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Title: The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain



Author: Mark Twain (and Albert Bigelow Paine)



Release Date: April, 2002  [Etext #3200]

[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]

[This file was first posted on February 25, 2001]

[Most recently updated: May 29, 2002]



Edition: 12



Language: English



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The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Entire PG Works of Mark Twain

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                    THE ENTIRE GUTENBERG TWAIN FILES

                             BY MARK TWAIN







ETEXT EDITOR'S NOTE:

This is a compilation of all the works of Mark Twain in the Project

Gutenberg Mark Twain collection which now has over sixty files.  These

individual files have been prepared by many different Gutenberg

volunteers over a period of many years.  Any of the individual works may

be found in much smaller size than this "entire" file at:



The Gutenberg Project Search Page:   http://www.promo.net/pg/



As additional works of Mark Twain become available the present file will

be updated to include them.  The bibliography of Twain by Albert Bigelow

Paine has been used in organizing the major works in this collection in

the order of the date of their first publication; however many of the

short stories, speeches and other shorter works are not in chronologic

order as they were originally included as part of major works of much

different publishing date.

                                        D.W.









           CONTENTS OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG TWAIN COLLECTION



THE INNOCENTS ABROAD

MARK TWAIN'S (BURLESQUE) AUTO-BIOGRAPHY

     FIRST ROMANCE.

ROUGHING IT

THE GILDED AGE (with Charles Dudley Warner)

SKETCHES NEW AND OLD

     MY WATCH

     POLITICAL ECONOMY

     THE JUMPING FROG

     JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE

     THE STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY

     THE STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY

     A COUPLE OF POEMS BY TWAIN AND MOORE

     NIAGARA

     ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS

     TO RAISE POULTRY

     EXPERIENCE OF THE MCWILLIAMSES WITH MEMBRANOUS CROUP

     MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE

     HOW THE AUTHOR WAS SOLD IN NEWARK

     THE OFFICE BORE

     JOHNNY GREER

     THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT

     THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER

     DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY

     THE JUDGES "SPIRITED WOMAN"

     INFORMATION WANTED

     SOME LEARNED FABLES, FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS

     MY LATE SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP

     A FASHION ITEM

     RILEY-NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT

     A FINE OLD MAN

     SCIENCE vs. LUCK

     THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

     MR. BLOKE'S ITEM

     A MEDIEVAL ROMANCE

     PETITION CONCERNING COPYRIGHT

     AFTER-DINNER SPEECH

     LIONIZING MURDERERS

     A NEW CRIME

     A CURIOUS DREAM

     A TRUE STORY

     THE SIAMESE TWINS

     SPEECH AT THE SCOTTISH BANQUET IN LONDON

     A GHOST STORY

     THE CAPITOLINE VENUS

     SPEECH ON ACCIDENT INSURANCE

     JOHN CHINAMAN IN NEW YORK

     HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER

     THE PETRIFIED MAN

     MY BLOODY MASSACRE

     THE UNDERTAKER'S CHAT

     CONCERNING CHAMBERMAIDS

     AURELIA'S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN

     "AFTER" JENKINS

     ABOUT BARBERS

     "PARTY CRIES" IN IRELAND

     THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECANT RESIGNATION

     HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

     HONORED AS A CURIOSITY

     FIRST INTERVIEW KITH ARTEMUS WARD

     CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS

     THE KILLING OF JULIUS CAESAR "LOCALIZED"

     THE WIDOW'S PROTEST

     THE SCRIPTURAL PANORAMIST

     CURING A COLD

     A CURIOUS PLEASURE EXCURSION

     RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR

     A MYSTERIOUS VISIT

THE CURIOUS REPUBLIC OF GONDOUR AND OTHER WHIMSICAL SKETCHES

     THE CURIOUS REPUBLIC OF GONDOUR

     A MEMORY

     INTRODUCTORY TO "MEMORANDA".

     ABOUT SMELLS

     A COUPLE OF SAD EXPERIENCES

     DAN MURPHY

     THE "TOURNAMENT" IN A.D. 1870

     CURIOUS RELIC FOR SALE

     A REMINISCENCE OF THE BACK SETTLEMENTS

     A ROYAL COMPLIMENT

     THE APPROACHING EPIDEMIC

     THE TONE-IMPARTING COMMITTEE

     OUR PRECIOUS LUNATIC

     THE EUROPEAN WAR

     THE WILD MAN INTERVIEWED

     LAST WORDS OF GREAT MEN

1601--CONVERSATION AT THE SOCIAL FIRESIDE OF THE TUDORS

THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT CARNIVAL OF CRIME IN CONNECTICUT

THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER

THE LOVES OF ALONZO FITZ CLARENCE AND ROSANNAH ETHELTON AND OTHER STORIES

     THE LOVES OF ALONZO FITZ CLARENCE AND ROSANNAH ETHELTON

     ON THE DECAY OF THE ART OF LYING

     ABOUT MAGNANIMOUS-INCIDENT LITERATURE

          THE GRATEFUL POODLE

          THE BENEVOLENT AUTHOR

          THE GRATEFUL HUSBAND

     PUNCH, BROTHERS, PUNCH

     THE GREAT REVOLUTION IN PITCAIRN

     THE CANVASSER'S TALE

     AN ENCOUNTER WITH AN INTERVIEWER

     PARIS NOTES

     LEGEND OF SAGENFELD, IN GERMANY

     SPEECH ON THE BABIES

     SPEECH ON THE WEATHER

     CONCERNING THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

     ROGERS

SOME RAMBLING NOTES OF AN IDLE EXCURSION

THE STOLEN WHITE ELEPHANT

A TRAMP ABROAD

THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER

LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI

THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT

THE AMERICAN CLAIMANT

EXTRACTS FROM ADAM'S DIARY

IN DEFENSE OF HARRIET SHELLEY

FENNIMORE COOPER'S LITERARY OFFENCES

ESSAYS ON PAUL BOURGET

     WHAT PAUL BOURGET THINKS OF US

     A LITTLE NOTE TO M. PAUL BOURGET

TOM SAWYER ABROAD

THE TRAGEDY OF PUDD'NHEAD WILSON

THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS

PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC

TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE

FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR, A JOURNEY AROUND THE WORLD

THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG

THE HADLEYBERG OTHER STORIES

     MY FIRST LIE, AND HOW I GOT OUT OF IT

     THE ESQUIMAUX MAIDEN'S ROMANCE

     CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND THE BOOK OF MRS. EDDY

     IS HE LIVING OR IS HE DEAD?

     MY DEBUT AS A LITERARY PERSON

     AT THE APPETITE-CURE

     CONCERNING THE JEWS

     FROM THE 'LONDON TIMES' OF 1904

     ABOUT PLAY-ACTING

     TRAVELLING WITH A REFORMER

     DIPLOMATIC PAY AND CLOTHES

     LUCK

     THE CAPTAIN'S STORY

     STIRRING TIMES IN AUSTRIA

     MEISTERSCHAFT

     MY BOYHOOD DREAMS

          TO THE ABOVE OLD PEOPLE

     IN MEMORIAM--OLIVIA SUSAN CLEMENS

WHAT IS MAN AND OTHER ESSAYS

     WHAT IS MAN?

     THE DEATH OF JEAN

     THE TURNING-POINT OF MY LIFE

     HOW TO MAKE HISTORY DATES STICK

     THE MEMORABLE ASSASSINATION

     A SCRAP OF CURIOUS HISTORY

     SWITZERLAND, THE CRADLE OF LIBERTY

     AT THE SHRINE OF ST. WAGNER

     WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

     ENGLISH AS SHE IS TAUGHT

     A SIMPLIFIED ALPHABET

     AS CONCERNS INTERPRETING THE DEITY

     CONCERNING TOBACCO

     TAMING THE BICYCLE

     IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?

THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER AND OTHER STORIES

     THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER

     A FABLE

     HUNTING THE DECEITFUL TURKEY

     THE McWILLIAMSES AND THE BURGLAR ALARM

A DOUBLE BARRELED DETECTIVE

A DOG'S TALE

THE $30,000 BEQUEST AND OTHER STORIES

      THE $30,000 BEQUEST

      A DOG'S TALE

      WAS IT HEAVEN?  OR HELL?

      A CURE FOR THE BLUES

      THE ENEMY CONQUERED; OR, LOVE TRIUMPHANT

      THE CALIFORNIAN'S TALE

      A HELPLESS SITUATION

      A TELEPHONIC CONVERSATION

      EDWARD MILLS AND GEORGE BENTON:  A TALE

      THE FIVE BOONS OF LIFE

      THE FIRST WRITING-MACHINES

      ITALIAN WITHOUT A MASTER

      ITALIAN WITH GRAMMAR

      A BURLESQUE BIOGRAPHY

      HOW TO TELL A STORY

      GENERAL WASHINGTON'S NEGRO BODY-SERVANT

      WIT INSPIRATIONS OF THE "TWO-YEAR-OLDS"

      AN ENTERTAINING ARTICLE

      A LETTER TO THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY

      AMENDED OBITUARIES

      A MONUMENT TO ADAM

      A HUMANE WORD FROM SATAN

      INTRODUCTION TO "THE NEW GUIDE OF THE

      CONVERSATION IN PORTUGUESE AND ENGLISH"

      ADVICE TO LITTLE GIRLS

      POST-MORTEM POETRY

      THE DANGER OF LYING IN BED

      PORTRAIT OF KING WILLIAM III

      DOES THE RACE OF MAN LOVE A LORD?

      EXTRACTS FROM ADAM'S DIARY

      EVE'S DIARY

A HORSE'S TALE

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

EXTRACT FROM CAPTAIN STORMFIELD'S VISIT TO HEAVEN

IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?

ON THE DECAY OF THE ART OF LYING

GOLDSMITH'S FRIEND ABROAD AGAIN

HOW TO TELL A STORY AND OTHER STORIES

     HOW TO TELL A STORY

          THE WOUNDED SOLDIER

          THE GOLDEN ARM

     MENTAL TELEGRAPHY AGAIN

     THE INVALIDS STORY

MARK TWAIN'S SPEECHES

     INTRODUCTION

     PREFACE

     THE STORY OF A SPEECH

     PLYMOUTH ROCK AND THE PILGRIMS

     COMPLIMENTS AND DEGREES

     BOOKS, AUTHORS, AND HATS

     DEDICATION SPEECH

     DIE SCHRECKEN DER DEUTSCHEN SPRACHE.

     THE HORRORS OF THE GERMAN LANGUAGE

     GERMAN FOR THE HUNGARIANS

     A NEW GERMAN WORD

     UNCONSCIOUS PLAGIARISM

     THE WEATHER

     THE BABIES

     OUR CHILDREN AND GREAT DISCOVERIES

     EDUCATING THEATRE-GOERS

     THE EDUCATIONAL THEATRE

     POETS AS POLICEMEN

     PUDD'NHEAD WILSON DRAMATIZED

     DALY THEATRE

     THE DRESS OF CIVILIZED WOMAN

     DRESS REFORM AND COPYRIGHT

     COLLEGE GIRLS

     GIRLS

     THE LADIES

     WOMAN'S PRESS CLUB

     VOTES FOR WOMEN

     WOMAN-AN OPINION

     ADVICE TO GIRLS

     TAXES AND MORALS

     TAMMANY AND CROKER

     MUNICIPAL CORRUPTION

     MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT

     CHINA AND THE PHILIPPINES

     THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL MORALS

     LAYMAN'S SERMON

     UNIVERSITY SETTLEMENT SOCIETY

     PUBLIC EDUCATION ASSOCIATION

     EDUCATION AND CITIZENSHIP

     COURAGE

     THE DINNER TO MR. CHOATE

     ON STANLEY AND LIVINGSTONE

     HENRY M. STANLEY

     DINNER TO MR. JEROME

     HENRY IRVING

     DINNER TO HAMILTON W. MABIE

     INTRODUCING NYE AND RILEY

     DINNER TO WHITELAW REID

     ROGERS AND RAILROADS

     THE OLD-FASHIONED PRINTER

     SOCIETY OF AMERICAN AUTHORS

     READING-ROOM OPENING

     LITERATURE

     DISAPPEARANCE OF LITERATURE

     THE NEW YORK PRESS CLUB DINNER

     THE ALPHABET AND SIMPLIFIED SPELLING

     SPELLING AND PICTURES

     BOOKS AND BURGLARS

     AUTHORS' CLUB

     BOOKSELLERS

     "MARK TWAIN's FIRST APPEARANCE"

     MORALS AND MEMORY

     QUEEN VICTORIA

     JOAN OF ARC

     ACCIDENT INSURANCE--ETC.

     OSTEOPATHY

     WATER-SUPPLY

     MISTAKEN IDENTITY

     CATS AND CANDY

     OBITUARY POETRY

     CIGARS AND TOBACCO

     BILLIARDS

     THE UNION RIGHT OR WRONG?

     AN IDEAL FRENCH ADDRESS

     STATISTICS

     GALVESTON ORPHAN BAZAAR

     SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE

     CHARITY AND ACTORS

     RUSSIAN REPUBLIC

     RUSSIAN SUFFERERS

     WATTERSON AND TWAIN AS REBELS

     ROBERT FULTON FUND

     FULTON DAY, JAMESTOWN

     LOTOS CLUB DINNER IN HONOR OF MARK TWAIN

     COPYRIGHT

     IN AID OF THE BLIND

     DR. MARK TWAIN, FARMEOPATH

     MISSOURI UNIVERSITY SPEECH

     BUSINESS

     CARNEGIE THE BENEFACTOR

     ON POETRY, VERACITY, AND SUICIDE

     WELCOME HOME

     AN UNDELIVERED SPEECH

     SIXTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY

     TO THE WHITEFRIARS

     THE ASCOT GOLD CUP

     THE SAVAGE CLUB DINNER

     GENERAL MILES AND THE DOG

     WHEN IN DOUBT, TELL THE TRUTH

     THE DAY WE CELEBRATE

     INDEPENDENCE DAY

     AMERICANS AND THE ENGLISH

     ABOUT LONDON

     PRINCETON

     THE ST. LOUIS HARBOR-BOAT "MARK TWAIN"

     SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY

MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS 1853-1910

     ARRANGED WITH COMMENT BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE

A BOY'S LIFE OF MARK TWAIN, BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE

MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY, BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE













               THE COMPLETE PROJECT GUTENBERG MARK TWAIN







INNOCENTS ABROAD



by Mark Twain





[From an 1869--1st Edition]







                                CONTENTS





                                CHAPTER I.

Popular Talk of the Excursion--Programme of the Trip--Duly Ticketed for

the Excursion--Defection of the Celebrities



                               CHAPTER II.

Grand Preparations--An Imposing Dignitary--The European Exodus--

Mr. Blucher's Opinion--Stateroom No. 10--The Assembling of the Clans--

At Sea at Last



                               CHAPTER III.

"Averaging" the Passengers--Far, far at Sea.--Tribulation among the

Patriarchs--Seeking Amusement under Difficulties--Five Captains in the

Ship



                               CHAPTER IV.

The Pilgrims Becoming Domesticated--Pilgrim Life at Sea--"Horse-

Billiards"--The "Synagogue"--The Writing School--Jack's "Journal"--

The "Q. C. Club"--The Magic Lantern--State Ball on Deck--Mock Trials--

Charades--Pilgrim Solemnity--Slow Music--The Executive Officer Delivers

an Opinion



                                CHAPTER V.

Summer in Mid-Atlantic--An Eccentric Moon--Mr. Blucher Loses Confidence

--The Mystery of "Ship Time"--The Denizens of the Deep--"Land Hoh"--

The First Landing on a Foreign Shore--Sensation among the Natives--

Something about the Azores Islands--Blucher's Disastrous Dinner--

The Happy Result



                               CHAPTER VI.

Solid Information--A Fossil Community--Curious Ways and Customs--Jesuit

Humbuggery--Fantastic Pilgrimizing--Origin of the Russ Pavement--

Squaring Accounts with the Fossils--At Sea Again



                               CHAPTER VII.

A Tempest at Night--Spain and Africa on Exhibition--Greeting a Majestic

Stranger--The Pillars of Hercules--The Rock of Gibraltar--Tiresome

Repetition--"The Queen's Chair"--Serenity Conquered--Curiosities of

the Secret Caverns--Personnel of Gibraltar--Some Odd Characters--A

Private Frolic in Africa--Bearding a Moorish Garrison (without loss of

life)--Vanity Rebuked--Disembarking in the Empire of Morocco



                              CHAPTER VIII.

The Ancient City of Tangier, Morocco--Strange Sights--A Cradle of

Antiquity--We become Wealthy--How they Rob the Mail in Africa--The Danger

of being Opulent in Morocco



                               CHAPTER IX.

A Pilgrim--in Deadly Peril--How they Mended the Clock--Moorish

Punishments for Crime--Marriage Customs--Looking Several ways for Sunday

--Shrewd, Practice of Mohammedan Pilgrims--Reverence for Cats--Bliss of

being a Consul-General



                                CHAPTER X.

Fourth of July at Sea--Mediterranean Sunset--The "Oracle" is Delivered

of an Opinion--Celebration Ceremonies--The Captain's Speech--France in

Sight--The Ignorant Native--In Marseilles--Another Blunder--Lost in

the Great City--Found Again--A Frenchy Scene



                               CHAPTER XI.

Getting used to it--No Soap--Bill of Fare, Table d'hote--"An American

Sir"--A Curious Discovery--The "Pilgrim" Bird--Strange Companionship--

A Grave of the Living--A Long Captivity--Some of Dumas' Heroes--Dungeon

of the Famous "Iron Mask."



                               CHAPTXR XII.

A Holiday Flight through France--Summer Garb of the Landscape--Abroad

on the Great Plains--Peculiarities of French Cars--French Politeness

American Railway Officials--"Twenty Mnutes to Dinner!"--Why there

are no Accidents--The "Old Travellers"--Still on the Wing--Paris at

Last----French Order and Quiet--Place of the Bastile--Seeing the Sights--

A Barbarous Atrocity--Absurd Billiards



                              CHAPTER XIII.

More Trouble--Monsieur Billfinger--Re-Christening the Frenchman--In the

Clutches of a Paris Guide--The International Exposition--Fine Military

Review--Glimpse of the Emperor Napoleon and the Sultan of Turkey



                               CHAPTER XIV.

The Venerable Cathedral of Notre-Dame--Jean Sanspeur's Addition--

Treasures and Sacred Relics--The Legend of the Cross--The Morgue--The

Outrageious 'Can-Can'--Blondin Aflame--The Louvre Palace--The Great Park

--Showy Pageantry--Preservation of Noted Things



                               CHAPTER XV.

French National Burying--Ground--Among the Great Dead--The Shrine of

Disappointed Love--The Story of Abelard and Heloise--"English Spoken

Here"--"American Drinks Compounded Here"--Imperial Honors to an

American--The Over-estimated Grisette--Departure from Paris--A Deliberate

Opinion Concerning the Comeliness of American Women



                               CHAPTER XVI.

Versailles--Paradise Regained--A Wonderful Park--Paradise Lost--

Napoleonic Strategy



                              CHAPTER XVII.

War--The American Forces Victorious--" Home Again"--Italy in Sight

The "City of Palaces"--Beauty of the Genoese Women--The "Stub-Hunters"--

Among the Palaces--Gifted Guide--Church Magnificence--"Women not

Admitted"--How the Genoese Live--Massive Architecture--A Scrap of Ancient

History--Graves for 60,000



                              CHAPTER XVIII.

Flying Through Italy--Marengo--First Glimpse of the Famous Cathedral--

Description of some of its Wonders--A Horror Carved in Stone----An

Unpleasant Adventure--A Good Man--A Sermon from the Tomb--Tons of Gold

and Silver--Some More Holy Relics--Solomon's Temple



                               CHAPTER XIX

"Do You Wiz zo Haut can be?"--La Scala--Petrarch and Laura--Lucrezia

Borgia--Ingenious Frescoes--Ancient Roman Amphitheatre--A Clever

Delusion--Distressing Billiards--The Chief Charm of European Life--An

Italian Bath--Wanted: Soap--Crippled French--Mutilated English--The Most

Celebrated Painting in the World--Amateur Raptures--Uninspired Critics--

Anecdote--A Wonderful Echo--A Kiss for a Franc



                                CHAPTER XX

Rural Italy by Rail--Fumigated, According to Law--The Sorrowing

Englishman--Night by the Lake of Como--The Famous Lake--Its Scenery--

Como compared with Tahoe--Meeting a Shipmate



                               CHAPTER XXI.

The Pretty Lago di Lecco--A Carriage Drive in the Country--Astonishing

Sociability in a Coachman--Sleepy Land--Bloody Shrines--The Heart and

Home of Priestcraft--A Thrilling Mediaeval Romance--The Birthplace of

Harlequin--Approaching Venice



                              CHAPTER XXII.

Night in Venice--The "Gay Gondolier"--The Grand Fete by Moonlight--

The Notable Sights of Venice--The Mother of the Republics Desolate



                              CHANTER XXIII.

The Famous Gondola--The Gondola in an Unromantic Aspect--The Great Square

of St. Mark and the Winged Lion--Snobs, at Home and Abroad--Sepulchres of

the Great Dead--A Tilt at the "Old Masters"--A Contraband Guide--

The Conspiracy--Moving Again



                              CHAPTER XXIV.

Down Through Italy by Rail--Idling in Florence--Dante and Galileo--An

Ungrateful City--Dazzling Generosity--Wonderful Mosaics--The Historical

Arno--Lost Again--Found Again, but no Fatted Calf Ready--The Leaning

Tower of Pisa--The Ancient Duomo--The Old Original First Pendulum that

Ever Swung--An Enchanting Echo--A New Holy Sepulchre--A Relic of

Antiquity--A Fallen Republic--At Leghorn--At Home Again, and Satisfied,

on Board the Ship--Our Vessel an Object of Grave Suspicion--Garibaldi

Visited--Threats of Quarantine



                               CHAPTER XXV.

The Works of Bankruptcy--Railway Grandeur--How to Fill an Empty

Treasury--The Sumptuousness of Mother Church--Ecclesiastical Splendor--

Magnificence and Misery--General Execration--More Magnificence

A Good Word for the Priests--Civita Vecchia the Dismal--Off for Rome



                              CHAPTER XXVI.

The Modern Roman on His Travels--The Grandeur of St. Peter's--Holy Relics

--Grand View from the Dome--The Holy Inquisition--Interesting Old Monkish

Frauds--The Ruined Coliseum--The Coliseum in the Days of its Prime--

Ancient Playbill of a Coliseum Performance--A Roman Newspaper Criticism

1700 Years Old



                              CHAPTER XXVII.

"Butchered to Make a Roman Holiday"--The Man who Never Complained--

An Exasperating Subject--Asinine Guides--The Roman Catacombs

The Saint Whose Fervor Burst his Ribs--The Miracle of the Bleeding Heart

--The Legend of Ara Coeli



                             CHAPTER XXVIII.

Picturesque Horrors--The Legend of Brother Thomas--Sorrow Scientifically

Analyzed--A Festive Company of the Dead--The Great Vatican Museum

Artist Sins of Omission--The Rape of the Sabines--Papal Protection of

Art--High Price of "Old Masters"--Improved Scripture--Scale of Rank

of the Holy Personages in Rome--Scale of Honors Accorded Them---

Fossilizing--Away for Naples



                              CHAPTER XXIX.

Naples--In Quarantine at Last--Annunciation--Ascent of Mount Vesuvius--A

Two Cent Community--The Black Side of Neapolitan Character--Monkish

Miracles--Ascent of Mount Vesuvius Continued--The Stranger and the

Hackman--Night View of Naples from the Mountain-side---Ascent of Mount

Vesuvius Continued



                               CHAPTER XXX.

Ascent of Mount Vesuvius Continued--Beautiful View at Dawn--Less

Beautiful in the Back Streets--Ascent of Vesuvius Continued--Dwellings a

Hundred Feet High--A Motley Procession--Bill of Fare for a Peddler's

Breakfast--Princely Salaries--Ascent of Vesuvius Continued--An Average of

Prices--The wonderful "Blue Grotto"--Visit to Celebrated Localities in

the Bay of Naples--The Poisoned "Grotto of the Dog"--A Petrified Sea of

Lava--Ascent of Mount Vesuvius Continued--The Summit Reached--Description

of the Crater--Descent of Vesuvius



                              CHAPTER XXXI.

The Buried City of Pompeii--How Dwellings Appear that have been

Unoccupied for Eighteen hundred years--The Judgment Seat--Desolation--The

Footprints of the Departed--"No Women Admitted"--Theatres, Bakeshops,

Schools--Skeletons preserved by the Ashes and Cinders--The Brave Martyr

to Duty--Rip Van Winkle--The Perishable Nature of Fame



                              CHAPTER XXXII.

At Sea Once More--The Pilgrims all Well--Superb Stromboli--Sicily by

Moonlight--Scylla and Charybdis--The "Oracle" at Fault--Skirting the

Isles of Greece Ancient Athens--Blockaded by Quarantine and Refused

Permission to Enter--Running the Blockade--A Bloodless Midnight

Adventure--Turning Robbers from Necessity--Attempt to Carry the Acropolis

by Storm--We Fail--Among the Glories of the Past--A World of Ruined

Sculpture--A Fairy Vision--Famous Localities--Retreating in Good Order

--Captured by the Guards--Travelling in Military State--Safe on Board

Again



                             CHAPTER XXXIII.

Modern Greece--Fallen Greatness--Sailing Through the Archipelago and the

Dardanelles--Footprints of History--The First Shoddy Contractor of whom

History gives any Account--Anchored Before Constantinople--Fantastic

Fashions--The Ingenious Goose-Rancher--Marvelous Cripples--The Great

Mosque--The Thousand and One Columns--The Grand Bazaar of Stamboul



                              CHAPTER XXXIV.

Scarcity of Morals and Whiskey--Slave-Girl Market Report--Commercial

Morality at a Discount--The Slandered Dogs of Constantinople--

Questionable Delights of Newspaperdom in Turkey--Ingenious Italian

Journalism--No More Turkish Lunches Desired--The Turkish Bath Fraud--

The Narghileh Fraud--Jackplaned by a Native--The Turkish Coffee Fraud



                              CHAPTER XXXV.

Sailing Through the Bosporus and the Black Sea--"Far-Away Moses"--

Melancholy Sebastopol--Hospitably Received in Russia--Pleasant English

People--Desperate Fighting--Relic Hunting--How Travellers Form "Cabinets"



                              CHAPTER XXXVI.

Nine Thousand Miles East--Imitation American Town in Russia--Gratitude

that Came Too Late--To Visit the Autocrat of All the Russias



                             CHAPTER XXXVII.

Summer Home of Royalty--Practising for the Dread Ordeal--Committee on

Imperial Address--Reception by the Emperor and Family--Dresses of the

Imperial Party--Concentrated Power--Counting the Spoons--At the Grand

Duke's--A Charming Villa--A Knightly Figure--The Grand Duchess--A Grand

Ducal Breakfast--Baker's Boy, the Famine-Breeder--Theatrical Monarchs a

Fraud--Saved as by Fire--The Governor--General's Visit to the Ship--

Official "Style"--Aristocratic Visitors--"Munchausenizing" with Them--

Closing Ceremonies



                             CHAPTER XXXVIII.

Return to Constantinople--We Sail for Asia--The Sailors Burlesque the

Imperial Visitors--Ancient Smyrna--The "Oriental Splendor" Fraud--

The "Biblical Crown of Life"--Pilgrim Prophecy-Savans--Sociable

Armenian Girls--A Sweet Reminiscence--"The Camels are Coming, Ha-ha!"



                              CHAPTER XXXIX.

Smyrna's Lions--The Martyr Polycarp--The "Seven Churches"--Remains of the

Six Smyrnas--Mysterious Oyster Mine Oysters--Seeking Scenery--A Millerite

Tradition--A Railroad Out of its Sphere



                               CHAPTER XL.

Journeying Toward Ancient Ephesus--Ancient Ayassalook--The Villanous

Donkey--A Fantastic Procession--Bygone Magnificence--Fragments of

History--The Legend of the Seven Sleepers



                               CHAPTER XLI.

Vandalism Prohibited--Angry Pilgrims--Approaching Holy Land!--The "Shrill

Note of Preparation"--Distress About Dragomans and Transportation--

The "Long Route" Adopted--In Syria--Something about Beirout--A Choice

Specimen of a Greek "Ferguson"--Outfits--Hideous Horseflesh--Pilgrim

"Style"--What of Aladdin's Lamp?



                              CHAPTER XLII.

"Jacksonville," in the Mountains of Lebanon--Breakfasting above a Grand

Panorama--The Vanished City--The Peculiar Steed, "Jericho"--The Pilgrims

Progress--Bible Scenes--Mount Hermon, Joshua's Battle Fields, etc.--

The Tomb of Noah--A Most Unfortunate People



                              CHAPTER XLIII.

Patriarchal Customs--Magnificent Baalbec--Description of the Ruins--

Scribbling Smiths and Joneses--Pilgrim Fidelity to the Letter of the Law

--The Revered Fountain of Baalam's Ass



                              CHAPTER XLIV.

Extracts from Note-Book--Mahomet's Paradise and the Bible's--Beautiful

Damascus the Oldest City on Earth--Oriental Scenes within the Curious Old

City--Damascus Street Car--The Story of St. Paul--The "Street called

Straight"--Mahomet's Tomb and St. George's--The Christian Massacre--

Mohammedan Dread of Pollution--The House of Naaman--

The Horrors of Leprosy



                               CHAPTER XLV.

The Cholera by way of Variety--Hot--Another Outlandish Procession--Pen

and-Ink Photograph of "Jonesborough," Syria--Tomb of Nimrod, the Mighty

Hunter--The Stateliest Ruin of All--Stepping over the Borders of Holy-

Land--Bathing in the Sources of Jordan--More "Specimen" Hunting--Ruins of

Cesarea--Philippi--"On This Rock Will I Build my Church"--The People the

Disciples Knew--The Noble Steed "Baalbec"--Sentimental Horse Idolatry of

the Arabs



                              CHAPTER XLVI.

Dan--Bashan--Genessaret--A Notable Panorama--Smallness of Palestine--

Scraps of History--Character of the Country--Bedouin Shepherds--Glimpses

of the Hoary Past--Mr. Grimes's Bedouins--A Battle--Ground of Joshua--

That Soldier's Manner of Fighting--Barak's Battle--The Necessity of

Unlearning Some Things--Desolation



                              CHAPTER XLVII.

"Jack's Adventure"--Joseph's Pit--The Story of Joseph--Joseph's

Magnanimity and Esau's--The Sacred Lake of Genessaret--Enthusiasm of the

Pilgrims--Why We did not Sail on Galilee--About Capernaum--Concerning the

Saviour's Brothers and Sisters--Journeying toward Magdela



                             CHAPTER XLVIII.

Curious Specimens of Art and Architecture--Public Reception of the

Pilgrims--Mary Magdalen's House--Tiberias and its Queer Inhabitants--

The Sacred Sea of Galilee--Galilee by Night



                              CHAPTER XLIX.

The Ancient Baths--Ye Apparition--A Distinguished Panorama--The Last

Battle of the Crusades--The Story of the Lord of Kerak--Mount Tabor--

What one Sees from its Top--Memory of a Wonderful Garden--The House of

Deborah the Prophetess



                                CHAPTER L.

Toward Nazareth--Bitten By a Camel--Grotto of the Annunciation, Nazareth

--Noted Grottoes in General--Joseph's Workshop--A Sacred Bowlder--

The Fountain of the Virgin--Questionable Female Beauty--

Literary Curiosities



                               CHAPTER LI.

Boyhood of the Saviour--Unseemly Antics of Sober Pilgrims--Home of the

Witch of Endor--Nain--Profanation--A Popular Oriental Picture--Biblical

Metaphors Becoming steadily More Intelligible--The Shuuem Miracle--

The "Free Son of The Desert"--Ancient Jezrael--Jehu's Achievements--

Samaria and its Famous Siege



                               CHAPTER LII

Curious Remnant of the Past--Shechem--The Oldest "First Family" on Earth

--The Oldest Manuscript Extant--The Genuine Tomb of Joseph--Jacob's Well

--Shiloh--Camping with the Arabs--Jacob's Ladder--More Desolation--

Ramah, Beroth, the Tomb of Samuel, The Fountain of Beira--Impatience--

Approaching Jerusalem--The Holy City in Sight--Noting Its Prominent

Features--Domiciled Within the Sacred Walls



                              CHAPTER LIII.

"The Joy of the Whole Earth"--Description of Jerusalem--Church of the

Holy Sepulchre--The Stone of Unction--The Grave of Jesus--Graves of

Nicodemus and Joseph of Armattea--Places of the Apparition--The Finding

of the There Crosses----The Legend--Monkish Impostures--The Pillar of

Flagellation--The Place of a Relic--Godfrey's Sword--"The Bonds of

Christ"--"The Center of the Earth"--Place whence the Dust was taken of

which Adam was Made--Grave of Adam--The Martyred Soldier--The Copper

Plate that was on the Cross--The Good St. Helena--Place of the Division

of the Garments--St. Dimas, the Penitent Thief--The Late Emperor

Maximilian's Contribution--Grotto wherein the Crosses were Found, and the

Nails, and the Crown of Thorns--Chapel of the Mocking--Tomb of

Melchizedek--Graves of Two Renowned Crusaders--The Place of the

Crucifixion



                               CHAPTER LIV.

The "Sorrowful Way"--The Legend of St. Veronica's Handkerchief--

An Illustrious Stone--House of the Wandering Jew--The Tradition of the

Wanderer--Solomon's Temple--Mosque of Omar--Moslem Traditions--"Women not

Admitted"--The Fate of a Gossip--Turkish Sacred Relics--Judgment Seat of

David and Saul--Genuine Precious Remains of Solomon's Temple--Surfeited

with Sights--The Pool of Siloam--The Garden of Gethsemane and Other

Sacred Localities



                               CHAPTER LV.

Rebellion in the Camp--Charms of Nomadic Life--Dismal Rumors--En Route

for Jericho and The Dead Sea--Pilgrim Strategy--Bethany and the Dwelling

of Lazarus--"Bedouins!"--Ancient Jericho--Misery--The Night March--

The Dead Sea--An Idea of What a "Wilderness" in Palestine is--The Holy

hermits of Mars Saba--Good St. Saba--Women not Admitted--Buried from the

World for all Time--Unselfish Catholic Benevolence--Gazelles--The Plain

of the Shepherds--Birthplace of the Saviour, Bethlehem--Church of the

Nativity--Its Hundred Holy Places--The Famous "Milk" Grotto--Tradition--

Return to Jerusalem--Exhausted



                               CHAPTER LVI.

Departure from Jerusalem--Samson--The Plain of Sharon--Arrival at Joppa--

Horse of Simon the Tanner--The Long Pilgrimage Ended--Character of

Palestine Scenery--The Curse



                              CHAPTER LVII.

The Happiness of being at Sea once more--"Home" as it is in a Pleasure

Ship--"Shaking Hands" with the Vessel--Jack in Costume--His Father's

Parting Advice--Approaching Egypt--Ashore in Alexandria--A Deserved

Compliment for the Donkeys--Invasion of the Lost Tribes of America--End

of the Celebrated "Jaffa Colony"--Scenes in Grand Cairo--Shepheard's

Hotel Contrasted with a Certain American Hotel--Preparing for the

Pyramids



                              CHAPTER LVIII.

"Recherche" Donkeys--A Wild Ride--Specimens of Egyptian Modesty--Moses in

the Bulrushes--Place where the Holy Family Sojourned--Distant view of the

Pyramids--A Nearer View--The Ascent--Superb View from the top of the

Pyramid--"Backsheesh! Backsheesh!"--An Arab Exploit--In the Bowels of the

Pyramid--Strategy--Reminiscence of "Holiday's Hill"--Boyish Exploit--The

Majestic Sphynx--Things the Author will not Tell--Grand Old Egypt



                               CHAPTER LIX.

Going Home--A Demoralized Note-Book--A Boy's Diary--Mere Mention of Old

Spain--Departure from Cadiz--A Deserved Rebuke--The Beautiful Madeiras

--Tabooed--In the Delightful Bermudas--An English Welcome--Good-by to

"Our Friends the Bermudians"--Packing Trunks for Home--Our First

Accident--The Long Cruise Drawing to a Close--At Home--Amen



                               CHAPTER LX.

Thankless Devotion--A Newspaper Valedictory--Conclusion













                                 PREFACE



This book is a record of a pleasure trip.  If it were a record of a

solemn scientific expedition, it would have about it that gravity, that

profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper

to works of that kind, and withal so attractive.  Yet notwithstanding it

is only a record of a pic-nic, it has a purpose, which is to suggest to

the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked

at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in

those countries before him.  I make small pretense of showing anyone how

he ought to look at objects of interest beyond the sea--other books do

that, and therefore, even if I were competent to do it, there is no need.



I offer no apologies for any departures from the usual style of travel-

writing that may be charged against me--for I think I have seen with

impartial eyes, and I am sure I have written at least honestly, whether

wisely or not.



In this volume I have used portions of letters which I wrote for the

Daily Alta California, of San Francisco, the proprietors of that journal

having waived their rights and given me the necessary permission.  I have

also inserted portions of several letters written for the New York

Tribune and the New York Herald.



THE AUTHOR.

SAN FRANCISCO.











CHAPTER I.



For months the great pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land was

chatted about in the newspapers everywhere in America and discussed at

countless firesides.  It was a novelty in the way of excursions--its like

had not been thought of before, and it compelled that interest which

attractive novelties always command.  It was to be a picnic on a gigantic

scale.  The participants in it, instead of freighting an ungainly steam

ferry--boat with youth and beauty and pies and doughnuts, and paddling up

some obscure creek to disembark upon a grassy lawn and wear themselves

out with a long summer day's laborious frolicking under the impression

that it was fun, were to sail away in a great steamship with flags flying

and cannon pealing, and take a royal holiday beyond the broad ocean in

many a strange clime and in many a land renowned in history! They were to

sail for months over the breezy Atlantic and the sunny Mediterranean;

they were to scamper about the decks by day, filling the ship with shouts

and laughter--or read novels and poetry in the shade of the smokestacks,

or watch for the jelly-fish and the nautilus over the side, and the

shark, the whale, and other strange monsters of the deep; and at night

they were to dance in the open air, on the upper deck, in the midst of a

ballroom that stretched from horizon to horizon, and was domed by the

bending heavens and lighted by no meaner lamps than the stars and the

magnificent moon--dance, and promenade, and smoke, and sing, and make

love, and search the skies for constellations that never associate with

the "Big Dipper" they were so tired of; and they were to see the ships of

twenty navies--the customs and costumes of twenty curious peoples--the

great cities of half a world--they were to hob-nob with nobility and hold

friendly converse with kings and princes, grand moguls, and the anointed

lords of mighty empires! It was a brave conception; it was the offspring

of a most ingenious brain.  It was well advertised, but it hardly needed

it: the bold originality, the extraordinary character, the seductive

nature, and the vastness of the enterprise provoked comment everywhere

and advertised it in every household in the land.  Who could read the

program of the excursion without longing to make one of the party? I will

insert it here.  It is almost as good as a map.  As a text for this book,

nothing could be better:



                   EXCURSION TO THE HOLY LAND, EGYPT,

      THE CRIMEA, GREECE, AND INTERMEDIATE POINTS OF INTEREST.

                     BROOKLYN, February 1st, 1867



       The undersigned will make an excursion as above during the coming

     season, and begs to submit to you the following programme:



       A first-class steamer, to be under his own command, and capable of

     accommodating at least one hundred and fifty cabin passengers, will

     be selected, in which will be taken a select company, numbering not

     more than   three-fourths of the ship's capacity.  There is good

     reason to believe that this company can be easily made up in this

     immediate vicinity, of mutual friends and acquaintances.



       The steamer will be provided with every necessary comfort,

     including library and musical instruments.



       An experienced physician will be on board.



       Leaving New York about June 1st, a middle and pleasant route will

     be taken across the Atlantic, and passing through the group of

     Azores, St. Michael will be reached in about ten days.  A day or two

     will be spent here, enjoying the fruit and wild scenery of these

     islands, and the voyage continued, and Gibraltar reached in three or

     four days.



       A day or two will be spent here in looking over the wonderful

     subterraneous fortifications, permission to visit these galleries

     being readily obtained.



       From Gibraltar, running along the coasts of Spain and France,

     Marseilles will be reached in three days.  Here ample time will be

     given not only to look over the city, which was founded six hundred

     years before the Christian era, and its artificial port, the finest

     of the kind in the Mediterranean, but to visit Paris during the

     Great Exhibition; and the beautiful city of Lyons, lying

     intermediate, from the heights of which, on a clear day, Mont Blanc

     and the Alps can be distinctly seen.  Passengers who may wish to

     extend the time at Paris can do so, and, passing down through

     Switzerland, rejoin the steamer at Genoa.



       From Marseilles to Genoa is a run of one night.  The excursionists

     will have an opportunity to look over this, the "magnificent city of

     palaces," and visit the birthplace of Columbus, twelve miles off,

     over a beautiful road built by Napoleon I.  From this point,

     excursions may be made to Milan, Lakes Como and Maggiore, or to

     Milan, Verona (famous for its extraordinary fortifications), Padua,

     and Venice.  Or, if passengers desire to visit Parma (famous for

     Correggio's frescoes) and Bologna, they can by rail go on to

     Florence, and rejoin the steamer at Leghorn, thus spending about

     three weeks amid the cities most famous for art in Italy.



       From Genoa the run to Leghorn will be made along the coast in one

     night, and time appropriated to this point in which to visit

     Florence, its palaces and galleries; Pisa, its cathedral and

     "Leaning Tower," and Lucca and its baths, and Roman amphitheater;

     Florence, the most remote, being distant by rail about sixty miles.



       From Leghorn to Naples (calling at Civita Vecchia to land any who

     may prefer to go to Rome from that point), the distance will be made

     in about thirty-six hours; the route will lay along the coast of

     Italy, close by Caprera, Elba, and Corsica.  Arrangements have been

     made to take on board at Leghorn a pilot for Caprera, and, if

     practicable, a call will be made there to visit the home of

     Garibaldi.



       Rome [by rail], Herculaneum, Pompeii, Vesuvius, Vergil's tomb, and

     possibly the ruins of Paestum can be visited, as well as the

     beautiful surroundings of Naples and its charming bay.



       The next point of interest will be Palermo, the most beautiful

     city of Sicily, which will be reached in one night from Naples.  A

     day will be spent here, and leaving in the evening, the course will

     be taken towards Athens.



       Skirting along the north coast of Sicily, passing through the

     group of Aeolian Isles, in sight of Stromboli and Vulcania, both

     active volcanoes, through the Straits of Messina, with "Scylla" on

     the one hand and "Charybdis" on the other, along the east coast of

     Sicily, and in sight of Mount Etna, along the south coast of Italy,

     the west and south coast of Greece, in sight of ancient Crete, up

     Athens Gulf, and into the Piraeus, Athens will be reached in two and

     a half or three days.  After tarrying here awhile, the Bay of

     Salamis will be crossed, and a day given to Corinth, whence the

     voyage will be continued to Constantinople, passing on the way

     through the Grecian Archipelago, the Dardanelles, the Sea of

     Marmora, and the mouth of the Golden Horn, and arriving in about

     forty-eight hours from Athens.



       After leaving Constantinople, the way will be taken out through

     the beautiful Bosphorus, across the Black Sea to Sebastopol and

     Balaklava, a run of about twenty-four hours.  Here it is proposed to

     remain two days, visiting the harbors, fortifications, and

     battlefields of the Crimea; thence back through the Bosphorus,

     touching at Constantinople to take in any who may have preferred to

     remain there; down through the Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles,

     along the coasts of ancient Troy and Lydia in Asia, to Smyrna, which

     will be reached in two or two and a half days from Constantinople.

     A sufficient stay will be made here to give opportunity of visiting

     Ephesus, fifty miles distant by rail.



       From Smyrna towards the Holy Land the course will lay through the

     Grecian  Archipelago, close by the Isle of Patmos, along the coast

     of Asia, ancient Pamphylia, and the Isle of Cyprus.  Beirut will be

     reached in three days.  At Beirut time will be given to visit

     Damascus; after which the steamer will proceed to Joppa.



       From Joppa, Jerusalem, the River Jordan, the Sea of Tiberias,

     Nazareth, Bethany, Bethlehem, and other points of interest in the

     Holy Land can be visited, and here those who may have preferred to

     make the journey from Beirut through the country, passing through

     Damascus, Galilee, Capernaum, Samaria, and by the River Jordan and

     Sea of Tiberias, can rejoin the steamer.



       Leaving Joppa, the next point of interest to visit will be

     Alexandria, which will be reached in twenty-four hours.  The ruins

     of Caesar's Palace, Pompey's Pillar, Cleopatra's Needle, the

     Catacombs, and ruins of ancient Alexandria will be found worth the

     visit.  The journey to Cairo, one hundred and thirty miles by rail,

     can be made in a few hours, and from which can be visited the site

     of ancient Memphis, Joseph's Granaries, and the Pyramids.



       From Alexandria the route will be taken homeward, calling at

     Malta, Cagliari (in Sardinia), and Palma (in Majorca), all

     magnificent harbors, with charming scenery, and abounding in fruits.



       A day or two will be spent at each place, and leaving Parma in the

     evening, Valencia in Spain will be reached the next morning.  A few

     days will be spent in this, the finest city of Spain.



       From Valencia, the homeward course will be continued, skirting

     along the coast of Spain.  Alicant, Carthagena, Palos, and Malaga

     will be passed but a mile or two distant, and Gibraltar reached in

     about twenty-four hours.



       A stay of one day will be made here, and the voyage continued to

     Madeira, which will be reached in about three days.  Captain

     Marryatt writes: "I do not know a spot on the globe which so much

     astonishes and delights upon first arrival as Madeira." A stay of

     one or two days will be made here, which, if time permits, may be

     extended, and passing on through the islands, and probably in sight

     of the Peak of Teneriffe, a southern track will be taken, and the

     Atlantic crossed within the latitudes of the northeast trade winds,

     where mild and pleasant weather, and a smooth sea, can always be

     expected.



       A call will be made at Bermuda, which lies directly in this route

     homeward, and will be reached in about ten days from Madeira, and

     after spending a short time with our friends the Bermudians, the

     final departure will be made for home, which will be reached in

     about three days.



       Already, applications have been received from parties in Europe

     wishing to join the Excursion there.



       The ship will at all times be a home, where the excursionists, if

     sick, will be surrounded by kind friends, and have all possible

     comfort and sympathy.



       Should contagious sickness exist in any of the ports named in the

     program, such ports will be passed, and others of interest

     substituted.



       The price of passage is fixed at $1,250, currency, for each adult

     passenger.  Choice of rooms and of seats at the tables apportioned

     in the order in which passages are engaged; and no passage

     considered engaged until ten percent of the passage money is

     deposited with the treasurer.



       Passengers can remain on board of the steamer, at all ports, if

     they desire, without additional expense, and all boating at the

     expense of the ship.



       All passages must be paid for when taken, in order that the most

     perfect arrangements be made for starting at the appointed time.



       Applications for passage must be approved by the committee before

     tickets are issued, and can be made to the undersigned.



       Articles of interest or curiosity, procured by the passengers

     during the voyage, may be brought home in the steamer free of

     charge.



       Five dollars per day, in gold, it is believed, will be a fair

     calculation to make for all traveling expenses onshore and at the

     various points where passengers may wish to leave the steamer for

     days at a time.



       The trip can be extended, and the route changed, by unanimous vote

     of the passengers.



      CHAS.  C.  DUNCAN,  117 WALL STREET, NEW YORK  R.  R.  G******,

     Treasurer



      Committee on Applications  J.  T.  H*****, ESQ.  R.  R.  G*****,

     ESQ.  C.  C.  Duncan



      Committee on Selecting Steamer  CAPT.  W.  W.  S* * * *, Surveyor

     for Board of Underwriters



       C.  W.  C******, Consulting Engineer for U.S.  and Canada  J.  T.

     H*****, Esq. C.  C.  DUNCAN



       P.S.--The very beautiful and substantial side-wheel steamship

     "Quaker City" has been chartered for the occasion, and will leave

     New York June 8th.  Letters have been issued by the government

     commending the party to courtesies abroad.



What was there lacking about that program to make it perfectly

irresistible? Nothing that any finite mind could discover.  Paris,

England, Scotland, Switzerland, Italy--Garibaldi! The Grecian

Archipelago! Vesuvius! Constantinople! Smyrna! The Holy Land! Egypt and

"our friends the Bermudians"! People in Europe desiring to join the

excursion--contagious sickness to be avoided--boating at the expense of

the ship--physician on board--the circuit of the globe to be made if the

passengers unanimously desired it--the company to be rigidly selected by

a pitiless "Committee on Applications"--the vessel to be as rigidly

selected by as pitiless a "Committee on Selecting Steamer." Human nature

could not withstand these bewildering temptations.  I hurried to the

treasurer's office and deposited my ten percent.  I rejoiced to know that

a few vacant staterooms were still left.  I did avoid a critical personal

examination into my character by that bowelless committee, but I referred

to all the people of high standing I could think of in the community who

would be least likely to know anything about me.



Shortly a supplementary program was issued which set forth that the

Plymouth Collection of Hymns would be used on board the ship.  I then

paid the balance of my passage money.



I was provided with a receipt and duly and officially accepted as an

excursionist.  There was happiness in that but it was tame compared to

the novelty of being "select."



This supplementary program also instructed the excursionists to provide

themselves with light musical instruments for amusement in the ship, with

saddles for Syrian travel, green spectacles and umbrellas, veils for

Egypt, and substantial clothing to use in rough pilgrimizing in the Holy

Land.  Furthermore, it was suggested that although the ship's library

would afford a fair amount of reading matter, it would still be well if

each passenger would provide himself with a few guidebooks, a Bible, and

some standard works of travel.  A list was appended, which consisted

chiefly of books relating to the Holy Land, since the Holy Land was part

of the excursion and seemed to be its main feature.



Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was to have accompanied the expedition, but

urgent duties obliged him to give up the idea.  There were other

passengers who could have been spared better and would have been spared

more willingly.  Lieutenant General Sherman was to have been of the party

also, but the Indian war compelled his presence on the plains.  A popular

actress had entered her name on the ship's books, but something

interfered and she couldn't go.  The "Drummer Boy of the Potomac"

deserted, and lo, we had never a celebrity left!



However, we were to have a "battery of guns" from the Navy Department (as

per advertisement) to be used in answering royal salutes; and the

document furnished by the Secretary of the Navy, which was to make

"General Sherman and party" welcome guests in the courts and camps of the

old world, was still left to us, though both document and battery, I

think, were shorn of somewhat of their original august proportions.

However, had not we the seductive program still, with its Paris, its

Constantinople, Smyrna, Jerusalem, Jericho, and "our friends the

Bermudians?" What did we care?









CHAPTER II.



Occasionally, during the following month, I dropped in at 117 Wall Street

to inquire how the repairing and refurnishing of the vessel was coming

on, how additions to the passenger list were averaging, how many people

the committee were decreeing not "select" every day and banishing in

sorrow and tribulation.  I was glad to know that we were to have a little

printing press on board and issue a daily newspaper of our own.  I was

glad to learn that our piano, our parlor organ, and our melodeon were to

be the best instruments of the kind that could be had in the market.  I

was proud to observe that among our excursionists were three ministers of

the gospel, eight doctors, sixteen or eighteen ladies, several military

and naval chieftains with sounding titles, an ample crop of "Professors"

of various kinds, and a gentleman who had "COMMISSIONER OF THE UNITED

STATES OF AMERICA TO EUROPE, ASIA, AND AFRICA" thundering after his name

in one awful blast!  I had carefully prepared myself to take rather a

back seat in that ship because of the uncommonly select material that

would alone be permitted to pass through the camel's eye of that

committee on credentials; I had schooled myself to expect an imposing

array of military and naval heroes and to have to set that back seat

still further back in consequence of it maybe; but I state frankly that I

was all unprepared for this crusher.



I fell under that titular avalanche a torn and blighted thing.  I said

that if that potentate must go over in our ship, why, I supposed he must

--but that to my thinking, when the United States considered it necessary

to send a dignitary of that tonnage across the ocean, it would be in

better taste, and safer, to take him apart and cart him over in sections

in several ships.



Ah, if I had only known then that he was only a common mortal, and that

his mission had nothing more overpowering about it than the collecting of

seeds and uncommon yams and extraordinary cabbages and peculiar bullfrogs

for that poor, useless, innocent, mildewed old fossil the Smithsonian

Institute, I would have felt so much relieved.



During that memorable month I basked in the happiness of being for once

in my life drifting with the tide of a great popular movement.  Everybody

was going to Europe--I, too, was going to Europe.  Everybody was going to

the famous Paris Exposition--I, too, was going to the Paris Exposition.

The steamship lines were carrying Americans out of the various ports of

the country at the rate of four or five thousand a week in the aggregate.

If I met a dozen individuals during that month who were not going to

Europe shortly, I have no distinct remembrance of it now.  I walked about

the city a good deal with a young Mr.  Blucher, who was booked for the

excursion.  He was confiding, good-natured, unsophisticated,

companionable; but he was not a man to set the river on fire.  He had the

most extraordinary notions about this European exodus and came at last to

consider the whole nation as packing up for emigration to France.  We

stepped into a store on Broadway one day, where he bought a handkerchief,

and when the man could not make change, Mr. B. said:



"Never mind, I'll hand it to you in Paris."



"But I am not going to Paris."



"How is--what did I understand you to say?"



"I said I am not going to Paris."



"Not going to Paris!  Not g---- well, then, where in the nation are you

going to?"



"Nowhere at all."



"Not anywhere whatsoever?--not any place on earth but this?"



"Not any place at all but just this--stay here all summer."



My comrade took his purchase and walked out of the store without a word--

walked out with an injured look upon his countenance.  Up the street

apiece he broke silence and said impressively: "It was a lie--that is my

opinion of it!"



In the fullness of time the ship was ready to receive her passengers.

I was introduced to the young gentleman who was to be my roommate, and

found him to be intelligent, cheerful of spirit, unselfish, full of

generous impulses, patient, considerate, and wonderfully good-natured.

Not any passenger that sailed in the Quaker City will withhold his

endorsement of what I have just said.  We selected a stateroom forward of

the wheel, on the starboard side, "below decks."  It bad two berths in

it, a dismal dead-light, a sink with a washbowl in it, and a long,

sumptuously cushioned locker, which was to do service as a sofa--partly--

and partly as a hiding place for our things.  Notwithstanding all this

furniture, there was still room to turn around in, but not to swing a cat

in, at least with entire security to the cat.  However, the room was

large, for a ship's stateroom, and was in every way satisfactory.



The vessel was appointed to sail on a certain Saturday early in June.



A little after noon on that distinguished Saturday I reached the ship and

went on board.  All was bustle and confusion.  [I have seen that remark

before somewhere.]  The pier was crowded with carriages and men;

passengers were arriving and hurrying on board; the vessel's decks were

encumbered with trunks and valises; groups of excursionists, arrayed in

unattractive traveling costumes, were moping about in a drizzling rain

and looking as droopy and woebegone as so many molting chickens.  The

gallant flag was up, but it was under the spell, too, and hung limp and

disheartened by the mast.  Altogether, it was the bluest, bluest

spectacle!  It was a pleasure excursion--there was no gainsaying that,

because the program said so--it was so nominated in the bond--but it

surely hadn't the general aspect of one.



Finally, above the banging, and rumbling, and shouting, and hissing of

steam rang the order to "cast off!"--a sudden rush to the gangways--a

scampering ashore of visitors-a revolution of the wheels, and we were

off--the pic-nic was begun!  Two very mild cheers went up from the

dripping crowd on the pier; we answered them gently from the slippery

decks; the flag made an effort to wave, and failed; the "battery of guns"

spake not--the ammunition was out.



We steamed down to the foot of the harbor and came to anchor.  It was

still raining.  And not only raining, but storming.  "Outside" we could

see, ourselves, that there was a tremendous sea on.  We must lie still,

in the calm harbor, till the storm should abate.  Our passengers hailed

from fifteen states; only a few of them had ever been to sea before;

manifestly it would not do to pit them against a full-blown tempest until

they had got their sea-legs on.  Toward evening the two steam tugs that

had accompanied us with a rollicking champagne-party of young New Yorkers

on board who wished to bid farewell to one of our number in due and

ancient form departed, and we were alone on the deep.  On deep five

fathoms, and anchored fast to the bottom.  And out in the solemn rain, at

that.  This was pleasuring with a vengeance.



It was an appropriate relief when the gong sounded for prayer meeting.

The first Saturday night of any other pleasure excursion might have been

devoted to whist and dancing; but I submit it to the unprejudiced mind if

it would have been in good taste for us to engage in such frivolities,

considering what we had gone through and the frame of mind we were in.

We would have shone at a wake, but not at anything more festive.



However, there is always a cheering influence about the sea; and in my

berth that night, rocked by the measured swell of the waves and lulled by

the murmur of the distant surf, I soon passed tranquilly out of all

consciousness of the dreary experiences of the day and damaging

premonitions of the future.









CHAPTER III.



All day Sunday at anchor.  The storm had gone down a great deal, but the

sea had not.  It was still piling its frothy hills high in air "outside,"

as we could plainly see with the glasses.  We could not properly begin a

pleasure excursion on Sunday; we could not offer untried stomachs to so

pitiless a sea as that.  We must lie still till Monday.  And we did.  But

we had repetitions of church and prayer-meetings; and so, of course, we

were just as eligibly situated as we could have been any where.



I was up early that Sabbath morning and was early to breakfast.  I felt a

perfectly natural desire to have a good, long, unprejudiced look at the

passengers at a time when they should be free from self-consciousness--

which is at breakfast, when such a moment occurs in the lives of human

beings at all.



I was greatly surprised to see so many elderly people--I might almost

say, so many venerable people.  A glance at the long lines of heads was

apt to make one think it was all gray.  But it was not.  There was a

tolerably fair sprinkling of young folks, and another fair sprinkling of

gentlemen and ladies who were non-committal as to age, being neither

actually old or absolutely young.



The next morning we weighed anchor and went to sea.  It was a great

happiness to get away after this dragging, dispiriting delay.  I thought

there never was such gladness in the air before, such brightness in the

sun, such beauty in the sea.  I was satisfied with the picnic then and

with all its belongings.  All my malicious instincts were dead within me;

and as America faded out of sight, I think a spirit of charity rose up in

their place that was as boundless, for the time being, as the broad ocean

that was heaving its billows about us.  I wished to express my feelings--

I wished to lift up my voice and sing; but I did not know anything to

sing, and so I was obliged to give up the idea.  It was no loss to the

ship, though, perhaps.



It was breezy and pleasant, but the sea was still very rough.  One could

not promenade without risking his neck; at one moment the bowsprit was

taking a deadly aim at the sun in midheaven, and at the next it was

trying to harpoon a shark in the bottom of the ocean.  What a weird

sensation it is to feel the stem of a ship sinking swiftly from under you

and see the bow climbing high away among the clouds!  One's safest course

that day was to clasp a railing and hang on; walking was too precarious a

pastime.



By some happy fortune I was not seasick.--That was a thing to be proud

of.  I had not always escaped before.  If there is one thing in the world

that will make a man peculiarly and insufferably self-conceited, it is to

have his stomach behave itself, the first day it sea, when nearly all his

comrades are seasick.  Soon a venerable fossil, shawled to the chin and

bandaged like a mummy, appeared at the door of the after deck-house, and

the next lurch of the ship shot him into my arms.  I said:



"Good-morning, Sir.  It is a fine day."



He put his hand on his stomach and said, "Oh, my!" and then staggered

away and fell over the coop of a skylight.



Presently another old gentleman was projected from the same door with

great violence.  I said:



"Calm yourself, Sir--There is no hurry.  It is a fine day, Sir."



He, also, put his hand on his stomach and said "Oh, my!" and reeled away.



In a little while another veteran was discharged abruptly from the same

door, clawing at the air for a saving support.  I said:



"Good morning, Sir.  It is a fine day for pleasuring.  You were about to

say--"



"Oh, my!"



I thought so.  I anticipated him, anyhow.  I stayed there and was

bombarded with old gentlemen for an hour, perhaps; and all I got out of

any of them was "Oh, my!"



I went away then in a thoughtful mood.  I said, this is a good pleasure

excursion.  I like it.  The passengers are not garrulous, but still they

are sociable.  I like those old people, but somehow they all seem to have

the "Oh, my" rather bad.



I knew what was the matter with them.  They were seasick.  And I was glad

of it.  We all like to see people seasick when we are not, ourselves.

Playing whist by the cabin lamps when it is storming outside is pleasant;

walking the quarterdeck in the moonlight is pleasant; smoking in the

breezy foretop is pleasant when one is not afraid to go up there; but

these are all feeble and commonplace compared with the joy of seeing

people suffering the miseries of seasickness.



I picked up a good deal of information during the afternoon.  At one time

I was climbing up the quarterdeck when the vessel's stem was in the sky;

I was smoking a cigar and feeling passably comfortable.  Somebody

ejaculated:



"Come, now, that won't answer.  Read the sign up there--NO SMOKING ABAFT

THE WHEEL!"



It was Captain Duncan, chief of the expedition.  I went forward, of

course.  I saw a long spyglass lying on a desk in one of the upper-deck

state-rooms back of the pilot-house and reached after it--there was a

ship in the distance.



"Ah, ah--hands off!  Come out of that!"



I came out of that.  I said to a deck-sweep--but in a low voice:



"Who is that overgrown pirate with the whiskers and the discordant

voice?"



"It's Captain Bursley--executive officer--sailing master."



I loitered about awhile, and then, for want of something better to do,

fell to carving a railing with my knife.  Somebody said, in an

insinuating, admonitory voice:



"Now, say--my friend--don't you know any better than to be whittling the

ship all to pieces that way? You ought to know better than that."



I went back and found the deck sweep.



"Who is that smooth-faced, animated outrage yonder in the fine clothes?"



"That's Captain L****, the owner of the ship--he's one of the main

bosses."



In the course of time I brought up on the starboard side of the

pilot-house and found a sextant lying on a bench.  Now, I said, they

"take the sun" through this thing; I should think I might see that vessel

through it.  I had hardly got it to my eye when someone touched me on the

shoulder and said deprecatingly:



"I'll have to get you to give that to me, Sir.  If there's anything you'd

like to know about taking the sun, I'd as soon tell you as not--but I

don't like to trust anybody with that instrument.  If you want any

figuring done--Aye, aye, sir!"



He was gone to answer a call from the other side.  I sought the

deck-sweep.



"Who is that spider-legged gorilla yonder with the sanctimonious

countenance?"



"It's Captain Jones, sir--the chief mate."



"Well.  This goes clear away ahead of anything I ever heard of before.

Do you--now I ask you as a man and a brother--do you think I could

venture to throw a rock here in any given direction without hitting a

captain of this ship?"



"Well, sir, I don't know--I think likely you'd fetch the captain of the

watch may be, because he's a-standing right yonder in the way."



I went below--meditating and a little downhearted.  I thought, if five

cooks can spoil a broth, what may not five captains do with a pleasure

excursion.









CHAPTER IV.



We plowed along bravely for a week or more, and without any conflict of

jurisdiction among the captains worth mentioning.  The passengers soon

learned to accommodate themselves to their new circumstances, and life in

the ship became nearly as systematically monotonous as the routine of a

barrack.  I do not mean that it was dull, for it was not entirely so by

any means--but there was a good deal of sameness about it.  As is always

the fashion at sea, the passengers shortly began to pick up sailor terms

--a sign that they were beginning to feel at home.  Half-past six was no

longer half-past six to these pilgrims from New England, the South, and

the Mississippi Valley, it was "seven bells"; eight, twelve, and four

o'clock were "eight bells"; the captain did not take the longitude at

nine o'clock, but at "two bells."  They spoke glibly of the "after

cabin," the "for'rard cabin," "port and starboard" and the "fo'castle."



At seven bells the first gong rang; at eight there was breakfast, for

such as were not too seasick to eat it.  After that all the well people

walked arm-in-arm up and down the long promenade deck, enjoying the fine

summer mornings, and the seasick ones crawled out and propped themselves

up in the lee of the paddle-boxes and ate their dismal tea and toast, and

looked wretched.  From eleven o'clock until luncheon, and from luncheon

until dinner at six in the evening, the employments and amusements were

various.  Some reading was done, and much smoking and sewing, though not

by the same parties; there were the monsters of the deep to be looked

after and wondered at; strange ships had to be scrutinized through

opera-glasses, and sage decisions arrived at concerning them; and more

than that, everybody took a personal interest in seeing that the flag was

run up and politely dipped three times in response to the salutes of

those strangers; in the smoking room there were always parties of

gentlemen playing euchre, draughts and dominoes, especially dominoes,

that delightfully harmless game; and down on the main deck, "for'rard"--

for'rard of the chicken-coops and the cattle--we had what was called

"horse billiards."  Horse billiards is a fine game.  It affords good,

active exercise, hilarity, and consuming excitement.  It is a mixture of

"hop-scotch" and shuffleboard played with a crutch.  A large hop-scotch

diagram is marked out on the deck with chalk, and each compartment

numbered.  You stand off three or four steps, with some broad wooden

disks before you on the deck, and these you send forward with a vigorous

thrust of a long crutch.  If a disk stops on a chalk line, it does not

count anything.  If it stops in division No. 7, it counts 7; in 5, it

counts 5, and so on.  The game is 100, and four can play at a time.  That

game would be very simple played on a stationary floor, but with us, to

play it well required science.  We had to allow for the reeling of the

ship to the right or the left.  Very often one made calculations for a

heel to the right and the ship did not go that way.  The consequence was

that that disk missed the whole hopscotch plan a yard or two, and then

there was humiliation on one side and laughter on the other.



When it rained the passengers had to stay in the house, of course--or at

least the cabins--and amuse themselves with games, reading, looking out

of the windows at the very familiar billows, and talking gossip.



By 7 o'clock in the evening, dinner was about over; an hour's promenade

on the upper deck followed; then the gong sounded and a large majority of

the party repaired to the after cabin (upper), a handsome saloon fifty or

sixty feet long, for prayers.  The unregenerated called this saloon the

"Synagogue."  The devotions consisted only of two hymns from the Plymouth

Collection and a short prayer, and seldom occupied more than fifteen

minutes.  The hymns were accompanied by parlor-organ music when the sea

was smooth enough to allow a performer to sit at the instrument without

being lashed to his chair.



After prayers the Synagogue shortly took the semblance of a writing

school.  The like of that picture was never seen in a ship before.

Behind the long dining tables on either side of the saloon, and scattered

from one end to the other of the latter, some twenty or thirty gentlemen

and ladies sat them down under the swaying lamps and for two or three

hours wrote diligently in their journals.  Alas!  that journals so

voluminously begun should come to so lame and impotent a conclusion as

most of them did!  I doubt if there is a single pilgrim of all that host

but can show a hundred fair pages of journal concerning the first twenty

days' voyaging in the Quaker City, and I am morally certain that not ten

of the party can show twenty pages of journal for the succeeding twenty

thousand miles of voyaging!  At certain periods it becomes the dearest

ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a

book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him

the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world,

and the pleasantest.  But if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find

out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance,

devotion to duty for duty's sake, and invincible determination may hope

to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal

and not sustain a shameful defeat.



One of our favorite youths, Jack, a splendid young fellow with a head

full of good sense, and a pair of legs that were a wonder to look upon in

the way of length and straightness and slimness, used to report progress

every morning in the most glowing and spirited way, and say:



"Oh, I'm coming along bully!" (he was a little given to slang in his

happier moods.)  "I wrote ten pages in my journal last night--and you

know I wrote nine the night before and twelve the night before that.

Why, it's only fun!"



"What do you find to put in it, Jack?"



"Oh, everything.  Latitude and longitude, noon every day; and how many

miles we made last twenty-four hours; and all the domino games I beat and

horse billiards; and whales and sharks and porpoises; and the text of the

sermon Sundays (because that'll tell at home, you know); and the ships we

saluted and what nation they were; and which way the wind was, and

whether there was a heavy sea, and what sail we carried, though we don't

ever carry any, principally, going against a head wind always--wonder

what is the reason of that?--and how many lies Moult has told--Oh, every

thing!  I've got everything down.  My father told me to keep that

journal.  Father wouldn't take a thousand dollars for it when I get it

done."



"No, Jack; it will be worth more than a thousand dollars--when you get it

done."



"Do you?--no, but do you think it will, though?



"Yes, it will be worth at least as much as a thousand dollars--when you

get it done.  May be more."



"Well, I about half think so, myself.  It ain't no slouch of a journal."



But it shortly became a most lamentable "slouch of a journal."  One night

in Paris, after a hard day's toil in sightseeing, I said:



"Now I'll go and stroll around the cafes awhile, Jack, and give you a

chance to write up your journal, old fellow."



His countenance lost its fire.  He said:



"Well, no, you needn't mind.  I think I won't run that journal anymore.

It is awful tedious.  Do you know--I reckon I'm as much as four thousand

pages behind hand.  I haven't got any France in it at all.  First I

thought I'd leave France out and start fresh.  But that wouldn't do,

would it? The governor would say, 'Hello, here--didn't see anything in

France? That cat wouldn't fight, you know.  First I thought I'd copy

France out of the guide-book, like old Badger in the for'rard cabin,

who's writing a book, but there's more than three hundred pages of it.

Oh, I don't think a journal's any use--do you? They're only a bother,

ain't they?"



"Yes, a journal that is incomplete isn't of much use, but a journal

properly kept is worth a thousand dollars--when you've got it done."



"A thousand!--well, I should think so.  I wouldn't finish it for a

million."



His experience was only the experience of the majority of that

industrious night school in the cabin.  If you wish to inflict a

heartless and malignant punishment upon a young person, pledge him to

keep a journal a year.



A good many expedients were resorted to to keep the excursionists amused

and satisfied.  A club was formed, of all the passengers, which met in

the writing school after prayers and read aloud about the countries we

were approaching and discussed the information so obtained.



Several times the photographer of the expedition brought out his

transparent pictures and gave us a handsome magic-lantern exhibition.

His views were nearly all of foreign scenes, but there were one or two

home pictures among them.  He advertised that he would "open his

performance in the after cabin at 'two bells' (nine P.M.) and show the

passengers where they shall eventually arrive"--which was all very well,

but by a funny accident the first picture that flamed out upon the canvas

was a view of Greenwood Cemetery!



On several starlight nights we danced on the upper deck, under the

awnings, and made something of a ball-room display of brilliancy by

hanging a number of ship's lanterns to the stanchions.  Our music

consisted of the well-mixed strains of a melodeon which was a little

asthmatic and apt to catch its breath where it ought to come out strong,

a clarinet which was a little unreliable on the high keys and rather

melancholy on the low ones, and a disreputable accordion that had a leak

somewhere and breathed louder than it squawked--a more elegant term does

not occur to me just now.  However, the dancing was infinitely worse than

the music.  When the ship rolled to starboard the whole platoon of

dancers came charging down to starboard with it, and brought up in mass

at the rail; and when it rolled to port they went floundering down to

port with the same unanimity of sentiment.  Waltzers spun around

precariously for a matter of fifteen seconds and then went scurrying down

to the rail as if they meant to go overboard.  The Virginia reel, as

performed on board the Quaker City, had more genuine reel about it than

any reel I ever saw before, and was as full of interest to the spectator

as it was full of desperate chances and hairbreadth escapes to the

participant.  We gave up dancing, finally.



We celebrated a lady's birthday anniversary with toasts, speeches, a

poem, and so forth.  We also had a mock trial.  No ship ever went to sea

that hadn't a mock trial on board.  The purser was accused of stealing an

overcoat from stateroom No. 10.  A judge was appointed; also clerks, a

crier of the court, constables, sheriffs; counsel for the State and for

the defendant; witnesses were subpoenaed, and a jury empaneled after much

challenging.  The witnesses were stupid and unreliable and contradictory,

as witnesses always are.  The counsel were eloquent, argumentative, and

vindictively abusive of each other, as was characteristic and proper.

The case was at last submitted and duly finished by the judge with an

absurd decision and a ridiculous sentence.



The acting of charades was tried on several evenings by the young

gentlemen and ladies, in the cabins, and proved the most distinguished

success of all the amusement experiments.



An attempt was made to organize a debating club, but it was a failure.

There was no oratorical talent in the ship.



We all enjoyed ourselves--I think I can safely say that, but it was in a

rather quiet way.  We very, very seldom played the piano; we played the

flute and the clarinet together, and made good music, too, what there was

of it, but we always played the same old tune; it was a very pretty tune

--how well I remember it--I wonder when I shall ever get rid of it.  We

never played either the melodeon or the organ except at devotions--but I

am too fast: young Albert did know part of a tune something about

"O Something-Or-Other How Sweet It Is to Know That He's His What's-his-

Name" (I do not remember the exact title of it, but it was very plaintive

and full of sentiment); Albert played that pretty much all the time until

we contracted with him to restrain himself.  But nobody ever sang by

moonlight on the upper deck, and the congregational singing at church and

prayers was not of a superior order of architecture.  I put up with it as

long as I could and then joined in and tried to improve it, but this

encouraged young George to join in too, and that made a failure of it;

because George's voice was just "turning," and when he was singing a

dismal sort of bass it was apt to fly off the handle and startle

everybody with a most discordant cackle on the upper notes.  George

didn't know the tunes, either, which was also a drawback to his

performances.  I said:



"Come, now, George, don't improvise.  It looks too egotistical.  It will

provoke remark.  Just stick to 'Coronation,' like the others.  It is a

good tune--you can't improve it any, just off-hand, in this way."



"Why, I'm not trying to improve it--and I am singing like the others--

just as it is in the notes."



And he honestly thought he was, too; and so he had no one to blame but

himself when his voice caught on the center occasionally and gave him the

lockjaw.



There were those among the unregenerated who attributed the unceasing

head-winds to our distressing choir-music.  There were those who said

openly that it was taking chances enough to have such ghastly music going

on, even when it was at its best; and that to exaggerate the crime by

letting George help was simply flying in the face of Providence.  These

said that the choir would keep up their lacerating attempts at melody

until they would bring down a storm some day that would sink the ship.



There were even grumblers at the prayers.  The executive officer said the

pilgrims had no charity:



"There they are, down there every night at eight bells, praying for fair

winds--when they know as well as I do that this is the only ship going

east this time of the year, but there's a thousand coming west--what's a

fair wind for us is a head wind to them--the Almighty's blowing a fair

wind for a thousand vessels, and this tribe wants him to turn it clear

around so as to accommodate one--and she a steamship at that!  It ain't

good sense, it ain't good reason, it ain't good Christianity, it ain't

common human charity.  Avast with such nonsense!"









CHAPTER V.



Taking it "by and large," as the sailors say, we had a pleasant ten days'

run from New York to the Azores islands--not a fast run, for the distance

is only twenty-four hundred miles, but a right pleasant one in the main.

True, we had head winds all the time, and several stormy experiences

which sent fifty percent of the passengers to bed sick and made the ship

look dismal and deserted--stormy experiences that all will remember who

weathered them on the tumbling deck and caught the vast sheets of spray

that every now and then sprang high in air from the weather bow and swept

the ship like a thunder-shower; but for the most part we had balmy summer

weather and nights that were even finer than the days.  We had the

phenomenon of a full moon located just in the same spot in the heavens at

the same hour every night.  The reason of this singular conduct on the

part of the moon did not occur to us at first, but it did afterward when

we reflected that we were gaining about twenty minutes every day because

we were going east so fast--we gained just about enough every day to keep

along with the moon.  It was becoming an old moon to the friends we had

left behind us, but to us Joshuas it stood still in the same place and

remained always the same.



Young Mr. Blucher, who is from the Far West and is on his first voyage,

was a good deal worried by the constantly changing "ship time."  He was

proud of his new watch at first and used to drag it out promptly when

eight bells struck at noon, but he came to look after a while as if he

were losing confidence in it.  Seven days out from New York he came on

deck and said with great decision:



"This thing's a swindle!"



"What's a swindle?"



"Why, this watch.  I bought her out in Illinois--gave $150 for her--and I

thought she was good.  And, by George, she is good onshore, but somehow

she don't keep up her lick here on the water--gets seasick may be.  She

skips; she runs along regular enough till half-past eleven, and then, all

of a sudden, she lets down.  I've set that old regulator up faster and

faster, till I've shoved it clear around, but it don't do any good; she

just distances every watch in the ship, and clatters along in a way

that's astonishing till it is noon, but them eight bells always gets in

about ten minutes ahead of her anyway.  I don't know what to do with her

now.  She's doing all she can--she's going her best gait, but it won't

save her.  Now, don't you know, there ain't a watch in the ship that's

making better time than she is, but what does it signify?  When you hear

them eight bells you'll find her just about ten minutes short of her

score sure."



The ship was gaining a full hour every three days, and this fellow was

trying to make his watch go fast enough to keep up to her.  But, as he

had said, he had pushed the regulator up as far as it would go, and the

watch was "on its best gait," and so nothing was left him but to fold his

hands and see the ship beat the race.  We sent him to the captain, and he

explained to him the mystery of "ship time" and set his troubled mind at

rest.  This young man asked a great many questions about seasickness

before we left, and wanted to know what its characteristics were and how

he was to tell when he had it.  He found out.



We saw the usual sharks, blackfish, porpoises, &c., of course, and by and

by large schools of Portuguese men-of-war were added to the regular list

of sea wonders.  Some of them were white and some of a brilliant carmine

color.  The nautilus is nothing but a transparent web of jelly that

spreads itself to catch the wind, and has fleshy-looking strings a foot

or two long dangling from it to keep it steady in the water.  It is an

accomplished sailor and has good sailor judgment.  It reefs its sail when

a storm threatens or the wind blows pretty hard, and furls it entirely

and goes down when a gale blows.  Ordinarily it keeps its sail wet and in

good sailing order by turning over and dipping it in the water for a

moment.  Seamen say the nautilus is only found in these waters between

the 35th and 45th parallels of latitude.



At three o'clock on the morning of the twenty-first of June, we were

awakened and notified that the Azores islands were in sight.  I said I

did not take any interest in islands at three o'clock in the morning.

But another persecutor came, and then another and another, and finally

believing that the general enthusiasm would permit no one to slumber in

peace, I got up and went sleepily on deck.  It was five and a half

o'clock now, and a raw, blustering morning.  The passengers were huddled

about the smoke-stacks and fortified behind ventilators, and all were

wrapped in wintry costumes and looking sleepy and unhappy in the pitiless

gale and the drenching spray.



The island in sight was Flores.  It seemed only a mountain of mud

standing up out of the dull mists of the sea.  But as we bore down upon

it the sun came out and made it a beautiful picture--a mass of green

farms and meadows that swelled up to a height of fifteen hundred feet and

mingled its upper outlines with the clouds.  It was ribbed with sharp,

steep ridges and cloven with narrow canyons, and here and there on the

heights, rocky upheavals shaped themselves into mimic battlements and

castles; and out of rifted clouds came broad shafts of sunlight, that

painted summit, and slope and glen, with bands of fire, and left belts of

somber shade between.  It was the aurora borealis of the frozen pole

exiled to a summer land!



We skirted around two-thirds of the island, four miles from shore, and

all the opera glasses in the ship were called into requisition to settle

disputes as to whether mossy spots on the uplands were groves of trees or

groves of weeds, or whether the white villages down by the sea were

really villages or only the clustering tombstones of cemeteries.  Finally

we stood to sea and bore away for San Miguel, and Flores shortly became a

dome of mud again and sank down among the mists, and disappeared.  But to

many a seasick passenger it was good to see the green hills again, and

all were more cheerful after this episode than anybody could have

expected them to be, considering how sinfully early they had gotten up.



But we had to change our purpose about San Miguel, for a storm came up

about noon that so tossed and pitched the vessel that common sense

dictated a run for shelter.  Therefore we steered for the nearest island

of the group--Fayal (the people there pronounce it Fy-all, and put the

accent on the first syllable).  We anchored in the open roadstead of

Horta, half a mile from the shore.  The town has eight thousand to ten

thousand inhabitants.  Its snow-white houses nestle cosily in a sea of

fresh green vegetation, and no village could look prettier or more

attractive.  It sits in the lap of an amphitheater of hills which are

three hundred to seven hundred feet high, and carefully cultivated clear

to their summits--not a foot of soil left idle.  Every farm and every

acre is cut up into little square inclosures by stone walls, whose duty

it is to protect the growing products from the destructive gales that

blow there.  These hundreds of green squares, marked by their black lava

walls, make the hills look like vast checkerboards.



The islands belong to Portugal, and everything in Fayal has Portuguese

characteristics about it.  But more of that anon.  A swarm of swarthy,

noisy, lying, shoulder-shrugging, gesticulating Portuguese boatmen, with

brass rings in their ears and fraud in their hearts, climbed the ship's

sides, and various parties of us contracted with them to take us ashore

at so much a head, silver coin of any country.  We landed under the walls

of a little fort, armed with batteries of twelve-and-thirty-two-pounders,

which Horta considered a most formidable institution, but if we were ever

to get after it with one of our turreted monitors, they would have to

move it out in the country if they wanted it where they could go and find

it again when they needed it.  The group on the pier was a rusty one--men

and women, and boys and girls, all ragged and barefoot, uncombed and

unclean, and by instinct, education, and profession beggars.  They

trooped after us, and never more while we tarried in Fayal did we get rid

of them.  We walked up the middle of the principal street, and these

vermin surrounded us on all sides and glared upon us; and every moment

excited couples shot ahead of the procession to get a good look back,

just as village boys do when they accompany the elephant on his

advertising trip from street to street.  It was very flattering to me to

be part of the material for such a sensation.  Here and there in the

doorways we saw women with fashionable Portuguese hoods on.  This hood is

of thick blue cloth, attached to a cloak of the same stuff, and is a

marvel of ugliness.  It stands up high and spreads far abroad, and is

unfathomably deep.  It fits like a circus tent, and a woman's head is

hidden away in it like the man's who prompts the singers from his tin

shed in the stage of an opera.  There is no particle of trimming about

this monstrous capote, as they call it--it is just a plain, ugly dead-

blue mass of sail, and a woman can't go within eight points of the wind

with one of them on; she has to go before the wind or not at all.  The

general style of the capote is the same in all the islands, and will

remain so for the next ten thousand years, but each island shapes its

capotes just enough differently from the others to enable an observer to

tell at a glance what particular island a lady hails from.



The Portuguese pennies, or reis (pronounced rays), are prodigious.  It

takes one thousand reis to make a dollar, and all financial estimates are

made in reis.  We did not know this until after we had found it out

through Blucher.  Blucher said he was so happy and so grateful to be on

solid land once more that he wanted to give a feast--said he had heard it

was a cheap land, and he was bound to have a grand banquet.  He invited

nine of us, and we ate an excellent dinner at the principal hotel.  In

the midst of the jollity produced by good cigars, good wine, and passable

anecdotes, the landlord presented his bill.  Blucher glanced at it and

his countenance fell.  He took another look to assure himself that his

senses had not deceived him and then read the items aloud, in a faltering

voice, while the roses in his cheeks turned to ashes:



"'Ten dinners, at 600 reis, 6,000 reis!'  Ruin and desolation!



"'Twenty-five cigars, at 100 reis, 2,500 reis!'  Oh, my sainted mother!



"'Eleven bottles of wine, at 1,200 reis, 13,200 reis!'  Be with us all!



"'TOTAL, TWENTY-ONE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED REIS!'  The suffering Moses!

There ain't money enough in the ship to pay that bill!  Go--leave me to

my misery, boys, I am a ruined community."



I think it was the blankest-looking party I ever saw.  Nobody could say a

word.  It was as if every soul had been stricken dumb.  Wine glasses

descended slowly to the table, their contents untasted.  Cigars dropped

unnoticed from nerveless fingers.  Each man sought his neighbor's eye,

but found in it no ray of hope, no encouragement.  At last the fearful

silence was broken.  The shadow of a desperate resolve settled upon

Blucher's countenance like a cloud, and he rose up and said:



"Landlord, this is a low, mean swindle, and I'll never, never stand it.

Here's a hundred and fifty dollars, Sir, and it's all you'll get--I'll

swim in blood before I'll pay a cent more."



Our spirits rose and the landlord's fell--at least we thought so; he was

confused, at any rate, notwithstanding he had not understood a word that

had been said.  He glanced from the little pile of gold pieces to Blucher

several times and then went out.  He must have visited an American, for

when he returned, he brought back his bill translated into a language

that a Christian could understand--thus:



10 dinners, 6,000 reis, or .  .  .$6.00



25 cigars, 2,500 reis, or .  .  .  2.50



11 bottles wine, 13,200 reis, or  13.20



Total 21,700 reis, or .  .  .  . $21.70



Happiness reigned once more in Blucher's dinner party.  More refreshments

were ordered.









CHAPTER VI.



I think the Azores must be very little known in America.  Out of our

whole ship's company there was not a solitary individual who knew

anything whatever about them.  Some of the party, well read concerning

most other lands, had no other information about the Azores than that

they were a group of nine or ten small islands far out in the Atlantic,

something more than halfway between New York and Gibraltar.  That was

all.  These considerations move me to put in a paragraph of dry facts

just here.



The community is eminently Portuguese--that is to say, it is slow, poor,

shiftless, sleepy, and lazy.  There is a civil governor, appointed by the

King of Portugal, and also a military governor, who can assume supreme

control and suspend the civil government at his pleasure.  The islands

contain a population of about 200,000, almost entirely Portuguese.

Everything is staid and settled, for the country was one hundred years

old when Columbus discovered America.  The principal crop is corn, and

they raise it and grind it just as their great-great-great-grandfathers

did.  They plow with a board slightly shod with iron; their trifling

little harrows are drawn by men and women; small windmills grind the

corn, ten bushels a day, and there is one assistant superintendent to

feed the mill and a general superintendent to stand by and keep him from

going to sleep.  When the wind changes they hitch on some donkeys and

actually turn the whole upper half of the mill around until the sails are

in proper position, instead of fixing the concern so that the sails could

be moved instead of the mill.  Oxen tread the wheat from the ear, after

the fashion prevalent in the time of Methuselah.  There is not a

wheelbarrow in the land--they carry everything on their heads, or on

donkeys, or in a wicker-bodied cart, whose wheels are solid blocks of

wood and whose axles turn with the wheel.  There is not a modern plow in

the islands or a threshing machine.  All attempts to introduce them have

failed.  The good Catholic Portuguese crossed himself and prayed God to

shield him from all blasphemous desire to know more than his father did

before him.  The climate is mild; they never have snow or ice, and I saw

no chimneys in the town.  The donkeys and the men, women, and children of

a family all eat and sleep in the same room, and are unclean, are ravaged

by vermin, and are truly happy.  The people lie, and cheat the stranger,

and are desperately ignorant, and have hardly any reverence for their

dead.  The latter trait shows how little better they are than the donkeys

they eat and sleep with.  The only well-dressed Portuguese in the camp

are the half a dozen well-to-do families, the Jesuit priests, and the

soldiers of the little garrison.  The wages of a laborer are twenty to

twenty-four cents a day, and those of a good mechanic about twice as

much.  They count it in reis at a thousand to the dollar, and this makes

them rich and contented.  Fine grapes used to grow in the islands, and an

excellent wine was made and exported.  But a disease killed all the vines

fifteen years ago, and since that time no wine has been made.  The

islands being wholly of volcanic origin, the soil is necessarily very

rich.  Nearly every foot of ground is under cultivation, and two or three

crops a year of each article are produced, but nothing is exported save a

few oranges--chiefly to England.  Nobody comes here, and nobody goes

away.  News is a thing unknown in Fayal.  A thirst for it is a passion

equally unknown.  A Portuguese of average intelligence inquired if our

civil war was over.  Because, he said, somebody had told him it was--or

at least it ran in his mind that somebody had told him something like

that!  And when a passenger gave an officer of the garrison copies of the

Tribune, the Herald, and Times, he was surprised to find later news in

them from Lisbon than he had just received by the little monthly steamer.

He was told that it came by cable.  He said he knew they had tried to lay

a cable ten years ago, but it had been in his mind somehow that they

hadn't succeeded!



It is in communities like this that Jesuit humbuggery flourishes.  We

visited a Jesuit cathedral nearly two hundred years old and found in it a

piece of the veritable cross upon which our Saviour was crucified.  It

was polished and hard, and in as excellent a state of preservation as if

the dread tragedy on Calvary had occurred yesterday instead of eighteen

centuries ago.  But these confiding people believe in that piece of wood

unhesitatingly.



In a chapel of the cathedral is an altar with facings of solid silver--at

least they call it so, and I think myself it would go a couple of hundred

to the ton (to speak after the fashion of the silver miners)--and before

it is kept forever burning a small lamp.  A devout lady who died, left

money and contracted for unlimited masses for the repose of her soul, and

also stipulated that this lamp should be kept lighted always, day and

night.  She did all this before she died, you understand.  It is a very

small lamp and a very dim one, and it could not work her much damage, I

think, if it went out altogether.



The great altar of the cathedral and also three or four minor ones are a

perfect mass of gilt gimcracks and gingerbread.  And they have a swarm of

rusty, dusty, battered apostles standing around the filagree work, some

on one leg and some with one eye out but a gamey look in the other, and

some with two or three fingers gone, and some with not enough nose left

to blow--all of them crippled and discouraged, and fitter subjects for

the hospital than the cathedral.



The walls of the chancel are of porcelain, all pictured over with figures

of almost life size, very elegantly wrought and dressed in the fanciful

costumes of two centuries ago.  The design was a history of something or

somebody, but none of us were learned enough to read the story.  The old

father, reposing under a stone close by, dated 1686, might have told us

if he could have risen.  But he didn't.



As we came down through the town we encountered a squad of little donkeys

ready saddled for use.  The saddles were peculiar, to say the least.

They consisted of a sort of saw-buck with a small mattress on it, and

this furniture covered about half the donkey.  There were no stirrups,

but really such supports were not needed--to use such a saddle was the

next thing to riding a dinner table--there was ample support clear out to

one's knee joints.  A pack of ragged Portuguese muleteers crowded around

us, offering their beasts at half a dollar an hour--more rascality to the

stranger, for the market price is sixteen cents.  Half a dozen of us

mounted the ungainly affairs and submitted to the indignity of making a

ridiculous spectacle of ourselves through the principal streets of a town

of 10,000 inhabitants.



We started.  It was not a trot, a gallop, or a canter, but a stampede,

and made up of all possible or conceivable gaits.  No spurs were

necessary.  There was a muleteer to every donkey and a dozen volunteers

beside, and they banged the donkeys with their goad sticks, and pricked

them with their spikes, and shouted something that sounded like "Sekki-

yah!" and kept up a din and a racket that was worse than Bedlam itself.

These rascals were all on foot, but no matter, they were always up to

time--they can outrun and outlast a donkey.  Altogether, ours was a

lively and a picturesque procession, and drew crowded audiences to the

balconies wherever we went.



Blucher could do nothing at all with his donkey.  The beast scampered

zigzag across the road and the others ran into him; he scraped Blucher

against carts and the corners of houses; the road was fenced in with high

stone walls, and the donkey gave him a polishing first on one side and

then on the other, but never once took the middle; he finally came to the

house he was born in and darted into the parlor, scraping Blucher off at

the doorway.  After remounting, Blucher said to the muleteer, "Now,

that's enough, you know; you go slow hereafter."



But the fellow knew no English and did not understand, so he simply said,

"Sekki-yah!" and the donkey was off again like a shot.  He turned a comer

suddenly, and Blucher went over his head.  And, to speak truly, every

mule stumbled over the two, and the whole cavalcade was piled up in a

heap.  No harm done.  A fall from one of those donkeys is of little more

consequence than rolling off a sofa.  The donkeys all stood still after

the catastrophe and waited for their dismembered saddles to be patched up

and put on by the noisy muleteers.  Blucher was pretty angry and wanted

to swear, but every time he opened his mouth his animal did so also and

let off a series of brays that drowned all other sounds.



It was fun, scurrying around the breezy hills and through the beautiful

canyons.  There was that rare thing, novelty, about it; it was a fresh,

new, exhilarating sensation, this donkey riding, and worth a hundred worn

and threadbare home pleasures.



The roads were a wonder, and well they might be.  Here was an island with

only a handful of people in it--25,000--and yet such fine roads do not

exist in the United States outside of Central Park.  Everywhere you go,

in any direction, you find either a hard, smooth, level thoroughfare,

just sprinkled with black lava sand, and bordered with little gutters

neatly paved with small smooth pebbles, or compactly paved ones like

Broadway.  They talk much of the Russ pavement in New York, and call it a

new invention--yet here they have been using it in this remote little

isle of the sea for two hundred years!  Every street in Horta is

handsomely paved with the heavy Russ blocks, and the surface is neat and

true as a floor--not marred by holes like Broadway.  And every road is

fenced in by tall, solid lava walls, which will last a thousand years in

this land where frost is unknown.  They are very thick, and are often

plastered and whitewashed and capped with projecting slabs of cut stone.

Trees from gardens above hang their swaying tendrils down, and contrast

their bright green with the whitewash or the black lava of the walls and

make them beautiful.  The trees and vines stretch across these narrow

roadways sometimes and so shut out the sun that you seem to be riding

through a tunnel.  The pavements, the roads, and the bridges are all

government work.



The bridges are of a single span--a single arch--of cut stone, without a

support, and paved on top with flags of lava and ornamental pebblework.

Everywhere are walls, walls, walls, and all of them tasteful and

handsome--and eternally substantial; and everywhere are those marvelous

pavements, so neat, so smooth, and so indestructible.  And if ever roads

and streets and the outsides of houses were perfectly free from any sign

or semblance of dirt, or dust, or mud, or uncleanliness of any kind, it

is Horta, it is Fayal.  The lower classes of the people, in their persons

and their domiciles, are not clean--but there it stops--the town and the

island are miracles of cleanliness.



We arrived home again finally, after a ten-mile excursion, and the

irrepressible muleteers scampered at our heels through the main street,

goading the donkeys, shouting the everlasting "Sekki-yah," and singing

"John Brown's Body" in ruinous English.



When we were dismounted and it came to settling, the shouting and jawing

and swearing and quarreling among the muleteers and with us was nearly

deafening.  One fellow would demand a dollar an hour for the use of his

donkey; another claimed half a dollar for pricking him up, another a

quarter for helping in that service, and about fourteen guides presented

bills for showing us the way through the town and its environs; and every

vagrant of them was more vociferous, and more vehement and more frantic

in gesture than his neighbor.  We paid one guide and paid for one

muleteer to each donkey.



The mountains on some of the islands are very high.  We sailed along the

shore of the island of Pico, under a stately green pyramid that rose up

with one unbroken sweep from our very feet to an altitude of 7,613 feet,

and thrust its summit above the white clouds like an island adrift in a

fog!



We got plenty of fresh oranges, lemons, figs, apricots, etc., in these

Azores, of course.  But I will desist.  I am not here to write Patent

Office reports.



We are on our way to Gibraltar, and shall reach there five or six days

out from the Azores.









CHAPTER VII.



A week of buffeting a tempestuous and relentless sea; a week of

seasickness and deserted cabins; of lonely quarterdecks drenched with

spray--spray so ambitious that it even coated the smokestacks thick with

a white crust of salt to their very tops; a week of shivering in the

shelter of the lifeboats and deckhouses by day and blowing suffocating

"clouds" and boisterously performing at dominoes in the smoking room at

night.



And the last night of the seven was the stormiest of all.  There was no

thunder, no noise but the pounding bows of the ship, the keen whistling

of the gale through the cordage, and the rush of the seething waters.

But the vessel climbed aloft as if she would climb to heaven--then paused

an instant that seemed a century and plunged headlong down again, as from

a precipice.  The sheeted sprays drenched the decks like rain.  The

blackness of darkness was everywhere.  At long intervals a flash of

lightning clove it with a quivering line of fire that revealed a heaving

world of water where was nothing before, kindled the dusky cordage to

glittering silver, and lit up the faces of the men with a ghastly luster!



Fear drove many on deck that were used to avoiding the night winds and

the spray.  Some thought the vessel could not live through the night, and

it seemed less dreadful to stand out in the midst of the wild tempest and

see the peril that threatened than to be shut up in the sepulchral

cabins, under the dim lamps, and imagine the horrors that were abroad on

the ocean.  And once out--once where they could see the ship struggling

in the strong grasp of the storm--once where they could hear the shriek

of the winds and face the driving spray and look out upon the majestic

picture the lightnings disclosed, they were prisoners to a fierce

fascination they could not resist, and so remained.  It was a wild night

--and a very, very long one.



Everybody was sent scampering to the deck at seven o'clock this lovely

morning of the thirtieth of June with the glad news that land was in

sight!  It was a rare thing and a joyful, to see all the ship's family

abroad once more, albeit the happiness that sat upon every countenance

could only partly conceal the ravages which that long siege of storms had

wrought there.  But dull eyes soon sparkled with pleasure, pallid cheeks

flushed again, and frames weakened by sickness gathered new life from the

quickening influences of the bright, fresh morning.  Yea, and from a

still more potent influence: the worn castaways were to see the blessed

land again!--and to see it was to bring back that motherland that was in

all their thoughts.



Within the hour we were fairly within the Straits of Gibraltar, the tall

yellow-splotched hills of Africa on our right, with their bases veiled in

a blue haze and their summits swathed in clouds--the same being according

to Scripture, which says that "clouds and darkness are over the land."

The words were spoken of this particular portion of Africa, I believe.

On our left were the granite-ribbed domes of old Spain.  The strait is

only thirteen miles wide in its narrowest part.



At short intervals along the Spanish shore were quaint-looking old stone

towers--Moorish, we thought--but learned better afterwards.  In former

times the Morocco rascals used to coast along the Spanish Main in their

boats till a safe opportunity seemed to present itself, and then dart in

and capture a Spanish village and carry off all the pretty women they

could find.  It was a pleasant business, and was very popular.  The

Spaniards built these watchtowers on the hills to enable them to keep a

sharper lookout on the Moroccan speculators.



The picture on the other hand was very beautiful to eyes weary of the

changeless sea, and by and by the ship's company grew wonderfully

cheerful.  But while we stood admiring the cloud-capped peaks and the

lowlands robed in misty gloom a finer picture burst upon us and chained

every eye like a magnet--a stately ship, with canvas piled on canvas till

she was one towering mass of bellying sail!  She came speeding over the

sea like a great bird.  Africa and Spain were forgotten.  All homage was

for the beautiful stranger.  While everybody gazed she swept superbly by

and flung the Stars and Stripes to the breeze!  Quicker than thought,

hats and handkerchiefs flashed in the air, and a cheer went up!  She was

beautiful before--she was radiant now.  Many a one on our decks knew then

for the first time how tame a sight his country's flag is at home

compared to what it is in a foreign land.  To see it is to see a vision

of home itself and all its idols, and feel a thrill that would stir a

very river of sluggish blood!



We were approaching the famed Pillars of Hercules, and already the

African one, "Ape's Hill," a grand old mountain with summit streaked with

granite ledges, was in sight.  The other, the great Rock of Gibraltar,

was yet to come.  The ancients considered the Pillars of Hercules the

head of navigation and the end of the world.  The information the

ancients didn't have was very voluminous.  Even the prophets wrote book

after book and epistle after epistle, yet never once hinted at the

existence of a great continent on our side of the water; yet they must

have known it was there, I should think.



In a few moments a lonely and enormous mass of rock, standing seemingly

in the center of the wide strait and apparently washed on all sides by

the sea, swung magnificently into view, and we needed no tedious traveled

parrot to tell us it was Gibraltar.  There could not be two rocks like

that in one kingdom.



The Rock of Gibraltar is about a mile and a half long, I should say, by

1,400 to 1,500 feet high, and a quarter of a mile wide at its base.  One

side and one end of it come about as straight up out of the sea as the

side of a house, the other end is irregular and the other side is a steep

slant which an army would find very difficult to climb.  At the foot of

this slant is the walled town of Gibraltar--or rather the town occupies

part of the slant.  Everywhere--on hillside, in the precipice, by the

sea, on the heights--everywhere you choose to look, Gibraltar is clad

with masonry and bristling with guns.  It makes a striking and lively

picture from whatsoever point you contemplate it.  It is pushed out into

the sea on the end of a flat, narrow strip of land, and is suggestive of

a "gob" of mud on the end of a shingle.  A few hundred yards of this flat

ground at its base belongs to the English, and then, extending across the

strip from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, a distance of a quarter of

a mile, comes the "Neutral Ground," a space two or three hundred yards

wide, which is free to both parties.



"Are you going through Spain to Paris?"  That question was bandied about

the ship day and night from Fayal to Gibraltar, and I thought I never

could get so tired of hearing any one combination of words again or more

tired of answering, "I don't know."  At the last moment six or seven had

sufficient decision of character to make up their minds to go, and did

go, and I felt a sense of relief at once--it was forever too late now and

I could make up my mind at my leisure not to go.  I must have a

prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to

make it up.



But behold how annoyances repeat themselves.  We had no sooner gotten rid

of the Spain distress than the Gibraltar guides started another--a

tiresome repetition of a legend that had nothing very astonishing about

it, even in the first place: "That high hill yonder is called the Queen's

Chair; it is because one of the queens of Spain placed her chair there

when the French and Spanish troops were besieging Gibraltar, and said she

would never move from the spot till the English flag was lowered from the

fortresses.  If the English hadn't been gallant enough to lower the flag

for a few hours one day, she'd have had to break her oath or die up

there."



We rode on asses and mules up the steep, narrow streets and entered the

subterranean galleries the English have blasted out in the rock.  These

galleries are like spacious railway tunnels, and at short intervals in

them great guns frown out upon sea and town through portholes five or six

hundred feet above the ocean.  There is a mile or so of this subterranean

work, and it must have cost a vast deal of money and labor.  The gallery

guns command the peninsula and the harbors of both oceans, but they might

as well not be there, I should think, for an army could hardly climb the

perpendicular wall of the rock anyhow.  Those lofty portholes afford

superb views of the sea, though.  At one place, where a jutting crag was

hollowed out into a great chamber whose furniture was huge cannon and

whose windows were portholes, a glimpse was caught of a hill not far

away, and a soldier said:



"That high hill yonder is called the Queen's Chair; it is because a queen

of Spain placed her chair there once when the French and Spanish troops

were besieging Gibraltar, and said she would never move from the spot

till the English flag was lowered from the fortresses.  If the English

hadn't been gallant enough to lower the flag for a few hours one day,

she'd have had to break her oath or die up there."



On the topmost pinnacle of Gibraltar we halted a good while, and no doubt

the mules were tired.  They had a right to be.  The military road was

good, but rather steep, and there was a good deal of it.  The view from

the narrow ledge was magnificent; from it vessels seeming like the

tiniest little toy boats were turned into noble ships by the telescopes,

and other vessels that were fifty miles away and even sixty, they said,

and invisible to the naked eye, could be clearly distinguished through

those same telescopes.  Below, on one side, we looked down upon an

endless mass of batteries and on the other straight down to the sea.



While I was resting ever so comfortably on a rampart, and cooling my

baking head in the delicious breeze, an officious guide belonging to

another party came up and said:



"Senor, that high hill yonder is called the Queen's Chair--"



"Sir, I am a helpless orphan in a foreign land.  Have pity on me.  Don't

--now don't inflict that most in-FERNAL old legend on me anymore today!"



There--I had used strong language after promising I would never do so

again; but the provocation was more than human nature could bear.  If you

had been bored so, when you had the noble panorama of Spain and Africa

and the blue Mediterranean spread abroad at your feet, and wanted to gaze

and enjoy and surfeit yourself in its beauty in silence, you might have

even burst into stronger language than I did.



Gibraltar has stood several protracted sieges, one of them of nearly four

years' duration (it failed), and the English only captured it by

stratagem.  The wonder is that anybody should ever dream of trying so

impossible a project as the taking it by assault--and yet it has been

tried more than once.



The Moors held the place twelve hundred years ago, and a staunch old

castle of theirs of that date still frowns from the middle of the town,

with moss-grown battlements and sides well scarred by shots fired in

battles and sieges that are forgotten now.  A secret chamber in the rock

behind it was discovered some time ago, which contained a sword of

exquisite workmanship, and some quaint old armor of a fashion that

antiquaries are not acquainted with, though it is supposed to be Roman.

Roman armor and Roman relics of various kinds have been found in a cave

in the sea extremity of Gibraltar; history says Rome held this part of

the country about the Christian era, and these things seem to confirm the

statement.



In that cave also are found human bones, crusted with a very thick, stony

coating, and wise men have ventured to say that those men not only lived

before the flood, but as much as ten thousand years before it.  It may be

true--it looks reasonable enough--but as long as those parties can't vote

anymore, the matter can be of no great public interest.  In this cave

likewise are found skeletons and fossils of animals that exist in every

part of Africa, yet within memory and tradition have never existed in any

portion of Spain save this lone peak of Gibraltar!  So the theory is that

the channel between Gibraltar and Africa was once dry land, and that the

low, neutral neck between Gibraltar and the Spanish hills behind it was

once ocean, and of course that these African animals, being over at

Gibraltar (after rock, perhaps--there is plenty there), got closed out

when the great change occurred.  The hills in Africa, across the channel,

are full of apes, and there are now and always have been apes on the rock

of Gibraltar--but not elsewhere in Spain!  The subject is an interesting

one.



There is an English garrison at Gibraltar of 6,000 or 7,000 men, and so

uniforms of flaming red are plenty; and red and blue, and undress

costumes of snowy white, and also the queer uniform of the bare-kneed

Highlander; and one sees soft-eyed Spanish girls from San Roque, and

veiled Moorish beauties (I suppose they are beauties) from Tarifa, and

turbaned, sashed, and trousered Moorish merchants from Fez, and long-

robed, bare-legged, ragged Muhammadan vagabonds from Tetuan and Tangier,

some brown, some yellow and some as black as virgin ink--and Jews from

all around, in gabardine, skullcap, and slippers, just as they are in

pictures and theaters, and just as they were three thousand years ago, no

doubt.  You can easily understand that a tribe (somehow our pilgrims

suggest that expression, because they march in a straggling procession

through these foreign places with such an Indian-like air of complacency

and independence about them) like ours, made up from fifteen or sixteen

states of the Union, found enough to stare at in this shifting panorama

of fashion today.



Speaking of our pilgrims reminds me that we have one or two people among

us who are sometimes an annoyance.  However, I do not count the Oracle in

that list.  I will explain that the Oracle is an innocent old ass who

eats for four and looks wiser than the whole Academy of France would have

any right to look, and never uses a one-syllable word when he can think

of a longer one, and never by any possible chance knows the meaning of

any long word he uses or ever gets it in the right place; yet he will

serenely venture an opinion on the most abstruse subject and back it up

complacently with quotations from authors who never existed, and finally

when cornered will slide to the other side of the question, say he has

been there all the time, and come back at you with your own spoken

arguments, only with the big words all tangled, and play them in your

very teeth as original with himself.  He reads a chapter in the

guidebooks, mixes the facts all up, with his bad memory, and then goes

off to inflict the whole mess on somebody as wisdom which has been

festering in his brain for years and which he gathered in college from

erudite authors who are dead now and out of print.  This morning at

breakfast he pointed out of the window and said:



"Do you see that there hill out there on that African coast?  It's one of

them Pillows of Herkewls, I should say--and there's the ultimate one

alongside of it."



"The ultimate one--that is a good word--but the pillars are not both on

the same side of the strait."  (I saw he had been deceived by a

carelessly written sentence in the guidebook.)



"Well, it ain't for you to say, nor for me.  Some authors states it that

way, and some states it different.  Old Gibbons don't say nothing about

it--just shirks it complete--Gibbons always done that when he got stuck--

but there is Rolampton, what does he say?  Why, be says that they was

both on the same side, and Trinculian, and Sobaster, and Syraccus, and

Langomarganbl----"



"Oh, that will do--that's enough.  If you have got your hand in for

inventing authors and testimony, I have nothing more to say--let them be

on the same side."



We don't mind the Oracle.  We rather like him.  We can tolerate the

Oracle very easily, but we have a poet and a good-natured enterprising

idiot on board, and they do distress the company.  The one gives copies

of his verses to consuls, commanders, hotel keepers, Arabs, Dutch--to

anybody, in fact, who will submit to a grievous infliction most kindly

meant.  His poetry is all very well on shipboard, notwithstanding when he

wrote an "Ode to the Ocean in a Storm" in one half hour, and an

"Apostrophe to the Rooster in the Waist of the Ship" in the next, the

transition was considered to be rather abrupt; but when he sends an

invoice of rhymes to the Governor of Fayal and another to the commander

in chief and other dignitaries in Gibraltar with the compliments of the

Laureate of the Ship, it is not popular with the passengers.



The other personage I have mentioned is young and green, and not bright,

not learned, and not wise.  He will be, though, someday if he recollects

the answers to all his questions.  He is known about the ship as the

"Interrogation Point," and this by constant use has become shortened to

"Interrogation."  He has distinguished himself twice already.  In Fayal

they pointed out a hill and told him it was 800 feet high and 1,100 feet

long.  And they told him there was a tunnel 2,000 feet long and 1,000

feet high running through the hill, from end to end.  He believed it.  He

repeated it to everybody, discussed it, and read it from his notes.

Finally, he took a useful hint from this remark, which a thoughtful old

pilgrim made:



"Well, yes, it is a little remarkable--singular tunnel altogether--stands

up out of the top of the hill about two hundred feet, and one end of it

sticks out of the hill about nine hundred!"



Here in Gibraltar he corners these educated British officers and badgers

them with braggadocio about America and the wonders she can perform!  He

told one of them a couple of our gunboats could come here and knock

Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea!



At this present moment half a dozen of us are taking a private pleasure

excursion of our own devising.  We form rather more than half the list of

white passengers on board a small steamer bound for the venerable Moorish

town of Tangier, Africa.  Nothing could be more absolutely certain than

that we are enjoying ourselves.  One can not do otherwise who speeds over

these sparkling waters and breathes the soft atmosphere of this sunny

land.  Care cannot assail us here.  We are out of its jurisdiction.



We even steamed recklessly by the frowning fortress of Malabat

(a stronghold of the Emperor of Morocco) without a twinge of fear.

The whole garrison turned out under arms and assumed a threatening

attitude--yet still we did not fear.  The entire garrison marched and

counter-marched within the rampart, in full view--yet notwithstanding

even this, we never flinched.



I suppose we really do not know what fear is.  I inquired the name of the

garrison of the fortress of Malabat, and they said it was Mehemet Ali Ben

Sancom.  I said it would be a good idea to get some more garrisons to

help him; but they said no, he had nothing to do but hold the place, and

he was competent to do that, had done it two years already.  That was

evidence which one could not well refute.  There is nothing like

reputation.



Every now and then my glove purchase in Gibraltar last night intrudes

itself upon me.  Dan and the ship's surgeon and I had been up to the

great square, listening to the music of the fine military bands and

contemplating English and Spanish female loveliness and fashion, and at

nine o'clock were on our way to the theater, when we met the General, the

Judge, the Commodore, the Colonel, and the Commissioner of the United

States of America to Europe, Asia, and Africa, who had been to the Club

House to register their several titles and impoverish the bill of fare;

and they told us to go over to the little variety store near the Hall of

Justice and buy some kid gloves.  They said they were elegant and very

moderate in price.  It seemed a stylish thing to go to the theater in kid

gloves, and we acted upon the hint.  A very handsome young lady in the

store offered me a pair of blue gloves.  I did not want blue, but she

said they would look very pretty on a hand like mine.  The remark touched

me tenderly.  I glanced furtively at my hand, and somehow it did seem

rather a comely member.  I tried a glove on my left and blushed a little.

Manifestly the size was too small for me.  But I felt gratified when she

said:



"Oh, it is just right!"  Yet I knew it was no such thing.



I tugged at it diligently, but it was discouraging work.  She said:



"Ah!  I see you are accustomed to wearing kid gloves--but some gentlemen

are so awkward about putting them on."



It was the last compliment I had expected.  I only understand putting on

the buckskin article perfectly.  I made another effort and tore the glove

from the base of the thumb into the palm of the hand--and tried to hide

the rent.  She kept up her compliments, and I kept up my determination to

deserve them or die:



"Ah, you have had experience!  [A rip down the back of the hand.] They

are just right for you--your hand is very small--if they tear you need

not pay for them.  [A rent across the middle.]  I can always tell when a

gentleman understands putting on kid gloves.  There is a grace about it

that only comes with long practice."  The whole after-guard of the glove

"fetched away," as the sailors say, the fabric parted across the

knuckles, and nothing was left but a melancholy ruin.



I was too much flattered to make an exposure and throw the merchandise on

the angel's hands.  I was hot, vexed, confused, but still happy; but I

hated the other boys for taking such an absorbing interest in the

proceedings.  I wished they were in Jericho.  I felt exquisitely mean

when I said cheerfully:



"This one does very well; it fits elegantly.  I like a glove that fits.

No, never mind, ma'am, never mind; I'll put the other on in the street.

It is warm here."



It was warm.  It was the warmest place I ever was in.  I paid the bill,

and as I passed out with a fascinating bow I thought I detected a light

in the woman's eye that was gently ironical; and when I looked back from

the street, and she was laughing all to herself about something or other,

I said to myself with withering sarcasm, "Oh, certainly; you know how to

put on kid gloves, don't you?  A self-complacent ass, ready to be

flattered out of your senses by every petticoat that chooses to take the

trouble to do it!"



The silence of the boys annoyed me.  Finally Dan said musingly:



"Some gentlemen don't know how to put on kid gloves at all, but some do."



And the doctor said (to the moon, I thought):



"But it is always easy to tell when a gentleman is used to putting on kid

gloves."



Dan soliloquized after a pause:



"Ah, yes; there is a grace about it that only comes with long, very long

practice."



"Yes, indeed, I've noticed that when a man hauls on a kid glove like he

was dragging a cat out of an ash hole by the tail, he understands putting

on kid gloves; he's had ex--"



"Boys, enough of a thing's enough!  You think you are very smart, I

suppose, but I don't.  And if you go and tell any of those old gossips in

the ship about this thing, I'll never forgive you for it; that's all."



They let me alone then for the time being.  We always let each other

alone in time to prevent ill feeling from spoiling a joke.  But they had

bought gloves, too, as I did.  We threw all the purchases away together

this morning.  They were coarse, unsubstantial, freckled all over with

broad yellow splotches, and could neither stand wear nor public

exhibition.  We had entertained an angel unawares, but we did not take

her in.  She did that for us.



Tangier!  A tribe of stalwart Moors are wading into the sea to carry us

ashore on their backs from the small boats.









CHAPTER VIII.



This is royal!  Let those who went up through Spain make the best of it--

these dominions of the Emperor of Morocco suit our little party well

enough.  We have had enough of Spain at Gibraltar for the present.

Tangier is the spot we have been longing for all the time.  Elsewhere we

have found foreign-looking things and foreign-looking people, but always

with things and people intermixed that we were familiar with before, and

so the novelty of the situation lost a deal of its force.  We wanted

something thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign--foreign from top to

bottom--foreign from center to circumference--foreign inside and outside

and all around--nothing anywhere about it to dilute its foreignness--

nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the sun.

And lo!  In Tangier we have found it.  Here is not the slightest thing

that ever we have seen save in pictures--and we always mistrusted the

pictures before.  We cannot anymore.  The pictures used to seem

exaggerations--they seemed too weird and fanciful for reality.  But

behold, they were not wild enough--they were not fanciful enough--they

have not told half the story.  Tangier is a foreign land if ever there

was one, and the true spirit of it can never be found in any book save

The Arabian Nights.  Here are no white men visible, yet swarms of

humanity are all about us.  Here is a packed and jammed city enclosed in

a massive stone wall which is more than a thousand years old.  All the

houses nearly are one-and two-story, made of thick walls of stone,

plastered outside, square as a dry-goods box, flat as a floor on top, no

cornices, whitewashed all over--a crowded city of snowy tombs!  And the

doors are arched with the peculiar arch we see in Moorish pictures; the

floors are laid in varicolored diamond flags; in tesselated, many-colored

porcelain squares wrought in the furnaces of Fez; in red tiles and broad

bricks that time cannot wear; there is no furniture in the rooms (of

Jewish dwellings) save divans--what there is in Moorish ones no man may

know; within their sacred walls no Christian dog can enter.  And the

streets are oriental--some of them three feet wide, some six, but only

two that are over a dozen; a man can blockade the most of them by

extending his body across them.  Isn't it an oriental picture?



There are stalwart Bedouins of the desert here, and stately Moors proud

of a history that goes back to the night of time; and Jews whose fathers

fled hither centuries upon centuries ago; and swarthy Riffians from the

mountains--born cut-throats--and original, genuine Negroes as black as

Moses; and howling dervishes and a hundred breeds of Arabs--all sorts and

descriptions of people that are foreign and curious to look upon.



And their dresses are strange beyond all description.  Here is a bronzed

Moor in a prodigious white turban, curiously embroidered jacket, gold and

crimson sash, of many folds, wrapped round and round his waist, trousers

that only come a little below his knee and yet have twenty yards of stuff

in them, ornamented scimitar, bare shins, stockingless feet, yellow

slippers, and gun of preposterous length--a mere soldier!--I thought he

was the Emperor at least.  And here are aged Moors with flowing white

beards and long white robes with vast cowls; and Bedouins with long,

cowled, striped cloaks; and Negroes and Riffians with heads clean-shaven

except a kinky scalp lock back of the ear or, rather, upon the after

corner of the skull; and all sorts of barbarians in all sorts of weird

costumes, and all more or less ragged.  And here are Moorish women who

are enveloped from head to foot in coarse white robes, and whose sex can

only be determined by the fact that they only leave one eye visible and

never look at men of their own race, or are looked at by them in public.

Here are five thousand Jews in blue gabardines, sashes about their

waists, slippers upon their feet, little skullcaps upon the backs of

their heads, hair combed down on the forehead, and cut straight across

the middle of it from side to side--the selfsame fashion their Tangier

ancestors have worn for I don't know how many bewildering centuries.

Their feet and ankles are bare.  Their noses are all hooked, and hooked

alike.  They all resemble each other so much that one could almost

believe they were of one family.  Their women are plump and pretty, and

do smile upon a Christian in a way which is in the last degree

comforting.



What a funny old town it is!  It seems like profanation to laugh and jest

and bandy the frivolous chat of our day amid its hoary relics.  Only the

stately phraseology and the measured speech of the sons of the Prophet

are suited to a venerable antiquity like this.  Here is a crumbling wall

that was old when Columbus discovered America; was old when Peter the

Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to arm for the first

Crusade; was old when Charlemagne and his paladins beleaguered enchanted

castles and battled with giants and genii in the fabled days of the olden

time; was old when Christ and his disciples walked the earth; stood where

it stands today when the lips of Memnon were vocal and men bought and

sold in the streets of ancient Thebes!



The Phoenicians, the Carthagenians, the English, Moors, Romans, all have

battled for Tangier--all have won it and lost it.  Here is a ragged,

oriental-looking Negro from some desert place in interior Africa, filling

his goatskin with water from a stained and battered fountain built by the

Romans twelve hundred years ago.  Yonder is a ruined arch of a bridge

built by Julius Caesar nineteen hundred years ago.  Men who had seen the

infant Saviour in the Virgin's arms have stood upon it, maybe.



Near it are the ruins of a dockyard where Caesar repaired his ships and

loaded them with grain when he invaded Britain, fifty years before the

Christian era.



Here, under the quiet stars, these old streets seem thronged with the

phantoms of forgotten ages.  My eyes are resting upon a spot where stood

a monument which was seen and described by Roman historians less than two

thousand years ago, whereon was inscribed:



               "WE ARE THE CANAANITES.  WE ARE THEY THAT

               HAVE BEEN DRIVEN OUT OF THE LAND OF CANAAN

               BY THE JEWISH ROBBER, JOSHUA."



Joshua drove them out, and they came here.  Not many leagues from here is

a tribe of Jews whose ancestors fled thither after an unsuccessful revolt

against King David, and these their descendants are still under a ban and

keep to themselves.



Tangier has been mentioned in history for three thousand years.  And it

was a town, though a queer one, when Hercules, clad in his lion skin,

landed here, four thousand years ago.  In these streets he met Anitus,

the king of the country, and brained him with his club, which was the

fashion among gentlemen in those days.  The people of Tangier (called

Tingis then) lived in the rudest possible huts and dressed in skins and

carried clubs, and were as savage as the wild beasts they were constantly

obliged to war with.  But they were a gentlemanly race and did no work.

They lived on the natural products of the land.  Their king's country

residence was at the famous Garden of Hesperides, seventy miles down the

coast from here.  The garden, with its golden apples (oranges), is gone

now--no vestige of it remains.  Antiquarians concede that such a

personage as Hercules did exist in ancient times and agree that he was an

enterprising and energetic man, but decline to believe him a good, bona-

fide god, because that would be unconstitutional.



Down here at Cape Spartel is the celebrated cave of Hercules, where that

hero took refuge when he was vanquished and driven out of the Tangier

country.  It is full of inscriptions in the dead languages, which fact

makes me think Hercules could not have traveled much, else he would not

have kept a journal.



Five days' journey from here--say two hundred miles--are the ruins of an

ancient city, of whose history there is neither record nor tradition.

And yet its arches, its columns, and its statues proclaim it to have been

built by an enlightened race.



The general size of a store in Tangier is about that of an ordinary

shower bath in a civilized land.  The Muhammadan merchant, tinman,

shoemaker, or vendor of trifles sits cross-legged on the floor and

reaches after any article you may want to buy.  You can rent a whole

block of these pigeonholes for fifty dollars a month.  The market people

crowd the marketplace with their baskets of figs, dates, melons,

apricots, etc., and among them file trains of laden asses, not much

larger, if any, than a Newfoundland dog.  The scene is lively, is

picturesque, and smells like a police court.  The Jewish money-changers

have their dens close at hand, and all day long are counting bronze coins

and transferring them from one bushel basket to another.  They don't coin

much money nowadays, I think.  I saw none but what was dated four or five

hundred years back, and was badly worn and battered.  These coins are not

very valuable.  Jack went out to get a napoleon changed, so as to have

money suited to the general cheapness of things, and came back and said

he bad "swamped the bank, had bought eleven quarts of coin, and the head

of the firm had gone on the street to negotiate for the balance of the

change."  I bought nearly half a pint of their money for a shilling

myself.  I am not proud on account of having so much money, though.  I

care nothing for wealth.



The Moors have some small silver coins and also some silver slugs worth a

dollar each.  The latter are exceedingly scarce--so much so that when

poor ragged Arabs see one they beg to be allowed to kiss it.



They have also a small gold coin worth two dollars.  And that reminds me

of something.  When Morocco is in a state of war, Arab couriers carry

letters through the country and charge a liberal postage.  Every now and

then they fall into the hands of marauding bands and get robbed.

Therefore, warned by experience, as soon as they have collected two

dollars' worth of money they exchange it for one of those little gold

pieces, and when robbers come upon them, swallow it.  The stratagem was

good while it was unsuspected, but after that the marauders simply gave

the sagacious United States mail an emetic and sat down to wait.



The Emperor of Morocco is a soulless despot, and the great officers under

him are despots on a smaller scale.  There is no regular system of

taxation, but when the Emperor or the Bashaw want money, they levy on

some rich man, and he has to furnish the cash or go to prison.

Therefore, few men in Morocco dare to be rich.  It is too dangerous a

luxury.  Vanity occasionally leads a man to display wealth, but sooner or

later the Emperor trumps up a charge against him--any sort of one will

do--and confiscates his property.  Of course, there are many rich men in

the empire, but their money is buried, and they dress in rags and

counterfeit poverty.  Every now and then the Emperor imprisons a man who

is suspected of the crime of being rich, and makes things so

uncomfortable for him that he is forced to discover where he has hidden

his money.



Moors and Jews sometimes place themselves under the protection of the

foreign consuls, and then they can flout their riches in the Emperor's

face with impunity.









CHAPTER IX.



About the first adventure we had yesterday afternoon, after landing here,

came near finishing that heedless Blucher.  We had just mounted some

mules and asses and started out under the guardianship of the stately,

the princely, the magnificent Hadji Muhammad Lamarty (may his tribe

increase!) when we came upon a fine Moorish mosque, with tall tower, rich

with checker-work of many-colored porcelain, and every part and portion

of the edifice adorned with the quaint architecture of the Alhambra, and

Blucher started to ride into the open doorway.  A startling "Hi-hi!" from

our camp followers and a loud "Halt!" from an English gentleman in the

party checked the adventurer, and then we were informed that so dire a

profanation is it for a Christian dog to set foot upon the sacred

threshold of a Moorish mosque that no amount of purification can ever

make it fit for the faithful to pray in again.  Had Blucher succeeded in

entering the place, he would no doubt have been chased through the town

and stoned; and the time has been, and not many years ago, either, when a

Christian would have been most ruthlessly slaughtered if captured in a

mosque.  We caught a glimpse of the handsome tessellated pavements within

and of the devotees performing their ablutions at the fountains, but even

that we took that glimpse was a thing not relished by the Moorish

bystanders.



Some years ago the clock in the tower of the mosque got out of order.

The Moors of Tangier have so degenerated that it has been long since

there was an artificer among them capable of curing so delicate a patient

as a debilitated clock.  The great men of the city met in solemn conclave

to consider how the difficulty was to be met.  They discussed the matter

thoroughly but arrived at no solution.  Finally, a patriarch arose and

said:



"Oh, children of the Prophet, it is known unto you that a Portuguee dog

of a Christian clock mender pollutes the city of Tangier with his

presence.  Ye know, also, that when mosques are builded, asses bear the

stones and the cement, and cross the sacred threshold.  Now, therefore,

send the Christian dog on all fours, and barefoot, into the holy place to

mend the clock, and let him go as an ass!"



And in that way it was done.  Therefore, if Blucher ever sees the inside

of a mosque, he will have to cast aside his humanity and go in his

natural character.  We visited the jail and found Moorish prisoners

making mats and baskets.  (This thing of utilizing crime savors of

civilization.)  Murder is punished with death.  A short time ago three

murderers were taken beyond the city walls and shot.  Moorish guns are

not good, and neither are Moorish marksmen.  In this instance they set up

the poor criminals at long range, like so many targets, and practiced on

them--kept them hopping about and dodging bullets for half an hour before

they managed to drive the center.



When a man steals cattle, they cut off his right hand and left leg and

nail them up in the marketplace as a warning to everybody.  Their surgery

is not artistic.  They slice around the bone a little, then break off the

limb.  Sometimes the patient gets well; but, as a general thing, he

don't.  However, the Moorish heart is stout.  The Moors were always

brave.  These criminals undergo the fearful operation without a wince,

without a tremor of any kind, without a groan!  No amount of suffering

can bring down the pride of a Moor or make him shame his dignity with a

cry.



Here, marriage is contracted by the parents of the parties to it.  There

are no valentines, no stolen interviews, no riding out, no courting in

dim parlors, no lovers' quarrels and reconciliations--no nothing that is

proper to approaching matrimony.  The young man takes the girl his father

selects for him, marries her, and after that she is unveiled, and he sees

her for the first time.  If after due acquaintance she suits him, he

retains her; but if he suspects her purity, he bundles her back to her

father; if he finds her diseased, the same; or if, after just and

reasonable time is allowed her, she neglects to bear children, back she

goes to the home of her childhood.



Muhammadans here who can afford it keep a good many wives on hand.  They

are called wives, though I believe the Koran only allows four genuine

wives--the rest are concubines.  The Emperor of Morocco don't know how

many wives he has, but thinks he has five hundred.  However, that is near

enough--a dozen or so, one way or the other, don't matter.



Even the Jews in the interior have a plurality of wives.



I have caught a glimpse of the faces of several Moorish women (for they

are only human, and will expose their faces for the admiration of a

Christian dog when no male Moor is by), and I am full of veneration for

the wisdom that leads them to cover up such atrocious ugliness.



They carry their children at their backs, in a sack, like other savages

the world over.



Many of the Negroes are held in slavery by the Moors.  But the moment a

female slave becomes her master's concubine her bonds are broken, and as

soon as a male slave can read the first chapter of the Koran (which

contains the creed) he can no longer be held in bondage.



They have three Sundays a week in Tangier.  The Muhammadans' comes on

Friday, the Jews' on Saturday, and that of the Christian Consuls on

Sunday.  The Jews are the most radical.  The Moor goes to his mosque

about noon on his Sabbath, as on any other day, removes his shoes at the

door, performs his ablutions, makes his salaams, pressing his forehead to

the pavement time and again, says his prayers, and goes back to his work.



But the Jew shuts up shop; will not touch copper or bronze money at all;

soils his fingers with nothing meaner than silver and gold; attends the

synagogue devoutly; will not cook or have anything to do with fire; and

religiously refrains from embarking in any enterprise.



The Moor who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca is entitled to high

distinction.  Men call him Hadji, and he is thenceforward a great

personage.  Hundreds of Moors come to Tangier every year and embark for

Mecca.  They go part of the way in English steamers, and the ten or

twelve dollars they pay for passage is about all the trip costs.  They

take with them a quantity of food, and when the commissary department

fails they "skirmish," as Jack terms it in his sinful, slangy way.  From

the time they leave till they get home again, they never wash, either on

land or sea.  They are usually gone from five to seven months, and as

they do not change their clothes during all that time, they are totally

unfit for the drawing room when they get back.



Many of them have to rake and scrape a long time to gather together the

ten dollars their steamer passage costs, and when one of them gets back

he is a bankrupt forever after.  Few Moors can ever build up their

fortunes again in one short lifetime after so reckless an outlay.  In

order to confine the dignity of Hadji to gentlemen of patrician blood and

possessions, the Emperor decreed that no man should make the pilgrimage

save bloated aristocrats who were worth a hundred dollars in specie.  But

behold how iniquity can circumvent the law!  For a consideration, the

Jewish money-changer lends the pilgrim one hundred dollars long enough

for him to swear himself through, and then receives it back before the

ship sails out of the harbor!



Spain is the only nation the Moors fear.  The reason is that Spain sends

her heaviest ships of war and her loudest guns to astonish these Muslims,

while America and other nations send only a little contemptible tub of a

gunboat occasionally.  The Moors, like other savages, learn by what they

see, not what they hear or read.  We have great fleets in the

Mediterranean, but they seldom touch at African ports.  The Moors have a

small opinion of England, France, and America, and put their

representatives to a deal of red-tape circumlocution before they grant

them their common rights, let alone a favor.  But the moment the Spanish

minister makes a demand, it is acceded to at once, whether it be just or

not.



Spain chastised the Moors five or six years ago, about a disputed piece

of property opposite Gibraltar, and captured the city of Tetouan.  She

compromised on an augmentation of her territory, twenty million dollars'

indemnity in money, and peace.  And then she gave up the city.  But she

never gave it up until the Spanish soldiers had eaten up all the cats.

They would not compromise as long as the cats held out.  Spaniards are

very fond of cats.  On the contrary, the Moors reverence cats as

something sacred.  So the Spaniards touched them on a tender point that

time.  Their unfeline conduct in eating up all the Tetouan cats aroused a

hatred toward them in the breasts of the Moors, to which even the driving

them out of Spain was tame and passionless.  Moors and Spaniards are foes

forever now.  France had a minister here once who embittered the nation

against him in the most innocent way.  He killed a couple of battalions

of cats (Tangier is full of them) and made a parlor carpet out of their

hides.  He made his carpet in circles--first a circle of old gray

tomcats, with their tails all pointing toward the center; then a circle

of yellow cats; next a circle of black cats and a circle of white ones;

then a circle of all sorts of cats; and, finally, a centerpiece of

assorted kittens.  It was very beautiful, but the Moors curse his memory

to this day.



When we went to call on our American Consul General today I noticed that

all possible games for parlor amusement seemed to be represented on his

center tables.  I thought that hinted at lonesomeness.  The idea was

correct.  His is the only American family in Tangier.  There are many

foreign consuls in this place, but much visiting is not indulged in.

Tangier is clear out of the world, and what is the use of visiting when

people have nothing on earth to talk about?  There is none.  So each

consul's family stays at home chiefly and amuses itself as best it can.

Tangier is full of interest for one day, but after that it is a weary

prison.  The Consul General has been here five years, and has got enough

of it to do him for a century, and is going home shortly.  His family

seize upon their letters and papers when the mail arrives, read them over

and over again for two days or three, talk them over and over again for

two or three more till they wear them out, and after that for days

together they eat and drink and sleep, and ride out over the same old

road, and see the same old tiresome things that even decades of centuries

have scarcely changed, and say never a single word!  They have literally

nothing whatever to talk about.  The arrival of an American man-of-war is

a godsend to them.  "O Solitude, where are the charms which sages have

seen in thy face?"  It is the completest exile that I can conceive of.

I would seriously recommend to the government of the United States that

when a man commits a crime so heinous that the law provides no adequate

punishment for it, they make him Consul General to Tangier.



I am glad to have seen Tangier--the second-oldest town in the world.  But

I am ready to bid it good-bye, I believe.



We shall go hence to Gibraltar this evening or in the morning, and

doubtless the Quaker City will sail from that port within the next forty-

eight hours.









CHAPTER X.



We passed the Fourth of July on board the Quaker City, in mid-ocean.  It

was in all respects a characteristic Mediterranean day--faultlessly

beautiful.  A cloudless sky; a refreshing summer wind; a radiant sunshine

that glinted cheerily from dancing wavelets instead of crested mountains

of water; a sea beneath us that was so wonderfully blue, so richly,

brilliantly blue, that it overcame the dullest sensibilities with the

spell of its fascination.



They even have fine sunsets on the Mediterranean--a thing that is

certainly rare in most quarters of the globe.  The evening we sailed away

from Gibraltar, that hard-featured rock was swimming in a creamy mist so

rich, so soft, so enchantingly vague and dreamy, that even the Oracle,

that serene, that inspired, that overpowering humbug, scorned the dinner

gong and tarried to worship!



He said: "Well, that's gorgis, ain't it!  They don't have none of them

things in our parts, do they?  I consider that them effects is on account

of the superior refragability, as you may say, of the sun's diramic

combination with the lymphatic forces of the perihelion of Jubiter.  What

should you think?"



"Oh, go to bed!" Dan said that, and went away.



"Oh, yes, it's all very well to say go to bed when a man makes an

argument which another man can't answer.  Dan don't never stand any

chance in an argument with me.  And he knows it, too.  What should you

say, Jack?"



"Now, Doctor, don't you come bothering around me with that dictionary

bosh.  I don't do you any harm, do I?  Then you let me alone."



"He's gone, too.  Well, them fellows have all tackled the old Oracle, as

they say, but the old man's most too many for 'em.  Maybe the Poet Lariat

ain't satisfied with them deductions?"



The poet replied with a barbarous rhyme and went below.



"'Pears that he can't qualify, neither.  Well, I didn't expect nothing

out of him.  I never see one of them poets yet that knowed anything.

He'll go down now and grind out about four reams of the awfullest slush

about that old rock and give it to a consul, or a pilot, or a nigger, or

anybody he comes across first which he can impose on.  Pity but

somebody'd take that poor old lunatic and dig all that poetry rubbage out

of him.  Why can't a man put his intellect onto things that's some value?

Gibbons, and Hippocratus, and Sarcophagus, and all them old ancient

philosophers was down on poets--"



"Doctor," I said, "you are going to invent authorities now and I'll leave

you, too.  I always enjoy your conversation, notwithstanding the

luxuriance of your syllables, when the philosophy you offer rests on your

own responsibility; but when you begin to soar--when you begin to support

it with the evidence of authorities who are the creations of your own

fancy--I lose confidence."



That was the way to flatter the doctor.  He considered it a sort of

acknowledgment on my part of a fear to argue with him.  He was always

persecuting the passengers with abstruse propositions framed in language

that no man could understand, and they endured the exquisite torture a

minute or two and then abandoned the field.  A triumph like this, over

half a dozen antagonists was sufficient for one day; from that time

forward he would patrol the decks beaming blandly upon all comers, and so

tranquilly, blissfully happy!



But I digress.  The thunder of our two brave cannon announced the Fourth

of July, at daylight, to all who were awake.  But many of us got our

information at a later hour, from the almanac.  All the flags were sent

aloft except half a dozen that were needed to decorate portions of the

ship below, and in a short time the vessel assumed a holiday appearance.

During the morning, meetings were held and all manner of committees set

to work on the celebration ceremonies.  In the afternoon the ship's

company assembled aft, on deck, under the awnings; the flute, the

asthmatic melodeon, and the consumptive clarinet crippled "The Star-

Spangled Banner," the choir chased it to cover, and George came in with a

peculiarly lacerating screech on the final note and slaughtered it.

Nobody mourned.



We carried out the corpse on three cheers (that joke was not intentional

and I do not endorse it), and then the President, throned behind a cable

locker with a national flag spread over it, announced the "Reader," who

rose up and read that same old Declaration of Independence which we have

all listened to so often without paying any attention to what it said;

and after that the President piped the Orator of the Day to quarters and

he made that same old speech about our national greatness which we so

religiously believe and so fervently applaud.  Now came the choir into

court again, with the complaining instruments, and assaulted "Hail

Columbia"; and when victory hung wavering in the scale, George returned

with his dreadful wild-goose stop turned on and the choir won, of course.

A minister pronounced the benediction, and the patriotic little gathering

disbanded.  The Fourth of July was safe, as far as the Mediterranean was

concerned.



At dinner in the evening, a well-written original poem was recited with

spirit by one of the ship's captains, and thirteen regular toasts were

washed down with several baskets of champagne.  The speeches were bad--

execrable almost without exception.  In fact, without any exception but

one.  Captain Duncan made a good speech; he made the only good speech of

the evening.  He said:



"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:--May we all live to a green old age and be

prosperous and happy.  Steward, bring up another basket of champagne."



It was regarded as a very able effort.



The festivities, so to speak, closed with another of those miraculous

balls on the promenade deck.  We were not used to dancing on an even

keel, though, and it was only a questionable success.  But take it all

together, it was a bright, cheerful, pleasant Fourth.



Toward nightfall the next evening, we steamed into the great artificial

harbor of this noble city of Marseilles, and saw the dying sunlight gild

its clustering spires and ramparts, and flood its leagues of environing

verdure with a mellow radiance that touched with an added charm the white

villas that flecked the landscape far and near.  [Copyright secured

according to law.]



There were no stages out, and we could not get on the pier from the ship.

It was annoying.  We were full of enthusiasm--we wanted to see France!

Just at nightfall our party of three contracted with a waterman for the

privilege of using his boat as a bridge--its stern was at our companion

ladder and its bow touched the pier.  We got in and the fellow backed out

into the harbor.  I told him in French that all we wanted was to walk

over his thwarts and step ashore, and asked him what he went away out

there for.  He said he could not understand me.  I repeated.  Still he

could not understand.  He appeared to be very ignorant of French.  The

doctor tried him, but he could not understand the doctor.  I asked this

boatman to explain his conduct, which he did; and then I couldn't

understand him.  Dan said:



"Oh, go to the pier, you old fool--that's where we want to go!"



We reasoned calmly with Dan that it was useless to speak to this

foreigner in English--that he had better let us conduct this business in

the French language and not let the stranger see how uncultivated he was.



"Well, go on, go on," he said, "don't mind me.  I don't wish to

interfere.  Only, if you go on telling him in your kind of French, he

never will find out where we want to go to.  That is what I think about

it."



We rebuked him severely for this remark and said we never knew an

ignorant person yet but was prejudiced.  The Frenchman spoke again, and

the doctor said:



"There now, Dan, he says he is going to allez to the douain.  Means he is

going to the hotel.  Oh, certainly--we don't know the French language."



This was a crusher, as Jack would say.  It silenced further criticism

from the disaffected member.  We coasted past the sharp bows of a navy of

great steamships and stopped at last at a government building on a stone

pier.  It was easy to remember then that the douain was the customhouse

and not the hotel.  We did not mention it, however.  With winning French

politeness the officers merely opened and closed our satchels, declined

to examine our passports, and sent us on our way.  We stopped at the

first cafe we came to and entered.  An old woman seated us at a table and

waited for orders.  The doctor said:



"Avez-vous du vin?"



The dame looked perplexed.  The doctor said again, with elaborate

distinctness of articulation:



"Avez-vous du--vin!"



The dame looked more perplexed than before.  I said:



"Doctor, there is a flaw in your pronunciation somewhere.  Let me try

her.  Madame, avez-vous du vin?--It isn't any use, Doctor--take the

witness."



"Madame, avez-vous du vin--du fromage--pain--pickled pigs' feet--beurre--

des oeufs--du boeuf--horseradish, sauerkraut, hog and hominy--anything,

anything in the world that can stay a Christian stomach!"



She said:



"Bless you, why didn't you speak English before?  I don't know anything

about your plagued French!"



The humiliating taunts of the disaffected member spoiled the supper, and

we dispatched it in angry silence and got away as soon as we could.  Here

we were in beautiful France--in a vast stone house of quaint

architecture--surrounded by all manner of curiously worded French signs--

stared at by strangely habited, bearded French people--everything

gradually and surely forcing upon us the coveted consciousness that at

last, and beyond all question, we were in beautiful France and absorbing

its nature to the forgetfulness of everything else, and coming to feel

the happy romance of the thing in all its enchanting delightfulness--and

to think of this skinny veteran intruding with her vile English, at such

a moment, to blow the fair vision to the winds!  It was exasperating.



We set out to find the centre of the city, inquiring the direction every

now and then.  We never did succeed in making anybody understand just

exactly what we wanted, and neither did we ever succeed in comprehending

just exactly what they said in reply, but then they always pointed--they

always did that--and we bowed politely and said, "Merci, monsieur," and

so it was a blighting triumph over the disaffected member anyway.  He was

restive under these victories and often asked:



"What did that pirate say?"



"Why, he told us which way to go to find the Grand Casino."



"Yes, but what did he say?"



"Oh, it don't matter what he said--we understood him.  These are educated

people--not like that absurd boatman."



"Well, I wish they were educated enough to tell a man a direction that

goes some where--for we've been going around in a circle for an hour.

I've passed this same old drugstore seven times."



We said it was a low, disreputable falsehood (but we knew it was not).

It was plain that it would not do to pass that drugstore again, though--

we might go on asking directions, but we must cease from following

finger-pointings if we hoped to check the suspicions of the disaffected

member.



A long walk through smooth, asphaltum-paved streets bordered by blocks of

vast new mercantile houses of cream-colored stone every house and every

block precisely like all the other houses and all the other blocks for a

mile, and all brilliantly lighted--brought us at last to the principal

thoroughfare.  On every hand were bright colors, flashing constellations

of gas burners, gaily dressed men and women thronging the sidewalks--

hurry, life, activity, cheerfulness, conversation, and laughter

everywhere!  We found the Grand Hotel du Louvre et de la Paix, and wrote

down who we were, where we were born, what our occupations were, the

place we came from last, whether we were married or single, how we liked

it, how old we were, where we were bound for and when we expected to get

there, and a great deal of information of similar importance--all for the

benefit of the landlord and the secret police.  We hired a guide and

began the business of sightseeing immediately.  That first night on

French soil was a stirring one.  I cannot think of half the places we

went to or what we particularly saw; we had no disposition to examine

carefully into anything at all--we only wanted to glance and go--to move,

keep moving!  The spirit of the country was upon us.  We sat down,

finally, at a late hour, in the great Casino, and called for unstinted

champagne.  It is so easy to be bloated aristocrats where it costs

nothing of consequence!  There were about five hundred people in that

dazzling place, I suppose, though the walls being papered entirely with

mirrors, so to speak, one could not really tell but that there were a

hundred thousand.  Young, daintily dressed exquisites and young,

stylishly dressed women, and also old gentlemen and old ladies, sat in

couples and groups about innumerable marble-topped tables and ate fancy

suppers, drank wine, and kept up a chattering din of conversation that

was dazing to the senses.  There was a stage at the far end and a large

orchestra; and every now and then actors and actresses in preposterous

comic dresses came out and sang the most extravagantly funny songs, to

judge by their absurd actions; but that audience merely suspended its

chatter, stared cynically, and never once smiled, never once applauded!

I had always thought that Frenchmen were ready to laugh at any thing.









CHAPTER XI.



We are getting foreignized rapidly and with facility.  We are getting

reconciled to halls and bedchambers with unhomelike stone floors and no

carpets--floors that ring to the tread of one's heels with a sharpness

that is death to sentimental musing.  We are getting used to tidy,

noiseless waiters, who glide hither and thither, and hover about your

back and your elbows like butterflies, quick to comprehend orders, quick

to fill them; thankful for a gratuity without regard to the amount; and

always polite--never otherwise than polite.  That is the strangest

curiosity yet--a really polite hotel waiter who isn't an idiot.  We are

getting used to driving right into the central court of the hotel, in the

midst of a fragrant circle of vines and flowers, and in the midst also of

parties of gentlemen sitting quietly reading the paper and smoking.  We

are getting used to ice frozen by artificial process in ordinary bottles

--the only kind of ice they have here.  We are getting used to all these

things, but we are not getting used to carrying our own soap.  We are

sufficiently civilized to carry our own combs and toothbrushes, but this

thing of having to ring for soap every time we wash is new to us and not

pleasant at all.  We think of it just after we get our heads and faces

thoroughly wet or just when we think we have been in the bathtub long

enough, and then, of course, an annoying delay follows.  These

Marseillaises make Marseillaise hymns and Marseilles vests and Marseilles

soap for all the world, but they never sing their hymns or wear their

vests or wash with their soap themselves.



We have learned to go through the lingering routine of the table d'hote

with patience, with serenity, with satisfaction.  We take soup, then wait

a few minutes for the fish; a few minutes more and the plates are

changed, and the roast beef comes; another change and we take peas;

change again and take lentils; change and take snail patties (I prefer

grasshoppers); change and take roast chicken and salad; then strawberry

pie and ice cream; then green figs, pears, oranges, green almonds, etc.;

finally coffee.  Wine with every course, of course, being in France.

With such a cargo on board, digestion is a slow process, and we must sit

long in the cool chambers and smoke--and read French newspapers, which

have a strange fashion of telling a perfectly straight story till you get

to the "nub" of it, and then a word drops in that no man can translate,

and that story is ruined.  An embankment fell on some Frenchmen

yesterday, and the papers are full of it today--but whether those

sufferers were killed, or crippled, or bruised, or only scared is more

than I can possibly make out, and yet I would just give anything to know.



We were troubled a little at dinner today by the conduct of an American,

who talked very loudly and coarsely and laughed boisterously where all

others were so quiet and well behaved.  He ordered wine with a royal

flourish and said:



"I never dine without wine, sir" (which was a pitiful falsehood), and

looked around upon the company to bask in the admiration he expected to

find in their faces.  All these airs in a land where they would as soon

expect to leave the soup out of the bill of fare as the wine!--in a land

where wine is nearly as common among all ranks as water!  This fellow

said: "I am a free-born sovereign, sir, an American, sir, and I want

everybody to know it!"  He did not mention that he was a lineal

descendant of Balaam's ass, but everybody knew that without his telling

it.



We have driven in the Prado--that superb avenue bordered with patrician

mansions and noble shade trees--and have visited the chateau Boarely and

its curious museum.  They showed us a miniature cemetery there--a copy of

the first graveyard that was ever in Marseilles, no doubt.  The delicate

little skeletons were lying in broken vaults and had their household gods

and kitchen utensils with them.  The original of this cemetery was dug up

in the principal street of the city a few years ago.  It had remained

there, only twelve feet underground, for a matter of twenty-five hundred

years or thereabouts.  Romulus was here before he built Rome, and thought

something of founding a city on this spot, but gave up the idea.  He may

have been personally acquainted with some of these Phoenicians whose

skeletons we have been examining.



In the great Zoological Gardens we found specimens of all the animals the

world produces, I think, including a dromedary, a monkey ornamented with

tufts of brilliant blue and carmine hair--a very gorgeous monkey he was--

a hippopotamus from the Nile, and a sort of tall, long-legged bird with a

beak like a powder horn and close-fitting wings like the tails of a dress

coat.  This fellow stood up with his eyes shut and his shoulders stooped

forward a little, and looked as if he had his hands under his coat tails.

Such tranquil stupidity, such supernatural gravity, such self-

righteousness, and such ineffable self-complacency as were in the

countenance and attitude of that gray-bodied, dark-winged, bald-headed,

and preposterously uncomely bird!  He was so ungainly, so pimply about

the head, so scaly about the legs, yet so serene, so unspeakably

satisfied!  He was the most comical-looking creature that can be

imagined.  It was good to hear Dan and the doctor laugh--such natural and

such enjoyable laughter had not been heard among our excursionists since

our ship sailed away from America.  This bird was a godsend to us, and I

should be an ingrate if I forgot to make honorable mention of him in

these pages.  Ours was a pleasure excursion; therefore we stayed with

that bird an hour and made the most of him.  We stirred him up

occasionally, but he only unclosed an eye and slowly closed it again,

abating no jot of his stately piety of demeanor or his tremendous

seriousness.  He only seemed to say, "Defile not Heaven's anointed with

unsanctified hands."  We did not know his name, and so we called him "The

Pilgrim."  Dan said:



"All he wants now is a Plymouth Collection."



The boon companion of the colossal elephant was a common cat!  This cat

had a fashion of climbing up the elephant's hind legs and roosting on his

back.  She would sit up there, with her paws curved under her breast, and

sleep in the sun half the afternoon.  It used to annoy the elephant at

first, and he would reach up and take her down, but she would go aft and

climb up again.  She persisted until she finally conquered the elephant's

prejudices, and now they are inseparable friends.  The cat plays about

her comrade's forefeet or his trunk often, until dogs approach, and then

she goes aloft out of danger.  The elephant has annihilated several dogs

lately that pressed his companion too closely.



We hired a sailboat and a guide and made an excursion to one of the small

islands in the harbor to visit the Castle d'If.  This ancient fortress

has a melancholy history.  It has been used as a prison for political

offenders for two or three hundred years, and its dungeon walls are

scarred with the rudely carved names of many and many a captive who

fretted his life away here and left no record of himself but these sad

epitaphs wrought with his own hands.  How thick the names were!  And

their long-departed owners seemed to throng the gloomy cells and

corridors with their phantom shapes.  We loitered through dungeon after

dungeon, away down into the living rock below the level of the sea, it

seemed.  Names everywhere!--some plebeian, some noble, some even

princely.  Plebeian, prince, and noble had one solicitude in common--they

would not be forgotten!  They could suffer solitude, inactivity, and the

horrors of a silence that no sound ever disturbed, but they could not

bear the thought of being utterly forgotten by the world.  Hence the

carved names.  In one cell, where a little light penetrated, a man had

lived twenty-seven years without seeing the face of a human being--lived

in filth and wretchedness, with no companionship but his own thoughts,

and they were sorrowful enough and hopeless enough, no doubt.  Whatever

his jailers considered that he needed was conveyed to his cell by night

through a wicket.



This man carved the walls of his prison house from floor to roof with all

manner of figures of men and animals grouped in intricate designs.  He

had toiled there year after year, at his self-appointed task, while

infants grew to boyhood--to vigorous youth--idled through school and

college--acquired a profession--claimed man's mature estate--married and

looked back to infancy as to a thing of some vague, ancient time, almost.

But who shall tell how many ages it seemed to this prisoner?  With the

one, time flew sometimes; with the other, never--it crawled always.  To

the one, nights spent in dancing had seemed made of minutes instead of

hours; to the other, those selfsame nights had been like all other nights

of dungeon life and seemed made of slow, dragging weeks instead of hours

and minutes.



One prisoner of fifteen years had scratched verses upon his walls, and

brief prose sentences--brief, but full of pathos.  These spoke not of

himself and his hard estate, but only of the shrine where his spirit fled

the prison to worship--of home and the idols that were templed there.

He never lived to see them.



The walls of these dungeons are as thick as some bed-chambers at home are

wide--fifteen feet.  We saw the damp, dismal cells in which two of Dumas'

heroes passed their confinement--heroes of "Monte Cristo."  It was here

that the brave Abbe wrote a book with his own blood, with a pen made of a

piece of iron hoop, and by the light of a lamp made out of shreds of

cloth soaked in grease obtained from his food; and then dug through the

thick wall with some trifling instrument which he wrought himself out of

a stray piece of iron or table cutlery and freed Dantes from his chains.

It was a pity that so many weeks of dreary labor should have come to

naught at last.



They showed us the noisome cell where the celebrated "Iron Mask"--that

ill-starred brother of a hardhearted king of France--was confined for a

season before he was sent to hide the strange mystery of his life from

the curious in the dungeons of Ste. Marguerite.  The place had a far

greater interest for us than it could have had if we had known beyond all

question who the Iron Mask was, and what his history had been, and why

this most unusual punishment had been meted out to him.  Mystery!  That

was the charm.  That speechless tongue, those prisoned features, that

heart so freighted with unspoken troubles, and that breast so oppressed

with its piteous secret had been here.  These dank walls had known the

man whose dolorous story is a sealed book forever!  There was fascination

in the spot.









CHAPTER XII.



We have come five hundred miles by rail through the heart of France.

What a bewitching land it is!  What a garden!  Surely the leagues of

bright green lawns are swept and brushed and watered every day and their

grasses trimmed by the barber.  Surely the hedges are shaped and measured

and their symmetry preserved by the most architectural of gardeners.

Surely the long straight rows of stately poplars that divide the

beautiful landscape like the squares of a checker-board are set with line

and plummet, and their uniform height determined with a spirit level.

Surely the straight, smooth, pure white turnpikes are jack-planed and

sandpapered every day.  How else are these marvels of symmetry,

cleanliness, and order attained?  It is wonderful.  There are no

unsightly stone walls and never a fence of any kind.  There is no dirt,

no decay, no rubbish anywhere--nothing that even hints at untidiness--

nothing that ever suggests neglect.  All is orderly and beautiful--every

thing is charming to the eye.



We had such glimpses of the Rhone gliding along between its grassy banks;

of cosy cottages buried in flowers and shrubbery; of quaint old red-tiled

villages with mossy medieval cathedrals looming out of their midst; of

wooded hills with ivy-grown towers and turrets of feudal castles

projecting above the foliage; such glimpses of Paradise, it seemed to us,

such visions of fabled fairyland!



We knew then what the poet meant when he sang of:  "--thy cornfields

green, and sunny vines,  O pleasant land of France!"



And it is a pleasant land.  No word describes it so felicitously as that

one.  They say there is no word for "home" in the French language.  Well,

considering that they have the article itself in such an attractive

aspect, they ought to manage to get along without the word.  Let us not

waste too much pity on "homeless" France.  I have observed that Frenchmen

abroad seldom wholly give up the idea of going back to France some time

or other.  I am not surprised at it now.



We are not infatuated with these French railway cars, though.  We took

first-class passage, not because we wished to attract attention by doing

a thing which is uncommon in Europe but because we could make our journey

quicker by so doing.  It is hard to make railroading pleasant in any

country.  It is too tedious.  Stagecoaching is infinitely more

delightful.  Once I crossed the plains and deserts and mountains of the

West in a stagecoach, from the Missouri line to California, and since

then all my pleasure trips must be measured to that rare holiday frolic.

Two thousand miles of ceaseless rush and rattle and clatter, by night and

by day, and never a weary moment, never a lapse of interest!  The first

seven hundred miles a level continent, its grassy carpet greener and

softer and smoother than any sea and figured with designs fitted to its

magnitude--the shadows of the clouds.  Here were no scenes but summer

scenes, and no disposition inspired by them but to lie at full length on

the mail sacks in the grateful breeze and dreamily smoke the pipe of

peace--what other, where all was repose and contentment?  In cool

mornings, before the sun was fairly up, it was worth a lifetime of city

toiling and moiling to perch in the foretop with the driver and see the

six mustangs scamper under the sharp snapping of the whip that never

touched them; to scan the blue distances of a world that knew no lords

but us; to cleave the wind with uncovered head and feel the sluggish

pulses rousing to the spirit of a speed that pretended to the resistless

rush of a typhoon!  Then thirteen hundred miles of desert solitudes; of

limitless panoramas of bewildering perspective; of mimic cities, of

pinnacled cathedrals, of massive fortresses, counterfeited in the eternal

rocks and splendid with the crimson and gold of the setting sun; of dizzy

altitudes among fog-wreathed peaks and never-melting snows, where

thunders and lightnings and tempests warred magnificently at our feet and

the storm clouds above swung their shredded banners in our very faces!

But I forgot.  I am in elegant France now, and not scurrying through the

great South Pass and the Wind River Mountains, among antelopes and

buffaloes and painted Indians on the warpath.  It is not meet that I

should make too disparaging comparisons between humdrum travel on a

railway and that royal summer flight across a continent in a stagecoach.

I meant in the beginning to say that railway journeying is tedious and

tiresome, and so it is--though at the time I was thinking particularly of

a dismal fifty-hour pilgrimage between New York and St. Louis.  Of course

our trip through France was not really tedious because all its scenes and

experiences were new and strange; but as Dan says, it had its

"discrepancies."



The cars are built in compartments that hold eight persons each.  Each

compartment is partially subdivided, and so there are two tolerably

distinct parties of four in it.  Four face the other four.  The seats and

backs are thickly padded and cushioned and are very comfortable; you can

smoke if you wish; there are no bothersome peddlers; you are saved the

infliction of a multitude of disagreeable fellow passengers.  So far, so

well.  But then the conductor locks you in when the train starts; there

is no water to drink in the car; there is no heating apparatus for night

travel; if a drunken rowdy should get in, you could not remove a matter

of twenty seats from him or enter another car; but above all, if you are

worn out and must sleep, you must sit up and do it in naps, with cramped

legs and in a torturing misery that leaves you withered and lifeless the

next day--for behold they have not that culmination of all charity and

human kindness, a sleeping car, in all France.  I prefer the American

system.  It has not so many grievous "discrepancies."



In France, all is clockwork, all is order.  They make no mistakes.  Every

third man wears a uniform, and whether he be a marshal of the empire or a

brakeman, he is ready and perfectly willing to answer all your questions

with tireless politeness, ready to tell you which car to take, yea, and

ready to go and put you into it to make sure that you shall not go

astray.  You cannot pass into the waiting room of the depot till you have

secured your ticket, and you cannot pass from its only exit till the

train is at its threshold to receive you.  Once on board, the train will

not start till your ticket has been examined--till every passenger's

ticket has been inspected.  This is chiefly for your own good.  If by any

possibility you have managed to take the wrong train, you will be handed

over to a polite official who will take you whither you belong and bestow

you with many an affable bow.  Your ticket will be inspected every now

and then along the route, and when it is time to change cars you will

know it.  You are in the hands of officials who zealously study your

welfare and your interest, instead of turning their talents to the

invention of new methods of discommoding and snubbing you, as is very

often the main employment of that exceedingly self-satisfied monarch, the

railroad conductor of America.



But the happiest regulation in French railway government is--thirty

minutes to dinner!  No five-minute boltings of flabby rolls, muddy

coffee, questionable eggs, gutta-percha beef, and pies whose conception

and execution are a dark and bloody mystery to all save the cook that

created them!  No, we sat calmly down--it was in old Dijon, which is so

easy to spell and so impossible to pronounce except when you civilize it

and call it Demijohn--and poured out rich Burgundian wines and munched

calmly through a long table d'hote bill of fare, snail patties, delicious

fruits and all, then paid the trifle it cost and stepped happily aboard

the train again, without once cursing the railroad company.  A rare

experience and one to be treasured forever.



They say they do not have accidents on these French roads, and I think it

must be true.  If I remember rightly, we passed high above wagon roads or

through tunnels under them, but never crossed them on their own level.

About every quarter of a mile, it seemed to me, a man came out and held

up a club till the train went by, to signify that everything was safe

ahead.  Switches were changed a mile in advance by pulling a wire rope

that passed along the ground by the rail, from station to station.

Signals for the day and signals for the night gave constant and timely

notice of the position of switches.



No, they have no railroad accidents to speak of in France.  But why?

Because when one occurs, somebody has to hang for it!  Not hang, maybe,

but be punished at least with such vigor of emphasis as to make

negligence a thing to be shuddered at by railroad officials for many a

day thereafter.  "No blame attached to the officers"--that lying and

disaster-breeding verdict so common to our softhearted juries is seldom

rendered in France.  If the trouble occurred in the conductor's

department, that officer must suffer if his subordinate cannot be proven

guilty; if in the engineer's department and the case be similar, the

engineer must answer.



The Old Travelers--those delightful parrots who have "been here before"

and know more about the country than Louis Napoleon knows now or ever

will know--tell us these things, and we believe them because they are

pleasant things to believe and because they are plausible and savor of

the rigid subjection to law and order which we behold about us

everywhere.



But we love the Old Travelers.  We love to hear them prate and drivel and

lie.  We can tell them the moment we see them.  They always throw out a

few feelers; they never cast themselves adrift till they have sounded

every individual and know that he has not traveled.  Then they open their

throttle valves, and how they do brag, and sneer, and swell, and soar,

and blaspheme the sacred name of Truth!  Their central idea, their grand

aim, is to subjugate you, keep you down, make you feel insignificant and

humble in the blaze of their cosmopolitan glory!  They will not let you

know anything.  They sneer at your most inoffensive suggestions; they

laugh unfeelingly at your treasured dreams of foreign lands; they brand

the statements of your traveled aunts and uncles as the stupidest

absurdities; they deride your most trusted authors and demolish the fair

images they have set up for your willing worship with the pitiless

ferocity of the fanatic iconoclast!  But still I love the Old Travelers.

I love them for their witless platitudes, for their supernatural ability

to bore, for their delightful asinine vanity, for their luxuriant

fertility of imagination, for their startling, their brilliant, their

overwhelming mendacity!



By Lyons and the Saone (where we saw the lady of Lyons and thought little

of her comeliness), by Villa Franca, Tonnere, venerable Sens, Melun,

Fontainebleau, and scores of other beautiful cities, we swept, always

noting the absence of hog-wallows, broken fences, cow lots, unpainted

houses, and mud, and always noting, as well, the presence of cleanliness,

grace, taste in adorning and beautifying, even to the disposition of a

tree or the turning of a hedge, the marvel of roads in perfect repair,

void of ruts and guiltless of even an inequality of surface--we bowled

along, hour after hour, that brilliant summer day, and as nightfall

approached we entered a wilderness of odorous flowers and shrubbery, sped

through it, and then, excited, delighted, and half persuaded that we were

only the sport of a beautiful dream, lo, we stood in magnificent Paris!



What excellent order they kept about that vast depot!  There was no

frantic crowding and jostling, no shouting and swearing, and no

swaggering intrusion of services by rowdy hackmen.  These latter gentry

stood outside--stood quietly by their long line of vehicles and said

never a word.  A kind of hackman general seemed to have the whole matter

of transportation in his hands.  He politely received the passengers and

ushered them to the kind of conveyance they wanted, and told the driver

where to deliver them.  There was no "talking back," no dissatisfaction

about overcharging, no grumbling about anything.  In a little while we

were speeding through the streets of Paris and delightfully recognizing

certain names and places with which books had long ago made us familiar.

It was like meeting an old friend when we read Rue de Rivoli on the

street corner; we knew the genuine vast palace of the Louvre as well as

we knew its picture; when we passed by the Column of July we needed no

one to tell us what it was or to remind us that on its site once stood

the grim Bastille, that grave of human hopes and happiness, that dismal

prison house within whose dungeons so many young faces put on the

wrinkles of age, so many proud spirits grew humble, so many brave hearts

broke.



We secured rooms at the hotel, or rather, we had three beds put into one

room, so that we might be together, and then we went out to a restaurant,

just after lamplighting, and ate a comfortable, satisfactory, lingering

dinner.  It was a pleasure to eat where everything was so tidy, the food

so well cooked, the waiters so polite, and the coming and departing

company so moustached, so frisky, so affable, so fearfully and

wonderfully Frenchy!  All the surroundings were gay and enlivening.  Two

hundred people sat at little tables on the sidewalk, sipping wine and

coffee; the streets were thronged with light vehicles and with joyous

pleasure-seekers; there was music in the air, life and action all about

us, and a conflagration of gaslight everywhere!



After dinner we felt like seeing such Parisian specialties as we might

see without distressing exertion, and so we sauntered through the

brilliant streets and looked at the dainty trifles in variety stores and

jewelry shops.  Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we

put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the

incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed

we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile

verbs and participles.



We noticed that in the jewelry stores they had some of the articles

marked "gold" and some labeled "imitation."  We wondered at this

extravagance of honesty and inquired into the matter.  We were informed

that inasmuch as most people are not able to tell false gold from the

genuine article, the government compels jewelers to have their gold work

assayed and stamped officially according to its fineness and their

imitation work duly labeled with the sign of its falsity.  They told us

the jewelers would not dare to violate this law, and that whatever a

stranger bought in one of their stores might be depended upon as being

strictly what it was represented to be.  Verily, a wonderful land is

France!



Then we hunted for a barber-shop.  From earliest infancy it had been a

cherished ambition of mine to be shaved some day in a palatial barber-

shop in Paris.  I wished to recline at full length in a cushioned invalid

chair, with pictures about me and sumptuous furniture; with frescoed

walls and gilded arches above me and vistas of Corinthian columns

stretching far before me; with perfumes of Araby to intoxicate my senses

and the slumbrous drone of distant noises to soothe me to sleep.  At the

end of an hour I would wake up regretfully and find my face as smooth and

as soft as an infant's.  Departing, I would lift my hands above that

barber's head and say, "Heaven bless you, my son!"



So we searched high and low, for a matter of two hours, but never a

barber-shop could we see.  We saw only wig-making establishments, with

shocks of dead and repulsive hair bound upon the heads of painted waxen

brigands who stared out from glass boxes upon the passer-by with their

stony eyes and scared him with the ghostly white of their countenances.

We shunned these signs for a time, but finally we concluded that the wig-

makers must of necessity be the barbers as well, since we could find no

single legitimate representative of the fraternity.  We entered and

asked, and found that it was even so.



I said I wanted to be shaved.  The barber inquired where my room was.  I

said never mind where my room was, I wanted to be shaved--there, on the

spot.  The doctor said he would be shaved also.  Then there was an

excitement among those two barbers!  There was a wild consultation, and

afterwards a hurrying to and fro and a feverish gathering up of razors

from obscure places and a ransacking for soap.  Next they took us into a

little mean, shabby back room; they got two ordinary sitting-room chairs

and placed us in them with our coats on.  My old, old dream of bliss

vanished into thin air!



I sat bolt upright, silent, sad, and solemn.  One of the wig-making

villains lathered my face for ten terrible minutes and finished by

plastering a mass of suds into my mouth.  I expelled the nasty stuff with

a strong English expletive and said, "Foreigner, beware!"  Then this

outlaw strapped his razor on his boot, hovered over me ominously for six

fearful seconds, and then swooped down upon me like the genius of

destruction.  The first rake of his razor loosened the very hide from my

face and lifted me out of the chair.  I stormed and raved, and the other

boys enjoyed it.  Their beards are not strong and thick.  Let us draw the

curtain over this harrowing scene.



Suffice it that I submitted and went through with the cruel infliction of

a shave by a French barber; tears of exquisite agony coursed down my

cheeks now and then, but I survived.  Then the incipient assassin held a

basin of water under my chin and slopped its contents over my face, and

into my bosom, and down the back of my neck, with a mean pretense of

washing away the soap and blood.  He dried my features with a towel and

was going to comb my hair, but I asked to be excused.  I said, with

withering irony, that it was sufficient to be skinned--I declined to be

scalped.



I went away from there with my handkerchief about my face, and never,

never, never desired to dream of palatial Parisian barber-shops anymore.

The truth is, as I believe I have since found out, that they have no

barber shops worthy of the name in Paris--and no barbers, either, for

that matter.  The impostor who does duty as a barber brings his pans and

napkins and implements of torture to your residence and deliberately

skins you in your private apartments.  Ah, I have suffered, suffered,

suffered, here in Paris, but never mind--the time is coming when I shall

have a dark and bloody revenge.  Someday a Parisian barber will come to

my room to skin me, and from that day forth that barber will never be

heard of more.



At eleven o'clock we alighted upon a sign which manifestly referred to

billiards.  Joy!  We had played billiards in the Azores with balls that

were not round and on an ancient table that was very little smoother than

a brick pavement--one of those wretched old things with dead cushions,

and with patches in the faded cloth and invisible obstructions that made

the balls describe the most astonishing and unsuspected angles and

perform feats in the way of unlooked-for and almost impossible

"scratches" that were perfectly bewildering.  We had played at Gibraltar

with balls the size of a walnut, on a table like a public square--and in

both instances we achieved far more aggravation than amusement.  We

expected to fare better here, but we were mistaken.  The cushions were a

good deal higher than the balls, and as the balls had a fashion of always

stopping under the cushions, we accomplished very little in the way of

caroms.  The cushions were hard and unelastic, and the cues were so

crooked that in making a shot you had to allow for the curve or you would

infallibly put the "English" on the wrong side of the hall.  Dan was to

mark while the doctor and I played.  At the end of an hour neither of us

had made a count, and so Dan was tired of keeping tally with nothing to

tally, and we were heated and angry and disgusted.  We paid the heavy

bill--about six cents--and said we would call around sometime when we had

a week to spend, and finish the game.



We adjourned to one of those pretty cafes and took supper and tested the

wines of the country, as we had been instructed to do, and found them

harmless and unexciting.  They might have been exciting, however, if we

had chosen to drink a sufficiency of them.



To close our first day in Paris cheerfully and pleasantly, we now sought

our grand room in the Grand Hotel du Louvre and climbed into our

sumptuous bed to read and smoke--but alas!



          It was pitiful,

          In a whole city-full,

          Gas we had none.



No gas to read by--nothing but dismal candles.  It was a shame.  We tried

to map out excursions for the morrow; we puzzled over French "guides to

Paris"; we talked disjointedly in a vain endeavor to make head or tail of

the wild chaos of the day's sights and experiences; we subsided to

indolent smoking; we gaped and yawned and stretched--then feebly wondered

if we were really and truly in renowned Paris, and drifted drowsily away

into that vast mysterious void which men call sleep.









CHAPTER XIII.



The next morning we were up and dressed at ten o'clock.  We went to the

'commissionaire' of the hotel--I don't know what a 'commissionaire' is,

but that is the man we went to--and told him we wanted a guide.  He said

the national Exposition had drawn such multitudes of Englishmen and

Americans to Paris that it would be next to impossible to find a good

guide unemployed.  He said he usually kept a dozen or two on hand, but he

only had three now.  He called them.  One looked so like a very pirate

that we let him go at once.  The next one spoke with a simpering

precision of pronunciation that was irritating and said:



"If ze zhentlemans will to me make ze grande honneur to me rattain in

hees serveece, I shall show to him every sing zat is magnifique to look

upon in ze beautiful Parree.  I speaky ze Angleesh pairfaitemaw."



He would have done well to have stopped there, because he had that much

by heart and said it right off without making a mistake.  But his self-

complacency seduced him into attempting a flight into regions of

unexplored English, and the reckless experiment was his ruin.  Within ten

seconds he was so tangled up in a maze of mutilated verbs and torn and

bleeding forms of speech that no human ingenuity could ever have gotten

him out of it with credit.  It was plain enough that he could not

"speaky" the English quite as "pairfaitemaw" as he had pretended he

could.



The third man captured us.  He was plainly dressed, but he had a

noticeable air of neatness about him.  He wore a high silk hat which was

a little old, but had been carefully brushed.  He wore second-hand kid

gloves, in good repair, and carried a small rattan cane with a curved

handle--a female leg--of ivory.  He stepped as gently and as daintily as

a cat crossing a muddy street; and oh, he was urbanity; he was quiet,

unobtrusive self-possession; he was deference itself!  He spoke softly

and guardedly; and when he was about to make a statement on his sole

responsibility or offer a suggestion, he weighed it by drachms and

scruples first, with the crook of his little stick placed meditatively to

his teeth.  His opening speech was perfect.  It was perfect in

construction, in phraseology, in grammar, in emphasis, in pronunciation--

everything.  He spoke little and guardedly after that.  We were charmed.

We were more than charmed--we were overjoyed.  We hired him at once.  We

never even asked him his price.  This man--our lackey, our servant, our

unquestioning slave though he was--was still a gentleman--we could see

that--while of the other two one was coarse and awkward and the other was

a born pirate.  We asked our man Friday's name.  He drew from his

pocketbook a snowy little card and passed it to us with a profound bow:



                             A. BILLFINGER,

                    Guide to Paris, France, Germany,

                            Spain, &c., &c.

                       Grande Hotel du Louvre.



"Billfinger!  Oh, carry me home to die!"



That was an "aside" from Dan.  The atrocious name grated harshly on my

ear, too.  The most of us can learn to forgive, and even to like, a

countenance that strikes us unpleasantly at first, but few of us, I

fancy, become reconciled to a jarring name so easily.  I was almost sorry

we had hired this man, his name was so unbearable.  However, no matter.

We were impatient to start.  Billfinger stepped to the door to call a

carriage, and then the doctor said:



"Well, the guide goes with the barbershop, with the billiard-table, with

the gasless room, and may be with many another pretty romance of Paris.

I expected to have a guide named Henri de Montmorency, or Armand de la

Chartreuse, or something that would sound grand in letters to the

villagers at home, but to think of a Frenchman by the name of Billfinger!

Oh!  This is absurd, you know.  This will never do.  We can't say

Billfinger; it is nauseating.  Name him over again; what had we better

call him?  Alexis du Caulaincourt?"



"Alphonse Henri Gustave de Hauteville," I suggested.



"Call him Ferguson," said Dan.



That was practical, unromantic good sense.  Without debate, we expunged

Billfinger as Billfinger, and called him Ferguson.



The carriage--an open barouche--was ready.  Ferguson mounted beside the

driver, and we whirled away to breakfast.  As was proper, Mr. Ferguson

stood by to transmit our orders and answer questions.  By and by, he

mentioned casually--the artful adventurer--that he would go and get his

breakfast as soon as we had finished ours.  He knew we could not get

along without him and that we would not want to loiter about and wait for

him.  We asked him to sit down and eat with us.  He begged, with many a

bow, to be excused.  It was not proper, he said; he would sit at another

table.  We ordered him peremptorily to sit down with us.



Here endeth the first lesson.  It was a mistake.



As long as we had that fellow after that, he was always hungry; he was

always thirsty.  He came early; he stayed late; he could not pass a

restaurant; he looked with a lecherous eye upon every wine shop.

Suggestions to stop, excuses to eat and to drink, were forever on his

lips.  We tried all we could to fill him so full that he would have no

room to spare for a fortnight, but it was a failure.  He did not hold

enough to smother the cravings of his superhuman appetite.



He had another "discrepancy" about him.  He was always wanting us to buy

things.  On the shallowest pretenses he would inveigle us into shirt

stores, boot stores, tailor shops, glove shops--anywhere under the broad

sweep of the heavens that there seemed a chance of our buying anything.

Anyone could have guessed that the shopkeepers paid him a percentage on

the sales, but in our blessed innocence we didn't until this feature of

his conduct grew unbearably prominent.  One day Dan happened to mention

that he thought of buying three or four silk dress patterns for presents.

Ferguson's hungry eye was upon him in an instant.  In the course of

twenty minutes the carriage stopped.



"What's this?"



"Zis is ze finest silk magazin in Paris--ze most celebrate."



"What did you come here for?  We told you to take us to the palace of the

Louvre."



"I suppose ze gentleman say he wish to buy some silk."



"You are not required to 'suppose' things for the party, Ferguson.  We do

not wish to tax your energies too much.  We will bear some of the burden

and heat of the day ourselves.  We will endeavor to do such 'supposing'

as is really necessary to be done.  Drive on."  So spake the doctor.



Within fifteen minutes the carriage halted again, and before another silk

store.  The doctor said:



"Ah, the palace of the Louvre--beautiful, beautiful edifice!  Does the

Emperor Napoleon live here now, Ferguson?"



"Ah, Doctor!  You do jest; zis is not ze palace; we come there directly.

But since we pass right by zis store, where is such beautiful silk--"



"Ah!  I see, I see.  I meant to have told you that we did not wish to

purchase any silks to-day, but in my absent-mindedness I forgot it.  I

also meant to tell you we wished to go directly to the Louvre, but I

forgot that also.  However, we will go there now.  Pardon my seeming

carelessness, Ferguson.  Drive on."



Within the half hour we stopped again--in front of another silk store.

We were angry; but the doctor was always serene, always smooth-voiced.

He said:



"At last!  How imposing the Louvre is, and yet how small!  How

exquisitely fashioned!  How charmingly situated!--Venerable, venerable

pile--"



"Pairdon, Doctor, zis is not ze Louvre--it is--"



"What is it?"



"I have ze idea--it come to me in a moment--zat ze silk in zis magazin--"



"Ferguson, how heedless I am.  I fully intended to tell you that we did

not wish to buy any silks to-day, and I also intended to tell you that we

yearned to go immediately to the palace of the Louvre, but enjoying the

happiness of seeing you devour four breakfasts this morning has so filled

me with pleasurable emotions that I neglect the commonest interests of

the time.  However, we will proceed now to the Louvre, Ferguson."



"But, doctor," (excitedly,) "it will take not a minute--not but one small

minute!  Ze gentleman need not to buy if he not wish to--but only look at

ze silk--look at ze beautiful fabric.  [Then pleadingly.] Sair--just only

one leetle moment!"



Dan said, "Confound the idiot!  I don't want to see any silks today, and

I won't look at them.  Drive on."



And the doctor: "We need no silks now, Ferguson.  Our hearts yearn for

the Louvre.  Let us journey on--let us journey on."



"But doctor!  It is only one moment--one leetle moment.  And ze time will

be save--entirely save!  Because zere is nothing to see now--it is too

late.  It want ten minute to four and ze Louvre close at four--only one

leetle moment, Doctor!"



The treacherous miscreant!  After four breakfasts and a gallon of

champagne, to serve us such a scurvy trick.  We got no sight of the

countless treasures of art in the Louvre galleries that day, and our only

poor little satisfaction was in the reflection that Ferguson sold not a

solitary silk dress pattern.



I am writing this chapter partly for the satisfaction of abusing that

accomplished knave Billfinger, and partly to show whosoever shall read

this how Americans fare at the hands of the Paris guides and what sort of

people Paris guides are.  It need not be supposed that we were a stupider

or an easier prey than our countrymen generally are, for we were not.

The guides deceive and defraud every American who goes to Paris for the

first time and sees its sights alone or in company with others as little

experienced as himself.  I shall visit Paris again someday, and then let

the guides beware!  I shall go in my war paint--I shall carry my tomahawk

along.



I think we have lost but little time in Paris.  We have gone to bed every

night tired out.  Of course we visited the renowned International

Exposition.  All the world did that.  We went there on our third day in

Paris--and we stayed there nearly two hours.  That was our first and last

visit.  To tell the truth, we saw at a glance that one would have to

spend weeks--yea, even months--in that monstrous establishment to get an

intelligible idea of it.  It was a wonderful show, but the moving masses

of people of all nations we saw there were a still more wonderful show.

I discovered that if I were to stay there a month, I should still find

myself looking at the people instead of the inanimate objects on

exhibition.  I got a little interested in some curious old tapestries of

the thirteenth century, but a party of Arabs came by, and their dusky

faces and quaint costumes called my attention away at once.  I watched a

silver swan, which had a living grace about his movements and a living

intelligence in his eyes--watched him swimming about as comfortably and

as unconcernedly as if he had been born in a morass instead of a

jeweler's shop--watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and

hold up his head and go through all the customary and elaborate motions

of swallowing it--but the moment it disappeared down his throat some

tattooed South Sea Islanders approached and I yielded to their

attractions.



Presently I found a revolving pistol several hundred years old which

looked strangely like a modern Colt, but just then I heard that the

Empress of the French was in another part of the building, and hastened

away to see what she might look like.  We heard martial music--we saw an

unusual number of soldiers walking hurriedly about--there was a general

movement among the people.  We inquired what it was all about and learned

that the Emperor of the French and the Sultan of Turkey were about to

review twenty-five thousand troops at the Arc de l'Etoile.  We

immediately departed.  I had a greater anxiety to see these men than I

could have had to see twenty expositions.



We drove away and took up a position in an open space opposite the

American minister's house.  A speculator bridged a couple of barrels with

a board and we hired standing places on it.  Presently there was a sound

of distant music; in another minute a pillar of dust came moving slowly

toward us; a moment more and then, with colors flying and a grand crash

of military music, a gallant array of cavalrymen emerged from the dust

and came down the street on a gentle trot.  After them came a long line

of artillery; then more cavalry, in splendid uniforms; and then their

imperial majesties Napoleon III and Abdul Aziz.  The vast concourse of

people swung their hats and shouted--the windows and housetops in the

wide vicinity burst into a snowstorm of waving handkerchiefs, and the

wavers of the same mingled their cheers with those of the masses below.

It was a stirring spectacle.



But the two central figures claimed all my attention.  Was ever such a

contrast set up before a multitude till then?  Napoleon in military

uniform--a long-bodied, short-legged man, fiercely moustached, old,

wrinkled, with eyes half closed, and such a deep, crafty, scheming

expression about them!--Napoleon, bowing ever so gently to the loud

plaudits, and watching everything and everybody with his cat eyes from

under his depressed hat brim, as if to discover any sign that those

cheers were not heartfelt and cordial.



Abdul Aziz, absolute lord of the Ottoman empire--clad in dark green

European clothes, almost without ornament or insignia of rank; a red

Turkish fez on his head; a short, stout, dark man, black-bearded, black-

eyed, stupid, unprepossessing--a man whose whole appearance somehow

suggested that if he only had a cleaver in his hand and a white apron on,

one would not be at all surprised to hear him say: "A mutton roast today,

or will you have a nice porterhouse steak?"



Napoleon III, the representative of the highest modern civilization,

progress, and refinement; Abdul-Aziz, the representative of a people by

nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive,

superstitious--and a government whose Three Graces are Tyranny, Rapacity,

Blood.  Here in brilliant Paris, under this majestic Arch of Triumph, the

First Century greets the Nineteenth!



NAPOLEON III., Emperor of France!  Surrounded by shouting thousands, by

military pomp, by the splendors of his capital city, and companioned by

kings and princes--this is the man who was sneered at and reviled and

called Bastard--yet who was dreaming of a crown and an empire all the

while; who was driven into exile--but carried his dreams with him; who

associated with the common herd in America and ran foot races for a

wager--but still sat upon a throne in fancy; who braved every danger to

go to his dying mother--and grieved that she could not be spared to see

him cast aside his plebeian vestments for the purple of royalty; who kept

his faithful watch and walked his weary beat a common policeman of

London--but dreamed the while of a coming night when he should tread the

long-drawn corridors of the Tuileries; who made the miserable fiasco of

Strasbourg; saw his poor, shabby eagle, forgetful of its lesson, refuse

to perch upon his shoulder; delivered his carefully prepared, sententious

burst of eloquence upon unsympathetic ears; found himself a prisoner, the

butt of small wits, a mark for the pitiless ridicule of all the world--

yet went on dreaming of coronations and splendid pageants as before; who

lay a forgotten captive in the dungeons of Ham--and still schemed and

planned and pondered over future glory and future power; President of

France at last! a coup d'etat, and surrounded by applauding armies,

welcomed by the thunders of cannon, he mounts a throne and waves before

an astounded world the sceptre of a mighty empire!  Who talks of the

marvels of fiction?  Who speaks of the wonders of romance?  Who prates of

the tame achievements of Aladdin and the Magii of Arabia?



ABDUL-AZIZ, Sultan of Turkey, Lord of the Ottoman Empire!  Born to a

throne; weak, stupid, ignorant, almost, as his meanest slave; chief of a

vast royalty, yet the puppet of his Premier and the obedient child of a

tyrannical mother; a man who sits upon a throne--the beck of whose finger

moves navies and armies--who holds in his hands the power of life and

death over millions--yet who sleeps, sleeps, eats, eats, idles with his

eight hundred concubines, and when he is surfeited with eating and

sleeping and idling, and would rouse up and take the reins of government

and threaten to be a sultan, is charmed from his purpose by wary Fuad

Pacha with a pretty plan for a new palace or a new ship--charmed away

with a new toy, like any other restless child; a man who sees his people

robbed and oppressed by soulless tax-gatherers, but speaks no word to

save them; who believes in gnomes and genii and the wild fables of The

Arabian Nights, but has small regard for the mighty magicians of to-day,

and is nervous in the presence of their mysterious railroads and

steamboats and telegraphs; who would see undone in Egypt all that great

Mehemet Ali achieved, and would prefer rather to forget than emulate him;

a man who found his great empire a blot upon the earth--a degraded,

poverty-stricken, miserable, infamous agglomeration of ignorance, crime,

and brutality--and will idle away the allotted days of his trivial life

and then pass to the dust and the worms and leave it so!



Napoleon has augmented the commercial prosperity of France in ten years

to such a degree that figures can hardly compute it.  He has rebuilt

Paris and has partly rebuilt every city in the state.  He condemns a

whole street at a time, assesses the damages, pays them, and rebuilds

superbly.  Then speculators buy up the ground and sell, but the original

owner is given the first choice by the government at a stated price

before the speculator is permitted to purchase.  But above all things, he

has taken the sole control of the empire of France into his hands and

made it a tolerably free land--for people who will not attempt to go too

far in meddling with government affairs.  No country offers greater

security to life and property than France, and one has all the freedom he

wants, but no license--no license to interfere with anybody or make

anyone uncomfortable.



As for the Sultan, one could set a trap any where and catch a dozen abler

men in a night.



The bands struck up, and the brilliant adventurer, Napoleon III., the

genius of Energy, Persistence, Enterprise; and the feeble Abdul-Aziz, the

genius of Ignorance, Bigotry, and Indolence, prepared for the Forward--

March!



We saw the splendid review, we saw the white-moustached old Crimean

soldier, Canrobert, Marshal of France, we saw--well, we saw every thing,

and then we went home satisfied.









CHAPTER XIV.



We went to see the Cathedral of Notre Dame.  We had heard of it before.

It surprises me sometimes to think how much we do know and how

intelligent we are.  We recognized the brown old Gothic pile in a moment;

it was like the pictures.  We stood at a little distance and changed from

one point of observation to another and gazed long at its lofty square

towers and its rich front, clustered thick with stony, mutilated saints

who had been looking calmly down from their perches for ages.  The

Patriarch of Jerusalem stood under them in the old days of chivalry and

romance, and preached the third Crusade, more than six hundred years ago;

and since that day they have stood there and looked quietly down upon the

most thrilling scenes, the grandest pageants, the most extraordinary

spectacles that have grieved or delighted Paris.  These battered and

broken-nosed old fellows saw many and many a cavalcade of mail-clad

knights come marching home from Holy Land; they heard the bells above

them toll the signal for the St. Bartholomew's Massacre, and they saw the

slaughter that followed; later they saw the Reign of Terror, the carnage

of the Revolution, the overthrow of a king, the coronation of two

Napoleons, the christening of the young prince that lords it over a

regiment of servants in the Tuileries to-day--and they may possibly

continue to stand there until they see the Napoleon dynasty swept away

and the banners of a great republic floating above its ruins.  I wish

these old parties could speak.  They could tell a tale worth the

listening to.



They say that a pagan temple stood where Notre Dame now stands, in the

old Roman days, eighteen or twenty centuries ago--remains of it are still

preserved in Paris; and that a Christian church took its place about A.D.

300; another took the place of that in A.D. 500; and that the foundations

of the present cathedral were laid about A.D. 1100.  The ground ought to

be measurably sacred by this time, one would think.  One portion of this

noble old edifice is suggestive of the quaint fashions of ancient times.

It was built by Jean Sans-Peur, Duke of Burgundy, to set his conscience

at rest--he had assassinated the Duke of Orleans.  Alas!  Those good old

times are gone when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and

soothe his troubles to sleep simply by getting out his bricks and mortar

and building an addition to a church.



The portals of the great western front are bisected by square pillars.

They took the central one away in 1852, on the occasion of thanksgivings

for the reinstitution of the presidential power--but precious soon they

had occasion to reconsider that motion and put it back again!  And they

did.



We loitered through the grand aisles for an hour or two, staring up at

the rich stained-glass windows embellished with blue and yellow and

crimson saints and martyrs, and trying to admire the numberless great

pictures in the chapels, and then we were admitted to the sacristy and

shown the magnificent robes which the Pope wore when he crowned Napoleon

I; a wagon-load of solid gold and silver utensils used in the great

public processions and ceremonies of the church; some nails of the true

cross, a fragment of the cross itself, a part of the crown of thorns.

We had already seen a large piece of the true cross in a church in the

Azores, but no nails.  They showed us likewise the bloody robe which that

archbishop of Paris wore who exposed his sacred person and braved the

wrath of the insurgents of 1848, to mount the barricades and hold aloft

the olive branch of peace in the hope of stopping the slaughter.  His

noble effort cost him his life.  He was shot dead.  They showed us a cast

of his face taken after death, the bullet that killed him, and the two

vertebrae in which it lodged.  These people have a somewhat singular

taste in the matter of relics.  Ferguson told us that the silver cross

which the good archbishop wore at his girdle was seized and thrown into

the Seine, where it lay embedded in the mud for fifteen years, and then

an angel appeared to a priest and told him where to dive for it; he did

dive for it and got it, and now it is there on exhibition at Notre Dame,

to be inspected by anybody who feels an interest in inanimate objects of

miraculous intervention.



Next we went to visit the Morgue, that horrible receptacle for the dead

who die mysteriously and leave the manner of their taking off a dismal

secret.  We stood before a grating and looked through into a room which

was hung all about with the clothing of dead men; coarse blouses, water-

soaked; the delicate garments of women and children; patrician vestments,

hacked and stabbed and stained with red; a hat that was crushed and

bloody.  On a slanting stone lay a drowned man, naked, swollen, purple;

clasping the fragment of a broken bush with a grip which death had so

petrified that human strength could not unloose it--mute witness of the

last despairing effort to save the life that was doomed beyond all help.

A stream of water trickled ceaselessly over the hideous face.  We knew

that the body and the clothing were there for identification by friends,

but still we wondered if anybody could love that repulsive object or

grieve for its loss.  We grew meditative and wondered if, some forty

years ago, when the mother of that ghastly thing was dandling it upon her

knee, and kissing it and petting it and displaying it with satisfied

pride to the passers-by, a prophetic vision of this dread ending ever

flitted through her brain.  I half feared that the mother, or the wife or

a brother of the dead man might come while we stood there, but nothing of

the kind occurred.  Men and women came, and some looked eagerly in and

pressed their faces against the bars; others glanced carelessly at the

body and turned away with a disappointed look--people, I thought, who

live upon strong excitements and who attend the exhibitions of the Morgue

regularly, just as other people go to see theatrical spectacles every

night.  When one of these looked in and passed on, I could not help

thinking--



"Now this don't afford you any satisfaction--a party with his head shot

off is what you need."



One night we went to the celebrated Jardin Mabille, but only staid a

little while.  We wanted to see some of this kind of Paris life, however,

and therefore the next night we went to a similar place of entertainment

in a great garden in the suburb of Asnieres.  We went to the railroad

depot, toward evening, and Ferguson got tickets for a second-class

carriage.  Such a perfect jam of people I have not often seen--but there

was no noise, no disorder, no rowdyism.  Some of the women and young

girls that entered the train we knew to be of the demi-monde, but others

we were not at all sure about.



The girls and women in our carriage behaved themselves modestly and

becomingly all the way out, except that they smoked.  When we arrived at

the garden in Asnieres, we paid a franc or two admission and entered a

place which had flower beds in it, and grass plots, and long, curving

rows of ornamental shrubbery, with here and there a secluded bower

convenient for eating ice cream in.  We moved along the sinuous gravel

walks, with the great concourse of girls and young men, and suddenly a

domed and filigreed white temple, starred over and over and over again

with brilliant gas jets, burst upon us like a fallen sun.  Nearby was a

large, handsome house with its ample front illuminated in the same way,

and above its roof floated the Star-Spangled Banner of America.



"Well!" I said.  "How is this?"  It nearly took my breath away.



Ferguson said an American--a New Yorker--kept the place, and was carrying

on quite a stirring opposition to the Jardin Mabille.



Crowds composed of both sexes and nearly all ages were frisking about the

garden or sitting in the open air in front of the flagstaff and the

temple, drinking wine and coffee or smoking.  The dancing had not begun

yet.  Ferguson said there was to be an exhibition.  The famous Blondin

was going to perform on a tightrope in another part of the garden.  We

went thither.  Here the light was dim, and the masses of people were

pretty closely packed together.  And now I made a mistake which any

donkey might make, but a sensible man never.  I committed an error which

I find myself repeating every day of my life.  Standing right before a

young lady, I said:



"Dan, just look at this girl, how beautiful she is!"



"I thank you more for the evident sincerity of the compliment, sir, than

for the extraordinary publicity you have given to it!"  This in good,

pure English.



We took a walk, but my spirits were very, very sadly dampened.  I did not

feel right comfortable for some time afterward.  Why will people be so

stupid as to suppose themselves the only foreigners among a crowd of ten

thousand persons?



But Blondin came out shortly.  He appeared on a stretched cable, far away

above the sea of tossing hats and handkerchiefs, and in the glare of the

hundreds of rockets that whizzed heavenward by him he looked like a wee

insect.  He balanced his pole and walked the length of his rope--two or

three hundred feet; he came back and got a man and carried him across; he

returned to the center and danced a jig; next he performed some gymnastic

and balancing feats too perilous to afford a pleasant spectacle; and he

finished by fastening to his person a thousand Roman candles, Catherine

wheels, serpents and rockets of all manner of brilliant colors, setting

them on fire all at once and walking and waltzing across his rope again

in a blinding blaze of glory that lit up the garden and the people's

faces like a great conflagration at midnight.



The dance had begun, and we adjourned to the temple.  Within it was a

drinking saloon, and all around it was a broad circular platform for the

dancers.  I backed up against the wall of the temple, and waited.  Twenty

sets formed, the music struck up, and then--I placed my hands before my

face for very shame.  But I looked through my fingers.  They were dancing

the renowned "Can-can."  A handsome girl in the set before me tripped

forward lightly to meet the opposite gentleman, tripped back again,

grasped her dresses vigorously on both sides with her hands, raised them

pretty high, danced an extraordinary jig that had more activity and

exposure about it than any jig I ever saw before, and then, drawing her

clothes still higher, she advanced gaily to the center and launched a

vicious kick full at her vis-a-vis that must infallibly have removed his

nose if he had been seven feet high.  It was a mercy he was only six.



That is the can-can.  The idea of it is to dance as wildly, as noisily,

as furiously as you can; expose yourself as much as possible if you are a

woman; and kick as high as you can, no matter which sex you belong to.

There is no word of exaggeration in this.  Any of the staid, respectable,

aged people who were there that night can testify to the truth of that

statement.  There were a good many such people present.  I suppose French

morality is not of that straight-laced description which is shocked at

trifles.



I moved aside and took a general view of the can-can.  Shouts, laughter,

furious music, a bewildering chaos of darting and intermingling forms,

stormy jerking and snatching of gay dresses, bobbing beads, flying arms,

lightning flashes of white-stockinged calves and dainty slippers in the

air, and then a grand final rush, riot, a terrific hubbub, and a wild

stampede!  Heavens!  Nothing like it has been seen on earth since

trembling Tam O'Shanter saw the devil and the witches at their orgies

that stormy night in "Alloway's auld haunted kirk."



We visited the Louvre, at a time when we had no silk purchases in view,

and looked at its miles of paintings by the old masters.  Some of them

were beautiful, but at the same time they carried such evidences about

them of the cringing spirit of those great men that we found small

pleasure in examining them.  Their nauseous adulation of princely patrons

was more prominent to me and chained my attention more surely than the

charms of color and expression which are claimed to be in the pictures.

Gratitude for kindnesses is well, but it seems to me that some of those

artists carried it so far that it ceased to be gratitude and became

worship.  If there is a plausible excuse for the worship of men, then by

all means let us forgive Rubens and his brethren.



But I will drop the subject, lest I say something about the old masters

that might as well be left unsaid.



Of course we drove in the Bois de Boulogne, that limitless park, with its

forests, its lakes, its cascades, and its broad avenues.  There were

thousands upon thousands of vehicles abroad, and the scene was full of

life and gaiety.  There were very common hacks, with father and mother

and all the children in them; conspicuous little open carriages with

celebrated ladies of questionable reputation in them; there were Dukes

and Duchesses abroad, with gorgeous footmen perched behind, and equally

gorgeous outriders perched on each of the six horses; there were blue and

silver, and green and gold, and pink and black, and all sorts and

descriptions of stunning and startling liveries out, and I almost yearned

to be a flunkey myself, for the sake of the fine clothes.



But presently the Emperor came along and he outshone them all.  He was

preceded by a bodyguard of gentlemen on horseback in showy uniforms, his

carriage-horses (there appeared to be somewhere in the remote

neighborhood of a thousand of them,) were bestridden by gallant-looking

fellows, also in stylish uniforms, and after the carriage followed

another detachment of bodyguards.  Everybody got out of the way;

everybody bowed to the Emperor and his friend the Sultan; and they went

by on a swinging trot and disappeared.



I will not describe the Bois de Boulogne.  I can not do it.  It is simply

a beautiful, cultivated, endless, wonderful wilderness.  It is an

enchanting place.  It is in Paris now, one may say, but a crumbling old

cross in one portion of it reminds one that it was not always so.  The

cross marks the spot where a celebrated troubadour was waylaid and

murdered in the fourteenth century.  It was in this park that that fellow

with an unpronounceable name made the attempt upon the Russian Czar's

life last spring with a pistol.  The bullet struck a tree.  Ferguson

showed us the place.  Now in America that interesting tree would be

chopped down or forgotten within the next five years, but it will be

treasured here.  The guides will point it out to visitors for the next

eight hundred years, and when it decays and falls down they will put up

another there and go on with the same old story just the same.









CHAPTER XV.



One of our pleasantest visits was to Pere la Chaise, the national

burying-ground of France, the honored resting-place of some of her

greatest and best children, the last home of scores of illustrious men

and women who were born to no titles, but achieved fame by their own

energy and their own genius.  It is a solemn city of winding streets and

of miniature marble temples and mansions of the dead gleaming white from

out a wilderness of foliage and fresh flowers.  Not every city is so well

peopled as this, or has so ample an area within its walls.  Few palaces

exist in any city that are so exquisite in design, so rich in art, so

costly in material, so graceful, so beautiful.



We had stood in the ancient church of St. Denis, where the marble

effigies of thirty generations of kings and queens lay stretched at

length upon the tombs, and the sensations invoked were startling and

novel; the curious armor, the obsolete costumes, the placid faces, the

hands placed palm to palm in eloquent supplication--it was a vision of

gray antiquity.  It seemed curious enough to be standing face to face, as

it were, with old Dagobert I., and Clovis and Charlemagne, those vague,

colossal heroes, those shadows, those myths of a thousand years ago!  I

touched their dust-covered faces with my finger, but Dagobert was deader

than the sixteen centuries that have passed over him, Clovis slept well

after his labor for Christ, and old Charlemagne went on dreaming of his

paladins, of bloody Roncesvalles, and gave no heed to me.



The great names of Pere la Chaise impress one, too, but differently.

There the suggestion brought constantly to his mind is, that this place

is sacred to a nobler royalty--the royalty of heart and brain.  Every

faculty of mind, every noble trait of human nature, every high occupation

which men engage in, seems represented by a famous name.  The effect is a

curious medley.  Davoust and Massena, who wrought in many a battle

tragedy, are here, and so also is Rachel, of equal renown in mimic

tragedy on the stage.  The Abbe Sicard sleeps here--the first great

teacher of the deaf and dumb--a man whose heart went out to every

unfortunate, and whose life was given to kindly offices in their service;

and not far off, in repose and peace at last, lies Marshal Ney, whose

stormy spirit knew no music like the bugle call to arms.  The man who

originated public gas-lighting, and that other benefactor who introduced

the cultivation of the potato and thus blessed millions of his starving

countrymen, lie with the Prince of Masserano, and with exiled queens and

princes of Further India.  Gay-Lussac the chemist, Laplace the

astronomer, Larrey the surgeon, de Suze the advocate, are here, and with

them are Talma, Bellini, Rubini; de Balzac, Beaumarchais, Beranger;

Moliere and Lafontaine, and scores of other men whose names and whose

worthy labors are as familiar in the remote by-places of civilization as

are the historic deeds of the kings and princes that sleep in the marble

vaults of St. Denis.



But among the thousands and thousands of tombs in Pere la Chaise, there

is one that no man, no woman, no youth of either sex, ever passes by

without stopping to examine.  Every visitor has a sort of indistinct idea

of the history of its dead and comprehends that homage is due there, but

not one in twenty thousand clearly remembers the story of that tomb and

its romantic occupants.  This is the grave of Abelard and Heloise--a

grave which has been more revered, more widely known, more written and

sung about and wept over, for seven hundred years, than any other in

Christendom save only that of the Saviour.  All visitors linger pensively

about it; all young people capture and carry away keepsakes and mementoes

of it; all Parisian youths and maidens who are disappointed in love come

there to bail out when they are full of tears; yea, many stricken lovers

make pilgrimages to this shrine from distant provinces to weep and wail

and "grit" their teeth over their heavy sorrows, and to purchase the

sympathies of the chastened spirits of that tomb with offerings of

immortelles and budding flowers.



Go when you will, you find somebody snuffling over that tomb.  Go when

you will, you find it furnished with those bouquets and immortelles.  Go

when you will, you find a gravel-train from Marseilles arriving to supply

the deficiencies caused by memento-cabbaging vandals whose affections

have miscarried.



Yet who really knows the story of Abelard and Heloise?  Precious few

people.  The names are perfectly familiar to every body, and that is

about all.  With infinite pains I have acquired a knowledge of that

history, and I propose to narrate it here, partly for the honest

information of the public and partly to show that public that they have

been wasting a good deal of marketable sentiment very unnecessarily.





                       STORY OF ABELARD AND HELOISE



Heloise was born seven hundred and sixty-six years ago.  She may have had

parents.  There is no telling.  She lived with her uncle Fulbert, a canon

of the cathedral of Paris.  I do not know what a canon of a cathedral is,

but that is what he was.  He was nothing more than a sort of a mountain

howitzer, likely, because they had no heavy artillery in those days.

Suffice it, then, that Heloise lived with her uncle the howitzer and was

happy.  She spent the most of her childhood in the convent of Argenteuil

--never heard of Argenteuil before, but suppose there was really such a

place.  She then returned to her uncle, the old gun, or son of a gun, as

the case may be, and he taught her to write and speak Latin, which was

the language of literature and polite society at that period.



Just at this time, Pierre Abelard, who had already made himself widely

famous as a rhetorician, came to found a school of rhetoric in Paris.

The originality of his principles, his eloquence, and his great physical

strength and beauty created a profound sensation.  He saw Heloise, and

was captivated by her blooming youth, her beauty, and her charming

disposition.  He wrote to her; she answered.  He wrote again; she

answered again.  He was now in love.  He longed to know her--to speak to

her face to face.



His school was near Fulbert's house.  He asked Fulbert to allow him to

call.  The good old swivel saw here a rare opportunity: his niece, whom

he so much loved, would absorb knowledge from this man, and it would not

cost him a cent.  Such was Fulbert--penurious.



Fulbert's first name is not mentioned by any author, which is

unfortunate.  However, George W. Fulbert will answer for him as well as

any other.  We will let him go at that.  He asked Abelard to teach her.



Abelard was glad enough of the opportunity.  He came often and staid

long.  A letter of his shows in its very first sentence that he came

under that friendly roof like a cold-hearted villain as he was, with the

deliberate intention of debauching a confiding, innocent girl.  This is

the letter:



          "I cannot cease to be astonished at the simplicity of Fulbert;

          I was as much surprised as if he had placed a lamb in the power

          of a hungry wolf.  Heloise and I, under pretext of study, gave

          ourselves up wholly to love, and the solitude that love seeks

          our studies procured for us.  Books were open before us, but we

          spoke oftener of love than philosophy, and kisses came more

          readily from our lips than words."



And so, exulting over an honorable confidence which to his degraded

instinct was a ludicrous "simplicity," this unmanly Abelard seduced the

niece of the man whose guest he was.  Paris found it out.  Fulbert was

told of it--told often--but refused to believe it.  He could not

comprehend how a man could be so depraved as to use the sacred protection

and security of hospitality as a means for the commission of such a crime

as that.  But when he heard the rowdies in the streets singing the love-

songs of Abelard to Heloise, the case was too plain--love-songs come not

properly within the teachings of rhetoric and philosophy.



He drove Abelard from his house.  Abelard returned secretly and carried

Heloise away to Palais, in Brittany, his native country.  Here, shortly

afterward, she bore a son, who, from his rare beauty, was surnamed

Astrolabe--William G.  The girl's flight enraged Fulbert, and he longed

for vengeance, but feared to strike lest retaliation visit Heloise--for

he still loved her tenderly.  At length Abelard offered to marry Heloise

--but on a shameful condition: that the marriage should be kept secret

from the world, to the end that (while her good name remained a wreck, as

before,) his priestly reputation might be kept untarnished.  It was like

that miscreant.  Fulbert saw his opportunity and consented.  He would see

the parties married, and then violate the confidence of the man who had

taught him that trick; he would divulge the secret and so remove somewhat

of the obloquy that attached to his niece's fame.  But the niece

suspected his scheme.  She refused the marriage at first; she said

Fulbert would betray the secret to save her, and besides, she did not

wish to drag down a lover who was so gifted, so honored by the world, and

who had such a splendid career before him.  It was noble, self-

sacrificing love, and characteristic of the pure-souled Heloise, but it

was not good sense.



But she was overruled, and the private marriage took place.  Now for

Fulbert!  The heart so wounded should be healed at last; the proud spirit

so tortured should find rest again; the humbled head should be lifted up

once more.  He proclaimed the marriage in the high places of the city and

rejoiced that dishonor had departed from his house.  But lo!  Abelard

denied the marriage!  Heloise denied it!  The people, knowing the former

circumstances, might have believed Fulbert had only Abelard denied it,

but when the person chiefly interested--the girl herself--denied it, they

laughed, despairing Fulbert to scorn.



The poor canon of the cathedral of Paris was spiked again.  The last hope

of repairing the wrong that had been done his house was gone.  What next?

Human nature suggested revenge.  He compassed it.  The historian says:



          "Ruffians, hired by Fulbert, fell upon Abelard by night, and

          inflicted upon him a terrible and nameless mutilation."



I am seeking the last resting place of those "ruffians."  When I find it

I shall shed some tears on it, and stack up some bouquets and

immortelles, and cart away from it some gravel whereby to remember that

howsoever blotted by crime their lives may have been, these ruffians did

one just deed, at any rate, albeit it was not warranted by the strict

letter of the law.



Heloise entered a convent and gave good-bye to the world and its

pleasures for all time.  For twelve years she never heard of Abelard--

never even heard his name mentioned.  She had become prioress of

Argenteuil and led a life of complete seclusion.  She happened one day to

see a letter written by him, in which he narrated his own history.  She

cried over it and wrote him.  He answered, addressing her as his "sister

in Christ."  They continued to correspond, she in the unweighed language

of unwavering affection, he in the chilly phraseology of the polished

rhetorician.  She poured out her heart in passionate, disjointed

sentences; he replied with finished essays, divided deliberately into

heads and sub-heads, premises and argument.  She showered upon him the

tenderest epithets that love could devise, he addressed her from the

North Pole of his frozen heart as the "Spouse of Christ!"  The abandoned

villain!



On account of her too easy government of her nuns, some disreputable

irregularities were discovered among them, and the Abbot of St. Denis

broke up her establishment.  Abelard was the official head of the

monastery of St. Gildas de Ruys, at that time, and when he heard of her

homeless condition a sentiment of pity was aroused in his breast (it is a

wonder the unfamiliar emotion did not blow his head off,) and he placed

her and her troop in the little oratory of the Paraclete, a religious

establishment which he had founded.  She had many privations and

sufferings to undergo at first, but her worth and her gentle disposition

won influential friends for her, and she built up a wealthy and

flourishing nunnery.  She became a great favorite with the heads of the

church, and also the people, though she seldom appeared in public.  She

rapidly advanced in esteem, in good report, and in usefulness, and

Abelard as rapidly lost ground.  The Pope so honored her that he made her

the head of her order.  Abelard, a man of splendid talents, and ranking

as the first debater of his time, became timid, irresolute, and

distrustful of his powers.  He only needed a great misfortune to topple

him from the high position he held in the world of intellectual

excellence, and it came.  Urged by kings and princes to meet the subtle

St. Bernard in debate and crush him, he stood up in the presence of a

royal and illustrious assemblage, and when his antagonist had finished he

looked about him and stammered a commencement; but his courage failed

him, the cunning of his tongue was gone: with his speech unspoken, he

trembled and sat down, a disgraced and vanquished champion.



He died a nobody, and was buried at Cluny, A.D., 1144.  They removed his

body to the Paraclete afterward, and when Heloise died, twenty years

later, they buried her with him, in accordance with her last wish.  He

died at the ripe age of 64, and she at 63.  After the bodies had remained

entombed three hundred years, they were removed once more.  They were

removed again in 1800, and finally, seventeen years afterward, they were

taken up and transferred to Pere la Chaise, where they will remain in

peace and quiet until it comes time for them to get up and move again.



History is silent concerning the last acts of the mountain howitzer.  Let

the world say what it will about him, I, at least, shall always respect

the memory and sorrow for the abused trust and the broken heart and the

troubled spirit of the old smooth-bore.  Rest and repose be his!



Such is the story of Abelard and Heloise.  Such is the history that

Lamartine has shed such cataracts of tears over.  But that man never

could come within the influence of a subject in the least pathetic

without overflowing his banks.  He ought to be dammed--or leveed, I

should more properly say.  Such is the history--not as it is usually

told, but as it is when stripped of the nauseous sentimentality that

would enshrine for our loving worship a dastardly seducer like Pierre

Abelard.  I have not a word to say against the misused, faithful girl,

and would not withhold from her grave a single one of those simple

tributes which blighted youths and maidens offer to her memory, but I am

sorry enough that I have not time and opportunity to write four or five

volumes of my opinion of her friend the founder of the Parachute, or the

Paraclete, or whatever it was.



The tons of sentiment I have wasted on that unprincipled humbug in my

ignorance!  I shall throttle down my emotions hereafter, about this sort

of people, until I have read them up and know whether they are entitled

to any tearful attentions or not.  I wish I had my immortelles back, now,

and that bunch of radishes.



In Paris we often saw in shop windows the sign "English Spoken Here,"

just as one sees in the windows at home the sign "Ici on parle

francaise."  We always invaded these places at once--and invariably

received the information, framed in faultless French, that the clerk who

did the English for the establishment had just gone to dinner and would

be back in an hour--would Monsieur buy something?  We wondered why those

parties happened to take their dinners at such erratic and extraordinary

hours, for we never called at a time when an exemplary Christian would be

in the least likely to be abroad on such an errand.  The truth was, it

was a base fraud--a snare to trap the unwary--chaff to catch fledglings

with.  They had no English-murdering clerk.  They trusted to the sign to

inveigle foreigners into their lairs, and trusted to their own

blandishments to keep them there till they bought something.



We ferreted out another French imposition--a frequent sign to this

effect: "ALL MANNER OF AMERICAN DRINKS ARTISTICALLY PREPARED HERE."  We

procured the services of a gentleman experienced in the nomenclature of

the American bar, and moved upon the works of one of these impostors.  A

bowing, aproned Frenchman skipped forward and said:



"Que voulez les messieurs?"  I do not know what "Que voulez les

messieurs?"  means, but such was his remark.



Our general said, "We will take a whiskey straight."



[A stare from the Frenchman.]



"Well, if you don't know what that is, give us a champagne cock-tail."



[A stare and a shrug.]



"Well, then, give us a sherry cobbler."



The Frenchman was checkmated.  This was all Greek to him.



"Give us a brandy smash!"



The Frenchman began to back away, suspicious of the ominous vigor of the

last order--began to back away, shrugging his shoulders and spreading his

hands apologetically.



The General followed him up and gained a complete victory.  The

uneducated foreigner could not even furnish a Santa Cruz Punch, an Eye-

Opener, a Stone-Fence, or an Earthquake.  It was plain that he was a

wicked impostor.



An acquaintance of mine said the other day that he was doubtless the only

American visitor to the Exposition who had had the high honor of being

escorted by the Emperor's bodyguard.  I said with unobtrusive frankness

that I was astonished that such a long-legged, lantern-jawed,

unprepossessing-looking specter as he should be singled out for a

distinction like that, and asked how it came about.  He said he had

attended a great military review in the Champ de Mars some time ago, and

while the multitude about him was growing thicker and thicker every

moment he observed an open space inside the railing.  He left his

carriage and went into it.  He was the only person there, and so he had

plenty of room, and the situation being central, he could see all the

preparations going on about the field.  By and by there was a sound of

music, and soon the Emperor of the French and the Emperor of Austria,

escorted by the famous Cent Gardes, entered the enclosure.  They seemed

not to observe him, but directly, in response to a sign from the

commander of the guard, a young lieutenant came toward him with a file of

his men following, halted, raised his hand, and gave the military salute,

and then said in a low voice that he was sorry to have to disturb a

stranger and a gentleman, but the place was sacred to royalty.  Then this

New Jersey phantom rose up and bowed and begged pardon, then with the

officer beside him, the file of men marching behind him, and with every

mark of respect, he was escorted to his carriage by the imperial Cent

Gardes!  The officer saluted again and fell back, the New Jersey sprite

bowed in return and had presence of mind enough to pretend that he had

simply called on a matter of private business with those emperors, and so

waved them an adieu and drove from the field!



Imagine a poor Frenchman ignorantly intruding upon a public rostrum

sacred to some six-penny dignitary in America.  The police would scare

him to death first with a storm of their elegant blasphemy, and then pull

him to pieces getting him away from there.  We are measurably superior to

the French in some things, but they are immeasurably our betters in

others.



Enough of Paris for the present.  We have done our whole duty by it.  We

have seen the Tuileries, the Napoleon Column, the Madeleine, that wonder

of wonders the tomb of Napoleon, all the great churches and museums,

libraries, imperial palaces, and sculpture and picture galleries, the

Pantheon, Jardin des Plantes, the opera, the circus, the legislative

body, the billiard rooms, the barbers, the grisettes--



Ah, the grisettes!  I had almost forgotten.  They are another romantic

fraud.  They were (if you let the books of travel tell it) always so

beautiful--so neat and trim, so graceful--so naive and trusting--so

gentle, so winning--so faithful to their shop duties, so irresistible to

buyers in their prattling importunity--so devoted to their poverty-

stricken students of the Latin Quarter--so lighthearted and happy on

their Sunday picnics in the suburbs--and oh, so charmingly, so

delightfully immoral!



Stuff!  For three or four days I was constantly saying:



"Quick, Ferguson!  Is that a grisette?"



And he always said, "No."



He comprehended at last that I wanted to see a grisette.  Then he showed

me dozens of them.  They were like nearly all the Frenchwomen I ever saw

--homely.  They had large hands, large feet, large mouths; they had pug

noses as a general thing, and moustaches that not even good breeding

could overlook; they combed their hair straight back without parting;

they were ill-shaped, they were not winning, they were not graceful; I

knew by their looks that they ate garlic and onions; and lastly and

finally, to my thinking it would be base flattery to call them immoral.



Aroint thee, wench!  I sorrow for the vagabond student of the Latin

Quarter now, even more than formerly I envied him.  Thus topples to earth

another idol of my infancy.



We have seen every thing, and tomorrow we go to Versailles.  We shall see

Paris only for a little while as we come back to take up our line of

march for the ship, and so I may as well bid the beautiful city a

regretful farewell.  We shall travel many thousands of miles after we

leave here and visit many great cities, but we shall find none so

enchanting as this.



Some of our party have gone to England, intending to take a roundabout

course and rejoin the vessel at Leghorn or Naples several weeks hence.

We came near going to Geneva, but have concluded to return to Marseilles

and go up through Italy from Genoa.



I will conclude this chapter with a remark that I am sincerely proud to

be able to make--and glad, as well, that my comrades cordially endorse

it, to wit: by far the handsomest women we have seen in France were born

and reared in America.



I feel now like a man who has redeemed a failing reputation and shed

luster upon a dimmed escutcheon, by a single just deed done at the

eleventh hour.



Let the curtain fall, to slow music.









CHAPTER XVI.



VERSAILLES!  It is wonderfully beautiful!  You gaze and stare and try to

understand that it is real, that it is on the earth, that it is not the

Garden of Eden--but your brain grows giddy, stupefied by the world of

beauty around you, and you half believe you are the dupe of an exquisite

dream.  The scene thrills one like military music!  A noble palace,

stretching its ornamented front, block upon block away, till it seemed

that it would never end; a grand promenade before it, whereon the armies

of an empire might parade; all about it rainbows of flowers, and colossal

statues that were almost numberless and yet seemed only scattered over

the ample space; broad flights of stone steps leading down from the

promenade to lower grounds of the park--stairways that whole regiments

might stand to arms upon and have room to spare; vast fountains whose

great bronze effigies discharged rivers of sparkling water into the air

and mingled a hundred curving jets together in forms of matchless beauty;

wide grass-carpeted avenues that branched hither and thither in every

direction and wandered to seemingly interminable distances, walled all

the way on either side with compact ranks of leafy trees whose branches

met above and formed arches as faultless and as symmetrical as ever were

carved in stone; and here and there were glimpses of sylvan lakes with

miniature ships glassed in their surfaces.  And every where--on the

palace steps, and the great promenade, around the fountains, among the

trees, and far under the arches of the endless avenues--hundreds and

hundreds of people in gay costumes walked or ran or danced, and gave to

the fairy picture the life and animation which was all of perfection it

could have lacked.



It was worth a pilgrimage to see.  Everything is on so gigantic a scale.

Nothing is small--nothing is cheap.  The statues are all large; the

palace is grand; the park covers a fair-sized county; the avenues are

interminable.  All the distances and all the dimensions about Versailles

are vast.  I used to think the pictures exaggerated these distances and

these dimensions beyond all reason, and that they made Versailles more

beautiful than it was possible for any place in the world to be.  I know

now that the pictures never came up to the subject in any respect, and

that no painter could represent Versailles on canvas as beautiful as it

is in reality.  I used to abuse Louis XIV for spending two hundred

millions of dollars in creating this marvelous park, when bread was so

scarce with some of his subjects; but I have forgiven him now.  He took a

tract of land sixty miles in circumference and set to work to make this

park and build this palace and a road to it from Paris.  He kept 36,000

men employed daily on it, and the labor was so unhealthy that they used

to die and be hauled off by cartloads every night.  The wife of a

nobleman of the time speaks of this as an "inconvenience," but naively

remarks that "it does not seem worthy of attention in the happy state of

tranquillity we now enjoy."



I always thought ill of people at home who trimmed their shrubbery into

pyramids and squares and spires and all manner of unnatural shapes, and

when I saw the same thing being practiced in this great park I began to

feel dissatisfied.  But I soon saw the idea of the thing and the wisdom

of it.  They seek the general effect.  We distort a dozen sickly trees

into unaccustomed shapes in a little yard no bigger than a dining room,

and then surely they look absurd enough.  But here they take two hundred

thousand tall forest trees and set them in a double row; allow no sign of

leaf or branch to grow on the trunk lower down than six feet above the

ground; from that point the boughs begin to project, and very gradually

they extend outward further and further till they meet overhead, and a

faultless tunnel of foliage is formed.  The arch is mathematically

precise.  The effect is then very fine.  They make trees take fifty

different shapes, and so these quaint effects are infinitely varied and

picturesque.  The trees in no two avenues are shaped alike, and

consequently the eye is not fatigued with anything in the nature of

monotonous uniformity.  I will drop this subject now, leaving it to

others to determine how these people manage to make endless ranks of

lofty forest trees grow to just a certain thickness of trunk (say a foot

and two-thirds); how they make them spring to precisely the same height

for miles; how they make them grow so close together; how they compel one

huge limb to spring from the same identical spot on each tree and form

the main sweep of the arch; and how all these things are kept exactly in

the same condition and in the same exquisite shapeliness and symmetry

month after month and year after year--for I have tried to reason out the

problem and have failed.



We walked through the great hall of sculpture and the one hundred and

fifty galleries of paintings in the palace of Versailles, and felt that

to be in such a place was useless unless one had a whole year at his

disposal.  These pictures are all battle scenes, and only one solitary

little canvas among them all treats of anything but great French

victories.  We wandered, also, through the Grand Trianon and the Petit

Trianon, those monuments of royal prodigality, and with histories so

mournful--filled, as it is, with souvenirs of Napoleon the First, and

three dead kings and as many queens.  In one sumptuous bed they had all

slept in succession, but no one occupies it now.  In a large dining room

stood the table at which Louis XIV and his mistress Madame Maintenon, and

after them Louis XV, and Pompadour, had sat at their meals naked and

unattended--for the table stood upon a trapdoor, which descended with it

to regions below when it was necessary to replenish its dishes.  In a

room of the Petit Trianon stood the furniture, just as poor Marie

Antoinette left it when the mob came and dragged her and the King to

Paris, never to return.  Near at hand, in the stables, were prodigious

carriages that showed no color but gold--carriages used by former kings

of France on state occasions, and never used now save when a kingly head

is to be crowned or an imperial infant christened.  And with them were

some curious sleighs, whose bodies were shaped like lions, swans, tigers,

etc.--vehicles that had once been handsome with pictured designs and

fine workmanship, but were dusty and decaying now.  They had their

history.  When Louis XIV had finished the Grand Trianon, he told

Maintenon he had created a Paradise for her, and asked if she could think

of anything now to wish for.  He said he wished the Trianon to be

perfection--nothing less.  She said she could think of but one thing--it

was summer, and it was balmy France--yet she would like well to sleigh

ride in the leafy avenues of Versailles!  The next morning found miles

and miles of grassy avenues spread thick with snowy salt and sugar, and a

procession of those quaint sleighs waiting to receive the chief concubine

of the gaiest and most unprincipled court that France has ever seen!



From sumptuous Versailles, with its palaces, its statues, its gardens,

and its fountains, we journeyed back to Paris and sought its antipodes--

the Faubourg St. Antoine.  Little, narrow streets; dirty children

blockading them; greasy, slovenly women capturing and spanking them;

filthy dens on first floors, with rag stores in them (the heaviest

business in the Faubourg is the chiffonier's); other filthy dens where

whole suits of second and third-hand clothing are sold at prices that

would ruin any proprietor who did not steal his stock; still other filthy

dens where they sold groceries--sold them by the half-pennyworth--five

dollars would buy the man out, goodwill and all.  Up these little crooked

streets they will murder a man for seven dollars and dump the body in the

Seine.  And up some other of these streets--most of them, I should say--

live lorettes.



All through this Faubourg St. Antoine, misery, poverty, vice, and crime

go hand in hand, and the evidences of it stare one in the face from every

side.  Here the people live who begin the revolutions.  Whenever there is

anything of that kind to be done, they are always ready.  They take as

much genuine pleasure in building a barricade as they do in cutting a

throat or shoving a friend into the Seine.  It is these savage-looking

ruffians who storm the splendid halls of the Tuileries occasionally, and

swarm into Versailles when a king is to be called to account.



But they will build no more barricades, they will break no more soldiers'

heads with paving-stones.  Louis Napoleon has taken care of all that.  He

is annihilating the crooked streets and building in their stead noble

boulevards as straight as an arrow--avenues which a cannon ball could

traverse from end to end without meeting an obstruction more irresistible

than the flesh and bones of men--boulevards whose stately edifices will

never afford refuges and plotting places for starving, discontented

revolution breeders.  Five of these great thoroughfares radiate from one

ample centre--a centre which is exceedingly well adapted to the

accommodation of heavy artillery.  The mobs used to riot there, but they

must seek another rallying-place in future.  And this ingenious Napoleon

paves the streets of his great cities with a smooth, compact composition

of asphaltum and sand.  No more barricades of flagstones--no more

assaulting his Majesty's troops with cobbles.  I cannot feel friendly

toward my quondam fellow-American, Napoleon III., especially at this

time,--[July, 1867.]--when in fancy I see his credulous victim,

Maximilian, lying stark and stiff in Mexico, and his maniac widow

watching eagerly from her French asylum for the form that will never

come--but I do admire his nerve, his calm self-reliance, his shrewd good

sense.









CHAPTER XVII.



We had a pleasant journey of it seaward again.  We found that for the

three past nights our ship had been in a state of war.  The first night

the sailors of a British ship, being happy with grog, came down on the

pier and challenged our sailors to a free fight.  They accepted with

alacrity, repaired to the pier, and gained--their share of a drawn

battle.  Several bruised and bloody members of both parties were carried

off by the police and imprisoned until the following morning.  The next

night the British boys came again to renew the fight, but our men had had

strict orders to remain on board and out of sight.  They did so, and the

besieging party grew noisy and more and more abusive as the fact became

apparent (to them) that our men were afraid to come out.  They went away

finally with a closing burst of ridicule and offensive epithets.  The

third night they came again and were more obstreperous than ever.  They

swaggered up and down the almost deserted pier, and hurled curses,

obscenity, and stinging sarcasms at our crew.  It was more than human

nature could bear.  The executive officer ordered our men ashore--with

instructions not to fight.  They charged the British and gained a

brilliant victory.  I probably would not have mentioned this war had it

ended differently.  But I travel to learn, and I still remember that they

picture no French defeats in the battle-galleries of Versailles.



It was like home to us to step on board the comfortable ship again and

smoke and lounge about her breezy decks.  And yet it was not altogether

like home, either, because so many members of the family were away.  We

missed some pleasant faces which we would rather have found at dinner,

and at night there were gaps in the euchre-parties which could not be

satisfactorily filled.  "Moult"  was in England, Jack in Switzerland,

Charley in Spain.  Blucher was gone, none could tell where.  But we were

at sea again, and we had the stars and the ocean to look at, and plenty

of room to meditate in.



In due time the shores of Italy were sighted, and as we stood gazing from

the decks, early in the bright summer morning, the stately city of Genoa

rose up out of the sea and flung back the sunlight from her hundred

palaces.



Here we rest for the present--or rather, here we have been trying to

rest, for some little time, but we run about too much to accomplish a

great deal in that line.



I would like to remain here.  I had rather not go any further.  There may

be prettier women in Europe, but I doubt it.  The population of Genoa is

120,000; two-thirds of these are women, I think, and at least two-thirds

of the women are beautiful.  They are as dressy and as tasteful and as

graceful as they could possibly be without being angels.  However, angels

are not very dressy, I believe.  At least the angels in pictures are not

--they wear nothing but wings.  But these Genoese women do look so

charming.  Most of the young demoiselles are robed in a cloud of white

from head to foot, though many trick themselves out more elaborately.

Nine-tenths of them wear nothing on their heads but a filmy sort of veil,

which falls down their backs like a white mist.  They are very fair, and

many of them have blue eyes, but black and dreamy dark brown ones are met

with oftenest.



The ladies and gentlemen of Genoa have a pleasant fashion of promenading

in a large park on the top of a hill in the center of the city, from six

till nine in the evening, and then eating ices in a neighboring garden an

hour or two longer.  We went to the park on Sunday evening.  Two thousand

persons were present, chiefly young ladies and gentlemen.  The gentlemen

were dressed in the very latest Paris fashions, and the robes of the

ladies glinted among the trees like so many snowflakes.  The multitude

moved round and round the park in a great procession.  The bands played,

and so did the fountains; the moon and the gas lamps lit up the scene,

and altogether it was a brilliant and an animated picture.  I scanned

every female face that passed, and it seemed to me that all were

handsome.  I never saw such a freshet of loveliness before.  I did not

see how a man of only ordinary decision of character could marry here,

because before he could get his mind made up he would fall in love with

somebody else.



Never smoke any Italian tobacco.  Never do it on any account.  It makes

me shudder to think what it must be made of.  You cannot throw an old

cigar "stub" down anywhere, but some vagabond will pounce upon it on the

instant.  I like to smoke a good deal, but it wounds my sensibilities to

see one of these stub-hunters watching me out of the corners of his

hungry eyes and calculating how long my cigar will be likely to last.

It reminded me too painfully of that San Francisco undertaker who used to

go to sick-beds with his watch in his hand and time the corpse.  One of

these stub-hunters followed us all over the park last night, and we never

had a smoke that was worth anything.  We were always moved to appease him

with the stub before the cigar was half gone, because he looked so

viciously anxious.  He regarded us as his own legitimate prey, by right

of discovery, I think, because he drove off several other professionals

who wanted to take stock in us.



Now, they surely must chew up those old stubs, and dry and sell them for

smoking-tobacco.  Therefore, give your custom to other than Italian

brands of the article.



"The Superb" and the "City of Palaces" are names which Genoa has held for

centuries.  She is full of palaces, certainly, and the palaces are

sumptuous inside, but they are very rusty without and make no pretensions

to architectural magnificence.  "Genoa the Superb" would be a felicitous

title if it referred to the women.



We have visited several of the palaces--immense thick-walled piles, with

great stone staircases, tesselated marble pavements on the floors,

(sometimes they make a mosaic work, of intricate designs, wrought in

pebbles or little fragments of marble laid in cement,) and grand salons

hung with pictures by Rubens, Guido, Titian, Paul Veronese, and so on,

and portraits of heads of the family, in plumed helmets and gallant coats

of mail, and patrician ladies in stunning costumes of centuries ago.

But, of course, the folks were all out in the country for the summer, and

might not have known enough to ask us to dinner if they had been at home,

and so all the grand empty salons, with their resounding pavements, their

grim pictures of dead ancestors, and tattered banners with the dust of

bygone centuries upon them, seemed to brood solemnly of death and the

grave, and our spirits ebbed away, and our cheerfulness passed from us.

We never went up to the eleventh story.  We always began to suspect

ghosts.  There was always an undertaker-looking servant along, too, who

handed us a program, pointed to the picture that began the list of the

salon he was in, and then stood stiff and stark and unsmiling in his

petrified livery till we were ready to move on to the next chamber,

whereupon he marched sadly ahead and took up another malignantly

respectful position as before.  I wasted so much time praying that the

roof would fall in on these dispiriting flunkies that I had but little

left to bestow upon palace and pictures.



And besides, as in Paris, we had a guide.  Perdition catch all the

guides.  This one said he was the most gifted linguist in Genoa, as far

as English was concerned, and that only two persons in the city beside

himself could talk the language at all.  He showed us the birthplace of

Christopher Columbus, and after we had reflected in silent awe before it

for fifteen minutes, he said it was not the birthplace of Columbus, but

of Columbus' grandmother!  When we demanded an explanation of his conduct

he only shrugged his shoulders and answered in barbarous Italian.  I

shall speak further of this guide in a future chapter.  All the

information we got out of him we shall be able to carry along with us, I

think.



I have not been to church so often in a long time as I have in the last

few weeks.  The people in these old lands seem to make churches their

specialty.  Especially does this seem to be the case with the citizens of

Genoa.  I think there is a church every three or four hundred yards all

over town.  The streets are sprinkled from end to end with shovel-hatted,

long-robed, well-fed priests, and the church bells by dozens are pealing

all the day long, nearly.  Every now and then one comes across a friar of

orders gray, with shaven head, long, coarse robe, rope girdle and beads,

and with feet cased in sandals or entirely bare.  These worthies suffer

in the flesh and do penance all their lives, I suppose, but they look

like consummate famine-breeders.  They are all fat and serene.



The old Cathedral of San Lorenzo is about as notable a building as we

have found in Genoa.  It is vast, and has colonnades of noble pillars,

and a great organ, and the customary pomp of gilded moldings, pictures,

frescoed ceilings, and so forth.  I cannot describe it, of course--it

would require a good many pages to do that.  But it is a curious place.

They said that half of it--from the front door halfway down to the altar

--was a Jewish synagogue before the Saviour was born, and that no

alteration had been made in it since that time.  We doubted the

statement, but did it reluctantly.  We would much rather have believed

it.  The place looked in too perfect repair to be so ancient.



The main point of interest about the cathedral is the little Chapel of

St. John the Baptist.  They only allow women to enter it on one day in

the year, on account of the animosity they still cherish against the sex

because of the murder of the Saint to gratify a caprice of Herodias.  In

this Chapel is a marble chest, in which, they told us, were the ashes of

St. John; and around it was wound a chain, which, they said, had confined

him when he was in prison.  We did not desire to disbelieve these

statements, and yet we could not feel certain that they were correct--

partly because we could have broken that chain, and so could St. John,

and partly because we had seen St. John's ashes before, in another

church.  We could not bring ourselves to think St. John had two sets of

ashes.



They also showed us a portrait of the Madonna which was painted by St.

Luke, and it did not look half as old and smoky as some of the pictures

by Rubens.  We could not help admiring the Apostle's modesty in never

once mentioning in his writings that he could paint.



But isn't this relic matter a little overdone?  We find a piece of the

true cross in every old church we go into, and some of the nails that

held it together.  I would not like to be positive, but I think we have

seen as much as a keg of these nails.  Then there is the crown of thorns;

they have part of one in Sainte Chapelle, in Paris, and part of one also

in Notre Dame.  And as for bones of St. Denis, I feel certain we have

seen enough of them to duplicate him if necessary.



I only meant to write about the churches, but I keep wandering from the

subject.  I could say that the Church of the Annunciation is a wilderness

of beautiful columns, of statues, gilded moldings, and pictures almost

countless, but that would give no one an entirely perfect idea of the

thing, and so where is the use?  One family built the whole edifice, and

have got money left.  There is where the mystery lies.  We had an idea at

first that only a mint could have survived the expense.



These people here live in the heaviest, highest, broadest, darkest,

solidest houses one can imagine.  Each one might "laugh a siege to

scorn."  A hundred feet front and a hundred high is about the style, and

you go up three flights of stairs before you begin to come upon signs of

occupancy.  Everything is stone, and stone of the heaviest--floors,

stairways, mantels, benches--everything.  The walls are four to five feet

thick.  The streets generally are four or five to eight feet wide and as

crooked as a corkscrew.  You go along one of these gloomy cracks, and

look up and behold the sky like a mere ribbon of light, far above your

head, where the tops of the tall houses on either side of the street bend

almost together.  You feel as if you were at the bottom of some

tremendous abyss, with all the world far above you.  You wind in and out

and here and there, in the most mysterious way, and have no more idea of

the points of the compass than if you were a blind man.  You can never

persuade yourself that these are actually streets, and the frowning,

dingy, monstrous houses dwellings, till you see one of these beautiful,

prettily dressed women emerge from them--see her emerge from a dark,

dreary-looking den that looks dungeon all over, from the ground away

halfway up to heaven.  And then you wonder that such a charming moth

could come from such a forbidding shell as that.  The streets are wisely

made narrow and the houses heavy and thick and stony, in order that the

people may be cool in this roasting climate.  And they are cool, and stay

so.  And while I think of it--the men wear hats and have very dark

complexions, but the women wear no headgear but a flimsy veil like a

gossamer's web, and yet are exceedingly fair as a general thing.

Singular, isn't it?



The huge palaces of Genoa are each supposed to be occupied by one family,

but they could accommodate a hundred, I should think.  They are relics of

the grandeur of Genoa's palmy days--the days when she was a great

commercial and maritime power several centuries ago.  These houses, solid

marble palaces though they be, are in many cases of a dull pinkish color,

outside, and from pavement to eaves are pictured with Genoese battle

scenes, with monstrous Jupiters and Cupids, and with familiar

illustrations from Grecian mythology.  Where the paint has yielded to age

and exposure and is peeling off in flakes and patches, the effect is not

happy.  A noseless Cupid or a Jupiter with an eye out or a Venus with a

fly-blister on her breast, are not attractive features in a picture.

Some of these painted walls reminded me somewhat of the tall van,

plastered with fanciful bills and posters, that follows the bandwagon of

a circus about a country village.  I have not read or heard that the

outsides of the houses of any other European city are frescoed in this

way.



I can not conceive of such a thing as Genoa in ruins.  Such massive

arches, such ponderous substructions as support these towering broad-

winged edifices, we have seldom seen before; and surely the great blocks

of stone of which these edifices are built can never decay; walls that

are as thick as an ordinary American doorway is high cannot crumble.



The republics of Genoa and Pisa were very powerful in the Middle Ages.

Their ships filled the Mediterranean, and they carried on an extensive

commerce with Constantinople and Syria.  Their warehouses were the great

distributing depots from whence the costly merchandise of the East was

sent abroad over Europe.  They were warlike little nations and defied, in

those days, governments that overshadow them now as mountains overshadow

molehills.  The Saracens captured and pillaged Genoa nine hundred years

ago, but during the following century Genoa and Pisa entered into an

offensive and defensive alliance and besieged the Saracen colonies in

Sardinia and the Balearic Isles with an obstinacy that maintained its

pristine vigor and held to its purpose for forty long years.  They were

victorious at last and divided their conquests equably among their great

patrician families.  Descendants of some of those proud families still

inhabit the palaces of Genoa, and trace in their own features a

resemblance to the grim knights whose portraits hang in their stately

halls, and to pictured beauties with pouting lips and merry eyes whose

originals have been dust and ashes for many a dead and forgotten century.



The hotel we live in belonged to one of those great orders of knights of

the Cross in the times of the Crusades, and its mailed sentinels once

kept watch and ward in its massive turrets and woke the echoes of these

halls and corridors with their iron heels.



But Genoa's greatness has degenerated into an unostentatious commerce in

velvets and silver filagree-work.  They say that each European town has

its specialty.  These filagree things are Genoa's specialty.  Her smiths

take silver ingots and work them up into all manner of graceful and

beautiful forms.  They make bunches of flowers, from flakes and wires of

silver, that counterfeit the delicate creations the frost weaves upon a

windowpane; and we were shown a miniature silver temple whose fluted

columns, whose Corinthian capitals and rich entablatures, whose spire,

statues, bells, and ornate lavishness of sculpture were wrought in

polished silver, and with such matchless art that every detail was a

fascinating study and the finished edifice a wonder of beauty.



We are ready to move again, though we are not really tired yet of the

narrow passages of this old marble cave.  Cave is a good word--when

speaking of Genoa under the stars.  When we have been prowling at

midnight through the gloomy crevices they call streets, where no

footfalls but ours were echoing, where only ourselves were abroad, and

lights appeared only at long intervals and at a distance, and

mysteriously disappeared again, and the houses at our elbows seemed to

stretch upward farther than ever toward the heavens, the memory of a cave

I used to know at home was always in my mind, with its lofty passages,

its silence and solitude, its shrouding gloom, its sepulchral echoes, its

flitting lights, and more than all, its sudden revelations of branching

crevices and corridors where we least expected them.



We are not tired of the endless processions of cheerful, chattering

gossipers that throng these courts and streets all day long, either; nor

of the coarse-robed monks; nor of the "Asti" wines, which that old doctor

(whom we call the Oracle,) with customary felicity in the matter of

getting everything wrong, misterms "nasty."  But we must go,

nevertheless.



Our last sight was the cemetery (a burial place intended to accommodate

60,000 bodies,) and we shall continue to remember it after we shall have

forgotten the palaces.  It is a vast marble collonaded corridor extending

around a great unoccupied square of ground; its broad floor is marble,

and on every slab is an inscription--for every slab covers a corpse.  On

either side, as one walks down the middle of the passage, are monuments,

tombs, and sculptured figures that are exquisitely wrought and are full

of grace and beauty.  They are new and snowy; every outline is perfect,

every feature guiltless of mutilation, flaw, or blemish; and therefore,

to us these far-reaching ranks of bewitching forms are a hundred fold

more lovely than the damaged and dingy statuary they have saved from the

wreck of ancient art and set up in the galleries of Paris for the worship

of the world.



Well provided with cigars and other necessaries of life, we are now ready

to take the cars for Milan.









CHAPTER XVIII.



All day long we sped through a mountainous country whose peaks were

bright with sunshine, whose hillsides were dotted with pretty villas

sitting in the midst of gardens and shrubbery, and whose deep ravines

were cool and shady and looked ever so inviting from where we and the

birds were winging our flight through the sultry upper air.



We had plenty of chilly tunnels wherein to check our perspiration,

though.  We timed one of them.  We were twenty minutes passing through

it, going at the rate of thirty to thirty-five miles an hour.



Beyond Alessandria we passed the battle-field of Marengo.



Toward dusk we drew near Milan and caught glimpses of the city and the

blue mountain peaks beyond.  But we were not caring for these things--

they did not interest us in the least.  We were in a fever of impatience;

we were dying to see the renowned cathedral!  We watched--in this

direction and that--all around--everywhere.  We needed no one to point it

out--we did not wish any one to point it out--we would recognize it even

in the desert of the great Sahara.



At last, a forest of graceful needles, shimmering in the amber sunlight,

rose slowly above the pygmy housetops, as one sometimes sees, in the far

horizon, a gilded and pinnacled mass of cloud lift itself above the waste

of waves, at sea,--the Cathedral!  We knew it in a moment.



Half of that night, and all of the next day, this architectural autocrat

was our sole object of interest.



What a wonder it is!  So grand, so solemn, so vast!  And yet so delicate,

so airy, so graceful!  A very world of solid weight, and yet it seems in

the soft moonlight only a fairy delusion of frost-work that might vanish

with a breath!  How sharply its pinnacled angles and its wilderness of

spires were cut against the sky, and how richly their shadows fell upon

its snowy roof!  It was a vision!--a miracle!--an anthem sung in stone, a

poem wrought in marble!



Howsoever you look at the great cathedral, it is noble, it is beautiful!

Wherever you stand in Milan or within seven miles of Milan, it is visible

and when it is visible, no other object can chain your whole attention.

Leave your eyes unfettered by your will but a single instant and they

will surely turn to seek it.  It is the first thing you look for when you

rise in the morning, and the last your lingering gaze rests upon at

night.  Surely it must be the princeliest creation that ever brain of man

conceived.



At nine o'clock in the morning we went and stood before this marble

colossus.  The central one of its five great doors is bordered with a

bas-relief of birds and fruits and beasts and insects, which have been so

ingeniously carved out of the marble that they seem like living

creatures--and the figures are so numerous and the design so complex that

one might study it a week without exhausting its interest.  On the great

steeple--surmounting the myriad of spires--inside of the spires--over the

doors, the windows--in nooks and corners--every where that a niche or a

perch can be found about the enormous building, from summit to base,

there is a marble statue, and every statue is a study in itself!

Raphael, Angelo, Canova--giants like these gave birth to the designs, and

their own pupils carved them.  Every face is eloquent with expression,

and every attitude is full of grace.  Away above, on the lofty roof, rank

on rank of carved and fretted spires spring high in the air, and through

their rich tracery one sees the sky beyond.  In their midst the central

steeple towers proudly up like the mainmast of some great Indiaman among

a fleet of coasters.



We wished to go aloft.  The sacristan showed us a marble stairway (of

course it was marble, and of the purest and whitest--there is no other

stone, no brick, no wood, among its building materials) and told us to go

up one hundred and eighty-two steps and stop till he came.  It was not

necessary to say stop--we should have done that any how.  We were tired

by the time we got there.  This was the roof.  Here, springing from its

broad marble flagstones, were the long files of spires, looking very tall

close at hand, but diminishing in the distance like the pipes of an

organ.  We could see now that the statue on the top of each was the size

of a large man, though they all looked like dolls from the street.  We

could see, also, that from the inside of each and every one of these

hollow spires, from sixteen to thirty-one beautiful marble statues looked

out upon the world below.



From the eaves to the comb of the roof stretched in endless succession

great curved marble beams, like the fore-and-aft braces of a steamboat,

and along each beam from end to end stood up a row of richly carved

flowers and fruits--each separate and distinct in kind, and over 15,000

species represented.  At a little distance these rows seem to close

together like the ties of a railroad track, and then the mingling

together of the buds and blossoms of this marble garden forms a picture

that is very charming to the eye.



We descended and entered.  Within the church, long rows of fluted

columns, like huge monuments, divided the building into broad aisles, and

on the figured pavement fell many a soft blush from the painted windows

above.  I knew the church was very large, but I could not fully

appreciate its great size until I noticed that the men standing far down

by the altar looked like boys, and seemed to glide, rather than walk.  We

loitered about gazing aloft at the monster windows all aglow with

brilliantly colored scenes in the lives of the Saviour and his followers.

Some of these pictures are mosaics, and so artistically are their

thousand particles of tinted glass or stone put together that the work

has all the smoothness and finish of a painting.  We counted sixty panes

of glass in one window, and each pane was adorned with one of these

master achievements of genius and patience.



The guide showed us a coffee-colored piece of sculpture which he said was

considered to have come from the hand of Phidias, since it was not

possible that any other artist, of any epoch, could have copied nature

with such faultless accuracy.  The figure was that of a man without a

skin; with every vein, artery, muscle, every fiber and tendon and tissue

of the human frame represented in minute detail.  It looked natural,

because somehow it looked as if it were in pain.  A skinned man would be

likely to look that way unless his attention were occupied with some

other matter.  It was a hideous thing, and yet there was a fascination

about it some where.  I am very sorry I saw it, because I shall always

see it now.  I shall dream of it sometimes.  I shall dream that it is

resting its corded arms on the bed's head and looking down on me with its

dead eyes; I shall dream that it is stretched between the sheets with me

and touching me with its exposed muscles and its stringy cold legs.



It is hard to forget repulsive things.  I remember yet how I ran off from

school once, when I was a boy, and then, pretty late at night, concluded

to climb into the window of my father's office and sleep on a lounge,

because I had a delicacy about going home and getting thrashed.  As I lay

on the lounge and my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I fancied I

could see a long, dusky, shapeless thing stretched upon the floor.  A

cold shiver went through me.  I turned my face to the wall.  That did not

answer.  I was afraid that that thing would creep over and seize me in

the dark.  I turned back and stared at it for minutes and minutes--they

seemed hours.  It appeared to me that the lagging moonlight never, never

would get to it.  I turned to the wall and counted twenty, to pass the

feverish time away.  I looked--the pale square was nearer.  I turned

again and counted fifty--it was almost touching it.  With desperate will

I turned again and counted one hundred, and faced about, all in a

tremble.  A white human hand lay in the moonlight!  Such an awful sinking

at the heart--such a sudden gasp for breath!  I felt--I cannot tell what

I felt.  When I recovered strength enough, I faced the wall again.  But

no boy could have remained so with that mysterious hand behind him.  I

counted again and looked--the most of a naked arm was exposed.  I put my

hands over my eyes and counted till I could stand it no longer, and then

--the pallid face of a man was there, with the corners of the mouth drawn

down, and the eyes fixed and glassy in death!  I raised to a sitting

posture and glowered on that corpse till the light crept down the bare

breastline by line--inch by inch--past the nipple--and then it disclosed

a ghastly stab!



I went away from there.  I do not say that I went away in any sort of a

hurry, but I simply went--that is sufficient.  I went out at the window,

and I carried the sash along with me.  I did not need the sash, but it

was handier to take it than it was to leave it, and so I took it.--I was

not scared, but I was considerably agitated.



When I reached home, they whipped me, but I enjoyed it.  It seemed

perfectly delightful.  That man had been stabbed near the office that

afternoon, and they carried him in there to doctor him, but he only lived

an hour.  I have slept in the same room with him often since then--in my

dreams.



Now we will descend into the crypt, under the grand altar of Milan

Cathedral, and receive an impressive sermon from lips that have been

silent and hands that have been gestureless for three hundred years.



The priest stopped in a small dungeon and held up his candle.  This was

the last resting-place of a good man, a warm-hearted, unselfish man; a

man whose whole life was given to succoring the poor, encouraging the

faint-hearted, visiting the sick; in relieving distress, whenever and

wherever he found it.  His heart, his hand, and his purse were always

open.  With his story in one's mind he can almost see his benignant

countenance moving calmly among the haggard faces of Milan in the days

when the plague swept the city, brave where all others were cowards, full

of compassion where pity had been crushed out of all other breasts by the

instinct of self-preservation gone mad with terror, cheering all, praying

with all, helping all, with hand and brain and purse, at a time when

parents forsook their children, the friend deserted the friend, and the

brother turned away from the sister while her pleadings were still

wailing in his ears.



This was good St. Charles Borromeo, Bishop of Milan.  The people idolized

him; princes lavished uncounted treasures upon him.  We stood in his

tomb.  Near by was the sarcophagus, lighted by the dripping candles.  The

walls were faced with bas-reliefs representing scenes in his life done in

massive silver.  The priest put on a short white lace garment over his

black robe, crossed himself, bowed reverently, and began to turn a

windlass slowly.  The sarcophagus separated in two parts, lengthwise, and

the lower part sank down and disclosed a coffin of rock crystal as clear

as the atmosphere.  Within lay the body, robed in costly habiliments

covered with gold embroidery and starred with scintillating gems.  The

decaying head was black with age, the dry skin was drawn tight to the

bones, the eyes were gone, there was a hole in the temple and another in

the cheek, and the skinny lips were parted as in a ghastly smile!  Over

this dreadful face, its dust and decay and its mocking grin, hung a crown

sown thick with flashing brilliants; and upon the breast lay crosses and

croziers of solid gold that were splendid with emeralds and diamonds.



How poor, and cheap, and trivial these gew-gaws seemed in presence of the

solemnity, the grandeur, the awful majesty of Death!  Think of Milton,

Shakespeare, Washington, standing before a reverent world tricked out in

the glass beads, the brass ear-rings and tin trumpery of the savages of

the plains!



Dead Bartolomeo preached his pregnant sermon, and its burden was: You

that worship the vanities of earth--you that long for worldly honor,

worldly wealth, worldly fame--behold their worth!



To us it seemed that so good a man, so kind a heart, so simple a nature,

deserved rest and peace in a grave sacred from the intrusion of prying

eyes, and believed that he himself would have preferred to have it so,

but peradventure our wisdom was at fault in this regard.



As we came out upon the floor of the church again, another priest

volunteered to show us the treasures of the church.



What, more?  The furniture of the narrow chamber of death we had just

visited weighed six millions of francs in ounces and carats alone,

without a penny thrown into the account for the costly workmanship

bestowed upon them!  But we followed into a large room filled with tall

wooden presses like wardrobes.  He threw them open, and behold, the

cargoes of "crude bullion" of the assay offices of Nevada faded out of my

memory.  There were Virgins and bishops there, above their natural size,

made of solid silver, each worth, by weight, from eight hundred thousand

to two millions of francs, and bearing gemmed books in their hands worth

eighty thousand; there were bas-reliefs that weighed six hundred pounds,

carved in solid silver; croziers and crosses, and candlesticks six and

eight feet high, all of virgin gold, and brilliant with precious stones;

and beside these were all manner of cups and vases, and such things, rich

in proportion.  It was an Aladdin's palace.  The treasures here, by

simple weight, without counting workmanship, were valued at fifty

millions of francs!  If I could get the custody of them for a while, I

fear me the market price of silver bishops would advance shortly, on

account of their exceeding scarcity in the Cathedral of Milan.



The priests showed us two of St. Paul's fingers, and one of St. Peter's;

a bone of Judas Iscariot, (it was black,) and also bones of all the other

disciples; a handkerchief in which the Saviour had left the impression of

his face.  Among the most precious of the relics were a stone from the

Holy Sepulchre, part of the crown of thorns, (they have a whole one at

Notre Dame,) a fragment of the purple robe worn by the Saviour, a nail

from the Cross, and a picture of the Virgin and Child painted by the

veritable hand of St. Luke.  This is the second of St. Luke's Virgins we

have seen.  Once a year all these holy relics are carried in procession

through the streets of Milan.



I like to revel in the dryest details of the great cathedral.  The

building is five hundred feet long by one hundred and eighty wide, and

the principal steeple is in the neighborhood of four hundred feet high.

It has 7,148 marble statues, and will have upwards of three thousand more

when it is finished.  In addition it has one thousand five hundred bas-

reliefs.  It has one hundred and thirty-six spires--twenty-one more are

to be added.  Each spire is surmounted by a statue six and a half feet

high.  Every thing about the church is marble, and all from the same

quarry; it was bequeathed to the Archbishopric for this purpose centuries

ago.  So nothing but the mere workmanship costs; still that is expensive

--the bill foots up six hundred and eighty-four millions of francs thus

far (considerably over a hundred millions of dollars,) and it is

estimated that it will take a hundred and twenty years yet to finish the

cathedral.  It looks complete, but is far from being so.  We saw a new

statue put in its niche yesterday, alongside of one which had been

standing these four hundred years, they said.  There are four staircases

leading up to the main steeple, each of which cost a hundred thousand

dollars, with the four hundred and eight statues which adorn them.  Marco

Compioni was the architect who designed the wonderful structure more than

five hundred years ago, and it took him forty-six years to work out the

plan and get it ready to hand over to the builders.  He is dead now.  The

building was begun a little less than five hundred years ago, and the

third generation hence will not see it completed.



The building looks best by moonlight, because the older portions of it,

being stained with age, contrast unpleasantly with the newer and whiter

portions.  It seems somewhat too broad for its height, but may be

familiarity with it might dissipate this impression.



They say that the Cathedral of Milan is second only to St. Peter's at

Rome.  I cannot understand how it can be second to anything made by human

hands.



We bid it good-bye, now--possibly for all time.  How surely, in some

future day, when the memory of it shall have lost its vividness, shall we

half believe we have seen it in a wonderful dream, but never with waking

eyes!









CHAPTER XIX.



"Do you wis zo haut can be?"



That was what the guide asked when we were looking up at the bronze

horses on the Arch of Peace.  It meant, do you wish to go up there?

I give it as a specimen of guide-English.  These are the people that make

life a burthen to the tourist.  Their tongues are never still.  They talk

forever and forever, and that is the kind of billingsgate they use.

Inspiration itself could hardly comprehend them.  If they would only show

you a masterpiece of art, or a venerable tomb, or a prison-house, or a

battle-field, hallowed by touching memories or historical reminiscences,

or grand traditions, and then step aside and hold still for ten minutes

and let you think, it would not be so bad.  But they interrupt every

dream, every pleasant train of thought, with their tiresome cackling.

Sometimes when I have been standing before some cherished old idol of

mine that I remembered years and years ago in pictures in the geography

at school, I have thought I would give a whole world if the human parrot

at my side would suddenly perish where he stood and leave me to gaze, and

ponder, and worship.



No, we did not "wis zo haut can be."  We wished to go to La Scala, the

largest theater in the world, I think they call it.  We did so.  It was a

large place.  Seven separate and distinct masses of humanity--six great

circles and a monster parquette.



We wished to go to the Ambrosian Library, and we did that also.  We saw a

manuscript of Virgil, with annotations in the handwriting of Petrarch,

the gentleman who loved another man's Laura, and lavished upon her all

through life a love which was a clear waste of the raw material.  It was

sound sentiment, but bad judgment.  It brought both parties fame, and

created a fountain of commiseration for them in sentimental breasts that

is running yet.  But who says a word in behalf of poor Mr. Laura?  (I do

not know his other name.)  Who glorifies him?  Who bedews him with tears?

Who writes poetry about him?  Nobody.  How do you suppose he liked the

state of things that has given the world so much pleasure?  How did he

enjoy having another man following his wife every where and making her

name a familiar word in every garlic-exterminating mouth in Italy with

his sonnets to her pre-empted eyebrows?  They got fame and sympathy--he

got neither.  This is a peculiarly felicitous instance of what is called

poetical justice.  It is all very fine; but it does not chime with my

notions of right.  It is too one-sided--too ungenerous.



Let the world go on fretting about Laura and Petrarch if it will; but as

for me, my tears and my lamentations shall be lavished upon the unsung

defendant.



We saw also an autograph letter of Lucrezia Borgia, a lady for whom I

have always entertained the highest respect, on account of her rare

histrionic capabilities, her opulence in solid gold goblets made of

gilded wood, her high distinction as an operatic screamer, and the

facility with which she could order a sextuple funeral and get the

corpses ready for it.  We saw one single coarse yellow hair from

Lucrezia's head, likewise.  It awoke emotions, but we still live.  In

this same library we saw some drawings by Michael Angelo (these Italians

call him Mickel Angelo,) and Leonardo da Vinci.  (They spell it Vinci and

pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.)

We reserve our opinion of these sketches.



In another building they showed us a fresco representing some lions and

other beasts drawing chariots; and they seemed to project so far from the

wall that we took them to be sculptures.  The artist had shrewdly

heightened the delusion by painting dust on the creatures' backs, as if

it had fallen there naturally and properly.  Smart fellow--if it be smart

to deceive strangers.



Elsewhere we saw a huge Roman amphitheatre, with its stone seats still in

good preservation.  Modernized, it is now the scene of more peaceful

recreations than the exhibition of a party of wild beasts with Christians

for dinner.  Part of the time, the Milanese use it for a race track, and

at other seasons they flood it with water and have spirited yachting

regattas there.  The guide told us these things, and he would hardly try

so hazardous an experiment as the telling of a falsehood, when it is all

he can do to speak the truth in English without getting the lock-jaw.



In another place we were shown a sort of summer arbor, with a fence

before it.  We said that was nothing.  We looked again, and saw, through

the arbor, an endless stretch of garden, and shrubbery, and grassy lawn.

We were perfectly willing to go in there and rest, but it could not be

done.  It was only another delusion--a painting by some ingenious artist

with little charity in his heart for tired folk.  The deception was

perfect.  No one could have imagined the park was not real.  We even

thought we smelled the flowers at first.



We got a carriage at twilight and drove in the shaded avenues with the

other nobility, and after dinner we took wine and ices in a fine garden

with the great public.  The music was excellent, the flowers and

shrubbery were pleasant to the eye, the scene was vivacious, everybody

was genteel and well-behaved, and the ladies were slightly moustached,

and handsomely dressed, but very homely.



We adjourned to a cafe and played billiards an hour, and I made six or

seven points by the doctor pocketing his ball, and he made as many by my

pocketing my ball.  We came near making a carom sometimes, but not the

one we were trying to make.  The table was of the usual European style--

cushions dead and twice as high as the balls; the cues in bad repair.

The natives play only a sort of pool on them.  We have never seen any

body playing the French three-ball game yet, and I doubt if there is any

such game known in France, or that there lives any man mad enough to try

to play it on one of these European tables.  We had to stop playing

finally because Dan got to sleeping fifteen minutes between the counts

and paying no attention to his marking.



Afterward we walked up and down one of the most popular streets for some

time, enjoying other people's comfort and wishing we could export some of

it to our restless, driving, vitality-consuming marts at home.  Just in

this one matter lies the main charm of life in Europe--comfort.  In

America, we hurry--which is well; but when the day's work is done, we go

on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry

our business cares to bed with us, and toss and worry over them when we

ought to be restoring our racked bodies and brains with sleep.  We burn

up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into

a lean and mean old age at a time of life which they call a man's prime

in Europe.  When an acre of ground has produced long and well, we let it

lie fallow and rest for a season; we take no man clear across the

continent in the same coach he started in--the coach is stabled somewhere

on the plains and its heated machinery allowed to cool for a few days;

when a razor has seen long service and refuses to hold an edge, the

barber lays it away for a few weeks, and the edge comes back of its own

accord.  We bestow thoughtful care upon inanimate objects, but none upon

ourselves.  What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be,

if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our

edges!



I do envy these Europeans the comfort they take.  When the work of the

day is done, they forget it.  Some of them go, with wife and children, to

a beer hall and sit quietly and genteelly drinking a mug or two of ale

and listening to music; others walk the streets, others drive in the

avenues; others assemble in the great ornamental squares in the early

evening to enjoy the sight and the fragrance of flowers and to hear the

military bands play--no European city being without its fine military

music at eventide; and yet others of the populace sit in the open air in

front of the refreshment houses and eat ices and drink mild beverages

that could not harm a child.  They go to bed moderately early, and sleep

well.  They are always quiet, always orderly, always cheerful,

comfortable, and appreciative of life and its manifold blessings.  One

never sees a drunken man among them.  The change that has come over our

little party is surprising.  Day by day we lose some of our restlessness

and absorb some of the spirit of quietude and ease that is in the

tranquil atmosphere about us and in the demeanor of the people.  We grow

wise apace.  We begin to comprehend what life is for.



We have had a bath in Milan, in a public bath-house.  They were going to

put all three of us in one bath-tub, but we objected.  Each of us had an

Italian farm on his back.  We could have felt affluent if we had been

officially surveyed and fenced in.  We chose to have three bathtubs, and

large ones--tubs suited to the dignity of aristocrats who had real

estate, and brought it with them.  After we were stripped and had taken

the first chilly dash, we discovered that haunting atrocity that has

embittered our lives in so many cities and villages of Italy and France--

there was no soap.  I called.  A woman answered, and I barely had time to

throw myself against the door--she would have been in, in another second.

I said:



"Beware, woman!  Go away from here--go away, now, or it will be the worse

for you.  I am an unprotected male, but I will preserve my honor at the

peril of my life!"



These words must have frightened her, for she skurried away very fast.



Dan's voice rose on the air:



"Oh, bring some soap, why don't you!"



The reply was Italian.  Dan resumed:



"Soap, you know--soap.  That is what I want--soap.  S-o-a-p, soap; s-o-p-

e, soap; s-o-u-p, soap.  Hurry up!  I don't know how you Irish spell it,

but I want it.  Spell it to suit yourself, but fetch it.  I'm freezing."



I heard the doctor say impressively:



"Dan, how often have we told you that these foreigners cannot understand

English?  Why will you not depend upon us?  Why will you not tell us what

you want, and let us ask for it in the language of the country?  It would

save us a great deal of the humiliation your reprehensible ignorance

causes us.  I will address this person in his mother tongue: 'Here,

cospetto!  corpo di Bacco!  Sacramento!  Solferino!--Soap, you son of a

gun!'  Dan, if you would let us talk for you, you would never expose your

ignorant vulgarity."



Even this fluent discharge of Italian did not bring the soap at once, but

there was a good reason for it.  There was not such an article about the

establishment.  It is my belief that there never had been.  They had to

send far up town, and to several different places before they finally got

it, so they said.  We had to wait twenty or thirty minutes.  The same

thing had occurred the evening before, at the hotel.  I think I have

divined the reason for this state of things at last.  The English know

how to travel comfortably, and they carry soap with them; other

foreigners do not use the article.



At every hotel we stop at we always have to send out for soap, at the

last moment, when we are grooming ourselves for dinner, and they put it

in the bill along with the candles and other nonsense.  In Marseilles

they make half the fancy toilet soap we consume in America, but the

Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they

have obtained from books of travel, just as they have acquired an

uncertain notion of clean shirts, and the peculiarities of the gorilla,

and other curious matters.  This reminds me of poor Blucher's note to the

landlord in Paris:



     PARIS, le 7 Juillet.  Monsieur le Landlord--Sir: Pourquoi don't you

     mettez some savon in your bed-chambers?  Est-ce que vous pensez I

     will steal it?  La nuit passee you charged me pour deux chandelles

     when I only had one; hier vous avez charged me avec glace when I had

     none at all; tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other

     on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice.

     Savon is a necessary de la vie to any body but a Frenchman, et je

     l'aurai hors de cet hotel or make trouble.  You hear me.  Allons.

     BLUCHER.



I remonstrated against the sending of this note, because it was so mixed

up that the landlord would never be able to make head or tail of it; but

Blucher said he guessed the old man could read the French of it and

average the rest.



Blucher's French is bad enough, but it is not much worse than the English

one finds in advertisements all over Italy every day.  For instance,

observe the printed card of the hotel we shall probably stop at on the

shores of Lake Como:



     "NOTISH."



     "This hotel which the best it is in Italy and most superb, is

     handsome locate on the best situation of the lake, with the most

     splendid view near the Villas Melzy, to the King of Belgian, and

     Serbelloni.  This hotel have recently enlarge, do offer all

     commodities on moderate price, at the strangers gentlemen who whish

     spend the seasons on the Lake Come."



How is that, for a specimen?  In the hotel is a handsome little chapel

where an English clergyman is employed to preach to such of the guests of

the house as hail from England and America, and this fact is also set

forth in barbarous English in the same advertisement.  Wouldn't you have

supposed that the adventurous linguist who framed the card would have

known enough to submit it to that clergyman before he sent it to the

printer?



Here in Milan, in an ancient tumble-down ruin of a church, is the

mournful wreck of the most celebrated painting in the world--"The Last

Supper," by Leonardo da Vinci.  We are not infallible judges of pictures,

but of course we went there to see this wonderful painting, once so

beautiful, always so worshipped by masters in art, and forever to be

famous in song and story.  And the first thing that occurred was the

infliction on us of a placard fairly reeking with wretched English.  Take

a morsel of it: "Bartholomew (that is the first figure on the left hand

side at the spectator,) uncertain and doubtful about what he thinks to

have heard, and upon which he wants to be assured by himself at Christ

and by no others."



Good, isn't it?  And then Peter is described as "argumenting in a

threatening and angrily condition at Judas Iscariot."



This paragraph recalls the picture.  "The Last Supper" is painted on the

dilapidated wall of what was a little chapel attached to the main church

in ancient times, I suppose.  It is battered and scarred in every

direction, and stained and discolored by time, and Napoleon's horses

kicked the legs off most the disciples when they (the horses, not the

disciples,) were stabled there more than half a century ago.



I recognized the old picture in a moment--the Saviour with bowed head

seated at the centre of a long, rough table with scattering fruits and

dishes upon it, and six disciples on either side in their long robes,

talking to each other--the picture from which all engravings and all

copies have been made for three centuries.  Perhaps no living man has

ever known an attempt to paint the Lord's Supper differently.  The world

seems to have become settled in the belief, long ago, that it is not

possible for human genius to outdo this creation of da Vinci's.  I

suppose painters will go on copying it as long as any of the original is

left visible to the eye.  There were a dozen easels in the room, and as

many artists transferring the great picture to their canvases.  Fifty

proofs of steel engravings and lithographs were scattered around, too.

And as usual, I could not help noticing how superior the copies were to

the original, that is, to my inexperienced eye.  Wherever you find a

Raphael, a Rubens, a Michelangelo, a Carracci, or a da Vinci (and we see

them every day,) you find artists copying them, and the copies are always

the handsomest.  Maybe the originals were handsome when they were new,

but they are not now.



This picture is about thirty feet long, and ten or twelve high, I should

think, and the figures are at least life size.  It is one of the largest

paintings in Europe.



The colors are dimmed with age; the countenances are scaled and marred,

and nearly all expression is gone from them; the hair is a dead blur upon

the wall, and there is no life in the eyes.  Only the attitudes are

certain.



People come here from all parts of the world, and glorify this

masterpiece.  They stand entranced before it with bated breath and parted

lips, and when they speak, it is only in the catchy ejaculations of

rapture:



"Oh, wonderful!"



"Such expression!"



"Such grace of attitude!"



"Such dignity!"



"Such faultless drawing!"



"Such matchless coloring!"



"Such feeling!"



"What delicacy of touch!"



"What sublimity of conception!"



"A vision!  A vision!"



I only envy these people; I envy them their honest admiration, if it be

honest--their delight, if they feel delight.  I harbor no animosity

toward any of them.  But at the same time the thought will intrude itself

upon me, How can they see what is not visible?  What would you think of a

man who looked at some decayed, blind, toothless, pock-marked Cleopatra,

and said: "What matchless beauty!  What soul!  What expression!"  What

would you think of a man who gazed upon a dingy, foggy sunset, and said:

"What sublimity!  What feeling!  What richness of coloring!"  What would

you think of a man who stared in ecstasy upon a desert of stumps and

said: "Oh, my soul, my beating heart, what a noble forest is here!"



You would think that those men had an astonishing talent for seeing

things that had already passed away.  It was what I thought when I stood

before "The Last Supper" and heard men apostrophizing wonders, and

beauties and perfections which had faded out of the picture and gone, a

hundred years before they were born.  We can imagine the beauty that was

once in an aged face; we can imagine the forest if we see the stumps; but

we can not absolutely see these things when they are not there.  I am

willing to believe that the eye of the practiced artist can rest upon the

Last Supper and renew a lustre where only a hint of it is left, supply a

tint that has faded away, restore an expression that is gone; patch, and

color, and add, to the dull canvas until at last its figures shall stand

before him aglow with the life, the feeling, the freshness, yea, with all

the noble beauty that was theirs when first they came from the hand of

the master.  But I can not work this miracle.  Can those other uninspired

visitors do it, or do they only happily imagine they do?



After reading so much about it, I am satisfied that the Last Supper was a

very miracle of art once.  But it was three hundred years ago.



It vexes me to hear people talk so glibly of "feeling," "expression,"

"tone," and those other easily acquired and inexpensive technicalities of

art that make such a fine show in conversations concerning pictures.

There is not one man in seventy-five hundred that can tell what a

pictured face is intended to express.  There is not one man in five

hundred that can go into a court-room and be sure that he will not

mistake some harmless innocent of a juryman for the black-hearted

assassin on trial.  Yet such people talk of "character" and presume to

interpret "expression" in pictures.  There is an old story that Matthews,

the actor, was once lauding the ability of the human face to express the

passions and emotions hidden in the breast.  He said the countenance

could disclose what was passing in the heart plainer than the tongue

could.



"Now," he said, "observe my face--what does it express?"



"Despair!"



"Bah, it expresses peaceful resignation!  What does this express?"



"Rage!"



"Stuff!  It means terror!  This!"



"Imbecility!"



"Fool!  It is smothered ferocity!  Now this!"



"Joy!"



"Oh, perdition!  Any ass can see it means insanity!"



Expression!  People coolly pretend to read it who would think themselves

presumptuous if they pretended to interpret the hieroglyphics on the

obelisks of Luxor--yet they are fully as competent to do the one thing as

the other.  I have heard two very intelligent critics speak of Murillo's

Immaculate Conception (now in the museum at Seville,) within the past few

days.  One said:



"Oh, the Virgin's face is full of the ecstasy of a joy that is complete--

that leaves nothing more to be desired on earth!"



The other said:



"Ah, that wonderful face is so humble, so pleading--it says as plainly as

words could say it: 'I fear; I tremble; I am unworthy.  But Thy will be

done; sustain Thou Thy servant!'"



The reader can see the picture in any drawing-room; it can be easily

recognized: the Virgin (the only young and really beautiful Virgin that

was ever painted by one of the old masters, some of us think,) stands in

the crescent of the new moon, with a multitude of cherubs hovering about

her, and more coming; her hands are crossed upon her breast, and upon her

uplifted countenance falls a glory out of the heavens.  The reader may

amuse himself, if he chooses, in trying to determine which of these

gentlemen read the Virgin's "expression" aright, or if either of them did

it.



Any one who is acquainted with the old masters will comprehend how much

"The Last Supper" is damaged when I say that the spectator can not really

tell, now, whether the disciples are Hebrews or Italians.  These ancient

painters never succeeded in denationalizing themselves.  The Italian

artists painted Italian Virgins, the Dutch painted Dutch Virgins, the

Virgins of the French painters were Frenchwomen--none of them ever put

into the face of the Madonna that indescribable something which proclaims

the Jewess, whether you find her in New York, in Constantinople, in

Paris, Jerusalem, or in the empire of Morocco.  I saw in the Sandwich

Islands, once, a picture copied by a talented German artist from an

engraving in one of the American illustrated papers.  It was an allegory,

representing Mr. Davis in the act of signing a secession act or some such

document.  Over him hovered the ghost of Washington in warning attitude,

and in the background a troop of shadowy soldiers in Continental uniform

were limping with shoeless, bandaged feet through a driving snow-storm.

Valley Forge was suggested, of course.  The copy seemed accurate, and yet

there was a discrepancy somewhere.  After a long examination I discovered

what it was--the shadowy soldiers were all Germans!  Jeff Davis was a

German!  even the hovering ghost was a German ghost!  The artist had

unconsciously worked his nationality into the picture.  To tell the

truth, I am getting a little perplexed about John the Baptist and his

portraits.  In France I finally grew reconciled to him as a Frenchman;

here he is unquestionably an Italian.  What next?  Can it be possible

that the painters make John the Baptist a Spaniard in Madrid and an

Irishman in Dublin?



We took an open barouche and drove two miles out of Milan to "see ze

echo," as the guide expressed it.  The road was smooth, it was bordered

by trees, fields, and grassy meadows, and the soft air was filled with

the odor of flowers.  Troops of picturesque peasant girls, coming from

work, hooted at us, shouted at us, made all manner of game of us, and

entirely delighted me.  My long-cherished judgment was confirmed.  I

always did think those frowsy, romantic, unwashed peasant girls I had

read so much about in poetry were a glaring fraud.



We enjoyed our jaunt.  It was an exhilarating relief from tiresome sight-

seeing.



We distressed ourselves very little about the astonishing echo the guide

talked so much about.  We were growing accustomed to encomiums on wonders

that too often proved no wonders at all.  And so we were most happily

disappointed to find in the sequel that the guide had even failed to rise

to the magnitude of his subject.



We arrived at a tumble-down old rookery called the Palazzo Simonetti--a

massive hewn-stone affair occupied by a family of ragged Italians.

A good-looking young girl conducted us to a window on the second floor

which looked out on a court walled on three sides by tall buildings.  She

put her head out at the window and shouted.  The echo answered more times

than we could count.  She took a speaking trumpet and through it she

shouted, sharp and quick, a single "Ha!"  The echo answered:



"Ha!--ha!----ha!--ha!--ha!-ha!  ha!  h-a-a-a-a-a!" and finally went off

into a rollicking convulsion of the jolliest laughter that could be

imagined.  It was so joyful--so long continued--so perfectly cordial and

hearty, that every body was forced to join in.  There was no resisting

it.



Then the girl took a gun and fired it.  We stood ready to count the

astonishing clatter of reverberations.  We could not say one, two, three,

fast enough, but we could dot our notebooks with our pencil points almost

rapidly enough to take down a sort of short-hand report of the result.

My page revealed the following account.  I could not keep up, but I did

as well as I could.



I set down fifty-two distinct repetitions, and then the echo got the

advantage of me.  The doctor set down sixty-four, and thenceforth the

echo moved too fast for him, also.  After the separate concussions could

no longer be noted, the reverberations dwindled to a wild, long-sustained

clatter of sounds such as a watchman's rattle produces.  It is likely

that this is the most remarkable echo in the world.



The doctor, in jest, offered to kiss the young girl, and was taken a

little aback when she said he might for a franc!  The commonest gallantry

compelled him to stand by his offer, and so he paid the franc and took

the kiss.  She was a philosopher.  She said a franc was a good thing to

have, and she did not care any thing for one paltry kiss, because she had

a million left.  Then our comrade, always a shrewd businessman, offered

to take the whole cargo at thirty days, but that little financial scheme

was a failure.









CHAPTER XX.



We left Milan by rail.  The Cathedral six or seven miles behind us; vast,

dreamy, bluish, snow-clad mountains twenty miles in front of us,--these

were the accented points in the scenery.  The more immediate scenery

consisted of fields and farm-houses outside the car and a monster-headed

dwarf and a moustached woman inside it.  These latter were not show-

people.  Alas, deformity and female beards are too common in Italy to

attract attention.



We passed through a range of wild, picturesque hills, steep, wooded,

cone-shaped, with rugged crags projecting here and there, and with

dwellings and ruinous castles perched away up toward the drifting clouds.

We lunched at the curious old town of Como, at the foot of the lake, and

then took the small steamer and had an afternoon's pleasure excursion to

this place,--Bellaggio.



When we walked ashore, a party of policemen (people whose cocked hats and

showy uniforms would shame the finest uniform in the military service of

the United States,) put us into a little stone cell and locked us in.  We

had the whole passenger list for company, but their room would have been

preferable, for there was no light, there were no windows, no

ventilation.  It was close and hot.  We were much crowded.  It was the

Black Hole of Calcutta on a small scale.  Presently a smoke rose about

our feet--a smoke that smelled of all the dead things of earth, of all

the putrefaction and corruption imaginable.



We were there five minutes, and when we got out it was hard to tell which

of us carried the vilest fragrance.



These miserable outcasts called that "fumigating" us, and the term was a

tame one indeed.  They fumigated us to guard themselves against the

cholera, though we hailed from no infected port.  We had left the cholera

far behind us all the time.  However, they must keep epidemics away

somehow or other, and fumigation is cheaper than soap.  They must either

wash themselves or fumigate other people.  Some of the lower classes had

rather die than wash, but the fumigation of strangers causes them no

pangs.  They need no fumigation themselves.  Their habits make it

unnecessary.  They carry their preventive with them; they sweat and

fumigate all the day long.  I trust I am a humble and a consistent

Christian.  I try to do what is right.  I know it is my duty to "pray for

them that despitefully use me;" and therefore, hard as it is, I shall

still try to pray for these fumigating, maccaroni-stuffing organ-

grinders.



Our hotel sits at the water's edge--at least its front garden does--and

we walk among the shrubbery and smoke at twilight; we look afar off at

Switzerland and the Alps, and feel an indolent willingness to look no

closer; we go down the steps and swim in the lake; we take a shapely

little boat and sail abroad among the reflections of the stars; lie on

the thwarts and listen to the distant laughter, the singing, the soft

melody of flutes and guitars that comes floating across the water from

pleasuring gondolas; we close the evening with exasperating billiards on

one of those same old execrable tables.  A midnight luncheon in our ample

bed-chamber; a final smoke in its contracted veranda facing the water,

the gardens, and the mountains; a summing up of the day's events.  Then

to bed, with drowsy brains harassed with a mad panorama that mixes up

pictures of France, of Italy, of the ship, of the ocean, of home, in

grotesque and bewildering disorder.  Then a melting away of familiar

faces, of cities, and of tossing waves, into a great calm of

forgetfulness and peace.



After which, the nightmare.



Breakfast in the morning, and then the lake.



I did not like it yesterday.  I thought Lake Tahoe was much finer.

I have to confess now, however, that my judgment erred somewhat, though

not extravagantly.  I always had an idea that Como was a vast basin of

water, like Tahoe, shut in by great mountains.  Well, the border of huge

mountains is here, but the lake itself is not a basin.  It is as crooked

as any brook, and only from one-quarter to two-thirds as wide as the

Mississippi.  There is not a yard of low ground on either side of it--

nothing but endless chains of mountains that spring abruptly from the

water's edge and tower to altitudes varying from a thousand to two

thousand feet.  Their craggy sides are clothed with vegetation, and white

specks of houses peep out from the luxuriant foliage everywhere; they are

even perched upon jutting and picturesque pinnacles a thousand feet above

your head.



Again, for miles along the shores, handsome country seats, surrounded by

gardens and groves, sit fairly in the water, sometimes in nooks carved by

Nature out of the vine-hung precipices, and with no ingress or egress

save by boats.  Some have great broad stone staircases leading down to

the water, with heavy stone balustrades ornamented with statuary and

fancifully adorned with creeping vines and bright-colored flowers--for

all the world like a drop curtain in a theatre, and lacking nothing but

long-waisted, high-heeled women and plumed gallants in silken tights

coming down to go serenading in the splendid gondola in waiting.



A great feature of Como's attractiveness is the multitude of pretty

houses and gardens that cluster upon its shores and on its mountain

sides.  They look so snug and so homelike, and at eventide when every

thing seems to slumber, and the music of the vesper bells comes stealing

over the water, one almost believes that nowhere else than on the lake of

Como can there be found such a paradise of tranquil repose.



From my window here in Bellaggio, I have a view of the other side of the

lake now, which is as beautiful as a picture.  A scarred and wrinkled

precipice rises to a height of eighteen hundred feet; on a tiny bench

half way up its vast wall, sits a little snowflake of a church, no bigger

than a martin-box, apparently; skirting the base of the cliff are a

hundred orange groves and gardens, flecked with glimpses of the white

dwellings that are buried in them; in front, three or four gondolas lie

idle upon the water--and in the burnished mirror of the lake, mountain,

chapel, houses, groves and boats are counterfeited so brightly and so

clearly that one scarce knows where the reality leaves off and the

reflection begins!



The surroundings of this picture are fine.  A mile away, a grove-plumed

promontory juts far into the lake and glasses its palace in the blue

depths; in midstream a boat is cutting the shining surface and leaving a

long track behind, like a ray of light; the mountains beyond are veiled

in a dreamy purple haze; far in the opposite direction a tumbled mass of

domes and verdant slopes and valleys bars the lake, and here indeed does

distance lend enchantment to the view--for on this broad canvas, sun and

clouds and the richest of atmospheres have blended a thousand tints

together, and over its surface the filmy lights and shadows drift, hour

after hour, and glorify it with a beauty that seems reflected out of

Heaven itself.  Beyond all question, this is the most voluptuous scene we

have yet looked upon.



Last night the scenery was striking and picturesque.  On the other side

crags and trees and snowy houses were reflected in the lake with a

wonderful distinctness, and streams of light from many a distant window

shot far abroad over the still waters.  On this side, near at hand, great

mansions, white with moonlight, glared out from the midst of masses of

foliage that lay black and shapeless in the shadows that fell from the

cliff above--and down in the margin of the lake every feature of the

weird vision was faithfully repeated.



Today we have idled through a wonder of a garden attached to a ducal

estate--but enough of description is enough, I judge.



I suspect that this was the same place the gardener's son deceived the

Lady of Lyons with, but I do not know.  You may have heard of the passage

somewhere:



          "A deep vale,

          Shut out by Alpine hills from the rude world,

          Near a clear lake margined by fruits of gold

          And whispering myrtles:

          Glassing softest skies, cloudless,

          Save with rare and roseate shadows;

          A palace, lifting to eternal heaven its marbled walls,

          From out a glossy bower of coolest foliage musical with birds."



That is all very well, except the "clear" part of the lake.  It certainly

is clearer than a great many lakes, but how dull its waters are compared

with the wonderful transparence of Lake Tahoe!  I speak of the north

shore of Tahoe, where one can count the scales on a trout at a depth of a

hundred and eighty feet.  I have tried to get this statement off at par

here, but with no success; so I have been obliged to negotiate it at

fifty percent discount.  At this rate I find some takers; perhaps the

reader will receive it on the same terms--ninety feet instead of one

hundred and eighty.  But let it be remembered that those are forced

terms--Sheriff's sale prices.  As far as I am privately concerned, I

abate not a jot of the original assertion that in those strangely

magnifying waters one may count the scales on a trout (a trout of the

large kind,) at a depth of a hundred and eighty feet--may see every

pebble on the bottom--might even count a paper of dray-pins.  People talk

of the transparent waters of the Mexican Bay of Acapulco, but in my own

experience I know they cannot compare with those I am speaking of.  I

have fished for trout, in Tahoe, and at a measured depth of eighty-four

feet I have seen them put their noses to the bait and I could see their

gills open and shut.  I could hardly have seen the trout themselves at

that distance in the open air.



As I go back in spirit and recall that noble sea, reposing among the

snow-peaks six thousand feet above the ocean, the conviction comes strong

upon me again that Como would only seem a bedizened little courtier in

that august presence.



Sorrow and misfortune overtake the legislature that still from year to

year permits Tahoe to retain its unmusical cognomen!  Tahoe!  It suggests

no crystal waters, no picturesque shores, no sublimity.  Tahoe for a sea

in the clouds: a sea that has character and asserts it in solemn calms at

times, at times in savage storms; a sea whose royal seclusion is guarded

by a cordon of sentinel peaks that lift their frosty fronts nine thousand

feet above the level world; a sea whose every aspect is impressive, whose

belongings are all beautiful, whose lonely majesty types the Deity!



Tahoe means grasshoppers.  It means grasshopper soup.  It is Indian, and

suggestive of Indians.  They say it is Pi-ute--possibly it is Digger.

I am satisfied it was named by the Diggers--those degraded savages who

roast their dead relatives, then mix the human grease and ashes of bones

with tar, and "gaum" it thick all over their heads and foreheads and

ears, and go caterwauling about the hills and call it mourning.  These

are the gentry that named the Lake.



People say that Tahoe means "Silver Lake"--"Limpid Water"--"Falling

Leaf."  Bosh.  It means grasshopper soup, the favorite dish of the Digger

tribe,--and of the Pi-utes as well.  It isn't worth while, in these

practical times, for people to talk about Indian poetry--there never was

any in them--except in the Fenimore Cooper Indians.  But they are an

extinct tribe that never existed.  I know the Noble Red Man.  I have

camped with the Indians; I have been on the warpath with them, taken part

in the chase with them--for grasshoppers; helped them steal cattle; I

have roamed with them, scalped them, had them for breakfast.  I would

gladly eat the whole race if I had a chance.



But I am growing unreliable.  I will return to my comparison of the

lakes.  Como is a little deeper than Tahoe, if people here tell the

truth.  They say it is eighteen hundred feet deep at this point, but it

does not look a dead enough blue for that.  Tahoe is one thousand five

hundred and twenty-five feet deep in the centre, by the state geologist's

measurement.  They say the great peak opposite this town is five thousand

feet high: but I feel sure that three thousand feet of that statement is

a good honest lie.  The lake is a mile wide, here, and maintains about

that width from this point to its northern extremity--which is distant

sixteen miles: from here to its southern extremity--say fifteen miles--it

is not over half a mile wide in any place, I should think.  Its snow-clad

mountains one hears so much about are only seen occasionally, and then in

the distance, the Alps.  Tahoe is from ten to eighteen miles wide, and

its mountains shut it in like a wall.  Their summits are never free from

snow the year round.  One thing about it is very strange: it never has

even a skim of ice upon its surface, although lakes in the same range of

mountains, lying in a lower and warmer temperature, freeze over in

winter.



It is cheerful to meet a shipmate in these out-of-the-way places and

compare notes with him.  We have found one of ours here--an old soldier

of the war, who is seeking bloodless adventures and rest from his

campaigns in these sunny lands.--[Colonel J.  HERON FOSTER, editor of a

Pittsburgh journal, and a most estimable gentleman.  As these sheets are

being prepared for the press I am pained to learn of his decease shortly

after his return home--M.T.]--









CHAPTER XXI.



We voyaged by steamer down the Lago di Lecco, through wild mountain

scenery, and by hamlets and villas, and disembarked at the town of Lecco.

They said it was two hours, by carriage to the ancient city of Bergamo,

and that we would arrive there in good season for the railway train.  We

got an open barouche and a wild, boisterous driver, and set out.  It was

delightful.  We had a fast team and a perfectly smooth road.  There were

towering cliffs on our left, and the pretty Lago di Lecco on our right,

and every now and then it rained on us.  Just before starting, the driver

picked up, in the street, a stump of a cigar an inch long, and put it in

his mouth.  When he had carried it thus about an hour, I thought it would

be only Christian charity to give him a light.  I handed him my cigar,

which I had just lit, and he put it in his mouth and returned his stump

to his pocket!  I never saw a more sociable man.  At least I never saw a

man who was more sociable on a short acquaintance.



We saw interior Italy, now.  The houses were of solid stone, and not

often in good repair.  The peasants and their children were idle, as a

general thing, and the donkeys and chickens made themselves at home in

drawing-room and bed-chamber and were not molested.  The drivers of each

and every one of the slow-moving market-carts we met were stretched in

the sun upon their merchandise, sound a sleep.  Every three or four

hundred yards, it seemed to me, we came upon the shrine of some saint or

other--a rude picture of him built into a huge cross or a stone pillar by

the road-side.--Some of the pictures of the Saviour were curiosities in

their way.  They represented him stretched upon the cross, his

countenance distorted with agony.  From the wounds of the crown of

thorns; from the pierced side; from the mutilated hands and feet; from

the scourged body--from every hand-breadth of his person streams of blood

were flowing!  Such a gory, ghastly spectacle would frighten the children

out of their senses, I should think.  There were some unique auxiliaries

to the painting which added to its spirited effect.  These were genuine

wooden and iron implements, and were prominently disposed round about the

figure: a bundle of nails; the hammer to drive them; the sponge; the reed

that supported it; the cup of vinegar; the ladder for the ascent of the

cross; the spear that pierced the Saviour's side.  The crown of thorns

was made of real thorns, and was nailed to the sacred head.  In some

Italian church-paintings, even by the old masters, the Saviour and the

Virgin wear silver or gilded crowns that are fastened to the pictured

head with nails.  The effect is as grotesque as it is incongruous.



Here and there, on the fronts of roadside inns, we found huge, coarse

frescoes of suffering martyrs like those in the shrines.  It could not

have diminished their sufferings any to be so uncouthly represented.

We were in the heart and home of priest craft--of a happy, cheerful,

contented ignorance, superstition, degradation, poverty, indolence, and

everlasting unaspiring worthlessness.  And we said fervently: it suits

these people precisely; let them enjoy it, along with the other animals,

and Heaven forbid that they be molested.  We feel no malice toward these

fumigators.



We passed through the strangest, funniest, undreampt-of old towns, wedded

to the customs and steeped in the dreams of the elder ages, and perfectly

unaware that the world turns round!  And perfectly indifferent, too, as

to whether it turns around or stands still.  They have nothing to do but

eat and sleep and sleep and eat, and toil a little when they can get a

friend to stand by and keep them awake.  They are not paid for thinking--

they are not paid to fret about the world's concerns.  They were not

respectable people--they were not worthy people--they were not learned

and wise and brilliant people--but in their breasts, all their stupid

lives long, resteth a peace that passeth understanding!  How can men,

calling themselves men, consent to be so degraded and happy.



We whisked by many a gray old medieval castle, clad thick with ivy that

swung its green banners down from towers and turrets where once some old

Crusader's flag had floated.  The driver pointed to one of these ancient

fortresses, and said, (I translate):



"Do you see that great iron hook that projects from the wall just under

the highest window in the ruined tower?"



We said we could not see it at such a distance, but had no doubt it was

there.



"Well," he said; "there is a legend connected with that iron hook.

Nearly seven hundred years ago, that castle was the property of the noble

Count Luigi Gennaro Guido Alphonso di Genova----"



"What was his other name?"  said Dan.



"He had no other name.  The name I have spoken was all the name he had.

He was the son of----"



"Poor but honest parents--that is all right--never mind the particulars--

go on with the legend."



                               THE LEGEND.



Well, then, all the world, at that time, was in a wild excitement about

the Holy Sepulchre.  All the great feudal lords in Europe were pledging

their lands and pawning their plate to fit out men-at-arms so that they

might join the grand armies of Christendom and win renown in the Holy

Wars.  The Count Luigi raised money, like the rest, and one mild

September morning, armed with battle-ax, portcullis and thundering

culverin, he rode through the greaves and bucklers of his donjon-keep

with as gallant a troop of Christian bandits as ever stepped in Italy.

He had his sword, Excalibur, with him.  His beautiful countess and her

young daughter waved him a tearful adieu from the battering-rams and

buttresses of the fortress, and he galloped away with a happy heart.



He made a raid on a neighboring baron and completed his outfit with the

booty secured.  He then razed the castle to the ground, massacred the

family and moved on.  They were hardy fellows in the grand old days of

chivalry.  Alas!  Those days will never come again.



Count Luigi grew high in fame in Holy Land.  He plunged into the carnage

of a hundred battles, but his good Excalibur always brought him out

alive, albeit often sorely wounded.  His face became browned by exposure

to the Syrian sun in long marches; he suffered hunger and thirst; he

pined in prisons, he languished in loathsome plague-hospitals.  And many

and many a time he thought of his loved ones at home, and wondered if all

was well with them.  But his heart said, Peace, is not thy brother

watching over thy household?



                              * * * * * * *



Forty-two years waxed and waned; the good fight was won; Godfrey reigned

in Jerusalem--the Christian hosts reared the banner of the cross above

the Holy Sepulchre!



Twilight was approaching.  Fifty harlequins, in flowing robes, approached

this castle wearily, for they were on foot, and the dust upon their

garments betokened that they had traveled far.  They overtook a peasant,

and asked him if it were likely they could get food and a hospitable bed

there, for love of Christian charity, and if perchance, a moral parlor

entertainment might meet with generous countenance--"for," said they,

"this exhibition hath no feature that could offend the most fastidious

taste."



"Marry," quoth the peasant, "an' it please your worships, ye had better

journey many a good rood hence with your juggling circus than trust your

bones in yonder castle."



"How now, sirrah!"  exclaimed the chief monk, "explain thy ribald speech,

or by'r Lady it shall go hard with thee."



"Peace, good mountebank, I did but utter the truth that was in my heart.

San Paolo be my witness that did ye but find the stout Count Leonardo in

his cups, sheer from the castle's topmost battlements would he hurl ye

all!  Alack-a-day, the good Lord Luigi reigns not here in these sad

times."



"The good Lord Luigi?"



"Aye, none other, please your worship.  In his day, the poor rejoiced in

plenty and the rich he did oppress; taxes were not known, the fathers of

the church waxed fat upon his bounty; travelers went and came, with none

to interfere; and whosoever would, might tarry in his halls in cordial

welcome, and eat his bread and drink his wine, withal.  But woe is me!

some two and forty years agone the good count rode hence to fight for

Holy Cross, and many a year hath flown since word or token have we had of

him.  Men say his bones lie bleaching in the fields of Palestine."



"And now?"



"Now!  God 'a mercy, the cruel Leonardo lords it in the castle.  He

wrings taxes from the poor; he robs all travelers that journey by his

gates; he spends his days in feuds and murders, and his nights in revel

and debauch; he roasts the fathers of the church upon his kitchen spits,

and enjoyeth the same, calling it pastime.  These thirty years Luigi's

countess hath not been seen by any [he] in all this land, and many

whisper that she pines in the dungeons of the castle for that she will

not wed with Leonardo, saying her dear lord still liveth and that she

will die ere she prove false to him.  They whisper likewise that her

daughter is a prisoner as well.  Nay, good jugglers, seek ye refreshment

other wheres.  'Twere better that ye perished in a Christian way than

that ye plunged from off yon dizzy tower.  Give ye good-day."



"God keep ye, gentle knave--farewell."



But heedless of the peasant's warning, the players moved straightway

toward the castle.



Word was brought to Count Leonardo that a company of mountebanks besought

his hospitality.



"'Tis well.  Dispose of them in the customary manner.  Yet stay!  I have

need of them.  Let them come hither.  Later, cast them from the

battlements--or--how many priests have ye on hand?"



"The day's results are meagre, good my lord.  An abbot and a dozen

beggarly friars is all we have."



"Hell and furies!  Is the estate going to seed?  Send hither the

mountebanks.  Afterward, broil them with the priests."



The robed and close-cowled harlequins entered.  The grim Leonardo sate in

state at the head of his council board.  Ranged up and down the hall on

either hand stood near a hundred men-at-arms.



"Ha, villains!"  quoth the count, "What can ye do to earn the hospitality

ye crave."



"Dread lord and mighty, crowded audiences have greeted our humble efforts

with rapturous applause.  Among our body count we the versatile and

talented Ugolino; the justly celebrated Rodolpho; the gifted and

accomplished Roderigo; the management have spared neither pains nor

expense--"



"S'death!  What can ye do?  Curb thy prating tongue."



"Good my lord, in acrobatic feats, in practice with the dumb-bells, in

balancing and ground and lofty tumbling are we versed--and sith your

highness asketh me, I venture here to publish that in the truly marvelous

and entertaining Zampillaerostation--"



"Gag him!  throttle him!  Body of Bacchus!  am I a dog that I am to be

assailed with polysyllabled blasphemy like to this?  But hold!  Lucretia,

Isabel, stand forth!  Sirrah, behold this dame, this weeping wench.  The

first I marry, within the hour; the other shall dry her tears or feed the

vultures.  Thou and thy vagabonds shall crown the wedding with thy merry-

makings.  Fetch hither the priest!"



The dame sprang toward the chief player.



"O, save me!"  she cried; "save me from a fate far worse than death!

Behold these sad eyes, these sunken cheeks, this withered frame!  See

thou the wreck this fiend hath made, and let thy heart be moved with

pity!  Look upon this damosel; note her wasted form, her halting step,

her bloomless cheeks where youth should blush and happiness exult in

smiles!  Hear us and have compassion.  This monster was my husband's

brother.  He who should have been our shield against all harm, hath kept

us shut within the noisome caverns of his donjon-keep for lo these thirty

years.  And for what crime?  None other than that I would not belie my

troth, root out my strong love for him who marches with the legions of

the cross in Holy Land, (for O, he is not dead!) and wed with him!  Save

us, O, save thy persecuted suppliants!"



She flung herself at his feet and clasped his knees.



"Ha!-ha!-ha!"  shouted the brutal Leonardo.  "Priest, to thy work!"  and

he dragged the weeping dame from her refuge.  "Say, once for all, will

you be mine?--for by my halidome, that breath that uttereth thy refusal

shall be thy last on earth!"



"NE-VER?"



"Then die!" and the sword leaped from its scabbard.



Quicker than thought, quicker than the lightning's flash, fifty monkish

habits disappeared, and fifty knights in splendid armor stood revealed!

fifty falchions gleamed in air above the men-at-arms, and brighter,

fiercer than them all, flamed Excalibur aloft, and cleaving downward

struck the brutal Leonardo's weapon from his grasp!



"A Luigi to the rescue!  Whoop!"



"A Leonardo!  'tare an ouns!'"



"Oh, God, Oh, God, my husband!"



"Oh, God, Oh, God, my wife!"



"My father!"



"My precious!"  [Tableau.]



Count Luigi bound his usurping brother hand and foot.  The practiced

knights from Palestine made holyday sport of carving the awkward men-at-

arms into chops and steaks.  The victory was complete.  Happiness

reigned.  The knights all married the daughter.  Joy!  wassail!  finis!



"But what did they do with the wicked brother?"



"Oh nothing--only hanged him on that iron hook I was speaking of.  By the

chin."



"As how?"



"Passed it up through his gills into his mouth."



"Leave him there?"



"Couple of years."



"Ah--is--is he dead?"



"Six hundred and fifty years ago, or such a matter."



"Splendid legend--splendid lie--drive on."



We reached the quaint old fortified city of Bergamo, the renowned in

history, some three-quarters of an hour before the train was ready to

start.  The place has thirty or forty thousand inhabitants and is

remarkable for being the birthplace of harlequin.  When we discovered

that, that legend of our driver took to itself a new interest in our

eyes.



Rested and refreshed, we took the rail happy and contented.  I shall not

tarry to speak of the handsome Lago di Gardi; its stately castle that

holds in its stony bosom the secrets of an age so remote that even

tradition goeth not back to it; the imposing mountain scenery that

ennobles the landscape thereabouts; nor yet of ancient Padua or haughty

Verona; nor of their Montagues and Capulets, their famous balconies and

tombs of Juliet and Romeo et al., but hurry straight to the ancient city

of the sea, the widowed bride of the Adriatic.  It was a long, long ride.

But toward evening, as we sat silent and hardly conscious of where we

were--subdued into that meditative calm that comes so surely after a

conversational storm--some one shouted--



"VENICE!"



And sure enough, afloat on the placid sea a league away, lay a great

city, with its towers and domes and steeples drowsing in a golden mist of

sunset.









CHAPTER XXII.



This Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent Republic for

nearly fourteen hundred years; whose armies compelled the world's

applause whenever and wherever they battled; whose navies well nigh held

dominion of the seas, and whose merchant fleets whitened the remotest

oceans with their sails and loaded these piers with the products of every

clime, is fallen a prey to poverty, neglect and melancholy decay.  Six

hundred years ago, Venice was the Autocrat of Commerce; her mart was the

great commercial centre, the distributing-house from whence the enormous

trade of the Orient was spread abroad over the Western world.  To-day her

piers are deserted, her warehouses are empty, her merchant fleets are

vanished, her armies and her navies are but memories.  Her glory is

departed, and with her crumbling grandeur of wharves and palaces about

her she sits among her stagnant lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten

of the world.  She that in her palmy days commanded the commerce of a

hemisphere and made the weal or woe of nations with a beck of her

puissant finger, is become the humblest among the peoples of the earth,--

a peddler of glass beads for women, and trifling toys and trinkets for

school-girls and children.



The venerable Mother of the Republics is scarce a fit subject for

flippant speech or the idle gossipping of tourists.  It seems a sort of

sacrilege to disturb the glamour of old romance that pictures her to us

softly from afar off as through a tinted mist, and curtains her ruin and

her desolation from our view.  One ought, indeed, to turn away from her

rags, her poverty and her humiliation, and think of her only as she was

when she sunk the fleets of Charlemagne; when she humbled Frederick

Barbarossa or waved her victorious banners above the battlements of

Constantinople.



We reached Venice at eight in the evening, and entered a hearse belonging

to the Grand Hotel d'Europe.  At any rate, it was more like a hearse than

any thing else, though to speak by the card, it was a gondola.  And this

was the storied gondola of Venice!--the fairy boat in which the princely

cavaliers of the olden time were wont to cleave the waters of the moonlit

canals and look the eloquence of love into the soft eyes of patrician

beauties, while the gay gondolier in silken doublet touched his guitar

and sang as only gondoliers can sing!  This the famed gondola and this

the gorgeous gondolier!--the one an inky, rusty old canoe with a sable

hearse-body clapped on to the middle of it, and the other a mangy,

barefooted guttersnipe with a portion of his raiment on exhibition which

should have been sacred from public scrutiny.  Presently, as he turned a

corner and shot his hearse into a dismal ditch between two long rows of

towering, untenanted buildings, the gay gondolier began to sing, true to

the traditions of his race.  I stood it a little while.  Then I said:



"Now, here, Roderigo Gonzales Michael Angelo, I'm a pilgrim, and I'm a

stranger, but I am not going to have my feelings lacerated by any such

caterwauling as that.  If that goes on, one of us has got to take water.

It is enough that my cherished dreams of Venice have been blighted

forever as to the romantic gondola and the gorgeous gondolier; this

system of destruction shall go no farther; I will accept the hearse,

under protest, and you may fly your flag of truce in peace, but here I

register a dark and bloody oath that you shan't sing.  Another yelp, and

overboard you go."



I began to feel that the old Venice of song and story had departed

forever.  But I was too hasty.  In a few minutes we swept gracefully out

into the Grand Canal, and under the mellow moonlight the Venice of poetry

and romance stood revealed.  Right from the water's edge rose long lines

of stately palaces of marble; gondolas were gliding swiftly hither and

thither and disappearing suddenly through unsuspected gates and alleys;

ponderous stone bridges threw their shadows athwart the glittering waves.

There was life and motion everywhere, and yet everywhere there was a

hush, a stealthy sort of stillness, that was suggestive of secret

enterprises of bravoes and of lovers; and clad half in moonbeams and half

in mysterious shadows, the grim old mansions of the Republic seemed to

have an expression about them of having an eye out for just such

enterprises as these at that same moment.  Music came floating over the

waters--Venice was complete.



It was a beautiful picture--very soft and dreamy and beautiful.  But what

was this Venice to compare with the Venice of midnight?  Nothing.  There

was a fete--a grand fete in honor of some saint who had been instrumental

in checking the cholera three hundred years ago, and all Venice was

abroad on the water.  It was no common affair, for the Venetians did not

know how soon they might need the saint's services again, now that the

cholera was spreading every where.  So in one vast space--say a third of

a mile wide and two miles long--were collected two thousand gondolas, and

every one of them had from two to ten, twenty and even thirty colored

lanterns suspended about it, and from four to a dozen occupants.  Just as

far as the eye could reach, these painted lights were massed together--

like a vast garden of many-colored flowers, except that these blossoms

were never still; they were ceaselessly gliding in and out, and mingling

together, and seducing you into bewildering attempts to follow their mazy

evolutions.  Here and there a strong red, green, or blue glare from a

rocket that was struggling to get away, splendidly illuminated all the

boats around it.  Every gondola that swam by us, with its crescents and

pyramids and circles of colored lamps hung aloft, and lighting up the

faces of the young and the sweet-scented and lovely below, was a picture;

and the reflections of those lights, so long, so slender, so numberless,

so many-colored and so distorted and wrinkled by the waves, was a picture

likewise, and one that was enchantingly beautiful.  Many and many a party

of young ladies and gentlemen had their state gondolas handsomely

decorated, and ate supper on board, bringing their swallow-tailed, white-

cravatted varlets to wait upon them, and having their tables tricked out

as if for a bridal supper.  They had brought along the costly globe lamps

from their drawing-rooms, and the lace and silken curtains from the same

places, I suppose.  And they had also brought pianos and guitars, and

they played and sang operas, while the plebeian paper-lanterned gondolas

from the suburbs and the back alleys crowded around to stare and listen.



There was music every where--choruses, string bands, brass bands, flutes,

every thing.  I was so surrounded, walled in, with music, magnificence

and loveliness, that I became inspired with the spirit of the scene, and

sang one tune myself.  However, when I observed that the other gondolas

had sailed away, and my gondolier was preparing to go overboard, I

stopped.



The fete was magnificent.  They kept it up the whole night long, and I

never enjoyed myself better than I did while it lasted.



What a funny old city this Queen of the Adriatic is!  Narrow streets,

vast, gloomy marble palaces, black with the corroding damps of centuries,

and all partly submerged; no dry land visible any where, and no sidewalks

worth mentioning; if you want to go to church, to the theatre, or to the

restaurant, you must call a gondola.  It must be a paradise for cripples,

for verily a man has no use for legs here.



For a day or two the place looked so like an overflowed Arkansas town,

because of its currentless waters laving the very doorsteps of all the

houses, and the cluster of boats made fast under the windows, or skimming

in and out of the alleys and by-ways, that I could not get rid of the

impression that there was nothing the matter here but a spring freshet,

and that the river would fall in a few weeks and leave a dirty high-water

mark on the houses, and the streets full of mud and rubbish.



In the glare of day, there is little poetry about Venice, but under the

charitable moon her stained palaces are white again, their battered

sculptures are hidden in shadows, and the old city seems crowned once

more with the grandeur that was hers five hundred years ago.  It is easy,

then, in fancy, to people these silent canals with plumed gallants and

fair ladies--with Shylocks in gaberdine and sandals, venturing loans upon

the rich argosies of Venetian commerce--with Othellos and Desdemonas,

with Iagos and Roderigos--with noble fleets and victorious legions

returning from the wars.  In the treacherous sunlight we see Venice

decayed, forlorn, poverty-stricken, and commerceless--forgotten and

utterly insignificant.  But in the moonlight, her fourteen centuries of

greatness fling their glories about her, and once more is she the

princeliest among the nations of the earth.



          "There is a glorious city in the sea;

          The sea is in the broad, the narrow streets,

          Ebbing and flowing; and the salt-sea weed

          Clings to the marble of her palaces.

          No track of men, no footsteps to and fro,

          Lead to her gates!  The path lies o'er the sea,

          Invisible: and from the land we went,

          As to a floating city--steering in,

          And gliding up her streets, as in a dream,

          So smoothly, silently--by many a dome,

          Mosque-like, and many a stately portico,

          The statues ranged along an azure sky;

          By many a pile, in more than Eastern pride,

          Of old the residence of merchant kings;

          The fronts of some, tho' time had shatter'd them,

          Still glowing with the richest hues of art,

          As tho' the wealth within them had run o'er."



What would one naturally wish to see first in Venice?  The Bridge of

Sighs, of course--and next the Church and the Great Square of St. Mark,

the Bronze Horses, and the famous Lion of St. Mark.



We intended to go to the Bridge of Sighs, but happened into the Ducal

Palace first--a building which necessarily figures largely in Venetian

poetry and tradition.  In the Senate Chamber of the ancient Republic we

wearied our eyes with staring at acres of historical paintings by

Tintoretto and Paul Veronese, but nothing struck us forcibly except the

one thing that strikes all strangers forcibly--a black square in the

midst of a gallery of portraits.  In one long row, around the great hall,

were painted the portraits of the Doges of Venice (venerable fellows,

with flowing white beards, for of the three hundred Senators eligible to

the office, the oldest was usually chosen Doge,) and each had its

complimentary inscription attached--till you came to the place that

should have had Marino Faliero's picture in it, and that was blank and

black--blank, except that it bore a terse inscription, saying that the

conspirator had died for his crime.  It seemed cruel to keep that

pitiless inscription still staring from the walls after the unhappy

wretch had been in his grave five hundred years.



At the head of the Giant's Staircase, where Marino Faliero was beheaded,

and where the Doges were crowned in ancient times, two small slits in the

stone wall were pointed out--two harmless, insignificant orifices that

would never attract a stranger's attention--yet these were the terrible

Lions' Mouths!  The heads were gone (knocked off by the French during

their occupation of Venice,) but these were the throats, down which went

the anonymous accusation, thrust in secretly at dead of night by an

enemy, that doomed many an innocent man to walk the Bridge of Sighs and

descend into the dungeon which none entered and hoped to see the sun

again.  This was in the old days when the Patricians alone governed

Venice--the common herd had no vote and no voice.  There were one

thousand five hundred Patricians; from these, three hundred Senators were

chosen; from the Senators a Doge and a Council of Ten were selected, and

by secret ballot the Ten chose from their own number a Council of Three.

All these were Government spies, then, and every spy was under

surveillance himself--men spoke in whispers in Venice, and no man trusted

his neighbor--not always his own brother.  No man knew who the Council of

Three were--not even the Senate, not even the Doge; the members of that

dread tribunal met at night in a chamber to themselves, masked, and robed

from head to foot in scarlet cloaks, and did not even know each other,

unless by voice.  It was their duty to judge heinous political crimes,

and from their sentence there was no appeal.  A nod to the executioner

was sufficient.  The doomed man was marched down a hall and out at a

door-way into the covered Bridge of Sighs, through it and into the

dungeon and unto his death.  At no time in his transit was he visible to

any save his conductor.  If a man had an enemy in those old days, the

cleverest thing he could do was to slip a note for the Council of Three

into the Lion's mouth, saying "This man is plotting against the

Government."  If the awful Three found no proof, ten to one they would

drown him anyhow, because he was a deep rascal, since his plots were

unsolvable.  Masked judges and masked executioners, with unlimited power,

and no appeal from their judgements, in that hard, cruel age, were not

likely to be lenient with men they suspected yet could not convict.



We walked through the hall of the Council of Ten, and presently entered

the infernal den of the Council of Three.



The table around which they had sat was there still, and likewise the

stations where the masked inquisitors and executioners formerly stood,

frozen, upright and silent, till they received a bloody order, and then,

without a word, moved off like the inexorable machines they were, to

carry it out.  The frescoes on the walls were startlingly suited to the

place.  In all the other saloons, the halls, the great state chambers of

the palace, the walls and ceilings were bright with gilding, rich with

elaborate carving, and resplendent with gallant pictures of Venetian

victories in war, and Venetian display in foreign courts, and hallowed

with portraits of the Virgin, the Saviour of men, and the holy saints

that preached the Gospel of Peace upon earth--but here, in dismal

contrast, were none but pictures of death and dreadful suffering!--not a

living figure but was writhing in torture, not a dead one but was smeared

with blood, gashed with wounds, and distorted with the agonies that had

taken away its life!



From the palace to the gloomy prison is but a step--one might almost jump

across the narrow canal that intervenes.  The ponderous stone Bridge of

Sighs crosses it at the second story--a bridge that is a covered tunnel--

you can not be seen when you walk in it.  It is partitioned lengthwise,

and through one compartment walked such as bore light sentences in

ancient times, and through the other marched sadly the wretches whom the

Three had doomed to lingering misery and utter oblivion in the dungeons,

or to sudden and mysterious death.  Down below the level of the water, by

the light of smoking torches, we were shown the damp, thick-walled cells

where many a proud patrician's life was eaten away by the long-drawn

miseries of solitary imprisonment--without light, air, books; naked,

unshaven, uncombed, covered with vermin; his useless tongue forgetting

its office, with none to speak to; the days and nights of his life no

longer marked, but merged into one eternal eventless night; far away from

all cheerful sounds, buried in the silence of a tomb; forgotten by his

helpless friends, and his fate a dark mystery to them forever; losing his

own memory at last, and knowing no more who he was or how he came there;

devouring the loaf of bread and drinking the water that were thrust into

the cell by unseen hands, and troubling his worn spirit no more with

hopes and fears and doubts and longings to be free; ceasing to scratch

vain prayers and complainings on walls where none, not even himself,

could see them, and resigning himself to hopeless apathy, driveling

childishness, lunacy!  Many and many a sorrowful story like this these

stony walls could tell if they could but speak.



In a little narrow corridor, near by, they showed us where many a

prisoner, after lying in the dungeons until he was forgotten by all save

his persecutors, was brought by masked executioners and garroted, or

sewed up in a sack, passed through a little window to a boat, at dead of

night, and taken to some remote spot and drowned.



They used to show to visitors the implements of torture wherewith the

Three were wont to worm secrets out of the accused--villainous machines

for crushing thumbs; the stocks where a prisoner sat immovable while

water fell drop by drop upon his head till the torture was more than

humanity could bear; and a devilish contrivance of steel, which inclosed

a prisoner's head like a shell, and crushed it slowly by means of a

screw.  It bore the stains of blood that had trickled through its joints

long ago, and on one side it had a projection whereon the torturer rested

his elbow comfortably and bent down his ear to catch the moanings of the

sufferer perishing within.



Of course we went to see the venerable relic of the ancient glory of

Venice, with its pavements worn and broken by the passing feet of a

thousand years of plebeians and patricians--The Cathedral of St. Mark.

It is built entirely of precious marbles, brought from the Orient--

nothing in its composition is domestic.  Its hoary traditions make it an

object of absorbing interest to even the most careless stranger, and thus

far it had interest for me; but no further.  I could not go into

ecstasies over its coarse mosaics, its unlovely Byzantine architecture,

or its five hundred curious interior columns from as many distant

quarries.  Every thing was worn out--every block of stone was smooth and

almost shapeless with the polishing hands and shoulders of loungers who

devoutly idled here in by-gone centuries and have died and gone to the

dev--no, simply died, I mean.



Under the altar repose the ashes of St. Mark--and Matthew, Luke and John,

too, for all I know.  Venice reveres those relics above all things

earthly.  For fourteen hundred years St. Mark has been her patron saint.

Every thing about the city seems to be named after him or so named as to

refer to him in some way--so named, or some purchase rigged in some way

to scrape a sort of hurrahing acquaintance with him.  That seems to be

the idea.  To be on good terms with St. Mark, seems to be the very summit

of Venetian ambition.  They say St. Mark had a tame lion, and used to

travel with him--and every where that St. Mark went, the lion was sure to

go.  It was his protector, his friend, his librarian.  And so the Winged

Lion of St. Mark, with the open Bible under his paw, is a favorite emblem

in the grand old city.  It casts its shadow from the most ancient pillar

in Venice, in the Grand Square of St. Mark, upon the throngs of free

citizens below, and has so done for many a long century.  The winged lion

is found every where--and doubtless here, where the winged lion is, no

harm can come.



St. Mark died at Alexandria, in Egypt.  He was martyred, I think.

However, that has nothing to do with my legend.  About the founding of

the city of Venice--say four hundred and fifty years after Christ--(for

Venice is much younger than any other Italian city,) a priest dreamed

that an angel told him that until the remains of St. Mark were brought to

Venice, the city could never rise to high distinction among the nations;

that the body must be captured, brought to the city, and a magnificent

church built over it; and that if ever the Venetians allowed the Saint to

be removed from his new resting-place, in that day Venice would perish

from off the face of the earth.  The priest proclaimed his dream, and

forthwith Venice set about procuring the corpse of St. Mark.  One

expedition after another tried and failed, but the project was never

abandoned during four hundred years.  At last it was secured by

stratagem, in the year eight hundred and something.  The commander of a

Venetian expedition disguised himself, stole the bones, separated them,

and packed them in vessels filled with lard.  The religion of Mahomet

causes its devotees to abhor anything that is in the nature of pork, and

so when the Christian was stopped by the officers at the gates of the

city, they only glanced once into his precious baskets, then turned up

their noses at the unholy lard, and let him go.  The bones were buried in

the vaults of the grand cathedral, which had been waiting long years to

receive them, and thus the safety and the greatness of Venice were

secured.  And to this day there be those in Venice who believe that if

those holy ashes were stolen away, the ancient city would vanish like a

dream, and its foundations be buried forever in the unremembering sea.









CHAPTER XXIII.



The Venetian gondola is as free and graceful, in its gliding movement, as

a serpent.  It is twenty or thirty feet long, and is narrow and deep,

like a canoe; its sharp bow and stern sweep upward from the water like

the horns of a crescent with the abruptness of the curve slightly

modified.



The bow is ornamented with a steel comb with a battle-ax attachment which

threatens to cut passing boats in two occasionally, but never does.  The

gondola is painted black because in the zenith of Venetian magnificence

the gondolas became too gorgeous altogether, and the Senate decreed that

all such display must cease, and a solemn, unembellished black be

substituted.  If the truth were known, it would doubtless appear that

rich plebeians grew too prominent in their affectation of patrician show

on the Grand Canal, and required a wholesome snubbing.  Reverence for the

hallowed Past and its traditions keeps the dismal fashion in force now

that the compulsion exists no longer.  So let it remain.  It is the color

of mourning.  Venice mourns.  The stern of the boat is decked over and

the gondolier stands there.  He uses a single oar--a long blade, of

course, for he stands nearly erect.  A wooden peg, a foot and a half

high, with two slight crooks or curves in one side of it and one in the

other, projects above the starboard gunwale.  Against that peg the

gondolier takes a purchase with his oar, changing it at intervals to the

other side of the peg or dropping it into another of the crooks, as the

steering of the craft may demand--and how in the world he can back and

fill, shoot straight ahead, or flirt suddenly around a corner, and make

the oar stay in those insignificant notches, is a problem to me and a

never diminishing matter of interest.  I am afraid I study the

gondolier's marvelous skill more than I do the sculptured palaces we

glide among.  He cuts a corner so closely, now and then, or misses

another gondola by such an imperceptible hair-breadth that I feel myself

"scrooching," as the children say, just as one does when a buggy wheel

grazes his elbow.  But he makes all his calculations with the nicest

precision, and goes darting in and out among a Broadway confusion of busy

craft with the easy confidence of the educated hackman.  He never makes a

mistake.



Sometimes we go flying down the great canals at such a gait that we can

get only the merest glimpses into front doors, and again, in obscure

alleys in the suburbs, we put on a solemnity suited to the silence, the

mildew, the stagnant waters, the clinging weeds, the deserted houses and

the general lifelessness of the place, and move to the spirit of grave

meditation.



The gondolier is a picturesque rascal for all he wears no satin harness,

no plumed bonnet, no silken tights.  His attitude is stately; he is lithe

and supple; all his movements are full of grace.  When his long canoe,

and his fine figure, towering from its high perch on the stern, are cut

against the evening sky, they make a picture that is very novel and

striking to a foreign eye.



We sit in the cushioned carriage-body of a cabin, with the curtains

drawn, and smoke, or read, or look out upon the passing boats, the

houses, the bridges, the people, and enjoy ourselves much more than we

could in a buggy jolting over our cobble-stone pavements at home.  This

is the gentlest, pleasantest locomotion we have ever known.



But it seems queer--ever so queer--to see a boat doing duty as a private

carriage.  We see business men come to the front door, step into a

gondola, instead of a street car, and go off down town to the counting-

room.



We see visiting young ladies stand on the stoop, and laugh, and kiss

good-bye, and flirt their fans and say "Come soon--now do--you've been

just as mean as ever you can be--mother's dying to see you--and we've

moved into the new house, O such a love of a place!--so convenient to the

post office and the church, and the Young Men's Christian Association;

and we do have such fishing, and such carrying on, and such swimming-

matches in the back yard--Oh, you must come--no distance at all, and if

you go down through by St. Mark's and the Bridge of Sighs, and cut

through the alley and come up by the church of Santa Maria dei Frari, and

into the Grand Canal, there isn't a bit of current--now do come, Sally

Maria--by-bye!" and then the little humbug trips down the steps, jumps

into the gondola, says, under her breath, "Disagreeable old thing, I hope

she won't!" goes skimming away, round the corner; and the other girl

slams the street door and says, "Well, that infliction's over, any way,--

but I suppose I've got to go and see her--tiresome stuck-up thing!"

Human nature appears to be just the same, all over the world.  We see the

diffident young man, mild of moustache, affluent of hair, indigent of

brain, elegant of costume, drive up to her father's mansion, tell his

hackman to bail out and wait, start fearfully up the steps and meet "the

old gentleman" right on the threshold!--hear him ask what street the new

British Bank is in--as if that were what he came for--and then bounce

into his boat and skurry away with his coward heart in his boots!--see

him come sneaking around the corner again, directly, with a crack of the

curtain open toward the old gentleman's disappearing gondola, and out

scampers his Susan with a flock of little Italian endearments fluttering

from her lips, and goes to drive with him in the watery avenues down

toward the Rialto.



We see the ladies go out shopping, in the most natural way, and flit from

street to street and from store to store, just in the good old fashion,

except that they leave the gondola, instead of a private carriage,

waiting at the curbstone a couple of hours for them,--waiting while they

make the nice young clerks pull down tons and tons of silks and velvets

and moire antiques and those things; and then they buy a paper of pins

and go paddling away to confer the rest of their disastrous patronage on

some other firm.  And they always have their purchases sent home just in

the good old way.  Human nature is very much the same all over the world;

and it is so like my dear native home to see a Venetian lady go into a

store and buy ten cents' worth of blue ribbon and have it sent home in a

scow.  Ah, it is these little touches of nature that move one to tears in

these far-off foreign lands.



We see little girls and boys go out in gondolas with their nurses, for an

airing.  We see staid families, with prayer-book and beads, enter the

gondola dressed in their Sunday best, and float away to church.  And at

midnight we see the theatre break up and discharge its swarm of hilarious

youth and beauty; we hear the cries of the hackman-gondoliers, and behold

the struggling crowd jump aboard, and the black multitude of boats go

skimming down the moonlit avenues; we see them separate here and there,

and disappear up divergent streets; we hear the faint sounds of laughter

and of shouted farewells floating up out of the distance; and then, the

strange pageant being gone, we have lonely stretches of glittering water

--of stately buildings--of blotting shadows--of weird stone faces

creeping into the moonlight--of deserted bridges--of motionless boats at

anchor.  And over all broods that mysterious stillness, that stealthy

quiet, that befits so well this old dreaming Venice.



We have been pretty much every where in our gondola.  We have bought

beads and photographs in the stores, and wax matches in the Great Square

of St. Mark.  The last remark suggests a digression.  Every body goes to

this vast square in the evening.  The military bands play in the centre

of it and countless couples of ladies and gentlemen promenade up and down

on either side, and platoons of them are constantly drifting away toward

the old Cathedral, and by the venerable column with the Winged Lion of

St. Mark on its top, and out to where the boats lie moored; and other

platoons are as constantly arriving from the gondolas and joining the

great throng.  Between the promenaders and the side-walks are seated

hundreds and hundreds of people at small tables, smoking and taking

granita, (a first cousin to ice-cream;) on the side-walks are more

employing themselves in the same way.  The shops in the first floor of

the tall rows of buildings that wall in three sides of the square are

brilliantly lighted, the air is filled with music and merry voices, and

altogether the scene is as bright and spirited and full of cheerfulness

as any man could desire.  We enjoy it thoroughly.  Very many of the young

women are exceedingly pretty and dress with rare good taste.  We are

gradually and laboriously learning the ill-manners of staring them

unflinchingly in the face--not because such conduct is agreeable to us,

but because it is the custom of the country and they say the girls like

it.  We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the

different countries, so that we can "show off" and astonish people when

we get home.  We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with

our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off.  All our

passengers are paying strict attention to this thing, with the end in

view which I have mentioned.  The gentle reader will never, never know

what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad.  I speak now,

of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad,

and therefore is not already a consummate ass.  If the case be otherwise,

I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and

call him brother.  I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own

heart when I shall have finished my travels.



On this subject let me remark that there are Americans abroad in Italy

who have actually forgotten their mother tongue in three months--forgot

it in France.  They can not even write their address in English in a

hotel register.  I append these evidences, which I copied verbatim from

the register of a hotel in a certain Italian city:



     "John P. Whitcomb, Etats Unis.  "Wm. L. Ainsworth, travailleur (he

     meant traveler, I suppose,) Etats Unis.  "George P. Morton et fils,

     d'Amerique.  "Lloyd B.  Williams, et trois amis, ville de Boston,

     Amerique.  "J. Ellsworth Baker, tout de suite de France, place de

     naissance Amerique, destination la Grand Bretagne."



I love this sort of people.  A lady passenger of ours tells of a fellow-

citizen of hers who spent eight weeks in Paris and then returned home and

addressed his dearest old bosom friend Herbert as Mr. "Er-bare!"  He

apologized, though, and said, "'Pon my soul it is aggravating, but I

cahn't help it--I have got so used to speaking nothing but French, my

dear Erbare--damme there it goes again!--got so used to French

pronunciation that I cahn't get rid of it--it is positively annoying, I

assure you."  This entertaining idiot, whose name was Gordon, allowed

himself to be hailed three times in the street before he paid any

attention, and then begged a thousand pardons and said he had grown so

accustomed to hearing himself addressed as "M'sieu Gor-r-dong," with a

roll to the r, that he had forgotten the legitimate sound of his name!

He wore a rose in his button-hole; he gave the French salutation--two

flips of the hand in front of the face; he called Paris Pairree in

ordinary English conversation; he carried envelopes bearing foreign

postmarks protruding from his breast-pocket; he cultivated a moustache

and imperial, and did what else he could to suggest to the beholder his

pet fancy that he resembled Louis Napoleon--and in a spirit of

thankfulness which is entirely unaccountable, considering the slim

foundation there was for it, he praised his Maker that he was as he was,

and went on enjoying his little life just the same as if he really had

been deliberately designed and erected by the great Architect of the

Universe.



Think of our Whitcombs, and our Ainsworths and our Williamses writing

themselves down in dilapidated French in foreign hotel registers!  We

laugh at Englishmen, when we are at home, for sticking so sturdily to

their national ways and customs, but we look back upon it from abroad

very forgivingly.  It is not pleasant to see an American thrusting his

nationality forward obtrusively in a foreign land, but Oh, it is pitiable

to see him making of himself a thing that is neither male nor female,

neither fish, flesh, nor fowl--a poor, miserable, hermaphrodite

Frenchman!



Among a long list of churches, art galleries, and such things, visited by

us in Venice, I shall mention only one--the church of Santa Maria dei

Frari.  It is about five hundred years old, I believe, and stands on

twelve hundred thousand piles.  In it lie the body of Canova and the

heart of Titian, under magnificent monuments.  Titian died at the age of

almost one hundred years.  A plague which swept away fifty thousand lives

was raging at the time, and there is notable evidence of the reverence in

which the great painter was held, in the fact that to him alone the state

permitted a public funeral in all that season of terror and death.



In this church, also, is a monument to the doge Foscari, whose name a

once resident of Venice, Lord Byron, has made permanently famous.



The monument to the doge Giovanni Pesaro, in this church, is a curiosity

in the way of mortuary adornment.  It is eighty feet high and is fronted

like some fantastic pagan temple.  Against it stand four colossal

Nubians, as black as night, dressed in white marble garments.  The black

legs are bare, and through rents in sleeves and breeches, the skin, of

shiny black marble, shows.  The artist was as ingenious as his funeral

designs were absurd.  There are two bronze skeletons bearing scrolls, and

two great dragons uphold the sarcophagus.  On high, amid all this

grotesqueness, sits the departed doge.



In the conventual buildings attached to this church are the state

archives of Venice.  We did not see them, but they are said to number

millions of documents.  "They are the records of centuries of the most

watchful, observant and suspicious government that ever existed--in which

every thing was written down and nothing spoken out."  They fill nearly

three hundred rooms.  Among them are manuscripts from the archives of

nearly two thousand families, monasteries and convents.  The secret

history of Venice for a thousand years is here--its plots, its hidden

trials, its assassinations, its commissions of hireling spies and masked

bravoes--food, ready to hand, for a world of dark and mysterious

romances.



Yes, I think we have seen all of Venice.  We have seen, in these old

churches, a profusion of costly and elaborate sepulchre ornamentation

such as we never dreampt of before.  We have stood in the dim religious

light of these hoary sanctuaries, in the midst of long ranks of dusty

monuments and effigies of the great dead of Venice, until we seemed

drifting back, back, back, into the solemn past, and looking upon the

scenes and mingling with the peoples of a remote antiquity.  We have been

in a half-waking sort of dream all the time.  I do not know how else to

describe the feeling.  A part of our being has remained still in the

nineteenth century, while another part of it has seemed in some

unaccountable way walking among the phantoms of the tenth.



We have seen famous pictures until our eyes are weary with looking at

them and refuse to find interest in them any longer.  And what wonder,

when there are twelve hundred pictures by Palma the Younger in Venice and

fifteen hundred by Tintoretto?  And behold there are Titians and the

works of other artists in proportion.  We have seen Titian's celebrated

Cain and Abel, his David and Goliah, his Abraham's Sacrifice.  We have

seen Tintoretto's monster picture, which is seventy-four feet long and I

do not know how many feet high, and thought it a very commodious picture.

We have seen pictures of martyrs enough, and saints enough, to regenerate

the world.  I ought not to confess it, but still, since one has no

opportunity in America to acquire a critical judgment in art, and since I

could not hope to become educated in it in Europe in a few short weeks, I

may therefore as well acknowledge with such apologies as may be due, that

to me it seemed that when I had seen one of these martyrs I had seen them

all.  They all have a marked family resemblance to each other, they dress

alike, in coarse monkish robes and sandals, they are all bald headed,

they all stand in about the same attitude, and without exception they are

gazing heavenward with countenances which the Ainsworths, the Mortons and

the Williamses, et fils, inform me are full of "expression."  To me there

is nothing tangible about these imaginary portraits, nothing that I can

grasp and take a living interest in.  If great Titian had only been

gifted with prophecy, and had skipped a martyr, and gone over to England

and painted a portrait of Shakspeare, even as a youth, which we could all

have confidence in now, the world down to the latest generations would

have forgiven him the lost martyr in the rescued seer.  I think posterity

could have spared one more martyr for the sake of a great historical

picture of Titian's time and painted by his brush--such as Columbus

returning in chains from the discovery of a world, for instance.  The old

masters did paint some Venetian historical pictures, and these we did not

tire of looking at, notwithstanding representations of the formal

introduction of defunct doges to the Virgin Mary in regions beyond the

clouds clashed rather harshly with the proprieties, it seemed to us.



But humble as we are, and unpretending, in the matter of art, our

researches among the painted monks and martyrs have not been wholly in

vain.  We have striven hard to learn.  We have had some success.  We have

mastered some things, possibly of trifling import in the eyes of the

learned, but to us they give pleasure, and we take as much pride in our

little acquirements as do others who have learned far more, and we love

to display them full as well.  When we see a monk going about with a lion

and looking tranquilly up to heaven, we know that that is St. Mark.  When

we see a monk with a book and a pen, looking tranquilly up to heaven,

trying to think of a word, we know that that is St. Matthew.  When we see

a monk sitting on a rock, looking tranquilly up to heaven, with a human

skull beside him, and without other baggage, we know that that is St.

Jerome.  Because we know that he always went flying light in the matter

of baggage.  When we see a party looking tranquilly up to heaven,

unconscious that his body is shot through and through with arrows, we

know that that is St. Sebastian.  When we see other monks looking

tranquilly up to heaven, but having no trade-mark, we always ask who

those parties are.  We do this because we humbly wish to learn.  We have

seen thirteen thousand St. Jeromes, and twenty-two thousand St. Marks,

and sixteen thousand St. Matthews, and sixty thousand St. Sebastians, and

four millions of assorted monks, undesignated, and we feel encouraged to

believe that when we have seen some more of these various pictures, and

had a larger experience, we shall begin to take an absorbing interest in

them like our cultivated countrymen from Amerique.



Now it does give me real pain to speak in this almost unappreciative way

of the old masters and their martyrs, because good friends of mine in the

ship--friends who do thoroughly and conscientiously appreciate them and

are in every way competent to discriminate between good pictures and

inferior ones--have urged me for my own sake not to make public the fact

that I lack this appreciation and this critical discrimination myself.  I

believe that what I have written and may still write about pictures will

give them pain, and I am honestly sorry for it.  I even promised that I

would hide my uncouth sentiments in my own breast.  But alas!  I never

could keep a promise.  I do not blame myself for this weakness, because

the fault must lie in my physical organization.  It is likely that such a

very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to

make promises, that the organ which should enable me to keep them was

crowded out.  But I grieve not.  I like no half-way things.  I had rather

have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary

capacity.  I certainly meant to keep that promise, but I find I can not

do it.  It is impossible to travel through Italy without speaking of

pictures, and can I see them through others' eyes?



If I did not so delight in the grand pictures that are spread before me

every day of my life by that monarch of all the old masters, Nature, I

should come to believe, sometimes, that I had in me no appreciation of

the beautiful, whatsoever.



It seems to me that whenever I glory to think that for once I have

discovered an ancient painting that is beautiful and worthy of all

praise, the pleasure it gives me is an infallible proof that it is not a

beautiful picture and not in any wise worthy of commendation.  This very

thing has occurred more times than I can mention, in Venice.  In every

single instance the guide has crushed out my swelling enthusiasm with the

remark:



"It is nothing--it is of the Renaissance."



I did not know what in the mischief the Renaissance was, and so always I

had to simply say,



"Ah!  so it is--I had not observed it before."



I could not bear to be ignorant before a cultivated negro, the offspring

of a South Carolina slave.  But it occurred too often for even my self-

complacency, did that exasperating "It is nothing--it is of the

Renaissance."  I said at last:



"Who is this Renaissance?  Where did he come from?  Who gave him

permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?"



We learned, then, that Renaissance was not a man; that renaissance was a

term used to signify what was at best but an imperfect rejuvenation of

art.  The guide said that after Titian's time and the time of the other

great names we had grown so familiar with, high art declined; then it

partially rose again--an inferior sort of painters sprang up, and these

shabby pictures were the work of their hands.  Then I said, in my heat,

that I "wished to goodness high art had declined five hundred years

sooner."  The Renaissance pictures suit me very well, though sooth to say

its school were too much given to painting real men and did not indulge

enough in martyrs.



The guide I have spoken of is the only one we have had yet who knew any

thing.  He was born in South Carolina, of slave parents.  They came to

Venice while he was an infant.  He has grown up here.  He is well

educated.  He reads, writes, and speaks English, Italian, Spanish, and

French, with perfect facility; is a worshipper of art and thoroughly

conversant with it; knows the history of Venice by heart and never tires

of talking of her illustrious career.  He dresses better than any of us,

I think, and is daintily polite.  Negroes are deemed as good as white

people, in Venice, and so this man feels no desire to go back to his

native land.  His judgment is correct.



I have had another shave.  I was writing in our front room this afternoon

and trying hard to keep my attention on my work and refrain from looking

out upon the canal.  I was resisting the soft influences of the climate

as well as I could, and endeavoring to overcome the desire to be indolent

and happy.  The boys sent for a barber.  They asked me if I would be

shaved.  I reminded them of my tortures in Genoa, Milan, Como; of my

declaration that I would suffer no more on Italian soil.  I said "Not any

for me, if you please."



I wrote on.  The barber began on the doctor.  I heard him say:



"Dan, this is the easiest shave I have had since we left the ship."



He said again, presently:



"Why Dan, a man could go to sleep with this man shaving him."



Dan took the chair.  Then he said:



"Why this is Titian.  This is one of the old masters."



I wrote on.  Directly Dan said:



"Doctor, it is perfect luxury.  The ship's barber isn't any thing to

him."



My rough beard wee distressing me beyond measure.  The barber was rolling

up his apparatus.  The temptation was too strong.  I said:



"Hold on, please.  Shave me also."



I sat down in the chair and closed my eyes.  The barber soaped my face,

and then took his razor and gave me a rake that well nigh threw me into

convulsions.  I jumped out of the chair: Dan and the doctor were both

wiping blood off their faces and laughing.



I said it was a mean, disgraceful fraud.



They said that the misery of this shave had gone so far beyond any thing

they had ever experienced before, that they could not bear the idea of

losing such a chance of hearing a cordial opinion from me on the subject.



It was shameful.  But there was no help for it.  The skinning was begun

and had to be finished.  The tears flowed with every rake, and so did the

fervent execrations.  The barber grew confused, and brought blood every

time.  I think the boys enjoyed it better than any thing they have seen

or heard since they left home.



We have seen the Campanile, and Byron's house and Balbi's the geographer,

and the palaces of all the ancient dukes and doges of Venice, and we have

seen their effeminate descendants airing their nobility in fashionable

French attire in the Grand Square of St. Mark, and eating ices and

drinking cheap wines, instead of wearing gallant coats of mail and

destroying fleets and armies as their great ancestors did in the days of

Venetian glory.  We have seen no bravoes with poisoned stilettos, no

masks, no wild carnival; but we have seen the ancient pride of Venice,

the grim Bronze Horses that figure in a thousand legends.  Venice may

well cherish them, for they are the only horses she ever had.  It is said

there are hundreds of people in this curious city who never have seen a

living horse in their lives.  It is entirely true, no doubt.



And so, having satisfied ourselves, we depart to-morrow, and leave the

venerable Queen of the Republics to summon her vanished ships, and

marshal her shadowy armies, and know again in dreams the pride of her old

renown.









CHAPTER XXIV.



Some of the Quaker City's passengers had arrived in Venice from

Switzerland and other lands before we left there, and others were

expected every day.  We heard of no casualties among them, and no

sickness.



We were a little fatigued with sight seeing, and so we rattled through a

good deal of country by rail without caring to stop.  I took few notes.

I find no mention of Bologna in my memorandum book, except that we

arrived there in good season, but saw none of the sausages for which the

place is so justly celebrated.



Pistoia awoke but a passing interest.



Florence pleased us for a while.  I think we appreciated the great figure

of David in the grand square, and the sculptured group they call the Rape

of the Sabines.  We wandered through the endless collections of paintings

and statues of the Pitti and Ufizzi galleries, of course.  I make that

statement in self-defense; there let it stop.  I could not rest under the

imputation that I visited Florence and did not traverse its weary miles

of picture galleries.  We tried indolently to recollect something about

the Guelphs and Ghibelines and the other historical cut-throats whose

quarrels and assassinations make up so large a share of Florentine

history, but the subject was not attractive.  We had been robbed of all

the fine mountain scenery on our little journey by a system of

railroading that had three miles of tunnel to a hundred yards of

daylight, and we were not inclined to be sociable with Florence.  We had

seen the spot, outside the city somewhere, where these people had allowed

the bones of Galileo to rest in unconsecrated ground for an age because

his great discovery that the world turned around was regarded as a

damning heresy by the church; and we know that long after the world had

accepted his theory and raised his name high in the list of its great

men, they had still let him rot there.  That we had lived to see his dust

in honored sepulture in the church of Santa Croce we owed to a society of

literati, and not to Florence or her rulers.  We saw Dante's tomb in that

church, also, but we were glad to know that his body was not in it; that

the ungrateful city that had exiled him and persecuted him would give

much to have it there, but need not hope to ever secure that high honor

to herself.  Medicis are good enough for Florence.  Let her plant Medicis

and build grand monuments over them to testify how gratefully she was

wont to lick the hand that scourged her.



Magnanimous Florence!  Her jewelry marts are filled with artists in

mosaic.  Florentine mosaics are the choicest in all the world.  Florence

loves to have that said.  Florence is proud of it.  Florence would foster

this specialty of hers.  She is grateful to the artists that bring to her

this high credit and fill her coffers with foreign money, and so she

encourages them with pensions.  With pensions!  Think of the lavishness

of it.  She knows that people who piece together the beautiful trifles

die early, because the labor is so confining, and so exhausting to hand

and brain, and so she has decreed that all these people who reach the age

of sixty shall have a pension after that!  I have not heard that any of

them have called for their dividends yet.  One man did fight along till

he was sixty, and started after his pension, but it appeared that there

had been a mistake of a year in his family record, and so he gave it up

and died.



These artists will take particles of stone or glass no larger than a

mustard seed, and piece them together on a sleeve button or a shirt stud,

so smoothly and with such nice adjustment of the delicate shades of color

the pieces bear, as to form a pigmy rose with stem, thorn, leaves, petals

complete, and all as softly and as truthfully tinted as though Nature had

builded it herself.  They will counterfeit a fly, or a high-toned bug, or

the ruined Coliseum, within the cramped circle of a breastpin, and do it

so deftly and so neatly that any man might think a master painted it.



I saw a little table in the great mosaic school in Florence--a little

trifle of a centre table--whose top was made of some sort of precious

polished stone, and in the stone was inlaid the figure of a flute, with

bell-mouth and a mazy complication of keys.  No painting in the world

could have been softer or richer; no shading out of one tint into another

could have been more perfect; no work of art of any kind could have been

more faultless than this flute, and yet to count the multitude of little

fragments of stone of which they swore it was formed would bankrupt any

man's arithmetic!  I do not think one could have seen where two particles

joined each other with eyes of ordinary shrewdness.  Certainly we could

detect no such blemish.  This table-top cost the labor of one man for ten

long years, so they said, and it was for sale for thirty-five thousand

dollars.



We went to the Church of Santa Croce, from time to time, in Florence, to

weep over the tombs of Michael Angelo, Raphael and Machiavelli,

(I suppose they are buried there, but it may be that they reside

elsewhere and rent their tombs to other parties--such being the fashion

in Italy,) and between times we used to go and stand on the bridges and

admire the Arno.  It is popular to admire the Arno.  It is a great

historical creek with four feet in the channel and some scows floating

around.  It would be a very plausible river if they would pump some water

into it.  They all call it a river, and they honestly think it is a

river, do these dark and bloody Florentines.  They even help out the

delusion by building bridges over it.  I do not see why they are too good

to wade.



How the fatigues and annoyances of travel fill one with bitter prejudices

sometimes!  I might enter Florence under happier auspices a month hence

and find it all beautiful, all attractive.  But I do not care to think of

it now, at all, nor of its roomy shops filled to the ceiling with snowy

marble and alabaster copies of all the celebrated sculptures in Europe--

copies so enchanting to the eye that I wonder how they can really be

shaped like the dingy petrified nightmares they are the portraits of.  I

got lost in Florence at nine o'clock, one night, and staid lost in that

labyrinth of narrow streets and long rows of vast buildings that look all

alike, until toward three o'clock in the morning.  It was a pleasant

night and at first there were a good many people abroad, and there were

cheerful lights about.  Later, I grew accustomed to prowling about

mysterious drifts and tunnels and astonishing and interesting myself with

coming around corners expecting to find the hotel staring me in the face,

and not finding it doing any thing of the kind.  Later still, I felt

tired.  I soon felt remarkably tired.  But there was no one abroad, now--

not even a policeman.  I walked till I was out of all patience, and very

hot and thirsty.  At last, somewhere after one o'clock, I came

unexpectedly to one of the city gates.  I knew then that I was very far

from the hotel.  The soldiers thought I wanted to leave the city, and

they sprang up and barred the way with their muskets.  I said:



"Hotel d'Europe!"



It was all the Italian I knew, and I was not certain whether that was

Italian or French.  The soldiers looked stupidly at each other and at me,

and shook their heads and took me into custody.  I said I wanted to go

home.  They did not understand me.  They took me into the guard-house and

searched me, but they found no sedition on me.  They found a small piece

of soap (we carry soap with us, now,) and I made them a present of it,

seeing that they regarded it as a curiosity.  I continued to say Hotel

d'Europe, and they continued to shake their heads, until at last a young

soldier nodding in the corner roused up and said something.  He said he

knew where the hotel was, I suppose, for the officer of the guard sent

him away with me.  We walked a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles, it

appeared to me, and then he got lost.  He turned this way and that, and

finally gave it up and signified that he was going to spend the remainder

of the morning trying to find the city gate again.  At that moment it

struck me that there was something familiar about the house over the way.

It was the hotel!



It was a happy thing for me that there happened to be a soldier there

that knew even as much as he did; for they say that the policy of the

government is to change the soldiery from one place to another constantly

and from country to city, so that they can not become acquainted with the

people and grow lax in their duties and enter into plots and conspiracies

with friends.  My experiences of Florence were chiefly unpleasant.  I

will change the subject.



At Pisa we climbed up to the top of the strangest structure the world has

any knowledge of--the Leaning Tower.  As every one knows, it is in the

neighborhood of one hundred and eighty feet high--and I beg to observe

that one hundred and eighty feet reach to about the hight of four

ordinary three-story buildings piled one on top of the other, and is a

very considerable altitude for a tower of uniform thickness to aspire to,

even when it stands upright--yet this one leans more than thirteen feet

out of the perpendicular.  It is seven hundred years old, but neither

history or tradition say whether it was built as it is, purposely, or

whether one of its sides has settled.  There is no record that it ever

stood straight up.  It is built of marble.  It is an airy and a beautiful

structure, and each of its eight stories is encircled by fluted columns,

some of marble and some of granite, with Corinthian capitals that were

handsome when they were new.  It is a bell tower, and in its top hangs a

chime of ancient bells.  The winding staircase within is dark, but one

always knows which side of the tower he is on because of his naturally

gravitating from one side to the other of the staircase with the rise or

dip of the tower.  Some of the stone steps are foot-worn only on one end;

others only on the other end; others only in the middle.  To look down

into the tower from the top is like looking down into a tilted well.  A

rope that hangs from the centre of the top touches the wall before it

reaches the bottom.  Standing on the summit, one does not feel altogether

comfortable when he looks down from the high side; but to crawl on your

breast to the verge on the lower side and try to stretch your neck out

far enough to see the base of the tower, makes your flesh creep, and

convinces you for a single moment in spite of all your philosophy, that

the building is falling.  You handle yourself very carefully, all the

time, under the silly impression that if it is not falling, your trifling

weight will start it unless you are particular not to "bear down" on it.



The Duomo, close at hand, is one of the finest cathedrals in Europe.  It

is eight hundred years old.  Its grandeur has outlived the high

commercial prosperity and the political importance that made it a

necessity, or rather a possibility.  Surrounded by poverty, decay and

ruin, it conveys to us a more tangible impression of the former greatness

of Pisa than books could give us.



The Baptistery, which is a few years older than the Leaning Tower, is a

stately rotunda, of huge dimensions, and was a costly structure.  In it

hangs the lamp whose measured swing suggested to Galileo the pendulum.

It looked an insignificant thing to have conferred upon the world of

science and mechanics such a mighty extension of their dominions as it

has.  Pondering, in its suggestive presence, I seemed to see a crazy

universe of swinging disks, the toiling children of this sedate parent.

He appeared to have an intelligent expression about him of knowing that

he was not a lamp at all; that he was a Pendulum; a pendulum disguised,

for prodigious and inscrutable purposes of his own deep devising, and not

a common pendulum either, but the old original patriarchal Pendulum--the

Abraham Pendulum of the world.



This Baptistery is endowed with the most pleasing echo of all the echoes

we have read of.  The guide sounded two sonorous notes, about half an

octave apart; the echo answered with the most enchanting, the most

melodious, the richest blending of sweet sounds that one can imagine.  It

was like a long-drawn chord of a church organ, infinitely softened by

distance.  I may be extravagant in this matter, but if this be the case

my ear is to blame--not my pen.  I am describing a memory--and one that

will remain long with me.



The peculiar devotional spirit of the olden time, which placed a higher

confidence in outward forms of worship than in the watchful guarding of

the heart against sinful thoughts and the hands against sinful deeds, and

which believed in the protecting virtues of inanimate objects made holy

by contact with holy things, is illustrated in a striking manner in one

of the cemeteries of Pisa.  The tombs are set in soil brought in ships

from the Holy Land ages ago.  To be buried in such ground was regarded by

the ancient Pisans as being more potent for salvation than many masses

purchased of the church and the vowing of many candles to the Virgin.



Pisa is believed to be about three thousand years old.  It was one of the

twelve great cities of ancient Etruria, that commonwealth which has left

so many monuments in testimony of its extraordinary advancement, and so

little history of itself that is tangible and comprehensible.  A Pisan

antiquarian gave me an ancient tear-jug which he averred was full four

thousand years old.  It was found among the ruins of one of the oldest of

the Etruscan cities.  He said it came from a tomb, and was used by some

bereaved family in that remote age when even the Pyramids of Egypt were

young, Damascus a village, Abraham a prattling infant and ancient Troy

not yet [dreampt] of, to receive the tears wept for some lost idol of a

household.  It spoke to us in a language of its own; and with a pathos

more tender than any words might bring, its mute eloquence swept down the

long roll of the centuries with its tale of a vacant chair, a familiar

footstep missed from the threshold, a pleasant voice gone from the

chorus, a vanished form!--a tale which is always so new to us, so

startling, so terrible, so benumbing to the senses, and behold how

threadbare and old it is!  No shrewdly-worded history could have brought

the myths and shadows of that old dreamy age before us clothed with human

flesh and warmed with human sympathies so vividly as did this poor little

unsentient vessel of pottery.



Pisa was a republic in the middle ages, with a government of her own,

armies and navies of her own and a great commerce.  She was a warlike

power, and inscribed upon her banners many a brilliant fight with Genoese

and Turks.  It is said that the city once numbered a population of four

hundred thousand; but her sceptre has passed from her grasp, now, her

ships and her armies are gone, her commerce is dead.  Her battle-flags

bear the mold and the dust of centuries, her marts are deserted, she has

shrunken far within her crumbling walls, and her great population has

diminished to twenty thousand souls.  She has but one thing left to boast

of, and that is not much, viz: she is the second city of Tuscany.



We reached Leghorn in time to see all we wished to see of it long before

the city gates were closed for the evening, and then came on board the

ship.



We felt as though we had been away from home an age.  We never entirely

appreciated, before, what a very pleasant den our state-room is; nor how

jolly it is to sit at dinner in one's own seat in one's own cabin, and

hold familiar conversation with friends in one's own language.  Oh, the

rare happiness of comprehending every single word that is said, and

knowing that every word one says in return will be understood as well!

We would talk ourselves to death, now, only there are only about ten

passengers out of the sixty-five to talk to.  The others are wandering,

we hardly know where.  We shall not go ashore in Leghorn.  We are

surfeited with Italian cities for the present, and much prefer to walk

the familiar quarterdeck and view this one from a distance.



The stupid magnates of this Leghorn government can not understand that so

large a steamer as ours could cross the broad Atlantic with no other

purpose than to indulge a party of ladies and gentlemen in a pleasure

excursion.  It looks too improbable.  It is suspicious, they think.

Something more important must be hidden behind it all.  They can not

understand it, and they scorn the evidence of the ship's papers.  They

have decided at last that we are a battalion of incendiary, blood-thirsty

Garibaldians in disguise!  And in all seriousness they have set a gun-

boat to watch the vessel night and day, with orders to close down on any

revolutionary movement in a twinkling!  Police boats are on patrol duty

about us all the time, and it is as much as a sailor's liberty is worth

to show himself in a red shirt.  These policemen follow the executive

officer's boat from shore to ship and from ship to shore and watch his

dark maneuvres with a vigilant eye.  They will arrest him yet unless he

assumes an expression of countenance that shall have less of carnage,

insurrection and sedition in it.  A visit paid in a friendly way to

General Garibaldi yesterday (by cordial invitation,) by some of our

passengers, has gone far to confirm the dread suspicions the government

harbors toward us.  It is thought the friendly visit was only the cloak

of a bloody conspiracy.  These people draw near and watch us when we

bathe in the sea from the ship's side.  Do they think we are communing

with a reserve force of rascals at the bottom?



It is said that we shall probably be quarantined at Naples.  Two or three

of us prefer not to run this risk.  Therefore, when we are rested, we

propose to go in a French steamer to Civita and from thence to Rome, and

by rail to Naples.  They do not quarantine the cars, no matter where they

got their passengers from.









CHAPTER XXV.



There are a good many things about this Italy which I do not understand--

and more especially I can not understand how a bankrupt Government can

have such palatial railroad depots and such marvels of turnpikes.  Why,

these latter are as hard as adamant, as straight as a line, as smooth as

a floor, and as white as snow.  When it is too dark to see any other

object, one can still see the white turnpikes of France and Italy; and

they are clean enough to eat from, without a table-cloth.  And yet no

tolls are charged.



As for the railways--we have none like them.  The cars slide as smoothly

along as if they were on runners.  The depots are vast palaces of cut

marble, with stately colonnades of the same royal stone traversing them

from end to end, and with ample walls and ceilings richly decorated with

frescoes.  The lofty gateways are graced with statues, and the broad

floors are all laid in polished flags of marble.



These things win me more than Italy's hundred galleries of priceless art

treasures, because I can understand the one and am not competent to

appreciate the other.  In the turnpikes, the railways, the depots, and

the new boulevards of uniform houses in Florence and other cities here, I

see the genius of Louis Napoleon, or rather, I see the works of that

statesman imitated.  But Louis has taken care that in France there shall

be a foundation for these improvements--money.  He has always the

wherewithal to back up his projects; they strengthen France and never

weaken her.  Her material prosperity is genuine.  But here the case is

different.  This country is bankrupt.  There is no real foundation for

these great works.  The prosperity they would seem to indicate is a

pretence.  There is no money in the treasury, and so they enfeeble her

instead of strengthening.  Italy has achieved the dearest wish of her

heart and become an independent State--and in so doing she has drawn an

elephant in the political lottery.  She has nothing to feed it on.

Inexperienced in government, she plunged into all manner of useless

expenditure, and swamped her treasury almost in a day.  She squandered

millions of francs on a navy which she did not need, and the first time

she took her new toy into action she got it knocked higher than

Gilderoy's kite--to use the language of the Pilgrims.



But it is an ill-wind that blows nobody good.  A year ago, when Italy saw

utter ruin staring her in the face and her greenbacks hardly worth the

paper they were printed on, her Parliament ventured upon a 'coup de main'

that would have appalled the stoutest of her statesmen under less

desperate circumstances.  They, in a manner, confiscated the domains of

the Church!  This in priest-ridden Italy!  This in a land which has

groped in the midnight of priestly superstition for sixteen hundred

years!  It was a rare good fortune for Italy, the stress of weather that

drove her to break from this prison-house.



They do not call it confiscating the church property.  That would sound

too harshly yet.  But it amounts to that.  There are thousands of

churches in Italy, each with untold millions of treasures stored away in

its closets, and each with its battalion of priests to be supported.

And then there are the estates of the Church--league on league of the

richest lands and the noblest forests in all Italy--all yielding immense

revenues to the Church, and none paying a cent in taxes to the State.

In some great districts the Church owns all the property--lands,

watercourses, woods, mills and factories.  They buy, they sell, they

manufacture, and since they pay no taxes, who can hope to compete with

them?



Well, the Government has seized all this in effect, and will yet seize it

in rigid and unpoetical reality, no doubt.  Something must be done to

feed a starving treasury, and there is no other resource in all Italy--

none but the riches of the Church.  So the Government intends to take to

itself a great portion of the revenues arising from priestly farms,

factories, etc., and also intends to take possession of the churches and

carry them on, after its own fashion and upon its own responsibility.

In a few instances it will leave the establishments of great pet churches

undisturbed, but in all others only a handful of priests will be retained

to preach and pray, a few will be pensioned, and the balance turned

adrift.



Pray glance at some of these churches and their embellishments, and see

whether the Government is doing a righteous thing or not.  In Venice,

today, a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants, there are twelve hundred

priests.  Heaven only knows how many there were before the Parliament

reduced their numbers.  There was the great Jesuit Church.  Under the old

regime it required sixty priests to engineer it--the Government does it

with five, now, and the others are discharged from service.  All about

that church wretchedness and poverty abound.  At its door a dozen hats

and bonnets were doffed to us, as many heads were humbly bowed, and as

many hands extended, appealing for pennies--appealing with foreign words

we could not understand, but appealing mutely, with sad eyes, and sunken

cheeks, and ragged raiment, that no words were needed to translate.  Then

we passed within the great doors, and it seemed that the riches of the

world were before us!  Huge columns carved out of single masses of

marble, and inlaid from top to bottom with a hundred intricate figures

wrought in costly verde antique; pulpits of the same rich materials,

whose draperies hung down in many a pictured fold, the stony fabric

counterfeiting the delicate work of the loom; the grand altar brilliant

with polished facings and balustrades of oriental agate, jasper, verde

antique, and other precious stones, whose names, even, we seldom hear--

and slabs of priceless lapis lazuli lavished every where as recklessly as

if the church had owned a quarry of it.  In the midst of all this

magnificence, the solid gold and silver furniture of the altar seemed

cheap and trivial.  Even the floors and ceilings cost a princely fortune.



Now, where is the use of allowing all those riches to lie idle, while

half of that community hardly know, from day to day, how they are going

to keep body and soul together?  And, where is the wisdom in permitting

hundreds upon hundreds of millions of francs to be locked up in the

useless trumpery of churches all over Italy, and the people ground to

death with taxation to uphold a perishing Government?



As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her

energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a

vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens

to accomplish it.  She is to-day one vast museum of magnificence and

misery.  All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could

hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals.  And

for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred--and rags and

vermin to match.  It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth.



Look at the grand Duomo of Florence--a vast pile that has been sapping

the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, and is not nearly

finished yet.  Like all other men, I fell down and worshipped it, but

when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking,

too suggestive, and I said, "O, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of

enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye?

Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?"



Three hundred happy, comfortable priests are employed in that Cathedral.



And now that my temper is up, I may as well go on and abuse every body I

can think of.  They have a grand mausoleum in Florence, which they built

to bury our Lord and Saviour and the Medici family in.  It sounds

blasphemous, but it is true, and here they act blasphemy.  The dead and

damned Medicis who cruelly tyrannized over Florence and were her curse

for over two hundred years, are salted away in a circle of costly vaults,

and in their midst the Holy Sepulchre was to have been set up.  The

expedition sent to Jerusalem to seize it got into trouble and could not

accomplish the burglary, and so the centre of the mausoleum is vacant

now.  They say the entire mausoleum was intended for the Holy Sepulchre,

and was only turned into a family burying place after the Jerusalem

expedition failed--but you will excuse me.  Some of those Medicis would

have smuggled themselves in sure.--What they had not the effrontery to

do, was not worth doing.  Why, they had their trivial, forgotten exploits

on land and sea pictured out in grand frescoes (as did also the ancient

Doges of Venice) with the Saviour and the Virgin throwing bouquets to

them out of the clouds, and the Deity himself applauding from his throne

in Heaven!  And who painted these things?  Why, Titian, Tintoretto, Paul

Veronese, Raphael--none other than the world's idols, the "old masters."



Andrea del Sarto glorified his princes in pictures that must save them

for ever from the oblivion they merited, and they let him starve.  Served

him right.  Raphael pictured such infernal villains as Catherine and

Marie de Medicis seated in heaven and conversing familiarly with the

Virgin Mary and the angels, (to say nothing of higher personages,) and

yet my friends abuse me because I am a little prejudiced against the old

masters--because I fail sometimes to see the beauty that is in their

productions.  I can not help but see it, now and then, but I keep on

protesting against the groveling spirit that could persuade those masters

to prostitute their noble talents to the adulation of such monsters as

the French, Venetian and Florentine Princes of two and three hundred

years ago, all the same.



I am told that the old masters had to do these shameful things for bread,

the princes and potentates being the only patrons of art.  If a grandly

gifted man may drag his pride and his manhood in the dirt for bread

rather than starve with the nobility that is in him untainted, the excuse

is a valid one.  It would excuse theft in Washingtons and Wellingtons,

and unchastity in women as well.



But somehow, I can not keep that Medici mausoleum out of my memory.  It

is as large as a church; its pavement is rich enough for the pavement of

a King's palace; its great dome is gorgeous with frescoes; its walls are

made of--what?  Marble?--plaster?--wood?--paper?  No.  Red porphyry--

verde antique--jasper--oriental agate--alabaster--mother-of-pearl--

chalcedony--red coral--lapis lazuli!  All the vast walls are made wholly

of these precious stones, worked in, and in and in together in elaborate

pattern s and figures, and polished till they glow like great mirrors

with the pictured splendors reflected from the dome overhead.  And before

a statue of one of those dead Medicis reposes a crown that blazes with

diamonds and emeralds enough to buy a ship-of-the-line, almost.  These

are the things the Government has its evil eye upon, and a happy thing it

will be for Italy when they melt away in the public treasury.



And now----.  However, another beggar approaches.  I will go out and

destroy him, and then come back and write another chapter of

vituperation.



Having eaten the friendless orphan--having driven away his comrades--

having grown calm and reflective at length--I now feel in a kindlier

mood.  I feel that after talking so freely about the priests and the

churches, justice demands that if I know any thing good about either I

ought to say it.  I have heard of many things that redound to the credit

of the priesthood, but the most notable matter that occurs to me now is

the devotion one of the mendicant orders showed during the prevalence of

the cholera last year.  I speak of the Dominican friars--men who wear a

coarse, heavy brown robe and a cowl, in this hot climate, and go

barefoot.  They live on alms altogether, I believe.  They must

unquestionably love their religion, to suffer so much for it.  When the

cholera was raging in Naples; when the people were dying by hundreds and

hundreds every day; when every concern for the public welfare was

swallowed up in selfish private interest, and every citizen made the

taking care of himself his sole object, these men banded themselves

together and went about nursing the sick and burying the dead.  Their

noble efforts cost many of them their lives.  They laid them down

cheerfully, and well they might.  Creeds mathematically precise, and

hair-splitting niceties of doctrine, are absolutely necessary for the

salvation of some kinds of souls, but surely the charity, the purity, the

unselfishness that are in the hearts of men like these would save their

souls though they were bankrupt in the true religion--which is ours.



One of these fat bare-footed rascals came here to Civita Vecchia with us

in the little French steamer.  There were only half a dozen of us in the

cabin.  He belonged in the steerage.  He was the life of the ship, the

bloody-minded son of the Inquisition!  He and the leader of the marine

band of a French man-of-war played on the piano and sang opera turn

about; they sang duets together; they rigged impromptu theatrical

costumes and gave us extravagant farces and pantomimes.  We got along

first-rate with the friar, and were excessively conversational, albeit he

could not understand what we said, and certainly he never uttered a word

that we could guess the meaning of.



This Civita Vecchia is the finest nest of dirt, vermin and ignorance we

have found yet, except that African perdition they call Tangier, which is

just like it.  The people here live in alleys two yards wide, which have

a smell about them which is peculiar but not entertaining.  It is well

the alleys are not wider, because they hold as much smell now as a person

can stand, and of course, if they were wider they would hold more, and

then the people would die.  These alleys are paved with stone, and

carpeted with deceased cats, and decayed rags, and decomposed vegetable-

tops, and remnants of old boots, all soaked with dish-water, and the

people sit around on stools and enjoy it.  They are indolent, as a

general thing, and yet have few pastimes.  They work two or three hours

at a time, but not hard, and then they knock off and catch flies.  This

does not require any talent, because they only have to grab--if they do

not get the one they are after, they get another.  It is all the same to

them.  They have no partialities.  Whichever one they get is the one they

want.



They have other kinds of insects, but it does not make them arrogant.

They are very quiet, unpretending people.  They have more of these kind

of things than other communities, but they do not boast.



They are very uncleanly--these people--in face, in person and dress.

When they see any body with a clean shirt on, it arouses their scorn.

The women wash clothes, half the day, at the public tanks in the streets,

but they are probably somebody else's.  Or may be they keep one set to

wear and another to wash; because they never put on any that have ever

been washed.  When they get done washing, they sit in the alleys and

nurse their cubs.  They nurse one ash-cat at a time, and the others

scratch their backs against the door-post and are happy.



All this country belongs to the Papal States.  They do not appear to have

any schools here, and only one billiard table.  Their education is at a

very low stage.  One portion of the men go into the military, another

into the priesthood, and the rest into the shoe-making business.



They keep up the passport system here, but so they do in Turkey.  This

shows that the Papal States are as far advanced as Turkey.  This fact

will be alone sufficient to silence the tongues of malignant

calumniators.  I had to get my passport vised for Rome in Florence, and

then they would not let me come ashore here until a policeman had

examined it on the wharf and sent me a permit.  They did not even dare to

let me take my passport in my hands for twelve hours, I looked so

formidable.  They judged it best to let me cool down.  They thought I

wanted to take the town, likely.  Little did they know me.  I wouldn't

have it.  They examined my baggage at the depot.  They took one of my

ablest jokes and read it over carefully twice and then read it backwards.

But it was too deep for them.  They passed it around, and every body

speculated on it awhile, but it mastered them all.



It was no common joke.  At length a veteran officer spelled it over

deliberately and shook his head three or four times and said that in his

opinion it was seditious.  That was the first time I felt alarmed.  I

immediately said I would explain the document, and they crowded around.

And so I explained and explained and explained, and they took notes of

all I said, but the more I explained the more they could not understand

it, and when they desisted at last, I could not even understand it

myself.  They said they believed it was an incendiary document, leveled

at the government.  I declared solemnly that it was not, but they only

shook their heads and would not be satisfied.  Then they consulted a good

while; and finally they confiscated it.  I was very sorry for this,

because I had worked a long time on that joke, and took a good deal of

pride in it, and now I suppose I shall never see it any more.  I suppose

it will be sent up and filed away among the criminal archives of Rome,

and will always be regarded as a mysterious infernal machine which would

have blown up like a mine and scattered the good Pope all around, but for

a miraculous providential interference.  And I suppose that all the time

I am in Rome the police will dog me about from place to place because

they think I am a dangerous character.



It is fearfully hot in Civita Vecchia.  The streets are made very narrow

and the houses built very solid and heavy and high, as a protection

against the heat.  This is the first Italian town I have seen which does

not appear to have a patron saint.  I suppose no saint but the one that

went up in the chariot of fire could stand the climate.



There is nothing here to see.  They have not even a cathedral, with

eleven tons of solid silver archbishops in the back room; and they do not

show you any moldy buildings that are seven thousand years old; nor any

smoke-dried old fire-screens which are chef d'oeuvres of Reubens or

Simpson, or Titian or Ferguson, or any of those parties; and they haven't

any bottled fragments of saints, and not even a nail from the true cross.

We are going to Rome.  There is nothing to see here.









CHAPTER XXVI.



What is it that confers the noblest delight?  What is that which swells a

man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring

to him?  Discovery!  To know that you are walking where none others have

walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that

you are breathing a virgin atmosphere.  To give birth to an idea--to

discover a great thought--an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of

a field that many a brain--plow had gone over before.  To find a new

planet, to invent a new hinge, to find the way to make the lightnings

carry your messages.  To be the first--that is the idea.  To do

something, say something, see something, before any body else--these are

the things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are

tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.  Morse, with his

first message, brought by his servant, the lightning; Fulton, in that

long-drawn century of suspense, when he placed his hand upon the

throttle-valve and lo, the steamboat moved; Jenner, when his patient with

the cow's virus in his blood, walked through the smallpox hospitals

unscathed; Howe, when the idea shot through his brain that for a hundred

and twenty generations the eye had been bored through the wrong end of

the needle; the nameless lord of art who laid down his chisel in some old

age that is forgotten, now, and gloated upon the finished Laocoon;

Daguerre, when he commanded the sun, riding in the zenith, to print the

landscape upon his insignificant silvered plate, and he obeyed; Columbus,

in the Pinta's shrouds, when he swung his hat above a fabled sea and

gazed abroad upon an unknown world!  These are the men who have really

lived--who have actually comprehended what pleasure is--who have crowded

long lifetimes of ecstasy into a single moment.



What is there in Rome for me to see that others have not seen before me?

What is there for me to touch that others have not touched?  What is

there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me

before it pass to others?  What can I discover?--Nothing.  Nothing

whatsoever.  One charm of travel dies here.  But if I were only a Roman!

--If, added to my own I could be gifted with modern Roman sloth, modern

Roman superstition, and modern Roman boundlessness of ignorance, what

bewildering worlds of unsuspected wonders I would discover!  Ah, if I

were only a habitant of the Campagna five and twenty miles from Rome!

Then I would travel.



I would go to America, and see, and learn, and return to the Campagna and

stand before my countrymen an illustrious discoverer.  I would say:



"I saw there a country which has no overshadowing Mother Church, and yet

the people survive.  I saw a government which never was protected by

foreign soldiers at a cost greater than that required to carry on the

government itself.  I saw common men and common women who could read;

I even saw small children of common country people reading from books;

if I dared think you would believe it, I would say they could write,

also.



"In the cities I saw people drinking a delicious beverage made of chalk

and water, but never once saw goats driven through their Broadway or

their Pennsylvania Avenue or their Montgomery street and milked at the

doors of the houses.  I saw real glass windows in the houses of even the

commonest people.  Some of the houses are not of stone, nor yet of

bricks; I solemnly swear they are made of wood.  Houses there will take

fire and burn, sometimes--actually burn entirely down, and not leave a

single vestige behind.  I could state that for a truth, upon my death-

bed.  And as a proof that the circumstance is not rare, I aver that they

have a thing which they call a fire-engine, which vomits forth great

streams of water, and is kept always in readiness, by night and by day,

to rush to houses that are burning.  You would think one engine would be

sufficient, but some great cities have a hundred; they keep men hired,

and pay them by the month to do nothing but put out fires.  For a certain

sum of money other men will insure that your house shall not burn down;

and if it burns they will pay you for it.  There are hundreds and

thousands of schools, and any body may go and learn to be wise, like a

priest.  In that singular country if a rich man dies a sinner, he is

damned; he can not buy salvation with money for masses.  There is really

not much use in being rich, there.  Not much use as far as the other

world is concerned, but much, very much use, as concerns this; because

there, if a man be rich, he is very greatly honored, and can become a

legislator, a governor, a general, a senator, no matter how ignorant an

ass he is--just as in our beloved Italy the nobles hold all the great

places, even though sometimes they are born noble idiots.  There, if a

man be rich, they give him costly presents, they ask him to feasts, they

invite him to drink complicated beverages; but if he be poor and in debt,

they require him to do that which they term to "settle."  The women put

on a different dress almost every day; the dress is usually fine, but

absurd in shape; the very shape and fashion of it changes twice in a

hundred years; and did I but covet to be called an extravagant falsifier,

I would say it changed even oftener.  Hair does not grow upon the

American women's heads; it is made for them by cunning workmen in the

shops, and is curled and frizzled into scandalous and ungodly forms.

Some persons wear eyes of glass which they see through with facility

perhaps, else they would not use them; and in the mouths of some are

teeth made by the sacrilegious hand of man.  The dress of the men is

laughably grotesque.  They carry no musket in ordinary life, nor no long-

pointed pole; they wear no wide green-lined cloak; they wear no peaked

black felt hat, no leathern gaiters reaching to the knee, no goat-skin

breeches with the hair side out, no hob-nailed shoes, no prodigious

spurs.  They wear a conical hat termed a "nail-kag;" a coat of saddest

black; a shirt which shows dirt so easily that it has to be changed every

month, and is very troublesome; things called pantaloons, which are held

up by shoulder straps, and on their feet they wear boots which are

ridiculous in pattern and can stand no wear.  Yet dressed in this

fantastic garb, these people laughed at my costume.  In that country,

books are so common that it is really no curiosity to see one.

Newspapers also.  They have a great machine which prints such things by

thousands every hour.



"I saw common men, there--men who were neither priests nor princes--who

yet absolutely owned the land they tilled.  It was not rented from the

church, nor from the nobles.  I am ready to take my oath of this.  In

that country you might fall from a third story window three several

times, and not mash either a soldier or a priest.--The scarcity of such

people is astonishing.  In the cities you will see a dozen civilians for

every soldier, and as many for every priest or preacher.  Jews, there,

are treated just like human beings, instead of dogs.  They can work at

any business they please; they can sell brand new goods if they want to;

they can keep drug-stores; they can practice medicine among Christians;

they can even shake hands with Christians if they choose; they can

associate with them, just the same as one human being does with another

human being; they don't have to stay shut up in one corner of the towns;

they can live in any part of a town they like best; it is said they even

have the privilege of buying land and houses, and owning them themselves,

though I doubt that, myself; they never have had to run races naked

through the public streets, against jackasses, to please the people in

carnival time; there they never have been driven by the soldiers into a

church every Sunday for hundreds of years to hear themselves and their

religion especially and particularly cursed; at this very day, in that

curious country, a Jew is allowed to vote, hold office, yea, get up on a

rostrum in the public street and express his opinion of the government if

the government don't suit him!  Ah, it is wonderful.  The common people

there know a great deal; they even have the effrontery to complain if

they are not properly governed, and to take hold and help conduct the

government themselves; if they had laws like ours, which give one dollar

of every three a crop produces to the government for taxes, they would

have that law altered: instead of paying thirty-three dollars in taxes,

out of every one hundred they receive, they complain if they have to pay

seven.  They are curious people.  They do not know when they are well

off.  Mendicant priests do not prowl among them with baskets begging for

the church and eating up their substance.  One hardly ever sees a

minister of the gospel going around there in his bare feet, with a

basket, begging for subsistence.  In that country the preachers are not

like our mendicant orders of friars--they have two or three suits of

clothing, and they wash sometimes.  In that land are mountains far higher

than the Alban mountains; the vast Roman Campagna, a hundred miles long

and full forty broad, is really small compared to the United States of

America; the Tiber, that celebrated river of ours, which stretches its

mighty course almost two hundred miles, and which a lad can scarcely

throw a stone across at Rome, is not so long, nor yet so wide, as the

American Mississippi--nor yet the Ohio, nor even the Hudson.  In America

the people are absolutely wiser and know much more than their

grandfathers did.  They do not plow with a sharpened stick, nor yet with

a three-cornered block of wood that merely scratches the top of the

ground.  We do that because our fathers did, three thousand years ago, I

suppose.  But those people have no holy reverence for their ancestors.

They plow with a plow that is a sharp, curved blade of iron, and it cuts

into the earth full five inches.  And this is not all.  They cut their

grain with a horrid machine that mows down whole fields in a day.  If I

dared, I would say that sometimes they use a blasphemous plow that works

by fire and vapor and tears up an acre of ground in a single hour--but--

but--I see by your looks that you do not believe the things I am telling

you.  Alas, my character is ruined, and I am a branded speaker of

untruths!"



Of course we have been to the monster Church of St. Peter, frequently.

I knew its dimensions.  I knew it was a prodigious structure.  I knew it

was just about the length of the capitol at Washington--say seven hundred

and thirty feet.  I knew it was three hundred and sixty-four feet wide,

and consequently wider than the capitol.  I knew that the cross on the

top of the dome of the church was four hundred and thirty-eight feet

above the ground, and therefore about a hundred or may be a hundred and

twenty-five feet higher than the dome of the capitol.--Thus I had one

gauge.  I wished to come as near forming a correct idea of how it was

going to look, as possible; I had a curiosity to see how much I would

err.  I erred considerably.  St. Peter's did not look nearly so large as

the capitol, and certainly not a twentieth part as beautiful, from the

outside.



When we reached the door, and stood fairly within the church, it was

impossible to comprehend that it was a very large building.  I had to

cipher a comprehension of it.  I had to ransack my memory for some more

similes.  St. Peter's is bulky.  Its height and size would represent two

of the Washington capitol set one on top of the other--if the capitol

were wider; or two blocks or two blocks and a half of ordinary buildings

set one on top of the other.  St. Peter's was that large, but it could

and would not look so.  The trouble was that every thing in it and about

it was on such a scale of uniform vastness that there were no contrasts

to judge by--none but the people, and I had not noticed them.  They were

insects.  The statues of children holding vases of holy water were

immense, according to the tables of figures, but so was every thing else

around them.  The mosaic pictures in the dome were huge, and were made of

thousands and thousands of cubes of glass as large as the end of my

little finger, but those pictures looked smooth, and gaudy of color, and

in good proportion to the dome.  Evidently they would not answer to

measure by.  Away down toward the far end of the church (I thought it was

really clear at the far end, but discovered afterward that it was in the

centre, under the dome,) stood the thing they call the baldacchino--a

great bronze pyramidal frame-work like that which upholds a mosquito bar.

It only looked like a considerably magnified bedstead--nothing more.  Yet

I knew it was a good deal more than half as high as Niagara Falls.  It

was overshadowed by a dome so mighty that its own height was snubbed.

The four great square piers or pillars that stand equidistant from each

other in the church, and support the roof, I could not work up to their

real dimensions by any method of comparison.  I knew that the faces of

each were about the width of a very large dwelling-house front, (fifty or

sixty feet,) and that they were twice as high as an ordinary three-story

dwelling, but still they looked small.  I tried all the different ways I

could think of to compel myself to understand how large St. Peter's was,

but with small success.  The mosaic portrait of an Apostle who was

writing with a pen six feet long seemed only an ordinary Apostle.



But the people attracted my attention after a while.  To stand in the

door of St. Peter's and look at men down toward its further extremity,

two blocks away, has a diminishing effect on them; surrounded by the

prodigious pictures and statues, and lost in the vast spaces, they look

very much smaller than they would if they stood two blocks away in the

open air.  I "averaged" a man as he passed me and watched him as he

drifted far down by the baldacchino and beyond--watched him dwindle to an

insignificant school-boy, and then, in the midst of the silent throng of

human pigmies gliding about him, I lost him.  The church had lately been

decorated, on the occasion of a great ceremony in honor of St. Peter, and

men were engaged, now, in removing the flowers and gilt paper from the

walls and pillars.  As no ladders could reach the great heights, the men

swung themselves down from balustrades and the capitals of pilasters by

ropes, to do this work.  The upper gallery which encircles the inner

sweep of the dome is two hundred and forty feet above the floor of the

church--very few steeples in America could reach up to it.  Visitors

always go up there to look down into the church because one gets the best

idea of some of the heights and distances from that point.  While we

stood on the floor one of the workmen swung loose from that gallery at

the end of a long rope.  I had not supposed, before, that a man could

look so much like a spider.  He was insignificant in size, and his rope

seemed only a thread.  Seeing that he took up so little space, I could

believe the story, then, that ten thousand troops went to St. Peter's,

once, to hear mass, and their commanding officer came afterward, and not

finding them, supposed they had not yet arrived.  But they were in the

church, nevertheless--they were in one of the transepts.  Nearly fifty

thousand persons assembled in St. Peter's to hear the publishing of the

dogma of the Immaculate Conception.  It is estimated that the floor of

the church affords standing room for--for a large number of people; I

have forgotten the exact figures.  But it is no matter--it is near

enough.



They have twelve small pillars, in St. Peter's, which came from Solomon's

Temple.  They have, also--which was far more interesting to me--a piece

of the true cross, and some nails, and a part of the crown of thorns.



Of course we ascended to the summit of the dome, and of course we also

went up into the gilt copper ball which is above it.--There was room

there for a dozen persons, with a little crowding, and it was as close

and hot as an oven.  Some of those people who are so fond of writing

their names in prominent places had been there before us--a million or

two, I should think.  From the dome of St. Peter's one can see every

notable object in Rome, from the Castle of St. Angelo to the Coliseum.

He can discern the seven hills upon which Rome is built.  He can see the

Tiber, and the locality of the bridge which Horatius kept "in the brave

days of old" when Lars Porsena attempted to cross it with his invading

host.  He can see the spot where the Horatii and the Curatii fought their

famous battle.  He can see the broad green Campagna, stretching away

toward the mountains, with its scattered arches and broken aqueducts of

the olden time, so picturesque in their gray ruin, and so daintily

festooned with vines.  He can see the Alban Mountains, the Appenines, the

Sabine Hills, and the blue Mediterranean.  He can see a panorama that is

varied, extensive, beautiful to the eye, and more illustrious in history

than any other in Europe.--About his feet is spread the remnant of a

city that once had a population of four million souls; and among its

massed edifices stand the ruins of temples, columns, and triumphal arches

that knew the Caesars, and the noonday of Roman splendor; and close by

them, in unimpaired strength, is a drain of arched and heavy masonry that

belonged to that older city which stood here before Romulus and Remus

were born or Rome thought of.  The Appian Way is here yet, and looking

much as it did, perhaps, when the triumphal processions of the Emperors

moved over it in other days bringing fettered princes from the confines

of the earth.  We can not see the long array of chariots and mail-clad

men laden with the spoils of conquest, but we can imagine the pageant,

after a fashion.  We look out upon many objects of interest from the dome

of St. Peter's; and last of all, almost at our feet, our eyes rest upon

the building which was once the Inquisition.  How times changed, between

the older ages and the new!  Some seventeen or eighteen centuries ago,

the ignorant men of Rome were wont to put Christians in the arena of the

Coliseum yonder, and turn the wild beasts in upon them for a show.  It

was for a lesson as well.  It was to teach the people to abhor and fear

the new doctrine the followers of Christ were teaching.  The beasts tore

the victims limb from limb and made poor mangled corpses of them in the

twinkling of an eye.  But when the Christians came into power, when the

holy Mother Church became mistress of the barbarians, she taught them the

error of their ways by no such means.  No, she put them in this pleasant

Inquisition and pointed to the Blessed Redeemer, who was so gentle and so

merciful toward all men, and they urged the barbarians to love him; and

they did all they could to persuade them to love and honor him--first by

twisting their thumbs out of joint with a screw; then by nipping their

flesh with pincers--red-hot ones, because they are the most comfortable

in cold weather; then by skinning them alive a little, and finally by

roasting them in public.  They always convinced those barbarians.  The

true religion, properly administered, as the good Mother Church used to

administer it, is very, very soothing.  It is wonderfully persuasive,

also.  There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts

and stirring up their finer feelings in an Inquisition.  One is the

system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened, civilized

people.  It is a great pity the playful Inquisition is no more.



I prefer not to describe St. Peter's.  It has been done before.  The

ashes of Peter, the disciple of the Saviour, repose in a crypt under the

baldacchino.  We stood reverently in that place; so did we also in the

Mamertine Prison, where he was confined, where he converted the soldiers,

and where tradition says he caused a spring of water to flow in order

that he might baptize them.  But when they showed us the print of Peter's

face in the hard stone of the prison wall and said he made that by

falling up against it, we doubted.  And when, also, the monk at the

church of San Sebastian showed us a paving-stone with two great

footprints in it and said that Peter's feet made those, we lacked

confidence again.  Such things do not impress one.  The monk said that

angels came and liberated Peter from prison by night, and he started away

from Rome by the Appian Way.  The Saviour met him and told him to go

back, which he did.  Peter left those footprints in the stone upon which

he stood at the time.  It was not stated how it was ever discovered whose

footprints they were, seeing the interview occurred secretly and at

night.  The print of the face in the prison was that of a man of common

size; the footprints were those of a man ten or twelve feet high.  The

discrepancy confirmed our unbelief.



We necessarily visited the Forum, where Caesar was assassinated, and also

the Tarpeian Rock.  We saw the Dying Gladiator at the Capitol, and I

think that even we appreciated that wonder of art; as much, perhaps, as

we did that fearful story wrought in marble, in the Vatican--the Laocoon.

And then the Coliseum.



Every body knows the picture of the Coliseum; every body recognizes at

once that "looped and windowed" band-box with a side bitten out.  Being

rather isolated, it shows to better advantage than any other of the

monuments of ancient Rome.  Even the beautiful Pantheon, whose pagan

altars uphold the cross, now, and whose Venus, tricked out in consecrated

gimcracks, does reluctant duty as a Virgin Mary to-day, is built about

with shabby houses and its stateliness sadly marred.  But the monarch of

all European ruins, the Coliseum, maintains that reserve and that royal

seclusion which is proper to majesty.  Weeds and flowers spring from its

massy arches and its circling seats, and vines hang their fringes from

its lofty walls.  An impressive silence broods over the monstrous

structure where such multitudes of men and women were wont to assemble in

other days.  The butterflies have taken the places of the queens of

fashion and beauty of eighteen centuries ago, and the lizards sun

themselves in the sacred seat of the Emperor.  More vividly than all the

written histories, the Coliseum tells the story of Rome's grandeur and

Rome's decay.  It is the worthiest type of both that exists.  Moving

about the Rome of to-day, we might find it hard to believe in her old

magnificence and her millions of population; but with this stubborn

evidence before us that she was obliged to have a theatre with sitting

room for eighty thousand persons and standing room for twenty thousand

more, to accommodate such of her citizens as required amusement, we find

belief less difficult.  The Coliseum is over one thousand six hundred

feet long, seven hundred and fifty wide, and one hundred and sixty-five

high.  Its shape is oval.



In America we make convicts useful at the same time that we punish them

for their crimes.  We farm them out and compel them to earn money for the

State by making barrels and building roads.  Thus we combine business

with retribution, and all things are lovely.  But in ancient Rome they

combined religious duty with pleasure.  Since it was necessary that the

new sect called Christians should be exterminated, the people judged it

wise to make this work profitable to the State at the same time, and

entertaining to the public.  In addition to the gladiatorial combats and

other shows, they sometimes threw members of the hated sect into the

arena of the Coliseum and turned wild beasts in upon them.  It is

estimated that seventy thousand Christians suffered martyrdom in this

place.  This has made the Coliseum holy ground, in the eyes of the

followers of the Saviour.  And well it might; for if the chain that bound

a saint, and the footprints a saint has left upon a stone he chanced to

stand upon, be holy, surely the spot where a man gave up his life for his

faith is holy.



Seventeen or eighteen centuries ago this Coliseum was the theatre of

Rome, and Rome was mistress of the world.  Splendid pageants were

exhibited here, in presence of the Emperor, the great ministers of State,

the nobles, and vast audiences of citizens of smaller consequence.

Gladiators fought with gladiators and at times with warrior prisoners

from many a distant land.  It was the theatre of Rome--of the world--and

the man of fashion who could not let fall in a casual and unintentional

manner something about "my private box at the Coliseum" could not move in

the first circles.  When the clothing-store merchant wished to consume

the corner grocery man with envy, he bought secured seats in the front

row and let the thing be known.  When the irresistible dry goods clerk

wished to blight and destroy, according to his native instinct, he got

himself up regardless of expense and took some other fellow's young lady

to the Coliseum, and then accented the affront by cramming her with ice

cream between the acts, or by approaching the cage and stirring up the

martyrs with his whalebone cane for her edification.  The Roman swell was

in his true element only when he stood up against a pillar and fingered

his moustache unconscious of the ladies; when he viewed the bloody

combats through an opera-glass two inches long; when he excited the envy

of provincials by criticisms which showed that he had been to the

Coliseum many and many a time and was long ago over the novelty of it;

when he turned away with a yawn at last and said,



"He a star! handles his sword like an apprentice brigand!  he'll do for

the country, may be, but he don't answer for the metropolis!"



Glad was the contraband that had a seat in the pit at the Saturday

matinee, and happy the Roman street-boy who ate his peanuts and guyed the

gladiators from the dizzy gallery.



For me was reserved the high honor of discovering among the rubbish of

the ruined Coliseum the only playbill of that establishment now extant.

There was a suggestive smell of mint-drops about it still, a corner of it

had evidently been chewed, and on the margin, in choice Latin, these

words were written in a delicate female hand:



     "Meet me on the Tarpeian Rock tomorrow evening, dear, at sharp

     seven.  Mother will be absent on a visit to her friends in the

     Sabine Hills.        CLAUDIA."



Ah, where is that lucky youth to-day, and where the little hand that

wrote those dainty lines?  Dust and ashes these seventeen hundred years!



Thus reads the bill:





                            ROMAN COLISEUM.

                        UNPARALLELED ATTRACTION!

               NEW PROPERTIES!  NEW LIONS!  NEW GLADIATORS!

                       Engagement of the renowned

                        MARCUS MARCELLUS VALERIAN!

                           FOR SIX NIGHTS ONLY!



The management beg leave to offer to the public an entertainment

surpassing in magnificence any thing that has heretofore been attempted

on any stage.  No expense has been spared to make the opening season one

which shall be worthy the generous patronage which the management feel

sure will crown their efforts.  The management beg leave to state that

they have succeeded in securing the services of a



                            GALAXY OF TALENT!

such as has not been beheld in Rome before.



The performance will commence this evening with a



                         GRAND BROADSWORD COMBAT!

between two young and promising amateurs and a celebrated Parthian

gladiator who has just arrived a prisoner from the Camp of Verus.



This will be followed by a grand moral



                          BATTLE-AX ENGAGEMENT!

between the renowned Valerian (with one hand tied behind him,) and two

gigantic savages from Britain.



After which the renowned Valerian (if he survive,) will fight with the

broad-sword,



                               LEFT HANDED!

against six Sophomores and a Freshman from the Gladiatorial College!



A long series of brilliant engagements will follow, in which the finest

talent of the Empire will take part



After which the celebrated Infant Prodigy known as



                          "THE YOUNG ACHILLES,"

will engage four tiger whelps in combat, armed with no other weapon than

his little spear!



The whole to conclude with a chaste and elegant



                            GENERAL SLAUGHTER!

In which thirteen African Lions and twenty-two Barbarian Prisoners will

war with each other until all are exterminated.



                           BOX OFFICE NOW OPEN.



Dress Circle One Dollar; Children and Servants half price.



An efficient police force will be on hand to preserve order and keep the

wild beasts from leaping the railings and discommoding the audience.



Doors open at 7; performance begins at 8.



POSITIVELY NO FREE LIST.



                          Diodorus Job Press.





It was as singular as it was gratifying that I was also so fortunate as

to find among the rubbish of the arena, a stained and mutilated copy of

the Roman Daily Battle-Ax, containing a critique upon this very

performance.  It comes to hand too late by many centuries to rank as

news, and therefore I translate and publish it simply to show how very

little the general style and phraseology of dramatic criticism has

altered in the ages that have dragged their slow length along since the

carriers laid this one damp and fresh before their Roman patrons:



     "THE OPENING SEASON.--COLISEUM.--Notwithstanding the inclemency of

     the weather, quite a respectable number of the rank and fashion of

     the city assembled last night to witness the debut upon metropolitan

     boards of the young tragedian who has of late been winning such

     golden opinions in the amphitheatres of the provinces.  Some sixty

     thousand persons were present, and but for the fact that the streets

     were almost impassable, it is fair to presume that the house would

     have been full.  His august Majesty, the Emperor Aurelius, occupied

     the imperial box, and was the cynosure of all eyes.  Many

     illustrious nobles and generals of the Empire graced the occasion

     with their presence, and not the least among them was the young

     patrician lieutenant whose laurels, won in the ranks of the

     "Thundering Legion," are still so green upon his brow.  The cheer

     which greeted his entrance was heard beyond the Tiber!



     "The late repairs and decorations add both to the comeliness and the

     comfort of the Coliseum.  The new cushions are a great improvement

     upon the hard marble seats we have been so long accustomed to.  The

     present management deserve well of the public.  They have restored

     to the Coliseum the gilding, the rich upholstery and the uniform

     magnificence which old Coliseum frequenters tell us Rome was so

     proud of fifty years ago.



     "The opening scene last night--the broadsword combat between two

     young amateurs and a famous Parthian gladiator who was sent here a

     prisoner--was very fine.  The elder of the two young gentlemen

     handled his weapon with a grace that marked the possession of

     extraordinary talent.  His feint of thrusting, followed instantly by

     a happily delivered blow which unhelmeted the Parthian, was received

     with hearty applause.  He was not thoroughly up in the backhanded

     stroke, but it was very gratifying to his numerous friends to know

     that, in time, practice would have overcome this defect.  However,

     he was killed.  His sisters, who were present, expressed

     considerable regret.  His mother left the Coliseum.  The other youth

     maintained the contest with such spirit as to call forth

     enthusiastic bursts of applause.  When at last he fell a corpse, his

     aged mother ran screaming, with hair disheveled and tears streaming

     from her eyes, and swooned away just as her hands were clutching at

     the railings of the arena.  She was promptly removed by the police.

     Under the circumstances the woman's conduct was pardonable, perhaps,

     but we suggest that such exhibitions interfere with the decorum

     which should be preserved during the performances, and are highly

     improper in the presence of the Emperor.  The Parthian prisoner

     fought bravely and well; and well he might, for he was fighting for

     both life and liberty.  His wife and children were there to nerve

     his arm with their love, and to remind him of the old home he should

     see again if he conquered.  When his second assailant fell, the

     woman clasped her children to her breast and wept for joy.  But it

     was only a transient happiness.  The captive staggered toward her

     and she saw that the liberty he had earned was earned too late.  He

     was wounded unto death.  Thus the first act closed in a manner which

     was entirely satisfactory.  The manager was called before the

     curtain and returned his thanks for the honor done him, in a speech

     which was replete with wit and humor, and closed by hoping that his

     humble efforts to afford cheerful and instructive entertainment

     would continue to meet with the approbation of the Roman public



     "The star now appeared, and was received with vociferous applause

     and the simultaneous waving of sixty thousand handkerchiefs.  Marcus

     Marcellus Valerian (stage name--his real name is Smith,) is a

     splendid specimen of physical development, and an artist of rare

     merit.  His management of the battle-ax is wonderful.  His gayety

     and his playfulness are irresistible, in his comic parts, and yet

     they are inferior to his sublime conceptions in the grave realm of

     tragedy.  When his ax was describing fiery circles about the heads

     of the bewildered barbarians, in exact time with his springing body

     and his prancing legs, the audience gave way to uncontrollable

     bursts of laughter; but when the back of his weapon broke the skull

     of one and almost in the same instant its edge clove the other's

     body in twain, the howl of enthusiastic applause that shook the

     building, was the acknowledgment of a critical assemblage that he

     was a master of the noblest department of his profession.  If he has

     a fault, (and we are sorry to even intimate that he has,) it is that

     of glancing at the audience, in the midst of the most exciting

     moments of the performance, as if seeking admiration.  The pausing

     in a fight to bow when bouquets are thrown to him is also in bad

     taste.  In the great left-handed combat he appeared to be looking at

     the audience half the time, instead of carving his adversaries; and

     when he had slain all the sophomores and was dallying with the

     freshman, he stooped and snatched a bouquet as it fell, and offered

     it to his adversary at a time when a blow was descending which

     promised favorably to be his death-warrant.  Such levity is proper

     enough in the provinces, we make no doubt, but it ill suits the

     dignity of the metropolis.  We trust our young friend will take

     these remarks in good part, for we mean them solely for his benefit.

     All who know us are aware that although we are at times justly

     severe upon tigers and martyrs, we never intentionally offend

     gladiators.



     "The Infant Prodigy performed wonders.  He overcame his four tiger

     whelps with ease, and with no other hurt than the loss of a portion

     of his scalp.  The General Slaughter was rendered with a

     faithfulness to details which reflects the highest credit upon the

     late participants in it.



     "Upon the whole, last night's performances shed honor not only upon

     the management but upon the city that encourages and sustains such

     wholesome and instructive entertainments.  We would simply suggest

     that the practice of vulgar young boys in the gallery of shying

     peanuts and paper pellets at the tigers, and saying "Hi-yi!" and

     manifesting approbation or dissatisfaction by such observations as

     "Bully for the lion!"  "Go it, Gladdy!"  "Boots!"  "Speech!"  "Take

     a walk round the block!"  and so on, are extremely reprehensible,

     when the Emperor is present, and ought to be stopped by the police.

     Several times last night, when the supernumeraries entered the arena

     to drag out the bodies, the young ruffians in the gallery shouted,

     "Supe!  supe!"  and also, "Oh, what a coat!"  and "Why don't you pad

     them shanks?"  and made use of various other remarks expressive of

     derision.  These things are very annoying to the audience.



     "A matinee for the little folks is promised for this afternoon, on

     which occasion several martyrs will be eaten by the tigers.  The

     regular performance will continue every night till further notice.

     Material change of programme every evening.  Benefit of Valerian,

     Tuesday, 29th, if he lives."





I have been a dramatic critic myself, in my time, and I was often

surprised to notice how much more I knew about Hamlet than Forrest did;

and it gratifies me to observe, now, how much better my brethren of

ancient times knew how a broad sword battle ought to be fought than the

gladiators.









CHAPTER XXVII.



So far, good.  If any man has a right to feel proud of himself, and

satisfied, surely it is I.  For I have written about the Coliseum, and

the gladiators, the martyrs, and the lions, and yet have never once used

the phrase "butchered to make a Roman holiday."  I am the only free white

man of mature age, who has accomplished this since Byron originated the

expression.



Butchered to make a Roman holiday sounds well for the first seventeen or

eighteen hundred thousand times one sees it in print, but after that it

begins to grow tiresome.  I find it in all the books concerning Rome--and

here latterly it reminds me of Judge Oliver.  Oliver was a young lawyer,

fresh from the schools, who had gone out to the deserts of Nevada to

begin life.  He found that country, and our ways of life, there, in those

early days, different from life in New England or Paris.  But he put on a

woollen shirt and strapped a navy revolver to his person, took to the

bacon and beans of the country, and determined to do in Nevada as Nevada

did.  Oliver accepted the situation so completely that although he must

have sorrowed over many of his trials, he never complained--that is, he

never complained but once.  He, two others, and myself, started to the

new silver mines in the Humboldt mountains--he to be Probate Judge of

Humboldt county, and we to mine.  The distance was two hundred miles.  It

was dead of winter.  We bought a two-horse wagon and put eighteen hundred

pounds of bacon, flour, beans, blasting-powder, picks and shovels in it;

we bought two sorry-looking Mexican "plugs," with the hair turned the

wrong way and more corners on their bodies than there are on the mosque

of Omar; we hitched up and started.  It was a dreadful trip.  But Oliver

did not complain.  The horses dragged the wagon two miles from town and

then gave out.  Then we three pushed the wagon seven miles, and Oliver

moved ahead and pulled the horses after him by the bits.  We complained,

but Oliver did not.  The ground was frozen, and it froze our backs while

we slept; the wind swept across our faces and froze our noses.  Oliver

did not complain.  Five days of pushing the wagon by day and freezing by

night brought us to the bad part of the journey--the Forty Mile Desert,

or the Great American Desert, if you please.  Still, this mildest-

mannered man that ever was, had not complained.  We started across at

eight in the morning, pushing through sand that had no bottom; toiling

all day long by the wrecks of a thousand wagons, the skeletons of ten

thousand oxen; by wagon-tires enough to hoop the Washington Monument to

the top, and ox-chains enough to girdle Long Island; by human graves;

with our throats parched always, with thirst; lips bleeding from the

alkali dust; hungry, perspiring, and very, very weary--so weary that when

we dropped in the sand every fifty yards to rest the horses, we could

hardly keep from going to sleep--no complaints from Oliver: none the next

morning at three o'clock, when we got across, tired to death.



Awakened two or three nights afterward at midnight, in a narrow canon, by

the snow falling on our faces, and appalled at the imminent danger of

being "snowed in," we harnessed up and pushed on till eight in the

morning, passed the "Divide" and knew we were saved.  No complaints.

Fifteen days of hardship and fatigue brought us to the end of the two

hundred miles, and the Judge had not complained.  We wondered if any

thing could exasperate him.  We built a Humboldt house.  It is done in

this way.  You dig a square in the steep base of the mountain, and set up

two uprights and top them with two joists.  Then you stretch a great

sheet of "cotton domestic" from the point where the joists join the hill-

side down over the joists to the ground; this makes the roof and the

front of the mansion; the sides and back are the dirt walls your digging

has left.  A chimney is easily made by turning up one corner of the roof.

Oliver was sitting alone in this dismal den, one night, by a sage-brush

fire, writing poetry; he was very fond of digging poetry out of himself--

or blasting it out when it came hard.  He heard an animal's footsteps

close to the roof; a stone or two and some dirt came through and fell by

him.  He grew uneasy and said "Hi!--clear out from there, can't you!"--

from time to time.  But by and by he fell asleep where he sat, and pretty

soon a mule fell down the chimney!  The fire flew in every direction, and

Oliver went over backwards.  About ten nights after that, he recovered

confidence enough to go to writing poetry again.  Again he dozed off to

sleep, and again a mule fell down the chimney.  This time, about half of

that side of the house came in with the mule.  Struggling to get up, the

mule kicked the candle out and smashed most of the kitchen furniture, and

raised considerable dust.  These violent awakenings must have been

annoying to Oliver, but he never complained.  He moved to a mansion on

the opposite side of the canon, because he had noticed the mules did not

go there.  One night about eight o'clock he was endeavoring to finish his

poem, when a stone rolled in--then a hoof appeared below the canvas--then

part of a cow--the after part.  He leaned back in dread, and shouted

"Hooy!  hooy!  get out of this!"  and the cow struggled manfully--lost

ground steadily--dirt and dust streamed down, and before Oliver could get

well away, the entire cow crashed through on to the table and made a

shapeless wreck of every thing!



Then, for the first time in his life, I think, Oliver complained.  He

said,



"This thing is growing monotonous!"



Then he resigned his judgeship and left Humboldt county.  "Butchered to

make a Roman holyday" has grown monotonous to me.



In this connection I wish to say one word about Michael Angelo

Buonarotti.  I used to worship the mighty genius of Michael Angelo--that

man who was great in poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture--great in

every thing he undertook.  But I do not want Michael Angelo for

breakfast--for luncheon--for dinner--for tea--for supper--for between

meals.  I like a change, occasionally.  In Genoa, he designed every

thing; in Milan he or his pupils designed every thing; he designed the

Lake of Como; in Padua, Verona, Venice, Bologna, who did we ever hear of,

from guides, but Michael Angelo?  In Florence, he painted every thing,

designed every thing, nearly, and what he did not design he used to sit

on a favorite stone and look at, and they showed us the stone.  In Pisa

he designed every thing but the old shot-tower, and they would have

attributed that to him if it had not been so awfully out of the

perpendicular.  He designed the piers of Leghorn and the custom house

regulations of Civita Vecchia.  But, here--here it is frightful.  He

designed St. Peter's; he designed the Pope; he designed the Pantheon, the

uniform of the Pope's soldiers, the Tiber, the Vatican, the Coliseum, the

Capitol, the Tarpeian Rock, the Barberini Palace, St. John Lateran, the

Campagna, the Appian Way, the Seven Hills, the Baths of Caracalla, the

Claudian Aqueduct, the Cloaca Maxima--the eternal bore designed the

Eternal City, and unless all men and books do lie, he painted every thing

in it!  Dan said the other day to the guide, "Enough, enough, enough!

Say no more!  Lump the whole thing!  say that the Creator made Italy from

designs by Michael Angelo!"



I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled

with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael

Angelo was dead.



But we have taken it out of this guide.  He has marched us through miles

of pictures and sculpture in the vast corridors of the Vatican; and

through miles of pictures and sculpture in twenty other palaces; he has

shown us the great picture in the Sistine Chapel, and frescoes enough to

frescoe the heavens--pretty much all done by Michael Angelo.  So with him

we have played that game which has vanquished so many guides for us--

imbecility and idiotic questions.  These creatures never suspect--they

have no idea of a sarcasm.



He shows us a figure and says: "Statoo brunzo."  (Bronze statue.)



We look at it indifferently and the doctor asks: "By Michael Angelo?"



"No--not know who."



Then he shows us the ancient Roman Forum.  The doctor asks: "Michael

Angelo?"



A stare from the guide.  "No--thousan' year before he is born."



Then an Egyptian obelisk.  Again: "Michael Angelo?"



"Oh, mon dieu, genteelmen!  Zis is two thousan' year before he is born!"



He grows so tired of that unceasing question sometimes, that he dreads to

show us any thing at all.  The wretch has tried all the ways he can think

of to make us comprehend that Michael Angelo is only responsible for the

creation of a part of the world, but somehow he has not succeeded yet.

Relief for overtasked eyes and brain from study and sightseeing is

necessary, or we shall become idiotic sure enough.  Therefore this guide

must continue to suffer.  If he does not enjoy it, so much the worse for

him.  We do.



In this place I may as well jot down a chapter concerning those necessary

nuisances, European guides.  Many a man has wished in his heart he could

do without his guide; but knowing he could not, has wished he could get

some amusement out of him as a remuneration for the affliction of his

society.  We accomplished this latter matter, and if our experience can

be made useful to others they are welcome to it.



Guides know about enough English to tangle every thing up so that a man

can make neither head or tail of it.  They know their story by heart--the

history of every statue, painting, cathedral or other wonder they show

you.  They know it and tell it as a parrot would--and if you interrupt,

and throw them off the track, they have to go back and begin over again.

All their lives long, they are employed in showing strange things to

foreigners and listening to their bursts of admiration.  It is human

nature to take delight in exciting admiration.  It is what prompts

children to say "smart" things, and do absurd ones, and in other ways

"show off" when company is present.  It is what makes gossips turn out in

rain and storm to go and be the first to tell a startling bit of news.

Think, then, what a passion it becomes with a guide, whose privilege it

is, every day, to show to strangers wonders that throw them into perfect

ecstasies of admiration!  He gets so that he could not by any possibility

live in a soberer atmosphere.  After we discovered this, we never went

into ecstasies any more--we never admired any thing--we never showed any

but impassible faces and stupid indifference in the presence of the

sublimest wonders a guide had to display.  We had found their weak point.

We have made good use of it ever since.  We have made some of those

people savage, at times, but we have never lost our own serenity.



The doctor asks the questions, generally, because he can keep his

countenance, and look more like an inspired idiot, and throw more

imbecility into the tone of his voice than any man that lives.  It comes

natural to him.



The guides in Genoa are delighted to secure an American party, because

Americans so much wonder, and deal so much in sentiment and emotion

before any relic of Columbus.  Our guide there fidgeted about as if he

had swallowed a spring mattress.  He was full of animation--full of

impatience.  He said:



"Come wis me, genteelmen!--come!  I show you ze letter writing by

Christopher Colombo!--write it himself!--write it wis his own hand!--

come!"



He took us to the municipal palace.  After much impressive fumbling of

keys and opening of locks, the stained and aged document was spread

before us.  The guide's eyes sparkled.  He danced about us and tapped the

parchment with his finger:



"What I tell you, genteelmen!  Is it not so?  See!  handwriting

Christopher Colombo!--write it himself!"



We looked indifferent--unconcerned.  The doctor examined the document

very deliberately, during a painful pause.--Then he said, without any

show of interest:



"Ah--Ferguson--what--what did you say was the name of the party who wrote

this?"



"Christopher Colombo! ze great Christopher Colombo!"



Another deliberate examination.



"Ah--did he write it himself; or--or how?"



"He write it himself!--Christopher Colombo!  He's own hand-writing, write

by himself!"



Then the doctor laid the document down and said:



"Why, I have seen boys in America only fourteen years old that could

write better than that."



"But zis is ze great Christo--"



"I don't care who it is!  It's the worst writing I ever saw.  Now you

musn't think you can impose on us because we are strangers.  We are not

fools, by a good deal.  If you have got any specimens of penmanship of

real merit, trot them out!--and if you haven't, drive on!"



We drove on.  The guide was considerably shaken up, but he made one more

venture.  He had something which he thought would overcome us.  He said:



"Ah, genteelmen, you come wis me!  I show you beautiful, O, magnificent

bust Christopher Colombo!--splendid, grand, magnificent!"



He brought us before the beautiful bust--for it was beautiful--and sprang

back and struck an attitude:



"Ah, look, genteelmen!--beautiful, grand,--bust Christopher Colombo!--

beautiful bust, beautiful pedestal!"



The doctor put up his eye-glass--procured for such occasions:



"Ah--what did you say this gentleman's name was?"



"Christopher Colombo!--ze great Christopher Colombo!"



"Christopher Colombo--the great Christopher Colombo.  Well, what did he

do?"



"Discover America!--discover America, Oh, ze devil!"



"Discover America.  No--that statement will hardly wash.  We are just

from America ourselves.  We heard nothing about it.  Christopher Colombo

--pleasant name--is--is he dead?"



"Oh, corpo di Baccho!--three hundred year!"



"What did he die of?"



"I do not know!--I can not tell."



"Small-pox, think?"



"I do not know, genteelmen!--I do not know what he die of!"



"Measles, likely?"



"May be--may be--I do not know--I think he die of somethings."



"Parents living?"



"Im-poseeeble!"



"Ah--which is the bust and which is the pedestal?"



"Santa Maria!--zis ze bust!--zis ze pedestal!"



"Ah, I see, I see--happy combination--very happy combination, indeed.

Is--is this the first time this gentleman was ever on a bust?"



That joke was lost on the foreigner--guides can not master the subtleties

of the American joke.



We have made it interesting for this Roman guide.  Yesterday we spent

three or four hours in the Vatican, again, that wonderful world of

curiosities.  We came very near expressing interest, sometimes--even

admiration--it was very hard to keep from it.  We succeeded though.

Nobody else ever did, in the Vatican museums.  The guide was bewildered--

non-plussed.  He walked his legs off, nearly, hunting up extraordinary

things, and exhausted all his ingenuity on us, but it was a failure; we

never showed any interest in any thing.  He had reserved what he

considered to be his greatest wonder till the last--a royal Egyptian

mummy, the best preserved in the world, perhaps.  He took us there.  He

felt so sure, this time, that some of his old enthusiasm came back to

him:



"See, genteelmen!--Mummy!  Mummy!"



The eye-glass came up as calmly, as deliberately as ever.



"Ah,--Ferguson--what did I understand you to say the gentleman's name

was?"



"Name?--he got no name!--Mummy!--'Gyptian mummy!"



"Yes, yes.  Born here?"



"No!  'Gyptian mummy!"



"Ah, just so.  Frenchman, I presume?"



"No!--not Frenchman, not Roman!--born in Egypta!"



"Born in Egypta.  Never heard of Egypta before.  Foreign locality,

likely.  Mummy--mummy.  How calm he is--how self-possessed.  Is, ah--is

he dead?"



"Oh, sacre bleu, been dead three thousan' year!"



The doctor turned on him savagely:



"Here, now, what do you mean by such conduct as this!  Playing us for

Chinamen because we are strangers and trying to learn!  Trying to impose

your vile second-hand carcasses on us!--thunder and lightning, I've a

notion to--to--if you've got a nice fresh corpse, fetch him out!--or by

George we'll brain you!"



We make it exceedingly interesting for this Frenchman.  However, he has

paid us back, partly, without knowing it.  He came to the hotel this

morning to ask if we were up, and he endeavored as well as he could to

describe us, so that the landlord would know which persons he meant.  He

finished with the casual remark that we were lunatics.  The observation

was so innocent and so honest that it amounted to a very good thing for a

guide to say.



There is one remark (already mentioned,) which never yet has failed to

disgust these guides.  We use it always, when we can think of nothing

else to say.  After they have exhausted their enthusiasm pointing out to

us and praising the beauties of some ancient bronze image or broken-

legged statue, we look at it stupidly and in silence for five, ten,

fifteen minutes--as long as we can hold out, in fact--and then ask:



"Is--is he dead?"



That conquers the serenest of them.  It is not what they are looking for

--especially a new guide.  Our Roman Ferguson is the most patient,

unsuspecting, long-suffering subject we have had yet.  We shall be sorry

to part with him.  We have enjoyed his society very much.  We trust he

has enjoyed ours, but we are harassed with doubts.



We have been in the catacombs.  It was like going down into a very deep

cellar, only it was a cellar which had no end to it.  The narrow passages

are roughly hewn in the rock, and on each hand as you pass along, the

hollowed shelves are carved out, from three to fourteen deep; each held a

corpse once.  There are names, and Christian symbols, and prayers, or

sentences expressive of Christian hopes, carved upon nearly every

sarcophagus.  The dates belong away back in the dawn of the Christian

era, of course.  Here, in these holes in the ground, the first Christians

sometimes burrowed to escape persecution.  They crawled out at night to

get food, but remained under cover in the day time.  The priest told us

that St. Sebastian lived under ground for some time while he was being

hunted; he went out one day, and the soldiery discovered and shot him to

death with arrows.  Five or six of the early Popes--those who reigned

about sixteen hundred years ago--held their papal courts and advised with

their clergy in the bowels of the earth.  During seventeen years--from

A.D. 235 to A.D. 252--the Popes did not appear above ground.  Four were

raised to the great office during that period.  Four years apiece, or

thereabouts.  It is very suggestive of the unhealthiness of underground

graveyards as places of residence.  One Pope afterward spent his entire

pontificate in the catacombs--eight years.  Another was discovered in

them and murdered in the episcopal chair.  There was no satisfaction in

being a Pope in those days.  There were too many annoyances.  There are

one hundred and sixty catacombs under Rome, each with its maze of narrow

passages crossing and recrossing each other and each passage walled to

the top with scooped graves its entire length.  A careful estimate makes

the length of the passages of all the catacombs combined foot up nine

hundred miles, and their graves number seven millions.  We did not go

through all the passages of all the catacombs.  We were very anxious to

do it, and made the necessary arrangements, but our too limited time

obliged us to give up the idea.  So we only groped through the dismal

labyrinth of St. Callixtus, under the Church of St. Sebastian.  In the

various catacombs are small chapels rudely hewn in the stones, and here

the early Christians often held their religious services by dim, ghostly

lights.  Think of mass and a sermon away down in those tangled caverns

under ground!



In the catacombs were buried St. Cecilia, St. Agnes, and several other of

the most celebrated of the saints.  In the catacomb of St. Callixtus, St.

Bridget used to remain long hours in holy contemplation, and St. Charles

Borromeo was wont to spend whole nights in prayer there.  It was also the

scene of a very marvelous thing.



     "Here the heart of St. Philip Neri was so inflamed with divine love

     as to burst his ribs."



I find that grave statement in a book published in New York in 1808, and

written by "Rev. William H. Neligan, LL.D., M. A., Trinity College,

Dublin; Member of the Archaeological Society of Great Britain."

Therefore, I believe it.  Otherwise, I could not.  Under other

circumstances I should have felt a curiosity to know what Philip had for

dinner.



This author puts my credulity on its mettle every now and then.  He tells

of one St. Joseph Calasanctius whose house in Rome he visited; he visited

only the house--the priest has been dead two hundred years.  He says the

Virgin Mary appeared to this saint.  Then he continues:



     "His tongue and his heart, which were found after nearly a century

     to be whole, when the body was disinterred before his canonization,

     are still preserved in a glass case, and after two centuries the

     heart is still whole.  When the French troops came to Rome, and when

     Pius VII. was carried away prisoner, blood dropped from it."



To read that in a book written by a monk far back in the Middle Ages,

would surprise no one; it would sound natural and proper; but when it is

seriously stated in the middle of the nineteenth century, by a man of

finished education, an LL.D., M. A., and an Archaeological magnate, it

sounds strangely enough.  Still, I would gladly change my unbelief for

Neligan's faith, and let him make the conditions as hard as he pleased.



The old gentleman's undoubting, unquestioning simplicity has a rare

freshness about it in these matter-of-fact railroading and telegraphing

days.  Hear him, concerning the church of Ara Coeli:



     "In the roof of the church, directly above the high altar, is

     engraved, 'Regina Coeli laetare Alleluia."  In the sixth century

     Rome was visited by a fearful pestilence.  Gregory the Great urged

     the people to do penance, and a general procession was formed.  It

     was to proceed from Ara Coeli to St. Peter's.  As it passed before

     the mole of Adrian, now the Castle of St. Angelo, the sound of

     heavenly voices was heard singing (it was Easter morn,) Regina

     Coeli, laetare!  alleluia!  quia quem meruisti portare, alleluia!

     resurrexit sicut dixit; alleluia!"  The Pontiff, carrying in his

     hands the portrait of the Virgin, (which is over the high altar and

     is said to have been painted by St. Luke,) answered, with the

     astonished people, 'Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia!'  At the same time

     an angel was seen to put up a sword in a scabbard, and the

     pestilence ceased on the same day.  There are four circumstances

     which 'CONFIRM'--[The italics are mine--M. T.]--this miracle: the

     annual procession which takes place in the western church on the

     feast of St Mark; the statue of St. Michael, placed on the mole of

     Adrian, which has since that time been called the Castle of St.

     Angelo; the antiphon Regina Coeli which the Catholic church sings

     during paschal time; and the inscription in the church."









CHAPTER XXVIII.



From the sanguinary sports of the Holy Inquisition; the slaughter of the

Coliseum; and the dismal tombs of the Catacombs, I naturally pass to the

picturesque horrors of the Capuchin Convent.  We stopped a moment in a

small chapel in the church to admire a picture of St. Michael vanquishing

Satan--a picture which is so beautiful that I can not but think it

belongs to the reviled "Renaissance," notwithstanding I believe they told

us one of the ancient old masters painted it--and then we descended into

the vast vault underneath.



Here was a spectacle for sensitive nerves!  Evidently the old masters had

been at work in this place.  There were six divisions in the apartment,

and each division was ornamented with a style of decoration peculiar to

itself--and these decorations were in every instance formed of human

bones!  There were shapely arches, built wholly of thigh bones; there

were startling pyramids, built wholly of grinning skulls; there were

quaint architectural structures of various kinds, built of shin bones and

the bones of the arm; on the wall were elaborate frescoes, whose curving

vines were made of knotted human vertebrae; whose delicate tendrils were

made of sinews and tendons; whose flowers were formed of knee-caps and

toe-nails.  Every lasting portion of the human frame was represented in

these intricate designs (they were by Michael Angelo, I think,) and there

was a careful finish about the work, and an attention to details that

betrayed the artist's love of his labors as well as his schooled ability.

I asked the good-natured monk who accompanied us, who did this?  And he

said, "We did it"--meaning himself and his brethren up stairs.  I could

see that the old friar took a high pride in his curious show.  We made

him talkative by exhibiting an interest we never betrayed to guides.



"Who were these people?"



"We--up stairs--Monks of the Capuchin order--my brethren."



"How many departed monks were required to upholster these six parlors?"



"These are the bones of four thousand."



"It took a long time to get enough?"



"Many, many centuries."



"Their different parts are well separated--skulls in one room, legs in

another, ribs in another--there would be stirring times here for a while

if the last trump should blow.  Some of the brethren might get hold of

the wrong leg, in the confusion, and the wrong skull, and find themselves

limping, and looking through eyes that were wider apart or closer

together than they were used to.  You can not tell any of these parties

apart, I suppose?"



"Oh, yes, I know many of them."



He put his finger on a skull.  "This was Brother Anselmo--dead three

hundred years--a good man."



He touched another.  "This was Brother Alexander--dead two hundred and

eighty years.  This was Brother Carlo--dead about as long."



Then he took a skull and held it in his hand, and looked reflectively

upon it, after the manner of the grave-digger when he discourses of

Yorick.



"This," he said, "was Brother Thomas.  He was a young prince, the scion

of a proud house that traced its lineage back to the grand old days of

Rome well nigh two thousand years ago.  He loved beneath his estate.  His

family persecuted him; persecuted the girl, as well.  They drove her from

Rome; he followed; he sought her far and wide; he found no trace of her.

He came back and offered his broken heart at our altar and his weary life

to the service of God.  But look you.  Shortly his father died, and

likewise his mother.  The girl returned, rejoicing.  She sought every

where for him whose eyes had used to look tenderly into hers out of this

poor skull, but she could not find him.  At last, in this coarse garb we

wear, she recognized him in the street.  He knew her.  It was too late.

He fell where he stood.  They took him up and brought him here.  He never

spoke afterward.  Within the week he died.  You can see the color of his

hair--faded, somewhat--by this thin shred that clings still to the

temple.  This, [taking up a thigh bone,] was his.  The veins of this

leaf in the decorations over your head, were his finger-joints, a hundred

and fifty years ago."



This business-like way of illustrating a touching story of the heart by

laying the several fragments of the lover before us and naming them, was

as grotesque a performance, and as ghastly, as any I ever witnessed.  I

hardly knew whether to smile or shudder.  There are nerves and muscles in

our frames whose functions and whose methods of working it seems a sort

of sacrilege to describe by cold physiological names and surgical

technicalities, and the monk's talk suggested to me something of this

kind.  Fancy a surgeon, with his nippers lifting tendons, muscles and

such things into view, out of the complex machinery of a corpse, and

observing, "Now this little nerve quivers--the vibration is imparted to

this muscle--from here it is passed to this fibrous substance; here its

ingredients are separated by the chemical action of the blood--one part

goes to the heart and thrills it with what is popularly termed emotion,

another part follows this nerve to the brain and communicates

intelligence of a startling character--the third part glides along this

passage and touches the spring connected with the fluid receptacles that

lie in the rear of the eye.  Thus, by this simple and beautiful process,

the party is informed that his mother is dead, and he weeps."  Horrible!



I asked the monk if all the brethren up stairs expected to be put in this

place when they died.  He answered quietly:



"We must all lie here at last."



See what one can accustom himself to.--The reflection that he must some

day be taken apart like an engine or a clock, or like a house whose owner

is gone, and worked up into arches and pyramids and hideous frescoes, did

not distress this monk in the least.  I thought he even looked as if he

were thinking, with complacent vanity, that his own skull would look well

on top of the heap and his own ribs add a charm to the frescoes which

possibly they lacked at present.



Here and there, in ornamental alcoves, stretched upon beds of bones, lay

dead and dried-up monks, with lank frames dressed in the black robes one

sees ordinarily upon priests.  We examined one closely.  The skinny hands

were clasped upon the breast; two lustreless tufts of hair stuck to the

skull; the skin was brown and sunken; it stretched tightly over the cheek

bones and made them stand out sharply; the crisp dead eyes were deep in

the sockets; the nostrils were painfully prominent, the end of the nose

being gone; the lips had shriveled away from the yellow teeth: and

brought down to us through the circling years, and petrified there, was a

weird laugh a full century old!



It was the jolliest laugh, but yet the most dreadful, that one can

imagine.  Surely, I thought, it must have been a most extraordinary joke

this veteran produced with his latest breath, that he has not got done

laughing at it yet.  At this moment I saw that the old instinct was

strong upon the boys, and I said we had better hurry to St. Peter's.

They were trying to keep from asking, "Is--is he dead?"



It makes me dizzy, to think of the Vatican--of its wilderness of statues,

paintings, and curiosities of every description and every age.  The "old

masters" (especially in sculpture,) fairly swarm, there.  I can not write

about the Vatican.  I think I shall never remember any thing I saw there

distinctly but the mummies, and the Transfiguration, by Raphael, and some

other things it is not necessary to mention now.  I shall remember the

Transfiguration partly because it was placed in a room almost by itself;

partly because it is acknowledged by all to be the first oil painting in

the world; and partly because it was wonderfully beautiful.  The colors

are fresh and rich, the "expression," I am told, is fine, the "feeling"

is lively, the "tone" is good, the "depth" is profound, and the width is

about four and a half feet, I should judge.  It is a picture that really

holds one's attention; its beauty is fascinating.  It is fine enough to

be a Renaissance.  A remark I made a while ago suggests a thought--and a

hope.  Is it not possible that the reason I find such charms in this

picture is because it is out of the crazy chaos of the galleries?  If

some of the others were set apart, might not they be beautiful?  If this

were set in the midst of the tempest of pictures one finds in the vast

galleries of the Roman palaces, would I think it so handsome?  If, up to

this time, I had seen only one "old master" in each palace, instead of

acres and acres of walls and ceilings fairly papered with them, might I

not have a more civilized opinion of the old masters than I have now?  I

think so.  When I was a school-boy and was to have a new knife, I could

not make up my mind as to which was the prettiest in the show-case, and I

did not think any of them were particularly pretty; and so I chose with a

heavy heart.  But when I looked at my purchase, at home, where no

glittering blades came into competition with it, I was astonished to see

how handsome it was.  To this day my new hats look better out of the shop

than they did in it with other new hats.  It begins to dawn upon me, now,

that possibly, what I have been taking for uniform ugliness in the

galleries may be uniform beauty after all.  I honestly hope it is, to

others, but certainly it is not to me.  Perhaps the reason I used to

enjoy going to the Academy of Fine Arts in New York was because there

were but a few hundred paintings in it, and it did not surfeit me to go

through the list.  I suppose the Academy was bacon and beans in the

Forty-Mile Desert, and a European gallery is a state dinner of thirteen

courses.  One leaves no sign after him of the one dish, but the thirteen

frighten away his appetite and give him no satisfaction.



There is one thing I am certain of, though.  With all the Michael

Angelos, the Raphaels, the Guidos and the other old masters, the sublime

history of Rome remains unpainted!  They painted Virgins enough, and

popes enough and saintly scarecrows enough, to people Paradise, almost,

and these things are all they did paint.  "Nero fiddling o'er burning

Rome," the assassination of Caesar, the stirring spectacle of a hundred

thousand people bending forward with rapt interest, in the coliseum, to

see two skillful gladiators hacking away each others' lives, a tiger

springing upon a kneeling martyr--these and a thousand other matters

which we read of with a living interest, must be sought for only in

books--not among the rubbish left by the old masters--who are no more, I

have the satisfaction of informing the public.



They did paint, and they did carve in marble, one historical scene, and

one only, (of any great historical consequence.) And what was it and why

did they choose it, particularly?  It was the Rape of the Sabines, and

they chose it for the legs and busts.



I like to look at statues, however, and I like to look at pictures, also

--even of monks looking up in sacred ecstacy, and monks looking down in

meditation, and monks skirmishing for something to eat--and therefore I

drop ill nature to thank the papal government for so jealously guarding

and so industriously gathering up these things; and for permitting me, a

stranger and not an entirely friendly one, to roam at will and unmolested

among them, charging me nothing, and only requiring that I shall behave

myself simply as well as I ought to behave in any other man's house.  I

thank the Holy Father right heartily, and I wish him long life and plenty

of happiness.



The Popes have long been the patrons and preservers of art, just as our

new, practical Republic is the encourager and upholder of mechanics.  In

their Vatican is stored up all that is curious and beautiful in art; in

our Patent Office is hoarded all that is curious or useful in mechanics.

When a man invents a new style of horse-collar or discovers a new and

superior method of telegraphing, our government issues a patent to him

that is worth a fortune; when a man digs up an ancient statue in the

Campagna, the Pope gives him a fortune in gold coin.  We can make

something of a guess at a man's character by the style of nose he carries

on his face.  The Vatican and the Patent Office are governmental noses,

and they bear a deal of character about them.



The guide showed us a colossal statue of Jupiter, in the Vatican, which

he said looked so damaged and rusty--so like the God of the Vagabonds--

because it had but recently been dug up in the Campagna.  He asked how

much we supposed this Jupiter was worth?  I replied, with intelligent

promptness, that he was probably worth about four dollars--may be four

and a half.  "A hundred thousand dollars!"  Ferguson said.  Ferguson

said, further, that the Pope permits no ancient work of this kind to

leave his dominions.  He appoints a commission to examine discoveries

like this and report upon the value; then the Pope pays the discoverer

one-half of that assessed value and takes the statue.  He said this

Jupiter was dug from a field which had just been bought for thirty-six

thousand dollars, so the first crop was a good one for the new farmer.

I do not know whether Ferguson always tells the truth or not, but I

suppose he does.  I know that an exorbitant export duty is exacted upon

all pictures painted by the old masters, in order to discourage the sale

of those in the private collections.  I am satisfied, also, that genuine

old masters hardly exist at all, in America, because the cheapest and

most insignificant of them are valued at the price of a fine farm.  I

proposed to buy a small trifle of a Raphael, myself, but the price of it

was eighty thousand dollars, the export duty would have made it

considerably over a hundred, and so I studied on it awhile and concluded

not to take it.



I wish here to mention an inscription I have seen, before I forget it:



"Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth TO MEN OF GOOD WILL!"  It is

not good scripture, but it is sound Catholic and human nature.



This is in letters of gold around the apsis of a mosaic group at the side

of the 'scala santa', church of St. John Lateran, the Mother and Mistress

of all the Catholic churches of the world.  The group represents the

Saviour, St. Peter, Pope Leo, St. Silvester, Constantine and Charlemagne.

Peter is giving the pallium to the Pope, and a standard to Charlemagne.

The Saviour is giving the keys to St. Silvester, and a standard to

Constantine.  No prayer is offered to the Saviour, who seems to be of

little importance any where in Rome; but an inscription below says,

"Blessed Peter, give life to Pope Leo and victory to king Charles."  It

does not say, "Intercede for us, through the Saviour, with the Father,

for this boon," but "Blessed Peter, give it us."



In all seriousness--without meaning to be frivolous--without meaning to

be irreverent, and more than all, without meaning to be blasphemous,--I

state as my simple deduction from the things I have seen and the things I

have heard, that the Holy Personages rank thus in Rome:



First--"The Mother of God"--otherwise the Virgin Mary.



Second--The Deity.



Third--Peter.



Fourth--Some twelve or fifteen canonized Popes and martyrs.



Fifth--Jesus Christ the Saviour--(but always as an infant in arms.)



I may be wrong in this--my judgment errs often, just as is the case with

other men's--but it is my judgment, be it good or bad.



Just here I will mention something that seems curious to me.  There are

no "Christ's Churches" in Rome, and no "Churches of the Holy Ghost," that

I can discover.  There are some four hundred churches, but about a fourth

of them seem to be named for the Madonna and St. Peter.  There are so

many named for Mary that they have to be distinguished by all sorts of

affixes, if I understand the matter rightly.  Then we have churches of

St. Louis; St. Augustine; St. Agnes; St. Calixtus; St. Lorenzo in Lucina;

St. Lorenzo in Damaso; St. Cecilia; St. Athanasius; St. Philip Neri; St.

Catherine, St. Dominico, and a multitude of lesser saints whose names are

not familiar in the world--and away down, clear out of the list of the

churches, comes a couple of hospitals: one of them is named for the

Saviour and the other for the Holy Ghost!



Day after day and night after night we have wandered among the crumbling

wonders of Rome; day after day and night after night we have fed upon the

dust and decay of five-and-twenty centuries--have brooded over them by

day and dreampt of them by night till sometimes we seemed moldering away

ourselves, and growing defaced and cornerless, and liable at any moment

to fall a prey to some antiquary and be patched in the legs, and

"restored" with an unseemly nose, and labeled wrong and dated wrong, and

set up in the Vatican for poets to drivel about and vandals to scribble

their names on forever and forevermore.



But the surest way to stop writing about Rome is to stop.  I wished to

write a real "guide-book" chapter on this fascinating city, but I could

not do it, because I have felt all the time like a boy in a candy-shop--

there was every thing to choose from, and yet no choice.  I have drifted

along hopelessly for a hundred pages of manuscript without knowing where

to commence.  I will not commence at all.  Our passports have been

examined.  We will go to Naples.









CHAPTER XXIX.



The ship is lying here in the harbor of Naples--quarantined.  She has

been here several days and will remain several more.  We that came by

rail from Rome have escaped this misfortune.  Of course no one is allowed

to go on board the ship, or come ashore from her.  She is a prison, now.

The passengers probably spend the long, blazing days looking out from

under the awnings at Vesuvius and the beautiful city--and in swearing.

Think of ten days of this sort of pastime!--We go out every day in a boat

and request them to come ashore.  It soothes them.  We lie ten steps from

the ship and tell them how splendid the city is; and how much better the

hotel fare is here than any where else in Europe; and how cool it is; and

what frozen continents of ice cream there are; and what a time we are

having cavorting about the country and sailing to the islands in the Bay.

This tranquilizes them.



                           ASCENT OF VESUVIUS.



I shall remember our trip to Vesuvius for many a day--partly because of

its sight-seeing experiences, but chiefly on account of the fatigue of

the journey.  Two or three of us had been resting ourselves among the

tranquil and beautiful scenery of the island of Ischia, eighteen miles

out in the harbor, for two days; we called it "resting," but I do not

remember now what the resting consisted of, for when we got back to

Naples we had not slept for forty-eight hours.  We were just about to go

to bed early in the evening, and catch up on some of the sleep we had

lost, when we heard of this Vesuvius expedition.  There was to be eight

of us in the party, and we were to leave Naples at midnight.  We laid in

some provisions for the trip, engaged carriages to take us to

Annunciation, and then moved about the city, to keep awake, till twelve.

We got away punctually, and in the course of an hour and a half arrived

at the town of Annunciation.  Annunciation is the very last place under

the sun.  In other towns in Italy the people lie around quietly and wait

for you to ask them a question or do some overt act that can be charged

for--but in Annunciation they have lost even that fragment of delicacy;

they seize a lady's shawl from a chair and hand it to her and charge a

penny; they open a carriage door, and charge for it--shut it when you get

out, and charge for it; they help you to take off a duster--two cents;

brush your clothes and make them worse than they were before--two cents;

smile upon you--two cents; bow, with a lick-spittle smirk, hat in hand--

two cents; they volunteer all information, such as that the mules will

arrive presently--two cents--warm day, sir--two cents--take you four

hours to make the ascent--two cents.  And so they go.  They crowd you--

infest you--swarm about you, and sweat and smell offensively, and look

sneaking and mean, and obsequious.  There is no office too degrading for

them to perform, for money.  I have had no opportunity to find out any

thing about the upper classes by my own observation, but from what I hear

said about them I judge that what they lack in one or two of the bad

traits the canaille have, they make up in one or two others that are

worse.  How the people beg!--many of them very well dressed, too.



I said I knew nothing against the upper classes by personal observation.

I must recall it!  I had forgotten.  What I saw their bravest and their

fairest do last night, the lowest multitude that could be scraped up out

of the purlieus of Christendom would blush to do, I think.  They

assembled by hundreds, and even thousands, in the great Theatre of San

Carlo, to do--what?  Why, simply, to make fun of an old woman--to deride,

to hiss, to jeer at an actress they once worshipped, but whose beauty is

faded now and whose voice has lost its former richness.  Every body spoke

of the rare sport there was to be.  They said the theatre would be

crammed, because Frezzolini was going to sing.  It was said she could not

sing well, now, but then the people liked to see her, anyhow.  And so we

went.  And every time the woman sang they hissed and laughed--the whole

magnificent house--and as soon as she left the stage they called her on

again with applause.  Once or twice she was encored five and six times in

succession, and received with hisses when she appeared, and discharged

with hisses and laughter when she had finished--then instantly encored

and insulted again!  And how the high-born knaves enjoyed it!  White-

kidded gentlemen and ladies laughed till the tears came, and clapped

their hands in very ecstacy when that unhappy old woman would come meekly

out for the sixth time, with uncomplaining patience, to meet a storm of

hisses!  It was the cruelest exhibition--the most wanton, the most

unfeeling.  The singer would have conquered an audience of American

rowdies by her brave, unflinching tranquillity (for she answered encore

after encore, and smiled and bowed pleasantly, and sang the best she

possibly could, and went bowing off, through all the jeers and hisses,

without ever losing countenance or temper:) and surely in any other land

than Italy her sex and her helplessness must have been an ample

protection to her--she could have needed no other.  Think what a

multitude of small souls were crowded into that theatre last night.  If

the manager could have filled his theatre with Neapolitan souls alone,

without the bodies, he could not have cleared less than ninety millions

of dollars.  What traits of character must a man have to enable him to

help three thousand miscreants to hiss, and jeer, and laugh at one

friendless old woman, and shamefully humiliate her?  He must have all the

vile, mean traits there are.  My observation persuades me (I do not like

to venture beyond my own personal observation,) that the upper classes of

Naples possess those traits of character.  Otherwise they may be very

good people; I can not say.





                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.



In this city of Naples, they believe in and support one of the

wretchedest of all the religious impostures one can find in Italy--the

miraculous liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius.  Twice a year the

priests assemble all the people at the Cathedral, and get out this vial

of clotted blood and let them see it slowly dissolve and become liquid--

and every day for eight days, this dismal farce is repeated, while the

priests go among the crowd and collect money for the exhibition.  The

first day, the blood liquefies in forty-seven minutes--the church is

crammed, then, and time must be allowed the collectors to get around:

after that it liquefies a little quicker and a little quicker, every day,

as the houses grow smaller, till on the eighth day, with only a few

dozens present to see the miracle, it liquefies in four minutes.



And here, also, they used to have a grand procession, of priests,

citizens, soldiers, sailors, and the high dignitaries of the City

Government, once a year, to shave the head of a made-up Madonna--a

stuffed and painted image, like a milliner's dummy--whose hair

miraculously grew and restored itself every twelve months.  They still

kept up this shaving procession as late as four or five years ago.  It

was a source of great profit to the church that possessed the remarkable

effigy, and the ceremony of the public barbering of her was always

carried out with the greatest possible eclat and display--the more the

better, because the more excitement there was about it the larger the

crowds it drew and the heavier the revenues it produced--but at last a

day came when the Pope and his servants were unpopular in Naples, and the

City Government stopped the Madonna's annual show.



There we have two specimens of these Neapolitans--two of the silliest

possible frauds, which half the population religiously and faithfully

believed, and the other half either believed also or else said nothing

about, and thus lent themselves to the support of the imposture.  I am

very well satisfied to think the whole population believed in those poor,

cheap miracles--a people who want two cents every time they bow to you,

and who abuse a woman, are capable of it, I think.





                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.



These Neapolitans always ask four times as much money as they intend to

take, but if you give them what they first demand, they feel ashamed of

themselves for aiming so low, and immediately ask more.  When money is to

be paid and received, there is always some vehement jawing and

gesticulating about it.  One can not buy and pay for two cents' worth of

clams without trouble and a quarrel.  One "course," in a two-horse

carriage, costs a franc--that is law--but the hackman always demands

more, on some pretence or other, and if he gets it he makes a new demand.

It is said that a stranger took a one-horse carriage for a course--

tariff, half a franc.  He gave the man five francs, by way of experiment.

He demanded more, and received another franc.  Again he demanded more,

and got a franc--demanded more, and it was refused.  He grew vehement--

was again refused, and became noisy.  The stranger said, "Well, give me

the seven francs again, and I will see what I can do"--and when he got

them, he handed the hackman half a franc, and he immediately asked for

two cents to buy a drink with.  It may be thought that I am prejudiced.



Perhaps I am.  I would be ashamed of myself if I were not.





                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.



Well, as I was saying, we got our mules and horses, after an hour and a

half of bargaining with the population of Annunciation, and started

sleepily up the mountain, with a vagrant at each mule's tail who

pretended to be driving the brute along, but was really holding on and

getting himself dragged up instead.  I made slow headway at first, but I

began to get dissatisfied at the idea of paying my minion five francs to

hold my mule back by the tail and keep him from going up the hill, and so

I discharged him.  I got along faster then.



We had one magnificent picture of Naples from a high point on the

mountain side.  We saw nothing but the gas lamps, of course--two-thirds

of a circle, skirting the great Bay--a necklace of diamonds glinting up

through the darkness from the remote distance--less brilliant than the

stars overhead, but more softly, richly beautiful--and over all the great

city the lights crossed and recrossed each other in many and many a

sparkling line and curve.  And back of the town, far around and abroad

over the miles of level campagna, were scattered rows, and circles, and

clusters of lights, all glowing like so many gems, and marking where a

score of villages were sleeping.  About this time, the fellow who was

hanging on to the tail of the horse in front of me and practicing all

sorts of unnecessary cruelty upon the animal, got kicked some fourteen

rods, and this incident, together with the fairy spectacle of the lights

far in the distance, made me serenely happy, and I was glad I started to

Vesuvius.





                  ASCENT OF MOUNT VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.



This subject will be excellent matter for a chapter, and tomorrow or next

day I will write it.









CHAPTER XXX.



                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.



"See Naples and die."  Well, I do not know that one would necessarily die

after merely seeing it, but to attempt to live there might turn out a

little differently.  To see Naples as we saw it in the early dawn from

far up on the side of Vesuvius, is to see a picture of wonderful beauty.

At that distance its dingy buildings looked white--and so, rank on rank

of balconies, windows and roofs, they piled themselves up from the blue

ocean till the colossal castle of St. Elmo topped the grand white pyramid

and gave the picture symmetry, emphasis and completeness.  And when its

lilies turned to roses--when it blushed under the sun's first kiss--it

was beautiful beyond all description.  One might well say, then, "See

Naples and die."  The frame of the picture was charming, itself.  In

front, the smooth sea--a vast mosaic of many colors; the lofty islands

swimming in a dreamy haze in the distance; at our end of the city the

stately double peak of Vesuvius, and its strong black ribs and seams of

lava stretching down to the limitless level campagna--a green carpet that

enchants the eye and leads it on and on, past clusters of trees, and

isolated houses, and snowy villages, until it shreds out in a fringe of

mist and general vagueness far away.  It is from the Hermitage, there on

the side of Vesuvius, that one should "see Naples and die."



But do not go within the walls and look at it in detail.  That takes away

some of the romance of the thing.  The people are filthy in their habits,

and this makes filthy streets and breeds disagreeable sights and smells.

There never was a community so prejudiced against the cholera as these

Neapolitans are.  But they have good reason to be.  The cholera generally

vanquishes a Neapolitan when it seizes him, because, you understand,

before the doctor can dig through the dirt and get at the disease the man

dies.  The upper classes take a sea-bath every day, and are pretty

decent.



The streets are generally about wide enough for one wagon, and how they

do swarm with people!  It is Broadway repeated in every street, in every

court, in every alley!  Such masses, such throngs, such multitudes of

hurrying, bustling, struggling humanity!  We never saw the like of it,

hardly even in New York, I think.  There are seldom any sidewalks, and

when there are, they are not often wide enough to pass a man on without

caroming on him.  So everybody walks in the street--and where the street

is wide enough, carriages are forever dashing along.  Why a thousand

people are not run over and crippled every day is a mystery that no man

can solve.  But if there is an eighth wonder in the world, it must be the

dwelling-houses of Naples.  I honestly believe a good majority of them

are a hundred feet high!  And the solid brick walls are seven feet

through.  You go up nine flights of stairs before you get to the "first"

floor.  No, not nine, but there or thereabouts.  There is a little bird-

cage of an iron railing in front of every window clear away up, up, up,

among the eternal clouds, where the roof is, and there is always somebody

looking out of every window--people of ordinary size looking out from the

first floor, people a shade smaller from the second, people that look a

little smaller yet from the third--and from thence upward they grow

smaller and smaller by a regularly graduated diminution, till the folks

in the topmost windows seem more like birds in an uncommonly tall martin-

box than any thing else.  The perspective of one of these narrow cracks

of streets, with its rows of tall houses stretching away till they come

together in the distance like railway tracks; its clothes-lines crossing

over at all altitudes and waving their bannered raggedness over the

swarms of people below; and the white-dressed women perched in balcony

railings all the way from the pavement up to the heavens--a perspective

like that is really worth going into Neapolitan details to see.





                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.



Naples, with its immediate suburbs, contains six hundred and twenty-five

thousand inhabitants, but I am satisfied it covers no more ground than an

American city of one hundred and fifty thousand.  It reaches up into the

air infinitely higher than three American cities, though, and there is

where the secret of it lies.  I will observe here, in passing, that the

contrasts between opulence and poverty, and magnificence and misery, are

more frequent and more striking in Naples than in Paris even.  One must

go to the Bois de Boulogne to see fashionable dressing, splendid

equipages and stunning liveries, and to the Faubourg St. Antoine to see

vice, misery, hunger, rags, dirt--but in the thoroughfares of Naples

these things are all mixed together.  Naked boys of nine years and the

fancy-dressed children of luxury; shreds and tatters, and brilliant

uniforms; jackass-carts and state-carriages; beggars, Princes and

Bishops, jostle each other in every street.  At six o'clock every

evening, all Naples turns out to drive on the 'Riviere di Chiaja',

(whatever that may mean;) and for two hours one may stand there and see

the motliest and the worst mixed procession go by that ever eyes beheld.

Princes (there are more Princes than policemen in Naples--the city is

infested with them)--Princes who live up seven flights of stairs and

don't own any principalities, will keep a carriage and go hungry; and

clerks, mechanics, milliners and strumpets will go without their dinners

and squander the money on a hack-ride in the Chiaja; the rag-tag and

rubbish of the city stack themselves up, to the number of twenty or

thirty, on a rickety little go-cart hauled by a donkey not much bigger

than a cat, and they drive in the Chiaja; Dukes and bankers, in sumptuous

carriages and with gorgeous drivers and footmen, turn out, also, and so

the furious procession goes.  For two hours rank and wealth, and

obscurity and poverty clatter along side by side in the wild procession,

and then go home serene, happy, covered with glory!



I was looking at a magnificent marble staircase in the King's palace, the

other day, which, it was said, cost five million francs, and I suppose it

did cost half a million, may be.  I felt as if it must be a fine thing to

live in a country where there was such comfort and such luxury as this.

And then I stepped out musing, and almost walked over a vagabond who was

eating his dinner on the curbstone--a piece of bread and a bunch of

grapes.  When I found that this mustang was clerking in a fruit

establishment (he had the establishment along with him in a basket,) at

two cents a day, and that he had no palace at home where he lived, I lost

some of my enthusiasm concerning the happiness of living in Italy.



This naturally suggests to me a thought about wages here.  Lieutenants in

the army get about a dollar a day, and common soldiers a couple of cents.

I only know one clerk--he gets four dollars a month.  Printers get six

dollars and a half a month, but I have heard of a foreman who gets

thirteen.



To be growing suddenly and violently rich, as this man is, naturally

makes him a bloated aristocrat.  The airs he puts on are insufferable.



And, speaking of wages, reminds me of prices of merchandise.  In Paris

you pay twelve dollars a dozen for Jouvin's best kid gloves; gloves of

about as good quality sell here at three or four dollars a dozen.  You

pay five and six dollars apiece for fine linen shirts in Paris; here and

in Leghorn you pay two and a half.  In Marseilles you pay forty dollars

for a first-class dress coat made by a good tailor, but in Leghorn you

can get a full dress suit for the same money.  Here you get handsome

business suits at from ten to twenty dollars, and in Leghorn you can get

an overcoat for fifteen dollars that would cost you seventy in New York.

Fine kid boots are worth eight dollars in Marseilles and four dollars

here.  Lyons velvets rank higher in America than those of Genoa.  Yet the

bulk of Lyons velvets you buy in the States are made in Genoa and

imported into Lyons, where they receive the Lyons stamp and are then

exported to America.  You can buy enough velvet in Genoa for twenty-five

dollars to make a five hundred dollar cloak in New York--so the ladies

tell me.  Of course these things bring me back, by a natural and easy

transition, to the



                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.



And thus the wonderful Blue Grotto is suggested to me.  It is situated on

the Island of Capri, twenty-two miles from Naples.  We chartered a little

steamer and went out there.  Of course, the police boarded us and put us

through a health examination, and inquired into our politics, before they

would let us land.  The airs these little insect Governments put on are

in the last degree ridiculous.  They even put a policeman on board of our

boat to keep an eye on us as long as we were in the Capri dominions.

They thought we wanted to steal the grotto, I suppose.  It was worth

stealing.  The entrance to the cave is four feet high and four feet wide,

and is in the face of a lofty perpendicular cliff--the sea-wall.  You

enter in small boats--and a tight squeeze it is, too.  You can not go in

at all when the tide is up.  Once within, you find yourself in an arched

cavern about one hundred and sixty feet long, one hundred and twenty

wide, and about seventy high.  How deep it is no man knows.  It goes down

to the bottom of the ocean.  The waters of this placid subterranean lake

are the brightest, loveliest blue that can be imagined.  They are as

transparent as plate glass, and their coloring would shame the richest

sky that ever bent over Italy.  No tint could be more ravishing, no

lustre more superb.  Throw a stone into the water, and the myriad of tiny

bubbles that are created flash out a brilliant glare like blue theatrical

fires.  Dip an oar, and its blade turns to splendid frosted silver,

tinted with blue.  Let a man jump in, and instantly he is cased in an

armor more gorgeous than ever kingly Crusader wore.



Then we went to Ischia, but I had already been to that island and tired

myself to death "resting" a couple of days and studying human villainy,

with the landlord of the Grande Sentinelle for a model.  So we went to

Procida, and from thence to Pozzuoli, where St. Paul landed after he

sailed from Samos.  I landed at precisely the same spot where St. Paul

landed, and so did Dan and the others.  It was a remarkable coincidence.

St. Paul preached to these people seven days before he started to Rome.



Nero's Baths, the ruins of Baiae, the Temple of Serapis; Cumae, where the

Cumaen Sybil interpreted the oracles, the Lake Agnano, with its ancient

submerged city still visible far down in its depths--these and a hundred

other points of interest we examined with critical imbecility, but the

Grotto of the Dog claimed our chief attention, because we had heard and

read so much about it.  Every body has written about the Grotto del Cane

and its poisonous vapors, from Pliny down to Smith, and every tourist has

held a dog over its floor by the legs to test the capabilities of the

place.  The dog dies in a minute and a half--a chicken instantly.  As a

general thing, strangers who crawl in there to sleep do not get up until

they are called.  And then they don't either.  The stranger that ventures

to sleep there takes a permanent contract.  I longed to see this grotto.

I resolved to take a dog and hold him myself; suffocate him a little, and

time him; suffocate him some more and then finish him.  We reached the

grotto at about three in the afternoon, and proceeded at once to make the

experiments.  But now, an important difficulty presented itself.  We had

no dog.



                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.



At the Hermitage we were about fifteen or eighteen hundred feet above the

sea, and thus far a portion of the ascent had been pretty abrupt.  For

the next two miles the road was a mixture--sometimes the ascent was

abrupt and sometimes it was not: but one characteristic it possessed all

the time, without failure--without modification--it was all

uncompromisingly and unspeakably infamous.  It was a rough, narrow trail,

and led over an old lava flow--a black ocean which was tumbled into a

thousand fantastic shapes--a wild chaos of ruin, desolation, and

barrenness--a wilderness of billowy upheavals, of furious whirlpools, of

miniature mountains rent asunder--of gnarled and knotted, wrinkled and

twisted masses of blackness that mimicked branching roots, great vines,

trunks of trees, all interlaced and mingled together: and all these weird

shapes, all this turbulent panorama, all this stormy, far-stretching

waste of blackness, with its thrilling suggestiveness of life, of action,

of boiling, surging, furious motion, was petrified!--all stricken dead

and cold in the instant of its maddest rioting!--fettered, paralyzed, and

left to glower at heaven in impotent rage for evermore!



Finally we stood in a level, narrow valley (a valley that had been

created by the terrific march of some old time irruption) and on either

hand towered the two steep peaks of Vesuvius.  The one we had to climb--

the one that contains the active volcano--seemed about eight hundred or

one thousand feet high, and looked almost too straight-up-and-down for

any man to climb, and certainly no mule could climb it with a man on his

back.  Four of these native pirates will carry you to the top in a sedan

chair, if you wish it, but suppose they were to slip and let you fall,--

is it likely that you would ever stop rolling?  Not this side of

eternity, perhaps.  We left the mules, sharpened our finger-nails, and

began the ascent I have been writing about so long, at twenty minutes to

six in the morning.  The path led straight up a rugged sweep of loose

chunks of pumice-stone, and for about every two steps forward we took, we

slid back one.  It was so excessively steep that we had to stop, every

fifty or sixty steps, and rest a moment.  To see our comrades, we had to

look very nearly straight up at those above us, and very nearly straight

down at those below.  We stood on the summit at last--it had taken an

hour and fifteen minutes to make the trip.



What we saw there was simply a circular crater--a circular ditch, if you

please--about two hundred feet deep, and four or five hundred feet wide,

whose inner wall was about half a mile in circumference.  In the centre

of the great circus ring thus formed, was a torn and ragged upheaval a

hundred feet high, all snowed over with a sulphur crust of many and many

a brilliant and beautiful color, and the ditch inclosed this like the

moat of a castle, or surrounded it as a little river does a little

island, if the simile is better.  The sulphur coating of that island was

gaudy in the extreme--all mingled together in the richest confusion were

red, blue, brown, black, yellow, white--I do not know that there was a

color, or shade of a color, or combination of colors, unrepresented--and

when the sun burst through the morning mists and fired this tinted

magnificence, it topped imperial Vesuvius like a jeweled crown!



The crater itself--the ditch--was not so variegated in coloring, but yet,

in its softness, richness, and unpretentious elegance, it was more

charming, more fascinating to the eye.  There was nothing "loud" about

its well-bred and well-creased look.  Beautiful?  One could stand and

look down upon it for a week without getting tired of it.  It had the

semblance of a pleasant meadow, whose slender grasses and whose velvety

mosses were frosted with a shining dust, and tinted with palest green

that deepened gradually to the darkest hue of the orange leaf, and

deepened yet again into gravest brown, then faded into orange, then into

brightest gold, and culminated in the delicate pink of a new-blown rose.

Where portions of the meadow had sunk, and where other portions had been

broken up like an ice-floe, the cavernous openings of the one, and the

ragged upturned edges exposed by the other, were hung with a lace-work of

soft-tinted crystals of sulphur that changed their deformities into

quaint shapes and figures that were full of grace and beauty.



The walls of the ditch were brilliant with yellow banks of sulphur and

with lava and pumice-stone of many colors.  No fire was visible any

where, but gusts of sulphurous steam issued silently and invisibly from a

thousand little cracks and fissures in the crater, and were wafted to our

noses with every breeze.  But so long as we kept our nostrils buried in

our handkerchiefs, there was small danger of suffocation.



Some of the boys thrust long slips of paper down into holes and set them

on fire, and so achieved the glory of lighting their cigars by the flames

of Vesuvius, and others cooked eggs over fissures in the rocks and were

happy.



The view from the summit would have been superb but for the fact that the

sun could only pierce the mists at long intervals.  Thus the glimpses we

had of the grand panorama below were only fitful and unsatisfactory.



                               THE DESCENT.



The descent of the mountain was a labor of only four minutes.  Instead of

stalking down the rugged path we ascended, we chose one which was bedded

knee-deep in loose ashes, and ploughed our way with prodigious strides

that would almost have shamed the performance of him of the seven-league

boots.



The Vesuvius of today is a very poor affair compared to the mighty

volcano of Kilauea, in the Sandwich Islands, but I am glad I visited it.

It was well worth it.



It is said that during one of the grand eruptions of Vesuvius it

discharged massy rocks weighing many tons a thousand feet into the air,

its vast jets of smoke and steam ascended thirty miles toward the

firmament, and clouds of its ashes were wafted abroad and fell upon the

decks of ships seven hundred and fifty miles at sea!  I will take the

ashes at a moderate discount, if any one will take the thirty miles of

smoke, but I do not feel able to take a commanding interest in the whole

story by myself.









CHAPTER XXXI.



                        THE BURIED CITY OF POMPEII



They pronounce it Pom-pay-e.  I always had an idea that you went down

into Pompeii with torches, by the way of damp, dark stairways, just as

you do in silver mines, and traversed gloomy tunnels with lava overhead

and something on either hand like dilapidated prisons gouged out of the

solid earth, that faintly resembled houses.  But you do nothing the kind.

Fully one-half of the buried city, perhaps, is completely exhumed and

thrown open freely to the light of day; and there stand the long rows of

solidly-built brick houses (roofless) just as they stood eighteen hundred

years ago, hot with the flaming sun; and there lie their floors, clean-

swept, and not a bright fragment tarnished or waiting of the labored

mosaics that pictured them with the beasts, and birds, and flowers which

we copy in perishable carpets to-day; and here are the Venuses, and

Bacchuses, and Adonises, making love and getting drunk in many-hued

frescoes on the walls of saloon and bed-chamber; and there are the narrow

streets and narrower sidewalks, paved with flags of good hard lava, the

one deeply rutted with the chariot-wheels, and the other with the passing

feet of the Pompeiians of by-gone centuries; and there are the bake-

shops, the temples, the halls of justice, the baths, the theatres--all

clean-scraped and neat, and suggesting nothing of the nature of a silver

mine away down in the bowels of the earth.  The broken pillars lying

about, the doorless doorways and the crumbled tops of the wilderness of

walls, were wonderfully suggestive of the "burnt district" in one of our

cities, and if there had been any charred timbers, shattered windows,

heaps of debris, and general blackness and smokiness about the place, the

resemblance would have been perfect.  But no--the sun shines as brightly

down on old Pompeii to-day as it did when Christ was born in Bethlehem,

and its streets are cleaner a hundred times than ever Pompeiian saw them

in her prime.  I know whereof I speak--for in the great, chief

thoroughfares (Merchant street and the Street of Fortune) have I not seen

with my own eyes how for two hundred years at least the pavements were

not repaired!--how ruts five and even ten inches deep were worn into the

thick flagstones by the chariot-wheels of generations of swindled tax-

payers?  And do I not know by these signs that Street Commissioners of

Pompeii never attended to their business, and that if they never mended

the pavements they never cleaned them?  And, besides, is it not the

inborn nature of Street Commissioners to avoid their duty whenever they

get a chance?  I wish I knew the name of the last one that held office in

Pompeii so that I could give him a blast.  I speak with feeling on this

subject, because I caught my foot in one of those ruts, and the sadness

that came over me when I saw the first poor skeleton, with ashes and lava

sticking to it, was tempered by the reflection that may be that party was

the Street Commissioner.



No--Pompeii is no longer a buried city.  It is a city of hundreds and

hundreds of roofless houses, and a tangled maze of streets where one

could easily get lost, without a guide, and have to sleep in some ghostly

palace that had known no living tenant since that awful November night of

eighteen centuries ago.



We passed through the gate which faces the Mediterranean, (called the

"Marine Gate,") and by the rusty, broken image of Minerva, still keeping

tireless watch and ward over the possessions it was powerless to save,

and went up a long street and stood in the broad court of the Forum of

Justice.  The floor was level and clean, and up and down either side was

a noble colonnade of broken pillars, with their beautiful Ionic and

Corinthian columns scattered about them.  At the upper end were the

vacant seats of the Judges, and behind them we descended into a dungeon

where the ashes and cinders had found two prisoners chained on that

memorable November night, and tortured them to death.  How they must have

tugged at the pitiless fetters as the fierce fires surged around them!



Then we lounged through many and many a sumptuous private mansion which

we could not have entered without a formal invitation in incomprehensible

Latin, in the olden time, when the owners lived there--and we probably

wouldn't have got it.  These people built their houses a good deal alike.

The floors were laid in fanciful figures wrought in mosaics of many-

colored marbles.  At the threshold your eyes fall upon a Latin sentence

of welcome, sometimes, or a picture of a dog, with the legend "Beware of

the Dog," and sometimes a picture of a bear or a faun with no inscription

at all.  Then you enter a sort of vestibule, where they used to keep the

hat-rack, I suppose; next a room with a large marble basin in the midst

and the pipes of a fountain; on either side are bedrooms; beyond the

fountain is a reception-room, then a little garden, dining-room, and so

forth and so on.  The floors were all mosaic, the walls were stuccoed, or

frescoed, or ornamented with bas-reliefs, and here and there were

statues, large and small, and little fish-pools, and cascades of

sparkling water that sprang from secret places in the colonnade of

handsome pillars that surrounded the court, and kept the flower-beds

fresh and the air cool.  Those Pompeiians were very luxurious in their

tastes and habits.  The most exquisite bronzes we have seen in Europe,

came from the exhumed cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and also the

finest cameos and the most delicate engravings on precious stones; their

pictures, eighteen or nineteen centuries old, are often much more

pleasing than the celebrated rubbish of the old masters of three

centuries ago.  They were well up in art.  From the creation of these

works of the first, clear up to the eleventh century, art seems hardly to

have existed at all--at least no remnants of it are left--and it was

curious to see how far (in some things, at any rate,) these old time

pagans excelled the remote generations of masters that came after them.

The pride of the world in sculptures seem to be the Laocoon and the Dying

Gladiator, in Rome.  They are as old as Pompeii, were dug from the earth

like Pompeii; but their exact age or who made them can only be

conjectured.  But worn, and cracked, without a history, and with the

blemishing stains of numberless centuries upon them, they still mutely

mock at all efforts to rival their perfections.



It was a quaint and curious pastime, wandering through this old silent

city of the dead--lounging through utterly deserted streets where

thousands and thousands of human beings once bought and sold, and walked

and rode, and made the place resound with the noise and confusion of

traffic and pleasure.  They were not lazy.  They hurried in those days.

We had evidence of that.  There was a temple on one corner, and it was a

shorter cut to go between the columns of that temple from one street to

the other than to go around--and behold that pathway had been worn deep

into the heavy flagstone floor of the building by generations of time-

saving feet!  They would not go around when it was quicker to go through.

We do that way in our cities.



Every where, you see things that make you wonder how old these old houses

were before the night of destruction came--things, too, which bring back

those long dead inhabitants and place the living before your eyes.  For

instance: The steps (two feet thick--lava blocks) that lead up out of the

school, and the same kind of steps that lead up into the dress circle of

the principal theatre, are almost worn through!  For ages the boys

hurried out of that school, and for ages their parents hurried into that

theatre, and the nervous feet that have been dust and ashes for eighteen

centuries have left their record for us to read to-day.  I imagined I

could see crowds of gentlemen and ladies thronging into the theatre, with

tickets for secured seats in their hands, and on the wall, I read the

imaginary placard, in infamous grammar, "POSITIVELY NO FREE LIST, EXCEPT

MEMBERS OF THE PRESS!"  Hanging about the doorway (I fancied,) were

slouchy Pompeiian street-boys uttering slang and profanity, and keeping a

wary eye out for checks.  I entered the theatre, and sat down in one of

the long rows of stone benches in the dress circle, and looked at the

place for the orchestra, and the ruined stage, and around at the wide

sweep of empty boxes, and thought to myself, "This house won't pay."  I

tried to imagine the music in full blast, the leader of the orchestra

beating time, and the "versatile" So-and-So (who had "just returned from

a most successful tour in the provinces to play his last and farewell

engagement of positively six nights only, in Pompeii, previous to his

departure for Herculaneum,") charging around the stage and piling the

agony mountains high--but I could not do it with such a "house" as that;

those empty benches tied my fancy down to dull reality.  I said, these

people that ought to be here have been dead, and still, and moldering to

dust for ages and ages, and will never care for the trifles and follies

of life any more for ever--"Owing to circumstances, etc., etc., there

will not be any performance to-night."  Close down the curtain.  Put out

the lights.



And so I turned away and went through shop after shop and store after

store, far down the long street of the merchants, and called for the

wares of Rome and the East, but the tradesmen were gone, the marts were

silent, and nothing was left but the broken jars all set in cement of

cinders and ashes: the wine and the oil that once had filled them were

gone with their owners.



In a bake-shop was a mill for grinding the grain, and the furnaces for

baking the bread: and they say that here, in the same furnaces, the

exhumers of Pompeii found nice, well baked loaves which the baker had not

found time to remove from the ovens the last time he left his shop,

because circumstances compelled him to leave in such a hurry.



In one house (the only building in Pompeii which no woman is now allowed

to enter,) were the small rooms and short beds of solid masonry, just as

they were in the old times, and on the walls were pictures which looked

almost as fresh as if they were painted yesterday, but which no pen could

have the hardihood to describe; and here and there were Latin

inscriptions--obscene scintillations of wit, scratched by hands that

possibly were uplifted to Heaven for succor in the midst of a driving

storm of fire before the night was done.



In one of the principal streets was a ponderous stone tank, and a water-

spout that supplied it, and where the tired, heated toilers from the

Campagna used to rest their right hands when they bent over to put their

lips to the spout, the thick stone was worn down to a broad groove an

inch or two deep.  Think of the countless thousands of hands that had

pressed that spot in the ages that are gone, to so reduce a stone that is

as hard as iron!



They had a great public bulletin board in Pompeii--a place where

announcements for gladiatorial combats, elections, and such things, were

posted--not on perishable paper, but carved in enduring stone.  One lady,

who, I take it, was rich and well brought up, advertised a dwelling or so

to rent, with baths and all the modern improvements, and several hundred

shops, stipulating that the dwellings should not be put to immoral

purposes.  You can find out who lived in many a house in Pompeii by the

carved stone door-plates affixed to them: and in the same way you can

tell who they were that occupy the tombs.  Every where around are things

that reveal to you something of the customs and history of this forgotten

people.  But what would a volcano leave of an American city, if it once

rained its cinders on it?  Hardly a sign or a symbol to tell its story.



In one of these long Pompeiian halls the skeleton of a man was found,

with ten pieces of gold in one hand and a large key in the other.  He had

seized his money and started toward the door, but the fiery tempest

caught him at the very threshold, and he sank down and died.  One more

minute of precious time would have saved him.  I saw the skeletons of a

man, a woman, and two young girls.  The woman had her hands spread wide

apart, as if in mortal terror, and I imagined I could still trace upon

her shapeless face something of the expression of wild despair that

distorted it when the heavens rained fire in these streets, so many ages

ago.  The girls and the man lay with their faces upon their arms, as if

they had tried to shield them from the enveloping cinders.  In one

apartment eighteen skeletons were found, all in sitting postures, and

blackened places on the walls still mark their shapes and show their

attitudes, like shadows.  One of them, a woman, still wore upon her

skeleton throat a necklace, with her name engraved upon it--JULIE DI

DIOMEDE.



But perhaps the most poetical thing Pompeii has yielded to modern

research, was that grand figure of a Roman soldier, clad in complete

armor; who, true to his duty, true to his proud name of a soldier of

Rome, and full of the stern courage which had given to that name its

glory, stood to his post by the city gate, erect and unflinching, till

the hell that raged around him burned out the dauntless spirit it could

not conquer.



We never read of Pompeii but we think of that soldier; we can not write

of Pompeii without the natural impulse to grant to him the mention he so

well deserves.  Let us remember that he was a soldier--not a policeman--

and so, praise him.  Being a soldier, he staid,--because the warrior

instinct forbade him to fly.  Had he been a policeman he would have

staid, also--because he would have been asleep.



There are not half a dozen flights of stairs in Pompeii, and no other

evidences that the houses were more than one story high.  The people did

not live in the clouds, as do the Venetians, the Genoese and Neapolitans

of to-day.



We came out from under the solemn mysteries of this city of the Venerable

Past--this city which perished, with all its old ways and its quaint old

fashions about it, remote centuries ago, when the Disciples were

preaching the new religion, which is as old as the hills to us now--and

went dreaming among the trees that grow over acres and acres of its still

buried streets and squares, till a shrill whistle and the cry of "All

aboard--last train for Naples!"  woke me up and reminded me that I

belonged in the nineteenth century, and was not a dusty mummy, caked with

ashes and cinders, eighteen hundred years old.  The transition was

startling.  The idea of a railroad train actually running to old dead

Pompeii, and whistling irreverently, and calling for passengers in the

most bustling and business-like way, was as strange a thing as one could

imagine, and as unpoetical and disagreeable as it was strange.



Compare the cheerful life and the sunshine of this day with the horrors

the younger Pliny saw here, the 9th of November, A.D. 79, when he was so

bravely striving to remove his mother out of reach of harm, while she

begged him, with all a mother's unselfishness, to leave her to perish and

save himself.



     'By this time the murky darkness had so increased that one might

     have believed himself abroad in a black and moonless night, or in a

     chamber where all the lights had been extinguished.  On every hand

     was heard the complaints of women, the wailing of children, and the

     cries of men.  One called his father, another his son, and another

     his wife, and only by their voices could they know each other.  Many

     in their despair begged that death would come and end their

     distress.



     "Some implored the gods to succor them, and some believed that this

     night was the last, the eternal night which should engulf the

     universe!



     "Even so it seemed to me--and I consoled myself for the coming death

     with the reflection: BEHOLD, THE WORLD IS PASSING AWAY!"



                              * * * * * * * *



After browsing among the stately ruins of Rome, of Baiae, of Pompeii, and

after glancing down the long marble ranks of battered and nameless

imperial heads that stretch down the corridors of the Vatican, one thing

strikes me with a force it never had before: the unsubstantial, unlasting

character of fame.  Men lived long lives, in the olden time, and

struggled feverishly through them, toiling like slaves, in oratory, in

generalship, or in literature, and then laid them down and died, happy in

the possession of an enduring history and a deathless name.  Well, twenty

little centuries flutter away, and what is left of these things?  A crazy

inscription on a block of stone, which snuffy antiquaries bother over and

tangle up and make nothing out of but a bare name (which they spell

wrong)--no history, no tradition, no poetry--nothing that can give it

even a passing interest.  What may be left of General Grant's great name

forty centuries hence?  This--in the Encyclopedia for A. D. 5868,

possibly:



     "URIAH S. (or Z.) GRAUNT--popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec

     provinces of the United States of British America.  Some authors say

     flourished about A. D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states

     that he was a cotemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and

     flourished about A. D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan

     war instead of before it.  He wrote 'Rock me to Sleep, Mother.'"



These thoughts sadden me.  I will to bed.









CHAPTER XXXII.



Home, again!  For the first time, in many weeks, the ship's entire family

met and shook hands on the quarter-deck.  They had gathered from many

points of the compass and from many lands, but not one was missing; there

was no tale of sickness or death among the flock to dampen the pleasure

of the reunion.  Once more there was a full audience on deck to listen to

the sailors' chorus as they got the anchor up, and to wave an adieu to

the land as we sped away from Naples.  The seats were full at dinner

again, the domino parties were complete, and the life and bustle on the

upper deck in the fine moonlight at night was like old times--old times

that had been gone weeks only, but yet they were weeks so crowded with

incident, adventure and excitement, that they seemed almost like years.

There was no lack of cheerfulness on board the Quaker City.  For once,

her title was a misnomer.



At seven in the evening, with the western horizon all golden from the

sunken sun, and specked with distant ships, the full moon sailing high

over head, the dark blue of the sea under foot, and a strange sort of

twilight affected by all these different lights and colors around us and

about us, we sighted superb Stromboli.  With what majesty the monarch

held his lonely state above the level sea!  Distance clothed him in a

purple gloom, and added a veil of shimmering mist that so softened his

rugged features that we seemed to see him through a web of silver gauze.

His torch was out; his fires were smoldering; a tall column of smoke that

rose up and lost itself in the growing moonlight was all the sign he gave

that he was a living Autocrat of the Sea and not the spectre of a dead

one.



At two in the morning we swept through the Straits of Messina, and so

bright was the moonlight that Italy on the one hand and Sicily on the

other seemed almost as distinctly visible as though we looked at them

from the middle of a street we were traversing.  The city of Messina,

milk-white, and starred and spangled all over with gaslights, was a fairy

spectacle.  A great party of us were on deck smoking and making a noise,

and waiting to see famous Scylla and Charybdis.  And presently the Oracle

stepped out with his eternal spy-glass and squared himself on the deck

like another Colossus of Rhodes.  It was a surprise to see him abroad at

such an hour.  Nobody supposed he cared anything about an old fable like

that of Scylla and Charybdis.  One of the boys said:



"Hello, doctor, what are you doing up here at this time of night?--What

do you want to see this place for?"



"What do I want to see this place for?  Young man, little do you know me,

or you wouldn't ask such a question.  I wish to see all the places that's

mentioned in the Bible."



"Stuff--this place isn't mentioned in the Bible."



"It ain't mentioned in the Bible!--this place ain't--well now, what place

is this, since you know so much about it?"



"Why it's Scylla and Charybdis."



"Scylla and Cha--confound it, I thought it was Sodom and Gomorrah!"



And he closed up his glass and went below.  The above is the ship story.

Its plausibility is marred a little by the fact that the Oracle was not a

biblical student, and did not spend much of his time instructing himself

about Scriptural localities.--They say the Oracle complains, in this hot

weather, lately, that the only beverage in the ship that is passable, is

the butter.  He did not mean butter, of course, but inasmuch as that

article remains in a melted state now since we are out of ice, it is fair

to give him the credit of getting one long word in the right place,

anyhow, for once in his life.  He said, in Rome, that the Pope was a

noble-looking old man, but he never did think much of his Iliad.



We spent one pleasant day skirting along the Isles of Greece.  They are

very mountainous.  Their prevailing tints are gray and brown, approaching

to red.  Little white villages surrounded by trees, nestle in the valleys

or roost upon the lofty perpendicular sea-walls.



We had one fine sunset--a rich carmine flush that suffused the western

sky and cast a ruddy glow far over the sea.--Fine sunsets seem to be

rare in this part of the world--or at least, striking ones.  They are

soft, sensuous, lovely--they are exquisite refined, effeminate, but we

have seen no sunsets here yet like the gorgeous conflagrations that flame

in the track of the sinking sun in our high northern latitudes.



But what were sunsets to us, with the wild excitement upon us of

approaching the most renowned of cities!  What cared we for outward

visions, when Agamemnon, Achilles, and a thousand other heroes of the

great Past were marching in ghostly procession through our fancies?  What

were sunsets to us, who were about to live and breathe and walk in actual

Athens; yea, and go far down into the dead centuries and bid in person

for the slaves, Diogenes and Plato, in the public market-place, or gossip

with the neighbors about the siege of Troy or the splendid deeds of

Marathon?  We scorned to consider sunsets.



We arrived, and entered the ancient harbor of the Piraeus at last.  We

dropped anchor within half a mile of the village.  Away off, across the

undulating Plain of Attica, could be seen a little square-topped hill

with a something on it, which our glasses soon discovered to be the

ruined edifices of the citadel of the Athenians, and most prominent among

them loomed the venerable Parthenon.  So exquisitely clear and pure is

this wonderful atmosphere that every column of the noble structure was

discernible through the telescope, and even the smaller ruins about it

assumed some semblance of shape.  This at a distance of five or six

miles.  In the valley, near the Acropolis, (the square-topped hill before

spoken of,) Athens itself could be vaguely made out with an ordinary

lorgnette.  Every body was anxious to get ashore and visit these classic

localities as quickly as possible.  No land we had yet seen had aroused

such universal interest among the passengers.



But bad news came.  The commandant of the Piraeus came in his boat, and

said we must either depart or else get outside the harbor and remain

imprisoned in our ship, under rigid quarantine, for eleven days!  So we

took up the anchor and moved outside, to lie a dozen hours or so, taking

in supplies, and then sail for Constantinople.  It was the bitterest

disappointment we had yet experienced.  To lie a whole day in sight of

the Acropolis, and yet be obliged to go away without visiting Athens!

Disappointment was hardly a strong enough word to describe the

circumstances.



All hands were on deck, all the afternoon, with books and maps and

glasses, trying to determine which "narrow rocky ridge" was the

Areopagus, which sloping hill the Pnyx, which elevation the Museum Hill,

and so on.  And we got things confused.  Discussion became heated, and

party spirit ran high.  Church members were gazing with emotion upon a

hill which they said was the one St. Paul preached from, and another

faction claimed that that hill was Hymettus, and another that it was

Pentelicon!  After all the trouble, we could be certain of only one

thing--the square-topped hill was the Acropolis, and the grand ruin that

crowned it was the Parthenon, whose picture we knew in infancy in the

school books.



We inquired of every body who came near the ship, whether there were

guards in the Piraeus, whether they were strict, what the chances were of

capture should any of us slip ashore, and in case any of us made the

venture and were caught, what would be probably done to us?  The answers

were discouraging: There was a strong guard or police force; the Piraeus

was a small town, and any stranger seen in it would surely attract

attention--capture would be certain.  The commandant said the punishment

would be "heavy;" when asked "how heavy?" he said it would be "very

severe"--that was all we could get out of him.



At eleven o'clock at night, when most of the ship's company were abed,

four of us stole softly ashore in a small boat, a clouded moon favoring

the enterprise, and started two and two, and far apart, over a low hill,

intending to go clear around the Piraeus, out of the range of its police.

Picking our way so stealthily over that rocky, nettle-grown eminence,

made me feel a good deal as if I were on my way somewhere to steal

something.  My immediate comrade and I talked in an undertone about

quarantine laws and their penalties, but we found nothing cheering in the

subject.  I was posted.  Only a few days before, I was talking with our

captain, and he mentioned the case of a man who swam ashore from a

quarantined ship somewhere, and got imprisoned six months for it; and

when he was in Genoa a few years ago, a captain of a quarantined ship

went in his boat to a departing ship, which was already outside of the

harbor, and put a letter on board to be taken to his family, and the

authorities imprisoned him three months for it, and then conducted him

and his ship fairly to sea, and warned him never to show himself in that

port again while he lived.  This kind of conversation did no good,

further than to give a sort of dismal interest to our quarantine-breaking

expedition, and so we dropped it.  We made the entire circuit of the town

without seeing any body but one man, who stared at us curiously, but said

nothing, and a dozen persons asleep on the ground before their doors,

whom we walked among and never woke--but we woke up dogs enough, in all

conscience--we always had one or two barking at our heels, and several

times we had as many as ten and twelve at once.  They made such a

preposterous din that persons aboard our ship said they could tell how we

were progressing for a long time, and where we were, by the barking of

the dogs.  The clouded moon still favored us.  When we had made the whole

circuit, and were passing among the houses on the further side of the

town, the moon came out splendidly, but we no longer feared the light.

As we approached a well, near a house, to get a drink, the owner merely

glanced at us and went within.  He left the quiet, slumbering town at our

mercy.  I record it here proudly, that we didn't do any thing to it.



Seeing no road, we took a tall hill to the left of the distant Acropolis

for a mark, and steered straight for it over all obstructions, and over a

little rougher piece of country than exists any where else outside of the

State of Nevada, perhaps.  Part of the way it was covered with small,

loose stones--we trod on six at a time, and they all rolled.  Another

part of it was dry, loose, newly-ploughed ground.  Still another part of

it was a long stretch of low grape-vines, which were tanglesome and

troublesome, and which we took to be brambles.  The Attic Plain, barring

the grape-vines, was a barren, desolate, unpoetical waste--I wonder what

it was in Greece's Age of Glory, five hundred years before Christ?



In the neighborhood of one o'clock in the morning, when we were heated

with fast walking and parched with thirst, Denny exclaimed, "Why, these

weeds are grape-vines!"  and in five minutes we had a score of bunches of

large, white, delicious grapes, and were reaching down for more when a

dark shape rose mysteriously up out of the shadows beside us and said

"Ho!"  And so we left.



In ten minutes more we struck into a beautiful road, and unlike some

others we had stumbled upon at intervals, it led in the right direction.

We followed it.  It was broad, and smooth, and white--handsome and in

perfect repair, and shaded on both sides for a mile or so with single

ranks of trees, and also with luxuriant vineyards.  Twice we entered and

stole grapes, and the second time somebody shouted at us from some

invisible place.  Whereupon we left again.  We speculated in grapes no

more on that side of Athens.



Shortly we came upon an ancient stone aqueduct, built upon arches, and

from that time forth we had ruins all about us--we were approaching our

journey's end.  We could not see the Acropolis now or the high hill,

either, and I wanted to follow the road till we were abreast of them, but

the others overruled me, and we toiled laboriously up the stony hill

immediately in our front--and from its summit saw another--climbed it and

saw another!  It was an hour of exhausting work.  Soon we came upon a row

of open graves, cut in the solid rock--(for a while one of them served

Socrates for a prison)--we passed around the shoulder of the hill, and

the citadel, in all its ruined magnificence, burst upon us!  We hurried

across the ravine and up a winding road, and stood on the old Acropolis,

with the prodigious walls of the citadel towering above our heads.  We

did not stop to inspect their massive blocks of marble, or measure their

height, or guess at their extraordinary thickness, but passed at once

through a great arched passage like a railway tunnel, and went straight

to the gate that leads to the ancient temples.  It was locked!  So, after

all, it seemed that we were not to see the great Parthenon face to face.

We sat down and held a council of war.  Result: the gate was only a

flimsy structure of wood--we would break it down.  It seemed like

desecration, but then we had traveled far, and our necessities were

urgent.  We could not hunt up guides and keepers--we must be on the ship

before daylight.  So we argued.  This was all very fine, but when we came

to break the gate, we could not do it.  We moved around an angle of the

wall and found a low bastion--eight feet high without--ten or twelve

within.  Denny prepared to scale it, and we got ready to follow.  By dint

of hard scrambling he finally straddled the top, but some loose stones

crumbled away and fell with a crash into the court within.  There was

instantly a banging of doors and a shout.  Denny dropped from the wall in

a twinkling, and we retreated in disorder to the gate.  Xerxes took that

mighty citadel four hundred and eighty years before Christ, when his five

millions of soldiers and camp-followers followed him to Greece, and if we

four Americans could have remained unmolested five minutes longer, we

would have taken it too.



The garrison had turned out--four Greeks.  We clamored at the gate, and

they admitted us.  [Bribery and corruption.]



We crossed a large court, entered a great door, and stood upon a pavement

of purest white marble, deeply worn by footprints.  Before us, in the

flooding moonlight, rose the noblest ruins we had ever looked upon--the

Propylae; a small Temple of Minerva; the Temple of Hercules, and the

grand Parthenon.  [We got these names from the Greek guide, who didn't

seem to know more than seven men ought to know.] These edifices were all

built of the whitest Pentelic marble, but have a pinkish stain upon them

now.  Where any part is broken, however, the fracture looks like fine

loaf sugar.  Six caryatides, or marble women, clad in flowing robes,

support the portico of the Temple of Hercules, but the porticos and

colonnades of the other structures are formed of massive Doric and Ionic

pillars, whose flutings and capitals are still measurably perfect,

notwithstanding the centuries that have gone over them and the sieges

they have suffered.  The Parthenon, originally, was two hundred and

twenty-six feet long, one hundred wide, and seventy high, and had two

rows of great columns, eight in each, at either end, and single rows of

seventeen each down the sides, and was one of the most graceful and

beautiful edifices ever erected.



Most of the Parthenon's imposing columns are still standing, but the roof

is gone.  It was a perfect building two hundred and fifty years ago, when

a shell dropped into the Venetian magazine stored here, and the explosion

which followed wrecked and unroofed it.  I remember but little about the

Parthenon, and I have put in one or two facts and figures for the use of

other people with short memories.  Got them from the guide-book.



As we wandered thoughtfully down the marble-paved length of this stately

temple, the scene about us was strangely impressive.  Here and there, in

lavish profusion, were gleaming white statues of men and women, propped

against blocks of marble, some of them armless, some without legs, others

headless--but all looking mournful in the moonlight, and startlingly

human!  They rose up and confronted the midnight intruder on every side--

they stared at him with stony eyes from unlooked-for nooks and recesses;

they peered at him over fragmentary heaps far down the desolate

corridors; they barred his way in the midst of the broad forum, and

solemnly pointed with handless arms the way from the sacred fane; and

through the roofless temple the moon looked down, and banded the floor

and darkened the scattered fragments and broken statues with the slanting

shadows of the columns.



What a world of ruined sculpture was about us!  Set up in rows--stacked

up in piles--scattered broadcast over the wide area of the Acropolis--

were hundreds of crippled statues of all sizes and of the most exquisite

workmanship; and vast fragments of marble that once belonged to the

entablatures, covered with bas-reliefs representing battles and sieges,

ships of war with three and four tiers of oars, pageants and processions

--every thing one could think of.  History says that the temples of the

Acropolis were filled with the noblest works of Praxiteles and Phidias,

and of many a great master in sculpture besides--and surely these elegant

fragments attest it.



We walked out into the grass-grown, fragment-strewn court beyond the

Parthenon.  It startled us, every now and then, to see a stony white face

stare suddenly up at us out of the grass with its dead eyes.  The place

seemed alive with ghosts.  I half expected to see the Athenian heroes of

twenty centuries ago glide out of the shadows and steal into the old

temple they knew so well and regarded with such boundless pride.



The full moon was riding high in the cloudless heavens, now.  We

sauntered carelessly and unthinkingly to the edge of the lofty

battlements of the citadel, and looked down--a vision!  And such a

vision!  Athens by moonlight!  The prophet that thought the splendors of

the New Jerusalem were revealed to him, surely saw this instead!  It lay

in the level plain right under our feet--all spread abroad like a

picture--and we looked down upon it as we might have looked from a

balloon.  We saw no semblance of a street, but every house, every window,

every clinging vine, every projection was as distinct and sharply marked

as if the time were noon-day; and yet there was no glare, no glitter,

nothing harsh or repulsive--the noiseless city was flooded with the

mellowest light that ever streamed from the moon, and seemed like some

living creature wrapped in peaceful slumber.  On its further side was a

little temple, whose delicate pillars and ornate front glowed with a rich

lustre that chained the eye like a spell; and nearer by, the palace of

the king reared its creamy walls out of the midst of a great garden of

shrubbery that was flecked all over with a random shower of amber lights

--a spray of golden sparks that lost their brightness in the glory of the

moon, and glinted softly upon the sea of dark foliage like the pallid

stars of the milky-way.  Overhead the stately columns, majestic still in

their ruin--under foot the dreaming city--in the distance the silver sea

--not on the broad earth is there an other picture half so beautiful!



As we turned and moved again through the temple, I wished that the

illustrious men who had sat in it in the remote ages could visit it again

and reveal themselves to our curious eyes--Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes,

Socrates, Phocion, Pythagoras, Euclid, Pindar, Xenophon, Herodotus,

Praxiteles and Phidias, Zeuxis the painter.  What a constellation of

celebrated names!  But more than all, I wished that old Diogenes, groping

so patiently with his lantern, searching so zealously for one solitary

honest man in all the world, might meander along and stumble on our

party.  I ought not to say it, may be, but still I suppose he would have

put out his light.



We left the Parthenon to keep its watch over old Athens, as it had kept

it for twenty-three hundred years, and went and stood outside the walls

of the citadel.  In the distance was the ancient, but still almost

perfect Temple of Theseus, and close by, looking to the west, was the

Bema, from whence Demosthenes thundered his philippics and fired the

wavering patriotism of his countrymen.  To the right was Mars Hill, where

the Areopagus sat in ancient times and where St. Paul defined his

position, and below was the market-place where he "disputed daily" with

the gossip-loving Athenians.  We climbed the stone steps St. Paul

ascended, and stood in the square-cut place he stood in, and tried to

recollect the Bible account of the matter--but for certain reasons, I

could not recall the words.  I have found them since:



     "Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in

     him, when he saw the city wholly given up to idolatry.  "Therefore

     disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews, and with the devout

     persons, and in the market daily with them that met with him.

                         * * * * * * * * *

     "And they took him and brought him unto Areopagus, saying, May we

     know what this new doctrine whereof thou speakest is?

                         * * * * * * * * *

     "Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars hill, and said, Ye men of

     Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious; "For

     as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this

     inscription: To THE UNKNOWN GOD.  Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly

     worship, him declare I unto you."--Acts, ch. xvii."



It occurred to us, after a while, that if we wanted to get home before

daylight betrayed us, we had better be moving.  So we hurried away.  When

far on our road, we had a parting view of the Parthenon, with the

moonlight streaming through its open colonnades and touching its capitals

with silver.  As it looked then, solemn, grand, and beautiful it will

always remain in our memories.



As we marched along, we began to get over our fears, and ceased to care

much about quarantine scouts or any body else.  We grew bold and

reckless; and once, in a sudden burst of courage, I even threw a stone at

a dog.  It was a pleasant reflection, though, that I did not hit him,

because his master might just possibly have been a policeman.  Inspired

by this happy failure, my valor became utterly uncontrollable, and at

intervals I absolutely whistled, though on a moderate key.  But boldness

breeds boldness, and shortly I plunged into a Vineyard, in the full light

of the moon, and captured a gallon of superb grapes, not even minding the

presence of a peasant who rode by on a mule.  Denny and Birch followed my

example.



Now I had grapes enough for a dozen, but then Jackson was all swollen up

with courage, too, and he was obliged to enter a vineyard presently.  The

first bunch he seized brought trouble.  A frowsy, bearded brigand sprang

into the road with a shout, and flourished a musket in the light of the

moon!  We sidled toward the Piraeus--not running you understand, but only

advancing with celerity.  The brigand shouted again, but still we

advanced.  It was getting late, and we had no time to fool away on every

ass that wanted to drivel Greek platitudes to us.  We would just as soon

have talked with him as not if we had not been in a hurry.  Presently

Denny said, "Those fellows are following us!"



We turned, and, sure enough, there they were--three fantastic pirates

armed with guns.  We slackened our pace to let them come up, and in the

meantime I got out my cargo of grapes and dropped them firmly but

reluctantly into the shadows by the wayside.  But I was not afraid.  I

only felt that it was not right to steal grapes.  And all the more so

when the owner was around--and not only around, but with his friends

around also.  The villains came up and searched a bundle Dr. Birch had in

his hand, and scowled upon him when they found it had nothing in it but

some holy rocks from Mars Hill, and these were not contraband.  They

evidently suspected him of playing some wretched fraud upon them, and

seemed half inclined to scalp the party.  But finally they dismissed us

with a warning, couched in excellent Greek, I suppose, and dropped

tranquilly in our wake.  When they had gone three hundred yards they

stopped, and we went on rejoiced.  But behold, another armed rascal came

out of the shadows and took their place, and followed us two hundred

yards.  Then he delivered us over to another miscreant, who emerged from

some mysterious place, and he in turn to another!  For a mile and a half

our rear was guarded all the while by armed men.  I never traveled in so

much state before in all my life.



It was a good while after that before we ventured to steal any more

grapes, and when we did we stirred up another troublesome brigand, and

then we ceased all further speculation in that line.  I suppose that

fellow that rode by on the mule posted all the sentinels, from Athens to

the Piraeus, about us.



Every field on that long route was watched by an armed sentinel, some of

whom had fallen asleep, no doubt, but were on hand, nevertheless.  This

shows what sort of a country modern Attica is--a community of

questionable characters.  These men were not there to guard their

possessions against strangers, but against each other; for strangers

seldom visit Athens and the Piraeus, and when they do, they go in

daylight, and can buy all the grapes they want for a trifle.  The modern

inhabitants are confiscators and falsifiers of high repute, if gossip

speaks truly concerning them, and I freely believe it does.



Just as the earliest tinges of the dawn flushed the eastern sky and

turned the pillared Parthenon to a broken harp hung in the pearly

horizon, we closed our thirteenth mile of weary, round-about marching,

and emerged upon the sea-shore abreast the ships, with our usual escort

of fifteen hundred Piraean dogs howling at our heels.  We hailed a boat

that was two or three hundred yards from shore, and discovered in a

moment that it was a police-boat on the lookout for any quarantine-

breakers that might chance to be abroad.  So we dodged--we were used to

that by this time--and when the scouts reached the spot we had so lately

occupied, we were absent.  They cruised along the shore, but in the wrong

direction, and shortly our own boat issued from the gloom and took us

aboard.  They had heard our signal on the ship.  We rowed noiselessly

away, and before the police-boat came in sight again, we were safe at

home once more.



Four more of our passengers were anxious to visit Athens, and started

half an hour after we returned; but they had not been ashore five minutes

till the police discovered and chased them so hotly that they barely

escaped to their boat again, and that was all.  They pursued the

enterprise no further.



We set sail for Constantinople to-day, but some of us little care for

that.  We have seen all there was to see in the old city that had its

birth sixteen hundred years before Christ was born, and was an old town

before the foundations of Troy were laid--and saw it in its most

attractive aspect.  Wherefore, why should we worry?



Two other passengers ran the blockade successfully last night.  So we

learned this morning.  They slipped away so quietly that they were not

missed from the ship for several hours.  They had the hardihood to march

into the Piraeus in the early dusk and hire a carriage.  They ran some

danger of adding two or three months' imprisonment to the other novelties

of their Holy Land Pleasure Excursion.  I admire "cheek."--[Quotation

from the Pilgrims.]--But they went and came safely, and never walked a

step.









CHAPTER XXXIII.



From Athens all through the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, we saw

little but forbidding sea-walls and barren hills, sometimes surmounted by

three or four graceful columns of some ancient temple, lonely and

deserted--a fitting symbol of the desolation that has come upon all

Greece in these latter ages.  We saw no ploughed fields, very few

villages, no trees or grass or vegetation of any kind, scarcely, and

hardly ever an isolated house.  Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert,

without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently.  What supports

its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.



I suppose that ancient Greece and modern Greece compared, furnish the

most extravagant contrast to be found in history.  George I., an infant

of eighteen, and a scraggy nest of foreign office holders, sit in the

places of Themistocles, Pericles, and the illustrious scholars and

generals of the Golden Age of Greece.  The fleets that were the wonder of

the world when the Parthenon was new, are a beggarly handful of fishing-

smacks now, and the manly people that performed such miracles of valor at

Marathon are only a tribe of unconsidered slaves to-day.  The classic

Illyssus has gone dry, and so have all the sources of Grecian wealth and

greatness.  The nation numbers only eight hundred thousand souls, and

there is poverty and misery and mendacity enough among them to furnish

forty millions and be liberal about it.  Under King Otho the revenues of

the State were five millions of dollars--raised from a tax of one-tenth

of all the agricultural products of the land (which tenth the farmer had

to bring to the royal granaries on pack-mules any distance not exceeding

six leagues) and from extravagant taxes on trade and commerce.  Out of

that five millions the small tyrant tried to keep an army of ten thousand

men, pay all the hundreds of useless Grand Equerries in Waiting, First

Grooms of the Bedchamber, Lord High Chancellors of the Exploded

Exchequer, and all the other absurdities which these puppy-kingdoms

indulge in, in imitation of the great monarchies; and in addition he set

about building a white marble palace to cost about five millions itself.

The result was, simply: ten into five goes no times and none over.  All

these things could not be done with five millions, and Otho fell into

trouble.



The Greek throne, with its unpromising adjuncts of a ragged population of

ingenious rascals who were out of employment eight months in the year

because there was little for them to borrow and less to confiscate, and a

waste of barren hills and weed-grown deserts, went begging for a good

while.  It was offered to one of Victoria's sons, and afterwards to

various other younger sons of royalty who had no thrones and were out of

business, but they all had the charity to decline the dreary honor, and

veneration enough for Greece's ancient greatness to refuse to mock her

sorrowful rags and dirt with a tinsel throne in this day of her

humiliation--till they came to this young Danish George, and he took it.

He has finished the splendid palace I saw in the radiant moonlight the

other night, and is doing many other things for the salvation of Greece,

they say.



We sailed through the barren Archipelago, and into the narrow channel

they sometimes call the Dardanelles and sometimes the Hellespont.  This

part of the country is rich in historic reminiscences, and poor as Sahara

in every thing else.  For instance, as we approached the Dardanelles, we

coasted along the Plains of Troy and past the mouth of the Scamander; we

saw where Troy had stood (in the distance,) and where it does not stand

now--a city that perished when the world was young.  The poor Trojans are

all dead, now.  They were born too late to see Noah's ark, and died too

soon to see our menagerie.  We saw where Agamemnon's fleets rendezvoused,

and away inland a mountain which the map said was Mount Ida.  Within the

Hellespont we saw where the original first shoddy contract mentioned in

history was carried out, and the "parties of the second part" gently

rebuked by Xerxes.  I speak of the famous bridge of boats which Xerxes

ordered to be built over the narrowest part of the Hellespont (where it

is only two or three miles wide.) A moderate gale destroyed the flimsy

structure, and the King, thinking that to publicly rebuke the contractors

might have a good effect on the next set, called them out before the army

and had them beheaded.  In the next ten minutes he let a new contract for

the bridge.  It has been observed by ancient writers that the second

bridge was a very good bridge.  Xerxes crossed his host of five millions

of men on it, and if it had not been purposely destroyed, it would

probably have been there yet.  If our Government would rebuke some of our

shoddy contractors occasionally, it might work much good.  In the

Hellespont we saw where Leander and Lord Byron swam across, the one to

see her upon whom his soul's affections were fixed with a devotion that

only death could impair, and the other merely for a flyer, as Jack says.

We had two noted tombs near us, too.  On one shore slept Ajax, and on the

other Hecuba.



We had water batteries and forts on both sides of the Hellespont, flying

the crimson flag of Turkey, with its white crescent, and occasionally a

village, and sometimes a train of camels; we had all these to look at

till we entered the broad sea of Marmora, and then the land soon fading

from view, we resumed euchre and whist once more.



We dropped anchor in the mouth of the Golden Horn at daylight in the

morning.  Only three or four of us were up to see the great Ottoman

capital.  The passengers do not turn out at unseasonable hours, as they

used to, to get the earliest possible glimpse of strange foreign cities.

They are well over that.  If we were lying in sight of the Pyramids of

Egypt, they would not come on deck until after breakfast, now-a-days.



The Golden Horn is a narrow arm of the sea, which branches from the

Bosporus (a sort of broad river which connects the Marmora and Black

Seas,) and, curving around, divides the city in the middle.  Galata and

Pera are on one side of the Bosporus, and the Golden Horn; Stamboul

(ancient Byzantium) is upon the other.  On the other bank of the Bosporus

is Scutari and other suburbs of Constantinople.  This great city contains

a million inhabitants, but so narrow are its streets, and so crowded

together are its houses, that it does not cover much more than half as

much ground as New York City.  Seen from the anchorage or from a mile or

so up the Bosporus, it is by far the handsomest city we have seen.  Its

dense array of houses swells upward from the water's edge, and spreads

over the domes of many hills; and the gardens that peep out here and

there, the great globes of the mosques, and the countless minarets that

meet the eye every where, invest the metropolis with the quaint Oriental

aspect one dreams of when he reads books of eastern travel.

Constantinople makes a noble picture.



But its attractiveness begins and ends with its picturesqueness.  From

the time one starts ashore till he gets back again, he execrates it.  The

boat he goes in is admirably miscalculated for the service it is built

for.  It is handsomely and neatly fitted up, but no man could handle it

well in the turbulent currents that sweep down the Bosporus from the

Black Sea, and few men could row it satisfactorily even in still water.

It is a long, light canoe (caique,) large at one end and tapering to a

knife blade at the other.  They make that long sharp end the bow, and you

can imagine how these boiling currents spin it about.  It has two oars,

and sometimes four, and no rudder.  You start to go to a given point and

you run in fifty different directions before you get there.  First one

oar is backing water, and then the other; it is seldom that both are

going ahead at once.  This kind of boating is calculated to drive an

impatient man mad in a week.  The boatmen are the awkwardest, the

stupidest, and the most unscientific on earth, without question.



Ashore, it was--well, it was an eternal circus.  People were thicker than

bees, in those narrow streets, and the men were dressed in all the

outrageous, outlandish, idolatrous, extravagant, thunder-and-lightning

costumes that ever a tailor with the delirium tremens and seven devils

could conceive of.  There was no freak in dress too crazy to be indulged

in; no absurdity too absurd to be tolerated; no frenzy in ragged

diabolism too fantastic to be attempted.  No two men were dressed alike.

It was a wild masquerade of all imaginable costumes--every struggling

throng in every street was a dissolving view of stunning contrasts.  Some

patriarchs wore awful turbans, but the grand mass of the infidel horde

wore the fiery red skull-cap they call a fez.  All the remainder of the

raiment they indulged in was utterly indescribable.



The shops here are mere coops, mere boxes, bath-rooms, closets--any thing

you please to call them--on the first floor.  The Turks sit cross-legged

in them, and work and trade and smoke long pipes, and smell like--like

Turks.  That covers the ground.  Crowding the narrow streets in front of

them are beggars, who beg forever, yet never collect any thing; and

wonderful cripples, distorted out of all semblance of humanity, almost;

vagabonds driving laden asses; porters carrying dry-goods boxes as large

as cottages on their backs; peddlers of grapes, hot corn, pumpkin seeds,

and a hundred other things, yelling like fiends; and sleeping happily,

comfortably, serenely, among the hurrying feet, are the famed dogs of

Constantinople; drifting noiselessly about are squads of Turkish women,

draped from chin to feet in flowing robes, and with snowy veils bound

about their heads, that disclose only the eyes and a vague, shadowy

notion of their features.  Seen moving about, far away in the dim, arched

aisles of the Great Bazaar, they look as the shrouded dead must have

looked when they walked forth from their graves amid the storms and

thunders and earthquakes that burst upon Calvary that awful night of the

Crucifixion.  A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to

see once--not oftener.



And then there was the goose-rancher--a fellow who drove a hundred geese

before him about the city, and tried to sell them.  He had a pole ten

feet long, with a crook in the end of it, and occasionally a goose would

branch out from the flock and make a lively break around the corner, with

wings half lifted and neck stretched to its utmost.  Did the goose-

merchant get excited?  No.  He took his pole and reached after that goose

with unspeakable sang froid--took a hitch round his neck, and "yanked"

him back to his place in the flock without an effort.  He steered his

geese with that stick as easily as another man would steer a yawl.  A few

hours afterward we saw him sitting on a stone at a corner, in the midst

of the turmoil, sound asleep in the sun, with his geese squatting around

him, or dodging out of the way of asses and men.  We came by again,

within the hour, and he was taking account of stock, to see whether any

of his flock had strayed or been stolen.  The way he did it was unique.

He put the end of his stick within six or eight inches of a stone wall,

and made the geese march in single file between it and the wall.  He

counted them as they went by.  There was no dodging that arrangement.



If you want dwarfs--I mean just a few dwarfs for a curiosity--go to

Genoa.  If you wish to buy them by the gross, for retail, go to Milan.

There are plenty of dwarfs all over Italy, but it did seem to me that in

Milan the crop was luxuriant.  If you would see a fair average style of

assorted cripples, go to Naples, or travel through the Roman States.

But if you would see the very heart and home of cripples and human

monsters, both, go straight to Constantinople.  A beggar in Naples who

can show a foot which has all run into one horrible toe, with one

shapeless nail on it, has a fortune--but such an exhibition as that would

not provoke any notice in Constantinople.  The man would starve.  Who

would pay any attention to attractions like his among the rare monsters

that throng the bridges of the Golden Horn and display their deformities

in the gutters of Stamboul?  O, wretched impostor!  How could he stand

against the three-legged woman, and the man with his eye in his cheek?

How would he blush in presence of the man with fingers on his elbow?

Where would he hide himself when the dwarf with seven fingers on each

hand, no upper lip, and his under-jaw gone, came down in his majesty?

Bismillah!  The cripples of Europe are a delusion and a fraud.  The truly

gifted flourish only in the by-ways of Pera and Stamboul.



That three-legged woman lay on the bridge, with her stock in trade so

disposed as to command the most striking effect--one natural leg, and two

long, slender, twisted ones with feet on them like somebody else's fore-

arm.  Then there was a man further along who had no eyes, and whose face

was the color of a fly-blown beefsteak, and wrinkled and twisted like a

lava-flow--and verily so tumbled and distorted were his features that no

man could tell the wart that served him for a nose from his cheek-bones.

In Stamboul was a man with a prodigious head, an uncommonly long body,

legs eight inches long and feet like snow-shoes.  He traveled on those

feet and his hands, and was as sway-backed as if the Colossus of Rhodes

had been riding him.  Ah, a beggar has to have exceedingly good points to

make a living in Constantinople.  A blue-faced man, who had nothing to

offer except that he had been blown up in a mine, would be regarded as a

rank impostor, and a mere damaged soldier on crutches would never make a

cent.  It would pay him to get apiece of his head taken off, and

cultivate a wen like a carpet sack.



The Mosque of St. Sophia is the chief lion of Constantinople.  You must

get a firman and hurry there the first thing.  We did that.  We did not

get a firman, but we took along four or five francs apiece, which is much

the same thing.



I do not think much of the Mosque of St. Sophia.  I suppose I lack

appreciation.  We will let it go at that.  It is the rustiest old barn in

heathendom.  I believe all the interest that attaches to it comes from

the fact that it was built for a Christian church and then turned into a

mosque, without much alteration, by the Mohammedan conquerors of the

land.  They made me take off my boots and walk into the place in my

stocking-feet.  I caught cold, and got myself so stuck up with a

complication of gums, slime and general corruption, that I wore out more

than two thousand pair of boot-jacks getting my boots off that night, and

even then some Christian hide peeled off with them.  I abate not a single

boot-jack.



St. Sophia is a colossal church, thirteen or fourteen hundred years old,

and unsightly enough to be very, very much older.  Its immense dome is

said to be more wonderful than St. Peter's, but its dirt is much more

wonderful than its dome, though they never mention it.  The church has a

hundred and seventy pillars in it, each a single piece, and all of costly

marbles of various kinds, but they came from ancient temples at Baalbec,

Heliopolis, Athens and Ephesus, and are battered, ugly and repulsive.

They were a thousand years old when this church was new, and then the

contrast must have been ghastly--if Justinian's architects did not trim

them any.  The inside of the dome is figured all over with a monstrous

inscription in Turkish characters, wrought in gold mosaic, that looks as

glaring as a circus bill; the pavements and the marble balustrades are

all battered and dirty; the perspective is marred every where by a web of

ropes that depend from the dizzy height of the dome, and suspend

countless dingy, coarse oil lamps, and ostrich-eggs, six or seven feet

above the floor.  Squatting and sitting in groups, here and there and far

and near, were ragged Turks reading books, hearing sermons, or receiving

lessons like children.  and in fifty places were more of the same sort

bowing and straightening up, bowing again and getting down to kiss the

earth, muttering prayers the while, and keeping up their gymnastics till

they ought to have been tired, if they were not.



Every where was dirt, and dust, and dinginess, and gloom; every where

were signs of a hoary antiquity, but with nothing touching or beautiful

about it; every where were those groups of fantastic pagans; overhead the

gaudy mosaics and the web of lamp-ropes--nowhere was there any thing to

win one's love or challenge his admiration.



The people who go into ecstasies over St. Sophia must surely get them out

of the guide-book (where every church is spoken of as being "considered

by good judges to be the most marvelous structure, in many respects, that

the world has ever seen.")  Or else they are those old connoisseurs from

the wilds of New Jersey who laboriously learn the difference between a

fresco and a fire-plug and from that day forward feel privileged to void

their critical bathos on painting, sculpture and architecture forever

more.



We visited the Dancing Dervishes.  There were twenty-one of them.  They

wore a long, light-colored loose robe that hung to their heels.  Each in

his turn went up to the priest (they were all within a large circular

railing) and bowed profoundly and then went spinning away deliriously and

took his appointed place in the circle, and continued to spin.  When all

had spun themselves to their places, they were about five or six feet

apart--and so situated, the entire circle of spinning pagans spun itself

three separate times around the room.  It took twenty-five minutes to do

it.  They spun on the left foot, and kept themselves going by passing the

right rapidly before it and digging it against the waxed floor.  Some of

them made incredible "time."  Most of them spun around forty times in a

minute, and one artist averaged about sixty-one times a minute, and kept

it up during the whole twenty-five.  His robe filled with air and stood

out all around him like a balloon.



They made no noise of any kind, and most of them tilted their heads back

and closed their eyes, entranced with a sort of devotional ecstacy.

There was a rude kind of music, part of the time, but the musicians were

not visible.  None but spinners were allowed within the circle.  A man

had to either spin or stay outside.  It was about as barbarous an

exhibition as we have witnessed yet.  Then sick persons came and lay

down, and beside them women laid their sick children (one a babe at the

breast,) and the patriarch of the Dervishes walked upon their bodies.  He

was supposed to cure their diseases by trampling upon their breasts or

backs or standing on the back of their necks.  This is well enough for a

people who think all their affairs are made or marred by viewless spirits

of the air--by giants, gnomes, and genii--and who still believe, to this

day, all the wild tales in the Arabian Nights.  Even so an intelligent

missionary tells me.



We visited the Thousand and One Columns.  I do not know what it was

originally intended for, but they said it was built for a reservoir.  It

is situated in the centre of Constantinople.  You go down a flight of

stone steps in the middle of a barren place, and there you are.  You are

forty feet under ground, and in the midst of a perfect wilderness of

tall, slender, granite columns, of Byzantine architecture.  Stand where

you would, or change your position as often as you pleased, you were

always a centre from which radiated a dozen long archways and colonnades

that lost themselves in distance and the sombre twilight of the place.

This old dried-up reservoir is occupied by a few ghostly silk-spinners

now, and one of them showed me a cross cut high up in one of the pillars.

I suppose he meant me to understand that the institution was there before

the Turkish occupation, and I thought he made a remark to that effect;

but he must have had an impediment in his speech, for I did not

understand him.



We took off our shoes and went into the marble mausoleum of the Sultan

Mahmoud, the neatest piece of architecture, inside, that I have seen

lately.  Mahmoud's tomb was covered with a black velvet pall, which was

elaborately embroidered with silver; it stood within a fancy silver

railing; at the sides and corners were silver candlesticks that would

weigh more than a hundred pounds, and they supported candles as large as

a man's leg; on the top of the sarcophagus was a fez, with a handsome

diamond ornament upon it, which an attendant said cost a hundred thousand

pounds, and lied like a Turk when he said it.  Mahmoud's whole family

were comfortably planted around him.



We went to the great Bazaar in Stamboul, of course, and I shall not

describe it further than to say it is a monstrous hive of little shops--

thousands, I should say--all under one roof, and cut up into innumerable

little blocks by narrow streets which are arched overhead.  One street is

devoted to a particular kind of merchandise, another to another, and so

on.



When you wish to buy a pair of shoes you have the swing of the whole

street--you do not have to walk yourself down hunting stores in different

localities.  It is the same with silks, antiquities, shawls, etc.  The

place is crowded with people all the time, and as the gay-colored Eastern

fabrics are lavishly displayed before every shop, the great Bazaar of

Stamboul is one of the sights that are worth seeing.  It is full of life,

and stir, and business, dirt, beggars, asses, yelling peddlers, porters,

dervishes, high-born Turkish female shoppers, Greeks, and weird-looking

and weirdly dressed Mohammedans from the mountains and the far provinces

--and the only solitary thing one does not smell when he is in the Great

Bazaar, is something which smells good.









CHAPTER XXXIV.



Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but

morals and whiskey are scarce.  The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to

drink.  Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral.  They say

the Sultan has eight hundred wives.  This almost amounts to bigamy.  It

makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in

Turkey.  We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however.



Circassian and Georgian girls are still sold in Constantinople by their

parents, but not publicly.  The great slave marts we have all read so

much about--where tender young girls were stripped for inspection, and

criticised and discussed just as if they were horses at an agricultural

fair--no longer exist.  The exhibition and the sales are private now.

Stocks are up, just at present, partly because of a brisk demand created

by the recent return of the Sultan's suite from the courts of Europe;

partly on account of an unusual abundance of bread-stuffs, which leaves

holders untortured by hunger and enables them to hold back for high

prices; and partly because buyers are too weak to bear the market, while

sellers are amply prepared to bull it.  Under these circumstances, if the

American metropolitan newspapers were published here in Constantinople,

their next commercial report would read about as follows, I suppose:



                        SLAVE GIRL MARKET REPORT.



     "Best brands Circassians, crop of 1850, L200; 1852, L250; 1854,

     L300.  Best brands Georgian, none in market; second quality, 1851,

     L180.  Nineteen fair to middling Wallachian girls offered at L130 @

     150, but no takers; sixteen prime A 1 sold in small lots to close

     out--terms private.



     "Sales of one lot Circassians, prime to good, 1852 to 1854, at L240

     @ 242, buyer 30; one forty-niner--damaged--at L23, seller ten, no

     deposit.  Several Georgians, fancy brands, 1852, changed hands to

     fill orders.  The Georgians now on hand are mostly last year's crop,

     which was unusually poor.  The new crop is a little backward, but

     will be coming in shortly.  As regards its quantity and quality, the

     accounts are most encouraging.  In this connection we can safely

     say, also, that the new crop of Circassians is looking extremely

     well.  His Majesty the Sultan has already sent in large orders for

     his new harem, which will be finished within a fortnight, and this

     has naturally strengthened the market and given Circassian stock a

     strong upward tendency.  Taking advantage of the inflated market,

     many of our shrewdest operators are selling short.  There are hints

     of a "corner" on Wallachians.



     "There is nothing new in Nubians.  Slow sale.



     "Eunuchs--None offering; however, large cargoes are expected from

     Egypt today."





I think the above would be about the style of the commercial report.

Prices are pretty high now, and holders firm; but, two or three years

ago, parents in a starving condition brought their young daughters down

here and sold them for even twenty and thirty dollars, when they could do

no better, simply to save themselves and the girls from dying of want.

It is sad to think of so distressing a thing as this, and I for one am

sincerely glad the prices are up again.



Commercial morals, especially, are bad.  There is no gainsaying that.

Greek, Turkish and Armenian morals consist only in attending church

regularly on the appointed Sabbaths, and in breaking the ten commandments

all the balance of the week.  It comes natural to them to lie and cheat

in the first place, and then they go on and improve on nature until they

arrive at perfection.  In recommending his son to a merchant as a

valuable salesman, a father does not say he is a nice, moral, upright

boy, and goes to Sunday School and is honest, but he says, "This boy is

worth his weight in broad pieces of a hundred--for behold, he will cheat

whomsoever hath dealings with him, and from the Euxine to the waters of

Marmora there abideth not so gifted a liar!"  How is that for a

recommendation?  The Missionaries tell me that they hear encomiums like

that passed upon people every day.  They say of a person they admire,

"Ah, he is a charming swindler, and a most exquisite liar!"



Every body lies and cheats--every body who is in business, at any rate.

Even foreigners soon have to come down to the custom of the country, and

they do not buy and sell long in Constantinople till they lie and cheat

like a Greek.  I say like a Greek, because the Greeks are called the

worst transgressors in this line.  Several Americans long resident in

Constantinople contend that most Turks are pretty trustworthy, but few

claim that the Greeks have any virtues that a man can discover--at least

without a fire assay.



I am half willing to believe that the celebrated dogs of Constantinople

have been misrepresented--slandered.  I have always been led to suppose

that they were so thick in the streets that they blocked the way; that

they moved about in organized companies, platoons and regiments, and took

what they wanted by determined and ferocious assault; and that at night

they drowned all other sounds with their terrible howlings.  The dogs I

see here can not be those I have read of.



I find them every where, but not in strong force.  The most I have found

together has been about ten or twenty.  And night or day a fair

proportion of them were sound asleep.  Those that were not asleep always

looked as if they wanted to be.  I never saw such utterly wretched,

starving, sad-visaged, broken-hearted looking curs in my life.  It seemed

a grim satire to accuse such brutes as these of taking things by force of

arms.  They hardly seemed to have strength enough or ambition enough to

walk across the street--I do not know that I have seen one walk that far

yet.  They are mangy and bruised and mutilated, and often you see one

with the hair singed off him in such wide and well defined tracts that he

looks like a map of the new Territories.  They are the sorriest beasts

that breathe--the most abject--the most pitiful.  In their faces is a

settled expression of melancholy, an air of hopeless despondency.  The

hairless patches on a scalded dog are preferred by the fleas of

Constantinople to a wider range on a healthier dog; and the exposed

places suit the fleas exactly.  I saw a dog of this kind start to nibble

at a flea--a fly attracted his attention, and he made a snatch at him;

the flea called for him once more, and that forever unsettled him; he

looked sadly at his flea-pasture, then sadly looked at his bald spot.

Then he heaved a sigh and dropped his head resignedly upon his paws.  He

was not equal to the situation.



The dogs sleep in the streets, all over the city.  From one end of the

street to the other, I suppose they will average about eight or ten to a

block.  Sometimes, of course, there are fifteen or twenty to a block.

They do not belong to any body, and they seem to have no close personal

friendships among each other.  But they district the city themselves, and

the dogs of each district, whether it be half a block in extent, or ten

blocks, have to remain within its bounds.  Woe to a dog if he crosses the

line!  His neighbors would snatch the balance of his hair off in a

second.  So it is said.  But they don't look it.



They sleep in the streets these days.  They are my compass--my guide.

When I see the dogs sleep placidly on, while men, sheep, geese, and all

moving things turn out and go around them, I know I am not in the great

street where the hotel is, and must go further.  In the Grand Rue the

dogs have a sort of air of being on the lookout--an air born of being

obliged to get out of the way of many carriages every day--and that

expression one recognizes in a moment.  It does not exist upon the face

of any dog without the confines of that street.  All others sleep

placidly and keep no watch.  They would not move, though the Sultan

himself passed by.



In one narrow street (but none of them are wide) I saw three dogs lying

coiled up, about a foot or two apart.  End to end they lay, and so they

just bridged the street neatly, from gutter to gutter.  A drove of a

hundred sheep came along.  They stepped right over the dogs, the rear

crowding the front, impatient to get on.  The dogs looked lazily up,

flinched a little when the impatient feet of the sheep touched their raw

backs--sighed, and lay peacefully down again.  No talk could be plainer

than that.  So some of the sheep jumped over them and others scrambled

between, occasionally chipping a leg with their sharp hoofs, and when the

whole flock had made the trip, the dogs sneezed a little, in the cloud of

dust, but never budged their bodies an inch.  I thought I was lazy, but I

am a steam-engine compared to a Constantinople dog.  But was not that a

singular scene for a city of a million inhabitants?



These dogs are the scavengers of the city.  That is their official

position, and a hard one it is.  However, it is their protection.  But

for their usefulness in partially cleansing these terrible streets, they

would not be tolerated long.  They eat any thing and every thing that

comes in their way, from melon rinds and spoiled grapes up through all

the grades and species of dirt and refuse to their own dead friends and

relatives--and yet they are always lean, always hungry, always

despondent.  The people are loath to kill them--do not kill them, in

fact.  The Turks have an innate antipathy to taking the life of any dumb

animal, it is said.  But they do worse.  They hang and kick and stone and

scald these wretched creatures to the very verge of death, and then leave

them to live and suffer.



Once a Sultan proposed to kill off all the dogs here, and did begin the

work--but the populace raised such a howl of horror about it that the

massacre was stayed.  After a while, he proposed to remove them all to an

island in the Sea of Marmora.  No objection was offered, and a ship-load

or so was taken away.  But when it came to be known that somehow or other

the dogs never got to the island, but always fell overboard in the night

and perished, another howl was raised and the transportation scheme was

dropped.



So the dogs remain in peaceable possession of the streets.  I do not say

that they do not howl at night, nor that they do not attack people who

have not a red fez on their heads.  I only say that it would be mean for

me to accuse them of these unseemly things who have not seen them do them

with my own eyes or heard them with my own ears.



I was a little surprised to see Turks and Greeks playing newsboy right

here in the mysterious land where the giants and genii of the Arabian

Nights once dwelt--where winged horses and hydra-headed dragons guarded

enchanted castles--where Princes and Princesses flew through the air on

carpets that obeyed a mystic talisman--where cities whose houses were

made of precious stones sprang up in a night under the hand of the

magician, and where busy marts were suddenly stricken with a spell and

each citizen lay or sat, or stood with weapon raised or foot advanced,

just as he was, speechless and motionless, till time had told a hundred

years!



It was curious to see newsboys selling papers in so dreamy a land as

that.  And, to say truly, it is comparatively a new thing here.  The

selling of newspapers had its birth in Constantinople about a year ago,

and was a child of the Prussian and Austrian war.



There is one paper published here in the English language--The Levant

Herald--and there are generally a number of Greek and a few French papers

rising and falling, struggling up and falling again.  Newspapers are not

popular with the Sultan's Government.  They do not understand journalism.

The proverb says, "The unknown is always great."  To the court, the

newspaper is a mysterious and rascally institution.  They know what a

pestilence is, because they have one occasionally that thins the people

out at the rate of two thousand a day, and they regard a newspaper as a

mild form of pestilence.  When it goes astray, they suppress it--pounce

upon it without warning, and throttle it.  When it don't go astray for a

long time, they get suspicious and throttle it anyhow, because they think

it is hatching deviltry.  Imagine the Grand Vizier in solemn council with

the magnates of the realm, spelling his way through the hated newspaper,

and finally delivering his profound decision: "This thing means mischief

--it is too darkly, too suspiciously inoffensive--suppress it!  Warn the

publisher that we can not have this sort of thing: put the editor in

prison!"



The newspaper business has its inconveniences in Constantinople.  Two

Greek papers and one French one were suppressed here within a few days of

each other.  No victories of the Cretans are allowed to be printed.  From

time to time the Grand Vizier sends a notice to the various editors that

the Cretan insurrection is entirely suppressed, and although that editor

knows better, he still has to print the notice.  The Levant Herald is too

fond of speaking praisefully of Americans to be popular with the Sultan,

who does not relish our sympathy with the Cretans, and therefore that

paper has to be particularly circumspect in order to keep out of trouble.

Once the editor, forgetting the official notice in his paper that the

Cretans were crushed out, printed a letter of a very different tenor,

from the American Consul in Crete, and was fined two hundred and fifty

dollars for it.  Shortly he printed another from the same source and was

imprisoned three months for his pains.  I think I could get the assistant

editorship of the Levant Herald, but I am going to try to worry along

without it.



To suppress a paper here involves the ruin of the publisher, almost.  But

in Naples I think they speculate on misfortunes of that kind.  Papers are

suppressed there every day, and spring up the next day under a new name.

During the ten days or a fortnight we staid there one paper was murdered

and resurrected twice.  The newsboys are smart there, just as they are

elsewhere.  They take advantage of popular weaknesses.  When they find

they are not likely to sell out, they approach a citizen mysteriously,

and say in a low voice--"Last copy, sir: double price; paper just been

suppressed!"  The man buys it, of course, and finds nothing in it.  They

do say--I do not vouch for it--but they do say that men sometimes print a

vast edition of a paper, with a ferociously seditious article in it,

distribute it quickly among the newsboys, and clear out till the

Government's indignation cools.  It pays well.  Confiscation don't amount

to any thing.  The type and presses are not worth taking care of.



There is only one English newspaper in Naples.  It has seventy

subscribers.  The publisher is getting rich very deliberately--very

deliberately indeed.



I never shall want another Turkish lunch.  The cooking apparatus was in

the little lunch room, near the bazaar, and it was all open to the

street.  The cook was slovenly, and so was the table, and it had no cloth

on it.  The fellow took a mass of sausage meat and coated it round a wire

and laid it on a charcoal fire to cook.  When it was done, he laid it

aside and a dog walked sadly in and nipped it.  He smelt it first, and

probably recognized the remains of a friend.  The cook took it away from

him and laid it before us.  Jack said, "I pass"--he plays euchre

sometimes--and we all passed in turn.  Then the cook baked a broad, flat,

wheaten cake, greased it well with the sausage, and started towards us

with it.  It dropped in the dirt, and he picked it up and polished it on

his breeches, and laid it before us.  Jack said, "I pass."  We all

passed.  He put some eggs in a frying pan, and stood pensively prying

slabs of meat from between his teeth with a fork.  Then he used the fork

to turn the eggs with--and brought them along.  Jack said "Pass again."

All followed suit.  We did not know what to do, and so we ordered a new

ration of sausage.  The cook got out his wire, apportioned a proper

amount of sausage-meat, spat it on his hands and fell to work!  This

time, with one accord, we all passed out.  We paid and left.  That is

all I learned about Turkish lunches.  A Turkish lunch is good, no doubt,

but it has its little drawbacks.



When I think how I have been swindled by books of Oriental travel, I want

a tourist for breakfast.  For years and years I have dreamed of the

wonders of the Turkish bath; for years and years I have promised myself

that I would yet enjoy one.  Many and many a time, in fancy, I have lain

in the marble bath, and breathed the slumbrous fragrance of Eastern

spices that filled the air; then passed through a weird and complicated

system of pulling and hauling, and drenching and scrubbing, by a gang of

naked savages who loomed vast and vaguely through the steaming mists,

like demons; then rested for a while on a divan fit for a king; then

passed through another complex ordeal, and one more fearful than the

first; and, finally, swathed in soft fabrics, been conveyed to a princely

saloon and laid on a bed of eider down, where eunuchs, gorgeous of

costume, fanned me while I drowsed and dreamed, or contentedly gazed at

the rich hangings of the apartment, the soft carpets, the sumptuous

furniture, the pictures, and drank delicious coffee, smoked the soothing

narghili, and dropped, at the last, into tranquil repose, lulled by

sensuous odors from unseen censers, by the gentle influence of the

narghili's Persian tobacco, and by the music of fountains that

counterfeited the pattering of summer rain.



That was the picture, just as I got it from incendiary books of travel.

It was a poor, miserable imposture.  The reality is no more like it than

the Five Points are like the Garden of Eden.  They received me in a great

court, paved with marble slabs; around it were broad galleries, one above

another, carpeted with seedy matting, railed with unpainted balustrades,

and furnished with huge rickety chairs, cushioned with rusty old

mattresses, indented with impressions left by the forms of nine

successive generations of men who had reposed upon them.  The place was

vast, naked, dreary; its court a barn, its galleries stalls for human

horses.  The cadaverous, half nude varlets that served in the

establishment had nothing of poetry in their appearance, nothing of

romance, nothing of Oriental splendor.  They shed no entrancing odors--

just the contrary.  Their hungry eyes and their lank forms continually

suggested one glaring, unsentimental fact--they wanted what they term in

California "a square meal."



I went into one of the racks and undressed.  An unclean starveling

wrapped a gaudy table-cloth about his loins, and hung a white rag over my

shoulders.  If I had had a tub then, it would have come natural to me to

take in washing.  I was then conducted down stairs into the wet, slippery

court, and the first things that attracted my attention were my heels.

My fall excited no comment.  They expected it, no doubt.  It belonged in

the list of softening, sensuous influences peculiar to this home of

Eastern luxury.  It was softening enough, certainly, but its application

was not happy.  They now gave me a pair of wooden clogs--benches in

miniature, with leather straps over them to confine my feet (which they

would have done, only I do not wear No. 13s.) These things dangled

uncomfortably by the straps when I lifted up my feet, and came down in

awkward and unexpected places when I put them on the floor again, and

sometimes turned sideways and wrenched my ankles out of joint.  However,

it was all Oriental luxury, and I did what I could to enjoy it.



They put me in another part of the barn and laid me on a stuffy sort of

pallet, which was not made of cloth of gold, or Persian shawls, but was

merely the unpretending sort of thing I have seen in the negro quarters

of Arkansas.  There was nothing whatever in this dim marble prison but

five more of these biers.  It was a very solemn place.  I expected that

the spiced odors of Araby were going to steal over my senses now, but

they did not.  A copper-colored skeleton, with a rag around him, brought

me a glass decanter of water, with a lighted tobacco pipe in the top of

it, and a pliant stem a yard long, with a brass mouth-piece to it.



It was the famous "narghili" of the East--the thing the Grand Turk smokes

in the pictures.  This began to look like luxury.  I took one blast at

it, and it was sufficient; the smoke went in a great volume down into my

stomach, my lungs, even into the uttermost parts of my frame.  I exploded

one mighty cough, and it was as if Vesuvius had let go.  For the next

five minutes I smoked at every pore, like a frame house that is on fire

on the inside.  Not any more narghili for me.  The smoke had a vile

taste, and the taste of a thousand infidel tongues that remained on that

brass mouthpiece was viler still.  I was getting discouraged.  Whenever,

hereafter, I see the cross-legged Grand Turk smoking his narghili, in

pretended bliss, on the outside of a paper of Connecticut tobacco, I

shall know him for the shameless humbug he is.



This prison was filled with hot air.  When I had got warmed up

sufficiently to prepare me for a still warmer temperature, they took me

where it was--into a marble room, wet, slippery and steamy, and laid me

out on a raised platform in the centre.  It was very warm.  Presently my

man sat me down by a tank of hot water, drenched me well, gloved his hand

with a coarse mitten, and began to polish me all over with it.  I began

to smell disagreeably.  The more he polished the worse I smelt.  It was

alarming.  I said to him:



"I perceive that I am pretty far gone.  It is plain that I ought to be

buried without any unnecessary delay.  Perhaps you had better go after my

friends at once, because the weather is warm, and I can not 'keep' long."



He went on scrubbing, and paid no attention.  I soon saw that he was

reducing my size.  He bore hard on his mitten, and from under it rolled

little cylinders, like maccaroni.  It could not be dirt, for it was too

white.  He pared me down in this way for a long time.  Finally I said:



"It is a tedious process.  It will take hours to trim me to the size you

want me; I will wait; go and borrow a jack-plane."



He paid no attention at all.



After a while he brought a basin, some soap, and something that seemed to

be the tail of a horse.  He made up a prodigious quantity of soap-suds,

deluged me with them from head to foot, without warning me to shut my

eyes, and then swabbed me viciously with the horse-tail.  Then he left me

there, a snowy statue of lather, and went away.  When I got tired of

waiting I went and hunted him up.  He was propped against the wall, in

another room, asleep.  I woke him.  He was not disconcerted.  He took me

back and flooded me with hot water, then turbaned my head, swathed me

with dry table-cloths, and conducted me to a latticed chicken-coop in one

of the galleries, and pointed to one of those Arkansas beds.  I mounted

it, and vaguely expected the odors of Araby a gain.  They did not come.



The blank, unornamented coop had nothing about it of that oriental

voluptuousness one reads of so much.  It was more suggestive of the

county hospital than any thing else.  The skinny servitor brought a

narghili, and I got him to take it out again without wasting any time

about it.  Then he brought the world-renowned Turkish coffee that poets

have sung so rapturously for many generations, and I seized upon it as

the last hope that was left of my old dreams of Eastern luxury.  It was

another fraud.  Of all the unchristian beverages that ever passed my

lips, Turkish coffee is the worst.  The cup is small, it is smeared with

grounds; the coffee is black, thick, unsavory of smell, and execrable in

taste.  The bottom of the cup has a muddy sediment in it half an inch

deep.  This goes down your throat, and portions of it lodge by the way,

and produce a tickling aggravation that keeps you barking and coughing

for an hour.



Here endeth my experience of the celebrated Turkish bath, and here also

endeth my dream of the bliss the mortal revels in who passes through it.

It is a malignant swindle.  The man who enjoys it is qualified to enjoy

any thing that is repulsive to sight or sense, and he that can invest it

with a charm of poetry is able to do the same with any thing else in the

world that is tedious, and wretched, and dismal, and nasty.









CHAPTER XXXV.



We left a dozen passengers in Constantinople, and sailed through the

beautiful Bosporus and far up into the Black Sea.  We left them in the

clutches of the celebrated Turkish guide, "FAR-AWAY MOSES," who will

seduce them into buying a ship-load of ottar of roses, splendid Turkish

vestments, and ail manner of curious things they can never have any use

for.  Murray's invaluable guide-books have mentioned 'Far-away Moses'

name, and he is a made man.  He rejoices daily in the fact that he is a

recognized celebrity.  However, we can not alter our established customs

to please the whims of guides; we can not show partialities this late in

the day.  Therefore, ignoring this fellow's brilliant fame, and ignoring

the fanciful name he takes such pride in, we called him Ferguson, just as

we had done with all other guides.  It has kept him in a state of

smothered exasperation all the time.  Yet we meant him no harm.  After he

has gotten himself up regardless of expense, in showy, baggy trowsers,

yellow, pointed slippers, fiery fez, silken jacket of blue, voluminous

waist-sash of fancy Persian stuff filled with a battery of silver-mounted

horse-pistols, and has strapped on his terrible scimitar, he considers it

an unspeakable humiliation to be called Ferguson.  It can not be helped.

All guides are Fergusons to us.  We can not master their dreadful foreign

names.



Sebastopol is probably the worst battered town in Russia or any where

else.  But we ought to be pleased with it, nevertheless, for we have been

in no country yet where we have been so kindly received, and where we

felt that to be Americans was a sufficient visa for our passports.  The

moment the anchor was down, the Governor of the town immediately

dispatched an officer on board to inquire if he could be of any

assistance to us, and to invite us to make ourselves at home in

Sebastopol!  If you know Russia, you know that this was a wild stretch of

hospitality.  They are usually so suspicious of strangers that they worry

them excessively with the delays and aggravations incident to a

complicated passport system.  Had we come from any other country we could

not have had permission to enter Sebastopol and leave again under three

days--but as it was, we were at liberty to go and come when and where we

pleased.  Every body in Constantinople warned us to be very careful about

our passports, see that they were strictly 'en regle', and never to

mislay them for a moment: and they told us of numerous instances of

Englishmen and others who were delayed days, weeks, and even months, in

Sebastopol, on account of trifling informalities in their passports, and

for which they were not to blame.  I had lost my passport, and was

traveling under my room-mate's, who stayed behind in Constantinople to

await our return.  To read the description of him in that passport and

then look at me, any man could see that I was no more like him than I am

like Hercules.  So I went into the harbor of Sebastopol with fear and

trembling--full of a vague, horrible apprehension that I was going to be

found out and hanged.  But all that time my true passport had been

floating gallantly overhead--and behold it was only our flag.  They never

asked us for any other.



We have had a great many Russian and English gentlemen and ladies on

board to-day, and the time has passed cheerfully away.  They were all

happy-spirited people, and I never heard our mother tongue sound so

pleasantly as it did when it fell from those English lips in this far-off

land.  I talked to the Russians a good deal, just to be friendly, and

they talked to me from the same motive; I am sure that both enjoyed the

conversation, but never a word of it either of us understood.  I did most

of my talking to those English people though, and I am sorry we can not

carry some of them along with us.



We have gone whithersoever we chose, to-day, and have met with nothing

but the kindest attentions.  Nobody inquired whether we had any passports

or not.



Several of the officers of the Government have suggested that we take the

ship to a little watering-place thirty miles from here, and pay the

Emperor of Russia a visit.  He is rusticating there.  These officers said

they would take it upon themselves to insure us a cordial reception.

They said if we would go, they would not only telegraph the Emperor, but

send a special courier overland to announce our coming.  Our time is so

short, though, and more especially our coal is so nearly out, that we

judged it best to forego the rare pleasure of holding social intercourse

with an Emperor.



Ruined Pompeii is in good condition compared to Sebastopol.  Here, you

may look in whatsoever direction you please, and your eye encounters

scarcely any thing but ruin, ruin, ruin!--fragments of houses, crumbled

walls, torn and ragged hills, devastation every where!  It is as if a

mighty earthquake had spent all its terrible forces upon this one little

spot.  For eighteen long months the storms of war beat upon the helpless

town, and left it at last the saddest wreck that ever the sun has looked

upon.  Not one solitary house escaped unscathed--not one remained

habitable, even.  Such utter and complete ruin one could hardly conceive

of.  The houses had all been solid, dressed stone structures; most of

them were ploughed through and through by cannon balls--unroofed and

sliced down from eaves to foundation--and now a row of them, half a mile

long, looks merely like an endless procession of battered chimneys.  No

semblance of a house remains in such as these.  Some of the larger

buildings had corners knocked off; pillars cut in two; cornices smashed;

holes driven straight through the walls.  Many of these holes are as

round and as cleanly cut as if they had been made with an auger.  Others

are half pierced through, and the clean impression is there in the rock,

as smooth and as shapely as if it were done in putty.  Here and there a

ball still sticks in a wall, and from it iron tears trickle down and

discolor the stone.



The battle-fields were pretty close together.  The Malakoff tower is on a

hill which is right in the edge of the town.  The Redan was within rifle-

shot of the Malakoff; Inkerman was a mile away; and Balaklava removed but

an hour's ride.  The French trenches, by which they approached and

invested the Malakoff were carried so close under its sloping sides that

one might have stood by the Russian guns and tossed a stone into them.

Repeatedly, during three terrible days, they swarmed up the little

Malakoff hill, and were beaten back with terrible slaughter.  Finally,

they captured the place, and drove the Russians out, who then tried to

retreat into the town, but the English had taken the Redan, and shut them

off with a wall of flame; there was nothing for them to do but go back

and retake the Malakoff or die under its guns.  They did go back; they

took the Malakoff and retook it two or three times, but their desperate

valor could not avail, and they had to give up at last.



These fearful fields, where such tempests of death used to rage, are

peaceful enough now; no sound is heard, hardly a living thing moves about

them, they are lonely and silent--their desolation is complete.



There was nothing else to do, and so every body went to hunting relics.

They have stocked the ship with them.  They brought them from the

Malakoff, from the Redan, Inkerman, Balaklava--every where.  They have

brought cannon balls, broken ramrods, fragments of shell--iron enough to

freight a sloop.  Some have even brought bones--brought them laboriously

from great distances, and were grieved to hear the surgeon pronounce them

only bones of mules and oxen.  I knew Blucher would not lose an

opportunity like this.  He brought a sack full on board and was going for

another.  I prevailed upon him not to go.  He has already turned his

state-room into a museum of worthless trumpery, which he has gathered up

in his travels.  He is labeling his trophies, now.  I picked up one a

while ago, and found it marked "Fragment of a Russian General."  I

carried it out to get a better light upon it--it was nothing but a couple

of teeth and part of the jaw-bone of a horse.  I said with some asperity:



"Fragment of a Russian General!  This is absurd.  Are you never going to

learn any sense?"



He only said: "Go slow--the old woman won't know any different."  [His

aunt.]



This person gathers mementoes with a perfect recklessness, now-a-days;

mixes them all up together, and then serenely labels them without any

regard to truth, propriety, or even plausibility.  I have found him

breaking a stone in two, and labeling half of it "Chunk busted from the

pulpit of Demosthenes," and the other half "Darnick from the Tomb of

Abelard and Heloise."  I have known him to gather up a handful of pebbles

by the roadside, and bring them on board ship and label them as coming

from twenty celebrated localities five hundred miles apart.  I

remonstrate against these outrages upon reason and truth, of course, but

it does no good.  I get the same tranquil, unanswerable reply every time:



"It don't signify--the old woman won't know any different."



Ever since we three or four fortunate ones made the midnight trip to

Athens, it has afforded him genuine satisfaction to give every body in

the ship a pebble from the Mars-hill where St. Paul preached.  He got all

those pebbles on the sea shore, abreast the ship, but professes to have

gathered them from one of our party.  However, it is not of any use for

me to expose the deception--it affords him pleasure, and does no harm to

any body.  He says he never expects to run out of mementoes of St. Paul

as long as he is in reach of a sand-bank.  Well, he is no worse than

others.  I notice that all travelers supply deficiencies in their

collections in the same way.  I shall never have any confidence in such

things again while I live.









CHAPTER XXXVI.



We have got so far east, now--a hundred and fifty-five degrees of

longitude from San Francisco--that my watch can not "keep the hang" of

the time any more.  It has grown discouraged, and stopped.  I think it

did a wise thing.  The difference in time between Sebastopol and the

Pacific coast is enormous.  When it is six o'clock in the morning here,

it is somewhere about week before last in California.  We are excusable

for getting a little tangled as to time.  These distractions and

distresses about the time have worried me so much that I was afraid my

mind was so much affected that I never would have any appreciation of

time again; but when I noticed how handy I was yet about comprehending

when it was dinner-time, a blessed tranquillity settled down upon me, and

I am tortured with doubts and fears no more.



Odessa is about twenty hours' run from Sebastopol, and is the most

northerly port in the Black Sea.  We came here to get coal, principally.

The city has a population of one hundred and thirty-three thousand, and

is growing faster than any other small city out of America.  It is a free

port, and is the great grain mart of this particular part of the world.

Its roadstead is full of ships.  Engineers are at work, now, turning the

open roadstead into a spacious artificial harbor.  It is to be almost

inclosed by massive stone piers, one of which will extend into the sea

over three thousand feet in a straight line.



I have not felt so much at home for a long time as I did when I "raised

the hill" and stood in Odessa for the first time.  It looked just like an

American city; fine, broad streets, and straight as well; low houses,

(two or three stories,) wide, neat, and free from any quaintness of

architectural ornamentation; locust trees bordering the sidewalks (they

call them acacias;) a stirring, business-look about the streets and the

stores; fast walkers; a familiar new look about the houses and every

thing; yea, and a driving and smothering cloud of dust that was so like a

message from our own dear native land that we could hardly refrain from

shedding a few grateful tears and execrations in the old time-honored

American way.  Look up the street or down the street, this way or that

way, we saw only America!  There was not one thing to remind us that we

were in Russia.  We walked for some little distance, reveling in this

home vision, and then we came upon a church and a hack-driver, and

presto! the illusion vanished!  The church had a slender-spired dome that

rounded inward at its base, and looked like a turnip turned upside down,

and the hackman seemed to be dressed in a long petticoat with out any

hoops.  These things were essentially foreign, and so were the carriages

--but every body knows about these things, and there is no occasion for

my describing them.



We were only to stay here a day and a night and take in coal; we

consulted the guide-books and were rejoiced to know that there were no

sights in Odessa to see; and so we had one good, untrammeled holyday on

our hands, with nothing to do but idle about the city and enjoy

ourselves.  We sauntered through the markets and criticised the fearful

and wonderful costumes from the back country; examined the populace as

far as eyes could do it; and closed the entertainment with an ice-cream

debauch.  We do not get ice-cream every where, and so, when we do, we are

apt to dissipate to excess.  We never cared any thing about ice-cream at

home, but we look upon it with a sort of idolatry now that it is so

scarce in these red-hot climates of the East.



We only found two pieces of statuary, and this was another blessing.  One

was a bronze image of the Duc de Richelieu, grand-nephew of the splendid

Cardinal.  It stood in a spacious, handsome promenade, overlooking the

sea, and from its base a vast flight of stone steps led down to the

harbor--two hundred of them, fifty feet long, and a wide landing at the

bottom of every twenty.  It is a noble staircase, and from a distance the

people toiling up it looked like insects.  I mention this statue and this

stairway because they have their story.  Richelieu founded Odessa--

watched over it with paternal care--labored with a fertile brain and a

wise understanding for its best interests--spent his fortune freely to

the same end--endowed it with a sound prosperity, and one which will yet

make it one of the great cities of the Old World--built this noble

stairway with money from his own private purse--and--.  Well, the people

for whom he had done so much, let him walk down these same steps, one

day, unattended, old, poor, without a second coat to his back; and when,

years afterwards, he died in Sebastopol in poverty and neglect, they

called a meeting, subscribed liberally, and immediately erected this

tasteful monument to his memory, and named a great street after him.

It reminds me of what Robert Burns' mother said when they erected a

stately monument to his memory: "Ah, Robbie, ye asked them for bread and

they hae gi'en ye a stane."



The people of Odessa have warmly recommended us to go and call on the

Emperor, as did the Sebastopolians.  They have telegraphed his Majesty,

and he has signified his willingness to grant us an audience.  So we are

getting up the anchors and preparing to sail to his watering-place.  What

a scratching around there will be, now! what a holding of important

meetings and appointing of solemn committees!--and what a furbishing up

of claw-hammer coats and white silk neck-ties!  As this fearful ordeal we

are about to pass through pictures itself to my fancy in all its dread

sublimity, I begin to feel my fierce desire to converse with a genuine

Emperor cooling down and passing away.  What am I to do with my hands?

What am I to do with my feet?  What in the world am I to do with myself?









CHAPTER XXXVII.



We anchored here at Yalta, Russia, two or three days ago.  To me the

place was a vision of the Sierras.  The tall, gray mountains that back

it, their sides bristling with pines--cloven with ravines--here and there

a hoary rock towering into view--long, straight streaks sweeping down

from the summit to the sea, marking the passage of some avalanche of

former times--all these were as like what one sees in the Sierras as if

the one were a portrait of the other.  The little village of Yalta

nestles at the foot of an amphitheatre which slopes backward and upward

to the wall of hills, and looks as if it might have sunk quietly down to

its present position from a higher elevation.  This depression is covered

with the great parks and gardens of noblemen, and through the mass of

green foliage the bright colors of their palaces bud out here and there

like flowers.  It is a beautiful spot.



We had the United States Consul on board--the Odessa Consul.  We

assembled in the cabin and commanded him to tell us what we must do to be

saved, and tell us quickly.  He made a speech.  The first thing he said

fell like a blight on every hopeful spirit: he had never seen a court

reception.  (Three groans for the Consul.)  But he said he had seen

receptions at the Governor General's in Odessa, and had often listened to

people's experiences of receptions at the Russian and other courts, and

believed he knew very well what sort of ordeal we were about to essay.

(Hope budded again.)  He said we were many; the summer palace was small--

a mere mansion; doubtless we should be received in summer fashion--in the

garden; we would stand in a row, all the gentlemen in swallow-tail coats,

white kids, and white neck-ties, and the ladies in light-colored silks,

or something of that kind; at the proper moment--12 meridian--the

Emperor, attended by his suite arrayed in splendid uniforms, would appear

and walk slowly along the line, bowing to some, and saying two or three

words to others.  At the moment his Majesty appeared, a universal,

delighted, enthusiastic smile ought to break out like a rash among the

passengers--a smile of love, of gratification, of admiration--and with

one accord, the party must begin to bow--not obsequiously, but

respectfully, and with dignity; at the end of fifteen minutes the Emperor

would go in the house, and we could run along home again.  We felt

immensely relieved.  It seemed, in a manner, easy.  There was not a man

in the party but believed that with a little practice he could stand in a

row, especially if there were others along; there was not a man but

believed he could bow without tripping on his coat tail and breaking his

neck; in a word, we came to believe we were equal to any item in the

performance except that complicated smile.  The Consul also said we ought

to draft a little address to the Emperor, and present it to one of his

aides-de-camp, who would forward it to him at the proper time.

Therefore, five gentlemen were appointed to prepare the document, and the

fifty others went sadly smiling about the ship--practicing.  During the

next twelve hours we had the general appearance, somehow, of being at a

funeral, where every body was sorry the death had occurred, but glad it

was over--where every body was smiling, and yet broken-hearted.



A committee went ashore to wait on his Excellency the Governor-General,

and learn our fate.  At the end of three hours of boding suspense, they

came back and said the Emperor would receive us at noon the next day--

would send carriages for us--would hear the address in person.  The Grand

Duke Michael had sent to invite us to his palace also.  Any man could see

that there was an intention here to show that Russia's friendship for

America was so genuine as to render even her private citizens objects

worthy of kindly attentions.



At the appointed hour we drove out three miles, and assembled in the

handsome garden in front of the Emperor's palace.



We formed a circle under the trees before the door, for there was no one

room in the house able to accommodate our three-score persons

comfortably, and in a few minutes the imperial family came out bowing and

smiling, and stood in our midst.  A number of great dignitaries of the

Empire, in undress unit forms, came with them.  With every bow, his

Majesty said a word of welcome.  I copy these speeches.  There is

character in them--Russian character--which is politeness itself, and the

genuine article.  The French are polite, but it is often mere ceremonious

politeness.  A Russian imbues his polite things with a heartiness, both

of phrase and expression, that compels belief in their sincerity.  As I

was saying, the Czar punctuated his speeches with bows:



"Good morning--I am glad to see you--I am gratified--I am delighted--I am

happy to receive you!"



All took off their hats, and the Consul inflicted the address on him.  He

bore it with unflinching fortitude; then took the rusty-looking document

and handed it to some great officer or other, to be filed away among the

archives of Russia--in the stove.  He thanked us for the address, and

said he was very much pleased to see us, especially as such friendly

relations existed between Russia and the United States.  The Empress said

the Americans were favorites in Russia, and she hoped the Russians were

similarly regarded in America.  These were all the speeches that were

made, and I recommend them to parties who present policemen with gold

watches, as models of brevity and point.  After this the Empress went and

talked sociably (for an Empress) with various ladies around the circle;

several gentlemen entered into a disjointed general conversation with the

Emperor; the Dukes and Princes, Admirals and Maids of Honor dropped into

free-and-easy chat with first one and then another of our party, and

whoever chose stepped forward and spoke with the modest little Grand

Duchess Marie, the Czar's daughter.  She is fourteen years old, light-

haired, blue-eyed, unassuming and pretty.  Every body talks English.



The Emperor wore a cap, frock coat and pantaloons, all of some kind of

plain white drilling--cotton or linen and sported no jewelry or any

insignia whatever of rank.  No costume could be less ostentatious.  He is

very tall and spare, and a determined-looking man, though a very

pleasant-looking one nevertheless.  It is easy to see that he is kind and

affectionate There is something very noble in his expression when his cap

is off.  There is none of that cunning in his eye that all of us noticed

in Louis Napoleon's.



The Empress and the little Grand Duchess wore simple suits of foulard (or

foulard silk, I don't know which is proper,) with a small blue spot in

it; the dresses were trimmed with blue; both ladies wore broad blue

sashes about their waists; linen collars and clerical ties of muslin;

low-crowned straw-hats trimmed with blue velvet; parasols and flesh-

colored gloves The Grand Duchess had no heels on her shoes.  I do not

know this of my own knowledge, but one of our ladies told me so.  I was

not looking at her shoes.  I was glad to observe that she wore her own

hair, plaited in thick braids against the back of her head, instead of

the uncomely thing they call a waterfall, which is about as much like a

waterfall as a canvas-covered ham is like a cataract.  Taking the kind

expression that is in the Emperor's face and the gentleness that is in

his young daughter's into consideration, I wondered if it would not tax

the Czar's firmness to the utmost to condemn a supplicating wretch to

misery in the wastes of Siberia if she pleaded for him.  Every time their

eyes met, I saw more and more what a tremendous power that weak,

diffident school-girl could wield if she chose to do it.  Many and many a

time she might rule the Autocrat of Russia, whose lightest word is law to

seventy millions of human beings!  She was only a girl, and she looked

like a thousand others I have seen, but never a girl provoked such a

novel and peculiar interest in me before.  A strange, new sensation is a

rare thing in this hum-drum life, and I had it here.  There was nothing

stale or worn out about the thoughts and feelings the situation and the

circumstances created.  It seemed strange--stranger than I can tell--to

think that the central figure in the cluster of men and women, chatting

here under the trees like the most ordinary individual in the land, was a

man who could open his lips and ships would fly through the waves,

locomotives would speed over the plains, couriers would hurry from

village to village, a hundred telegraphs would flash the word to the four

corners of an Empire that stretches its vast proportions over a seventh

part of the habitable globe, and a countless multitude of men would

spring to do his bidding.  I had a sort of vague desire to examine his

hands and see if they were of flesh and blood, like other men's.  Here

was a man who could do this wonderful thing, and yet if I chose I could

knock him down.  The case was plain, but it seemed preposterous,

nevertheless--as preposterous as trying to knock down a mountain or wipe

out a continent.  If this man sprained his ankle, a million miles of

telegraph would carry the news over mountains--valleys--uninhabited

deserts--under the trackless sea--and ten thousand newspapers would prate

of it; if he were grievously ill, all the nations would know it before

the sun rose again; if he dropped lifeless where he stood, his fall might

shake the thrones of half a world!  If I could have stolen his coat, I

would have done it.  When I meet a man like that, I want something to

remember him by.



As a general thing, we have been shown through palaces by some plush-

legged filagreed flunkey or other, who charged a franc for it; but after

talking with the company half an hour, the Emperor of Russia and his

family conducted us all through their mansion themselves.  They made no

charge.  They seemed to take a real pleasure in it.



We spent half an hour idling through the palace, admiring the cosy

apartments and the rich but eminently home-like appointments of the

place, and then the Imperial family bade our party a kind good-bye, and

proceeded to count the spoons.



An invitation was extended to us to visit the palace of the eldest son,

the Crown Prince of Russia, which was near at hand.  The young man was

absent, but the Dukes and Countesses and Princes went over the premises

with us as leisurely as was the case at the Emperor's, and conversation

continued as lively as ever.



It was a little after one o'clock, now.  We drove to the Grand Duke

Michael's, a mile away, in response to his invitation, previously given.



We arrived in twenty minutes from the Emperor's.  It is a lovely place.

The beautiful palace nestles among the grand old groves of the park, the

park sits in the lap of the picturesque crags and hills, and both look

out upon the breezy ocean.  In the park are rustic seats, here and there,

in secluded nooks that are dark with shade; there are rivulets of crystal

water; there are lakelets, with inviting, grassy banks; there are

glimpses of sparkling cascades through openings in the wilderness of

foliage; there are streams of clear water gushing from mimic knots on the

trunks of forest trees; there are miniature marble temples perched upon

gray old crags; there are airy lookouts whence one may gaze upon a broad

expanse of landscape and ocean.  The palace is modeled after the choicest

forms of Grecian architecture, and its wide colonnades surround a central

court that is banked with rare flowers that fill the place with their

fragrance, and in their midst springs a fountain that cools the summer

air, and may possibly breed mosquitoes, but I do not think it does.



The Grand Duke and his Duchess came out, and the presentation ceremonies

were as simple as they had been at the Emperor's.  In a few minutes,

conversation was under way, as before.  The Empress appeared in the

verandah, and the little Grand Duchess came out into the crowd.  They had

beaten us there.  In a few minutes, the Emperor came himself on

horseback.  It was very pleasant.  You can appreciate it if you have ever

visited royalty and felt occasionally that possibly you might be wearing

out your welcome--though as a general thing, I believe, royalty is not

scrupulous about discharging you when it is done with you.



The Grand Duke is the third brother of the Emperor, is about thirty-seven

years old, perhaps, and is the princeliest figure in Russia.  He is even

taller than the Czar, as straight as an Indian, and bears himself like

one of those gorgeous knights we read about in romances of the Crusades.

He looks like a great-hearted fellow who would pitch an enemy into the

river in a moment, and then jump in and risk his life fishing him out

again.  The stories they tell of him show him to be of a brave and

generous nature.  He must have been desirous of proving that Americans

were welcome guests in the imperial palaces of Russia, because he rode

all the way to Yalta and escorted our procession to the Emperor's

himself, and kept his aids scurrying about, clearing the road and

offering assistance wherever it could be needed.  We were rather familiar

with him then, because we did not know who he was.  We recognized him

now, and appreciated the friendly spirit that prompted him to do us a

favor that any other Grand Duke in the world would have doubtless

declined to do.  He had plenty of servitors whom he could have sent, but

he chose to attend to the matter himself.



The Grand Duke was dressed in the handsome and showy uniform of a Cossack

officer.  The Grand Duchess had on a white alpaca robe, with the seams

and gores trimmed with black barb lace, and a little gray hat with a

feather of the same color.  She is young, rather pretty modest and

unpretending, and full of winning politeness.



Our party walked all through the house, and then the nobility escorted

them all over the grounds, and finally brought them back to the palace

about half-past two o'clock to breakfast.  They called it breakfast, but

we would have called it luncheon.  It consisted of two kinds of wine;

tea, bread, cheese, and cold meats, and was served on the centre-tables

in the reception room and the verandahs--anywhere that was convenient;

there was no ceremony.  It was a sort of picnic.  I had heard before that

we were to breakfast there, but Blucher said he believed Baker's boy had

suggested it to his Imperial Highness.  I think not--though it would be

like him.  Baker's boy is the famine-breeder of the ship.  He is always

hungry.  They say he goes about the state-rooms when the passengers are

out, and eats up all the soap.  And they say he eats oakum.  They say he

will eat any thing he can get between meals, but he prefers oakum.  He

does not like oakum for dinner, but he likes it for a lunch, at odd

hours, or any thing that way.  It makes him very disagreeable, because it

makes his breath bad, and keeps his teeth all stuck up with tar.  Baker's

boy may have suggested the breakfast, but I hope he did not.  It went off

well, anyhow.  The illustrious host moved about from place to place, and

helped to destroy the provisions and keep the conversation lively, and

the Grand Duchess talked with the verandah parties and such as had

satisfied their appetites and straggled out from the reception room.



The Grand Duke's tea was delicious.  They give one a lemon to squeeze

into it, or iced milk, if he prefers it.  The former is best.  This tea

is brought overland from China.  It injures the article to transport it

by sea.



When it was time to go, we bade our distinguished hosts good-bye, and

they retired happy and contented to their apartments to count their

spoons.



We had spent the best part of half a day in the home of royalty, and had

been as cheerful and comfortable all the time as we could have been in

the ship.  I would as soon have thought of being cheerful in Abraham's

bosom as in the palace of an Emperor.  I supposed that Emperors were

terrible people.  I thought they never did any thing but wear magnificent

crowns and red velvet dressing-gowns with dabs of wool sewed on them in

spots, and sit on thrones and scowl at the flunkies and the people in the

parquette, and order Dukes and Duchesses off to execution.  I find,

however, that when one is so fortunate as to get behind the scenes and

see them at home and in the privacy of their firesides, they are

strangely like common mortals.  They are pleasanter to look upon then

than they are in their theatrical aspect.  It seems to come as natural to

them to dress and act like other people as it is to put a friend's cedar

pencil in your pocket when you are done using it.  But I can never have

any confidence in the tinsel kings of the theatre after this.  It will be

a great loss.  I used to take such a thrilling pleasure in them.  But,

hereafter, I will turn me sadly away and say;



"This does not answer--this isn't the style of king that I am acquainted

with."



When they swagger around the stage in jeweled crowns and splendid robes,

I shall feel bound to observe that all the Emperors that ever I was

personally acquainted with wore the commonest sort of clothes, and did

not swagger.  And when they come on the stage attended by a vast body-

guard of supes in helmets and tin breastplates, it will be my duty as

well as my pleasure to inform the ignorant that no crowned head of my

acquaintance has a soldier any where about his house or his person.



Possibly it may be thought that our party tarried too long, or did other

improper things, but such was not the case.  The company felt that they

were occupying an unusually responsible position--they were representing

the people of America, not the Government--and therefore they were

careful to do their best to perform their high mission with credit.



On the other hand, the Imperial families, no doubt, considered that in

entertaining us they were more especially entertaining the people of

America than they could by showering attentions on a whole platoon of

ministers plenipotentiary and therefore they gave to the event its

fullest significance, as an expression of good will and friendly feeling

toward the entire country.  We took the kindnesses we received as

attentions thus directed, of course, and not to ourselves as a party.

That we felt a personal pride in being received as the representatives of

a nation, we do not deny; that we felt a national pride in the warm

cordiality of that reception, can not be doubted.



Our poet has been rigidly suppressed, from the time we let go the anchor.

When it was announced that we were going to visit the Emperor of Russia,

the fountains of his great deep were broken up, and he rained ineffable

bosh for four-and-twenty hours.  Our original anxiety as to what we were

going to do with ourselves, was suddenly transformed into anxiety about

what we were going to do with our poet.  The problem was solved at last.

Two alternatives were offered him--he must either swear a dreadful oath

that he would not issue a line of his poetry while he was in the Czar's

dominions, or else remain under guard on board the ship until we were

safe at Constantinople again.  He fought the dilemma long, but yielded at

last.  It was a great deliverance.  Perhaps the savage reader would like

a specimen of his style.  I do not mean this term to be offensive.  I

only use it because "the gentle reader" has been used so often that any

change from it can not but be refreshing:



          "Save us and sanctify us, and finally, then,

          See good provisions we enjoy while we journey to Jerusalem.

          For so man proposes, which it is most true

          And time will wait for none, nor for us too."



The sea has been unusually rough all day.  However, we have had a lively

time of it, anyhow.  We have had quite a run of visitors.  The Governor-

General came, and we received him with a salute of nine guns.  He brought

his family with him.  I observed that carpets were spread from the pier-

head to his carriage for him to walk on, though I have seen him walk

there without any carpet when he was not on business.  I thought may be

he had what the accidental insurance people might call an extra-hazardous

polish ("policy" joke, but not above mediocrity,) on his boots, and

wished to protect them, but I examined and could not see that they were

blacked any better than usual.  It may have been that he had forgotten

his carpet, before, but he did not have it with him, anyhow.  He was an

exceedingly pleasant old gentleman; we all liked him, especially Blucher.

When he went away, Blucher invited him to come again and fetch his carpet

along.



Prince Dolgorouki and a Grand Admiral or two, whom we had seen yesterday

at the reception, came on board also.  I was a little distant with these

parties, at first, because when I have been visiting Emperors I do not

like to be too familiar with people I only know by reputation, and whose

moral characters and standing in society I can not be thoroughly

acquainted with.  I judged it best to be a little offish, at first.  I

said to myself, Princes and Counts and Grand Admirals are very well, but

they are not Emperors, and one can not be too particular about who he

associates with.



Baron Wrangel came, also.  He used to be Russian Ambassador at

Washington.  I told him I had an uncle who fell down a shaft and broke

himself in two, as much as a year before that.  That was a falsehood, but

then I was not going to let any man eclipse me on surprising adventures,

merely for the want of a little invention.  The Baron is a fine man, and

is said to stand high in the Emperor's confidence and esteem.



Baron Ungern-Sternberg, a boisterous, whole-souled old nobleman, came

with the rest.  He is a man of progress and enterprise--a representative

man of the age.  He is the Chief Director of the railway system of

Russia--a sort of railroad king.  In his line he is making things move

along in this country He has traveled extensively in America.  He says he

has tried convict labor on his railroads, and with perfect success.  He

says the convicts work well, and are quiet and peaceable.  He observed

that he employs nearly ten thousand of them now.



This appeared to be another call on my resources.  I was equal to the

emergency.  I said we had eighty thousand convicts employed on the

railways in America--all of them under sentence of death for murder in

the first degree.  That closed him out.



We had General Todtleben (the famous defender of Sebastopol, during the

siege,) and many inferior army and also navy officers, and a number of

unofficial Russian ladies and gentlemen.  Naturally, a champagne luncheon

was in order, and was accomplished without loss of life.  Toasts and

jokes were discharged freely, but no speeches were made save one thanking

the Emperor and the Grand Duke, through the Governor-General, for our

hospitable reception, and one by the Governor-General in reply, in which

he returned the Emperor's thanks for the speech, etc., etc.









CHAPTER XXXVIII.



We returned to Constantinople, and after a day or two spent in exhausting

marches about the city and voyages up the Golden Horn in caiques, we

steamed away again.  We passed through the Sea of Marmora and the

Dardanelles, and steered for a new land--a new one to us, at least--Asia.

We had as yet only acquired a bowing acquaintance with it, through

pleasure excursions to Scutari and the regions round about.



We passed between Lemnos and Mytilene, and saw them as we had seen Elba

and the Balearic Isles--mere bulky shapes, with the softening mists of

distance upon them--whales in a fog, as it were.  Then we held our course

southward, and began to "read up" celebrated Smyrna.



At all hours of the day and night the sailors in the forecastle amused

themselves and aggravated us by burlesquing our visit to royalty.  The

opening paragraph of our Address to the Emperor was framed as follows:



     "We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply

     for recreation--and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial

     state--and, therefore, we have no excuse to tender for presenting

     ourselves before your Majesty, save the desire of offering our

     grateful acknowledgments to the lord of a realm, which, through good

     and through evil report, has been the steadfast friend of the land

     we love so well."



The third cook, crowned with a resplendent tin basin and wrapped royally

in a table-cloth mottled with grease-spots and coffee stains, and bearing

a sceptre that looked strangely like a belaying-pin, walked upon a

dilapidated carpet and perched himself on the capstan, careless of the

flying spray; his tarred and weather-beaten Chamberlains, Dukes and Lord

High Admirals surrounded him, arrayed in all the pomp that spare

tarpaulins and remnants of old sails could furnish.  Then the visiting

"watch below," transformed into graceless ladies and uncouth pilgrims, by

rude travesties upon waterfalls, hoopskirts, white kid gloves and

swallow-tail coats, moved solemnly up the companion way, and bowing low,

began a system of complicated and extraordinary smiling which few

monarchs could look upon and live.  Then the mock consul, a slush-

plastered deck-sweep, drew out a soiled fragment of paper and proceeded

to read, laboriously:



"To His Imperial Majesty, Alexander II., Emperor of Russia:



"We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply for

recreation,--and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial state--and

therefore, we have no excuse to tender for presenting ourselves before

your Majesty--"



The Emperor--"Then what the devil did you come for?"



--"Save the desire of offering our grateful acknowledgments to the lord

of a realm which--"



The Emperor--" Oh, d--n the Address!--read it to the police.

Chamberlain, take these people over to my brother, the Grand Duke's, and

give them a square meal.  Adieu!  I am happy--I am gratified--I am

delighted--I am bored.  Adieu, adieu--vamos the ranch!  The First Groom

of the Palace will proceed to count the portable articles of value

belonging to the premises."



The farce then closed, to be repeated again with every change of the

watches, and embellished with new and still more extravagant inventions

of pomp and conversation.



At all times of the day and night the phraseology of that tiresome

address fell upon our ears.  Grimy sailors came down out of the foretop

placidly announcing themselves as "a handful of private citizens of

America, traveling simply for recreation and unostentatiously," etc.; the

coal passers moved to their duties in the profound depths of the ship,

explaining the blackness of their faces and their uncouthness of dress,

with the reminder that they were "a handful of private citizens,

traveling simply for recreation," etc., and when the cry rang through the

vessel at midnight: "EIGHT BELLS!--LARBOARD WATCH, TURN OUT!"  the

larboard watch came gaping and stretching out of their den, with the

everlasting formula: "Aye-aye, sir!  We are a handful of private citizens

of America, traveling simply for recreation, and unostentatiously, as

becomes our unofficial state!"



As I was a member of the committee, and helped to frame the Address,

these sarcasms came home to me.  I never heard a sailor proclaiming

himself as a handful of American citizens traveling for recreation, but I

wished he might trip and fall overboard, and so reduce his handful by one

individual, at least.  I never was so tired of any one phrase as the

sailors made me of the opening sentence of the Address to the Emperor of

Russia.



This seaport of Smyrna, our first notable acquaintance in Asia, is a

closely packed city of one hundred and thirty thousand inhabitants, and,

like Constantinople, it has no outskirts.  It is as closely packed at its

outer edges as it is in the centre, and then the habitations leave

suddenly off and the plain beyond seems houseless.  It is just like any

other Oriental city.  That is to say, its Moslem houses are heavy and

dark, and as comfortless as so many tombs; its streets are crooked,

rudely and roughly paved, and as narrow as an ordinary staircase; the

streets uniformly carry a man to any other place than the one he wants to

go to, and surprise him by landing him in the most unexpected localities;

business is chiefly carried on in great covered bazaars, celled like a

honeycomb with innumerable shops no larger than a common closet, and the

whole hive cut up into a maze of alleys about wide enough to accommodate

a laden camel, and well calculated to confuse a stranger and eventually

lose him; every where there is dirt, every where there are fleas, every

where there are lean, broken-hearted dogs; every alley is thronged with

people; wherever you look, your eye rests upon a wild masquerade of

extravagant costumes; the workshops are all open to the streets, and the

workmen visible; all manner of sounds assail the ear, and over them all

rings out the muezzin's cry from some tall minaret, calling the faithful

vagabonds to prayer; and superior to the call to prayer, the noises in

the streets, the interest of the costumes--superior to every thing, and

claiming the bulk of attention first, last, and all the time--is a

combination of Mohammedan stenches, to which the smell of even a Chinese

quarter would be as pleasant as the roasting odors of the fatted calf to

the nostrils of the returning Prodigal.  Such is Oriental luxury--such is

Oriental splendor!  We read about it all our days, but we comprehend it

not until we see it.  Smyrna is a very old city.  Its name occurs several

times in the Bible, one or two of the disciples of Christ visited it, and

here was located one of the original seven apocalyptic churches spoken of

in Revelations.  These churches were symbolized in the Scriptures as

candlesticks, and on certain conditions there was a sort of implied

promise that Smyrna should be endowed with a "crown of life."  She was to

"be faithful unto death"--those were the terms.  She has not kept up her

faith straight along, but the pilgrims that wander hither consider that

she has come near enough to it to save her, and so they point to the fact

that Smyrna to-day wears her crown of life, and is a great city, with a

great commerce and full of energy, while the cities wherein were located

the other six churches, and to which no crown of life was promised, have

vanished from the earth.  So Smyrna really still possesses her crown of

life, in a business point of view.  Her career, for eighteen centuries,

has been a chequered one, and she has been under the rule of princes of

many creeds, yet there has been no season during all that time, as far as

we know, (and during such seasons as she was inhabited at all,) that she

has been without her little community of Christians "faithful unto

death."  Hers was the only church against which no threats were implied

in the Revelations, and the only one which survived.



With Ephesus, forty miles from here, where was located another of the

seven churches, the case was different.  The "candlestick" has been

removed from Ephesus.  Her light has been put out.  Pilgrims, always

prone to find prophecies in the Bible, and often where none exist, speak

cheerfully and complacently of poor, ruined Ephesus as the victim of

prophecy.  And yet there is no sentence that promises, without due

qualification, the destruction of the city.  The words are:



     "Remember, therefore, from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and

     do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will

     remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent."



That is all; the other verses are singularly complimentary to Ephesus.

The threat is qualified.  There is no history to show that she did not

repent.  But the cruelest habit the modern prophecy-savans have, is that

one of coolly and arbitrarily fitting the prophetic shirt on to the wrong

man.  They do it without regard to rhyme or reason.  Both the cases I

have just mentioned are instances in point.  Those "prophecies" are

distinctly leveled at the "churches of Ephesus, Smyrna," etc., and yet

the pilgrims invariably make them refer to the cities instead.  No crown

of life is promised to the town of Smyrna and its commerce, but to the

handful of Christians who formed its "church."  If they were "faithful

unto death," they have their crown now--but no amount of faithfulness and

legal shrewdness combined could legitimately drag the city into a

participation in the promises of the prophecy.  The stately language of

the Bible refers to a crown of life whose lustre will reflect the day-

beams of the endless ages of eternity, not the butterfly existence of a

city built by men's hands, which must pass to dust with the builders and

be forgotten even in the mere handful of centuries vouchsafed to the

solid world itself between its cradle and its grave.



The fashion of delving out fulfillments of prophecy where that prophecy

consists of mere "ifs," trenches upon the absurd.  Suppose, a thousand

years from now, a malarious swamp builds itself up in the shallow harbor

of Smyrna, or something else kills the town; and suppose, also, that

within that time the swamp that has filled the renowned harbor of Ephesus

and rendered her ancient site deadly and uninhabitable to-day, becomes

hard and healthy ground; suppose the natural consequence ensues, to wit:

that Smyrna becomes a melancholy ruin, and Ephesus is rebuilt.  What

would the prophecy-savans say?  They would coolly skip over our age of

the world, and say: "Smyrna was not faithful unto death, and so her crown

of life was denied her; Ephesus repented, and lo!  her candle-stick was

not removed.  Behold these evidences!  How wonderful is prophecy!"



Smyrna has been utterly destroyed six times.  If her crown of life had

been an insurance policy, she would have had an opportunity to collect on

it the first time she fell.  But she holds it on sufferance and by a

complimentary construction of language which does not refer to her.

Six different times, however, I suppose some infatuated prophecy-

enthusiast blundered along and said, to the infinite disgust of Smyrna

and the Smyrniotes: "In sooth, here is astounding fulfillment of

prophecy!  Smyrna hath not been faithful unto death, and behold her crown

of life is vanished from her head.  Verily, these things be astonishing!"



Such things have a bad influence.  They provoke worldly men into using

light conversation concerning sacred subjects.  Thick-headed commentators

upon the Bible, and stupid preachers and teachers, work more damage to

religion than sensible, cool-brained clergymen can fight away again, toil

as they may.  It is not good judgment to fit a crown of life upon a city

which has been destroyed six times.  That other class of wiseacres who

twist prophecy in such a manner as to make it promise the destruction and

desolation of the same city, use judgment just as bad, since the city is

in a very flourishing condition now, unhappily for them.  These things

put arguments into the mouth of infidelity.



A portion of the city is pretty exclusively Turkish; the Jews have a

quarter to themselves; the Franks another quarter; so, also, with the

Armenians.  The Armenians, of course, are Christians.  Their houses are

large, clean, airy, handsomely paved with black and white squares of

marble, and in the centre of many of them is a square court, which has in

it a luxuriant flower-garden and a sparkling fountain; the doors of all

the rooms open on this.  A very wide hall leads to the street door, and

in this the women sit, the most of the day.  In the cool of the evening

they dress up in their best raiment and show themselves at the door.

They are all comely of countenance, and exceedingly neat and cleanly;

they look as if they were just out of a band-box.  Some of the young

ladies--many of them, I may say--are even very beautiful; they average a

shade better than American girls--which treasonable words I pray may be

forgiven me.  They are very sociable, and will smile back when a stranger

smiles at them, bow back when he bows, and talk back if he speaks to

them.  No introduction is required.  An hour's chat at the door with a

pretty girl one never saw before, is easily obtained, and is very

pleasant.  I have tried it.  I could not talk anything but English, and

the girl knew nothing but Greek, or Armenian, or some such barbarous

tongue, but we got along very well.  I find that in cases like these, the

fact that you can not comprehend each other isn't much of a drawback.

In that Russia n town of Yalta I danced an astonishing sort of dance an

hour long, and one I had not heard of before, with a very pretty girl,

and we talked incessantly, and laughed exhaustingly, and neither one ever

knew what the other was driving at.  But it was splendid.  There were

twenty people in the set, and the dance was very lively and complicated.

It was complicated enough without me--with me it was more so.  I threw in

a figure now and then that surprised those Russians.  But I have never

ceased to think of that girl.  I have written to her, but I can not

direct the epistle because her name is one of those nine-jointed Russian

affairs, and there are not letters enough in our alphabet to hold out.

I am not reckless enough to try to pronounce it when I am awake, but I

make a stagger at it in my dreams, and get up with the lockjaw in the

morning.  I am fading.  I do not take my meals now, with any sort of

regularity.  Her dear name haunts me still in my dreams.  It is awful on

teeth.  It never comes out of my mouth but it fetches an old snag along

with it.  And then the lockjaw closes down and nips off a couple of the

last syllables--but they taste good.



Coming through the Dardanelles, we saw camel trains on shore with the

glasses, but we were never close to one till we got to Smyrna.  These

camels are very much larger than the scrawny specimens one sees in the

menagerie.  They stride along these streets, in single file, a dozen in a

train, with heavy loads on their backs, and a fancy-looking negro in

Turkish costume, or an Arab, preceding them on a little donkey and

completely overshadowed and rendered insignificant by the huge beasts.

To see a camel train laden with the spices of Arabia and the rare fabrics

of Persia come marching through the narrow alleys of the bazaar, among

porters with their burdens, money-changers, lamp-merchants, Al-naschars

in the glassware business, portly cross-legged Turks smoking the famous

narghili; and the crowds drifting to and fro in the fanciful costumes of

the East, is a genuine revelation of the Orient.  The picture lacks

nothing.  It casts you back at once into your forgotten boyhood, and

again you dream over the wonders of the Arabian Nights; again your

companions are princes, your lord is the Caliph Haroun Al Raschid, and

your servants are terrific giants and genii that come with smoke and

lightning and thunder, and go as a storm goes when they depart!









CHAPTER XXXIX.



We inquired, and learned that the lions of Smyrna consisted of the ruins

of the ancient citadel, whose broken and prodigious battlements frown

upon the city from a lofty hill just in the edge of the town--the Mount

Pagus of Scripture, they call it; the site of that one of the Seven

Apocalyptic Churches of Asia which was located here in the first century

of the Christian era; and the grave and the place of martyrdom of the

venerable Polycarp, who suffered in Smyrna for his religion some eighteen

hundred years ago.



We took little donkeys and started.  We saw Polycarp's tomb, and then

hurried on.



The "Seven Churches"--thus they abbreviate it--came next on the list.  We

rode there--about a mile and a half in the sweltering sun--and visited a

little Greek church which they said was built upon the ancient site; and

we paid a small fee, and the holy attendant gave each of us a little wax

candle as a remembrancer of the place, and I put mine in my hat and the

sun melted it and the grease all ran down the back of my neck; and so now

I have not any thing left but the wick, and it is a sorry and a wilted-

looking wick at that.



Several of us argued as well as we could that the "church" mentioned in

the Bible meant a party of Christians, and not a building; that the Bible

spoke of them as being very poor--so poor, I thought, and so subject to

persecution (as per Polycarp's martyrdom) that in the first place they

probably could not have afforded a church edifice, and in the second

would not have dared to build it in the open light of day if they could;

and finally, that if they had had the privilege of building it, common

judgment would have suggested that they build it somewhere near the town.

But the elders of the ship's family ruled us down and scouted our

evidences.  However, retribution came to them afterward.  They found that

they had been led astray and had gone to the wrong place; they discovered

that the accepted site is in the city.



Riding through the town, we could see marks of the six Smyrnas that have

existed here and been burned up by fire or knocked down by earthquakes.

The hills and the rocks are rent asunder in places, excavations expose

great blocks of building-stone that have lain buried for ages, and all

the mean houses and walls of modern Smyrna along the way are spotted

white with broken pillars, capitals and fragments of sculptured marble

that once adorned the lordly palaces that were the glory of the city in

the olden time.



The ascent of the hill of the citadel is very steep, and we proceeded

rather slowly.  But there were matters of interest about us.  In one

place, five hundred feet above the sea, the perpendicular bank on the

upper side of the road was ten or fifteen feet high, and the cut exposed

three veins of oyster shells, just as we have seen quartz veins exposed

in the cutting of a road in Nevada or Montana.  The veins were about

eighteen inches thick and two or three feet apart, and they slanted along

downward for a distance of thirty feet or more, and then disappeared

where the cut joined the road.  Heaven only knows how far a man might

trace them by "stripping."  They were clean, nice oyster shells, large,

and just like any other oyster shells.  They were thickly massed

together, and none were scattered above or below the veins.  Each one was

a well-defined lead by itself, and without a spur.  My first instinct was

to set up the usual--



                                 NOTICE:



     "We, the undersigned, claim five claims of two hundred feet each,

     (and one for discovery,) on this ledge or lode of oyster-shells,

     with all its dips, spurs, angles, variations and sinuosities, and

     fifty feet on each side of the same, to work it, etc., etc.,

     according to the mining laws of Smyrna."



They were such perfectly natural-looking leads that I could hardly keep

from "taking them up."  Among the oyster-shells were mixed many fragments

of ancient, broken crockery ware.  Now how did those masses of oyster-

shells get there?  I can not determine.  Broken crockery and oyster-

shells are suggestive of restaurants--but then they could have had no

such places away up there on that mountain side in our time, because

nobody has lived up there.  A restaurant would not pay in such a stony,

forbidding, desolate place.  And besides, there were no champagne corks

among the shells.  If there ever was a restaurant there, it must have

been in Smyrna's palmy days, when the hills were covered with palaces.

I could believe in one restaurant, on those terms; but then how about the

three?  Did they have restaurants there at three different periods of the

world?--because there are two or three feet of solid earth between the

oyster leads.  Evidently, the restaurant solution will not answer.



The hill might have been the bottom of the sea, once, and been lifted up,

with its oyster-beds, by an earthquake--but, then, how about the

crockery?  And moreover, how about three oyster beds, one above another,

and thick strata of good honest earth between?



That theory will not do.  It is just possible that this hill is Mount

Ararat, and that Noah's Ark rested here, and he ate oysters and threw the

shells overboard.  But that will not do, either.  There are the three

layers again and the solid earth between--and, besides, there were only

eight in Noah's family, and they could not have eaten all these oysters

in the two or three months they staid on top of that mountain.  The

beasts--however, it is simply absurd to suppose he did not know any more

than to feed the beasts on oyster suppers.



It is painful--it is even humiliating--but I am reduced at last to one

slender theory: that the oysters climbed up there of their own accord.

But what object could they have had in view?--what did they want up

there?  What could any oyster want to climb a hill for?  To climb a hill

must necessarily be fatiguing and annoying exercise for an oyster.  The

most natural conclusion would be that the oysters climbed up there to

look at the scenery.  Yet when one comes to reflect upon the nature of an

oyster, it seems plain that he does not care for scenery.  An oyster has

no taste for such things; he cares nothing for the beautiful.  An oyster

is of a retiring disposition, and not lively--not even cheerful above the

average, and never enterprising.  But above all, an oyster does not take

any interest in scenery--he scorns it.  What have I arrived at now?

Simply at the point I started from, namely, those oyster shells are

there, in regular layers, five hundred feet above the sea, and no man

knows how they got there.  I have hunted up the guide-books, and the gist

of what they say is this: "They are there, but how they got there is a

mystery."



Twenty-five years ago, a multitude of people in America put on their

ascension robes, took a tearful leave of their friends, and made ready to

fly up into heaven at the first blast of the trumpet.  But the angel did

not blow it.  Miller's resurrection day was a failure.  The Millerites

were disgusted.  I did not suspect that there were Millers in Asia Minor,

but a gentleman tells me that they had it all set for the world to come

to an end in Smyrna one day about three years ago.  There was much

buzzing and preparation for a long time previously, and it culminated in

a wild excitement at the appointed time.  A vast number of the populace

ascended the citadel hill early in the morning, to get out of the way of

the general destruction, and many of the infatuated closed up their shops

and retired from all earthly business.  But the strange part of it was

that about three in the afternoon, while this gentleman and his friends

were at dinner in the hotel, a terrific storm of rain, accompanied by

thunder and lightning, broke forth and continued with dire fury for two

or three hours.  It was a thing unprecedented in Smyrna at that time of

the year, and scared some of the most skeptical.  The streets ran rivers

and the hotel floor was flooded with water.  The dinner had to be

suspended.  When the storm finished and left every body drenched through

and through, and melancholy and half-drowned, the ascensionists came down

from the mountain as dry as so many charity-sermons!  They had been

looking down upon the fearful storm going on below, and really believed

that their proposed destruction of the world was proving a grand success.



A railway here in Asia--in the dreamy realm of the Orient--in the fabled

land of the Arabian Nights--is a strange thing to think of.  And yet they

have one already, and are building another.  The present one is well

built and well conducted, by an English Company, but is not doing an

immense amount of business.  The first year it carried a good many

passengers, but its freight list only comprised eight hundred pounds of

figs!



It runs almost to the very gates of Ephesus--a town great in all ages of

the world--a city familiar to readers of the Bible, and one which was as

old as the very hills when the disciples of Christ preached in its

streets.  It dates back to the shadowy ages of tradition, and was the

birthplace of gods renowned in Grecian mythology.  The idea of a

locomotive tearing through such a place as this, and waking the phantoms

of its old days of romance out of their dreams of dead and gone

centuries, is curious enough.



We journey thither tomorrow to see the celebrated ruins.









CHAPTER XL.



This has been a stirring day.  The Superintendent of the railway put a

train at our disposal, and did us the further kindness of accompanying us

to Ephesus and giving to us his watchful care.  We brought sixty scarcely

perceptible donkeys in the freight cars, for we had much ground to go

over.  We have seen some of the most grotesque costumes, along the line

of the railroad, that can be imagined.  I am glad that no possible

combination of words could describe them, for I might then be foolish

enough to attempt it.



At ancient Ayassalook, in the midst of a forbidding desert, we came upon

long lines of ruined aqueducts, and other remnants of architectural

grandeur, that told us plainly enough we were nearing what had been a

metropolis, once.  We left the train and mounted the donkeys, along with

our invited guests--pleasant young gentlemen from the officers' list of

an American man-of-war.



The little donkeys had saddles upon them which were made very high in

order that the rider's feet might not drag the ground.  The preventative

did not work well in the cases of our tallest pilgrims, however.  There

were no bridles--nothing but a single rope, tied to the bit.  It was

purely ornamental, for the donkey cared nothing for it.  If he were

drifting to starboard, you might put your helm down hard the other way,

if it were any satisfaction to you to do it, but he would continue to

drift to starboard all the same.  There was only one process which could

be depended on, and it was to get down and lift his rear around until his

head pointed in the right direction, or take him under your arm and carry

him to a part of the road which he could not get out of without climbing.

The sun flamed down as hot as a furnace, and neck-scarfs, veils and

umbrellas seemed hardly any protection; they served only to make the long

procession look more than ever fantastic--for be it known the ladies were

all riding astride because they could not stay on the shapeless saddles

sidewise, the men were perspiring and out of temper, their feet were

banging against the rocks, the donkeys were capering in every direction

but the right one and being belabored with clubs for it, and every now

and then a broad umbrella would suddenly go down out of the cavalcade,

announcing to all that one more pilgrim had bitten the dust.  It was a

wilder picture than those solitudes had seen for many a day.  No donkeys

ever existed that were as hard to navigate as these, I think, or that had

so many vile, exasperating instincts.  Occasionally we grew so tired and

breathless with fighting them that we had to desist,--and immediately the

donkey would come down to a deliberate walk.  This, with the fatigue, and

the sun, would put a man asleep; and soon as the man was asleep, the

donkey would lie down.  My donkey shall never see his boyhood's home

again.  He has lain down once too often. He must die.



We all stood in the vast theatre of ancient Ephesus,--the stone-benched

amphitheatre I mean--and had our picture taken.  We looked as proper

there as we would look any where, I suppose.  We do not embellish the

general desolation of a desert much.  We add what dignity we can to a

stately ruin with our green umbrellas and jackasses, but it is little.

However, we mean well.



I wish to say a brief word of the aspect of Ephesus.



On a high, steep hill, toward the sea, is a gray ruin of ponderous blocks

of marble, wherein, tradition says, St. Paul was imprisoned eighteen

centuries ago.  From these old walls you have the finest view of the

desolate scene where once stood Ephesus, the proudest city of ancient

times, and whose Temple of Diana was so noble in design, and so exquisite

of workmanship, that it ranked high in the list of the Seven Wonders of

the World.



Behind you is the sea; in front is a level green valley, (a marsh, in

fact,) extending far away among the mountains; to the right of the front

view is the old citadel of Ayassalook, on a high hill; the ruined Mosque

of the Sultan Selim stands near it in the plain, (this is built over the

grave of St. John, and was formerly Christian Church ;) further toward

you is the hill of Pion, around whose front is clustered all that remains

of the ruins of Ephesus that still stand; divided from it by a narrow

valley is the long, rocky, rugged mountain of Coressus.  The scene is a

pretty one, and yet desolate--for in that wide plain no man can live, and

in it is no human habitation.  But for the crumbling arches and monstrous

piers and broken walls that rise from the foot of the hill of Pion, one

could not believe that in this place once stood a city whose renown is

older than tradition itself.  It is incredible to reflect that things as

familiar all over the world to-day as household words, belong in the

history and in the shadowy legends of this silent, mournful solitude.

We speak of Apollo and of Diana--they were born here; of the

metamorphosis of Syrinx into a reed--it was done here; of the great god

Pan--he dwelt in the caves of this hill of Coressus; of the Amazons--this

was their best prized home; of Bacchus and Hercules both fought the

warlike women here; of the Cyclops--they laid the ponderous marble blocks

of some of the ruins yonder; of Homer--this was one of his many

birthplaces; of Cirmon of Athens; of Alcibiades, Lysander, Agesilaus--

they visited here; so did Alexander the Great; so did Hannibal and

Antiochus, Scipio, Lucullus and Sylla; Brutus, Cassius, Pompey, Cicero,

and Augustus; Antony was a judge in this place, and left his seat in the

open court, while the advocates were speaking, to run after Cleopatra,

who passed the door; from this city these two sailed on pleasure

excursions, in galleys with silver oars and perfumed sails, and with

companies of beautiful girls to serve them, and actors and musicians to

amuse them; in days that seem almost modern, so remote are they from the

early history of this city, Paul the Apostle preached the new religion

here, and so did John, and here it is supposed the former was pitted

against wild beasts, for in 1 Corinthians, xv. 32 he says:



     "If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus,"

     &c.,



when many men still lived who had seen the Christ; here Mary Magdalen

died, and here the Virgin Mary ended her days with John, albeit Rome has

since judged it best to locate her grave elsewhere; six or seven hundred

years ago--almost yesterday, as it were--troops of mail-clad Crusaders

thronged the streets; and to come down to trifles, we speak of meandering

streams, and find a new interest in a common word when we discover that

the crooked river Meander, in yonder valley, gave it to our dictionary.

It makes me feel as old as these dreary hills to look down upon these

moss-hung ruins, this historic desolation.  One may read the Scriptures

and believe, but he can not go and stand yonder in the ruined theatre and

in imagination people it again with the vanished multitudes who mobbed

Paul's comrades there and shouted, with one voice, "Great is Diana of the

Ephesians!"  The idea of a shout in such a solitude as this almost makes

one shudder.



It was a wonderful city, this Ephesus.  Go where you will about these

broad plains, you find the most exquisitely sculptured marble fragments

scattered thick among the dust and weeds; and protruding from the ground,

or lying prone upon it, are beautiful fluted columns of porphyry and all

precious marbles; and at every step you find elegantly carved capitals

and massive bases, and polished tablets engraved with Greek inscriptions.

It is a world of precious relics, a wilderness of marred and mutilated

gems.  And yet what are these things to the wonders that lie buried here

under the ground?  At Constantinople, at Pisa, in the cities of Spain,

are great mosques and cathedrals, whose grandest columns came from the

temples and palaces of Ephesus, and yet one has only to scratch the

ground here to match them.  We shall never know what magnificence is,

until this imperial city is laid bare to the sun.



The finest piece of sculpture we have yet seen and the one that impressed

us most, (for we do not know much about art and can not easily work up

ourselves into ecstasies over it,) is one that lies in this old theatre

of Ephesus which St. Paul's riot has made so celebrated.  It is only the

headless body of a man, clad in a coat of mail, with a Medusa head upon

the breast-plate, but we feel persuaded that such dignity and such

majesty were never thrown into a form of stone before.



What builders they were, these men of antiquity!  The massive arches of

some of these ruins rest upon piers that are fifteen feet square and

built entirely of solid blocks of marble, some of which are as large as a

Saratoga trunk, and some the size of a boarding-house sofa.  They are not

shells or shafts of stone filled inside with rubbish, but the whole pier

is a mass of solid masonry.  Vast arches, that may have been the gates of

the city, are built in the same way.  They have braved the storms and

sieges of three thousand years, and have been shaken by many an

earthquake, but still they stand.  When they dig alongside of them, they

find ranges of ponderous masonry that are as perfect in every detail as

they were the day those old Cyclopian giants finished them.  An English

Company is going to excavate Ephesus--and then!



And now am I reminded of--



                    THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN SLEEPERS.



In the Mount of Pion, yonder, is the Cave of the Seven Sleepers.  Once

upon a time, about fifteen hundred years ago, seven young men lived near

each other in Ephesus, who belonged to the despised sect of the

Christians.  It came to pass that the good King Maximilianus, (I am

telling this story for nice little boys and girls,) it came to pass, I

say, that the good King Maximilianus fell to persecuting the Christians,

and as time rolled on he made it very warm for them.  So the seven young

men said one to the other, let us get up and travel.  And they got up and

traveled.  They tarried not to bid their fathers and mothers good-bye, or

any friend they knew.  They only took certain moneys which their parents

had, and garments that belonged unto their friends, whereby they might

remember them when far away; and they took also the dog Ketmehr, which

was the property of their neighbor Malchus, because the beast did run his

head into a noose which one of the young men was carrying carelessly, and

they had not time to release him; and they took also certain chickens

that seemed lonely in the neighboring coops, and likewise some bottles of

curious liquors that stood near the grocer's window; and then they

departed from the city.  By-and-by they came to a marvelous cave in the

Hill of Pion and entered into it and feasted, and presently they hurried

on again.  But they forgot the bottles of curious liquors, and left them

behind.  They traveled in many lands, and had many strange adventures.

They were virtuous young men, and lost no opportunity that fell in their

way to make their livelihood.  Their motto was in these words, namely,

"Procrastination is the thief of time."  And so, whenever they did come

upon a man who was alone, they said, Behold, this person hath the

wherewithal--let us go through him.  And they went through him.  At the

end of five years they had waxed tired of travel and adventure, and

longed to revisit their old home again and hear the voices and see the

faces that were dear unto their youth.  Therefore they went through such

parties as fell in their way where they sojourned at that time, and

journeyed back toward Ephesus again.  For the good King Maximilianus was

become converted unto the new faith, and the Christians rejoiced because

they were no longer persecuted.  One day as the sun went down, they came

to the cave in the Mount of Pion, and they said, each to his fellow, Let

us sleep here, and go and feast and make merry with our friends when the

morning cometh.  And each of the seven lifted up his voice and said, It

is a whiz.  So they went in, and lo, where they had put them, there lay

the bottles of strange liquors, and they judged that age had not impaired

their excellence.  Wherein the wanderers were right, and the heads of the

same were level.  So each of the young men drank six bottles, and behold

they felt very tired, then, and lay down and slept soundly.



When they awoke, one of them, Johannes--surnamed Smithianus--said, We are

naked.  And it was so.  Their raiment was all gone, and the money which

they had gotten from a stranger whom they had proceeded through as they

approached the city, was lying upon the ground, corroded and rusted and

defaced.  Likewise the dog Ketmehr was gone, and nothing save the brass

that was upon his collar remained.  They wondered much at these things.

But they took the money, and they wrapped about their bodies some leaves,

and came up to the top of the hill.  Then were they perplexed.  The

wonderful temple of Diana was gone; many grand edifices they had never

seen before stood in the city; men in strange garbs moved about the

streets, and every thing was changed.



Johannes said, It hardly seems like Ephesus.  Yet here is the great

gymnasium; here is the mighty theatre, wherein I have seen seventy

thousand men assembled; here is the Agora; there is the font where the

sainted John the Baptist immersed the converts; yonder is the prison of

the good St. Paul, where we all did use to go to touch the ancient chains

that bound him and be cured of our distempers; I see the tomb of the

disciple Luke, and afar off is the church wherein repose the ashes of the

holy John, where the Christians of Ephesus go twice a year to gather the

dust from the tomb, which is able to make bodies whole again that are

corrupted by disease, and cleanse the soul from sin; but see how the

wharves encroach upon the sea, and what multitudes of ships are anchored

in the bay; see, also, how the city hath stretched abroad, far over the

valley behind Pion, and even unto the walls of Ayassalook; and lo, all

the hills are white with palaces and ribbed with colonnades of marble.

How mighty is Ephesus become!



And wondering at what their eyes had seen, they went down into the city

and purchased garments and clothed themselves.  And when they would have

passed on, the merchant bit the coins which they had given him, with his

teeth, and turned them about and looked curiously upon them, and cast

them upon his counter, and listened if they rang; and then he said, These

be bogus.  And they said, Depart thou to Hades, and went their way.  When

they were come to their houses, they recognized them, albeit they seemed

old and mean; and they rejoiced, and were glad.  They ran to the doors,

and knocked, and strangers opened, and looked inquiringly upon them.  And

they said, with great excitement, while their hearts beat high, and the

color in their faces came and went, Where is my father?  Where is my

mother?  Where are Dionysius and Serapion, and Pericles, and Decius?  And

the strangers that opened said, We know not these.  The Seven said, How,

you know them not?  How long have ye dwelt here, and whither are they

gone that dwelt here before ye?  And the strangers said, Ye play upon us

with a jest, young men; we and our fathers have sojourned under these

roofs these six generations; the names ye utter rot upon the tombs, and

they that bore them have run their brief race, have laughed and sung,

have borne the sorrows and the weariness that were allotted them, and are

at rest; for nine-score years the summers have come and gone, and the

autumn leaves have fallen, since the roses faded out of their cheeks and

they laid them to sleep with the dead.



Then the seven young men turned them away from their homes, and the

strangers shut the doors upon them.  The wanderers marveled greatly, and

looked into the faces of all they met, as hoping to find one that they

knew; but all were strange, and passed them by and spake no friendly

word.  They were sore distressed and sad.  Presently they spake unto a

citizen and said, Who is King in Ephesus?  And the citizen answered and

said, Whence come ye that ye know not that great Laertius reigns in

Ephesus?  They looked one at the other, greatly perplexed, and presently

asked again, Where, then, is the good King Maximilianus?  The citizen

moved him apart, as one who is afraid, and said, Verily these men be mad,

and dream dreams, else would they know that the King whereof they speak

is dead above two hundred years agone.



Then the scales fell from the eyes of the Seven, and one said, Alas, that

we drank of the curious liquors.  They have made us weary, and in

dreamless sleep these two long centuries have we lain.  Our homes are

desolate, our friends are dead.  Behold, the jig is up--let us die.  And

that same day went they forth and laid them down and died.  And in that

self-same day, likewise, the Seven-up did cease in Ephesus, for that the

Seven that were up were down again, and departed and dead withal.  And

the names that be upon their tombs, even unto this time, are Johannes

Smithianus, Trumps, Gift, High, and Low, Jack, and The Game.  And with

the sleepers lie also the bottles wherein were once the curious liquors:

and upon them is writ, in ancient letters, such words as these--Dames of

heathen gods of olden time, perchance: Rumpunch, Jinsling, Egnog.



Such is the story of the Seven Sleepers, (with slight variations,) and I

know it is true, because I have seen the cave myself.



Really, so firm a faith had the ancients this legend, that as late as

eight or nine hundred years ago, learned travelers held it in

superstitious fear.  Two of them record that they ventured into it, but

ran quickly out again, not daring to tarry lest they should fall asleep

and outlive their great grand-children a century or so.  Even at this day

the ignorant denizens of the neighboring country prefer not to sleep in

it.









CHAPTER XLI.



When I last made a memorandum, we were at Ephesus.  We are in Syria, now,

encamped in the mountains of Lebanon.  The interregnum has been long,

both as to time and distance.  We brought not a relic from Ephesus!

After gathering up fragments of sculptured marbles and breaking ornaments

from the interior work of the Mosques; and after bringing them at a cost

of infinite trouble and fatigue, five miles on muleback to the railway

depot, a government officer compelled all who had such things to

disgorge!  He had an order from Constantinople to look out for our party,

and see that we carried nothing off.  It was a wise, a just, and a well-

deserved rebuke, but it created a sensation.  I never resist a temptation

to plunder a stranger's premises without feeling insufferably vain about

it.  This time I felt proud beyond expression.  I was serene in the midst

of the scoldings that were heaped upon the Ottoman government for its

affront offered to a pleasuring party of entirely respectable gentlemen

and ladies I said, "We that have free souls, it touches us not."  The

shoe not only pinched our party, but it pinched hard; a principal

sufferer discovered that the imperial order was inclosed in an envelop

bearing the seal of the British Embassy at Constantinople, and therefore

must have been inspired by the representative of the Queen.  This was

bad--very bad.  Coming solely from the Ottomans, it might have signified

only Ottoman hatred of Christians, and a vulgar ignorance as to genteel

methods of expressing it; but coming from the Christianized, educated,

politic British legation, it simply intimated that we were a sort of

gentlemen and ladies who would bear watching!  So the party regarded it,

and were incensed accordingly.  The truth doubtless was, that the same

precautions would have been taken against any travelers, because the

English Company who have acquired the right to excavate Ephesus, and have

paid a great sum for that right, need to be protected, and deserve to be.

They can not afford to run the risk of having their hospitality abused by

travelers, especially since travelers are such notorious scorners of

honest behavior.



We sailed from Smyrna, in the wildest spirit of expectancy, for the chief

feature, the grand goal of the expedition, was near at hand--we were

approaching the Holy Land!  Such a burrowing into the hold for trunks

that had lain buried for weeks, yes for months; such a hurrying to and

fro above decks and below; such a riotous system of packing and

unpacking; such a littering up of the cabins with shirts and skirts, and

indescribable and unclassable odds and ends; such a making up of bundles,

and setting apart of umbrellas, green spectacles and thick veils; such a

critical inspection of saddles and bridles that had never yet touched

horses; such a cleaning and loading of revolvers and examining of bowie-

knives; such a half-soling of the seats of pantaloons with serviceable

buckskin; then such a poring over ancient maps; such a reading up of

Bibles and Palestine travels; such a marking out of routes; such

exasperating efforts to divide up the company into little bands of

congenial spirits who might make the long and arduous Journey without

quarreling; and morning, noon and night, such mass-meetings in the

cabins, such speech-making, such sage suggesting, such worrying and

quarreling, and such a general raising of the very mischief, was never

seen in the ship before!



But it is all over now.  We are cut up into parties of six or eight, and

by this time are scattered far and wide.  Ours is the only one, however,

that is venturing on what is called "the long trip"--that is, out into

Syria, by Baalbec to Damascus, and thence down through the full length of

Palestine.  It would be a tedious, and also a too risky journey, at this

hot season of the year, for any but strong, healthy men, accustomed

somewhat to fatigue and rough life in the open air.  The other parties

will take shorter journeys.



For the last two months we have been in a worry about one portion of this

Holy Land pilgrimage.  I refer to transportation service.  We knew very

well that Palestine was a country which did not do a large passenger

business, and every man we came across who knew any thing about it gave

us to understand that not half of our party would be able to get dragomen

and animals.  At Constantinople every body fell to telegraphing the

American Consuls at Alexandria and Beirout to give notice that we wanted

dragomen and transportation.  We were desperate--would take horses,

jackasses, cameleopards, kangaroos--any thing.  At Smyrna, more

telegraphing was done, to the same end.  Also fearing for the worst, we

telegraphed for a large number of seats in the diligence for Damascus,

and horses for the ruins of Baalbec.



As might have been expected, a notion got abroad in Syria and Egypt that

the whole population of the Province of America (the Turks consider us a

trifling little province in some unvisited corner of the world,) were

coming to the Holy Land--and so, when we got to Beirout yesterday, we

found the place full of dragomen and their outfits.  We had all intended

to go by diligence to Damascus, and switch off to Baalbec as we went

along--because we expected to rejoin the ship, go to Mount Carmel, and

take to the woods from there.  However, when our own private party of

eight found that it was possible, and proper enough, to make the "long

trip," we adopted that programme.  We have never been much trouble to a

Consul before, but we have been a fearful nuisance to our Consul at

Beirout.  I mention this because I can not help admiring his patience,

his industry, and his accommodating spirit.  I mention it also, because I

think some of our ship's company did not give him as full credit for his

excellent services as he deserved.



Well, out of our eight, three were selected to attend to all business

connected with the expedition.  The rest of us had nothing to do but look

at the beautiful city of Beirout, with its bright, new houses nestled

among a wilderness of green shrubbery spread abroad over an upland that

sloped gently down to the sea; and also at the mountains of Lebanon that

environ it; and likewise to bathe in the transparent blue water that

rolled its billows about the ship (we did not know there were sharks

there.) We had also to range up and down through the town and look at the

costumes.  These are picturesque and fanciful, but not so varied as at

Constantinople and Smyrna; the women of Beirout add an agony--in the two

former cities the sex wear a thin veil which one can see through (and

they often expose their ancles,) but at Beirout they cover their entire

faces with dark-colored or black veils, so that they look like mummies,

and then expose their breasts to the public.  A young gentleman (I

believe he was a Greek,) volunteered to show us around the city, and said

it would afford him great pleasure, because he was studying English and

wanted practice in that language.  When we had finished the rounds,

however, he called for remuneration--said he hoped the gentlemen would

give him a trifle in the way of a few piastres (equivalent to a few five

cent pieces.)  We did so.  The Consul was surprised when he heard it, and

said he knew the young fellow's family very well, and that they were an

old and highly respectable family and worth a hundred and fifty thousand

dollars!  Some people, so situated, would have been ashamed of the berth

he had with us and his manner of crawling into it.



At the appointed time our business committee reported, and said all

things were in readdress--that we were to start to-day, with horses, pack

animals, and tents, and go to Baalbec, Damascus, the Sea of Tiberias, and

thence southward by the way of the scene of Jacob's Dream and other

notable Bible localities to Jerusalem--from thence probably to the Dead

Sea, but possibly not--and then strike for the ocean and rejoin the ship

three or four weeks hence at Joppa; terms, five dollars a day apiece, in

gold, and every thing to be furnished by the dragoman.  They said we

would lie as well as at a hotel.  I had read something like that before,

and did not shame my judgment by believing a word of it.  I said nothing,

however, but packed up a blanket and a shawl to sleep in, pipes and

tobacco, two or three woollen shirts, a portfolio, a guide-book, and a

Bible.  I also took along a towel and a cake of soap, to inspire respect

in the Arabs, who would take me for a king in disguise.



We were to select our horses at 3 P.M.  At that hour Abraham, the

dragoman, marshaled them before us.  With all solemnity I set it down

here, that those horses were the hardest lot I ever did come across, and

their accoutrements were in exquisite keeping with their style.  One

brute had an eye out; another had his tail sawed off close, like a

rabbit, and was proud of it; another had a bony ridge running from his

neck to his tail, like one of those ruined aqueducts one sees about Rome,

and had a neck on him like a bowsprit; they all limped, and had sore

backs, and likewise raw places and old scales scattered about their

persons like brass nails in a hair trunk; their gaits were marvelous to

contemplate, and replete with variety under way the procession looked

like a fleet in a storm.  It was fearful.  Blucher shook his head and

said:



"That dragon is going to get himself into trouble fetching these old

crates out of the hospital the way they are, unless he has got a permit."



I said nothing.  The display was exactly according to the guide-book, and

were we not traveling by the guide-book?  I selected a certain horse

because I thought I saw him shy, and I thought that a horse that had

spirit enough to shy was not to be despised.



At 6 o'clock P.M., we came to a halt here on the breezy summit of a

shapely mountain overlooking the sea, and the handsome valley where dwelt

some of those enterprising Phoenicians of ancient times we read so much

about; all around us are what were once the dominions of Hiram, King of

Tyre, who furnished timber from the cedars of these Lebanon hills to

build portions of King Solomon's Temple with.



Shortly after six, our pack train arrived.  I had not seen it before, and

a good right I had to be astonished.  We had nineteen serving men and

twenty-six pack mules!  It was a perfect caravan.  It looked like one,

too, as it wound among the rocks.  I wondered what in the very mischief

we wanted with such a vast turn-out as that, for eight men.  I wondered

awhile, but soon I began to long for a tin plate, and some bacon and

beans.  I had camped out many and many a time before, and knew just what

was coming.  I went off, without waiting for serving men, and unsaddled

my horse, and washed such portions of his ribs and his spine as projected

through his hide, and when I came back, behold five stately circus tents

were up--tents that were brilliant, within, with blue, and gold, and

crimson, and all manner of splendid adornment!  I was speechless.  Then

they brought eight little iron bedsteads, and set them up in the tents;

they put a soft mattress and pillows and good blankets and two snow-white

sheets on each bed.  Next, they rigged a table about the centre-pole, and

on it placed pewter pitchers, basins, soap, and the whitest of towels--

one set for each man; they pointed to pockets in the tent, and said we

could put our small trifles in them for convenience, and if we needed

pins or such things, they were sticking every where.  Then came the

finishing touch--they spread carpets on the floor!  I simply said, "If

you call this camping out, all right--but it isn't the style I am used

to; my little baggage that I brought along is at a discount."



It grew dark, and they put candles on the tables--candles set in bright,

new, brazen candlesticks.  And soon the bell--a genuine, simon-pure bell

--rang, and we were invited to "the saloon."  I had thought before that

we had a tent or so too many, but now here was one, at least, provided

for; it was to be used for nothing but an eating-saloon.  Like the

others, it was high enough for a family of giraffes to live in, and was

very handsome and clean and bright-colored within.  It was a gem of a

place.  A table for eight, and eight canvas chairs; a table-cloth and

napkins whose whiteness and whose fineness laughed to scorn the things we

were used to in the great excursion steamer; knives and forks, soup-

plates, dinner-plates--every thing, in the handsomest kind of style.  It

was wonderful!  And they call this camping out.  Those stately fellows in

baggy trowsers and turbaned fezzes brought in a dinner which consisted of

roast mutton, roast chicken, roast goose, potatoes, bread, tea, pudding,

apples, and delicious grapes; the viands were better cooked than any we

had eaten for weeks, and the table made a finer appearance, with its

large German silver candlesticks and other finery, than any table we had

sat down to for a good while, and yet that polite dragoman, Abraham, came

bowing in and apologizing for the whole affair, on account of the

unavoidable confusion of getting under way for a very long trip, and

promising to do a great deal better in future!



It is midnight, now, and we break camp at six in the morning.



They call this camping out.  At this rate it is a glorious privilege to

be a pilgrim to the Holy Land.









CHAPTER XLII.



We are camped near Temnin-el-Foka--a name which the boys have simplified

a good deal, for the sake of convenience in spelling.  They call it

Jacksonville.  It sounds a little strangely, here in the Valley of

Lebanon, but it has the merit of being easier to remember than the Arabic

name.



                     "COME LIKE SPIRITS, SO DEPART."



                 "The night shall be filled with music,

                   And the cares that infest the day

                 Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,

                      And as silently steal away."



I slept very soundly last night, yet when the dragoman's bell rang at

half-past five this morning and the cry went abroad of "Ten minutes to

dress for breakfast!"  I heard both.  It surprised me, because I have not

heard the breakfast gong in the ship for a month, and whenever we have

had occasion to fire a salute at daylight, I have only found it out in

the course of conversation afterward.  However, camping out, even though

it be in a gorgeous tent, makes one fresh and lively in the morning--

especially if the air you are breathing is the cool, fresh air of the

mountains.



I was dressed within the ten minutes, and came out.  The saloon tent had

been stripped of its sides, and had nothing left but its roof; so when we

sat down to table we could look out over a noble panorama of mountain,

sea and hazy valley.  And sitting thus, the sun rose slowly up and

suffused the picture with a world of rich coloring.



Hot mutton chops, fried chicken, omelettes, fried potatoes and coffee--

all excellent.  This was the bill of fare.  It was sauced with a savage

appetite purchased by hard riding the day before, and refreshing sleep in

a pure atmosphere.  As I called for a second cup of coffee, I glanced

over my shoulder, and behold our white village was gone--the splendid

tents had vanished like magic!  It was wonderful how quickly those Arabs

had "folded their tents;" and it was wonderful, also, how quickly they

had gathered the thousand odds and ends of the camp together and

disappeared with them.



By half-past six we were under way, and all the Syrian world seemed to be

under way also.  The road was filled with mule trains and long

processions of camels.  This reminds me that we have been trying for some

time to think what a camel looks like, and now we have made it out.  When

he is down on all his knees, flat on his breast to receive his load, he

looks something like a goose swimming; and when he is upright he looks

like an ostrich with an extra set of legs.  Camels are not beautiful, and

their long under lip gives them an exceedingly "gallus"--[Excuse the

slang, no other word will describe it]--expression.  They have immense,

flat, forked cushions of feet, that make a track in the dust like a pie

with a slice cut out of it.  They are not particular about their diet.

They would eat a tombstone if they could bite it.  A thistle grows about

here which has needles on it that would pierce through leather, I think;

if one touches you, you can find relief in nothing but profanity.  The

camels eat these.  They show by their actions that they enjoy them.  I

suppose it would be a real treat to a camel to have a keg of nails for

supper.



While I am speaking of animals, I will mention that I have a horse now by

the name of "Jericho."  He is a mare.  I have seen remarkable horses

before, but none so remarkable as this.  I wanted a horse that could shy,

and this one fills the bill.  I had an idea that shying indicated spirit.

If I was correct, I have got the most spirited horse on earth.  He shies

at every thing he comes across, with the utmost impartiality.  He appears

to have a mortal dread of telegraph poles, especially; and it is

fortunate that these are on both sides of the road, because as it is now,

I never fall off twice in succession on the same side.  If I fell on the

same side always, it would get to be monotonous after a while.  This

creature has scared at every thing he has seen to-day, except a haystack.

He walked up to that with an intrepidity and a recklessness that were

astonishing.  And it would fill any one with admiration to see how he

preserves his self-possession in the presence of a barley sack.  This

dare-devil bravery will be the death of this horse some day.



He is not particularly fast, but I think he will get me through the Holy

Land.  He has only one fault.  His tail has been chopped off or else he

has sat down on it too hard, some time or other, and he has to fight the

flies with his heels.  This is all very well, but when he tries to kick a

fly off the top of his head with his hind foot, it is too much variety.

He is going to get himself into trouble that way some day.  He reaches

around and bites my legs too.  I do not care particularly about that,

only I do not like to see a horse too sociable.



I think the owner of this prize had a wrong opinion about him.  He had an

idea that he was one of those fiery, untamed steeds, but he is not of

that character.  I know the Arab had this idea, because when he brought

the horse out for inspection in Beirout, he kept jerking at the bridle

and shouting in Arabic, "Ho!  will you?  Do you want to run away, you

ferocious beast, and break your neck?" when all the time the horse was

not doing anything in the world, and only looked like he wanted to lean

up against something and think.  Whenever he is not shying at things, or

reaching after a fly, he wants to do that yet.  How it would surprise his

owner to know this.



We have been in a historical section of country all day.  At noon we

camped three hours and took luncheon at Mekseh, near the junction of the

Lebanon Mountains and the Jebel el Kuneiyiseh, and looked down into the

immense, level, garden-like Valley of Lebanon.  To-night we are camping

near the same valley, and have a very wide sweep of it in view.  We can

see the long, whale-backed ridge of Mount Hermon projecting above the

eastern hills.  The "dews of Hermon" are falling upon us now, and the

tents are almost soaked with them.



Over the way from us, and higher up the valley, we can discern, through

the glasses, the faint outlines of the wonderful ruins of Baalbec, the

supposed Baal-Gad of Scripture.  Joshua, and another person, were the two

spies who were sent into this land of Canaan by the children of Israel to

report upon its character--I mean they were the spies who reported

favorably.  They took back with them some specimens of the grapes of this

country, and in the children's picture-books they are always represented

as bearing one monstrous bunch swung to a pole between them, a

respectable load for a pack-train.  The Sunday-school books exaggerated

it a little.  The grapes are most excellent to this day, but the bunches

are not as large as those in the pictures.  I was surprised and hurt when

I saw them, because those colossal bunches of grapes were one of my most

cherished juvenile traditions.



Joshua reported favorably, and the children of Israel journeyed on, with

Moses at the head of the general government, and Joshua in command of the

army of six hundred thousand fighting men.  Of women and children and

civilians there was a countless swarm.  Of all that mighty host, none but

the two faithful spies ever lived to set their feet in the Promised Land.

They and their descendants wandered forty years in the desert, and then

Moses, the gifted warrior, poet, statesman and philosopher, went up into

Pisgah and met his mysterious fate.  Where he was buried no man knows--

for



          "* * * no man dug that sepulchre,

          And no man saw it e'er--

          For the Sons of God upturned the sod

          And laid the dead man there!"



Then Joshua began his terrible raid, and from Jericho clear to this Baal-

Gad, he swept the land like the Genius of Destruction.  He slaughtered

the people, laid waste their soil, and razed their cities to the ground.

He wasted thirty-one kings also.  One may call it that, though really it

can hardly be called wasting them, because there were always plenty of

kings in those days, and to spare.  At any rate, he destroyed thirty-one

kings, and divided up their realms among his Israelites.  He divided up

this valley stretched out here before us, and so it was once Jewish

territory.  The Jews have long since disappeared from it, however.



Back yonder, an hour's journey from here, we passed through an Arab

village of stone dry-goods boxes (they look like that,) where Noah's tomb

lies under lock and key.  [Noah built the ark.]  Over these old hills and

valleys the ark that contained all that was left of a vanished world once

floated.



I make no apology for detailing the above information.  It will be news

to some of my readers, at any rate.



Noah's tomb is built of stone, and is covered with a long stone building.

Bucksheesh let us in.  The building had to be long, because the grave of

the honored old navigator is two hundred and ten feet long itself!  It is

only about four feet high, though.  He must have cast a shadow like a

lightning-rod.  The proof that this is the genuine spot where Noah was

buried can only be doubted by uncommonly incredulous people.  The

evidence is pretty straight.  Shem, the son of Noah, was present at the

burial, and showed the place to his descendants, who transmitted the

knowledge to their descendants, and the lineal descendants of these

introduced themselves to us to-day.  It was pleasant to make the

acquaintance of members of so respectable a family.  It was a thing to be

proud of.  It was the next thing to being acquainted with Noah himself.



Noah's memorable voyage will always possess a living interest for me,

henceforward.



If ever an oppressed race existed, it is this one we see fettered around

us under the inhuman tyranny of the Ottoman Empire.  I wish Europe would

let Russia annihilate Turkey a little--not much, but enough to make it

difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a diving-

bell.  The Syrians are very poor, and yet they are ground down by a

system of taxation that would drive any other nation frantic.  Last year

their taxes were heavy enough, in all conscience--but this year they have

been increased by the addition of taxes that were forgiven them in times

of famine in former years.  On top of this the Government has levied a

tax of one-tenth of the whole proceeds of the land.  This is only half

the story.  The Pacha of a Pachalic does not trouble himself with

appointing tax-collectors.  He figures up what all these taxes ought to

amount to in a certain district.  Then he farms the collection out.  He

calls the rich men together, the highest bidder gets the speculation,

pays the Pacha on the spot, and then sells out to smaller fry, who sell

in turn to a piratical horde of still smaller fry.  These latter compel

the peasant to bring his little trifle of grain to the village, at his

own cost.  It must be weighed, the various taxes set apart, and the

remainder returned to the producer.  But the collector delays this duty

day after day, while the producer's family are perishing for bread; at

last the poor wretch, who can not but understand the game, says, "Take a

quarter--take half--take two-thirds if you will, and let me go!"  It is a

most outrageous state of things.



These people are naturally good-hearted and intelligent, and with

education and liberty, would be a happy and contented race.  They often

appeal to the stranger to know if the great world will not some day come

to their relief and save them.  The Sultan has been lavishing money like

water in England and Paris, but his subjects are suffering for it now.



This fashion of camping out bewilders me.  We have boot-jacks and a bath-

tub, now, and yet all the mysteries the pack-mules carry are not

revealed.  What next?









CHAPTER XLIII.



We had a tedious ride of about five hours, in the sun, across the Valley

of Lebanon.  It proved to be not quite so much of a garden as it had

seemed from the hill-sides.  It was a desert, weed-grown waste, littered

thickly with stones the size of a man's fist.  Here and there the natives

had scratched the ground and reared a sickly crop of grain, but for the

most part the valley was given up to a handful of shepherds, whose flocks

were doing what they honestly could to get a living, but the chances were

against them.  We saw rude piles of stones standing near the roadside, at

intervals, and recognized the custom of marking boundaries which obtained

in Jacob's time.  There were no walls, no fences, no hedges--nothing to

secure a man's possessions but these random heaps of stones.  The

Israelites held them sacred in the old patriarchal times, and these other

Arabs, their lineal descendants, do so likewise.  An American, of

ordinary intelligence, would soon widely extend his property, at an

outlay of mere manual labor, performed at night, under so loose a system

of fencing as this.



The plows these people use are simply a sharpened stick, such as Abraham

plowed with, and they still winnow their wheat as he did--they pile it on

the house-top, and then toss it by shovel-fulls into the air until the

wind has blown all the chaff away.  They never invent any thing, never

learn any thing.



We had a fine race, of a mile, with an Arab perched on a camel.  Some of

the horses were fast, and made very good time, but the camel scampered by

them without any very great effort.  The yelling and shouting, and

whipping and galloping, of all parties interested, made it an

exhilarating, exciting, and particularly boisterous race.



At eleven o'clock, our eyes fell upon the walls and columns of Baalbec, a

noble ruin whose history is a sealed book.  It has stood there for

thousands of years, the wonder and admiration of travelers; but who built

it, or when it was built, are questions that may never be answered.  One

thing is very sure, though.  Such grandeur of design, and such grace of

execution, as one sees in the temples of Baalbec, have not been equaled

or even approached in any work of men's hands that has been built within

twenty centuries past.



The great Temple of the Sun, the Temple of Jupiter, and several smaller

temples, are clustered together in the midst of one of these miserable

Syrian villages, and look strangely enough in such plebeian company.

These temples are built upon massive substructions that might support a

world, almost; the materials used are blocks of stone as large as an

omnibus--very few, if any of them, are smaller than a carpenter's tool

chest--and these substructions are traversed by tunnels of masonry

through which a train of cars might pass.  With such foundations as

these, it is little wonder that Baalbec has lasted so long.  The Temple

of the Sun is nearly three hundred feet long and one hundred and sixty

feet wide.  It had fifty-four columns around it, but only six are

standing now--the others lie broken at its base, a confused and

picturesque heap.  The six columns are their bases, Corinthian capitals

and entablature--and six more shapely columns do not exist.  The columns

and the entablature together are ninety feet high--a prodigious altitude

for shafts of stone to reach, truly--and yet one only thinks of their

beauty and symmetry when looking at them; the pillars look slender and

delicate, the entablature, with its elaborate sculpture, looks like rich

stucco-work.  But when you have gazed aloft till your eyes are weary, you

glance at the great fragments of pillars among which you are standing,

and find that they are eight feet through; and with them lie beautiful

capitals apparently as large as a small cottage; and also single slabs of

stone, superbly sculptured, that are four or five feet thick, and would

completely cover the floor of any ordinary parlor.  You wonder where

these monstrous things came from, and it takes some little time to

satisfy yourself that the airy and graceful fabric that towers above your

head is made up of their mates.  It seems too preposterous.



The Temple of Jupiter is a smaller ruin than the one I have been speaking

of, and yet is immense.  It is in a tolerable state of preservation.  One

row of nine columns stands almost uninjured.  They are sixty-five feet

high and support a sort of porch or roof, which connects them with the

roof of the building.  This porch-roof is composed of tremendous slabs of

stone, which are so finely sculptured on the under side that the work

looks like a fresco from below.  One or two of these slabs had fallen,

and again I wondered if the gigantic masses of carved stone that lay

about me were no larger than those above my head.  Within the temple, the

ornamentation was elaborate and colossal.  What a wonder of architectural

beauty and grandeur this edifice must have been when it was new!  And

what a noble picture it and its statelier companion, with the chaos of

mighty fragments scattered about them, yet makes in the moonlight!



I can not conceive how those immense blocks of stone were ever hauled

from the quarries, or how they were ever raised to the dizzy heights they

occupy in the temples.  And yet these sculptured blocks are trifles in

size compared with the rough-hewn blocks that form the wide verandah or

platform which surrounds the Great Temple.  One stretch of that platform,

two hundred feet long, is composed of blocks of stone as large, and some

of them larger, than a street-car.  They surmount a wall about ten or

twelve feet high.  I thought those were large rocks, but they sank into

insignificance compared with those which formed another section of the

platform.  These were three in number, and I thought that each of them

was about as long as three street cars placed end to end, though of

course they are a third wider and a third higher than a street car.

Perhaps two railway freight cars of the largest pattern, placed end to

end, might better represent their size.  In combined length these three

stones stretch nearly two hundred feet; they are thirteen feet square;

two of them are sixty-four feet long each, and the third is sixty-nine.

They are built into the massive wall some twenty feet above the ground.

They are there, but how they got there is the question.  I have seen the

hull of a steamboat that was smaller than one of those stones.  All these

great walls are as exact and shapely as the flimsy things we build of

bricks in these days.  A race of gods or of giants must have inhabited

Baalbec many a century ago.  Men like the men of our day could hardly

rear such temples as these.



We went to the quarry from whence the stones of Baalbec were taken.  It

was about a quarter of a mile off, and down hill.  In a great pit lay the

mate of the largest stone in the ruins.  It lay there just as the giants

of that old forgotten time had left it when they were called hence--just

as they had left it, to remain for thousands of years, an eloquent rebuke

unto such as are prone to think slightingly of the men who lived before

them.  This enormous block lies there, squared and ready for the

builders' hands--a solid mass fourteen feet by seventeen, and but a few

inches less than seventy feet long!  Two buggies could be driven abreast

of each other, on its surface, from one end of it to the other, and leave

room enough for a man or two to walk on either side.



One might swear that all the John Smiths and George Wilkinsons, and all

the other pitiful nobodies between Kingdom Come and Baalbec would

inscribe their poor little names upon the walls of Baalbec's magnificent

ruins, and would add the town, the county and the State they came from--

and swearing thus, be infallibly correct.  It is a pity some great ruin

does not fall in and flatten out some of these reptiles, and scare their

kind out of ever giving their names to fame upon any walls or monuments

again, forever.



Properly, with the sorry relics we bestrode, it was a three days' journey

to Damascus.  It was necessary that we should do it in less than two.

It was necessary because our three pilgrims would not travel on the

Sabbath day.  We were all perfectly willing to keep the Sabbath day, but

there are times when to keep the letter of a sacred law whose spirit is

righteous, becomes a sin, and this was a case in point.  We pleaded for

the tired, ill-treated horses, and tried to show that their faithful

service deserved kindness in return, and their hard lot compassion.  But

when did ever self-righteousness know the sentiment of pity?  What were a

few long hours added to the hardships of some over-taxed brutes when

weighed against the peril of those human souls?  It was not the most

promising party to travel with and hope to gain a higher veneration for

religion through the example of its devotees.  We said the Saviour who

pitied dumb beasts and taught that the ox must be rescued from the mire

even on the Sabbath day, would not have counseled a forced march like

this.  We said the "long trip" was exhausting and therefore dangerous in

the blistering heats of summer, even when the ordinary days' stages were

traversed, and if we persisted in this hard march, some of us might be

stricken down with the fevers of the country in consequence of it.

Nothing could move the pilgrims.  They must press on.  Men might die,

horses might die, but they must enter upon holy soil next week, with no

Sabbath-breaking stain upon them.  Thus they were willing to commit a sin

against the spirit of religious law, in order that they might preserve

the letter of it.  It was not worth while to tell them "the letter

kills."  I am talking now about personal friends; men whom I like; men

who are good citizens; who are honorable, upright, conscientious; but

whose idea of the Saviour's religion seems to me distorted.  They lecture

our shortcomings unsparingly, and every night they call us together and

read to us chapters from the Testament that are full of gentleness, of

charity, and of tender mercy; and then all the next day they stick to

their saddles clear up to the summits of these rugged mountains, and

clear down again.  Apply the Testament's gentleness, and charity, and

tender mercy to a toiling, worn and weary horse?--Nonsense--these are for

God's human creatures, not His dumb ones.  What the pilgrims choose to

do, respect for their almost sacred character demands that I should allow

to pass--but I would so like to catch any other member of the party

riding his horse up one of these exhausting hills once!



We have given the pilgrims a good many examples that might benefit them,

but it is virtue thrown away.  They have never heard a cross word out of

our lips toward each other--but they have quarreled once or twice.  We

love to hear them at it, after they have been lecturing us.  The very

first thing they did, coming ashore at Beirout, was to quarrel in the

boat.  I have said I like them, and I do like them--but every time they

read me a scorcher of a lecture I mean to talk back in print.



Not content with doubling the legitimate stages, they switched off the

main road and went away out of the way to visit an absurd fountain called

Figia, because Baalam's ass had drank there once.  So we journeyed on,

through the terrible hills and deserts and the roasting sun, and then far

into the night, seeking the honored pool of Baalam's ass, the patron

saint of all pilgrims like us.  I find no entry but this in my note-book:



     "Rode to-day, altogether, thirteen hours, through deserts, partly,

     and partly over barren, unsightly hills, and latterly through wild,

     rocky scenery, and camped at about eleven o'clock at night on the

     banks of a limpid stream, near a Syrian village.  Do not know its

     name--do not wish to know it--want to go to bed.  Two horses lame

     (mine and Jack's) and the others worn out.  Jack and I walked three

     or four miles, over the hills, and led the horses.  Fun--but of a

     mild type."



Twelve or thirteen hours in the saddle, even in a Christian land and a

Christian climate, and on a good horse, is a tiresome journey; but in an

oven like Syria, in a ragged spoon of a saddle that slips fore-and-aft,

and "thort-ships," and every way, and on a horse that is tired and lame,

and yet must be whipped and spurred with hardly a moment's cessation all

day long, till the blood comes from his side, and your conscience hurts

you every time you strike if you are half a man,--it is a journey to be

remembered in bitterness of spirit and execrated with emphasis for a

liberal division of a man's lifetime.









CHAPTER XLIV.



The next day was an outrage upon men and horses both.  It was another

thirteen-hour stretch (including an hour's "nooning.") It was over the

barrenest chalk-hills and through the baldest canons that even Syria can

show.  The heat quivered in the air every where.  In the canons we almost

smothered in the baking atmosphere.  On high ground, the reflection from

the chalk-hills was blinding.  It was cruel to urge the crippled horses,

but it had to be done in order to make Damascus Saturday night.  We saw

ancient tombs and temples of fanciful architecture carved out of the

solid rock high up in the face of precipices above our heads, but we had

neither time nor strength to climb up there and examine them.  The terse

language of my note-book will answer for the rest of this day's

experiences:



     "Broke camp at 7 A.M., and made a ghastly trip through the Zeb Dana

     valley and the rough mountains--horses limping and that Arab

     screech-owl that does most of the singing and carries the water-

     skins, always a thousand miles ahead, of course, and no water to

     drink--will he never die?  Beautiful stream in a chasm, lined thick

     with pomegranate, fig, olive and quince orchards, and nooned an hour

     at the celebrated Baalam's Ass Fountain of Figia, second in size in

     Syria, and the coldest water out of Siberia--guide-books do not

     say Baalam's ass ever drank there--somebody been imposing on the

     pilgrims, may be.  Bathed in it--Jack and I.  Only a second--ice-

     water.  It is the principal source of the Abana river--only one-

     half mile down to where it joins.  Beautiful place--giant trees all

     around--so shady and cool, if one could keep awake--vast stream

     gushes straight out from under the mountain in a torrent.  Over it

     is a very ancient ruin, with no known history--supposed to have been

     for the worship of the deity of the fountain or Baalam's ass or

     somebody.  Wretched nest of human vermin about the fountain--rags,

     dirt, sunken cheeks, pallor of sickness, sores, projecting bones,

     dull, aching misery in their eyes and ravenous hunger speaking from

     every eloquent fibre and muscle from head to foot.  How they sprang

     upon a bone, how they crunched the bread we gave them!  Such as

     these to swarm about one and watch every bite he takes, with greedy

     looks, and swallow unconsciously every time he swallows, as if they

     half fancied the precious morsel went down their own throats--

     hurry up the caravan!--I never shall enjoy a meal in this

     distressful country.  To think of eating three times every day under

     such circumstances for three weeks yet--it is worse punishment than

     riding all day in the sun.  There are sixteen starving babies from

     one to six years old in the party, and their legs are no larger than

     broom handles.  Left the fountain at 1 P.M.  (the fountain took us

     at least two hours out of our way,) and reached Mahomet's lookout

     perch, over Damascus, in time to get a good long look before it was

     necessary to move on.  Tired?  Ask of the winds that far away with

     fragments strewed the sea."



As the glare of day mellowed into twilight, we looked down upon a picture

which is celebrated all over the world.  I think I have read about four

hundred times that when Mahomet was a simple camel-driver he reached this

point and looked down upon Damascus for the first time, and then made a

certain renowned remark.  He said man could enter only one paradise; he

preferred to go to the one above.  So he sat down there and feasted his

eyes upon the earthly paradise of Damascus, and then went away without

entering its gates.  They have erected a tower on the hill to mark the

spot where he stood.



Damascus is beautiful from the mountain.  It is beautiful even to

foreigners accustomed to luxuriant vegetation, and I can easily

understand how unspeakably beautiful it must be to eyes that are only

used to the God-forsaken barrenness and desolation of Syria.  I should

think a Syrian would go wild with ecstacy when such a picture bursts upon

him for the first time.



From his high perch, one sees before him and below him, a wall of dreary

mountains, shorn of vegetation, glaring fiercely in the sun; it fences in

a level desert of yellow sand, smooth as velvet and threaded far away

with fine lines that stand for roads, and dotted with creeping mites we

know are camel-trains and journeying men; right in the midst of the

desert is spread a billowy expanse of green foliage; and nestling in its

heart sits the great white city, like an island of pearls and opals

gleaming out of a sea of emeralds.  This is the picture you see spread

far below you, with distance to soften it, the sun to glorify it, strong

contrasts to heighten the effects, and over it and about it a drowsing

air of repose to spiritualize it and make it seem rather a beautiful

estray from the mysterious worlds we visit in dreams than a substantial

tenant of our coarse, dull globe.  And when you think of the leagues of

blighted, blasted, sandy, rocky, sun-burnt, ugly, dreary, infamous

country you have ridden over to get here, you think it is the most

beautiful, beautiful picture that ever human eyes rested upon in all the

broad universe!  If I were to go to Damascus again, I would camp on

Mahomet's hill about a week, and then go away.  There is no need to go

inside the walls.  The Prophet was wise without knowing it when he

decided not to go down into the paradise of Damascus.



There is an honored old tradition that the immense garden which Damascus

stands in was the Garden of Eden, and modern writers have gathered up

many chapters of evidence tending to show that it really was the Garden

of Eden, and that the rivers Pharpar and Abana are the "two rivers" that

watered Adam's Paradise.  It may be so, but it is not paradise now, and

one would be as happy outside of it as he would be likely to be within.

It is so crooked and cramped and dirty that one can not realize that he

is in the splendid city he saw from the hill-top.  The gardens are hidden

by high mud-walls, and the paradise is become a very sink of pollution

and uncomeliness.  Damascus has plenty of clear, pure water in it,

though, and this is enough, of itself, to make an Arab think it beautiful

and blessed.  Water is scarce in blistered Syria.  We run railways by our

large cities in America; in Syria they curve the roads so as to make them

run by the meagre little puddles they call "fountains," and which are not

found oftener on a journey than every four hours.  But the "rivers" of

Pharpar and Abana of Scripture (mere creeks,) run through Damascus, and

so every house and every garden have their sparkling fountains and

rivulets of water.  With her forest of foliage and her abundance of

water, Damascus must be a wonder of wonders to the Bedouin from the

deserts.  Damascus is simply an oasis--that is what it is.  For four

thousand years its waters have not gone dry or its fertility failed.

Now we can understand why the city has existed so long.  It could not

die.  So long as its waters remain to it away out there in the midst of

that howling desert, so long will Damascus live to bless the sight of the

tired and thirsty wayfarer.



     "Though old as history itself, thou art fresh as the breath of

     spring, blooming as thine own rose-bud, and fragrant as thine own

     orange flower, O Damascus, pearl of the East!"



Damascus dates back anterior to the days of Abraham, and is the oldest

city in the world.  It was founded by Uz, the grandson of Noah.  "The

early history of Damascus is shrouded in the mists of a hoary antiquity."

Leave the matters written of in the first eleven chapters of the Old

Testament out, and no recorded event has occurred in the world but

Damascus was in existence to receive the news of it.  Go back as far as

you will into the vague past, there was always a Damascus.  In the

writings of every century for more than four thousand years, its name has

been mentioned and its praises sung.  To Damascus, years are only

moments, decades are only flitting trifles of time.  She measures time,

not by days and months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise,

and prosper and crumble to ruin.  She is a type of immortality.  She saw

the foundations of Baalbec, and Thebes, and Ephesus laid; she saw these

villages grow into mighty cities, and amaze the world with their

grandeur--and she has lived to see them desolate, deserted, and given

over to the owls and the bats.  She saw the Israelitish empire exalted,

and she saw it annihilated.  She saw Greece rise, and flourish two

thousand years, and die.  In her old age she saw Rome built; she saw it

overshadow the world with its power; she saw it perish.  The few hundreds

of years of Genoese and Venetian might and splendor were, to grave old

Damascus, only a trifling scintillation hardly worth remembering.

Damascus has seen all that has ever occurred on earth, and still she

lives.  She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will

see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies.  Though another claims

the name, old Damascus is by right the Eternal City.



We reached the city gates just at sundown.  They do say that one can get

into any walled city of Syria, after night, for bucksheesh, except

Damascus.  But Damascus, with its four thousand years of respectability

in the world, has many old fogy notions.  There are no street lamps

there, and the law compels all who go abroad at night to carry lanterns,

just as was the case in old days, when heroes and heroines of the Arabian

Nights walked the streets of Damascus, or flew away toward Bagdad on

enchanted carpets.



It was fairly dark a few minutes after we got within the wall, and we

rode long distances through wonderfully crooked streets, eight to ten

feet wide, and shut in on either aide by the high mud-walls of the

gardens.  At last we got to where lanterns could be seen flitting about

here and there, and knew we were in the midst of the curious old city.

In a little narrow street, crowded with our pack-mules and with a swarm

of uncouth Arabs, we alighted, and through a kind of a hole in the wall

entered the hotel.  We stood in a great flagged court, with flowers and

citron trees about us, and a huge tank in the centre that was receiving

the waters of many pipes.  We crossed the court and entered the rooms

prepared to receive four of us.  In a large marble-paved recess between

the two rooms was a tank of clear, cool water, which was kept running

over all the time by the streams that were pouring into it from half a

dozen pipes.  Nothing, in this scorching, desolate land could look so

refreshing as this pure water flashing in the lamp-light; nothing could

look so beautiful, nothing could sound so delicious as this mimic rain to

ears long unaccustomed to sounds of such a nature.  Our rooms were large,

comfortably furnished, and even had their floors clothed with soft,

cheerful-tinted carpets.  It was a pleasant thing to see a carpet again,

for if there is any thing drearier than the tomb-like, stone-paved

parlors and bed-rooms of Europe and Asia, I do not know what it is.

They make one think of the grave all the time.  A very broad, gaily

caparisoned divan, some twelve or fourteen feet long, extended across one

side of each room, and opposite were single beds with spring mattresses.

There were great looking-glasses and marble-top tables.  All this luxury

was as grateful to systems and senses worn out with an exhausting day's

travel, as it was unexpected--for one can not tell what to expect in a

Turkish city of even a quarter of a million inhabitants.



I do not know, but I think they used that tank between the rooms to draw

drinking water from; that did not occur to me, however, until I had

dipped my baking head far down into its cool depths.  I thought of it

then, and superb as the bath was, I was sorry I had taken it, and was

about to go and explain to the landlord.  But a finely curled and scented

poodle dog frisked up and nipped the calf of my leg just then, and before

I had time to think, I had soused him to the bottom of the tank, and when

I saw a servant coming with a pitcher I went off and left the pup trying

to climb out and not succeeding very well.  Satisfied revenge was all I

needed to make me perfectly happy, and when I walked in to supper that

first night in Damascus I was in that condition.  We lay on those divans

a long time, after supper, smoking narghilies and long-stemmed chibouks,

and talking about the dreadful ride of the day, and I knew then what I

had sometimes known before--that it is worth while to get tired out,

because one so enjoys resting afterward.



In the morning we sent for donkeys.  It is worthy of note that we had to

send for these things.  I said Damascus was an old fossil, and she is.

Any where else we would have been assailed by a clamorous army of donkey-

drivers, guides, peddlers and beggars--but in Damascus they so hate the

very sight of a foreign Christian that they want no intercourse whatever

with him; only a year or two ago, his person was not always safe in

Damascus streets.  It is the most fanatical Mohammedan purgatory out of

Arabia.  Where you see one green turban of a Hadji elsewhere (the honored

sign that my lord has made the pilgrimage to Mecca,) I think you will see

a dozen in Damascus.  The Damascenes are the ugliest, wickedest looking

villains we have seen.  All the veiled women we had seen yet, nearly,

left their eyes exposed, but numbers of these in Damascus completely hid

the face under a close-drawn black veil that made the woman look like a

mummy.  If ever we caught an eye exposed it was quickly hidden from our

contaminating Christian vision; the beggars actually passed us by without

demanding bucksheesh; the merchants in the bazaars did not hold up their

goods and cry out eagerly, "Hey, John!"  or "Look this, Howajji!"  On the

contrary, they only scowled at us and said never a word.



The narrow streets swarmed like a hive with men and women in strange

Oriental costumes, and our small donkeys knocked them right and left as

we plowed through them, urged on by the merciless donkey-boys.  These

persecutors run after the animals, shouting and goading them for hours

together; they keep the donkey in a gallop always, yet never get tired

themselves or fall behind.  The donkeys fell down and spilt us over their

heads occasionally, but there was nothing for it but to mount and hurry

on again.  We were banged against sharp corners, loaded porters, camels,

and citizens generally; and we were so taken up with looking out for

collisions and casualties that we had no chance to look about us at all.

We rode half through the city and through the famous "street which is

called Straight" without seeing any thing, hardly.  Our bones were nearly

knocked out of joint, we were wild with excitement, and our sides ached

with the jolting we had suffered.  I do not like riding in the Damascus

street-cars.



We were on our way to the reputed houses of Judas and Ananias.  About

eighteen or nineteen hundred years ago, Saul, a native of Tarsus, was

particularly bitter against the new sect called Christians, and he left

Jerusalem and started across the country on a furious crusade against

them.  He went forth "breathing threatenings and slaughter against the

disciples of the Lord."



     "And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly there

     shined round about him a light from heaven:



     "And he fell to the earth and heard a voice saying unto him, 'Saul,

     Saul, why persecutest thou me?'



     "And when he knew that it was Jesus that spoke to him he trembled,

     and was astonished, and said, 'Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?'"



He was told to arise and go into the ancient city and one would tell him

what to do.  In the meantime his soldiers stood speechless and awe-

stricken, for they heard the mysterious voice but saw no man.  Saul rose

up and found that that fierce supernatural light had destroyed his sight,

and he was blind, so "they led him by the hand and brought him to

Damascus."  He was converted.



Paul lay three days, blind, in the house of Judas, and during that time

he neither ate nor drank.



There came a voice to a citizen of Damascus, named Ananias, saying,

"Arise, and go into the street which is called Straight, and inquire at

the house of Judas, for one called Saul, of Tarsus; for behold, he

prayeth."



Ananias did not wish to go at first, for he had heard of Saul before, and

he had his doubts about that style of a "chosen vessel" to preach the

gospel of peace.  However, in obedience to orders, he went into the

"street called Straight" (how he found his way into it, and after he did,

how he ever found his way out of it again, are mysteries only to be

accounted for by the fact that he was acting under Divine inspiration.)

He found Paul and restored him, and ordained him a preacher; and from

this old house we had hunted up in the street which is miscalled

Straight, he had started out on that bold missionary career which he

prosecuted till his death.  It was not the house of the disciple who sold

the Master for thirty pieces of silver.  I make this explanation in

justice to Judas, who was a far different sort of man from the person

just referred to.  A very different style of man, and lived in a very

good house.  It is a pity we do not know more about him.



I have given, in the above paragraphs, some more information for people

who will not read Bible history until they are defrauded into it by some

such method as this.  I hope that no friend of progress and education

will obstruct or interfere with my peculiar mission.



The street called Straight is straighter than a corkscrew, but not as

straight as a rainbow.  St. Luke is careful not to commit himself; he

does not say it is the street which is straight, but the "street which is

called Straight."  It is a fine piece of irony; it is the only facetious

remark in the Bible, I believe.  We traversed the street called Straight

a good way, and then turned off and called at the reputed house of

Ananias.  There is small question that a part of the original house is

there still; it is an old room twelve or fifteen feet under ground, and

its masonry is evidently ancient.  If Ananias did not live there in St.

Paul's time, somebody else did, which is just as well.  I took a drink

out of Ananias' well, and singularly enough, the water was just as fresh

as if the well had been dug yesterday.



We went out toward the north end of the city to see the place where the

disciples let Paul down over the Damascus wall at dead of night--for he

preached Christ so fearlessly in Damascus that the people sought to kill

him, just as they would to-day for the same offense, and he had to escape

and flee to Jerusalem.



Then we called at the tomb of Mahomet's children and at a tomb which

purported to be that of St. George who killed the dragon, and so on out

to the hollow place under a rock where Paul hid during his flight till

his pursuers gave him up; and to the mausoleum of the five thousand

Christians who were massacred in Damascus in 1861 by the Turks.  They say

those narrow streets ran blood for several days, and that men, women and

children were butchered indiscriminately and left to rot by hundreds all

through the Christian quarter; they say, further, that the stench was

dreadful.  All the Christians who could get away fled from the city, and

the Mohammedans would not defile their hands by burying the "infidel

dogs."  The thirst for blood extended to the high lands of Hermon and

Anti-Lebanon, and in a short time twenty-five thousand more Christians

were massacred and their possessions laid waste.  How they hate a

Christian in Damascus!--and pretty much all over Turkeydom as well.  And

how they will pay for it when Russia turns her guns upon them again!



It is soothing to the heart to abuse England and France for interposing

to save the Ottoman Empire from the destruction it has so richly deserved

for a thousand years.  It hurts my vanity to see these pagans refuse to

eat of food that has been cooked for us; or to eat from a dish we have

eaten from; or to drink from a goatskin which we have polluted with our

Christian lips, except by filtering the water through a rag which they

put over the mouth of it or through a sponge!  I never disliked a

Chinaman as I do these degraded Turks and Arabs, and when Russia is ready

to war with them again, I hope England and France will not find it good

breeding or good judgment to interfere.



In Damascus they think there are no such rivers in all the world as their

little Abana and Pharpar.  The Damascenes have always thought that way.

In 2 Kings, chapter v., Naaman boasts extravagantly about them.  That was

three thousand years ago.  He says: "Are not Abana and Pharpar rivers of

Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?  May I not wash in them

and be clean?"  But some of my readers have forgotten who Naaman was,

long ago.  Naaman was the commander of the Syrian armies.  He was the

favorite of the king and lived in great state.  "He was a mighty man of

valor, but he was a leper."  Strangely enough, the house they point out

to you now as his, has been turned into a leper hospital, and the inmates

expose their horrid deformities and hold up their hands and beg for

bucksheesh when a stranger enters.



One can not appreciate the horror of this disease until he looks upon it

in all its ghastliness, in Naaman's ancient dwelling in Damascus.  Bones

all twisted out of shape, great knots protruding from face and body,

joints decaying and dropping away--horrible!









CHAPTER XLV.



The last twenty-four hours we staid in Damascus I lay prostrate with a

violent attack of cholera, or cholera morbus, and therefore had a good

chance and a good excuse to lie there on that wide divan and take an

honest rest.  I had nothing to do but listen to the pattering of the

fountains and take medicine and throw it up again.  It was dangerous

recreation, but it was pleasanter than traveling in Syria.  I had plenty

of snow from Mount Hermon, and as it would not stay on my stomach, there

was nothing to interfere with my eating it--there was always room for

more.  I enjoyed myself very well.  Syrian travel has its interesting

features, like travel in any other part of the world, and yet to break

your leg or have the cholera adds a welcome variety to it.



We left Damascus at noon and rode across the plain a couple of hours, and

then the party stopped a while in the shade of some fig-trees to give me

a chance to rest.  It was the hottest day we had seen yet--the sun-flames

shot down like the shafts of fire that stream out before a blow-pipe--the

rays seemed to fall in a steady deluge on the head and pass downward like

rain from a roof.  I imagined I could distinguish between the floods of

rays--I thought I could tell when each flood struck my head, when it

reached my shoulders, and when the next one came.  It was terrible.  All

the desert glared so fiercely that my eyes were swimming in tears all the

time.  The boys had white umbrellas heavily lined with dark green.  They

were a priceless blessing.  I thanked fortune that I had one, too,

notwithstanding it was packed up with the baggage and was ten miles

ahead.  It is madness to travel in Syria without an umbrella.  They told

me in Beirout (these people who always gorge you with advice) that it was

madness to travel in Syria without an umbrella.  It was on this account

that I got one.



But, honestly, I think an umbrella is a nuisance any where when its

business is to keep the sun off.  No Arab wears a brim to his fez, or

uses an umbrella, or any thing to shade his eyes or his face, and he

always looks comfortable and proper in the sun.  But of all the

ridiculous sights I ever have seen, our party of eight is the most so--

they do cut such an outlandish figure.  They travel single file; they all

wear the endless white rag of Constantinople wrapped round and round

their hats and dangling down their backs; they all wear thick green

spectacles, with side-glasses to them; they all hold white umbrellas,

lined with green, over their heads; without exception their stirrups are

too short--they are the very worst gang of horsemen on earth, their

animals to a horse trot fearfully hard--and when they get strung out one

after the other; glaring straight ahead and breathless; bouncing high and

out of turn, all along the line; knees well up and stiff, elbows flapping

like a rooster's that is going to crow, and the long file of umbrellas

popping convulsively up and down--when one sees this outrageous picture

exposed to the light of day, he is amazed that the gods don't get out

their thunderbolts and destroy them off the face of the earth!  I do--I

wonder at it.  I wouldn't let any such caravan go through a country of

mine.



And when the sun drops below the horizon and the boys close their

umbrellas and put them under their arms, it is only a variation of the

picture, not a modification of its absurdity.



But may be you can not see the wild extravagance of my panorama.  You

could if you were here.  Here, you feel all the time just as if you were

living about the year 1200 before Christ--or back to the patriarchs--or

forward to the New Era.  The scenery of the Bible is about you--the

customs of the patriarchs are around you--the same people, in the same

flowing robes, and in sandals, cross your path--the same long trains of

stately camels go and come--the same impressive religious solemnity and

silence rest upon the desert and the mountains that were upon them in the

remote ages of antiquity, and behold, intruding upon a scene like this,

comes this fantastic mob of green-spectacled Yanks, with their flapping

elbows and bobbing umbrellas!  It is Daniel in the lion's den with a

green cotton umbrella under his arm, all over again.



My umbrella is with the baggage, and so are my green spectacles--and

there they shall stay.  I will not use them.  I will show some respect

for the eternal fitness of things.  It will be bad enough to get sun-

struck, without looking ridiculous into the bargain.  If I fall, let me

fall bearing about me the semblance of a Christian, at least.



Three or four hours out from Damascus we passed the spot where Saul was

so abruptly converted, and from this place we looked back over the

scorching desert, and had our last glimpse of beautiful Damascus, decked

in its robes of shining green.  After nightfall we reached our tents,

just outside of the nasty Arab village of Jonesborough.  Of course the

real name of the place is El something or other, but the boys still

refuse to recognize the Arab names or try to pronounce them.  When I say

that that village is of the usual style, I mean to insinuate that all

Syrian villages within fifty miles of Damascus are alike--so much alike

that it would require more than human intelligence to tell wherein one

differed from another.  A Syrian village is a hive of huts one story high

(the height of a man,) and as square as a dry-goods box; it is mud-

plastered all over, flat roof and all, and generally whitewashed after a

fashion.  The same roof often extends over half the town, covering many

of the streets, which are generally about a yard wide.  When you ride

through one of these villages at noon-day, you first meet a melancholy

dog, that looks up at you and silently begs that you won't run over him,

but he does not offer to get out of the way; next you meet a young boy

without any clothes on, and he holds out his hand and says "Bucksheesh!"

--he don't really expect a cent, but then he learned to say that before

he learned to say mother, and now he can not break himself of it; next

you meet a woman with a black veil drawn closely over her face, and her

bust exposed; finally, you come to several sore-eyed children and

children in all stages of mutilation and decay; and sitting humbly in the

dust, and all fringed with filthy rags, is a poor devil whose arms and

legs are gnarled and twisted like grape-vines.  These are all the people

you are likely to see.  The balance of the population are asleep within

doors, or abroad tending goats in the plains and on the hill-sides.  The

village is built on some consumptive little water-course, and about it is

a little fresh-looking vegetation.  Beyond this charmed circle, for miles

on every side, stretches a weary desert of sand and gravel, which

produces a gray bunchy shrub like sage-brush.  A Syrian village is the

sorriest sight in the world, and its surroundings are eminently in

keeping with it.



I would not have gone into this dissertation upon Syrian villages but for

the fact that Nimrod, the Mighty Hunter of Scriptural notoriety, is

buried in Jonesborough, and I wished the public to know about how he is

located.  Like Homer, he is said to be buried in many other places, but

this is the only true and genuine place his ashes inhabit.



When the original tribes were dispersed, more than four thousand years

ago, Nimrod and a large party traveled three or four hundred miles, and

settled where the great city of Babylon afterwards stood.  Nimrod built

that city.  He also began to build the famous Tower of Babel, but

circumstances over which he had no control put it out of his power to

finish it.  He ran it up eight stories high, however, and two of them

still stand, at this day--a colossal mass of brickwork, rent down the

centre by earthquakes, and seared and vitrified by the lightnings of an

angry God.  But the vast ruin will still stand for ages, to shame the

puny labors of these modern generations of men.  Its huge compartments

are tenanted by owls and lions, and old Nimrod lies neglected in this

wretched village, far from the scene of his grand enterprise.



We left Jonesborough very early in the morning, and rode forever and

forever and forever, it seemed to me, over parched deserts and rocky

hills, hungry, and with no water to drink.  We had drained the goat-skins

dry in a little while.  At noon we halted before the wretched Arab town

of El Yuba Dam, perched on the side of a mountain, but the dragoman said

if we applied there for water we would be attacked by the whole tribe,

for they did not love Christians.  We had to journey on.  Two hours later

we reached the foot of a tall isolated mountain, which is crowned by the

crumbling castle of Banias, the stateliest ruin of that kind on earth, no

doubt.  It is a thousand feet long and two hundred wide, all of the most

symmetrical, and at the same time the most ponderous masonry.  The

massive towers and bastions are more than thirty feet high, and have been

sixty.  From the mountain's peak its broken turrets rise above the groves

of ancient oaks and olives, and look wonderfully picturesque.  It is of

such high antiquity that no man knows who built it or when it was built.

It is utterly inaccessible, except in one place, where a bridle-path

winds upward among the solid rocks to the old portcullis.  The horses'

hoofs have bored holes in these rocks to the depth of six inches during

the hundreds and hundreds of years that the castle was garrisoned.  We

wandered for three hours among the chambers and crypts and dungeons of

the fortress, and trod where the mailed heels of many a knightly Crusader

had rang, and where Phenician heroes had walked ages before them.



We wondered how such a solid mass of masonry could be affected even by an

earthquake, and could not understand what agency had made Banias a ruin;

but we found the destroyer, after a while, and then our wonder was

increased tenfold.  Seeds had fallen in crevices in the vast walls; the

seeds had sprouted; the tender, insignificant sprouts had hardened; they

grew larger and larger, and by a steady, imperceptible pressure forced

the great stones apart, and now are bringing sure destruction upon a

giant work that has even mocked the earthquakes to scorn!  Gnarled and

twisted trees spring from the old walls every where, and beautify and

overshadow the gray battlements with a wild luxuriance of foliage.



From these old towers we looked down upon a broad, far-reaching green

plain, glittering with the pools and rivulets which are the sources of

the sacred river Jordan.  It was a grateful vision, after so much desert.



And as the evening drew near, we clambered down the mountain, through

groves of the Biblical oaks of Bashan, (for we were just stepping over

the border and entering the long-sought Holy Land,) and at its extreme

foot, toward the wide valley, we entered this little execrable village of

Banias and camped in a great grove of olive trees near a torrent of

sparkling water whose banks are arrayed in fig-trees, pomegranates and

oleanders in full leaf.  Barring the proximity of the village, it is a

sort of paradise.



The very first thing one feels like doing when he gets into camp, all

burning up and dusty, is to hunt up a bath.  We followed the stream up to

where it gushes out of the mountain side, three hundred yards from the

tents, and took a bath that was so icy that if I did not know this was

the main source of the sacred river, I would expect harm to come of it.

It was bathing at noonday in the chilly source of the Abana, "River of

Damascus," that gave me the cholera, so Dr. B.  said.  However, it

generally does give me the cholera to take a bath.



The incorrigible pilgrims have come in with their pockets full of

specimens broken from the ruins.  I wish this vandalism could be stopped.

They broke off fragments from Noah's tomb; from the exquisite sculptures

of the temples of Baalbec; from the houses of Judas and Ananias, in

Damascus; from the tomb of Nimrod the Mighty Hunter in Jonesborough; from

the worn Greek and Roman inscriptions set in the hoary walls of the

Castle of Banias; and now they have been hacking and chipping these old

arches here that Jesus looked upon in the flesh.  Heaven protect the

Sepulchre when this tribe invades Jerusalem!



The ruins here are not very interesting.  There are the massive walls of

a great square building that was once the citadel; there are many

ponderous old arches that are so smothered with debris that they barely

project above the ground; there are heavy-walled sewers through which the

crystal brook of which Jordan is born still runs; in the hill-side are

the substructions of a costly marble temple that Herod the Great built

here--patches of its handsome mosaic floors still remain; there is a

quaint old stone bridge that was here before Herod's time, may be;

scattered every where, in the paths and in the woods, are Corinthian

capitals, broken porphyry pillars, and little fragments of sculpture; and

up yonder in the precipice where the fountain gushes out, are well-worn

Greek inscriptions over niches in the rock where in ancient times the

Greeks, and after them the Romans, worshipped the sylvan god Pan.  But

trees and bushes grow above many of these ruins now; the miserable huts

of a little crew of filthy Arabs are perched upon the broken masonry of

antiquity, the whole place has a sleepy, stupid, rural look about it, and

one can hardly bring himself to believe that a busy, substantially built

city once existed here, even two thousand years ago.  The place was

nevertheless the scene of an event whose effects have added page after

page and volume after volume to the world's history.  For in this place

Christ stood when he said to Peter:



     "Thou art Peter; and upon this rock will I build my church, and the

     gates of hell shall not prevail against it.  And I will give unto

     thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt

     bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt

     loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."



On those little sentences have been built up the mighty edifice of the

Church of Rome; in them lie the authority for the imperial power of the

Popes over temporal affairs, and their godlike power to curse a soul or

wash it white from sin.  To sustain the position of "the only true

Church," which Rome claims was thus conferred upon her, she has fought

and labored and struggled for many a century, and will continue to keep

herself busy in the same work to the end of time.  The memorable words I

have quoted give to this ruined city about all the interest it possesses

to people of the present day.



It seems curious enough to us to be standing on ground that was once

actually pressed by the feet of the Saviour.  The situation is suggestive

of a reality and a tangibility that seem at variance with the vagueness

and mystery and ghostliness that one naturally attaches to the character

of a god.  I can not comprehend yet that I am sitting where a god has

stood, and looking upon the brook and the mountains which that god looked

upon, and am surrounded by dusky men and women whose ancestors saw him,

and even talked with him, face to face, and carelessly, just as they

would have done with any other stranger.  I can not comprehend this; the

gods of my understanding have been always hidden in clouds and very far

away.



This morning, during breakfast, the usual assemblage of squalid humanity

sat patiently without the charmed circle of the camp and waited for such

crumbs as pity might bestow upon their misery.  There were old and young,

brown-skinned and yellow.  Some of the men were tall and stalwart, (for

one hardly sees any where such splendid-looking men as here in the East,)

but all the women and children looked worn and sad, and distressed with

hunger.  They reminded me much of Indians, did these people.  They had

but little clothing, but such as they had was fanciful in character and

fantastic in its arrangement.  Any little absurd gewgaw or gimcrack they

had they disposed in such a way as to make it attract attention most

readily.  They sat in silence, and with tireless patience watched our

every motion with that vile, uncomplaining impoliteness which is so truly

Indian, and which makes a white man so nervous and uncomfortable and

savage that he wants to exterminate the whole tribe.



These people about us had other peculiarities, which I have noticed in

the noble red man, too: they were infested with vermin, and the dirt had

caked on them till it amounted to bark.



The little children were in a pitiable condition--they all had sore eyes,

and were otherwise afflicted in various ways.  They say that hardly a

native child in all the East is free from sore eyes, and that thousands

of them go blind of one eye or both every year.  I think this must be so,

for I see plenty of blind people every day, and I do not remember seeing

any children that hadn't sore eyes.  And, would you suppose that an

American mother could sit for an hour, with her child in her arms, and

let a hundred flies roost upon its eyes all that time undisturbed?  I see

that every day.  It makes my flesh creep.  Yesterday we met a woman

riding on a little jackass, and she had a little child in her arms--

honestly, I thought the child had goggles on as we approached, and I

wondered how its mother could afford so much style.  But when we drew

near, we saw that the goggles were nothing but a camp meeting of flies

assembled around each of the child's eyes, and at the same time there was

a detachment prospecting its nose.  The flies were happy, the child was

contented, and so the mother did not interfere.



As soon as the tribe found out that we had a doctor in our party, they

began to flock in from all quarters.  Dr. B., in the charity of his

nature, had taken a child from a woman who sat near by, and put some sort

of a wash upon its diseased eyes.  That woman went off and started the

whole nation, and it was a sight to see them swarm!  The lame, the halt,

the blind, the leprous--all the distempers that are bred of indolence,

dirt, and iniquity--were represented in the Congress in ten minutes, and

still they came!  Every woman that had a sick baby brought it along, and

every woman that hadn't, borrowed one.  What reverent and what worshiping

looks they bent upon that dread, mysterious power, the Doctor!  They

watched him take his phials out; they watched him measure the particles

of white powder; they watched him add drops of one precious liquid, and

drops of another; they lost not the slightest movement; their eyes were

riveted upon him with a fascination that nothing could distract.

I believe they thought he was gifted like a god.  When each individual

got his portion of medicine, his eyes were radiant with joy--

notwithstanding by nature they are a thankless and impassive race--and

upon his face was written the unquestioning faith that nothing on earth

could prevent the patient from getting well now.



Christ knew how to preach to these simple, superstitious, disease-

tortured creatures: He healed the sick.  They flocked to our poor human

doctor this morning when the fame of what he had done to the sick child

went abroad in the land, and they worshiped him with their eyes while

they did not know as yet whether there was virtue in his simples or not.

The ancestors of these--people precisely like them in color, dress,

manners, customs, simplicity--flocked in vast multitudes after Christ,

and when they saw Him make the afflicted whole with a word, it is no

wonder they worshiped Him.  No wonder His deeds were the talk of the

nation.  No wonder the multitude that followed Him was so great that at

one time--thirty miles from here--they had to let a sick man down through

the roof because no approach could be made to the door; no wonder His

audiences were so great at Galilee that He had to preach from a ship

removed a little distance from the shore; no wonder that even in the

desert places about Bethsaida, five thousand invaded His solitude, and He

had to feed them by a miracle or else see them suffer for their confiding

faith and devotion; no wonder when there was a great commotion in a city

in those days, one neighbor explained it to another in words to this

effect: "They say that Jesus of Nazareth is come!"



Well, as I was saying, the doctor distributed medicine as long as he had

any to distribute, and his reputation is mighty in Galilee this day.

Among his patients was the child of the Shiek's daughter--for even this

poor, ragged handful of sores and sin has its royal Shiek--a poor old

mummy that looked as if he would be more at home in a poor-house than in

the Chief Magistracy of this tribe of hopeless, shirtless savages.  The

princess--I mean the Shiek's daughter--was only thirteen or fourteen

years old, and had a very sweet face and a pretty one.  She was the only

Syrian female we have seen yet who was not so sinfully ugly that she

couldn't smile after ten o'clock Saturday night without breaking the

Sabbath.  Her child was a hard specimen, though--there wasn't enough of

it to make a pie, and the poor little thing looked so pleadingly up at

all who came near it (as if it had an idea that now was its chance or

never,) that we were filled with compassion which was genuine and not put

on.



But this last new horse I have got is trying to break his neck over the

tent-ropes, and I shall have to go out and anchor him.  Jericho and I

have parted company.  The new horse is not much to boast of, I think.

One of his hind legs bends the wrong way, and the other one is as

straight and stiff as a tent-pole.  Most of his teeth are gone, and he is

as blind as bat.  His nose has been broken at some time or other, and is

arched like a culvert now.  His under lip hangs down like a camel's, and

his ears are chopped off close to his head.  I had some trouble at first

to find a name for him, but I finally concluded to call him Baalbec,

because he is such a magnificent ruin.  I can not keep from talking about

my horses, because I have a very long and tedious journey before me, and

they naturally occupy my thoughts about as much as matters of apparently

much greater importance.



We satisfied our pilgrims by making those hard rides from Baalbec to

Damascus, but Dan's horse and Jack's were so crippled we had to leave

them behind and get fresh animals for them.  The dragoman says Jack's

horse died.  I swapped horses with Mohammed, the kingly-looking Egyptian

who is our Ferguson's lieutenant.  By Ferguson I mean our dragoman

Abraham, of course.  I did not take this horse on account of his personal

appearance, but because I have not seen his back.  I do not wish to see

it.  I have seen the backs of all the other horses, and found most of

them covered with dreadful saddle-boils which I know have not been washed

or doctored for years.  The idea of riding all day long over such ghastly

inquisitions of torture is sickening.  My horse must be like the others,

but I have at least the consolation of not knowing it to be so.



I hope that in future I may be spared any more sentimental praises of the

Arab's idolatry of his horse.  In boyhood I longed to be an Arab of the

desert and have a beautiful mare, and call her Selim or Benjamin or

Mohammed, and feed her with my own hands, and let her come into the tent,

and teach her to caress me and look fondly upon me with her great tender

eyes; and I wished that a stranger might come at such a time and offer me

a hundred thousand dollars for her, so that I could do like the other

Arabs--hesitate, yearn for the money, but overcome by my love for my

mare, at last say, "Part with thee, my beautiful one!  Never with my

life!  Away, tempter, I scorn thy gold!"  and then bound into the saddle

and speed over the desert like the wind!



But I recall those aspirations.  If these Arabs be like the other Arabs,

their love for their beautiful mares is a fraud.  These of my

acquaintance have no love for their horses, no sentiment of pity for

them, and no knowledge of how to treat them or care for them.  The Syrian

saddle-blanket is a quilted mattress two or three inches thick.  It is

never removed from the horse, day or night.  It gets full of dirt and

hair, and becomes soaked with sweat.  It is bound to breed sores.  These

pirates never think of washing a horse's back.  They do not shelter the

horses in the tents, either--they must stay out and take the weather as

it comes.  Look at poor cropped and dilapidated "Baalbec," and weep for

the sentiment that has been wasted upon the Selims of romance!









CHAPTER XLVI.



About an hour's ride over a rough, rocky road, half flooded with water,

and through a forest of oaks of Bashan, brought us to Dan.



From a little mound here in the plain issues a broad stream of limpid

water and forms a large shallow pool, and then rushes furiously onward,

augmented in volume.  This puddle is an important source of the Jordan.

Its banks, and those of the brook are respectably adorned with blooming

oleanders, but the unutterable beauty of the spot will not throw a well-

balanced man into convulsions, as the Syrian books of travel would lead

one to suppose.



From the spot I am speaking of, a cannon-ball would carry beyond the

confines of Holy Land and light upon profane ground three miles away.

We were only one little hour's travel within the borders of Holy Land--we

had hardly begun to appreciate yet that we were standing upon any

different sort of earth than that we had always been used to, and see how

the historic names began already to cluster!  Dan--Bashan--Lake Huleh--

the Sources of Jordan--the Sea of Galilee.  They were all in sight but

the last, and it was not far away.  The little township of Bashan was

once the kingdom so famous in Scripture for its bulls and its oaks.

Lake Huleh is the Biblical "Waters of Merom."  Dan was the northern and

Beersheba the southern limit of Palestine--hence the expression "from Dan

to Beersheba."  It is equivalent to our phrases "from Maine to Texas"--

"from Baltimore to San Francisco."  Our expression and that of the

Israelites both mean the same--great distance.  With their slow camels

and asses, it was about a seven days' journey from Dan to Beersheba---say

a hundred and fifty or sixty miles--it was the entire length of their

country, and was not to be undertaken without great preparation and much

ceremony.  When the Prodigal traveled to "a far country," it is not

likely that he went more than eighty or ninety miles.  Palestine is only

from forty to sixty miles wide.  The State of Missouri could be split

into three Palestines, and there would then be enough material left for

part of another--possibly a whole one.  From Baltimore to San Francisco

is several thousand miles, but it will be only a seven days' journey in

the cars when I am two or three years older.--[The railroad has been

completed since the above was written.]--If I live I shall necessarily

have to go across the continent every now and then in those cars, but one

journey from Dan to Beersheba will be sufficient, no doubt.  It must be

the most trying of the two.  Therefore, if we chance to discover that

from Dan to Beersheba seemed a mighty stretch of country to the

Israelites, let us not be airy with them, but reflect that it was and is

a mighty stretch when one can not traverse it by rail.



The small mound I have mentioned a while ago was once occupied by the

Phenician city of Laish.  A party of filibusters from Zorah and Eschol

captured the place, and lived there in a free and easy way, worshiping

gods of their own manufacture and stealing idols from their neighbors

whenever they wore their own out.  Jeroboam set up a golden calf here to

fascinate his people and keep them from making dangerous trips to

Jerusalem to worship, which might result in a return to their rightful

allegiance.  With all respect for those ancient Israelites, I can not

overlook the fact that they were not always virtuous enough to withstand

the seductions of a golden calf.  Human nature has not changed much since

then.



Some forty centuries ago the city of Sodom was pillaged by the Arab

princes of Mesopotamia, and among other prisoners they seized upon the

patriarch Lot and brought him here on their way to their own possessions.

They brought him to Dan, and father Abraham, who was pursuing them, crept

softly in at dead of night, among the whispering oleanders and under the

shadows of the stately oaks, and fell upon the slumbering victors and

startled them from their dreams with the clash of steel.  He recaptured

Lot and all the other plunder.



We moved on.  We were now in a green valley, five or six miles wide and

fifteen long.  The streams which are called the sources of the Jordan

flow through it to Lake Huleh, a shallow pond three miles in diameter,

and from the southern extremity of the Lake the concentrated Jordan flows

out.  The Lake is surrounded by a broad marsh, grown with reeds.  Between

the marsh and the mountains which wall the valley is a respectable strip

of fertile land; at the end of the valley, toward Dan, as much as half

the land is solid and fertile, and watered by Jordan's sources.  There is

enough of it to make a farm.  It almost warrants the enthusiasm of the

spies of that rabble of adventurers who captured Dan.  They said: "We

have seen the land, and behold it is very good.  * * *  A place where

there is no want of any thing that is in the earth."



Their enthusiasm was at least warranted by the fact that they had never

seen a country as good as this.  There was enough of it for the ample

support of their six hundred men and their families, too.



When we got fairly down on the level part of the Danite farm, we came to

places where we could actually run our horses.  It was a notable

circumstance.



We had been painfully clambering over interminable hills and rocks for

days together, and when we suddenly came upon this astonishing piece of

rockless plain, every man drove the spurs into his horse and sped away

with a velocity he could surely enjoy to the utmost, but could never hope

to comprehend in Syria.



Here were evidences of cultivation--a rare sight in this country--an acre

or two of rich soil studded with last season's dead corn-stalks of the

thickness of your thumb and very wide apart.  But in such a land it was a

thrilling spectacle.  Close to it was a stream, and on its banks a great

herd of curious-looking Syrian goats and sheep were gratefully eating

gravel.  I do not state this as a petrified fact--I only suppose they

were eating gravel, because there did not appear to be any thing else for

them to eat.  The shepherds that tended them were the very pictures of

Joseph and his brethren I have no doubt in the world.  They were tall,

muscular, and very dark-skinned Bedouins, with inky black beards.  They

had firm lips, unquailing eyes, and a kingly stateliness of bearing.

They wore the parti-colored half bonnet, half hood, with fringed ends

falling upon their shoulders, and the full, flowing robe barred with

broad black stripes--the dress one sees in all pictures of the swarthy

sons of the desert.  These chaps would sell their younger brothers if

they had a chance, I think.  They have the manners, the customs, the

dress, the occupation and the loose principles of the ancient stock.

[They attacked our camp last night, and I bear them no good will.]

They had with them the pigmy jackasses one sees all over Syria and

remembers in all pictures of the "Flight into Egypt," where Mary and the

Young Child are riding and Joseph is walking alongside, towering high

above the little donkey's shoulders.



But really, here the man rides and carries the child, as a general thing,

and the woman walks.  The customs have not changed since Joseph's time.

We would not have in our houses a picture representing Joseph riding and

Mary walking; we would see profanation in it, but a Syrian Christian

would not.  I know that hereafter the picture I first spoke of will look

odd to me.



We could not stop to rest two or three hours out from our camp, of

course, albeit the brook was beside us.  So we went on an hour longer.

We saw water, then, but nowhere in all the waste around was there a foot

of shade, and we were scorching to death.  "Like unto the shadow of a

great rock in a weary land."  Nothing in the Bible is more beautiful than

that, and surely there is no place we have wandered to that is able to

give it such touching expression as this blistering, naked, treeless

land.



Here you do not stop just when you please, but when you can.  We found

water, but no shade.  We traveled on and found a tree at last, but no

water.  We rested and lunched, and came on to this place, Ain Mellahah

(the boys call it Baldwinsville.) It was a very short day's run, but the

dragoman does not want to go further, and has invented a plausible lie

about the country beyond this being infested by ferocious Arabs, who

would make sleeping in their midst a dangerous pastime.  Well, they ought

to be dangerous.  They carry a rusty old weather-beaten flint-lock gun,

with a barrel that is longer than themselves; it has no sights on it, it

will not carry farther than a brickbat, and is not half so certain.  And

the great sash they wear in many a fold around their waists has two or

three absurd old horse-pistols in it that are rusty from eternal disuse--

weapons that would hang fire just about long enough for you to walk out

of range, and then burst and blow the Arab's head off.  Exceedingly

dangerous these sons of the desert are.



It used to make my blood run cold to read Wm. C. Grimes' hairbreadth

escapes from Bedouins, but I think I could read them now without a

tremor.  He never said he was attacked by Bedouins, I believe, or was

ever treated uncivilly, but then in about every other chapter he

discovered them approaching, any how, and he had a blood-curdling fashion

of working up the peril; and of wondering how his relations far away

would feel could they see their poor wandering boy, with his weary feet

and his dim eyes, in such fearful danger; and of thinking for the last

time of the old homestead, and the dear old church, and the cow, and

those things; and of finally straightening his form to its utmost height

in the saddle, drawing his trusty revolver, and then dashing the spurs

into "Mohammed" and sweeping down upon the ferocious enemy determined to

sell his life as dearly as possible.  True the Bedouins never did any

thing to him when he arrived, and never had any intention of doing any

thing to him in the first place, and wondered what in the mischief he was

making all that to-do about; but still I could not divest myself of the

idea, somehow, that a frightful peril had been escaped through that man's

dare-devil bravery, and so I never could read about Wm. C. Grimes'

Bedouins and sleep comfortably afterward.  But I believe the Bedouins to

be a fraud, now.  I have seen the monster, and I can outrun him.  I shall

never be afraid of his daring to stand behind his own gun and discharge

it.



About fifteen hundred years before Christ, this camp-ground of ours by

the Waters of Merom was the scene of one of Joshua's exterminating

battles.  Jabin, King of Hazor, (up yonder above Dan,) called all the

sheiks about him together, with their hosts, to make ready for Israel's

terrible General who was approaching.



     "And when all these Kings were met together, they came and pitched

     together by the Waters of Merom, to fight against Israel.  And they

     went out, they and all their hosts with them, much people, even as

     the sand that is upon the sea-shore for multitude," etc.



But Joshua fell upon them and utterly destroyed them, root and branch.

That was his usual policy in war.  He never left any chance for newspaper

controversies about who won the battle.  He made this valley, so quiet

now, a reeking slaughter-pen.



Somewhere in this part of the country--I do not know exactly where--

Israel fought another bloody battle a hundred years later.  Deborah, the

prophetess, told Barak to take ten thousand men and sally forth against

another King Jabin who had been doing something.  Barak came down from

Mount Tabor, twenty or twenty-five miles from here, and gave battle to

Jabin's forces, who were in command of Sisera.  Barak won the fight, and

while he was making the victory complete by the usual method of

exterminating the remnant of the defeated host, Sisera fled away on foot,

and when he was nearly exhausted by fatigue and thirst, one Jael, a woman

he seems to have been acquainted with, invited him to come into her tent

and rest himself.  The weary soldier acceded readily enough, and Jael put

him to bed.  He said he was very thirsty, and asked his generous

preserver to get him a cup of water.  She brought him some milk, and he

drank of it gratefully and lay down again, to forget in pleasant dreams

his lost battle and his humbled pride.  Presently when he was asleep she

came softly in with a hammer and drove a hideous tent-pen down through

his brain!



"For he was fast asleep and weary.  So he died."  Such is the touching

language of the Bible.  "The Song of Deborah and Barak" praises Jael for

the memorable service she had rendered, in an exultant strain:



     "Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be,

     blessed shall she be above women in the tent.



     "He asked for water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter

     in a lordly dish.



     "She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workman's

     hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head

     when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.



     "At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed,

     he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead."



Stirring scenes like these occur in this valley no more.  There is not a

solitary village throughout its whole extent--not for thirty miles in

either direction.  There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin

tents, but not a single permanent habitation.  One may ride ten miles,

hereabouts, and not see ten human beings.



To this region one of the prophecies is applied:



     "I will bring the land into desolation; and your enemies which dwell

     therein shall be astonished at it.  And I will scatter you among the

     heathen, and I will draw out a sword after you; and your land shall

     be desolate and your cities waste."



No man can stand here by deserted Ain Mellahah and say the prophecy has

not been fulfilled.



In a verse from the Bible which I have quoted above, occurs the phrase

"all these kings."  It attracted my attention in a moment, because it

carries to my mind such a vastly different significance from what it

always did at home.  I can see easily enough that if I wish to profit by

this tour and come to a correct understanding of the matters of interest

connected with it, I must studiously and faithfully unlearn a great many

things I have somehow absorbed concerning Palestine.  I must begin a

system of reduction.  Like my grapes which the spies bore out of the

Promised Land, I have got every thing in Palestine on too large a scale.

Some of my ideas were wild enough.  The word Palestine always brought to

my mind a vague suggestion of a country as large as the United States.

I do not know why, but such was the case.  I suppose it was because I

could not conceive of a small country having so large a history.  I think

I was a little surprised to find that the grand Sultan of Turkey was a

man of only ordinary size.  I must try to reduce my ideas of Palestine to

a more reasonable shape.  One gets large impressions in boyhood,

sometimes, which he has to fight against all his life.  "All these

kings."  When I used to read that in Sunday School, it suggested to me

the several kings of such countries as England, France, Spain, Germany,

Russia, etc., arrayed in splendid robes ablaze with jewels, marching in

grave procession, with sceptres of gold in their hands and flashing

crowns upon their heads.  But here in Ain Mellahah, after coming through

Syria, and after giving serious study to the character and customs of the

country, the phrase "all these kings" loses its grandeur.  It suggests

only a parcel of petty chiefs--ill-clad and ill-conditioned savages much

like our Indians, who lived in full sight of each other and whose

"kingdoms" were large when they were five miles square and contained two

thousand souls.  The combined monarchies of the thirty "kings" destroyed

by Joshua on one of his famous campaigns, only covered an area about

equal to four of our counties of ordinary size.  The poor old sheik we

saw at Cesarea Philippi with his ragged band of a hundred followers,

would have been called a "king" in those ancient times.



It is seven in the morning, and as we are in the country, the grass ought

to be sparkling with dew, the flowers enriching the air with their

fragrance, and the birds singing in the trees.  But alas, there is no dew

here, nor flowers, nor birds, nor trees.  There is a plain and an

unshaded lake, and beyond them some barren mountains.  The tents are

tumbling, the Arabs are quarreling like dogs and cats, as usual, the

campground is strewn with packages and bundles, the labor of packing them

upon the backs of the mules is progressing with great activity, the

horses are saddled, the umbrellas are out, and in ten minutes we shall

mount and the long procession will move again.  The white city of the

Mellahah, resurrected for a moment out of the dead centuries, will have

disappeared again and left no sign.









CHAPTER XLVII.



We traversed some miles of desolate country whose soil is rich enough,

but is given over wholly to weeds--a silent, mournful expanse, wherein we

saw only three persons--Arabs, with nothing on but a long coarse shirt

like the "tow-linen" shirts which used to form the only summer garment of

little negro boys on Southern plantations.  Shepherds they were, and they

charmed their flocks with the traditional shepherd's pipe--a reed

instrument that made music as exquisitely infernal as these same Arabs

create when they sing.



In their pipes lingered no echo of the wonderful music the shepherd

forefathers heard in the Plains of Bethlehem what time the angels sang

"Peace on earth, good will to men."



Part of the ground we came over was not ground at all, but rocks--cream-

colored rocks, worn smooth, as if by water; with seldom an edge or a

corner on them, but scooped out, honey-combed, bored out with eye-holes,

and thus wrought into all manner of quaint shapes, among which the

uncouth imitation of skulls was frequent.  Over this part of the route

were occasional remains of an old Roman road like the Appian Way, whose

paving-stones still clung to their places with Roman tenacity.



Gray lizards, those heirs of ruin, of sepulchres and desolation, glided

in and out among the rocks or lay still and sunned themselves.  Where

prosperity has reigned, and fallen; where glory has flamed, and gone out;

where beauty has dwelt, and passed away; where gladness was, and sorrow

is; where the pomp of life has been, and silence and death brood in its

high places, there this reptile makes his home, and mocks at human

vanity.  His coat is the color of ashes: and ashes are the symbol of

hopes that have perished, of aspirations that came to nought, of loves

that are buried.  If he could speak, he would say, Build temples: I will

lord it in their ruins; build palaces: I will inhabit them; erect

empires: I will inherit them; bury your beautiful: I will watch the worms

at their work; and you, who stand here and moralize over me: I will crawl

over your corpse at the last.



A few ants were in this desert place, but merely to spend the summer.

They brought their provisions from Ain Mellahah--eleven miles.



Jack is not very well to-day, it is easy to see; but boy as he is, he is

too much of a man to speak of it.  He exposed himself to the sun too much

yesterday, but since it came of his earnest desire to learn, and to make

this journey as useful as the opportunities will allow, no one seeks to

discourage him by fault-finding.  We missed him an hour from the camp,

and then found him some distance away, by the edge of a brook, and with

no umbrella to protect him from the fierce sun.  If he had been used to

going without his umbrella, it would have been well enough, of course;

but he was not.  He was just in the act of throwing a clod at a mud-

turtle which was sunning itself on a small log in the brook.  We said:



"Don't do that, Jack.  What do you want to harm him for?  What has he

done?"



"Well, then, I won't kill him, but I ought to, because he is a fraud."



We asked him why, but he said it was no matter.  We asked him why, once

or twice, as we walked back to the camp but he still said it was no

matter.  But late at night, when he was sitting in a thoughtful mood on

the bed, we asked him again and he said:



"Well, it don't matter; I don't mind it now, but I did not like it today,

you know, because I don't tell any thing that isn't so, and I don't think

the Colonel ought to, either.  But he did; he told us at prayers in the

Pilgrims' tent, last night, and he seemed as if he was reading it out of

the Bible, too, about this country flowing with milk and honey, and about

the voice of the turtle being heard in the land.  I thought that was

drawing it a little strong, about the turtles, any how, but I asked Mr.

Church if it was so, and he said it was, and what Mr. Church tells me, I

believe.  But I sat there and watched that turtle nearly an hour today,

and I almost burned up in the sun; but I never heard him sing.  I believe

I sweated a double handful of sweat---I know I did--because it got in my

eyes, and it was running down over my nose all the time; and you know my

pants are tighter than any body else's--Paris foolishness--and the

buckskin seat of them got wet with sweat, and then got dry again and

began to draw up and pinch and tear loose--it was awful--but I never

heard him sing.  Finally I said, This is a fraud--that is what it is, it

is a fraud--and if I had had any sense I might have known a cursed mud-

turtle couldn't sing.  And then I said, I don't wish to be hard on this

fellow, and I will just give him ten minutes to commence; ten minutes--

and then if he don't, down goes his building.  But he didn't commence,

you know.  I had staid there all that time, thinking may be he might,

pretty soon, because he kept on raising his head up and letting it down,

and drawing the skin over his eyes for a minute and then opening them out

again, as if he was trying to study up something to sing, but just as the

ten minutes were up and I was all beat out and blistered, he laid his

blamed head down on a knot and went fast asleep."



"It was a little hard, after you had waited so long."



"I should think so.  I said, Well, if you won't sing, you shan't sleep,

any way; and if you fellows had let me alone I would have made him shin

out of Galilee quicker than any turtle ever did yet.  But it isn't any

matter now--let it go.  The skin is all off the back of my neck."



About ten in the morning we halted at Joseph's Pit.  This is a ruined

Khan of the Middle Ages, in one of whose side courts is a great walled

and arched pit with water in it, and this pit, one tradition says, is the

one Joseph's brethren cast him into.  A more authentic tradition, aided

by the geography of the country, places the pit in Dothan, some two days'

journey from here.  However, since there are many who believe in this

present pit as the true one, it has its interest.



It is hard to make a choice of the most beautiful passage in a book which

is so gemmed with beautiful passages as the Bible; but it is certain that

not many things within its lids may take rank above the exquisite story

of Joseph.  Who taught those ancient writers their simplicity of

language, their felicity of expression, their pathos, and above all,

their faculty of sinking themselves entirely out of sight of the reader

and making the narrative stand out alone and seem to tell itself?

Shakspeare is always present when one reads his book; Macaulay is present

when we follow the march of his stately sentences; but the Old Testament

writers are hidden from view.



If the pit I have been speaking of is the right one, a scene transpired

there, long ages ago, which is familiar to us all in pictures.  The sons

of Jacob had been pasturing their flocks near there.  Their father grew

uneasy at their long absence, and sent Joseph, his favorite, to see if

any thing had gone wrong with them.  He traveled six or seven days'

journey; he was only seventeen years old, and, boy like, he toiled

through that long stretch of the vilest, rockiest, dustiest country in

Asia, arrayed in the pride of his heart, his beautiful claw-hammer coat

of many colors.  Joseph was the favorite, and that was one crime in the

eyes of his brethren; he had dreamed dreams, and interpreted them to

foreshadow his elevation far above all his family in the far future, and

that was another; he was dressed well and had doubtless displayed the

harmless vanity of youth in keeping the fact prominently before his

brothers.  These were crimes his elders fretted over among themselves and

proposed to punish when the opportunity should offer.  When they saw him

coming up from the Sea of Galilee, they recognized him and were glad.

They said, "Lo, here is this dreamer--let us kill him."  But Reuben

pleaded for his life, and they spared it.  But they seized the boy, and

stripped the hated coat from his back and pushed him into the pit.  They

intended to let him die there, but Reuben intended to liberate him

secretly.  However, while Reuben was away for a little while, the

brethren sold Joseph to some Ishmaelitish merchants who were journeying

towards Egypt.  Such is the history of the pit.  And the self-same pit is

there in that place, even to this day; and there it will remain until the

next detachment of image-breakers and tomb desecraters arrives from the

Quaker City excursion, and they will infallibly dig it up and carry it

away with them.  For behold in them is no reverence for the solemn

monuments of the past, and whithersoever they go they destroy and spare

not.



Joseph became rich, distinguished, powerful--as the Bible expresses it,

"lord over all the land of Egypt."  Joseph was the real king, the

strength, the brain of the monarchy, though Pharaoh held the title.

Joseph is one of the truly great men of the Old Testament.  And he was

the noblest and the manliest, save Esau.  Why shall we not say a good

word for the princely Bedouin?  The only crime that can be brought

against him is that he was unfortunate.  Why must every body praise

Joseph's great-hearted generosity to his cruel brethren, without stint of

fervent language, and fling only a reluctant bone of praise to Esau for

his still sublimer generosity to the brother who had wronged him?  Jacob

took advantage of Esau's consuming hunger to rob him of his birthright

and the great honor and consideration that belonged to the position; by

treachery and falsehood he robbed him of his father's blessing; he made

of him a stranger in his home, and a wanderer.  Yet after twenty years

had passed away and Jacob met Esau and fell at his feet quaking with fear

and begging piteously to be spared the punishment he knew he deserved,

what did that magnificent savage do?  He fell upon his neck and embraced

him!  When Jacob--who was incapable of comprehending nobility of

character--still doubting, still fearing, insisted upon "finding grace

with my lord" by the bribe of a present of cattle, what did the gorgeous

son of the desert say?



"Nay, I have enough, my brother; keep that thou hast unto thyself!"



Esau found Jacob rich, beloved by wives and children, and traveling in

state, with servants, herds of cattle and trains of camels--but he

himself was still the uncourted outcast this brother had made him.  After

thirteen years of romantic mystery, the brethren who had wronged Joseph,

came, strangers in a strange land, hungry and humble, to buy "a little

food"; and being summoned to a palace, charged with crime, they beheld in

its owner their wronged brother; they were trembling beggars--he, the

lord of a mighty empire!  What Joseph that ever lived would have thrown

away such a chance to "show off?"  Who stands first--outcast Esau

forgiving Jacob in prosperity, or Joseph on a king's throne forgiving the

ragged tremblers whose happy rascality placed him there?



Just before we came to Joseph's Pit, we had "raised" a hill, and there, a

few miles before us, with not a tree or a shrub to interrupt the view,

lay a vision which millions of worshipers in the far lands of the earth

would give half their possessions to see--the sacred Sea of Galilee!



Therefore we tarried only a short time at the pit.  We rested the horses

and ourselves, and felt for a few minutes the blessed shade of the

ancient buildings.  We were out of water, but the two or three scowling

Arabs, with their long guns, who were idling about the place, said they

had none and that there was none in the vicinity.  They knew there was a

little brackish water in the pit, but they venerated a place made sacred

by their ancestor's imprisonment too much to be willing to see Christian

dogs drink from it.  But Ferguson tied rags and handkerchiefs together

till he made a rope long enough to lower a vessel to the bottom, and we

drank and then rode on; and in a short time we dismounted on those shores

which the feet of the Saviour have made holy ground.



At noon we took a swim in the Sea of Galilee--a blessed privilege in this

roasting climate--and then lunched under a neglected old fig-tree at the

fountain they call Ain-et-Tin, a hundred yards from ruined Capernaum.

Every rivulet that gurgles out of the rocks and sands of this part of the

world is dubbed with the title of "fountain," and people familiar with

the Hudson, the great lakes and the Mississippi fall into transports of

admiration over them, and exhaust their powers of composition in writing

their praises.  If all the poetry and nonsense that have been discharged

upon the fountains and the bland scenery of this region were collected in

a book, it would make a most valuable volume to burn.



During luncheon, the pilgrim enthusiasts of our party, who had been so

light-hearted and so happy ever since they touched holy ground that they

did little but mutter incoherent rhapsodies, could scarcely eat, so

anxious were they to "take shipping" and sail in very person upon the

waters that had borne the vessels of the Apostles.  Their anxiety grew

and their excitement augmented with every fleeting moment, until my fears

were aroused and I began to have misgivings that in their present

condition they might break recklessly loose from all considerations of

prudence and buy a whole fleet of ships to sail in instead of hiring a

single one for an hour, as quiet folk are wont to do.  I trembled to

think of the ruined purses this day's performances might result in.

I could not help reflecting bodingly upon the intemperate zeal with which

middle-aged men are apt to surfeit themselves upon a seductive folly

which they have tasted for the first time.  And yet I did not feel that

I had a right to be surprised at the state of things which was giving me

so much concern.  These men had been taught from infancy to revere,

almost to worship, the holy places whereon their happy eyes were resting

now.  For many and many a year this very picture had visited their

thoughts by day and floated through their dreams by night.  To stand

before it in the flesh--to see it as they saw it now--to sail upon the

hallowed sea, and kiss the holy soil that compassed it about: these were

aspirations they had cherished while a generation dragged its lagging

seasons by and left its furrows in their faces and its frosts upon their

hair.  To look upon this picture, and sail upon this sea, they had

forsaken home and its idols and journeyed thousands and thousands of

miles, in weariness and tribulation.  What wonder that the sordid lights

of work-day prudence should pale before the glory of a hope like theirs

in the full splendor of its fruition?  Let them squander millions!

I said--who speaks of money at a time like this?



In this frame of mind I followed, as fast as I could, the eager footsteps

of the pilgrims, and stood upon the shore of the lake, and swelled, with

hat and voice, the frantic hail they sent after the "ship" that was

speeding by.  It was a success.  The toilers of the sea ran in and

beached their barque.  Joy sat upon every countenance.



"How much?--ask him how much, Ferguson!--how much to take us all--eight

of us, and you--to Bethsaida, yonder, and to the mouth of Jordan, and to

the place where the swine ran down into the sea--quick!--and we want to

coast around every where--every where!--all day long!--I could sail a

year in these waters!--and tell him we'll stop at Magdala and finish at

Tiberias!--ask him how much?--any thing--any thing whatever!--tell him we

don't care what the expense is!"  [I said to myself, I knew how it would

be.]



Ferguson--(interpreting)--"He says two Napoleons--eight dollars."



One or two countenances fell.  Then a pause.



"Too much!--we'll give him one!"



I never shall know how it was--I shudder yet when I think how the place

is given to miracles--but in a single instant of time, as it seemed to

me, that ship was twenty paces from the shore, and speeding away like a

frightened thing!  Eight crestfallen creatures stood upon the shore, and

O, to think of it!  this--this--after all that overmastering ecstacy!

Oh, shameful, shameful ending, after such unseemly boasting!  It was too

much like "Ho! let me at him!"  followed by a prudent "Two of you hold

him--one can hold me!"



Instantly there was wailing and gnashing of teeth in the camp.  The two

Napoleons were offered--more if necessary--and pilgrims and dragoman

shouted themselves hoarse with pleadings to the retreating boatmen to

come back.  But they sailed serenely away and paid no further heed to

pilgrims who had dreamed all their lives of some day skimming over the

sacred waters of Galilee and listening to its hallowed story in the

whisperings of its waves, and had journeyed countless leagues to do it,

and--and then concluded that the fare was too high.  Impertinent

Mohammedan Arabs, to think such things of gentlemen of another faith!



Well, there was nothing to do but just submit and forego the privilege of

voyaging on Genessaret, after coming half around the globe to taste that

pleasure.  There was a time, when the Saviour taught here, that boats

were plenty among the fishermen of the coasts--but boats and fishermen

both are gone, now; and old Josephus had a fleet of men-of-war in these

waters eighteen centuries ago--a hundred and thirty bold canoes--but

they, also, have passed away and left no sign.  They battle here no more

by sea, and the commercial marine of Galilee numbers only two small

ships, just of a pattern with the little skiffs the disciples knew.  One

was lost to us for good--the other was miles away and far out of hail.

So we mounted the horses and rode grimly on toward Magdala, cantering

along in the edge of the water for want of the means of passing over it.



How the pilgrims abused each other!  Each said it was the other's fault,

and each in turn denied it.  No word was spoken by the sinners--even the

mildest sarcasm might have been dangerous at such a time.  Sinners that

have been kept down and had examples held up to them, and suffered

frequent lectures, and been so put upon in a moral way and in the matter

of going slow and being serious and bottling up slang, and so crowded in

regard to the matter of being proper and always and forever behaving,

that their lives have become a burden to them, would not lag behind

pilgrims at such a time as this, and wink furtively, and be joyful, and

commit other such crimes--because it would not occur to them to do it.

Otherwise they would.  But they did do it, though--and it did them a

world of good to hear the pilgrims abuse each other, too.  We took an

unworthy satisfaction in seeing them fall out, now and then, because it

showed that they were only poor human people like us, after all.



So we all rode down to Magdala, while the gnashing of teeth waxed and

waned by turns, and harsh words troubled the holy calm of Galilee.



Lest any man think I mean to be ill-natured when I talk about our

pilgrims as I have been talking, I wish to say in all sincerity that I do

not.  I would not listen to lectures from men I did not like and could

not respect; and none of these can say I ever took their lectures

unkindly, or was restive under the infliction, or failed to try to profit

by what they said to me.  They are better men than I am; I can say that

honestly; they are good friends of mine, too--and besides, if they did

not wish to be stirred up occasionally in print, why in the mischief did

they travel with me?  They knew me.  They knew my liberal way--that I

like to give and take--when it is for me to give and other people to

take.  When one of them threatened to leave me in Damascus when I had the

cholera, he had no real idea of doing it--I know his passionate nature

and the good impulses that underlie it.  And did I not overhear Church,

another pilgrim, say he did not care who went or who staid, he would

stand by me till I walked out of Damascus on my own feet or was carried

out in a coffin, if it was a year?  And do I not include Church every

time I abuse the pilgrims--and would I be likely to speak ill-naturedly

of him?  I wish to stir them up and make them healthy; that is all.



We had left Capernaum behind us.  It was only a shapeless ruin.  It bore

no semblance to a town, and had nothing about it to suggest that it had

ever been a town.  But all desolate and unpeopled as it was, it was

illustrious ground.  From it sprang that tree of Christianity whose broad

arms overshadow so many distant lands to-day.  After Christ was tempted

of the devil in the desert, he came here and began his teachings; and

during the three or four years he lived afterward, this place was his

home almost altogether.  He began to heal the sick, and his fame soon

spread so widely that sufferers came from Syria and beyond Jordan, and

even from Jerusalem, several days' journey away, to be cured of their

diseases.  Here he healed the centurion's servant and Peter's mother-in-

law, and multitudes of the lame and the blind and persons possessed of

devils; and here, also, he raised Jairus's daughter from the dead.  He

went into a ship with his disciples, and when they roused him from sleep

in the midst of a storm, he quieted the winds and lulled the troubled sea

to rest with his voice.  He passed over to the other side, a few miles

away and relieved two men of devils, which passed into some swine.  After

his return he called Matthew from the receipt of customs, performed some

cures, and created scandal by eating with publicans and sinners.  Then he

went healing and teaching through Galilee, and even journeyed to Tyre and

Sidon.  He chose the twelve disciples, and sent them abroad to preach the

new gospel.  He worked miracles in Bethsaida and Chorazin--villages two

or three miles from Capernaum.  It was near one of them that the

miraculous draft of fishes is supposed to have been taken, and it was in

the desert places near the other that he fed the thousands by the

miracles of the loaves and fishes.  He cursed them both, and Capernaum

also, for not repenting, after all the great works he had done in their

midst, and prophesied against them.  They are all in ruins, now--which is

gratifying to the pilgrims, for, as usual, they fit the eternal words of

gods to the evanescent things of this earth; Christ, it is more probable,

referred to the people, not their shabby villages of wigwams: he said it

would be sad for them at "the day of judgment"--and what business have

mud-hovels at the Day of Judgment?  It would not affect the prophecy in

the least--it would neither prove it or disprove it--if these towns were

splendid cities now instead of the almost vanished ruins they are.

Christ visited Magdala, which is near by Capernaum, and he also visited

Cesarea Philippi.  He went up to his old home at Nazareth, and saw his

brothers Joses, and Judas, and James, and Simon--those persons who, being

own brothers to Jesus Christ, one would expect to hear mentioned

sometimes, yet who ever saw their names in a newspaper or heard them from

a pulpit?  Who ever inquires what manner of youths they were; and whether

they slept with Jesus, played with him and romped about him; quarreled

with him concerning toys and trifles; struck him in anger, not suspecting

what he was?  Who ever wonders what they thought when they saw him come

back to Nazareth a celebrity, and looked long at his unfamiliar face to

make sure, and then said, "It is Jesus?"  Who wonders what passed in

their minds when they saw this brother, (who was only a brother to them,

however much he might be to others a mysterious stranger who was a god

and had stood face to face with God above the clouds,) doing strange

miracles with crowds of astonished people for witnesses?  Who wonders if

the brothers of Jesus asked him to come home with them, and said his

mother and his sisters were grieved at his long absence, and would be

wild with delight to see his face again?  Who ever gives a thought to

the sisters of Jesus at all?--yet he had sisters; and memories of them

must have stolen into his mind often when he was ill-treated among

strangers; when he was homeless and said he had not where to lay his

head; when all deserted him, even Peter, and he stood alone among his

enemies.



Christ did few miracles in Nazareth, and staid but a little while.  The

people said, "This the Son of God!  Why, his father is nothing but a

carpenter.  We know the family.  We see them every day.  Are not his

brothers named so and so, and his sisters so and so, and is not his

mother the person they call Mary?  This is absurd."  He did not curse his

home, but he shook its dust from his feet and went away.



Capernaum lies close to the edge of the little sea, in a small plain some

five miles long and a mile or two wide, which is mildly adorned with

oleanders which look all the better contrasted with the bald hills and

the howling deserts which surround them, but they are not as deliriously

beautiful as the books paint them.  If one be calm and resolute he can

look upon their comeliness and live.



One of the most astonishing things that have yet fallen under our

observation is the exceedingly small portion of the earth from which

sprang the now flourishing plant of Christianity.  The longest journey

our Saviour ever performed was from here to Jerusalem--about one hundred

to one hundred and twenty miles.  The next longest was from here to

Sidon--say about sixty or seventy miles.  Instead of being wide apart--as

American appreciation of distances would naturally suggest--the places

made most particularly celebrated by the presence of Christ are nearly

all right here in full view, and within cannon-shot of Capernaum.

Leaving out two or three short journeys of the Saviour, he spent his

life, preached his gospel, and performed his miracles within a compass no

larger than an ordinary county in the United States.  It is as much as I

can do to comprehend this stupefying fact.  How it wears a man out to

have to read up a hundred pages of history every two or three miles--for

verily the celebrated localities of Palestine occur that close together.

How wearily, how bewilderingly they swarm about your path!



In due time we reached the ancient village of Magdala.









CHAPTER XLVIII.



Magdala is not a beautiful place.  It is thoroughly Syrian, and that is

to say that it is thoroughly ugly, and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable,

and filthy--just the style of cities that have adorned the country since

Adam's time, as all writers have labored hard to prove, and have

succeeded.  The streets of Magdala are any where from three to six feet

wide, and reeking with uncleanliness.  The houses are from five to seven

feet high, and all built upon one arbitrary plan--the ungraceful form of

a dry-goods box.  The sides are daubed with a smooth white plaster, and

tastefully frescoed aloft and alow with disks of camel-dung placed there

to dry.  This gives the edifice the romantic appearance of having been

riddled with cannon-balls, and imparts to it a very warlike aspect.  When

the artist has arranged his materials with an eye to just proportion--the

small and the large flakes in alternate rows, and separated by carefully-

considered intervals--I know of nothing more cheerful to look upon than a

spirited Syrian fresco.  The flat, plastered roof is garnished by

picturesque stacks of fresco materials, which, having become thoroughly

dried and cured, are placed there where it will be convenient.  It is

used for fuel.  There is no timber of any consequence in Palestine--none

at all to waste upon fires--and neither are there any mines of coal.

If my description has been intelligible, you will perceive, now, that a

square, flat-roofed hovel, neatly frescoed, with its wall-tops gallantly

bastioned and turreted with dried camel-refuse, gives to a landscape a

feature that is exceedingly festive and picturesque, especially if one is

careful to remember to stick in a cat wherever, about the premises, there

is room for a cat to sit.  There are no windows to a Syrian hut, and no

chimneys.  When I used to read that they let a bed-ridden man down

through the roof of a house in Capernaum to get him into the presence of

the Saviour, I generally had a three-story brick in my mind, and marveled

that they did not break his neck with the strange experiment.  I perceive

now, however, that they might have taken him by the heels and thrown him

clear over the house without discommoding him very much.  Palestine is

not changed any since those days, in manners, customs, architecture, or

people.



As we rode into Magdala not a soul was visible.  But the ring of the

horses' hoofs roused the stupid population, and they all came trooping

out--old men and old women, boys and girls, the blind, the crazy, and the

crippled, all in ragged, soiled and scanty raiment, and all abject

beggars by nature, instinct and education.  How the vermin-tortured

vagabonds did swarm!  How they showed their scars and sores, and

piteously pointed to their maimed and crooked limbs, and begged with

their pleading eyes for charity!  We had invoked a spirit we could not

lay.  They hung to the horses's tails, clung to their manes and the

stirrups, closed in on every aide in scorn of dangerous hoofs--and out of

their infidel throats, with one accord, burst an agonizing and most

infernal chorus: "Howajji, bucksheesh!  howajji, bucksheesh!  howajji,

bucksheesh!  bucksheesh!  bucksheesh!"  I never was in a storm like that

before.



As we paid the bucksheesh out to sore-eyed children and brown, buxom

girls with repulsively tattooed lips and chins, we filed through the town

and by many an exquisite fresco, till we came to a bramble-infested

inclosure and a Roman-looking ruin which had been the veritable dwelling

of St. Mary Magdalene, the friend and follower of Jesus.  The guide

believed it, and so did I.  I could not well do otherwise, with the house

right there before my eyes as plain as day.  The pilgrims took down

portions of the front wall for specimens, as is their honored custom, and

then we departed.



We are camped in this place, now, just within the city walls of Tiberias.

We went into the town before nightfall and looked at its people--we cared

nothing about its houses.  Its people are best examined at a distance.

They are particularly uncomely Jews, Arabs, and negroes.  Squalor and

poverty are the pride of Tiberias.  The young women wear their dower

strung upon a strong wire that curves downward from the top of the head

to the jaw--Turkish silver coins which they have raked together or

inherited.  Most of these maidens were not wealthy, but some few had been

very kindly dealt with by fortune.  I saw heiresses there worth, in their

own right--worth, well, I suppose I might venture to say, as much as nine

dollars and a half.  But such cases are rare.  When you come across one

of these, she naturally puts on airs.  She will not ask for bucksheesh.

She will not even permit of undue familiarity.  She assumes a crushing

dignity and goes on serenely practicing with her fine-tooth comb and

quoting poetry just the same as if you were not present at all.  Some

people can not stand prosperity.



They say that the long-nosed, lanky, dyspeptic-looking body-snatchers,

with the indescribable hats on, and a long curl dangling down in front of

each ear, are the old, familiar, self-righteous Pharisees we read of in

the Scriptures.  Verily, they look it.  Judging merely by their general

style, and without other evidence, one might easily suspect that self-

righteousness was their specialty.



From various authorities I have culled information concerning Tiberias.

It was built by Herod Antipas, the murderer of John the Baptist, and

named after the Emperor Tiberius.  It is believed that it stands upon the

site of what must have been, ages ago, a city of considerable

architectural pretensions, judging by the fine porphyry pillars that are

scattered through Tiberias and down the lake shore southward.  These were

fluted, once, and yet, although the stone is about as hard as iron, the

flutings are almost worn away.  These pillars are small, and doubtless

the edifices they adorned were distinguished more for elegance than

grandeur.  This modern town--Tiberias--is only mentioned in the New

Testament; never in the Old.



The Sanhedrim met here last, and for three hundred years Tiberias was the

metropolis of the Jews in Palestine.  It is one of the four holy cities

of the Israelites, and is to them what Mecca is to the Mohammedan and

Jerusalem to the Christian.  It has been the abiding place of many

learned and famous Jewish rabbins.  They lie buried here, and near them

lie also twenty-five thousand of their faith who traveled far to be near

them while they lived and lie with them when they died.  The great Rabbi

Ben Israel spent three years here in the early part of the third century.

He is dead, now.



The celebrated Sea of Galilee is not so large a sea as Lake Tahoe--

[I measure all lakes by Tahoe, partly because I am far more familiar with

it than with any other, and partly because I have such a high admiration

for it and such a world of pleasant recollections of it, that it is very

nearly impossible for me to speak of lakes and not mention it.]--by a

good deal--it is just about two-thirds as large.  And when we come to

speak of beauty, this sea is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a

meridian of longitude is to a rainbow.  The dim waters of this pool can

not suggest the limpid brilliancy of Tahoe; these low, shaven, yellow

hillocks of rocks and sand, so devoid of perspective, can not suggest the

grand peaks that compass Tahoe like a wall, and whose ribbed and chasmed

fronts are clad with stately pines that seem to grow small and smaller as

they climb, till one might fancy them reduced to weeds and shrubs far

upward, where they join the everlasting snows.  Silence and solitude

brood over Tahoe; and silence and solitude brood also over this lake of

Genessaret.  But the solitude of the one is as cheerful and fascinating

as the solitude of the other is dismal and repellant.



In the early morning one watches the silent battle of dawn and darkness

upon the waters of Tahoe with a placid interest; but when the shadows

sulk away and one by one the hidden beauties of the shore unfold

themselves in the full splendor of noon; when the still surface is belted

like a rainbow with broad bars of blue and green and white, half the

distance from circumference to centre; when, in the lazy summer

afternoon, he lies in a boat, far out to where the dead blue of the deep

water begins, and smokes the pipe of peace and idly winks at the

distant crags and patches of snow from under his cap-brim; when the boat

drifts shoreward to the white water, and he lolls over the gunwale and

gazes by the hour down through the crystal depths and notes the colors of

the pebbles and reviews the finny armies gliding in procession a hundred

feet below; when at night he sees moon and stars, mountain ridges

feathered with pines, jutting white capes, bold promontories, grand

sweeps of rugged scenery topped with bald, glimmering peaks, all

magnificently pictured in the polished mirror of the lake, in richest,

softest detail, the tranquil interest that was born with the morning

deepens and deepens, by sure degrees, till it culminates at last in

resistless fascination!



It is solitude, for birds and squirrels on the shore and fishes in the

water are all the creatures that are near to make it otherwise, but it is

not the sort of solitude to make one dreary.  Come to Galilee for that.

If these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that never,

never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines, and fade and

faint into vague perspective; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum; this

stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under its six funereal plumes of

palms; yonder desolate declivity where the swine of the miracle ran down

into the sea, and doubtless thought it was better to swallow a devil or

two and get drowned into the bargain than have to live longer in such a

place; this cloudless, blistering sky; this solemn, sailless, tintless

lake, reposing within its rim of yellow hills and low, steep banks, and

looking just as expressionless and unpoetical (when we leave its sublime

history out of the question,) as any metropolitan reservoir in

Christendom--if these things are not food for rock me to sleep, mother,

none exist, I think.



But I should not offer the evidence for the prosecution and leave the

defense unheard.  Wm. C. Grimes deposes as follows:--



     "We had taken ship to go over to the other side.  The sea was not

     more than six miles wide.  Of the beauty of the scene, however, I

     can not say enough, nor can I imagine where those travelers carried

     their eyes who have described the scenery of the lake as tame or

     uninteresting.  The first great characteristic of it is the deep

     basin in which it lies.  This is from three to four hundred feet

     deep on all sides except at the lower end, and the sharp slope of

     the banks, which are all of the richest green, is broken and

     diversified by the wadys and water-courses which work their way down

     through the sides of the basin, forming dark chasms or light sunny

     valleys.  Near Tiberias these banks are rocky, and ancient

     sepulchres open in them, with their doors toward the water.  They

     selected grand spots, as did the Egyptians of old, for burial

     places, as if they designed that when the voice of God should reach

     the sleepers, they should walk forth and open their eyes on scenes

     of glorious beauty.  On the east, the wild and desolate mountains

     contrast finely with the deep blue lake; and toward the north,

     sublime and majestic, Hermon looks down on the sea, lifting his

     white crown to heaven with the pride of a hill that has seen the

     departing footsteps of a hundred generations.  On the north-east

     shore of the sea was a single tree, and this is the only tree of any

     size visible from the water of the lake, except a few lonely palms

     in the city of Tiberias, and by its solitary position attracts more

     attention than would a forest.  The whole appearance of the scene is

     precisely what we would expect and desire the scenery of Genessaret

     to be, grand beauty, but quiet calm.  The very mountains are calm."



It is an ingeniously written description, and well calculated to deceive.

But if the paint and the ribbons and the flowers be stripped from it, a

skeleton will be found beneath.



So stripped, there remains a lake six miles wide and neutral in color;

with steep green banks, unrelieved by shrubbery; at one end bare,

unsightly rocks, with (almost invisible) holes in them of no consequence

to the picture; eastward, "wild and desolate mountains;" (low, desolate

hills, he should have said;) in the north, a mountain called Hermon, with

snow on it; peculiarity of the picture, "calmness;" its prominent

feature, one tree.



No ingenuity could make such a picture beautiful--to one's actual vision.



I claim the right to correct misstatements, and have so corrected the

color of the water in the above recapitulation.  The waters of Genessaret

are of an exceedingly mild blue, even from a high elevation and a

distance of five miles.  Close at hand (the witness was sailing on the

lake,) it is hardly proper to call them blue at all, much less "deep"

blue.  I wish to state, also, not as a correction, but as matter of

opinion, that Mount Hermon is not a striking or picturesque mountain by

any means, being too near the height of its immediate neighbors to be so.

That is all.  I do not object to the witness dragging a mountain forty-

five miles to help the scenery under consideration, because it is

entirely proper to do it, and besides, the picture needs it.



"C. W. E.," (of "Life in the Holy Land,") deposes as follows:--



     "A beautiful sea lies unbosomed among the Galilean hills, in the

     midst of that land once possessed by Zebulon and Naphtali, Asher and

     Dan.  The azure of the sky penetrates the depths of the lake, and

     the waters are sweet and cool.  On the west, stretch broad fertile

     plains; on the north the rocky shores rise step by step until in the

     far distance tower the snowy heights of Hermon; on the east through

     a misty veil are seen the high plains of Perea, which stretch away

     in rugged mountains leading the mind by varied paths toward

     Jerusalem the Holy.  Flowers bloom in this terrestrial paradise,

     once beautiful and verdant with waving trees; singing birds enchant

     the ear; the turtle-dove soothes with its soft note; the crested

     lark sends up its song toward heaven, and the grave and stately

     stork inspires the mind with thought, and leads it on to meditation

     and repose.  Life here was once idyllic, charming; here were once no

     rich, no poor, no high, no low.  It was a world of ease, simplicity,

     and beauty; now it is a scene of desolation and misery."



This is not an ingenious picture.  It is the worst I ever saw.  It

describes in elaborate detail what it terms a "terrestrial paradise," and

closes with the startling information that this paradise is "a scene of

desolation and misery."



I have given two fair, average specimens of the character of the

testimony offered by the majority of the writers who visit this region.

One says, "Of the beauty of the scene I can not say enough," and then

proceeds to cover up with a woof of glittering sentences a thing which,

when stripped for inspection, proves to be only an unobtrusive basin of

water, some mountainous desolation, and one tree.  The other, after a

conscientious effort to build a terrestrial paradise out of the same

materials, with the addition of a "grave and stately stork," spoils it

all by blundering upon the ghastly truth at the last.



Nearly every book concerning Galilee and its lake describes the scenery

as beautiful.  No--not always so straightforward as that.  Sometimes the

impression intentionally conveyed is that it is beautiful, at the same

time that the author is careful not to say that it is, in plain Saxon.

But a careful analysis of these descriptions will show that the materials

of which they are formed are not individually beautiful and can not be

wrought into combinations that are beautiful.  The veneration and the

affection which some of these men felt for the scenes they were speaking

of, heated their fancies and biased their judgment; but the pleasant

falsities they wrote were full of honest sincerity, at any rate.  Others

wrote as they did, because they feared it would be unpopular to write

otherwise.  Others were hypocrites and deliberately meant to deceive.

Any of them would say in a moment, if asked, that it was always right and

always best to tell the truth.  They would say that, at any rate, if they

did not perceive the drift of the question.



But why should not the truth be spoken of this region?  Is the truth

harmful?  Has it ever needed to hide its face?  God made the Sea of

Galilee and its surroundings as they are.  Is it the province of Mr.

Grimes to improve upon the work?



I am sure, from the tenor of books I have read, that many who have

visited this land in years gone by, were Presbyterians, and came seeking

evidences in support of their particular creed; they found a Presbyterian

Palestine, and they had already made up their minds to find no other,

though possibly they did not know it, being blinded by their zeal.

Others were Baptists, seeking Baptist evidences and a Baptist Palestine.

Others were Catholics, Methodists, Episcopalians, seeking evidences

indorsing their several creeds, and a Catholic, a Methodist, an

Episcopalian Palestine.  Honest as these men's intentions may have been,

they were full of partialities and prejudices, they entered the country

with their verdicts already prepared, and they could no more write

dispassionately and impartially about it than they could about their own

wives and children.  Our pilgrims have brought their verdicts with them.

They have shown it in their conversation ever since we left Beirout.

I can almost tell, in set phrase, what they will say when they see Tabor,

Nazareth, Jericho and Jerusalem--because I have the books they will

"smouch" their ideas from.  These authors write pictures and frame

rhapsodies, and lesser men follow and see with the author's eyes instead

of their own, and speak with his tongue.  What the pilgrims said at

Cesarea Philippi surprised me with its wisdom.  I found it afterwards in

Robinson.  What they said when Genessaret burst upon their vision,

charmed me with its grace.  I find it in Mr. Thompson's "Land and the

Book."  They have spoken often, in happily worded language which never

varied, of how they mean to lay their weary heads upon a stone at Bethel,

as Jacob did, and close their dim eyes, and dream, perchance, of angels

descending out of heaven on a ladder.  It was very pretty.  But I have

recognized the weary head and the dim eyes, finally.  They borrowed the

idea--and the words--and the construction--and the punctuation--from

Grimes.  The pilgrims will tell of Palestine, when they get home, not as

it appeared to them, but as it appeared to Thompson and Robinson and

Grimes--with the tints varied to suit each pilgrim's creed.



Pilgrims, sinners and Arabs are all abed, now, and the camp is still.

Labor in loneliness is irksome.  Since I made my last few notes, I have

been sitting outside the tent for half an hour.  Night is the time to see

Galilee.  Genessaret under these lustrous stars has nothing repulsive

about it.  Genessaret with the glittering reflections of the

constellations flecking its surface, almost makes me regret that I ever

saw the rude glare of the day upon it.  Its history and its associations

are its chiefest charm, in any eyes, and the spells they weave are feeble

in the searching light of the sun.  Then, we scarcely feel the fetters.

Our thoughts wander constantly to the practical concerns of life, and

refuse to dwell upon things that seem vague and unreal.  But when the day

is done, even the most unimpressible must yield to the dreamy influences

of this tranquil starlight.  The old traditions of the place steal upon

his memory and haunt his reveries, and then his fancy clothes all sights

and sounds with the supernatural.  In the lapping of the waves upon the

beach, he hears the dip of ghostly oars; in the secret noises of the

night he hears spirit voices; in the soft sweep of the breeze, the rush

of invisible wings.  Phantom ships are on the sea, the dead of twenty

centuries come forth from the tombs, and in the dirges of the night wind

the songs of old forgotten ages find utterance again.



In the starlight, Galilee has no boundaries but the broad compass of the

heavens, and is a theatre meet for great events; meet for the birth of a

religion able to save a world; and meet for the stately Figure appointed

to stand upon its stage and proclaim its high decrees.  But in the

sunlight, one says: Is it for the deeds which were done and the words

which were spoken in this little acre of rocks and sand eighteen

centuries gone, that the bells are ringing to-day in the remote islands

of the sea and far and wide over continents that clasp the circumference

of the huge globe?



One can comprehend it only when night has hidden all incongruities and

created a theatre proper for so grand a drama.









CHAPTER XLIX.



We took another swim in the Sea of Galilee at twilight yesterday, and

another at sunrise this morning.  We have not sailed, but three swims are

equal to a sail, are they not?  There were plenty of fish visible in the

water, but we have no outside aids in this pilgrimage but "Tent Life in

the Holy Land," "The Land and the Book," and other literature of like

description--no fishing-tackle.  There were no fish to be had in the

village of Tiberias.  True, we saw two or three vagabonds mending their

nets, but never trying to catch any thing with them.



We did not go to the ancient warm baths two miles below Tiberias.  I had

no desire in the world to go there.  This seemed a little strange, and

prompted me to try to discover what the cause of this unreasonable

indifference was.  It turned out to be simply because Pliny mentions

them.  I have conceived a sort of unwarrantable unfriendliness toward

Pliny and St. Paul, because it seems as if I can never ferret out a place

that I can have to myself.  It always and eternally transpires that St.

Paul has been to that place, and Pliny has "mentioned" it.



In the early morning we mounted and started.  And then a weird apparition

marched forth at the head of the procession--a pirate, I thought, if ever

a pirate dwelt upon land.  It was a tall Arab, as swarthy as an Indian;

young-say thirty years of age.  On his head he had closely bound a

gorgeous yellow and red striped silk scarf, whose ends, lavishly fringed

with tassels, hung down between his shoulders and dallied with the wind.

From his neck to his knees, in ample folds, a robe swept down that was a

very star-spangled banner of curved and sinuous bars of black and white.

Out of his back, somewhere, apparently, the long stem of a chibouk

projected, and reached far above his right shoulder.  Athwart his back,

diagonally, and extending high above his left shoulder, was an Arab gum

of Saladin's time, that was splendid with silver plating from stock clear

up to the end of its measureless stretch of barrel.  About his waist was

bound many and many a yard of elaborately figured but sadly tarnished

stuff that came from sumptuous Persia, and among the baggy folds in front

the sunbeams glinted from a formidable battery of old brass-mounted

horse-pistols and the gilded hilts of blood-thirsty knives.  There were

holsters for more pistols appended to the wonderful stack of long-haired

goat-skins and Persian carpets, which the man had been taught to regard

in the light of a saddle; and down among the pendulous rank of vast

tassels that swung from that saddle, and clanging against the iron shovel

of a stirrup that propped the warrior's knees up toward his chin, was a

crooked, silver-clad scimitar of such awful dimensions and such

implacable expression that no man might hope to look upon it and not

shudder.  The fringed and bedizened prince whose privilege it is to ride

the pony and lead the elephant into a country village is poor and naked

compared to this chaos of paraphernalia, and the happy vanity of the one

is the very poverty of satisfaction compared to the majestic serenity,

the overwhelming complacency of the other.



"Who is this?  What is this?"  That was the trembling inquiry all down

the line.



"Our guard!  From Galilee to the birthplace of the Savior, the country is

infested with fierce Bedouins, whose sole happiness it is, in this life,

to cut and stab and mangle and murder unoffending Christians.  Allah be

with us!"



"Then hire a regiment!  Would you send us out among these desperate

hordes, with no salvation in our utmost need but this old turret?"



The dragoman laughed--not at the facetiousness of the simile, for verily,

that guide or that courier or that dragoman never yet lived upon earth

who had in him the faintest appreciation of a joke, even though that joke

were so broad and so ponderous that if it fell on him it would flatten

him out like a postage stamp--the dragoman laughed, and then, emboldened

by some thought that was in his brain, no doubt, proceeded to extremities

and winked.



In straits like these, when a man laughs, it is encouraging when he

winks, it is positively reassuring.  He finally intimated that one guard

would be sufficient to protect us, but that that one was an absolute

necessity.  It was because of the moral weight his awful panoply would

have with the Bedouins.  Then I said we didn't want any guard at all.

If one fantastic vagabond could protect eight armed Christians and a pack

of Arab servants from all harm, surely that detachment could protect

themselves.  He shook his head doubtfully.  Then I said, just think of

how it looks--think of how it would read, to self-reliant Americans, that

we went sneaking through this deserted wilderness under the protection of

this masquerading Arab, who would break his neck getting out of the

country if a man that was a man ever started after him.  It was a mean,

low, degrading position.  Why were we ever told to bring navy revolvers

with us if we had to be protected at last by this infamous star-spangled

scum of the desert?  These appeals were vain--the dragoman only smiled

and shook his head.



I rode to the front and struck up an acquaintance with King Solomon-in-

all-his-glory, and got him to show me his lingering eternity of a gun.

It had a rusty flint lock; it was ringed and barred and plated with

silver from end to end, but it was as desperately out of the

perpendicular as are the billiard cues of '49 that one finds yet in

service in the ancient mining camps of California.  The muzzle was eaten

by the rust of centuries into a ragged filigree-work, like the end of a

burnt-out stove-pipe.  I shut one eye and peered within--it was flaked

with iron rust like an old steamboat boiler.  I borrowed the ponderous

pistols and snapped them.  They were rusty inside, too--had not been

loaded for a generation.  I went back, full of encouragement, and

reported to the guide, and asked him to discharge this dismantled

fortress.  It came out, then.  This fellow was a retainer of the Sheik of

Tiberias.  He was a source of Government revenue.  He was to the Empire

of Tiberias what the customs are to America.  The Sheik imposed guards

upon travelers and charged them for it.  It is a lucrative source of

emolument, and sometimes brings into the national treasury as much as

thirty-five or forty dollars a year.



I knew the warrior's secret now; I knew the hollow vanity of his rusty

trumpery, and despised his asinine complacency.  I told on him, and with

reckless daring the cavalcade straight ahead into the perilous solitudes

of the desert, and scorned his frantic warnings of the mutilation and

death that hovered about them on every side.



Arrived at an elevation of twelve hundred feet above the lake, (I ought

to mention that the lake lies six hundred feet below the level of the

Mediterranean--no traveler ever neglects to flourish that fragment of

news in his letters,) as bald and unthrilling a panorama as any land can

afford, perhaps, was spread out before us.  Yet it was so crowded with

historical interest, that if all the pages that have been written about

it were spread upon its surface, they would flag it from horizon to

horizon like a pavement.  Among the localities comprised in this view,

were Mount Hermon; the hills that border Cesarea Philippi, Dan, the

Sources of the Jordan and the Waters of Merom; Tiberias; the Sea of

Galilee; Joseph's Pit; Capernaum; Bethsaida; the supposed scenes of the

Sermon on the Mount, the feeding of the multitudes and the miraculous

draught of fishes; the declivity down which the swine ran to the sea; the

entrance and the exit of the Jordan; Safed, "the city set upon a hill,"

one of the four holy cities of the Jews, and the place where they believe

the real Messiah will appear when he comes to redeem the world; part of

the battle-field of Hattin, where the knightly Crusaders fought their

last fight, and in a blaze of glory passed from the stage and ended their

splendid career forever; Mount Tabor, the traditional scene of the Lord's

Transfiguration.  And down toward the southeast lay a landscape that

suggested to my mind a quotation (imperfectly remembered, no doubt:)



     "The Ephraimites, not being called upon to share in the rich spoils

     of the Ammonitish war, assembled a mighty host to fight against

     Jeptha, Judge of Israel; who, being apprised of their approach,

     gathered together the men of Israel and gave them battle and put

     them to flight.  To make his victory the more secure, he stationed

     guards at the different fords and passages of the Jordan, with

     instructions to let none pass who could not say Shibboleth.  The

     Ephraimites, being of a different tribe, could not frame to

     pronounce the word right, but called it Sibboleth, which proved them

     enemies and cost them their lives; wherefore, forty and two thousand

     fell at the different fords and passages of the Jordan that day."



We jogged along peacefully over the great caravan route from Damascus to

Jerusalem and Egypt, past Lubia and other Syrian hamlets, perched, in the

unvarying style, upon the summit of steep mounds and hills, and fenced

round about with giant cactuses, (the sign of worthless land,) with

prickly pears upon them like hams, and came at last to the battle-field

of Hattin.



It is a grand, irregular plateau, and looks as if it might have been

created for a battle-field.  Here the peerless Saladin met the Christian

host some seven hundred years ago, and broke their power in Palestine for

all time to come.  There had long been a truce between the opposing

forces, but according to the Guide-Book, Raynauld of Chatillon, Lord of

Kerak, broke it by plundering a Damascus caravan, and refusing to give up

either the merchants or their goods when Saladin demanded them.  This

conduct of an insolent petty chieftain stung the Sultan to the quick, and

he swore that he would slaughter Raynauld with his own hand, no matter

how, or when, or where he found him.  Both armies prepared for war.

Under the weak King of Jerusalem was the very flower of the Christian

chivalry.  He foolishly compelled them to undergo a long, exhausting

march, in the scorching sun, and then, without water or other

refreshment, ordered them to encamp in this open plain.  The splendidly

mounted masses of Moslem soldiers swept round the north end of

Genessaret, burning and destroying as they came, and pitched their camp

in front of the opposing lines.  At dawn the terrific fight began.

Surrounded on all sides by the Sultan's swarming battalions, the

Christian Knights fought on without a hope for their lives.  They fought

with desperate valor, but to no purpose; the odds of heat and numbers,

and consuming thirst, were too great against them.  Towards the middle of

the day the bravest of their band cut their way through the Moslem ranks

and gained the summit of a little hill, and there, hour after hour, they

closed around the banner of the Cross, and beat back the charging

squadrons of the enemy.



But the doom of the Christian power was sealed.  Sunset found Saladin

Lord of Palestine, the Christian chivalry strewn in heaps upon the field,

and the King of Jerusalem, the Grand Master of the Templars, and Raynauld

of Chatillon, captives in the Sultan's tent.  Saladin treated two of the

prisoners with princely courtesy, and ordered refreshments to be set

before them.  When the King handed an iced Sherbet to Chatillon, the

Sultan said," It is thou that givest it to him, not I."  He remembered

his oath, and slaughtered the hapless Knight of Chatillon with his own

hand.



It was hard to realize that this silent plain had once resounded with

martial music and trembled to the tramp of armed men.  It was hard to

people this solitude with rushing columns of cavalry, and stir its torpid

pulses with the shouts of victors, the shrieks of the wounded, and the

flash of banner and steel above the surging billows of war.  A desolation

is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and

action.



We reached Tabor safely, and considerably in advance of that old iron-

clad swindle of a guard.  We never saw a human being on the whole route,

much less lawless hordes of Bedouins.  Tabor stands solitary and alone,

a giant sentinel above the Plain of Esdraelon.  It rises some fourteen

hundred feet above the surrounding level, a green, wooden cone,

symmetrical and full of grace--a prominent landmark, and one that is

exceedingly pleasant to eyes surfeited with the repulsive monotony of

desert Syria.  We climbed the steep path to its summit, through breezy

glades of thorn and oak.  The view presented from its highest peak was

almost beautiful.  Below, was the broad, level plain of Esdraelon,

checkered with fields like a chess-board, and full as smooth and level,

seemingly; dotted about its borders with white, compact villages, and

faintly penciled, far and near, with the curving lines of roads and

trails.  When it is robed in the fresh verdure of spring, it must form a

charming picture, even by itself.  Skirting its southern border rises

"Little Hermon," over whose summit a glimpse of Gilboa is caught.  Nain,

famous for the raising of the widow's son, and Endor, as famous for the

performances of her witch are in view.  To the eastward lies the Valley

of the Jordan and beyond it the mountains of Gilead.  Westward is Mount

Carmel.  Hermon in the north--the table-lands of Bashan--Safed, the holy

city, gleaming white upon a tall spur of the mountains of Lebanon--a

steel-blue corner of the Sea of Galilee--saddle-peaked Hattin,

traditional "Mount of Beatitudes" and mute witness brave fights of the

Crusading host for Holy Cross--these fill up the picture.



To glance at the salient features of this landscape through the

picturesque framework of a ragged and ruined stone window--arch of the

time of Christ, thus hiding from sight all that is unattractive, is to

secure to yourself a pleasure worth climbing the mountain to enjoy.  One

must stand on his head to get the best effect in a fine sunset, and set a

landscape in a bold, strong framework that is very close at hand, to

bring out all its beauty.  One learns this latter truth never more to

forget it, in that mimic land of enchantment, the wonderful garden of my

lord the Count Pallavicini, near Genoa.  You go wandering for hours among

hills and wooded glens, artfully contrived to leave the impression that

Nature shaped them and not man; following winding paths and coming

suddenly upon leaping cascades and rustic bridges; finding sylvan lakes

where you expected them not; loitering through battered mediaeval castles

in miniature that seem hoary with age and yet were built a dozen years

ago; meditating over ancient crumbling tombs, whose marble columns were

marred and broken purposely by the modern artist that made them;

stumbling unawares upon toy palaces, wrought of rare and costly

materials, and again upon a peasant's hut, whose dilapidated furniture

would never suggest that it was made so to order; sweeping round and

round in the midst of a forest on an enchanted wooden horse that is moved

by some invisible agency; traversing Roman roads and passing under

majestic triumphal arches; resting in quaint bowers where unseen spirits

discharge jets of water on you from every possible direction, and where

even the flowers you touch assail you with a shower; boating on a

subterranean lake among caverns and arches royally draped with clustering

stalactites, and passing out into open day upon another lake, which is

bordered with sloping banks of grass and gay with patrician barges that

swim at anchor in the shadow of a miniature marble temple that rises out

of the clear water and glasses its white statues, its rich capitals and

fluted columns in the tranquil depths.  So, from marvel to marvel you

have drifted on, thinking all the time that the one last seen must be the

chiefest.  And, verily, the chiefest wonder is reserved until the last,

but you do not see it until you step ashore, and passing through a

wilderness of rare flowers, collected from every corner of the earth, you

stand at the door of one more mimic temple.  Right in this place the

artist taxed his genius to the utmost, and fairly opened the gates of

fairy land.  You look through an unpretending pane of glass, stained

yellow--the first thing you see is a mass of quivering foliage, ten short

steps before you, in the midst of which is a ragged opening like a

gateway-a thing that is common enough in nature, and not apt to excite

suspicions of a deep human design--and above the bottom of the gateway,

project, in the most careless way! a few broad tropic leaves and

brilliant flowers.  All of a sudden, through this bright, bold gateway,

you catch a glimpse of the faintest, softest, richest picture that ever

graced the dream of a dying Saint, since John saw the New Jerusalem

glimmering above the clouds of Heaven.  A broad sweep of sea, flecked

with careening sails; a sharp, jutting cape, and a lofty lighthouse on

it; a sloping lawn behind it; beyond, a portion of the old "city of

palaces," with its parks and hills and stately mansions; beyond these, a

prodigious mountain, with its strong outlines sharply cut against ocean

and sky; and over all, vagrant shreds and flakes of cloud, floating in a

sea of gold.  The ocean is gold, the city is gold, the meadow, the

mountain, the sky--every thing is golden-rich, and mellow, and dreamy as

a vision of Paradise.  No artist could put upon canvas, its entrancing

beauty, and yet, without the yellow glass, and the carefully contrived

accident of a framework that cast it into enchanted distance and shut out

from it all unattractive features, it was not a picture to fall into

ecstasies over.  Such is life, and the trail of the serpent is over us

all.



There is nothing for it now but to come back to old Tabor, though the

subject is tiresome enough, and I can not stick to it for wandering off

to scenes that are pleasanter to remember.  I think I will skip, any how.

There is nothing about Tabor (except we concede that it was the scene of

the Transfiguration,) but some gray old ruins, stacked up there in all

ages of the world from the days of stout Gideon and parties that

flourished thirty centuries ago to the fresh yesterday of Crusading

times.  It has its Greek Convent, and the coffee there is good, but never

a splinter of the true cross or bone of a hallowed saint to arrest the

idle thoughts of worldlings and turn them into graver channels.

A Catholic church is nothing to me that has no relics.



The plain of Esdraelon--"the battle-field of the nations"--only sets one

to dreaming of Joshua, and Benhadad, and Saul, and Gideon; Tamerlane,

Tancred, Coeur de Lion, and Saladin; the warrior Kings of Persia, Egypt's

heroes, and Napoleon--for they all fought here.  If the magic of the

moonlight could summon from the graves of forgotten centuries and many

lands the countless myriads that have battled on this wide, far-reaching

floor, and array them in the thousand strange Costumes of their hundred

nationalities, and send the vast host sweeping down the plain, splendid

with plumes and banners and glittering lances, I could stay here an age

to see the phantom pageant.  But the magic of the moonlight is a vanity

and a fraud; and whoso putteth his trust in it shall suffer sorrow and

disappointment.



Down at the foot of Tabor, and just at the edge of the storied Plain of

Esdraelon, is the insignificant village of Deburieh, where Deborah,

prophetess of Israel, lived.  It is just like Magdala.









CHAPTER L.



We descended from Mount Tabor, crossed a deep ravine, followed a hilly,

rocky road to Nazareth--distant two hours.  All distances in the East are

measured by hours, not miles.  A good horse will walk three miles an hour

over nearly any kind of a road; therefore, an hour, here, always stands

for three miles.  This method of computation is bothersome and annoying;

and until one gets thoroughly accustomed to it, it carries no

intelligence to his mind until he has stopped and translated the pagan

hours into Christian miles, just as people do with the spoken words of a

foreign language they are acquainted with, but not familiarly enough to

catch the meaning in a moment.  Distances traveled by human feet are also

estimated by hours and minutes, though I do not know what the base of the

calculation is.  In Constantinople you ask, "How far is it to the

Consulate?" and they answer, "About ten minutes."  "How far is it to the

Lloyds' Agency?"  "Quarter of an hour."  "How far is it to the lower

bridge?"  "Four minutes."  I can not be positive about it, but I think

that there, when a man orders a pair of pantaloons, he says he wants them

a quarter of a minute in the legs and nine seconds around the waist.



Two hours from Tabor to Nazareth--and as it was an uncommonly narrow,

crooked trail, we necessarily met all the camel trains and jackass

caravans between Jericho and Jacksonville in that particular place and

nowhere else.  The donkeys do not matter so much, because they are so

small that you can jump your horse over them if he is an animal of

spirit, but a camel is not jumpable.  A camel is as tall as any ordinary

dwelling-house in Syria--which is to say a camel is from one to two, and

sometimes nearly three feet taller than a good-sized man.  In this part

of the country his load is oftenest in the shape of colossal sacks--one

on each side.  He and his cargo take up as much room as a carriage.

Think of meeting this style of obstruction in a narrow trail.  The camel

would not turn out for a king.  He stalks serenely along, bringing his

cushioned stilts forward with the long, regular swing of a pendulum, and

whatever is in the way must get out of the way peaceably, or be wiped out

forcibly by the bulky sacks.  It was a tiresome ride to us, and perfectly

exhausting to the horses.  We were compelled to jump over upwards of

eighteen hundred donkeys, and only one person in the party was unseated

less than sixty times by the camels.  This seems like a powerful

statement, but the poet has said, "Things are not what they seem."  I can

not think of any thing, now, more certain to make one shudder, than to

have a soft-footed camel sneak up behind him and touch him on the ear

with its cold, flabby under-lip.  A camel did this for one of the boys,

who was drooping over his saddle in a brown study.  He glanced up and saw

the majestic apparition hovering above him, and made frantic efforts to

get out of the way, but the camel reached out and bit him on the shoulder

before he accomplished it.  This was the only pleasant incident of the

journey.



At Nazareth we camped in an olive grove near the Virgin Mary's fountain,

and that wonderful Arab "guard" came to collect some bucksheesh for his

"services" in following us from Tiberias and warding off invisible

dangers with the terrors of his armament.  The dragoman had paid his

master, but that counted as nothing--if you hire a man to sneeze for you,

here, and another man chooses to help him, you have got to pay both.

They do nothing whatever without pay.  How it must have surprised these

people to hear the way of salvation offered to them "without money and

without price."  If the manners, the people or the customs of this

country have changed since the Saviour's time, the figures and metaphors

of the Bible are not the evidences to prove it by.



We entered the great Latin Convent which is built over the traditional

dwelling-place of the Holy Family.  We went down a flight of fifteen

steps below the ground level, and stood in a small chapel tricked out

with tapestry hangings, silver lamps, and oil paintings.  A spot marked

by a cross, in the marble floor, under the altar, was exhibited as the

place made forever holy by the feet of the Virgin when she stood up to

receive the message of the angel.  So simple, so unpretending a locality,

to be the scene of so mighty an event!  The very scene of the

Annunciation--an event which has been commemorated by splendid shrines

and august temples all over the civilized world, and one which the

princes of art have made it their loftiest ambition to picture worthily

on their canvas; a spot whose history is familiar to the very children of

every house, and city, and obscure hamlet of the furthest lands of

Christendom; a spot which myriads of men would toil across the breadth of

a world to see, would consider it a priceless privilege to look upon.

It was easy to think these thoughts.  But it was not easy to bring myself

up to the magnitude of the situation.  I could sit off several thousand

miles and imagine the angel appearing, with shadowy wings and lustrous

countenance, and note the glory that streamed downward upon the Virgin's

head while the message from the Throne of God fell upon her ears--any one

can do that, beyond the ocean, but few can do it here.  I saw the little

recess from which the angel stepped, but could not fill its void.  The

angels that I know are creatures of unstable fancy--they will not fit in

niches of substantial stone.  Imagination labors best in distant fields.

I doubt if any man can stand in the Grotto of the Annunciation and people

with the phantom images of his mind its too tangible walls of stone.



They showed us a broken granite pillar, depending from the roof, which

they said was hacked in two by the Moslem conquerors of Nazareth, in the

vain hope of pulling down the sanctuary.  But the pillar remained

miraculously suspended in the air, and, unsupported itself, supported

then and still supports the roof.  By dividing this statement up among

eight, it was found not difficult to believe it.



These gifted Latin monks never do any thing by halves.  If they were to

show you the Brazen Serpent that was elevated in the wilderness, you

could depend upon it that they had on hand the pole it was elevated on

also, and even the hole it stood in.  They have got the "Grotto" of the

Annunciation here; and just as convenient to it as one's throat is to his

mouth, they have also the Virgin's Kitchen, and even her sitting-room,

where she and Joseph watched the infant Saviour play with Hebrew toys

eighteen hundred years ago.  All under one roof, and all clean, spacious,

comfortable "grottoes."  It seems curious that personages intimately

connected with the Holy Family always lived in grottoes--in Nazareth, in

Bethlehem, in imperial Ephesus--and yet nobody else in their day and

generation thought of doing any thing of the kind.  If they ever did,

their grottoes are all gone, and I suppose we ought to wonder at the

peculiar marvel of the preservation of these I speak of.  When the Virgin

fled from Herod's wrath, she hid in a grotto in Bethlehem, and the same

is there to this day.  The slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem was

done in a grotto; the Saviour was born in a grotto--both are shown to

pilgrims yet.  It is exceedingly strange that these tremendous events all

happened in grottoes--and exceedingly fortunate, likewise, because the

strongest houses must crumble to ruin in time, but a grotto in the living

rock will last forever.  It is an imposture--this grotto stuff--but it is

one that all men ought to thank the Catholics for.  Wherever they ferret

out a lost locality made holy by some Scriptural event, they straightway

build a massive--almost imperishable--church there, and preserve the

memory of that locality for the gratification of future generations.  If

it had been left to Protestants to do this most worthy work, we would not

even know where Jerusalem is to-day, and the man who could go and put his

finger on Nazareth would be too wise for this world.  The world owes the

Catholics its good will even for the happy rascality of hewing out these

bogus grottoes in the rock; for it is infinitely more satisfactory to

look at a grotto, where people have faithfully believed for centuries

that the Virgin once lived, than to have to imagine a dwelling-place for

her somewhere, any where, nowhere, loose and at large all over this town

of Nazareth.  There is too large a scope of country.  The imagination can

not work.  There is no one particular spot to chain your eye, rivet your

interest, and make you think.  The memory of the Pilgrims can not perish

while Plymouth Rock remains to us.  The old monks are wise.  They know

how to drive a stake through a pleasant tradition that will hold it to

its place forever.



We visited the places where Jesus worked for fifteen years as a

carpenter, and where he attempted to teach in the synagogue and was

driven out by a mob.  Catholic chapels stand upon these sites and protect

the little fragments of the ancient walls which remain.  Our pilgrims

broke off specimens.  We visited, also, a new chapel, in the midst of the

town, which is built around a boulder some twelve feet long by four feet

thick; the priests discovered, a few years ago, that the disciples had

sat upon this rock to rest, once, when they had walked up from Capernaum.

They hastened to preserve the relic.  Relics are very good property.

Travelers are expected to pay for seeing them, and they do it cheerfully.

We like the idea.  One's conscience can never be the worse for the

knowledge that he has paid his way like a man.  Our pilgrims would have

liked very well to get out their lampblack and stencil-plates and paint

their names on that rock, together with the names of the villages they

hail from in America, but the priests permit nothing of that kind.

To speak the strict truth, however, our party seldom offend in that way,

though we have men in the ship who never lose an opportunity to do it.

Our pilgrims' chief sin is their lust for "specimens."  I suppose that by

this time they know the dimensions of that rock to an inch, and its

weight to a ton; and I do not hesitate to charge that they will go back

there to-night and try to carry it off.



This "Fountain of the Virgin" is the one which tradition says Mary used

to get water from, twenty times a day, when she was a girl, and bear it

away in a jar upon her head.  The water streams through faucets in the

face of a wall of ancient masonry which stands removed from the houses of

the village.  The young girls of Nazareth still collect about it by the

dozen and keep up a riotous laughter and sky-larking.  The Nazarene girls

are homely.  Some of them have large, lustrous eyes, but none of them

have pretty faces.  These girls wear a single garment, usually, and it is

loose, shapeless, of undecided color; it is generally out of repair, too.

They wear, from crown to jaw, curious strings of old coins, after the

manner of the belles of Tiberias, and brass jewelry upon their wrists and

in their ears.  They wear no shoes and stockings.  They are the most

human girls we have found in the country yet, and the best natured.

But there is no question that these picturesque maidens sadly lack

comeliness.



A pilgrim--the "Enthusiast"--said: "See that tall, graceful girl! look at

the Madonna-like beauty of her countenance!"



Another pilgrim came along presently and said: "Observe that tall,

graceful girl; what queenly Madonna-like gracefulness of beauty is in her

countenance."



I said: "She is not tall, she is short; she is not beautiful, she is

homely; she is graceful enough, I grant, but she is rather boisterous."



The third and last pilgrim moved by, before long, and he said: "Ah, what

a tall, graceful girl! what Madonna-like gracefulness of queenly beauty!"



The verdicts were all in.  It was time, now, to look up the authorities

for all these opinions.  I found this paragraph, which follows.  Written

by whom?  Wm. C. Grimes:



     "After we were in the saddle, we rode down to the spring to have a

     last look at the women of Nazareth, who were, as a class, much the

     prettiest that we had seen in the East.  As we approached the crowd

     a tall girl of nineteen advanced toward Miriam and offered her a cup

     of water.  Her movement was graceful and queenly.  We exclaimed on

     the spot at the Madonna-like beauty of her countenance.  Whitely was

     suddenly thirsty, and begged for water, and drank it slowly, with

     his eyes over the top of the cup, fixed on her large black eyes,

     which gazed on him quite as curiously as he on her.  Then Moreright

     wanted water.  She gave it to him and he managed to spill it so as

     to ask for another cup, and by the time she came to me she saw

     through the operation; her eyes were full of fun as she looked at

     me.  I laughed outright, and she joined me in as gay a shout as ever

     country maiden in old Orange county.  I wished for a picture of her.

     A Madonna, whose face was a portrait of that beautiful Nazareth

     girl, would be a 'thing of beauty' and 'a joy forever.'"



That is the kind of gruel which has been served out from Palestine for

ages.  Commend me to Fennimore Cooper to find beauty in the Indians, and

to Grimes to find it in the Arabs.  Arab men are often fine looking, but

Arab women are not.  We can all believe that the Virgin Mary was

beautiful; it is not natural to think otherwise; but does it follow that

it is our duty to find beauty in these present women of Nazareth?



I love to quote from Grimes, because he is so dramatic.  And because he

is so romantic.  And because he seems to care but little whether he tells

the truth or not, so he scares the reader or excites his envy or his

admiration.



He went through this peaceful land with one hand forever on his revolver,

and the other on his pocket-handkerchief.  Always, when he was not on the

point of crying over a holy place, he was on the point of killing an

Arab.  More surprising things happened to him in Palestine than ever

happened to any traveler here or elsewhere since Munchausen died.



At Beit Jin, where nobody had interfered with him, he crept out of his

tent at dead of night and shot at what he took to be an Arab lying on a

rock, some distance away, planning evil.  The ball killed a wolf.  Just

before he fired, he makes a dramatic picture of himself--as usual, to

scare the reader:



     "Was it imagination, or did I see a moving object on the surface of

     the rock?  If it were a man, why did he not now drop me?  He had a

     beautiful shot as I stood out in my black boornoose against the

     white tent.  I had the sensation of an entering bullet in my throat,

     breast, brain."



Reckless creature!



Riding toward Genessaret, they saw two Bedouins, and "we looked to our

pistols and loosened them quietly in our shawls," etc.  Always cool.



In Samaria, he charged up a hill, in the face of a volley of stones; he

fired into the crowd of men who threw them.  He says:



     "I never lost an opportunity of impressing the Arabs with the

     perfection of American and English weapons, and the danger of

     attacking any one of the armed Franks.  I think the lesson of that

     ball not lost."



At Beit Jin he gave his whole band of Arab muleteers a piece of his mind,

and then--



     "I contented myself with a solemn assurance that if there occurred

     another instance of disobedience to orders I would thrash the

     responsible party as he never dreamed of being thrashed, and if I

     could not find who was responsible, I would whip them all, from

     first to last, whether there was a governor at hand to do it or I

     had to do it myself"



Perfectly fearless, this man.



He rode down the perpendicular path in the rocks, from the Castle of

Banias to the oak grove, at a flying gallop, his horse striding "thirty

feet" at every bound.  I stand prepared to bring thirty reliable

witnesses to prove that Putnam's famous feat at Horseneck was

insignificant compared to this.



Behold him--always theatrical--looking at Jerusalem--this time, by an

oversight, with his hand off his pistol for once.



     "I stood in the road, my hand on my horse's neck, and with my dim

     eyes sought to trace the outlines of the holy places which I had

     long before fixed in my mind, but the fast-flowing tears forbade my

     succeeding.  There were our Mohammedan servants, a Latin monk, two

     Armenians and a Jew in our cortege, and all alike gazed with

     overflowing eyes."



If Latin monks and Arabs cried, I know to a moral certainty that the

horses cried also, and so the picture is complete.



But when necessity demanded, he could be firm as adamant.  In the Lebanon

Valley an Arab youth--a Christian; he is particular to explain that

Mohammedans do not steal--robbed him of a paltry ten dollars' worth of

powder and shot.  He convicted him before a sheik and looked on while he

was punished by the terrible bastinado.  Hear him:



     "He (Mousa) was on his back in a twinkling, howling, shouting,

     screaming, but he was carried out to the piazza before the door,

     where we could see the operation, and laid face down.  One man sat

     on his back and one on his legs, the latter holding up his feet,

     while a third laid on the bare soles a rhinoceros-hide koorbash

     --["A Koorbash is Arabic for cowhide, the cow being a rhinoceros.

     It is the most cruel whip known to fame.  Heavy as lead, and

     flexible as India-rubber, usually about forty inches long and

     tapering gradually from an inch in diameter to a point, it

     administers a blow which leaves its mark for time."--Scow Life in

     Egypt, by the same author.]--that whizzed through the air at every

     stroke.  Poor Moreright was in agony, and Nama and Nama the Second

     (mother and sister of Mousa,) were on their faces begging and

     wailing, now embracing my knees and now Whitely's, while the

     brother, outside, made the air ring with cries louder than Mousa's.

     Even Yusef came and asked me on his knees to relent, and last of

     all, Betuni--the rascal had lost a feed-bag in their house and had

     been loudest in his denunciations that morning--besought the Howajji

     to have mercy on the fellow."



But not he!  The punishment was "suspended," at the fifteenth blow to

hear the confession.  Then Grimes and his party rode away, and left the

entire Christian family to be fined and as severely punished as the

Mohammedan sheik should deem proper.



     "As I mounted, Yusef once more begged me to interfere and have mercy

     on them, but I looked around at the dark faces of the crowd, and I

     couldn't find one drop of pity in my heart for them."



He closes his picture with a rollicking burst of humor which contrasts

finely with the grief of the mother and her children.



One more paragraph:



     "Then once more I bowed my head.  It is no shame to have wept in

     Palestine.  I wept, when I saw Jerusalem, I wept when I lay in the

     starlight at Bethlehem.  I wept on the blessed shores of Galilee.

     My hand was no less firm on the rein, my anger did not tremble on

     the trigger of my pistol when I rode with it in my right hand along

     the shore of the blue sea" (weeping.) "My eye was not dimmed by

     those tears nor my heart in aught weakened.  Let him who would sneer

     at my emotion close this volume here, for he will find little to his

     taste in my journeyings through Holy Land."



He never bored but he struck water.



I am aware that this is a pretty voluminous notice of Mr. Grimes' book.

However, it is proper and legitimate to speak of it, for "Nomadic Life in

Palestine" is a representative book--the representative of a class of

Palestine books--and a criticism upon it will serve for a criticism upon

them all.  And since I am treating it in the comprehensive capacity of a

representative book, I have taken the liberty of giving to both book and

author fictitious names.  Perhaps it is in better taste, any how, to do

this.









CHAPTER LI.



Nazareth is wonderfully interesting because the town has an air about it

of being precisely as Jesus left it, and one finds himself saying, all

the time, "The boy Jesus has stood in this doorway--has played in that

street--has touched these stones with his hands--has rambled over these

chalky hills."  Whoever shall write the boyhood of Jesus ingeniously will

make a book which will possess a vivid interest for young and old alike.

I judge so from the greater interest we found in Nazareth than any of our

speculations upon Capernaum and the Sea of Galilee gave rise to.  It was

not possible, standing by the Sea of Galilee, to frame more than a vague,

far-away idea of the majestic Personage who walked upon the crested waves

as if they had been solid earth, and who touched the dead and they rose

up and spoke.  I read among my notes, now, with a new interest, some

sentences from an edition of 1621 of the Apocryphal New Testament.

[Extract.]



     "Christ, kissed by a bride made dumb by sorcerers, cures her.  A

     leprous girl cured by the water in which the infant Christ was

     washed, and becomes the servant of Joseph and Mary.  The leprous son

     of a Prince cured in like manner.



     "A young man who had been bewitched and turned into a mule,

     miraculously cured by the infant Savior being put on his back, and

     is married to the girl who had been cured of leprosy.  Whereupon the

     bystanders praise God.



     "Chapter 16.  Christ miraculously widens or contracts gates, milk-

     pails, sieves or boxes, not properly made by Joseph, he not being

     skillful at his carpenter's trade.  The King of Jerusalem gives

     Joseph an order for a throne.  Joseph works on it for two years and

     makes it two spans too short.  The King being angry with him, Jesus

     comforts him--commands him to pull one side of the throne while he

     pulls the other, and brings it to its proper dimensions.



     "Chapter 19.  Jesus, charged with throwing a boy from the roof of a

     house, miraculously causes the dead boy to speak and acquit him;

     fetches water for his mother, breaks the pitcher and miraculously

     gathers the water in his mantle and brings it home.



     "Sent to a schoolmaster, refuses to tell his letters, and the

     schoolmaster going to whip him, his hand withers."



Further on in this quaint volume of rejected gospels is an epistle of St.

Clement to the Corinthians, which was used in the churches and considered

genuine fourteen or fifteen hundred years ago.  In it this account of the

fabled phoenix occurs:



     "1.  Let us consider that wonderful type of the resurrection, which

     is seen in the Eastern countries, that is to say, in Arabia.



     "2.  There is a certain bird called a phoenix.  Of this there is

     never but one at a time, and that lives five hundred years.  And

     when the time of its dissolution draws near, that it must die, it

     makes itself a nest of frankincense, and myrrh, and other spices,

     into which, when its time is fulfilled, it enters and dies.



     "3.  But its flesh, putrefying, breeds a certain worm, which, being

     nourished by the juice of the dead bird, brings forth feathers; and

     when it is grown to a perfect state, it takes up the nest in which

     the bones of its parent lie, and carries it from Arabia into Egypt,

     to a city called Heliopolis:



     "4.  And flying in open day in the sight of all men, lays it upon

     the altar of the sun, and so returns from whence it came.



     "5.  The priests then search into the records of the time, and find

     that it returned precisely at the end of five hundred years."



Business is business, and there is nothing like punctuality, especially

in a phoenix.



The few chapters relating to the infancy of the Saviour contain many

things which seem frivolous and not worth preserving.  A large part of

the remaining portions of the book read like good Scripture, however.

There is one verse that ought not to have been rejected, because it so

evidently prophetically refers to the general run of Congresses of the

United States:



     "199.  They carry themselves high, and as prudent men; and though

     they are fools, yet would seem to be teachers."



I have set these extracts down, as I found them.  Everywhere among the

cathedrals of France and Italy, one finds traditions of personages that

do not figure in the Bible, and of miracles that are not mentioned in its

pages.  But they are all in this Apocryphal New Testament, and though

they have been ruled out of our modern Bible, it is claimed that they

were accepted gospel twelve or fifteen centuries ago, and ranked as high

in credit as any.  One needs to read this book before he visits those

venerable cathedrals, with their treasures of tabooed and forgotten

tradition.



They imposed another pirate upon us at Nazareth--another invincible Arab

guard.  We took our last look at the city, clinging like a whitewashed

wasp's nest to the hill-side, and at eight o'clock in the morning

departed.  We dismounted and drove the horses down a bridle-path which I

think was fully as crooked as a corkscrew, which I know to be as steep as

the downward sweep of a rainbow, and which I believe to be the worst

piece of road in the geography, except one in the Sandwich Islands, which

I remember painfully, and possibly one or two mountain trails in the

Sierra Nevadas.  Often, in this narrow path the horse had to poise

himself nicely on a rude stone step and then drop his fore-feet over the

edge and down something more than half his own height.  This brought his

nose near the ground, while his tail pointed up toward the sky somewhere,

and gave him the appearance of preparing to stand on his head.  A horse

cannot look dignified in this position.  We accomplished the long descent

at last, and trotted across the great Plain of Esdraelon.



Some of us will be shot before we finish this pilgrimage.  The pilgrims

read "Nomadic Life" and keep themselves in a constant state of Quixotic

heroism.  They have their hands on their pistols all the time, and every

now and then, when you least expect it, they snatch them out and take aim

at Bedouins who are not visible, and draw their knives and make savage

passes at other Bedouins who do not exist.  I am in deadly peril always,

for these spasms are sudden and irregular, and of course I cannot tell

when to be getting out of the way.  If I am accidentally murdered, some

time, during one of these romantic frenzies of the pilgrims, Mr. Grimes

must be rigidly held to answer as an accessory before the fact.  If the

pilgrims would take deliberate aim and shoot at a man, it would be all

right and proper--because that man would not be in any danger; but these

random assaults are what I object to.  I do not wish to see any more

places like Esdraelon, where the ground is level and people can gallop.

It puts melodramatic nonsense into the pilgrims' heads.  All at once,

when one is jogging along stupidly in the sun, and thinking about

something ever so far away, here they come, at a stormy gallop, spurring

and whooping at those ridgy old sore-backed plugs till their heels fly

higher than their heads, and as they whiz by, out comes a little potato-

gum of a revolver, there is a startling little pop, and a small pellet

goes singing through the air.  Now that I have begun this pilgrimage, I

intend to go through with it, though sooth to say, nothing but the most

desperate valor has kept me to my purpose up to the present time.  I do

not mind Bedouins,--I am not afraid of them; because neither Bedouins nor

ordinary Arabs have shown any disposition to harm us, but I do feel

afraid of my own comrades.



Arriving at the furthest verge of the Plain, we rode a little way up a

hill and found ourselves at Endor, famous for its witch.  Her descendants

are there yet.  They were the wildest horde of half-naked savages we have

found thus far.  They swarmed out of mud bee-hives; out of hovels of the

dry-goods box pattern; out of gaping caves under shelving rocks; out of

crevices in the earth.  In five minutes the dead solitude and silence of

the place were no more, and a begging, screeching, shouting mob were

struggling about the horses' feet and blocking the way.  "Bucksheesh!

bucksheesh!  bucksheesh!  howajji, bucksheesh!"  It was Magdala over

again, only here the glare from the infidel eyes was fierce and full of

hate.  The population numbers two hundred and fifty, and more than half

the citizens live in caves in the rock.  Dirt, degradation and savagery

are Endor's specialty.  We say no more about Magdala and Deburieh now.

Endor heads the list.  It is worse than any Indian 'campoodie'.  The hill

is barren, rocky, and forbidding.  No sprig of grass is visible, and only

one tree.  This is a fig-tree, which maintains a precarious footing among

the rocks at the mouth of the dismal cavern once occupied by the

veritable Witch of Endor.  In this cavern, tradition says, Saul, the

king, sat at midnight, and stared and trembled, while the earth shook,

the thunders crashed among the hills, and out of the midst of fire and

smoke the spirit of the dead prophet rose up and confronted him.  Saul

had crept to this place in the darkness, while his army slept, to learn

what fate awaited him in the morrow's battle.  He went away a sad man, to

meet disgrace and death.



A spring trickles out of the rock in the gloomy recesses of the cavern,

and we were thirsty.  The citizens of Endor objected to our going in

there.  They do not mind dirt; they do not mind rags; they do not mind

vermin; they do not mind barbarous ignorance and savagery; they do not

mind a reasonable degree of starvation, but they do like to be pure and

holy before their god, whoever he may be, and therefore they shudder and

grow almost pale at the idea of Christian lips polluting a spring whose

waters must descend into their sanctified gullets.  We had no wanton

desire to wound even their feelings or trample upon their prejudices, but

we were out of water, thus early in the day, and were burning up with

thirst.  It was at this time, and under these circumstances, that I

framed an aphorism which has already become celebrated.  I said:

"Necessity knows no law."  We went in and drank.



We got away from the noisy wretches, finally, dropping them in squads and

couples as we filed over the hills--the aged first, the infants next, the

young girls further on; the strong men ran beside us a mile, and only

left when they had secured the last possible piastre in the way of

bucksheesh.



In an hour, we reached Nain, where Christ raised the widow's son to life.

Nain is Magdala on a small scale.  It has no population of any

consequence.  Within a hundred yards of it is the original graveyard, for

aught I know; the tombstones lie flat on the ground, which is Jewish

fashion in Syria.  I believe the Moslems do not allow them to have

upright tombstones.  A Moslem grave is usually roughly plastered over and

whitewashed, and has at one end an upright projection which is shaped

into exceedingly rude attempts at ornamentation.  In the cities, there is

often no appearance of a grave at all; a tall, slender marble tombstone,

elaborately lettred, gilded and painted, marks the burial place, and this

is surmounted by a turban, so carved and shaped as to signify the dead

man's rank in life.



They showed a fragment of ancient wall which they said was one side of

the gate out of which the widow's dead son was being brought so many

centuries ago when Jesus met the procession:



     "Now when he came nigh to the gate of the city, behold there was a

     dead man carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a

     widow: and much people of the city was with her.



     "And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said, Weep

     not.



     "And he came and touched the bier: and they that bare him stood

     still.  And he said, Young man, I say unto thee, arise.



     "And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak.  And he delivered

     him to his mother.



     "And there came a fear on all.  And they glorified God, saying, That

     a great prophet is risen up among us; and That God hath visited his

     people."



A little mosque stands upon the spot which tradition says was occupied by

the widow's dwelling.  Two or three aged Arabs sat about its door.  We

entered, and the pilgrims broke specimens from the foundation walls,

though they had to touch, and even step, upon the "praying carpets" to do

it.  It was almost the same as breaking pieces from the hearts of those

old Arabs.  To step rudely upon the sacred praying mats, with booted

feet--a thing not done by any Arab--was to inflict pain upon men who had

not offended us in any way.  Suppose a party of armed foreigners were to

enter a village church in America and break ornaments from the altar

railings for curiosities, and climb up and walk upon the Bible and the

pulpit cushions?  However, the cases are different.  One is the

profanation of a temple of our faith--the other only the profanation of a

pagan one.



We descended to the Plain again, and halted a moment at a well--of

Abraham's time, no doubt.  It was in a desert place.  It was walled three

feet above ground with squared and heavy blocks of stone, after the

manner of Bible pictures.  Around it some camels stood, and others knelt.

There was a group of sober little donkeys with naked, dusky children

clambering about them, or sitting astride their rumps, or pulling their

tails.  Tawny, black-eyed, barefooted maids, arrayed in rags and adorned

with brazen armlets and pinchbeck ear-rings, were poising water-jars upon

their heads, or drawing water from the well.  A flock of sheep stood by,

waiting for the shepherds to fill the hollowed stones with water, so that

they might drink--stones which, like those that walled the well, were

worn smooth and deeply creased by the chafing chins of a hundred

generations of thirsty animals.  Picturesque Arabs sat upon the ground,

in groups, and solemnly smoked their long-stemmed chibouks.  Other Arabs

were filling black hog-skins with water--skins which, well filled, and

distended with water till the short legs projected painfully out of the

proper line, looked like the corpses of hogs bloated by drowning.  Here

was a grand Oriental picture which I had worshiped a thousand times in

soft, rich steel engravings!  But in the engraving there was no

desolation; no dirt; no rags; no fleas; no ugly features; no sore eyes;

no feasting flies; no besotted ignorance in the countenances; no raw

places on the donkeys' backs; no disagreeable jabbering in unknown

tongues; no stench of camels; no suggestion that a couple of tons of

powder placed under the party and touched off would heighten the effect

and give to the scene a genuine interest and a charm which it would

always be pleasant to recall, even though a man lived a thousand years.

Oriental scenes look best in steel engravings.  I cannot be imposed upon

any more by that picture of the Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon.  I shall

say to myself, You look fine, Madam but your feet are not clean and you

smell like a camel.



Presently a wild Arab in charge of a camel train recognized an old friend

in Ferguson, and they ran and fell upon each other's necks and kissed

each other's grimy, bearded faces upon both cheeks.  It explained

instantly a something which had always seemed to me only a farfetched

Oriental figure of speech.  I refer to the circumstance of Christ's

rebuking a Pharisee, or some such character, and reminding him that from

him he had received no "kiss of welcome."  It did not seem reasonable to

me that men should kiss each other, but I am aware, now, that they did.

There was reason in it, too.  The custom was natural and proper; because

people must kiss, and a man would not be likely to kiss one of the women

of this country of his own free will and accord.  One must travel, to

learn.  Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any

significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.



We journeyed around the base of the mountain--"Little Hermon,"--past the

old Crusaders' castle of El Fuleh, and arrived at Shunem.  This was

another Magdala, to a fraction, frescoes and all.  Here, tradition says,

the prophet Samuel was born, and here the Shunamite woman built a little

house upon the city wall for the accommodation of the prophet Elisha.

Elisha asked her what she expected in return.  It was a perfectly natural

question, for these people are and were in the habit of proffering favors

and services and then expecting and begging for pay.  Elisha knew them

well.  He could not comprehend that any body should build for him that

humble little chamber for the mere sake of old friendship, and with no

selfish motive whatever.  It used to seem a very impolite, not to say a

rude, question, for Elisha to ask the woman, but it does not seem so to

me now.  The woman said she expected nothing.  Then for her goodness and

her unselfishness, he rejoiced her heart with the news that she should

bear a son.  It was a high reward--but she would not have thanked him for

a daughter--daughters have always been unpopular here.  The son was born,

grew, waxed strong, died.  Elisha restored him to life in Shunem.



We found here a grove of lemon trees--cool, shady, hung with fruit.  One

is apt to overestimate beauty when it is rare, but to me this grove

seemed very beautiful.  It was beautiful.  I do not overestimate it.  I

must always remember Shunem gratefully, as a place which gave to us this

leafy shelter after our long, hot ride.  We lunched, rested, chatted,

smoked our pipes an hour, and then mounted and moved on.



As we trotted across the Plain of Jezreel, we met half a dozen Digger

Indians (Bedouins) with very long spears in their hands, cavorting around

on old crowbait horses, and spearing imaginary enemies; whooping, and

fluttering their rags in the wind, and carrying on in every respect like

a pack of hopeless lunatics.  At last, here were the "wild, free sons of

the desert, speeding over the plain like the wind, on their beautiful

Arabian mares" we had read so much about and longed so much to see!  Here

were the "picturesque costumes!"  This was the "gallant spectacle!"

Tatterdemalion vagrants--cheap braggadocio--"Arabian mares" spined and

necked like the ichthyosaurus in the museum, and humped and cornered like

a dromedary!  To glance at the genuine son of the desert is to take the

romance out of him forever--to behold his steed is to long in charity to

strip his harness off and let him fall to pieces.



Presently we came to a ruinous old town on a hill, the same being the

ancient Jezreel.



Ahab, King of Samaria, (this was a very vast kingdom, for those days, and

was very nearly half as large as Rhode Island) dwelt in the city of

Jezreel, which was his capital.  Near him lived a man by the name of

Naboth, who had a vineyard.  The King asked him for it, and when he would

not give it, offered to buy it.  But Naboth refused to sell it.  In those

days it was considered a sort of crime to part with one's inheritance at

any price--and even if a man did part with it, it reverted to himself or

his heirs again at the next jubilee year.  So this spoiled child of a

King went and lay down on the bed with his face to the wall, and grieved

sorely.  The Queen, a notorious character in those days, and whose name

is a by-word and a reproach even in these, came in and asked him

wherefore he sorrowed, and he told her.  Jezebel said she could secure

the vineyard; and she went forth and forged letters to the nobles and

wise men, in the King's name, and ordered them to proclaim a fast and set

Naboth on high before the people, and suborn two witnesses to swear that

he had blasphemed.  They did it, and the people stoned the accused by the

city wall, and he died.  Then Jezebel came and told the King, and said,

Behold, Naboth is no more--rise up and seize the vineyard.  So Ahab

seized the vineyard, and went into it to possess it.  But the Prophet

Elijah came to him there and read his fate to him, and the fate of

Jezebel; and said that in the place where dogs licked the blood of

Naboth, dogs should also lick his blood--and he said, likewise, the dogs

should eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel.  In the course of time, the

King was killed in battle, and when his chariot wheels were washed in the

pool of Samaria, the dogs licked the blood.  In after years, Jehu, who

was King of Israel, marched down against Jezreel, by order of one of the

Prophets, and administered one of those convincing rebukes so common

among the people of those days: he killed many kings and their subjects,

and as he came along he saw Jezebel, painted and finely dressed, looking

out of a window, and ordered that she be thrown down to him.  A servant

did it, and Jehu's horse trampled her under foot.  Then Jehu went in and

sat down to dinner; and presently he said, Go and bury this cursed woman,

for she is a King's daughter.  The spirit of charity came upon him too

late, however, for the prophecy had already been fulfilled--the dogs had

eaten her, and they "found no more of her than the skull, and the feet,

and the palms of her hands."



Ahab, the late King, had left a helpless family behind him, and Jehu

killed seventy of the orphan sons.  Then he killed all the relatives, and

teachers, and servants and friends of the family, and rested from his

labors, until he was come near to Samaria, where he met forty-two persons

and asked them who they were; they said they were brothers of the King of

Judah.  He killed them.  When he got to Samaria, he said he would show

his zeal for the Lord; so he gathered all the priests and people together

that worshiped Baal, pretending that he was going to adopt that worship

and offer up a great sacrifice; and when they were all shut up where they

could not defend themselves, he caused every person of them to be killed.

Then Jehu, the good missionary, rested from his labors once more.



We went back to the valley, and rode to the Fountain of Ain Jelud.  They

call it the Fountain of Jezreel, usually.  It is a pond about one hundred

feet square and four feet deep, with a stream of water trickling into it

from under an overhanging ledge of rocks.  It is in the midst of a great

solitude.  Here Gideon pitched his camp in the old times; behind Shunem

lay the "Midianites, the Amalekites, and the Children of the East," who

were "as grasshoppers for multitude; both they and their camels were

without number, as the sand by the sea-side for multitude."  Which means

that there were one hundred and thirty-five thousand men, and that they

had transportation service accordingly.



Gideon, with only three hundred men, surprised them in the night, and

stood by and looked on while they butchered each other until a hundred

and twenty thousand lay dead on the field.



We camped at Jenin before night, and got up and started again at one

o'clock in the morning.  Somewhere towards daylight we passed the

locality where the best authenticated tradition locates the pit into

which Joseph's brethren threw him, and about noon, after passing over a

succession of mountain tops, clad with groves of fig and olive trees,

with the Mediterranean in sight some forty miles away, and going by many

ancient Biblical cities whose inhabitants glowered savagely upon our

Christian procession, and were seemingly inclined to practice on it with

stones, we came to the singularly terraced and unlovely hills that

betrayed that we were out of Galilee and into Samaria at last.



We climbed a high hill to visit the city of Samaria, where the woman may

have hailed from who conversed with Christ at Jacob's Well, and from

whence, no doubt, came also the celebrated Good Samaritan.  Herod the

Great is said to have made a magnificent city of this place, and a great

number of coarse limestone columns, twenty feet high and two feet

through, that are almost guiltless of architectural grace of shape and

ornament, are pointed out by many authors as evidence of the fact.  They

would not have been considered handsome in ancient Greece, however.



The inhabitants of this camp are particularly vicious, and stoned two

parties of our pilgrims a day or two ago who brought about the difficulty

by showing their revolvers when they did not intend to use them--a thing

which is deemed bad judgment in the Far West, and ought certainly to be

so considered any where.  In the new Territories, when a man puts his

hand on a weapon, he knows that he must use it; he must use it instantly

or expect to be shot down where he stands.  Those pilgrims had been

reading Grimes.



There was nothing for us to do in Samaria but buy handfuls of old Roman

coins at a franc a dozen, and look at a dilapidated church of the

Crusaders and a vault in it which once contained the body of John the

Baptist.  This relic was long ago carried away to Genoa.



Samaria stood a disastrous siege, once, in the days of Elisha, at the

hands of the King of Syria.  Provisions reached such a figure that "an

ass' head was sold for eighty pieces of silver and the fourth part of a

cab of dove's dung for five pieces of silver."



An incident recorded of that heavy time will give one a very good idea of

the distress that prevailed within these crumbling walls.  As the King

was walking upon the battlements one day, "a woman cried out, saying,

Help, my lord, O King!  And the King said, What aileth thee?  and she

answered, This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him to-

day, and we will eat my son to-morrow.  So we boiled my son, and did eat

him; and I said unto her on the next day, Give thy son that we may eat

him; and she hath hid her son."



The prophet Elisha declared that within four and twenty hours the prices

of food should go down to nothing, almost, and it was so.  The Syrian

army broke camp and fled, for some cause or other, the famine was

relieved from without, and many a shoddy speculator in dove's dung and

ass's meat was ruined.



We were glad to leave this hot and dusty old village and hurry on.  At

two o'clock we stopped to lunch and rest at ancient Shechem, between the

historic Mounts of Gerizim and Ebal, where in the old times the books of

the law, the curses and the blessings, were read from the heights to the

Jewish multitudes below.









CHAPTER LII.



The narrow canon in which Nablous, or Shechem, is situated, is under high

cultivation, and the soil is exceedingly black and fertile.  It is well

watered, and its affluent vegetation gains effect by contrast with the

barren hills that tower on either side.  One of these hills is the

ancient Mount of Blessings and the other the Mount of Curses and wise men

who seek for fulfillments of prophecy think they find here a wonder of

this kind--to wit, that the Mount of Blessings is strangely fertile and

its mate as strangely unproductive.  We could not see that there was

really much difference between them in this respect, however.



Shechem is distinguished as one of the residences of the patriarch Jacob,

and as the seat of those tribes that cut themselves loose from their

brethren of Israel and propagated doctrines not in conformity with those

of the original Jewish creed.  For thousands of years this clan have

dwelt in Shechem under strict tabu, and having little commerce or

fellowship with their fellow men of any religion or nationality.  For

generations they have not numbered more than one or two hundred, but they

still adhere to their ancient faith and maintain their ancient rites and

ceremonies.  Talk of family and old descent!  Princes and nobles pride

themselves upon lineages they can trace back some hundreds of years.

What is this trifle to this handful of old first families of Shechem who

can name their fathers straight back without a flaw for thousands--

straight back to a period so remote that men reared in a country where

the days of two hundred years ago are called "ancient" times grow dazed

and bewildered when they try to comprehend it!  Here is respectability

for you--here is "family"--here is high descent worth talking about.

This sad, proud remnant of a once mighty community still hold themselves

aloof from all the world; they still live as their fathers lived, labor

as their fathers labored, think as they did, feel as they did, worship in

the same place, in sight of the same landmarks, and in the same quaint,

patriarchal way their ancestors did more than thirty centuries ago.  I

found myself gazing at any straggling scion of this strange race with a

riveted fascination, just as one would stare at a living mastodon, or a

megatherium that had moved in the grey dawn of creation and seen the

wonders of that mysterious world that was before the flood.



Carefully preserved among the sacred archives of this curious community

is a MSS.  copy of the ancient Jewish law, which is said to be the oldest

document on earth.  It is written on vellum, and is some four or five

thousand years old.  Nothing but bucksheesh can purchase a sight.  Its

fame is somewhat dimmed in these latter days, because of the doubts so

many authors of Palestine travels have felt themselves privileged to cast

upon it.  Speaking of this MSS. reminds me that I procured from the high-

priest of this ancient Samaritan community, at great expense, a secret

document of still higher antiquity and far more extraordinary interest,

which I propose to publish as soon as I have finished translating it.



Joshua gave his dying injunction to the children of Israel at Shechem,

and buried a valuable treasure secretly under an oak tree there about the

same time.  The superstitious Samaritans have always been afraid to hunt

for it.  They believe it is guarded by fierce spirits invisible to men.



About a mile and a half from Shechem we halted at the base of Mount Ebal

before a little square area, inclosed by a high stone wall, neatly

whitewashed.  Across one end of this inclosure is a tomb built after the

manner of the Moslems.  It is the tomb of Joseph.  No truth is better

authenticated than this.



When Joseph was dying he prophesied that exodus of the Israelites from

Egypt which occurred four hundred years afterwards.  At the same time he

exacted of his people an oath that when they journeyed to the land of

Canaan they would bear his bones with them and bury them in the ancient

inheritance of his fathers.  The oath was kept. "And the bones of Joseph,

which the children of Israel brought up out of Egypt, buried they in

Shechem, in a parcel of ground which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor

the father of Shechem for a hundred pieces of silver."



Few tombs on earth command the veneration of so many races and men of

divers creeds as this of Joseph.  "Samaritan and Jew, Moslem and

Christian alike, revere it, and honor it with their visits.  The tomb of

Joseph, the dutiful son, the affectionate, forgiving brother, the

virtuous man, the wise Prince and ruler.  Egypt felt his influence--the

world knows his history."



In this same "parcel of ground" which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor

for a hundred pieces of silver, is Jacob's celebrated well.  It is cut in

the solid rock, and is nine feet square and ninety feet deep.  The name

of this unpretending hole in the ground, which one might pass by and take

no notice of, is as familiar as household words to even the children and

the peasants of many a far-off country.  It is more famous than the

Parthenon; it is older than the Pyramids.



It was by this well that Jesus sat and talked with a woman of that

strange, antiquated Samaritan community I have been speaking of, and told

her of the mysterious water of life.  As descendants of old English

nobles still cherish in the traditions of their houses how that this king

or that king tarried a day with some favored ancestor three hundred years

ago, no doubt the descendants of the woman of Samaria, living there in

Shechem, still refer with pardonable vanity to this conversation of their

ancestor, held some little time gone by, with the Messiah of the

Christians.  It is not likely that they undervalue a distinction such as

this.  Samaritan nature is human nature, and human nature remembers

contact with the illustrious, always.



For an offense done to the family honor, the sons of Jacob exterminated

all Shechem once.



We left Jacob's Well and traveled till eight in the evening, but rather

slowly, for we had been in the saddle nineteen hours, and the horses were

cruelly tired.  We got so far ahead of the tents that we had to camp in

an Arab village, and sleep on the ground.  We could have slept in the

largest of the houses; but there were some little drawbacks: it was

populous with vermin, it had a dirt floor, it was in no respect cleanly,

and there was a family of goats in the only bedroom, and two donkeys in

the parlor.  Outside there were no inconveniences, except that the dusky,

ragged, earnest-eyed villagers of both sexes and all ages grouped

themselves on their haunches all around us, and discussed us and

criticised us with noisy tongues till midnight.  We did not mind the

noise, being tired, but, doubtless, the reader is aware that it is almost

an impossible thing to go to sleep when you know that people are looking

at you.  We went to bed at ten, and got up again at two and started once

more.  Thus are people persecuted by dragomen, whose sole ambition in

life is to get ahead of each other.



About daylight we passed Shiloh, where the Ark of the Covenant rested

three hundred years, and at whose gates good old Eli fell down and "brake

his neck" when the messenger, riding hard from the battle, told him of

the defeat of his people, the death of his sons, and, more than all, the

capture of Israel's pride, her hope, her refuge, the ancient Ark her

forefathers brought with them out of Egypt.  It is little wonder that

under circumstances like these he fell down and brake his neck.  But

Shiloh had no charms for us.  We were so cold that there was no comfort

but in motion, and so drowsy we could hardly sit upon the horses.



After a while we came to a shapeless mass of ruins, which still bears the

name of Bethel.  It was here that Jacob lay down and had that superb

vision of angels flitting up and down a ladder that reached from the

clouds to earth, and caught glimpses of their blessed home through the

open gates of Heaven.



The pilgrims took what was left of the hallowed ruin, and we pressed on

toward the goal of our crusade, renowned Jerusalem.



The further we went the hotter the sun got, and the more rocky and bare,

repulsive and dreary the landscape became.  There could not have been

more fragments of stone strewn broadcast over this part of the world, if

every ten square feet of the land had been occupied by a separate and

distinct stonecutter's establishment for an age.  There was hardly a tree

or a shrub any where.  Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends

of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.  No landscape

exists that is more tiresome to the eye than that which bounds the

approaches to Jerusalem.  The only difference between the roads and the

surrounding country, perhaps, is that there are rather more rocks in the

roads than in the surrounding country.



We passed Ramah, and Beroth, and on the right saw the tomb of the prophet

Samuel, perched high upon a commanding eminence.  Still no Jerusalem came

in sight.  We hurried on impatiently.  We halted a moment at the ancient

Fountain of Beira, but its stones, worn deeply by the chins of thirsty

animals that are dead and gone centuries ago, had no interest for us--we

longed to see Jerusalem.  We spurred up hill after hill, and usually

began to stretch our necks minutes before we got to the top--but

disappointment always followed:--more stupid hills beyond--more unsightly

landscape--no Holy City.



At last, away in the middle of the day, ancient bite of wall and

crumbling arches began to line the way--we toiled up one more hill, and

every pilgrim and every sinner swung his hat on high!  Jerusalem!



Perched on its eternal hills, white and domed and solid, massed together

and hooped with high gray walls, the venerable city gleamed in the sun.

So small!  Why, it was no larger than an American village of four

thousand inhabitants, and no larger than an ordinary Syrian city of

thirty thousand.  Jerusalem numbers only fourteen thousand people.



We dismounted and looked, without speaking a dozen sentences, across the

wide intervening valley for an hour or more; and noted those prominent

features of the city that pictures make familiar to all men from their

school days till their death.  We could recognize the Tower of Hippicus,

the Mosque of Omar, the Damascus Gate, the Mount of Olives, the Valley of

Jehoshaphat, the Tower of David, and the Garden of Gethsemane--and dating

from these landmarks could tell very nearly the localities of many others

we were not able to distinguish.



I record it here as a notable but not discreditable fact that not even

our pilgrims wept.  I think there was no individual in the party whose

brain was not teeming with thoughts and images and memories invoked by

the grand history of the venerable city that lay before us, but still

among them all was no "voice of them that wept."



There was no call for tears.  Tears would have been out of place.  The

thoughts Jerusalem suggests are full of poetry, sublimity, and more than

all, dignity.  Such thoughts do not find their appropriate expression in

the emotions of the nursery.



Just after noon we entered these narrow, crooked streets, by the ancient

and the famed Damascus Gate, and now for several hours I have been trying

to comprehend that I am actually in the illustrious old city where

Solomon dwelt, where Abraham held converse with the Deity, and where

walls still stand that witnessed the spectacle of the Crucifixion.









CHAPTER LIII.



A fast walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely

around the city in an hour.  I do not know how else to make one

understand how small it is.  The appearance of the city is peculiar.  It

is as knobby with countless little domes as a prison door is with bolt-

heads.  Every house has from one to half a dozen of these white plastered

domes of stone, broad and low, sitting in the centre of, or in a cluster

upon, the flat roof.  Wherefore, when one looks down from an eminence,

upon the compact mass of houses (so closely crowded together, in fact,

that there is no appearance of streets at all, and so the city looks

solid,) he sees the knobbiest town in the world, except Constantinople.

It looks as if it might be roofed, from centre to circumference, with

inverted saucers.  The monotony of the view is interrupted only by the

great Mosque of Omar, the Tower of Hippicus, and one or two other

buildings that rise into commanding prominence.



The houses are generally two stories high, built strongly of masonry,

whitewashed or plastered outside, and have a cage of wooden lattice-work

projecting in front of every window.  To reproduce a Jerusalem street, it

would only be necessary to up-end a chicken-coop and hang it before each

window in an alley of American houses.



The streets are roughly and badly paved with stone, and are tolerably

crooked--enough so to make each street appear to close together

constantly and come to an end about a hundred yards ahead of a pilgrim as

long as he chooses to walk in it.  Projecting from the top of the lower

story of many of the houses is a very narrow porch-roof or shed, without

supports from below; and I have several times seen cats jump across the

street from one shed to the other when they were out calling.  The cats

could have jumped double the distance without extraordinary exertion.  I

mention these things to give an idea of how narrow the streets are.

Since a cat can jump across them without the least inconvenience, it is

hardly necessary to state that such streets are too narrow for carriages.

These vehicles cannot navigate the Holy City.



The population of Jerusalem is composed of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins,

Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of

Protestants.  One hundred of the latter sect are all that dwell now in

this birthplace of Christianity.  The nice shades of nationality

comprised in the above list, and the languages spoken by them, are

altogether too numerous to mention.  It seems to me that all the races

and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the

fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem.  Rags, wretchedness,

poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of

Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound.  Lepers,

cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they

know but one word of but one language apparently--the eternal

"bucksheesh."  To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased

humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might

suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the

Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of

Bethesda.  Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless.  I would not

desire to live here.



One naturally goes first to the Holy Sepulchre.  It is right in the city,

near the western gate; it and the place of the Crucifixion, and, in fact,

every other place intimately connected with that tremendous event, are

ingeniously massed together and covered by one roof--the dome of the

Church of the Holy Sepulchre.



Entering the building, through the midst of the usual assemblage of

beggars, one sees on his left a few Turkish guards--for Christians of

different sects will not only quarrel, but fight, also, in this sacred

place, if allowed to do it.  Before you is a marble slab, which covers

the Stone of Unction, whereon the Saviour's body was laid to prepare it

for burial.  It was found necessary to conceal the real stone in this way

in order to save it from destruction.  Pilgrims were too much given to

chipping off pieces of it to carry home.  Near by is a circular railing

which marks the spot where the Virgin stood when the Lord's body was

anointed.



Entering the great Rotunda, we stand before the most sacred locality in

Christendom--the grave of Jesus.  It is in the centre of the church, and

immediately under the great dome.  It is inclosed in a sort of little

temple of yellow and white stone, of fanciful design.  Within the little

temple is a portion of the very stone which was rolled away from the door

of the Sepulchre, and on which the angel was sitting when Mary came

thither "at early dawn."  Stooping low, we enter the vault--the Sepulchre

itself.  It is only about six feet by seven, and the stone couch on which

the dead Saviour lay extends from end to end of the apartment and

occupies half its width.  It is covered with a marble slab which has been

much worn by the lips of pilgrims.  This slab serves as an altar, now.

Over it hang some fifty gold and silver lamps, which are kept always

burning, and the place is otherwise scandalized by trumpery, gewgaws, and

tawdry ornamentation.



All sects of Christians (except Protestants,) have chapels under the roof

of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and each must keep to itself and not

venture upon another's ground.  It has been proven conclusively that they

can not worship together around the grave of the Saviour of the World in

peace.  The chapel of the Syrians is not handsome; that of the Copts is

the humblest of them all.  It is nothing but a dismal cavern, roughly

hewn in the living rock of the Hill of Calvary.  In one side of it two

ancient tombs are hewn, which are claimed to be those in which Nicodemus

and Joseph of Aramathea were buried.



As we moved among the great piers and pillars of another part of the

church, we came upon a party of black-robed, animal-looking Italian

monks, with candles in their hands, who were chanting something in Latin,

and going through some kind of religious performance around a disk of

white marble let into the floor.  It was there that the risen Saviour

appeared to Mary Magdalen in the likeness of a gardener.  Near by was a

similar stone, shaped like a star--here the Magdalen herself stood, at

the same time.  Monks were performing in this place also.  They perform

everywhere--all over the vast building, and at all hours.  Their candles

are always flitting about in the gloom, and making the dim old church

more dismal than there is any necessity that it should be, even though it

is a tomb.



We were shown the place where our Lord appeared to His mother after the

Resurrection.  Here, also, a marble slab marks the place where St.

Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, found the crosses about

three hundred years after the Crucifixion.  According to the legend, this

great discovery elicited extravagant demonstrations of joy.  But they

were of short duration.  The question intruded itself: "Which bore the

blessed Saviour, and which the thieves?"  To be in doubt, in so mighty a

matter as this--to be uncertain which one to adore--was a grievous

misfortune.  It turned the public joy to sorrow.  But when lived there a

holy priest who could not set so simple a trouble as this at rest?  One

of these soon hit upon a plan that would be a certain test.  A noble lady

lay very ill in Jerusalem.  The wise priests ordered that the three

crosses be taken to her bedside one at a time.  It was done.  When her

eyes fell upon the first one, she uttered a scream that was heard beyond

the Damascus Gate, and even upon the Mount of Olives, it was said, and

then fell back in a deadly swoon.  They recovered her and brought the

second cross.  Instantly she went into fearful convulsions, and it was

with the greatest difficulty that six strong men could hold her.  They

were afraid, now, to bring in the third cross.  They began to fear that

possibly they had fallen upon the wrong crosses, and that the true cross

was not with this number at all.  However, as the woman seemed likely to

die with the convulsions that were tearing her, they concluded that the

third could do no more than put her out of her misery with a happy

dispatch.  So they brought it, and behold, a miracle!  The woman sprang

from her bed, smiling and joyful, and perfectly restored to health.  When

we listen to evidence like this, we cannot but believe.  We would be

ashamed to doubt, and properly, too.  Even the very part of Jerusalem

where this all occurred is there yet.  So there is really no room for

doubt.



The priests tried to show us, through a small screen, a fragment of the

genuine Pillar of Flagellation, to which Christ was bound when they

scourged him.  But we could not see it, because it was dark inside the

screen.  However, a baton is kept here, which the pilgrim thrusts through

a hole in the screen, and then he no longer doubts that the true Pillar

of Flagellation is in there.  He can not have any excuse to doubt it, for

he can feel it with the stick.  He can feel it as distinctly as he could

feel any thing.



Not far from here was a niche where they used to preserve a piece of the

True Cross, but it is gone, now.  This piece of the cross was discovered

in the sixteenth century.  The Latin priests say it was stolen away, long

ago, by priests of another sect.  That seems like a hard statement to

make, but we know very well that it was stolen, because we have seen it

ourselves in several of the cathedrals of Italy and France.



But the relic that touched us most was the plain old sword of that stout

Crusader, Godfrey of Bulloigne--King Godfrey of Jerusalem.  No blade in

Christendom wields such enchantment as this--no blade of all that rust in

the ancestral halls of Europe is able to invoke such visions of romance

in the brain of him who looks upon it--none that can prate of such

chivalric deeds or tell such brave tales of the warrior days of old.  It

stirs within a man every memory of the Holy Wars that has been sleeping

in his brain for years, and peoples his thoughts with mail-clad images,

with marching armies, with battles and with sieges.  It speaks to him of

Baldwin, and Tancred, the princely Saladin, and great Richard of the Lion

Heart.  It was with just such blades as these that these splendid heroes

of romance used to segregate a man, so to speak, and leave the half of

him to fall one way and the other half the other.  This very sword has

cloven hundreds of Saracen Knights from crown to chin in those old times

when Godfrey wielded it.  It was enchanted, then, by a genius that was

under the command of King Solomon.  When danger approached its master's

tent it always struck the shield and clanged out a fierce alarm upon the

startled ear of night.  In times of doubt, or in fog or darkness, if it

were drawn from its sheath it would point instantly toward the foe, and

thus reveal the way--and it would also attempt to start after them of its

own accord.  A Christian could not be so disguised that it would not know

him and refuse to hurt him--nor a Moslem so disguised that it would not

leap from its scabbard and take his life.  These statements are all well

authenticated in many legends that are among the most trustworthy legends

the good old Catholic monks preserve.  I can never forget old Godfrey's

sword, now.  I tried it on a Moslem, and clove him in twain like a

doughnut.  The spirit of Grimes was upon me, and if I had had a graveyard

I would have destroyed all the infidels in Jerusalem.  I wiped the blood

off the old sword and handed it back to the priest--I did not want the

fresh gore to obliterate those sacred spots that crimsoned its brightness

one day six hundred years ago and thus gave Godfrey warning that before

the sun went down his journey of life would end.



Still moving through the gloom of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre we

came to a small chapel, hewn out of the rock--a place which has been

known as "The Prison of Our Lord" for many centuries.  Tradition says

that here the Saviour was confined just previously to the crucifixion.

Under an altar by the door was a pair of stone stocks for human legs.

These things are called the "Bonds of Christ," and the use they were once

put to has given them the name they now bear.



The Greek Chapel is the most roomy, the richest and the showiest chapel

in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  Its altar, like that of all the

Greek churches, is a lofty screen that extends clear across the chapel,

and is gorgeous with gilding and pictures.  The numerous lamps that hang

before it are of gold and silver, and cost great sums.



But the feature of the place is a short column that rises from the middle

of the marble pavement of the chapel, and marks the exact centre of the

earth.  The most reliable traditions tell us that this was known to be

the earth's centre, ages ago, and that when Christ was upon earth he set

all doubts upon the subject at rest forever, by stating with his own lips

that the tradition was correct.  Remember, He said that that particular

column stood upon the centre of the world.  If the centre of the world

changes, the column changes its position accordingly.  This column has

moved three different times of its own accord.  This is because, in great

convulsions of nature, at three different times, masses of the earth--

whole ranges of mountains, probably--have flown off into space, thus

lessening the diameter of the earth, and changing the exact locality of

its centre by a point or two.  This is a very curious and interesting

circumstance, and is a withering rebuke to those philosophers who would

make us believe that it is not possible for any portion of the earth to

fly off into space.



To satisfy himself that this spot was really the centre of the earth, a

sceptic once paid well for the privilege of ascending to the dome of the

church to see if the sun gave him a shadow at noon.  He came down

perfectly convinced.  The day was very cloudy and the sun threw no

shadows at all; but the man was satisfied that if the sun had come out

and made shadows it could not have made any for him.  Proofs like these

are not to be set aside by the idle tongues of cavilers.  To such as are

not bigoted, and are willing to be convinced, they carry a conviction

that nothing can ever shake.



If even greater proofs than those I have mentioned are wanted, to satisfy

the headstrong and the foolish that this is the genuine centre of the

earth, they are here.  The greatest of them lies in the fact that from

under this very column was taken the dust from which Adam was made.  This

can surely be regarded in the light of a settler.  It is not likely that

the original first man would have been made from an inferior quality of

earth when it was entirely convenient to get first quality from the

world's centre.  This will strike any reflecting mind forcibly.  That

Adam was formed of dirt procured in this very spot is amply proven by the

fact that in six thousand years no man has ever been able to prove that

the dirt was not procured here whereof he was made.



It is a singular circumstance that right under the roof of this same

great church, and not far away from that illustrious column, Adam

himself, the father of the human race, lies buried.  There is no question

that he is actually buried in the grave which is pointed out as his--

there can be none--because it has never yet been proven that that grave

is not the grave in which he is buried.



The tomb of Adam!  How touching it was, here in a land of strangers, far

away from home, and friends, and all who cared for me, thus to discover

the grave of a blood relation.  True, a distant one, but still a

relation.  The unerring instinct of nature thrilled its recognition.  The

fountain of my filial affection was stirred to its profoundest depths,

and I gave way to tumultuous emotion.  I leaned upon a pillar and burst

into tears.  I deem it no shame to have wept over the grave of my poor

dead relative.  Let him who would sneer at my emotion close this volume

here, for he will find little to his taste in my journeyings through Holy

Land.  Noble old man--he did not live to see me--he did not live to see

his child.  And I--I--alas, I did not live to see him.  Weighed down by

sorrow and disappointment, he died before I was born--six thousand brief

summers before I was born.  But let us try to bear it with fortitude.

Let us trust that he is better off where he is.  Let us take comfort in

the thought that his loss is our eternal gain.



The next place the guide took us to in the holy church was an altar

dedicated to the Roman soldier who was of the military guard that

attended at the Crucifixion to keep order, and who--when the vail of the

Temple was rent in the awful darkness that followed; when the rock of

Golgotha was split asunder by an earthquake; when the artillery of heaven

thundered, and in the baleful glare of the lightnings the shrouded dead

flitted about the streets of Jerusalem--shook with fear and said, "Surely

this was the Son of God!"  Where this altar stands now, that Roman

soldier stood then, in full view of the crucified Saviour--in full sight

and hearing of all the marvels that were transpiring far and wide about

the circumference of the Hill of Calvary.  And in this self-same spot the

priests of the Temple beheaded him for those blasphemous words he had

spoken.



In this altar they used to keep one of the most curious relics that human

eyes ever looked upon--a thing that had power to fascinate the beholder

in some mysterious way and keep him gazing for hours together.  It was

nothing less than the copper plate Pilate put upon the Saviour's cross,

and upon which he wrote, "THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS."  I think St.

Helena, the mother of Constantine, found this wonderful memento when she

was here in the third century.  She traveled all over Palestine, and was

always fortunate.  Whenever the good old enthusiast found a thing

mentioned in her Bible, Old or New, she would go and search for that

thing, and never stop until she found it.  If it was Adam, she would find

Adam; if it was the Ark, she would find the Ark; if it was Goliath, or

Joshua, she would find them.  She found the inscription here that I was

speaking of, I think.  She found it in this very spot, close to where the

martyred Roman soldier stood.  That copper plate is in one of the

churches in Rome, now.  Any one can see it there.  The inscription is

very distinct.



We passed along a few steps and saw the altar built over the very spot

where the good Catholic priests say the soldiers divided the raiment of

the Saviour.



Then we went down into a cavern which cavilers say was once a cistern.

It is a chapel, now, however--the Chapel of St. Helena.  It is fifty-one

feet long by forty-three wide.  In it is a marble chair which Helena used

to sit in while she superintended her workmen when they were digging and

delving for the True Cross.  In this place is an altar dedicated to St.

Dimas, the penitent thief.  A new bronze statue is here--a statue of St.

Helena.  It reminded us of poor Maximilian, so lately shot.  He presented

it to this chapel when he was about to leave for his throne in Mexico.



From the cistern we descended twelve steps into a large roughly-shaped

grotto, carved wholly out of the living rock.  Helena blasted it out when

she was searching for the true Cross.  She had a laborious piece of work,

here, but it was richly rewarded.  Out of this place she got the crown of

thorns, the nails of the cross, the true Cross itself, and the cross of

the penitent thief.  When she thought she had found every thing and was

about to stop, she was told in a dream to continue a day longer.  It was

very fortunate.  She did so, and found the cross of the other thief.



The walls and roof of this grotto still weep bitter tears in memory of

the event that transpired on Calvary, and devout pilgrims groan and sob

when these sad tears fall upon them from the dripping rock.  The monks

call this apartment the "Chapel of the Invention of the Cross"--a name

which is unfortunate, because it leads the ignorant to imagine that a

tacit acknowledgment is thus made that the tradition that Helena found

the true Cross here is a fiction--an invention.  It is a happiness to

know, however, that intelligent people do not doubt the story in any of

its particulars.



Priests of any of the chapels and denominations in the Church of the Holy

Sepulchre can visit this sacred grotto to weep and pray and worship the

gentle Redeemer.  Two different congregations are not allowed to enter at

the same time, however, because they always fight.



Still marching through the venerable Church of the Holy Sepulchre, among

chanting priests in coarse long robes and sandals; pilgrims of all colors

and many nationalities, in all sorts of strange costumes; under dusky

arches and by dingy piers and columns; through a sombre cathedral gloom

freighted with smoke and incense, and faintly starred with scores of

candles that appeared suddenly and as suddenly disappeared, or drifted

mysteriously hither and thither about the distant aisles like ghostly

jack-o'-lanterns--we came at last to a small chapel which is called the

"Chapel of the Mocking."  Under the altar was a fragment of a marble

column; this was the seat Christ sat on when he was reviled, and

mockingly made King, crowned with a crown of thorns and sceptred with a

reed.  It was here that they blindfolded him and struck him, and said in

derision, "Prophesy who it is that smote thee."  The tradition that this

is the identical spot of the mocking is a very ancient one.  The guide

said that Saewulf was the first to mention it.  I do not know Saewulf,

but still, I cannot well refuse to receive his evidence--none of us can.



They showed us where the great Godfrey and his brother Baldwin, the first

Christian Kings of Jerusalem, once lay buried by that sacred sepulchre

they had fought so long and so valiantly to wrest from the hands of the

infidel.  But the niches that had contained the ashes of these renowned

crusaders were empty.  Even the coverings of their tombs were gone--

destroyed by devout members of the Greek Church, because Godfrey and

Baldwin were Latin princes, and had been reared in a Christian faith

whose creed differed in some unimportant respects from theirs.



We passed on, and halted before the tomb of Melchisedek!  You will

remember Melchisedek, no doubt; he was the King who came out and levied a

tribute on Abraham the time that he pursued Lot's captors to Dan, and

took all their property from them.  That was about four thousand years

ago, and Melchisedek died shortly afterward.  However, his tomb is in a

good state of preservation.



When one enters the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Sepulchre itself is

the first thing he desires to see, and really is almost the first thing

he does see.  The next thing he has a strong yearning to see is the spot

where the Saviour was crucified.  But this they exhibit last.  It is the

crowning glory of the place.  One is grave and thoughtful when he stands

in the little Tomb of the Saviour--he could not well be otherwise in such

a place--but he has not the slightest possible belief that ever the Lord

lay there, and so the interest he feels in the spot is very, very greatly

marred by that reflection.  He looks at the place where Mary stood, in

another part of the church, and where John stood, and Mary Magdalen;

where the mob derided the Lord; where the angel sat; where the crown of

thorns was found, and the true Cross; where the risen Saviour appeared--

he looks at all these places with interest, but with the same conviction

he felt in the case of the Sepulchre, that there is nothing genuine about

them, and that they are imaginary holy places created by the monks.  But

the place of the Crucifixion affects him differently.  He fully believes

that he is looking upon the very spot where the Savior gave up his

life.  He remembers that Christ was very celebrated, long before he came

to Jerusalem; he knows that his fame was so great that crowds followed

him all the time; he is aware that his entry into the city produced a

stirring sensation, and that his reception was a kind of ovation; he can

not overlook the fact that when he was crucified there were very many in

Jerusalem who believed that he was the true Son of God.  To publicly

execute such a personage was sufficient in itself to make the locality of

the execution a memorable place for ages; added to this, the storm, the

darkness, the earthquake, the rending of the vail of the Temple, and the

untimely waking of the dead, were events calculated to fix the execution

and the scene of it in the memory of even the most thoughtless witness.

Fathers would tell their sons about the strange affair, and point out the

spot; the sons would transmit the story to their children, and thus a

period of three hundred years would easily be spanned--[The thought is

Mr. Prime's, not mine, and is full of good sense.  I borrowed it from his

"Tent Life."--M.  T.]--at which time Helena came and built a church upon

Calvary to commemorate the death and burial of the Lord and preserve the

sacred place in the memories of men; since that time there has always

been a church there.  It is not possible that there can be any mistake

about the locality of the Crucifixion.  Not half a dozen persons knew

where they buried the Saviour, perhaps, and a burial is not a startling

event, any how; therefore, we can be pardoned for unbelief in the

Sepulchre, but not in the place of the Crucifixion.  Five hundred years

hence there will be no vestige of Bunker Hill Monument left, but America

will still know where the battle was fought and where Warren fell.  The

crucifixion of Christ was too notable an event in Jerusalem, and the Hill

of Calvary made too celebrated by it, to be forgotten in the short space

of three hundred years.  I climbed the stairway in the church which

brings one to the top of the small inclosed pinnacle of rock, and looked

upon the place where the true cross once stood, with a far more absorbing

interest than I had ever felt in any thing earthly before.  I could not

believe that the three holes in the top of the rock were the actual ones

the crosses stood in, but I felt satisfied that those crosses had stood

so near the place now occupied by them, that the few feet of possible

difference were a matter of no consequence.



When one stands where the Saviour was crucified, he finds it all he can

do to keep it strictly before his mind that Christ was not crucified in a

Catholic Church.  He must remind himself every now and then that the

great event transpired in the open air, and not in a gloomy, candle-

lighted cell in a little corner of a vast church, up-stairs--a small cell

all bejeweled and bespangled with flashy ornamentation, in execrable

taste.



Under a marble altar like a table, is a circular hole in the marble

floor, corresponding with the one just under it in which the true Cross

stood.  The first thing every one does is to kneel down and take a candle

and examine this hole.  He does this strange prospecting with an amount

of gravity that can never be estimated or appreciated by a man who has

not seen the operation.  Then he holds his candle before a richly

engraved picture of the Saviour, done on a messy slab of gold, and

wonderfully rayed and starred with diamonds, which hangs above the hole

within the altar, and his solemnity changes to lively admiration.  He

rises and faces the finely wrought figures of the Saviour and the

malefactors uplifted upon their crosses behind the altar, and bright with

a metallic lustre of many colors.  He turns next to the figures close to

them of the Virgin and Mary Magdalen; next to the rift in the living rock

made by the earthquake at the time of the Crucifixion, and an extension

of which he had seen before in the wall of one of the grottoes below; he

looks next at the show-case with a figure of the Virgin in it, and is

amazed at the princely fortune in precious gems and jewelry that hangs so

thickly about the form as to hide it like a garment almost.  All about

the apartment the gaudy trappings of the Greek Church offend the eye and

keep the mind on the rack to remember that this is the Place of the

Crucifixion--Golgotha--the Mount of Calvary.  And the last thing he looks

at is that which was also the first--the place where the true Cross

stood.  That will chain him to the spot and compel him to look once more,

and once again, after he has satisfied all curiosity and lost all

interest concerning the other matters pertaining to the locality.



And so I close my chapter on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre--the most

sacred locality on earth to millions and millions of men, and women, and

children, the noble and the humble, bond and free.  In its history from

the first, and in its tremendous associations, it is the most illustrious

edifice in Christendom.  With all its clap-trap side-shows and unseemly

impostures of every kind, it is still grand, reverend, venerable--for a

god died there; for fifteen hundred years its shrines have been wet with

the tears of pilgrims from the earth's remotest confines; for more than

two hundred, the most gallant knights that ever wielded sword wasted

their lives away in a struggle to seize it and hold it sacred from

infidel pollution.  Even in our own day a war, that cost millions of

treasure and rivers of blood, was fought because two rival nations

claimed the sole right to put a new dome upon it.  History is full of

this old Church of the Holy Sepulchre--full of blood that was shed

because of the respect and the veneration in which men held the last

resting-place of the meek and lowly, the mild and gentle, Prince of

Peace!









CHAPTER LIV.



We were standing in a narrow street, by the Tower of Antonio.  "On these

stones that are crumbling away," the guide said, "the Saviour sat and

rested before taking up the cross.  This is the beginning of the

Sorrowful Way, or the Way of Grief."  The party took note of the sacred

spot, and moved on.  We passed under the "Ecce Homo Arch," and saw the

very window from which Pilate's wife warned her husband to have nothing

to do with the persecution of the Just Man.  This window is in an

excellent state of preservation, considering its great age.  They showed

us where Jesus rested the second time, and where the mob refused to give

him up, and said, "Let his blood be upon our heads, and upon our

children's children forever."  The French Catholics are building a church

on this spot, and with their usual veneration for historical relics, are

incorporating into the new such scraps of ancient walls as they have

found there.  Further on, we saw the spot where the fainting Saviour fell

under the weight of his cross.  A great granite column of some ancient

temple lay there at the time, and the heavy cross struck it such a blow

that it broke in two in the middle.  Such was the guide's story when he

halted us before the broken column.



We crossed a street, and came presently to the former residence of St.

Veronica.  When the Saviour passed there, she came out, full of womanly

compassion, and spoke pitying words to him, undaunted by the hootings and

the threatenings of the mob, and wiped the perspiration from his face

with her handkerchief.  We had heard so much of St. Veronica, and seen

her picture by so many masters, that it was like meeting an old friend

unexpectedly to come upon her ancient home in Jerusalem.  The strangest

thing about the incident that has made her name so famous, is, that when

she wiped the perspiration away, the print of the Saviour's face remained

upon the handkerchief, a perfect portrait, and so remains unto this day.

We knew this, because we saw this handkerchief in a cathedral in Paris,

in another in Spain, and in two others in Italy.  In the Milan cathedral

it costs five francs to see it, and at St. Peter's, at Rome, it is almost

impossible to see it at any price.  No tradition is so amply verified as

this of St. Veronica and her handkerchief.



At the next corner we saw a deep indention in the hard stone masonry of

the corner of a house, but might have gone heedlessly by it but that the

guide said it was made by the elbow of the Saviour, who stumbled here and

fell.  Presently we came to just such another indention in a stone wall.

The guide said the Saviour fell here, also, and made this depression with

his elbow.



There were other places where the Lord fell, and others where he rested;

but one of the most curious landmarks of ancient history we found on this

morning walk through the crooked lanes that lead toward Calvary, was a

certain stone built into a house--a stone that was so seamed and scarred

that it bore a sort of grotesque resemblance to the human face.  The

projections that answered for cheeks were worn smooth by the passionate

kisses of generations of pilgrims from distant lands.  We asked "Why?"

The guide said it was because this was one of "the very stones of

Jerusalem" that Christ mentioned when he was reproved for permitting the

people to cry "Hosannah!"  when he made his memorable entry into the

city upon an ass.  One of the pilgrims said, "But there is no evidence

that the stones did cry out--Christ said that if the people stopped from

shouting Hosannah, the very stones would do it."  The guide was perfectly

serene.  He said, calmly, "This is one of the stones that would have

cried out.  "It was of little use to try to shake this fellow's simple

faith--it was easy to see that.



And so we came at last to another wonder, of deep and abiding interest--

the veritable house where the unhappy wretch once lived who has been

celebrated in song and story for more than eighteen hundred years as the

Wandering Jew.  On the memorable day of the Crucifixion he stood in this

old doorway with his arms akimbo, looking out upon the struggling mob

that was approaching, and when the weary Saviour would have sat down and

rested him a moment, pushed him rudely away and said, "Move on!"  The

Lord said, "Move on, thou, likewise," and the command has never been

revoked from that day to this.  All men know how that the miscreant upon

whose head that just curse fell has roamed up and down the wide world,

for ages and ages, seeking rest and never finding it--courting death but

always in vain--longing to stop, in city, in wilderness, in desert

solitudes, yet hearing always that relentless warning to march--march on!

They say--do these hoary traditions--that when Titus sacked Jerusalem and

slaughtered eleven hundred thousand Jews in her streets and by-ways, the

Wandering Jew was seen always in the thickest of the fight, and that when

battle-axes gleamed in the air, he bowed his head beneath them; when

swords flashed their deadly lightnings, he sprang in their way; he bared

his breast to whizzing javelins, to hissing arrows, to any and to every

weapon that promised death and forgetfulness, and rest.  But it was

useless--he walked forth out of the carnage without a wound.  And it is

said that five hundred years afterward he followed Mahomet when he

carried destruction to the cities of Arabia, and then turned against him,

hoping in this way to win the death of a traitor.  His calculations were

wrong again.  No quarter was given to any living creature but one, and

that was the only one of all the host that did not want it.  He sought

death five hundred years later, in the wars of the Crusades, and offered

himself to famine and pestilence at Ascalon.  He escaped again--he could

not die.  These repeated annoyances could have at last but one effect--

they shook his confidence.  Since then the Wandering Jew has carried on a

kind of desultory toying with the most promising of the aids and

implements of destruction, but with small hope, as a general thing.  He

has speculated some in cholera and railroads, and has taken almost a

lively interest in infernal machines and patent medicines.  He is old,

now, and grave, as becomes an age like his; he indulges in no light

amusements save that he goes sometimes to executions, and is fond of

funerals.



There is one thing he can not avoid; go where he will about the world, he

must never fail to report in Jerusalem every fiftieth year.  Only a year

or two ago he was here for the thirty-seventh time since Jesus was

crucified on Calvary.  They say that many old people, who are here now,

saw him then, and had seen him before.  He looks always the same--old,

and withered, and hollow-eyed, and listless, save that there is about him

something which seems to suggest that he is looking for some one,

expecting some one--the friends of his youth, perhaps.  But the most of

them are dead, now.  He always pokes about the old streets looking

lonesome, making his mark on a wall here and there, and eyeing the oldest

buildings with a sort of friendly half interest; and he sheds a few tears

at the threshold of his ancient dwelling, and bitter, bitter tears they

are.  Then he collects his rent and leaves again.  He has been seen

standing near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on many a starlight night,

for he has cherished an idea for many centuries that if he could only

enter there, he could rest.  But when he approaches, the doors slam to

with a crash, the earth trembles, and all the lights in Jerusalem burn a

ghastly blue!  He does this every fifty years, just the same.  It is

hopeless, but then it is hard to break habits one has been eighteen

hundred years accustomed to.  The old tourist is far away on his

wanderings, now.  How he must smile to see a pack of blockheads like us,

galloping about the world, and looking wise, and imagining we are finding

out a good deal about it!  He must have a consuming contempt for the

ignorant, complacent asses that go skurrying about the world in these

railroading days and call it traveling.



When the guide pointed out where the Wandering Jew had left his familiar

mark upon a wall, I was filled with astonishment.  It read:



                         "S. T.--1860--X."



All I have revealed about the Wandering Jew can be amply proven by

reference to our guide.



The mighty Mosque of Omar, and the paved court around it, occupy a fourth

part of Jerusalem.  They are upon Mount Moriah, where King Solomon's

Temple stood.  This Mosque is the holiest place the Mohammedan knows,

outside of Mecca.  Up to within a year or two past, no Christian could

gain admission to it or its court for love or money.  But the prohibition

has been removed, and we entered freely for bucksheesh.



I need not speak of the wonderful beauty and the exquisite grace and

symmetry that have made this Mosque so celebrated--because I did not see

them.  One can not see such things at an instant glance--one frequently

only finds out how really beautiful a really beautiful woman is after

considerable acquaintance with her; and the rule applies to Niagara

Falls, to majestic mountains and to mosques--especially to mosques.



The great feature of the Mosque of Omar is the prodigious rock in the

centre of its rotunda.  It was upon this rock that Abraham came so near

offering up his son Isaac--this, at least, is authentic--it is very much

more to be relied on than most of the traditions, at any rate.  On this

rock, also, the angel stood and threatened Jerusalem, and David persuaded

him to spare the city.  Mahomet was well acquainted with this stone.

From it he ascended to heaven.  The stone tried to follow him, and if the

angel Gabriel had not happened by the merest good luck to be there to

seize it, it would have done it.  Very few people have a grip like

Gabriel--the prints of his monstrous fingers, two inches deep, are to be

seen in that rock to-day.



This rock, large as it is, is suspended in the air.  It does not touch

any thing at all.  The guide said so.  This is very wonderful.  In the

place on it where Mahomet stood, he left his foot-prints in the solid

stone.  I should judge that he wore about eighteens.  But what I was

going to say, when I spoke of the rock being suspended, was, that in the

floor of the cavern under it they showed us a slab which they said

covered a hole which was a thing of extraordinary interest to all

Mohammedans, because that hole leads down to perdition, and every soul

that is transferred from thence to Heaven must pass up through this

orifice.  Mahomet stands there and lifts them out by the hair.  All

Mohammedans shave their heads, but they are careful to leave a lock of

hair for the Prophet to take hold of.  Our guide observed that a good

Mohammedan would consider himself doomed to stay with the damned forever

if he were to lose his scalp-lock and die before it grew again.  The most

of them that I have seen ought to stay with the damned, any how, without

reference to how they were barbered.



For several ages no woman has been allowed to enter the cavern where that

important hole is.  The reason is that one of the sex was once caught

there blabbing every thing she knew about what was going on above ground,

to the rapscallions in the infernal regions down below.  She carried her

gossiping to such an extreme that nothing could be kept private--nothing

could be done or said on earth but every body in perdition knew all about

it before the sun went down.  It was about time to suppress this woman's

telegraph, and it was promptly done.  Her breath subsided about the same

time.



The inside of the great mosque is very showy with variegated marble walls

and with windows and inscriptions of elaborate mosaic.  The Turks have

their sacred relics, like the Catholics.  The guide showed us the

veritable armor worn by the great son-in-law and successor of Mahomet,

and also the buckler of Mahomet's uncle.  The great iron railing which

surrounds the rock was ornamented in one place with a thousand rags tied

to its open work.  These are to remind Mahomet not to forget the

worshipers who placed them there.  It is considered the next best thing

to tying threads around his finger by way of reminders.



Just outside the mosque is a miniature temple, which marks the spot where

David and Goliah used to sit and judge the people.--[A pilgrim informs

me that it was not David and Goliah, but David and Saul.  I stick to my

own statement--the guide told me, and he ought to know.]



Every where about the Mosque of Omar are portions of pillars, curiously

wrought altars, and fragments of elegantly carved marble--precious

remains of Solomon's Temple.  These have been dug from all depths in the

soil and rubbish of Mount Moriah, and the Moslems have always shown a

disposition to preserve them with the utmost care.  At that portion of

the ancient wall of Solomon's Temple which is called the Jew's Place of

Wailing, and where the Hebrews assemble every Friday to kiss the

venerated stones and weep over the fallen greatness of Zion, any one can

see a part of the unquestioned and undisputed Temple of Solomon, the same

consisting of three or four stones lying one upon the other, each of

which is about twice as long as a seven-octave piano, and about as thick

as such a piano is high.  But, as I have remarked before, it is only a

year or two ago that the ancient edict prohibiting Christian rubbish like

ourselves to enter the Mosque of Omar and see the costly marbles that

once adorned the inner Temple was annulled.  The designs wrought upon

these fragments are all quaint and peculiar, and so the charm of novelty

is added to the deep interest they naturally inspire.  One meets with

these venerable scraps at every turn, especially in the neighboring

Mosque el Aksa, into whose inner walls a very large number of them are

carefully built for preservation.  These pieces of stone, stained and

dusty with age, dimly hint at a grandeur we have all been taught to

regard as the princeliest ever seen on earth; and they call up pictures

of a pageant that is familiar to all imaginations--camels laden with

spices and treasure--beautiful slaves, presents for Solomon's harem--a

long cavalcade of richly caparisoned beasts and warriors--and Sheba's

Queen in the van of this vision of "Oriental magnificence."  These

elegant fragments bear a richer interest than the solemn vastness of the

stones the Jews kiss in the Place of Wailing can ever have for the

heedless sinner.



Down in the hollow ground, underneath the olives and the orange-trees

that flourish in the court of the great Mosque, is a wilderness of

pillars--remains of the ancient Temple; they supported it.  There are

ponderous archways down there, also, over which the destroying "plough"

of prophecy passed harmless.  It is pleasant to know we are disappointed,

in that we never dreamed we might see portions of the actual Temple of

Solomon, and yet experience no shadow of suspicion that they were a

monkish humbug and a fraud.



We are surfeited with sights.  Nothing has any fascination for us, now,

but the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  We have been there every day, and

have not grown tired of it; but we are weary of every thing else.  The

sights are too many.  They swarm about you at every step; no single foot

of ground in all Jerusalem or within its neighborhood seems to be without

a stirring and important history of its own.  It is a very relief to

steal a walk of a hundred yards without a guide along to talk unceasingly

about every stone you step upon and drag you back ages and ages to the

day when it achieved celebrity.



It seems hardly real when I find myself leaning for a moment on a ruined

wall and looking listlessly down into the historic pool of Bethesda.  I

did not think such things could be so crowded together as to diminish

their interest.  But in serious truth, we have been drifting about, for

several days, using our eyes and our ears more from a sense of duty than

any higher and worthier reason.  And too often we have been glad when it

was time to go home and be distressed no more about illustrious

localities.



Our pilgrims compress too much into one day.  One can gorge sights to

repletion as well as sweetmeats.  Since we breakfasted, this morning, we

have seen enough to have furnished us food for a year's reflection if we

could have seen the various objects in comfort and looked upon them

deliberately.  We visited the pool of Hezekiah, where David saw Uriah's

wife coming from the bath and fell in love with her.



We went out of the city by the Jaffa gate, and of course were told many

things about its Tower of Hippicus.



We rode across the Valley of Hinnom, between two of the Pools of Gihon,

and by an aqueduct built by Solomon, which still conveys water to the

city.  We ascended the Hill of Evil Counsel, where Judas received his

thirty pieces of silver, and we also lingered a moment under the tree a

venerable tradition says he hanged himself on.



We descended to the canon again, and then the guide began to give name

and history to every bank and boulder we came to: "This was the Field of

Blood; these cuttings in the rocks were shrines and temples of Moloch;

here they sacrificed children; yonder is the Zion Gate; the Tyropean

Valley, the Hill of Ophel; here is the junction of the Valley of

Jehoshaphat--on your right is the Well of Job."  We turned up

Jehoshaphat.  The recital went on.  "This is the Mount of Olives; this is

the Hill of Offense; the nest of huts is the Village of Siloam; here,

yonder, every where, is the King's Garden; under this great tree

Zacharias, the high priest, was murdered; yonder is Mount Moriah and the

Temple wall; the tomb of Absalom; the tomb of St. James; the tomb of

Zacharias; beyond, are the Garden of Gethsemane and the tomb of the

Virgin Mary; here is the Pool of Siloam, and----"



We said we would dismount, and quench our thirst, and rest.  We were

burning up with the heat.  We were failing under the accumulated fatigue

of days and days of ceaseless marching.  All were willing.



The Pool is a deep, walled ditch, through which a clear stream of water

runs, that comes from under Jerusalem somewhere, and passing through the

Fountain of the Virgin, or being supplied from it, reaches this place by

way of a tunnel of heavy masonry.  The famous pool looked exactly as it

looked in Solomon's time, no doubt, and the same dusky, Oriental women,

came down in their old Oriental way, and carried off jars of the water on

their heads, just as they did three thousand years ago, and just as they

will do fifty thousand years hence if any of them are still left on

earth.



We went away from there and stopped at the Fountain of the Virgin.  But

the water was not good, and there was no comfort or peace any where, on

account of the regiment of boys and girls and beggars that persecuted us

all the time for bucksheesh.  The guide wanted us to give them some

money, and we did it; but when he went on to say that they were starving

to death we could not but feel that we had done a great sin in throwing

obstacles in the way of such a desirable consummation, and so we tried to

collect it back, but it could not be done.



We entered the Garden of Gethsemane, and we visited the Tomb of the

Virgin, both of which we had seen before.  It is not meet that I should

speak of them now.  A more fitting time will come.



I can not speak now of the Mount of Olives or its view of Jerusalem, the

Dead Sea and the mountains of Moab; nor of the Damascus Gate or the tree

that was planted by King Godfrey of Jerusalem.  One ought to feel

pleasantly when he talks of these things.  I can not say any thing about

the stone column that projects over Jehoshaphat from the Temple wall like

a cannon, except that the Moslems believe Mahomet will sit astride of it

when he comes to judge the world.  It is a pity he could not judge it

from some roost of his own in Mecca, without trespassing on our holy

ground.  Close by is the Golden Gate, in the Temple wall--a gate that was

an elegant piece of sculpture in the time of the Temple, and is even so

yet.  From it, in ancient times, the Jewish High Priest turned loose the

scapegoat and let him flee to the wilderness and bear away his twelve-

month load of the sins of the people.  If they were to turn one loose

now, he would not get as far as the Garden of Gethsemane, till these

miserable vagabonds here would gobble him up,--[Favorite pilgrim

expression.]--sins and all.  They wouldn't care.  Mutton-chops and sin is

good enough living for them.  The Moslems watch the Golden Gate with a

jealous eye, and an anxious one, for they have an honored tradition that

when it falls, Islamism will fall and with it the Ottoman Empire.  It did

not grieve me any to notice that the old gate was getting a little shaky.



We are at home again.  We are exhausted.  The sun has roasted us, almost.

We have full comfort in one reflection, however.  Our experiences in

Europe have taught us that in time this fatigue will be forgotten; the

heat will be forgotten; the thirst, the tiresome volubility of the guide,

the persecutions of the beggars--and then, all that will be left will be

pleasant memories of Jerusalem, memories we shall call up with always

increasing interest as the years go by, memories which some day will

become all beautiful when the last annoyance that incumbers them shall

have faded out of our minds never again to return.  School-boy days are

no happier than the days of after life, but we look back upon them

regretfully because we have forgotten our punishments at school, and how

we grieved when our marbles were lost and our kites destroyed--because we

have forgotten all the sorrows and privations of that canonized epoch and

remember only its orchard robberies, its wooden sword pageants and its

fishing holydays.  We are satisfied.  We can wait.  Our reward will come.

To us, Jerusalem and to-day's experiences will be an enchanted memory a

year hence--memory which money could not buy from us.









CHAPTER LV.



We cast up the account.  It footed up pretty fairly.  There was nothing

more at Jerusalem to be seen, except the traditional houses of Dives and

Lazarus of the parable, the Tombs of the Kings, and those of the Judges;

the spot where they stoned one of the disciples to death, and beheaded

another; the room and the table made celebrated by the Last Supper; the

fig-tree that Jesus withered; a number of historical places about

Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives, and fifteen or twenty others in

different portions of the city itself.



We were approaching the end.  Human nature asserted itself, now.

Overwork and consequent exhaustion began to have their natural effect.

They began to master the energies and dull the ardor of the party.

Perfectly secure now, against failing to accomplish any detail of the

pilgrimage, they felt like drawing in advance upon the holiday soon to be

placed to their credit.  They grew a little lazy.  They were late to

breakfast and sat long at dinner.  Thirty or forty pilgrims had arrived

from the ship, by the short routes, and much swapping of gossip had to be

indulged in.  And in hot afternoons, they showed a strong disposition to

lie on the cool divans in the hotel and smoke and talk about pleasant

experiences of a month or so gone by--for even thus early do episodes of

travel which were sometimes annoying, sometimes exasperating and full as

often of no consequence at all when they transpired, begin to rise above

the dead level of monotonous reminiscences and become shapely landmarks

in one's memory.  The fog-whistle, smothered among a million of trifling

sounds, is not noticed a block away, in the city, but the sailor hears it

far at sea, whither none of those thousands of trifling sounds can reach.

When one is in Rome, all the domes are alike; but when he has gone away

twelve miles, the city fades utterly from sight and leaves St. Peter's

swelling above the level plain like an anchored balloon.  When one is

traveling in Europe, the daily incidents seem all alike; but when he has

placed them all two months and two thousand miles behind him, those that

were worthy of being remembered are prominent, and those that were really

insignificant have vanished.  This disposition to smoke, and idle and

talk, was not well.  It was plain that it must not be allowed to gain

ground.  A diversion must be tried, or demoralization would ensue.  The

Jordan, Jericho and the Dead Sea were suggested.  The remainder of

Jerusalem must be left unvisited, for a little while.  The journey was

approved at once.  New life stirred in every pulse.  In the saddle--

abroad on the plains--sleeping in beds bounded only by the horizon: fancy

was at work with these things in a moment.--It was painful to note how

readily these town-bred men had taken to the free life of the camp and

the desert The nomadic instinct is a human instinct; it was born with

Adam and transmitted through the patriarchs, and after thirty centuries

of steady effort, civilization has not educated it entirely out of us

yet.  It has a charm which, once tasted, a man will yearn to taste again.

The nomadic instinct can not be educated out of an Indian at all.



The Jordan journey being approved, our dragoman was notified.



At nine in the morning the caravan was before the hotel door and we were

at breakfast.  There was a commotion about the place.  Rumors of war and

bloodshed were flying every where.  The lawless Bedouins in the Valley of

the Jordan and the deserts down by the Dead Sea were up in arms, and were

going to destroy all comers.  They had had a battle with a troop of

Turkish cavalry and defeated them; several men killed.  They had shut up

the inhabitants of a village and a Turkish garrison in an old fort near

Jericho, and were besieging them.  They had marched upon a camp of our

excursionists by the Jordan, and the pilgrims only saved their lives by

stealing away and flying to Jerusalem under whip and spur in the darkness

of the night.  Another of our parties had been fired on from an ambush

and then attacked in the open day.  Shots were fired on both sides.

Fortunately there was no bloodshed.  We spoke with the very pilgrim who

had fired one of the shots, and learned from his own lips how, in this

imminent deadly peril, only the cool courage of the pilgrims, their

strength of numbers and imposing display of war material, had saved them

from utter destruction.  It was reported that the Consul had requested

that no more of our pilgrims should go to the Jordan while this state of

things lasted; and further, that he was unwilling that any more should

go, at least without an unusually strong military guard.  Here was

trouble.  But with the horses at the door and every body aware of what

they were there for, what would you have done?  Acknowledged that you

were afraid, and backed shamefully out?  Hardly.  It would not be human

nature, where there were so many women.  You would have done as we did:

said you were not afraid of a million Bedouins--and made your will and

proposed quietly to yourself to take up an unostentatious position in the

rear of the procession.



I think we must all have determined upon the same line of tactics, for it

did seem as if we never would get to Jericho.  I had a notoriously slow

horse, but somehow I could not keep him in the rear, to save my neck.

He was forever turning up in the lead.  In such cases I trembled a

little, and got down to fix my saddle.  But it was not of any use.  The

others all got down to fix their saddles, too.  I never saw such a time

with saddles.  It was the first time any of them had got out of order in

three weeks, and now they had all broken down at once.  I tried walking,

for exercise--I had not had enough in Jerusalem searching for holy

places.  But it was a failure.  The whole mob were suffering for

exercise, and it was not fifteen minutes till they were all on foot and I

had the lead again.  It was very discouraging.



This was all after we got beyond Bethany.  We stopped at the village of

Bethany, an hour out from Jerusalem.  They showed us the tomb of Lazarus.

I had rather live in it than in any house in the town.  And they showed

us also a large "Fountain of Lazarus," and in the centre of the village

the ancient dwelling of Lazarus.  Lazarus appears to have been a man of

property.  The legends of the Sunday Schools do him great injustice; they

give one the impression that he was poor.  It is because they get him

confused with that Lazarus who had no merit but his virtue, and virtue

never has been as respectable as money.  The house of Lazarus is a three-

story edifice, of stone masonry, but the accumulated rubbish of ages has

buried all of it but the upper story.  We took candles and descended to

the dismal cell-like chambers where Jesus sat at meat with Martha and

Mary, and conversed with them about their brother.  We could not but look

upon these old dingy apartments with a more than common interest.



We had had a glimpse, from a mountain top, of the Dead Sea, lying like a

blue shield in the plain of the Jordan, and now we were marching down a

close, flaming, rugged, desolate defile, where no living creature could

enjoy life, except, perhaps, a salamander.  It was such a dreary,

repulsive, horrible solitude!  It was the "wilderness" where John

preached, with camel's hair about his loins--raiment enough--but he never

could have got his locusts and wild honey here.  We were moping along

down through this dreadful place, every man in the rear.  Our guards--two

gorgeous young Arab sheiks, with cargoes of swords, guns, pistols and

daggers on board--were loafing ahead.



"Bedouins!"



Every man shrunk up and disappeared in his clothes like a mud-turtle.

My first impulse was to dash forward and destroy the Bedouins.  My second

was to dash to the rear to see if there were any coming in that

direction.  I acted on the latter impulse.  So did all the others.  If

any Bedouins had approached us, then, from that point of the compass,

they would have paid dearly for their rashness.  We all remarked that,

afterwards.  There would have been scenes of riot and bloodshed there

that no pen could describe.  I know that, because each man told what he

would have done, individually; and such a medley of strange and unheard-

of inventions of cruelty you could not conceive of.  One man said he had

calmly made up his mind to perish where he stood, if need be, but never

yield an inch; he was going to wait, with deadly patience, till he could

count the stripes upon the first Bedouin's jacket, and then count them

and let him have it.  Another was going to sit still till the first lance

reached within an inch of his breast, and then dodge it and seize it.  I

forbear to tell what he was going to do to that Bedouin that owned it.

It makes my blood run cold to think of it.  Another was going to scalp

such Bedouins as fell to his share, and take his bald-headed sons of the

desert home with him alive for trophies.  But the wild-eyed pilgrim

rhapsodist was silent.  His orbs gleamed with a deadly light, but his

lips moved not.  Anxiety grew, and he was questioned.  If he had got a

Bedouin, what would he have done with him--shot him?  He smiled a smile

of grim contempt and shook his head.  Would he have stabbed him?  Another

shake.  Would he have quartered him--flayed him?  More shakes.  Oh!

horror what would he have done?



"Eat him!"



Such was the awful sentence that thundered from his lips.  What was

grammar to a desperado like that?  I was glad in my heart that I had been

spared these scenes of malignant carnage.  No Bedouins attacked our

terrible rear.  And none attacked the front.  The new-comers were only a

reinforcement of cadaverous Arabs, in shirts and bare legs, sent far

ahead of us to brandish rusty guns, and shout and brag, and carry on like

lunatics, and thus scare away all bands of marauding Bedouins that might

lurk about our path.  What a shame it is that armed white Christians must

travel under guard of vermin like this as a protection against the

prowling vagabonds of the desert--those sanguinary outlaws who are always

going to do something desperate, but never do it.  I may as well mention

here that on our whole trip we saw no Bedouins, and had no more use for

an Arab guard than we could have had for patent leather boots and white

kid gloves.  The Bedouins that attacked the other parties of pilgrims so

fiercely were provided for the occasion by the Arab guards of those

parties, and shipped from Jerusalem for temporary service as Bedouins.

They met together in full view of the pilgrims, after the battle, and

took lunch, divided the bucksheesh extorted in the season of danger, and

then accompanied the cavalcade home to the city!  The nuisance of an Arab

guard is one which is created by the Sheiks and the Bedouins together,

for mutual profit, it is said, and no doubt there is a good deal of truth

in it.



We visited the fountain the prophet Elisha sweetened (it is sweet yet,)

where he remained some time and was fed by the ravens.



Ancient Jericho is not very picturesque as a ruin.  When Joshua marched

around it seven times, some three thousand years ago, and blew it down

with his trumpet, he did the work so well and so completely that he

hardly left enough of the city to cast a shadow.  The curse pronounced

against the rebuilding of it, has never been removed.  One King, holding

the curse in light estimation, made the attempt, but was stricken sorely

for his presumption.  Its site will always remain unoccupied; and yet it

is one of the very best locations for a town we have seen in all

Palestine.



At two in the morning they routed us out of bed--another piece of

unwarranted cruelty--another stupid effort of our dragoman to get ahead

of a rival.  It was not two hours to the Jordan.  However, we were

dressed and under way before any one thought of looking to see what time

it was, and so we drowsed on through the chill night air and dreamed of

camp fires, warm beds, and other comfortable things.



There was no conversation.  People do not talk when they are cold, and

wretched, and sleepy.  We nodded in the saddle, at times, and woke up

with a start to find that the procession had disappeared in the gloom.

Then there was energy and attention to business until its dusky outlines

came in sight again.  Occasionally the order was passed in a low voice

down the line: "Close up--close up!  Bedouins lurk here, every where!"

What an exquisite shudder it sent shivering along one's spine!



We reached the famous river before four o'clock, and the night was so

black that we could have ridden into it without seeing it.  Some of us

were in an unhappy frame of mind.  We waited and waited for daylight, but

it did not come.  Finally we went away in the dark and slept an hour on

the ground, in the bushes, and caught cold.  It was a costly nap, on that

account, but otherwise it was a paying investment because it brought

unconsciousness of the dreary minutes and put us in a somewhat fitter

mood for a first glimpse of the sacred river.



With the first suspicion of dawn, every pilgrim took off his clothes and

waded into the dark torrent, singing:



               "On Jordan's stormy banks I stand,

               And cast a wistful eye

               To Canaan's fair and happy land,

               Where my possessions lie."



But they did not sing long.  The water was so fearfully cold that they

were obliged to stop singing and scamper out again.  Then they stood on

the bank shivering, and so chagrined and so grieved, that they merited

holiest compassion.  Because another dream, another cherished hope, had

failed.  They had promised themselves all along that they would cross the

Jordan where the Israelites crossed it when they entered Canaan from

their long pilgrimage in the desert.  They would cross where the twelve

stones were placed in memory of that great event.  While they did it they

would picture to themselves that vast army of pilgrims marching through

the cloven waters, bearing the hallowed ark of the covenant and shouting

hosannahs, and singing songs of thanksgiving and praise.  Each had

promised himself that he would be the first to cross.  They were at the

goal of their hopes at last, but the current was too swift, the water was

too cold!



It was then that Jack did them a service.  With that engaging

recklessness of consequences which is natural to youth, and so proper and

so seemly, as well, he went and led the way across the Jordan, and all

was happiness again.  Every individual waded over, then, and stood upon

the further bank.  The water was not quite breast deep, any where.  If it

had been more, we could hardly have accomplished the feat, for the strong

current would have swept us down the stream, and we would have been

exhausted and drowned before reaching a place where we could make a

landing.  The main object compassed, the drooping, miserable party sat

down to wait for the sun again, for all wanted to see the water as well

as feel it.  But it was too cold a pastime.  Some cans were filled from

the holy river, some canes cut from its banks, and then we mounted and

rode reluctantly away to keep from freezing to death.  So we saw the

Jordan very dimly.  The thickets of bushes that bordered its banks threw

their shadows across its shallow, turbulent waters ("stormy," the hymn

makes them, which is rather a complimentary stretch of fancy,) and we

could not judge of the width of the stream by the eye.  We knew by our

wading experience, however, that many streets in America are double as

wide as the Jordan.



Daylight came, soon after we got under way, and in the course of an hour

or two we reached the Dead Sea.  Nothing grows in the flat, burning

desert around it but weeds and the Dead Sea apple the poets say is

beautiful to the eye, but crumbles to ashes and dust when you break it.

Such as we found were not handsome, but they were bitter to the taste.

They yielded no dust.  It was because they were not ripe, perhaps.



The desert and the barren hills gleam painfully in the sun, around the

Dead Sea, and there is no pleasant thing or living creature upon it or

about its borders to cheer the eye.  It is a scorching, arid, repulsive

solitude.  A silence broods over the scene that is depressing to the

spirits.  It makes one think of funerals and death.



The Dead Sea is small.  Its waters are very clear, and it has a pebbly

bottom and is shallow for some distance out from the shores.  It yields

quantities of asphaltum; fragments of it lie all about its banks; this

stuff gives the place something of an unpleasant smell.



All our reading had taught us to expect that the first plunge into the

Dead Sea would be attended with distressing results--our bodies would

feel as if they were suddenly pierced by millions of red-hot needles; the

dreadful smarting would continue for hours; we might even look to be

blistered from head to foot, and suffer miserably for many days.  We were

disappointed.  Our eight sprang in at the same time that another party of

pilgrims did, and nobody screamed once.  None of them ever did complain

of any thing more than a slight pricking sensation in places where their

skin was abraded, and then only for a short time.  My face smarted for a

couple of hours, but it was partly because I got it badly sun-burned

while I was bathing, and staid in so long that it became plastered over

with salt.



No, the water did not blister us; it did not cover us with a slimy ooze

and confer upon us an atrocious fragrance; it was not very slimy; and I

could not discover that we smelt really any worse than we have always

smelt since we have been in Palestine.  It was only a different kind of

smell, but not conspicuous on that account, because we have a great deal

of variety in that respect.  We didn't smell, there on the Jordan, the

same as we do in Jerusalem; and we don't smell in Jerusalem just as we

did in Nazareth, or Tiberias, or Cesarea Philippi, or any of those other

ruinous ancient towns in Galilee.  No, we change all the time, and

generally for the worse.  We do our own washing.



It was a funny bath.  We could not sink.  One could stretch himself at

full length on his back, with his arms on his breast, and all of his body

above a line drawn from the corner of his jaw past the middle of his

side, the middle of his leg and through his ancle bone, would remain out

of water.  He could lift his head clear out, if he chose.  No position

can be retained long; you lose your balance and whirl over, first on your

back and then on your face, and so on.  You can lie comfortably, on your

back, with your head out, and your legs out from your knees down, by

steadying yourself with your hands.  You can sit, with your knees drawn

up to your chin and your arms clasped around them, but you are bound to

turn over presently, because you are top-heavy in that position.  You can

stand up straight in water that is over your head, and from the middle of

your breast upward you will not be wet.  But you can not remain so.  The

water will soon float your feet to the surface.  You can not swim on your

back and make any progress of any consequence, because your feet stick

away above the surface, and there is nothing to propel yourself with but

your heels.  If you swim on your face, you kick up the water like a

stern-wheel boat.  You make no headway.  A horse is so top-heavy that he

can neither swim nor stand up in the Dead Sea.  He turns over on his side

at once.  Some of us bathed for more than an hour, and then came out

coated with salt till we shone like icicles.  We scrubbed it off with a

coarse towel and rode off with a splendid brand-new smell, though it was

one which was not any more disagreeable than those we have been for

several weeks enjoying.  It was the variegated villainy and novelty of it

that charmed us.  Salt crystals glitter in the sun about the shores of

the lake.  In places they coat the ground like a brilliant crust of ice.



When I was a boy I somehow got the impression that the river Jordan was

four thousand miles long and thirty-five miles wide.  It is only ninety

miles long, and so crooked that a man does not know which side of it he

is on half the time.  In going ninety miles it does not get over more

than fifty miles of ground.  It is not any wider than Broadway in New

York.



There is the Sea of Galilee and this Dead Sea--neither of them twenty

miles long or thirteen wide.  And yet when I was in Sunday School I

thought they were sixty thousand miles in diameter.



Travel and experience mar the grandest pictures and rob us of the most

cherished traditions of our boyhood.  Well, let them go.  I have already

seen the Empire of King Solomon diminish to the size of the State of

Pennsylvania; I suppose I can bear the reduction of the seas and the

river.



We looked every where, as we passed along, but never saw grain or crystal

of Lot's wife.  It was a great disappointment.  For many and many a year

we had known her sad story, and taken that interest in her which

misfortune always inspires.  But she was gone.  Her picturesque form no

longer looms above the desert of the Dead Sea to remind the tourist of

the doom that fell upon the lost cities.



I can not describe the hideous afternoon's ride from the Dead Sea to Mars

Saba.  It oppresses me yet, to think of it.  The sun so pelted us that

the tears ran down our cheeks once or twice.  The ghastly, treeless,

grassless, breathless canons smothered us as if we had been in an oven.

The sun had positive weight to it, I think.  Not a man could sit erect

under it.  All drooped low in the saddles.  John preached in this

"Wilderness!"  It must have been exhausting work.  What a very heaven the

messy towers and ramparts of vast Mars Saba looked to us when we caught a

first glimpse of them!



We staid at this great convent all night, guests of the hospitable

priests.  Mars Saba, perched upon a crag, a human nest stock high up

against a perpendicular mountain wall, is a world of grand masonry that

rises, terrace upon terrace away above your head, like the terraced and

retreating colonnades one sees in fanciful pictures of Belshazzar's Feast

and the palaces of the ancient Pharaohs.  No other human dwelling is

near.  It was founded many ages ago by a holy recluse who lived at first

in a cave in the rock--a cave which is inclosed in the convent walls,

now, and was reverently shown to us by the priests.  This recluse, by his

rigorous torturing of his flesh, his diet of bread and water, his utter

withdrawal from all society and from the vanities of the world, and his

constant prayer and saintly contemplation of a skull, inspired an

emulation that brought about him many disciples.  The precipice on the

opposite side of the canyon is well perforated with the small holes they

dug in the rock to live in.  The present occupants of Mars Saba, about

seventy in number, are all hermits.  They wear a coarse robe, an ugly,

brimless stove-pipe of a hat, and go without shoes.  They eat nothing

whatever but bread and salt; they drink nothing but water.  As long as

they live they can never go outside the walls, or look upon a woman--for

no woman is permitted to enter Mars Saba, upon any pretext whatsoever.



Some of those men have been shut up there for thirty years.  In all that

dreary time they have not heard the laughter of a child or the blessed

voice of a woman; they have seen no human tears, no human smiles; they

have known no human joys, no wholesome human sorrows.  In their hearts

are no memories of the past, in their brains no dreams of the future.

All that is lovable, beautiful, worthy, they have put far away from them;

against all things that are pleasant to look upon, and all sounds that

are music to the ear, they have barred their massive doors and reared

their relentless walls of stone forever.  They have banished the tender

grace of life and left only the sapped and skinny mockery.  Their lips

are lips that never kiss and never sing; their hearts are hearts that

never hate and never love; their breasts are breasts that never swell

with the sentiment, "I have a country and a flag."  They are dead men who

walk.



I set down these first thoughts because they are natural--not because

they are just or because it is right to set them down.  It is easy for

book-makers to say "I thought so and so as I looked upon such and such a

scene"--when the truth is, they thought all those fine things afterwards.

One's first thought is not likely to be strictly accurate, yet it is no

crime to think it and none to write it down, subject to modification by

later experience.  These hermits are dead men, in several respects, but

not in all; and it is not proper, that, thinking ill of them at first, I

should go on doing so, or, speaking ill of them I should reiterate the

words and stick to them.  No, they treated us too kindly for that.  There

is something human about them somewhere.  They knew we were foreigners

and Protestants, and not likely to feel admiration or much friendliness

toward them.  But their large charity was above considering such things.

They simply saw in us men who were hungry, and thirsty, and tired, and

that was sufficient.  They opened their doors and gave us welcome.  They

asked no questions, and they made no self-righteous display of their

hospitality.  They fished for no compliments.  They moved quietly about,

setting the table for us, making the beds, and bringing water to wash in,

and paid no heed when we said it was wrong for them to do that when we

had men whose business it was to perform such offices.  We fared most

comfortably, and sat late at dinner.  We walked all over the building

with the hermits afterward, and then sat on the lofty battlements and

smoked while we enjoyed the cool air, the wild scenery and the sunset.

One or two chose cosy bed-rooms to sleep in, but the nomadic instinct

prompted the rest to sleep on the broad divan that extended around the

great hall, because it seemed like sleeping out of doors, and so was more

cheery and inviting.  It was a royal rest we had.



When we got up to breakfast in the morning, we were new men.  For all

this hospitality no strict charge was made.  We could give something if

we chose; we need give nothing, if we were poor or if we were stingy.

The pauper and the miser are as free as any in the Catholic Convents of

Palestine.  I have been educated to enmity toward every thing that is

Catholic, and sometimes, in consequence of this, I find it much easier to

discover Catholic faults than Catholic merits.  But there is one thing I

feel no disposition to overlook, and no disposition to forget: and that

is, the honest gratitude I and all pilgrims owe, to the Convent Fathers

in Palestine.  Their doors are always open, and there is always a welcome

for any worthy man who comes, whether he comes in rags or clad in purple.

The Catholic Convents are a priceless blessing to the poor.  A pilgrim

without money, whether he be a Protestant or a Catholic, can travel the

length and breadth of Palestine, and in the midst of her desert wastes

find wholesome food and a clean bed every night, in these buildings.

Pilgrims in better circumstances are often stricken down by the sun and

the fevers of the country, and then their saving refuge is the Convent.

Without these hospitable retreats, travel in Palestine would be a

pleasure which none but the strongest men could dare to undertake.  Our

party, pilgrims and all, will always be ready and always willing, to

touch glasses and drink health, prosperity and long life to the Convent

Fathers of Palestine.



So, rested and refreshed, we fell into line and filed away over the

barren mountains of Judea, and along rocky ridges and through sterile

gorges, where eternal silence and solitude reigned.  Even the scattering

groups of armed shepherds we met the afternoon before, tending their

flocks of long-haired goats, were wanting here.  We saw but two living

creatures.  They were gazelles, of "soft-eyed" notoriety.  They looked

like very young kids, but they annihilated distance like an express

train.  I have not seen animals that moved faster, unless I might say it

of the antelopes of our own great plains.



At nine or ten in the morning we reached the Plain of the Shepherds, and

stood in a walled garden of olives where the shepherds were watching

their flocks by night, eighteen centuries ago, when the multitude of

angels brought them the tidings that the Saviour was born.  A quarter of

a mile away was Bethlehem of Judea, and the pilgrims took some of the

stone wall and hurried on.



The Plain of the Shepherds is a desert, paved with loose stones, void of

vegetation, glaring in the fierce sun.  Only the music of the angels it

knew once could charm its shrubs and flowers to life again and restore

its vanished beauty.  No less potent enchantment could avail to work this

miracle.



In the huge Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem, built fifteen hundred

years ago by the inveterate St. Helena, they took us below ground, and

into a grotto cut in the living rock.  This was the "manger" where Christ

was born.  A silver star set in the floor bears a Latin inscription to

that effect.  It is polished with the kisses of many generations of

worshiping pilgrims.  The grotto was tricked out in the usual tasteless

style observable in all the holy places of Palestine.  As in the Church

of the Holy Sepulchre, envy and uncharitableness were apparent here.  The

priests and the members of the Greek and Latin churches can not come by

the same corridor to kneel in the sacred birthplace of the Redeemer, but

are compelled to approach and retire by different avenues, lest they

quarrel and fight on this holiest ground on earth.



I have no "meditations," suggested by this spot where the very first

"Merry Christmas!" was uttered in all the world, and from whence the

friend of my childhood, Santa Claus, departed on his first journey, to

gladden and continue to gladden roaring firesides on wintry mornings in

many a distant land forever and forever.  I touch, with reverent finger,

the actual spot where the infant Jesus lay, but I think--nothing.



You can not think in this place any more than you can in any other in

Palestine that would be likely to inspire reflection.  Beggars, cripples

and monks compass you about, and make you think only of bucksheesh when

you would rather think of something more in keeping with the character of

the spot.



I was glad to get away, and glad when we had walked through the grottoes

where Eusebius wrote, and Jerome fasted, and Joseph prepared for the

flight into Egypt, and the dozen other distinguished grottoes, and knew

we were done.  The Church of the Nativity is almost as well packed with

exceeding holy places as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself.  They

even have in it a grotto wherein twenty thousand children were

slaughtered by Herod when he was seeking the life of the infant Saviour.



We went to the Milk Grotto, of course--a cavern where Mary hid herself

for a while before the flight into Egypt.  Its walls were black before

she entered, but in suckling the Child, a drop of her milk fell upon the

floor and instantly changed the darkness of the walls to its own snowy

hue.  We took many little fragments of stone from here, because it is

well known in all the East that a barren woman hath need only to touch

her lips to one of these and her failing will depart from her.  We took

many specimens, to the end that we might confer happiness upon certain

households that we wot of.



We got away from Bethlehem and its troops of beggars and relic-peddlers

in the afternoon, and after spending some little time at Rachel's tomb,

hurried to Jerusalem as fast as possible.  I never was so glad to get

home again before.  I never have enjoyed rest as I have enjoyed it during

these last few hours.  The journey to the Dead Sea, the Jordan and

Bethlehem was short, but it was an exhausting one.  Such roasting heat,

such oppressive solitude, and such dismal desolation can not surely exist

elsewhere on earth.  And such fatigue!



The commonest sagacity warns me that I ought to tell the customary

pleasant lie, and say I tore myself reluctantly away from every noted

place in Palestine.  Every body tells that, but with as little

ostentation as I may, I doubt the word of every he who tells it.  I could

take a dreadful oath that I have never heard any one of our forty

pilgrims say any thing of the sort, and they are as worthy and as

sincerely devout as any that come here.  They will say it when they get

home, fast enough, but why should they not?  They do not wish to array

themselves against all the Lamartines and Grimeses in the world.  It does

not stand to reason that men are reluctant to leave places where the very

life is almost badgered out of them by importunate swarms of beggars and

peddlers who hang in strings to one's sleeves and coat-tails and shriek

and shout in his ears and horrify his vision with the ghastly sores and

malformations they exhibit.  One is glad to get away.  I have heard

shameless people say they were glad to get away from Ladies' Festivals

where they were importuned to buy by bevies of lovely young ladies.

Transform those houris into dusky hags and ragged savages, and replace

their rounded forms with shrunken and knotted distortions, their soft

hands with scarred and hideous deformities, and the persuasive music of

their voices with the discordant din of a hated language, and then see

how much lingering reluctance to leave could be mustered.  No, it is the

neat thing to say you were reluctant, and then append the profound

thoughts that "struggled for utterance," in your brain; but it is the

true thing to say you were not reluctant, and found it impossible to

think at all--though in good sooth it is not respectable to say it, and

not poetical, either.



We do not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when

the glare, and the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we

revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom

pageants of an age that has passed away.









CHAPTER LVI.



We visited all the holy places about Jerusalem which we had left

unvisited when we journeyed to the Jordan and then, about three o'clock

one afternoon, we fell into procession and marched out at the stately

Damascus gate, and the walls of Jerusalem shut us out forever.  We paused

on the summit of a distant hill and took a final look and made a final

farewell to the venerable city which had been such a good home to us.



For about four hours we traveled down hill constantly.  We followed a

narrow bridle-path which traversed the beds of the mountain gorges, and

when we could we got out of the way of the long trains of laden camels

and asses, and when we could not we suffered the misery of being mashed

up against perpendicular walls of rock and having our legs bruised by the

passing freight.  Jack was caught two or three times, and Dan and Moult

as often.  One horse had a heavy fall on the slippery rocks, and the

others had narrow escapes.  However, this was as good a road as we had

found in Palestine, and possibly even the best, and so there was not much

grumbling.



Sometimes, in the glens, we came upon luxuriant orchards of figs,

apricots, pomegranates, and such things, but oftener the scenery was

rugged, mountainous, verdureless and forbidding.  Here and there, towers

were perched high up on acclivities which seemed almost inaccessible.

This fashion is as old as Palestine itself and was adopted in ancient

times for security against enemies.



We crossed the brook which furnished David the stone that killed Goliah,

and no doubt we looked upon the very ground whereon that noted battle was

fought.  We passed by a picturesque old gothic ruin whose stone pavements

had rung to the armed heels of many a valorous Crusader, and we rode

through a piece of country which we were told once knew Samson as a

citizen.



We staid all night with the good monks at the convent of Ramleh, and in

the morning got up and galloped the horses a good part of the distance

from there to Jaffa, or Joppa, for the plain was as level as a floor and

free from stones, and besides this was our last march in Holy Land.

These two or three hours finished, we and the tired horses could have

rest and sleep as long as we wanted it.  This was the plain of which

Joshua spoke when he said, "Sun, stand thou still on Gibeon, and thou

moon in the valley of Ajalon."  As we drew near to Jaffa, the boys

spurred up the horses and indulged in the excitement of an actual race--

an experience we had hardly had since we raced on donkeys in the Azores

islands.



We came finally to the noble grove of orange-trees in which the Oriental

city of Jaffa lies buried; we passed through the walls, and rode again

down narrow streets and among swarms of animated rags, and saw other

sights and had other experiences we had long been familiar with.  We

dismounted, for the last time, and out in the offing, riding at anchor,

we saw the ship!  I put an exclamation point there because we felt one

when we saw the vessel.  The long pilgrimage was ended, and somehow we

seemed to feel glad of it.



[For description of Jaffa, see Universal Gazetteer.] Simon the Tanner

formerly lived here.  We went to his house.  All the pilgrims visit Simon

the Tanner's house.  Peter saw the vision of the beasts let down in a

sheet when he lay upon the roof of Simon the Tanner's house.  It was from

Jaffa that Jonah sailed when he was told to go and prophesy against

Nineveh, and no doubt it was not far from the town that the whale threw

him up when he discovered that he had no ticket.  Jonah was disobedient,

and of a fault-finding, complaining disposition, and deserves to be

lightly spoken of, almost.  The timbers used in the construction of

Solomon's Temple were floated to Jaffa in rafts, and the narrow opening

in the reef through which they passed to the shore is not an inch wider

or a shade less dangerous to navigate than it was then.  Such is the

sleepy nature of the population Palestine's only good seaport has now and

always had.  Jaffa has a history and a stirring one.  It will not be

discovered any where in this book.  If the reader will call at the

circulating library and mention my name, he will be furnished with books

which will afford him the fullest information concerning Jaffa.



So ends the pilgrimage.  We ought to be glad that we did not make it for

the purpose of feasting our eyes upon fascinating aspects of nature, for

we should have been disappointed--at least at this season of the year.  A

writer in "Life in the Holy Land" observes:



     "Monotonous and uninviting as much of the Holy Land will appear to

     persons accustomed to the almost constant verdure of flowers, ample

     streams and varied surface of our own country, we must remember that

     its aspect to the Israelites after the weary march of forty years

     through the desert must have been very different."



Which all of us will freely grant.  But it truly is "monotonous and

uninviting," and there is no sufficient reason for describing it as being

otherwise.



Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be

the prince.  The hills are barren, they are dull of color, they are

unpicturesque in shape.  The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a

feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and

despondent.  The Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee sleep in the midst of a

vast stretch of hill and plain wherein the eye rests upon no pleasant

tint, no striking object, no soft picture dreaming in a purple haze or

mottled with the shadows of the clouds.  Every outline is harsh, every

feature is distinct, there is no perspective--distance works no

enchantment here.  It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.



Small shreds and patches of it must be very beautiful in the full flush

of spring, however, and all the more beautiful by contrast with the far-

reaching desolation that surrounds them on every side.  I would like much

to see the fringes of the Jordan in spring-time, and Shechem, Esdraelon,

Ajalon and the borders of Galilee--but even then these spots would seem

mere toy gardens set at wide intervals in the waste of a limitless

desolation.



Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.  Over it broods the spell of a

curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.  Where

Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers, that solemn sea now

floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing exists--over

whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs motionless and dead--

about whose borders nothing grows but weeds, and scattering tufts of

cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises refreshment to parching

lips, but turns to ashes at the touch.  Nazareth is forlorn; about that

ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the Promised Land with

songs of rejoicing, one finds only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins

of the desert; Jericho the accursed, lies a moldering ruin, to-day, even

as Joshua's miracle left it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem

and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about

them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor of the

Saviour's presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their

flocks by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, good will to

men, is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature

that is pleasant to the eye.  Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest

name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is become a

pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer there to compel the

admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the wonderful temple which was

the pride and the glory of Israel, is gone, and the Ottoman crescent is

lifted above the spot where, on that most memorable day in the annals of

the world, they reared the Holy Cross.  The noted Sea of Galilee, where

Roman fleets once rode at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed

in their ships, was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and

commerce, and its borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a

shapeless ruin; Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and

Chorazin have vanished from the earth, and the "desert places" round

about them where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour's voice

and ate the miraculous bread, sleep in the hush of a solitude that is

inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.



Palestine is desolate and unlovely.  And why should it be otherwise?  Can

the curse of the Deity beautify a land?



Palestine is no more of this work-day world.  It is sacred to poetry and

tradition--it is dream-land.









CHAPTER LVII.



It was worth a kingdom to be at sea again.  It was a relief to drop all

anxiety whatsoever--all questions as to where we should go; how long we

should stay; whether it were worth while to go or not; all anxieties

about the condition of the horses; all such questions as "Shall we ever

get to water?"  "Shall we ever lunch?"  "Ferguson, how many more million

miles have we got to creep under this awful sun before we camp?"  It was

a relief to cast all these torturing little anxieties far away--ropes of

steel they were, and every one with a separate and distinct strain on it

--and feel the temporary contentment that is born of the banishment of

all care and responsibility.  We did not look at the compass: we did not

care, now, where the ship went to, so that she went out of sight of land

as quickly as possible.  When I travel again, I wish to go in a pleasure

ship.  No amount of money could have purchased for us, in a strange

vessel and among unfamiliar faces, the perfect satisfaction and the sense

of being at home again which we experienced when we stepped on board the

"Quaker City,"--our own ship--after this wearisome pilgrimage.  It is a

something we have felt always when we returned to her, and a something we

had no desire to sell.



We took off our blue woollen shirts, our spurs, and heavy boots, our

sanguinary revolvers and our buckskin-seated pantaloons, and got shaved

and came out in Christian costume once more.  All but Jack, who changed

all other articles of his dress, but clung to his traveling pantaloons.

They still preserved their ample buckskin seat intact; and so his short

pea jacket and his long, thin legs assisted to make him a picturesque

object whenever he stood on the forecastle looking abroad upon the ocean

over the bows.  At such times his father's last injunction suggested

itself to me.  He said:



"Jack, my boy, you are about to go among a brilliant company of gentlemen

and ladies, who are refined and cultivated, and thoroughly accomplished

in the manners and customs of good society.  Listen to their

conversation, study their habits of life, and learn.  Be polite and

obliging to all, and considerate towards every one's opinions, failings

and prejudices.  Command the just respect of all your fellow-voyagers,

even though you fail to win their friendly regard.  And Jack--don't you

ever dare, while you live, appear in public on those decks in fair

weather, in a costume unbecoming your mother's drawing-room!"



It would have been worth any price if the father of this hopeful youth

could have stepped on board some time, and seen him standing high on the

fore-castle, pea jacket, tasseled red fez, buckskin patch and all,

placidly contemplating the ocean--a rare spectacle for any body's

drawing-room.



After a pleasant voyage and a good rest, we drew near to Egypt and out of

the mellowest of sunsets we saw the domes and minarets of Alexandria rise

into view.  As soon as the anchor was down, Jack and I got a boat and

went ashore.  It was night by this time, and the other passengers were

content to remain at home and visit ancient Egypt after breakfast.  It

was the way they did at Constantinople.  They took a lively interest in

new countries, but their school-boy impatience had worn off, and they had

learned that it was wisdom to take things easy and go along comfortably--

these old countries do not go away in the night; they stay till after

breakfast.



When we reached the pier we found an army of Egyptian boys with donkeys

no larger than themselves, waiting for passengers--for donkeys are the

omnibuses of Egypt.  We preferred to walk, but we could not have our own

way.  The boys crowded about us, clamored around us, and slewed their

donkeys exactly across our path, no matter which way we turned.  They

were good-natured rascals, and so were the donkeys.  We mounted, and the

boys ran behind us and kept the donkeys in a furious gallop, as is the

fashion at Damascus.  I believe I would rather ride a donkey than any

beast in the world.  He goes briskly, he puts on no airs, he is docile,

though opinionated.  Satan himself could not scare him, and he is

convenient--very convenient.  When you are tired riding you can rest your

feet on the ground and let him gallop from under you.



We found the hotel and secured rooms, and were happy to know that the

Prince of Wales had stopped there once.  They had it every where on

signs.  No other princes had stopped there since, till Jack and I came.

We went abroad through the town, then, and found it a city of huge

commercial buildings, and broad, handsome streets brilliant with gas-

light.  By night it was a sort of reminiscence of Paris.  But finally

Jack found an ice-cream saloon, and that closed investigations for that

evening.  The weather was very hot, it had been many a day since Jack had

seen ice-cream, and so it was useless to talk of leaving the saloon till

it shut up.



In the morning the lost tribes of America came ashore and infested the

hotels and took possession of all the donkeys and other open barouches

that offered.  They went in picturesque procession to the American

Consul's; to the great gardens; to Cleopatra's Needles; to Pompey's

Pillar; to the palace of the Viceroy of Egypt; to the Nile; to the superb

groves of date-palms.  One of our most inveterate relic-hunters had his

hammer with him, and tried to break a fragment off the upright Needle and

could not do it; he tried the prostrate one and failed; he borrowed a

heavy sledge hammer from a mason and tried again.  He tried Pompey's

Pillar, and this baffled him.  Scattered all about the mighty monolith

were sphinxes of noble countenance, carved out of Egyptian granite as

hard as blue steel, and whose shapely features the wear of five thousand

years had failed to mark or mar.  The relic-hunter battered at these

persistently, and sweated profusely over his work.  He might as well have

attempted to deface the moon.  They regarded him serenely with the

stately smile they had worn so long, and which seemed to say, "Peck away,

poor insect; we were not made to fear such as you; in ten-score dragging

ages we have seen more of your kind than there are sands at your feet:

have they left a blemish upon us?"



But I am forgetting the Jaffa Colonists.  At Jaffa we had taken on board

some forty members of a very celebrated community.  They were male and

female; babies, young boys and young girls; young married people, and

some who had passed a shade beyond the prime of life.  I refer to the

"Adams Jaffa Colony."  Others had deserted before.  We left in Jaffa Mr.

Adams, his wife, and fifteen unfortunates who not only had no money but

did not know where to turn or whither to go.  Such was the statement made

to us.  Our forty were miserable enough in the first place, and they lay

about the decks seasick all the voyage, which about completed their

misery, I take it.  However, one or two young men remained upright, and

by constant persecution we wormed out of them some little information.

They gave it reluctantly and in a very fragmentary condition, for, having

been shamefully humbugged by their prophet, they felt humiliated and

unhappy.  In such circumstances people do not like to talk.



The colony was a complete fiasco.  I have already said that such as could

get away did so, from time to time.  The prophet Adams--once an actor,

then several other things, afterward a Mormon and a missionary, always an

adventurer--remains at Jaffa with his handful of sorrowful subjects.  The

forty we brought away with us were chiefly destitute, though not all of

them.  They wished to get to Egypt.  What might become of them then they

did not know and probably did not care--any thing to get away from hated

Jaffa.  They had little to hope for.  Because after many appeals to the

sympathies of New England, made by strangers of Boston, through the

newspapers, and after the establishment of an office there for the

reception of moneyed contributions for the Jaffa colonists, One Dollar

was subscribed.  The consul-general for Egypt showed me the newspaper

paragraph which mentioned the circumstance and mentioned also the

discontinuance of the effort and the closing of the office.  It was

evident that practical New England was not sorry to be rid of such

visionaries and was not in the least inclined to hire any body to bring

them back to her.  Still, to get to Egypt, was something, in the eyes of

the unfortunate colonists, hopeless as the prospect seemed of ever

getting further.



Thus circumstanced, they landed at Alexandria from our ship.  One of our

passengers, Mr. Moses S. Beach, of the New York Sun, inquired of the

consul-general what it would cost to send these people to their home in

Maine by the way of Liverpool, and he said fifteen hundred dollars in

gold would do it.  Mr. Beach gave his check for the money and so the

troubles of the Jaffa colonists were at an end.--[It was an unselfish

act of benevolence; it was done without any ostentation, and has never

been mentioned in any newspaper, I think.  Therefore it is refreshing to

learn now, several months after the above narrative was written, that

another man received all the credit of this rescue of the colonists.

Such is life.]



Alexandria was too much like a European city to be novel, and we soon

tired of it.  We took the cars and came up here to ancient Cairo, which

is an Oriental city and of the completest pattern.  There is little about

it to disabuse one's mind of the error if he should take it into his head

that he was in the heart of Arabia.  Stately camels and dromedaries,

swarthy Egyptians, and likewise Turks and black Ethiopians, turbaned,

sashed, and blazing in a rich variety of Oriental costumes of all shades

of flashy colors, are what one sees on every hand crowding the narrow

streets and the honeycombed bazaars.  We are stopping at Shepherd's

Hotel, which is the worst on earth except the one I stopped at once in a

small town in the United States.  It is pleasant to read this sketch in

my note-book, now, and know that I can stand Shepherd's Hotel, sure,

because I have been in one just like it in America and survived:



     I stopped at the Benton House.  It used to be a good hotel, but that

     proves nothing--I used to be a good boy, for that matter.  Both of

     us have lost character of late years.  The Benton is not a good

     hotel.  The Benton lacks a very great deal of being a good hotel.

     Perdition is full of better hotels than the Benton.



     It was late at night when I got there, and I told the clerk I would

     like plenty of lights, because I wanted to read an hour or two.

     When I reached No. 15 with the porter (we came along a dim hall that

     was clad in ancient carpeting, faded, worn out in many places, and

     patched with old scraps of oil cloth--a hall that sank under one's

     feet, and creaked dismally to every footstep,) he struck a light--

     two inches of sallow, sorrowful, consumptive tallow candle, that

     burned blue, and sputtered, and got discouraged and went out.  The

     porter lit it again, and I asked if that was all the light the clerk

     sent.  He said, "Oh no, I've got another one here," and he produced

     another couple of inches of tallow candle.  I said, "Light them both

     --I'll have to have one to see the other by."  He did it, but the

     result was drearier than darkness itself.  He was a cheery,

     accommodating rascal.  He said he would go "somewheres" and steal a

     lamp.  I abetted and encouraged him in his criminal design.  I heard

     the landlord get after him in the hall ten minutes afterward.



     "Where are you going with that lamp?"



     "Fifteen wants it, sir."



     "Fifteen!  why he's got a double lot of candles--does the man want

     to illuminate the house?--does he want to get up a torch-light

     procession?--what is he up to, any how?"



     "He don't like them candles--says he wants a lamp."



     "Why what in the nation does----why I never heard of such a thing?

     What on earth can he want with that lamp?"



     "Well, he only wants to read--that's what he says."



     "Wants to read, does he?--ain't satisfied with a thousand candles,

     but has to have a lamp!--I do wonder what the devil that fellow

     wants that lamp for?  Take him another candle, and then if----"



     "But he wants the lamp--says he'll burn the d--d old house down if

     he don't get a lamp!" (a remark which I never made.)



     "I'd like to see him at it once.  Well, you take it along--but I

     swear it beats my time, though--and see if you can't find out what

     in the very nation he wants with that lamp."



     And he went off growling to himself and still wondering and

     wondering over the unaccountable conduct of No. 15.  The lamp was a

     good one, but it revealed some disagreeable things--a bed in the

     suburbs of a desert of room--a bed that had hills and valleys in it,

     and you'd have to accommodate your body to the impression left in it

     by the man that slept there last, before you could lie comfortably;

     a carpet that had seen better days; a melancholy washstand in a

     remote corner, and a dejected pitcher on it sorrowing over a broken

     nose; a looking-glass split across the centre, which chopped your

     head off at the chin and made you look like some dreadful unfinished

     monster or other; the paper peeling in shreds from the walls.



     I sighed and said: "This is charming; and now don't you think you

     could get me something to read?"



     The porter said, "Oh, certainly; the old man's got dead loads of

     books;" and he was gone before I could tell him what sort of

     literature I would rather have.  And yet his countenance expressed

     the utmost confidence in his ability to execute the commission with

     credit to himself.  The old man made a descent on him.



     "What are you going to do with that pile of books?"



     "Fifteen wants 'em, sir."



     "Fifteen, is it?  He'll want a warming-pan, next--he'll want a

     nurse!  Take him every thing there is in the house--take him the

     bar-keeper--take him the baggage-wagon--take him a chamber-maid!

     Confound me, I never saw any thing like it.  What did he say he

     wants with those books?"



     "Wants to read 'em, like enough; it ain't likely he wants to eat

     'em, I don't reckon."



     "Wants to read 'em--wants to read 'em this time of night, the

     infernal lunatic!  Well, he can't have them."



     "But he says he's mor'ly bound to have 'em; he says he'll just go a-

     rairin' and a-chargin' through this house and raise more--well,

     there's no tellin' what he won't do if he don't get 'em; because

     he's drunk and crazy and desperate, and nothing'll soothe him down

     but them cussed books."  [I had not made any threats, and was not in

     the condition ascribed to me by the porter.]



     "Well, go on; but I will be around when he goes to rairing and

     charging, and the first rair he makes I'll make him rair out of the

     window."  And then the old gentleman went off, growling as before.



     The genius of that porter was something wonderful.  He put an armful

     of books on the bed and said "Good night" as confidently as if he

     knew perfectly well that those books were exactly my style of

     reading matter.  And well he might.  His selection covered the whole

     range of legitimate literature.  It comprised "The Great

     Consummation," by Rev. Dr. Cummings--theology; "Revised Statutes of

     the State of Missouri"--law; "The Complete Horse-Doctor"--medicine;

     "The Toilers of the Sea," by Victor Hugo--romance; "The works of

     William Shakspeare"--poetry.  I shall never cease to admire the tact

     and the intelligence of that gifted porter.



But all the donkeys in Christendom, and most of the Egyptian boys, I

think, are at the door, and there is some noise going on, not to put it

in stronger language.--We are about starting to the illustrious Pyramids

of Egypt, and the donkeys for the voyage are under inspection.  I will go

and select one before the choice animals are all taken.









CHAPTER LVIII.



The donkeys were all good, all handsome, all strong and in good

condition, all fast and all willing to prove it.  They were the best we

had found any where, and the most 'recherche'.  I do not know what

'recherche' is, but that is what these donkeys were, anyhow.  Some were

of a soft mouse-color, and the others were white, black, and vari-

colored.  Some were close-shaven, all over, except that a tuft like a

paint-brush was left on the end of the tail.  Others were so shaven in

fanciful landscape garden patterns, as to mark their bodies with curving

lines, which were bounded on one side by hair and on the other by the

close plush left by the shears.  They had all been newly barbered, and

were exceedingly stylish.  Several of the white ones were barred like

zebras with rainbow stripes of blue and red and yellow paint.  These were

indescribably gorgeous.  Dan and Jack selected from this lot because they

brought back Italian reminiscences of the "old masters."  The saddles

were the high, stuffy, frog-shaped things we had known in Ephesus and

Smyrna.  The donkey-boys were lively young Egyptian rascals who could

follow a donkey and keep him in a canter half a day without tiring.  We

had plenty of spectators when we mounted, for the hotel was full of

English people bound overland to India and officers getting ready for the

African campaign against the Abyssinian King Theodorus.  We were not a

very large party, but as we charged through the streets of the great

metropolis, we made noise for five hundred, and displayed activity and

created excitement in proportion.  Nobody can steer a donkey, and some

collided with camels, dervishes, effendis, asses, beggars and every thing

else that offered to the donkeys a reasonable chance for a collision.

When we turned into the broad avenue that leads out of the city toward

Old Cairo, there was plenty of room.  The walls of stately date-palms

that fenced the gardens and bordered the way, threw their shadows down

and made the air cool and bracing.  We rose to the spirit of the time and

the race became a wild rout, a stampede, a terrific panic.  I wish to

live to enjoy it again.



Somewhere along this route we had a few startling exhibitions of Oriental

simplicity.  A girl apparently thirteen years of age came along the great

thoroughfare dressed like Eve before the fall.  We would have called her

thirteen at home; but here girls who look thirteen are often not more

than nine, in reality.  Occasionally we saw stark-naked men of superb

build, bathing, and making no attempt at concealment.  However, an hour's

acquaintance with this cheerful custom reconciled the pilgrims to it, and

then it ceased to occasion remark.  Thus easily do even the most

startling novelties grow tame and spiritless to these sight-surfeited

wanderers.



Arrived at Old Cairo, the camp-followers took up the donkeys and tumbled

them bodily aboard a small boat with a lateen sail, and we followed and

got under way.  The deck was closely packed with donkeys and men; the two

sailors had to climb over and under and through the wedged mass to work

the sails, and the steersman had to crowd four or five donkeys out of the

way when he wished to swing his tiller and put his helm hard-down.  But

what were their troubles to us?  We had nothing to do; nothing to do but

enjoy the trip; nothing to do but shove the donkeys off our corns and

look at the charming scenery of the Nile.



On the island at our right was the machine they call the Nilometer, a

stone-column whose business it is to mark the rise of the river and

prophecy whether it will reach only thirty-two feet and produce a famine,

or whether it will properly flood the land at forty and produce plenty,

or whether it will rise to forty-three and bring death and destruction to

flocks and crops--but how it does all this they could not explain to us

so that we could understand.  On the same island is still shown the spot

where Pharaoh's daughter found Moses in the bulrushes.  Near the spot we

sailed from, the Holy Family dwelt when they sojourned in Egypt till

Herod should complete his slaughter of the innocents.  The same tree they

rested under when they first arrived, was there a short time ago, but the

Viceroy of Egypt sent it to the Empress Eugenie lately.  He was just in

time, otherwise our pilgrims would have had it.



The Nile at this point is muddy, swift and turbid, and does not lack a

great deal of being as wide as the Mississippi.



We scrambled up the steep bank at the shabby town of Ghizeh, mounted the

donkeys again, and scampered away.  For four or five miles the route lay

along a high embankment which they say is to be the bed of a railway the

Sultan means to build for no other reason than that when the Empress of

the French comes to visit him she can go to the Pyramids in comfort.

This is true Oriental hospitality.  I am very glad it is our privilege to

have donkeys instead of cars.



At the distance of a few miles the Pyramids rising above the palms,

looked very clean-cut, very grand and imposing, and very soft and filmy,

as well.  They swam in a rich haze that took from them all suggestions of

unfeeling stone, and made them seem only the airy nothings of a dream--

structures which might blossom into tiers of vague arches, or ornate

colonnades, may be, and change and change again, into all graceful forms

of architecture, while we looked, and then melt deliciously away and

blend with the tremulous atmosphere.



At the end of the levee we left the mules and went in a sailboat across

an arm of the Nile or an overflow, and landed where the sands of the

Great Sahara left their embankment, as straight as a wall, along the

verge of the alluvial plain of the river.  A laborious walk in the

flaming sun brought us to the foot of the great Pyramid of Cheops.  It

was a fairy vision no longer.  It was a corrugated, unsightly mountain of

stone.  Each of its monstrous sides was a wide stairway which rose

upward, step above step, narrowing as it went, till it tapered to a point

far aloft in the air.  Insect men and women--pilgrims from the Quaker

City--were creeping about its dizzy perches, and one little black swarm

were waving postage stamps from the airy summit--handkerchiefs will be

understood.



Of course we were besieged by a rabble of muscular Egyptians and Arabs

who wanted the contract of dragging us to the top--all tourists are.  Of

course you could not hear your own voice for the din that was around you.

Of course the Sheiks said they were the only responsible parties; that

all contracts must be made with them, all moneys paid over to them, and

none exacted from us by any but themselves alone.  Of course they

contracted that the varlets who dragged us up should not mention

bucksheesh once.  For such is the usual routine.  Of course we contracted

with them, paid them, were delivered into the hands of the draggers,

dragged up the Pyramids, and harried and be-deviled for bucksheesh from

the foundation clear to the summit.  We paid it, too, for we were

purposely spread very far apart over the vast side of the Pyramid.  There

was no help near if we called, and the Herculeses who dragged us had a

way of asking sweetly and flatteringly for bucksheesh, which was

seductive, and of looking fierce and threatening to throw us down the

precipice, which was persuasive and convincing.



Each step being full as high as a dinner-table; there being very, very

many of the steps; an Arab having hold of each of our arms and springing

upward from step to step and snatching us with them, forcing us to lift

our feet as high as our breasts every time, and do it rapidly and keep it

up till we were ready to faint, who shall say it is not lively,

exhilarating, lacerating, muscle-straining, bone-wrenching and perfectly

excruciating and exhausting pastime, climbing the Pyramids?  I beseeched

the varlets not to twist all my joints asunder; I iterated, reiterated,

even swore to them that I did not wish to beat any body to the top; did

all I could to convince them that if I got there the last of all I would

feel blessed above men and grateful to them forever; I begged them,

prayed them, pleaded with them to let me stop and rest a moment--only one

little moment: and they only answered with some more frightful springs,

and an unenlisted volunteer behind opened a bombardment of determined

boosts with his head which threatened to batter my whole political

economy to wreck and ruin.



Twice, for one minute, they let me rest while they extorted bucksheesh,

and then continued their maniac flight up the Pyramid.  They wished to

beat the other parties.  It was nothing to them that I, a stranger, must

be sacrificed upon the altar of their unholy ambition.  But in the midst

of sorrow, joy blooms.  Even in this dark hour I had a sweet consolation.

For I knew that except these Mohammedans repented they would go straight

to perdition some day.  And they never repent--they never forsake their

paganism.  This thought calmed me, cheered me, and I sank down, limp and

exhausted, upon the summit, but happy, so happy and serene within.



On the one hand, a mighty sea of yellow sand stretched away toward the

ends of the earth, solemn, silent, shorn of vegetation, its solitude

uncheered by any forms of creature life; on the other, the Eden of Egypt

was spread below us--a broad green floor, cloven by the sinuous river,

dotted with villages, its vast distances measured and marked by the

diminishing stature of receding clusters of palms.  It lay asleep in an

enchanted atmosphere.  There was no sound, no motion.  Above the date-

plumes in the middle distance, swelled a domed and pinnacled mass,

glimmering through a tinted, exquisite mist; away toward the horizon a

dozen shapely pyramids watched over ruined Memphis: and at our feet the

bland impassible Sphynx looked out upon the picture from her throne in

the sands as placidly and pensively as she had looked upon its like full

fifty lagging centuries ago.



We suffered torture no pen can describe from the hungry appeals for

bucksheesh that gleamed from Arab eyes and poured incessantly from Arab

lips.  Why try to call up the traditions of vanished Egyptian grandeur;

why try to fancy Egypt following dead Rameses to his tomb in the Pyramid,

or the long multitude of Israel departing over the desert yonder?  Why

try to think at all?  The thing was impossible.  One must bring his

meditations cut and dried, or else cut and dry them afterward.



The traditional Arab proposed, in the traditional way, to run down

Cheops, cross the eighth of a mile of sand intervening between it and the

tall pyramid of Cephron, ascend to Cephron's summit and return to us on

the top of Cheops--all in nine minutes by the watch, and the whole

service to be rendered for a single dollar.  In the first flush of

irritation, I said let the Arab and his exploits go to the mischief.

But stay.  The upper third of Cephron was coated with dressed marble,

smooth as glass.  A blessed thought entered my brain.  He must infallibly

break his neck.  Close the contract with dispatch, I said, and let him

go.  He started.  We watched.  He went bounding down the vast broadside,

spring after spring, like an ibex.  He grew small and smaller till he

became a bobbing pigmy, away down toward the bottom--then disappeared.

We turned and peered over the other side--forty seconds--eighty seconds--

a hundred--happiness, he is dead already!--two minutes--and a quarter--

"There he goes!"  Too true--it was too true.  He was very small, now.

Gradually, but surely, he overcame the level ground.  He began to spring

and climb again.  Up, up, up--at last he reached the smooth coating--now

for it.  But he clung to it with toes and fingers, like a fly.  He

crawled this way and that--away to the right, slanting upward--away to

the left, still slanting upward--and stood at last, a black peg on the

summit, and waved his pigmy scarf!  Then he crept downward to the raw

steps again, then picked up his agile heels and flew.  We lost him

presently.  But presently again we saw him under us, mounting with

undiminished energy.  Shortly he bounded into our midst with a gallant

war-whoop.  Time, eight minutes, forty-one seconds.  He had won.  His

bones were intact.  It was a failure.  I reflected.  I said to myself, he

is tired, and must grow dizzy.  I will risk another dollar on him.



He started again.  Made the trip again.  Slipped on the smooth coating

--I almost had him.  But an infamous crevice saved him.  He was with us

once more--perfectly sound.  Time, eight minutes, forty-six seconds.



I said to Dan, "Lend me a dollar--I can beat this game, yet."



Worse and worse.  He won again.  Time, eight minutes, forty-eight

seconds.  I was out of all patience, now.  I was desperate.--Money was

no longer of any consequence.  I said, "Sirrah, I will give you a hundred

dollars to jump off this pyramid head first.  If you do not like the

terms, name your bet.  I scorn to stand on expenses now.  I will stay

right here and risk money on you as long as Dan has got a cent."



I was in a fair way to win, now, for it was a dazzling opportunity for an

Arab.  He pondered a moment, and would have done it, I think, but his

mother arrived, then, and interfered.  Her tears moved me--I never can

look upon the tears of woman with indifference--and I said I would give

her a hundred to jump off, too.



But it was a failure.  The Arabs are too high-priced in Egypt.  They put

on airs unbecoming to such savages.



We descended, hot and out of humor.  The dragoman lit candles, and we all

entered a hole near the base of the pyramid, attended by a crazy rabble

of Arabs who thrust their services upon us uninvited.  They dragged us up

a long inclined chute, and dripped candle-grease all over us.  This chute

was not more than twice as wide and high as a Saratoga trunk, and was

walled, roofed and floored with solid blocks of Egyptian granite as wide

as a wardrobe, twice as thick and three times as long.  We kept on

climbing, through the oppressive gloom, till I thought we ought to be

nearing the top of the pyramid again, and then came to the "Queen's

Chamber," and shortly to the Chamber of the King.  These large apartments

were tombs.  The walls were built of monstrous masses of smoothed

granite, neatly joined together.  Some of them were nearly as large

square as an ordinary parlor.  A great stone sarcophagus like a bath-tub

stood in the centre of the King's Chamber.  Around it were gathered a

picturesque group of Arab savages and soiled and tattered pilgrims, who

held their candles aloft in the gloom while they chattered, and the

winking blurs of light shed a dim glory down upon one of the

irrepressible memento-seekers who was pecking at the venerable

sarcophagus with his sacrilegious hammer.



We struggled out to the open air and the bright sunshine, and for the

space of thirty minutes received ragged Arabs by couples, dozens and

platoons, and paid them bucksheesh for services they swore and proved by

each other that they had rendered, but which we had not been aware of

before--and as each party was paid, they dropped into the rear of the

procession and in due time arrived again with a newly-invented delinquent

list for liquidation.



We lunched in the shade of the pyramid, and in the midst of this

encroaching and unwelcome company, and then Dan and Jack and I started

away for a walk.  A howling swarm of beggars followed us--surrounded us--

almost headed us off.  A sheik, in flowing white bournous and gaudy head-

gear, was with them.  He wanted more bucksheesh.  But we had adopted a

new code--it was millions for defense, but not a cent for bucksheesh.  I

asked him if he could persuade the others to depart if we paid him.  He

said yes--for ten francs.  We accepted the contract, and said--



"Now persuade your vassals to fall back."



He swung his long staff round his head and three Arabs bit the dust.  He

capered among the mob like a very maniac.  His blows fell like hail, and

wherever one fell a subject went down.  We had to hurry to the rescue and

tell him it was only necessary to damage them a little, he need not kill

them.--In two minutes we were alone with the sheik, and remained so.

The persuasive powers of this illiterate savage were remarkable.



Each side of the Pyramid of Cheops is about as long as the Capitol at

Washington, or the Sultan's new palace on the Bosporus, and is longer

than the greatest depth of St. Peter's at Rome--which is to say that each

side of Cheops extends seven hundred and some odd feet.  It is about

seventy-five feet higher than the cross on St. Peter's.  The first time I

ever went down the Mississippi, I thought the highest bluff on the river

between St. Louis and New Orleans--it was near Selma, Missouri--was

probably the highest mountain in the world.  It is four hundred and

thirteen feet high.  It still looms in my memory with undiminished

grandeur.  I can still see the trees and bushes growing smaller and

smaller as I followed them up its huge slant with my eye, till they

became a feathery fringe on the distant summit.  This symmetrical Pyramid

of Cheops--this solid mountain of stone reared by the patient hands of

men--this mighty tomb of a forgotten monarch--dwarfs my cherished

mountain.  For it is four hundred and eighty feet high.  In still earlier

years than those I have been recalling, Holliday's Hill, in our town, was

to me the noblest work of God.  It appeared to pierce the skies.  It was

nearly three hundred feet high.  In those days I pondered the subject

much, but I never could understand why it did not swathe its summit with

never-failing clouds, and crown its majestic brow with everlasting snows.

I had heard that such was the custom of great mountains in other parts of

the world.  I remembered how I worked with another boy, at odd afternoons

stolen from study and paid for with stripes, to undermine and start from

its bed an immense boulder that rested upon the edge of that hilltop; I

remembered how, one Saturday afternoon, we gave three hours of honest

effort to the task, and saw at last that our reward was at hand; I

remembered how we sat down, then, and wiped the perspiration away, and

waited to let a picnic party get out of the way in the road below--and

then we started the boulder.  It was splendid.  It went crashing down the

hillside, tearing up saplings, mowing bushes down like grass, ripping and

crushing and smashing every thing in its path--eternally splintered and

scattered a wood pile at the foot of the hill, and then sprang from the

high bank clear over a dray in the road--the negro glanced up once and

dodged--and the next second it made infinitesimal mince-meat of a frame

cooper-shop, and the coopers swarmed out like bees.  Then we said it was

perfectly magnificent, and left.  Because the coopers were starting up

the hill to inquire.



Still, that mountain, prodigious as it was, was nothing to the Pyramid of

Cheops.  I could conjure up no comparison that would convey to my mind a

satisfactory comprehension of the magnitude of a pile of monstrous stones

that covered thirteen acres of ground and stretched upward four hundred

and eighty tiresome feet, and so I gave it up and walked down to the

Sphynx.



After years of waiting, it was before me at last.  The great face was so

sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient.  There was a dignity not of

earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never any

thing human wore.  It was stone, but it seemed sentient.  If ever image

of stone thought, it was thinking.  It was looking toward the verge of

the landscape, yet looking at nothing--nothing but distance and vacancy.

It was looking over and beyond every thing of the present, and far into

the past.  It was gazing out over the ocean of Time--over lines of

century-waves which, further and further receding, closed nearer and

nearer together, and blended at last into one unbroken tide, away toward

the horizon of remote antiquity.  It was thinking of the wars of departed

ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations

whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had watched, whose

annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, the life and death, the

grandeur and decay, of five thousand slow revolving years.  It was the

type of an attribute of man--of a faculty of his heart and brain.  It was

MEMORY--RETROSPECTION--wrought into visible, tangible form.  All who know

what pathos there is in memories of days that are accomplished and faces

that have vanished--albeit only a trifling score of years gone by--will

have some appreciation of the pathos that dwells in these grave eyes that

look so steadfastly back upon the things they knew before History was

born--before Tradition had being--things that were, and forms that moved,

in a vague era which even Poetry and Romance scarce know of--and passed

one by one away and left the stony dreamer solitary in the midst of a

strange new age, and uncomprehended scenes.



The Sphynx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its magnitude;

it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its story.  And there is

that in the overshadowing majesty of this eternal figure of stone, with

its accusing memory of the deeds of all ages, which reveals to one

something of what he shall feel when he shall stand at last in the awful

presence of God.



There are some things which, for the credit of America, should be left

unsaid, perhaps; but these very things happen sometimes to be the very

things which, for the real benefit of Americans, ought to have prominent

notice.  While we stood looking, a wart, or an excrescence of some kind,

appeared on the jaw of the Sphynx.  We heard the familiar clink of a

hammer, and understood the case at once.  One of our well meaning

reptiles--I mean relic-hunters--had crawled up there and was trying to

break a "specimen" from the face of this the most majestic creation the

hand of man has wrought.  But the great image contemplated the dead ages

as calmly as ever, unconscious of the small insect that was fretting at

its jaw.  Egyptian granite that has defied the storms and earthquakes of

all time has nothing to fear from the tack-hammers of ignorant

excursionists--highwaymen like this specimen.  He failed in his

enterprise.  We sent a sheik to arrest him if he had the authority, or to

warn him, if he had not, that by the laws of Egypt the crime he was

attempting to commit was punishable with imprisonment or the bastinado.

Then he desisted and went away.



The Sphynx: a hundred and twenty-five feet long, sixty feet high, and a

hundred and two feet around the head, if I remember rightly--carved out

of one solid block of stone harder than any iron.  The block must have

been as large as the Fifth Avenue Hotel before the usual waste (by the

necessities of sculpture) of a fourth or a half of the original mass was

begun.  I only set down these figures and these remarks to suggest the

prodigious labor the carving of it so elegantly, so symmetrically, so

faultlessly, must have cost.  This species of stone is so hard that

figures cut in it remain sharp and unmarred after exposure to the weather

for two or three thousand years.  Now did it take a hundred years of

patient toil to carve the Sphynx?  It seems probable.



Something interfered, and we did not visit the Red Sea and walk upon the

sands of Arabia.  I shall not describe the great mosque of Mehemet Ali,

whose entire inner walls are built of polished and glistening alabaster;

I shall not tell how the little birds have built their nests in the

globes of the great chandeliers that hang in the mosque, and how they

fill the whole place with their music and are not afraid of any body

because their audacity is pardoned, their rights are respected, and

nobody is allowed to interfere with them, even though the mosque be thus

doomed to go unlighted; I certainly shall not tell the hackneyed story of

the massacre of the Mamelukes, because I am glad the lawless rascals were

massacred, and I do not wish to get up any sympathy in their behalf; I

shall not tell how that one solitary Mameluke jumped his horse a hundred

feet down from the battlements of the citadel and escaped, because I do

not think much of that--I could have done it myself; I shall not tell of

Joseph's well which he dug in the solid rock of the citadel hill and

which is still as good as new, nor how the same mules he bought to draw

up the water (with an endless chain) are still at it yet and are getting

tired of it, too; I shall not tell about Joseph's granaries which he

built to store the grain in, what time the Egyptian brokers were "selling

short," unwitting that there would be no corn in all the land when it

should be time for them to deliver; I shall not tell any thing about the

strange, strange city of Cairo, because it is only a repetition, a good

deal intensified and exaggerated, of the Oriental cities I have already

spoken of; I shall not tell of the Great Caravan which leaves for Mecca

every year, for I did not see it; nor of the fashion the people have of

prostrating themselves and so forming a long human pavement to be ridden

over by the chief of the expedition on its return, to the end that their

salvation may be thus secured, for I did not see that either; I shall not

speak of the railway, for it is like any other railway--I shall only say

that the fuel they use for the locomotive is composed of mummies three

thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that

purpose, and that sometimes one hears the profane engineer call out

pettishly, "D--n these plebeians, they don't burn worth a cent--pass out

a King;"--[Stated to me for a fact.  I only tell it as I got it.  I am

willing to believe it.  I can believe any thing.]--I shall not tell of

the groups of mud cones stuck like wasps' nests upon a thousand mounds

above high water-mark the length and breadth of Egypt--villages of the

lower classes; I shall not speak of the boundless sweep of level plain,

green with luxuriant grain, that gladdens the eye as far as it can pierce

through the soft, rich atmosphere of Egypt; I shall not speak of the

vision of the Pyramids seen at a distance of five and twenty miles, for

the picture is too ethereal to be limned by an uninspired pen; I shall

not tell of the crowds of dusky women who flocked to the cars when they

stopped a moment at a station, to sell us a drink of water or a ruddy,

juicy pomegranate; I shall not tell of the motley multitudes and wild

costumes that graced a fair we found in full blast at another barbarous

station; I shall not tell how we feasted on fresh dates and enjoyed the

pleasant landscape all through the flying journey; nor how we thundered

into Alexandria, at last, swarmed out of the cars, rowed aboard the ship,

left a comrade behind, (who was to return to Europe, thence home,) raised

the anchor, and turned our bows homeward finally and forever from the

long voyage; nor how, as the mellow sun went down upon the oldest land on

earth, Jack and Moult assembled in solemn state in the smoking-room and

mourned over the lost comrade the whole night long, and would not be

comforted.  I shall not speak a word of any of these things, or write a

line.  They shall be as a sealed book.  I do not know what a sealed book

is, because I never saw one, but a sealed book is the expression to use

in this connection, because it is popular.



We were glad to have seen the land which was the mother of civilization--

which taught Greece her letters, and through Greece Rome, and through

Rome the world; the land which could have humanized and civilized the

hapless children of Israel, but allowed them to depart out of her borders

little better than savages.  We were glad to have seen that land which

had an enlightened religion with future eternal rewards and punishment in

it, while even Israel's religion contained no promise of a hereafter.

We were glad to have seen that land which had glass three thousand years

before England had it, and could paint upon it as none of us can paint

now; that land which knew, three thousand years ago, well nigh all of

medicine and surgery which science has discovered lately; which had all

those curious surgical instruments which science has invented recently;

which had in high excellence a thousand luxuries and necessities of an

advanced civilization which we have gradually contrived and accumulated

in modern times and claimed as things that were new under the sun; that

had paper untold centuries before we dreampt of it--and waterfalls before

our women thought of them; that had a perfect system of common schools so

long before we boasted of our achievements in that direction that it

seems forever and forever ago; that so embalmed the dead that flesh was

made almost immortal--which we can not do; that built temples which mock

at destroying time and smile grimly upon our lauded little prodigies of

architecture; that old land that knew all which we know now, perchance,

and more; that walked in the broad highway of civilization in the gray

dawn of creation, ages and ages before we were born; that left the

impress of exalted, cultivated Mind upon the eternal front of the Sphynx

to confound all scoffers who, when all her other proofs had passed away,

might seek to persuade the world that imperial Egypt, in the days of her

high renown, had groped in darkness.









CHAPTER LIX.



We were at sea now, for a very long voyage--we were to pass through the

entire length of the Levant; through the entire length of the

Mediterranean proper, also, and then cross the full width of the

Atlantic--a voyage of several weeks.  We naturally settled down into a

very slow, stay-at-home manner of life, and resolved to be quiet,

exemplary people, and roam no more for twenty or thirty days.  No more,

at least, than from stem to stern of the ship.  It was a very comfortable

prospect, though, for we were tired and needed a long rest.



We were all lazy and satisfied, now, as the meager entries in my note-

book (that sure index, to me, of my condition,) prove.  What a stupid

thing a note-book gets to be at sea, any way.  Please observe the style:



     "Sunday--Services, as usual, at four bells.  Services at night,

     also.  No cards.



     "Monday--Beautiful day, but rained hard.  The cattle purchased at

     Alexandria for beef ought to be shingled.  Or else fattened.  The

     water stands in deep puddles in the depressions forward of their

     after shoulders.  Also here and there all over their backs.  It is

     well they are not cows--it would soak in and ruin the milk.  The

     poor devil eagle--[Afterwards presented to the Central Park.]--from

     Syria looks miserable and droopy in the rain, perched on the forward

     capstan.  He appears to have his own opinion of a sea voyage, and if

     it were put into language and the language solidified, it would

     probably essentially dam the widest river in the world.



     "Tuesday--Somewhere in the neighborhood of the island of Malta.  Can

     not stop there.  Cholera.  Weather very stormy.  Many passengers

     seasick and invisible.



     "Wednesday--Weather still very savage.  Storm blew two land birds to

     sea, and they came on board.  A hawk was blown off, also.  He

     circled round and round the ship, wanting to light, but afraid of

     the people.  He was so tired, though, that he had to light, at last,

     or perish.  He stopped in the foretop, repeatedly, and was as often

     blown away by the wind.  At last Harry caught him.  Sea full of

     flying-fish.  They rise in flocks of three hundred and flash along

     above the tops of the waves a distance of two or three hundred feet,

     then fall and disappear.



     "Thursday--Anchored off Algiers, Africa.  Beautiful city, beautiful

     green hilly landscape behind it.  Staid half a day and left.  Not

     permitted to land, though we showed a clean bill of health.  They

     were afraid of Egyptian plague and cholera.



     "Friday--Morning, dominoes.  Afternoon, dominoes.  Evening,

     promenading the deck.  Afterwards, charades.



     "Saturday--Morning, dominoes.  Afternoon, dominoes.  Evening,

     promenading the decks.  Afterwards, dominoes.



     "Sunday--Morning service, four bells.  Evening service, eight bells.

     Monotony till midnight.--Whereupon, dominoes.



     "Monday--Morning, dominoes.  Afternoon, dominoes.  Evening,

     promenading the decks.  Afterward, charades and a lecture from Dr.

     C. Dominoes.



     "No date--Anchored off the picturesque city of Cagliari, Sardinia.

     Staid till midnight, but not permitted to land by these infamous

     foreigners.  They smell inodorously--they do not wash--they dare not

     risk cholera.



     "Thursday--Anchored off the beautiful cathedral city of Malaga,

     Spain.--Went ashore in the captain's boat--not ashore, either, for

     they would not let us land.  Quarantine.  Shipped my newspaper

     correspondence, which they took with tongs, dipped it in sea water,

     clipped it full of holes, and then fumigated it with villainous

     vapors till it smelt like a Spaniard.  Inquired about chances to run

     to blockade and visit the Alhambra at Granada.  Too risky--they

     might hang a body.  Set sail--middle of afternoon.



     "And so on, and so on, and so forth, for several days.  Finally,

     anchored off Gibraltar, which looks familiar and home-like."



It reminds me of the journal I opened with the New Year, once, when I was

a boy and a confiding and a willing prey to those impossible schemes of

reform which well-meaning old maids and grandmothers set for the feet of

unwary youths at that season of the year--setting oversized tasks for

them, which, necessarily failing, as infallibly weaken the boy's strength

of will, diminish his confidence in himself and injure his chances of

success in life.  Please accept of an extract:



     "Monday--Got up, washed, went to bed.

     "Tuesday--Got up, washed, went to bed.

     "Wednesday--Got up, washed, went to bed.

     "Thursday--Got up, washed, went to bed.

     "Friday--Got up, washed, went to bed.

     "Next Friday--Got up, washed, went to bed.

     "Friday fortnight--Got up, washed, went to bed.

     "Following month--Got up, washed, went to bed."



I stopped, then, discouraged.  Startling events appeared to be too rare,

in my career, to render a diary necessary.  I still reflect with pride,

however, that even at that early age I washed when I got up.  That

journal finished me.  I never have had the nerve to keep one since.  My

loss of confidence in myself in that line was permanent.



The ship had to stay a week or more at Gibraltar to take in coal for the

home voyage.



It would be very tiresome staying here, and so four of us ran the

quarantine blockade and spent seven delightful days in Seville, Cordova,

Cadiz, and wandering through the pleasant rural scenery of Andalusia, the

garden of Old Spain.  The experiences of that cheery week were too varied

and numerous for a short chapter and I have not room for a long one.

Therefore I shall leave them all out.









CHAPTER LX.



Ten or eleven o'clock found us coming down to breakfast one morning in

Cadiz.  They told us the ship had been lying at anchor in the harbor two

or three hours.  It was time for us to bestir ourselves.  The ship could

wait only a little while because of the quarantine.  We were soon on

board, and within the hour the white city and the pleasant shores of

Spain sank down behind the waves and passed out of sight.  We had seen no

land fade from view so regretfully.



It had long ago been decided in a noisy public meeting in the main cabin

that we could not go to Lisbon, because we must surely be quarantined

there.  We did every thing by mass-meeting, in the good old national way,

from swapping off one empire for another on the programme of the voyage

down to complaining of the cookery and the scarcity of napkins.  I am

reminded, now, of one of these complaints of the cookery made by a

passenger.  The coffee had been steadily growing more and more execrable

for the space of three weeks, till at last it had ceased to be coffee

altogether and had assumed the nature of mere discolored water--so this

person said.  He said it was so weak that it was transparent an inch in

depth around the edge of the cup.  As he approached the table one morning

he saw the transparent edge--by means of his extraordinary vision long

before he got to his seat.  He went back and complained in a high-handed

way to Capt.  Duncan.  He said the coffee was disgraceful.  The Captain

showed his.  It seemed tolerably good.  The incipient mutineer was more

outraged than ever, then, at what he denounced as the partiality shown

the captain's table over the other tables in the ship.  He flourished

back and got his cup and set it down triumphantly, and said:



"Just try that mixture once, Captain Duncan."



He smelt it--tasted it--smiled benignantly--then said:



"It is inferior--for coffee--but it is pretty fair tea."



The humbled mutineer smelt it, tasted it, and returned to his seat.  He

had made an egregious ass of himself before the whole ship.  He did it no

more.  After that he took things as they came.  That was me.



The old-fashioned ship-life had returned, now that we were no longer in

sight of land.  For days and days it continued just the same, one day

being exactly like another, and, to me, every one of them pleasant.  At

last we anchored in the open roadstead of Funchal, in the beautiful

islands we call the Madeiras.



The mountains looked surpassingly lovely, clad as they were in living,

green; ribbed with lava ridges; flecked with white cottages; riven by

deep chasms purple with shade; the great slopes dashed with sunshine and

mottled with shadows flung from the drifting squadrons of the sky, and

the superb picture fitly crowned by towering peaks whose fronts were

swept by the trailing fringes of the clouds.



But we could not land.  We staid all day and looked, we abused the man

who invented quarantine, we held half a dozen mass-meetings and crammed

them full of interrupted speeches, motions that fell still-born,

amendments that came to nought and resolutions that died from sheer

exhaustion in trying to get before the house.  At night we set sail.



We averaged four mass-meetings a week for the voyage--we seemed always in

labor in this way, and yet so often fallaciously that whenever at long

intervals we were safely delivered of a resolution, it was cause for

public rejoicing, and we hoisted the flag and fired a salute.



Days passed--and nights; and then the beautiful Bermudas rose out of the

sea, we entered the tortuous channel, steamed hither and thither among

the bright summer islands, and rested at last under the flag of England

and were welcome.  We were not a nightmare here, where were civilization

and intelligence in place of Spanish and Italian superstition, dirt and

dread of cholera.  A few days among the breezy groves, the flower

gardens, the coral caves, and the lovely vistas of blue water that went

curving in and out, disappearing and anon again appearing through jungle

walls of brilliant foliage, restored the energies dulled by long drowsing

on the ocean, and fitted us for our final cruise--our little run of a

thousand miles to New York--America--HOME.



We bade good-bye to "our friends the Bermudians," as our programme hath

it--the majority of those we were most intimate with were negroes--and

courted the great deep again.  I said the majority.  We knew more negroes

than white people, because we had a deal of washing to be done, but we

made some most excellent friends among the whites, whom it will be a

pleasant duty to hold long in grateful remembrance.



We sailed, and from that hour all idling ceased.  Such another system of

overhauling, general littering of cabins and packing of trunks we had not

seen since we let go the anchor in the harbor of Beirout.  Every body was

busy.  Lists of all purchases had to be made out, and values attached, to

facilitate matters at the custom-house.  Purchases bought by bulk in

partnership had to be equitably divided, outstanding debts canceled,

accounts compared, and trunks, boxes and packages labeled.  All day long

the bustle and confusion continued.



And now came our first accident.  A passenger was running through a

gangway, between decks, one stormy night, when he caught his foot in the

iron staple of a door that had been heedlessly left off a hatchway, and

the bones of his leg broke at the ancle.  It was our first serious

misfortune.  We had traveled much more than twenty thousand miles, by

land and sea, in many trying climates, without a single hurt, without a

serious case of sickness and without a death among five and sixty

passengers.  Our good fortune had been wonderful.  A sailor had jumped

overboard at Constantinople one night, and was seen no more, but it was

suspected that his object was to desert, and there was a slim chance, at

least, that he reached the shore.  But the passenger list was complete.

There was no name missing from the register.



At last, one pleasant morning, we steamed up the harbor of New York, all

on deck, all dressed in Christian garb--by special order, for there was a

latent disposition in some quarters to come out as Turks--and amid a

waving of handkerchiefs from welcoming friends, the glad pilgrims noted

the shiver of the decks that told that ship and pier had joined hands

again and the long, strange cruise was over.  Amen.









CHAPTER LXI.



In this place I will print an article which I wrote for the New York

Herald the night we arrived.  I do it partly because my contract with my

publishers makes it compulsory; partly because it is a proper, tolerably

accurate, and exhaustive summing up of the cruise of the ship and the

performances of the pilgrims in foreign lands; and partly because some of

the passengers have abused me for writing it, and I wish the public to

see how thankless a task it is to put one's self to trouble to glorify

unappreciative people.  I was charged with "rushing into print" with

these compliments.  I did not rush.  I had written news letters to the

Herald sometimes, but yet when I visited the office that day I did not

say any thing about writing a valedictory.  I did go to the Tribune

office to see if such an article was wanted, because I belonged on the

regular staff of that paper and it was simply a duty to do it.  The

managing editor was absent, and so I thought no more about it.  At night

when the Herald's request came for an article, I did not "rush."  In

fact, I demurred for a while, because I did not feel like writing

compliments then, and therefore was afraid to speak of the cruise lest I

might be betrayed into using other than complimentary language.  However,

I reflected that it would be a just and righteous thing to go down and

write a kind word for the Hadjis--Hadjis are people who have made the

pilgrimage--because parties not interested could not do it so feelingly

as I, a fellow-Hadji, and so I penned the valedictory.  I have read it,

and read it again; and if there is a sentence in it that is not fulsomely

complimentary to captain, ship and passengers, I can not find it.  If it

is not a chapter that any company might be proud to have a body write

about them, my judgment is fit for nothing.  With these remarks I

confidently submit it to the unprejudiced judgment of the reader:



     RETURN OF THE HOLY LAND EXCURSIONISTS--THE STORY OF THE CRUISE.



     TO THE EDITOR OF THE HERALD:



     The steamer Quaker City has accomplished at last her extraordinary

     voyage and returned to her old pier at the foot of Wall street.

     The expedition was a success in some respects, in some it was not.

     Originally it was advertised as a "pleasure excursion."  Well,

     perhaps, it was a pleasure excursion, but certainly it did not look

     like one; certainly it did not act like one.  Any body's and every

     body's notion of a pleasure excursion is that the parties to it will

     of a necessity be young and giddy and somewhat boisterous.  They

     will dance a good deal, sing a good deal, make love, but sermonize

     very little.  Any body's and every body's notion of a well conducted

     funeral is that there must be a hearse and a corpse, and chief

     mourners and mourners by courtesy, many old people, much solemnity,

     no levity, and a prayer and a sermon withal.  Three-fourths of the

     Quaker City's passengers were between forty and seventy years of

     age!  There was a picnic crowd for you!  It may be supposed that the

     other fourth was composed of young girls.  But it was not.  It was

     chiefly composed of rusty old bachelors and a child of six years.

     Let us average the ages of the Quaker City's pilgrims and set the

     figure down as fifty years.  Is any man insane enough to imagine

     that this picnic of patriarchs sang, made love, danced, laughed,

     told anecdotes, dealt in ungodly levity?  In my experience they

     sinned little in these matters.  No doubt it was presumed here at

     home that these frolicsome veterans laughed and sang and romped all

     day, and day after day, and kept up a noisy excitement from one end

     of the ship to the other; and that they played blind-man's buff or

     danced quadrilles and waltzes on moonlight evenings on the quarter-

     deck; and that at odd moments of unoccupied time they jotted a

     laconic item or two in the journals they opened on such an elaborate

     plan when they left home, and then skurried off to their whist and

     euchre labors under the cabin lamps.  If these things were presumed,

     the presumption was at fault.  The venerable excursionists were not

     gay and frisky.  They played no blind-man's buff; they dealt not in

     whist; they shirked not the irksome journal, for alas! most of them

     were even writing books.  They never romped, they talked but little,

     they never sang, save in the nightly prayer-meeting.  The pleasure

     ship was a synagogue, and the pleasure trip was a funeral excursion

     without a corpse.  (There is nothing exhilarating about a funeral

     excursion without a corpse.) A free, hearty laugh was a sound that

     was not heard oftener than once in seven days about those decks or

     in those cabins, and when it was heard it met with precious little

     sympathy.  The excursionists danced, on three separate evenings,

     long, long ago, (it seems an age.) quadrilles, of a single set, made

     up of three ladies and five gentlemen, (the latter with

     handkerchiefs around their arms to signify their sex.) who timed

     their feet to the solemn wheezing of a melodeon; but even this

     melancholy orgie was voted to be sinful, and dancing was

     discontinued.



     The pilgrims played dominoes when too much Josephus or Robinson's

     Holy Land Researches, or book-writing, made recreation necessary--

     for dominoes is about as mild and sinless a game as any in the

     world, perhaps, excepting always the ineffably insipid diversion

     they call croquet, which is a game where you don't pocket any balls

     and don't carom on any thing of any consequence, and when you are

     done nobody has to pay, and there are no refreshments to saw off,

     and, consequently, there isn't any satisfaction whatever about it--

     they played dominoes till they were rested, and then they

     blackguarded each other privately till prayer-time.  When they were

     not seasick they were uncommonly prompt when the dinner-gong

     sounded.  Such was our daily life on board the ship--solemnity,

     decorum, dinner, dominoes, devotions, slander.  It was not lively

     enough for a pleasure trip; but if we had only had a corpse it would

     have made a noble funeral excursion.  It is all over now; but when I

     look back, the idea of these venerable fossils skipping forth on a

     six months' picnic, seems exquisitely refreshing.  The advertised

     title of the expedition--"The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion"--

     was a misnomer.  "The Grand Holy Land Funeral Procession" would have

     been better--much better.



     Wherever we went, in Europe, Asia, or Africa, we made a sensation,

     and, I suppose I may add, created a famine.  None of us had ever

     been any where before; we all hailed from the interior; travel was a

     wild novelty to us, and we conducted ourselves in accordance with

     the natural instincts that were in us, and trammeled ourselves with

     no ceremonies, no conventionalities.  We always took care to make it

     understood that we were Americans--Americans!  When we found that a

     good many foreigners had hardly ever heard of America, and that a

     good many more knew it only as a barbarous province away off

     somewhere, that had lately been at war with somebody, we pitied the

     ignorance of the Old World, but abated no jot of our importance.

     Many and many a simple community in the Eastern hemisphere will

     remember for years the incursion of the strange horde in the year of

     our Lord 1867, that called themselves Americans, and seemed to

     imagine in some unaccountable way that they had a right to be proud

     of it.  We generally created a famine, partly because the coffee on

     the Quaker City was unendurable, and sometimes the more substantial

     fare was not strictly first class; and partly because one naturally

     tires of sitting long at the same board and eating from the same

     dishes.



     The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant.  They

     looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of

     America.  They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes.

     They noticed that we looked out for expenses, and got what we

     conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the

     mischief we came from.  In Paris they just simply opened their eyes

     and stared when we spoke to them in French!  We never did succeed in

     making those idiots understand their own language.  One of our

     passengers said to a shopkeeper, in reference to a proposed return

     to buy a pair of gloves, "Allong restay trankeel--may be ve coom

     Moonday;" and would you believe it, that shopkeeper, a born

     Frenchman, had to ask what it was that had been said.  Sometimes it

     seems to me, somehow, that there must be a difference between

     Parisian French and Quaker City French.



     The people stared at us every where, and we stared at them.  We

     generally made them feel rather small, too, before we got done with

     them, because we bore down on them with America's greatness until we

     crushed them.  And yet we took kindly to the manners and customs,

     and especially to the fashions of the various people we visited.

     When we left the Azores, we wore awful capotes and used fine tooth

     combs--successfully.  When we came back from Tangier, in Africa, we

     were topped with fezzes of the bloodiest hue, hung with tassels like

     an Indian's scalp-lock.  In France and Spain we attracted some

     attention in these costumes.  In Italy they naturally took us for

     distempered Garibaldians, and set a gunboat to look for any thing

     significant in our changes of uniform.  We made Rome howl.  We could

     have made any place howl when we had all our clothes on.  We got no

     fresh raiment in Greece--they had but little there of any kind.  But

     at Constantinople, how we turned out!  Turbans, scimetars, fezzes,

     horse-pistols, tunics, sashes, baggy trowsers, yellow slippers--Oh,

     we were gorgeous!  The illustrious dogs of Constantinople barked

     their under jaws off, and even then failed to do us justice.  They

     are all dead by this time.  They could not go through such a run of

     business as we gave them and survive.



     And then we went to see the Emperor of Russia.  We just called on

     him as comfortably as if we had known him a century or so, and when

     we had finished our visit we variegated ourselves with selections

     from Russian costumes and sailed away again more picturesque than

     ever.  In Smyrna we picked up camel's hair shawls and other dressy

     things from Persia; but in Palestine--ah, in Palestine--our splendid

     career ended.  They didn't wear any clothes there to speak of.  We

     were satisfied, and stopped.  We made no experiments.  We did not

     try their costume.  But we astonished the natives of that country.

     We astonished them with such eccentricities of dress as we could

     muster.  We prowled through the Holy Land, from Cesarea Philippi to

     Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, a weird procession of pilgrims, gotten

     up regardless of expense, solemn, gorgeous, green-spectacled,

     drowsing under blue umbrellas, and astride of a sorrier lot of

     horses, camels and asses than those that came out of Noah's ark,

     after eleven months of seasickness and short rations.  If ever those

     children of Israel in Palestine forget when Gideon's Band went

     through there from America, they ought to be cursed once more and

     finished.  It was the rarest spectacle that ever astounded mortal

     eyes, perhaps.



     Well, we were at home in Palestine.  It was easy to see that that

     was the grand feature of the expedition.  We had cared nothing much

     about Europe.  We galloped through the Louvre, the Pitti, the

     Ufizzi, the Vatican--all the galleries--and through the pictured and

     frescoed churches of Venice, Naples, and the cathedrals of Spain;

     some of us said that certain of the great works of the old masters

     were glorious creations of genius, (we found it out in the guide-

     book, though we got hold of the wrong picture sometimes,) and the

     others said they were disgraceful old daubs.  We examined modern and

     ancient statuary with a critical eye in Florence, Rome, or any where

     we found it, and praised it if we saw fit, and if we didn't we said

     we preferred the wooden Indians in front of the cigar stores of

     America.  But the Holy Land brought out all our enthusiasm.  We fell

     into raptures by the barren shores of Galilee; we pondered at Tabor

     and at Nazareth; we exploded into poetry over the questionable

     loveliness of Esdraelon; we meditated at Jezreel and Samaria over

     the missionary zeal of Jehu; we rioted--fairly rioted among the holy

     places of Jerusalem; we bathed in Jordan and the Dead Sea, reckless

     whether our accident-insurance policies were extra-hazardous or not,

     and brought away so many jugs of precious water from both places

     that all the country from Jericho to the mountains of Moab will

     suffer from drouth this year, I think.  Yet, the pilgrimage part of

     the excursion was its pet feature--there is no question about that.

     After dismal, smileless Palestine, beautiful Egypt had few charms

     for us.  We merely glanced at it and were ready for home.



     They wouldn't let us land at Malta--quarantine; they would not let

     us land in Sardinia; nor at Algiers, Africa; nor at Malaga, Spain,

     nor Cadiz, nor at the Madeira islands.  So we got offended at all

     foreigners and turned our backs upon them and came home.  I suppose

     we only stopped at the Bermudas because they were in the programme.

     We did not care any thing about any place at all.  We wanted to go

     home.  Homesickness was abroad in the ship--it was epidemic.  If the

     authorities of New York had known how badly we had it, they would

     have quarantined us here.



     The grand pilgrimage is over.  Good-bye to it, and a pleasant memory

     to it, I am able to say in all kindness.  I bear no malice, no ill-

     will toward any individual that was connected with it, either as

     passenger or officer.  Things I did not like at all yesterday I like

     very well to-day, now that I am at home, and always hereafter I

     shall be able to poke fun at the whole gang if the spirit so moves

     me to do, without ever saying a malicious word.  The expedition

     accomplished all that its programme promised that it should

     accomplish, and we ought all to be satisfied with the management of

     the matter, certainly.  Bye-bye!



                                             MARK TWAIN.





I call that complimentary.  It is complimentary; and yet I never have

received a word of thanks for it from the Hadjis; on the contrary I speak

nothing but the serious truth when I say that many of them even took

exceptions to the article.  In endeavoring to please them I slaved over

that sketch for two hours, and had my labor for my pains.  I never will

do a generous deed again.









CONCLUSION.



Nearly one year has flown since this notable pilgrimage was ended; and as

I sit here at home in San Francisco thinking, I am moved to confess that

day by day the mass of my memories of the excursion have grown more and

more pleasant as the disagreeable incidents of travel which encumbered

them flitted one by one out of my mind--and now, if the Quaker City were

weighing her anchor to sail away on the very same cruise again, nothing

could gratify me more than to be a passenger.  With the same captain and

even the same pilgrims, the same sinners.  I was on excellent terms with

eight or nine of the excursionists (they are my staunch friends yet,) and

was even on speaking terms with the rest of the sixty-five.  I have been

at sea quite enough to know that that was a very good average.  Because a

long sea-voyage not only brings out all the mean traits one has, and

exaggerates them, but raises up others which he never suspected he

possessed, and even creates new ones.  A twelve months' voyage at sea

would make of an ordinary man a very miracle of meanness.  On the other

hand, if a man has good qualities, the spirit seldom moves him to exhibit

them on shipboard, at least with any sort of emphasis.  Now I am

satisfied that our pilgrims are pleasant old people on shore; I am also

satisfied that at sea on a second voyage they would be pleasanter,

somewhat, than they were on our grand excursion, and so I say without

hesitation that I would be glad enough to sail with them again.  I could

at least enjoy life with my handful of old friends.  They could enjoy

life with their cliques as well--passengers invariably divide up into

cliques, on all ships.



And I will say, here, that I would rather travel with an excursion party

of Methuselahs than have to be changing ships and comrades constantly, as

people do who travel in the ordinary way.  Those latter are always

grieving over some other ship they have known and lost, and over other

comrades whom diverging routes have separated from them.  They learn to

love a ship just in time to change it for another, and they become

attached to a pleasant traveling companion only to lose him.  They have

that most dismal experience of being in a strange vessel, among strange

people who care nothing about them, and of undergoing the customary

bullying by strange officers and the insolence of strange servants,

repeated over and over again within the compass of every month.  They

have also that other misery of packing and unpacking trunks--of running

the distressing gauntlet of custom-houses--of the anxieties attendant

upon getting a mass of baggage from point to point on land in safety.

I had rasher sail with a whole brigade of patriarchs than suffer so.

We never packed our trunks but twice--when we sailed from New York, and

when we returned to it.  Whenever we made a land journey, we estimated

how many days we should be gone and what amount of clothing we should

need, figured it down to a mathematical nicety, packed a valise or two

accordingly, and left the trunks on board.  We chose our comrades from

among our old, tried friends, and started.  We were never dependent upon

strangers for companionship.  We often had occasion to pity Americans

whom we found traveling drearily among strangers with no friends to

exchange pains and pleasures with.  Whenever we were coming back from a

land journey, our eyes sought one thing in the distance first--the ship--

and when we saw it riding at anchor with the flag apeak, we felt as a

returning wanderer feels when he sees his home.  When we stepped on

board, our cares vanished, our troubles were at an end--for the ship was

home to us.  We always had the same familiar old state-room to go to, and

feel safe and at peace and comfortable again.



I have no fault to find with the manner in which our excursion was

conducted.  Its programme was faithfully carried out--a thing which

surprised me, for great enterprises usually promise vastly more than they

perform.  It would be well if such an excursion could be gotten up every

year and the system regularly inaugurated.  Travel is fatal to prejudice,

bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on

these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can

not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's

lifetime.



The Excursion is ended, and has passed to its place among the things that

were.  But its varied scenes and its manifold incidents will linger

pleasantly in our memories for many a year to come.  Always on the wing,

as we were, and merely pausing a moment to catch fitful glimpses of the

wonders of half a world, we could not hope to receive or retain vivid

impressions of all it was our fortune to see.  Yet our holyday flight has

not been in vain--for above the confusion of vague recollections, certain

of its best prized pictures lift themselves and will still continue

perfect in tint and outline after their surroundings shall have faded

away.



We shall remember something of pleasant France; and something also of

Paris, though it flashed upon us a splendid meteor, and was gone again,

we hardly knew how or where.  We shall remember, always, how we saw

majestic Gibraltar glorified with the rich coloring of a Spanish sunset

and swimming in a sea of rainbows.  In fancy we shall see Milan again,

and her stately Cathedral with its marble wilderness of graceful spires.

And Padua--Verona--Como, jeweled with stars; and patrician Venice, afloat

on her stagnant flood--silent, desolate, haughty--scornful of her humbled

state--wrapping herself in memories of her lost fleets, of battle and

triumph, and all the pageantry of a glory that is departed.



We can not forget Florence--Naples--nor the foretaste of heaven that is

in the delicious atmosphere of Greece--and surely not Athens and the

broken temples of the Acropolis.  Surely not venerable Rome--nor the

green plain that compasses her round about, contrasting its brightness

with her gray decay--nor the ruined arches that stand apart in the plain

and clothe their looped and windowed raggedness with vines.  We shall

remember St. Peter's: not as one sees it when he walks the streets of

Rome and fancies all her domes are just alike, but as he sees it leagues

away, when every meaner edifice has faded out of sight and that one dome

looms superbly up in the flush of sunset, full of dignity and grace,

strongly outlined as a mountain.



We shall remember Constantinople and the Bosporus--the colossal

magnificence of Baalbec--the Pyramids of Egypt--the prodigious form, the

benignant countenance of the Sphynx--Oriental Smyrna--sacred Jerusalem--

Damascus, the "Pearl of the East," the pride of Syria, the fabled Garden

of Eden, the home of princes and genii of the Arabian Nights, the oldest

metropolis on earth, the one city in all the world that has kept its name

and held its place and looked serenely on while the Kingdoms and Empires

of four thousand years have risen to life, enjoyed their little season of

pride and pomp, and then vanished and been forgotten!









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Innocents Abroad,

by Mark Twain













A BURLESQUE AUTOBIOGRAPHY



by Mark Twain







CONTENTS:

        MARK TWAIN'S (BURLESQUE) AUTO-BIOGRAPHY

        FIRST ROMANCE.



1871









BURLESQUE AUTOBIOGRAPHY.



Two or three persons having at different times intimated that if I would

write an autobiography they would read it, when they got leisure, I yield

at last to this frenzied public demand, and herewith tender my history:



Ours is a noble old house, and stretches a long way back into antiquity.

The earliest ancestor the Twains have any record of was a friend of the

family by the name of Higgins.  This was in the eleventh century, when

our people were living in Aberdeen, county of Cork, England.  Why it is

that our long line has ever since borne the maternal name (except when

one of them now and then took a playful refuge in an alias to avert

foolishness), instead of Higgins, is a mystery which none of us has ever

felt much desire to stir.  It is a kind of vague, pretty romance, and we

leave it alone.  All the old families do that way.



Arthour Twain was a man of considerable note a solicitor on the highway

in William Rufus' time.  At about the age of thirty he went to one of

those fine old English places of resort called Newgate, to see about

something, and never returned again.  While there he died suddenly.



Augustus Twain, seems to have made something of a stir about -the year

1160.  He was as full of fun as he could be, and used to take his old

sabre and sharpen it up, and get in a convenient place on a dark night,

and stick it through people as they went by, to see them jump.  He was a

born humorist.  But he got to going too far with it; and the first time

he was found stripping one of these parties, the authorities removed one

end of him, and put it up on a nice high place on Temple Bar, where it

could contemplate the people and have a good time.  He never liked any

situation so much or stuck to it so long.



Then for the next two hundred years the family tree shows a succession of

soldiers--noble, high-spirited fellows, who always went into battle

singing; right behind the army, and always went out a-whooping, right

ahead of it.



This is a scathing rebuke to old dead Froissart's poor witticism that our

family tree never had but one limb to it, and that that one stuck out at

right angles, and bore fruit winter, and summer.



                         ||=======|====

                         ||       |

                         ||       |

                         ||       O

                         ||     / || \

                         ||       ||

                         ||       ||

                         ||

                         ||

                         ||

                         OUR FAMILY TREE



Early in the fifteenth century we have Beau Twain, called "the Scholar."

He wrote a beautiful, beautiful hand.  And he could imitate anybody's

hand so closely that it was enough to make a person laugh his head off to

see it.  He had infinite sport with his talent.  But by and by he took a

contract to break stone for a road, and the roughness of the work spoiled

his hand.  Still, he enjoyed life all the time he was in the stone

business, which, with inconsiderable intervals, was some forty-two years.

In fact, he died in harness.  During all those long years he gave such

satisfaction that he never was through with one contract a week till

government gave him another.  He was a perfect pet.  And he was always a

favorite with his fellow-artists, and was a conspicuous member of their

benevolent secret society, called the Chain Gang.  He always wore his

hair short, had a preference for striped clothes, and died lamented by

the government.  He was a sore loss to his country.  For he was so

regular.



Some years later we have the illustrious John Morgan Twain.  He came over

to this country with Columbus in 1492, as a passenger.  He appears to

have been of a crusty, uncomfortable disposition.  He complained of the

food all the way over, and was always threatening to go ashore unless

there was a change.  He wanted fresh shad.  Hardly a day passed over his

head that he did not go idling about the ship with his nose in the air,

sneering about the commander, and saying he did not believe Columbus knew

where he was going to or had ever been there before.  The memorable cry

of "Land ho!" thrilled every heart in the ship but his.  He gazed a while

through a piece of smoked glass at the penciled line lying on the distant

water, and then said: "Land be hanged,--it's a raft!"



When this questionable passenger came on board the ship, he brought

nothing with him but an old newspaper containing a handkerchief marked

"B. G.," one cotton sock marked "L. W. C." one woollen one marked "D. F."

and a night-shirt marked "O. M. R."  And yet during the voyage he worried

more about his "trunk," and gave himself more airs about it, than all

the rest of the passengers put together.



If the ship was "down by the head," and would got steer, he would go and

move his "trunk" farther aft, and then watch the effect.  If the

ship was "by the stern," he would suggest to Columbus to detail some men

to "shift that baggage."  In storms he had to be gagged, because his

wailings about his "trunk" made it impossible for the men to hear the

orders.  The man does not appear to have been openly charged with any

gravely unbecoming thing, but it is noted in the ship's log as a "curious

circumstance" that albeit he brought his baggage on board the ship in a

newspaper, he took it ashore in four trunks, a queensware crate, and a

couple of champagne baskets.  But when he came back insinuating in an

insolent, swaggering way, that some of his things were missing, and was

going to search the other passengers' baggage, it was too much, and they

threw him overboard.  They watched long and wonderingly for him to come

up, but not even a bubble rose on the quietly ebbing tide.  But while

every one was most absorbed in gazing over the side, and the interest was

momentarily increasing, it was observed with consternation that the

vessel was adrift and the anchor cable hanging limp from the bow.  Then

in the ship's dimmed and ancient log we find this quaint note:



          "In time it was discouvered yt ye troblesome passenger hadde

          gonne downe and got ye anchor, and toke ye same and solde it to

          ye dam sauvages from ye interior, saying yt he hadde founde it,

          ye sonne of a ghun!"



Yet this ancestor had good and noble instincts, and it is with pride that

we call to mind the fact that he was the first white person who ever

interested himself in the work of elevating and civilizing our Indians.

He built a commodious jail and put up a gallows, and to his dying day he

claimed with satisfaction that he had had a more restraining and

elevating influence on the Indians than any other reformer that ever,

labored among them.  At this point the chronicle becomes less frank and

chatty, and closes abruptly by saying that the old voyager went to see

his gallows perform on the first white man ever hanged in America, and

while there received injuries which terminated in his death.



The great grandson of the "Reformer" flourished in sixteen hundred and

something, and was known in our annals as, "the old Admiral," though in

history he had other titles.  He was long in command of fleets of swift

vessels, well armed and, manned, and did great service in hurrying up

merchantmen.  Vessels which he followed and kept his eagle eye on, always

made good fair time across the ocean.  But if a ship still loitered in

spite of all he could do, his indignation would grow till he could

contain himself no longer--and then he would take that ship home where he

lived and, keep it there carefully, expecting the owners to come for it,

but they never did.  And he would try to get the idleness and sloth out

of the sailors of that ship by compelling, them to take invigorating

exercise and a bath.  He called it "walking a plank."  All the pupils

liked it.  At any rate, they never found any fault with it after trying

it.  When the owners were late coming for their ships, the Admiral always

burned them, so that the insurance money should not be lost.  At last

this fine old tar was cut down in the fulness of his years and honors.

And to her dying day, his poor heart-broken widow believed that if he had

been cut down fifteen minutes sooner he might have been resuscitated.



Charles Henry Twain lived during the latter part of the seventeenth

century, and was a zealous and distinguished missionary.  He converted

sixteen thousand South Sea islanders, and taught them that a dog-tooth

necklace and a pair of spectacles was not enough clothing to come to

divine service in.  His poor flock loved him very, very dearly; and when

his funeral was over, they got up in a body (and came out of the

restaurant) with tears in their eyes, and saying, one to another, that he

was a good tender missionary, and they wished they had some more of him.



PAH-GO-TO-WAH-WAH-PUKKETEKEEWIS (Mighty-Hunter-with-a-Hog-Eye) TWAIN

adorned the middle of the eighteenth century, and aided Gen. Braddock

with all his heart to resist the oppressor Washington.  It was this

ancestor who fired seventeen times at our Washington from behind a tree.

So far the beautiful romantic narrative in the moral story-books is

correct; but when that narrative goes on to say that at the seventeenth

round the awe-stricken savage said solemnly that that man was being

reserved by the Great Spirit for some mighty mission, and he dared not

lift his sacrilegious rifle against him again, the narrative seriously

impairs the integrity of history.  What he did say was:



"It ain't no (hic !) no use.  'At man's so drunk he can't stan' still

long enough for a man to hit him.  I (hic !) I can't 'ford to fool away

any more am'nition on him!"



That was why he stopped at the seventeenth round, and it was, a good

plain matter-of-fact reason, too, and one that easily commends itself to

us by the eloquent, persuasive flavor of probability there is about it.



I always enjoyed the story-book narrative, but I felt a marring misgiving

that every Indian at Braddock's Defeat who fired at a soldier a couple of

times (two easily grows to seventeen in a century), and missed him,

jumped to the conclusion that the Great Spirit was reserving that soldier

for some grand mission; and so I somehow feared that the only reason why

Washington's case is remembered and the others forgotten is, that in his

the prophecy' came true, and in that of the others it didn't.  There are

not books enough on earth to contain the record of the prophecies Indians

and other unauthorized parties have made; but one may carry in his

overcoat pockets the record of all the prophecies that have been

fulfilled.



I will remark here, in passing, that certain ancestors of mine are so

thoroughly well known in history by their aliases, that I have not felt

it to be worth while to dwell upon them, or even mention them in the

order of their birth.  Among these may be mentioned RICHARD BRINSLEY

TWAIN, alias Guy Fawkes; JOHN WENTWORTH TWAIN, alias Sixteen-String Jack;

WILLIAM HOGARTH TWAIN, alias Jack Sheppard; ANANIAS TWAIN, alias Baron

Munchausen; JOHN GEORGE TWAIN, alias Capt. Kydd; and them there are

George Francis Train, Tom Pepper, Nebuchadnezzar and Baalam's Ass--they

all belong to our family, but to a branch of it somewhat distantly

removed from the honorable direct line--in fact, a collateral branch,

whose members chiefly differ from the ancient stock in that, in order to

acquire the notoriety we have always yearned and hungered for, they have

got into a low way of going to jail instead of getting hanged.



It is not well; when writing an autobiography, to follow your ancestry

down too close to your own time--it is safest to speak only vaguely of

your great-grandfather, and then skip from there to yourself, which I now

do.



I was born without teeth--and there Richard III had the advantage of me;

but I was born without a humpback, likewise, and there I had the

advantage of him.  My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously

honest.



But now a thought occurs to me.  My own history would really seem so tame

contrasted with that of my ancestors, that it is simply wisdom to leave

it unwritten until I am hanged.  If some other biographies I have read

had stopped with the ancestry until a like event occurred, it would have

been a felicitous thing, for the reading public.  How does it strike you?















                            AWFUL, TERRIBLE

                            MEDIEVAL ROMANCE



CHAPTER I



THE SECRET REVEALED.



It was night.  Stillness reigned in the grand old feudal castle of

Klugenstein.  The year 1222 was drawing to a close.  Far away up in the

tallest of the castle's towers a single light glimmered.  A secret

council was being held there.  The stern old lord of Klugenstein sat in

a chair of state meditating.  Presently he, said, with a tender

accent:



"My daughter!"



A young man of noble presence, clad from head to heel in knightly mail,

answered:



"Speak, father!"



"My daughter, the time is come for the revealing of the mystery that hath

puzzled all your young life.  Know, then, that it had its birth in the

matters which I shall now unfold.  My brother Ulrich is the great Duke of

Brandenburgh.  Our father, on his deathbed, decreed that if no son were

born to Ulrich, the succession should pass to my house, provided a son

were born to me.  And further, in case no son, were born to either, but

only daughters, then the succession should pass to Ulrich's daughter,

if she proved stainless; if she did not, my daughter should succeed,

if she retained a blameless name.  And so I, and my old wife here, prayed

fervently for the good boon of a son, but the prayer was vain.  You were

born to us.  I was in despair.  I saw the mighty prize slipping from my

grasp, the splendid dream vanishing away.  And I had been so hopeful!

Five years had Ulrich lived in wedlock, and yet his wife had borne no

heir of either sex.



"'But hold,' I said, 'all is not lost.'  A saving scheme had shot athwart

my brain.  You were born at midnight.  Only the leech, the nurse, and six

waiting-women knew your sex.  I hanged them every one before an hour had

sped.  Next morning all the barony went mad with rejoicing over the

proclamation that a son was born to Klugenstein, an heir to mighty

Brandenburgh!  And well the secret has been kept.  Your mother's own

sister nursed your infancy, and from that time forward we feared nothing.



"When you were ten years old, a daughter was born to Ulrich.  We grieved,

but hoped for good results from measles, or physicians, or other natural

enemies of infancy, but were always disappointed.  She lived, she throve-

-Heaven's malison upon her!  But it is nothing.  We are safe.  For,

Ha-ha! have we not a son?  And is not our son the future Duke?  Our well-

beloved Conrad, is it not so?--for, woman of eight-and-twenty years--as

you are, my child, none other name than that hath ever fallen to you!



"Now it hath come to pass that age hath laid its hand upon my brother,

and he waxes feeble.  The cares of state do tax him sore.  Therefore he

wills that you shall come to him and be already Duke--in act, though not

yet in name.  Your servitors are ready--you journey forth to-night.



"Now listen well.  Remember every word I say.  There is a law as old as

Germany that if any woman sit for a single instant in the great ducal

chair before she hath been absolutely crowned in presence of the people,

SHE SHALL DIE! So heed my words.  Pretend humility.  Pronounce your

judgments from the Premier's chair, which stands at the foot of the

throne.  Do this until you are crowned and safe.  It is not likely that

your sex will ever be discovered; but still it is the part of wisdom to

make all things as safe as may be in this treacherous earthly life."



"Oh; my father, is it for this my life hath been a lie!  Was it that I

might cheat my unoffending cousin of her rights?  Spare me, father,

spare your child!"



"What, huzzy!  Is this my reward for the august fortune my brain has

wrought for thee?  By the bones of my father, this puling sentiment of

thine but ill accords with my humor.



"Betake thee to the Duke, instantly!  And beware how thou meddlest with my

purpose!"



Let this suffice, of the conversation.  It is enough for us to know that

the prayers, the entreaties and the tears of the gentle-natured girl

availed nothing.  They nor anything could move the stout old lord of

Klugenstein.  And so, at last, with a heavy heart, the daughter saw the

castle gates close behind her, and found herself riding away in the

darkness surrounded by a knightly array of armed, vassals and a brave

following of servants.



The old baron sat silent for many minutes after his daughter's departure,

and then he turned to his sad wife and said:



"Dame, our matters seem speeding fairly.  It is full three months since I

sent the shrewd and handsome Count Detzin on his devilish mission to my

brother's daughter Constance.  If he fail, we are not wholly safe; but if

he do succeed, no power can bar our girl from being Duchess e'en though

ill-fortune should decree she never should be Duke!"



"My heart is full of bodings, yet all may still be well."



"Tush, woman! Leave the owls to croak.  To bed with ye, and dream of

Brandenburgh and grandeur!"









CHAPTER II.



FESTIVITY AND TEARS



Six days after the occurrences related in the above chapter, the

brilliant capital of the Duchy of Brandenburgh was resplendent with

military pageantry, and noisy with the rejoicings of loyal multitudes;

for Conrad, the young heir to the crown, was come.  The old Duke's, heart

was full of happiness, for Conrad's handsome person and graceful bearing

had won his love at once.  The great halls of tie palace were thronged

with nobles, who welcomed Conrad bravely; and so bright and happy did all

things seem, that he felt his fears and sorrows passing away and giving

place to a comforting contentment.



But in a remote apartment of the palace a scene of a different nature

was, transpiring.  By a window stood the Duke's only child, the Lady

Constance.  Her eyes were red and swollen, and full of tears.  She was

alone.  Presently she fell to weeping anew, and said aloud:



"The villain Detzin is gone--has fled the dukedom!  I could not believe

it at first, but alas! it is too true.  And I loved him so.  I dared to

love him though I knew the Duke my father would never let me wed him.

I loved him--but now I hate him!  With all, my soul I hate him!  Oh, what

is to become of me!  I am lost, lost, lost!  I shall go mad!"









CHAPTER III.



THE PLOT THICKENS.



Few months drifted by.  All men published the praises of the young

Conrad's government and extolled the wisdom of his judgments, the

mercifulness of his sentences, and the modesty with which he bore himself

in his great office.  The old Duke soon gave everything into his hands,

and sat apart and listened with proud satisfaction while his heir

delivered the decrees of the crown from the seat of the premier.

It seemed plain that one so loved and praised and honored of all men

as Conrad was, could not be otherwise than happy.  But strange enough,

he was not.  For he saw with dismay that the Princess Constance had begun

to love him!  The love of, the rest of the world was happy fortune for

him, but this was freighted with danger!  And he saw, moreover, that the

delighted Duke had discovered his daughter's passion likewise, and was

already dreaming of a marriage.  Every day somewhat of the deep sadness

that had been in the princess' face faded away; every day hope and

animation beamed brighter from her eye; and by and by even vagrant smiles

visited the face that had been so troubled.



Conrad was appalled.  He bitterly cursed himself for having yielded to

the instinct that had made him seek the companionship of one of his own

sex when he was new and a stranger in the palace--when he was sorrowful

and yearned for a sympathy such as only women can give or feel.  He now

began to avoid, his cousin.  But this only made matters worse, for,

naturally enough, the more he avoided her, the more she cast herself in

his way.  He marveled at this at first; and next it startled him.  The

girl haunted him; she hunted him; she happened upon him at all times and

in all places, in the night as well as in the day.  She seemed singularly

anxious.  There was surely a mystery somewhere.



This could not go on forever.  All the world was talking about it.  The

Duke was beginning to look perplexed.  Poor Conrad was becoming a very

ghost through dread and dire distress.  One day as he was emerging from a

private ante-room attached to the picture gallery, Constance confronted

him, and seizing both his hands, in hers, exclaimed:



"Oh, why, do you avoid me?  What have I done--what have I said, to lose

your kind opinion of me--for, surely I had it once?  Conrad, do not

despise me, but pity a tortured heart?  I cannot--cannot hold the words

unspoken longer, lest they kill me--I LOVE you, CONRAD!  There, despise

me if you must, but they would be uttered!"



Conrad was speechless.  Constance hesitated a moment, and then,

misinterpreting his silence, a wild gladness flamed in her eyes, and she

flung her arms about his neck and said:



"You relent! you relent! You can love me--you will love me! Oh, say you

will, my own, my worshipped Conrad!'"



Conrad groaned aloud.  A sickly pallor overspread his countenance, and

he trembled like an aspen.  Presently, in desperation, he thrust the poor

girl from him, and cried:



"You know not what you ask!  It is forever and ever impossible!"  And then

he fled like a criminal and left the princess stupefied with amazement.

A minute afterward she was crying and sobbing there, and Conrad was

crying and sobbing in his chamber.  Both were in despair.  Both save ruin

staring them in the face.



By and by Constance rose slowly to her feet and moved away, saying:



"To think that he was despising my love at the very moment that I thought

it was melting his cruel heart!  I hate him!  He spurned me--did this

man--he spurned me from him like a dog!"









CHAPTER IV



THE AWFUL REVELATION.



Time passed on.  A settled sadness rested once more upon the countenance

of the good Duke's daughter.  She and Conrad were seen together no more

now.  The Duke grieved at this.  But as the weeks wore away, Conrad's

color came back to his cheeks and his old-time vivacity to his eye, and

he administered the government with a clear and steadily ripening wisdom.



Presently a strange whisper began to be heard about the palace.  It grew

louder; it spread farther.  The gossips of the city got hold-of it.  It

swept the dukedom.  And this is what the whisper said:



"The Lady Constance hath given birth to a child!"



When the lord of Klugenstein heard it, he swung his plumed helmet thrice

around his head and shouted:



"Long live.  Duke Conrad!--for lo, his crown is sure, from this day

forward!  Detzin has done his errand well, and the good scoundrel shall

be rewarded!"



And he spread, the tidings far and wide, and for eight-and-forty hours no

soul in all the barony but did dance and sing, carouse and illuminate, to

celebrate the great event, and all at proud and happy old Klugenstein's

expense.









CHAPTER V.



THE FRIGHTFUL CATASTROPHE.



The trial was at hand.  All the great lords and barons of Brandenburgh

were assembled in the Hall of Justice in the ducal palace.  No space was

left unoccupied where there was room for a spectator to stand or sit.

Conrad, clad in purple and ermine, sat in the premier's chair, and on

either side sat the great judges of the realm.  The old Duke had sternly

commanded that the trial of his daughter should proceed, without favor,

and then had taken to his bed broken-hearted.  His days were numbered.

Poor Conrad had begged, as for his very life, that he might be spared the

misery of sitting in judgment upon his cousin's crime, but it did not

avail.



The saddest heart in all that great assemblage was in Conrad's breast.



The gladdest was in his father's.  For, unknown to his daughter "Conrad,"

the old Baron Klugenstein was come, and was among the crowd of nobles,

triumphant in the swelling fortunes of his house.



After the heralds had made due proclamation and the other preliminaries

had followed, the venerable Lord Chief justice said:



"Prisoner, stand forth!"



The unhappy princess rose and stood unveiled before the vast multitude.

The Lord Chief Justice continued:



"Most noble lady, before the great judges of this realm it hath been

charged and proven that out of holy wedlock your Grace hath given birth

unto a child; and by our ancient law the penalty is death, excepting in

one sole contingency, whereof his Grace the acting Duke, our good Lord

Conrad, will advertise you in his solemn sentence now; wherefore, give

heed."



Conrad stretched forth the reluctant sceptre, and in the self-same moment

the womanly heart beneath his robe yearned pityingly toward the doomed

prisoner, and the tears came into his eyes.  He opened his lips to speak,

but the Lord Chief Justice said quickly:



"Not there, your Grace, not there!  It is not lawful to pronounce

judgment upon any of the ducal line SAVE FROM THE DUCAL THRONE!"



A shudder went to the heart of poor Conrad, and a tremor shook the iron

frame of his old father likewise.  CONRAD HAD NOT BEEN CROWNED--dared he

profane the throne? He hesitated and turned pale with fear.  But it must

be done.  Wondering eyes were already upon him.  They would be suspicious

eyes if he hesitated longer.  He ascended the throne.  Presently he

stretched forth the sceptre again, and said:



"Prisoner, in the name of our sovereign lord, Ulrich, Duke of

Brandenburgh, I proceed to the solemn duty that hath devolved upon me.

Give heed to my words.  By the ancient law of the land, except you

produce the partner of your guilt and deliver him up to the executioner,

you must surely die.  Embrace this opportunity--save yourself while yet

you may.  Name the father of your child!"



A solemn hush fell upon the great court--a silence so profound that men

could hear their own hearts beat.  Then the princess slowly turned, with

eyes gleaming with hate, and pointing her finger straight at Conrad,

said:



"Thou art the man!"



An appalling conviction of his helpless, hopeless peril struck a chill to

Conrad's heart like the chill of death itself.  What power on earth could

save him!  To disprove the charge, he must reveal that he was a woman;

and for an uncrowned woman to sit in the ducal chair was death!  At one

and the same moment, he and his grim old father swooned and fell to, the

ground.



[The remainder of this thrilling and eventful story will NOT be found in

this or any other publication, either now or at any future time.]



The truth is, I have got my hero (or heroine) into such a particularly

close place, that I do not see how I am ever going to get him (or her)

out of it again--and therefore I will wash my hands of the whole

business, and leave that person to get out the best way that offers--or

else stay there.  I thought it was going to be easy enough to straighten

out that little difficulty, but it looks different now.



[If Harper's Weekly or the New York Tribune desire to copy these initial

chapters into the, reading columns of their valuable journals, just as

they do the opening chapters of Ledger and New York Weekly novels, they

are at liberty to do so at the usual rates, provided they "trust."]



                                                       MARK TWAIN









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of A Burlesque Autobiography,

by Mark Twain













ROUGHING IT



by Mark Twain



1880







                                   TO

                           CALVIN H. HIGBIE,

                             Of California,

        an Honest Man, a Genial Comrade, and a Steadfast Friend.

                         THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED

                             By the Author,

                     In Memory of the Curious Time

                              When We Two

                    WERE MILLIONAIRES FOR TEN DAYS.









                              ROUGHING IT



                                   BY

                              MARK TWAIN.

                          (SAMUEL L. CLEMENS.)







                               PREFATORY.



This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history

or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of

variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting

reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad

him with science. Still, there is information in the volume; information

concerning an interesting episode in the history of the Far West, about

which no books have been written by persons who were on the ground in

person, and saw the happenings of the time with their own eyes. I allude

to the rise, growth and culmination of the silver-mining fever in Nevada

-a curious episode, in some respects; the only one, of its peculiar kind,

that has occurred in the land; and the only one, indeed, that is likely

to occur in it.



Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the

book. I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped:

information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar

of roses out of the otter. Sometimes it has seemed to me that I would

give worlds if I could retain my facts; but it cannot be. The more I calk

up the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom. Therefore,

I can only claim indulgence at the hands of the reader, not

justification.



THE AUTHOR.







CONTENTS.



CHAPTER I.

My Brother appointed Secretary of Nevada--I Envy His Prospective

Adventures--Am Appointed Private Secretary Under Him--My Contentment

Complete--Packed in One Hour--Dreams and Visions--On the Missouri River--

A Bully Boat



CHAPTER II.

Arrive at St. Joseph--Only Twenty-five Pounds Baggage Allowed--Farewell

to Kid Gloves and Dress Coats--Armed to the Teeth--The "Allen"--A

Cheerful Weapon--Persuaded to Buy a Mule--Schedule of Luxuries--We Leave

the "States"--"Our Coach"--Mails for the Indians--Between a Wink and an

Earthquake--A Modern Sphynx and How She Entertained Us--A Sociable Heifer



CHAPTER III.

"The Thoroughbrace is Broke"--Mails Delivered Properly--Sleeping Under

Difficulties--A Jackass Rabbit Meditating, and on Business--A Modern

Gulliver--Sage-brush--Overcoats as an Article of Diet--Sad Fate of a

Camel--Warning to Experimenters



CHAPTER IV.

Making Our Bed--Assaults by the Unabridged--At a Station--Our Driver a

Great and Shining Dignitary--Strange Place for a Frontyard--

Accommodations--Double Portraits--An Heirloom--Our Worthy Landlord--

"Fixings and Things"--An Exile--Slumgullion--A Well Furnished Table--The

Landlord Astonished--Table Etiquette--Wild Mexican Mules--Stage-coaching

and Railroading



CHAPTER V.

New Acquaintances--The Cayote--A Dog's Experiences--A Disgusted Dog--The

Relatives of the Cayote--Meals Taken Away from Home



CHAPTER VI.

The Division Superintendent--The Conductor--The Driver--One Hundred and

Fifty Miles' Drive Without Sleep--Teaching a Subordinate--Our Old Friend

Jack and a Pilgrim--Ben Holliday Compared to Moses



CHAPTER VII.

Overland City--Crossing the Platte--Bemis's Buffalo Hunt--Assault by a

Buffalo--Bemis's Horse Goes Crazy--An Impromptu Circus--A New Departure--

Bemis Finds Refuge in a Tree--Escapes Finally by a Wonderful Method



CHAPTER VIII.

The Pony Express--Fifty Miles Without Stopping--"Here he Comes"--Alkali

Water--Riding an Avalanche--Indian Massacre



CHAPTER IX.

Among the Indians--An Unfair Advantage--Laying on our Arms--A Midnight

Murder--Wrath of Outlaws--A Dangerous, yet Valuable Citizen



CHAPTER X.

History of Slade--A Proposed Fist-fight--Encounter with Jules--Paradise

of Outlaws--Slade as Superintendent--As Executioner--A Doomed Whisky

Seller--A Prisoner--A Wife's Bravery--An Ancient Enemy Captured--Enjoying

a Luxury--Hob-nobbing with Slade--Too Polite--A Happy Escape



CHAPTER XI.

Slade in Montana--"On a Spree"--In Court--Attack on a Judge--Arrest by

the Vigilantes--Turn out of the Miners--Execution of Slade--Lamentations

of His Wife--Was Slade a Coward?



CHAPTER XII.

A Mormon Emigrant Train--The Heart of the Rocky Mountains--Pure

Saleratus--A Natural Ice-House--An Entire Inhabitant--In Sight of

"Eternal Snow"--The South Pass--The Parting Streams--An Unreliable Letter

Carrier--Meeting of Old Friends--A Spoiled Watermelon--Down the Mountain-

-A Scene of Desolation--Lost in the Dark--Unnecessary Advice--U.S. Troops

and Indians--Sublime Spectacle--Another Delusion Dispelled--Among the

Angels



CHAPTER XIII.

Mormons and Gentiles--Exhilarating Drink, and its Effect on Bemis--Salt

Lake City--A Great Contrast--A Mormon Vagrant--Talk with a Saint--A Visit

to the "King"--A Happy Simile



CHAPTER XIV.

Mormon Contractors--How Mr. Street Astonished Them--The Case Before

Brigham Young, and How he Disposed of it--Polygamy Viewed from a New

Position



CHAPTER XV.

A Gentile Den--Polygamy Discussed--Favorite Wife and D. 4--Hennery for

Retired Wives--Children Need Marking--Cost of a Gift to No. 6--A Penny-

whistle Gift and its Effects--Fathering the Foundlings--It Resembled Him

--The Family Bedstead



CHAPTER XVI

The Mormon Bible--Proofs of its Divinity--Plagiarism of its Authors--

Story of Nephi--Wonderful Battle--Kilkenny Cats Outdone



CHAPTER XVII.

Three Sides to all Questions--Everything "A Quarter"--Shriveled Up--

Emigrants and White Shirts at a Discount--"Forty-Niners"--Above Par--Real

Happiness



CHAPTER XVIII.

Alkali Desert--Romance of Crossing Dispelled--Alkali Dust--Effect on the

Mules--Universal Thanksgiving



CHAPTER XIX.

The Digger Indians Compared with the Bushmen of Africa--Food, Life and

Characteristics--Cowardly Attack on a Stage Coach--A Brave Driver--The

Noble Red Man



CHAPTER XX.

The Great American Desert--Forty Miles on Bones--Lakes Without Outlets--

Greely's Remarkable Ride--Hank Monk, the Renowned Driver--Fatal Effects

of "Corking" a Story--Bald-Headed Anecdote



CHAPTER XXI.

Alkali Dust--Desolation and Contemplation--Carson City--Our Journey

Ended--We are Introduced to Several Citizens--A Strange Rebuke--A Washoe

Zephyr at Play--Its Office Hours--Governor's Palace--Government Offices--

Our French Landlady Bridget O'Flannigan--Shadow Secrets--Cause for a

Disturbance at Once--The Irish Brigade--Mrs. O'Flannigan's Boarders--The

Surveying Expedition--Escape of the Tarantulas



CHAPTER XXII.

The Son of a Nabob--Start for Lake Tahoe--Splendor of the Views--Trip on

the Lake--Camping Out--Reinvigorating Climate--Clearing a Tract of Land--

Securing a Title--Outhouse and Fences



CHAPTER XXIII.

A Happy Life--Lake Tahoe and its Moods--Transparency of the Waters--A

Catastrophe--Fire! Fire!--A Magnificent Spectacle--Homeless Again--We

take to the Lake--A Storm--Return to Carson



CHAPTER XXIV.

Resolve to Buy a Horse--Horsemanship in Carson--A Temptation--Advice

Given Me Freely--I Buy the Mexican Plug--My First Ride--A Good Bucker--I

Loan the Plug--Experience of Borrowers--Attempts to Sell--Expense of the

Experiment--A Stranger Taken In



CHAPTER XXV.

The Mormons in Nevada--How to Persuade a Loan from Them--Early History of

the Territory--Silver Mines Discovered--The New Territorial Government--A

Foreign One and a Poor One--Its Funny Struggles for Existence--No Credit,

no Cash--Old Abe Currey Sustains it and its Officers--Instructions and

Vouchers--An Indian's Endorsement--Toll-Gates



CHAPTER XXVI.

The Silver Fever--State of the Market--Silver Bricks--Tales Told--Off for

the Humboldt Mines



CHAPTER XXVII.

Our manner of going--Incidents of the Trip--A Warm but Too Familiar a

Bedfellow--Mr. Ballou Objects--Sunshine amid Clouds--Safely Arrived



CHAPTER XXVIII.

Arrive at the Mountains--Building Our Cabin--My First Prospecting Tour--

My First Gold Mine--Pockets Filled With Treasures--Filtering the News to

My Companions--The Bubble Pricked--All Not Gold That Glitters



CHAPTER XXIX.

Out Prospecting--A Silver Mine At Last--Making a Fortune With Sledge and

Drill--A Hard Road to Travel--We Own in Claims--A Rocky Country



CHAPTER XXX.

Disinterested Friends--How "Feet" Were Sold--We Quit Tunnelling--A Trip

to Esmeralda--My Companions--An Indian Prophesy--A Flood--Our Quarters

During It



CHAPTER XXXI.

The Guests at "Honey Lake Smith's"--"Bully Old Arkansas"--"Our Landlord"-

-Determined to Fight--The Landlord's Wife--The Bully Conquered by Her--

Another Start--Crossing the Carson--A Narrow Escape--Following Our Own

Track--A New Guide--Lost in the Snow



CHAPTER XXXII.

Desperate Situation--Attempts to Make a Fire--Our Horses leave us--We

Find Matches--One, Two, Three and the Last--No Fire--Death Seems

Inevitable--We Mourn Over Our Evil Lives--Discarded Vices--We Forgive

Each Other--An Affectionate Farewell--The Sleep of Oblivion



CHAPTER XXXIII.

Return of Consciousness--Ridiculous Developments--A Station House--Bitter

Feelings--Fruits of Repentance--Resurrected Vices



CHAPTER XXXIV.

About Carson--General Buncombe--Hyde vs. Morgan--How Hyde Lost His Ranch-

-The Great Landslide Case--The Trial--General Buncombe in Court--A

Wonderful Decision--A Serious Afterthought



CHAPTER XXXV.

A New Travelling Companion--All Full and No Accommodations--How Captain

Nye found Room--and Caused Our Leaving to be Lamented--The Uses of

Tunnelling--A Notable Example--We Go into the "Claim" Business and Fail--

At the Bottom



CHAPTER XXXVI.

A Quartz Mill--Amalgamation--"Screening Tailings"--First Quartz Mill in

Nevada--Fire Assay--A Smart Assayer--I stake for an advance



CHAPTER XXXVII.

The Whiteman Cement Mine--Story of its Discovery--A Secret Expedition--A

Nocturnal Adventure--A Distressing Position--A Failure and a Week's

Holiday



CHAPTER XXXVIII.

Mono Lake--Shampooing Made Easy--Thoughtless Act of Our Dog and the

Results--Lye Water--Curiosities of the Lake--Free Hotel--Some Funny

Incidents a Little Overdrawn



CHAPTER XXXIX.

Visit to the Islands in Lake Mono--Ashes and Desolation--Life Amid Death

Our Boat Adrift--A Jump For Life--A Storm On the Lake--A Mass of Soap

Suds--Geological Curiosities--A Week On the Sierras--A Narrow Escape From

a Funny Explosion--"Stove Heap Gone"



CHAPTER XL.

The "Wide West" Mine--It is "Interviewed" by Higbie--A Blind Lead--Worth

a Million--We are Rich At Last--Plans for the Future



CHAPTER XLI.

A Rheumatic Patient--Day Dreams--An Unfortunate Stumble--I Leave

Suddenly--Another Patient--Higbie in the Cabin--Our Balloon Bursted--

Worth Nothing--Regrets and Explanations--Our Third Partner



CHAPTER XLII.

What to do Next?--Obstacles I Had Met With--"Jack of All Trades"--Mining

Again--Target Shooting--I Turn City Editor--I Succeed Finely



CHAPTER XLIII.

My Friend Boggs--The School Report--Boggs Pays Me An Old Debt--Virginia

City



CHAPTER XLIV.

Flush Times--Plenty of Stock--Editorial Puffing--Stocks Given Me--Salting

Mines--A Tragedian In a New Role



CHAPTER XLV.

Flush Times Continue--Sanitary Commission Fund--Wild Enthusiasm of the

People--Would not wait to Contribute--The Sanitary Flour Sack--It is

Carried to Gold Hill and Dayton--Final Reception in Virginia--Results of

the Sale--A Grand Total



CHAPTER XLVI.

The Nabobs of Those Days--John Smith as a Traveler--Sudden Wealth--A

Sixty-Thousand-Dollar Horse--A Smart Telegraph Operator--A Nabob in New

York City--Charters an Omnibus--"Walk in, It's All Free"--"You Can't Pay

a Cent"--"Hold On, Driver, I Weaken"--Sociability of New Yorkers



CHAPTER XLVII.

Buck Fanshaw's Death--The Cause Thereof--Preparations for His Burial--

Scotty Briggs the Committee Man--He Visits the Minister--Scotty Can't

Play His Hand--The Minister Gets Mixed--Both Begin to See--"All Down

Again But Nine"--Buck Fanshaw as a Citizen--How To "Shook Your Mother"--

The Funeral--Scotty Briggs as a Sunday School Teacher



CHAPTER XLVIII.

The First Twenty-Six Graves in Nevada--The Prominent Men of the County--

The Man Who Had Killed His Dozen--Trial by Jury--Specimen Jurors--A

Private Grave Yard--The Desperadoes--Who They Killed--Waking up the Weary

Passenger--Satisfaction Without Fighting



CHAPTER XLIX.

Fatal Shooting Affray--Robbery and Desperate Affray--A Specimen City

Official--A Marked Man--A Street Fight--Punishment of Crime



CHAPTER L.

Captain Ned Blakely--Bill Nookes Receives Desired Information--Killing of

Blakely's Mate--A Walking Battery--Blakely Secures Nookes--Hang First and

Be Tried Afterwards--Captain Blakely as a Chaplain--The First Chapter of

Genesis Read at a Hanging--Nookes Hung--Blakely's Regrets



CHAPTER LI.

The Weekly Occidental--A Ready Editor--A Novel--A Concentration of

Talent--The Heroes and the Heroines--The Dissolute Author Engaged--

Extraordinary Havoc With the Novel--A Highly Romantic Chapter--The Lovers

Separated--Jonah Out-done--A Lost Poem--The Aged Pilot Man--Storm On the

Erie Canal--Dollinger the Pilot Man--Terrific Gale--Danger Increases--A

Crisis Arrived--Saved as if by a Miracle



CHAPTER LII.

Freights to California--Silver Bricks--Under Ground Mines--Timber

Supports--A Visit to the Mines--The Caved Mines--Total of Shipments in

1863



CHAPTER LIII.

Jim Blaine and his Grandfather's Ram--Filkin's Mistake--Old Miss Wagner

and her Glass Eye--Jacobs, the Coffin Dealer--Waiting for a Customer--His

Bargain With Old Robbins--Robbins Sues for Damage and Collects--A New Use

for Missionaries--The Effect--His Uncle Lem. and the Use Providence Made

of Him--Sad Fate of Wheeler--Devotion of His Wife--A Model Monument--What

About the Ram?



CHAPTER LIV.

Chinese in Virginia City--Washing Bills--Habit of Imitation--Chinese

Immigration--A Visit to Chinatown--Messrs. Ah Sing, Hong Wo, See Yup, &c.



CHAPTER LV.

Tired of Virginia City--An Old Schoolmate--A Two Years' Loan--Acting as

an Editor--Almost Receive an Offer--An Accident--Three Drunken Anecdotes

--Last Look at Mt. Davidson--A Beautiful Incident



CHAPTER LVI.

Off for San Francisco--Western and Eastern Landscapes--The Hottest place

on Earth--Summer and Winter



CHAPTER LVII.

California--Novelty of Seeing a Woman--"Well if it ain't a Child!"--One

Hundred and Fifty Dollars for a Kiss--Waiting for a turn



CHAPTER LVIII.

Life in San Francisco--Worthless Stocks--My First Earthquake--Reportorial

Instincts--Effects of the Shocks--Incidents and Curiosities--Sabbath

Breakers--The Lodger and the Chambermaid--A Sensible Fashion to Follow--

Effects of the Earthquake on the Ministers



CHAPTER LIX.

Poor Again--Slinking as a Business--A Model Collector--Misery loves

Company--Comparing Notes for Comfort--A Streak of Luck--Finding a Dime--

Wealthy by Comparison--Two Sumptuous Dinners



CHAPTER LX.

An Old Friend--An Educated Miner--Pocket Mining--Freaks of Fortune



CHAPTER LXI.

Dick Baker and his Cat--Tom Quartz's Peculiarities--On an Excursion--

Appearance On His Return--A Prejudiced Cat--Empty Pockets and a Roving

Life



CHAPTER LXII.

Bound for the Sandwich Islands--The Three Captains--The Old Admiral--His

Daily Habits--His Well Fought Fields--An Unexpected Opponent--The Admiral

Overpowered--The Victor Declared a Hero



CHAPTER LXIII.

Arrival at the Islands--Honolulu--What I Saw There--Dress and Habits of

the Inhabitants--The Animal Kingdom--Fruits and Delightful Effects



CHAPTER LXIV.

An Excursion--Captain Phillips and his Turn-Out--A Horseback Ride--A

Vicious Animal--Nature and Art--Interesting Ruins--All Praise to the

Missionaries



CHAPTER LXV.

Interesting Mementoes and Relics--An Old Legend of a Frightful Leap--An

Appreciative Horse--Horse Jockeys and Their Brothers--A New Trick--A Hay

Merchant--Good Country for Horse Lovers



CHAPTER LXVI.

A Saturday Afternoon--Sandwich Island Girls on a Frolic--The Poi

Merchant--Grand Gala Day--A Native Dance--Church Membership--Cats and

Officials--An Overwhelming Discovery



CHAPTER LXVII.

The Legislature of the Island--What Its President Has Seen--Praying for

an Enemy--Women's Rights--Romantic Fashions--Worship of the Shark--Desire

for Dress--Full Dress--Not Paris Style--Playing Empire--Officials and

Foreign Ambassadors--Overwhelming Magnificence



CHAPTER LXVIII.

A Royal Funeral--Order of Procession--Pomp and Ceremony--A Striking

Contrast--A Sick Monarch--Human Sacrifices at His Death--Burial Orgies



CHAPTER LXIX.

"Once more upon the Waters."--A Noisy Passenger--Several Silent Ones--A

Moonlight Scene--Fruits and Plantations



CHAPTER LXX.

A Droll Character--Mrs. Beazely and Her Son--Meditations on Turnips--A

Letter from Horace Greeley--An Indignant Rejoinder--The Letter Translated

but too Late



CHAPTER LXXI.

Kealakekua Bay--Death of Captain Cook--His Monument--Its Construction--On

Board the Schooner



CHAPTER LXXII.

Young Kanakas in New England--A Temple Built by Ghosts--Female Bathers--I

Stood Guard--Women and Whiskey--A Fight for Religion--Arrival of

Missionaries



CHAPTER LXXIII.

Native Canoes--Surf Bathing--A Sanctuary--How Built--The Queen's Rock--

Curiosities--Petrified Lava



CHAPTER LXXIV.

Visit to the Volcano--The Crater--Pillar of Fire--Magnificent Spectacle--

A Lake of Fire



CHAPTER LXXV.

The North Lake--Fountains of Fire--Streams of Burning Lava--Tidal Waves



CHAPTER LXXVI.

A Reminiscence--Another Horse Story--My Ride with the Retired Milk Horse-

-A Picnicing Excursion--Dead Volcano of Holeakala--Comparison with

Vesuvius--An Inside View



CHAPTER LXXVII.

A Curious Character--A Series of Stories--Sad Fate of a Liar--Evidence of

Insanity



CHAPTER LXXVIII.

Return to San Francisco--Ship Amusements--Preparing for Lecturing--

Valuable Assistance Secured--My First Attempt--The Audience Carried--

"All's Well that Ends Well."



CHAPTER LXXIX.

Highwaymen--A Predicament--A Huge Joke--Farewell to California--At Home

Again--Great Changes.  Moral.







APPENDIX.

A.--Brief Sketch of Mormon History

B.--The Mountain Meadows Massacre

C.--Concerning a Frightful Assassination that was never Consummated













CHAPTER I.



My brother had just been appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory--an

office of such majesty that it concentrated in itself the duties and

dignities of Treasurer, Comptroller, Secretary of State, and Acting

Governor in the Governor's absence.  A salary of eighteen hundred dollars

a year and the title of "Mr. Secretary," gave to the great position an

air of wild and imposing grandeur.  I was young and ignorant, and I

envied my brother.  I coveted his distinction and his financial splendor,

but particularly and especially the long, strange journey he was going to

make, and the curious new world he was going to explore.  He was going to

travel!  I never had been away from home, and that word "travel" had a

seductive charm for me.  Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of

miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of

the Far West, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and

antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and may be get hanged or

scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us all

about it, and be a hero.  And he would see the gold mines and the silver

mines, and maybe go about of an afternoon when his work was done, and

pick up two or three pailfuls of shining slugs, and nuggets of gold and

silver on the hillside.  And by and by he would become very rich, and

return home by sea, and be able to talk as calmly about San Francisco and

the ocean, and "the isthmus" as if it was nothing of any consequence to

have seen those marvels face to face.  What I suffered in contemplating

his happiness, pen cannot describe.  And so, when he offered me, in cold

blood, the sublime position of private secretary under him, it appeared

to me that the heavens and the earth passed away, and the firmament was

rolled together as a scroll!  I had nothing more to desire.  My

contentment was complete.



At the end of an hour or two I was ready for the journey.  Not much

packing up was necessary, because we were going in the overland stage

from the Missouri frontier to Nevada, and passengers were only allowed a

small quantity of baggage apiece.  There was no Pacific railroad in those

fine times of ten or twelve years ago--not a single rail of it.

I only proposed to stay in Nevada three months--I had no thought of

staying longer than that.  I meant to see all I could that was new and

strange, and then hurry home to business.  I little thought that I would

not see the end of that three-month pleasure excursion for six or seven

uncommonly long years!



I dreamed all night about Indians, deserts, and silver bars, and in due

time, next day, we took shipping at the St. Louis wharf on board a

steamboat bound up the Missouri River.



We were six days going from St. Louis to "St. Jo."--a trip that was so

dull, and sleepy, and eventless that it has left no more impression on my

memory than if its duration had been six minutes instead of that many

days.  No record is left in my mind, now, concerning it, but a confused

jumble of savage-looking snags, which we deliberately walked over with

one wheel or the other; and of reefs which we butted and butted, and then

retired from and climbed over in some softer place; and of sand-bars

which we roosted on occasionally, and rested, and then got out our

crutches and sparred over.



In fact, the boat might almost as well have gone to St. Jo. by land, for

she was walking most of the time, anyhow--climbing over reefs and

clambering over snags patiently and laboriously all day long.  The

captain said she was a "bully" boat, and all she wanted was more "shear"

and a bigger wheel.  I thought she wanted a pair of stilts, but I had the

deep sagacity not to say so.









CHAPTER II.



The first thing we did on that glad evening that landed us at St. Joseph

was to hunt up the stage-office, and pay a hundred and fifty dollars

apiece for tickets per overland coach to Carson City, Nevada.



The next morning, bright and early, we took a hasty breakfast, and

hurried to the starting-place.  Then an inconvenience presented itself

which we had not properly appreciated before, namely, that one cannot

make a heavy traveling trunk stand for twenty-five pounds of baggage--

because it weighs a good deal more.  But that was all we could take--

twenty-five pounds each.  So we had to snatch our trunks open, and make a

selection in a good deal of a hurry.  We put our lawful twenty-five

pounds apiece all in one valise, and shipped the trunks back to St. Louis

again.  It was a sad parting, for now we had no swallow-tail coats and

white kid gloves to wear at Pawnee receptions in the Rocky Mountains, and

no stove-pipe hats nor patent-leather boots, nor anything else necessary

to make life calm and peaceful.  We were reduced to a war-footing.  Each

of us put on a rough, heavy suit of clothing, woolen army shirt and

"stogy" boots included; and into the valise we crowded a few white

shirts, some under-clothing and such things.  My brother, the Secretary,

took along about four pounds of United States statutes and six pounds of

Unabridged Dictionary; for we did not know--poor innocents--that such

things could be bought in San Francisco on one day and received in Carson

City the next.  I was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little Smith &

Wesson's seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homoeopathic pill,

and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult.  But I thought

it was grand.  It appeared to me to be a dangerous weapon.  It only had

one fault--you could not hit anything with it.  One of our "conductors"

practiced awhile on a cow with it, and as long as she stood still and

behaved herself she was safe; but as soon as she went to moving about,

and he got to shooting at other things, she came to grief.  The Secretary

had a small-sized Colt's revolver strapped around him for protection

against the Indians, and to guard against accidents he carried it

uncapped.  Mr. George Bemis was dismally formidable.  George Bemis was

our fellow-traveler.



We had never seen him before.  He wore in his belt an old original

"Allen" revolver, such as irreverent people called a "pepper-box." Simply

drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired the pistol.  As the trigger

came back, the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn over,

and presently down would drop the hammer, and away would speed the ball.

To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat

which was probably never done with an "Allen" in the world.  But George's

was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as one of the stage-drivers

afterward said, "If she didn't get what she went after, she would fetch

something else." And so she did.  She went after a deuce of spades nailed

against a tree, once, and fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to

the left of it.  Bemis did not want the mule; but the owner came out with

a double-barreled shotgun and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow.  It was a

cheerful weapon--the "Allen." Sometimes all its six barrels would go off

at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round about,

but behind it.



We took two or three blankets for protection against frosty weather in

the mountains.  In the matter of luxuries we were modest--we took none

along but some pipes and five pounds of smoking tobacco.  We had two

large canteens to carry water in, between stations on the Plains, and we

also took with us a little shot-bag of silver coin for daily expenses in

the way of breakfasts and dinners.



By eight o'clock everything was ready, and we were on the other side of

the river.  We jumped into the stage, the driver cracked his whip, and we

bowled away and left "the States" behind us.  It was a superb summer

morning, and all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine.  There was a

freshness and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of emancipation

from all sorts of cares and responsibilities, that almost made us feel

that the years we had spent in the close, hot city, toiling and slaving,

had been wasted and thrown away.  We were spinning along through Kansas,

and in the course of an hour and a half we were fairly abroad on the

great Plains.  Just here the land was rolling--a grand sweep of regular

elevations and depressions as far as the eye could reach--like the

stately heave and swell of the ocean's bosom after a storm.  And

everywhere were cornfields, accenting with squares of deeper green, this

limitless expanse of grassy land.  But presently this sea upon dry ground

was to lose its "rolling" character and stretch away for seven hundred

miles as level as a floor!



Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage, of the most sumptuous

description--an imposing cradle on wheels.  It was drawn by six handsome

horses, and by the side of the driver sat the "conductor," the legitimate

captain of the craft; for it was his business to take charge and care of

the mails, baggage, express matter, and passengers.  We three were the

only passengers, this trip.  We sat on the back seat, inside.  About all

the rest of the coach was full of mail bags--for we had three days'

delayed mails with us.  Almost touching our knees, a perpendicular wall

of mail matter rose up to the roof.  There was a great pile of it

strapped on top of the stage, and both the fore and hind boots were full.

We had twenty-seven hundred pounds of it aboard, the driver said--"a

little for Brigham, and Carson, and 'Frisco, but the heft of it for the

Injuns, which is powerful troublesome 'thout they get plenty of truck to

read." But as he just then got up a fearful convulsion of his countenance

which was suggestive of a wink being swallowed by an earthquake, we

guessed that his remark was intended to be facetious, and to mean that we

would unload the most of our mail matter somewhere on the Plains and

leave it to the Indians, or whosoever wanted it.



We changed horses every ten miles, all day long, and fairly flew over the

hard, level road.  We jumped out and stretched our legs every time the

coach stopped, and so the night found us still vivacious and unfatigued.



After supper a woman got in, who lived about fifty miles further on, and

we three had to take turns at sitting outside with the driver and

conductor.  Apparently she was not a talkative woman.  She would sit

there in the gathering twilight and fasten her steadfast eyes on a

mosquito rooting into her arm, and slowly she would raise her other hand

till she had got his range, and then she would launch a slap at him that

would have jolted a cow; and after that she would sit and contemplate the

corpse with tranquil satisfaction--for she never missed her mosquito; she

was a dead shot at short range.  She never removed a carcase, but left

them there for bait.  I sat by this grim Sphynx and watched her kill

thirty or forty mosquitoes--watched her, and waited for her to say

something, but she never did.  So I finally opened the conversation

myself.  I said:



"The mosquitoes are pretty bad, about here, madam."



"You bet!"



"What did I understand you to say, madam?"



"You BET!"



Then she cheered up, and faced around and said:



"Danged if I didn't begin to think you fellers was deef and dumb.  I did,

b'gosh.  Here I've sot, and sot, and sot, a-bust'n muskeeters and

wonderin' what was ailin' ye.  Fust I thot you was deef and dumb, then I

thot you was sick or crazy, or suthin', and then by and by I begin to

reckon you was a passel of sickly fools that couldn't think of nothing to

say.  Wher'd ye come from?"



The Sphynx was a Sphynx no more!  The fountains of her great deep were

broken up, and she rained the nine parts of speech forty days and forty

nights, metaphorically speaking, and buried us under a desolating deluge

of trivial gossip that left not a crag or pinnacle of rejoinder

projecting above the tossing waste of dislocated grammar and decomposed

pronunciation!



How we suffered, suffered, suffered!  She went on, hour after hour, till

I was sorry I ever opened the mosquito question and gave her a start.

She never did stop again until she got to her journey's end toward

daylight; and then she stirred us up as she was leaving the stage (for we

were nodding, by that time), and said:



"Now you git out at Cottonwood, you fellers, and lay over a couple o'

days, and I'll be along some time to-night, and if I can do ye any good

by edgin' in a word now and then, I'm right thar.  Folks'll tell you't

I've always ben kind o' offish and partic'lar for a gal that's raised in

the woods, and I am, with the rag-tag and bob-tail, and a gal has to be,

if she wants to be anything, but when people comes along which is my

equals, I reckon I'm a pretty sociable heifer after all."



We resolved not to "lay by at Cottonwood."









CHAPTER III.



About an hour and a half before daylight we were bowling along smoothly

over the road--so smoothly that our cradle only rocked in a gentle,

lulling way, that was gradually soothing us to sleep, and dulling our

consciousness--when something gave away under us!  We were dimly aware of

it, but indifferent to it.  The coach stopped.  We heard the driver and

conductor talking together outside, and rummaging for a lantern, and

swearing because they could not find it--but we had no interest in

whatever had happened, and it only added to our comfort to think of those

people out there at work in the murky night, and we snug in our nest with

the curtains drawn.  But presently, by the sounds, there seemed to be an

examination going on, and then the driver's voice said:



"By George, the thoroughbrace is broke!"



This startled me broad awake--as an undefined sense of calamity is always

apt to do.  I said to myself: "Now, a thoroughbrace is probably part of a

horse; and doubtless a vital part, too, from the dismay in the driver's

voice.  Leg, maybe--and yet how could he break his leg waltzing along

such a road as this?  No, it can't be his leg.  That is impossible,

unless he was reaching for the driver.  Now, what can be the

thoroughbrace of a horse, I wonder?  Well, whatever comes, I shall not

air my ignorance in this crowd, anyway."



Just then the conductor's face appeared at a lifted curtain, and his

lantern glared in on us and our wall of mail matter.  He said:

"Gents, you'll have to turn out a spell.  Thoroughbrace is broke."



We climbed out into a chill drizzle, and felt ever so homeless and

dreary.  When I found that the thing they called a "thoroughbrace" was

the massive combination of belts and springs which the coach rocks itself

in, I said to the driver:



"I never saw a thoroughbrace used up like that, before, that I can

remember.  How did it happen?"



"Why, it happened by trying to make one coach carry three days' mail--

that's how it happened," said he.  "And right here is the very direction

which is wrote on all the newspaper-bags which was to be put out for the

Injuns for to keep 'em quiet.  It's most uncommon lucky, becuz it's so

nation dark I should 'a' gone by unbeknowns if that air thoroughbrace

hadn't broke."



I knew that he was in labor with another of those winks of his, though I

could not see his face, because he was bent down at work; and wishing him

a safe delivery, I turned to and helped the rest get out the mail-sacks.

It made a great pyramid by the roadside when it was all out.  When they

had mended the thoroughbrace we filled the two boots again, but put no

mail on top, and only half as much inside as there was before.  The

conductor bent all the seat-backs down, and then filled the coach just

half full of mail-bags from end to end.  We objected loudly to this, for

it left us no seats.  But the conductor was wiser than we, and said a bed

was better than seats, and moreover, this plan would protect his

thoroughbraces.  We never wanted any seats after that.  The lazy bed was

infinitely preferable.  I had many an exciting day, subsequently, lying

on it reading the statutes and the dictionary, and wondering how the

characters would turn out.



The conductor said he would send back a guard from the next station to

take charge of the abandoned mail-bags, and we drove on.



It was now just dawn; and as we stretched our cramped legs full length on

the mail sacks, and gazed out through the windows across the wide wastes

of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist, to where there was an expectant

look in the eastern horizon, our perfect enjoyment took the form of a

tranquil and contented ecstasy.  The stage whirled along at a spanking

gait, the breeze flapping curtains and suspended coats in a most

exhilarating way; the cradle swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering

of the horses' hoofs, the cracking of the driver's whip, and his "Hi-yi!

g'lang!" were music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees appeared

to give us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after

us with interest, or envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the

pipe of peace and compared all this luxury with the years of tiresome

city life that had gone before it, we felt that there was only one

complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had found it.



After breakfast, at some station whose name I have forgotten, we three

climbed up on the seat behind the driver, and let the conductor have our

bed for a nap.  And by and by, when the sun made me drowsy, I lay down on

my face on top of the coach, grasping the slender iron railing, and slept

for an hour or more.  That will give one an appreciable idea of those

matchless roads.  Instinct will make a sleeping man grip a fast hold of

the railing when the stage jolts, but when it only swings and sways, no

grip is necessary.  Overland drivers and conductors used to sit in their

places and sleep thirty or forty minutes at a time, on good roads, while

spinning along at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour.  I saw them do

it, often.  There was no danger about it; a sleeping man will seize the

irons in time when the coach jolts.  These men were hard worked, and it

was not possible for them to stay awake all the time.



By and by we passed through Marysville, and over the Big Blue and Little

Sandy; thence about a mile, and entered Nebraska.  About a mile further

on, we came to the Big Sandy--one hundred and eighty miles from St.

Joseph.



As the sun was going down, we saw the first specimen of an animal known

familiarly over two thousand miles of mountain and desert--from Kansas

clear to the Pacific Ocean--as the "jackass rabbit." He is well named.

He is just like any other rabbit, except that he is from one third to

twice as large, has longer legs in proportion to his size, and has the

most preposterous ears that ever were mounted on any creature but a

jackass.



When he is sitting quiet, thinking about his sins, or is absent-minded or

unapprehensive of danger, his majestic ears project above him

conspicuously; but the breaking of a twig will scare him nearly to death,

and then he tilts his ears back gently and starts for home.  All you can

see, then, for the next minute, is his long gray form stretched out

straight and "streaking it" through the low sage-brush, head erect, eyes

right, and ears just canted a little to the rear, but showing you where

the animal is, all the time, the same as if he carried a jib.  Now and

then he makes a marvelous spring with his long legs, high over the

stunted sage-brush, and scores a leap that would make a horse envious.

Presently he comes down to a long, graceful "lope," and shortly he

mysteriously disappears.  He has crouched behind a sage-bush, and will

sit there and listen and tremble until you get within six feet of him,

when he will get under way again.  But one must shoot at this creature

once, if he wishes to see him throw his heart into his heels, and do the

best he knows how.  He is frightened clear through, now, and he lays his

long ears down on his back, straightens himself out like a yard-stick

every spring he makes, and scatters miles behind him with an easy

indifference that is enchanting.



Our party made this specimen "hump himself," as the conductor said.  The

secretary started him with a shot from the Colt; I commenced spitting at

him with my weapon; and all in the same instant the old "Allen's" whole

broadside let go with a rattling crash, and it is not putting it too

strong to say that the rabbit was frantic!  He dropped his ears, set up

his tail, and left for San Francisco at a speed which can only be

described as a flash and a vanish!  Long after he was out of sight we

could hear him whiz.



I do not remember where we first came across "sage-brush," but as I have

been speaking of it I may as well describe it.



This is easily done, for if the reader can imagine a gnarled and

venerable live oak-tree reduced to a little shrub two feet-high, with its

rough bark, its foliage, its twisted boughs, all complete, he can picture

the "sage-brush" exactly.  Often, on lazy afternoons in the mountains, I

have lain on the ground with my face under a sage-bush, and entertained

myself with fancying that the gnats among its foliage were liliputian

birds, and that the ants marching and countermarching about its base were

liliputian flocks and herds, and myself some vast loafer from Brobdignag

waiting to catch a little citizen and eat him.



It is an imposing monarch of the forest in exquisite miniature, is the

"sage-brush."  Its foliage is a grayish green, and gives that tint to

desert and mountain.  It smells like our domestic sage, and "sage-tea"

made from it taste like the sage-tea which all boys are so well

acquainted with.  The sage-brush is a singularly hardy plant, and grows

right in the midst of deep sand, and among barren rocks, where nothing

else in the vegetable world would try to grow, except "bunch-grass."

--["Bunch-grass" grows on the bleak mountain-sides of Nevada and

neighboring territories, and offers excellent feed for stock, even in the

dead of winter, wherever the snow is blown aside and exposes it;

notwithstanding its unpromising home, bunch-grass is a better and more

nutritious diet for cattle and horses than almost any other hay or grass

that is known--so stock-men say.]--The sage-bushes grow from three to

six or seven feet apart, all over the mountains and deserts of the Far

West, clear to the borders of California.  There is not a tree of any

kind in the deserts, for hundreds of miles--there is no vegetation at all

in a regular desert, except the sage-brush and its cousin the

"greasewood," which is so much like the sage-brush that the difference

amounts to little.  Camp-fires and hot suppers in the deserts would be

impossible but for the friendly sage-brush.  Its trunk is as large as a

boy's wrist (and from that up to a man's arm), and its crooked branches

are half as large as its trunk--all good, sound, hard wood, very like

oak.



When a party camps, the first thing to be done is to cut sage-brush; and

in a few minutes there is an opulent pile of it ready for use.  A hole a

foot wide, two feet deep, and two feet long, is dug, and sage-brush

chopped up and burned in it till it is full to the brim with glowing

coals.  Then the cooking begins, and there is no smoke, and consequently

no swearing.  Such a fire will keep all night, with very little

replenishing; and it makes a very sociable camp-fire, and one around

which the most impossible reminiscences sound plausible, instructive, and

profoundly entertaining.



Sage-brush is very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished

failure.  Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his

illegitimate child the mule.  But their testimony to its nutritiousness

is worth nothing, for they will eat pine knots, or anthracite coal, or

brass filings, or lead pipe, or old bottles, or anything that comes

handy, and then go off looking as grateful as if they had had oysters for

dinner.  Mules and donkeys and camels have appetites that anything will

relieve temporarily, but nothing satisfy.



In Syria, once, at the head-waters of the Jordan, a camel took charge of

my overcoat while the tents were being pitched, and examined it with a

critical eye, all over, with as much interest as if he had an idea of

getting one made like it; and then, after he was done figuring on it as

an article of apparel, he began to contemplate it as an article of diet.

He put his foot on it, and lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth,

and chewed and chewed at it, gradually taking it in, and all the while

opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had

never tasted anything as good as an overcoat before, in his life.  Then

he smacked his lips once or twice, and reached after the other sleeve.

Next he tried the velvet collar, and smiled a smile of such contentment

that it was plain to see that he regarded that as the daintiest thing

about an overcoat.  The tails went next, along with some percussion caps

and cough candy, and some fig-paste from Constantinople.  And then my

newspaper correspondence dropped out, and he took a chance in that--

manuscript letters written for the home papers.  But he was treading on

dangerous ground, now.  He began to come across solid wisdom in those

documents that was rather weighty on his stomach; and occasionally he

would take a joke that would shake him up till it loosened his teeth; it

was getting to be perilous times with him, but he held his grip with good

courage and hopefully, till at last he began to stumble on statements

that not even a camel could swallow with impunity.  He began to gag and

gasp, and his eyes to stand out, and his forelegs to spread, and in about

a quarter of a minute he fell over as stiff as a carpenter's work-bench,

and died a death of indescribable agony.  I went and pulled the

manuscript out of his mouth, and found that the sensitive creature had

choked to death on one of the mildest and gentlest statements of fact

that I ever laid before a trusting public.



I was about to say, when diverted from my subject, that occasionally one

finds sage-bushes five or six feet high, and with a spread of branch and

foliage in proportion, but two or two and a half feet is the usual

height.









CHAPTER IV.



As the sun went down and the evening chill came on, we made preparation

for bed.  We stirred up the hard leather letter-sacks, and the knotty

canvas bags of printed matter (knotty and uneven because of projecting

ends and corners of magazines, boxes and books).  We stirred them up and

redisposed them in such a way as to make our bed as level as possible.

And we did improve it, too, though after all our work it had an upheaved

and billowy look about it, like a little piece of a stormy sea.  Next we

hunted up our boots from odd nooks among the mail-bags where they had

settled, and put them on.  Then we got down our coats, vests, pantaloons

and heavy woolen shirts, from the arm-loops where they had been swinging

all day, and clothed ourselves in them--for, there being no ladies either

at the stations or in the coach, and the weather being hot, we had looked

to our comfort by stripping to our underclothing, at nine o'clock in the

morning.  All things being now ready, we stowed the uneasy Dictionary

where it would lie as quiet as possible, and placed the water-canteens

and pistols where we could find them in the dark.  Then we smoked a final

pipe, and swapped a final yarn; after which, we put the pipes, tobacco

and bag of coin in snug holes and caves among the mail-bags, and then

fastened down the coach curtains all around, and made the place as "dark

as the inside of a cow," as the conductor phrased it in his picturesque

way.  It was certainly as dark as any place could be--nothing was even

dimly visible in it.  And finally, we rolled ourselves up like silk-

worms, each person in his own blanket, and sank peacefully to sleep.



Whenever the stage stopped to change horses, we would wake up, and try to

recollect where we were--and succeed--and in a minute or two the stage

would be off again, and we likewise.  We began to get into country, now,

threaded here and there with little streams.  These had high, steep banks

on each side, and every time we flew down one bank and scrambled up the

other, our party inside got mixed somewhat.  First we would all be down

in a pile at the forward end of the stage, nearly in a sitting posture,

and in a second we would shoot to the other end, and stand on our heads.

And we would sprawl and kick, too, and ward off ends and corners of mail-

bags that came lumbering over us and about us; and as the dust rose from

the tumult, we would all sneeze in chorus, and the majority of us would

grumble, and probably say some hasty thing, like: "Take your elbow out of

my ribs!--can't you quit crowding?"



Every time we avalanched from one end of the stage to the other, the

Unabridged Dictionary would come too; and every time it came it damaged

somebody.  One trip it "barked" the Secretary's elbow; the next trip it

hurt me in the stomach, and the third it tilted Bemis's nose up till he

could look down his nostrils--he said.  The pistols and coin soon settled

to the bottom, but the pipes, pipe-stems, tobacco and canteens clattered

and floundered after the Dictionary every time it made an assault on us,

and aided and abetted the book by spilling tobacco in our eyes, and water

down our backs.



Still, all things considered, it was a very comfortable night.  It wore

gradually away, and when at last a cold gray light was visible through

the puckers and chinks in the curtains, we yawned and stretched with

satisfaction, shed our cocoons, and felt that we had slept as much as was

necessary.  By and by, as the sun rose up and warmed the world, we pulled

off our clothes and got ready for breakfast.  We were just pleasantly in

time, for five minutes afterward the driver sent the weird music of his

bugle winding over the grassy solitudes, and presently we detected a low

hut or two in the distance.  Then the rattling of the coach, the clatter

of our six horses' hoofs, and the driver's crisp commands, awoke to a

louder and stronger emphasis, and we went sweeping down on the station at

our smartest speed.  It was fascinating--that old overland stagecoaching.



We jumped out in undress uniform.  The driver tossed his gathered reins

out on the ground, gaped and stretched complacently, drew off his heavy

buckskin gloves with great deliberation and insufferable dignity--taking

not the slightest notice of a dozen solicitous inquires after his health,

and humbly facetious and flattering accostings, and obsequious tenders of

service, from five or six hairy and half-civilized station-keepers and

hostlers who were nimbly unhitching our steeds and bringing the fresh

team out of the stables--for in the eyes of the stage-driver of that day,

station-keepers and hostlers were a sort of good enough low creatures,

useful in their place, and helping to make up a world, but not the kind

of beings which a person of distinction could afford to concern himself

with; while, on the contrary, in the eyes of the station-keeper and the

hostler, the stage-driver was a hero--a great and shining dignitary, the

world's favorite son, the envy of the people, the observed of the

nations.  When they spoke to him they received his insolent silence

meekly, and as being the natural and proper conduct of so great a man;

when he opened his lips they all hung on his words with admiration (he

never honored a particular individual with a remark, but addressed it

with a broad generality to the horses, the stables, the surrounding

country and the human underlings); when he discharged a facetious

insulting personality at a hostler, that hostler was happy for the day;

when he uttered his one jest--old as the hills, coarse, profane, witless,

and inflicted on the same audience, in the same language, every time his

coach drove up there--the varlets roared, and slapped their thighs, and

swore it was the best thing they'd ever heard in all their lives.  And

how they would fly around when he wanted a basin of water, a gourd of the

same, or a light for his pipe!--but they would instantly insult a

passenger if he so far forgot himself as to crave a favor at their hands.

They could do that sort of insolence as well as the driver they copied it

from--for, let it be borne in mind, the overland driver had but little

less contempt for his passengers than he had for his hostlers.



The hostlers and station-keepers treated the really powerful conductor of

the coach merely with the best of what was their idea of civility, but

the driver was the only being they bowed down to and worshipped.  How

admiringly they would gaze up at him in his high seat as he gloved

himself with lingering deliberation, while some happy hostler held the

bunch of reins aloft, and waited patiently for him to take it!  And how

they would bombard him with glorifying ejaculations as he cracked his

long whip and went careering away.



The station buildings were long, low huts, made of sundried, mud-colored

bricks, laid up without mortar (adobes, the Spaniards call these bricks,

and Americans shorten it to 'dobies).  The roofs, which had no slant to

them worth speaking of, were thatched and then sodded or covered with a

thick layer of earth, and from this sprung a pretty rank growth of weeds

and grass.  It was the first time we had ever seen a man's front yard on

top of his house.  The building consisted of barns, stable-room for

twelve or fifteen horses, and a hut for an eating-room for passengers.

This latter had bunks in it for the station-keeper and a hostler or two.

You could rest your elbow on its eaves, and you had to bend in order to

get in at the door.  In place of a window there was a square hole about

large enough for a man to crawl through, but this had no glass in it.

There was no flooring, but the ground was packed hard.  There was no

stove, but the fire-place served all needful purposes.  There were no

shelves, no cupboards, no closets.  In a corner stood an open sack of

flour, and nestling against its base were a couple of black and venerable

tin coffee-pots, a tin teapot, a little bag of salt, and a side of bacon.





By the door of the station-keeper's den, outside, was a tin wash-basin,

on the ground.  Near it was a pail of water and a piece of yellow bar

soap, and from the eaves hung a hoary blue woolen shirt, significantly--

but this latter was the station-keeper's private towel, and only two

persons in all the party might venture to use it--the stage-driver and

the conductor.  The latter would not, from a sense of decency; the former

would not, because did not choose to encourage the advances of a station-

keeper.  We had towels--in the valise; they might as well have been in

Sodom and Gomorrah.  We (and the conductor) used our handkerchiefs, and

the driver his pantaloons and sleeves.  By the door, inside, was fastened

a small old-fashioned looking-glass frame, with two little fragments of

the original mirror lodged down in one corner of it.  This arrangement

afforded a pleasant double-barreled portrait of you when you looked into

it, with one half of your head set up a couple of inches above the other

half.  From the glass frame hung the half of a comb by a string--but if I

had to describe that patriarch or die, I believe I would order some

sample coffins.



It had come down from Esau and Samson, and had been accumulating hair

ever since--along with certain impurities.  In one corner of the room

stood three or four rifles and muskets, together with horns and pouches

of ammunition.  The station-men wore pantaloons of coarse, country-woven

stuff, and into the seat and the inside of the legs were sewed ample

additions of buckskin, to do duty in place of leggings, when the man rode

horseback--so the pants were half dull blue and half yellow, and

unspeakably picturesque.  The pants were stuffed into the tops of high

boots, the heels whereof were armed with great Spanish spurs, whose

little iron clogs and chains jingled with every step.  The man wore a

huge beard and mustachios, an old slouch hat, a blue woolen shirt, no

suspenders, no vest, no coat--in a leathern sheath in his belt, a great

long "navy" revolver (slung on right side, hammer to the front), and

projecting from his boot a horn-handled bowie-knife.  The furniture of

the hut was neither gorgeous nor much in the way.  The rocking-chairs and

sofas were not present, and never had been, but they were represented by

two three-legged stools, a pine-board bench four feet long, and two empty

candle-boxes.  The table was a greasy board on stilts, and the table-

cloth and napkins had not come--and they were not looking for them,

either.  A battered tin platter, a knife and fork, and a tin pint cup,

were at each man's place, and the driver had a queens-ware saucer that

had seen better days.  Of course this duke sat at the head of the table.

There was one isolated piece of table furniture that bore about it a

touching air of grandeur in misfortune.  This was the caster.  It was

German silver, and crippled and rusty, but it was so preposterously out

of place there that it was suggestive of a tattered exiled king among

barbarians, and the majesty of its native position compelled respect even

in its degradation.



There was only one cruet left, and that was a stopperless, fly-specked,

broken-necked thing, with two inches of vinegar in it, and a dozen

preserved flies with their heels up and looking sorry they had invested

there.



The station-keeper upended a disk of last week's bread, of the shape and

size of an old-time cheese, and carved some slabs from it which were as

good as Nicholson pavement, and tenderer.



He sliced off a piece of bacon for each man, but only the experienced old

hands made out to eat it, for it was condemned army bacon which the

United States would not feed to its soldiers in the forts, and the stage

company had bought it cheap for the sustenance of their passengers and

employees.  We may have found this condemned army bacon further out on

the plains than the section I am locating it in, but we found it--there

is no gainsaying that.



Then he poured for us a beverage which he called "Slum gullion," and it

is hard to think he was not inspired when he named it.  It really

pretended to be tea, but there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old

bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler.



He had no sugar and no milk--not even a spoon to stir the ingredients

with.



We could not eat the bread or the meat, nor drink the "slumgullion." And

when I looked at that melancholy vinegar-cruet, I thought of the anecdote

(a very, very old one, even at that day) of the traveler who sat down to

a table which had nothing on it but a mackerel and a pot of mustard.  He

asked the landlord if this was all.  The landlord said:



"All!  Why, thunder and lightning, I should think there was mackerel

enough there for six."



"But I don't like mackerel."



"Oh--then help yourself to the mustard."



In other days I had considered it a good, a very good, anecdote, but

there was a dismal plausibility about it, here, that took all the humor

out of it.



Our breakfast was before us, but our teeth were idle.



I tasted and smelt, and said I would take coffee, I believed.  The

station-boss stopped dead still, and glared at me speechless.  At last,

when he came to, he turned away and said, as one who communes with

himself upon a matter too vast to grasp:



"Coffee!  Well, if that don't go clean ahead of me, I'm d---d!"



We could not eat, and there was no conversation among the hostlers and

herdsmen--we all sat at the same board.  At least there was no

conversation further than a single hurried request, now and then, from

one employee to another.  It was always in the same form, and always

gruffly friendly.  Its western freshness and novelty startled me, at

first, and interested me; but it presently grew monotonous, and lost its

charm.  It was:



"Pass the bread, you son of a skunk!"  No, I forget--skunk was not the

word; it seems to me it was still stronger than that; I know it was, in

fact, but it is gone from my memory, apparently.  However, it is no

matter--probably it was too strong for print, anyway.  It is the landmark

in my memory which tells me where I first encountered the vigorous new

vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains.



We gave up the breakfast, and paid our dollar apiece and went back to our

mail-bag bed in the coach, and found comfort in our pipes.  Right here we

suffered the first diminution of our princely state.  We left our six

fine horses and took six mules in their place.  But they were wild

Mexican fellows, and a man had to stand at the head of each of them and

hold him fast while the driver gloved and got himself ready.  And when at

last he grasped the reins and gave the word, the men sprung suddenly away

from the mules' heads and the coach shot from the station as if it had

issued from a cannon.  How the frantic animals did scamper!  It was a

fierce and furious gallop--and the gait never altered for a moment till

we reeled off ten or twelve miles and swept up to the next collection of

little station-huts and stables.



So we flew along all day.  At 2 P.M.  the belt of timber that fringes the

North Platte and marks its windings through the vast level floor of the

Plains came in sight.  At 4 P.M.  we crossed a branch of the river, and

at 5 P.M.  we crossed the Platte itself, and landed at Fort Kearney,

fifty-six hours out from St. Joe--THREE HUNDRED MILES!



Now that was stage-coaching on the great overland, ten or twelve years

ago, when perhaps not more than ten men in America, all told, expected to

live to see a railroad follow that route to the Pacific.  But the

railroad is there, now, and it pictures a thousand odd comparisons and

contrasts in my mind to read the following sketch, in the New York Times,

of a recent trip over almost the very ground I have been describing.  I

can scarcely comprehend the new state of things:



     "ACROSS THE CONTINENT.



     "At 4.20 P.M., Sunday, we rolled out of the station at Omaha, and

     started westward on our long jaunt.  A couple of hours out, dinner

     was announced--an "event" to those of us who had yet to experience

     what it is to eat in one of Pullman's hotels on wheels; so, stepping

     into the car next forward of our sleeping palace, we found ourselves

     in the dining-car.  It was a revelation to us, that first dinner on

     Sunday.  And though we continued to dine for four days, and had as

     many breakfasts and suppers, our whole party never ceased to admire

     the perfection of the arrangements, and the marvelous results

     achieved.  Upon tables covered with snowy linen, and garnished with

     services of solid silver, Ethiop waiters, flitting about in spotless

     white, placed as by magic a repast at which Delmonico himself could

     have had no occasion to blush; and, indeed, in some respects it

     would be hard for that distinguished chef to match our menu; for, in

     addition to all that ordinarily makes up a first-chop dinner, had we

     not our antelope steak (the gormand who has not experienced this--

     bah! what does he know of the feast of fat things?) our delicious

     mountain-brook trout, and choice fruits and berries, and (sauce

     piquant and unpurchasable!) our sweet-scented, appetite-compelling

     air of the prairies?



     "You may depend upon it, we all did justice to the good things, and

     as we washed them down with bumpers of sparkling Krug, whilst we

     sped along at the rate of thirty miles an hour, agreed it was the

     fastest living we had ever experienced.  (We beat that, however, two

     days afterward when we made twenty-seven miles in twenty-seven

     minutes, while our Champagne glasses filled to the brim spilled not

     a drop!) After dinner we repaired to our drawing-room car, and, as

     it was Sabbath eve, intoned some of the grand old hymns--"Praise God

     from whom," etc.; "Shining Shore," "Coronation," etc.--the voices of

     the men singers and of the women singers blending sweetly in the

     evening air, while our train, with its great, glaring Polyphemus

     eye, lighting up long vistas of prairie, rushed into the night and

     the Wild.  Then to bed in luxurious couches, where we slept the

     sleep of the just and only awoke the next morning (Monday) at eight

     o'clock, to find ourselves at the crossing of the North Platte,

     three hundred miles from Omaha--fifteen hours and forty minutes

     out."









CHAPTER V.



Another night of alternate tranquillity and turmoil.  But morning came,

by and by.  It was another glad awakening to fresh breezes, vast expanses

of level greensward, bright sunlight, an impressive solitude utterly

without visible human beings or human habitations, and an atmosphere of

such amazing magnifying properties that trees that seemed close at hand

were more than three mile away.  We resumed undress uniform, climbed

a-top of the flying coach, dangled our legs over the side, shouted

occasionally at our frantic mules, merely to see them lay their ears back

and scamper faster, tied our hats on to keep our hair from blowing away,

and leveled an outlook over the world-wide carpet about us for things new

and strange to gaze at.  Even at this day it thrills me through and

through to think of the life, the gladness and the wild sense of freedom

that used to make the blood dance in my veins on those fine overland

mornings!



Along about an hour after breakfast we saw the first prairie-dog

villages, the first antelope, and the first wolf.  If I remember rightly,

this latter was the regular cayote (pronounced ky-o-te) of the farther

deserts.  And if it was, he was not a pretty creature or respectable

either, for I got well acquainted with his race afterward, and can speak

with confidence.  The cayote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking

skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail

that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and

misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly

lifted lip and exposed teeth.  He has a general slinking expression all

over.  The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want.  He is always

hungry.



He is always poor, out of luck and friendless.  The meanest creatures

despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.  He is

so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are

pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it.  And he

is so homely!--so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful.

When he sees you he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out, and

then turns a little out of the course he was pursuing, depresses his head

a bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the sage-brush,

glancing over his shoulder at you, from time to time, till he is about

out of easy pistol range, and then he stops and takes a deliberate survey

of you; he will trot fifty yards and stop again--another fifty and stop

again; and finally the gray of his gliding body blends with the gray of

the sage-brush, and he disappears.  All this is when you make no

demonstration against him; but if you do, he develops a livelier interest

in his journey, and instantly electrifies his heels and puts such a deal

of real estate between himself and your weapon, that by the time you have

raised the hammer you see that you need a minie rifle, and by the time

you have got him in line you need a rifled cannon, and by the time you

have "drawn a bead" on him you see well enough that nothing but an

unusually long-winded streak of lightning could reach him where he is

now.  But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it

ever so much--especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of

himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed.



The cayote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and

every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that

will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition,

and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his neck

further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail out

straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder frenzy,

and leave a broader and broader, and higher and denser cloud of desert

sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake across the level plain!

And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the cayote,

and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is that he cannot

get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him

madder and madder to see how gently the cayote glides along and never

pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more and more

incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire

stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot

is; and next he notices that he is getting fagged, and that the cayote

actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from

him--and then that town-dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain

and weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the

cayote with concentrated and desperate energy.  This "spurt" finds him

six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends.  And

then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting up his face, the

cayote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more, and with a something

about it which seems to say: "Well, I shall have to tear myself away from

you, bub--business is business, and it will not do for me to be fooling

along this way all day"--and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the

sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that

dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude!



It makes his head swim.  He stops, and looks all around; climbs the

nearest sand-mound, and gazes into the distance; shakes his head

reflectively, and then, without a word, he turns and jogs along back to

his train, and takes up a humble position under the hindmost wagon, and

feels unspeakably mean, and looks ashamed, and hangs his tail at half-

mast for a week.  And for as much as a year after that, whenever there is

a great hue and cry after a cayote, that dog will merely glance in that

direction without emotion, and apparently observe to himself, "I believe

I do not wish any of the pie."



The cayote lives chiefly in the most desolate and forbidding desert,

along with the lizard, the jackass-rabbit and the raven, and gets an

uncertain and precarious living, and earns it.  He seems to subsist

almost wholly on the carcases of oxen, mules and horses that have dropped

out of emigrant trains and died, and upon windfalls of carrion, and

occasional legacies of offal bequeathed to him by white men who have been

opulent enough to have something better to butcher than condemned army

bacon.



He will eat anything in the world that his first cousins, the desert-

frequenting tribes of Indians will, and they will eat anything they can

bite.  It is a curious fact that these latter are the only creatures

known to history who will eat nitro-glycerine and ask for more if they

survive.



The cayote of the deserts beyond the Rocky Mountains has a peculiarly

hard time of it, owing to the fact that his relations, the Indians, are

just as apt to be the first to detect a seductive scent on the desert

breeze, and follow the fragrance to the late ox it emanated from, as he

is himself; and when this occurs he has to content himself with sitting

off at a little distance watching those people strip off and dig out

everything edible, and walk off with it.  Then he and the waiting ravens

explore the skeleton and polish the bones.  It is considered that the

cayote, and the obscene bird, and the Indian of the desert, testify their

blood kinship with each other in that they live together in the waste

places of the earth on terms of perfect confidence and friendship, while

hating all other creature and yearning to assist at their funerals.  He

does not mind going a hundred miles to breakfast, and a hundred and fifty

to dinner, because he is sure to have three or four days between meals,

and he can just as well be traveling and looking at the scenery as lying

around doing nothing and adding to the burdens of his parents.



We soon learned to recognize the sharp, vicious bark of the cayote as it

came across the murky plain at night to disturb our dreams among the

mail-sacks; and remembering his forlorn aspect and his hard fortune, made

shift to wish him the blessed novelty of a long day's good luck and a

limitless larder the morrow.









CHAPTER VI.



Our new conductor (just shipped) had been without sleep for twenty hours.

Such a thing was very frequent.  From St. Joseph, Missouri, to

Sacramento, California, by stage-coach, was nearly nineteen hundred

miles, and the trip was often made in fifteen days (the cars do it in

four and a half, now), but the time specified in the mail contracts, and

required by the schedule, was eighteen or nineteen days, if I remember

rightly.  This was to make fair allowance for winter storms and snows,

and other unavoidable causes of detention.  The stage company had

everything under strict discipline and good system.  Over each two

hundred and fifty miles of road they placed an agent or superintendent,

and invested him with great authority.  His beat or jurisdiction of two

hundred and fifty miles was called a "division." He purchased horses,

mules harness, and food for men and beasts, and distributed these things

among his stage stations, from time to time, according to his judgment of

what each station needed.  He erected station buildings and dug wells.

He attended to the paying of the station-keepers, hostlers, drivers and

blacksmiths, and discharged them whenever he chose.  He was a very, very

great man in his "division"--a kind of Grand Mogul, a Sultan of the

Indies, in whose presence common men were modest of speech and manner,

and in the glare of whose greatness even the dazzling stage-driver

dwindled to a penny dip.  There were about eight of these kings, all

told, on the overland route.



Next in rank and importance to the division-agent came the "conductor."

His beat was the same length as the agent's--two hundred and fifty miles.

He sat with the driver, and (when necessary) rode that fearful distance,

night and day, without other rest or sleep than what he could get perched

thus on top of the flying vehicle.  Think of it!  He had absolute charge

of the mails, express matter, passengers and stage, coach, until he

delivered them to the next conductor, and got his receipt for them.



Consequently he had to be a man of intelligence, decision and

considerable executive ability.  He was usually a quiet, pleasant man,

who attended closely to his duties, and was a good deal of a gentleman.

It was not absolutely necessary that the division-agent should be a

gentleman, and occasionally he wasn't.  But he was always a general in

administrative ability, and a bull-dog in courage and determination--

otherwise the chieftainship over the lawless underlings of the overland

service would never in any instance have been to him anything but an

equivalent for a month of insolence and distress and a bullet and a

coffin at the end of it.  There were about sixteen or eighteen conductors

on the overland, for there was a daily stage each way, and a conductor on

every stage.



Next in real and official rank and importance, after the conductor, came

my delight, the driver--next in real but not in apparent importance--for

we have seen that in the eyes of the common herd the driver was to the

conductor as an admiral is to the captain of the flag-ship.  The driver's

beat was pretty long, and his sleeping-time at the stations pretty short,

sometimes; and so, but for the grandeur of his position his would have

been a sorry life, as well as a hard and a wearing one.  We took a new

driver every day or every night (for they drove backward and forward over

the same piece of road all the time), and therefore we never got as well

acquainted with them as we did with the conductors; and besides, they

would have been above being familiar with such rubbish as passengers,

anyhow, as a general thing.  Still, we were always eager to get a sight

of each and every new driver as soon as the watch changed, for each and

every day we were either anxious to get rid of an unpleasant one, or

loath to part with a driver we had learned to like and had come to be

sociable and friendly with.  And so the first question we asked the

conductor whenever we got to where we were to exchange drivers, was

always, "Which is him?"  The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not

know, then, that it would go into a book some day.  As long as everything

went smoothly, the overland driver was well enough situated, but if a

fellow driver got sick suddenly it made trouble, for the coach must go

on, and so the potentate who was about to climb down and take a luxurious

rest after his long night's siege in the midst of wind and rain and

darkness, had to stay where he was and do the sick man's work.  Once, in

the Rocky Mountains, when I found a driver sound asleep on the box, and

the mules going at the usual break-neck pace, the conductor said never

mind him, there was no danger, and he was doing double duty--had driven

seventy-five miles on one coach, and was now going back over it on this

without rest or sleep.  A hundred and fifty miles of holding back of six

vindictive mules and keeping them from climbing the trees!  It sounds

incredible, but I remember the statement well enough.



The station-keepers, hostlers, etc., were low, rough characters, as

already described; and from western Nebraska to Nevada a considerable

sprinkling of them might be fairly set down as outlaws--fugitives from

justice, criminals whose best security was a section of country which was

without law and without even the pretence of it.  When the "division-

agent" issued an order to one of these parties he did it with the full

understanding that he might have to enforce it with a navy six-shooter,

and so he always went "fixed" to make things go along smoothly.



Now and then a division-agent was really obliged to shoot a hostler

through the head to teach him some simple matter that he could have

taught him with a club if his circumstances and surroundings had been

different.  But they were snappy, able men, those division-agents, and

when they tried to teach a subordinate anything, that subordinate

generally "got it through his head."



A great portion of this vast machinery--these hundreds of men and

coaches, and thousands of mules and horses--was in the hands of Mr. Ben

Holliday.  All the western half of the business was in his hands.  This

reminds me of an incident of Palestine travel which is pertinent here, so

I will transfer it just in the language in which I find it set down in my

Holy Land note-book:



      No doubt everybody has heard of Ben Holliday--a man of prodigious

      energy, who used to send mails and passengers flying across the

      continent in his overland stage-coaches like a very whirlwind--two

      thousand long miles in fifteen days and a half, by the watch!  But

      this fragment of history is not about Ben Holliday, but about a

      young New York boy by the name of Jack, who traveled with our small

      party of pilgrims in the Holy Land (and who had traveled to

      California in Mr. Holliday's overland coaches three years before,

      and had by no means forgotten it or lost his gushing admiration of

      Mr. H.) Aged nineteen.  Jack was a good boy--a good-hearted and

      always well-meaning boy, who had been reared in the city of New

      York, and although he was bright and knew a great many useful

      things, his Scriptural education had been a good deal neglected--to

      such a degree, indeed, that all Holy Land history was fresh and new

      to him, and all Bible names mysteries that had never disturbed his

      virgin ear.



      Also in our party was an elderly pilgrim who was the reverse of

      Jack, in that he was learned in the Scriptures and an enthusiast

      concerning them.  He was our encyclopedia, and we were never tired

      of listening to his speeches, nor he of making them.  He never

      passed a celebrated locality, from Bashan to Bethlehem, without

      illuminating it with an oration.  One day, when camped near the

      ruins of Jericho, he burst forth with something like this:



      "Jack, do you see that range of mountains over yonder that bounds

      the Jordan valley?  The mountains of Moab, Jack!  Think of it, my

      boy--the actual mountains of Moab--renowned in Scripture history!

      We are actually standing face to face with those illustrious crags

      and peaks--and for all we know" [dropping his voice impressively],

      "our eyes may be resting at this very moment upon the spot WHERE

      LIES THE MYSTERIOUS GRAVE OF MOSES!  Think of it, Jack!"



      "Moses who?"  (falling inflection).



      "Moses who!  Jack, you ought to be ashamed of yourself--you ought to

      be ashamed of such criminal ignorance.  Why, Moses, the great guide,

      soldier, poet, lawgiver of ancient Israel!  Jack, from this spot

      where we stand, to Egypt, stretches a fearful desert three hundred

      miles in extent--and across that desert that wonderful man brought

      the children of Israel!--guiding them with unfailing sagacity for

      forty years over the sandy desolation and among the obstructing

      rocks and hills, and landed them at last, safe and sound, within

      sight of this very spot; and where we now stand they entered the

      Promised Land with anthems of rejoicing!  It was a wonderful,

      wonderful thing to do, Jack!  Think of it!"



      "Forty years?  Only three hundred miles?  Humph!  Ben Holliday would

      have fetched them through in thirty-six hours!"



The boy meant no harm.  He did not know that he had said anything that

was wrong or irreverent.  And so no one scolded him or felt offended with

him--and nobody could but some ungenerous spirit incapable of excusing

the heedless blunders of a boy.



At noon on the fifth day out, we arrived at the "Crossing of the South

Platte," alias "Julesburg," alias "Overland City," four hundred and

seventy miles from St. Joseph--the strangest, quaintest, funniest

frontier town that our untraveled eyes had ever stared at and been

astonished with.









CHAPTER VII.



It did seem strange enough to see a town again after what appeared to us

such a long acquaintance with deep, still, almost lifeless and houseless

solitude!  We tumbled out into the busy street feeling like meteoric

people crumbled off the corner of some other world, and wakened up

suddenly in this.  For an hour we took as much interest in Overland City

as if we had never seen a town before.  The reason we had an hour to

spare was because we had to change our stage (for a less sumptuous

affair, called a "mud-wagon") and transfer our freight of mails.



Presently we got under way again.  We came to the shallow, yellow, muddy

South Platte, with its low banks and its scattering flat sand-bars and

pigmy islands--a melancholy stream straggling through the centre of the

enormous flat plain, and only saved from being impossible to find with

the naked eye by its sentinel rank of scattering trees standing on either

bank.  The Platte was "up," they said--which made me wish I could see it

when it was down, if it could look any sicker and sorrier.  They said it

was a dangerous stream to cross, now, because its quicksands were liable

to swallow up horses, coach and passengers if an attempt was made to ford

it.  But the mails had to go, and we made the attempt.  Once or twice in

midstream the wheels sunk into the yielding sands so threateningly that

we half believed we had dreaded and avoided the sea all our lives to be

shipwrecked in a "mud-wagon" in the middle of a desert at last.  But we

dragged through and sped away toward the setting sun.



Next morning, just before dawn, when about five hundred and fifty miles

from St. Joseph, our mud-wagon broke down.  We were to be delayed five or

six hours, and therefore we took horses, by invitation, and joined a

party who were just starting on a buffalo hunt.  It was noble sport

galloping over the plain in the dewy freshness of the morning, but our

part of the hunt ended in disaster and disgrace, for a wounded buffalo

bull chased the passenger Bemis nearly two miles, and then he forsook his

horse and took to a lone tree.  He was very sullen about the matter for

some twenty-four hours, but at last he began to soften little by little,

and finally he said:



"Well, it was not funny, and there was no sense in those gawks making

themselves so facetious over it.  I tell you I was angry in earnest for

awhile.  I should have shot that long gangly lubber they called Hank, if

I could have done it without crippling six or seven other people--but of

course I couldn't, the old 'Allen's' so confounded comprehensive.  I wish

those loafers had been up in the tree; they wouldn't have wanted to laugh

so.  If I had had a horse worth a cent--but no, the minute he saw that

buffalo bull wheel on him and give a bellow, he raised straight up in the

air and stood on his heels.  The saddle began to slip, and I took him

round the neck and laid close to him, and began to pray.  Then he came

down and stood up on the other end awhile, and the bull actually stopped

pawing sand and bellowing to contemplate the inhuman spectacle.



"Then the bull made a pass at him and uttered a bellow that sounded

perfectly frightful, it was so close to me, and that seemed to literally

prostrate my horse's reason, and make a raving distracted maniac of him,

and I wish I may die if he didn't stand on his head for a quarter of a

minute and shed tears.  He was absolutely out of his mind--he was, as

sure as truth itself, and he really didn't know what he was doing.  Then

the bull came charging at us, and my horse dropped down on all fours and

took a fresh start--and then for the next ten minutes he would actually

throw one hand-spring after another so fast that the bull began to get

unsettled, too, and didn't know where to start in--and so he stood there

sneezing, and shovelling dust over his back, and bellowing every now and

then, and thinking he had got a fifteen-hundred dollar circus horse for

breakfast, certain.  Well, I was first out on his neck--the horse's, not

the bull's--and then underneath, and next on his rump, and sometimes head

up, and sometimes heels--but I tell you it seemed solemn and awful to be

ripping and tearing and carrying on so in the presence of death, as you

might say.  Pretty soon the bull made a snatch for us and brought away

some of my horse's tail (I suppose, but do not know, being pretty busy at

the time), but something made him hungry for solitude and suggested to

him to get up and hunt for it.



"And then you ought to have seen that spider legged old skeleton go! and

you ought to have seen the bull cut out after him, too--head down, tongue

out, tail up, bellowing like everything, and actually mowing down the

weeds, and tearing up the earth, and boosting up the sand like a

whirlwind!  By George, it was a hot race!  I and the saddle were back on

the rump, and I had the bridle in my teeth and holding on to the pommel

with both hands.  First we left the dogs behind; then we passed a jackass

rabbit; then we overtook a cayote, and were gaining on an antelope when

the rotten girth let go and threw me about thirty yards off to the left,

and as the saddle went down over the horse's rump he gave it a lift with

his heels that sent it more than four hundred yards up in the air, I wish

I may die in a minute if he didn't.  I fell at the foot of the only

solitary tree there was in nine counties adjacent (as any creature could

see with the naked eye), and the next second I had hold of the bark with

four sets of nails and my teeth, and the next second after that I was

astraddle of the main limb and blaspheming my luck in a way that made my

breath smell of brimstone.  I had the bull, now, if he did not think of

one thing.  But that one thing I dreaded.  I dreaded it very seriously.

There was a possibility that the bull might not think of it, but there

were greater chances that he would.  I made up my mind what I would do in

case he did.  It was a little over forty feet to the ground from where I

sat.  I cautiously unwound the lariat from the pommel of my saddle----"



"Your saddle?  Did you take your saddle up in the tree with you?"



"Take it up in the tree with me?  Why, how you talk.  Of course I didn't.

No man could do that.  It fell in the tree when it came down."



"Oh--exactly."



"Certainly.  I unwound the lariat, and fastened one end of it to the

limb.  It was the very best green raw-hide, and capable of sustaining

tons.  I made a slip-noose in the other end, and then hung it down to see

the length.  It reached down twenty-two feet--half way to the ground.

I then loaded every barrel of the Allen with a double charge.  I felt

satisfied.  I said to myself, if he never thinks of that one thing that I

dread, all right--but if he does, all right anyhow--I am fixed for him.

But don't you know that the very thing a man dreads is the thing that

always happens?  Indeed it is so.  I watched the bull, now, with anxiety

--anxiety which no one can conceive of who has not been in such a

situation and felt that at any moment death might come.  Presently a

thought came into the bull's eye.  I knew it! said I--if my nerve fails

now, I am lost.  Sure enough, it was just as I had dreaded, he started in

to climb the tree----"



"What, the bull?"



"Of course--who else?"



"But a bull can't climb a tree."



"He can't, can't he?  Since you know so much about it, did you ever see a

bull try?"



"No!  I never dreamt of such a thing."



"Well, then, what is the use of your talking that way, then?  Because you

never saw a thing done, is that any reason why it can't be done?"



"Well, all right--go on.  What did you do?"



"The bull started up, and got along well for about ten feet, then slipped

and slid back.  I breathed easier.  He tried it again--got up a little

higher--slipped again.  But he came at it once more, and this time he was

careful.  He got gradually higher and higher, and my spirits went down

more and more.  Up he came--an inch at a time--with his eyes hot, and his

tongue hanging out.  Higher and higher--hitched his foot over the stump

of a limb, and looked up, as much as to say, 'You are my meat, friend.'

Up again--higher and higher, and getting more excited the closer he got.

He was within ten feet of me!  I took a long breath,--and then said I,

'It is now or never.'  I had the coil of the lariat all ready; I paid it

out slowly, till it hung right over his head; all of a sudden I let go of

the slack, and the slipnoose fell fairly round his neck!  Quicker than

lightning I out with the Allen and let him have it in the face.  It was

an awful roar, and must have scared the bull out of his senses.  When the

smoke cleared away, there he was, dangling in the air, twenty foot from

the ground, and going out of one convulsion into another faster than you

could count!  I didn't stop to count, anyhow--I shinned down the tree and

shot for home."



"Bemis, is all that true, just as you have stated it?"



"I wish I may rot in my tracks and die the death of a dog if it isn't."



"Well, we can't refuse to believe it, and we don't.  But if there were

some proofs----"



"Proofs!  Did I bring back my lariat?"



"No."



"Did I bring back my horse?"



"No."



"Did you ever see the bull again?"



"No."



"Well, then, what more do you want?  I never saw anybody as particular as

you are about a little thing like that."



I made up my mind that if this man was not a liar he only missed it by

the skin of his teeth.  This episode reminds me of an incident of my

brief sojourn in Siam, years afterward.  The European citizens of a town

in the neighborhood of Bangkok had a prodigy among them by the name of

Eckert, an Englishman--a person famous for the number, ingenuity and

imposing magnitude of his lies.  They were always repeating his most

celebrated falsehoods, and always trying to "draw him out" before

strangers; but they seldom succeeded.  Twice he was invited to the house

where I was visiting, but nothing could seduce him into a specimen lie.

One day a planter named Bascom, an influential man, and a proud and

sometimes irascible one, invited me to ride over with him and call on

Eckert.  As we jogged along, said he:



"Now, do you know where the fault lies?  It lies in putting Eckert on his

guard.  The minute the boys go to pumping at Eckert he knows perfectly

well what they are after, and of course he shuts up his shell.  Anybody

might know he would.  But when we get there, we must play him finer than

that.  Let him shape the conversation to suit himself--let him drop it or

change it whenever he wants to.  Let him see that nobody is trying to

draw him out.  Just let him have his own way.  He will soon forget

himself and begin to grind out lies like a mill.  Don't get impatient--

just keep quiet, and let me play him.  I will make him lie.  It does seem

to me that the boys must be blind to overlook such an obvious and simple

trick as that."



Eckert received us heartily--a pleasant-spoken, gentle-mannered creature.

We sat in the veranda an hour, sipping English ale, and talking about the

king, and the sacred white elephant, the Sleeping Idol, and all manner of

things; and I noticed that my comrade never led the conversation himself

or shaped it, but simply followed Eckert's lead, and betrayed no

solicitude and no anxiety about anything.  The effect was shortly

perceptible.  Eckert began to grow communicative; he grew more and more

at his ease, and more and more talkative and sociable.  Another hour

passed in the same way, and then all of a sudden Eckert said:



"Oh, by the way!  I came near forgetting.  I have got a thing here to

astonish you.  Such a thing as neither you nor any other man ever heard

of--I've got a cat that will eat cocoanut!  Common green cocoanut--and

not only eat the meat, but drink the milk.  It is so--I'll swear to it."



A quick glance from Bascom--a glance that I understood--then:



"Why, bless my soul, I never heard of such a thing.  Man, it is

impossible."



"I knew you would say it.  I'll fetch the cat."



He went in the house.  Bascom said:



"There--what did I tell you?  Now, that is the way to handle Eckert.  You

see, I have petted him along patiently, and put his suspicions to sleep.

I am glad we came.  You tell the boys about it when you go back.  Cat eat

a cocoanut--oh, my!  Now, that is just his way, exactly--he will tell the

absurdest lie, and trust to luck to get out of it again.



"Cat eat a cocoanut--the innocent fool!"



Eckert approached with his cat, sure enough.



Bascom smiled.  Said he:



"I'll hold the cat--you bring a cocoanut."



Eckert split one open, and chopped up some pieces.  Bascom smuggled a

wink to me, and proffered a slice of the fruit to puss.  She snatched it,

swallowed it ravenously, and asked for more!



We rode our two miles in silence, and wide apart.  At least I was silent,

though Bascom cuffed his horse and cursed him a good deal,

notwithstanding the horse was behaving well enough.  When I branched off

homeward, Bascom said:



"Keep the horse till morning.  And--you need not speak of this--

foolishness to the boys."









CHAPTER VIII.



In a little while all interest was taken up in stretching our necks and

watching for the "pony-rider"--the fleet messenger who sped across the

continent from St. Joe to Sacramento, carrying letters nineteen hundred

miles in eight days!  Think of that for perishable horse and human flesh

and blood to do!  The pony-rider was usually a little bit of a man,

brimful of spirit and endurance.  No matter what time of the day or night

his watch came on, and no matter whether it was winter or summer,

raining, snowing, hailing, or sleeting, or whether his "beat" was a level

straight road or a crazy trail over mountain crags and precipices, or

whether it led through peaceful regions or regions that swarmed with

hostile Indians, he must be always ready to leap into the saddle and be

off like the wind!  There was no idling-time for a pony-rider on duty.

He rode fifty miles without stopping, by daylight, moonlight, starlight,

or through the blackness of darkness--just as it happened.  He rode a

splendid horse that was born for a racer and fed and lodged like a

gentleman; kept him at his utmost speed for ten miles, and then, as he

came crashing up to the station where stood two men holding fast a fresh,

impatient steed, the transfer of rider and mail-bag was made in the

twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eager pair and were out of sight

before the spectator could get hardly the ghost of a look.  Both rider

and horse went "flying light." The rider's dress was thin, and fitted

close; he wore a "round-about," and a skull-cap, and tucked his

pantaloons into his boot-tops like a race-rider.  He carried no arms--he

carried nothing that was not absolutely necessary, for even the postage

on his literary freight was worth five dollars a letter.



He got but little frivolous correspondence to carry--his bag had business

letters in it, mostly.  His horse was stripped of all unnecessary weight,

too.  He wore a little wafer of a racing-saddle, and no visible blanket.

He wore light shoes, or none at all.  The little flat mail-pockets

strapped under the rider's thighs would each hold about the bulk of a

child's primer.  They held many and many an important business chapter

and newspaper letter, but these were written on paper as airy and thin as

gold-leaf, nearly, and thus bulk and weight were economized.  The stage-

coach traveled about a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five miles a day

(twenty-four hours), the pony-rider about two hundred and fifty.  There

were about eighty pony-riders in the saddle all the time, night and day,

stretching in a long, scattering procession from Missouri to California,

forty flying eastward, and forty toward the west, and among them making

four hundred gallant horses earn a stirring livelihood and see a deal of

scenery every single day in the year.



We had had a consuming desire, from the beginning, to see a pony-rider,

but somehow or other all that passed us and all that met us managed to

streak by in the night, and so we heard only a whiz and a hail, and the

swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out of

the windows.  But now we were expecting one along every moment, and would

see him in broad daylight.  Presently the driver exclaims:



"HERE HE COMES!"



Every neck is stretched further, and every eye strained wider.  Away

across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears

against the sky, and it is plain that it moves.  Well, I should think so!



In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling,

rising and falling--sweeping toward us nearer and nearer--growing more

and more distinct, more and more sharply defined--nearer and still

nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear--another

instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider's

hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and

go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm!



So sudden is it all, and so like a flash of unreal fancy, that but for

the flake of white foam left quivering and perishing on a mail-sack after

the vision had flashed by and disappeared, we might have doubted whether

we had seen any actual horse and man at all, maybe.



We rattled through Scott's Bluffs Pass, by and by.  It was along here

somewhere that we first came across genuine and unmistakable alkali water

in the road, and we cordially hailed it as a first-class curiosity, and a

thing to be mentioned with eclat in letters to the ignorant at home.

This water gave the road a soapy appearance, and in many places the

ground looked as if it had been whitewashed.  I think the strange alkali

water excited us as much as any wonder we had come upon yet, and I know

we felt very complacent and conceited, and better satisfied with life

after we had added it to our list of things which we had seen and some

other people had not.  In a small way we were the same sort of simpletons

as those who climb unnecessarily the perilous peaks of Mont Blanc and the

Matterhorn, and derive no pleasure from it except the reflection that it

isn't a common experience.  But once in a while one of those parties

trips and comes darting down the long mountain-crags in a sitting

posture, making the crusted snow smoke behind him, flitting from bench to

bench, and from terrace to terrace, jarring the earth where he strikes,

and still glancing and flitting on again, sticking an iceberg into

himself every now and then, and tearing his clothes, snatching at things

to save himself, taking hold of trees and fetching them along with him,

roots and all, starting little rocks now and then, then big boulders,

then acres of ice and snow and patches of forest, gathering and still

gathering as he goes, adding and still adding to his massed and sweeping

grandeur as he nears a three thousand-foot precipice, till at last he

waves his hat magnificently and rides into eternity on the back of a

raging and tossing avalanche!



This is all very fine, but let us not be carried away by excitement, but

ask calmly, how does this person feel about it in his cooler moments next

day, with six or seven thousand feet of snow and stuff on top of him?



We crossed the sand hills near the scene of the Indian mail robbery and

massacre of 1856, wherein the driver and conductor perished, and also all

the passengers but one, it was supposed; but this must have been a

mistake, for at different times afterward on the Pacific coast I was

personally acquainted with a hundred and thirty-three or four people who

were wounded during that massacre, and barely escaped with their lives.

There was no doubt of the truth of it--I had it from their own lips.  One

of these parties told me that he kept coming across arrow-heads in his

system for nearly seven years after the massacre; and another of them

told me that he was struck so literally full of arrows that after the

Indians were gone and he could raise up and examine himself, he could not

restrain his tears, for his clothes were completely ruined.



The most trustworthy tradition avers, however, that only one man, a

person named Babbitt, survived the massacre, and he was desperately

wounded.  He dragged himself on his hands and knee (for one leg was

broken) to a station several miles away.  He did it during portions of

two nights, lying concealed one day and part of another, and for more

than forty hours suffering unimaginable anguish from hunger, thirst and

bodily pain.  The Indians robbed the coach of everything it contained,

including quite an amount of treasure.









CHAPTER IX.



We passed Fort Laramie in the night, and on the seventh morning out we

found ourselves in the Black Hills, with Laramie Peak at our elbow

(apparently) looming vast and solitary--a deep, dark, rich indigo blue in

hue, so portentously did the old colossus frown under his beetling brows

of storm-cloud.  He was thirty or forty miles away, in reality, but he

only seemed removed a little beyond the low ridge at our right.  We

breakfasted at Horse-Shoe Station, six hundred and seventy-six miles out

from St. Joseph.  We had now reached a hostile Indian country, and during

the afternoon we passed Laparelle Station, and enjoyed great discomfort

all the time we were in the neighborhood, being aware that many of the

trees we dashed by at arm's length concealed a lurking Indian or two.

During the preceding night an ambushed savage had sent a bullet through

the pony-rider's jacket, but he had ridden on, just the same, because

pony-riders were not allowed to stop and inquire into such things except

when killed.  As long as they had life enough left in them they had to

stick to the horse and ride, even if the Indians had been waiting for

them a week, and were entirely out of patience.  About two hours and a

half before we arrived at Laparelle Station, the keeper in charge of it

had fired four times at an Indian, but he said with an injured air that

the Indian had "skipped around so's to spile everything--and ammunition's

blamed skurse, too." The most natural inference conveyed by his manner of

speaking was, that in "skipping around," the Indian had taken an unfair

advantage.



The coach we were in had a neat hole through its front--a reminiscence of

its last trip through this region.  The bullet that made it wounded the

driver slightly, but he did not mind it much.  He said the place to keep

a man "huffy" was down on the Southern Overland, among the Apaches,

before the company moved the stage line up on the northern route.  He

said the Apaches used to annoy him all the time down there, and that he

came as near as anything to starving to death in the midst of abundance,

because they kept him so leaky with bullet holes that he "couldn't hold

his vittles."



This person's statement were not generally believed.



We shut the blinds down very tightly that first night in the hostile

Indian country, and lay on our arms.  We slept on them some, but most of

the time we only lay on them.  We did not talk much, but kept quiet and

listened.  It was an inky-black night, and occasionally rainy.  We were

among woods and rocks, hills and gorges--so shut in, in fact, that when

we peeped through a chink in a curtain, we could discern nothing.  The

driver and conductor on top were still, too, or only spoke at long

intervals, in low tones, as is the way of men in the midst of invisible

dangers.  We listened to rain-drops pattering on the roof; and the

grinding of the wheels through the muddy gravel; and the low wailing of

the wind; and all the time we had that absurd sense upon us, inseparable

from travel at night in a close-curtained vehicle, the sense of remaining

perfectly still in one place, notwithstanding the jolting and swaying of

the vehicle, the trampling of the horses, and the grinding of the wheels.

We listened a long time, with intent faculties and bated breath; every

time one of us would relax, and draw a long sigh of relief and start to

say something, a comrade would be sure to utter a sudden "Hark!" and

instantly the experimenter was rigid and listening again.  So the

tiresome minutes and decades of minutes dragged away, until at last our

tense forms filmed over with a dulled consciousness, and we slept, if one

might call such a condition by so strong a name--for it was a sleep set

with a hair-trigger.  It was a sleep seething and teeming with a weird

and distressful confusion of shreds and fag-ends of dreams--a sleep that

was a chaos.  Presently, dreams and sleep and the sullen hush of the

night were startled by a ringing report, and cloven by such a long, wild,

agonizing shriek!  Then we heard--ten steps from the stage--



"Help!  help!  help!" [It was our driver's voice.]



"Kill him!  Kill him like a dog!"



"I'm being murdered!  Will no man lend me a pistol?"



"Look out! head him off! head him off!"



[Two pistol shots; a confusion of voices and the trampling of many feet,

as if a crowd were closing and surging together around some object;

several heavy, dull blows, as with a club; a voice that said appealingly,

"Don't, gentlemen, please don't--I'm a dead man!" Then a fainter groan,

and another blow, and away sped the stage into the darkness, and left the

grisly mystery behind us.]



What a startle it was!  Eight seconds would amply cover the time it

occupied--maybe even five would do it.  We only had time to plunge at a

curtain and unbuckle and unbutton part of it in an awkward and hindering

flurry, when our whip cracked sharply overhead, and we went rumbling and

thundering away, down a mountain "grade."



We fed on that mystery the rest of the night--what was left of it, for it

was waning fast.  It had to remain a present mystery, for all we could

get from the conductor in answer to our hails was something that sounded,

through the clatter of the wheels, like "Tell you in the morning!"



So we lit our pipes and opened the corner of a curtain for a chimney, and

lay there in the dark, listening to each other's story of how he first

felt and how many thousand Indians he first thought had hurled themselves

upon us, and what his remembrance of the subsequent sounds was, and the

order of their occurrence.  And we theorized, too, but there was never a

theory that would account for our driver's voice being out there, nor yet

account for his Indian murderers talking such good English, if they were

Indians.



So we chatted and smoked the rest of the night comfortably away, our

boding anxiety being somehow marvelously dissipated by the real presence

of something to be anxious about.



We never did get much satisfaction about that dark occurrence.  All that

we could make out of the odds and ends of the information we gathered in

the morning, was that the disturbance occurred at a station; that we

changed drivers there, and that the driver that got off there had been

talking roughly about some of the outlaws that infested the region ("for

there wasn't a man around there but had a price on his head and didn't

dare show himself in the settlements," the conductor said); he had talked

roughly about these characters, and ought to have "drove up there with

his pistol cocked and ready on the seat alongside of him, and begun

business himself, because any softy would know they would be laying for

him."



That was all we could gather, and we could see that neither the conductor

nor the new driver were much concerned about the matter.  They plainly

had little respect for a man who would deliver offensive opinions of

people and then be so simple as to come into their presence unprepared to

"back his judgment," as they pleasantly phrased the killing of any

fellow-being who did not like said opinions.  And likewise they plainly

had a contempt for the man's poor discretion in venturing to rouse the

wrath of such utterly reckless wild beasts as those outlaws--and the

conductor added:



"I tell you it's as much as Slade himself want to do!"



This remark created an entire revolution in my curiosity.  I cared

nothing now about the Indians, and even lost interest in the murdered

driver.  There was such magic in that name, SLADE!  Day or night, now, I

stood always ready to drop any subject in hand, to listen to something

new about Slade and his ghastly exploits.  Even before we got to Overland

City, we had begun to hear about Slade and his "division" (for he was a

"division-agent") on the Overland; and from the hour we had left Overland

City we had heard drivers and conductors talk about only three things--

"Californy," the Nevada silver mines, and this desperado Slade.  And a

deal the most of the talk was about Slade.  We had gradually come to have

a realizing sense of the fact that Slade was a man whose heart and hands

and soul were steeped in the blood of offenders against his dignity; a

man who awfully avenged all injuries, affront, insults or slights, of

whatever kind--on the spot if he could, years afterward if lack of

earlier opportunity compelled it; a man whose hate tortured him day and

night till vengeance appeased it--and not an ordinary vengeance either,

but his enemy's absolute death--nothing less; a man whose face would

light up with a terrible joy when he surprised a foe and had him at a

disadvantage.  A high and efficient servant of the Overland, an outlaw

among outlaws and yet their relentless scourge, Slade was at once the

most bloody, the most dangerous and the most valuable citizen that

inhabited the savage fastnesses of the mountains.









CHAPTER X.



Really and truly, two thirds of the talk of drivers and conductors had

been about this man Slade, ever since the day before we reached

Julesburg.  In order that the eastern reader may have a clear conception

of what a Rocky Mountain desperado is, in his highest state of

development, I will reduce all this mass of overland gossip to one

straightforward narrative, and present it in the following shape:



Slade was born in Illinois, of good parentage.  At about twenty-six years

of age he killed a man in a quarrel and fled the country.  At St. Joseph,

Missouri, he joined one of the early California-bound emigrant trains,

and was given the post of train-master.  One day on the plains he had an

angry dispute with one of his wagon-drivers, and both drew their

revolvers.  But the driver was the quicker artist, and had his weapon

cocked first.  So Slade said it was a pity to waste life on so small a

matter, and proposed that the pistols be thrown on the ground and the

quarrel settled by a fist-fight.  The unsuspecting driver agreed, and

threw down his pistol--whereupon Slade laughed at his simplicity, and

shot him dead!



He made his escape, and lived a wild life for awhile, dividing his time

between fighting Indians and avoiding an Illinois sheriff, who had been

sent to arrest him for his first murder.  It is said that in one Indian

battle he killed three savages with his own hand, and afterward cut their

ears off and sent them, with his compliments, to the chief of the tribe.



Slade soon gained a name for fearless resolution, and this was sufficient

merit to procure for him the important post of overland division-agent at

Julesburg, in place of Mr. Jules, removed.  For some time previously, the

company's horses had been frequently stolen, and the coaches delayed, by

gangs of outlaws, who were wont to laugh at the idea of any man's having

the temerity to resent such outrages.  Slade resented them promptly.



The outlaws soon found that the new agent was a man who did not fear

anything that breathed the breath of life.  He made short work of all

offenders.  The result was that delays ceased, the company's property was

let alone, and no matter what happened or who suffered, Slade's coaches

went through, every time!  True, in order to bring about this wholesome

change, Slade had to kill several men--some say three, others say four,

and others six--but the world was the richer for their loss.  The first

prominent difficulty he had was with the ex-agent Jules, who bore the

reputation of being a reckless and desperate man himself.  Jules hated

Slade for supplanting him, and a good fair occasion for a fight was all

he was waiting for.  By and by Slade dared to employ a man whom Jules had

once discharged.  Next, Slade seized a team of stage-horses which he

accused Jules of having driven off and hidden somewhere for his own use.

War was declared, and for a day or two the two men walked warily about

the streets, seeking each other, Jules armed with a double-barreled shot

gun, and Slade with his history-creating revolver.  Finally, as Slade

stepped into a store Jules poured the contents of his gun into him from

behind the door.  Slade was plucky, and Jules got several bad pistol

wounds in return.



Then both men fell, and were carried to their respective lodgings, both

swearing that better aim should do deadlier work next time.  Both were

bedridden a long time, but Jules got to his feet first, and gathering his

possessions together, packed them on a couple of mules, and fled to the

Rocky Mountains to gather strength in safety against the day of

reckoning.  For many months he was not seen or heard of, and was

gradually dropped out of the remembrance of all save Slade himself.  But

Slade was not the man to forget him.  On the contrary, common report said

that Slade kept a reward standing for his capture, dead or alive!



After awhile, seeing that Slade's energetic administration had restored

peace and order to one of the worst divisions of the road, the overland

stage company transferred him to the Rocky Ridge division in the Rocky

Mountains, to see if he could perform a like miracle there.  It was the

very paradise of outlaws and desperadoes.  There was absolutely no

semblance of law there.  Violence was the rule.  Force was the only

recognized authority.  The commonest misunderstandings were settled on

the spot with the revolver or the knife.  Murders were done in open day,

and with sparkling frequency, and nobody thought of inquiring into them.

It was considered that the parties who did the killing had their private

reasons for it; for other people to meddle would have been looked upon as

indelicate.  After a murder, all that Rocky Mountain etiquette required

of a spectator was, that he should help the gentleman bury his game--

otherwise his churlishness would surely be remembered against him the

first time he killed a man himself and needed a neighborly turn in

interring him.



Slade took up his residence sweetly and peacefully in the midst of this

hive of horse-thieves and assassins, and the very first time one of them

aired his insolent swaggerings in his presence he shot him dead!  He

began a raid on the outlaws, and in a singularly short space of time he

had completely stopped their depredations on the stage stock, recovered a

large number of stolen horses, killed several of the worst desperadoes of

the district, and gained such a dread ascendancy over the rest that they

respected him, admired him, feared him, obeyed him!  He wrought the same

marvelous change in the ways of the community that had marked his

administration at Overland City.  He captured two men who had stolen

overland stock, and with his own hands he hanged them.  He was supreme

judge in his district, and he was jury and executioner likewise--and not

only in the case of offences against his employers, but against passing

emigrants as well.  On one occasion some emigrants had their stock lost

or stolen, and told Slade, who chanced to visit their camp.  With a

single companion he rode to a ranch, the owners of which he suspected,

and opening the door, commenced firing, killing three, and wounding the

fourth.



From a bloodthirstily interesting little Montana book.--["The Vigilantes

of Montana," by Prof. Thos. J. Dimsdale.]--I take this paragraph:



      "While on the road, Slade held absolute sway.  He would ride down to

      a station, get into a quarrel, turn the house out of windows, and

      maltreat the occupants most cruelly.  The unfortunates had no means

      of redress, and were compelled to recuperate as best they could."



On one of these occasions, it is said he killed the father of the fine

little half-breed boy Jemmy, whom he adopted, and who lived with his

widow after his execution.  Stories of Slade's hanging men, and of

innumerable assaults, shootings, stabbings and beatings, in which he was

a principal actor, form part of the legends of the stage line.  As for

minor quarrels and shootings, it is absolutely certain that a minute

history of Slade's life would be one long record of such practices.



Slade was a matchless marksman with a navy revolver.  The legends say

that one morning at Rocky Ridge, when he was feeling comfortable, he saw

a man approaching who had offended him some days before--observe the fine

memory he had for matters like that--and, "Gentlemen," said Slade,

drawing, "it is a good twenty-yard shot--I'll clip the third button on

his coat!"  Which he did.  The bystanders all admired it.  And they all

attended the funeral, too.



On one occasion a man who kept a little whisky-shelf at the station did

something which angered Slade--and went and made his will.  A day or two

afterward Slade came in and called for some brandy.  The man reached

under the counter (ostensibly to get a bottle--possibly to get something

else), but Slade smiled upon him that peculiarly bland and satisfied

smile of his which the neighbors had long ago learned to recognize as a

death-warrant in disguise, and told him to "none of that!--pass out the

high-priced article."  So the poor bar-keeper had to turn his back and

get the high-priced brandy from the shelf; and when he faced around again

he was looking into the muzzle of Slade's pistol.  "And the next

instant," added my informant, impressively, "he was one of the deadest

men that ever lived."



The stage-drivers and conductors told us that sometimes Slade would leave

a hated enemy wholly unmolested, unnoticed and unmentioned, for weeks

together--had done it once or twice at any rate.  And some said they

believed he did it in order to lull the victims into unwatchfulness, so

that he could get the advantage of them, and others said they believed he

saved up an enemy that way, just as a schoolboy saves up a cake, and made

the pleasure go as far as it would by gloating over the anticipation.

One of these cases was that of a Frenchman who had offended Slade.

To the surprise of everybody Slade did not kill him on the spot, but let

him alone for a considerable time.  Finally, however, he went to the

Frenchman's house very late one night, knocked, and when his enemy opened

the door, shot him dead--pushed the corpse inside the door with his foot,

set the house on fire and burned up the dead man, his widow and three

children!  I heard this story from several different people, and they

evidently believed what they were saying.  It may be true, and it may

not.  "Give a dog a bad name," etc.



Slade was captured, once, by a party of men who intended to lynch him.

They disarmed him, and shut him up in a strong log-house, and placed a

guard over him.  He prevailed on his captors to send for his wife, so

that he might have a last interview with her.  She was a brave, loving,

spirited woman.  She jumped on a horse and rode for life and death.

When she arrived they let her in without searching her, and before the

door could be closed she whipped out a couple of revolvers, and she and

her lord marched forth defying the party.  And then, under a brisk fire,

they mounted double and galloped away unharmed!



In the fulness of time Slade's myrmidons captured his ancient enemy

Jules, whom they found in a well-chosen hiding-place in the remote

fastnesses of the mountains, gaining a precarious livelihood with his

rifle.  They brought him to Rocky Ridge, bound hand and foot, and

deposited him in the middle of the cattle-yard with his back against a

post.  It is said that the pleasure that lit Slade's face when he heard

of it was something fearful to contemplate.  He examined his enemy to see

that he was securely tied, and then went to bed, content to wait till

morning before enjoying the luxury of killing him.  Jules spent the night

in the cattle-yard, and it is a region where warm nights are never known.

In the morning Slade practised on him with his revolver, nipping the

flesh here and there, and occasionally clipping off a finger, while Jules

begged him to kill him outright and put him out of his misery.  Finally

Slade reloaded, and walking up close to his victim, made some

characteristic remarks and then dispatched him.  The body lay there half

a day, nobody venturing to touch it without orders, and then Slade

detailed a party and assisted at the burial himself.  But he first cut

off the dead man's ears and put them in his vest pocket, where he carried

them for some time with great satisfaction.  That is the story as I have

frequently heard it told and seen it in print in California newspapers.

It is doubtless correct in all essential particulars.



In due time we rattled up to a stage-station, and sat down to breakfast

with a half-savage, half-civilized company of armed and bearded

mountaineers, ranchmen and station employees.  The most gentlemanly-

appearing, quiet and affable officer we had yet found along the road in

the Overland Company's service was the person who sat at the head of the

table, at my elbow.  Never youth stared and shivered as I did when I

heard them call him SLADE!



Here was romance, and I sitting face to face with it!--looking upon it--

touching it--hobnobbing with it, as it were!  Here, right by my side, was

the actual ogre who, in fights and brawls and various ways, had taken the

lives of twenty-six human beings, or all men lied about him!  I suppose I

was the proudest stripling that ever traveled to see strange lands and

wonderful people.



He was so friendly and so gentle-spoken that I warmed to him in spite of

his awful history.  It was hardly possible to realize that this pleasant

person was the pitiless scourge of the outlaws, the raw-head-and-bloody-

bones the nursing mothers of the mountains terrified their children with.

And to this day I can remember nothing remarkable about Slade except that

his face was rather broad across the cheek bones, and that the cheek

bones were low and the lips peculiarly thin and straight.  But that was

enough to leave something of an effect upon me, for since then I seldom

see a face possessing those characteristics without fancying that the

owner of it is a dangerous man.



The coffee ran out.  At least it was reduced to one tin-cupful, and Slade

was about to take it when he saw that my cup was empty.



He politely offered to fill it, but although I wanted it, I politely

declined.  I was afraid he had not killed anybody that morning, and might

be needing diversion.  But still with firm politeness he insisted on

filling my cup, and said I had traveled all night and better deserved it

than he--and while he talked he placidly poured the fluid, to the last

drop.  I thanked him and drank it, but it gave me no comfort, for I could

not feel sure that he would not be sorry, presently, that he had given it

away, and proceed to kill me to distract his thoughts from the loss.

But nothing of the kind occurred.  We left him with only twenty-six dead

people to account for, and I felt a tranquil satisfaction in the thought

that in so judiciously taking care of No. 1 at that breakfast-table I had

pleasantly escaped being No. 27.  Slade came out to the coach and saw us

off, first ordering certain rearrangements of the mail-bags for our

comfort, and then we took leave of him, satisfied that we should hear of

him again, some day, and wondering in what connection.









CHAPTER XI.



And sure enough, two or three years afterward, we did hear him again.

News came to the Pacific coast that the Vigilance Committee in Montana

(whither Slade had removed from Rocky Ridge) had hanged him.  I find an

account of the affair in the thrilling little book I quoted a paragraph

from in the last chapter--"The Vigilantes of Montana; being a Reliable

Account of the Capture, Trial and Execution of Henry Plummer's Notorious

Road Agent Band: By Prof. Thos. J. Dimsdale, Virginia City, M.T."

Mr. Dimsdale's chapter is well worth reading, as a specimen of how the

people of the frontier deal with criminals when the courts of law prove

inefficient.  Mr. Dimsdale makes two remarks about Slade, both of which

are accurately descriptive, and one of which is exceedingly picturesque:

"Those who saw him in his natural state only, would pronounce him to be a

kind husband, a most hospitable host and a courteous gentleman; on the

contrary, those who met him when maddened with liquor and surrounded by a

gang of armed roughs, would pronounce him a fiend incarnate."  And this:

"From Fort Kearney, west, he was feared a great deal more than the

almighty."  For compactness, simplicity and vigor of expression, I will

"back" that sentence against anything in literature.  Mr. Dimsdale's

narrative is as follows.  In all places where italics occur, they are

mine:



      After the execution of the five men on the 14th of January, the

      Vigilantes considered that their work was nearly ended.  They had

      freed the country of highwaymen and murderers to a great extent, and

      they determined that in the absence of the regular civil authority

      they would establish a People's Court where all offenders should be

      tried by judge and jury.  This was the nearest approach to social

      order that the circumstances permitted, and, though strict legal

      authority was wanting, yet the people were firmly determined to

      maintain its efficiency, and to enforce its decrees.  It may here be

      mentioned that the overt act which was the last round on the fatal

      ladder leading to the scaffold on which Slade perished, was the

      tearing in pieces and stamping upon a writ of this court, followed

      by his arrest of the Judge Alex. Davis, by authority of a presented

      Derringer, and with his own hands.



      J. A. Slade was himself, we have been informed, a Vigilante; he

      openly boasted of it, and said he knew all that they knew.  He was

      never accused, or even suspected, of either murder or robbery,

      committed in this Territory (the latter crime was never laid to his

      charge, in any place); but that he had killed several men in other

      localities was notorious, and his bad reputation in this respect was

      a most powerful argument in determining his fate, when he was

      finally arrested for the offence above mentioned.  On returning from

      Milk River he became more and more addicted to drinking, until at

      last it was a common feat for him and his friends to "take the

      town."  He and a couple of his dependents might often be seen on one

      horse, galloping through the streets, shouting and yelling, firing

      revolvers, etc.  On many occasions he would ride his horse into

      stores, break up bars, toss the scales out of doors and use most

      insulting language to parties present.  Just previous to the day of

      his arrest, he had given a fearful beating to one of his followers;

      but such was his influence over them that the man wept bitterly at

      the gallows, and begged for his life with all his power.  It had

      become quite common, when Slade was on a spree, for the shop-keepers

      and citizens to close the stores and put out all the lights; being

      fearful of some outrage at his hands.  For his wanton destruction of

      goods and furniture, he was always ready to pay, when sober, if he

      had money; but there were not a few who regarded payment as small

      satisfaction for the outrage, and these men were his personal

      enemies.



      From time to time Slade received warnings from men that he well knew

      would not deceive him, of the certain end of his conduct.  There was

      not a moment, for weeks previous to his arrest, in which the public

      did not expect to hear of some bloody outrage.  The dread of his

      very name, and the presence of the armed band of hangers-on who

      followed him alone prevented a resistance which must certainly have

      ended in the instant murder or mutilation of the opposing party.



      Slade was frequently arrested by order of the court whose

      organization we have described, and had treated it with respect by

      paying one or two fines and promising to pay the rest when he had

      money; but in the transaction that occurred at this crisis, he

      forgot even this caution, and goaded by passion and the hatred of

      restraint, he sprang into the embrace of death.



      Slade had been drunk and "cutting up" all night.  He and his

      companions had made the town a perfect hell.  In the morning, J. M.

      Fox, the sheriff, met him, arrested him, took him into court and

      commenced reading a warrant that he had for his arrest, by way of

      arraignment.  He became uncontrollably furious, and seizing the

      writ, he tore it up, threw it on the ground and stamped upon it.



      The clicking of the locks of his companions' revolvers was instantly

      heard, and a crisis was expected.  The sheriff did not attempt his

      retention; but being at least as prudent as he was valiant, he

      succumbed, leaving Slade the master of the situation and the

      conqueror and ruler of the courts, law and law-makers.  This was a

      declaration of war, and was so accepted.  The Vigilance Committee

      now felt that the question of social order and the preponderance of

      the law-abiding citizens had then and there to be decided.  They

      knew the character of Slade, and they were well aware that they must

      submit to his rule without murmur, or else that he must be dealt

      with in such fashion as would prevent his being able to wreak his

      vengeance on the committee, who could never have hoped to live in

      the Territory secure from outrage or death, and who could never

      leave it without encountering his friend, whom his victory would

      have emboldened and stimulated to a pitch that would have rendered

      them reckless of consequences.  The day previous he had ridden into

      Dorris's store, and on being requested to leave, he drew his

      revolver and threatened to kill the gentleman who spoke to him.

      Another saloon he had led his horse into, and buying a bottle of

      wine, he tried to make the animal drink it.  This was not considered

      an uncommon performance, as he had often entered saloons and

      commenced firing at the lamps, causing a wild stampede.



      A leading member of the committee met Slade, and informed him in the

      quiet, earnest manner of one who feels the importance of what he is

      saying: "Slade, get your horse at once, and go home, or there will

      be ---- to pay."  Slade started and took a long look, with his dark

      and piercing eyes, at the gentleman.  "What do you mean?"  said he.

      "You have no right to ask me what I mean," was the quiet reply, "get

      your horse at once, and remember what I tell you."  After a short

      pause he promised to do so, and actually got into the saddle; but,

      being still intoxicated, he began calling aloud to one after another

      of his friends, and at last seemed to have forgotten the warning he

      had received and became again uproarious, shouting the name of a

      well-known courtezan in company with those of two men whom he

      considered heads of the committee, as a sort of challenge; perhaps,

      however, as a simple act of bravado.  It seems probable that the

      intimation of personal danger he had received had not been forgotten

      entirely; though fatally for him, he took a foolish way of showing

      his remembrance of it.  He sought out Alexander Davis, the Judge of

      the Court, and drawing a cocked Derringer, he presented it at his

      head, and told him that he should hold him as a hostage for his own

      safety.  As the judge stood perfectly quiet, and offered no

      resistance to his captor, no further outrage followed on this score.

      Previous to this, on account of the critical state of affairs, the

      committee had met, and at last resolved to arrest him.  His

      execution had not been agreed upon, and, at that time, would have

      been negatived, most assuredly.  A messenger rode down to Nevada to

      inform the leading men of what was on hand, as it was desirable to

      show that there was a feeling of unanimity on the subject, all along

      the gulch.



      The miners turned out almost en masse, leaving their work and

      forming in solid column about six hundred strong, armed to the

      teeth, they marched up to Virginia.  The leader of the body well

      knew the temper of his men on the subject.  He spurred on ahead of

      them, and hastily calling a meeting of the executive, he told them

      plainly that the miners meant "business," and that, if they came up,

      they would not stand in the street to be shot down by Slade's

      friends; but that they would take him and hang him.  The meeting was

      small, as the Virginia men were loath to act at all.  This momentous

      announcement of the feeling of the Lower Town was made to a cluster

      of men, who were deliberation behind a wagon, at the rear of a store

      on Main street.



      The committee were most unwilling to proceed to extremities.  All

      the duty they had ever performed seemed as nothing to the task

      before them; but they had to decide, and that quickly.  It was

      finally agreed that if the whole body of the miners were of the

      opinion that he should be hanged, that the committee left it in

      their hands to deal with him.  Off, at hot speed, rode the leader of

      the Nevada men to join his command.



      Slade had found out what was intended, and the news sobered him

      instantly.  He went into P. S. Pfouts' store, where Davis was, and

      apologized for his conduct, saying that he would take it all back.



      The head of the column now wheeled into Wallace street and marched

      up at quick time.  Halting in front of the store, the executive

      officer of the committee stepped forward and arrested Slade, who was

      at once informed of his doom, and inquiry was made as to whether he

      had any business to settle.  Several parties spoke to him on the

      subject; but to all such inquiries he turned a deaf ear, being

      entirely absorbed in the terrifying reflections on his own awful

      position.  He never ceased his entreaties for life, and to see his

      dear wife.  The unfortunate lady referred to, between whom and Slade

      there existed a warm affection, was at this time living at their

      ranch on the Madison.  She was possessed of considerable personal

      attractions; tall, well-formed, of graceful carriage, pleasing

      manners, and was, withal, an accomplished horsewoman.



      A messenger from Slade rode at full speed to inform her of her

      husband's arrest.  In an instant she was in the saddle, and with all

      the energy that love and despair could lend to an ardent temperament

      and a strong physique, she urged her fleet charger over the twelve

      miles of rough and rocky ground that intervened between her and the

      object of her passionate devotion.



      Meanwhile a party of volunteers had made the necessary preparations

      for the execution, in the valley traversed by the branch.  Beneath

      the site of Pfouts and Russell's stone building there was a corral,

      the gate-posts of which were strong and high.  Across the top was

      laid a beam, to which the rope was fastened, and a dry-goods box

      served for the platform.  To this place Slade was marched,

      surrounded by a guard, composing the best armed and most numerous

      force that has ever appeared in Montana Territory.



      The doomed man had so exhausted himself by tears, prayers and

      lamentations, that he had scarcely strength left to stand under the

      fatal beam.  He repeatedly exclaimed, "My God! my God! must I die?

      Oh, my dear wife!"



      On the return of the fatigue party, they encountered some friends of

      Slade, staunch and reliable citizens and members of the committee,

      but who were personally attached to the condemned.  On hearing of

      his sentence, one of them, a stout-hearted man, pulled out his

      handkerchief and walked away, weeping like a child.  Slade still

      begged to see his wife, most piteously, and it seemed hard to deny

      his request; but the bloody consequences that were sure to follow

      the inevitable attempt at a rescue, that her presence and entreaties

      would have certainly incited, forbade the granting of his request.

      Several gentlemen were sent for to see him, in his last moments, one

      of whom (Judge Davis) made a short address to the people; but in

      such low tones as to be inaudible, save to a few in his immediate

      vicinity.  One of his friends, after exhausting his powers of

      entreaty, threw off his coat and declared that the prisoner could

      not be hanged until he himself was killed.  A hundred guns were

      instantly leveled at him; whereupon he turned and fled; but, being

      brought back, he was compelled to resume his coat, and to give a

      promise of future peaceable demeanor.



      Scarcely a leading man in Virginia could be found, though numbers of

      the citizens joined the ranks of the guard when the arrest was made.

      All lamented the stern necessity which dictated the execution.



      Everything being ready, the command was given, "Men, do your duty,"

      and the box being instantly slipped from beneath his feet, he died

      almost instantaneously.



      The body was cut down and carried to the Virginia Hotel, where, in a

      darkened room, it was scarcely laid out, when the unfortunate and

      bereaved companion of the deceased arrived, at headlong speed, to

      find that all was over, and that she was a widow.  Her grief and

      heart-piercing cries were terrible evidences of the depth of her

      attachment for her lost husband, and a considerable period elapsed

      before she could regain the command of her excited feelings.



There is something about the desperado-nature that is wholly

unaccountable--at least it looks unaccountable.  It is this.  The true

desperado is gifted with splendid courage, and yet he will take the most

infamous advantage of his enemy; armed and free, he will stand up before

a host and fight until he is shot all to pieces, and yet when he is under

the gallows and helpless he will cry and plead like a child.  Words are

cheap, and it is easy to call Slade a coward (all executed men who do not

"die game" are promptly called cowards by unreflecting people), and when

we read of Slade that he "had so exhausted himself by tears, prayers and

lamentations, that he had scarcely strength left to stand under the fatal

beam," the disgraceful word suggests itself in a moment--yet in

frequently defying and inviting the vengeance of banded Rocky Mountain

cut-throats by shooting down their comrades and leaders, and never

offering to hide or fly, Slade showed that he was a man of peerless

bravery.  No coward would dare that.  Many a notorious coward, many a

chicken-livered poltroon, coarse, brutal, degraded, has made his dying

speech without a quaver in his voice and been swung into eternity with

what looked liked the calmest fortitude, and so we are justified in

believing, from the low intellect of such a creature, that it was not

moral courage that enabled him to do it.  Then, if moral courage is not

the requisite quality, what could it have been that this stout-hearted

Slade lacked?--this bloody, desperate, kindly-mannered, urbane gentleman,

who never hesitated to warn his most ruffianly enemies that he would kill

them whenever or wherever he came across them next!  I think it is a

conundrum worth investigating.









CHAPTER XII.



Just beyond the breakfast-station we overtook a Mormon emigrant train of

thirty-three wagons; and tramping wearily along and driving their herd of

loose cows, were dozens of coarse-clad and sad-looking men, women and

children, who had walked as they were walking now, day after day for

eight lingering weeks, and in that time had compassed the distance our

stage had come in eight days and three hours--seven hundred and ninety-

eight miles!  They were dusty and uncombed, hatless, bonnetless and

ragged, and they did look so tired!



After breakfast, we bathed in Horse Creek, a (previously) limpid,

sparkling stream--an appreciated luxury, for it was very seldom that our

furious coach halted long enough for an indulgence of that kind.  We

changed horses ten or twelve times in every twenty-four hours--changed

mules, rather--six mules--and did it nearly every time in four minutes.

It was lively work.  As our coach rattled up to each station six

harnessed mules stepped gayly from the stable; and in the twinkling of an

eye, almost, the old team was out, and the new one in and we off and away

again.



During the afternoon we passed Sweetwater Creek, Independence Rock,

Devil's Gate and the Devil's Gap.  The latter were wild specimens of

rugged scenery, and full of interest--we were in the heart of the Rocky

Mountains, now.  And we also passed by "Alkali" or "Soda Lake," and we

woke up to the fact that our journey had stretched a long way across the

world when the driver said that the Mormons often came there from Great

Salt Lake City to haul away saleratus.  He said that a few days gone by

they had shoveled up enough pure saleratus from the ground (it was a dry

lake) to load two wagons, and that when they got these two wagons-loads

of a drug that cost them nothing, to Salt Lake, they could sell it for

twenty-five cents a pound.



In the night we sailed by a most notable curiosity, and one we had been

hearing a good deal about for a day or two, and were suffering to see.

This was what might be called a natural ice-house.  It was August, now,

and sweltering weather in the daytime, yet at one of the stations the men

could scape the soil on the hill-side under the lee of a range of

boulders, and at a depth of six inches cut out pure blocks of ice--hard,

compactly frozen, and clear as crystal!



Toward dawn we got under way again, and presently as we sat with raised

curtains enjoying our early-morning smoke and contemplating the first

splendor of the rising sun as it swept down the long array of mountain

peaks, flushing and gilding crag after crag and summit after summit, as

if the invisible Creator reviewed his gray veterans and they saluted with

a smile, we hove in sight of South Pass City.  The hotel-keeper, the

postmaster, the blacksmith, the mayor, the constable, the city marshal

and the principal citizen and property holder, all came out and greeted

us cheerily, and we gave him good day.  He gave us a little Indian news,

and a little Rocky Mountain news, and we gave him some Plains information

in return.  He then retired to his lonely grandeur and we climbed on up

among the bristling peaks and the ragged clouds.  South Pass City

consisted of four log cabins, one if which was unfinished, and the

gentleman with all those offices and titles was the chiefest of the ten

citizens of the place.  Think of hotel-keeper, postmaster, blacksmith,

mayor, constable, city marshal and principal citizen all condensed into

one person and crammed into one skin.  Bemis said he was "a perfect

Allen's revolver of dignities."  And he said that if he were to die as

postmaster, or as blacksmith, or as postmaster and blacksmith both, the

people might stand it; but if he were to die all over, it would be a

frightful loss to the community.



Two miles beyond South Pass City we saw for the first time that

mysterious marvel which all Western untraveled boys have heard of and

fully believe in, but are sure to be astounded at when they see it with

their own eyes, nevertheless--banks of snow in dead summer time.  We were

now far up toward the sky, and knew all the time that we must presently

encounter lofty summits clad in the "eternal snow" which was so common

place a matter of mention in books, and yet when I did see it glittering

in the sun on stately domes in the distance and knew the month was August

and that my coat was hanging up because it was too warm to wear it, I was

full as much amazed as if I never had heard of snow in August before.

Truly, "seeing is believing"--and many a man lives a long life through,

thinking he believes certain universally received and well established

things, and yet never suspects that if he were confronted by those things

once, he would discover that he did not really believe them before, but

only thought he believed them.



In a little while quite a number of peaks swung into view with long claws

of glittering snow clasping them; and with here and there, in the shade,

down the mountain side, a little solitary patch of snow looking no larger

than a lady's pocket-handkerchief but being in reality as large as a

"public square."



And now, at last, we were fairly in the renowned SOUTH PASS, and whirling

gayly along high above the common world.  We were perched upon the

extreme summit of the great range of the Rocky Mountains, toward which we

had been climbing, patiently climbing, ceaselessly climbing, for days and

nights together--and about us was gathered a convention of Nature's kings

that stood ten, twelve, and even thirteen thousand feet high--grand old

fellows who would have to stoop to see Mount Washington, in the twilight.

We were in such an airy elevation above the creeping populations of the

earth, that now and then when the obstructing crags stood out of the way

it seemed that we could look around and abroad and contemplate the whole

great globe, with its dissolving views of mountains, seas and continents

stretching away through the mystery of the summer haze.



As a general thing the Pass was more suggestive of a valley than a

suspension bridge in the clouds--but it strongly suggested the latter at

one spot.  At that place the upper third of one or two majestic purple

domes projected above our level on either hand and gave us a sense of a

hidden great deep of mountains and plains and valleys down about their

bases which we fancied we might see if we could step to the edge and look

over.  These Sultans of the fastnesses were turbaned with tumbled volumes

of cloud, which shredded away from time to time and drifted off fringed

and torn, trailing their continents of shadow after them; and catching

presently on an intercepting peak, wrapped it about and brooded there--

then shredded away again and left the purple peak, as they had left the

purple domes, downy and white with new-laid snow.  In passing, these

monstrous rags of cloud hung low and swept along right over the

spectator's head, swinging their tatters so nearly in his face that his

impulse was to shrink when they came closet.  In the one place I speak

of, one could look below him upon a world of diminishing crags and

canyons leading down, down, and away to a vague plain with a thread in it

which was a road, and bunches of feathers in it which were trees,--a

pretty picture sleeping in the sunlight--but with a darkness stealing

over it and glooming its features  deeper and deeper under the frown of a

coming storm; and then, while no film or shadow marred the noon

brightness of his high perch, he could watch the tempest break forth down

there and see the lightnings leap from crag to crag and the sheeted rain

drive along the canyon-sides, and hear the thunders peal and crash and

roar.  We had this spectacle; a familiar one to many, but to us a

novelty.



We bowled along cheerily, and presently, at the very summit (though it

had been all summit to us, and all equally level, for half an hour or

more), we came to a spring which spent its water through two outlets and

sent it in opposite directions.  The conductor said that one of those

streams which we were looking at, was just starting on a journey westward

to the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean, through hundreds and

even thousands of miles of desert solitudes.  He said that the other was

just leaving its home among the snow-peaks on a similar journey eastward

--and we knew that long after we should have forgotten the simple rivulet

it would still be plodding its patient way down the mountain sides, and

canyon-beds, and between the banks of the Yellowstone; and by and by

would join the broad Missouri and flow through unknown plains and deserts

and unvisited wildernesses; and add a long and troubled pilgrimage among

snags and wrecks and sandbars; and enter the Mississippi, touch the

wharves of St. Louis and still drift on, traversing shoals and rocky

channels, then endless chains of bottomless and ample bends, walled with

unbroken forests, then mysterious byways and secret passages among woody

islands, then the chained bends again, bordered with wide levels of

shining sugar-cane in place of the sombre forests; then by New Orleans

and still other chains of bends--and finally, after two long months of

daily and nightly harassment, excitement, enjoyment, adventure, and awful

peril of parched throats, pumps and evaporation, pass the Gulf and enter

into its rest upon the bosom of the tropic sea, never to look upon its

snow-peaks again or regret them.



I freighted a leaf with a mental message for the friends at home, and

dropped it in the stream.  But I put no stamp on it and it was held for

postage somewhere.



On the summit we overtook an emigrant train of many wagons, many tired

men and women, and many a disgusted sheep and cow.



In the wofully dusty horseman in charge of the expedition I recognized

John -----.  Of all persons in the world to meet on top of the Rocky

Mountains thousands of miles from home, he was the last one I should have

looked for.  We were school-boys together and warm friends for years.

But a boyish prank of mine had disruptured this friendship and it had

never been renewed.  The act of which I speak was this.  I had been

accustomed to visit occasionally an editor whose room was in the third

story of a building and overlooked the street.  One day this editor gave

me a watermelon which I made preparations to devour on the spot, but

chancing to look out of the window, I saw John standing directly under it

and an irresistible desire came upon me to drop the melon on his head,

which I immediately did.  I was the loser, for it spoiled the melon, and

John never forgave me and we dropped all intercourse and parted, but now

met again under these circumstances.



We recognized each other simultaneously, and hands were grasped as warmly

as if no coldness had ever existed between us, and no allusion was made

to any.  All animosities were buried and the simple fact of meeting a

familiar face in that isolated spot so far from home, was sufficient to

make us forget all things but pleasant ones, and we parted again with

sincere "good-bye" and "God bless you" from both.



We had been climbing up the long shoulders of the Rocky Mountains for

many tedious hours--we started down them, now.  And we went spinning away

at a round rate too.



We left the snowy Wind River Mountains and Uinta Mountains behind, and

sped away, always through splendid scenery but occasionally through long

ranks of white skeletons of mules and oxen--monuments of the huge

emigration of other days--and here and there were up-ended boards or

small piles of stones which the driver said marked the resting-place of

more precious remains.



It was the loneliest land for a grave!  A land given over to the cayote

and the raven--which is but another name for desolation and utter

solitude.  On damp, murky nights, these scattered skeletons gave forth a

soft, hideous glow, like very faint spots of moonlight starring the vague

desert.  It was because of the phosphorus in the bones.  But no

scientific explanation could keep a body from shivering when he drifted

by one of those ghostly lights and knew that a skull held it.



At midnight it began to rain, and I never saw anything like it--indeed, I

did not even see this, for it was too dark.  We fastened down the

curtains and even caulked them with clothing, but the rain streamed in in

twenty places, nothwithstanding.  There was no escape.  If one moved his

feet out of a stream, he brought his body under one; and if he moved his

body he caught one somewhere else.  If he struggled out of the drenched

blankets and sat up, he was bound to get one down the back of his neck.

Meantime the stage was wandering about a plain with gaping gullies in it,

for the driver could not see an inch before his face nor keep the road,

and the storm pelted so pitilessly that there was no keeping the horses

still.  With the first abatement the conductor turned out with lanterns

to look for the road, and the first dash he made was into a chasm about

fourteen feet deep, his lantern following like a meteor.  As soon as he

touched bottom he sang out frantically:



"Don't come here!"



To which the driver, who was looking over the precipice where he had

disappeared, replied, with an injured air: "Think I'm a dam fool?"



The conductor was more than an hour finding the road--a matter which

showed us how far we had wandered and what chances we had been taking.

He traced our wheel-tracks to the imminent verge of danger, in two

places.  I have always been glad that we were not killed that night.

I do not know any particular reason, but I have always been glad.

In the morning, the tenth day out, we crossed Green River, a fine, large,

limpid stream--stuck in it with the water just up to the top of our mail-

bed, and waited till extra teams were put on to haul us up the steep

bank.  But it was nice cool water, and besides it could not find any

fresh place on us to wet.



At the Green River station we had breakfast--hot biscuits, fresh antelope

steaks, and coffee--the only decent meal we tasted between the United

States and Great Salt Lake City, and the only one we were ever really

thankful for.



Think of the monotonous execrableness of the thirty that went before it,

to leave this one simple breakfast looming up in my memory like a shot-

tower after all these years have gone by!



At five P.M.  we reached Fort Bridger, one hundred and seventeen miles

from the South Pass, and one thousand and twenty-five miles from St.

Joseph.  Fifty-two miles further on, near the head of Echo Canyon, we met

sixty United States soldiers from Camp Floyd.  The day before, they had

fired upon three hundred or four hundred Indians, whom they supposed

gathered together for no good purpose.  In the fight that had ensued,

four Indians were captured, and the main body chased four miles, but

nobody killed.  This looked like business.  We had a notion to get out

and join the sixty soldiers, but upon reflecting that there were four

hundred of the Indians, we concluded to go on and join the Indians.



Echo Canyon is twenty miles long.  It was like a long, smooth, narrow

street, with a gradual descending grade, and shut in by enormous

perpendicular walls of coarse conglomerate, four hundred feet high in

many places, and turreted like mediaeval castles.  This was the most

faultless piece of road in the mountains, and the driver said he would

"let his team out."  He did, and if the Pacific express trains whiz

through there now any faster than we did then in the stage-coach, I envy

the passengers the exhilaration of it.  We fairly seemed to pick up our

wheels and fly--and the mail matter was lifted up free from everything

and held in solution!  I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a

thing I mean it.



However, time presses.  At four in the afternoon we arrived on the summit

of Big Mountain, fifteen miles from Salt Lake City, when all the world

was glorified with the setting sun, and the most stupendous panorama of

mountain peaks yet encountered burst on our sight.  We looked out upon

this sublime spectacle from under the arch of a brilliant rainbow!  Even

the overland stage-driver stopped his horses and gazed!



Half an hour or an hour later, we changed horses, and took supper with a

Mormon "Destroying Angel."



"Destroying Angels," as I understand it, are Latter-Day Saints who are

set apart by the Church to conduct permanent disappearances of obnoxious

citizens.  I had heard a deal about these Mormon Destroying Angels and

the dark and bloody deeds they had done, and when I entered this one's

house I had my shudder all ready.  But alas for all our romances, he was

nothing but a loud, profane, offensive, old blackguard!  He was murderous

enough, possibly, to fill the bill of a Destroyer, but would you have any

kind of an Angel devoid of dignity?  Could you abide an Angel in an

unclean shirt and no suspenders?  Could you respect an Angel with a

horse-laugh and a swagger like a buccaneer?



There were other blackguards present--comrades of this one.  And there

was one person that looked like a gentleman--Heber C. Kimball's son, tall

and well made, and thirty years old, perhaps.  A lot of slatternly women

flitted hither and thither in a hurry, with coffee-pots, plates of bread,

and other appurtenances to supper, and these were said to be the wives of

the Angel--or some of them, at least.  And of course they were; for if

they had been hired "help" they would not have let an angel from above

storm and swear at them as he did, let alone one from the place this one

hailed from.



This was our first experience of the western "peculiar institution," and

it was not very prepossessing.  We did not tarry long to observe it, but

hurried on to the home of the Latter-Day Saints, the stronghold of the

prophets, the capital of the only absolute monarch in America--Great Salt

Lake City.  As the night closed in we took sanctuary in the Salt Lake

House and unpacked our baggage.









CHAPTER XIII.



We had a fine supper, of the freshest meats and fowls and vegetables--a

great variety and as great abundance.  We walked about the streets some,

afterward, and glanced in at shops and stores; and there was fascination

in surreptitiously staring at every creature we took to be a Mormon.

This was fairy-land to us, to all intents and purposes--a land of

enchantment, and goblins, and awful mystery.  We felt a curiosity to ask

every child how many mothers it had, and if it could tell them apart; and

we experienced a thrill every time a dwelling-house door opened and shut

as we passed, disclosing a glimpse of human heads and backs and

shoulders--for we so longed to have a good satisfying look at a Mormon

family in all its comprehensive ampleness, disposed in the customary

concentric rings of its home circle.



By and by the Acting Governor of the Territory introduced us to other

"Gentiles," and we spent a sociable hour with them.  "Gentiles" are

people who are not Mormons.  Our fellow-passenger, Bemis, took care of

himself, during this part of the evening, and did not make an

overpowering success of it, either, for he came into our room in the

hotel about eleven o'clock, full of cheerfulness, and talking loosely,

disjointedly and indiscriminately, and every now and then tugging out a

ragged word by the roots that had more hiccups than syllables in it.

This, together with his hanging his coat on the floor on one side of a

chair, and his vest on the floor on the other side, and piling his pants

on the floor just in front of the same chair, and then comtemplating the

general result with superstitious awe, and finally pronouncing it "too

many for him" and going to bed with his boots on, led us to fear that

something he had eaten had not agreed with him.



But we knew afterward that it was something he had been drinking.  It was

the exclusively Mormon refresher, "valley tan."



Valley tan (or, at least, one form of valley tan) is a kind of whisky,

or first cousin to it; is of Mormon invention and manufactured only in

Utah.  Tradition says it is made of (imported) fire and brimstone.  If I

remember rightly no public drinking saloons were allowed in the kingdom

by Brigham Young, and no private drinking permitted among the faithful,

except they confined themselves to "valley tan."



Next day we strolled about everywhere through the broad, straight, level

streets, and enjoyed the pleasant strangeness of a city of fifteen

thousand inhabitants with no loafers perceptible in it; and no visible

drunkards or noisy people; a limpid stream rippling and dancing through

every street in place of a filthy gutter; block after block of trim

dwellings, built of "frame" and sunburned brick--a great thriving orchard

and garden behind every one of them, apparently--branches from the street

stream winding and sparkling among the garden beds and fruit trees--and a

grand general air of neatness, repair, thrift and comfort, around and

about and over the whole.  And everywhere were workshops, factories, and

all manner of industries; and intent faces and busy hands were to be seen

wherever one looked; and in one's ears was the ceaseless clink of

hammers, the buzz of trade and the contented hum of drums and fly-wheels.



The armorial crest of my own State consisted of two dissolute bears

holding up the head of a dead and gone cask between them and making the

pertinent remark, "UNITED, WE STAND--(hic!)--DIVIDED, WE FALL."  It was

always too figurative for the author of this book.  But the Mormon crest

was easy.  And it was simple, unostentatious, and fitted like a glove.

It was a representation of a GOLDEN BEEHIVE, with the bees all at work!



The city lies in the edge of a level plain as broad as the State of

Connecticut, and crouches close down to the ground under a curving wall

of mighty mountains whose heads are hidden in the clouds, and whose

shoulders bear relics of the snows of winter all the summer long.



Seen from one of these dizzy heights, twelve or fifteen miles off, Great

Salt Lake City is toned down and diminished till it is suggestive of a

child's toy-village reposing under the majestic protection of the Chinese

wall.



On some of those mountains, to the southwest, it had been raining every

day for two weeks, but not a drop had fallen in the city.  And on hot

days in late spring and early autumn the citizens could quit fanning and

growling and go out and cool off by looking at the luxury of a glorious

snow-storm going on in the mountains.  They could enjoy it at a distance,

at those seasons, every day, though no snow would fall in their streets,

or anywhere near them.



Salt Lake City was healthy--an extremely healthy city.



They declared there was only one physician in the place and he was

arrested every week regularly and held to answer under the vagrant act

for having "no visible means of support."  They always give you a good

substantial article of truth in Salt Lake, and good measure and good

weight, too. [Very often, if you wished to weigh one of their airiest

little commonplace statements you would want the hay scales.]



We desired to visit the famous inland sea, the American "Dead Sea," the

great Salt Lake--seventeen miles, horseback, from the city--for we had

dreamed about it, and thought about it, and talked about it, and yearned

to see it, all the first part of our trip; but now when it was only arm's

length away it had suddenly lost nearly every bit of its interest.  And

so we put it off, in a sort of general way, till next day--and that was

the last we ever thought of it.  We dined with some hospitable Gentiles;

and visited the foundation of the prodigious temple; and talked long with

that shrewd Connecticut Yankee, Heber C. Kimball (since deceased), a

saint of high degree and a mighty man of commerce.



We saw the "Tithing-House," and the "Lion House," and I do not know or

remember how many more church and government buildings of various kinds

and curious names.  We flitted hither and thither and enjoyed every hour,

and picked up a great deal of useful information and entertaining

nonsense, and went to bed at night satisfied.



The second day, we made the acquaintance of Mr. Street (since deceased)

and put on white shirts and went and paid a state visit to the king.

He seemed a quiet, kindly, easy-mannered, dignified, self-possessed old

gentleman of fifty-five or sixty, and had a gentle craft in his eye that

probably belonged there.  He was very simply dressed and was just taking

off a straw hat as we entered.  He talked about Utah, and the Indians,

and Nevada, and general American matters and questions, with our

secretary and certain government officials who came with us.  But he

never paid any attention to me, notwithstanding I made several attempts

to "draw him out" on federal politics and his high handed attitude toward

Congress.  I thought some of the things I said were rather fine.  But he

merely looked around at me, at distant intervals, something as I have

seen a benignant old cat look around to see which kitten was meddling

with her tail.



By and by I subsided into an indignant silence, and so sat until the end,

hot and flushed, and execrating him in my heart for an ignorant savage.

But he was calm.  His conversation with those gentlemen flowed on as

sweetly and peacefully and musically as any summer brook.  When the

audience was ended and we were retiring from the presence, he put his

hand on my head, beamed down on me in an admiring way and said to my

brother:



"Ah--your child, I presume?  Boy, or girl?"









CHAPTER XIV.



Mr. Street was very busy with his telegraphic matters--and considering

that he had eight or nine hundred miles of rugged, snowy, uninhabited

mountains, and waterless, treeless, melancholy deserts to traverse with

his wire, it was natural and needful that he should be as busy as

possible.  He could not go comfortably along and cut his poles by the

road-side, either, but they had to be hauled by ox teams across those

exhausting deserts--and it was two days' journey from water to water, in

one or two of them.  Mr. Street's contract was a vast work, every way one

looked at it; and yet to comprehend what the vague words "eight hundred

miles of rugged mountains and dismal deserts" mean, one must go over the

ground in person--pen and ink descriptions cannot convey the dreary

reality to the reader.  And after all, Mr. S.'s mightiest difficulty

turned out to be one which he had never taken into the account at all.

Unto Mormons he had sub-let the hardest and heaviest half of his great

undertaking, and all of a sudden they concluded that they were going to

make little or nothing, and so they tranquilly threw their poles

overboard in mountain or desert, just as it happened when they took the

notion, and drove home and went about their customary business!  They

were under written contract to Mr. Street, but they did not care anything

for that.  They said they would "admire" to see a "Gentile" force a

Mormon to fulfil a losing contract in Utah!  And they made themselves

very merry over the matter.  Street said--for it was he that told us

these things:



"I was in dismay.  I was under heavy bonds to complete my contract in a

given time, and this disaster looked very much like ruin.  It was an

astounding thing; it was such a wholly unlooked-for difficulty, that I

was entirely nonplussed.  I am a business man--have always been a

business man--do not know anything but business--and so you can imagine

how like being struck by lightning it was to find myself in a country

where written contracts were worthless!--that main security, that sheet-

anchor, that absolute necessity, of business.  My confidence left me.

There was no use in making new contracts--that was plain.  I talked with

first one prominent citizen and then another.  They all sympathized with

me, first rate, but they did not know how to help me.  But at last a

Gentile said, 'Go to Brigham Young!--these small fry cannot do you any

good.'  I did not think much of the idea, for if the law could not help

me, what could an individual do who had not even anything to do with

either making the laws or executing them?  He might be a very good

patriarch of a church and preacher in its tabernacle, but something

sterner than religion and moral suasion was needed to handle a hundred

refractory, half-civilized sub-contractors.  But what was a man to do?

I thought if Mr. Young could not do anything else, he might probably be

able to give me some advice and a valuable hint or two, and so I went

straight to him and laid the whole case before him.  He said very little,

but he showed strong interest all the way through.  He examined all the

papers in detail, and whenever there seemed anything like a hitch, either

in the papers or my statement, he would go back and take up the thread

and follow it patiently out to an intelligent and satisfactory result.

Then he made a list of the contractors' names.  Finally he said:



"'Mr. Street, this is all perfectly plain.  These contracts are strictly

and legally drawn, and are duly signed and certified.  These men

manifestly entered into them with their eyes open.  I see no fault or

flaw anywhere.'



"Then Mr. Young turned to a man waiting at the other end of the room and

said: 'Take this list of names to So-and-so, and tell him to have these

men here at such-and-such an hour.'



"They were there, to the minute.  So was I.  Mr. Young asked them a

number of questions, and their answers made my statement good.  Then he

said to them:



"'You signed these contracts and assumed these obligations of your own

free will and accord?'



"'Yes.'



"'Then carry them out to the letter, if it makes paupers of you!  Go!'



"And they did go, too!  They are strung across the deserts now, working

like bees.  And I never hear a word out of them.



"There is a batch of governors, and judges, and other officials here,

shipped from Washington, and they maintain the semblance of a republican

form of government--but the petrified truth is that Utah is an absolute

monarchy and Brigham Young is king!"



Mr. Street was a fine man, and I believe his story.  I knew him well

during several years afterward in San Francisco.



Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we

had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of

polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to

calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter.



I had the will to do it.  With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I

was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here--until

I saw the Mormon women.  Then I was touched.  My heart was wiser than my

head.  It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically "homely"

creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I

said, "No--the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian

charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their

harsh censure--and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of

open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered

in his presence and worship in silence."



      [For a brief sketch of Mormon history, and the noted Mountain Meadow

      massacre, see Appendices A and B. ]









CHAPTER XV.



It is a luscious country for thrilling evening stories about

assassinations of intractable Gentiles.  I cannot easily conceive of

anything more cosy than the night in Salt Lake which we spent in a

Gentile den, smoking pipes and listening to tales of how Burton galloped

in among the pleading and defenceless "Morisites" and shot them down, men

and women, like so many dogs.  And how Bill Hickman, a Destroying Angel,

shot Drown and Arnold dead for bringing suit against him for a debt.

And how Porter Rockwell did this and that dreadful thing.  And how

heedless people often come to Utah and make remarks about Brigham, or

polygamy, or some other sacred matter, and the very next morning at

daylight such parties are sure to be found lying up some back alley,

contentedly waiting for the hearse.



And the next most interesting thing is to sit and listen to these

Gentiles talk about polygamy; and how some portly old frog of an elder,

or a bishop, marries a girl--likes her, marries her sister--likes her,

marries another sister--likes her, takes another--likes her, marries her

mother--likes her, marries her father, grandfather, great grandfather,

and then comes back hungry and asks for more.  And how the pert young

thing of eleven will chance to be the favorite wife and her own venerable

grandmother have to rank away down toward D 4 in their mutual husband's

esteem, and have to sleep in the kitchen, as like as not.  And how this

dreadful sort of thing, this hiving together in one foul nest of mother

and daughters, and the making a young daughter superior to her own mother

in rank and authority, are things which Mormon women submit to because

their religion teaches them that the more wives a man has on earth, and

the more children he rears, the higher the place they will all have in

the world to come--and the warmer, maybe, though they do not seem to say

anything about that.



According to these Gentile friends of ours, Brigham Young's harem

contains twenty or thirty wives.  They said that some of them had grown

old and gone out of active service, but were comfortably housed and cared

for in the henery--or the Lion House, as it is strangely named.  Along

with each wife were her children--fifty altogether.  The house was

perfectly quiet and orderly, when the children were still.  They all took

their meals in one room, and a happy and home-like sight it was

pronounced to be.  None of our party got an opportunity to take dinner

with Mr. Young, but a Gentile by the name of Johnson professed to have

enjoyed a sociable breakfast in the Lion House.  He gave a preposterous

account of the "calling of the roll," and other preliminaries, and the

carnage that ensued when the buckwheat cakes came in.  But he embellished

rather too much.  He said that Mr. Young told him several smart sayings

of certain of his "two-year-olds," observing with some pride that for

many years he had been the heaviest contributor in that line to one of

the Eastern magazines; and then he wanted to show Mr. Johnson one of the

pets that had said the last good thing, but he could not find the child.



He searched the faces of the children in detail, but could not decide

which one it was.  Finally he gave it up with a sigh and said:



"I thought I would know the little cub again but I don't."  Mr. Johnson

said further, that Mr. Young observed that life was a sad, sad thing--

"because the joy of every new marriage a man contracted was so apt to be

blighted by the inopportune funeral of a less recent bride."  And Mr.

Johnson said that while he and Mr. Young were pleasantly conversing in

private, one of the Mrs. Youngs came in and demanded a breast-pin,

remarking that she had found out that he had been giving a breast-pin to

No. 6, and she, for one, did not propose to let this partiality go on

without making a satisfactory amount of trouble about it.  Mr. Young

reminded her that there was a stranger present.  Mrs. Young said that if

the state of things inside the house was not agreeable to the stranger,

he could find room outside.  Mr. Young promised the breast-pin, and she

went away.  But in a minute or two another Mrs. Young came in and

demanded a breast-pin.  Mr. Young began a remonstrance, but Mrs. Young

cut him short.  She said No. 6 had got one, and No. 11 was promised one,

and it was "no use for him to try to impose on her--she hoped she knew

her rights."  He gave his promise, and she went.  And presently three

Mrs. Youngs entered in a body and opened on their husband a tempest of

tears, abuse, and entreaty.  They had heard all about No. 6, No. 11, and

No. 14.  Three more breast-pins were promised.  They were hardly gone

when nine more Mrs. Youngs filed into the presence, and a new tempest

burst forth and raged round about the prophet and his guest.  Nine

breast-pins were promised, and the weird sisters filed out again.  And in

came eleven more, weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth.  Eleven

promised breast-pins purchased peace once more.



"That is a specimen," said Mr. Young.  "You see how it is.  You see what

a life I lead.  A man can't be wise all the time.  In a heedless moment I

gave my darling No. 6--excuse my calling her thus, as her other name has

escaped me for the moment--a breast-pin.  It was only worth twenty-five

dollars--that is, apparently that was its whole cost--but its ultimate

cost was inevitably bound to be a good deal more.  You yourself have seen

it climb up to six hundred and fifty dollars--and alas, even that is not

the end!  For I have wives all over this Territory of Utah.  I have

dozens of wives whose numbers, even, I do not know without looking in the

family Bible.  They are scattered far and wide among the mountains and

valleys of my realm.  And mark you, every solitary one of them will hear

of this wretched breast pin, and every last one of them will have one or

die.  No. 6's breast pin will cost me twenty-five hundred dollars before

I see the end of it.  And these creatures will compare these pins

together, and if one is a shade finer than the rest, they will all be

thrown on my hands, and I will have to order a new lot to keep peace in

the family.  Sir, you probably did not know it, but all the time you were

present with my children your every movement was watched by vigilant

servitors of mine.  If you had offered to give a child a dime, or a stick

of candy, or any trifle of the kind, you would have been snatched out of

the house instantly, provided it could be done before your gift left your

hand.  Otherwise it would be absolutely necessary for you to make an

exactly similar gift to all my children--and knowing by experience the

importance of the thing, I would have stood by and seen to it myself that

you did it, and did it thoroughly.  Once a gentleman gave one of my

children a tin whistle--a veritable invention of Satan, sir, and one

which I have an unspeakable horror of, and so would you if you had eighty

or ninety children in your house.  But the deed was done--the man

escaped.  I knew what the result was going to be, and I thirsted for

vengeance.  I ordered out a flock of Destroying Angels, and they hunted

the man far into the fastnesses of the Nevada mountains.  But they never

caught him.  I am not cruel, sir--I am not vindictive except when sorely

outraged--but if I had caught him, sir, so help me Joseph Smith, I would

have locked him into the nursery till the brats whistled him to death.

By the slaughtered body of St. Parley Pratt (whom God assail!) there

was never anything on this earth like it!  I knew who gave the whistle to

the child, but I could, not make those jealous mothers believe me.  They

believed I did it, and the result was just what any man of reflection

could have foreseen: I had to order a hundred and ten whistles--I think

we had a hundred and ten children in the house then, but some of them are

off at college now--I had to order a hundred and ten of those shrieking

things, and I wish I may never speak another word if we didn't have to

talk on our fingers entirely, from that time forth until the children got

tired of the whistles.  And if ever another man gives a whistle to a

child of mine and I get my hands on him, I will hang him higher than

Haman!  That is the word with the bark on it!  Shade of Nephi!  You don't

know anything about married life.  I am rich, and everybody knows it.  I

am benevolent, and everybody takes advantage of it.  I have a strong

fatherly instinct and all the foundlings are foisted on me.



"Every time a woman wants to do well by her darling, she puzzles her brain

to cipher out some scheme for getting it into my hands.  Why, sir, a

woman came here once with a child of a curious lifeless sort of

complexion (and so had the woman), and swore that the child was mine and

she my wife--that I had married her at such-and-such a time in such-and-

such a place, but she had forgotten her number, and of course I could not

remember her name.  Well, sir, she called my attention to the fact that

the child looked like me, and really it did seem to resemble me--a common

thing in the Territory--and, to cut the story short, I put it in my

nursery, and she left.  And by the ghost of Orson Hyde, when they came to

wash the paint off that child it was an Injun!  Bless my soul, you don't

know anything about married life.  It is a perfect dog's life, sir--a

perfect dog's life.  You can't economize.  It isn't possible.  I have

tried keeping one set of bridal attire for all occasions.  But it is of

no use.  First you'll marry a combination of calico and consumption

that's as thin as a rail, and next you'll get a creature that's nothing

more than the dropsy in disguise, and then you've got to eke out that

bridal dress with an old balloon.  That is the way it goes.  And think of

the wash-bill--(excuse these tears)--nine hundred and eighty-four pieces

a week!  No, sir, there is no such a thing as economy in a family like

mine.  Why, just the one item of cradles--think of it!  And vermifuge!

Soothing syrup!  Teething rings!  And 'papa's watches' for the babies to

play with!  And things to scratch the furniture with!  And lucifer

matches for them to eat, and pieces of glass to cut themselves with!

The item of glass alone would support your family, I venture to say, sir.

Let me scrimp and squeeze all I can, I still can't get ahead as fast as I

feel I ought to, with my opportunities.  Bless you, sir, at a time when I

had seventy-two wives in this house, I groaned under the pressure of

keeping thousands of dollars tied up in seventy-two bedsteads when the

money ought to have been out at interest; and I just sold out the whole

stock, sir, at a sacrifice, and built a bedstead seven feet long and

ninety-six feet wide.  But it was a failure, sir.  I could not sleep.

It appeared to me that the whole seventy-two women snored at once.

The roar was deafening.  And then the danger of it!  That was what I was

looking at.  They would all draw in their breath at once, and you could

actually see the walls of the house suck in--and then they would all

exhale their breath at once, and you could see the walls swell out, and

strain, and hear the rafters crack, and the shingles grind together.

My friend, take an old man's advice, and don't encumber yourself with a

large family--mind, I tell you, don't do it.  In a small family, and in a

small family only, you will find that comfort and that peace of mind

which are the best at last of the blessings this world is able to afford

us, and for the lack of which no accumulation of wealth, and no

acquisition of fame, power, and greatness can ever compensate us.

Take my word for it, ten or eleven wives is all you need--never go over

it."



Some instinct or other made me set this Johnson down as being unreliable.

And yet he was a very entertaining person, and I doubt if some of the

information he gave us could have been acquired from any other source.

He was a pleasant contrast to those reticent Mormons.









CHAPTER XVI.



All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have

seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it.  I brought away a

copy from Salt Lake.  The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a

pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of

inspiration.  It is chloroform in print.  If Joseph Smith composed this

book, the act was a miracle--keeping awake while he did it was, at any

rate.  If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain

ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he

found under a stone, in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of

translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason.



The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the

Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New

Testament.  The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint,

old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James's translation of the

Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel--half modern glibness, and half

ancient simplicity and gravity.  The latter is awkward and constrained;

the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast.  Whenever he found his

speech growing too modern--which was about every sentence or two--he

ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as "exceeding sore," "and it came

to pass," etc., and made things satisfactory again.  "And it came to

pass" was his pet.  If he had left that out, his Bible would have been

only a pamphlet.



The title-page reads as follows:



      THE BOOK OF MORMON: AN ACCOUNT WRITTEN BY THE HAND OF MORMON, UPON

      PLATES TAKEN FROM THE PLATES OF NEPHI.



      Wherefore it is an abridgment of the record of the people of Nephi,

      and also of the Lamanites; written to the Lamanites, who are a

      remnant of the House of Israel; and also to Jew and Gentile; written

      by way of commandment, and also by the spirit of prophecy and of

      revelation.  Written and sealed up, and hid up unto the Lord, that

      they might not be destroyed; to come forth by the gift and power of

      God unto the interpretation thereof; sealed by the hand of Moroni,

      and hid up unto the Lord, to come forth in due time by the way of

      Gentile; the interpretation thereof by the gift of God.  An

      abridgment taken from the Book of Ether also; which is a record of

      the people of Jared; who were scattered at the time the Lord

      confounded the language of the people when they were building a

      tower to get to Heaven.



"Hid up" is good.  And so is "wherefore"--though why "wherefore"?  Any

other word would have answered as well--though--in truth it would not

have sounded so Scriptural.



Next comes:



      THE TESTIMONY OF THREE WITNESSES.

      Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people unto

      whom this work shall come, that we, through the grace of God the

      Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, have seen the plates which

      contain this record, which is a record of the people of Nephi, and

      also of the Lamanites, their brethren, and also of the people of

      Jared, who came from the tower of which hath been spoken; and we

      also know that they have been translated by the gift and power of

      God, for His voice hath declared it unto us; wherefore we know of a

      surety that the work is true.  And we also testify that we have seen

      the engravings which are upon the plates; and they have been shown

      unto us by the power of God, and not of man.  And we declare with

      words of soberness, that an angel of God came down from heaven, and

      he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the

      plates, and the engravings thereon; and we know that it is by the

      grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, that we beheld

      and bear record that these things are true; and it is marvellous in

      our eyes; nevertheless the voice of the Lord commanded us that we

      should bear record of it; wherefore, to be obedient unto the

      commandments of God, we bear testimony of these things.  And we know

      that if we are faithful in Christ, we shall rid our garments of the

      blood of all men, and be found spotless before the judgment-seat of

      Christ, and shall dwell with Him eternally in the heavens.  And the

      honor be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, which

      is one God.  Amen.

                          OLIVER COWDERY,

                          DAVID WHITMER,

                          MARTIN HARRIS.



Some people have to have a world of evidence before they can come

anywhere in the neighborhood of believing anything; but for me, when a

man tells me that he has "seen the engravings which are upon the plates,"

and not only that, but an angel was there at the time, and saw him see

them, and probably took his receipt for it, I am very far on the road to

conviction, no matter whether I ever heard of that man before or not, and

even if I do not know the name of the angel, or his nationality either.



Next is this:



      AND ALSO THE TESTIMONY OF EIGHT WITNESSES.

      Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people unto

      whom this work shall come, that Joseph Smith, Jr., the translator of

      this work, has shown unto us the plates of which hath been spoken,

      which have the appearance of gold; and as many of the leaves as the

      said Smith has translated, we did handle with our hands; and we also

      saw the engravings thereon, all of which has the appearance of

      ancient work, and of curious workmanship.  And this we bear record

      with words of soberness, that the said Smith has shown unto us, for

      we have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the said Smith

      has got the plates of which we have spoken.  And we give our names

      unto the world, to witness unto the world that which we have seen;

      and we lie not, God bearing witness of it.

                          CHRISTIAN WHITMER,

                          JACOB WHITMER,

                          PETER WHITMER, JR.,

                          JOHN WHITMER,

                          HIRAM PAGE,

                          JOSEPH SMITH, SR.,

                          HYRUM SMITH,

                          SAMUEL H.  SMITH.



And when I am far on the road to conviction, and eight men, be they

grammatical or otherwise, come forward and tell me that they have seen

the plates too; and not only seen those plates but "hefted" them, I am

convinced.  I could not feel more satisfied and at rest if the entire

Whitmer family had testified.



The Mormon Bible consists of fifteen "books"--being the books of Jacob,

Enos, Jarom, Omni, Mosiah, Zeniff, Alma, Helaman, Ether, Moroni, two

"books" of Mormon, and three of Nephi.



In the first book of Nephi is a plagiarism of the Old Testament, which

gives an account of the exodus from Jerusalem of the "children of Lehi";

and it goes on to tell of their wanderings in the wilderness, during

eight years, and their supernatural protection by one of their number, a

party by the name of Nephi.  They finally reached the land of

"Bountiful," and camped by the sea.  After they had remained there "for

the space of many days"--which is more Scriptural than definite--Nephi

was commanded from on high to build a ship wherein to "carry the people

across the waters."  He travestied Noah's ark--but he obeyed orders in

the matter of the plan.  He finished the ship in a single day, while his

brethren stood by and made fun of it--and of him, too--"saying, our

brother is a fool, for he thinketh that he can build a ship."  They did

not wait for the timbers to dry, but the whole tribe or nation sailed the

next day.  Then a bit of genuine nature cropped out, and is revealed by

outspoken Nephi with Scriptural frankness--they all got on a spree!

They, "and also their wives, began to make themselves merry, insomuch

that they began to dance, and to sing, and to speak with much rudeness;

yea, they were lifted up unto exceeding rudeness."



Nephi tried to stop these scandalous proceedings; but they tied him neck

and heels, and went on with their lark.  But observe how Nephi the

prophet circumvented them by the aid of the invisible powers:



      And it came to pass that after they had bound me, insomuch that I

      could not move, the compass, which had been prepared of the Lord,

      did cease to work; wherefore, they knew not whither they should

      steer the ship, insomuch that there arose a great storm, yea, a

      great and terrible tempest, and we were driven back upon the waters

      for the space of three days; and they began to be frightened

      exceedingly, lest they should be drowned in the sea; nevertheless

      they did not loose me.  And on the fourth day, which we had been

      driven back, the tempest began to be exceeding sore.  And it came to

      pass that we were about to be swallowed up in the depths of the sea.



Then they untied him.



      And it came to pass after they had loosed me, behold, I took the

      compass, and it did work whither I desired it.  And it came to pass

      that I prayed unto the Lord; and after I had prayed, the winds did

      cease, and the storm did cease, and there was a great calm.



Equipped with their compass, these ancients appear to have had the

advantage of Noah.



Their voyage was toward a "promised land"--the only name they give it.

They reached it in safety.



Polygamy is a recent feature in the Mormon religion, and was added by

Brigham Young after Joseph Smith's death.  Before that, it was regarded

as an "abomination."  This verse from the Mormon Bible occurs in Chapter

II. of the book of Jacob:



      For behold, thus saith the Lord, this people begin to wax in

      iniquity; they understand not the Scriptures; for they seek to

      excuse themselves in committing whoredoms, because of the things

      which were written concerning David, and Solomon his son.  Behold,

      David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing

      was abominable before me, saith the Lord; wherefore, thus saith the

      Lord, I have led this people forth out of the land of Jerusalem, by

      the power of mine arm, that I might raise up unto me a righteous

      branch from the fruit of the loins of Joseph.  Wherefore, I the Lord

      God, will no suffer that this people shall do like unto them of old.



However, the project failed--or at least the modern Mormon end of it--for

Brigham "suffers" it.  This verse is from the same chapter:



      Behold, the Lamanites your brethren, whom ye hate, because of their

      filthiness and the cursings which hath come upon their skins, are

      more righteous than you; for they have not forgotten the commandment

      of the Lord, which was given unto our fathers, that they should

      have, save it were one wife; and concubines they should have none.



The following verse (from Chapter IX. of the Book of Nephi) appears to

contain information not familiar to everybody:



      And now it came to pass that when Jesus had ascended into heaven,

      the multitude did disperse, and every man did take his wife and his

      children, and did return to his own home.



      And it came to pass that on the morrow, when the multitude was

      gathered together, behold, Nephi and his brother whom he had raised

      from the dead, whose name was Timothy, and also his son, whose name

      was Jonas, and also Mathoni, and Mathonihah, his brother, and Kumen,

      and Kumenenhi, and Jeremiah, and Shemnon, and Jonas, and Zedekiah,

      and Isaiah; now these were the names of the disciples whom Jesus had

      chosen.



In order that the reader may observe how much more grandeur and

picturesqueness (as seen by these Mormon twelve) accompanied on of the

tenderest episodes in the life of our Saviour than other eyes seem to

have been aware of, I quote the following from the same "book"--Nephi:



      And it came to pass that Jesus spake unto them, and bade them arise.

      And they arose from the earth, and He said unto them, Blessed are ye

      because of your faith.  And now behold, My joy is full.  And when He

      had said these words, He wept, and the multitude bear record of it,

      and He took their little children, one by one, and blessed them, and

      prayed unto the Father for them.  And when He had done this He wept

      again, and He spake unto the multitude, and saith unto them, Behold

      your little ones.  And as they looked to behold, they cast their

      eyes toward heaven, and they saw the heavens open, and they saw

      angels descending out of heaven as it were, in the midst of fire;

      and they came down and encircled those little ones about, and they

      were encircled about with fire; and the angels did minister unto

      them, and the multitude did see and hear and bear record; and they

      know that their record is true, for they all of them did see and

      hear, every man for himself; and they were in number about two

      thousand and five hundred souls; and they did consist of men, women,

      and children.



And what else would they be likely to consist of?



The Book of Ether is an incomprehensible medley of if "history," much of

it relating to battles and sieges among peoples whom the reader has

possibly never heard of; and who inhabited a country which is not set

down in the geography.  These was a King with the remarkable name of

Coriantumr,^^ and he warred with Shared, and Lib, and Shiz, and others,

in the "plains of Heshlon"; and the "valley of Gilgal"; and the

"wilderness of Akish"; and the "land of Moran"; and the "plains of

Agosh"; and "Ogath," and "Ramah," and the "land of Corihor," and the

"hill Comnor," by "the waters of Ripliancum," etc., etc., etc.  "And it

came to pass," after a deal of fighting, that Coriantumr, upon making

calculation of his losses, found that "there had been slain two millions

of mighty men, and also their wives and their children"--say 5,000,000 or

6,000,000 in all--"and he began to sorrow in his heart."  Unquestionably

it was time.  So he wrote to Shiz, asking a cessation of hostilities, and

offering to give up his kingdom to save his people.  Shiz declined,

except upon condition that Coriantumr would come and let him cut his head

off first--a thing which Coriantumr would not do.  Then there was more

fighting for a season; then four years were devoted to gathering the

forces for a final struggle--after which ensued a battle, which, I take

it, is the most remarkable set forth in history,--except, perhaps, that

of the Kilkenny cats, which it resembles in some respects.  This is the

account of the gathering and the battle:



      7.  And it came to pass that they did gather together all the

      people, upon all the face of the land, who had not been slain, save

      it was Ether.  And it came to pass that Ether did behold all the

      doings of the people; and he beheld that the people who were for

      Coriantumr, were gathered together to the army of Coriantumr; and

      the people who were for Shiz, were gathered together to the army of

      Shiz; wherefore they were for the space of four years gathering

      together the people, that they might get all who were upon the face

      of the land, and that they might receive all the strength which it

      was possible that they could receive.  And it came to pass that when

      they were all gathered together, every one to the army which he

      would, with their wives and their children; both men, women, and

      children being armed with weapons of war, having shields, and

      breast-plates, and head-plates, and being clothed after the manner

      of war, they did march forth one against another, to battle; and

      they fought all that day, and conquered not.  And it came to pass

      that when it was night they were weary, and retired to their camps;

      and after they had retired to their camps, they took up a howling

      and a lamentation for the loss of the slain of their people; and so

      great were their cries, their howlings and lamentations, that it did

      rend the air exceedingly.  And it came to pass that on the morrow

      they did go again to battle, and great and terrible was that day;

      nevertheless they conquered not, and when the night came again, they

      did rend the air with their cries, and their howlings, and their

      mournings, for the loss of the slain of their people.



      8.  And it came to pass that Coriantumr wrote again an epistle unto

      Shiz, desiring that he would not come again to battle, but that he

      would take the kingdom, and spare the lives of the people.  But

      behold, the Spirit of the Lord had ceased striving with them, and

      Satan had full power over the hearts of the people, for they were

      given up unto the hardness of their hearts, and the blindness of

      their minds that they might be destroyed; wherefore they went again

      to battle.  And it came to pass that they fought all that day, and

      when the night came they slept upon their swords; and on the morrow

      they fought even until the night came; and when the night came they

      were drunken with anger, even as a man who is drunken with wine; and

      they slept again upon their swords; and on the morrow they fought

      again; and when the night came they had all fallen by the sword save

      it were fifty and two of the people of Coriantumr, and sixty and

      nine of the people of Shiz.  And it came to pass that they slept

      upon their swords that night, and on the morrow they fought again,

      and they contended in their mights with their swords, and with their

      shields, all that day; and when the night came there were thirty and

      two of the people of Shiz, and twenty and seven of the people of

      Coriantumr.



      9.  And it came to pass that they ate and slept, and prepared for

      death on the morrow.  And they were large and mighty men, as to the

      strength of men.  And it came to pass that they fought for the space

      of three hours, and they fainted with the loss of blood.  And it

      came to pass that when the men of Coriantumr had received sufficient

      strength, that they could walk, they were about to flee for their

      lives, but behold, Shiz arose, and also his men, and he swore in his

      wrath that he would slay Coriantumr, or he would perish by the

      sword: wherefore he did pursue them, and on the morrow he did

      overtake them; and they fought again with the sword.  And it came to

      pass that when they had all fallen by the sword, save it were

      Coriantumr and Shiz, behold Shiz had fainted with loss of blood.

      And it came to pass that when Coriantumr had leaned upon his sword,

      that he rested a little, he smote off the head of Shiz.  And it came

      to pass that after he had smote off the head of Shiz, that Shiz

      raised upon his hands and fell; and after that he had struggled for

      breath, he died.  And it came to pass that Coriantumr fell to the

      earth, and became as if he had no life.  And the Lord spake unto

      Ether, and said unto him, go forth.  And he went forth, and beheld

      that the words of the Lord had all been fulfilled; and he finished

      his record; and the hundredth part I have not written.



It seems a pity he did not finish, for after all his dreary former

chapters of commonplace, he stopped just as he was in danger of becoming

interesting.



The Mormon Bible is rather stupid and tiresome to read, but there is

nothing vicious in its teachings.  Its code of morals is unobjectionable-

-it is "smouched" [Milton] from the New Testament and no credit given.









CHAPTER XVII.



At the end of our two days' sojourn, we left Great Salt Lake City hearty

and well fed and happy--physically superb but not so very much wiser, as

regards the "Mormon question," than we were when we arrived, perhaps.

We had a deal more "information" than we had before, of course, but we

did not know what portion of it was reliable and what was not--for it all

came from acquaintances of a day--strangers, strictly speaking.  We were

told, for instance, that the dreadful "Mountain Meadows Massacre" was the

work of the Indians entirely, and that the Gentiles had meanly tried to

fasten it upon the Mormons; we were told, likewise, that the Indians were

to blame, partly, and partly the Mormons; and we were told, likewise, and

just as positively, that the Mormons were almost if not wholly and

completely responsible for that most treacherous and pitiless butchery.

We got the story in all these different shapes, but it was not till

several years afterward that Mrs. Waite's book, "The Mormon Prophet,"

came out with Judge Cradlebaugh's trial of the accused parties in it and

revealed the truth that the latter version was the correct one and that

the Mormons were the assassins.  All our "information" had three sides to

it, and so I gave up the idea that I could settle the "Mormon question"

in two days.  Still I have seen newspaper correspondents do it in one.



I left Great Salt Lake a good deal confused as to what state of things

existed there--and sometimes even questioning in my own mind whether a

state of things existed there at all or not.  But presently I remembered

with a lightening sense of relief that we had learned two or three

trivial things there which we could be certain of; and so the two days

were not wholly lost.  For instance, we had learned that we were at last

in a pioneer land, in absolute and tangible reality.



The high prices charged for trifles were eloquent of high freights and

bewildering distances of freightage.  In the east, in those days, the

smallest moneyed denomination was a penny and it represented the smallest

purchasable quantity of any commodity.  West of Cincinnati the smallest

coin in use was the silver five-cent piece and no smaller quantity of an

article could be bought than "five cents' worth."  In Overland City the

lowest coin appeared to be the ten-cent piece; but in Salt Lake there did

not seem to be any money in circulation smaller than a quarter, or any

smaller quantity purchasable of any commodity than twenty-five cents'

worth.  We had always been used to half dimes and "five cents' worth" as

the minimum of financial negotiations; but in Salt Lake if one wanted a

cigar, it was a quarter; if he wanted a chalk pipe, it was a quarter; if

he wanted a peach, or a candle, or a newspaper, or a shave, or a little

Gentile whiskey to rub on his corns to arrest indigestion and keep him

from having the toothache, twenty-five cents was the price, every time.

When we looked at the shot-bag of silver, now and then, we seemed to be

wasting our substance in riotous living, but if we referred to the

expense account we could see that we had not been doing anything of the

kind.



But people easily get reconciled to big money and big prices, and fond

and vain of both--it is a descent to little coins and cheap prices that

is hardest to bear and slowest to take hold upon one's toleration.  After

a month's acquaintance with the twenty-five cent minimum, the average

human being is ready to blush every time he thinks of his despicable

five-cent days.  How sunburnt with blushes I used to get in gaudy Nevada,

every time I thought of my first financial experience in Salt Lake.

It was on this wise (which is a favorite expression of great authors, and

a very neat one, too, but I never hear anybody say on this wise when they

are talking).  A young half-breed with a complexion like a yellow-jacket

asked me if I would have my boots blacked.  It was at the Salt Lake House

the morning after we arrived.  I said yes, and he blacked them.  Then I

handed him a silver five-cent piece, with the benevolent air of a person

who is conferring wealth and blessedness upon poverty and suffering.  The

yellow-jacket took it with what I judged to be suppressed emotion, and

laid it reverently down in the middle of his broad hand.  Then he began

to contemplate it, much as a philosopher contemplates a gnat's ear in the

ample field of his microscope.  Several mountaineers, teamsters, stage-

drivers, etc., drew near and dropped into the tableau and fell to

surveying the money with that attractive indifference to formality which

is noticeable in the hardy pioneer.  Presently the yellow-jacket handed

the half dime back to me and told me I ought to keep my money in my

pocket-book instead of in my soul, and then I wouldn't get it cramped and

shriveled up so!



What a roar of vulgar laughter there was!  I destroyed the mongrel

reptile on the spot, but I smiled and smiled all the time I was detaching

his scalp, for the remark he made was good for an "Injun."



Yes, we had learned in Salt Lake to be charged great prices without

letting the inward shudder appear on the surface--for even already we had

overheard and noted the tenor of conversations among drivers, conductors,

and hostlers, and finally among citizens of Salt Lake, until we were well

aware that these superior beings despised "emigrants."  We permitted no

tell-tale shudders and winces in our countenances, for we wanted to seem

pioneers, or Mormons, half-breeds, teamsters, stage-drivers, Mountain

Meadow assassins--anything in the world that the plains and Utah

respected and admired--but we were wretchedly ashamed of being

"emigrants," and sorry enough that we had white shirts and could not

swear in the presence of ladies without looking the other way.



And many a time in Nevada, afterwards, we had occasion to remember with

humiliation that we were "emigrants," and consequently a low and inferior

sort of creatures.  Perhaps the reader has visited Utah, Nevada, or

California, even in these latter days, and while communing with himself

upon the sorrowful banishment of these countries from what he considers

"the world," has had his wings clipped by finding that he is the one to

be pitied, and that there are entire populations around him ready and

willing to do it for him--yea, who are complacently doing it for him

already, wherever he steps his foot.



Poor thing, they are making fun of his hat; and the cut of his New York

coat; and his conscientiousness about his grammar; and his feeble

profanity; and his consumingly ludicrous ignorance of ores, shafts,

tunnels, and other things which he never saw before, and never felt

enough interest in to read about.  And all the time that he is thinking

what a sad fate it is to be exiled to that far country, that lonely land,

the citizens around him are looking down on him with a blighting

compassion because he is an "emigrant" instead of that proudest and

blessedest creature that exists on all the earth, a "FORTY-NINER."



The accustomed coach life began again, now, and by midnight it almost

seemed as if we never had been out of our snuggery among the mail sacks

at all.  We had made one alteration, however.  We had provided enough

bread, boiled ham and hard boiled eggs to last double the six hundred

miles of staging we had still to do.



And it was comfort in those succeeding days to sit up and contemplate the

majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us and eat

ham and hard boiled eggs while our spiritual natures revelled alternately

in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets.  Nothing helps scenery

like ham and eggs.  Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe--an old, rank,

delicious pipe--ham and eggs and scenery, a "down grade," a flying coach,

a fragrant pipe and a contented heart--these make happiness.  It is what

all the ages have struggled for.









CHAPTER XVIII.



At eight in the morning we reached the remnant and ruin of what had been

the important military station of "Camp Floyd," some forty-five or fifty

miles from Salt Lake City.  At four P.M.  we had doubled our distance and

were ninety or a hundred miles from Salt Lake.  And now we entered upon

one of that species of deserts whose concentrated hideousness shames the

diffused and diluted horrors of Sahara--an "alkali" desert.  For sixty-

eight miles there was but one break in it.  I do not remember that this

was really a break; indeed it seems to me that it was nothing but a

watering depot in the midst of the stretch of sixty-eight miles.  If my

memory serves me, there was no well or spring at this place, but the

water was hauled there by mule and ox teams from the further side of the

desert.  There was a stage station there.  It was forty-five miles from

the beginning of the desert, and twenty-three from the end of it.



We plowed and dragged and groped along, the whole live-long night, and at

the end of this uncomfortable twelve hours we finished the forty-five-

mile part of the desert and got to the stage station where the imported

water was.  The sun was just rising.  It was easy enough to cross a

desert in the night while we were asleep; and it was pleasant to reflect,

in the morning, that we in actual person had encountered an absolute

desert and could always speak knowingly of deserts in presence of the

ignorant thenceforward.  And it was pleasant also to reflect that this

was not an obscure, back country desert, but a very celebrated one, the

metropolis itself, as you may say.  All this was very well and very

comfortable and satisfactory--but now we were to cross a desert in

daylight.  This was fine--novel--romantic--dramatically adventurous--

this, indeed, was worth living for, worth traveling for!  We would write

home all about it.



This enthusiasm, this stern thirst for adventure, wilted under the sultry

August sun and did not last above one hour.  One poor little hour--and

then we were ashamed that we had "gushed" so.  The poetry was all in the

anticipation--there is none in the reality.  Imagine a vast, waveless

ocean stricken dead and turned to ashes; imagine this solemn waste tufted

with ash-dusted sage-bushes; imagine the lifeless silence and solitude

that belong to such a place; imagine a coach, creeping like a bug through

the midst of this shoreless level, and sending up tumbled volumes of dust

as if it were a bug that went by steam; imagine this aching monotony of

toiling and plowing kept up hour after hour, and the shore still as far

away as ever, apparently; imagine team, driver, coach and passengers so

deeply coated with ashes that they are all one colorless color; imagine

ash-drifts roosting above moustaches and eyebrows like snow accumulations

on boughs and bushes.  This is the reality of it.



The sun beats down with dead, blistering, relentless malignity; the

perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but scarcely a

sign of it finds its way to the surface--it is absorbed before it gets

there; there is not the faintest breath of air stirring; there is not a

merciful shred of cloud in all the brilliant firmament; there is not a

living creature visible in any direction whither one searches the blank

level that stretches its monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a

sound--not a sigh--not a whisper--not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or

distant pipe of bird--not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless

people that dead air.  And so the occasional sneezing of the resting

mules, and the champing of the bits, grate harshly on the grim stillness,

not dissipating the spell but accenting it and making one feel more

lonesome and forsaken than before.



The mules, under violent swearing, coaxing and whip-cracking, would make

at stated intervals a "spurt," and drag the coach a hundred or may be two

hundred yards, stirring up a billowy cloud of dust that rolled back,

enveloping the vehicle to the wheel-tops or higher, and making it seem

afloat in a fog.  Then a rest followed, with the usual sneezing and bit-

champing.  Then another "spurt" of a hundred yards and another rest at

the end of it.  All day long we kept this up, without water for the mules

and without ever changing the team.  At least we kept it up ten hours,

which, I take it, is a day, and a pretty honest one, in an alkali desert.

It was from four in the morning till two in the afternoon.  And it was so

hot! and so close! and our water canteens went dry in the middle of the

day and we got so thirsty!  It was so stupid and tiresome and dull! and

the tedious hours did lag and drag and limp along with such a cruel

deliberation!  It was so trying to give one's watch a good long

undisturbed spell and then take it out and find that it had been fooling

away the time and not trying to get ahead any!  The alkali dust cut

through our lips, it persecuted our eyes, it ate through the delicate

membranes and made our noses bleed and kept them bleeding--and truly and

seriously the romance all faded far away and disappeared, and left the

desert trip nothing but a harsh reality--a thirsty, sweltering, longing,

hateful reality!



Two miles and a quarter an hour for ten hours--that was what we

accomplished.  It was hard to bring the comprehension away down to such a

snail-pace as that, when we had been used to making eight and ten miles

an hour.  When we reached the station on the farther verge of the desert,

we were glad, for the first time, that the dictionary was along, because

we never could have found language to tell how glad we were, in any sort

of dictionary but an unabridged one with pictures in it.  But there could

not have been found in a whole library of dictionaries language

sufficient to tell how tired those mules were after their twenty-three

mile pull.  To try to give the reader an idea of how thirsty they were,

would be to "gild refined gold or paint the lily."



Somehow, now that it is there, the quotation does not seem to fit--but no

matter, let it stay, anyhow.  I think it is a graceful and attractive

thing, and therefore have tried time and time again to work it in where

it would fit, but could not succeed.  These efforts have kept my mind

distracted and ill at ease, and made my narrative seem broken and

disjointed, in places.  Under these circumstances it seems to me best to

leave it in, as above, since this will afford at least a temporary

respite from the wear and tear of trying to "lead up" to this really apt

and beautiful quotation.









CHAPTER XIX.



On the morning of the sixteenth day out from St. Joseph we arrived at the

entrance of Rocky Canyon, two hundred and fifty miles from Salt Lake.

It was along in this wild country somewhere, and far from any habitation

of white men, except the stage stations, that we came across the

wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen, up to this writing.  I

refer to the Goshoot Indians.  From what we could see and all we could

learn, they are very considerably inferior to even the despised Digger

Indians of California; inferior to all races of savages on our continent;

inferior to even the Terra del Fuegans; inferior to the Hottentots, and

actually inferior in some respects to the Kytches of Africa.  Indeed, I

have been obliged to look the bulky volumes of Wood's "Uncivilized Races

of Men" clear through in order to find a savage tribe degraded enough to

take rank with the Goshoots.  I find but one people fairly open to that

shameful verdict.  It is the Bosjesmans (Bushmen) of South Africa.  Such

of the Goshoots as we saw, along the road and hanging about the stations,

were small, lean, "scrawny" creatures; in complexion a dull black like

the ordinary American negro; their faces and hands bearing dirt which

they had been hoarding and accumulating for months, years, and even

generations, according to the age of the proprietor; a silent, sneaking,

treacherous looking race; taking note of everything, covertly, like all

the other "Noble Red Men" that we (do not) read about, and betraying no

sign in their countenances; indolent, everlastingly patient and tireless,

like all other Indians; prideless beggars--for if the beggar instinct

were left out of an Indian he would not "go," any more than a clock

without a pendulum; hungry, always hungry, and yet never refusing

anything that a hog would eat, though often eating what a hog would

decline; hunters, but having no higher ambition than to kill and eat

jack-ass rabbits,  crickets and grasshoppers, and embezzle carrion from

the buzzards and cayotes; savages who, when asked if they have the common

Indian belief in a Great Spirit show a something which almost amounts to

emotion, thinking whiskey is referred to; a thin, scattering race of

almost naked black children, these Goshoots are, who produce nothing at

all, and have no villages, and no gatherings together into strictly

defined tribal communities--a people whose only shelter is a rag cast on

a bush to keep off a portion of the snow, and yet who inhabit one of the

most rocky, wintry, repulsive wastes that our country or any other can

exhibit.



The Bushmen and our Goshoots are manifestly descended from the self-same

gorilla, or kangaroo, or Norway rat, which-ever animal--Adam the

Darwinians trace them to.



One would as soon expect the rabbits to fight as the Goshoots, and yet

they used to live off the offal and refuse of the stations a few months

and then come some dark night when no mischief was expected, and burn

down the buildings and kill the men from ambush as they rushed out.

And once, in the night, they attacked the stage-coach when a District

Judge, of Nevada Territory, was the only passenger, and with their first

volley of arrows (and a bullet or two) they riddled the stage curtains,

wounded a horse or two and mortally wounded the driver.  The latter was

full of pluck, and so was his passenger.  At the driver's call Judge Mott

swung himself out, clambered to the box and seized the reins of the team,

and away they plunged, through the racing mob of skeletons and under a

hurtling storm of missiles.  The stricken driver had sunk down on the

boot as soon as he was wounded, but had held on to the reins and said he

would manage to keep hold of them until relieved.



And after they were taken from his relaxing grasp, he lay with his head

between Judge Mott's feet, and tranquilly gave directions about the road;

he said he believed he could live till the miscreants were outrun and

left behind, and that if he managed that, the main difficulty would be at

an end, and then if the Judge drove so and so (giving directions about

bad places in the road, and general course) he would reach the next

station without trouble.  The Judge distanced the enemy and at last

rattled up to the station and knew that the night's perils were done; but

there was no comrade-in-arms for him to rejoice with, for the soldierly

driver was dead.



Let us forget that we have been saying harsh things about the Overland

drivers, now.  The disgust which the Goshoots gave me, a disciple of

Cooper and a worshipper of the Red Man--even of the scholarly savages in

the "Last of the Mohicans" who are fittingly associated with backwoodsmen

who divide each sentence into two equal parts: one part critically

grammatical, refined and choice of language, and the other part just such

an attempt to talk like a hunter or a mountaineer, as a Broadway clerk

might make after eating an edition of Emerson Bennett's works and

studying frontier life at the Bowery Theatre a couple of weeks--I say

that the nausea which the Goshoots gave me, an Indian worshipper, set me

to examining authorities, to see if perchance I had been over-estimating

the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance.

The revelations that came were disenchanting.  It was curious to see how

quickly the paint and tinsel fell away from him and left him treacherous,

filthy and repulsive--and how quickly the evidences accumulated that

wherever one finds an Indian tribe he has only found Goshoots more or

less modified by circumstances and surroundings--but Goshoots, after all.

They deserve pity, poor creatures; and they can have mine--at this

distance.  Nearer by, they never get anybody's.



There is an impression abroad that the Baltimore and Washington Railroad

Company and many of its employees are Goshoots; but it is an error.

There is only a plausible resemblance, which, while it is apt enough to

mislead the ignorant, cannot deceive parties who have contemplated both

tribes.  But seriously, it was not only poor wit, but very wrong to start

the report referred to above; for however innocent the motive may have

been, the necessary effect was to injure the reputation of a class who

have a hard enough time of it in the pitiless deserts of the Rocky

Mountains, Heaven knows!  If we cannot find it in our hearts to give

those poor naked creatures our Christian sympathy and compassion, in

God's name let us at least not throw mud at them.









CHAPTER XX.



On the seventeenth day we passed the highest mountain peaks we had yet

seen, and although the day was very warm the night that followed upon its

heels was wintry cold and blankets were next to useless.



On the eighteenth day we encountered the eastward-bound telegraph-

constructors at Reese River station and sent a message to his Excellency

Gov. Nye at Carson City (distant one hundred and fifty-six miles).



On the nineteenth day we crossed the Great American Desert--forty

memorable miles of bottomless sand, into which the coach wheels sunk from

six inches to a foot.  We worked our passage most of the way across.

That is to say, we got out and walked.  It was a dreary pull and a long

and thirsty one, for we had no water.  From one extremity of this desert

to the other, the road was white with the bones of oxen and horses.

It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that we could have walked the

forty miles and set our feet on a bone at every step!  The desert was one

prodigious graveyard.  And the log-chains, wagon tyres, and rotting

wrecks of vehicles were almost as thick as the bones.  I think we saw

log-chains enough rusting there in the desert, to reach across any State

in the Union.  Do not these relics suggest something of an idea of the

fearful suffering and privation the early emigrants to California

endured?



At the border of the Desert lies Carson Lake, or The "Sink" of the

Carson, a shallow, melancholy sheet of water some eighty or a hundred

miles in circumference.  Carson River empties into it and is lost--sinks

mysteriously into the earth and never appears in the light of the sun

again--for the lake has no outlet whatever.



There are several rivers in Nevada, and they all have this mysterious

fate.  They end in various lakes or "sinks," and that is the last of

them.  Carson Lake, Humboldt Lake, Walker Lake, Mono Lake, are all great

sheets of water without any visible outlet.  Water is always flowing into

them; none is ever seen to flow out of them, and yet they remain always

level full, neither receding nor overflowing.  What they do with their

surplus is only known to the Creator.



On the western verge of the Desert we halted a moment at Ragtown.  It

consisted of one log house and is not set down on the map.



This reminds me of a circumstance.  Just after we left Julesburg, on the

Platte, I was sitting with the driver, and he said:



"I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to

listen to it.  Horace Greeley went over this road once.  When he was

leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an

engagement to lecture at Placerville and was very anxious to go through

quick.  Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace.

The coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the

buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through

the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to

go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago.

But Hank Monk said, 'Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on

time'--and you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!"



A day or two after that we picked up a Denver man at the cross roads, and

he told us a good deal about the country and the Gregory Diggings.

He seemed a very entertaining person and a man well posted in the affairs

of Colorado.  By and by he remarked:



"I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to

listen to it.  Horace Greeley went over this road once.  When he was

leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an

engagement to lecture at Placerville and was very anxious to go through

quick.  Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace.  The

coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the

buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through

the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to

go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago.

But Hank Monk said, 'Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on

time!'--and you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!"



At Fort Bridger, some days after this, we took on board a cavalry

sergeant, a very proper and soldierly person indeed.  From no other man

during the whole journey, did we gather such a store of concise and well-

arranged military information.  It was surprising to find in the desolate

wilds of our country a man so thoroughly acquainted with everything

useful to know in his line of life, and yet of such inferior rank and

unpretentious bearing.  For as much as three hours we listened to him

with unabated interest.  Finally he got upon the subject of trans-

continental travel, and presently said:



"I can tell you a very laughable thing indeed, if you would like to

listen to it.  Horace Greeley went over this road once.  When he was

leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an

engagement to lecture at Placerville and was very anxious to go through

quick.  Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace.  The

coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the

buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through

the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to

go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago.

But Hank Monk said, 'Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on

time!'--and you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!"



When we were eight hours out from Salt Lake City a Mormon preacher got in

with us at a way station--a gentle, soft-spoken, kindly man, and one whom

any stranger would warm to at first sight.  I can never forget the pathos

that was in his voice as he told, in simple language, the story of his

people's wanderings and unpitied sufferings.  No pulpit eloquence was

ever so moving and so beautiful as this outcast's picture of the first

Mormon pilgrimage across the plains, struggling sorrowfully onward to the

land of its banishment and marking its desolate way with graves and

watering it with tears.  His words so wrought upon us that it was a

relief to us all when the conversation drifted into a more cheerful

channel and the natural features of the curious country we were in came

under treatment.  One matter after another was pleasantly discussed, and

at length the stranger said:



"I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to

listen to it.  Horace Greeley went over this road once.  When he was

leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an

engagement to lecture in Placerville, and was very anxious to go through

quick.  Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace.  The

coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the

buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through

the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to

go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago.

But Hank Monk said, 'Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on

time!'--and you bet you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!"



Ten miles out of Ragtown we found a poor wanderer who had lain down to

die.  He had walked as long as he could, but his limbs had failed him at

last.  Hunger and fatigue had conquered him.  It would have been inhuman

to leave him there.  We paid his fare to Carson and lifted him into the

coach.  It was some little time before he showed any very decided signs

of life; but by dint of chafing him and pouring brandy between his lips

we finally brought him to a languid consciousness.  Then we fed him a

little, and by and by he seemed to comprehend the situation and a

grateful light softened his eye.  We made his mail-sack bed as

comfortable as possible, and constructed a pillow for him with our coats.

He seemed very thankful.  Then he looked up in our faces, and said in a

feeble voice that had a tremble of honest emotion in it:



"Gentlemen, I know not who you are, but you have saved my life; and

although I can never be able to repay you for it, I feel that I can at

least make one hour of your long journey lighter.  I take it you are

strangers to this great thorough fare, but I am entirely familiar with

it.  In this connection I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if

you would like to listen to it.  Horace Greeley----"



I said, impressively:



"Suffering stranger, proceed at your peril.  You see in me the melancholy

wreck of a once stalwart and magnificent manhood.  What has brought me to

this?  That thing which you are about to tell.  Gradually but surely,

that tiresome old anecdote has sapped my strength, undermined my

constitution, withered my life.  Pity my helplessness.  Spare me only

just this once, and tell me about young George Washington and his little

hatchet for a change."



We were saved.  But not so the invalid.  In trying to retain the anecdote

in his system he strained himself and died in our arms.



I am aware, now, that I ought not to have asked of the sturdiest citizen

of all that region, what I asked of that mere shadow of a man; for, after

seven years' residence on the Pacific coast, I know that no passenger or

driver on the Overland ever corked that anecdote in, when a stranger was

by, and survived.  Within a period of six years I crossed and recrossed

the Sierras between Nevada and California thirteen times by stage and

listened to that deathless incident four hundred and eighty-one or

eighty-two times.  I have the list somewhere.  Drivers always told it,

conductors told it, landlords told it, chance passengers told it, the

very Chinamen and vagrant Indians recounted it.  I have had the same

driver tell it to me two or three times in the same afternoon.  It has

come to me in all the multitude of tongues that Babel bequeathed to

earth, and flavored with whiskey, brandy, beer, cologne, sozodont,

tobacco, garlic, onions, grasshoppers--everything that has a fragrance to

it through all the long list of things that are gorged or guzzled by the

sons of men.  I never have smelt any anecdote as often as I have smelt

that one; never have smelt any anecdote that smelt so variegated as that

one.  And you never could learn to know it by its smell, because every

time you thought you had learned the smell of it, it would turn up with a

different smell.  Bayard Taylor has written about this hoary anecdote,

Richardson has published it; so have Jones, Smith, Johnson, Ross Browne,

and every other correspondence-inditing being that ever set his foot upon

the great overland road anywhere between Julesburg and San Francisco; and

I have heard that it is in the Talmud.  I have seen it in print in nine

different foreign languages; I have been told that it is employed in the

inquisition in Rome; and I now learn with regret that it is going to be

set to music.  I do not think that such things are right.



Stage-coaching on the Overland is no more, and stage drivers are a race

defunct.  I wonder if they bequeathed that bald-headed anecdote to their

successors, the railroad brakemen and conductors, and if these latter

still persecute the helpless passenger with it until he concludes, as did

many a tourist of other days, that the real grandeurs of the Pacific

coast are not Yo Semite and the Big Trees, but Hank Monk and his

adventure with Horace Greeley.  [And what makes that worn anecdote the

more aggravating, is, that the adventure it celebrates never occurred.

If it were a good anecdote, that seeming demerit would be its chiefest

virtue, for creative power belongs to greatness; but what ought to be

done to a man who would wantonly contrive so flat a one as this?  If I

were to suggest what ought to be done to him, I should be called

extravagant--but what does the sixteenth chapter of Daniel say?  Aha!]









CHAPTER XXI.



We were approaching the end of our long journey.  It was the morning of

the twentieth day.  At noon we would reach Carson City, the capital of

Nevada Territory.  We were not glad, but sorry.  It had been a fine

pleasure trip; we had fed fat on wonders every day; we were now well

accustomed to stage life, and very fond of it; so the idea of coming to a

stand-still and settling down to a humdrum existence in a village was not

agreeable, but on the contrary depressing.



Visibly our new home was a desert, walled in by barren, snow-clad

mountains.  There was not a tree in sight.  There was no vegetation but

the endless sage-brush and greasewood.  All nature was gray with it.  We

were plowing through great deeps of powdery alkali dust that rose in

thick clouds and floated across the plain like smoke from a burning

house.



We were coated with it like millers; so were the coach, the mules, the

mail-bags, the driver--we and the sage-brush and the other scenery were

all one monotonous color.  Long trains of freight wagons in the distance

envelope in ascending masses of dust suggested pictures of prairies on

fire.  These teams and their masters were the only life we saw.

Otherwise we moved in the midst of solitude, silence and desolation.

Every twenty steps we passed the skeleton of some dead beast of burthen,

with its dust-coated skin stretched tightly over its empty ribs.

Frequently a solemn raven sat upon the skull or the hips and contemplated

the passing coach with meditative serenity.



By and by Carson City was pointed out to us.  It nestled in the edge of a

great plain and was a sufficient number of miles away to look like an

assemblage of mere white spots in the shadow of a grim range of mountains

overlooking it, whose summits seemed lifted clear out of companionship

and consciousness of earthly things.



We arrived, disembarked, and the stage went on.  It was a "wooden" town;

its population two thousand souls.  The main street consisted of four or

five blocks of little white frame stores which were too high to sit down

on, but not too high for various other purposes; in fact, hardly high

enough.  They were packed close together, side by side, as if room were

scarce in that mighty plain.



The sidewalk was of boards that were more or less loose and inclined to

rattle when walked upon.  In the middle of the town, opposite the stores,

was the "plaza" which is native to all towns beyond the Rocky Mountains--

a large, unfenced, level vacancy, with a liberty pole in it, and very

useful as a place for public auctions, horse trades, and mass meetings,

and likewise for teamsters to camp in.  Two other sides of the plaza were

faced by stores, offices and stables.



The rest of Carson City was pretty scattering.



We were introduced to several citizens, at the stage-office and on the

way up to the Governor's from the hotel--among others, to a Mr. Harris,

who was on horseback; he began to say something, but interrupted himself

with the remark:



"I'll have to get you to excuse me a minute; yonder is the witness that

swore I helped to rob the California coach--a piece of impertinent

intermeddling, sir, for I am not even acquainted with the man."



Then he rode over and began to rebuke the stranger with a six-shooter,

and the stranger began to explain with another.  When the pistols were

emptied, the stranger resumed his work (mending a whip-lash), and Mr.

Harris rode by with a polite nod, homeward bound, with a bullet through

one of his lungs, and several in his hips; and from them issued little

rivulets of blood that coursed down the horse's sides and made the animal

look quite picturesque.  I never saw Harris shoot a man after that but it

recalled to mind that first day in Carson.



This was all we saw that day, for it was two o'clock, now, and according

to custom the daily "Washoe Zephyr" set in; a soaring dust-drift about

the size of the United States set up edgewise came with it, and the

capital of Nevada Territory disappeared from view.



Still, there were sights to be seen which were not wholly uninteresting

to new comers; for the vast dust cloud was thickly freckled with things

strange to the upper air--things living and dead, that flitted hither and

thither, going and coming, appearing and disappearing among the rolling

billows of dust--hats, chickens and parasols sailing in the remote

heavens; blankets, tin signs, sage-brush and shingles a shade lower;

door-mats and buffalo robes lower still; shovels and coal scuttles on the

next grade; glass doors, cats and little children on the next; disrupted

lumber yards, light buggies and wheelbarrows on the next; and down only

thirty or forty feet above ground was a scurrying storm of emigrating

roofs and vacant lots.



It was something to see that much.  I could have seen more, if I could

have kept the dust out of my eyes.



But seriously a Washoe wind is by no means a trifling matter.  It blows

flimsy houses down, lifts shingle roofs occasionally, rolls up tin ones

like sheet music, now and then blows a stage coach over and spills the

passengers; and tradition says the reason there are so many bald people

there, is, that the wind blows the hair off their heads while they are

looking skyward after their hats.  Carson streets seldom look inactive on

Summer afternoons, because there are so many citizens skipping around

their escaping hats, like chambermaids trying to head off a spider.



The "Washoe Zephyr" (Washoe is a pet nickname for Nevada) is a peculiar

Scriptural wind, in that no man knoweth "whence it cometh."  That is to

say, where it originates.  It comes right over the mountains from the

West, but when one crosses the ridge he does not find any of it on the

other side!  It probably is manufactured on the mountain-top for the

occasion, and starts from there.  It is a pretty regular wind, in the

summer time.  Its office hours are from two in the afternoon till two the

next morning; and anybody venturing abroad during those twelve hours

needs to allow for the wind or he will bring up a mile or two to leeward

of the point he is aiming at.  And yet the first complaint a Washoe

visitor to San Francisco makes, is that the sea winds blow so, there!

There is a good deal of human nature in that.



We found the state palace of the Governor of Nevada Territory to consist

of a white frame one-story house with two small rooms in it and a

stanchion supported shed in front--for grandeur--it compelled the respect

of the citizen and inspired the Indians with awe.  The newly arrived

Chief and Associate Justices of the Territory, and other machinery of the

government, were domiciled with less splendor.  They were boarding around

privately, and had their offices in their bedrooms.



The Secretary and I took quarters in the "ranch" of a worthy French lady

by the name of Bridget O'Flannigan, a camp follower of his Excellency the

Governor.  She had known him in his prosperity as commander-in-chief of

the Metropolitan Police of New York, and she would not desert him in his

adversity as Governor of Nevada.



Our room was on the lower floor, facing the plaza, and when we had got

our bed, a small table, two chairs, the government fire-proof safe, and

the Unabridged Dictionary into it, there was still room enough left for a

visitor--may be two, but not without straining the walls.  But the walls

could stand it--at least the partitions could, for they consisted simply

of one thickness of white "cotton domestic" stretched from corner to

corner of the room.  This was the rule in Carson--any other kind of

partition was the rare exception.  And if you stood in a dark room and

your neighbors in the next had lights, the shadows on your canvas told

queer secrets sometimes!  Very often these partitions were made of old

flour sacks basted together; and then the difference between the common

herd and the aristocracy was, that the common herd had unornamented

sacks, while the walls of the aristocrat were overpowering with

rudimental fresco--i.e., red and blue mill brands on the flour sacks.



Occasionally, also, the better classes embellished their canvas by

pasting pictures from Harper's Weekly on them.  In many cases, too, the

wealthy and the cultured rose to spittoons and other evidences of a

sumptuous and luxurious taste.  [Washoe people take a joke so hard that I

must explain that the above description was only the rule; there were

many honorable exceptions in Carson--plastered ceilings and houses that

had considerable furniture in them.--M. T.]



We had a carpet and a genuine queen's-ware washbowl.  Consequently we

were hated without reserve by the other tenants of the O'Flannigan

"ranch."  When we added a painted oilcloth window curtain, we simply took

our lives into our own hands.  To prevent bloodshed I removed up stairs

and took up quarters with the untitled plebeians in one of the fourteen

white pine cot-bedsteads that stood in two long ranks in the one sole

room of which the second story consisted.



It was a jolly company, the fourteen.  They were principally voluntary

camp-followers of the Governor, who had joined his retinue by their own

election at New York and San Francisco and came along, feeling that in

the scuffle for little territorial crumbs and offices they could not make

their condition more precarious than it was, and might reasonably expect

to make it better.  They were popularly known as the "Irish Brigade,"

though there were only four or five Irishmen among all the Governor's

retainers.



His good-natured Excellency was much annoyed at the gossip his henchmen

created--especially when there arose a rumor that they were paid

assassins of his, brought along to quietly reduce the democratic vote

when desirable!



Mrs. O'Flannigan was boarding and lodging them at ten dollars a week

apiece, and they were cheerfully giving their notes for it.  They were

perfectly satisfied, but Bridget presently found that notes that could

not be discounted were but a feeble constitution for a Carson boarding-

house.  So she began to harry the Governor to find employment for the

"Brigade."  Her importunities and theirs together drove him to a gentle

desperation at last, and he finally summoned the Brigade to the presence.

Then, said he:



"Gentlemen, I have planned a lucrative and useful service for you--a

service which will provide you with recreation amid noble landscapes, and

afford you never ceasing opportunities for enriching your minds by

observation and study.  I want you to survey a railroad from Carson City

westward to a certain point!  When the legislature meets I will have the

necessary bill passed and the remuneration arranged."



"What, a railroad over the Sierra Nevada Mountains?"



"Well, then, survey it eastward to a certain point!"



He converted them into surveyors, chain-bearers and so on, and turned

them loose in the desert.  It was "recreation" with a vengeance!

Recreation on foot, lugging chains through sand and sage-brush, under a

sultry sun and among cattle bones, cayotes and tarantulas.



"Romantic adventure" could go no further.  They surveyed very slowly,

very deliberately, very carefully.  They returned every night during the

first week, dusty, footsore, tired, and hungry, but very jolly.  They

brought in great store of prodigious hairy spiders--tarantulas--and

imprisoned them in covered tumblers up stairs in the "ranch."  After the

first week, they had to camp on the field, for they were getting well

eastward.  They made a good many inquiries as to the location of that

indefinite "certain point," but got no information.  At last, to a

peculiarly urgent inquiry of "How far eastward?"  Governor Nye

telegraphed back:



"To the Atlantic Ocean, blast you!--and then bridge it and go on!"



This brought back the dusty toilers, who sent in a report and ceased from

their labors.  The Governor was always comfortable about it; he said Mrs.

O'Flannigan would hold him for the Brigade's board anyhow, and he

intended to get what entertainment he could out of the boys; he said,

with his old-time pleasant twinkle, that he meant to survey them into

Utah and then telegraph Brigham to hang them for trespass!



The surveyors brought back more tarantulas with them, and so we had quite

a menagerie arranged along the shelves of the room.  Some of these

spiders could straddle over a common saucer with their hairy, muscular

legs, and when their feelings were hurt, or their dignity offended, they

were the wickedest-looking desperadoes the animal world can furnish.

If their glass prison-houses were touched ever so lightly they were up

and spoiling for a fight in a minute.  Starchy?--proud?  Indeed, they

would take up a straw and pick their teeth like a member of Congress.

There was as usual a furious "zephyr" blowing the first night of the

brigade's return, and about midnight the roof of an adjoining stable blew

off, and a corner of it came crashing through the side of our ranch.

There was a simultaneous awakening, and a tumultuous muster of the

brigade in the dark, and a general tumbling and sprawling over each other

in the narrow aisle between the bedrows.  In the midst of the turmoil,

Bob H---- sprung up out of a sound sleep, and knocked down a shelf with

his head.  Instantly he shouted:



"Turn out, boys--the tarantulas is loose!"



No warning ever sounded so dreadful.  Nobody tried, any longer, to leave

the room, lest he might step on a tarantula.  Every man groped for a

trunk or a bed, and jumped on it.  Then followed the strangest silence--a

silence of grisly suspense it was, too--waiting, expectancy, fear.  It

was as dark as pitch, and one had to imagine the spectacle of those

fourteen scant-clad men roosting gingerly on trunks and beds, for not a

thing could be seen.  Then came occasional little interruptions of the

silence, and one could recognize a man and tell his locality by his

voice, or locate any other sound a sufferer made by his gropings or

changes of position.  The occasional voices were not given to much

speaking--you simply heard a gentle ejaculation of "Ow!" followed by a

solid thump, and you knew the gentleman had felt a hairy blanket or

something touch his bare skin and had skipped from a bed to the floor.

Another silence.  Presently you would hear a gasping voice say:



"Su--su--something's crawling up the back of my neck!"



Every now and then you could hear a little subdued scramble and a

sorrowful "O Lord!" and then you knew that somebody was getting away from

something he took for a tarantula, and not losing any time about it,

either.  Directly a voice in the corner rang out wild and clear:



"I've got him!  I've got him!" [Pause, and probable change of

circumstances.]  "No, he's got me!  Oh, ain't they never going to fetch a

lantern!"



The lantern came at that moment, in the hands of Mrs. O'Flannigan, whose

anxiety to know the amount of damage done by the assaulting roof had not

prevented her waiting a judicious interval, after getting out of bed and

lighting up, to see if the wind was done, now, up stairs, or had a larger

contract.



The landscape presented when the lantern flashed into the room was

picturesque, and might have been funny to some people, but was not to us.

Although we were perched so strangely upon boxes, trunks and beds, and so

strangely attired, too, we were too earnestly distressed and too

genuinely miserable to see any fun about it, and there was not the

semblance of a smile anywhere visible.  I know I am not capable of

suffering more than I did during those few minutes of suspense in the

dark, surrounded by those creeping, bloody-minded tarantulas.  I had

skipped from bed to bed and from box to box in a cold agony, and every

time I touched anything that was furzy I fancied I felt the fangs.  I had

rather go to war than live that episode over again.  Nobody was hurt.

The man who thought a tarantula had "got him" was mistaken--only a crack

in a box had caught his finger.  Not one of those escaped tarantulas was

ever seen again.  There were ten or twelve of them.  We took candles and

hunted the place high and low for them, but with no success.  Did we go

back to bed then?  We did nothing of the kind.  Money could not have

persuaded us to do it.  We sat up the rest of the night playing cribbage

and keeping a sharp lookout for the enemy.









CHAPTER XXII.



It was the end of August, and the skies were cloudless and the weather

superb.  In two or three weeks I had grown wonderfully fascinated with

the curious new country and concluded to put off my return to "the

States" awhile.  I had grown well accustomed to wearing a damaged slouch

hat, blue woolen shirt, and pants crammed into boot-tops, and gloried in

the absence of coat, vest and braces.  I felt rowdyish and "bully," (as

the historian Josephus phrases it, in his fine chapter upon the

destruction of the Temple).  It seemed to me that nothing could be so

fine and so romantic.  I had become an officer of the government, but

that was for mere sublimity.  The office was an unique sinecure.  I had

nothing to do and no salary.  I was private Secretary to his majesty the

Secretary and there was not yet writing enough for two of us.  So Johnny

K---- and I devoted our time to amusement.  He was the young son of an

Ohio nabob and was out there for recreation.  He got it.  We had heard a

world of talk about the marvellous beauty of Lake Tahoe, and finally

curiosity drove us thither to see it.  Three or four members of the

Brigade had been there and located some timber lands on its shores and

stored up a quantity of provisions in their camp.  We strapped a couple

of blankets on our shoulders and took an axe apiece and started--for we

intended to take up a wood ranch or so ourselves and become wealthy.

We were on foot.  The reader will find it advantageous to go horseback.

We were told that the distance was eleven miles.  We tramped a long time

on level ground, and then toiled laboriously up a mountain about a

thousand miles high and looked over.  No lake there.  We descended on the

other side, crossed the valley and toiled up another mountain three or

four thousand miles high, apparently, and looked over again.  No lake

yet.  We sat down tired and perspiring, and hired a couple of Chinamen to

curse those people who had beguiled us.  Thus refreshed, we presently

resumed the march with renewed vigor and determination.  We plodded on,

two or three hours longer, and at last the Lake burst upon us--a noble

sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the

level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that

towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still!  It was a vast oval,

and one would have to use up eighty or a hundred good miles in traveling

around it.  As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly

photographed upon its still surface I thought it must surely be the

fairest picture the whole earth affords.



We found the small skiff belonging to the Brigade boys, and without loss

of time set out across a deep bend of the lake toward the landmarks that

signified the locality of the camp.  I got Johnny to row--not because I

mind exertion myself, but because it makes me sick to ride backwards when

I am at work.  But I steered.  A three-mile pull brought us to the camp

just as the night fell, and we stepped ashore very tired and wolfishly

hungry.  In a "cache" among the rocks we found the provisions and the

cooking utensils, and then, all fatigued as I was, I sat down on a

boulder and superintended while Johnny gathered wood and cooked supper.

Many a man who had gone through what I had, would have wanted to rest.



It was a delicious supper--hot bread, fried bacon, and black coffee.  It

was a delicious solitude we were in, too.  Three miles away was a saw-

mill and some workmen, but there were not fifteen other human beings

throughout the wide circumference of the lake.  As the darkness closed

down and the stars came out and spangled the great mirror with jewels, we

smoked meditatively in the solemn hush and forgot our troubles and our

pains.  In due time we spread our blankets in the warm sand between two

large boulders and soon feel asleep, careless of the procession of ants

that passed in through rents in our clothing and explored our persons.

Nothing could disturb the sleep that fettered us, for it had been fairly

earned, and if our consciences had any sins on them they had to adjourn

court for that night, any way.  The wind rose just as we were losing

consciousness, and we were lulled to sleep by the beating of the surf

upon the shore.



It is always very cold on that lake shore in the night, but we had plenty

of blankets and were warm enough.  We never moved a muscle all night, but

waked at early dawn in the original positions, and got up at once,

thoroughly refreshed, free from soreness, and brim full of friskiness.

There is no end of wholesome medicine in such an experience.  That

morning we could have whipped ten such people as we were the day before--

sick ones at any rate.  But the world is slow, and people will go to

"water cures" and "movement cures" and to foreign lands for health.

Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy

to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator.  I do

not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones.

The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and

delicious.  And why shouldn't it be?--it is the same the angels breathe.

I think that hardly any amount of fatigue can be gathered together that a

man cannot sleep off in one night on the sand by its side.  Not under a

roof, but under the sky; it seldom or never rains there in the summer

time.  I know a man who went there to die.  But he made a failure of it.

He was a skeleton when he came, and could barely stand.  He had no

appetite, and did nothing but read tracts and reflect on the future.

Three months later he was sleeping out of doors regularly, eating all he

could hold, three times a day, and chasing game over mountains three

thousand feet high for recreation.  And he was a skeleton no longer, but

weighed part of a ton.  This is no fancy sketch, but the truth.  His

disease was consumption.  I confidently commend his experience to other

skeletons.



I superintended again, and as soon as we had eaten breakfast we got in

the boat and skirted along the lake shore about three miles and

disembarked.  We liked the appearance of the place, and so we claimed

some three hundred acres of it and stuck our "notices" on a tree.  It was

yellow pine timber land--a dense forest of trees a hundred feet high and

from one to five feet through at the butt.  It was necessary to fence our

property or we could not hold it.  That is to say, it was necessary to

cut down trees here and there and make them fall in such a way as to form

a sort of enclosure (with pretty wide gaps in it).  We cut down three

trees apiece, and found it such heart-breaking work that we decided to

"rest our case" on those; if they held the property, well and good; if

they didn't, let the property spill out through the gaps and go; it was

no use to work ourselves to death merely to save a few acres of land.

Next day we came back to build a house--for a house was also necessary,

in order to hold the property.  We decided to build a substantial log-

house and excite the envy of the Brigade boys; but by the time we had cut

and trimmed the first log it seemed unnecessary to be so elaborate, and

so we concluded to build it of saplings.  However, two saplings, duly cut

and trimmed, compelled recognition of the fact that a still modester

architecture would satisfy the law, and so we concluded to build a

"brush" house.  We devoted the next day to this work, but we did so much

"sitting around" and discussing, that by the middle of the afternoon we

had achieved only a half-way sort of affair which one of us had to watch

while the other cut brush, lest if both turned our backs we might not be

able to find it again, it had such a strong family resemblance to the

surrounding vegetation.  But we were satisfied with it.



We were land owners now, duly seized and possessed, and within the

protection of the law.  Therefore we decided to take up our residence on

our own domain and enjoy that large sense of independence which only such

an experience can bring.  Late the next afternoon, after a good long

rest, we sailed away from the Brigade camp with all the provisions and

cooking utensils we could carry off--borrow is the more accurate word--

and just as the night was falling we beached the boat at our own landing.









CHAPTER XXIII.



If there is any life that is happier than the life we led on our timber

ranch for the next two or three weeks, it must be a sort of life which I

have not read of in books or experienced in person.  We did not see a

human being but ourselves during the time, or hear any sounds but those

that were made by the wind and the waves, the sighing of the pines, and

now and then the far-off thunder of an avalanche.  The forest about us

was dense and cool, the sky above us was cloudless and brilliant with

sunshine, the broad lake before us was glassy and clear, or rippled and

breezy, or black and storm-tossed, according to Nature's mood; and its

circling border of mountain domes, clothed with forests, scarred with

land-slides, cloven by canons and valleys, and helmeted with glittering

snow, fitly framed and finished the noble picture.  The view was always

fascinating, bewitching, entrancing.  The eye was never tired of gazing,

night or day, in calm or storm; it suffered but one grief, and that was

that it could not look always, but must close sometimes in sleep.



We slept in the sand close to the water's edge, between two protecting

boulders, which took care of the stormy night-winds for us.  We never

took any paregoric to make us sleep.  At the first break of dawn we were

always up and running foot-races to tone down excess of physical vigor

and exuberance of spirits.  That is, Johnny was--but I held his hat.

While smoking the pipe of peace after breakfast we watched the sentinel

peaks put on the glory of the sun, and followed the conquering light as

it swept down among the shadows, and set the captive crags and forests

free.  We watched the tinted pictures grow and brighten upon the water

till every little detail of forest, precipice and pinnacle was wrought in

and finished, and the miracle of the enchanter complete.  Then to

"business."



That is, drifting around in the boat.  We were on the north shore.

There, the rocks on the bottom are sometimes gray, sometimes white.

This gives the marvelous transparency of the water a fuller advantage

than it has elsewhere on the lake.  We usually pushed out a hundred yards

or so from shore, and then lay down on the thwarts, in the sun, and let

the boat drift by the hour whither it would.  We seldom talked.

It interrupted the Sabbath stillness, and marred the dreams the luxurious

rest and indolence brought.  The shore all along was indented with deep,

curved bays and coves, bordered by narrow sand-beaches; and where the

sand ended, the steep mountain-sides rose right up aloft into space--rose

up like a vast wall a little out of the perpendicular, and thickly wooded

with tall pines.



So singularly clear was the water, that where it was only twenty or

thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly distinct that the boat

seemed floating in the air!  Yes, where it was even eighty feet deep.

Every little pebble was distinct, every speckled trout, every hand's-

breadth of sand.  Often, as we lay on our faces, a granite boulder, as

large as a village church, would start out of the bottom apparently, and

seem climbing up rapidly to the surface, till presently it threatened to

touch our faces, and we could not resist the impulse to seize an oar and

avert the danger.  But the boat would float on, and the boulder descend

again, and then we could see that when we had been exactly above it, it

must still have been twenty or thirty feet below the surface.  Down

through the transparency of these great depths, the water was not merely

transparent, but dazzlingly, brilliantly so.  All objects seen through it

had a bright, strong vividness, not only of outline, but of every minute

detail, which they would not have had when seen simply through the same

depth of atmosphere.  So empty and airy did all spaces seem below us, and

so strong was the sense of floating high aloft in mid-nothingness, that

we called these boat-excursions "balloon-voyages."



We fished a good deal, but we did not average one fish a week.  We could

see trout by the thousand winging about in the emptiness under us, or

sleeping in shoals on the bottom, but they would not bite--they could see

the line too plainly, perhaps.  We frequently selected the trout we

wanted, and rested the bait patiently and persistently on the end of his

nose at a depth of eighty feet, but he would only shake it off with an

annoyed manner, and shift his position.



We bathed occasionally, but the water was rather chilly, for all it

looked so sunny.  Sometimes we rowed out to the "blue water," a mile or

two from shore.  It was as dead blue as indigo there, because of the

immense depth.  By official measurement the lake in its centre is one

thousand five hundred and twenty-five feet deep!



Sometimes, on lazy afternoons, we lolled on the sand in camp, and smoked

pipes and read some old well-worn novels.  At night, by the camp-fire, we

played euchre and seven-up to strengthen the mind--and played them with

cards so greasy and defaced that only a whole summer's acquaintance with

them could enable the student to tell the ace of clubs from the jack of

diamonds.



We never slept in our "house."  It never recurred to us, for one thing;

and besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was enough.  We

did not wish to strain it.



By and by our provisions began to run short, and we went back to the old

camp and laid in a new supply.  We were gone all day, and reached home

again about night-fall, pretty tired and hungry.  While Johnny was

carrying the main bulk of the provisions up to our "house" for future

use, I took the loaf of bread, some slices of bacon, and the coffee-pot,

ashore, set them down by a tree, lit a fire, and went back to the boat to

get the frying-pan.  While I was at this, I heard a shout from Johnny,

and looking up I saw that my fire was galloping all over the premises!

Johnny was on the other side of it.  He had to run through the flames to

get to the lake shore, and then we stood helpless and watched the

devastation.



The ground was deeply carpeted with dry pine-needles, and the fire

touched them off as if they were gunpowder.  It was wonderful to see with

what fierce speed the tall sheet of flame traveled!  My coffee-pot was

gone, and everything with it.  In a minute and a half the fire seized

upon a dense growth of dry manzanita chapparal six or eight feet high,

and then the roaring and popping and crackling was something terrific.

We were driven to the boat by the intense heat, and there we remained,

spell-bound.



Within half an hour all before us was a tossing, blinding tempest of

flame!  It went surging up adjacent ridges--surmounted them and

disappeared in the canons beyond--burst into view upon higher and farther

ridges, presently--shed a grander illumination abroad, and dove again--

flamed out again, directly, higher and still higher up the mountain-side-

-threw out skirmishing parties of fire here and there, and sent them

trailing their crimson spirals away among remote ramparts and ribs and

gorges, till as far as the eye could reach the lofty mountain-fronts were

webbed as it were with a tangled network of red lava streams.  Away

across the water the crags and domes were lit with a ruddy glare, and the

firmament above was a reflected hell!



Every feature of the spectacle was repeated in the glowing mirror of the

lake!  Both pictures were sublime, both were beautiful; but that in the

lake had a bewildering richness about it that enchanted the eye and held

it with the stronger fascination.



We sat absorbed and motionless through four long hours.  We never thought

of supper, and never felt fatigue.  But at eleven o'clock the

conflagration had traveled beyond our range of vision, and then darkness

stole down upon the landscape again.



Hunger asserted itself now, but there was nothing to eat.  The provisions

were all cooked, no doubt, but we did not go to see.  We were homeless

wanderers again, without any property.  Our fence was gone, our house

burned down; no insurance.  Our pine forest was well scorched, the dead

trees all burned up, and our broad acres of manzanita swept away.  Our

blankets were on our usual sand-bed, however, and so we lay down and went

to sleep.  The next morning we started back to the old camp, but while

out a long way from shore, so great a storm came up that we dared not try

to land.  So I baled out the seas we shipped, and Johnny pulled heavily

through the billows till we had reached a point three or four miles

beyond the camp.  The storm was increasing, and it became evident that it

was better to take the hazard of beaching the boat than go down in a

hundred fathoms of water; so we ran in, with tall white-caps following,

and I sat down in the stern-sheets and pointed her head-on to the shore.

The instant the bow struck, a wave came over the stern that washed crew

and cargo ashore, and saved a deal of trouble.  We shivered in the lee of

a boulder all the rest of the day, and froze all the night through.  In

the morning the tempest had gone down, and we paddled down to the camp

without any unnecessary delay.  We were so starved that we ate up the

rest of the Brigade's provisions, and then set out to Carson to tell them

about it and ask their forgiveness.  It was accorded, upon payment of

damages.



We made many trips to the lake after that, and had many a hair-breadth

escape and blood-curdling adventure which will never be recorded in any

history.









CHAPTER XXIV.



I resolved to have a horse to ride.  I had never seen such wild, free,

magnificent horsemanship outside of a circus as these picturesquely-clad

Mexicans, Californians and Mexicanized Americans displayed in Carson

streets every day.  How they rode!  Leaning just gently forward out of

the perpendicular, easy and nonchalant, with broad slouch-hat brim blown

square up in front, and long riata swinging above the head, they swept

through the town like the wind!  The next minute they were only a sailing

puff of dust on the far desert.  If they trotted, they sat up gallantly

and gracefully, and seemed part of the horse; did not go jiggering up and

down after the silly Miss-Nancy fashion of the riding-schools.  I had

quickly learned to tell a horse from a cow, and was full of anxiety to

learn more.  I was resolved to buy a horse.



While the thought was rankling in my mind, the auctioneer came skurrying

through the plaza on a black beast that had as many humps and corners on

him as a dromedary, and was necessarily uncomely; but he was "going,

going, at twenty-two!--horse, saddle and bridle at twenty-two dollars,

gentlemen!" and I could hardly resist.



A man whom I did not know (he turned out to be the auctioneer's brother)

noticed the wistful look in my eye, and observed that that was a very

remarkable horse to be going at such a price; and added that the saddle

alone was worth the money.  It was a Spanish saddle, with ponderous

'tapidaros', and furnished with the ungainly sole-leather covering with

the unspellable name.  I said I had half a notion to bid.  Then this

keen-eyed person appeared to me to be "taking my measure"; but I

dismissed the suspicion when he spoke, for his manner was full of

guileless candor and truthfulness.  Said he:



"I know that horse--know him well.  You are a stranger, I take it, and so

you might think he was an American horse, maybe, but I assure you he is

not.  He is nothing of the kind; but--excuse my speaking in a low voice,

other people being near--he is, without the shadow of a doubt, a Genuine

Mexican Plug!"



I did not know what a Genuine Mexican Plug was, but there was something

about this man's way of saying it, that made me swear inwardly that I

would own a Genuine Mexican Plug, or die.



"Has he any other--er--advantages?"  I inquired, suppressing what

eagerness I could.



He hooked his forefinger in the pocket of my army-shirt, led me to one

side, and breathed in my ear impressively these words:



"He can out-buck anything in America!"



"Going, going, going--at twent--ty--four dollars and a half, gen--"



"Twenty-seven!" I shouted, in a frenzy.



"And sold!" said the auctioneer, and passed over the Genuine Mexican Plug

to me.



I could scarcely contain my exultation.  I paid the money, and put the

animal in a neighboring livery-stable to dine and rest himself.



In the afternoon I brought the creature into the plaza, and certain

citizens held him by the head, and others by the tail, while I mounted

him.  As soon as they let go, he placed all his feet in a bunch together,

lowered his back, and then suddenly arched it upward, and shot me

straight into the air a matter of three or four feet!  I came as straight

down again, lit in the saddle, went instantly up again, came down almost

on the high pommel, shot up again, and came down on the horse's neck--all

in the space of three or four seconds.  Then he rose and stood almost

straight up on his hind feet, and I, clasping his lean neck desperately,

slid back into the saddle and held on.  He came down, and immediately

hoisted his heels into the air, delivering a vicious kick at the sky, and

stood on his forefeet.  And then down he came once more, and began the

original exercise of shooting me straight up again.  The third time I

went up I heard a stranger say:



"Oh, don't he buck, though!"



While I was up, somebody struck the horse a sounding thwack with a

leathern strap, and when I arrived again the Genuine Mexican Plug was not

there.  A California youth chased him up and caught him, and asked if he

might have a ride.  I granted him that luxury.  He mounted the Genuine,

got lifted into the air once, but sent his spurs home as he descended,

and the horse darted away like a telegram.  He soared over three fences

like a bird, and disappeared down the road toward the Washoe Valley.



I sat down on a stone, with a sigh, and by a natural impulse one of my

hands sought my forehead, and the other the base of my stomach.  I

believe I never appreciated, till then, the poverty of the human

machinery--for I still needed a hand or two to place elsewhere.  Pen

cannot describe how I was jolted up.  Imagination cannot conceive how

disjointed I was--how internally, externally and universally I was

unsettled, mixed up and ruptured.  There was a sympathetic crowd around

me, though.



One elderly-looking comforter said:



"Stranger, you've been taken in.  Everybody in this camp knows that

horse.  Any child, any Injun, could have told you that he'd buck; he is

the very worst devil to buck on the continent of America.  You hear me.

I'm Curry.  Old Curry.  Old Abe Curry.  And moreover, he is a simon-pure,

out-and-out, genuine d--d Mexican plug, and an uncommon mean one at that,

too.  Why, you turnip, if you had laid low and kept dark, there's chances

to buy an American horse for mighty little more than you paid for that

bloody old foreign relic."



I gave no sign; but I made up my mind that if the auctioneer's brother's

funeral took place while I was in the Territory I would postpone all

other recreations and attend it.



After a gallop of sixteen miles the Californian youth and the Genuine

Mexican Plug came tearing into town again, shedding foam-flakes like the

spume-spray that drives before a typhoon, and, with one final skip over a

wheelbarrow and a Chinaman, cast anchor in front of the "ranch."



Such panting and blowing!  Such spreading and contracting of the red

equine nostrils, and glaring of the wild equine eye!  But was the

imperial beast subjugated?  Indeed he was not.



His lordship the Speaker of the House thought he was, and mounted him to

go down to the Capitol; but the first dash the creature made was over a

pile of telegraph poles half as high as a church; and his time to the

Capitol--one mile and three quarters--remains unbeaten to this day.  But

then he took an advantage--he left out the mile, and only did the three

quarters.  That is to say, he made a straight cut across lots, preferring

fences and ditches to a crooked road; and when the Speaker got to the

Capitol he said he had been in the air so much he felt as if he had made

the trip on a comet.



In the evening the Speaker came home afoot for exercise, and got the

Genuine towed back behind a quartz wagon.  The next day I loaned the

animal to the Clerk of the House to go down to the Dana silver mine, six

miles, and he walked back for exercise, and got the horse towed.

Everybody I loaned him to always walked back; they never could get enough

exercise any other way.



Still, I continued to loan him to anybody who was willing to borrow him,

my idea being to get him crippled, and throw him on the borrower's hands,

or killed, and make the borrower pay for him.  But somehow nothing ever

happened to him.  He took chances that no other horse ever took and

survived, but he always came out safe.  It was his daily habit to try

experiments that had always before been considered impossible, but he

always got through.  Sometimes he miscalculated a little, and did not get

his rider through intact, but he always got through himself.  Of course I

had tried to sell him; but that was a stretch of simplicity which met

with little sympathy.  The auctioneer stormed up and down the streets on

him for four days, dispersing the populace, interrupting business, and

destroying children, and never got a bid--at least never any but the

eighteen-dollar one he hired a notoriously substanceless bummer to make.

The people only smiled pleasantly, and restrained their desire to buy, if

they had any.  Then the auctioneer brought in his bill, and I withdrew

the horse from the market.  We tried to trade him off at private vendue

next, offering him at a sacrifice for second-hand tombstones, old iron,

temperance tracts--any kind of property.  But holders were stiff, and we

retired from the market again.  I never tried to ride the horse any more.

Walking was good enough exercise for a man like me, that had nothing the

matter with him except ruptures, internal injuries, and such things.

Finally I tried to give him away.  But it was a failure.  Parties said

earthquakes were handy enough on the Pacific coast--they did not wish to

own one.  As a last resort I offered him to the Governor for the use of

the "Brigade."  His face lit up eagerly at first, but toned down again,

and he said the thing would be too palpable.



Just then the livery stable man brought in his bill for six weeks'

keeping--stall-room for the horse, fifteen dollars; hay for the horse,

two hundred and fifty!  The Genuine Mexican Plug had eaten a ton of the

article, and the man said he would have eaten a hundred if he had let

him.



I will remark here, in all seriousness, that the regular price of hay

during that year and a part of the next was really two hundred and fifty

dollars a ton.  During a part of the previous year it had sold at five

hundred a ton, in gold, and during the winter before that there was such

scarcity of the article that in several instances small quantities had

brought eight hundred dollars a ton in coin!  The consequence might be

guessed without my telling it: peopled turned their stock loose to

starve, and before the spring arrived Carson and Eagle valleys were

almost literally carpeted with their carcases!  Any old settler there

will verify these statements.



I managed to pay the livery bill, and that same day I gave the Genuine

Mexican Plug to a passing Arkansas emigrant whom fortune delivered into

my hand.  If this ever meets his eye, he will doubtless remember the

donation.



Now whoever has had the luck to ride a real Mexican plug will recognize

the animal depicted in this chapter, and hardly consider him exaggerated

--but the uninitiated will feel justified in regarding his portrait as a

fancy sketch, perhaps.









CHAPTER XXV.



Originally, Nevada was a part of Utah and was called Carson county; and a

pretty large county it was, too.  Certain of its valleys produced no end

of hay, and this attracted small colonies of Mormon stock-raisers and

farmers to them.  A few orthodox Americans straggled in from California,

but no love was lost between the two classes of colonists.  There was

little or no friendly intercourse; each party staid to itself.  The

Mormons were largely in the majority, and had the additional advantage of

being peculiarly under the protection of the Mormon government of the

Territory.  Therefore they could afford to be distant, and even

peremptory toward their neighbors.  One of the traditions of Carson

Valley illustrates the condition of things that prevailed at the time I

speak of.  The hired girl of one of the American families was Irish, and

a Catholic; yet it was noted with surprise that she was the only person

outside of the Mormon ring who could get favors from the Mormons.  She

asked kindnesses of them often, and always got them.  It was a mystery to

everybody.  But one day as she was passing out at the door, a large bowie

knife dropped from under her apron, and when her mistress asked for an

explanation she observed that she was going out to "borry a wash-tub from

the Mormons!"



In 1858 silver lodes were discovered in "Carson County," and then the

aspect of things changed.  Californians began to flock in, and the

American element was soon in the majority.  Allegiance to Brigham Young

and Utah was renounced, and a temporary territorial government for

"Washoe" was instituted by the citizens.  Governor Roop was the first and

only chief magistrate of it.  In due course of time Congress passed a

bill to organize "Nevada Territory," and President Lincoln sent out

Governor Nye to supplant Roop.



At this time the population of the Territory was about twelve or fifteen

thousand, and rapidly increasing.  Silver mines were being vigorously

developed and silver mills erected.  Business of all kinds was active and

prosperous and growing more so day by day.



The people were glad to have a legitimately constituted government, but

did not particularly enjoy having strangers from distant States put in

authority over them--a sentiment that was natural enough.  They thought

the officials should have been chosen from among themselves from among

prominent citizens who had earned a right to such promotion, and who

would be in sympathy with the populace and likewise thoroughly acquainted

with the needs of the Territory.  They were right in viewing the matter

thus, without doubt.  The new officers were "emigrants," and that was no

title to anybody's affection or admiration either.



The new government was received with considerable coolness.  It was not

only a foreign intruder, but a poor one.  It was not even worth plucking

--except by the smallest of small fry office-seekers and such.  Everybody

knew that Congress had appropriated only twenty thousand dollars a year

in greenbacks for its support--about money enough to run a quartz mill a

month.  And everybody knew, also, that the first year's money was still

in Washington, and that the getting hold of it would be a tedious and

difficult process.  Carson City was too wary and too wise to open up a

credit account with the imported bantling with anything like indecent

haste.



There is something solemnly funny about the struggles of a new-born

Territorial government to get a start in this world.  Ours had a trying

time of it.  The Organic Act and the "instructions" from the State

Department commanded that a legislature should be elected at such-and-

such a time, and its sittings inaugurated at such-and-such a date.  It

was easy to get legislators, even at three dollars a day, although board

was four dollars and fifty cents, for distinction has its charm in Nevada

as well as elsewhere, and there were plenty of patriotic souls out of

employment; but to get a legislative hall for them to meet in was another

matter altogether.  Carson blandly declined to give a room rent-free, or

let one to the government on credit.



But when Curry heard of the difficulty, he came forward, solitary and

alone, and shouldered the Ship of State over the bar and got her afloat

again.  I refer to "Curry--Old Curry--Old Abe Curry."  But for him the

legislature would have been obliged to sit in the desert.  He offered his

large stone building just outside the capital limits, rent-free, and it

was gladly accepted.  Then he built a horse-railroad from town to the

capitol, and carried the legislators gratis.



He also furnished pine benches and chairs for the legislature, and

covered the floors with clean saw-dust by way of carpet and spittoon

combined.  But for Curry the government would have died in its tender

infancy.  A canvas partition to separate the Senate from the House of

Representatives was put up by the Secretary, at a cost of three dollars

and forty cents, but the United States declined to pay for it.  Upon

being reminded that the "instructions" permitted the payment of a liberal

rent for a legislative hall, and that that money was saved to the country

by Mr. Curry's generosity, the United States said that did not alter the

matter, and the three dollars and forty cents would be subtracted from

the Secretary's eighteen hundred dollar salary--and it was!



The matter of printing was from the beginning an interesting feature of

the new government's difficulties.  The Secretary was sworn to obey his

volume of written "instructions," and these commanded him to do two

certain things without fail, viz.:



1.  Get the House and Senate journals printed; and,

2.  For this work, pay one dollar and fifty cents per "thousand" for

composition, and one dollar and fifty cents per "token" for press-work,

in greenbacks.



It was easy to swear to do these two things, but it was entirely

impossible to do more than one of them.  When greenbacks had gone down to

forty cents on the dollar, the prices regularly charged everybody by

printing establishments were one dollar and fifty cents per "thousand"

and one dollar and fifty cents per "token," in gold.  The "instructions"

commanded that the Secretary regard a paper dollar issued by the

government as equal to any other dollar issued by the government.  Hence

the printing of the journals was discontinued.  Then the United States

sternly rebuked the Secretary for disregarding the "instructions," and

warned him to correct his ways.  Wherefore he got some printing done,

forwarded the bill to Washington with full exhibits of the high prices of

things in the Territory, and called attention to a printed market report

wherein it would be observed that even hay was two hundred and fifty

dollars a ton.  The United States responded by subtracting the printing-

bill from the Secretary's suffering salary--and moreover remarked with

dense gravity that he would find nothing in his "instructions" requiring

him to purchase hay!



Nothing in this world is palled in such impenetrable obscurity as a U.S.

Treasury Comptroller's understanding.  The very fires of the hereafter

could get up nothing more than a fitful glimmer in it.  In the days I

speak of he never could be made to comprehend why it was that twenty

thousand dollars would not go as far in Nevada, where all commodities

ranged at an enormous figure, as it would in the other Territories, where

exceeding cheapness was the rule.  He was an officer who looked out for

the little expenses all the time.  The Secretary of the Territory kept

his office in his bedroom, as I before remarked; and he charged the

United States no rent, although his "instructions" provided for that item

and he could have justly taken advantage of it (a thing which I would

have done with more than lightning promptness if I had been Secretary

myself).  But the United States never applauded this devotion.  Indeed, I

think my country was ashamed to have so improvident a person in its

employ.



Those "instructions" (we used to read a chapter from them every morning,

as intellectual gymnastics, and a couple of chapters in Sunday school

every Sabbath, for they treated of all subjects under the sun and had

much valuable religious matter in them along with the other statistics)

those "instructions" commanded that pen-knives, envelopes, pens and

writing-paper be furnished the members of the legislature.  So the

Secretary made the purchase and the distribution.  The knives cost three

dollars apiece.  There was one too many, and the Secretary gave it to the

Clerk of the House of Representatives.  The United States said the Clerk

of the House was not a "member" of the legislature, and took that three

dollars out of the Secretary's salary, as usual.



White men charged three or four dollars a "load" for sawing up stove-

wood.  The Secretary was sagacious enough to know that the United States

would never pay any such price as that; so he got an Indian to saw up a

load of office wood at one dollar and a half.  He made out the usual

voucher, but signed no name to it--simply appended a note explaining that

an Indian had done the work, and had done it in a very capable and

satisfactory way, but could not sign the voucher owing to lack of ability

in the necessary direction.  The Secretary had to pay that dollar and a

half.  He thought the United States would admire both his economy and his

honesty in getting the work done at half price and not putting a

pretended Indian's signature to the voucher, but the United States did

not see it in that light.



The United States was too much accustomed to employing dollar-and-a-half

thieves in all manner of official capacities to regard his explanation of

the voucher as having any foundation in fact.



But the next time the Indian sawed wood for us I taught him to make a

cross at the bottom of the voucher--it looked like a cross that had been

drunk a year--and then I "witnessed" it and it went through all right.

The United States never said a word.  I was sorry I had not made the

voucher for a thousand loads of wood instead of one.



The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic

villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable

pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two.



That was a fine collection of sovereigns, that first Nevada legislature.

They levied taxes to the amount of thirty or forty thousand dollars and

ordered expenditures to the extent of about a million.  Yet they had

their little periodical explosions of economy like all other bodies of

the kind.  A member proposed to save three dollars a day to the nation by

dispensing with the Chaplain.  And yet that short-sighted man needed the

Chaplain more than any other member, perhaps, for he generally sat with

his feet on his desk, eating raw turnips, during the morning prayer.



The legislature sat sixty days, and passed private tollroad franchises

all the time.  When they adjourned it was estimated that every citizen

owned about three franchises, and it was believed that unless Congress

gave the Territory another degree of longitude there would not be room

enough to accommodate the toll-roads.  The ends of them were hanging over

the boundary line everywhere like a fringe.



The fact is, the freighting business had grown to such important

proportions that there was nearly as much excitement over suddenly

acquired toll-road fortunes as over the wonderful silver mines.









CHAPTER XXVI.



By and by I was smitten with the silver fever.  "Prospecting parties"

were leaving for the mountains every day, and discovering and taking

possession of rich silver-bearing lodes and ledges of quartz.  Plainly

this was the road to fortune.  The great "Gould and Curry" mine was held

at three or four hundred dollars a foot when we arrived; but in two

months it had sprung up to eight hundred.  The "Ophir" had been worth

only a mere trifle, a year gone by, and now it was selling at nearly four

thousand dollars a foot!  Not a mine could be named that had not

experienced an astonishing advance in value within a short time.

Everybody was talking about these marvels.  Go where you would, you heard

nothing else, from morning till far into the night.  Tom So-and-So had

sold out of the "Amanda Smith" for $40,000--hadn't a cent when he "took

up" the ledge six months ago.  John Jones had sold half his interest in

the "Bald Eagle and Mary Ann" for $65,000, gold coin, and gone to the

States for his family.  The widow Brewster had "struck it rich" in the

"Golden Fleece" and sold ten feet for $18,000--hadn't money enough to buy

a crape bonnet when Sing-Sing Tommy killed her husband at Baldy Johnson's

wake last spring.  The "Last Chance" had found a "clay casing" and knew

they were "right on the ledge"--consequence, "feet" that went begging

yesterday were worth a brick house apiece to-day, and seedy owners who

could not get trusted for a drink at any bar in the country yesterday

were roaring drunk on champagne to-day and had hosts of warm personal

friends in a town where they had forgotten how to bow or shake hands from

long-continued want of practice.  Johnny Morgan, a common loafer, had

gone to sleep in the gutter and waked up worth a hundred thousand

dollars, in consequence of the decision in the "Lady Franklin and Rough

and Ready" lawsuit.  And so on--day in and day out the talk pelted our

ears and the excitement waxed hotter and hotter around us.



I would have been more or less than human if I had not gone mad like the

rest.  Cart-loads of solid silver bricks, as large as pigs of lead, were

arriving from the mills every day, and such sights as that gave substance

to the wild talk about me.  I succumbed and grew as frenzied as the

craziest.



Every few days news would come of the discovery of a bran-new mining

region; immediately the papers would teem with accounts of its richness,

and away the surplus population would scamper to take possession.  By the

time I was fairly inoculated with the disease, "Esmeralda" had just had a

run and "Humboldt" was beginning to shriek for attention.  "Humboldt!

Humboldt!" was the new cry, and straightway Humboldt, the newest of the

new, the richest of the rich, the most marvellous of the marvellous

discoveries in silver-land was occupying two columns of the public prints

to "Esmeralda's" one.  I was just on the point of starting to Esmeralda,

but turned with the tide and got ready for Humboldt.  That the reader may

see what moved me, and what would as surely have moved him had he been

there, I insert here one of the newspaper letters of the day.  It and

several other letters from the same calm hand were the main means of

converting me.  I shall not garble the extract, but put it in just as it

appeared in the Daily Territorial Enterprise:



      But what about our mines?  I shall be candid with you.  I shall

      express an honest opinion, based upon a thorough examination.

      Humboldt county is the richest mineral region upon God's footstool.

      Each mountain range is gorged with the precious ores.  Humboldt is

      the true Golconda.



      The other day an assay of mere croppings yielded exceeding four

      thousand dollars to the ton.  A week or two ago an assay of just

      such surface developments made returns of seven thousand dollars to

      the ton.  Our mountains are full of rambling prospectors.  Each day

      and almost every hour reveals new and more startling evidences of

      the profuse and intensified wealth of our favored county.  The metal

      is not silver alone.  There are distinct ledges of auriferous ore.

      A late discovery plainly evinces cinnabar.  The coarser metals are

      in gross abundance.  Lately evidences of bituminous coal have been

      detected.  My theory has ever been that coal is a ligneous

      formation.  I told Col.  Whitman, in times past, that the

      neighborhood of Dayton (Nevada) betrayed no present or previous

      manifestations of a ligneous foundation, and that hence I had no

      confidence in his lauded coal mines.  I repeated the same doctrine

      to the exultant coal discoverers of Humboldt.  I talked with my

      friend Captain Burch on the subject.  My pyrhanism vanished upon his

      statement that in the very region referred to he had seen petrified

      trees of the length of two hundred feet.  Then is the fact

      established that huge forests once cast their grim shadows over this

      remote section.  I am firm in the coal faith.



      Have no fears of the mineral resources of Humboldt county.  They are

      immense--incalculable.



Let me state one or two things which will help the reader to better

comprehend certain items in the above.  At this time, our near neighbor,

Gold Hill, was the most successful silver mining locality in Nevada.  It

was from there that more than half the daily shipments of silver bricks

came.  "Very rich" (and scarce) Gold Hill ore yielded from $100 to $400

to the ton; but the usual yield was only $20 to $40 per ton--that is to

say, each hundred pounds of ore yielded from one dollar to two dollars.

But the reader will perceive by the above extract, that in Humboldt from

one fourth to nearly half the mass was silver!  That is to say, every one

hundred pounds of the ore had from two hundred dollars up to about three

hundred and fifty in it.  Some days later this same correspondent wrote:



      I have spoken of the vast and almost fabulous wealth of this

      region--it is incredible.  The intestines of our mountains are

      gorged with precious ore to plethora.  I have said that nature

      has so shaped our mountains as to furnish most excellent

      facilities for the working of our mines.  I have also told you

      that the country about here is pregnant with the finest mill

      sites in the world.  But what is the mining history of Humboldt?

      The Sheba mine is in the hands of energetic San Francisco

      capitalists.  It would seem that the ore is combined with metals

      that render it difficult of reduction with our imperfect mountain

      machinery.  The proprietors have combined the capital and labor

      hinted at in my exordium.  They are toiling and probing.  Their

      tunnel has reached the length of one hundred feet.  From primal

      assays alone, coupled with the development of the mine and public

      confidence in the continuance of effort, the stock had reared

      itself to eight hundred dollars market value.  I do not know that

      one ton of the ore has been converted into current metal.  I do

      know that there are many lodes in this section that surpass the

      Sheba in primal assay value.  Listen a moment to the calculations

      of the Sheba operators.  They purpose transporting the ore

      concentrated to Europe.  The conveyance from Star City (its

      locality) to Virginia City will cost seventy dollars per ton;

      from Virginia to San Francisco, forty dollars per ton; from

      thence to Liverpool, its destination, ten dollars per ton.  Their

      idea is that its conglomerate metals will reimburse them their

      cost of original extraction, the price of transportation, and the

      expense of reduction, and that then a ton of the raw ore will net

      them twelve hundred dollars.  The estimate may be extravagant.

      Cut it in twain, and the product is enormous, far transcending

      any previous developments of our racy Territory.



      A very common calculation is that many of our mines will yield

      five hundred dollars to the ton.  Such fecundity throws the Gould

      & Curry, the Ophir and the Mexican, of your neighborhood, in the

      darkest shadow.  I have given you the estimate of the value of a

      single developed mine.  Its richness is indexed by its market

      valuation.  The people of Humboldt county are feet crazy.  As I

      write, our towns are near deserted.  They look as languid as a

      consumptive girl.  What has become of our sinewy and athletic

      fellow-citizens?  They are coursing through ravines and over

      mountain tops.  Their tracks are visible in every direction.

      Occasionally a horseman will dash among us.  His steed betrays

      hard usage.  He alights before his adobe dwelling, hastily

      exchanges courtesies with his townsmen, hurries to an assay

      office and from thence to the District Recorder's.  In the

      morning, having renewed his provisional supplies, he is off again

      on his wild and unbeaten route.  Why, the fellow numbers already

      his feet by the thousands.  He is the horse-leech.  He has the

      craving stomach of the shark or anaconda.  He would conquer

      metallic worlds.



This was enough.  The instant we had finished reading the above article,

four of us decided to go to Humboldt.  We commenced getting ready at

once.  And we also commenced upbraiding ourselves for not deciding

sooner--for we were in terror lest all the rich mines would be found and

secured before we got there, and we might have to put up with ledges that

would not yield more than two or three hundred dollars a ton, maybe.  An

hour before, I would have felt opulent if I had owned ten feet in a Gold

Hill mine whose ore produced twenty-five dollars to the ton; now I was

already annoyed at the prospect of having to put up with mines the

poorest of which would be a marvel in Gold Hill.









CHAPTER XXVII.



Hurry, was the word!  We wasted no time.  Our party consisted of four

persons--a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and myself.

We bought a wagon and two miserable old horses.  We put eighteen hundred

pounds of provisions and mining tools in the wagon and drove out of

Carson on a chilly December afternoon.  The horses were so weak and old

that we soon found that it would be better if one or two of us got out

and walked.  It was an improvement.  Next, we found that it would be

better if a third man got out.  That was an improvement also.  It was at

this time that I volunteered to drive, although I had never driven a

harnessed horse before and many a man in such a position would have felt

fairly excused from such a responsibility.  But in a little while it was

found that it would be a fine thing if the drive got out and walked also.

It was at this time that I resigned the position of driver, and never

resumed it again.  Within the hour, we found that it would not only be

better, but was absolutely necessary, that we four, taking turns, two at

a time, should put our hands against the end of the wagon and push it

through the sand, leaving the feeble horses little to do but keep out of

the way and hold up the tongue.  Perhaps it is well for one to know his

fate at first, and get reconciled to it.  We had learned ours in one

afternoon.  It was plain that we had to walk through the sand and shove

that wagon and those horses two hundred miles.  So we accepted the

situation, and from that time forth we never rode.  More than that, we

stood regular and nearly constant watches pushing up behind.



We made seven miles, and camped in the desert.  Young Clagett (now member

of Congress from Montana) unharnessed and fed and watered the horses;

Oliphant and I cut sagebrush, built the fire and brought water to cook

with; and old Mr. Ballou the blacksmith did the cooking.  This division

of labor, and this appointment, was adhered to throughout the journey.

We had no tent, and so we slept under our blankets in the open plain.  We

were so tired that we slept soundly.



We were fifteen days making the trip--two hundred miles; thirteen,

rather, for we lay by a couple of days, in one place, to let the horses

rest.



We could really have accomplished the journey in ten days if we had towed

the horses behind the wagon, but we did not think of that until it was

too late, and so went on shoving the horses and the wagon too when we

might have saved half the labor.  Parties who met us, occasionally,

advised us to put the horses in the wagon, but Mr. Ballou, through whose

iron-clad earnestness no sarcasm could pierce, said that that would not

do, because the provisions were exposed and would suffer, the horses

being "bituminous from long deprivation."  The reader will excuse me from

translating.  What Mr. Ballou customarily meant, when he used a long

word, was a secret between himself and his Maker.  He was one of the best

and kindest hearted men that ever graced a humble sphere of life.  He was

gentleness and simplicity itself--and unselfishness, too.  Although he

was more than twice as old as the eldest of us, he never gave himself any

airs, privileges, or exemptions on that account.  He did a young man's

share of the work; and did his share of conversing and entertaining from

the general stand-point of any age--not from the arrogant, overawing

summit-height of sixty years.  His one striking peculiarity was his

Partingtonian fashion of loving and using big words for their own sakes,

and independent of any bearing they might have upon the thought he was

purposing to convey.  He always let his ponderous syllables fall with an

easy unconsciousness that left them wholly without offensiveness.

In truth his air was so natural and so simple that one was always

catching himself accepting his stately sentences as meaning something,

when they really meant nothing in the world.  If a word was long and

grand and resonant, that was sufficient to win the old man's love, and he

would drop that word into the most out-of-the-way place in a sentence or

a subject, and be as pleased with it as if it were perfectly luminous

with meaning.



We four always spread our common stock of blankets together on the frozen

ground, and slept side by side; and finding that our foolish, long-legged

hound pup had a deal of animal heat in him, Oliphant got to admitting him

to the bed, between himself and Mr. Ballou, hugging the dog's warm back

to his breast and finding great comfort in it.  But in the night the pup

would get stretchy and brace his feet against the old man's back and

shove, grunting complacently the while; and now and then, being warm and

snug, grateful and happy, he would paw the old man's back simply in

excess of comfort; and at yet other times he would dream of the chase and

in his sleep tug at the old man's back hair and bark in his ear.  The old

gentleman complained mildly about these familiarities, at last, and when

he got through with his statement he said that such a dog as that was not

a proper animal to admit to bed with tired men, because he was "so

meretricious in his movements and so organic in his emotions."  We turned

the dog out.



It was a hard, wearing, toilsome journey, but it had its bright side; for

after each day was done and our wolfish hunger appeased with a hot supper

of fried bacon, bread, molasses and black coffee, the pipe-smoking, song-

singing and yarn-spinning around the evening camp-fire in the still

solitudes of the desert was a happy, care-free sort of recreation that

seemed the very summit and culmination of earthly luxury.



It is a kind of life that has a potent charm for all men, whether city or

country-bred.  We are descended from desert-lounging Arabs, and countless

ages of growth toward perfect civilization have failed to root out of us

the nomadic instinct.  We all confess to a gratified thrill at the

thought of "camping out."



Once we made twenty-five miles in a day, and once we made forty miles

(through the Great American Desert), and ten miles beyond--fifty in all--

in twenty-three hours, without halting to eat, drink or rest.  To stretch

out and go to sleep, even on stony and frozen ground, after pushing a

wagon and two horses fifty miles, is a delight so supreme that for the

moment it almost seems cheap at the price.



We camped two days in the neighborhood of the "Sink of the Humboldt."

We tried to use the strong alkaline water of the Sink, but it would not

answer.  It was like drinking lye, and not weak lye, either.  It left a

taste in the mouth, bitter and every way execrable, and a burning in the

stomach that was very uncomfortable.  We put molasses in it, but that

helped it very little; we added a pickle, yet the alkali was the

prominent taste and so it was unfit for drinking.



The coffee we made of this water was the meanest compound man has yet

invented.  It was really viler to the taste than the unameliorated water

itself.  Mr. Ballou, being the architect and builder of the beverage felt

constrained to endorse and uphold it, and so drank half a cup, by little

sips, making shift to praise it faintly the while, but finally threw out

the remainder, and said frankly it was "too technical for him."



But presently we found a spring of fresh water, convenient, and then,

with nothing to mar our enjoyment, and no stragglers to interrupt it, we

entered into our rest.









CHAPTER XXVIII.



After leaving the Sink, we traveled along the Humboldt river a little

way.  People accustomed to the monster mile-wide Mississippi, grow

accustomed to associating the term "river" with a high degree of watery

grandeur.  Consequently, such people feel rather disappointed when they

stand on the shores of the Humboldt or the Carson and find that a "river"

in Nevada is a sickly rivulet which is just the counterpart of the Erie

canal in all respects save that the canal is twice as long and four times

as deep.  One of the pleasantest and most invigorating exercises one can

contrive is to run and jump across the Humboldt river till he is

overheated, and then drink it dry.



On the fifteenth day we completed our march of two hundred miles and

entered Unionville, Humboldt county, in the midst of a driving snow-

storm.  Unionville consisted of eleven cabins and a liberty-pole.  Six of

the cabins were strung along one side of a deep canyon, and the other

five faced them.  The rest of the landscape was made up of bleak mountain

walls that rose so high into the sky from both sides of the canyon that

the village was left, as it were, far down in the bottom of a crevice.

It was always daylight on the mountain tops a long time before the

darkness lifted and revealed Unionville.



We built a small, rude cabin in the side of the crevice and roofed it

with canvas, leaving a corner open to serve as a chimney, through which

the cattle used to tumble occasionally, at night, and mash our furniture

and interrupt our sleep.  It was very cold weather and fuel was scarce.

Indians brought brush and bushes several miles on their backs; and when

we could catch a laden Indian it was well--and when we could not (which

was the rule, not the exception), we shivered and bore it.



I confess, without shame, that I expected to find masses of silver lying

all about the ground.  I expected to see it glittering in the sun on the

mountain summits.  I said nothing about this, for some instinct told me

that I might possibly have an exaggerated idea about it, and so if I

betrayed my thought I might bring derision upon myself.  Yet I was as

perfectly satisfied in my own mind as I could be of anything, that I was

going to gather up, in a day or two, or at furthest a week or two, silver

enough to make me satisfactorily wealthy--and so my fancy was already

busy with plans for spending this money.  The first opportunity that

offered, I sauntered carelessly away from the cabin, keeping an eye on

the other boys, and stopping and contemplating the sky when they seemed

to be observing me; but as soon as the coast was manifestly clear, I fled

away as guiltily as a thief might have done and never halted till I was

far beyond sight and call.  Then I began my search with a feverish

excitement that was brimful of expectation--almost of certainty.

I crawled about the ground, seizing and examining bits of stone, blowing

the dust from them or rubbing them on my clothes, and then peering at

them with anxious hope.  Presently I found a bright fragment and my heart

bounded!  I hid behind a boulder and polished it and scrutinized it with

a nervous eagerness and a delight that was more pronounced than absolute

certainty itself could have afforded.  The more I examined the fragment

the more I was convinced that I had found the door to fortune.  I marked

the spot and carried away my specimen.  Up and down the rugged mountain

side I searched, with always increasing interest and always augmenting

gratitude that I had come to Humboldt and come in time.  Of all the

experiences of my life, this secret search among the hidden treasures of

silver-land was the nearest to unmarred ecstasy.  It was a delirious

revel.



By and by, in the bed of a shallow rivulet, I found a deposit of shining

yellow scales, and my breath almost forsook me!  A gold mine, and in my

simplicity I had been content with vulgar silver!  I was so excited that

I half believed my overwrought imagination was deceiving me.  Then a fear

came upon me that people might be observing me and would guess my secret.

Moved by this thought, I made a circuit of the place, and ascended a

knoll to reconnoiter.  Solitude.  No creature was near.  Then I returned

to my mine, fortifying myself against possible disappointment, but my

fears were groundless--the shining scales were still there.  I set about

scooping them out, and for an hour I toiled down the windings of the

stream and robbed its bed.  But at last the descending sun warned me to

give up the quest, and I turned homeward laden with wealth.  As I walked

along I could not help smiling at the thought of my being so excited over

my fragment of silver when a nobler metal was almost under my nose.  In

this little time the former had so fallen in my estimation that once or

twice I was on the point of throwing it away.



The boys were as hungry as usual, but I could eat nothing.  Neither could

I talk.  I was full of dreams and far away.  Their conversation

interrupted the flow of my fancy somewhat, and annoyed me a little, too.

I despised the sordid and commonplace things they talked about.  But as

they proceeded, it began to amuse me.  It grew to be rare fun to hear

them planning their poor little economies and sighing over possible

privations and distresses when a gold mine, all our own, lay within sight

of the cabin and I could point it out at any moment.  Smothered hilarity

began to oppress me, presently.  It was hard to resist the impulse to

burst out with exultation and reveal everything; but I did resist.  I

said within myself that I would filter the great news through my lips

calmly and be serene as a summer morning while I watched its effect in

their faces.  I said:



"Where have you all been?"



"Prospecting."



"What did you find?"



"Nothing."



"Nothing?  What do you think of the country?"



"Can't tell, yet," said Mr. Ballou, who was an old gold miner, and had

likewise had considerable experience among the silver mines.



"Well, haven't you formed any sort of opinion?"



"Yes, a sort of a one.  It's fair enough here, may be, but overrated.

Seven thousand dollar ledges are scarce, though.



"That Sheba may be rich enough, but we don't own it; and besides, the rock

is so full of base metals that all the science in the world can't work

it.  We'll not starve, here, but we'll not get rich, I'm afraid."



"So you think the prospect is pretty poor?"



"No name for it!"



"Well, we'd better go back, hadn't we?"



"Oh, not yet--of course not.  We'll try it a riffle, first."



"Suppose, now--this is merely a supposition, you know--suppose you could

find a ledge that would yield, say, a hundred and fifty dollars a ton--

would that satisfy you?"



"Try us once!" from the whole party.



"Or suppose--merely a supposition, of course--suppose you were to find a

ledge that would yield two thousand dollars a ton--would that satisfy

you?"



"Here--what do you mean?  What are you coming at?  Is there some mystery

behind all this?"



"Never mind.  I am not saying anything.  You know perfectly well there

are no rich mines here--of course you do.  Because you have been around

and examined for yourselves.  Anybody would know that, that had been

around.  But just for the sake of argument, suppose--in a kind of general

way--suppose some person were to tell you that two-thousand-dollar ledges

were simply contemptible--contemptible, understand--and that right yonder

in sight of this very cabin there were piles of pure gold and pure

silver--oceans of it--enough to make you all rich in twenty-four hours!

Come!"



"I should say he was as crazy as a loon!" said old Ballou, but wild with

excitement, nevertheless.



"Gentlemen," said I, "I don't say anything--I haven't been around, you

know, and of course don't know anything--but all I ask of you is to cast

your eye on that, for instance, and tell me what you think of it!" and I

tossed my treasure before them.



There was an eager scramble for it, and a closing of heads together over

it under the candle-light.  Then old Ballou said:



"Think of it?  I think it is nothing but a lot of granite rubbish and

nasty glittering mica that isn't worth ten cents an acre!"



So vanished my dream.  So melted my wealth away.  So toppled my airy

castle to the earth and left me stricken and forlorn.



Moralizing, I observed, then, that "all that glitters is not gold."



Mr. Ballou said I could go further than that, and lay it up among my

treasures of knowledge, that nothing that glitters is gold.  So I learned

then, once for all, that gold in its native state is but dull,

unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration

of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter.  However, like the rest of

the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of

mica.  Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.









CHAPTER XXIX.



True knowledge of the nature of silver mining came fast enough.  We went

out "prospecting" with Mr. Ballou.  We climbed the mountain sides, and

clambered among sage-brush, rocks and snow till we were ready to drop

with exhaustion, but found no silver--nor yet any gold.  Day after day we

did this.  Now and then we came upon holes burrowed a few feet into the

declivities and apparently abandoned; and now and then we found one or

two listless men still burrowing.  But there was no appearance of silver.

These holes were the beginnings of tunnels, and the purpose was to drive

them hundreds of feet into the mountain, and some day tap the hidden

ledge where the silver was.  Some day!  It seemed far enough away, and

very hopeless and dreary.  Day after day we toiled, and climbed and

searched, and we younger partners grew sicker and still sicker of the

promiseless toil.  At last we halted under a beetling rampart of rock

which projected from the earth high upon the mountain.  Mr. Ballou broke

off some fragments with a hammer, and examined them long and attentively

with a small eye-glass; threw them away and broke off more; said this

rock was quartz, and quartz was the sort of rock that contained silver.

Contained it!  I had thought that at least it would be caked on the

outside of it like a kind of veneering.  He still broke off pieces and

critically examined them, now and then wetting the piece with his tongue

and applying the glass.  At last he exclaimed:



"We've got it!"



We were full of anxiety in a moment.  The rock was clean and white, where

it was broken, and across it ran a ragged thread of blue.  He said that

that little thread had silver in it, mixed with base metal, such as lead

and antimony, and other rubbish, and that there was a speck or two of

gold visible.  After a great deal of effort we managed to discern some

little fine yellow specks, and judged that a couple of tons of them

massed together might make a gold dollar, possibly.  We were not

jubilant, but Mr. Ballou said there were worse ledges in the world than

that.  He saved what he called the "richest" piece of the rock, in order

to determine its value by the process called the "fire-assay."  Then we

named the mine "Monarch of the Mountains" (modesty of nomenclature is not

a prominent feature in the mines), and Mr. Ballou wrote out and stuck up

the following "notice," preserving a copy to be entered upon the books in

the mining recorder's office in the town.



      "NOTICE."



      "We the undersigned claim three claims, of three hundred feet each

      (and one for discovery), on this silver-bearing quartz lead or lode,

      extending north and south from this notice, with all its dips,

      spurs, and angles, variations and sinuosities, together with fifty

      feet of ground on either side for working the same."



We put our names to it and tried to feel that our fortunes were made.

But when we talked the matter all over with Mr. Ballou, we felt depressed

and dubious.  He said that this surface quartz was not all there was of

our mine; but that the wall or ledge of rock called the "Monarch of the

Mountains," extended down hundreds and hundreds of feet into the earth--

he illustrated by saying it was like a curb-stone, and maintained a

nearly uniform thickness-say twenty feet--away down into the bowels of

the earth, and was perfectly distinct from the casing rock on each side

of it; and that it kept to itself, and maintained its distinctive

character always, no matter how deep it extended into the earth or how

far it stretched itself through and across the hills and valleys.  He

said it might be a mile deep and ten miles long, for all we knew; and

that wherever we bored into it above ground or below, we would find gold

and silver in it, but no gold or silver in the meaner rock it was cased

between.  And he said that down in the great depths of the ledge was its

richness, and the deeper it went the richer it grew.  Therefore, instead

of working here on the surface, we must either bore down into the rock

with a shaft till we came to where it was rich--say a hundred feet or so

--or else we must go down into the valley and bore a long tunnel into the

mountain side and tap the ledge far under the earth.  To do either was

plainly the labor of months; for we could blast and bore only a few feet

a day--some five or six.  But this was not all.  He said that after we

got the ore out it must be hauled in wagons to a distant silver-mill,

ground up, and the silver extracted by a tedious and costly process.  Our

fortune seemed a century away!



But we went to work.  We decided to sink a shaft.  So, for a week we

climbed the mountain, laden with picks, drills, gads, crowbars, shovels,

cans of blasting powder and coils of fuse and strove with might and main.

At first the rock was broken and loose and we dug it up with picks and

threw it out with shovels, and the hole progressed very well.  But the

rock became more compact, presently, and gads and crowbars came into

play.  But shortly nothing could make an impression but blasting powder.



That was the weariest work!  One of us held the iron drill in its place

and another would strike with an eight-pound sledge--it was like driving

nails on a large scale.  In the course of an hour or two the drill would

reach a depth of two or three feet, making a hole a couple of inches in

diameter.  We would put in a charge of powder, insert half a yard of

fuse, pour in sand and gravel and ram it down, then light the fuse and

run.  When the explosion came and the rocks and smoke shot into the air,

we would go back and find about a bushel of that hard, rebellious quartz

jolted out.  Nothing more.  One week of this satisfied me.  I resigned.

Clagget and Oliphant followed.  Our shaft was only twelve feet deep.  We

decided that a tunnel was the thing we wanted.



So we went down the mountain side and worked a week; at the end of which

time we had blasted a tunnel about deep enough to hide a hogshead in, and

judged that about nine hundred feet more of it would reach the ledge.

I resigned again, and the other boys only held out one day longer.

We decided that a tunnel was not what we wanted.  We wanted a ledge that

was already "developed."  There were none in the camp.



We dropped the "Monarch" for the time being.



Meantime the camp was filling up with people, and there was a constantly

growing excitement about our Humboldt mines.  We fell victims to the

epidemic and strained every nerve to acquire more "feet."  We prospected

and took up new claims, put "notices" on them and gave them grandiloquent

names.  We traded some of our "feet" for "feet" in other people's claims.

In a little while we owned largely in the "Gray Eagle," the "Columbiana,"

the "Branch Mint," the "Maria Jane," the "Universe," the "Root-Hog-or-

Die," the "Samson and Delilah," the "Treasure Trove," the "Golconda," the

"Sultana," the "Boomerang," the "Great Republic," the "Grand Mogul," and

fifty other "mines" that had never been molested by a shovel or scratched

with a pick.  We had not less than thirty thousand "feet" apiece in the

"richest mines on earth" as the frenzied cant phrased it--and were in

debt to the butcher.  We were stark mad with excitement--drunk with

happiness--smothered under mountains of prospective wealth--arrogantly

compassionate toward the plodding millions who knew not our marvellous

canyon--but our credit was not good at the grocer's.



It was the strangest phase of life one can imagine.  It was a beggars'

revel.  There was nothing doing in the district--no mining--no milling--

no productive effort--no income--and not enough money in the entire camp

to buy a corner lot in an eastern village, hardly; and yet a stranger

would have supposed he was walking among bloated millionaires.

Prospecting parties swarmed out of town with the first flush of dawn, and

swarmed in again at nightfall laden with spoil--rocks.  Nothing but

rocks.  Every man's pockets were full of them; the floor of his cabin was

littered with them; they were disposed in labeled rows on his shelves.









CHAPTER XXX.



I met men at every turn who owned from one thousand to thirty thousand

"feet" in undeveloped silver mines, every single foot of which they

believed would shortly be worth from fifty to a thousand dollars--and as

often as any other way they were men who had not twenty-five dollars in

the world.  Every man you met had his new mine to boast of, and his

"specimens" ready; and if the opportunity offered, he would infallibly

back you into a corner and offer as a favor to you, not to him, to part

with just a few feet in the "Golden Age," or the "Sarah Jane," or some

other unknown stack of croppings, for money enough to get a "square meal"

with, as the phrase went.  And you were never to reveal that he had made

you the offer at such a ruinous price, for it was only out of friendship

for you that he was willing to make the sacrifice.  Then he would fish a

piece of rock out of his pocket, and after looking mysteriously around as

if he feared he might be waylaid and robbed if caught with such wealth in

his possession, he would dab the rock against his tongue, clap an

eyeglass to it, and exclaim:



"Look at that!  Right there in that red dirt!  See it?  See the specks of

gold?  And the streak of silver?  That's from the Uncle Abe.  There's a

hundred thousand tons like that in sight!  Right in sight, mind you!

And when we get down on it and the ledge comes in solid, it will be the

richest thing in the world!  Look at the assay!  I don't want you to

believe me--look at the assay!"



Then he would get out a greasy sheet of paper which showed that the

portion of rock assayed had given evidence of containing silver and gold

in the proportion of so many hundreds or thousands of dollars to the ton.





I little knew, then, that the custom was to hunt out the richest piece of

rock and get it assayed!  Very often, that piece, the size of a filbert,

was the only fragment in a ton that had a particle of metal in it--and

yet the assay made it pretend to represent the average value of the ton

of rubbish it came from!



On such a system of assaying as that, the Humboldt world had gone crazy.

On the authority of such assays its newspaper correspondents were

frothing about rock worth four and seven thousand dollars a ton!



And does the reader remember, a few pages back, the calculations, of a

quoted correspondent, whereby the ore is to be mined and shipped all the

way to England, the metals extracted, and the gold and silver contents

received back by the miners as clear profit, the copper, antimony and

other things in the ore being sufficient to pay all the expenses

incurred?  Everybody's head was full of such "calculations" as those--

such raving insanity, rather.  Few people took work into their

calculations--or outlay of money either; except the work and expenditures

of other people.



We never touched our tunnel or our shaft again.  Why?  Because we judged

that we had learned the real secret of success in silver mining--which

was, not to mine the silver ourselves by the sweat of our brows and the

labor of our hands, but to sell the ledges to the dull slaves of toil and

let them do the mining!



Before leaving Carson, the Secretary and I had purchased "feet" from

various Esmeralda stragglers.  We had expected immediate returns of

bullion, but were only afflicted with regular and constant "assessments"

instead--demands for money wherewith to develop the said mines.  These

assessments had grown so oppressive that it seemed necessary to look into

the matter personally.  Therefore I projected a pilgrimage to Carson and

thence to Esmeralda.  I bought a horse and started, in company with

Mr. Ballou and a gentleman named Ollendorff, a Prussian--not the party

who has inflicted so much suffering on the world with his wretched

foreign grammars, with their interminable repetitions of questions which

never have occurred and are never likely to occur in any conversation

among human beings.  We rode through a snow-storm for two or three days,

and arrived at "Honey Lake Smith's," a sort of isolated inn on the Carson

river.  It was a two-story log house situated on a small knoll in the

midst of the vast basin or desert through which the sickly Carson winds

its melancholy way.  Close to the house were the Overland stage stables,

built of sun-dried bricks.  There was not another building within several

leagues of the place.  Towards sunset about twenty hay-wagons arrived and

camped around the house and all the teamsters came in to supper--a very,

very rough set.  There were one or two Overland stage drivers there,

also, and half a dozen vagabonds and stragglers; consequently the house

was well crowded.



We walked out, after supper, and visited a small Indian camp in the

vicinity.  The Indians were in a great hurry about something, and were

packing up and getting away as fast as they could.  In their broken

English they said, "By'm-by, heap water!" and by the help of signs made

us understand that in their opinion a flood was coming.  The weather was

perfectly clear, and this was not the rainy season.  There was about a

foot of water in the insignificant river--or maybe two feet; the stream

was not wider than a back alley in a village, and its banks were scarcely

higher than a man's head.



So, where was the flood to come from?  We canvassed the subject awhile

and then concluded it was a ruse, and that the Indians had some better

reason for leaving in a hurry than fears of a flood in such an

exceedingly dry time.



At seven in the evening we went to bed in the second story--with our

clothes on, as usual, and all three in the same bed, for every available

space on the floors, chairs, etc., was in request, and even then there

was barely room for the housing of the inn's guests.  An hour later we

were awakened by a great turmoil, and springing out of bed we picked our

way nimbly among the ranks of snoring teamsters on the floor and got to

the front windows of the long room.  A glance revealed a strange

spectacle, under the moonlight.  The crooked Carson was full to the brim,

and its waters were raging and foaming in the wildest way--sweeping

around the sharp bends at a furious speed, and bearing on their surface a

chaos of logs, brush and all sorts of rubbish.  A depression, where its

bed had once been, in other times, was already filling, and in one or two

places the water was beginning to wash over the main bank.  Men were

flying hither and thither, bringing cattle and wagons close up to the

house, for the spot of high ground on which it stood extended only some

thirty feet in front and about a hundred in the rear.  Close to the old

river bed just spoken of, stood a little log stable, and in this our

horses were lodged.



While we looked, the waters increased so fast in this place that in a few

minutes a torrent was roaring by the little stable and its margin

encroaching steadily on the logs.  We suddenly realized that this flood

was not a mere holiday spectacle, but meant damage--and not only to the

small log stable but to the Overland buildings close to the main river,

for the waves had now come ashore and were creeping about the foundations

and invading the great hay-corral adjoining.  We ran down and joined the

crowd of excited men and frightened animals.  We waded knee-deep into the

log stable, unfastened the horses and waded out almost waist-deep, so

fast the waters increased.  Then the crowd rushed in a body to the hay-

corral and began to tumble down the huge stacks of baled hay and roll the

bales up on the high ground by the house.  Meantime it was discovered

that Owens, an overland driver, was missing, and a man ran to the large

stable, and wading in, boot-top deep, discovered him asleep in his bed,

awoke him, and waded out again.  But Owens was drowsy and resumed his

nap; but only for a minute or two, for presently he turned in his bed,

his hand dropped over the side and came in contact with the cold water!

It was up level with the mattress!  He waded out, breast-deep, almost,

and the next moment the sun-burned bricks melted down like sugar and the

big building crumbled to a ruin and was washed away in a twinkling.



At eleven o'clock only the roof of the little log stable was out of

water, and our inn was on an island in mid-ocean.  As far as the eye

could reach, in the moonlight, there was no desert visible, but only a

level waste of shining water.  The Indians were true prophets, but how

did they get their information?  I am not able to answer the question.

We remained cooped up eight days and nights with that curious crew.

Swearing, drinking and card playing were the order of the day, and

occasionally a fight was thrown in for variety.  Dirt and vermin--but let

us forget those features; their profusion is simply inconceivable--it is

better that they remain so.



There were two men----however, this chapter is long enough.









CHAPTER XXXI.



There were two men in the company who caused me particular discomfort.

One was a little Swede, about twenty-five years old, who knew only one

song, and he was forever singing it.  By day we were all crowded into one

small, stifling bar-room, and so there was no escaping this person's

music.  Through all the profanity, whisky-guzzling, "old sledge" and

quarreling, his monotonous song meandered with never a variation in its

tiresome sameness, and it seemed to me, at last, that I would be content

to die, in order to be rid of the torture.  The other man was a stalwart

ruffian called "Arkansas," who carried two revolvers in his belt and a

bowie knife projecting from his boot, and who was always drunk and always

suffering for a fight.  But he was so feared, that nobody would

accommodate him.  He would try all manner of little wary ruses to entrap

somebody into an offensive remark, and his face would light up now and

then when he fancied he was fairly on the scent of a fight, but

invariably his victim would elude his toils and then he would show a

disappointment that was almost pathetic.  The landlord, Johnson, was a

meek, well-meaning fellow, and Arkansas fastened on him early, as a

promising subject, and gave him no rest day or night, for awhile.  On the

fourth morning, Arkansas got drunk and sat himself down to wait for an

opportunity.  Presently Johnson came in, just comfortably sociable with

whisky, and said:



"I reckon the Pennsylvania 'lection--"



Arkansas raised his finger impressively and Johnson stopped.  Arkansas

rose unsteadily and confronted him.  Said he:



"Wha-what do you know a--about Pennsylvania?  Answer me that.  Wha--what

do you know 'bout Pennsylvania?"



"I was only goin' to say--"



"You was only goin' to say.  You was!  You was only goin' to say--what

was you goin' to say?  That's it!  That's what I want to know.  I want to

know wha--what you ('ic) what you know about Pennsylvania, since you're

makin' yourself so d---d free.  Answer me that!"



"Mr. Arkansas, if you'd only let me--"



"Who's a henderin' you?  Don't you insinuate nothing agin me!--don't you

do it.  Don't you come in here bullyin' around, and cussin' and goin' on

like a lunatic--don't you do it.  'Coz I won't stand it.  If fight's what

you want, out with it!  I'm your man!  Out with it!"



Said Johnson, backing into a corner, Arkansas following, menacingly:



"Why, I never said nothing, Mr. Arkansas.  You don't give a man no

chance.  I was only goin' to say that Pennsylvania was goin' to have an

election next week--that was all--that was everything I was goin' to say

--I wish I may never stir if it wasn't."



"Well then why d'n't you say it?  What did you come swellin' around that

way for, and tryin' to raise trouble?"



"Why I didn't come swellin' around, Mr. Arkansas--I just--"



"I'm a liar am I!  Ger-reat Caesar's ghost--"



"Oh, please, Mr. Arkansas, I never meant such a thing as that, I wish I

may die if I did.  All the boys will tell you that I've always spoke well

of you, and respected you more'n any man in the house.  Ask Smith.  Ain't

it so, Smith?  Didn't I say, no longer ago than last night, that for a

man that was a gentleman all the time and every way you took him, give me

Arkansas?  I'll leave it to any gentleman here if them warn't the very

words I used.  Come, now, Mr. Arkansas, le's take a drink--le's shake

hands and take a drink.  Come up--everybody!  It's my treat.  Come up,

Bill, Tom, Bob, Scotty--come up.  I want you all to take a drink with me

and Arkansas--old Arkansas, I call him--bully old Arkansas.  Gimme your

hand agin.  Look at him, boys--just take a look at him.  Thar stands the

whitest man in America!--and the man that denies it has got to fight me,

that's all.  Gimme that old flipper agin!"



They embraced, with drunken affection on the landlord's part and

unresponsive toleration on the part of Arkansas, who, bribed by a drink,

was disappointed of his prey once more.  But the foolish landlord was so

happy to have escaped butchery, that he went on talking when he ought to

have marched himself out of danger.  The consequence was that Arkansas

shortly began to glower upon him dangerously, and presently said:



"Lan'lord, will you p-please make that remark over agin if you please?"



"I was a-sayin' to Scotty that my father was up'ards of eighty year old

when he died."



"Was that all that you said?"



"Yes, that was all."



"Didn't say nothing but that?"



"No--nothing."



Then an uncomfortable silence.



Arkansas played with his glass a moment, lolling on his elbows on the

counter.  Then he meditatively scratched his left shin with his right

boot, while the awkward silence continued.  But presently he loafed away

toward the stove, looking dissatisfied; roughly shouldered two or three

men out of a comfortable position; occupied it himself, gave a sleeping

dog a kick that sent him howling under a bench, then spread his long legs

and his blanket-coat tails apart and proceeded to warm his back.  In a

little while he fell to grumbling to himself, and soon he slouched back

to the bar and said:



"Lan'lord, what's your idea for rakin' up old personalities and blowin'

about your father?  Ain't this company agreeable to you?  Ain't it?  If

this company ain't agreeable to you, p'r'aps we'd better leave.  Is that

your idea?  Is that what you're coming at?"



"Why bless your soul, Arkansas, I warn't thinking of such a thing.  My

father and my mother--"



"Lan'lord, don't crowd a man!  Don't do it.  If nothing'll do you but a

disturbance, out with it like a man ('ic)--but don't rake up old bygones

and fling'em in the teeth of a passel of people that wants to be

peaceable if they could git a chance.  What's the matter with you this

mornin', anyway?  I never see a man carry on so."



"Arkansas, I reely didn't mean no harm, and I won't go on with it if it's

onpleasant to you.  I reckon my licker's got into my head, and what with

the flood, and havin' so many to feed and look out for--"



"So that's what's a-ranklin' in your heart, is it?  You want us to leave

do you?  There's too many on us.  You want us to pack up and swim.  Is

that it?  Come!"



"Please be reasonable, Arkansas.  Now you know that I ain't the man to--"



"Are you a threatenin' me?  Are you?  By George, the man don't live that

can skeer me!  Don't you try to come that game, my chicken--'cuz I can

stand a good deal, but I won't stand that.  Come out from behind that bar

till I clean you!  You want to drive us out, do you, you sneakin'

underhanded hound!  Come out from behind that bar!  I'll learn you to

bully and badger and browbeat a gentleman that's forever trying to

befriend you and keep you out of trouble!"



"Please, Arkansas, please don't shoot!  If there's got to be bloodshed--"



"Do you hear that, gentlemen?  Do you hear him talk about bloodshed?  So

it's blood you want, is it, you ravin' desperado!  You'd made up your

mind to murder somebody this mornin'--I knowed it perfectly well.  I'm

the man, am I?  It's me you're goin' to murder, is it?  But you can't do

it 'thout I get one chance first, you thievin' black-hearted, white-

livered son of a nigger!  Draw your weepon!"



With that, Arkansas began to shoot, and the landlord to clamber over

benches, men and every sort of obstacle in a frantic desire to escape.

In the midst of the wild hubbub the landlord crashed through a glass

door, and as Arkansas charged after him the landlord's wife suddenly

appeared in the doorway and confronted the desperado with a pair of

scissors!  Her fury was magnificent.  With head erect and flashing eye

she stood a moment and then advanced, with her weapon raised.  The

astonished ruffian hesitated, and then fell back a step.  She followed.

She backed him step by step into the middle of the bar-room, and then,

while the wondering crowd closed up and gazed, she gave him such another

tongue-lashing as never a cowed and shamefaced braggart got before,

perhaps!  As she finished and retired victorious, a roar of applause

shook the house, and every man ordered "drinks for the crowd" in one and

the same breath.



The lesson was entirely sufficient.  The reign of terror was over, and

the Arkansas domination broken for good.  During the rest of the season

of island captivity, there was one man who sat apart in a state of

permanent humiliation, never mixing in any quarrel or uttering a boast,

and never resenting the insults the once cringing crew now constantly

leveled at him, and that man was "Arkansas."



By the fifth or sixth morning the waters had subsided from the land, but

the stream in the old river bed was still high and swift and there was no

possibility of crossing it.  On the eighth it was still too high for an

entirely safe passage, but life in the inn had become next to

insupportable by reason of the dirt, drunkenness, fighting, etc., and so

we made an effort to get away.  In the midst of a heavy snow-storm we

embarked in a canoe, taking our saddles aboard and towing our horses

after us by their halters.  The Prussian, Ollendorff, was in the bow,

with a paddle, Ballou paddled in the middle, and I sat in the stern

holding the halters.  When the horses lost their footing and began to

swim, Ollendorff got frightened, for there was great danger that the

horses would make our aim uncertain, and it was plain that if we failed

to land at a certain spot the current would throw us off and almost

surely cast us into the main Carson, which was a boiling torrent, now.

Such a catastrophe would be death, in all probability, for we would be

swept to sea in the "Sink" or overturned and drowned.  We warned

Ollendorff to keep his wits about him and handle himself carefully, but

it was useless; the moment the bow touched the bank, he made a spring and

the canoe whirled upside down in ten-foot water.



Ollendorff seized some brush and dragged himself ashore, but Ballou and I

had to swim for it, encumbered with our overcoats.  But we held on to the

canoe, and although we were washed down nearly to the Carson, we managed

to push the boat ashore and make a safe landing.  We were cold and water-

soaked, but safe.  The horses made a landing, too, but our saddles were

gone, of course.  We tied the animals in the sage-brush and there they

had to stay for twenty-four hours.  We baled out the canoe and ferried

over some food and blankets for them, but we slept one more night in the

inn before making another venture on our journey.



The next morning it was still snowing furiously when we got away with our

new stock of saddles and accoutrements.  We mounted and started.  The

snow lay so deep on the ground that there was no sign of a road

perceptible, and the snow-fall was so thick that we could not see more

than a hundred yards ahead, else we could have guided our course by the

mountain ranges.  The case looked dubious, but Ollendorff said his

instinct was as sensitive as any compass, and that he could "strike a

bee-line" for Carson city and never diverge from it.  He said that if he

were to straggle a single point out of the true line his instinct would

assail him like an outraged conscience.  Consequently we dropped into his

wake happy and content.  For half an hour we poked along warily enough,

but at the end of that time we came upon a fresh trail, and Ollendorff

shouted proudly:



"I knew I was as dead certain as a compass, boys!  Here we are, right in

somebody's tracks that will hunt the way for us without any trouble.

Let's hurry up and join company with the party."



So we put the horses into as much of a trot as the deep snow would allow,

and before long it was evident that we were gaining on our predecessors,

for the tracks grew more distinct.  We hurried along, and at the end of

an hour the tracks looked still newer and fresher--but what surprised us

was, that the number of travelers in advance of us seemed to steadily

increase.  We wondered how so large a party came to be traveling at such

a time and in such a solitude.  Somebody suggested that it must be a

company of soldiers from the fort, and so we accepted that solution and

jogged along a little faster still, for they could not be far off now.

But the tracks still multiplied, and we began to think the platoon of

soldiers was miraculously expanding into a regiment--Ballou said they had

already increased to five hundred!  Presently he stopped his horse and

said:



"Boys, these are our own tracks, and we've actually been circussing round

and round in a circle for more than two hours, out here in this blind

desert!  By George this is perfectly hydraulic!"



Then the old man waxed wroth and abusive.  He called Ollendorff all

manner of hard names--said he never saw such a lurid fool as he was, and

ended with the peculiarly venomous opinion that he "did not know as much

as a logarythm!"



We certainly had been following our own tracks.  Ollendorff and his

"mental compass" were in disgrace from that moment.



After all our hard travel, here we were on the bank of the stream again,

with the inn beyond dimly outlined through the driving snow-fall.  While

we were considering what to do, the young Swede landed from the canoe and

took his pedestrian way Carson-wards, singing his same tiresome song

about his "sister and his brother" and "the child in the grave with its

mother," and in a short minute faded and disappeared in the white

oblivion.  He was never heard of again.  He no doubt got bewildered and

lost, and Fatigue delivered him over to Sleep and Sleep betrayed him to

Death.  Possibly he followed our treacherous tracks till he became

exhausted and dropped.



Presently the Overland stage forded the now fast receding stream and

started toward Carson on its first trip since the flood came.  We

hesitated no longer, now, but took up our march in its wake, and trotted

merrily along, for we had good confidence in the driver's bump of

locality.  But our horses were no match for the fresh stage team.  We

were soon left out of sight; but it was no matter, for we had the deep

ruts the wheels made for a guide.  By this time it was three in the

afternoon, and consequently it was not very long before night came--and

not with a lingering twilight, but with a sudden shutting down like a

cellar door, as is its habit in that country.  The snowfall was still as

thick as ever, and of course we could not see fifteen steps before us;

but all about us the white glare of the snow-bed enabled us to discern

the smooth sugar-loaf mounds made by the covered sage-bushes, and just in

front of us the two faint grooves which we knew were the steadily filling

and slowly disappearing wheel-tracks.



Now those sage-bushes were all about the same height--three or four feet;

they stood just about seven feet apart, all over the vast desert; each of

them was a mere snow-mound, now; in any direction that you proceeded (the

same as in a well laid out orchard) you would find yourself moving down a

distinctly defined avenue, with a row of these snow-mounds an either side

of it--an avenue the customary width of a road, nice and level in its

breadth, and rising at the sides in the most natural way, by reason of

the mounds.  But we had not thought of this.  Then imagine the chilly

thrill that shot through us when it finally occurred to us, far in the

night, that since the last faint trace of the wheel-tracks had long ago

been buried from sight, we might now be wandering down a mere sage-brush

avenue, miles away from the road and diverging further and further away

from it all the time.  Having a cake of ice slipped down one's back is

placid comfort compared to it.  There was a sudden leap and stir of blood

that had been asleep for an hour, and as sudden a rousing of all the

drowsing activities in our minds and bodies.  We were alive and awake at

once--and shaking and quaking with consternation, too.  There was an

instant halting and dismounting, a bending low and an anxious scanning of

the road-bed.  Useless, of course; for if a faint depression could not be

discerned from an altitude of four or five feet above it, it certainly

could not with one's nose nearly against it.









CHAPTER XXXII.



We seemed to be in a road, but that was no proof.  We tested this by

walking off in various directions--the regular snow-mounds and the

regular avenues between them convinced each man that he had found the

true road, and that the others had found only false ones.  Plainly the

situation was desperate.  We were cold and stiff and the horses were

tired.  We decided to build a sage-brush fire and camp out till morning.

This was wise, because if we were wandering from the right road and the

snow-storm continued another day our case would be the next thing to

hopeless if we kept on.



All agreed that a camp fire was what would come nearest to saving us,

now, and so we set about building it.  We could find no matches, and so

we tried to make shift with the pistols.  Not a man in the party had ever

tried to do such a thing before, but not a man in the party doubted that

it could be done, and without any trouble--because every man in the party

had read about it in books many a time and had naturally come to believe

it, with trusting simplicity, just as he had long ago accepted and

believed that other common book-fraud about Indians and lost hunters

making a fire by rubbing two dry sticks together.



We huddled together on our knees in the deep snow, and the horses put

their noses together and bowed their patient heads over us; and while the

feathery flakes eddied down and turned us into a group of white statuary,

we proceeded with the momentous experiment.  We broke twigs from a sage

bush and piled them on a little cleared place in the shelter of our

bodies.  In the course of ten or fifteen minutes all was ready, and then,

while conversation ceased and our pulses beat low with anxious suspense,

Ollendorff applied his revolver, pulled the trigger and blew the pile

clear out of the county!  It was the flattest failure that ever was.



This was distressing, but it paled before a greater horror--the horses

were gone!  I had been appointed to hold the bridles, but in my absorbing

anxiety over the pistol experiment I had unconsciously dropped them and

the released animals had walked off in the storm.  It was useless to try

to follow them, for their footfalls could make no sound, and one could

pass within two yards of the creatures and never see them.  We gave them

up without an effort at recovering them, and cursed the lying books that

said horses would stay by their masters for protection and companionship

in a distressful time like ours.



We were miserable enough, before; we felt still more forlorn, now.

Patiently, but with blighted hope, we broke more sticks and piled them,

and once more the Prussian shot them into annihilation.  Plainly, to

light a fire with a pistol was an art requiring practice and experience,

and the middle of a desert at midnight in a snow-storm was not a good

place or time for the acquiring of the accomplishment.  We gave it up and

tried the other.  Each man took a couple of sticks and fell to chafing

them together.  At the end of half an hour we were thoroughly chilled,

and so were the sticks.  We bitterly execrated the Indians, the hunters

and the books that had betrayed us with the silly device, and wondered

dismally what was next to be done.  At this critical moment Mr. Ballou

fished out four matches from the rubbish of an overlooked pocket.  To

have found four gold bars would have seemed poor and cheap good luck

compared to this.



One cannot think how good a match looks under such circumstances--or how

lovable and precious, and sacredly beautiful to the eye.  This time we

gathered sticks with high hopes; and when Mr. Ballou prepared to light

the first match, there was an amount of interest centred upon him that

pages of writing could not describe.  The match burned hopefully a

moment, and then went out.  It could not have carried more regret with it

if it had been a human life.  The next match simply flashed and died.

The wind puffed the third one out just as it was on the imminent verge of

success.  We gathered together closer than ever, and developed a

solicitude that was rapt and painful, as Mr. Ballou scratched our last

hope on his leg.  It lit, burned blue and sickly, and then budded into a

robust flame.  Shading it with his hands, the old gentleman bent

gradually down and every heart went with him--everybody, too, for that

matter--and blood and breath stood still.  The flame touched the sticks

at last, took gradual hold upon them--hesitated--took a stronger hold--

hesitated again--held its breath five heart-breaking seconds, then gave a

sort of human gasp and went out.



Nobody said a word for several minutes.  It was a solemn sort of silence;

even the wind put on a stealthy, sinister quiet, and made no more noise

than the falling flakes of snow.  Finally a sad-voiced conversation

began, and it was soon apparent that in each of our hearts lay the

conviction that this was our last night with the living.  I had so hoped

that I was the only one who felt so.  When the others calmly acknowledged

their conviction, it sounded like the summons itself.  Ollendorff said:



"Brothers, let us die together.  And let us go without one hard feeling

towards each other.  Let us forget and forgive bygones.  I know that you

have felt hard towards me for turning over the canoe, and for knowing too

much and leading you round and round in the snow--but I meant well;

forgive me.  I acknowledge freely that I have had hard feelings against

Mr. Ballou for abusing me and calling me a logarythm, which is a thing I

do not know what, but no doubt a thing considered disgraceful and

unbecoming in America, and it has scarcely been out of my mind and has

hurt me a great deal--but let it go; I forgive Mr. Ballou with all my

heart, and--"



Poor Ollendorff broke down and the tears came.  He was not alone, for I

was crying too, and so was Mr. Ballou.  Ollendorff got his voice again

and forgave me for things I had done and said.  Then he got out his

bottle of whisky and said that whether he lived or died he would never

touch another drop.  He said he had given up all hope of life, and

although ill-prepared, was ready to submit humbly to his fate; that he

wished he could be spared a little longer, not for any selfish reason,

but to make a thorough reform in his character, and by devoting himself

to helping the poor, nursing the sick, and pleading with the people to

guard themselves against the evils of intemperance, make his life a

beneficent example to the young, and lay it down at last with the

precious reflection that it had not been lived in vain.  He ended by

saying that his reform should begin at this moment, even here in the

presence of death, since no longer time was to be vouchsafed wherein to

prosecute it to men's help and benefit--and with that he threw away the

bottle of whisky.



Mr. Ballou made remarks of similar purport, and began the reform he could

not live to continue, by throwing away the ancient pack of cards that had

solaced our captivity during the flood and made it bearable.



He said he never gambled, but still was satisfied that the meddling with

cards in any way was immoral and injurious, and no man could be wholly

pure and blemishless without eschewing them.  "And therefore," continued

he, "in doing this act I already feel more in sympathy with that

spiritual saturnalia necessary to entire and obsolete reform."  These

rolling syllables touched him as no intelligible eloquence could have

done, and the old man sobbed with a mournfulness not unmingled with

satisfaction.



My own remarks were of the same tenor as those of my comrades, and I know

that the feelings that prompted them were heartfelt and sincere.  We were

all sincere, and all deeply moved and earnest, for we were in the

presence of death and without hope.  I threw away my pipe, and in doing

it felt that at last I was free of a hated vice and one that had ridden

me like a tyrant all my days.  While I yet talked, the thought of the

good I might have done in the world and the still greater good I might

now do, with these new incentives and higher and better aims to guide me

if I could only be spared a few years longer, overcame me and the tears

came again.  We put our arms about each other's necks and awaited the

warning drowsiness that precedes death by freezing.



It came stealing over us presently, and then we bade each other a last

farewell.  A delicious dreaminess wrought its web about my yielding

senses, while the snow-flakes wove a winding sheet about my conquered

body.  Oblivion came.  The battle of life was done.









CHAPTER XXXIII.



I do not know how long I was in a state of forgetfulness, but it seemed

an age.  A vague consciousness grew upon me by degrees, and then came a

gathering anguish of pain in my limbs and through all my body.  I

shuddered.  The thought flitted through my brain, "this is death--this is

the hereafter."



Then came a white upheaval at my side, and a voice said, with bitterness:



"Will some gentleman be so good as to kick me behind?"



It was Ballou--at least it was a towzled snow image in a sitting posture,

with Ballou's voice.



I rose up, and there in the gray dawn, not fifteen steps from us, were

the frame buildings of a stage station, and under a shed stood our still

saddled and bridled horses!



An arched snow-drift broke up, now, and Ollendorff emerged from it, and

the three of us sat and stared at the houses without speaking a word.

We really had nothing to say.  We were like the profane man who could not

"do the subject justice," the whole situation was so painfully ridiculous

and humiliating that words were tame and we did not know where to

commence anyhow.



The joy in our hearts at our deliverance was poisoned; well-nigh

dissipated, indeed.  We presently began to grow pettish by degrees, and

sullen; and then, angry at each other, angry at ourselves, angry at

everything in general, we moodily dusted the snow from our clothing and

in unsociable single file plowed our way to the horses, unsaddled them,

and sought shelter in the station.



I have scarcely exaggerated a detail of this curious and absurd

adventure.  It occurred almost exactly as I have stated it.  We actually

went into camp in a snow-drift in a desert, at midnight in a storm,

forlorn and hopeless, within fifteen steps of a comfortable inn.



For two hours we sat apart in the station and ruminated in disgust.

The mystery was gone, now, and it was plain enough why the horses had

deserted us.  Without a doubt they were under that shed a quarter of a

minute after they had left us, and they must have overheard and enjoyed

all our confessions and lamentations.



After breakfast we felt better, and the zest of life soon came back.

The world looked bright again, and existence was as dear to us as ever.

Presently an uneasiness came over me--grew upon me--assailed me without

ceasing.  Alas, my regeneration was not complete--I wanted to smoke!

I resisted with all my strength, but the flesh was weak.  I wandered away

alone and wrestled with myself an hour.  I recalled my promises of reform

and preached to myself persuasively, upbraidingly, exhaustively.  But it

was all vain, I shortly found myself sneaking among the snow-drifts

hunting for my pipe.  I discovered it after a considerable search, and

crept away to hide myself and enjoy it.  I remained behind the barn a

good while, asking myself how I would feel if my braver, stronger, truer

comrades should catch me in my degradation.  At last I lit the pipe, and

no human being can feel meaner and baser than I did then.  I was ashamed

of being in my own pitiful company.  Still dreading discovery, I felt

that perhaps the further side of the barn would be somewhat safer, and so

I turned the corner.  As I turned the one corner, smoking, Ollendorff

turned the other with his bottle to his lips, and between us sat

unconscious Ballou deep in a game of "solitaire" with the old greasy

cards!



Absurdity could go no farther.  We shook hands and agreed to say no more

about "reform" and "examples to the rising generation."



The station we were at was at the verge of the Twenty-six-Mile Desert.

If we had approached it half an hour earlier the night before, we must

have heard men shouting there and firing pistols; for they were expecting

some sheep drovers and their flocks and knew that they would infallibly

get lost and wander out of reach of help unless guided by sounds.



While we remained at the station, three of the drovers arrived, nearly

exhausted with their wanderings, but two others of their party were never

heard of afterward.



We reached Carson in due time, and took a rest.  This rest, together with

preparations for the journey to Esmeralda, kept us there a week, and the

delay gave us the opportunity to be present at the trial of the great

land-slide case of Hyde vs. Morgan--an episode which is famous in Nevada

to this day.  After a word or two of necessary explanation, I will set

down the history of this singular affair just as it transpired.









CHAPTER XXXIV.



The mountains are very high and steep about Carson, Eagle and Washoe

Valleys--very high and very steep, and so when the snow gets to melting

off fast in the Spring and the warm surface-earth begins to moisten and

soften, the disastrous land-slides commence.  The reader cannot know what

a land-slide is, unless he has lived in that country and seen the whole

side of a mountain taken off some fine morning and deposited down in the

valley, leaving a vast, treeless, unsightly scar upon the mountain's

front to keep the circumstance fresh in his memory all the years that he

may go on living within seventy miles of that place.



General Buncombe was shipped out to Nevada in the invoice of Territorial

officers, to be United States Attorney.  He considered himself a lawyer

of parts, and he very much wanted an opportunity to manifest it--partly

for the pure gratification of it and partly because his salary was

Territorially meagre (which is a strong expression).  Now the older

citizens of a new territory look down upon the rest of the world with a

calm, benevolent compassion, as long as it keeps out of the way--when it

gets in the way they snub it.  Sometimes this latter takes the shape of a

practical joke.



One morning Dick Hyde rode furiously up to General Buncombe's door in

Carson city and rushed into his presence without stopping to tie his

horse.  He seemed much excited.  He told the General that he wanted him

to conduct a suit for him and would pay him five hundred dollars if he

achieved a victory.  And then, with violent gestures and a world of

profanity, he poured out his grief.  He said it was pretty well known

that for some years he had been farming (or ranching as the more

customary term is) in Washoe District, and making a successful thing of

it, and furthermore it was known that his ranch was situated just in the

edge of the valley, and that Tom Morgan owned a ranch immediately above

it on the mountain side.



And now the trouble was, that one of those hated and dreaded land-slides

had come and slid Morgan's ranch, fences, cabins, cattle, barns and

everything down on top of his ranch and exactly covered up every single

vestige of his property, to a depth of about thirty-eight feet.  Morgan

was in possession and refused to vacate the premises--said he was

occupying his own cabin and not interfering with anybody else's--and said

the cabin was standing on the same dirt and same ranch it had always

stood on, and he would like to see anybody make him vacate.



"And when I reminded him," said Hyde, weeping, "that it was on top of my

ranch and that he was trespassing, he had the infernal meanness to ask me

why didn't I stay on my ranch and hold possession when I see him

a-coming!  Why didn't I stay on it, the blathering lunatic--by George,

when I heard that racket and looked up that hill it was just like the

whole world was a-ripping and a-tearing down that mountain side--

splinters, and cord-wood, thunder and lightning, hail and snow, odds and

ends of hay stacks, and awful clouds of dust!--trees going end over end

in the air, rocks as big as a house jumping 'bout a thousand feet high

and busting into ten million pieces, cattle turned inside out and

a-coming head on with their tails hanging out between their teeth!--and

in the midst of all that wrack and destruction sot that cussed Morgan on

his gate-post, a-wondering why I didn't stay and hold possession!  Laws

bless me, I just took one glimpse, General, and lit out'n the county in

three jumps exactly.



"But what grinds me is that that Morgan hangs on there and won't move

off'n that ranch--says it's his'n and he's going to keep it--likes it

better'n he did when it was higher up the hill.  Mad!  Well, I've been so

mad for two days I couldn't find my way to town--been wandering around in

the brush in a starving condition--got anything here to drink, General?

But I'm here now, and I'm a-going to law.  You hear me!"



Never in all the world, perhaps, were a man's feelings so outraged as

were the General's.  He said he had never heard of such high-handed

conduct in all his life as this Morgan's.  And he said there was no use

in going to law--Morgan had no shadow of right to remain where he was--

nobody in the wide world would uphold him in it, and no lawyer would take

his case and no judge listen to it.  Hyde said that right there was where

he was mistaken--everybody in town sustained Morgan; Hal Brayton, a very

smart lawyer, had taken his case; the courts being in vacation, it was to

be tried before a referee, and ex-Governor Roop had already been

appointed to that office and would open his court in a large public hall

near the hotel at two that afternoon.



The General was amazed.  He said he had suspected before that the people

of that Territory were fools, and now he knew it.  But he said rest easy,

rest easy and collect the witnesses, for the victory was just as certain

as if the conflict were already over.  Hyde wiped away his tears and

left.



At two in the afternoon referee Roop's Court opened and Roop appeared

throned among his sheriffs, the witnesses, and spectators, and wearing

upon his face a solemnity so awe-inspiring that some of his fellow-

conspirators had misgivings that maybe he had not comprehended, after

all, that this was merely a joke.  An unearthly stillness prevailed, for

at the slightest noise the judge uttered sternly the command:



"Order in the Court!"



And the sheriffs promptly echoed it.  Presently the General elbowed his

way through the crowd of spectators, with his arms full of law-books, and

on his ears fell an order from the judge which was the first respectful

recognition of his high official dignity that had ever saluted them, and

it trickled pleasantly through his whole system:



"Way for the United States Attorney!"



The witnesses were called--legislators, high government officers,

ranchmen, miners, Indians, Chinamen, negroes.  Three fourths of them were

called by the defendant Morgan, but no matter, their testimony invariably

went in favor of the plaintiff Hyde.  Each new witness only added new

testimony to the absurdity of a man's claiming to own another man's

property because his farm had slid down on top of it.  Then the Morgan

lawyers made their speeches, and seemed to make singularly weak ones--

they did really nothing to help the Morgan cause.  And now the General,

with exultation in his face, got up and made an impassioned effort; he

pounded the table, he banged the law-books, he shouted, and roared, and

howled, he quoted from everything and everybody, poetry, sarcasm,

statistics, history, pathos, bathos, blasphemy, and wound up with a grand

war-whoop for free speech, freedom of the press, free schools, the

Glorious Bird of America and the principles of eternal justice!

[Applause.]



When the General sat down, he did it with the conviction that if there

was anything in good strong testimony, a great speech and believing and

admiring countenances all around, Mr. Morgan's case was killed.  Ex-

Governor Roop leant his head upon his hand for some minutes, thinking,

and the still audience waited for his decision.  Then he got up and stood

erect, with bended head, and thought again.  Then he walked the floor

with long, deliberate strides, his chin in his hand, and still the

audience waited.  At last he returned to his throne, seated himself, and

began impressively:



"Gentlemen, I feel the great responsibility that rests upon me this day.

This is no ordinary case.  On the contrary it is plain that it is the

most solemn and awful that ever man was called upon to decide.

Gentlemen, I have listened attentively to the evidence, and have

perceived that the weight of it, the overwhelming weight of it, is in

favor of the plaintiff Hyde.  I have listened also to the remarks of

counsel, with high interest--and especially will I commend the masterly

and irrefutable logic of the distinguished gentleman who represents the

plaintiff.  But gentlemen, let us beware how we allow mere human

testimony, human ingenuity in argument and human ideas of equity, to

influence us at a moment so solemn as this.  Gentlemen, it ill becomes

us, worms as we are, to meddle with the decrees of Heaven.  It is plain

to me that Heaven, in its inscrutable wisdom, has seen fit to move this

defendant's ranch for a purpose.  We are but creatures, and we must

submit.  If Heaven has chosen to favor the defendant Morgan in this

marked and wonderful manner; and if Heaven, dissatisfied with the

position of the Morgan ranch upon the mountain side, has chosen to remove

it to a position more eligible and more advantageous for its owner, it

ill becomes us, insects as we are, to question the legality of the act or

inquire into the reasons that prompted it.  No--Heaven created the

ranches and it is Heaven's prerogative to rearrange them, to experiment

with them around at its pleasure.  It is for us to submit, without

repining.



"I warn you that this thing which has happened is a thing with which the

sacrilegious hands and brains and tongues of men must not meddle.

Gentlemen, it is the verdict of this court that the plaintiff, Richard

Hyde, has been deprived of his ranch by the visitation of God!  And from

this decision there is no appeal."



Buncombe seized his cargo of law-books and plunged out of the court-room

frantic with indignation.  He pronounced Roop to be a miraculous fool, an

inspired idiot.  In all good faith he returned at night and remonstrated

with Roop upon his extravagant decision, and implored him to walk the

floor and think for half an hour, and see if he could not figure out some

sort of modification of the verdict.  Roop yielded at last and got up to

walk.  He walked two hours and a half, and at last his face lit up

happily and he told Buncombe it had occurred to him that the ranch

underneath the new Morgan ranch still belonged to Hyde, that his title to

the ground was just as good as it had ever been, and therefore he was of

opinion that Hyde had a right to dig it out from under there and--



The General never waited to hear the end of it.  He was always an

impatient and irascible man, that way.  At the end of two months the fact

that he had been played upon with a joke had managed to bore itself, like

another Hoosac Tunnel, through the solid adamant of his understanding.









CHAPTER XXXV.



When we finally left for Esmeralda, horseback, we had an addition to the

company in the person of Capt. John Nye, the Governor's brother.  He had

a good memory, and a tongue hung in the middle.  This is a combination

which gives immortality to conversation.  Capt. John never suffered the

talk to flag or falter once during the hundred and twenty miles of the

journey.  In addition to his conversational powers, he had one or two

other endowments of a marked character.  One was a singular "handiness"

about doing anything and everything, from laying out a railroad or

organizing a political party, down to sewing on buttons, shoeing a horse,

or setting a broken leg, or a hen.  Another was a spirit of accommodation

that prompted him to take the needs, difficulties and perplexities of

anybody and everybody upon his own shoulders at any and all times, and

dispose of them with admirable facility and alacrity--hence he always

managed to find vacant beds in crowded inns, and plenty to eat in the

emptiest larders.  And finally, wherever he met a man, woman or child, in

camp, inn or desert, he either knew such parties personally or had been

acquainted with a relative of the same.  Such another traveling comrade

was never seen before.  I cannot forbear giving a specimen of the way in

which he overcame difficulties.  On the second day out, we arrived, very

tired and hungry, at a poor little inn in the desert, and were told that

the house was full, no provisions on hand, and neither hay nor barley to

spare for the horses--must move on.  The rest of us wanted to hurry on

while it was yet light, but Capt. John insisted on stopping awhile.

We dismounted and entered.  There was no welcome for us on any face.

Capt. John began his blandishments, and within twenty minutes he had

accomplished the following things, viz.: found old acquaintances in three

teamsters; discovered that he used to go to school with the landlord's

mother; recognized his wife as a lady whose life he had saved once in

California, by stopping her runaway horse; mended a child's broken toy

and won the favor of its mother, a guest of the inn; helped the hostler

bleed a horse, and prescribed for another horse that had the "heaves";

treated the entire party three times at the landlord's bar; produced a

later paper than anybody had seen for a week and sat himself down to read

the news to a deeply interested audience.  The result, summed up, was as

follows: The hostler found plenty of feed for our horses; we had a trout

supper, an exceedingly sociable time after it, good beds to sleep in, and

a surprising breakfast in the morning--and when we left, we left lamented

by all!  Capt. John had some bad traits, but he had some uncommonly

valuable ones to offset them with.



Esmeralda was in many respects another Humboldt, but in a little more

forward state.  The claims we had been paying assessments on were

entirely worthless, and we threw them away.  The principal one cropped

out of the top of a knoll that was fourteen feet high, and the inspired

Board of Directors were running a tunnel under that knoll to strike the

ledge.  The tunnel would have to be seventy feet long, and would then

strike the ledge at the same dept that a shaft twelve feet deep would

have reached!  The Board were living on the "assessments."  [N.B.--This

hint comes too late for the enlightenment of New York silver miners; they

have already learned all about this neat trick by experience.]  The Board

had no desire to strike the ledge, knowing that it was as barren of

silver as a curbstone.  This reminiscence calls to mind Jim Townsend's

tunnel.  He had paid assessments on a mine called the "Daley" till he was

well-nigh penniless.  Finally an assessment was levied to run a tunnel

two hundred and fifty feet on the Daley, and Townsend went up on the hill

to look into matters.



He found the Daley cropping out of the apex of an exceedingly sharp-

pointed peak, and a couple of men up there "facing" the proposed tunnel.

Townsend made a calculation.  Then he said to the men:



"So you have taken a contract to run a tunnel into this hill two hundred

and fifty feet to strike this ledge?"



"Yes, sir."



"Well, do you know that you have got one of the most expensive and

arduous undertakings before you that was ever conceived by man?"



"Why no--how is that?"



"Because this hill is only twenty-five feet through from side to side;

and so you have got to build two hundred and twenty-five feet of your

tunnel on trestle-work!"



The ways of silver mining Boards are exceedingly dark and sinuous.



We took up various claims, and commenced shafts and tunnels on them, but

never finished any of them.  We had to do a certain amount of work on

each to "hold" it, else other parties could seize our property after the

expiration of ten days.  We were always hunting up new claims and doing a

little work on them and then waiting for a buyer--who never came.  We

never found any ore that would yield more than fifty dollars a ton; and

as the mills charged fifty dollars a ton for working ore and extracting

the silver, our pocket-money melted steadily away and none returned to

take its place.  We lived in a little cabin and cooked for ourselves; and

altogether it was a hard life, though a hopeful one--for we never ceased

to expect fortune and a customer to burst upon us some day.



At last, when flour reached a dollar a pound, and money could not be

borrowed on the best security at less than eight per cent a month (I

being without the security, too), I abandoned mining and went to milling.

That is to say, I went to work as a common laborer in a quartz mill, at

ten dollars a week and board.









CHAPTER XXXVI.



I had already learned how hard and long and dismal a task it is to burrow

down into the bowels of the earth and get out the coveted ore; and now I

learned that the burrowing was only half the work; and that to get the

silver out of the ore was the dreary and laborious other half of it.

We had to turn out at six in the morning and keep at it till dark.

This mill was a six-stamp affair, driven by steam.  Six tall, upright

rods of iron, as large as a man's ankle, and heavily shod with a mass of

iron and steel at their lower ends, were framed together like a gate, and

these rose and fell, one after the other, in a ponderous dance, in an

iron box called a "battery."  Each of these rods or stamps weighed six

hundred pounds.  One of us stood by the battery all day long, breaking up

masses of silver-bearing rock with a sledge and shoveling it into the

battery.  The ceaseless dance of the stamps pulverized the rock to

powder, and a stream of water that trickled into the battery turned it to

a creamy paste.  The minutest particles were driven through a fine wire

screen which fitted close around the battery, and were washed into great

tubs warmed by super-heated steam--amalgamating pans, they are called.

The mass of pulp in the pans was kept constantly stirred up by revolving

"mullers."  A quantity of quicksilver was kept always in the battery, and

this seized some of the liberated gold and silver particles and held on

to them; quicksilver was shaken in a fine shower into the pans, also,

about every half hour, through a buckskin sack.  Quantities of coarse

salt and sulphate of copper were added, from time to time to assist the

amalgamation by destroying base metals which coated the gold and silver

and would not let it unite with the quicksilver.



All these tiresome things we had to attend to constantly.  Streams of

dirty water flowed always from the pans and were carried off in broad

wooden troughs to the ravine.  One would not suppose that atoms of gold

and silver would float on top of six inches of water, but they did; and

in order to catch them, coarse blankets were laid in the troughs, and

little obstructing "riffles" charged with quicksilver were placed here

and there across the troughs also.  These riffles had to be cleaned and

the blankets washed out every evening, to get their precious

accumulations--and after all this eternity of trouble one third of the

silver and gold in a ton of rock would find its way to the end of the

troughs in the ravine at last and have to be worked over again some day.

There is nothing so aggravating as silver milling.  There never was any

idle time in that mill.  There was always something to do.  It is a pity

that Adam could not have gone straight out of Eden into a quartz mill, in

order to understand the full force of his doom to "earn his bread by the

sweat of his brow."  Every now and then, during the day, we had to scoop

some pulp out of the pans, and tediously "wash" it in a horn spoon--wash

it little by little over the edge till at last nothing was left but some

little dull globules of quicksilver in the bottom.  If they were soft and

yielding, the pan needed some salt or some sulphate of copper or some

other chemical rubbish to assist digestion; if they were crisp to the

touch and would retain a dint, they were freighted with all the silver

and gold they could seize and hold, and consequently the pan needed a

fresh charge of quicksilver.  When there was nothing else to do, one

could always "screen tailings."  That is to say, he could shovel up the

dried sand that had washed down to the ravine through the troughs and

dash it against an upright wire screen to free it from pebbles and

prepare it for working over.



The process of amalgamation differed in the various mills, and this

included changes in style of pans and other machinery, and a great

diversity of opinion existed as to the best in use, but none of the

methods employed, involved the principle of milling ore without

"screening the tailings."  Of all recreations in the world, screening

tailings on a hot day, with a long-handled shovel, is the most

undesirable.



At the end of the week the machinery was stopped and we "cleaned up."

That is to say, we got the pulp out of the pans and batteries, and washed

the mud patiently away till nothing was left but the long accumulating

mass of quicksilver, with its imprisoned treasures.  This we made into

heavy, compact snow-balls, and piled them up in a bright, luxurious heap

for inspection.  Making these snow-balls cost me a fine gold ring--that

and ignorance together; for the quicksilver invaded the ring with the

same facility with which water saturates a sponge--separated its

particles and the ring crumbled to pieces.



We put our pile of quicksilver balls into an iron retort that had a pipe

leading from it to a pail of water, and then applied a roasting heat.

The quicksilver turned to vapor, escaped through the pipe into the pail,

and the water turned it into good wholesome quicksilver again.

Quicksilver is very costly, and they never waste it.  On opening the

retort, there was our week's work--a lump of pure white, frosty looking

silver, twice as large as a man's head.  Perhaps a fifth of the mass was

gold, but the color of it did not show--would not have shown if two

thirds of it had been gold.  We melted it up and made a solid brick of it

by pouring it into an iron brick-mould.



By such a tedious and laborious process were silver bricks obtained.

This mill was but one of many others in operation at the time.  The first

one in Nevada was built at Egan Canyon and was a small insignificant

affair and compared most unfavorably with some of the immense

establishments afterwards located at Virginia City and elsewhere.



From our bricks a little corner was chipped off for the "fire-assay"--a

method used to determine the proportions of gold, silver and base metals

in the mass.  This is an interesting process.  The chip is hammered out

as thin as paper and weighed on scales so fine and sensitive that if you

weigh a two-inch scrap of paper on them and then write your name on the

paper with a course, soft pencil and weigh it again, the scales will take

marked notice of the addition.



Then a little lead (also weighed) is rolled up with the flake of silver

and the two are melted at a great heat in a small vessel called a cupel,

made by compressing bone ashes into a cup-shape in a steel mold.  The

base metals oxydize and are absorbed with the lead into the pores of the

cupel.  A button or globule of perfectly pure gold and silver is left

behind, and by weighing it and noting the loss, the assayer knows the

proportion of base metal the brick contains.  He has to separate the gold

from the silver now.  The button is hammered out flat and thin, put in

the furnace and kept some time at a red heat; after cooling it off it is

rolled up like a quill and heated in a glass vessel containing nitric

acid; the acid dissolves the silver and leaves the gold pure and ready to

be weighed on its own merits.  Then salt water is poured into the vessel

containing the dissolved silver and the silver returns to palpable form

again and sinks to the bottom.  Nothing now remains but to weigh it; then

the proportions of the several metals contained in the brick are known,

and the assayer stamps the value of the brick upon its surface.



The sagacious reader will know now, without being told, that the

speculative miner, in getting a "fire-assay" made of a piece of rock from

his mine (to help him sell the same), was not in the habit of picking out

the least valuable fragment of rock on his dump-pile, but quite the

contrary.  I have seen men hunt over a pile of nearly worthless quartz

for an hour, and at last find a little piece as large as a filbert, which

was rich in gold and silver--and this was reserved for a fire-assay!  Of

course the fire-assay would demonstrate that a ton of such rock would

yield hundreds of dollars--and on such assays many an utterly worthless

mine was sold.



Assaying was a good business, and so some men engaged in it,

occasionally, who were not strictly scientific and capable.  One assayer

got such rich results out of all specimens brought to him that in time he

acquired almost a monopoly of the business.  But like all men who achieve

success, he became an object of envy and suspicion.  The other assayers

entered into a conspiracy against him, and let some prominent citizens

into the secret in order to show that they meant fairly.  Then they broke

a little fragment off a carpenter's grindstone and got a stranger to take

it to the popular scientist and get it assayed.  In the course of an hour

the result came--whereby it appeared that a ton of that rock would yield

$1,184.40 in silver and $366.36 in gold!



Due publication of the whole matter was made in the paper, and the

popular assayer left town "between two days."



I will remark, in passing, that I only remained in the milling business

one week.  I told my employer I could not stay longer without an advance

in my wages; that I liked quartz milling, indeed was infatuated with it;

that I had never before grown so tenderly attached to an occupation in so

short a time; that nothing, it seemed to me, gave such scope to

intellectual activity as feeding a battery and screening tailings, and

nothing so stimulated the moral attributes as retorting bullion and

washing blankets--still, I felt constrained to ask an increase of salary.

He said he was paying me ten dollars a week, and thought it a good round

sum.  How much did I want?



I said about four hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was about

all I could reasonably ask, considering the hard times.



I was ordered off the premises!  And yet, when I look back to those days

and call to mind the exceeding hardness of the labor I performed in that

mill, I only regret that I did not ask him seven hundred thousand.



Shortly after this I began to grow crazy, along with the rest of the

population, about the mysterious and wonderful "cement mine," and to make

preparations to take advantage of any opportunity that might offer to go

and help hunt for it.









CHAPTER XXXVII.



It was somewhere in the neighborhood of Mono Lake that the marvellous

Whiteman cement mine was supposed to lie.  Every now and then it would be

reported that Mr. W. had passed stealthily through Esmeralda at dead of

night, in disguise, and then we would have a wild excitement--because he

must be steering for his secret mine, and now was the time to follow him.

In less than three hours after daylight all the horses and mules and

donkeys in the vicinity would be bought, hired or stolen, and half the

community would be off for the mountains, following in the wake of

Whiteman.  But W. would drift about through the mountain gorges for days

together, in a purposeless sort of way, until the provisions of the

miners ran out, and they would have to go back home.  I have known it

reported at eleven at night, in a large mining camp, that Whiteman had

just passed through, and in two hours the streets, so quiet before, would

be swarming with men and animals.  Every individual would be trying to be

very secret, but yet venturing to whisper to just one neighbor that W.

had passed through.  And long before daylight--this in the dead of

Winter--the stampede would be complete, the camp deserted, and the whole

population gone chasing after W.



The tradition was that in the early immigration, more than twenty years

ago, three young Germans, brothers, who had survived an Indian massacre

on the Plains, wandered on foot through the deserts, avoiding all trails

and roads, and simply holding a westerly direction and hoping to find

California before they starved, or died of fatigue.  And in a gorge in

the mountains they sat down to rest one day, when one of them noticed a

curious vein of cement running along the ground, shot full of lumps of

dull yellow metal.  They saw that it was gold, and that here was a

fortune to be acquired in a single day.  The vein was about as wide as a

curbstone, and fully two thirds of it was pure gold.  Every pound of the

wonderful cement was worth well-nigh $200.



Each of the brothers loaded himself with about twenty-five pounds of it,

and then they covered up all traces of the vein, made a rude drawing of

the locality and the principal landmarks in the vicinity, and started

westward again.  But troubles thickened about them.  In their wanderings

one brother fell and broke his leg, and the others were obliged to go on

and leave him to die in the wilderness.  Another, worn out and starving,

gave up by and by, and laid down to die, but after two or three weeks of

incredible hardships, the third reached the settlements of California

exhausted, sick, and his mind deranged by his sufferings.  He had thrown

away all his cement but a few fragments, but these were sufficient to set

everybody wild with excitement.  However, he had had enough of the cement

country, and nothing could induce him to lead a party thither.  He was

entirely content to work on a farm for wages.  But he gave Whiteman his

map, and described the cement region as well as he could and thus

transferred the curse to that gentleman--for when I had my one accidental

glimpse of Mr. W. in Esmeralda he had been hunting for the lost mine, in

hunger and thirst, poverty and sickness, for twelve or thirteen years.

Some people believed he had found it, but most people believed he had

not.  I saw a piece of cement as large as my fist which was said to have

been given to Whiteman by the young German, and it was of a seductive

nature.  Lumps of virgin gold were as thick in it as raisins in a slice

of fruit cake.  The privilege of working such a mine one week would be

sufficient for a man of reasonable desires.



A new partner of ours, a Mr. Higbie, knew Whiteman well by sight, and a

friend of ours, a Mr. Van Dorn, was well acquainted with him, and not

only that, but had Whiteman's promise that he should have a private hint

in time to enable him to join the next cement expedition.  Van Dorn had

promised to extend the hint to us.  One evening Higbie came in greatly

excited, and said he felt certain he had recognized Whiteman, up town,

disguised and in a pretended state of intoxication.  In a little while

Van Dorn arrived and confirmed the news; and so we gathered in our cabin

and with heads close together arranged our plans in impressive whispers.



We were to leave town quietly, after midnight, in two or three small

parties, so as not to attract attention, and meet at dawn on the "divide"

overlooking Mono Lake, eight or nine miles distant.  We were to make no

noise after starting, and not speak above a whisper under any

circumstances.  It was believed that for once Whiteman's presence was

unknown in the town and his expedition unsuspected.  Our conclave broke

up at nine o'clock, and we set about our preparation diligently and with

profound secrecy.  At eleven o'clock we saddled our horses, hitched them

with their long riatas (or lassos), and then brought out a side of bacon,

a sack of beans, a small sack of coffee, some sugar, a hundred pounds of

flour in sacks, some tin cups and a coffee pot, frying pan and some few

other necessary articles.  All these things were "packed" on the back of

a led horse--and whoever has not been taught, by a Spanish adept, to pack

an animal, let him never hope to do the thing by natural smartness.  That

is impossible.  Higbie had had some experience, but was not perfect.  He

put on the pack saddle (a thing like a saw-buck), piled the property on

it and then wound a rope all over and about it and under it, "every which

way," taking a hitch in it every now and then, and occasionally surging

back on it till the horse's sides sunk in and he gasped for breath--but

every time the lashings grew tight in one place they loosened in another.

We never did get the load tight all over, but we got it so that it would

do, after a fashion, and then we started, in single file, close order,

and without a word.  It was a dark night.  We kept the middle of the

road, and proceeded in a slow walk past the rows of cabins, and whenever

a miner came to his door I trembled for fear the light would shine on us

an excite curiosity.  But nothing happened.  We began the long winding

ascent of the canyon, toward the "divide," and presently the cabins began

to grow infrequent, and the intervals between them wider and wider, and

then I began to breathe tolerably freely and feel less like a thief and a

murderer.  I was in the rear, leading the pack horse.  As the ascent grew

steeper he grew proportionately less satisfied with his cargo, and began

to pull back on his riata occasionally and delay progress.  My comrades

were passing out of sight in the gloom.  I was getting anxious.  I coaxed

and bullied the pack horse till I presently got him into a trot, and then

the tin cups and pans strung about his person frightened him and he ran.

His riata was wound around the pummel of my saddle, and so, as he went by

he dragged me from my horse and the two animals traveled briskly on

without me.  But I was not alone--the loosened cargo tumbled overboard

from the pack horse and fell close to me.  It was abreast of almost the

last cabin.



A miner came out and said:



"Hello!"



I was thirty steps from him, and knew he could not see me, it was so very

dark in the shadow of the mountain.  So I lay still.  Another head

appeared in the light of the cabin door, and presently the two men walked

toward me.  They stopped within ten steps of me, and one said:



"Sh!  Listen."



I could not have been in a more distressed state if I had been escaping

justice with a price on my head.  Then the miners appeared to sit down on

a boulder, though I could not see them distinctly enough to be very sure

what they did.  One said:



"I heard a noise, as plain as I ever heard anything.  It seemed to be

about there--"



A stone whizzed by my head.  I flattened myself out in the dust like a

postage stamp, and thought to myself if he mended his aim ever so little

he would probably hear another noise.  In my heart, now, I execrated

secret expeditions.  I promised myself that this should be my last,

though the Sierras were ribbed with cement veins.  Then one of the men

said:



"I'll tell you what!  Welch knew what he was talking about when he said

he saw Whiteman to-day.  I heard horses--that was the noise.  I am going

down to Welch's, right away."



They left and I was glad.  I did not care whither they went, so they

went.  I was willing they should visit Welch, and the sooner the better.



As soon as they closed their cabin door my comrades emerged from the

gloom; they had caught the horses and were waiting for a clear coast

again.  We remounted the cargo on the pack horse and got under way, and

as day broke we reached the "divide" and joined Van Dorn.  Then we

journeyed down into the valley of the Lake, and feeling secure, we halted

to cook breakfast, for we were tired and sleepy and hungry.  Three hours

later the rest of the population filed over the "divide" in a long

procession, and drifted off out of sight around the borders of the Lake!



Whether or not my accident had produced this result we never knew, but at

least one thing was certain--the secret was out and Whiteman would not

enter upon a search for the cement mine this time.  We were filled with

chagrin.



We held a council and decided to make the best of our misfortune and

enjoy a week's holiday on the borders of the curious Lake.  Mono, it is

sometimes called, and sometimes the "Dead Sea of California."  It is one

of the strangest freaks of Nature to be found in any land, but it is

hardly ever mentioned in print and very seldom visited, because it lies

away off the usual routes of travel and besides is so difficult to get at

that only men content to endure the roughest life will consent to take

upon themselves the discomforts of such a trip.  On the morning of our

second day, we traveled around to a remote and particularly wild spot on

the borders of the Lake, where a stream of fresh, ice-cold water entered

it from the mountain side, and then we went regularly into camp.  We

hired a large boat and two shot-guns from a lonely ranchman who lived

some ten miles further on, and made ready for comfort and recreation.

We soon got thoroughly acquainted with the Lake and all its

peculiarities.









CHAPTER XXXVIII.



Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, eight thousand

feet above the level of the sea, and is guarded by mountains two thousand

feet higher, whose summits are always clothed in clouds.  This solemn,

silent, sail-less sea--this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth

--is little graced with the picturesque.  It is an unpretending expanse

of grayish water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two

islands in its centre, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered

lava, snowed over with gray banks and drifts of pumice-stone and ashes,

the winding sheet of the dead volcano, whose vast crater the lake has

seized upon and occupied.



The lake is two hundred feet deep, and its sluggish waters are so strong

with alkali that if you only dip the most hopelessly soiled garment into

them once or twice, and wring it out, it will be found as clean as if it

had been through the ablest of washerwomen's hands.  While we camped

there our laundry work was easy.  We tied the week's washing astern of

our boat, and sailed a quarter of a mile, and the job was complete, all

to the wringing out.  If we threw the water on our heads and gave them a

rub or so, the white lather would pile up three inches high.  This water

is not good for bruised places and abrasions of the skin.  We had a

valuable dog.  He had raw places on him.  He had more raw places on him

than sound ones.  He was the rawest dog I almost ever saw.  He jumped

overboard one day to get away from the flies.  But it was bad judgment.

In his condition, it would have been just as comfortable to jump into the

fire.



The alkali water nipped him in all the raw places simultaneously, and he

struck out for the shore with considerable interest.  He yelped and

barked and howled as he went--and by the time he got to the shore there

was no bark to him--for he had barked the bark all out of his inside, and

the alkali water had cleaned the bark all off his outside, and he

probably wished he had never embarked in any such enterprise.  He ran

round and round in a circle, and pawed  the earth and clawed the air, and

threw double somersaults, sometimes backward and sometimes forward, in

the most extraordinary manner.  He was not a demonstrative dog, as a

general thing, but rather of a grave and serious turn of mind, and I

never saw him take so much interest in anything before.  He finally

struck out over the mountains, at a gait which we estimated at about two

hundred and fifty miles an hour, and he is going yet.  This was about

nine years ago.  We look for what is left of him along here every day.



A white man cannot drink the water of Mono Lake, for it is nearly pure

lye.  It is said that the Indians in the vicinity drink it sometimes,

though.  It is not improbable, for they are among the purest liars I ever

saw.  [There will be no additional charge for this joke, except to

parties requiring an explanation of it.  This joke has received high

commendation from some of the ablest minds of the age.]



There are no fish in Mono Lake--no frogs, no snakes, no polliwigs--

nothing, in fact, that goes to make life desirable.  Millions of wild

ducks and sea-gulls swim about the surface, but no living thing exists

under the surface, except a white feathery sort of worm, one half an inch

long, which looks like a bit of white thread frayed out at the sides.  If

you dip up a gallon of water, you will get about fifteen thousand of

these.  They give to the water a sort of grayish-white appearance.  Then

there is a fly, which looks something like our house fly.  These settle

on the beach to eat the worms that wash ashore--and any time, you can see

there a belt of flies an inch deep and six feet wide, and this belt

extends clear around the lake--a belt of flies one hundred miles long.

If you throw a stone among them, they swarm up so thick that they look

dense, like a cloud.  You can hold them under water as long as you

please--they do not mind it--they are only proud of it.  When you let

them go, they pop up to the surface as dry as a patent office report, and

walk off as unconcernedly as if they had been educated especially with a

view to affording instructive entertainment to man in that particular

way.  Providence leaves nothing to go by chance.  All things have their

uses and their part and proper place in Nature's economy: the ducks eat

the flies--the flies eat the worms--the Indians eat all three--the wild

cats eat the Indians--the white folks eat the wild cats--and thus all

things are lovely.



Mono Lake is a hundred miles in a straight line from the ocean--and

between it and the ocean are one or two ranges of mountains--yet

thousands of sea-gulls go there every season to lay their eggs and rear

their young.  One would as soon expect to find sea-gulls in Kansas.

And in this connection let us observe another instance of Nature's

wisdom.  The islands in the lake being merely huge masses of lava, coated

over with ashes and pumice-stone, and utterly innocent of vegetation or

anything that would burn; and sea-gull's eggs being entirely useless to

anybody unless they be cooked, Nature has provided an unfailing spring of

boiling water on the largest island, and you can put your eggs in there,

and in four minutes you can boil them as hard as any statement I have

made during the past fifteen years.  Within ten feet of the boiling

spring is a spring of pure cold water, sweet and wholesome.



So, in that island you get your board and washing free of charge--and if

nature had gone further and furnished a nice American hotel clerk who was

crusty and disobliging, and didn't know anything about the time tables,

or the railroad routes--or--anything--and was proud of it--I would not

wish for a more desirable boarding-house.



Half a dozen little mountain brooks flow into Mono Lake, but not a stream

of any kind flows out of it.  It neither rises nor falls, apparently, and

what it does with its surplus water is a dark and bloody mystery.



There are only two seasons in the region round about Mono Lake--and these

are, the breaking up of one Winter and the beginning of the next.  More

than once (in Esmeralda) I have seen a perfectly blistering morning open

up with the thermometer at ninety degrees at eight o'clock, and seen the

snow fall fourteen inches deep and that same identical thermometer go

down to forty-four degrees under shelter, before nine o'clock at night.

Under favorable circumstances it snows at least once in every single

month in the year, in the little town of Mono.  So uncertain is the

climate in Summer that a lady who goes out visiting cannot hope to be

prepared for all emergencies unless she takes her fan under one arm and

her snow shoes under the other.  When they have a Fourth of July

procession it generally snows on them, and they do say that as a general

thing when a man calls for a brandy toddy there, the bar keeper chops it

off with a hatchet and wraps it up in a paper, like maple sugar.  And it

is further reported that the old soakers haven't any teeth--wore them out

eating gin cocktails and brandy punches.  I do not endorse that

statement--I simply give it for what it is worth--and it is worth--well,

I should say, millions, to any man who can believe it without straining

himself.  But I do endorse the snow on the Fourth of July--because I know

that to be true.









CHAPTER XXXIX.



About seven o'clock one blistering hot morning--for it was now dead

summer time--Higbie and I took the boat and started on a voyage of

discovery to the two islands.  We had often longed to do this, but had

been deterred by the fear of storms; for they were frequent, and severe

enough to capsize an ordinary row-boat like ours without great

difficulty--and once capsized, death would ensue in spite of the bravest

swimming, for that venomous water would eat a man's eyes out like fire,

and burn him out inside, too, if he shipped a sea.  It was called twelve

miles, straight out to the islands--a long pull and a warm one--but the

morning was so quiet and sunny, and the lake so smooth and glassy and

dead, that we could not resist the temptation.  So we filled two large

tin canteens with water (since we were not acquainted with the locality

of the spring said to exist on the large island), and started.  Higbie's

brawny muscles gave the boat good speed, but by the time we reached our

destination we judged that we had pulled nearer fifteen miles than

twelve.



We landed on the big island and went ashore.  We tried the water in the

canteens, now, and found that the sun had spoiled it; it was so brackish

that we could not drink it; so we poured it out and began a search for

the spring--for thirst augments fast as soon as it is apparent that one

has no means at hand of quenching it.  The island was a long, moderately

high hill of ashes--nothing but gray ashes and pumice-stone, in which we

sunk to our knees at every step--and all around the top was a forbidding

wall of scorched and blasted rocks.  When we reached the top and got

within the wall, we found simply a shallow, far-reaching basin, carpeted

with ashes, and here and there a patch of fine sand.  In places,

picturesque jets of steam shot up out of crevices, giving evidence that

although this ancient crater had gone out of active business, there was

still some fire left in its furnaces.  Close to one of these jets of

steam stood the only tree on the island--a small pine of most graceful

shape and most faultless symmetry; its color was a brilliant green, for

the steam drifted unceasingly through its branches and kept them always

moist.  It contrasted strangely enough, did this vigorous and beautiful

outcast, with its dead and dismal surroundings.  It was like a cheerful

spirit in a mourning household.



We hunted for the spring everywhere, traversing the full length of the

island (two or three miles), and crossing it twice--climbing ash-hills

patiently, and then sliding down the other side in a sitting posture,

plowing up smothering volumes of gray dust.  But we found nothing but

solitude, ashes and a heart-breaking silence.  Finally we noticed that

the wind had risen, and we forgot our thirst in a solicitude of greater

importance; for, the lake being quiet, we had not taken pains about

securing the boat.  We hurried back to a point overlooking our landing

place, and then--but mere words cannot describe our dismay--the boat was

gone!  The chances were that there was not another boat on the entire

lake.  The situation was not comfortable--in truth, to speak plainly, it

was frightful.  We were prisoners on a desolate island, in aggravating

proximity to friends who were for the present helpless to aid us; and

what was still more uncomfortable was the reflection that we had neither

food nor water.  But presently we sighted the boat.  It was drifting

along, leisurely, about fifty yards from shore, tossing in a foamy sea.

It drifted, and continued to drift, but at the same safe distance from

land, and we walked along abreast it and waited for fortune to favor us.

At the end of an hour it approached a jutting cape, and Higbie ran ahead

and posted himself on the utmost verge and prepared for the assault.  If

we failed there, there was no hope for us.  It was driving gradually

shoreward all the time, now; but whether it was driving fast enough to

make the connection or not was the momentous question.  When it got

within thirty steps of Higbie I was so excited that I fancied I could

hear my own heart beat.  When, a little later, it dragged slowly along

and seemed about to go by, only one little yard out of reach, it seemed

as if my heart stood still; and when it was exactly abreast him and began

to widen away, and he still standing like a watching statue, I knew my

heart did stop.  But when he gave a great spring, the next instant, and

lit fairly in the stern, I discharged a war-whoop that woke the

solitudes!



But it dulled my enthusiasm, presently, when he told me he had not been

caring whether the boat came within jumping distance or not, so that it

passed within eight or ten yards of him, for he had made up his mind to

shut his eyes and mouth and swim that trifling distance.  Imbecile that I

was, I had not thought of that.  It was only a long swim that could be

fatal.



The sea was running high and the storm increasing.  It was growing late,

too--three or four in the afternoon.  Whether to venture toward the

mainland or not, was a question of some moment.  But we were so

distressed by thirst that we decide to try it, and so Higbie fell to work

and I took the steering-oar.  When we had pulled a mile, laboriously,

we were evidently in serious peril, for the storm had greatly augmented;

the billows ran very high and were capped with foaming crests,

the heavens were hung with black, and the wind blew with great fury.

We would have gone back, now, but we did not dare to turn the boat

around, because as soon as she got in the trough of the sea she would

upset, of course.  Our only hope lay in keeping her head-on to the seas.

It was hard work to do this, she plunged so, and so beat and belabored

the billows with her rising and falling bows.  Now and then one of

Higbie's oars would trip on the top of a wave, and the other one would

snatch the boat half around in spite of my cumbersome steering apparatus.

We were drenched by the sprays constantly, and the boat occasionally

shipped water.  By and by, powerful as my comrade was, his great

exertions began to tell on him, and he was anxious that I should change

places with him till he could rest a little.  But I told him this was

impossible; for if the steering oar were dropped a moment while we

changed, the boat would slue around into the trough of the sea, capsize,

and in less than five minutes we would have a hundred gallons of soap-

suds in us and be eaten up so quickly that we could not even be present

at our own inquest.



But things cannot last always.  Just as the darkness shut down we came

booming into port, head on.  Higbie dropped his oars to hurrah--I dropped

mine to help--the sea gave the boat a twist, and over she went!



The agony that alkali water inflicts on bruises, chafes and blistered

hands, is unspeakable, and nothing but greasing all over will modify it--

but we ate, drank and slept well, that night, notwithstanding.



In speaking of the peculiarities of Mono Lake, I ought to have mentioned

that at intervals all around its shores stand picturesque turret-looking

masses and clusters of a whitish, coarse-grained rock that resembles

inferior mortar dried hard; and if one breaks off fragments of this rock

he will find perfectly shaped and thoroughly petrified gulls' eggs deeply

imbedded in the mass.  How did they get there?  I simply state the fact--

for it is a fact--and leave the geological reader to crack the nut at his

leisure and solve the problem after his own fashion.



At the end of a week we adjourned to the Sierras on a fishing excursion,

and spent several days in camp under snowy Castle Peak, and fished

successfully for trout in a bright, miniature lake whose surface was

between ten and eleven thousand feet above the level of the sea; cooling

ourselves during the hot August noons by sitting on snow banks ten feet

deep, under whose sheltering edges fine grass and dainty flowers

flourished luxuriously; and at night entertaining ourselves by almost

freezing to death.  Then we returned to Mono Lake, and finding that the

cement excitement was over for the present, packed up and went back to

Esmeralda.  Mr. Ballou reconnoitred awhile, and not liking the prospect,

set out alone for Humboldt.



About this time occurred a little incident which has always had a sort of

interest to me, from the fact that it came so near "instigating" my

funeral.  At a time when an Indian attack had been expected, the citizens

hid their gunpowder where it would be safe and yet convenient to hand

when wanted.  A neighbor of ours hid six cans of rifle powder in the

bake-oven of an old discarded cooking stove which stood on the open

ground near a frame out-house or shed, and from and after that day never

thought of it again.  We hired a half-tamed Indian to do some washing for

us, and he took up quarters under the shed with his tub.  The ancient

stove reposed within six feet of him, and before his face.  Finally it

occurred to him that hot water would be better than cold, and he went out

and fired up under that forgotten powder magazine and set on a kettle of

water.  Then he returned to his tub.



I entered the shed presently and threw down some more clothes, and was

about to speak to him when the stove blew up with a prodigious crash, and

disappeared, leaving not a splinter behind.  Fragments of it fell in the

streets full two hundred yards away.  Nearly a third of the shed roof

over our heads was destroyed, and one of the stove lids, after cutting a

small stanchion half in two in front of the Indian, whizzed between us

and drove partly through the weather-boarding beyond.  I was as white as

a sheet and as weak as a kitten and speechless.  But the Indian betrayed

no trepidation, no distress, not even discomfort.  He simply stopped

washing, leaned forward and surveyed the clean, blank ground a moment,

and then remarked:



"Mph!  Dam stove heap gone!"--and resumed his scrubbing as placidly as if

it were an entirely customary thing for a stove to do.  I will explain,

that "heap" is "Injun-English" for "very much."  The reader will perceive

the exhaustive expressiveness of it in the present instance.









CHAPTER XL.

I now come to a curious episode--the most curious, I think, that had yet

accented my slothful, valueless, heedless career.  Out of a hillside

toward the upper end of the town, projected a wall of reddish looking

quartz-croppings, the exposed comb of a silver-bearing ledge that

extended deep down into the earth, of course.  It was owned by a company

entitled the "Wide West."  There was a shaft sixty or seventy feet deep

on the under side of the croppings, and everybody was acquainted with the

rock that came from it--and tolerably rich rock it was, too, but nothing

extraordinary.  I will remark here, that although to the inexperienced

stranger all the quartz of a particular "district" looks about alike, an

old resident of the camp can take a glance at a mixed pile of rock,

separate the fragments and tell you which mine each came from, as easily

as a confectioner can separate and classify the various kinds and

qualities of candy in a mixed heap of the article.



All at once the town was thrown into a state of extraordinary excitement.

In mining parlance the Wide West had "struck it rich!"  Everybody went to

see the new developments, and for some days there was such a crowd of

people about the Wide West shaft that a stranger would have supposed

there was a mass meeting in session there.  No other topic was discussed

but the rich strike, and nobody thought or dreamed about anything else.

Every man brought away a specimen, ground it up in a hand mortar, washed

it out in his horn spoon, and glared speechless upon the marvelous

result.  It was not hard rock, but black, decomposed stuff which could be

crumbled in the hand like a baked potato, and when spread out on a paper

exhibited a thick sprinkling of gold and particles of "native" silver.

Higbie brought a handful to the cabin, and when he had washed it out his

amazement was beyond description.  Wide West stock soared skywards.  It

was said that repeated offers had been made for it at a thousand dollars

a foot, and promptly refused.  We have all had the "blues"--the mere sky-

blues--but mine were indigo, now--because I did not own in the Wide West.

The world seemed hollow to me, and existence a grief.  I lost my

appetite, and ceased to take an interest in anything.  Still I had to

stay, and listen to other people's rejoicings, because I had no money to

get out of the camp with.



The Wide West company put a stop to the carrying away of "specimens," and

well they might, for every handful of the ore was worth a sun of some

consequence.  To show the exceeding value of the ore, I will remark that

a sixteen-hundred-pounds parcel of it was sold, just as it lay, at the

mouth of the shaft, at one dollar a pound; and the man who bought it

"packed" it on mules a hundred and fifty or two hundred miles, over the

mountains, to San Francisco, satisfied that it would yield at a rate that

would richly compensate him for his trouble.  The Wide West people also

commanded their foreman to refuse any but their own operatives permission

to enter the mine at any time or for any purpose.  I kept up my "blue"

meditations and Higbie kept up a deal of thinking, too, but of a

different sort.  He puzzled over the "rock," examined it with a glass,

inspected it in different lights and from different points of view, and

after each experiment delivered himself, in soliloquy, of one and the

same unvarying opinion in the same unvarying formula:



"It is not Wide West rock!"



He said once or twice that he meant to have a look into the Wide West

shaft if he got shot for it.  I was wretched, and did not care whether he

got a look into it or not.  He failed that day, and tried again at night;

failed again; got up at dawn and tried, and failed again.  Then he lay in

ambush in the sage brush hour after hour, waiting for the two or three

hands to adjourn to the shade of a boulder for dinner; made a start once,

but was premature--one of the men came back for something; tried it

again, but when almost at the mouth of the shaft, another of the men rose

up from behind the boulder as if to reconnoitre, and he dropped on the

ground and lay quiet; presently he crawled on his hands and knees to the

mouth of the shaft, gave a quick glance around, then seized the rope and

slid down the shaft.



He disappeared in the gloom of a "side drift" just as a head appeared in

the mouth of the shaft and somebody shouted "Hello!"--which he did not

answer.  He was not disturbed any more.  An hour later he entered the

cabin, hot, red, and ready to burst with smothered excitement, and

exclaimed in a stage whisper:



"I knew it!  We are rich!  IT'S A BLIND LEAD!"



I thought the very earth reeled under me.  Doubt--conviction--doubt

again--exultation--hope, amazement, belief, unbelief--every emotion

imaginable swept in wild procession through my heart and brain, and I

could not speak a word.  After a moment or two of this mental fury, I

shook myself to rights, and said:



"Say it again!"



"It's blind lead!"



"Cal, let's--let's burn the house--or kill somebody!  Let's get out where

there's room to hurrah!  But what is the use?  It is a hundred times too

good to be true."



"It's a blind lead, for a million!--hanging wall--foot wall--clay

casings--everything complete!" He swung his hat and gave three cheers,

and I cast doubt to the winds and chimed in with a will.  For I was worth

a million dollars, and did not care "whether school kept or not!"



But perhaps I ought to explain.  A "blind lead" is a lead or ledge that

does not "crop out" above the surface.  A miner does not know where to

look for such leads, but they are often stumbled upon by accident in the

course of driving a tunnel or sinking a shaft.  Higbie knew the Wide West

rock perfectly well, and the more he had examined the new developments

the more he was satisfied that the ore could not have come from the Wide

West vein.  And so had it occurred to him alone, of all the camp, that

there was a blind lead down in the shaft, and that even the Wide West

people themselves did not suspect it.  He was right.  When he went down

the shaft, he found that the blind lead held its independent way through

the Wide West vein, cutting it diagonally, and that it was enclosed in

its own well-defined casing-rocks and clay.  Hence it was public

property.  Both leads being perfectly well defined, it was easy for any

miner to see which one belonged to the Wide West and which did not.



We thought it well to have a strong friend, and therefore we brought the

foreman of the Wide West to our cabin that night and revealed the great

surprise to him.  Higbie said:



"We are going to take possession of this blind lead, record it and

establish ownership, and then forbid the Wide West company to take out

any more of the rock.  You cannot help your company in this matter--

nobody can help them.  I will go into the shaft with you and prove to

your entire satisfaction that it is a blind lead.  Now we propose to take

you in with us, and claim the blind lead in our three names.  What do you

say?"



What could a man say who had an opportunity to simply stretch forth his

hand and take possession of a fortune without risk of any kind and

without wronging any one or attaching the least taint of dishonor to his

name?  He could only say, "Agreed."



The notice was put up that night, and duly spread upon the recorder's

books before ten o'clock.  We claimed two hundred feet each--six hundred

feet in all--the smallest and compactest organization in the district,

and the easiest to manage.



No one can be so thoughtless as to suppose that we slept, that night.

Higbie and I went to bed at midnight, but it was only to lie broad awake

and think, dream, scheme.  The floorless, tumble-down cabin was a palace,

the ragged gray blankets silk, the furniture rosewood and mahogany.

Each new splendor that burst out of my visions of the future whirled me

bodily over in bed or jerked me to a sitting posture just as if an

electric battery had been applied to me.  We shot fragments of

conversation back and forth at each other.  Once Higbie said:



"When are you going home--to the States?"



"To-morrow!"--with an evolution or two, ending with a sitting position.

"Well--no--but next month, at furthest."



"We'll go in the same steamer."



"Agreed."



A pause.



"Steamer of the 10th?"



"Yes.  No, the 1st."



"All right."



Another pause.



"Where are you going to live?"  said Higbie.



"San Francisco."



"That's me!"



Pause.



"Too high--too much climbing"--from Higbie.



"What is?"



"I was thinking of Russian Hill--building a house up there."



"Too much climbing?  Shan't you keep a carriage?"



"Of course.  I forgot that."



Pause.



"Cal., what kind of a house are you going to build?"



"I was thinking about that.  Three-story and an attic."



"But what kind?"



"Well, I don't hardly know.  Brick, I suppose."



"Brick--bosh."



"Why?  What is your idea?"



"Brown stone front--French plate glass--billiard-room off the dining-

room--statuary and paintings--shrubbery and two-acre grass plat--

greenhouse--iron dog on the front stoop--gray horses--landau, and a

coachman with a bug on his hat!"



"By George!"



A long pause.



"Cal., when are you going to Europe?"



"Well--I hadn't thought of that.  When are you?"



"In the Spring."



"Going to be gone all summer?"



"All summer!  I shall remain there three years."



"No--but are you in earnest?"



"Indeed I am."



"I will go along too."



"Why of course you will."



"What part of Europe shall you go to?"



"All parts.  France, England, Germany--Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Syria,

Greece, Palestine, Arabia, Persia, Egypt--all over--everywhere."



"I'm agreed."



"All right."



"Won't it be a swell trip!"



"We'll spend forty or fifty thousand dollars trying to make it one,

anyway."



Another long pause.



"Higbie, we owe the butcher six dollars, and he has been threatening to

stop our--"



"Hang the butcher!"



"Amen."



And so it went on.  By three o'clock we found it was no use, and so we

got up and played cribbage and smoked pipes till sunrise.  It was my week

to cook.  I always hated cooking--now, I abhorred it.



The news was all over town.  The former excitement was great--this one

was greater still.  I walked the streets serene and happy.  Higbie said

the foreman had been offered two hundred thousand dollars for his third

of the mine.  I said I would like to see myself selling for any such

price.  My ideas were lofty.  My figure was a million.  Still, I honestly

believe that if I had been offered it, it would have had no other effect

than to make me hold off for more.



I found abundant enjoyment in being rich.  A man offered me a three-

hundred-dollar horse, and wanted to take my simple, unendorsed note for

it.  That brought the most realizing sense I had yet had that I was

actually rich, beyond shadow of doubt.  It was followed by numerous other

evidences of a similar nature--among which I may mention the fact of the

butcher leaving us a double supply of meat and saying nothing about

money.



By the laws of the district, the "locators" or claimants of a ledge were

obliged to do a fair and reasonable amount of work on their new property

within ten days after the date of the location, or the property was

forfeited, and anybody could go and seize it that chose.  So we

determined to go to work the next day.  About the middle of the

afternoon, as I was coming out of the post office, I met a Mr. Gardiner,

who told me that Capt. John Nye was lying dangerously ill at his place

(the "Nine-Mile Ranch"), and that he and his wife were not able to give

him nearly as much care and attention as his case demanded.  I said if he

would wait for me a moment, I would go down and help in the sick room.

I ran to the cabin to tell Higbie.  He was not there, but I left a note

on the table for him, and a few minutes later I left town in Gardiner's

wagon.









CHAPTER XLI.



Captain Nye was very ill indeed, with spasmodic rheumatism.  But the old

gentleman was himself--which is to say, he was kind-hearted and agreeable

when comfortable, but a singularly violent wild-cat when things did not

go well.  He would be smiling along pleasantly enough, when a sudden

spasm of his disease would take him and he would go out of his smile into

a perfect fury.  He would groan and wail and howl with the anguish, and

fill up the odd chinks with the most elaborate profanity that strong

convictions and a fine fancy could contrive.  With fair opportunity he

could swear very well and handle his adjectives with considerable

judgment; but when the spasm was on him it was painful to listen to him,

he was so awkward.  However, I had seen him nurse a sick man himself and

put up patiently with the inconveniences of the situation, and

consequently I was willing that he should have full license now that his

own turn had come.  He could not disturb me, with all his raving and

ranting, for my mind had work on hand, and it labored on diligently,

night and day, whether my hands were idle or employed.  I was altering

and amending the plans for my house, and thinking over the propriety of

having the billard-room in the attic, instead of on the same floor with

the dining-room; also, I was trying to decide between green and blue for

the upholstery of the drawing-room, for, although my preference was blue

I feared it was a color that would be too easily damaged by dust and

sunlight; likewise while I was content to put the coachman in a modest

livery, I was uncertain about a footman--I needed one, and was even

resolved to have one, but wished he could properly appear and perform his

functions out of livery, for I somewhat dreaded so much show; and yet,

inasmuch as my late grandfather had had a coachman and such things, but

no liveries, I felt rather drawn to beat him;--or beat his ghost, at any

rate; I was also systematizing the European trip, and managed to get it

all laid out, as to route and length of time to be devoted to it--

everything, with one exception--namely, whether to cross the desert from

Cairo to Jerusalem per camel, or go by sea to Beirut, and thence down

through the country per caravan.  Meantime I was writing to the friends

at home every day, instructing them concerning all my plans and

intentions, and directing them to look up a handsome homestead for my

mother and agree upon a price for it against my coming, and also

directing them to sell my share of the Tennessee land and tender the

proceeds to the widows' and orphans' fund of the typographical union of

which I had long been a member in good standing.  [This Tennessee land

had been in the possession of the family many years, and promised to

confer high fortune upon us some day; it still promises it, but in a less

violent way.]



When I had been nursing the Captain nine days he was somewhat better,

but very feeble.  During the afternoon we lifted him into a chair and

gave him an alcoholic vapor bath, and then set about putting him on the

bed again.  We had to be exceedingly careful, for the least jar produced

pain.  Gardiner had his shoulders and I his legs; in an unfortunate

moment I stumbled and the patient fell heavily on the bed in an agony of

torture.  I never heard a man swear so in my life.  He raved like a

maniac, and tried to snatch a revolver from the table--but I got it.

He ordered me out of the house, and swore a world of oaths that he would

kill me wherever he caught me when he got on his feet again.  It was

simply a passing fury, and meant nothing.  I knew he would forget it in

an hour, and maybe be sorry for it, too; but it angered me a little, at

the moment.  So much so, indeed, that I determined to go back to

Esmeralda.  I thought he was able to get along alone, now, since he was

on the war path.  I took supper, and as soon as the moon rose, began my

nine-mile journey, on foot.



Even millionaires needed no horses, in those days, for a mere nine-mile

jaunt without baggage.



As I "raised the hill" overlooking the town, it lacked fifteen minutes of

twelve.  I glanced at the hill over beyond the canyon, and in the bright

moonlight saw what appeared to be about half the population of the

village massed on and around the Wide West croppings.  My heart gave an

exulting bound, and I said to myself, "They have made a new strike to-

night--and struck it richer than ever, no doubt."  I started over there,

but gave it up.  I said the "strick" would keep, and I had climbed hill

enough for one night.  I went on down through the town, and as I was

passing a little German bakery, a woman ran out and begged me to come in

and help her.  She said her husband had a fit.  I went in, and judged she

was right--he appeared to have a hundred of them, compressed into one.

Two Germans were there, trying to hold him, and not making much of a

success of it.  I ran up the street half a block or so and routed out a

sleeping doctor, brought him down half dressed, and we four wrestled with

the maniac, and doctored, drenched and bled him, for more than an hour,

and the poor German woman did the crying.  He grew quiet, now, and the

doctor and I withdrew and left him to his friends.



It was a little after one o'clock.  As I entered the cabin door, tired

but jolly, the dingy light of a tallow candle revealed Higbie, sitting by

the pine table gazing stupidly at my note, which he held in his fingers,

and looking pale, old, and haggard.  I halted, and looked at him.  He

looked at me, stolidly.  I said:



"Higbie, what--what is it?"



"We're ruined--we didn't do the work--THE BLIND LEAD'S RELOCATED!"



It was enough.  I sat down sick, grieved--broken-hearted, indeed.  A

minute before, I was rich and brimful of vanity; I was a pauper now, and

very meek.  We sat still an hour, busy with thought, busy with vain and

useless self-upbraidings, busy with "Why didn't I do this, and why didn't

I do that," but neither spoke a word.  Then we dropped into mutual

explanations, and the mystery was cleared away.  It came out that Higbie

had depended on me, as I had on him, and as both of us had on the

foreman.  The folly of it!  It was the first time that ever staid and

steadfast Higbie had left an important matter to chance or failed to be

true to his full share of a responsibility.



But he had never seen my note till this moment, and this moment was the

first time he had been in the cabin since the day he had seen me last.

He, also, had left a note for me, on that same fatal afternoon--had

ridden up on horseback, and looked through the window, and being in a

hurry and not seeing me, had tossed the note into the cabin through a

broken pane.  Here it was, on the floor, where it had remained

undisturbed for nine days:



      "Don't fail to do the work before the ten days expire.  W.

      has passed through and given me notice.  I am to join him at

      Mono Lake, and we shall go on from there to-night.  He says

      he will find it this time, sure.  CAL."



"W."  meant Whiteman, of course.  That thrice accursed "cement!"



That was the way of it.  An old miner, like Higbie, could no more

withstand the fascination of a mysterious mining excitement like this

"cement" foolishness, than he could refrain from eating when he was

famishing.  Higbie had been dreaming about the marvelous cement for

months; and now, against his better judgment, he had gone off and "taken

the chances" on my keeping secure a mine worth a million undiscovered

cement veins.  They had not been followed this time.  His riding out of

town in broad daylight was such a common-place thing to do that it had

not attracted any attention.  He said they prosecuted their search in the

fastnesses of the mountains during nine days, without success; they could

not find the cement.  Then a ghastly fear came over him that something

might have happened to prevent the doing of the necessary work to hold

the blind lead (though indeed he thought such a thing hardly possible),

and forthwith he started home with all speed.  He would have reached

Esmeralda in time, but his horse broke down and he had to walk a great

part of the distance.  And so it happened that as he came into Esmeralda

by one road, I entered it by another.  His was the superior energy,

however, for he went straight to the Wide West, instead of turning aside

as I had done--and he arrived there about five or ten minutes too late!

The "notice" was already up, the "relocation" of our mine completed

beyond recall, and the crowd rapidly dispersing.  He learned some facts

before he left the ground.  The foreman had not been seen about the

streets since the night we had located the mine--a telegram had called

him to California on a matter of life and death, it was said.  At any

rate he had done no work and the watchful eyes of the community were

taking note of the fact.  At midnight of this woful tenth day, the ledge

would be "relocatable," and by eleven o'clock the hill was black with men

prepared to do the relocating.  That was the crowd I had seen when I

fancied a new "strike" had been made--idiot that I was.



[We three had the same right to relocate the lead that other people had,

provided we were quick enough.] As midnight was announced, fourteen men,

duly armed and ready to back their proceedings, put up their "notice" and

proclaimed their ownership of the blind lead, under the new name of the

"Johnson."  But A. D. Allen our partner (the foreman) put in a sudden

appearance about that time, with a cocked revolver in his hand, and said

his name must be added to the list, or he would "thin out the Johnson

company some."  He was a manly, splendid, determined fellow, and known to

be as good as his word, and therefore a compromise was effected.  They

put in his name for a hundred feet, reserving to themselves the customary

two hundred feet each.  Such was the history of the night's events, as

Higbie gathered from a friend on the way home.



Higbie and I cleared out on a new mining excitement the next morning,

glad to get away from the scene of our sufferings, and after a month or

two of hardship and disappointment, returned to Esmeralda once more.

Then we learned that the Wide West and the Johnson companies had

consolidated; that the stock, thus united, comprised five thousand feet,

or shares; that the foreman, apprehending tiresome litigation, and

considering such a huge concern unwieldy, had sold his hundred feet for

ninety thousand dollars in gold and gone home to the States to enjoy it.

If the stock was worth such a gallant figure, with five thousand shares

in the corporation, it makes me dizzy to think what it would have been

worth with only our original six hundred in it.  It was the difference

between six hundred men owning a house and five thousand owning it.  We

would have been millionaires if we had only worked with pick and spade

one little day on our property and so secured our ownership!



It reads like a wild fancy sketch, but the evidence of many witnesses,

and likewise that of the official records of Esmeralda District, is

easily obtainable in proof that it is a true history.  I can always have

it to say that I was absolutely and unquestionably worth a million

dollars, once, for ten days.



A year ago my esteemed and in every way estimable old millionaire

partner, Higbie, wrote me from an obscure little mining camp in

California that after nine or ten years of buffetings and hard striving,

he was at last in a position where he could command twenty-five hundred

dollars, and said he meant to go into the fruit business in a modest way.

How such a thought would have insulted him the night we lay in our cabin

planning European trips and brown stone houses on Russian Hill!









CHAPTER XLII.



What to do next?



It was a momentous question.  I had gone out into the world to shift for

myself, at the age of thirteen (for my father had endorsed for friends;

and although he left us a sumptuous legacy of pride in his fine Virginian

stock and its national distinction, I presently found that I could not

live on that alone without occasional bread to wash it down with).  I had

gained a livelihood in various vocations, but had not dazzled anybody

with my successes; still the list was before me, and the amplest liberty

in the matter of choosing, provided I wanted to work--which I did not,

after being so wealthy.  I had once been a grocery clerk, for one day,

but had consumed so much sugar in that time that I was relieved from

further duty by the proprietor; said he wanted me outside, so that he

could have my custom.  I had studied law an entire week, and then given

it up because it was so prosy and tiresome.  I had engaged briefly in the

study of blacksmithing, but wasted so much time trying to fix the bellows

so that it would blow itself, that the master turned me adrift in

disgrace, and told me I would come to no good.  I had been a bookseller's

clerk for awhile, but the customers bothered me so much I could not read

with any comfort, and so the proprietor gave me a furlough and forgot to

put a limit to it.  I had clerked in a drug store part of a summer, but

my prescriptions were unlucky, and we appeared to sell more stomach pumps

than soda water.  So I had to go.  I had made of myself a tolerable

printer, under the impression that I would be another Franklin some day,

but somehow had missed the connection thus far.  There was no berth open

in the Esmeralda Union, and besides I had always been such a slow

compositor that I looked with envy upon the achievements of apprentices

of two years' standing; and when I took a "take," foremen were in the

habit of suggesting that it would be wanted "some time during the year."



I was a good average St. Louis and New Orleans pilot and by no means

ashamed of my abilities in that line; wages were two hundred and fifty

dollars a month and no board to pay, and I did long to stand behind a

wheel again and never roam any more--but I had been making such an ass of

myself lately in grandiloquent letters home about my blind lead and my

European excursion that I did what many and many a poor disappointed

miner had done before; said "It is all over with me now, and I will never

go back home to be pitied--and snubbed."  I had been a private secretary,

a silver miner and a silver mill operative, and amounted to less than

nothing in each, and now--



What to do next?



I yielded to Higbie's appeals and consented to try the mining once more.

We climbed far up on the mountain side and went to work on a little

rubbishy claim of ours that had a shaft on it eight feet deep.  Higbie

descended into it and worked bravely with his pick till he had loosened

up a deal of rock and dirt and then I went down with a long-handled

shovel (the most awkward invention yet contrived by man) to throw it out.

You must brace the shovel forward with the side of your knee till it is

full, and then, with a skilful toss, throw it backward over your left

shoulder.  I made the toss, and landed the mess just on the edge of the

shaft and it all came back on my head and down the back of my neck.

I never said a word, but climbed out and walked home.  I inwardly

resolved that I would starve before I would make a target of myself and

shoot rubbish at it with a long-handled shovel.



I sat down, in the cabin, and gave myself up to solid misery--so to

speak.  Now in pleasanter days I had amused myself with writing letters

to the chief paper of the Territory, the Virginia Daily Territorial

Enterprise, and had always been surprised when they appeared in print.

My good opinion of the editors had steadily declined; for it seemed to me

that they might have found something better to fill up with than my

literature.  I had found a letter in the post office as I came home from

the hill side, and finally I opened it.  Eureka!  [I never did know what

Eureka meant, but it seems to be as proper a word to heave in as any when

no other that sounds pretty offers.] It was a deliberate offer to me of

Twenty-Five Dollars a week to come up to Virginia and be city editor of

the Enterprise.



I would have challenged the publisher in the "blind lead" days--I wanted

to fall down and worship him, now.  Twenty-Five Dollars a week--it looked

like bloated luxury--a fortune a sinful and lavish waste of money.

But my transports cooled when I thought of my inexperience and consequent

unfitness for the position--and straightway, on top of this, my long

array of failures rose up before me.  Yet if I refused this place I must

presently become dependent upon somebody for my bread, a thing

necessarily distasteful to a man who had never experienced such a

humiliation since he was thirteen years old.  Not much to be proud of,

since it is so common--but then it was all I had to be proud of.  So I

was scared into being a city editor.  I would have declined, otherwise.

Necessity is the mother of "taking chances."  I do not doubt that if, at

that time, I had been offered a salary to translate the Talmud from the

original Hebrew, I would have accepted--albeit with diffidence and some

misgivings--and thrown as much variety into it as I could for the money.



I went up to Virginia and entered upon my new vocation.  I was a rusty

looking city editor, I am free to confess--coatless, slouch hat, blue

woolen shirt, pantaloons stuffed into boot-tops, whiskered half down to

the waist, and the universal navy revolver slung to my belt.  But I

secured a more Christian costume and discarded the revolver.



I had never had occasion to kill anybody, nor ever felt a desire to do

so, but had worn the thing in deference to popular sentiment, and in

order that I might not, by its absence, be offensively conspicuous, and a

subject of remark.  But the other editors, and all the printers, carried

revolvers.  I asked the chief editor and proprietor (Mr. Goodman, I will

call him, since it describes him as well as any name could do) for some

instructions with regard to my duties, and he told me to go all over town

and ask all sorts of people all sorts of questions, make notes of the

information gained, and write them out for publication.  And he added:



"Never say 'We learn' so-and-so, or 'It is reported,' or 'It is rumored,'

or 'We understand' so-and-so, but go to headquarters and get the absolute

facts, and then speak out and say 'It is so-and-so.'  Otherwise, people

will not put confidence in your news.  Unassailable certainly is the

thing that gives a newspaper the firmest and most valuable reputation."



It was the whole thing in a nut-shell; and to this day when I find a

reporter commencing his article with "We understand," I gather a

suspicion that he has not taken as much pains to inform himself as he

ought to have done.  I moralize well, but I did not always practise well

when I was a city editor; I let fancy get the upper hand of fact too

often when there was a dearth of news.  I can never forget my first day's

experience as a reporter.  I wandered about town questioning everybody,

boring everybody, and finding out that nobody knew anything.  At the end

of five hours my notebook was still barren.  I spoke to Mr. Goodman.  He

said:



"Dan used to make a good thing out of the hay wagons in a dry time when

there were no fires or inquests.  Are there no hay wagons in from the

Truckee?  If there are, you might speak of the renewed activity and all

that sort of thing, in the hay business, you know.



"It isn't sensational or exciting, but it fills up and looks business

like."



I canvassed the city again and found one wretched old hay truck dragging

in from the country.  But I made affluent use of it.  I multiplied it by

sixteen, brought it into town from sixteen different directions, made

sixteen separate items out of it, and got up such another sweat about hay

as Virginia City had never seen in the world before.



This was encouraging.  Two nonpareil columns had to be filled, and I was

getting along.  Presently, when things began to look dismal again, a

desperado killed a man in a saloon and joy returned once more.  I never

was so glad over any mere trifle before in my life.  I said to the

murderer:



"Sir, you are a stranger to me, but you have done me a kindness this day

which I can never forget.  If whole years of gratitude can be to you any

slight compensation, they shall be yours.  I was in trouble and you have

relieved me nobly and at a time when all seemed dark and drear.  Count me

your friend from this time forth, for I am not a man to forget a favor."



If I did not really say that to him I at least felt a sort of itching

desire to do it.  I wrote up the murder with a hungry attention to

details, and when it was finished experienced but one regret--namely,

that they had not hanged my benefactor on the spot, so that I could work

him up too.



Next I discovered some emigrant wagons going into camp on the plaza and

found that they had lately come through the hostile Indian country and

had fared rather roughly.  I made the best of the item that the

circumstances permitted, and felt that if I were not confined within

rigid limits by the presence of the reporters of the other papers I could

add particulars that would make the article much more interesting.

However, I found one wagon that was going on to California, and made some

judicious inquiries of the proprietor.  When I learned, through his short

and surly answers to my cross-questioning, that he was certainly going on

and would not be in the city next day to make trouble, I got ahead of the

other papers, for I took down his list of names and added his party to

the killed and wounded.  Having more scope here, I put this wagon through

an Indian fight that to this day has no parallel in history.



My two columns were filled.  When I read them over in the morning I felt

that I had found my legitimate occupation at last.  I reasoned within

myself that news, and stirring news, too, was what a paper needed, and I

felt that I was peculiarly endowed with the ability to furnish it.

Mr. Goodman said that I was as good a reporter as Dan.  I desired no

higher commendation.  With encouragement like that, I felt that I could

take my pen and murder all the immigrants on the plains if need be and

the interests of the paper demanded it.









CHAPTER XLIII.



However, as I grew better acquainted with the business and learned the

run of the sources of information I ceased to require the aid of fancy to

any large extent, and became able to fill my columns without diverging

noticeably from the domain of fact.



I struck up friendships with the reporters of the other journals, and we

swapped "regulars" with each other and thus economized work.  "Regulars"

are permanent sources of news, like courts, bullion returns, "clean-ups"

at the quartz mills, and inquests.  Inasmuch as everybody went armed, we

had an inquest about every day, and so this department was naturally set

down among the "regulars."  We had lively papers in those days.  My great

competitor among the reporters was Boggs of the Union.  He was an

excellent reporter.  Once in three or four months he would get a little

intoxicated, but as a general thing he was a wary and cautious drinker

although always ready to tamper a little with the enemy.  He had the

advantage of me in one thing; he could get the monthly public school

report and I could not, because the principal hated the Enterprise.

One snowy night when the report was due, I started out sadly wondering

how I was going to get it.  Presently, a few steps up the almost deserted

street I stumbled on Boggs and asked him where he was going.



"After the school report."



"I'll go along with you."



"No, sir.  I'll excuse you."



"Just as you say."



A saloon-keeper's boy passed by with a steaming pitcher of hot punch, and

Boggs snuffed the fragrance gratefully.  He gazed fondly after the boy

and saw him start up the Enterprise stairs.  I said:



"I wish you could help me get that school business, but since you can't,

I must run up to the Union office and see if I can get them to let me

have a proof of it after they have set it up, though I don't begin to

suppose they will.  Good night."



"Hold on a minute.  I don't mind getting the report and sitting around

with the boys a little, while you copy it, if you're willing to drop down

to the principal's with me."



"Now you talk like a rational being.  Come along."



We plowed a couple of blocks through the snow, got the report and

returned to our office.  It was a short document and soon copied.

Meantime Boggs helped himself to the punch.  I gave the manuscript back

to him and we started out to get an inquest, for we heard pistol shots

near by.  We got the particulars with little loss of time, for it was

only an inferior sort of bar-room murder, and of little interest to the

public, and then we separated.  Away at three o'clock in the morning,

when we had gone to press and were having a relaxing concert as usual--

for some of the printers were good singers and others good performers on

the guitar and on that atrocity the accordion--the proprietor of the

Union strode in and desired to know if anybody had heard anything of

Boggs or the school report.  We stated the case, and all turned out to

help hunt for the delinquent.  We found him standing on a table in a

saloon, with an old tin lantern in one hand and the school report in the

other, haranguing a gang of intoxicated Cornish miners on the iniquity of

squandering the public moneys on education "when hundreds and hundreds of

honest hard-working men are literally starving for whiskey."  [Riotous

applause.]  He had been assisting in a regal spree with those parties for

hours.  We dragged him away and put him to bed.



Of course there was no school report in the Union, and Boggs held me

accountable, though I was innocent of any intention or desire to compass

its absence from that paper and was as sorry as any one that the

misfortune had occurred.



But we were perfectly friendly.  The day that the school report was next

due, the proprietor of the "Genessee" mine furnished us a buggy and asked

us to go down and write something about the property--a very common

request and one always gladly acceded to when people furnished buggies,

for we were as fond of pleasure excursions as other people.  In due time

we arrived at the "mine"--nothing but a hole in the ground ninety feet

deep, and no way of getting down into it but by holding on to a rope and

being lowered with a windlass.  The workmen had just gone off somewhere

to dinner.  I was not strong enough to lower Boggs's bulk; so I took an

unlighted candle in my teeth, made a loop for my foot in the end of the

rope, implored Boggs not to go to sleep or let the windlass get the start

of him, and then swung out over the shaft.  I reached the bottom muddy

and bruised about the elbows, but safe.  I lit the candle, made an

examination of the rock, selected some specimens and shouted to Boggs to

hoist away.  No answer.  Presently a head appeared in the circle of

daylight away aloft, and a voice came down:



"Are you all set?"



"All set--hoist away."



"Are you comfortable?"



"Perfectly."



"Could you wait a little?"



"Oh certainly--no particular hurry."



"Well--good by."



"Why?  Where are you going?"



"After the school report!"



And he did.  I staid down there an hour, and surprised the workmen when

they hauled up and found a man on the rope instead of a bucket of rock.

I walked home, too--five miles--up hill.  We had no school report next

morning; but the Union had.



Six months after my entry into journalism the grand "flush times" of

Silverland began, and they continued with unabated splendor for three

years.  All difficulty about filling up the "local department" ceased,

and the only trouble now was how to make the lengthened columns hold the

world of incidents and happenings that came to our literary net every

day.  Virginia had grown to be the "livest" town, for its age and

population, that America had ever produced.  The sidewalks swarmed with

people--to such an extent, indeed, that it was generally no easy matter

to stem the human tide.  The streets themselves were just as crowded with

quartz wagons, freight teams and other vehicles.  The procession was

endless.  So great was the pack, that buggies frequently had to wait half

an hour for an opportunity to cross the principal street.  Joy sat on

every countenance, and there was a glad, almost fierce, intensity in

every eye, that told of the money-getting schemes that were seething in

every brain and the high hope that held sway in every heart.  Money was

as plenty as dust; every individual considered himself wealthy, and a

melancholy countenance was nowhere to be seen.  There were military

companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres, "hurdy-

gurdy houses," wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows, civic

processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey mill

every fifteen steps, a Board of Aldermen, a Mayor, a City Surveyor, a

City Engineer, a Chief of the Fire Department, with First, Second and

Third Assistants, a Chief of Police, City Marshal and a large police

force, two Boards of Mining Brokers, a dozen breweries and half a dozen

jails and station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a

church.  The "flush times" were in magnificent flower!  Large fire-proof

brick buildings were going up in the principal streets, and the wooden

suburbs were spreading out in all directions.  Town lots soared up to

prices that were amazing.



The great "Comstock lode" stretched its opulent length straight through

the town from north to south, and every mine on it was in diligent

process of development.  One of these mines alone employed six hundred

and seventy-five men, and in the matter of elections the adage was, "as

the 'Gould and Curry' goes, so goes the city."  Laboring men's wages were

four and six dollars a day, and they worked in three "shifts" or gangs,

and the blasting and picking and shoveling went on without ceasing, night

and day.



The "city" of Virginia roosted royally midway up the steep side of Mount

Davidson, seven thousand two hundred feet above the level of the sea, and

in the clear Nevada atmosphere was visible from a distance of fifty

miles!  It claimed a population of fifteen thousand to eighteen thousand,

and all day long half of this little army swarmed the streets like bees

and the other half swarmed among the drifts and tunnels of the

"Comstock," hundreds of feet down in the earth directly under those same

streets.  Often we felt our chairs jar, and heard the faint boom of a

blast down in the bowels of the earth under the office.



The mountain side was so steep that the entire town had a slant to it

like a roof.  Each street was a terrace, and from each to the next street

below the descent was forty or fifty feet.  The fronts of the houses were

level with the street they faced, but their rear first floors were

propped on lofty stilts; a man could stand at a rear first floor window

of a C street house and look down the chimneys of the row of houses below

him facing D street.  It was a laborious climb, in that thin atmosphere,

to ascend from D to A street, and you were panting and out of breath when

you got there; but you could turn around and go down again like a house

a-fire--so to speak.  The atmosphere was so rarified, on account of the

great altitude, that one's blood lay near the surface always, and the

scratch of a pin was a disaster worth worrying about, for the chances

were that a grievous erysipelas would ensue.  But to offset this, the

thin atmosphere seemed to carry healing to gunshot wounds, and therefore,

to simply shoot your adversary through both lungs was a thing not likely

to afford you any permanent satisfaction, for he would be nearly certain

to be around looking for you within the month, and not with an opera

glass, either.



From Virginia's airy situation one could look over a vast, far-reaching

panorama of mountain ranges and deserts; and whether the day was bright

or overcast, whether the sun was rising or setting, or flaming in the

zenith, or whether night and the moon held sway, the spectacle was always

impressive and beautiful.  Over your head Mount Davidson lifted its gray

dome, and before and below you a rugged canyon clove the battlemented

hills, making a sombre gateway through which a soft-tinted desert was

glimpsed, with the silver thread of a river winding through it, bordered

with trees which many miles of distance diminished to a delicate fringe;

and still further away the snowy mountains rose up and stretched their

long barrier to the filmy horizon--far enough beyond a lake that burned

in the desert like a fallen sun, though that, itself, lay fifty miles

removed.  Look from your window where you would, there was fascination in

the picture.  At rare intervals--but very rare--there were clouds in our

skies, and then the setting sun would gild and flush and glorify this

mighty expanse of scenery with a bewildering pomp of color that held the

eye like a spell and moved the spirit like music.









CHAPTER XLIV.



My salary was increased to forty dollars a week.  But I seldom drew it.

I had plenty of other resources, and what were two broad twenty-dollar

gold pieces to a man who had his pockets full of such and a cumbersome

abundance of bright half dollars besides?  [Paper money has never come

into use on the Pacific coast.]  Reporting was lucrative, and every man

in the town was lavish with his money and his "feet."  The city and all

the great mountain side were riddled with mining shafts.  There were more

mines than miners.  True, not ten of these mines were yielding rock worth

hauling to a mill, but everybody said, "Wait till the shaft gets down

where the ledge comes in solid, and then you will see!"  So nobody was

discouraged.  These were nearly all "wild cat" mines, and wholly

worthless, but nobody believed it then.  The "Ophir," the "Gould &

Curry," the "Mexican," and other great mines on the Comstock lead in

Virginia and Gold Hill were turning out huge piles of rich rock every

day, and every man believed that his little wild cat claim was as good as

any on the "main lead" and would infallibly be worth a thousand dollars a

foot when he "got down where it came in solid."  Poor fellow, he was

blessedly blind to the fact that he never would see that day.  So the

thousand wild cat shafts burrowed deeper and deeper into the earth day by

day, and all men were beside themselves with hope and happiness.  How

they labored, prophesied, exulted!  Surely nothing like it was ever seen

before since the world began.  Every one of these wild cat mines--not

mines, but holes in the ground over imaginary mines--was incorporated and

had handsomely engraved "stock" and the stock was salable, too.  It was

bought and sold with a feverish avidity in the boards every day.  You

could go up on the mountain side, scratch around and find a ledge (there

was no lack of them), put up a "notice" with a grandiloquent name in it,

start a shaft, get your stock printed, and with nothing whatever to prove

that your mine was worth a straw, you could put your stock on the market

and sell out for hundreds and even thousands of dollars.  To make money,

and make it fast, was as easy as it was to eat your dinner.



Every man owned "feet" in fifty different wild cat mines and considered

his fortune made.  Think of a city with not one solitary poor man in it!

One would suppose that when month after month went by and still not a

wild cat mine (by wild cat I mean, in general terms, any claim not

located on the mother vein, i.e., the "Comstock") yielded a ton of rock

worth crushing, the people would begin to wonder if they were not putting

too much faith in their prospective riches; but there was not a thought

of such a thing.  They burrowed away, bought and sold, and were happy.



New claims were taken up daily, and it was the friendly custom to run

straight to the newspaper offices, give the reporter forty or fifty

"feet," and get them to go and examine the mine and publish a notice of

it.  They did not care a fig what you said about the property so you said

something.  Consequently we generally said a word or two to the effect

that the "indications" were good, or that the ledge was "six feet wide,"

or that the rock "resembled the Comstock" (and so it did--but as a

general thing the resemblance was not startling enough to knock you

down).  If the rock was moderately promising, we followed the custom of

the country, used strong adjectives and frothed at the mouth as if a very

marvel in silver discoveries had transpired.  If the mine was a

"developed" one, and had no pay ore to show (and of course it hadn't), we

praised the tunnel; said it was one of the most infatuating tunnels in

the land; driveled and driveled about the tunnel till we ran entirely out

of ecstasies--but never said a word about the rock.  We would squander

half a column of adulation on a shaft, or a new wire rope, or a dressed

pine windlass, or a fascinating force pump, and close with a burst of

admiration of the "gentlemanly and efficient Superintendent" of the mine

--but never utter a whisper about the rock.  And those people were always

pleased, always satisfied.  Occasionally we patched up and varnished our

reputation for discrimination and stern, undeviating accuracy, by giving

some old abandoned claim a blast that ought to have made its dry bones

rattle--and then somebody would seize it and sell it on the fleeting

notoriety thus conferred upon it.



There was nothing in the shape of a mining claim that was not salable.

We received presents of "feet" every day.  If we needed a hundred dollars

or so, we sold some; if not, we hoarded it away, satisfied that it would

ultimately be worth a thousand dollars a foot.  I had a trunk about half

full of "stock."  When a claim made a stir in the market and went up to a

high figure, I searched through my pile to see if I had any of its stock

--and generally found it.



The prices rose and fell constantly; but still a fall disturbed us

little, because a thousand dollars a foot was our figure, and so we were

content to let it fluctuate as much as it pleased till it reached it.

My pile of stock was not all given to me by people who wished their

claims "noticed."  At least half of it was given me by persons who had no

thought of such a thing, and looked for nothing more than a simple verbal

"thank you;" and you were not even obliged by law to furnish that.

If you are coming up the street with a couple of baskets of apples in

your hands, and you meet a friend, you naturally invite him to take a

few.  That describes the condition of things in Virginia in the "flush

times."  Every man had his pockets full of stock, and it was the actual

custom of the country to part with small quantities of it to friends

without the asking.



Very often it was a good idea to close the transaction instantly, when a

man offered a stock present to a friend, for the offer was only good and

binding at that moment, and if the price went to a high figure shortly

afterward the procrastination was a thing to be regretted.  Mr. Stewart

(Senator, now, from Nevada) one day told me he would give me twenty feet

of "Justis" stock if I would walk over to his office.  It was worth five

or ten dollars a foot.  I asked him to make the offer good for next day,

as I was just going to dinner.  He said he would not be in town; so I

risked it and took my dinner instead of the stock.  Within the week the

price went up to seventy dollars and afterward to a hundred and fifty,

but nothing could make that man yield.  I suppose he sold that stock of

mine and placed the guilty proceeds in his own pocket.  [My revenge will

be found in the accompanying portrait.]  I met three friends one

afternoon, who said they had been buying "Overman" stock at auction at

eight dollars a foot.  One said if I would come up to his office he would

give me fifteen feet; another said he would add fifteen; the third said

he would do the same.  But I was going after an inquest and could not

stop.  A few weeks afterward they sold all their "Overman" at six hundred

dollars a foot and generously came around to tell me about it--and also

to urge me to accept of the next forty-five feet of it that people tried

to force on me.



These are actual facts, and I could make the list a long one and still

confine myself strictly to the truth.  Many a time friends gave us as

much as twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars

a foot, and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a

guest a cigar.  These were "flush times" indeed!  I thought they were

going to last always, but somehow I never was much of a prophet.



To show what a wild spirit possessed the mining brain of the community,

I will remark that "claims" were actually "located" in excavations for

cellars, where the pick had exposed what seemed to be quartz veins--and

not cellars in the suburbs, either, but in the very heart of the city;

and forthwith stock would be issued and thrown on the market.  It was

small matter who the cellar belonged to--the "ledge" belonged to the

finder, and unless the United States government interfered (inasmuch as

the government holds the primary right to mines of the noble metals in

Nevada--or at least did then), it was considered to be his privilege to

work it.  Imagine a stranger staking out a mining claim among the costly

shrubbery in your front yard and calmly proceeding to lay waste the

ground with pick and shovel and blasting powder!  It has been often done

in California.  In the middle of one of the principal business streets of

Virginia, a man "located" a mining claim and began a shaft on it.  He

gave me a hundred feet of the stock and I sold it for a fine suit of

clothes because I was afraid somebody would fall down the shaft and sue

for damages.  I owned in another claim that was located in the middle of

another street; and to show how absurd people can be, that "East India"

stock (as it was called) sold briskly although there was an ancient

tunnel running directly under the claim and any man could go into it and

see that it did not cut a quartz ledge or anything that remotely

resembled one.



One plan of acquiring sudden wealth was to "salt" a wild cat claim and

sell out while the excitement was up.  The process was simple.



The schemer located a worthless ledge, sunk a shaft on it, bought a wagon

load of rich "Comstock" ore, dumped a portion of it into the shaft and

piled the rest by its side, above ground.  Then he showed the property to

a simpleton and sold it to him at a high figure.  Of course the wagon

load of rich ore was all that the victim ever got out of his purchase.

A most remarkable case of "salting" was that of the "North Ophir."

It was claimed that this vein was a "remote extension" of the original

"Ophir," a valuable mine on the "Comstock."  For a few days everybody was

talking about the rich developments in the North Ophir.  It was said that

it yielded perfectly pure silver in small, solid lumps.  I went to the

place with the owners, and found a shaft six or eight feet deep, in the

bottom of which was a badly shattered vein of dull, yellowish,

unpromising rock.  One would as soon expect to find silver in a

grindstone.  We got out a pan of the rubbish and washed it in a puddle,

and sure enough, among the sediment we found half a dozen black, bullet-

looking pellets of unimpeachable "native" silver.  Nobody had ever heard

of such a thing before; science could not account for such a queer

novelty.  The stock rose to sixty-five dollars a foot, and at this figure

the world-renowned tragedian, McKean Buchanan, bought a commanding

interest and prepared to quit the stage once more--he was always doing

that.  And then it transpired that the mine had been "salted"--and not in

any hackneyed way, either, but in a singularly bold, barefaced and

peculiarly original and outrageous fashion.  On one of the lumps of

"native" silver was discovered the minted legend, "TED STATES OF," and

then it was plainly apparent that the mine had been "salted" with melted

half-dollars!  The lumps thus obtained had been blackened till they

resembled native silver, and were then mixed with the shattered rock in

the bottom of the shaft.  It is literally true.  Of course the price of

the stock at once fell to nothing, and the tragedian was ruined.  But for

this calamity we might have lost McKean Buchanan from the stage.









CHAPTER XLV.



The "flush times" held bravely on.  Something over two years before, Mr.

Goodman and another journeyman printer, had borrowed forty dollars and

set out from San Francisco to try their fortunes in the new city of

Virginia.  They found the Territorial Enterprise, a poverty-stricken

weekly journal, gasping for breath and likely to die.  They bought it,

type, fixtures, good-will and all, for a thousand dollars, on long time.

The editorial sanctum, news-room, press-room, publication office, bed-

chamber, parlor, and kitchen were all compressed into one apartment and

it was a small one, too.  The editors and printers slept on the floor, a

Chinaman did their cooking, and the "imposing-stone" was the general

dinner table.  But now things were changed.  The paper was a great daily,

printed by steam; there were five editors and twenty-three compositors;

the subscription price was sixteen dollars a year; the advertising rates

were exorbitant, and the columns crowded.  The paper was clearing from

six to ten thousand dollars a month, and the "Enterprise Building" was

finished and ready for occupation--a stately fireproof brick.  Every day

from five all the way up to eleven columns of "live" advertisements were

left out or crowded into spasmodic and irregular "supplements."



The "Gould & Curry" company were erecting a monster hundred-stamp mill at

a cost that ultimately fell little short of a million dollars.  Gould &

Curry stock paid heavy dividends--a rare thing, and an experience

confined to the dozen or fifteen claims located on the "main lead," the

"Comstock."  The Superintendent of the Gould & Curry lived, rent free, in

a fine house built and furnished by the company.  He drove a fine pair of

horses which were a present from the company, and his salary was twelve

thousand dollars a year.  The superintendent of another of the great

mines traveled in grand state, had a salary of twenty-eight thousand

dollars a year, and in a law suit in after days claimed that he was to

have had one per cent. on the gross yield of the bullion likewise.



Money was wonderfully plenty.  The trouble was, not how to get it,--but

how to spend it, how to lavish it, get rid of it, squander it.  And so it

was a happy thing that just at this juncture the news came over the wires

that a great United States Sanitary Commission had been formed and money

was wanted for the relief of the wounded sailors and soldiers of the

Union languishing in the Eastern hospitals.  Right on the heels of it

came word that San Francisco had responded superbly before the telegram

was half a day old.  Virginia rose as one man!  A Sanitary Committee was

hurriedly organized, and its chairman mounted a vacant cart in C street

and tried to make the clamorous multitude understand that the rest of the

committee were flying hither and thither and working with all their might

and main, and that if the town would only wait an hour, an office would

be ready, books opened, and the Commission prepared to receive

contributions.  His voice was drowned and his information lost in a

ceaseless roar of cheers, and demands that the money be received now--

they swore they would not wait.  The chairman pleaded and argued, but,

deaf to all entreaty, men plowed their way through the throng and rained

checks of gold coin into the cart and skurried away for more.  Hands

clutching money, were thrust aloft out of the jam by men who hoped this

eloquent appeal would cleave a road their strugglings could not open.

The very Chinamen and Indians caught the excitement and dashed their half

dollars into the cart without knowing or caring what it was all about.

Women plunged into the crowd, trimly attired, fought their way to the

cart with their coin, and emerged again, by and by, with their apparel in

a state of hopeless dilapidation.  It was the wildest mob Virginia had

ever seen and the most determined and ungovernable; and when at last it

abated its fury and dispersed, it had not a penny in its pocket.



To use its own phraseology, it came there "flush" and went away "busted."



After that, the Commission got itself into systematic working order, and

for weeks the contributions flowed into its treasury in a generous

stream.  Individuals and all sorts of organizations levied upon

themselves a regular weekly tax for the sanitary fund, graduated

according to their means, and there was not another grand universal

outburst till the famous "Sanitary Flour Sack" came our way.  Its history

is peculiar and interesting.  A former schoolmate of mine, by the name of

Reuel Gridley, was living at the little city of Austin, in the Reese

river country, at this time, and was the Democratic candidate for mayor.

He and the Republican candidate made an agreement that the defeated man

should be publicly presented with a fifty-pound sack of flour by the

successful one, and should carry it home on his shoulder.  Gridley was

defeated.  The new mayor gave him the sack of flour, and he shouldered it

and carried it a mile or two, from Lower Austin to his home in Upper

Austin, attended by a band of music and the whole population.  Arrived

there, he said he did not need the flour, and asked what the people

thought he had better do with it.  A voice said:



"Sell it to the highest bidder, for the benefit of the Sanitary fund."



The suggestion was greeted with a round of applause, and Gridley mounted

a dry-goods box and assumed the role of auctioneer.  The bids went higher

and higher, as the sympathies of the pioneers awoke and expanded, till at

last the sack was knocked down to a mill man at two hundred and fifty

dollars, and his check taken.  He was asked where he would have the flour

delivered, and he said:



"Nowhere--sell it again."



Now the cheers went up royally, and the multitude were fairly in the

spirit of the thing.  So Gridley stood there and shouted and perspired

till the sun went down; and when the crowd dispersed he had sold the sack

to three hundred different people, and had taken in eight thousand

dollars in gold.  And still the flour sack was in his possession.



The news came to Virginia, and a telegram went back:



"Fetch along your flour sack!"



Thirty-six hours afterward Gridley arrived, and an afternoon mass meeting

was held in the Opera House, and the auction began.  But the sack had

come sooner than it was expected; the people were not thoroughly aroused,

and the sale dragged.  At nightfall only five thousand dollars had been

secured, and there was a crestfallen feeling in the community.  However,

there was no disposition to let the matter rest here and acknowledge

vanquishment at the hands of the village of Austin.  Till late in the

night the principal citizens were at work arranging the morrow's

campaign, and when they went to bed they had no fears for the result.

At eleven the next morning a procession of open carriages, attended by

clamorous bands of music and adorned with a moving display of flags,

filed along C street and was soon in danger of blockade by a huzzaing

multitude of citizens.  In the first carriage sat Gridley, with the flour

sack in prominent view, the latter splendid with bright paint and gilt

lettering; also in the same carriage sat the mayor and the recorder.

The other carriages contained the Common Council, the editors and

reporters, and other people of imposing consequence.  The crowd pressed

to the corner of C and Taylor streets, expecting the sale to begin there,

but they were disappointed, and also unspeakably surprised; for the

cavalcade moved on as if Virginia had ceased to be of importance, and

took its way over the "divide," toward the small town of Gold Hill.

Telegrams had gone ahead to Gold Hill, Silver City and Dayton, and those

communities were at fever heat and rife for the conflict.  It was a very

hot day, and wonderfully dusty.  At the end of a short half hour we

descended into Gold Hill with drums beating and colors flying, and

enveloped in imposing clouds of dust.  The whole population--men, women

and children, Chinamen and Indians, were massed in the main street, all

the flags in town were at the mast head, and the blare of the bands was

drowned in cheers.  Gridley stood up and asked who would make the first

bid for the National Sanitary Flour Sack.  Gen. W. said:



"The Yellow Jacket silver mining company offers a thousand dollars,

coin!"



A tempest of applause followed.  A telegram carried the news to Virginia,

and fifteen minutes afterward that city's population was massed in the

streets devouring the tidings--for it was part of the programme that the

bulletin boards should do a good work that day.  Every few minutes a new

dispatch was bulletined from Gold Hill, and still the excitement grew.

Telegrams began to return to us from Virginia beseeching Gridley to bring

back the flour sack; but such was not the plan of the campaign.  At the

end of an hour Gold Hill's small population had paid a figure for the

flour sack that awoke all the enthusiasm of Virginia when the grand total

was displayed upon the bulletin boards.  Then the Gridley cavalcade moved

on, a giant refreshed with new lager beer and plenty of it--for the

people brought it to the carriages without waiting to measure it--and

within three hours more the expedition had carried Silver City and Dayton

by storm and was on its way back covered with glory.  Every move had been

telegraphed and bulletined, and as the procession entered Virginia and

filed down C street at half past eight in the evening the town was abroad

in the thoroughfares, torches were glaring, flags flying, bands playing,

cheer on cheer cleaving the air, and the city ready to surrender at

discretion.  The auction began, every bid was greeted with bursts of

applause, and at the end of two hours and a half a population of fifteen

thousand souls had paid in coin for a fifty-pound sack of flour a sum

equal to forty thousand dollars in greenbacks!  It was at a rate in the

neighborhood of three dollars for each man, woman and child of the

population.  The grand total would have been twice as large, but the

streets were very narrow, and hundreds who wanted to bid could not get

within a block of the stand, and could not make themselves heard.  These

grew tired of waiting and many of them went home long before the auction

was over.  This was the greatest day Virginia ever saw, perhaps.



Gridley sold the sack in Carson city and several California towns; also

in San Francisco.  Then he took it east and sold it in one or two

Atlantic cities, I think.  I am not sure of that, but I know that he

finally carried it to St. Louis, where a monster Sanitary Fair was being

held, and after selling it there for a large sum and helping on the

enthusiasm by displaying the portly silver bricks which Nevada's donation

had produced, he had the flour baked up into small cakes and retailed

them at high prices.



It was estimated that when the flour sack's mission was ended it had been

sold for a grand total of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in

greenbacks!  This is probably the only instance on record where common

family flour brought three thousand dollars a pound in the public market.



It is due to Mr. Gridley's memory to mention that the expenses of his

sanitary flour sack expedition of fifteen thousand miles, going and

returning, were paid in large part if not entirely, out of his own

pocket.  The time he gave to it was not less than three months.

Mr. Gridley was a soldier in the Mexican war and a pioneer Californian.

He died at Stockton, California, in December, 1870, greatly regretted.









CHAPTER XLVI.



There were nabobs in those days--in the "flush times," I mean.  Every

rich strike in the mines created one or two.  I call to mind several of

these.  They were careless, easy-going fellows, as a general thing, and

the community at large was as much benefited by their riches as they were

themselves--possibly more, in some cases.



Two cousins, teamsters, did some hauling for a man and had to take a

small segregated portion of a silver mine in lieu of $300 cash.  They

gave an outsider a third to open the mine, and they went on teaming.  But

not long.  Ten months afterward the mine was out of debt and paying each

owner $8,000 to $10,000 a month--say $100,000 a year.



One of the earliest nabobs that Nevada was delivered of wore $6,000 worth

of diamonds in his bosom, and swore he was unhappy because he could not

spend his money as fast as he made it.



Another Nevada nabob boasted an income that often reached $16,000 a

month; and he used to love to tell how he had worked in the very mine

that yielded it, for five dollars a day, when he first came to the

country.



The silver and sage-brush State has knowledge of another of these pets of

fortune--lifted from actual poverty to affluence almost in a single

night--who was able to offer $100,000 for a position of high official

distinction, shortly afterward, and did offer it--but failed to get it,

his politics not being as sound as his bank account.



Then there was John Smith.  He was a good, honest, kind-hearted soul,

born and reared in the lower ranks of life, and miraculously ignorant.

He drove a team, and owned a small ranch--a ranch that paid him a

comfortable living, for although it yielded but little hay, what little

it did yield was worth from $250 to $300 in gold per ton in the market.

Presently Smith traded a few acres of the ranch for a small undeveloped

silver mine in Gold Hill.  He opened the mine and built a little

unpretending ten-stamp mill.  Eighteen months afterward he retired from

the hay business, for his mining income had reached a most comfortable

figure.  Some people said it was $30,000 a month, and others said it was

$60,000.  Smith was very rich at any rate.



And then he went to Europe and traveled.  And when he came back he was

never tired of telling about the fine hogs he had seen in England, and

the gorgeous sheep he had seen in Spain, and the fine cattle he had

noticed in the vicinity of Rome.  He was full of wonders of the old

world, and advised everybody to travel.  He said a man never imagined

what surprising things there were in the world till he had traveled.



One day, on board ship, the passengers made up a pool of $500, which was

to be the property of the man who should come nearest to guessing the run

of the vessel for the next twenty-four hours.  Next day, toward noon, the

figures were all in the purser's hands in sealed envelopes.  Smith was

serene and happy, for he had been bribing the engineer.  But another

party won the prize!  Smith said:



"Here, that won't do!  He guessed two miles wider of the mark than I did."



The purser said, "Mr. Smith, you missed it further than any man on board.

We traveled two hundred and eight miles yesterday."



"Well, sir," said Smith, "that's just where I've got you, for I guessed

two hundred and nine.  If you'll look at my figgers again you'll find a 2

and two 0's, which stands for 200, don't it?--and after 'em you'll find a

9 (2009), which stands for two hundred and nine.  I reckon I'll take that

money, if you please."



The Gould & Curry claim comprised twelve hundred feet, and it all

belonged originally to the two men whose names it bears.  Mr. Curry owned

two thirds of it--and he said that he sold it out for twenty-five hundred

dollars in cash, and an old plug horse that ate up his market value in

hay and barley in seventeen days by the watch.  And he said that Gould

sold out for a pair of second-hand government blankets and a bottle of

whisky that killed nine men in three hours, and that an unoffending

stranger that smelt the cork was disabled for life.  Four years afterward

the mine thus disposed of was worth in the San Francisco market seven

millions six hundred thousand dollars in gold coin.



In the early days a poverty-stricken Mexican who lived in a canyon

directly back of Virginia City, had a stream of water as large as a man's

wrist trickling from the hill-side on his premises.  The Ophir Company

segregated a hundred feet of their mine and traded it to him for the

stream of water.  The hundred feet proved to be the richest part of the

entire mine; four years after the swap, its market value (including its

mill) was $1,500,000.



An individual who owned twenty feet in the Ophir mine before its great

riches were revealed to men, traded it for a horse, and a very sorry

looking brute he was, too.  A year or so afterward, when Ophir stock went

up to $3,000 a foot, this man, who had not a cent, used to say he was the

most startling example of magnificence and misery the world had ever

seen--because he was able to ride a sixty-thousand-dollar horse--yet

could not scrape up cash enough to buy a saddle, and was obliged to

borrow one or ride bareback.  He said if fortune were to give him another

sixty-thousand-dollar horse it would ruin him.



A youth of nineteen, who was a telegraph operator in Virginia on a salary

of a hundred dollars a month, and who, when he could not make out German

names in the list of San Francisco steamer arrivals, used to ingeniously

select and supply substitutes for them out of an old Berlin city

directory, made himself rich by watching the mining telegrams that passed

through his hands and buying and selling stocks accordingly, through a

friend in San Francisco.  Once when a private dispatch was sent from

Virginia announcing a rich strike in a prominent mine and advising that

the matter be kept secret till a large amount of the stock could be

secured, he bought forty "feet" of the stock at twenty dollars a foot,

and afterward sold half of it at eight hundred dollars a foot and the

rest at double that figure.  Within three months he was worth $150,000,

and had resigned his telegraphic position.



Another telegraph operator who had been discharged by the company for

divulging the secrets of the office, agreed with a moneyed man in San

Francisco to furnish him the result of a great Virginia mining lawsuit

within an hour after its private reception by the parties to it in San

Francisco.  For this he was to have a large percentage of the profits on

purchases and sales made on it by his fellow-conspirator.  So he went,

disguised as a teamster, to a little wayside telegraph office in the

mountains, got acquainted with the operator, and sat in the office day

after day, smoking his pipe, complaining that his team was fagged out and

unable to travel--and meantime listening to the dispatches as they passed

clicking through the machine from Virginia.  Finally the private dispatch

announcing the result of the lawsuit sped over the wires, and as soon as

he heard it he telegraphed his friend in San Francisco:



"Am tired waiting.  Shall sell the team and go home."



It was the signal agreed upon.  The word "waiting" left out, would have

signified that the suit had gone the other way.



The mock teamster's friend picked up a deal of the mining stock, at low

figures, before the news became public, and a fortune was the result.



For a long time after one of the great Virginia mines had been

incorporated, about fifty feet of the original location were still in the

hands of a man who had never signed the incorporation papers.  The stock

became very valuable, and every effort was made to find this man, but he

had disappeared.  Once it was heard that he was in New York, and one or

two speculators went east but failed to find him.  Once the news came

that he was in the Bermudas, and straightway a speculator or two hurried

east and sailed for Bermuda--but he was not there.  Finally he was heard

of in Mexico, and a friend of his, a bar-keeper on a salary, scraped

together a little money and sought him out, bought his "feet" for a

hundred dollars, returned and sold the property for $75,000.



But why go on?  The traditions of Silverland are filled with instances

like these, and I would never get through enumerating them were I to

attempt do it.  I only desired to give, the reader an idea of a

peculiarity of the "flush times" which I could not present so strikingly

in any other way, and which some mention of was necessary to a realizing

comprehension of the time and the country.



I was personally acquainted with the majority of the nabobs I have

referred to, and so, for old acquaintance sake, I have shifted their

occupations and experiences around in such a way as to keep the Pacific

public from recognizing these once notorious men.  No longer notorious,

for the majority of them have drifted back into poverty and obscurity

again.



In Nevada there used to be current the story of an adventure of two of

her nabobs, which may or may not have occurred.  I give it for what it is

worth:



Col. Jim had seen somewhat of the world, and knew more or less of its

ways; but Col. Jack was from the back settlements of the States, had led

a life of arduous toil, and had never seen a city.  These two, blessed

with sudden wealth, projected a visit to New York,--Col. Jack to see the

sights, and Col. Jim to guard his unsophistication from misfortune.  They

reached San Francisco in the night, and sailed in the morning.  Arrived

in New York, Col.  Jack said:



"I've heard tell of carriages all my life, and now I mean to have a ride

in one; I don't care what it costs.  Come along."



They stepped out on the sidewalk, and Col. Jim called a stylish barouche.

But Col. Jack said:



"No, sir!  None of your cheap-John turn-outs for me.  I'm here to have a

good time, and money ain't any object.  I mean to have the nobbiest rig

that's going.  Now here comes the very trick.  Stop that yaller one with

the pictures on it--don't you fret--I'll stand all the expenses myself."



So Col. Jim stopped an empty omnibus, and they got in.  Said Col. Jack:



"Ain't it gay, though?  Oh, no, I reckon not!  Cushions, and windows, and

pictures, till you can't rest.  What would the boys say if they could see

us cutting a swell like this in New York?  By George, I wish they could

see us."



Then he put his head out of the window, and shouted to the driver:



"Say, Johnny, this suits me!--suits yours truly, you bet, you!  I want

this shebang all day.  I'm on it, old man!  Let 'em out!  Make 'em go!

We'll make it all right with you, sonny!"



The driver passed his hand through the strap-hole, and tapped for his

fare--it was before the gongs came into common use.  Col. Jack took the

hand, and shook it cordially.  He said:



"You twig me, old pard!  All right between gents.  Smell of that, and see

how you like it!"



And he put a twenty-dollar gold piece in the driver's hand.  After a

moment the driver said he could not make change.



"Bother the change!  Ride it out.  Put it in your pocket."



Then to Col.  Jim, with a sounding slap on his thigh:



"Ain't it style, though?  Hanged if I don't hire this thing every day for

a week."



The omnibus stopped, and a young lady got in.  Col. Jack stared a moment,

then nudged Col. Jim with his elbow:



"Don't say a word," he whispered.  "Let her ride, if she wants to.

Gracious, there's room enough."



The young lady got out her porte-monnaie, and handed her fare to Col.

Jack.



"What's this for?"  said he.



"Give it to the driver, please."



"Take back your money, madam.  We can't allow it.  You're welcome to ride

here as long as you please, but this shebang's chartered, and we can't

let you pay a cent."



The girl shrunk into a corner, bewildered.  An old lady with a basket

climbed in, and proffered her fare.



"Excuse me," said Col. Jack.  "You're perfectly welcome here, madam, but

we can't allow you to pay.  Set right down there, mum, and don't you be

the least uneasy.  Make yourself just as free as if you was in your own

turn-out."



Within two minutes, three gentlemen, two fat women, and a couple of

children, entered.



"Come right along, friends," said Col.  Jack; "don't mind us.  This is a

free blow-out."  Then he whispered to Col.  Jim,



"New York ain't no sociable place, I don't reckon--it ain't no name for

it!"



He resisted every effort to pass fares to the driver, and made everybody

cordially welcome.  The situation dawned on the people, and they pocketed

their money, and delivered themselves up to covert enjoyment of the

episode.  Half a dozen more passengers entered.



"Oh, there's plenty of room," said Col.  Jack.  "Walk right in, and make

yourselves at home.  A blow-out ain't worth anything as a blow-out,

unless a body has company."  Then in a whisper to Col.  Jim: "But ain't

these New Yorkers friendly?  And ain't they cool about it, too?  Icebergs

ain't anywhere.  I reckon they'd tackle a hearse, if it was going their

way."



More passengers got in; more yet, and still more.  Both seats were

filled, and a file of men were standing up, holding on to the cleats

overhead.  Parties with baskets and bundles were climbing up on the roof.

Half-suppressed laughter rippled up from all sides.



"Well, for clean, cool, out-and-out cheek, if this don't bang anything

that ever I saw, I'm an Injun!" whispered Col. Jack.



A Chinaman crowded his way in.



"I weaken!" said Col. Jack.  "Hold on, driver!  Keep your seats, ladies,

and gents.  Just make yourselves free--everything's paid for.  Driver,

rustle these folks around as long as they're a mind to go--friends of

ours, you know.  Take them everywheres--and if you want more money, come

to the St. Nicholas, and we'll make it all right.  Pleasant journey to

you, ladies and gents--go it just as long as you please--it shan't cost

you a cent!"



The two comrades got out, and Col. Jack said:



"Jimmy, it's the sociablest place I ever saw.  The Chinaman waltzed in as

comfortable as anybody.  If we'd staid awhile, I reckon we'd had some

niggers.  B' George, we'll have to barricade our doors to-night, or some

of these ducks will be trying to sleep with us."









CHAPTER XLVII.



Somebody has said that in order to know a community, one must observe the

style of its funerals and know what manner of men they bury with most

ceremony.  I cannot say which class we buried with most eclat in our

"flush times," the distinguished public benefactor or the distinguished

rough--possibly the two chief grades or grand divisions of society

honored their illustrious dead about equally; and hence, no doubt the

philosopher I have quoted from would have needed to see two

representative funerals in Virginia before forming his estimate of the

people.



There was a grand time over Buck Fanshaw when he died.  He was a

representative citizen.  He had "killed his man"--not in his own quarrel,

it is true, but in defence of a stranger unfairly beset by numbers.

He had kept a sumptuous saloon.  He had been the proprietor of a dashing

helpmeet whom he could have discarded without the formality of a divorce.

He had held a high position in the fire department and been a very

Warwick in politics.  When he died there was great lamentation throughout

the town, but especially in the vast bottom-stratum of society.



On the inquest it was shown that Buck Fanshaw, in the delirium of a

wasting typhoid fever, had taken arsenic, shot himself through the body,

cut his throat, and jumped out of a four-story window and broken his

neck--and after due deliberation, the jury, sad and tearful, but with

intelligence unblinded by its sorrow, brought in a verdict of death "by

the visitation of God."  What could the world do without juries?



Prodigious preparations were made for the funeral.  All the vehicles in

town were hired, all the saloons put in mourning, all the municipal and

fire-company flags hung at half-mast, and all the firemen ordered to

muster in uniform and bring their machines duly draped in black.  Now--

let us remark in parenthesis--as all the peoples of the earth had

representative adventurers in the Silverland, and as each adventurer had

brought the slang of his nation or his locality with him, the combination

made the slang of Nevada the richest and the most infinitely varied and

copious that had ever existed anywhere in the world, perhaps, except in

the mines of California in the "early days."  Slang was the language of

Nevada.  It was hard to preach a sermon without it, and be understood.

Such phrases as "You bet!"  "Oh, no, I reckon not!"  "No Irish need

apply," and a hundred others, became so common as to fall from the lips

of a speaker unconsciously--and very often when they did not touch the

subject under discussion and consequently failed to mean anything.



After Buck Fanshaw's inquest, a meeting of the short-haired brotherhood

was held, for nothing can be done on the Pacific coast without a public

meeting and an expression of sentiment.  Regretful resolutions were

passed and various committees appointed; among others, a committee of one

was deputed to call on the minister, a fragile, gentle, spiritual new

fledgling from an Eastern theological seminary, and as yet unacquainted

with the ways of the mines.  The committeeman, "Scotty" Briggs, made his

visit; and in after days it was worth something to hear the minister tell

about it.  Scotty was a stalwart rough, whose customary suit, when on

weighty official business, like committee work, was a fire helmet,

flaming red flannel shirt, patent leather belt with spanner and revolver

attached, coat hung over arm, and pants stuffed into boot tops.

He formed something of a contrast to the pale theological student.  It is

fair to say of Scotty, however, in passing, that he had a warm heart, and

a strong love for his friends, and never entered into a quarrel when he

could reasonably keep out of it.  Indeed, it was commonly said that

whenever one of Scotty's fights was investigated, it always turned out

that it had originally been no affair of his, but that out of native

good-heartedness he had dropped in of his own accord to help the man who

was getting the worst of it.  He and Buck Fanshaw were bosom friends, for

years, and had often taken adventurous "pot-luck" together.  On one

occasion, they had thrown off their coats and taken the weaker side in a

fight among strangers, and after gaining a hard-earned victory, turned

and found that the men they were helping had deserted early, and not only

that, but had stolen their coats and made off with them!  But to return

to Scotty's visit to the minister.  He was on a sorrowful mission, now,

and his face was the picture of woe.  Being admitted to the presence he

sat down before the clergyman, placed his fire-hat on an unfinished

manuscript sermon under the minister's nose, took from it a red silk

handkerchief, wiped his brow and heaved a sigh of dismal impressiveness,

explanatory of his business.



He choked, and even shed tears; but with an effort he mastered his voice

and said in lugubrious tones:



"Are you the duck that runs the gospel-mill next door?"



"Am I the--pardon me, I believe I do not understand?"



With another sigh and a half-sob, Scotty rejoined:



"Why you see we are in a bit of trouble, and the boys thought maybe you

would give us a lift, if we'd tackle you--that is, if I've got the rights

of it and you are the head clerk of the doxology-works next door."



"I am the shepherd in charge of the flock whose fold is next door."



"The which?"



"The spiritual adviser of the little company of believers whose sanctuary

adjoins these premises."



Scotty scratched his head, reflected a moment, and then said:



"You ruther hold over me, pard.  I reckon I can't call that hand.  Ante

and pass the buck."



"How? I beg pardon.  What did I understand you to say?"



"Well, you've ruther got the bulge on me.  Or maybe we've both got the

bulge, somehow.  You don't smoke me and I don't smoke you.  You see, one

of the boys has passed in his checks and we want to give him a good send-

off, and so the thing I'm on now is to roust out somebody to jerk a

little chin-music for us and waltz him through handsome."



"My friend, I seem to grow more and more bewildered.  Your observations

are wholly incomprehensible to me.  Cannot you simplify them in some way?

At first I thought perhaps I understood you, but I grope now.  Would it

not expedite matters if you restricted yourself to categorical statements

of fact unencumbered with obstructing accumulations of metaphor and

allegory?"



Another pause, and more reflection.  Then, said Scotty:



"I'll have to pass, I judge."



"How?"



"You've raised me out, pard."



"I still fail to catch your meaning."



"Why, that last lead of yourn is too many for me--that's the idea.  I

can't neither-trump nor follow suit."



The clergyman sank back in his chair perplexed.  Scotty leaned his head

on his hand and gave himself up to thought.



Presently his face came up, sorrowful but confident.



"I've got it now, so's you can savvy," he said.  "What we want is a

gospel-sharp.  See?"



"A what?"



"Gospel-sharp.  Parson."



"Oh!  Why did you not say so before?  I am a clergyman--a parson."



"Now you talk!  You see my blind and straddle it like a man.  Put it

there!"--extending a brawny paw, which closed over the minister's small

hand and gave it a shake indicative of fraternal sympathy and fervent

gratification.



"Now we're all right, pard.  Let's start fresh.  Don't you mind my

snuffling a little--becuz we're in a power of trouble.  You see, one of

the boys has gone up the flume--"



"Gone where?"



"Up the flume--throwed up the sponge, you understand."



"Thrown up the sponge?"



"Yes--kicked the bucket--"



"Ah--has departed to that mysterious country from whose bourne no

traveler returns."



"Return!  I reckon not.  Why pard, he's dead!"



"Yes, I understand."



"Oh, you do?  Well I thought maybe you might be getting tangled some

more.  Yes, you see he's dead again--"



"Again?  Why, has he ever been dead before?"



"Dead before?  No!  Do you reckon a man has got as many lives as a cat?

But you bet you he's awful dead now, poor old boy, and I wish I'd never

seen this day.  I don't want no better friend than Buck Fanshaw.

I knowed him by the back; and when I know a man and like him, I freeze to

him--you hear me.  Take him all round, pard, there never was a bullier

man in the mines.  No man ever knowed Buck Fanshaw to go back on a

friend.  But it's all up, you know, it's all up.  It ain't no use.

They've scooped him."



"Scooped him?"



"Yes--death has.  Well, well, well, we've got to give him up.  Yes

indeed.  It's a kind of a hard world, after all, ain't it?  But pard, he

was a rustler!  You ought to seen him get started once.  He was a bully

boy with a glass eye!  Just spit in his face and give him room according

to his strength, and it was just beautiful to see him peel and go in.

He was the worst son of a thief that ever drawed breath.  Pard, he was on

it!  He was on it bigger than an Injun!"



"On it?  On what?"



"On the shoot.  On the shoulder.  On the fight, you understand.

He didn't give a continental for any body.  Beg your pardon, friend, for

coming so near saying a cuss-word--but you see I'm on an awful strain, in

this palaver, on account of having to cramp down and draw everything so

mild.  But we've got to give him up.  There ain't any getting around

that, I don't reckon.  Now if we can get you to help plant him--"



"Preach the funeral discourse?  Assist at the obsequies?"



"Obs'quies is good.  Yes.  That's it--that's our little game.  We are

going to get the thing up regardless, you know.  He was always nifty

himself, and so you bet you his funeral ain't going to be no slouch--

solid silver door-plate on his coffin, six plumes on the hearse, and a

nigger on the box in a biled shirt and a plug hat--how's that for high?

And we'll take care of you, pard.  We'll fix you all right.  There'll be

a kerridge for you; and whatever you want, you just 'scape out and we'll

'tend to it.  We've got a shebang fixed up for you to stand behind, in

No. 1's house, and don't you be afraid.  Just go in and toot your horn,

if you don't sell a clam.  Put Buck through as bully as you can, pard,

for anybody that knowed him will tell you that he was one of the whitest

men that was ever in the mines.  You can't draw it too strong.  He never

could stand it to see things going wrong.  He's done more to make this

town quiet and peaceable than any man in it.  I've seen him lick four

Greasers in eleven minutes, myself.  If a thing wanted regulating, he

warn't a man to go browsing around after somebody to do it, but he would

prance in and regulate it himself.  He warn't a Catholic.  Scasely.  He

was down on 'em.  His word was, 'No Irish need apply!'  But it didn't

make no difference about that when it came down to what a man's rights

was--and so, when some roughs jumped the Catholic bone-yard and started

in to stake out town-lots in it he went for 'em!  And he cleaned 'em,

too!  I was there, pard, and I seen it myself."



"That was very well indeed--at least the impulse was--whether the act was

strictly defensible or not.  Had deceased any religious convictions?

That is to say, did he feel a dependence upon, or acknowledge allegiance

to a higher power?"



More reflection.



"I reckon you've stumped me again, pard.  Could you say it over once

more, and say it slow?"



"Well, to simplify it somewhat, was he, or rather had he ever been

connected with any organization sequestered from secular concerns and

devoted to self-sacrifice in the interests of morality?"



"All down but nine--set 'em up on the other alley, pard."



"What did I understand you to say?"



"Why, you're most too many for me, you know.  When you get in with your

left I hunt grass every time.  Every time you draw, you fill; but I don't

seem to have any luck.  Lets have a new deal."



"How?  Begin again?"



"That's it."



"Very well.  Was he a good man, and--"



"There--I see that; don't put up another chip till I look at my hand.

A good man, says you?  Pard, it ain't no name for it.  He was the best

man that ever--pard, you would have doted on that man.  He could lam any

galoot of his inches in America.  It was him that put down the riot last

election before it got a start; and everybody said he was the only man

that could have done it.  He waltzed in with a spanner in one hand and a

trumpet in the other, and sent fourteen men home on a shutter in less

than three minutes.  He had that riot all broke up and prevented nice

before anybody ever got a chance to strike a blow.  He was always for

peace, and he would have peace--he could not stand disturbances.  Pard,

he was a great loss to this town.  It would please the boys if you could

chip in something like that and do him justice.  Here once when the Micks

got to throwing stones through the Methodis' Sunday school windows, Buck

Fanshaw, all of his own notion, shut up his saloon and took a couple of

six-shooters and mounted guard over the Sunday school.  Says he, 'No

Irish need apply!'  And they didn't.  He was the bulliest man in the

mountains, pard!  He could run faster, jump higher, hit harder, and hold

more tangle-foot whisky without spilling it than any man in seventeen

counties.  Put that in, pard--it'll please the boys more than anything

you could say.  And you can say, pard, that he never shook his mother."



"Never shook his mother?"



"That's it--any of the boys will tell you so."



"Well, but why should he shake her?"



"That's what I say--but some people does."



"Not people of any repute?"



"Well, some that averages pretty so-so."



"In my opinion the man that would offer personal violence to his own

mother, ought to--"



"Cheese it, pard; you've banked your ball clean outside the string.

What I was a drivin' at, was, that he never throwed off on his mother--

don't you see?  No indeedy.  He give her a house to live in, and town

lots, and plenty of money; and he looked after her and took care of her

all the time; and when she was down with the small-pox I'm d---d if he

didn't set up nights and nuss her himself!  Beg your pardon for saying

it, but it hopped out too quick for yours truly.



"You've treated me like a gentleman, pard, and I ain't the man to hurt

your feelings intentional.  I think you're white.  I think you're a

square man, pard.  I like you, and I'll lick any man that don't.  I'll

lick him till he can't tell himself from a last year's corpse!  Put it

there!" [Another fraternal hand-shake--and exit.]



The obsequies were all that "the boys" could desire.  Such a marvel of

funeral pomp had never been seen in Virginia.  The plumed hearse, the

dirge-breathing brass bands, the closed marts of business, the flags

drooping at half mast, the long, plodding procession of uniformed secret

societies, military battalions and fire companies, draped engines,

carriages of officials, and citizens in vehicles and on foot, attracted

multitudes of spectators to the sidewalks, roofs and windows; and for

years afterward, the degree of grandeur attained by any civic display in

Virginia was determined by comparison with Buck Fanshaw's funeral.



Scotty Briggs, as a pall-bearer and a mourner, occupied a prominent place

at the funeral, and when the sermon was finished and the last sentence of

the prayer for the dead man's soul ascended, he responded, in a low

voice, but with feelings:



"AMEN.  No Irish need apply."



As the bulk of the response was without apparent relevancy, it was

probably nothing more than a humble tribute to the memory of the friend

that was gone; for, as Scotty had once said, it was "his word."



Scotty Briggs, in after days, achieved the distinction of becoming the

only convert to religion that was ever gathered from the Virginia roughs;

and it transpired that the man who had it in him to espouse the quarrel

of the weak out of inborn nobility of spirit was no mean timber whereof

to construct a Christian.  The making him one did not warp his generosity

or diminish his courage; on the contrary it gave intelligent direction to

the one and a broader field to the other.



If his Sunday-school class progressed faster than the other classes, was

it matter for wonder?  I think not.  He talked to his pioneer small-fry

in a language they understood!  It was my large privilege, a month before

he died, to hear him tell the beautiful story of Joseph and his brethren

to his class "without looking at the book."  I leave it to the reader to

fancy what it was like, as it fell, riddled with slang, from the lips of

that grave, earnest teacher, and was listened to by his little learners

with a consuming interest that showed that they were as unconscious as he

was that any violence was being done to the sacred proprieties!









CHAPTER XLVIII.



The first twenty-six graves in the Virginia cemetery were occupied by

murdered men.  So everybody said, so everybody believed, and so they will

always say and believe.  The reason why there was so much slaughtering

done, was, that in a new mining district the rough element predominates,

and a person is not respected until he has "killed his man."  That was

the very expression used.



If an unknown individual arrived, they did not inquire if he was capable,

honest, industrious, but--had he killed his man?  If he had not, he

gravitated to his natural and proper position, that of a man of small

consequence; if he had, the cordiality of his reception was graduated

according to the number of his dead.  It was tedious work struggling up

to a position of influence with bloodless hands; but when a man came with

the blood of half a dozen men on his soul, his worth was recognized at

once and his acquaintance sought.



In Nevada, for a time, the lawyer, the editor, the banker, the chief

desperado, the chief gambler, and the saloon keeper, occupied the same

level in society, and it was the highest.  The cheapest and easiest way

to become an influential man and be looked up to by the community at

large, was to stand behind a bar, wear a cluster-diamond pin, and sell

whisky.  I am not sure but that the saloon-keeper held a shade higher

rank than any other member of society.  His opinion had weight.  It was

his privilege to say how the elections should go.  No great movement

could succeed without the countenance and direction of the saloon-

keepers.  It was a high favor when the chief saloon-keeper consented to

serve in the legislature or the board of aldermen.



Youthful ambition hardly aspired so much to the honors of the law, or the

army and navy as to the dignity of proprietorship in a saloon.



To be a saloon-keeper and kill a man was to be illustrious.  Hence the

reader will not be surprised to learn that more than one man was killed

in Nevada under hardly the pretext of provocation, so impatient was the

slayer to achieve reputation and throw off the galling sense of being

held in indifferent repute by his associates.  I knew two youths who

tried to "kill their men" for no other reason--and got killed themselves

for their pains.  "There goes the man that killed Bill Adams" was higher

praise and a sweeter sound in the ears of this sort of people than any

other speech that admiring lips could utter.



The men who murdered Virginia's original twenty-six cemetery-occupants

were never punished.  Why?  Because Alfred the Great, when he invented

trial by jury and knew that he had admirably framed it to secure justice

in his age of the world, was not aware that in the nineteenth century the

condition of things would be so entirely changed that unless he rose from

the grave and altered the jury plan to meet the emergency, it would prove

the most ingenious and infallible agency for defeating justice that human

wisdom could contrive.  For how could he imagine that we simpletons would

go on using his jury plan after circumstances had stripped it of its

usefulness, any more than he could imagine that we would go on using his

candle-clock after we had invented chronometers?  In his day news could

not travel fast, and hence he could easily find a jury of honest,

intelligent men who had not heard of the case they were called to try--

but in our day of telegraphs and newspapers his plan compels us to swear

in juries composed of fools and rascals, because the system rigidly

excludes honest men and men of brains.



I remember one of those sorrowful farces, in Virginia, which we call a

jury trial.  A noted desperado killed Mr. B., a good citizen, in the most

wanton and cold-blooded way.  Of course the papers were full of it, and

all men capable of reading, read about it.  And of course all men not

deaf and dumb and idiotic, talked about it.  A jury-list was made out,

and Mr. B. L., a prominent banker and a valued citizen, was questioned

precisely as he would have been questioned in any court in America:



"Have you heard of this homicide?"



"Yes."



"Have you held conversations upon the subject?"



"Yes."



"Have you formed or expressed opinions about it?"



"Yes."



"Have you read the newspaper accounts of it?"



"Yes."



"We do not want you."



A minister, intelligent, esteemed, and greatly respected; a merchant of

high character and known probity; a mining superintendent of intelligence

and unblemished reputation; a quartz mill owner of excellent standing,

were all questioned in the same way, and all set aside.  Each said the

public talk and the newspaper reports had not so biased his mind but that

sworn testimony would overthrow his previously formed opinions and enable

him to render a verdict without prejudice and in accordance with the

facts.  But of course such men could not be trusted with the case.

Ignoramuses alone could mete out unsullied justice.



When the peremptory challenges were all exhausted, a jury of twelve men

was impaneled--a jury who swore they had neither heard, read, talked

about nor expressed an opinion concerning a murder which the very cattle

in the corrals, the Indians in the sage-brush and the stones in the

streets were cognizant of!  It was a jury composed of two desperadoes,

two low beer-house politicians, three bar-keepers, two ranchmen who could

not read, and three dull, stupid, human donkeys!  It actually came out

afterward, that one of these latter thought that incest and arson were

the same thing.



The verdict rendered by this jury was, Not Guilty.  What else could one

expect?



The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty, and a premium

upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury.  It is a shame that we must

continue to use a worthless system because it was good a thousand years

ago.  In this age, when a gentleman of high social standing, intelligence

and probity, swears that testimony given under solemn oath will outweigh,

with him, street talk and newspaper reports based upon mere hearsay, he

is worth a hundred jurymen who will swear to their own ignorance and

stupidity, and justice would be far safer in his hands than in theirs.

Why could not the jury law be so altered as to give men of brains and

honesty and equal chance with fools and miscreants?  Is it right to show

the present favoritism to one class of men and inflict a disability on

another, in a land whose boast is that all its citizens are free and

equal?  I am a candidate for the legislature.  I desire to tamper with

the jury law.  I wish to so alter it as to put a premium on intelligence

and character, and close the jury box against idiots, blacklegs, and

people who do not read newspapers.  But no doubt I shall be defeated--

every effort I make to save the country "misses fire."



My idea, when I began this chapter, was to say something about

desperadoism in the "flush times" of Nevada.  To attempt a portrayal of

that era and that land, and leave out the blood and carnage, would be

like portraying Mormondom and leaving out polygamy.  The desperado

stalked the streets with a swagger graded according to the number of his

homicides, and a nod of recognition from him was sufficient to make a

humble admirer happy for the rest of the day.  The deference that was

paid to a desperado of wide reputation, and who "kept his private

graveyard," as the phrase went, was marked, and cheerfully accorded.

When he moved along the sidewalk in his excessively long-tailed frock-

coat, shiny stump-toed boots, and with dainty little slouch hat tipped

over left eye, the small-fry roughs made room for his majesty; when he

entered the restaurant, the waiters deserted bankers and merchants to

overwhelm him with obsequious service; when he shouldered his way to a

bar, the shouldered parties wheeled indignantly, recognized him, and--

apologized.



They got a look in return that froze their marrow, and by that time a

curled and breast-pinned bar keeper was beaming over the counter, proud

of the established acquaintanceship that permitted such a familiar form

of speech as:



"How're ye, Billy, old fel?  Glad to see you.  What'll you take--the old

thing?"



The "old thing" meant his customary drink, of course.



The best known names in the Territory of Nevada were those belonging to

these long-tailed heroes of the revolver.  Orators, Governors,

capitalists and leaders of the legislature enjoyed a degree of fame, but

it seemed local and meagre when contrasted with the fame of such men as

Sam Brown, Jack Williams, Billy Mulligan, Farmer Pease, Sugarfoot Mike,

Pock Marked Jake, El Dorado Johnny, Jack McNabb, Joe McGee, Jack Harris,

Six-fingered Pete, etc., etc.  There was a long list of them.  They were

brave, reckless men, and traveled with their lives in their hands.  To

give them their due, they did their killing principally among themselves,

and seldom molested peaceable citizens, for they considered it small

credit to add to their trophies so cheap a bauble as the death of a man

who was "not on the shoot," as they phrased it.  They killed each other

on slight provocation, and hoped and expected to be killed themselves--

for they held it almost shame to die otherwise than "with their boots

on," as they expressed it.



I remember an instance of a desperado's contempt for such small game as a

private citizen's life.  I was taking a late supper in a restaurant one

night, with two reporters and a little printer named--Brown, for

instance--any name will do.  Presently a stranger with a long-tailed coat

on came in, and not noticing Brown's hat, which was lying in a chair, sat

down on it.  Little Brown sprang up and became abusive in a moment.  The

stranger smiled, smoothed out the hat, and offered it to Brown with

profuse apologies couched in caustic sarcasm, and begged Brown not to

destroy him.  Brown threw off his coat and challenged the man to fight--

abused him, threatened him, impeached his courage, and urged and even

implored him to fight; and in the meantime the smiling stranger placed

himself under our protection in mock distress.  But presently he assumed

a serious tone, and said:



"Very well, gentlemen, if we must fight, we must, I suppose.  But don't

rush into danger and then say I gave you no warning.  I am more than a

match for all of you when I get started.  I will give you proofs, and

then if my friend here still insists, I will try to accommodate him."



The table we were sitting at was about five feet long, and unusually

cumbersome and heavy.  He asked us to put our hands on the dishes and

hold them in their places a moment--one of them was a large oval dish

with a portly roast on it.  Then he sat down, tilted up one end of the

table, set two of the legs on his knees, took the end of the table

between his teeth, took his hands away, and pulled down with his teeth

till the table came up to a level position, dishes and all!  He said he

could lift a keg of nails with his teeth.  He picked up a common glass

tumbler and bit a semi-circle out of it.  Then he opened his bosom and

showed us a net-work of knife and bullet scars; showed us more on his

arms and face, and said he believed he had bullets enough in his body to

make a pig of lead.  He was armed to the teeth.  He closed with the

remark that he was Mr. ---- of Cariboo--a celebrated name whereat we shook

in our shoes.  I would publish the name, but for the suspicion that he

might come and carve me.  He finally inquired if Brown still thirsted for

blood.  Brown turned the thing over in his mind a moment, and then--asked

him to supper.



With the permission of the reader, I will group together, in the next

chapter, some samples of life in our small mountain village in the old

days of desperadoism.  I was there at the time.  The reader will observe

peculiarities in our official society; and he will observe also, an

instance of how, in new countries, murders breed murders.









CHAPTER XLIX.



An extract or two from the newspapers of the day will furnish a

photograph that can need no embellishment:



      FATAL SHOOTING AFFRAY.--An affray occurred, last evening, in a

      billiard saloon on C street, between Deputy Marshal Jack Williams

      and Wm. Brown, which resulted in the immediate death of the latter.

      There had been some difficulty between the parties for several

      months.



      An inquest was immediately held, and the following testimony

      adduced:



      Officer GEO. BIRDSALL, sworn, says:--I was told Wm. Brown was drunk

      and was looking for Jack Williams; so soon as I heard that I started

      for the parties to prevent a collision; went into the billiard

      saloon; saw Billy Brown running around, saying if anybody had

      anything against him to show cause; he was talking in a boisterous

      manner, and officer Perry took him to the other end of the room to

      talk to him; Brown came back to me; remarked to me that he thought

      he was as good as anybody, and knew how to take care of himself; he

      passed by me and went to the bar; don't know whether he drank or

      not; Williams was at the end of the billiard-table, next to the

      stairway; Brown, after going to the bar, came back and said he was

      as good as any man in the world; he had then walked out to the end

      of the first billiard-table from the bar; I moved closer to them,

      supposing there would be a fight; as Brown drew his pistol I caught

      hold of it; he had fired one shot at Williams; don't know the effect

      of it; caught hold of him with one hand, and took hold of the pistol

      and turned it up; think he fired once after I caught hold of the

      pistol; I wrenched the pistol from him; walked to the end of the

      billiard-table and told a party that I had Brown's pistol, and to

      stop shooting; I think four shots were fired in all; after walking

      out, Mr. Foster remarked that Brown was shot dead.



Oh, there was no excitement about it--he merely "remarked" the small

circumstance!



Four months later the following item appeared in the same paper (the

Enterprise).  In this item the name of one of the city officers above

referred to (Deputy Marshal Jack Williams) occurs again:



      ROBBERY AND DESPERATE AFFRAY.--On Tuesday night, a German named

      Charles Hurtzal, engineer in a mill at Silver City, came to this

      place, and visited the hurdy-gurdy house on B street.  The music,

      dancing and Teutonic maidens awakened memories of Faderland until

      our German friend was carried away with rapture.  He evidently had

      money, and was spending if freely.  Late in the evening Jack

      Williams and Andy Blessington invited him down stairs to take a cup

      of coffee.  Williams proposed a game of cards and went up stairs to

      procure a deck, but not finding any returned.  On the stairway he

      met the German, and drawing his pistol knocked him down and rifled

      his pockets of some seventy dollars.  Hurtzal dared give no alarm,

      as he was told, with a pistol at his head, if he made any noise or

      exposed them, they would blow his brains out.  So effectually was he

      frightened that he made no complaint, until his friends forced him.

      Yesterday a warrant was issued, but the culprits had disappeared.



This efficient city officer, Jack Williams, had the common reputation of

being a burglar, a highwayman and a desperado.  It was said that he had

several times drawn his revolver and levied money contributions on

citizens at dead of night in the public streets of Virginia.



Five months after the above item appeared, Williams was assassinated

while sitting at a card table one night; a gun was thrust through the

crack of the door and Williams dropped from his chair riddled with balls.

It was said, at the time, that Williams had been for some time aware that

a party of his own sort (desperadoes) had sworn away his life; and it was

generally believed among the people that Williams's friends and enemies

would make the assassination memorable--and useful, too--by a wholesale

destruction of each other.



It did not so happen, but still, times were not dull during the next

twenty-four hours, for within that time a woman was killed by a pistol

shot, a man was brained with a slung shot, and a man named Reeder was

also disposed of permanently.  Some matters in the Enterprise account of

the killing of Reeder are worth nothing--especially the accommodating

complaisance of a Virginia justice of the peace.  The italics in the

following narrative are mine:



      MORE CUTTING AND SHOOTING.--The devil seems to have again broken

      loose in our town.  Pistols and guns explode and knives gleam in our

      streets as in early times.  When there has been a long season of

      quiet, people are slow to wet their hands in blood; but once blood

      is spilled, cutting and shooting come easy.  Night before last Jack

      Williams was assassinated, and yesterday forenoon we had more bloody

      work, growing out of the killing of Williams, and on the same street

      in which he met his death.  It appears that Tom Reeder, a friend of

      Williams, and George Gumbert were talking, at the meat market of the

      latter, about the killing of Williams the previous night, when

      Reeder said it was a most cowardly act to shoot a man in such a way,

      giving him "no show."  Gumbert said that Williams had "as good a

      show as he gave Billy Brown," meaning the man killed by Williams

      last March.  Reeder said it was a d---d lie, that Williams had no

      show at all.  At this, Gumbert drew a knife and stabbed Reeder,

      cutting him in two places in the back.  One stroke of the knife cut

      into the sleeve of Reeder's coat and passed downward in a slanting

      direction through his clothing, and entered his body at the small of

      the back; another blow struck more squarely, and made a much more

      dangerous wound.  Gumbert gave himself up to the officers of

      justice, and was shortly after discharged by Justice Atwill, on his

      own recognizance, to appear for trial at six o'clock in the evening.

      In the meantime Reeder had been taken into the office of Dr. Owens,

      where his wounds were properly dressed.  One of his wounds was

      considered quite dangerous, and it was thought by many that it would

      prove fatal.  But being considerably under the influence of liquor,

      Reeder did not feel his wounds as he otherwise would, and he got up

      and went into the street.  He went to the meat market and renewed

      his quarrel with Gumbert, threatening his life.  Friends tried to

      interfere to put a stop to the quarrel and get the parties away from

      each other.  In the Fashion Saloon Reeder made threats against the

      life of Gumbert, saying he would kill him, and it is said that he

      requested the officers not to arrest Gumbert, as he intended to kill

      him.  After these threats Gumbert went off and procured a double-

      barreled shot gun, loaded with buck-shot or revolver balls, and went

      after Reeder.  Two or three persons were assisting him along the

      street, trying to get him home, and had him just in front of the

      store of Klopstock & Harris, when Gumbert came across toward him

      from the opposite side of the street with his gun.  He came up

      within about ten or fifteen feet of Reeder, and called out to those

      with him to "look out! get out of the way!" and they had only time

      to heed the warning, when he fired.  Reeder was at the time

      attempting to screen himself behind a large cask, which stood

      against the awning post of Klopstock & Harris's store, but some of

      the balls took effect in the lower part of his breast, and he reeled

      around forward and fell in front of the cask.  Gumbert then raised

      his gun and fired the second barrel, which missed Reeder and entered

      the ground.  At the time that this occurred, there were a great many

      persons on the street in the vicinity, and a number of them called

      out to Gumbert, when they saw him raise his gun, to "hold on," and

      "don't shoot!"  The cutting took place about ten o'clock and the

      shooting about twelve.  After the shooting the street was instantly

      crowded with the inhabitants of that part of the town, some

      appearing much excited and laughing--declaring that it looked like

      the "good old times of '60."  Marshal Perry and officer Birdsall

      were near when the shooting occurred, and Gumbert was immediately

      arrested and his gun taken from him, when he was marched off to

      jail.  Many persons who were attracted to the spot where this bloody

      work had just taken place, looked bewildered and seemed to be asking

      themselves what was to happen next, appearing in doubt as to whether

      the killing mania had reached its climax, or whether we were to turn

      in and have a grand killing spell, shooting whoever might have given

      us offence.  It was whispered around that it was not all over yet--

      five or six more were to be killed before night.  Reeder was taken

      to the Virginia City Hotel, and doctors called in to examine his

      wounds.  They found that two or three balls had entered his right

      side; one of them appeared to have passed through the substance of

      the lungs, while another passed into the liver.  Two balls were also

      found to have struck one of his legs.  As some of the balls struck

      the cask, the wounds in Reeder's leg were probably from these,

      glancing downwards, though they might have been caused by the second

      shot fired.  After being shot, Reeder said when he got on his feet--

      smiling as he spoke--"It will take better shooting than that to kill

      me."  The doctors consider it almost impossible for him to recover,

      but as he has an excellent constitution he may survive,

      notwithstanding the number and dangerous character of the wounds he

      has received.  The town appears to be perfectly quiet at present, as

      though the late stormy times had cleared our moral atmosphere; but

      who can tell in what quarter clouds are lowering or plots ripening?



Reeder--or at least what was left of him--survived his wounds two days!

Nothing was ever done with Gumbert.



Trial by jury is the palladium of our liberties.  I do not know what a

palladium is, having never seen a palladium, but it is a good thing no

doubt at any rate.  Not less than a hundred men have been murdered in

Nevada--perhaps I would be within bounds if I said three hundred--and as

far as I can learn, only two persons have suffered the death penalty

there.  However, four or five who had no money and no political influence

have been punished by imprisonment--one languished in prison as much as

eight months, I think.  However, I do not desire to be extravagant--it

may have been less.



However, one prophecy was verified, at any rate.  It was asserted by the

desperadoes that one of their brethren (Joe McGee, a special policeman)

was known to be the conspirator chosen by lot to assassinate Williams;

and they also asserted that doom had been pronounced against McGee, and

that he would be assassinated in exactly the same manner that had been

adopted for the destruction of Williams--a prophecy which came true a

year later.  After twelve months of distress (for McGee saw a fancied

assassin in every man that approached him), he made the last of many

efforts to get out of the country unwatched.  He went to Carson and sat

down in a saloon to wait for the stage--it would leave at four in the

morning.  But as the night waned and the crowd thinned, he grew uneasy,

and told the bar-keeper that assassins were on his track.  The bar-keeper

told him to stay in the middle of the room, then, and not go near the

door, or the window by the stove.  But a fatal fascination seduced him to

the neighborhood of the stove every now and then, and repeatedly the bar-

keeper brought him back to the middle of the room and warned him to

remain there.  But he could not.  At three in the morning he again

returned to the stove and sat down by a stranger.  Before the bar-keeper

could get to him with another warning whisper, some one outside fired

through the window and riddled McGee's breast with slugs, killing him

almost instantly.  By the same discharge the stranger at McGee's side

also received attentions which proved fatal in the course of two or three

days.









CHAPTER L.



These murder and jury statistics remind me of a certain very

extraordinary trial and execution of twenty years ago; it is a scrap of

history familiar to all old Californians, and worthy to be known by other

peoples of the earth that love simple, straightforward justice

unencumbered with nonsense.  I would apologize for this digression but

for the fact that the information I am about to offer is apology enough

in itself.  And since I digress constantly anyhow, perhaps it is as well

to eschew apologies altogether and thus prevent their growing irksome.



Capt. Ned Blakely--that name will answer as well as any other fictitious

one (for he was still with the living at last accounts, and may not

desire to be famous)--sailed ships out of the harbor of San Francisco for

many years.  He was a stalwart, warm-hearted, eagle-eyed veteran, who had

been a sailor nearly fifty years--a sailor from early boyhood.  He was a

rough, honest creature, full of pluck, and just as full of hard-headed

simplicity, too.  He hated trifling conventionalities--"business" was the

word, with him.  He had all a sailor's vindictiveness against the quips

and quirks of the law, and steadfastly believed that the first and last

aim and object of the law and lawyers was to defeat justice.



He sailed for the Chincha Islands in command of a guano ship.  He had a

fine crew, but his negro mate was his pet--on him he had for years

lavished his admiration and esteem.  It was Capt. Ned's first voyage to

the Chinchas, but his fame had gone before him--the fame of being a man

who would fight at the dropping of a handkerchief, when imposed upon, and

would stand no nonsense.  It was a fame well earned.  Arrived in the

islands, he found that the staple of conversation was the exploits of one

Bill Noakes, a bully, the mate of a trading ship.  This man had created a

small reign of terror there.  At nine o'clock at night, Capt. Ned, all

alone, was pacing his deck in the starlight.  A form ascended the side,

and approached him.  Capt. Ned said:



"Who goes there?"



"I'm Bill Noakes, the best man in the islands."



"What do you want aboard this ship?"



"I've heard of Capt. Ned Blakely, and one of us is a better man than

'tother--I'll know which, before I go ashore."



"You've come to the right shop--I'm your man.  I'll learn you to come

aboard this ship without an invite."



He seized Noakes, backed him against the mainmast, pounded his face to a

pulp, and then threw him overboard.



Noakes was not convinced.  He returned the next night, got the pulp

renewed, and went overboard head first, as before.



He was satisfied.



A week after this, while Noakes was carousing with a sailor crowd on

shore, at noonday, Capt. Ned's colored mate came along, and Noakes tried

to pick a quarrel with him.  The negro evaded the trap, and tried to get

away.  Noakes followed him up; the negro began to run; Noakes fired on

him with a revolver and killed him.  Half a dozen sea-captains witnessed

the whole affair.  Noakes retreated to the small after-cabin of his ship,

with two other bullies, and gave out that death would be the portion of

any man that intruded there.  There was no attempt made to follow the

villains; there was no disposition to do it, and indeed very little

thought of such an enterprise.  There were no courts and no officers;

there was no government; the islands belonged to Peru, and Peru was far

away; she had no official representative on the ground; and neither had

any other nation.



However, Capt. Ned was not perplexing his head about such things.  They

concerned him not.  He was boiling with rage and furious for justice.

At nine o'clock at night he loaded a double-barreled gun with slugs,

fished out a pair of handcuffs, got a ship's lantern, summoned his

quartermaster, and went ashore.  He said:



"Do you see that ship there at the dock?"



"Ay-ay, sir."



"It's the Venus."



"Ay-ay, sir."



"You--you know me."



"Ay-ay, sir."



"Very well, then.  Take the lantern.  Carry it just under your chin.

I'll walk behind you and rest this gun-barrel on your shoulder, p'inting

forward--so.  Keep your lantern well up so's I can see things ahead of

you good.  I'm going to march in on Noakes--and take him--and jug the

other chaps.  If you flinch--well, you know me."



"Ay-ay, sir."



In this order they filed aboard softly, arrived at Noakes's den, the

quartermaster pushed the door open, and the lantern revealed the three

desperadoes sitting on the floor.  Capt.  Ned said:



"I'm Ned Blakely.  I've got you under fire.  Don't you move without

orders--any of you.  You two kneel down in the corner; faces to the wall

--now.  Bill Noakes, put these handcuffs on; now come up close.

Quartermaster, fasten 'em.  All right.  Don't stir, sir.  Quartermaster,

put the key in the outside of the door.  Now, men, I'm going to lock you

two in; and if you try to burst through this door--well, you've heard of

me.  Bill Noakes, fall in ahead, and march.  All set.  Quartermaster,

lock the door."



Noakes spent the night on board Blakely's ship, a prisoner under strict

guard.  Early in the morning Capt. Ned called in all the sea-captains in

the harbor and invited them, with nautical ceremony, to be present on

board his ship at nine o'clock to witness the hanging of Noakes at the

yard-arm!



"What!  The man has not been tried."



"Of course he hasn't.  But didn't he kill the nigger?"



"Certainly he did; but you are not thinking of hanging him without a

trial?"



"Trial!  What do I want to try him for, if he killed the nigger?"



"Oh, Capt.  Ned, this will never do.  Think how it will sound."



"Sound be hanged!  Didn't he kill the nigger?"



"Certainly, certainly, Capt.  Ned,--nobody denies that,--but--"



"Then I'm going to hang him, that's all.  Everybody I've talked to talks

just the same way you do.  Everybody says he killed the nigger, everybody

knows he killed the nigger, and yet every lubber of you wants him tried

for it.  I don't understand such bloody foolishness as that.  Tried!

Mind you, I don't object to trying him, if it's got to be done to give

satisfaction; and I'll be there, and chip in and help, too; but put it

off till afternoon--put it off till afternoon, for I'll have my hands

middling full till after the burying--"



"Why, what do you mean?  Are you going to hang him any how--and try him

afterward?"



"Didn't I say I was going to hang him?  I never saw such people as you.

What's the difference?  You ask a favor, and then you ain't satisfied

when you get it.  Before or after's all one--you know how the trial will

go.  He killed the nigger.  Say--I must be going.  If your mate would

like to come to the hanging, fetch him along.  I like him."



There was a stir in the camp.  The captains came in a body and pleaded

with Capt. Ned not to do this rash thing.  They promised that they would

create a court composed of captains of the best character; they would

empanel a jury; they would conduct everything in a way becoming the

serious nature of the business in hand, and give the case an impartial

hearing and the accused a fair trial.  And they said it would be murder,

and punishable by the American courts if he persisted and hung the

accused on his ship.  They pleaded hard.  Capt. Ned said:



"Gentlemen, I'm not stubborn and I'm not unreasonable.  I'm always

willing to do just as near right as I can.  How long will it take?"



"Probably only a little while."



"And can I take him up the shore and hang him as soon as you are done?"



"If he is proven guilty he shall be hanged without unnecessary delay."



"If he's proven guilty.  Great Neptune, ain't he guilty?  This beats my

time.  Why you all know he's guilty."



But at last they satisfied him that they were projecting nothing

underhanded.  Then he said:



"Well, all right.  You go on and try him and I'll go down and overhaul

his conscience and prepare him to go--like enough he needs it, and I

don't want to send him off without a show for hereafter."



This was another obstacle.  They finally convinced him that it was

necessary to have the accused in court.  Then they said they would send a

guard to bring him.



"No, sir, I prefer to fetch him myself--he don't get out of my hands.

Besides, I've got to go to the ship to get a rope, anyway."



The court assembled with due ceremony, empaneled a jury, and presently

Capt. Ned entered, leading the prisoner with one hand and carrying a

Bible and a rope in the other.  He seated himself by the side of his

captive and told the court to "up anchor and make sail."  Then he turned

a searching eye on the jury, and detected Noakes's friends, the two

bullies.



He strode over and said to them confidentially:



"You're here to interfere, you see.  Now you vote right, do you hear?--or

else there'll be a double-barreled inquest here when this trial's off,

and your remainders will go home in a couple of baskets."



The caution was not without fruit.  The jury was a unit--the verdict.

"Guilty."



Capt.  Ned sprung to his feet and said:



"Come along--you're my meat now, my lad, anyway.  Gentlemen you've done

yourselves proud.  I invite you all to come and see that I do it all

straight.  Follow me to the canyon, a mile above here."



The court informed him that a sheriff had been appointed to do the

hanging, and--



Capt.  Ned's patience was at an end.  His wrath was boundless.  The

subject of a sheriff was judiciously dropped.



When the crowd arrived at the canyon, Capt. Ned climbed a tree and

arranged the halter, then came down and noosed his man.  He opened his

Bible, and laid aside his hat.  Selecting a chapter at random, he read it

through, in a deep bass voice and with sincere solemnity.  Then he said:



"Lad, you are about to go aloft and give an account of yourself; and the

lighter a man's manifest is, as far as sin's concerned, the better for

him.  Make a clean breast, man, and carry a log with you that'll bear

inspection.  You killed the nigger?"



No reply.  A long pause.



The captain read another chapter, pausing, from time to time, to impress

the effect.  Then he talked an earnest, persuasive sermon to him, and

ended by repeating the question:



"Did you kill the nigger?"



No reply--other than a malignant scowl.  The captain now read the first

and second chapters of Genesis, with deep feeling--paused a moment,

closed the book reverently, and said with a perceptible savor of

satisfaction:



"There.  Four chapters.  There's few that would have took the pains with

you that I have."



Then he swung up the condemned, and made the rope fast; stood by and

timed him half an hour with his watch, and then delivered the body to the

court.  A little after, as he stood contemplating the motionless figure,

a doubt came into his face; evidently he felt a twinge of conscience--a

misgiving--and he said with a sigh:



"Well, p'raps I ought to burnt him, maybe.  But I was trying to do for

the best."



When the history of this affair reached California (it was in the "early

days") it made a deal of talk, but did not diminish the captain's

popularity in any degree.  It increased it, indeed.  California had a

population then that "inflicted" justice after a fashion that was

simplicity and primitiveness itself, and could therefore admire

appreciatively when the same fashion was followed elsewhere.









CHAPTER LI.



Vice flourished luxuriantly during the hey-day of our "flush times."  The

saloons were overburdened with custom; so were the police courts, the

gambling dens, the brothels and the jails--unfailing signs of high

prosperity in a mining region--in any region for that matter.  Is it not

so?  A crowded police court docket is the surest of all signs that trade

is brisk and money plenty.  Still, there is one other sign; it comes

last, but when it does come it establishes beyond cavil that the "flush

times" are at the flood.  This is the birth of the "literary" paper.

The Weekly Occidental, "devoted to literature," made its appearance in

Virginia.  All the literary people were engaged to write for it.  Mr. F.

was to edit it.  He was a felicitous skirmisher with a pen, and a man who

could say happy things in a crisp, neat way.  Once, while editor of the

Union, he had disposed of a labored, incoherent, two-column attack made

upon him by a contemporary, with a single line, which, at first glance,

seemed to contain a solemn and tremendous compliment--viz.: "THE LOGIC OF

OUR ADVERSARY RESEMBLES THE PEACE OF GOD,"--and left it to the reader's

memory and after-thought to invest the remark with another and "more

different" meaning by supplying for himself and at his own leisure the

rest of the Scripture--" in that it passeth understanding."  He once said

of a little, half-starved, wayside community that had no subsistence

except what they could get by preying upon chance passengers who stopped

over with them a day when traveling by the overland stage, that in their

Church service they had altered the Lord's Prayer to read: "Give us this

day our daily stranger!"



We expected great things of the Occidental.  Of course it could not get

along without an original novel, and so we made arrangements to hurl into

the work the full strength of the company.  Mrs. F. was an able romancist

of the ineffable school--I know no other name to apply to a school whose

heroes are all dainty and all perfect.  She wrote the opening chapter,

and introduced a lovely blonde simpleton who talked nothing but pearls

and poetry and who was virtuous to the verge of eccentricity.  She also

introduced a young French Duke of aggravated refinement, in love with the

blonde.  Mr. F. followed next week, with a brilliant lawyer who set about

getting the Duke's estates into trouble, and a sparkling young lady of

high society who fell to fascinating the Duke and impairing the appetite

of the blonde.  Mr. D., a dark and bloody editor of one of the dailies,

followed Mr. F., the third  week, introducing a mysterious Roscicrucian

who transmuted metals, held consultations with the devil in a cave at

dead of night, and cast the horoscope of the several heroes and heroines

in such a way as to provide plenty of trouble for their future careers

and breed a solemn and awful public interest in the novel.  He also

introduced a cloaked and masked melodramatic miscreant, put him on a

salary and set him on the midnight track of the Duke with a poisoned

dagger.  He also created an Irish coachman with a rich brogue and placed

him in the service of the society-young-lady with an ulterior mission to

carry billet-doux to the Duke.



About this time there arrived in Virginia a dissolute stranger with a

literary turn of mind--rather seedy he was, but very quiet and

unassuming; almost diffident, indeed.  He was so gentle, and his manners

were so pleasing and kindly, whether he was sober or intoxicated, that he

made friends of all who came in contact with him.  He applied for

literary work, offered conclusive evidence that he wielded an easy and

practiced pen, and so Mr. F. engaged him at once to help write the novel.

His chapter was to follow Mr. D.'s, and mine was to come next.  Now what

does this fellow do but go off and get drunk and then proceed to his

quarters and set to work with his imagination in a state of chaos, and

that chaos in a condition of extravagant activity.  The result may be

guessed.  He scanned the chapters of his predecessors, found plenty of

heroes and heroines already created, and was satisfied with them; he

decided to introduce no more; with all the confidence that whisky

inspires and all the easy complacency it gives to its servant, he then

launched himself lovingly into his work: he married the coachman to the

society-young-lady for the sake of the scandal; married the Duke to the

blonde's stepmother, for the sake of the sensation; stopped the

desperado's salary; created a misunderstanding between the devil and the

Roscicrucian; threw the Duke's property into the wicked lawyer's hands;

made the lawyer's upbraiding conscience drive him to drink, thence to

delirium tremens, thence to suicide; broke the coachman's neck; let his

widow succumb to contumely, neglect, poverty and consumption; caused the

blonde to drown herself, leaving her clothes on the bank with the

customary note pinned to them forgiving the Duke and hoping he would be

happy; revealed to the Duke, by means of the usual strawberry mark on

left arm, that he had married his own long-lost mother and destroyed his

long-lost sister; instituted the proper and necessary suicide of the Duke

and the Duchess in order to compass poetical justice; opened the earth

and let the Roscicrucian through, accompanied with the accustomed smoke

and thunder and smell of brimstone, and finished with the promise that in

the next chapter, after holding a general inquest, he would take up the

surviving character of the novel and tell what became of the devil!

It read with singular smoothness, and with a "dead" earnestness that was

funny enough to suffocate a body.  But there was war when it came in.

The other novelists were furious.  The mild stranger, not yet more than

half sober, stood there, under a scathing fire of vituperation, meek and

bewildered, looking from one to another of his assailants, and wondering

what he could have done to invoke such a storm.  When a lull came at

last, he said his say gently and appealingly--said he did not rightly

remember what he had written, but was sure he had tried to do the best he

could, and knew his object had been to make the novel not only pleasant

and plausible but instructive and----



The bombardment began again.  The novelists assailed his ill-chosen

adjectives and demolished them with a storm of denunciation and ridicule.

And so the siege went on.  Every time the stranger tried to appease the

enemy he only made matters worse.  Finally he offered to rewrite the

chapter.  This arrested hostilities.  The indignation gradually quieted

down, peace reigned again and the sufferer retired in safety and got him

to his own citadel.



But on the way thither the evil angel tempted him and he got drunk again.

And again his imagination went mad.  He led the heroes and heroines a

wilder dance than ever; and yet all through it ran that same convincing

air of honesty and earnestness that had marked his first work.  He got

the characters into the most extraordinary situations, put them through

the most surprising performances, and made them talk the strangest talk!

But the chapter cannot be described.  It was symmetrically crazy; it was

artistically absurd; and it had explanatory footnotes that were fully as

curious as the text.  I remember one of the "situations," and will offer

it as an example of the whole.  He altered the character of the brilliant

lawyer, and made him a great-hearted, splendid fellow; gave him fame and

riches, and set his age at thirty-three years.  Then he made the blonde

discover, through the help of the Roscicrucian and the melodramatic

miscreant, that while the Duke loved her money ardently and wanted it, he

secretly felt a sort of leaning toward the society-young-lady.  Stung to

the quick, she tore her affections from him and bestowed them with

tenfold power upon the lawyer, who responded with consuming zeal.  But

the parents would none of it.  What they wanted in the family was a Duke;

and a Duke they were determined to have; though they confessed that next

to the Duke the lawyer had their preference.  Necessarily the blonde now

went into a decline.  The parents were alarmed.  They pleaded with her to

marry the Duke, but she steadfastly refused, and pined on.  Then they

laid a plan.  They told her to wait a year and a day, and if at the end

of that time she still felt that she could not marry the Duke, she might

marry the lawyer with their full consent.  The result was as they had

foreseen: gladness came again, and the flush of returning health.  Then

the parents took the next step in their scheme.  They had the family

physician recommend a long sea voyage and much land travel for the

thorough restoration of the blonde's strength; and they invited the Duke

to be of the party.  They judged that the Duke's constant presence and

the lawyer's protracted absence would do the rest--for they did not

invite the lawyer.



So they set sail in a steamer for America--and the third day out, when

their sea-sickness called truce and permitted them to take their first

meal at the public table, behold there sat the lawyer!  The Duke and

party made the best of an awkward situation; the voyage progressed, and

the vessel neared America.



But, by and by, two hundred miles off New Bedford, the ship took fire;

she burned to the water's edge; of all her crew and passengers, only

thirty were saved.  They floated about the sea half an afternoon and all

night long.  Among them were our friends.  The lawyer, by superhuman

exertions, had saved the blonde and her parents, swimming back and forth

two hundred yards and bringing one each time--(the girl first).  The Duke

had saved himself.  In the morning two whale ships arrived on the scene

and sent their boats.  The weather was stormy and the embarkation was

attended with much confusion and excitement.  The lawyer did his duty

like a man; helped his exhausted and insensible blonde, her parents and

some others into a boat (the Duke helped himself in); then a child fell

overboard at the other end of the raft and the lawyer rushed thither and

helped half a dozen people fish it out, under the stimulus of its

mother's screams.  Then he ran back--a few seconds too late--the blonde's

boat was under way.  So he had to take the other boat, and go to the

other ship.  The storm increased and drove the vessels out of sight of

each other--drove them whither it would.



When it calmed, at the end of three days, the blonde's ship was seven

hundred miles north of Boston and the other about seven hundred south of

that port.  The blonde's captain was bound on a whaling cruise in the

North Atlantic and could not go back such a distance or make a port

without orders; such being nautical law.  The lawyer's captain was to

cruise in the North Pacific, and he could not go back or make a port

without orders.  All the lawyer's money and baggage were in the blonde's

boat and went to the blonde's ship--so his captain made him work his

passage as a common sailor.  When both ships had been cruising nearly a

year, the one was off the coast of Greenland and the other in Behring's

Strait.  The blonde had long ago been well-nigh persuaded that her lawyer

had been washed overboard and lost just before the whale ships reached

the raft, and now, under the pleadings of her parents and the Duke she

was at last beginning to nerve herself for the doom of the covenant, and

prepare for the hated marriage.



But she would not yield a day before the date set.  The weeks dragged on,

the time narrowed, orders were given to deck the ship for the wedding--a

wedding at sea among icebergs and walruses.  Five days more and all would

be over.  So the blonde reflected, with a sigh and a tear.  Oh where was

her true love--and why, why did he not come and save her?  At that moment

he was lifting his harpoon to strike a whale in Behring's Strait, five

thousand miles away, by the way of the Arctic Ocean, or twenty thousand

by the way of the Horn--that was the reason.  He struck, but not with

perfect aim--his foot slipped and he fell in the whale's mouth and went

down his throat.  He was insensible five days.  Then he came to himself

and heard voices; daylight was streaming through a hole cut in the

whale's roof.  He climbed out and astonished the sailors who were

hoisting blubber up a ship's side.  He recognized the vessel, flew

aboard, surprised the wedding party at the altar and exclaimed:



"Stop the proceedings--I'm here!  Come to my arms, my own!"



There were foot-notes to this extravagant piece of literature wherein the

author endeavored to show that the whole thing was within the

possibilities; he said he got the incident of the whale traveling from

Behring's Strait to the coast of Greenland, five thousand miles in five

days, through the Arctic Ocean, from Charles Reade's "Love Me Little Love

Me Long," and considered that that established the fact that the thing

could be done; and he instanced Jonah's adventure as proof that a man

could live in a whale's belly, and added that if a preacher could stand

it three days a lawyer could surely stand it five!



There was a fiercer storm than ever in the editorial sanctum now, and the

stranger was peremptorily discharged, and his manuscript flung at his

head.  But he had already delayed things so much that there was not time

for some one else to rewrite the chapter, and so the paper came out

without any novel in it.  It was but a feeble, struggling, stupid

journal, and the absence of the novel probably shook public confidence;

at any rate, before the first side of the next issue went to press, the

Weekly Occidental died as peacefully as an infant.



An effort was made to resurrect it, with the proposed advantage of a

telling new title, and Mr. F. said that The Phenix would be just the name

for it, because it would give the idea of a resurrection from its dead

ashes in a new and undreamed of condition of splendor; but some low-

priced smarty on one of the dailies suggested that we call it the

Lazarus; and inasmuch as the people were not profound in Scriptural

matters but thought the resurrected Lazarus and the dilapidated mendicant

that begged in the rich man's gateway were one and the same person, the

name became the laughing stock of the town, and killed the paper for good

and all.



I was sorry enough, for I was very proud of being connected with a

literary paper--prouder than I have ever been of anything since, perhaps.

I had written some rhymes for it--poetry I considered it--and it was a

great grief to me that the production was on the "first side" of the

issue that was not completed, and hence did not see the light.  But time

brings its revenges--I can put it in here; it will answer in place of a

tear dropped to the memory of the lost Occidental.  The idea (not the

chief idea, but the vehicle that bears it) was probably suggested by the

old song called "The Raging Canal," but I cannot remember now.  I do

remember, though, that at that time I thought my doggerel was one of the

ablest poems of the age:





THE AGED PILOT MAN.



On the Erie Canal, it was,

All on a summer's day,

I sailed forth with my parents

Far away to Albany.



From out the clouds at noon that day

There came a dreadful storm,

That piled the billows high about,

And filled us with alarm.



A man came rushing from a house,

Saying, "Snub up your boat I pray,

[The customary canal technicality for "tie up."]

Snub up your boat, snub up, alas,

Snub up while yet you may."



Our captain cast one glance astern,

Then forward glanced he,

And said, "My wife and little ones

I never more shall see."



Said Dollinger the pilot man,

In noble words, but few,--

"Fear not, but lean on Dollinger,

And he will fetch you through."



The boat drove on, the frightened mules

Tore through the rain and wind,

And bravely still, in danger's post,

The whip-boy strode behind.



"Come 'board, come 'board," the captain cried,

"Nor tempt so wild a storm;"

But still the raging mules advanced,

And still the boy strode on.



Then said the captain to us all,

"Alas, 'tis plain to me,

The greater danger is not there,

But here upon the sea.



"So let us strive, while life remains,

To save all souls on board,

And then if die at last we must,

Let .  .  .  .  I cannot speak the word!"



Said Dollinger the pilot man,

Tow'ring above the crew,

"Fear not, but trust in Dollinger,

And he will fetch you through."



"Low bridge!  low bridge!" all heads went down,

The laboring bark sped on;

A mill we passed, we passed church,

Hamlets, and fields of corn;

And all the world came out to see,

And chased along the shore

Crying, "Alas, alas, the sheeted rain,

The wind, the tempest's roar!

Alas, the gallant ship and crew,

Can nothing help them more?"



And from our deck sad eyes looked out

Across the stormy scene:

The tossing wake of billows aft,

The bending forests green,

The chickens sheltered under carts

In lee of barn the cows,

The skurrying swine with straw in mouth,

The wild spray from our bows!



"She balances!

She wavers!

Now let her go about!

If she misses stays and broaches to,

We're all"--then with a shout,]

"Huray!  huray!

Avast!  belay!

Take in more sail!

Lord, what a gale!

Ho, boy, haul taut on the hind mule's tail!"

"Ho!  lighten ship!  ho!  man the pump!

Ho, hostler, heave the lead!"



"A quarter-three!--'tis shoaling fast!

Three feet large!--t-h-r-e-e feet!--

Three feet scant!" I cried in fright

"Oh, is there no retreat?"



Said Dollinger, the pilot man,

As on the vessel flew,

"Fear not, but trust in Dollinger,

And he will fetch you through."



A panic struck the bravest hearts,

The boldest cheek turned pale;

For plain to all, this shoaling said

A leak had burst the ditch's bed!

And, straight as bolt from crossbow sped,

Our ship swept on, with shoaling lead,

Before the fearful gale!



"Sever the tow-line!  Cripple the mules!"

Too late!  There comes a shock!

Another length, and the fated craft

Would have swum in the saving lock!



Then gathered together the shipwrecked crew

And took one last embrace,

While sorrowful tears from despairing eyes

Ran down each hopeless face;

And some did think of their little ones

Whom they never more might see,

And others of waiting wives at home,

And mothers that grieved would be.



But of all the children of misery there

On that poor sinking frame,

But one spake words of hope and faith,

And I worshipped as they came:

Said Dollinger the pilot man,--

(O brave heart, strong and true!)--

"Fear not, but trust in Dollinger,

For he will fetch you through."



Lo!  scarce the words have passed his lips

The dauntless prophet say'th,

When every soul about him seeth

A wonder crown his faith!



And count ye all, both great and small,

As numbered with the dead:

For mariner for forty year,

On Erie, boy and man,

I never yet saw such a storm,

Or one't with it began!"



So overboard a keg of nails

And anvils three we threw,

Likewise four bales of gunny-sacks,

Two hundred pounds of glue,

Two sacks of corn, four ditto wheat,

A box of books, a cow,

A violin, Lord Byron's works,

A rip-saw and a sow.



A curve!  a curve!  the dangers grow!

"Labbord!--stabbord!--s-t-e-a-d-y!--so!--

Hard-a-port, Dol!--hellum-a-lee!

Haw the head mule!--the aft one gee!

Luff!--bring her to the wind!"



For straight a farmer brought a plank,--

(Mysteriously inspired)--

And laying it unto the ship,

In silent awe retired.



Then every sufferer stood amazed

That pilot man before;

A moment stood.  Then wondering turned,

And speechless walked ashore.









CHAPTER LII.



Since I desire, in this chapter, to say an instructive word or two about

the silver mines, the reader may take this fair warning and skip, if he

chooses.  The year 1863 was perhaps the very top blossom and culmination

of the "flush times."  Virginia swarmed with men and vehicles to that

degree that the place looked like a very hive--that is when one's vision

could pierce through the thick fog of alkali dust that was generally

blowing in summer.  I will say, concerning this dust, that if you drove

ten miles through it, you and your horses would be coated with it a

sixteenth of an inch thick and present an outside appearance that was a

uniform pale yellow color, and your buggy would have three inches of dust

in it, thrown there by the wheels.  The delicate scales used by the

assayers were inclosed in glass cases intended to be air-tight, and yet

some of this dust was so impalpable and so invisibly fine that it would

get in, somehow, and impair the accuracy of those scales.



Speculation ran riot, and yet there was a world of substantial business

going on, too.  All freights were brought over the mountains from

California (150 miles) by pack-train partly, and partly in huge wagons

drawn by such long mule teams that each team amounted to a procession,

and it did seem, sometimes, that the grand combined procession of animals

stretched unbroken from Virginia to California.  Its long route was

traceable clear across the deserts of the Territory by the writhing

serpent of dust it lifted up.  By these wagons, freights over that

hundred and fifty miles were $200 a ton for small lots (same price for

all express matter brought by stage), and $100 a ton for full loads.

One Virginia firm received one hundred tons of freight a month, and paid

$10,000 a month freightage.  In the winter the freights were much higher.

All the bullion was shipped in bars by stage to San Francisco (a bar was

usually about twice the size of a pig of lead and contained from $1,500

to $3,000 according to the amount of gold mixed with the silver), and the

freight on it (when the shipment was large) was one and a quarter per

cent. of its intrinsic value.



So, the freight on these bars probably averaged something more than $25

each.  Small shippers paid two per cent.  There were three stages a day,

each way, and I have seen the out-going stages carry away a third of a

ton of bullion each, and more than once I saw them divide a two-ton lot

and take it off.  However, these were extraordinary events.

[Mr. Valentine, Wells Fargo's agent, has handled all the bullion shipped

through the Virginia office for many a month.  To his memory--which is

excellent--we are indebted for the following exhibit of the company's

business in the Virginia office since the first of January, 1862: From

January 1st to April 1st, about $270,000 worth of bullion passed through

that office, during the next quarter, $570,000; next quarter, $800,000;

next quarter, $956,000; next quarter, $1,275,000; and for the quarter

ending on the 30th of last June, about $1,600,000.  Thus in a year and a

half, the Virginia office only shipped $5,330,000 in bullion.  During the

year 1862 they shipped $2,615,000, so we perceive the average shipments

have more than doubled in the last six months.  This gives us room to

promise for the Virginia office $500,000 a month for the year 1863

(though perhaps, judging by the steady increase in the business, we are

under estimating, somewhat).  This gives us $6,000,000 for the year.

Gold Hill and Silver City together can beat us--we will give them

$10,000,000.  To Dayton, Empire City, Ophir and Carson City, we will

allow an aggregate of $8,000,000, which is not over the mark, perhaps,

and may possibly be a little under it.  To Esmeralda we give $4,000,000.

To Reese River and Humboldt $2,000,000, which is liberal now, but may not

be before the year is out.  So we prognosticate that the yield of bullion

this year will be about $30,000,000.  Placing the number of mills in the

Territory at one hundred, this gives to each the labor of producing

$300,000 in bullion during the twelve months.  Allowing them to run three

hundred days in the year (which none of them more than do), this makes

their work average $1,000 a day.  Say the mills average twenty tons of

rock a day and this rock worth $50 as a general thing, and you have the

actual work of our one hundred mills figured down "to a spot"--$1,000 a

day each, and $30,000,000 a year in the aggregate.--Enterprise.

[A considerable over estimate--M.  T.]]



Two tons of silver bullion would be in the neighborhood of forty bars,

and the freight on it over $1,000.  Each coach always carried a deal of

ordinary express matter beside, and also from fifteen to twenty

passengers at from $25 to $30 a head.  With six stages going all the

time, Wells, Fargo and Co.'s Virginia City business was important and

lucrative.



All along under the centre of Virginia and Gold Hill, for a couple of

miles, ran the great Comstock silver lode--a vein of ore from fifty to

eighty feet thick between its solid walls of rock--a vein as wide as some

of New York's streets.  I will remind the reader that in Pennsylvania a

coal vein only eight feet wide is considered ample.



Virginia was a busy city of streets and houses above ground.  Under it

was another busy city, down in the bowels of the earth, where a great

population of men thronged in and out among an intricate maze of tunnels

and drifts, flitting hither and thither under a winking sparkle of

lights, and over their heads towered a vast web of interlocking timbers

that held the walls of the gutted Comstock apart.  These timbers were as

large as a man's body, and the framework stretched upward so far that no

eye could pierce to its top through the closing gloom.  It was like

peering up through the clean-picked ribs and bones of some colossal

skeleton.  Imagine such a framework two miles long, sixty feet wide, and

higher than any church spire in America.  Imagine this stately lattice-

work stretching down Broadway, from the St. Nicholas to Wall street, and

a Fourth of July procession, reduced to pigmies, parading on top of it

and flaunting their flags, high above the pinnacle of Trinity steeple.

One can imagine that, but he cannot well imagine what that forest of

timbers cost, from the time they were felled in the pineries beyond

Washoe Lake, hauled up and around Mount Davidson at atrocious rates of

freightage, then squared, let down into the deep maw of the mine and

built up there.  Twenty ample fortunes would not timber one of the

greatest of those silver mines.  The Spanish proverb says it requires a

gold mine to "run" a silver one, and it is true.  A beggar with a silver

mine is a pitiable pauper indeed if he cannot sell.



I spoke of the underground Virginia as a city.  The Gould and Curry is

only one single mine under there, among a great many others; yet the

Gould and Curry's streets of dismal drifts and tunnels were five miles in

extent, altogether, and its population five hundred miners.  Taken as a

whole, the underground city had some thirty miles of streets and a

population of five or six thousand.  In this present day some of those

populations are at work from twelve to sixteen hundred feet under

Virginia and Gold Hill, and the signal-bells that tell them what the

superintendent above ground desires them to do are struck by telegraph as

we strike a fire alarm.  Sometimes men fall down a shaft, there, a

thousand feet deep.  In such cases, the usual plan is to hold an inquest.



If you wish to visit one of those mines, you may walk through a tunnel

about half a mile long if you prefer it, or you may take the quicker plan

of shooting like a dart down a shaft, on a small platform.  It is like

tumbling down through an empty steeple, feet first.  When you reach the

bottom, you take a candle and tramp through drifts and tunnels where

throngs of men are digging and blasting; you watch them send up tubs full

of great lumps of stone--silver ore; you select choice specimens from the

mass, as souvenirs; you admire the world of skeleton timbering; you

reflect frequently that you are buried under a mountain, a thousand feet

below daylight; being in the bottom of the mine you climb from "gallery"

to "gallery," up endless ladders that stand straight up and down; when

your legs fail you at last, you lie down in a small box-car in a cramped

"incline" like a half-up-ended sewer and are dragged up to daylight

feeling as if you are crawling through a coffin that has no end to it.

Arrived at the top, you find a busy crowd of men receiving the ascending

cars and tubs and dumping the ore from an elevation into long rows of

bins capable of holding half a dozen tons each; under the bins are rows

of wagons loading from chutes and trap-doors in the bins, and down the

long street is a procession of these wagons wending toward the silver

mills with their rich freight.  It is all "done," now, and there you are.

You need never go down again, for you have seen it all.  If you have

forgotten the process of reducing the ore in the mill and making the

silver bars, you can go back and find it again in my Esmeralda chapters

if so disposed.



Of course these mines cave in, in places, occasionally, and then it is

worth one's while to take the risk of descending into them and observing

the crushing power exerted by the pressing weight of a settling mountain.

I published such an experience in the Enterprise, once, and from it I

will take an extract:



      AN HOUR IN THE CAVED MINES.--We journeyed down into the Ophir mine,

      yesterday, to see the earthquake.  We could not go down the deep

      incline, because it still has a propensity to cave in places.

      Therefore we traveled through the long tunnel which enters the hill

      above the Ophir office, and then by means of a series of long

      ladders, climbed away down from the first to the fourth gallery.

      Traversing a drift, we came to the Spanish line, passed five sets of

      timbers still uninjured, and found the earthquake.  Here was as

      complete a chaos as ever was seen--vast masses of earth and

      splintered and broken timbers piled confusedly together, with

      scarcely an aperture left large enough for a cat to creep through.

      Rubbish was still falling at intervals from above, and one timber

      which had braced others earlier in the day, was now crushed down out

      of its former position, showing that the caving and settling of the

      tremendous mass was still going on.  We were in that portion of the

      Ophir known as the "north mines."  Returning to the surface, we

      entered a tunnel leading into the Central, for the purpose of

      getting into the main Ophir.  Descending a long incline in this

      tunnel, we traversed a drift or so, and then went down a deep shaft

      from whence we proceeded into the fifth gallery of the Ophir.  From

      a side-drift we crawled through a small hole and got into the midst

      of the earthquake again--earth and broken timbers mingled together

      without regard to grace or symmetry.  A large portion of the second,

      third and fourth galleries had caved in and gone to destruction--the

      two latter at seven o'clock on the previous evening.



      At the turn-table, near the northern extremity of the fifth gallery,

      two big piles of rubbish had forced their way through from the fifth

      gallery, and from the looks of the timbers, more was about to come.

      These beams are solid--eighteen inches square; first, a great beam

      is laid on the floor, then upright ones, five feet high, stand on

      it, supporting another horizontal beam, and so on, square above

      square, like the framework of a window.  The superincumbent weight

      was sufficient to mash the ends of those great upright beams fairly

      into the solid wood of the horizontal ones three inches, compressing

      and bending the upright beam till it curved like a bow.  Before the

      Spanish caved in, some of their twelve-inch horizontal timbers were

      compressed in this way until they were only five inches thick!

      Imagine the power it must take to squeeze a solid log together in

      that way.  Here, also, was a range of timbers, for a distance of

      twenty feet, tilted six inches out of the perpendicular by the

      weight resting upon them from the caved galleries above.  You could

      hear things cracking and giving way, and it was not pleasant to know

      that the world overhead was slowly and silently sinking down upon

      you.  The men down in the mine do not mind it, however.



      Returning along the fifth gallery, we struck the safe part of the

      Ophir incline, and went down it to the sixth; but we found ten

      inches of water there, and had to come back.  In repairing the

      damage done to the incline, the pump had to be stopped for two

      hours, and in the meantime the water gained about a foot.  However,

      the pump was at work again, and the flood-water was decreasing.

      We climbed up to the fifth gallery again and sought a deep shaft,

      whereby we might descend to another part of the sixth, out of reach

      of the water, but suffered disappointment, as the men had gone to

      dinner, and there was no one to man the windlass.  So, having seen

      the earthquake, we climbed out at the Union incline and tunnel, and

      adjourned, all dripping with candle grease and perspiration, to

      lunch at the Ophir office.



      During the great flush year of 1863, Nevada [claims to have]

      produced $25,000,000 in bullion--almost, if not quite, a round

      million to each thousand inhabitants, which is very well,

      considering that she was without agriculture and manufactures.

      Silver mining was her sole productive industry. [Since the above was

      in type, I learn from an official source that the above figure is

      too high, and that the yield for 1863 did not exceed $20,000,000.]

      However, the day for large figures is approaching; the Sutro Tunnel

      is to plow through the Comstock lode from end to end, at a depth of

      two thousand feet, and then mining will be easy and comparatively

      inexpensive; and the momentous matters of drainage, and hoisting and

      hauling of ore will cease to be burdensome.  This vast work will

      absorb many years, and millions of dollars, in its completion; but

      it will early yield money, for that desirable epoch will begin as

      soon as it strikes the first end of the vein.  The tunnel will be

      some eight miles long, and will develop astonishing riches.  Cars

      will carry the ore through the tunnel and dump it in the mills and

      thus do away with the present costly system of double handling and

      transportation by mule teams.  The water from the tunnel will

      furnish the motive power for the mills.  Mr. Sutro, the originator

      of this prodigious enterprise, is one of the few men in the world

      who is gifted with the pluck and perseverance necessary to follow up

      and hound such an undertaking to its completion.  He has converted

      several obstinate Congresses to a deserved friendliness toward his

      important work, and has gone up and down and to and fro in Europe

      until he has enlisted a great moneyed interest in it there.









CHAPTER LIII.



Every now and then, in these days, the boys used to tell me I ought to

get one Jim Blaine to tell me the stirring story of his grandfather's old

ram--but they always added that I must not mention the matter unless Jim

was drunk at the time--just comfortably and sociably drunk.  They kept

this up until my curiosity was on the rack to hear the story.  I got to

haunting Blaine; but it was of no use, the boys always found fault with

his condition; he was often moderately but never satisfactorily drunk.

I never watched a man's condition with such absorbing interest, such

anxious solicitude; I never so pined to see a man uncompromisingly drunk

before.  At last, one evening I hurried to his cabin, for I learned that

this time his situation was such that even the most fastidious could find

no fault with it--he was tranquilly, serenely, symmetrically drunk--not a

hiccup to mar his voice, not a cloud upon his brain thick enough to

obscure his memory.  As I entered, he was sitting upon an empty powder-

keg, with a clay pipe in one hand and the other raised to command

silence.  His face was round, red, and very serious; his throat was bare

and his hair tumbled; in general appearance and costume he was a stalwart

miner of the period.  On the pine table stood a candle, and its dim light

revealed "the boys" sitting here and there on bunks, candle-boxes,

powder-kegs, etc.  They said:



"Sh--!  Don't speak--he's going to commence."





                THE STORY OF THE OLD RAM.



I found a seat at once, and Blaine said:



'I don't reckon them times will ever come again.  There never was a more

bullier old ram than what he was.  Grandfather fetched him from Illinois

--got him of a man by the name of Yates--Bill Yates--maybe you might have

heard of him; his father was a deacon--Baptist--and he was a rustler,

too; a man had to get up ruther early to get the start of old Thankful

Yates; it was him that put the Greens up to jining teams with my

grandfather when he moved west.



'Seth Green was prob'ly the pick of the flock; he married a Wilkerson--

Sarah Wilkerson--good cretur, she was--one of the likeliest heifers that

was ever raised in old Stoddard, everybody said that knowed her.  She

could heft a bar'l of flour as easy as I can flirt a flapjack.  And spin?

Don't mention it!  Independent?  Humph!  When Sile Hawkins come a

browsing around her, she let him know that for all his tin he couldn't

trot in harness alongside of her.  You see, Sile Hawkins was--no, it

warn't Sile Hawkins, after all--it was a galoot by the name of Filkins--

I disremember his first name; but he was a stump--come into pra'r meeting

drunk, one night, hooraying for Nixon, becuz he thought it was a primary;

and old deacon Ferguson up and scooted him through the window and he lit

on old Miss Jefferson's head, poor old filly.  She was a good soul--had a

glass eye and used to lend it to old Miss Wagner, that hadn't any, to

receive company in; it warn't big enough, and when Miss Wagner warn't

noticing, it would get twisted around in the socket, and look up, maybe,

or out to one side, and every which way, while t' other one was looking

as straight ahead as a spy-glass.



'Grown people didn't mind it, but it most always made the children cry, it

was so sort of scary.  She tried packing it in raw cotton, but it

wouldn't work, somehow--the cotton would get loose and stick out and look

so kind of awful that the children couldn't stand it no way.  She was

always dropping it out, and turning up her old dead-light on the company

empty, and making them oncomfortable, becuz she never could tell when it

hopped out, being blind on that side, you see.  So somebody would have to

hunch her and say, "Your game eye has fetched loose.  Miss Wagner dear"--

and then all of them would have to sit and wait till she jammed it in

again--wrong side before, as a general thing, and green as a bird's egg,

being a bashful cretur and easy sot back before company.  But being wrong

side before warn't much difference, anyway; becuz her own eye was sky-

blue and the glass one was yaller on the front side, so whichever way she

turned it it didn't match nohow.



'Old Miss Wagner was considerable on the borrow, she was.  When she had a

quilting, or Dorcas S'iety at her house she gen'ally borrowed Miss

Higgins's wooden leg to stump around on; it was considerable shorter than

her other pin, but much she minded that.  She said she couldn't abide

crutches when she had company, becuz they were so slow; said when she had

company and things had to be done, she wanted to get up and hump herself.

She was as bald as a jug, and so she used to borrow Miss Jacops's wig--

Miss Jacops was the coffin-peddler's wife--a ratty old buzzard, he was,

that used to go roosting around where people was sick, waiting for 'em;

and there that old rip would sit all day, in the shade, on a coffin that

he judged would fit the can'idate; and if it was a slow customer and kind

of uncertain, he'd fetch his rations and a blanket along and sleep in the

coffin nights.  He was anchored out that way, in frosty weather, for

about three weeks, once, before old Robbins's place, waiting for him; and

after that, for as much as two years, Jacops was not on speaking terms

with the old man, on account of his disapp'inting him.  He got one of his

feet froze, and lost money, too, becuz old Robbins took a favorable turn

and got well.  The next time Robbins got sick, Jacops tried to make up

with him, and varnished up the same old coffin and fetched it along; but

old Robbins was too many for him; he had him in, and 'peared to be

powerful weak; he bought the coffin for ten dollars and Jacops was to pay

it back and twenty-five more besides if Robbins didn't like the coffin

after he'd tried it.  And then Robbins died, and at the funeral he

bursted off the lid and riz up in his shroud and told the parson to let

up on the performances, becuz he could not stand such a coffin as that.

You see he had been in a trance once before, when he was young, and he

took the chances on another, cal'lating that if he made the trip it was

money in his pocket, and if he missed fire he couldn't lose a cent.  And

by George he sued Jacops for the rhino and got jedgment; and he set up

the coffin in his back parlor and said he 'lowed to take his time, now.

It was always an aggravation to Jacops, the way that miserable old thing

acted.  He moved back to Indiany pretty soon--went to Wellsville--

Wellsville was the place the Hogadorns was from.  Mighty fine family.

Old Maryland stock.  Old Squire Hogadorn could carry around more mixed

licker, and cuss better than most any man I ever see.  His second wife

was the widder Billings--she that was Becky Martin; her dam was deacon

Dunlap's first wife.  Her oldest child, Maria, married a missionary and

died in grace--et up by the savages.  They et him, too, poor feller--

biled him.  It warn't the custom, so they say, but they explained to

friends of his'n that went down there to bring away his things, that

they'd tried missionaries every other way and never could get any good

out of 'em--and so it annoyed all his relations to find out that that

man's life was fooled away just out of a dern'd experiment, so to speak.

But mind you, there ain't anything ever reely lost; everything that

people can't understand and don't see the reason of does good if you only

hold on and give it a fair shake; Prov'dence don't fire no blank

ca'tridges, boys.  That there missionary's substance, unbeknowns to

himself, actu'ly converted every last one of them heathens that took a

chance at the barbacue.  Nothing ever fetched them but that.  Don't tell

me it was an accident that he was biled.  There ain't no such a thing as

an accident.



'When my uncle Lem was leaning up agin a scaffolding once, sick, or drunk,

or suthin, an Irishman with a hod full of bricks fell on him out of the

third story and broke the old man's back in two places.  People said it

was an accident.  Much accident there was about that.  He didn't know

what he was there for, but he was there for a good object.  If he hadn't

been there the Irishman would have been killed.  Nobody can ever make me

believe anything different from that.  Uncle Lem's dog was there.  Why

didn't the Irishman fall on the dog?  Becuz the dog would a seen him a

coming and stood from under.  That's the reason the dog warn't appinted.

A dog can't be depended on to carry out a special providence.  Mark my

words it was a put-up thing.  Accidents don't happen, boys.  Uncle Lem's

dog--I wish you could a seen that dog.  He was a reglar shepherd--or

ruther he was part bull and part shepherd--splendid animal; belonged to

parson Hagar before Uncle Lem got him.  Parson Hagar belonged to the

Western Reserve Hagars; prime family; his mother was a Watson; one of his

sisters married a Wheeler; they settled in Morgan county, and he got

nipped by the machinery in a carpet factory and went through in less than

a quarter of a minute; his widder bought the piece of carpet that had his

remains wove in, and people come a hundred mile to 'tend the funeral.

There was fourteen yards in the piece.



'She wouldn't let them roll him up, but planted him just so--full length.

The church was middling small where they preached the funeral, and they

had to let one end of the coffin stick out of the window.  They didn't

bury him--they planted one end, and let him stand up, same as a monument.

And they nailed a sign on it and put--put on--put on it --sacred to--the

m-e-m-o-r-y--of fourteen y-a-r-d-s--of three-ply--car---pet--containing

all that was--m-o-r-t-a-l--of--of--W-i-l-l-i-a-m--W-h-e--"'



Jim Blaine had been growing gradually drowsy and drowsier--his head

nodded, once, twice, three times--dropped peacefully upon his breast, and

he fell tranquilly asleep.  The tears were running down the boys' cheeks

--they were suffocating with suppressed laughter--and had been from the

start, though I had never noticed it.  I perceived that I was "sold."

I learned then that Jim Blaine's peculiarity was that whenever he reached

a certain stage of intoxication, no human power could keep him from

setting out, with impressive unction, to tell about a wonderful adventure

which he had once had with his grandfather's old ram--and the mention of

the ram in the first sentence was as far as any man had ever heard him

get, concerning it.  He always maundered off, interminably, from one

thing to another, till his whisky got the best of him and he fell asleep.

What the thing was that happened to him and his grandfather's old ram is

a dark mystery to this day, for nobody has ever yet found out.









CHAPTER LIV.



Of course there was a large Chinese population in Virginia--it is the

case with every town and city on the Pacific coast.  They are a harmless

race when white men either let them alone or treat them no worse than

dogs; in fact they are almost entirely harmless anyhow, for they seldom

think of resenting the vilest insults or the cruelest injuries.  They are

quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as

industrious as the day is long.  A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a

lazy one does not exist.  So long as a Chinaman has strength to use his

hands he needs no support from anybody; white men often complain of want

of work, but a Chinaman offers no such complaint; he always manages to

find something to do.  He is a great convenience to everybody--even to

the worst class of white men, for he bears the most of their sins,

suffering fines for their petty thefts, imprisonment for their robberies,

and death for their murders.  Any white man can swear a Chinaman's life

away in the courts, but no Chinaman can testify against a white man.

Ours is the "land of the free"--nobody denies that--nobody challenges it.

[Maybe it is because we won't let other people testify.] As I write, news

comes that in broad daylight in San Francisco, some boys have stoned an

inoffensive Chinaman to death, and that although a large crowd witnessed

the shameful deed, no one interfered.



There are seventy thousand (and possibly one hundred thousand) Chinamen

on the Pacific coast.  There were about a thousand in Virginia.  They

were penned into a "Chinese quarter"--a thing which they do not

particularly object to, as they are fond of herding together.  Their

buildings were of wood; usually only one story high, and set thickly

together along streets scarcely wide enough for a wagon to pass through.

Their quarter was a little removed from the rest of the town.  The chief

employment of Chinamen in towns is to wash clothing.  They always send a

bill, like this below, pinned to the clothes.  It is mere ceremony, for

it does not enlighten the customer much.  Their price for washing was

$2.50 per dozen--rather cheaper than white people could afford to wash

for at that time.  A very common sign on the Chinese houses was: "See

Yup, Washer and Ironer"; "Hong Wo, Washer"; "Sam Sing & Ah Hop, Washing."

The house servants, cooks, etc., in California and Nevada, were chiefly

Chinamen.  There were few white servants and no Chinawomen so employed.

Chinamen make good house servants, being quick, obedient, patient, quick

to learn and tirelessly industrious.  They do not need to be taught a

thing twice, as a general thing.  They are imitative.  If a Chinaman were

to see his master break up a centre table, in a passion, and kindle a

fire with it, that Chinaman would be likely to resort to the furniture

for fuel forever afterward.



All Chinamen can read, write and cipher with easy facility--pity but all

our petted voters could.  In California they rent little patches of

ground and do a deal of gardening.  They will raise surprising crops of

vegetables on a sand pile.  They waste nothing.  What is rubbish to a

Christian, a Chinaman carefully preserves and makes useful in one way or

another.  He gathers up all the old oyster and sardine cans that white

people throw away, and procures marketable tin and solder from them by

melting.  He gathers up old bones and turns them into manure.

In California he gets a living out of old mining claims that white men

have abandoned as exhausted and worthless--and then the officers come

down on him once a month with an exorbitant swindle to which the

legislature has given the broad, general name of "foreign" mining tax,

but it is usually inflicted on no foreigners but Chinamen.  This swindle

has in some cases been repeated once or twice on the same victim in the

course of the same month--but the public treasury was no additionally

enriched by it, probably.



Chinamen hold their dead in great reverence--they worship their departed

ancestors, in fact.  Hence, in China, a man's front yard, back yard, or

any other part of his premises, is made his family burying ground, in

order that he may visit the graves at any and all times.  Therefore that

huge empire is one mighty cemetery; it is ridged and wringled from its

centre to its circumference with graves--and inasmuch as every foot of

ground must be made to do its utmost, in China, lest the swarming

population suffer for food, the very graves are cultivated and yield a

harvest, custom holding this to be no dishonor to the dead.  Since the

departed are held in such worshipful reverence, a Chinaman cannot bear

that any indignity be offered the places where they sleep.

Mr. Burlingame said that herein lay China's bitter opposition to

railroads; a road could not be built anywhere in the empire without

disturbing the graves of their ancestors or friends.



A Chinaman hardly believes he could enjoy the hereafter except his body

lay in his beloved China; also, he desires to receive, himself, after

death, that worship with which he has honored his dead that preceded him.

Therefore, if he visits a foreign country, he makes arrangements to have

his bones returned to China in case he dies; if he hires to go to a

foreign country on a labor contract, there is always a stipulation that

his body shall be taken back to China if he dies; if the government sells

a gang of Coolies to a foreigner for the usual five-year term, it is

specified in the contract that their bodies shall be restored to China in

case of death.  On the Pacific coast the Chinamen all belong to one or

another of several great companies or organizations, and these companies

keep track of their members, register their names, and ship their bodies

home when they die.  The See Yup Company is held to be the largest of

these.  The Ning Yeong Company is next, and numbers eighteen thousand

members on the coast.  Its headquarters are at San Francisco, where it

has a costly temple, several great officers (one of whom keeps regal

state in seclusion and cannot be approached by common humanity), and a

numerous priesthood.  In it I was shown a register of its members, with

the dead and the date of their shipment to China duly marked.  Every ship

that sails from San Francisco carries away a heavy freight of Chinese

corpses--or did, at least, until the legislature, with an ingenious

refinement of Christian cruelty, forbade the shipments, as a neat

underhanded way of deterring Chinese immigration.  The bill was offered,

whether it passed or not.  It is my impression that it passed.  There was

another bill--it became a law--compelling every incoming Chinaman to be

vaccinated on the wharf and pay a duly appointed quack (no decent doctor

would defile himself with such legalized robbery) ten dollars for it.

As few importers of Chinese would want to go to an expense like that, the

law-makers thought this would be another heavy blow to Chinese

immigration.



What the Chinese quarter of Virginia was like--or, indeed, what the

Chinese quarter of any Pacific coast town was and is like--may be

gathered from this item which I printed in the Enterprise while reporting

for that paper:



      CHINATOWN.--Accompanied by a fellow reporter, we made a trip through

      our Chinese quarter the other night.  The Chinese have built their

      portion of the city to suit themselves; and as they keep neither

      carriages nor wagons, their streets are not wide enough, as a

      general thing, to admit of the passage of vehicles.  At ten o'clock

      at night the Chinaman may be seen in all his glory.  In every little

      cooped-up, dingy cavern of a hut, faint with the odor of burning

      Josh-lights and with nothing to see the gloom by save the sickly,

      guttering tallow candle, were two or three yellow, long-tailed

      vagabonds, coiled up on a sort of short truckle-bed, smoking opium,

      motionless and with their lustreless eyes turned inward from excess

      of satisfaction--or rather the recent smoker looks thus, immediately

      after having passed the pipe to his neighbor--for opium-smoking is a

      comfortless operation, and requires constant attention.  A lamp sits

      on the bed, the length of the long pipe-stem from the smoker's

      mouth; he puts a pellet of opium on the end of a wire, sets it on

      fire, and plasters it into the pipe much as a Christian would fill a

      hole with putty; then he applies the bowl to the lamp and proceeds

      to smoke--and the stewing and frying of the drug and the gurgling of

      the juices in the stem would well-nigh turn the stomach of a statue.

      John likes it, though; it soothes him, he takes about two dozen

      whiffs, and then rolls over to dream, Heaven only knows what, for we

      could not imagine by looking at the soggy creature.  Possibly in his

      visions he travels far away from the gross world and his regular

      washing, and feast on succulent rats and birds'-nests in Paradise.



Mr. Ah Sing keeps a general grocery and provision store at No.  13 Wang

street.  He lavished his hospitality upon our party in the friendliest

way.  He had various kinds of colored and colorless wines and brandies,

with unpronouncable names, imported from China in little crockery jugs,

and which he offered to us in dainty little miniature wash-basins of

porcelain.  He offered us a mess of birds'-nests; also, small, neat

sausages, of which we could have swallowed several yards if we had chosen

to try, but we suspected that each link contained the corpse of a mouse,

and therefore refrained.  Mr. Sing had in his store a thousand articles

of merchandise, curious to behold, impossible to imagine the uses of, and

beyond our ability to describe.



His ducks, however, and his eggs, we could understand; the former were

split open and flattened out like codfish, and came from China in that

shape, and the latter were plastered over with some kind of paste which

kept them fresh and palatable through the long voyage.



We found Mr. Hong Wo, No. 37 Chow-chow street, making up a lottery

scheme--in fact we found a dozen others occupied in the same way in

various parts of the quarter, for about every third Chinaman runs a

lottery, and the balance of the tribe "buck" at it.  "Tom," who speaks

faultless English, and used to be chief and only cook to the Territorial

Enterprise, when the establishment kept bachelor's hall two years ago,

said that "Sometime Chinaman buy ticket one dollar hap, ketch um two tree

hundred, sometime no ketch um anything; lottery like one man fight um

seventy--may-be he whip, may-be he get whip heself, welly good."



However, the percentage being sixty-nine against him, the chances are,

as a general thing, that "he get whip heself."  We could not see that

these lotteries differed in any respect from our own, save that the

figures being Chinese, no ignorant white man might ever hope to succeed

in telling "t'other from which;" the manner of drawing is similar to

ours.



Mr. See Yup keeps a fancy store on Live Fox street.  He sold us fans of

white feathers, gorgeously ornamented; perfumery that smelled like

Limburger cheese, Chinese pens, and watch-charms made of a stone

unscratchable with steel instruments, yet polished and tinted like the

inner coat of a sea-shell.  As tokens of his esteem, See Yup presented

the party with gaudy plumes made of gold tinsel and trimmed with

peacocks' feathers.



We ate chow-chow with chop-sticks in the celestial restaurants; our

comrade chided the moon-eyed damsels in front of the houses for their

want of feminine reserve; we received protecting Josh-lights from our

hosts and "dickered" for a pagan God or two.  Finally, we were impressed

with the genius of a Chinese book-keeper; he figured up his accounts on a

machine like a gridiron with buttons strung on its bars; the different

rows represented units, tens, hundreds and thousands.  He fingered them

with incredible rapidity--in fact, he pushed them from place to place as

fast as a musical professor's fingers travel over the keys of a piano.



They are a kindly disposed, well-meaning race, and are respected and well

treated by the upper classes, all over the Pacific coast.  No Californian

gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman, under any

circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the East.

Only the scum of the population do it--they and their children; they,

and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise,

for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as

well as elsewhere in America.









CHAPTER LV.



I began to get tired of staying in one place so long.



There was no longer satisfying variety in going down to Carson to report

the proceedings of the legislature once a year, and horse-races and

pumpkin-shows once in three months; (they had got to raising pumpkins and

potatoes in Washoe Valley, and of course one of the first achievements of

the legislature was to institute a ten-thousand-dollar Agricultural Fair

to show off forty dollars' worth of those pumpkins in--however, the

territorial legislature was usually spoken of as the "asylum").  I wanted

to see San Francisco.  I wanted to go somewhere.  I wanted--I did not

know what I wanted.  I had the "spring fever" and wanted a change,

principally, no doubt.  Besides, a convention had framed a State

Constitution; nine men out of every ten wanted an office; I believed that

these gentlemen would "treat" the moneyless and the irresponsible among

the population into adopting the constitution and thus well-nigh killing

the country (it could not well carry such a load as a State government,

since it had nothing to tax that could stand a tax, for undeveloped mines

could not, and there were not fifty developed ones in the land, there was

but little realty to tax, and it did seem as if nobody was ever going to

think of the simple salvation of inflicting a money penalty on murder).

I believed that a State government would destroy the "flush times," and I

wanted to get away.  I believed that the mining stocks I had on hand

would soon be worth $100,000, and thought if they reached that before the

Constitution was adopted, I would sell out and make myself secure from

the crash the change of government was going to bring.  I considered

$100,000 sufficient to go home with decently, though it was but a small

amount compared to what I had been expecting to return with.  I felt

rather down-hearted about it, but I tried to comfort myself with the

reflection that with such a sum I could not fall into want.  About this

time a schoolmate of mine whom I had not seen since boyhood, came

tramping in on foot from Reese River, a very allegory of Poverty.

The son of wealthy parents, here he was, in a strange land, hungry,

bootless, mantled in an ancient horse-blanket, roofed with a brimless

hat, and so generally and so extravagantly dilapidated that he could have

"taken the shine out of the Prodigal Son himself," as he pleasantly

remarked.



He wanted to borrow forty-six dollars--twenty-six to take him to San

Francisco, and twenty for something else; to buy some soap with, maybe,

for he needed it.  I found I had but little more than the amount wanted,

in my pocket; so I stepped in and borrowed forty-six dollars of a banker

(on twenty days' time, without the formality of a note), and gave it him,

rather than walk half a block to the office, where I had some specie laid

up.  If anybody had told me that it would take me two years to pay back

that forty-six dollars to the banker (for I did not expect it of the

Prodigal, and was not disappointed), I would have felt injured.  And so

would the banker.



I wanted a change.  I wanted variety of some kind.  It came.  Mr. Goodman

went away for a week and left me the post of chief editor.  It destroyed

me.  The first day, I wrote my "leader" in the forenoon.  The second day,

I had no subject and put it off till the afternoon.  The third day I put

it off till evening, and then copied an elaborate editorial out of the

"American Cyclopedia," that steadfast friend of the editor, all over this

land.  The fourth day I "fooled around" till midnight, and then fell back

on the Cyclopedia again.  The fifth day I cudgeled my brain till

midnight, and then kept the press waiting while I penned some bitter

personalities on six different people.  The sixth day I labored in

anguish till far into the night and brought forth--nothing.  The paper

went to press without an editorial.  The seventh day I resigned.  On the

eighth, Mr. Goodman returned and found six duels on his hands--my

personalities had borne fruit.



Nobody, except he has tried it, knows what it is to be an editor.  It is

easy to scribble local rubbish, with the facts all before you; it is easy

to clip selections from other papers; it is easy to string out a

correspondence from any locality; but it is unspeakable hardship to write

editorials.  Subjects are the trouble--the dreary lack of them, I mean.

Every day, it is drag, drag, drag--think, and worry and suffer--all the

world is a dull blank, and yet the editorial columns must be filled.

Only give the editor a subject, and his work is done--it is no trouble to

write it up; but fancy how you would feel if you had to pump your brains

dry every day in the week, fifty-two weeks in the year.  It makes one low

spirited simply to think of it.  The matter that each editor of a daily

paper in America writes in the course of a year would fill from four to

eight bulky volumes like this book!  Fancy what a library an editor's

work would make, after twenty or thirty years' service.  Yet people often

marvel that Dickens, Scott, Bulwer, Dumas, etc., have been able to

produce so many books.  If these authors had wrought as voluminously as

newspaper editors do, the result would be something to marvel at, indeed.

How editors can continue this tremendous labor, this exhausting

consumption of brain fibre (for their work is creative, and not a mere

mechanical laying-up of facts, like reporting), day after day and year

after year, is incomprehensible.  Preachers take two months' holiday in

midsummer, for they find that to produce two sermons a week is wearing,

in the long run.  In truth it must be so, and is so; and therefore, how

an editor can take from ten to twenty texts and build upon them from ten

to twenty painstaking editorials a week and keep it up all the year

round, is farther beyond comprehension than ever.  Ever since I survived

my week as editor, I have found at least one pleasure in any newspaper

that comes to my hand; it is in admiring the long columns of editorial,

and wondering to myself how in the mischief he did it!



Mr. Goodman's return relieved me of employment, unless I chose to become

a reporter again.  I could not do that; I could not serve in the ranks

after being General of the army.  So I thought I would depart and go

abroad into the world somewhere.  Just at this juncture, Dan, my

associate in the reportorial department, told me, casually, that two

citizens had been trying to persuade him to go with them to New York and

aid in selling a rich silver mine which they had discovered and secured

in a new mining district in our neighborhood.  He said they offered to

pay his expenses and give him one third of the proceeds of the sale.

He had refused to go.  It was the very opportunity I wanted.  I abused

him for keeping so quiet about it, and not mentioning it sooner.  He said

it had not occurred to him that I would like to go, and so he had

recommended them to apply to Marshall, the reporter of the other paper.

I asked Dan if it was a good, honest mine, and no swindle.  He said the

men had shown him nine tons of the rock, which they had got out to take

to New York, and he could cheerfully say that he had seen but little rock

in Nevada that was richer; and moreover, he said that they had secured a

tract of valuable timber and a mill-site, near the mine.  My first idea

was to kill Dan.  But I changed my mind, notwithstanding I was so angry,

for I thought maybe the chance was not yet lost.  Dan said it was by no

means lost; that the men were absent at the mine again, and would not be

in Virginia to leave for the East for some ten days; that they had

requested him to do the talking to Marshall, and he had promised that he

would either secure Marshall or somebody else for them by the time they

got back; he would now say nothing to anybody till they returned, and

then fulfil his promise by furnishing me to them.



It was splendid.  I went to bed all on fire with excitement; for nobody

had yet gone East to sell a Nevada silver mine, and the field was white

for the sickle.  I felt that such a mine as the one described by Dan

would bring a princely sum in New York, and sell without delay or

difficulty.  I could not sleep, my fancy so rioted through its castles in

the air.  It was the "blind lead" come again.



Next day I got away, on the coach, with the usual eclat attending

departures of old citizens,--for if you have only half a dozen friends

out there they will make noise for a hundred rather than let you seem to

go away neglected and unregretted--and Dan promised to keep strict watch

for the men that had the mine to sell.



The trip was signalized but by one little incident, and that occurred

just as we were about to start.  A very seedy looking vagabond passenger

got out of the stage a moment to wait till the usual ballast of silver

bricks was thrown in.  He was standing on the pavement, when an awkward

express employee, carrying a brick weighing a hundred pounds, stumbled

and let it fall on the bummer's foot.  He instantly dropped on the ground

and began to howl in the most heart-breaking way.  A sympathizing crowd

gathered around and were going to pull his boot off; but he screamed

louder than ever and they desisted; then he fell to gasping, and between

the gasps ejaculated "Brandy!  for Heaven's sake, brandy!"  They poured

half a pint down him, and it wonderfully restored and comforted him.

Then he begged the people to assist him to the stage, which was done.

The express people urged him to have a doctor at their expense, but he

declined, and said that if he only had a little brandy to take along with

him, to soothe his paroxyms of pain when they came on, he would be

grateful and content.  He was quickly supplied with two bottles, and we

drove off.  He was so smiling and happy after that, that I could not

refrain from asking him how he could possibly be so comfortable with a

crushed foot.



"Well," said he, "I hadn't had a drink for twelve hours, and hadn't a

cent to my name.  I was most perishing--and so, when that duffer dropped

that hundred-pounder on my foot, I see my chance.  Got a cork leg, you

know!" and he pulled up his pantaloons and proved it.



He was as drunk as a lord all day long, and full of chucklings over his

timely ingenuity.



One drunken man necessarily reminds one of another.  I once heard a

gentleman tell about an incident which he witnessed in a Californian bar-

room.  He entitled it "Ye Modest Man Taketh a Drink."  It was nothing but

a bit of acting, but it seemed to me a perfect rendering, and worthy of

Toodles himself.  The modest man, tolerably far gone with beer and other

matters, enters a saloon (twenty-five cents is the price for anything and

everything, and specie the only money used) and lays down a half dollar;

calls for whiskey and drinks it; the bar-keeper makes change and lays the

quarter in a wet place on the counter; the modest man fumbles at it with

nerveless fingers, but it slips and the water holds it; he contemplates

it, and tries again; same result; observes that people are interested in

what he is at, blushes; fumbles at the quarter again--blushes--puts his

forefinger carefully, slowly down, to make sure of his aim--pushes the

coin toward the bar-keeper, and says with a sigh:



"Gimme a cigar!"



Naturally, another gentleman present told about another drunken man.  He

said he reeled toward home late at night; made a mistake and entered the

wrong gate; thought he saw a dog on the stoop; and it was--an iron one.



He stopped and considered; wondered if it was a dangerous dog; ventured

to say "Be (hic) begone!"  No effect.  Then he approached warily, and

adopted conciliation; pursed up his lips and tried to whistle, but

failed; still approached, saying, "Poor dog!--doggy, doggy, doggy!--poor

doggy-dog!"  Got up on the stoop, still petting with fond names; till

master of the advantages; then exclaimed, "Leave, you thief!"--planted a

vindictive kick in his ribs, and went head-over-heels overboard, of

course.  A pause; a sigh or two of pain, and then a remark in a

reflective voice:



"Awful solid dog.  What could he ben eating?  ('ic!) Rocks, p'raps.

Such animals is dangerous.--'  At's what I say--they're dangerous.  If a

man--('ic!)--if a man wants to feed a dog on rocks, let him feed him on

rocks; 'at's all right; but let him keep him at home--not have him layin'

round promiscuous, where ('ic!) where people's liable to stumble over him

when they ain't noticin'!"



It was not without regret that I took a last look at the tiny flag (it

was thirty-five feet long and ten feet wide) fluttering like a lady's

handkerchief from the topmost peak of Mount Davidson, two thousand feet

above Virginia's roofs, and felt that doubtless I was bidding a permanent

farewell to a city which had afforded me the most vigorous enjoyment of

life I had ever experienced.  And this reminds me of an incident which

the dullest memory Virginia could boast at the time it happened must

vividly recall, at times, till its possessor dies.  Late one summer

afternoon we had a rain shower.



That was astonishing enough, in itself, to set the whole town buzzing,

for it only rains (during a week or two weeks) in the winter in Nevada,

and even then not enough at a time to make it worth while for any

merchant to keep umbrellas for sale.  But the rain was not the chief

wonder.  It only lasted five or ten minutes; while the people were still

talking about it all the heavens gathered to themselves a dense blackness

as of midnight.  All the vast eastern front of Mount Davidson, over-

looking the city, put on such a funereal gloom that only the nearness and

solidity of the mountain made its outlines even faintly distinguishable

from the dead blackness of the heavens they rested against.  This

unaccustomed sight turned all eyes toward the mountain; and as they

looked, a little tongue of rich golden flame was seen waving and

quivering in the heart of the midnight, away up on the extreme summit!

In a few minutes the streets were packed with people, gazing with hardly

an uttered word, at the one brilliant mote in the brooding world of

darkness.  It flicked like a candle-flame, and looked no larger; but with

such a background it was wonderfully bright, small as it was.  It was the

flag!--though no one suspected it at first, it seemed so like a

supernatural visitor of some kind--a mysterious messenger of good

tidings, some were fain to believe.  It was the nation's emblem

transfigured by the departing rays of a sun that was entirely palled from

view; and on no other object did the glory fall, in all the broad

panorama of mountain ranges and deserts.  Not even upon the staff of the

flag--for that, a needle in the distance at any time, was now untouched

by the light and undistinguishable in the gloom.  For a whole hour the

weird visitor winked and burned in its lofty solitude, and still the

thousands of uplifted eyes watched it with fascinated interest.  How the

people were wrought up!  The superstition grew apace that this was a

mystic courier come with great news from the war--the poetry of the idea

excusing and commending it--and on it spread, from heart to heart, from

lip to lip and from street to street, till there was a general impulse to

have out the military and welcome the bright waif with a salvo of

artillery!



And all that time one sorely tried man, the telegraph operator sworn to

official secrecy, had to lock his lips and chain his tongue with a

silence that was like to rend them; for he, and he only, of all the

speculating multitude, knew the great things this sinking sun had seen

that day in the east--Vicksburg fallen, and the Union arms victorious at

Gettysburg!



But for the journalistic monopoly that forbade the slightest revealment

of eastern news till a day after its publication in the California

papers, the glorified flag on Mount Davidson would have been saluted and

re-saluted, that memorable evening, as long as there was a charge of

powder to thunder with; the city would have been illuminated, and every

man that had any respect for himself would have got drunk,--as was the

custom of the country on all occasions of public moment.  Even at this

distant day I cannot think of this needlessly marred supreme opportunity

without regret.  What a time we might have had!









CHAPTER LVI.



We rumbled over the plains and valleys, climbed the Sierras to the

clouds, and looked down upon summer-clad California.  And I will remark

here, in passing, that all scenery in California requires distance to

give it its highest charm.  The mountains are imposing in their sublimity

and their majesty of form and altitude, from any point of view--but one

must have distance to soften their ruggedness and enrich their tintings;

a Californian forest is best at a little distance, for there is a sad

poverty of variety in species, the trees being chiefly of one monotonous

family--redwood, pine, spruce, fir--and so, at a near view there is a

wearisome sameness of attitude in their rigid arms, stretched down ward

and outward in one continued and reiterated appeal to all men to "Sh!--

don't say a word!--you might disturb somebody!"  Close at hand, too,

there is a reliefless and relentless smell of pitch and turpentine; there

is a ceaseless melancholy in their sighing and complaining foliage; one

walks over a soundless carpet of beaten yellow bark and dead spines of

the foliage till he feels like a wandering spirit bereft of a footfall;

he tires of the endless tufts of needles and yearns for substantial,

shapely leaves; he looks for moss and grass to loll upon, and finds none,

for where there is no bark there is naked clay and dirt, enemies to

pensive musing and clean apparel.  Often a grassy plain in California, is

what it should be, but often, too, it is best contemplated at a distance,

because although its grass blades are tall, they stand up vindictively

straight and self-sufficient, and are unsociably wide apart, with

uncomely spots of barren sand between.



One of the queerest things I know of, is to hear tourists from "the

States" go into ecstasies over the loveliness of "ever-blooming

California."  And they always do go into that sort of ecstasies.  But

perhaps they would modify them if they knew how old Californians, with

the memory full upon them of the dust-covered and questionable summer

greens of Californian "verdure," stand astonished, and filled with

worshipping admiration, in the presence of the lavish richness, the

brilliant green, the infinite freshness, the spend-thrift variety of form

and species and foliage that make an Eastern landscape a vision of

Paradise itself.  The idea of a man falling into raptures over grave and

sombre California, when that man has seen New England's meadow-expanses

and her maples, oaks and cathedral-windowed elms decked in summer attire,

or the opaline splendors of autumn descending upon her forests, comes

very near being funny--would be, in fact, but that it is so pathetic.

No land with an unvarying climate can be very beautiful.  The tropics are

not, for all the sentiment that is wasted on them.  They seem beautiful

at first, but sameness impairs the charm by and by.  Change is the

handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with.  The land that has

four well-defined seasons, cannot lack beauty, or pall with monotony.

Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in the watching of

its unfolding, its gradual, harmonious development, its culminating

graces--and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away and a

radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in its train.

And I think that to one in sympathy with nature, each season, in its

turn, seems the loveliest.



San Francisco, a truly fascinating city to live in, is stately and

handsome at a fair distance, but close at hand one notes that the

architecture is mostly old-fashioned, many streets are made up of

decaying, smoke-grimed, wooden houses, and the barren sand-hills toward

the outskirts obtrude themselves too prominently.  Even the kindly

climate is sometimes pleasanter when read about than personally

experienced, for a lovely, cloudless sky wears out its welcome by and by,

and then when the longed for rain does come it stays.  Even the playful

earthquake is better contemplated at a dis--



However there are varying opinions about that.



The climate of San Francisco is mild and singularly equable.  The

thermometer stands at about seventy degrees the year round.  It hardly

changes at all.  You sleep under one or two light blankets Summer and

Winter, and never use a mosquito bar.  Nobody ever wears Summer clothing.

You wear black broadcloth--if you have it--in August and January, just

the same.  It is no colder, and no warmer, in the one month than the

other.  You do not use overcoats and you do not use fans.  It is as

pleasant a climate as could well be contrived, take it all around, and is

doubtless the most unvarying in the whole world.  The wind blows there a

good deal in the summer months, but then you can go over to Oakland, if

you choose--three or four miles away--it does not blow there.  It has

only snowed twice in San Francisco in nineteen years, and then it only

remained on the ground long enough to astonish the children, and set them

to wondering what the feathery stuff was.



During eight months of the year, straight along, the skies are bright and

cloudless, and never a drop of rain falls.  But when the other four

months come along, you will need to go and steal an umbrella.  Because

you will require it.  Not just one day, but one hundred and twenty days

in hardly varying succession.  When you want to go visiting, or attend

church, or the theatre, you never look up at the clouds to see whether it

is likely to rain or not--you look at the almanac.  If it is Winter, it

will rain--and if it is Summer, it won't rain, and you cannot help it.

You never need a lightning-rod, because it never thunders and it never

lightens.  And after you have listened for six or eight weeks, every

night, to the dismal monotony of those quiet rains, you will wish in your

heart the thunder would leap and crash and roar along those drowsy skies

once, and make everything alive--you will wish the prisoned lightnings

would cleave the dull firmament asunder and light it with a blinding

glare for one little instant.  You would give anything to hear the old

familiar thunder again and see the lightning strike somebody.  And along

in the Summer, when you have suffered about four months of lustrous,

pitiless sunshine, you are ready to go down on your knees and plead for

rain--hail--snow--thunder and lightning--anything to break the monotony--

you will take an earthquake, if you cannot do any better.  And the

chances are that you'll get it, too.



San Francisco is built on sand hills, but they are prolific sand hills.

They yield a generous vegetation.  All the rare flowers which people in

"the States" rear with such patient care in parlor flower-pots and green-

houses, flourish luxuriantly in the open air there all the year round.

Calla lilies, all sorts of geraniums, passion flowers, moss roses--I do

not know the names of a tenth part of them.  I only know that while New

Yorkers are burdened with banks and drifts of snow, Californians are

burdened with banks and drifts of flowers, if they only keep their hands

off and let them grow.  And I have heard that they have also that rarest

and most curious of all the flowers, the beautiful Espiritu Santo, as the

Spaniards call it--or flower of the Holy Spirit--though I thought it grew

only in Central America--down on the Isthmus.  In its cup is the

daintiest little facsimile of a dove, as pure as snow.  The Spaniards

have a superstitious reverence for it.  The blossom has been conveyed to

the States, submerged in ether; and the bulb has been taken thither also,

but every attempt to make it bloom after it arrived, has failed.



I have elsewhere spoken of the endless Winter of Mono, California, and

but this moment of the eternal Spring of San Francisco.  Now if we travel

a hundred miles in a straight line, we come to the eternal Summer of

Sacramento.  One never sees Summer-clothing or mosquitoes in San

Francisco--but they can be found in Sacramento.  Not always and

unvaryingly, but about one hundred and forty-three months out of twelve

years, perhaps.  Flowers bloom there, always, the reader can easily

believe--people suffer and sweat, and swear, morning, noon and night, and

wear out their stanchest energies fanning themselves.  It gets hot there,

but if you go down to Fort Yuma you will find it hotter.  Fort Yuma is

probably the hottest place on earth.  The thermometer stays at one

hundred and twenty in the shade there all the time--except when it varies

and goes higher.  It is a U.S. military post, and its occupants get so

used to the terrific heat that they suffer without it.  There is a

tradition (attributed to John Phenix [It has been purloined by fifty

different scribblers who were too poor to invent a fancy but not ashamed

to steal one.--M.  T.]) that a very, very wicked soldier died there,

once, and of course, went straight to the hottest corner of perdition,--

and the next day he telegraphed back for his blankets.  There is no doubt

about the truth of this statement--there can be no doubt about it.  I

have seen the place where that soldier used to board.  In Sacramento it

is fiery Summer always, and you can gather roses, and eat strawberries

and ice-cream, and wear white linen clothes, and pant and perspire, at

eight or nine o'clock in the morning, and then take the cars, and at noon

put on your furs and your skates, and go skimming over frozen Donner

Lake, seven thousand feet above the valley, among snow banks fifteen feet

deep, and in the shadow of grand mountain peaks that lift their frosty

crags ten thousand feet above the level of the sea.



There is a transition for you!  Where will you find another like it in

the Western hemisphere?  And some of us have swept around snow-walled

curves of the Pacific Railroad in that vicinity, six thousand feet above

the sea, and looked down as the birds do, upon the deathless Summer of

the Sacramento Valley, with its fruitful fields, its feathery foliage,

its silver streams, all slumbering in the mellow haze of its enchanted

atmosphere, and all infinitely softened and spiritualized by distance--a

dreamy, exquisite glimpse of fairyland, made all the more charming and

striking that it was caught through a forbidden gateway of ice and snow,

and savage crags and precipices.









CHAPTER LVII.



It was in this Sacramento Valley, just referred to, that a deal of the

most lucrative of the early gold mining was done, and you may still see,

in places, its grassy slopes and levels torn and guttered and disfigured

by the avaricious spoilers of fifteen and twenty years ago.  You may see

such disfigurements far and wide over California--and in some such

places, where only meadows and forests are visible--not a living

creature, not a house, no stick or stone or remnant of a ruin, and not a

sound, not even a whisper to disturb the Sabbath stillness--you will find

it hard to believe that there stood at one time a fiercely-flourishing

little city, of two thousand or three thousand souls, with its newspaper,

fire company, brass band, volunteer militia, bank, hotels, noisy Fourth

of July processions and speeches, gambling hells crammed with tobacco

smoke, profanity, and rough-bearded men of all nations and colors, with

tables heaped with gold dust sufficient for the revenues of a German

principality--streets crowded and rife with business--town lots worth

four hundred dollars a front foot--labor, laughter, music, dancing,

swearing, fighting, shooting, stabbing--a bloody inquest and a man for

breakfast every morning--everything that delights and adorns existence--

all the appointments and appurtenances of a thriving and prosperous and

promising young city,--and now nothing is left of it all but a lifeless,

homeless solitude.  The men are gone, the houses have vanished, even the

name of the place is forgotten.  In no other land, in modern times, have

towns so absolutely died and disappeared, as in the old mining regions of

California.



It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days.  It was a

curious population.  It was the only population of the kind that the

world has ever seen gathered together, and it is not likely that the

world will ever see its like again.  For observe, it was an assemblage of

two hundred thousand young men--not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved

weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of

push and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute that goes to

make up a peerless and magnificent manhood--the very pick and choice of

the world's glorious ones.  No women, no children, no gray and stooping

veterans,--none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young

giants--the strangest population, the finest population, the most gallant

host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land.

And where are they now?  Scattered to the ends of the earth--or

prematurely aged and decrepit--or shot or stabbed in street affrays--or

dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts--all gone, or nearly all--

victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf--the noblest holocaust

that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward.  It is pitiful to

think upon.



It was a splendid population--for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained

sloths staid at home--you never find that sort of people among pioneers--

you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material.  It was that

population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding

enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring

and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this

day--and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as

usual, and says "Well, that is California all over."



But they were rough in those times!  They fairly reveled in gold, whisky,

fights, and fandangoes, and were unspeakably happy.  The honest miner

raked from a hundred to a thousand dollars out of his claim a day, and

what with the gambling dens and the other entertainments, he hadn't a

cent the next morning, if he had any sort of luck.  They cooked their own

bacon and beans, sewed on their own buttons, washed their own shirts--

blue woollen ones; and if a man wanted a fight on his hands without any

annoying delay, all he had to do was to appear in public in a white shirt

or a stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated.  For those people

hated aristocrats.  They had a particular and malignant animosity toward

what they called a "biled shirt."



It was a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society!  Men--only swarming

hosts of stalwart men--nothing juvenile, nothing feminine, visible

anywhere!



In those days miners would flock in crowds to catch a glimpse of that

rare and blessed spectacle, a woman!  Old inhabitants tell how, in a

certain camp, the news went abroad early in the morning that a woman was

come!  They had seen a calico dress hanging out of a wagon down at the

camping-ground--sign of emigrants from over the great plains.  Everybody

went down there, and a shout went up when an actual, bona fide dress was

discovered fluttering in the wind!  The male emigrant was visible.  The

miners said:



"Fetch her out!"



He said: "It is my wife, gentlemen--she is sick--we have been robbed of

money, provisions, everything, by the Indians--we want to rest."



"Fetch her out!  We've got to see her!"



"But, gentlemen, the poor thing, she--"



"FETCH HER OUT!"



He "fetched her out," and they swung their hats and sent up three rousing

cheers and a tiger; and they crowded around and gazed at her, and touched

her dress, and listened to her voice with the look of men who listened to

a memory rather than a present reality--and then they collected twenty-

five hundred dollars in gold and gave it to the man, and swung their hats

again and gave three more cheers, and went home satisfied.





Once I dined in San Francisco with the family of a pioneer, and talked

with his daughter, a young lady whose first experience in San Francisco

was an adventure, though she herself did not remember it, as she was only

two or three years old at the time.  Her father said that, after landing

from the ship, they were walking up the street, a servant leading the

party with the little girl in her arms.  And presently a huge miner,

bearded, belted, spurred, and bristling with deadly weapons--just down

from a long campaign in the mountains, evidently-barred the way, stopped

the servant, and stood gazing, with a face all alive with gratification

and astonishment.  Then he said, reverently:



"Well, if it ain't a child!" And then he snatched a little leather sack

out of his pocket and said to the servant:



"There's a hundred and fifty dollars in dust, there, and I'll give it to

you to let me kiss the child!"



That anecdote is true.



But see how things change.  Sitting at that dinner-table, listening to

that anecdote, if I had offered double the money for the privilege of

kissing the same child, I would have been refused.  Seventeen added years

have far more than doubled the price.



And while upon this subject I will remark that once in Star City, in the

Humboldt Mountains, I took my place in a sort of long, post-office single

file of miners, to patiently await my chance to peep through a crack in

the cabin and get a sight of the splendid new sensation--a genuine, live

Woman!  And at the end of half of an hour my turn came, and I put my eye

to the crack, and there she was, with one arm akimbo, and tossing flap-

jacks in a frying-pan with the other.



And she was one hundred and sixty-five [Being in calmer mood, now, I

voluntarily knock off a hundred from that.--M.T.] years old, and hadn't a

tooth in her head.









CHAPTER LVIII.



For a few months I enjoyed what to me was an entirely new phase of

existence--a butterfly idleness; nothing to do, nobody to be responsible

to, and untroubled with financial uneasiness.  I fell in love with the

most cordial and sociable city in the Union.  After the sage-brush and

alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me.  I lived at

the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places,

infested the opera, and learned to seem enraptured with music which

oftener afflicted my ignorant ear than enchanted it, if I had had the

vulgar honesty to confess it.  However, I suppose I was not greatly worse

than the most of my countrymen in that.  I had longed to be a butterfly,

and I was one at last.  I attended private parties in sumptuous evening

dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkad and

schottisched with a step peculiar to myself--and the kangaroo.  In a

word, I kept the due state of a man worth a hundred thousand dollars

(prospectively,) and likely to reach absolute affluence when that silver-

mine sale should be ultimately achieved in the East.  I spent money with

a free hand, and meantime watched the stock sales with an interested eye

and looked to see what might happen in Nevada.



Something very important happened.  The property holders of Nevada voted

against the State Constitution; but the folks who had nothing to lose

were in the majority, and carried the measure over their heads.  But

after all it did not immediately look like a disaster, though

unquestionably it was one I hesitated, calculated the chances, and then

concluded not to sell.  Stocks went on rising; speculation went mad;

bankers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, laborers, even the very

washerwomen and servant girls, were putting up their earnings on silver

stocks, and every sun that rose in the morning went down on paupers

enriched and rich men beggared.  What a gambling carnival it was!  Gould

and Curry soared to six thousand three hundred dollars a foot!  And then

--all of a sudden, out went the bottom and everything and everybody went

to ruin and destruction!  The wreck was complete.



The bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it.  I was an

early beggar and a thorough one.  My hoarded stocks were not worth the

paper they were printed on.  I threw them all away.  I, the cheerful

idiot that had been squandering money like water, and thought myself

beyond the reach of misfortune, had not now as much as fifty dollars when

I gathered together my various debts and paid them.  I removed from the

hotel to a very private boarding house.  I took a reporter's berth and

went to work.  I was not entirely broken in spirit, for I was building

confidently on the sale of the silver mine in the east.  But I could not

hear from Dan.  My letters miscarried or were not answered.



One day I did not feel vigorous and remained away from the office.  The

next day I went down toward noon as usual, and found a note on my desk

which had been there twenty-four hours.  It was signed "Marshall"--the

Virginia reporter--and contained a request that I should call at the

hotel and see him and a friend or two that night, as they would sail for

the east in the morning.  A postscript added that their errand was a big

mining speculation!  I was hardly ever so sick in my life.  I abused

myself for leaving Virginia and entrusting to another man a matter I

ought to have attended to myself; I abused myself for remaining away from

the office on the one day of all the year that I should have been there.

And thus berating myself I trotted a mile to the steamer wharf and

arrived just in time to be too late.  The ship was in the stream and

under way.



I comforted myself with the thought that may be the speculation would

amount to nothing--poor comfort at best--and then went back to my

slavery, resolved to put up with my thirty-five dollars a week and forget

all about it.



A month afterward I enjoyed my first earthquake.  It was one which was

long called the "great" earthquake, and is doubtless so distinguished

till this day.  It was just after noon, on a bright October day.  I was

coming down Third street.  The only objects in motion anywhere in sight

in that thickly built and populous quarter, were a man in a buggy behind

me, and a street car wending slowly up the cross street.  Otherwise, all

was solitude and a Sabbath stillness.  As I turned the corner, around a

frame house, there was a great rattle and jar, and it occurred to me that

here was an item!--no doubt a fight in that house.  Before I could turn

and seek the door, there came a really terrific shock; the ground seemed

to roll under me in waves, interrupted by a violent joggling up and down,

and there was a heavy grinding noise as of brick houses rubbing together.

I fell up against the frame house and hurt my elbow.  I knew what it was,

now, and from mere reportorial instinct, nothing else, took out my watch

and noted the time of day; at that moment a third and still severer shock

came, and as I reeled about on the pavement trying to keep my footing,

I saw a sight!  The entire front of a tall four-story brick building in

Third street sprung outward like a door and fell sprawling across the

street, raising a dust like a great volume of smoke!  And here came the

buggy--overboard went the man, and in less time than I can tell it the

vehicle was distributed in small fragments along three hundred yards of

street.



One could have fancied that somebody had fired a charge of chair-rounds

and rags down the thoroughfare.  The street car had stopped, the horses

were rearing and plunging, the passengers were pouring out at both ends,

and one fat man had crashed half way through a glass window on one side

of the car, got wedged fast and was squirming and screaming like an

impaled madman.  Every door, of every house, as far as the eye could

reach, was vomiting a stream of human beings; and almost before one could

execute a wink and begin another, there was a massed multitude of people

stretching in endless procession down every street my position commanded.

Never was solemn solitude turned into teeming life quicker.



Of the wonders wrought by "the great earthquake," these were all that

came under my eye; but the tricks it did, elsewhere, and far and wide

over the town, made toothsome gossip for nine days.



The destruction of property was trifling--the injury to it was wide-

spread and somewhat serious.



The "curiosities" of the earthquake were simply endless.  Gentlemen and

ladies who were sick, or were taking a siesta, or had dissipated till a

late hour and were making up lost sleep, thronged into the public streets

in all sorts of queer apparel, and some without any at all.  One woman

who had been washing a naked child, ran down the street holding it by the

ankles as if it were a dressed turkey.  Prominent citizens who were

supposed to keep the Sabbath strictly, rushed out of saloons in their

shirt-sleeves, with billiard cues in their hands.  Dozens of men with

necks swathed in napkins, rushed from barber-shops, lathered to the eyes

or with one cheek clean shaved and the other still bearing a hairy

stubble.  Horses broke from stables, and a frightened dog rushed up a

short attic ladder and out on to a roof, and when his scare was over had

not the nerve to go down again the same way he had gone up.



A prominent editor flew down stairs, in the principal hotel, with nothing

on but one brief undergarment--met a chambermaid, and exclaimed:



"Oh, what shall I do!  Where shall I go!"



She responded with naive serenity:



"If you have no choice, you might try a clothing-store!"



A certain foreign consul's lady was the acknowledged leader of fashion,

and every time she appeared in anything new or extraordinary, the ladies

in the vicinity made a raid on their husbands' purses and arrayed

themselves similarly.  One man who had suffered considerably and growled

accordingly, was standing at the window when the shocks came, and the

next instant the consul's wife, just out of the bath, fled by with no

other apology for clothing than--a bath-towel!  The sufferer rose

superior to the terrors of the earthquake, and said to his wife:



"Now that is something like!  Get out your towel my dear!"



The plastering that fell from ceilings in San Francisco that day, would

have covered several acres of ground.  For some days afterward, groups of

eyeing and pointing men stood about many a building, looking at long zig-

zag cracks that extended from the eaves to the ground.  Four feet of the

tops of three chimneys on one house were broken square off and turned

around in such a way as to completely stop the draft.



A crack a hundred feet long gaped open six inches wide in the middle of

one street and then shut together again with such force, as to ridge up

the meeting earth like a slender grave.  A lady sitting in her rocking

and quaking parlor, saw the wall part at the ceiling, open and shut

twice, like a mouth, and then-drop the end of a brick on the floor like a

tooth.  She was a woman easily disgusted with foolishness, and she arose

and went out of there.  One lady who was coming down stairs was

astonished to see a bronze Hercules lean forward on its pedestal as if to

strike her with its club.  They both reached the bottom of the flight at

the same time,--the woman insensible from the fright.  Her child, born

some little time afterward, was club-footed.  However--on second

thought,--if the reader sees any coincidence in this, he must do it at

his own risk.



The first shock brought down two or three huge organ-pipes in one of the

churches.  The minister, with uplifted hands, was just closing the

services.  He glanced up, hesitated, and said:



"However, we will omit the benediction!"--and the next instant there was

a vacancy in the atmosphere where he had stood.



After the first shock, an Oakland minister said:



"Keep your seats!  There is no better place to die than this"--



And added, after the third:



"But outside is good enough!"  He then skipped out at the back door.



Such another destruction of mantel ornaments and toilet bottles as the

earthquake created, San Francisco never saw before.  There was hardly a

girl or a matron in the city but suffered losses of this kind.  Suspended

pictures were thrown down, but oftener still, by a curious freak of the

earthquake's humor, they were whirled completely around with their faces

to the wall!  There was great difference of opinion, at first, as to the

course or direction the earthquake traveled, but water that splashed out

of various tanks and buckets settled that.  Thousands of people were made

so sea-sick by the rolling and pitching of floors and streets that they

were weak and bed-ridden for hours, and some few for even days

afterward.--Hardly an individual escaped nausea entirely.



The queer earthquake--episodes that formed the staple of San Francisco

gossip for the next week would fill a much larger book than this, and so

I will diverge from the subject.



By and by, in the due course of things, I picked up a copy of the

Enterprise one day, and fell under this cruel blow:



      NEVADA MINES IN NEW YORK.--G.  M.  Marshall, Sheba Hurs and Amos H.

      Rose, who left San Francisco last July for New York City, with ores

      from mines in Pine Wood District, Humboldt County, and on the Reese

      River range, have disposed of a mine containing six thousand feet

      and called the Pine Mountains Consolidated, for the sum of

      $3,000,000.  The stamps on the deed, which is now on its way to

      Humboldt County, from New York, for record, amounted to $3,000,

      which is said to be the largest amount of stamps ever placed on one

      document.  A working capital of $1,000,000 has been paid into the

      treasury, and machinery has already been purchased for a large

      quartz mill, which will be put up as soon as possible.  The stock in

      this company is all full paid and entirely unassessable.  The ores

      of the mines in this district somewhat resemble those of the Sheba

      mine in Humboldt.  Sheba Hurst, the discoverer of the mines, with

      his friends corralled all the best leads and all the land and timber

      they desired before making public their whereabouts.  Ores from

      there, assayed in this city, showed them to be exceedingly rich in

      silver and gold--silver predominating.  There is an abundance of

      wood and water in the District.  We are glad to know that New York

      capital has been enlisted in the development of the mines of this

      region.  Having seen the ores and assays, we are satisfied that the

      mines of the District are very valuable--anything but wild-cat.



Once more native imbecility had carried the day, and I had lost a

million!  It was the "blind lead" over again.



Let us not dwell on this miserable matter.  If I were inventing these

things, I could be wonderfully humorous over them; but they are too true

to be talked of with hearty levity, even at this distant day. [True, and

yet not exactly as given in the above figures, possibly.  I saw Marshall,

months afterward, and although he had plenty of money he did not claim to

have captured an entire million.  In fact I gathered that he had not then

received $50,000.  Beyond that figure his fortune appeared to consist of

uncertain vast expectations rather than prodigious certainties.  However,

when the above item appeared in print I put full faith in it, and

incontinently wilted and went to seed under it.] Suffice it that I so

lost heart, and so yielded myself up to repinings and sighings and

foolish regrets, that I neglected my duties and became about worthless,

as a reporter for a brisk newspaper.  And at last one of the proprietors

took me aside, with a charity I still remember with considerable respect,

and gave me an opportunity to resign my berth and so save myself the

disgrace of a dismissal.









CHAPTER LIX.



For a time I wrote literary screeds for the Golden Era. C. H. Webb had

established a very excellent literary weekly called the Californian, but

high merit was no guaranty of success; it languished, and he sold out to

three printers, and Bret Harte became editor at $20 a week, and I was

employed to contribute an article a week at $12.  But the journal still

languished, and the printers sold out to Captain Ogden, a rich man and a

pleasant gentleman who chose to amuse himself with such an expensive

luxury without much caring about the cost of it.  When he grew tired of

the novelty, he re-sold to the printers, the paper presently died a

peaceful death, and I was out of work again.  I would not mention these

things but for the fact that they so aptly illustrate the ups and downs

that characterize life on the Pacific coast.  A man could hardly stumble

into such a variety of queer vicissitudes in any other country.



For two months my sole occupation was avoiding acquaintances; for during

that time I did not earn a penny, or buy an article of any kind, or pay

my board.  I became a very adept at "slinking."  I slunk from back street

to back street, I slunk away from approaching faces that looked familiar,

I slunk to my meals, ate them humbly and with a mute apology for every

mouthful I robbed my generous landlady of, and at midnight, after

wanderings that were but slinkings away from cheerfulness and light, I

slunk to my bed.  I felt meaner, and lowlier and more despicable than the

worms.  During all this time I had but one piece of money--a silver ten

cent piece--and I held to it and would not spend it on any account, lest

the consciousness coming strong upon me that I was entirely penniless,

might suggest suicide.  I had pawned every thing but the clothes I had

on; so I clung to my dime desperately, till it was smooth with handling.



However, I am forgetting.  I did have one other occupation beside that of

"slinking."  It was the entertaining of a collector (and being

entertained by him,) who had in his hands the Virginia banker's bill for

forty-six dollars which I had loaned my schoolmate, the "Prodigal."  This

man used to call regularly once a week and dun me, and sometimes oftener.

He did it from sheer force of habit, for he knew he could get nothing.

He would get out his bill, calculate the interest for me, at five per

cent a month, and show me clearly that there was no attempt at fraud in

it and no mistakes; and then plead, and argue and dun with all his might

for any sum--any little trifle--even a dollar--even half a dollar, on

account.  Then his duty was accomplished and his conscience free.  He

immediately dropped the subject there always; got out a couple of cigars

and divided, put his feet in the window, and then we would have a long,

luxurious talk about everything and everybody, and he would furnish me a

world of curious dunning adventures out of the ample store in his memory.

By and by he would clap his hat on his head, shake hands and say briskly:



"Well, business is business--can't stay with you always!"--and was off in

a second.



The idea of pining for a dun!  And yet I used to long for him to come,

and would get as uneasy as any mother if the day went by without his

visit, when I was expecting him.  But he never collected that bill, at

last nor any part of it.  I lived to pay it to the banker myself.



Misery loves company.  Now and then at night, in out-of-the way, dimly

lighted places, I found myself happening on another child of misfortune.

He looked so seedy and forlorn, so homeless and friendless and forsaken,

that I yearned toward him as a brother.  I wanted to claim kinship with

him and go about and enjoy our wretchedness together.  The drawing toward

each other must have been mutual; at any rate we got to falling together

oftener, though still seemingly by accident; and although we did not

speak or evince any recognition, I think the dull anxiety passed out of

both of us when we saw each other, and then for several hours we would

idle along contentedly, wide apart, and glancing furtively in at home

lights and fireside gatherings, out of the night shadows, and very much

enjoying our dumb companionship.



Finally we spoke, and were inseparable after that.  For our woes were

identical, almost.  He had been a reporter too, and lost his berth, and

this was his experience, as nearly as I can recollect it.  After losing

his berth he had gone down, down, down, with never a halt: from a

boarding house on Russian Hill to a boarding house in Kearney street;

from thence to Dupont; from thence to a low sailor den; and from thence

to lodgings in goods boxes and empty hogsheads near the wharves.  Then;

for a while, he had gained a meagre living by sewing up bursted sacks of

grain on the piers; when that failed he had found food here and there as

chance threw it in his way.  He had ceased to show his face in daylight,

now, for a reporter knows everybody, rich and poor, high and low, and

cannot well avoid familiar faces in the broad light of day.



This mendicant Blucher--I call him that for convenience--was a splendid

creature.  He was full of hope, pluck and philosophy; he was well read

and a man of cultivated taste; he had a bright wit and was a master of

satire; his kindliness and his generous spirit made him royal in my eyes

and changed his curb-stone seat to a throne and his damaged hat to a

crown.



He had an adventure, once, which sticks fast in my memory as the most

pleasantly grotesque that ever touched my sympathies.  He had been

without a penny for two months.  He had shirked about obscure streets,

among friendly dim lights, till the thing had become second nature to

him.  But at last he was driven abroad in daylight.  The cause was

sufficient; he had not tasted food for forty-eight hours, and he could

not endure the misery of his hunger in idle hiding.  He came along a back

street, glowering at the loaves in bake-shop windows, and feeling that he

could trade his life away for a morsel to eat.  The sight of the bread

doubled his hunger; but it was good to look at it, any how, and imagine

what one might do if one only had it.



Presently, in the middle of the street he saw a shining spot--looked

again--did not, and could not, believe his eyes--turned away, to try

them, then looked again.  It was a verity--no vain, hunger-inspired

delusion--it was a silver dime!



He snatched it--gloated over it; doubted it--bit it--found it genuine--

choked his heart down, and smothered a halleluiah.  Then he looked

around--saw that nobody was looking at him--threw the dime down where it

was before--walked away a few steps, and approached again, pretending he

did not know it was there, so that he could re-enjoy the luxury of

finding it.  He walked around it, viewing it from different points; then

sauntered about with his hands in his pockets, looking up at the signs

and now and then glancing at it and feeling the old thrill again.

Finally he took it up, and went away, fondling it in his pocket.  He

idled through unfrequented streets, stopping in doorways and corners to

take it out and look at it.  By and by he went home to his lodgings--an

empty queens-ware hogshead,--and employed himself till night trying to

make up his mind what to buy with it.  But it was hard to do.  To get the

most for it was the idea.  He knew that at the Miner's Restaurant he

could get a plate of beans and a piece of bread for ten cents; or a fish-

ball and some few trifles, but they gave "no bread with one fish-ball"

there.  At French Pete's he could get a veal cutlet, plain, and some

radishes and bread, for ten cents; or a cup of coffee--a pint at least--

and a slice of bread; but the slice was not thick enough by the eighth of

an inch, and sometimes they were still more criminal than that in the

cutting of it.  At seven o'clock his hunger was wolfish; and still his

mind was not made up.  He turned out and went up Merchant street, still

ciphering; and chewing a bit of stick, as is the way of starving men.



He passed before the lights of Martin's restaurant, the most aristocratic

in the city, and stopped.  It was a place where he had often dined, in

better days, and Martin knew him well.  Standing aside, just out of the

range of the light, he worshiped the quails and steaks in the show

window, and imagined that may be the fairy times were not gone yet and

some prince in disguise would come along presently and tell him to go in

there and take whatever he wanted.  He chewed his stick with a hungry

interest as he warmed to his subject.  Just at this juncture he was

conscious of some one at his side, sure enough; and then a finger touched

his arm.  He looked up, over his shoulder, and saw an apparition--a very

allegory of Hunger!  It was a man six feet high, gaunt, unshaven, hung

with rags; with a haggard face and sunken cheeks, and eyes that pleaded

piteously.  This phantom said:



"Come with me--please."



He locked his arm in Blucher's and walked up the street to where the

passengers were few and the light not strong, and then facing about, put

out his hands in a beseeching way, and said:



"Friend--stranger--look at me!  Life is easy to you--you go about, placid

and content, as I did once, in my day--you have been in there, and eaten

your sumptuous supper, and picked your teeth, and hummed your tune, and

thought your pleasant thoughts, and said to yourself it is a good world--

but you've never suffered!  You don't know what trouble is--you don't

know what misery is--nor hunger!  Look at me!  Stranger have pity on a

poor friendless, homeless dog!  As God is my judge, I have not tasted

food for eight and forty hours!--look in my eyes and see if I lie!  Give

me the least trifle in the world to keep me from starving--anything--

twenty-five cents!  Do it, stranger--do it, please.  It will be nothing

to you, but life to me.  Do it, and I will go down on my knees and lick

the dust before you!  I will kiss your footprints--I will worship the

very ground you walk on!  Only twenty-five cents!  I am famishing--

perishing--starving by inches!  For God's sake don't desert me!"



Blucher was bewildered--and touched, too--stirred to the depths.  He

reflected.  Thought again.  Then an idea struck him, and he said:



"Come with me."



He took the outcast's arm, walked him down to Martin's restaurant, seated

him at a marble table, placed the bill of fare before him, and said:



"Order what you want, friend.  Charge it to me, Mr. Martin."



"All right, Mr. Blucher," said Martin.



Then Blucher stepped back and leaned against the counter and watched the

man stow away cargo after cargo of buckwheat cakes at seventy-five cents

a plate; cup after cup of coffee, and porter house steaks worth two

dollars apiece; and when six dollars and a half's worth of destruction

had been accomplished, and the stranger's hunger appeased, Blucher went

down to French Pete's, bought a veal cutlet plain, a slice of bread, and

three radishes, with his dime, and set to and feasted like a king!



Take the episode all around, it was as odd as any that can be culled from

the myriad curiosities of Californian life, perhaps.









CHAPTER LX.



By and by, an old friend of mine, a miner, came down from one of the

decayed mining camps of Tuolumne, California, and I went back with him.

We lived in a small cabin on a verdant hillside, and there were not five

other cabins in view over the wide expanse of hill and forest.  Yet a

flourishing city of two or three thousand population had occupied this

grassy dead solitude during the flush times of twelve or fifteen years

before, and where our cabin stood had once been the heart of the teeming

hive, the centre of the city.  When the mines gave out the town fell into

decay, and in a few years wholly disappeared--streets, dwellings, shops,

everything--and left no sign.  The grassy slopes were as green and smooth

and desolate of life as if they had never been disturbed.  The mere

handful of miners still remaining, had seen the town spring up spread,

grow and flourish in its pride; and they had seen it sicken and die, and

pass away like a dream.  With it their hopes had died, and their zest of

life.  They had long ago resigned themselves to their exile, and ceased

to correspond with their distant friends or turn longing eyes toward

their early homes.  They had accepted banishment, forgotten the world and

been forgotten of the world.  They were far from telegraphs and

railroads, and they stood, as it were, in a living grave, dead to the

events that stirred the globe's great populations, dead to the common

interests of men, isolated and outcast from brotherhood with their kind.

It was the most singular, and almost the most touching and melancholy

exile that fancy can imagine.--One of my associates in this locality, for

two or three months, was a man who had had a university education; but

now for eighteen years he had decayed there by inches, a bearded, rough-

clad, clay-stained miner, and at times, among his sighings and

soliloquizings, he unconsciously interjected vaguely remembered Latin and

Greek sentences--dead and musty tongues, meet vehicles for the thoughts

of one whose dreams were all of the past, whose life was a failure; a

tired man, burdened with the present, and indifferent to the future; a

man without ties, hopes, interests, waiting for rest and the end.



In that one little corner of California is found a species of mining

which is seldom or never mentioned in print.  It is called "pocket

mining" and I am not aware that any of it is done outside of that little

corner.  The gold is not evenly distributed through the surface dirt, as

in ordinary placer mines, but is collected in little spots, and they are

very wide apart and exceedingly hard to find, but when you do find one

you reap a rich and sudden harvest.  There are not now more than twenty

pocket miners in that entire little region.  I think I know every one of

them personally.  I have known one of them to hunt patiently about the

hill-sides every day for eight months without finding gold enough to make

a snuff-box--his grocery bill running up relentlessly all the time--and

then find a pocket and take out of it two thousand dollars in two dips of

his shovel.  I have known him to take out three thousand dollars in two

hours, and go and pay up every cent of his indebtedness, then enter on a

dazzling spree that finished the last of his treasure before the night

was gone.  And the next day he bought his groceries on credit as usual,

and shouldered his pan and shovel and went off to the hills hunting

pockets again happy and content.  This is the most fascinating of all the

different kinds of mining, and furnishes a very handsome percentage of

victims to the lunatic asylum.



Pocket hunting is an ingenious process.  You take a spadeful of earth

from the hill-side and put it in a large tin pan and dissolve and wash it

gradually away till nothing is left but a teaspoonful of fine sediment.

Whatever gold was in that earth has remained, because, being the

heaviest, it has sought the bottom.  Among the sediment you will find

half a dozen yellow particles no larger than pin-heads.  You are

delighted.  You move off to one side and wash another pan.  If you find

gold again, you move to one side further, and wash a third pan.  If you

find no gold this time, you are delighted again, because you know you are

on the right scent.



You lay an imaginary plan, shaped like a fan, with its handle up the

hill--for just where the end of the handle is, you argue that the rich

deposit lies hidden, whose vagrant grains of gold have escaped and been

washed down the hill, spreading farther and farther apart as they

wandered.  And so you proceed up the hill, washing the earth and

narrowing your lines every time the absence of gold in the pan shows that

you are outside the spread of the fan; and at last, twenty yards up the

hill your lines have converged to a point--a single foot from that point

you cannot find any gold.  Your breath comes short and quick, you are

feverish with excitement; the dinner-bell may ring its clapper off, you

pay no attention; friends may die, weddings transpire, houses burn down,

they are nothing to you; you sweat and dig and delve with a frantic

interest--and all at once you strike it!  Up comes a spadeful of earth

and quartz that is all lovely with soiled lumps and leaves and sprays of

gold.  Sometimes that one spadeful is all--$500.  Sometimes the nest

contains $10,000, and it takes you three or four days to get it all out.

The pocket-miners tell of one nest that yielded $60,000 and two men

exhausted it in two weeks, and then sold the ground for $10,000 to a

party who never got $300 out of it afterward.



The hogs are good pocket hunters.  All the summer they root around the

bushes, and turn up a thousand little piles of dirt, and then the miners

long for the rains; for the rains beat upon these little piles and wash

them down and expose the gold, possibly right over a pocket.  Two pockets

were found in this way by the same man in one day.  One had $5,000 in it

and the other $8,000.  That man could appreciate it, for he hadn't had a

cent for about a year.



In Tuolumne lived two miners who used to go to the neighboring village in

the afternoon and return every night with household supplies.  Part of

the distance they traversed a trail, and nearly always sat down to rest

on a great boulder that lay beside the path.  In the course of thirteen

years they had worn that boulder tolerably smooth, sitting on it.  By and

by two vagrant Mexicans came along and occupied the seat.  They began to

amuse themselves by chipping off flakes from the boulder with a sledge-

hammer.  They examined one of these flakes and found it rich with gold.

That boulder paid them $800 afterward.  But the aggravating circumstance

was that these "Greasers" knew that there must be more gold where that

boulder came from, and so they went panning up the hill and found what

was probably the richest pocket that region has yet produced.  It took

three months to exhaust it, and it yielded $120,000.  The two American

miners who used to sit on the boulder are poor yet, and they take turn

about in getting up early in the morning to curse those Mexicans--and

when it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is

gifted above the sons of men.



I have dwelt at some length upon this matter of pocket mining because it

is a subject that is seldom referred to in print, and therefore I judged

that it would have for the reader that interest which naturally attaches

to novelty.









CHAPTER LXI.



One of my comrades there--another of those victims of eighteen years of

unrequited toil and blighted hopes--was one of the gentlest spirits that

ever bore its patient cross in a weary exile: grave and simple Dick

Baker, pocket-miner of Dead-House Gulch.--He was forty-six, gray as a

rat, earnest, thoughtful, slenderly educated, slouchily dressed and clay-

soiled, but his heart was finer metal than any gold his shovel ever

brought to light--than any, indeed, that ever was mined or minted.



Whenever he was out of luck and a little down-hearted, he would fall to

mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where women

and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets, for they

must love something).  And he always spoke of the strange sagacity of

that cat with the air of a man who believed in his secret heart that

there was something human about it--may be even supernatural.



I heard him talking about this animal once.  He said:



"Gentlemen, I used to have a cat here, by the name of Tom Quartz, which

you'd a took an interest in I reckon--most any body would.  I had him

here eight year--and he was the remarkablest cat I ever see.  He was a

large gray one of the Tom specie, an' he had more hard, natchral sense

than any man in this camp--'n' a power of dignity--he wouldn't let the

Gov'ner of Californy be familiar with him.  He never ketched a rat in his

life--'peared to be above it.  He never cared for nothing but mining.

He knowed more about mining, that cat did, than any man I ever, ever see.

You couldn't tell him noth'n 'bout placer diggin's--'n' as for pocket

mining, why he was just born for it.



"He would dig out after me an' Jim when we went over the hills

prospect'n', and he would trot along behind us for as much as five mile,

if we went so fur.  An' he had the best judgment about mining ground--why

you never see anything like it.  When we went to work, he'd scatter a

glance around, 'n' if he didn't think much of the indications, he would

give a look as much as to say, 'Well, I'll have to get you to excuse me,'

'n' without another word he'd hyste his nose into the air 'n' shove for

home.  But if the ground suited him, he would lay low 'n' keep dark till

the first pan was washed, 'n' then he would sidle up 'n' take a look, an'

if there was about six or seven grains of gold he was satisfied--he

didn't want no better prospect 'n' that--'n' then he would lay down on

our coats and snore like a steamboat till we'd struck the pocket, an'

then get up 'n' superintend.  He was nearly lightnin' on superintending.



"Well, bye an' bye, up comes this yer quartz excitement.  Every body was

into it--every body was pick'n' 'n' blast'n' instead of shovelin' dirt on

the hill side--every body was put'n' down a shaft instead of scrapin' the

surface.  Noth'n' would do Jim, but we must tackle the ledges, too, 'n'

so we did.  We commenced put'n' down a shaft, 'n' Tom Quartz he begin to

wonder what in the Dickens it was all about.  He hadn't ever seen any

mining like that before, 'n' he was all upset, as you may say--he

couldn't come to a right understanding of it no way--it was too many for

him.  He was down on it, too, you bet you--he was down on it powerful--

'n' always appeared to consider it the cussedest foolishness out.  But

that cat, you know, was always agin new fangled arrangements--somehow he

never could abide'em.  You know how it is with old habits.  But by an' by

Tom Quartz begin to git sort of reconciled a little, though he never

could altogether understand that eternal sinkin' of a shaft an' never

pannin' out any thing.  At last he got to comin' down in the shaft,

hisself, to try to cipher it out.  An' when he'd git the blues, 'n' feel

kind o'scruffy, 'n' aggravated 'n' disgusted--knowin' as he did, that the

bills was runnin' up all the time an' we warn't makin' a cent--he would

curl up on a gunny sack in the corner an' go to sleep.  Well, one day

when the shaft was down about eight foot, the rock got so hard that we

had to put in a blast--the first blast'n' we'd ever done since Tom Quartz

was born.  An' then we lit the fuse 'n' clumb out 'n' got off 'bout fifty

yards--'n' forgot 'n' left Tom Quartz sound asleep on the gunny sack.



"In 'bout a minute we seen a puff of smoke bust up out of the hole, 'n'

then everything let go with an awful crash, 'n' about four million ton of

rocks 'n' dirt 'n' smoke 'n; splinters shot up 'bout a mile an' a half

into the air, an' by George, right in the dead centre of it was old Tom

Quartz a goin' end over end, an' a snortin' an' a sneez'n', an' a clawin'

an' a reachin' for things like all possessed.  But it warn't no use, you

know, it warn't no use.  An' that was the last we see of him for about

two minutes 'n' a half, an' then all of a sudden it begin to rain rocks

and rubbage, an' directly he come down ker-whop about ten foot off f'm

where we stood Well, I reckon he was p'raps the orneriest lookin' beast

you ever see.  One ear was sot back on his neck, 'n' his tail was stove

up, 'n' his eye-winkers was swinged off, 'n' he was all blacked up with

powder an' smoke, an' all sloppy with mud 'n' slush f'm one end to the

other.



"Well sir, it warn't no use to try to apologize--we couldn't say a word.

He took a sort of a disgusted look at hisself, 'n' then he looked at us--

an' it was just exactly the same as if he had said--'Gents, may be you

think it's smart to take advantage of a cat that 'ain't had no experience

of quartz minin', but I think different'--an' then he turned on his heel

'n' marched off home without ever saying another word.



"That was jest his style.  An' may be you won't believe it, but after

that you never see a cat so prejudiced agin quartz mining as what he was.

An' by an' bye when he did get to goin' down in the shaft agin, you'd 'a

been astonished at his sagacity.  The minute we'd tetch off a blast 'n'

the fuse'd begin to sizzle, he'd give a look as much as to say: 'Well,

I'll have to git you to excuse me,' an' it was surpris'n' the way he'd

shin out of that hole 'n' go f'r a tree.  Sagacity?  It ain't no name for

it.  'Twas inspiration!"



I said, "Well, Mr. Baker, his prejudice against quartz-mining was

remarkable, considering how he came by it.  Couldn't you ever cure him of

it?"



"Cure him!  No!  When Tom Quartz was sot once, he was always sot--and you

might a blowed him up as much as three million times 'n' you'd never a

broken him of his cussed prejudice agin quartz mining."



The affection and the pride that lit up Baker's face when he delivered

this tribute to the firmness of his humble friend of other days, will

always be a vivid memory with me.



At the end of two months we had never "struck" a pocket.  We had panned

up and down the hillsides till they looked plowed like a field; we could

have put in a crop of grain, then, but there would have been no way to

get it to market.  We got many good "prospects," but when the gold gave

out in the pan and we dug down, hoping and longing, we found only

emptiness--the pocket that should have been there was as barren as our

own.--At last we shouldered our pans and shovels and struck out over the

hills to try new localities.  We prospected around Angel's Camp, in

Calaveras county, during three weeks, but had no success.  Then we

wandered on foot among the mountains, sleeping under the trees at night,

for the weather was mild, but still we remained as centless as the last

rose of summer.  That is a poor joke, but it is in pathetic harmony with

the circumstances, since we were so poor ourselves.  In accordance with

the custom of the country, our door had always stood open and our board

welcome to tramping miners--they drifted along nearly every day, dumped

their paust shovels by the threshold and took "pot luck" with us--and now

on our own tramp we never found cold hospitality.



Our wanderings were wide and in many directions; and now I could give the

reader a vivid description of the Big Trees and the marvels of the Yo

Semite--but what has this reader done to me that I should persecute him?

I will deliver him into the hands of less conscientious tourists and take

his blessing.  Let me be charitable, though I fail in all virtues else.



Note: Some of the phrases in the above are mining technicalities, purely,

and may be a little obscure to the general reader.  In "placer diggings"

the gold is scattered all through the surface dirt; in "pocket" diggings

it is concentrated in one little spot; in "quartz" the gold is in a

solid, continuous vein of rock, enclosed between distinct walls of some

other kind of stone--and this is the most laborious and expensive of all

the different kinds of mining.  "Prospecting" is hunting for a "placer";

"indications" are signs of its presence; "panning out" refers to the

washing process by which the grains of gold are separated from the dirt;

a "prospect" is what one finds in the first panful of dirt--and its value

determines whether it is a good or a bad prospect, and whether it is

worth while to tarry there or seek further.









CHAPTER LXII.



After a three months' absence, I found myself in San Francisco again,

without a cent.  When my credit was about exhausted, (for I had become

too mean and lazy, now, to work on a morning paper, and there were no

vacancies on the evening journals,) I was created San Francisco

correspondent of the Enterprise, and at the end of five months I was out

of debt, but my interest in my work was gone; for my correspondence being

a daily one, without rest or respite, I got unspeakably tired of it.

I wanted another change.  The vagabond instinct was strong upon me.

Fortune favored and I got a new berth and a delightful one.  It was to go

down to the Sandwich Islands and write some letters for the Sacramento

Union, an excellent journal and liberal with employees.



We sailed in the propeller Ajax, in the middle of winter.  The almanac

called it winter, distinctly enough, but the weather was a compromise

between spring and summer.  Six days out of port, it became summer

altogether.  We had some thirty passengers; among them a cheerful soul

by the name of Williams, and three sea-worn old whaleship captains going

down to join their vessels.  These latter played euchre in the smoking

room day and night, drank astonishing quantities of raw whisky without

being in the least affected by it, and were the happiest people I think

I ever saw.  And then there was "the old Admiral--"  a retired whaleman.

He was a roaring, terrific combination of wind and lightning and thunder,

and earnest, whole-souled profanity.  But nevertheless he was tender-

hearted as a girl.  He was a raving, deafening, devastating typhoon,

laying waste the cowering seas but with an unvexed refuge in the centre

where all comers were safe and at rest.  Nobody could know the "Admiral"

without liking him; and in a sudden and dire emergency I think no friend

of his would know which to choose--to be cursed by him or prayed for by a

less efficient person.



His Title of "Admiral" was more strictly "official" than any ever worn by

a naval officer before or since, perhaps--for it was the voluntary

offering of a whole nation, and came direct from the people themselves

without any intermediate red tape--the people of the Sandwich Islands.

It was a title that came to him freighted with affection, and honor, and

appreciation of his unpretending merit.  And in testimony of the

genuineness of the title it was publicly ordained that an exclusive flag

should be devised for him and used solely to welcome his coming and wave

him God-speed in his going.  From that time forth, whenever his ship was

signaled in the offing, or he catted his anchor and stood out to sea,

that ensign streamed from the royal halliards on the parliament house and

the nation lifted their hats to it with spontaneous accord.



Yet he had never fired a gun or fought a battle in his life.  When I knew

him on board the Ajax, he was seventy-two years old and had plowed the

salt water sixty-one of them.  For sixteen years he had gone in and out

of the harbor of Honolulu in command of a whaleship, and for sixteen more

had been captain of a San Francisco and Sandwich Island passenger packet

and had never had an accident or lost a vessel.  The simple natives knew

him for a friend who never failed them, and regarded him as children

regard a father.  It was a dangerous thing to oppress them when the

roaring Admiral was around.



Two years before I knew the Admiral, he had retired from the sea on a

competence, and had sworn a colossal nine-jointed oath that he would

"never go within smelling distance of the salt water again as long as he

lived."  And he had conscientiously kept it.  That is to say, he

considered he had kept it, and it would have been more than dangerous to

suggest to him, even in the gentlest way, that making eleven long sea

voyages, as a passenger, during the two years that had transpired since

he "retired," was only keeping the general spirit of it and not the

strict letter.



The Admiral knew only one narrow line of conduct to pursue in any and all

cases where there was a fight, and that was to shoulder his way straight

in without an inquiry as to the rights or the merits of it, and take the

part of the weaker side.--And this was the reason why he was always sure

to be present at the trial of any universally execrated criminal to

oppress and intimidate the jury with a vindictive pantomime of what he

would do to them if he ever caught them out of the box.  And this was why

harried cats and outlawed dogs that knew him confidently took sanctuary

under his chair in time of trouble.  In the beginning he was the most

frantic and bloodthirsty Union man that drew breath in the shadow of the

Flag; but the instant the Southerners began to go down before the sweep

of the Northern armies, he ran up the Confederate colors and from that

time till the end was a rampant and inexorable secessionist.



He hated intemperance with a more uncompromising animosity than any

individual I have ever met, of either sex; and he was never tired of

storming against it and beseeching friends and strangers alike to be wary

and drink with moderation.  And yet if any creature had been guileless

enough to intimate that his absorbing nine gallons of "straight" whiskey

during our voyage was any fraction short of rigid or inflexible

abstemiousness, in that self-same moment the old man would have spun him

to the uttermost parts of the earth in the whirlwind of his wrath.  Mind,

I am not saying his whisky ever affected his head or his legs, for it did

not, in even the slightest degree.  He was a capacious container, but he

did not hold enough for that.  He took a level tumblerful of whisky every

morning before he put his clothes on--"to sweeten his bilgewater," he

said.--He took another after he got the most of his clothes on, "to

settle his mind and give him his bearings."  He then shaved, and put on a

clean shirt; after which he recited the Lord's Prayer in a fervent,

thundering bass that shook the ship to her kelson and suspended all

conversation in the main cabin.  Then, at this stage, being invariably

"by the head," or "by the stern," or "listed to port or starboard," he

took one more to "put him on an even keel so that he would mind his

hellum and not miss stays and go about, every time he came up in the

wind."--And now, his state-room door swung open and the sun of his

benignant face beamed redly out upon men and women and children, and he

roared his "Shipmets a'hoy!" in a way that was calculated to wake the

dead and precipitate the final resurrection; and forth he strode, a

picture to look at and a presence to enforce attention.  Stalwart and

portly; not a gray hair; broadbrimmed slouch hat; semi-sailor toggery of

blue navy flannel--roomy and ample; a stately expanse of shirt-front and

a liberal amount of black silk neck-cloth tied with a sailor knot; large

chain and imposing seals impending from his fob; awe-inspiring feet, and

"a hand like the hand of Providence," as his whaling brethren expressed

it; wrist-bands and sleeves pushed back half way to the elbow, out of

respect for the warm weather, and exposing hairy arms, gaudy with red and

blue anchors, ships, and goddesses of liberty tattooed in India ink.

But these details were only secondary matters--his face was the lodestone

that chained the eye.  It was a sultry disk, glowing determinedly out

through a weather beaten mask of mahogany, and studded with warts, seamed

with scars, "blazed" all over with unfailing fresh slips of the razor;

and with cheery eyes, under shaggy brows, contemplating the world from

over the back of a gnarled crag of a nose that loomed vast and lonely out

of the undulating immensity that spread away from its foundations.

At his heels frisked the darling of his bachelor estate, his terrier

"Fan," a creature no larger than a squirrel.  The main part of his daily

life was occupied in looking after "Fan," in a motherly way, and

doctoring her for a hundred ailments which existed only in his

imagination.



The Admiral seldom read newspapers; and when he did he never believed

anything they said.  He read nothing, and believed in nothing, but "The

Old Guard," a secession periodical published in New York.  He carried a

dozen copies of it with him, always, and referred to them for all

required information.  If it was not there, he supplied it himself, out

of a bountiful fancy, inventing history, names, dates, and every thing

else necessary to make his point good in an argument.  Consequently he

was a formidable antagonist in a dispute.  Whenever he swung clear of the

record and began to create history, the enemy was helpless and had to

surrender.  Indeed, the enemy could not keep from betraying some little

spark of indignation at his manufactured history--and when it came to

indignation, that was the Admiral's very "best hold."  He was always

ready for a political argument, and if nobody started one he would do it

himself.  With his third retort his temper would begin to rise, and

within five minutes he would be blowing a gale, and within fifteen his

smoking-room audience would be utterly stormed away and the old man left

solitary and alone, banging the table with his fist, kicking the chairs,

and roaring a hurricane of profanity.  It got so, after a while, that

whenever the Admiral approached, with politics in his eye, the passengers

would drop out with quiet accord, afraid to meet him; and he would camp

on a deserted field.



But he found his match at last, and before a full company.  At one time

or another, everybody had entered the lists against him and been routed,

except the quiet passenger Williams.  He had never been able to get an

expression of opinion out of him on politics.  But now, just as the

Admiral drew near the door and the company were about to slip out,

Williams said:



"Admiral, are you certain about that circumstance concerning the

clergymen you mentioned the other day?"--referring to a piece of the

Admiral's manufactured history.



Every one was amazed at the man's rashness.  The idea of deliberately

inviting annihilation was a thing incomprehensible.  The retreat came to

a halt; then everybody sat down again wondering, to await the upshot of

it.  The Admiral himself was as surprised as any one.  He paused in the

door, with his red handkerchief half raised to his sweating face, and

contemplated the daring reptile in the corner.



"Certain of it?  Am I certain of it?  Do you think I've been lying about

it?  What do you take me for?  Anybody that don't know that circumstance,

don't know anything; a child ought to know it.  Read up your history!

Read it up-----, and don't come asking a man if he's certain about a bit

of ABC stuff that the very southern niggers know all about."



Here the Admiral's fires began to wax hot, the atmosphere thickened, the

coming earthquake rumbled, he began to thunder and lighten.  Within three

minutes his volcano was in full irruption and he was discharging flames

and ashes of indignation, belching black volumes of foul history aloft,

and vomiting red-hot torrents of profanity from his crater.  Meantime

Williams sat silent, and apparently deeply and earnestly interested in

what the old man was saying.  By and by, when the lull came, he said in

the most deferential way, and with the gratified air of a man who has had

a mystery cleared up which had been puzzling him uncomfortably:



"Now I understand it.  I always thought I knew that piece of history well

enough, but was still afraid to trust it, because there was not that

convincing particularity about it that one likes to have in history; but

when you mentioned every name, the other day, and every date, and every

little circumstance, in their just order and sequence, I said to myself,

this sounds something like--this is history--this is putting it in a

shape that gives a man confidence; and I said to myself afterward, I will

just ask the Admiral if he is perfectly certain about the details, and if

he is I will come out and thank him for clearing this matter up for me.

And that is what I want to do now--for until you set that matter right it

was nothing but just a confusion in my mind, without head or tail to it."



Nobody ever saw the Admiral look so mollified before, and so pleased.

Nobody had ever received his bogus history as gospel before; its

genuineness had always been called in question either by words or looks;

but here was a man that not only swallowed it all down, but was grateful

for the dose.  He was taken a back; he hardly knew what to say; even his

profanity failed him.  Now, Williams continued, modestly and earnestly:



"But Admiral, in saying that this was the first stone thrown, and that

this precipitated the war, you have overlooked a circumstance which you

are perfectly familiar with, but which has escaped your memory.  Now I

grant you that what you have stated is correct in every detail--to wit:

that on the 16th of October, 1860, two Massachusetts clergymen, named

Waite and Granger, went in disguise to the house of John Moody, in

Rockport, at dead of night, and dragged forth two southern women and

their two little children, and after tarring and feathering them conveyed

them to Boston and burned them alive in the State House square; and I

also grant your proposition that this deed is what led to the secession

of South Carolina on the 20th of December following.  Very well."  [Here

the company were pleasantly surprised to hear Williams proceed to come

back at the Admiral with his own invincible weapon--clean, pure,

manufactured history, without a word of truth in it.]  "Very well, I say.

But Admiral, why overlook the Willis and Morgan case in South Carolina?

You are too well informed a man not to know all about that circumstance.

Your arguments and your conversations have shown you to be intimately

conversant with every detail of this national quarrel.  You develop

matters of history every day that show plainly that you are no smatterer

in it, content to nibble about the surface, but a man who has searched

the depths and possessed yourself of everything that has a bearing upon

the great question.  Therefore, let me just recall to your mind that

Willis and Morgan case--though I see by your face that the whole thing is

already passing through your memory at this moment.  On the 12th of

August, 1860, two months before the Waite and Granger affair, two South

Carolina clergymen, named John H. Morgan and Winthrop L.  Willis, one a

Methodist and the other an Old School Baptist, disguised themselves, and

went at midnight to the house of a planter named Thompson--Archibald F.

Thompson, Vice President under Thomas Jefferson,--and took thence, at

midnight, his widowed aunt, (a Northern woman,) and her adopted child, an

orphan--named Mortimer Highie, afflicted with epilepsy and suffering at

the time from white swelling on one of his legs, and compelled to walk on

crutches in consequence; and the two ministers, in spite of the pleadings

of the victims, dragged them to the bush, tarred and feathered them, and

afterward burned them at the stake in the city of Charleston.  You

remember perfectly well what a stir it made; you remember perfectly well

that even the Charleston Courier stigmatized the act as being unpleasant,

of questionable propriety, and scarcely justifiable, and likewise that it

would not be matter of surprise if retaliation ensued.  And you remember

also, that this thing was the cause of the Massachusetts outrage.  Who,

indeed, were the two Massachusetts ministers?  and who were the two

Southern women they burned?  I do not need to remind you, Admiral, with

your intimate knowledge of history, that Waite was the nephew of the

woman burned in Charleston; that Granger was her cousin in the second

degree, and that the woman they burned in Boston was the wife of John H.

Morgan, and the still loved but divorced wife of Winthrop L. Willis.

Now, Admiral, it is only fair that you should acknowledge that the first

provocation came from the Southern preachers and that the Northern ones

were justified in retaliating.  In your arguments you never yet have

shown the least disposition to withhold a just verdict or be in anywise

unfair, when authoritative history condemned your position, and therefore

I have no hesitation in asking you to take the original blame from the

Massachusetts ministers, in this matter, and transfer it to the South

Carolina clergymen where it justly belongs."



The Admiral was conquered.  This sweet spoken creature who swallowed his

fraudulent history as if it were the bread of life; basked in his furious

blasphemy as if it were generous sunshine; found only calm, even-handed

justice in his rampart partisanship; and flooded him with invented

history so sugarcoated with flattery and deference that there was no

rejecting it, was "too many" for him.  He stammered some awkward, profane

sentences about the-----Willis and Morgan business having escaped his

memory, but that he "remembered it now," and then, under pretence of

giving Fan some medicine for an imaginary cough, drew out of the battle

and went away, a vanquished man.  Then cheers and laughter went up, and

Williams, the ship's benefactor was a hero.  The news went about the

vessel, champagne was ordered, and enthusiastic reception instituted in

the smoking room, and everybody flocked thither to shake hands with the

conqueror.  The wheelman said afterward, that the Admiral stood up behind

the pilot house and "ripped and cursed all to himself" till he loosened

the smokestack guys and becalmed the mainsail.



The Admiral's power was broken.  After that, if he began argument,

somebody would bring Williams, and the old man would grow weak and begin

to quiet down at once.  And as soon as he was done, Williams in his

dulcet, insinuating way, would invent some history (referring for proof,

to the old man's own excellent memory and to copies of "The Old Guard"

known not to be in his possession) that would turn the tables completely

and leave the Admiral all abroad and helpless.  By and by he came to so

dread Williams and his gilded tongue that he would stop talking when he

saw him approach, and finally ceased to mention politics altogether, and

from that time forward there was entire peace and serenity in the ship.









CHAPTER LXIII.



On a certain bright morning the Islands hove in sight, lying low on the

lonely sea, and everybody climbed to the upper deck to look.  After two

thousand miles of watery solitude the vision was a welcome one.  As we

approached, the imposing promontory of Diamond Head rose up out of the

ocean its rugged front softened by the hazy distance, and presently the

details of the land began to make themselves manifest: first the line of

beach; then the plumed coacoanut trees of the tropics; then cabins of the

natives; then the white town of Honolulu, said to contain between twelve

and fifteen thousand inhabitants spread over a dead level; with streets

from twenty to thirty feet wide, solid and level as a floor, most of them

straight as a line and few as crooked as a corkscrew.



The further I traveled through the town the better I liked it.  Every

step revealed a new contrast--disclosed something I was unaccustomed to.

In place of the grand mud-colored brown fronts of San Francisco, I saw

dwellings built of straw, adobies, and cream-colored pebble-and-shell-

conglomerated coral, cut into oblong blocks and laid in cement; also a

great number of neat white cottages, with green window-shutters; in place

of front yards like billiard-tables with iron fences around them, I saw

these homes surrounded by ample yards, thickly clad with green grass, and

shaded by tall trees, through whose dense foliage the sun could scarcely

penetrate; in place of the customary geranium, calla lily, etc.,

languishing in dust and general debility, I saw luxurious banks and

thickets of flowers, fresh as a meadow after a rain, and glowing with the

richest dyes; in place of the dingy horrors of San Francisco's pleasure

grove, the "Willows," I saw huge-bodied, wide-spreading forest trees,

with strange names and stranger appearance--trees that cast a shadow like

a thunder-cloud, and were able to stand alone without being tied to green

poles; in place of gold fish, wiggling around in glass globes, assuming

countless shades and degrees of distortion through the magnifying and

diminishing qualities of their transparent prison houses, I saw cats--

Tom-cats, Mary Ann cats, long-tailed cats, bob-tailed cats, blind cats,

one-eyed cats, wall-eyed cats, cross-eyed cats, gray cats, black cats,

white cats, yellow cats, striped cats, spotted cats, tame cats, wild

cats, singed cats, individual cats, groups of cats, platoons of cats,

companies of cats, regiments of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats,

millions of cats, and all of them sleek, fat, lazy and sound asleep.

I looked on a multitude of people, some white, in white coats, vests,

pantaloons, even white cloth shoes, made snowy with chalk duly laid on

every morning; but the majority of the people were almost as dark as

negroes--women with comely features, fine black eyes, rounded forms,

inclining to the voluptuous, clad in a single bright red or white garment

that fell free and unconfined from shoulder to heel, long black hair

falling loose, gypsy hats, encircled with wreaths of natural flowers of a

brilliant carmine tint; plenty of dark men in various costumes, and some

with nothing on but a battered stove-pipe hat tilted on the nose, and a

very scant breech-clout;--certain smoke-dried children were clothed in

nothing but sunshine--a very neat fitting and picturesque apparel indeed.



In place of roughs and rowdies staring and blackguarding on the corners,

I saw long-haired, saddle-colored Sandwich Island maidens sitting on the

ground in the shade of corner houses, gazing indolently at whatever or

whoever happened along; instead of wretched cobble-stone pavements, I

walked on a firm foundation of coral, built up from the bottom of the sea

by the absurd but persevering insect of that name, with a light layer of

lava and cinders overlying the coral, belched up out of fathomless

perdition long ago through the seared and blackened crater that stands

dead and harmless in the distance now; instead of cramped and crowded

street-cars, I met dusky native women sweeping by, free as the wind, on

fleet horses and astride, with gaudy riding-sashes, streaming like

banners behind them; instead of the combined stenches of Chinadom and

Brannan street slaughter-houses, I breathed the balmy fragrance of

jessamine, oleander, and the Pride of India; in place of the hurry and

bustle and noisy confusion of San Francisco, I moved in the midst of a

Summer calm as tranquil as dawn in the Garden of Eden; in place of the

Golden City's skirting sand hills and the placid bay, I saw on the one

side a frame-work of tall, precipitous mountains close at hand, clad in

refreshing green, and cleft by deep, cool, chasm-like valleys--and in

front the grand sweep of the ocean; a brilliant, transparent green near

the shore, bound and bordered by a long white line of foamy spray dashing

against the reef, and further out the dead blue water of the deep sea,

flecked with "white caps," and in the far horizon a single, lonely sail--

a mere accent-mark to emphasize a slumberous calm and a solitude that

were without sound or limit.  When the sun sunk down--the one intruder

from other realms and persistent in suggestions of them--it was tranced

luxury to sit in the perfumed air and forget that there was any world but

these enchanted islands.



It was such ecstacy to dream, and dream--till you got a bite.



A scorpion bite.  Then the first duty was to get up out of the grass and

kill the scorpion; and the next to bathe the bitten place with alcohol or

brandy; and the next to resolve to keep out of the grass in future.  Then

came an adjournment to the bed-chamber and the pastime of writing up the

day's journal with one hand and the destruction of mosquitoes with the

other--a whole community of them at a slap.  Then, observing an enemy

approaching,--a hairy tarantula on stilts--why not set the spittoon on

him?  It is done, and the projecting ends of his paws give a luminous

idea of the magnitude of his reach.  Then to bed and become a promenade

for a centipede with forty-two legs on a side and every foot hot enough

to burn a hole through a raw-hide.  More soaking with alcohol, and a

resolution to examine the bed before entering it, in future.  Then wait,

and suffer, till all the mosquitoes in the neighborhood have crawled in

under the bar, then slip out quickly, shut them in and sleep peacefully

on the floor till morning.  Meantime it is comforting to curse the

tropics in occasional wakeful intervals.



We had an abundance of fruit in Honolulu, of course.  Oranges, pine-

apples, bananas, strawberries, lemons, limes, mangoes, guavas, melons,

and a rare and curious luxury called the chirimoya, which is

deliciousness itself.  Then there is the tamarind.  I thought tamarinds

were made to eat, but that was probably not the idea.  I ate several, and

it seemed to me that they were rather sour that year.  They pursed up my

lips, till they resembled the stem-end of a tomato, and I had to take my

sustenance through a quill for twenty-four hours.



They sharpened my teeth till I could have shaved with them, and gave them

a "wire edge" that I was afraid would stay; but a citizen said "no, it

will come off when the enamel does"--which was comforting, at any rate.

I found, afterward, that only strangers eat tamarinds--but they only eat

them once.









CHAPTER LXIV.



In my diary of our third day in Honolulu, I find this:



I am probably the most sensitive man in Hawaii to-night--especially about

sitting down in the presence of my betters.  I have ridden fifteen or

twenty miles on horse-back since 5 P.M.  and to tell the honest truth, I

have a delicacy about sitting down at all.



An excursion to Diamond Head and the King's Coacoanut Grove was planned

to-day--time, 4:30 P.M.--the party to consist of half a dozen gentlemen

and three ladies.  They all started at the appointed hour except myself.

I was at the Government prison, (with Captain Fish and another whaleship-

skipper, Captain Phillips,) and got so interested in its examination that

I did not notice how quickly the time was passing.  Somebody remarked

that it was twenty minutes past five o'clock, and that woke me up.  It

was a fortunate circumstance that Captain Phillips was along with his

"turn out," as he calls a top-buggy that Captain Cook brought here in

1778, and a horse that was here when Captain Cook came.  Captain Phillips

takes a just pride in his driving and in the speed of his horse, and to

his passion for displaying them I owe it that we were only sixteen

minutes coming from the prison to the American Hotel--a distance which

has been estimated to be over half a mile.  But it took some fearful

driving.  The Captain's whip came down fast, and the blows started so

much dust out of the horse's hide that during the last half of the

journey we rode through an impenetrable fog, and ran by a pocket compass

in the hands of Captain Fish, a whaler of twenty-six years experience,

who sat there through the perilous voyage as self-possessed as if he had

been on the euchre-deck of his own ship, and calmly said, "Port your

helm--port," from time to time, and "Hold her a little free--steady--so--

so," and "Luff--hard down to starboard!" and never once lost his presence

of mind or betrayed the least anxiety by voice or manner.  When we came

to anchor at last, and Captain Phillips looked at his watch and said,

"Sixteen minutes--I told you it was in her!  that's over three miles an

hour!" I could see he felt entitled to a compliment, and so I said I had

never seen lightning go like that horse.  And I never had.



The landlord of the American said the party had been gone nearly an hour,

but that he could give me my choice of several horses that could overtake

them.  I said, never mind--I preferred a safe horse to a fast one--I

would like to have an excessively gentle horse--a horse with no spirit

whatever--a lame one, if he had such a thing.  Inside of five minutes I

was mounted, and perfectly satisfied with my outfit.  I had no time to

label him "This is a horse," and so if the public took him for a sheep I

cannot help it.  I was satisfied, and that was the main thing.  I could

see that he had as many fine points as any man's horse, and so I hung my

hat on one of them, behind the saddle, and swabbed the perspiration from

my face and started.  I named him after this island, "Oahu" (pronounced

O-waw-hee).  The first gate he came to he started in; I had neither whip

nor spur, and so I simply argued the case with him.  He resisted

argument, but ultimately yielded to insult and abuse.  He backed out of

that gate and steered for another one on the other side of the street.

I triumphed by my former process.  Within the next six hundred yards he

crossed the street fourteen times and attempted thirteen gates, and in

the meantime the tropical sun was beating down and threatening to cave

the top of my head in, and I was literally dripping with perspiration.

He abandoned the gate business after that and went along peaceably

enough, but absorbed in meditation.  I noticed this latter circumstance,

and it soon began to fill me with apprehension.  I said to my self, this

creature is planning some new outrage, some fresh deviltry or other--no

horse ever thought over a subject so profoundly as this one is doing just

for nothing.  The more this thing preyed upon my mind the more uneasy I

became, until the suspense became almost unbearable and I dismounted to

see if there was anything wild in his eye--for I had heard that the eye

of this noblest of our domestic animals is very expressive.



I cannot describe what a load of anxiety was lifted from my mind when I

found that he was only asleep.  I woke him up and started him into a

faster walk, and then the villainy of his nature came out again.  He

tried to climb over a stone wall, five or six feet high.  I saw that I

must apply force to this horse, and that I might as well begin first as

last.  I plucked a stout switch from a tamarind tree, and the moment he

saw it, he surrendered.  He broke into a convulsive sort of a canter,

which had three short steps in it and one long one, and reminded me

alternately of the clattering shake of the great earthquake, and the

sweeping plunging of the Ajax in a storm.



And now there can be no fitter occasion than the present to pronounce a

left-handed blessing upon the man who invented the American saddle.

There is no seat to speak of about it--one might as well sit in a shovel-

-and the stirrups are nothing but an ornamental nuisance.  If I were to

write down here all the abuse I expended on those stirrups, it would make

a large book, even without pictures.  Sometimes I got one foot so far

through, that the stirrup partook of the nature of an anklet; sometimes

both feet were through, and I was handcuffed by the legs; and sometimes

my feet got clear out and left the stirrups wildly dangling about my

shins.  Even when I was in proper position and carefully balanced upon

the balls of my feet, there was no comfort in it, on account of my

nervous dread that they were going to slip one way or the other in a

moment.  But the subject is too exasperating to write about.



A mile and a half from town, I came to a grove of tall cocoanut trees,

with clean, branchless stems reaching straight up sixty or seventy feet

and topped with a spray of green foliage sheltering clusters of cocoa-

nuts--not more picturesque than a forest of collossal ragged parasols,

with bunches of magnified grapes under them, would be.



I once heard a gouty northern invalid say that a cocoanut tree might be

poetical, possibly it was; but it looked like a feather-duster struck by

lightning.  I think that describes it better than a picture--and yet,

without any question, there is something fascinating about a cocoa-nut

tree--and graceful, too.



About a dozen cottages, some frame and the others of native grass,

nestled sleepily in the shade here and there.  The grass cabins are of a

grayish color, are shaped much like our own cottages, only with higher

and steeper roofs usually, and are made of some kind of weed strongly

bound together in bundles.  The roofs are very thick, and so are the

walls; the latter have square holes in them for windows.  At a little

distance these cabins have a furry appearance, as if they might be made

of bear skins.  They are very cool and pleasant inside.  The King's flag

was flying from the roof of one of the cottages, and His Majesty was

probably within.  He owns the whole concern thereabouts, and passes his

time there frequently, on sultry days "laying off."  The spot is called

"The King's Grove."



Near by is an interesting ruin--the meagre remains of an ancient heathen

temple--a place where human sacrifices were offered up in those old

bygone days when the simple child of nature, yielding momentarily to sin

when sorely tempted, acknowledged his error when calm reflection had

shown it him, and came forward with noble frankness and offered up his

grandmother as an atoning sacrifice--in those old days when the luckless

sinner could keep on cleansing his conscience and achieving periodical

happiness as long as his relations held out; long, long before the

missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them

permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a

place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there; and showed

the poor native how dreary a place perdition is and what unnecessarily

liberal facilities there are for going to it; showed him how, in his

ignorance he had gone and fooled away all his kinfolks to no purpose;

showed him what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy

food for next day with, as compared with fishing for pastime and lolling

in the shade through eternal Summer, and eating of the bounty that nobody

labored to provide but Nature.  How sad it is to think of the multitudes

who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never knew

there was a hell!



This ancient temple was built of rough blocks of lava, and was simply a

roofless inclosure a hundred and thirty feet long and seventy wide--

nothing but naked walls, very thick, but not much higher than a man's

head.  They will last for ages no doubt, if left unmolested.  Its three

altars and other sacred appurtenances have crumbled and passed away years

ago.  It is said that in the old times thousands of human beings were

slaughtered here, in the presence of naked and howling savages.  If these

mute stones could speak, what tales they could tell, what pictures they

could describe, of fettered victims writhing under the knife; of massed

forms straining forward out of the gloom, with ferocious faces lit up by

the sacrificial fires; of the background of ghostly trees; of the dark

pyramid of Diamond Head standing sentinel over the uncanny scene, and the

peaceful moon looking down upon it through rifts in the cloud-rack!



When Kamehameha (pronounced Ka-may-ha-may-ah) the Great--who was a sort

of a Napoleon in military genius and uniform success--invaded this island

of Oahu three quarters of a century ago, and exterminated the army sent

to oppose him, and took full and final possession of the country, he

searched out the dead body of the King of Oahu, and those of the

principal chiefs, and impaled their heads on the walls of this temple.



Those were savage times when this old slaughter-house was in its prime.

The King and the chiefs ruled the common herd with a rod of iron; made

them gather all the provisions the masters needed; build all the houses

and temples; stand all the expenses, of whatever kind; take kicks and

cuffs for thanks; drag out lives well flavored with misery, and then

suffer death for trifling offences or yield up their lives on the

sacrificial altars to purchase favors from the gods for their hard

rulers.  The missionaries have clothed them, educated them, broken up the

tyrannous authority of their chiefs, and given them freedom and the right

to enjoy whatever their hands and brains produce with equal laws for all,

and punishment for all alike who transgress them.  The contrast is so

strong--the benefit conferred upon this people by the missionaries is so

prominent, so palpable and so unquestionable, that the frankest

compliment I can pay them, and the best, is simply to point to the

condition of the Sandwich Islanders of Captain Cook's time, and their

condition to-day.



Their work speaks for itself.









CHAPTER LXV.



By and by, after a rugged climb, we halted on the summit of a hill which

commanded a far-reaching view.  The moon rose and flooded mountain and

valley and ocean with a mellow radiance, and out of the shadows of the

foliage the distant lights of Honolulu glinted like an encampment of

fireflies.  The air was heavy with the fragrance of flowers.  The halt

was brief.--Gayly laughing and talking, the party galloped on, and I

clung to the pommel and cantered after.  Presently we came to a place

where no grass grew--a wide expanse of deep sand.  They said it was an

old battle ground.  All around everywhere, not three feet apart, the

bleached bones of men gleamed white in the moonlight.  We picked up a lot

of them for mementoes.  I got quite a number of arm bones and leg bones--

of great chiefs, may be, who had fought savagely in that fearful battle

in the old days, when blood flowed like wine where we now stood--and wore

the choicest of them out on Oahu afterward, trying to make him go.  All

sorts of bones could be found except skulls; but a citizen said,

irreverently, that there had been an unusual number of "skull-hunters"

there lately--a species of sportsmen I had never heard of before.



Nothing whatever is known about this place--its story is a secret that

will never be revealed.  The oldest natives make no pretense of being

possessed of its history.  They say these bones were here when they were

children.  They were here when their grandfathers were children--but how

they came here, they can only conjecture.  Many people believe this spot

to be an ancient battle-ground, and it is usual to call it so; and they

believe that these skeletons have lain for ages just where their

proprietors fell in the great fight.  Other people believe that

Kamehameha I.  fought his first battle here.  On this point, I have heard

a story, which may have been taken from one of the numerous books which

have been written concerning these islands--I do not know where the

narrator got it.  He said that when Kamehameha (who was at first merely a

subordinate chief on the island of Hawaii), landed here, he brought a

large army with him, and encamped at Waikiki.  The Oahuans marched

against him, and so confident were they of success that they readily

acceded to a demand of their priests that they should draw a line where

these bones now lie, and take an oath that, if forced to retreat at all,

they would never retreat beyond this boundary.  The priests told them

that death and everlasting punishment would overtake any who violated the

oath, and the march was resumed.  Kamehameha drove them back step by

step; the priests fought in the front rank and exhorted them both by

voice and inspiriting example to remember their oath--to die, if need be,

but never cross the fatal line.  The struggle was manfully maintained,

but at last the chief priest fell, pierced to the heart with a spear, and

the unlucky omen fell like a blight upon the brave souls at his back;

with a triumphant shout the invaders pressed forward--the line was

crossed--the offended gods deserted the despairing army, and, accepting

the doom their perjury had brought upon them, they broke and fled over

the plain where Honolulu stands now--up the beautiful Nuuanu Valley--

paused a moment, hemmed in by precipitous mountains on either hand and

the frightful precipice of the Pari in front, and then were driven over--

a sheer plunge of six hundred feet!



The story is pretty enough, but Mr. Jarves' excellent history says the

Oahuans were intrenched in Nuuanu Valley; that Kamehameha ousted them,

routed them, pursued them up the valley and drove them over the

precipice.  He makes no mention of our bone-yard at all in his book.



Impressed by the profound silence and repose that rested over the

beautiful landscape, and being, as usual, in the rear, I gave voice to my

thoughts.  I said:



"What a picture is here slumbering in the solemn glory of the moon!  How

strong the rugged outlines of the dead volcano stand out against the

clear sky!  What a snowy fringe marks the bursting of the surf over the

long, curved reef!  How calmly the dim city sleeps yonder in the plain!

How soft the shadows lie upon the stately mountains that border the

dream-haunted Mauoa Valley!  What a grand pyramid of billowy clouds

towers above the storied Pari!  How the grim warriors of the past seem

flocking in ghostly squadrons to their ancient battlefield again--how the

wails of the dying well up from the--"



At this point the horse called Oahu sat down in the sand.  Sat down to

listen, I suppose.  Never mind what he heard, I stopped apostrophising

and convinced him that I was not a man to allow contempt of Court on the

part of a horse.  I broke the back-bone of a Chief over his rump and set

out to join the cavalcade again.



Very considerably fagged out we arrived in town at 9 o'clock at night,

myself in the lead--for when my horse finally came to understand that he

was homeward bound and hadn't far to go, he turned his attention strictly

to business.



This is a good time to drop in a paragraph of information.  There is no

regular livery stable in Honolulu, or, indeed, in any part of the Kingdom

of Hawaii; therefore unless you are acquainted with wealthy residents

(who all have good horses), you must hire animals of the wretchedest

description from the Kanakas.  (i.e.  natives.) Any horse you hire, even

though it be from a white man, is not often of much account, because it

will be brought in for you from some ranch, and has necessarily been

leading a hard life.  If the Kanakas who have been caring for him

(inveterate riders they are) have not ridden him half to death every day

themselves, you can depend upon it they have been doing the same thing by

proxy, by clandestinely hiring him out.  At least, so I am informed.  The

result is, that no horse has a chance to eat, drink, rest, recuperate, or

look well or feel well, and so strangers go about the Islands mounted as

I was to-day.



In hiring a horse from a Kanaka, you must have all your eyes about you,

because you can rest satisfied that you are dealing with a shrewd

unprincipled rascal.  You may leave your door open and your trunk

unlocked as long as you please, and he will not meddle with your

property; he has no important vices and no inclination to commit robbery

on a large scale; but if he can get ahead of you in the horse business,

he will take a genuine delight in doing it.  This traits is

characteristic of horse jockeys, the world over, is it not?  He will

overcharge you if he can; he will hire you a fine-looking horse at night

(anybody's--may be the King's, if the royal steed be in convenient view),

and bring you the mate to my Oahu in the morning, and contend that it is

the same animal.  If you make trouble, he will get out by saying it was

not himself who made the bargain with you, but his brother, "who went out

in the country this morning."  They have always got a "brother" to shift

the responsibility upon.  A victim said to one of these fellows one day:



"But I know I hired the horse of you, because I noticed that scar on your

cheek."



The reply was not bad: "Oh, yes--yes--my brother all same--we twins!"



A friend of mine, J.  Smith, hired a horse yesterday, the Kanaka

warranting him to be in excellent condition.



Smith had a saddle and blanket of his own, and he ordered the Kanaka to

put these on the horse.  The Kanaka protested that he was perfectly

willing to trust the gentleman with the saddle that was already on the

animal, but Smith refused to use it.  The change was made; then Smith

noticed that the Kanaka had only changed the saddles, and had left the

original blanket on the horse; he said he forgot to change the blankets,

and so, to cut the bother short, Smith mounted and rode away.  The horse

went lame a mile from town, and afterward got to cutting up some

extraordinary capers.  Smith got down and took off the saddle, but the

blanket stuck fast to the horse--glued to a procession of raw places.

The Kanaka's mysterious conduct stood explained.



Another friend of mine bought a pretty good horse from a native, a day or

two ago, after a tolerably thorough examination of the animal.  He

discovered today that the horse was as blind as a bat, in one eye.  He

meant to have examined that eye, and came home with a general notion that

he had done it; but he remembers now that every time he made the attempt

his attention was called to something else by his victimizer.



One more instance, and then I will pass to something else.  I am informed

that when a certain Mr. L., a visiting stranger, was here, he bought a

pair of very respectable-looking match horses from a native.  They were

in a little stable with a partition through the middle of it--one horse

in each apartment.  Mr. L.  examined one of them critically through a

window (the Kanaka's "brother" having gone to the country with the key),

and then went around the house and examined the other through a window on

the other side.  He said it was the neatest match he had ever seen, and

paid for the horses on the spot.  Whereupon the Kanaka departed to join

his brother in the country.  The fellow had shamefully swindled L.  There

was only one "match" horse, and he had examined his starboard side

through one window and his port side through another!  I decline to

believe this story, but I give it because it is worth something as a

fanciful illustration of a fixed fact--namely, that the Kanaka horse-

jockey is fertile in invention and elastic in conscience.



You can buy a pretty good horse for forty or fifty dollars, and a good

enough horse for all practical purposes for two dollars and a half.  I

estimate "Oahu" to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-five

cents.  A good deal better animal than he is was sold here day before

yesterday for a dollar and seventy-five cents, and sold again to-day for

two dollars and twenty-five cents; Williams bought a handsome and lively

little pony yesterday for ten dollars; and about the best common horse on

the island (and he is a really good one) sold yesterday, with Mexican

saddle and bridle, for seventy dollars--a horse which is well and widely

known, and greatly respected for his speed, good disposition and

everlasting bottom.



You give your horse a little grain once a day; it comes from San

Francisco, and is worth about two cents a pound; and you give him as much

hay as he wants; it is cut and brought to the market by natives, and is

not very good it is baled into long, round bundles, about the size of a

large man; one of them is stuck by the middle on each end of a six foot

pole, and the Kanaka shoulders the pole and walks about the streets

between the upright bales in search of customers.  These hay bales, thus

carried, have a general resemblance to a colossal capital 'H.'



The hay-bundles cost twenty-five cents apiece, and one will last a horse

about a day.  You can get a horse for a song, a week's hay for another

song, and you can turn your animal loose among the luxuriant grass in

your neighbor's broad front yard without a song at all--you do it at

midnight, and stable the beast again before morning.  You have been at no

expense thus far, but when you come to buy a saddle and bridle they will

cost you from twenty to thirty-five dollars.  You can hire a horse,

saddle and bridle at from seven to ten dollars a week, and the owner will

take care of them at his own expense.



It is time to close this day's record--bed time.  As I prepare for sleep,

a rich voice rises out of the still night, and, far as this ocean rock is

toward the ends of the earth, I recognize a familiar home air.  But the

words seem somewhat out of joint:





"Waikiki lantoni oe Kaa hooly hooly wawhoo."



Translated, that means "When we were marching through Georgia."









CHAPTER LXVI.



Passing through the market place we saw that feature of Honolulu under

its most favorable auspices--that is, in the full glory of Saturday

afternoon, which is a festive day with the natives.  The native girls by

twos and threes and parties of a dozen, and sometimes in whole platoons

and companies, went cantering up and down the neighboring streets astride

of fleet but homely horses, and with their gaudy riding habits streaming

like banners behind them.  Such a troop of free and easy riders, in their

natural home, the saddle, makes a gay and graceful spectacle.  The riding

habit I speak of is simply a long, broad scarf, like a tavern table cloth

brilliantly colored, wrapped around the loins once, then apparently

passed between the limbs and each end thrown backward over the same, and

floating and flapping behind on both sides beyond the horse's tail like a

couple of fancy flags; then, slipping the stirrup-irons between her toes,

the girl throws her chest for ward, sits up like a Major General and goes

sweeping by like the wind.



The girls put on all the finery they can on Saturday afternoon--fine

black silk robes; flowing red ones that nearly put your eyes out; others

as white as snow; still others that discount the rainbow; and they wear

their hair in nets, and trim their jaunty hats with fresh flowers, and

encircle their dusky throats with home-made necklaces of the brilliant

vermillion-tinted blossom of the ohia; and they fill the markets and the

adjacent street with their bright presences, and smell like a rag factory

on fire with their offensive cocoanut oil.



Occasionally you see a heathen from the sunny isles away down in the

South Seas, with his face and neck tatooed till he looks like the

customary mendicant from Washoe who has been blown up in a mine.  Some

are tattooed a dead blue color down to the upper lip--masked, as it were

--leaving the natural light yellow skin of Micronesia unstained from

thence down; some with broad marks drawn down from hair to neck, on both

sides of the face, and a strip of the original yellow skin, two inches

wide, down the center--a gridiron with a spoke broken out; and some with

the entire face discolored with the popular mortification tint, relieved

only by one or two thin, wavy threads of natural yellow running across

the face from ear to ear, and eyes twinkling out of this darkness, from

under shadowing hat-brims, like stars in the dark of the moon.



Moving among the stirring crowds, you come to the poi merchants,

squatting in the shade on their hams, in true native fashion, and

surrounded by purchasers.  (The Sandwich Islanders always squat on their

hams, and who knows but they may be the old original "ham sandwiches?"

The thought is pregnant with interest.) The poi looks like common flour

paste, and is kept in large bowls formed of a species of gourd, and

capable of holding from one to three or four gallons.  Poi is the chief

article of food among the natives, and is prepared from the taro plant.



The taro root looks like a thick, or, if you please, a corpulent sweet

potato, in shape, but is of a light purple color when boiled.  When

boiled it answers as a passable substitute for bread.  The buck Kanakas

bake it under ground, then mash it up well with a heavy lava pestle, mix

water with it until it becomes a paste, set it aside and let if ferment,

and then it is poi--and an unseductive mixture it is, almost tasteless

before it ferments and too sour for a luxury afterward.  But nothing is

more nutritious.  When solely used, however, it produces acrid humors, a

fact which sufficiently accounts for the humorous character of the

Kanakas.  I think there must be as much of a knack in handling poi as

there is in eating with chopsticks.  The forefinger is thrust into the

mess and stirred quickly round several times and drawn as quickly out,

thickly coated, just as it it were poulticed; the head is thrown back,

the finger inserted in the mouth and the delicacy stripped off and

swallowed--the eye closing gently, meanwhile, in a languid sort of

ecstasy.  Many a different finger goes into the same bowl and many a

different kind of dirt and shade and quality of flavor is added to the

virtues of its contents.



Around a small shanty was collected a crowd of natives buying the awa

root.  It is said that but for the use of this root the destruction of

the people in former times by certain imported diseases would have been

far greater than it was, and by others it is said that this is merely a

fancy.  All agree that poi will rejuvenate a man who is used up and his

vitality almost annihilated by hard drinking, and that in some kinds of

diseases it will restore health after all medicines have failed; but all

are not willing to allow to the awa the virtues claimed for it.  The

natives manufacture an intoxicating drink from it which is fearful in its

effects when persistently indulged in.  It covers the body with dry,

white scales, inflames the eyes, and causes premature decripitude.

Although the man before whose establishment we stopped has to pay a

Government license of eight hundred dollars a year for the exclusive

right to sell awa root, it is said that he makes a small fortune every

twelve-month; while saloon keepers, who pay a thousand dollars a year for

the privilege of retailing whiskey, etc., only make a bare living.



We found the fish market crowded; for the native is very fond of fish,

and eats the article raw and alive!  Let us change the subject.



In old times here Saturday was a grand gala day indeed.  All the native

population of the town forsook their labors, and those of the surrounding

country journeyed to the city.  Then the white folks had to stay indoors,

for every street was so packed with charging cavaliers and cavalieresses

that it was next to impossible to thread one's way through the cavalcades

without getting crippled.



At night they feasted and the girls danced the lascivious hula hula--a

dance that is said to exhibit the very perfection of educated notion of

limb and arm, hand, head and body, and the exactest uniformity of

movement and accuracy of "time."  It was performed by a circle of girls

with no raiment on them to speak of, who went through an infinite variety

of motions and figures without prompting, and yet so true was their

"time," and in such perfect concert did they move that when they were

placed in a straight line, hands, arms, bodies, limbs and heads waved,

swayed, gesticulated, bowed, stooped, whirled, squirmed, twisted and

undulated as if they were part and parcel of a single individual; and it

was difficult to believe they were not moved in a body by some exquisite

piece of mechanism.



Of late years, however, Saturday has lost most of its quondam gala

features.  This weekly stampede of the natives interfered too much with

labor and the interests of the white folks, and by sticking in a law

here, and preaching a sermon there, and by various other means, they

gradually broke it up.  The demoralizing hula hula was forbidden to be

performed, save at night, with closed doors, in presence of few

spectators, and only by permission duly procured from the authorities and

the payment of ten dollars for the same.  There are few girls now-a-days

able to dance this ancient national dance in the highest perfection of

the art.



The missionaries have christianized and educated all the natives.  They

all belong to the Church, and there is not one of them, above the age of

eight years, but can read and write with facility in the native tongue.

It is the most universally educated race of people outside of China.

They have any quantity of books, printed in the Kanaka language, and all

the natives are fond of reading.  They are inveterate church-goers--

nothing can keep them away.  All this ameliorating cultivation has at

last built up in the native women a profound respect for chastity--in

other people.  Perhaps that is enough to say on that head.  The national

sin will die out when the race does, but perhaps not earlier.--But

doubtless this purifying is not far off, when we reflect that contact

with civilization and the whites has reduced the native population from

four hundred thousand (Captain Cook's estimate,) to fifty-five thousand

in something over eighty years!



Society is a queer medley in this notable missionary, whaling and

governmental centre.  If you get into conversation with a stranger and

experience that natural desire to know what sort of ground you are

treading on by finding out what manner of man your stranger is, strike

out boldly and address him as "Captain."  Watch him narrowly, and if you

see by his countenance that you are on the wrong tack, ask him where he

preaches.  It is a safe bet that he is either a missionary or captain of

a whaler.  I am now personally acquainted with seventy-two captains and

ninety-six missionaries.  The captains and ministers form one-half of the

population; the third fourth is composed of common Kanakas and mercantile

foreigners and their families, and the final fourth is made up of high

officers of the Hawaiian Government.  And there are just about cats

enough for three apiece all around.



A solemn stranger met me in the suburbs the other day, and said:



"Good morning, your reverence.  Preach in the stone church yonder, no

doubt?"



"No, I don't.  I'm not a preacher."



"Really, I beg your pardon, Captain.  I trust you had a good season.  How

much oil"--



"Oil?  What do you take me for?  I'm not a whaler."



"Oh, I beg a thousand pardons, your Excellency.



"Major General in the household troops, no doubt?  Minister of the

Interior, likely?  Secretary of war?  First Gentleman of the Bed-chamber?

Commissioner of the Royal"--



"Stuff!  I'm no official.  I'm not connected in any way with the

Government."



"Bless my life!  Then, who the mischief are you?  what the mischief are

you?  and how the mischief did you get here, and where in thunder did you

come from?"



"I'm only a private personage--an unassuming stranger--lately arrived

from America."



"No?  Not a missionary!  Not a whaler!  not a member of his Majesty's

Government!  not even Secretary of the Navy!  Ah, Heaven!  it is too

blissful to be true; alas, I do but dream.  And yet that noble, honest

countenance--those oblique, ingenuous eyes--that massive head, incapable

of--of--anything; your hand; give me your hand, bright waif.  Excuse

these tears.  For sixteen weary years I have yearned for a moment like

this, and"--



Here his feelings were too much for him, and he swooned away.  I pitied

this poor creature from the bottom of my heart.  I was deeply moved.  I

shed a few tears on him and kissed him for his mother.  I then took what

small change he had and "shoved".









CHAPTER LXVII.



I still quote from my journal:



I found the national Legislature to consist of half a dozen white men and

some thirty or forty natives.  It was a dark assemblage.  The nobles and

Ministers (about a dozen of them altogether) occupied the extreme left of

the hall, with David Kalakaua (the King's Chamberlain) and Prince William

at the head.  The President of the Assembly, His Royal Highness M.

Kekuanaoa, [Kekuanaoa is not of the blood royal.  He derives his princely

rank from his wife, who was a daughter of Kamehameha the Great.  Under

other monarchies the male line takes precedence of the female in tracing

genealogies, but here the opposite is the case--the female line takes

precedence.  Their reason for this is exceedingly sensible, and I

recommend it to the aristocracy of Europe: They say it is easy to know

who a man's mother was, but, etc., etc.] and the Vice President (the

latter a white man,) sat in the pulpit, if I may so term it.

The President is the King's father.  He is an erect, strongly built,

massive featured, white-haired, tawny old gentleman of eighty years of

age or thereabouts.  He was simply but well dressed, in a blue cloth coat

and white vest, and white pantaloons, without spot, dust or blemish upon

them.  He bears himself with a calm, stately dignity, and is a man of

noble presence.  He was a young man and a distinguished warrior under

that terrific fighter, Kamehameha I., more than half a century ago.  A

knowledge of his career suggested some such thought as this: "This man,

naked as the day he was born, and war-club and spear in hand, has charged

at the head of a horde of savages against other hordes of savages more

than a generation and a half ago, and reveled in slaughter and carnage;

has worshipped wooden images on his devout knees; has seen hundreds of

his race offered up in heathen temples as sacrifices to wooden idols, at

a time when no missionary's foot had ever pressed this soil, and he had

never heard of the white man's God; has believed his enemy could secretly

pray him to death; has seen the day, in his childhood, when it was a

crime punishable by death for a man to eat with his wife, or for a

plebeian to let his shadow fall upon the King--and now look at him; an

educated Christian; neatly and handsomely dressed; a high-minded, elegant

gentleman; a traveler, in some degree, and one who has been the honored

guest of royalty in Europe; a man practiced in holding the reins of an

enlightened government, and well versed in the politics of his country

and in general, practical information.  Look at him, sitting there

presiding over the deliberations of a legislative body, among whom are

white men--a grave, dignified, statesmanlike personage, and as seemingly

natural and fitted to the place as if he had been born in it and had

never been out of it in his life time.  How the experiences of this old

man's eventful life shame the cheap inventions of romance!"



The christianizing of the natives has hardly even weakened some of their

barbarian superstitions, much less destroyed them.  I have just referred

to one of these.  It is still a popular belief that if your enemy can get

hold of any article belonging to you he can get down on his knees over it

and pray you to death.  Therefore many a native gives up and dies merely

because he imagines that some enemy is putting him through a course of

damaging prayer.  This praying an individual to death seems absurb enough

at a first glance, but then when we call to mind some of the pulpit

efforts of certain of our own ministers the thing looks plausible.



In former times, among the Islanders, not only a plurality of wives was

customary, but a plurality of husbands likewise.  Some native women of

noble rank had as many as six husbands.  A woman thus supplied did not

reside with all her husbands at once, but lived several months with each

in turn.  An understood sign hung at her door during these months.  When

the sign was taken down, it meant "NEXT."



In those days woman was rigidly taught to "know her place."  Her place

was to do all the work, take all the cuffs, provide all the food, and

content herself with what was left after her lord had finished his

dinner.  She was not only forbidden, by ancient law, and under penalty of

death, to eat with her husband or enter a canoe, but was debarred, under

the same penalty, from eating bananas, pine-apples, oranges and other

choice fruits at any time or in any place.  She had to confine herself

pretty strictly to "poi" and hard work.  These poor ignorant heathen seem

to have had a sort of groping idea of what came of woman eating fruit in

the garden of Eden, and they did not choose to take any more chances.

But the missionaries broke up this satisfactory arrangement of things.

They liberated woman and made her the equal of man.



The natives had a romantic fashion of burying some of their children

alive when the family became larger than necessary.  The missionaries

interfered in this matter too, and stopped it.



To this day the natives are able to lie down and die whenever they want

to, whether there is anything the matter with them or not.  If a Kanaka

takes a notion to die, that is the end of him; nobody can persuade him to

hold on; all the doctors in the world could not save him.



A luxury which they enjoy more than anything else, is a large funeral.

If a person wants to get rid of a troublesome native, it is only

necessary to promise him a fine funeral and name the hour and he will be

on hand to the minute--at least his remains will.



All the natives are Christians, now, but many of them still desert to the

Great Shark God for temporary succor in time of trouble.  An irruption of

the great volcano of Kilauea, or an earthquake, always brings a deal of

latent loyalty to the Great Shark God to the surface.  It is common

report that the King, educated, cultivated and refined Christian

gentleman as he undoubtedly is, still turns to the idols of his fathers

for help when disaster threatens.  A planter caught a shark, and one of

his christianized natives testified his emancipation from the thrall of

ancient superstition by assisting to dissect the shark after a fashion

forbidden by his abandoned creed.  But remorse shortly began to torture

him.  He grew moody and sought solitude; brooded over his sin, refused

food, and finally said he must die and ought to die, for he had sinned

against the Great Shark God and could never know peace any more.  He was

proof against persuasion and ridicule, and in the course of a day or two

took to his bed and died, although he showed no symptom of disease.

His young daughter followed his lead and suffered a like fate within the

week.  Superstition is ingrained in the native blood and bone and it is

only natural that it should crop out in time of distress.  Wherever one

goes in the Islands, he will find small piles of stones by the wayside,

covered with leafy offerings, placed there by the natives to appease evil

spirits or honor local deities belonging to the mythology of former days.



In the rural districts of any of the Islands, the traveler hourly comes

upon parties of dusky maidens bathing in the streams or in the sea

without any clothing on and exhibiting no very intemperate zeal in the

matter of hiding their nakedness.  When the missionaries first took up

their residence in Honolulu, the native women would pay their families

frequent friendly visits, day by day, not even clothed with a blush.

It was found a hard matter to convince them that this was rather

indelicate.  Finally the missionaries provided them with long, loose

calico robes, and that ended the difficulty--for the women would troop

through the town, stark naked, with their robes folded under their arms,

march to the missionary houses and then  proceed to dress!--The natives

soon manifested a strong proclivity for clothing, but it was shortly

apparent that they only wanted it for grandeur.  The missionaries

imported a quantity of hats, bonnets, and other male and female wearing

apparel, instituted a general distribution, and begged the people not to

come to church naked, next Sunday, as usual.  And they did not; but the

national spirit of unselfishness led them to divide up with neighbors who

were not at the distribution, and next Sabbath the poor preachers could

hardly keep countenance before their vast congregations.  In the midst of

the reading of a hymn a brown, stately dame would sweep up the aisle with

a world of airs, with nothing in the world on but a "stovepipe" hat and a

pair of cheap gloves; another dame would follow, tricked out in a man's

shirt, and nothing else; another one would enter with a flourish, with

simply the sleeves of a bright calico dress tied around her waist and the

rest of the garment dragging behind like a peacock's tail off duty; a

stately "buck" Kanaka would stalk in with a woman's bonnet on, wrong side

before--only this, and nothing more; after him would stride his fellow,

with the legs of a pair of pantaloons tied around his neck, the rest of

his person untrammeled; in his rear would come another gentleman simply

gotten up in a fiery neck-tie and a striped vest.



The poor creatures were beaming with complacency and wholly unconscious

of any absurdity in their appearance.  They gazed at each other with

happy admiration, and it was plain to see that the young girls were

taking note of what each other had on, as naturally as if they had always

lived in a land of Bibles and knew what churches were made for; here was

the evidence of a dawning civilization.  The spectacle which the

congregation presented was so extraordinary and withal so moving, that

the missionaries found it difficult to keep to the text and go on with

the services; and by and by when the simple children of the sun began a

general swapping of garments in open meeting and produced some

irresistibly grotesque effects in the course of re-dressing, there was

nothing for it but to cut the thing short with the benediction and

dismiss the fantastic assemblage.



In our country, children play "keep house;" and in the same high-sounding

but miniature way the grown folk here, with the poor little material of

slender territory and meagre population, play "empire."  There is his

royal Majesty the King, with a New York detective's income of thirty or

thirty-five thousand dollars a year from the "royal civil list" and the

"royal domain."  He lives in a two-story frame "palace."



And there is the "royal family"--the customary hive of royal brothers,

sisters, cousins and other noble drones and vagrants usual to monarchy,--

all with a spoon in the national pap-dish, and all bearing such titles as

his or her Royal Highness the Prince or Princess So-and-so.  Few of them

can carry their royal splendors far enough to ride in carriages, however;

they sport the economical Kanaka horse or "hoof it" with the plebeians.



Then there is his Excellency the "royal Chamberlain"--a sinecure, for his

majesty dresses himself with his own hands, except when he is ruralizing

at Waikiki and then he requires no dressing.



Next we have his Excellency the Commander-in-chief of the Household

Troops, whose forces consist of about the number of soldiers usually

placed under a corporal in other lands.



Next comes the royal Steward and the Grand Equerry in Waiting--high

dignitaries with modest salaries and little to do.



Then we have his Excellency the First Gentleman of the Bed-chamber--an

office as easy as it is magnificent.



Next we come to his Excellency the Prime Minister, a renegade American

from New Hampshire, all jaw, vanity, bombast and ignorance, a lawyer of

"shyster" calibre, a fraud by nature, a humble worshiper of the sceptre

above him, a reptile never tired of sneering at the land of his birth or

glorifying the ten-acre kingdom that has adopted him--salary, $4,000 a

year, vast consequence, and no perquisites.



Then we have his Excellency the Imperial Minister of Finance, who handles

a million dollars of public money a year, sends in his annual "budget"

with great ceremony, talks prodigiously of "finance," suggests imposing

schemes for paying off the "national debt" (of $150,000,) and does it all

for $4,000 a year and unimaginable glory.



Next we have his Excellency the Minister of War, who holds sway over the

royal armies--they consist of two hundred and thirty uniformed Kanakas,

mostly Brigadier Generals, and if the country ever gets into trouble with

a foreign power we shall probably hear from them.  I knew an American

whose copper-plate visiting card bore this impressive legend:

"Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Infantry."  To say that he was proud of

this distinction is stating it but tamely.  The Minister of War has also

in his charge some venerable swivels on Punch-Bowl Hill wherewith royal

salutes are fired when foreign vessels of war enter the port.



Next comes his Excellency the Minister of the Navy--a nabob who rules the

"royal fleet," (a steam-tug and a sixty-ton schooner.)



And next comes his Grace the Lord Bishop of Honolulu, the chief dignitary

of the "Established Church"--for when the American Presbyterian

missionaries had completed the reduction of the nation to a compact

condition of Christianity, native royalty stepped in and erected the

grand dignity of an "Established (Episcopal) Church" over it, and

imported a cheap ready-made Bishop from England to take charge.  The

chagrin of the missionaries has never been comprehensively expressed, to

this day, profanity not being admissible.



Next comes his Excellency the Minister of Public Instruction.



Next, their Excellencies the Governors of Oahu, Hawaii, etc., and after

them a string of High Sheriffs and other small fry too numerous for

computation.



Then there are their Excellencies the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister

Plenipotentiary of his Imperial Majesty the Emperor of the French; her

British Majesty's Minister; the Minister Resident, of the United States;

and some six or eight representatives of other foreign nations, all with

sounding titles, imposing dignity and prodigious but economical state.



Imagine all this grandeur in a play-house "kingdom" whose population

falls absolutely short of sixty thousand souls!



The people are so accustomed to nine-jointed titles and colossal magnates

that a foreign prince makes very little more stir in Honolulu than a

Western Congressman does in New York.



And let it be borne in mind that there is a strictly defined "court

costume" of so "stunning" a nature that it would make the clown in a

circus look tame and commonplace by comparison; and each Hawaiian

official dignitary has a gorgeous vari-colored, gold-laced uniform

peculiar to his office--no two of them are alike, and it is hard to tell

which one is the "loudest."  The King had a "drawing-room" at stated

intervals, like other monarchs, and when these varied uniforms congregate

there--weak-eyed people have to contemplate the spectacle through smoked

glass.  Is there not a gratifying contrast between this latter-day

exhibition and the one the ancestors of some of these magnates afforded

the missionaries the Sunday after the old-time distribution of clothing?

Behold what religion and civilization have wrought!









CHAPTER LXVIII.



While I was in Honolulu I witnessed the ceremonious funeral of the King's

sister, her Royal Highness the Princess Victoria.  According to the royal

custom, the remains had lain in state at the palace thirty days, watched

day and night by a guard of honor.  And during all that time a great

multitude of natives from the several islands had kept the palace grounds

well crowded and had made the place a pandemonium every night with their

howlings and wailings, beating of tom-toms and dancing of the (at other

times) forbidden "hula-hula" by half-clad maidens to the music of songs

of questionable decency chanted in honor of the deceased.  The printed

programme of the funeral procession interested me at the time; and after

what I have just said of Hawaiian grandiloquence in the matter of

"playing empire," I am persuaded that a perusal of it may interest the

reader:



      After reading the long list of dignitaries, etc., and remembering

      the sparseness of the population, one is almost inclined to wonder

      where the material for that portion of the procession devoted to

      "Hawaiian Population Generally" is going to be procured:



Undertaker.

Royal School.  Kawaiahao School.  Roman Catholic School.  Maemae School.

Honolulu Fire Department.

Mechanics' Benefit Union.

Attending Physicians.

Knonohikis (Superintendents) of the Crown Lands, Konohikis of the Private

Lands of His Majesty Konohikis of the Private Lands of Her late Royal

Highness.

Governor of Oahu and Staff.

Hulumanu (Military Company).

Household Troops.

The Prince of Hawaii's Own (Military Company).

The King's household servants.

Servants of Her late Royal Highness.

Protestant Clergy.  The Clergy of the Roman Catholic Church.

His Lordship Louis Maigret, The Right Rev.  Bishop of Arathea, Vicar-

Apostolic of the Hawaiian Islands.

The Clergy of the Hawaiian Reformed Catholic Church.

His Lordship the Right Rev.  Bishop of Honolulu.

Her Majesty Queen Emma's Carriage.

His Majesty's Staff.

Carriage of Her late Royal Highness.

Carriage of Her Majesty the Queen Dowager.

The King's Chancellor.

Cabinet Ministers.

His Excellency the Minister Resident of the United States.

H. B. M's Commissioner.

H. B. M's Acting Commissioner.

Judges of Supreme Court.

Privy Councillors.

Members of Legislative Assembly.

Consular Corps.

Circuit Judges.

Clerks of Government Departments.

Members of the Bar.

Collector General, Custom-house Officers and Officers of the Customs.

Marshal and Sheriffs of the different Islands.

King's Yeomanry.

Foreign Residents.

Ahahui Kaahumanu.

Hawaiian Population Generally.

Hawaiian Cavalry.

Police Force.



I resume my journal at the point where the procession arrived at the

royal mausoleum:



      As the procession filed through the gate, the military deployed

      handsomely to the right and left and formed an avenue through which

      the long column of mourners passed to the tomb.  The coffin was

      borne through the door of the mausoleum, followed by the King and

      his chiefs, the great officers of the kingdom, foreign Consuls,

      Embassadors and distinguished guests (Burlingame and General Van

      Valkenburgh).  Several of the kahilis were then fastened to a frame-

      work in front of the tomb, there to remain until they decay and fall

      to pieces, or, forestalling this, until another scion of royalty

      dies.  At this point of the proceedings the multitude set up such a

      heart-broken wailing as I hope never to hear again.



The soldiers fired three volleys of musketry--the wailing being

previously silenced to permit of the guns being heard.  His Highness

Prince William, in a showy military uniform (the "true prince," this--

scion of the house over-thrown by the present dynasty--he was formerly

betrothed to the Princess but was not allowed to marry her), stood guard

and paced back and forth within the door.  The privileged few who

followed the coffin into the mausoleum remained sometime, but the King

soon came out and stood in the door and near one side of it.  A stranger

could have guessed his rank (although he was so simply and

unpretentiously dressed) by the profound deference paid him by all

persons in his vicinity; by seeing his high officers receive his quiet

orders and suggestions with bowed and uncovered heads; and by observing

how careful those persons who came out of the mausoleum were to avoid

"crowding" him (although there was room enough in the doorway for a wagon

to pass, for that matter); how respectfully they edged out sideways,

scraping their backs against the wall and always presenting a front view

of their persons to his Majesty, and never putting their hats on until

they were well out of the royal presence.



He was dressed entirely in black--dress-coat and silk hat--and looked

rather democratic in the midst of the showy uniforms about him.  On his

breast he wore a large gold star, which was half hidden by the lapel of

his coat.  He remained at the door a half hour, and occasionally gave an

order to the men who were erecting the kahilis [Ranks of long-handled

mops made of gaudy feathers--sacred to royalty.  They are stuck in the

ground around the tomb and left there.]  before the tomb.  He had the

good taste to make one of them substitute black crape for the ordinary

hempen rope he was about to tie one of them to the frame-work with.

Finally he entered his carriage and drove away, and the populace shortly

began to drop into his wake.  While he was in view there was but one man

who attracted more attention than himself, and that was Harris (the

Yankee Prime Minister).  This feeble personage had crape enough around

his hat to express the grief of an entire nation, and as usual he

neglected no opportunity of making himself conspicuous and exciting the

admiration of the simple Kanakas.  Oh! noble ambition of this modern

Richelieu!



It is interesting to contrast the funeral ceremonies of the Princess

Victoria with those of her noted ancestor Kamehameha the Conqueror, who

died fifty years ago--in 1819, the year before the first missionaries

came.



      "On the 8th of May, 1819, at the age of sixty-six, he died, as he

      had lived, in the faith of his country.  It was his misfortune not

      to have come in contact with men who could have rightly influenced

      his religious aspirations.  Judged by his advantages and compared

      with the most eminent of his countrymen he may be justly styled not

      only great, but good.  To this day his memory warms the heart and

      elevates the national feelings of Hawaiians.  They are proud of

      their old warrior King; they love his name; his deeds form their

      historical age; and an enthusiasm everywhere prevails, shared even

      by foreigners who knew his worth, that constitutes the firmest

      pillar of the throne of his dynasty.



      "In lieu of human victims (the custom of that age), a sacrifice of

      three hundred dogs attended his obsequies--no mean holocaust when

      their national value and the estimation in which they were held are

      considered.  The bones of Kamehameha, after being kept for a while,

      were so carefully concealed that all knowledge of their final

      resting place is now lost.  There was a proverb current among the

      common people that the bones of a cruel King could not be hid; they

      made fish-hooks and arrows of them, upon which, in using them, they

      vented their abhorrence of his memory in bitter execrations."



The account of the circumstances of his death, as written by the native

historians, is full of minute detail, but there is scarcely a line of it

which does not mention or illustrate some by-gone custom of the country.

In this respect it is the most comprehensive document I have yet met

with.  I will quote it entire:



      "When Kamehameha was dangerously sick, and the priests were unable

      to cure him, they said: 'Be of good courage and build a house for

      the god' (his own private god or idol), that thou mayest recover.'

      The chiefs corroborated this advice of the priests, and a place of

      worship was prepared for Kukailimoku, and consecrated in the

      evening.  They proposed also to the King, with a view to prolong his

      life, that human victims should be sacrificed to his deity; upon

      which the greater part of the people absconded through fear of

      death, and concealed themselves in hiding places till the tabu [Tabu

      (pronounced tah-boo,) means prohibition (we have borrowed it,) or

      sacred.  The tabu was sometimes permanent, sometimes temporary; and

      the person or thing placed under tabu was for the time being sacred

      to the purpose for which it was set apart.  In the above case the

      victims selected under the tabu would be sacred to the sacrifice]

      in which destruction impended, was past.  It is doubtful whether

      Kamehameha approved of the plan of the chiefs and priests to

      sacrifice men, as he was known to say, 'The men are sacred for the

      King;' meaning that they were for the service of his successor.

      This information was derived from Liholiho, his son.



      "After this, his sickness increased to such a degree that he had not

      strength to turn himself in his bed.  When another season,

      consecrated for worship at the new temple (heiau) arrived, he said

      to his son, Liholiho, 'Go thou and make supplication to thy god; I

      am not able to go, and will offer my prayers at home.'  When his

      devotions to his feathered god, Kukailimoku, were concluded, a

      certain religiously disposed individual, who had a bird god,

      suggested to the King that through its influence his sickness might

      be removed.  The name of this god was Pua; its body was made of a

      bird, now eaten by the Hawaiians, and called in their language alae.

      Kamehameha was willing that a trial should be made, and two houses

      were constructed to facilitate the experiment; but while dwelling in

      them he became so very weak as not to receive food.  After lying

      there three days, his wives, children and chiefs, perceiving that he

      was very low, returned him to his own house.  In the evening he was

      carried to the eating house,  where he took a little food in his

      mouth which he did not swallow; also a cup of water.  The chiefs

      requested him to give them his counsel; but he made no reply, and

      was carried back to the dwelling house; but when near midnight--ten

      o'clock, perhaps--he was carried again to the place to eat; but, as

      before, he merely tasted of what was presented to him.  Then

      Kaikioewa addressed him thus: 'Here we all are, your younger

      brethren, your son Liholiho and your foreigner; impart to us your

      dying charge, that Liholiho and Kaahumanu may hear.' Then Kamehameha

      inquired, 'What do you say?' Kaikioewa repeated, 'Your counsels for

      us.'



      "He then said, 'Move on in my good way and--.' He could proceed no

      further.  The foreigner, Mr. Young, embraced and kissed him.

      Hoapili also embraced him, whispering something in his ear, after

      which he was taken back to the house.  About twelve he was carried

      once more to the house for eating, into which his head entered,

      while his body was in the dwelling house immediately adjoining.  It

      should be remarked that this frequent carrying of a sick chief from

      one house to another resulted from the tabu system, then in force.

      There were at that time six houses (huts) connected with an

      establishment--one was for worship, one for the men to eat in, an

      eating house for the women, a house to sleep in, a house in which to

      manufacture kapa (native cloth) and one where, at certain intervals,

      the women might dwell in seclusion.



      "The sick was once more taken to his house, when he expired; this

      was at two o'clock, a circumstance from which Leleiohoku derived his

      name.  As he breathed his last, Kalaimoku came to the eating house

      to order those in it to go out.  There were two aged persons thus

      directed to depart; one went, the other remained on account of love

      to the King, by whom he had formerly been kindly sustained.  The

      children also were sent away.  Then Kalaimoku came to the house, and

      the chiefs had a consultation.  One of them spoke thus: 'This is my

      thought--we will eat him raw. [This sounds suspicious, in view of

      the fact that all Sandwich Island historians, white and black,

      protest that cannibalism never existed in the islands.  However,

      since they only proposed to "eat him raw" we "won't count that".

      But it would certainly have been cannibalism if they had cooked

      him.--M.  T.]  Kaahumanu (one of the dead King's widows) replied,

      'Perhaps his body is not at our disposal; that is more properly with

      his successor.  Our part in him--his breath--has departed; his

      remains will be disposed of by Liholiho.'



      "After this conversation the body was taken into the consecrated

      house for the performance of the proper rites by the priest and the

      new King.  The name of this ceremony is uko; and when the sacred hog

      was baked the priest offered it to the dead body, and it became a

      god, the King at the same time repeating the customary prayers.



      "Then the priest, addressing himself to the King and chiefs, said:

      'I will now make known to you the rules to be observed respecting

      persons to be sacrificed on the burial of this body.  If you obtain

      one man before the corpse is removed, one will be sufficient; but

      after it leaves this house four will be required.  If delayed until

      we carry the corpse to the grave there must be ten; but after it is

      deposited in the grave there must be fifteen.  To-morrow morning

      there will be a tabu, and, if the sacrifice be delayed until that

      time, forty men must die.'



      "Then the high priest, Hewahewa, inquired of the chiefs, 'Where

      shall be the residence of King Liholiho?'  They replied, 'Where,

      indeed?  You, of all men, ought to know.'  Then the priest observed,

      'There are two suitable places; one is Kau, the other is Kohala.'

      The chiefs preferred the latter, as it was more thickly inhabited.

      The priest added, 'These are proper places for the King's residence;

      but he must not remain in Kona, for it is polluted.'  This was

      agreed to.  It was now break of day.  As he was being carried to the

      place of burial the people perceived that their King was dead, and

      they wailed.  When the corpse was removed from the house to the

      tomb, a distance of one chain, the procession was met by a certain

      man who was ardently attached to the deceased.  He leaped upon the

      chiefs who were carrying the King's body; he desired to die with him

      on account of his love.  The chiefs drove him away.  He persisted in

      making numerous attempts, which were unavailing.  Kalaimoka also had

      it in his heart to die with him, but was prevented by Hookio.



      "The morning following Kamehameha's death, Liholiho and his train

      departed for Kohala, according to the suggestions of the priest, to

      avoid the defilement occasioned by the dead.  At this time if a

      chief died the land was polluted, and the heirs sought a residence

      in another part of the country until the corpse was dissected and

      the bones tied in a bundle, which being done, the season of

      defilement terminated.  If the deceased were not a chief, the house

      only was defiled which became pure again on the burial of the body.

      Such were the laws on this subject.



      "On the morning on which Liholiho sailed in his canoe for Kohala,

      the chiefs and people mourned after their manner on occasion of a

      chief's death, conducting themselves like madmen and like beasts.

      Their conduct was such as to forbid description; The priests, also,

      put into action the sorcery apparatus, that the person who had

      prayed the King to death might die; for it was not believed that

      Kamehameha's departure was the effect either of sickness or old age.

      When the sorcerers set up by their fire-places sticks with a strip

      of kapa flying at the top, the chief Keeaumoku, Kaahumaun's brother,

      came in a state of intoxication and broke the flag-staff of the

      sorcerers, from which it was inferred that Kaahumanu and her friends

      had been instrumental in the King's death.  On this account they

      were subjected to abuse."



You have the contrast, now, and a strange one it is.  This great Queen,

Kaahumanu, who was "subjected to abuse" during the frightful orgies that

followed the King's death, in accordance with ancient custom, afterward

became a devout Christian and a steadfast and powerful friend of the

missionaries.



Dogs were, and still are, reared and fattened for food, by the natives--

hence the reference to their value in one of the above paragraphs.



Forty years ago it was the custom in the Islands to suspend all law for a

certain number of days after the death of a royal personage; and then a

saturnalia ensued which one may picture to himself after a fashion, but

not in the full horror of the reality.  The people shaved their heads,

knocked out a tooth or two, plucked out an eye sometimes, cut, bruised,

mutilated or burned their flesh, got drunk, burned each other's huts,

maimed or murdered one another according to the caprice of the moment,

and both sexes gave themselves up to brutal and unbridled licentiousness.



And after it all, came a torpor from which the nation slowly emerged

bewildered and dazed, as if from a hideous half-remembered nightmare.

They were not the salt of the earth, those "gentle children of the sun."



The natives still keep up an old custom of theirs which cannot be

comforting to an invalid.  When they think a sick friend is going to die,

a couple of dozen neighbors surround his hut and keep up a deafening

wailing night and day till he either dies or gets well.  No doubt this

arrangement has helped many a subject to a shroud before his appointed

time.



They surround a hut and wail in the same heart-broken way when its

occupant returns from a journey.  This is their dismal idea of a welcome.

A very little of it would go a great way with most of us.









CHAPTER LXIX.



Bound for Hawaii (a hundred and fifty miles distant,) to visit the great

volcano and behold the other notable things which distinguish that island

above the remainder of the group, we sailed from Honolulu on a certain

Saturday afternoon, in the good schooner Boomerang.



The Boomerang was about as long as two street cars, and about as wide as

one.  She was so small (though she was larger than the majority of the

inter-island coasters) that when I stood on her deck I felt but little

smaller than the Colossus of Rhodes must have felt when he had a man-of-

war under him.  I could reach the water when she lay over under a strong

breeze.  When the Captain and my comrade (a Mr. Billings), myself and

four other persons were all assembled on the little after portion of the

deck which is sacred to the cabin passengers, it was full--there was not

room for any more quality folks.  Another section of the deck, twice as

large as ours, was full of natives of both sexes, with their customary

dogs, mats, blankets, pipes, calabashes of poi, fleas, and other luxuries

and baggage of minor importance.  As soon as we set sail the natives all

lay down on the deck as thick as negroes in a slave-pen, and smoked,

conversed, and spit on each other, and were truly sociable.



The little low-ceiled cabin below was rather larger than a hearse, and as

dark as a vault.  It had two coffins on each side--I mean two bunks.

A small table, capable of accommodating three persons at dinner, stood

against the forward bulkhead, and over it hung the dingiest whale oil

lantern that ever peopled the obscurity of a dungeon with ghostly shapes.

The floor room unoccupied was not extensive.  One might swing a cat in

it, perhaps, but not a long cat.  The hold forward of the bulkhead had

but little freight in it, and from morning till night a portly old

rooster, with a voice like Baalam's ass, and the same disposition to use

it, strutted up and down in that part of the vessel and crowed.  He

usually took dinner at six o'clock, and then, after an hour devoted to

meditation, he mounted a barrel and crowed a good part of the night.

He got hoarser all the time, but he scorned to allow any personal

consideration to interfere with his duty, and kept up his labors in

defiance of threatened diphtheria.



Sleeping was out of the question when he was on watch.  He was a source

of genuine aggravation and annoyance.  It was worse than useless to shout

at him or apply offensive epithets to him--he only took these things for

applause, and strained himself to make more noise.  Occasionally, during

the day, I threw potatoes at him through an aperture in the bulkhead, but

he only dodged and went on crowing.



The first night, as I lay in my coffin, idly watching the dim lamp

swinging to the rolling of the ship, and snuffing the nauseous odors of

bilge water, I felt something gallop over me.  I turned out promptly.

However, I turned in again when I found it was only a rat.  Presently

something galloped over me once more.  I knew it was not a rat this time,

and I thought it might be a centipede, because the Captain had killed one

on deck in the afternoon.  I turned out.  The first glance at the pillow

showed me repulsive sentinel perched upon each end of it--cockroaches as

large as peach leaves--fellows with long, quivering antennae and fiery,

malignant eyes.  They were grating their teeth like tobacco worms, and

appeared to be dissatisfied about something.  I had often heard that

these reptiles were in the habit of eating off sleeping sailors' toe

nails down to the quick, and I would not get in the bunk any more.  I lay

down on the floor.  But a rat came and bothered me, and shortly afterward

a procession of cockroaches arrived and camped in my hair.  In a few

moments the rooster was crowing with uncommon spirit and a party of fleas

were throwing double somersaults about my person in the wildest disorder,

and taking a bite every time they struck.  I was beginning to feel really

annoyed.  I got up and put my clothes on and went on deck.



The above is not overdrawn; it is a truthful sketch of inter-island

schooner life.  There is no such thing as keeping a vessel in elegant

condition, when she carries molasses and Kanakas.



It was compensation for my sufferings to come unexpectedly upon so

beautiful a scene as met my eye--to step suddenly out of the sepulchral

gloom of the cabin and stand under the strong light of the moon--in the

centre, as it were, of a glittering sea of liquid silver--to see the

broad sails straining in the gale, the ship heeled over on her side, the

angry foam hissing past her lee bulwarks, and sparkling sheets of spray

dashing high over her bows and raining upon her decks; to brace myself

and hang fast to the first object that presented itself, with hat jammed

down and coat tails whipping in the breeze, and feel that exhilaration

that thrills in one's hair and quivers down his back bone when he knows

that every inch of canvas is drawing and the vessel cleaving through the

waves at her utmost speed.  There was no darkness, no dimness, no

obscurity there.  All was brightness, every object was vividly defined.

Every prostrate Kanaka; every coil of rope; every calabash of poi; every

puppy; every seam in the flooring; every bolthead; every object; however

minute, showed sharp and distinct in its every outline; and the shadow of

the broad mainsail lay black as a pall upon the deck, leaving Billings's

white upturned face glorified and his body in a total eclipse.

Monday morning we were close to the island of Hawaii.  Two of its high

mountains were in view--Mauna Loa and Hualaiai.



The latter is an imposing peak, but being only ten thousand feet high is

seldom mentioned or heard of.  Mauna Loa is said to be sixteen thousand

feet high.  The rays of glittering snow and ice, that clasped its summit

like a claw, looked refreshing when viewed from the blistering climate we

were in.  One could stand on that mountain (wrapped up in blankets and

furs to keep warm), and while he nibbled a snowball or an icicle to

quench his thirst he could look down the long sweep of its sides and see

spots where plants are growing that grow only where the bitter cold of

Winter prevails; lower down he could see sections devoted to production

that thrive in the temperate zone alone; and at the bottom of the

mountain he could see the home of the tufted cocoa-palms and other

species of vegetation that grow only in the sultry atmosphere of eternal

Summer.  He could see all the climes of the world at a single glance of

the eye, and that glance would only pass over a distance of four or five

miles as the bird flies!



By and by we took boat and went ashore at Kailua, designing to ride

horseback through the pleasant orange and coffee region of Kona, and

rejoin the vessel at a point some leagues distant.  This journey is well

worth taking.  The trail passes along on high ground--say a thousand feet

above sea level--and usually about a mile distant from the ocean, which

is always in sight, save that occasionally you find yourself buried in

the forest in the midst of a rank tropical vegetation and a dense growth

of trees, whose great bows overarch the road and shut out sun and sea and

everything, and leave you in a dim, shady tunnel, haunted with invisible

singing birds and fragrant with the odor of flowers.  It was pleasant to

ride occasionally in the warm sun, and feast the eye upon the ever-

changing panorama of the forest (beyond and below us), with its many

tints, its softened lights and shadows, its billowy undulations sweeping

gently down from the mountain to the sea.  It was pleasant also, at

intervals, to leave the sultry sun and pass into the cool, green depths

of this forest and indulge in sentimental reflections under the

inspiration of its brooding twilight and its whispering foliage.

We rode through one orange grove that had ten thousand tree in it!

They were all laden with fruit.



At one farmhouse we got some large peaches of excellent flavor.

This fruit, as a general thing, does not do well in the Sandwich Islands.

It takes a sort of almond shape, and is small and bitter.  It needs

frost, they say, and perhaps it does; if this be so, it will have a good

opportunity to go on needing it, as it will not be likely to get it.

The trees from which the fine fruit I have spoken of, came, had been

planted and replanted sixteen times, and to this treatment the proprietor

of the orchard attributed his-success.



We passed several sugar plantations--new ones and not very extensive.

The crops were, in most cases, third rattoons.  [NOTE.--The first crop is

called "plant cane;" subsequent crops which spring from the original

roots, without replanting, are called "rattoons."] Almost everywhere on

the island of Hawaii sugar-cane matures in twelve months, both rattoons

and plant, and although it ought to be taken off as soon as it tassels,

no doubt, it is not absolutely necessary to do it until about four months

afterward.  In Kona, the average yield of an acre of ground is two tons

of sugar, they say.  This is only a moderate yield for these islands, but

would be astounding for Louisiana and most other sugar growing countries.

The plantations in Kona being on pretty high ground--up among the light

and frequent rains--no irrigation whatever is required.









CHAPTER LXX.



We stopped some time at one of the plantations, to rest ourselves and

refresh the horses.  We had a chatty conversation with several gentlemen

present; but there was one person, a middle aged man, with an absent look

in his face, who simply glanced up, gave us good-day and lapsed again

into the meditations which our coming had interrupted.  The planters

whispered us not to mind him--crazy.  They said he was in the Islands for

his health; was a preacher; his home, Michigan.  They said that if he

woke up presently and fell to talking about a correspondence which he had

some time held with Mr. Greeley about a trifle of some kind, we must

humor him and listen with interest; and we must humor his fancy that this

correspondence was the talk of the world.



It was easy to see that he was a gentle creature and that his madness had

nothing vicious in it.  He looked pale, and a little worn, as if with

perplexing thought and anxiety of mind.  He sat a long time, looking at

the floor, and at intervals muttering to himself and nodding his head

acquiescingly or shaking it in mild protest.  He was lost in his thought,

or in his memories.  We continued our talk with the planters, branching

from subject to subject.  But at last the word "circumstance," casually

dropped, in the course of conversation, attracted his attention and

brought an eager look into his countenance.  He faced about in his chair

and said:



"Circumstance?  What circumstance?  Ah, I know--I know too well.  So you

have heard of it too."  [With a sigh.] "Well, no matter--all the world

has heard of it.  All the world.  The whole world.  It is a large world,

too, for a thing to travel so far in--now isn't it?  Yes, yes--the

Greeley correspondence with Erickson has created the saddest and

bitterest controversy on both sides of the ocean--and still they keep it

up!  It makes us famous, but at what a sorrowful sacrifice!  I was so

sorry when I heard that it had caused that bloody and distressful war

over there in Italy.  It was little comfort to me, after so much

bloodshed, to know that the victors sided with me, and the vanquished

with Greeley.--It is little comfort to know that Horace Greeley is

responsible for the battle of Sadowa, and not me.



"Queen Victoria wrote me that she felt just as I did about it--she said

that as much as she was opposed to Greeley and the spirit he showed in

the correspondence with me, she would not have had Sadowa happen for

hundreds of dollars.  I can show you her letter, if you would like to see

it.  But gentlemen, much as you may think you know about that unhappy

correspondence, you cannot know the straight of it till you hear it from

my lips.  It has always been garbled in the journals, and even in

history.  Yes, even in history--think of it!  Let me--please let me, give

you the matter, exactly as it occurred.  I truly will not abuse your

confidence."



Then he leaned forward, all interest, all earnestness, and told his

story--and told it appealingly, too, and yet in the simplest and most

unpretentious way; indeed, in such a way as to suggest to one, all the

time, that this was a faithful, honorable witness, giving evidence in the

sacred interest of justice, and under oath.  He said:



"Mrs. Beazeley--Mrs. Jackson Beazeley, widow, of the village of

Campbellton, Kansas,--wrote me about a matter which was near her heart

--a matter which many might think trivial, but to her it was a thing of

deep concern.  I was living in Michigan, then--serving in the ministry.

She was, and is, an estimable woman--a woman to whom poverty and hardship

have proven incentives to industry, in place of discouragements.

Her only treasure was her son William, a youth just verging upon manhood;

religious, amiable, and sincerely attached to agriculture.  He was the

widow's comfort and her pride.  And so, moved by her love for him, she

wrote me about a matter, as I have said before, which lay near her heart

--because it lay near her boy's.  She desired me to confer with

Mr. Greeley about turnips.  Turnips were the dream of her child's young

ambition.  While other youths were frittering away in frivolous

amusements the precious years of budding vigor which God had given them

for useful preparation, this boy was patiently enriching his mind with

information concerning turnips.  The sentiment which he felt toward the

turnip was akin to adoration.  He could not think of the turnip without

emotion; he could not speak of it calmly; he could not contemplate it

without exaltation.  He could not eat it without shedding tears.  All the

poetry in his sensitive nature was in sympathy with the gracious

vegetable.  With the earliest pipe of dawn he sought his patch, and when

the curtaining night drove him from it he shut himself up with his books

and garnered statistics till sleep overcame him.  On rainy days he sat

and talked hours together with his mother about turnips.  When company

came, he made it his loving duty to put aside everything else and

converse with them all the day long of his great joy in the turnip.



"And yet, was this joy rounded and complete?  Was there no secret alloy of

unhappiness in it?  Alas, there was.  There was a canker gnawing at his

heart; the noblest inspiration of his soul eluded his endeavor--viz: he

could not make of the turnip a climbing vine.  Months went by; the bloom

forsook his cheek, the fire faded out of his eye; sighings and

abstraction usurped the place of smiles and cheerful converse.  But a

watchful eye noted these things and in time a motherly sympathy unsealed

the secret.  Hence the letter to me.  She pleaded for attention--she said

her boy was dying by inches.



"I was a stranger to Mr. Greeley, but what of that?  The matter was

urgent.  I wrote and begged him to solve the difficult problem if

possible and save the student's life.  My interest grew, until it partook

of the anxiety of the mother.  I waited in much suspense.--At last the

answer came.



"I found that I could not read it readily, the handwriting being

unfamiliar and my emotions somewhat wrought up.  It seemed to refer in

part to the boy's case, but chiefly to other and irrelevant matters--such

as paving-stones, electricity, oysters, and something which I took to be

'absolution' or 'agrarianism,' I could not be certain which; still, these

appeared to be simply casual mentions, nothing more; friendly in spirit,

without doubt, but lacking the connection or coherence necessary to make

them useful.--I judged that my understanding was affected by my feelings,

and so laid the letter away till morning.



"In the morning I read it again, but with difficulty and uncertainty

still, for I had lost some little rest and my mental vision seemed

clouded.  The note was more connected, now, but did not meet the

emergency it was expected to meet.  It was too discursive.  It appeared

to read as follows, though I was not certain of some of the words:



      "Polygamy dissembles majesty; extracts redeem polarity; causes

      hitherto exist.  Ovations pursue wisdom, or warts inherit and

      condemn.  Boston, botany, cakes, folony undertakes, but who shall

      allay?  We fear not.  Yrxwly,

                               HEVACE EVEELOJ.'



"But there did not seem to be a word about turnips.  There seemed to be

no suggestion as to how they might be made to grow like vines.  There was

not even a reference to the Beazeleys.  I slept upon the matter; I ate no

supper, neither any breakfast next morning.  So I resumed my work with a

brain refreshed, and was very hopeful.  Now the letter took a different

aspect-all save the signature, which latter I judged to be only a

harmless affectation of Hebrew.  The epistle was necessarily from Mr.

Greeley, for it bore the printed heading of The Tribune, and I had

written to no one else there.  The letter, I say, had taken a different

aspect, but still its language was eccentric and avoided the issue.  It

now appeared to say:



      "Bolivia extemporizes mackerel; borax esteems polygamy; sausages

      wither in the east.  Creation perdu, is done; for woes inherent one

      can damn.  Buttons, buttons, corks, geology underrates but we shall

      allay.  My beer's out.  Yrxwly,

                                         HEVACE EVEELOJ.'



"I was evidently overworked.  My comprehension was impaired.  Therefore I

gave two days to recreation, and then returned to my task greatly

refreshed.  The letter now took this form:



      "Poultices do sometimes choke swine; tulips reduce posterity; causes

      leather to resist.  Our notions empower wisdom, her let's afford

      while we can.  Butter but any cakes, fill any undertaker, we'll wean

      him from his filly.  We feel hot.

                                    Yrxwly, HEVACE EVEELOJ.'



"I was still not satisfied.  These generalities did not meet the

question.  They were crisp, and vigorous, and delivered with a confidence

that almost compelled conviction; but at such a time as this, with a

human life at stake, they seemed inappropriate, worldly, and in bad

taste.  At any other time I would have been not only glad, but proud, to

receive from a man like Mr. Greeley a letter of this kind, and would have

studied it earnestly and tried to improve myself all I could; but now,

with that poor boy in his far home languishing for relief, I had no heart

for learning.



"Three days passed by, and I read the note again.  Again its tenor had

changed.  It now appeared to say:



      "Potations do sometimes wake wines; turnips restrain passion; causes

      necessary to state.  Infest the poor widow; her lord's effects will

      be void.  But dirt, bathing, etc., etc., followed unfairly, will

      worm him from his folly--so swear not.

                                              Yrxwly, HEVACE EVEELOJ.'



"This was more like it.  But I was unable to proceed.  I was too much

worn.  The word 'turnips' brought temporary joy and encouragement, but my

strength was so much impaired, and the delay might be so perilous for the

boy, that I relinquished the idea of pursuing the translation further,

and resolved to do what I ought to have done at first.  I sat down and

wrote Mr. Greeley as follows:



      "DEAR SIR: I fear I do not entirely comprehend your kind note.  It

      cannot be possible, Sir, that 'turnips restrain passion'--at least

      the study or contemplation of turnips cannot--for it is this very

      employment that has scorched our poor friend's mind and sapped his

      bodily strength.--But if they do restrain it, will you bear with us

      a little further and explain how they should be prepared?  I observe

      that you say 'causes necessary to state,' but you have omitted to

      state them.



      "Under a misapprehension, you seem to attribute to me interested

      motives in this matter--to call it by no harsher term.  But I assure

      you, dear sir, that if I seem to be 'infesting the widow,' it is all

      seeming, and void of reality.  It is from no seeking of mine that I

      am in this position.  She asked me, herself, to write you.  I never

      have infested her--indeed I scarcely know her.  I do not infest

      anybody.  I try to go along, in my humble way, doing as near right

      as I can, never harming anybody, and never throwing out

      insinuations.  As for 'her lord and his effects,' they are of no

      interest to me.  I trust I have effects enough of my own--shall

      endeavor to get along with them, at any rate, and not go mousing

      around to get hold of somebody's that are 'void.'  But do you not

      see?--this woman is a widow--she has no 'lord.'  He is dead--or

      pretended to be, when they buried him.  Therefore, no amount of

      'dirt, bathing,' etc., etc., howsoever 'unfairly followed' will be

      likely to 'worm him from his folly'--if being dead and a ghost is

      'folly.'  Your closing remark is as unkind as it was uncalled for;

      and if report says true you might have applied it to yourself, sir,

      with more point and less impropriety.

                               Very Truly Yours, SIMON ERICKSON.



"In the course of a few days, Mr. Greely did what would have saved a

world of trouble, and much mental and bodily suffering and

misunderstanding, if he had done it sooner.  To wit, he sent an

intelligible rescript or translation of his original note, made in a

plain hand by his clerk.  Then the mystery cleared, and I saw that his

heart had been right, all the time.  I will recite the note in its

clarified form:



      [Translation.]

      'Potatoes do sometimes make vines; turnips remain passive: cause

      unnecessary to state.  Inform the poor widow her lad's efforts will

      be vain.  But diet, bathing, etc.  etc., followed uniformly, will

      wean him from his folly--so fear not.

                                         Yours, HORACE GREELEY.'



"But alas, it was too late, gentlemen--too late.  The criminal delay had

done its work--young Beazely was no more.  His spirit had taken its

flight to a land where all anxieties shall be charmed away, all desires

gratified, all ambitions realized.  Poor lad, they laid him to his rest

with a turnip in each hand."



So ended Erickson, and lapsed again into nodding, mumbling, and

abstraction.  The company broke up, and left him so....  But they did not

say what drove him crazy.  In the momentary confusion, I forgot to ask.









CHAPTER LXXI.



At four o'clock in the afternoon we were winding down a mountain of

dreary and desolate lava to the sea, and closing our pleasant land

journey.  This lava is the accumulation of ages; one torrent of fire

after another has rolled down here in old times, and built up the island

structure higher and higher.  Underneath, it is honey-combed with caves;

it would be of no use to dig wells in such a place; they would not hold

water--you would not find any for them to hold, for that matter.

Consequently, the planters depend upon cisterns.



The last lava flow occurred here so long ago that there are none now

living who witnessed it.  In one place it enclosed and burned down a

grove of cocoa-nut trees, and the holes in the lava where the trunks

stood are still visible; their sides retain the impression of the bark;

the trees fell upon the burning river, and becoming partly submerged,

left in it the perfect counterpart of every knot and branch and leaf,

and even nut, for curiosity seekers of a long distant day to gaze upon

and wonder at.



There were doubtless plenty of Kanaka sentinels on guard hereabouts at

that time, but they did not leave casts of their figures in the lava as

the Roman sentinels at Herculaneum and Pompeii did.  It is a pity it is

so, because such things are so interesting; but so it is.  They probably

went away.  They went away early, perhaps.  However, they had their

merits; the Romans exhibited the higher pluck, but the Kanakas showed the

sounder judgment.



Shortly we came in sight of that spot whose history is so familiar to

every school-boy in the wide world--Kealakekua Bay--the place where

Captain Cook, the great circumnavigator, was killed by the natives,

nearly a hundred years ago.  The setting sun was flaming upon it, a

Summer shower was falling, and it was spanned by two magnificent

rainbows.  Two men who were in advance of us rode through one of these

and for a moment their garments shone with a more than regal splendor.

Why did not Captain Cook have taste enough to call his great discovery

the Rainbow Islands?  These charming spectacles are present to you at

every turn; they are common in all the islands; they are visible every

day, and frequently at night also--not the silvery bow we see once in an

age in the States, by moonlight, but barred with all bright and beautiful

colors, like the children of the sun and rain.  I saw one of them a few

nights ago.  What the sailors call "raindogs"--little patches of rainbow

--are often seen drifting about the heavens in these latitudes, like

stained cathedral windows.



Kealakekua Bay is a little curve like the last kink of a snail-shell,

winding deep into the land, seemingly not more than a mile wide from

shore to shore.  It is bounded on one side--where the murder was done--by

a little flat plain, on which stands a cocoanut grove and some ruined

houses; a steep wall of lava, a thousand feet high at the upper end and

three or four hundred at the lower, comes down from the mountain and

bounds the inner extremity of it.  From this wall the place takes its

name, Kealakekua, which in the native tongue signifies "The Pathway of

the Gods."  They say, (and still believe, in spite of their liberal

education in Christianity), that the great god Lono, who used to live

upon the hillside, always traveled that causeway when urgent business

connected with heavenly affairs called him down to the seashore in a

hurry.



As the red sun looked across the placid ocean through the tall, clean

stems of the cocoanut trees, like a blooming whiskey bloat through the

bars of a city prison, I went and stood in the edge of the water on the

flat rock pressed by Captain Cook's feet when the blow was dealt which

took away his life, and tried to picture in my mind the doomed man

struggling in the midst of the multitude of exasperated savages--the men

in the ship crowding to the vessel's side and gazing in anxious dismay

toward the shore--the--but I discovered that I could not do it.



It was growing dark, the rain began to fall, we could see that the

distant Boomerang was helplessly becalmed at sea, and so I adjourned to

the cheerless little box of a warehouse and sat down to smoke and think,

and wish the ship would make the land--for we had not eaten much for ten

hours and were viciously hungry.



Plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook's

assassination, and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide.

Wherever he went among the islands, he was cordially received and

welcomed by the inhabitants, and his ships lavishly supplied with all

manner of food.  He returned these kindnesses with insult and ill-

treatment.  Perceiving that the people took him for the long vanished and

lamented god Lono, he encouraged them in the delusion for the sake of the

limitless power it gave him; but during the famous disturbance at this

spot, and while he and his comrades were surrounded by fifteen thousand

maddened savages, he received a hurt and betrayed his earthly origin with

a groan.  It was his death-warrant.  Instantly a shout went up: "He

groans!--he is not a god!" So they closed in upon him and dispatched him.



His flesh was stripped from the bones and burned (except nine pounds of

it which were sent on board the ships).  The heart was hung up in a

native hut, where it was found and eaten by three children, who mistook

it for the heart of a dog.  One of these children grew to be a very old

man, and died in Honolulu a few years ago.  Some of Cook's bones were

recovered and consigned to the deep by the officers of the ships.



Small blame should attach to the natives for the killing of Cook.

They treated him well.  In return, he abused them.  He and his men

inflicted bodily injury upon many of them at different times, and killed

at least three of them before they offered any proportionate retaliation.



Near the shore we found "Cook's Monument"--only a cocoanut stump, four

feet high and about a foot in diameter at the butt.  It had lava boulders

piled around its base to hold it up and keep it in its place, and it was

entirely sheathed over, from top to bottom, with rough, discolored sheets

of copper, such as ships' bottoms are coppered with.  Each sheet had a

rude inscription scratched upon it--with a nail, apparently--and in every

case the execution was wretched.  Most of these merely recorded the

visits of British naval commanders to the spot, but one of them bore this

legend:



     "Near this spot fell

      CAPTAIN JAMES COOK,

      The Distinguished Circumnavigator,

      Who Discovered these Islands

      A. D.  1778."



After Cook's murder, his second in command, on board the ship, opened

fire upon the swarms of natives on the beach, and one of his cannon balls

cut this cocoanut tree short off and left this monumental stump standing.

It looked sad and lonely enough to us, out there in the rainy twilight.

But there is no other monument to Captain Cook.  True, up on the mountain

side we had passed by a large inclosure like an ample hog-pen, built of

lava blocks, which marks the spot where Cook's flesh was stripped from

his bones and burned; but this is not properly a monument since it was

erected by the natives themselves, and less to do honor to the

circumnavigator than for the sake of convenience in roasting him.

A thing like a guide-board was elevated above this pen on a tall pole,

and formerly there was an inscription upon it describing the memorable

occurrence that had there taken place; but the sun and the wind have long

ago so defaced it as to render it illegible.



Toward midnight a fine breeze sprang up and the schooner soon worked

herself into the bay and cast anchor.  The boat came ashore for us, and

in a little while the clouds and the rain were all gone.  The moon was

beaming tranquilly down on land and sea, and we two were stretched upon

the deck sleeping the refreshing sleep and dreaming the happy dreams that

are only vouchsafed to the weary and the innocent.









CHAPTER LXXII.



In the breezy morning we went ashore and visited the ruined temple of the

last god Lono.  The high chief cook of this temple--the priest who

presided over it and roasted the human sacrifices--was uncle to Obookia,

and at one time that youth was an apprentice-priest under him.  Obookia

was a young native of fine mind, who, together with three other native

boys, was taken to New England by the captain of a whaleship during the

reign of Kamehameha I, and they were the means of attracting the

attention of the religious world to their country.  This resulted in the

sending of missionaries there.  And this Obookia was the very same

sensitive savage who sat down on the church steps and wept because his

people did not have the Bible.  That incident has been very elaborately

painted in many a charming Sunday School book--aye, and told so

plaintively and so tenderly that I have cried over it in Sunday School

myself, on general principles, although at a time when I did not know

much and could not understand why the people of the Sandwich Islands

needed to worry so much about it as long as they did not know there was a

Bible at all.



Obookia was converted and educated, and was to have returned to his

native land with the first missionaries, had he lived.  The other native

youths made the voyage, and two of them did good service, but the third,

William Kanui, fell from grace afterward, for a time, and when the gold

excitement broke out in California he journeyed thither and went to

mining, although he was fifty years old.  He succeeded pretty well, but

the failure of Page, Bacon & Co. relieved him of six thousand dollars,

and then, to all intents and purposes, he was a bankrupt in his old age

and he resumed service in the pulpit again.  He died in Honolulu in 1864.



Quite a broad tract of land near the temple, extending from the sea to

the mountain top, was sacred to the god Lono in olden times--so sacred

that if a common native set his sacrilegious foot upon it it was

judicious for him to make his will, because his time had come.  He might

go around it by water, but he could not cross it.  It was well sprinkled

with pagan temples and stocked with awkward, homely idols carved out of

logs of wood.  There was a temple devoted to prayers for rain--and with

fine sagacity it was placed at a point so well up on the mountain side

that if you prayed there twenty-four times a day for rain you would be

likely to get it every time.  You would seldom get to your Amen before

you would have to hoist your umbrella.



And there was a large temple near at hand which was built in a single

night, in the midst of storm and thunder and rain, by the ghastly hands

of dead men!  Tradition says that by the weird glare of the lightning a

noiseless multitude of phantoms were seen at their strange labor far up

the mountain side at dead of night--flitting hither and thither and

bearing great lava-blocks clasped in their nerveless fingers--appearing

and disappearing as the pallid lustre fell upon their forms and faded

away again.  Even to this day, it is said, the natives hold this dread

structure in awe and reverence, and will not pass by it in the night.



At noon I observed a bevy of nude native young ladies bathing in the sea,

and went and sat down on their clothes to keep them from being stolen.

I begged them to come out, for the sea was rising and I was satisfied

that they were running some risk.  But they were not afraid, and

presently went on with their sport.  They were finished swimmers and

divers, and enjoyed themselves to the last degree.



They swam races, splashed and ducked and tumbled each other about, and

filled the air with their laughter.  It is said that the first thing an

Islander learns is how to swim; learning to walk being a matter of

smaller consequence, comes afterward.  One hears tales of native men and

women swimming ashore from vessels many miles at sea--more miles, indeed,

than I dare vouch for or even mention.  And they tell of a native diver

who went down in thirty or forty-foot waters and brought up an anvil!

I think he swallowed the anvil afterward, if my memory serves me.

However I will not urge this point.



I have spoken, several times, of the god Lono--I may as well furnish two

or three sentences concerning him.



The idol the natives worshipped for him was a slender, unornamented staff

twelve feet long.  Tradition says he was a favorite god on the Island of

Hawaii--a great king who had been deified for meritorious services--just

our own fashion of rewarding heroes, with the difference that we would

have made him a Postmaster instead of a god, no doubt.  In an angry

moment he slew his wife, a goddess named Kaikilani Aiii.  Remorse of

conscience drove him mad, and tradition presents us the singular

spectacle of a god traveling "on the shoulder;" for in his gnawing grief

he wandered about from place to place boxing and wrestling with all whom

he met.  Of course this pastime soon lost its novelty, inasmuch as it

must necessarily have been the case that when so powerful a deity sent a

frail human opponent "to grass" he never came back any more.  Therefore,

he instituted games called makahiki, and ordered that they should be held

in his honor, and then sailed for foreign lands on a three-cornered raft,

stating that he would return some day--and that was the last of Lono.

He was never seen any more; his raft got swamped, perhaps.  But the

people always expected his return, and thus they were easily led to

accept Captain Cook as the restored god.



Some of the old natives believed Cook was Lono to the day of their death;

but many did not, for they could not understand how he could die if he

was a god.



Only a mile or so from Kealakekua Bay is a spot of historic interest--the

place where the last battle was fought for idolatry.  Of course we

visited it, and came away as wise as most people do who go and gaze upon

such mementoes of the past when in an unreflective mood.



While the first missionaries were on their way around the Horn, the

idolatrous customs which had obtained in the island, as far back as

tradition reached were suddenly broken up.  Old Kamehameha I., was dead,

and his son, Liholiho, the new King was a free liver, a roystering,

dissolute fellow, and hated the restraints of the ancient tabu.  His

assistant in the Government, Kaahumanu, the Queen dowager, was proud and

high-spirited, and hated the tabu because it restricted the privileges of

her sex and degraded all women very nearly to the level of brutes.

So the case stood.  Liholiho had half a mind to put his foot down,

Kaahumahu had a whole mind to badger him into doing it, and whiskey did

the rest.  It was probably the rest.  It was probably the first time

whiskey ever prominently figured as an aid to civilization.  Liholiho

came up to Kailua as drunk as a piper, and attended a great feast; the

determined Queen spurred his drunken courage up to a reckless pitch, and

then, while all the multitude stared in blank dismay, he moved

deliberately forward and sat down with the women!



They saw him eat from the same vessel with them, and were appalled!

Terrible moments drifted slowly by, and still the King ate, still he

lived, still the lightnings of the insulted gods were withheld!

Then conviction came like a revelation--the superstitions of a hundred

generations passed from before the people like a cloud, and a shout went

up, "the tabu is broken!  the tabu is broken!"



Thus did King Liholiho and his dreadful whiskey preach the first sermon

and prepare the way for the new gospel that was speeding southward over

the waves of the Atlantic.



The tabu broken and destruction failing to follow the awful sacrilege,

the people, with that childlike precipitancy which has always

characterized them, jumped to the conclusion that their gods were a weak

and wretched swindle, just as they formerly jumped to the conclusion that

Captain Cook was no god, merely because he groaned, and promptly killed

him without stopping to inquire whether a god might not groan as well as

a man if it suited his convenience to do it; and satisfied that the idols

were powerless to protect themselves they went to work at once and pulled

them down--hacked them to pieces--applied the torch--annihilated them!



The pagan priests were furious.  And well they might be; they had held

the fattest offices in the land, and now they were beggared; they had

been great--they had stood above the chiefs--and now they were vagabonds.

They raised a revolt; they scared a number of people into joining their

standard, and Bekuokalani, an ambitious offshoot of royalty, was easily

persuaded to become their leader.



In the first skirmish the idolaters triumphed over the royal army sent

against them, and full of confidence they resolved to march upon Kailua.

The King sent an envoy to try and conciliate them, and came very near

being an envoy short by the operation; the savages not only refused to

listen to him, but wanted to kill him.  So the King sent his men forth

under Major General Kalaimoku and the two host met a Kuamoo.  The battle

was long and fierce--men and women fighting side by side, as was the

custom--and when the day was done the rebels were flying in every

direction in hopeless panic, and idolatry and the tabu were dead in the

land!



The royalists marched gayly home to Kailua glorifying the new

dispensation.  "There is no power in the gods," said they; "they are a

vanity and a lie.  The army with idols was weak; the army without idols

was strong and victorious!"



The nation was without a religion.



The missionary ship arrived in safety shortly afterward, timed by

providential exactness to meet the emergency, and the Gospel was planted

as in a virgin soil.









CHAPTER LXXIII.



At noon, we hired a Kanaka to take us down to the ancient ruins at

Honaunan in his canoe--price two dollars--reasonable enough, for a sea

voyage of eight miles, counting both ways.



The native canoe is an irresponsible looking contrivance.  I cannot think

of anything to liken it to but a boy's sled runner hollowed out, and that

does not quite convey the correct idea.  It is about fifteen feet long,

high and pointed at both ends, is a foot and a half or two feet deep, and

so narrow that if you wedged a fat man into it you might not get him out

again.  It sits on top of the water like a duck, but it has an outrigger

and does not upset easily, if you keep still.  This outrigger is formed

of two long bent sticks like plow handles, which project from one side,

and to their outer ends is bound a curved beam composed of an extremely

light wood, which skims along the surface of the water and thus saves you

from an upset on that side, while the outrigger's weight is not so easily

lifted as to make an upset on the other side a thing to be greatly

feared.  Still, until one gets used to sitting perched upon this

knifeblade, he is apt to reason within himself that it would be more

comfortable if there were just an outrigger or so on the other side also.

I had the bow seat, and Billings sat amidships and faced the Kanaka, who

occupied the stern of the craft and did the paddling.  With the first

stroke the trim shell of a thing shot out from the shore like an arrow.

There was not much to see.  While we were on the shallow water of the

reef, it was pastime to look down into the limpid depths at the large

bunches of branching coral--the unique shrubbery of the sea.  We lost

that, though, when we got out into the dead blue water of the deep.  But

we had the picture of the surf, then, dashing angrily against the crag-

bound shore and sending a foaming spray high into the air.



There was interest in this beetling border, too, for it was honey-combed

with quaint caves and arches and tunnels, and had a rude semblance of the

dilapidated architecture of ruined keeps and castles rising out of the

restless sea.  When this novelty ceased to be a novelty, we turned our

eyes shoreward and gazed at the long mountain with its rich green forests

stretching up into the curtaining clouds, and at the specks of houses in

the rearward distance and the diminished schooner riding sleepily at

anchor.  And when these grew tiresome we dashed boldly into the midst of

a school of huge, beastly porpoises engaged at their eternal game of

arching over a wave and disappearing, and then doing it over again and

keeping it up--always circling over, in that way, like so many well-

submerged wheels.  But the porpoises wheeled themselves away, and then we

were thrown upon our own resources.  It did not take many minutes to

discover that the sun was blazing like a bonfire, and that the weather

was of a melting temperature.  It had a drowsing effect, too.

In one place we came upon a large company of naked natives, of both sexes

and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf-

bathing.  Each heathen would paddle three or four hundred yards out to

sea, (taking a short board with him), then face the shore and wait for a

particularly prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment he

would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board,

and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell!  It did not seem

that a lightning express train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting

speed.  I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of

it.  I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but

missed the connection myself.--The board struck the shore in three

quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about

the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me.  None but natives

ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly.



At the end of an hour, we had made the four miles, and landed on a level

point of land, upon which was a wide extent of old ruins, with many a

tall cocoanut tree growing among them.  Here was the ancient City of

Refuge--a vast inclosure, whose stone walls were twenty feet thick at the

base, and fifteen feet high; an oblong square, a thousand and forty feet

one way and a fraction under seven hundred the other.  Within this

inclosure, in early times, has been three rude temples; each two hundred

and ten feet long by one hundred wide, and thirteen high.



In those days, if a man killed another anywhere on the island the

relatives were privileged to take the murderer's life; and then a chase

for life and liberty began--the outlawed criminal flying through pathless

forests and over mountain and plain, with his hopes fixed upon the

protecting walls of the City of Refuge, and the avenger of blood

following hotly after him!



Sometimes the race was kept up to the very gates of the temple, and the

panting pair sped through long files of excited natives, who watched the

contest with flashing eye and dilated nostril, encouraging the hunted

refugee with sharp, inspiriting ejaculations, and sending up a ringing

shout of exultation when the saving gates closed upon him and the cheated

pursuer sank exhausted at the threshold.  But sometimes the flying

criminal fell under the hand of the avenger at the very door, when one

more brave stride, one more brief second of time would have brought his

feet upon the sacred ground and barred him against all harm.  Where did

these isolated pagans get this idea of a City of Refuge--this ancient

Oriental custom?



This old sanctuary was sacred to all--even to rebels in arms and invading

armies.  Once within its walls, and confession made to the priest and

absolution obtained, the wretch with a price upon his head could go forth

without fear and without danger--he was tabu, and to harm him was death.

The routed rebels in the lost battle for idolatry fled to this place to

claim sanctuary, and many were thus saved.



Close to the corner of the great inclosure is a round structure of stone,

some six or eight feet high, with a level top about ten or twelve in

diameter.  This was the place of execution.  A high palisade of cocoanut

piles shut out the cruel scenes from the vulgar multitude.  Here

criminals were killed, the flesh stripped from the bones and burned, and

the bones secreted in holes in the body of the structure.  If the man had

been guilty of a high crime, the entire corpse was burned.



The walls of the temple are a study.  The same food for speculation that

is offered the visitor to the Pyramids of Egypt he will find here--the

mystery of how they were constructed by a people unacquainted with

science and mechanics.  The natives have no invention of their own for

hoisting heavy weights, they had no beasts of burden, and they have never

even shown any knowledge of the properties of the lever.  Yet some of the

lava blocks quarried out, brought over rough, broken ground, and built

into this wall, six or seven feet from the ground, are of prodigious size

and would weigh tons.  How did they transport and how raise them?



Both the inner and outer surfaces of the walls present a smooth front and

are very creditable specimens of masonry.  The blocks are of all manner

of shapes and sizes, but yet are fitted together with the neatest

exactness.  The gradual narrowing of the wall from the base upward is

accurately preserved.



No cement was used, but the edifice is firm and compact and is capable of

resisting storm and decay for centuries.  Who built this temple, and how

was it built, and when, are mysteries that may never be unraveled.

Outside of these ancient walls lies a sort of coffin-shaped stone eleven

feet four inches long and three feet square at the small end (it would

weigh a few thousand pounds), which the high chief who held sway over

this district many centuries ago brought thither on his shoulder one day

to use as a lounge!  This circumstance is established by the most

reliable traditions.  He used to lie down on it, in his indolent way, and

keep an eye on his subjects at work for him and see that there was no

"soldiering" done.  And no doubt there was not any done to speak of,

because he was a man of that sort of build that incites to attention to

business on the part of an employee.



He was fourteen or fifteen feet high.  When he stretched himself at full

length on his lounge, his legs hung down over the end, and when he snored

he woke the dead.  These facts are all attested by irrefragable

tradition.



On the other side of the temple is a monstrous seven-ton rock, eleven

feet long, seven feet wide and three feet thick.  It is raised a foot or

a foot and a half above the ground, and rests upon half a dozen little

stony pedestals.  The same old fourteen-footer brought it down from the

mountain, merely for fun (he had his own notions about fun), and propped

it up as we find it now and as others may find it a century hence, for it

would take a score of horses to budge it from its position.  They say

that fifty or sixty years ago the proud Queen Kaahumanu used to fly to

this rock for safety, whenever she had been making trouble with her

fierce husband, and hide under it until his wrath was appeased.  But

these Kanakas will lie, and this statement is one of their ablest

efforts--for Kaahumanu was six feet high--she was bulky--she was built

like an ox--and she could no more have squeezed herself under that rock

than she could have passed between the cylinders of a sugar mill.  What

could she gain by it, even if she succeeded?  To be chased and abused by

a savage husband could not be otherwise than humiliating to her high

spirit, yet it could never make her feel so flat as an hour's repose

under that rock would.



We walked a mile over a raised macadamized road of uniform width; a road

paved with flat stones and exhibiting in its every detail a considerable

degree of engineering skill.  Some say that that wise old pagan,

Kamehameha I planned and built it, but others say it was built so long

before his time that the knowledge of who constructed it has passed out

of the traditions.  In either case, however, as the handiwork of an

untaught and degraded race it is a thing of pleasing interest.  The

stones are worn and smooth, and pushed apart in places, so that the road

has the exact appearance of those ancient paved highways leading out of

Rome which one sees in pictures.



The object of our tramp was to visit a great natural curiosity at the

base of the foothills--a congealed cascade of lava.  Some old forgotten

volcanic eruption sent its broad river of fire down the mountain side

here, and it poured down in a great torrent from an overhanging bluff

some fifty feet high to the ground below.  The flaming torrent cooled in

the winds from the sea, and remains there to-day, all seamed, and frothed

and rippled a petrified Niagara.  It is very picturesque, and withal so

natural that one might almost imagine it still flowed.  A smaller stream

trickled over the cliff and built up an isolated pyramid about thirty

feet high, which has the semblance of a mass of large gnarled and knotted

vines and roots and stems intricately twisted and woven together.



We passed in behind the cascade and the pyramid, and found the bluff

pierced by several cavernous tunnels, whose crooked courses we followed a

long distance.



Two of these winding tunnels stand as proof of Nature's mining abilities.

Their floors are level, they are seven feet wide, and their roofs are

gently arched.  Their height is not uniform, however.  We passed through

one a hundred feet long, which leads through a spur of the hill and opens

out well up in the sheer wall of a precipice whose foot rests in the

waves of the sea.  It is a commodious tunnel, except that there are

occasional places in it where one must stoop to pass under.  The roof is

lava, of course, and is thickly studded with little lava-pointed icicles

an inch long, which hardened as they dripped.  They project as closely

together as the iron teeth of a corn-sheller, and if one will stand up

straight and walk any distance there, he can get his hair combed free of

charge.









CHAPTER LXXIV.



We got back to the schooner in good time, and then sailed down to Kau,

where we disembarked and took final leave of the vessel.  Next day we

bought horses and bent our way over the summer-clad mountain-terraces,

toward the great volcano of Kilauea (Ke-low-way-ah).  We made nearly a

two days' journey of it, but that was on account of laziness.  Toward

sunset on the second day, we reached an elevation of some four thousand

feet above sea level, and as we picked our careful way through billowy

wastes of lava long generations ago stricken dead and cold in the climax

of its tossing fury, we began to come upon signs of the near presence of

the volcano--signs in the nature of ragged fissures that discharged jets

of sulphurous vapor into the air, hot from the molten ocean down in the

bowels of the mountain.



Shortly the crater came into view.  I have seen Vesuvius since, but it

was a mere toy, a child's volcano, a soup-kettle, compared to this.

Mount Vesuvius is a shapely cone thirty-six hundred feet high; its crater

an inverted cone only three hundred feet deep, and not more than a

thousand feet in diameter, if as much as that; its fires meagre, modest,

and docile.--But here was a vast, perpendicular, walled cellar, nine

hundred feet deep in some places, thirteen hundred in others, level-

floored, and ten miles in circumference!  Here was a yawning pit upon

whose floor the armies of Russia could camp, and have room to spare.



Perched upon the edge of the crater, at the opposite end from where we

stood, was a small look-out house--say three miles away.  It assisted us,

by comparison, to comprehend and appreciate the great depth of the basin

--it looked like a tiny martin-box clinging at the eaves of a cathedral.

After some little time spent in resting and looking and ciphering, we

hurried on to the hotel.



By the path it is half a mile from the Volcano House to the lookout-

house.  After a hearty supper we waited until it was thoroughly dark and

then started to the crater.  The first glance in that direction revealed

a scene of wild beauty.  There was a heavy fog over the crater and it was

splendidly illuminated by the glare from the fires below.  The

illumination was two miles wide and a mile high, perhaps; and if you

ever, on a dark night and at a distance beheld the light from thirty or

forty blocks of distant buildings all on fire at once, reflected strongly

against over-hanging clouds, you can form a fair idea of what this looked

like.



A colossal column of cloud towered to a great height in the air

immediately above the crater, and the outer swell of every one of its

vast folds was dyed with a rich crimson luster, which was subdued to a

pale rose tint in the depressions between.  It glowed like a muffled

torch and stretched upward to a dizzy height toward the zenith.  I

thought it just possible that its like had not been seen since the

children of Israel wandered on their long march through the desert so

many centuries ago over a path illuminated by the mysterious "pillar of

fire."  And I was sure that I now had a vivid conception of what the

majestic "pillar of fire" was like, which almost amounted to a

revelation.



Arrived at the little thatched lookout house, we rested our elbows on the

railing in front and looked abroad over the wide crater and down over the

sheer precipice at the seething fires beneath us.  The view was a

startling improvement on my daylight experience.  I turned to see the

effect on the balance of the company and found the reddest-faced set of

men I almost ever saw.  In the strong light every countenance glowed like

red-hot iron, every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded

rearward into dingy, shapeless obscurity!  The place below looked like

the infernal regions and these men like half-cooled devils just come up

on a furlough.



I turned my eyes upon the volcano again.  The "cellar" was tolerably well

lighted up.  For a mile and a half in front of us and half a mile on

either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated; beyond

these limits the mists hung down their gauzy curtains and cast a

deceptive gloom over all that made the twinkling fires in the remote

corners of the crater seem countless leagues removed--made them seem like

the camp-fires of a great army far away.  Here was room for the

imagination to work!  You could imagine those lights the width of a

continent away--and that hidden under the intervening darkness were

hills, and winding rivers, and weary wastes of plain and desert--and even

then the tremendous vista stretched on, and on, and on!--to the fires and

far beyond!  You could not compass it--it was the idea of eternity made

tangible--and the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye!



The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as

ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was

ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of

liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire!  It looked like a colossal railroad

map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight

sky.  Imagine it--imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled net-

work of angry fire!



Here and there were gleaming holes a hundred feet in diameter, broken in

the dark crust, and in them the melted lava--the color a dazzling white

just tinged with yellow--was boiling and surging furiously; and from

these holes branched numberless bright torrents in many directions, like

the spokes of a wheel, and kept a tolerably straight course for a while

and then swept round in huge rainbow curves, or made a long succession of

sharp worm-fence angles, which looked precisely like the fiercest jagged

lightning.  These streams met other streams, and they mingled with and

crossed and recrossed each other in every conceivable direction, like

skate tracks on a popular skating ground.  Sometimes streams twenty or

thirty feet wide flowed from the holes to some distance without dividing

--and through the opera-glasses we could see that they ran down small,

steep hills and were genuine cataracts of fire, white at their source,

but soon cooling and turning to the richest red, grained with alternate

lines of black and gold.  Every now and then masses of the dark crust

broke away and floated slowly down these streams like rafts down a river.

Occasionally the molten lava flowing under the superincumbent crust broke

through--split a dazzling streak, from five hundred to a thousand feet

long, like a sudden flash of lightning, and then acre after acre of the

cold lava parted into fragments, turned up edgewise like cakes of ice

when a great river breaks up, plunged downward and were swallowed in the

crimson cauldron.  Then the wide expanse of the "thaw" maintained a ruddy

glow for a while, but shortly cooled and became black and level again.

During a "thaw," every dismembered cake was marked by a glittering white

border which was superbly shaded inward by aurora borealis rays, which

were a flaming yellow where they joined the white border, and from thence

toward their points tapered into glowing crimson, then into a rich, pale

carmine, and finally into a faint blush that held its own a moment and

then dimmed and turned black.  Some of the streams preferred to mingle

together in a tangle of fantastic circles, and then they looked something

like the confusion of ropes one sees on a ship's deck when she has just

taken in sail and dropped anchor--provided one can imagine those ropes on

fire.



Through the glasses, the little fountains scattered about looked very

beautiful.  They boiled, and coughed, and spluttered, and discharged

sprays of stringy red fire--of about the consistency of mush, for

instance--from ten to fifteen feet into the air, along with a shower of

brilliant white sparks--a quaint and unnatural mingling of gouts of blood

and snow-flakes!



We had circles and serpents and streaks of lightning all twined and

wreathed and tied together, without a break throughout an area more than

a mile square (that amount of ground was covered, though it was not

strictly "square"), and it was with a feeling of placid exultation that

we reflected that many years had elapsed since any visitor had seen such

a splendid display--since any visitor had seen anything more than the now

snubbed and insignificant "North" and "South" lakes in action.  We had

been reading old files of Hawaiian newspapers and the "Record Book" at

the Volcano House, and were posted.



I could see the North Lake lying out on the black floor away off in the

outer edge of our panorama, and knitted to it by a web-work of lava

streams.  In its individual capacity it looked very little more

respectable than a schoolhouse on fire.  True, it was about nine hundred

feet long and two or three hundred wide, but then, under the present

circumstances, it necessarily appeared rather insignificant, and besides

it was so distant from us.



I forgot to say that the noise made by the bubbling lava is not great,

heard as we heard it from our lofty perch.  It makes three distinct

sounds--a rushing, a hissing, and a coughing or puffing sound; and if you

stand on the brink and close your eyes it is no trick at all to imagine

that you are sweeping down a river on a large low-pressure steamer, and

that you hear the hissing of the steam about her boilers, the puffing

from her escape-pipes and the churning rush of the water abaft her

wheels.  The smell of sulphur is strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner.



We left the lookout house at ten o'clock in a half cooked condition,

because of the heat from Pele's furnaces, and wrapping up in blankets,

for the night was cold, we returned to our Hotel.









CHAPTER LXXV.



The next night was appointed for a visit to the bottom of the crater, for

we desired to traverse its floor and see the "North Lake" (of fire) which

lay two miles away, toward the further wall.  After dark half a dozen of

us set out, with lanterns and native guides, and climbed down a crazy,

thousand-foot pathway in a crevice fractured in the crater wall, and

reached the bottom in safety.



The irruption of the previous evening had spent its force and the floor

looked black and cold; but when we ran out upon it we found it hot yet,

to the feet, and it was likewise riven with crevices which revealed the

underlying fires gleaming vindictively.  A neighboring cauldron was

threatening to overflow, and this added to the dubiousness of the

situation.  So the native guides refused to continue the venture, and

then every body deserted except a stranger named Marlette.  He said he

had been in the crater a dozen times in daylight and believed he could

find his way through it at night.  He thought that a run of three hundred

yards would carry us over the hottest part of the floor and leave us our

shoe-soles.  His pluck gave me back-bone.  We took one lantern and

instructed the guides to hang the other to the roof of the look-out house

to serve as a beacon for us in case we got lost, and then the party

started back up the precipice and Marlette and I made our run.

We skipped over the hot floor and over the red crevices with brisk

dispatch and reached the cold lava safe but with pretty warm feet.  Then

we took things leisurely and comfortably, jumping tolerably wide and

probably bottomless chasms, and threading our way through picturesque

lava upheavals with considerable confidence.  When we got fairly away

from the cauldrons of boiling fire, we seemed to be in a gloomy desert,

and a suffocatingly dark one, surrounded by dim walls that seemed to

tower to the sky.  The only cheerful objects were the glinting stars high

overhead.



By and by Marlette shouted "Stop!" I never stopped quicker in my life.

I asked what the matter was.  He said we were out of the path.  He said

we must not try to go on till we found it again, for we were surrounded

with beds of rotten lava through which we could easily break and plunge

down a thousand feet.  I thought eight hundred would answer for me, and

was about to say so when Marlette partly proved his statement by

accidentally crushing through and disappearing to his arm-pits.



He got out and we hunted for the path with the lantern.  He said there

was only one path and that it was but vaguely defined.  We could not find

it.  The lava surface was all alike in the lantern light.  But he was an

ingenious man.  He said it was not the lantern that had informed him that

we were out of the path, but his feet.  He had noticed a crisp grinding

of fine lava-needles under his feet, and some instinct reminded him that

in the path these were all worn away.  So he put the lantern behind him,

and began to search with his boots instead of his eyes.  It was good

sagacity.  The first time his foot touched a surface that did not grind

under it he announced that the trail was found again; and after that we

kept up a sharp listening for the rasping sound and it always warned us

in time.



It was a long tramp, but an exciting one.  We reached the North Lake

between ten and eleven o'clock, and sat down on a huge overhanging lava-

shelf, tired but satisfied.  The spectacle presented was worth coming

double the distance to see.  Under us, and stretching away before us, was

a heaving sea of molten fire of seemingly limitless extent.  The glare

from it was so blinding that it was some time before we could bear to

look upon it steadily.



It was like gazing at the sun at noon-day, except that the glare was not

quite so white.  At unequal distances all around the shores of the lake

were nearly white-hot chimneys or hollow drums of lava, four or five feet

high, and up through them were bursting gorgeous sprays of lava-gouts and

gem spangles, some white, some red and some golden--a ceaseless

bombardment, and one that fascinated the eye with its unapproachable

splendor.  The mere distant jets, sparkling up through an intervening

gossamer veil of vapor, seemed miles away; and the further the curving

ranks of fiery fountains receded, the more fairy-like and beautiful they

appeared.



Now and then the surging bosom of the lake under our noses would calm

down ominously and seem to be gathering strength for an enterprise; and

then all of a sudden a red dome of lava of the bulk of an ordinary

dwelling would heave itself aloft like an escaping balloon, then burst

asunder, and out of its heart would flit a pale-green film of vapor, and

float upward and vanish in the darkness--a released soul soaring homeward

from captivity with the damned, no doubt.  The crashing plunge of the

ruined dome into the lake again would send a world of seething billows

lashing against the shores and shaking the foundations of our perch.  By

and by, a loosened mass of the hanging shelf we sat on tumbled into the

lake, jarring the surroundings like an earthquake and delivering a

suggestion that may have been intended for a hint, and may not.  We did

not wait to see.



We got lost again on our way back, and were more than an hour hunting for

the path.  We were where we could see the beacon lantern at the look-out

house at the time, but thought it was a star and paid no attention to it.

We reached the hotel at two o'clock in the morning pretty well fagged

out.



Kilauea never overflows its vast crater, but bursts a passage for its

lava through the mountain side when relief is necessary, and then the

destruction is fearful.  About 1840 it rent its overburdened stomach and

sent a broad river of fire careering down to the sea, which swept away

forests, huts, plantations and every thing else that lay in its path.

The stream was five miles broad, in places, and two hundred feet deep,

and the distance it traveled was forty miles.  It tore up and bore away

acre-patches of land on its bosom like rafts--rocks, trees and all

intact.  At night the red glare was visible a hundred miles at sea; and

at a distance of forty miles fine print could be read at midnight.  The

atmosphere was poisoned with sulphurous vapors and choked with falling

ashes, pumice stones and cinders; countless columns of smoke rose up and

blended together in a tumbled canopy that hid the heavens and glowed with

a ruddy flush reflected from the fires below; here and there jets of lava

sprung hundreds of feet into the air and burst into rocket-sprays that

returned to earth in a crimson rain; and all the while the laboring

mountain shook with Nature's great palsy and voiced its distress in

moanings and the muffled booming of subterranean thunders.



Fishes were killed for twenty miles along the shore, where the lava

entered the sea.  The earthquakes caused some loss of human life, and a

prodigious tidal wave swept inland, carrying every thing before it and

drowning a number of natives.  The devastation consummated along the

route traversed by the river of lava was complete and incalculable.  Only

a Pompeii and a Herculaneum were needed at the foot of Kilauea to make

the story of the irruption immortal.









CHAPTER LXXVI.



We rode horseback all around the island of Hawaii (the crooked road

making the distance two hundred miles), and enjoyed the journey very

much.  We were more than a week making the trip, because our Kanaka

horses would not go by a house or a hut without stopping--whip and spur

could not alter their minds about it, and so we finally found that it

economized time to let them have their way.  Upon inquiry the mystery was

explained: the natives are such thorough-going gossips that they never

pass a house without stopping to swap news, and consequently their horses

learn to regard that sort of thing as an essential part of the whole duty

of man, and his salvation not to be compassed without it.  However, at a

former crisis of my life I had once taken an aristocratic young lady out

driving, behind a horse that had just retired from a long and honorable

career as the moving impulse of a milk wagon, and so this present

experience awoke a reminiscent sadness in me in place of the exasperation

more natural to the occasion.  I remembered how helpless I was that day,

and how humiliated; how ashamed I was of having intimated to the girl

that I had always owned the horse and was accustomed to grandeur; how

hard I tried to appear easy, and even vivacious, under suffering that was

consuming my vitals; how placidly and maliciously the girl smiled, and

kept on smiling, while my hot blushes baked themselves into a permanent

blood-pudding in my face; how the horse ambled from one side of the

street to the other and waited complacently before every third house two

minutes and a quarter while I belabored his back and reviled him in my

heart; how I tried to keep him from turning corners and failed; how I

moved heaven and earth to get him out of town, and did not succeed; how

he traversed the entire settlement and delivered imaginary milk at a

hundred and sixty-two different domiciles, and how he finally brought up

at a dairy depot and refused to budge further, thus rounding and

completing the revealment of what the plebeian service of his life had

been; how, in eloquent silence, I walked the girl home, and how, when I

took leave of her, her parting remark scorched my soul and appeared to

blister me all over: she said that my horse was a fine, capable animal,

and I must have taken great comfort in him in my time--but that if I

would take along some milk-tickets next time, and appear to deliver them

at the various halting places, it might expedite his movements a little.

There was a coolness between us after that.



In one place in the island of Hawaii, we saw a laced and ruffled cataract

of limpid water leaping from a sheer precipice fifteen hundred feet high;

but that sort of scenery finds its stanchest ally in the arithmetic

rather than in spectacular effect.  If one desires to be so stirred by a

poem of Nature wrought in the happily commingled graces of picturesque

rocks, glimpsed distances, foliage, color, shifting lights and shadows,

and failing water, that the tears almost come into his eyes so potent is

the charm exerted, he need not go away from America to enjoy such an

experience.  The Rainbow Fall, in Watkins Glen (N.Y.), on the Erie

railway, is an example.  It would recede into pitiable insignificance if

the callous tourist drew on arithmetic on it; but left to compete for the

honors simply on scenic grace and beauty--the grand, the august and the

sublime being barred the contest--it could challenge the old world and

the new to produce its peer.



In one locality, on our journey, we saw some horses that had been born

and reared on top of the mountains, above the range of running water, and

consequently they had never drank that fluid in their lives, but had been

always accustomed to quenching their thirst by eating dew-laden or

shower-wetted leaves.  And now it was destructively funny to see them

sniff suspiciously at a pail of water, and then put in their noses and

try to take a bite out of the fluid, as if it were a solid.  Finding it

liquid, they would snatch away their heads and fall to trembling,

snorting and showing other evidences of fright.  When they became

convinced at last that the water was friendly and harmless, they thrust

in their noses up to their eyes, brought out a mouthful of water, and

proceeded to chew it complacently.  We saw a man coax, kick and spur one

of them five or ten minutes before he could make it cross a running

stream.  It spread its nostrils, distended its eyes and trembled all

over, just as horses customarily do in the presence of a serpent--and for

aught I know it thought the crawling stream was a serpent.



In due course of time our journey came to an end at Kawaehae (usually

pronounced To-a-hi--and before we find fault with this elaborate

orthographical method of arriving at such an unostentatious result, let

us lop off the ugh from our word "though").  I made this horseback trip

on a mule.  I paid ten dollars for him at Kau (Kah-oo), added four to get

him shod, rode him two hundred miles, and then sold him for fifteen

dollars.  I mark the circumstance with a white stone (in the absence of

chalk--for I never saw a white stone that a body could mark anything

with, though out of respect for the ancients I have tried it often

enough); for up to that day and date it was the first strictly commercial

transaction I had ever entered into, and come out winner.  We returned to

Honolulu, and from thence sailed to the island of Maui, and spent several

weeks there very pleasantly.  I still remember, with a sense of indolent

luxury, a picnicing excursion up a romantic gorge there, called the Iao

Valley.  The trail lay along the edge of a brawling stream in the bottom

of the gorge--a shady route, for it was well roofed with the verdant

domes of forest trees.  Through openings in the foliage we glimpsed

picturesque scenery that revealed ceaseless changes and new charms with

every step of our progress.  Perpendicular walls from one to three

thousand feet high guarded the way, and were sumptuously plumed with

varied foliage, in places, and in places swathed in waving ferns.

Passing shreds of cloud trailed their shadows across these shining

fronts, mottling them with blots; billowy masses of white vapor hid the

turreted summits, and far above the vapor swelled a background of

gleaming green crags and cones that came and went, through the veiling

mists, like islands drifting in a fog; sometimes the cloudy curtain

descended till half the canon wall was hidden, then shredded gradually

away till only airy glimpses of the ferny front appeared through it--then

swept aloft and left it glorified in the sun again.  Now and then, as our

position changed, rocky bastions swung out from the wall, a mimic ruin of

castellated ramparts and crumbling towers clothed with mosses and hung

with garlands of swaying vines, and as we moved on they swung back again

and hid themselves once more in the foliage.  Presently a verdure-clad

needle of stone, a thousand feet high, stepped out from behind a corner,

and mounted guard over the mysteries of the valley.  It seemed to me that

if Captain Cook needed a monument, here was one ready made--therefore,

why not put up his sign here, and sell out the venerable cocoanut stump?



But the chief pride of Maui is her dead volcano of Haleakala--which

means, translated, "the house of the sun."  We climbed a thousand feet up

the side of this isolated colossus one afternoon; then camped, and next

day climbed the remaining nine thousand feet, and anchored on the summit,

where we built a fire and froze and roasted by turns, all night.  With

the first pallor of dawn we got up and saw things that were new to us.

Mounted on a commanding pinnacle, we watched Nature work her silent

wonders.  The sea was spread abroad on every hand, its tumbled surface

seeming only wrinkled and dimpled in the distance.  A broad valley below

appeared like an ample checker-board, its velvety green sugar plantations

alternating with dun squares of barrenness and groves of trees diminished

to mossy tufts.  Beyond the valley were mountains picturesquely grouped

together; but bear in mind, we fancied that we were looking up at these

things--not down.  We seemed to sit in the bottom of a symmetrical bowl

ten thousand feet deep, with the valley and the skirting sea lifted away

into the sky above us!  It was curious; and not only curious, but

aggravating; for it was having our trouble all for nothing, to climb ten

thousand feet toward heaven and then have to look up at our scenery.

However, we had to be content with it and make the best of it; for, all

we could do we could not coax our landscape down out of the clouds.

Formerly, when I had read an article in which Poe treated of this

singular fraud perpetrated upon the eye by isolated great altitudes,

I had looked upon the matter as an invention of his own fancy.



I have spoken of the outside view--but we had an inside one, too.  That

was the yawning dead crater, into which we now and then tumbled rocks,

half as large as a barrel, from our perch, and saw them go careering down

the almost perpendicular sides, bounding three hundred feet at a jump;

kicking up cast-clouds wherever they struck; diminishing to our view as

they sped farther into distance; growing invisible, finally, and only

betraying their course by faint little puffs of dust; and coming to a

halt at last in the bottom of the abyss, two thousand five hundred feet

down from where they started!  It was magnificent sport.  We wore

ourselves out at it.



The crater of Vesuvius, as I have before remarked, is a modest pit about

a thousand feet deep and three thousand in circumference; that of Kilauea

is somewhat deeper, and ten miles in circumference.  But what are either

of them compared to the vacant stomach of Haleakala?  I will not offer

any figures of my own, but give official ones--those of Commander Wilkes,

U.S.N., who surveyed it and testifies that it is twenty-seven miles in

circumference!  If it had a level bottom it would make a fine site for a

city like London.  It must have afforded a spectacle worth contemplating

in the old days when its furnaces gave full rein to their anger.



Presently vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high over the sea and

the valley; then they came in couples and groups; then in imposing

squadrons; gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves solidly

together, a thousand feet under us, and totally shut out land and ocean--

not a vestige of anything was left in view but just a little of the rim

of the crater, circling away from the pinnacle whereon we sat (for a

ghostly procession of wanderers from the filmy hosts without had drifted

through a chasm in the crater wall and filed round and round, and

gathered and sunk and blended together till the abyss was stored to the

brim with a fleecy fog).  Thus banked, motion ceased, and silence

reigned.  Clear to the horizon, league on league, the snowy floor

stretched without a break--not level, but in rounded folds, with shallow

creases between, and with here and there stately piles of vapory

architecture lifting themselves aloft out of the common plain--some near

at hand, some in the middle distances, and others relieving the monotony

of the remote solitudes.  There was little conversation, for the

impressive scene overawed speech.  I felt like the Last Man, neglected of

the judgment, and left pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a

vanished world.



While the hush yet brooded, the messengers of the coming resurrection

appeared in the East.  A growing warmth suffused the horizon, and soon

the sun emerged and looked out over the cloud-waste, flinging bars of

ruddy light across it, staining its folds and billow-caps with blushes,

purpling the shaded troughs between, and glorifying the massy vapor-

palaces and cathedrals with a wasteful splendor of all blendings and

combinations of rich coloring.



It was the sublimest spectacle I ever witnessed, and I think the memory

of it will remain with me always.









CHAPTER LXXVII.



I stumbled upon one curious character in the Island of Mani.  He became a

sore annoyance to me in the course of time.  My first glimpse of him was

in a sort of public room in the town of Lahaina.  He occupied a chair at

the opposite side of the apartment, and sat eyeing our party with

interest for some minutes, and listening as critically to what we were

saying as if he fancied we were talking to him and expecting him to

reply.  I thought it very sociable in a stranger.  Presently, in the

course of conversation, I made a statement bearing upon the subject under

discussion--and I made it with due modesty, for there was nothing

extraordinary about it, and it was only put forth in illustration of a

point at issue.  I had barely finished when this person spoke out with

rapid utterance and feverish anxiety:



"Oh, that was certainly remarkable, after a fashion, but you ought to

have seen my chimney--you ought to have seen my chimney, sir!  Smoke!

I wish I may hang if--Mr. Jones, you remember that chimney--you must

remember that chimney!  No, no--I recollect, now, you warn't living on

this side of the island then.  But I am telling you nothing but the

truth, and I wish I may never draw another breath if that chimney didn't

smoke so that the smoke actually got caked in it and I had to dig it out

with a pickaxe!  You may smile, gentlemen, but the High Sheriff's got a

hunk of it which I dug out before his eyes, and so it's perfectly easy

for you to go and examine for yourselves."



The interruption broke up the conversation, which had already begun to

lag, and we presently hired some natives and an out-rigger canoe or two,

and went out to overlook a grand surf-bathing contest.



Two weeks after this, while talking in a company, I looked up and

detected this same man boring through and through me with his intense

eye, and noted again his twitching muscles and his feverish anxiety to

speak.  The moment I paused, he said:



"Beg your pardon, sir, beg your pardon, but it can only be considered

remarkable when brought into strong outline by isolation.  Sir,

contrasted with a circumstance which occurred in my own experience, it

instantly becomes commonplace.  No, not that--for I will not speak so

discourteously of any experience in the career of a stranger and a

gentleman--but I am obliged to say that you could not, and you would not

ever again refer to this tree as a large one, if you could behold, as I

have, the great Yakmatack tree, in the island of Ounaska, sea of

Kamtchatka--a tree, sir, not one inch less than four hundred and fifteen

feet in solid diameter!--and I wish I may die in a minute if it isn't so!

Oh, you needn't look so questioning, gentlemen; here's old Cap Saltmarsh

can say whether I know what I'm talking about or not.  I showed him the

tree."



Captain Saltmarsh--"Come, now, cat your anchor, lad--you're heaving too

taut.  You promised to show me that stunner, and I walked more than

eleven mile with you through the cussedest jungle I ever see, a hunting

for it; but the tree you showed me finally warn't as big around as a beer

cask, and you know that your own self, Markiss."



"Hear the man talk!  Of course the tree was reduced that way, but didn't

I explain it?  Answer me, didn't I?  Didn't I say I wished you could have

seen it when I first saw it?  When you got up on your ear and called me

names, and said I had brought you eleven miles to look at a sapling,

didn't I explain to you that all the whale-ships in the North Seas had

been wooding off of it for more than twenty-seven years?  And did you

s'pose the tree could last for-ever, con-found it?  I don't see why you

want to keep back things that way, and try to injure a person that's

never done you any harm."



Somehow this man's presence made me uncomfortable, and I was glad when a

native arrived at that moment to say that Muckawow, the most

companionable and luxurious among the rude war-chiefs of the Islands,

desired us to come over and help him enjoy a missionary whom he had found

trespassing on his grounds.



I think it was about ten days afterward that, as I finished a statement I

was making for the instruction of a group of friends and acquaintances,

and which made no pretence of being extraordinary, a familiar voice

chimed instantly in on the heels of my last word, and said:



"But, my dear sir, there was nothing remarkable about that horse, or the

circumstance either--nothing in the world!  I mean no sort of offence

when I say it, sir, but you really do not know anything whatever about

speed.  Bless your heart, if you could only have seen my mare Margaretta;

there was a beast!--there was lightning for you!  Trot!  Trot is no name

for it--she flew!  How she could whirl a buggy along!  I started her out

once, sir--Colonel Bilgewater, you recollect that animal perfectly well--

I started her out about thirty or thirty-five yards ahead of the

awfullest storm I ever saw in my life, and it chased us upwards of

eighteen miles!  It did, by the everlasting hills!  And I'm telling you

nothing but the unvarnished truth when I say that not one single drop of

rain fell on me--not a single drop, sir!  And I swear to it!  But my dog

was a-swimming behind the wagon all the way!"



For a week or two I stayed mostly within doors, for I seemed to meet this

person everywhere, and he had become utterly hateful to me.  But one

evening I dropped in on Captain Perkins and his friends, and we had a

sociable time.  About ten o'clock I chanced to be talking about a

merchant friend of mine, and without really intending it, the remark

slipped out that he was a little mean and parsimonious about paying his

workmen.  Instantly, through the steam of a hot whiskey punch on the

opposite side of the room, a remembered voice shot--and for a moment I

trembled on the imminent verge of profanity:



"Oh, my dear sir, really you expose yourself when you parade that as a

surprising circumstance.  Bless your heart and hide, you are ignorant of

the very A B C of meanness! ignorant as the unborn babe! ignorant as

unborn twins!  You don't know anything about it!  It is pitiable to see

you, sir, a well-spoken and prepossessing stranger, making such an

enormous pow-wow here about a subject concerning which your ignorance is

perfectly humiliating!  Look me in the eye, if you please; look me in the

eye.  John James Godfrey was the son of poor but honest parents in the

State of Mississippi--boyhood friend of mine--bosom comrade in later

years.  Heaven rest his noble spirit, he is gone from us now.  John James

Godfrey was hired by the Hayblossom Mining Company in California to do

some blasting for them--the "Incorporated Company of Mean Men," the boys

used to call it.



"Well, one day he drilled a hole about four feet deep and put in an awful

blast of powder, and was standing over it ramming it down with an iron

crowbar about nine foot long, when the cussed thing struck a spark and

fired the powder, and scat! away John Godfrey whizzed like a skyrocket,

him and his crowbar!  Well, sir, he kept on going up in the air higher

and higher, till he didn't look any bigger than a boy--and he kept going

on up higher and higher, till he didn't look any bigger than a doll--and

he kept on going up higher and higher, till he didn't look any bigger

than a little small bee--and then he went out of sight!  Presently he

came in sight again, looking like a little small bee--and he came along

down further and further, till he looked as big as a doll again--and down

further and further, till he was as big as a boy again--and further and

further, till he was a full-sized man once more; and then him and his

crowbar came a wh-izzing down and lit right exactly in the same old

tracks and went to r-ramming down, and r-ramming down, and r-ramming down

again, just the same as if nothing had happened!  Now do you know, that

poor cuss warn't gone only sixteen minutes, and yet that Incorporated

Company of Mean Men DOCKED HIM FOR THE LOST TIME!"



I said I had the headache, and so excused myself and went home.  And on

my diary I entered "another night spoiled" by this offensive loafer.

And a fervent curse was set down with it to keep the item company.  And

the very next day I packed up, out of all patience, and left the Island.



Almost from the very beginning, I regarded that man as a liar.



The line of points represents an interval of years.  At the end of which

time the opinion hazarded in that last sentence came to be gratifyingly

and remarkably endorsed, and by wholly disinterested persons.  The man

Markiss was found one morning hanging to a beam of his own bedroom (the

doors and windows securely fastened on the inside), dead; and on his

breast was pinned a paper in his own handwriting begging his friends to

suspect no innocent person of having any thing to do with his death, for

that it was the work of his own hands entirely.  Yet the jury brought in

the astounding verdict that deceased came to his death "by the hands of

some person or persons unknown!"  They explained that the perfectly

undeviating consistency of Markiss's character for thirty years towered

aloft as colossal and indestructible testimony, that whatever statement

he chose to make was entitled to instant and unquestioning acceptance as

a lie.  And they furthermore stated their belief that he was not dead,

and instanced the strong circumstantial evidence of his own word that he

was dead--and beseeched the coroner to delay the funeral as long as

possible, which was done.  And so in the tropical climate of Lahaina the

coffin stood open for seven days, and then even the loyal jury gave him

up.  But they sat on him again, and changed their verdict to "suicide

induced by mental aberration"--because, said they, with penetration, "he

said he was dead, and he was dead; and would he have told the truth if he

had been in his right mind?  No, sir."









CHAPTER LXXVIII.



After half a year's luxurious vagrancy in the islands, I took shipping in

a sailing vessel, and regretfully returned to San Francisco--a voyage in

every way delightful, but without an incident: unless lying two long

weeks in a dead calm, eighteen hundred miles from the nearest land, may

rank as an incident.  Schools of whales grew so tame that day after day

they played about the ship among the porpoises and the sharks without the

least apparent fear of us, and we pelted them with empty bottles for lack

of better sport.  Twenty-four hours afterward these bottles would be

still lying on the glassy water under our noses, showing that the ship

had not moved out of her place in all that time.  The calm was absolutely

breathless, and the surface of the sea absolutely without a wrinkle.

For a whole day and part of a night we lay so close to another ship that

had drifted to our vicinity, that we carried on conversations with her

passengers, introduced each other by name, and became pretty intimately

acquainted with people we had never heard of before, and have never heard

of since.  This was the only vessel we saw during the whole lonely

voyage.  We had fifteen passengers, and to show how hard pressed they

were at last for occupation and amusement, I will mention that the

gentlemen gave a good part of their time every day, during the calm, to

trying to sit on an empty champagne bottle (lying on its side), and

thread a needle without touching their heels to the deck, or falling

over; and the ladies sat in the shade of the mainsail, and watched the

enterprise with absorbing interest.  We were at sea five Sundays; and

yet, but for the almanac, we never would have known but that all the

other days were Sundays too.



I was home again, in San Francisco, without means and without employment.

I tortured my brain for a saving scheme of some kind, and at last a

public lecture occurred to me!  I sat down and wrote one, in a fever of

hopeful anticipation.  I showed it to several friends, but they all shook

their heads.  They said nobody would come to hear me, and I would make a

humiliating failure of it.



They said that as I had never spoken in public, I would break down in the

delivery, anyhow.  I was disconsolate now.  But at last an editor slapped

me on the back and told me to "go ahead."  He said, "Take the largest

house in town, and charge a dollar a ticket."  The audacity of the

proposition was charming; it seemed fraught with practical worldly

wisdom, however.  The proprietor of the several theatres endorsed the

advice, and said I might have his handsome new opera-house at half price

--fifty dollars.  In sheer desperation I took it--on credit, for

sufficient reasons.  In three days I did a hundred and fifty dollars'

worth of printing and advertising, and was the most distressed and

frightened creature on the Pacific coast.  I could not sleep--who could,

under such circumstances?  For other people there was facetiousness in

the last line of my posters, but to me it was plaintive with a pang when

I wrote it:



           "Doors open at 7 1/2.  The trouble will begin at 8."



That line has done good service since.  Showmen have borrowed it

frequently.  I have even seen it appended to a newspaper advertisement

reminding school pupils in vacation what time next term would begin.  As

those three days of suspense dragged by, I grew more and more unhappy.

I had sold two hundred tickets among my personal friends, but I feared

they might not come.  My lecture, which had seemed "humorous" to me, at

first, grew steadily more and more dreary, till not a vestige of fun

seemed left, and I grieved that I could not bring a coffin on the stage

and turn the thing into a funeral.  I was so panic-stricken, at last,

that I went to three old friends, giants in stature, cordial by nature,

and stormy-voiced, and said:



"This thing is going to be a failure; the jokes in it are so dim that

nobody will ever see them; I would like to have you sit in the parquette,

and help me through."



They said they would.  Then I went to the wife of a popular citizen, and

said that if she was willing to do me a very great kindness, I would be

glad if she and her husband would sit prominently in the left-hand stage-

box, where the whole house could see them.  I explained that I should

need help, and would turn toward her and smile, as a signal, when I had

been delivered of an obscure joke--"and then," I added, "don't wait to

investigate, but respond!"



She promised.  Down the street I met a man I never had seen before.  He

had been drinking, and was beaming with smiles and good nature.  He said:



"My name's Sawyer.  You don't know me, but that don't matter.  I haven't

got a cent, but if you knew how bad I wanted to laugh, you'd give me a

ticket.  Come, now, what do you say?"



"Is your laugh hung on a hair-trigger?--that is, is it critical, or can

you get it off easy?"



My drawling infirmity of speech so affected him that he laughed a

specimen or two that struck me as being about the article I wanted, and I

gave him a ticket, and appointed him to sit in the second circle, in the

centre, and be responsible for that division of the house.  I gave him

minute instructions about how to detect indistinct jokes, and then went

away, and left him chuckling placidly over the novelty of the idea.



I ate nothing on the last of the three eventful days--I only suffered.

I had advertised that on this third day the box-office would be opened

for the sale of reserved seats.  I crept down to the theater at four in

the afternoon to see if any sales had been made.  The ticket seller was

gone, the box-office was locked up.  I had to swallow suddenly, or my

heart would have got out.  "No sales," I said to myself; "I might have

known it."  I thought of suicide, pretended illness, flight.  I thought

of these things in earnest, for I was very miserable and scared.  But of

course I had to drive them away, and prepare to meet my fate.  I could

not wait for half-past seven--I wanted to face the horror, and end it--

the feeling of many a man doomed to hang, no doubt.  I went down back

streets at six o'clock, and entered the theatre by the back door.

I stumbled my way in the dark among the ranks of canvas scenery, and

stood on the stage.  The house was gloomy and silent, and its emptiness

depressing.  I went into the dark among the scenes again, and for an hour

and a half gave myself up to the horrors, wholly unconscious of

everything else.  Then I heard a murmur; it rose higher and higher, and

ended in a crash, mingled with cheers.  It made my hair raise, it was so

close to me, and so loud.



There was a pause, and then another; presently came a third, and before I

well knew what I was about, I was in the middle of the stage, staring at

a sea of faces, bewildered by the fierce glare of the lights, and quaking

in every limb with a terror that seemed like to take my life away.  The

house was full, aisles and all!



The tummult in my heart and brain and legs continued a full minute before

I could gain any command over myself.  Then I recognized the charity and

the friendliness in the faces before me, and little by little my fright

melted away, and I began to talk Within three or four minutes I was

comfortable, and even content.  My three chief allies, with three

auxiliaries, were on hand, in the parquette, all sitting together, all

armed with bludgeons, and all ready to make an onslaught upon the

feeblest joke that might show its head.  And whenever a joke did fall,

their bludgeons came down and their faces seemed to split from ear to

ear.



Sawyer, whose hearty countenance was seen looming redly in the centre of

the second circle, took it up, and the house was carried handsomely.

Inferior jokes never fared so royally before.  Presently I delivered a

bit of serious matter with impressive unction (it was my pet), and the

audience listened with an absorbed hush that gratified me more than any

applause; and as I dropped the last word of the clause, I happened to

turn and catch Mrs.--'s intent and waiting eye; my conversation with her

flashed upon me, and in spite of all I could do I smiled.  She took it

for the signal, and promptly delivered a mellow laugh that touched off

the whole audience; and the explosion that followed was the triumph of

the evening.  I thought that that honest man Sawyer would choke himself;

and as for the bludgeons, they performed like pile-drivers.  But my poor

little morsel of pathos was ruined.  It was taken in good faith as an

intentional joke, and the prize one of the entertainment, and I wisely

let it go at that.



All the papers were kind in the morning; my appetite returned; I had a

abundance of money.  All's well that ends well.









CHAPTER LXXIX.



I launched out as a lecturer, now, with great boldness.  I had the field

all to myself, for public lectures were almost an unknown commodity in

the Pacific market.  They are not so rare, now, I suppose.  I took an old

personal friend along to play agent for me, and for two or three weeks we

roamed through Nevada and California and had a very cheerful time of it.

Two days before I lectured in Virginia City, two stagecoaches were robbed

within two miles of the town.  The daring act was committed just at dawn,

by six masked men, who sprang up alongside the coaches, presented

revolvers at the heads of the drivers and passengers, and commanded a

general dismount.  Everybody climbed down, and the robbers took their

watches and every cent they had.  Then they took gunpowder and blew up

the express specie boxes and got their contents.  The leader of the

robbers was a small, quick-spoken man, and the fame of his vigorous

manner and his intrepidity was in everybody's mouth when we arrived.



The night after instructing Virginia, I walked over the desolate "divide"

and down to Gold Hill, and lectured there.  The lecture done, I stopped

to talk with a friend, and did not start back till eleven.  The "divide"

was high, unoccupied ground, between the towns, the scene of twenty

midnight murders and a hundred robberies.  As we climbed up and stepped

out on this eminence, the Gold Hill lights dropped out of sight at our

backs, and the night closed down gloomy and dismal.  A sharp wind swept

the place, too, and chilled our perspiring bodies through.



"I tell you I don't like this place at night," said Mike the agent.



"Well, don't speak so loud," I said.  "You needn't remind anybody that we

are here."



Just then a dim figure approached me from the direction of Virginia--a

man, evidently.  He came straight at me, and I stepped aside to let him

pass; he stepped in the way and confronted me again.  Then I saw that he

had a mask on and was holding something in my face--I heard a click-click

and recognized a revolver in dim outline.  I pushed the barrel aside with

my hand and said:



"Don't!"



He ejaculated sharply:



"Your watch!  Your money!"



I said:



"You can have them with pleasure--but take the pistol away from my face,

please.  It makes me shiver."



"No remarks!  Hand out your money!"



"Certainly--I--"



"Put up your hands!  Don't you go for a weapon!  Put 'em up!  Higher!"



I held them above my head.



A pause.  Then:



"Are you going to hand out your money or not?"



I dropped my hands to my pockets and said:



Certainly!  I--"



"Put up your hands!  Do you want your head blown off?  Higher!"



I put them above my head again.



Another pause.



Are you going to hand out your money or not?  Ah-ah--again?  Put up your

hands!  By George, you want the head shot off you awful bad!"



"Well, friend, I'm trying my best to please you.  You tell me to give up

my money, and when I reach for it you tell me to put up my hands.  If you

would only--.  Oh, now--don't!  All six of you at me!  That other man

will get away while.--Now please take some of those revolvers out of my

face--do, if you please!  Every time one of them clicks, my liver comes

up into my throat!  If you have a mother--any of you--or if any of you

have ever had a mother--or a--grandmother--or a--"



"Cheese it!  Will you give up your money, or have we got to--.  There--

there--none of that!  Put up your hands!"



"Gentlemen--I know you are gentlemen by your--"



"Silence!  If you want to be facetious, young man, there are times and

places more fitting.  This is a serious business."



"You prick the marrow of my opinion.  The funerals I have attended in my

time were comedies compared to it.  Now I think--"



"Curse your palaver!  Your money!--your money!--your money!  Hold!--put

up your hands!"



"Gentlemen, listen to reason.  You see how I am situated--now don't put

those pistols so close--I smell the powder.



"You see how I am situated.  If I had four hands--so that I could hold up

two and--"



"Throttle him!  Gag him!  Kill him!"



"Gentlemen, don't!  Nobody's watching the other fellow.  Why don't some

of you--.  Ouch!  Take it away, please!



"Gentlemen, you see that I've got to hold up my hands; and so I can't take

out my money--but if you'll be so kind as to take it out for me, I will

do as much for you some--"



"Search him Beauregard--and stop his jaw with a bullet, quick, if he wags

it again.  Help Beauregard, Stonewall."



Then three of them, with the small, spry leader, adjourned to Mike and

fell to searching him.  I was so excited that my lawless fancy tortured

me to ask my two men all manner of facetious questions about their rebel

brother-generals of the South, but, considering the order they had

received, it was but common prudence to keep still.  When everything had

been taken from me,--watch, money, and a multitude of trifles of small

value,--I supposed I was free, and forthwith put my cold hands into my

empty pockets and began an inoffensive jig to warm my feet and stir up

some latent courage--but instantly all pistols were at my head, and the

order came again:



They stood Mike up alongside of me, with strict orders to keep his hands

above his head, too, and then the chief highwayman said:



"Beauregard, hide behind that boulder; Phil Sheridan, you hide behind

that other one; Stonewall Jackson, put yourself behind that sage-bush

there.  Keep your pistols bearing on these fellows, and if they take down

their hands within ten minutes, or move a single peg, let them have it!"



Then three disappeared in the gloom toward the several ambushes, and the

other three disappeared down the road toward Virginia.



It was depressingly still, and miserably cold.  Now this whole thing was

a practical joke, and the robbers were personal friends of ours in

disguise, and twenty more lay hidden within ten feet of us during the

whole operation, listening.  Mike knew all this, and was in the joke, but

I suspected nothing of it.  To me it was most uncomfortably genuine.

When we had stood there in the middle of the road five minutes, like a

couple of idiots, with our hands aloft, freezing to death by inches,

Mike's interest in the joke began to wane.  He said:



"The time's up, now, aint it?"



"No, you keep still.  Do you want to take any chances with these bloody

savages?"



Presently Mike said:



"Now the time's up, anyway.  I'm freezing."



"Well freeze.  Better freeze than carry your brains home in a basket.

Maybe the time is up, but how do we know?--got no watch to tell by.

I mean to give them good measure.  I calculate to stand here fifteen

minutes or die.  Don't you move."



So, without knowing it, I was making one joker very sick of his contract.

When we took our arms down at last, they were aching with cold and

fatigue, and when we went sneaking off, the dread I was in that the time

might not yet be up and that we would feel bullets in a moment, was not

sufficient to draw all my attention from the misery that racked my

stiffened body.



The joke of these highwayman friends of ours was mainly a joke upon

themselves; for they had waited for me on the cold hill-top two full

hours before I came, and there was very little fun in that; they were so

chilled that it took them a couple of weeks to get warm again.  Moreover,

I never had a thought that they would kill me to get money which it was

so perfectly easy to get without any such folly, and so they did not

really frighten me bad enough to make their enjoyment worth the trouble

they had taken.  I was only afraid that their weapons would go off

accidentally.  Their very numbers inspired me with confidence that no

blood would be intentionally spilled.  They were not smart; they ought to

have sent only one highwayman, with a double-barrelled shot gun, if they

desired to see the author of this volume climb a tree.



However, I suppose that in the long run I got the largest share of the

joke at last; and in a shape not foreseen by the highwaymen; for the

chilly exposure on the "divide" while I was in a perspiration gave me a

cold which developed itself into a troublesome disease and kept my hands

idle some three months, besides costing me quite a sum in doctor's bills.

Since then I play no practical jokes on people and generally lose my

temper when one is played upon me.



When I returned to San Francisco I projected a pleasure journey to Japan

and thence westward around the world; but a desire to see home again

changed my mind, and I took a berth in the steamship, bade good-bye to

the friendliest land and livest, heartiest community on our continent,

and came by the way of the Isthmus to New York--a trip that was not much

of a pic-nic excursion, for the cholera broke out among us on the passage

and we buried two or three bodies at sea every day.  I found home a

dreary place after my long absence; for half the children I had known

were now wearing whiskers or waterfalls, and few of the grown people I

had been acquainted with remained at their hearthstones prosperous and

happy--some of them had wandered to other scenes, some were in jail, and

the rest had been hanged.  These changes touched me deeply, and I went

away and joined the famous Quaker City European Excursion and carried my

tears to foreign lands.



Thus, after seven years of vicissitudes, ended a "pleasure trip" to the

silver mines of Nevada which had originally been intended to occupy only

three months.  However, I usually miss my calculations further than that.





MORAL.



If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to

it, he is in error.  The moral of it is this: If you are of any account,

stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are "no

account," go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you

want to or not.  Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to

be a nuisance to them--if the people you go among suffer by the

operation.









APPENDIX. A.



BRIEF SKETCH OF MORMON HISTORY.



Mormonism is only about forty years old, but its career has been full of

stir and adventure from the beginning, and is likely to remain so to the

end.  Its adherents have been hunted and hounded from one end of the

country to the other, and the result is that for years they have hated

all "Gentiles" indiscriminately and with all their might.  Joseph Smith,

the finder of the Book of Mormon and founder of the religion, was driven

from State to State with his mysterious copperplates and the miraculous

stones he read their inscriptions with.  Finally he instituted his

"church" in Ohio and Brigham Young joined it.  The neighbors began to

persecute, and apostasy commenced.  Brigham held to the faith and worked

hard.  He arrested desertion.  He did more--he added converts in the

midst of the trouble.  He rose in favor and importance with the brethren.

He was made one of the Twelve Apostles of the Church.  He shortly fought

his way to a higher post and a more powerful--President of the Twelve.

The neighbors rose up and drove the Mormons out of Ohio, and they settled

in Missouri.  Brigham went with them.  The Missourians drove them out and

they retreated to Nauvoo, Illinois.  They prospered there, and built a

temple which made some pretensions to architectural grace and achieved

some celebrity in a section of country where a brick court-house with a

tin dome and a cupola on it was contemplated with reverential awe.

But the Mormons were badgered and harried again by their neighbors.

All the proclamations Joseph Smith could issue denouncing polygamy and

repudiating it as utterly anti-Mormon were of no avail; the people of the

neighborhood, on both sides of the Mississippi, claimed that polygamy was

practised by the Mormons, and not only polygamy but a little of

everything that was bad.  Brigham returned from a mission to England,

where he had established a Mormon newspaper, and he brought back with him

several hundred converts to his preaching.  His influence among the

brethren augmented with every move he made.  Finally Nauvoo was invaded

by the Missouri and Illinois Gentiles, and Joseph Smith killed.  A Mormon

named Rigdon assumed the Presidency of the Mormon church and government,

in Smith's place, and even tried his hand at a prophecy or two.  But a

greater than he was at hand.  Brigham seized the advantage of the hour

and without other authority than superior brain and nerve and will,

hurled Rigdon from his high place and occupied it himself.  He did more.

He launched an elaborate curse at Rigdon and his disciples; and he

pronounced Rigdon's "prophecies" emanations from the devil, and ended by

"handing the false prophet over to the buffetings of Satan for a thousand

years"--probably the longest term ever inflicted in Illinois.  The people

recognized their master.  They straightway elected Brigham Young

President, by a prodigious majority, and have never faltered in their

devotion to him from that day to this.  Brigham had forecast--a quality

which no other prominent Mormon has probably ever possessed.

He recognized that it was better to move to the wilderness than be moved.

By his command the people gathered together their meagre effects, turned

their backs upon their homes, and their faces toward the wilderness, and

on a bitter night in February filed in sorrowful procession across the

frozen Mississippi, lighted on their way by the glare from their burning

temple, whose sacred furniture their own hands had fired!  They camped,

several days afterward, on the western verge of Iowa, and poverty, want,

hunger, cold, sickness, grief and persecution did their work, and many

succumbed and died--martyrs, fair and true, whatever else they might have

been.  Two years the remnant remained there, while Brigham and a small

party crossed the country and founded Great Salt Lake City, purposely

choosing a land which was outside the ownership and jurisdiction of the

hated American nation.  Note that.  This was in 1847.  Brigham moved his

people there and got them settled just in time to see disaster fall

again.  For the war closed and Mexico ceded Brigham's refuge to the

enemy--the United States!  In 1849 the Mormons organized a "free and

independent" government and erected the "State of Deseret," with Brigham

Young as its head.  But the very next year Congress deliberately snubbed

it and created the "Territory of Utah" out of the same accumulation of

mountains, sage-brush, alkali and general desolation,--but made Brigham

Governor of it.  Then for years the enormous migration across the plains

to California poured through the land of the Mormons and yet the church

remained staunch and true to its lord and master.  Neither hunger,

thirst, poverty, grief, hatred, contempt, nor persecution could drive the

Mormons from their faith or their allegiance; and even the thirst for

gold, which gleaned the flower of the youth and strength of many nations

was not able to entice them!  That was the final test.  An experiment

that could survive that was an experiment with some substance to it

somewhere.



Great Salt Lake City throve finely, and so did Utah.  One of the last

things which Brigham Young had done before leaving Iowa, was to appear in

the pulpit dressed to personate the worshipped and lamented prophet

Smith, and confer the prophetic succession, with all its dignities,

emoluments and authorities, upon "President Brigham Young!"  The people

accepted the pious fraud with the maddest enthusiasm, and Brigham's power

was sealed and secured for all time.  Within five years afterward he

openly added polygamy to the tenets of the church by authority of a

"revelation" which he pretended had been received nine years before by

Joseph Smith, albeit Joseph is amply on record as denouncing polygamy to

the day of his death.



Now was Brigham become a second Andrew Johnson in the small beginning and

steady progress of his official grandeur.  He had served successively as

a disciple in the ranks; home missionary; foreign missionary; editor and

publisher; Apostle; President of the Board of Apostles; President of all

Mormondom, civil and ecclesiastical; successor to the great Joseph by the

will of heaven; "prophet," "seer," "revelator."  There was but one

dignity higher which he could aspire to, and he reached out modestly and

took that--he proclaimed himself a God!



He claims that he is to have a heaven of his own hereafter, and that he

will be its God, and his wives and children its goddesses, princes and

princesses.  Into it all faithful Mormons will be admitted, with their

families, and will take rank and consequence according to the number of

their wives and children.  If a disciple dies before he has had time to

accumulate enough wives and children to enable him to be respectable in

the next world any friend can marry a few wives and raise a few children

for him after he is dead, and they are duly credited to his account and

his heavenly status advanced accordingly.



Let it be borne in mind that the majority of the Mormons have always been

ignorant, simple, of an inferior order of intellect, unacquainted with

the world and its ways; and let it be borne in mind that the wives of

these Mormons are necessarily after the same pattern and their children

likely to be fit representatives of such a conjunction; and then let it

be remembered that for forty years these creatures have been driven,

driven, driven, relentlessly!  and mobbed, beaten, and shot down; cursed,

despised, expatriated; banished to a remote desert, whither they

journeyed gaunt with famine and disease, disturbing the ancient solitudes

with their lamentations and marking the long way with graves of their

dead--and all because they were simply trying to live and worship God in

the way which they believed with all their hearts and souls to be the

true one.  Let all these things be borne in mind, and then it will not be

hard to account for the deathless hatred which the Mormons bear our

people and our government.



That hatred has "fed fat its ancient grudge" ever since Mormon Utah

developed into a self-supporting realm and the church waxed rich and

strong.  Brigham as Territorial Governor made it plain that Mormondom was

for the Mormons.  The United States tried to rectify all that by

appointing territorial officers from New England and other anti-Mormon

localities, but Brigham prepared to make their entrance into his

dominions difficult.  Three thousand United States troops had to go

across the plains and put these gentlemen in office.  And after they were

in office they were as helpless as so many stone images.  They made laws

which nobody minded and which could not be executed.  The federal judges

opened court in a land filled with crime and violence and sat as holiday

spectacles for insolent crowds to gape at--for there was nothing to try,

nothing to do nothing on the dockets!  And if a Gentile brought a suit,

the Mormon jury would do just as it pleased about bringing in a verdict,

and when the judgment of the court was rendered no Mormon cared for it

and no officer could execute it.  Our Presidents shipped one cargo of

officials after another to Utah, but the result was always the same--they

sat in a blight for awhile they fairly feasted on scowls and insults day

by day, they saw every attempt to do their official duties find its

reward in darker and darker looks, and in secret threats and warnings of

a more and more dismal nature--and at last they either succumbed and

became despised tools and toys of the Mormons, or got scared and

discomforted beyond all endurance and left the Territory.  If a brave

officer kept on courageously till his pluck was proven, some pliant

Buchanan or Pierce would remove him and appoint a stick in his place.

In 1857 General Harney came very near being appointed Governor of Utah.

And so it came very near being Harney governor and Cradlebaugh judge!--

two men who never had any idea of fear further than the sort of murky

comprehension of it which they were enabled to gather from the

dictionary.  Simply (if for nothing else) for the variety they would have

made in a rather monotonous history of Federal servility and

helplessness, it is a pity they were not fated to hold office together in

Utah.



Up to the date of our visit to Utah, such had been the Territorial

record.  The Territorial government established there had been a hopeless

failure, and Brigham Young was the only real power in the land.  He was

an absolute monarch--a monarch who defied our President--a monarch who

laughed at our armies when they camped about his capital--a monarch who

received without emotion the news that the august Congress of the United

States had enacted a solemn law against polygamy, and then went forth

calmly and married twenty-five or thirty more wives.









B.

THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE.



The persecutions which the Mormons suffered so long--and which they

consider they still suffer in not being allowed to govern themselves--

they have endeavored and are still endeavoring to repay.  The now almost

forgotten "Mountain Meadows massacre" was their work.  It was very famous

in its day.  The whole United States rang with its horrors.  A few items

will refresh the reader's memory.  A great emigrant train from Missouri

and Arkansas passed through Salt Lake City and a few disaffected Mormons

joined it for the sake of the strong protection it afforded for their

escape.  In that matter lay sufficient cause for hot retaliation by the

Mormon chiefs.  Besides, these one hundred and forty-five or one hundred

and fifty unsuspecting emigrants being in part from Arkansas, where a

noted Mormon missionary had lately been killed, and in part from

Missouri, a State remembered with execrations as a bitter persecutor of

the saints when they were few and poor and friendless, here were

substantial additional grounds for lack of love for these wayfarers.

And finally, this train was rich, very rich in cattle, horses, mules and

other property--and how could the Mormons consistently keep up their

coveted resemblance to the Israelitish tribes and not seize the "spoil"

of an enemy when the Lord had so manifestly "delivered it into their

hand?"



Wherefore, according to Mrs. C. V. Waite's entertaining book, "The Mormon

Prophet," it transpired that--



"A 'revelation' from Brigham Young, as Great Grand Archee or God, was

dispatched to President J. C. Haight, Bishop Higbee and J. D. Lee

(adopted son of Brigham), commanding them to raise all the forces they

could muster and trust, follow those cursed Gentiles (so read the

revelation), attack them disguised as Indians, and with the arrows of the

Almighty make a clean sweep of them, and leave none to tell the tale; and

if they needed any assistance they were commanded to hire the Indians as

their allies, promising them a share of the booty.  They were to be

neither slothful nor negligent in their duty, and to be punctual in

sending the teams back to him before winter set in, for this was the

mandate of Almighty God."



The command of the "revelation" was faithfully obeyed.  A large party of

Mormons, painted and tricked out as Indians, overtook the train of

emigrant wagons some three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, and

made an attack.  But the emigrants threw up earthworks, made fortresses

of their wagons and defended themselves gallantly and successfully for

five days!  Your Missouri or Arkansas gentleman is not much afraid of the

sort of scurvy apologies for "Indians" which the southern part of Utah

affords.  He would stand up and fight five hundred of them.



At the end of the five days the Mormons tried military strategy.  They

retired to the upper end of the "Meadows," resumed civilized apparel,

washed off their paint, and then, heavily armed, drove down in wagons to

the beleaguered emigrants, bearing a flag of truce!  When the emigrants

saw white men coming they threw down their guns and welcomed them with

cheer after cheer!  And, all unconscious of the poetry of it, no doubt,

they lifted a little child aloft, dressed in white, in answer to the flag

of truce!



The leaders of the timely white "deliverers" were President Haight and

Bishop John D. Lee, of the Mormon Church.  Mr. Cradlebaugh, who served a

term as a Federal Judge in Utah and afterward was sent to Congress from

Nevada, tells in a speech delivered in Congress how these leaders next

proceeded:



"They professed to be on good terms with the Indians, and represented

them as being very mad.  They also proposed to intercede and settle the

matter with the Indians.  After several hours parley they, having

(apparently) visited the Indians, gave the ultimatum of the savages;

which was, that the emigrants should march out of their camp, leaving

everything behind them, even their guns.  It was promised by the Mormon

bishops that they would bring a force and guard the emigrants back to the

settlements.  The terms were agreed to, the emigrants being desirous of

saving the lives of their families.  The Mormons retired, and

subsequently appeared with thirty or forty armed men.  The emigrants were

marched out, the women and children in front and the men behind, the

Mormon guard being in the rear.  When they had marched in this way about

a mile, at a given signal the slaughter commenced.  The men were almost

all shot down at the first fire from the guard.  Two only escaped, who

fled to the desert, and were followed one hundred and fifty miles before

they were overtaken and slaughtered.  The women and children ran on, two

or three hundred yards further, when they were overtaken and with the aid

of the Indians they were slaughtered.  Seventeen individuals only, of all

the emigrant party, were spared, and they were little children, the

eldest of them being only seven years old.  Thus, on the 10th day of

September, 1857, was consummated one of the most cruel, cowardly and

bloody murders known in our history."



The number of persons butchered by the Mormons on this occasion was one

hundred and twenty.



With unheard-of temerity Judge Cradlebaugh opened his court and proceeded

to make Mormondom answer for the massacre.  And what a spectacle it must

have been to see this grim veteran, solitary and alone in his pride and

his pluck, glowering down on his Mormon jury and Mormon auditory,

deriding them by turns, and by turns "breathing threatenings and

slaughter!"



An editorial in the Territorial Enterprise of that day says of him and of

the occasion:



"He spoke and acted with the fearlessness and resolution of a Jackson;

but the jury failed to indict, or even report on the charges, while

threats of violence were heard in every quarter, and an attack on the

U.S. troops intimated, if he persisted in his course.



"Finding that nothing could be done with the juries, they were discharged

with a scathing rebuke from the judge.  And then, sitting as a committing

magistrate, he commenced his task alone.  He examined witnesses, made

arrests in every quarter, and created a consternation in the camps of the

saints greater than any they had ever witnessed before, since Mormondom

was born.  At last accounts terrified elders and bishops were decamping

to save their necks; and developments of the most starling character were

being made, implicating the highest Church dignitaries in the many

murders and robberies committed upon the Gentiles during the past eight

years."



Had Harney been Governor, Cradlebaugh would have been supported in his

work, and the absolute proofs adduced by him of Mormon guilt in this

massacre and in a number of previous murders, would have conferred

gratuitous coffins upon certain citizens, together with occasion to use

them.  But Cumming was the Federal Governor, and he, under a curious

pretense of impartiality, sought to screen the Mormons from the demands

of justice.  On one occasion he even went so far as to publish his

protest against the use of the U.S. troops in aid of Cradlebaugh's

proceedings.



Mrs. C. V. Waite closes her interesting detail of the great massacre with

the following remark and accompanying summary of the testimony--and the

summary is concise, accurate and reliable:



"For the benefit of those who may still be disposed to doubt the guilt of

Young and his Mormons in this transaction, the testimony is here collated

and circumstances given which go not merely to implicate but to fasten

conviction upon them by 'confirmations strong as proofs of Holy Writ:'



"1.  The evidence of Mormons themselves, engaged in the affair, as shown

by the statements of Judge Cradlebaugh and Deputy U.S.  Marshall Rodgers.



"2.  The failure of Brigham Young to embody any account of it in his

Report as Superintendent of Indian Affairs.  Also his failure to make any

allusion to it whatever from the pulpit, until several years after the

occurrence



"3.  The flight to the mountains of men high in authority in the Mormon

Church and State, when this affair was brought to the ordeal of a

judicial investigation.



"4.  The failure of the Deseret News, the Church organ, and the only

paper then published in the Territory, to notice the massacre until

several months afterward, and then only to deny that Mormons were engaged

in it.



"5.  The testimony of the children saved from the massacre.



"6.  The children and the property of the emigrants found in possession

of the Mormons, and that possession traced back to the very day after the

massacre.



"7.  The statements of Indians in the neighborhood of the scene of the

massacre: these statements are shown, not only by Cradlebaugh and

Rodgers, but by a number of military officers, and by J. Forney, who was,

in 1859, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Territory.  To all

these were such statements freely and frequently made by the Indians.



"8.  The testimony of R. P. Campbell, Capt.  2d Dragoons, who was sent in

the Spring of 1859 to Santa Clara, to protect travelers on the road to

California and to inquire into Indian depredations."









C.

CONCERNING A FRIGHTFUL ASSASSINATION THAT WAS NEVER CONSUMMATED



If ever there was a harmless man, it is Conrad Wiegand, of Gold Hill,

Nevada.  If ever there was a gentle spirit that thought itself unfired

gunpowder and latent ruin, it is Conrad Wiegand.  If ever there was an

oyster that fancied itself a whale; or a jack-o'lantern, confined to a

swamp, that fancied itself a planet with a billion-mile orbit; or a

summer zephyr that deemed itself a hurricane, it is Conrad Wiegand.

Therefore, what wonder is it that when he says a thing, he thinks the

world listens; that when he does a thing the world stands still to look;

and that when he suffers, there is a convulsion of nature?  When I met

Conrad, he was "Superintendent of the Gold Hill Assay Office"--and he was

not only its Superintendent, but its entire force.  And he was a street

preacher, too, with a mongrel religion of his own invention, whereby he

expected to regenerate the universe.  This was years ago.  Here latterly

he has entered journalism; and his journalism is what it might be

expected to be: colossal to ear, but pigmy to the eye.  It is extravagant

grandiloquence confined to a newspaper about the size of a double letter

sheet.  He doubtless edits, sets the type, and prints his paper, all

alone; but he delights to speak of the concern as if it occupies a block

and employs a thousand men.



[Something less than two years ago, Conrad assailed several people

mercilessly in his little "People's Tribune," and got himself into

trouble.  Straightway he airs the affair in the "Territorial Enterprise,"

in a communication over his own signature, and I propose to reproduce it

here, in all its native simplicity and more than human candor.  Long as

it is, it is well worth reading, for it is the richest specimen of

journalistic literature the history of America can furnish, perhaps:]



From the Territorial Enterprise, Jan. 20, 1870.



SEEMING PLOT FOR ASSASSINATION MISCARRIED.



TO THE EDITOR OF THE ENTERPRISE: Months ago, when Mr. Sutro incidentally

exposed mining management on the Comstock, and among others roused me to

protest against its continuance, in great kindness you warned me that any

attempt by publications, by public meetings and by legislative action,

aimed at the correction of chronic mining evils in Storey County, must

entail upon me (a) business ruin, (b) the burden of all its costs, (c)

personal violence, and if my purpose were persisted in, then (d)

assassination, and after all nothing would be effected.



YOUR PROPHECY FULFILLING.

In large part at least your prophecies have been fulfilled, for (a)

assaying, which was well attended to in the Gold Hill Assay Office (of

which I am superintendent), in consequence of my publications, has been

taken elsewhere, so the President of one of the companies assures me.

With no reason assigned, other work has been taken away.  With but one or

two important exceptions, our assay business now consists simply of the

gleanings of the vicinity.  (b) Though my own personal donations to the

People's Tribune Association have already exceeded $1,500, outside of our

own numbers we have received (in money) less than $300 as contributions

and subscriptions for the journal.  (c) On Thursday last, on the main

street in Gold Hill, near noon, with neither warning nor cause assigned,

by a powerful blow I was felled to the ground, and while down I was

kicked by a man who it would seem had been led to believe that I had

spoken derogatorily of him.  By whom he was so induced to believe I am as

yet unable to say.  On Saturday last I was again assailed and beaten by a

man who first informed me why he did so, and who persisted in making his

assault even after the erroneous impression under which he also was at

first laboring had been clearly and repeatedly pointed out.  This same

man, after failing through intimidation to elicit from me the names of

our editorial contributors, against giving which he knew me to be

pledged, beat himself weary upon me with a raw hide, I not resisting, and

then pantingly threatened me with permanent disfiguring mayhem, if ever

again I should introduce his name into print, and who but a few minutes

before his attack upon me assured me that the only reason I was

"permitted" to reach home alive on Wednesday evening last (at which time

the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE was issued) was, that he deems me only half-witted,

and be it remembered the very next morning I was knocked down and kicked

by a man who seemed to be prepared for flight.

[He sees doom impending:]



WHEN WILL THE CIRCLE JOIN?

How long before the whole of your prophecy will be fulfilled I cannot

say, but under the shadow of so much fulfillment in so short a time, and

with such threats from a man who is one of the most prominent exponents

of the San Francisco mining-ring staring me and this whole community

defiantly in the face and pointing to a completion of your augury, do you

blame me for feeling that this communication is the last I shall ever

write for the Press, especially when a sense alike of personal self-

respect, of duty to this money-oppressed and fear-ridden community, and

of American fealty to the spirit of true Liberty all command me, and each

more loudly than love of life itself, to declare the name of that

prominent man to be JOHN B. WINTERS, President of the Yellow Jacket

Company, a political aspirant and a military General?  The name of his

partially duped accomplice and abettor in this last marvelous assault, is

no other than PHILIP LYNCH, Editor and Proprietor of the Gold Hill News.



Despite the insult and wrong heaped upon me by John B. Winters, on

Saturday afternoon, only a glimpse of which I shall be able to afford

your readers, so much do I deplore clinching (by publicity) a serious

mistake of any one, man or woman, committed under natural and not self-

wrought passion, in view of his great apparent excitement at the time and

in view of the almost perfect privacy of the assault, I am far from sure

that I should not have given him space for repentance before exposing

him, were it not that he himself has so far exposed the matter as to make

it the common talk of the town that he has horsewhipped me.  That fact

having been made public, all the facts in connection need to be also, or

silence on my part would seem more than singular, and with many would be

proof either that I was conscious of some unworthy aim in publishing the

article, or else that my "non-combatant" principles are but a convenient

cloak alike of physical and moral cowardice.  I therefore shall try to

present a graphic but truthful picture of this whole affair, but shall

forbear all comments, presuming that the editors of our own journal, if

others do not, will speak freely and fittingly upon this subject in our

next number, whether I shall then be dead or living, for my death will

not stop, though it may suspend, the publication of the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE.

[The "non-combatant" sticks to principle, but takes along a friend or two

of a conveniently different stripe:]



THE TRAP SET.

On Saturday morning John B. Winters sent verbal word to the Gold Hill

Assay Office that he desired to see me at the Yellow Jacket office.

Though such a request struck me as decidedly cool in view of his own

recent discourtesies to me there alike as a publisher and as a

stockholder in the Yellow Jacket mine, and though it seemed to me more

like a summons than the courteous request by one gentleman to another for

a favor, hoping that some conference with Sharon looking to the

betterment of mining matters in Nevada might arise from it, I felt

strongly inclined to overlook what possibly was simply an oversight in

courtesy.  But as then it had only been two days since I had been bruised

and beaten under a hasty and false apprehension of facts, my caution was

somewhat aroused.  Moreover I remembered sensitively his contemptuousness

of manner to me at my last interview in his office.  I therefore felt it

needful, if I went at all, to go accompanied by a friend whom he would

not dare to treat with incivility, and whose presence with me might

secure exemption from insult.  Accordingly I asked a neighbor to

accompany me.



THE TRAP ALMOST DETECTED.

Although I was not then aware of this fact, it would seem that previous

to my request this same neighbor had heard Dr. Zabriskie state publicly

in a saloon, that Mr. Winters had told him he had decided either to kill

or to horsewhip me, but had not finally decided on which.  My neighbor,

therefore, felt unwilling to go down with me until he had first called on

Mr. Winters alone.  He therefore paid him a visit.  From that interview

he assured me that he gathered the impression that he did not believe I

would have any difficulty with Mr. Winters, and that he (Winters) would

call on me at four o'clock in my own office.



MY OWN PRECAUTIONS.

As Sheriff Cummings was in Gold Hill that afternoon, and as I desired to

converse with him about the previous assault, I invited him to my office,

and he came.  Although a half hour had passed beyond four o'clock, Mr.

Winters had not called, and we both of us began preparing to go home.

Just then, Philip Lynch, Publisher of the Gold Hill News, came in and

said, blandly and cheerily, as if bringing good news:



"Hello, John B. Winters wants to see you."



I replied, "Indeed!  Why he sent me word that he would call on me here

this afternoon at four o'clock!"



"O, well, it don't do to be too ceremonious just now, he's in my office,

and that will do as well--come on in, Winters wants to consult with you

alone.  He's got something to say to you."



Though slightly uneasy at this change of programme, yet believing that in

an editor's house I ought to be safe, and anyhow that I would be within

hail of the street, I hurriedly, and but partially whispered my dim

apprehensions to Mr. Cummings, and asked him if he would not keep near

enough to hear my voice in case I should call.  He consented to do so

while waiting for some other parties, and to come in if he heard my voice

or thought I had need of protection.



On reaching the editorial part of the News office, which viewed from the

street is dark, I did not see Mr. Winters, and again my misgivings arose.

Had I paused long enough to consider the case, I should have invited

Sheriff Cummings in, but as Lynch went down stairs, he said: "This way,

Wiegand--it's best to be private," or some such remark.



[I do not desire to strain the reader's fancy, hurtfully, and yet it

would be a favor to me if he would try to fancy this lamb in battle, or

the duelling ground or at the head of a vigilance committee--M.  T.:]



I followed, and without Mr. Cummings, and without arms, which I never do

or will carry, unless as a soldier in war, or unless I should yet come to

feel I must fight a duel, or to join and aid in the ranks of a necessary

Vigilance Committee.  But by following I made a fatal mistake.  Following

was entering a trap, and whatever animal suffers itself to be caught

should expect the common fate of a caged rat, as I fear events to come

will prove.



Traps commonly are not set for benevolence.

[His body-guard is shut out:]



THE TRAP INSIDE.

I followed Lynch down stairs.  At their foot a door to the left opened

into a small room.  From that room another door opened into yet another

room, and once entered I found myself inveigled into what many will ever

henceforth regard as a private subterranean Gold Hill den, admirably

adapted in proper hands to the purposes of murder, raw or disguised, for

from it, with both or even one door closed, when too late, I saw that I

could not be heard by Sheriff Cummings, and from it, BY VIOLENCE AND BY

FORCE, I was prevented from making a peaceable exit, when I thought I saw

the studious object of this "consultation" was no other than to compass

my killing, in the presence of Philip Lynch as a witness, as soon as by

insult a proverbially excitable man should be exasperated to the point of

assailing Mr. Winters, so that Mr. Lynch, by his conscience and by his

well known tenderness of heart toward the rich and potent would be

compelled to testify that he saw Gen. John B. Winters kill Conrad Wiegand

in "self-defence."  But I am going too fast.



OUR HOST.

Mr. Lynch was present during the most of the time (say a little short of

an hour), but three times he left the room.  His testimony, therefore,

would be available only as to the bulk of what transpired.  On entering

this carpeted den I was invited to a seat near one corner of the room.

Mr. Lynch took a seat near the window.  J. B. Winters sat (at first) near

the door, and began his remarks essentially as follows:



"I have come here to exact of you a retraction, in black and white, of

those damnably false charges which you have preferred against me in that-

--infamous lying sheet of yours, and you must declare yourself their

author, that you published them knowing them to be false, and that your

motives were malicious."



"Hold, Mr. Winters.  Your language is insulting and your demand an

enormity.  I trust I was not invited here either to be insulted or

coerced.  I supposed myself here by invitation of Mr. Lynch, at your

request."



"Nor did I come here to insult you.  I have already told you that I am

here for a very different purpose."



"Yet your language has been offensive, and even now shows strong

excitement.  If insult is repeated I shall either leave the room or call

in Sheriff Cummings, whom I just left standing and waiting for me outside

the door."



"No, you won't, sir.  You may just as well understand it at once as not.

Here you are my man, and I'll tell you why!  Months ago you put your

property out of your hands, boasting that you did so to escape losing it

on prosecution for libel."



"It is true that I did convert all my immovable property into personal

property, such as I could trust safely to others, and chiefly to escape

ruin through possible libel suits."



"Very good, sir.  Having placed yourself beyond the pale of the law, may

God help your soul if you DON'T make precisely such a retraction as I

have demanded.  I've got you now, and by--before you can get out of this

room you've got to both write and sign precisely the retraction I have

demanded, and before you go, anyhow--you---low-lived--lying---, I'll

teach you what personal responsibility is outside of the law; and, by--,

Sheriff Cummings and all the friends you've got in the world besides,

can't save you, you---, etc.!  No, sir.  I'm alone now, and I'm prepared

to be shot down just here and now rather than be villified by you as I

have been, and suffer you to escape me after publishing those charges,

not only here where I am known and universally respected, but where I am

not personally known and may be injured."



I confess this speech, with its terrible and but too plainly implied

threat of killing me if I did not sign the paper he demanded, terrified

me, especially as I saw he was working himself up to the highest possible

pitch of passion, and instinct told me that any reply other than one of

seeming concession to his demands would only be fuel to a raging fire,

so I replied:



"Well, if I've got to sign--," and then I paused some time.  Resuming,

I said, "But, Mr. Winters, you are greatly excited.  Besides, I see you

are laboring under a total misapprehension.  It is your duty not to

inflame but to calm yourself.  I am prepared to show you, if you will

only point out the article that you allude to, that you regard as

'charges' what no calm and logical mind has any right to regard as such.

Show me the charges, and I will try, at all events; and if it becomes

plain that no charges have been preferred, then plainly there can be

nothing to retract, and no one could rightly urge you to demand a

retraction.  You should beware of making so serious a mistake, for

however honest a man may be, every one is liable to misapprehend.

Besides you assume that I am the author of some certain article which you

have not pointed out.  It is hasty to do so."



He then pointed to some numbered paragraphs in a TRIBUNE article, headed

"What's the Matter with Yellow Jacket?" saying "That's what I refer to."



To gain time for general reflection and resolution, I took up the paper

and looked it over for awhile, he remaining silent, and as I hoped,

cooling.  I then resumed saying, "As I supposed.  I do not admit having

written that article, nor have you any right to assume so important a

point, and then base important action upon your assumption.  You might

deeply regret it afterwards.  In my published Address to the People, I

notified the world that no information as to the authorship of any

article would be given without the consent of the writer.  I therefore

cannot honorably tell you who wrote that article, nor can you exact it."



"If you are not the author, then I do demand to know who is?"



"I must decline to say."



"Then, by--, I brand you as its author, and shall treat you accordingly."



"Passing that point, the most important misapprehension which I notice

is, that you regard them as 'charges' at all, when their context, both at

their beginning and end, show they are not.  These words introduce them:

'Such an investigation [just before indicated], we think MIGHT result in

showing some of the following points.' Then follow eleven specifications,

and the succeeding paragraph shows that the suggested investigation

'might EXONERATE those who are generally believed guilty.' You see,

therefore, the context proves they are not preferred as charges, and this

you seem to have overlooked."



While making those comments, Mr. Winters frequently interrupted me in

such a way as to convince me that he was resolved not to consider

candidly the thoughts contained in my words.  He insisted upon it that

they were charges, and "By--," he would make me take them back as

charges, and he referred the question to Philip Lynch, to whom I then

appealed as a literary man, as a logician, and as an editor, calling his

attention especially to the introductory paragraph just before quoted.

He replied, "if they are not charges, they certainly are insinuations,"

whereupon Mr. Winters renewed his demands for retraction precisely such

as he had before named, except that he would allow me to state who did

write the article if I did not myself, and this time shaking his fist in

my face with more cursings and epithets.



When he threatened me with his clenched fist, instinctively I tried to

rise from my chair, but Winters then forcibly thrust me down, as he did

every other time (at least seven or eight), when under similar imminent

danger of bruising by his fist (or for aught I could know worse than that

after the first stunning blow), which he could easily and safely to

himself have dealt me so long as he kept me down and stood over me.



This fact it was, which more than anything else, convinced me that by

plan and plot I was purposely made powerless in Mr. Winters' hands, and

that he did not mean to allow me that advantage of being afoot, which he

possessed.  Moreover, I then became convinced, that Philip Lynch (and for

what reason I wondered) would do absolutely nothing to protect me in his

own house.  I realized then the situation thoroughly.  I had found it

equally vain to protest or argue, and I would make no unmanly appeal for

pity, still less apologize.  Yet my life had been by the plainest

possible implication threatened.  I was a weak man.  I was unarmed.  I

was helplessly down, and Winters was afoot and probably armed.  Lynch was

the only "witness."  The statements demanded, if given and not explained,

would utterly sink me in my own self-respect, in my family's eyes, and in

the eyes of the community.  On the other hand, should I give the author's

name how could I ever expect that confidence of the People which I should

no longer deserve, and how much dearer to me and to my family was my life

than the life of the real author to his friends.  Yet life seemed dear

and each minute that remained seemed precious if not solemn.  I sincerely

trust that neither you nor any of your readers, and especially none with

families, may ever be placed in such seeming direct proximity to death

while obliged to decide the one question I was compelled to, viz.: What

should I do--I, a man of family, and not as Mr. Winters is, "alone."

[The reader is requested not to skip the following.--M.  T.:]



STRATEGY AND MESMERISM.

To gain time for further reflection, and hoping that by a seeming

acquiescence I might regain my personal liberty, at least till I could

give an alarm, or take advantage of some momentary inadvertence of

Winters, and then without a cowardly flight escape, I resolved to write a

certain kind of retraction, but previously had inwardly decided



First.--That I would studiously avoid every action which might be

construed into the drawing of a weapon, even by a self-infuriated man, no

matter what amount of insult might be heaped upon me, for it seemed to me

that this great excess of compound profanity, foulness and epithet must

be more than a mere indulgence, and therefore must have some object.

"Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird."  Therefore,

as before without thought, I thereafter by intent kept my hands away from

my pockets, and generally in sight and spread upon my knees.



Second.--I resolved to make no motion with my arms or hands which could

possibly be construed into aggression.



Third.--I resolved completely to govern my outward manner and suppress

indignation.  To do this, I must govern my spirit.  To do that, by force

of imagination I was obliged like actors on the boards to resolve myself

into an unnatural mental state and see all things through the eyes of an

assumed character.



Fourth.--I resolved to try on Winters, silently, and unconsciously to

himself a mesmeric power which I possess over certain kinds of people,

and which at times I have found to work even in the dark over the lower

animals.



Does any one smile at these last counts?  God save you from ever being

obliged to beat in a game of chess, whose stake is your life, you having

but four poor pawns and pieces and your adversary with his full force

unshorn.  But if you are, provided you have any strength with breadth of

will, do not despair.  Though mesmeric power may not save you, it may

help you; try it at all events.  In this instance I was conscious of

power coming into me, and by a law of nature, I know Winters was

correspondingly weakened.  If I could have gained more time I am sure he

would not even have struck me.



It takes time both to form such resolutions and to recite them.  That

time, however, I gained while thinking of my retraction, which I first

wrote in pencil, altering it from time to time till I got it to suit me,

my aim being to make it look like a concession to demands, while in fact

it should tersely speak the truth into Mr. Winters' mind.  When it was

finished, I copied it in ink, and if correctly copied from my first draft

it should read as follows.  In copying I do not think I made any material

change.



COPY.

To Philip Lynch, Editor of the Gold Hill News: I learn that Gen. John B.

Winters believes the following (pasted on) clipping from the PEOPLE'S

TRIBUNE of January to contain distinct charges of mine against him

personally, and that as such he desires me to retract them unqualifiedly.



In compliance with his request, permit me to say that, although Mr.

Winters and I see this matter differently, in view of his strong feelings

in the premises, I hereby declare that I do not know those "charges" (if

such they are) to be true, and I hope that a critical examination would

altogether disprove them.

                              CONRAD WIEGAND.

                         Gold Hill, January 15, 1870.





I then read what I had written and handed it to Mr. Lynch, whereupon Mr.

Winters said:



"That's not satisfactory, and it won't do;" and then addressing himself

to Mr. Lynch, he further said: "How does it strike you?"



"Well, I confess I don't see that it retracts anything."



"Nor do I," said Winters; "in fact, I regard it as adding insult to

injury.  Mr. Wiegand you've got to do better than that.  You are not the

man who can pull wool over my eyes."



"That, sir, is the only retraction I can write."



"No it isn't, sir, and if you so much as say so again you do it at your

peril, for I'll thrash you to within an inch of your life, and, by--,

sir, I don't pledge myself to spare you even that inch either.  I want

you to understand I have asked you for a very different paper, and that

paper you've got to sign."



"Mr. Winters, I assure you that I do not wish to irritate you, but, at

the same time, it is utterly impossible for me to write any other paper

than that which I have written.  If you are resolved to compel me to sign

something, Philip Lynch's hand must write at your dictation, and if, when

written, I can sign it I will do so, but such a document as you say you

must have from me, I never can sign.  I mean what I say."



"Well, sir, what's to be done must be done quickly, for I've been here

long enough already.  I'll put the thing in another shape (and then

pointing to the paper); don't you know those charges to be false?"



"I do not."



"Do you know them to be true?"



"Of my own personal knowledge I do not."



"Why then did you print them?"



"Because rightly considered in their connection they are not charges, but

pertinent and useful suggestions in answer to the queries of a

correspondent who stated facts which are inexplicable."



"Don't you know that I know they are false?"



"If you do, the proper course is simply to deny them and court an

investigation."



"And do YOU claim the right to make ME come out and deny anything you may

choose to write and print?"



To that question I think I made no reply, and he then further said:



"Come, now, we've talked about the matter long enough.  I want your final

answer--did you write that article or not?"



"I cannot in honor tell you who wrote it."



"Did you not see it before it was printed?"



"Most certainly, sir."



"And did you deem it a fit thing to publish?"



"Most assuredly, sir, or I would never have consented to its appearance.

Of its authorship I can say nothing whatever, but for its publication I

assume full, sole and personal responsibility."



"And do you then retract it or not?"



"Mr. Winters, if my refusal to sign such a paper as you have demanded

must entail upon me all that your language in this room fairly implies,

then I ask a few minutes for prayer."



"Prayer!---you, this is not your hour for prayer--your time to pray was

when you were writing those--lying charges.  Will you sign or not?"



"You already have my answer."



"What!  do you still refuse?"



"I do, sir."



"Take that, then," and to my amazement and inexpressible relief he drew

only a rawhide instead of what I expected--a bludgeon or pistol.  With

it, as he spoke, he struck at my left ear downwards, as if to tear it

off, and afterwards on the side of the head.  As he moved away to get a

better chance for a more effective shot, for the first time I gained a

chance under peril to rise, and I did so pitying him from the very bottom

of my soul, to think that one so naturally capable of true dignity, power

and nobility could, by the temptations of this State, and by unfortunate

associations and aspirations, be so deeply debased as to find in such

brutality anything which he could call satisfaction--but the great hope

for us all is in progress and growth, and John B.  Winters, I trust, will

yet be able to comprehend my feelings.



He continued to beat me with all his great force, until absolutely weary,

exhausted and panting for breath.  I still adhered to my purpose of non-

aggressive defence, and made no other use of my arms than to defend my

head and face from further disfigurement.  The mere pain arising from the

blows he inflicted upon my person was of course transient, and my

clothing to some extent deadened its severity, as it now hides all

remaining traces.



When I supposed he was through, taking the butt end of his weapon and

shaking it in my face, he warned me, if I correctly understood him, of

more yet to come, and furthermore said, if ever I again dared introduce

his name to print, in either my own or any other public journal, he would

cut off my left ear (and I do not think he was jesting) and send me home

to my family a visibly mutilated man, to be a standing warning to all

low-lived puppies who seek to blackmail gentlemen and to injure their

good names.  And when he did so operate, he informed me that his

implement would not be a whip but a knife.



When he had said this, unaccompanied by Mr. Lynch, as I remember it, he

left the room, for I sat down by Mr. Lynch, exclaiming: "The man is mad--

he is utterly mad--this step is his ruin--it is a mistake--it would be

ungenerous in me, despite of all the ill usage I have here received, to

expose him, at least until he has had an opportunity to reflect upon the

matter.  I shall be in no haste."



"Winters is very mad just now," replied Mr. Lynch, "but when he is

himself he is one of the finest men I ever met.  In fact, he told me the

reason he did not meet you upstairs was to spare you the humiliation of a

beating in the sight of others."



I submit that that unguarded remark of Philip Lynch convicts him of

having been privy in advance to Mr. Winters' intentions whatever they may

have been, or at least to his meaning to make an assault upon me, but I

leave to others to determine how much censure an editor deserves for

inveigling a weak, non-combatant man, also a publisher, to a pen of his

own to be horsewhipped, if no worse, for the simple printing of what is

verbally in the mouth of nine out of ten men, and women too, upon the

street.



While writing this account two theories have occurred to me as possibly

true respecting this most remarkable assault:

First--The aim may have been simply to extort from me such admissions as

in the hands of money and influence would have sent me to the

Penitentiary for libel.  This, however, seems unlikely, because any

statements elicited by fear or force could not be evidence in law or

could be so explained as to have no force.  The statements wanted so

badly must have been desired for some other purpose.

Second--The other theory has so dark and wilfully murderous a look that I

shrink from writing it, yet as in all probability my death at the

earliest practicable moment has already been decreed, I feel I should do

all I can before my hour arrives, at least to show others how to break up

that aristocratic rule and combination which has robbed all Nevada of

true freedom, if not of manhood itself.  Although I do not prefer this

hypothesis as a "charge," I feel that as an American citizen I still have

a right both to think and to speak my thoughts even in the land of Sharon

and Winters, and as much so respecting the theory of a brutal assault

(especially when I have been its subject) as respecting any other

apparent enormity.  I give the matter simply as a suggestion which may

explain to the proper authorities and to the people whom they should

represent, a well ascertained but notwithstanding a darkly mysterious

fact.  The scheme of the assault may have been:



First--To terrify me by making me conscious of my own helplessness after

making actual though not legal threats against my life.



Second--To imply that I could save my life only by writing or signing

certain specific statements which if not subsequently explained would

eternally have branded me as infamous and would have consigned my family

to shame and want, and to the dreadful compassion and patronage of the

rich.



Third--To blow my brains out the moment I had signed, thereby preventing

me from making any subsequent explanation such as could remove the

infamy.



Fourth--Philip Lynch to be compelled to testify that I was killed by John

B.  Winters in self-defence, for the conviction of Winters would bring

him in as an accomplice.  If that was the programme in John B.  Winters'

mind nothing saved my life but my persistent refusal to sign, when that

refusal seemed clearly to me to be the choice of death.



The remarkable assertion made to me by Mr. Winters, that pity only spared

my life on Wednesday evening last, almost compels me to believe that at

first he could not have intended me to leave that room alive; and why I

was allowed to, unless through mesmeric or some other invisible

influence, I cannot divine.  The more I reflect upon this matter, the

more probable as true does this horrible interpretation become.



The narration of these things I might have spared both to Mr. Winters and

to the public had he himself observed silence, but as he has both

verbally spoken and suffered a thoroughly garbled statement of facts to

appear in the Gold Hill News I feel it due to myself no less than to this

community, and to the entire independent press of America and Great

Britain, to give a true account of what even the Gold Hill News has

pronounced a disgraceful affair, and which it deeply regrets because of

some alleged telegraphic mistake in the account of it.  [Who received the

erroneous telegrams?]



Though he may not deem it prudent to take my life just now, the

publication of this article I feel sure must compel Gen. Winters (with

his peculiar views about his right to exemption from criticism by me) to

resolve on my violent death, though it may take years to compass it.

Notwithstanding I bear him no ill will; and if W. C. Ralston and William

Sharon, and other members of the San Francisco mining and milling Ring

feel that he above all other men in this State and California is the most

fitting man to supervise and control Yellow Jacket matters, until I am

able to vote more than half their stock I presume he will be retained to

grace his present post.



Meantime, I cordially invite all who know of any sort of important

villainy which only can be cured by exposure (and who would expose it if

they felt sure they would not be betrayed under bullying threats), to

communicate with the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE; for until I am murdered, so long

as I can raise the means to publish, I propose to continue my efforts at

least to revive the liberties of the State, to curb oppression, and to

benefit man's world and God's earth.

                              CONRAD WIEGAND.





[It does seem a pity that the Sheriff was shut out, since the good sense

of a general of militia and of a prominent editor failed to teach them

that the merited castigation of this weak, half-witted child was a thing

that ought to have been done in the street, where the poor thing could

have a chance to run.  When a journalist maligns a citizen, or attacks

his good name on hearsay evidence, he deserves to be thrashed for it,

even if he is a "non-combatant" weakling; but a generous adversary would

at least allow such a lamb the use of his legs at such a time.--M.  T.]









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Roughing It

by Mark Twain













THE GILDED AGE



A Tale of Today



by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner



1873







PREFACE.



This book was not written for private circulation among friends; it was

not written to cheer and instruct a diseased relative of the author's;

it was not thrown off during intervals of wearing labor to amuse an idle

hour.  It was not written for any of these reasons, and therefore it is

submitted without the usual apologies.



It will be seen that it deals with an entirely ideal state of society;

and the chief embarrassment of the writers in this realm of the

imagination has been the want of illustrative examples.  In a State where

there is no fever of speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth,

where the poor are all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all

honest and generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity

and politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic,

there are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have

constructed out of an ideal commonwealth.



No apology is needed for following the learned custom of placing

attractive scraps of literature at the heads of our chapters.  It has

been truly observed by Wagner that such headings, with their vague

suggestions of the matter which is to follow them, pleasantly inflame the

reader's interest without wholly satisfying his curiosity, and we will

hope that it may be found to be so in the present case.



Our quotations are set in a vast number of tongues; this is done for the

reason that very few foreign nations among whom the book will circulate

can read in any language but their own; whereas we do not write for a

particular class or sect or nation, but to take in the whole world.



We do not object to criticism; and we do not expect that the critic will

read the book before writing a notice of it: We do not even expect the

reviewer of the book will say that he has not read it.  No, we have no

anticipations of anything unusual in this age of criticism.  But if the

Jupiter, Who passes his opinion on the novel, ever happens to peruse it

in some weary moment of his subsequent life, we hope that he will not be

the victim of a remorse bitter but too late.



One word more.  This is--what it pretends to be a joint production, in

the conception of the story, the exposition of the characters, and in its

literal composition.  There is scarcely a chapter that does not bear the

marks of the two writers of the book.   S. L. C.

                                        C. D. W.







[Etext Editor's Note: The following chapters were written by Mark Twain:

1-11, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 32-34, 36, 37, 42, 43, 45, 51-53, 57, 59-62;

and portions of 35, 49, and 56.  See Twain's letter to Dr. John Brown

Feb. 28, 1874   D.W.]







CHAPTER I.



June 18--.  Squire Hawkins sat upon the pyramid of large blocks, called

the "stile," in front of his house, contemplating the morning.



The locality was Obedstown, East Tennessee.  You would not know that

Obedstown stood on the top of a mountain, for there was nothing about the

landscape to indicate it--but it did: a mountain that stretched abroad

over whole counties, and rose very gradually.  The district was called

the "Knobs of East Tennessee," and had a reputation like Nazareth, as far

as turning out any good thing was concerned.



The Squire's house was a double log cabin, in a state of decay; two or

three gaunt hounds lay asleep about the threshold, and lifted their heads

sadly whenever Mrs. Hawkins or the children stepped in and out over their

bodies.  Rubbish was scattered about the grassless yard; a bench stood

near the door with a tin wash basin on it and a pail of water and a

gourd; a cat had begun to drink from the pail, but the exertion was

overtaxing her energies, and she had stopped to rest.  There was an ash-

hopper by the fence, and an iron pot, for soft-soap-boiling, near it.



This dwelling constituted one-fifteenth of Obedstown; the other fourteen

houses were scattered about among the tall pine trees and among the corn-

fields in such a way that a man might stand in the midst of the city and

not know but that he was in the country if he only depended on his eyes

for information.



"Squire" Hawkins got his title from being postmaster of Obedstown--not

that the title properly belonged to the office, but because in those

regions the chief citizens always must have titles of some sort, and so

the usual courtesy had been extended to Hawkins.  The mail was monthly,

and sometimes amounted to as much as three or four letters at a single

delivery.  Even a rush like this did not fill up the postmaster's whole

month, though, and therefore he "kept store" in the intervals.



The Squire was contemplating the morning.  It was balmy and tranquil,

the vagrant breezes were laden with the odor of flowers, the murmur of

bees was in the air, there was everywhere that suggestion of repose that

summer woodlands bring to the senses, and the vague, pleasurable

melancholy that such a time and such surroundings inspire.



Presently the United States mail arrived, on horseback.  There was but

one letter, and it was for the postmaster.  The long-legged youth who

carried the mail tarried an hour to talk, for there was no hurry; and in

a little while the male population of the village had assembled to help.

As a general thing, they were dressed in homespun "jeans," blue or

yellow--here were no other varieties of it; all wore one suspender and

sometimes two--yarn ones knitted at home,--some wore vests, but few wore

coats.  Such coats and vests as did appear, however, were rather

picturesque than otherwise, for they were made of tolerably fanciful

patterns of calico--a fashion which prevails thereto this day among those

of the community who have tastes above the common level and are able to

afford style.  Every individual arrived with his hands in his pockets;

a hand came out occasionally for a purpose, but it always went back again

after service; and if it was the head that was served, just the cant that

the dilapidated straw hat got by being uplifted and rooted under, was

retained until the next call altered the inclination; many' hats were

present, but none were erect and no two were canted just alike.  We are

speaking impartially of men, youths and boys.  And we are also speaking

of these three estates when we say that every individual was either

chewing natural leaf tobacco prepared on his own premises, or smoking the

same in a corn-cob pipe.  Few of the men wore whiskers; none wore

moustaches; some had a thick jungle of hair under the chin and hiding the

throat--the only pattern recognized there as being the correct thing in

whiskers; but no part of any individual's face had seen a razor for a

week.



These neighbors stood a few moments looking at the mail carrier

reflectively while he talked; but fatigue soon began to show itself,

and one after another they climbed up and occupied the top rail of the

fence, hump-shouldered and grave, like a company of buzzards assembled

for supper and listening for the death-rattle.  Old Damrell said:



"Tha hain't no news 'bout the jedge, hit ain't likely?"



"Cain't tell for sartin; some thinks he's gwyne to be 'long toreckly,

and some thinks 'e hain't.  Russ Mosely he tote ole Hanks he mought git

to Obeds tomorrer or nex' day he reckoned."



"Well, I wisht I knowed.  I got a 'prime sow and pigs in the, cote-house,

and I hain't got no place for to put 'em.  If the jedge is a gwyne to

hold cote, I got to roust 'em out, I reckon.  But tomorrer'll do, I

'spect."



The speaker bunched his thick lips together like the stem-end of a tomato

and shot a bumble-bee dead that had lit on a weed seven feet away.

One after another the several chewers expressed a charge of tobacco juice

and delivered it at the deceased with steady, aim and faultless accuracy.



"What's a stirrin', down 'bout the Forks?" continued Old Damrell.



"Well, I dunno, skasely.  Ole, Drake Higgins he's ben down to Shelby las'

week.  Tuck his crap down; couldn't git shet o' the most uv it; hit

wasn't no time for to sell, he say, so he 'fotch it back agin, 'lowin' to

wait tell fall.  Talks 'bout goin' to Mozouri--lots uv 'ems talkin' that-

away down thar, Ole Higgins say.  Cain't make a livin' here no mo', sich

times as these.  Si Higgins he's ben over to Kaintuck n' married a high-

toned gal thar, outen the fust families, an' he's come back to the Forks

with jist a hell's-mint o' whoop-jamboree notions, folks says.  He's tuck

an' fixed up the ole house like they does in Kaintuck, he say, an' tha's

ben folks come cler from Turpentine for to see it.  He's tuck an gawmed

it all over on the inside with plarsterin'."



"What's plasterin'?"



"I dono.  Hit's what he calls it.  'Ole Mam Higgins, she tole me.

She say she wasn't gwyne to hang out in no sich a dern hole like a hog.

Says it's mud, or some sich kind o' nastiness that sticks on n' covers up

everything.  Plarsterin', Si calls it."



This marvel was discussed at considerable length; and almost with

animation.  But presently there was a dog-fight over in the neighborhood

of the blacksmith shop, and the visitors slid off their perch like so

many turtles and strode to the battle-field with an interest bordering on

eagerness.  The Squire remained, and read his letter.  Then he sighed,

and sat long in meditation.  At intervals he said:



Missouri.  Missouri.  Well, well, well, everything is so uncertain."



At last he said:



"I believe I'll do it.--A man will just rot, here.  My house my yard,

everything around me, in fact, shows' that I am becoming one of these

cattle--and I used to be thrifty in other times."



He was not more than thirty-five, but he had a worn look that made him

seem older.  He left the stile, entered that part of his house which was

the store, traded a quart of thick molasses for a coonskin and a cake of

beeswax, to an old dame in linsey-woolsey, put his letter away, an went

into the kitchen.  His wife was there, constructing some dried apple

pies; a slovenly urchin of ten was dreaming over a rude weather-vane of

his own contriving; his small sister, close upon four years of age, was

sopping corn-bread in some gravy left in the bottom of a frying-pan and

trying hard not to sop over a finger-mark that divided the pan through

the middle--for the other side belonged to the brother, whose musings

made him forget his stomach for the moment; a negro woman was busy

cooking, at a vast fire-place.  Shiftlessness and poverty reigned in the

place.



"Nancy, I've made up my mind.  The world is done with me, and perhaps I

ought to be done with it.  But no matter--I can wait.  I am going to

Missouri.  I won't stay in this dead country and decay with it.  I've had

it on my mind sometime.  I'm going to sell out here for whatever I can

get, and buy a wagon and team and put you and the children in it and

start."



"Anywhere that suits you, suits me, Si.  And the children can't be any

worse off in Missouri than, they are here, I reckon."



Motioning his wife to a private conference in their own room, Hawkins

said: "No, they'll be better off.  I've looked out for them, Nancy," and

his face lighted.  "Do you see these papers?  Well, they are evidence

that I have taken up Seventy-five Thousand Acres of Land in this county-

think what an enormous fortune it will be some day!  Why, Nancy, enormous

don't express it--the word's too tame!  I tell your Nancy----"



"For goodness sake, Si----"



"Wait, Nancy, wait--let me finish--I've been secretly bailing and fuming

with this grand inspiration for weeks, and I must talk or I'll burst!

I haven't whispered to a soul--not a word--have had my countenance under

lock and key, for fear it might drop something that would tell even these

animals here how to discern the gold mine that's glaring under their

noses.  Now all that is necessary to hold this land and keep it in the

family is to pay the trifling taxes on it yearly--five or ten dollars--

the whole tract would not sell for over a third of a cent an acre now,

but some day people wild be glad to get it for twenty dollars, fifty

dollars, a hundred dollars an acre!  What should you say to" [here he

dropped his voice to a whisper and looked anxiously around to see that

there were no eavesdroppers,] "a thousand dollars an acre!



"Well you may open your eyes and stare!  But it's so.  You and I may not

see the day, but they'll see it.  Mind I tell you; they'll see it.

Nancy, you've heard of steamboats, and maybe you believed in them--of

course you did.  You've heard these cattle here scoff at them and call

them lies and humbugs,--but they're not lies and humbugs, they're a

reality and they're going to be a more wonderful thing some day than they

are now.  They're going to make a revolution in this world's affairs that

will make men dizzy to contemplate.  I've been watching--I've been

watching while some people slept, and I know what's coming.



"Even you and I will see the day that steamboats will come up that little

Turkey river to within twenty miles of this land of ours--and in high

water they'll come right to it!  And this is not all, Nancy--it isn't

even half!  There's a bigger wonder--the railroad!  These worms here have

never even heard of it--and when they do they'll not believe in it.

But it's another fact.  Coaches that fly over the ground twenty miles an

hour--heavens and earth, think of that, Nancy!  Twenty miles an hour.

It makes a main's brain whirl.  Some day, when you and I are in our

graves, there'll be a railroad stretching hundreds of miles--all the way

down from the cities of the Northern States to New Orleans--and its got

to run within thirty miles of this land--may be even touch a corner of

it.  Well; do you know, they've quit burning wood in some places in the

Eastern States?  And what do you suppose they burn?  Coal!" [He bent over

and whispered again:] "There's world--worlds of it on this land!  You

know that black stuff that crops out of the bank of the branch?--well,

that's it.  You've taken it for rocks; so has every body here; and

they've built little dams and such things with it.  One man was going to

build a chimney out of it.  Nancy I expect I turned as white as a sheet!

Why, it might have caught fire and told everything.  I showed him it was

too crumbly.  Then he was going to build it of copper ore--splendid

yellow forty-per-cent. ore!  There's fortunes upon fortunes of copper ore

on our land!  It scared me to death, the idea of this fool starting a

smelting furnace in his house without knowing it, and getting his dull

eyes opened.  And then he was going to build it of iron ore!  There's

mountains of iron ore here, Nancy--whole mountains of it.  I wouldn't

take any chances.  I just stuck by him--I haunted him--I never let him

alone till he built it of mud and sticks like all the rest of the

chimneys in this dismal country.  Pine forests, wheat land, corn land,

iron, copper, coal-wait till the railroads come, and the steamboats!

We'll never see the day, Nancy--never in the world---never, never, never,

child.  We've got to drag along, drag along, and eat crusts in toil and

poverty, all hopeless and forlorn--but they'll ride in coaches, Nancy!

They'll live like the princes of the earth; they'll be courted and

worshiped; their names will be known from ocean to ocean!  Ah, well-a-

day!  Will they ever come back here, on the railroad and the steamboat,

and say, 'This one little spot shall not be touched--this hovel shall be

sacred--for here our father and our mother suffered for us, thought for

us, laid the foundations of our future as solid as the hills!'"



"You are a great, good, noble soul, Si Hawkins, and I am an honored woman

to be the wife of such a man"--and the tears stood in her eyes when she

said it.  "We will go to Missouri.  You are out of your place, here,

among these groping dumb creatures.  We will find a higher place, where

you can walk with your own kind, and be understood when you speak--not

stared at as if you were talking some foreign tongue.  I would go

anywhere, anywhere in the wide world with you I would rather my body

would starve and die than your mind should hunger and wither away in this

lonely land."



"Spoken like yourself, my child!  But we'll not starve, Nancy.  Far from

it.  I have a letter from Beriah Sellers--just came this day.  A letter

that--I'll read you a line from it!"



He flew out of the room.  A shadow blurred the sunlight in Nancy's face--

there was uneasiness in it, and disappointment.  A procession of

disturbing thoughts began to troop through her mind.  Saying nothing

aloud, she sat with her hands in her lap; now and then she clasped them,

then unclasped them, then tapped the ends of the fingers together;

sighed, nodded, smiled--occasionally paused, shook her head.  This

pantomime was the elocutionary expression of an unspoken soliloquy which

had something of this shape:



"I was afraid of it--was afraid of it.  Trying to make our fortune in

Virginia, Beriah Sellers nearly ruined us and we had to settle in

Kentucky and start over again.  Trying to make our fortune in Kentucky he

crippled us again and we had to move here.  Trying to make our fortune

here, he brought us clear down to the ground, nearly.  He's an honest

soul, and means the very best in the world, but I'm afraid, I'm afraid

he's too flighty.  He has splendid ideas, and he'll divide his chances

with his friends with a free hand, the good generous soul, but something

does seem to always interfere and spoil everything.  I never did think he

was right well balanced.  But I don't blame my husband, for I do think

that when that man gets his head full of a new notion, he can out-talk a

machine.  He'll make anybody believe in that notion that'll listen to him

ten minutes--why I do believe he would make a deaf and dumb man believe

in it and get beside himself, if you only set him where he could see his

eyes tally and watch his hands explain.  What a head he has got!  When he

got up that idea there in Virginia of buying up whole loads of negroes in

Delaware and Virginia and Tennessee, very quiet, having papers drawn to

have them delivered at a place in Alabama and take them and pay for them,

away yonder at a certain time, and then in the meantime get a law made

stopping everybody from selling negroes to the south after a certain day

--it was somehow that way--mercy how the man would have made money!

Negroes would have gone up to four prices.  But after he'd spent money

and worked hard, and traveled hard, and had heaps of negroes all

contracted for, and everything going along just right, he couldn't get

the laws passed and down the whole thing tumbled.  And there in Kentucky,

when he raked up that old numskull that had been inventing away at a

perpetual motion machine for twenty-two years, and Beriah Sellers saw at

a glance where just one more little cog-wheel would settle the business,

why I could see it as plain as day when he came in wild at midnight and

hammered us out of bed and told the whole thing in a whisper with the

doors bolted and the candle in an empty barrel.  Oceans of money in it-

anybody could see that.  But it did cost a deal to buy the old numskull

out--and then when they put the new cog wheel in they'd overlooked

something somewhere and it wasn't any use--the troublesome thing wouldn't

go.  That notion he got up here did look as handy as anything in the

world; and how him and Si did sit up nights working at it with the

curtains down and me watching to see if any neighbors were about.  The

man did honestly believe there was a fortune in that black gummy oil that

stews out of the bank Si says is coal; and he refined it himself till it

was like water, nearly, and it did burn, there's no two ways about that;

and I reckon he'd have been all right in Cincinnati with his lamp that he

got made, that time he got a house full of rich speculators to see him

exhibit only in the middle of his speech it let go and almost blew the

heads off the whole crowd.  I haven't got over grieving for the money

that cost yet.  I am sorry enough Beriah Sellers is in Missouri, now, but

I was glad when he went.  I wonder what his letter says.  But of course

it's cheerful; he's never down-hearted--never had any trouble in his

life--didn't know it if he had.  It's always sunrise with that man, and

fine and blazing, at that--never gets noon; though--leaves off and rises

again.  Nobody can help liking the creature, he means so well--but I do

dread to come across him again; he's bound to set us all crazy, of

coarse.  Well, there goes old widow Hopkins--it always takes her a week

to buy a spool of thread and trade a hank of yarn.  Maybe Si can come

with the letter, now."



And he did:



"Widow Hopkins kept me--I haven't any patience with such tedious people.

Now listen, Nancy--just listen at this:



     "'Come right along to Missouri!  Don't wait and worry about a good

     price but sell out for whatever you can get, and come along, or you

     might be too late.  Throw away your traps, if necessary, and come

     empty-handed.  You'll never regret it.  It's the grandest country--

     the loveliest land--the purest atmosphere--I can't describe it; no

     pen can do it justice.  And it's filling up, every day--people

     coming from everywhere.  I've got the biggest scheme on earth--and

     I'll take you in; I'll take in every friend I've got that's ever

     stood by me, for there's enough for all, and to spare.  Mum's the

     word--don't whisper--keep yourself to yourself.  You'll see!  Come!

     --rush!--hurry!--don't wait for anything!'



"It's the same old boy, Nancy, jest the same old boy--ain't he?"



"Yes, I think there's a little of the old sound about his voice yet.

I suppose you--you'll still go, Si?"



"Go!  Well, I should think so, Nancy.  It's all a chance, of course, and,

chances haven't been kind to us, I'll admit--but whatever comes, old

wife, they're provided for.  Thank God for that!"



"Amen," came low and earnestly.



And with an activity and a suddenness that bewildered Obedstown and

almost took its breath away, the Hawkinses hurried through with their

arrangements in four short months and flitted out into the great

mysterious blank that lay beyond the Knobs of Tennessee.









CHAPTER II.



Toward the close of the third day's journey the wayfarers were just

beginning to think of camping, when they came upon a log cabin in the

woods.  Hawkins drew rein and entered the yard.  A boy about ten years

old was sitting in the cabin door with his face bowed in his hands.

Hawkins approached, expecting his footfall to attract attention, but it

did not.  He halted a moment, and then said:



"Come, come, little chap, you mustn't be going to sleep before sundown"



With a tired expression the small face came up out of the hands,--a face

down which tears were flowing.



"Ah, I'm sorry I spoke so, my boy.  Tell me--is anything the matter?"



The boy signified with a scarcely perceptible gesture that the trouble

was in the, house, and made room for Hawkins to pass.  Then he put his

face in his hands again and rocked himself about as one suffering a grief

that is too deep to find help in moan or groan or outcry.  Hawkins

stepped within.  It was a poverty stricken place.  Six or eight middle-

aged country people of both sexes were grouped about an object in the

middle of the room; they were noiselessly busy and they talked in

whispers when they spoke.  Hawkins uncovered and approached.  A coffin

stood upon two backless chairs.  These neighbors had just finished

disposing the body of a woman in it--a woman with a careworn, gentle face

that had more the look of sleep about it than of death.  An old lady

motioned, toward the door and said to Hawkins in a whisper:



"His mother, po' thing.  Died of the fever, last night.  Tha warn't no

sich thing as saving of her.  But it's better for her--better for her.

Husband and the other two children died in the spring, and she hain't

ever hilt up her head sence.  She jest went around broken-hearted like,

and never took no intrust in anything but Clay--that's the boy thar.

She jest worshiped Clay--and Clay he worshiped her.  They didn't 'pear to

live at all, only when they was together, looking at each other, loving

one another.  She's ben sick three weeks; and if you believe me that

child has worked, and kep' the run of the med'cin, and the times of

giving it, and sot up nights and nussed her, and tried to keep up her

sperits, the same as a grown-up person.  And last night when she kep' a

sinking and sinking, and turned away her head and didn't know him no mo',

it was fitten to make a body's heart break to see him climb onto the bed

and lay his cheek agin hern and call her so pitiful and she not answer.

But bymeby she roused up, like, and looked around wild, and then she see

him, and she made a great cry and snatched him to her breast and hilt him

close and kissed him over and over agin; but it took the last po'

strength she had, and so her eyelids begin to close down, and her arms

sort o' drooped away and then we see she was gone, po' creetur.  And

Clay, he--Oh, the po' motherless thing--I cain't talk abort it--I cain't

bear to talk about it."



Clay had disappeared from the door; but he came in, now, and the

neighbors reverently fell apart and made way for him.  He leaned upon the

open coffin and let his tears course silently.  Then he put out his small

hand and smoothed the hair and stroked the dead face lovingly.  After a

bit he brought his other hand up from behind him and laid three or four

fresh wild flowers upon the breast, bent over and kissed the unresponsive

lips time and time again, and then turned away and went out of the house

without looking at any of the company.  The old lady said to Hawkins:



"She always loved that kind o' flowers.  He fetched 'em for her every

morning, and she always kissed him.  They was from away north somers--she

kep' school when she fust come.  Goodness knows what's to become o' that

po' boy.  No father, no mother, no kin folks of no kind.  Nobody to go

to, nobody that k'yers for him--and all of us is so put to it for to get

along and families so large."



Hawkins understood.  All, eyes were turned inquiringly upon him.  He

said:



"Friends, I am not very well provided for, myself, but still I would not

turn my back on a homeless orphan.  If he will go with me I will give him

a home, and loving regard--I will do for him as I would have another do

for a child of my own in misfortune."



One after another the people stepped forward and wrung the stranger's

hand with cordial good will, and their eyes looked all that their hands

could not express or their lips speak.



"Said like a true man," said one.



"You was a stranger to me a minute ago, but you ain't now," said another.



"It's bread cast upon the waters--it'll return after many days," said the

old lady whom we have heard speak before.



"You got to camp in my house as long as you hang out here," said one.

"If tha hain't room for you and yourn my tribe'll turn out and camp in

the hay loft."



A few minutes afterward, while the preparations for the funeral were

being concluded, Mr. Hawkins arrived at his wagon leading his little waif

by the hand, and told his wife all that had happened, and asked her if he

had done right in giving to her and to himself this new care?  She said:



"If you've done wrong, Si Hawkins, it's a wrong that will shine brighter

at the judgment day than the rights that many' a man has done before you.

And there isn't any compliment you can pay me equal to doing a thing like

this and finishing it up, just taking it for granted that I'll be willing

to it.  Willing?  Come to me; you poor motherless boy, and let me take

your grief and help you carry it."



When the child awoke in the morning, it was as if from a troubled dream.

But slowly the confusion in his mind took form, and he remembered his

great loss; the beloved form in the coffin; his talk with a generous

stranger who offered him a home; the funeral, where the stranger's wife

held him by the hand at the grave, and cried with him and comforted him;

and he remembered how this, new mother tucked him in his bed in the

neighboring farm house, and coaxed him to talk about his troubles, and

then heard him say his prayers and kissed him good night, and left him

with the soreness in his heart almost healed and his bruised spirit at

rest.



And now the new mother came again, and helped him to dress, and combed

his hair, and drew his mind away by degrees from the dismal yesterday,

by telling him about the wonderful journey he was going to take and the

strange things he was going to see.  And after breakfast they two went

alone to the grave, and his heart went out to his new friend and his

untaught eloquence poured the praises of his buried idol into her ears

without let or hindrance.  Together they planted roses by the headboard

and strewed wild flowers upon the grave; and then together they went

away, hand in hand, and left the dead to the long sleep that heals all

heart-aches and ends all sorrows.









CHAPTER III.



Whatever the lagging dragging journey may have been to the rest of the

emigrants, it was a wonder and delight to the children, a world of

enchantment; and they believed it to be peopled with the mysterious

dwarfs and giants and goblins that figured in the tales the negro slaves

were in the habit of telling them nightly by the shuddering light of the

kitchen fire.



At the end of nearly a week of travel, the party went into camp near a

shabby village which was caving, house by house, into the hungry

Mississippi.  The river astonished the children beyond measure.  Its

mile-breadth of water seemed an ocean to them, in the shadowy twilight,

and the vague riband of trees on the further shore, the verge of a

continent which surely none but they had ever seen before.



"Uncle Dan'l"(colored,) aged 40; his wife, "aunt Jinny," aged 30, "Young

Miss" Emily Hawkins, "Young Mars" Washington Hawkins and "Young Mars"

Clay, the new member of the family, ranged themselves on a log, after

supper, and contemplated the marvelous river and discussed it.  The moon

rose and sailed aloft through a maze of shredded cloud-wreaths; the

sombre river just perceptibly brightened under the veiled light; a deep

silence pervaded the air and was emphasized, at intervals, rather than

broken, by the hooting of an owl, the baying of a dog, or the muffled

crash of a raving bank in the distance.



The little company assembled on the log were all children (at least in

simplicity and broad and comprehensive ignorance,) and the remarks they

made about the river were in keeping with the character; and so awed were

they by the grandeur and the solemnity of the scene before then, and by

their belief that the air was filled with invisible spirits and that the

faint zephyrs were caused by their passing wings, that all their talk

took to itself a tinge of the supernatural, and their voices were subdued

to a low and reverent tone.  Suddenly Uncle Dan'l exclaimed:



"Chil'en, dah's sum fin a comin!"



All crowded close together and every heart beat faster.



Uncle Dan'l pointed down the river with his bony finger.



A deep coughing sound troubled the stillness, way toward a wooded cape

that jetted into the stream a mile distant.  All in an instant a fierce

eye of fire shot out froth behind the cape and sent a long brilliant

pathway quivering athwart the dusky water.  The coughing grew louder and

louder, the glaring eye grew larger and still larger, glared wilder and

still wilder.  A huge shape developed itself out of the gloom, and from

its tall duplicate horns dense volumes of smoke, starred and spangled

with sparks, poured out and went tumbling away into the farther darkness.

Nearer and nearer the thing came, till its long sides began to glow with

spots of light which mirrored themselves in the river and attended the

monster like a torchlight procession.



"What is it!  Oh, what is it, Uncle Dan'l!"



With deep solemnity the answer came:



"It's de Almighty!  Git down on yo' knees!"



It was not necessary to say it twice.  They were all kneeling, in a

moment.  And then while the mysterious coughing rose stronger and

stronger and the threatening glare reached farther and wider, the negro's

voice lifted up its supplications:



"O Lord', we's ben mighty wicked, an' we knows dat we 'zerve to go to de

bad place, but good Lord, deah Lord, we ain't ready yit, we ain't ready--

let dese po' chilen hab one mo' chance, jes' one mo' chance.  Take de ole

niggah if you's, got to hab somebody.--Good Lord, good deah Lord, we

don't know whah you's a gwyne to, we don't know who you's got yo' eye on,

but we knows by de way you's a comin', we knows by de way you's a tiltin'

along in yo' charyot o' fiah dat some po' sinner's a gwyne to ketch it.

But good Lord, dose chilen don't b'long heah, dey's f'm Obedstown whah

dey don't know nuffin, an' you knows, yo' own sef, dat dey ain't

'sponsible.  An' deah Lord, good Lord, it ain't like yo' mercy, it ain't

like yo' pity, it ain't like yo' long-sufferin' lovin' kindness for to

take dis kind o' 'vantage o' sick little chil'en as dose is when dey's so

many ornery grown folks chuck full o' cussedness dat wants roastin' down

dah.  Oh, Lord, spah de little chil'en, don't tar de little chil'en away

f'm dey frens, jes' let 'em off jes' dis once, and take it out'n de ole

nibgah.  HEAH I IS, LORD, HEAH I IS!  De ole niggah's ready, Lord,

de ole----"



The flaming and churning steamer was right abreast the party, and not

twenty steps away.  The awful thunder of a mud-valve suddenly burst

forth, drowning the prayer, and as suddenly Uncle Dan'l snatched a child

under each arm and scoured into the woods with the rest of the pack at

his heels.  And then, ashamed of himself, he halted in the deep darkness

and shouted, (but rather feebly:)



"Heah I is, Lord, heah I is!"



There was a moment of throbbing suspense, and then, to the surprise and

the comfort of the party, it was plain that the august presence had gone

by, for its dreadful noises were receding.  Uncle Dan'l headed a cautious

reconnaissance in the direction of the log.  Sure enough "the Lord" was

just turning a point a short distance up the river, and while they looked

the lights winked out and the coughing diminished by degrees and

presently ceased altogether.



"H'wsh!  Well now dey's some folks says dey ain't no 'ficiency in prah.

Dis Chile would like to know whah we'd a ben now if it warn't fo' dat

prah?  Dat's it.  Dat's it!"



"Uncle Dan'l, do you reckon it was the prayer that saved us?" said Clay.



"Does I reckon?  Don't I know it!  Whah was yo' eyes?  Warn't de Lord

jes' a cumin' chow!  chow!  CHOW!  an' a goin' on turrible--an' do de

Lord carry on dat way 'dout dey's sumfin don't suit him?  An' warn't he a

lookin' right at dis gang heah, an' warn't he jes' a reachin' for 'em?

An' d'you spec' he gwyne to let 'em off 'dout somebody ast him to do it?

No indeedy!"



"Do you reckon he saw, us, Uncle Dan'l?



"De law sakes, Chile, didn't I see him a lookin' at us?".



"Did you feel scared, Uncle Dan'l?"



"No sah!  When a man is 'gaged in prah, he ain't fraid o' nuffin--dey

can't nuffin tetch him."



"Well what did you run for?"



"Well, I--I--mars Clay, when a man is under de influence ob de sperit,

he do-no, what he's 'bout--no sah; dat man do-no what he's 'bout.  You

mout take an' tah de head off'n dat man an' he wouldn't scasely fine it

out.  Date's de Hebrew chil'en dat went frough de fiah; dey was burnt

considable--ob coase dey was; but dey didn't know nuffin 'bout it--heal

right up agin; if dey'd ben gals dey'd missed dey long haah, (hair,)

maybe, but dey wouldn't felt de burn."



"I don't know but what they were girls.  I think they were."



"Now mars Clay, you knows bettern dat.  Sometimes a body can't tell

whedder you's a sayin' what you means or whedder you's a sayin' what you

don't mean, 'case you says 'em bofe de same way."



"But how should I know whether they were boys or girls?"



"Goodness sakes, mars Clay, don't de Good Book say?  'Sides, don't it

call 'em de HE-brew chil'en?  If dey was gals wouldn't dey be de SHE-brew

chil'en?  Some people dat kin read don't 'pear to take no notice when dey

do read."



"Well, Uncle Dan'l, I think that-----My!  here comes another one up the

river!  There can't be two!"



"We gone dis time--we done gone dis time, sho'!  Dey ain't two, mars

Clay--days de same one.  De Lord kin 'pear eberywhah in a second.

Goodness, how do fiah and de smoke do belch up!  Dat mean business,

honey.  He comin' now like he fo'got sumfin.  Come 'long, chil'en, time

you's gwyne to roos'.  Go 'long wid you--ole Uncle Daniel gwyne out in de

woods to rastle in prah--de ole nigger gwyne to do what he kin to sabe

you agin"



He did go to the woods and pray; but he went so far that he doubted,

himself, if the Lord heard him when He went by.









CHAPTER IV.



--Seventhly, Before his Voyage, He should make his peace with God,

satisfie his Creditors if he be in debt; Pray earnestly to God to prosper

him in his Voyage, and to keep him from danger, and, if he be 'sui juris'

he should make his last will, and wisely order all his affairs, since

many that go far abroad, return not home.  (This good and Christian

Counsel is given by Martinus Zeilerus in his Apodemical Canons before his

Itinerary of Spain and Portugal.)





Early in the morning Squire Hawkins took passage in a small steamboat,

with his family and his two slaves, and presently the bell rang, the

stage-plank; was hauled in, and the vessel proceeded up the river.

The children and the slaves were not much more at ease after finding out

that this monster was a creature of human contrivance than they were the

night before when they thought it the Lord of heaven and earth.  They

started, in fright, every time the gauge-cocks sent out an angry hiss,

and they quaked from head to foot when the mud-valves thundered.  The

shivering of the boat under the beating of the wheels was sheer misery to

them.



But of course familiarity with these things soon took away their terrors,

and then the voyage at once became a glorious adventure, a royal progress

through the very heart and home of romance, a realization of their

rosiest wonder-dreams.  They sat by the hour in the shade of the pilot

house on the hurricane deck and looked out over the curving expanses of

the river sparkling in the sunlight.  Sometimes the boat fought the mid-

stream current, with a verdant world on either hand, and remote from

both; sometimes she closed in under a point, where the dead water and the

helping eddies were, and shaved the bank so closely that the decks were

swept by the jungle of over-hanging willows and littered with a spoil of

leaves; departing from these "points" she regularly crossed the river

every five miles, avoiding the "bight" of the great binds and thus

escaping the strong current; sometimes she went out and skirted a high

"bluff" sand-bar in the middle of the stream, and occasionally followed

it up a little too far and touched upon the shoal water at its head--and

then the intelligent craft refused to run herself aground, but "smelt"

the bar, and straightway the foamy streak that streamed away from her

bows vanished, a great foamless wave rolled forward and passed her under

way, and in this instant she leaned far over on her side, shied from the

bar and fled square away from the danger like a frightened thing--and the

pilot was lucky if he managed to "straighten her up" before she drove her

nose into the opposite bank; sometimes she approached a solid wall of

tall trees as if she meant to break through it, but all of a sudden a

little crack would open just enough to admit her, and away she would go

plowing through the "chute" with just barely room enough between the

island on one side and the main land on the other; in this sluggish water

she seemed to go like a racehorse; now and then small log cabins appeared

in little clearings, with the never-failing frowsy women and girls in

soiled and faded linsey-woolsey leaning in the doors or against woodpiles

and rail fences, gazing sleepily at the passing show; sometimes she found

shoal water, going out at the head of those "chutes" or crossing the

river, and then a deck-hand stood on the bow and hove the lead, while the

boat slowed down and moved cautiously; sometimes she stopped a moment at

a landing and took on some freight or a passenger while a crowd of

slouchy white men and negroes stood on the bank and looked sleepily on

with their hands in their pantaloons pockets,--of course--for they never

took them out except to stretch, and when they did this they squirmed

about and reached their fists up into the air and lifted themselves on

tip-toe in an ecstasy of enjoyment.



When the sun went down it turned all the broad river to a national banner

laid in gleaming bars of gold and purple and crimson; and in time these

glories faded out in the twilight and left the fairy archipelagoes

reflecting their fringing foliage in the steely mirror of the stream.



At night the boat forged on through the deep solitudes of the river,

hardly ever discovering a light to testify to a human presence--mile

after mile and league after league the vast bends were guarded by

unbroken walls of forest that had never been disturbed by the voice or

the foot-fall of man or felt the edge of his sacrilegious axe.



An hour after supper the moon came up, and Clay and Washington ascended

to the hurricane deck to revel again in their new realm of enchantment.

They ran races up and down the deck; climbed about the bell; made friends

with the passenger-dogs chained under the lifeboat; tried to make friends

with a passenger-bear fastened to the verge-staff but were not

encouraged; "skinned the cat" on the hog-chains; in a word, exhausted the

amusement-possibilities of the deck.  Then they looked wistfully up at

the pilot house, and finally, little by little, Clay ventured up there,

followed diffidently by Washington.  The pilot turned presently to "get

his stern-marks," saw the lads and invited them in.  Now their happiness

was complete.  This cosy little house, built entirely of glass and

commanding a marvelous prospect in every direction was a magician's

throne to them and their enjoyment of the place was simply boundless.



They sat them down on a high bench and looked miles ahead and saw the

wooded capes fold back and reveal the bends beyond; and they looked miles

to the rear and saw the silvery highway diminish its breadth by degrees

and close itself together in the distance.  Presently the pilot said:



"By George, yonder comes the Amaranth!"



A spark appeared, close to the water, several miles down the river.  The

pilot took his glass and looked at it steadily for a moment, and said,

chiefly to himself:



"It can't be the Blue Wing.  She couldn't pick us up this way.  It's the

Amaranth, sure!"



He bent over a speaking tube and said:



"Who's on watch down there?"



A hollow, unhuman voice rumbled up through the tube in answer:



"I am.  Second engineer."



"Good!  You want to stir your stumps, now, Harry--the Amaranth's just

turned the point--and she's just a--humping herself, too!"



The pilot took hold of a rope that stretched out forward, jerked it

twice, and two mellow strokes of the big bell responded.  A voice out on

the deck shouted:



"Stand by, down there, with that labboard lead!"



"No, I don't want the lead," said the pilot, "I want you.  Roust out the

old man--tell him the Amaranth's coming.  And go and call Jim--tell him."



"Aye-aye, sir!"



The "old man" was the captain--he is always called so, on steamboats and

ships; "Jim" was the other pilot.  Within two minutes both of these men

were flying up the pilothouse stairway, three steps at a jump.  Jim was

in his shirt sleeves,--with his coat and vest on his arm.  He said:



"I was just turning in.  Where's the glass"



He took it and looked:



"Don't appear to be any night-hawk on the jack-staff--it's the Amaranth,

dead sure!"



The captain took a good long look, and only said:



"Damnation!"



George Davis, the pilot on watch, shouted to the night-watchman on deck:



"How's she loaded?"



"Two inches by the head, sir."



"'T ain't enough!"



The captain shouted, now:



"Call the mate.  Tell him to call all hands and get a lot of that sugar

forrard--put her ten inches by the head.  Lively, now!"



"Aye-aye, sir."



A riot of shouting and trampling floated up from below, presently, and

the uneasy steering of the boat soon showed that she was getting "down by

the head."



The three men in the pilot house began to talk in short, sharp sentences,

low and earnestly.  As their excitement rose, their voices went down.

As fast as one of them put down the spy-glass another took it up--but

always with a studied air of calmness.  Each time the verdict was:



"She's a gaining!"



The captain spoke through the tube:



"What steam are You carrying?"



"A hundred and forty-two, sir!  But she's getting hotter and hotter all

the time."



The boat was straining and groaning and quivering like a monster in pain.

Both pilots were at work now, one on each side of the wheel, with their

coats and vests off, their bosoms and collars wide open and the

perspiration flowing down heir faces.  They were holding the boat so

close to the shore that the willows swept the guards almost from stem to

stern.



"Stand by!" whispered George.



"All ready!" said Jim, under his breath.



"Let her come!"



The boat sprang away, from the bank like a deer, and darted in a long

diagonal toward the other shore.  She closed in again and thrashed her

fierce way along the willows as before.  The captain put down the glass:



"Lord how she walks up on us!  I do hate to be beat!"



"Jim," said George, looking straight ahead, watching the slightest yawing

of the boat and promptly meeting it with the wheel, "how'll it do to try

Murderer's Chute?"



"Well, it's--it's taking chances.  How was the cottonwood stump on the

false point below Boardman's Island this morning?"



"Water just touching the roots."



"Well it's pretty close work.  That gives six feet scant in the head of

Murderer's Chute.  We can just barely rub through if we hit it exactly

right.  But it's worth trying.  She don't dare tackle it!"--meaning the

Amaranth.



In another instant the Boreas plunged into what seemed a crooked creek,

and the Amaranth's approaching lights were shut out in a moment.  Not a

whisper was uttered, now, but the three men stared ahead into the shadows

and two of them spun the wheel back and forth with anxious watchfulness

while the steamer tore along.  The chute seemed to come to an end every

fifty yards, but always opened out in time.  Now the head of it was at

hand.  George tapped the big bell three times, two leadsmen sprang to

their posts, and in a moment their weird cries rose on the night air and

were caught up and repeated by two men on the upper deck:



"No-o bottom!"



"De-e-p four!"



"Half three!"



"Quarter three!"



"Mark under wa-a-ter three!"



"Half twain!"



"Quarter twain!-----"



Davis pulled a couple of ropes--there was a jingling of small bells far

below, the boat's speed slackened, and the pent steam began to whistle

and the gauge-cocks to scream:



"By the mark twain!"



"Quar--ter--her--er--less twain!"



"Eight and a half!"



"Eight feet!"



"Seven-ana-half!"



Another jingling of little bells and the wheels ceased turning

altogether.  The whistling of the steam was something frightful now--it

almost drowned all other noises.



"Stand by to meet her!"



George had the wheel hard down and was standing on a spoke.



"All ready!"



The, boat hesitated seemed to hold her breath, as did the captain and

pilots--and then she began to fall away to starboard and every eye

lighted:



"Now then!--meet her!  meet her!  Snatch her!"



The wheel flew to port so fast that the spokes blended into a spider-web

--the swing of the boat subsided--she steadied herself----



"Seven feet!"



"Sev--six and a half!"



"Six feet!  Six f----"



Bang!  She hit the bottom!  George shouted through the tube:



"Spread her wide open!  Whale it at her!"



Pow-wow-chow!  The escape-pipes belched snowy pillars of steam aloft, the

boat ground and surged and trembled--and slid over into----



"M-a-r-k twain!"



"Quarter-her----"



"Tap!  tap!  tap!" (to signify "Lay in the leads")



And away she went, flying up the willow shore, with the whole silver sea

of the Mississippi stretching abroad on every hand.



No Amaranth in sight!



"Ha-ha, boys, we took a couple of tricks that time!" said the captain.



And just at that moment a red glare appeared in the head of the chute and

the Amaranth came springing after them!



"Well, I swear!"



"Jim, what is the meaning of that?"



"I'll tell you what's the meaning of it.  That hail we had at Napoleon

was Wash Hastings, wanting to come to Cairo--and we didn't stop.  He's in

that pilot house, now, showing those mud turtles how to hunt for easy

water."



"That's it!  I thought it wasn't any slouch that was running that middle

bar in Hog-eye Bend.  If it's Wash Hastings--well, what he don't know

about the river ain't worth knowing--a regular gold-leaf, kid-glove,

diamond breastpin pilot Wash Hastings is.  We won't take any tricks off

of him, old man!"



"I wish I'd a stopped for him, that's all."



The Amaranth was within three hundred yards of the Boreas, and still

gaining.  The "old man" spoke through the tube:



"What is she-carrying now?"



"A hundred and sixty-five, sir!"



"How's your wood?"



"Pine all out-cypress half gone-eating up cotton-wood like pie!"



"Break into that rosin on the main deck-pile it in, the boat can pay for

it!"



Soon the boat was plunging and quivering and screaming more madly than

ever.  But the Amaranth's head was almost abreast the Boreas's stern:



"How's your steam, now, Harry?"



"Hundred and eighty-two, sir!"



"Break up the casks of bacon in the forrard hold!  Pile it in!  Levy on

that turpentine in the fantail-drench every stick of wood with it!"



The boat was a moving earthquake by this time:



"How is she now?"



"A hundred and ninety-six and still a-swelling!--water, below the middle

gauge-cocks!--carrying every pound she can stand!--nigger roosting on the

safety-valve!"



"Good!  How's your draft?"



"Bully!  Every time a nigger heaves a stick of wood into the furnace he

goes out the chimney, with it!"



The Amaranth drew steadily up till her jack-staff breasted the Boreas's

wheel-house--climbed along inch by inch till her chimneys breasted it--

crept along, further and further, till the boats were wheel to wheel--and

then they, closed up with a heavy jolt and locked together tight and fast

in the middle of the big river under the flooding moonlight!  A roar and

a hurrah went up from the crowded decks of both steamers--all hands

rushed to the guards to look and shout and gesticulate--the weight

careened the vessels over toward each other--officers flew hither and

thither cursing and storming, trying to drive the people amidships--both

captains were leaning over their railings shaking their fists, swearing

and threatening--black volumes of smoke rolled up and canopied the

scene,--delivering a rain of sparks upon the vessels--two pistol shots

rang out, and both captains dodged unhurt and the packed masses of

passengers surged back and fell apart while the shrieks of women and

children soared above the intolerable din----



And then there was a booming roar, a thundering crash, and the riddled

Amaranth dropped loose from her hold and drifted helplessly away!



Instantly the fire-doors of the Boreas were thrown open and the men began

dashing buckets of water into the furnaces--for it would have been death

and destruction to stop the engines with such a head of steam on.



As soon as possible the Boreas dropped down to the floating wreck and

took off the dead, the wounded and the unhurt--at least all that could be

got at, for the whole forward half of the boat was a shapeless ruin, with

the great chimneys lying crossed on top of it, and underneath were a

dozen victims imprisoned alive and wailing for help.  While men with axes

worked with might and main to free these poor fellows, the Boreas's boats

went about, picking up stragglers from the river.



And now a new horror presented itself.  The wreck took fire from the

dismantled furnaces!  Never did men work with a heartier will than did

those stalwart braves with the axes.  But it was of no use.  The fire ate

its way steadily, despising the bucket brigade that fought it.  It

scorched the clothes, it singed the hair of the axemen--it drove them

back, foot by foot-inch by inch--they wavered, struck a final blow in the

teeth of the enemy, and surrendered.  And as they fell back they heard

prisoned voices saying:



"Don't leave us!  Don't desert us!  Don't, don't do it!"



And one poor fellow said:



"I am Henry Worley, striker of the Amaranth!  My mother lives in St.

Louis.  Tell her a lie for a poor devil's sake, please.  Say I was killed

in an instant and never knew what hurt me--though God knows I've neither

scratch nor bruise this moment!  It's hard to burn up in a coop like this

with the whole wide world so near.  Good-bye boys--we've all got to come

to it at last, anyway!"



The Boreas stood away out of danger, and the ruined steamer went drifting

down the stream an island of wreathing and climbing flame that vomited

clouds of smoke from time to time, and glared more fiercely and sent its

luminous tongues higher and higher after each emission.  A shriek at

intervals told of a captive that had met his doom.  The wreck lodged upon

a sandbar, and when the Boreas turned the next point on her upward

journey it was still burning with scarcely abated fury.



When the boys came down into the main saloon of the Boreas, they saw a

pitiful sight and heard a world of pitiful sounds.  Eleven poor creatures

lay dead and forty more lay moaning, or pleading or screaming, while a

score of Good Samaritans moved among them doing what they could to

relieve their sufferings; bathing their chinless faces and bodies with

linseed oil and lime water and covering the places with bulging masses of

raw cotton that gave to every face and form a dreadful and unhuman

aspect.



A little wee French midshipman of fourteen lay fearfully injured, but

never uttered a sound till a physician of Memphis was about to dress his

hurts.  Then he said:



"Can I get well?  You need not be afraid to tell me."



"No--I--I am afraid you can not."



"Then do not waste your time with me--help those that can get well."



"But----"



"Help those that can get well!  It is, not for me to be a girl.  I carry

the blood of eleven generations of soldiers in my veins!"



The physician--himself a man who had seen service in the navy in his

time--touched his hat to this little hero, and passed on.



The head engineer of the Amaranth, a grand specimen of physical manhood,

struggled to his feet a ghastly spectacle and strode toward his brother,

the second engineer, who was unhurt.  He said:



"You were on watch.  You were boss.  You would not listen to me when I

begged you to reduce your steam.  Take that!--take it to my wife and tell

her it comes from me by the hand of my murderer!  Take it--and take my

curse with it to blister your heart a hundred years--and may you live so

long!"



And he tore a ring from his finger, stripping flesh and skin with it,

threw it down and fell dead!



But these things must not be dwelt upon.  The Boreas landed her dreadful

cargo at the next large town and delivered it over to a multitude of

eager hands and warm southern hearts--a cargo amounting by this time to

39 wounded persons and 22 dead bodies.  And with these she delivered a

list of 96 missing persons that had drowned or otherwise perished at the

scene of the disaster.



A jury of inquest was impaneled, and after due deliberation and inquiry

they returned the inevitable American verdict which has been so familiar

to our ears all the days of our lives--"NOBODY TO BLAME."



**[The incidents of the explosion are not invented.  They happened just

as they are told.--The Authors.]









CHAPTER V.



Il veut faire secher de la neige au four et la vendre pour du sel blanc.





When the Boreas backed away from the land to continue her voyage up the

river, the Hawkinses were richer by twenty-four hours of experience in

the contemplation of human suffering and in learning through honest hard

work how to relieve it.  And they were richer in another way also.

In the early turmoil an hour after the explosion, a little black-eyed

girl of five years, frightened and crying bitterly, was struggling

through the throng in the Boreas' saloon calling her mother and father,

but no one answered.  Something in the face of Mr. Hawkins attracted her

and she came and looked up at him; was satisfied, and took refuge with

him.  He petted her, listened to her troubles, and said he would find her

friends for her.  Then he put her in a state-room with his children and

told them to be kind to her (the adults of his party were all busy with

the wounded) and straightway began his search.



It was fruitless.  But all day he and his wife made inquiries, and hoped

against hope.  All that they could learn was that the child and her

parents came on board at New Orleans, where they had just arrived in a

vessel from Cuba; that they looked like people from the Atlantic States;

that the family name was Van Brunt and the child's name Laura.  This was

all.  The parents had not been seen since the explosion.  The child's

manners were those of a little lady, and her clothes were daintier and

finer than any Mrs. Hawkins had ever seen before.



As the hours dragged on the child lost heart, and cried so piteously for

her mother that it seemed to the Hawkinses that the moanings and the

wailings of the mutilated men and women in the saloon did not so strain

at their heart-strings as the sufferings of this little desolate

creature.  They tried hard to comfort her; and in trying, learned to love

her; they could not help it, seeing how she clung, to them and put her

arms about their necks and found-no solace but in their kind eyes and

comforting words: There was a question in both their hearts--a question

that rose up and asserted itself with more and more pertinacity as the

hours wore on--but both hesitated to give it voice--both kept silence--

and--waited.  But a time came at last when the matter would bear delay no

longer.  The boat had landed, and the dead and the wounded were being

conveyed to the shore.  The tired child was asleep in the arms of Mrs.

Hawkins.  Mr. Hawkins came into their presence and stood without

speaking.  His eyes met his wife's; then both looked at the child--and as

they looked it stirred in its sleep and nestled closer; an expression of

contentment and peace settled upon its face that touched the mother-

heart; and when the eyes of husband and wife met again, the question was

asked and answered.



When the Boreas had journeyed some four hundred miles from the time the

Hawkinses joined her, a long rank of steamboats was sighted, packed side

by side at a wharf like sardines, in a box, and above and beyond them

rose the domes and steeples and general architectural confusion of a

city--a city with an imposing umbrella of black smoke spread over it.

This was St. Louis.  The children of the Hawkins family were playing

about the hurricane deck, and the father and mother were sitting in the

lee of the pilot house essaying to keep order and not greatly grieved

that they were not succeeding.



"They're worth all the trouble they are, Nancy."



"Yes, and more, Si."



"I believe you!  You wouldn't sell one of them at a good round figure?"



"Not for all the money in the bank, Si."



"My own sentiments every time.  It is true we are not rich--but still you

are not sorry---you haven't any misgivings about the additions?"



"No.  God will provide"



"Amen.  And so you wouldn't even part with Clay? Or Laura!"



"Not for anything in the world.  I love them just the same as I love my

own: They pet me and spoil me even more than the others do, I think.

I reckon we'll get along, Si."



"Oh yes, it will all come out right, old mother.  I wouldn't be afraid to

adopt a thousand children if I wanted to, for there's that Tennessee

Land, you know--enough to make an army of them rich.  A whole army,

Nancy!  You and I will never see the day, but these little chaps will.

Indeed they will.  One of these days it will be the rich Miss Emily

Hawkins--and the wealthy Miss Laura Van Brunt Hawkins--and the Hon.

George Washington Hawkins, millionaire--and Gov. Henry Clay Hawkins,

millionaire!  That is the way the world will word it!  Don't let's ever

fret about the children, Nancy--never in the world.  They're all right.

Nancy, there's oceans and oceans of money in that land--mark my words!"



The children had stopped playing, for the moment, and drawn near to

listen.  Hawkins said:



"Washington, my boy, what will you do when you get to be one of the

richest men in the world?"



"I don't know, father.  Sometimes I think I'll have a balloon and go up

in the air; and sometimes I think I'll have ever so many books; and

sometimes I think I'll have ever so many weathercocks and water-wheels;

or have a machine like that one you and Colonel Sellers bought; and

sometimes I think I'll have--well, somehow I don't know--somehow I ain't

certain; maybe I'll get a steamboat first."



"The same old chap!--always just a little bit divided about things.--And

what will you do when you get to be one of the richest men in the world,

Clay?"



"I don't know, sir.  My mother--my other mother that's gone away--she

always told me to work along and not be much expecting to get rich, and

then I wouldn't be disappointed if I didn't get rich.  And so I reckon

it's better for me to wait till I get rich, and then by that time maybe

I'll know what I'll want--but I don't now, sir."



"Careful old head!--Governor Henry Clay Hawkins!--that's what you'll be,

Clay, one of these days.  Wise old head! weighty old head!  Go on, now,

and play--all of you.  It's a prime lot, Nancy; as the Obedstown folk say

about their hogs."



A smaller steamboat received the Hawkinses and their fortunes, and bore

them a hundred and thirty miles still higher up the Mississippi, and

landed them at a little tumble-down village on the Missouri shore in the

twilight of a mellow October day.



The next morning they harnessed up their team and for two days they

wended slowly into the interior through almost roadless and uninhabited

forest solitudes.  And when for the last time they pitched their tents,

metaphorically speaking, it was at the goal of their hopes, their new

home.



By the muddy roadside stood a new log cabin, one story high--the store;

clustered in the neighborhood were ten or twelve more cabins, some new,

some old.



In the sad light of the departing day the place looked homeless enough.

Two or three coatless young men sat in front of the store on a dry-goods

box, and whittled it with their knives, kicked it with their vast boots,

and shot tobacco-juice at various marks.  Several ragged negroes leaned

comfortably against the posts of the awning and contemplated the arrival

of the wayfarers with lazy curiosity.  All these people presently managed

to drag themselves to the vicinity of the Hawkins' wagon, and there they

took up permanent positions, hands in pockets and resting on one leg; and

thus anchored they proceeded to look and enjoy.  Vagrant dogs came

wagging around and making inquiries of Hawkins's dog, which were not

satisfactory and they made war on him in concert.  This would have

interested the citizens but it was too many on one to amount to anything

as a fight, and so they commanded the peace and the foreign dog coiled

his tail and took sanctuary under the wagon.  Slatternly negro girls and

women slouched along with pails deftly balanced on their heads, and

joined the group and stared.  Little half dressed white boys, and little

negro boys with nothing whatever on but tow-linen shirts with a fine

southern exposure, came from various directions and stood with their

hands locked together behind them and aided in the inspection.  The rest

of the population were laying down their employments and getting ready to

come, when a man burst through the assemblage and seized the new-comers

by the hands in a frenzy of welcome, and exclaimed--indeed almost

shouted:



"Well who could have believed it!  Now is it you sure enough--turn

around! hold up your heads! I want to look at you good!  Well, well,

well, it does seem most too good to be true, I declare!  Lord, I'm so

glad to see you!  Does a body's whole soul good to look at you!  Shake

hands again!  Keep on shaking hands!  Goodness gracious alive.  What will

my wife say?--Oh yes indeed, it's so!--married only last week--lovely,

perfectly lovely creature, the noblest woman that ever--you'll like her,

Nancy!  Like her?  Lord bless me you'll love her--you'll dote on her--

you'll be twins!  Well, well, well, let me look at you again!  Same old--

why bless my life it was only jest this very morning that my wife says,

'Colonel'--she will call me Colonel spite of everything I can do--she

says 'Colonel, something tells me somebody's coming!'  and sure enough

here you are, the last people on earth a body could have expected.

Why she'll think she's a prophetess--and hanged if I don't think so too--

and you know there ain't any, country but what a prophet's an honor to,

as the proverb says.  Lord bless me and here's the children, too!

Washington, Emily, don't you know me?  Come, give us a kiss.  Won't I fix

you, though!--ponies, cows, dogs, everything you can think of that'll

delight a child's heart-and--Why how's this?  Little strangers?  Well

you won't be any strangers here, I can tell you.  Bless your souls we'll

make you think you never was at home before--'deed and 'deed we will,

I can tell you!  Come, now, bundle right along with me.  You can't

glorify any hearth stone but mine in this camp, you know--can't eat

anybody's bread but mine--can't do anything but just make yourselves

perfectly at home and comfortable, and spread yourselves out and rest!

You hear me!  Here--Jim, Tom, Pete, Jake, fly around!  Take that team to

my place--put the wagon in my lot--put the horses under the shed, and get

out hay and oats and fill them up!  Ain't any hay and oats?  Well get

some--have it charged to me--come, spin around, now!  Now, Hawkins, the

procession's ready; mark time, by the left flank, forward-march!"



And the Colonel took the lead, with Laura astride his neck, and the

newly-inspired and very grateful immigrants picked up their tired limbs

with quite a spring in them and dropped into his wake.



Presently they were ranged about an old-time fire-place whose blazing

logs sent out rather an unnecessary amount of heat, but that was no

matter-supper was needed, and to have it, it had to be cooked.  This

apartment was the family bedroom, parlor, library and kitchen, all in

one.  The matronly little wife of the Colonel moved hither and thither

and in and out with her pots and pans in her hands', happiness in her

heart and a world of admiration of her husband in her eyes.  And when at

last she had spread the cloth and loaded it with hot corn bread, fried

chickens, bacon, buttermilk, coffee, and all manner of country luxuries,

Col. Sellers modified his harangue and for a moment throttled it down to

the orthodox pitch for a blessing, and then instantly burst forth again

as from a parenthesis and clattered on with might and main till every

stomach in the party was laden with all it could carry.  And when the

new-comers ascended the ladder to their comfortable feather beds on the

second floor--to wit the garret--Mrs. Hawkins was obliged to say:



"Hang the fellow, I do believe he has gone wilder than ever, but still a

body can't help liking him if they would--and what is more, they don't

ever want to try when they see his eyes and hear him talk."



Within a week or two the Hawkinses were comfortably domiciled in a new

log house, and were beginning to feel at home.  The children were put to

school; at least it was what passed for a school in those days: a place

where tender young humanity devoted itself for eight or ten hours a day

to learning incomprehensible rubbish by heart out of books and reciting

it by rote, like parrots; so that a finished education consisted simply

of a permanent headache and the ability to read without stopping to spell

the words or take breath.  Hawkins bought out the village store for a

song and proceeded to reap the profits, which amounted to but little more

than another song.



The wonderful speculation hinted at by Col. Sellers in his letter turned

out to be the raising of mules for the Southern market; and really it

promised very well.  The young stock cost but a trifle, the rearing but

another trifle, and so Hawkins was easily persuaded to embark his slender

means in the enterprise and turn over the keep and care of the animals to

Sellers and Uncle Dan'l.



All went well: Business prospered little by little.  Hawkins even built a

new house, made it two full stories high and put a lightning rod on it.

People came two or three miles to look at it.  But they knew that the rod

attracted the lightning, and so they gave the place a wide berth in a

storm, for they were familiar with marksmanship and doubted if the

lightning could hit that small stick at a distance of a mile and a half

oftener than once in a hundred and fifty times.  Hawkins fitted out his

house with "store" furniture from St. Louis, and the fame of its

magnificence went abroad in the land.  Even the parlor carpet was from

St. Louis--though the other rooms were clothed in the "rag" carpeting of

the country.  Hawkins put up the first "paling" fence that had ever

adorned the village; and he did not stop there, but whitewashed it.

His oil-cloth window-curtains had noble pictures on them of castles such

as had never been seen anywhere in the world but on window-curtains.

Hawkins enjoyed the admiration these prodigies compelled, but he always

smiled to think how poor and, cheap they were, compared to what the

Hawkins mansion would display in a future day after the Tennessee Land

should have borne its minted fruit.  Even Washington observed, once, that

when the Tennessee Land was sold he would have a "store" carpet in his

and Clay's room like the one in the parlor.  This pleased Hawkins, but it

troubled his wife.  It did not seem wise, to her, to put one's entire

earthly trust in the Tennessee Land and never think of doing any work.



Hawkins took a weekly Philadelphia newspaper and a semi-weekly St. Louis

journal--almost the only papers that came to the village, though Godey's

Lady's Book found a good market there and was regarded as the perfection

of polite literature by some of the ablest critics in the place.  Perhaps

it is only fair to explain that we are writing of a by gone age--some

twenty or thirty years ago.  In the two newspapers referred to lay the

secret of Hawkins's growing prosperity.  They kept him informed of the

condition of the crops south and east, and thus he knew which articles

were likely to be in demand and which articles were likely to be

unsalable, weeks and even months in advance of the simple folk about him.

As the months went by he came to be regarded as a wonderfully lucky man.

It did not occur to the citizens that brains were at the bottom of his

luck.



His title of "Squire" came into vogue again, but only for a season; for,

as his wealth and popularity augmented, that title, by imperceptible

stages, grew up into "Judge;" indeed' it bade fair to swell into

"General" bye and bye.  All strangers of consequence who visited the

village gravitated to the Hawkins Mansion and became guests of the

"Judge."



Hawkins had learned to like the people of his section very much.  They

were uncouth and not cultivated, and not particularly industrious; but

they were honest and straightforward, and their virtuous ways commanded

respect.  Their patriotism was strong, their pride in the flag was of the

old fashioned pattern, their love of country amounted to idolatry.

Whoever dragged the national honor in the dirt won their deathless

hatred.  They still cursed Benedict Arnold as if he were a personal

friend who had broken faith--but a week gone by.









CHAPTER VI.



We skip ten years and this history finds certain changes to record.



Judge Hawkins and Col. Sellers have made and lost two or three moderate

fortunes in the meantime and are now pinched by poverty.  Sellers has two

pairs of twins and four extras.  In Hawkins's family are six children of

his own and two adopted ones.  From time to time, as fortune smiled, the

elder children got the benefit of it, spending the lucky seasons at

excellent schools in St. Louis and the unlucky ones at home in the

chafing discomfort of straightened circumstances.



Neither the Hawkins children nor the world that knew them ever supposed

that one of the girls was of alien blood and parentage: Such difference

as existed between Laura and Emily is not uncommon in a family.  The

girls had grown up as sisters, and they were both too young at the time

of the fearful accident on the Mississippi to know that it was that which

had thrown their lives together.



And yet any one who had known the secret of Laura's birth and had seen

her during these passing years, say at the happy age of twelve or

thirteen, would have fancied that he knew the reason why she was more

winsome than her school companion.



Philosophers dispute whether it is the promise of what she will be in

the careless school-girl, that makes her attractive, the undeveloped

maidenhood, or the mere natural, careless sweetness of childhood.

If Laura at twelve was beginning to be a beauty, the thought of it had

never entered her head.  No, indeed.  Her mind wad filled with more

important thoughts.  To her simple school-girl dress she was beginning to

add those mysterious little adornments of ribbon-knots and ear-rings,

which were the subject of earnest consultations with her grown friends.



When she tripped down the street on a summer's day with her dainty hands

propped into the ribbon-broidered pockets of her apron, and elbows

consequently more or less akimbo with her wide Leghorn hat flapping down

and hiding her face one moment and blowing straight up against her fore

head the next and making its revealment of fresh young beauty; with all

her pretty girlish airs and graces in full play, and that sweet ignorance

of care and that atmosphere of innocence and purity all about her that

belong to her gracious time of life, indeed she was a vision to warm the

coldest heart and bless and cheer the saddest.



Willful, generous, forgiving, imperious, affectionate, improvident,

bewitching, in short--was Laura at this period.  Could she have remained

there, this history would not need to be written.  But Laura had grown to

be almost a woman in these few years, to the end of which we have now

come--years which had seen Judge Hawkins pass through so many trials.



When the judge's first bankruptcy came upon him, a homely human angel

intruded upon him with an offer of $1,500 for the Tennessee Land.  Mrs.

Hawkins said take it.  It was a grievous temptation, but the judge

withstood it.  He said the land was for the children--he could not rob

them of their future millions for so paltry a sum.  When the second

blight fell upon him, another angel appeared and offered $3,000 for the

land.  He was in such deep distress that he allowed his wife to persuade

him to let the papers be drawn; but when his children came into his

presence in their poor apparel, he felt like a traitor and refused to

sign.



But now he was down again, and deeper in the mire than ever.  He paced

the floor all day, he scarcely slept at night.  He blushed even to

acknowledge it to himself, but treason was in his mind--he was

meditating, at last, the sale of the land.  Mrs. Hawkins stepped into the

room.  He had not spoken a word, but he felt as guilty as if she had

caught him in some shameful act.  She said:



"Si, I do not know what we are going to do.  The children are not fit to

be seen, their clothes are in such a state.  But there's something more

serious still.--There is scarcely a bite in the house to eat"



"Why, Nancy, go to Johnson----."



"Johnson indeed!  You took that man's part when he hadn't a friend in the

world, and you built him up and made him rich.  And here's the result of

it: He lives in our fine house, and we live in his miserable log cabin.

He has hinted to our children that he would rather they wouldn't come

about his yard to play with his children,--which I can bear, and bear

easy enough, for they're not a sort we want to associate with much--but

what I can't bear with any quietness at all, is his telling Franky our

bill was running pretty high this morning when I sent him for some meal--

and that was all he said, too--didn't give him the meal--turned off and

went to talking with the Hargrave girls about some stuff they wanted to

cheapen."



"Nancy, this is astounding!"



"And so it is, I warrant you.  I've kept still, Si, as long as ever I

could.  Things have been getting worse and worse, and worse and worse,

every single day; I don't go out of the house, I feel so down; but you

had trouble enough, and I wouldn't say a word--and I wouldn't say a word

now, only things have got so bad that I don't know what to do, nor where

to turn."  And she gave way and put her face in her hands and cried.



"Poor child, don't grieve so.  I never thought that of Johnson.  I am

clear at my wit's end.  I don't know what in the world to do.  Now if

somebody would come along and offer $3,000--Uh, if somebody only would

come along and offer $3,000 for that Tennessee Land."



"You'd sell it, S!" said Mrs. Hawkins excitedly.



"Try me!"



Mrs. Hawkins was out of the room in a moment.  Within a minute she was

back again with a business-looking stranger, whom she seated, and then

she took her leave again.  Hawkins said to himself, "How can a man ever

lose faith?  When the blackest hour comes, Providence always comes with

it--ah, this is the very timeliest help that ever poor harried devil had;

if this blessed man offers but a thousand I'll embrace him like a

brother!"



The stranger said:



"I am aware that you own 75,000 acres, of land in East Tennessee, and

without sacrificing your time, I will come to the point at once.  I am

agent of an iron manufacturing company, and they empower me to offer you

ten thousand dollars for that land."



Hawkins's heart bounded within him.  His whole frame was racked and

wrenched with fettered hurrahs.  His first impulse was to shout "Done!

and God bless the iron company, too!"



But a something flitted through his mind, and his opened lips uttered

nothing.  The enthusiasm faded away from his eyes, and the look of a man

who is thinking took its place.  Presently, in a hesitating, undecided

way, he said:



"Well, I--it don't seem quite enough.  That--that is a very valuable

property--very valuable.  It's brim full of iron-ore, sir--brim full of

it!  And copper, coal,--everything--everything you can think of!  Now,

I'll tell you what I'll, do.  I'll reserve everything except the iron,

and I'll sell them the iron property for $15,000 cash, I to go in with

them and own an undivided interest of one-half the concern--or the stock,

as you may say.  I'm out of business, and I'd just as soon help run the

thing as not.  Now how does that strike you?"



"Well, I am only an agent of these people, who are friends of mine, and

I am not even paid for my services.  To tell you the truth, I have tried

to persuade them not to go into the thing; and I have come square out

with their offer, without throwing out any feelers--and I did it in the

hope that you would refuse.  A man pretty much always refuses another

man's first offer, no matter what it is.  But I have performed my duty,

and will take pleasure in telling them what you say."



He was about to rise.  Hawkins said,



"Wait a bit."



Hawkins thought again.  And the substance of his thought was: "This

is a deep man; this is a very deep man; I don't like his candor; your

ostentatiously candid business man's a deep fox--always a deep fox;

this man's that iron company himself--that's what he is; he wants that

property, too; I am not so blind but I can see that; he don't want the

company to go into this thing--O, that's very good; yes, that's very

good indeed--stuff! he'll be back here tomorrow, sure, and take my offer;

take it?  I'll risk anything he is suffering to take it now; here--I must

mind what I'm about.  What has started this sudden excitement about iron?

I wonder what is in the wind? just as sure as I'm alive this moment,

there's something tremendous stirring in iron speculation" [here Hawkins

got up and began to pace the floor with excited eyes and with gesturing

hands]--"something enormous going on in iron, without the shadow of a

doubt, and here I sit mousing in the dark and never knowing anything

about it; great heaven, what an escape I've made! this underhanded

mercenary creature might have taken me up--and ruined me! but I have

escaped, and I warrant me I'll not put my foot into--"



He stopped and turned toward the stranger; saying:



"I have made you a proposition, you have not accepted it, and I desire

that you will consider that I have made none.  At the same time my

conscience will not allow me to--.  Please alter the figures I named to

thirty thousand dollars, if you will, and let the proposition go to the

company--I will stick to it if it breaks my heart!"  The stranger looked

amused, and there was a pretty well defined touch of surprise in his

expression, too, but Hawkins never noticed it.  Indeed he scarcely

noticed anything or knew what he was about.  The man left; Hawkins flung

himself into a chair; thought a few moments, then glanced around, looked

frightened, sprang to the door----



"Too late--too late!  He's gone!  Fool that I am! always a fool!  Thirty

thousand--ass that I am!  Oh, why didn't I say fifty thousand!"



He plunged his hands into his hair and leaned his elbows on his knees,

and fell to rocking himself back and forth in anguish.  Mrs. Hawkins

sprang in, beaming:



"Well, Si?"



"Oh, con-found the con-founded--con-found it, Nancy.  I've gone and done

it, now!"



"Done what Si for mercy's sake!"



"Done everything!  Ruined everything!"



"Tell me, tell me, tell me!  Don't keep a body in such suspense.  Didn't

he buy, after all?  Didn't he make an offer?"



Offer?  He offered $10,000 for our land, and----"



"Thank the good providence from the very bottom of my heart of hearts!

What sort of ruin do you call that, Si!"



"Nancy, do you suppose I listened to such a preposterous proposition?

No!  Thank fortune I'm not a simpleton!  I saw through the pretty scheme

in a second.  It's a vast iron speculation!--millions upon millions in

it!  But fool as I am I told him he could have half the iron property for

thirty thousand--and if I only had him back here he couldn't touch it for

a cent less than a quarter of a million!"



Mrs. Hawkins looked up white and despairing:



"You threw away this chance, you let this man go, and we in this awful

trouble?  You don't mean it, you can't mean it!"



"Throw it away?  Catch me at it!  Why woman, do you suppose that man

don't know what he is about?  Bless you, he'll be back fast enough to-

morrow."



"Never, never, never.  He never will comeback.  I don't know what is to

become of us.  I don't know what in the world is to become of us."



A shade of uneasiness came into Hawkins's face.  He said:



"Why, Nancy, you--you can't believe what you are saying."



"Believe it, indeed?  I know it, Si.  And I know that we haven't a cent

in the world, and we've sent ten thousand dollars a-begging."



"Nancy, you frighten me.  Now could that man--is it possible that I--

hanged if I don't believe I have missed a chance!  Don't grieve, Nancy,

don't grieve.  I'll go right after him.  I'll take--I'll take--what a

fool I am!--I'll take anything he'll give!"



The next instant he left the house on a run.  But the man was no longer

in the town.  Nobody knew where he belonged or whither he had gone.

Hawkins came slowly back, watching wistfully but hopelessly for the

stranger, and lowering his price steadily with his sinking heart.  And

when his foot finally pressed his own threshold, the value he held the

entire Tennessee property at was five hundred dollars--two hundred down

and the rest in three equal annual payments, without interest.



There was a sad gathering at the Hawkins fireside the next night.  All

the children were present but Clay.  Mr. Hawkins said:



"Washington, we seem to be hopelessly fallen, hopelessly involved.  I am

ready to give up.  I do not know where to turn--I never have been down so

low before, I never have seen things so dismal.  There are many mouths to

feed; Clay is at work; we must lose you, also, for a little while, my

boy.  But it will not be long--the Tennessee land----"



He stopped, and was conscious of a blush.  There was silence for a

moment, and then Washington--now a lank, dreamy-eyed stripling between

twenty-two and twenty-three years of age--said:



"If Col. Sellers would come for me, I would go and stay with him a while,

till the Tennessee land is sold.  He has often wanted me to come, ever

since he moved to Hawkeye."



"I'm afraid he can't well come for you, Washington.  From what I can

hear--not from him of course, but from others--he is not far from as bad

off as we are--and his family is as large, too.  He might find something

for you to do, maybe, but you'd better try to get to him yourself,

Washington--it's only thirty miles."



"But how can I, father?  There's no stage or anything."



"And if there were, stages require money.  A stage goes from Swansea,

five miles from here.  But it would be cheaper to walk."



"Father, they must know you there, and no doubt they would credit you in

a moment, for a little stage ride like that.  Couldn't you write and ask

them?"



"Couldn't you, Washington--seeing it's you that wants the ride?  And what

do you think you'll do, Washington, when you get to Hawkeye?  Finish your

invention for making window-glass opaque?"



"No, sir, I have given that up.  I almost knew I could do it, but it was

so tedious and troublesome I quit it."



"I was afraid of it, my boy.  Then I suppose you'll finish your plan of

coloring hen's eggs by feeding a peculiar diet to the hen?"



"No, sir.  I believe I have found out the stuff that will do it, but it

kills the hen; so I have dropped that for the present, though I can take

it up again some day when I learn how to manage the mixture better."



"Well, what have you got on hand--anything?"



"Yes, sir, three or four things.  I think they are all good and can all

be done, but they are tiresome, and besides they require money.  But as

soon as the land is sold----"



"Emily, were you about to say something?" said Hawkins.



Yes, sir.  If you are willing, I will go to St. Louis.  That will make

another mouth less to feed.  Mrs. Buckner has always wanted me to come."



"But the money, child?"



"Why I think she would send it, if you would write her--and I know she

would wait for her pay till----"



"Come, Laura, let's hear from you, my girl."



Emily and Laura were about the same age--between seventeen and eighteen.

Emily was fair and pretty, girlish and diffident--blue eyes and light

hair.  Laura had a proud bearing, and a somewhat mature look; she had

fine, clean-cut features, her complexion was pure white and contrasted

vividly with her black hair and eyes; she was not what one calls pretty--

she was beautiful.  She said:



"I will go to St. Louis, too, sir.  I will find a way to get there.

I will make a way.  And I will find a way to help myself along, and do

what I can to help the rest, too."



She spoke it like a princess.  Mrs. Hawkins smiled proudly and kissed

her, saying in a tone of fond reproof:



"So one of my girls is going to turn out and work for her living!  It's

like your pluck and spirit, child, but we will hope that we haven't got

quite down to that, yet."



The girl's eyes beamed affection under her mother's caress.  Then she

straightened up, folded her white hands in her lap and became a splendid

ice-berg.  Clay's dog put up his brown nose for a little attention, and

got it.  He retired under the table with an apologetic yelp, which did

not affect the iceberg.



Judge Hawkins had written and asked Clay to return home and consult with

him upon family affairs.  He arrived the evening after this conversation,

and the whole household gave him a rapturous welcome.  He brought sadly

needed help with him, consisting of the savings of a year and a half of

work--nearly two hundred dollars in money.



It was a ray of sunshine which (to this easy household) was the earnest

of a clearing sky.



Bright and early in the morning the family were astir, and all were busy

preparing Washington for his journey--at least all but Washington

himself, who sat apart, steeped in a reverie.  When the time for his

departure came, it was easy to see how fondly all loved him and how hard

it was to let him go, notwithstanding they had often seen him go before,

in his St. Louis schooling days.  In the most matter-of-course way they

had borne the burden of getting him ready for his trip, never seeming to

think of his helping in the matter; in the same matter-of-course way Clay

had hired a horse and cart; and now that the good-byes were ended he

bundled Washington's baggage in and drove away with the exile.



At Swansea Clay paid his stage fare, stowed him away in the vehicle, and

saw him off.  Then he returned home and reported progress, like a

committee of the whole.



Clay remained at home several days.  He held many consultations with his

mother upon the financial condition of the family, and talked once with

his father upon the same subject, but only once.  He found a change in

that quarter which was distressing; years of fluctuating fortune had done

their work; each reverse had weakened the father's spirit and impaired

his energies; his last misfortune seemed to have left hope and ambition

dead within him; he had no projects, formed no plans--evidently he was a

vanquished man.  He looked worn and tired.  He inquired into Clay's

affairs and prospects, and when he found that Clay was doing pretty well

and was likely to do still better, it was plain that he resigned himself

with easy facility to look to the son for a support; and he said, "Keep

yourself informed of poor Washington's condition and movements, and help

him along all you can, Clay."



The younger children, also, seemed relieved of all fears and distresses,

and very ready and willing to look to Clay for a livelihood.  Within

three days a general tranquility and satisfaction reigned in the

household.  Clay's hundred and eighty or ninety, dollars had worked a

wonder.  The family were as contented, now, and as free from care as they

could have been with a fortune.  It was well that Mrs. Hawkins held the

purse otherwise the treasure would have lasted but a very little while.



It took but a trifle to pay Hawkins's outstanding obligations, for he had

always had a horror of debt.



When Clay bade his home good-bye and set out to return to the field of

his labors, he was conscious that henceforth he was to have his father's

family on his hands as pensioners; but he did not allow himself to chafe

at the thought, for he reasoned that his father had dealt by him with a

free hand and a loving one all his life, and now that hard fortune had

broken his spirit it ought to be a pleasure, not a pain, to work for him.

The younger children were born and educated dependents.  They had never

been taught to do anything for themselves, and it did not seem to occur

to them to make an attempt now.



The girls would not have been permitted to work for a living under any

circumstances whatever.  It was a southern family, and of good blood;

and for any person except Laura, either within or without the household

to have suggested such an idea would have brought upon the suggester the

suspicion of being a lunatic.









CHAPTER VII.



          Via, Pecunia! when she's run and gone

          And fled, and dead, then will I fetch her again

          With aqua vita, out of an old hogshead!

          While there are lees of wine, or dregs of beer,

          I'll never want her!  Coin her out of cobwebs,

          Dust, but I'll have her! raise wool upon egg-shells,

          Sir, and make grass grow out of marrow-bones,

          To make her come!

                                        B. Jonson.



Bearing Washington Hawkins and his fortunes, the stage-coach tore out of

Swansea at a fearful gait, with horn tooting gaily and half the town

admiring from doors and windows.  But it did not tear any more after it

got to the outskirts; it dragged along stupidly enough, then--till it

came in sight of the next hamlet; and then the bugle tooted gaily again

and again the vehicle went tearing by the horses.  This sort of conduct

marked every entry to a station and every exit from it; and so in those

days children grew up with the idea that stage-coaches always tore and

always tooted; but they also grew up with the idea that pirates went into

action in their Sunday clothes, carrying the black flag in one hand and

pistolling people with the other, merely because they were so represented

in the pictures--but these illusions vanished when later years brought

their disenchanting wisdom.  They learned then that the stagecoach is but

a poor, plodding, vulgar thing in the solitudes of the highway; and that

the pirate is only a seedy, unfantastic "rough," when he is out of the

pictures.



Toward evening, the stage-coach came thundering into Hawkeye with a

perfectly triumphant ostentation--which was natural and proper, for

Hawkey a was a pretty large town for interior Missouri.  Washington,

very stiff and tired and hungry, climbed out, and wondered how he was to

proceed now.  But his difficulty was quickly solved.  Col. Sellers came

down the street on a run and arrived panting for breath.  He said:



"Lord bless you--I'm glad to see you, Washington--perfectly delighted to

see you, my boy!  I got your message.  Been on the look-out for you.

Heard the stage horn, but had a party I couldn't shake off--man that's

got an enormous thing on hand--wants me to put some capital into it--and

I tell you, my boy, I could do worse, I could do a deal worse.  No, now,

let that luggage alone; I'll fix that.  Here, Jerry, got anything to do?

All right-shoulder this plunder and follow me.  Come along, Washington.

Lord I'm glad to see you!  Wife and the children are just perishing to

look at you.  Bless you, they won't know you, you've grown so.  Folks all

well, I suppose?  That's good--glad to hear that.  We're always going to

run down and see them, but I'm into so many operations, and they're not

things a man feels like trusting to other people, and so somehow we keep

putting it off.  Fortunes in them!  Good gracious, it's the country to

pile up wealth in!  Here we are--here's where the Sellers dynasty hangs

out.  Hump it on the door-step, Jerry--the blackest niggro in the State,

Washington, but got a good heart--mighty likely boy, is Jerry.  And now I

suppose you've got to have ten cents, Jerry.  That's all right--when a

man works for me--when a man--in the other pocket, I reckon--when a man--

why, where the mischief as that portmonnaie!--when a--well now that's

odd--Oh, now I remember, must have left it at the bank; and b'George I've

left my check-book, too--Polly says I ought to have a nurse--well, no

matter.  Let me have a dime, Washington, if you've got--ah, thanks.  Now

clear out, Jerry, your complexion has brought on the twilight half an

hour ahead of time.  Pretty fair joke--pretty fair.  Here he is, Polly!

Washington's come, children! come now, don't eat him up--finish him in

the house.  Welcome, my boy, to a mansion that is proud to shelter the

son of the best man that walks on the ground.  Si Hawkins has been a good

friend to me, and I believe I can say that whenever I've had a chance to

put him into a good thing I've done it, and done it pretty cheerfully,

too.  I put him into that sugar speculation--what a grand thing that was,

if we hadn't held on too long!"



True enough; but holding on too long had utterly ruined both of them;

and the saddest part of it was, that they never had had so much money to

lose before, for Sellers's sale of their mule crop that year in New

Orleans had been a great financial success.  If he had kept out of sugar

and gone back home content to stick to mules it would have been a happy

wisdom.  As it was, he managed to kill two birds with one stone--that is

to say, he killed the sugar speculation by holding for high rates till he

had to sell at the bottom figure, and that calamity killed the mule that

laid the golden egg--which is but a figurative expression and will be so

understood.  Sellers had returned home cheerful but empty-handed, and the

mule business lapsed into other hands.  The sale of the Hawkins property

by the Sheriff had followed, and the Hawkins hearts been torn to see

Uncle Dan'l and his wife pass from the auction-block into the hands of a

negro trader and depart for the remote South to be seen no more by the

family.  It had seemed like seeing their own flesh and blood sold into

banishment.



Washington was greatly pleased with the Sellers mansion.  It was a two-

story-and-a-half brick, and much more stylish than any of its neighbors.

He was borne to the family sitting room in triumph by the swarm of little

Sellerses, the parents following with their arms about each other's

waists.



The whole family were poorly and cheaply dressed; and the clothing,

although neat and clean, showed many evidences of having seen long

service.  The Colonel's "stovepipe" hat was napless and shiny with much

polishing, but nevertheless it had an almost convincing expression about

it of having been just purchased new.  The rest of his clothing was

napless and shiny, too, but it had the air of being entirely satisfied

with itself and blandly sorry for other people's clothes.  It was growing

rather dark in the house, and the evening air was chilly, too.  Sellers

said:



"Lay off your overcoat, Washington, and draw up to the stove and make

yourself at home--just consider yourself under your own shingles my boy--

I'll have a fire going, in a jiffy.  Light the lamp, Polly, dear, and

let's have things cheerful just as glad to see you, Washington, as if

you'd been lost a century and we'd found you again!"



By this time the Colonel was conveying a lighted match into a poor little

stove.  Then he propped the stove door to its place by leaning the poker

against it, for the hinges had retired from business.  This door framed

a small square of isinglass, which now warmed up with a faint glow.

Mrs. Sellers lit a cheap, showy lamp, which dissipated a good deal of the

gloom, and then everybody gathered into the light and took the stove into

close companionship.



The children climbed all over Sellers, fondled him, petted him, and were

lavishly petted in return.  Out from this tugging, laughing, chattering

disguise of legs and arms and little faces, the Colonel's voice worked

its way and his tireless tongue ran blithely on without interruption;

and the purring little wife, diligent with her knitting, sat near at hand

and looked happy and proud and grateful; and she listened as one who

listens to oracles and, gospels and whose grateful soul is being

refreshed with the bread of life.  Bye and bye the children quieted down

to listen; clustered about their father, and resting their elbows on his

legs, they hung upon his words as if he were uttering the music of the

spheres.



A dreary old hair-cloth sofa against the wall; a few damaged chairs; the

small table the lamp stood on; the crippled stove--these things

constituted the furniture of the room.  There was no carpet on the floor;

on the wall were occasional square-shaped interruptions of the general

tint of the plaster which betrayed that there used to be pictures in the

house--but there were none now.  There were no mantel ornaments, unless

one might bring himself to regard as an ornament a clock which never came

within fifteen strokes of striking the right time, and whose hands always

hitched together at twenty-two minutes past anything and traveled in

company the rest of the way home.



"Remarkable clock!" said Sellers, and got up and wound it.  "I've been

offered--well, I wouldn't expect you to believe what I've been offered

for that clock.  Old Gov. Hager never sees me but he says, 'Come, now,

Colonel, name your price--I must have that clock!'  But my goodness I'd

as soon think of selling my wife.  As I was saying to ---- silence in the

court, now, she's begun to strike!  You can't talk against her--you have

to just be patient and hold up till she's said her say.  Ah well, as I

was saying, when--she's beginning again!  Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one,

twenty-two, twen----ah, that's all.--Yes, as I was saying to old Judge--

--go it, old girl, don't mind me.--Now how is that?----isn't that a

good, spirited tone?  She can wake the dead!  Sleep?  Why you might as

well try to sleep in a thunder-factory.  Now just listen at that.  She'll

strike a hundred and fifty, now, without stopping,--you'll see.  There

ain't another clock like that in Christendom."



Washington hoped that this might be true, for the din was distracting--

though the family, one and all, seemed filled with joy; and the more the

clock "buckled down to her work" as the Colonel expressed it, and the

more insupportable the clatter became, the more enchanted they all

appeared to be.  When there was silence, Mrs Sellers lifted upon

Washington a face that beamed with a childlike pride, and said:



"It belonged to his grandmother."



The look and the tone were a plain call for admiring surprise, and

therefore Washington said (it was the only thing that offered itself at

the moment:)



"Indeed!"



"Yes, it did, didn't it father!" exclaimed one of the twins.  "She was my

great-grandmother--and George's too; wasn't she, father!  You never saw

her, but Sis has seen her, when Sis was a baby-didn't you, Sis!  Sis has

seen her most a hundred times.  She was awful deef--she's dead, now.

Aint she, father!"



All the children chimed in, now, with one general Babel of information

about deceased--nobody offering to read the riot act or seeming to

discountenance the insurrection or disapprove of it in any way--but the

head twin drowned all the turmoil and held his own against the field:



"It's our clock, now--and it's ,got wheels inside of it, and a thing that

flatters every time she strikes--don't it, father!  Great-grandmother

died before hardly any of us was born--she was an Old-School Baptist and

had warts all over her--you ask father if she didn't.  She had an uncle

once that was bald-headed and used to have fits; he wasn't our uncle,

I don't know what he was to us--some kin or another I reckon--father's

seen him a thousand times--hain't you, father!  We used to have a calf

that et apples and just chawed up dishrags like nothing, and if you stay

here you'll see lots of funerals--won't he, Sis!  Did you ever see a

house afire?  I have!  Once me and Jim Terry----"



But Sellers began to speak now, and the storm ceased.  He began to tell

about an enormous speculation he was thinking of embarking some capital

in--a speculation which some London bankers had been over to consult with

him about--and soon he was building glittering pyramids of coin, and

Washington was presently growing opulent under the magic of his

eloquence.  But at the same time Washington was not able to ignore the

cold entirely.  He was nearly as close to the stove as he could get,

and yet he could not persuade himself, that he felt the slightest heat,

notwithstanding the isinglass' door was still gently and serenely

glowing.  He tried to get a trifle closer to the stove, and the

consequence was, he tripped the supporting poker and the stove-door

tumbled to the floor.  And then there was a revelation--there was nothing

in the stove but a lighted tallow-candle!  The poor youth blushed and

felt as if lie must die with shame.  But the Colonel was only

disconcerted for a moment--he straightway found his voice again:



"A little idea of my own, Washington--one of the greatest things in the

world!  You must write and tell your father about it--don't forget that,

now.  I have been reading up some European Scientific reports--friend of

mine, Count Fugier, sent them to me--sends me all sorts of things from

Paris--he thinks the world of me, Fugier does.  Well, I saw that the

Academy of France had been testing the properties of heat, and they came

to the conclusion that it was a nonconductor or something like that,

and of course its influence must necessarily be deadly in nervous

organizations with excitable temperaments, especially where there is any

tendency toward rheumatic affections.  Bless you I saw in a moment what

was the matter with us, and says I, out goes your fires!--no more slow

torture and certain death for me, sir.  What you want is the appearance

of heat, not the heat itself--that's the idea.  Well how to do it was the

next thing.  I just put my head, to work, pegged away, a couple of days,

and here you are!  Rheumatism?  Why a man can't any more start a case of

rheumatism in this house than he can shake an opinion out of a mummy!

Stove with a candle in it and a transparent door--that's it--it has been

the salvation of this family.  Don't you fail to write your father about

it, Washington.  And tell him the idea is mine--I'm no more conceited

than most people, I reckon, but you know it is human nature for a man to

want credit for a thing like that."



Washington said with his blue lips that he would, but he said in his

secret heart that he would promote no such iniquity.  He tried to believe

in the healthfulness of the invention, and succeeded tolerably well;

but after all he could not feel that good health in a frozen, body was

any real improvement on the rheumatism.









CHAPTER VIII.



         --Whan pe horde is thynne, as of seruyse,

          Nought replenesshed with grete diuersite

          Of mete & drinke, good chere may then suffise

          With honest talkyng----

                                   The Book of Curtesye.



          MAMMON.  Come on, sir.  Now, you set your foot on shore

          In Novo Orbe; here's the rich Peru:

          And there within, sir, are the golden mines,

          Great Solomon's Ophir!----

                                   B. Jonson



The supper at Col. Sellers's was not sumptuous, in the beginning, but it

improved on acquaintance.  That is to say, that what Washington regarded

at first sight as mere lowly potatoes, presently became awe-inspiring

agricultural productions that had been reared in some ducal garden beyond

the sea, under the sacred eye of the duke himself, who had sent them to

Sellers; the bread was from corn which could be grown in only one favored

locality in the earth and only a favored few could get it; the Rio

coffee, which at first seemed execrable to the taste, took to itself an

improved flavor when Washington was told to drink it slowly and not hurry

what should be a lingering luxury in order to be fully appreciated--it

was from the private stores of a Brazilian nobleman with an

unrememberable name.  The Colonel's tongue was a magician's wand that

turned dried apples into figs and water into wine as easily as it could

change a hovel into a palace and present poverty into imminent future

riches.



Washington slept in a cold bed in a carpetless room and woke up in a

palace in the morning; at least the palace lingered during the moment

that he was rubbing his eyes and getting his bearings--and then it

disappeared and he recognized that the Colonel's inspiring talk had been

influencing his dreams.  Fatigue had made him sleep late; when he entered

the sitting room he noticed that the old hair-cloth sofa was absent; when

he sat down to breakfast the Colonel tossed six or seven dollars in bills

on the table, counted them over, said he was a little short and must call

upon his banker; then returned the bills to his wallet with the

indifferent air of a man who is used to money.  The breakfast was not an

improvement upon the supper, but the Colonel talked it up and transformed

it into an oriental feast.  Bye and bye, he said:



"I intend to look out for you, Washington, my boy.  I hunted up a place

for you yesterday, but I am not referring to that,--now--that is a mere

livelihood--mere bread and butter; but when I say I mean to look out for

you I mean something very different.  I mean to put things in your way

than will make a mere livelihood a trifling thing.  I'll put you in a way

to make more money than you'll ever know what to do with.  You'll be

right here where I can put my hand on you when anything turns up.  I've

got some prodigious operations on foot; but I'm keeping quiet; mum's the

word; your old hand don't go around pow-wowing and letting everybody see

his k'yards and find out his little game.  But all in good time,

Washington, all in good time.  You'll see.  Now there's an operation in

corn that looks well.  Some New York men are trying to get me to go into

it--buy up all the growing crops and just boss the market when they

mature--ah I tell you it's a great thing.  And it only costs a trifle;

two millions or two and a half will do it.  I haven't exactly promised

yet--there's no hurry--the more indifferent I seem, you know, the more

anxious those fellows will get.  And then there is the hog speculation--

that's bigger still.  We've got quiet men at work," [he was very

impressive here,] "mousing around, to get propositions out of all the

farmers in the whole west and northwest for the hog crop, and other

agents quietly getting propositions and terms out of all the

manufactories--and don't you see, if we can get all the hogs and all the

slaughter horses into our hands on the dead quiet--whew! it would take

three ships to carry the money.--I've looked into the thing--calculated

all the chances for and all the chances against, and though I shake my

head and hesitate and keep on thinking, apparently, I've got my mind made

up that if the thing can be done on a capital of six millions, that's the

horse to put up money on!  Why Washington--but what's the use of talking

about it--any man can see that there's whole Atlantic oceans of cash in

it, gulfs and bays thrown in.  But there's a bigger thing than that, yes

bigger----"



"Why Colonel, you can't want anything bigger!" said Washington, his eyes

blazing.  "Oh, I wish I could go into either of those speculations--I

only wish I had money--I wish I wasn't cramped and kept down and fettered

with poverty, and such prodigious chances lying right here in sight!

Oh, it is a fearful thing to be poor.  But don't throw away those things

--they are so splendid and I can see how sure they are.  Don't throw them

away for something still better and maybe fail in it!  I wouldn't,

Colonel.  I would stick to these.  I wish father were here and were his

old self again--Oh, he never in his life had such chances as these are.

Colonel; you can't improve on these--no man can improve on them!"



A sweet, compassionate smile played about the Colonel's features, and he

leaned over the table with the air of a man who is "going to show you"

and do it without the least trouble:



"Why Washington, my boy, these things are nothing.  They look large of

course--they look large to a novice, but to a man who has been all his

life accustomed to large operations--shaw!  They're well enough to while

away an idle hour with, or furnish a bit of employment that will give a

trifle of idle capital a chance to earn its bread while it is waiting for

something to do, but--now just listen a moment--just let me give you an

idea of what we old veterans of commerce call 'business.'  Here's the

Rothschild's proposition--this is between you and me, you understand----"



Washington nodded three or four times impatiently, and his glowing eyes

said, "Yes, yes--hurry--I understand----"



----"for I wouldn't have it get out for a fortune.  They want me to go in

with them on the sly--agent was here two weeks ago about it--go in on the

sly" [voice down to an impressive whisper, now,] "and buy up a hundred

and thirteen wild cat banks in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois and

Missouri--notes of these banks are at all sorts of discount now--average

discount of the hundred and thirteen is forty-four per cent--buy them all

up, you see, and then all of a sudden let the cat out of the bag!  Whiz!

the stock of every one of those wildcats would spin up to a tremendous

premium before you could turn a handspring--profit on the speculation not

a dollar less than forty millions!" [An eloquent pause, while the

marvelous vision settled into W.'s focus.]  "Where's your hogs now?

Why my dear innocent boy, we would just sit down on the front door-steps

and peddle banks like lucifer matches!"



Washington finally got his breath and said:



"Oh, it is perfectly wonderful!  Why couldn't these things have happened

in father's day?  And I--it's of no use--they simply lie before my face

and mock me.  There is nothing for me but to stand helpless and see other

people reap the astonishing harvest."



"Never mind, Washington, don't you worry.  I'll fix you.  There's plenty

of chances.  How much money have you got?"



In the presence of so many millions, Washington could not keep from

blushing when he had to confess that he had but eighteen dollars in the

world.



"Well, all right--don't despair.  Other people have been obliged to begin

with less.  I have a small idea that may develop into something for us

both, all in good time.  Keep your money close and add to it.  I'll make

it breed.  I've been experimenting (to pass away the time), on a little

preparation for curing sore eyes--a kind of decoction nine-tenths water

and the other tenth drugs that don't cost more than a dollar a barrel;

I'm still experimenting; there's one ingredient wanted yet to perfect the

thing, and somehow I can't just manage to hit upon the thing that's

necessary, and I don't dare talk with a chemist, of course.  But I'm

progressing, and before many weeks I wager the country will ring with the

fame of Beriah Sellers' Infallible Imperial Oriental Optic Liniment and

Salvation for Sore Eyes--the Medical Wonder of the Age!  Small bottles

fifty cents, large ones a dollar.  Average cost, five and seven cents for

the two sizes.



"The first year sell, say, ten thousand bottles in Missouri, seven

thousand in Iowa, three thousand in Arkansas, four thousand in Kentucky,

six thousand in Illinois, and say twenty-five thousand in the rest of the

country.  Total, fifty five thousand bottles; profit clear of all

expenses, twenty thousand dollars at the very lowest calculation.  All

the capital needed is to manufacture the first two thousand bottles--

say a hundred and fifty dollars--then the money would begin to flow in.

The second year, sales would reach 200,000 bottles--clear profit, say,

$75,000--and in the meantime the great factory would be building in St.

Louis, to cost, say, $100,000.  The third year we could, easily sell

1,000,000 bottles in the United States and----"



"O, splendid!" said Washington.  "Let's commence right away--let's----"



"----1,000,000 bottles in the United States--profit at least $350,000--

and then it would begin to be time to turn our attention toward the real

idea of the business."



"The real idea of it!  Ain't $350,000 a year a pretty real----"



"Stuff!  Why what an infant you are, Washington--what a guileless, short-

sighted, easily-contented innocent you, are, my poor little country-bred

know-nothing!  Would I go to all that trouble and bother for the poor

crumbs a body might pick up in this country?  Now do I look like a man

who----does my history suggest that I am a man who deals in trifles,

contents himself with the narrow horizon that hems in the common herd,

sees no further than the end of his nose?  Now you know that that is not

me--couldn't be me.  You ought to know that if I throw my time and

abilities into a patent medicine, it's a patent medicine whose field of

operations is the solid earth! its clients the swarming nations that

inhabit it!  Why what is the republic of America for an eye-water

country?  Lord bless you, it is nothing but a barren highway that you've

got to cross to get to the true eye-water market!  Why, Washington, in

the Oriental countries people swarm like the sands of the desert; every

square mile of ground upholds its thousands upon thousands of struggling

human creatures--and every separate and individual devil of them's got

the ophthalmia!  It's as natural to them as noses are--and sin.  It's

born with them, it stays with them, it's all that some of them have left

when they die.  Three years of introductory trade in the orient and what

will be the result?  Why, our headquarters would be in Constantinople and

our hindquarters in Further India!  Factories and warehouses in Cairo,

Ispahan, Bagdad, Damascus, Jerusalem, Yedo, Peking, Bangkok, Delhi,

Bombay--and Calcutta!  Annual income--well, God only knows how many

millions and millions apiece!"



Washington was so dazed, so bewildered--his heart and his eyes had

wandered so far away among the strange lands beyond the seas, and such

avalanches of coin and currency had fluttered and jingled confusedly down

before him, that he was now as one who has been whirling round and round

for a time, and, stopping all at once, finds his surroundings still

whirling and all objects a dancing chaos.  However, little by little the

Sellers family cooled down and crystalized into shape, and the poor room

lost its glitter and resumed its poverty.  Then the youth found his voice

and begged Sellers to drop everything and hurry up the eye-water; and he

got his eighteen dollars and tried to force it upon the Colonel--pleaded

with him to take it--implored him to do it.  But the Colonel would not;

said he would not need the capital (in his native magnificent way he

called that eighteen dollars Capital) till the eye-water was an

accomplished fact.  He made Washington easy in his mind, though, by

promising that he would call for it just as soon as the invention was

finished, and he added the glad tidings that nobody but just they two

should be admitted to a share in the speculation.



When Washington left the breakfast table he could have worshiped that

man.  Washington was one of that kind of people whose hopes are in the

very, clouds one day and in the gutter the next.  He walked on air, now.

The Colonel was ready to take him around and introduce him to the

employment he had found for him, but Washington begged for a few moments

in which to write home; with his kind of people, to ride to-day's new

interest to death and put off yesterday's till another time, is nature

itself.  He ran up stairs and wrote glowingly, enthusiastically, to his

mother about the hogs and the corn, the banks and the eye-water--and

added a few inconsequential millions to each project.  And he said that

people little dreamed what a man Col. Sellers was, and that the world

would open its eyes when it found out.  And he closed his letter thus:



"So make yourself perfectly easy, mother-in a little while you shall have

everything you want, and more.  I am not likely to stint you in anything,

I fancy.  This money will not be for me, alone, but for all of us.

I want all to share alike; and there is going to be far more for each

than one person can spend.  Break it to father cautiously--you understand

the need of that--break it to him cautiously, for he has had such cruel

hard fortune, and is so stricken by it that great good news might

prostrate him more surely than even bad, for he is used to the bad but

is grown sadly unaccustomed to the other.  Tell Laura--tell all the

children.  And write to Clay about it if he is not with you yet.  You may

tell Clay that whatever I get he can freely share in-freely.  He knows

that that is true--there will be no need that I should swear to that to

make him believe it.  Good-bye--and mind what I say: Rest perfectly easy,

one and all of you, for our troubles are nearly at an end."



Poor lad, he could not know that his mother would cry some loving,

compassionate tears over his letter and put off the family with a

synopsis of its contents which conveyed a deal of love to then but not

much idea of his prospects or projects.  And he never dreamed that such a

joyful letter could sadden her and fill her night with sighs, and

troubled thoughts, and bodings of the future, instead of filling it with

peace and blessing it with restful sleep.



When the letter was done, Washington and the Colonel sallied forth, and

as they walked along Washington learned what he was to be.  He was to be

a clerk in a real estate office.  Instantly the fickle youth's dreams

forsook the magic eye-water and flew back to the Tennessee Land.  And the

gorgeous possibilities of that great domain straightway began to occupy

his imagination to such a degree that he could scarcely manage to keep

even enough of his attention upon the Colonel's talk to retain the

general run of what he was saying.  He was glad it was a real estate

office--he was a made man now, sure.



The Colonel said that General Boswell was a rich man and had a good and

growing business; and that Washington's work world be light and he would

get forty dollars a month and be boarded and lodged in the General's

family--which was as good as ten dollars more; and even better, for he

could not live as well even at the "City Hotel" as he would there, and

yet the hotel charged fifteen dollars a month where a man had a good

room.



General Boswell was in his office; a comfortable looking place, with

plenty of outline maps hanging about the walls and in the windows, and

a spectacled man was marking out another one on a long table.  The office

was in the principal street.  The General received Washington with a

kindly but reserved politeness.  Washington rather liked his looks.

He was about fifty years old, dignified, well preserved and well dressed.

After the Colonel took his leave, the General talked a while with

Washington--his talk consisting chiefly of instructions about the

clerical duties of the place.  He seemed satisfied as to Washington's

ability to take care of the books, he was evidently a pretty fair

theoretical bookkeeper, and experience would soon harden theory into

practice.  By and by dinner-time came, and the two walked to the

General's house; and now Washington noticed an instinct in himself that

moved him to keep not in the General's rear, exactly, but yet not at his

side--somehow the old gentleman's dignity and reserve did not inspire

familiarity.









CHAPTER IX



Washington dreamed his way along the street, his fancy flitting from

grain to hogs, from hogs to banks, from banks to eyewater, from eye-water

to Tennessee Land, and lingering but a feverish moment upon each of these

fascinations.  He was conscious of but one outward thing, to wit, the

General, and he was really not vividly conscious of him.



Arrived at the finest dwelling in the town, they entered it and were at

home.  Washington was introduced to Mrs. Boswell, and his imagination was

on the point of flitting into the vapory realms of speculation again,

when a lovely girl of sixteen or seventeen came in.  This vision swept

Washington's mind clear of its chaos of glittering rubbish in an instant.

Beauty had fascinated him before; many times he had been in love even for

weeks at a time with the same object but his heart had never suffered so

sudden and so fierce an assault as this, within his recollection.



Louise Boswell occupied his mind and drifted among his multiplication

tables all the afternoon.  He was constantly catching himself in a

reverie--reveries made up of recalling how she looked when she first

burst upon him; how her voice thrilled him when she first spoke; how

charmed the very air seemed by her presence.  Blissful as the afternoon

was, delivered up to such a revel as this, it seemed an eternity, so

impatient was he to see the girl again.  Other afternoons like it

followed.  Washington plunged into this love affair as he plunged into

everything else--upon impulse and without reflection.  As the days went

by it seemed plain that he was growing in favor with Louise,--not

sweepingly so, but yet perceptibly, he fancied.  His attentions to her

troubled her father and mother a little, and they warned Louise, without

stating particulars or making allusions to any special person, that a

girl was sure to make a mistake who allowed herself to marry anybody but

a man who could support her well.



Some instinct taught Washington that his present lack of money would be

an obstruction, though possibly not a bar, to his hopes, and straightway

his poverty became a torture to him which cast all his former sufferings

under that held into the shade.  He longed for riches now as he had ever

longed for them before.



He had been once or twice to dine with Col. Sellers, and had been

discouraged to note that the Colonel's bill of fare was falling off both

in quantity and quality--a sign, he feared, that the lacking ingredient

in the eye-water still remained undiscovered--though Sellers always

explained that these changes in the family diet had been ordered by the

doctor, or suggested by some new scientific work the Colonel had stumbled

upon.  But it always turned out that the lacking ingredient was still

lacking--though it always appeared, at the same time, that the Colonel

was right on its heels.



Every time the Colonel came into the real estate office Washington's

heart bounded and his eyes lighted with hope, but it always turned out

that the Colonel was merely on the scent of some vast, undefined landed

speculation--although he was customarily able to say that he was nearer

to the all-necessary ingredient than ever, and could almost name the hour

when success would dawn.  And then Washington's heart world sink again

and a sigh would tell when it touched bottom.



About this time a letter came, saying that Judge Hawkins had been ailing

for a fortnight, and was now considered to be seriously ill.  It was

thought best that Washington should come home.  The news filled him with

grief, for he loved and honored his father; the Boswells were touched by

the youth's sorrow, and even the General unbent and said encouraging

things to him.--There was balm in this; but when Louise bade him good-

bye, and shook his hand and said, "Don't be cast down--it will all come

out right--I know it will all come out right," it seemed a blessed thing

to be in misfortune, and the tears that welled up to his eyes were the

messengers of an adoring and a grateful heart; and when the girl saw them

and answering tears came into her own eyes, Washington could hardly

contain the excess of happiness that poured into the cavities of his

breast that were so lately stored to the roof with grief.



All the way home he nursed his woe and exalted it.  He pictured himself

as she must be picturing him: a noble, struggling young spirit persecuted

by misfortune, but bravely and patiently waiting in the shadow of a dread

calamity and preparing to meet the blow as became one who was all too

used to hard fortune and the pitiless buffetings of fate.  These thoughts

made him weep, and weep more broken-heartedly than ever; and be wished

that she could see his sufferings now.



There was nothing significant in the fact that Louise, dreamy and

distraught, stood at her bedroom bureau that night, scribbling

"Washington" here and there over a sheet of paper.  But there was

something significant in the fact that she scratched the word out every

time she wrote it; examined the erasure critically to see if anybody

could guess at what the word had been; then buried it under a maze of

obliterating lines; and finally, as if still unsatisfied, burned the

paper.



When Washington reached home, he recognized at once how serious his

father's case was.  The darkened room, the labored breathing and

occasional moanings of the patient, the tip-toeing of the attendants and

their whispered consultations, were full of sad meaning.  For three or

four nights Mrs. Hawkins and Laura had been watching by the bedside; Clay

had arrived, preceding Washington by one day, and he was now added to the

corps of watchers.  Mr. Hawkins would have none but these three, though

neighborly assistance was offered by old friends.  From this time forth

three-hour watches were instituted, and day and night the watchers kept

their vigils.  By degrees Laura and her mother began to show wear, but

neither of them would yield a minute of their tasks to Clay.  He ventured

once to let the midnight hour pass without calling Laura, but he ventured

no more; there was that about her rebuke when he tried to explain, that

taught him that to let her sleep when she might be ministering to her

father's needs, was to rob her of moments that were priceless in her

eyes; he perceived that she regarded it as a privilege to watch, not a

burden.  And, he had noticed, also, that when midnight struck, the

patient turned his eyes toward the door, with an expectancy in them which

presently grew into a longing but brightened into contentment as soon

as the door opened and Laura appeared.  And he did not need Laura's

rebuke when he heard his father say:



"Clay is good, and you are tired, poor child; but I wanted you so."



"Clay is not good, father--he did not call me.  I would not have treated

him so.  How could you do it, Clay?"



Clay begged forgiveness and promised not to break faith again; and as he

betook him to his bed, he said to himself:  "It's a steadfast little

soul; whoever thinks he is doing the Duchess a kindness by intimating

that she is not sufficient for any undertaking she puts her hand to,

makes a mistake; and if I did not know it before, I know now that there

are surer ways of pleasing her than by trying to lighten her labor when

that labor consists in wearing herself out for the sake of a person she

loves."



A week drifted by, and all the while the patient sank lower and lower.

The night drew on that was to end all suspense.  It was a wintry one.

The darkness gathered, the snow was falling, the wind wailed plaintively

about the house or shook it with fitful gusts.  The doctor had paid his

last visit and gone away with that dismal remark to the nearest friend of

the family that he "believed there was nothing more that he could do"--

a remark which is always overheard by some one it is not meant for and

strikes a lingering half-conscious hope dead with a withering shock;

the medicine phials had been removed from the bedside and put out of

sight, and all things made orderly and meet for the solemn event that was

impending; the patient, with closed eyes, lay scarcely breathing; the

watchers sat by and wiped the gathering damps from his forehead while the

silent tears flowed down their faces; the deep hush was only interrupted

by sobs from the children, grouped about the bed.



After a time--it was toward midnight now--Mr. Hawkins roused out of a

doze, looked about him and was evidently trying to speak.  Instantly

Laura lifted his head and in a failing voice he said, while something of

the old light shone in his eyes:



"Wife--children--come nearer--nearer.  The darkness grows.  Let me see

you all, once more."



The group closed together at the bedside, and their tears and sobs came

now without restraint.



"I am leaving you in cruel poverty.  I have been--so foolish--so short-

sighted.  But courage!  A better day is--is coming.  Never lose sight of

the Tennessee Land!  Be wary.  There is wealth stored up for you there--

wealth that is boundless!  The children shall hold up their heads with

the best in the land, yet.  Where are the papers?--Have you got the

papers safe?  Show them--show them to me!"



Under his strong excitement his voice had gathered power and his last

sentences were spoken with scarcely a perceptible halt or hindrance.

With an effort he had raised himself almost without assistance to a

sitting posture.  But now the fire faded out of his eyes and be fell back

exhausted.  The papers were brought and held before him, and the

answering smile that flitted across his face showed that he was

satisfied.  He closed his eyes, and the signs of approaching dissolution

multiplied rapidly.  He lay almost motionless for a little while, then

suddenly partly raised his head and looked about him as one who peers

into a dim uncertain light.  He muttered:



"Gone?  No--I see you--still.  It is--it is-over.  But you are--safe.

Safe.  The Ten-----"



The voice died out in a whisper; the sentence was never finished.  The

emaciated fingers began to pick at the coverlet, a fatal sign.  After a

time there were no sounds but the cries of the mourners within and the

gusty turmoil of the wind without.  Laura had bent down and kissed her

father's lips as the spirit left the body; but she did not sob, or utter

any ejaculation; her tears flowed silently.  Then she closed the dead

eyes, and crossed the hands upon the breast; after a season, she kissed

the forehead reverently, drew the sheet up over the face, and then walked

apart and sat down with the look of one who is done with life and has no

further interest in its joys and sorrows, its hopes or its ambitions.

Clay buried his face in the coverlet of the bed; when the other children

and the mother realized that death was indeed come at last, they threw

themselves into each others' arms and gave way to a frenzy of grief.









CHAPTER X.



Only two or three days had elapsed since the funeral, when something

happened which was to change the drift of Laura's life somewhat, and

influence in a greater or lesser degree the formation of her character.



Major Lackland had once been a man of note in the State--a man of

extraordinary natural ability and as extraordinary learning.  He had been

universally trusted and honored in his day, but had finally, fallen into

misfortune; while serving his third term in Congress, and while upon the

point of being elevated to the Senate--which was considered the summit of

earthly aggrandizement in those days--he had yielded to temptation, when

in distress for money wherewith to save his estate; and sold his vote.

His crime was discovered, and his fall followed instantly.  Nothing could

reinstate him in the confidence of the people, his ruin was

irretrievable--his disgrace complete.  All doors were closed against him,

all men avoided him.  After years of skulking retirement and dissipation,

death had relieved him of his troubles at last, and his funeral followed

close upon that of Mr. Hawkins.  He died as he had latterly lived--wholly

alone and friendless.  He had no relatives--or if he had they did not

acknowledge him.  The coroner's jury found certain memoranda upon his

body and about the premises which revealed a fact not suspected by the

villagers before-viz., that Laura was not the child of Mr. and Mrs.

Hawkins.



The gossips were soon at work.  They were but little hampered by the fact

that the memoranda referred to betrayed nothing but the bare circumstance

that Laura's real parents were unknown, and stopped there.  So far from

being hampered by this, the gossips seemed to gain all the more freedom

from it.  They supplied all the missing information themselves, they

filled up all the blanks.  The town soon teemed with histories of Laura's

origin and secret history, no two versions precisely alike, but all

elaborate, exhaustive, mysterious and interesting, and all agreeing in

one vital particular-to-wit, that there was a suspicious cloud about her

birth, not to say a disreputable one.



Laura began to encounter cold looks, averted eyes and peculiar nods and

gestures which perplexed her beyond measure; but presently the pervading

gossip found its way to her, and she understood them--then.  Her pride

was stung.  She was astonished, and at first incredulous.  She was about

to ask her mother if there was any truth in these reports, but upon

second thought held her peace.  She soon gathered that Major Lackland's

memoranda seemed to refer to letters which had passed between himself and

Judge Hawkins.  She shaped her course without difficulty the day that

that hint reached her.



That night she sat in her room till all was still, and then she stole

into the garret and began a search.  She rummaged long among boxes of

musty papers relating to business matters of no, interest to her, but at

last she found several bundles of letters.  One bundle was marked

"private," and in that she found what she wanted.  She selected six or

eight letters from the package and began to devour their contents,

heedless of the cold.



By the dates, these letters were from five to seven years old.  They were

all from Major Lackland to Mr. Hawkins.  The substance of them was, that

some one in the east had been inquiring of Major Lackland about a lost

child and its parents, and that it was conjectured that the child might

be Laura.



Evidently some of the letters were missing, for the name of the inquirer

was not mentioned; there was a casual reference to "this handsome-

featured aristocratic gentleman," as if the reader and the writer were

accustomed to speak of him and knew who was meant.



In one letter the Major said he agreed with Mr. Hawkins that the inquirer

seemed not altogether on the wrong track; but he also agreed that it

would be best to keep quiet until more convincing developments were

forthcoming.



Another letter said that "the poor soul broke completely down when be saw

Laura's picture, and declared it must be she."



Still another said:



     "He seems entirely alone in the world, and his heart is so wrapped

     up in this thing that I believe that if it proved a false hope, it

     would kill him; I have persuaded him to wait a little while and go

     west when I go."



Another letter had this paragraph in it:



     "He is better one day and worse the next, and is out of his mind a

     good deal of the time.  Lately his case has developed a something

     which is a wonder to the hired nurses, but which will not be much of

     a marvel to you if you have read medical philosophy much.  It is

     this: his lost memory returns to him when he is delirious, and goes

     away again when he is himself-just as old Canada Joe used to talk

     the French patois of his boyhood in the delirium of typhus fever,

     though he could not do it when his mind was clear.  Now this poor

     gentleman's memory has always broken down before he reached the

     explosion of the steamer; he could only remember starting up the

     river with his wife and child, and he had an idea that there was a

     race, but he was not certain; he could not name the boat he was on;

     there was a dead blank of a month or more that supplied not an item

     to his recollection.  It was not for me to assist him, of course.

     But now in his delirium it all comes out: the names of the boats,

     every incident of the explosion, and likewise the details of his

     astonishing escape--that is, up to where, just as a yawl-boat was

     approaching him (he was clinging to the starboard wheel of the

     burning wreck at the time), a falling timber struck him on the head.

     But I will write out his wonderful escape in full to-morrow or next

     day.  Of course the physicians will not let me tell him now that our

     Laura is indeed his child--that must come later, when his health is

     thoroughly restored.  His case is not considered dangerous at all;

     he will recover presently, the doctors say.  But they insist that he

     must travel a little when he gets well--they recommend a short sea

     voyage, and they say he can be persuaded to try it if we continue to

     keep him in ignorance and promise to let him see L. as soon as he

     returns."



The letter that bore the latest date of all, contained this clause:



     "It is the most unaccountable thing in the world; the mystery

     remains as impenetrable as ever; I have hunted high and low for him,

     and inquired of everybody, but in vain; all trace of him ends at

     that hotel in New York; I never have seen or heard of him since,

     up to this day; he could hardly have sailed, for his name does not

     appear upon the books of any shipping office in New York or Boston

     or Baltimore.  How fortunate it seems, now, that we kept this thing

     to ourselves; Laura still has a father in you, and it is better for

     her that we drop this subject here forever."



That was all.  Random remarks here and there, being pieced together gave

Laura a vague impression of a man of fine presence, abort forty-three or

forty-five years of age, with dark hair and eyes, and a slight limp in

his walk--it was not stated which leg was defective.  And this indistinct

shadow represented her father.  She made an exhaustive search for the

missing letters, but found none.  They had probably been burned; and she

doubted not that the ones she had ferreted out would have shared the same

fate if Mr. Hawkins had not been a dreamer, void of method, whose mind

was perhaps in a state of conflagration over some bright new speculation

when he received them.



She sat long, with the letters in her lap, thinking--and unconsciously

freezing.  She felt like a lost person who has traveled down a long lane

in good hope of escape, and, just as the night descends finds his

progress barred by a bridge-less river whose further shore, if it has

one, is lost in the darkness.  If she could only have found these letters

a month sooner!  That was her thought.  But now the dead had carried

their secrets with them.  A dreary, melancholy settled down upon her.

An undefined sense of injury crept into her heart.  She grew very

miserable.



She had just reached the romantic age--the age when there is a sad

sweetness, a dismal comfort to a girl to find out that there is a mystery

connected with her birth, which no other piece of good luck can afford.

She had more than her rightful share of practical good sense, but still

she was human; and to be human is to have one's little modicum of romance

secreted away in one's composition.  One never ceases to make a hero of

one's self, (in private,) during life, but only alters the style of his

heroism from time to time as the drifting years belittle certain gods of

his admiration and raise up others in their stead that seem greater.



The recent wearing days and nights of watching, and the wasting grief

that had possessed her, combined with the profound depression that

naturally came with the reaction of idleness, made Laura peculiarly

susceptible at this time to romantic impressions.  She was a heroine,

now, with a mysterious father somewhere.  She could not really tell

whether she wanted to find him and spoil it all or not; but still all the

traditions of romance pointed to the making the attempt as the usual and

necessary, course to follow; therefore she would some day begin the

search when opportunity should offer.



Now a former thought struck her--she would speak to Mrs. Hawkins.

And naturally enough Mrs. Hawkins appeared on the stage at that moment.



She said she knew all--she knew that Laura had discovered the secret that

Mr. Hawkins, the elder children, Col. Sellers and herself had kept so

long and so faithfully; and she cried and said that now that troubles had

begun they would never end; her daughter's love would wean itself away

from her and her heart would break.  Her grief so wrought upon Laura that

the girl almost forgot her own troubles for the moment in her compassion

for her mother's distress.  Finally Mrs. Hawkins said:



"Speak to me, child--do not forsake me.  Forget all this miserable talk.

Say I am your mother!--I have loved you so long, and there is no other.

I am your mother, in the sight of God, and nothing shall ever take you

from me!"



All barriers fell, before this appeal.  Laura put her arms about her

mother's neck and said:



"You are my mother, and always shall be.  We will be as we have always

been; and neither this foolish talk nor any other thing shall part us or

make us less to each other than we are this hour."



There was no longer any sense of separation or estrangement between them.

Indeed their love seemed more perfect now than it had ever been before.

By and by they went down stairs and sat by the fire and talked long and

earnestly about Laura's history and the letters.  But it transpired that

Mrs. Hawkins had never known of this correspondence between her husband

and Major Lackland.  With his usual consideration for his wife, Mr.

Hawkins had shielded her from the worry the matter would have caused her.



Laura went to bed at last with a mind that had gained largely in

tranquility and had lost correspondingly in morbid romantic exaltation.

She was pensive, the next day, and subdued; but that was not matter for

remark, for she did not differ from the mournful friends about her in

that respect.  Clay and Washington were the same loving and admiring

brothers now that they had always been.  The great secret was new to some

of the younger children, but their love suffered no change under the

wonderful revelation.



It is barely possible that things might have presently settled down into

their old rut and the mystery have lost the bulk of its romantic

sublimity in Laura's eyes, if the village gossips could have quieted

down.  But they could not quiet down and they did not.  Day after day

they called at the house, ostensibly upon visits of condolence, and they

pumped away at the mother and the children without seeming to know that

their questionings were in bad taste.  They meant no harm they only

wanted to know.  Villagers always want to know.



The family fought shy of the questionings, and of course that was high

testimony "if the Duchess was respectably born, why didn't they come out

and prove it?--why did they, stick to that poor thin story about picking

her up out of a steamboat explosion?"



Under this ceaseless persecution, Laura's morbid self-communing was

renewed.  At night the day's contribution of detraction, innuendo and

malicious conjecture would be canvassed in her mind, and then she would

drift into a course of thinking.  As her thoughts ran on, the indignant

tears would spring to her eyes, and she would spit out fierce little

ejaculations at intervals.  But finally she would grow calmer and say

some comforting disdainful thing--something like this:



"But who are they?--Animals!  What are their opinions to me?  Let them

talk--I will not stoop to be affected by it.  I could hate----.

Nonsense--nobody I care for or in any way respect is changed toward me,

I fancy."



She may have supposed she was thinking of many individuals, but it was

not so--she was thinking of only one.  And her heart warmed somewhat,

too, the while.  One day a friend overheard a conversation like this:--

and naturally came and told her all about it:



"Ned, they say you don't go there any more.  How is that?"



"Well, I don't; but I tell you it's not because I don't want to and it's

not because I think it is any matter who her father was or who he wasn't,

either; it's only on account of this talk, talk, talk.  I think she is a

fine girl every way, and so would you if you knew her as well as I do;

but you know how it is when a girl once gets talked about--it's all up

with her--the world won't ever let her alone, after that."



The only comment Laura made upon this revelation, was:



"Then it appears that if this trouble had not occurred I could have had

the happiness of Mr. Ned Thurston's serious attentions.  He is well

favored in person, and well liked, too, I believe, and comes of one of

the first families of the village.  He is prosperous, too, I hear; has

been a doctor a year, now, and has had two patients--no, three, I think;

yes, it was three.  I attended their funerals.  Well, other people have

hoped and been disappointed; I am not alone in that.  I wish you could

stay to dinner, Maria--we are going to have sausages; and besides,

I wanted to talk to you about Hawkeye and make you promise to come and

see us when we are settled there."



But Maria could not stay.  She had come to mingle romantic tears with

Laura's over the lover's defection and had found herself dealing with a

heart that could not rise to an appreciation of affliction because its

interest was all centred in sausages.



But as soon as Maria was gone, Laura stamped her expressive foot and

said:



"The coward!  Are all books lies?  I thought he would fly to the front,

and be brave and noble, and stand up for me against all the world, and

defy my enemies, and wither these gossips with his scorn!  Poor crawling

thing, let him go.  I do begin to despise thin world!"



She lapsed into thought.  Presently she said:



"If the time ever comes, and I get a chance, Oh, I'll----"



She could not find a word that was strong enough, perhaps.  By and by she

said:



"Well, I am glad of it--I'm glad of it.  I never cared anything for him

anyway!"



And then, with small consistency, she cried a little, and patted her foot

more indignantly than ever.







CHAPTER XI



Two months had gone by and the Hawkins family were domiciled in Hawkeye.

Washington was at work in the real estate office again, and was

alternately in paradise or the other place just as it happened that

Louise was gracious to him or seemingly indifferent--because indifference

or preoccupation could mean nothing else than that she was thinking of

some other young person.  Col. Sellers had asked him several times, to

dine with him, when he first returned to Hawkeye, but Washington, for no

particular reason, had not accepted.  No particular reason except one

which he preferred to keep to himself--viz. that he could not bear to be

away from Louise.  It occurred to him, now, that the Colonel had not

invited him lately--could he be offended?  He resolved to go that very

day, and give the Colonel a pleasant surprise.  It was a good idea;

especially as Louise had absented herself from breakfast that morning,

and torn his heart; he would tear hers, now, and let her see how it felt.



The Sellers family were just starting to dinner when Washington burst

upon them with his surprise.  For an instant the Colonel looked

nonplussed, and just a bit uncomfortable; and Mrs. Sellers looked

actually distressed; but the next moment the head of the house was

himself again, and exclaimed:



"All right, my boy, all right--always glad to see you--always glad to

hear your voice and take you by the hand.  Don't wait for special

invitations--that's all nonsense among friends.  Just come whenever you

can, and come as often as you can--the oftener the better.  You can't

please us any better than that, Washington; the little woman will tell

you so herself.  We don't pretend to style.  Plain folks, you know--plain

folks.  Just a plain family dinner, but such as it is, our friends are

always welcome, I reckon you know that yourself, Washington.  Run along,

children, run along; Lafayette,--[**In those old days the average man

called his children after his most revered literary and historical idols;

consequently there was hardly a family, at least in the West, but had a

Washington in it--and also a Lafayette, a Franklin, and six or eight

sounding names from Byron, Scott, and the Bible, if the offspring held

out.  To visit such a family, was to find one's self confronted by a

congress made up of representatives of the imperial myths and the

majestic dead of all the ages.  There was something thrilling about it,

to a stranger, not to say awe inspiring.]--stand off the cat's tail,

child, can't you see what you're doing?--Come, come, come, Roderick Dhu,

it isn't nice for little boys to hang onto young gentlemen's coat tails--

but never mind him, Washington, he's full of spirits and don't mean any

harm.  Children will be children, you know.  Take the chair next to Mrs.

Sellers, Washington--tut, tut, Marie Antoinette, let your brother have

the fork if he wants it, you are bigger than he is."



Washington contemplated the banquet, and wondered if he were in his right

mind.  Was this the plain family dinner?  And was it all present?  It was

soon apparent that this was indeed the dinner: it was all on the table:

it consisted of abundance of clear, fresh water, and a basin of raw

turnips--nothing more.



Washington stole a glance at Mrs. Sellers's face, and would have given

the world, the next moment, if he could have spared her that.  The poor

woman's face was crimson, and the tears stood in her eyes.  Washington

did not know what to do.  He wished he had never come there and spied out

this cruel poverty and brought pain to that poor little lady's heart and

shame to her cheek; but he was there, and there was no escape.  Col.

Sellers hitched back his coat sleeves airily from his wrists as who

should say "Now for solid enjoyment!" seized a fork, flourished it and

began to harpoon turnips and deposit them in the plates before him "Let

me help you, Washington--Lafyette pass this plate Washington--ah, well,

well, my boy, things are looking pretty bright, now, I tell you.

Speculation--my! the whole atmosphere's full of money.  I would'nt take

three fortunes for one little operation I've got on hand now--have

anything from the casters?  No?  Well, you're right, you're right.  Some

people like mustard with turnips, but--now there was Baron Poniatowski--

Lord, but that man did know how to live!--true Russian you know, Russian

to the back bone; I say to my wife, give me a Russian every time, for a

table comrade.  The Baron used to say, 'Take mustard, Sellers, try the

mustard,--a man can't know what turnips are in perfection without,

mustard,' but I always said, 'No, Baron, I'm a plain man and I want my

food plain--none of your embellishments for Beriah Sellers--no made

dishes for me!  And it's the best way--high living kills more than it

cures in this world, you can rest assured of that.--Yes indeed,

Washington, I've got one little operation on hand that--take some more

water--help yourself, won't you?--help yourself, there's plenty of it.

--You'll find it pretty good, I guess.  How does that fruit strike you?"



Washington said he did not know that he had ever tasted better.  He did

not add that he detested turnips even when they were cooked loathed them

in their natural state.  No, he kept this to himself, and praised the

turnips to the peril of his soul.



"I thought you'd like them.  Examine them--examine them--they'll bear it.

See how perfectly firm and juicy they are--they can't start any like them

in this part of the country, I can tell you.  These are from New Jersey

--I imported them myself.  They cost like sin, too; but lord bless me,

I go in for having the best of a thing, even if it does cost a little

more--it's the best economy, in the long run.  These are the Early

Malcolm--it's a turnip that can't be produced except in just one orchard,

and the supply never is up to the demand.  Take some more water,

Washington--you can't drink too much water with fruit--all the doctors

say that.  The plague can't come where this article is, my boy!"



"Plague?  What plague?"



"What plague, indeed?  Why the Asiatic plague that nearly depopulated

London a couple of centuries ago."



"But how does that concern us?  There is no plague here, I reckon."



"Sh! I've let it out!  Well, never mind--just keep it to yourself.

Perhaps I oughtn't said anything, but its bound to come out sooner or

later, so what is the odds?  Old McDowells wouldn't like me to--to--

bother it all, I'll jest tell the whole thing and let it go.  You see,

I've been down to St. Louis, and I happened to run across old Dr.

McDowells--thinks the world of me, does the doctor.  He's a man that

keeps himself to himself, and well he may, for he knows that he's got a

reputation that covers the whole earth--he won't condescend to open

himself out to many people, but lord bless you, he and I are just like

brothers; he won't let me go to a hotel when I'm in the city--says I'm

the only man that's company to him, and I don't know but there's some

truth in it, too, because although I never like to glorify myself and

make a great to-do over what I am or what I can do or what I know,

I don't mind saying here among friends that I am better read up in most

sciences, maybe, than the general run of professional men in these days.

Well, the other day he let me into a little secret, strictly on the

quiet, about this matter of the plague.



"You see it's booming right along in our direction--follows the Gulf

Stream, you know, just as all those epidemics do, and within three months

it will be just waltzing through this land like a whirlwind!  And whoever

it touches can make his will and contract for the funeral.  Well you

can't cure it, you know, but you can prevent it.  How?  Turnips! that's

it!  Turnips and water!  Nothing like it in the world, old McDowells

says, just fill yourself up two or three times a day, and you can snap

your fingers at the plague.  Sh!--keep mum, but just you confine yourself

to that diet and you're all right.  I wouldn't have old McDowells know

that I told about it for anything--he never would speak to me again.

Take some more water, Washington--the more water you drink, the better.

Here, let me give you some more of the turnips.  No, no, no, now, I

insist.  There, now.  Absorb those.  They're, mighty sustaining--brim

full of nutriment--all the medical books say so.  Just eat from four to

seven good-sized turnips at a meal, and drink from a pint and a half to a

quart of water, and then just sit around a couple of hours and let them

ferment.  You'll feel like a fighting cock next day."



Fifteen or twenty minutes later the Colonel's tongue was still chattering

away--he had piled up several future fortunes out of several incipient

"operations" which he had blundered into within the past week, and was

now soaring along through some brilliant expectations born of late

promising experiments upon the lacking ingredient of the eye-water.

And at such a time Washington ought to have been a rapt and enthusiastic

listener, but he was not, for two matters disturbed his mind and

distracted his attention.  One was, that he discovered, to his confusion

and shame, that in allowing himself to be helped a second time to the

turnips, he had robbed those hungry children.  He had not needed the

dreadful "fruit," and had not wanted it; and when he saw the pathetic

sorrow in their faces when they asked for more and there was no more to

give them, he hated himself for his stupidity and pitied the famishing

young things with all his heart.  The other matter that disturbed him was

the dire inflation that had begun in his stomach.  It grew and grew, it

became more and more insupportable.  Evidently the turnips were

"fermenting."  He forced himself to sit still as long as he could, but

his anguish conquered him at last.



He rose in the midst of the Colonel's talk and excused himself on the

plea of a previous engagement.  The Colonel followed him to the door,

promising over and over again that he would use his influence to get some

of the Early Malcolms for him, and insisting that he should not be such a

stranger but come and take pot-luck with him every chance he got.

Washington was glad enough to get away and feel free again.  He

immediately bent his steps toward home.



In bed he passed an hour that threatened to turn his hair gray, and then

a blessed calm settled down upon him that filled his heart with

gratitude.  Weak and languid, he made shift to turn himself about and

seek rest and sleep; and as his soul hovered upon the brink of

unconciousness, he heaved a long, deep sigh, and said to himself that in

his heart he had cursed the Colonel's preventive of rheumatism, before,

and now let the plague come if it must--he was done with preventives;

if ever any man beguiled him with turnips and water again, let him die

the death.



If he dreamed at all that night, no gossiping spirit disturbed his

visions to whisper in his ear of certain matters just then in bud in the

East, more than a thousand miles away that after the lapse of a few years

would develop influences which would profoundly affect the fate and

fortunes of the Hawkins family.









CHAPTER XII



"Oh, it's easy enough to make a fortune," Henry said.



"It seems to be easier than it is, I begin to think," replied Philip.



"Well, why don't you go into something?  You'll never dig it out of the

Astor Library."



If there be any place and time in the world where and when it seems easy

to "go into something" it is in Broadway on a spring morning, when one is

walking city-ward, and has before him the long lines of palace-shops with

an occasional spire seen through the soft haze that lies over the lower

town, and hears the roar and hum of its multitudinous traffic.



To the young American, here or elsewhere, the paths to fortune are

innumerable and all open; there is invitation in the air and success in

all his wide horizon.  He is embarrassed which to choose, and is not

unlikely to waste years in dallying with his chances, before giving

himself to the serious tug and strain of a single object.  He has no

traditions to bind him or guide him, and his impulse is to break away

from the occupation his father has followed, and make a new way for

himself.



Philip Sterling used to say that if he should seriously set himself for

ten years to any one of the dozen projects that were in his brain, he

felt that he could be a rich man.  He wanted to be rich, he had a sincere

desire for a fortune, but for some unaccountable reason he hesitated

about addressing himself to the narrow work of getting it.  He never

walked Broadway, a part of its tide of abundant shifting life, without

feeling something of the flush of wealth, and unconsciously taking the

elastic step of one well-to-do in this prosperous world.



Especially at night in the crowded theatre--Philip was too young to

remember the old Chambers' Street box, where the serious Burton led his

hilarious and pagan crew--in the intervals of the screaming comedy, when

the orchestra scraped and grunted and tooted its dissolute tunes, the

world seemed full of opportunities to Philip, and his heart exulted with

a conscious ability to take any of its prizes he chose to pluck.



Perhaps it was the swimming ease of the acting, on the stage, where

virtue had its reward in three easy acts, perhaps it was the excessive

light of the house, or the music, or the buzz of the excited talk between

acts, perhaps it was youth which believed everything, but for some reason

while Philip was at the theatre he had the utmost confidence in life and

his ready victory in it.



Delightful illusion of paint and tinsel and silk attire, of cheap

sentiment and high and mighty dialogue!  Will there not always be rosin

enough for the squeaking fiddle-bow?



Do we not all like the maudlin hero, who is sneaking round the right

entrance, in wait to steal the pretty wife of his rich and tyrannical

neighbor from the paste-board cottage at the left entrance? and when he

advances down to the foot-lights and defiantly informs the audience that,

"he who lays his hand on a woman except in the way of kindness," do we

not all applaud so as to drown the rest of the sentence?



Philip never was fortunate enough to hear what would become of a man who

should lay his hand on a woman with the exception named; but he learned

afterwards that the woman who lays her hand on a man, without any

exception whatsoever, is always acquitted by the jury.



The fact was, though Philip Sterling did not know it, that he wanted

several other things quite as much as he wanted wealth.  The modest

fellow would have liked fame thrust upon him for some worthy achievement;

it might be for a book, or for the skillful management of some great

newspaper, or for some daring expedition like that of Lt. Strain or Dr.

Kane.  He was unable to decide exactly what it should be.  Sometimes he

thought he would like to stand in a conspicuous pulpit and humbly preach

the gospel of repentance; and it even crossed his mind that it would be

noble to give himself to a missionary life to some benighted region,

where the date-palm grows, and the nightingale's voice is in tune, and

the bul-bul sings on the off nights.  If he were good enough he would

attach himself to that company of young men in the Theological Seminary,

who were seeing New York life in preparation for the ministry.



Philip was a New England boy and had graduated at Yale; he had not

carried off with him all the learning of that venerable institution, but

he knew some things that were not in the regular course of study.  A very

good use of the English language and considerable knowledge of its

literature was one of them; he could sing a song very well, not in time

to be sure, but with enthusiasm; he could make a magnetic speech at a

moment's notice in the class room, the debating society, or upon any

fence or dry-goods box that was convenient; he could lift himself by one

arm, and do the giant swing in the gymnasium; he could strike out from

his left shoulder; he could handle an oar like a professional and pull

stroke in a winning race.  Philip had a good appetite, a sunny temper,

and a clear hearty laugh.  He had brown hair, hazel eyes set wide apart,

a broad but not high forehead, and a fresh winning face.  He was six feet

high, with broad shoulders, long legs and a swinging gait; one of those

loose-jointed, capable fellows, who saunter into the world with a free

air and usually make a stir in whatever company they enter.



After he left college Philip took the advice of friends and read law.

Law seemed to him well enough as a science, but he never could discover a

practical case where it appeared to him worth while to go to law, and all

the clients who stopped with this new clerk in the ante-room of the law

office where he was writing, Philip invariably advised to settle--no

matter how, but settle--greatly to the disgust of his employer, who knew

that justice between man and man could only be attained by the recognized

processes, with the attendant fees.  Besides Philip hated the copying of

pleadings, and he was certain that a life of "whereases" and "aforesaids"

and whipping the devil round the stump, would be intolerable.



[Note: these few paragraphs are nearly an autobiography of the life of

Charles Dudley Warner whose contributions to the story start here with

Chapter XII.  D.W.]



His pen therefore, and whereas, and not as aforesaid, strayed off into

other scribbling.  In an unfortunate hour, he had two or three papers

accepted by first-class magazines, at three dollars the printed page,

and, behold, his vocation was open to him.  He would make his mark in

literature.



Life has no moment so sweet as that in which a young man believes himself

called into the immortal ranks of the masters of literature.  It is such

a noble ambition, that it is a pity it has usually such a shallow

foundation.



At the time of this history, Philip had gone to New York for a career.

With his talent he thought he should have little difficulty in getting an

editorial position upon a metropolitan newspaper; not that he knew

anything about news paper work, or had the least idea of journalism; he

knew he was not fitted for the technicalities of the subordinate

departments, but he could write leaders with perfect ease, he was sure.

The drudgery of the newspaper office was too distaste ful, and besides it

would be beneath the dignity of a graduate and a successful magazine

writer.  He wanted to begin at the top of the ladder.



To his surprise he found that every situation in the editorial department

of the journals was full, always had been full, was always likely to be

full.  It seemed to him that the newspaper managers didn't want genius,

but mere plodding and grubbing.  Philip therefore read diligently in the

Astor library, planned literary works that should compel attention, and

nursed his genius.  He had no friend wise enough to tell him to step into

the Dorking Convention, then in session, make a sketch of the men and

women on the platform, and take it to the editor of the Daily Grapevine,

and see what he could get a line for it.



One day he had an offer from some country friends, who believed in him,

to take charge of a provincial daily newspaper, and he went to consult

Mr. Gringo--Gringo who years ago managed the Atlas--about taking the

situation.



"Take it of course," says Gringo, take anything that offers, why not?"



"But they want me to make it an opposition paper."



"Well, make it that.  That party is going to succeed, it's going to elect

the next president."



"I don't believe it," said Philip, stoutly, "its wrong in principle, and

it ought not to succeed, but I don't see how I can go for a thing I don't

believe in."



"O, very well," said Gringo, turning away with a shade of contempt,

"you'll find if you are going into literature and newspaper work that you

can't afford a conscience like that."



But Philip did afford it, and he wrote, thanking his friends, and

declining because he said the political scheme would fail, and ought to

fail.  And he went back to his books and to his waiting for an opening

large enough for his dignified entrance into the literary world.



It was in this time of rather impatient waiting that Philip was one

morning walking down Broadway with Henry Brierly.  He frequently

accompanied Henry part way down town to what the latter called his office

in Broad Street, to which he went, or pretended to go, with regularity

every day.  It was evident to the most casual acquaintance that he was a

man of affairs, and that his time was engrossed in the largest sort of

operations, about which there was a mysterious air.  His liability to be

suddenly summoned to Washington, or Boston or Montreal or even to

Liverpool was always imminent.  He never was so summoned, but none of his

acquaintances would have been surprised to hear any day that he had gone

to Panama or Peoria, or to hear from him that he had bought the Bank of

Commerce.



The two were intimate at that time,--they had been class, mates--and saw

a great deal of each other.  Indeed, they lived together in Ninth Street,

in a boarding-house, there, which had the honor of lodging and partially

feeding several other young fellows of like kidney, who have since gone

their several ways into fame or into obscurity.



It was during the morning walk to which reference has been made that

Henry Brierly suddenly said, "Philip, how would you like to go to

St. Jo?"



"I think I should like it of all things," replied Philip, with some

hesitation, "but what for."



"Oh, it's a big operation.  We are going, a lot of us, railroad men,

engineers, contractors.  You know my uncle is a great railroad man.  I've

no doubt I can get you a chance to go if you'll go."



"But in what capacity would I go?"



"Well, I'm going as an engineer.  You can go as one."



"I don't know an engine from a coal cart."



"Field engineer, civil engineer.  You can begin by carrying a rod, and

putting down the figures.  It's easy enough.  I'll show you about that.

We'll get Trautwine and some of those books."



"Yes, but what is it for, what is it all about?"



"Why don't you see?  We lay out a line, spot the good land, enter it up,

know where the stations are to be, spot them, buy lots; there's heaps of

money in it.  We wouldn't engineer long."



"When do you go?" was Philip's next question, after some moments of

silence.



"To-morrow.  Is that too soon?"



"No, its not too soon.  I've been ready to go anywhere for six months.

The fact is, Henry, that I'm about tired of trying to force myself into

things, and am quite willing to try floating with the stream for a while,

and see where I will land.  This seems like a providential call; it's

sudden enough."



The two young men who were by this time full of the adventure, went down

to the Wall street office of Henry's uncle and had a talk with that wily

operator.  The uncle knew Philip very well, and was pleased with his

frank enthusiasm, and willing enough to give him a trial in the western

venture.  It was settled therefore, in the prompt way in which things are

settled in New York, that they would start with the rest of the company

next morning for the west.



On the way up town these adventurers bought books on engineering, and

suits of India-rubber, which they supposed they would need in a new and

probably damp country, and many other things which nobody ever needed

anywhere.



The night was spent in packing up and writing letters, for Philip would

not take such an important step without informing his friends.  If they

disapprove, thought he, I've done my duty by letting them know.  Happy

youth, that is ready to pack its valise, and start for Cathay on an

hour's notice.



"By the way," calls out Philip from his bed-room, to Henry, "where is

St. Jo.?"



"Why, it's in Missouri somewhere, on the frontier I think.  We'll get a

map."



"Never mind the map.  We will find the place itself.  I was afraid it was

nearer home."



Philip wrote a long letter, first of all, to his mother, full of love and

glowing anticipations of his new opening.  He wouldn't bother her with

business details, but he hoped that the day was not far off when she

would see him return, with a moderate fortune, and something to add to

the comfort of her advancing years.



To his uncle he said that he had made an arrangement with some New York

capitalists to go to Missouri, in a land and railroad operation, which

would at least give him a knowledge of the world and not unlikely offer

him a business opening.  He knew his uncle would be glad to hear that he

had at last turned his thoughts to a practical matter.



It was to Ruth Bolton that Philip wrote last.  He might never see her

again; he went to seek his fortune.  He well knew the perils of the

frontier, the savage state of society, the lurking Indians and the

dangers of fever.  But there was no real danger to a person who took care

of himself.  Might he write to her often and, tell her of his life.

If he returned with a fortune, perhaps and perhaps.  If he was

unsuccessful, or if he never returned--perhaps it would be as well.

No time or distance, however, would ever lessen his interest in her.  He

would say good-night, but not good-bye.



In the soft beginning of a Spring morning, long before New York had

breakfasted, while yet the air of expectation hung about the wharves of

the metropolis, our young adventurers made their way to the Jersey City

railway station of the Erie road, to begin the long, swinging, crooked

journey, over what a writer of a former day called a causeway of cracked

rails and cows, to the West.









CHAPTER XIII.



          What ever to say be toke in his entente,

          his langage was so fayer & pertynante,

          yt semeth unto manys herying not only the worde,

          but veryly the thyng.

                              Caxton's Book of Curtesye.



In the party of which our travelers found themselves members, was Duff

Brown, the great railroad contractor, and subsequently a well-known

member of Congress; a bluff, jovial Bost'n man, thick-set, close shaven,

with a heavy jaw and a low forehead--a very pleasant man if you were not

in his way.  He had government contracts also, custom houses and dry

docks, from Portland to New Orleans, and managed to get out of congress,

in appropriations, about weight for weight of gold for the stone

furnished.



Associated with him, and also of this party, was Rodney Schaick, a sleek

New York broker, a man as prominent in the church as in the stock

exchange, dainty in his dress, smooth of speech, the necessary complement

of Duff Brown in any enterprise that needed assurance and adroitness.



It would be difficult to find a pleasanter traveling party one that shook

off more readily the artificial restraints of Puritanic strictness, and

took the world with good-natured allowance.  Money was plenty for every

attainable luxury, and there seemed to be no doubt that its supply would

continue, and that fortunes were about to be made without a great deal of

toil.  Even Philip soon caught the prevailing spirit; Barry did not need

any inoculation, he always talked in six figures.  It was as natural for

the dear boy to be rich as it is for most people to be poor.



The elders of the party were not long in discovering the fact, which

almost all travelers to the west soon find out; that the water was poor.

It must have been by a lucky premonition of this that they all had brandy

flasks with which to qualify the water of the country; and it was no

doubt from an uneasy feeling of the danger of being poisoned that they

kept experimenting, mixing a little of the dangerous and changing fluid,

as they passed along, with the contents of the flasks, thus saving their

lives hour by hour.  Philip learned afterwards that temperance and the

strict observance of Sunday and a certain gravity of deportment are

geographical habits, which people do not usually carry with them away

from home.



Our travelers stopped in Chicago long enough to see that they could make

their fortunes there in two week's tine, but it did not seem worth while;

the west was more attractive; the further one went the wider the

opportunities opened.



They took railroad to Alton and the steamboat from there to St. Louis,

for the change and to have a glimpse of the river.



"Isn't this jolly?" cried Henry, dancing out of the barber's room, and

coming down the deck with a one, two, three step, shaven, curled and

perfumed after his usual exquisite fashion.



"What's jolly?" asked Philip, looking out upon the dreary and monotonous

waste through which the shaking steamboat was coughing its way.



"Why, the whole thing; it's immense I can tell you.  I wouldn't give that

to be guaranteed a hundred thousand cold cash in a year's time."



"Where's Mr. Brown?"



"He is in the saloon, playing poker with Schaick and that long haired

party with the striped trousers, who scrambled aboard when the stage

plank was half hauled in, and the big Delegate to Congress from out

west."



"That's a fine looking fellow, that delegate, with his glossy, black

whiskers; looks like a Washington man; I shouldn't think he'd be at

poker."



"Oh, its only five cent ante, just to make it interesting, the Delegate

said."



"But I shouldn't think a representative in Congress would play poker any

way in a public steamboat."



"Nonsense, you've got to pass the time.  I tried a hand myself, but those

old fellows are too many for me.  The Delegate knows all the points.

I'd bet a hundred dollars he will ante his way right into the United

States Senate when his territory comes in.  He's got the cheek for it."



"He has the grave and thoughtful manner of expectoration of a public man,

for one thing," added Philip.



"Harry," said Philip, after a pause, "what have you got on those big

boots for; do you expect to wade ashore?"



"I'm breaking 'em in."



The fact was Harry had got himself up in what he thought a proper costume

for a new country, and was in appearance a sort of compromise between a

dandy of Broadway and a backwoodsman.  Harry, with blue eyes, fresh

complexion, silken whiskers and curly chestnut hair, was as handsome as

a fashion plate.  He wore this morning a soft hat, a short cutaway coat,

an open vest displaying immaculate linen, a leathern belt round his

waist, and top-boots of soft leather, well polished, that came above his

knees and required a string attached to his belt to keep them up.  The

light hearted fellow gloried in these shining encasements of his well

shaped legs, and told Philip that they were a perfect protection against

prairie rattle-snakes, which never strike above the knee.



The landscape still wore an almost wintry appearance when our travelers

left Chicago.  It was a genial spring day when they landed at St. Louis;

the birds were singing, the blossoms of peach trees in city garden plots,

made the air sweet, and in the roar and tumult on the long river levee

they found an excitement that accorded with their own hopeful

anticipations.



The party went to the Southern Hotel, where the great Duff Brown was very

well known, and indeed was a man of so much importance that even the

office clerk was respectful to him.  He might have respected in him also

a certain vulgar swagger and insolence of money, which the clerk greatly

admired.



The young fellows liked the house and liked the city; it seemed to them a

mighty free and hospitable town.  Coming from the East they were struck

with many peculiarities.  Everybody smoked in the streets, for one thing,

they noticed; everybody "took a drink" in an open manner whenever he

wished to do so or was asked, as if the habit needed no concealment or

apology.  In the evening when they walked about they found people sitting

on the door-steps of their dwellings, in a manner not usual in a northern

city; in front of some of the hotels and saloons the side walks were

filled with chairs and benches--Paris fashion, said Harry--upon which

people lounged in these warm spring evenings, smoking, always smoking;

and the clink of glasses and of billiard balls was in the air.  It was

delightful.



Harry at once found on landing that his back-woods custom would not be

needed in St. Louis, and that, in fact, he had need of all the resources

of his wardrobe to keep even with the young swells of the town.  But this

did not much matter, for Harry was always superior to his clothes.

As they were likely to be detained some time in the city, Harry told

Philip that he was going to improve his time.  And he did.  It was an

encouragement to any industrious man to see this young fellow rise,

carefully dress himself, eat his breakfast deliberately, smoke his cigar

tranquilly, and then repair to his room, to what he called his work, with

a grave and occupied manner, but with perfect cheerfulness.



Harry would take off his coat, remove his cravat, roll up his shirt-

sleeves, give his curly hair the right touch before the glass, get out

his book on engineering, his boxes of instruments, his drawing paper,

his profile paper, open the book of logarithms, mix his India ink,

sharpen his pencils, light a cigar, and sit down at the table to "lay out

a line," with the most grave notion that he was mastering the details of

engineering.  He would spend half a day in these preparations without

ever working out a problem or having the faintest conception of the use

of lines or logarithms.  And when he had finished, he had the most

cheerful confidence that he had done a good day's work.



It made no difference, however, whether Harry was in his room in a hotel

or in a tent, Philip soon found, he was just the same.  In camp he would

get himself, up in the most elaborate toilet at his command, polish his

long boots to the top, lay out his work before him, and spend an hour or

longer, if anybody was looking at him, humming airs, knitting his brows,

and "working" at engineering; and if a crowd of gaping rustics were

looking on all the while it was perfectly satisfactory to him.



"You see," he says to Philip one morning at the hotel when he was thus

engaged, "I want to get the theory of this thing, so that I can have a

check on the engineers."



"I thought you were going to be an engineer yourself,"  queried Philip.



"Not many times, if the court knows herself.  There's better game.  Brown

and Schaick have, or will have, the control for the whole line of the

Salt Lick Pacific Extension, forty thousand dollars a mile over the

prairie, with extra for hard-pan--and it'll be pretty much all hardpan

I can tell you; besides every alternate section of land on this line.

There's millions in the job.  I'm to have the sub-contract for the first

fifty miles, and you can bet it's a soft thing."



"I'll tell you what you do, Philip," continued Larry, in a burst of

generosity, "if I don't get you into my contract, you'll be with the

engineers, and you jest stick a stake at the first ground marked for a

depot, buy the land of the farmer before he knows where the depot will

be, and we'll turn a hundred or so on that.  I'll advance the money for

the payments, and you can sell the lots.  Schaick is going to let me have

ten thousand just for a flyer in such operations."



"But that's a good deal of money."



"Wait till you are used to handling money.  I didn't come out here for a

bagatelle.  My uncle wanted me to stay East and go in on the Mobile

custom house, work up the Washington end of it; he said there was a

fortune in it for a smart young fellow, but I preferred to take the

chances out here.  Did I tell you I had an offer from Bobbett and Fanshaw

to go into their office as confidential clerk on a salary of ten

thousand?"



"Why didn't you take it ?" asked Philip, to whom a salary of two thousand

would have seemed wealth, before he started on this journey.



"Take it?  I'd rather operate on my own hook;" said Harry, in his most

airy manner.



A few evenings after their arrival at the Southern, Philip and Harry made

the acquaintance of a very agreeable gentleman, whom they had frequently

seen before about the hotel corridors, and passed a casual word with.  He

had the air of a man of business, and was evidently a person of

importance.



The precipitating of this casual intercourse into the more substantial

form of an acquaintanceship was the work of the gentleman himself, and

occurred in this wise.  Meeting the two friends in the lobby one evening,

he asked them to give him the time, and added:



"Excuse me, gentlemen--strangers in St. Louis?  Ah, yes-yes.  From the

East, perhaps?  Ah; just so, just so.  Eastern born myself--Virginia.

Sellers is my name--Beriah Sellers.



"Ah! by the way--New York, did you say?  That reminds me; just met some

gentlemen from your State, a week or two ago--very prominent gentlemen--

in public life they are; you must know them, without doubt.  Let me see--

let me see.  Curious those names have escaped me.  I know they were from

your State, because I remember afterward my old friend Governor Shackleby

said to me--fine man, is the Governor--one of the finest men our country

has produced--said he, 'Colonel, how did you like those New York

gentlemen?--not many such men in the world,--Colonel Sellers,' said the

Governor--yes, it was New York he said--I remember it distinctly.

I can't recall those names, somehow.  But no matter.  Stopping here,

gentlemen--stopping at the Southern?"



In shaping their reply in their minds, the title "Mr." had a place in it;

but when their turn had arrived to speak, the title "Colonel" came from

their lips instead.



They said yes, they were abiding at the Southern, and thought it a very

good house.



"Yes, yes, the Southern is fair.  I myself go to the Planter's, old,

aristocratic house.  We Southern gentlemen don't change our ways, you

know.  I always make it my home there when I run down from Hawkeye--my

plantation is in Hawkeye, a little up in the country.  You should know

the Planter's."



Philip and Harry both said they should like to see a hotel that had been

so famous in its day--a cheerful hostelrie, Philip said it must have been

where duels were fought there across the dining-room table.



"You may believe it, sir, an uncommonly pleasant lodging.  Shall we

walk?"



And the three strolled along the streets, the Colonel talking all the way

in the most liberal and friendly manner, and with a frank open-

heartedness that inspired confidence.



"Yes, born East myself, raised all along, know the West--a great country,

gentlemen.  The place for a young fellow of spirit to pick up a fortune,

simply pick it up, it's lying round loose here.  Not a day that I don't

put aside an opportunity; too busy to look into it.  Management of my own

property takes my time.  First visit?  Looking for an opening?"



"Yes, looking around," replied Harry.



"Ah, here we are.  You'd rather sit here in front than go to my

apartments?  So had I. An opening eh?"



The Colonel's eyes twinkled.  "Ah, just so.  The country is opening up,

all we want is capital to develop it.  Slap down the rails and bring the

land into market.  The richest land on God Almighty's footstool is lying

right out there.  If I had my capital free I could plant it for

millions."



"I suppose your capital is largely in your plantation?" asked Philip.



"Well, partly, sir, partly.  I'm down here now with reference to a little

operation--a little side thing merely.  By the way gentlemen, excuse the

liberty, but it's about my usual time"--



The Colonel paused, but as no movement of his acquaintances followed this

plain remark, he added, in an explanatory manner,



"I'm rather particular about the exact time--have to be in this climate."



Even this open declaration of his hospitable intention not being

understood the Colonel politely said,



"Gentlemen, will you take something?"



Col. Sellers led the way to a saloon on Fourth street under the hotel,

and the young gentlemen fell into the custom of the country.



"Not that," said the Colonel to the bar-keeper, who shoved along the

counter a bottle of apparently corn-whiskey, as if he had done it before

on the same order; "not that," with a wave of the hand.  "That Otard if

you please.  Yes.  Never take an inferior liquor, gentlemen, not in the

evening, in this climate.  There.  That's the stuff.  My respects!"



The hospitable gentleman, having disposed of his liquor, remarking that

it was not quite the thing--"when a man has his own cellar to go to, he

is apt to get a little fastidious about his liquors"--called for cigars.

But the brand offered did not suit him; he motioned the box away, and

asked for some particular Havana's, those in separate wrappers.



"I always smoke this sort, gentlemen; they are a little more expensive,

but you'll learn, in this climate, that you'd better not economize on

poor cigars"



Having imparted this valuable piece of information, the Colonel lighted

the fragrant cigar with satisfaction, and then carelessly put his fingers

into his right vest pocket.  That movement being without result, with a

shade of disappointment on his face, he felt in his left vest pocket.

Not finding anything there, he looked up with a serious and annoyed air,

anxiously slapped his right pantaloon's pocket, and then his left, and

exclaimed,



"By George, that's annoying.  By George, that's mortifying.  Never had

anything of that kind happen to me before.  I've left my pocket-book.

Hold!  Here's a bill, after all.  No, thunder, it's a receipt."



"Allow me," said Philip, seeing how seriously the Colonel was annoyed,

and taking out his purse.



The Colonel protested he couldn't think of it, and muttered something to

the barkeeper about "hanging it up," but the vender of exhilaration made

no sign, and Philip had the privilege of paying the costly shot; Col.

Sellers profusely apologizing and claiming the right "next time, next

time."



As soon as Beriah Sellers had bade his friends good night and seen them

depart, he did not retire apartments in the Planter's, but took his way

to his lodgings with a friend in a distant part of the city.









CHAPTER XIV.



The letter that Philip Sterling wrote to Ruth Bolton, on the evening of

setting out to seek his fortune in the west, found that young lady in her

own father's house in Philadelphia.  It was one of the pleasantest of the

many charming suburban houses in that hospitable city, which is

territorially one of the largest cities in the world, and only prevented

from becoming the convenient metropolis of the country by the intrusive

strip of Camden and Amboy sand which shuts it off from the Atlantic

ocean.  It is a city of steady thrift, the arms of which might well be

the deliberate but delicious terrapin that imparts such a royal flavor to

its feasts.



It was a spring morning, and perhaps it was the influence of it that made

Ruth a little restless, satisfied neither with the out-doors nor the in-

doors.  Her sisters had gone to the city to show some country visitors

Independence Hall, Girard College and Fairmount Water Works and Park,

four objects which Americans cannot die peacefully, even in Naples,

without having seen.  But Ruth confessed that she was tired of them, and

also of the Mint.  She was tired of other things.  She tried this morning

an air or two upon the piano, sang a simple song in a sweet but slightly

metallic voice, and then seating herself by the open window, read

Philip's letter.  Was she thinking about Philip, as she gazed across the

fresh lawn over the tree tops to the Chelton Hills, or of that world

which his entrance, into her tradition-bound life had been one of the

means of opening to her?  Whatever she thought, she was not idly musing,

as one might see by the expression of her face.  After a time she took

up a book; it was a medical work, and to all appearance about as

interesting to a girl of eighteen as the statutes at large; but her face

was soon aglow over its pages, and she was so absorbed in it that she did

not notice the entrance of her mother at the open door.



"Ruth?"



"Well, mother," said the young student, looking up, with a shade of

impatience.



"I wanted to talk with thee a little about thy plans."



"Mother; thee knows I couldn't stand it at Westfield; the school stifled

me, it's a place to turn young people into dried fruit."



"I know," said Margaret Bolton, with a half anxious smile, thee chafes

against all the ways of Friends, but what will thee do?  Why is thee so

discontented?"



"If I must say it, mother, I want to go away, and get out of this dead

level."



With a look half of pain and half of pity, her mother answered, "I am

sure thee is little interfered with; thee dresses as thee will, and goes

where thee pleases, to any church thee likes, and thee has music.  I had

a visit yesterday from the society's committee by way of discipline,

because we have a piano in the house, which is against the rules."



"I hope thee told the elders that father and I are responsible for the

piano, and that, much as thee loves music, thee is never in the room when

it is played.  Fortunately father is already out of meeting, so they

can't discipline him.  I heard father tell cousin Abner that he was

whipped so often for whistling when he was a boy that he was determined

to have what compensation he could get now."



"Thy ways greatly try me, Ruth, and all thy relations.  I desire thy

happiness first of all, but thee is starting out on a dangerous path.

Is thy father willing thee should go away to a school of the world's

people?"



"I have not asked him," Ruth replied with a look that might imply that

she was one of those determined little bodies who first made up her own

mind and then compelled others to make up theirs in accordance with hers.



"And when thee has got the education thee wants, and lost all relish for

the society of thy friends and the ways of thy ancestors, what then?"



Ruth turned square round to her mother, and with an impassive face and

not the slightest change of tone, said,



"Mother, I'm going to study medicine?"



Margaret Bolton almost lost for a moment her habitual placidity.



"Thee, study medicine!  A slight frail girl like thee, study medicine!

Does thee think thee could stand it six months?  And the lectures,

and the dissecting rooms, has thee thought of the dissecting rooms?"



"Mother," said Ruth calmly, "I have thought it all over.  I know I can go

through the whole, clinics, dissecting room and all.  Does thee think I

lack nerve?  What is there to fear in a person dead more than in a person

living?"



"But thy health and strength, child; thee can never stand the severe

application.  And, besides, suppose thee does learn medicine?"



"I will practice it."



"Here?"



"Here."



"Where thee and thy family are known?"



"If I can get patients."



"I hope at least, Ruth, thee will let us know when thee opens an office,"

said her mother, with an approach to sarcasm that she rarely indulged in,

as she rose and left the room.



Ruth sat quite still for a tine, with face intent and flushed.  It was

out now.  She had begun her open battle.



The sight-seers returned in high spirits from the city.  Was there any

building in Greece to compare with Girard College, was there ever such a

magnificent pile of stone devised for the shelter of poor orphans?  Think

of the stone shingles of the roof eight inches thick!  Ruth asked the

enthusiasts if they would like to live in such a sounding mausoleum, with

its great halls and echoing rooms, and no comfortable place in it for the

accommodation of any body?  If they were orphans, would they like to be

brought up in a Grecian temple?



And then there was Broad street!  Wasn't it the broadest and the longest-

street in the world?  There certainly was no end to it, and even Ruth was

Philadelphian enough to believe that a street ought not to have any end,

or architectural point upon which the weary eye could rest.



But neither St. Girard, nor Broad street, neither wonders of the Mint nor

the glories of the Hall where the ghosts of our fathers sit always

signing the Declaration; impressed the visitors so much as the splendors

of the Chestnut street windows, and the bargains on Eighth street.

The truth is that the country cousins had come to town to attend the

Yearly Meeting, and the amount of shopping that preceded that religious

event was scarcely exceeded by the preparations for the opera in more

worldly circles.



"Is thee going to the Yearly Meeting, Ruth?" asked one of the girls.



"I have nothing to wear," replied that demure person.  "If thee wants to

see new bonnets, orthodox to a shade and conformed to the letter of the

true form, thee must go to the Arch Street Meeting.  Any departure from

either color or shape would be instantly taken note of.  It has occupied

mother a long time, to find at the shops the exact shade for her new

bonnet.  Oh, thee must go by all means.  But thee won't see there a

sweeter woman than mother."



"And thee won't go?"



"Why should I?  I've been again and again.  If I go to Meeting at all I

like best to sit in the quiet old house in Germantown, where the windows

are all open and I can see the trees, and hear the stir of the leaves.

It's such a crush at the Yearly Meeting at Arch Street, and then there's

the row of sleek-looking young men who line the curbstone and stare at us

as we come out.  No, I don't feel at home there."



That evening Ruth and her father sat late by the drawing-room fire, as

they were quite apt to do at night.  It was always a time of confidences.



"Thee has another letter from young Sterling," said Eli Bolton.



"Yes.  Philip has gone to the far west."



"How far?"



"He doesn't say, but it's on the frontier, and on the map everything

beyond it is marked 'Indians' and 'desert,' and looks as desolate as a

Wednesday Meeting."



"Humph.  It was time for him to do something.  Is he going to start a

daily newspaper among the Kick-a-poos?"



"Father, thee's unjust to Philip.  He's going into business."



"What sort of business can a young man go into without capital?"



"He doesn't say exactly what it is," said Ruth a little dubiously, "but

it's something about land and railroads, and thee knows, father, that

fortunes are made nobody knows exactly how, in a new country."



"I should think so, you innocent puss, and in an old one too.  But Philip

is honest, and he has talent enough, if he will stop scribbling, to make

his way.  But thee may as well take care of theeself, Ruth, and not go

dawdling along with a young man in his adventures, until thy own mind is

a little more settled what thee wants."



This excellent advice did not seem to impress Ruth greatly, for she was

looking away with that abstraction of vision which often came into her

grey eyes, and at length she exclaimed, with a sort of impatience,



"I wish I could go west, or south, or somewhere.  What a box women are

put into, measured for it, and put in young; if we go anywhere it's in a

box, veiled and pinioned and shut in by disabilities.  Father, I should

like to break things and get loose!"



What a sweet-voiced little innocent, it was to be sure.



"Thee will no doubt break things enough when thy time comes, child; women

always have; but what does thee want now that thee hasn't?"



"I want to be something, to make myself something, to do something.  Why

should I rust, and be stupid, and sit in inaction because I am a girl?

What would happen to me if thee should lose thy property and die?  What

one useful thing could I do for a living, for the support of mother and

the children?  And if I had a fortune, would thee want me to lead a

useless life?"



"Has thy mother led a useless life?"



"Somewhat that depends upon whether her children amount to anything,"

retorted the sharp little disputant.  "What's the good, father, of a

series of human beings who don't advance any?"



Friend Eli, who had long ago laid aside the Quaker dress, and was out of

Meeting, and who in fact after a youth of doubt could not yet define his

belief, nevertheless looked with some wonder at this fierce young eagle

of his, hatched in a Friend's dove-cote.  But he only said,



"Has thee consulted thy mother about a career, I suppose it is a career

thee wants?"



Ruth did not reply directly; she complained that her mother didn't

understand her.  But that wise and placid woman understood the sweet

rebel a great deal better than Ruth understood herself.  She also had a

history, possibly, and had sometime beaten her young wings against the

cage of custom, and indulged in dreams of a new social order, and had

passed through that fiery period when it seems possible for one mind,

which has not yet tried its limits, to break up and re-arrange the world.



Ruth replied to Philip's letter in due time and in the most cordial and

unsentimental manner.  Philip liked the letter, as he did everything she

did; but he had a dim notion that there was more about herself in the

letter than about him.  He took it with him from the Southern Hotel, when

he went to walk, and read it over and again in an unfrequented street as

he stumbled along. The rather common-place and unformed hand-writing

seemed to him peculiar and characteristic, different from that of any

other woman.



Ruth was glad to hear that Philip had made a push into the world, and she

was sure that his talent and courage would make a way for him.  She

should pray for his success at any rate, and especially that the Indians,

in St. Louis, would not take his scalp.



Philip looked rather dubious at this sentence, and wished that he had

written nothing about Indians.









CHAPTER XV.



Eli Bolton and his wife talked over Ruth's case, as they had often done

before, with no little anxiety.  Alone of all their children she was

impatient of the restraints and monotony of the Friends' Society, and

wholly indisposed to accept the "inner light" as a guide into a life of

acceptance and inaction.  When Margaret told her husband of Ruth's newest

project, he did not exhibit so much surprise as she hoped for.  In fact

he said that he did not see why a woman should not enter the medical

profession if she felt a call to it.



"But," said Margaret, "consider her total inexperience of the world, and

her frail health.  Can such a slight little body endure the ordeal of the

preparation for, or the strain of, the practice of the profession?"



"Did thee ever think, Margaret, whether, she can endure being thwarted in

an, object on which she has so set her heart, as she has on this?  Thee

has trained her thyself at home, in her enfeebled childhood, and thee

knows how strong her will is, and what she has been able to accomplish in

self-culture by the simple force of her determination.  She never will be

satisfied until she has tried her own strength."



"I wish," said Margaret, with an inconsequence that is not exclusively

feminine, "that she were in the way to fall in love and marry by and by.

I think that would cure her of some of her notions.  I am not sure but if

she went away, to some distant school, into an entirely new life, her

thoughts would be diverted."



Eli Bolton almost laughed as he regarded his wife, with eyes that never

looked at her except fondly, and replied,



"Perhaps thee remembers that thee had notions also, before we were

married, and before thee became a member of Meeting.  I think Ruth comes

honestly by certain tendencies which thee has hidden under the Friend's

dress."



Margaret could not say no to this, and while she paused, it was evident

that memory was busy with suggestions to shake her present opinions.



"Why not let Ruth try the study for a time," suggested Eli; "there is a

fair beginning of a Woman's Medical College in the city.  Quite likely

she will soon find that she needs first a more general culture, and fall,

in with thy wish that she should see more of the world at some large

school."



There really seemed to be nothing else to be done, and Margaret consented

at length without approving.  And it was agreed that Ruth, in order to

spare her fatigue, should take lodgings with friends near the college and

make a trial in the pursuit of that science to which we all owe our

lives, and sometimes as by a miracle of escape.



That day Mr. Bolton brought home a stranger to dinner, Mr. Bigler of the

great firm of Pennybacker, Bigler & Small, railroad contractors.  He was

always bringing home somebody, who had a scheme; to build a road, or open

a mine, or plant a swamp with cane to grow paper-stock, or found a

hospital, or invest in a patent shad-bone separator, or start a college

somewhere on the frontier, contiguous to a land speculation.



The Bolton house was a sort of hotel for this kind of people.  They were

always coming.  Ruth had known them from childhood, and she used to say

that her father attracted them as naturally as a sugar hogshead does

flies.  Ruth had an idea that a large portion of the world lived by

getting the rest of the world into schemes.  Mr. Bolton never could say

"no" to any of them, not even, said Ruth again, to the society for

stamping oyster shells with scripture texts before they were sold at

retail.



Mr. Bigler's plan this time, about which he talked loudly, with his mouth

full, all dinner time, was the building of the Tunkhannock, Rattlesnake

and Youngwomans-town railroad, which would not only be a great highway to

the west, but would open to market inexhaustible coal-fields and untold

millions of lumber.  The plan of operations was very simple.



"We'll buy the lands," explained he, "on long time, backed by the notes

of good men; and then mortgage them for money enough to get the road well

on.  Then get the towns on the line to issue their bonds for stock, and

sell their bonds for enough to complete the road, and partly stock it,

especially if we mortgage each section as we complete it.  We can then

sell the rest of the stock on the prospect of the business of the road

through an improved country, and also sell the lands at a big advance,

on the strength of the road.  All we want," continued Mr. Bigler in his

frank manner, "is a few thousand dollars to start the surveys, and

arrange things in the legislature.  There is some parties will have to be

seen, who might make us trouble."



"It will take a good deal of money to start the enterprise," remarked Mr.

Bolton, who knew very well what "seeing" a Pennsylvania Legislature

meant, but was too polite to tell Mr. Bigler what he thought of him,

while he was his guest; "what security would one have for it?"



Mr. Bigler smiled a hard kind of smile, and said, "You'd be inside, Mr.

Bolton, and you'd have the first chance in the deal."



This was rather unintelligible to Ruth, who was nevertheless somewhat

amused by the study of a type of character she had seen before.

At length she interrupted the conversation by asking,



"You'd sell the stock, I suppose, Mr. Bigler, to anybody who was

attracted by the prospectus?"



"O, certainly, serve all alike," said Mr. Bigler, now noticing Ruth for

the first time, and a little puzzled by the serene, intelligent face that

was turned towards him.



"Well, what would become of the poor people who had been led to put their

little money into the speculation, when you got out of it and left it

half way?"



It would be no more true to say of Mr. Bigler that he was or could be

embarrassed, than to say that a brass counterfeit dollar-piece would

change color when refused; the question annoyed him a little, in Mr.

Bolton's presence.



"Why, yes, Miss, of course, in a great enterprise for the benefit of the

community there will little things occur, which, which--and, of course,

the poor ought to be looked to; I tell my wife, that the poor must be

looked to; if you can tell who are poor--there's so many impostors.  And

then, there's so many poor in the legislature to be looked after," said

the contractor with a sort of a chuckle, "isn't that so, Mr. Bolton?"



Eli Bolton replied that he never had much to do with the legislature.



"Yes," continued this public benefactor, "an uncommon poor lot this year,

uncommon.  Consequently an expensive lot.  The fact is, Mr. Bolton, that

the price is raised so high on United States Senator now, that it affects

the whole market; you can't get any public improvement through on

reasonable terms.  Simony is what I call it, Simony," repeated Mr.

Bigler, as if he had said a good thing.



Mr. Bigler went on and gave some very interesting details of the intimate

connection between railroads and politics, and thoroughly entertained

himself all dinner time, and as much disgusted Ruth, who asked no more

questions, and her father who replied in monosyllables:



"I wish," said Ruth to her father, after the guest had gone, "that you

wouldn't bring home any more such horrid men.  Do all men who wear big

diamond breast-pins, flourish their knives at table, and use bad grammar,

and cheat?"



"O, child, thee mustn't be too observing.  Mr. Bigler is one of the most

important men in the state; nobody has more influence at Harrisburg.

I don't like him any more than thee does, but I'd better lend him a

little money than to have his ill will."



"Father, I think thee'd better have his ill-will than his company.  Is it

true that he gave money to help build the pretty little church of

St. James the Less, and that he is, one of the vestrymen?"



"Yes.  He is not such a bad fellow.  One of the men in Third street asked

him the other day, whether his was a high church or a low church?  Bigler

said he didn't know; he'd been in it once, and he could touch the ceiling

in the side aisle with his hand."



"I think he's just horrid," was Ruth's final summary of him, after the

manner of the swift judgment of women, with no consideration of the

extenuating circumstances.  Mr. Bigler had no idea that he had not made a

good impression on the whole family; he certainly intended to be

agreeable.  Margaret agreed with her daughter, and though she never said

anything to such people, she was grateful to Ruth for sticking at least

one pin into him.



Such was the serenity of the Bolton household that a stranger in it would

never have suspected there was any opposition to Ruth's going to the

Medical School.  And she went quietly to take her residence in town, and

began her attendance of the lectures, as if it were the most natural

thing in the world.  She did not heed, if she heard, the busy and

wondering gossip of relations and acquaintances, gossip that has no less

currency among the Friends than elsewhere because it is whispered slyly

and creeps about in an undertone.



Ruth was absorbed, and for the first time in her life thoroughly happy;

happy in the freedom of her life, and in the keen enjoyment of the

investigation that broadened its field day by day.  She was in high

spirits when she came home to spend First Days; the house was full of her

gaiety and her merry laugh, and the children wished that Ruth would never

go away again.  But her mother noticed, with a little anxiety, the

sometimes flushed face, and the sign of an eager spirit in the kindling

eyes, and, as well, the serious air of determination and endurance in her

face at unguarded moments.



The college was a small one and it sustained itself not without

difficulty in this city, which is so conservative, and is yet the origin

of so many radical movements.  There were not more than a dozen

attendants on the lectures all together, so that the enterprise had the

air of an experiment, and the fascination of pioneering for those engaged

in it.  There was one woman physician driving about town in her carriage,

attacking the most violent diseases in all quarters with persistent

courage, like a modern Bellona in her war chariot, who was popularly

supposed to gather in fees to the amount ten to twenty thousand dollars a

year.  Perhaps some of these students looked forward to the near day when

they would support such a practice and a husband besides, but it is

unknown that any of them ever went further than practice in hospitals and

in their own nurseries, and it is feared that some of them were quite as

ready as their sisters, in emergencies, to "call a man."



If Ruth had any exaggerated expectations of a professional life, she kept

them to herself, and was known to her fellows of the class simply as a

cheerful, sincere student, eager in her investigations, and never

impatient at anything, except an insinuation that women had not as much

mental capacity for science as men.



"They really say," said one young Quaker sprig to another youth of his

age, "that Ruth Bolton is really going to be a saw-bones, attends

lectures, cuts up bodies, and all that.  She's cool enough for a surgeon,

anyway."  He spoke feelingly, for he had very likely been weighed in

Ruth's calm eyes sometime, and thoroughly scared by the little laugh that

accompanied a puzzling reply to one of his conversational nothings.  Such

young gentlemen, at this time, did not come very distinctly into Ruth's

horizon, except as amusing circumstances.



About the details of her student life, Ruth said very little to her

friends, but they had reason to know, afterwards, that it required all

her nerve and the almost complete exhaustion of her physical strength,

to carry her through.  She began her anatomical practice upon detached

portions of the human frame, which were brought into the demonstrating

room--dissecting the eye, the ear, and a small tangle of muscles and

nerves--an occupation which had not much more savor of death in it than

the analysis of a portion of a plant out of which the life went when it

was plucked up by the roots.  Custom inures the most sensitive persons to

that which is at first most repellant; and in the late war we saw the

most delicate women, who could not at home endure the sight of blood,

become so used to scenes of carnage, that they walked the hospitals and

the margins of battle-fields, amid the poor remnants of torn humanity,

with as perfect self-possession as if they were strolling in a flower

garden.



It happened that Ruth was one evening deep in a line of investigation

which she could not finish or understand without demonstration, and so

eager was she in it, that it seemed as if she could not wait till the

next day.  She, therefore, persuaded a fellow student, who was reading

that evening with her, to go down to the dissecting room of the college,

and ascertain what they wanted to know by an hour's work there.  Perhaps,

also, Ruth wanted to test her own nerve, and to see whether the power of

association was stronger in her mind than her own will.



The janitor of the shabby and comfortless old building admitted the

girls, not without suspicion, and gave them lighted candles, which they

would need, without other remark than "there's a new one, Miss," as the

girls went up the broad stairs.



They climbed to the third story, and paused before a door, which they

unlocked, and which admitted them into a long apartment, with a row of

windows on one side and one at the end.  The room was without light, save

from the stars and the candles the girls carried, which revealed to them

dimly two long and several small tables, a few benches and chairs, a

couple of skeletons hanging on the wall, a sink, and cloth-covered heaps

of something upon the tables here and there.



The windows were open, and the cool night wind came in strong enough to

flutter a white covering now and then, and to shake the loose casements.

But all the sweet odors of the night could not take from the room a faint

suggestion of mortality.



The young ladies paused a moment.  The room itself was familiar enough,

but night makes almost any chamber eerie, and especially such a room of

detention as this where the mortal parts of the unburied might--almost be

supposed to be, visited, on the sighing night winds, by the wandering

spirits of their late tenants.



Opposite and at some distance across the roofs of lower buildings, the

girls saw a tall edifice, the long upper story of which seemed to be a

dancing hall.  The windows of that were also open, and through them they

heard the scream of the jiggered and tortured violin, and the pump, pump

of the oboe, and saw the moving shapes of men and women in quick

transition, and heard the prompter's drawl.



"I wonder," said Ruth, "what the girls dancing there would think if they

saw us, or knew that there was such a room as this so near them."



She did not speak very loud, and, perhaps unconsciously, the girls drew

near to each other as they approached the long table in the centre of the

room.  A straight object lay upon it, covered with a sheet.  This was

doubtless "the new one" of which the janitor spoke.  Ruth advanced, and

with a not very steady hand lifted the white covering from the upper part

of the figure and turned it down.  Both the girls started.  It was a

negro.  The black face seemed to defy the pallor of death, and asserted

an ugly life-likeness that was frightful.



Ruth was as pale as the white sheet, and her comrade whispered, "Come

away, Ruth, it is awful."



Perhaps it was the wavering light of the candles, perhaps it was only the

agony from a death of pain, but the repulsive black face seemed to wear a

scowl that said, "Haven't you yet done with the outcast, persecuted black

man, but you must now haul him from his grave, and send even your women

to dismember his body?"



Who is this dead man, one of thousands who died yesterday, and will be

dust anon, to protest that science shall not turn his worthless carcass

to some account?



Ruth could have had no such thought, for with a pity in her sweet face,

that for the moment overcame fear and disgust, she reverently replaced

the covering, and went away to her own table, as her companion did to

hers.  And there for an hour they worked at their several problems,

without speaking, but not without an awe of the presence there, "the new

one," and not without an awful sense of life itself, as they heard the

pulsations of the music and the light laughter from the dancing-hall.



When, at length, they went away, and locked the dreadful room behind

them, and came out into the street, where people were passing, they, for

the first time, realized, in the relief they felt, what a nervous strain

they had been under.









CHAPTER XVI.



While Ruth was thus absorbed in her new occupation, and the spring was

wearing away, Philip and his friends were still detained at the Southern

Hotel.  The great contractors had concluded their business with the state

and railroad officials and with the lesser contractors, and departed for

the East.  But the serious illness of one of the engineers kept Philip

and Henry in the city and occupied in alternate watchings.



Philip wrote to Ruth of the new acquaintance they had made, Col. Sellers,

an enthusiastic and hospitable gentleman, very much interested in the

development of the country, and in their success.  They had not had an

opportunity to visit at his place "up in the country" yet, but the

Colonel often dined with them, and in confidence, confided to them his

projects, and seemed to take a great liking to them, especially to his

friend Harry.  It was true that he never seemed to have ready money,

but he was engaged in very large operations.



The correspondence was not very brisk between these two young persons,

so differently occupied; for though Philip wrote long letters, he got

brief ones in reply, full of sharp little observations however, such as

one concerning Col. Sellers, namely, that such men dined at their house

every week.



Ruth's proposed occupation astonished Philip immensely, but while he

argued it and discussed it, he did not dare hint to her his fear that it

would interfere with his most cherished plans.  He too sincerely

respected Ruth's judgment to make any protest, however, and he would have

defended her course against the world.



This enforced waiting at St. Louis was very irksome to Philip.  His money

was running away, for one thing, and he longed to get into the field,

and see for himself what chance there was for a fortune or even an

occupation.  The contractors had given the young men leave to join the

engineer corps as soon as they could, but otherwise had made no provision

for them, and in fact had left them with only the most indefinite

expectations of something large in the future.



Harry was entirely happy; in his circumstances.  He very soon knew

everybody, from the governor of the state down to the waiters at the

hotel.  He had the Wall street slang at his tongue's end; he always

talked like a capitalist, and entered with enthusiasm into all the land

and railway schemes with which the air was thick.



Col. Sellers and Harry talked together by the hour and by the day.  Harry

informed his new friend that he was going out with the engineer corps of

the Salt Lick Pacific Extension, but that wasn't his real business.



"I'm to have, with another party," said Harry, "a big contract in the

road, as soon as it is let; and, meantime, I'm with the engineers to spy

out the best land and the depot sites."



"It's everything," suggested' the Colonel, "in knowing where to invest.

I've known people throwaway their money because they  were too

consequential to take Sellers' advice.  Others, again, have made their

pile on taking it.  I've looked over the ground; I've been studying it

for twenty years.  You can't put your finger on a spot in the map of

Missouri that I don't know as if I'd made it.  When you want to place

anything," continued the Colonel, confidently, "just let Beriah Sellers

know.  That's all."



"Oh, I haven't got much in ready money I can lay my hands on now, but if

a fellow could do anything with fifteen or twenty thousand dollars,

as a beginning, I shall draw for that when I see the right opening."



"Well, that's something, that's something, fifteen or twenty thousand

dollars, say twenty--as an advance," said the Colonel reflectively, as if

turning over his mind for a project that could be entered on with such a

trifling sum.



"I'll tell you what it is--but only to you Mr. Brierly, only to you,

mind; I've got a little project that I've been keeping.  It looks small,

looks small on paper, but it's got a big future.  What should you say,

sir, to a city, built up like the rod of Aladdin had touched it, built up

in two years, where now you wouldn't expect it any more than you'd expect

a light-house on the top of Pilot Knob? and you could own the land!  It

can be done, sir.  It can be done!"



The Colonel hitched up his chair close to Harry, laid his hand on his

knee, and, first looking about him, said in a low voice, "The Salt Lick

Pacific Extension is going to run through Stone's Landing!  The Almighty

never laid out a cleaner piece of level prairie for a city; and it's the

natural center of all that region of hemp and tobacco."



"What makes you think the road will go there?  It's twenty miles, on the

map, off the straight line of the road?"



"You can't tell what is the straight line till the engineers have been

over it.  Between us, I have talked with Jeff Thompson, the division

engineer.  He understands the wants of Stone's Landing, and the claims of

the inhabitants--who are to be there.  Jeff says that a railroad is for-

the accommodation of the people and not for the benefit of gophers; and

if, he don't run this to Stone's Landing he'll be damned!  You ought to

know Jeff; he's one of the most enthusiastic engineers in this western

country, and one of the best fellows that ever looked through the bottom

of a glass."



The recommendation was not undeserved.  There was nothing that Jeff

wouldn't do, to accommodate a friend, from sharing his last dollar with

him, to winging him in a duel.  When he understood from Col. Sellers.

how the land lay at Stone's Landing, he cordially shook hands with that

gentleman, asked him to drink, and fairly roared out, "Why, God bless my

soul, Colonel, a word from one Virginia gentleman to another is 'nuff

ced.'  There's Stone's Landing been waiting for a railroad more than four

thousand years, and damme if she shan't have it."



Philip had not so much faith as Harry in Stone's Landing, when the latter

opened the project to him, but Harry talked about it as if he already

owned that incipient city.



Harry thoroughly believed in all his projects and inventions, and lived

day by day in their golden atmosphere.  Everybody liked the young fellow,

for how could they help liking one of such engaging manners and large

fortune?  The waiters at the hotel would do more for him than for any

other guest, and he made a great many acquaintances among the people of

St. Louis, who liked his sensible and liberal views about the development

of the western country, and about St. Louis.  He said it ought to be the

national capital.  Harry made partial arrangements with several of the

merchants for furnishing supplies for his contract on the Salt Lick

Pacific Extension; consulted the maps with the engineers, and went over

the profiles with the contractors, figuring out estimates for bids.

He was exceedingly busy with those things when he was not at the bedside

of his sick acquaintance, or arranging the details of his speculation

with Col. Sellers.



Meantime the days went along and the weeks, and the money in Harry's

pocket got lower and lower.  He was just as liberal with what he had as

before, indeed it was his nature to be free with his money or with that

of others, and he could lend or spend a dollar with an air that made it

seem like ten.  At length, at the end of one week, when his hotel bill

was presented, Harry found not a cent in his pocket to meet it.  He

carelessly remarked to the landlord that he was not that day in funds,

but he would draw on New York, and he sat down and wrote to the

contractors in that city a glowing letter about the prospects of the

road, and asked them to advance a hundred or two, until he got at work.

No reply came.  He wrote again, in an unoffended business like tone,

suggesting that he had better draw at three days.  A short answer came to

this, simply saying that money was very tight in Wall street just then,

and that he had better join the engineer corps as soon as he could.



But the bill had to be paid, and Harry took it to Philip, and asked him

if he thought he hadn't better draw on his uncle.  Philip had not much

faith in Harry's power of "drawing," and told him that he would pay the

bill himself.  Whereupon Harry dismissed the matter then and thereafter

from his thoughts, and, like a light-hearted good fellow as he was, gave

himself no more trouble about his board-bills.  Philip paid them, swollen

as they were with a monstrous list of extras; but he seriously counted

the diminishing bulk of his own hoard, which was all the money he had in

the world.  Had he not tacitly agreed to share with Harry to the last in

this adventure, and would not the generous fellow divide; with him if he,

Philip, were in want and Harry had anything?



The fever at length got tired of tormenting the stout young engineer, who

lay sick at the hotel, and left him, very thin, a little sallow but an

"acclimated" man.  Everybody said he was "acclimated" now, and said it

cheerfully.  What it is to be acclimated to western fevers no two persons

exactly agree.



Some say it is a sort of vaccination that renders death by some malignant

type of fever less probable.  Some regard it as a sort of initiation,

like that into the Odd Fellows, which renders one liable to his regular

dues thereafter.  Others consider it merely the acquisition of a habit of

taking every morning before breakfast a dose of bitters, composed of

whiskey and assafoetida, out of the acclimation jug.



Jeff Thompson afterwards told Philip that he once asked Senator Atchison,

then acting Vice-President: of the United States, about the possibility

of acclimation; he thought the opinion of the second officer of our great

government would be, valuable on this point.  They were sitting together

on a bench before a country tavern, in the free converse permitted by our

democratic habits.



"I suppose, Senator, that you have become acclimated to this country?"



"Well," said the Vice-President, crossing his legs, pulling his wide-

awake down over his forehead, causing a passing chicken to hop quickly

one side by the accuracy of his aim, and speaking with senatorial

deliberation, "I think I have.  I've been here twenty-five years, and

dash, dash my dash to dash, if I haven't entertained twenty-five separate

and distinct earthquakes, one a year.  The niggro is the only person who

can stand the fever and ague of this region."



The convalescence of the engineer was the signal for breaking up quarters

at St. Louis, and the young fortune-hunters started up the river in good

spirits.  It was only the second time either of them had been upon a

Mississippi steamboat, and nearly everything they saw had the charm of

novelty.  Col. Sellers was at the landing to bid thorn good-bye.



"I shall send you up that basket of champagne by the next boat; no, no;

no thanks; you'll find it not bad in camp," he cried out as the plank was

hauled in.  "My respects to Thompson.  Tell him to sight for Stone's.

Let me know, Mr. Brierly, when you are ready to locate; I'll come over

from Hawkeye.  Goodbye."



And the last the young fellows saw of the Colonel, he was waving his hat,

and beaming prosperity and good luck.



The voyage was delightful, and was not long enough to become monotonous.

The travelers scarcely had time indeed to get accustomed to the splendors

of the great saloon where the tables were spread for meals, a marvel of

paint and gilding, its ceiling hung with fancifully cut tissue-paper of

many colors, festooned and arranged in endless patterns.  The whole was

more beautiful than a barber's shop.  The printed bill of fare at dinner

was longer and more varied, the proprietors justly boasted, than that of

any hotel in New York.  It must have been the work of an author of talent

and imagination, and it surely was not his fault if the dinner itself was

to a certain extent a delusion, and if the guests got something that

tasted pretty much the same whatever dish they ordered; nor was it his

fault if a general flavor of rose in all the dessert dishes suggested

that they hid passed through the barber's saloon on their way from the

kitchen.



The travelers landed at a little settlement on the left bank, and at once

took horses for the camp in the interior, carrying their clothes and

blankets strapped behind the saddles.  Harry was dressed as we have seen

him once before, and his long and shining boots attracted not a little

the attention of the few persons they met on the road, and especially of

the bright faced wenches who lightly stepped along the highway,

picturesque in their colored kerchiefs, carrying light baskets, or riding

upon mules and balancing before them a heavier load.



Harry sang fragments of operas and talked abort their fortune.  Philip

even was excited by the sense of freedom and adventure, and the beauty of

the landscape.  The prairie, with its new grass and unending acres of

brilliant flowers--chiefly the innumerable varieties of phlox-bore the

look of years of cultivation, and the occasional open groves of white

oaks gave it a park-like appearance.  It was hardly unreasonable to

expect to see at any moment, the gables and square windows of an

Elizabethan mansion in one of the well kept groves.



Towards sunset of the third day, when the young gentlemen thought they

ought to be near the town of Magnolia, near which they had been directed

to find the engineers' camp, they descried a log house and drew up before

it to enquire the way.  Half the building was store, and half was

dwelling house.  At the door of the latter stood a regress with a bright

turban on her head, to whom Philip called,



"Can you tell me, auntie, how far it is to the town of Magnolia?"



"Why, bress you chile," laughed the woman, "you's dere now."



It was true.  This log horse was the compactly built town, and all

creation was its suburbs.  The engineers' camp was only two or three

miles distant.



"You's boun' to find it," directed auntie, "if you don't keah nuffin

'bout de road, and go fo' de sun-down."



A brisk gallop brought the riders in sight of the twinkling light of the

camp, just as the stars came out.  It lay in a little hollow, where a

small stream ran through a sparse grove of young white oaks.  A half

dozen tents were pitched under the trees, horses and oxen were corraled

at a little distance, and a group of men sat on camp stools or lay on

blankets about a bright fire.  The twang of a banjo became audible as

they drew nearer, and they saw a couple of negroes, from some neighboring

plantation, "breaking down" a juba in approved style, amid the "hi, hi's"

of the spectators.



Mr. Jeff Thompson, for it was the camp of this redoubtable engineer, gave

the travelers a hearty welcome, offered them ground room in his own tent,

ordered supper, and set out a small jug, a drop from which he declared

necessary on account of the chill of the evening.



"I never saw an Eastern man," said Jeff, "who knew how to drink from a

jug with one hand.  It's as easy as lying.  So."  He grasped the handle

with the right hand, threw the jug back upon his arm, and applied his

lips to the nozzle.  It was an act as graceful as it was simple.

"Besides," said Mr. Thompson, setting it down, "it puts every man on his

honor as to quantity."



Early to turn in was the rule of the camp, and by nine o'clock everybody

was under his blanket, except Jeff himself, who worked awhile at his

table over his field-book, and then arose, stepped outside the tent door

and sang, in a strong and not unmelodious tenor, the Star Spangled Banner

from beginning to end.  It proved to be his nightly practice to let off

the unexpended seam of his conversational powers, in the words of this

stirring song.



It was a long time before Philip got to sleep.  He saw the fire light,

he saw the clear stars through the tree-tops, he heard the gurgle of the

stream, the stamp of the horses, the occasional barking of the dog which

followed the cook's wagon, the hooting of an owl; and when these failed

he saw Jeff, standing on a battlement, mid the rocket's red glare, and

heard him sing, "Oh, say, can you see?", It was the first time he had

ever slept on the ground.









CHAPTER XVII.



         ----"We have view'd it,

          And measur'd it within all, by the scale

          The richest tract of land, love, in the kingdom!

          There will be made seventeen or eighteeen millions,

          Or more, as't may be handled!

                              The Devil is an Ass.



Nobody dressed more like an engineer than Mr. Henry Brierly.  The

completeness of his appointments was the envy of the corps, and the gay

fellow himself was the admiration of the camp servants, axemen, teamsters

and cooks.



"I reckon you didn't git them boots no wher's this side o' Sent Louis?"

queried the tall Missouri youth who acted as commissariy's assistant.



"No, New York."



"Yas, I've heern o' New York," continued the butternut lad, attentively

studying each item of Harry's dress, and endeavoring to cover his design

with interesting conversation.  "'N there's Massachusetts.",



"It's not far off."



"I've heern Massachusetts was a-----of a place.  Les, see, what state's

Massachusetts in?"



"Massachusetts," kindly replied Harry, "is in the state of Boston."



"Abolish'n wan't it?  They must a cost right smart," referring to the

boots.



Harry shouldered his rod and went to the field, tramped over the prairie

by day, and figured up results at night, with the utmost cheerfulness and

industry, and plotted the line on the profile paper, without, however,

the least idea of engineering practical or theoretical.  Perhaps there

was not a great deal of scientific knowledge in the entire corps, nor was

very much needed.  They were making, what is called a preliminary survey,

and the chief object of a preliminary survey was to get up an excitement

about the road, to interest every town in that part of the state in it,

under the belief that the road would run through it, and to get the aid

of every planter upon the prospect that a station would be on his land.



Mr. Jeff Thompson was the most popular engineer who could be found for

this work.  He did not bother himself much about details or

practicabilities of location, but ran merrily along, sighting from the

top of one divide to the top of another, and striking "plumb" every town

site and big plantation within twenty or thirty miles of his route.  In

his own language he "just went booming."



This course gave Harry an opportunity, as he said, to learn the practical

details of engineering, and it gave Philip a chance to see the country,

and to judge for himself what prospect of a fortune it offered.  Both he

and Harry got the "refusal" of more than one plantation as they went

along, and wrote urgent letters to their eastern correspondents, upon the

beauty of the land and the certainty that it would quadruple in value as

soon as the road was finally located.  It seemed strange to them that

capitalists did not flock out there and secure this land.



They had not been in the field over two weeks when Harry wrote to his

friend Col. Sellers that he'd better be on the move, for the line was

certain to go to Stone's Landing.  Any one who looked at the line on the

map, as it was laid down from day to day, would have been uncertain which

way it was going; but Jeff had declared that in his judgment the only

practicable route from the point they then stood on was to follow the

divide to Stone's Landing, and it was generally understood that that town

would be the next one hit.



"We'll make it, boys," said the chief, "if we have to go in a balloon."



And make it they did In less than a week, this indomitable engineer had

carried his moving caravan over slues and branches, across bottoms and

along divides, and pitched his tents in the very heart of the city of

Stone's Landing.



"Well, I'll be dashed," was heard the cheery voice of Mr. Thompson, as he

stepped outside the tent door at sunrise next morning.  "If this don't

get me.  I say, yon, Grayson, get out your sighting iron and see if you

can find old Sellers' town.  Blame me if we wouldn't have run plumb by it

if twilight had held on a little longer.  Oh!  Sterling, Brierly, get up

and see the city.  There's a steamboat just coming round the bend."  And

Jeff roared with laughter.  "The mayor'll be round here to breakfast."



The fellows turned out of the tents, rubbing their eyes, and stared about

them.  They were camped on the second bench of the narrow bottom of a

crooked, sluggish stream, that was some five rods wide in the present

good stage of water.  Before them were a dozen log cabins, with stick and

mud chimneys, irregularly disposed on either side of a not very well

defined road, which did not seem to know its own mind exactly, and, after

straggling through the town, wandered off over the rolling prairie in an

uncertain way, as if it had started for nowhere and was quite likely to

reach its destination.  Just as it left the town, however, it was cheered

and assisted by a guide-board, upon which was the legend "10 Mils to

Hawkeye."



The road had never been made except by the travel over it, and at this

season--the rainy June--it was a way of ruts cut in the black soil, and

of fathomless mud-holes.  In the principal street of the city, it had

received more attention; for hogs; great and small, rooted about in it

and wallowed in it, turning the street into a liquid quagmire which could

only be crossed on pieces of plank thrown here and there.



About the chief cabin, which was the store and grocery of this mart of

trade, the mud was more liquid than elsewhere, and the rude platform in

front of it and the dry-goods boxes mounted thereon were places of refuge

for all the loafers of the place.  Down by the stream was a dilapidated

building which served for a hemp warehouse, and a shaky wharf extended

out from it, into the water.  In fact a flat-boat was there moored by it,

it's setting poles lying across the gunwales.  Above the town the stream

was crossed by a crazy wooden bridge, the supports of which leaned all

ways in the soggy soil; the absence of a plank here and there in the

flooring made the crossing of the bridge faster than a walk an offense

not necessary to be prohibited by law.



"This, gentlemen," said Jeff, "is Columbus River, alias Goose Run.  If it

was widened, and deepened, and straightened, and  made, long enough, it

would be one of the finest rivers in the western country."



As the sun rose and sent his level beams along the stream, the thin

stratum of mist, or malaria, rose also and dispersed, but the light was

not able to enliven the dull water nor give any hint of its apparently

fathomless depth.  Venerable mud-turtles crawled up and roosted upon the

old logs in the stream, their backs glistening in the sun, the first

inhabitants of the metropolis to begin the active business of the day.



It was not long, however, before smoke began to issue from the city

chimnies; and before the engineers, had finished their breakfast they

were the object of the curious inspection of six or eight boys and men,

who lounged into the camp and gazed about them with languid interest,

their hands in their pockets every one.



"Good morning; gentlemen," called out the chief engineer, from the table.



"Good mawning," drawled out the spokesman of the party.  "I allow thish-

yers the railroad, I heern it was a-comin'."



"Yes, this is the railroad; all but the rails and the ironhorse."



"I reckon you kin git all the rails you want oaten my white oak timber

over, thar," replied the first speaker, who appeared to be a man of

property and willing to strike up a trade.



"You'll have to negotiate with the contractors about the rails, sir,"

said Jeff; "here's Mr. Brierly, I've no doubt would like to buy your

rails when the time comes."



"O," said the man, "I thought maybe you'd fetch the whole bilin along

with you.  But if you want rails, I've got em, haint I Eph."



"Heaps," said Eph, without taking his eyes off the group at the table.



"Well," said Mr. Thompson, rising from his seat and moving towards his

tent, "the railroad has come to Stone's Landing, sure; I move we take a

drink on it all round."



The proposal met with universal favor.  Jeff gave prosperity to Stone's

Landing and navigation to Goose Run, and the toast was washed down with

gusto, in the simple fluid of corn; and with the return compliment that a

rail road was a good thing, and that Jeff Thompson was no slouch.



About ten o'clock a horse and wagon was descried making a slow approach

to the camp over the prairie.  As it drew near, the wagon was seen to

contain a portly gentleman, who hitched impatiently forward on his seat,

shook the reins and gently touched up his horse, in the vain attempt to

communicate his own energy to that dull beast, and looked eagerly at the

tents.  When the conveyance at length drew up to Mr. Thompson's door,

the gentleman descended with great deliberation, straightened himself up,

rubbed his hands, and beaming satisfaction from every part of his radiant

frame, advanced to the group that was gathered to welcome him, and which

had saluted him by name as soon as he came within hearing.



"Welcome to Napoleon, gentlemen, welcome.  I am proud to see you here

Mr. Thompson.  You are, looking well Mr. Sterling.  This is the country,

sir.  Right glad to see you Mr. Brierly.  You got that basket of

champagne?  No?  Those blasted river thieves!  I'll never send anything

more by 'em.  The best brand, Roederer.  The last I had in my cellar,

from a lot sent me by Sir George Gore--took him out on a buffalo hunt,

when he visited our, country.  Is always sending me some trifle.  You

haven't looked about any yet, gentlemen?  It's in the rough yet, in the

rough.  Those buildings will all have to come down.  That's the place for

the public square, Court House, hotels, churches, jail--all that sort of

thing.  About where we stand, the deepo.  How does that strike your

engineering eye, Mr. Thompson?  Down yonder the business streets, running

to the wharves.  The University up there, on rising ground, sightly

place, see the river for miles.  That's Columbus river, only forty-nine

miles to the Missouri.  You see what it is, placid, steady, no current to

interfere with navigation, wants widening in places and dredging, dredge

out the harbor and raise a levee in front of the town; made by nature on

purpose for a mart.  Look at all this country, not another building

within ten miles, no other navigable stream, lay of the land points right

here; hemp, tobacco, corn, must come here.  The railroad will do it,

Napoleon won't know itself in a year."



"Don't now evidently," said Philip aside to Harry.  "Have you breakfasted

Colonel?"



"Hastily.  Cup of coffee.  Can't trust any coffee I don't import myself.

But I put up a basket of provisions,--wife would put in a few delicacies,

women always will, and a half dozen of that Burgundy, I was telling you

of Mr. Briefly.  By the way, you never got to dine with me."  And the

Colonel strode away to the wagon and looked under the seat for the

basket.



Apparently it was not there.  For the Colonel raised up the flap, looked

in front and behind, and then exclaimed,



"Confound it.  That comes of not doing a thing yourself.  I trusted to

the women folks to set that basket in the wagon, and it ain't there."



The camp cook speedily prepared a savory breakfast for the Colonel,

broiled chicken, eggs, corn-bread, and coffee, to which he did ample

justice, and topped  off with a drop of Old Bourbon, from Mr. Thompson's

private store, a brand which he said he knew well, he should think it

came from his own sideboard.



While the engineer corps went to the field, to run back a couple of miles

and ascertain, approximately, if a road could ever get down to the

Landing, and to sight ahead across the Run, and see if it could ever get

out again, Col. Sellers and Harry sat down and began to roughly map out

the city of Napoleon on a large piece of drawing paper.



"I've got the refusal of a mile square here," said the Colonel, "in our

names, for a year, with a quarter interest reserved for the four owners."



They laid out the town liberally, not lacking room, leaving space for the

railroad to come in, and for the river as it was to be when improved.



The engineers reported that the railroad could come in, by taking a

little sweep and crossing the stream on a high bridge, but the grades

would be steep.  Col. Sellers said he didn't care so much about the

grades, if the road could only be made to reach the elevators on the

river.  The next day Mr. Thompson made a hasty survey of the stream for a

mile or two, so that the Colonel and Harry were enabled to show on their

map how nobly that would accommodate the city.  Jeff took a little

writing from the Colonel and Harry for a prospective share but Philip

declined to join in, saying that he had no money, and didn't want to make

engagements he couldn't fulfill.



The next morning the camp moved on, followed till it was out of sight by

the listless eyes of the group in front of the store, one of whom

remarked that, "he'd be doggoned if he ever expected to see that railroad

any mo'."



Harry went with the Colonel to Hawkeye to complete their arrangements, a

part of which was the preparation of a petition to congress for the

improvement of the navigation of Columbus River.









CHAPTER XVIII.



Eight years have passed since the death of Mr. Hawkins.  Eight years are

not many in the life of a nation or the history of a state, but they

maybe years of destiny that shall fix the current of the century

following.  Such years were those that followed the little scrimmage on

Lexington Common.  Such years were those that followed the double-shotted

demand for the surrender of Fort Sumter.  History is never done with

inquiring of these years, and summoning witnesses about them, and trying

to understand their significance.



The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted institutions that

were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the

social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the

entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of

two or three generations.



As we are accustomed to interpret the economy of providence, the life of

the individual is as nothing to that of the nation or the race; but who

can say, in the broader view and the more intelligent weight of values,

that the life of one man is not more than that of a nationality, and that

there is not a tribunal where the tragedy of one human soul shall not

seem more significant than the overturning of any human institution

whatever?



When one thinks of the tremendous forces of the upper and the nether

world which play for the mastery of the soul of a woman during the few

years in which she passes from plastic girlhood to the ripe maturity of

womanhood, he may well stand in awe before the momentous drama.



What capacities she has of purity, tenderness, goodness; what capacities

of vileness, bitterness and evil.  Nature must needs be lavish with the

mother and creator of men, and centre in her all the possibilities of

life.  And a few critical years can decide whether her life is to be full

of sweetness and light, whether she is to be the vestal of a holy temple,

or whether she will be the fallen priestess of a desecrated shrine.

There are women, it is true, who seem to be capable neither of rising

much nor of falling much, and whom a conventional life saves from any

special development of character.



But Laura was not one of them.  She had the fatal gift of beauty, and

that more fatal gift which does not always accompany mere beauty, the

power of fascination, a power that may, indeed, exist without beauty.

She had will, and pride and courage and ambition, and she was left to be

very much her own guide at the age when romance comes to the aid of

passion, and when the awakening powers of her vigorous mind had little

object on which to discipline themselves.



The tremendous conflict that was fought in this girl's soul none of those

about her knew, and very few knew that her life had in it anything

unusual or romantic or strange.



Those were troublous days in Hawkeye as well as in most other Missouri

towns, days of confusion, when between Unionist and Confederate

occupations, sudden maraudings and bush-whackings and raids, individuals

escaped observation or comment in actions that would have filled the town

with scandal in quiet times.



Fortunately we only need to deal with Laura's life at this period

historically, and look back upon such portions of it as will serve to

reveal the woman as she was at the time of the arrival of Mr. Harry

Brierly in Hawkeye.



The Hawkins family were settled there, and had a hard enough struggle

with poverty and the necessity of keeping up appearances in accord with

their own family pride and the large expectations they secretly cherished

of a fortune in the Knobs of East Tennessee.  How pinched they were

perhaps no one knew but Clay, to whom they looked for almost their whole

support.  Washington had been in Hawkeye off and on, attracted away

occasionally by some tremendous speculation, from which he invariably

returned to Gen. Boswell's office as poor as he went.  He was the

inventor of no one knew how many useless contrivances, which were not

worth patenting, and his years had been passed in dreaming and planning

to no purpose; until he was now a man of about thirty, without a

profession or a permanent occupation, a tall, brown-haired, dreamy person

of the best intentions and the frailest resolution.  Probably however

the, eight years had been happier to him than to any others in his

circle, for the time had been mostly spent in a blissful dream of the

coming of enormous wealth.



He went out with a company from Hawkeye to the war, and was not wanting

in courage, but be would have been a better soldier if he had been less

engaged in contrivances for circumventing the enemy by strategy unknown

to the books.



It happened to him to be captured in one of his self-appointed

expeditions, but the federal colonel released him, after a short

examination, satisfied that he could most injure the confederate forces

opposed to the Unionists by returning him to his regiment.  Col. Sellers

was of course a prominent man during the war.  He was captain of the home

guards in Hawkeye, and he never left home except upon one occasion, when

on the strength of a rumor, he executed a flank movement and fortified

Stone's Landing, a place which no one unacquainted with the country would

be likely to find.



"Gad," said the Colonel afterwards, "the Landing is the key to upper

Missouri, and it is the only place the enemy never captured.  If other

places had been defended as well as that was, the result would have been

different, sir."



The Colonel had his own theories about war as he had in other things.

If everybody had stayed at home as he did, he said, the South never would

have been conquered.  For what would there have been to conquer?  Mr.

Jeff Davis was constantly writing him to take command of a corps in the

confederate army, but Col. Sellers said, no, his duty was at home.  And

he was by no means idle.  He was the inventor of the famous air torpedo,

which came very near destroying the Union armies in Missouri, and the

city of St. Louis itself.



His plan was to fill a torpedo with Greek fire and poisonous and deadly

missiles, attach it to a balloon, and then let it sail away over the

hostile camp and explode at the right moment, when the time-fuse burned

out.  He intended to use this invention in the capture of St. Louis,

exploding his torpedoes over the city, and raining destruction upon it

until the army of occupation would gladly capitulate.  He was unable to

procure the Greek fire, but he constructed a vicious torpedo which would

have answered the purpose, but the first one prematurely exploded in his

wood-house, blowing it clean away, and setting fire to his house.  The

neighbors helped him put out the conflagration, but they discouraged any

more experiments of that sort.



The patriotic old gentleman, however, planted so much powder and so many

explosive contrivances in the roads leading into Hawkeye, and then forgot

the exact spots of danger, that people were afraid to travel the

highways, and used to come to town across the fields, The Colonel's motto

was, "Millions for defence but not one cent for tribute."



When Laura came to Hawkeye she might have forgotten the annoyances of the

gossips of Murpheysburg and have out lived the bitterness that was

growing in her heart, if she had been thrown less upon herself, or if the

surroundings of her life had been more congenial and helpful.  But she

had little society, less and less as she grew older that was congenial to

her, and her mind preyed upon itself; and the mystery of her birth at

once chagrined her and raised in her the most extravagant expectations.

She was proud and she felt the sting of poverty.  She could not but be

conscious of her beauty also, and she was vain of that, and came to take

a sort of delight in the exercise of her fascinations upon the rather

loutish young men who came in her way and whom she despised.



There was another world opened to her--a world of books.  But it was not

the best world of that sort, for the small libraries she had access to in

Hawkeye were decidedly miscellaneous, and largely made up of romances and

fictions which fed her imagination with the most exaggerated notions of

life, and showed her men and women in a very false sort of heroism.  From

these stories she learned what a woman of keen intellect and some culture

joined to beauty and fascination of manner, might expect to accomplish in

society as she read of it; and along with these ideas she imbibed other

very crude ones in regard to the emancipation of woman.



There were also other books-histories, biographies of distinguished

people, travels in far lands, poems, especially those of Byron, Scott and

Shelley and Moore, which she eagerly absorbed, and appropriated therefrom

what was to her liking.  Nobody in Hawkeye had read so much or, after a

fashion, studied so diligently as Laura.  She passed for an accomplished

girl, and no doubt thought herself one, as she was, judged by any

standard near her.



During the war there came to Hawkeye a confederate officer, Col. Selby,

who was stationed there for a time, in command of that district.  He was

a handsome, soldierly man of thirty years, a graduate of the University

of Virginia, and of distinguished family, if his story might be believed,

and, it was evident, a man of the world and of extensive travel and

adventure.



To find in such an out of the way country place a woman like Laura was a

piece of good luck upon which Col. Selby congratulated himself.  He was

studiously polite to her and treated her with a consideration to which

she was unaccustomed.  She had read of such men, but she had never seen

one before, one so high-bred, so noble in sentiment, so entertaining in

conversation, so engaging in manner.



It is a long story; unfortunately it is an old story, and it need not be

dwelt on.  Laura loved him, and believed that his love for her was as

pure and deep as her own.  She worshipped him and would have counted her

life a little thing to give him, if he would only love her and let her

feed the hunger of her heart upon him.



The passion possessed her whole being, and lifted her up, till she seemed

to walk on air.  It was all true, then, the romances she had read, the

bliss of love she had dreamed of.  Why had she never noticed before how

blithesome the world was, how jocund with love; the birds sang it, the

trees whispered it to her as she passed, the very flowers beneath her

feet strewed the way as for a bridal march.



When the Colonel went away they were engaged to be married, as soon as he

could make certain arrangements which he represented to be necessary, and

quit the army.  He wrote to her from Harding, a small town in the

southwest corner of the state, saying that he should be held in the

service longer than he had expected, but that it would not be more than a

few months, then he should be at liberty to take her to Chicago where he

had property, and should have business, either now or as soon as the war

was over, which he thought could not last long.  Meantime why should they

be separated?  He was established in comfortable quarters, and if she

could find company and join him, they would be married, and gain so many

more months of happiness.



Was woman ever prudent when she loved?  Laura went to Harding, the

neighbors supposed to nurse Washington who had fallen ill there.

Her engagement was, of course, known in Hawkeye, and was indeed a matter

of pride to her family.  Mrs. Hawkins would have told the first inquirer

that.  Laura had gone to be married; but Laura had cautioned her; she did

not want to be thought of, she said, as going in search of a husband; let

the news come back after she was married.



So she traveled to Harding on the pretence we have mentioned, and was

married.  She was married, but something must have happened on that very

day or the next that alarmed her.  Washington did not know then or after

what it was, but Laura bound him not to send news of her marriage to

Hawkeye yet, and to enjoin her mother not to speak of it.  Whatever cruel

suspicion or nameless dread this was, Laura tried bravely to put it away,

and not let it cloud her happiness.



Communication that summer, as may be imagined, was neither regular nor

frequent between the remote confederate camp at Harding and Hawkeye, and

Laura was in a measure lost sight of--indeed, everyone had troubles

enough of his own without borrowing from his neighbors.



Laura had given herself utterly to her husband, and if he had faults, if

he was selfish, if he was sometimes coarse, if he was dissipated, she did

not or would not see it.  It was the passion of her life, the time when

her whole nature went to flood tide and swept away all barriers.  Was her

husband ever cold or indifferent?  She shut her eyes to everything but

her sense of possession of her idol.



Three months passed.  One morning her husband informed her that he had

been ordered South, and must go within two hours.



"I can be ready," said Laura, cheerfully.



"But I can't take you.  You must go back to Hawkeye."



"Can't-take-me?" Laura asked, with wonder in her eyes.  "I can't live

without you.  You said-----"



"O bother what I said,"--and the Colonel took up his sword to buckle it

on, and then continued coolly, "the fact is Laura, our romance is played

out."



Laura heard, but she did not comprehend.  She caught his arm and cried,

"George, how can you joke so cruelly?  I will go any where with you.

I will wait any where.  I can't go back to Hawkeye."



"Well, go where you like.  Perhaps," continued he with a sneer, "you

would do as well to wait here, for another colonel."



Laura's brain whirled.  She did not yet comprehend.  "What does this

mean?  Where are you going?"



"It means," said the officer, in measured words, "that you haven't

anything to show for a legal marriage, and that I am going to New

Orleans."



"It's a lie, George, it's a lie.  I am your wife.  I shall go.  I shall

follow you to New Orleans."



"Perhaps my wife might not like it!"



Laura raised her head, her eyes flamed with fire, she tried to utter a

cry, and fell senseless on the floor.



When she came to herself the Colonel was gone.  Washington Hawkins stood

at her bedside.  Did she come to herself?  Was there anything left in her

heart but hate and bitterness, a sense of an infamous wrong at the hands

of the only man she had ever loved?



She returned to Hawkeye.  With the exception of Washington and his

mother, no one knew what had happened.  The neighbors supposed that the

engagement with Col. Selby had fallen through.  Laura was ill for a long

time, but she recovered; she had that resolution in her that could

conquer death almost.  And with her health came back her beauty, and an

added fascination, a something that might be mistaken for sadness.  Is

there a beauty in the knowledge of evil, a beauty that shines out in the

face of a person whose inward life is transformed by some terrible

experience?  Is the pathos in the eyes of the Beatrice Cenci from her

guilt or her innocence?



Laura was not much changed.  The lovely woman had a devil in her heart.

That was all.









CHAPTER XIX.



Mr. Harry Brierly drew his pay as an engineer while he was living at the

City Hotel in Hawkeye.  Mr. Thompson had been kind enough to say that it

didn't make any difference whether he was with the corps or not; and

although Harry protested to the Colonel daily and to Washington Hawkins

that he must go back at once to the line and superintend the lay-out with

reference to his contract, yet he did not go, but wrote instead long

letters to Philip, instructing him to keep his eye out, and to let him

know when any difficulty occurred that required his presence.



Meantime Harry blossomed out in the society of Hawkeye, as he did in any

society where fortune cast him and he had the slightest opportunity to

expand.  Indeed the talents of a rich and accomplished young fellow like

Harry were not likely to go unappreciated in such a place.  A land

operator, engaged in vast speculations, a favorite in the select circles

of New York, in correspondence with brokers and bankers, intimate with

public men at Washington, one who could play the guitar and touch the

banjo lightly, and who had an eye for a pretty girl, and knew the

language of flattery, was welcome everywhere in Hawkeye.  Even Miss Laura

Hawkins thought it worth while to use her fascinations upon him, and to

endeavor to entangle the volatile fellow in the meshes of her

attractions.



"Gad," says Harry to the Colonel, "she's a superb creature, she'd make a

stir in New York, money or no money.  There are men I know would give her

a railroad or an opera house, or whatever she wanted--at least they'd

promise."



Harry had a way of looking at women as he looked at anything else in the

world he wanted, and he half resolved to appropriate Miss Laura, during

his stay in Hawkeye.  Perhaps the Colonel divined his thoughts, or was

offended at Harry's talk, for he replied,



"No nonsense, Mr. Brierly.  Nonsense won't do in Hawkeye, not with my

friends.  The Hawkins' blood is good blood, all the way from Tennessee.

The Hawkinses are under the weather now, but their Tennessee property is

millions when it comes into market."



"Of course, Colonel.  Not the least offense intended.  But you can see

she is a fascinating woman.  I was only thinking, as to this

appropriation, now, what such a woman could do in Washington.  All

correct, too, all correct.  Common thing, I assure you in Washington; the

wives of senators, representatives, cabinet officers, all sorts of wives,

and some who are not wives, use their influence.  You want an

appointment?  Do you go to Senator X?  Not much.  You get on the right

side of his wife.  Is it an appropriation?  You'd go 'straight to the

Committee, or to the Interior office, I suppose?  You'd learn better than

that.  It takes a woman to get any thing through the Land Office: I tell

you, Miss Laura would fascinate an appropriation right through the Senate

and the House of Representatives in one session, if she was in

Washington, as your friend, Colonel, of course as your friend."



"Would you have her sign our petition?" asked the Colonel, innocently.



Harry laughed.  "Women don't get anything by petitioning Congress; nobody

does, that's for form.  Petitions are referred somewhere, and that's the

last of them; you can't refer a handsome woman so easily, when she is

present.  They prefer 'em mostly."



The petition however was elaborately drawn up, with a glowing description

of Napoleon and the adjacent country, and a statement of the absolute

necessity to the prosperity of that region and of one of the stations on

the great through route to the Pacific, of the, immediate improvement of

Columbus River; to this was appended a map of the city and a survey of

the river.  It was signed by all the people at Stone's Landing who could

write their names, by Col. Beriah Sellers, and the Colonel agreed to have

the names headed by all the senators and representatives from the state

and by a sprinkling of ex-governors and ex-members of congress.  When

completed it was a formidable document.  Its preparation and that of more

minute plots of the new city consumed the valuable time of Sellers and

Harry for many weeks, and served to keep them both in the highest

spirits.



In the eyes of Washington Hawkins, Harry was a superior being, a man who

was able to bring things to pass in a way that excited his enthusiasm.

He never tired of listening to his stories of what he had done and of

what he was going to do.  As for Washington, Harry thought he was a man

of ability and comprehension, but "too visionary," he told the Colonel.

The Colonel said he might be right, but he had never noticed anything

visionary about him.



"He's got his plans, sir.  God bless my soul, at his age, I was full of

plans.  But experience sobers a man, I never touch any thing now that

hasn't been weighed in my judgment; and when Beriah Sellers puts his

judgment on a thing, there it is."



Whatever might have been Harry's intentions with regard to Laura, he saw

more and more of her every day, until he got to be restless and nervous

when he was not with her.



That consummate artist in passion allowed him to believe that the

fascination was mainly on his side, and so worked upon his vanity, while

inflaming his ardor, that he scarcely knew what he was about.  Her

coolness and coyness were even made to appear the simple precautions of a

modest timidity, and attracted him even more than the little tendernesses

into which she was occasionally surprised.  He could never be away from

her long, day or evening; and in a short time their intimacy was the town

talk.  She played with him so adroitly that Harry thought she was

absorbed in love for him, and yet he was amazed that he did not get on

faster in his conquest.



And when he thought of it, he was piqued as well.  A country girl, poor

enough, that was evident; living with her family in a cheap and most

unattractive frame house, such as carpenters build in America, scantily

furnished and unadorned; without the adventitious aids of dress or jewels

or the fine manners of society--Harry couldn't understand it.  But she

fascinated him, and held him just beyond the line of absolute familiarity

at the same time.  While he was with her she made him forget that the

Hawkins' house was nothing but a wooden tenement, with four small square

rooms on the ground floor and a half story; it might have been a palace

for aught he knew.



Perhaps Laura was older than Harry.  She was, at any rate, at that ripe

age when beauty in woman seems more solid than in the budding period of

girlhood, and she had come to understand her powers perfectly, and to

know exactly how much of the susceptibility and archness of the girl it

was profitable to retain.  She saw that many women, with the best

intentions, make a mistake of carrying too much girlishness into

womanhood.  Such a woman would have attracted Harry at any time, but only

a woman with a cool brain and exquisite art could have made him lose his

head in this way; for Harry thought himself a man of the world.  The

young fellow never dreamed that he was merely being experimented on; he

was to her a man of another society and another culture, different from

that she had any knowledge of except in books, and she was not unwilling

to try on him the fascinations of her mind and person.



For Laura had her dreams.  She detested the narrow limits in which her

lot was cast, she hated poverty.  Much of her reading had been of modern

works of fiction, written by her own sex, which had revealed to her

something of her own powers and given her indeed, an exaggerated notion

of the influence, the wealth, the position a woman may attain who has

beauty and talent and ambition and a little culture, and is not too

scrupulous in the use of them.  She wanted to be rich, she wanted luxury,

she wanted men at her feet, her slaves, and she had not--thanks to some

of the novels she had read--the nicest discrimination between notoriety

and reputation; perhaps she did not know how fatal notoriety usually is

to the bloom of womanhood.



With the other Hawkins children Laura had been brought up in the belief

that they had inherited a fortune in the Tennessee Lands.  She did not by

any means share all the delusion of the family; but her brain was not

seldom busy with schemes about it.  Washington seemed to her only to

dream of it and to be willing to wait for its riches to fall upon him in

a golden shower; but she was impatient, and wished she were a man to take

hold of the business.



"You men must enjoy your schemes and your activity and liberty to go

about the world," she said to Harry one day, when he had been talking of

New York and Washington and his incessant engagements.



"Oh, yes," replied that martyr to business, "it's all well enough, if you

don't have too much of it, but it only has one object."



"What is that?"



"If a woman doesn't know, it's useless to tell her.  What do you suppose

I am staying in Hawkeye for, week after week, when I ought to be with my

corps?"



"I suppose it's your business with Col. Sellers about Napoleon, you've

always told me so," answered Laura, with a look intended to contradict

her words.



"And now I tell you that is all arranged, I suppose you'll tell me I

ought to go?"



"Harry!" exclaimed Laura, touching his arm and letting her pretty hand

rest there a moment.  "Why should I want you to go away?  The only person

in Hawkeye who understands me."



"But you refuse to understand me," replied Harry, flattered but still

petulant.  "You are like an iceberg, when we are alone."



Laura looked up with wonder in her great eyes, and something like a blush

suffusing her face, followed by a look of langour that penetrated Harry's

heart as if it had been longing.



"Did I ever show any want of confidence in you, Harry?"  And she gave him

her hand, which Harry pressed with effusion--something in her manner told

him that he must be content with that favor.



It was always so.  She excited his hopes and denied him, inflamed his

passion and restrained it, and wound him in her toils day by day.  To

what purpose?  It was keen delight to Laura to prove that she had power

over men.



Laura liked to hear about life at the east, and especially about the

luxurious society in which Mr. Brierly moved when he was at home.  It

pleased her imagination to fancy herself a queen in it.



"You should be a winter in Washington," Harry said.



"But I have no acquaintances there."



"Don't know any of the families of the congressmen?  They like to have a

pretty woman staying with them."



"Not one."



"Suppose Col. Sellers should, have business there; say, about this

Columbus River appropriation?"



"Sellers!" and Laura laughed.



"You needn't laugh.  Queerer things have happened.  Sellers knows

everybody from Missouri, and from the West, too, for that matter.  He'd

introduce you to Washington life quick enough.  It doesn't need a crowbar

to break your way into society there as it does in Philadelphia.  It's

democratic, Washington is.  Money or beauty will open any door.  If I

were a handsome woman, I shouldn't want any better place than the capital

to pick up a prince or a fortune."



"Thank you," replied Laura.  "But I prefer the quiet of home, and the

love of those I know;" and her face wore a look of sweet contentment and

unworldliness that finished Mr. Harry Brierly for the day.



Nevertheless, the hint that Harry had dropped fell upon good ground, and

bore fruit an hundred fold; it worked in her mind until she had built up

a plan on it, and almost a career for herself.  Why not, she said, why

shouldn't I do as other women have done?  She took the first opportunity

to see Col. Sellers, and to sound him about the Washington visit.  How

was he getting on with his navigation scheme, would it be likely to take

him from home to Jefferson City; or to Washington, perhaps?



"Well, maybe.  If the people of Napoleon want me to go to Washington, and

look after that matter, I might tear myself from my home.  It's been

suggested to me, but--not a word of it to Mrs. Sellers and the children.

Maybe they wouldn't like to think of their father in Washington.  But

Dilworthy, Senator Dilworthy, says to me, 'Colonel, you are the man, you

could influence more votes than any one else on such a measure, an old

settler, a man of the people, you know the wants of Missouri; you've a

respect for religion too, says he, and know how the cause of the gospel

goes with improvements: Which is true enough, Miss Laura, and hasn't been

enough thought of in connection with Napoleon.  He's an able man,

Dilworthy, and a good man.  A man has got to be good to succeed as he

has.  He's only been in Congress a few years, and he must be worth a

million.  First thing in the morning when he stayed with me he asked

about family prayers, whether we had 'em before or after breakfast.

I hated to disappoint the Senator, but I had to out with it, tell him we

didn't have 'em, not steady.  He said he understood, business

interruptions and all that, some men were well enough without, but as for

him he never neglected the ordinances of religion.  He doubted if the

Columbus River appropriation would succeed if we did not invoke the

Divine Blessing on it."



Perhaps it is unnecessary to say to the reader that Senator Dilworthy had

not stayed with Col. Sellers while he was in Hawkeye; this visit to his

house being only one of the Colonel's hallucinations--one of those

instant creations of his fertile fancy, which were always flashing into

his brain and out of his mouth in the course of any conversation and

without interrupting the flow of it.



During the summer Philip rode across the country and made a short visit

in Hawkeye, giving Harry an opportunity to show him the progress that he

and the Colonel had made in their operation at Stone's Landing, to

introduce him also to Laura, and to borrow a little money when he

departed.  Harry bragged about his conquest, as was his habit, and took

Philip round to see his western prize.



Laura received Mr. Philip with a courtesy and a slight hauteur that

rather surprised and not a little interested him.  He saw at once that

she was older than Harry, and soon made up his mind that she was leading

his friend a country dance to which he was unaccustomed.  At least he

thought he saw that, and half hinted as much to Harry, who flared up at

once; but on a second visit Philip was not so sure, the young lady was

certainly kind and friendly and almost confiding with Harry, and treated

Philip with the greatest consideration.  She deferred to his opinions,

and listened attentively when he talked, and in time met his frank manner

with an equal frankness, so that he was quite convinced that whatever she

might feel towards Harry, she was sincere with him.  Perhaps his manly

way did win her liking.  Perhaps in her mind, she compared him with

Harry, and recognized in him a man to whom a woman might give her whole

soul, recklessly and with little care if she lost it.  Philip was not

invincible to her beauty nor to the intellectual charm of her presence.



The week seemed very short that he passed in Hawkeye, and when he bade

Laura good by, he seemed to have known her a year.



"We shall see you again, Mr. Sterling," she said as she gave him her

hand, with just a shade of sadness in her handsome eyes.



And when he turned away she followed him with a look that might have

disturbed his serenity, if he had not at the moment had a little square

letter in his breast pocket, dated at Philadelphia, and signed "Ruth."









CHAPTER XX.



The visit of Senator Abner Dilworthy was an event in Hawkeye.  When a

Senator, whose place is in Washington moving among the Great and guiding

the destinies of the nation, condescends to mingle among the people and

accept the hospitalities of such a place as Hawkeye, the honor is not

considered a light one.  All, parties are flattered by it and politics

are forgotten in the presence of one so distinguished among his fellows.



Senator Dilworthy, who was from a neighboring state, had been a Unionist

in the darkest days of his country, and had thriven by it, but was that

any reason why Col. Sellers, who had been a confederate and had not

thriven by it, should give him the cold shoulder?



The Senator was the guest of his old friend Gen. Boswell, but it almost

appeared that he was indebted to Col. Sellers for the unreserved

hospitalities of the town.  It was the large hearted Colonel who, in a

manner, gave him the freedom of the city.



"You are known here, sir," said the Colonel," and Hawkeye is proud of

you.  You will find every door open, and a welcome at every hearthstone.

I should insist upon your going to my house, if you were not claimed by

your older friend Gen. Boswell.  But you will mingle with our people, and

you will see here developments that will surprise you."



The Colonel was so profuse in his hospitality that he must have made the

impression upon himself that he had entertained the Senator at his own

mansion during his stay; at any rate, he afterwards always spoke of him

as his guest, and not seldom referred to the Senator's relish of certain

viands on his table.  He did, in fact, press him to dine upon the morning

of the day the Senator was going away.



Senator Dilworthy was large and portly, though not tall--a pleasant

spoken man, a popular man with the people.



He took a lively interest in the town and all the surrounding country,

and made many inquiries as to the progress of agriculture, of education,

and of religion, and especially as to the condition of the emancipated

race.



"Providence," he said, "has placed them in our hands, and although you

and I, General, might have chosen a different destiny for them, under the

Constitution, yet Providence knows best."



"You can't do much with 'em," interrupted Col. Sellers.  "They are a

speculating race, sir, disinclined to work for white folks without

security, planning how to live by only working for themselves.  Idle,

sir, there's my garden just a ruin of weeds.  Nothing practical in 'em."



"There is some truth in your observation, Colonel, but you must educate

them."



"You educate the niggro and you make him more speculating than he was

before.  If he won't stick to any industry except for himself now, what

will he do then?"



"But, Colonel, the negro when educated will be more able to make his

speculations fruitful."



"Never, sir, never.  He would only have a wider scope to injure himself.

A niggro has no grasp, sir.  Now, a white man can conceive great

operations, and carry them out; a niggro can't."



"Still," replied the Senator, "granting that he might injure himself in a

worldly point of view, his elevation through education would multiply his

chances for the hereafter--which is the important thing after all,

Colonel.  And no matter what the result is, we must fulfill our duty by

this being."



"I'd elevate his soul," promptly responded the Colonel; "that's just it;

you can't make his soul too immortal, but I wouldn't touch him, himself.

Yes, sir!  make his soul immortal, but don't disturb the niggro as he

is."



Of course one of the entertainments offered the Senator was a public

reception, held in the court house, at which he made a speech to his

fellow citizens.  Col. Sellers was master of ceremonies.  He escorted the

band from the city hotel to Gen. Boswell's; he marshalled the procession

of Masons, of Odd Fellows, and of Firemen, the Good Templars, the Sons of

Temperance, the Cadets of Temperance, the Daughters of Rebecca, the

Sunday School children, and citizens generally, which followed the

Senator to the court house; he bustled about the room long after every

one else was seated, and loudly cried "Order!" in the dead silence which

preceded the introduction of the Senator by Gen. Boswell.  The occasion

was one to call out his finest powers of personal appearance, and one he

long dwelt on with pleasure.



This not being an edition of the Congressional Globe it is impossible to

give Senator Dilworthy's speech in full.  He began somewhat as follows:



"Fellow citizens: It gives me great pleasure to thus meet and mingle with

you, to lay aside for a moment the heavy duties of an official and

burdensome station, and confer in familiar converse with my friends in

your great state.  The good opinion of my fellow citizens of all sections

is the sweetest solace in all my anxieties.  I look forward with longing

to the time when I can lay aside the cares of office--" ["dam sight,"

shouted a tipsy fellow near the door.  Cries of "put him out."]



"My friends, do not remove him.  Let the misguided man stay.  I see that

he is a victim of that evil which is swallowing up public virtue and

sapping the foundation of society.  As I was saying, when I can lay down

the cares of office and retire to the sweets of private life in some such

sweet, peaceful, intelligent, wide-awake and patriotic place as Hawkeye

(applause).  I have traveled much, I have seen all parts of our glorious

union, but I have never seen a lovelier village than yours, or one that

has more signs of commercial and industrial and religious prosperity--

(more applause)."



The Senator then launched into a sketch of our great country, and dwelt

for an hour or more upon its prosperity and the dangers which threatened

it.



He then touched reverently upon the institutions of religion, and upon

the necessity of private purity, if we were to have any public morality.

"I trust," he said, "that there are children within the sound of my

voice," and after some remarks to them, the Senator closed with an

apostrophe to "the genius of American Liberty, walking with the Sunday

School in one hand and Temperance in the other up the glorified steps of

the National Capitol."



Col. Sellers did not of course lose the opportunity to impress upon so

influential a person as the Senator the desirability of improving the

navigation of Columbus river.  He and Mr. Brierly took the Senator over

to Napoleon and opened to him their plan.  It was a plan that the Senator

could understand without a great deal of explanation, for he seemed to be

familiar with the like improvements elsewhere.  When, however, they

reached Stone's Landing the Senator looked about him and inquired,



"Is this Napoleon?"



"This is the nucleus, the nucleus," said the Colonel, unrolling his map.

"Here is the deepo, the church, the City Hall and so on."



"Ah, I see.  How far from here is Columbus River?  Does that stream

empty----"



"That, why, that's Goose Run.  Thar ain't no Columbus, thout'n it's over

to Hawkeye," interrupted one of the citizens, who had come out to stare

at the strangers.  "A railroad come here last summer, but it haint been

here no mo'."



"Yes, sir," the Colonel hastened to explain, "in the old records Columbus

River is called Goose Run.  You see how it sweeps round the town-forty-

nine miles to the Missouri; sloop navigation all the way pretty much,

drains this whole country; when it's improved steamboats will run right

up here.  It's got to be enlarged, deepened.  You see by the map.

Columbus River.  This country must have water communication!"



"You'll want a considerable appropriation, Col. Sellers.



"I should say a million; is that your figure Mr. Brierly."



"According to our surveys," said Harry, "a million would do it; a million

spent on the river would make Napoleon worth two millions at least."



"I see," nodded the Senator.  "But you'd better begin by asking only for

two or three hundred thousand, the usual way.  You can begin to sell town

lots on that appropriation you know."



The Senator, himself, to do him justice, was not very much interested in

the country or the stream, but he favored the appropriation, and he gave

the Colonel and Mr. Brierly to and understand that he would endeavor to

get it through.  Harry, who thought he was shrewd and understood

Washington, suggested an interest.



But he saw that the Senator was wounded by the suggestion.



"You will offend me by repeating such an observation," he said.

"Whatever I do will be for the public interest.  It will require a

portion of the appropriation for necessary expenses, and I am sorry to

say that there are members who will have to be seen.  But you can reckon

upon my humble services."



This aspect of the subject was not again alluded to.  The Senator

possessed himself of the facts, not from his observation of the ground,

but from the lips of Col. Sellers, and laid the appropriation scheme away

among his other plans for benefiting the public.



It was on this visit also that the Senator made the acquaintance of Mr.

Washington Hawkins, and was greatly taken with his innocence, his

guileless manner and perhaps with his ready adaptability to enter upon

any plan proposed.



Col. Sellers was pleased to see this interest that Washington had

awakened, especially since it was likely to further his expectations with

regard to the Tennessee lands; the Senator having remarked to the

Colonel, that he delighted to help any deserving young man, when the

promotion of a private advantage could at the same time be made to

contribute to the general good.  And he did not doubt that this was an

opportunity of that kind.



The result of several conferences with Washington was that the Senator

proposed that he should go to Washington with him and become his private

secretary and the secretary of his committee; a proposal which was

eagerly accepted.



The Senator spent Sunday in Hawkeye and attended church.  He cheered the

heart of the worthy and zealous minister by an expression of his sympathy

in his labors, and by many inquiries in regard to the religious state of

the region.  It was not a very promising state, and the good man felt how

much lighter his task would be, if he had the aid of such a man as

Senator Dilworthy.



"I am glad to see, my dear sir," said the Senator, "that you give them

the doctrines.  It is owing to a neglect of the doctrines, that there is

such a fearful falling away in the country.  I wish that we might have

you in Washington--as chaplain, now, in the senate."



The good man could not but be a little flattered, and if sometimes,

thereafter, in his discouraging work, he allowed the thought that he

might perhaps be called to Washington as chaplain of the Senate, to cheer

him, who can wonder.  The Senator's commendation at least did one service

for him, it elevated him in the opinion of Hawkeye.



Laura was at church alone that day, and Mr. Brierly walked home with her.

A part of their way lay with that of General Boswell and Senator

Dilworthy, and introductions were made.  Laura had her own reasons for

wishing to know the Senator, and the Senator was not a man who could be

called indifferent to charms such as hers.  That meek young lady so

commended herself to him in the short walk, that he announced his

intentions of paying his respects to her the next day, an intention which

Harry received glumly; and when the Senator was out of hearing he called

him "an old fool."



"Fie," said Laura, "I do believe you are jealous, Harry.  He is a very

pleasant man.  He said you were a young man of great promise."



The Senator did call next day, and the result of his visit was that he

was confirmed in his impression that there was something about him very

attractive to ladies.  He saw Laura again and again daring his stay, and

felt more and more the subtle influence of her feminine beauty, which

every man felt who came near her.



Harry was beside himself with rage while the Senator remained in town;

he declared that women were always ready to drop any man for higher game;

and he attributed his own ill-luck to the Senator's appearance.  The

fellow was in fact crazy about her beauty and ready to beat his brains

out in chagrin.  Perhaps Laura enjoyed his torment, but she soothed him

with blandishments that increased his ardor, and she smiled to herself to

think that he had, with all his protestations of love, never spoken of

marriage.  Probably the vivacious fellow never had thought of it.  At any

rate when he at length went away from Hawkeye he was no nearer it.  But

there was no telling to what desperate lengths his passion might not

carry him.



Laura bade him good bye with tender regret, which, however, did not

disturb her peace or interfere with her plans.  The visit of Senator

Dilworthy had become of more importance to her, and it by and by bore the

fruit she longed for, in an invitation to visit his family in the

National Capital during the winter session of Congress.









CHAPTER XXI.



                              O lift your natures up:

               Embrace our aims: work out your freedom.  Girls,

               Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed;

               Drink deep until the habits of the slave,

               The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite

               And slander, die.

                                   The Princess.



Whether medicine is a science, or only an empirical method of getting a

living out of the ignorance of the human race, Ruth found before her

first term was over at the medical school that there were other things

she needed to know quite as much as that which is taught in medical

books, and that she could never satisfy her aspirations without more

general culture.



"Does your doctor know any thing--I don't mean about medicine, but about

things in general, is he a man of information and good sense?" once asked

an old practitioner.  "If he doesn't know any thing but medicine the

chance is he doesn't know that:"



The close application to her special study was beginning to tell upon

Ruth's delicate health also, and the summer brought with it only

weariness and indisposition for any mental effort.



In this condition of mind and body the quiet of her home and the

unexciting companionship of those about her were more than ever tiresome.



She followed with more interest Philip's sparkling account of his life

in the west, and longed for his experiences, and to know some of those

people of a world so different from here, who alternately amused and

displeased him.  He at least was learning the world, the good and the bad

of it, as must happen to every one who accomplishes anything in it.



But what, Ruth wrote, could a woman do, tied up by custom, and cast into

particular circumstances out of which it was almost impossible to

extricate herself?  Philip thought that he would go some day and

extricate Ruth, but he did not write that, for he had the instinct to

know that this was not the extrication she dreamed of, and that she must

find out by her own experience what her heart really wanted.



Philip was not a philosopher, to be sure, but he had the old fashioned

notion, that whatever a woman's theories of life might be, she would come

round to matrimony, only give her time.  He could indeed recall to mind

one woman--and he never knew a nobler--whose whole soul was devoted and

who believed that her life was consecrated to a certain benevolent

project in singleness of life, who yielded to the touch of matrimony, as

an icicle yields to a sunbeam.



Neither at home nor elsewhere did Ruth utter any complaint, or admit any

weariness or doubt of her ability to pursue the path she had marked out

for herself.  But her mother saw clearly enough her struggle with

infirmity, and was not deceived by either her gaiety or by the cheerful

composure which she carried into all the ordinary duties that fell to

her.  She saw plainly enough that Ruth needed an entire change of scene

and of occupation, and perhaps she believed that such a change, with the

knowledge of the world it would bring, would divert Ruth from a course

for which she felt she was physically entirely unfitted.



It therefore suited the wishes of all concerned, when autumn came, that

Ruth should go away to school.  She selected a large New England

Seminary, of which she had often heard Philip speak, which was attended

by both sexes and offered almost collegiate advantages of education.

Thither she went in September, and began for the second time in the year

a life new to her.



The Seminary was the chief feature of Fallkill, a village of two to three

thousand inhabitants.  It was a prosperous school, with three hundred

students, a large corps of teachers, men and women, and with a venerable

rusty row of academic buildings on the shaded square of the town.  The

students lodged and boarded in private families in the place, and so it

came about that while the school did a great deal to support the town,

the town gave the students society and the sweet influences of home life.

It is at least respectful to say that the influences of home life are

sweet.



Ruth's home, by the intervention of Philip, was in a family--one of the

rare exceptions in life or in fiction--that had never known better days.

The Montagues, it is perhaps well to say, had intended to come over in

the Mayflower, but were detained at Delft Haven by the illness of a

child.  They came over to Massachusetts Bay in another vessel, and thus

escaped the onus of that brevet nobility under which the successors of

the Mayflower Pilgrims have descended.  Having no factitious weight of

dignity to carry, the Montagues steadily improved their condition from

the day they landed, and they were never more vigorous or prosperous than

at the date of this narrative.  With character compacted by the rigid

Puritan discipline of more than two centuries, they had retained its

strength and purity and thrown off its narrowness, and were now

blossoming under the generous modern influences.  Squire Oliver Montague,

a lawyer who had retired from the practice of his profession except in

rare cases, dwelt in a square old fashioned New England mile away from

the green.  It was called a mansion because it stood alone with ample

fields about it, and had an avenue of trees leading to it from the road,

and on the west commanded a view of a pretty little lake with gentle

slopes and nodding were now blossoming under the generous modern

influences.  Squire Oliver Montague, a lawyer who had retired from the

practice of his profession except in rare cases, dwelt in a square old

fashioned New England groves.  But it was just a plain, roomy house,

capable of extending to many guests an unpretending hospitality.



The family consisted of the Squire and his wife, a son and a daughter

married and not at home, a son in college at Cambridge, another son at

the Seminary, and a daughter Alice, who was a year or more older than

Ruth.  Having only riches enough to be able to gratify reasonable

desires, and yet make their gratifications always a novelty and a

pleasure, the family occupied that just mean in life which is so rarely

attained, and still more rarely enjoyed without discontent.



If Ruth did not find so much luxury in the house as in her own home,

there were evidences of culture, of intellectual activity and of a zest

in the affairs of all the world, which greatly impressed her.  Every room

had its book-cases or book-shelves, and was more or less a library; upon

every table was liable to be a litter of new books, fresh periodicals and

daily newspapers.  There were plants in the sunny windows and some choice

engravings on the walls, with bits of color in oil or water-colors;

the piano was sure to be open and strewn with music; and there were

photographs and little souvenirs here and there of foreign travel.

An absence of any "what-pots" in the corners with rows of cheerful

shells, and Hindoo gods, and Chinese idols, and nests of use less boxes

of lacquered wood, might be taken as denoting a languidness in the family

concerning foreign missions, but perhaps unjustly.



At any rate the life of the world flowed freely into this hospitable

house, and there was always so much talk there of the news of the day,

of the new books and of authors, of Boston radicalism and New York

civilization, and the virtue of Congress, that small gossip stood a very

poor chance.



All this was in many ways so new to Ruth that she seemed to have passed

into another world, in which she experienced a freedom and a mental

exhilaration unknown to her before.  Under this influence she entered

upon her studies with keen enjoyment, finding for a time all the

relaxation she needed, in the charming social life at the Montague house.



It is strange, she wrote to Philip, in one of her occasional letters,

that you never told me more about this delightful family, and scarcely

mentioned Alice who is the life of it, just the noblest girl, unselfish,

knows how to do so many things, with lots of talent, with a dry humor,

and an odd way of looking at things, and yet quiet and even serious

often--one of your "capable" New England girls.  We shall be great

friends.  It had never occurred to Philip that there was any thing

extraordinary about the family that needed mention.  He knew dozens of

girls like Alice, he thought to himself, but only one like Ruth.



Good friends the two girls were from the beginning.  Ruth was a study to

Alice; the product of a culture entirely foreign to her experience, so

much a child in some things, so much a woman in others; and Ruth in turn,

it must be confessed, probing Alice sometimes with her serious grey eyes,

wondered what her object in life was, and whether she had any purpose

beyond living as she now saw her.  For she could scarcely conceive of a

life that should not be devoted to the accomplishment of some definite

work, and she had-no doubt that in her own case everything else would

yield to the professional career she had marked out.



"So you know Philip Sterling," said Ruth one day as the girls sat at

their sewing.  Ruth never embroidered, and never sewed when she could

avoid it.  Bless her.



"Oh yes, we are old friends.  Philip used to come to Fallkill often while

he was in college.  He was once rusticated here for a term."



"Rusticated?"



"Suspended for some College scrape.  He was a great favorite here.

Father and he were famous friends.  Father said that Philip had no end of

nonsense in him and was always blundering into something, but he was a

royal good fellow and would come out all right."



"Did you think he was fickle?"



"Why, I never thought whether he was or not," replied Alice looking up.

"I suppose he was always in love with some girl or another, as college

boys are.  He used to make me his confidant now and then, and be terribly

in the dumps."



"Why did he come to you?" pursued Ruth you were younger than he."



"I'm sure I don't know.  He was at our house a good deal.  Once at a

picnic by the lake, at the risk of his own life, he saved sister Millie

from drowning, and we all liked to have him here.  Perhaps he thought as

he had saved one sister, the other ought to help him when he was in

trouble.  I don't know."



The fact was that Alice was a person who invited confidences, because she

never betrayed them, and gave abundant sympathy in return.  There are

persons, whom we all know, to whom human confidences, troubles and heart-

aches flow as naturally its streams to a placid lake.



This is not a history of Fallkill, nor of the Montague family, worthy as

both are of that honor, and this narrative cannot be diverted into long

loitering with them.  If the reader visits the village to-day, he will

doubtless be pointed out the Montague dwelling, where Ruth lived, the

cross-lots path she traversed to the Seminary, and the venerable chapel

with its cracked bell.



In the little society of the place, the Quaker girl was a favorite, and

no considerable social gathering or pleasure party was thought complete

without her.  There was something in this seemingly transparent and yet

deep character, in her childlike gaiety and enjoyment of the society

about her, and in her not seldom absorption in herself, that would have

made her long remembered there if no events had subsequently occurred to

recall her to mind.



To the surprise of Alice, Ruth took to the small gaieties of the village

with a zest of enjoyment that seemed foreign to one who had devoted her

life to a serious profession from the highest motives.  Alice liked

society well enough, she thought, but there was nothing exciting in that

of Fallkill, nor anything novel in the attentions of the well-bred young

gentlemen one met in it.  It must have worn a different aspect to Ruth,

for she entered into its pleasures at first with curiosity, and then with

interest and finally with a kind of staid abandon that no one would have

deemed possible for her.  Parties, picnics, rowing-matches, moonlight

strolls, nutting expeditions in the October woods,--Alice declared that

it was a whirl of dissipation.  The fondness of Ruth, which was scarcely

disguised, for the company of agreeable young fellows, who talked

nothings, gave Alice opportunity for no end of banter.



"Do you look upon them as I subjects, dear?" she would ask.



And Ruth laughed her merriest laugh, and then looked sober again.

Perhaps she was thinking, after all, whether she knew herself.



If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would

swim if you brought it to the Nile.



Surely no one would have predicted when Ruth left Philadelphia that she

would become absorbed to this extent, and so happy, in a life so unlike

that she thought she desired.  But no one can tell how a woman will act

under any circumstances.  The reason novelists nearly always fail in

depicting women when they make them act, is that they let them do what

they have observed some woman has done at sometime or another.  And that

is where they make a mistake; for a woman will never do again what has

been done before.  It is this uncertainty that causes women, considered

as materials for fiction, to be so interesting to themselves and to

others.



As the fall went on and the winter, Ruth did not distinguish herself

greatly at the Fallkill Seminary as a student, a fact that apparently

gave her no anxiety, and did not diminish her enjoyment of a new sort of

power which had awakened within her.









CHAPTER XXII.

In mid-winter, an event occurred of unusual interest to the inhabitants

of the Montague house, and to the friends of the young ladies who sought

their society.



This was the arrival at the Sassacua Hotel of two young gentlemen from

the west.



It is the fashion in New England to give Indian names to the public

houses, not that the late lamented savage knew how to keep a hotel, but

that his warlike name may impress the traveler who humbly craves shelter

there, and make him grateful to the noble and gentlemanly clerk if he is

allowed to depart with his scalp safe.



The two young gentlemen were neither students for the Fallkill Seminary,

nor lecturers on physiology, nor yet life assurance solicitors, three

suppositions that almost exhausted the guessing power of the people at

the hotel in respect to the names of "Philip Sterling and Henry Brierly,

Missouri," on the register.  They were handsome enough fellows, that was

evident, browned by out-door exposure, and with a free and lordly way

about them that almost awed the hotel clerk himself.  Indeed, he very

soon set down Mr. Brierly as a gentleman of large fortune, with enormous

interests on his shoulders.  Harry had a way of casually mentioning

western investments, through lines, the freighting business, and the

route through the Indian territory to Lower California, which was

calculated to give an importance to his lightest word.



"You've a pleasant town here, sir, and the most comfortable looking hotel

I've seen out of New York," said Harry to the clerk; "we shall stay here

a few days if you can give us a roomy suite of apartments."



Harry usually had the best of everything, wherever he went, as such

fellows always do have in this accommodating world.  Philip would have

been quite content with less expensive quarters, but there was no

resisting Harry's generosity in such matters.



Railroad surveying and real-estate operations were at a standstill during

the winter in Missouri, and the young men had taken advantage of the lull

to come east, Philip to see if there was any disposition in his friends,

the railway contractors, to give him a share in the Salt Lick Union

Pacific Extension, and Harry to open out to his uncle the prospects of

the new city at Stone's Landing, and to procure congressional

appropriations for the harbor and for making Goose Run navigable.  Harry

had with him a map of that noble stream and of the harbor, with a perfect

net-work of railroads centering in it, pictures of wharves, crowded with

steamboats, and of huge grain-elevators on the bank, all of which grew

out of the combined imaginations of Col. Sellers and Mr. Brierly.  The

Colonel had entire confidence in Harry's influence with Wall street, and

with congressmen, to bring about the consummation of their scheme, and he

waited his return in the empty house at Hawkeye, feeding his pinched

family upon the most gorgeous expectations with a reckless prodigality.



"Don't let 'em into the thing more than is necessary," says the Colonel

to Harry; "give 'em a small interest; a lot apiece in the suburbs of the

Landing ought to do a congressman, but I reckon you'll have to mortgage a

part of the city itself to the brokers."



Harry did not find that eagerness to lend money on Stone's Landing in

Wall street which Col. Sellers had expected, (it had seen too many such

maps as he exhibited), although his uncle and some of the brokers looked

with more favor on the appropriation for improving the navigation of

Columbus River, and were not disinclined to form a company for that

purpose.  An appropriation was a tangible thing, if you could get hold of

it, and it made little difference what it was appropriated for, so long

as you got hold of it.



Pending these weighty negotiations, Philip has persuaded Harry to take a

little run up to Fallkill, a not difficult task, for that young man would

at any time have turned his back upon all the land in the West at sight

of a new and pretty face, and he had, it must be confessed, a facility in

love making which made it not at all an interference with the more

serious business of life.  He could not, to be sure, conceive how Philip

could be interested in a young lady who was studying medicine, but he had

no objection to going, for he did not doubt that there were other girls

in Fallkill who were worth a week's attention.



The young men were received at the house of the Montagues with the

hospitality which never failed there.



"We are glad to see you again," exclaimed the Squire heartily, "you are

welcome Mr. Brierly, any friend of Phil's is welcome at our house"



"It's more like home to me, than any place except my own home," cried

Philip, as he looked about the cheerful house and went through a general

hand-shaking.



"It's a long time, though, since you have been here to say so," Alice

said, with her father's frankness of manner; "and I suspect we owe the

visit now to your sudden interest in the Fallkill Seminary."



Philip's color came, as it had an awkward way of doing in his tell-tale

face, but before he could stammer a reply, Harry came in with,



"That accounts for Phil's wish to build a Seminary at Stone's Landing,

our place in Missouri, when Col. Sellers insisted it should be a

University.  Phil appears to have a weakness for Seminaries."



"It would have been better for your friend Sellers," retorted Philip,

"if he had had a weakness for district schools.  Col. Sellers, Miss

Alice, is a great friend of Harry's, who is always trying to build a

house by beginning at the top."



"I suppose it's as easy to build a University on paper as a Seminary, and

it looks better," was Harry's reflection; at which the Squire laughed,

and said he quite agreed with him.  The old gentleman understood Stone's

Landing a good deal better than he would have done after an hour's talk

with either of it's expectant proprietors.



At this moment, and while Philip was trying to frame a question that he

found it exceedingly difficult to put into words, the door opened

quietly, and Ruth entered.  Taking in the, group with a quick glance, her

eye lighted up, and with a merry smile she advanced and shook hands with

Philip.  She was so unconstrained and sincerely cordial, that it made

that hero of the west feel somehow young, and very ill at ease.



For months and months he had thought of this meeting and pictured it to

himself a hundred times, but he had never imagined it would be like this.

He should meet Ruth unexpectedly, as she was walking alone from the

school, perhaps, or entering the room where he was waiting for her, and

she would cry "Oh!  Phil," and then check herself, and perhaps blush, and

Philip calm but eager and enthusiastic, would reassure her by his warm

manner, and he would take her hand impressively, and she would look up

timidly, and, after his' long absence, perhaps he would be permitted to

Good heavens, how many times he had come to this point, and wondered if

it could happen so.  Well, well; he had never supposed that he should be

the one embarrassed, and above all by a sincere and cordial welcome.



"We heard you were at the Sassacus House," were Ruth's first words; "and

this I suppose is your friend?"



"I beg your pardon," Philip at length blundered out, "this is Mr. Brierly

of whom I have written you."



And Ruth welcomed Harry with a friendliness that Philip thought was due

to his friend, to be sure, but which seemed to him too level with her

reception of himself, but which Harry received as his due from the other

sex.



Questions were asked about the journey and about the West, and the

conversation became a general one, until Philip at length found himself

talking with the Squire in relation to land and railroads and things he

couldn't keep his mind on especially as he heard Ruth and Harry in an

animated discourse, and caught the words "New York," and "opera," and

"reception," and knew that Harry was giving his imagination full range in

the world of fashion.



Harry knew all about the opera, green room and all (at least he said so)

and knew a good many of the operas and could make very entertaining

stories of their plots, telling how the soprano came in here, and the

basso here, humming the beginning of their airs--tum-ti-tum-ti-ti--

suggesting the profound dissatisfaction of the basso recitative--down-

among-the-dead-men--and touching off the whole with an airy grace quite

captivating; though he couldn't have sung a single air through to save

himself, and he hadn't an ear to know whether it was sung correctly.  All

the same he doted on the opera, and kept a box there, into which he

lounged occasionally to hear a favorite scene and meet his society

friends.



If Ruth was ever in the city he should be happy to place his box at the

disposal of Ruth and her friends.  Needless to say that she was delighted

with the offer.



When she told Philip of it, that discreet young fellow only smiled, and

said that he hoped she would be fortunate enough to be in New York some

evening when Harry had not already given the use of his private box to

some other friend.



The Squire pressed the visitors to let him send for their trunks and

urged them to stay at his house, and Alice joined in the invitation, but

Philip had reasons for declining.  They staid to supper, however, and in;

the evening Philip had a long talk apart with Ruth, a delightful hour to

him, in which she spoke freely of herself as of old, of her studies at

Philadelphia and of her plans, and she entered into his adventures and

prospects in the West with a genuine and almost sisterly interest; an

interest, however, which did not exactly satisfy Philip--it was too

general and not personal enough to suit him.  And with all her freedom in

speaking of her own hopes, Philip could not, detect any reference to

himself in them; whereas he never undertook anything that he did not

think of Ruth in connection with it, he never made a plan that had not

reference to her, and he never thought of anything as complete if she

could not share it.  Fortune, reputation these had no value to him except

in Ruth's eyes, and there were times when it seemed to him that if Ruth

was not on this earth, he should plunge off into some remote wilderness

and live in a purposeless seclusion.



"I hoped," said Philip; "to get a little start in connection with this

new railroad, and make a little money, so that I could came east and

engage in something more suited to my tastes.  I shouldn't like to live

in the West.  Would you?



"It never occurred to me whether I would or not," was the unembarrassed

reply.  "One of our graduates went to Chicago, and has a nice practice

there.  I don't know where I shall go.  It would mortify mother

dreadfully to have me driving about Philadelphia in a doctor's gig."



Philip laughed at the idea of it.  "And does it seem as necessary to you

to do it as it did before you came to Fallkill?"



It was a home question, and went deeper than Philip knew, for Ruth at

once thought of practicing her profession among the young gentlemen and

ladies of her acquaintance in the village; but she was reluctant to admit

to herself that her notions of a career had undergone any change.



"Oh, I don't think I should come to Fallkill to practice, but I must do

something when I am through school; and why not medicine?"



Philip would like to have explained why not, but the explanation would be

of no use if it were not already obvious to Ruth.



Harry was equally in his element whether instructing Squire Montague

about the investment of capital in Missouri, the improvement of Columbus

River, the project he and some gentlemen in New York had for making a

shorter Pacific connection with the Mississippi than the present one; or

diverting Mrs. Montague with his experience in cooking in camp; or

drawing for Miss Alice an amusing picture of the social contrasts of New

England and the border where he had been. Harry was a very entertaining

fellow, having his imagination to help his memory, and telling his

stories as if he believed them--as perhaps he did. Alice was greatly

amused with Harry and listened so seriously to his romancing that he

exceeded his usual limits.  Chance allusions to his bachelor

establishment in town and the place of his family on the Hudson, could

not have been made by a millionaire, more naturally.



"I should think," queried Alice, "you would rather stay in New York than

to try the rough life at the West you have been speaking of."



"Oh, adventure," says Harry, "I get tired of New York.  And besides I

got involved in some operations that I had to see through.  Parties in

New York only last week wanted me to go down into Arizona in a big

diamond interest.  I told them, no, no speculation for me.  I've got my

interests in Missouri; and I wouldn't leave Philip, as long as he stays

there."



When the young gentlemen were on their way back to the hotel, Mr. Philip,

who was not in very good humor, broke out,



"What the deuce, Harry, did you go on in that style to the Montagues

for?"



"Go on?" cried Harry.  "Why shouldn't I try to make a pleasant evening?

And besides, ain't I going to do those things?  What difference does it

make about the mood and tense of a mere verb?  Didn't uncle tell me only

last Saturday, that I might as well go down to Arizona and hunt for

diamonds?  A fellow might as well make a good impression as a poor one."



"Nonsense.  You'll get to believing your own romancing by and by."



"Well, you'll see.  When Sellers and I get that appropriation, I'll show

you an establishment in town and another on the Hudson and a box at the

opera."



"Yes, it will be like Col. Sellers' plantation at Hawkeye.  Did you ever

see that?"



"Now, don't be cross, Phil.  She's just superb, that little woman.  You

never told me."



"Who's just superb?" growled Philip, fancying this turn of the

conversation less than the other.



"Well, Mrs. Montague, if you must know."  And Harry stopped to light a

cigar, and then puffed on in silence.  The little quarrel didn't last

over night, for Harry never appeared to cherish any ill-will half a

second, and Philip was too sensible to continue a row about nothing; and

he had invited Harry to come with him.



The young gentlemen stayed in Fallkill a week, and were every day at the

Montagues, and took part in the winter gaieties of the village.  There

were parties here and there to which the friends of Ruth and the

Montagues were of course invited, and Harry in the generosity of his

nature, gave in return a little supper at the hotel, very simple indeed,

with dancing in the hall, and some refreshments passed round.  And Philip

found the whole thing in the bill when he came to pay it.



Before the week was over Philip thought he had a new light on the

character of Ruth.  Her absorption in the small gaieties of the society

there surprised him.  He had few opportunities for serious conversation

with her.  There was always some butterfly or another flitting about,

and when Philip showed by his manner that he was not pleased, Ruth

laughed merrily enough and rallied him on his soberness--she declared he

was getting to be grim and unsocial.  He talked indeed more with Alice

than with Ruth, and scarcely concealed from her the trouble that was in

his mind.  It needed, in fact, no word from him, for she saw clearly

enough what was going forward, and knew her sex well enough to know there

was no remedy for it but time.



"Ruth is a dear girl, Philip, and has as much firmness of purpose as

ever, but don't you see she has just discovered that she is fond of

society?  Don't you let her see you are selfish about it, is my advice."



The last evening they were to spend in Fallkill, they were at the

Montagues, and Philip hoped that he would find Ruth in a different mood.

But she was never more gay, and there was a spice of mischief in her eye

and in her laugh.  "Confound it," said Philip to himself, "she's in a

perfect twitter."



He would have liked to quarrel with her, and fling himself out of the

house in tragedy style, going perhaps so far as to blindly wander off

miles into the country and bathe his throbbing brow in the chilling rain

of the stars, as people do in novels; but he had no opportunity.  For

Ruth was as serenely unconscious of mischief as women can be at times,

and fascinated him more than ever with her little demurenesses and half-

confidences.  She even said "Thee" to him once in reproach for a cutting

speech he began.  And the sweet little word made his heart beat like a

trip-hammer, for never in all her life had she said "thee" to him before.



Was she fascinated with Harry's careless 'bon homie' and gay assurance?

Both chatted away in high spirits, and made the evening whirl along in

the most mirthful manner.  Ruth sang for Harry, and that young gentleman

turned the leaves for her at the piano, and put in a bass note now and

then where he thought it would tell.



Yes, it was a merry evening, and Philip was heartily glad when it was

over, and the long leave-taking with the family was through with.



"Farewell Philip.  Good night Mr. Brierly," Ruth's clear voice sounded

after them as they went down the walk.



And she spoke Harry's name last, thought Philip.









CHAPTER XXIII.



               "O see ye not yon narrow road

               So thick beset wi' thorns and briers?

               That is the Path of Righteousness,

               Though after it but few inquires.



               "And see ye not yon braid, braid road,

               That lies across the lily leven?

               That is the Path of Wickedness,

               Though some call it the road to Heaven."



                                             Thomas the Rhymer.



Phillip and Harry reached New York in very different states of mind.

Harry was buoyant.  He found a letter from Col. Sellers urging him to go

to Washington and confer with Senator Dilworthy.  The petition was in his

hands.



It had been signed by everybody of any importance in Missouri, and would

be presented immediately.



"I should go on myself," wrote the Colonel, "but I am engaged in the

invention of a process for lighting such a city as St. Louis by means of

water; just attach my machine to the water-pipes anywhere and the

decomposition of the fluid begins, and you will have floods of light for

the mere cost of the machine.  I've nearly got the lighting part, but I

want to attach to it a heating, cooking, washing and ironing apparatus.

It's going to be the great thing, but we'd better keep this appropriation

going while I am perfecting it."



Harry took letters to several congressmen from his uncle and from Mr.

Duff Brown, each of whom had an extensive acquaintance in both houses

where they were well known as men engaged in large private operations for

the public good and men, besides, who, in the slang of the day,

understood the virtues of "addition, division and silence."



Senator Dilworthy introduced the petition into the Senate with the remark

that he knew, personally, the signers of it, that they were men

interested; it was true, in the improvement of the country, but he

believed without any selfish motive, and that so far as he knew the

signers were loyal.  It pleased him to see upon the roll the names of

many colored citizens, and it must rejoice every friend of humanity to

know that this lately emancipated race were intelligently taking part in

the development of the resources of their native land.  He moved the

reference of the petition to the proper committee.



Senator Dilworthy introduced his young friend to influential members,

as a person who was very well informed about the Salt Lick Extension of

the Pacific, and was one of the Engineers who had made a careful survey

of Columbus River; and left him to exhibit his maps and plans and to show

the connection between the public treasury, the city of Napoleon and

legislation for the benefit off the whole country.



Harry was the guest of Senator Dilworthy.  There was scarcely any good

movement in which the Senator was not interested.  His house was open to

all the laborers in the field of total abstinence, and much of his time

was taken up in attending the meetings of this cause.  He had a Bible

class in the Sunday school of the church which he attended, and he

suggested to Harry that he might take a class during the time he remained

in Washington, Mr. Washington Hawkins had a class.  Harry asked the

Senator if there was a class of young ladies for him to teach, and after

that the Senator did not press the subject.



Philip, if the truth must be told, was not well satisfied with his

western prospects, nor altogether with the people he had fallen in with.

The railroad contractors held out large but rather indefinite promises.

Opportunities for a fortune he did not doubt existed in Missouri, but for

himself he saw no better means for livelihood than the mastery of the

profession he had rather thoughtlessly entered upon.  During the summer

he had made considerable practical advance in the science of engineering;

he had been diligent, and made himself to a certain extent necessary to

the work he was engaged on.  The contractors called him into their

consultations frequently, as to the character of the country he had been

over, and the cost of constructing the road, the nature of the work, etc.



Still Philip felt that if he was going to make either reputation or money

as an engineer, he had a great deal of hard study before him, and it is

to his credit that he did not shrink from it.  While Harry was in

Washington dancing attendance upon the national legislature and making

the acquaintance of the vast lobby that encircled it, Philip devoted

himself day and night, with an energy and a concentration he was capable

of, to the learning and theory of his profession, and to the science of

railroad building.  He wrote some papers at this time for the "Plow, the

Loom and the Anvil," upon the strength of materials, and especially upon

bridge-building, which attracted considerable attention, and were copied

into the English "Practical Magazine."  They served at any rate to raise

Philip in the opinion of his friends the contractors, for practical men

have a certain superstitious estimation of ability with the pen, and

though they may a little despise the talent, they are quite ready to make

use of it.



Philip sent copies of his performances to Ruth's father and to other

gentlemen whose good opinion he coveted, but he did not rest upon his

laurels.  Indeed, so diligently had he applied himself, that when it came

time for him to return to the West, he felt himself, at least in theory,

competent to take charge of a division in the field.









CHAPTER XXIV.



The capital of the Great Republic was a new world to country-bred

Washington Hawkins.  St. Louis was a greater city, but its floating.

population did not hail from great distances, and so it had the general

family aspect of the permanent population; but Washington gathered its

people from the four winds of heaven, and so the manners, the faces and

the fashions there, presented a variety that was infinite.  Washington

had never been in "society" in St. Louis, and he knew nothing of the ways

of its wealthier citizens and had never inspected one of their dwellings.

Consequently, everything in the nature of modern fashion and grandeur was

a new and wonderful revelation to him.



Washington is an interesting city to any of us.  It seems to become more

and more interesting the oftener we visit it.  Perhaps the reader has

never been there?  Very well.  You arrive either at night, rather too

late to do anything or see anything until morning, or you arrive so early

in the morning that you consider it best to go to your hotel and sleep an

hour or two while the sun bothers along over the Atlantic.  You cannot

well arrive at a pleasant intermediate hour, because the railway

corporation that keeps the keys of the only door that leads into the town

or out of it take care of that.  You arrive in tolerably good spirits,

because it is only thirty-eight miles from Baltimore to the capital, and

so you have only been insulted three times (provided you are not in a

sleeping car--the average is higher there): once when you renewed your

ticket after stopping over in Baltimore, once when you were about to

enter the "ladies' car" without knowing it was a lady's car, and once

When you asked the conductor at what hour you would reach Washington.



You are assailed by a long rank of hackmen who shake their whips in your

face as you step out upon the sidewalk; you enter what they regard as a

"carriage," in the capital, and you wonder why they do not take it out of

service and put it in the museum: we have few enough antiquities, and

it is little to our credit that we make scarcely any effort to preserve

the few we have.  You reach your hotel, presently--and here let us draw

the curtain of charity--because of course you have gone to the wrong one.

You being a stranger, how could you do otherwise?  There are a hundred

and eighteen bad hotels, and only one good one.  The most renowned and

popular hotel of them all is perhaps the worst one known to history.



It is winter, and night.  When you arrived, it was snowing.  When you

reached the hotel, it was sleeting.  When you went to bed, it was

raining.  During the night it froze hard, and the wind blew some chimneys

down.  When you got up in the morning, it was foggy.  When you finished

your breakfast at ten o'clock and went out, the sunshine was brilliant,

the weather balmy and delicious, and the mud and slush deep and all-

pervading.  You will like the climate when you get used to it.



You naturally wish to view the city; so you take an umbrella, an

overcoat, and a fan, and go forth.  The prominent features you soon

locate and get familiar with; first you glimpse the ornamental upper

works of a long, snowy palace projecting above a grove of trees, and a

tall, graceful white dome with a statue on it surmounting the palace and

pleasantly contrasting with the background of blue sky.  That building is

the capitol; gossips will tell you that by the original estimates it was

to cost $12,000,000, and that the government did come within $21,200,000

of building it for that sum.



You stand at the back of the capitol to treat yourself to a view, and it

is a very noble one.  You understand, the capitol stands upon the verge

of a high piece of table land, a fine commanding position, and its front

looks out over this noble situation for a city--but it don't see it, for

the reason that when the capitol extension was decided upon, the property

owners at once advanced their prices to such inhuman figures that the

people went down and built the city in the muddy low marsh behind the

temple of liberty; so now the lordly front of the building, with, its

imposing colonades, its, projecting, graceful wings, its, picturesque

groups of statuary, and its long terraced ranges of steps, flowing down

in white marble waves to the ground, merely looks out upon a sorrowful

little desert of cheap boarding houses.



So you observe, that you take your view from the back of the capitol.

And yet not from the airy outlooks of the dome, by the way, because to

get there you must pass through the great rotunda: and to do that, you

would have to see the marvelous Historical Paintings that hang there,

and the bas-reliefs--and what have you done that you should suffer thus?

And besides, you might have to pass through the old part of the building,

and you could not help seeing Mr. Lincoln, as petrified by a young lady

artist for $10,000--and you might take his marble emancipation

proclamation, which he holds out in his hand and contemplates, for a

folded napkin; and you might conceive from his expression and his

attitude, that he is finding fault with the washing.  Which is not the

case.  Nobody knows what is the matter with him; but everybody feels for

him.  Well, you ought not to go into the dome anyhow, because it would be

utterly impossible to go up there without seeing the frescoes in it--and

why should you be interested in the delirium tremens of art?



The capitol is a very noble and a very beautiful building, both within

and without, but you need not examine it now.  Still, if you greatly

prefer going into the dome, go.  Now your general glance gives you

picturesque stretches of gleaming water, on your left, with a sail here

and there and a lunatic asylum on shore; over beyond the water, on a

distant elevation, you see a squat yellow temple which your eye dwells

upon lovingly through a blur of unmanly moisture, for it recalls your

lost boyhood and the Parthenons done in molasses candy which made it

blest and beautiful.  Still in the distance, but on this side of the

water and close to its edge, the Monument to the Father of his Country

towers out of the mud--sacred soil is the, customary term.  It has the

aspect of a factory chimney with the top broken off.  The skeleton of a

decaying scaffolding lingers about its summit, and tradition says that

the spirit of Washington often comes down and sits on those rafters to

enjoy this tribute of respect which the nation has reared as the symbol

of its unappeasable gratitude.  The Monument is to be finished, some day,

and at that time our Washington will have risen still higher in the

nation's veneration, and will be known as the Great-Great-Grandfather of

his Country.  The memorial Chimney stands in a quiet pastoral locality

that is full of reposeful expression.  With a glass you can see the cow-

sheds about its base, and the contented sheep nimbling pebbles in the

desert solitudes that surround it, and the tired pigs dozing in the holy

calm of its protecting shadow.



Now you wrench your gaze loose, and you look down in front of you and see

the broad Pennsylvania Avenue stretching straight ahead for a mile or

more till it brings up against the iron fence in front of a pillared

granite pile, the Treasury building-an edifice that would command respect

in any capital.  The stores and hotels that wall in this broad avenue are

mean, and cheap, and dingy, and are better left without comment.  Beyond

the Treasury is a fine large white barn, with wide unhandsome grounds

about it.  The President lives there.  It is ugly enough outside, but

that is nothing to what it is inside.  Dreariness, flimsiness, bad taste

reduced to mathematical completeness is what the inside offers to the

eye, if it remains yet what it always has been.



The front and right hand views give you the city at large.  It is a wide

stretch of cheap little brick houses, with here and there a noble

architectural pile lifting itself out of the midst-government buildings,

these.  If the thaw is still going on when you come down and go about

town, you will wonder at the short-sightedness of the city fathers, when

you come to inspect the streets, in that they do not dilute the mud a

little more and use them for canals.



If you inquire around a little, you will find that there are more

boardinghouses to the square acre in Washington than there are in any

other city in the land, perhaps.  If you apply for a home in one of them,

it will seem odd to you to have the landlady inspect you with a severe

eye and then ask you if you are a member of Congress.  Perhaps, just as a

pleasantry, you will say yes.  And then she will tell you that she is

"full."  Then you show her her advertisement in the morning paper, and

there she stands, convicted and ashamed.  She will try to blush, and it

will be only polite in you to take the effort for the deed.  She shows

you her rooms, now, and lets yon take one--but she makes you pay in

advance for it.  That is what you will get for pretending to be a member

of Congress.  If you had been content to be merely a private citizen,

your trunk would have been sufficient security for your board.  If you

are curious and inquire into this thing, the chances are that your

landlady will be ill-natured enough to say that the person and property

of a Congressman are exempt from arrest or detention, and that with the

tears in her eyes she has seen several of the people's representatives

walk off to their several States and Territories carrying her unreceipted

board bills in their pockets for keepsakes.  And before you have been in

Washington many weeks you will be mean enough to believe her, too.



Of course you contrive to see everything and find out everything.  And

one of the first and most startling things you find out is, that every

individual you encounter in the City of Washington almost--and certainly

every separate and distinct individual in the public employment, from the

highest bureau chief, clear down to the maid who scrubs Department halls,

the night watchmen of the public buildings and the darkey boy who

purifies the Department spittoons--represents Political Influence.

Unless you can get the ear of a Senator, or a Congressman, or a Chief of

a Bureau or Department, and persuade him to use his "influence" in your

behalf, you cannot get an employment of the most trivial nature in

Washington.  Mere merit, fitness and capability, are useless baggage to

you without "influence."  The population of Washington consists pretty

much entirely of government employee and the people who board them.

There are thousands of these employees, and they have gathered there from

every corner of the Union and got their berths through the intercession

(command is nearer the word) of the Senators and Representatives of their

respective States.  It would be an odd circumstance to see a girl get

employment at three or four dollars a week in one of the great public

cribs without any political grandee to back her, but merely because she

was worthy, and competent, and a good citizen of a free country that

"treats all persons alike."  Washington would be mildly thunderstruck at

such a thing as that.  If you are a member of Congress, (no offence,) and

one of your constituents who doesn't know anything, and does not want to

go into the bother of learning something, and has no money, and no

employment, and can't earn a living, comes besieging you for help, do you

say, "Come, my friend, if your services were valuable you could get

employment elsewhere--don't want you here?  "Oh, no: You take him to a

Department and say, "Here, give this person something to pass away the

time at--and a salary"--and the thing is done.  You throw him on his

country.  He is his country's child, let his country support him.  There

is something good and motherly about Washington, the grand old benevolent

National Asylum for the Helpless.



The wages received by this great hive of employees are placed at the

liberal figure meet and just for skilled and competent labor.  Such of

them as are immediately employed about the two Houses of Congress, are

not only liberally paid also, but are remembered in the customary Extra

Compensation bill which slides neatly through, annually, with the general

grab that signalizes the last night of a session, and thus twenty per

cent. is added to their wages, for--for fun, no doubt.



Washington Hawkins' new life was an unceasing delight to him.  Senator

Dilworthy lived sumptuously, and Washington's quarters were charming--

gas; running water, hot and cold; bath-room, coal-fires, rich carpets,

beautiful pictures on the walls; books on religion, temperance, public

charities and financial schemes; trim colored servants, dainty food--

everything a body could wish for.  And as for stationery, there was no

end to it; the government furnished it; postage stamps were not needed--

the Senator's frank could convey a horse through the mails, if necessary.



And then he saw such dazzling company.  Renowned generals and admirals

who had seemed but colossal myths when he was in the far west, went in

and out before him or sat at the Senator's table, solidified into

palpable flesh and blood; famous statesmen crossed his path daily; that

once rare and awe-inspiring being, a Congressman, was become a common

spectacle--a spectacle so common, indeed, that he could contemplate it

without excitement, even without embarrassment; foreign ministers were

visible to the naked eye at happy intervals; he had looked upon the

President himself, and lived.  And more; this world of enchantment teemed

with speculation--the whole atmosphere was thick with hand that indeed

was Washington Hawkins' native air; none other refreshed his lungs so

gratefully.  He had found paradise at last.



The more he saw of his chief the Senator, the more he honored him, and

the more conspicuously the moral grandeur of his character appeared to

stand out.  To possess the friendship and the kindly interest of such a

man, Washington said in a letter to Louise, was a happy fortune for a

young man whose career had been so impeded and so clouded as his.



The weeks drifted by;--Harry Brierly flirted, danced, added lustre to the

brilliant Senatorial receptions, and diligently "buzzed" and "button-

holed" Congressmen in the interest of the Columbus River scheme; meantime

Senator Dilworthy labored hard in the same interest--and in others of

equal national importance.  Harry wrote frequently to Sellers, and always

encouragingly; and from these letters it was easy to see that Harry was a

pet with all Washington, and was likely to carry the thing through; that

the assistance rendered him by "old Dilworthy" was pretty fair--pretty

fair; "and every little helps, you know," said Harry.



Washington wrote Sellers officially, now and then.  In one of his letters

it appeared that whereas no member of the House committee favored the

scheme at first, there was now needed but one more vote to compass a

majority report.  Closing sentence:



     "Providence seems to further our efforts."

          (Signed,) "ABNER DILWORTHY, U. S. S.,

                         per WASHINGTON HAWKINS, P. S."



At the end of a week, Washington was able to send the happy news,

officially, as usual,--that the needed vote had been added and the bill

favorably reported from the Committee.  Other letters recorded its perils

in Committee of the whole, and by and by its victory, by just the skin of

its teeth, on third reading and final passage.  Then came letters telling

of Mr. Dilworthy's struggles with a stubborn majority in his own

Committee in the Senate; of how these gentlemen succumbed, one by one,

till a majority was secured.



Then there was a hiatus.  Washington watched every move on the board, and

he was in a good position to do this, for he was clerk of this committee,

and also one other.  He received no salary as private secretary, but

these two clerkships, procured by his benefactor, paid him an aggregate

of twelve dollars a day, without counting the twenty percent extra

compensation which would of course be voted to him on the last night of

the session.



He saw the bill go into Committee of the whole and struggle for its life

again, and finally worry through.  In the fullness of time he noted its

second reading, and by and by the day arrived when the grand ordeal came,

and it was put upon its final passage.  Washington listened with bated

breath to the "Aye!" "No!" "No!" "Aye!" of the voters, for a few dread

minutes, and then could bear the suspense no longer.  He ran down from

the gallery and hurried home to wait.



At the end of two or three hours the Senator arrived in the bosom of his

family, and dinner was waiting.  Washington sprang forward, with the

eager question on his lips, and the Senator said:



"We may rejoice freely, now, my son--Providence has crowned our efforts

with success."









CHAPTER XXV.



Washington sent grand good news to Col. Sellers that night.  To Louise he

wrote:



"It is beautiful to hear him talk when his heart is full of thankfulness

for some manifestation of the Divine favor.  You shall know him, some day

my Louise, and knowing him you will honor him, as I do."



Harry wrote:



"I pulled it through, Colonel, but it was a tough job, there is no

question about that.  There was not a friend to the measure in the House

committee when I began, and not a friend in the Senate committee except

old Dil himself, but they were all fixed for a majority report when I

hauled off my forces.  Everybody here says you can't get a thing like

this through Congress without buying committees for straight-out cash on

delivery, but I think I've taught them a thing or two--if I could only

make them believe it.  When I tell the old residenters that this thing

went through without buying a vote or making a promise, they say, 'That's

rather too thin.'  And when I say thin or not thin it's a fact, anyway,

they say, 'Come, now, but do you really believe that?' and when I say I

don't believe anything about it, I know it, they smile and say, 'Well,

you are pretty innocent, or pretty blind, one or the other--there's no

getting around that.'  Why they really do believe that votes have been

bought--they do indeed.  But let them keep on thinking so.  I have found

out that if a man knows how to talk to women, and has a little gift in

the way of argument with men, he can afford to play for an appropriation

against a money bag and give the money bag odds in the game.  We've raked

in $200,000 of Uncle Sam's money, say what they will--and there is more

where this came from, when we want it, and I rather fancy I am the person

that can go in and occupy it, too, if I do say it myself, that shouldn't,

perhaps.  I'll be with you within a week.  Scare up all the men you can,

and put them to work at once.  When I get there I propose to make things

hum."  The great news lifted Sellers into the clouds.  He went to work on

the instant.  He flew hither and thither making contracts, engaging men,

and steeping his soul in the ecstasies of business.  He was the happiest

man in Missouri.  And Louise was the happiest woman; for presently came a

letter from Washington which said:



"Rejoice with me, for the long agony is over!  We have waited patiently

and faithfully, all these years, and now at last the reward is at hand.

A man is to pay our family $40,000 for the Tennessee Land!  It is but a

little sum compared to what we could get by waiting, but I do so long to

see the day when I can call you my own, that I have said to myself,

better take this and enjoy life in a humble way than wear out our best

days in this miserable separation.  Besides, I can put this money into

operations here that will increase it a hundred fold, yes, a thousand

fold, in a few months.  The air is full of such chances, and I know our

family would consent in a moment that I should put in their shares with

mine.  Without a doubt we shall be worth half a million dollars in a year

from this time--I put it at the very lowest figure, because it is always

best to be on the safe side--half a million at the very lowest

calculation, and then your father will give his consent and we can marry

at last.  Oh, that will be a glorious day.  Tell our friends the good

news--I want all to share it."



And she did tell her father and mother, but they said, let it be kept

still for the present.  The careful father also told her to write

Washington and warn him not to speculate with the money, but to wait a

little and advise with one or two wise old heads.  She did this.  And she

managed to keep the good news to herself, though it would seem that the

most careless observer might have seen by her springing step and her

radiant countenance that some fine piece of good fortune had descended

upon her.



Harry joined the Colonel at Stone's Landing, and that dead place sprang

into sudden life.  A swarm of men were hard at work, and the dull air was

filled with the cheery music of labor.  Harry had been constituted

engineer-in-general, and he threw the full strength of his powers into

his work.  He moved among his hirelings like a king.  Authority seemed to

invest him with a new splendor.  Col. Sellers, as general superintendent

of a great public enterprise, was all that a mere human being could be--

and more.  These two grandees went at their imposing "improvement" with

the air of men who had been charged with the work of altering the

foundations of the globe.



They turned their first attention to straightening the river just above

the Landing, where it made a deep bend, and where the maps and plans

showed that the process of straightening would not only shorten distance

but increase the "fall."  They started a cut-off canal across the

peninsula formed by the bend, and such another tearing up of the earth

and slopping around in the mud as followed the order to the men, had

never been seen in that region before.  There was such a panic among the

turtles that at the end of six hours there was not one to be found within

three miles of Stone's Landing.  They took the young and the aged, the

decrepit and the sick upon their backs and left for tide-water in

disorderly procession, the tadpoles following and the bull-frogs bringing

up the rear.



Saturday night came, but the men were obliged to wait, because the

appropriation had not come.  Harry said he had written to hurry up the

money and it would be along presently.  So the work continued, on Monday.

Stone's Landing was making quite a stir in the vicinity, by this time.

Sellers threw a lot or two on the market, "as a feeler," and they sold

well.  He re-clothed his family, laid in a good stock of provisions, and

still had money left.  He started a bank account, in a small way--and

mentioned the deposit casually to friends; and to strangers, too; to

everybody, in fact; but not as a new thing--on the contrary, as a matter

of life-long standing.  He could not keep from buying trifles every day

that were not wholly necessary, it was such a gaudy thing to get out his

bank-book and draw a check, instead of using his old customary formula,

"Charge it" Harry sold a lot or two, also--and had a dinner party or two

at Hawkeye and a general good time with the money.  Both men held on

pretty strenuously for the coming big prices, however.



At the end of a month things were looking bad.  Harry had besieged the

New York headquarters of the Columbus River Slack-water Navigation

Company with demands, then commands, and finally appeals, but to no

purpose; the appropriation did not come; the letters were not even

answered.  The workmen were clamorous, now.  The Colonel and Harry

retired to consult.



"What's to be done?" said the Colonel.



"Hang'd if I know."



"Company say anything?"



"Not a word."



"You telegraphed yesterday?"



Yes, and the day before, too."



"No answer?"



"None-confound them!"



Then there was a long pause.  Finally both spoke at once:



"I've got it!"



"I've got it!"



"What's yours?" said Harry.



"Give the boys thirty-day orders on the Company for the back pay."



"That's it-that's my own idea to a dot.  But then--but then----"



"Yes, I know," said the Colonel; "I know they can't wait for the orders

to go to New York and be cashed, but what's the reason they can't get

them discounted in Hawkeye?"



"Of course they can.  That solves the difficulty.  Everybody knows the

appropriation's been made and the Company's perfectly good."



So the orders were given and the men appeased, though they grumbled a

little at first.  The orders went well enough for groceries and such

things at a fair discount, and the work danced along gaily for a time.

Two or three purchasers put up frame houses at the Landing and moved in,

and of course a far-sighted but easy-going journeyman printer wandered

along and started the "Napoleon Weekly Telegraph and Literary

Repository"--a paper with a Latin motto from the Unabridged dictionary,

and plenty of "fat" conversational tales and double-leaded poetry--all

for two dollars a year, strictly in advance.  Of course the merchants

forwarded the orders at once to New York--and never heard of them again.



At the end of some weeks Harry's orders were a drug in the market--nobody

would take them at any discount whatever.  The second month closed with a

riot.--Sellers was absent at the time, and Harry began an active absence

himself with the mob at his heels.  But being on horseback, he had the

advantage.  He did not tarry in Hawkeye, but went on, thus missing

several appointments with creditors.  He was far on his flight eastward,

and well out of danger when the next morning dawned.  He telegraphed the

Colonel to go down and quiet the laborers--he was bound east for money--

everything would be right in a week--tell the men so--tell them to rely

on him and not be afraid.



Sellers found the mob quiet enough when he reached the Landing.

They had gutted the Navigation office, then piled the beautiful engraved

stock-books and things in the middle of the floor and enjoyed the bonfire

while it lasted.  They had a liking for the Colonel, but still they had

some idea of hanging him, as a sort of make-shift that might answer,

after a fashion, in place of more satisfactory game.



But they made the mistake of waiting to hear what he had to say first.

Within fifteen minutes his tongue had done its work and they were all

rich men.--He gave every one of them a lot in the suburbs of the city of

Stone's Landing, within a mile and a half of the future post office and

railway station, and they promised to resume work as soon as Harry got

east and started the money along.  Now things were blooming and pleasant

again, but the men had no money, and nothing to live on.  The Colonel

divided with them the money he still had in bank--an act which had

nothing surprising about it because he was generally ready to divide

whatever he had with anybody that wanted it, and it was owing to this

very trait that his family spent their days in poverty and at times were

pinched with famine.



When the men's minds had cooled and Sellers was gone, they hated

themselves for letting him beguile them with fine speeches, but it was

too late, now--they agreed to hang him another time--such time as

Providence should appoint.









CHAPTER XXVI.



Rumors of Ruth's frivolity and worldliness at Fallkill traveled to

Philadelphia in due time, and occasioned no little undertalk among the

Bolton relatives.



Hannah Shoecraft told another, cousin that, for her part, she never

believed that Ruth had so much more "mind" than other people; and Cousin

Hulda added that she always thought Ruth was fond of admiration, and that

was the reason she was unwilling to wear plain clothes and attend

Meeting.  The story that Ruth was "engaged" to a young gentleman of

fortune in Fallkill came with the other news, and helped to give point to

the little satirical remarks that went round about Ruth's desire to be a

doctor!



Margaret Bolton was too wise to be either surprised or alarmed by these

rumors.  They might be true; she knew a woman's nature too well to think

them improbable, but she also knew how steadfast Ruth was in her

purposes, and that, as a brook breaks into ripples and eddies and dances

and sports by the way, and yet keeps on to the sea, it was in Ruth's

nature to give back cheerful answer to the solicitations of friendliness

and pleasure, to appear idly delaying even, and sporting in the sunshine,

while the current of her resolution flowed steadily on.



That Ruth had this delight in the mere surface play of life that she

could, for instance, be interested in that somewhat serious by-play

called "flirtation," or take any delight in the exercise of those little

arts of pleasing and winning which are none the less genuine and charming

because they are not intellectual, Ruth, herself, had never suspected

until she went to Fallkill.  She had believed it her duty to subdue her

gaiety of temperament, and let nothing divert her from what are called

serious pursuits: In her limited experience she brought everything to the

judgment of her own conscience, and settled the affairs of all the world

in her own serene judgment hall.  Perhaps her mother saw this, and saw

also that there was nothing in the Friends' society to prevent her from

growing more and more opinionated.



When Ruth returned to Philadelphia, it must be confessed--though it would

not have been by her--that a medical career did seem a little less

necessary for her than formerly; and coming back in a glow of triumph, as

it were, and in the consciousness of the freedom and life in a lively

society and in new and sympathetic friendship, she anticipated pleasure

in an attempt to break up the stiffness and levelness of the society at

home, and infusing into it something of the motion and sparkle which were

so agreeable at Fallkill.  She expected visits from her new friends, she

would have company, the new books and the periodicals about which all the

world was talking, and, in short, she would have life.



For a little while she lived in this atmosphere which she had brought

with her.  Her mother was delighted with this change in her, with the

improvement in her health and the interest she exhibited in home affairs.

Her father enjoyed the society of his favorite daughter as he did few

things besides; he liked her mirthful and teasing ways, and not less a

keen battle over something she had read.  He had been a great reader all

his life, and a remarkable memory had stored his mind with encyclopaedic

information.  It was one of Ruth's delights to cram herself with some out

of the way subject and endeavor to catch her father; but she almost

always failed.  Mr. Bolton liked company, a house full of it, and the

mirth of young people, and he would have willingly entered into any

revolutionary plans Ruth might have suggested in relation to Friends'

society.



But custom and the fixed order are stronger than the most enthusiastic

and rebellious young lady, as Ruth very soon found.  In spite of all her

brave efforts, her frequent correspondence, and her determined animation,

her books and her music, she found herself settling into the clutches of

the old monotony, and as she realized the hopelessness of her endeavors,

the medical scheme took new hold of her, and seemed to her the only

method of escape.



"Mother, thee does not know how different it is in Fallkill, how much

more interesting the people are one meets, how much more life there is."



"But thee will find the world, child, pretty much all the same, when thee

knows it better.  I thought once as thee does now, and had as little

thought of being a Friend as thee has.  Perhaps when thee has seen more,

thee will better appreciate a quiet life."



"Thee married young.  I shall not marry young, and perhaps not at all,"

said Ruth, with a look of vast experience.



"Perhaps thee doesn't know thee own mind; I have known persons of thy

age who did not.  Did thee see anybody whom thee would like to live with

always in Fallkill?"



"Not always," replied Ruth with a little laugh.  "Mother, I think I

wouldn't say 'always' to any one until I have a profession and am as

independent as he is.  Then my love would be a free act, and not in any

way a necessity."



Margaret Bolton smiled at this new-fangled philosophy.  "Thee will find

that love, Ruth, is a thing thee won't reason about, when it comes, nor

make any bargains about.  Thee wrote that Philip Sterling was at

Fallkill."



"Yes, and Henry Brierly, a friend of his; a very amusing young fellow and

not so serious-minded as Philip, but a bit of a fop maybe."



"And thee preferred the fop to the serious-minded?"



"I didn't prefer anybody; but Henry Brierly was good company, which

Philip wasn't always."



"Did thee know thee father had been in correspondence with Philip?"



Ruth looked up surprised and with a plain question in her eyes.



"Oh, it's not about thee."



"What then?" and if there was any shade of disappointment in her tone,

probably Ruth herself did not know it.



"It's about some land up in the country.  That man Bigler has got father

into another speculation."



"That odious man!  Why will father have anything to do with him?  Is it

that railroad?"



"Yes.  Father advanced money and took land as security, and whatever has

gone with the money and the bonds, he has on his hands a large tract of

wild land."



"And what has Philip to do with that?"



"It has good timber, if it could ever be got out, and father says that

there must be coal in it; it's in a coal region.  He wants Philip to

survey it, and examine it for indications of coal."



"It's another of father's fortunes, I suppose," said Ruth.  "He has put

away so many fortunes for us that I'm afraid we never shall find them."



Ruth was interested in it nevertheless, and perhaps mainly because Philip

was to be connected with the enterprise.  Mr. Bigler came to dinner with

her father next day, and talked a great deal about Mr. Bolton's

magnificent tract of land, extolled the sagacity that led him to secure

such a property, and led the talk along to another railroad which would

open a northern communication to this very land.



"Pennybacker says it's full of coal, he's no doubt of it, and a railroad

to strike the Erie would make it a fortune."



"Suppose you take the land and work the thing up, Mr. Bigler; you may

have the tract for three dollars an acre."



"You'd throw it away, then," replied Mr. Bigler, "and I'm not the man to

take advantage of a friend.  But if you'll put a mortgage on it for the

northern road, I wouldn't mind taking an interest, if Pennybacker is

willing; but Pennybacker, you know, don't go much on land, he sticks to

the legislature."  And Mr. Bigler laughed.



When Mr. Bigler had gone, Ruth asked her father about Philip's connection

with the land scheme.



"There's nothing definite," said Mr. Bolton.  "Philip is showing aptitude

for his profession.  I hear the best reports of him in New York, though

those sharpers don't 'intend to do anything but use him.  I've written

and offered him employment in surveying and examining the land.  We want

to know what it is.  And if there is anything in it that his enterprise

can dig out, he shall have an interest.  I should be glad to give the

young fellow a lift."



All his life Eli Bolton had been giving young fellows a lift, and

shouldering the loses when things turned out unfortunately.  His ledger,

take-it-altogether, would not show a balance on the right side; but

perhaps the losses on his books will turn out to be credits in a world

where accounts are kept on a different basis.  The left hand of the

ledger will appear the right, looked at from the other side.



Philip, wrote to Ruth rather a comical account of the bursting up of the

city of Napoleon and the navigation improvement scheme, of Harry's flight

and the Colonel's discomfiture.  Harry left in such a hurry that he

hadn't even time to bid Miss Laura Hawkins good-bye, but he had no doubt

that Harry would console himself with the next pretty face he saw--

a remark which was thrown in for Ruth's benefit.  Col. Sellers had in all

probability, by this time, some other equally brilliant speculation in

his brain.



As to the railroad, Philip had made up his mind that it was merely kept

on foot for speculative purposes in Wall street, and he was about to quit

it.  Would Ruth be glad to hear, he wondered, that he was coming East?

For he was coming, in spite of a letter from Harry in New York, advising

him to hold on until he had made some arrangements in regard to

contracts, he to be a little careful about Sellers, who was somewhat

visionary, Harry said.



The summer went on without much excitement for Ruth.  She kept up a

correspondence with Alice, who promised a visit in the fall, she read,

she earnestly tried to interest herself in home affairs and such people

as came to the house; but she found herself falling more and more into

reveries, and growing weary of things as they were.  She felt that

everybody might become in time like two relatives from a Shaker

establishment in Ohio, who visited the Boltons about this time, a father

and son, clad exactly alike, and alike in manners.  The son; however,

who was not of age, was more unworldly and sanctimonious than his father;

he always addressed his parent as "Brother Plum," and bore himself,

altogether in such a superior manner that Ruth longed to put bent pins in

his chair.  Both father and son wore the long, single breasted collarless

coats of their society, without buttons, before or behind, but with a row

of hooks and eyes on either side in front.  It was Ruth's suggestion that

the coats would be improved by a single hook and eye sewed on in the

small of the back where the buttons usually are.



Amusing as this Shaker caricature of the Friends was, it oppressed Ruth

beyond measure; and increased her feeling of being stifled.



It was a most unreasonable feeling.  No home could be pleasanter than

Ruth's.  The house, a little out of the city; was one of those elegant

country residences which so much charm visitors to the suburbs of

Philadelphia.  A modern dwelling and luxurious in everything that wealth

could suggest for comfort, it stood in the midst of exquisitely kept

lawns, with groups of trees, parterres of flowers massed in colors, with

greenhouse, grapery and garden; and on one side, the garden sloped away

in undulations to a shallow brook that ran over a pebbly bottom and sang

under forest trees.  The country about teas the perfection of cultivated

landscape, dotted with cottages, and stately mansions of Revolutionary

date, and sweet as an English country-side, whether seen in the soft

bloom of May or in the mellow ripeness of late October.



It needed only the peace of the mind within, to make it a paradise.

One riding by on the Old Germantown road, and seeing a young girl

swinging in the hammock on the piazza and, intent upon some volume of old

poetry or the latest novel, would no doubt have envied a life so idyllic.

He could not have imagined that the young girl was reading a volume of

reports of clinics and longing to be elsewhere.



Ruth could not have been more discontented if all the wealth about her

had been as unsubstantial as a dream.  Perhaps she so thought it.



"I feel," she once said to her father, "as if I were living in a house of

cards."



"And thee would like to turn it into a hospital?"



"No.  But tell me father," continued Ruth, not to be put off, "is thee

still going on with that Bigler and those other men who come here and

entice thee?"



Mr. Bolton smiled, as men do when they talk with women about "business"

"Such men have their uses, Ruth.  They keep the world active, and I owe a

great many of my best operations to such men.  Who knows, Ruth, but this

new land purchase, which I confess I yielded a little too much to Bigler

in, may not turn out a fortune for thee and the rest of the children?"



"Ah, father, thee sees every thing in a rose-colored light.  I do believe

thee wouldn't have so readily allowed me to begin the study of medicine,

if it hadn't had the novelty of an experiment to thee."



"And is thee satisfied with it?"



"If thee means, if I have had enough of it, no.  I just begin to see what

I can do in it, and what a noble profession it is for a woman.  Would

thee have me sit here like a bird on a bough and wait for somebody to

come and put me in a cage?"



Mr. Bolton was not sorry to divert the talk from his own affairs, and he

did not think it worth while to tell his family of a performance that

very day which was entirely characteristic of him.



Ruth might well say that she felt as if she were living in a house of

cards, although the Bolton household had no idea of the number of perils

that hovered over them, any more than thousands of families in America

have of the business risks and contingences upon which their prosperity

and luxury hang.



A sudden call upon Mr. Bolton for a large sum of money, which must be

forthcoming at once, had found him in the midst of a dozen ventures, from

no one of which a dollar could be realized.  It was in vain that he

applied to his business acquaintances and friends; it was a period of

sudden panic and no money.  "A hundred thousand!  Mr. Bolton," said

Plumly.  "Good God, if you should ask me for ten, I shouldn't know where

to get it."



And yet that day Mr. Small (Pennybacker, Bigler and Small) came to Mr.

Bolton with a piteous story of ruin in a coal operation, if he could not

raise ten thousand dollars.  Only ten, and he was sure of a fortune.

Without it he was a beggar.  Mr. Bolton had already Small's notes for a

large amount in his safe, labeled "doubtful;" he had helped him again and

again, and always with the same result.  But Mr. Small spoke with a

faltering voice of his family, his daughter in school, his wife ignorant

of his calamity, and drew such a picture of their agony, that Mr. Bolton

put by his own more pressing necessity, and devoted the day to scraping

together, here and there, ten thousand dollars for this brazen beggar,

who had never kept a promise to him nor paid a debt.



Beautiful credit!  The foundation of modern society.  Who shall say that

this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon

human promises?  That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a

whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar

newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished

speculator in lands and mines this remark:--"I wasn't worth a cent two

years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars."









CHAPTER XXVII.



It was a hard blow to poor Sellers to see the work on his darling

enterprise stop, and the noise and bustle and confusion that had been

such refreshment to his soul, sicken and die out.  It was hard to come

down to humdrum ordinary life again after being a General Superintendent

and the most conspicuous man in the community.  It was sad to see his

name disappear from the newspapers; sadder still to see it resurrected at

intervals, shorn of its aforetime gaudy gear of compliments and clothed

on with rhetorical tar and feathers.



But his friends suffered more on his account than he did.  He was a cork

that could not be kept under the water many moments at a time.



He had to bolster up his wife's spirits every now and then.  On one of

these occasions he said:



"It's all right, my dear, all right; it will all come right in a little

while.  There's $200,000 coming, and that will set things booming again:

Harry seems to be having some difficulty, but that's to be expected--you

can't move these big operations to the tune of Fisher's Hornpipe, you

know.  But Harry will get it started along presently, and then you'll

see!  I expect the news every day now."



"But Beriah, you've been expecting it every day, all along, haven't you?"



"Well, yes; yes--I don't know but I have.  But anyway, the longer it's

delayed, the nearer it grows to the time when it will start--same as

every day you live brings you nearer to--nearer--"



"The grave?"



"Well, no--not that exactly; but you can't understand these things, Polly

dear--women haven't much head for business, you know.  You make yourself

perfectly comfortable, old lady, and you'll see how we'll trot this right

along.  Why bless you, let the appropriation lag, if it wants to--that's

no great matter--there's a bigger thing than that."



"Bigger than $200,000, Beriah?"



"Bigger, child?--why, what's $200,000?  Pocket money!  Mere pocket money!

Look at the railroad!  Did you forget the railroad?  It ain't many months

till spring; it will be coming right along, and the railroad swimming

right along behind it.  Where'll it be by the middle of summer?  Just

stop and fancy a moment--just think a little--don't anything suggest

itself?  Bless your heart, you dear women live right in the present all

the time--but a man, why a man lives----



"In the future, Beriah?  But don't we live in the future most too much,

Beriah?  We do somehow seem to manage to live on next year's crop of corn

and potatoes as a general thing while this year is still dragging along,

but sometimes it's not a robust diet,--Beriah.  But don't look that way,

dear--don't mind what I say.  I don't mean to fret, I don't mean to

worry; and I don't, once a month, do I, dear?  But when I get a little

low and feel bad, I get a bit troubled and worrisome, but it don't mean

anything in the world.  It passes right away.  I know you're doing all

you can, and I don't want to seem repining and ungrateful--for I'm not,

Beriah--you know I'm not, don't you?"



"Lord bless you, child, I know you are the very best little woman that

ever lived--that ever lived on the whole face of the Earth!  And I know

that I would be a dog not to work for you and think for you and scheme

for you with all my might.  And I'll bring things all right yet, honey--

cheer up and don't you fear.  The railroad----"



"Oh, I had forgotten the railroad, dear, but when a body gets blue, a

body forgets everything.  Yes, the railroad--tell me about the railroad."



"Aha, my girl, don't you see?  Things ain't so dark, are they?  Now I

didn't forget the railroad.  Now just think for a moment--just figure up

a little on the future dead moral certainties.  For instance, call this

waiter St. Louis.



"And we'll lay this fork (representing the railroad) from St. Louis to

this potato, which is Slouchburg:



"Then with this carving knife we'll continue the railroad from Slouchburg

to Doodleville, shown by the black pepper:



"Then we run along the--yes--the comb--to the tumbler that's Brimstone:



"Thence by the pipe to Belshazzar, which is the salt-cellar:



"Thence to, to--that quill--Catfish--hand me the pincushion, Marie

Antoinette:



"Thence right along these shears to this horse, Babylon:



"Then by the spoon to Bloody Run--thank you, the ink:



"Thence to Hail Columbia--snuffers, Polly, please move that cup and

saucer close up, that's Hail Columbia:



"Then--let me open my knife--to Hark-from-the-Tomb, where we'll put the

candle-stick--only a little distance from Hail Columbia to Hark-from-the-

Tomb--down-grade all the way.



"And there we strike Columbus River--pass me two or throe skeins of

thread to stand for the river; the sugar bowl will do for Hawkeye, and

the rat trap for Stone's Landing-Napoleon, I mean--and you can see how

much better Napoleon is located than Hawkeye.  Now here you are with your

railroad complete, and showing its continuation to Hallelujah and thence

to Corruptionville.



"Now then-them you are!  It's a beautiful road, beautiful.  Jeff Thompson

can out-engineer any civil engineer that ever sighted through an aneroid,

or a theodolite, or whatever they call it--he calls it sometimes one and

sometimes the other just whichever levels off his sentence neatest, I

reckon.  But ain't it a ripping toad, though?  I tell you, it'll make a

stir when it gets along.  Just see what a country it goes through.

There's your onions at Slouchburg--noblest onion country that graces

God's footstool; and there's your turnip country all around Doodleville--

bless my life, what fortunes are going to be made there when they get

that contrivance perfected for extracting olive oil out of turnips--if

there's any in them; and I reckon there is, because Congress has made an

appropriation of money to test the thing, and they wouldn't have done

that just on conjecture, of course.  And now we come to the Brimstone

region--cattle raised there till you can't rest--and corn, and all that

sort of thing.  Then you've got a little stretch along through Belshazzar

that don't produce anything now--at least nothing but rocks--but

irrigation will fetch it.  Then from Catfish to Babylon it's a little

swampy, but there's dead loads of peat down under there somewhere.  Next

is the Bloody Run and Hail Columbia country--tobacco enough can be raised

there to support two such railroads.  Next is the sassparilla region.

I reckon there's enough of that truck along in there on the line of the

pocket-knife, from Hail Columbia to Hark-from-the Tomb to fat up all the

consumptives in all the hospitals from Halifax to the Holy Land.  It just

grows like weeds!  I've got a little belt of sassparilla land in there

just tucked away unobstrusively waiting for my little Universal

Expectorant to get into shape in my head.  And I'll fix that, you know.

One of these days I'll have all the nations of the earth expecto--"



"But Beriah, dear--"



"Don't interrupt me; Polly--I don't want you to lose the run of the map--

well, take your toy-horse, James Fitz-James, if you must have it--and run

along with you.  Here, now--the soap will do for Babylon.  Let me see--

where was I?  Oh yes--now we run down to Stone's Lan--Napoleon--now we

run down to Napoleon.  Beautiful road.  Look at that, now.  Perfectly

straight line-straight as the way to the grave.  And see where it leaves

Hawkeye-clear out in the cold, my dear, clear out in the cold.  That

town's as bound to die as--well if I owned it I'd get its obituary ready,

now, and notify the mourners.  Polly, mark my words--in three years from

this, Hawkeye'll be a howling wilderness.  You'll see.  And just look at

that river--noblest stream that meanders over the thirsty earth!--

calmest, gentlest artery that refreshes her weary bosom!  Railroad goes

all over it and all through it--wades right along on stilts.  Seventeen

bridges in three miles and a half-forty-nine bridges from Hark-from-the-

Tomb to Stone's Landing altogether--forty nine bridges, and culverts

enough to culvert creation itself!  Hadn't skeins of thread enough to

represent them all--but you get an idea--perfect trestle-work of bridges

for seventy two miles: Jeff Thompson and I fixed all that, you know; he's

to get the contracts and I'm to put them through on the divide.  Just

oceans of money in those bridges.  It's the only part of the railroad I'm

interested in,--down along the line--and it's all I want, too.  It's

enough, I should judge. Now here we are at Napoleon.  Good enough country

plenty good enough--all it wants is population.  That's all right--that

will come.  And it's no bad country now for calmness and solitude, I can

tell you--though there's no money in that, of course.  No money, but a

man wants rest, a man wants peace--a man don't want to rip and tear

around all the time.  And here we go, now, just as straight as a string

for Hallelujah--it's a beautiful angle--handsome up grade all the way--

and then away you go to Corruptionville, the gaudiest country for early

carrots and cauliflowers that ever--good missionary field, too.  There

ain't such another missionary field outside the jungles of Central

Africa.  And patriotic?--why they named it after Congress itself.  Oh,

I warn you, my dear, there's a good time coming, and it'll be right along

before you know what you're about, too.  That railroad's fetching it.

You see what it is as far as I've got, and if I had enough bottles and

soap and boot-jacks and such things to carry it along to where it joins

onto the Union Pacific, fourteen hundred miles from here, I should

exhibit to you in that little internal improvement a spectacle of

inconceivable sublimity.  So, don't you see?  We've got the rail road to

fall back on; and in the meantime, what are we worrying about that

$200,000 appropriation for?  That's all right.  I'd be willing to bet

anything that the very next letter that comes from Harry will--"



The eldest boy entered just in the nick of time and brought a letter,

warm from the post-office.



"Things do look bright, after all, Beriah.  I'm sorry I was blue, but it

did seem as if everything had been going against us for whole ages.  Open

the letter--open it quick, and let's know all about it before we stir out

of our places.  I am all in a fidget to know what it says."



The letter was opened, without any unnecessary delay.









CHAPTER XXVIII.



Whatever may have been the language of Harry's letter to the Colonel,

the information it conveyed wars condensed or expanded, one or the other,

from the following episode of his visit to New York:



He called, with official importance in his mien, at No.--Wall street,

where a great gilt sign betokened the presence of the head-quarters of

the a Columbus River Slack-Water Navigation Company."  He entered and

gave a dressy porter his card, and was requested to wait a moment in a

sort of ante-room.  The porter returned in a minute; and asked whom he

would like to see?



"The president of the company, of course."



"He is busy with some gentlemen, sir; says he will be done with them

directly."



That a copper-plate card with "Engineer-in-Chief" on it should be

received with such tranquility as this, annoyed Mr. Brierly not a little.

But he had to submit.  Indeed his annoyance had time to augment a good

deal; for he was allowed to cool his heels a frill half hour in the ante-

room before those gentlemen emerged and he was ushered into the presence.

He found a stately dignitary occupying a very official chair behind a

long green morocco-covered table, in a room with sumptuously carpeted and

furnished, and well garnished with pictures.



"Good morning, sir; take a seat--take a seat."



"Thank you sir," said Harry, throwing as much chill into his manner as

his ruffled dignity prompted.



"We perceive by your reports and the reports of the Chief Superintendent,

that you have been making gratifying progress with the work.--We are all

very much pleased."



"Indeed?  We did not discover it from your letters--which we have not

received; nor by the treatment our drafts have met with--which were not

honored; nor by the reception of any part of the appropriation, no part

of it having come to hand."



"Why, my dear Mr. Brierly, there must be some mistake, I am sure we wrote

you and also Mr. Sellers, recently--when my clerk comes he will show

copies--letters informing you of the ten per cent. assessment."



"Oh, certainly, we got those letters.  But what we wanted was money to

carry on the work--money to pay the men."



"Certainly, certainly--true enough--but we credited you both for a large

part of your assessments--I am sure that was in our letters."



"Of course that was in--I remember that."



"Ah, very well then.  Now we begin to understand each other."



"Well, I don't see that we do.  There's two months' wages due the men,

and----"



"How?  Haven't you paid the men?"



"Paid them!  How are we going to pay them when you don't honor our

drafts?"



"Why, my dear sir, I cannot see how you can find any fault with us.  I am

sure we have acted in a perfectly straight forward business way.--Now let

us look at the thing a moment.  You subscribed for 100 shares of the

capital stock, at $1,000 a share, I believe?"



"Yes, sir, I did."



"And Mr. Sellers took a like amount?"



"Yes, sir."



"Very well.  No concern can get along without money.  We levied a ten per

cent. assessment.  It was the original understanding that you and Mr.

Sellers were to have the positions you now hold, with salaries of $600 a

month each, while in active service.  You were duly elected to these

places, and you accepted them.  Am I right?"



"Certainly."



"Very well.  You were given your instructions and put to work.  By your

reports it appears that you have expended the sum of $9,610 upon the said

work.  Two months salary to you two officers amounts altogether to

$2,400--about one-eighth of your ten per cent. assessment, you see; which

leaves you in debt to the company for the other seven-eighths of the

assessment--viz, something over $8,000 apiece.  Now instead of requiring

you to forward this aggregate of $16,000 or $17,000 to New York, the

company voted unanimously to let you pay it over to the contractors,

laborers from time to time, and give you credit on the books for it.

And they did it without a murmur, too, for they were pleased with the

progress you had made, and were glad to pay you that little compliment--

and a very neat one it was, too, I am sure.  The work you did fell short

of $10,000, a trifle.  Let me see--$9,640 from $20,000 salary $2;400

added--ah yes, the balance due the company from yourself and Mr. Sellers

is $7,960, which I will take the responsibility of allowing to stand for

the present, unless you prefer to draw a check now, and thus----"



"Confound it, do you mean to say that instead of the company owing us

$2,400, we owe the company $7,960?"



"Well, yes."



"And that we owe the men and the contractors nearly ten thousand dollars

besides?"



"Owe them!  Oh bless my soul, you can't mean that you have not paid these

people?"



"But I do mean it!"



The president rose and walked the floor like a man in bodily pain.  His

brows contracted, he put his hand up and clasped his forehead, and kept

saying, "Oh, it is, too bad, too bad, too bad!  Oh, it is bound to be

found out--nothing can prevent it--nothing!"



Then he threw himself into his chair and said:



"My dear Mr. Brierson, this is dreadful--perfectly dreadful.  It will be

found out.  It is bound to tarnish the good name of the company; our

credit will be seriously, most seriously impaired.  How could you be so

thoughtless--the men ought to have been paid though it beggared us all!"



"They ought, ought they?  Then why the devil--my name is not Bryerson, by

the way--why the mischief didn't the compa--why what in the nation ever

became of the appropriation?  Where is that appropriation?--if a

stockholder may make so bold as to ask."



The appropriation?--that paltry $200,000, do you mean?"



"Of course--but I didn't know that $200,000 was so very paltry.  Though I

grant, of course, that it is not a large sum, strictly speaking.  But

where is it?"



"My dear sir, you surprise me.  You surely cannot have had a large

acquaintance with this sort of thing.  Otherwise you would not have

expected much of a result from a mere INITIAL appropriation like that.

It was never intended for anything but a mere nest egg for the future and

real appropriations to cluster around."



"Indeed?  Well, was it a myth, or was it a reality?  Whatever become of

it?"



"Why the--matter is simple enough.  A Congressional appropriation costs

money.  Just reflect, for instance--a majority of the House Committee,

say $10,000 apiece--$40,000; a majority of the Senate Committee, the same

each--say $40,000; a little extra to one or two chairman of one or two

such committees, say $10,000 each--$20,000; and there's $100,000 of the

money gone, to begin with.  Then, seven male lobbyists, at $3,000 each--

$21,000; one female lobbyist, $10,000; a high moral Congressman or

Senator here and there--the high moral ones cost more, because they.

give tone to a measure--say ten of these at $3,000 each, is $30,000; then

a lot of small-fry country members who won't vote for anything whatever

without pay--say twenty at $500 apiece, is $10,000; a lot of dinners to

members--say $10,000 altogether; lot of jimcracks for Congressmen's wives

and children--those go a long way--you can't sped too much money in that

line--well, those things cost in a lump, say $10,000--along there

somewhere; and then comes your printed documents--your maps, your tinted

engravings, your pamphlets, your illuminated show cards, your

advertisements in a hundred and fifty papers at ever so much a line--

because you've got to keep the papers all light or you are gone up, you

know.  Oh, my dear sir, printing bills are destruction itself.  Ours so

far amount to--let me see--10; 52; 22; 13;--and then there's 11; 14; 33--

well, never mind the details, the total in clean numbers foots up

$118,254.42 thus far!"



"What!"



"Oh, yes indeed.  Printing's no bagatelle, I can tell you.  And then

there's your contributions, as a company, to Chicago fires and Boston

fires, and orphan asylums and all that sort of thing--head the list, you

see, with the company's full name and a thousand dollars set opposite--

great card, sir--one of the finest advertisements in the world--the

preachers mention it in the pulpit when it's a religious charity--one of

the happiest advertisements in the world is your benevolent donation.

Ours have amounted to sixteen thousand dollars and some cents up to this

time."



"Good heavens!"



"Oh, yes.  Perhaps the biggest thing we've done in the advertising line

was to get an officer of the U. S. government, of perfectly Himmalayan

official altitude, to write up our little internal improvement for a

religious paper of enormous circulation--I tell you that makes our bonds

go handsomely among the pious poor.  Your religious paper is by far the

best vehicle for a thing of this kind, because they'll 'lead' your

article and put it right in the midst of the reading matter; and if it's

got a few Scripture quotations in it, and some temperance platitudes and

a bit of gush here and there about Sunday Schools, and a sentimental

snuffle now and then about 'God's precious ones, the honest hard-handed

poor,' it works the nation like a charm, my dear sir, and never a man

suspects that it is an advertisement; but your secular paper sticks you

right into the advertising columns and of course you don't take a trick.

Give me a religious paper to advertise in, every time; and if you'll just

look at their advertising pages, you'll observe that other people think a

good deal as I do--especially people who have got little financial

schemes to make everybody rich with.  Of course I mean your great big

metropolitan religious papers that know how to serve God and make money

at the same time--that's your sort, sir, that's your sort--a religious

paper that isn't run to make money is no use to us, sir, as an

advertising medium--no use to anybody--in our line of business.  I guess

our next best dodge was sending a pleasure trip of newspaper reporters

out to Napoleon.  Never paid them a cent; just filled them up with

champagne and the fat of the land, put pen, ink and paper before them

while they were red-hot, and bless your soul when you come to read their

letters you'd have supposed they'd been to heaven.  And if a sentimental

squeamishness held one or two of them back from taking a less rosy view

of Napoleon, our hospitalities tied his tongue, at least, and he said

nothing at all and so did us no harm.  Let me see--have I stated all the

expenses I've been at?  No, I was near forgetting one or two items.

There's your official salaries--you can't get good men for nothing.

Salaries cost pretty lively.  And then there's your big high-sounding

millionaire names stuck into your advertisements as stockholders--another

card, that--and they are stockholders, too, but you have to give them the

stock and non-assessable at that--so they're an expensive lot.  Very,

very expensive thing, take it all around, is a big internal improvement

concern--but you see that yourself, Mr. Bryerman--you see that, yourself,

sir."



"But look here.  I think you are a little mistaken about it's ever having

cost anything for Congressional votes.  I happen to know something about

that.  I've let you say your say--now let me say mine.  I don't wish to

seem to throw any suspicion on anybody's statements, because we are all

liable to be mistaken.  But how would it strike you if I were to say that

I was in Washington all the time this bill was pending? and what if I

added that I put the measure through myself?  Yes, sir, I did that little

thing.  And moreover, I never paid a dollar for any man's vote and never

promised one.  There are some ways of doing a thing that are as good as

others which other people don't happen to think about, or don't have the

knack of succeeding in, if they do happen to think of them.  My dear sir,

I am obliged to knock some of your expenses in the head--for never a cent

was paid a Congressman or Senator on the part of this Navigation Company."



The president smiled blandly, even sweetly, all through this harangue,

and then said:



"Is that so?"



"Every word of it."



"Well it does seem to alter the complexion of things a little.  You are

acquainted with the members down there, of course, else you could not

have worked to such advantage?"



"I know them all, sir.  I know their wives, their children, their babies

--I even made it a point to be on good terms with their lackeys.  I know

every Congressman well--even familiarly."



"Very good.  Do you know any of their signatures?  Do you know their

handwriting?"



"Why I know their handwriting as well as I know my own--have had

correspondence enough with them, I should think.  And their signatures--

why I can tell their initials, even."



The president went to a private safe, unlocked it and got out some

letters and certain slips of paper.  Then he said:



"Now here, for instance; do you believe that that is a genuine letter?

Do you know this signature here?--and this one?  Do you know who those

initials represent--and are they forgeries?"



Harry was stupefied.  There were things there that made his brain swim.

Presently, at the bottom of one of the letters he saw a signature that

restored his equilibrium; it even brought the sunshine of a smile to his

face.



The president said:



"That one amuses you.  You never suspected him?"



"Of course I ought to have suspected him, but I don't believe it ever

really occurred to me.  Well, well, well--how did you ever have the nerve

to approach him, of all others?"



"Why my friend, we never think of accomplishing anything without his

help.  He is our mainstay.  But how do those letters strike you?"



"They strike me dumb!  What a stone-blind idiot I have been!"



"Well, take it all around, I suppose you had a pleasant time in

Washington," said the president, gathering up the letters; "of course you

must have had.  Very few men could go there and get a money bill through

without buying a single"



"Come, now, Mr. President, that's plenty of that!  I take back everything

I said on that head.  I'm a wiser man to-day than I was yesterday, I can

tell you."



"I think you are.  In fact I am satisfied you are.  But now I showed you

these things in confidence, you understand.  Mention facts as much as you

want to, but don't mention names to anybody.  I can depend on you for

that, can't I?"



"Oh, of course.  I understand the necessity of that.  I will not betray

the names.  But to go back a bit, it begins to look as if you never saw

any of that appropriation at all?"



"We saw nearly ten thousand dollars of it--and that was all.  Several of

us took turns at log-rolling in Washington, and if we had charged

anything for that service, none of that $10,000 would ever have reached

New York."



"If you hadn't levied the assessment you would have been in a close place

I judge?"



"Close?  Have you figured up the total of the disbursements I told you

of?"



"No, I didn't think of that."



"Well, lets see:



Spent in Washington, say, ........... $191,000

Printing, advertising, etc., say .... $118,000

Charity, say, .......................  $16,000



               Total, ............... $325,000



The money to do that with, comes from--

Appropriation, ...................... $200,000



Ten per cent. assessment on capital of

     $1,000,000 ..................... $100,000



               Total, ............... $300,000



"Which leaves us in debt some $25,000 at this moment.  Salaries of home

officers are still going on; also printing and advertising.  Next month

will show a state of things!"



"And then--burst up, I suppose?"



"By no means.  Levy another assessment"



"Oh, I see.  That's dismal."



"By no means."



"Why isn't it?  What's the road out?"



"Another appropriation, don't you see?"



"Bother the appropriations.  They cost more than they come to."



"Not the next one.  We'll call for half a million--get it and go for a

million the very next month."--"Yes, but the cost of it!"



The president smiled, and patted his secret letters affectionately.  He

said:



"All these people are in the next Congress.  We shan't have to pay them a

cent.  And what is more, they will work like beavers for us--perhaps it

might be to their advantage."



Harry reflected profoundly a while.  Then he said:



"We send many missionaries to lift up the benighted races of other lands.

How much cheaper and better it would be if those people could only come

here and drink of our civilization at its fountain head."



"I perfectly agree with yon, Mr. Beverly.  Must you go?  Well, good

morning.  Look in, when you are passing; and whenever I can give you any

information about our affairs and pro'spects, I shall be glad to do it."



Harry's letter was not a long one, but it contained at least the

calamitous figures that came out in the above conversation.  The Colonel

found himself in a rather uncomfortable place--no $1,200 salary

forthcoming; and himself held responsible for half of the $9,640 due the

workmen, to say nothing of being in debt to the company to the extent of

nearly $4,000.  Polly's heart was nearly broken; the "blues" returned in

fearful force, and she had to go out of the room to hide the tears that

nothing could keep back now.



There was mourning in another quarter, too, for Louise had a letter.

Washington had refused, at the last moment, to take $40,000 for the

Tennessee Land, and had demanded $150,000!  So the trade fell through,

and now Washington was wailing because he had been so foolish.  But he

wrote that his man might probably return to the city soon, and then he

meant to sell to him, sure, even if he had to take $10,000.  Louise had a

good cry-several of them, indeed--and the family charitably forebore to

make any comments that would increase her grief.



Spring blossomed, summer came, dragged its hot weeks by, and the

Colonel's spirits rose, day by day, for the railroad was making good

progress.  But by and by something happened.  Hawkeye had always declined

to subscribe anything toward the railway, imagining that her large

business would be a sufficient compulsory influence; but now Hawkeye was

frightened; and before Col. Sellers knew what he was about, Hawkeye, in a

panic, had rushed to the front and subscribed such a sum that Napoleon's

attractions suddenly sank into insignificance and the railroad concluded

to follow a comparatively straight coarse instead of going miles out of

its way to build up a metropolis in the muddy desert of Stone's Landing.



The thunderbolt fell.  After all the Colonel's deep planning; after all

his brain work and tongue work in drawing public attention to his pet

project and enlisting interest in it; after all his faithful hard toil

with his hands, and running hither and thither on his busy feet; after

all his high hopes and splendid prophecies, the fates had turned their

backs on him at last, and all in a moment his air-castles crumbled to

ruins abort him.  Hawkeye rose from her fright triumphant and rejoicing,

and down went Stone's Landing!  One by one its meagre parcel of

inhabitants packed up and moved away, as the summer waned and fall

approached.  Town lots were no longer salable, traffic ceased, a deadly

lethargy fell upon the place once more, the "Weekly Telegraph" faded into

an early grave, the wary tadpole returned from exile, the bullfrog

resumed his ancient song, the tranquil turtle sunned his back upon bank

and log and drowsed his grateful life away as in the old sweet days of

yore.









CHAPTER XXIX.



Philip Sterling was on his way to Ilium, in the state of Pennsylvania.

Ilium was the railway station nearest to the tract of wild land which

Mr. Bolton had commissioned him to examine.



On the last day of the journey as the railway train Philip was on was

leaving a large city, a lady timidly entered the drawing-room car, and

hesitatingly took a chair that was at the moment unoccupied.  Philip saw

from the window that a gentleman had put her upon the car just as it was

starting.  In a few moments the conductor entered, and without waiting an

explanation, said roughly to the lady,



"Now you can't sit there.  That seat's taken.  Go into the other car."



"I did not intend to take the seat," said the lady rising, "I only sat

down a moment till the conductor should come and give me a seat."



"There aint any.  Car's full.  You'll have to leave."



"But, sir," said the lady, appealingly, "I thought--"



"Can't help what you thought--you must go into the other car."



"The train is going very fast, let me stand here till we stop."



"The lady can have my seat," cried Philip, springing up.



The conductor turned towards Philip, and coolly and deliberately surveyed

him from head to foot, with contempt in every line of his face, turned

his back upon him without a word, and said to the lady,



"Come, I've got no time to talk.  You must go now."



The lady, entirely disconcerted by such rudeness, and frightened, moved

towards the door, opened it and stepped out.  The train was swinging

along at a rapid rate, jarring from side to side; the step was a long one

between the cars and there was no protecting grating.  The lady attempted

it, but lost her balance, in the wind and the motion of the car, and

fell!  She would inevitably have gone down under the wheels, if Philip,

who had swiftly followed her, had not caught her arm and drawn her up.

He then assisted her across, found her a seat, received her bewildered

thanks, and returned to his car.



The conductor was still there, taking his tickets, and growling something

about imposition.  Philip marched up to him, and burst out with,



"You are a brute, an infernal brute, to treat a woman that way."



"Perhaps you'd like to make a fuss about it," sneered the conductor.



Philip's reply was a blow, given so suddenly and planted so squarely in

the conductor's face, that it sent him reeling over a fat passenger, who

was looking up in mild wonder that any one should dare to dispute with a

conductor, and against the side of the car.



He recovered himself, reached the bell rope, "Damn you, I'll learn you,"

stepped to the door and called a couple of brakemen, and then, as the

speed slackened; roared out,



"Get off this train."



"I shall not get off.  I have as much right here as you."



"We'll see," said the conductor, advancing with the brakemen.  The

passengers protested, and some of them said to each other, "That's too

bad," as they always do in such cases, but none of them offered to take a

hand with Philip.  The men seized him, wrenched him from his seat,

dragged him along the aisle, tearing his clothes, thrust him from the

car, and, then flung his carpet-bag, overcoat and umbrella after him.

And the train went on.



The conductor, red in the face and puffing from his exertion, swaggered

through the car, muttering "Puppy, I'll learn him."  The passengers, when

he had gone, were loud in their indignation, and talked about signing a

protest, but they did nothing more than talk.



The next morning the Hooverville Patriot and Clarion had this "item":--





                          SLIGHTUALLY OVERBOARD.



     "We learn that as the down noon express was leaving H---- yesterday

     a lady! (God save the mark) attempted to force herself into the

     already full palatial car.  Conductor Slum, who is too old a bird to

     be caught with chaff, courteously informed her that the car was

     full, and when she insisted on remaining, he persuaded her to go

     into the car where she belonged.  Thereupon a young sprig, from the

     East, blustered like a Shanghai rooster, and began to sass the

     conductor with his chin music.  That gentleman delivered the young

     aspirant for a muss one of his elegant little left-handers, which so

     astonished him that he began to feel for his shooter.  Whereupon Mr.

     Slum gently raised the youth, carried him forth, and set him down

     just outside the car to cool off.  Whether the young blood has yet

     made his way out of Bascom's swamp, we have not learned.  Conductor

     Slum is one of the most gentlemanly and efficient officers on the

     road; but he ain't trifled with, not much.  We learn that the

     company have put a new engine on the seven o'clock train, and newly

     upholstered the drawing-room car throughout.  It spares no effort

     for the comfort of the traveling public."



Philip never had been before in Bascom's swamp, and there was nothing

inviting in it to detain him.  After the train got out of the way he

crawled out of the briars and the mud, and got upon the track.  He was

somewhat bruised, but he was too angry to mind that.  He plodded along

over the ties in a very hot condition of mind and body.  In the scuffle,

his railway check had disappeared, and he grimly wondered, as he noticed

the loss, if the company would permit him to walk over their track if

they should know he hadn't a ticket.



Philip had to walk some five miles before he reached a little station,

where he could wait for a train, and he had ample time for reflection.

At first he was full of vengeance on the company.  He would sue it.  He

would make it pay roundly.  But then it occurred to him that he did not

know the name of a witness he could summon, and that a personal fight

against a railway corporation was about the most hopeless in the world.

He then thought he would seek out that conductor, lie in wait for him at

some station, and thrash him, or get thrashed himself.



But as he got cooler, that did not seem to him a project worthy of a

gentleman exactly.  Was it possible for a gentleman to get even with such

a fellow as that conductor on the letter's own plane?  And when he came

to this point, he began to ask himself, if he had not acted very much

like a fool.  He didn't regret striking the fellow--he hoped he had left

a mark on him.  But, after all, was that the best way?  Here was he,

Philip Sterling, calling himself a gentleman, in a brawl with a vulgar

conductor, about a woman he had never seen before.  Why should he have

put himself in such a ridiculous position?  Wasn't it enough to have

offered the lady his seat, to have rescued her from an accident, perhaps

from death?  Suppose he had simply said to the conductor, "Sir, your

conduct is brutal, I shall report you."  The passengers, who saw the

affair, might have joined in a report against the conductor, and he might

really have accomplished something.  And, now!  Philip looked at leis

torn clothes, and thought with disgust of his haste in getting into a

fight with such an autocrat.



At the little station where Philip waited for the next train, he met a

man--who turned out to be a justice of the peace in that neighborhood,

and told him his adventure.  He was a kindly sort of man, and seemed very

much interested.



"Dum 'em," said he, when he had heard the story.



"Do you think any thing can be done, sir?"



"Wal, I guess tain't no use.  I hain't a mite of doubt of every word you

say.  But suin's no use.  The railroad company owns all these people

along here, and the judges on the bench too.  Spiled your clothes!  Wal,

'least said's soonest mended.'  You haint no chance with the company."



When next morning, he read the humorous account in the Patriot and

Clarion, he saw still more clearly what chance he would have had before

the public in a fight with the railroad company.



Still Philip's conscience told him that it was his plain duty to carry

the matter into the courts, even with the certainty of defeat.

He confessed that neither he nor any citizen had a right to consult his

own feelings or conscience in a case where a law of the land had been

violated before his own eyes.  He confessed that every citizen's first

duty in such case is to put aside his own business and devote his time

and his best efforts to seeing that the infraction is promptly punished;

and he knew that no country can be well governed unless its citizens as

a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians

of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its

execution, nothing more.  As a finality he was obliged to confess that he

was a bad citizen, and also that the general laxity of the time, and the

absence of a sense of duty toward any part of the community but the

individual himself were ingrained in him, am he was no better than the

rest of the people.



The result of this little adventure was that Philip did not reach Ilium

till daylight the next morning, when he descended sleepy and sore, from a

way train, and looked about him.  Ilium was in a narrow mountain gorge,

through which a rapid stream ran.  It consisted of the plank platform on

which he stood, a wooden house, half painted, with a dirty piazza

(unroofed) in front, and a sign board hung on a slanting pole--bearing

the legend, "Hotel. P. Dusenheimer," a sawmill further down the stream,

a blacksmith-shop, and a store, and three or four unpainted dwellings of

the slab variety.



As Philip approached the hotel he saw what appeared to be a wild beast

crouching on the piazza.  It did not stir, however, and he soon found

that it was only a stuffed skin.  This cheerful invitation to the tavern

was the remains of a huge panther which had been killed in the region a

few weeks before.  Philip examined his ugly visage and strong crooked

fore-arm, as he was waiting admittance, having pounded upon the door.



"Yait a bit.  I'll shoost--put on my trowsers," shouted a voice from the

window, and the door was soon opened by the yawning landlord.



"Morgen!  Didn't hear d' drain oncet.  Dem boys geeps me up zo spate.

Gom right in."



Philip was shown into a dirty bar-room.  It was a small room, with a

stove in the middle, set in a long shallow box of sand, for the benefit

of the "spitters," a bar across one end--a mere counter with a sliding

glass-case behind it containing a few bottles having ambitious labels,

and a wash-sink in one corner.  On the walls were the bright yellow and

black handbills of a traveling circus, with pictures of acrobats in human

pyramids, horses flying in long leaps through the air, and sylph-like

women in a paradisaic costume, balancing themselves upon the tips of

their toes on the bare backs of frantic and plunging steeds, and kissing

their hands to the spectators meanwhile.



As Philip did not desire a room at that hour, he was invited to wash

himself at the nasty sink, a feat somewhat easier than drying his face,

for the towel that hung in a roller over the sink was evidently as much a

fixture as the sink itself, and belonged, like the suspended brush and

comb, to the traveling public.  Philip managed to complete his toilet by

the use of his pocket-handkerchief, and declining the hospitality of the

landlord, implied in the remark, "You won'd dake notin'?" he went into

the open air to wait for breakfast.



The country he saw was wild but not picturesque.  The mountain before him

might be eight hundred feet high, and was only a portion of a long

unbroken range, savagely wooded, which followed the stream.  Behind the

hotel, and across the brawling brook, was another level-topped, wooded

range exactly like it.  Ilium itself, seen at a glance, was old enough to

be dilapidated, and if it had gained anything by being made a wood and

water station of the new railroad, it was only a new sort of grime and

rawness.  P. Dusenheimer, standing in the door of his uninviting

groggery, when the trains stopped for water; never received from the

traveling public any patronage except facetious remarks upon his personal

appearance.  Perhaps a thousand times he had heard the remark, "Ilium

fuit," followed in most instances by a hail to himself as "AEneas," with

the inquiry "Where is old Anchises?  "At first he had replied, "Dere

ain't no such man;" but irritated by its senseless repetition, he had

latterly dropped into the formula of, "You be dam."



Philip was recalled from the contemplation of Ilium by the rolling and

growling of the gong within the hotel, the din and clamor increasing till

the house was apparently unable to contain it; when it burst out of the

front door and informed the world that breakfast was on the table.



The dining room was long, low and narrow, and a narrow table extended its

whole length.  Upon this was spread a cloth which from appearance might

have been as long in use as the towel in the barroom.  Upon the table was

the usual service, the heavy, much nicked stone ware, the row of plated

and rusty castors, the sugar bowls with the zinc tea-spoons sticking up

in them, the piles of yellow biscuits, the discouraged-looking plates of

butter.  The landlord waited, and Philip was pleased to observe the

change in his manner.  In the barroom he was the conciliatory landlord.

Standing behind his guests at table, he had an air of peremptory

patronage, and the voice in which he shot out the inquiry, as he seized

Philip's plate, "Beefsteak or liver?" quite took away Philip's power of

choice.  He begged for a glass of milk, after trying that green hued

compound called coffee, and made his breakfast out of that and some hard

crackers which seemed to have been imported into Ilium before the

introduction of the iron horse, and to have withstood a ten years siege

of regular boarders, Greeks and others.



The land that Philip had come to look at was at least five miles distant

from Ilium station.  A corner of it touched the railroad, but the rest

was pretty much an unbroken wilderness, eight or ten thousand acres of

rough country, most of it such a mountain range as he saw at Ilium.



His first step was to hire three woodsmen to accompany him.  By their

help he built a log hut, and established a camp on the land, and then

began his explorations, mapping down his survey as he went along, noting

the timber, and the lay of the land, and making superficial observations

as to the prospect of coal.



The landlord at Ilium endeavored to persuade Philip to hire the services

of a witch-hazel professor of that region, who could walk over the land

with his wand and tell him infallibly whether it contained coal, and

exactly where the strata ran.  But Philip preferred to trust to his own

study of the country, and his knowledge of the geological formation.

He spent a month in traveling over the land and making calculations;

and made up his mind that a fine vein of coal ran through the mountain

about a mile from the railroad, and that the place to run in a tunnel was

half way towards its summit.



Acting with his usual promptness, Philip, with the consent of Mr. Bolton,

broke ground there at once, and, before snow came, had some rude

buildings up, and was ready for active operations in the spring.  It was

true that there were no outcroppings of coal at the place, and the people

at Ilium said he "mought as well dig for plug terbaccer there;" but

Philip had great faith in the uniformity of nature's operations in ages

past, and he had no doubt that he should strike at this spot the rich

vein that had made the fortune of the Golden Briar Company.









CHAPTER XXX.



Once more Louise had good news from her Washington--Senator Dilworthy was

going to sell the Tennessee Land to the government!  Louise told Laura in

confidence.  She had told her parents, too, and also several bosom

friends; but all of these people had simply looked sad when they heard

the news, except Laura.  Laura's face suddenly brightened under it--only

for an instant, it is true, but poor Louise was grateful for even that

fleeting ray of encouragement.  When next Laura was alone, she fell into

a train of thought something like this:



If the Senator has really taken hold of this matter, I may look for that

invitation to his house at, any moment.  I am perishing to go!  I do long

to know whether I am only simply a large-sized pigmy among these pigmies

here, who tumble over so easily when one strikes them, or whether I am

really--."  Her thoughts drifted into other channels, for a season.

"Then she continued:--"He said I could be useful in the great cause of

philanthropy, and help in the blessed work of uplifting the poor and the

ignorant, if he found it feasible to take hold of our Land.  Well, that

is neither here nor there; what I want, is to go to Washington and find

out what I am.  I want money, too; and if one may judge by what she

hears, there are chances there for a--."  For a fascinating woman, she

was going to say, perhaps, but she did not.



Along in the fall the invitation came, sure enough.  It came officially

through brother Washington, the private Secretary, who appended a

postscript that was brimming with delight over the prospect of seeing the

Duchess again.  He said it would be happiness enough to look upon her

face once more--it would be almost too much happiness when to it was

added the fact that she would bring messages with her that were fresh

from Louise's lips.



In Washington's letter were several important enclosures.  For instance,

there was the Senator's check for $2,000--"to buy suitable clothing in

New York with!"  It was a loan to be refunded when the Land was sold.

Two thousand--this was fine indeed.  Louise's father was called rich, but

Laura doubted if Louise had ever had $400 worth of new clothing at one

time in her life.  With the check came two through tickets--good on the

railroad from Hawkeye to Washington via New York--and they were "dead-

head" tickets, too, which had beep given to Senator Dilworthy by the

railway companies.  Senators and representatives were paid thousands of

dollars by the government for traveling expenses, but they always

traveled "deadhead" both ways, and then did as any honorable, high-minded

men would naturally do--declined to receive the mileage tendered them by

the government.  The Senator had plenty of railway passes, and could.

easily spare two to Laura--one for herself and one for a male escort.

Washington suggested that she get some old friend of the family to come

with her, and said the Senator would "deadhead" him home again as soon as

he had grown tired, of the sights of the capital.  Laura thought the

thing over.  At first she was pleased with the idea, but presently she

began to feel differently about it.  Finally she said, "No, our staid,

steady-going Hawkeye friends' notions and mine differ about some things--

they respect me, now, and I respect them--better leave it so--I will go

alone; I am not afraid to travel by myself."  And so communing with

herself, she left the house for an afternoon walk.



Almost at the door she met Col. Sellers.  She told him about her

invitation to Washington.



"Bless me!" said the Colonel.  "I have about made up my mind to go there

myself.  You see we've got to get another appropriation through, and the

Company want me to come east and put it through Congress.  Harry's there,

and he'll do what he can, of course; and Harry's a good fellow and always

does the very best he knows how, but then he's young--rather young for

some parts of such work, you know--and besides he talks too much, talks a

good deal too much; and sometimes he appears to be a little bit

visionary, too, I think the worst thing in the world for a business man.

A man like that always exposes his cards, sooner or later.  This sort of

thing wants an old, quiet, steady hand--wants an old cool head, you know,

that knows men, through and through, and is used to large operations.

I'm expecting my salary, and also some dividends from the company, and if

they get along in time, I'll go along with you Laura--take you under my

wing--you mustn't travel alone.  Lord I wish I had the money right now.

--But there'll be plenty soon--plenty."



Laura reasoned with herself that if the kindly, simple-hearted Colonel

was going anyhow, what could she gain by traveling alone and throwing

away his company?  So she told him she accepted his offer gladly,

gratefully.  She said it would be the greatest of favors if he would go

with her and protect her--not at his own expense as far as railway fares

were concerned, of course; she could not expect him to put himself to so

much trouble for her and pay his fare besides.  But he wouldn't hear of

her paying his fare--it would be only a pleasure to him to serve her.

Laura insisted on furnishing the tickets; and finally, when argument

failed, she said the tickets cost neither her nor any one else a cent--

she had two of them--she needed but one--and if he would not take the

other she would not go with him.  That settled the matter.  He took the

ticket.  Laura was glad that she had the check for new clothing, for she

felt very certain of being able to get the Colonel to borrow a little of

the money to pay hotel bills with, here and there.



She wrote Washington to look for her and Col. Sellers toward the end of

November; and at about the time set the two travelers arrived safe in the

capital of the nation, sure enough.









CHAPTER XXXL





               She the, gracious lady, yet no paines did spare

               To doe him ease, or doe him remedy:

               Many restoratives of vertues rare

               And costly cordialles she did apply,

               To mitigate his stubborne malady.

                                        Spenser's Faerie Queens.



Mr. Henry Brierly was exceedingly busy in New York, so he wrote Col.

Sellers, but he would drop everything and go to Washington.



The Colonel believed that Harry was the prince of lobbyists, a little too

sanguine, may be, and given to speculation, but, then, he knew everybody;

the Columbus River navigation scheme was, got through almost entirely by

his aid.  He was needed now to help through another scheme, a benevolent

scheme in which Col. Sellers, through the Hawkinses, had a deep interest.



"I don't care, you know," he wrote to Harry, "so much about the niggroes.

But if the government will buy this land, it will set up the Hawkins

family--make Laura an heiress--and I shouldn't wonder if Beriah Sellers

would set up his carriage again.  Dilworthy looks at it different,

of course.  He's all for philanthropy, for benefiting the colored race.

There's old Balsam, was in the Interior--used to be the Rev. Orson Balsam

of Iowa--he's made the riffle on the Injun; great Injun pacificator and

land dealer.  Balaam'a got the Injun to himself, and I suppose that

Senator Dilworthy feels that there is nothing left him but the colored

man.  I do rechon he is the best friend the colored man has got in

Washington."



Though Harry was in a hurry to reach Washington, he stopped in

Philadelphia; and prolonged his visit day after day, greatly to the

detriment of his business both in New York and Washington.  The society

at the Bolton's might have been a valid excuse for neglecting business

much more important than his.  Philip was there; he was a partner with

Mr. Bolton now in the new coal venture, concerning which there was much

to be arranged in preparation for the Spring work, and Philip lingered

week after week in the hospitable house.  Alice was making a winter

visit.  Ruth only went to town twice a week to attend lectures, and the

household was quite to Mr. Bolton's taste, for he liked the cheer of

company and something going on evenings.  Harry was cordially asked to

bring his traveling-bag there, and he did not need urging to do so.

Not even the thought of seeing Laura at the capital made him restless in

the society of the two young ladies; two birds in hand are worth one in

the bush certainly.



Philip was at home--he sometimes wished he were not so much so.  He felt

that too much or not enough was taken for granted.  Ruth had met him,

when he first came, with a cordial frankness, and her manner continued

entirely unrestrained.  She neither sought his company nor avoided it,

and this perfectly level treatment irritated him more than any other

could have done.  It was impossible to advance much in love-making with

one who offered no obstacles, had no concealments and no embarrassments,

and whom any approach to sentimentality would be quite likely to set into

a fit of laughter.



"Why, Phil," she would say, "what puts you in the dumps to day?  You are

as solemn as the upper bench in Meeting.  I shall have to call Alice to

raise your spirits; my presence seems to depress you."



It's not your presence, but your absence when you are present," began

Philip, dolefully, with the idea that he was saying a rather deep thing.

"But you won't understand me."



"No, I confess I cannot.  If you really are so low, as to think I am

absent when I am present, it's a frightful case of aberration; I shall

ask father to bring out Dr. Jackson.  Does Alice appear to be present

when she is absent?"



"Alice has some human feeling, anyway.  She cares for something besides

musty books and dry bones.  I think, Ruth, when I die," said Philip,

intending to be very grim and sarcastic, "I'll leave you my skeleton.

You might like that."



"It might be more cheerful than you are at times," Ruth replied with a

laugh.  "But you mustn't do it without consulting Alice.  She might not.

like it."



"I don't know why you should bring Alice up on every occasion.  Do you

think I am in love with her?"



"Bless you, no.  It never entered my head.  Are you?  The thought of

Philip Sterling in love is too comical.  I thought you were only in love

with the Ilium coal mine, which you and father talk about half the time."



This is a specimen of Philip's wooing.  Confound the girl, he would say

to himself, why does she never tease Harry and that young Shepley who

comes here?



How differently Alice treated him.  She at least never mocked him, and it

was a relief to talk with one who had some sympathy with him.  And he did

talk to her, by the hour, about Ruth.  The blundering fellow poured all

his doubts and anxieties into her ear, as if she had been the impassive

occupant of one of those little wooden confessionals in the Cathedral on

Logan Square.  Has, a confessor, if she is young and pretty, any feeling?

Does it mend the matter by calling her your sister?



Philip called Alice his good sister, and talked to her about love and

marriage, meaning Ruth, as if sisters could by no possibility have any

personal concern in such things.  Did Ruth ever speak of him?  Did she

think Ruth cared for him?  Did Ruth care for anybody at Fallkill?  Did

she care for anything except her profession?  And so on.



Alice was loyal to Ruth, and if she knew anything she did not betray her

friend.  She did not, at any rate, give Philip too much encouragement.

What woman, under the circumstances, would?



"I can tell you one thing, Philip," she said, "if ever Ruth Bolton loves,

it will be with her whole soul, in a depth of passion that will sweep

everything before it and surprise even herself."



A remark that did not much console Philip, who imagined that only some

grand heroism could unlock the sweetness of such a heart; and Philip

feared that he wasn't a hero.  He did not know out of what materials a

woman can construct a hero, when she is in the creative mood.



Harry skipped into this society with his usual lightness and gaiety.

His good nature was inexhaustible, and though he liked to relate his own

exploits, he had a little tact in adapting himself to the tastes of his

hearers.  He was not long in finding out that Alice liked to hear about

Philip, and Harry launched out into the career of his friend in the West,

with a prodigality of invention that would have astonished the chief

actor.  He was the most generous fellow in the world, and picturesque

conversation was the one thing in which he never was bankrupt.  With Mr.

Bolton be was the serious man of business, enjoying the confidence of

many of the monied men in New York, whom Mr. Bolton knew, and engaged

with them in railway schemes and government contracts.  Philip, who had

so long known Harry, never could make up his mind that Harry did not

himself believe that he was a chief actor in all these large operations

of which he talked so much.



Harry did not neglect to endeavor to make himself agreeable to Mrs.

Bolton, by paying great attention to the children, and by professing the

warmest interest in the Friends' faith.  It always seemed to him the most

peaceful religion; he thought it must be much easier to live by an

internal light than by a lot of outward rules; he had a dear Quaker aunt

in Providence of whom Mrs. Bolton constantly reminded him.  He insisted

upon going with Mrs. Bolton and the children to the Friends Meeting on

First Day, when Ruth and Alice and Philip, "world's people," went to a

church in town, and he sat through the hour of silence with his hat on,

in most exemplary patience.  In short, this amazing actor succeeded so

well with Mrs. Bolton, that she said to Philip one day,



"Thy friend, Henry Brierly, appears to be a very worldly minded young

man.  Does he believe in anything?"



"Oh, yes," said Philip laughing, "he believes in more things than any

other person I ever saw."



To Ruth, Harry seemed to be very congenial.  He was never moody for one

thing, but lent himself with alacrity to whatever her fancy was.  He was

gay or grave as the need might be.  No one apparently could enter more

fully into her plans for an independent career.



"My father," said Harry, "was bred a physician, and practiced a little

before he went into Wall street.  I always had a leaning to the study.

There was a skeleton hanging in the closet of my father's study when I

was a boy, that I used to dress up in old clothes.  Oh, I got quite

familiar with the human frame."



"You must have," said Philip.  "Was that where you learned to play the

bones?  He is a master of those musical instruments, Ruth; he plays well

enough to go on the stage."



"Philip hates science of any kind, and steady application," retorted

Harry.  He didn't fancy Philip's banter, and when the latter had gone

out, and Ruth asked,



"Why don't you take up medicine, Mr. Brierly?"



Harry said, "I have it in mind.  I believe I would begin attending

lectures this winter if it weren't for being wanted in Washington.  But

medicine is particularly women's province."



"Why so?" asked Ruth, rather amused.



"Well, the treatment of disease is a good deal a matter of sympathy.

A woman's intuition is better than a man's.  Nobody knows anything,

really, you know, and a woman can guess a good deal nearer than a man."



"You are very complimentary to my sex."



"But," said Harry frankly; "I should want to choose my doctor; an ugly

woman would ruin me, the disease would be sure to strike in and kill me

at sight of her.  I think a pretty physician, with engaging manners,

would coax a fellow to live through almost anything."



"I am afraid you are a scoffer, Mr. Brierly."



"On the contrary, I am quite sincere.  Wasn't it old what's his name?

that said only the beautiful is useful?"



Whether Ruth was anything more than diverted with Harry's company; Philip

could not determine.  He scorned at any rate to advance his own interest

by any disparaging communications about Harry, both because he could not

help liking the fellow himself, and because he may have known that he

could not more surely create a sympathy for him in Ruth's mind.  That

Ruth was in no danger of any serious impression he felt pretty sure,

felt certain of it when he reflected upon her severe occupation with her

profession.  Hang it, he would say to himself, she is nothing but pure

intellect anyway.  And he only felt uncertain of it when she was in one

of her moods of raillery, with mocking mischief in her eyes.  At such

times she seemed to prefer Harry's society to his.  When Philip was

miserable about this, he always took refuge with Alice, who was never

moody, and who generally laughed him out of his sentimental nonsense.

He felt at his ease with Alice, and was never in want of something to

talk about; and he could not account for the fact that he was so often

dull with Ruth, with whom, of all persons in the world, he wanted to

appear at his best.



Harry was entirely satisfied with his own situation.  A bird of passage

is always at its ease, having no house to build, and no responsibility.

He talked freely with Philip about Ruth, an almighty fine girl, he said,

but what the deuce she wanted to study medicine for, he couldn't see.



There was a concert one night at the Musical Fund Hall and the four had

arranged to go in and return by the Germantown cars.  It was Philip's

plan, who had engaged the seats, and promised himself an evening with

Ruth, walking with her, sitting by her in the hall, and enjoying the

feeling of protecting that a man always has of a woman in a public place.

He was fond of music, too, in a sympathetic way; at least, he knew that

Ruth's delight in it would be enough for him.



Perhaps he meant to take advantage of the occasion to say some very

serious things.  His love for Ruth was no secret to Mrs. Bolton, and he

felt almost sure that he should have no opposition in the family.  Mrs.

Bolton had been cautious in what she said, but Philip inferred everything

from her reply to his own questions, one day, "Has thee ever spoken thy

mind to Ruth?"



Why shouldn't he speak his mind, and end his doubts?  Ruth had been more

tricksy than usual that day, and in a flow of spirits quite inconsistent,

it would seem, in a young lady devoted to grave studies.



Had Ruth a premonition of Philip's intention, in his manner?  It may be,

for when the girls came down stairs, ready to walk to the cars; and met

Philip and Harry in the hall, Ruth said, laughing,



"The two tallest must walk together" and before Philip knew how it

happened Ruth had taken Harry's arm, and his evening was spoiled.  He had

too much politeness and good sense and kindness to show in his manner

that he was hit.  So he said to Harry,



"That's your disadvantage in being short."  And he gave Alice no reason

to feel during the evening that she would not have been his first choice

for the excursion.  But he was none the less chagrined, and not a little

angry at the turn the affair took.



The Hall was crowded with the fashion of the town.  The concert was one

of those fragmentary drearinesses that people endure because they are

fashionable; tours de force on the piano, and fragments from operas,

which have no meaning without the setting, with weary pauses of waiting

between; there is the comic basso who is so amusing and on such familiar

terms with the audience, and always sings the Barber; the attitudinizing

tenor, with his languishing "Oh, Summer Night;" the soprano with her

"Batti Batti," who warbles and trills and runs and fetches her breath,

and ends with a noble scream that brings down a tempest of applause in

the midst of which she backs off the stage smiling and bowing.  It was

this sort of concert, and Philip was thinking that it was the most stupid

one he ever sat through, when just as the soprano was in the midst of

that touching ballad, "Comin' thro' the Rye" (the soprano always sings

"Comin' thro' the Rye" on an encore)--the Black Swan used to make it

irresistible, Philip remembered, with her arch, "If a body kiss a body"

there was a cry of "Fire!"



The hall is long and narrow, and there is only one place of egress.

Instantly the audience was on its feet, and a rush began for the door.

Men shouted, women screamed, and panic seized the swaying mass.

A second's thought would have convinced every one that getting out was

impossible, and that the only effect of a rush would be to crash people

to death.  But a second's thought was not given.  A few cried:



"Sit down, sit down," but the mass was turned towards the door.  Women

were down and trampled on in the aisles, and stout men, utterly lost to

self-control, were mounting the benches, as if to run a race over the

mass to the entrance.



Philip who had forced the girls to keep their seats saw, in a flash, the

new danger, and sprang to avert it.  In a second more those infuriated

men would be over the benches and crushing Ruth and Alice under their

boots.  He leaped upon the bench in front of them and struck out before

him with all his might, felling one man who was rushing on him, and

checking for an instant the movement, or rather parting it, and causing

it to flow on either side of him.  But it was only for an instant; the

pressure behind was too great, and, the next Philip was  dashed backwards

over the seat.



And yet that instant of arrest had probably saved the girls, for as

Philip fell, the orchestra struck up "Yankee Doodle" in the liveliest

manner.  The familiar tune caught the ear of the mass, which paused in

wonder, and gave the conductor's voice a chance to be heard--"It's a

false alarm!"



The tumult was over in a minute, and the next, laughter was heard, and

not a few said, "I knew it wasn't anything."  "What fools people are at

such a time."



The concert was over, however.  A good many people were hurt, some of

them seriously, and among them Philip Sterling was found bent across the

seat, insensible, with his left arm hanging limp and a bleeding wound on

his head.



When he was carried into the air he revived, and said it was nothing.

A surgeon was called, and it was thought best to drive at once to the

Bolton's, the surgeon supporting Philip, who did not speak the whole way.

His arm was set and his head dressed, and the surgeon said he would come

round all right in his mind by morning; he was very weak.  Alice who was

not much frightened while the panic lasted in the hall, was very much

unnerved by seeing Philip so pale and bloody.  Ruth assisted the surgeon

with the utmost coolness and with skillful hands helped to dress Philip's

wounds.  And there was a certain intentness and fierce energy in what she

did that might have revealed something to Philip if he had been in his

senses.



But he was not, or he would not have murmured "Let Alice do it, she is

not too tall."



It was Ruth's first case.









CHAPTER, XXXII.



Washington's delight in his beautiful sister was measureless.  He said

that she had always been the queenliest creature in the land, but that

she was only commonplace before, compared to what she was now, so

extraordinary was the improvement wrought by rich fashionable attire.



"But your criticisms are too full of brotherly partiality to be depended

on, Washington.  Other people will judge differently."



"Indeed they won't.  You'll see.  There will never be a woman in

Washington that can compare with you.  You'll be famous within a

fortnight, Laura.  Everybody will want to know you.  You wait--you'll

see."



Laura wished in her heart that the prophecy might come true; and

privately she even believed it might--for she had brought all the women

whom she had seen since she left home under sharp inspection, and the

result had not been unsatisfactory to her.



During a week or two Washington drove about the city every day with her

and familiarized her with all of its salient features.  She was beginning

to feel very much at home with the town itself, and she was also fast

acquiring ease with the distinguished people she met at the Dilworthy

table, and losing what little of country timidity she had brought with

her from Hawkeye.  She noticed with secret pleasure the little start of

admiration that always manifested itself in the faces of the guests when

she entered the drawing-room arrayed in evening costume: she took

comforting note of the fact that these guests directed a very liberal

share of their conversation toward her; she observed with surprise, that

famous statesmen and soldiers did not talk like gods, as a general thing,

but said rather commonplace things for the most part; and she was filled

with gratification to discover that she, on the contrary, was making a

good many shrewd speeches and now and then a really brilliant one, and

furthermore, that they were beginning to be repeated in social circles

about the town.



Congress began its sittings, and every day or two Washington escorted her

to the galleries set apart for lady members of the households of Senators

and Representatives.  Here was a larger field and a wider competition,

but still she saw that many eyes were uplifted toward her face, and that

first one person and then another called a neighbor's attention to her;

she was not too dull to perceive that the speeches of some of the younger

statesmen were delivered about as much and perhaps more at her than to

the presiding officer; and she was not sorry to see that the dapper young

Senator from Iowa came at once and stood in the open space before the

president's desk to exhibit his feet as soon as she entered the gallery,

whereas she had early learned from common report that his usual custom

was to prop them on his desk and enjoy them himself with a selfish

disregard of other people's longings.



Invitations began to flow in upon her and soon she was fairly "in

society."  "The season" was now in full bloom, and the first select

reception was at hand that is to say, a reception confined to invited

guests.  Senator Dilworthy had become well convinced; by this time, that

his judgment of the country-bred Missouri girl had not deceived him--it

was plain that she was going to be a peerless missionary in the field of

labor he designed her for, and therefore it would be perfectly safe and

likewise judicious to send her forth well panoplied for her work.--So he

had added new and still richer costumes to her wardrobe, and assisted

their attractions with costly jewelry-loans on the future land sale.



This first select reception took place at a cabinet minister's--or rather

a cabinet secretary's mansion.  When Laura and the Senator arrived, about

half past nine or ten in the evening, the place was already pretty well

crowded, and the white-gloved negro servant at the door was still

receiving streams of guests.--The drawing-rooms were brilliant with

gaslight, and as hot as ovens.  The host and hostess stood just within

the door of entrance; Laura was presented, and then she passed on into

the maelstrom of be-jeweled and richly attired low-necked ladies and

white-kid-gloved and steel pen-coated gentlemen and wherever she moved

she was followed by a buzz of admiration that was grateful to all her

senses--so grateful, indeed, that her white face was tinged and its

beauty heightened by a perceptible suffusion of color.  She caught such

remarks as, "Who is she?"  "Superb woman!"  "That is the new beauty from

the west," etc., etc.



Whenever she halted, she was presently surrounded by Ministers, Generals,

Congressmen, and all manner of aristocratic, people.  Introductions

followed, and then the usual original question, "How do you like

Washington, Miss Hawkins?" supplemented by that other usual original

question, "Is this your first visit?"



These two exciting topics being exhausted, conversation generally drifted

into calmer channels, only to be interrupted at frequent intervals by new

introductions and new inquiries as to how Laura liked the capital and

whether it was her first visit or not.  And thus for an hour or more the

Duchess moved through the crush in a rapture of happiness, for her doubts

were dead and gone, now she knew she could conquer here.  A familiar face

appeared in the midst of the multitude and Harry Brierly fought his

difficult way to her side, his eyes shouting their gratification, so to

speak:



"Oh, this is a happiness!  Tell me, my dear Miss Hawkins--"



"Sh!  I know what you are going to ask.  I do like Washington--I like it

ever so much!"



"No, but I was going to ask--"



"Yes, I am coming to it, coming to it as fast as I can.  It is my first

visit.  I think you should know that yourself."



And straightway a wave of the crowd swept her beyond his reach.



"Now what can the girl mean?  Of course she likes Washington--I'm not

such a dummy as to have to ask her that.  And as to its being her first

visit, why bang it, she knows that I knew it was.  Does she think I have

turned idiot?  Curious girl, anyway.  But how they do swarm about her!

She is the reigning belle of Washington after this night.  She'll know

five hundred of the heaviest guns in the town before this night's

nonsense is over.  And this isn't even the beginning.  Just as I used to

say--she'll be a card in the matter of--yes sir!  She shall turn the

men's heads and I'll turn the women's!  What a team that will be in

politics here.  I wouldn't take a quarter of a million for what I can do

in this present session--no indeed I wouldn't.  Now, here--I don't

altogether like this.  That insignificant secretary of legation is--why,

she's smiling on him as if he--and now on the Admiral!  Now she's

illuminating that, stuffy Congressman from Massachusetts--vulgar

ungrammatcal shovel-maker--greasy knave of spades.  I don't like this

sort of thing.  She doesn't appear to be much distressed about me--she

hasn't looked this way once.  All right, my bird of Paradise, if it suits

you, go on.  But I think I know your sex.  I'll go to smiling around a

little, too, and see what effect that will have on you"



And he did "smile around a little," and got as near to her as he could to

watch the effect, but the scheme was a failure--he could not get her

attention.  She seemed wholly unconscious of him, and so he could not

flirt with any spirit; he could only talk disjointedly; he could not keep

his eyes on the charmers he talked to; he grew irritable, jealous, and

very, unhappy.  He gave up his enterprise, leaned his shoulder against a

fluted pilaster and pouted while he kept watch upon Laura's every

movement.  His other shoulder stole the bloom from many a lovely cheek

that brushed him in the surging crush, but he noted it not.  He was too

busy cursing himself inwardly for being an egotistical imbecile.  An hour

ago he had thought to take this country lass under his protection and

show her "life" and enjoy her wonder and delight--and here she was,

immersed in the marvel up to her eyes, and just a trifle more at home in

it than he was himself.  And now his angry comments ran on again:



"Now she's sweetening old Brother Balaam; and he--well he is inviting her

to the Congressional prayer-meeting, no doubt--better let old Dilworthy

alone to see that she doesn't overlook that.  And now its Splurge, of New

York; and now its Batters of New Hampshire--and now the Vice President!

Well I may as well adjourn.  I've got enough."



But he hadn't.  He got as far as the door--and then struggled back to

take one more look, hating himself all the while for his weakness.



Toward midnight, when supper was announced, the crowd thronged to the

supper room where a long table was decked out with what seemed a rare

repast, but which consisted of things better calculated to feast the eye

than the appetite.  The ladies were soon seated in files along the wall,

and in groups here and there, and the colored waiters filled the plates

and glasses and the, male guests moved hither and thither conveying them

to the privileged sex.



Harry took an ice and stood up by the table with other gentlemen, and

listened to the buzz of conversation while he ate.



From these remarks he learned a good deal about Laura that was news to

him.  For instance, that she was of a distinguished western family; that

she was highly educated; that she was very rich and a great landed

heiress; that she was not a professor of religion, and yet was a

Christian in the truest and best sense of the word, for her whole heart

was devoted to the accomplishment of a great and noble enterprise--none

other than the sacrificing of her landed estates to the uplifting of the

down-trodden negro and the turning of his erring feet into the way of

light and righteousness.  Harry observed that as soon as one listener had

absorbed the story, he turned about and delivered it to his next neighbor

and the latter individual straightway passed it on.  And thus he saw it

travel the round of the gentlemen and overflow rearward among the ladies.

He could not trace it backward to its fountain head, and so he could not

tell who it was that started it.



One thing annoyed Harry a great deal; and that was the reflection that he

might have been in Washington days and days ago and thrown his

fascinations about Laura with permanent effect while she was new and

strange to the capital, instead of dawdling in Philadelphia to no

purpose.  He feared he had "missed a trick," as he expressed it.



He only found one little opportunity of speaking again with Laura before

the evening's festivities ended, and then, for the first time in years,

his airy self-complacency failed him, his tongue's easy confidence

forsook it in a great measure, and he was conscious of an unheroic

timidity.  He was glad to get away and find a place where he could

despise himself in private and try to grow his clipped plumes again.



When Laura reached home she was tired but exultant, and Senator Dilworthy

was pleased and satisfied.  He called Laura "my daughter," next morning,

and gave her some "pin money," as he termed it, and she sent a hundred

and fifty dollars of it to her mother and loaned a trifle to Col.

Sellers.  Then the Senator had a long private conference with Laura, and

unfolded certain plans of his for the good of the country, and religion,

and the poor, and temperance, and showed her how she could assist him in

developing these worthy and noble enterprises.









CHAPTER XXXIII.



Laura soon discovered that there were three distinct aristocracies in

Washington.  One of these, (nick-named the Antiques,) consisted of

cultivated, high-bred old families who looked back with pride upon an

ancestry that had been always great in the nation's councils and its wars

from the birth of the republic downward.  Into this select circle it was

difficult to gain admission.  No. 2 was the aristocracy of the middle

ground--of which, more anon.  No. 3 lay beyond; of it we will say a word

here.  We will call it the Aristocracy of the Parvenus--as, indeed, the

general public did.  Official position, no matter how obtained, entitled

a man to a place in it, and carried his family with him, no matter whence

they sprang.  Great wealth gave a man a still higher and nobler place in

it than did official position.  If this wealth had been acquired by

conspicuous ingenuity, with just a pleasant little spice of illegality

about it, all the better.  This aristocracy was "fast," and not averse to

ostentation.



The aristocracy of the Antiques ignored the aristocracy of the Parvenus;

the Parvenus laughed at the Antiques, (and secretly envied them.)



There were certain important "society" customs which one in Laura's

position needed to understand.  For instance, when a lady of any

prominence comes to one of our cities and takes up her residence, all the

ladies of her grade favor her in turn with an initial call, giving their

cards to the servant at the door by way of introduction.  They come

singly, sometimes; sometimes in couples; and always in elaborate full

dress.  They talk two minutes and a quarter and then go.  If the lady

receiving the call desires a further acquaintance, she must return the

visit within two weeks; to neglect it beyond that time means "let the

matter drop."  But if she does return the visit within two weeks, it then

becomes the other party's privilege to continue the acquaintance or drop

it.  She signifies her willingness to continue it by calling again any

time within twelve-months; after that, if the parties go on calling upon

each other once a year, in our large cities, that is sufficient, and the

acquaintanceship holds good.  The thing goes along smoothly, now.

The annual visits are made and returned with peaceful regularity and

bland satisfaction, although it is not necessary that the two ladies

shall actually see each other oftener than once every few years.  Their

cards preserve the intimacy and keep the acquaintanceship intact.



For instance, Mrs. A.  pays her annual visit, sits in her carriage and

sends in her card with the lower right hand corner turned down, which

signifies that she has "called in person;" Mrs. B: sends down word that

she is "engaged" or "wishes to be excused"--or if she is a Parvenu and

low-bred, she perhaps sends word that she is "not at home."  Very good;

Mrs. A.  drives, on happy and content.  If Mrs. A.'s daughter marries,

or a child is born to the family, Mrs. B. calls, sends in her card with

the upper left hand corner turned down, and then goes along about her

affairs--for that inverted corner means "Congratulations."  If Mrs. B.'s

husband falls downstairs and breaks his neck, Mrs. A. calls, leaves her

card with the upper right hand corner turned down, and then takes her

departure; this corner means "Condolence."  It is very necessary to get

the corners right, else one may unintentionally condole with a friend on

a wedding or congratulate her upon a funeral.  If either lady is about to

leave the city, she goes to the other's house and leaves her card with

"P. P. C." engraved under the name--which signifies, "Pay Parting Call."

But enough of etiquette.  Laura was early instructed in the mysteries of

society life by a competent mentor, and thus was preserved from

troublesome mistakes.



The first fashionable call she received from a member of the ancient

nobility, otherwise the Antiques, was of a pattern with all she received

from that limb of the aristocracy afterward.  This call was paid by Mrs.

Major-General Fulke-Fulkerson and daughter.  They drove up at one in the

afternoon in a rather antiquated vehicle with a faded coat of arms on the

panels, an aged white-wooled negro coachman on the box and a younger

darkey beside him--the footman.  Both of these servants were dressed in

dull brown livery that had seen considerable service.



The ladies entered the drawing-room in full character; that is to say,

with Elizabethan stateliness on the part of the dowager, and an easy

grace and dignity on the part of the young lady that had a nameless

something about it that suggested conscious superiority.  The dresses of

both ladies were exceedingly rich, as to material, but as notably modest

as to color and ornament.  All parties having seated themselves, the

dowager delivered herself of a remark that was not unusual in its form,

and yet it came from her lips with the impressiveness of Scripture:



"The weather has been unpropitious of late, Miss Hawkins."



"It has indeed," said Laura.  "The climate seems to be variable."



"It is its nature of old, here," said the daughter--stating it apparently

as a fact, only, and by her manner waving aside all personal

responsibility on account of it.  "Is it not so, mamma?"



"Quite so, my child.  Do you like winter, Miss Hawkins?"  She said "like"

as if she had, an idea that its dictionary meaning was "approve of."



"Not as well as summer--though I think all seasons have their charms."



"It is a very just remark.  The general held similar views.  He

considered snow in winter proper; sultriness in summer legitimate; frosts

in the autumn the same, and rains in spring not objectionable.  He was

not an exacting man.  And I call to mind now that he always admired

thunder.  You remember, child, your father always admired thunder?"



"He adored it."



No doubt it reminded him of battle," said Laura.



"Yes, I think perhaps it did.  He had a great respect for Nature.

He often said there was something striking about the ocean.  You remember

his saying that, daughter?"



"Yes, often, Mother.  I remember it very well."



"And hurricanes...  He took a great interest in hurricanes.  And animals.

Dogs, especially--hunting dogs.  Also comets.  I think we all have our

predilections.  I think it is this that gives variety to our tastes."



Laura coincided with this view.



"Do you find it hard and lonely to be so far from your home and friends,

Miss Hawkins?"



"I do find it depressing sometimes, but then there is so much about me

here that is novel and interesting that my days are made up more of

sunshine than shadow."



"Washington is not a dull city in the season," said the young lady.

"We have some very good society indeed, and one need not be at a loss for

means to pass the time pleasantly.  Are you fond of watering-places, Miss

Hawkins?"



"I have really had no experience of them, but I have always felt a strong

desire to see something of fashionable watering-place life."



"We of Washington are unfortunately situated in that respect," said the

dowager.  "It is a tedious distance to Newport.  But there is no help for

it."



Laura said to herself, "Long Branch and Cape May are nearer than Newport;

doubtless these places are low; I'll feel my way a little and see."  Then

she said aloud:



"Why I thought that Long Branch--"



There was no need to "feel" any further--there was that in both faces

before her which made that truth apparent.  The dowager said:



"Nobody goes there, Miss Hawkins--at least only persons of no position in

society.  And the President."  She added that with tranquility.



"Newport is damp, and cold, and windy and excessively disagreeable," said

the daughter, "but it is very select.  One cannot be fastidious about

minor matters when one has no choice."



The visit had spun out nearly three minutes, now.  Both ladies rose with

grave dignity, conferred upon Laura a formal invitation to call, aid then

retired from the conference.  Laura remained in the drawing-room and left

them to pilot themselves out of the house--an inhospitable thing,

it seemed to her, but then she was following her instructions.  She

stood, steeped in reverie, a while, and then she said:



"I think I could always enjoy icebergs--as scenery but not as company."



Still, she knew these two people by reputation, and was aware that they

were not ice-bergs when they were in their own waters and amid their

legitimate surroundings, but on the contrary were people to be respected

for their stainless characters and esteemed for their social virtues and

their benevolent impulses.  She thought it a pity that they had to be

such changed and dreary creatures on occasions of state.



The first call Laura received from the other extremity of the Washington

aristocracy followed close upon the heels of the one we have just been

describing.  The callers this time were the Hon. Mrs. Oliver Higgins,

the Hon. Mrs. Patrique Oreille (pronounced O-relay,) Miss Bridget

(pronounced Breezhay) Oreille, Mrs. Peter Gashly, Miss Gashly, and Miss

Emmeline Gashly.



The three carriages arrived at the same moment from different directions.

They were new and wonderfully shiny, and the brasses on the harness were

highly polished and bore complicated monograms.  There were showy coats

of arms, too, with Latin mottoes.  The coachmen and footmen were clad in

bright new livery, of striking colors, and they had black rosettes with

shaving-brushes projecting above them, on the sides of their stove-pipe

hats.



When the visitors swept into the drawing-room they filled the place with

a suffocating sweetness procured at the perfumer's.  Their costumes, as

to architecture, were the latest fashion intensified; they were rainbow-

hued; they were hung with jewels--chiefly diamonds.  It would have been

plain to any eye that it had cost something to upholster these women.



The Hon. Mrs. Oliver Higgins was the wife of a delegate from a distant

territory--a gentleman who had kept the principal "saloon," and sold the

best whiskey in the principal village in his wilderness, and so, of

course, was recognized as the first man of his commonwealth and its

fittest representative.



He was a man of paramount influence at home, for he was public spirited,

he was chief of the fire department, he had an admirable command of

profane language, and had killed several "parties."  His shirt fronts

were always immaculate; his boots daintily polished, and no man could

lift a foot and fire a dead shot at a stray speck of dirt on it with a

white handkerchief with a finer grace than he; his watch chain weighed a

pound; the gold in his finger ring was worth forty five dollars; he wore

a diamond cluster-pin and he parted his hair behind.  He had always been,

regarded as the most elegant gentleman in his territory, and it was

conceded by all that no man thereabouts was anywhere near his equal in

the telling of an obscene story except the venerable white-haired

governor himself.  The Hon. Higgins had not come to serve his country in

Washington for nothing.  The appropriation which he had engineered

through Congress for the maintenance, of the Indians in his Territory

would have made all those savages rich if it had ever got to them.



The Hon. Mrs. Higgins was a picturesque woman, and a fluent talker, and

she held a tolerably high station among the Parvenus.  Her English was

fair enough, as a general thing--though, being of New York origin, she

had the fashion peculiar to many natives of that city of pronouncing saw

and law as if they were spelt sawr and lawr.



Petroleum was the agent that had suddenly transformed the Gashlys from

modest hard-working country village folk into "loud" aristocrats and

ornaments of the city.



The Hon. Patrique Oreille was a wealthy Frenchman from Cork.  Not that he

was wealthy when he first came from Cork, but just the reverse.  When he

first landed in New York with his wife, he had only halted at Castle

Garden for a few minutes to receive and exhibit papers showing that he

had resided in this country two years--and then he voted the democratic

ticket and went up town to hunt a house.  He found one and then went to

work as assistant to an architect and builder, carrying a hod all day and

studying politics evenings.  Industry and economy soon enabled him to

start a low rum shop in a foul locality, and this gave him political

influence.  In our country it is always our first care to see that our

people have the opportunity of voting for their choice of men to

represent and govern them--we do not permit our great officials to

appoint the little officials.  We prefer to have so tremendous a power as

that in our own hands.  We hold it safest to elect our judges and

everybody else.  In our cities, the ward meetings elect delegates to the

nominating conventions and instruct them whom to nominate.  The publicans

and their retainers rule the ward meetings (for every body else hates the

worry of politics and stays at home); the delegates from the ward

meetings organize as a nominating convention and make up a list of

candidates--one convention offering a democratic and another a republican

list of incorruptibles; and then the great meek public come forward at

the proper time and make unhampered choice and bless Heaven that they

live in a free land where no form of despotism can ever intrude.



Patrick O'Riley (as his name then stood) created friends and influence

very, fast, for he was always on hand at the police courts to give straw

bail for his customers or establish an alibi for them in case they had

been beating anybody to death on his premises.  Consequently he presently

became a political leader, and was elected to a petty office under the

city government.  Out of a meager salary he soon saved money enough to

open quite a stylish liquor saloon higher up town, with a faro bank

attached and plenty of capital to conduct it with.  This gave him fame

and great respectability.  The position of alderman was forced upon him,

and it was just the same as presenting him a gold mine.  He had fine

horses and carriages, now, and closed up his whiskey mill.



By and by he became a large contractor for city work, and was a bosom

friend of the great and good Wm. M. Weed himself, who had stolen

$20,600,000 from the city and was a man so envied, so honored,--so

adored, indeed, that when the sheriff went to his office to arrest him as

a felon, that sheriff blushed and apologized, and one of the illustrated

papers made a picture of the scene and spoke of the matter in such a way

as to show that the editor regretted that the offense of an arrest had

been offered to so exalted a personage as Mr. Weed.



Mr. O'Riley furnished shingle nails to, the new Court House at three

thousand dollars a keg, and eighteen gross of 60-cent thermometers at

fifteen hundred dollars a dozen; the controller and the board of audit

passed the bills, and a mayor, who was simply ignorant but not criminal,

signed them.  When they were paid, Mr. O'Riley's admirers gave him a

solitaire diamond pin of the size of a filbert, in imitation of the

liberality of Mr. Weed's friends, and then Mr. O'Riley retired from

active service and amused himself with buying real estate at enormous

figures and holding it in other people's names.  By and by the newspapers

came out with exposures and called Weed and O'Riley "thieves,"--whereupon

the people rose as one man (voting repeatedly) and elected the two

gentlemen to their proper theatre of action, the New York legislature.

The newspapers clamored, and the courts proceeded to try the new

legislators for their small irregularities.  Our admirable jury system

enabled the persecuted ex-officials to secure a jury of nine gentlemen

from a neighboring asylum and three graduates from Sing-Sing, and

presently they walked forth with characters vindicated.  The legislature

was called upon to spew them forth--a thing which the legislature

declined to do.  It was like asking children to repudiate their own

father.  It was a legislature of the modern pattern.



Being now wealthy and distinguished, Mr. O'Riley, still bearing the

legislative "Hon." attached to his name (for titles never die in America,

although we do take a republican pride in poking fun at such trifles),

sailed for Europe with his family.  They traveled all about, turning

their noses up at every thing, and not finding it a difficult thing to

do, either, because nature had originally given those features a cast in

that direction; and finally they established themselves in Paris, that

Paradise of Americans of their sort.--They staid there two years and

learned to speak English with a foreign accent--not that it hadn't always

had a foreign accent (which was indeed the case) but now the nature of it

was changed.  Finally they returned home and became ultra fashionables.

They landed here as the Hon.  Patrique Oreille and family, and so are

known unto this day.



Laura provided seats for her visitors and they immediately launched forth

into a breezy, sparkling conversation with that easy confidence which is

to be found only among persons accustomed to high life.



"I've been intending to call sooner, Miss Hawkins," said the Hon. Mrs.

Oreille, "but the weather's been so horrid.  How do you like Washington?"



Laura liked it very well indeed.



Mrs. Gashly--"Is it your first visit?"



Yea, it was her first.



All--"Indeed?"



Mrs. Oreille--"I'm afraid you'll despise the weather, Miss Hawkins.

It's perfectly awful.  It always is.  I tell Mr. Oreille I can't and

I won't put up with any such a climate.  If we were obliged to do it,

I wouldn't mind it; but we are not obliged to, and so I don't see the use

of it.  Sometimes its real pitiful the way the childern pine for Parry--

don't look so sad, Bridget, 'ma chere'--poor child, she can't hear Parry

mentioned without getting the blues."



Mrs. Gashly--"Well I should think so, Mrs. Oreille.  A body lives in

Paris, but a body, only stays here.  I dote on Paris; I'd druther scrimp

along on ten thousand dollars a year there, than suffer and worry here on

a real decent income."



Miss Gashly--"Well then, I wish you'd take us back, mother; I'm sure I

hate this stoopid country enough, even if it is our dear native land."



Miss Emmeline Gashly--"What and leave poor Johnny Peterson behind?" [An

airy genial laugh applauded this sally].



Miss Gashly--"Sister, I should think you'd be ashamed of yourself!"



Miss Emmeline--"Oh, you needn't ruffle your feathers so: I was only

joking.  He don't mean anything by coming to, the house every evening--

only comes to see mother.  Of course that's all!" [General laughter].



Miss G. prettily confused--"Emmeline, how can you!"



Mrs. G.--"Let your sister alone, Emmeline.  I never saw such a tease!"



Mrs. Oreille--"What lovely corals you have, Miss Hawkins!  Just look at

them, Bridget, dear.  I've a great passion for corals--it's a pity

they're getting a little common.  I have some elegant ones--not as

elegant as yours, though--but of course I don't wear them now."



Laura--"I suppose they are rather common, but still I have a great

affection for these, because they were given to me by a dear old friend

of our family named Murphy.  He was a very charming man, but very

eccentric.  We always supposed he was an Irishman, but after be got rich

he went abroad for a year or two, and when he came back you would have

been amused to see how interested he was in a potato.  He asked what it

was!  Now you know that when Providence shapes a mouth especially for the

accommodation of a potato you can detect that fact at a glance when that

mouth is in repose--foreign travel can never remove that sign.  But he

was a very delightful gentleman, and his little foible did not hurt him

at all.  We all have our shams--I suppose there is a sham somewhere about

every individual, if we could manage to ferret it out.  I would so like

to go to France.  I suppose our society here compares very favorably with

French society does it not, Mrs. Oreille?"



Mrs. O.--"Not by any means, Miss Hawkins!  French society is much more

elegant--much more so."



Laura--"I am sorry to hear that.  I suppose ours has deteriorated of

late."



Mrs. O.--"Very much indeed.  There are people in society here that have

really no more money to live on than what some of us pay for servant

hire.  Still I won't say but what some of them are very good people--and

respectable, too."



Laura--"The old families seem to be holding themselves aloof, from what I

hear.  I suppose you seldom meet in society now, the people you used to

be familiar with twelve or fifteen years ago?"



Mrs. O.--"Oh, no-hardly ever."



Mr. O'Riley kept his first rum-mill and protected his customers from the

law in those days, and this turn of the conversation was rather

uncomfortable to madame than otherwise.



Hon. Mrs. Higgins--"Is Francois' health good now, Mrs. Oreille?"



Mrs. O.--(Thankful for the intervention)--"Not very.  A body couldn't

expect it.  He was always delicate--especially his lungs--and this odious

climate tells on him strong, now, after Parry, which is so mild."



Mrs. H:--"I should think so.  Husband says Percy'll die if he don't have

a change; and so I'm going to swap round a little and see what can be

done.  I saw a lady from Florida last week, and she recommended Key West.

I told her Percy couldn't abide winds, as he was threatened with a

pulmonary affection, and then she said try St. Augustine.  It's an awful

distance--ten or twelve hundred mile, they say but then in a case of this

kind--a body can't stand back for trouble, you know."



Mrs. O.--"No, of course that's off.  If Francois don't get better soon

we've got to look out for some other place, or else Europe.  We've

thought some of the Hot Springs, but I don't know.  It's a great

responsibility and a body wants to go cautious.  Is Hildebrand about

again, Mrs. Gashly?"



Mrs. G.--"Yes, but that's about all.  It was indigestion, you know, and

it looks as if it was chronic.  And you know I do dread dyspepsia.  We've

all been worried a good deal about him.  The doctor recommended baked

apple and spoiled meat, and I think it done him good.  It's about the

only thing that will stay on his stomach now-a-days.  We have Dr. Shovel

now.  Who's your doctor, Mrs. Higgins?"



Mrs. H.--"Well, we had Dr. Spooner a good while, but he runs so much to

emetics, which I think are weakening, that we changed off and took Dr.

Leathers.  We like him very much.  He has a fine European reputation,

too.  The first thing he suggested for Percy was to have him taken out in

the back yard for an airing, every afternoon, with nothing at all on."



Mrs. O. and Mrs. G.--"What!"



Mrs. H.--"As true as I'm sitting here.  And it actually helped him for

two or three days; it did indeed.  But after that the doctor said it

seemed to be too severe and so he has fell back on hot foot-baths at

night and cold showers in the morning.  But I don't think there, can be

any good sound help for him in such a climate as this.  I believe we are

going to lose him if we don't make a change."



Mrs. O.  "I suppose you heard of the fright we had two weeks ago last

Saturday?  No?  Why that is strange--but come to remember, you've all

been away to Richmond.  Francois tumbled from the sky light--in the

second-story hall clean down to the first floor--"



Everybody--"Mercy!"



Mrs.  O.--"Yes indeed--and broke two of his ribs--"



Everybody--"What!"



Mrs. O.  "Just as true as you live.  First we thought he must be injured

internally.  It was fifteen minutes past 8 in the evening.  Of course we

were all distracted in a moment--everybody was flying everywhere, and

nobody doing anything worth anything.  By and by I flung out next door

and dragged in Dr. Sprague; President of the Medical University no time

to go for our own doctor of course--and the minute he saw Francois he

said, 'Send for your own physician, madam;' said it as cross as a bear,

too, and turned right on his heel, and cleared out without doing a

thing!"



Everybody--"The mean, contemptible brute!"



Mrs. O--"Well you may say it.  I was nearly out of my wits by this time.

But we hurried off the servants after our own doctor and telegraphed

mother--she was in New York and rushed down on the first train; and when

the doctor got there, lo and behold you he found Francois had broke one

of his legs, too!"



Everybody--"Goodness!"



Mrs. O.--"Yes.  So he set his leg and bandaged it up, and fixed his ribs

and gave him a dose of something to quiet down his excitement and put him

to sleep--poor thing he was trembling and frightened to death and it was

pitiful to see him.  We had him in my bed--Mr. Oreille slept in the guest

room and I laid down beside Francois--but not to sleep bless you no.

Bridget and I set up all night, and the doctor staid till two in the

morning, bless his old heart.--When mother got there she was so used up

with anxiety, that she had to go to bed and have the doctor; but when she

found that Francois was not in immediate danger she rallied, and by night

she was able to take a watch herself.  Well for three days and nights we

three never left that bedside only to take an hour's nap at a time.

And then the doctor said Francois was out of danger and if ever there was

a thankful set, in this world, it was us."



Laura's respect for these, women had augmented during this conversation,

naturally enough; affection and devotion are qualities that are able to

adorn and render beautiful a character that is otherwise unattractive,

and even repulsive.



Mrs. Gashly--"I do believe I would a died if I had been in your place,

Mrs. Oreille.  The time Hildebrand was so low with the pneumonia Emmeline

and me were all, alone with him most of the time and we never took a

minute's sleep for as much as two days, and nights.  It was at Newport

and we wouldn't trust hired nurses.  One afternoon he had a fit, and

jumped up and run out on the portico of the hotel with nothing in the

world on and the wind a blowing liken ice and we after him scared to

death; and when the ladies and gentlemen saw that he had a fit, every

lady scattered for her room and not a gentleman lifted his hand to help,

the wretches!  Well after that his life hung by a thread for as much as

ten days, and the minute he was out of danger Emmeline and me just went

to bed sick and worn out.  I never want to pass through such a time

again.  Poor dear Francois--which leg did he break, Mrs. Oreille!"



Mrs. O.--"It was his right hand hind leg.  Jump down, Francois dear, and

show the ladies what a cruel limp you've got yet."



Francois demurred, but being coaxed and delivered gently upon the floor,

he performed very satisfactorily, with his "right hand hind leg" in the

air.  All were affected--even Laura--but hers was an affection of the

stomach.  The country-bred girl had not suspected that the little whining

ten-ounce black and tan reptile, clad in a red embroidered pigmy blanket

and reposing in Mrs. Oreille's lap all through the visit was the

individual whose sufferings had been stirring the dormant generosities of

her nature.  She said:



"Poor little creature!  You might have lost him!"



Mrs. O.--" O pray don't mention it, Miss Hawkins--it gives me such a

turn!"



Laura--"And Hildebrand and Percy--are they-are they like this one?"



Mrs. G.--"No, Hilly has considerable Skye blood in him, I believe."



Mrs. H.--"Percy's the same, only he is two months and ten days older and

has his ears cropped.  His father, Martin Farquhar Tupper, was sickly,

and died young, but he was the sweetest disposition.--His mother had

heart disease but was very gentle and resigned, and a wonderful ratter."

--[** As impossible and exasperating as this conversation may sound to a

person who is not an idiot, it is scarcely in any respect an exaggeration

of one which one of us actually listened to in an American drawing room--

otherwise we could not venture to put such a chapter into a book which,

professes to deal with social possibilities.--THE AUTHORS.]



So carried away had the visitors become by their interest attaching to

this discussion of family matters, that their stay had been prolonged to

a very improper and unfashionable length; but they suddenly recollected

themselves now and took their departure.



Laura's scorn was boundless.  The more she thought of these people and

their extraordinary talk, the more offensive they seemed to her; and yet

she confessed that if one must choose between the two extreme

aristocracies it might be best, on the whole, looking at things from a

strictly business point of view, to herd with the Parvenus; she was in

Washington solely to compass a certain matter and to do it at any cost,

and these people might be useful to her, while it was plain that her

purposes and her schemes for pushing them would not find favor in the

eyes of the Antiques.  If it came to choice--and it might come to that,

sooner or later--she believed she could come to a decision without much

difficulty or many pangs.



But the best aristocracy of the three Washington castes, and really the

most powerful, by far, was that of the Middle Ground: It was made up of

the families of public men from nearly every state in the Union--men who

held positions in both the executive and legislative branches of the

government, and whose characters had been for years blemishless, both at

home and at the capital.  These gentlemen and their households were

unostentatious people; they were educated and refined; they troubled

themselves but little about the two other orders of nobility, but moved

serenely in their wide orbit, confident in their own strength and well

aware of the potency of their influence.  They had no troublesome

appearances to keep up, no rivalries which they cared to distress

themselves about, no jealousies to fret over.  They could afford to mind

their own affairs and leave other combinations to do the same or do

otherwise, just as they chose.  They were people who were beyond

reproach, and that was sufficient.



Senator Dilworthy never came into collision with any of these factions.

He labored for them all and with them all.  He said that all men were

brethren and all were entitled to the honest unselfish help and

countenance of a Christian laborer in the public vineyard.



Laura concluded, after reflection, to let circumstances determine the

course it might be best for her to pursue as regarded the several

aristocracies.



Now it might occur to the reader that perhaps Laura had been somewhat

rudely suggestive in her remarks to Mrs. Oreille when the subject of

corals was under discussion, but it did not occur to Laura herself.

She was not a person of exaggerated refinement; indeed, the society and

the influences that had formed her character had not been of a nature

calculated to make her so; she thought that "give and take was fair

play," and that to parry an offensive thrust with a sarcasm was a neat

and legitimate thing to do.  She some times talked to people in a way

which some ladies would consider, actually shocking; but Laura rather

prided herself upon some of her exploits of that character.  We are sorry

we cannot make her a faultless heroine; but we cannot, for the reason

that she was human.



She considered herself a superior conversationist.  Long ago, when the

possibility had first been brought before her mind that some day she

might move in Washington society, she had recognized the fact that

practiced conversational powers would be a necessary weapon in that

field; she had also recognized the fact that since her dealings there

must be mainly with men, and men whom she supposed to be exceptionally

cultivated and able, she would need heavier shot in her magazine than

mere brilliant "society" nothings; whereupon she had at once entered upon

a tireless and elaborate course of reading, and had never since ceased to

devote every unoccupied moment to this sort of preparation.  Having now

acquired a happy smattering of various information, she used it with good

effect--she passed for a singularly well informed woman in Washington.

The quality of her literary tastes had necessarily undergone constant

improvement under this regimen, and as necessarily, also; the duality of

her language had improved, though it cannot be denied that now and then

her former condition of life betrayed itself in just perceptible

inelegancies of expression and lapses of grammar.









CHAPTER XXXIV.



When Laura had been in Washington three months, she was still the same

person, in one respect, that she was when she first arrived there--that

is to say, she still bore the name of Laura Hawkins.  Otherwise she was

perceptibly changed.--



She had arrived in a state of grievous uncertainty as to what manner of

woman she was, physically and intellectually, as compared with eastern

women; she was well satisfied, now, that her beauty was confessed, her

mind a grade above the average, and her powers of fascination rather

extraordinary.  So she, was at ease upon those points.  When she arrived,

she was possessed of habits of economy and not possessed of money; now

she dressed elaborately, gave but little thought to the cost of things,

and was very well fortified financially.  She kept her mother and

Washington freely supplied with money, and did the same by Col. Sellers--

who always insisted upon giving his note for loans--with interest; he was

rigid upon that; she must take interest; and one of the Colonel's

greatest satisfactions was to go over his accounts and note what a

handsome sum this accruing interest amounted to, and what a comfortable

though modest support it would yield Laura in case reverses should

overtake her.



In truth he could not help feeling that he was an efficient shield for

her against poverty; and so, if her expensive ways ever troubled him for

a brief moment, he presently dismissed the thought and said to himself,

"Let her go on--even if she loses everything she is still safe--this

interest will always afford her a good easy income."



Laura was on excellent terms with a great many members of Congress, and

there was an undercurrent of suspicion in some quarters that she was one

of that detested class known as "lobbyists;" but what belle could escape

slander in such a city?  Fairminded people declined to condemn her on

mere suspicion, and so the injurious talk made no very damaging headway.

She was very gay, now, and very celebrated, and she might well expect to

be assailed by many kinds of gossip.  She was growing used to celebrity,

and could already sit calm and seemingly unconscious, under the fire of

fifty lorgnettes in a theatre, or even overhear the low voice "That's

she!" as she passed along the street without betraying annoyance.



The whole air was full of a vague vast scheme which was to eventuate in

filling Laura's pockets with millions of money; some had one idea of the

scheme, and some another, but nobody had any exact knowledge upon the

subject.  All that any one felt sure about, was that Laura's landed

estates were princely in value and extent, and that the government was

anxious to get hold of them for public purposes, and that Laura was

willing to make the sale but not at all anxious about the matter and not

at all in a hurry.  It was whispered that Senator Dilworthy was a

stumbling block in the way of an immediate sale, because he was resolved

that the government should not have the lands except with the

understanding that they should be devoted to the uplifting of the negro

race; Laura did not care what they were devoted to, it was said, (a world

of very different gossip to the contrary notwithstanding,) but there were

several other heirs and they would be guided entirely by the Senator's

wishes; and finally, many people averred that while it would be easy to

sell the lands to the government for the benefit of the negro, by

resorting to the usual methods of influencing votes, Senator Dilworthy

was unwilling to have so noble a charity sullied by any taint of

corruption--he was resolved that not a vote should be bought.  Nobody

could get anything definite from Laura about these matters, and so gossip

had to feed itself chiefly upon guesses.  But the effect of it all was,

that Laura was considered to be very wealthy and likely to be vastly more

so in a little while.  Consequently she was much courted and as much

envied: Her wealth attracted many suitors.  Perhaps they came to worship

her riches, but they remained to worship her.  Some of the noblest men of

the time succumbed to her fascinations.  She frowned upon no lover when

he made his first advances, but by and by when she was hopelessly

enthralled, he learned from her own lips that she had formed a resolution

never to marry.  Then he would go away hating and cursing the whole sex,

and she would calmly add his scalp to her string, while she mused upon

the bitter day that Col. Selby trampled her love and her pride in the

dust.  In time it came to be said that her way was paved with broken

hearts.



Poor Washington gradually woke up to the fact that he too was an

intellectual marvel as well as his gifted sister.  He could not conceive

how it had come about (it did not occur to him that the gossip about his

family's great wealth had any thing to do with it). He could not account

for it by any process of reasoning, and was simply obliged to accept the

fact and give up trying to solve the riddle.  He found himself dragged

into society and courted, wondered at and envied very much as if he were

one of those foreign barbers who flit over here now and then with a self-

conferred title of nobility and marry some rich fool's absurd daughter.

Sometimes at a dinner party or a reception he would find himself the

centre of interest, and feel unutterably uncomfortable in the discovery.

Being obliged to say something, he would mine his brain and put in a

blast and when the smoke and flying debris had cleared away the result

would be what seemed to him but a poor little intellectual clod of dirt

or two, and then he would be astonished to see everybody as lost in

admiration as if he had brought up a ton or two of virgin gold.  Every

remark he made delighted his hearers and compelled their applause; he

overheard people say he was exceedingly bright--they were chiefly mammas

and marriageable young ladies.  He found that some of his good things

were being repeated about the town.  Whenever he heard of an instance of

this kind, he would keep that particular remark in mind and analyze it at

home in private.  At first he could not see that the remark was anything

better than a parrot might originate; but by and by he began to feel that

perhaps he underrated his powers; and after that he used to analyze his

good things with a deal of comfort, and find in them a brilliancy which

would have been unapparent to him in earlier days--and then he would make

a note, of that good thing and say it again the first time he found

himself in a new company.  Presently he had saved up quite a repertoire

of brilliancies; and after that he confined himself to repeating these

and ceased to originate any more, lest he might injure his reputation by

an unlucky effort.



He was constantly having young ladies thrust upon his notice at

receptions, or left upon his hands at parties, and in time he began to

feel that he was being deliberately persecuted in this way; and after

that he could not enjoy society because of his constant dread of these

female ambushes and surprises.  He was distressed to find that nearly

every time he showed a young lady a polite attention he was straightway

reported to be engaged to her; and as some of these reports got into the

newspapers occasionally, he had to keep writing to Louise that they were

lies and she must believe in him and not mind them or allow them to

grieve her.



Washington was as much in the dark as anybody with regard to the great

wealth that was hovering in the air and seemingly on the point of

tumbling into the family pocket.  Laura would give him no satisfaction.

All she would say, was:



"Wait.  Be patient.  You will see."



"But will it be soon, Laura?"



"It will not be very long, I think."



"But what makes you think so?"



"I have reasons--and good ones.  Just wait, and be patient."



"But is it going to be as much as people say it is?"



"What do they say it is?"



"Oh, ever so much.  Millions!"



"Yes, it will be a great sum."



"But how great, Laura?  Will it be millions?"



"Yes, you may call it that.  Yes, it will be millions.  There, now--does

that satisfy you?"



"Splendid!  I can wait.  I can wait patiently--ever so patiently.  Once I

was near selling the land for twenty thousand dollars; once for thirty

thousand dollars; once after that for seven thousand dollars; and once

for forty thousand dollars--but something always told me not to do it.

What a fool I would have been to sell it for such a beggarly trifle!  It

is the land that's to bring the money, isn't it Laura?  You can tell me

that much, can't you?"



"Yes, I don't mind saying that much.  It is the land.



"But mind--don't ever hint that you got it from me.  Don't mention me in

the matter at all, Washington."



"All right--I won't.  Millions!  Isn't it splendid!  I mean to look

around for a building lot; a lot with fine ornamental shrubbery and all

that sort of thing.  I will do it to-day.  And I might as well see an

architect, too, and get him to go to work at a plan for a house.  I don't

intend to spare and expense; I mean to have the noblest house that money

can build."  Then after a pause--he did not notice Laura's smiles "Laura,

would you lay the main hall in encaustic tiles, or just in fancy patterns

of hard wood?"



Laura laughed a good old-fashioned laugh that had more of her former

natural self about it than any sound that had issued from her mouth in

many weeks.  She said:



"You don't change, Washington.  You still begin to squander a fortune

right and left the instant you hear of it in the distance; you never wait

till the foremost dollar of it arrives within a hundred miles of you,"--

and she kissed her brother good bye and left him weltering in his dreams,

so to speak.



He got up and walked the floor feverishly during two hours; and when he

sat down he had married Louise, built a house, reared a family, married

them off, spent upwards of eight hundred thousand dollars on mere

luxuries, and died worth twelve millions.









CHAPTER XXXV.





Laura went down stairs, knocked at/the study door, and entered, scarcely

waiting for the response.  Senator Dilworthy was alone--with an open

Bible in his hand, upside down.  Laura smiled, and said, forgetting her

acquired correctness of speech,



"It is only me."



"Ah, come in, sit down," and the Senator closed the book and laid it

down.  "I wanted to see you.  Time to report progress from the committee

of the whole," and the Senator beamed with his own congressional wit.



"In the committee of the whole things are working very well.  We have

made ever so much progress in a week.  I believe that you and I together

could run this government beautifully, uncle."



The Senator beamed again.  He liked to be called "uncle" by this

beautiful woman.



"Did you see Hopperson last night after the congressional prayer

meeting?"



"Yes.  He came.  He's a kind of--"



"Eh? he is one of my friends, Laura.  He's a fine man, a very fine man.

I don't know any man in congress I'd sooner go to for help in any

Christian work.  What did he say?"



"Oh, he beat around a little.  He said he should like to help the negro,

his heart went out to the negro, and all that--plenty of them say that

but he was a little afraid of the Tennessee Land bill; if Senator

Dilworthy wasn't in it, he should suspect there was a fraud on the

government."



"He said that, did he?"



"Yes.  And he said he felt he couldn't vote for it.  He was shy."



"Not shy, child, cautious.  He's a very cautious man.  I have been with

him a great deal on conference committees.  He wants reasons, good ones.

Didn't you show him he was in error about the bill?"



"I did.  I went over the whole thing.  I had to tell him some of the side

arrangements, some of the--"



"You didn't mention me?"



"Oh, no.  I told him you were daft about the negro and the philanthropy

part of it, as you are."



"Daft is a little strong, Laura.  But you know that I wouldn't touch this

bill if it were not for the public good, and for the good of the colored

race; much as I am interested in the heirs of this property, and would

like to have them succeed."



Laura looked a little incredulous, and the Senator proceeded.



"Don't misunderstand me, I don't deny that it is for the interest of all

of us that this bill should go through, and it will.  I have no

concealments from you.  But I have one principle in my public life, which

I should like you to keep in mind; it has always been my guide.  I never

push a private interest if it is not Justified and ennobled by some

larger public good.  I doubt Christian would be justified in working for

his own salvation if it was not to aid in the salvation of his fellow

men."



The Senator spoke with feeling, and then added,



"I hope you showed Hopperson that our motives were pure?"



"Yes, and he seemed to have a new light on the measure: I think will vote

for it."



"I hope so; his name will give tone and strength to it.  I knew you would

only have to show him that it was just and pure, in order to secure his

cordial support."



"I think I convinced him.  Yes, I am perfectly sure he will vote right

now."



"That's good, that's good," said the Senator; smiling, and rubbing his

hands.  "Is there anything more?"



"You'll find some changes in that I guess," handing the Senator a printed

list of names.  "Those checked off are all right."



"Ah--'m--'m," running his eye down the list.  "That's encouraging.  What

is the 'C' before some of the names, and the 'B. B.'?"



"Those are my private marks.  That 'C' stands for 'convinced,' with

argument.  The 'B. B.' is a general sign for a relative.  You see it

stands before three of the Hon. Committee.  I expect to see the chairman

of the committee to-day, Mr. Buckstone."



"So, you must, he ought to be seen without any delay.  Buckstone is a

worldly sort of a fellow, but he has charitable impulses.  If we secure

him we shall have a favorable report by the committee, and it will be a

great thing to be able to state that fact quietly where it will do good."



"Oh, I saw Senator Balloon"



"He will help us, I suppose?  Balloon is a whole-hearted fellow.  I can't

help loving that man, for all his drollery and waggishness.  He puts on

an air of levity sometimes, but there aint a man in the senate knows the

scriptures as he does.  He did not make any objections?"



"Not exactly, he said--shall I tell you what he said?" asked Laura

glancing furtively at him.



"Certainly."



"He said he had no doubt it was a good thing; if Senator Dilworthy was in

it, it would pay to look into it."



The Senator laughed, but rather feebly, and said, "Balloon is always full

of his jokes."



"I explained it to him.  He said it was all right, he only wanted a word

with you,", continued Laura.  "He is a handsome old gentleman, and he is

gallant for an old man."



"My daughter," said the Senator, with a grave look, "I trust there was

nothing free in his manner?"



"Free?" repeated Laura, with indignation in her face.  "With me!"



"There, there, child.  I meant nothing, Balloon talks a little freely

sometimes, with men.  But he is right at heart.  His term expires next

year and I fear we shall lose him."



"He seemed to be packing the day I was there.  His rooms were full of dry

goods boxes, into which his servant was crowding all manner of old

clothes and stuff: I suppose he will paint 'Pub. Docs' on them and frank

them home.  That's good economy, isn't it?"



"Yes, yes, but child, all Congressmen do that.  It may not be strictly

honest, indeed it is not unless he had some public documents mixed in

with the clothes."



"It's a funny world.  Good-bye, uncle.  I'm going to see that chairman."



And humming a cheery opera air, she departed to her room to dress for

going out.  Before she did that, however, she took out her note book and

was soon deep in its contents; marking, dashing, erasing, figuring, and

talking to herself.



"Free!  I wonder what Dilworthy does think of me anyway?  One .  .  .

two.  .  .eight .  .  .  seventeen .  .  .  twenty-one,.  .  'm'm .  .  .

it takes a heap for a majority.  Wouldn't Dilworthy open his eyes if he

knew some of the things Balloon did say to me.  There.  .  .  .

Hopperson's influence ought to count twenty .  .  .  the sanctimonious

old curmudgeon.  Son-in-law.  .  .  . sinecure in the negro institution

.  .  .  .That about gauges him .  .  . The three committeemen .  .  .  .

sons-in-law.  Nothing like a son-in-law here in Washington or a brother-

in-law .  .  . And everybody has 'em .  .  .Let's see: .  .  .  sixty-

one.  .  .  .  with places .  .  .  twenty-five .  .  .  persuaded--it is

getting on; .  .  .  . we'll have two-thirds of Congress in time .  .  .

Dilworthy must surely know I understand him.  Uncle Dilworthy .  .  .  .

Uncle Balloon!--Tells very amusing stories .  .  .  when ladies are not

present .  .  . I should think so .  .  .  .'m .  .  .  'm.  Eighty-five.

There.  I must find that chairman.  Queer.  .  .  .  Buckstone acts .  .

Seemed to be in love .  .  .  .  .  I was sure of it.  He promised to

come here.  .  . and he hasn't.  .  . Strange.  Very strange .  .  .  .

I must chance to meet him to-day."



Laura dressed and went out, thinking she was perhaps too early for Mr.

Buckstone to come from the house, but as he lodged near the bookstore she

would drop in there and keep a look out for him.



While Laura is on her errand to find Mr. Buckstone, it may not be out of

the way to remark that she knew quite as much of Washington life as

Senator Dilworthy gave her credit for, and more than she thought proper

to tell him.  She was acquainted by this time with a good many of the

young fellows of Newspaper Row; and exchanged gossip with them to their

mutual advantage.



They were always talking in the Row, everlastingly gossiping, bantering

and sarcastically praising things, and going on in a style which was a

curious commingling of earnest and persiflage.  Col. Sellers liked this

talk amazingly, though he was sometimes a little at sea in it--and

perhaps that didn't lessen the relish of the conversation to the

correspondents.



It seems that they had got hold of the dry-goods box packing story about

Balloon, one day, and were talking it over when the Colonel came in.

The Colonel wanted to know all about it, and Hicks told him.  And then

Hicks went on, with a serious air,



"Colonel, if you register a letter, it means that it is of value, doesn't

it?  And if you pay fifteen cents for registering it, the government will

have to take extra care of it and even pay you back its full value if it

is lost.  Isn't that so?"



"Yes.  I suppose it's so.".



"Well Senator Balloon put fifteen cents worth of stamps on each of those

seven huge boxes of old clothes, and shipped that ton of second-hand

rubbish, old boots and pantaloons and what not through the mails as

registered matter!  It was an ingenious thing and it had a genuine touch

of humor about it, too.  I think there is more real: talent among our

public men of to-day than there was among those of old times--a far more

fertile fancy, a much happier ingenuity.  Now, Colonel, can you picture

Jefferson, or Washington or John Adams franking their wardrobes through

the mails and adding the facetious idea of making the government

responsible for the cargo for the sum of one dollar and five cents?

Statesmen were dull creatures in those days.  I have a much greater

admiration for Senator Balloon."



"Yes, Balloon is a man of parts, there is no denying it"



"I think so.  He is spoken of for the post of Minister to China, or

Austria, and I hope will be appointed.  What we want abroad is good

examples of the national character.



"John Jay and Benjamin Franklin were well enough in their day, but the

nation has made progress since then.  Balloon is a man we know and can

depend on to be true to himself."



"Yes, and Balloon has had a good deal of public experience.  He is an old

friend of mine.  He was governor of one of the territories a while, and

was very satisfactory."



"Indeed he was.  He was ex-officio Indian agent, too.  Many a man would

have taken the Indian appropriation and devoted the money to feeding and

clothing the helpless savages, whose land had been taken from them by the

white man in the interests of civilization; but Balloon knew their needs

better.  He built a government saw-mill on the reservation with the

money, and the lumber sold for enormous prices--a relative of his did all

the work free of charge--that is to say he charged nothing more than the

lumber world bring."  "But the poor Injuns--not that I care much for

Injuns--what did he do for them?"



"Gave them the outside slabs to fence in the reservation with.  Governor

Balloon was nothing less than a father to the poor Indians.  But Balloon

is not alone, we have many truly noble statesmen in our country's service

like Balloon.  The Senate is full of them.  Don't you think so Colonel?"



"Well, I dunno.  I honor my country's public servants as much as any one

can.  I meet them, Sir, every day, and the more I see of them the more I

esteem them and the more grateful I am that our institutions give us the

opportunity of securing their services.  Few lands are so blest."



"That is true, Colonel.  To be sure you can buy now and then a Senator or

a Representative but they do not know it is wrong, and so they are not

ashamed of it.  They are gentle, and confiding and childlike, and in my

opinion these are qualities that ennoble them far more than any amount of

sinful sagacity could.  I quite agree with you, Col. Sellers."



"Well"--hesitated the, Colonel--"I am afraid some of them do buy their

seats--yes, I am afraid they do--but as Senator Dilworthy himself said to

me, it is sinful,--it is very wrong--it is shameful; Heaven protect me

from such a charge.  That is what Dilworthy said.  And yet when you come

to look at it you cannot deny that we would have to go without the

services of some of our ablest men, sir, if the country were opposed to--

to--bribery.  It is a harsh term.  I do not like to use it."



The Colonel interrupted himself at this point to meet an engagement with

the Austrian minister, and took his leave with his usual courtly bow.









CHAPTER XXXVI.





In due time Laura alighted at the book store, and began to look at the

titles of the handsome array of books on the counter.  A dapper clerk of

perhaps nineteen or twenty years, with hair accurately parted and

surprisingly slick, came bustling up and leaned over with a pretty smile

and an affable--



"Can I--was there any particular book you wished to see?"



"Have you Taine's England?"



"Beg pardon?"



"Taine's Notes on England."



The young gentleman scratched the side of his nose with a cedar pencil

which he took down from its bracket on the side of his head, and

reflected a moment:



"Ah--I see," [with a bright smile]--"Train, you mean--not Taine.  George

Francis Train.  No, ma'm we--"



"I mean Taine--if I may take the liberty."



The clerk reflected again--then:



"Taine .  .  .  .  Taine .  .  .  . Is it hymns?"



"No, it isn't hymns.  It is a volume that is making a deal of talk just

now, and is very widely known--except among parties who sell it."



The clerk glanced at her face to see if a sarcasm might not lurk

somewhere in that obscure speech, but the gentle simplicity of the

beautiful eyes that met his, banished that suspicion.  He went away and

conferred with the proprietor.  Both appeared to be non-plussed.  They

thought and talked, and talked and thought by turns.  Then both came

forward and the proprietor said:



"Is it an American book, ma'm?"



"No, it is an American reprint of an English translation."



"Oh!  Yes--yes--I remember, now.  We are expecting it every day.  It

isn't out yet."



"I think you must be mistaken, because you advertised it a week ago."



"Why no--can that be so?"



"Yes, I am sure of it.  And besides, here is the book itself, on the

counter."



She bought it and the proprietor retired from the field.  Then she asked

the clerk for the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table--and was pained to see

the admiration her beauty had inspired in him fade out of his face.

He said with cold dignity, that cook books were somewhat out of their

line, but be would order it if she desired it.  She said, no, never mind.

Then she fell to conning the titles again, finding a delight in the

inspection of the Hawthornes, the Longfellows, the Tennysons, and other

favorites of her idle hours.  Meantime the clerk's eyes were busy, and no

doubt his admiration was returning again--or may be he was only gauging

her probable literary tastes by some sagacious system of admeasurement

only known to his guild.  Now he began to "assist" her in making a

selection; but his efforts met with no success--indeed they only annoyed

her and unpleasantly interrupted her meditations.  Presently, while she

was holding a copy of "Venetian Life" in her hand and running over a

familiar passage here and there, the clerk said, briskly, snatching up a

paper-covered volume and striking the counter a smart blow with it to

dislodge the dust:



"Now here is a work that we've sold a lot of.  Everybody that's read it

likes it"--and he intruded it under her nose; "it's a book that I can

recommend--'The Pirate's Doom, or the Last of the Buccaneers.'  I think

it's one of the best things that's come out this season."



Laura pushed it gently aside her hand and went on and went on filching

from "Venetian Life."



"I believe I do not want it," she said.



The clerk hunted around awhile, glancing at one title and then another,

but apparently not finding what he wanted.



However, he succeeded at last.  Said he:



"Have you ever read this, ma'm?  I am sure you'll like it.  It's by the

author of 'The Hooligans of Hackensack.' It is full of love troubles and

mysteries and all sorts of such things.  The heroine strangles her own

mother.  Just glance at the title please,--'Gonderil the Vampire, or The

Dance of Death.'  And here is 'The Jokist's Own Treasury, or, The Phunny

Phellow's Bosom Phriend.'  The funniest thing!--I've read it four times,

ma'm, and I can laugh at the very sight of it yet.  And 'Gonderil,'--

I assure you it is the most splendid book I ever read.  I know you will

like these books, ma'm, because I've read them myself and I know what

they are."



"Oh, I was perplexed--but I see how it is, now.  You must have thought

I asked you to tell me what sort of books I wanted--for I am apt to say

things which I don't really mean, when I am absent minded.  I suppose I

did ask you, didn't I?"



"No ma'm,--but I--"



"Yes, I must have done it, else you would not have offered your services,

for fear it might be rude.  But don't be troubled--it was all my fault.

I ought not to have been so heedless--I ought not to have asked you."



"But you didn't ask me, ma'm.  We always help customers all we can.

You see our experience--living right among books all the time--that sort

of thing makes us able to help a customer make a selection, you know."



"Now does it, indeed?  It is part of your business, then?"



"Yes'm, we always help."



"How good it is of you.  Some people would think it rather obtrusive,

perhaps, but I don't--I think it is real kindness--even charity.  Some

people jump to conclusions without any thought--you have noticed that?"



"O yes," said the clerk, a little perplexed as to whether to feel

comfortable or the reverse; "Oh yes, indeed, I've often noticed that,

ma'm."



"Yes, they jump to conclusions with an absurd heedlessness.  Now some

people would think it odd that because you, with the budding tastes and

the innocent enthusiasms natural to your time of life, enjoyed the

Vampires and the volume of nursery jokes, you should imagine that an

older person would delight in them too--but I do not think it odd at all.

I think it natural--perfectly natural in you.  And kind, too.  You look

like a person who not only finds a deep pleasure in any little thing in

the way of literature that strikes you forcibly, but is willing and glad

to share that pleasure with others--and that, I think, is noble and

admirable--very noble and admirable.  I think we ought all--to share our

pleasures with others, and do what we can to make each other happy, do

not you?"



"Oh, yes.  Oh, yes, indeed.  Yes, you are quite right, ma'm."



But he was getting unmistakably uncomfortable, now, notwithstanding

Laura's confiding sociability and almost affectionate tone.



"Yes, indeed.  Many people would think that what a bookseller--or perhaps

his clerk--knows about literature as literature, in contradistinction to

its character as merchandise, would hardly, be of much assistance to a

person--that is, to an adult, of course--in the selection of food for the

mind--except of course wrapping paper, or twine, or wafers, or something

like that--but I never feel that way.  I feel that whatever service you

offer me, you offer with a good heart, and I am as grateful for it as if

it were the greatest boon to me.  And it is useful to me--it is bound to

be so.  It cannot be otherwise.  If you show me a book which you have

read--not skimmed over or merely glanced at, but read--and you tell me

that you enjoyed it and that you could read it three or four times, then

I know what book I want--"



"Thank you!--th--"



--"to avoid.  Yes indeed.  I think that no information ever comes amiss

in this world.  Once or twice I have traveled in the cars--and there you

know, the peanut boy always measures you with his eye, and hands you out

a book of murders if you are fond of theology; or Tupper or a dictionary

or T. S. Arthur if you are fond of poetry; or he hands you a volume of

distressing jokes or a copy of the American Miscellany if you

particularly dislike that sort of literary fatty degeneration of the

heart--just for the world like a pleasant spoken well-meaning gentleman

in any, bookstore.  But here I am running on as if business men had

nothing to do but listen to women talk.  You must pardon me, for I was

not thinking.--And you must let me thank you again for helping me.

I read a good deal, and shall be in nearly every day and I would be sorry

to have you think me a customer who talks too much and buys too little.

Might I ask you to give me the time?  Ah-two-twenty-two.  Thank you

very much.  I will set mine while I have the opportunity."



But she could not get her watch open, apparently.  She tried, and tried

again.  Then the clerk, trembling at his own audacity, begged to be

allowed to assist.  She allowed him.  He succeeded, and was radiant under

the sweet influences of her pleased face and her seductively worded

acknowledgements with gratification.  Then he gave her the exact time

again, and anxiously watched her turn the hands slowly till they reached

the precise spot without accident or loss of life, and then he looked as

happy as a man who had helped a fellow being through a momentous

undertaking, and was grateful to know that he had not lived in vain.

Laura thanked him once more.  The words were music to his ear; but what

were they compared to the ravishing smile with which she flooded his

whole system?  When she bowed her adieu and turned away, he was no longer

suffering torture in the pillory where she had had him trussed up during

so many distressing moments, but he belonged to the list of her conquests

and was a flattered and happy thrall, with the dawn-light of love

breaking over the eastern elevations of his heart.



It was about the hour, now, for the chairman of the House Committee on

Benevolent Appropriations to make his appearance, and Laura stepped to

the door to reconnoiter.  She glanced up the street, and sure enough--









CHAPTER XXXVII.





That Chairman was nowhere in sight.  Such disappointments seldom occur in

novels, but are always happening in real life.



She was obliged to make a new plan.  She sent him a note, and asked him

to call in the evening--which he did.



She received the Hon. Mr. Buckstone with a sunny smile, and said:



"I don't know how I ever dared to send you a note, Mr. Buckstone, for you

have the reputation of not being very partial to our sex."



"Why I am sure my, reputation does me wrong, then, Miss Hawkins.  I have

been married once--is that nothing in my favor?"



"Oh, yes--that is, it may be and it may not be.  If you have known what

perfection is in woman, it is fair to argue that inferiority cannot

interest you now."



"Even if that were the case it could not affect you, Miss Hawkins," said

the chairman gallantly.  "Fame does not place you in the list of ladies

who rank below perfection."  This happy speech delighted Mr. Buckstone as

much as it seemed to delight Laura.  But it did not confuse him as much

as it apparently did her.



"I wish in all sincerity that I could be worthy of such a felicitous

compliment as that.  But I am a woman, and so I am gratified for it just

as it is, and would not have it altered."



"But it is not merely a compliment--that is, an empty complement--it is

the truth.  All men will endorse that."



Laura looked pleased, and said:



"It is very kind of you to say it.  It is a distinction indeed, for a

country-bred girl like me to be so spoken of by people of brains and

culture.  You are so kind that I know you will pardon my putting you to

the trouble to come this evening."



"Indeed it was no trouble.  It was a pleasure.  I am alone in the world

since I lost my wife, and I often long for the society of your sex, Miss

Hawkins, notwithstanding what people may say to the contrary."



"It is pleasant to hear you say that.  I am sure it must be so.  If I

feel lonely at times, because of my exile from old friends, although

surrounded by new ones who are already very dear to me, how much more

lonely must you feel, bereft as you are, and with no wholesome relief

from the cares of state that weigh you down.  For your own sake, as well

as for the sake of others, you ought to go into society oftener.

I seldom see you at a reception, and when I do you do not usually give me

very, much of your attention"



"I never imagined that you wished it or I would have been very glad to

make myself happy in that way.--But one seldom gets an opportunity to say

more than a sentence to you in a place like that.  You are always the

centre of a group--a fact which you may have noticed yourself.  But if

one might come here--"



"Indeed you would always find a hearty welcome, Mr. Buckstone.  I have

often wished you would come and tell me more about Cairo and the

Pyramids, as you once promised me you would."



"Why, do you remember that yet, Miss Hawkins?  I thought ladies' memories

were more fickle than that."



"Oh, they are not so fickle as gentlemen's promises.  And besides, if I

had been inclined to forget, I--did you not give me something by way of a

remembrancer?"



"Did I?"



"Think."



"It does seem to me that I did; but I have forgotten what it was now."



"Never, never call a lady's memory fickle again!  Do you recognize this?"



"A little spray of box!  I am beaten--I surrender.  But have you kept

that all this time?"



Laura's confusion was very, pretty.  She tried to hide it, but the more

she tried the more manifest it became and withal the more captivating to

look upon.  Presently she threw the spray of box from her with an annoyed

air, and said:



"I forgot myself.  I have been very foolish.  I beg that you will forget

this absurd thing."



Mr. Buckstone picked up the spray, and sitting down by Laura's side on

the sofa, said:



"Please let me keep it, Miss Hawkins.  I set a very high value upon it

now."



"Give it to me, Mr. Buckstone, and do not speak so.  I have been

sufficiently punished for my thoughtlessness.  You cannot take pleasure

in adding to my distress.  Please give it to me."



"Indeed I do not wish to distress you.  But do not consider the matter so

gravely; you have done yourself no wrong.  You probably forgot that you

had it; but if you had given it to me I would have kept it--and not

forgotten it."



"Do not talk so, Mr. Buckstone.  Give it to me, please, and forget the

matter."



"It would not be kind to refuse, since it troubles you so, and so I

restore it.  But if you would give me part of it and keep the rest--"



"So that you might have something to remind you of me when you wished to

laugh at my foolishness?"



"Oh, by no means, no!  Simply that I might remember that I had once

assisted to discomfort you, and be reminded to do so no more."



Laura looked up, and scanned his face a moment.  She was about to break

the twig, but she hesitated and said:



"If I were sure that you--"She threw the spray away, and continued:

"This is silly!  We will change the subject.  No, do not insist--I must

have my way in this."



Then Mr. Buckstone drew off his forces and proceeded to make a wily

advance upon the fortress under cover of carefully--contrived artifices

and stratagems of war.  But he contended with an alert and suspicious

enemy; and so at the end of two hours it was manifest to him that he had

made but little progress.  Still, he had made some; he was sure of that.



Laura sat alone and communed with herself;



"He is fairly hooked, poor thing.  I can play him at my leisure and land

him when I choose.  He was all ready to be caught, days and days ago--

I saw that, very well.  He will vote for our bill--no fear about that;

and moreover he will work for it, too, before I am done with him.  If he

had a woman's eyes he would have noticed that the spray of box had grown

three inches since he first gave it to me, but a man never sees anything

and never suspects.  If I had shown him a whole bush he would have

thought it was the same.  Well, it is a good night's work: the committee

is safe.  But this is a desperate game I am playing in these days--

a wearing, sordid, heartless game.  If I lose, I lose everything--even

myself.  And if I win the game, will it be worth its cost after all?

I do not know.  Sometimes I doubt.  Sometimes I half wish I had not

begun.  But no matter; I have begun, and I will never turn back; never

while I live."



Mr. Buckstone indulged in a reverie as he walked homeward:



"She is shrewd and deep, and plays her cards with considerable

discretion--but she will lose, for all that.  There is no hurry; I shall

come out winner, all in good time.  She is the most beautiful woman in

the world; and she surpassed herself to-night.  I suppose I must vote for

that bill, in the end maybe; but that is not a matter of much consequence

the government can stand it.  She is bent on capturing me, that is plain;

but she will find by and by that what she took for a sleeping garrison

was an ambuscade."









CHAPTER XXXVIII.



          Now this surprising news caus'd her fall in 'a trance,

          Life as she were dead, no limbs she could advance,

          Then her dear brother came, her from the ground he took

          And she spake up and said, O my poor heart is broke.



                              The Barnardcastle Tragedy.



"Don't you think he is distinguished looking?"



"What! That gawky looking person, with Miss Hawkins?"



"There.  He's just speaking to Mrs. Schoonmaker.  Such high-bred

negligence and unconsciousness.  Nothing studied.  See his fine eyes."



"Very.  They are moving this way now.  Maybe he is coming here.  But he

looks as helpless as a rag baby.  Who is he, Blanche?"



"Who is he?  And you've been here a week, Grace, and don't know?  He's

the catch of the season.  That's Washington Hawkins--her brother."



"No, is it?"



"Very old family, old Kentucky family I believe.  He's got enormous

landed property in Tennessee, I think.  The family lost everything,

slaves and that sort of thing, you know, in the war.  But they have a

great deal of land, minerals, mines and all that.  Mr. Hawkins and his

sister too are very much interested in the amelioration of the condition

of the colored race; they have some plan, with Senator Dilworthy, to

convert a large part of their property to something another for the

freedmen."



"You don't say so?  I thought he was some guy from Pennsylvania.  But he

is different from others.  Probably he has lived all his life on his

plantation."



It was a day reception of Mrs. Representative Schoonmaker, a sweet woman,

of simple and sincere manners.  Her house was one of the most popular in

Washington.  There was less ostentation there than in some others, and

people liked to go where the atmosphere reminded them of the peace and

purity of home.  Mrs. Schoonmaker was as natural and unaffected in

Washington society as she was in her own New York house, and kept up the

spirit of home-life there, with her husband and children.  And that was

the reason, probably, why people of refinement liked to go there.



Washington is a microcosm, and one can suit himself with any sort of

society within a radius of a mile.  To a large portion of the people who

frequent Washington or dwell where, the ultra fashion, the shoddy, the

jobbery are as utterly distasteful as they would he in a refined New

England City.  Schoonmaker was not exactly a leader in the House, but he

was greatly respected for his fine talents and his honesty.  No one would

have thought of offering to carry National Improvement Directors Relief

stock for him.



These day receptions were attended by more women than men, and those

interested in the problem might have studied the costumes of the ladies

present, in view of this fact, to discover whether women dress more for

the eyes of women or for effect upon men.  It is a very important

problem, and has been a good deal discussed, and its solution would form

one fixed, philosophical basis, upon which to estimate woman's character.

We are inclined to take a medium ground, and aver that woman dresses to

please herself, and in obedience to a law of her own nature.



"They are coming this way," said Blanche.  People who made way for them

to pass, turned to look at them.  Washington began to feel that the eyes

of the public were on him also, and his eyes rolled about, now towards

the ceiling, now towards the floor, in an effort to look unconscious.



"Good morning, Miss Hawkins.  Delighted.  Mr. Hawkins.  My friend, Miss

Medlar."



Mr. Hawkins, who was endeavoring to square himself for a bow, put his

foot through the train of Mrs. Senator Poplin, who looked round with a

scowl, which turned into a smile as she saw who it was.  In extricating

himself, Mr. Hawkins, who had the care of his hat as well as the

introduction on his mind, shambled against Miss Blanche, who said pardon,

with the prettiest accent, as if the awkwardness were her own.  And Mr.

Hawkins righted himself.



"Don't you find it very warm to-day, Mr. Hawkins?" said Blanche, by way

of a remark.



It's awful hot," said Washington.



"It's warm for the season," continued Blanche pleasantly.  "But I suppose

you are accustomed to it," she added, with a general idea that the

thermometer always stands at 90 deg. in all parts of the late slave

states.  "Washington weather generally cannot be very congenial to you?"



"It's congenial," said Washington brightening up, "when it's not

congealed."



"That's very good.  Did you hear, Grace, Mr. Hawkins says it's congenial

when it's not congealed."



"What is, dear?" said Grace, who was talking with Laura.



The conversation was now finely under way.  Washington launched out an

observation of his own.



"Did you see those Japs, Miss Leavitt?"



"Oh, yes, aren't they queer.  But so high-bred, so picturesque.  Do you

think that color makes any difference, Mr. Hawkins?  I used to be so

prejudiced against color."



"Did you?  I never was.  I used to think my old mammy was handsome."



"How interesting your life must have been!  I should like to hear about

it."



Washington was about settling himself into his narrative style,

when Mrs. Gen. McFingal caught his eye.



"Have you been at the Capitol to-day, Mr. Hawkins?"



Washington had not.  "Is anything uncommon going on?"



"They say it was very exciting.  The Alabama business you know.

Gen.  Sutler, of Massachusetts, defied England, and they say he wants

war."



"He wants to make himself conspicuous more like," said Laura.

"He always, you have noticed, talks with one eye on the gallery, while

the other is on the speaker."



"Well, my husband says, its nonsense to talk of war, and wicked.

He knows what war is.  If we do have war, I hope it will be for the

patriots of Cuba.  Don't you think we want Cuba, Mr. Hawkins?"



"I think we want it bad," said Washington.  "And Santo Domingo.  Senator

Dilworthy says, we are bound to extend our religion over the isles of the

sea.  We've got to round out our territory, and--"



Washington's further observations were broken off by Laura, who whisked

him off to another part of the room, and reminded him that they must make

their adieux.



"How stupid and tiresome these people are," she said.  "Let's go."



They were turning to say good-by to the hostess, when Laura's attention

was arrested by the sight of a gentleman  who was just speaking to Mrs.

Schoonmaker.  For a second her heart stopped beating.  He was a handsome

man of forty and perhaps more, with grayish hair and whiskers, and he

walked with a cane, as if he were slightly lame.  He might be less than

forty, for his face was worn into hard lines, and he was pale.



No.  It could not be, she said to herself.  It is only a resemblance.

But as the gentleman turned and she saw his full face, Laura put out her

hand and clutched Washington's arm to prevent herself from falling.



Washington, who was not minding anything, as usual, looked 'round in

wonder.  Laura's eyes were blazing fire and hatred; he had never seen her

look so before; and her face, was livid.



"Why, what is it, sis?  Your face is as white as paper."



"It's he, it's he.  Come, come," and she dragged him away.



"It's who?" asked Washington, when they had gained the carriage.



"It's nobody, it's nothing.  Did I say he?  I was faint with the heat.

Don't mention it.  Don't you speak of it," she added earnestly, grasping

his arm.



When she had gained her room she went to the glass and saw a pallid and

haggard face.



"My God," she cried, "this will never do.  I should have killed him, if I

could.  The scoundrel still lives, and dares to come here.  I ought to

kill him.  He has no right to live.  How I hate him.  And yet I loved

him.  Oh heavens, how I did love that man.  And why didn't he kill me?

He might better.  He did kill all that was good in me.  Oh, but he shall

not escape.  He shall not escape this time.  He may have forgotten.  He

will find that a woman's hate doesn't forget.  The law?  What would the

law do but protect him and make me an outcast?  How all Washington would

gather up its virtuous skirts and avoid me, if it knew.  I wonder if he

hates me as I do him?"



So Laura raved, in tears and in rage by turns, tossed in a tumult of

passion, which she gave way to with little effort to control.



A servant came to summon her to dinner.  She had a headache.  The hour

came for the President's reception.  She had a raving headache, and the

Senator must go without her.



That night of agony was like another night she recalled.  How vividly it

all came back to her.  And at that time she remembered she thought she

might be mistaken.  He might come back to her.  Perhaps he loved her,

a little, after all.  Now, she knew he did not.  Now, she knew he was a

cold-blooded scoundrel, without pity.  Never a word in all these years.

She had hoped he was dead.  Did his wife live, she wondered.  She caught

at that--and it gave a new current to her thoughts.  Perhaps, after all--

she must see him.  She could not live without seeing him.  Would he smile

as in the old days when she loved him so; or would he sneer as when she

last saw him?  If be looked so, she hated him.  If he should call her

"Laura, darling," and look SO!  She must find him.  She must end her

doubts.



Laura kept her room for two days, on one excuse and another--a nervous

headache, a cold--to the great anxiety of the Senator's household.

Callers, who went away, said she had been too gay--they did not say

"fast," though some of them may have thought it.  One so conspicuous and

successful in society as Laura could not be out of the way two days,

without remarks being made, and not all of them complimentary.



When she came down she appeared as usual, a little pale may be, but

unchanged in manner.  If there were any deepened lines about the eyes

they had been concealed.  Her course of action was quite determined.



At breakfast she asked if any one had heard any unusual noise during the

night?  Nobody had.  Washington never heard any noise of any kind after

his eyes were shut.  Some people thought he never did when they were open

either.



Senator Dilworthy said he had come in late.  He was detained in a little

consultation after the Congressional prayer meeting.  Perhaps it was his

entrance.



No, Laura said.  She heard that.  It was later.  She might have been

nervous, but she fancied somebody was trying to get into the house.



Mr. Brierly humorously suggested that it might be, as none of the members

were occupied in night session.



The Senator frowned, and said he did not like to hear that kind of

newspaper slang.  There might be burglars about.



Laura said that very likely it was only her nervousness.  But she thought

she world feel safer if Washington would let her take one of his pistols.

Washington brought her one of his revolvers, and instructed her in the

art of loading and firing it.



During the morning Laura drove down to Mrs. Schoonmaker's to pay a

friendly call.



"Your receptions are always delightful," she said to that lady, "the

pleasant people all seem to come here."



"It's pleasant to hear you say so, Miss Hawkins.  I believe my friends

like to come here.  Though society in Washington is mixed; we have a

little of everything."



"I suppose, though, you don't see much of the old rebel element?" said

Laura with a smile.



If this seemed to Mrs. Schoonmaker a singular remark for a lady to make,

who was meeting "rebels" in society every day, she did not express it in

any way, but only said,



"You know we don't say 'rebel' anymore.  Before we came to Washington I

thought rebels would look unlike other people.  I find we are very much

alike, and that kindness and good nature wear away prejudice.  And then

you know there are all sorts of common interests.  My husband sometimes

says that he doesn't see but confederates are just as eager to get at the

treasury as Unionists.  You know that Mr. Schoonmaker is on the

appropriations."



"Does he know many Southerners?"



"Oh, yes.  There were several at my reception the other day.  Among

others a confederate Colonel--a stranger--handsome man with gray hair,

probably you didn't notice him, uses a cane in walking.  A very agreeable

man.  I wondered why he called.  When my husband came home and looked

over the cards, he said he had a cotton claim.  A real southerner.

Perhaps you might know him if I could think of his name.  Yes, here's his

card--Louisiana."



Laura took the card, looked at it intently till she was sure of the

address, and then laid it down, with,



"No, he is no friend of ours."



That afternoon, Laura wrote and dispatched the following note.  It was in

a round hand, unlike her flowing style, and it was directed to a number

and street in Georgetown:--



     "A Lady at Senator Dilworthy's would like to see Col. George Selby,

     on business connected with the Cotton Claims.  Can he call Wednesday

     at three o'clock P. M.?"



On Wednesday at 3 P. M, no one of the family was likely to be in the

house except Laura.









CHAPTER XXXIX.



Col. Selby had just come to Washington, and taken lodgings in Georgetown.

His business was to get pay for some cotton that was destroyed during the

war.  There were many others in Washington on the same errand, some of

them with claims as difficult to establish as his.  A concert of action

was necessary, and he was not, therefore, at all surprised to receive the

note from a lady asking him to call at Senator Dilworthy's.



At a little after three on Wednesday he rang the bell of the Senator's

residence.  It was a handsome mansion on the Square opposite the

President's house.  The owner must be a man of great wealth, the Colonel

thought; perhaps, who knows, said he with a smile, he may have got some

of my cotton in exchange for salt and quinine after the capture of New

Orleans.  As this thought passed through his mind he was looking at the

remarkable figure of the Hero of New Orleans, holding itself by main

strength from sliding off the back of the rearing bronze horse, and

lifting its hat in the manner of one who acknowledges the playing of that

martial air: "See, the Conquering Hero Comes!"  "Gad," said the Colonel

to himself, "Old Hickory ought to get down and give his seat to Gen.

Sutler--but they'd have to tie him on."



Laura was in the drawing room.  She heard the bell, she heard the steps

in the hall, and the emphatic thud of the supporting cane.  She had risen

from her chair and was leaning against the piano, pressing her left hand

against the violent beating of her heart.  The door opened and the

Colonel entered, standing in the full light of the opposite window.

Laura was more in the shadow and stood for an instant, long enough for

the Colonel to make the inward observation that she was a magnificent

Woman.  She then advanced a step.



"Col. Selby, is it not?"



The Colonel staggered back, caught himself by a chair, and turned towards

her a look of terror.



"Laura?  My God!"



"Yes, your wife!"



"Oh, no, it can't be.  How came you here?  I thought you were--"



"You thought I was dead?  You thought you were rid of me?  Not so long as

you live, Col. Selby, not so long as you live;" Laura in her passion was

hurried on to say.



No man had ever accused Col. Selby of cowardice.  But he was a coward

before this woman.  May be he was not the man he once was.  Where was his

coolness?  Where was his sneering, imperturbable manner, with which he

could have met, and would have met, any woman he had wronged, if he had

only been forewarned.  He felt now that he must temporize, that he must

gain time.  There was danger in Laura's tone.  There was something

frightful in her calmness.  Her steady eyes seemed to devour him.



"You have ruined my life," she said; "and I was so young, so ignorant,

and loved you so.  You betrayed me, and left me mocking me and trampling

me into the dust, a soiled cast-off.  You might better have killed me

then.  Then I should not have hated you."



"Laura," said the Colonel, nerving himself, but still pale, and speaking

appealingly, "don't say that.  Reproach me.  I deserve it.  I was a

scoundrel.  I was everything monstrous.  But your beauty made me crazy.

You are right.  I was a brute in leaving you as I did.  But what could I

do?  I was married, and--"



"And your wife still lives?" asked Laura, bending a little forward in her

eagerness.



The Colonel noticed the action, and he almost said "no," but he thought

of the folly of attempting concealment.



"Yes.  She is here."



What little color had wandered back into Laura's face forsook it again.

Her heart stood still, her strength seemed going from her limbs.  Her

last hope was gone.  The room swam before her for a moment, and the

Colonel stepped towards her, but she waved him back, as hot anger again

coursed through her veins, and said,



"And you dare come with her, here, and tell me of it, here and mock me

with it!  And you think I will have it; George?  You think I will let you

live with that woman?  You think I am as powerless as that day I fell

dead at your feet?"



She raged now.  She was in a tempest of excitement.  And she advanced

towards him with a threatening mien.  She would kill me if she could,

thought the Colonel; but he thought at the same moment, how beautiful she

is.  He had recovered his head now.  She was lovely when he knew her,

then a simple country girl, Now she was dazzling, in the fullness of ripe

womanhood, a superb creature, with all the fascination that a woman of

the world has for such a man as Col. Selby.  Nothing of this was lost on

him.  He stepped quickly to her, grasped both her hands in his, and said,



"Laura, stop!  think!  Suppose I loved you yet!  Suppose I hated my fate!

What can I do?  I am broken by the war.  I have lost everything almost.

I had as lief be dead and done with it."



The Colonel spoke with a low remembered voice that thrilled through

Laura.  He was looking into her eyes as he had looked  in those old days,

when no birds of all those that sang in the groves where they walked sang

a note of warning.  He was wounded.  He had been punished.  Her strength

forsook her with her rage, and she sank upon a chair, sobbing,



"Oh!  my God, I thought I hated him!"



The Colonel knelt beside her.  He took her hand and she let him keep it.

She, looked down into his face, with a pitiable tenderness, and said in a

weak voice.



"And you do love me a little?"



The Colonel vowed and protested.  He kissed her hand and her lips.  He

swore his false soul into perdition.



She wanted love, this woman.  Was not her love for George Selby deeper

than any other woman's could be?  Had she not a right to him?  Did he

not belong to her by virtue of her overmastering passion?  His wife--she

was not his wife, except by the law.  She could not be.  Even with the

law she could have no right to stand between two souls that were one.

It was an infamous condition in society that George should be tied to

her.



Laura thought this, believed it; because she desired to believe it.  She

came to it as an original propositions founded an the requirements of her

own nature.  She may have heard, doubtless she had, similar theories that

were prevalent at that day, theories of the tyranny of marriage and of

the freedom of marriage.  She had even heard women lecturers say, that

marriage should only continue so long as it pleased either party to it--

for a year, or a month, or a day.  She had not given much heed to this,

but she saw its justice now in a dash of revealing desire.  It must be

right.  God would not have permitted her to love George Selby as she did,

and him to love her, if it was right for society to raise up a barrier

between them.  He belonged to her.  Had he not confessed it himself?



Not even the religious atmosphere of Senator Dilworthy's house had been

sufficient to instill into Laura that deep Christian principle which had

been somehow omitted in her training.  Indeed in that very house had she

not heard women, prominent before the country and besieging Congress,

utter sentiments that fully justified the course she was marking out for

herself.



They were seated now, side by side, talking with more calmness.  Laura

was happy, or thought she was.  But it was that feverish sort of

happiness which is snatched out of the black shadow of falsehood, and is

at the moment recognized as fleeting and perilous, and indulged

tremblingly.  She loved.  She was loved.  That is happiness certainly.

And the black past and the troubled present and the uncertain future

could not snatch that from her.



What did they say as they sat there?  What nothings do people usually say

in such circumstances, even if they are three-score and ten?  It was

enough for Laura to hear his voice and be near him.  It was enough for

him to be near her, and avoid committing himself as much as he could.

Enough for him was the present also.  Had there not always been some way

out of such scrapes?



And yet Laura could not be quite content without prying into tomorrow.

How could the Colonel manage to free himself from his wife?  Would it be

long?  Could he not go into some State where it would not take much time?

He could not say exactly.  That they must think of.  That they must talk

over.  And so on.  Did this seem like a damnable plot to Laura against

the life, maybe, of a sister, a woman like herself?  Probably not.

It was right that this man should be hers, and there were some obstacles

in the way.  That was all.  There are as good reasons for bad actions as

for good ones,--to those who commit them.  When one has broken the tenth

commandment, the others are not of much account.



Was it unnatural, therefore, that when George Selby departed, Laura

should watch him from the window, with an almost joyful heart as he went

down the sunny square?  "I shall see him to-morrow," she said," and the

next day, and the next.  He is mine now."



"Damn the woman," said the Colonel as he picked his way down the steps.

"Or," he added, as his thoughts took a new turn, "I wish my wife was in

New Orleans."









CHAPTER XL.



          Open your ears; for which of you will stop,

          The vent of hearing when loud Rumor speaks?

          I, from the orient to the drooping west,

          Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold

          The acts commenced on this ball of earth:

          Upon my tongues continual slanders ride;

          The which in every, language I pronounce,

          Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.



                                             King Henry IV.



As may be readily believed, Col. Beriah Sellers was by this time one of

the best known men in Washington.  For the first time in his life his

talents had a fair field.



He was now at the centre of the manufacture of gigantic schemes,

of speculations of all sorts, of political and social gossip.

The atmosphere was full of little and big rumors and of vast, undefined

expectations.  Everybody was in haste, too, to push on his private plan,

and feverish in his haste, as if in constant apprehension that tomorrow

would be Judgment Day.  Work while Congress is in session, said the

uneasy spirit, for in the recess there is no work and no device.



The Colonel enjoyed this bustle and confusion amazingly; he thrived in

the air of-indefinite expectation.  All his own schemes took larger shape

and more misty and majestic proportions; and in this congenial air, the

Colonel seemed even to himself to expand into something large and

mysterious.  If he respected himself before, he almost worshipped Beriah

Sellers now, as a superior being.  If he could have chosen an official

position out of the highest, he would have been embarrassed in the

selection.  The presidency of the republic seemed too limited and cramped

in the constitutional restrictions.  If he could have been Grand Llama of

the United States, that might have come the nearest to his idea of a

position.  And next to that he would have luxuriated in the irresponsible

omniscience of the Special Correspondent.



Col. Sellers knew the President very well, and had access to his presence

when officials were kept cooling their heels in the Waiting-room.  The

President liked to hear the Colonel talk, his voluble ease was a

refreshment after the decorous dullness of men who only talked business

and government, and everlastingly expounded their notions of justice and

the distribution of patronage.  The Colonel was as much a lover of

farming and of horses as Thomas Jefferson was.  He talked to the

President by the hour about his magnificent stud, and his plantation at

Hawkeye, a kind of principality--he represented it.  He urged the

President to pay him a visit during the recess, and see his stock farm.



"The President's table is well enough," he used to say, to the loafers

who gathered about him at Willard's, "well enough for a man on a salary,

but God bless my soul, I should like him to see a little old-fashioned

hospitality--open house, you know.  A person seeing me at home might

think I paid no attention to what was in the house, just let things flow

in and out.  He'd be mistaken.  What I look to is quality, sir.  The

President has variety enough, but the quality!  Vegetables of course you

can't expect here.  I'm very particular about mine.  Take celery, now--

there's only one spot in this country where celery will grow.  But I an

surprised about the wines.  I should think they were manufactured in the

New York Custom House.  I must send the President some from my cellar.

I was really mortified the other day at dinner to see Blacque Bey leave

his standing in the glasses."



When the Colonel first came to Washington he had thoughts of taking the

mission to Constantinople, in order to be on the spot to look after the

dissemination, of his Eye Water, but as that invention; was not yet quite

ready, the project shrank a little in the presence of vaster schemes.

Besides he felt that he could do the country more good by remaining at

home.  He was one of the Southerners who were constantly quoted as

heartily "accepting the situation."



"I'm whipped," he used to say with a jolly laugh, "the government was too

many for me; I'm cleaned out, done for, except my plantation and private

mansion.  We played for a big thing, and lost it, and I don't whine, for

one.  I go for putting the old flag on all the vacant lots.  I said to

the President, says I, 'Grant, why don't you take Santo Domingo, annex

the whole thing, and settle the bill afterwards.  That's my way.  I'd,

take the job to manage Congress.  The South would come into it.  You've

got to conciliate the South, consolidate the two debts, pay 'em off in

greenbacks, and go ahead.  That's my notion.  Boutwell's got the right

notion about the value of paper, but he lacks courage. I should like to

run the treasury department about six months.  I'd make things plenty,

and business look up.'"



The Colonel had access to the departments.  He knew all the senators and

representatives, and especially, the lobby.  He was consequently a great

favorite in Newspaper Row, and was often lounging in the offices there,

dropping bits of private, official information, which were immediately,

caught up and telegraphed all over the country.  But it need to surprise

even the Colonel when he read it, it was embellished to that degree that

he hardly recognized it, and the hint was not lost on him.  He began to

exaggerate his heretofore simple conversation to suit the newspaper

demand.



People used to wonder in the winters of 187- and 187-, where the

"Specials" got that remarkable information with which they every morning

surprised the country, revealing the most secret intentions of the

President and his cabinet, the private thoughts of political leaders,

the hidden meaning of every movement.  This information was furnished by

Col. Sellers.



When he was asked, afterwards, about the stolen copy of the Alabama

Treaty which got into the "New York Tribune," he only looked mysterious,

and said that neither he nor Senator Dilworthy knew anything about it.

But those whom he was in the habit of meeting occasionally felt almost

certain that he did know.



It must not be supposed that the Colonel in his general patriotic labors

neglected his own affairs.  The Columbus River Navigation Scheme absorbed

only a part of his time, so he was enabled to throw quite a strong

reserve force of energy into the Tennessee Land plan, a vast enterprise

commensurate with his abilities, and in the prosecution of which he was

greatly aided by Mr. Henry Brierly, who was buzzing about the capitol and

the hotels day and night, and making capital for it in some mysterious

way.



"We must create, a public opinion," said Senator Dilworthy.  "My only

interest in it is a public one, and if the country wants the institution,

Congress will have to yield."



It may have been after a conversation between the Colonel and Senator

Dilworthy that the following special despatch was sent to a New York

newspaper:



     "We understand that a philanthropic plan is on foot in relation to

     the colored race that will, if successful, revolutionize the whole

     character of southern industry.  An experimental institution is in

     contemplation in Tennessee which will do for that state what the

     Industrial School at Zurich did for Switzerland.  We learn that

     approaches have been made to the heirs of the late Hon. Silas

     Hawkins of Missouri, in reference to a lease of a portion of their

     valuable property in East Tennessee.  Senator Dilworthy, it is

     understood, is inflexibly opposed to any arrangement that will not

     give the government absolute control.  Private interests must give

     way to the public good.  It is to be hoped that Col. Sellers, who

     represents the heirs, will be led to see the matter in this light."



When Washington Hawkins read this despatch, he went to the Colonel in

some anxiety.  He was for a lease, he didn't want to surrender anything.

What did he think the government would offer?  Two millions?



"May be three, may be four," said the Colonel, "it's worth more than the

bank of England."



"If they will not lease," said Washington, "let 'em make it two millions

for an undivided half.  I'm not going to throw it away, not the whole of

it."



Harry told the Colonel that they must drive the thing through, he

couldn't be dallying round Washington when Spring opened.  Phil wanted

him, Phil had a great thing on hand up in Pennsylvania.



"What is that?" inquired the Colonel, always ready to interest himself in

anything large.



"A mountain of coal; that's all.  He's going to run a tunnel into it in

the Spring."



"Does he want any capital?", asked the Colonel, in the tone of a man who

is given to calculating carefully before he makes an investment.



"No.  Old man Bolton's behind him.  He has capital, but I judged that he

wanted my experience in starting."



"If he wants me, tell him I'll come, after Congress adjourns.  I should

like to give him a little lift.  He lacks enterprise--now, about that

Columbus River.  He doesn't see his chances.  But he's a good fellow, and

you can tell him that Sellers won't go back on him."



"By the way," asked Harry, "who is that rather handsome party that's

hanging 'round Laura?  I see him with her everywhere, at the Capitol, in

the horse cars, and he comes to Dilworthy's.  If he weren't lame, I

should think he was going to run off with her."



"Oh, that's nothing.  Laura knows her business.  He has a cotton claim.

Used to be at Hawkeye during the war.



"Selby's his name, was a Colonel.  Got a wife and family.

Very respectable people, the Selby's."



"Well, that's all right," said Harry, "if it's business.  But if a woman

looked at me as I've seen her at Selby, I should understand it.  And it's

talked about, I can tell you."



Jealousy had no doubt sharpened this young gentleman's observation.

Laura could not have treated him with more lofty condescension if she had

been the Queen of Sheba, on a royal visit to the great republic.  And he

resented it, and was "huffy" when he was with her, and ran her errands,

and brought her gossip, and bragged of his intimacy with the lovely

creature among the fellows at Newspaper Row.



Laura's life was rushing on now in the full stream of intrigue and

fashionable dissipation.  She was conspicuous at the balls of the fastest

set, and was suspected of being present at those doubtful suppers that

began late and ended early.  If Senator Dilworthy remonstrated about

appearances, she had a way of silencing him.  Perhaps she had some hold

on him, perhaps she was necessary to his plan for ameliorating the

condition the tube colored race.



She saw Col. Selby, when the public knew and when it did not know.

She would see him, whatever excuses he made, and however he avoided her.

She was urged on by a fever of love and hatred and jealousy, which

alternately possessed her.  Sometimes she petted him, and coaxed him and

tried all her fascinations.  And again she threatened him and reproached

him.  What was he doing?  Why had he taken no steps to free himself?

Why didn't he send his wife home?  She should have money soon.

They could go to Europe--anywhere.  What did she care for talk?



And he promised, and lied, and invented fresh excuses for delay, like a

cowardly gambler and roue as he was, fearing to break with her, and half

the time unwilling to give her up.



"That woman doesn't know what fear is," he said to himself, "and she

watches me like a hawk."



He told his wife that this woman was a lobbyist, whom he had to tolerate

and use in getting through his claims, and that he should pay her and

have done with her, when he succeeded.









CHAPTER XLI.



Henry Brierly was at the Dilwortby's constantly and on such terms of

intimacy that he came and went without question.  The Senator was not an

inhospitable man, he liked to have guests in his house, and Harry's gay

humor and rattling way entertained him; for even the most devout men and

busy statesmen must have hours of relaxation.



Harry himself believed that he was of great service in the University

business, and that the success of the scheme depended upon him to a great

degree.  He spent many hours in talking it over with the Senator after

dinner.  He went so far as to consider whether it would be worth his

while to take the professorship of civil engineering in the new

institution.



But it was not the Senator's society nor his dinners--at which this

scapegrace remarked that there was too much grace and too little wine--

which attracted him to the horse.  The fact was the poor fellow hung

around there day after day for the chance of seeing Laura for five

minutes at a time.  For her presence at dinner he would endure the long

bore of the Senator's talk afterwards, while Laura was off at some

assembly, or excused herself on the plea of fatigue.  Now and then he

accompanied her to some reception, and rarely, on off nights, he was

blessed with her company in the parlor, when he sang, and was chatty and

vivacious and performed a hundred little tricks of imitation and

ventriloquism, and made himself as entertaining as a man could be.



It puzzled him not a little that all his fascinations seemed to go for so

little with Laura; it was beyond his experience with women.  Sometimes

Laura was exceedingly kind and petted him a little, and took the trouble

to exert her powers of pleasing, and to entangle him deeper and deeper.

But this, it angered him afterwards to think, was in private; in public

she was beyond his reach, and never gave occasion to the suspicion that

she had any affair with him.  He was never permitted to achieve the

dignity of a serious flirtation with her in public.



"Why do you treat me so?" he once said, reproachfully.



"Treat you how?" asked Laura in a sweet voice, lifting her eyebrows.



"You know well enough.  You let other fellows monopolize you in society,

and you are as indifferent to me as if we were strangers."



"Can I help it if they are attentive, can I be rude?  But we are such old

friends, Mr. Brierly, that I didn't suppose you would be jealous."



"I think I must be a very old friend, then, by your conduct towards me.

By the same rule I should judge that Col. Selby must be very new."



Laura looked up quickly, as if about to return an indignant answer to

such impertinence, but she only said, "Well, what of Col. Selby, sauce-

box?"



"Nothing, probably, you'll care for.  Your being with him so much is the

town talk, that's all?"



"What do people say?" asked Laura calmly.



"Oh, they say a good many things.  You are offended, though, to have me

speak of it?"



"Not in the least.  You are my true friend.  I feel that I can trust you.

You wouldn't deceive me, Harry?"  throwing into her eyes a look of trust

and tenderness that melted away all his petulance and distrust.  "What do

they say?"



"Some say that you've lost your head about him; others that you don't

care any more for him than you do for a dozen others, but that he is

completely fascinated with you and about to desert his wife; and others

say it is nonsense to suppose you would entangle yourself with a married

man, and that your intimacy only arises from the matter of the cotton,

claims, for which he wants your influence with Dilworthy.  But you know

everybody is talked about more or less in Washington.  I shouldn't care;

but I wish you wouldn't have so much to do with Selby, Laura," continued

Harry, fancying that he was now upon such terms that his, advice, would

be heeded.



"And you believed these slanders?"



"I don't believe anything against you, Laura, but Col. Selby does not

mean you any good.  I know you wouldn't be seen with him if you knew his

reputation."



"Do you know him?"  Laura asked, as indifferently as she could.



"Only a little.  I was at his lodgings' in Georgetown a day or two ago,

with Col. Sellers.  Sellers wanted to talk with him about some patent

remedy he has, Eye Water, or something of that sort, which he wants to

introduce into Europe.  Selby is going abroad very soon."



Laura started; in spite of her self-control.



"And his wife!--Does he take his family?  Did you see his wife?"



"Yes.  A dark little woman, rather worn--must have been pretty once

though.  Has three or four children, one of them a baby.  They'll all

go of course.  She said she should be glad enough to get away from

Washington.  You know Selby has got his claim allowed, and they say he

has had a run, of luck lately at Morrissey's."



Laura heard all this in a kind of stupor, looking straight at Harry,

without seeing him.  Is it possible, she was thinking, that this base

wretch, after, all his promises, will take his wife and children and

leave me?  Is it possible the town is saying all these things about me?

And a look of bitterness coming into her face--does the fool think he can

escape so?



"You are angry with me, Laura," said Harry, not comprehending in the

least what was going on in her mind.



"Angry?" she said, forcing herself to come back to his presence.

"With you?  Oh no.  I'm angry with the cruel world, which, pursues an

independent woman as it never does a man.  I'm grateful to you Harry;

I'm grateful to you for telling me of that odious man."



And she rose from her chair and gave him her pretty hand, which the silly

fellow took, and kissed and clung to.  And he said many silly things,

before she disengaged herself gently, and left him, saying it was time to

dress, for dinner.



And Harry went away, excited, and a little hopeful, but only a little.

The happiness was only a gleam, which departed and left him thoroughly,

miserable.  She never would love him, and she was going to the devil,

besides.  He couldn't shut his eyes to what he saw, nor his ears to what

he heard of her.



What had come over this trilling young lady-killer?  It was a pity to see

such a gay butterfly broken on a wheel.  Was there something good in him,

after all, that had been touched?  He was in fact madly in love with this

woman.



It is not for us to analyze the passion and say whether it was a worthy

one.  It absorbed his whole nature and made him wretched enough.  If he

deserved punishment, what more would you have?  Perhaps this love was

kindling a new heroism in him.



He saw the road on which Laura was going clearly enough, though he did

not believe the worst he heard of her.  He  loved her too passionately to

credit that for a moment.  And it seemed to him that if he could compel

her to recognize her position, and his own devotion, she might love him,

and  that he could save her.  His love was so far ennobled, and become a

very different thing from its beginning in Hawkeye.  Whether he ever

thought that if he could save her from ruin, he could give her up

himself, is doubtful.  Such a pitch of virtue does not occur often in

real life, especially in such natures as Harry's, whose generosity and

unselfishness were matters of temperament rather than habits or

principles.



He wrote a long letter to Laura, an incoherent, passionate letter,

pouring out his love as he could not do in her presence, and warning her

as plainly as he dared of the dangers that surrounded her, and the risks

she ran of compromising herself in many ways.



Laura read the letter, with a little sigh may be, as she thought of other

days, but with contempt also, and she put it into the fire with the

thought, "They are all alike."



Harry was in the habit of writing to Philip freely, and boasting also

about his doings, as he could not help doing and remain himself.

Mixed up with his own exploits, and his daily triumphs as a lobbyist,

especially in the matter of the new University, in which Harry was to

have something handsome, were amusing sketches of Washington society,

hints about Dilworthy, stories about Col. Sellers, who had become a well-

known character, and wise remarks upon the machinery of private

legislation for the public-good, which greatly entertained Philip in his

convalescence.



Laura's name occurred very often in these letters, at first in casual

mention as the belle of the season, carrying everything before her with

her wit and beauty, and then more seriously, as if Harry did not exactly

like so much general admiration of her, and was a little nettled by her

treatment of him.



This was so different from Harry's usual tone about women, that Philip

wondered a good deal over it.  Could it be possible that he was seriously

affected?  Then came stories about Laura, town talk, gossip which Harry

denied the truth of indignantly; but he was evidently uneasy, and at

length wrote in such miserable spirits that Philip asked him squarely

what the trouble was; was he in love?



Upon this, Harry made a clean breast of it, and told Philip all he knew

about the Selby affair, and Laura's treatment of him, sometimes

encouraging him--and then throwing him off, and finally his belief that

she would go, to the bad if something was not done to arouse her from her

infatuation.  He wished Philip was in Washington.  He knew Laura, and she

had a great respect for his character, his opinions, his judgment.

Perhaps he, as an uninterested person whom she would have some

confidence, and as one of the public, could say some thing to her that

would show her where she stood.



Philip saw the situation clearly enough.  Of Laura he knew not much,

except that she was a woman of uncommon fascination, and he thought from

what he had seen of her in Hawkeye, her conduct towards him and towards

Harry, of not too much principle.  Of course he knew nothing of her

history; he knew nothing seriously against her, and if Harry was

desperately enamored of her, why should he not win her if he could.

If, however, she had already become what Harry uneasily felt she might

become, was it not his duty to go to the rescue of his friend and try to

save him from any rash act on account of a woman that might prove to be

entirely unworthy of him; for trifler and visionary as he was, Harry

deserved a better fate than this.



Philip determined to go to Washington and see for himself.  He had other

reasons also.  He began to know enough of Mr. Bolton's affairs to be

uneasy.  Pennybacker had been there several times during the winter, and

he suspected that he was involving Mr. Bolton in some doubtful scheme.

Pennybacker was in Washington, and Philip thought he might perhaps find

out something about him, and his plans, that would be of service to Mr.

Bolton.



Philip had enjoyed his winter very well, for a man with his arm broken

and his head smashed.  With two such nurses as Ruth and Alice, illness

seemed to him rather a nice holiday, and every moment of his

convalescence had been precious and all too fleeting.  With a young

fellow of the habits of Philip, such injuries cannot be counted on to

tarry long, even for the purpose of love-making, and Philip found himself

getting strong with even disagreeable rapidity.



During his first weeks of pain and weakness, Ruth was unceasing in her

ministrations; she quietly took charge of him, and with a gentle firmness

resisted all attempts of Alice or any one else to share to any great

extent the burden with her.  She was clear, decisive and peremptory in

whatever she did; but often when Philip, opened his eyes in those first

days of suffering and found her standing by his bedside, he saw a look of

tenderness in her anxious face that quickened his already feverish pulse,

a look that, remained in his heart long after he closed his eyes.

Sometimes he felt her hand on his forehead, and did not open his eyes for

fear she world take it away.  He watched for her coming to his chamber;

he could distinguish her light footstep from all others.  If this is what

is meant by women practicing medicine, thought Philip to himself, I like

it.



"Ruth," said he one day when he was getting to be quite himself,

"I believe in it?"



"Believe in what?"



"Why, in women physicians."



"Then, I'd better call in Mrs. Dr. Longstreet."



"Oh, no.  One will do, one at a time.  I think I should be well tomorrow,

if I thought I should never have any other."



"Thy physician thinks thee mustn't talk, Philip," said Ruth putting her

finger on his lips.



"But, Ruth, I want to tell you that I should wish I never had got well

if--"



"There, there, thee must not talk.  Thee is wandering again," and Ruth

closed his lips, with a smile on her own that broadened into a merry

laugh as she ran away.



Philip was not weary, however, of making these attempts, he rather

enjoyed it.  But whenever he inclined to be sentimental, Ruth would cut

him off, with some such gravely conceived speech as, "Does thee think

that thy physician will take advantage of the condition of a man who is

as weak as thee is?  I will call Alice, if thee has any dying confessions

to make."



As Philip convalesced, Alice more and more took Ruth's place as his

entertainer, and read to him by the hour, when he did not want to talk--

to talk about Ruth, as he did a good deal of the time.  Nor was this

altogether unsatisfactory to Philip.  He was always happy and contented

with Alice.  She was the most restful person he knew.  Better informed

than Ruth and with a much more varied culture, and bright and

sympathetic, he was never weary of her company, if he was not greatly

excited by it.  She had upon his mind that peaceful influence that Mrs.

Bolton had when, occasionally, she sat by his bedside with her work.

Some people have this influence, which is like an emanation.  They bring

peace to a house, they diffuse serene content in a room full of mixed

company, though they may say very little, and are apparently, unconscious

of their own power;



Not that Philip did not long for Ruth's presence all the same.  Since he

was well enough to be about the house, she was busy again with her

studies.  Now and then her teasing humor came again.  She always had a

playful shield against his sentiment.  Philip used sometimes to declare

that she had no sentiment; and then he doubted if he should be pleased

with her after all if she were at all sentimental; and he rejoiced that

she had, in such matters what he called the airy grace of sanity.  She

was the most gay serious person he ever saw.



Perhaps he waw not so much at rest or so contented with her as with

Alice.  But then he loved her.  And what have rest and contentment to do

with love?









CHAPTER XLIL



Mr. Buckstone's campaign was brief--much briefer than he supposed it

would be.  He began it purposing to win Laura without being won himself;

but his experience was that of all who had fought on that field before

him; he diligently continued his effort to win her, but he presently

found that while as yet he could not feel entirely certain of having won

her, it was very manifest that she had won him.  He had made an able

fight, brief as it was, and that at least was to his credit.  He was in

good company, now; he walked in a leash of conspicuous captives.  These

unfortunates followed Laura helplessly, for whenever she took a prisoner

he remained her slave henceforth.  Sometimes they chafed in their

bondage; sometimes they tore themselves free and said their serfdom was

ended; but sooner or later they always came back penitent and worshiping.

Laura pursued her usual course: she encouraged Mr. Buckstone by turns,

and by turns she harassed him; she exalted him to the clouds at one time,

and at another she dragged him down again.  She constituted him chief

champion of the Knobs University bill, and he accepted the position, at

first reluctantly, but later as a valued means of serving her--he even

came to look upon it as a piece of great good fortune, since it brought

him into such frequent contact with her.



Through him she learned that the Hon. Mr. Trollop was a bitter enemy of

her bill.  He urged her not to attempt to influence Mr. Trollop in any

way, and explained that whatever she might attempt in that direction

would surely be used against her and with damaging effect.



She at first said she knew Mr. Trollop, "and was aware that he had a

Blank-Blank;"--[**Her private figure of speech for Brother--or Son-in-

law]--but Mr. Buckstone said that he was not able to conceive what so

curious a phrase as Blank-Blank might mean, and had no wish to pry into

the matter, since it was probably private, he "would nevertheless venture

the blind assertion that nothing would answer in this particular case and

during this particular session but to be exceedingly wary and keep clear

away from Mr. Trollop; any other course would be fatal."



It seemed that nothing could be done.  Laura was seriously troubled.

Everything was looking well, and yet it was plain that one vigorous and

determined enemy might eventually succeed in overthrowing all her plans.

A suggestion came into her mind presently and she said:



"Can't you fight against his great Pension bill and, bring him to terms?"



"Oh, never; he and I are sworn brothers on that measure; we work in

harness and are very loving--I do everything I possibly can for him

there.  But I work with might and main against his Immigration bill,

--as pertinaciously and as vindictively, indeed, as he works against our

University.  We hate each other through half a conversation and are all

affection through the other half.  We understand each other.  He is an

admirable worker outside the capitol; he will do more for the Pension

bill than any other man could do; I wish he would make the great speech

on it which he wants to make--and then I would make another and we would

be safe."



"Well if he wants to make a great speech why doesn't he do it?"



Visitors interrupted the conversation and Mr. Buckstone took his leave.

It was not of the least moment to Laura that her question had not been

answered, inasmuch as it concerned a thing which did not interest her;

and yet, human being like, she thought she would have liked to know.

An opportunity occurring presently, she put the same question to another

person and got an answer that satisfied her.  She pondered a good while

that night, after she had gone to bed, and when she finally turned over,

to, go to sleep, she had thought out a new scheme.  The next evening at

Mrs. Gloverson's party, she said to Mr. Buckstone:



"I want Mr. Trollop to make his great speech on the Pension bill."



"Do you?  But you remember I was interrupted, and did not explain

to you--"



"Never mind, I know.  You must' make him make that speech.  I very.

particularly desire, it."



"Oh, it is easy, to say make him do it, but how am I to make him!"



"It is perfectly easy; I have thought it all out."



She then went into the details.  At length Mr. Buckstone said:



"I see now.  I can manage it, I am sure.  Indeed I wonder he never

thought of it himself--there are no end of precedents.  But how is this

going to benefit you, after I have managed it?  There is where the

mystery lies."



"But I will take care of that.  It will benefit me a great deal."



"I only wish I could see how; it is the oddest freak.  You seem to go the

furthest around to get at a thing--but you are in earnest, aren't you?"



"Yes I am, indeed."



"Very well, I will do it--but why not tell me how you imagine it is going

to help you?"



"I will, by and by.--Now there is nobody talking to him.  Go straight and

do it, there's a good fellow."



A moment or two later the two sworn friends of the Pension bill were

talking together, earnestly, and seemingly unconscious of the moving

throng about them.  They talked an hour, and then Mr. Buckstone came back

and said:



"He hardly fancied it at first, but he fell in love with it after a bit.

And we have made a compact, too.  I am to keep his secret and he is to

spare me, in future, when he gets ready to denounce the supporters of the

University bill--and I can easily believe he will keep his word on this

occasion."



A fortnight elapsed, and the University bill had gathered to itself many

friends, meantime.  Senator Dilworthy began to think the harvest was

ripe.  He conferred with Laura privately.  She was able to tell him

exactly how the House would vote.  There was a majority--the bill would

pass, unless weak members got frightened at the last, and deserted--a

thing pretty likely to occur.  The Senator said:



"I wish we had one more good strong man.  Now Trollop ought to be on our

side, for he is a friend of the negro.  But be is against us, and is our

bitterest opponent.  If he would simply vote No, but keep quiet and not

molest us, I would feel perfectly cheerful and content.  But perhaps

there is no use in thinking of that."



"Why I laid a little plan for his benefit two weeks ago.  I think he will

be tractable, maybe.  He is to come here tonight."



"Look out for him, my child!  He means mischief, sure.  It is said that

he claims to know of improper practices having been used in the interest

of this bill, and he thinks be sees a chance to make a great sensation

when the bill comes up.  Be wary.  Be very, very careful, my dear.

Do your very-ablest talking, now.  You can convince a man of anything,

when you try.  You must convince him that if anything improper has been

done, you at least are ignorant of it and sorry for it.  And if you could

only persuade him out of his hostility to the bill, too--but don't overdo

the thing; don't seem too anxious, dear."



"I won't; I'll be ever so careful.  I'll talk as sweetly to him as if he

were my own child!  You may trust me--indeed you may."



The door-bell rang.



"That is the gentleman now," said Laura.  Senator Dilworthy retired to

his study.



Laura welcomed Mr. Trollop, a grave, carefully dressed and very

respectable looking man, with a bald head, standing collar and old

fashioned watch seals.



"Promptness is a virtue, Mr. Trollop, and I perceive that you have it.

You are always prompt with me."



"I always meet my engagements, of every kind, Miss Hawkins."



"It is a quality which is rarer in the world than it has been, I believe.

I wished to see you on business, Mr. Trollop."



"I judged so.  What can I do for you?"



"You know my bill--the Knobs University bill?"



"Ah, I believe it is your bill.  I had forgotten.  Yes, I know the bill."



"Well, would you mind telling me your opinion of it?"



"Indeed, since you seem to ask it without reserve, I am obliged to say

that I do not regard it favorably.  I have not seen the bill itself, but

from what I can hear, it--it--well, it has a bad look about it.  It--"



"Speak it out--never fear."



"Well, it--they say it contemplates a fraud upon the government."



"Well?" said Laura tranquilly.



"Well!  I say 'Well?' too."



"Well, suppose it were a fraud--which I feel able to deny--would it be

the first one?"



"You take a body's breath away!  Would you--did you wish me to vote for

it?  Was that what you wanted to see me about?"



"Your instinct is correct.  I did want you--I do want you to vote for

it."



"Vote for a fr--for a measure which is generally believed to be at least

questionable?  I am afraid we cannot come to an understanding, Miss

Hawkins."



"No, I am afraid not--if you have resumed your principles, Mr. Trollop."



"Did you send for we merely to insult me?  It is time for me to take my

leave, Miss Hawkins."



"No-wait a moment.  Don't be offended at a trifle.  Do not be offish and

unsociable.  The Steamship Subsidy bill was a fraud on the government.

You voted for it, Mr. Trollop, though you always opposed the measure

until after you had an interview one evening with a certain Mrs. McCarter

at her house.  She was my agent.  She was acting for me.  Ah, that is

right--sit down again.  You can be sociable, easily enough if you have a

mind to.  Well?  I am waiting.  Have you nothing to say?"



"Miss Hawkins, I voted for that bill because when I came to examine into

it--"



"Ah yes.  When you came to examine into it.  Well, I only want you to

examine into my bill.  Mr. Trollop, you would not sell your vote on that

subsidy bill--which was perfectly right--but you accepted of some of the

stock, with the understanding that it was to stand in your brother-in-

law's name."



"There is no pr--I mean, this is, utterly groundless, Miss Hawkins."  But

the gentleman seemed somewhat uneasy, nevertheless.



"Well, not entirely so, perhaps.  I and a person whom we will call Miss

Blank (never mind the real name,) were in a closet at your elbow all the

while."



Mr. Trollop winced--then he said with dignity:



"Miss Hawkins is it possible that you were capable of such a thing as

that?"



"It was bad; I confess that.  It was bad.  Almost as bad as selling one's

vote for--but I forget; you did not sell your vote--you only accepted a

little trifle, a small token of esteem, for your brother-in-law.  Oh, let

us come out and be frank with each other: I know you, Mr. Trollop.

I have met you on business three or four times; true, I never offered to

corrupt your principles--never hinted such a thing; but always when I had

finished sounding you, I manipulated you through an agent.  Let us be

frank.  Wear this comely disguise of virtue before the public--it will

count there; but here it is out of place.  My dear sir, by and by there

is going to be an investigation into that National Internal Improvement

Directors' Relief Measure of a few years ago, and you know very well that

you will be a crippled man, as likely as not, when it is completed."



"It cannot be shown that a man is a knave merely for owning that stock.

I am not distressed about the National Improvement Relief Measure."



"Oh indeed I am not trying to distress you.  I only wished, to make good

my assertion that I knew you.  Several of you gentlemen bought of that

stack (without paying a penny down) received dividends from it, (think of

the happy idea of receiving dividends, and very large ones, too, from

stock one hasn't paid for!) and all the while your names never appeared

in the transaction; if ever you took the stock at all, you took it in

other people's names.  Now you see, you had to know one of two things;

namely, you either knew that the idea of all this preposterous generosity

was to bribe you into future legislative friendship, or you didn't know

it.  That is to say, you had to be either a knave or a--well, a fool--

there was no middle ground.  You are not a fool, Mr. Trollop."



"Miss Hawking you flatter me.  But seriously, you do not forget that some

of the best and purest men in Congress took that stock in that way?"



"Did Senator Bland?"



"Well, no--I believe not."



"Of course you believe not.  Do you suppose he was ever approached, on

the subject?"



"Perhaps not."



"If you had approached him, for instance, fortified with the fact that

some of the best men in Congress, and the purest, etc., etc.; what would

have been the result?"



"Well, what WOULD have been the result?"



"He would have shown you the door!  For Mr. Blank is neither a knave nor

a fool.  There are other men in the Senate and the House whom no one

would have been hardy enough to approach with that Relief Stock in that

peculiarly generous way, but they are not of the class that you regard as

the best and purest.  No, I say I know you Mr. Trollop.  That is to say,

one may suggest a thing to Mr. Trollop which it would not do to suggest

to Mr. Blank.  Mr. Trollop, you are pledged to support the Indigent

Congressmen's Retroactive Appropriation which is to come up, either in

this or the next session.  You do not deny that, even in public.  The man

that will vote for that bill will break the eighth commandment in any

other way, sir!"



"But he will not vote for your corrupt measure, nevertheless, madam!"

exclaimed Mr. Trollop, rising from his seat in a passion.



"Ah, but he will.  Sit down again, and let me explain why.  Oh, come,

don't behave so.  It is very unpleasant.  Now be good, and you shall

have, the missing page of your great speech.  Here it is!"--and she

displayed a sheet of manuscript.



Mr. Trollop turned immediately back from the threshold.  It might have

been gladness that flashed into his face; it might have been something

else; but at any rate there was much astonishment mixed with it.



"Good!  Where did you get it?  Give it me!"



"Now there is no hurry.  Sit down; sit down and let us talk and be

friendly."



The gentleman wavered.  Then he said:



"No, this is only a subterfuge.  I will go.  It is not the missing page."



Laura tore off a couple of lines from the bottom of the sheet.



"Now," she said, "you will know whether this is the handwriting or not.

You know it is the handwriting.  Now if you will listen, you will know

that this must be the list of statistics which was to be the 'nub' of

your great effort, and the accompanying blast the beginning of the burst

of eloquence which was continued on the next page--and you will recognize

that there was where you broke down."



She read the page.  Mr. Trollop said:



"This is perfectly astounding.  Still, what is all this to me?  It is

nothing.  It does not concern me.  The speech is made, and there an end.

I did break down for a moment, and in a rather uncomfortable place, since

I had led up to those statistics with some grandeur; the hiatus was

pleasanter to the House and the galleries than it was to me.  But it is

no matter now.  A week has passed; the jests about it ceased three or

four days ago.  The, whole thing is a matter of indifference to me, Miss

Hawkins."



"But you apologized; and promised the statistics for next day.  Why

didn't you keep your promise."



"The matter was not of sufficient consequence.  The time was gone by to

produce an effect with them."



"But I hear that other friends of the Soldiers' Pension Bill desire them

very much.  I think you ought to let them have them."



"Miss Hawkins, this silly blunder of my copyist evidently has more

interest for you than it has for me.  I will send my private secretary to

you and let him discuss the subject with you at length."



"Did he copy your speech for you?"



"Of course he did.  Why all these questions?  Tell me--how did you get

hold of that page of manuscript?  That is the only thing that stirs a

passing interest in my mind."



"I'm coming to that."  Then she said, much as if she were talking to

herself: "It does seem like taking a deal of unnecessary pains, for a

body to hire another body to construct a great speech for him and then go

and get still another body to copy it before it can be read in the

House."



"Miss Hawkins, what do yo mean by such talk as that?"



"Why I am sure I mean no harm--no harm to anybody in the world.  I am

certain that I overheard the Hon. Mr. Buckstone either promise to write

your great speech for you or else get some other competent person to do

it."



"This is perfectly absurd, madam, perfectly absurd!" and Mr. Trollop

affected a laugh of derision.



"Why, the thing has occurred before now.  I mean that I have heard that

Congressmen have sometimes hired literary grubs to build speeches for

them.--Now didn't I overhear a conversation like that I spoke of?"



"Pshaw!  Why of course you may have overheard some such jesting nonsense.

But would one be in earnest about so farcical a thing?"



"Well if it was only a joke, why did you make a serious matter of it?

Why did you get the speech written for you, and then read it in the House

without ever having it copied?"



Mr. Trollop did not laugh this time; he seemed seriously perplexed.  He

said:



"Come, play out your jest, Miss Hawkins.  I can't understand what you are

contriving--but it seems to entertain you--so please, go on."



"I will, I assure you; but I hope to make the matter entertaining to you,

too.  Your private secretary never copied your speech."



"Indeed?  Really you seem to know my affairs better than I do myself."



"I believe I do.  You can't name your own amanuensis, Mr. Trollop."



"That is sad, indeed.  Perhaps Miss Hawkins can?"



"Yes, I can.  I wrote your speech myself, and you read it from my

manuscript.  There, now!"



Mr. Trollop did not spring to his feet and smite his brow with his hand

while a cold sweat broke out all over him and the color forsook his face

--no, he only said, "Good God!" and looked greatly astonished.



Laura handed him her commonplace-book and called his attention to the

fact that the handwriting there and the handwriting of this speech were

the same.  He was shortly convinced.  He laid the book aside and said,

composedly:



"Well, the wonderful tragedy is done, and it transpires that I am

indebted to you for my late eloquence.  What of it?  What was all this

for and what does it amount to after all?  What do you propose to do

about it?"



"Oh nothing.  It is only a bit of pleasantry.  When I overheard that

conversation I took an early opportunity to ask Mr. Buckstone if he knew

of anybody who might want a speech written--I had a friend, and so forth

and so on.  I was the friend, myself; I thought I might do you a good

turn then and depend on you to do me one by and by.  I never let Mr.

Buckstone have the speech till the last moment, and when you hurried off

to the House with it, you did not know there was a missing page, of

course, but I did.



"And now perhaps you think that if I refuse to support your bill, you

will make a grand exposure?"



"Well I had not thought of that.  I only kept back the page for the mere

fun of the thing; but since you mention it, I don't know but I might do

something if I were angry."



"My dear Miss Hawkins, if you were to give out that you composed my

speech, you know very well that people would say it was only your

raillery, your fondness for putting a victim in the pillory and amusing

the public at his expense.  It is too flimsy, Miss Hawkins, for a person

of your fine inventive talent--contrive an abler device than that.

Come!"



"It is easily done, Mr. Trollop.  I will hire a man, and pin this page on

his breast, and label it, 'The Missing Fragment of the Hon. Mr. Trollop's

Great Speech--which speech was written and composed by Miss Laura Hawkins

under a secret understanding for one hundred dollars--and the money has

not been paid.'  And I will pin round about it notes in my handwriting,

which I will procure from prominent friends of mine for the occasion;

also your printed speech in the Globe, showing the connection between its

bracketed hiatus and my Fragment; and I give you my word of honor that I

will stand that human bulletin board in the rotunda of the capitol and

make him stay there a week!  You see you are premature, Mr. Trollop, the

wonderful tragedy is not done yet, by any means.  Come, now, doesn't it

improve?"



Mr Trollop opened his eyes rather widely at this novel aspect of the

case.  He got up and walked the floor and gave himself a moment for

reflection.  Then he stopped and studied Laura's face a while, and ended

by saying:



"Well, I am obliged to believe yon would be reckless enough to do that."



"Then don't put me to the test, Mr. Trollop.  But let's drop the matter.

I have had my joke and you've borne the infliction becomingly enough.

It spoils a jest to harp on it after one has had one's laugh.  I would

much rather talk about my bill."



"So would I, now, my clandestine amanuensis.  Compared with some other

subjects, even your bill is a pleasant topic to discuss."



"Very good indeed!  I thought.  I could persuade you.  Now I am sure you

will be generous to the poor negro and vote for that bill."



"Yes, I feel more tenderly toward the oppressed colored man than I did.

Shall we bury the hatchet and be good friends and respect each other's

little secrets, on condition that I vote Aye on the measure?"



"With all my heart, Mr. Trollop.  I give you my word of that."



"It is a bargain.  But isn't there something else you could give me,

too?"



Laura looked at him inquiringly a moment, and then she comprehended.



"Oh, yes!  You may have it now.  I haven't any, more use for it."  She

picked up the page of manuscript, but she reconsidered her intention of

handing it to him, and said, "But never mind; I will keep it close; no

one shall see it; you shall have it as soon as your vote is recorded."



Mr. Trollop looked disappointed.  But presently made his adieux, and had

got as far as the hall, when something occurred to Laura.  She said to

herself, "I don't simply want his vote under compulsion--he might vote

aye, but work against the bill in secret, for revenge; that man is

unscrupulous enough to do anything.  I must have his hearty co-operation

as well as his vote.  There is only one way to get that."



She called him back, and said:



"I value your vote, Mr. Trollop, but I value your influence more.  You

are able to help a measure along in many ways, if you choose.  I want to

ask you to work for the bill as well as vote for it."



"It takes so much of one's time, Miss Hawkins--and time is money, you

know."



"Yes, I know it is--especially in Congress.  Now there is no use in you

and I dealing in pretenses and going at matters in round-about ways.

We know each other--disguises are nonsense.  Let us be plain.  I will

make it an object to you to work for the bill."



"Don't make it unnecessarily plain, please.  There are little proprieties

that are best preserved.  What do you propose?"



"Well, this."  She mentioned the names of several prominent Congressmen.



"Now," said she, "these gentlemen are to vote and work for the bill,

simply out of love for the negro--and out of pure generosity I have put

in a relative of each as a member of the University incorporation.  They

will handle a million or so of money, officially, but will receive no

salaries.  A larger number of statesmen are to, vote and work for the

bill--also out of love for the negro--gentlemen of but moderate

influence, these--and out of pure generosity I am to see that relatives

of theirs have positions in the University, with salaries, and good ones,

too.  You will vote and work for the bill, from mere affection for the

negro, and I desire to testify my gratitude becomingly.  Make free

choice.  Have you any friend whom you would like to present with a

salaried or unsalaried position in our institution?"



"Well, I have a brother-in-law--"



"That same old brother-in-law, you good unselfish provider!  I have heard

of him often, through my agents.  How regularly he does 'turn up,' to be

sure.  He could deal with those millions virtuously, and withal with

ability, too--but of course you would rather he had a salaried position?"



"Oh, no," said the gentleman, facetiously, "we are very humble, very

humble in our desires; we want no money; we labor solely, for our country

and require no reward but the luxury of an applauding conscience.  Make

him one of those poor hard working unsalaried corporators and let him do

every body good with those millions--and go hungry himself!  I will try

to exert a little influence in favor of the bill."



Arrived at home, Mr. Trollop sat down and thought it all over--something

after this fashion: it is about the shape it might have taken if he had

spoken it aloud.



"My reputation is getting a little damaged, and I meant to clear it up

brilliantly with an exposure of this bill at the supreme moment, and ride

back into Congress on the eclat of it; and if I had that bit of

manuscript, I would do it yet.  It would be more money in my pocket in

the end, than my brother-in-law will get out of that incorporatorship,

fat as it is.  But that sheet of paper is out of my reach--she will never

let that get out of her hands.  And what a mountain it is!  It blocks up

my road, completely.  She was going to hand it to me, once.  Why didn't

she!  Must be a deep woman.  Deep devil!  That is what she is;

a beautiful devil--and perfectly fearless, too.  The idea of her pinning

that paper on a man and standing him up in the rotunda looks absurd at a

first glance.  But she would do it!  She is capable of doing anything.

I went there hoping she would try to bribe me--good solid capital that

would be in the exposure.  Well, my prayer was answered; she did try to

bribe me; and I made the best of a bad bargain and let her.  I am check-

mated.  I must contrive something fresh to get back to Congress on.

Very well; a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; I will work for

the bill--the incorporatorship will be a very good thing."



As soon as Mr. Trollop had taken his leave, Laura ran to Senator

Dilworthy and began to speak, but he interrupted her and said

distressfully, without even turning from his writing to look at her:



"Only half an hour!  You gave it up early, child.  However, it was best,

it was best--I'm sure it was best--and safest."



"Give it up!  I!"



The Senator sprang up, all aglow:



"My child, you can't mean that you--"



"I've made him promise on honor to think about a compromise tonight and

come and tell me his decision in the morning."



"Good!  There's hope yet that--"



Nonsense, uncle.  I've made him engage to let the Tennessee Land bill

utterly alone!"



"Impossible!  You--"



"I've made him promise to vote with us!"



"INCREDIBLE!  Abso--"



"I've made him swear that he'll work for us!"



"PRE - - - POSTEROUS!--Utterly pre--break a window, child, before I

suffocate!"



"No matter, it's true anyway.  Now we can march into Congress with drums

beating and colors flying!"



"Well--well--well.  I'm sadly bewildered, sadly bewildered.  I can't

understand it at all--the most extraordinary woman that ever--it's a

great day, it's a great day.  There--there--let me put my hand in

benediction on this precious head.  Ah, my child, the poor negro will

bless--"



"Oh bother the poor negro, uncle!  Put it in your speech.  Good-night,

good-bye--we'll marshal our forces and march with the dawn!"



Laura reflected a while, when she was alone, and then fell to laughing,

peacefully.



"Everybody works for me,"--so ran her thought.  "It was a good idea to

make Buckstone lead Mr. Trollop on to get a great speech written for him;

and it was a happy part of the same idea for me to copy the speech after

Mr. Buckstone had written it, and then keep back a page.  Mr. B.  was

very complimentary to me when Trollop's break-down in the House showed

him the object of my mysterious scheme; I think he will say, still finer

things when I tell him the triumph the sequel to it has gained for us.



"But what a coward the man was, to believe I would have exposed that page

in the rotunda, and so exposed myself.  However, I don't know--I don't

know.  I will think a moment.  Suppose he voted no; suppose the bill

failed; that is to suppose this stupendous game lost forever, that I have

played so desperately for; suppose people came around pitying me--odious!

And he could have saved me by his single voice.  Yes, I would have

exposed him!  What would I care for the talk that that would have made

about me when I was gone to Europe with Selby and all the world was busy

with my history and my dishonor?  It would be almost happiness to spite

somebody at such a time."









CHAPTER XLIII.



The very next day, sure enough, the campaign opened.  In due course, the

Speaker of the House reached that Order of Business which is termed

"Notices of Bills," and then the Hon. Mr. Buckstone rose in his place and

gave notice of a bill "To Found and Incorporate the Knobs Industrial

University," and then sat down without saying anything further.  The busy

gentlemen in the reporters' gallery jotted a line in their note-books,

ran to the telegraphic desk in a room which communicated with their own

writing-parlor, and then hurried back to their places in the gallery; and

by the time they had resumed their seats, the line which they had

delivered to the operator had been read in telegraphic offices in towns

and cities hundreds of miles away.  It was distinguished by frankness of

language as well as by brevity:



"The child is born.  Buckstone gives notice of the thieving Knobs

University job.  It is said the noses have been counted and enough votes

have been bought to pass it."



For some time the correspondents had been posting their several journals

upon the alleged disreputable nature of the bill, and furnishing daily

reports of the Washington gossip concerning it.  So the next morning,

nearly every newspaper of character in the land assailed the measure and

hurled broadsides of invective at Mr. Buckstone.  The Washington papers

were more respectful, as usual--and conciliatory, also, as usual.  They

generally supported measures, when it was possible; but when they could

not they "deprecated" violent expressions of opinion in other

journalistic quarters.



They always deprecated, when there was trouble ahead.  However, 'The

Washington Daily Love-Feast' hailed the bill with warm approbation.  This

was Senator Balaam's paper--or rather, "Brother" Balaam, as he was

popularly called, for he had been a clergyman, in his day; and he himself

and all that he did still emitted an odor of sanctity now that he had

diverged into journalism and politics.  He was a power in the

Congressional prayer meeting, and in all movements that looked to the

spread of religion and temperance.



His paper supported the new bill with gushing affection; it was a noble

measure; it was a just measure; it was a generous measure; it was a pure

measure, and that surely should recommend it in these corrupt times; and

finally, if the nature of the bill were not known at all, the 'Love

Feast' would support it anyway, and unhesitatingly, for the fact that

Senator Dilworthy was the originator of the measure was a guaranty that

it contemplated a worthy and righteous work.



Senator Dilworthy was so anxious to know what the New York papers would

say about the bill; that he had arranged to have synopses of their

editorials telegraphed to him; he could not wait for the papers

themselves to crawl along down to Washington by a mail train which has

never run over a cow since the road was built; for the reason that it has

never been able to overtake one.  It carries the usual "cow-catcher" in

front of the locomotive, but this is mere ostentation.  It ought to be

attached to the rear car, where it could do some good; but instead, no

provision is made there for the protection of the traveling public, and

hence it is not a matter of surprise that cows so frequently climb aboard

that train and among the passengers.



The Senator read his dispatches aloud at the breakfast table.  Laura was

troubled beyond measure at their tone, and said that that sort of comment

would defeat the bill; but the Senator said:



"Oh, not at all, not at all, my child.  It is just what we want.

Persecution is the one thing needful, now--all the other forces are

secured.  Give us newspaper persecution enough, and we are safe.

Vigorous persecution will alone carry a bill sometimes, dear; and when

you start with a strong vote in the first place, persecution comes in

with double effect.  It scares off some of the weak supporters, true,

but it soon turns strong ones into stubborn ones.  And then, presently,

it changes the tide of public opinion.  The great public is weak-minded;

the great public is sentimental; the great public always turns around and

weeps for an odious murderer, and prays for-him, and carries flowers to

his prison and besieges the governor with appeals to his clemency, as

soon as the papers begin to howl for that man's blood.--In a word, the

great putty-hearted public loves to 'gush,' and there is no such darling

opportunity to gush as a case of persecution affords."



"Well, uncle, dear; if your theory is right, let us go into raptures,

for nobody can ask a heartier persecution than these editorials are

furnishing."



"I am not so sure of that, my daughter.  I don't entirely like the tone

of some of these remarks.  They lack vim, they lack venom.  Here is one

calls it a 'questionable measure.'  Bah, there is no strength in that.

This one is better; it calls it 'highway robbery.'  That sounds something

like.  But now this one seems satisfied to call it an 'iniquitous

scheme'.  'Iniquitous' does not exasperate anybody; it is weak--puerile.

The ignorant will imagine it to be intended for a compliment.  But this

other one--the one I read last--has the true ring: 'This vile, dirty

effort to rob the public treasury, by the kites and vultures that now

infest the filthy den called Congress'--that is admirable, admirable!

We must have more of that sort.  But it will come--no fear of that;

they're not warmed up, yet.  A week from now you'll see."



"Uncle, you and Brother Balaam are bosom friends--why don't you get his

paper to persecute us, too?"



"It isn't worth while, my, daughter.  His support doesn't hurt a bill.

Nobody reads his editorials but himself.  But I wish the New York papers

would talk a little plainer.  It is annoying to have to wait a week for

them to warm up.  I expected better things at their hands--and time is

precious, now."



At the proper hour, according to his previous notice, Mr. Buckstone duly

introduced his bill entitled "An Act to Found and Incorporate the Knobs

Industrial University," moved its proper reference, and sat down.



The Speaker of the House rattled off this observation:



"'Fnobjectionbilltakuzhlcoixrssoreferred!'"



Habitues of the House comprehended that this long, lightning-heeled word

signified that if there was no objection, the bill would take the

customary course of a measure of its nature, and be referred to the

Committee on Benevolent Appropriations, and that it was accordingly so

referred.  Strangers merely supposed that the Speaker was taking a gargle

for some affection of the throat.



The reporters immediately telegraphed the introduction of the bill.--And

they added:



     "The assertion that the bill will pass was premature.  It is said

     that many favorers of it will desert when the storm breaks upon them

     from the public press."



The storm came, and during ten days it waxed more and more violent day by

day.  The great "Negro University Swindle" became the one absorbing topic

of conversation throughout the Union.  Individuals denounced it, journals

denounced it, public meetings denounced it, the pictorial papers

caricatured its friends, the whole nation seemed to be growing frantic

over it.  Meantime the Washington correspondents were sending such

telegrams as these abroad in the land; Under date of--



SATURDAY.  "Congressmen Jex and Fluke are wavering; it is believed they

will desert the execrable bill."



MONDAY.  "Jex and Fluke have deserted!"



THURSDAY.  "Tubbs and Huffy left the sinking ship last night"



Later on:



"Three desertions.  The University thieves are getting scared, though

they will not own it."



Later:



"The leaders are growing stubborn--they swear they can carry it, but it

is now almost certain that they no longer have a majority!"



After a day or two of reluctant and ambiguous telegrams:



"Public sentiment seems changing, a trifle in favor of the bill--

but only a trifle."



And still later:



"It is whispered that the Hon. Mr. Trollop has gone over to the pirates.

It is probably a canard.  Mr. Trollop has all along been the bravest and

most efficient champion of virtue and the people against the bill, and

the report is without doubt a shameless invention."



Next day:



"With characteristic treachery, the truckling and pusillanimous reptile,

Crippled-Speech Trollop, has gone over to the enemy.  It is contended,

now, that he has been a friend to the bill, in secret, since the day it

was introduced, and has had bankable reasons for being so; but he himself

declares that he has gone over because the malignant persecution of the

bill by the newspapers caused him to study its provisions with more care

than he had previously done, and this close examination revealed the fact

that the measure is one in every way worthy of support.  (Pretty thin!)

It cannot be denied that this desertion has had a damaging effect.  Jex

and Fluke have returned to their iniquitous allegiance, with six or eight

others of lesser calibre, and it is reported and believed that Tubbs and

Huffy are ready to go back.  It is feared that the University swindle is

stronger to-day than it has ever been before."



Later-midnight:



"It is said that the committee will report the bill back to-morrow.  Both

sides are marshaling their forces, and the fight on this bill is

evidently going to be the hottest of the session.--All Washington is

boiling."









CHAPTER XLIV.



"It's easy enough for another fellow to talk," said Harry, despondingly,

after he had put Philip in possession of his view of the case.  "It's

easy enough to say 'give her up,' if you don't care for her.  What am I

going to do to give her up?"



It seemed to Harry that it was a situation requiring some active

measures.  He couldn't realize that he had fallen hopelessly in love

without some rights accruing to him for the possession of the object of

his passion.  Quiet resignation under relinquishment of any thing he

wanted was not in his line.  And when it appeared to him that his

surrender of Laura would be the withdrawal of the one barrier that kept

her from ruin, it was unreasonable to expect that he could see how to

give her up.



Harry had the most buoyant confidence in his own projects always; he saw

everything connected with himself in a large way and in rosy lines.  This

predominance of the imagination over the judgment gave that appearance of

exaggeration to his conversation and to his communications with regard to

himself, which sometimes conveyed the impression that he was not speaking

the truth.  His acquaintances had been known to say that they invariably

allowed a half for shrinkage in his statements, and held the other half

under advisement for confirmation.



Philip in this case could not tell from Harry's story exactly how much

encouragement Laura had given him, nor what hopes he might justly have of

winning her.  He had never seen him desponding before.  The "brag"

appeared to be all taken out of him, and his airy manner only asserted

itself now and then in a comical imitation of its old self.



Philip wanted time to look about him before he decided what to do.

He was not familiar with Washington, and it was difficult to adjust his

feelings and perceptions to its peculiarities.  Coming out of the sweet

sanity of the Bolton household, this was by contrast the maddest Vanity

Fair one could conceive.  It seemed to him a feverish, unhealthy

atmosphere in which lunacy would be easily developed.  He fancied that

everybody attached to himself an exaggerated importance, from the fact of

being at the national capital, the center of political influence, the

fountain of patronage, preferment, jobs and opportunities.



People were introduced to each other as from this or that state, not from

cities or towns, and this gave a largeness to their representative

feeling.  All the women talked politics as naturally and glibly as they

talk fashion or literature elsewhere.  There was always some exciting

topic at the Capitol, or some huge slander was rising up like a miasmatic

exhalation from the Potomac, threatening to settle no one knew exactly

where.  Every other person was an aspirant for a place, or, if he had

one, for a better place, or more pay; almost every other one had some

claim or interest or remedy to urge; even the women were all advocates

for the advancement of some person, and they violently espoused or

denounced this or that measure as it would affect some relative,

acquaintance or friend.



Love, travel, even death itself, waited on the chances of the dies daily

thrown in the two Houses, and the committee rooms there.  If the measure

went through, love could afford to ripen into marriage, and longing for

foreign travel would have fruition; and it must have been only eternal

hope springing in the breast that kept alive numerous old claimants who

for years and years had besieged the doors of Congress, and who looked as

if they needed not so much an appropriation of money as six feet of

ground.  And those who stood so long waiting for success to bring them

death were usually those who had a just claim.



Representing states and talking of national and even international

affairs, as familiarly as neighbors at home talk of poor crops and the

extravagance of their ministers, was likely at first to impose upon

Philip as to the importance of the people gathered here.



There was a little newspaper editor from Phil's native town, the

assistant on a Peddletonian weekly, who made his little annual joke about

the "first egg laid on our table," and who was the menial of every

tradesman in the village and under bonds to him for frequent "puffs,"

except the undertaker, about whose employment he was recklessly

facetious.  In Washington he was an important man, correspondent, and

clerk of two house committees, a "worker" in politics, and a confident

critic of every woman and every man in Washington.  He would be a consul

no doubt by and by, at some foreign port, of the language of which he was

ignorant--though if ignorance of language were a qualification he might

have been a consul at home.  His easy familiarity with great men was

beautiful to see, and when Philip learned what a tremendous underground

influence this little ignoramus had, he no longer wondered at the queer

appointments and the queerer legislation.



Philip was not long in discovering that people in Washington did not

differ much from other people; they had the same meannesses,

generosities, and tastes: A Washington boarding house had the odor of a

boarding house the world over.



Col. Sellers was as unchanged as any one Philip saw whom he had known

elsewhere.  Washington appeared to be the native element of this man.

His pretentions were equal to any he encountered there.  He saw nothing

in its society that equalled that of Hawkeye, he sat down to no table

that could not be unfavorably contrasted with his own at home; the most

airy scheme inflated in the hot air of the capital only reached in

magnitude some of his lesser fancies, the by-play of his constructive

imagination.



"The country is getting along very well," he said to Philip, "but our

public men are too timid.  What we want is more money.  I've told

Boutwell so.  Talk about basing the currency on gold; you might as well

base it on pork.  Gold is only one product.  Base it on everything!

You've got to do something for the West.  How am I to move my crops?

We must have improvements.  Grant's got the idea.  We want a canal from

the James River to the Mississippi.  Government ought to build it."



It was difficult to get the Colonel off from these large themes when he

was once started, but Philip brought the conversation round to Laura and

her reputation in the City.



"No," he said, "I haven't noticed much.  We've been so busy about this

University.  It will make Laura rich with the rest of us, and she has

done nearly as much as if she were a man.  She has great talent, and will

make a big match.  I see the foreign ministers and that sort after her.

Yes, there is talk, always will be about a pretty woman so much in public

as she is.  Tough stories come to me, but I put'em away.  'Taint likely

one of Si Hawkins's children would do that--for she is the same as a

child of his.  I told her, though, to go slow," added the Colonel, as if

that mysterious admonition from him would set everything right.



"Do you know anything about a Col. Selby?"



"Know all about him.  Fine fellow.  But he's got a wife; and I told him,

as a friend, he'd better sheer off from Laura.  I reckon he thought

better of it and did."



But Philip was not long in learning the truth.  Courted as Laura was by a

certain class and still admitted into society, that, nevertheless, buzzed

with disreputable stories about her, she had lost character with the best

people.  Her intimacy with Selby was open gossip, and there were winks

and thrustings of the tongue in any group of men when she passed by.

It was clear enough that Harry's delusion must be broken up, and that no

such feeble obstacle as his passion could interpose would turn Laura from

her fate.  Philip determined to see her, and put himself in possession of

the truth, as he suspected it, in order to show Harry his folly.



Laura, after her last conversation with Harry, had a new sense of her

position.  She had noticed before the signs of a change in manner towards

her, a little less respect perhaps from men, and an avoidance by women.

She had attributed this latter partly to jealousy of her, for no one is

willing to acknowledge a fault in himself when a more agreeable motive

can be found for the estrangement of his acquaintances.  But now, if

society had turned on her, she would defy it.  It was not in her nature

to shrink.  She knew she had been wronged, and she knew that she had no

remedy.



What she heard of Col. Selby's proposed departure alarmed her more than

anything else, and she calmly determined that if he was deceiving her the

second time it should be the last.  Let society finish the tragedy if it

liked; she was indifferent what came after.  At the first opportunity,

she charged Selby with his intention to abandon her.  He unblushingly

denied it.



He had not thought of going to Europe.  He had only been amusing himself

with Sellers' schemes.  He swore that as soon as she succeeded with her

bill, he would fly with her to any part of the world.



She did not quite believe him, for she saw that he feared her, and she

began to suspect that his were the protestations of a coward to gain

time.  But she showed him no doubts.



She only watched his movements day by day, and always held herself ready

to act promptly.



When Philip came into the presence of this attractive woman, he could not

realize that she was the subject of all the scandal he had heard.  She

received him with quite the old Hawkeye openness and cordiality, and fell

to talking at once of their little acquaintance there; and it seemed

impossible that he could ever say to her what he had come determined to

say.  Such a man as Philip has only one standard by which to judge women.



Laura recognized that fact no doubt.  The better part of her woman's

nature saw it.  Such a man might, years ago, not now, have changed her

nature, and made the issue of her life so different, even after her cruel

abandonment.  She had a dim feeling of this, and she would like now to

stand well with him.  The spark of truth and honor that was left in her

was elicited by his presence.  It was this influence that governed her

conduct in this interview.



"I have come," said Philip in his direct manner, "from my friend

Mr. Brierly.  You are not ignorant of his feeling towards you?"



"Perhaps not."



"But perhaps you do not know, you who have so much admiration, how

sincere and overmastering his love is for you?"  Philip would not have

spoken so plainly, if he had in mind anything except to draw from Laura

something that would end Harry's passion.



"And is sincere love so rare, Mr. Sterling?" asked Laura, moving her foot

a little, and speaking with a shade of sarcasm.



"Perhaps not in Washington," replied Philip,--tempted into a similar

tone.  "Excuse my bluntness," he continued, "but would the knowledge of

his love; would his devotion, make any difference to you in your

Washington life?"



"In respect to what?" asked Laura quickly.



"Well, to others.  I won't equivocate--to Col. Selby?"



Laura's face flushed with anger, or shame; she looked steadily at Philip

and began,



"By what right, sir,--"



"By the right of friendship," interrupted Philip stoutly.  "It may matter

little to you.  It is everything to him.  He has a Quixotic notion that

you would turn back from what is before you for his sake.  You cannot be

ignorant of what all the city is talking of."  Philip said this

determinedly and with some bitterness.



It was a full minute before Laura spoke.  Both had risen, Philip as if to

go, and Laura in suppressed excitement.  When she spoke her voice was

very unsteady, and she looked down.



"Yes, I know.  I perfectly understand what you mean.  Mr. Brierly is

nothing--simply nothing.  He is a moth singed, that is all--the trifler

with women thought he was a wasp.  I have no pity for him, not the least.

You may tell him not to make a fool of himself, and to keep away.  I say

this on your account, not his.  You are not like him.  It is enough for

me that you want it so.  Mr. Sterling," she continued, looking up; and

there were tears in her eyes that contradicted the hardness of her

language, "you might not pity him if you knew my history; perhaps you

would not wonder at some things you hear.  No; it is useless to ask me

why it must be so.  You can't make a life over--society wouldn't let you

if you would--and mine must be lived as it is.  There, sir, I'm not

offended; but it is useless for you to say anything more."



Philip went away with his heart lightened about Harry, but profoundly

saddened by the glimpse of what this woman might have been.  He told

Harry all that was necessary of the conversation--she was bent on going

her own way, he had not the ghost of a chance--he was a fool, she had

said, for thinking he had.



And Harry accepted it meekly, and made up his own mind that Philip didn't

know much about women.









CHAPTER XLV.



The galleries of the House were packed, on the momentous day, not because

the reporting of an important bill back by a committee was a thing to be

excited about, if the bill were going to take the ordinary course

afterward; it would be like getting excited over the empaneling of a

coroner's jury in a murder case, instead of saving up one's emotions for

the grander occasion of the hanging of the accused, two years later,

after all the tedious forms of law had been gone through with.



But suppose you understand that this coroner's jury is going to turn out

to be a vigilance committee in disguise, who will hear testimony for an

hour and then hang the murderer on the spot?  That puts a different

aspect upon the matter.  Now it was whispered that the legitimate forms

of procedure usual in the House, and which keep a bill hanging along for

days and even weeks, before it is finally passed upon, were going to be

overruled, in this case, and short work made of the, measure; and so,

what was beginning as a mere inquest might, torn out to be something very

different.



In the course of the day's business the Order of "Reports of Committees"

was finally reached and when the weary crowds heard that glad

announcement issue from the Speaker's lips they ceased to fret at the

dragging delay, and plucked up spirit.  The Chairman of the Committee on

Benevolent Appropriations rose and made his report, and just then a blue-

uniformed brass-mounted little page put a note into his hand.



It was from Senator Dilworthy, who had appeared upon the floor of the

House for a moment and flitted away again:



     "Everybody expects a grand assault in force; no doubt you believe,

     as I certainly do, that it is the thing to do; we are strong, and

     everything is hot for the contest.  Trollop's espousal of our cause

     has immensely helped us and we grow in power constantly.  Ten of the

     opposition were called away from town about noon,(but--so it is

     said--only for one day).  Six others are sick, but expect to be

     about again tomorrow or next day, a friend tells me.  A bold

     onslaught is worth trying.  Go for a suspension of the rules!  You

     will find we can swing a two-thirds vote--I am perfectly satisfied

     of it.  The Lord's truth will prevail.

                                                  "DILWORTHY.



Mr. Buckstone had reported the bills from his committee, one by one,

leaving the bill to the last.  When the House had voted upon the

acceptance or rejection of the report upon all but it, and the question

now being upon its disposal--Mr. Buckstone begged that the House would

give its attention to a few remarks which he desired to make.  His

committee had instructed him to report the bill favorably; he wished to

explain the nature of the measure, and thus justify the committee's

action; the hostility roused by the press would then disappear, and the

bill would shine forth in its true and noble character.  He said that its

provisions were simple.  It incorporated the Knobs Industrial University,

locating it in East Tennessee, declaring it open to all persons without

distinction of sex, color or religion, and committing its management to a

board of perpetual trustees, with power to fill vacancies in their own

number.  It provided for the erection of certain buildings for the

University, dormitories, lecture-halls, museums, libraries, laboratories,

work-shops, furnaces, and mills.  It provided also for the purchase of

sixty-five thousand acres of land, (fully described) for the purposes of

the University, in the Knobs of East Tennessee.  And it appropriated

[blank] dollars for the purchase of the Land, which should be the

property of the national trustees in trust for the uses named.



Every effort had been made to secure the refusal of the whole amount of

the property of the Hawkins heirs in the Knobs, some seventy-five

thousand acres Mr. Buckstone said.  But Mr. Washington Hawkins (one of

the heirs) objected.  He was, indeed, very reluctant to sell any part of

the land at any price; and indeed--this reluctance was justifiable when

one considers how constantly and how greatly the property is rising in

value.



What the South needed, continued Mr. Buckstone, was skilled labor.

Without that it would be unable to develop its mines, build its roads,

work to advantage and without great waste its fruitful land, establish

manufactures or enter upon a prosperous industrial career.  Its laborers

were almost altogether unskilled.  Change them into intelligent, trained

workmen, and you increased at once the capital, the resources of the

entire south, which would enter upon a prosperity hitherto unknown.

In five years the increase in local wealth would not only reimburse the

government for the outlay in this appropriation, but pour untold wealth

into the treasury.



This was the material view, and the least important in the honorable

gentleman's opinion.  [Here he referred to some notes furnished him by

Senator Dilworthy, and then continued.] God had given us the care of

these colored millions.  What account should we render to Him of our

stewardship?  We had made them free.  Should we leave them ignorant?

We had cast them upon their own resources.  Should we leave them without

tools?  We could not tell what the intentions of Providence are in regard

to these peculiar people, but our duty was plain.  The Knobs Industrial

University would be a vast school of modern science and practice, worthy

of a great nation.  It would combine the advantages of Zurich, Freiburg,

Creuzot and the Sheffield Scientific.  Providence had apparently reserved

and set apart the Knobs of East Tennessee for this purpose.  What else

were they for?  Was it not wonderful that for more than thirty years,

over a generation, the choicest portion of them had remained in one

family, untouched, as if, separated for some great use!



It might be asked why the government should buy this land, when it had

millions of yes, more than the railroad companies desired, which, it

might devote to this purpose?  He answered, that the government had no

such tract of land as this.  It had nothing comparable to it for the

purposes of the University: This was to be a school of mining, of

engineering, of the working of metals, of chemistry, zoology, botany,

manufactures, agriculture, in short of all the complicated industries

that make a state great.  There was no place for the location of such a

school like the Knobs of East Tennessee.  The hills abounded in metals of

all sorts, iron in all its combinations, copper, bismuth, gold and silver

in small quantities, platinum he--believed, tin, aluminium; it was

covered with forests and strange plants; in the woods were found the

coon, the opossum, the fox, the deer and many other animals who roamed in

the domain of natural history; coal existed in enormous quantity and no

doubt oil; it was such a place for the practice of agricultural

experiments that any student who had been successful there would have an

easy task in any other portion of the country.



No place offered equal facilities for experiments in mining, metallurgy,

engineering.  He expected to live to see the day, when the youth of the

south would resort to its mines, its workshops, its labratories, its

furnaces and factories for practical instruction in all the great

industrial pursuits.



A noisy and rather ill-natured debate followed, now, and lasted hour

after hour.  The friends of the bill were instructed by the leaders to

make no efort to check it; it was deemed better strategy to tire out the

opposition; it was decided to vote down every proposition to adjourn, and

so continue the sitting into the night; opponents might desert, then, one

by one and weaken their party, for they had no personal stake in the

bill.



Sunset came, and still the fight went on; the gas was lit, the crowd in

the galleries began to thin, but the contest continued; the crowd

returned, by and by, with hunger and thirst appeased, and aggravated the

hungry and thirsty House by looking contented and comfortable; but still

the wrangle lost nothing of its bitterness.  Recesses were moved

plaintively by the opposition, and invariably voted down by the

University army.



At midnight the House presented a spectacle calculated to interest a

stranger.  The great galleries were still thronged--though only with men,

now; the bright colors that had made them look like hanging gardens were

gone, with the ladies.  The reporters' gallery, was merely occupied by

one or two watchful sentinels of the quill-driving guild; the main body

cared nothing for a debate that had dwindled to a mere vaporing of dull

speakers and now and then a brief quarrel over a point of order; but

there was an unusually large attendance of journalists in the reporters'

waiting-room, chatting, smoking, and keeping on the 'qui vive' for the

general irruption of the Congressional volcano that must come when the

time was ripe for it.  Senator Dilworthy and Philip were in the

Diplomatic Gallery; Washington sat in the public gallery, and Col.

Sellers was, not far away.  The Colonel had been flying about the

corridors and button-holing Congressmen all the evening, and believed

that he had accomplished a world of valuable service; but fatigue was

telling upon him, now, and he was quiet and speechless--for once.  Below,

a few Senators lounged upon the sofas set apart for visitors, and talked

with idle Congressmen.  A dreary member was speaking; the presiding

officer was nodding; here and there little knots of members stood in the

aisles, whispering together; all about the House others sat in all the

various attitudes that express weariness; some, tilted back, had one or

more legs disposed upon their desks; some sharpened pencils indolently;

some scribbled aimlessly; some yawned and stretched; a great many lay

upon their breasts upon the desks, sound asleep and gently snoring.

The flooding gaslight from the fancifully wrought roof poured down upon

the tranquil scene.  Hardly a sound disturbed the stillness, save the

monotonous eloquence of the gentleman who occupied the floor.  Now and

then a warrior of the opposition broke down under the pressure, gave it

up, and went home.



Mr. Buckstone began to think it might be safe, now, to "proceed to

business."  He consulted with Trollop and one or two others.  Senator

Dilworthy descended to the floor of the House and they went to meet him.

After a brief comparison of notes, the Congressmen sought their seats and

sent pages about the House with messages to friends.  These latter

instantly roused up, yawned, and began to look alert.  The moment the

floor was unoccupied, Mr. Buckstone rose, with an injured look, and said

it was evident that the opponents of the bill were merely talking against

time, hoping in this unbecoming way to tire out the friends of the

measure and so defeat it.  Such conduct might be respectable enough in a

village debating society, but it was trivial among statesmen, it was out

of place in so august an assemblage as the House of Representatives of

the United States.  The friends of the bill had been not only willing

that its opponents should express their opinions, but had strongly

desired it.  They courted the fullest and freest discussion; but it

seemed to him that this fairness was but illy appreciated, since

gentlemen were capable of taking advantage of it for selfish and unworthy

ends.  This trifling had gone far enough.  He called for the question.



The instant Mr. Buckstone sat down, the storm burst forth.  A dozen

gentlemen sprang to their feet.



"Mr. Speaker!"



"Mr. Speaker!"



"Mr. Speaker!"



"Order!  Order!  Order!  Question!  Question!"



The sharp blows of the Speaker's gavel rose above the din.



The "previous question," that hated gag, was moved and carried.  All

debate came to a sudden end, of course.  Triumph No. 1.



Then the vote was taken on the adoption of the report and it carried by a

surprising majority.



Mr. Buckstone got the floor again and moved that the rules be suspended

and the bill read a first time.



Mr. Trollop--"Second the motion!"



The Speaker--"It is moved and--"



Clamor of Voices.  "Move we adjourn!  Second the motion!  Adjourn!

Adjourn!  Order!  Order!"



The Speaker, (after using his gavel vigorously)--"It is moved and

seconded that the House do now adjourn.  All those in favor--"



Voices--"Division!  Division!  Ayes and nays!  Ayes and nays!"



It was decided to vote upon the adjournment by ayes and nays.  This was

in earnest.  The excitement was furious.  The galleries were in commotion

in an instant, the reporters swarmed to their places. Idling members of

the House flocked to their seats, nervous gentlemen sprang to their feet,

pages flew hither and thither, life and animation were visible

everywhere, all the long ranks of faces in the building were kindled.



"This thing decides it!" thought Mr. Buckstone; "but let the fight

proceed."



The voting began, and every sound.  ceased but the calling if the names

and the "Aye!"  "No!"  "No!"  "Aye!" of the responses.  There was not a

movement in the House; the people seemed to hold their breath.



The voting ceased, and then there was an interval of dead silence while

the clerk made up his count.  There was a two-thirds vote on the

University side--and two over.



The Speaker--"The rules are suspended, the motion is carried--first

reading of the bill!"



By one impulse the galleries broke forth into stormy applause, and even

some of the members of the House were not wholly able to restrain their

feelings.  The Speaker's gavel came to the rescue and his clear voice

followed:



"Order, gentlemen--!  The House will come to order!  If spectators offend

again, the Sergeant-at-arms will clear the galleries!"



Then he cast his eyes aloft and gazed at some object attentively for a

moment.  All eyes followed the direction of the Speaker's, and then there

was a general titter.  The Speaker said:



"Let the Sergeant-at Arms inform the gentleman that his conduct is an

infringement of the dignity of the House--and one which is not warranted

by the state of the weather."  Poor Sellers was the culprit.  He sat in

the front seat of the gallery, with his arms and his tired body

overflowing the balustrade--sound asleep, dead to all excitements, all

disturbances.  The fluctuations of the Washington weather had influenced

his dreams, perhaps, for during the recent tempest of applause he had

hoisted his gingham umbrella, and calmly gone on with his slumbers.

Washington Hawkins had seen the act, but was not near enough at hand to

save his friend, and no one who was near enough desired to spoil the

effect.  But a neighbor stirred up the Colonel, now that the House had

its eye upon him, and the great speculator furled his tent like the Arab.

He said:



"Bless my soul, I'm so absent-minded when I, get to thinking!  I never

wear an umbrella in the house--did anybody 'notice it'?  What-asleep?

Indeed?  And did you wake me sir?  Thank you--thank you very much indeed.

It might have fallen out of my hands and been injured.  Admirable

article, sir--present from a friend in Hong Kong; one doesn't come across

silk like that in this country--it's the real--Young Hyson, I'm told."



By this time the incident was forgotten, for the House was at war again.

Victory was almost in sight, now, and the friends of the bill threw

themselves into their work with enthusiasm.  They soon moved and carried

its second reading, and after a strong, sharp fight, carried a motion to

go into Committee of the whole.  The Speaker left his place, of course,

and a chairman was appointed.



Now the contest raged hotter than ever--for the authority that compels

order when the House sits as a House, is greatly diminished when it sits

as Committee.  The main fight came upon the filling of the blanks with

the sum to be appropriated for the purchase of the land, of course.



Buckstone--"Mr. Chairman, I move you, sir, that the words 'three millions

of' be inserted."



Mr. Hadley--"Mr. Chairman, I move that the words two and a half dollars

be inserted."



Mr. Clawson--"Mr. Chairman, I move the insertion of the words five and

twenty cents, as representing the true value of this barren and isolated

tract of desolation."



The question, according to rule, was taken upon the smallest sum first.

It was lost.



Then upon the nest smallest sum.  Lost, also.



And then upon the three millions.  After a vigorous battle that lasted a

considerable time, this motion was carried.



Then, clause by clause the bill was read, discussed, and amended in

trifling particulars, and now the Committee rose and reported.



The moment the House had resumed its functions and received the report,

Mr. Buckstone moved and carried the third reading of the bill.



The same bitter war over the sum to be paid was fought over again, and

now that the ayes and nays could be called and placed on record, every

man was compelled to vote by name on the three millions, and indeed on

every paragraph of the bill from the enacting clause straight through.

But as before, the friends of the measure stood firm and voted in a solid

body every time, and so did its enemies.



The supreme moment was come, now, but so sure was the result that not

even a voice was raised to interpose an adjournment.  The enemy were

totally demoralized.  The bill was put upon its final passage almost

without dissent, and the calling of the ayes and nays began.  When it was

ended the triumph was complete--the two-thirds vote held good, and a veto

was impossible, as far as the House was concerned!



Mr. Buckstone resolved that now that the nail was driven home, he would

clinch it on the other side and make it stay forever.  He moved a

reconsideration of the vote by which the bill had passed.  The motion was

lost, of course, and the great Industrial University act was an

accomplished fact as far as it was in the power of the House of

Representatives to make it so.



There was no need to move an adjournment.  The instant the last motion

was decided, the enemies of the University rose and flocked out of the

Hall, talking angrily, and its friends flocked after them jubilant and

congratulatory.  The galleries disgorged their burden, and presently the

house was silent and deserted.



When Col. Sellers and Washington stepped out of the building they were

surprised to find that the daylight was old and the sun well up.  Said

the Colonel:



"Give me your hand, my boy!  You're all right at last!  You're a

millionaire!  At least you're going to be.  The thing is dead sure.

Don't you bother about the Senate.  Leave me and Dilworthy to take care

of that.  Run along home, now, and tell Laura.  Lord, it's magnificent

news--perfectly magnificent!  Run, now.  I'll telegraph my wife.  She

must come here and help me build a house.  Everything's all right now!"



Washington was so dazed by his good fortune and so bewildered by the

gaudy pageant of dreams that was already trailing its long ranks through

his brain, that he wandered he knew not where, and so loitered by the way

that when at last he reached home he woke to a sudden annoyance in the

fact that his news must be old to Laura, now, for of course Senator

Dilworthy must have already been home and told her an hour before.  He

knocked at her door, but there was no answer.



"That is like the Duchess," said he.  "Always cool; a body can't excite

her-can't keep her excited, anyway.  Now she has gone off to sleep again,

as comfortably as if she were used to picking up a million dollars every

day or two"



Then he vent to bed.  But he could not sleep; so he got up and wrote a

long, rapturous letter to Louise, and another to his mother.  And he

closed both to much the same effect:



     "Laura will be queen of America, now, and she will be applauded, and

     honored and petted by the whole nation.  Her name will be in every

     one's mouth more than ever, and how they will court her and quote

     her bright speeches.  And mine, too, I suppose; though they do that

     more already, than they really seem to deserve.  Oh, the world is so

     bright, now, and so cheery; the clouds are all gone, our long

     struggle is ended, our, troubles are all over.  Nothing can ever

     make us unhappy any more.  You dear faithful ones will have the

     reward of your patient waiting now.  How father's Wisdom is proven

     at last!  And how I repent me, that there have been times when I

     lost faith and said, the blessing he stored up for us a tedious

     generation ago was but a long-drawn curse, a blight upon us all.

     But everything is well, now--we are done with poverty, sad toil,

     weariness and heart-break; all the world is filled with sunshine."









CHAPTER XLVI.



Philip left the capitol and walked up Pennsylvania Avenue in company with

Senator Dilworthy.  It was a bright spring morning, the air was soft and

inspiring; in the deepening wayside green, the pink flush of the

blossoming peach trees, the soft suffusion on the heights of Arlington,

and the breath of the warm south wind was apparent, the annual miracle of

the resurrection of the earth.



The Senator took off his hat and seemed to open his soul to the sweet

influences of the morning.  After the heat and noise of the chamber,

under its dull gas-illuminated glass canopy, and the all night struggle

of passion and feverish excitement there, the open, tranquil world seemed

like Heaven.  The Senator was not in an exultant mood, but rather in a

condition of holy joy, befitting a Christian statesman whose benevolent

plans Providence has made its own and stamped with approval.  The great

battle had been fought, but the measure had still to encounter the

scrutiny of the Senate, and Providence sometimes acts differently in the

two Houses.  Still the Senator was tranquil, for he knew that there is an

esprit de corps in the Senate which does not exist in the House, the

effect of which is to make the members complaisant towards the projects

of each other, and to extend a mutual aid which in a more vulgar body

would be called "log-rolling."



"It is, under Providence, a good night's work, Mr. Sterling.  The

government has founded an institution which will remove half the

difficulty from the southern problem.  And it is a good thing for the

Hawkins heirs, a very good thing.  Laura will be almost a millionaire."



"Do you think, Mr. Dilworthy, that the Hawkinses will get much of the

money?" asked Philip innocently, remembering the fate of the Columbus

River appropriation.



The Senator looked at his companion scrutinizingly for a moment to see if

he meant any thing personal, and then replied,



"Undoubtedly, undoubtedly.  I have had their interests greatly at heart.

There will of course be a few expenses, but the widow and orphans will

realize all that Mr. Hawkins, dreamed of for them."



The birds were singing as they crossed the Presidential Square, now

bright with its green turf and tender foliage.  After the two had gained

the steps of the Senator's house they stood a moment, looking upon the

lovely prospect:



"It is like the peace of God," said the Senator devoutly.



Entering the house, the Senator called a servant and said, "Tell Miss

Laura that we are waiting to see her.  I ought to have sent a messenger

on horseback half an hour ago," he added to Philip, "she will be

transported with our victory.  You must stop to breakfast, and see the

excitement."  The servant soon came back, with a wondering look and

reported,



"Miss Laura ain't dah, sah.  I reckon she hain't been dah all night!"



The Senator and Philip both started up.  In Laura's room there were the

marks of a confused and hasty departure, drawers half open, little

articles strewn on the floor.  The bed had not been disturbed.  Upon

inquiry it appeared that Laura had not been at dinner, excusing herself

to Mrs. Dilworthy on the plea of a violent headache; that she made a

request to the servants that she might not be disturbed.



The Senator was astounded.  Philip thought at once of Col. Selby.  Could

Laura have run away with him?  The Senator thought not.  In fact it could

not be.  Gen. Leffenwell, the member from New Orleans, had casually told

him at the house last night that Selby and his family went to New York

yesterday morning and were to sail for Europe to-day.



Philip had another idea which, he did not mention.  He seized his hat,

and saying that he would go and see what he could learn, ran to the

lodgings of Harry; whom he had not seen since yesterday afternoon, when

he left him to go to the House.



Harry was not in.  He had gone out with a hand-bag before six o'clock

yesterday, saying that he had to go to New York, but should return next

day.  In Harry's-room on the table Philip found this note:



          "Dear Mr. Brierly:--Can you meet me at the six o'clock train,

          and be my escort to New York?  I have to go about this

          University bill, the vote of an absent member we must have

          here, Senator Dilworthy cannot go.

                                             Yours,  L.  H."



"Confound it," said Phillip, "the noodle has fallen into her trap.  And

she promised she would let him alone."



He only stopped to send a note to Senator Dilworthy, telling him what he

had found, and that he should go at once to New York, and then hastened

to the railway station.  He had to wait an hour for a train, and when it

did start it seemed to go at a snail's pace.



Philip was devoured with anxiety.  Where could they, have gone?  What was

Laura's object in taking Harry?  Had the flight anything to do with

Selby?  Would Harry be such a fool as to be dragged into some public

scandal?



It seemed as if the train would never reach Baltimore.  Then there was a

long delay at Havre de Grace.  A hot box had to be cooled at Wilmington.

Would it never get on?  Only in passing around the city of Philadelphia

did the train not seem to go slow.  Philip stood upon the platform and

watched for the Boltons' house, fancied he could distinguish its roof

among the trees, and wondered how Ruth would feel if she knew he was so

near her.



Then came Jersey, everlasting Jersey, stupid irritating Jersey, where the

passengers are always asking which line they are on, and where they are

to come out, and whether they have yet reached Elizabeth.  Launched into

Jersey, one has a vague notion that he is on many lines and no one in

particular, and that he is liable at any moment to come to Elizabeth.

He has no notion what Elizabeth is, and always resolves that the next

time he goes that way, he will look out of the window and see what it is

like; but he never does.  Or if he does, he probably finds that it is

Princeton or something of that sort.  He gets annoyed, and never can see

the use of having different names for stations in Jersey.  By and by.

there is Newark, three or four Newarks apparently; then marshes; then

long rock cuttings devoted to the advertisements of 'patent medicines and

ready-made, clothing, and New York tonics for Jersey agues, and Jersey

City is reached.



On the ferry-boat Philip bought an evening paper from a boy crying

"'Ere's the Evening Gram, all about the murder," and with breathless

haste--ran his eyes over the following:



                            SHOCKING MURDER!!!



     TRAGEDY IN HIGH LIFE!!  A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN SHOOTS A DISTINGUISHED

     CONFEDERATE SOLDIER AT THE SOUTHERN HOTEL!!!  JEALOUSY THE CAUSE!!!



     This morning occurred another of those shocking murders which have

     become the almost daily food of the newspapers, the direct result of

     the socialistic doctrines and woman's rights agitations, which have

     made every woman the avenger of her own wrongs, and all society the

     hunting ground for her victims.



     About nine o'clock a lady deliberately shot a man dead in the public

     parlor of the Southern Hotel, coolly remarking, as she threw down

     her revolver and permitted herself to be taken into custody, "He

     brought it on himself."  Our reporters were immediately dispatched

     to the scene of the tragedy, and gathered the following particulars.



     Yesterday afternoon arrived at the hotel from Washington, Col.

     George Selby and family, who had taken passage and were to sail at

     noon to-day in the steamer Scotia for England.  The Colonel was a

     handsome man about forty, a gentleman Of wealth and high social

     position, a resident of New Orleans.  He served with distinction in

     the confederate army, and received a wound in the leg from which he

     has never entirely recovered, being obliged to use a cane in

     locomotion.



     This morning at about nine o'clock, a lady, accompanied by a

     gentleman, called at the office Of the hotel and asked for Col.

     Selby.  The Colonel was at breakfast.  Would the clerk tell him that

     a lady and gentleman wished to see him for a moment in the parlor?

     The clerk says that the gentleman asked her, "What do you want to

     see him for?" and that she replied, "He is going to Europe, and I

     ought to just say good by."



     Col. Selby was informed; and the lady and gentleman were shown to

     the parlor, in which were at the time three or four other persons.

     Five minutes after two shots were fired in quick succession, and

     there was a rush to the parlor from which the reports came.



     Col. Selby was found lying on the floor, bleeding, but not dead.

     Two gentlemen, who had just come in, had seized the lady, who made

     no resistance, and she was at once given in charge of a police

     officer who arrived.  The persons who were in the parlor agree

     substantially as to what occurred.  They had happened to be looking

     towards the door when the man--Col. Selby--entered with his cane,

     and they looked at him, because he stopped as if surprised and

     frightened, and made a backward movement. At the same moment the

     lady in the bonnet advanced towards him and said something like,

     "George, will you go with me?"  He replied, throwing up his hand and

     retreating, "My God I can't, don't fire," and the next instants two

     shots were heard and he fell.  The lady appeared to be beside

     herself with rage or excitement, and trembled very much when the

     gentlemen took hold of her; it was to them she said, "He brought it

     on himself."



     Col. Selby was carried at once to his room and Dr. Puffer, the

     eminent surgeon was sent for.  It was found that he was shot through

     the breast and through the abdomen.  Other aid was summoned, but the

     wounds were mortal, and Col Selby expired in an hour, in pain, but

     his mind was clear to the last and he made a full deposition.  The

     substance of it was that his murderess is a Miss Laura Hawkins, whom

     he had known at Washington as a lobbyist and had some business with

     her.  She had followed him with her attentions and solicitations,

     and had endeavored to make him desert his wife and go to Europe with

     her.  When he resisted and avoided her she had threatened him.  Only

     the day before he left Washington she had declared that he should

     never go out of the city alive without her.



     It seems to have been a deliberate and premeditated murder, the

     woman following him to Washington on purpose to commit it.



     We learn that the, murderess, who is a woman of dazzling and

     transcendent beauty and about twenty six or seven, is a niece of

     Senator Dilworthy at whose house she has been spending the winter.

     She belongs to a high Southern family, and has the reputation of

     being an heiress. Like some other great beauties and belles in

     Washington however there have been whispers that she had something

     to do with the lobby.  If we mistake not we have heard her name

     mentioned in connection with the sale of the Tennessee Lands to the

     Knobs University, the bill for which passed the House last night.



     Her companion is Mr. Harry Brierly, a New York dandy, who has been

     in Washington. His connection with her and with this tragedy is not

     known, but he was also taken into custody, and will be detained at

     least as a witness.



     P. S.  One of the persons present in the parlor says that after

     Laura Hawkins had fired twice, she turned the pistol towards

     herself, but that Brierly sprung and caught it from her hand, and

     that it was he who threw it on the floor.



     Further particulars with full biographies of all the parties in our

     next edition.



Philip hastened at once to the Southern Hotel, where he found still a

great state of excitement, and a thousand different and exaggerated

stories passing from mouth to mouth.  The witnesses of the event had told

it over so many time that they had worked it up into a most dramatic

scene, and embellished it with whatever could heighten its awfulness.

Outsiders had taken up invention also.  The Colonel's wife had gone

insane, they said.  The children had rushed into the parlor and rolled

themselves in their father's blood.  The hotel clerk said that he noticed

there was murder in the woman's eye when he saw her.  A person who had

met the woman on the stairs felt a creeping sensation.  Some thought

Brierly was an accomplice, and that he had set the woman on to kill his

rival.  Some said the woman showed the calmness and indifference of

insanity.



Philip learned that Harry and Laura had both been taken to the city

prison, and he went there; but he was not admitted.  Not being a

newspaper reporter, he could not see either of them that night; but the

officer questioned him suspiciously and asked him who he was.  He might

perhaps see Brierly in the morning.



The latest editions of the evening papers had the result of the inquest.

It was a plain enough case for the jury, but they sat over it a long

time, listening to the wrangling of the physicians.  Dr. Puffer insisted

that the man died from the effects of the wound in the chest.  Dr. Dobb

as strongly insisted that the wound in the abdomen caused death.  Dr.

Golightly suggested that in his opinion death ensued from a complication

of the two wounds and perhaps other causes.  He examined the table

waiter, as to whether Col. Selby ate any breakfast, and what he ate, and

if he had any appetite.



The jury finally threw themselves back upon the indisputable fact that

Selby was dead, that either wound would have killed him (admitted by the

doctors), and rendered a verdict that he died from pistol-shot wounds

inflicted by a pistol in the hands of Laura Hawkins.



The morning papers blazed with big type, and overflowed with details of

the murder.  The accounts in the evening papers were only the premonitory

drops to this mighty shower.  The scene was dramatically worked up in

column after column.  There were sketches, biographical and historical.

There were long "specials" from Washington, giving a full history of

Laura's career there, with the names of men with whom she was said to be

intimate, a description of Senator Dilworthy's residence and of his

family, and of Laura's room in his house, and a sketch of the Senator's

appearance and what he said.  There was a great deal about her beauty,

her accomplishments and her brilliant position in society, and her

doubtful position in society.  There was also an interview with Col.

Sellers and another with Washington Hawkins, the brother of the

murderess.  One journal had a long dispatch from Hawkeye, reporting the

excitement in that quiet village and the reception of the awful

intelligence.



All the parties had been "interviewed."  There were reports of

conversations with the clerk at the hotel; with the call-boy; with the

waiter at table with all the witnesses, with the policeman, with the

landlord (who wanted it understood that nothing of that sort had ever

happened in his house before, although it had always been frequented by

the best Southern society,) and with Mrs. Col. Selby.  There were

diagrams illustrating the scene of the shooting, and views of the hotel

and street, and portraits of the parties.  There were three minute and

different statements from the doctors about the wounds, so technically

worded that nobody could understand them.  Harry and Laura had also been

"interviewed" and there was a statement from Philip himself, which a

reporter had knocked him up out of bed at midnight to give, though how he

found him, Philip never could conjecture.



What some of the journals lacked in suitable length for the occasion,

they made up in encyclopaedic information about other similar murders and

shootings.



The statement from Laura was not full, in fact it was fragmentary, and

consisted of nine parts of, the reporter's valuable observations to one

of Laura's, and it was, as the reporter significantly remarked,

"incoherent", but it appeared that Laura claimed to be Selby's wife,

or to have been his wife, that he had deserted her and betrayed her, and

that she was going to follow him to Europe.  When the reporter asked:



"What made you shoot him Miss. Hawkins?"



Laura's only reply was, very simply,



"Did I shoot him?  Do they say I shot him?".  And she would say no more.



The news of the murder was made the excitement of the day. Talk of it

filled the town.  The facts reported were scrutinized, the standing of

the parties was discussed, the dozen different theories of the motive,

broached in the newspapers, were disputed over.



During the night subtle electricity had carried the tale over all the

wires of the continent and under the sea; and in all villages and towns

of the Union, from the.  Atlantic to the territories, and away up and

down the Pacific slope, and as far as London and Paris and Berlin, that

morning the name of Laura Hawkins was spoken by millions and millions of

people, while the owner of it--the sweet child of years ago, the

beautiful queen of Washington drawing rooms--sat shivering on her cot-bed

in the darkness of a damp cell in the Tombs.









CHAPTER XLVII.



Philip's first effort was to get Harry out of the Tombs.  He gained

permission to see him, in the presence of an officer, during the day,

and he found that hero very much cast down.



"I never intended to come to such a place as this, old fellow," he said

to Philip; "it's no place for a gentleman, they've no idea how to treat a

gentleman.  Look at that provender," pointing to his uneaten prison

ration.  "They tell me I am detained as a witness, and I passed the night

among a lot of cut-throats and dirty rascals--a pretty witness I'd be in

a month spent in such company."



"But what under heavens," asked Philip, "induced you to come to New York

with Laura!  What was it for?"



"What for?  Why, she wanted me to come.  I didn't know anything about

that cursed Selby.  She said it was lobby business for the University.

I'd no idea what she was dragging me into that confounded hotel for.

I suppose she knew that the Southerners all go there, and thought she'd

find her man.  Oh!  Lord, I wish I'd taken your advice.  You might as

well murder somebody and have the credit of it, as get into the

newspapers the way I have.  She's pure devil, that girl.  You ought to

have seen how sweet she was on me; what an ass I am."



"Well, I'm not going to dispute a poor, prisoner.  But the first thing is

to get you out of this.  I've brought the note Laura wrote you, for one

thing, and I've seen your uncle, and explained the truth of the case to

him.  He will be here soon."



Harry's uncle came, with; other friends, and in the course of the day

made such a showing to the authorities that Harry was released, on giving

bonds to appear as a witness when wanted.  His spirits rose with their

usual elasticity as soon as he was out of Centre Street, and he insisted

on giving Philip and his friends a royal supper at Delmonico's, an excess

which was perhaps excusable in the rebound of his feelings, and which was

committed with his usual reckless generosity.  Harry ordered, the supper,

and it is perhaps needless to say, that Philip paid the bill.



Neither of the young men felt like attempting to see Laura that day,

and she saw no company except the newspaper reporters, until the arrival

of  Col. Sellers and Washington Hawkins, who had hastened to New York

with all speed.



They found Laura in a cell in the upper tier of the women's department.

The cell was somewhat larger than those in the men's department, and

might be eight feet by ten square, perhaps a little longer.  It was of

stone, floor and all, and tile roof was oven shaped.  A narrow slit in

the roof admitted sufficient light, and was the only means of

ventilation; when the window was opened there was nothing to prevent the

rain coming in.  The only means of heating being from the corridor, when

the door was ajar, the cell was chilly and at this time damp.  It was

whitewashed and clean, but it had a slight jail odor; its only furniture

was a narrow iron bedstead, with a tick of straw and some blankets, not

too clean.



When Col. Sellers was conducted to this cell by the matron and looked

in, his emotions quite overcame him, the tears rolled down his cheeks and

his voice trembled so that he could hardly speak.  Washington was unable

to say anything; he looked from Laura to the miserable creatures who were

walking in the corridor with unutterable disgust.  Laura was alone calm

and self-contained, though she was not unmoved by the sight of the grief

of her friends.



"Are you comfortable, Laura?" was the first word the Colonel could get

out.



"You see," she replied.  "I can't say it's exactly comfortable."



"Are you cold?"



"It is pretty chilly.  The stone floor is like ice.  It chills me through

to step on it.  I have to sit on the bed."



"Poor thing, poor thing.  And can you eat any thing?"



"No, I am not hungry.  I don't know that I could eat any thing, I can't

eat that."



"Oh dear," continued the Colonel, "it's dreadful.  But cheer up, dear,

cheer up;" and the Colonel broke down entirely.



"But," he went on, "we'll stand by you.  We'll do everything for you.

I know you couldn't have meant to do it, it must have been insanity, you

know, or something of that sort.  You never did anything of the sort

before."



Laura smiled very faintly and said,



"Yes, it was something of that sort.  It's all a whirl.  He was a

villain; you don't know."



"I'd rather have killed him myself, in a duel you know, all fair.  I wish

I had.  But don't you be down.  We'll get you the best counsel, the

lawyers in New York can do anything; I've read of cases.  But you must be

comfortable now.  We've brought some of your clothes, at the hotel.  What

else, can we get for you?"



Laura suggested that she would like some sheets for her bed, a piece of

carpet to step on, and her meals sent in; and some books and writing

materials if it was allowed.  The Colonel and Washington promised to

procure all these things, and then took their sorrowful leave, a great

deal more affected than the criminal was, apparently, by her situation.



The colonel told the matron as he went away that if she would look to

Laura's comfort a little it shouldn't be the worse for her; and to the

turnkey who let them out he patronizingly said,



"You've got a big establishment here, a credit to the city.  I've got a

friend in there--I shall see you again, sir."



By the next day something more of Laura's own story began to appear in

the newspapers, colored and heightened by reporters' rhetoric.  Some of

them cast a lurid light upon the Colonel's career, and represented his

victim as a beautiful avenger of her murdered innocence; and others

pictured her as his willing paramour and pitiless slayer.  Her

communications to the reporters were stopped by her lawyers as soon as

they were retained and visited her, but this fact did not prevent--it may

have facilitated--the appearance of casual paragraphs here and there

which were likely to beget popular sympathy for the poor girl.



The occasion did not pass without "improvement" by the leading journals;

and Philip preserved the editorial comments of three or four of them

which pleased him most.  These he used to read aloud to his friends

afterwards and ask them to guess from which journal each of them had been

cut.  One began in this simple manner:--



     History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of

     the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken

     fragments of antique legends.  Washington is not Corinth, and Lais,

     the beautiful daughter of Timandra, might not have been the

     prototype of the ravishing Laura, daughter of the plebeian house of

     Hawkins; but the orators add statesmen who were the purchasers of

     the favors of the one, may have been as incorruptible as the

     Republican statesmen who learned how to love and how to vote from

     the sweet lips of the Washington lobbyist; and perhaps the modern

     Lais would never have departed from the national Capital if there

     had been there even one republican Xenocrates who resisted her

     blandishments.  But here the parallel: fails.  Lais, wandering away

     with the youth Rippostratus, is slain by the women who are jealous

     of her charms. Laura, straying into her Thessaly with the youth

     Brierly, slays her other lover and becomes the champion of the

     wrongs of her sex.



Another journal began its editorial with less lyrical beauty, but with

equal force.  It closed as follows:--



     With Laura Hawkins, fair, fascinating and fatal, and with the

     dissolute Colonel of a lost cause, who has reaped the harvest he

     sowed, we have nothing to do.  But as the curtain rises on this

     awful tragedy, we catch a glimpse of the society at the capital

     under this Administration, which we cannot contemplate without alarm

     for the fate of the Republic.



A third newspaper took up the subject in a different tone.  It said:--



     Our repeated predictions are verified.  The pernicious doctrines

     which we have announced as prevailing in American society have been

     again illustrated.  The name of the city is becoming a reproach.

     We may have done something in averting its ruin in our resolute

     exposure of the Great Frauds; we shall not be deterred from

     insisting that the outraged laws for the protection of human life

     shall be vindicated now, so that a person can walk the streets or

     enter the public houses, at least in the day-time, without the risk

     of a bullet through his brain.



A fourth journal began its remarks as follows:--



     The fullness with which we present our readers this morning the

     details of the Selby-Hawkins homicide is a miracle of modern

     journalism.  Subsequent investigation can do little to fill out the

     picture.  It is the old story.  A beautiful woman shoots her

     absconding lover in cold-blood; and we shall doubtless learn in due

     time that if she was not as mad as a hare in this month of March,

     she was at least laboring under what is termed "momentary insanity."



It would not be too much to say that upon the first publication of the

facts of the tragedy, there was an almost universal feeling of rage

against the murderess in the Tombs, and that reports of her beauty only

heightened the indignation.  It was as if she presumed upon that and upon

her sex, to defy the law; and there was a fervent, hope that the law

would take its plain course.



Yet Laura was not without friends, and some of them very influential too.

She had in keeping a great many secrets and a great many reputations,

perhaps.  Who shall set himself up to judge human motives.  Why, indeed,

might we not feel pity for a woman whose brilliant career had been so

suddenly extinguished in misfortune and crime?  Those who had known her

so well in Washington might find it impossible to believe that the

fascinating woman could have had murder in her heart, and would readily

give ear to the current sentimentality about the temporary aberration of

mind under the stress of personal calamity.



Senator Dilworthy, was greatly shocked, of course, but he was full of

charity for the erring.



"We shall all need mercy," he said.  "Laura as an inmate of my family was

a most exemplary female, amiable, affectionate and truthful, perhaps too

fond of gaiety, and neglectful of the externals of religion, but a woman

of principle.  She may have had experiences of which I am ignorant, but

she could not have gone to this extremity if she had been in her own

right mind."



To the Senator's credit be it said, he was willing to help Laura and her

family in this dreadful trial.  She, herself, was not without money, for

the Washington lobbyist is not seldom more fortunate than the Washington

claimant, and she was able to procure a good many luxuries to mitigate

the severity of her prison life.  It enabled her also to have her own

family near her, and to see some of them daily.  The tender solicitude of

her mother, her childlike grief, and her firm belief in the real

guiltlessness of her daughter, touched even the custodians of the Tombs

who are enured to scenes of pathos.



Mrs. Hawkins had hastened to her daughter as soon as she received money

for the journey.  She had no reproaches, she had only tenderness and

pity.  She could not shut out the dreadful facts of the case, but it had

been enough for her that Laura had said, in their first interview,

"mother, I did not know what I was doing."  She obtained lodgings near,

the prison and devoted her life to her daughter, as if she had been

really her own child.  She would have remained in the prison day and

night if it had been permitted.  She was aged and feeble, but this great

necessity seemed to give her new life.



The pathetic story of the old lady's ministrations, and her simplicity

and faith, also got into the newspapers in time, and probably added to

the pathos of this wrecked woman's fate, which was beginning to be felt

by the public.  It was certain that she had champions who thought that

her wrongs ought to be placed against her crime, and expressions of this

feeling came to her in various ways.  Visitors came to see her, and gifts

of fruit and flowers were sent, which brought some cheer into her hard

and gloomy cell.



Laura had declined to see either Philip or Harry, somewhat to the

former's relief, who had a notion that she would necessarily feel

humiliated by seeing him after breaking faith with him, but to the

discomfiture of Harry, who still felt her fascination, and thought her

refusal heartless.  He told Philip that of course he had got through with

such a woman, but he wanted to see her.



Philip, to keep him from some new foolishness, persuaded him to go with

him to Philadelphia; and, give his valuable services in the mining

operations at Ilium.



The law took its course with Laura.  She was indicted for murder in the

first degree and held for trial at the summer term.  The two most

distinguished criminal lawyers in the city had been retained for her

defence, and to that the resolute woman devoted her days with a courage

that rose as she consulted with her counsel and understood the methods of

criminal procedure in New York.



She was greatly depressed, however, by the news from Washington.

Congress adjourned and her bill had failed to pass the Senate.  It must

wait for the next session.









CHAPTER XLVIII



It had been a bad winter, somehow, for the firm of Pennybacker, Bigler

and Small.  These celebrated contractors usually made more money during

the session of the legislature at Harrisburg than upon all their summer

work, and this winter had been unfruitful.  It was unaccountable to

Bigler.



"You see, Mr. Bolton," he said, and Philip was present at the

conversation, "it puts us all out.  It looks as if politics was played

out.  We'd counted on the year of Simon's re-election.  And, now, he's

reelected, and I've yet to see the first man who's the better for it."



"You don't mean to say," asked Philip, "that he went in without paying

anything?"



"Not a cent, not a dash cent, as I can hear," repeated Mr. Bigler,

indignantly.  "I call it a swindle on the state.  How it was done gets

me.  I never saw such a tight time for money in Harrisburg."



"Were there no combinations, no railroad jobs, no mining schemes put

through in connection with the election?



"Not that I knew," said Bigler, shaking his head in disgust.  "In fact it

was openly said, that there was no money in the election.  It's perfectly

unheard of."



"Perhaps," suggested Philip, "it was effected on what the insurance

companies call the 'endowment,' or the 'paid up' plan, by which a policy

is secured after a certain time without further payment."



"You think then," said Mr. Bolton smiling, "that a liberal and sagacious

politician might own a legislature after a time, and not be bothered with

keeping up his payments?"



"Whatever it is," interrupted Mr. Bigler, "it's devilish ingenious and

goes ahead of my calculations; it's cleaned me out, when I thought we had

a dead sure thing.  I tell you what it is, gentlemen, I shall go in for

reform.  Things have got pretty mixed when a legislature will give away a

United States senatorship."



It was melancholy, but Mr. Bigler was not a man to be crushed by one

misfortune, or to lose his confidence in human nature, on one exhibition

of apparent honesty.  He was already on his feet again, or would be if

Mr. Bolton could tide him over shoal water for ninety days.



"We've got something with money in it," he explained to Mr. Bolton,

"got hold of it by good luck.  We've got the entire contract for Dobson's

Patent Pavement for the city of Mobile.  See here."



Mr. Bigler made some figures; contract so; much, cost of work and

materials so much, profits so much.  At the end of three months the city

would owe the company three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars-two

hundred thousand of that would be profits.  The whole job was worth at

least a million to the company--it might be more.  There could be no

mistake in these figures; here was the contract, Mr. Bolton knew what

materials were worth and what the labor would cost.



Mr. Bolton knew perfectly well from sore experience that there was always

a mistake in figures when Bigler or Small made them, and he knew that he

ought to send the fellow about his business.  Instead of that, he let him

talk.



They only wanted to raise fifty thousand dollars to carry on the

contract--that expended they would have city bonds.  Mr. Bolton said he

hadn't the money.  But Bigler could raise it on his name.  Mr. Bolton

said he had no right to put his family to that risk.  But the entire

contract could be assigned to him--the security was ample--it was a

fortune to him if it was forfeited.  Besides Mr. Bigler had been

unfortunate, he didn't know where to look for the necessaries of life for

his family.  If he could only have one more chance, he was sure he could

right himself.  He begged for it.



And Mr. Bolton yielded.  He could never refuse such appeals.  If he had

befriended a man once and been cheated by him, that man appeared to have

a claim upon him forever.  He shrank, however, from telling his wife what

he had done on this occasion, for he knew that if any person was more

odious than Small to his family it was Bigler.



"Philip tells me," Mrs. Bolton said that evening, "that the man Bigler

has been with thee again to-day.  I hope thee will have nothing more to

do with him."



He has been very unfortunate," replied Mr. Bolton, uneasily.



"He is always unfortunate, and he is always getting thee into trouble.

But thee didn't listen to him again?"



"Well, mother, his family is in want, and I lent him my name--but I took

ample security.  The worst that can happen will be a little

inconvenience."



Mrs. Bolton looked grave and anxious, but she did not complain or

remonstrate; she knew what a "little inconvenience" meant, but she knew

there was no help for it.  If Mr. Bolton had been on his way to market to

buy a dinner for his family with the only dollar he had in the world in

his pocket, he would have given it to a chance beggar who asked him for

it.  Mrs. Bolton only asked (and the question showed that she was no mere

provident than her husband where her heart was interested),



"But has thee provided money for Philip to use in opening the coal mine?"



"Yes, I have set apart as much as it ought to cost to open the mine,

as much as we can afford to lose if no coal is found.  Philip has the

control of it, as equal partner in the venture, deducting the capital

invested.  He has great confidence in his success, and I hope for his

sake he won't be disappointed."



Philip could not but feel that he was treated very much like one of the

Bolton-family--by all except Ruth.  His mother, when he went home after

his recovery from his accident, had affected to be very jealous of Mrs.

Bolton, about whom and Ruth she asked a thousand questions--

an affectation of jealousy which no doubt concealed a real heartache,

which comes to every mother when her son goes out into the world and

forms new ties.  And to Mrs. Sterling; a widow, living on a small income

in a remote Massachusetts village, Philadelphia was a city of many

splendors.  All its inhabitants seemed highly favored, dwelling in ease

and surrounded by superior advantages.  Some of her neighbors had

relations living in Philadelphia, and it seemed to them somehow a

guarantee of respectability to have relations in Philadelphia.

Mrs. Sterling was not sorry to have Philip make his way among such well-

to-do people, and she was sure that no good fortune could be too good for

his deserts.



"So, sir," said Ruth, when Philip came from New York, "you have been

assisting in a pretty tragedy.  I saw your name in the papers.  Is this

woman a specimen of your western friends?"



"My only assistance," replied Philip, a little annoyed, was in trying to

keep Harry out of a bad scrape, and I failed after all.  He walked into

her trap, and he has been punished for it.  I'm going to take him up to

Ilium to see if he won't work steadily at one thing, and quit his

nonsense."



"Is she as beautiful as the newspapers say she is?"



"I don't know, she has a kind of beauty--she is not like--'



"Not like Alice?"



"Well, she is brilliant; she was called the handsomest woman in

Washington--dashing, you know, and sarcastic and witty.  Ruth, do you

believe a woman ever becomes a devil?"



"Men do, and I don't know why women shouldn't.  But I never saw one."



"Well, Laura Hawkins comes very near it.  But it is dreadful to think of

her fate."



"Why, do you suppose they will hang a woman?  Do you suppose they will be

so barbarous as that?"



"I wasn't thinking of that--it's doubtful if a New York jury would find a

woman guilty of any such crime.  But to think of her life if she is

acquitted."



"It is dreadful," said Ruth, thoughtfully, "but the worst of it is that

you men do not want women educated to do anything, to be able to earn an

honest living by their own exertions.  They are educated as if they were

always to be petted and supported, and there was never to be any such

thing as misfortune.  I suppose, now, that you would all choose to have

me stay idly at home, and give up my profession."



"Oh, no," said Philip, earnestly, "I  respect your resolution.  But,

Ruth, do you think you would be happier or do more good in following your

profession than in having a home of your own?"



"What is to hinder having a home of my, own?"



"Nothing, perhaps, only you never would be in it--you would be away day

and night, if you had any practice; and what sort of a home would that

make for your husband?"



"What sort of a home is it for the wife whose husband is always away

riding about in his doctor's gig?"



"Ah, you know that is not fair.  The woman makes the home."



Philip and Ruth often had this sort of discussion, to which Philip was

always trying to give a personal turn.  He was now about to go to Ilium

for the season, and he did not like to go without some assurance from

Ruth that she might perhaps love him some day; when he was worthy of it,

and when he could offer her something better than a partnership in his

poverty.



"I should work with a great deal better heart, Ruth," he said the morning

he was taking leave, "if I knew you cared for me a little."



Ruth was looking down; the color came faintly to her cheeks, and she

hesitated.  She needn't be looking down, he thought, for she was ever so

much shorter than tall Philip.



"It's not much of a place, Ilium," Philip went on, as if a little

geographical remark would fit in here as well as anything else, "and I

shall have plenty of time to think over the responsibility I have taken,

and--" his observation did not seem to be coming out any where.



But Ruth looked up, and there was a light in her eyes that quickened

Phil's pulse.  She took his hand, and said with serious sweetness:



"Thee mustn't lose heart, Philip."  And then she added, in another mood,

"Thee knows I graduate in the summer and shall have my diploma.  And if

any thing happens--mines explode sometimes--thee can send for me.

Farewell."



The opening of the Ilium coal mine was begun with energy, but without

many omens of success.  Philip was running a tunnel into the breast of

the mountain, in faith that the coal stratum ran there as it ought to.

How far he must go in he believed he knew, but no one could tell exactly.

Some of the miners said that they should probably go through the

mountain, and that the hole could be used for a railway tunnel.  The

mining camp was a busy place at any rate.  Quite a settlement of board

and log shanties had gone up, with a blacksmith shop, a small machine

shop, and a temporary store for supplying the wants of the workmen.

Philip and Harry pitched a commodious tent, and lived in the full

enjoyment of the free life.



There is no difficulty in digging a bole in the ground, if you have money

enough to pay for the digging, but those who try this sort of work are

always surprised at the large amount of money necessary to make a small

hole.  The earth is never willing to yield one product, hidden in her

bosom, without an equivalent for it.  And when a person asks of her coal,

she is quite apt to require gold in exchange.



It was exciting work for all concerned in it.  As the tunnel advanced

into the rock every day promised to be the golden day.  This very blast

might disclose the treasure.



The work went on week after week, and at length during the night as well

as the daytime.  Gangs relieved each other, and the tunnel was every

hour, inch by inch and foot by foot, crawling into the mountain.  Philip

was on the stretch of hope and excitement.  Every pay day he saw his

funds melting away, and still there was only the faintest show of what

the miners call "signs."



The life suited Harry, whose buoyant hopefulness was never disturbed.

He made endless calculations, which nobody could understand, of the

probable position of the vein.  He stood about among the workmen with the

busiest air.  When he was down at Ilium he called himself the engineer of

the works, and he used to spend hours smoking his pipe with the Dutch

landlord on the hotel porch, and astonishing the idlers there with the

stories of his railroad operations in Missouri.  He talked with the

landlord, too, about enlarging his hotel, and about buying some village

lots, in the prospect of a rise, when the mine was opened.  He taught the

Dutchman how to mix a great many cooling drinks for the summer time, and

had a bill at the hotel, the growing length of which Mr. Dusenheimer

contemplated with pleasant anticipations.  Mr. Brierly was a very useful

and cheering person wherever he went.



Midsummer arrived: Philip could report to Mr. Bolton only progress, and

this was not a cheerful message for him to send to Philadelphia in reply

to inquiries that he thought became more and more anxious.  Philip

himself was a prey to the constant fear that the money would give out

before the coal was struck.



At this time Harry was summoned to New York, to attend the trial of Laura

Hawkins.  It was possible that Philip would have to go also, her lawyer

wrote, but they hoped for a postponement.  There was important evidence

that they could not yet obtain, and he hoped the judge would not force

them to a trial unprepared.  There were many reasons for a delay, reasons

which of course are never mentioned, but which it would seem that a New

York judge sometimes must understand, when he grants a postponement upon

a motion that seems to the public altogether inadequate.



Harry went, but he soon came back.  The trial was put off.  Every week we

can gain, said the learned counsel, Braham, improves our chances.  The

popular rage never lasts long.









CHAPTER XLIX.



"We've struck it!"



This was the announcement at the tent door that woke Philip out of a

sound sleep at dead of night, and shook all the sleepiness out of him in

a trice.



"What!  Where is it?  When?  Coal?  Let me see it.  What quality is it?"

were some of the rapid questions that Philip poured out as he hurriedly

dressed.  "Harry, wake up, my boy, the coal train is coming.  Struck it,

eh?  Let's see?"



The foreman put down his lantern, and handed Philip a black lump.  There

was no mistake about it, it was the hard, shining anthracite, and its

freshly fractured surface, glistened in the light like polished steel.

Diamond never shone with such lustre in the eyes of Philip.



Harry was exuberant, but Philip's natural caution found expression in his

next remark.



"Now, Roberts, you are sure about this?"



"What--sure that it's coal?"



"O, no, sure that it's the main vein."



"Well, yes.  We took it to be that"



"Did you from the first?"



"I can't say we did at first.  No, we didn't.  Most of the indications

were there, but not all of them, not all of them.  So we thought we'd

prospect a bit."



"Well?"



"It was tolerable thick, and looked as if it might be the vein--looked as

if it ought to be the vein.  Then we went down on it a little.  Looked

better all the time."



"When did you strike it?"



"About ten o'clock."



"Then you've been prospecting about four hours."



"Yes, been sinking on it something over four hours."



"I'm afraid you couldn't go down very far in four hours--could you?"



"O yes--it's a good deal broke up, nothing but picking and gadding

stuff."



"Well, it does look encouraging, sure enough--but then the lacking

indications--"



"I'd rather we had them, Mr. Sterling, but I've seen more than one good

permanent mine struck without 'em in my time."



"Well, that is encouraging too."



"Yes, there was the Union, the Alabama and the Black Mohawk--all good,

sound mines, you know--all just exactly like this one when we first

struck them."



"Well, I begin to feel a good deal more easy.  I guess we've really got

it.  I remember hearing them tell about the Black Mohawk."



"I'm free to say that I believe it, and the men all think so too.  They

are all old hands at this business."



"Come Harry, let's go up and look at it, just for the comfort of it,"

said Philip.  They came back in the course of an hour, satisfied and

happy.



There was no more sleep for them that night.  They lit their pipes, put a

specimen of the coal on the table, and made it a kind of loadstone of

thought and conversation.



"Of course," said Harry, "there will have to be a branch track built, and

a 'switch-back' up the hill."



"Yes, there will be no trouble about getting the money for that now.  We

could sell-out tomorrow for a handsome sum.  That sort of coal doesn't go

begging within a mile of a rail-road.  I wonder if Mr. Bolton' would

rather sell out or work it?"



"Oh, work it," says Harry, "probably the whole mountain is coal now

you've got to it."



"Possibly it might not be much of a vein after all," suggested Philip.



"Possibly it is; I'll bet it's forty feet thick.  I told you.  I knew the

sort of thing as soon as I put my eyes on it."



Philip's next thought was to write to his friends and announce their good

fortune.  To Mr. Bolton he wrote a short, business letter, as calm as he

could make it.  They had found coal of excellent quality, but they could

not yet tell with absolute certainty what the vein was.  The prospecting

was still going on.  Philip also wrote to Ruth; but though this letter

may have glowed, it was not with the heat of burning anthracite.  He

needed no artificial heat to warm his pen and kindle his ardor when he

sat down to write to Ruth.  But it must be confessed that the words never

flowed so easily before, and he ran on for an hour disporting in all the

extravagance of his imagination.  When Ruth read it, she doubted if the

fellow had not gone out of his senses.  And it was not until she reached

the postscript that she discovered the cause of the exhilaration.

"P. S.--We have found coal."



The news couldn't have come to Mr. Bolton in better time.  He had never

been so sorely pressed.  A dozen schemes which he had in hand, any one

of which might turn up a fortune, all languished, and each needed just

a little more, money to save that which had been invested.  He hadn't

a piece of real estate that was not covered with mortgages, even to the

wild tract which Philip was experimenting on, and which had, no

marketable value above the incumbrance on it.



He had come home that day early, unusually dejected.



"I am afraid," he said to his wife, "that we shall have to give up our

house.  I don't care for myself, but for thee and the children."



"That will be the least of misfortunes," said Mrs. Bolton, cheerfully,

"if thee can clear thyself from debt and anxiety, which is wearing thee

out, we can live any where.  Thee knows we were never happier than when

we were in a much humbler home."



"The truth is, Margaret, that affair of Bigler and Small's has come on me

just when I couldn't stand another ounce.  They have made another failure

of it.  I might have known they would; and the sharpers, or fools, I

don't know which, have contrived to involve me for three times as much as

the first obligation.  The security is in my hands, but it is good for

nothing to me.  I have not the money to do anything with the contract."



Ruth heard this dismal news without great surprise.  She had long felt

that they were living on a volcano, that might go in to active operation

at any hour.  Inheriting from her father an active brain and the courage

to undertake new things, she had little of his sanguine temperament which

blinds one to difficulties and possible failures.  She had little

confidence in the many schemes which had been about to lift her father

out of all his embarrassments and into great wealth, ever since she was

a child; as she grew older, she rather wondered that they were as

prosperous as they seemed to be, and that they did not all go to smash

amid so many brilliant projects.  She was nothing but a woman, and did

not know how much of the business prosperity of the world is only a,

bubble of credit and speculation, one scheme helping to float another

which is no better than it, and the whole liable to come to naught and

confusion as soon as the busy brain that conceived them ceases its power

to devise, or when some accident produces a sudden panic.



"Perhaps, I shall be the stay of the family, yet," said Ruth, with an

approach to gaiety; "When we move into a little house in town, will thee

let me put a little sign on the door: DR. RUTH BOLTON?

Mrs. Dr. Longstreet, thee knows, has a great income."



"Who will pay for the sign, Ruth?" asked Mr. Bolton.



A servant entered with the afternoon mail from the office.  Mr. Bolton

took his letters listlessly, dreading to open them.  He knew well what

they contained, new difficulties, more urgent demands fox money.



"Oh, here is one from Philip.  Poor fellow.  I shall feel his

disappointment as much as my own bad luck.  It is hard to bear when one

is young."



He opened the letter and read.  As he read his face lightened, and he

fetched such a sigh of relief, that Mrs. Bolton and Ruth both exclaimed.



"Read that," he cried, "Philip has found coal!"



The world was changed in a moment.  One little sentence had done it.

There was no more trouble.  Philip had found coal.  That meant relief.

That meant fortune.  A great weight was taken off, and the spirits of the

whole household rose magically.  Good Money! beautiful demon of Money,

what an enchanter thou art!  Ruth felt that she was of less consequence

in the household, now that Philip had found Coal, and perhaps she was not

sorry to feel so.



Mr. Bolton was ten years younger the next morning.  He went into the

city, and showed his letter on change.  It was the sort of news his

friends were quite willing to listen to.  They took a new interest in

him.  If it was confirmed, Bolton would come right up again.  There would

be no difficulty about his getting all the money he wanted.  The money

market did not seem to be half so tight as it was the day before.

Mr. Bolton spent a very pleasant day in his office, and went home

revolving some new plans, and the execution of some projects he had long

been prevented from entering upon by the lack of money.



The day had been spent by Philip in no less excitement.  By daylight,

with Philip's letters to the mail, word had gone down to Ilium that coal

had been found, and very early a crowd of eager spectators had come up to

see for themselves.



The "prospecting" continued day and night for upwards of a week, and

during the first four or five days the indications grew more and more

promising, and the telegrams and letters kept Mr. Bolton duly posted.

But at last a change came, and the promises began to fail with alarming

rapidity.  In the end it was demonstrated without the possibility of a

doubt that the great "find" was nothing but a worthless seam.



Philip was cast down, all the more so because he had been so foolish as

to send the news to Philadelphia before he knew what he was writing

about.  And now he must contradict it.  "It turns out to be only a mere

seam," he wrote, "but we look upon it as an indication of better further

in."



Alas!  Mr. Bolton's affairs could not wait for "indications."  The future

might have a great deal in store, but the present was black and hopeless.

It was doubtful if any sacrifice could save him from ruin.  Yet sacrifice

he must make, and that instantly, in the hope of saving something from

the wreck of his fortune.



His lovely country home must go.  That would bring the most ready money.

The house that he had built with loving thought for each one of his

family, as he planned its luxurious apartments and adorned it; the

grounds that he had laid out, with so much delight in following the

tastes of his wife, with whom the country, the cultivation of rare trees

and flowers, the care of garden and lawn and conservatories were a

passion almost; this home, which he had hoped his children would enjoy

long after he had done with it, must go.



The family bore the sacrifice better than he did.  They declared in fact

--women are such hypocrites--that they quite enjoyed the city (it was in

August) after living so long in the country, that it was a thousand tunes

more convenient in every respect; Mrs. Bolton said it was a relief from

the worry of a large establishment, and Ruth reminded her father that she

should have had to come to town anyway before long.



Mr. Bolton was relieved, exactly as a water-logged ship is lightened by

throwing overboard the most valuable portion of the cargo--but the leak

was not stopped.  Indeed his credit was injured instead of helped by the

prudent step be had taken.  It was regarded as a sure evidence of his

embarrassment, and it was much more difficult for him to obtain help than

if he had, instead of retrenching, launched into some new speculation.



Philip was greatly troubled, and exaggerated his own share in the

bringing about of the calamity.



"You must not look at it so!" Mr. Bolton wrote him.  "You have neither

helped nor hindered--but you know you may help by and by.  It would have

all happened just so, if we had never begun to dig that hole.  That is

only a drop.  Work away.  I still have hope that something will occur to

relieve me.  At any rate we must not give up the mine, so long as we have

any show."



Alas!  the relief did not come.  New misfortunes came instead.  When the

extent of the Bigler swindle was disclosed there was no more hope that

Mr. Bolton could extricate himself, and he had, as an honest man, no

resource except to surrender all his property for the benefit of his

creditors.



The Autumn came and found Philip working with diminished force but still

with hope.  He had again and again been encouraged by good "indications,"

but he had again and again been disappointed.  He could not go on much

longer, and almost everybody except himself had thought it was useless to

go on as long as he had been doing.



When the news came of Mr. Bolton's failure, of course the work stopped.

The men were discharged, the tools were housed, the hopeful noise of

pickman and driver ceased, and the mining camp had that desolate and

mournful aspect which always hovers over a frustrated enterprise.



Philip sat down amid the ruins, and almost wished he were buried in them.

How distant Ruth was now from him, now, when she might need him most.

How changed was all the Philadelphia world, which had hitherto stood for

the exemplification of happiness and prosperity.



He still had faith that there was coal in that mountain.  He made

a picture of himself living there a hermit in a shanty by the tunnel,

digging away with solitary pick and wheelbarrow, day after day and year

after year, until he grew gray and aged, and was known in all that region

as the old man of the mountain.  Perhaps some day--he felt it must be so

some day--he should strike coal.  But what if he did?  Who would be alive

to care for it then?  What would he care for it then?  No, a man wants

riches in his youth, when the world is fresh to him.  He wondered why

Providence could not have reversed the usual process, and let the

majority of men begin with wealth and gradually spend it, and die poor

when they no longer needed it.



Harry went back to the city.  It was evident that his services were no

longer needed.  Indeed, he had letters from his uncle, which he did not

read to Philip, desiring him to go to San Francisco to look after some

government contracts in the harbor there.



Philip had to look about him for something to do; he was like Adam;

the world was all before him whereto choose.  He made, before he went

elsewhere, a somewhat painful visit to Philadelphia, painful but yet not

without its sweetnesses.  The family had never shown him so much

affection before; they all seemed to think his disappointment of more

importance than their own misfortune.  And there was that in Ruth's

manner--in what she gave him and what she withheld--that would have made

a hero of a very much less promising character than Philip Sterling.



Among the assets of the Bolton property, the Ilium tract was sold, and

Philip bought it in at the vendue, for a song, for no one cared to even

undertake the mortgage on it except himself.  He went away the owner of

it, and had ample time before he reached home in November, to calculate

how much poorer he was by possessing it.









CHAPTER L.



It is impossible for the historian, with even the best intentions,

to control events or compel the persons of his narrative to act wisely

or to be successful.  It is easy to see how things might have been better

managed; a very little change here and there would have made a very,

different history of this one now in hand.



If Philip had adopted some regular profession, even some trade, he might

now be a prosperous editor or a conscientious plumber, or an honest

lawyer, and have borrowed money at the saving's bank and built a cottage,

and be now furnishing it for the occupancy of Ruth and himself.  Instead

of this, with only a smattering of civil engineering, he is at his

mother's house, fretting and fuming over his ill-luck, and the hardness

and, dishonesty of men, and thinking of nothing but how to get the coal

out of the Ilium hills.



If Senator Dilworthy had not made that visit to Hawkeye, the Hawkins

family and Col. Sellers would not now be dancing attendance upon

Congress, and endeavoring to tempt that immaculate body into one of those

appropriations, for the benefit of its members, which the members find it

so difficult to explain to their constituents; and Laura would not be

lying in the Tombs, awaiting her trial for murder, and doing her best,

by the help of able counsel, to corrupt the pure fountain of criminal

procedure in New York.



If Henry Brierly had been blown up on the first Mississippi steamboat he

set foot on, as the chances were that he would be, he and Col. Sellers

never would have gone into the Columbus Navigation scheme, and probably

never into the East Tennessee Land scheme, and he would not now be

detained in New York from very important business operations on the

Pacific coast, for the sole purpose of giving evidence to convict of

murder the only woman he ever loved half as much as he loves himself.

If Mr. Bolton had said the little word "no" to Mr. Bigler, Alice Montague

might now be spending the winter in Philadelphia, and Philip also

(waiting to resume his mining operations in the spring); and Ruth would

not be an assistant in a Philadelphia hospital, taxing her strength with

arduous routine duties, day by day, in order to lighten a little the

burdens that weigh upon her unfortunate family.



It is altogether a bad business.  An honest historian, who had progressed

thus far, and traced everything to such a condition of disaster and

suspension, might well be justified in ending his narrative and writing--

"after this the deluge."  His only consolation would be in the reflection

that he was not responsible for either characters or events.



And the most annoying thought is that a little money, judiciously

applied, would relieve the burdens and anxieties of most of these people;

but affairs seem to be so arranged that money is most difficult to get

when people need it most.



A little of what Mr. Bolton has weakly given to unworthy people would now

establish his family in a sort of comfort, and relieve Ruth of the

excessive toil for which she inherited no adequate physical vigor.

A little money would make a prince of Col. Sellers; and a little more

would calm the anxiety of Washington Hawkins about Laura, for however the

trial ended, he could feel sure of extricating her in the end.  And if

Philip had a little money he could unlock the stone door in the mountain

whence would issue a stream of shining riches.  It needs a golden wand to

strike that rock.  If the Knobs University bill could only go through,

what a change would be wrought in the condition of most of the persons in

this history.  Even Philip himself would feel the good effects of it;

for Harry would have something and Col. Sellers would have something;

and have not both these cautious people expressed a determination to take

an interest in the Ilium mine when they catch their larks?



Philip could not resist the inclination to pay a visit to Fallkill.  He

had not been at the Montague's since the tune he saw Ruth there, and he

wanted to consult the Squire about an occupation.  He was determined now

to waste no more time in waiting on Providence, but to go to work at

something, if it were nothing better, than teaching in the Fallkill

Seminary, or digging clams on Hingham beach.  Perhaps he could read law

in Squire Montague's office while earning his bread as a teacher in the

Seminary.



It was not altogether Philip's fault, let us own, that he was in this

position.  There are many young men like him in American society, of his

age, opportunities, education and abilities, who have really been

educated for nothing and have let themselves drift, in the hope that they

will find somehow, and by some sudden turn of good luck, the golden road

to fortune.  He was not idle or lazy, he had energy and a disposition to

carve his own way.  But he was born into a time when all young men of his

age caught the fever of speculation, and expected to get on in the world

by the omission of some of the regular processes which have been

appointed from of old.  And examples were not wanting to encourage him.

He saw people, all around him, poor yesterday, rich to-day, who had come

into sudden opulence by some means which they could not have classified

among any of the regular occupations of life.  A war would give such a

fellow a career and very likely fame.  He might have been a "railroad

man," or a politician, or a land speculator, or one of those mysterious

people who travel free on all rail-roads and steamboats, and are

continually crossing and recrossing the Atlantic, driven day and night

about nobody knows what, and make a great deal of money by so doing.

Probably, at last, he sometimes thought with a whimsical smile, he should

end by being an insurance agent, and asking people to insure their lives

for his benefit.



Possibly Philip did not think how much the attractions of Fallkill were

increased by the presence of Alice there.  He had known her so long, she

had somehow grown into his life by habit, that he would expect the

pleasure of her society without thinking mach about it.  Latterly he

never thought of her without thinking of Ruth, and if he gave the subject

any attention, it was probably in an undefined consciousness that, he had

her sympathy in his love, and that she was always willing to hear him

talk about it.  If he ever wondered that Alice herself was not in love

and never spoke of the possibility of her own marriage, it was a

transient thought for love did not seem necessary, exactly, to one so

calm and evenly balanced and with so many resources in her herself.



Whatever her thoughts may have been they were unknown to Philip, as they

are to these historians; if she was seeming to be what she was not, and

carrying a burden heavier than any one else carried, because she had to

bear it alone, she was only doing what thousands of women do, with a

self-renunciation and heroism, of which men, impatient and complaining,

have no conception.  Have not these big babies with beards filled all

literature with their outcries, their griefs and their lamentations?  It

is always the gentle sex which is hard and cruel and fickle and

implacable.



"Do you think you would be contented to live in Fallkill, and attend the

county Court?" asked Alice, when Philip had opened the budget of his new

programme.



"Perhaps not always," said Philip, "I might go and practice in Boston

maybe, or go to Chicago."



"Or you might get elected to Congress."



Philip looked at Alice to see if she was in earnest and not chaffing him.

Her face was quite sober.  Alice was one of those patriotic women in the

rural districts, who think men are still selected for Congress on account

of qualifications for the office.



"No," said Philip, "the chances are that a man cannot get into congress

now without resorting to arts and means that should render hint unfit to

go there; of course there are exceptions; but do you know that I could

not go into politics if I were a lawyer, without losing standing somewhat

in my profession, and without raising at least a suspicion of my

intentions and unselfishness?  Why, it is telegraphed all over the

country and commented on as something wonderful if a congressman votes

honestly and unselfishly and refuses to take advantage of his position to

steal from the government."



"But," insisted Alice, "I should think it a noble ambition to go to

congress, if it is so bad, and help reform it.  I don't believe it is as

corrupt as the English parliament used to be, if there is any truth in

the novels, and I suppose that is reformed."



"I'm sure I don't know where the reform is to begin.  I've seen a

perfectly capable, honest man, time and again, run against an illiterate

trickster, and get beaten.  I suppose if the people wanted decent members

of congress they would elect them.  Perhaps," continued Philip with a

smile, "the women will have to vote."



"Well, I should be willing to, if it were a necessity, just as I would go

to war and do what I could, if the country couldn't be saved otherwise,"

said Alice, with a spirit that surprised Philip, well as he thought he

knew her.  "If I were a young gentleman in these times--"



Philip laughed outright.  "It's just what Ruth used to say, 'if she were

a man.' I wonder if all the young ladies are contemplating a change of

sex."



"No, only a changed sex," retorted Alice; "we contemplate for the most

part young men who don't care for anything they ought to care for."



"Well," said Philip, looking humble, "I care for some things, you and

Ruth for instance; perhaps I ought not to.  Perhaps I ought to care for

Congress and that sort of thing."



"Don't be a goose, Philip.  I heard from Ruth yesterday."



"Can I see her letter?"



"No, indeed.  But I am afraid her hard work is telling on her, together

with her anxiety about her father."



"Do you think, Alice," asked Philip with one of those selfish thoughts

that are not seldom mixed with real love, "that Ruth prefers her

profession to--to marriage?"



"Philip," exclaimed Alice, rising to quit the room, and speaking

hurriedly as if the words were forced from her, "you are as blind as a

bat; Ruth would cut off her right hand for you this minute."



Philip never noticed that Alice's face was flushed and that her voice was

unsteady; he only thought of the delicious words he had heard.  And the

poor girl, loyal to Ruth, loyal to Philip, went straight to her room,

locked the door, threw herself on the bed and sobbed as if her heart

world break.  And then she prayed that her Father in Heaven would give

her strength.  And after a time she was calm again, and went to her

bureau drawer and took from a hiding place a little piece of paper,

yellow with age.  Upon it was pinned a four-leaved clover, dry and yellow

also.  She looked long at this foolish memento.  Under the clover leaf

was written in a school-girl's hand--"Philip, June, 186-."



Squire Montague thought very well of Philip's proposal.  It would have

been better if he had begun the study of the law as soon as he left

college, but it was not too late now, and besides he had gathered some

knowledge of the world.



"But," asked the Squire, "do you mean to abandon your land in

Pennsylvania?"  This track of land seemed an immense possible fortune to

this New England lawyer-farmer.  Hasn't it good timber, and doesn't the

railroad almost touch it?"



"I can't do anything with it now.  Perhaps I can sometime."



"What is your reason for supposing that there is coal there?"



"The opinion of the best geologist I could consult, my own observation

of the country, and the little veins of it we found.  I feel certain it

is there.  I shall find it some day.  I know it.  If I can only keep the

land till I make money enough to try again."



Philip took from his pocket a map of the anthracite coal region, and

pointed out the position of the Ilium mountain which he had begun to

tunnel.



"Doesn't it look like it?"



"It certainly does," said the Squire, very much interested.  It is not

unusual for a quiet country gentleman to be more taken with such a

venture than a speculator who, has had more experience in its

uncertainty.  It was astonishing how many New England clergymen, in the

time of the petroleum excitement, took chances in oil.  The Wall street

brokers are said to do a good deal of small business for country

clergymen, who are moved no doubt with the laudable desire of purifying

the New York stock board.



"I don't see that there is much risk," said the Squire, at length.

"The timber is worth more than the mortgage; and if that coal seam does

run there, it's a magnificent fortune.  Would you like to try it again in

the spring, Phil?"



Like to try it!  If he could have a little help, he would work himself,

with pick and barrow, and live on a crust.  Only give him one more

chance.



And this is how it came about that the cautious old Squire Montague was

drawn into this young fellow's speculation, and began to have his serene

old age disturbed by anxieties and by the hope of a great stroke of luck.



"To be sure, I only care about it for the boy," he said.  The Squire was

like everybody else; sooner or later he must "take a chance."



It is probably on account of the lack of enterprise in women that they

are not so fond of stock speculations and mine ventures as men.  It is

only when woman becomes demoralized that she takes to any sort of

gambling.  Neither Alice nor Ruth were much elated with the prospect of

Philip's renewal of his mining enterprise.



But Philip was exultant.  He wrote to Ruth as if his fortune were already

made, and as if the clouds that lowered over the house of Bolton were

already in the deep bosom of a coal mine buried.  Towards spring he went

to Philadelphia with his plans all matured for a new campaign.  His

enthusiasm was irresistible.



"Philip has come, Philip has come," cried the children, as if some great

good had again come into the household; and the refrain even sang itself

over in Ruth's heart as she went the weary hospital rounds.  Mr. Bolton

felt more courage than he had had in months, at the sight of his manly

face and the sound of his cheery voice.



Ruth's course was vindicated now, and it certainly did not become Philip,

who had nothing to offer but a future chance against the visible result

of her determination and industry, to open an argument with her.  Ruth

was never more certain that she was right and that she was sufficient

unto herself.  She, may be, did not much heed the still small voice that

sang in her maiden heart as she went about her work, and which lightened

it and made it easy, "Philip has come."



"I am glad for father's sake," she said to Philip, that thee has come.

I can see that he depends greatly upon what thee can do.  He thinks women

won't hold out long," added Ruth with the smile that Philip never exactly

understood.



"And aren't you tired sometimes of the struggle?"



"Tired?  Yes, everybody is tired I suppose.  But it is a glorious

profession.  And would you want me to be dependent, Philip?"



"Well, yes, a little," said Philip, feeling his way towards what he

wanted to say.



"On what, for instance, just now?" asked Ruth, a little maliciously

Philip thought.



"Why, on--" he couldn't quite say it, for it occurred to him that he was

a poor stick for any body to lean on in the present state of his fortune,

and that the woman before him was at least as independent as he was.



"I don't mean depend," he began again.  "But I love you, that's all.  Am

I nothing--to you?" And Philip looked a little defiant, and as if he had

said something that ought to brush away all the sophistries of obligation

on either side, between man and woman.



Perhaps Ruth saw this.  Perhaps she saw that her own theories of a

certain equality of power, which ought to precede a union of two hearts,

might be pushed too far.  Perhaps she had felt sometimes her own weakness

and the need after all of so dear a sympathy and so tender an interest

confessed, as that which Philip could give.  Whatever moved her--the

riddle is as old as creation--she simply looked up to Philip and said in

a low voice, "Everything."



And Philip clasping both her hands in his, and looking down into her

eyes, which drank in all his tenderness with the thirst of a true woman's

nature--



"Oh! Philip, come out here," shouted young Eli, throwing the door wide

open.



And Ruth escaped away to her room, her heart singing again, and now as if

it would burst for joy, "Philip has come."



That night Philip received a dispatch from Harry--"The trial begins

tomorrow."









CHAPTER, LI



December 18--, found Washington Hawkins and Col. Sellers once more at the

capitol of the nation, standing guard over the University bill.  The

former gentleman was despondent, the latter hopeful.  Washington's

distress of mind was chiefly on Laura's account.  The court would soon

sit to try her, case, he said, and consequently a great deal of ready

money would be needed in the engineering of it.  The University bill was

sure to pass this, time, and that would make money plenty, but might not

the, help come too late?  Congress had only just assembled, and delays

were to be feared.



"Well," said the Colonel, "I don't know but you are more or less right,

there.  Now let's figure up a little on, the preliminaries.  I think

Congress always tries to do as near right as it can, according to its

lights.  A man can't ask any fairer, than that.  The first preliminary it

always starts out on, is, to clean itself, so to speak.  It will arraign

two or three dozen of its members, or maybe four or five dozen, for

taking bribes to vote for this and that and the other bill last winter."



"It goes up into the dozens, does it?"



"Well, yes; in a free country likes ours, where any man can run for

Congress and anybody can vote for him, you can't expect immortal purity

all the time--it ain't in nature.  Sixty or eighty or a hundred and fifty

people are bound to get in who are not angels in disguise, as young Hicks

the correspondent says; but still it is a very good average; very good

indeed.  As long as it averages as well as that, I think we can feel very

well satisfied.  Even in these days, when people growl so much and the

newspapers are so out of patience, there is still a very respectable

minority of honest men in Congress."



"Why a respectable minority of honest men can't do any good, Colonel."



"Oh, yes it can, too"



"Why, how?"



"Oh, in many ways, many ways."



"But what are the ways?"



"Well--I don't know--it is a question that requires time; a body can't

answer every question right off-hand.  But it does do good.  I am

satisfied of that."



"All right, then; grant that it does good; go on with the preliminaries."



"That is what I am coming to.  First, as I said, they will try a lot of

members for taking money for votes.  That will take four weeks."



"Yes, that's like last year; and it is a sheer waste of the time for

which the nation pays those men to work--that is what that is.  And it

pinches when a body's got a bill waiting."



"A waste of time, to purify the fountain of public law?  Well, I never

heard anybody express an idea like that before.  But if it were, it would

still be the fault of the minority, for the majority don't institute

these proceedings.  There is where that minority becomes an obstruction--

but still one can't say it is on the wrong side.--Well, after they have

finished the bribery cases, they will take up cases of members who have

bought their seats with money.  That will take another four weeks."



"Very good; go on.  You have accounted for two-thirds of the session."



"Next they will try each other for various smaller irregularities, like

the sale of appointments to West Point cadetships, and that sort of

thing--mere trifling pocket-money enterprises that might better, be

passed over in silence, perhaps, but then one of our Congresses can never

rest easy till it has thoroughly purified itself of all blemishes--and

that is a thing to be applauded."



"How long does it take to disinfect itself of these minor impurities?"



"Well, about two weeks, generally."



"So Congress always lies helpless in quarantine ten weeks of a session.

That's encouraging.  Colonel, poor Laura will never get any benefit from

our bill.  Her trial will be over before Congress has half purified

itself.--And doesn't it occur to you that by the time it has expelled all

its impure members there, may not be enough members left to do business

legally?"



"Why I did not say Congress would expel anybody."



"Well won't it expel anybody?"



"Not necessarily.  Did it last year?  It never does.  That would not be

regular."



"Then why waste all the session in that tomfoolery of trying members?"



"It is usual; it is customary; the country requires it."



"Then the country is a fool, I think."



"Oh, no.  The country thinks somebody is going to be expelled."



"Well, when nobody is expelled, what does the country think then?"



"By that time, the thing has strung out so long that the country is sick

and tired of it and glad to have a change on any terms.  But all that

inquiry is not lost.  It has a good moral effect."



"Who does it have a good moral effect on?"



"Well--I don't know.  On foreign countries, I think.  We have always been

under the gaze of foreign countries.  There is no country in the world,

sir, that pursues corruption as inveterately as we do.  There is no

country in the world whose representatives try each other as much as ours

do, or stick to it as long on a stretch.  I think there is something

great in being a model for the whole civilized world, Washington"



"You don't mean a model; you mean an example."



"Well, it's all the same; it's just the same thing.  It shows that a man

can't be corrupt in this country without sweating for it, I can tell you

that."



"Hang it, Colonel, you just said we never punish anybody for villainous

practices."



"But good God we try them, don't we!  Is it nothing to show a disposition

to sift things and bring people to a strict account?  I tell you it has

its effect."



"Oh, bother the effect!--What is it they do do?  How do they proceed?

You know perfectly well--and it is all bosh, too.  Come, now, how do they

proceed?"



"Why they proceed right and regular--and it ain't bosh, Washington, it

ain't bosh.  They appoint a committee to investigate, and that committee

hears evidence three weeks, and all the witnesses on one side swear that

the accused took money or stock or something for his vote.  Then the

accused stands up and testifies that he may have done it, but he was

receiving and handling a good deal of money at the time and he doesn't

remember this particular circumstance--at least with sufficient

distinctness to enable him to grasp it tangibly.  So of course the thing

is not proven--and that is what they say in the verdict.  They don't

acquit, they don't condemn.  They just say, 'Charge not proven.'  It

leaves the accused is a kind of a shaky condition before the country,

it purifies Congress, it satisfies everybody, and it doesn't seriously

hurt anybody.  It has taken a long time to perfect our system, but it is

the most admirable in the world, now."



"So one of those long stupid investigations always turns out in that lame

silly way.  Yes, you are correct.  I thought maybe you viewed the matter

differently from other people.  Do you think a Congress of ours could

convict the devil of anything if he were a member?"



"My dear boy, don't let these damaging delays prejudice you against

Congress.  Don't use such strong language; you talk like a newspaper.

Congress has inflicted frightful punishments on its members--now you know

that.  When they tried Mr. Fairoaks, and a cloud of witnesses proved him

to be--well, you know what they proved him to be--and his own testimony

and his own confessions gave him the same character, what did Congress do

then?--come!"



"Well, what did Congress do?"



"You know what Congress did, Washington.  Congress intimated plainly

enough, that they considered him almost a stain upon their body; and

without waiting ten days, hardly, to think the thing over, the rose up

and hurled at him a resolution declaring that they disapproved of his

conduct!  Now you know that, Washington."



"It was a terrific thing--"there is no denying that.  If he had been

proven guilty of theft, arson, licentiousness, infanticide, and defiling

graves, I believe they would have suspended him for two days."



"You can depend on it, Washington.  Congress is vindictive, Congress is

savage, sir, when it gets waked up once.  It will go to any length to

vindicate its honor at such a time."



"Ah well, we have talked the morning through, just as usual in these

tiresome days of waiting, and we have reached the same old result; that

is to say, we are no better off than when we began.  The land bill is

just as far away as ever, and the trial is closer at hand.  Let's give up

everything and die."



"Die and leave the Duchess to fight it out all alone?  Oh, no, that won't

do.  Come, now, don't talk so.  It is all going to come out right.  Now

you'll see."



"It never will, Colonel, never in the world.  Something tells me that.

I get more tired and more despondent every day.  I don't see any hope;

life is only just a trouble.  I am so miserable, these days!"



The Colonel made Washington get up and walk the floor with him, arm in

arm.  The good old speculator wanted to comfort him, but he hardly knew

how to go about it.  He made many attempts, but they were lame; they

lacked spirit; the words were encouraging; but they were only words--he

could not get any heart into them.  He could not always warm up, now,

with the old Hawkeye fervor.  By and by his lips trembled and his voice

got unsteady.  He said:



"Don't give up the ship, my boy--don't do it.  The wind's bound to fetch

around and set in our favor.  I know it."



And the prospect was so cheerful that he wept.  Then he blew a trumpet-

blast that started the meshes of his handkerchief, and said in almost his

breezy old-time way:



"Lord bless us, this is all nonsense!  Night doesn't last always; day has

got to break some time or other.  Every silver lining has a cloud behind

it, as the poet says; and that remark has always cheered me; though--

I never could see any meaning to it.  Everybody uses it, though, and

everybody gets comfort out of it.  I wish they would start something

fresh.  Come, now, let's cheer up; there's been as good fish in the sea

as there are now.  It shall never be said that Beriah Sellers--

Come in?"



It was the telegraph boy.  The Colonel reached for the message and

devoured its contents:



"I said it!  Never give up the ship!  The trial's, postponed till

February, and we'll save the child yet.  Bless my life, what lawyers

they, have in New-York!  Give them money to fight with; and the ghost of

an excuse, and they: would manage to postpone anything in this world,

unless it might be the millennium or something like that.  Now for work

again my boy.  The trial will last to the middle of March, sure; Congress

ends the fourth of March.  Within three days of the end of the session

they will be done putting through the preliminaries then they will be

ready for national business:  Our bill will go through in forty-eight

hours, then, and we'll telegraph a million dollar's to the jury--to the

lawyers, I mean--and the verdict of the jury will be 'Accidental murder

resulting from justifiable insanity'--or something to, that effect,

something to that effect.--Everything is dead sure, now.  Come, what is

the matter?  What are you wilting down like that, for?  You mustn't be a

girl, you know."



"Oh, Colonel, I am become so used to troubles, so used to failures,

disappointments, hard luck of all kinds, that a little good news breaks

me right down.  Everything has been so hopeless that now I can't stand

good news at all.  It is too good to be true, anyway.  Don't you see how

our bad luck has worked on me?  My hair is getting gray, and many nights

I don't sleep at all.  I wish it was all over and we could rest.  I wish

we could lie, down and just forget everything, and let it all be just a

dream that is done and can't come back to trouble us any more.  I am so

tired."



"Ah, poor child, don't talk like that-cheer up--there's daylight ahead.

Don't give, up.  You'll have Laura again, and--Louise, and your mother,

and oceans and oceans of money--and then you can go away, ever so far

away somewhere, if you want to, and forget all about this infernal place.

And by George I'll go with you!  I'll go with you--now there's my word on

it.  Cheer up.  I'll run out and tell the friends the news."



And he wrung Washington's hand and was about to hurry away when his

companion, in a burst of grateful admiration said:



"I think you are the best soul and the noblest I ever knew, Colonel

Sellers! and if the people only knew you as I do, you would not be

tagging around here a nameless man--you would be in Congress."



The gladness died out of the Colonel's face, and he laid his hand upon

Washington's shoulder and said gravely:



"I have always been a friend of your family, Washington, and I think I

have always tried to do right as between man and man, according to my

lights.  Now I don't think there has ever been anything in my conduct

that should make you feel Justified in saying a thing like that."



He turned, then, and walked slowly out, leaving Washington abashed and

somewhat bewildered.  When Washington had presently got his thoughts into

line again, he said to himself, "Why, honestly, I only meant to

compliment him--indeed I would not have hurt him for the world."









CHAPTER LII.



The weeks drifted by monotonously enough, now.  The "preliminaries"

continued to drag along in Congress, and life was a dull suspense to

Sellers and Washington, a weary waiting which might have broken their

hearts, maybe, but for the relieving change which they got out of am

occasional visit to New York to see Laura.  Standing guard in Washington

or anywhere else is not an exciting business in time of peace, but

standing guard was all that the two friends had to do; all that was

needed of them was that they should be on hand and ready for any

emergency that might come up.  There was no work to do; that was all

finished; this was but the second session of the last winter's Congress,

and its action on the bill could have but one result--its passage.  The

house must do its work over again, of course, but the same membership was

there to see that it did it.--The Senate was secure--Senator Dilworthy

was able to put all doubts to rest on that head.  Indeed it was no secret

in Washington that a two-thirds vote in the Senate was ready and waiting

to be cast for the University bill as soon as it should come before that

body.



Washington did not take part in the gaieties of "the season," as he had

done the previous winter.  He had lost his interest in such things; he

was oppressed with cares, now.  Senator Dilworthy said to Washington that

an humble deportment, under punishment, was best, and that there was but

one way in which the troubled heart might find perfect repose and peace.

The suggestion found a response in Washington's breast, and the Senator

saw the sign of it in his face.



From that moment one could find the youth with the Senator even oftener

than with Col. Sellers.  When the statesman presided at great temperance

meetings, he placed Washington in the front rank of impressive

dignitaries that gave tone to the occasion and pomp to the platform.

His bald headed surroundings made the youth the more conspicuous.



When the statesman made remarks in these meetings, he not infrequently

alluded with effect to the encouraging spectacle of one of the wealthiest

and most brilliant young favorites of society forsaking the light

vanities of that butterfly existence to nobly and self-sacrificingly

devote his talents and his riches to the cause of saving his hapless

fellow creatures from shame and misery here and eternal regret hereafter.

At the prayer meetings the Senator always brought Washington up the aisle

on his arm and seated him prominently; in his prayers he referred to him

in the cant terms which the Senator employed, perhaps unconsciously, and

mistook, maybe, for religion, and in other ways brought him into notice.

He had him out at gatherings for the benefit of the negro, gatherings for

the benefit of the Indian, gatherings for the benefit of the heathen in

distant lands.  He had him out time and again, before Sunday Schools,

as an example for emulation.  Upon all these occasions the Senator made

casual references to many benevolent enterprises which his ardent young

friend was planning against the day when the passage of the University

bill should make his means available for the amelioration of the

condition of the unfortunate among his fellow men of all nations and all.

climes.  Thus as the weeks rolled on Washington grew up, into an imposing

lion once more, but a lion that roamed the peaceful fields of religion

and temperance, and revisited the glittering domain of fashion no more.

A great moral influence was thus brought, to bear in favor of the bill;

the  weightiest of friends flocked to its standard; its most energetic

enemies said it was useless to fight longer; they had tacitly surrendered

while as yet the day of battle was not come.









CHAPTER LIII.



The session was drawing toward its close.  Senator Dilworthy thought he

would run out west and shake hands with his constituents and let them

look at him.  The legislature whose duty it would be to re-elect him to

the United States Senate, was already in session.  Mr. Dilworthy

considered his re-election certain, but he was a careful, painstaking

man, and if, by visiting his State he could find the opportunity to

persuade a few more legislators to vote for him, he held the journey to

be well worth taking.  The University bill was safe, now; he could leave

it without fear; it needed his presence and his watching no longer.

But there was a person in his State legislature who did need watching--

a person who, Senator Dilworthy said, was a narrow, grumbling,

uncomfortable malcontent--a person who was stolidly opposed to reform,

and progress and him,--a person who, he feared, had been bought with

money to combat him, and through him the commonwealth's welfare and its

politics' purity.



"If this person Noble," said Mr. Dilworthy, in a little speech at a

dinner party given him by some of his admirers, "merely desired to

sacrifice me.--I would willingly offer up my political life on the altar

of my dear State's weal, I would be glad and grateful to do it; but when

he makes of me but a cloak to hide his deeper designs, when he proposes

to strike through me at the heart of my beloved State, all the lion in me

is roused--and I say here I stand, solitary and alone, but unflinching,

unquailing, thrice armed with my sacred trust; and whoso passes, to do

evil to this fair domain that looks to me for protection, must do so over

my dead body."



He further said that if this Noble were a pure man, and merely misguided,

he could bear it, but that he should succeed in his wicked designs

through, a base use of money would leave a blot upon his State which

would work untold evil to the morals of the people, and that he would not

suffer; the public morals must not be contaminated.  He would seek this

man Noble; he would argue, he would persuade, he would appeal to his

honor.



When he arrived on the ground he found his friends unterrified; they were

standing firmly by him and were full of courage.  Noble was working hard,

too, but matters were against him, he was not making much progress.

Mr. Dilworthy took an early opportunity to send for Mr. Noble; he had a

midnight interview with him, and urged him to forsake his evil ways; he

begged him to come again and again, which he did.  He finally sent the

man away at 3 o'clock one morning; and when he was gone, Mr. Dilworthy

said to himself,



"I feel a good deal relieved, now, a great deal relieved."



The Senator now turned his attention to matters touching the souls of his

people.  He appeared in church; he took a leading part in prayer

meetings; he met and encouraged the temperance societies; he graced the

sewing circles of the ladies with his presence, and even took a needle

now and then and made a stitch or two upon a calico shirt for some poor

Bibleless pagan of the South Seas, and this act enchanted the ladies,

who regarded the garments thus honored as in a manner sanctified.

The Senator wrought in Bible classes, and nothing could keep him away

from the Sunday Schools--neither sickness nor storms nor weariness.

He even traveled a tedious thirty miles in a poor little rickety

stagecoach to comply with the desire of the miserable hamlet of

Cattleville that he would let its Sunday School look upon him.



All the town was assembled at the stage office when he arrived,

two bonfires were burning, and a battery of anvils was popping exultant

broadsides; for a United States Senator was a sort of god in the

understanding of these people who never had seen any creature mightier

than a county judge.  To them a United States Senator was a vast, vague

colossus, an awe inspiring unreality.



Next day everybody was at the village church a full half hour before time

for Sunday School to open; ranchmen and farmers had come with their

families from five miles around, all eager to get a glimpse of the great

man--the man who had been to Washington; the man who had seen the

President of the United States, and had even talked with him; the man who

had seen the actual Washington Monument--perhaps touched it with his

hands.



When the Senator arrived the Church was crowded, the windows were full,

the aisles were packed, so was the vestibule, and so indeed was the yard

in front of the building.  As he worked his way through to the pulpit on

the arm of the minister and followed by the envied officials of the

village, every neck was stretched and, every eye twisted around

intervening obstructions to get a glimpse.  Elderly people directed each

other's attention and, said, "There! that's him, with the grand, noble

forehead!"  Boys nudged each other and said, "Hi, Johnny, here he is,

there, that's him, with the peeled head!"



The Senator took his seat in the pulpit, with the minister' on one side

of him and the Superintendent of the Sunday School on the other.

The town dignitaries sat in an impressive row within the altar railings

below.  The Sunday School children occupied ten of the front benches.

dressed in their best and most uncomfortable clothes, and with hair

combed and faces too clean to feel natural.  So awed were they by the

presence of a living United States Senator, that during three minutes not

a "spit ball" was thrown.  After that they began to come to themselves by

degrees, and presently the spell was wholly gone and they were reciting

verses and pulling hair.



The usual Sunday School exercises were hurried through, and then the

minister, got up and bored the house with a speech built on the customary

Sunday School plan; then the Superintendent put in his oar; then the town

dignitaries had their say.  They all made complimentary reference to

"their friend the, Senator," and told what a great and illustrious man he

was and what he had done for his country and for religion and temperance,

and exhorted the little boys to be good and diligent and try to become

like him some day.  The speakers won the deathless hatred of the house by

these delays, but at last there was an end and hope revived; inspiration

was about to find utterance.



Senator Dilworthy rose and beamed upon the assemblage for a full minute

in silence.  Then he smiled with an access of sweetness upon the children

and began:



"My little friends--for I hope that all these bright-faced little people

are my friends and will let me be their friend--my little friends, I have

traveled much, I have been in many cities and many States, everywhere in

our great and noble country, and by the blessing of Providence I have

been permitted to see many gatherings like this--but I am proud, I am

truly proud to say that I never have looked upon so much intelligence,

so much grace, such sweetness of disposition as I see in the charming

young countenances I see before me at this moment.  I have been asking

myself as I sat here, Where am I?  Am I in some far-off monarchy, looking

upon little princes and princesses?  No.  Am I in some populous centre of

my own country, where the choicest children of the land have been

selected and brought together as at a fair for a prize?  No.  Am I in

some strange foreign clime where the children are marvels that we know

not of?  No.  Then where am I?  Yes--where am I?  I am in a simple,

remote, unpretending settlement of my own dear State, and these are the

children of the noble and virtuous men who have made me what I am!

My soul is lost in wonder at the thought!  And I humbly thank Him to whom

we are but as worms of the dust, that he has been pleased to call me to

serve such men!  Earth has no higher, no grander position for me.  Let

kings and emperors keep their tinsel crowns, I want them not; my heart is

here!



"Again I thought, Is this a theatre?  No.  Is it a concert or a gilded

opera?  No.  Is it some other vain, brilliant, beautiful temple of soul-

staining amusement and hilarity?  No.  Then what is it?  What did my

consciousness reply?  I ask you, my little friends, What did my

consciousness reply?  It replied, It is the temple of the Lord!  Ah,

think of that, now.  I could hardly beep the tears back, I was so

grateful.  Oh, how beautiful it is to see these ranks of sunny little

faces assembled here to learn the way of life; to learn to be good; to

learn to be useful; to learn to be pious; to learn to be great and

glorious men and women; to learn to be props and pillars of the State and

shining lights in the councils and the households of the nation; to be

bearers of the banner and soldiers of the cross in the rude campaigns of

life, and raptured souls in the happy fields of Paradise hereafter.



"Children, honor your parents and be grateful to them for providing for

you the precious privileges of a Sunday School.



"Now my dear little friends, sit up straight and pretty--there, that's

it--and give me your attention and let me tell you about a poor little

Sunday School scholar I once knew.--He lived in the far west, and his

parents were poor.  They could not give him a costly education; but they

were good and wise and they sent him to the Sunday School.  He loved the

Sunday School.  I hope you love your Sunday School--ah, I see by your

faces that you do!  That is right!



"Well, this poor little boy was always in his place when the bell rang,

and he always knew his lesson; for his teachers wanted him to learn and

he loved his teachers dearly.  Always love your teachers, my children,

for they love you more than you can know, now.  He would not let bad boys

persuade him to go to play on Sunday.  There was one little bad boy who

was always trying to persuade him, but he never could.



"So this poor little boy grew up to be a man, and had to go out in the

world, far from home and friends to earn his living.  Temptations lay all

about him, and sometimes he was about to yield, but he would think of

some precious lesson he learned in his Sunday School a long time ago, and

that would save him.  By and by he was elected to the legislature--Then

he did everything he could for Sunday Schools.  He got laws passed for

them; he got Sunday Schools established wherever he could.



"And by and by the people made him governor--and he said it was all owing

to the Sunday School.



"After a while the people elected him a Representative to the Congress of

the United States, and he grew very famous.--Now temptations assailed him

on every hand.  People tried to get him to drink wine; to dance, to go to

theatres; they even tried to buy his vote; but no, the memory of his

Sunday School saved him from all harm; he remembered the fate of the bad

little boy who used to try to get him to play on Sunday, and who grew up

and became a drunkard and was hanged.  He remembered that, and was glad

he never yielded and played on Sunday.



"Well, at last, what do you think happened?  Why the people gave him a

towering, illustrious position, a grand, imposing position.  And what do

you think it was?  What should you say it was, children?  It was Senator

of the United States!  That poor little boy that loved his Sunday School

became that man.  That man stands before you!  All that he is, he owes to

the Sunday School.



"My precious children, love your parents, love your teachers, love your

Sunday School, be pious, be obedient, be honest, be diligent, and then

you will succeed in life and be honored of all men.  Above all things,

my children, be honest.  Above all things be pure-minded as the snow.

Let us join in prayer."



When Senator Dilworthy departed from Cattleville, he left three dozen

boys behind him arranging a campaign of life whose objective point was

the United States Senate.



When be arrived at the State capital at midnight Mr. Noble came and held

a three-hours' conference with him, and then as he was about leaving

said:



"I've worked hard, and I've got them at last.  Six of them haven't got

quite back-bone enough to slew around and come right out for you on the

first ballot to-morrow; but they're going to vote against you on the

first for the sake of appearances, and then come out for you all in a

body on the second--I've fixed all that!  By supper time to-morrow you'll

be re-elected.  You can go to bed and sleep easy on that."



After Mr. Noble was gone, the Senator said:



"Well, to bring about a complexion of things like this was worth coming

West for."









CHAPTER LIV.



The case of the State of New York against Laura Hawkins was finally set

down for trial on the 15th day of February, less than a year after the

shooting of George Selby.



If the public had almost forgotten the existence of Laura and her crime,

they were reminded of all the details of the murder by the newspapers,

which for some days had been announcing the approaching trial.  But they

had not forgotten.  The sex, the age, the beauty of the prisoner; her

high social position in Washington, the unparalled calmness with which

the crime was committed had all conspired to fix the event in the public

mind, although nearly three hundred and sixty-five subsequent murders had

occurred to vary the monotony of metropolitan life.



No, the public read from time to time of the lovely prisoner, languishing

in the city prison, the tortured victim of the law's delay; and as the

months went by it was natural that the horror of her crime should become

a little indistinct in memory, while the heroine of it should be invested

with a sort of sentimental interest.  Perhaps her counsel had calculated

on this.  Perhaps it was by their advice that Laura had interested

herself in the unfortunate criminals who shared her prison confinement,

and had done not a little to relieve, from her own purse, the necessities

of some of the poor creatures.  That she had done this, the public read

in the journals of the day, and the simple announcement cast a softening

light upon her character.



The court room was crowded at an early hour, before the arrival of

judges, lawyers and prisoner.  There is no enjoyment so keen to certain

minds as that of looking upon the slow torture of a human being on trial

for life, except it be an execution; there is no display of human

ingenuity, wit and power so fascinating as that made by trained lawyers

in the trial of an important case, nowhere else is exhibited such

subtlety, acumen, address, eloquence.



All the conditions of intense excitement meet in a murder trial.  The

awful issue at stake gives significance to the lightest word or look.

How the quick eyes of the spectators rove from the stolid jury to the

keen lawyers, the impassive judge, the anxious prisoner.  Nothing is

lost of the sharp wrangle of the counsel on points of law, the measured

decision's of the bench; the duels between the attorneys and the

witnesses.  The crowd sways with the rise and fall of the shifting,

testimony, in sympathetic interest, and hangs upon the dicta of the

judge in breathless silence.  It speedily takes sides for or against

the accused, and recognizes as quickly its favorites among the lawyers.

Nothing delights it more than the sharp retort of a witness and the

discomfiture of an obnoxious attorney.  A joke, even if it be a lame,

one, is no where so keenly relished or quickly applauded as in a murder

trial.



Within the bar the young lawyers and the privileged hangers-on filled all

the chairs except those reserved at the table for those engaged in the

case.  Without, the throng occupied all the seats, the window ledges and

the standing room.  The atmosphere was already something horrible.

It was the peculiar odor of a criminal court, as if it were tainted by

the presence, in different persons, of all the crimes that men and women

can commit.



There was a little stir when the Prosecuting Attorney, with two

assistants, made his way in, seated himself at the table, and spread his

papers before him.  There was more stir when the counsel of the defense

appeared.  They were Mr. Braham, the senior, and Mr. Quiggle and Mr.

O'Keefe, the juniors.



Everybody in the court room knew Mr. Braham, the great criminal lawyer,

and he was not unaware that he was the object of all eyes as he moved to

his place, bowing to his friends in the bar.  A large but rather spare

man, with broad shoulders and a massive head, covered with chestnut curls

which fell down upon his coat collar and which he had a habit of shaking

as a lion is supposed to shake his mane.  His face was clean shaven,

and he had a wide mouth and rather small dark eyes, set quite too near

together: Mr. Braham wore a brown frock coat buttoned across his breast,

with a rose-bud in the upper buttonhole, and light pantaloons.

A diamond stud was seen to flash from his bosom; and as he seated himself

and drew off his gloves a heavy seal ring was displayed upon his white

left hand.  Mr. Braham having seated himself, deliberately surveyed the

entire house, made a remark to one of his assistants, and then taking an

ivory-handled knife from his pocket began to pare his finger nails,

rocking his chair backwards and forwards slowly.



A moment later Judge O'Shaunnessy entered at the rear door and took his

seat in one of the chairs behind the bench; a gentleman in black

broadcloth, with sandy hair, inclined to curl, a round; reddish and

rather jovial face, sharp rather than intellectual, and with a self-

sufficient air.  His career had nothing remarkable in it.  He was

descended from a long line of Irish Kings, and he was the first one of

them who had ever come into his kingdom--the kingdom of such being the

city of New York.  He had, in fact, descended so far and so low that he

found himself, when a boy, a sort of street Arab in that city; but he had

ambition and native shrewdness, and he speedily took to boot-polishing,

and newspaper hawking, became the office and errand boy of a law firm,

picked up knowledge enough to get some employment in police courts, was

admitted to the bar, became a rising young politician, went to the

legislature, and was finally elected to the bench which he now honored.

In this democratic country he was obliged to conceal his royalty under

a plebeian aspect.  Judge O'Shaunnessy never had a lucrative practice nor

a large salary but he had prudently laid away money-believing that

a dependant judge can never be impartial--and he had lands and houses

to the value of three or four hundred thousand dollars.  Had he not

helped to build and furnish this very Court House?  Did he not know that

the very "spittoon" which his judgeship used cost the city the sum of one

thousand dollars?



As soon as the judge was seated, the court was opened, with the "oi yis,

oi yis" of the officer in his native language, the case called, and the

sheriff was directed to bring in the prisoner.  In the midst of a

profound hush Laura entered, leaning on the arm of the officer, and was

conducted to a seat by her counsel.  She was followed by her mother and

by Washington Hawkins, who were given seats near her.



Laura was very pale, but this pallor heightened the lustre of her large

eyes and gave a touching sadness to her expressive face.  She was dressed

in simple black, with exquisite taste, and without an ornament.  The thin

lace vail which partially covered her face did not so much conceal as

heighten her beauty.  She would not have entered a drawing room with more

self-poise, nor a church with more haughty humility.  There was in her

manner or face neither shame nor boldness, and when she took her seat in

fall view of half the spectators, her eyes were downcast.  A murmur of

admiration ran through the room.  The newspaper reporters made their

pencils fly.  Mr. Braham again swept his eyes over the house as if in

approval.  When Laura at length raised her eyes a little, she saw Philip

and Harry within the bar, but she gave no token of recognition.



The clerk then read the indictment, which was in the usual form.  It

charged Laura Hawkins, in effect, with the premeditated murder of George

Selby, by shooting him with a pistol, with a revolver, shotgun, rifle,

repeater, breech-loader, cannon, six-shooter, with a gun, or some other,

weapon; with killing him with a slung-shot, a bludgeon, carving knife,

bowie knife, pen knife, rolling pin, car, hook, dagger, hair pin, with a

hammer, with a screw-driver; with a nail, and with all other weapons and

utensils whatsoever, at the Southern hotel and in all other hotels and

places wheresoever, on the thirteenth day of March and all other days of

the Christian era wheresoever.



Laura stood while the long indictment was read; and at the end, in

response to the inquiry, of the judge, she said in a clear, low voice;

"Not guilty."  She sat down and the court proceeded to impanel a jury.



The first man called was Michael Lanigan, saloon keeper.



"Have you formed or expressed any opinion on this case, and do you know

any of the parties?"



"Not any," said Mr. Lanigan.



"Have you any conscientious objections to capital punishment?"



"No, sir, not to my knowledge."



"Have you read anything about this case?"



"To be sure, I read the papers, y'r Honor."



Objected to by Mr. Braham, for cause, and discharged.



Patrick Coughlin.



"What is your business?"



"Well--I haven't got any particular business."



"Haven't any particular business, eh?  Well, what's your general

business?  What do you do for a living?"



"I own some terriers, sir."



"Own some terriers, eh?  Keep a rat pit?"



"Gentlemen comes there to have a little sport.  I never fit 'em, sir."



"Oh, I see--you are probably the amusement committee of the city council.

Have you ever heard of this case?"



"Not till this morning, sir."



"Can you read?"



"Not fine print, y'r Honor."



The man was about to be sworn, when Mr. Braham asked,



"Could your father read?"



"The old gentleman was mighty handy at that, sir."



Mr. Braham submitted that the man was disqualified Judge thought not.

Point argued.  Challenged peremptorily, and set aside.



Ethan Dobb, cart-driver.



"Can you read?"



"Yes, but haven't a habit of it."



"Have you heard of this case?"



"I think so--but it might be another.  I have no opinion about it."



Dist. A.  "Tha--tha--there!  Hold on a bit?  Did anybody tell you to say

you had no opinion about it?"



"N--n--o, sir."



Take care now, take care.  Then what suggested it to you to volunteer

that remark?"



"They've always asked that, when I was on juries."



All right, then.  Have you any conscientious scruples about capital

punishment?"



"Any which?"



"Would you object to finding a person guilty--of murder on evidence?"



"I might, sir, if I thought he wan't guilty."



The district attorney thought he saw a point.



"Would this feeling rather incline you against a capital conviction?"



The juror said he hadn't any feeling, and didn't know any of the parties.

Accepted and sworn.



Dennis Lafin, laborer.  Have neither formed nor expressed an opinion.

Never had heard of the case.  Believed in hangin' for them that deserved

it.  Could read if it was necessary.



Mr. Braham objected.  The man was evidently bloody minded.  Challenged

peremptorily.



Larry O'Toole, contractor.  A showily dressed man of the style known as

"vulgar genteel," had a sharp eye and a ready tongue.  Had read the

newspaper reports of the case, but they made no impression on him.

Should be governed by the evidence.  Knew no reason why he could not be

an impartial juror.



Question by District Attorney.



"How is it that the reports made no impression on you?"



"Never believe anything I see in the newspapers."



(Laughter from the crowd, approving smiles from his Honor and Mr.

Braham.) Juror sworn in.  Mr. Braham whispered to O'Keefe, "that's the

man."



Avery Hicks, pea-nut peddler.  Did he ever hear of this case?  The man

shook his head.



"Can you read?"



"No."  "Any scruples about capital punishment?"



"No."



He was about to be sworn, when the district attorney turning to him

carelessly, remarked,



"Understand the nature of an oath?"



"Outside," said the man, pointing to the door.



"I say, do you know what an oath is?"



"Five cents," explained the man.



"Do you mean to insult me?" roared the prosecuting officer. "Are you an

idiot?"



"Fresh baked.  I'm deefe.  I don't hear a word you say."



The man was discharged.  "He wouldn't have made a bad juror, though,"

whispered Braham.  "I saw him looking at the prisoner sympathizingly.

That's a point you want to watch for."



The result of the whole day's work was the selection of only two jurors.

These however were satisfactory to Mr. Braham.  He had kept off all those

he did not know.  No one knew better than this great criminal lawyer that

the battle was fought on the selection of the jury.  The subsequent

examination of witnesses, the eloquence expended on the jury are all for

effect outside.  At least that is the theory of Mr. Braham.  But human

nature is a queer thing, he admits; sometimes jurors are unaccountably

swayed, be as careful as you can in choosing them.



It was four weary days before this jury was made up, but when it was

finally complete, it did great credit to the counsel for the defence.

So far as Mr. Braham knew, only two could read, one of whom was the

foreman, Mr. Braham's friend, the showy contractor.  Low foreheads and

heavy faces they all had; some had a look of animal cunning, while the

most were only stupid.  The entire panel formed that boasted heritage

commonly described as the "bulwark of our liberties."



The District Attorney, Mr.McFlinn, opened the case for the state.  He

spoke with only the slightest accent, one that had been inherited but not

cultivated.  He contented himself with a brief statement of the case.

The state would prove that Laura Hawkins, the prisoner at the bar, a

fiend in the form of a beautiful woman, shot dead George Selby, a

Southern gentleman, at the, time and place described.  That the murder

was in cold blood, deliberate and without provocation; that it had been

long premeditated and threatened; that she had followed the deceased-from

Washington to commit it.  All this would be proved by unimpeachable

witnesses.  The attorney added that the duty of the jury, however painful

it might be, would be plain and simple.  They were citizens, husbands,

perhaps fathers.  They knew how insecure life had become in the

metropolis.  Tomorrow our own wives might be widows, their own children

orphans, like the bereaved family in yonder hotel, deprived of husband

and father by the jealous hand of some murderous female.  The attorney

sat down, and the clerk called?"



"Henry Brierly."









CHAPTER LV.



Henry Brierly took the stand.  Requested by the District Attorney to tell

the jury all he knew about the killing, he narrated the circumstances

substantially as the reader already knows them.



He accompanied Miss Hawkins to New York at her request, supposing she was

coming in relation to a bill then pending in Congress, to secure the

attendance of absent members.  Her note to him was here shown.  She

appeared to be very much excited at the Washington station.  After she

had asked the conductor several questions, he heard her say, "He can't

escape."  Witness asked her "Who?" and she replied "Nobody."  Did not see

her during the night.  They traveled in a sleeping car.  In the morning

she appeared not to have slept, said she had a headache.  In crossing the

ferry she asked him about the shipping in sight; he pointed out where the

Cunarders lay when in port.  They took a cup of coffee that morning at a

restaurant.  She said she was anxious to reach the Southern Hotel where

Mr. Simons, one of the absent members, was staying, before he went out.

She was entirely self-possessed, and beyond unusual excitement did not

act unnaturally.  After she had fired twice at Col. Selby, she turned the

pistol towards her own breast, and witness snatched it from her.  She had

seen a great deal with Selby in Washington, appeared to be infatuated

with him.



(Cross-examined by Mr. Braham.) "Mist-er.....er Brierly!" (Mr. Braham had

in perfection this lawyer's trick of annoying a witness, by drawling out

the "Mister," as if unable to recall the name, until the witness is

sufficiently aggravated, and then suddenly, with a rising inflection,

flinging his name at him with startling unexpectedness.) "Mist-er.....er

Brierly!  What is your occupation?"



"Civil Engineer, sir."



"Ah, civil engineer, (with a glance at the jury).  Following that

occupation with Miss Hawkins?" (Smiles by the jury).



"No, sir," said Harry, reddening.



"How long have you known the prisoner?"



"Two years, sir.  I made her acquaintance in Hawkeye, Missouri."



"M.....m...m.  Mist-er.....er Brierly!  Were you not a lover of Miss

Hawkins?"



Objected to.  "I submit, your Honor, that I have the right to establish

the relation of this unwilling witness to the prisoner."  Admitted.



"Well, sir," said Harry hesitatingly, "we were friends."



"You act like a friend!" (sarcastically.) The jury were beginning to hate

this neatly dressed young sprig.  "Mister......er....Brierly!  Didn't

Miss Hawkins refuse you?"



Harry blushed and stammered and looked at the judge.  "You must answer,

sir," said His Honor.



"She--she--didn't accept me."



"No.  I should think not.  Brierly do you dare tell the jury that you had

not an interest in the removal of your rival, Col. Selby?" roared Mr.

Braham in a voice of thunder.



"Nothing like this, sir, nothing like this," protested the witness.



"That's all, sir," said Mr. Braham severely.



"One word," said the District Attorney.  "Had you the least suspicion of

the prisoner's intention, up to the moment of the shooting?"



"Not the least," answered Harry earnestly.



"Of course not, of course-not," nodded Mr. Braham to the jury.



The prosecution then put upon the stand the other witnesses of the

shooting at the hotel, and the clerk and the attending physicians.  The

fact of the homicide was clearly established.  Nothing new was elicited,

except from the clerk, in reply to a question by Mr. Braham, the fact

that when the prisoner enquired for Col. Selby she appeared excited and

there was a wild look in her eyes.



The dying deposition of Col. Selby was then produced.  It set forth

Laura's threats, but there was a significant addition to it, which the

newspaper report did not have.  It seemed that after the deposition was

taken as reported, the Colonel was told for the first time by his

physicians that his wounds were mortal.  He appeared to be in great

mental agony and fear; and said he had not finished his deposition.

He added, with great difficulty and long pauses these words.  "I--have--

not--told--all.  I must tell--put--it--down--I--wronged--her.  Years--

ago--I--can't see--O--God--I--deserved----"  That was all.  He fainted

and did not revive again.



The Washington railway conductor testified that the prisoner had asked

him if a gentleman and his family went out on the evening train,

describing the persons he had since learned were Col. Selby and family.



Susan Cullum, colored servant at Senator Dilworthy's, was sworn.  Knew

Col. Selby.  Had seen him come to the house often, and be alone in the

parlor with Miss Hawkins.  He came the day but one before he was shot.

She let him in.  He appeared flustered like.  She heard talking in the

parlor, I peared like it was quarrelin'.  Was afeared sumfin' was wrong:

Just put her ear to--the--keyhole of the back parlor-door.  Heard a man's

voice, "I--can't--I can't, Good God, quite beggin' like.  Heard--young

Miss' voice, "Take your choice, then.  If you 'bandon me, you knows what

to 'spect."  Then he rushes outen the house, I goes in--and I says,

"Missis did you ring?"  She was a standin' like a tiger, her eyes

flashin'.  I come right out.



This was the substance of Susan's testimony, which was not shaken in the

least by severe cross-examination.  In reply to Mr. Braham's question, if

the prisoner did not look insane, Susan said, "Lord; no, sir, just mad as

a hawnet."



Washington Hawkins was sworn.  The pistol, identified by the officer as

the one used in the homicide, was produced Washington admitted that it

was his.  She had asked him for it one morning, saying she thought she

had heard burglars the night before.  Admitted that he never had heard

burglars in the house.  Had anything unusual happened just before that.



Nothing that he remembered.  Did he accompany her to a reception at Mrs.

Shoonmaker's a day or two before?  Yes.  What occurred?  Little by little

it was dragged out of the witness that Laura had behaved strangely there,

appeared to be sick, and he had taken her home.  Upon being pushed he

admitted that she had afterwards confessed that she saw Selby there.

And Washington volunteered the statement that Selby, was a black-hearted

villain.



The District Attorney said, with some annoyance; "There--there! That will

do."



The defence declined to examine Mr. Hawkins at present.  The case for the

prosecution was closed.  Of the murder there could not be the least

doubt, or that the prisoner followed the deceased to New York with a

murderous intent:  On the evidence the jury must convict, and might do so

without leaving their seats.  This was the condition of the case

two days after the jury had been selected.  A week had passed since the

trial opened; and a Sunday had intervened.



The public who read the reports of the evidence saw no chance for the

prisoner's escape.  The crowd of spectators who had watched the trial

were moved with the most profound sympathy for Laura.



Mr. Braham opened the case for the defence.  His manner was subdued, and

he spoke in so low a voice that it was only by reason of perfect silence

in the court room that he could be heard.  He spoke very distinctly,

however, and if his nationality could be discovered in his speech it was

only in a certain richness and breadth of tone.



He began by saying that he trembled at the responsibility he had

undertaken; and he should, altogether despair, if he did not see before

him a jury of twelve men of rare intelligence, whose acute minds would

unravel all the sophistries of the prosecution, men with a sense, of

honor, which would revolt at the remorseless persecution of this hunted

woman by the state, men with hearts to feel for the wrongs of which she

was the victim.  Far be it from him to cast any suspicion upon the

motives of the able, eloquent and ingenious lawyers of the state; they

act officially; their business is to convict.  It is our business,

gentlemen, to see that justice is done.



"It is my duty, gentlemen, to untold to you one of the most affecting

dramas in all, the history of misfortune.  I shall have to show you a

life, the sport of fate and circumstances, hurried along through shifting

storm and sun, bright with trusting innocence and anon black with

heartless villainy, a career which moves on in love and desertion and

anguish, always hovered over by the dark spectre of INSANITY--an insanity

hereditary and induced by mental torture,--until it ends, if end it must

in your verdict, by one of those fearful accidents, which are inscrutable

to men and of which God alone knows the secret.



"Gentlemen, I, shall ask you to go with me away from this court room and

its minions of the law, away from the scene of this tragedy, to a

distant, I wish I could say a happier day.  The story I have to tell is

of a lovely little girl, with sunny hair and laughing eyes, traveling

with her parents, evidently people of wealth and refinement, upon a

Mississippi steamboat.  There is an explosion, one of those terrible

catastrophes which leave the imprint of an unsettled mind upon the

survivors.  Hundreds of mangled remains are sent into eternity.  When the

wreck is cleared away this sweet little girl is found among the panic

stricken survivors in the midst of a scene of horror enough to turn the

steadiest brain.  Her parents have disappeared.  Search even for their

bodies is in vain.  The bewildered, stricken child--who can say what

changes the fearful event wrought in her tender brain--clings to the

first person who shows her sympathy.  It is Mrs. Hawkins, this good lady

who is still her loving friend.  Laura is adopted into the Hawkins

family.  Perhaps she forgets in time that she is not their child.  She is

an orphan.  No, gentlemen, I will not deceive you, she is not an orphan.

Worse than that.  There comes another day of agony.  She knows that her

father lives.  Who is he, where is he?  Alas, I cannot tell you.  Through

the scenes of this painful history he flits here and there a lunatic!

If he, seeks his daughter, it is the purposeless search of a lunatic, as

one who wanders bereft of reason, crying where is my child?  Laura seeks

her father.  In vain just as she is about to find him, again and again-he

disappears, he is gone, he vanishes.



"But this is only the prologue to the tragedy.  Bear with me while I

relate it.  (Mr. Braham takes out a handkerchief, unfolds it slowly;

crashes it in his nervous hand, and throws it on the table).  Laura grew

up in her humble southern home, a beautiful creature, the joy, of the

house, the pride of the neighborhood, the loveliest flower in all the

sunny south.  She might yet have been happy; she was happy.  But the

destroyer came into this paradise.  He plucked the sweetest bud that grew

there, and having enjoyed its odor, trampled it in the mire beneath his

feet.  George Selby, the deceased, a handsome, accomplished Confederate

Colonel, was this human fiend.  He deceived her with a mock marriage;

after some months he brutally, abandoned her, and spurned her as if she

were a contemptible thing; all the time he had a wife in New Orleans.

Laura was crushed.  For weeks, as I shall show you by the testimony of

her adopted mother and brother, she hovered over death in delirium.

Gentlemen, did she ever emerge from this delirium?  I shall show you that

when she recovered her health, her mind was changed, she was not what she

had been.  You can judge yourselves whether the tottering reason ever

recovered its throne.



"Years pass.  She is in Washington, apparently the happy favorite of a

brilliant society.  Her family have become enormously rich by one of

those sudden turns, in fortune that the inhabitants of America are

familiar with--the discovery of immense mineral wealth in some wild lands

owned by them.  She is engaged in a vast philanthropic scheme for the

benefit of the poor, by, the use of this wealth.  But, alas, even here

and now, the same, relentless fate pursued her.  The villain Selby

appears again upon the scene, as if on purpose to complete the ruin of

her life.  He appeared to taunt her with her dishonor, he threatened

exposure if she did not become again the mistress of his passion.

Gentlemen, do you wonder if this woman, thus pursued, lost her reason,

was beside herself with fear, and that her wrongs preyed upon her mind

until she was no longer responsible for her acts?  I turn away my head as

one who would not willingly look even upon the just vengeance of Heaven.

(Mr.Braham paused as if overcome by his emotions.  Mrs. Hawkins and

Washington were in tears, as were many of the spectators also.  The jury

looked scared.)



"Gentlemen, in this condition of affairs it needed but a spark--I do not

say a suggestion, I do not say a hint--from this butterfly Brierly; this

rejected rival, to cause the explosion.  I make no charges, but if this

woman was in her right mind when she fled from Washington and reached

this city in company--with Brierly, then I do not know what insanity is."



When Mr. Braham sat down, he felt that he had the jury with him.  A burst

of applause followed, which the officer promptly, suppressed.  Laura,

with tears in her eyes, turned a grateful look upon her counsel.  All the

women among the spectators saw the tears and wept also.  They thought as

they also looked at Mr. Braham; how handsome he is!



Mrs. Hawkins took the stand.  She was somewhat confused to be the target

of so many, eyes, but her honest and good face at once told in Laura's

favor.



"Mrs. Hawkins," said Mr. Braham, "will you' be kind enough to state the

circumstances of your finding Laura?"



"I object," said Mr. McFlinn; rising to his feet.  "This has nothing

whatever to do with the case, your honor.  I am surprised at it, even

after the extraordinary speech of my learned friend."



"How do you propose to connect it, Mr. Braham?" asked the judge.



"If it please the court," said Mr. Braham, rising impressively, "your

Honor has permitted the prosecution, and I have submitted without a word;

to go into the most extraordinary testimony to establish a motive.  Are

we to be shut out from showing that the motive attributed to us could not

by reason of certain mental conditions exist?  I purpose, may, it please

your Honor, to show the cause and the origin of an aberration of mind,

to follow it up, with other like evidence, connecting it with the very

moment of the homicide, showing a condition of the intellect, of the

prisoner that precludes responsibility."



"The State must insist upon its objections," said the District Attorney.

"The purpose evidently is to open the door to a mass of irrelevant

testimony, the object of which is to produce an effect upon the jury your

Honor well understands."



"Perhaps," suggested the judge, "the court ought to hear the testimony,

and exclude it afterwards, if it is irrelevant."



"Will your honor hear argument on that!"



"Certainly."



And argument his honor did hear, or pretend to, for two whole days,

from all the counsel in turn, in the course of which the lawyers read

contradictory decisions enough to perfectly establish both sides, from

volume after volume, whole libraries in fact, until no mortal man could

say what the rules were.  The question of insanity in all its legal

aspects was of course drawn into the discussion, and its application

affirmed and denied.  The case was felt to turn upon the admission or

rejection of this evidence.  It was a sort of test trial of strength

between the lawyers.  At the end the judge decided to admit the

testimony, as the judge usually does in such cases, after a sufficient

waste of time in what are called arguments.



Mrs. Hawkins was allowed to go on.









CHAPTER LVI.



Mrs. Hawkins slowly and conscientiously, as if every detail of her family

history was important, told the story of the steamboat explosion, of the

finding and adoption of Laura.  Silas, that its Mr. Hawkins, and she

always loved Laura, as if she had been their own, child.



She then narrated the circumstances of Laura's supposed marriage, her

abandonment and long illness, in a manner that touched all hearts.  Laura

had been a different woman since then.



Cross-examined.  At the time of first finding Laura on the steamboat,

did she notice that Laura's mind was at all deranged?  She couldn't say

that she did.  After the recovery of Laura from her long illness, did

Mrs. Hawkins think there, were any signs of insanity about her?  Witness

confessed that she did not think of it then.



Re-Direct examination.  "But she was different after that?"



"O, yes, sir."



Washington Hawkins corroborated his mother's testimony as to Laura's

connection with Col. Selby.  He was at Harding during the time of her

living there with him.  After Col. Selby's desertion she was almost dead,

never appeared to know anything rightly for weeks.  He added that he

never saw such a scoundrel as Selby.  (Checked by District attorney.)

Had he noticed any change in, Laura after her illness?  Oh, yes.

Whenever, any allusion was made that might recall Selby to mind, she

looked awful--as if she could kill him.



"You mean," said Mr. Braham, "that there was an unnatural, insane gleam

in her eyes?"



"Yes, certainly," said Washington in confusion.



All this was objected to by the district attorney, but it was got before

the jury, and Mr. Braham did not care how much it was ruled out after

that.



"Beriah Sellers was the next witness called.  The Colonel made his way to

the stand with majestic, yet bland deliberation.  Having taken the oath

and kissed the Bible with a smack intended to show his great respect for

that book, he bowed to his Honor with dignity, to the jury with

familiarity, and then turned to the lawyers and stood in an attitude of

superior attention.



"Mr. Sellers, I believe?" began Mr. Braham.



"Beriah Sellers, Missouri," was the courteous acknowledgment that the

lawyer was correct.



"Mr. Sellers; you know the parties here, you are a friend of the family?"



"Know them all, from infancy, sir.  It was me, sir, that induced Silas

Hawkins, Judge Hawkins, to come to Missouri, and make his fortune.

It was by my advice and in company with me, sir, that he went into the

operation of--"



"Yes, yes.  Mr. Sellers, did you know a Major Lackland?"



"Knew him, well, sir, knew him and honored him, sir.  He was one of the

most remarkable men of our country, sir.  A member of congress.  He was

often at my mansion sir, for weeks.  He used to say to me, 'Col. Sellers,

if you would go into politics, if I had you for a colleague, we should

show Calhoun and Webster that the brain of the country didn't lie east of

the Alleganies.  But I said--"



"Yes, yes.  I believe Major Lackland is not living, Colonel?"



There was an almost imperceptible sense of pleasure betrayed in the

Colonel's face at this prompt acknowledgment of his title.



"Bless you, no.  Died years ago, a miserable death, sir, a ruined man,

a poor sot.  He was suspected of selling his vote in Congress, and

probably he did; the disgrace killed' him, he was an outcast, sir,

loathed by himself and by his constituents.  And I think; sir"----



The Judge.  "You will confine yourself, Col. Sellers to the questions of

the counsel."



"Of course, your honor.  This," continued the Colonel in confidential

explanation, "was twenty years ago.  I shouldn't have thought of referring

to such a trifling circumstance now.  If I remember rightly, sir"--



A bundle of letters was here handed to the witness.



"Do you recognize, that hand-writing?"



"As if it was my own, sir. It's Major Lackland's. I was knowing to these

letters when Judge Hawkins received them.  [The Colonel's memory was a

little at fault here.  Mr. Hawkins had never gone into detail's with him

on this subject.]  He used to show them to me, and say, 'Col, Sellers

you've a mind to untangle this sort of thing.'  Lord, how everything

comes back to me.  Laura was a little thing then. 'The Judge and I were

just laying our plans to buy the Pilot Knob, and--"



"Colonel, one moment.  Your Honor, we put these letters in evidence."



The letters were a portion of the correspondence of Major Lackland with

Silas Hawkins; parts of them were missing and important letters were

referred to that were not here.  They related, as the reader knows, to

Laura's father.  Lackland had come upon the track of a man who was

searching for a lost child in a Mississippi steamboat explosion years

before.  The man was lame in one leg, and appeared to be flitting from

place to place.  It seemed that Major Lackland got so close track of him

that he was able to describe his personal appearance and learn his name.

But the letter containing these particulars was lost.  Once he heard of

him at a hotel in Washington; but the man departed, leaving an empty

trunk, the day before the major went there.  There was something very

mysterious in all his movements.



Col. Sellers, continuing his testimony, said that he saw this lost

letter, but could not now recall the name.  Search for the supposed

father had been continued by Lackland, Hawkins and himself for several

years, but Laura was not informed of it till after the death of Hawkins,

for fear of raising false hopes in her mind.



Here the Distract Attorney arose and said,



"Your Honor, I must positively object to letting the witness wander off

into all these irrelevant details."



Mr. Braham.  "I submit your honor, that we cannot be interrupted in this

manner we have suffered the state to have full swing.  Now here is a

witness, who has known the prisoner from infancy, and is competent to

testify upon the one point vital to her safety.  Evidently he is a

gentleman of character, and his knowledge of the case cannot be shut out

without increasing the aspect of persecution which the State's attitude

towards the prisoner already has assumed."



The wrangle continued, waxing hotter and hotter.  The Colonel seeing the

attention of the counsel and Court entirely withdrawn from him, thought

he perceived here his opportunity, turning and beaming upon the jury, he

began simply to talk, but as the grandeur of his position grew upon him--

talk broadened unconsciously into an oratorical vein.



"You see how she was situated, gentlemen; poor child, it might have

broken her, heart to let her mind get to running on such a thing as that.

You see, from what we could make out her father was lame in the left leg

and had a deep scar on his left forehead.  And so ever since the day she

found out she had another father, she never could, run across a lame

stranger without being taken all over with a shiver, and almost fainting

where she, stood. And the next minute she would go right after that man.

Once she stumbled on a stranger with a game leg; and she was the most

grateful thing in this world--but it was the wrong leg, and it was days

and days before she could leave her bed. Once she found a man with a scar

on his forehead and she was just going to throw herself into his arms,`

but he stepped out just then, and there wasn't anything the matter with

his legs.  Time and time again, gentlemen of the jury, has this poor

suffering orphan flung herself on her knees with all her heart's

gratitude in her eyes before some scarred and crippled veteran, but

always, always to be disappointed, always to be plunged into new

despair--if his legs were right his scar was wrong, if his scar was right

his legs were wrong.  Never could find a man that would fill the bill.

Gentlemen of the jury; you have hearts, you have feelings, you have warm

human sympathies; you can feel for this poor suffering child. Gentlemen

of the jury, if I had time, if I had the opportunity, if I might be

permitted to go on and tell you the thousands and thousands and thousands

of mutilated strangers this poor girl has started out of cover, and

hunted from city to city, from state to state, from continent to

continent, till she has run them down and found they wan't the ones; I

know your hearts--"



By this time the Colonel had become so warmed up, that his voice, had

reached a pitch above that of the contending counsel; the lawyers

suddenly stopped, and they and the Judge turned towards the Colonel and

remained far several seconds too surprised at this novel exhibition to

speak.  In this interval of silence, an appreciation of the situation

gradually stole over the, audience, and an explosion of laughter

followed, in which even the Court and the bar could hardly keep from

joining.



Sheriff.  "Order in the Court."



The Judge.  "The witness will confine his remarks to answers to

questions."



The Colonel turned courteously to the Judge and said,



"Certainly, your Honor--certainly.  I am not well acquainted with the

forms of procedure in the courts of New York, but in the West, sir, in

the West--"



The Judge.  "There, there, that will do, that will do!



"You see, your Honor, there were no questions asked me, and I thought I

would take advantage of the lull in the proceedings to explain to the,

jury a very significant train of--"



The Judge.  "That will DO sir!  Proceed Mr. Braham."



"Col. Sellers, have you any, reason to suppose that this man is still

living?"



"Every reason, sir, every reason.



"State why"



"I have never heard of his death, sir.  It has never come to my

knowledge.  In fact, sir, as I once said to Governor--"



"Will you state to the jury what has been the effect of the knowledge of

this wandering and evidently unsettled being, supposed to be her father,

upon the mind of Miss Hawkins for so many years!"



Question objected to.  Question ruled out.



Cross-examined.  "Major Sellers, what is your occupation?"



The Colonel looked about him loftily, as if casting in his mind what

would be the proper occupation of a person of such multifarious interests

and then said with dignity:



"A gentleman, sir.  My father used to always say, sir"--



"Capt. Sellers, did you; ever see this man, this supposed father?"



"No, Sir. But upon one occasion, old Senator Thompson said to me, its my

opinion, Colonel Sellers"--



"Did you ever see any body who had seen him?"



"No, sir: It was reported around at one time, that"--



"That is all."



The defense then sent a day in the examination of medical experts in

insanity who testified, on the evidence heard, that sufficient causes had

occurred to produce an insane mind in the prisoner.  Numerous cases were

cited to sustain this opinion.  There was such a thing as momentary

insanity, in which the person, otherwise rational to all appearances,

was for the time actually bereft of reason, and not responsible for his

acts.  The causes of this momentary possession could often be found in

the person's life.  [It afterwards came out that the chief expert for the

defense, was paid a thousand dollars for looking into the case.]



The prosecution consumed another day in the examination of experts

refuting the notion of insanity. These causes might have produced

insanity, but there was no evidence that they have produced it in this

case, or that the prisoner was not at the time of the commission of the

crime in full possession of her ordinary faculties.



The trial had now lasted two weeks. It required four days now for the

lawyers to "sum up." These arguments of the counsel were very important

to their friends, and greatly enhanced their reputation at the bar but

they have small interest to us.  Mr. Braham in his closing speech

surpassed himself; his effort is still remembered as the greatest in the

criminal annals of New York.



Mr. Braham re-drew for the jury the picture, of Laura's early life; he

dwelt long upon that painful episode of the pretended marriage and the

desertion.  Col. Selby, he said, belonged, gentlemen; to what is called

the "upper classes:"  It is the privilege of the "upper classes" to prey

upon the sons and daughters of the people.  The Hawkins family, though

allied to the best blood of the South, were at the time in humble

circumstances.  He commented upon her parentage.  Perhaps her agonized

father, in his intervals of sanity, was still searching for his lost

daughter.  Would he one day hear that she had died a felon's death?

Society had pursued her, fate had pursued her, and in a moment of

delirium she had turned and defied fate and society.  He dwelt upon the

admission of base wrong in Col. Selby's dying statement.  He drew a

vivid, picture of the villain at last overtaken by the vengeance of

Heaven.  Would the jury say that this retributive justice, inflicted by

an outraged, and deluded woman, rendered irrational by the most cruel

wrongs, was in the nature of a foul, premeditated murder?  "Gentlemen;

it is enough for me to look upon the life of this most beautiful and

accomplished of her sex, blasted by the heartless villainy of man,

without seeing, at the-end of it; the horrible spectacle of a gibbet.

Gentlemen, we are all human, we have all sinned, we all have need of

mercy.  But I do not ask mercy of you who are the guardians of society

and of the poor waifs, its sometimes wronged victims; I ask only that

justice which you and I shall need in that last, dreadful hour, when

death will be robbed of half its terrors if we can reflect that we have

never wronged a human being.  Gentlemen, the life of this lovely and once

happy girl, this now stricken woman, is in your hands."



The jury were risibly affected. Half the court room was in tears.  If a

vote of both spectators and jury could have been taken then, the verdict

would have been, "let her go, she has suffered enough."



But the district attorney had the closing argument.  Calmly and without

malice or excitement he reviewed the testimony.  As the cold facts were

unrolled, fear settled upon the listeners.  There was no escape from the

murder or its premeditation.  Laura's character as a lobbyist in

Washington which had been made to appear incidentally in the evidence was

also against her: the whole body of the testimony of the defense was

shown to be irrelevant, introduced only to excite sympathy, and not

giving a color of probability to the absurd supposition of insanity.

The attorney then dwelt upon, the insecurity of life in the city, and the

growing immunity with which women committed murders.  Mr. McFlinn made a

very able speech; convincing the reason without touching the feelings.



The Judge in his charge reviewed the, testimony with great show of

impartiality.  He ended by saying that the verdict must be acquital or

murder in the first, degree.  If you find that the prisoner committed a

homicide, in possession of her reason and with premeditation, your

verdict will be accordingly.  If you find she was not in her right mind,

that she was the victim of insanity, hereditary or momentary, as it has

been explained, your verdict will take that into account.



As the Judge finished his charge, the spectators anxiously watched the

faces of the jury.  It was not a remunerative study.  In the court room

the general feeling was in favor of Laura, but whether this feeling

extended to the jury, their stolid faces did not reveal.  The public

outside hoped for a conviction, as it always does; it wanted an example;

the newspapers trusted the jury would have the courage to do its duty.

When Laura was convicted, then the public would tern around and abuse the

governor if he did; not pardon her.



The jury went out.  Mr. Braham preserved his serene confidence, but

Laura's friends were dispirited.  Washington and Col. Sellers had been

obliged to go to Washington, and they had departed under the unspoken

fear the verdict would be unfavorable, a disagreement was the best they

could hope for, and money was needed.  The necessity of the passage of

the University bill was now imperative.



The Court waited, for, some time, but the jury gave no signs of coming

in.  Mr. Braham said it was extraordinary.  The Court then took a recess

for a couple of hours.  Upon again coming in, word was brought that the

jury had not yet agreed.



But the, jury, had a question.  The point upon which, they wanted

instruction was this.  They wanted to know if Col. Sellers was related to

the Hawkins famiry.  The court then adjourned till morning.



Mr. Braham, who was in something of a pet, remarked to Mr. O'Toole that

they must have been deceived, that juryman with the broken nose could

read!









CHAPTER LVII.



The momentous day was at hand--a day that promised to make or mar the

fortunes of  Hawkins family for all time.  Washington Hawkins and Col.

Sellers were both up early, for neither of them could sleep.  Congress

was expiring, and was passing bill after bill as if they were gasps and

each likely to be its last.  The University was on file for its third

reading this day, and to-morrow Washington would be a millionaire and

Sellers no longer, impecunious but this day, also, or at farthest the

next, the jury  in Laura's Case would come to a decision of some kind or

other--they would find her guilty, Washington secretly feared, and then

the care and the trouble would all come back again, and these would be

wearing months of besieging judges for new trials; on this day, also, the

re-election of Mr. Dilworthy to the Senate would take place.  So

Washington's mind was in a state of turmoil; there were more interests at

stake than it could handle with serenity. He exulted when he thought of

his millions; he was filled with dread when he thought of Laura. But

Sellers was excited and happy. He said:



"Everything is going right, everything's going perfectly right.  Pretty

soon the telegrams will begin to rattle in, and then you'll see, my boy.

Let the jury do what they please; what difference is it going to make?

To-morrow we can send a million to New York and set the lawyers at work

on the judges; bless your heart they will go before judge after judge and

exhort and beseech and pray and shed tears.  They always do; and they

always win, too.  And they will win this time.  They will get a writ of

habeas corpus, and a stay of proceedings, and a supersedeas, and a new

trial and a nolle prosequi, and there you are!  That's the routine, and

it's no trick at all to a New York lawyer.  That's the regular routine

--everything's red tape and routine in the law, you see; it's all Greek

to you, of course, but to a man who is acquainted with those things it's

mere--I'll explain it to you sometime.  Everything's going to glide right

along easy and comfortable now.  You'll see, Washington, you'll see how

it will be.  And then, let me think ..... Dilwortby will be elected

to-day, and by day, after to-morrow night be will be in New York ready to

put in his shovel--and you haven't lived in Washington all this time not

to know that the people who walk right by a Senator whose term is up

without hardly seeing him will be down at the deepo to say 'Welcome back

and God bless you; Senator, I'm glad to see yon, sir!' when he comes

along back re-elected, you know.  Well, you see, his influence was

naturally running low when he left here, but now he has got a new six-

years' start, and his suggestions will simply just weigh a couple of tons

a-piece day after tomorrow.  Lord bless you he could rattle through that

habeas corpus and supersedeas and all those things for Laura all by

himself if he wanted to, when he gets back."



"I hadn't thought of that," said Washington, brightening, but it is so.

A newly-elected Senator is a power, I know that."



"Yes indeed he is.--Why it, is just human nature.  Look at me. When we

first carne here, I was Mr. Sellers, and Major Sellers, Captain Sellers,

but nobody could ever get it right, somehow; but the minute our bill

went, through the House, I was Col. Sellers every time.  And nobody could

do enough for me, and whatever I said was wonderful, Sir, it was always

wonderful; I never seemed to say any flat things at all. It was Colonel,

won't you come and dine with us; and Colonel why don't we ever see you at

our house; and the Colonel says this; and the Colonel says that; and we

know such-and-such is so-and-so because my husband heard Col. Sellers say

so. Don't you see?  Well, the Senate adjourned and left our bill high,

and dry, and I'll be hanged if I warn't Old Sellers from that day, till

our bill passed the House again last week.  Now I'm the Colonel again;

and if I were to eat all the dinners I am invited to, I reckon I'd wear

my teeth down level with my gums in a couple of weeks."



"Well I do wonder what you will be to-morrow; Colonel, after the

President signs the bill!"



"General, sir?--General, without a doubt. Yes, sir, tomorrow it will be

General, let me congratulate you, sir; General, you've done a great work,

sir;--you've done a great work for the niggro; Gentlemen allow me the

honor to introduce my friend General Sellers, the humane friend of the

niggro.  Lord bless me; you'll' see the newspapers say, General Sellers

and servants arrived in the city last night and is stopping at the Fifth

Avenue; and General Sellers has accepted a reception and banquet by the

Cosmopolitan Club; you'll see the General's opinions quoted, too--

and what the General has to say about the propriety of a new trial and

a habeas corpus for the unfortunate Miss Hawkins will not be without

weight in influential quarters, I can tell you."



"And I want to be the first to shake your faithful old hand and salute

you with your new honors, and I want to do it now--General!" said

Washington, suiting the action to the word, and accompanying it with all

the meaning that a cordial grasp and eloquent eyes could give it.



The Colonel was touched; he was pleased and proud, too; his face answered

for that.



Not very long after breakfast the telegrams began to arrive.  The first

was from Braham, and ran thus:



     "We feel certain that the verdict will be rendered to-day.  Be it

     good or bad, let it find us ready to make the next move instantly,

     whatever it may be:"



That's the right talk," said Sellers.  That Graham's a wonderful man.

He was the only man there that really understood me; he told me so

himself, afterwards."



The next telegram was from Mr. Dilworthy:



     "I have not only brought over the Great Invincible, but through him

     a dozen more of the opposition.  Shall be re-elected to-day by an

     overwhelming majority."



"Good again!" said the Colonel.  "That man's talent for organization is

something marvelous. He wanted me to go out there and engineer that

thing, but I said, No, Dilworthy, I must be on hand here,--both on

Laura's account and the bill's--but you've no trifling genius for

organization yourself, said I--and I was right.  You go ahead, said I--

you can fix it--and so he has.  But I claim no credit for that--if I

stiffened up his back-bone a little, I simply put him in the way to make

his fight--didn't undertake it myself.  He has captured Noble--.

I consider that a splendid piece of diplomacy--Splendid, Sir!"



By and by came another dispatch from New York:



"Jury still out. Laura calm and firm as a statue.  The report that the

jury have brought her in guilty is false and premature."



"Premature!" gasped Washington, turning white.  "Then they all expect

that sort of a verdict, when it comes in."



And so did he; but he had not had courage enough to put it into words.

He had been preparing himself for the worst, but after all his

preparation the bare suggestion of the possibility of such a verdict

struck him cold as death.



The friends grew impatient, now; the telegrams did not come fast enough:

even the lightning could not keep up with their anxieties.  They walked

the floor talking disjointedly and listening for the door-bell.  Telegram

after telegram came.  Still no result.  By and by there was one which

contained a single line:



"Court now coming in after brief recess to hear verdict. Jury ready."



"Oh, I wish they would finish!" said Washington. "This suspense is

killing me by inches!"



Then came another telegram:



"Another hitch somewhere. Jury want a little more time and further

instructions."



"Well, well, well, this is trying," said the Colonel.  And after a pause,

"No dispatch from Dilworthy for two hours, now.  Even a dispatch from him

would be better than nothing, just to vary this thing."



They waited twenty minutes. It seemed twenty hours.



"Come!" said Washington. "I can't wait for the telegraph boy to come all

the way up here. Let's go down to Newspaper Row--meet him on the way."



While they were passing along the Avenue, they saw someone putting up a

great display-sheet on the bulletin board of a newspaper office, and an

eager crowd of men was collecting abort the place. Washington and the

Colonel ran to the spot and read this:



"Tremendous Sensation! Startling news from Saint's Rest!  On first ballot

for U. S. Senator, when voting was about to begin, Mr. Noble rose in his

place and drew forth a package, walked forward and laid it on the

Speaker's desk, saying, 'This contains $7,000 in bank bills and was given

me by Senator Dilworthy in his bed-chamber at midnight last night to buy

--my vote for him--I wish the Speaker to count the money and retain it to

pay the expense of prosecuting this infamous traitor for bribery.  The

whole legislature was stricken speechless with dismay and astonishment.

Noble further said that there were fifty members present with money in

their pockets, placed there by Dilworthy to buy their votes.  Amidst

unparalleled excitement the ballot was now taken, and J. W. Smith elected

U. S. Senator; Dilworthy receiving not one vote!  Noble promises damaging

exposures concerning Dilworthy and certain measures of his now pending in

Congress.



"Good heavens and earth!" exclaimed the Colonel.



"To the Capitol!" said Washington. "Fly!"



And they did fly.  Long before they got there the newsboys were running

ahead of them with Extras, hot from the press, announcing the astounding

news.



Arrived in the gallery of the Senate, the friends saw a curious spectacle

very Senator held an Extra in his hand and looked as interested as if it

contained news of the destruction of the earth.  Not a single member was

paying the least attention to the business of the hour.



The Secretary, in a loud voice, was just beginning to read the title of a

bill:



"House-Bill--No.4,231,--An-Act-to-Found-and-Incorporate-the Knobs-

Industrial-University!--Read-first-and-second-time-considered-in-

committee-of-the-whole-ordered-engrossed and-passed-to-third-reading-and-

final passage!"



The President--"Third reading of the bill!"



The two friends shook in their shoes.  Senators threw down their extras

and snatched a word or two with each other in whispers. Then the gavel

rapped to command silence while the names were called on the ayes and

nays.  Washington grew paler and paler, weaker and weaker while the

lagging list progressed; and when it was finished, his head fell

helplessly forward on his arms.  The fight was fought, the long struggle

was over, and he was a pauper.  Not a man had voted for the bill!



Col. Sellers was bewildered and well nigh paralyzed, himself. But no man

could long consider his own troubles in the presence of such suffering as

Washington's.  He got him up and supported him--almost carried him

indeed--out of the building and into a carriage.  All the way home

Washington lay with his face against the Colonel's shoulder and merely

groaned and wept.  The Colonel tried as well as he could under the dreary

circumstances to hearten him a little, but it was of no use.  Washington

was past all hope of cheer, now.  He only said:



"Oh, it is all over--it is all over for good, Colonel. We must beg our

bread, now.  We never can get up again.  It was our last chance, and it

is gone.  They will hang Laura!  My God they will hang her!  Nothing can

save the poor girl now.  Oh, I wish with all my soul they would hang me

instead!"



Arrived at home, Washington fell into a chair and buried his face in his

hands and gave full way to his misery.  The Colonel did not know where to

turn nor what to do.  The servant maid knocked at the door and passed in

a telegram, saying it had come while they were gone.



The Colonel tore it open and read with the voice of a man-of-war's

broadside:



"VERDICT OF JURY, NOT GUILTY AND LAURA IS FREE!"









CHAPTER LVIII.



The court room was packed on the morning on which the verdict of the jury

was expected, as it had been every day of the trial, and by the same

spectators, who had followed its progress with such intense interest.



There is a delicious moment of excitement which the frequenter of trials

well knows, and which he would not miss for the world.  It is that

instant when the foreman of the jury stands up to give the verdict,

and before he has opened his fateful lips.



The court assembled and waited.  It was an obstinate jury.



It even had another question--this intelligent jury--to ask the judge

this morning.



The question was this: "Were the doctors clear that the deceased had no

disease which might soon have carried him off, if he had not been shot?"

There was evidently one jury man who didn't want to waste life, and was

willing to stake a general average, as the jury always does in a civil

case, deciding not according to the evidence but reaching the verdict by

some occult mental process.



During the delay the spectators exhibited unexampled patience, finding

amusement and relief in the slightest movements of the court, the

prisoner and the lawyers.  Mr. Braham divided with Laura the attention

of the house.  Bets were made by the Sheriff's deputies on the verdict,

with large odds in favor of a disagreement.



It was afternoon when it was announced that the jury was coming in.

The reporters took their places and were all attention; the judge and

lawyers were in their seats; the crowd swayed and pushed in eager

expectancy, as the jury walked in and stood up in silence.



Judge.  "Gentlemen, have you agreed upon your verdict?"



Foreman.  "We have."



Judge.  "What is it?"



Foreman.  "NOT GUILTY."



A shout went up from the entire room and a tumult of cheering which the

court in vain attempted to quell.  For a few moments all order was lost.

The spectators crowded within the bar and surrounded Laura who, calmer

than anyone else, was supporting her aged mother, who had almost fainted

from excess of joy.



And now occurred one of those beautiful incidents which no fiction-writer

would dare to imagine, a scene of touching pathos, creditable to our

fallen humanity.  In the eyes of the women of the audience Mr. Braham was

the hero of the occasion; he had saved the life of the prisoner; and

besides he was such a handsome man.  The women could not restrain their

long pent-up emotions.  They threw themselves upon Mr. Braham in a

transport of gratitude; they kissed him again and again, the young as

well as the advanced in years, the married as well as the ardent single

women; they improved the opportunity with a touching self-sacrifice; in

the words of a newspaper of the day they "lavished him with kisses."



It was something sweet to do; and it would be sweet for a woman to

remember in after years, that she had kissed Braham!  Mr. Braham himself

received these fond assaults with the gallantry of his nation, enduring

the ugly, and heartily paying back beauty in its own coin.



This beautiful scene is still known in New York as "the kissing of

Braham."



When the tumult of congratulation had a little spent itself, and order

was restored, Judge O'Shaunnessy said that it now became his duty to

provide for the proper custody and treatment of the acquitted.  The

verdict of the jury having left no doubt that the woman was of an unsound

mind, with a kind of insanity dangerous to the safety of the community,

she could not be permitted to go at large.  "In accordance with the

directions of the law in such cases," said the Judge, "and in obedience

to the dictates of a wise humanity, I hereby commit Laura Hawkins to the

care of the Superintendent of the State Hospital for Insane Criminals, to

be held in confinement until the State Commissioners on Insanity shall

order her discharge.  Mr. Sheriff, you will attend at once to the

execution of this decree."



Laura was overwhelmed and terror-stricken.  She had expected to walk

forth in freedom in a few moments.  The revulsion was terrible.  Her

mother appeared like one shaken with an ague fit.  Laura insane!  And

about to be locked up with madmen!  She had never contemplated this.

Mr. Graham said he should move at once for a writ of 'habeas corpus'.



But the judge could not do less than his duty, the law must have its way.

As in the stupor of a sudden calamity, and not fully comprehending it,

Mrs. Hawkins saw Laura led away by the officer.



With little space for thought she was, rapidly driven to the railway

station, and conveyed to the Hospital for Lunatic Criminals.  It was only

when she was within this vast and grim abode of madness that she realized

the horror of her situation.  It was only when she was received by the

kind physician and read pity in his eyes, and saw his look of hopeless

incredulity when she attempted to tell him that she was not insane; it

was only when she passed through the ward to which she was consigned and

saw the horrible creatures, the victims of a double calamity, whose

dreadful faces she was hereafter to see daily, and was locked into the

small, bare room that was to be her home, that all her fortitude forsook

her.  She sank upon the bed, as soon as she was left alone--she had been

searched by the matron--and tried to think.  But her brain was in a

whirl.  She recalled Braham's speech, she recalled the testimony

regarding her lunacy.  She wondered if she were not mad; she felt that

she soon should be among these loathsome creatures.  Better almost to

have died, than to slowly go mad in this confinement.



--We beg the reader's pardon.  This is not history, which has just been

written.  It is really what would have occurred if this were a novel.

If this were a work of fiction, we should not dare to dispose of Laura

otherwise.  True art and any attention to dramatic proprieties required

it.  The novelist who would turn loose upon society an insane murderess

could not escape condemnation.  Besides, the safety of society, the

decencies of criminal procedure, what we call our modern civilization,

all would demand that Laura should be disposed of in the manner we have

described.  Foreigners, who read this sad story, will be unable to

understand any other termination of it.



But this is history and not fiction.  There is no such law or custom as

that to which his Honor is supposed to have referred; Judge O'Shaunnessy

would not probably pay any attention to it if there were.  There is no

Hospital for Insane Criminals; there is no State commission of lunacy.

What actually occurred when the tumult in the court room had subsided the

sagacious reader will now learn.



Laura left the court room, accompanied by her mother and other friends,

amid the congratulations of those assembled, and was cheered as she

entered a carriage, and drove away.  How sweet was the sunlight, how

exhilarating the sense of freedom!  Were not these following cheers the

expression of popular approval and affection?  Was she not the heroine of

the hour?



It was with a feeling of triumph that Laura reached her hotel, a scornful

feeling of victory over society with its own weapons.



Mrs. Hawkins shared not at all in this feeling; she was broken with the

disgrace and the long anxiety.



"Thank God, Laura," she said, "it is over.  Now we will go away from this

hateful city.  Let us go home at once."



"Mother," replied Laura, speaking with some tenderness, "I cannot go with

you.  There, don't cry, I cannot go back to that life."



Mrs. Hawkins was sobbing.  This was more cruel than anything else, for

she had a dim notion of what it would be to leave Laura to herself.



"No, mother, you have been everything to me.  You know how dearly I love

you.  But I cannot go back."



A boy brought in a telegraphic despatch.  Laura took it and read:



"The bill is lost.  Dilworthy ruined.  (Signed) WASHINGTON."



For a moment the words swam before her eyes.  The next her eyes flashed

fire as she handed the dispatch to her m other and bitterly said,



"The world is against me.  Well, let it be, let it.  I am against it."



"This is a cruel disappointment," said Mrs. Hawkins, to whom one grief

more or less did not much matter now, "to you and, Washington; but we

must humbly bear it."



"Bear it;"  replied Laura scornfully, "I've all my life borne it, and fate

has thwarted me at every step."



A servant came to the door to say that there was a gentleman below who

wished to speak with Miss Hawkins.  "J. Adolphe Griller" was the name

Laura read on the card.  "I do not know such a person.  He probably comes

from Washington.  Send him up."



Mr. Griller entered.  He was a small man, slovenly in dress, his tone

confidential, his manner wholly void of animation, all his features below

the forehead protruding--particularly the apple of his throat--hair

without a kink in it, a hand with no grip, a meek, hang-dog countenance.

a falsehood done in flesh and blood; for while every visible sign about

him proclaimed him a poor, witless, useless weakling, the truth was that

he had the brains to plan great enterprises and the pluck to carry them

through.  That was his reputation, and it was a deserved one.  He softly

said:



"I called to see you on business, Miss Hawkins.  You have my card?"



Laura bowed.



Mr. Griller continued to purr, as softly as before.



"I will proceed to business.  I am a business man.  I am a lecture-agent,

Miss Hawkins, and as soon as I saw that you were acquitted, it occurred

to me that an early interview would be mutually beneficial."



"I don't understand you, sir," said Laura coldly.



"No?  You see, Miss Hawkins, this is your opportunity.  If you will enter

the lecture field under good auspices, you will carry everything before

you."



"But, sir, I never lectured, I haven't any lecture, I don't know anything

about it."



"Ah, madam, that makes no difference--no real difference.  It is not

necessary to be able to lecture in order to go into the lecture tour.

If ones name is celebrated all over the land, especially, and, if she is

also beautiful, she is certain to draw large audiences."



"But what should I lecture about?" asked Laura, beginning in spite of

herself to be a little interested as well as amused.



"Oh, why; woman--something about woman, I should say; the marriage

relation, woman's fate, anything of that sort.  Call it The Revelations

of a Woman's Life; now, there's a good title.  I wouldn't want any better

title than that.  I'm prepared to make you an offer, Miss Hawkins,

a liberal offer,--twelve thousand dollars for thirty nights."



Laura thought.  She hesitated.  Why not?  It would give her employment,

money.  She must do something.



"I will think of it, and let you know soon.  But still, there is very

little likelihood that I--however, we will not discuss it further now."



"Remember, that the sooner we get to work the better, Miss Hawkins,

public curiosity is so fickle.  Good day, madam."



The close of the trial released Mr. Harry Brierly and left him free to

depart upon his long talked of Pacific-coast mission.  He was very

mysterious about it, even to Philip.



"It's confidential, old boy," he said, "a little scheme we have hatched

up.  I don't mind telling you that it's a good deal bigger thing than

that in Missouri, and a sure thing.  I wouldn't take a half a million

just for my share.  And it will open something for you, Phil.  You will

hear from me."



Philip did hear, from Harry a few months afterward.  Everything promised

splendidly, but there was a little delay.  Could Phil let him have a

hundred, say, for ninety days?



Philip himself hastened to Philadelphia, and, as soon as the spring

opened, to the mine at Ilium, and began transforming the loan he had

received from Squire Montague into laborers' wages.  He was haunted with

many anxieties; in the first place, Ruth was overtaxing her strength in

her hospital labors, and Philip felt as if he must move heaven and earth

to save her from such toil and suffering.  His increased pecuniary

obligation oppressed him.  It seemed to him also that he had been one

cause of the misfortune to the Bolton family, and that he was dragging

into loss and ruin everybody who associated with him.  He worked on day

after day and week after week, with a feverish anxiety.



It would be wicked, thought Philip, and impious, to pray for luck; he

felt that perhaps he ought not to ask a blessing upon the sort of labor

that was only a venture; but yet in that daily petition, which this very

faulty and not very consistent young Christian gentleman put up, he

prayed earnestly enough for Ruth and for the Boltons and for those whom

he loved and who trusted in him, and that his life might not be a

misfortune to them and a failure to himself.



Since this young fellow went out into the world from his New England

home, he had done some things that he would rather his mother should not

know, things maybe that he would shrink from telling Ruth.  At a certain

green age young gentlemen are sometimes afraid of being called milksops,

and Philip's associates had not always been the most select, such as

these historians would have chosen for him, or whom at a later, period he

would have chosen for himself.  It seemed inexplicable, for instance,

that his life should have been thrown so much with his college

acquaintance, Henry Brierly.



Yet, this was true of Philip, that in whatever company he had been he had

never been ashamed to stand up for the principles he learned from his

mother, and neither raillery nor looks of wonder turned him from that

daily habit had learned at his mother's knees.--Even flippant Harry

respected this, and perhaps it was one of the reasons why Harry and all

who knew Philip trusted him implicitly.  And yet it must be confessed

that Philip did not convey the impression to the world of a very serious

young man, or of a man who might not rather easily fall into temptation.

One looking for a real hero would have to go elsewhere.



The parting between Laura and her mother was exceedingly painful to both.

It was as if two friends parted on a wide plain, the one to journey

towards the setting and the other towards the rising sun, each

comprehending that every, step henceforth must separate their lives,

wider and wider.









CHAPTER LIX.



When Mr. Noble's bombshell fell, in Senator Dilworthy's camp, the

statesman was disconcerted for a moment. For a moment; that was all.

The next moment he was calmly up and doing.  From the centre of our

country to its circumference, nothing was talked of but Mr. Noble's

terrible revelation, and the people were furious.  Mind, they were not

furious because bribery was uncommon in our public life, but merely

because here was another case.  Perhaps it did not occur to the nation of

good and worthy people that while they continued to sit comfortably at

home and leave the true source of our political power (the "primaries,")

in the hands of saloon-keepers, dog-fanciers and hod-carriers, they could

go on expecting "another" case of this kind, and even dozens and hundreds

of them, and never be disappointed.  However, they may have thought that

to sit at home and grumble would some day right the evil.



Yes, the nation was excited, but Senator Dilworthy was calm--what was

left of him after the explosion of the shell.  Calm, and up and doing.

What did he do first?  What would you do first, after you had tomahawked

your mother at the breakfast table for putting too much sugar in your

coffee?  You would "ask for a suspension of public opinion."  That is

what Senator Dilworthy did.  It is the custom.  He got the usual amount

of suspension.  Far and wide he was called a thief, a briber, a promoter

of steamship subsidies, railway swindles, robberies of the government in

all possible forms and fashions.  Newspapers and everybody else called

him a pious hypocrite, a sleek, oily fraud, a reptile who manipulated

temperance movements, prayer meetings, Sunday schools, public charities,

missionary enterprises, all for his private benefit.  And as these

charges were backed up by what seemed to be good and sufficient,

evidence, they were believed with national unanimity.



Then Mr. Dilworthy made another move.  He moved instantly to Washington

and "demanded an investigation."  Even this could not pass without,

comment.  Many papers used language to this effect:



     "Senator Dilworthy's remains have demanded an investigation.  This

     sounds fine and bold and innocent; but when we reflect that they

     demand it at the hands of the Senate of the United States, it simply

     becomes matter for derision.  One might as well set the gentlemen

     detained in the public prisons to trying each other.  This

     investigation is likely to be like all other Senatorial

     investigations--amusing but not useful.  Query.  Why does the Senate

     still stick to this pompous word, 'Investigation?'  One does not

     blindfold one's self in order to investigate an object."



Mr. Dilworthy appeared in his place in the Senate and offered a

resolution appointing a committee to investigate his case.  It carried,

of course, and the committee was appointed.  Straightway the newspapers

said:



     "Under the guise of appointing a committee to investigate the late

     Mr. Dilworthy, the Senate yesterday appointed a committee to

     investigate his accuser, Mr. Noble.  This is the exact spirit and

     meaning of the resolution, and the committee cannot try anybody but

     Mr. Noble without overstepping its authority.  That Dilworthy had

     the effrontery to offer such a resolution will surprise no one, and

     that the Senate could entertain it without blushing and pass it

     without shame will surprise no one.  We are now reminded of a note

     which we have received from the notorious burglar Murphy, in which

     he finds fault with a statement of ours to the effect that he had

     served one term in the penitentiary and also one in the U. S.

     Senate.  He says, 'The latter statement is untrue and does me great

     injustice.'  After an unconscious sarcasm like that, further comment

     is unnecessary."



And yet the Senate was roused by the Dilworthy trouble.  Many speeches

were made.  One Senator (who was accused in the public prints of selling

his chances of re-election to his opponent for $50,000 and had not yet

denied the charge) said that, "the presence in the Capital of such a

creature as this man Noble, to testify against a brother member of their

body, was an insult to the Senate."



Another Senator said, "Let the investigation go on and let it make an

example of this man Noble; let it teach him and men like him that they

could not attack the reputation of a United States-Senator with

impunity."



Another said he was glad the investigation was to be had, for it was high

time that the Senate should crush some cur like this man Noble, and thus

show his kind that it was able and resolved to uphold its ancient

dignity.



A by-stander laughed, at this finely delivered peroration; and said:



"Why, this is the Senator who franked his, baggage home through the mails

last week-registered, at that.  However, perhaps he was merely engaged in

'upholding the ancient dignity of the Senate,'--then."



"No, the modern dignity of it," said another by-stander.  "It don't

resemble its ancient dignity but it fits its modern style like a glove."



There being no law against making offensive remarks about U. S.

Senators, this conversation, and others like it, continued without let or

hindrance.  But our business is with the investigating committee.



Mr. Noble appeared before the Committee of the Senate; and testified to

the following effect:



He said that he was a member of the State legislature of the

Happy-Land-of-Canaan; that on the --- day of ------ he assembled himself

together at the city of Saint's Rest, the capital of the State, along

with his brother legislators; that he was known to be a political enemy

of Mr. Dilworthy and bitterly opposed to his re-election; that Mr.

Dilworthy came to Saint's Rest and reported to be buying pledges of votes

with money; that the said Dilworthy sent for him to come to his room in

the hotel at night, and he went; was introduced to Mr. Dilworthy; called

two or three times afterward at Dilworthy's request--usually after

midnight; Mr. Dilworthy urged him to vote for him Noble declined;

Dilworthy argued; said he was bound to be elected, and could then ruin

him (Noble) if he voted no; said he had every railway and every public

office and stronghold of political power in the State under his thumb,

and could set up or pull down any man he chose; gave instances showing

where and how he had used this power; if Noble would vote for him he

would make him a Representative in Congress; Noble still declined to

vote, and said he did not believe Dilworthy was going to be elected;

Dilworthy showed a list of men who would vote for him--a majority of the

legislature; gave further proofs of his power by telling Noble everything

the opposing party had done or said in secret caucus; claimed that his

spies reported everything to him, and that--



Here a member of the Committee objected that this evidence was irrelevant

and also in opposition to the spirit of the Committee's instructions,

because if these things reflected upon any one it was upon Mr. Dilworthy.

The chairman said, let the person proceed with his statement--the

Committee could exclude evidence that did not bear upon the case.



Mr. Noble continued.  He said that his party would cast him out if he

voted for Mr, Dilworthy; Dilwortby said that that would inure to his

benefit because he would then be a recognized friend of his (Dilworthy's)

and he could consistently exalt him politically and make his fortune;

Noble said he was poor, and it was hard to tempt him so; Dilworthy said

he would fix that; he said, "Tell, me what you want, and say you will vote

for me;" Noble could not say; Dilworthy said "I will give you $5,000."



A Committee man said, impatiently, that this stuff was all outside the

case, and valuable time was being wasted; this was all, a plain

reflection upon a brother Senator.  The Chairman said it was the quickest

way to proceed, and the evidence need have no weight.



Mr. Noble continued.  He said he told Dilworthy that $5,000 was not much

to pay for a man's honor, character and everything that was worth having;

Dilworthy said he was surprised; he considered $5,000 a fortune--for some

men; asked what Noble's figure was; Noble said he could not think $10,000

too little; Dilworthy said it was a great deal too much; he would not do

it for any other man, but he had conceived a liking for Noble, and where

he liked a man his heart yearned to help him; he was aware that Noble was

poor, and had a family to support, and that he bore an unblemished

reputation at home; for such a man and such a man's influence he could do

much, and feel that to help such a man would be an act that would have

its reward; the struggles of the poor always touched him; he believed

that Noble would make a good use of this money and that it would cheer

many a sad heart and needy home; he would give the, $10,000; all he

desired in return was that when the balloting began, Noble should cast

his vote for him and should explain to the legislature that upon looking

into the charges against Mr. Dilworthy of bribery, corruption, and

forwarding stealing measures in Congress he had found them to be base

calumnies upon a man whose motives were pure and whose character was

stainless; he then took from his pocket $2,000 in bank bills and handed

them to Noble, and got another package containing $5,000 out of his trunk

and gave to him also.  He----



A Committee man jumped up, and said:



"At last, Mr. Chairman, this shameless person has arrived at the point.

This is sufficient and conclusive.  By his own confession he has received

a bribe, and did it deliberately.



"This is a grave offense, and cannot be passed over in silence, sir.  By

the terms of our instructions we can now proceed to mete out to him such

punishment as is meet for one who has maliciously brought disrespect upon

a Senator of the United States.  We have no need to hear the rest of his

evidence."



The Chairman said it would be better and more regular to proceed with the

investigation according to the usual forms.  A note would be made of

Mr. Noble's admission.



Mr. Noble continued.  He said that it was now far past midnight; that he

took his leave and went straight to certain legislators, told them

everything, made them count the money, and also told them of the exposure

he would make in joint convention; he made that exposure, as all the

world knew.  The rest of the $10,000 was to be paid the day after

Dilworthy was elected.



Senator Dilworthy was now asked to take the stand and tell what he knew

about the man Noble.  The Senator wiped his mouth with his handkerchief,

adjusted his white cravat, and said that but for the fact that public

morality required an example, for the warning of future Nobles, he would

beg that in Christian charity this poor misguided creature might be

forgiven and set free.  He said that it was but too evident that this

person had approached him in the hope of obtaining a bribe; he had

intruded himself time and again, and always with moving stories of his

poverty.  Mr. Dilworthy said that his heart had bled for him--insomuch

that he had several times been on the point of trying to get some one to

do something for him.  Some instinct had told him from the beginning that

this was a bad man, an evil-minded man, but his inexperience of such had

blinded him to his real motives, and hence he had never dreamed that his

object was to undermine the purity of a United States Senator.

He regretted that it was plain, now, that such was the man's object and

that punishment could not with safety to the Senate's honor be withheld.

He grieved to say that one of those mysterious dispensations of an

inscrutable Providence which are decreed from time to time by His wisdom

and for His righteous, purposes, had given this conspirator's tale a

color of plausibility,--but this would soon disappear under the clear

light of truth which would now be thrown upon the case.



It so happened, (said the Senator,) that about the time in question, a

poor young friend of mine, living in a distant town of my State, wished

to establish a bank; he asked me to lend him the necessary money; I said

I had no, money just then, but world try to borrow it.  The day before

the election a friend said to me that my election expenses must be very

large specially my hotel bills, and offered to lend me some money.

Remembering my young, friend, I said I would like a few thousands now,

and a few more by and by; whereupon he gave me two packages of bills said

to contain $2,000 and $5,000 respectively; I did not open the packages or

count the money; I did not give any note or receipt for the same; I made

no memorandum of the transaction, and neither did my friend.  That night

this evil man Noble came troubling me again: I could not rid myself of

him, though my time was very precious.  He mentioned my young friend and

said he was very anxious to have the $7000 now to begin his banking

operations with, and could wait a while for the rest.  Noble wished to

get the money and take it to him. I finally gave him the two packages of

bills; I took no note or receipt from him, and made no memorandum of the

matter.  I no more look for duplicity and deception in another man than I

would look for it in myself.  I never thought of this man again until I

was overwhelmed the next day by learning what a shameful use he had made

of the confidence I had reposed in him and the money I had entrusted to

his care. This is all, gentlemen.  To the absolute truth of every detail

of my statement I solemnly swear, and I call Him to witness who is the

Truth and the loving Father of all whose lips abhor false speaking; I

pledge my honor as a Senator, that I have spoken but the truth.  May God

forgive this wicked man as I do.



Mr. Noble--"Senator Dilworthy, your bank account shows that up to that

day, and even on that very day, you conducted all your financial business

through the medium of checks instead of bills, and so kept careful record

of every moneyed transaction.  Why did you deal in bank bills on this

particular occasion?"



The Chairman--"The gentleman will please to remember that the Committee

is conducting this investigation."



Mr. Noble--"Then will the Committee ask the question?"



The Chairman--"The Committee will--when it desires to know."



Mr. Noble--"Which will not be daring this century perhaps."



The Chairman--"Another remark like that, sir, will procure you the

attentions of the Sergeant-at-arms."



Mr. Noble--"D--n the Sergeant-at-arms, and the Committee too!"



Several Committeemen--"Mr. Chairman, this is Contempt!"



Mr. Noble--"Contempt of whom?"



"Of the Committee!  Of the Senate of the United States!"



Mr. Noble--"Then I am become the acknowledged representative of a nation.

You know as well as I do that the whole nation hold as much as three-

fifths of the United States Senate in entire contempt.--Three-fifths of

you are Dilworthys."



The Sergeant-at-arms very soon put a quietus upon the observations of the

representative of the nation, and convinced him that he was not, in the

over-free atmosphere of his Happy-Land-of-Canaan:



The statement of Senator Dilworthy naturally carried conviction to the

minds of the committee.--It was close, logical, unanswerable; it bore

many internal evidences of its, truth.  For instance, it is customary in

all countries for business men to loan large sums of money in bank bills

instead of checks.  It is customary for the lender to make no memorandum

of the transaction.  It is customary, for the borrower to receive the

money without making a memorandum of it, or giving a note or a receipt

for it's use--the borrower is not likely to die or forget about it.

It is customary to lend nearly anybody money to start a bank with

especially if you have not the money to lend him and have to borrow it

for the purpose.  It is customary to carry large sums of money in bank

bills about your person or in your trunk.  It is customary to hand a

large sure in bank bills to a man you have just been introduced to (if he

asks you to do it,) to be conveyed to a distant town and delivered to

another party.  It is not customary to make a memorandum of this

transaction; it is not customary for the conveyor to give a note or a

receipt for the money; it is not customary to require that he shall get a

note or a receipt from the man he is to convey it to in the distant town.

It would be at least singular in you to say to the proposed conveyor,

"You might be robbed; I will deposit the money in a bank and send a check

for it to my friend through the mail."



Very well.  It being plain that Senator Dilworthy's statement was rigidly

true, and this fact being strengthened by his adding to it the support of

"his honor as a Senator," the Committee rendered a verdict of "Not proven

that a bribe had been offered and accepted."  This in a manner exonerated

Noble and let him escape.



The Committee made its report to the Senate, and that body proceeded to

consider its acceptance.  One Senator indeed, several Senators--objected

that the Committee had failed of its duty; they had proved this man Noble

guilty of nothing, they had meted out no punishment to him; if the report

were accepted, he would go forth free and scathless, glorying in his

crime, and it would be a tacit admission that any blackguard could insult

the Senate of the United States and conspire against the sacred

reputation of its members with impunity; the Senate owed it to the

upholding of its ancient dignity to make an example of this man Noble--

he should be crushed.



An elderly Senator got up and took another view of the case.  This was a

Senator of the worn-out and obsolete pattern; a man still lingering among

the cobwebs of the past, and behind the spirit of the age.  He said that

there seemed to be a curious misunderstanding of the case.  Gentlemen

seemed exceedingly anxious to preserve and maintain the honor and dignity

of the Senate.



Was this to be done by trying an obscure adventurer for attempting to

trap a Senator into bribing him?  Or would not the truer way be to find

out whether the Senator was capable of being entrapped into so shameless

an act, and then try him?  Why, of course.  Now the whole idea of the

Senate seemed to be to shield the Senator and turn inquiry away from him.

The true way to uphold the honor of the Senate was to have none but

honorable men in its body.  If this Senator had yielded to temptation and

had offered a bribe, he was a soiled man and ought to be instantly

expelled; therefore he wanted the Senator tried, and not in the usual

namby-pamby way, but in good earnest.  He wanted to know the truth of

this matter.  For himself, he believed that the guilt of Senator

Dilworthy was established beyond the shadow of a doubt; and he considered

that in trifling with his case and shirking it the Senate was doing a

shameful and cowardly thing--a thing which suggested that in its

willingness to sit longer in the company of such a man, it was

acknowledging that it was itself of a kind with him and was therefore not

dishonored by his presence.  He desired that a rigid examination be made

into Senator Dilworthy's case, and that it be continued clear into the

approaching extra session if need be.  There was no dodging this thing

with the lame excuse of want of time.



In reply, an honorable Senator said that he thought it would be as well

to drop the matter and accept the Committee's report.  He said with some

jocularity that the more one agitated this thing, the worse it was for

the agitator.  He was not able to deny that he believed Senator Dilworthy

to be guilty--but what then?  Was it such an extraordinary case?  For his

part, even allowing the Senator to be guilty, he did not think his

continued presence during the few remaining days of the Session would

contaminate the Senate to a dreadful degree.  [This humorous sally was

received with smiling admiration--notwithstanding it was not wholly new,

having originated with the Massachusetts General in the House a day or

two before, upon the occasion of the proposed expulsion of a member for

selling his vote for money.]



The Senate recognized the fact that it could not be contaminated by

sitting a few days longer with Senator Dilworthy, and so it accepted the

committee's report and dropped the unimportant matter.



Mr. Dilworthy occupied his seat to the last hour of the session.  He said

that his people had reposed a trust in him, and it was not for him to

desert them.  He would remain at his post till he perished, if need be.



His voice was lifted up and his vote cast for the last time, in support

of an ingenious measure contrived by the General from Massachusetts

whereby the President's salary was proposed to be doubled and every

Congressman paid several thousand dollars extra for work previously done,

under an accepted contract, and already paid for once and receipted for.



Senator Dilworthy was offered a grand ovation by his friends at home, who

said that their affection for him and their confidence in him were in no

wise impaired by the persecutions that had pursued him, and that he was

still good enough for them.



--[The $7,000 left by Mr. Noble with his state legislature was placed in

safe keeping to await the claim of the legitimate owner.  Senator

Dilworthy made one little effort through his protege the embryo banker

to recover it, but there being no notes of hand or, other memoranda to

support the claim, it failed.  The moral of which is, that when one loans

money to start a bank with, one ought to take the party's written

acknowledgment of the fact.]









CHAPTER LX.



For some days Laura had been a free woman once more.  During this time,

she had experienced--first, two or three days of triumph, excitement,

congratulations, a sort of sunburst of gladness, after a long night of

gloom and anxiety; then two or three days of calming down, by degrees--

a receding of tides, a quieting of the storm-wash to a murmurous surf-

beat, a diminishing of devastating winds to a refrain that bore the

spirit of a truce-days given to solitude, rest, self-communion, and the

reasoning of herself into a realization of the fact that she was actually

done with bolts and bars, prison, horrors and impending, death; then came

a day whose hours filed slowly by her, each laden with some remnant,

some remaining fragment of the dreadful time so lately ended--a day

which, closing at last, left the past a fading shore behind her and

turned her eyes toward the broad sea of the future.  So speedily do we

put the dead away and come back to our place in the ranks to march in the

pilgrimage of life again.



And now the sun rose once more and ushered in the first day of what Laura

comprehended and accepted as a new life.



The past had sunk below the horizon, and existed no more for her;

she was done with it for all time.  She was gazing out over the trackless

expanses of the future, now, with troubled eyes.  Life must be begun

again--at eight and twenty years of age.  And where to begin?  The page

was blank, and waiting for its first record; so this was indeed a

momentous day.



Her thoughts drifted back, stage by stage, over her career.  As far as

the long highway receded over the plain of her life, it was lined with

the gilded and pillared splendors of her ambition all crumbled to ruin

and ivy-grown; every milestone marked a disaster; there was no green spot

remaining anywhere in memory of a hope that had found its fruition; the

unresponsive earth had uttered no voice of flowers in testimony that one

who was blest had gone that road.



Her life had been a failure.  That was plain, she said.  No more of that.

She would now look the future in the face; she would mark her course upon

the chart of life, and follow it; follow it without swerving, through

rocks and shoals, through storm and calm, to a haven of rest and peace or

shipwreck.  Let the end be what it might, she would mark her course now--

to-day--and follow it.



On her table lay six or seven notes.  They were from lovers; from some of

the prominent names in the land; men whose devotion had survived even the

grisly revealments of her character which the courts had uncurtained;

men who knew her now, just as she was, and yet pleaded as for their lives

for the dear privilege of calling the murderess wife.



As she read these passionate, these worshiping, these supplicating

missives, the woman in her nature confessed itself; a strong yearning

came upon her to lay her head upon a loyal breast and find rest from the

conflict of life, solace for her griefs, the healing of love for her

bruised heart.



With her forehead resting upon her hand, she sat thinking, thinking,

while the unheeded moments winged their flight.  It was one of those

mornings in early spring when nature seems just stirring to a half

consciousness out of a long, exhausting lethargy; when the first faint

balmy airs go wandering about, whispering the secret of the coming

change; when the abused brown grass, newly relieved of snow, seems

considering whether it can be worth the trouble and worry of contriving

its green raiment again only to fight the inevitable fight with the

implacable winter and be vanquished and buried once more; when the sun

shines out and a few birds venture forth and lift up a forgotten song;

when a strange stillness and suspense pervades the waiting air.  It is a

time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the

past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the

future but a way to death.  It is a time when one is filled with vague

longings; when one dreams of flight to peaceful islands in the remote

solitudes of the sea, or folds his hands and says, What is the use of

struggling, and toiling and worrying any more? let us give it all up.



It was into such a mood as this that Laura had drifted from the musings

which the letters of her lovers had called up.  Now she lifted her head

and noted with surprise how the day had wasted.  She thrust the letters

aside, rose up and went and stood at the window.  But she was soon

thinking again, and was only gazing into vacancy.



By and by she turned; her countenance had cleared; the dreamy look was

gone out of her face, all indecision had vanished; the poise of her head

and the firm set of her lips told that her resolution was formed.

She moved toward the table with all the old dignity in her carriage,

and all the old pride in her mien.  She took up each letter in its turn,

touched a match to it and watched it slowly consume to ashes.  Then she

said:



"I have landed upon a foreign shore, and burned my ships behind me.

These letters were the last thing that held me in sympathy with any

remnant or belonging of the old life.  Henceforth that life and all that

appertains to it are as dead to me and as far removed from me as if I

were become a denizen of another world."



She said that love was not for her--the time that it could have satisfied

her heart was gone by and could not return; the opportunity was lost,

nothing could restore it.  She said there could be no love without

respect, and she would only despise a man who could content himself with

a thing like her.  Love, she said, was a woman's first necessity: love

being forfeited; there was but one thing left that could give a passing

zest to a wasted life, and that was fame, admiration, the applause of the

multitude.



And so her resolution was taken.  She would turn to that final resort of

the disappointed of her sex, the lecture platform.  She would array

herself in fine attire, she would adorn herself with jewels, and stand in

her isolated magnificence before massed, audiences and enchant them with

her eloquence and amaze them with her unapproachable beauty.  She would

move from city to city like a queen of romance, leaving marveling

multitudes behind her and impatient multitudes awaiting her coming.

Her life, during one hour of each day, upon the platform, would be a

rapturous intoxication--and when the curtain fell; and the lights were

out, and the people gone, to nestle in their homes and forget her, she

would find in sleep oblivion of her homelessness, if she could, if not

she would brave out the night in solitude and wait for the next day's

hour of ecstasy.



So, to take up life and begin again was no great evil.  She saw her way.

She would be brave and strong; she would make the best of, what was left

for her among the possibilities.



She sent for the lecture agent, and matters were soon arranged.



Straightway, all the papers were filled with her name, and all the dead

walls flamed with it.  The papers called down imprecations upon her head;

they reviled her without stint; they wondered if all sense of decency was

dead in this shameless murderess, this brazen lobbyist, this heartless

seducer of the affections of weak and misguided men; they implored the

people, for the sake of their pure wives, their sinless daughters, for

the sake of decency, for the sake of public morals, to give this wretched

creature such a rebuke as should be an all-sufficient evidence to her and

to such as her, that there was a limit where the flaunting of their foul

acts and opinions before the world must stop; certain of them, with a

higher art, and to her a finer cruelty, a sharper torture, uttered no

abuse, but always spoke of her in terms of mocking eulogy and ironical

admiration.  Everybody talked about the new wonder, canvassed the theme

of her proposed discourse, and marveled how she would handle it.



Laura's few friends wrote to her or came and talked with her, and pleaded

with her to retire while it was yet time, and not attempt to face the

gathering storm.  But it was fruitless.  She was stung to the quick by

the comments of the newspapers; her spirit was roused, her ambition was

towering, now.  She was more determined than ever.  She would show these

people what a hunted and persecuted woman could do.



The eventful night came.  Laura arrived before the great lecture hall in

a close carriage within five minutes of the time set for the lecture to

begin.  When she stepped out of the vehicle her heart beat fast and her

eyes flashed with exultation: the whole street was packed with people,

and she could hardly force her way to the hall!  She reached the ante-

room, threw off her wraps and placed herself before the dressing-glass.

She turned herself this way and that--everything was satisfactory, her

attire was perfect.  She smoothed her hair, rearranged a jewel here and

there, and all the while her heart sang within her, and her face was

radiant.  She had not been so happy for ages and ages, it seemed to her.

Oh, no, she had never been so overwhelmingly grateful and happy in her

whole life before.  The lecture agent appeared at the door.  She waved

him away and said:



"Do not disturb me.  I want no introduction.  And do not fear for me; the

moment the hands point to eight I will step upon the platform."



He disappeared.  She held her watch before her.  She was so impatient

that the second-hand seemed whole tedious minutes dragging its way around

the circle.  At last the supreme moment came, and with head erect and the

bearing of an empress she swept through the door and stood upon the

stage.  Her eyes fell upon only a vast, brilliant emptiness--there were

not forty people in the house!  There were only a handful of coarse men

and ten or twelve still coarser women, lolling upon the benches and

scattered about singly and in couples.



Her pulses stood still, her limbs quaked, the gladness went out of her

face.  There was a moment of silence, and then a brutal laugh and an

explosion of cat-calls and hisses saluted her from the audience.  The

clamor grew stronger and louder, and insulting speeches were shouted at

her.  A half-intoxicated man rose up and threw something, which missed

her but bespattered a chair at her side, and this evoked an outburst of

laughter and boisterous admiration.  She was bewildered, her strength was

forsaking her.  She reeled away from the platform, reached the ante-room,

and dropped helpless upon a sofa.  The lecture agent ran in, with a

hurried question upon his lips; but she put forth her hands, and with the

tears raining from her eyes, said:



"Oh, do not speak!  Take me away-please take me away, out of this.

dreadful place!  Oh, this is like all my life--failure, disappointment,

misery--always misery, always failure.  What have I done, to be so

pursued!  Take me away, I beg of you, I implore you!"



Upon the pavement she was hustled by the mob, the surging masses roared

her name and accompanied it with every species of insulting epithet;

they thronged after the carriage, hooting, jeering, cursing, and even

assailing the vehicle with missiles.  A stone crushed through a blind,

wounding Laura's forehead, and so stunning her that she hardly knew what

further transpired during her flight.



It was long before her faculties were wholly restored, and then she found

herself lying on the floor by a sofa in her own sitting-room, and alone.

So she supposed she must have sat down upon the sofa and afterward

fallen.  She raised herself up, with difficulty, for the air was chilly

and her limbs were stiff.  She turned up the gas and sought the glass.

She hardly knew herself, so worn and old she looked, and so marred with

blood were her features.  The night was far spent, and a dead stillness

reigned.  She sat down by her table, leaned her elbows upon it and put

her face in her hands.



Her thoughts wandered back over her old life again and her tears flowed

unrestrained.  Her pride was humbled, her spirit was broken.  Her memory

found but one resting place; it lingered about her young girlhood with a

caressing regret; it dwelt upon it as the one brief interval of her life

that bore no curse.  She saw herself again in the budding grace of her

twelve years, decked in her dainty pride of ribbons, consorting with the

bees and the butterflies, believing in fairies, holding confidential

converse with the flowers, busying herself all day long with airy trifles

that were as weighty to her as the affairs that tax the brains of

diplomats and emperors.  She was without sin, then, and unacquainted with

grief; the world was full of sunshine and her heart was full of music.

From that--to this!



"If I could only die!" she said.  "If I could only go back, and be as I

was then, for one hour--and hold my father's hand in mine again, and see

all the household about me, as in that old innocent time--and then die!

My God, I am humbled, my pride is all gone, my stubborn heart repents--

have pity!"



When the spring morning dawned, the form still sat there, the elbows

resting upon the table and the face upon the hands.  All day long the

figure sat there, the sunshine enriching its costly raiment and flashing

from its jewels; twilight came, and presently the stars, but still the

figure remained; the moon found it there still, and framed the picture

with the shadow of the window sash, and flooded, it with mellow light; by

and by the darkness swallowed it up, and later the gray dawn revealed it

again; the new day grew toward its prime, and still the forlorn presence

was undisturbed.



But now the keepers of the house had become uneasy; their periodical

knockings still finding no response, they burst open the door.



The jury of inquest found that death had resulted from heart disease, and

was instant and painless.  That was all.  Merely heart disease.









CHAPTER LXI.



Clay Hawkins, years gone by, had yielded, after many a struggle, to the

migratory and speculative instinct of our age and our people, and had

wandered further and further westward upon trading ventures.  Settling

finally in Melbourne, Australia, he ceased to roam, became a steady-going

substantial merchant, and prospered greatly.  His life lay beyond the

theatre of this tale.



His remittances had supported the Hawkins family, entirely, from the time

of his father's death until latterly when Laura by her efforts in

Washington had been able to assist in this work.  Clay was away on a long

absence in some of the eastward islands when Laura's troubles began,

trying (and almost in vain,) to arrange certain interests which had

become disordered through a dishonest agent, and consequently he knew

nothing of the murder till he returned and read his letters and papers.

His natural impulse was to hurry to the States and save his sister if

possible, for he loved her with a deep and abiding affection.  His

business was so crippled now, and so deranged, that to leave it would be

ruin; therefore he sold out at a sacrifice that left him considerably

reduced in worldly possessions, and began his voyage to San Francisco.

Arrived there, he perceived by the newspapers that the trial was near its

close.  At Salt Lake later telegrams told him of the acquittal, and his

gratitude was boundless--so boundless, indeed, that sleep was driven from

his eyes by the pleasurable excitement almost as effectually as preceding

weeks of anxiety had done it.  He shaped his course straight for Hawkeye,

now, and his meeting with his mother and the rest of the household was

joyful--albeit he had been away so long that he seemed almost a stranger

in his own home.



But the greetings and congratulations were hardly finished when all the

journals in the land clamored the news of Laura's miserable death.

Mrs. Hawkins was prostrated by this last blow, and it was well that Clay

was at her side to stay her with comforting words and take upon himself

the ordering of the household with its burden of labors and cares.



Washington Hawkins had scarcely more than entered upon that decade which

carries one to the full blossom of manhood which we term the beginning:

of middle age, and yet a brief sojourn at the capital of the nation had

made him old.  His hair was already turning gray when the late session of

Congress began its sittings; it grew grayer still, and rapidly, after the

memorable day that saw Laura proclaimed a murderess; it waxed grayer and

still grayer during the lagging suspense that succeeded it and after the

crash which ruined  his last hope--the failure of his bill in the Senate

and the destruction of its champion, Dilworthy.  A few days later, when

he stood uncovered while the last prayer was pronounced over Laura's

grave, his hair was whiter and his face hardly less old than the

venerable minister's whose words were sounding in his ears.



A week after this, be was sitting in a double-bedded room in a cheap

boarding house in Washington, with Col. Sellers.  The two had been living

together lately, and this mutual cavern of theirs the Colonel sometimes

referred to as their "premises" and sometimes as their "apartments"--more

particularly when conversing with persons outside.  A canvas-covered

modern trunk, marked "G. W. H."  stood on end by the door, strapped and

ready for a journey; on it lay a small morocco satchel, also marked "G.

W. H."  There was another trunk close by--a worn, and scarred, and

ancient hair relic, with "B. S."  wrought in brass nails on its top;

on it lay a pair of saddle-bags that probably knew more about the last

century than they could tell.  Washington got up and walked the floor a

while in a restless sort of way, and finally was about to sit down on the

hair trunk.



"Stop, don't sit down on that!" exclaimed the Colonel: "There, now that's

all right--the chair's better.  I couldn't get another trunk like that--

not another like it in America, I reckon."



"I am afraid not," said Washington, with a faint attempt at a smile.



"No indeed; the man is dead that made that trunk and that saddle-bags."





"Are his great-grand-children still living?" said Washington, with levity

only in the words, not in the tone.



"Well, I don't know--I hadn't thought of that--but anyway they can't make

trunks and saddle-bags like that, if they are--no man can," said the

Colonel with honest simplicity.  "Wife didn't like to see me going off

with that trunk--she said it was nearly certain to be stolen."



"Why?"



"Why?  Why, aren't trunks always being stolen?"



"Well, yes--some kinds of trunks are."



"Very well, then; this is some kind of a trunk--and an almighty rare

kind, too."



"Yes, I believe it is."



"Well, then, why shouldn't a man want to steal it if he got a chance?"



"Indeed I don't know.--Why should he?"



"Washington, I never heard anybody talk like you.  Suppose you were a

thief, and that trunk was lying around and nobody watching--wouldn't you

steal it?  Come, now, answer fair--wouldn't you steal it?



"Well, now, since you corner me, I would take it,--but I wouldn't

consider it stealing.



"You wouldn't!  Well, that beats me.  Now what would you call stealing?"



"Why, taking property is stealing."



"Property!  Now what a way to talk that is: What do you suppose that

trunk is worth?"



"Is it in good repair?"



"Perfect.  Hair rubbed off a little, but the main structure is perfectly

sound."



"Does it leak anywhere?"



"Leak?  Do you want to carry water in it?  What do you mean by does it

leak?"



"Why--a--do the clothes fall out of it when it is--when it is

stationary?"



"Confound it, Washington, you are trying to make fun of me.  I don't know

what has got into you to-day; you act mighty curious.  What is the matter

with you?"



"Well, I'll tell you, old friend.  I am almost happy.  I am, indeed.

It wasn't Clay's telegram that hurried me up so and got me ready to start

with you.  It was a letter from Louise."



"Good!  What is it?  What does she say?"



"She says come home--her father has consented, at last."



"My boy, I want to congratulate you; I want to shake you by the hand!

It's a long turn that has no lane at the end of it, as the proverb says,

or somehow that way.  You'll be happy yet, and Beriah Sellers will be

there to see, thank God!"



"I believe it.  General Boswell is pretty nearly a poor man, now.  The

railroad that was going to build up Hawkeye made short work of him, along

with the rest.  He isn't so opposed to a son-in-law without a fortune,

now."



"Without a fortune, indeed!  Why that Tennessee Land--"



"Never mind the Tennessee Land, Colonel.  I am done with that, forever

and forever--"



"Why no!  You can't mean to say--"



"My father, away back yonder, years ago, bought it for a blessing for his

children, and--"



"Indeed he did!  Si Hawkins said to me--"



"It proved a curse to him as long as he lived, and never a curse like it

was inflicted upon any man's heirs--"



"I'm bound to say there's more or less truth--"



"It began to curse me when I was a baby, and it has cursed every hour of

my life to this day--"



"Lord, lord, but it's so!  Time and again my wife--"



"I depended on it all through my boyhood and never tried to do an honest

stroke of work for my living--"



"Right again--but then you--"



"I have chased it years and years as children chase butterflies.  We

might all have been prosperous, now; we might all have been happy, all

these heart-breaking years, if we had accepted our poverty at first and

gone contentedly to work and built up our own wealth by our own toil and

sweat--"



"It's so, it's so; bless my soul, how often I've told Si Hawkins--"



"Instead of that, we have suffered more than the damned themselves

suffer!  I loved my father, and I honor his memory and recognize his good

intentions; but I grieve for his mistaken ideas of conferring happiness

upon his children.  I am going to begin my life over again, and begin it

and end it with good solid work!  I'll leave my children no Tennessee

Land!"



"Spoken like a man, sir, spoken like a man!  Your hand, again my boy!

And always remember that when a word of advice from Beriah Sellers can

help, it is at your service.  I'm going to begin again, too!"



"Indeed!"



"Yes, sir.  I've seen enough to show me where my mistake was.  The law is

what I was born for.  I shall begin the study of the law.  Heavens and

earth, but that Brabant's a wonderful man--a wonderful man sir!  Such a

head!  And such a way with him!  But I could see that he was jealous of

me.  The little licks I got in in the course of my argument before the

jury--"



"Your argument!  Why, you were a witness."



"Oh, yes, to the popular eye, to the popular eye--but I knew when I was

dropping information and when I was letting drive at the court with an

insidious argument.  But the court knew it, bless you, and weakened every

time!  And Brabant knew it.  I just reminded him of it in a quiet way,

and its final result, and he said in a whisper, 'You did it, Colonel, you

did it, sir--but keep it mum for my sake; and I'll tell you what you do,'

says he, 'you go into the law, Col. Sellers--go into the law, sir; that's

your native element!'  And into the law the subscriber is going.  There's

worlds of money in it!--whole worlds of money!  Practice first in

Hawkeye, then in Jefferson, then in St. Louis, then in New York!  In the

metropolis of the western world!  Climb, and climb, and climb--and wind

up on the Supreme bench.  Beriah Sellers, Chief Justice of the Supreme

Court of the United States, sir!  A made man for all time and eternity!

That's the way I block it out, sir--and it's as clear as day--clear as

the rosy-morn!"



Washington had heard little of this.  The first reference to Laura's

trial had brought the old dejection to his face again, and he stood

gazing out of the window at nothing, lost in reverie.



There was a knock-the postman handed in a letter.  It was from Obedstown.

East Tennessee, and was for Washington.  He opened it.  There was a note

saying that enclosed he would please find a bill for the current year's

taxes on the 75,000 acres of Tennessee Land belonging to the estate of

Silas Hawkins, deceased, and added that the money must be paid within

sixty days or the land would be sold at public auction for the taxes, as

provided by law.  The bill was for $180--something more than twice the

market value of the land, perhaps.



Washington hesitated.  Doubts flitted through his mind.  The old instinct

came upon him to cling to the land just a little longer and give it one

more chance.  He walked the floor feverishly, his mind tortured by

indecision.  Presently he stopped, took out his pocket book and counted

his money.  Two hundred and thirty dollars--it was all he had in the

world.



"One hundred and eighty .  .  .  .  .  .  .  from two hundred and

thirty," he said to himself.  "Fifty left .  .  .  .  .  .  It is enough

to get me home .  .  .  ..  .  .  Shall I do it, or shall I not?  .  .  .

.  .  .  .  I wish I had somebody to decide for me."



The pocket book lay open in his hand, with Louise's small letter in view.

His eye fell upon that, and it decided him.



"It shall go for taxes," he said, "and never tempt me or mine any more!"



He opened the window and stood there tearing the tax bill to bits and

watching the breeze waft them away, till all were gone.



"The spell is broken, the life-long curse is ended!" he said.  "Let us

go."



The baggage wagon had arrived; five minutes later the two friends were

mounted upon their luggage in it, and rattling off toward the station,

the Colonel endeavoring to sing "Homeward Bound," a song whose words he

knew, but whose tune, as he rendered it, was a trial to auditors.











CHAPTER LXII





Philip Sterling's circumstances were becoming straightened.  The prospect

was gloomy.  His long siege of unproductive labor was beginning to tell

upon his spirits; but what told still more upon them was the undeniable

fact that the promise of ultimate success diminished every day, now.

That is to say, the tunnel had reached a point in the hill which was

considerably beyond where the coal vein should pass (according to all his

calculations) if there were a coal vein there; and so, every foot that

the tunnel now progressed seemed to carry it further away from the object

of the search.



Sometimes he ventured to hope that he had made a mistake in estimating

the direction which the vein should naturally take after crossing the

valley and entering the hill.  Upon such occasions he would go into the

nearest mine on the vein he was hunting for, and once more get the

bearings of the deposit and mark out its probable course; but the result

was the same every time; his tunnel had manifestly pierced beyond the

natural point of junction; and then his, spirits fell a little lower.

His men had already lost faith, and he often overheard them saying it was

perfectly plain that there was no coal in the hill.



Foremen and laborers from neighboring mines, and no end of experienced

loafers from the village, visited the tunnel from time to time, and their

verdicts were always the same and always disheartening--"No coal in that

hill."  Now and then Philip would sit down and think it all over and

wonder what the mystery meant; then he would go into the tunnel and ask

the men if there were no signs yet?  None--always "none."



He would bring out a piece of rock and examine it, and say to himself,

"It is limestone--it has crinoids and corals in it--the rock is right"

Then he would throw it down with a sigh, and say, "But that is nothing;

where coal is, limestone with these fossils in it is pretty certain to

lie against its foot casing; but it does not necessarily follow that

where this peculiar rock is coal must lie above it or beyond it; this

sign is not sufficient."



The thought usually followed:--"There is one infallible sign--if I could

only strike that!"



Three or four tines in as many weeks he said to himself, "Am I a

visionary? I must be a visionary; everybody is in these days; everybody

chases butterflies: everybody seeks sudden fortune and will not lay one

up by slow toil.  This is not right, I will discharge the men and go at

some honest work.  There is no coal here.  What a fool I have been; I

will give it up."



But he never could do it.  A half hour of profound thinking always

followed; and at the end of it he was sure to get up and straighten

himself and say: "There is coal there; I will not give it up; and coal

or no coal I will drive the tunnel clear through the hill; I will not

surrender while I am alive."



He never thought of asking Mr. Montague for more money.  He said there

was now but one chance of finding coal against nine hundred and ninety

nine that he would not find it, and so it would be wrong in him to make

the request and foolish in Mr. Montague to grant it.



He had been working three shifts of men.  Finally, the settling of a

weekly account exhausted his means.  He could not afford to run in debt,

and therefore he gave the men their discharge.  They came into his cabin

presently, where he sat with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his

hands--the picture of discouragement and their spokesman said:



"Mr. Sterling, when Tim was down a week with his fall you kept him on

half-wages and it was a mighty help to his family; whenever any of us was

in trouble you've done what you could to help us out; you've acted fair

and square with us every time, and I reckon we are men and know a man

when we see him.  We haven't got any faith in that hill, but we have a

respect for a man that's got the pluck that you've showed; youv'e fought

a good fight, with everybody agin you and if we had grub to go on, I'm d-

--d if we wouldn't stand by you till the cows come home!  That is what

the boys say.  Now we want to put in one parting blast for luck.  We want

to work three days more; if we don't find anything, we won't bring in no

bill against you.  That is what we've come to say."



Philip was touched.  If he had had money enough to buy three days' "grub"

he would have accepted the generous offer, but as it was, he could not

consent to be less magnanimous than the men, and so he declined in a

manly speech; shook hands all around and resumed his solitary communings.

The men went back to the tunnel and "put in a parting blast for luck"

anyhow.  They did a full day's work and then took their leave.  They

called at his cabin and gave him good-bye, but were not able to tell him

their day's effort had given things a mere promising look.



The next day Philip sold all the tools but two or three sets; he also

sold one of the now deserted cabins as old, lumber, together with its

domestic wares; and made up his mind that he would buy, provisions with

the trifle of money thus gained and continue his work alone.  About the

middle of the after noon he put on his roughest clothes and went to the

tunnel. He lit a candle and groped his way in.  Presently he heard the

sound of a pick or a drill, and wondered, what it meant. A spark of light

now appeared in the far end of the tunnel, and when he arrived there he

found the man Tim at work. Tim said:



"I'm to have a job in the Golden Brier mine by and by--in a week or ten

days--and I'm going to work here till then.  A man might as well be at

some thing, and besides I consider that I owe you what you paid me when I

was laid up."



Philip said,  Oh, no, he didn't owe anything; but Tim persisted, and then

Philip said he had a little provision now, and would share.  So for

several days Philip held the drill and Tim did the striking.  At first

Philip was impatient to see the result of every blast, and was always

back and peering among the smoke the moment after the explosion.  But

there was never any encouraging result; and therefore he finally lost

almost all interest, and hardly troubled himself to inspect results at

all.  He simply labored on, stubbornly and with little hope.



Tim staid with him till the last moment, and then took up his job at the

Golden Brier, apparently as depressed by the continued barrenness of

their mutual labors as Philip was himself.  After that, Philip fought his

battle alone, day after day, and slow work it was; he could scarcely see

that he made any progress.



Late one afternoon he finished drilling a hole which he had been at work

at for more than two hours; he swabbed it out, and poured in the powder

and inserted the fuse; then filled up the rest of the hole with dirt and

small fragments of stone; tamped it down firmly, touched his candle to

the fuse, and ran.  By and by the I dull report came, and he was about to

walk back mechanically and see what was accomplished; but he halted;

presently turned on his heel and thought, rather than said:



"No, this is useless, this is absurd.  If I found anything it would only

be one of those little aggravating seams of coal which doesn't mean

anything, and--"



By this time he was walking out of the tunnel.  His thought ran on:



"I am conquered .  .  .  .  .  .  I am out of provisions, out of money.

.  .  .  .  I have got to give it up .  .  .  .  .  .  All this hard work

lost!  But I am not conquered!  I will go and work for money, and come

back and have another fight with fate.  Ah me, it may be years, it may,

be years."



Arrived at the mouth of the tunnel, he threw his coat upon the ground,

sat down on, a stone, and his eye sought the westering sun and dwelt upon

the charming landscape which stretched its woody ridges, wave upon wave,

to the golden horizon.



Something was taking place at his feet which did not attract his

attention.



His reverie continued, and its burden grew more and more gloomy.

Presently he rose up and, cast a look far away toward the valley, and his

thoughts took a new direction:



"There it is!  How good it looks! But down there is not up here.  Well,

I will go home and pack up--there is nothing else to do"



He moved off moodily toward his cabin.  He had gone some distance before

he thought of his coat; then he was about to turn back, but he smiled at

the thought, and continued his journey--such a coat as that could be of

little use in a civilized land; a little further on, he remembered that

there were some papers of value in one of the pockets of the relic, and

then with a penitent ejaculation he turned back picked up the coat and

put it on.



He made a dozen steps, and then stopped very suddenly.  He stood still a

moment, as one who is trying to believe something and cannot.  He put a

hand up over his shoulder and felt his back, and a great thrill shot

through him.  He grasped the skirt of the coat impulsively and another

thrill followed.  He snatched the coat from his back, glanced at it,

threw it from him and flew back to the tunnel.  He sought the spot where

the coat had lain--he had to look close, for the light was waning--then

to make sure, he put his hand to the ground and a little stream of water

swept against his fingers:



"Thank God, I've struck it at last!"



He lit a candle and ran into the tunnel; he picked up a piece of rubbish

cast out by the last blast, and said:



"This clayey stuff is what I've longed for--I know what is behind it."



He swung his pick with hearty good will till long after the darkness had

gathered upon the earth, and when he trudged home at length he knew he

had a coal vein and that it was seven feet thick from wall to wall.



He found a yellow envelope lying on his rickety table, and recognized

that it was of a family sacred to the transmission of telegrams.



He opened it, read it, crushed it in his hand and threw it down.  It

simply said:



"Ruth is very ill."









CHAPTER LXIII.



It was evening when Philip took the cars at the Ilium station.  The news

of, his success had preceded him, and while he waited for the train, he

was the center of a group of eager questioners, who asked him a hundred

things about the mine, and magnified his good fortune.  There was no

mistake this time.



Philip, in luck, had become suddenly a person of consideration, whose

speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were all significant.

The words of the proprietor of a rich coal mine have a golden sound,

and his common sayings are repeated as if they were solid wisdom.



Philip wished to be alone; his good fortune at this moment seemed an

empty mockery, one of those sarcasms of fate, such as that which spreads

a dainty banquet for the man who has no appetite.  He had longed for

success principally for Ruth's sake; and perhaps now, at this very moment

of his triumph, she was dying.



"Shust what I said, Mister Sderling," the landlord of the Ilium hotel

kept repeating.  "I dold Jake Schmidt he find him dere shust so sure as

noting."



"You ought to have taken a share, Mr.  Dusenheimer," said Philip.



"Yaas, I know.  But d'old woman, she say 'You sticks to your pisiness.

So I sticks to'em.  Und I makes noting.  Dat Mister Prierly, he don't

never come back here no more, ain't it?"



"Why?" asked Philip.



"Vell, dere is so many peers, and so many oder dhrinks, I got 'em all set

down, ven he coomes back."



It was a long night for Philip, and a restless one.  At any other time

the swing of the cars would have lulled him to sleep, and the rattle and

clank of wheels and rails, the roar of the whirling iron would have only

been cheerful reminders of swift and safe travel.  Now they were voices

of warning and taunting; and instead of going rapidly the train seemed to

crawl at a snail's pace.  And it not only crawled, but it frequently

stopped; and when it stopped it stood dead still and there was an ominous

silence.  Was anything the matter, he wondered.  Only a station probably.

Perhaps, he thought, a telegraphic station.  And then he listened

eagerly.  Would the conductor open the door and ask for Philip Sterling,

and hand him a fatal dispatch?



How long they seemed to wait.  And then slowly beginning to move, they

were off again, shaking, pounding, screaming through the night.  He drew

his curtain from time to time and looked out.  There was the lurid sky

line of the wooded range along the base of which they were crawling.

There was the Susquehannah, gleaming in the moon-light.  There was a

stretch of level valley with silent farm houses, the occupants all at

rest, without trouble, without anxiety.  There was a church, a graveyard,

a mill, a village; and now, without pause or fear, the train had mounted

a trestle-work high in air and was creeping along the top of it while a

swift torrent foamed a hundred feet below.



What would the morning bring? Even while he was flying to her, her gentle

spirit might have gone on another flight, whither he could not follow

her.  He was full of foreboding.  He fell at length into a restless doze.

There was a noise in his ears as of a rushing torrent when a stream is

swollen by a freshet in the spring.  It was like the breaking up of life;

he was struggling in the consciousness of coming death: when Ruth stood

by his side, clothed in white, with a face like that of an angel,

radiant, smiling, pointing to the sky, and saying, "Come."  He awoke with

a cry--the train was roaring through a bridge, and it shot out into

daylight.



When morning came the train was industriously toiling along through the

fat lands of Lancaster, with its broad farms of corn and wheat, its mean

houses of stone, its vast barns and granaries, built as if, for storing

the riches of Heliogabalus.  Then came the smiling fields of Chester,

with their English green, and soon the county of Philadelphia itself, and

the increasing signs of the approach to a great city.  Long trains of

coal cars, laden and unladen, stood upon sidings; the tracks of other

roads were crossed; the smoke of other locomotives was seen on parallel

lines; factories multiplied; streets appeared; the noise of a busy city

began to fill the air;--and with a slower and slower clank on the

connecting rails and interlacing switches the train rolled into the

station and stood still.



It was a hot August morning.  The broad streets glowed in the sun, and

the white-shuttered houses stared at the hot thoroughfares like closed

bakers' ovens set along the highway.  Philip was oppressed with the heavy

air; the sweltering city lay as in a swoon.  Taking a street car, he rode

away to the northern part of the city, the newer portion, formerly the

district of Spring Garden, for in this the Boltons now lived, in a small

brick house, befitting their altered fortunes.



He could scarcely restrain his impatience when he came in sight of the

house.  The window shutters were not "bowed"; thank God, for that.  Ruth

was still living, then.  He ran up the steps and rang.  Mrs.  Bolton met

him at the door.



"Thee is very welcome, Philip."



"And Ruth?"



"She is very ill, but quieter than, she has been, and the fever is a

little abating.  The most dangerous time will be when the fever leaves

her.  The doctor fears she will not have strength enough to rally from

it.  Yes, thee can see her."



Mrs.  Bolton led the way to the little chamber where Ruth lay.  "Oh,"

said her mother, "if she were only in her cool and spacious room in our

old home.  She says that seems like heaven."



Mr. Bolton sat by Ruth's bedside, and he rose and silently pressed

Philip's hand.  The room had but one window; that was wide open to admit

the air, but the air that came in was hot and lifeless.  Upon the table

stood a vase of flowers.  Ruth's eyes were closed; her cheeks were

flushed with fever, and she moved her head restlessly as if in pain.



"Ruth," said her mother, bending over her, "Philip is here."



Ruth's eyes unclosed, there was a gleam of recognition in them, there was

an attempt at a smile upon her face, and she tried to raise her thin

hand, as Philip touched her forehead with his lips; and he heard her

murmur,



"Dear Phil."



There was nothing to be done but to watch and wait for the cruel fever to

burn itself out.  Dr. Longstreet told Philip that the fever had

undoubtedly been contracted in the hospital, but it was not malignant,

and would be little dangerous if Ruth were not so worn down with work,

or if she had a less delicate constitution.



"It is only her indomitable will that has kept her up for weeks.  And if

that should leave her now, there will be no hope.  You can do more for

her now, sir, than I can?"



"How?" asked Philip eagerly.



"Your presence, more than anything else, will inspire her with the desire

to live."



When the fever turned, Ruth was in a very critical condition.  For two

days her life was like the fluttering of a lighted candle in the wind.

Philip was constantly by her side, and she seemed to be conscious of his

presence, and to cling to him, as one borne away by a swift stream clings

to a stretched-out hand from the shore.  If he was absent a moment her

restless eyes sought something they were disappointed not to find.



Philip so yearned to bring her back to life, he willed it so strongly and

passionately, that his will appeared to affect hers and she seemed slowly

to draw life from his.



After two days of this struggle with the grasping enemy, it was evident

to Dr. Longstreet that Ruth's will was beginning to issue its orders to

her body with some force, and that strength was slowly coming back.

In another day there was a decided improvement.  As Philip sat holding

her weak hand and watching the least sign of resolution in her face, Ruth

was able to whisper,



"I so want to live, for you, Phil!"



"You will; darling, you must," said Philip in a tone of faith and courage

that carried a thrill of determination--of command--along all her nerves.



Slowly Philip drew her back to life.  Slowly she came back, as one

willing but well nigh helpless.  It was new for Ruth to feel this

dependence on another's nature, to consciously draw strength of will from

the will of another.  It was a new but a dear joy, to be lifted up and

carried back into the happy world, which was now all aglow with the light

of love; to be lifted and carried by the one she loved more than her own

life.



"Sweetheart," she said to Philip, "I would not have cared to come back

but for thy love."



"Not for thy profession?"



"Oh, thee may be glad enough of that some day, when thy coal bed is dug

out and thee and father are in the air again."



When Ruth was able to ride she was taken into the country, for the pure

air was necessary to her speedy recovery.  The family went with her.

Philip could not be spared from her side, and Mr.  Bolton had gone up to

Ilium to look into that wonderful coal mine and to make arrangements for

developing it, and bringing its wealth to market.  Philip had insisted on

re-conveying the Ilium property to Mr. Bolton, retaining only the share

originally contemplated for himself, and Mr.  Bolton, therefore, once

more found himself engaged in business and a person of some consequence

in Third street.  The mine turned out even better than was at first

hoped, and would, if judiciously managed, be a fortune to them all.

This also seemed to be the opinion of Mr. Bigler, who heard of it as soon

as anybody, and, with the impudence of his class called upon Mr. Bolton

for a little aid in a patent car-wheel he had bought an interest in.

That rascal, Small, he said, had swindled him out of all he had.



Mr. Bolton told him he was very sorry, and recommended him to sue Small.



Mr. Small also came with a similar story about Mr. Bigler; and Mr.

Bolton had the grace to give him like advice.  And he added, "If you and

Bigler will procure the indictment of each other, you may have the

satisfaction of putting each other in the penitentiary for the forgery of

my acceptances."



Bigler and Small did not quarrel however.  They both attacked Mr. Bolton

behind his back as a swindler, and circulated the story that he had made

a fortune by failing.



In the pure air of the highlands, amid the golden glories of ripening

September, Ruth rapidly came back to health.  How beautiful the world is

to an invalid, whose senses are all clarified, who has been so near the

world of spirits that she is sensitive to the finest influences, and

whose frame responds with a thrill to the subtlest ministrations of

soothing nature.  Mere life is a luxury, and the color of the grass, of

the flowers, of the sky, the wind in the trees, the outlines of the

horizon, the forms of clouds, all give a pleasure as exquisite as the

sweetest music to the ear famishing for it.  The world was all new and

fresh to Ruth, as if it had just been created for her, and love filled

it, till her heart was overflowing with happiness.



It was golden September also at Fallkill.  And Alice sat by the open

window in her room at home, looking out upon the meadows where the

laborers were cutting the second crop of clover.  The fragrance of it

floated to her nostrils.  Perhaps she did not mind it.  She was thinking.

She had just been writing to Ruth, and on the table before her was a

yellow piece of paper with a faded four-leaved clover pinned on it--only

a memory now.  In her letter to Ruth she had poured out her heartiest

blessings upon them both, with her dear love forever and forever.



"Thank God," she said, "they will never know"



They never would know.  And the world never knows how many women there

are like Alice, whose sweet but lonely lives of self-sacrifice, gentle,

faithful, loving souls, bless it continually.



"She is a dear girl," said Philip, when Ruth showed him the letter.



"Yes, Phil, and we can spare a great deal of love for her, our own lives

are so full."









APPENDIX.



Perhaps some apology to the reader is necessary in view of our failure to

find Laura's father.  We supposed, from the ease with which lost persons

are found in novels, that it would not be difficult.  But it was; indeed,

it was impossible; and therefore the portions of the narrative containing

the record of the search have been stricken out.  Not because they were

not interesting--for they were; but inasmuch as the man was not found,

after all, it did not seem wise to harass and excite the reader to no

purpose.



THE AUTHORS









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Gilded Age,

by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner













SKETCHES NEW AND OLD



by Mark Twain







CONTENTS:



PREFACE

MY WATCH

POLITICAL ECONOMY

THE JUMPING FROG

JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE

THE STORY OF THE BAD LITTLE BOY

THE STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY

A COUPLE OF POEMS BY TWAIN AND MOORE

NIAGARA

ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS

TO RAISE POULTRY

EXPERIENCE OF THE MCWILLIAMSES WITH MEMBRANOUS CROUP

MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE

HOW THE AUTHOR WAS SOLD IN NEWARK

THE OFFICE BORE

JOHNNY GREER

THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT

THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER

DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY

THE JUDGES "SPIRITED WOMAN"

INFORMATION WANTED

SOME LEARNED FABLES, FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS

MY LATE SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP

A FASHION ITEM

RILEY-NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT

A FINE OLD MAN

SCIENCE vs. LUCK

THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

MR. BLOKE'S ITEM

A MEDIEVAL ROMANCE

PETITION CONCERNING COPYRIGHT

AFTER-DINNER SPEECH

LIONIZING MURDERERS

A NEW CRIME

A CURIOUS DREAM

A TRUE STORY

THE SIAMESE TWINS

SPEECH AT THE SCOTTISH BANQUET IN LONDON

A GHOST STORY

THE CAPITOLINE VENUS

SPEECH ON ACCIDENT INSURANCE

JOHN CHINAMAN IN NEW YORK

HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER

THE PETRIFIED MAN

MY BLOODY MASSACRE

THE UNDERTAKER'S CHAT

CONCERNING CHAMBERMAIDS

AURELIA'S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN

"AFTER" JENKINS

ABOUT BARBERS

"PARTY CRIES" IN IRELAND

THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT RESIGNATION

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

HONORED AS A CURIOSITY

FIRST INTERVIEW WITH ARTEMUS WARD

CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS

THE KILLING OF JULIUS CAESAR "LOCALIZED"

THE WIDOW'S PROTEST

THE SCRIPTURAL PANORAMIST

CURING A COLD

A CURIOUS PLEASURE EXCURSION

RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR

A MYSTERIOUS VISIT









PREFACE



I have scattered through this volume a mass of matter which has never

been in print before (such as "Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and

Girls," the "Jumping Frog restored to the English tongue after martyrdom

in the French," the "Membranous Croup" sketch, and many others which I

need not specify): not doing this in order to make an advertisement of

it, but because these things seemed instructive.



HARTFORD, 1875.

                                             MARK TWAIN.













SKETCHES NEW AND OLD









MY WATCH--[Written about 1870.]



AN INSTRUCTIVE LITTLE TALE



My beautiful new watch had run eighteen months without losing or gaining,

and without breaking any part of its machinery or stopping.  I had come

to believe it infallible in its judgments about the time of day, and to

consider its constitution and its anatomy imperishable.  But at last, one

night, I let it run down.  I grieved about it as if it were a recognized

messenger and forerunner of calamity.  But by and by I cheered up, set

the watch by guess, and commanded my bodings and superstitions to depart.

Next day I stepped into the chief jeweler's to set it by the exact time,

and the head of the establishment took it out of my hand and proceeded to

set it for me.  Then he said, "She is four minutes slow-regulator wants

pushing up."  I tried to stop him--tried to make him understand that the

watch kept perfect time.  But no; all this human cabbage could see was

that the watch was four minutes slow, and the regulator must be pushed up

a little; and so, while I danced around him in anguish, and implored him

to let the watch alone, he calmly and cruelly did the shameful deed.  My

watch began to gain.  It gained faster and faster day by day.  Within the

week it sickened to a raging fever, and its pulse went up to a hundred

and fifty in the shade.  At the end of two months it had left all the

timepieces of the town far in the rear, and was a fraction over thirteen

days ahead of the almanac.  It was away into November enjoying the snow,

while the October leaves were still turning.  It hurried up house rent,

bills payable, and such things, in such a ruinous way that I could not

abide it.  I took it to the watchmaker to be regulated.  He asked me if I

had ever had it repaired.  I said no, it had never needed any repairing.

He looked a look of vicious happiness and eagerly pried the watch open,

and then put a small dice-box into his eye and peered into its machinery.

He said it wanted cleaning and oiling, besides regulating--come in a

week.  After being cleaned and oiled, and regulated, my watch slowed down

to that degree that it ticked like a tolling bell.  I began to be left by

trains, I failed all appointments, I got to missing my dinner; my watch

strung out three days' grace to four and let me go to protest;

I gradually drifted back into yesterday, then day before, then into last

week, and by and by the comprehension came upon me that all solitary and

alone I was lingering along in week before last, and the world was out of

sight.  I seemed to detect in myself a sort of sneaking fellow-feeling

for the mummy in the museum, and a desire to swap news with him.  I went

to a watchmaker again.  He took the watch all to pieces while I waited,

and then said the barrel was "swelled."  He said he could reduce it in

three days.  After this the watch averaged well, but nothing more.  For

half a day it would go like the very mischief, and keep up such a barking

and wheezing and whooping and sneezing and snorting, that I could not

hear myself think for the disturbance; and as long as it held out there

was not a watch in the land that stood any chance against it.  But the

rest of the day it would keep on slowing down and fooling along until all

the clocks it had left behind caught up again.  So at last, at the end of

twenty-four hours, it would trot up to the judges' stand all right and

just in time.  It would show a fair and square average, and no man could

say it had done more or less than its duty.  But a correct average is

only a mild virtue in a watch, and I took this instrument to another

watchmaker.  He said the king-bolt was broken.  I said I was glad it was

nothing more serious.  To tell the plain truth, I had no idea what the

king-bolt was, but I did not choose to appear ignorant to a stranger.

He repaired the king-bolt, but what the watch gained in one way it lost

in another.  It would run awhile and then stop awhile, and then run

awhile again, and so on, using its own discretion about the intervals.

And every time it went off it kicked back like a musket.  I padded my

breast for a few days, but finally took the watch to another watchmaker.

He picked it all to pieces, and turned the ruin over and over under his

glass; and then he said there appeared to be something the matter with

the hair-trigger.  He fixed it, and gave it a fresh start.  It did well

now, except that always at ten minutes to ten the hands would shut

together like a pair of scissors, and from that time forth they would

travel together.  The oldest man in the world could not make head or tail

of the time of day by such a watch, and so I went again to have the thing

repaired.  This person said that the crystal had got bent, and that the

mainspring was not straight.  He also remarked that part of the works

needed half-soling.  He made these things all right, and then my

timepiece performed unexceptionably, save that now and then, after

working along quietly for nearly eight hours, everything inside would let

go all of a sudden and begin to buzz like a bee, and the hands would

straightway begin to spin round and round so fast that their

individuality was lost completely, and they simply seemed a delicate

spider's web over the face of the watch.  She would reel off the next

twenty-four hours in six or seven minutes, and then stop with a bang.

I went with a heavy heart to one more watchmaker, and looked on while he

took her to pieces.  Then I prepared to cross-question him rigidly, for

this thing was getting serious.  The watch had cost two hundred dollars

originally, and I seemed to have paid out two or three thousand for

repairs.  While I waited and looked on I presently recognized in this

watchmaker an old acquaintance--a steamboat engineer of other days, and

not a good engineer, either.  He examined all the parts carefully, just

as the other watchmakers had done, and then delivered his verdict with

the same confidence of manner.



He said:



"She makes too much steam-you want to hang the monkey-wrench on the

safety-valve!"



I brained him on the spot, and had him buried at my own expense.



My uncle William (now deceased, alas!) used to say that a good horse was,

a good horse until it had run away once, and that a good watch was a good

watch until the repairers got a chance at it.  And he used to wonder what

became of all the unsuccessful tinkers, and gunsmiths, and shoemakers,

and engineers, and blacksmiths; but nobody could ever tell him.













POLITICAL ECONOMY



     Political Economy is the basis of all good government.  The wisest

     men of all ages have brought to bear upon this subject the--



[Here I was interrupted and informed that a stranger wished to see me

down at the door.  I went and confronted him, and asked to know his

business, struggling all the time to keep a tight rein on my seething

political-economy ideas, and not let them break away from me or get

tangled in their harness.  And privately I wished the stranger was in the

bottom of the canal with a cargo of wheat on top of him.  I was all in a

fever, but he was cool.  He said he was sorry to disturb me, but as he

was passing he noticed that I needed some lightning-rods.  I said, "Yes,

yes--go on--what about it?"  He said there was nothing about it, in

particular--nothing except that he would like to put them up for me.

I am new to housekeeping; have been used to hotels and boarding-houses

all my life.  Like anybody else of similar experience, I try to appear

(to strangers) to be an old housekeeper; consequently I said in an

offhand way that I had been intending for some time to have six or eight

lightning-rods put up, but--The stranger started, and looked inquiringly

at me, but I was serene.  I thought that if I chanced to make any

mistakes, he would not catch me by my countenance.  He said he would

rather have my custom than any man's in town.  I said, "All right," and

started off to wrestle with my great subject again, when he called me

back and said it would be necessary to know exactly how many "points" I

wanted put up, what parts of the house I wanted them on, and what quality

of rod I preferred.  It was close quarters for a man not used to the

exigencies of housekeeping; but I went through creditably, and he

probably never suspected that I was a novice.  I told him to put up eight

"points," and put them all on the roof, and use the best quality of rod.

He said he could furnish the "plain" article at 20 cents a foot;

"coppered," 25 cents; "zinc-plated spiral-twist," at 30 cents, that would

stop a streak of lightning any time, no matter where it was bound, and

"render its errand harmless and its further progress apocryphal."  I said

apocryphal was no slouch of a word, emanating from the source it did,

but, philology aside, I liked the spiral-twist and would take that brand.

Then he said he could make two hundred and fifty feet answer; but to do

it right, and make the best job in town of it, and attract the admiration

of the just and the unjust alike, and compel all parties to say they

never saw a more symmetrical and hypothetical display of lightning-rods

since they were born, he supposed he really couldn't get along without

four hundred, though he was not vindictive, and trusted he was willing to

try.  I said, go ahead and use four hundred, and make any kind of a job

he pleased out of it, but let me get back to my work.  So I got rid of

him at last; and now, after half an hour spent in getting my train of

political-economy thoughts coupled together again, I am ready to go on

once more.]



     richest treasures of their genius, their experience of life, and

     their learning.  The great lights of commercial jurisprudence,

     international confraternity, and biological deviation, of all ages,

     all civilizations, and all nationalities, from Zoroaster down to

     Horace Greeley, have--



[Here I was interrupted again, and required to go down and confer further

with that lightning-rod man.  I hurried off, boiling and surging with

prodigious thoughts wombed in words of such majesty that each one of them

was in itself a straggling procession of syllables that might be fifteen

minutes passing a given point, and once more I confronted him--he so calm

and sweet, I so hot and frenzied.  He was standing in the contemplative

attitude of the Colossus of Rhodes, with one foot on my infant tuberose,

and the other among my pansies, his hands on his hips, his hat-brim

tilted forward, one eye shut and the other gazing critically and

admiringly in the direction of my principal chimney.  He said now there

was a state of things to make a man glad to be alive; and added, "I leave

it to you if you ever saw anything more deliriously picturesque than

eight lightning-rods on one chimney?"  I said I had no present

recollection of anything that transcended it.  He said that in his

opinion nothing on earth but Niagara Falls was superior to it in the way

of natural scenery.  All that was needed now, he verily believed, to make

my house a perfect balm to the eye, was to kind of touch up the other

chimneys a little, and thus "add to the generous 'coup d'oeil' a soothing

uniformity of achievement which would allay the excitement naturally

consequent upon the 'coup d'etat.'"  I asked him if he learned to talk

out of a book, and if I could borrow it anywhere?  He smiled pleasantly,

and said that his manner of speaking was not taught in books, and that

nothing but familiarity with lightning could enable a man to handle his

conversational style with impunity.  He then figured up an estimate, and

said that about eight more rods scattered about my roof would about fix

me right, and he guessed five hundred feet of stuff would do it; and

added that the first eight had got a little the start of him, so to

speak, and used up a mere trifle of material more than he had calculated

on--a hundred feet or along there.  I said I was in a dreadful hurry,

and I wished we could get this business permanently mapped out, so that I

could go on with my work.  He said, "I could have put up those eight

rods, and marched off about my business--some men would have done it.

But no; I said to myself, this man is a stranger to me, and I will die

before I'll wrong him; there ain't lightning-rods enough on that house,

and for one I'll never stir out of my tracks till I've done as I would be

done by, and told him so.  Stranger, my duty is accomplished; if the

recalcitrant and dephlogistic messenger of heaven strikes your--"

"There, now, there," I said, "put on the other eight--add five hundred

feet of spiral-twist--do anything and everything you want to do; but calm

your sufferings, and try to keep your feelings where you can reach them

with the dictionary.  Meanwhile, if we understand each other now, I will

go to work again."



I think I have been sitting here a full hour this time, trying to get

back to where I was when my train of thought was broken up by the last

interruption; but I believe I have accomplished it at last, and may

venture to proceed again.]



     wrestled with this great subject, and the greatest among them have

     found it a worthy adversary, and one that always comes up fresh and

     smiling after every throw.  The great Confucius said that he would

     rather be a profound political economist than chief of police.

     Cicero frequently said that political economy was the grandest

     consummation that the human mind was capable of consuming; and even

     our own Greeley had said vaguely but forcibly that "Political--



[Here the lightning-rod man sent up another call for me.  I went down in

a state of mind bordering on impatience.  He said he would rather have

died than interrupt me, but when he was employed to do a job, and that

job was expected to be done in a clean, workmanlike manner, and when it

was finished and fatigue urged him to seek the rest and recreation he

stood so much in need of, and he was about to do it, but looked up and

saw at a glance that all the calculations had been a little out, and if a

thunder-storm were to come up, and that house, which he felt a personal

interest in, stood there with nothing on earth to protect it but sixteen

lightning-rods--"Let us have peace!" I shrieked.  "Put up a hundred and

fifty!  Put some on the kitchen!  Put a dozen on the barn!  Put a couple

on the cow!  Put one on the cook!--scatter them all over the persecuted

place till it looks like a zinc-plated, spiral-twisted, silver-mounted

canebrake!  Move!  Use up all the material you can get your hands on, and

when you run out of lightning-rods put up ramrods, cam-rods, stair-rods,

piston-rods--anything that will pander to your dismal appetite for

artificial scenery, and bring respite to my raging brain and healing to

my lacerated soul!"  Wholly unmoved--further than to smile sweetly--this

iron being simply turned back his wrist-bands daintily, and said he would

now proceed to hump himself.  Well, all that was nearly three hours ago.

It is questionable whether I am calm enough yet to write on the noble

theme of political economy, but I cannot resist the desire to try, for it

is the one subject that is nearest to my heart and dearest to my brain of

all this world's philosophy.]



     economy is heaven's best boon to man."  When the loose but gifted

     Byron lay in his Venetian exile he observed that, if it could be

     granted him to go back and live his misspent life over again, he

     would give his lucid and unintoxicated intervals to the composition,

     not of frivolous rhymes, but of essays upon political economy.

     Washington loved this exquisite science; such names as Baker,

     Beckwith, Judson, Smith, are imperishably linked with it; and even

     imperial Homer, in the ninth book of the Iliad, has said:



                    Fiat justitia, ruat coelum,

                    Post mortem unum, ante bellum,

                    Hic facet hoc, ex-parte res,

                    Politicum e-conomico est.



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

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

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

     and made it more celebrated than any that ever--



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

and relapse into impenetrable silence for ever and ever on these

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

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

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

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

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

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

popular ebullition of ignorance."]



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

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

theaters languished, for their happiest scenic inventions were tame and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

that was making my house so magnificently conspicuous in the general

gloom of the storm.



By actual count, the lightning struck at my establishment seven

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

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

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

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

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

the vicinity were transporting all the lightning they could possibly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

enough in nerve and brain to resume it.



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

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

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

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

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

the publisher.













THE JUMPING FROG [written about 1865]



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

ONCE MORE BY PATIENT, UNREMUNERATED TOIL.



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

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

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

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

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

Humoristes Americaines" (These Humorist Americans).  I am one of these

humorists American dissected by him, and hence the complaint I am making.



This gentleman's article is an able one (as articles go, in the French,

where they always tangle up everything to that degree that when you start

into a sentence you never know whether you are going to come out alive or

not).  It is a very good article and the writer says all manner of kind

and complimentary things about me--for which I am sure thank him with all

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

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

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

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

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

extravagantly funny about it.  Just there is where my complaint

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[after it will be found the French version--(French version is deleted

from this edition)--, and after the latter my retranslation from the

French]









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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

some inquiries about a cherished companion of his boyhood named Leonidas

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

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

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

I would feel under many obligations to him.



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

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

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

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

initial sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

don't anyway.'



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

as you could cipher it down.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

that ever they see.



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

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

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



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



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

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



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

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



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

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



"The feller took the box again, and took another long, partiular look,

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

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

frog.'



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

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

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

resk forty dollars the he can outjump any frog in Calaveras County.'



"And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad-like, 'Well,

I'm only a, stranger here, and I ain't got no frog; but if I had a frog,

I'd bet you.



"And then Smiley says, 'That's all right--that's all right if you'll hold

my box a minute, I'll go and get you a frog.'  Any so the feller took the

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

wait.



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

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

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

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

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

in, and give him to this feller and says:



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

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

three--git' and him and the feller touches up the frogs from behind, and

the new frog hopped off lively but Dan'l give a heave, and hysted up his

shoulders---so-like a Frenchman, but it warn't no use--he couldn't budge;

he was planted as solid as a church, and he couldn't no more stir than if

he was anchored out.  Smiley was a good deal surprised, and he was

disgusted too, but he didn't have no idea what the matter was of course.



"The Teller took the money and started away; and when he was going out at

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ketched him.  And--"



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

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

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

gone a second."



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

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

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

away.



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

and recommenced:



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

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



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

the afflicted cow, but took my leave.





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

further go:



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



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





THE JUMPING FROG



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

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

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

l'autre, c'est que je me souviens que le grand bief n'etait pas acheve

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

etait l'homme le plus friand de paris qui se put voir, pariant sur tout

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

n'en trouvait pas il passait du cote oppose.  Tout ce qui convenaiat

l'autre lui convenait; pourvu qu'il eut un pari, Smiley etait satisfait.

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

It faut dire qu'il etait toujours pret a'exposer, qu'on ne pouvait

mentionner la moindre chose sans que ce gaillard offrit de parier la-

dessus n'importe quoi et de prendre le cote que l'on voudrait, comme je

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

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

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

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

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

aviat 'meeting' au camp, il venait parier regulierement pour le cure

Walker, qu'il jugeait etre le meilleur predicateur des environs, et qui

l'etait en effet, et un brave homme.  Il aurai rencontre une punaise de

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

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

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

temps qu'il y perdrait.  Une fois la femme du cure Walker fut tres malade

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

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

bien mieux, grace a l'infinie misericorde tellement mieux qu'avec la

benediction de la Providence elle s'en tirerait, et voila que, sans y

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

de meme.



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

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

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

l'argent avec cette bete, quoi-qu'elle fut poussive, cornarde, toujours

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

d'approchant. On lui donnait 2 ou 300 'yards' au depart, puffs on la

depassait sans peine; mais jamais a la fin elle ne manquait de

s'echauffer, de s'exasperer et elle arrivait, s'ecartant, se defendant,

ses jambes greles en l'ai devant les obstacles, quelquefois les evitant

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

surtout avec ses eternumens et reniflemens.---crac! elle arrivaat donc

toujour premiere d'une tete, aussi juste qu'on peut le mesurer.  Et il

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

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

aussitot les enjeux faits, il devenait un autre chien.  Sa machoire

inferieure commencait a ressortir comme un gaillard d'avant, ses dents se

decouvcraient brillantes commes des fournaises, et un chien pouvait le

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

son epaule, Andre Jackson, c'etait le nom du chien, Andre Jackson prenait

cela tranquillement, comme s'il ne se fut jamais attendu a autre chose,

et quand les paris etaient doubles et redoubles contre lui, il vous

saisissait l'autre chien juste a l'articulation de la jambe de derriere,

et il ne la lachait plus, non pas qu'il la machat, vous concevez, mais il

s'y serait tenu pendu jusqu'a ce qu'on jetat l'eponge en l'air, fallut-il

attendre un an.  Smiley gagnait toujours avec cette bete-la;

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

pattes de derriere, parce qu'on les avait sciees, et quand les choses

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

morceau favori, le pauvre chien comprit en un instant qu'on s'etait moque

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

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

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

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

livre a un chien qui n'a pas de pattes de derriere, puisque c'est par la

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

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

s'il avait vecu, car il y avait de l'etoffe en lui, il avait du genie,

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

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

certaines circonstances etant donnees, ait manque de talent.  Je me sens

triste toutes les fois que je pense a son dernier combat et au denoument

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

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

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

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

chez lui, disant qu'il pretendait faire son Education; vous me croirez si

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

sauter dans une cour retire de sa maison. Et je vous reponds qu'il avait

reussi.  Il lui donnait un petit coup par derriere, et l'instant d'apres

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

la poele, faire une culbute, quelquefois deux, lorsqu'elle etait bien

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

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

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

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

grenouille, c'etait l'education, qu'avec l'education elle pouvait faire

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

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

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

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

nouveau par terre, ou il restait vraiment a se gratter la tete avec sa

patte de derriere, comme s'il n'avait pas eu la moindre idee de sa

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

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

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

un saut qu'aucune bete de son espece que vous puissiez connaitre. Sauter

a plat, c'etait son fort! Quand il s'agissait de cela, Smiley en tassait

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

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

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

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

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

parfois a la Ville pour quelque pari.



"Un jour, un individu etranger au camp l'arrete aver sa boite et lui

dit:--Qu'est-ce que vous avez donc serre la dedans?



"Smiley dit d'un air indifferent:--Cela pourrait etre un perroquet ou un

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



"L'individu la prend, la regarde avec soin, la tourne d'un cote et de

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



"--Mon Dieu! repond Smiley, toujours d'un air degage, elle est bonne pour

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

comte de Calaveras.



"L'individu reprend la boite, l'examine de nouveau longuement, et la rend

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

grenouille ait rien de mieux qu'aucune grenouille.



"--Possible qua vous ne le voyiez pat, dit Smiley, possible que vous vous

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

possible qua vous avez de l'experience, et possible que vous ne soyez

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

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



"L'individu reflechit one seconde et dit comma attriste:--Je ne suis

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

avais une, je tiendrais le pari.



"--Fort bien! repond Smiley.  Rien de plus facile. Si vous voulez tenir

ma boite one minute, j'irai vous chercher une grenouille.--Voile donc

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

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

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

avec une cuiller a the l'emplit de menu plomb de chasse, mail l'emplit

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

etait a barboter dans une mare.  Finalement il attrape une grenouille,

l'apporte cet individu et dit:--Maintenant, si vous etes pret, mettez-la

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

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



"Lui et l'individu touchent leurs grenouilles par derriere, et la

grenouille neuve se met h sautiller, mais Daniel se souleve lourdement,

hausse les epaules ainsi, comma un Francais; a quoi bon? il ne pouvait

bouger, il etait plante solide comma une enclume, il n'avancait pas plus

que si on l'eut mis a l'ancre. Smiley fut surpris et degoute, mais il ne

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

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

dessus l'epaule, comma ca, au pauvre Daniel, en disant de son air

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

qu'une autre.



"Smiley se gratta longtemps la tete, les yeux fixes Sur Daniel; jusqu'a

ce qu'enfin il dit:--je me demande comment diable il se fait qua cette

bite ait refuse, . . . Est-ce qu'elle aurait quelque chose? . . . On

croirait qu'elle est enflee.



"Il empoigne Daniel par la peau du coo, le souleve et dit:--Le loup me

croque, s'il ne pese pas cinq livres.



"Il le retourne, et le malheureux crache deux poignees de plomb.  Quand

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

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

rattrapa jamais, et ...."







[Translation of the above back from the French:]



THE FROG JUMPING OF THE COUNTY OF CALAVERAS



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

all of same."



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

effort to gain the combat, and was rudely shucked.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

flies, Daniel, some fifes!"--in a flash of the eye Daniel 30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

bytimes to the village for some bet.



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

him said:



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



Smiley said, with an air indifferent:



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

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



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

and from the other, then he said:



"Tiens! in effect!--At what is she good?"



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

one thing, to my notice (A mon avis), she can better in jumping (elle pent

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



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

to Smiley in saying with an air deliberate:



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

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

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

judge.--M.  T.]



"Possible that you not it saw not," said Smiley, "possible that you--you

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

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

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

she better in jumping no matter which frog of the county of Calaveras."



The individual reflected a second, and said like sad:



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

one, I would embrace the bet."



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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

said:



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

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

three--advance!"



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

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

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

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

put at the anchor.



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

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

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

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

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

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

ce qu'il ne donne pas un coup d pouce par-dessus l'epaule, comme ga, au

pauvre Daniel, en disant de son air delibere):



"Eh bien! I no see not that that frog has nothin of better than another."



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

until that which at last he said:



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

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



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



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



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

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

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

not him caught never.





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

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

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

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

pints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog," is it kind,

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

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

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



HARTFORD, March, 1875,













JOURNALISM IN TENNESSEE--[Written about 1871.]



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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sprinkled with cigar stubs and "old soldiers," and a stove with a door

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

interest.



I wrote as follows:



                    SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS



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

     misapprehension with regard to the Dallyhack railroad.  It is not

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

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

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

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

     making the correction.



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

     Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom, arrived in the city

     yesterday.  He is stopping at the Van Buren House.



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

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

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

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

     by incomplete election returns.



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

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

     impassable streets with the Nicholson pavement.  The Daily Hurrah

     urges the measure with ability, and seems confident of ultimate

     success.



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

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

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

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



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

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

gruel as that?  Give me the pen!"



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

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

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

and marred the symmetry of my ear.



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

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

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

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

me.  Merely a finger shot off.



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

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

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

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

teeth out.



"That stove is utterly ruined," said the chief editor.



I said I believed it was.



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

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

written."



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

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

follows:



                    SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS



     The inveterate liars of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake are evidently

     endeavoring to palm off upon a noble and chivalrous people another

     of their vile and brutal falsehoods with regard to that most

     glorious conception of the nineteenth century, the Ballyhack

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

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

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

     they want to save their abandoned reptile carcasses the cowhiding

     they so richly deserve.



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

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



     We observe that the besotted blackguard of the Mud Springs Morning

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

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

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

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

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

     holier, and happier; and yet this blackhearted scoundrel degrades

     his great office persistently to the dissemination of falsehood,

     calumny, vituperation, and vulgarity.



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

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

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

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

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

     imbecility, and imagining that he is talking sense.





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

journalism gives me the fan-tods."



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

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

--I began to feel in the way.



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

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



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

a dragoon revolver in his hand.



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

mangy sheet?"



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

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

Blatherskite Tecumseh?"



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

leisure we will begin."



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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

way to the undertaker's and left.



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

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

and attend to the customers."



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

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

think of anything to say.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

stairs.  He advertises--we take it out in trade."



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

us.



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



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

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

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

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

to interruption.



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

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

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

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

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

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

judiciously distributed.  A gentleman shoots at you through the window

and cripples me; a bombshell comes down the stovepipe for your

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

your masterly hand has infused the fervent spirit of Tennesseean

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

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

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

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

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

me."



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

hospital.













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



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

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

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

this one was called Jim.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

books.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

trunk.  He browsed around the cupboard after essence-of peppermint, and

didn't make a mistake and drink aqua fortis.  He stole his father's gun

and went hunting on the Sabbath, and didn't shoot three or four of his

fingers off.  He struck his little sister on the temple with his fist

when he was angry, and she didn't linger in pain through long summer

days, and die with sweet words of forgiveness upon her lips that

redoubled the anguish of his breaking heart.  No; she got over it.  He

ran off and went to sea at last, and didn't come back and find himself

sad and alone in the world, his loved ones sleeping in the quiet

churchyard, and the vine-embowered home of his boyhood tumbled down and

gone to decay.  Ah, no; he came home as drunk as a piper, and got into

the station-house the first thing.



And he grew up and married, and raised a large family, and brained them

all with an ax one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and

rascality; and now he is the infernalest wickedest scoundrel in his

native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the

legislature.



So you see there never was a bad James in the Sunday-school books that

had such a streak of luck as this sinful Jim with the charmed life.













THE STORY OF THE GOOD LITTLE BOY--[Witten about 1865]



Once there was a good little boy by the name of Jacob Blivens.  He always

obeyed his parents, no matter how absurd and unreasonable their demands

were; and he always learned his book, and never was late at Sabbath-

school.  He would not play hookey, even when his sober judgment told him

it was the most profitable thing he could do.  None of the other boys

could ever make that boy out, he acted so strangely.  He wouldn't lie, no

matter how convenient it was.  He just said it was wrong to lie, and that

was sufficient for him.  And he was so honest that he was simply

ridiculous.  The curious ways that that Jacob had, surpassed everything.

He wouldn't play marbles on Sunday, he wouldn't rob birds' nests, he

wouldn't give hot pennies to organ-grinders' monkeys; he didn't seem to

take any interest in any kind of rational amusement.  So the other boys

used to try to reason it out and come to an understanding of him, but

they couldn't arrive at any satisfactory conclusion.  As I said before,

they could only figure out a sort of vague idea that he was "afflicted,"

and so they took him under their protection, and never allowed any harm

to come to him.



This good little boy read all the Sunday-school books; they were his

greatest delight.  This was the whole secret of it.  He believed in the

gold little boys they put in the Sunday-school book; he had every

confidence in them.  He longed to come across one of them alive once;

but he never did.  They all died before his time, maybe.  Whenever he

read about a particularly good one he turned over quickly to the end to

see what became of him, because he wanted to travel thousands of miles

and gaze on him; but it wasn't any use; that good little boy always died

in the last chapter, and there was a picture of the funeral, with all his

relations and the Sunday-school children standing around the grave in

pantaloons that were too short, and bonnets that were too large, and

everybody crying into handkerchiefs that had as much as a yard and a half

of stuff in them.  He was always headed off in this way.  He never could

see one of those good little boys on account of his always dying in the

last chapter.



Jacob had a noble ambition to be put in a Sunday school book.  He wanted

to be put in, with pictures representing him gloriously declining to lie

to his mother, and her weeping for joy about it; and pictures

representing him standing on the doorstep giving a penny to a poor

beggar-woman with six children, and telling her to spend it freely, but

not to be extravagant, because extravagance is a sin; and pictures of him

magnanimously refusing to tell on the bad boy who always lay in wait for

him around the corner as he came from school, and welted him so over the

head with a lath, and then chased him home, saying, "Hi! hi!" as he

proceeded.  That was the ambition of young Jacob Blivens.  He wished to

be put in a Sunday-school book.  It made him feel a lithe uncomfortable

sometimes when he reflected that the good little boys always died.  He

loved to live, you know, and this was the most unpleasant feature about

being a Sunday-school-boo boy.  He knew it was not healthy to be good.

He knew it was more fatal than consumption to be so supernaturally good

as the boys in the books were he knew that none of them had ever been

able to stand it long, and it pained him to think that if they put him in

a book he wouldn't ever see it, or even if they did get the book out

before he died it wouldn't be popular without any picture of his funeral

in the back part of it.  It couldn't be much of a Sunday-school book that

couldn't tell about the advice he gave to the community when he was

dying.  So at last, of course, he had to make up his mind to do the best

he could under the circumstances--to live right, and hang on as long as

he could and have his dying speech all ready when his time came.



But somehow nothing ever went right with the good little boy; nothing

ever turned out with him the way it turned out with the good little boys

in the books.  They always had a good time, and the bad boys had the

broken legs; but in his case there was a screw loose somewhere, and it

all happened just the other way.  When he found Jim Blake stealing

apples, and went under the tree to read to him about the bad little boy

who fell out of a neighbor's apple tree and broke his arm, Jim fell out

of the tree, too, but he fell on him and broke his arm, and Jim wasn't

hurt at all.  Jacob couldn't understand that.  There wasn't anything in

the books like it.



And once, when some bad boys pushed a blind man over in the mud, and

Jacob ran to help him up and receive his blessing, the blind man did not

give him any blessing at all, but whacked him over the head with his

stick and said he would like to catch him shoving him again, and then

pretending to help him up.  This was not in accordance with any of the

books.  Jacob looked them all over to see.



One thing that Jacob wanted to do was to find a lame dog that hadn't any

place to stay, and was hungry and persecuted, and bring him home and pet

him and have that dog's imperishable gratitude.  And at last he found one

and was happy; and he brought him home and fed him, but when he was going

to pet him the dog flew at him and tore all the clothes off him except

those that were in front, and made a spectacle of him that was

astonishing.  He examined authorities, but he could not understand the

matter.  It was of the same breed of dogs that was in the books, but it

acted very differently.  Whatever this boy did he got into trouble.  The

very things the boys in the books got rewarded for turned out to be about

the most unprofitable things he could invest in.



Once, when he was on his way to Sunday-school, he saw some bad boys

starting off pleasuring in a sailboat.  He was filled with consternation,

because he knew from his reading that boys who went sailing on Sunday

invariably got drowned.  So he ran out on a raft to warn them, but a log

turned with him and slid him into the river.  A man got him out pretty

soon, and the doctor pumped the water out of him, and gave him a fresh

start with his bellows, but he caught cold and lay sick abed nine weeks.

But the most unaccountable thing about it was that the bad boys in the

boat had a good time all day, and then reached home alive and well in the

most surprising manner.  Jacob Blivens said there was nothing like these

things in the books.  He was perfectly dumfounded.



When he got well he was a little discouraged, but he resolved to keep on

trying anyhow.  He knew that so far his experiences wouldn't do to go in

a book, but he hadn't yet reached the allotted term of life for good

little boys, and he hoped to be able to make a record yet if he could

hold on till his time was fully up.  If everything else failed he had his

dying speech to fall back on.



He examined his authorities, and found that it was now time for him to go

to sea as a cabin-boy.  He called on a ship-captain and made his

application, and when the captain asked for his recommendations he

proudly drew out a tract and pointed to the word, "To Jacob Blivens, from

his affectionate teacher."  But the captain was a coarse, vulgar man, and

he said, "Oh, that be blowed! that wasn't any proof that he knew how to

wash dishes or handle a slush-bucket, and he guessed he didn't want him."

This was altogether the most extraordinary thing that ever happened to

Jacob in all his life.  A compliment from a teacher, on a tract, had

never failed to move the tenderest emotions of ship-captains, and open

the way to all offices of honor and profit in their gift it never had in

any book that ever he had read.  He could hardly believe his senses.



This boy always had a hard time of it.  Nothing ever came out according

to the authorities with him.  At last, one day, when he was around

hunting up bad little boys to admonish, he found a lot of them in the old

iron-foundry fixing up a little joke on fourteen or fifteen dogs, which

they had tied together in long procession, and were going to ornament

with empty nitroglycerin cans made fast to their tails.  Jacob's heart

was touched.  He sat down on one of those cans (for he never minded

grease when duty was before him), and he took hold of the foremost dog by

the collar, and turned his reproving eye upon wicked Tom Jones.  But just

at that moment Alderman McWelter, full of wrath, stepped in.  All the bad

boys ran away, but Jacob Blivens rose in conscious innocence and began

one of those stately little Sunday-school-book speeches which always

commence with "Oh, sir!" in dead opposition to the fact that no boy, good

or bad, ever starts a remark with "Oh, sir."  But the alderman never

waited to hear the rest.  He took Jacob Blivens by the ear and turned him

around, and hit him a whack in the rear with the flat of his hand; and in

an instant that good little boy shot out through the roof and soared away

toward the sun with the fragments of those fifteen dogs stringing after

him like the tail of a kite.  And there wasn't a sign of that alderman or

that old iron-foundry left on the face of the earth; and, as for young

Jacob Blivens, he never got a chance to make his last dying speech after

all his trouble fixing it up, unless he made it to the birds; because,

although the bulk of him came down all right in a tree-top in an

adjoining county, the rest of him was apportioned around among four

townships, and so they had to hold five inquests on him to find out

whether he was dead or not, and how it occurred.  You never saw a boy

scattered so.--[This glycerin catastrophe is borrowed from a floating

newspaper item, whose author's name I would give if I knew it.--M. T.]



Thus perished the good little boy who did the best he could, but didn't

come out according to the books.  Every boy who ever did as he did

prospered except him.  His case is truly remarkable.  It will probably

never be accounted for.













A COUPLE OF POEMS BY TWAIN AND MOORE--[Written about 1865]





                         THOSE EVENING BELLS



                           BY THOMAS MOORE



               Those evening bells!  those evening bells!

               How many a tale their music tells

               Of youth, and home, and that sweet time

               When last I heard their soothing chime.



               Those joyous hours are passed away;

               And many a heart that then was gay,

               Within the tomb now darkly dwells,

               And hears no more those evening bells.



               And so 'twill be when I am gone

               That tuneful peal will still ring on;

               While other bards shall walk these dells,

               And sing your praise, sweet evening bells.





                         THOSE ANNUAL BILLS



                           BY MARK TWAIN



               These annual bills! these annual bills!

               How many a song their discord trills

               Of "truck" consumed, enjoyed, forgot,

               Since I was skinned by last year's lot!



               Those joyous beans are passed away;

               Those onions blithe, O where are they?

               Once loved, lost, mourned--now vexing ILLS

               Your shades troop back in annual bills!



               And so 'twill be when I'm aground

               These yearly duns will still go round,

               While other bards, with frantic quills,

               Shall damn and damn these annual bills!













NIAGARA [ Written about 1871.]



Niagara Falls is a most enjoyable place of resort.  The hotels are

excellent, and the prices not at all exorbitant.  The opportunities for

fishing are not surpassed in the country; in fact, they are not even

equaled elsewhere.  Because, in other localities, certain places in the

streams are much better than others; but at Niagara one place is just as

good as another, for the reason that the fish do not bite anywhere, and

so there is no use in your walking five miles to fish, when you can

depend on being just as unsuccessful nearer home.  The advantages of this

state of things have never heretofore been properly placed before the

public.



The weather is cool in summer, and the walks and drives are all pleasant

and none of them fatiguing.  When you start out to "do" the Falls you

first drive down about a mile, and pay a small sum for the privilege of

looking down from a precipice into the narrowest part of the Niagara

River.  A railway "cut" through a hill would be as comely if it had the

angry river tumbling and foaming through its bottom.  You can descend a

staircase here a hundred and fifty feet down, and stand at the edge of

the water.  After you have done it, you will wonder why you did it; but

you will then be too late.



The guide will explain to you, in his blood-curdling way, how he saw the

little steamer, Maid of the Mist, descend the fearful rapids--how first

one paddle-box was out of sight behind the raging billows and then the

other, and at what point it was that her smokestack toppled overboard,

and where her planking began to break and part asunder--and how she did

finally live through the trip, after accomplishing the incredible feat of

traveling seventeen miles in six minutes, or six miles in seventeen

minutes, I have really forgotten which.  But it was very extraordinary,

anyhow.  It is worth the price of admission to hear the guide tell the

story nine times in succession to different parties, and never miss a

word or alter a sentence or a gesture.



Then you drive over to Suspension Bridge, and divide your misery between

the chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below, and

the chances of having the railway-train overhead smashing down onto you.

Either possibility is discomforting taken by itself, but, mixed together,

they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness.



On the Canada side you drive along the chasm between long ranks of

photographers standing guard behind their cameras, ready to make an

ostentatious frontispiece of you and your decaying ambulance, and your

solemn crate with a hide on it, which you are expected to regard in the

light of a horse, and a diminished and unimportant background of sublime

Niagara; and a great many people have the incredible effrontery or the

native depravity to aid and abet this sort of crime.



Any day, in the hands of these photographers, you may see stately

pictures of papa and mamma, Johnny and Bub and Sis or a couple of country

cousins, all smiling vacantly, and all disposed in studied and

uncomfortable attitudes in their carriage, and all looming up in their

awe-inspiring imbecility before the snubbed and diminished presentment of

that majestic presence whose ministering spirits are the rainbows, whose

voice is the thunder, whose awful front is veiled in clouds, who was

monarch here dead and forgotten ages before this hackful of small

reptiles was deemed temporarily necessary to fill a crack in the world's

unnoted myriads, and will still be monarch here ages and decades of ages

after they shall have gathered themselves to their blood-relations, the

other worms, and been mingled with the unremembering dust.



There is no actual harm in making Niagara a background whereon to display

one's marvelous insignificance in a good strong light, but it requires a

sort of superhuman self-complacency to enable one to do it.



When you have examined the stupendous Horseshoe Fall till you are

satisfied you cannot improve on it, you return to America by the new

Suspension Bridge, and follow up the bank to where they exhibit the Cave

of the Winds.



Here I followed instructions, and divested myself of all my clothing, and

put on a waterproof jacket and overalls.  This costume is picturesque,

but not beautiful.  A guide, similarly dressed, led the way down a flight

of winding stairs, which wound and wound, and still kept on winding long

after the thing ceased to be a novelty, and then terminated long before

it had begun to be a pleasure.  We were then well down under the

precipice, but still considerably above the level of the river.



We now began to creep along flimsy bridges of a single plank, our persons

shielded from destruction by a crazy wooden railing, to which I clung

with both hands--not because I was afraid, but because I wanted to.

Presently the descent became steeper and the bridge flimsier, and sprays

from the American Fall began to rain down on us in fast increasing sheets

that soon became blinding, and after that our progress was mostly in the

nature of groping.  Nova a furious wind began to rush out from behind the

waterfall, which seemed determined to sweep us from the bridge, and

scatter us on the rocks and among the torrents below.  I remarked that I

wanted to go home; but it was too late.  We were almost under the

monstrous wall of water thundering down from above, and speech was in

vain in the midst of such a pitiless crash of sound.



In another moment the guide disappeared behind the deluge, and bewildered

by the thunder, driven helplessly by the wind, and smitten by the arrowy

tempest of rain, I followed.  All was darkness.  Such a mad storming,

roaring, and bellowing of warring wind and water never crazed my ears

before.  I bent my head, and seemed to receive the Atlantic on my back.

The world seemed going to destruction.  I could not see anything, the

flood poured down savagely.  I raised my head, with open mouth, and the

most of the American cataract went down my throat.  If I had sprung a

leak now I had been lost.  And at this moment I discovered that the

bridge had ceased, and we must trust for a foothold to the slippery and

precipitous rocks.  I never was so scared before and survived it.  But we

got through at last, and emerged into the open day, where we could stand

in front of the laced and frothy and seething world of descending water,

and look at it.  When I saw how much of it there was, and how fearfully

in earnest it was, I was sorry I had gone behind it.



The noble Red Man has always been a friend and darling of mine.  I love

to read about him in tales and legends and romances.  I love to read of

his inspired sagacity, and his love of the wild free life of mountain and

forest, and his general nobility of character, and his stately

metaphorical manner of speech, and his chivalrous love for the dusky

maiden, and the picturesque pomp of his dress and accoutrements.

Especially the picturesque pomp of his dress and accoutrements.  When I

found the shops at Niagara Falls full of dainty Indian beadwork, and

stunning moccasins, and equally stunning toy figures representing human

beings who carried their weapons in holes bored through their arms and

bodies, and had feet shaped like a pie, I was filled with emotion.

I knew that now, at last, I was going to come face to face with the noble

Red Man.



A lady clerk in a shop told me, indeed, that all her grand array of

curiosities were made by the Indians, and that they were plenty about the

Falls, and that they were friendly, and it would not be dangerous to

speak to them.  And sure enough, as I approached the bridge leading over

to Luna Island, I came upon a noble Son of the Forest sitting under a

tree, diligently at work on a bead reticule.  He wore a slouch hat and

brogans, and had a short black pipe in his mouth.  Thus does the baneful

contact with our effeminate civilization dilute the picturesque pomp

which is so natural to the Indian when far removed from us in his native

haunts.  I addressed the relic as follows:



"Is the Wawhoo-Wang-Wang of the Whack-a-Whack happy?  Does the great

Speckled Thunder sigh for the war-path, or is his heart contented with

dreaming of the dusky maiden, the Pride of the Forest?  Does the mighty

Sachem yearn to drink the blood of his enemies, or is he satisfied to

make bead reticules for the pappooses of the paleface?  Speak, sublime

relic of bygone grandeur--venerable ruin, speak!"



The relic said:



"An' is it mesilf, Dennis Hooligan, that ye'd be takon' for a dirty

Injin, ye drawlin', lantern-jawed, spider-legged divil!  By the piper

that played before Moses, I'll ate ye!"



I went away from there.



By and by, in the neighborhood of the Terrapin Tower, I came upon a

gentle daughter of the aborigines in fringed and beaded buckskin

moccasins and leggins, seated on a bench with her pretty wares about her.

She had just carved out a wooden chief that had a strong family

resemblance to a clothes-pin, and was now boring a hole through his

abdomen to put his bow through.  I hesitated a moment, and then addressed

her:



"Is the heart of the forest maiden heavy?  Is the Laughing Tadpole

lonely?  Does she mourn over the extinguished council-fires of her race,

and the vanished glory of her ancestors?  Or does her sad spirit wander

afar toward the hunting-grounds whither her brave Gobbler-of-the-

Lightnings is gone?  Why is my daughter silent?  Has she ought against

the paleface stranger?"



The maiden said:



"Faix, an' is it Biddy Malone ye dare to be callin' names?  Lave this, or

I'll shy your lean carcass over the cataract, ye sniveling blaggard!"



I adjourned from there also.



"Confound these Indians!" I said.  "They told me they were tame; but, if

appearances go for anything, I should say they were all on the warpath."



I made one more attempt to fraternize with them, and only one.  I came

upon a camp of them gathered in the shade of a great tree, making wampum

and moccasins, and addressed them in the language of friendship:



"Noble Red Men, Braves, Grand Sachems, War Chiefs, Squaws, and High Muck-

a-Mucks, the paleface from the land of the setting sun greets you! You,

Beneficent Polecat--you, Devourer of Mountains--you, Roaring Thundergust

--you, Bully Boy with a Glass eye--the paleface from beyond the great

waters greets you all! War and pestilence have thinned your ranks and

destroyed your once proud nation.  Poker and seven-up, and a vain modern

expense for soap, unknown to your glorious ancestors, have depleted your

purses.  Appropriating, in your simplicity, the property of others has

gotten you into trouble.  Misrepresenting facts, in your simple

innocence, has damaged your reputation with the soulless usurper.

Trading for forty-rod whisky, to enable you to get drunk and happy and

tomahawk your families, has played the everlasting mischief with the

picturesque pomp of your dress, and here you are, in the broad light of

the nineteenth century, gotten up like the ragtag and bobtail of the

purlieus of New York.  For shame!  Remember your ancestors!  Recall their

mighty deeds!  Remember Uncas!--and Red jacket! and Hole in the Day!--

and Whoopdedoodledo!  Emulate their achievements!  Unfurl yourselves

under my banner, noble savages, illustrious guttersnipes--"



"Down wid him!"  "Scoop the blaggard!"  "Burn him!"  "Bang him!"

"Dhround him!"



It was the quickest operation that ever was.  I simply saw a sudden flash

in the air of clubs, brickbats, fists, bead-baskets, and moccasins--a

single flash, and they all appeared to hit me at once, and no two of them

in the same place.  In the next instant the entire tribe was upon me.

They tore half the clothes off me; they broke my arms and legs; they gave

me a thump that dented the top of my head till it would hold coffee like

a saucer; and, to crown their disgraceful proceedings and add insult to

injury, they threw me over the Niagara Falls, and I got wet.



About ninety or a hundred feet from the top, the remains of my vest

caught on a projecting rock, and I was almost drowned before I could get

loose.  I finally fell, and brought up in a world of white foam at the

foot of the Fall, whose celled and bubbly masses towered up several

inches above my head.  Of course I got into the eddy.  I sailed round and

round in it forty-four times--chasing a chip and gaining on it--each

round trip a half-mile--reaching for the same bush on the bank forty-four

times, and just exactly missing it by a hair's-breadth every time.



At last a man walked down and sat down close to that bush, and put a pipe

in his mouth, and lit a match, and followed me with one eye and kept the

other on the match, while he sheltered it in his hands from the wind.

Presently a puff of wind blew it out.  The next time I swept around he

said:



"Got a match?"



"Yes; in my other vest.  Help me out, please."



"Not for Joe."



When I came round again, I said:



"Excuse the seemingly impertinent curiosity of a drowning man, but will

you explain this singular conduct of yours?"



"With pleasure.  I am the coroner.  Don't hurry on my account.  I can

wait for you.  But I wish I had a match."



I said: "Take my place, and I'll go and get you one."



He declined.  This lack of confidence on his part created a coldness

between us, and from that time forward I avoided him.  It was my idea,

in case anything happened to me, to so time the occurrence as to throw my

custom into the hands of the opposition coroner on the American side.



At last a policeman came along, and arrested me for disturbing the peace

by yelling at people on shore for help.  The judge fined me, but had the

advantage of him.  My money was with my pantaloons, and my pantaloons

were with the Indians.



Thus I escaped.  I am now lying in a very critical condition.  At least I

am lying anyway---critical or not critical.  I am hurt all over, but I

cannot tell the full extent yet, because the doctor is not done taking

inventory.  He will make out my manifest this evening.  However, thus far

he thinks only sixteen of my wounds are fatal.  I don't mind the others.



Upon regaining my right mind, I said:



"It is an awful savage tribe of Indians that do the beadwork and

moccasins for Niagara Falls, doctor.  Where are they from?"



"Limerick, my son."













ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS--[Written about 1865.]



"MORAL STATISTICIAN."--I don't want any of your statistics; I took your

whole batch and lit my pipe with it.  I hate your kind of people.  You

are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much

his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he

wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal

practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking

coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of

wine at dinner, etc., etc., etc.  And you are always figuring out how

many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion of

wearing expansive hoops, etc., etc., etc.  You never see more than one

side of the question.  You are blind to the fact that most old men in

America smoke and drink coffee, although, according to your theory, they

ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and

survive it, and portly old Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and yet

grow older and fatter all the time.  And you never by to find out how

much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking

in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money he would

save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost

in a lifetime your kind of people from not smoking.  Of course you can

save money by denying yourself all the little vicious enjoyments for

fifty years; but then what can you do with it?  What use can you put it

to?  Money can't save your infinitesimal soul.  All the use that money

can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life;

therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment, where is the use

of accumulating cash?  It won't do for you say that you can use it to

better purpose in furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in

supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who

have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you

stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and

hungry.  And you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor

wretch, seeing you in a good humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you;

and in church you are always down on your knees, with your eyes buried in

the cushion, when the contribution-box comes around; and you never give

the revenue officer: full statement of your income.  Now you know these

things yourself, don't you?  Very well, then what is the use of your

stringing out your miserable lives to a lean and withered old age?  What

is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you?  In

a word, why don't you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying

to seduce people into becoming as "ornery" and unlovable as you are

yourselves, by your villainous "moral statistics"?  Now I don't approve

of dissipation, and I don't indulge in it, either; but I haven't a

particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices, and so

I don't want to hear from you any more.  I think you are the very same

man who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading vice of

smoking cigars, and then came back, in my absence, with your

reprehensible fireproof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor

stove.





"YOUNG AUTHOR."--Yes, Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, because

the phosphorus in it makes brain.  So far you are correct.  But I cannot

help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat--at least, not

with certainty.  If the specimen composition you send is about your fair

usual average, I should judge that perhaps a couple of whales would be

all you would want for the present.  Not the largest kind, but simply

good, middling-sized whales.





"SIMON WHEELER," Sonora.--The following simple and touching remarks and

accompanying poem have just come to hand from the rich gold-mining region

of Sonora:



     To Mr. Mark Twain: The within parson, which I have set to poetry

     under the name and style of "He Done His Level Best," was one among

     the whitest men I ever see, and it ain't every man that knowed him

     that can find it in his heart to say he's glad the poor cuss is

     busted and gone home to the States.  He was here in an early day,

     and he was the handyest man about takin' holt of anything that come

     along you most ever see, I judge.  He was a cheerful, stirnn'

     cretur, always doin' somethin', and no man can say he ever see him

     do anything by halvers.  Preachin was his nateral gait, but he

     warn't a man to lay back a twidle his thumbs because there didn't

     happen to be nothin' do in his own especial line--no, sir, he was a

     man who would meander forth and stir up something for hisself.  His

     last acts was to go his pile on "Kings-and" (calkatin' to fill, but

     which he didn't fill), when there was a "flush" out agin him, and

     naterally, you see, he went under.  And so he was cleaned out as you

     may say, and he struck the home-trail, cheerful but flat broke.  I

     knowed this talonted man in Arkansaw, and if you would print this

     humbly tribute to his gorgis abilities, you would greatly obleege

     his onhappy friend.



                    HE DONE HIS LEVEL BEST

                    Was he a mining on the flat--

                    He done it with a zest;

                    Was he a leading of the choir--

                    He done his level best.



                    If he'd a reg'lar task to do,

                    He never took no rest;

                    Or if 'twas off-and-on-the same--

                    He done his level best.



                    If he was preachin' on his beat,

                    He'd tramp from east to west,

                    And north to south-in cold and heat

                    He done his level best.



                    He'd yank a sinner outen (Hades),**

                    And land him with the blest;

                    Then snatch a prayer'n waltz in again,

                    And do his level best.



     **Here I have taken a slight liberty with the original MS.  "Hades"

     does not make such good meter as the other word of one syllable, but

     it sounds better.



                    He'd cuss and sing and howl and pray,

                    And dance and drink and jest,

                    And lie and steal-all one to him--

                    He done his level best.



                    Whate'er this man was sot to do,

                    He done it with a zest;

                    No matter what his contract was,

                    HE'D DO HIS LEVEL BEST.



Verily, this man was gifted with "gorgis abilities," and it is a

happiness to me to embalm the memory of their luster in these columns.

If it were not that the poet crop is unusually large and rank in

California this year, I would encourage you to continue writing, Simon

Wheeler; but, as it is, perhaps it might be too risky in you to enter

against so much opposition.





"PROFESSIONAL BEGGAR."--NO; you are not obliged to take greenbacks at

par.





"MELTON MOWBRAY," Dutch Flat.--This correspondent sends a lot of

doggerel, and says it has been regarded as very good in Dutch Flat.  I

give a specimen verse:



          The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,

          And his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold;

          And the sheen of his spears was like stars on the sea,

          When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.**



     **This piece of pleasantry, published in a San Francisco paper, was

     mistaken by the country journals for seriousness, and many and loud

     were the denunciations of the ignorance of author and editor, in not

     knowing that the lines in question were "written by Byron."



There, that will do.  That may be very good Dutch Flat poetry, but it

won't do in the metropolis.  It is too smooth and blubbery; it reads like

butter milk gurgling from a jug.  What the people ought to have is

something spirited--something like "Johnny Comes Marching Home."  However

keep on practising, and you may succeed yet.  There is genius in you, but

too much blubber.





     "ST. CLAIR HIGGINS." Los Angeles.--"My life is a failure; I have

     adored, wildly, madly, and she whom I love has turned coldly from me

     and shed her affections upon another.  What would you advise me to

     do?"



You should set your affections on another also--or on several, if there

are enough to go round.  Also, do everything you can to make your former

flame unhappy.  There is an absurd idea disseminated in novels, that the

happier a girl is with another man, the happier it makes the old lover

she has blighted.  Don't allow yourself to believe any such nonsense as

that.  The more cause that girl finds to regret that she did not marry

you, the more comfortable you will feel over it.  It isn't poetical, but

it is mighty sound doctrine.





     "ARITHMETICUS." Virginia, Nevada.--"If it would take a cannon-ball

     3 and 1/3 seconds to travel four miles, and 3 and 3/8 seconds to

     travel the next four, and 3 and 5/8 to travel the next four, and if

     its rate of progress continued to diminish in the same ratio, how

     long would it take it to go fifteen hundred million miles?"



I don't know.





"AMBITIOUS LEARNER," Oakland.--Yes; you are right America was not

discovered by Alexander Selkirk.





     "DISCARDED LOVER."--"I loved, and still love, the beautiful Edwitha

     Howard, and intended to marry her.  Yet, during my temporary absence

     at Benicia, last week, alas! she married Jones.  Is my happiness to

     be thus blasted for life? Have I no redress?"



Of course you have.  All the law, written and unwritten, is on your side.

The intention and not the act constitutes crime--in other words,

constitutes the deed.  If you call your bosom friend a fool, and intend

it for an insult, it is an insult; but if you do it playfully, and

meaning no insult, it is not an insult.  If you discharge a pistol

accidentally, and kill a man, you can go free, for you have done no

murder; but if you try to kill a man, and manifestly intend to kill him,

but fail utterly to do it, the law still holds that the intention

constituted the crime, and you are guilty of murder.  Ergo, if you had

married Edwitha accidentally, and without really intending to do it, you

would not actually be married to her at all, because the act of marriage

could not be complete without the intention.  And ergo, in the strict

spirit of the law, since you deliberately intended to marry Edwitha, and

didn't do it, you are married to her all the same--because, as I said

before, the intention constitutes the crime.  It is as clear as day that

Edwitha is your wife, and your redress lies in taking a club and

mutilating Jones with it as much as you can.  Any man has a right to

protect his own wife from the advances of other men.  But you have

another alternative--you were married to Edwitha first, because of your

deliberate intention, and now you can prosecute her for bigamy, in

subsequently marrying Jones.  But there is another phase in this

complicated case:  You intended to marry Edwitha, and consequently,

according to law, she is your wife--there is no getting around that; but

she didn't marry you, and if she never intended to marry you, you are not

her husband, of course.  Ergo, in marrying Jones, she was guilty of

bigamy, because she was the wife of another man at the time; which is all

very well as far as it goes--but then, don't you see, she had no other

husband when she married Jones, and consequently she was not guilty of

bigamy.  Now, according to this view of the case, Jones married a

spinster, who was a widow at the same time and another man's wife at the

same time, and yet who had no husband and never had one, and never had

any intention of getting married, and therefore, of course, never had

been married; and by the same reasoning you are a bachelor, because you

have never been any one's husband; and a married man, because you have a

wife living; and to all intents and purposes a widower, because you have

been deprived of that wife; and a consummate ass for going off to Benicia

in the first place, while things were so mixed.  And by this time I have

got myself so tangled up in the intricacies of this extraordinary case

that I shall have to give up any further attempt to advise you--I might

get confused and fail to make myself understood.  I think I could take up

the argument where I left off, and by following it closely awhile,

perhaps I could prove to your satisfaction, either that you never existed

at all, or that you are dead now, and consequently don't need the

faithless Edwitha--I think I could do that, if it would afford you any

comfort.





"ARTHUR AUGUSTUS."--No; you are wrong; that is the proper way to throw a

brickbat or a tomahawk; but it doesn't answer so well for a bouquet; you

will hurt somebody if you keep it up.  Turn your nosegay upside down,

take it by the stems, and toss it with an upward sweep.  Did you ever

pitch quoits? that is the idea.  The practice of recklessly heaving

immense solid bouquets, of the general size and weight of prize cabbages,

from the dizzy altitude of the galleries, is dangerous and very

reprehensible.  Now, night before last, at the Academy of Music, just

after Signorina had finished that exquisite melody, "The Last Rose of

Summer," one of these floral pile-drivers came cleaving down through the

atmosphere of applause, and if she hadn't deployed suddenly to the right,

it would have driven her into the floor like a shinglenail.  Of course

that bouquet was well meant; but how would you like to have been the

target?  A sincere compliment is always grateful to a lady, so long as

you don't try to knock her down with it.





"YOUNG MOTHER."--And so you think a baby is a thing of beauty and a joy

forever?  Well, the idea is pleasing, but not original; every cow thinks

the same of its own calf. Perhaps the cow may not think it so elegantly,

but still she thinks it nevertheless.  I honor the cow for it.  We all

honor this touching maternal instinct wherever we find it, be it in the

home of luxury or in the humble cove-shed.  But really, madam, when I

come to examine the matter in all its bearings, I find that the

correctness of your assertion does not assert itself in all cases.

A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded

as a thing of beauty; and inasmuch as babyhood spans but three short

years, no baby is competent to be a joy "forever."  It pains me thus to

demolish two-thirds of your pretty sentiment in a single sentence; but

the position I hold in this chair requires that I shall not permit you to

deceive and mislead the public with your plausible figures of speech.

I know a female baby, aged eighteen months, in this city, which cannot

hold out as a "joy" twenty-four hours on a stretch, let alone "forever."

And it possesses some of the most remarkable eccentricities of character

and appetite that have ever fallen under my notice.  I will set down here

a statement of this infant's operations (conceived, planned, and earned

out by itself, and without suggestion or assistance from its mother or

any one else), during a single day; and what I shall say can be

substantiated by the sworn testimony of witnesses.



It commenced by eating one dozen large blue-mass pills, box and all; then

it fell down a flight of stairs, and arose with a blue and purple knot on

its forehead, after which it proceeded in quest of further refreshment

and amusement. It found a glass trinket ornamented with brass-work

--smashed up and ate the glass, and then swallowed the brass.

Then it drank about twenty drops of laudanum, and more than a dozen

tablespoonfuls of strong spirits of camphor.  The reason why it took no

more laudanum was because there was no more to take.  After this it lay

down on its back, and shoved five or six, inches of a silver-headed

whalebone cane down its throat; got it fast there, and it was all its

mother could do to pull the cane out again, without pulling out some of

the child with it.  Then, being hungry for glass again, it broke up

several wine glasses, and fell to eating and swallowing the fragments,

not minding a cut or two.  Then it ate a quantity of butter, pepper,

salt, and California matches, actually taking a spoonful of butter, a

spoonful of salt, a spoonful of pepper, and three or four lucifer matches

at each mouthful. (I will remark here that this thing of beauty likes

painted German lucifers, and eats all she can get of them; but she

prefers California matches, which I regard as a compliment to our home

manufactures of more than ordinary value, coming, as it does, from one

who is too young to flatter.)  Then she washed her head with soap and

water, and afterward ate what soap was left, and drank as much of the

suds as she had room for; after which she sallied forth and took the cow

familiarly by the tail, and got kicked heels over head.  At odd times

during the day, when this joy forever happened to have nothing particular

on hand, she put in the time by climbing up on places, and falling down

off them, uniformly damaging her self in the operation.  As young as she

is, she speaks many words tolerably distinctly; and being plain spoken in

other respects, blunt and to the point, she opens conversation with all

strangers, male or female, with the same formula, "How do, Jim?"



Not being familiar with the ways of children, it is possible that I have

been magnifying into matter of surprise things which may not strike any

one who is familiar with infancy as being at all astonishing.  However, I

cannot believe that such is the case, and so I repeat that my report of

this baby's performances is strictly true; and if any one doubts it,

I can produce the child.  I will further engage that she will devour

anything that is given her (reserving to myself only the right to exclude

anvils), and fall down from any place to which she may be elevated

(merely stipulating that her preference for alighting on her head shall

be respected, and, therefore, that the elevation chosen shall be high

enough to enable her to accomplish this to her satisfaction).  But I find

I have wandered from my subject; so, without further argument, I will

reiterate my conviction that not all babies are things of beauty and joys

forever.





     "ARITHMETICUS." Virginia, Nevada.--"I am an enthusiastic student of

     mathematics, and it is so vexatious to me to find my progress

     constantly impeded by these mysterious arithmetical technicalities.

     Now do tell me what the difference is between geometry and

     conchology?"



Here you come again with your arithmetical conundrums, when I am

suffering death with a cold in the head.  If you could have seen the

expression of scorn that darkened my countenance a moment ago, and was

instantly split from the center in every direction like a fractured

looking-glass by my last sneeze, you never would have written that

disgraceful question.  Conchology is a science which has nothing to do

with mathematics; it relates only to shells.  At the same time, however,

a man who opens oysters for a hotel, or shells a fortified town, or sucks

eggs, is not, strictly speaking, a conchologist-a fine stroke of sarcasm

that, but it will be lost on such an unintellectual clam as you.  Now

compare conchology and geometry together, and you will see what the

difference is, and your question will be answered.  But don't torture me

with any more arithmetical horrors until you know I am rid of my cold.  I

feel the bitterest animosity toward you at this moment-bothering me in

this way, when I can do nothing but sneeze and rage and snort pocket-

handkerchiefs to atoms.  If I had you in range of my nose now I would

blow your brains out.













TO RAISE POULTRY



--[Being a letter written to a Poultry Society that had conferred a

complimentary membership upon the author.  Written about 1870.]



Seriously, from early youth I have taken an especial interest in the

subject of poultry-raising, and so this membership touches a ready

sympathy in my breast.  Even as a schoolboy, poultry-raising was a study

with me, and I may say without egotism that as early as the age of

seventeen I was acquainted with all the best and speediest methods of

raising chickens, from raising them off a roost by burning lucifer

matches under their noses, down to lifting them off a fence on a frosty

night by insinuating the end of a warm board under their heels.  By the

time I was twenty years old, I really suppose I had raised more poultry

than any one individual in all the section round about there.  The very

chickens came to know my talent by and by.  The youth of both sexes

ceased to paw the earth for worms, and old roosters that came to crow,

"remained to pray," when I passed by.



I have had so much experience in the raising of fowls that I cannot but

think that a few hints from me might be useful to the society.  The two

methods I have already touched upon are very simple, and are only used in

the raising of the commonest class of fowls; one is for summer, the other

for winter.  In the one case you start out with a friend along about

eleven o'clock' on a summer's night (not later, because in some states--

especially in California and Oregon--chickens always rouse up just at

midnight and crow from ten to thirty minutes, according to the ease or

difficulty they experience in getting the public waked up), and your

friend carries with him a sack.  Arrived at the henroost (your

neighbor's, not your own), you light a match and hold it under first one

and then another pullet's nose until they are willing to go into that bag

without making any trouble about it.  You then return home, either taking

the bag with you or leaving it behind, according as circumstances shall

dictate.  N. B.--I have seen the time when it was eligible and

appropriate to leave the sack behind and walk off with considerable

velocity, without ever leaving any word where to send it.



In the case of the other method mentioned for raising poultry, your

friend takes along a covered vessel with a charcoal fire in it, and you

carry a long slender plank.  This is a frosty night, understand.  Arrived

at the tree, or fence, or other henroost (your own if you are an idiot),

you warm the end of your plank in your friend's fire vessel, and then

raise it aloft and ease it up gently against a slumbering chicken's foot.

If the subject of your attentions is a true bird, he will infallibly

return thanks with a sleepy cluck or two, and step out and take up

quarters on the plank, thus becoming so conspicuously accessory before

the fact to his own murder as to make it a grave question in our minds as

it once was in the mind of Blackstone, whether he is not really and

deliberately, committing suicide in the second degree.  [But you enter

into a contemplation of these legal refinements subsequently not then.]



When you wish to raise a fine, large, donkey voiced Shanghai rooster, you

do it with a lasso, just as you would a bull.  It is because he must

choked, and choked effectually, too.  It is the only good, certain way,

for whenever he mentions a matter which he is cordially interested in,

the chances are ninety-nine in a hundred that he secures somebody else's

immediate attention to it too, whether it day or night.



The Black Spanish is an exceedingly fine bird and a costly one.  Thirty-

five dollars is the usual figure and fifty a not uncommon price for a

specimen.  Even its eggs are worth from a dollar to a dollar and a half

apiece, and yet are so unwholesome that the city physician seldom or

never orders them for the workhouse.  Still I have once or twice procured

as high as a dozen at a time for nothing, in the dark of the moon.  The

best way to raise the Black Spanish fowl is to go late in the evening and

raise coop and all.  The reason I recommend this method is that, the

birds being so valuable, the owners do not permit them to roost around

promiscuously, they put them in a coop as strong as a fireproof safe and

keep it in the kitchen at night.  The method I speak of is not always a

bright and satisfying success, and yet there are so many little articles

of vertu about a kitchen, that if you fail on the coop you can generally

bring away something else.  I brought away a nice steel trap one night,

worth ninety cents.



But what is the use in my pouring out my whole intellect on this subject?

I have shown the Western New York Poultry Society that they have taken to

their bosom a party who is not a spring chicken by any means, but a man

who knows all about poultry, and is just as high up in the most efficient

methods of raising it as the president of the institution himself.

I thank these gentlemen for the honorary membership they have conferred

upon me, and shall stand at all times ready and willing to testify my

good feeling and my official zeal by deeds as well as by this hastily

penned advice and information.  Whenever they are ready to go to raising

poultry, let them call for me any evening after eleven o'clock,













EXPERIENCE OF THE McWILLIAMSES WITH MEMBRANOUS CROUP



[As related to the author of this book by Mr. McWilliams, a pleasant New

York gentleman whom the said author met by chance on a journey.]



Well, to go back to where I was before I digressed to explain to you how

that frightful and incurable disease, membranous croup,[Diphtheria D.W.]

was ravaging the town and driving all mothers mad with terror, I called

Mrs. McWilliams's attention to little Penelope, and said:



"Darling, I wouldn't let that child be chewing that pine stick if I were

you."



"Precious, where is the harm in it?"  said she, but at the same time

preparing to take away the stick for women cannot receive even the most

palpably judicious suggestion without arguing it, that is married women.



I replied:



"Love, it is notorious that pine is the least nutritious wood that a

child can eat."



My wife's hand paused, in the act of taking the stick, and returned

itself to her lap.  She bridled perceptibly, and said:



"Hubby, you know better than that.  You know you do.  Doctors all say

that the turpentine in pine wood is good for weak back and the kidneys."



"Ah--I was under a misapprehension.  I did not know that the child's

kidneys and spine were affected, and that the family physician had

recommended--"



"Who said the child's spine and kidneys were affected?"



"My love, you intimated it."



"The idea!  I never intimated anything of the kind."



"Why, my dear, it hasn't been two minutes since you said--"



"Bother what I said!  I don't care what I did say.  There isn't any harm

in the child's chewing a bit of pine stick if she wants to, and you know

it perfectly well.  And she shall chew it, too.  So there, now!"



"Say no more, my dear.  I now see the force of your reasoning, and I will

go and order two or three cords of the best pine wood to-day.  No child

of mine shall want while I--"



"Oh, please go along to your office and let me have some peace.  A body

can never make the simplest remark but you must take it up and go to

arguing and arguing and arguing till you don't know what you are talking

about, and you never do."



"Very well, it shall be as you say.  But there is a want of logic in your

last remark which--"



However, she was gone with a flourish before I could finish, and had

taken the child with her.  That night at dinner she confronted me with a

face a white as a sheet:



"Oh, Mortimer, there's another!  Little Georgi Gordon is taken."



"Membranous croup?"



"Membranous croup."



"Is there any hope for him?"



"None in the wide world.  Oh, what is to be come of us!"



By and by a nurse brought in our Penelope to say good night and offer the

customary prayer at the mother's knee.  In the midst of "Now I lay me

down to sleep," she gave a slight cough!  My wife fell back like one

stricken with death.  But the next moment she was up and brimming with

the activities which terror inspires.



She commanded that the child's crib be removed from the nursery to our

bedroom; and she went along to see the order executed.  She took me with

her, of course.  We got matters arranged with speed.  A cot-bed was put

up in my wife's dressing room for the nurse.  But now Mrs. McWilliams

said we were too far away from the other baby, and what if he were to

have the symptoms in the night--and she blanched again, poor thing.



We then restored the crib and the nurse to the nursery and put up a bed

for ourselves in a room adjoining.



Presently, however, Mrs. McWilliams said suppose the baby should catch it

from Penelope?  This thought struck a new panic to her heart, and the

tribe of us could not get the crib out of the nursery again fast enough

to satisfy my wife, though she assisted in her own person and well-nigh

pulled the crib to pieces in her frantic hurry.



We moved down-stairs; but there was no place there to stow the nurse, and

Mrs. McWilliams said the nurse's experience would be an inestimable help.

So we returned, bag and baggage, to our own bedroom once more, and felt a

great gladness, like storm-buffeted birds that have found their nest

again.



Mrs. McWilliams sped to the nursery to see how things were going on

there.  She was back in a moment with a new dread.  She said:



"What can make Baby sleep so?"



I said:



"Why, my darling, Baby always sleeps like a graven image."



"I know.  I know; but there's something peculiar about his sleep now.

He seems to--to--he seems to breathe so regularly.  Oh, this is

dreadful."



"But, my dear, he always breathes regularly."



"Oh, I know it, but there's something frightful about it now.  His nurse

is too young and inexperienced.  Maria shall stay there with her, and be

on hand if anything happens."



"That is a good idea, but who will help you?"



"You can help me all I want.  I wouldn't allow anybody to do anything but

myself, anyhow, at such a time as this."



I said I would feel mean to lie abed and sleep, and leave her to watch

and toil over our little patient all the weary night.  But she reconciled

me to it.  So old Maria departed and took up her ancient quarters in the

nursery.



Penelope coughed twice in her sleep.



"Oh, why don't that doctor come!  Mortimer, this room is too warm.  This

room is certainly too warm.  Turn off the register-quick!"



I shut it off, glancing at the thermometer at the same time, and

wondering to myself if 70 was too warm for a sick child.



The coachman arrived from down-town now with the news that our physician

was ill and confined to his bed.  Mrs. McWilliams turned a dead eye upon

me, and said in a dead voice:



"There is a Providence in it.  It is foreordained.  He never was sick

before.  Never.  We have not been living as we ought to live, Mortimer.

Time and time again I have told you so.  Now you see the result.  Our

child will never get well.  Be thankful if you can forgive yourself; I

never can forgive myself."



I said, without intent to hurt, but with heedless choice of words, that I

could not see that we had been living such an abandoned life.



"Mortimer!  Do you want to bring the judgment upon Baby, too!"



Then she began to cry, but suddenly exclaimed:



"The doctor must have sent medicines!"



I said:



"Certainly.  They are here.  I was only waiting for you to give me a

chance."



"Well do give them to me!  Don't you know that every moment is precious

now?  But what was the use in sending medicines, when he knows that the

disease is incurable?"



I said that while there was life there was hope.



"Hope!  Mortimer, you know no more what you are talking about than the

child unborn.  If you would--As I live, the directions say give one

teaspoonful once an hour!  Once an hour!--as if we had a whole year

before us to save the child in!  Mortimer, please hurry.  Give the poor

perishing thing a tablespoonful, and try to be quick!"



"Why, my dear, a tablespoonful might--"



"Don't drive me frantic!  .  .  .  There, there, there, my precious, my

own; it's nasty bitter stuff, but it's good for Nelly--good for mother's

precious darling; and it will make her well.  There, there, there, put

the little head on mamma's breast and go to sleep, and pretty soon--oh,

I know she can't live till morning!  Mortimer, a tablespoonful every

half-hour will--Oh, the child needs belladonna, too; I know she does--and

aconite.  Get them, Mortimer.  Now do let me have my way.  You know

nothing about these things."



We now went to bed, placing the crib close to my wife's pillow.  All this

turmoil had worn upon me, and within two minutes I was something more

than half asleep.  Mrs. McWilliams roused me:



"Darling, is that register turned on?"



"No."



"I thought as much.  Please turn it on at once.  This room is cold."



I turned it on, and presently fell asleep again.  I was aroused once

more:



"Dearie, would you mind moving the crib to your side of the bed?  It is

nearer the register."



I moved it, but had a collision with the rug and woke up the child.  I

dozed off once more, while my wife quieted the sufferer.  But in a little

while these words came murmuring remotely through the fog of my

drowsiness:



"Mortimer, if we only had some goose grease--will you ring?"



I climbed dreamily out, and stepped on a cat, which responded with a

protest and would have got a convincing kick for it if a chair had not

got it instead.



"Now, Mortimer, why do you want to turn up the gas and wake up the child

again?"



"Because I want to see how much I am hurt, Caroline."



"Well, look at the chair, too--I have no doubt it is ruined.  Poor cat,

suppose you had--"



"Now I am not going to suppose anything about the cat.  It never would

have occurred if Maria had been allowed to remain here and attend to

these duties, which are in her line and are not in mine."



"Now, Mortimer, I should think you would be ashamed to make a remark like

that.  It is a pity if you cannot do the few little things I ask of you

at such an awful time as this when our child--"



"There, there, I will do anything you want.  But I can't raise anybody

with this bell.  They're all gone to bed.  Where is the goose grease?"



"On the mantelpiece in the nursery.  If you'll step there and speak to

Maria--"



I fetched the goose grease and went to sleep again.  Once more I was

called:



"Mortimer, I so hate to disturb you, but the room is still too cold for

me to try to apply this stuff.  Would you mind lighting the fire?  It is

all ready to touch a match to."



I dragged myself out and lit the fire, and then sat down disconsolate.



"Mortimer, don't sit there and catch your death of cold.  Come to bed."



As I was stepping in she said:



"But wait a moment.  Please give the child some more of the medicine."



Which I did.  It was a medicine which made a child more or less lively;

so my wife made use of its waking interval to strip it and grease it all

over with the goose oil.  I was soon asleep once more, but once more I

had to get up.



"Mortimer, I feel a draft.  I feel it distinctly.  There is nothing so

bad for this disease as a draft.  Please move the crib in front of the

fire."



I did it; and collided with the rug again, which I threw in the fire.

Mrs. McWilliams sprang out of bed and rescued it and we had some words.

I had another trifling interval of sleep, and then got up, by request,

and constructed a flax-seed poultice.  This was placed upon the child's

breast and left there to do its healing work.



A wood-fire is not a permanent thing.  I got up every twenty minutes and

renewed ours, and this gave Mrs. McWilliams the opportunity to shorten

the times of giving the medicines by ten minutes, which was a great

satisfaction to her.  Now and then, between times, I reorganized the

flax-seed poultices, and applied sinapisms and other sorts of blisters

where unoccupied places could be found upon the child.  Well, toward

morning the wood gave out and my wife wanted me to go down cellar and get

some more.  I said:



"My dear, it is a laborious job, and the child must be nearly warm

enough, with her extra clothing.  Now mightn't we put on another layer of

poultices and--"



I did not finish, because I was interrupted.  I lugged wood up from below

for some little time, and then turned in and fell to snoring as only a

man can whose strength is all gone and whose soul is worn out.  Just at

broad daylight I felt a grip on my shoulder that brought me to my senses

suddenly.  My wife was glaring down upon me and gasping.  As soon as she

could command her tongue she said:



"It is all over!  All over!  The child's perspiring!  What shall we do?"



"Mercy, how you terrify me!  I don't know what we ought to do.  Maybe if

we scraped her and put her in the draft again--"



"Oh, idiot!  There is not a moment to lose!  Go for the doctor.

Go yourself.  Tell him he must come, dead or alive."



I dragged that poor sick man from his bed and brought him.  He looked at

the child and said she was not dying.  This was joy unspeakable to me,

but it made my wife as mad as if he had offered her a personal affront.

Then he said the child's cough was only caused by some trifling

irritation or other in the throat.  At this I thought my wife had a mind

to show him the door.  Now the doctor said he would make the child cough

harder and dislodge the trouble.  So he gave her something that sent her

into a spasm of coughing, and presently up came a little wood splinter or

so.



"This child has no membranous croup," said he.  "She has been chewing a

bit of pine shingle or something of the kind, and got some little slivers

in her throat.  They won't do her any hurt."



"No," said I, "I can well believe that.  Indeed, the turpentine that is

in them is very good for certain sorts of diseases that are peculiar to

children.  My wife will tell you so."



But she did not.  She turned away in disdain and left the room; and since

that time there is one episode in our life which we never refer to.

Hence the tide of our days flows by in deep and untroubled serenity.



[Very few married men have such an experience as McWilliams's, and so the

author of this book thought that maybe the novelty of it would give it a

passing interest to the reader.]













MY FIRST LITERARY VENTURE



I was a very smart child at the age of thirteen--an unusually smart

child, I thought at the time.  It was then that I did my first newspaper

scribbling, and most unexpectedly to me it stirred up a fine sensation in

the community.  It did, indeed, and I was very proud of it, too.  I was a

printer's "devil," and a progressive and aspiring one.  My uncle had me

on his paper (the Weekly Hannibal journal, two dollars a year in advance

--five hundred subscribers, and they paid in cordwood, cabbages, and

unmarketable turnips), and on a lucky summer's day he left town to be

gone a week, and asked me if I thought I could edit one issue of the

paper judiciously.  Ah! didn't I want to try!  Higgins was the editor on

the rival paper.  He had lately been jilted, and one night a friend found

an open note on the poor fellow's bed, in which he stated that he could

not longer endure life and had drowned himself in Bear Creek.  The friend

ran down there and discovered Higgins wading back to shore.  He had

concluded he wouldn't.  The village was full of it for several days,

but Higgins did not suspect it.  I thought this was a fine opportunity.

I wrote an elaborately wretched account of the whole matter, and then

illustrated it with villainous cuts engraved on the bottoms of wooden

type with a jackknife--one of them a picture of Higgins wading out into

the creek in his shirt, with a lantern, sounding the depth of the water

with a walking-stick.  I thought it was desperately funny, and was

densely unconscious that there was any moral obliquity about such a

publication.  Being satisfied with this effort I looked around for other

worlds to conquer, and it struck me that it would make good, interesting

matter to charge the editor of a neighboring country paper with a piece

of gratuitous rascality and "see him squirm."



I did it, putting the article into the form of a parody on the "Burial of

Sir John Moore"--and a pretty crude parody it was, too.



Then I lampooned two prominent citizens outrageously--not because they

had done anything to deserve, but merely because I thought it was my duty

to make the paper lively.



Next I gently touched up the newest stranger--the lion of the day, the

gorgeous journeyman tailor from Quincy.  He was a simpering coxcomb of

the first water, and the "loudest" dressed man in the state.  He was an

inveterate woman-killer.  Every week he wrote lushy "poetry" for the

journal, about his newest conquest.  His rhymes for my week were headed,

"To MARY IN H--l," meaning to Mary in Hannibal, of course.  But while

setting up the piece I was suddenly riven from head to heel by what I

regarded as a perfect thunderbolt of humor, and I compressed it into a

snappy footnote at the bottom--thus: "We will let this thing pass, just

this once; but we wish Mr. J. Gordon Runnels to understand distinctly

that we have a character to sustain, and from this time forth when he

wants to commune with his friends in h--l, he must select some other

medium than the columns of this journal!"



The paper came out, and I never knew any little thing attract so much

attention as those playful trifles of mine.



For once the Hannibal Journal was in demand--a novelty it had not

experienced before.  The whole town was stirred.  Higgins dropped in with

a double-barreled shotgun early in the forenoon.  When he found that it

was an infant (as he called me) that had done him the damage, he simply

pulled my ears and went away; but he threw up his situation that night

and left town for good.  The tailor came with his goose and a pair of

shears; but he despised me, too, and departed for the South that night.

The two lampooned citizens came with threats of libel, and went away

incensed at my insignificance.  The country editor pranced in with a war-

whoop next day, suffering for blood to drink; but he ended by forgiving

me cordially and inviting me down to the drug store to wash away all

animosity in a friendly bumper of "Fahnestock's Vermifuge."  It was his

little joke.  My uncle was very angry when he got back--unreasonably so,

I thought, considering what an impetus I had given the paper, and

considering also that gratitude for his preservation ought to have been

uppermost in his mind, inasmuch as by his delay he had so wonderfully

escaped dissection, tomahawking, libel, and getting his head shot off.



But he softened when he looked at the accounts and saw that I had

actually booked the unparalleled number of thirty-three new subscribers,

and had the vegetables to show for it, cordwood, cabbage, beans, and

unsalable turnips enough to run the family for two dears!













HOW THE AUTHOR WAS SOLD IN NEWARK--[Written about 1869.]



It is seldom pleasant to tell on oneself, but some times it is a sort of

relief to a man to make a confession.  I wish to unburden my mind now,

and yet I almost believe that I am moved to do it more because I long to

bring censure upon another man than because I desire to pour balm upon my

wounded heart. (I don't know what balm is, but I believe it is the

correct expression to use in this connection--never having seen any

balm.) You may remember that I lectured in Newark lately for the young

gentlemen of the-----Society?  I did at any rate.  During the afternoon

of that day I was talking with one of the young gentlemen just referred

to, and he said he had an uncle who, from some cause or other, seemed to

have grown permanently bereft of all emotion.  And with tears in his

eyes, this young man said, "Oh, if I could only see him laugh once more!

Oh, if I could only see him weep!"  I was touched.  I could never

withstand distress.



I said: "Bring him to my lecture.  I'll start him for you."



"Oh, if you could but do it!  If you could but do it, all our family

would bless you for evermore--for he is so very dear to us.  Oh, my

benefactor, can you make him laugh? can you bring soothing tears to those

parched orbs?"



I was profoundly moved.  I said: "My son, bring the old party round.

I have got some jokes in that lecture that will make him laugh if there

is any laugh in him; and if they miss fire, I have got some others that

will make him cry or kill him, one or the other."  Then the young man

blessed me, and wept on my neck, and went after his uncle.  He placed him

in full view, in the second row of benches, that night, and I began on

him.  I tried him with mild jokes, then with severe ones; I dosed him

with bad jokes and riddled him with good ones; I fired old stale jokes

into him, and peppered him fore and aft with red-hot new ones; I warmed

up to my work, and assaulted him on the right and left, in front and

behind; I fumed and sweated and charged and ranted till I was hoarse and

sick and frantic and furious; but I never moved him once--I never started

a smile or a tear!  Never a ghost of a smile, and never a suspicion of

moisture!  I was astounded.  I closed the lecture at last with one

despairing shriek--with one wild burst of humor, and hurled a joke of

supernatural atrocity full at him!



Then I sat down bewildered and exhausted.



The president of the society came up and bathed my head with cold water,

and said: "What made you carry on so toward the last?"



I said: "I was trying to make that confounded old fool laugh, in the

second row."



And he said: "Well, you were wasting your time, because he is deaf and

dumb, and as blind as a badger!"



Now, was that any way for that old man's nephew to impose on a stranger

and orphan like me?  I ask you as a man and brother, if that was any way

for him to do?













THE OFFICE BORE--[Written about 1869]



He arrives just as regularly as the clock strikes nine in the morning.

And so he even beats the editor sometimes, and the porter must leave his

work and climb two or three pairs of stairs to unlock the "Sanctum" door

and let him in.  He lights one of the office pipes--not reflecting,

perhaps, that the editor may be one of those "stuck-up" people who would

as soon have a stranger defile his tooth-brush as his pipe-stem.  Then he

begins to loll--for a person who can consent to loaf his useless life

away in ignominious indolence has not the energy to sit up straight.

He stretches full length on the sofa awhile; then draws up to half

length; then gets into a chair, hangs his head back and his arms abroad,

and stretches his legs till the rims of his boot-heels rest upon the

floor; by and by sits up and leans forward, with one leg or both over the

arm of the chair.  But it is still observable that with all his changes

of position, he never assumes the upright or a fraudful affectation of

dignity.  From time to time he yawns, and stretches, and scratches

himself with a tranquil, mangy enjoyment, and now and then he grunts a

kind of stuffy, overfed grunt, which is full of animal contentment.  At

rare and long intervals, however, he sighs a sigh that is the eloquent

expression of a secret confession, to wit "I am useless and a nuisance,

a cumberer of the earth."  The bore and his comrades--for there are

usually from two to four on hand, day and night--mix into the

conversation when men come in to see the editors for a moment on

business; they hold noisy talks among themselves about politics in

particular, and all other subjects in general--even warming up, after a

fashion, sometimes, and seeming to take almost a real interest in what

they are discussing.  They ruthlessly call an editor from his work with

such a remark as: "Did you see this, Smith, in the Gazette?" and proceed

to read the paragraph while the sufferer reins in his impatient pen and

listens; they often loll and sprawl round the office hour after hour,

swapping anecdotes and relating personal experiences to each other--

hairbreadth escapes, social encounters with distinguished men, election

reminiscences, sketches of odd characters, etc.  And through all those

hours they never seem to comprehend that they are robbing the editors of

their time, and the public of journalistic excellence in next day's

paper.  At other times they drowse, or dreamily pore over exchanges, or

droop limp and pensive over the chair-arms for an hour.  Even this solemn

silence is small respite to the editor, for the next uncomfortable thing

to having people look over his shoulders, perhaps, is to have them sit by

in silence and listen to the scratching of his pen.  If a body desires to

talk private business with one of the editors, he must call him outside,

for no hint milder than blasting-powder or nitroglycerin would be likely

to move the bores out of listening-distance.  To have to sit and endure

the presence of a bore day after day; to feel your cheerful spirits begin

to sink as his footstep sounds on the stair, and utterly vanish away as

his tiresome form enters the door; to suffer through his anecdotes and

die slowly to his reminiscences; to feel always the fetters of his

clogging presence; to long hopelessly for one single day's privacy; to

note with a shudder, by and by, that to contemplate his funeral in fancy

has ceased to soothe, to imagine him undergoing in strict and fearful

detail the tortures of the ancient Inquisition has lost its power to

satisfy the heart, and that even to wish him millions and millions and

millions of miles in Tophet is able to bring only a fitful gleam of joy;

to have to endure all this, day after day, and week after week, and month

after month, is an affliction that transcends any other that men suffer.

Physical pain is pastime to it, and hanging a pleasure excursion.













JOHNNY GREER



"The church was densely crowded that lovely summer Sabbath," said the

Sunday-school superintendent, "and all, as their eyes rested upon the

small coffin, seemed impressed by the poor black boy's fate.  Above the

stillness the pastor's voice rose, and chained the interest of every ear

as he told, with many an envied compliment, how that the brave, noble,

daring little Johnny Greer, when he saw the drowned body sweeping down

toward the deep part of the river whence the agonized parents never could

have recovered it in this world, gallantly sprang into the stream, and,

at the risk of his life, towed the corpse to shore, and held it fast till

help came and secured it.  Johnny Greer was sitting just in front of me.

A ragged street-boy, with eager eye, turned upon him instantly, and said

in a hoarse whisper



"'No; but did you, though?'



"'Yes.'



"'Towed the carkiss ashore and saved it yo'self?'



"'Yes.'



"'Cracky!  What did they give you?'



"'Nothing.'



"'W-h-a-t [with intense disgust]!  D'you know what I'd 'a' done?  I'd 'a'

anchored him out in the stream, and said, Five dollars, gents, or you

carn't have yo' nigger.'"













THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE GREAT BEEF CONTRACT--[Written about 1867.]



In as few words as possible I wish to lay before the nation what's here,

howsoever small, I have had in this matter--this matter which has so

exercised the public mind, engendered so much ill-feeling, and so filled

the newspapers of both continents with distorted statements and

extravagant comments.



The origin of this distressful thing was this--and I assert here that

every fact in the following resume can be amply proved by the official

records of the General Government.



John Wilson Mackenzie, of Rotterdam, Chemung County, New Jersey,

deceased, contracted with the General Government, on or about the 10th

day of October, 1861, to furnish to General Sherman the sum total of

thirty barrels of beef.



Very well.



He started after Sherman with the beef, but when he got to Washington

Sherman had gone to Manassas; so he took the beef and followed him there,

but arrived too late; he followed him to Nashville, and from Nashville to

Chattanooga, and from Chattanooga to Atlanta--but he never could overtake

him.  At Atlanta he took a fresh start and followed him clear through his

march to the sea.  He arrived too late again by a few days; but hearing

that Sherman was going out in the Quaker City excursion to the Holy Land,

he took shipping for Beirut, calculating to head off the other vessel.

When he arrived in Jerusalem with his beef, he learned that Sherman had

not sailed in the Quaker City, but had gone to the Plains to fight the

Indians.  He returned to America and started for the Rocky Mountains.

After sixty-eight days of arduous travel on the Plains, and when he had

got within four miles of Sherman's headquarters, he was tomahawked and

scalped, and the Indians got the beef.  They got all of it but one

barrel.  Sherman's army captured that, and so, even in death, the bold

navigator partly fulfilled his contract.  In his will, which he had kept

like a journal, he bequeathed the contract to his son Bartholomew W.

Bartholomew W.  made out the following bill, and then died:



     THE UNITED STATES



               In account with JOHN WILSON MACKENZIE, of New Jersey,

               deceased, .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .          Dr.



     To thirty barrels of beef for General Sherman, at $100, $3,000

     To traveling expenses and transportation .  .  .  .  .  14,000



               Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  $17,000

               Rec'd Pay't.





He died then; but he left the contract to Wm. J. Martin, who tried to

collect it, but died before he got through.  He left it to Barker J.

Allen, and he tried to collect it also.  He did not survive.  Barker J.

Allen left it to Anson G. Rogers, who attempted to collect it, and got

along as far as the Ninth Auditor's Office, when Death, the great

Leveler, came all unsummoned, and foreclosed on him also.  He left the

bill to a relative of his in Connecticut, Vengeance Hopkins by name, who

lasted four weeks and two days, and made the best time on record, coming

within one of reaching the Twelfth Auditor.  In his will he gave the

contract bill to his uncle, by the name of O-be-joyful Johnson.  It was

too undermining for joyful.  His last words were: "Weep not for me--I am

willing to go."  And so he was, poor soul.  Seven people inherited the

contract after that; but they all died.  So it came into my hands at

last.  It fell to me through a relative by the name of, Hubbard--

Bethlehem Hubbard, of Indiana.  He had had a grudge against me for a long

time; but in his last moments he sent for me, and forgave me everything,

and, weeping, gave me the beef contract.



This ends the history of it up to the time that I succeeded to the

property.  I will now endeavor to set myself straight before the nation

in everything that concerns my share in the matter.  I took this beef

contract, and the bill for mileage and transportation, to the President

of the United States.



He said, "Well, sir, what can I do for you?"



I said, "Sire, on or about the l0th day of October, 1861, John Wilson

Mackenzie, of Rotterdam, Chemung County, New Jersey, deceased, contracted

with the General Government to furnish to General Sherman the sum total

of thirty barrels of beef--"



He stopped me there, and dismissed me from hi presence--kindly, but

firmly.  The next day called on the Secretary of State.



He said, "Well, sir?"



I said, "Your Royal Highness: on or about the 10th day of October, 1861,

John Wilson Mackenzie of Rotterdam, Chemung County, New Jersey, deceased,

contracted with the General Government to furnish to General Sherman the

sum total of thirty barrels of beef--"



"That will do, sir--that will do; this office has nothing to do with

contracts for beef."



I was bowed out.  I thought the matter all over and finally, the

following day, I visited the Secretary of the Navy, who said, "Speak

quickly, sir; do not keep me waiting."



I said, "Your Royal Highness, on or about the 10th day of October, 1861,

John Wilson Mackenzie of Rotterdam, Chemung County, New Jersey, deceased,

contracted with the General Government to General Sherman the sum total

of thirty barrels of beef--"



Well, it was as far as I could get.  He had nothing to do with beef

contracts for General Sherman either.  I began to think it was a curious

kind of government.  It looked somewhat as if they wanted to get out of

paying for that beef.  The following day I went to the Secretary of the

Interior.



I said, "Your Imperial Highness, on or about the 10th day of October--"



"That is sufficient, sir.  I have heard of you before.  Go, take your

infamous beef contract out of this establishment.  The Interior

Department has nothing whatever to do with subsistence for the army."



I went away.  But I was exasperated now.  I said I would haunt them;

I would infest every department of this iniquitous government till that

contract business was settled.  I would collect that bill, or fall, as

fell my predecessors, trying.  I assailed the Postmaster-General;

I besieged the Agricultural Department; I waylaid the Speaker of the

House of Representatives.  They had nothing to do with army contracts for

beef.  I moved upon the Commissioner of the Patent Office.



I said, "Your August Excellency, on or about--"



"Perdition! have you got here with your incendiary beef contract, at

last?  We have nothing to do with beef contracts for the army, my dear

sir."



"Oh, that is all very well--but somebody has got to pay for that beef.

It has got to be paid now, too, or I'll confiscate this old Patent Office

and everything in it."



"But, my dear sir--"



"It don't make any difference, sir.  The Patent Office is liable for that

beef, I reckon; and, liable or not liable, the Patent Office has got to

pay for it."



Never mind the details.  It ended in a fight.  The Patent Office won.

But I found out something to my advantage.  I was told that the Treasury

Department was the proper place for me to go to.  I went there.  I waited

two hours and a half, and then I was admitted to the First Lord of the

Treasury.



I said, "Most noble, grave, and reverend Signor, on or about the 10th day

of October, 1861, John Wilson Macken--"



"That is sufficient, sir.  I have heard of you.  Go to the First Auditor

of the Treasury."



I did so.  He sent me to the Second Auditor.  The Second Auditor sent me

to the Third, and the Third sent me to the First Comptroller of the Corn-

Beef Division.  This began to look like business.  He examined his books

and all his loose papers, but found no minute of the beef contract.  I

went to the Second Comptroller of the Corn-Beef Division.  He examined

his books and his loose papers, but with no success.  I was encouraged.

During that week I got as far as the Sixth Comptroller in that division;

the next week I got through the Claims Department; the third week I began

and completed the Mislaid Contracts Department, and got a foothold in the

Dead Reckoning Department.  I finished that in three days.  There was

only one place left for it now.  I laid siege to the Commissioner of Odds

and Ends.  To his clerk, rather--he was not there himself.  There were

sixteen beautiful young ladies in the room, writing in books, and there

were seven well-favored young clerks showing them how.  The young women

smiled up over their shoulders, and the clerks smiled back at them, and

all went merry as a marriage bell.  Two or three clerks that were reading

the newspapers looked at me rather hard, but went on reading, and nobody

said anything.  However, I had been used to this kind of alacrity from

Fourth Assistant Junior Clerks all through my eventful career, from the

very day I entered the first office of the Corn-Beef Bureau clear till I

passed out of the last one in the Dead Reckoning Division.  I had got so

accomplished by this time that I could stand on one foot from the moment

I entered an office till a clerk spoke to me, without changing more than

two, or maybe three, times.



So I stood there till I had changed four different times.  Then I said to

one of the clerks who was reading:



"Illustrious Vagrant, where is the Grand Turk?"



"What do you mean, sir? whom do you mean?  If you mean the Chief of the

Bureau, he is out."



"Will he visit the harem to-day?"



The young man glared upon me awhile, and then went on reading his paper.

But I knew the ways of those clerks.  I knew I was safe if he got through

before another New York mail arrived.  He only had two more papers left.

After a while he finished them, and then he yawned and asked me what I

wanted.



"Renowned and honored Imbecile: on or about--"



"You are the beef-contract man.  Give me your papers."



He took them, and for a long time he ransacked his odds and ends.

Finally he found the Northwest Passage, as I regarded it--he found the

long lost record of that beef contract--he found the rock upon which so

many of my ancestors had split before they ever got to it.  I was deeply

moved.  And yet I rejoiced--for I had survived.  I said with emotion,

"Give it me.  The government will settle now."  He waved me back, and

said there was something yet to be done first.



"Where is this John Wilson Mackenzie?"  said he.



"Dead."



"When did he die?"



"He didn't die at all--he was killed."



"How?"



"Tomahawked."



"Who tomahawked him?"



"Why, an Indian, of course.  You didn't suppose it was the superintendent

of a Sunday-school, did you?"



"No.  An Indian, was it?"



"The same."



"Name of the Indian?"



"His name?  I don't know his name."



"Must have his name.  Who saw the tomahawking done?"



"I don't know."



"You were not present yourself, then?"



"Which you can see by my hair.  I was absent.



"Then how do you know that Mackenzie is dead?"



"Because he certainly died at that time, and have every reason to believe

that he has been dead ever since.  I know he has, in fact."



"We must have proofs.  Have you got this Indian?"



"Of course not."



"Well, you must get him.  Have you got the tomahawk?"



"I never thought of such a thing."



"You must get the tomahawk.  You must produce the Indian and the

tomahawk.  If Mackenzie's death can be proven by these, you can then go

before the commission appointed to audit claims with some show of getting

your bill under such headway that your children may possibly live to

receive the money and enjoy it.  But that man's death must be proven.

However, I may as well tell you that the government will never pay that

transportation and those traveling expenses of the lamented Mackenzie.

It may possibly pay for the barrel of beef that Sherman's soldiers

captured, if you can get a relief bill through Congress making an

appropriation for that purpose; but it will not pay for the twenty-nine

barrels the Indians ate."



"Then there is only a hundred dollars due me, and that isn't certain!

After all Mackenzie's travels in Europe, Asia, and America with that

beef; after all his trials and tribulations and transportation; after the

slaughter of all those innocents that tried to collect that bill!  Young

man, why didn't the First Comptroller of the Corn-Beef Division tell me

this?"



"He didn't know anything about the genuineness of your claim."



"Why didn't the Second tell me? why didn't the, Third? why didn't all

those divisions and departments tell me?"



"None of them knew.  We do things by routine here.  You have followed the

routine and found out what you wanted to know.  It is the best way.

It is the only way.  It is very regular, and very slow, but it is very

certain."



"Yes, certain death.  It has been, to the most of our tribe.  I begin to

feel that I, too, am called."



"Young man, you love the bright creature yonder with the gentle blue eyes

and the steel pens behind her ears--I see it in your soft glances; you

wish to marry her--but you are poor.  Here, hold out your hand--here is

the beef contract; go, take her and be happy Heaven bless you, my

children!"



This is all I know about the great beef contract that has created so much

talk in the community.  The clerk to whom I bequeathed it died.  I know

nothing further about the contract, or any one connected with it.  I only

know that if a man lives long enough he can trace a thing through the

Circumlocution Office of Washington and find out, after much labor and

trouble and delay, that which he could have found out on the first day if

the business of the Circumlocution Office were as ingeniously

systematized as it would be if it were a great private mercantile

institution.













THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER



--[Some years ago, about 1867, when this was first published, few people

believed it, but considered it a mere extravaganza.  In these latter days

it seems hard to realize that there was ever a time when the robbing of

our government was a novelty.  The very man who showed me where to find

the documents for this case was at that very time spending hundreds of

thousands of dollars in Washington for a mail steamship concern, in the

effort to procure a subsidy for the company-a fact which was a long time

in coming to the surface, but leaked out at last and underwent

Congressional investigation.]



This is history.  It is not a wild extravaganza, like "John Wilson

Mackenzie's Great Beef Contract," but is a plain statement of facts and

circumstances with which the Congress of the United States has interested

itself from time to time during the long period of half a century.



I will not call this matter of George Fisher's a great deathless and

unrelenting swindle upon the government and people of the United States-

for it has never been so decided, and I hold that it is a grave and

solemn wrong for a writer to cast slurs or call names when such is the

case--but will simply present the evidence and let the reader deduce his

own verdict.  Then we shall do nobody injustice, and our consciences

shall be clear.



On or about the 1st day of September, 1813, the Creek war being then in

progress in Florida, the crops, herds, and houses of Mr. George Fisher,

a citizen, were destroyed, either by the Indians or by the United States

troops in pursuit of them.  By the terms of the law, if the Indians

destroyed the property, there was no relief for Fisher; but if the troops

destroyed it, the Government of the United States was debtor to Fisher

for the amount involved.



George Fisher must have considered that the Indians destroyed the

property, because, although he lived several years afterward, he does not

appear to have ever made any claim upon the government.



In the course of time Fisher died, and his widow married again.

And by and by, nearly twenty years after that dimly remembered raid upon

Fisher's corn-fields, the widow Fisher's new husband petitioned Congress

for pay for the property, and backed up the petition with many

depositions and affidavits which purported to prove that the troops,

and not the Indians, destroyed the property; that the troops, for some

inscrutable reason, deliberately burned down "houses" (or cabins) valued

at $600, the same belonging to a peaceable private citizen, and also

destroyed various other property belonging to the same citizen.  But

Congress declined to believe that the troops were such idiots (after

overtaking and scattering a band of Indians proved to have been found

destroying Fisher's property) as to calmly continue the work of

destruction themselves; and make a complete job of what the Indians had

only commenced.  So Congress denied the petition of the heirs of George

Fisher in 1832, and did not pay them a cent.



We hear no more from them officially until 1848, sixteen years after

their first attempt on the Treasury, and a full generation after the

death of the man whose fields were destroyed.  The new generation of

Fisher heirs then came forward and put in a bill for damages.  The Second

Auditor awarded them $8,873, being half the damage sustained by Fisher.

The Auditor said the testimony showed that at least half the destruction

was done by the Indians "before the troops started in pursuit," and of

course the government was not responsible for that half.



2.  That was in April, 1848.  In December, 1848, the heirs of George

Fisher, deceased, came forward and pleaded for a "revision" of their bill

of damages.  The revision was made, but nothing new could be found in

their favor except an error of $100 in the former calculation.  However,

in order to keep up the spirits of the Fisher family, the Auditor

concluded to go back and allow interest from the date of the first

petition (1832) to the date when the bill of damages was awarded.  This

sent the Fishers home happy with sixteen years' interest on $8,873--the

same amounting to $8,997.94.  Total, $17,870.94.



3.  For an entire year the suffering Fisher family remained quiet--even

satisfied, after a fashion.  Then they swooped down upon the government

with their wrongs once more.  That old patriot, Attorney-General Toucey,

burrowed through the musty papers of the Fishers and discovered one more

chance for the desolate orphans--interest on that original award of

$8,873 from date of destruction of the property (1813) up to 1832!

Result, $110,004.89 for the indigent Fishers.  So now we have: First,

$8,873 damages; second, interest on it from 1832 to 1848, $8997.94;

third, interest on it dated back to 1813, $10,004.89.  Total, $27,875.83!

What better investment for a great-grandchild than to get the Indians to

burn a corn-field for him sixty or seventy years before his birth, and

plausibly lay it on lunatic United States troops?



4.  Strange as it may seem, the Fishers let Congress alone for five

years--or, what is perhaps more likely, failed to make themselves heard

by Congress for that length of time.  But at last, in 1854, they got a

hearing.  They persuaded Congress to pass an act requiring the Auditor to

re-examine their case.  But this time they stumbled upon the misfortune

of an honest Secretary of the Treasury (Mr. James Guthrie), and he

spoiled everything.  He said in very plain language that the Fishers were

not only not entitled to another cent, but that those children of many

sorrows and acquainted with grief had been paid too much already.



5.  Therefore another interval of rest and silent ensued-an interval

which lasted four years--viz till 1858.  The "right man in the right

place" was then Secretary of War--John B. Floyd, of peculiar renown!

Here was a master intellect; here was the very man to succor the

suffering heirs of dead and forgotten Fisher.  They came up from Florida

with a rush--a great tidal wave of Fishers freighted with the same old

musty documents about the same in immortal corn-fields of their ancestor.

They straight-way got an act passed transferring the Fisher matter from

the dull Auditor to the ingenious Floyd.  What did Floyd do?  He said,

"IT WAS PROVED that the Indians destroyed everything they could before

the troops entered in pursuit."  He considered, therefore, that what they

destroyed must have consisted of "the houses with all their contents, and

the liquor" (the most trifling part of the destruction, and set down at

only $3,200 all told), and that the government troops then drove them off

and calmly proceeded to destroy--



Two hundred and twenty acres of corn in the field, thirty-five acres of

wheat, and nine hundred and eighty-six head of live stock!  [What a

singularly intelligent army we had in those days, according to Mr. Floyd

--though not according to the Congress of 1832.]



So Mr. Floyd decided that the Government was not responsible for that

$3,200 worth of rubbish which the Indians destroyed, but was responsible

for the property destroyed by the troops--which property consisted of (I

quote from the printed United States Senate document):



                                             Dollars

     Corn at Bassett's Creek, ............... 3,000

     Cattle, ................................ 5,000

     Stock hogs, ............................ 1,050

     Drove hogs, ............................ 1,204

     Wheat, .................................   350

     Hides, ................................. 4,000

     Corn on the Alabama River, ............. 3,500



                         Total, .............18,104



That sum, in his report, Mr. Floyd calls the "full value of the property

destroyed by the troops."



He allows that sum to the starving Fishers, TOGETHER WITH INTEREST FROM

1813.  From this new sum total the amounts already paid to the Fishers

were deducted, and then the cheerful remainder (a fraction under forty

thousand dollars) was handed to then and again they retired to Florida in

a condition of temporary tranquillity.  Their ancestor's farm had now

yielded them altogether nearly sixty-seven thousand dollars in cash.



6.  Does the reader suppose that that was the end of it?  Does he suppose

those diffident Fishers we: satisfied?  Let the evidence show.  The

Fishers were quiet just two years.  Then they came swarming up out of the

fertile swamps of Florida with their same old documents, and besieged

Congress once more.  Congress capitulated on the 1st of June, 1860, and

instructed Mr. Floyd to overhaul those papers again, and pay that bill.

A Treasury clerk was ordered to go through those papers and report to Mr.

Floyd what amount was still due the emaciated Fishers.  This clerk (I can

produce him whenever he is wanted) discovered what was apparently a

glaring and recent forgery in the paper; whereby a witness's testimony as

to the price of corn in Florida in 1813 was made to name double the

amount which that witness had originally specified as the price!  The

clerk not only called his superior's attention to this thing, but in

making up his brief of the case called particular attention to it in

writing.  That part of the brief never got before Congress, nor has

Congress ever yet had a hint of forgery existing among the Fisher papers.

Nevertheless, on the basis of the double prices (and totally ignoring the

clerk's assertion that the figures were manifestly and unquestionably a

recent forgery), Mr. Floyd remarks in his new report that "the testimony,

particularly in regard to the corn crops, DEMANDS A MUCH HIGHER ALLOWANCE

than any heretofore made by the Auditor or myself."  So he estimates the

crop at sixty bushels to the acre (double what Florida acres produce),

and then virtuously allows pay for only half the crop, but allows two

dollars and a half a bushel for that half, when there are rusty old books

and documents in the Congressional library to show just what the Fisher

testimony showed before the forgery--viz., that in the fall of 1813 corn

was only worth from $1.25 to $1.50 a bushel.  Having accomplished this,

what does Mr. Floyd do next?  Mr. Floyd ("with an earnest desire to

execute truly the legislative will," as he piously remarks) goes to work

and makes out an entirely new bill of Fisher damages, and in this new

bill he placidly ignores the Indians altogether puts no particle of the

destruction of the Fisher property upon them, but, even repenting him of

charging them with burning the cabins and drinking the whisky and

breaking the crockery, lays the entire damage at the door of the imbecile

United States troops down to the very last item!  And not only that, but

uses the forgery to double the loss of corn at "Bassett's Creek," and

uses it again to absolutely treble the loss of corn on the "Alabama

River."  This new and ably conceived and executed bill of Mr. Floyd's

figures up as follows (I copy again from the printed United States Senate

document):



      The United States in account with the legal representatives

                      of George Fisher, deceased.

                                                             DOL.C

1813.--To 550 head of cattle, at 10 dollars, ............. 5,500.00

       To 86 head of drove hogs, ......................... 1,204.00

       To 350 head of stock hogs, ........................ 1,750.00

       To 100 ACRES OF CORN ON BASSETT'S CREEK, .......... 6,000.00

       To 8 barrels of whisky, ...........................   350.00

       To 2 barrels of brandy, ...........................   280.00

       To 1 barrel of rum, ...............................    70.00

       To dry-goods and merchandise in store, ............ 1,100.00

       To 35 acres of wheat, .............................   350.00

       To 2,000 hides, ................................... 4,000.00

       To furs and hats in store, ........................   600.00

       To crockery ware in store, ........................   100.00

       To smith's and carpenter's tools, .................   250.00

       To houses burned and destroyed, ...................   600.00

       To 4 dozen bottles of wine, .......................    48.00

1814.--To 120 acres of corn on Alabama River, ............ 9,500.00

       To crops of peas, fodder, etc. .................... 3,250.00



                         Total, ..........................34,952.00



       To interest on $22,202, from July 1813

          to November 1860, 47 years and 4 months, .......63,053.68

       To interest on $12,750, from September

          1814 to November 1860, 46 years and 2 months, ..35,317.50



                         Total, ........................ 133,323.18



He puts everything in this time.  He does not even allow that the Indians

destroyed the crockery or drank the four dozen bottles of (currant) wine.

When it came to supernatural comprehensiveness in "gobbling," John B.

Floyd was without his equal, in his own or any other generation.

Subtracting from the above total the $67,000 already paid to

George Fisher's implacable heirs, Mr. Floyd announced that the government

was still indebted to them in the sum of sixty-six thousand five hundred

and nineteen dollars and eighty-five cents, "which," Mr. Floyd

complacently remarks, "will be paid, accordingly, to the administrator of

the estate of George Fisher, deceased, or to his attorney in fact."



But, sadly enough for the destitute orphans, a new President came in just

at this time, Buchanan and Floyd went out, and they never got their

money.  The first thing Congress did in 1861 was to rescind the

resolution of June 1, 1860, under which Mr. Floyd had been ciphering.

Then Floyd (and doubtless the heirs of George Fisher likewise) had to

give up financial business for a while, and go into the Confederate army

and serve their country.



Were the heirs of George Fisher killed?  No.  They are back now at this

very time (July, 1870), beseeching Congress through that blushing and

diffident creature, Garrett Davis, to commence making payments again on

their interminable and insatiable bill of damages for corn and whisky

destroyed by a gang of irresponsible Indians, so long ago that even

government red-tape has failed to keep consistent and intelligent track

of it.



Now the above are facts.  They are history.  Any one who doubts it can

send to the Senate Document Department of the Capitol for H. R. Ex. Doc.

No. 21, 36th Congress, 2d Session; and for S. Ex. Doc. No. 106, 41st

Congress, 2d Session, and satisfy himself.  The whole case is set forth

in the first volume of the Court of Claims Reports.



It is my belief that as long as the continent of America holds together,

the heirs of George Fisher, deceased, will still make pilgrimages to

Washington from the swamps of Florida, to plead for just a little more

cash on their bill of damages (even when they received the last of that

sixty-seven thousand dollars, they said it was only one fourth what the

government owed them on that fruitful corn-field), and as long as they

choose to come they will find Garrett Davises to drag their vampire

schemes before Congress.  This is not the only hereditary fraud (if fraud

it is--which I have before repeatedly remarked is not proven) that is

being quietly handed down from generation to generation of fathers and

sons, through the persecuted Treasury of the United States.













DISGRACEFUL PERSECUTION OF A BOY



In San Francisco, the other day, "A well-dressed boy, on his way to

Sunday-school, was arrested and thrown into the city prison for stoning

Chinamen."



What a commentary is this upon human justice!  What sad prominence it

gives to our human disposition to tyrannize over the weak!  San Francisco

has little right to take credit to herself for her treatment of this poor

boy.  What had the child's education been?  How should he suppose it was

wrong to stone a Chinaman?  Before we side against him, along with

outraged San Francisco, let us give him a chance--let us hear the

testimony for the defense.



He was a "well-dressed" boy, and a Sunday-school scholar, and therefore

the chances are that his parents were intelligent, well-to-do people,

with just enough natural villainy in their composition to make them yearn

after the daily papers, and enjoy them; and so this boy had opportunities

to learn all through the week how to do right, as well as on Sunday.



It was in this way that he found out that the great commonwealth of

California imposes an unlawful mining-tax upon John the foreigner, and

allows Patrick the foreigner to dig gold for nothing--probably because

the degraded Mongol is at no expense for whisky, and the refined Celt

cannot exist without it.



It was in this way that he found out that a respectable number of the

tax-gatherers--it would be unkind to say all of them--collect the tax

twice, instead of once; and that, inasmuch as they do it solely to

discourage Chinese immigration into the mines, it is a thing that is much

applauded, and likewise regarded as being singularly facetious.



It was in this way that he found out that when a white man robs a sluice-

box (by the term white man is meant Spaniards, Mexicans, Portuguese,

Irish, Hondurans, Peruvians, Chileans, etc., etc.), they make him leave

the camp; and when a Chinaman does that thing, they hang him.



It was in this way that he found out that in many districts of the vast

Pacific coast, so strong is the wild, free love of justice in the hearts

of the people, that whenever any secret and mysterious crime is

committed, they say, "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall," and

go straightway and swing a Chinaman.



It was in this way that he found out that by studying one half of each

day's "local items," it would appear that the police of San Francisco

were either asleep or dead, and by studying the other half it would seem

that the reporters were gone mad with admiration of the energy, the

virtue, the high effectiveness, and the dare-devil intrepidity of that

very police-making exultant mention of how "the Argus-eyed officer So-

and-so" captured a wretched knave of a Chinaman who was stealing

chickens, and brought him gloriously to the city prison; and how "the

gallant officer Such-and-such-a-one" quietly kept an eye on the movements

of an "unsuspecting, almond-eyed son of Confucius" (your reporter is

nothing if not facetious), following him around with that far-off look.

of vacancy and unconsciousness always so finely affected by that

inscrutable being, the forty-dollar policeman, during a waking interval,

and captured him at last in the very act of placing his hands in a

suspicious manner upon a paper of tacks, left by the owner in an exposed

situation; and how one officer performed this prodigious thing, and

another officer that, and another the other--and pretty much every one of

these performances having for a dazzling central incident a Chinaman

guilty of a shilling's worth of crime, an unfortunate, whose misdemeanor

must be hurrahed into something enormous in order to keep the public from

noticing how many really important rascals went uncaptured in the mean

time, and how overrated those glorified policemen actually are.



It was in this way that the boy found out that the legislature, being

aware that the Constitution has made America, an asylum for the poor and

the oppressed of all nations, and that, therefore, the poor and oppressed

who fly to our shelter must not be charged a disabling admission fee,

made a law that every Chinaman, upon landing, must be vaccinated upon the

wharf, and pay to the state's appointed officer ten dollars for the

service, when there are plenty of doctors in San Francisco who would be

glad enough to do it for him for fifty cents.



It was in this way that the boy found out that a Chinaman had no rights

that any man was bound to respect; that he had no sorrows that any man

was bound to pity; that neither his life nor his liberty was worth the

purchase of a penny when a white man needed a scapegoat; that nobody

loved Chinamen, nobody befriended them, nobody spared them suffering when

it was convenient to inflict it; everybody, individuals, communities, the

majesty of the state itself, joined in hating, abusing, and persecuting

these humble strangers.



And, therefore, what could have been more natural than for this sunny-

hearted-boy, tripping along to Sunday-school, with his mind teeming with

freshly learned incentives to high and virtuous action, to say

to himself:



"Ah, there goes a Chinaman!  God will not love me if I do not stone him."



And for this he was arrested and put in the city jail.



Everything conspired to teach him that it was a high and holy thing to

stone a Chinaman, and yet he no sooner attempts to do his duty than he is

punished for it--he, poor chap, who has been aware all his life that one

of the principal recreations of the police, out toward the Gold Refinery,

is to look on with tranquil enjoyment while the butchers of Brannan

Street set their dogs on unoffending Chinamen, and make them flee for

their lives.



--[I have many such memories in my mind, but am thinking just at present

of one particular one, where the Brannan Street butchers set their dogs

on a Chinaman who was quietly passing with a basket of clothes on his

head; and while the dogs mutilated his flesh, a butcher increased the

hilarity of the occasion by knocking some of the Chinaman's teeth down

his throat with half a brick.  This incident sticks in my memory with a

more malevolent tenacity, perhaps, on account of the fact that I was in

the employ of a San Francisco journal at the time, and was not allowed to

publish it because it might offend some of the peculiar element that

subscribed for the paper.]



Keeping in mind the tuition in the humanities which the entire "Pacific

coast" gives its youth, there is a very sublimity of incongruity in the

virtuous flourish with which the good city fathers of San Francisco

proclaim (as they have lately done) that "The police are positively

ordered to arrest all boys, of every description and wherever found, who

engage in assaulting Chinamen."



Still, let us be truly glad they have made the order, notwithstanding its

inconsistency; and let us rest perfectly confident the police are glad,

too.  Because there is no personal peril in arresting boys, provided they

be of the small kind, and the reporters will have to laud their

performances just as loyally as ever, or go without items.



The new form for local items in San Francisco will now be: "The ever-

vigilant and efficient officer So-and-so succeeded, yesterday afternoon,

in arresting Master Tommy Jones, after a determined resistance," etc.,

etc., followed by the customary statistics and final hurrah, with its

unconscious sarcasm: "We are happy in being able to state that this is

the forty-seventh boy arrested by this gallant officer since the new

ordinance went into effect.  The most extraordinary activity prevails in

the police department.  Nothing like it has been seen since we can

remember."













THE JUDGE'S "SPIRITED WOMAN"



"I was sitting here," said the judge, "in this old pulpit, holding court,

and we were trying a big, wicked-looking Spanish desperado for killing

the husband of a bright, pretty Mexican woman. It was a lazy summer day,

and an awfully long one, and the witnesses were tedious.  None of us took

any interest in the trial except that nervous, uneasy devil of a Mexican

woman because you know how they love and how they hate, and this one had

loved her husband with all her might, and now she had boiled it all down

into hate, and stood here spitting it at that Spaniard with her eyes;

and I tell you she would stir me up, too, with a little of her summer

lightning, occasionally.  Well, I had my coat off and my heels up,

lolling and sweating, and smoking one of those cabbage cigars the San

Francisco people used to think were good enough for us in those times;

and the lawyers they all had their coats off, and were smoking and

whittling, and the witnesses the same, and so was the prisoner.  Well,

the fact is, there warn't any interest in a murder trial then, because

the fellow was always brought in 'not guilty,' the jury expecting him to

do as much for them some time; and, although the evidence was straight

and square against this Spaniard, we knew we could not convict him

without seeming to be rather high-handed and sort of reflecting on every

gentleman in the community; for there warn't any carriages and liveries

then, and so the only 'style' there was, was to keep your private

graveyard.  But that woman seemed to have her heart set on hanging that

Spaniard; and you'd ought to have seen how she would glare on him a

minute, and then look up at me in her pleading way, and then turn and for

the next five minutes search the jury's faces, and by and by drop her

face in her hands for just a little while as if she was most ready to

give up; but out she'd come again directly, and be as live and anxious as

ever.  But when the jury announced the verdict--Not Guilty--and I told

the prisoner he was acquitted and free to go, that woman rose up till she

appeared to be as tall and grand as a seventy-four-gun ship, and says

she:



"'Judge, do I understand you to say that this man is not guilty that

murdered my husband without any cause before my own eyes and my little

children's, and that all has been done to him that ever justice and the

law can do?'



"'The same,' says I.



"And then what do you reckon she did?  Why, she turned on that smirking

Spanish fool like a wildcat, and out with a 'navy' and shot him dead in

open court!"



"That was spirited, I am willing to admit."



"Wasn't it, though?" said the judge admiringly.



"I wouldn't have missed it for anything.  I adjourned court right on the

spot, and we put on our coats and went out and took up a collection for

her and her cubs, and sent them over the mountains to their friends.

Ah, she was a spirited wench!"













INFORMATION WANTED



                              "WASHINGTON, December 10, 1867.



"Could you give me any information respecting such islands, if any, as

the government is going to purchase?"



It is an uncle of mine that wants to know.  He is an industrious man and

well disposed, and wants to make a living in an honest, humble way, but

more especially he wants to be quiet.  He wishes to settle down, and be

quiet and unostentatious.  He has been to the new island St. Thomas, but

he says he thinks things are unsettled there.  He went there early with

an attache of the State Department, who was sent down with money to pay

for the island.  My uncle had his money in the same box, and so when they

went ashore, getting a receipt, the sailors broke open the box and took

all the money, not making any distinction between government money, which

was legitimate money to be stolen, and my uncle's, which was his own

private property, and should have been respected.  But he came home and

got some more and went back.  And then he took the fever.  There are

seven kinds of fever down there, you know; and, as his blood was out of

order by reason of loss of sleep and general wear and tear of mind, he

failed to cure the first fever, and then somehow he got the other six.

He is not a kind of man that enjoys fevers, though he is well meaning and

always does what he thinks is right, and so he was a good deal annoyed

when it appeared he was going to die.



But he worried through, and got well and started a farm.  He fenced it

in, and the next day that great storm came on and washed the most of it

over to Gibraltar, or around there somewhere.  He only said, in his

patient way, that it was gone, and he wouldn't bother about trying to

find out where it went to, though it was his opinion it went to

Gibraltar.



Then he invested in a mountain, and started a farm up there, so as to be

out of the way when the sea came ashore again.  It was a good mountain,

and a good farm, but it wasn't any use; an earthquake came the next night

and shook it all down.  It was all fragments, you know, and so mixed up

with another man's property that he could not tell which were his

fragments without going to law; and he would not do that, because his

main object in going to St. Thomas was to be quiet.  All that he wanted

was to settle down and be quiet.



He thought it all over, and finally he concluded to try the low ground

again, especially as he wanted to start a brickyard this time.  He bought

a flat, and put out a hundred thousand bricks to dry preparatory to

baking them.  But luck appeared to be against him.  A volcano shoved

itself through there that night, and elevated his brickyard about two

thousand feet in the air.  It irritated him a good deal.  He has been up

there, and he says the bricks are all baked right enough, but he can't

get them down.  At first, he thought maybe the government would get the

bricks down for him, because since government bought the island, it ought

to protect the property where a man has invested in good faith; but all

he wants is quiet, and so he is not going to apply for the subsidy he was

thinking about.



He went back there last week in a couple of ships of war, to prospect

around the coast for a safe place for a farm where he could be quiet;

but a great "tidal wave" came, and hoisted both of the ships out into one

of the interior counties, and he came near losing his life.  So he has

given up prospecting in a ship, and is discouraged.



Well, now he don't know what to do.  He has tried Alaska; but the bears

kept after him so much, and kept him so much on the jump, as it were,

that he had to leave the country.  He could not be quiet there with those

bears prancing after him all the time.  That is how he came to go to the

new island we have bought--St. Thomas.  But he is getting to think St.

Thomas is not quiet enough for a man of his turn of mind, and that is why

he wishes me to find out if government is likely to buy some more islands

shortly.  He has heard that government is thinking about buying Porto

Rico.  If that is true, he wishes to try Porto Rico, if it is a quiet

place.  How is Porto Rico for his style of man?  Do you think the

government will buy it?













SOME LEARNED FABLES, FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS



IN THREE PARTS





PART FIRST



HOW THE ANIMALS OF THE WOOD SENT OUT A SCIENTIFIC EXPEDITION



Once the creatures of the forest held a great convention and appointed a

commission consisting of the most illustrious scientists among them to go

forth, clear beyond the forest and out into the unknown and unexplored

world, to verify the truth of the matters already taught in their schools

and colleges and also to make discoveries.  It was the most imposing

enterprise of the kind the nation had ever embarked in.  True, the

government had once sent Dr. Bull Frog, with a picked crew, to hunt for a

northwesterly passage through the swamp to the right-hand corner of the

wood, and had since sent out many expeditions to hunt for Dr. Bull Frog;

but they never could find him, and so government finally gave him up and

ennobled his mother to show its gratitude for the services her son had

rendered to science.  And once government sent Sir Grass Hopper to hunt

for the sources of the rill that emptied into the swamp; and afterward

sent out many expeditions to hunt for Sir Grass, and at last they were

successful--they found his body, but if he had discovered the sources

meantime, he did not let on.  So government acted handsomely by deceased,

and many envied his funeral.



But these expeditions were trifles compared with the present one; for

this one comprised among its servants the very greatest among the

learned; and besides it was to go to the utterly unvisited regions

believed to lie beyond the mighty forest--as we have remarked before.

How the members were banqueted, and glorified, and talked about!

Everywhere that one of them showed himself, straightway there was a crowd

to gape and stare at him.



Finally they set off, and it was a sight to see the long procession of

dry-land Tortoises heavily laden with savants, scientific instruments,

Glow-Worms and Fire-Flies for signal service, provisions, Ants and

Tumble-Bugs to fetch and carry and delve, Spiders to carry the surveying

chain and do other engineering duty, and so forth and so on; and after

the Tortoises came another long train of ironclads--stately and spacious

Mud Turtles for marine transportation service; and from every Tortoise

and every Turtle flaunted a flaming gladiolus or other splendid banner;

at the head of the column a great band of Bumble-Bees, Mosquitoes,

Katy-Dids, and Crickets discoursed martial music; and the entire train

was under the escort and protection of twelve picked regiments of the

Army Worm.



At the end of three weeks the expedition emerged from the forest and

looked upon the great Unknown World.  Their eyes were greeted with an

impressive spectacle.  A vast level plain stretched before them, watered

by a sinuous stream; and beyond there towered up against the sky along

and lofty barrier of some kind, they did not know what.  The Tumble-Bug

said he believed it was simply land tilted up on its edge, because he

knew he could see trees on it.  But Professor Snail and the others said:



"You are hired to dig, sir--that is all.  We need your muscle, not your

brains.  When we want your opinion on scientific matters, we will hasten

to let you know.  Your coolness is intolerable, too--loafing about here

meddling with august matters of learning, when the other laborers are

pitching camp.  Go along and help handle the baggage."



The Tumble-Bug turned on his heel uncrushed, unabashed, observing to

himself, "If it isn't land tilted up, let me die the death of the

unrighteous."



Professor Bull Frog (nephew of the late explorer) said he believed the

ridge was the wall that inclosed the earth.  He continued:



"Our fathers have left us much learning, but they had not traveled far,

and so we may count this a noble new discovery.  We are safe for renown

now, even though our labors began and ended with this single achievement.

I wonder what this wall is built of?  Can it be fungus?  Fungus is an

honorable good thing to build a wall of."



Professor Snail adjusted his field-glass and examined the rampart

critically.  Finally he said:



"'The fact that it is not diaphanous convinces me that it is a dense

vapor formed by the calorification of ascending moisture dephlogisticated

by refraction.  A few endiometrical experiments would confirm this, but

it is not necessary.  The thing is obvious."



So he shut up his glass and went into his shell to make a note of the

discovery of the world's end, and the nature of it.



"Profound mind!" said Professor Angle-Worm to Professor Field-Mouse;

"profound mind! nothing can long remain a mystery to that august brain."



Night drew on apace, the sentinel crickets were posted, the Glow-Worm and

Fire-Fly lamps were lighted, and the camp sank to silence and sleep.

After breakfast in the morning, the expedition moved on.  About noon a

great avenue was reached, which had in it two endless parallel bars of

some kind of hard black substance, raised the height of the tallest Bull

Frog, above the general level.  The scientists climbed up on these and

examined and tested them in various ways.  They walked along them for a

great distance, but found no end and no break in them.  They could arrive

at no decision.  There was nothing in the records of science that

mentioned anything of this kind.  But at last the bald and venerable

geographer, Professor Mud Turtle, a person who, born poor, and of a

drudging low family, had, by his own native force raised himself to the

headship of the geographers of his generation, said:



"'My friends, we have indeed made a discovery here.  We have found in a

palpable, compact, and imperishable state what the wisest of our fathers

always regarded as a mere thing of the imagination.  Humble yourselves,

my friends, for we stand in a majestic presence.  These are parallels of

latitude!"



Every heart and every head was bowed, so awful, so sublime was the

magnitude of the discovery.  Many shed tears.



The camp was pitched and the rest of the day given up to writing

voluminous accounts of the marvel, and correcting astronomical tables to

fit it.  Toward midnight a demoniacal shriek was heard, then a clattering

and rumbling noise, and the next instant a vast terrific eye shot by,

with a long tail attached, and disappeared in the gloom, still uttering

triumphant shrieks.



The poor damp laborers were stricken to the heart with fright, and

stampeded for the high grass in a body.  But not the scientists.  They

had no superstitions.  They calmly proceeded to exchange theories.

The ancient geographer's opinion was asked.  He went into his shell and

deliberated long and profoundly.  When he came out at last, they all knew

by his worshiping countenance that he brought light.  Said he:



"Give thanks for this stupendous thing which we have been permitted to

witness.  It is the Vernal Equinox!"



There were shoutings and great rejoicings.



"But," said the Angle-Worm, uncoiling after reflection, "this is dead

summer-time."



"Very well," said the Turtle, "we are far from our region; the season

differs with the difference of time between the two points."



"Ah, true:  True enough.  But it is night.  How should the sun pass in

the night?"



"In these distant regions he doubtless passes always in the night at this

hour."



"Yes, doubtless that is true.  But it being night, how is it that we

could see him?"



"It is a great mystery.  I grant that.  But I am persuaded that the

humidity of the atmosphere in these remote regions is such that particles

of daylight adhere to the disk and it was by aid of these that we were

enabled to see the sun in the dark."



This was deemed satisfactory, and due entry was made of the decision.



But about this moment those dreadful shriekings were heard again; again

the rumbling and thundering came speeding up out of the night; and once

more a flaming great eye flashed by and lost itself in gloom and

distance.



The camp laborers gave themselves up for lost.  The savants were sorely

perplexed.  Here was a marvel hard to account for.  They thought and they

talked, they talked and they thought.  Finally the learned and aged Lord

Grand-Daddy-Longlegs, who had been sitting in deep study, with his

slender limbs crossed and his stemmy arms folded, said:



"Deliver your opinions, brethren, and then I will tell my thought--for I

think I have solved this problem."



"So be it, good your lordship," piped the weak treble of the wrinkled and

withered Professor Woodlouse, "for we shall hear from your lordship's

lips naught but wisdom."  [Here the speaker threw in a mess of trite,

threadbare, exasperating quotations from the ancient poets and

philosophers, delivering them with unction in the sounding grandeurs of

the original tongues, they being from the Mastodon, the Dodo, and other

dead languages.]  "Perhaps I ought not to presume to meddle with matters

pertaining to astronomy at all, in such a presence as this, I who have

made it the business of my life to delve only among the riches of the

extinct languages and unearth the opulence of their ancient lore; but

still, as unacquainted as I am with the noble science of astronomy, I beg

with deference and humility to suggest that inasmuch as the last of these

wonderful apparitions proceeded in exactly the opposite direction from

that pursued by the first, which you decide to be the Vernal Equinox,

and greatly resembled it in all particulars, is it not possible, nay

certain, that this last is the Autumnal Equi--"



" O-o-o!"  "O-o-o! go to bed! go to bed!" with annoyed derision from

everybody.  So the poor old Woodlouse retreated out of sight, consumed

with shame.



Further discussion followed, and then the united voice of the commission

begged Lord Longlegs to speak.  He said:



"Fellow-scientists, it is my belief that we have witnessed a thing which

has occurred in perfection but once before in the knowledge of created

beings.  It is a phenomenon of inconceivable importance and interest,

view it as one may, but its interest to us is vastly heightened by an

added knowledge of its nature which no scholar has heretofore possessed

or even suspected.  This great marvel which we have just witnessed,

fellow-savants (it almost takes my breath away), is nothing less than the

transit of Venus!"



Every scholar sprang to his feet pale with astonishment.  Then ensued

tears, handshakings, frenzied embraces, and the most extravagant

jubilations of every sort.  But by and by, as emotion began to retire

within bounds, and reflection to return to the front, the accomplished

Chief Inspector Lizard observed:



"But how is this?  Venus should traverse the sun's surface, not the

earth's."



The arrow went home.  It earned sorrow to the breast of every apostle of

learning there, for none could deny that this was a formidable criticism.

But tranquilly the venerable Duke crossed his limbs behind his ears and

said:



"My friend has touched the marrow of our mighty discovery.  Yes--all that

have lived before us thought a transit of Venus consisted of a flight

across the sun's face; they thought it, they maintained it, they honestly

believed it, simple hearts, and were justified in it by the limitations

of their knowledge; but to us has been granted the inestimable boon of

proving that the transit occurs across the earth's face, for we have SEEN

it!"



The assembled wisdom sat in speechless adoration of this imperial

intellect.  All doubts had instantly departed, like night before the

lightning.



The Tumble-Bug had just intruded, unnoticed.  He now came reeling forward

among the scholars, familiarly slapping first one and then another on the

shoulder, saying "Nice ('ic) nice old boy!" and smiling a smile of

elaborate content.  Arrived at a good position for speaking, he put his

left arm akimbo with his knuckles planted in his hip just under the edge

of his cut-away coat, bent his right leg, placing his toe on the ground

and resting his heel with easy grace against his left shin, puffed out

his aldermanic stomach, opened his lips, leaned his right elbow on

Inspector Lizard's shoulder, and--



But the shoulder was indignantly withdrawn and the hard-handed son of

toil went to earth.  He floundered a bit, but came up smiling, arranged

his attitude with the same careful detail as before, only choosing

Professor Dogtick's shoulder for a support, opened his lips and--



Went to earth again.  He presently scrambled up once more, still smiling,

made a loose effort to brush the dust off his coat and legs, but a smart

pass of his hand missed entirely, and the force of the unchecked impulse

stewed him suddenly around, twisted his legs together, and projected him,

limber and sprawling, into the lap of the Lord Longlegs.  Two or three

scholars sprang forward, flung the low creature head over heels into a

corner, and reinstated the patrician, smoothing his ruffled dignity with

many soothing and regretful speeches.  Professor Bull Frog roared out:



"No more of this, sirrah Tumble-Bug!  Say your say and then get you about

your business with speed!  Quick--what is your errand?  Come move off a

trifle; you smell like a stable; what have you been at?"



"Please ('ic!) please your worship I chanced to light upon a find.  But

no m(e-uck!) matter 'bout that.  There's b('ic !) been another find

which--beg pardon, your honors, what was that th('ic!) thing that ripped

by here first?"



"It was the Vernal Equinox."



"Inf('ic!)fernal equinox.  'At's all right.  D('ic !) Dunno him.  What's

other one?"



"The transit of Venus.



"G('ic !) Got me again.  No matter.  Las' one dropped something."



"Ah, indeed!  Good luck!  Good news!  Quick what is it?"



"M('ic!) Mosey out 'n' see.  It'll pay."



No more votes were taken for four-and-twenty hours.  Then the following

entry was made:



"The commission went in a body to view the find.  It was found to consist

of a hard, smooth, huge object with a rounded summit surmounted by a

short upright projection resembling a section of a cabbage stalk divided

transversely.  This projection was not solid, but was a hollow cylinder

plugged with a soft woody substance unknown to our region--that is, it

had been so plugged, but unfortunately this obstruction had been

heedlessly removed by Norway Rat, Chief of the Sappers and Miners, before

our arrival.  The vast object before us, so mysteriously conveyed from

the glittering domains of space, was found to be hollow and nearly filled

with a pungent liquid of a brownish hue, like rainwater that has stood

for some time.  And such a spectacle as met our view!  Norway Rat was

perched upon the summit engaged in thrusting his tail into the

cylindrical projection, drawing it out dripping, permitting the

struggling multitude of laborers to suck the end of it, then straightway

reinserting it and delivering the fluid to the mob as before.  Evidently

this liquor had strangely potent qualities; for all that partook of it

were immediately exalted with great and pleasurable emotions, and went

staggering about singing ribald songs, embracing, fighting, dancing,

discharging irruptions of profanity, and defying all authority.  Around

us struggled a massed and uncontrolled mob--uncontrolled and likewise

uncontrollable, for the whole army, down to the very sentinels, were mad

like the rest, by reason of the drink.  We were seized upon by these

reckless creatures, and within the hour we, even we, were

undistinguishable from the rest--the demoralization was complete and

universal.  In time the camp wore itself out with its orgies and sank

into a stolid and pitiable stupor, in whose mysterious bonds rank was

forgotten and strange bedfellows made, our eyes, at the resurrection,

being blasted and our souls petrified with the incredible spectacle of

that intolerable stinking scavenger, the Tumble-Bug, and the illustrious

patrician my Lord Grand Daddy, Duke of Longlegs, lying soundly steeped in

sleep, and clasped lovingly in each other's arms, the like whereof hath

not been seen in all the ages that tradition compasseth, and doubtless

none shall ever in this world find faith to master the belief of it save

only we that have beheld the damnable and unholy vision.  Thus

inscrutable be the ways of God, whose will be done!



"This day, by order, did the engineer-in-chief, Herr Spider, rig the

necessary tackle for the overturning of the vast reservoir, and so its

calamitous contents were discharged in a torrent upon the thirsty earth,

which drank it up, and now there is no more danger, we reserving but a

few drops for experiment and scrutiny, and to exhibit to the king and

subsequently preserve among the wonders of the museum.  What this liquid

is has been determined.  It is without question that fierce and most

destructive fluid called lightning.  It was wrested, in its container,

from its storehouse in the clouds, by the resistless might of the flying

planet, and hurled at our feet as she sped by.  An interesting discovery

here results.  Which is, that lightning, kept to itself, is quiescent; it

is the assaulting contact of the thunderbolt that releases it from

captivity, ignites its awful fires, and so produces an instantaneous

combustion and explosion which spread disaster and desolation far and

wide in the earth."



After another day devoted to rest and recovery, the expedition proceeded

upon its way.  Some days later it went into camp in a pleasant part of

the plain, and the savants sallied forth to see what they might find.

Their reward was at hand.  Professor Bull Frog discovered a strange tree,

and called his comrades.  They inspected it with profound interest.  It

was very tall and straight, and wholly devoid of bark, limbs, or foliage.

By triangulation Lord Longlegs determined its altitude; Herr Spider

measured its circumference at the base and computed the circumference at

its top by a mathematical demonstration based upon the warrant furnished

by the uniform degree of its taper upward.  It was considered a very

extraordinary find; and since it was a tree of a hitherto unknown

species, Professor Woodlouse gave it a name of a learned sound, being

none other than that of Professor Bull Frog translated into the ancient

Mastodon language, for it had always been the custom with discoverers to

perpetuate their names and honor themselves by this sort of connection

with their discoveries.



Now Professor Field-Mouse having placed his sensitive ear to the tree,

detected a rich, harmonious sound issuing from it.  This surprising thing

was tested and enjoyed by each scholar in turn, and great was the

gladness and astonishment of all.  Professor Woodlouse was requested to

add to and extend the tree's name so as to make it suggest the musical

quality it possessed--which he did, furnishing the addition Anthem

Singer, done into the Mastodon tongue.



By this time Professor Snail was making some telescopic inspections.

He discovered a great number of these trees, extending in a single rank,

with wide intervals between, as far as his instrument would carry, both

southward and northward.  He also presently discovered that all these

trees were bound together, near their tops, by fourteen great ropes, one

above another, which ropes were continuous, from tree to tree, as far as

his vision could reach.  This was surprising.  Chief Engineer Spider ran

aloft and soon reported that these ropes were simply a web hung thereby

some colossal member of his own species, for he could see its prey

dangling here and there from the strands, in the shape of mighty shreds

and rags that had a woven look about their texture and were no doubt the

discarded skins of prodigious insects which had been caught and eaten.

And then he ran along one of the ropes to make a closer inspection, but

felt a smart sudden burn on the soles of his feet, accompanied by a

paralyzing shock, wherefore he let go and swung himself to the earth by a

thread of his own spinning, and advised all to hurry at once to camp,

lest the monster should appear and get as much interested in the savants

as they were in him and his works.  So they departed with speed, making

notes about the gigantic web as they went.  And that evening the

naturalist of the expedition built a beautiful model of the colossal

spider, having no need to see it in order to do this, because he had

picked up a fragment of its vertebra by the tree, and so knew exactly

what the creature looked like and what its habits and its preferences

were by this simple evidence alone.  He built it with a tail, teeth,

fourteen legs, and a snout, and said it ate grass, cattle, pebbles, and

dirt with equal enthusiasm.  This animal was regarded as a very precious

addition to science.  It was hoped a dead one might be found to stuff.

Professor Woodlouse thought that he and his brother scholars, by lying

hid and being quiet, might maybe catch a live one.  He was advised to try

it.  Which was all the attention that was paid to his suggestion.  The

conference ended with the naming the monster after the naturalist, since

he, after God, had created it.



"And improved it, mayhap," muttered the Tumble-Bug, who was intruding

again, according to his idle custom and his unappeasable curiosity.



END OF PART FIRST









SOME LEARNED FABLES FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS



PART SECOND



HOW THE ANIMALS OF THE WOOD COMPLETED THEIR SCIENTIFIC LABORS



A week later the expedition camped in the midst of a collection of

wonderful curiosities.  These were a sort of vast caverns of stone that

rose singly and in bunches out of the plain by the side of the river

which they had first seen when they emerged from the forest.  These

caverns stood in long, straight rows on opposite sides of broad aisles

that were bordered with single ranks of trees.  The summit of each cavern

sloped sharply both ways.  Several horizontal rows of great square holes,

obstructed by a thin, shiny, transparent substance, pierced the frontage

of each cavern.  Inside were caverns within caverns; and one might ascend

and visit these minor compartments by means of curious winding ways

consisting of continuous regular terraces raised one above another.

There were many huge, shapeless objects in each compartment which were

considered to have been living creatures at one time, though now the thin

brown skin was shrunken and loose, and rattled when disturbed.  Spiders

were here in great number, and their cobwebs, stretched in all directions

and wreathing the great skinny dead together, were a pleasant spectacle,

since they inspired with life and wholesome cheer a scene which would

otherwise have brought to the mind only a sense of forsakenness and

desolation.  Information was sought of these spiders, but in vain.  They

were of a different nationality from those with the expedition, and their

language seemed but a musical, meaningless jargon.  They were a timid,

gentle race, but ignorant, and heathenish worshipers of unknown gods.

The expedition detailed a great detachment of missionaries to teach them

the true religion, and in a week's time a precious work had been wrought

among those darkened creatures, not three families being by that time at

peace with each other or having a settled belief in any system of

religion whatever.  This encouraged the expedition to establish a colony

of missionaries there permanently, that the work of grace might go on.



But let us not outrun our narrative.  After close examination of the

fronts of the caverns, and much thinking and exchanging of theories, the

scientists determined the nature of these singular formations.  They said

that each belonged mainly to the Old Red Sandstone period; that the

cavern fronts rose in innumerable and wonderfully regular strata high in

the air, each stratum about five frog-spans thick, and that in the

present discovery lay an overpowering refutation of all received geology;

for between every two layers of Old Red Sandstone reposed a thin layer of

decomposed limestone; so instead of there having been but one Old Red

Sandstone period there had certainly been not less than a hundred and

seventy-five!  And by the same token it was plain that there had also

been a hundred and seventy-five floodings of the earth and depositings of

limestone strata!  The unavoidable deduction from which pair of facts was

the overwhelming truth that the world, instead of being only two hundred

thousand years old, was older by millions upon millions of years!  And

there was another curious thing: every stratum of Old Red Sandstone was

pierced and divided at mathematically regular intervals by vertical

strata of limestone.  Up-shootings of igneous rock through fractures in

water formations were common; but here was the first instance where

water-formed rock had been so projected.  It was a great and noble

discovery, and its value to science was considered to be inestimable.



A critical examination of some of the lower strata demonstrated the

presence of fossil ants and tumble-bugs (the latter accompanied by their

peculiar goods), and with high gratification the fact was enrolled upon

the scientific record; for this was proof that these vulgar laborers

belonged to the first and lowest orders of created beings, though at the

same time there was something repulsive in the reflection that the

perfect and exquisite creature of the modern uppermost order owed its

origin to such ignominious beings through the mysterious law of

Development of Species.



The Tumble-Bug, overhearing this discussion, said he was willing that the

parvenus of these new times should find what comfort they might in their

wise-drawn theories, since as far as he was concerned he was content to

be of the old first families and proud to point back to his place among

the old original aristocracy of the land.



"Enjoy your mushroom dignity, stinking of the varnish of yesterday's

veneering, since you like it," said he; "suffice it for the Tumble-Bugs

that they come of a race that rolled their fragrant spheres down the

solemn aisles of antiquity, and left their imperishable works embalmed in

the Old Red Sandstone to proclaim it to the wasting centuries as they

file along the highway of Time!"



"Oh, take a walk!" said the chief of the expedition, with derision.



The summer passed, and winter approached.  In and about many of the

caverns were what seemed to be inscriptions.  Most of the scientists said

they were inscriptions, a few said they were not.  The chief philologist,

Professor Woodlouse, maintained that they were writings, done in a

character utterly unknown to scholars, and in a language equally unknown.

He had early ordered his artists and draftsmen to make facsimiles of all

that were discovered; and had set himself about finding the key to the

hidden tongue.  In this work he had followed the method which had always

been used by decipherers previously.  That is to say, he placed a number

of copies of inscriptions before him and studied them both collectively

and in detail.  To begin with, he placed the following copies together:



     THE AMERICAN HOTEL.      MEALS AT ALL HOURS.

     THE SHADES.              NO SMOKING.

     BOATS FOR HIRE CHEAP     UNION PRAYER MEETING, 6 P.M.

     BILLIARDS.               THE WATERSIDE JOURNAL.

     THE A1 BARBER SHOP.      TELEGRAPH OFFICE.

     KEEP OFF THE GRASS.      TRY BRANDRETH'S PILLS.

     COTTAGES FOR RENT DURING THE WATERING SEASON.

     FOR SALE CHEAP.          FOR SALE CHEAP.

     FOR SALE CHEAP.          FOR SALE CHEAP.



At first it seemed to the professor that this was a sign-language, and

that each word was represented by a distinct sign; further examination

convinced him that it was a written language, and that every letter of

its alphabet was represented by a character of its own; and finally he

decided that it was a language which conveyed itself partly by letters,

and partly by signs or hieroglyphics.  This conclusion was forced upon

him by the discovery of several specimens of the following nature:



He observed that certain inscriptions were met with in greater frequency

than others.  Such as "FOR SALE CHEAP"; "BILLIARDS"; "S. T.--1860--X";

"KENO"; "ALE ON DRAUGHT."  Naturally, then, these must be religious

maxims.  But this idea was cast aside by and by, as the mystery of the

strange alphabet began to clear itself.  In time, the professor was

enabled to translate several of the inscriptions with considerable

plausibility, though not to the perfect satisfaction of all the scholars.

Still, he made constant and encouraging progress.



Finally a cavern was discovered with these inscriptions upon it:



                           WATERSIDE MUSEUM.

                           Open at All Hours.

                          Admission 50 cents.

                        WONDERFUL COLLECTION OF

                      WAX-WORKS, ANCIENT FOSSILS,

                                  ETC.



Professor Woodlouse affirmed that the word "Museum" was equivalent to the

phrase "lumgath molo," or "Burial Place."  Upon entering, the scientists

were well astonished.  But what they saw may be best conveyed in the

language of their own official report:



"Erect, in a row, were a sort of rigid great figures which struck us

instantly as belonging to the long extinct species of reptile called MAN,

described in our ancient records.  This was a peculiarly gratifying

discovery, because of late times it has become fashionable to regard this

creature as a myth and a superstition, a work of the inventive

imaginations of our remote ancestors.  But here, indeed, was Man,

perfectly preserved, in a fossil state.  And this was his burial place,

as already ascertained by the inscription.  And now it began to be

suspected that the caverns we had been inspecting had been his ancient

haunts in that old time that he roamed the earth--for upon the breast of

each of these tall fossils was an inscription in the character heretofore

noticed.  One read, 'CAPTAIN KIDD THE PIRATE'; another, 'QUEEN VICTORIA';

another, 'ABE LINCOLN'; another, 'GEORGE WASHINGTON,' etc.



"With feverish interest we called for our ancient scientific records to

discover if perchance the description of Man there set down would tally

with the fossils before us.  Professor Woodlouse read it aloud in its

quaint and musty phraseology, to wit:



"'In ye time of our fathers Man still walked ye earth, as by tradition we

know.  It was a creature of exceeding great size, being compassed about

with a loose skin, sometimes of one color, sometimes of many, the which

it was able to cast at will; which being done, the hind legs were

discovered to be armed with short claws like to a mole's but broader, and

ye forelegs with fingers of a curious slimness and a length much more

prodigious than a frog's, armed also with broad talons for scratching in

ye earth for its food.  It had a sort of feathers upon its head such as

hath a rat, but longer, and a beak suitable for seeking its food by ye

smell thereof.  When it was stirred with happiness, it leaked water from

its eyes; and when it suffered or was sad, it manifested it with a

horrible hellish cackling clamor that was exceeding dreadful to hear and

made one long that it might rend itself and perish, and so end its

troubles.  Two Mans being together, they uttered noises at each other

like this: "Haw-haw-haw--dam good, dam good," together with other sounds

of more or less likeness to these, wherefore ye poets conceived that they

talked, but poets be always ready to catch at any frantic folly, God he

knows.  Sometimes this creature goeth about with a long stick ye which it

putteth to its face and bloweth fire and smoke through ye same with a

sudden and most damnable bruit and noise that doth fright its prey to

death, and so seizeth it in its talons and walketh away to its habitat,

consumed with a most fierce and devilish joy.'



"Now was the description set forth by our ancestors wonderfully indorsed

and confirmed by the fossils before us, as shall be seen.  The specimen

marked 'Captain Kidd' was examined in detail.  Upon its head and part of

its face was a sort of fur like that upon the tail of a horse.  With

great labor its loose skin was removed, whereupon its body was discovered

to be of a polished white texture, thoroughly petrified.  The straw it

had eaten, so many ages gone by, was still in its body, undigested--and

even in its legs.



"Surrounding these fossils were objects that would mean nothing to the

ignorant, but to the eye of science they were a revelation.  They laid

bare the secrets of dead ages.  These musty Memorials told us when Man

lived, and what were his habits.  For here, side by side with Man, were

the evidences that he had lived in the earliest ages of creation, the

companion of the other low orders of life that belonged to that forgotten

time.  Here was the fossil nautilus that sailed the primeval seas; here

was the skeleton of the mastodon, the ichthyosaurus, the cave-bear, the

prodigious elk.  Here, also, were the charred bones of some of these

extinct animals and of the young of Man's own species, split lengthwise,

showing that to his taste the marrow was a toothsome luxury.  It was

plain that Man had robbed those bones of their contents, since no tooth-

mark of any beast was upon them albeit the Tumble-Bug intruded the remark

that 'no beast could mark a bone with its teeth, anyway.'  Here were

proofs that Man had vague, groveling notions of art; for this fact was

conveyed by certain things marked with the untranslatable words, 'FLINT

HATCHETS, KNIVES, ARROW--HEADS, AND BONE ORNAMENTS OF PRIMEVAL MAN.'

Some of these seemed to be rude weapons chipped out of flint, and in a

secret place was found some more in process of construction, with this

untranslatable legend, on a thin, flimsy material, lying by:



     "'Jones, if you don't want to be discharged from the Musseum, make

     the next primeaveal weppons more careful--you couldn't even fool one

     of these sleepy old syentific grannys from the Coledge with the last

     ones.  And mind you the animles you carved on some of the Bone

     Ornaments is a blame sight too good for any primeaveal man that was

     ever fooled.--Varnum, Manager.'



"Back of the burial place was a mass of ashes, showing that Man always

had a feast at a funeral--else why the ashes in such a place; and

showing, also, that he believed in God and the immortality of the soil

--else why these solemn ceremonies?



"To, sum up.  We believe that Man had a written language.  We know that

he indeed existed at one time, and is not a myth; also, that he was the

companion of the cave-bear, the mastodon, and other extinct species; that

he cooked and ate them and likewise the young of his own kind; also, that

he bore rude weapons, and knew something of art; that he imagined he had

a soul, and pleased himself with the fancy that it was immortal.  But let

us not laugh; there may be creatures in existence to whom we and our

vanities and profundities may seem as ludicrous."



END OF PART SECOND









SOME LEARNED FABLES FOR GOOD OLD BOYS AND GIRLS



PART THIRD



Near the margin of the great river the scientists presently found a huge,

shapely stone, with this inscription:



     "In 1847, in the spring, the river overflowed its banks and covered

     the whole township.  The depth was from two to six feet.  More than

     900 head of cattle were lost, and many homes destroyed.  The Mayor

     ordered this memorial to be erected to perpetuate the event.  God

     spare us the repetition of it!"



With infinite trouble, Professor Woodlouse succeeded in making a

translation of this inscription, which was sent home, and straightway an

enormous excitement was created about it.  It confirmed, in a remarkable

way, certain treasured traditions of the ancients.  The translation was

slightly marred by one or two untranslatable words, but these did not

impair the general clearness of the meaning.  It is here presented:



     "One thousand eight hundred and forty-seven years ago, the (fires?)

     descended and consumed the whole city.  Only some nine hundred souls

     were saved, all others destroyed.  The (king?) commanded this stone

     to be set up to .  .  .  (untranslatable) .  .  .  prevent the

     repetition of it."



This was the first successful and satisfactory translation that had been

made of the mysterious character let behind him by extinct man, and it

gave Professor Woodlouse such reputation that at once every seat of

learning in his native land conferred a degree of the most illustrious

grade upon him, and it was believed that if he had been a soldier and had

turned his splendid talents to the extermination of a remote tribe of

reptiles, the king would have ennobled him and made him rich.  And this,

too, was the origin of that school of scientists called Manologists,

whose specialty is the deciphering of the ancient records of the extinct

bird termed Man.  [For it is now decided that Man was a bird and not a

reptile.]  But Professor Woodlouse began and remained chief of these, for

it was granted that no translations were ever so free from error as his.

Others made mistakes he seemed incapable of it.  Many a memorial of the

lost race was afterward found, but none ever attained to the renown and

veneration achieved by the "Mayoritish Stone" it being so called from the

word "Mayor" in it, which, being translated "King," "Mayoritish Stone"

was but another way of saying "King Stone."



Another time the expedition made a great "find."  It was a vast round

flattish mass, ten frog-spans in diameter and five or six high.

Professor Snail put on his spectacles and examined it all around, and

then climbed up and inspected the top.  He said:



"The result of my perlustration and perscontation of this isoperimetrical

protuberance is a belief at it is one of those rare and wonderful

creation left by the Mound Builders.  The fact that this one is

lamellibranchiate in its formation, simply adds to its interest as being

possibly of a different kind from any we read of in the records of

science, but yet in no manner marring its authenticity.  Let the

megalophonous grasshopper sound a blast and summon hither the perfunctory

and circumforaneous Tumble-Bug, to the end that excavations may be made

and learning gather new treasures."



Not a Tumble-Bug could be found on duty, so the Mound was excavated by a

working party of Ants.  Nothing was discovered.  This would have been a

great disappointment, had not the venerable Longlegs explained the

matter.  He said:



"It is now plain to me that the mysterious and forgotten race of Mound

Builders did not always erect these edifices as mausoleums, else in this

case, as in all previous cases, their skeletons would be found here,

along with the rude implements which the creatures used in life.  Is not

this manifest?"



"True! true!" from everybody.



"Then we have made a discovery of peculiar value here; a discovery which

greatly extends our knowledge of this creature in place of diminishing

it; a discovery which will add luster to the achievements of this

expedition and win for us the commendations of scholars everywhere.

For the absence of the customary relics here means nothing less than

this: The Mound Builder, instead of being the ignorant, savage reptile we

have been taught to consider him, was a creature of cultivation and high

intelligence, capable of not only appreciating worthy achievements of the

great and noble of his species, but of commemorating them!  Fellow-

scholars, this stately Mound is not a sepulcher, it is a monument!"



A profound impression was produced by this.



But it was interrupted by rude and derisive laughter--and the Tumble-Bug

appeared.



"A monument!" quoth he.  "A monument setup by a Mound Builder!  Aye, so

it is!  So it is, indeed, to the shrewd keen eye of science; but to an,

ignorant poor devil who has never seen a college, it is not a Monument,

strictly speaking, but is yet a most rich and noble property; and with

your worship's good permission I will proceed to manufacture it into

spheres of exceedings grace and--"



The Tumble-Bug was driven away with stripes, and the draftsmen of the

expedition were set to making views of the Monument from different

standpoints, while Professor Woodlouse, in a frenzy of scientific zeal,

traveled all over it and all around it hoping to find an inscription.

But if there had ever been one, it had decayed or been removed by some

vandal as a relic.



The views having been completed, it was now considered safe to load the

precious Monument itself upon the backs of four of the largest Tortoises

and send it home to the king's museum, which was done; and when it

arrived it was received with enormous Mat and escorted to its future

abiding-place by thousands of enthusiastic citizens, King Bullfrog XVI.

himself attending and condescending to sit enthroned upon it throughout

the progress.



The growing rigor of the weather was now admonishing the scientists to

close their labors for the present, so they made preparations to journey

homeward.  But even their last day among the Caverns bore fruit; for one

of the scholars found in an out-of-the-way corner of the Museum or

"Burial Place" a most strange and extraordinary thing.  It was nothing

less than a double Man-Bird lashed together breast to breast by a natural

ligament, and labeled with the untranslatable words, "Siamese Twins."

The official report concerning this thing closed thus:



"Wherefore it appears that there were in old times two distinct species

of this majestic fowl, the one being single and the other double.  Nature

has a reason for all things.  It is plain to the eye of science that the

Double-Man originally inhabited a region where dangers abounded; hence he

was paired together to the end that while one part slept the other might

watch; and likewise that, danger being discovered, there might always be

a double instead of a single power to oppose it.  All honor to the

mystery-dispelling eye of godlike Science!"



And near the Double Man-Bird was found what was plainly an ancient record

of his, marked upon numberless sheets of a thin white substance and bound

together.  Almost the first glance that Professor Woodlouse threw into it

revealed this following sentence, which he instantly translated and laid

before the scientists, in a tremble, and it uplifted every soul there

with exultation and astonishment:



"In truth it is believed by many that the lower animals reason and talk

together."



When the great official report of the expedition appeared, the above

sentence bore this comment:



"Then there are lower animals than Man!  This remarkable passage can mean

nothing else.  Man himself is extinct, but they may still exist.  What

can they be?  Where do they inhabit?  One's enthusiasm bursts all bounds

in the contemplation of the brilliant field of discovery and

investigation here thrown open to science.  We close our labors with the

humble prayer that your Majesty will immediately appoint a commission and

command it to rest not nor spare expense until the search for this

hitherto unsuspected race of the creatures of God shall be crowned with

success."



The expedition then journeyed homeward after its long absence and its

faithful endeavors, and was received with a mighty ovation by the whole

grateful country.  There were vulgar, ignorant carpers, of course, as

there always are and always will be; and naturally one of these was the

obscene Tumble-Bug.  He said that all he had learned by his travels was

that science only needed a spoonful of supposition to build a mountain of

demonstrated fact out of; and that for the future he meant to be content

with the knowledge that nature had made free to all creatures and not go

prying into the august secrets of the Deity.













MY LATE SENATORIAL SECRETARYSHIP--[Written about 1867.]



I am not a private secretary to a senator any more I now.  I held the

berth two months in security and in great cheerfulness of spirit, but my

bread began to return from over the waters then--that is to say, my works

came back and revealed themselves.  I judged it best to resign.  The way

of it was this.  My employer sent for me one morning tolerably early,

and, as soon as I had finished inserting some conundrums clandestinely

into his last great speech upon finance, I entered the presence.  There

was something portentous in his appearance.  His cravat was untied, his

hair was in a state of disorder, and his countenance bore about it the

signs of a suppressed storm.  He held a package of letters in his tense

grasp, and I knew that the dreaded Pacific mail was in.  He said:



"I thought you were worthy of confidence."



I said, "Yes, sir."



He said, "I gave you a letter from certain of my constituents in the

State of Nevada, asking the establishment of a post-office at Baldwin's

Ranch, and told you to answer it, as ingeniously as you could, with

arguments which should persuade them that there was no real necessity for

as office at that place."



I felt easier.  "Oh, if that is all, sir, I did do that."



"Yes, you did.  I will read your answer for your own humiliation:



                                        'WASHINGTON, Nov. 24

     'Messrs. Smith, Jones, and others.



     'GENTLEMEN:  What the mischief do you suppose you want with a

     post-office at Baldwin's Ranch?  It would not do you any good.

     If any letters came there, you couldn't read them, you know; and,

     besides, such letters as ought to pass through, with money in them,

     for other localities, would not be likely to get through, you must

     perceive at once; and that would make trouble for us all.  No, don't

     bother about a post-office in your camp.  I have your best interests

     at heart, and feel that it would only be an ornamental folly.  What

     you want is a nice jail, you know--a nice, substantial jail and a

     free school.  These will be a lasting benefit to you.  These will

     make you really contented and happy.  I will move in the matter at

     once.

                    'Very truly, etc.,

                              Mark Twain,

                    'For James W. N------, U. S. Senator.'



"That is the way you answered that letter.  Those people say they will

hang me, if I ever enter that district again; and I am perfectly

satisfied they will, too."



"Well, sir, I did not know I was doing any harm.  I only wanted to

convince them."



"Ah.  Well, you did convince them, I make no manner of doubt.  Now, here

is another specimen.  I gave you a petition from certain gentlemen of

Nevada, praying that I would get a bill through Congress incorporating

the Methodist Episcopal Church of the State of Nevada.  I told you to

say, in reply, that the creation of such a law came more properly within

the province of the state legislature; and to endeavor to show them that,

in the present feebleness of the religious element in that new

commonwealth, the expediency of incorporating the church was

questionable.  What did you write?



                                        "'WASHINGTON, Nov. 24.



     "'Rev. John Halifax and others.



     "'GENTLEMEN: You will have to go to the state legislature about that

     speculation of yours--Congress don't know anything about religion.

     But don't you hurry to go there, either; because this thing you

     propose to do out in that new country isn't expedient--in fact, it

     is ridiculous.  Your religious people there are too feeble, in

     intellect, in morality, in piety in everything, pretty much.  You

     had better drop this--you can't make it work.  You can't issue stock

     on an incorporation like that--or if you could, it would only keep

     you in trouble all the time.  The other denominations would abuse

     it, and "bear" it, and "sell it short," and break it down.  They

     would do with it just as they would with one of your silver-mines

     out there--they would try to make all the world believe it was

     "wildcat."  You ought not to do anything that is calculated to bring

     a sacred thing into disrepute.  You ought to be ashamed of

     yourselves that is what I think about it.  You close your petition

     with the words: "And we will ever pray."  I think you had better you

     need to do it.

                         "'Very truly, etc.,

                                   "'MARK TWAIN,

                         "'For James W. N-----, U. S. Senator.'





"That luminous epistle finishes me with the religious element among my

constituents.  But that my political murder might be made sure, some evil

instinct prompted me to hand you this memorial from the grave company of

elders composing the board of aldermen of the city of San Francisco, to

try your hand upon a, memorial praying that the city's right to the

water-lots upon the city front might be established by law of Congress.

I told you this was a dangerous matter to move in.  I told you to write a

non-committal letter to the aldermen--an ambiguous letter--a letter that

should avoid, as far as possible, all real consideration and discussion

of the water-lot question.  If there is any feeling left in you--any

shame--surely this letter you wrote, in obedience to that order, ought to

evoke it, when its words fall upon your ears:



                                        'WASHINGTON, Nov. 27



     'The Honorable Board of Aldermen, etc.



     'GENTLEMEN: George Washington, the revered Father of his Country,

     is dead.  His long and brilliant career is closed, alas! forever.

     He was greatly respected in this section of the country, and his

     untimely decease cast a gloom over the whole community.  He died on

     the 14th day of December, 1799.  He passed peacefully away from the

     scene of his honors and his great achievements, the most lamented

     hero and the best beloved that ever earth hath yielded unto Death.

     At such a time as this, you speak of water-lots! what a lot was his!



     'What is fame!  Fame is an accident.  Sir Isaac Newton discovered

     an apple falling to the ground--a trivial discovery, truly, and one

     which a million men had made before him--but his parents were

     influential, and so they tortured that small circumstance into

     something wonderful, and, lo! the simple world took up the shout

     and, in almost the twinkling of an eye, that man was famous.

     Treasure these thoughts.



     'Poesy, sweet poesy, who shall estimate what the world owes to

     thee!



     "Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow--

     And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go."



                    "Jack and Gill went up the hill

                    To draw a pail of water;

                    Jack fell down and broke his crown,

                    And Gill came tumbling after."



     'For simplicity, elegance of diction, and freedom from immoral

     tendencies, I regard those two poems in the light of gems.  They

     are suited to all grades of intelligence, to every sphere of life

    --to the field, to the nursery, to the guild.  Especially should

     no Board of Aldermen be without them.



     'Venerable fossils! write again.  Nothing improves one so much as

     friendly correspondence.  Write again--and if there is anything in

     this memorial of yours that refers to anything in particular, do

     not be backward about explaining it.  We shall always be happy to

     hear you chirp.

                         'Very truly, etc.,

                                   "'MARK TWAIN,

                         'For James W. N-----, U. S. Senator.'





"That is an atrocious, a ruinous epistle!  Distraction!"



"Well, sir, I am really sorry if there is anything wrong about it--but

--but it appears to me to dodge the water-lot question."



"Dodge the mischief!  Oh!--but never mind.  As long as destruction must

come now, let it be complete.  Let it be complete--let this last of your

performances, which I am about to read, make a finality of it.  I am a

ruined man.  I had my misgivings when I gave you the letter from

Humboldt, asking that the post route from Indian Gulch to Shakespeare Gap

and intermediate points be changed partly to the old Mormon trail.  But I

told you it was a delicate question, and warned you to deal with it

deftly--to answer it dubiously, and leave them a little in the dark.

And your fatal imbecility impelled you to make this disastrous reply.

I should think you would stop your ears, if you are not dead to all

shame:



                                        "'WASHINGTON, Nov. 30.



     "'Messes. Perkins, Wagner, et at.



     "'GENTLEMEN: It is a delicate question about this Indian trail, but,

     handled with proper deftness and dubiousness, I doubt not we shall

     succeed in some measure or otherwise, because the place where the

     route leaves the Lassen Meadows, over beyond where those two Shawnee

     chiefs, Dilapidated Vengeance and Biter-of-the-Clouds, were scalped

     last winter, this being the favorite direction to some, but others

     preferring something else in consequence of things, the Mormon trail

     leaving Mosby's at three in the morning, and passing through Jaw

     bone Flat to Blucher, and then down by Jug-Handle, the road passing

     to the right of it, and naturally leaving it on the right, too, and

     Dawson's on the left of the trail where it passes to the left of

     said Dawson's and onward thence to Tomahawk, thus making the route

     cheaper, easier of access to all who can get at it, and compassing

     all the desirable objects so considered by others, and, therefore,

     conferring the most good upon the greatest number, and,

     consequently, I am encouraged to hope we shall.  However, I shall be

     ready, and happy, to afford you still further information upon the

     subject, from time to time, as you may desire it and the Post-office

     Department be enabled to furnish it to me.

                              "'Very truly, etc.,

                                        "'MARK TWAIN,

                              "'For James W. N-----, U. S. Senator.'





"There--now what do you think of that?"



"Well, I don't know, sir.  It--well, it appears to me--to be dubious

enough."



"Du--leave the house!  I am a ruined man. Those Humboldt savages never

will forgive me for tangling their brains up with this inhuman letter.

I have lost the respect of the Methodist Church, the board of aldermen--"



"Well, I haven't anything to say about that, because I may have missed it

a little in their cases, but I was too many for the Baldwin's Ranch

people, General!"



"Leave the house!  Leave it forever and forever, too."



I regarded that as a sort of covert intimation that my service could be

dispensed with, and so I resigned.  I never will be a private secretary

to a senator again.  You can't please that kind of people.  They don't

know anything.  They can't appreciate a party's efforts.













A FASHION ITEM--[Written about 1867.]



At General G----'s reception the other night, the most fashionably

dressed lady was Mrs. G. C.  She wore a pink satin dress, plain in front

but with a good deal of rake to it--to the train, I mean; it was said to

be two or three yards long.  One could see it creeping along the floor

some little time after the woman was gone.  Mrs. C. wore also a white

bodice, cut bias, with Pompadour sleeves, flounced with ruches; low neck,

with the inside handkerchief not visible, with white kid gloves.  She had

on a pearl necklace, which glinted lonely, high up the midst of that

barren waste of neck and shoulders.  Her hair was frizzled into a tangled

chaparral, forward of her ears, aft it was drawn together, and compactly

bound and plaited into a stump like a pony's tail, and furthermore was

canted upward at a sharp angle, and ingeniously supported by a red velvet

crupper, whose forward extremity was made fast with a half-hitch around a

hairpin on the top of her head.  Her whole top hamper was neat and

becoming.  She had a beautiful complexion when she first came, but it

faded out by degrees in an unaccountable way.  However, it is not lost

for good.  I found the most of it on my shoulder afterward.  (I stood

near the door when she squeezed out with the throng.)  There were other

ladies present, but I only took notes of one as a specimen.  I would

gladly enlarge upon the subject were I able to do it justice.













RILEY-NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT



One of the best men in Washington--or elsewhere--is RILEY, correspondent

of one of the great San Francisco dailies.



Riley is full of humor, and has an unfailing vein of irony, which makes

his conversation to the last degree entertaining (as long as the remarks

are about somebody else).  But notwithstanding the possession of these

qualities, which should enable a man to write a happy and an appetizing

letter, Riley's newspaper letters often display a more than earthly

solemnity, and likewise an unimaginative devotion to petrified facts,

which surprise and distress all men who know him in his unofficial

character.  He explains this curious thing by saying that his employers

sent him to Washington to write facts, not fancy, and that several times

he has come near losing his situation by inserting humorous remarks

which, not being looked for at headquarters, and consequently not

understood, were thought to be dark and bloody speeches intended to

convey signals and warnings to murderous secret societies, or something

of that kind, and so were scratched out with a shiver and a prayer and

cast into the stove.  Riley says that sometimes he is so afflicted with

a yearning to write a sparkling and absorbingly readable letter that he

simply cannot resist it, and so he goes to his den and revels in the

delight of untrammeled scribbling; and then, with suffering such as only

a mother can know, he destroys the pretty children of his fancy and

reduces his letter to the required dismal accuracy.  Having seen Riley do

this very thing more than once, I know whereof I speak.  Often I have

laughed with him over a happy passage, and grieved to see him plow his

pen through it.  He would say, "I had to write that or die; and I've got

to scratch it out or starve.  They wouldn't stand it, you know."



I think Riley is about the most entertaining company I ever saw.  We

lodged together in many places in Washington during the winter of '67-8,

moving comfortably from place to place, and attracting attention by

paying our board--a course which cannot fail to make a person conspicuous

in Washington.  Riley would tell all about his trip to California in the

early days, by way of the Isthmus and the San Juan River; and about his

baking bread in San Francisco to gain a living, and setting up tenpins,

and practising law, and opening oysters, and delivering lectures, and

teaching French, and tending bar, and reporting for the newspapers, and

keeping dancing-schools, and interpreting Chinese in the courts--which

latter was lucrative, and Riley was doing handsomely and laying up a

little money when people began to find fault because his translations

were too "free," a thing for which Riley considered he ought not to be

held responsible, since he did not know a word of the Chinese tongue, and

only adopted interpreting as a means of gaining an honest livelihood.

Through the machinations of enemies he was removed from the position of

official interpreter, and a man put in his place who was familiar with

the Chinese language, but did not know any English.  And Riley used to

tell about publishing a newspaper up in what is Alaska now, but was only

an iceberg then, with a population composed of bears, walruses, Indians,

and other animals; and how the iceberg got adrift at last, and left all

his paying subscribers behind, and as soon as the commonwealth floated

out of the jurisdiction of Russia the people rose and threw off their

allegiance and ran up the English flag, calculating to hook on and become

an English colony as they drifted along down the British Possessions; but

a land breeze and a crooked current carried them by, and they ran up the

Stars and Stripes and steered for California, missed the connection again

and swore allegiance to Mexico, but it wasn't any use; the anchors came

home every time, and away they went with the northeast trades drifting

off sideways toward the Sandwich Islands, whereupon they ran up the

Cannibal flag and had a grand human barbecue in honor of it, in which it

was noticed that the better a man liked a friend the better he enjoyed

him; and as soon as they got fairly within the tropics the weather got so

fearfully hot that the iceberg began to melt, and it got so sloppy under

foot that it was almost impossible for ladies to get about at all; and at

last, just as they came in sight of the islands, the melancholy remnant

of the once majestic iceberg canted first to one side and then to the

other, and then plunged under forever, carrying the national archives

along with it--and not only the archives and the populace, but some

eligible town lots which had increased in value as fast as they

diminished in size in the tropics, and which Riley could have sold at

thirty cents a pound and made himself rich if he could have kept the

province afloat ten hours longer and got her into port.



Riley is very methodical, untiringly accommodating, never forgets

anything that is to be attended to, is a good son, a stanch friend, and a

permanent reliable enemy.  He will put himself to any amount of trouble

to oblige a body, and therefore always has his hands full of things to be

done for the helpless and the shiftless.  And he knows how to do nearly

everything, too.  He is a man whose native benevolence is a well-spring

that never goes dry.  He stands always ready to help whoever needs help,

as far as he is able--and not simply with his money, for that is a cheap

and common charity, but with hand and brain, and fatigue of limb and

sacrifice of time.  This sort of men is rare.



Riley has a ready wit, a quickness and aptness at selecting and applying

quotations, and a countenance that is as solemn and as blank as the back

side of a tombstone when he is delivering a particularly exasperating

joke.  One night a negro woman was burned to death in a house next door

to us, and Riley said that our landlady would be oppressively emotional

at breakfast, because she generally made use of such opportunities as

offered, being of a morbidly sentimental turn, and so we should find it

best to let her talk along and say nothing back--it was the only way to

keep her tears out of the gravy.  Riley said there never was a funeral in

the neighborhood but that the gravy was watery for a week.



And, sure enough, at breakfast the landlady was down in the very sloughs

of woe--entirely brokenhearted.  Everything she looked at reminded her of

that poor old negro woman, and so the buckwheat cakes made her sob, the

coffee forced a groan, and when the beefsteak came on she fetched a wail

that made our hair rise.  Then she got to talking about deceased, and

kept up a steady drizzle till both of us were soaked through and through.

Presently she took a fresh breath and said, with a world of sobs:



"Ah, to think of it, only to think of it!--the poor old faithful

creature.  For she was so faithful.  Would you believe it, she had been a

servant in that selfsame house and that selfsame family for twenty seven

years come Christmas, and never a cross word and never a lick!  And, oh,

to think she should meet such a death at last!--a-sitting over the red

hot stove at three o'clock in the morning and went to sleep and fell on

it and was actually roasted!  Not just frizzled up a bit, but literally

roasted to a crisp!  Poor faithful creature, how she was cooked!  I am

but a poor woman, but even if I have to scrimp to do it, I will put up a

tombstone over that lone sufferer's grave--and Mr. Riley if you would

have the goodness to think up a little epitaph to put on it which would

sort of describe the awful way in which she met her--"



"Put it, 'Well done, good and faithful servant,'" said Riley, and never

smiled.













A FINE OLD MAN



John Wagner, the oldest man in Buffalo--one hundred and four years old

--recently walked a mile and a half in two weeks.



He is as cheerful and bright as any of these other old men that charge

around so persistently and tiresomely in the newspapers, and in every way

as remarkable.



Last November he walked five blocks in a rainstorm, without any shelter

but an umbrella, and cast his vote for Grant, remarking that he had voted

for forty-seven presidents--which was a lie.



His "second crop" of rich brown hair arrived from New York yesterday, and

he has a new set of teeth coming from Philadelphia.



He is to be married next week to a girl one hundred and two years old,

who still takes in washing.



They have been engaged eighty years, but their parents persistently

refused their consent until three days ago.



John Wagner is two years older than the Rhode Island veteran, and yet has

never tasted a drop of liquor in his life--unless-unless you count

whisky.













SCIENCE V.S. LUCK--[Written about 1867.]



At that time, in Kentucky (said the Hon. Mr. K-----); the law was very

strict against what is termed "games of chance."  About a dozen of the

boys were detected playing "seven up" or "old sledge" for money, and the

grand jury found a true bill against them.  Jim Sturgis was retained to

defend them when the case came up, of course. The more he studied over

the matter, and looked into the evidence, the plainer it was that he must

lose a case at last--there was no getting around that painful fact.

Those boys had certainly been betting money on a game of chance.  Even

public sympathy was roused in behalf of Sturgis.  People said it was a

pity to see him mar his successful career with a big prominent case like

this, which must go against him.



But after several restless nights an inspired idea flashed upon Sturgis,

and he sprang out of bed delighted.  He thought he saw his way through.

The next day he whispered around a little among his clients and a few

friends, and then when the case came up in court he acknowledged the

seven-up and the betting, and, as his sole defense, had the astounding

effrontery to put in the plea that old sledge was not a game of chance!

There was the broadest sort of a smile all over the faces of that

sophisticated audience.  The judge smiled with the rest.  But Sturgis

maintained a countenance whose earnestness was even severe.  The opposite

counsel tried to ridicule him out of his position, and did not succeed.

The judge jested in a ponderous judicial way about the thing, but did not

move him.  The matter was becoming grave.  The judge lost a little of his

patience, and said the joke had gone far enough.  Jim Sturgis said he

knew of no joke in the matter--his clients could not be punished for

indulging in what some people chose to consider a game of chance until it

was proven that it was a game of chance.  Judge and counsel said that

would be an easy matter, and forthwith called Deacons Job, Peters, Burke,

and Johnson, and Dominies Wirt and Miggles, to testify; and they

unanimously and with strong feeling put down the legal quibble of Sturgis

by pronouncing that old sledge was a game of chance.



"What do you call it now?" said the judge.



"I call it a game of science!" retorted Sturgis; "and I'll prove it,

too!"



They saw his little game.



He brought in a cloud of witnesses, and produced an overwhelming mass of

testimony, to show that old sledge was not a game of chance but a game of

science.



Instead of being the simplest case in the world, it had somehow turned

out to be an excessively knotty one.  The judge scratched his head over

it awhile, and said there was no way of coming to a determination,

because just as many men could be brought into court who would testify on

one side as could be found to testify on the other.  But he said he was

willing to do the fair thing by all parties, and would act upon any

suggestion Mr. Sturgis would make for the solution of the difficulty.



Mr. Sturgis was on his feet in a second.



"Impanel a jury of six of each, Luck versus Science.  Give them candles

and a couple of decks of cards.  Send them into the jury-room, and just

abide by the result!"



There was no disputing the fairness of the proposition.  The four deacons

and the two dominies were sworn in as the "chance" jurymen, and six

inveterate old seven-up professors were chosen to represent the "science"

side of the issue.  They retired to the jury-room.



In about two hours Deacon Peters sent into court to borrow three dollars

from a friend.  [Sensation.]  In about two hours more Dominie Miggles

sent into court to borrow a "stake" from a friend.  [Sensation.]  During

the next three or four hours the other dominie and the other deacons sent

into court for small loans.  And still the packed audience waited, for it

was a prodigious occasion in Bull's Corners, and one in which every

father of a family was necessarily interested.



The rest of the story can be told briefly.  About daylight the jury came

in, and Deacon Job, the foreman, read the following:



     VERDICT:



     We, the jury in the case of the Commonwealth of Kentucky vs. John

     Wheeler et al., have carefully considered the points of the case,

     and tested the merits of the several theories advanced, and do

     hereby unanimously decide that the game commonly known as old sledge

     or seven-up is eminently a game of science and not of chance.  In

     demonstration whereof it is hereby and herein stated, iterated,

     reiterated, set forth, and made manifest that, during the entire

     night, the "chance" men never won a game or turned a jack, although

     both feats were common and frequent to the opposition; and

     furthermore, in support of this our verdict, we call attention to

     the significant fact that the "chance" men are all busted, and the

     "science" men have got the money.  It is the deliberate opinion of

     this jury, that the "chance" theory concerning seven-up is a

     pernicious doctrine, and calculated to inflict untold suffering and

     pecuniary loss upon any community that takes stock in it.



"That is the way that seven-up came to be set apart and particularized in

the statute-books of Kentucky as being a game not of chance but of

science, and therefore not punishable under the law," said Mr. K-----.

"That verdict is of record, and holds good to this day."













THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN--[Written about 1870.]



["Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow just

as well."--B. F.]



This party was one of those persons whom they call Philosophers.  He was

twins, being born simultaneously in two different houses in the city of

Boston.  These houses remain unto this day, and have signs upon them

worded in accordance with the facts.  The signs are considered well

enough to have, though not necessary, because the inhabitants point out

the two birthplaces to the stranger anyhow, and sometimes as often as

several times in the same day.  The subject of this memoir was of a

vicious disposition, and early prostituted his talents to the invention

of maxims and aphorisms calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising

generation of all subsequent ages.  His simplest acts, also, were

contrived with a view to their being held up for the emulation of boys

forever--boys who might otherwise have been happy.  It was in this spirit

that he became the son of a soap-boiler, and probably for no other reason

than that the efforts of all future boys who tried to be anything might

be looked upon with suspicion unless they were the sons of soap-boilers.

With a malevolence which is without parallel in history, he would work

all day, and then sit up nights, and let on to be studying algebra by the

light of a smoldering fire, so that all other boys might have to do that

also, or else have Benjamin Franklin thrown up to them.  Not satisfied

with these proceedings, he had a fashion of living wholly on bread and

water, and studying astronomy at meal-time--a thing which has brought

affliction to millions of boys since, whose fathers had read Franklin's

pernicious biography.



His maxims were full of animosity toward boys.  Nowadays a boy cannot

follow out a single natural instinct without tumbling over some of those

everlasting aphorisms and hearing from Franklin, on the spot.  If he buys

two cents' worth of peanuts, his father says, "Remember what Franklin has

said, my son--'A grout a day's a penny a year"'; and the comfort is all

gone out of those peanuts.  If he wants to spin his top when he has done

work, his father quotes, "Procrastination is the thief of time."  If he

does a virtuous action, he never gets anything for it, because "Virtue is

its own reward."  And that boy is hounded to death and robbed of his

natural rest, because Franklin, said once, in one of his inspired flights

of malignity:



               Early to bed and early to rise

               Makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise.



As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on

such terms.  The sorrow that that maxim has cost me, through my parents,

experimenting on me with it, tongue cannot tell. The legitimate result is

my present state of general debility, indigence, and mental aberration.

My parents used to have me up before nine o'clock in the morning

sometimes when I was a boy.  If they had let me take my natural rest

where would I have been now?  Keeping store, no doubt, and respected by

all.



And what an adroit old adventurer the subject of this memoir was!

In order to get a chance to fly his kite on Sunday he used to hang a key

on the string and let on to be fishing for lightning.  And a guileless

public would go home chirping about the "wisdom" and the "genius" of the

hoary Sabbath-breaker.  If anybody caught him playing "mumblepeg" by

himself, after the age of sixty, he would immediately appear to be

ciphering out how the grass grew--as if it was any of his business.

My grandfather knew him well, and he says Franklin was always

fixed--always ready.  If a body, during his old age, happened on him

unexpectedly when he was catching flies, or making mud-pies, or sliding

on a cellar door, he would immediately look wise, and rip out a maxim,

and walk off with his nose in the air and his cap turned wrong side

before, trying to appear absent-minded and eccentric.  He was a hard lot.



He invented a stove that would smoke your head off in four hours by the

clock.  One can see the almost devilish satisfaction he took in it by his

giving it his name.



He was always proud of telling how he entered Philadelphia for the first

time, with nothing in the world but two shillings in his pocket and four

rolls of bread under his arm.  But really, when you come to examine it

critically, it was nothing.  Anybody could have done it.



To the subject of this memoir belongs the honor of recommending the army

to go back to bows and arrows in place of bayonets and muskets.

He observed, with his customary force, that the bayonet was very well

under some circumstances, but that he doubted whether it could be used

with accuracy at a long range.



Benjamin Franklin did a great many notable things for his country,

and made her young name to be honored in many lands as the mother of such

a son.  It is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up.

No; the simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his,

which he worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that

had become wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel;

and also to snub his stove, and his military inspirations, his unseemly

endeavor to make himself conspicuous when he entered Philadelphia, and

his flying his kite and fooling away his time in all sorts of such ways

when he ought to have been foraging for soap-fat, or constructing

candles.  I merely desired to do away with somewhat of the prevalent

calamitous idea among heads of families that Franklin acquired his great

genius by working for nothing, studying by moonlight, and getting up in

the night instead of waiting till morning like a Christian; and that this

program, rigidly inflicted, will make a Franklin of every father's fool.

It is time these gentlemen were finding out that these execrable

eccentricities of instinct and conduct are only the evidences of genius,

not the creators of it.  I wish I had been the father of my parents long

enough to make them comprehend this truth, and thus prepare them to let

their son have an easier time of it.  When I was a child I had to boil

soap, notwithstanding my father was wealthy, and I had to get up early

and study geometry at breakfast, and peddle my own poetry, and do

everything just as Franklin did, in the solemn hope that I would be a

Franklin some day.  And here I am.













MR. BLOKE'S ITEM--[Written about 1865.]



Our esteemed friend, Mr. John William Bloke, of Virginia City, walked

into the office where we are sub-editor at a late hour last night, with

an expression of profound and heartfelt suffering upon his countenance,

and, sighing heavily, laid the following item reverently upon the desk,

and walked slowly out again.  He paused a moment at the door, and seemed

struggling to command his feelings sufficiently to enable him to speak,

and then, nodding his head toward his manuscript, ejaculated in a broken

voice, "Friend of mine--oh! how sad!" and burst into tears.  We were so

moved at his distress that we did not think to call him back and endeavor

to comfort him until he was gone, and it was too late.  The paper had

already gone to press, but knowing that our friend would consider the

publication of this item important, and cherishing the hope that to print

it would afford a melancholy satisfaction to his sorrowing heart, we

stopped, the press at once and inserted it in our columns:



     DISTRESSING ACCIDENT.--Last evening, about six o'clock, as Mr.

     William Schuyler, an old and respectable citizen of South Park, was

     leaving his residence to go down-town, as has been his usual custom

     for many years with the exception only of a short interval in the

     spring of 1850, during which he was confined to his bed by injuries

     received in attempting to stop a runaway horse by thoughtlessly

     placing himself directly in its wake and throwing up his hands and

     shouting, which if he had done so even a single moment sooner, must

     inevitably have frightened the animal still more instead of checking

     its speed, although disastrous enough to himself as it was, and

     rendered more melancholy and distressing by reason of the presence

     of his wife's mother, who was there and saw the sad occurrence

     notwithstanding it is at least likely, though not necessarily so,

     that she should be reconnoitering in another direction when

     incidents occur, not being vivacious and on the lookout, as a

     general thing, but even the reverse, as her own mother is said to

     have stated, who is no more, but died in the full hope of a glorious

     resurrection, upwards of three years ago; aged eighty-six, being a

     Christian woman and without guile, as it were, or property, in

     consequence of the fire of 1849, which destroyed every single thing

     she had in the world.  But such is life.  Let us all take warning by

     this solemn occurrence, and let us endeavor so to conduct ourselves

     that when we come to die we can do it.  Let us place our hands upon

     our heart, and say with earnestness and sincerity that from this day

     forth we will beware of the intoxicating bowl.--'First Edition of

     the Californian.'



The head editor has been in here raising the mischief, and tearing his

hair and kicking the furniture about, and abusing me like a pickpocket.

He says that every time he leaves me in charge of the paper for half an

hour I get imposed upon by the first infant or the first idiot that comes

along.  And he says that that distressing item of Mr. Bloke's is nothing

but a lot of distressing bash, and has no point to it, and no sense in

it, and no information in it, and that there was no sort of necessity for

stopping the press to publish it.



Now all this comes of being good-hearted.  If I had been as

unaccommodating and unsympathetic as some people, I would have told

Mr. Bloke that I wouldn't receive his communication at such a late hour;

but no, his snuffling distress touched my heart, and I jumped at the

chance of doing something to modify his misery.  I never read his item to

see whether there was anything wrong about it, but hastily wrote the few

lines which preceded it, and sent it to the printers.  And what has my

kindness done for me?  It has done nothing but bring down upon me a storm

of abuse and ornamental blasphemy.



Now I will read that item myself, and see if there is any foundation for

all this fuss.  And if there is, the author of it shall hear from me.



I have read it, and I am bound to admit that it seems a little mixed at a

first glance.  However, I will peruse it once more.



I have read it again, and it does really seem a good deal more mixed than

ever.



I have read it over five times, but if I can get at the meaning of it I

wish I may get my just deserts.  It won't bear analysis.  There are

things about it which I cannot understand at all.  It don't say whatever

became of William Schuyler.  It just says enough about him to get one

interested in his career, and then drops him.  Who is William Schuyler,

anyhow, and what part of South Park did he live in, and if he started

down-town at six o'clock, did he ever get there, and if he did, did

anything happen to him?  Is he the individual that met with the

"distressing accident"?  Considering the elaborate circumstantiality of

detail observable in the item, it seems to me that it ought to contain

more information than it does.  On the contrary, it is obscure and not

only obscure, but utterly incomprehensible.  Was the breaking of Mr.

Schuyler's leg, fifteen years ago, the "distressing accident" that

plunged Mr. Bloke into unspeakable grief, and caused him to come up here

at dead of night and stop our press to acquaint the world with the

circumstance?  Or did the "distressing accident" consist in the

destruction of Schuyler's mother-in-law's property in early times?

Or did it consist in the death of that person herself three years ago

(albeit it does not appear that she died by accident)?  In a word, what

did that "distressing accident" consist in?  What did that driveling ass

of a Schuyler stand in the wake of a runaway horse for, with his shouting

and gesticulating, if he wanted to stop him?  And how the mischief could

he get run over by a horse that had already passed beyond him?  And what

are we to take "warning" by?  And how is this extraordinary chapter of

incomprehensibilities going to be a "lesson" to us?  And, above all, what

has the intoxicating "bowl" got to do with it, anyhow?  It is not stated

that Schuyler drank, or that his wife drank, or that his mother-in-law

drank, or that the horse drank wherefore, then, the reference to the

intoxicating bowl?  It does seem to me that if Mr. Bloke had let the

intoxicating bowl alone himself, he never would have got into so much

trouble about this exasperating imaginary accident.  I have read this.

absurd item over and over again, with all its insinuating plausibility,

until my head swims; but I can make neither head nor tail of it.  There

certainly seems to have been an accident of some kind or other, but it is

impossible to determine what the nature of it was, or who was the

sufferer by it.  I do not like to do it, but I feel compelled to request

that the next time anything happens to one of Mr. Bloke's friends, he

will append such explanatory notes to his account of it as will enable me

to find out what sort of an accident it was and whom it happened to.  I

had rather all his friends should die than that I should be driven to the

verge of lunacy again in trying to cipher out the meaning of another such

production as the above.













A MEDIEVAL ROMANCE





CHAPTER I



THE SECRET REVEALED.



It was night.  Stillness reigned in the grand old feudal castle of

Klugenstein.  The year 1222 was drawing to a close.  Far away up in the

tallest of the castle's towers a single light glimmered.  A secret

council was being held there.  The stern old lord of Klugenstein sat in

a chair of state meditating.  Presently he, said, with a tender

accent:



"My daughter!"



A young man of noble presence, clad from head to heel in knightly mail,

answered:



"Speak, father!"



"My daughter, the time is come for the revealing of the mystery that hath

puzzled all your young life.  Know, then, that it had its birth in the

matters which I shall now unfold.  My brother Ulrich is the great Duke of

Brandenburgh.  Our father, on his deathbed, decreed that if no son were

born to Ulrich, the succession should pass to my house, provided a son

were born to me.  And further, in case no son, were born to either, but

only daughters, then the succession should pass to Ulrich's daughter,

if she proved stainless; if she did not, my daughter should succeed,

if she retained a blameless name.  And so I, and my old wife here, prayed

fervently for the good boon of a son, but the prayer was vain.  You were

born to us.  I was in despair.  I saw the mighty prize slipping from my

grasp, the splendid dream vanishing away.  And I had been so hopeful!

Five years had Ulrich lived in wedlock, and yet his wife had borne no

heir of either sex.



"'But hold,' I said, 'all is not lost.'  A saving scheme had shot athwart

my brain.  You were born at midnight.  Only the leech, the nurse, and six

waiting-women knew your sex.  I hanged them every one before an hour had

sped.  Next morning all the barony went mad with rejoicing over the

proclamation that a son was born to Klugenstein, an heir to mighty

Brandenburgh!  And well the secret has been kept.  Your mother's own

sister nursed your infancy, and from that time forward we feared nothing.



"When you were ten years old, a daughter was born to Ulrich.  We grieved,

but hoped for good results from measles, or physicians, or other natural

enemies of infancy, but were always disappointed.  She lived, she throve-

-Heaven's malison upon her!  But it is nothing.  We are safe.  For,

Ha-ha! have we not a son?  And is not our son the future Duke?  Our well-

beloved Conrad, is it not so?--for, woman of eight-and-twenty years--as

you are, my child, none other name than that hath ever fallen to you!



"Now it hath come to pass that age hath laid its hand upon my brother,

and he waxes feeble.  The cares of state do tax him sore.  Therefore he

wills that you shall come to him and be already Duke--in act, though not

yet in name.  Your servitors are ready--you journey forth to-night.



"Now listen well.  Remember every word I say.  There is a law as old as

Germany that if any woman sit for a single instant in the great ducal

chair before she hath been absolutely crowned in presence of the people,

SHE SHALL DIE! So heed my words.  Pretend humility.  Pronounce your

judgments from the Premier's chair, which stands at the foot of the

throne.  Do this until you are crowned and safe.  It is not likely that

your sex will ever be discovered; but still it is the part of wisdom to

make all things as safe as may be in this treacherous earthly life."



"Oh; my father, is it for this my life hath been a lie!  Was it that I

might cheat my unoffending cousin of her rights?  Spare me, father,

spare your child!"



"What, huzzy!  Is this my reward for the august fortune my brain has

wrought for thee?  By the bones of my father, this puling sentiment of

thine but ill accords with my humor.



"Betake thee to the Duke, instantly!  And beware how thou meddlest with my

purpose!"



Let this suffice, of the conversation.  It is enough for us to know that

the prayers, the entreaties and the tears of the gentle-natured girl

availed nothing.  They nor anything could move the stout old lord of

Klugenstein.  And so, at last, with a heavy heart, the daughter saw the

castle gates close behind her, and found herself riding away in the

darkness surrounded by a knightly array of armed, vassals and a brave

following of servants.



The old baron sat silent for many minutes after his daughter's departure,

and then he turned to his sad wife and said:



"Dame, our matters seem speeding fairly.  It is full three months since I

sent the shrewd and handsome Count Detzin on his devilish mission to my

brother's daughter Constance.  If he fail, we are not wholly safe; but if

he do succeed, no power can bar our girl from being Duchess e'en though

ill-fortune should decree she never should be Duke!"



"My heart is full of bodings, yet all may still be well."



"Tush, woman! Leave the owls to croak.  To bed with ye, and dream of

Brandenburgh and grandeur!"









CHAPTER II.



FESTIVITY AND TEARS



Six days after the occurrences related in the above chapter, the

brilliant capital of the Duchy of Brandenburgh was resplendent with

military pageantry, and noisy with the rejoicings of loyal multitudes;

for Conrad, the young heir to the crown, was come.  The old Duke's, heart

was full of happiness, for Conrad's handsome person and graceful bearing

had won his love at once.  The great halls of tie palace were thronged

with nobles, who welcomed Conrad bravely; and so bright and happy did all

things seem, that he felt his fears and sorrows passing away and giving

place to a comforting contentment.



But in a remote apartment of the palace a scene of a different nature

was, transpiring.  By a window stood the Duke's only child, the Lady

Constance.  Her eyes were red and swollen, and full of tears.  She was

alone.  Presently she fell to weeping anew, and said aloud:



"The villain Detzin is gone--has fled the dukedom!  I could not believe

it at first, but alas! it is too true.  And I loved him so.  I dared to

love him though I knew the Duke my father would never let me wed him.

I loved him--but now I hate him!  With all, my soul I hate him!  Oh, what

is to become of me!  I am lost, lost, lost!.  I shall go mad!"









CHAPTER III.



THE PLOT THICKENS.



Few months drifted by.  All men published the praises of the young

Conrad's government and extolled the wisdom of his judgments, the

mercifulness of his sentences, and the modesty with which he bore himself

in his great office.  The old Duke soon gave everything into his hands,

and sat apart and listened with proud satisfaction while his heir

delivered the decrees of the crown from the seat of the premier.

It seemed plain that one so loved and praised and honored of all men

as Conrad was, could not be otherwise than happy.  But strange enough,

he was not.  For he saw with dismay that the Princess Constance had begun

to love him!  The love of, the rest of the world was happy fortune for

him, but this was freighted with danger!  And he saw, moreover, that the

delighted Duke had discovered his daughter's passion likewise, and was

already dreaming of a marriage.  Every day somewhat of the deep sadness

that had been in the princess' face faded away; every day hope and

animation beamed brighter from her eye; and by and by even vagrant smiles

visited the face that had been so troubled.



Conrad was appalled.  He bitterly cursed himself for having yielded to

the instinct that had made him seek the companionship of one of his own

sex when he was new and a stranger in the palace--when he was sorrowful

and yearned for a sympathy such as only women can give or feel.  He now

began to avoid, his cousin.  But this only made matters worse, for,

naturally enough, the more he avoided her, the more she cast herself in

his way.  He marveled at this at first; and next it startled him.  The

girl haunted him; she hunted him; she happened upon him at all times and

in all places, in the night as well as in the day.  She seemed singularly

anxious.  There was surely a mystery somewhere.



This could not go on forever.  All the world was talking about it.  The

Duke was beginning to look perplexed.  Poor Conrad was becoming a very

ghost through dread and dire distress.  One day as he was emerging from a

private ante-room attached to the picture gallery, Constance confronted

him, and seizing both his hands, in hers, exclaimed:



"Oh, why, do you avoid me?  What have I done--what have I said, to lose

your kind opinion of me--for, surely I had it once?  Conrad, do not

despise me, but pity a tortured heart?  I cannot,--cannot hold the words

unspoken longer, lest they kill me--I LOVE you, CONRAD!  There, despise

me if you must, but they would be uttered!"



Conrad was speechless.  Constance hesitated a moment, and then,

misinterpreting his silence, a wild gladness flamed in her eyes, and she

flung her arms about his neck and said:



"You relent! you relent! You can love me--you will love me! Oh, say you

will, my own, my worshipped Conrad!'"



"Conrad groaned aloud.  A sickly pallor overspread his countenance, and

he trembled like an aspen.  Presently, in desperation, he thrust the poor

girl from him, and cried:



"You know not what you ask!  It is forever and ever impossible!"  And then

he fled like a criminal and left the princess stupefied with amazement.

A minute afterward she was crying and sobbing there, and Conrad was

crying and sobbing in his chamber.  Both were in despair.  Both save ruin

staring them in the face.



By and by Constance rose slowly to her feet and moved away, saying:



"To think that he was despising my love at the very moment that I thought

it was melting his cruel heart!  I hate him!  He spurned me--did this

man--he spurned me from him like a dog!"









CHAPTER IV



THE AWFUL REVELATION.



Time passed on.  A settled sadness rested once more upon the countenance

of the good Duke's daughter.  She and Conrad were seen together no more

now.  The Duke grieved at this.  But as the weeks wore away, Conrad's

color came back to his cheeks and his old-time vivacity to his eye, and

he administered the government with a clear and steadily ripening wisdom.



Presently a strange whisper began to be heard about the palace.  It grew

louder; it spread farther.  The gossips of the city got hold-of it.  It

swept the dukedom.  And this is what the whisper said:



"The Lady Constance hath given birth to a child!"



When the lord of Klugenstein heard it, he swung his plumed helmet thrice

around his head and shouted:



"Long live.  Duke Conrad!--for lo, his crown is sure, from this day

forward!  Detzin has done his errand well, and the good scoundrel shall

be rewarded!"



And he spread, the tidings far and wide, and for eight-and-forty hours no

soul in all the barony but did dance and sing, carouse and illuminate, to

celebrate the great event, and all at proud and happy old Klugenstein's

expense.









CHAPTER V.



THE FRIGHTFUL CATASTROPHE.



The trial was at hand.  All the great lords and barons of Brandenburgh

were assembled in the Hall of Justice in the ducal palace.  No space was

left unoccupied where there was room for a spectator to stand or sit.

Conrad, clad in purple and ermine, sat in the premier's chair, and on

either side sat the great judges of the realm.  The old Duke had sternly

commanded that the trial of his daughter should proceed, without favor,

and then had taken to his bed broken-hearted.  His days were numbered.

Poor Conrad had begged, as for his very life, that he might be spared the

misery of sitting in judgment upon his cousin's crime, but it did not

avail.



The saddest heart in all that great assemblage was in Conrad's breast.



The gladdest was in his father's.  For, unknown to his daughter "Conrad,"

the old Baron Klugenstein was come, and was among the crowd of nobles,

triumphant in the swelling fortunes of his house.



After the heralds had made due proclamation and the other preliminaries

had followed, the venerable Lord Chief justice said:



"Prisoner, stand forth!"



The unhappy princess rose and stood unveiled before the vast multitude.

The Lord Chief Justice continued:



"Most noble lady, before the great judges of this realm it hath been

charged and proven that out of holy wedlock your Grace hath given birth

unto a child; and by our ancient law the penalty is death, excepting in

one sole contingency, whereof his Grace the acting Duke, our good Lord

Conrad, will advertise you in his solemn sentence now; wherefore, give

heed."



Conrad stretched forth the reluctant sceptre, and in the self-same moment

the womanly heart beneath his robe yearned pityingly toward the doomed

prisoner, and the tears came into his eyes.  He opened his lips to speak,

but the Lord Chief Justice said quickly:



"Not there, your Grace, not there!  It is not lawful to pronounce

judgment upon any of the ducal line SAVE FROM THE DUCAL THRONE!"



A shudder went to the heart of poor Conrad, and a tremor shook the iron

frame of his old father likewise.  CONRAD HAD NOT BEEN CROWNED--dared he

profane the throne? He hesitated and turned pale with fear.  But it must

be done.  Wondering eyes were already upon him.  They would be suspicious

eyes if he hesitated longer.  He ascended the throne.  Presently he

stretched forth the sceptre again, and said:



"Prisoner, in the name of our sovereign lord, Ulrich, Duke of

Brandenburgh, I proceed to the solemn duty that hath devolved upon me.

Give heed to my words.  By the ancient law of the land, except you

produce the partner of your guilt and deliver him up to the executioner,

you must surely die.  Embrace this opportunity--save yourself while yet

you may.  Name the father of your child!"



A solemn hush fell upon the great court--a silence so profound that men

could hear their own hearts beat.  Then the princess slowly turned, with

eyes gleaming with hate, and pointing her finger straight at Conrad,

said:



"Thou art the man!"



An appalling conviction of his helpless, hopeless peril struck a chill to

Conrad's heart like the chill of death itself.  What power on earth could

save him!  To disprove the charge, he must reveal that he was a woman;

and for an uncrowned woman to sit in the ducal chair was death!  At one

and the same moment, he and his grim old father swooned and fell to, the

ground.



[The remainder of this thrilling and eventful story will NOT be found in

this or any other publication, either now or at any future time.]



The truth is, I have got my hero (or heroine) into such a particularly

close place, that I do not see how I am ever going to get him (or her)

out of it again--and therefore I will wash my hands of the whole

business, and leave that person to get out the best way that offers--or

else stay there.  I thought it was going to be easy enough to straighten

out that little difficulty, but it looks different now.













PETITION CONCERNING COPYRIGHT



TO THE HONORABLE THE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

IN CONGRESS ASSEMBLED:



Whereas, The Constitution guarantees equal rights to all, backed by the

Declaration of Independence; and



Whereas, Under our laws, the right of property in real estate is

perpetual; and



Whereas, Under our laws, the right of property in the literary result of

a citizen's intellectual labor is restricted to forty-two years; and



Whereas, Forty-two years seems an exceedingly just and righteous term,

and a sufficiently long one for the retention of property;



Therefore, Your petitioner, having the good of his country solely at

heart, humbly prays that "equal rights" and fair and equal treatment may

be meted out to all citizens, by the restriction of rights in all

property, real estate included, to the beneficent term of forty-two

years.  Then shall all men bless your honorable body and be happy.  And

for this will your petitioner ever pray.

                                             MARK TWAIN.





A PARAGRAPH NOT ADDED TO THE PETITION



The charming absurdity of restricting property-rights in books to

forty-two years sticks prominently out in the fact that hardly any man's

books ever live forty-two years, or even the half of it; and so, for the

sake of getting a shabby advantage of the heirs of about one Scott or

Burns or Milton in a hundred years, the lawmakers of the "Great" Republic

are content to leave that poor little pilfering edict upon the

statute-books.  It is like an emperor lying in wait to rob a Phenix's

nest, and waiting the necessary century to get the chance.













AFTER-DINNER SPEECH



[AT A FOURTH OF JULY GATHERING, IN LONDON, OF AMERICANS]



MR. CHAIRMAN AND LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: I thank you for the compliment

which has just been tendered me, and to show my appreciation of it I will

not afflict you with many words.  It is pleasant to celebrate in this

peaceful way, upon this old mother soil, the anniversary of an experiment

which was born of war with this same land so long ago, and wrought out to

a successful issue by the devotion of our ancestors.  It has taken nearly

a hundred years to bring the English and Americans into kindly and

mutually appreciative relations, but I believe it has been accomplished

at last.  It was a great step when the two last misunderstandings were

settled by arbitration instead of cannon.  It is another great step when

England adopts our sewing-machines without claiming the invention--as

usual.  It was another when they imported one of our sleeping-cars the

other day.  And it warmed my heart more than I can tell, yesterday, when

I witnessed the spectacle of an Englishman ordering an American sherry

cobbler of his own free will and accord--and not only that but with a

great brain and a level head reminding the barkeeper not to forget the

strawberries.  With a common origin, a common language, a common

literature, a common religion and--common drinks, what is longer needful

to the cementing of the two nations together in a permanent bond of

brotherhood?



This is an age of progress, and ours is a progressive land.  A great and

glorious land, too--a land which has developed a Washington, a Franklin,

a William M. Tweed, a Longfellow, a Motley, a Jay Gould, a Samuel C.

Pomeroy, a recent Congress which has never had its equal (in some

respects), and a United States Army which conquered sixty Indians in

eight months by tiring them out--which is much better than uncivilized

slaughter, God knows.  We have a criminal jury system which is superior

to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty

of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read.

And I may observe that we have an insanity plea that would have saved

Cain.  I think I can say,--and say with pride, that we have some

legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.



I refer with effusion to our railway system, which consents to let us

live, though it might do the opposite, being our owners.  It only

destroyed three thousand and seventy lives last year by collisions, and

twenty-seven thousand two hundred and sixty by running over heedless and

unnecessary people at crossings.  The companies seriously regretted the

killing of these thirty thousand people, and went so far as to pay for

some of them--voluntarily, of course, for the meanest of us would not

claim that we possess a court treacherous enough to enforce a law against

a railway company.  But, thank Heaven, the railway companies are

generally disposed to do the right and kindly thing without compulsion.

I know of an instance which greatly touched me at the time.  After an

accident the company sent home the remains of a dear distant old relative

of mine in a basket, with the remark, "Please state what figure you hold

him at--and return the basket."  Now there couldn't be anything

friendlier than that.



But I must not stand here and brag all night.  However, you won't mind a

body bragging a little about his country on the fourth of July.  It is a

fair and legitimate time to fly the eagle.  I will say only one more word

of brag--and a hopeful one.  It is this.  We have a form of government

which gives each man a fair chance and no favor.  With us no individual

is born with a right to look down upon his neighbor and hold him in

contempt.  Let such of us as are not dukes find our consolation in that.

And we may find hope for the future in the fact that as unhappy as is the

condition of our political morality to-day, England has risen up out of

a far fouler since the days when Charles I. ennobled courtesans and all

political place was a matter of bargain and sale.  There is hope for us

yet.



     [At least the above is the speech which I was going to make, but our

     minister, General Schenck, presided, and after the blessing, got up

     and made a great long inconceivably dull harangue, and wound up by

     saying that inasmuch as speech-making did not seem to exhilarate the

     guests much, all further oratory would be dispensed with during the

     evening, and we could just sit and talk privately to our elbow-

     neighbors and have a good sociable time.  It is known that in

     consequence of that remark forty-four perfected speeches died in the

     womb.  The depression, the gloom, the solemnity that reigned over

     the banquet from that time forth will be a lasting memory with many

     that were there.  By that one thoughtless remark General Schenck

     lost forty-four of the best friends he had in England.  More than

     one said that night, "And this is the sort of person that is sent to

     represent us in a great sister empire!"]













LIONIZING MURDERERS



I had heard so much about the celebrated fortune-teller Madame-----, that

I went to see her yesterday.  She has a dark complexion naturally, and

this effect is heightened by artificial aids which cost her nothing.

She wears curls--very black ones, and I had an impression that she gave

their native attractiveness a lift with rancid butter.  She wears a

reddish check handkerchief, cast loosely around her neck, and it was

plain that her other one is slow getting back from the wash.  I presume

she takes snuff.  At any rate, something resembling it had lodged among

the hairs sprouting from her upper lip.  I know she likes garlic--I knew

that as soon as she sighed.  She looked at me searchingly for nearly a

minute, with her black eyes, and then said:



"It is enough.  Come!"



She started down a very dark and dismal corridor--I stepping close after

her.  Presently she stopped, and said that, as the way was so crooked and

dark, perhaps she had better get a light.  But it seemed ungallant to

allow a woman to put herself to so much trouble for me, and so I said:



"It is not worth while, madam.  If you will heave another sigh, I think I

can follow it."



So we got along all right.  Arrived at her official and mysterious den,

she asked me to tell her the date of my birth, the exact hour of that

occurrence, and the color of my grandmother's hair.  I answered as

accurately as I could.  Then she said:



"Young man, summon your fortitude--do not tremble.  I am about to reveal

the past."



"Information concerning the future would be, in a general way, more--"



"Silence!  You have had much trouble, some joy, some good fortune, some

bad.  Your great grandfather was hanged."



"That is a l--"



"Silence!  Hanged sir.  But it was not his fault.  He could not help it."



"I am glad you do him justice."



"Ah--grieve, rather, that the jury did.  He was hanged.  His star crosses

yours in the fourth division, fifth sphere.  Consequently you will be

hanged also."



"In view of this cheerful--"



"I must have silence.  Yours was not, in the beginning, a criminal

nature, but circumstances changed it.  At the age of nine you stole

sugar.  At the age of fifteen you stole money.  At twenty you stole

horses.  At twenty-five you committed arson.  At thirty, hardened in

crime, you became an editor.  You are now a public lecturer.  Worse

things are in store for you.  You will be sent to Congress.  Next, to the

penitentiary.  Finally, happiness will come again--all will be well--you

will be hanged."



I was now in tears.  It seemed hard enough to go to Congress; but to be

hanged--this was too sad, too dreadful.  The woman seemed surprised at my

grief.  I told her the thoughts that were in my mind.  Then she comforted

me.



"Why, man," she said, "hold up your head--you have nothing to grieve

about.  Listen.



--[In this paragraph the fortune-teller details the exact history of the

Pike-Brown assassination case in New Hampshire, from the succoring and

saving of the stranger Pike by the Browns, to the subsequent hanging and

coffining of that treacherous miscreant.  She adds nothing, invents

nothing, exaggerates nothing (see any New England paper for November,

1869).  This Pike-Brown case is selected merely as a type, to illustrate

a custom that prevails, not in New Hampshire alone, but in every state in

the Union--I mean the sentimental custom of visiting, petting,

glorifying, and snuffling over murderers like this Pike, from the day

they enter the jail under sentence of death until they swing from the

gallows.  The following extract from the Temple Bar (1866) reveals the

fact that this custom is not confined to the United States.--"on December

31, 1841, a man named John Johnes, a shoemaker, murdered his sweetheart,

Mary Hallam, the daughter of a respectable laborer, at Mansfield, in the

county of Nottingham.  He was executed on March 23, 1842.  He was a man

of unsteady habits, and gave way to violent fits of passion.  The girl

declined his addresses, and he said if he did not have her no one else

should.  After he had inflicted the first wound, which was not

immediately fatal, she begged for her life, but seeing him resolved,

asked for time to pray.  He said that he would pray for both, and

completed the crime.  The wounds were inflicted by a shoemaker's knife,

and her throat was cut barbarously.  After this he dropped on his knees

some time, and prayed God to have mercy on two unfortunate lovers.

He made no attempt to escape, and confessed the crime.  After his

imprisonment he behaved in a most decorous manner; he won upon the good

opinion of the jail chaplain, and he was visited by the Bishop of

Lincoln.  It does not appear that he expressed any contrition for the

crime, but seemed to pass away with triumphant certainty that he was

going to rejoin his victim in heaven.  He was visited by some pious and

benevolent ladies of Nottingham, some of whom declared he was a child of

God, if ever there was one.  One of the ladies sent him a while camellia

to wear at his execution."]



"You will live in New Hampshire.  In your sharp need and distress the

Brown family will succor you--such of them as Pike the assassin left

alive.  They will be benefactors to you.  When you shall have grown fat

upon their bounty, and are grateful and happy, you will desire to make

some modest return for these things, and so you will go to the house some

night and brain the whole family with an ax.  You will rob the dead

bodies of your benefactors, and disburse your gains in riotous living

among the rowdies and courtesans of Boston.  Then you will, be arrested,

tried, condemned to be hanged, thrown into prison.  Now is your happy

day.  You will be converted--you will be converted just as soon as

every effort to compass pardon, commutation, or reprieve has failed--and

then!--Why, then, every morning and every afternoon, the best and purest

young ladies of the village will assemble in your cell and sing hymns.

This will show that assassination is respectable.  Then you will write a

touching letter, in which you will forgive all those recent Browns.  This

will excite the public admiration.  No public can withstand magnanimity.

Next, they will take you to the scaffold, with great eclat, at the head

of an imposing procession composed of clergymen, officials, citizens

generally, and young ladies walking pensively two and two, and bearing

bouquets and immortelles.  You will mount the scaffold, and while the

great concourse stand uncovered in your presence, you will read your

sappy little speech which the minister has written for you.  And then, in

the midst of a grand and impressive silence, they will swing you into

per--Paradise, my son.  There will not be a dry eye on the ground.  You

will be a hero!  Not a rough there but will envy you.  Not a rough there

but will resolve to emulate you.  And next, a great procession will

follow you to the tomb--will weep over your remains--the young ladies

will sing again the hymns made dear by sweet associations connected with

the jail, and, as a last tribute of affection, respect, and appreciation

of your many sterling qualities, they will walk two and two around your

bier, and strew wreaths of flowers on it.  And lo! you are canonized.

Think of it, son-ingrate, assassin, robber of the dead, drunken brawler

among thieves and harlots in the slums of Boston one month, and the pet

of the pure and innocent daughters of the land the next!  A bloody and

hateful devil--a bewept, bewailed, and sainted martyr--all in a month!

Fool!--so noble a fortune, and yet you sit here grieving!"



"No, madam," I said, "you do me wrong, you do, indeed.  I am perfectly

satisfied.  I did not know before that my great-grandfather was hanged,

but it is of no consequence.  He has probably ceased to bother about it

by this time--and I have not commenced yet.  I confess, madam, that I do

something in the way of editing and lecturing, but the other crimes you

mention have escaped my memory.  Yet I must have committed them--you

would not deceive a stranger.  But let the past be as it was, and let the

future be as it may--these are nothing.  I have only cared for one thing.

I have always felt that I should be hanged some day, and somehow the

thought has annoyed me considerably; but if you can only assure me that I

shall be hanged in New Hampshire--"



"Not a shadow of a doubt!"



"Bless you, my benefactress!--excuse this embrace--you have removed a

great load from my breast.  To be hanged in New Hampshire is happiness

--it leaves an honored name behind a man, and introduces him at once into

the best New Hampshire society in the other world."



I then took leave of the fortune-teller.  But, seriously, is it well to

glorify a murderous villain on the scaffold, as Pike was glorified in New

Hampshire?  Is it well to turn the penalty for a bloody crime into a

reward?  Is it just to do it?  Is, it safe?













A NEW CRIME



LEGISLATION NEEDED



This country, during the last thirty or forty years, has produced some of

the most remarkable cases of insanity of which there is any mention in

history.  For instance, there was the Baldwin case, in Ohio, twenty-two

years ago.  Baldwin, from his boyhood up, had been of a vindictive,

malignant, quarrelsome nature.  He put a boy's eye out once, and never

was heard upon any occasion to utter a regret for it.  He did many such

things.  But at last he did something that was serious.  He called at a

house just after dark one evening, knocked, and when the occupant came to

the door, shot him dead, and then tried to escape, but was captured.

Two days before, he had wantonly insulted a helpless cripple, and the man

he afterward took swift vengeance upon with an assassin bullet had

knocked him down.  Such was the Baldwin case.  The trial was long and

exciting; the community was fearfully wrought up.  Men said this

spiteful, bad-hearted villain had caused grief enough in his time, and

now he should satisfy the law.  But they were mistaken; Baldwin was

insane when he did the deed--they had not thought of that.  By the

argument of counsel it was shown that at half past ten in the morning on

the day of the murder, Baldwin became insane, and remained so for eleven

hours and a half exactly.  This just covered the case comfortably, and he

was acquitted.  Thus, if an unthinking and excited community had been

listened to instead of the arguments of counsel, a poor crazy creature

would have been held to a fearful responsibility for a mere freak of

madness.  Baldwin went clear, and although his relatives and friends were

naturally incensed against the community for their injurious suspicions

and remarks, they said let it go for this time, and did not prosecute.

The Baldwins were very wealthy.  This same Baldwin had momentary fits of

insanity twice afterward, and on both occasions killed people he had

grudges against.  And on both these occasions the circumstances of the

killing were so aggravated, and the murders so seemingly heartless and

treacherous, that if Baldwin had not been insane he would have been

hanged without the shadow of a doubt.  As it was, it required all his

political and family influence to get him clear in one of the cases, and

cost him not less than ten thousand dollars to get clear in the other.

One of these men he had notoriously been threatening to kill for twelve

years.  The poor creature happened, by the merest piece of ill fortune,

to come along a dark alley at the very moment that Baldwin's insanity

came upon him, and so he was shot in the back with a gun loaded with

slugs.



Take the case of Lynch Hackett, of Pennsylvania.  Twice, in public, he

attacked a German butcher by the name of Bemis Feldner, with a cane, and

both times Feldner whipped him with his fists.  Hackett was a vain,

wealthy, violent gentleman, who held his blood and family in high esteem,

and believed that a reverent respect was due to his great riches.  He

brooded over the shame of his chastisement for two weeks, and then, in a

momentary fit of insanity, armed himself to the teeth, rode into town,

waited a couple of hours until he saw Feldner coming down the street with

his wife on his arm, and then, as the couple passed the doorway in which

he had partially concealed himself, he drove a knife into Feldner's neck,

killing him instantly.  The widow caught the limp form and eased it to

the earth.  Both were drenched with blood.  Hackett jocosely remarked to

her that as a professional butcher's recent wife she could appreciate the

artistic neatness of the job that left her in condition to marry again,

in case she wanted to.  This remark, and another which he made to a

friend, that his position in society made the killing of an obscure

citizen simply an "eccentricity" instead of a crime, were shown to be

evidences of insanity, and so Hackett escaped punishment.  The jury were

hardly inclined to accept these as proofs at first, inasmuch as the

prisoner had never been insane before the murder, and under the

tranquilizing effect of the butchering had immediately regained his right

mind; but when the defense came to show that a third cousin of Hackett's

wife's stepfather was insane, and not only insane, but had a nose the

very counterpart of Hackett's, it was plain that insanity was hereditary

in the family, and Hackett had come by it by legitimate inheritance.



Of course the jury then acquitted him.  But it was a merciful providence

that Mrs. H.'s people had been afflicted as shown, else Hackett would

certainly have been hanged.



However, it is not possible to recount all the marvelous cases of

insanity that have come under the public notice in the last thirty or

forty years.  There was the Durgin case in New Jersey three years ago.

The servant girl, Bridget Durgin, at dead of night, invaded her

mistress's bedroom and carved the lady literally to pieces with a knife.

Then she dragged the body to the middle of the floor, and beat and banged

it with chairs and such things.  Next she opened the feather beds, and

strewed the contents around, saturated everything with kerosene, and set

fire to the general wreck.  She now took up the young child of the

murdered woman in her blood smeared hands and walked off, through the

snow, with no shoes on, to a neighbor's house a quarter of a mile off,

and told a string of wild, incoherent stories about some men coming and

setting fire to the house; and then she cried piteously, and without

seeming to think there was anything suggestive about the blood upon her

hands, her clothing, and the baby, volunteered the remark that she was

afraid those men had murdered her mistress!  Afterward, by her own

confession and other testimony, it was proved that the mistress had

always been kind to the girl, consequently there was no revenge in the

murder; and it was also shown that the girl took nothing away from the

burning house, not even her own shoes, and consequently robbery was not

the motive.



Now, the reader says, "Here comes that same old plea of insanity again."

But the reader has deceived himself this time.  No such plea was offered

in her defense.  The judge sentenced her, nobody persecuted the governor

with petitions for her pardon, and she was promptly hanged.



There was that youth in Pennsylvania, whose curious confession was

published some years ago.  It was simply a conglomeration of incoherent

drivel from beginning to end; and so was his lengthy speech on the

scaffold afterward.  For a whole year he was haunted with a desire to

disfigure a certain young woman, so that no one would marry her.  He did

not love her himself, and did not want to marry her, but he did not want

anybody else to do it.  He would not go anywhere with her, and yet was

opposed to anybody else's escorting her.  Upon one occasion he declined

to go to a wedding with her, and when she got other company, lay in wait

for the couple by the road, intending to make them go back or kill the

escort.  After spending sleepless nights over his ruling desire for a

full year, he at last attempted its execution--that is, attempted to

disfigure the young woman.  It was a success.  It was permanent.  In

trying to shoot her cheek (as she sat at the supper-table with her

parents and brothers and sisters) in such a manner as to mar its

comeliness, one of his bullets wandered a little out of the course, and

she dropped dead.  To the very last moment of his life he bewailed the

ill luck that made her move her face just at the critical moment.  And so

he died, apparently about half persuaded that somehow it was chiefly her

own fault that she got killed.  This idiot was hanged.  The plea, of

insanity was not offered.



Insanity certainly is on the increase in the world, and crime is dying

out.  There are no longer any murders--none worth mentioning, at any

rate.  Formerly, if you killed a man, it was possible that you were

insane--but now, if you, having friends and money, kill a mate, it is

evidence that you are a lunatic.  In these days, too, if a person of good

family and high social standing steals anything, they call it

kleptomania, and send him to the lunatic asylum.  If a person of high

standing squanders his fortune in dissipation, and closes his career with

strychnine or a bullet, "Temporary Aberration" is what was the trouble

with him.



Is not this insanity plea becoming rather common?  Is it not so common

that the reader confidently expects to see it offered in every criminal

case that comes before the courts?  And is it not so cheap, and so

common, and often so trivial, that the reader smiles in derision when the

newspaper mentions it?



And is it not curious to note how very often it wins acquittal for the

prisoner?  Of late years it does not seem possible for a man to so

conduct himself, before killing another man, as not to be manifestly

insane.  If he talks about the stars, he is insane.  If he appears

nervous and uneasy an hour before the killing, he is insane.  If he weeps

over a great grief, his friends shake their heads, and fear that he is

"not right."  If, an hour after the murder, he seems ill at ease,

preoccupied, and excited, he is, unquestionably insane.



Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against

insanity.  There is where the true evil lies.













A CURIOUS DREAM



CONTAINING A MORAL



Night before last I had a singular dream.  I seemed to be sitting on a

doorstep (in no particular city perhaps) ruminating, and the time of

night appeared to be about twelve or one o'clock.  The weather was balmy

and delicious.  There was no human sound in the air, not even a footstep.

There was no sound of any kind to emphasize the dead stillness, except

the occasional hollow barking of a dog in the distance and the fainter

answer of a further dog.  Presently up the street I heard a bony

clack-clacking, and guessed it was the castanets of a serenading party.

In a minute more a tall skeleton, hooded, and half clad in a tattered and

moldy shroud, whose shreds were flapping about the ribby latticework of

its person, swung by me with a stately stride and disappeared in the gray

gloom of the starlight.  It had a broken and worm-eaten coffin on its

shoulder and a bundle of something in its hand.  I knew what the

clack-clacking was then; it was this party's joints working together,

and his elbows knocking against his sides as he walked.  I may say I was

surprised.  Before I could collect my thoughts and enter upon any

speculations as to what this apparition might portend, I heard another

one coming for I recognized his clack-clack.  He had two-thirds of a

coffin on his shoulder, and some foot and head boards under his arm.

I mightily wanted, to peer under his hood and speak to him, but when he

turned and smiled upon me with his cavernous sockets and his projecting

grin as he went by, I thought I would not detain him.  He was hardly gone

when I heard the clacking again, and another one issued from the shadowy

half-light.  This one was bending under a heavy gravestone, and dragging

a shabby coffin after him by a string.  When he got to me he gave me a

steady look for a moment or two, and then rounded to and backed up to me,

saying:



"Ease this down for a fellow, will you?"



I eased the gravestone down till it rested on the ground, and in doing so

noticed that it bore the name of "John Baxter Copmanhurst," with "May,

1839," as the date of his death.  Deceased sat wearily down by me, and

wiped his os frontis with his major maxillary--chiefly from former habit

I judged, for I could not see that he brought away any perspiration.



"It is too bad, too bad," said he, drawing the remnant of the shroud

about him and leaning his jaw pensively on his hand.  Then he put his

left foot up on his knee and fell to scratching his anklebone absently

with a rusty nail which he got out of his coffin.



"What is too bad, friend?"



"Oh, everything, everything.  I almost wish I never had died."



"You surprise me.  Why do you say this?  Has anything gone wrong?  What

is the matter?"



"Matter!  Look at this shroud-rags.  Look at this gravestone, all

battered up.  Look at that disgraceful old coffin.  All a man's property

going to ruin and destruction before his eyes, and ask him if anything is

wrong?  Fire and brimstone!"



"Calm yourself, calm yourself," I said.  "It is too bad-it is certainly

too bad, but then I had not supposed that you would much mind such

matters situated as you are."



"Well, my dear sir, I do mind them.  My pride is hurt, and my comfort is

impaired--destroyed, I might say.  I will state my case--I will put it to

you in such a way that you can comprehend it, if you will let me," said

the poor skeleton, tilting the hood of his shroud back, as if he were

clearing for action, and thus unconsciously giving himself a jaunty and

festive air very much at variance with the grave character of his

position in life--so to speak--and in prominent contrast with his

distressful mood.



"Proceed," said I.



"I reside in the shameful old graveyard a block or two above you here,

in this street--there, now, I just expected that cartilage would let go!-

-third rib from the bottom, friend, hitch the end of it to my spine with

a string, if you have got such a thing about you, though a bit of silver

wire is a deal pleasanter, and more durable and becoming, if one keeps it

polished--to think of shredding out and going to pieces in this way, just

on account of the indifference and neglect of one's posterity!"--and the

poor ghost grated his teeth in a way that gave me a wrench and a shiver

--for the effect is mightily increased by the absence of muffling flesh

and cuticle.  "I reside in that old graveyard, and have for these thirty

years; and I tell you things are changed since I first laid this old

tired frame there, and turned over, and stretched out for a long sleep,

with a delicious sense upon me of being done with bother, and grief,

and anxiety, and doubt, and fear, forever and ever, and listening with

comfortable and increasing satisfaction to the sexton's work, from the

startling clatter of his first spadeful on my coffin till it dulled away

to the faint patting that shaped the roof of my new home-delicious!  My!

I wish you could try it to-night!" and out of my reverie deceased fetched

me a rattling slap with a bony hand.



"Yes, sir, thirty years ago I laid me down there, and was happy.  For it

was out in the country then--out in the breezy, flowery, grand old woods,

and the lazy winds gossiped with the leaves, and the squirrels capered

over us and around us, and the creeping things visited us, and the birds

filled the tranquil solitude with music.  Ah, it was worth ten years of a

man's life to be dead then!  Everything was pleasant.  I was in a good

neighborhood, for all the dead people that lived near me belonged to the

best families in the city.  Our posterity appeared to think the world of

us.  They kept our graves in the very best condition; the fences were

always in faultless repair, head-boards were kept painted or whitewashed,

and were replaced with new ones as soon as they began to look rusty or

decayed; monuments were kept upright, railings intact and bright, the

rose-bushes and shrubbery trimmed, trained, and free from blemish, the

walks clean and smooth and graveled.  But that day is gone by.  Our

descendants have forgotten us.  My grandson lives in a stately house

built with money made by these old hands of mine, and I sleep in a

neglected grave with invading vermin that gnaw my shroud to build them

nests withal!  I and friends that lie with me founded and secured the

prosperity of this fine city, and the stately bantling of our loves

leaves us to rot in a dilapidated cemetery which neighbors curse and

strangers scoff at.  See the difference between the old time and this

--for instance: Our graves are all caved in now; our head-boards have

rotted away and tumbled down; our railings reel this way and that, with

one foot in the air, after a fashion of unseemly levity; our monuments

lean wearily, and our gravestones bow their heads discouraged; there be

no adornments any more--no roses, nor shrubs, nor graveled walks, nor

anything that is a comfort to the eye; and even the paintless old board

fence that did make a show of holding us sacred from companionship with

beasts and the defilement of heedless feet, has tottered till it

overhangs the street, and only advertises the presence of our dismal

resting-place and invites yet more derision to it.  And now we cannot

hide our poverty and tatters in the friendly woods, for the city has

stretched its withering arms abroad and taken us in, and all that remains

of the cheer of our old home is the cluster of lugubrious forest trees

that stand, bored and weary of a city life, with their feet in our

coffins, looking into the hazy distance and wishing they were there.

I tell you it is disgraceful!



"You begin to comprehend--you begin to see how it is.  While our

descendants are living sumptuously on our money, right around us in the

city, we have to fight hard to keep skull and bones together.  Bless you,

there isn't a grave in our cemetery that doesn't leak not one.  Every

time it rains in the night we have to climb out and roost in the trees

and sometimes we are wakened suddenly by the chilly water trickling down

the back of our necks.  Then I tell you there is a general heaving up of

old graves and kicking over of old monuments, and scampering of old

skeletons for the trees!  Bless me, if you had gone along there some such

nights after twelve you might have seen as many as fifteen of us roosting

on one limb, with our joints rattling drearily and the wind wheezing

through our ribs!  Many a time we have perched there for three or four

dreary hours, and then come down, stiff and chilled through and drowsy,

and borrowed each other's skulls to bail out our graves with--if you will

glance up in my mouth now as I tilt my head back, you can see that my

head-piece is half full of old dry sediment how top-heavy and stupid it

makes me sometimes!  Yes, sir, many a time if you had happened to come

along just before the dawn you'd have caught us bailing out the graves

and hanging our shrouds on the fence to dry.  Why, I had an elegant

shroud stolen from there one morning--think a party by the name of Smith

took it, that resides in a plebeian graveyard over yonder--I think so

because the first time I ever saw him he hadn't anything on but a check

shirt, and the last time I saw him, which was at a social gathering in

the new cemetery, he was the best-dressed corpse in the company--and it

is a significant fact that he left when he saw me; and presently an old

woman from here missed her coffin--she generally took it with her when

she went anywhere, because she was liable to take cold and bring on the

spasmodic rheumatism that originally killed her if she exposed herself to

the night air much.  She was named Hotchkiss--Anna Matilda Hotchkiss--you

might know her?  She has two upper front teeth, is tall, but a good deal

inclined to stoop, one rib on the left side gone, has one shred of rusty

hair hanging from the left side of her head, and one little tuft just

above and a little forward of her right ear, has her underjaw wired on

one side where it had worked loose, small bone of left forearm gone--lost

in a fight has a kind of swagger in her gait and a 'gallus' way of going

with: her arms akimbo and her nostrils in the air has been pretty free

and easy, and is all damaged and battered up till she looks like a

queensware crate in ruins--maybe you have met her?"



"God forbid!" I involuntarily ejaculated, for somehow I was not looking

for that form of question, and it caught me a little off my guard.  But I

hastened to make amends for my rudeness, and say, "I simply meant I had

not had the honor--for I would not deliberately speak discourteously of a

friend of yours.  You were saying that you were robbed--and it was a

shame, too--but it appears by what is left of the shroud you have on that

it was a costly one in its day.  How did--"



A most ghastly expression began to develop among the decayed features and

shriveled integuments of my guest's face, and I was beginning to grow

uneasy and distressed, when he told me he was only working up a deep,

sly smile, with a wink in it, to suggest that about the time he acquired

his present garment a ghost in a neighboring cemetery missed one.  This

reassured me, but I begged him to confine himself to speech thenceforth,

because his facial expression was uncertain.  Even with the most

elaborate care it was liable to miss fire.  Smiling should especially be

avoided.  What he might honestly consider a shining success was likely to

strike me in a very different light.  I said I liked to see a skeleton

cheerful, even decorously playful, but I did not think smiling was a

skeleton's best hold.



"Yes, friend," said the poor skeleton, "the facts are just as I have

given them to you.  Two of these old graveyards--the one that I resided

in and one further along have been deliberately neglected by our

descendants of to-day until there is no occupying them any longer.  Aside

from the osteological discomfort of it--and that is no light matter this

rainy weather--the present state of things is ruinous to property.  We

have got to move or be content to see our effects wasted away and utterly

destroyed.



"Now, you will hardly believe it, but it is true, nevertheless, that there

isn't a single coffin in good repair among all my acquaintance--now that

is an absolute fact.  I do not refer to low people who come in a pine box

mounted on an express-wagon, but I am talking about your high-toned,

silver-mounted burial-case, your monumental sort, that travel under black

plumes at the head of a procession and have choice of cemetery lots--

I mean folks like the Jarvises, and the Bledsoes and Burlings, and such.

They are all about ruined.  The most substantial people in our set, they

were.  And now look at them--utterly used up and poverty-stricken.  One

of the Bledsoes actually traded his monument to a late barkeeper for some

fresh shavings to put under his head.  I tell you it speaks volumes, for

there is nothing a corpse takes so much pride in as his monument.  He

loves to read the inscription.  He comes after a while to believe what it

says himself, and then you may see him sitting on the fence night after

night enjoying it.  Epitaphs are cheap, and they do a poor chap a world

of good after he is dead, especially if he had hard luck while he was

alive.  I wish they were used more.  Now I don't complain, but

confidentially I do think it was a little shabby in my descendants to

give me nothing but this old slab of a gravestone--and all the more that

there isn't a compliment on it.  It used to have:



                    'GONE TO HIS JUST REWARD'



"on it, and I was proud when I first saw it, but by and by I noticed that

whenever an old friend of mine came along he would hook his chin on the

railing and pull a long face and read along down till he came to that,

and then he would chuckle to himself and walk off, looking satisfied and

comfortable.  So I scratched it off to get rid of those fools.  But a

dead man always takes a deal of pride in his monument.  Yonder goes half

a dozen of the Jarvises now, with the family monument along.  And

Smithers and some hired specters went by with his awhile ago.  Hello,

Higgins, good-by, old friend!  That's Meredith Higgins--died in '44--

belongs to our set in the cemetery--fine old family--great-grand mother

was an Injun--I am on the most familiar terms with him he didn't hear me

was the reason he didn't answer me.  And I am sorry, too, because I would

have liked to introduce you.  You would admire him.  He is the most

disjointed, sway-backed, and generally distorted old skeleton you ever

saw, but he is full of fun.  When he laughs it sounds like rasping two

stones together, and he always starts it off with a cheery screech like

raking a nail across a window-pane.  Hey, Jones!  That is old Columbus

Jones--shroud cost four hundred dollars entire trousseau, including

monument, twenty-seven hundred.  This was in the spring of '26.  It was

enormous style for those days.  Dead people came all the way from the

Alleghanies to see his things--the party that occupied the grave next to

mine remembers it well.  Now do you see that individual going along with

a piece of a head-board under his arm, one leg-bone below his knee gone,

and not a thing in the world on?  That is Barstow Dalhousie, and next to

Columbus Jones he was the most sumptuously outfitted person that ever

entered our cemetery.  We are all leaving.  We cannot tolerate the

treatment we are receiving at the hands of our descendants.  They open

new cemeteries, but they leave us to our ignominy.  They mend the

streets, but they never mend anything that is about us or belongs to us.

Look at that coffin of mine--yet I tell you in its day it was a piece of

furniture that would have attracted attention in any drawing-room in this

city.  You may have it if you want it--I can't afford to repair it.

Put a new bottom in her, and part of a new top, and a bit of fresh lining

along the left side, and you'll find her about as comfortable as any

receptacle of her species you ever tried.  No thanks no, don't mention it

you have been civil to me, and I would give you all the property I have

got before I would seem ungrateful.  Now this winding-sheet is a kind of

a sweet thing in its way, if you would like to--No?  Well, just as you

say, but I wished to be fair and liberal there's nothing mean about me.

Good-by, friend, I must be going.  I may have a good way to go to-night

--don't know.  I only know one thing for certain, and that is that I am

on the emigrant trail now, and I'll never sleep in that crazy old

cemetery again.  I will travel till I fiend respectable quarters, if I

have to hoof it to New Jersey.  All the boys are going.  It was decided

in public conclave, last night, to emigrate, and by the time the sun

rises there won't be a bone left in our old habitations.  Such cemeteries

may suit my surviving friends, but they do not suit the remains that have

the honor to make these remarks.  My opinion is the general opinion.

If you doubt it, go and see how the departing ghosts upset things before

they started.  They were almost riotous in their demonstrations of

distaste.  Hello, here are some of the Bledsoes, and if you will give me

a lift with this tombstone I guess I will join company and jog along with

them--mighty respectable old family, the Bledsoes, and used to always

come out in six-horse hearses and all that sort of thing fifty years ago

when I walked these streets in daylight.  Good-by, friend."



And with his gravestone on his shoulder he joined the grisly procession,

dragging his damaged coffin after him, for notwithstanding he pressed it

upon me so earnestly, I utterly refused his hospitality.  I suppose that

for as much as two hours these sad outcasts went clacking by, laden with

their dismal effects, and all that time I sat pitying them.  One or two

of the youngest and least dilapidated among them inquired about midnight

trains on the railways, but the rest seemed unacquainted with that mode

of travel, and merely asked about common public roads to various towns

and cities, some of which are not on the map now, and vanished from it

and from the earth as much as thirty years ago, and some few of them

never had existed anywhere but on maps, and private ones in real-estate

agencies at that.  And they asked about the condition of the cemeteries

in these towns and cities, and about the reputation the citizens bore as

to reverence for the dead.



This whole matter interested me deeply, and likewise compelled my

sympathy for these homeless ones.  And it all seeming real, and I not

knowing it was a dream, I mentioned to one shrouded wanderer an idea that

had entered my head to publish an account of this curious and very

sorrowful exodus, but said also that I could not describe it truthfully,

and just as it occurred, without seeming to trifle with a grave subject

and exhibit an irreverence for the dead that would shock and distress

their surviving friends.  But this bland and stately remnant of a former

citizen leaned him far over my gate and whispered in my ear, and said:



"Do not let that disturb you.  The community that can stand such

graveyards as those we are emigrating from can stand anything a body can

say about the neglected and forsaken dead that lie in them."



At that very moment a cock crowed, and the weird procession vanished and

left not a shred or a bone behind.  I awoke, and found myself lying with

my head out of the bed and "sagging" downward considerably--a position

favorable to dreaming dreams with morals in them, maybe, but not poetry.



NOTE.--The reader is assured that if the cemeteries in his town are kept

in good order, this Dream is not leveled at his town at all, but is

leveled particularly and venomously at the next town.













A TRUE STORY



REPEATED WORD FOR WORD AS I HEARD IT--[Written about 1876]



It was summer-time, and twilight.  We were sitting on the porch of the

farmhouse, on the summit of the hill, and "Aunt Rachel" was sitting

respectfully below our level, on the steps-for she was our Servant, and

colored.  She was of mighty frame and stature; she was sixty years old,

but her eye was undimmed and her strength unabated.  She was a cheerful,

hearty soul, and it was no more trouble for her to laugh than it is for a

bird to sing.  She was under fire now, as usual when the day was done.

That is to say, she was being chaffed without mercy, and was enjoying it.

She would let off peal after of laughter, and then sit with her face in

her hands and shake with throes of enjoyment which she could no longer

get breath enough to express.  It such a moment as this a thought

occurred to me, and I said:



"Aunt Rachel, how is it that you've lived sixty years and never had any

trouble?"



She stopped quaking.  She paused, and there was moment of silence.  She

turned her face over her shoulder toward me, and said, without even a

smile her voice:



"Misto C-----, is you in 'arnest?"



It surprised me a good deal; and it sobered my manner and my speech, too.

I said:



"Why, I thought--that is, I meant--why, you can't have had any trouble.

I've never heard you sigh, and never seen your eye when there wasn't a

laugh in it."



She faced fairly around now, and was full earnestness.



"Has I had any trouble? Misto C-----, I's gwyne to tell you, den I leave

it to you.  I was bawn down 'mongst de slaves; I knows all 'bout slavery,

'case I ben one of 'em my own se'f.  Well sah, my ole man--dat's my

husban'--he was lov an' kind to me, jist as kind as you is to yo' own

wife.  An' we had chil'en--seven chil'en--an' loved dem chil'en jist de

same as you loves yo' chil'en.  Dey was black, but de Lord can't make

chil'en so black but what dey mother loves 'em an' wouldn't give 'em up,

no, not for anything dat's in dis whole world.



"Well, sah, I was raised in ole Fo'ginny, but mother she was raised in

Maryland; an' my souls she was turrible when she'd git started!  My lan!

but she'd make de fur fly!  When she'd git into dem tantrums, she always

had one word dat she said.  She'd straighten herse'f up an' put her fists

in her hips an' say, 'I want you to understan' dat I wa'n't bawn in the

mash to be fool' by trash!  I's one o' de ole Blue Hen's Chickens, I is!'

'Ca'se you see, dat's what folks dat's bawn in Maryland calls deyselves,

an' dey's proud of it.  Well, dat was her word.  I don't ever forgit it,

beca'se she said it so much, an' beca'se she said it one day when my

little Henry tore his wris' awful, and most busted 'is head, right up at

de top of his forehead, an' de niggers didn't fly aroun' fas' enough to

'tend to him.  An' when dey talk' back at her, she up an' she says,

'Look-a-heah!' she says, 'I want you niggers to understan' dat I wa'n't

bawn in de mash be fool' by trash! I's one o' de ole Blue Hen's chickens,

I is!' an' den she clar' dat kitchen an' bandage' up de chile herse'f.

So I says dat word, too, when I's riled.



"Well, bymeby my ole mistis say she's broke, an she got to sell all de

niggers on de place.  An' when I heah dat dey gwyne to sell us all off at

oction in Richmon', oh, de good gracious! I know what dat mean!"



Aunt Rachel had gradually risen, while she warmed to her subject, and now

she towered above us, black against the stars.



"Dey put chains on us an' put us on a stan' as high as dis po'ch--twenty

foot high-an' all de people stood aroun', crowds 'an' crowds.  An' dey'd

come up dah an' look at us all roun', an' squeeze our arm, an' make us

git up an' walk, an' den say, Dis one too ole,' or 'Dis one lame,' or

'Dis one don't 'mount to much.' An' dey sole my ole man, an' took him

away, an' dey begin to sell my chil'en an' take dem away, an' I begin to

cry; an' de man say, 'Shet up yo' damn blubberin',' an' hit me on de mouf

wid his han'.  An' when de las' one was gone but my little Henry, I grab'

him clost up to my breas' so, an' I ris up an' says, 'You sha'nt take him

away,' I says; 'I'll kill de man dat tetch him!' I says.  But my little

Henry whisper an' say 'I gwyne to run away, an' den I work an' buy yo'

freedom' Oh, bless de chile, he always so good!  But dey got him--dey got

him, de men did; but I took and tear de clo'es mos' off of 'em an' beat

'em over de head wid my chain; an' dey give it to me too, but I didn't

mine dat.



"Well, dah was my ole man gone, an' all my chil'en, all my seven chil'en

--an' six of 'em I hain't set eyes on ag'in to dis day, an' dat's

twenty-two year ago las' Easter.  De man dat bought me b'long' in

Newbern, an' he took me dah.  Well, bymeby de years roll on an' de waw

come.  My marster he was a Confedrit colonel, an' I was his family's

cook.  So when de Unions took dat town dey all run away an' lef' me all

by myse'f wid de other niggers in dat mons'us big house.  So de big Union

officers move in dah, an' dey ask me would I cook for dem.  'Lord bless

you,' says I, 'dat what I's for.'



"Dey wa'n't no small-fry officers, mine you, de was de biggest dey is;

an' de way dey made dem sojers mosey roun'!  De Gen'l he tole me to boss

dat kitchen; an' he say, 'If anybody come meddlin' wid you, you jist make

'em walk chalk; don't you be afeared,' he say; 'you's 'mong frens now.'



"Well, I thinks to myse'f, if my little Henry ever got a chance to run

away, he'd make to de Norf, o' course.  So one day I comes in dah whar de

big officers was, in de parlor, an' I drops a kurtchy, so, an' I up an'

tole 'em 'bout my Henry, dey a-listenin' to my troubles jist de same as

if I was white folks; an' I says, 'What I come for is beca'se if he got

away and got up Norf whar you gemmen comes from, you might 'a' seen him,

maybe, an' could tell me so as I could fine him ag'in; he was very

little, an' he had a sk-yar on his lef' wris' an' at de top of his

forehead.' Den dey look mournful, an' de Gen'l says, 'How long sence you

los' him?' an' I say, 'Thirteen year.   Den de Gen'l say, 'He wouldn't be

little no mo' now--he's a man!'



"I never thought o' dat befo'!  He was only dat little feller to me yit.

I never thought 'bout him growin' up an' bein' big.  But I see it den.

None o' de gemmen had run acrost him, so dey couldn't do nothin' for me.

But all dat time, do' I didn't know it, my Henry was run off to de Norf,

years an' years, an' he was a barber, too, an' worked for hisse'f.  An'

bymeby, when de waw come he ups an' he says: 'I's done barberin',' he

says, 'I's gwyne to fine my ole mammy, less'n she's dead.'  So he sole

out an' went to whar dey was recruitin', an' hired hisse'f out to de

colonel for his servant an' den he went all froo de battles everywhah,

huntin' for his ole mammy; yes, indeedy, he'd hire to fust one officer

an' den another, tell he'd ransacked de whole Souf; but you see I didn't

know nuffin 'bout dis.  How was I gwyne to know it?



"Well, one night we had a big sojer ball; de sojers dah at Newbern was

always havin' balls an' carryin' on.  Dey had 'em in my kitchen, heaps o'

times, 'ca'se it was so big.  Mine you, I was down on sich doin's;

beca'se my place was wid de officers, an' it rasp me to have dem common

sojers cavortin' roun' in my kitchen like dat.  But I alway' stood aroun'

an kep' things straight, I did; an' sometimes dey'd git my dander up, an'

den I'd make 'em clar dat kitchen mine I tell you!



"Well, one night--it was a Friday night--dey comes a whole platoon f'm a

nigger ridgment da was on guard at de house--de house was head quarters,

you know-an' den I was jist a-bilin' mad?  I was jist a-boomin'!  I

swelled aroun', an swelled aroun'; I jist was a-itchin' for 'em to do

somefin for to start me.  An' dey was a-waltzin' an a dancin'! my but dey

was havin' a time! an I jist a-swellin' an' a-swellin' up!  Pooty soon,

'long comes sich a spruce young nigger a-sailin' down de room wid a

yaller wench roun' de wais'; an' roun an' roun' an roun' dey went, enough

to make a body drunk to look at 'em; an' when dey got abreas' o' me, dey

went to kin' o' balancin' aroun' fust on one leg an' den on t'other, an'

smilin' at my big red turban, an' makin' fun, an' I ups an' says 'Git

along wid you!--rubbage!'  De young man's face kin' o' changed, all of a

sudden, for 'bout a second but den he went to smilin' ag'in, same as he

was befo'.  Well, 'bout dis time, in comes some niggers dat played music

and b'long' to de ban', an' dey never could git along widout puttin' on

airs.  An de very fust air dey put on dat night, I lit into em!  Dey

laughed, an' dat made me wuss.  De res' o' de niggers got to laughin',

an' den my soul alive but I was hot!  My eye was jist a-blazin'!  I jist

straightened myself up so--jist as I is now, plum to de ceilin', mos'--

an' I digs my fists into my hips, an' I says, 'Look-a-heah!' I says, 'I

want you niggers to understan' dat I wa'n't bawn in de mash to be fool'

by trash!  I's one o' de ole Blue hen's Chickens, I is!' an' den I see

dat young man stan' a-starin' an' stiff, lookin' kin' o' up at de ceilin'

like he fo'got somefin, an' couldn't 'member it no mo'.  Well, I jist

march' on dem niggers--so, lookin' like a gen'l--an' dey jist cave' away

befo' me an' out at de do'.  An' as dis young man a-goin' out, I heah him

say to another nigger, 'Jim,' he says, 'you go 'long an' tell de cap'n I

be on han' 'bout eight o'clock in de mawnin'; dey's somefin on my mine,'

he says; 'I don't sleep no mo' dis night.  You go 'long,' he says, 'an'

leave me by my own se'f.'



"Dis was 'bout one o'clock in de mawnin'.  Well, 'bout seven, I was up

an' on han', gittin' de officers' breakfast.  I was a-stoopin' down by de

stove jist so, same as if yo' foot was de stove--an' I'd opened de stove

do' wid my right han'--so, pushin' it back, jist as I pushes yo' foot--

an' I'd jist got de pan o' hot biscuits in my han' an' was 'bout to raise

up, when I see a black face come aroun' under mine, an' de eyes a-lookin'

up into mine, jist as I's a-lookin' up clost under yo' face now; an' I

jist stopped right dah, an' never budged! jist gazed an' gazed so; an' de

pan begin to tremble, an' all of a sudden I knowed!  De pan drop' on de

flo' an' I grab his lef' han' an' shove back his sleeve--jist so, as I's

doin' to you--an' den I goes for his forehead an' push de hair back so,

an' 'Boy!' I says, 'if you an't my Henry, what is you doin' wid dis welt

on yo' wris' an' dat sk-yar on yo' forehead?  De Lord God ob heaven be

praise', I got my own ag'in!'



     "Oh no' Misto C-----, I hain't had no trouble.  An' no joy!"













THE SIAMESE TWINS--[Written about 1868.]



I do not wish to write of the personal habits of these strange creatures

solely, but also of certain curious details of various kinds concerning

them, which, belonging only to their private life, have never crept into

print.  Knowing the Twins intimately, I feel that I am peculiarly well

qualified for the task I have taken upon myself.



The Siamese Twins are naturally tender and affectionate indisposition,

and have clung to each other with singular fidelity throughout a long and

eventful life.  Even as children they were inseparable companions; and it

was noticed that they always seemed to prefer each other's society to

that of any other persons.  They nearly always played together; and, so

accustomed was their mother to this peculiarity, that, whenever both of

them chanced to be lost, she usually only hunted for one of them--

satisfied that when she found that one she would find his brother

somewhere in the immediate neighborhood.  And yet these creatures were

ignorant and unlettered-barbarians themselves and the offspring of

barbarians, who knew not the light of philosophy and science.  What a

withering rebuke is this to our boasted civilization, with its

quarrelings, its wranglings, and its separations of brothers!



As men, the Twins have not always lived in perfect accord; but still

there has always been a bond between them which made them unwilling to go

away from each other and dwell apart.  They have even occupied the same

house, as a general thing, and it is believed that they have never failed

to even sleep together on any night since they were born.  How surely do

the habits of a lifetime become second nature to us!  The Twins always go

to bed at the same time; but Chang usually gets up about an hour before

his brother.  By an understanding between themselves, Chang does all the

indoor work and Eng runs all the errands.  This is because Eng likes to

go out; Chang's habits are sedentary.  However, Chang always goes along.

Eng is a Baptist, but Chang is a Roman Catholic; still, to please his

brother, Chang consented to be baptized at the same time that Eng was, on

condition that it should not "count."  During the war they were strong

partisans, and both fought gallantly all through the great struggle--Eng

on the Union side and Chang on the Confederate.  They took each other

prisoners at Seven Oaks, but the proofs of capture were so evenly

balanced in favor of each, that a general army court had to be assembled

to determine which one was properly the captor and which the captive.

The jury was unable to agree for a long time; but the vexed question was

finally decided by agreeing to consider them both prisoners, and then

exchanging them.  At one time Chang was convicted of disobedience of

orders, and sentenced to ten days in the guard-house, but Eng, in spite

of all arguments, felt obliged to share his imprisonment, notwithstanding

he himself was entirely innocent; and so, to save the blameless brother

from suffering, they had to discharge both from custody--the just reward

of faithfulness.



Upon one occasion the brothers fell out about something, and Chang

knocked Eng down, and then tripped and fell on him, whereupon both

clinched and began to beat and gouge each other without mercy.  The

bystanders interfered, and tried to separate them, but they could not do

it, and so allowed them to fight it out.  In the end both were disabled,

and were carried to the hospital on one and the same shutter.



Their ancient habit of going always together had its drawbacks when they

reached man's estate, and entered upon the luxury of courting.  Both fell

in love with the same girl.  Each tried to steal clandestine interviews

with her, but at the critical moment the other would always turn up.

By and by Eng saw, with distraction, that Chang had won the girl's

affections; and, from that day forth, he had to bear with the agony of

being a witness to all their dainty billing and cooing.  But with a

magnanimity that did him infinite credit, he succumbed to his fate, and

gave countenance and encouragement to a state of things that bade fair to

sunder his generous heart-strings.  He sat from seven every evening until

two in the morning, listening to the fond foolishness of the two lovers,

and to the concussion of hundreds of squandered kisses--for the privilege

of sharing only one of which he would have given his right hand.  But he

sat patiently, and waited, and gaped, and yawned, and stretched, and

longed for two o'clock to come.  And he took long walks with the lovers

on moonlight evenings--sometimes traversing ten miles, notwithstanding he

was usually suffering from rheumatism.  He is an inveterate smoker; but

he could not smoke on these occasions, because the young lady was

painfully sensitive to the smell of tobacco.  Eng cordially wanted them

married, and done with it; but although Chang often asked the momentous

question, the young lady could not gather sufficient courage to answer it

while Eng was by.  However, on one occasion, after having walked some

sixteen miles, and sat up till nearly daylight, Eng dropped asleep, from

sheer exhaustion, and then the question was asked and answered.  The

lovers were married.  All acquainted with the circumstance applauded the

noble brother-in-law.  His unwavering faithfulness was the theme of every

tongue.  He had stayed by them all through their long and arduous

courtship; and when at last they were married, he lifted his hands above

their heads, and said with impressive unction, "Bless ye, my children, I

will never desert ye!" and he kept his word.  Fidelity like this is all

too rare in this cold world.



By and by Eng fell in love with his sister-in-law's sister, and married

her, and since that day they have all lived together, night and day, in

an exceeding sociability which is touching and beautiful to behold, and

is a scathing rebuke to our boasted civilization.



The sympathy existing between these two brothers is so close and so

refined that the feelings, the impulses, the emotions of the one are

instantly experienced by the other.  When one is sick, the other is sick;

when one feels pain, the other feels it; when one is angered, the other's

temper takes fire.  We have already seen with what happy facility they

both fell in love with the same girl.  Now Chang is bitterly opposed to

all forms of intemperance, on principle; but Eng is the reverse--for,

while these men's feelings and emotions are so closely wedded, their

reasoning faculties are unfettered; their thoughts are free.  Chang

belongs to the Good Templars, and is a hard--working, enthusiastic

supporter of all temperance reforms.  But, to his bitter distress, every

now and then Eng gets drunk, and, of course, that makes Chang drunk too.

This unfortunate thing has been a great sorrow to Chang, for it almost

destroys his usefulness in his favorite field of effort.  As sure as he

is to head a great temperance procession Eng ranges up alongside of him,

prompt to the minute, and drunk as a lord; but yet no more dismally and

hopelessly drunk than his brother, who has not tasted a drop.  And so the

two begin to hoot and yell, and throw mud and bricks at the Good

Templars; and, of course, they break up the procession.  It would be

manifestly wrong to punish Chang for what Eng does, and, therefore, the

Good Templars accept the untoward situation, and suffer in silence and

sorrow.  They have officially and deliberately examined into the matter,

and find Chang blameless.  They have taken the two brothers and filled

Chang full of warm water and sugar and Eng full of whisky, and in twenty-

five minutes it was not possible to tell which was the drunkest.  Both

were as drunk as loons--and on hot whisky punches, by the smell of their

breath.  Yet all the while Chang's moral principles were unsullied, his

conscience clear; and so all just men were forced to confess that he was

not morally, but only physically, drunk.  By every right and by every

moral evidence the man was strictly sober; and, therefore, it caused his

friends all the more anguish to see him shake hands with the pump and try

to wind his watch with his night-key.



There is a moral in these solemn warnings--or, at least, a warning in

these solemn morals; one or the other.  No matter, it is somehow.  Let us

heed it; let us profit by it.



I could say more of an instructive nature about these interesting beings,

but let what I have written suffice.



Having forgotten to mention it sooner, I will remark in conclusion that

the ages of the Siamese Twins are respectively fifty-one and fifty-three

years.













SPEECH AT THE SCOTTISH BANQUET IN LONDON--[Written about 1872.]



On the anniversary festival of the Scottish Corporation of London on

Monday evening, in response to the toast of "The Ladies," MARK TWAIN

replied.  The following is his speech as reported in the London Observer:



I am proud, indeed, of the distinction of being chosen to respond to this

especial toast, to 'The Ladies,' or to women if you please, for that is

the preferable term, perhaps; it is certainly the older, and therefore

the more entitled to reverence [Laughter.]  I have noticed that the

Bible, with that plain, blunt honesty which is such a conspicuous

characteristic of the Scriptures, is always particular to never refer to

even the illustrious mother of all mankind herself as a 'lady,' but

speaks of her as a woman, [Laughter.]  It is odd, but you will find it is

so.  I am peculiarly proud of this honor, because I think that the toast

to women is one which, by right and by every rule of gallantry, should

take precedence of all others--of the army, of the navy, of even royalty

itself perhaps, though the latter is not necessary in this day and in

this land, for the reason that, tacitly, you do drink a broad general

health to all good women when you drink the health of the Queen of

England and the Princess of Wales.  [Loud cheers.]  I have in mind a poem

just now which is familiar to you all, familiar to everybody.  And what

an inspiration that was (and how instantly the present toast recalls the

verses to all our minds) when the most noble, the most gracious, the

purest, and sweetest of all poets says:



                         "Woman!  O woman!--er--

                         Wom--"



[Laughter.]  However, you remember the lines; and you remember how

feelingly, how daintily, how almost imperceptibly the verses raise up

before you, feature by feature, the ideal of a true and perfect woman;

and how, as you contemplate the finished marvel, your homage grows into

worship of the intellect that could create so fair a thing out of mere

breath, mere words.  And you call to mind now, as I speak, how the poet,

with stern fidelity to the history of all humanity, delivers this

beautiful child of his heart and his brain over to the trials and sorrows

that must come to all, sooner or later, that abide in the earth, and how

the pathetic story culminates in that apostrophe--so wild, so regretful,

so full of mournful retrospection.  The lines run thus:



                    "Alas!--alas!--a--alas!

                    ----Alas!--------alas!"



--and so on.  [Laughter.] I do not remember the rest; but, taken

together, it seems to me that poem is the noblest tribute to woman that

human genius has ever brought forth--[laughter]--and I feel that if I

were to talk hours I could not do my great theme completer or more

graceful justice than I have now done in simply quoting that poet's

matchless words.  [Renewed laughter.] The phases of the womanly nature

are infinite in their variety.  Take any type of woman, and you shall

find in it something to respect, something to admire, something to love.

And you shall find the whole joining you heart and hand.  Who was more

patriotic than Joan of Arc?  Who was braver?  Who has given us a grander

instance of self-sacrificing devotion?  Ah! you remember, you remember

well, what a throb of pain, what a great tidal wave of grief swept over

us all when Joan of Arc fell at Waterloo.  [Much laughter.]  Who does not

sorrow for the loss of Sappho, the sweet singer of Israel?  [Laughter.]

Who among us does not miss the gentle ministrations, the softening

influences, the humble piety of Lucretia Borgia?  [Laughter.]  Who can

join in the heartless libel that says woman is extravagant in dress when

he can look back and call to mind our simple and lowly mother Eve arrayed

in her modification of the Highland costume.  [Roars of laughter.]

Sir, women have been soldiers, women have been painters, women have been

poets.  As long as language lives the name of Cleopatra will live.



And, not because she conquered George III. [laughter]--but because she

wrote those divine lines:



                    "Let dogs delight to bark and bite,

                    For God hath made them so."



[More laughter.]  The story of the world is adorned with the names of

illustrious ones of our own sex--some of them sons of St.  Andrew, too--

Scott, Bruce, Burns, the warrior Wallace, Ben Nevis--[laughter]--the

gifted Ben Lomond, and the great new Scotchman, Ben Disraeli.  [Great

laughter.]  Out of the great plains of history tower whole mountain

ranges of sublime women--the Queen of Sheba, Josephine, Semiramis, Sairey

Gamp; the list is endless--[laughter]--but I will not call the mighty

roll, the names rise up in your own memories at the mere suggestion,

luminous with the glory of deeds that cannot die, hallowed by the loving

worship of the good and the true of all epochs and all climes.  [Cheers.]

Suffice it for our pride and our honor that we in our day have added to

it such names as those of Grace Darling and Florence Nightingale.

[Cheers.]  Woman is all that she should be-gentle, patient, long

suffering, trustful, unselfish, full of generous impulses.  It is her

blessed mission to comfort the sorrowing, plead for the erring, encourage

the faint of purpose, succor the distressed, uplift the fallen, befriend

the friendless in a word, afford the healing of her sympathies and a home

in her heart for all the bruised and persecuted children of misfortune

that knock at its hospitable door. [Cheers.]  And when I say, God bless

her, there is none among us who has known the ennobling affection of a

wife, or the steadfast devotion of a mother, but in his heart will say,

Amen!  [Loud and prolonged cheering.]



--[Mr.  Benjamin Disraeli, at that time Prime Minister of England, had

just been elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University, and had made a

speech which gave rise to a world of discussion.]













A GHOST STORY



I took a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper

stories had been wholly unoccupied for years until I came.  The place had

long been given up to dust and cobwebs, to solitude and silence.

I seemed groping among the tombs and invading the privacy of the dead,

that first night I climbed up to my quarters.  For the first time in my

life a superstitious dread came over me; and as I turned a dark angle of

the stairway and an invisible cobweb swung its slazy woof in my face and

clung there, I shuddered as one who had encountered a phantom.



I was glad enough when I reached my room and locked out the mold and the

darkness.  A cheery fire was burning in the grate, and I sat down before

it with a comforting sense of relief.  For two hours I sat there,

thinking of bygone times; recalling old scenes, and summoning half-

forgotten faces out of the mists of the past; listening, in fancy, to

voices that long ago grew silent for all time, and to once familiar songs

that nobody sings now.  And as my reverie softened down to a sadder and

sadder pathos, the shrieking of the winds outside softened to a wail, the

angry beating of the rain against the panes diminished to a tranquil

patter, and one by one the noises in the street subsided, until the

hurrying footsteps of the last belated straggler died away in the

distance and left no sound behind.



The fire had burned low.  A sense of loneliness crept over me.  I arose

and undressed, moving on tiptoe about the room, doing stealthily what I

had to do, as if I were environed by sleeping enemies whose slumbers it

would be fatal to break.  I covered up in bed, and lay listening to the

rain and wind and the faint creaking of distant shutters, till they

lulled me to sleep.



I slept profoundly, but how long I do not know.  All at once I found

myself awake, and filled with a shuddering expectancy.  All was still.

All but my own heart--I could hear it beat.  Presently the bedclothes

began to slip away slowly toward the foot of the bed, as if some one were

pulling them!  I could not stir; I could not speak.  Still the blankets

slipped deliberately away, till my breast was uncovered.  Then with a

great effort I seized them and drew them over my head.  I waited,

listened, waited.  Once more that steady pull began, and once more I lay

torpid a century of dragging seconds till my breast was naked again.  At

last I roused my energies and snatched the covers back to their place and

held them with a strong grip.  I waited.  By and by I felt a faint tug,

and took a fresh grip.  The tug strengthened to a steady strain--it grew

stronger and stronger.  My hold parted, and for the third time the

blankets slid away.  I groaned.  An answering groan came from the foot of

the bed!  Beaded drops of sweat stood upon my forehead.  I was more dead

than alive.  Presently I heard a heavy footstep in my room--the step of

an elephant, it seemed to me--it was not like anything human.  But it was

moving from me--there was relief in that.  I heard it approach the door--

pass out without moving bolt or lock--and wander away among the dismal

corridors, straining the floors and joists till they creaked again as it

passed--and then silence reigned once more.



When my excitement had calmed, I said to myself, "This is a dream--simply

a hideous dream."  And so I lay thinking it over until I convinced myself

that it was a dream, and then a comforting laugh relaxed my lips and I

was happy again.  I got up and struck a light; and when I found that the

locks and bolts were just as I had left them, another soothing laugh

welled in my heart and rippled from my lips.  I took my pipe and lit it,

and was just sitting down before the fire, when-down went the pipe out of

my nerveless fingers, the blood forsook my cheeks, and my placid

breathing was cut short with a gasp!  In the ashes on the hearth, side by

side with my own bare footprint, was another, so vast that in comparison

mine was but an infant's!  Then I had had a visitor, and the elephant

tread was explained.



I put out the light and returned to bed, palsied with fear.  I lay a long

time, peering into the darkness, and listening.--Then I heard a grating

noise overhead, like the dragging of a heavy body across the floor; then

the throwing down of the body, and the shaking of my windows in response

to the concussion.  In distant parts of the building I heard the muffled

slamming of doors.  I heard, at intervals, stealthy footsteps creeping in

and out among the corridors, and up and down the stairs.  Sometimes these

noises approached my door, hesitated, and went away again.  I heard the

clanking of chains faintly, in remote passages, and listened while the

clanking grew nearer--while it wearily climbed the stairways, marking

each move by the loose surplus of chain that fell with an accented rattle

upon each succeeding step as the goblin that bore it advanced.  I heard

muttered sentences; half-uttered screams that seemed smothered violently;

and the swish of invisible garments, the rush of invisible wings.  Then I

became conscious that my chamber was invaded--that I was not alone.

I heard sighs and breathings about my bed, and mysterious whisperings.

Three little spheres of soft phosphorescent light appeared on the ceiling

directly over my head, clung and glowed there a moment, and then dropped

--two of them upon my face and one upon the pillow.  They, spattered,

liquidly, and felt warm.  Intuition told me they had--turned to gouts of

blood as they fell--I needed no light to satisfy myself of that.  Then I

saw pallid faces, dimly luminous, and white uplifted hands, floating

bodiless in the air--floating a moment and then disappearing.

The whispering ceased, and the voices and the sounds, anal a solemn

stillness followed.  I waited and listened.  I felt that I must have

light or die.  I was weak with fear.  I slowly raised myself toward a

sitting posture, and my face came in contact with a clammy hand!

All strength went from me apparently, and I fell back like a stricken

invalid.  Then I heard the rustle of a garment it seemed to pass to the

door and go out.



When everything was still once more, I crept out of bed, sick and feeble,

and lit the gas with a hand that trembled as if it were aged with a

hundred years.  The light brought some little cheer to my spirits.  I sat

down and fell into a dreamy contemplation of that great footprint in the

ashes.  By and by its outlines began to waver and grow dim.  I glanced up

and the broad gas-flame was slowly wilting away.  In the same moment I

heard that elephantine tread again.  I noted its approach, nearer and

nearer, along the musty halls, and dimmer and dimmer the light waned.

The tread reached my very door and paused--the light had dwindled to a

sickly blue, and all things about me lay in a spectral twilight.  The

door did not open, and yet I felt a faint gust of air fan my cheek, and

presently was conscious of a huge, cloudy presence before me.  I watched

it with fascinated eyes.  A pale glow stole over the Thing; gradually its

cloudy folds took shape--an arm appeared, then legs, then a body, and

last a great sad face looked out of the vapor.  Stripped of its filmy

housings, naked, muscular and comely, the majestic Cardiff Giant loomed

above me!



All my misery vanished--for a child might know that no harm could come

with that benignant countenance.  My cheerful spirits returned at once,

and in sympathy with them the gas flamed up brightly again.  Never a

lonely outcast was so glad to welcome company as I was to greet the

friendly giant.  I said:



"Why, is it nobody but you?  Do you know, I have been scared to death for

the last two or three hours?  I am most honestly glad to see you.  I wish

I had a chair--Here, here, don't try to sit down in that thing--"



But it was too late.  He was in it before I could stop him and down he

went--I never saw a chair shivered so in my life.



"Stop, stop, you'll ruin ev--"



Too late again.  There was another crash, and another chair was resolved

into its original elements.



"Confound it, haven't you got any judgment at' all?  Do you want to ruin

all the furniture on the place?  Here, here, you petrified fool--"



But it was no use.  Before I could arrest him he had sat down on the bed,

and it was a melancholy ruin.



"Now what sort of a way is that to do?  First you come lumbering about

the place bringing a legion of vagabond goblins along with you to worry

me to death, and then when I overlook an indelicacy of costume which

would not be tolerated anywhere by cultivated people except in a

respectable theater, and not even there if the nudity were of your sex,

you repay me by wrecking all the furniture you can find to sit down on.

And why will you?  You damage yourself as much as you do me.  You have

broken off the end of your spinal column, and littered up the floor with

chips of your hams till the place looks like a marble yard.  You ought to

be ashamed of yourself--you are big enough to know better."



"Well, I will not break any more furniture.  But what am I to do?  I have

not had a chance to sit down for a century."  And the tears came into his

eyes.



"Poor devil," I said, "I should not have been so harsh with you.  And you

are an orphan, too, no doubt.  But sit down on the floor here--nothing

else can stand your weight--and besides, we cannot be sociable with you

away up there above me; I want you down where I can perch on this high

counting-house stool and gossip with you face to face."  So he sat down

on the floor, and lit a pipe which I gave him, threw one of my red

blankets over his shoulders, inverted my sitz-bath on his head, helmet

fashion, and made himself picturesque and comfortable.  Then he crossed

his ankles, while I renewed the fire, and exposed the flat, honeycombed

bottoms of his prodigious feet to the grateful warmth.



"What is the matter with the bottom of your feet and the back of your

legs, that they are gouged up so?"



"Infernal chilblains--I caught them clear up to the back of my head,

roosting out there under Newell's farm.  But I love the place; I love it

as one loves his old home.  There is no peace for me like the peace I

feel when I am there."



We talked along for half an hour, and then I noticed that he looked

tired, and spoke of it.



"Tired?" he said.  "Well, I should think so.  And now I will tell you all

about it, since you have treated me so well.  I am the spirit of the

Petrified Man that lies across the street there in the museum. I am the

ghost of the Cardiff Giant.  I can have no rest, no peace, till they have

given that poor body burial again.  Now what was the most natural thing

for me to do, to make men satisfy this wish?  Terrify them into it!

haunt the place where the body lay!  So I haunted the museum night after

night.  I even got other spirits to help me.  But it did no good, for

nobody ever came to the museum at midnight.  Then it occurred to me to

come over the way and haunt this place a little.  I felt that if I ever

got a hearing I must succeed, for I had the most efficient company that

perdition could furnish.  Night after night we have shivered around

through these mildewed halls, dragging chains, groaning, whispering,

tramping up and down stairs, till, to tell you the truth, I am almost

worn out.  But when I saw a light in your room to-night I roused my

energies again and went at it with a deal of the old freshness.  But I am

tired out--entirely fagged out.  Give me, I beseech you, give me some

hope!"  I lit off my perch in a burst of excitement, and exclaimed:



"This transcends everything!  everything that ever did occur!  Why you

poor blundering old fossil, you have had all your trouble for nothing--

you have been haunting a plaster cast of yourself--the real Cardiff Giant

is in Albany!--[A fact.  The original fraud was ingeniously and

fraudfully duplicated, and exhibited in New York as the "only genuine"

Cardiff Giant (to the unspeakable disgust of the owners of the real

colossus) at the very same time that the latter was drawing crowds at a

museum is Albany,]--Confound it, don't you know your own remains?"



I never saw such an eloquent look of shame, of pitiable humiliation,

overspread a countenance before.



The Petrified Man rose slowly to his feet, and said:



"Honestly, is that true?"



"As true as I am sitting here."



He took the pipe from his mouth and laid it on the mantel, then stood

irresolute a moment (unconsciously, from old habit, thrusting his hands

where his pantaloons pockets should have been, and meditatively dropping

his chin on his breast); and finally said:



"Well-I never felt so absurd before.  The Petrified Man has sold

everybody else, and now the mean fraud has ended by selling its own

ghost!  My son, if there is any charity left in your heart for a poor

friendless phantom like me, don't let this get out.  Think how you would

feel if you had made such an ass of yourself."



I heard his stately tramp die away, step by step down the stairs and out

into the deserted street, and felt sorry that he was gone, poor fellow--

and sorrier still that he had carried off my red blanket and my bath-tub.













THE CAPITOLINE VENUS



CHAPTER I



[Scene-An Artist's Studio in Rome.]



"Oh, George, I do love you!"



"Bless your dear heart, Mary, I know that--why is your father so

obdurate?"



"George, he means well, but art is folly to him--he only understands

groceries.  He thinks you would starve me."



"Confound his wisdom--it savors of inspiration.  Why am I not a money-

making bowelless grocer, instead of a divinely gifted sculptor with

nothing to eat?"



"Do not despond, Georgy, dear--all his prejudices will fade away as soon

as you shall have acquired fifty thousand dol--"



"Fifty thousand demons!  Child, I am in arrears for my board!"







CHAPTER II



[Scene-A Dwelling in Rome.]



"My dear sir, it is useless to talk.  I haven't anything against you, but

I can't let my daughter marry a hash of love, art, and starvation--I

believe you have nothing else to offer."



"Sir, I am poor, I grant you.  But is fame nothing?  The Hon. Bellamy

Foodle of Arkansas says that my new statue of America, is a clever piece

of sculpture, and he is satisfied that my name will one day be famous."



"Bosh!  What does that Arkansas ass know about it?  Fame's nothing--the

market price of your marble scarecrow is the thing to look at.  It took

you six months to chisel it, and you can't sell it for a hundred dollars.

No, sir!  Show me fifty thousand dollars and you can have my daughter--

otherwise she marries young Simper.  You have just six months to raise

the money in.  Good morning, sir."



"Alas!  Woe is me!"







CHAPTER III



[ Scene-The Studio.]



"Oh, John, friend of my boyhood, I am the unhappiest of men."



"You're a simpleton!"



"I have nothing left to love but my poor statue of America--and see, even

she has no sympathy for me in her cold marble countenance--so beautiful

and so heartless!"



"You're a dummy!"



"Oh, John!"



Oh, fudge!  Didn't you say you had six months to raise the money in?"



"Don't deride my agony, John.  If I had six centuries what good would it

do?  How could it help a poor wretch without name, capital, or friends?"



"Idiot!  Coward!  Baby!  Six months to raise the money in--and five will

do!"



"Are you insane?"



"Six months--an abundance.  Leave it to me.  I'll raise it."



"What do you mean, John?  How on earth can you raise such a monstrous sum

for me?"



"Will you let that be my business, and not meddle?  Will you leave the

thing in my hands?  Will you swear to submit to whatever I do?  Will you

pledge me to find no fault with my actions?"



"I am dizzy--bewildered--but I swear."



John took up a hammer and deliberately smashed the nose of America!  He

made another pass and two of her fingers fell to the floor--another, and

part of an ear came away--another, and a row of toes was mangled and

dismembered--another, and the left leg, from the knee down, lay a

fragmentary ruin!



John put on his hat and departed.



George gazed speechless upon the battered and grotesque nightmare before

him for the space of thirty seconds, and then wilted to the floor and

went into convulsions.



John returned presently with a carriage, got the broken-hearted artist

and the broken-legged statue aboard, and drove off, whistling low and

tranquilly.



He left the artist at his lodgings, and drove off and disappeared down

the Via Quirinalis with the statue.







CHAPTER IV



[Scene--The Studio.]



"The six months will be up at two o'clock to-day!  Oh, agony!  My life is

blighted.  I would that I were dead.  I had no supper yesterday.  I have

had no breakfast to-day.  I dare not enter an eating-house.  And hungry?

--don't mention it!  My bootmaker duns me to death--my tailor duns me--

my landlord haunts me.  I am miserable.  I haven't seen John since that

awful day.  She smiles on me tenderly when we meet in the great

thoroughfares, but her old flint of a father makes her look in the other

direction in short order.  Now who is knocking at that door?  Who is come

to persecute me?  That malignant villain the bootmaker, I'll warrant.

Come in!"



"Ah, happiness attend your highness--Heaven be propitious to your grace!

I have brought my lord's new boots--ah, say nothing about the pay, there

is no hurry, none in the world.  Shall be proud if my noble lord will

continue to honor me with his custom--ah, adieu!"



"Brought the boots himself!  Don't wait his pay!  Takes his leave with a

bow and a scrape fit to honor majesty withal!  Desires a continuance of

my custom!  Is the world coming to an end?  Of all the--come in!"



"Pardon, signore, but I have brought your new suit of clothes for--"



"Come in!"



"A thousand pardons for this intrusion, your worship.  But I have

prepared the beautiful suite of rooms below for you--this wretched den is

but ill suited to--"



"Come in!"



"I have called to say that your credit at our bank, some time since

unfortunately interrupted, is entirely and most satisfactorily restored,

and we shall be most happy if you will draw upon us for any--"



"COME IN!"



"My noble boy, she is yours!  She'll be here in a moment!  Take her--

marry her--love her--be happy!--God bless you both!  Hip, hip, hur--"



"COME IN!!!!!"



"Oh, George, my own darling, we are saved!"



"Oh, Mary, my own darling, we are saved--but I'll swear I don't know why

nor how!"







CHAPTER V



[Scene-A Roman Cafe.]



One of a group of American gentlemen reads and translates from the weekly

edition of 'Il Slangwhanger di Roma' as follows:



WONDERFUL DISCOVERY--Some six months ago Signor John Smitthe, an American

gentleman now some years a resident of Rome, purchased for a trifle a

small piece of ground in the Campagna, just beyond the tomb of the Scipio

family, from the owner, a bankrupt relative of the Princess Borghese.

Mr. Smitthe afterward went to the Minister of the Public Records and had

the piece of ground transferred to a poor American artist named George

Arnold, explaining that he did it as payment and satisfaction for

pecuniary damage accidentally done by him long since upon property

belonging to Signor Arnold, and further observed that he would make

additional satisfaction by improving the ground for Signor A., at his own

charge and cost.  Four weeks ago, while making some necessary excavations

upon the property, Signor Smitthe unearthed the most remarkable ancient

statue that has ever bees added to the opulent art treasures of Rome.

It was an exquisite figure of a woman, and though sadly stained by the

soil and the mold of ages, no eye can look unmoved upon its ravishing

beauty.  The nose, the left leg from the knee down, an ear, and also the

toes of the right foot and two fingers of one of the hands were gone,

but otherwise the noble figure was in a remarkable state of preservation.

The government at once took military possession of the statue, and

appointed a commission of art-critics, antiquaries, and cardinal princes

of the church to assess its value and determine the remuneration that

must go to the owner of the ground in which it was found.  The whole

affair was kept a profound secret until last night.  In the mean time the

commission sat with closed doors and deliberated.  Last night they

decided unanimously that the statue is a Venus, and the work of some

unknown but sublimely gifted artist of the third century before Christ.

They consider it the most faultless work of art the world has any

knowledge of.



At midnight they held a final conference and, decided that the Venus was

worth the enormous sum of ten million francs!  In accordance with Roman

law and Roman usage, the government being half-owner in all works of art

found in the Campagna, the State has naught to do but pay five million

francs to Mr.  Arnold and take permanent possession of the beautiful

statue.  This morning the Venus will be removed to the Capitol, there to

remain, and at noon the commission will wait upon Signor Arnold with His

Holiness the Pope's order upon the Treasury for the princely sum of five

million francs is gold!



Chorus of Voices.--"Luck!  It's no name for it!"



Another Voice.--" Gentlemen, I propose that we immediately form an

American joint-stock company for the purchase of lands and excavations of

statues here, with proper connections in Wall Street to bull and bear the

stock."



All.--"Agreed."







CHAPTER VI



[Scene--The Roman Capitol Ten Years Later.]



"Dearest Mary, this is the most celebrated statue in the world.  This is

the renowned 'Capitoline Venus' you've heard so much about.  Here she is

with her little blemishes 'restored' (that is, patched) by the most noted

Roman artists--and the mere fact that they did the humble patching of so

noble a creation will make their names illustrious while the world

stands.  How strange it seems this place!  The day before I last stood

here, ten happy years ago, I wasn't a rich man bless your soul, I hadn't

a cent.  And yet I had a good deal to do with making Rome mistress of

this grandest work of ancient art the world contains."



"The worshiped, the illustrious Capitoline Venus--and what a sum she is

valued at!  Ten millions of francs!"



"Yes--now she is."



"And oh, Georgy, how divinely beautiful she is!"



"Ah, yes but nothing to what she was before that blessed John Smith broke

her leg and battered her nose.  Ingenious Smith!--gifted Smith!--noble

Smith!  Author of all our bliss!  Hark!  Do you know what that wheeze

means?  Mary, that cub has got the whooping-cough.  Will you never learn

to take care of the children!"



THE END





The Capitoline Venus is still in the Capitol at Rome, and is still the

most charming and most illustrious work of ancient art the world can

boast of.  But if ever it shall be your fortune to stand before it and go

into the customary ecstasies over it, don't permit this true and secret

history of its origin to mar your bliss--and when you read about a

gigantic Petrified man being dug up near Syracuse, in the State of New

York, or near any other place, keep your own counsel--and if the Barnum

that buried him there offers to sell to you at an enormous sum, don't you

buy.  Send him to the Pope!





[NOTE.--The above sketch was written at the time the famous swindle of

the

"Petrified Giant" was the sensation of the day in the United States]













SPEECH ON ACCIDENT INSURANCE



DELIVERED IN HARTFORD, AT A DINNER TO CORNELIUS WALFORD, OF LONDON



GENTLEMEN: I am glad, indeed, to assist in welcoming the distinguished

guest of this occasion to a city whose fame as an insurance center has

extended to all lands, and given us the name of being a quadruple band of

brothers working sweetly hand in hand--the Colt's Arms Company making the

destruction of our race easy and convenient, our life insurance citizens

paying for the victims when they pass away, Mr. Batterson perpetuating

their memory with his stately monuments, and our fire-insurance comrades

taking care of their hereafter.  I am glad to assist in welcoming our

guest first, because he is an Englishman, and I owe a heavy debt of

hospitality to certain of his fellow-countrymen; and secondly, because he

is in sympathy with insurance and has been the means of making may other

men cast their sympathies in the same direction.



Certainly there is no nobler field for human effort than the insurance

line of business--especially accident insurance.  Ever since I have been

a director in an accident-insurance company I have felt that I am a

better man.  Life has seemed more precious.  Accidents have assumed a

kindlier aspect.  Distressing special providences have lost half their

horror.  I look upon a cripple now with affectionate interest--as an

advertisement.  I do not seem to care for poetry any more.  I do not care

for politics--even agriculture does not excite me.  But to me now there

is a charm about a railway collision that is unspeakable.



There is nothing more beneficent than accident insurance.  I have seen an

entire family lifted out of poverty and into affluence by the simple boon

of a broken leg.  I have had people come to me on crutches, with tears in

their eyes, to bless this beneficent institution.  In all my experience

of life, I have seen nothing so seraphic as the look that comes into a

freshly mutilated man's face when he feels in his vest pocket with his

remaining hand and finds his accident ticket all right.  And I have seen

nothing so sad as the look that came into another splintered customer's

face when he found he couldn't collect on a wooden leg.



I will remark here, by way of advertisement, that that noble charity

which we have named the HARTFORD ACCIDENT INSURANCE COMPANY--[The

speaker is a director of the company named.]--is an institution which is

peculiarly to be depended upon.  A man is bound to prosper who gives it

his custom.



No man can take out a policy in it and not get crippled before the year

is out.  Now there was one indigent man who had been disappointed so

often with other companies that he had grown disheartened, his appetite

left him, he ceased to smile--life was but a weariness.  Three weeks ago

I got him to insure with us, and now he is the brightest, happiest spirit

in this land has a good steady income and a stylish suit of new bandages

every day, and travels around on a shutter.



I will say, in conclusion, that my share of the welcome to our guest is

none the less hearty because I talk so much nonsense, and I know that I

can say the same for the rest of the speakers.













JOHN CHINAMAN IN NEW YORK



As I passed along by one of those monster American tea stores in New

York, I found a Chinaman sitting before it acting in the capacity of a

sign.  Everybody that passed by gave him a steady stare as long as their

heads would twist over their shoulders without dislocating their necks,

and a group had stopped to stare deliberately.



Is it not a shame that we, who prate so much about civilization and

humanity, are content to degrade a fellow-being to such an office as

this?  Is it not time for reflection when we find ourselves willing to

see in such a being matter for frivolous curiosity instead of regret and

grave reflection?  Here was a poor creature whom hard fortune had exiled

from his natural home beyond the seas, and whose troubles ought to have

touched these idle strangers that thronged about him; but did it?

Apparently not.  Men calling themselves the superior race, the race of

culture and of gentle blood, scanned his quaint Chinese hat, with peaked

roof and ball on top, and his long queue dangling down his back; his

short silken blouse, curiously frogged and figured (and, like the rest of

his raiment, rusty, dilapidated, and awkwardly put on); his blue cotton,

tight-legged pants, tied close around the ankles; and his clumsy blunt-

toed shoes with thick cork soles; and having so scanned him from head to

foot, cracked some unseemly joke about his outlandish attire or his

melancholy face, and passed on.  In my heart I pitied the friendless

Mongol.  I wondered what was passing behind his sad face, and what

distant scene his vacant eye was dreaming of.  Were his thoughts with his

heart, ten thousand miles away, beyond the billowy wastes of the Pacific?

among the ricefields and the plumy palms of China? under the shadows of

remembered mountain peaks, or in groves of bloomy shrubs and strange

forest trees unknown to climes like ours?  And now and then, rippling

among his visions and his dreams, did he hear familiar laughter and half-

forgotten voices, and did he catch fitful glimpses of the friendly faces

of a bygone time?  A cruel fate it is, I said, that is befallen this

bronzed wanderer.  In order that the group of idlers might be touched at

least by the words of the poor fellow, since the appeal of his pauper

dress and his dreary exile was lost upon them, I touched him on the

shoulder and said:



"Cheer up--don't be downhearted.  It is not America that treats you in

this way, it is merely one citizen, whose greed of gain has eaten the

humanity out of his heart.  America has a broader hospitality for the

exiled and oppressed.  America and Americans are always ready to help the

unfortunate.  Money shall be raised--you shall go back to China you shall

see your friends again.  What wages do they pay you here?"



"Divil a cint but four dollars a week and find meself; but it's aisy,

barrin' the troublesome furrin clothes that's so expinsive."



The exile remains at his post.  The New York tea merchants who need

picturesque signs are not likely to run out of Chinamen.













HOW I EDITED AN AGRICULTURAL PAPER--[Written abort 1870.]



I did not take temporary editorship of an agricultural paper without

misgivings.  Neither would a landsman take command of a ship without

misgivings.  But I was in circumstances that made the salary an object.

The regular editor of the paper was going off for a holiday, and I

accepted the terms he offered, and took his place.



The sensation of being at work again was luxurious, and I wrought all the

week with unflagging pleasure.  We went to press, and I waited a day with

some solicitude to see whether my effort was going to attract any notice.

As I left the office, toward sundown, a group of men and boys at the foot

of the stairs dispersed with one impulse, and gave me passageway, and I

heard one or two of them say: "That's him!"  I was naturally pleased by

this incident.  The next morning I found a similar group at the foot of

the stairs, and scattering couples and individuals standing here and

there in the street and over the way, watching me with interest.  The

group separated and fell back as I approached, and I heard a man say,

"Look at his eye!"  I pretended not to observe the notice I was

attracting, but secretly I was pleased with it, and was purposing to

write an account of it to my aunt.  I went up the short flight of stairs,

and heard cheery voices and a ringing laugh as I drew near the door,

which I opened, and caught a glimpse of two young rural-looking men,

whose faces blanched and lengthened when they saw me, and then they both

plunged through the window with a great crash.  I was surprised.



In about half an hour an old gentleman, with a flowing beard and a fine

but rather austere face, entered, and sat down at my invitation.  He

seemed to have something on his mind.  He took off his hat and set it on

the floor, and got out of it a red silk handkerchief and a copy of our

paper.



He put the paper on his lap, and while he polished his spectacles with

his handkerchief he said, "Are you the new editor?"



I said I was.



"Have you ever edited an agricultural paper before?"



"No," I said; "this is my first attempt."



"Very likely.  Have you had any experience in agriculture practically?"



"No; I believe I have not."



"Some instinct told me so," said the old gentleman, putting on his

spectacles, and looking over them at me with asperity, while he folded

his paper into a convenient shape.  "I wish to read you what must have

made me have that instinct.  It was this editorial.  Listen, and see if

it was you that wrote it:



     "'Turnips should never be pulled, it injures them.  It is much

     better to send a boy up and let him shake the tree.'



"Now, what do you think of that?  for I really suppose you wrote it?"



"Think of it?  Why, I think it is good.  I think it is sense.  I have no

doubt that every year millions and millions of bushels of turnips are

spoiled in this township alone by being pulled in a half-ripe condition,

when, if they had sent a boy up to shake the tree--"



"Shake your grandmother!  Turnips don't grow on trees!"



"Oh, they don't, don't they?  Well, who said they did?  The language was

intended to be figurative, wholly figurative.  Anybody that knows

anything will know that I meant that the boy should shake the vine."



Then this old person got up and tore his paper all into small shreds, and

stamped on them, and broke several things with his cane, and said I did

not know as much as a cow; and then went--out and banged the door after

him, and, in short, acted in such a way that I fancied he was displeased

about something.  But not knowing what the trouble was, I could not be

any help to him.



Pretty soon after this a long, cadaverous creature, with lanky locks

hanging down to his shoulders, and a week's stubble bristling from the

hills and valleys of his face, darted within the door, and halted,

motionless, with finger on lip, and head and body bent in listening

attitude.  No sound was heard.



Still he listened.  No sound.  Then he turned the key in the door, and

came elaborately tiptoeing toward me till he was within long reaching

distance of me, when he stopped and, after scanning my face with intense

interest for a while, drew a folded copy of our paper from his bosom, and

said:



"There, you wrote that.  Read it to me--quick!  Relieve me.  I suffer."



I read as follows; and as the sentences fell from my lips I could see the

relief come, I could see the drawn muscles relax, and the anxiety go out

of the face, and rest and peace steal over the features like the merciful

moonlight over a desolate landscape:



     The guano is a fine bird, but great care is necessary in rearing it.

     It should not be imported earlier than June or later than September.

     In the winter it should be kept in a warm place, where it can hatch

     out its young.



     It is evident that we are to have a backward season for grain.

     Therefore it will be well for the farmer to begin setting out his

     corn-stalks and planting his buckwheat cakes in July instead of

     August.



     Concerning the pumpkin.  This berry is a favorite with the natives

     of the interior of New England, who prefer it to the gooseberry for

     the making of fruit-cake, and who likewise give it the preference

     over the raspberry for feeding cows, as being more filling and fully

     as satisfying.  The pumpkin is the only esculent of the orange

     family that will thrive in the North, except the gourd and one or

     two varieties of the squash.  But the custom of planting it in the

     front yard with the shrubbery is fast going out of vogue, for it is

     now generally conceded that, the pumpkin as a shade tree is a

     failure.



     Now, as the warm weather approaches, and the ganders begin to

     spawn--





The excited listener sprang toward me to shake hands, and said:



"There, there--that will do.  I know I am all right now, because you have

read it just as I did, word, for word.  But, stranger, when I first read

it this morning, I said to myself, I never, never believed it before,

notwithstanding my friends kept me under watch so strict, but now I

believe I am crazy; and with that I fetched a howl that you might have

heard two miles, and started out to kill somebody--because, you know,

I knew it would come to that sooner or later, and so I might as well

begin.  I read one of them paragraphs over again, so as to be certain,

and then I burned my house down and started.  I have crippled several

people, and have got one fellow up a tree, where I can get him if I want

him.  But I thought I would call in here as I passed along and make the

thing perfectly certain; and now it is certain, and I tell you it is

lucky for the chap that is in the tree.  I should have killed him sure,

as I went back.  Good-by, sir, good-by; you have taken a great load off

my mind.  My reason has stood the strain of one of your agricultural

articles, and I know that nothing can ever unseat it now.  Good-by, sir."



I felt a little uncomfortable about the cripplings and arsons this person

had been entertaining himself with, for I could not help feeling remotely

accessory to them.  But these thoughts were quickly banished, for the

regular editor walked in!  [I thought to myself, Now if you had gone to

Egypt as I recommended you to, I might have had a chance to get my hand

in; but you wouldn't do it, and here you are.  I sort of expected you.]



The editor was looking sad and perplexed and dejected.



He surveyed the wreck which that old rioter and those two young farmers

had made, and then said "This is a sad business--a very sad business.

There is the mucilage-bottle broken, and six panes of glass, and a

spittoon, and two candlesticks.  But that is not the worst.  The

reputation of the paper is injured--and permanently, I fear.  True, there

never was such a call for the paper before, and it never sold such a

large edition or soared to such celebrity; but does one want to be famous

for lunacy, and prosper upon the infirmities of his mind?  My friend, as

I am an honest man, the street out here is full of people, and others are

roosting on the fences, waiting to get a glimpse of you, because they

think you are crazy.  And well they might after reading your editorials.

They are a disgrace to journalism.  Why, what put it into your head that

you could edit a paper of this nature?  You do not seem to know the first

rudiments of agriculture.  You speak of a furrow and a harrow as being

the same thing; you talk of the moulting season for cows; and you

recommend the domestication of the pole-cat on account of its playfulness

and its excellence as a ratter!  Your remark that clams will lie quiet if

music be played to them was superfluous--entirely superfluous.  Nothing

disturbs clams.  Clams always lie quiet.  Clams care nothing whatever

about music.  Ah, heavens and earth, friend! if you had made the

acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have

graduated with higher honor than you could to-day.  I never saw anything

like it.  Your observation that the horse-chestnut as an article of

commerce is steadily gaining in favor is simply calculated to destroy

this journal.  I want you to throw up your situation and go.  I want no

more holiday--I could not enjoy it if I had it.  Certainly not with you

in my chair.  I would always stand in dread of what you might be going to

recommend next.  It makes me lose all patience every time I think of your

discussing oyster-beds under the head of 'Landscape Gardening.'  I want

you to go.  Nothing on earth could persuade me to take another holiday.

Oh! why didn't you tell me you didn't know anything about agriculture?"



"Tell you, you corn-stalk, you cabbage, you son of a cauliflower?  It's

the first time I ever heard such an unfeeling remark.  I tell you I have

been in the editorial business going on fourteen years, and it is the

first time I ever heard of a man's having to know anything in order to

edit a newspaper.  You turnip!  Who write the dramatic critiques for the

second-rate papers?  Why, a parcel of promoted shoemakers and apprentice

apothecaries, who know just as much about good acting as I do about good

farming and no more.  Who review the books?  People who never wrote one.

Who do up the heavy leaders on finance?  Parties who have had the largest

opportunities for knowing nothing about it.  Who criticize the Indian

campaigns?  Gentlemen who do not know a war-whoop from a wigwam, and who

never have had to run a foot-race with a tomahawk, or pluck arrows out of

the several members of their families to build the evening camp-fire

with.  Who write the temperance appeals, and clamor about the flowing

bowl?  Folks who will never draw another sober breath till they do it in

the grave.  Who edit the agricultural papers, you--yam?  Men, as a

general thing, who fail in the poetry line, yellow-colored novel line,

sensation, drama line, city-editor line, and finally fall back on

agriculture as a temporary reprieve from the poorhouse.  You try to tell

me anything about the newspaper business!  Sir, I have been through it

from Alpha to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the bigger

the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands.  Heaven knows

if I had but been ignorant instead of cultivated, and impudent instead of

diffident, I could have made a name for myself in this cold, selfish

world.  I take my leave, sir.  Since I have been treated as you have

treated me, I am perfectly willing to go.  But I have done my duty.  I

have fulfilled my contract as far as I was permitted to do it.  I said I

could make your paper of interest to all classes--and I have.  I said I

could run your circulation up to twenty thousand copies, and if I had had

two more weeks I'd have done it.  And I'd have given you the best class

of readers that ever an agricultural paper had--not a farmer in it, nor a

solitary individual who could tell a watermelon-tree from a peach-vine to

save his life.  You are the loser by this rupture, not me, Pie-plant.

Adios."



I then left.













THE PETRIFIED MAN



Now, to show how really hard it is to foist a moral or a truth upon an

unsuspecting public through a burlesque without entirely and absurdly

missing one's mark, I will here set down two experiences of my own in

this thing.  In the fall of 1862, in Nevada and California, the people

got to running wild about extraordinary petrifactions and other natural

marvels.  One could scarcely pick up a paper without finding in it one or

two glorified discoveries of this kind.  The mania was becoming a little

ridiculous.  I was a brand-new local editor in Virginia City, and I felt

called upon to destroy this growing evil; we all have our benignant,

fatherly moods at one time or another, I suppose.  I chose to kill the

petrifaction mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire.  But maybe it

was altogether too delicate, for nobody ever perceived the satire part of

it at all.  I put my scheme in the shape of the discovery of a remarkably

petrified man.



I had had a temporary falling out with Mr.----, the new coroner and

justice of the peace of Humboldt, and thought I might as well touch him

up a little at the same time and make him ridiculous, and thus combine

pleasure with business.  So I told, in patient, belief-compelling detail,

all about the finding of a petrified-man at Gravelly Ford (exactly a

hundred and twenty miles, over a breakneck mountain trail from where----

lived); how all the savants of the immediate neighborhood had been to

examine it (it was notorious that there was not a living creature within

fifty miles of there, except a few starving Indians; some crippled

grasshoppers, and four or five buzzards out of meat and too feeble to get

away); how those savants all pronounced the petrified man to have been in

a state of complete petrifaction for over ten generations; and then, with

a seriousness that I ought to have been ashamed to assume, I stated that

as soon as Mr.----heard the news he summoned a jury, mounted his mule,

and posted off, with noble reverence for official duty, on that awful

five days' journey, through alkali, sage brush, peril of body, and

imminent starvation, to hold an inquest on this man that had been dead

and turned to everlasting stone for more than three hundred years!

And then, my hand being "in," so to speak, I went on, with the same

unflinching gravity, to state that the jury returned a verdict that

deceased came to his death from protracted exposure.  This only moved me

to higher flights of imagination, and I said that the jury, with that

charity so characteristic of pioneers, then dug a grave, and were about

to give the petrified man Christian burial, when they found that for ages

a limestone sediment had been trickling down the face of the stone

against which he was sitting, and this stuff had run under him and

cemented him fast to the "bed-rock"; that the jury (they were all silver-

miners) canvassed the difficulty a moment, and then got out their powder

and fuse, and proceeded to drill a hole under him, in order to blast him

from his position, when Mr.----, "with that delicacy so characteristic of

him, forbade them, observing that it would be little less than sacrilege

to do such a thing."



From beginning to end the "Petrified Man" squib was a string of roaring

absurdities, albeit they were told with an unfair pretense of truth that

even imposed upon me to some extent, and I was in some danger of

believing in my own fraud.  But I really had no desire to deceive

anybody, and no expectation of doing it.  I depended on the way the

petrified man was sitting to explain to the public that he was a swindle.

Yet I purposely mixed that up with other things, hoping to make it

obscure--and I did.  I would describe the position of one foot, and then

say his right thumb was against the side of his nose; then talk about his

other foot, and presently come back and say the fingers of his right hand

were spread apart; then talk about the back of his head a little, and

return and say the left thumb was hooked into the right little finger;

then ramble off about something else, and by and by drift back again and

remark that the fingers of the left hand were spread like those of the

right.  But I was too ingenious.  I mixed it up rather too much; and so

all that description of the attitude, as a key to the humbuggery of the

article, was entirely lost, for nobody but me ever discovered and

comprehended the peculiar and suggestive position of the petrified man's

hands.



As a satire on the petrifaction mania, or anything else, my petrified Man

was a disheartening failure; for everybody received him in innocent good

faith, and I was stunned to see the creature I had begotten to pull down

the wonder-business with, and bring derision upon it, calmly exalted to

the grand chief place in the list of the genuine marvels our Nevada had

produced.  I was so disappointed at the curious miscarriage of my scheme,

that at first I was angry, and did not like to think about it; but by and

by, when the exchanges began to come in with the Petrified Man copied and

guilelessly glorified, I began to feel a soothing secret satisfaction;

and as my gentleman's field of travels broadened, and by the exchanges I

saw that he steadily and implacably penetrated territory after territory,

state after state, and land after land, till he swept the great globe and

culminated in sublime and unimpeached legitimacy in the august London

Lancet, my cup was full, and I said I was glad I had done it.  I think

that for about eleven months, as nearly as I can remember, Mr.----'s

daily mail-bag continued to be swollen by the addition of half a bushel

of newspapers hailing from many climes with the Petrified Man in them,

marked around with a prominent belt of ink.  I sent them to him.  I did

it for spite, not for fun.



He used to shovel them into his back yard and curse.  And every day

during all those months the miners, his constituents (for miners never

quit joking a person when they get started), would call on him and ask if

he could tell them where they could get hold of a paper with the

Petrified Man in it.  He could have accommodated a continent with them.

I hated-----in those days, and these things pacified me and pleased me.

I could not have gotten more real comfort out of him without killing him.













MY BLOODY MASSACRE



The other burlesque I have referred to was my fine satire upon the

financial expedients of "cooking dividends," a thing which became

shamefully frequent on the Pacific coast for a while.  Once more, in my

self-complacent simplicity I felt that the time had arrived for me to

rise up and be a reformer.  I put this reformatory satire, in the shape

of a fearful "Massacre at Empire City."  The San Francisco papers were

making a great outcry about the iniquity of the Daney Silver-Mining

Company, whose directors had declared a "cooked" or false dividend, for

the purpose of increasing the value of their stock, so that they could

sell out at a comfortable figure, and then scramble from under the

tumbling concern.  And while abusing the Daney, those papers did not

forget to urge the public to get rid of all their silver stocks and

invest in, sound and safe San Francisco stocks, such as the Spring Valley

Water Company, etc.  But right at this unfortunate juncture, behold the

Spring Valley cooked a dividend too!  And so, under the insidious mask of

an invented "bloody massacre," I stole upon the public unawares with my

scathing satire upon the dividend cooking system.  In about half a column

of imaginary human carnage I told how a citizen hard murdered his wife

and nine children, and then committed suicide.  And I said slyly, at the

bottom, that the sudden madness of which this melancholy massacre was the

result had been brought about by his having allowed himself to be

persuaded by the California papers to sell his sound and lucrative Nevada

silver stocks, and buy into Spring Valley just in time to get cooked

along with that company's fancy dividend, and sink every cent he had in

the world.



Ah, it was a deep, deep satire, and most ingeniously contrived.  But I

made the horrible details so carefully and conscientiously interesting

that the public devoured them greedily, and wholly overlooked the

following distinctly stated facts, to wit: The murderer was perfectly

well known to every creature in the land as a bachelor, and consequently

he could not murder his wife and nine children; he murdered them "in his

splendid dressed-stone mansion just in the edge of the great pine forest

between Empire City and Dutch Nick's," when even the very pickled oysters

that came on our tables knew that there was not a "dressed-stone mansion"

in all Nevada Territory; also that, so far from there being a "great pine

forest between Empire City and Dutch Nick's," there wasn't a solitary

tree within fifteen miles of either place; and, finally, it was patent

and notorious that Empire City and Dutch Nick's were one and the same

place, and contained only six houses anyhow, and consequently there could

be no forest between them; and on top of all these absurdities I stated

that this diabolical murderer, after inflicting a wound upon himself that

the reader ought to have seen would kill an elephant in the twinkling of

an eye, jumped on his horse and rode four miles, waving his wife's

reeking scalp in the air, and thus performing entered Carson City with

tremendous eclat, and dropped dead in front of the chief saloon, the envy

and admiration of all beholders.



Well, in all my life I never saw anything like the sensation that little

satire created.  It was the talk of the town, it was the talk of the

territory.  Most of the citizens dropped gently into it at breakfast, and

they never finished their meal.  There was something about those minutely

faithful details that was a sufficing substitute for food.  Few people

that were able to read took food that morning.  Dan and I (Dan was my

reportorial associate) took our seats on either side of our customary

table in the "Eagle Restaurant," and, as I unfolded the shred they used

to call a napkin in that establishment, I saw at the next table two

stalwart innocents with that sort of vegetable dandruff sprinkled about

their clothing which was the sign and evidence that they were in from the

Truckee with a load of hay.  The one facing me had the morning paper

folded to a long, narrow strip, and I knew, without any telling, that

that strip represented the column that contained my pleasant financial

satire.  From the way he was excitedly mumbling, I saw that the heedless

son of a hay-mow was skipping with all his might, in order to get to the

bloody details as quickly as possible; and so he was missing the guide-

boards I had set up to warn him that the whole thing was a fraud.

Presently his eyes spread wide open, just as his jaws swung asunder to

take in a potato approaching it on a fork; the potato halted, the face

lit up redly, and the whole man was on fire with excitement.  Then he

broke into a disjointed checking off of the particulars--his potato

cooling in mid-air meantime, and his mouth making a reach for it

occasionally; but always bringing up suddenly against a new and still

more direful performance of my hero.  At last he looked his stunned and

rigid comrade impressively in the face, and said, with an expression of

concentrated awe:



"Jim, he b'iled his baby, and he took the old 'oman's skelp.  Cuss'd if I

want any breakfast!"



And he laid his lingering potato reverently down, and he and his friend

departed from the restaurant empty but satisfied.



He never got down to where the satire part of it began.  Nobody ever did.

They found the thrilling particulars sufficient.  To drop in with a poor

little moral at the fag-end of such a gorgeous massacre was like

following the expiring sun with a candle and hope to attract the world's

attention to it.



The idea that anybody could ever take my massacre for a genuine

occurrence never once suggested itself to me, hedged about as it was by

all those telltale absurdities and impossibilities concerning the "great

pine forest," the "dressed-stone mansion," etc.  But I found out then,

and never have forgotten since, that we never read the dull explanatory

surroundings of marvelously exciting things when we have no occasion to

suppose that some irresponsible scribbler is trying to defraud us; we

skip all that, and hasten to revel in the blood-curdling particulars and

be happy.















THE UNDERTAKER'S CHAT



"Now that corpse," said the undertaker, patting the folded hands of

deceased approvingly, was a brick-every way you took him he was a brick.

He was so real accommodating, and so modest-like and simple in his last

moments.  Friends wanted metallic burial-case--nothing else would do.

I couldn't get it.  There warn't going to be time--anybody could see

that.



"Corpse said never mind, shake him up some kind of a box he could stretch

out in comfortable, he warn't particular 'bout the general style of it.

Said he went more on room than style, anyway in a last final container.



"Friends wanted a silver door-plate on the coffin, signifying who he was

and wher' he was from.  Now you know a fellow couldn't roust out such a

gaily thing as that in a little country-town like this.  What did corpse

say?



"Corpse said, whitewash his old canoe and dob his address and general

destination onto it with a blacking-brush and a stencil-plate, 'long with

a verse from some likely hymn or other, and pint him for the tomb, and

mark him C. O. D., and just let him flicker.  He warn't distressed any

more than you be--on the contrary, just as ca,'m and collected as a

hearse-horse; said he judged that wher' he was going to a body would find

it considerable better to attract attention by a picturesque moral

character than a natty burial-case with a swell door-plate on it.



"Splendid man, he was.  I'd druther do for a corpse like that 'n any I've

tackled in seven year.  There's some satisfaction in buryin' a man like

that.  You feel that what you're doing is appreciated.  Lord bless you,

so's he got planted before he sp'iled, he was perfectly satisfied; said

his relations meant well, perfectly well, but all them preparations was

bound to delay the thing more or less, and he didn't wish to be kept

layin' around.  You never see such a clear head as what he had--and so

ca,'m and so cool.  Jist a hunk of brains--that is what he was.

Perfectly awful.  It was a ripping distance from one end of that man's

head to t'other.  Often and over again he's had brain-fever a-raging in

one place, and the rest of the pile didn't know anything about it--didn't

affect it any more than an Injun Insurrection in Arizona affects the

Atlantic States.  "Well, the relations they wanted a big funeral, but

corpse said he was down on flummery--didn,'t want any procession--fill

the hearse full of mourners, and get out a stern line and tow him behind.

He was the most down on style of any remains I ever struck.  A beautiful,

simpleminded creature it was what he was, you can depend on that.  He was

just set on having things the way he wanted them, and he took a solid

comfort in laying his little plans.  He had me measure him and take a

whole raft of directions; then he had the minister stand up behind along

box with a table--cloth over it, to represent the coffin, and read his

funeral sermon, saying 'Angcore, angcore!' at the good places, and making

him scratch out every bit of brag about him, and all the hifalutin; and

then he made them trot out the choir, so's he could help them pick out

the tunes for the occasion, and he got them to sing 'Pop Goes the

Weasel,' because he'd always liked that tune when he was downhearted, and

solemn music made him sad; and when they sung that with tears in their

eyes (because they all loved him), and his relations grieving around, he

just laid there as happy as a bug, and trying to beat time and showing

all over how much he enjoyed it; and presently he got worked up and

excited, and tried to join in, for, mind you, he was pretty proud of his

abilities in the singing line; but the first time he opened his mouth and

was just going to spread himself his breath took a walk.



"I never see a man snuffed out so sudden.  Ah, it was a great loss--a,

powerful loss to this poor little one-horse town.  Well, well, well, I

hain't got time to be palavering along here--got to nail on the lid and

mosey along with him; and if you'll just give me a lift we'll skeet him

into the hearse and meander along.  Relations bound to have it so--don't

pay no attention to dying injunctions, minute a corpse's gone; but, if I

had my way, if I didn't respect his last wishes and tow him behind the

hearse I'll be cuss'd.  I consider that whatever a corpse wants done for

his comfort is little enough matter, and a man hain't got no right to

deceive him or take advantage of him; and whatever a corpse trusts me to

do I'm a-going to do, you know, even if it's to stuff him and paint him

yaller and keep him for a keepsake--you hear me!"



He cracked his whip and went lumbering away with his ancient ruin of a

hearse, and I continued my walk with a valuable lesson learned--that a

healthy and wholesome cheerfulness is not necessarily impossible to any

occupation.  The lesson is likely to be lasting, for it will take many

months to obliterate the memory of the remarks and circumstances that

impressed it.













CONCERNING CHAMBERMAIDS



Against all chambermaids, of whatsoever age or nationality, I launch the

curse of bachelordom!  Because:



They always put the pillows at the opposite end of the bed from the gas-

burner, so that while you read and smoke before sleeping (as is the

ancient and honored custom of bachelors), you have to hold your book

aloft, in an uncomfortable position, to keep the light from dazzling your

eyes.



When they find the pillows removed to the other end of the bed in the

morning, they receive not the suggestion in a friendly spirit; but,

glorying in their absolute sovereignty, and unpitying your helplessness,

they make the bed just as it was originally, and gloat in secret over the

pang their tyranny will cause you.



Always after that, when they find you have transposed the pillows, they

undo your work, and thus defy and seek to embitter the life that God has

given you.



If they cannot get the light in an inconvenient position any other way,

they move the bed.



If you pull your trunk out six inches from the wall, so that the lid will

stay up when you open it, they always shove that trunk back again.  They

do it on purpose.



If you want the spittoon in a certain spot, where it will be handy, they

don't, and so they move it.



They always put your other boots into inaccessible places.  They chiefly

enjoy depositing them as far under the bed as the wall will permit.  It

is because this compels you to get down in an undignified attitude and

make wild sweeps for them in the dark with the bootjack, and swear.



They always put the matchbox in some other place.  They hunt up a new

place for it every day, and put up a bottle, or other perishable glass

thing, where the box stood before.  This is to cause you to break that

glass thing, groping in the dark, and get yourself into trouble.



They are for ever and ever moving the furniture.  When you come in in the

night you can calculate on finding the bureau where the wardrobe was in

the morning.  And when you go out in the morning, if you leave the slop-

bucket by the door and rocking-chair by the window, when you come in at

midnight or thereabout, you will fall over that rocking-chair, and you

will proceed toward the window and sit down in that slop-tub.  This will

disgust you.  They like that.



No matter where you put anything, they are not going to let it stay

there.  They will take it and move it the first chance they get.  It is

their nature.  And, besides, it gives them pleasure to be mean and

contrary this way.  They would die if they couldn't be villains.



They always save up all the old scraps of printed rubbish you throw on

the floor, and stack them up carefully on the table, and start the fire

with your valuable manuscripts.  If there is any one particular old scrap

that you are more down on than any other, and which you are gradually

wearing your life out trying to get rid of, you may take all the pains

you possibly can in that direction, but it won't be of any use, because

they will always fetch that old scrap back and put it in the same old

place again every time.  It does them good.



And they use up more hair-oil than any six men.  If charged with

purloining the same, they lie about it.  What do they care about a

hereafter?  Absolutely nothing.



If you leave the key in the door for convenience' sake, they will carry

it down to the office and give it to the clerk.  They do this under the

vile pretense of trying to protect your property from thieves; but

actually they do it because they want to make you tramp back down-stairs

after it when you come home tired, or put you to the trouble of sending a

waiter for it, which waiter will expect you to pay him something.  In

which case I suppose the degraded creatures divide.



They keep always trying to make your bed before you get up, thus

destroying your rest and inflicting agony upon you; but after you get up,

they don't come any more till next day.



They do all the mean things they can think of, and they do them just out

of pure cussedness, and nothing else.



Chambermaids are dead to every human instinct.



If I can get a bill through the legislature abolishing chambermaids, I

mean to do it.













AURELIA'S UNFORTUNATE YOUNG MAN--[Written about 1865.]



The facts in the following case came to me by letter from a young lady

who lives in the beautiful city of San Jose; she is perfectly unknown to

me, and simply signs herself "Aurelia Maria," which may possibly be a

fictitious name.  But no matter, the poor girl is almost heartbroken by

the misfortunes she has undergone, and so confused by the conflicting

counsels of misguided friends and insidious enemies that she does not

know what course to pursue in order to extricate herself from the web of

difficulties in which she seems almost hopelessly involved.  In this

dilemma she turns to me for help, and supplicates for my guidance and

instruction with a moving eloquence that would touch the heart of a

statue.  Hear her sad story:



She says that when she was sixteen years old she met and loved, with all

the devotion of a passionate nature, a young man from New Jersey, named

Williamson Breckinridge Caruthers, who was some six years her senior.

They were engaged, with the free consent of their friends and relatives,

and for a time it seemed as if their career was destined to, be

characterized by an immunity from sorrow beyond the usual lot of

humanity.  But at last the tide of fortune turned; young Caruthers became

infect with smallpox of the most virulent type, and when he recovered

from his illness his face was pitted like a waffle-mold, and his

comeliness gone forever.  Aurelia thought to break off the engagement at

first, but pity for her unfortunate lover caused her to postpone the

marriage-day for a season, and give him another trial.



The very day before the wedding was to have taken place, Breckinridge,

while absorbed in watching the flight of a balloon, walked into a well

and fractured one of his legs, and it had to be taken off above the knee.

Again Aurelia was moved to break the engagement, but again love

triumphed, and she set the day forward and gave him another chance to

reform.



And again misfortune overtook the unhappy youth.  He lost one arm by the

premature discharge of a Fourth of July cannon, and within three months

he got the other pulled out by a carding-machine.  Aurelia's heart was

almost crushed by these latter calamities.  She could not but be deeply

grieved to see her lover passing from her by piecemeal, feeling, as she

did, that he could not last forever under this disastrous process of

reduction, yet knowing of no way to stop its dreadful career, and in her

tearful despair she almost regretted, like brokers who hold on and lose,

that she had not taken him at first, before he had suffered such an

alarming depreciation.  Still, her brave soul bore her up, and she

resolved to bear with her friend's unnatural disposition yet a little

longer.



Again the wedding-day approached, and again disappointment overshadowed

it; Caruthers fell ill with the erysipelas, and lost the use of one of

his eyes entirely.  The friends and relatives of the bride, considering

that she had already put up with more than could reasonably be expected

of her, now came forward and insisted that the match should be broken

off; but after wavering awhile, Aurelia, with a generous spirit which did

her credit, said she had reflected calmly upon the matter, and could not

discover that Breckinridge was to blame.



So she extended the time once more, and he broke his other leg.



It was a sad day for the poor girl when, she saw the surgeons reverently

bearing away the sack whose uses she had learned by previous experience,

and her heart told her the bitter truth that some more of her lover was

gone.  She felt that the field of her affections was growing more and

more circumscribed every day, but once more she frowned down her

relatives and renewed her betrothal.



Shortly before the time set for the nuptials another disaster occurred.

There was but one man scalped by the Owens River Indians last year.  That

man was Williamson Breckinridge Caruthers of New Jersey.  He was hurrying

home with happiness in his heart, when he lost his hair forever, and in

that hour of bitterness he almost cursed the mistaken mercy that had

spared his head.



At last Aurelia is in serious perplexity as to what she ought to do.  She

still loves her Breckinridge, she writes, with truly womanly feeling--she

still loves what is left of him but her parents are bitterly opposed to

the match, because he has no property and is disabled from working, and

she has not sufficient means to support both comfortably.  "Now, what

should she do?" she asked with painful and anxious solicitude.



It is a delicate question; it is one which involves the lifelong

happiness of a woman, and that of nearly two-thirds of a man, and I feel

that it would be assuming too great a responsibility to do more than make

a mere suggestion in the case.  How would it do to build to him?  If

Aurelia can afford the expense, let her furnish her mutilated lover with

wooden arms and wooden legs, and a glass eye and a wig, and give him

another show; give him ninety days, without grace, and if he does not

break his neck in the mean time, marry him and take the chances.  It does

not seem to me that there is much risk, anyway, Aurelia, because if he

sticks to his singular propensity for damaging himself every time he sees

a good opportunity, his next experiment is bound to finish him, and then

you are safe, married or single.  If married, the wooden legs and such

other valuables as he may possess revert to the widow, and you see you

sustain no actual loss save the cherished fragment of a noble but most

unfortunate husband, who honestly strove to do right, but whose

extraordinary instincts were against him.  Try it, Maria. I have thought

the matter over carefully and well, and it is the only chance I see for

you.  It would have been a happy conceit on the part of Caruthers if he

had started with his neck and broken that first; but since he has seen

fit to choose a different policy and string himself out as long as

possible, I do not think we ought to upbraid him for it if he has enjoyed

it.  We must do the best we can under the circumstances, and try not to

feel exasperated at him.













"AFTER" JENKINS



A grand affair of a ball--the Pioneers'--came off at the Occidental some

time ago.  The following notes of the costumes worn by the belles of the

occasion may not be uninteresting to the general reader, and Jerkins may

get an idea therefrom:



Mrs. W. M. was attired in an elegant 'pate de foie gras,' made expressly

for her, and was greatly admired.  Miss S. had her hair done up.  She was

the center of attraction for the envy of all the ladies.  Mrs. G. W. was

tastefully dressed in a 'tout ensemble,' and was greeted with deafening

applause wherever she went.  Mrs. C. N. was superbly arrayed in white kid

gloves.  Her modest and engaging manner accorded well with the

unpretending simplicity of her costume and caused her to be regarded with

absorbing interest by every one.



The charming Miss M. M. B. appeared in a thrilling waterfall, whose

exceeding grace and volume compelled the homage of pioneers and emigrants

alike.  How beautiful she was!



The queenly Mrs. L. R.  was attractively attired in her new and beautiful

false teeth, and the 'bon jour' effect they naturally produced was

heightened by her enchanting and well-sustained smile.



Miss R. P., with that repugnance to ostentation in dress which is so

peculiar to her, was attired in a simple white lace collar, fastened with

a neat pearl-button solitaire.  The fine contrast between the sparkling

vivacity of her natural optic, and the steadfast attentiveness of her

placid glass eye, was the subject of general and enthusiastic remark.



Miss C. L. B.  had her fine nose elegantly enameled, and the easy grace

with which she blew it from time to time marked her as a cultivated and

accomplished woman of the world; its exquisitely modulated tone excited

the admiration of all who had the happiness to hear it.













ABOUT BARBERS



All things change except barbers, the ways of barbers, and the

surroundings of barbers.  These never change.  What one experiences in a

barber's shop the first time he enters one is what he always experiences

in barbers' shops afterward till the end of his days.  I got shaved this

morning as usual.  A man approached the door from Jones Street as I

approached it from Main--a thing that always happens.  I hurried up, but

it was of no use; he entered the door one little step ahead of me, and I

followed in on his heels and saw him take the only vacant chair, the one

presided over by the best barber.  It always happens so.  I sat down,

hoping that I might fall heir to the chair belonging to the better of the

remaining two barbers, for he had already begun combing his man's hair,

while his comrade was not yet quite done rubbing up and oiling his

customer's locks.  I watched the probabilities with strong interest.

When I saw that No. 2 was gaining on No. 1 my interest grew to

solicitude.  When No. 1 stopped a moment to make change on a bath ticket

for a new-comer, and lost ground in the race, my solicitude rose to

anxiety.  When No. 1 caught up again, and both he and his comrade were

pulling the towels away and brushing the powder from their customers'

cheeks, and it was about an even thing which one would say "Next!" first,

my very breath stood still with the suspense.  But when at the

culminating moment No. 1 stopped to pass a comb a couple of times through

his customer's eyebrows, I saw that he had lost the race by a single

instant, and I rose indignant and quitted the shop, to keep from falling

into the hands of No. 2; for I have none of that enviable firmness that

enables a man to look calmly into the eyes of a waiting barber and tell

him he will wait for his fellow-barber's chair.



I stayed out fifteen minutes, and then went back, hoping for better luck.

Of course all the chairs were occupied now, and four men sat waiting,

silent, unsociable, distraught, and looking bored, as men always do who

are waiting their turn in a barber's shop.  I sat down in one of the

iron-armed compartments of an old sofa, and put in the time far a while

reading the framed advertisements of all sorts of quack nostrums for

dyeing and coloring the hair.  Then I read the greasy names on the

private bayrum bottles; read the names and noted the numbers on the

private shaving-cups in the pigeonholes; studied the stained and damaged

cheap prints on the walls, of battles, early Presidents, and voluptuous

recumbent sultanas, and the tiresome and everlasting young girl putting

her grandfather's spectacles on; execrated in my heart the cheerful

canary and the distracting parrot that few barbers' shops are without.

Finally, I searched out the least dilapidated of last year's illustrated

papers that littered the foul center-table, and conned their

unjustifiable misrepresentations of old forgotten events.



At last my turn came.  A voice said "Next!" and I surrendered to--No.  2,

of course.  It always happens so.  I said meekly that I was in a hurry,

and it affected him as strongly as if he had never heard it.  He shoved

up my head, and put a napkin under it.  He plowed his fingers into my

collar and fixed a towel there.  He explored my hair with his claws and

suggested that it needed trimming.  I said I did not want it trimmed.  He

explored again and said it was pretty long for the present style--better

have a little taken off; it needed it behind especially.  I said I had

had it cut only a week before.  He yearned over it reflectively a moment,

and then asked with a disparaging manner, who cut it?  I came back at him

promptly with a "You did!" I had him there.  Then he fell to stirring up

his lather and regarding himself in the glass, stopping now and then to

get close and examine his chin critically or inspect a pimple.  Then he

lathered one side of my face thoroughly, and was about to lather the

other, when a dog-fight attracted his attention, and he ran to the window

and stayed and saw it out, losing two shillings on the result in bets

with the other barbers, a thing which gave me great satisfaction.  He

finished lathering, and then began to rub in the suds with his hand.



He now began to sharpen his razor on an old suspender, and was delayed a

good deal on account of a controversy about a cheap masquerade ball he

had figured at the night before, in red cambric and bogus ermine, as some

kind of a king.  He was so gratified with being chaffed about some damsel

whom he had smitten with his charms that he used every means to continue

the controversy by pretending to be annoyed at the chaffings of his

fellows.  This matter begot more surveyings of himself in the glass, and

he put down his razor and brushed his hair with elaborate care,

plastering an inverted arch of it down on his forehead, accomplishing an

accurate "Part" behind, and brushing the two wings forward over his ears

with nice exactness.  In the mean time the lather was drying on my face,

and apparently eating into my vitals.



Now he began to shave, digging his fingers into my countenance to stretch

the skin and bundling and tumbling my head this way and that as

convenience in shaving demanded.  As long as he was on the tough sides of

my face I did not suffer; but when he began to rake, and rip, and tug at

my chin, the tears came.  He now made a handle of my nose, to assist him

shaving the corners of my upper lip, and it was by this bit of

circumstantial evidence that I discovered that a part of his duties in

the shop was to clean the kerosene-lamps.  I had often wondered in an

indolent way whether the barbers did that, or whether it was the boss.



About this time I was amusing myself trying to guess where he would be

most likely to cut me this time, but he got ahead of me, and sliced me on

the end of the chin before I had got my mind made up.  He immediately

sharpened his razor--he might have done it before.  I do not like a close

shave, and would not let him go over me a second time.  I tried to get

him to put up his razor, dreading that he would make for the side of my

chin, my pet tender spot, a place which a razor cannot touch twice

without making trouble; but he said he only wanted to just smooth off one

little roughness, and in the same moment he slipped his razor along the

forbidden ground, and the dreaded pimple-signs of a close shave rose up

smarting and answered to the call.  Now he soaked his towel in bay rum,

and slapped it all over my face nastily; slapped it over as if a human

being ever yet washed his face in that way.  Then he dried it by slapping

with the dry part of the towel, as if a human being ever dried his face

in such a fashion; but a barber seldom rubs you like a Christian.  Next

he poked bay ruin into the cut place with his towel, then choked the

wound with powdered starch, then soaked it with bay rum again, and would

have gone on soaking and powdering it forevermore, no doubt, if I had not

rebelled and begged off.  He powdered my whole face now, straightened me

up, and began to plow my hair thoughtfully with his hands.  Then he

suggested a shampoo, and said my hair needed it badly, very badly.

I observed that I shampooed it myself very thoroughly in the bath

yesterday.  I "had him" again.  He next recommended some of "Smith's Hair

Glorifier," and offered to sell me a bottle.  I declined.  He praised the

new perfume, "Jones's Delight of the Toilet," and proposed to sell me

some of that.  I declined again.  He tendered me a tooth-wash atrocity of

his own invention, and when I declined offered to trade knives with me.



He returned to business after the miscarriage of this last enterprise,

sprinkled me all over, legs and all, greased my hair in defiance of my

protest against it, rubbed and scrubbed a good deal of it out by the

roots, and combed and brushed the rest, parting it behind, and plastering

the eternal inverted arch of hair down on my forehead, and then, while

combing my scant eyebrows and defiling them with pomade, strung out an

account of the achievements of a six-ounce black-and-tan terrier of his

till I heard the whistles blow for noon, and knew I was five minutes too

late for the train.  Then he snatched away the towel, brushed it lightly

about my face, passed his comb through my eyebrows once more, and gaily

sang out "Next!"



This barber fell down and died of apoplexy two hours later.  I am waiting

over a day for my revenge--I am going to attend his funeral.













"PARTY CRIES" IN IRELAND



Belfast is a peculiarly religious community.  This may be said of the

whole of the North of Ireland.  About one-half of the people are

Protestants and the other half Catholics.  Each party does all it can to

make its own doctrines popular and draw the affections of the irreligious

toward them.  One hears constantly of the most touching instances of this

zeal.  A week ago a vast concourse of Catholics assembled at Armagh to

dedicate a new Cathedral; and when they started home again the roadways

were lined with groups of meek and lowly Protestants who stoned them till

all the region round about was marked with blood.  I thought that only

Catholics argued in that way, but it seems to be a mistake.



Every man in the community is a missionary and carries a brick to

admonish the erring with.  The law has tried to break this up, but not

with perfect success.  It has decreed that irritating "party cries" shall

not be indulged in, and that persons uttering them shall be fined forty

shillings and costs.  And so, in the police court reports every day, one

sees these fines recorded.  Last week a girl of twelve years old was

fined the usual forty shillings and costs for proclaiming in the public

streets that she was "a Protestant."  The usual cry is, "To hell with the

Pope!" or "To hell with the Protestants!" according to the utterer's

system of salvation.



One of Belfast's local jokes was very good.  It referred to the uniform

and inevitable fine of forty shillings and costs for uttering a party

cry--and it is no economical fine for a poor man, either, by the way.

They say that a policeman found a drunken man lying on the ground, up a

dark alley, entertaining himself with shouting, "To hell with!"  "To hell

with!"  The officer smelt a fine--informers get half.



"What's that you say?"



"To hell with!"



"To hell with who?  To hell with what?"



"Ah, bedad, ye can finish it yourself--it's too expansive for me!"



I think the seditious disposition, restrained by the economical instinct,

is finely put in that.













THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT RESIGNATION



WASHINGTON, December, 1867.



I have resigned.  The government appears to go on much the same, but

there is a spoke out of its wheel, nevertheless.  I was clerk of the

Senate Committee on Conchology, and I have thrown up the position.

I could see the plainest disposition on the part of the other members of

the government to debar me from having any voice in the counsels of the

nation, and so I could no longer hold office and retain my self-respect.

If I were to detail all the outrages that were heaped upon me during the

six days that I was connected with the government in an official

capacity, the narrative would fill a volume.  They appointed me clerk of

that Committee on Conchology and then allowed me no amanuensis to play

billiards with.  I would have borne that, lonesome as it was, if I had

met with that courtesy from the other members of the Cabinet which was my

due.  But I did not.  Whenever I observed that the head of a department

was pursuing a wrong course, I laid down everything and went and tried to

set him right, as it was my duty to do; and I never was thanked for it in

a single instance.  I went, with the best intentions in the world, to the

Secretary of the Navy, and said:



"Sir, I cannot see that Admiral Farragut is doing anything but

skirmishing around there in Europe, having a sort of picnic.  Now, that

may be all very well, but it does not exhibit itself to me in that light.

If there is no fighting for him to do, let him come home.  There is no

use in a man having a whole fleet for a pleasure excursion.  It is too

expensive.  Mind, I do not object to pleasure excursions for the naval

officers--pleasure excursions that are in reason--pleasure excursions

that are economical.  Now, they might go down the Mississippi

on a raft--"



You ought to have heard him storm!  One would have supposed I had

committed a crime of some kind.  But I didn't mind.  I said it was cheap,

and full of republican simplicity, and perfectly safe.  I said that, for

a tranquil pleasure excursion, there was nothing equal to a raft.



Then the Secretary of the Navy asked me who I was; and when I told him I

was connected with the government, he wanted to know in what capacity.  I

said that, without remarking upon the singularity of such a question,

coming, as it did, from a member of that same government, I would inform

him that I was clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology.  Then there

was a fine storm!  He finished by ordering me to leave the premises, and

give my attention strictly to my own business in future.  My first

impulse was to get him removed.  However, that would harm others besides

himself, and do me no real good, and so I let him stay.



I went next to the Secretary of War, who was not inclined to see me at

all until he learned that I was connected with the government.  If I had

not been on important business, I suppose I could not have got in.

I asked him for alight (he was smoking at the time), and then I told him

I had no fault to find with his defending the parole stipulations of

General Lee and his comrades in arms, but that I could not approve of his

method of fighting the Indians on the Plains.  I said he fought too

scattering.  He ought to get the Indians more together--get them together

in some convenient place, where he could have provisions enough for both

parties, and then have a general massacre.  I said there was nothing so

convincing to an Indian as a general massacre.  If he could not approve

of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and

education.  Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they

are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may

recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him

some time or other.  It undermines his constitution; it strikes at the

foundation of his being.  "Sir," I said, "the time has come when blood-

curdling cruelty has become necessary.  Inflict soap and a spelling-book

on every Indian that ravages the Plains, and let them die!"



The Secretary of War asked me if I was a member of the Cabinet, and I

said I was.  He inquired what position I held, and I said I was clerk of

the Senate Committee on Conchology.  I was then ordered under arrest for

contempt of court, and restrained of my liberty for the best part of the

day.



I almost resolved to be silent thenceforward, and let the Government get

along the best way it could.  But duty called, and I obeyed.  I called on

the Secretary of the Treasury.  He said:



"What will you have?"



The question threw me off my guard.  I said, "Rum punch."



He said: "If you have got any business here, sir, state it--and in as few

words as possible."



I then said that I was sorry he had seen fit to change the subject so

abruptly, because such conduct was very offensive to me; but under the

circumstances I would overlook the matter and come to the point.  I now

went into an earnest expostulation with him upon the extravagant length

of his report.  I said it was expensive, unnecessary, and awkwardly

constructed; there were no descriptive passages in it, no poetry, no

sentiment no heroes, no plot, no pictures--not even wood-cuts.  Nobody

would read it, that was a clear case.  I urged him not to ruin his

reputation by getting out a thing like that.  If he ever hoped to succeed

in literature he must throw more variety into his writings.  He must

beware of dry detail.  I said that the main popularity of the almanac was

derived from its poetry and conundrums, and that a few conundrums

distributed around through his Treasury report would help the sale of it

more than all the internal revenue he could put into it.  I said these

things in the kindest spirit, and yet the Secretary of the Treasury fell

into a violent passion.  He even said I was an ass.  He abused me in the

most vindictive manner, and said that if I came there again meddling with

his business he would throw me out of the window.  I said I would take my

hat and go, if I could not be treated with the respect due to my office,

and I did go.  It was just like a new author.  They always think they

know more than anybody else when they are getting out their first book.

Nobody can tell them anything.



During the whole time that I was connected with the government it seemed

as if I could not do anything in an official capacity without getting

myself into trouble.  And yet I did nothing, attempted nothing, but what

I conceived to be for the good of my country.  The sting of my wrongs may

have driven me to unjust and harmful conclusions, but it surely seemed to

me that the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of

the Treasury, and others of my confreres had conspired from the very

beginning to drive me from the Administration.  I never attended but one

Cabinet meeting while I was connected with the government.  That was

sufficient for me.  The servant at the White House door did not seem

disposed to make way for me until I asked if the other members of the

Cabinet had arrived.  He said they had, and I entered.  They were all

there; but nobody offered me a seat.  They stared at me as if I had been

an intruder.  The President said:



"Well, sir, who are you?"



I handed him my card, and he read: "The HON.  MARK TWAIN, Clerk of the

Senate Committee on Conchology."  Then he looked at me from head to foot,

as if he had never heard of me before.  The Secretary of the Treasury

said:



"This is the meddlesome ass that came to recommend me to put poetry and

conundrums in my report, as if it were an almanac."



The Secretary of War said: "It is the same visionary that came to me

yesterday with a scheme to educate a portion of the Indians to death,

and massacre the balance."



The Secretary of the Navy said: "I recognize this youth as the person who

has been interfering with my business time and again during the week.  He

is distressed about Admiral Farragut's using a whole fleet for a pleasure

excursion, as he terms it.  His proposition about some insane pleasure

excursion on a raft is too absurd to repeat."



I said: "Gentlemen, I perceive here a disposition to throw discredit

upon every act of my official career; I perceive, also, a disposition to

debar me from all voice in the counsels of the nation.  No notice

whatever was sent to me to-day.  It was only by the merest chance that I

learned that there was going to be a Cabinet meeting.  But let these

things pass.  All I wish to know is, is this a Cabinet meeting or is it

not?"



The President said it was.



"Then," I said, "let us proceed to business at once, and not fritter away

valuable time in unbecoming fault-findings with each other's official

conduct."



The Secretary of State now spoke up, in his benignant way, and said,

"Young man, you are laboring under a mistake.  The clerks of the

Congressional committees are not members of the Cabinet.  Neither are the

doorkeepers of the Capitol, strange as it may seem.  Therefore, much as

we could desire your more than human wisdom in our deliberations, we

cannot lawfully avail ourselves of it.  The counsels of the nation must

proceed without you; if disaster follows, as follow full well it may, be

it balm to your sorrowing spirit that by deed and voice you did what in

you lay to avert it.  You have my blessing.  Farewell."



These gentle words soothed my troubled breast, and I went away.  But the

servants of a nation can know no peace.  I had hardly reached my den in

the Capitol, and disposed my feet on the table like a representative,

when one of the Senators on the Conchological Committee came in in a

passion and said:



"Where have you been all day?"



I observed that, if that was anybody's affair but my own, I had been to a

Cabinet meeting.



"To a Cabinet meeting?  I would like to know what business you had at a

Cabinet meeting?"



I said I went there to consult--allowing for the sake of argument that he

was in any wise concerned in the matter.  He grew insolent then, and

ended by saying he had wanted me for three days past to copy a report on

bomb-shells, egg-shells, clamshells, and I don't know what all, connected

with conchology, and nobody had been able to find me.



This was too much.  This was the feather that broke the clerical camel's

back.  I said, "Sir, do you suppose that I am going to work for six

dollars a day?  If that is the idea, let me recommend the Senate

Committee on Conchology to hire somebody else.  I am the slave of no

faction!  Take back your degrading commission.  Give me liberty, or give

me death!"



From that hour I was no longer connected with the government.  Snubbed by

the department, snubbed by the Cabinet, snubbed at last by the chairman

of a committee I was endeavoring to adorn, I yielded to persecution, cast

far from me the perils and seductions of my great office, and forsook my

bleeding country in the hour of her peril.



But I had done the state some service, and I sent in my bill:



     The United States of America in account with

     the Hon. Clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology,   Dr.

          To consultation with Secretary of War ............ $50

          To consultation with Secretary of Navy ........... $50

          To consultation with Secretary of the Treasury ... $50

          Cabinet consultation ...................No charge.

          To mileage to and from Jerusalem, via Egypt,

               Algiers, Gibraltar, and Cadiz,

               14,000 miles, at 20c. a mile ............. $2,800

          To salary as Clerk of Senate Committee

          on Conchology, six days, at $6 per day ........... $36



                         Total .......................... $2,986



--[Territorial delegates charge mileage both ways, although they never go

back when they get here once.  Why my mileage is denied me is more than I

can understand.]



Not an item of this bill has been paid, except that trifle of thirty-six

dollars for clerkship salary.  The Secretary of the Treasury, pursuing me

to the last, drew his pen through all the other items, and simply marked

in the margin "Not allowed."  So, the dread alternative is embraced at

last.  Repudiation has begun!  The nation is lost.



I am done with official life for the present.  Let those clerks who are

willing to be imposed on remain.  I know numbers of them in the

departments who are never informed when there is to be a Cabinet meeting,

whose advice is never asked about war, or finance, or commerce, by the

heads of the nation, any more than if they were not connected with the

government, and who actually stay in their offices day after day and

work!  They know their importance to the nation, and they unconsciously

show it in their bearing, and the way they order their sustenance at the

restaurant--but they work.  I know one who has to paste all sorts of

little scraps from the newspapers into a scrapbook--sometimes as many as

eight or ten scraps a day.  He doesn't do it well, but he does it as well

as he can.  It is very fatiguing.  It is exhausting to the intellect.

Yet he only gets eighteen hundred dollars a year.  With a brain like his,

that young man could amass thousands and thousands of dollars in some

other pursuit, if he chose to do it.  But no--his heart is with his

country, and he will serve her as long as she has got a scrapbook left.

And I know clerks that don't know how to write very well, but such

knowledge as they possess they nobly lay at the feet of their country,

and toil on and suffer for twenty-five hundred dollars a year.  What they

write has to be written over again by other clerks sometimes; but when a

man has done his best for his country, should his country complain?  Then

there are clerks that have no clerkships, and are waiting, and waiting,

and waiting for a vacancy--waiting patiently for a chance to help their

country out--and while they, are waiting, they only get barely two

thousand dollars a year for it.  It is sad it is very, very sad.  When a

member of Congress has a friend who is gifted, but has no employment

wherein his great powers may be brought to bear, he confers him upon his

country, and gives him a clerkship in a department.  And there that man

has to slave his life out, fighting documents for the benefit of a nation

that never thinks of him, never sympathizes with him--and all for two

thousand or three thousand dollars a year.  When I shall have completed

my list of all the clerks in the several departments, with my statement

of what they have to do, and what they get for it, you will see that

there are not half enough clerks, and that what there are do not get half

enough pay.













HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF



The following I find in a Sandwich Island paper which some friend has

sent me from that tranquil far-off retreat.  The coincidence between my

own experience and that here set down by the late Mr. Benton is so

remarkable that I cannot forbear publishing and commenting upon the

paragraph.  The Sandwich Island paper says:



How touching is this tribute of the late Hon. T. H. Benton to his

mother's influence:--'My mother asked me never to use tobacco; I have

never touched it from that time to the present day.  She asked me not to

gamble, and I have never gambled.  I cannot tell who is losing in games

that are being played.  She admonished me, too, against liquor-drinking,

and whatever capacity for endurance I have at present, and whatever

usefulness I may have attained through life, I attribute to having

complied with her pious and correct wishes.  When I was seven years of

age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a resolution of total

abstinence; and that I have adhered to it through all time I owe to my

mother.'



I never saw anything so curious.  It is almost an exact epitome of my own

moral career--after simply substituting a grandmother for a mother.  How

well I remember my grandmother's asking me not to use tobacco, good old

soul!  She said, "You're at it again, are you, you whelp?  Now don't ever

let me catch you chewing tobacco before breakfast again, or I lay I'll

blacksnake you within an inch of your life!"  I have never touched it at

that hour of the morning from that time to the present day.



She asked me not to gamble.  She whispered and said, "Put up those wicked

cards this minute!--two pair and a jack, you numskull, and the other

fellow's got a flush!"



I never have gambled from that day to this--never once--without a "cold

deck" in my pocket.  I cannot even tell who is going to lose in games

that are being played unless I deal myself.



When I was two years of age she asked me not to drink, and then I made a

resolution of total abstinence.  That I have adhered to it and enjoyed

the beneficent effects of it through all time, I owe to my grandmother.

I have never drunk a drop from that day to this of any kind of water.













HONORED AS A CURIOSITY



If you get into conversation with a stranger in Honolulu, and experience

that natural desire to know what sort of ground you are treading on by

finding out what manner of man your stranger is, strike out boldly and

address him as "Captain."  Watch him narrowly, and if you see by his

countenance that you are on the wrong track, ask him where he preaches.

It is a safe bet that he is either a missionary or captain of a whaler.

I became personally acquainted with seventy-two captains and ninety-six

missionaries.  The captains and ministers form one-half of the

population; the third fourth is composed of common Kanakas and mercantile

foreigners and their families; and the final fourth is made up of high

officers of the Hawaiian Government.  And there are just about cats

enough for three apiece all around.



A solemn stranger met me in the suburbs one day, and said:



"Good morning, your reverence.  Preach in the stone church yonder, no

doubt!"



"No, I don't.  I'm not a preacher."



"Really, I beg your pardon, captain.  I trust you had a good season.  How

much oil--"



"Oil!  Why, what do you take me for?  I'm not a whaler."



"Oh!  I beg a thousand pardons, your Excellency.  Major-General in the

household troops, no doubt?  Minister of the Interior, likely?  Secretary

of War?  First Gentleman of the Bedchamber?  Commissioner of the Royal--"



"Stuff, man!  I'm not connected in any way with the government."



"Bless my life!  Then who the mischief are you? what the mischief are

you? and how the mischief did you get here? and where in thunder did you

come from?"



"I'm only a private personage--an unassuming stranger--lately arrived

from America."



" No!  Not a missionary! not a whaler! not a member of his Majesty's

government! not even a Secretary of the Navy!  Ah!  Heaven! it is too

blissful to be true, alas! I do but dream.  And yet that noble, honest

countenance--those oblique, ingenuous eyes--that massive head, incapable

of--of anything; your hand; give me your hand, bright waif.  Excuse these

tears.  For sixteen weary years I have yearned for a moment like this,

and--"



Here his feelings were too much for him, and he swooned away.  I pitied

this poor creature from the bottom of my heart.  I was deeply moved.

I shed a few tears on him, and kissed him for his mother.  I then took

what small change he had, and "shoved."













FIRST INTERVIEW WITH ARTEMUS WARD--[Written about 1870.]



I had never seen him before.  He brought letters of introduction from

mutual friends in San Francisco, and by invitation I breakfasted with

him.  It was almost religion, there in the silver-mines, to precede such

a meal with whisky cocktails.  Artemus, with the true cosmopolitan

instinct, always deferred to the customs of the country he was in, and so

he ordered three of those abominations.  Hingston was present.  I said I

would rather not drink a whisky cocktail.  I said it would go right to my

head, and confuse me so that I would be in a helpless tangle in ten

minutes.  I did not want to act like a lunatic before strangers.  But

Artemus gently insisted, and I drank the treasonable mixture under

protest, and felt all the time that I was doing a thing I might be sorry

for.  In a minute or two I began to imagine that my ideas were clouded.

I waited in great anxiety for the conversation to open, with a sort of

vague hope that my understanding would prove clear, after all, and my

misgivings groundless.



Artemus dropped an unimportant remark or two, and then assumed a look of

superhuman earnestness, and made the following astounding speech.  He

said:



"Now there is one thing I ought to ask you about before I forget it.  You

have been here in Silver land--here in Nevada--two or three years, and,

of course, your position on the daily press has made it necessary for you

to go down in the mines and examine them carefully in detail, and

therefore you know all about the silver-mining business.  Now what I want

to get at is--is, well, the way the deposits of ore are made, you know.

For instance.  Now, as I understand it, the vein which contains the

silver is sandwiched in between casings of granite, and runs along the

ground, and sticks up like a curb stone.  Well, take a vein forty feet

thick, for example, or eighty, for that matter, or even a hundred--say

you go down on it with a shaft, straight down, you know, or with what you

call 'incline' maybe you go down five hundred feet, or maybe you don't go

down but two hundred--anyway, you go down, and all the time this vein

grows narrower, when the casings come nearer or approach each other, you

may say--that is, when they do approach, which, of course, they do not

always do, particularly in cases where the nature of the formation is

such that they stand apart wider than they otherwise would, and which

geology has failed to account for, although everything in that science

goes to prove that, all things being equal, it would if it did not, or

would not certainly if it did, and then, of course, they are.  Do not you

think it is?"



I said to myself:



"Now I just knew how it would be--that whisky cocktail has done the

business for me; I don't understand any more than a clam."



And then I said aloud:



"I--I--that is--if you don't mind, would you--would you say that over

again?  I ought--"



"Oh, certainly, certainly!  You see I am very unfamiliar with the

subject, and perhaps I don't present my case clearly, but I--"



"No, no-no, no-you state it plain enough, but that cocktail has muddled

me a little.  But I will no, I do understand for that matter; but I would

get the hang of it all the better if you went over it again-and I'll pay

better attention this time."



He said; "Why, what I was after was this."



[Here he became even more fearfully impressive than ever, and emphasized

each particular point by checking it off on his finger-ends.]



"This vein, or lode, or ledge, or whatever you call it, runs along

between two layers of granite, just the same as if it were a sandwich.

Very well.  Now suppose you go down on that, say a thousand feet, or

maybe twelve hundred (it don't really matter) before you drift, and then

you start your drifts, some of them across the ledge, and others along

the length of it, where the sulphurets--I believe they call them

sulphurets, though why they should, considering that, so far as I can

see, the main dependence of a miner does not so lie, as some suppose, but

in which it cannot be successfully maintained, wherein the same should

not continue, while part and parcel of the same ore not committed to

either in the sense referred to, whereas, under different circumstances,

the most inexperienced among us could not detect it if it were, or might

overlook it if it did, or scorn the very idea of such a thing, even

though it were palpably demonstrated as such.  Am I not right?"



I said, sorrowfully: "I feel ashamed of myself, Mr.  Ward.  I know I

ought to understand you perfectly well, but you see that treacherous

whisky cocktail has got into my head, and now I cannot understand even

the simplest proposition.  I told you how it would be."



"Oh, don't mind it, don't mind it; the fault was my own, no doubt--though

I did think it clear enough for--"



"Don't say a word.  Clear!  Why, you stated it as clear as the sun to

anybody but an abject idiot; but it's that confounded cocktail that has

played the mischief."



"No; now don't say that.  I'll begin it all over again, and--"



"Don't now--for goodness' sake, don't do anything of the kind, because I

tell you my head is in such a condition that I don't believe I could

understand the most trifling question a man could ask me.



"Now don't you be afraid.  I'll put it so plain this time that you can't

help but get the hang of it.  We will begin at the very beginning."

[Leaning far across the table, with determined impressiveness wrought

upon his every feature, and fingers prepared to keep tally of each point

enumerated; and I, leaning forward with painful interest, resolved to

comprehend or perish.]  "You know the vein, the ledge, the thing that

contains the metal, whereby it constitutes the medium between all other

forces, whether of present or remote agencies, so brought to bear in

favor of the former against the latter, or the latter against the former

or all, or both, or compromising the relative differences existing within

the radius whence culminate the several degrees of similarity to which--"



I said: "Oh, hang my wooden head, it ain't any use!--it ain't any use to

try--I can't understand anything.  The plainer you get it the more I

can't get the hang of it."



I heard a suspicious noise behind me, and turned in time to see Hingston

dodging behind a newspaper, and quaking with a gentle ecstasy of

laughter.  I looked at Ward again, and he had thrown off his dread

solemnity and was laughing also.  Then I saw that I had been sold--that I

had been made a victim of a swindle in the way of a string of plausibly

worded sentences that didn't mean anything under the sun.  Artemus Ward

was one of the best fellows in the world, and one of the most

companionable.  It has been said that he was not fluent in conversation,

but, with the above experience in my mind, I differ.













CANNIBALISM IN THE CARS--[Written abort 1867.]



I visited St. Louis lately, and on my way West, after changing cars at

Terre Haute, Indiana, a mild, benevolent-looking gentleman of about

forty-five, or maybe fifty, came in at one of the way-stations and sat

down beside me.  We talked together pleasantly on various subjects for an

hour, perhaps, and I found him exceedingly intelligent and entertaining.

When he learned that I was from Washington, he immediately began to ask

questions about various public men, and about Congressional affairs; and

I saw very shortly that I was conversing with a man who was perfectly

familiar with the ins and outs of political life at the Capital, even to

the ways and manners, and customs of procedure of Senators and

Representatives in the Chambers of the national Legislature.  Presently

two men halted near us for a single moment, and one said to the other:



"Harris, if you'll do that for me, I'll never forget you, my boy."



My new comrade's eye lighted pleasantly.  The words had touched upon a

happy memory, I thought.  Then his face settled into thoughtfulness--

almost into gloom.  He turned to me and said,



"Let me tell you a story; let me give you a secret chapter of my life--

a chapter that has never been referred to by me since its events

transpired.  Listen patiently, and promise that you will not interrupt

me."



I said I would not, and he related the following strange adventure,

speaking sometimes with animation, sometimes with melancholy, but always

with feeling and earnestness.





                         THE STRANGER'S NARRATIVE



"On the 19th of December, 1853, I started from St. Louis on the evening

train bound for Chicago.  There were only twenty-four passengers, all

told.  There were no ladies and no children.  We were in excellent

spirits, and pleasant acquaintanceships were soon formed.  The journey

bade fair to be a happy one; and no individual in the party, I think, had

even the vaguest presentiment of the horrors we were soon to undergo.



"At 11 P.m.  it began to snow hard.  Shortly after leaving the small

village of Welden, we entered upon that tremendous prairie solitude that

stretches its leagues on leagues of houseless dreariness far away toward

the jubilee Settlements.  The winds, unobstructed by trees or hills, or

even vagrant rocks, whistled fiercely across the level desert, driving

the falling snow before it like spray from the crested waves of a stormy

sea.  The snow was deepening fast; and we knew, by the diminished speed

of the train, that the engine was plowing through it with steadily

increasing difficulty.  Indeed, it almost came to a dead halt sometimes,

in the midst of great drifts that piled themselves like colossal graves

across the track.  Conversation began to flag.  Cheerfulness gave place

to grave concern.  The possibility of being imprisoned in the snow, on

the bleak prairie, fifty miles from any house, presented itself to every

mind, and extended its depressing influence over every spirit.



"At two o'clock in the morning I was aroused out of an uneasy slumber by

the ceasing of all motion about me.  The appalling truth flashed upon me

instantly--we were captives in a snow-drift!  'All hands to the rescue!'

Every man sprang to obey.  Out into the wild night, the pitchy darkness,

the billowy snow, the driving storm, every soul leaped, with the

consciousness that a moment lost now might bring destruction to us all.

Shovels, hands, boards--anything, everything that could displace snow,

was brought into instant requisition.  It was a weird picture, that small

company of frantic men fighting the banking snows, half in the blackest

shadow and half in the angry light of the locomotive's reflector.



"One short hour sufficed to prove the utter uselessness of our efforts.

The storm barricaded the track with a dozen drifts while we dug one away.

And worse than this, it was discovered that the last grand charge the

engine had made upon the enemy had broken the fore-and-aft shaft of the

driving-wheel!  With a free track before us we should still have been

helpless.  We entered the car wearied with labor, and very sorrowful.

We gathered about the stoves, and gravely canvassed our situation.  We

had no provisions whatever--in this lay our chief distress.  We could not

freeze, for there was a good supply of wood in the tender.  This was our

only comfort.  The discussion ended at last in accepting the

disheartening decision of the conductor, viz., that it would be death for

any man to attempt to travel fifty miles on foot through snow like that.

We could not send for help, and even if we could it would not come.  We

must submit, and await, as patiently as we might, succor or starvation!

I think the stoutest heart there felt a momentary chill when those words

were uttered.



"Within the hour conversation subsided to a low murmur here and there

about the car, caught fitfully between the rising and falling of the

blast; the lamps grew dim; and the majority of the castaways settled

themselves among the flickering shadows to think--to forget the present,

if they could--to sleep, if they might.



"The eternal night-it surely seemed eternal to us-wore its lagging hours

away at last, and the cold gray dawn broke in the east.  As the light

grew stronger the passengers began to stir and give signs of life, one

after another, and each in turn pushed his slouched hat up from his

forehead, stretched his stiffened limbs, and glanced out of the windows

upon the cheerless prospect.  It was cheer less, indeed!-not a living

thing visible anywhere, not a human habitation; nothing but a vast white

desert; uplifted sheets of snow drifting hither and thither before the

wind--a world of eddying flakes shutting out the firmament above.



"All day we moped about the cars, saying little, thinking much.  Another

lingering dreary night--and hunger.



"Another dawning--another day of silence, sadness, wasting hunger,

hopeless watching for succor that could not come.  A night of restless

slumber, filled with dreams of feasting--wakings distressed with the

gnawings of hunger.



"The fourth day came and went--and the fifth!  Five days of dreadful

imprisonment!  A savage hunger looked out at every eye.  There was in it

a sign of awful import--the foreshadowing of a something that was vaguely

shaping itself in every heart--a something which no tongue dared yet to

frame into words.



"The sixth day passed--the seventh dawned upon as gaunt and haggard and

hopeless a company of men as ever stood in the shadow of death.  It must

out now!  That thing which had been growing up in every heart was ready

to leap from every lip at last!  Nature had been taxed to the utmost--she

must yield.  RICHARD H. GASTON of Minnesota, tall, cadaverous, and pale,

rose up.  All knew what was coming.  All prepared--every emotion, every

semblance of excitement--was smothered--only a calm, thoughtful

seriousness appeared in the eyes that were lately so wild.



"'Gentlemen: It cannot be delayed longer!  The time is at hand!  We must

determine which of us shall die to furnish food for the rest!'



"MR. JOHN J. WILLIAMS of Illinois rose and said: 'Gentlemen--I nominate

the Rev. James Sawyer of Tennessee.'



"MR. Wm. R. ADAMS of Indiana said: 'I nominate Mr. Daniel Slote of New

York.'



"MR. CHARLES J. LANGDON: 'I nominate Mr. Samuel A.  Bowen of St. Louis.'



"MR. SLOTE: 'Gentlemen--I desire to decline in favor of Mr. John A. Van

Nostrand, Jun., of New Jersey.'



"MR. GASTON: 'If there be no objection, the gentleman's desire will be

acceded to.'



"MR. VAN NOSTRAND objecting, the resignation of Mr. Slote was rejected.

The resignations of Messrs. Sawyer and Bowen were also offered, and

refused upon the same grounds.



"MR. A. L. BASCOM of Ohio: 'I move that the nominations now close, and

that the House proceed to an election by ballot.'



"MR. SAWYER: 'Gentlemen--I protest earnestly against these proceedings.

They are, in every way, irregular and unbecoming.  I must beg to move

that they be dropped at once, and that we elect a chairman of the meeting

and proper officers to assist him, and then we can go on with the

business before us understandingly.'



"MR. BELL of Iowa: 'Gentlemen--I object.  This is no time to stand upon

forms and ceremonious observances.  For more than seven days we have been

without food.  Every moment we lose in idle discussion increases our

distress.  I am satisfied with the nominations that have been made--every

gentleman present is, I believe--and I, for one, do not see why we should

not proceed at once to elect one or more of them.  I wish to offer a

resolution--'



"MR. GASTON: 'It would be objected to, and have to lie over one day under

the rules, thus bringing about the very delay you wish to avoid.  The

gentleman from New Jersey--'



"MR. VAN NOSTRAND: 'Gentlemen--I am a stranger among you; I have not

sought the distinction that has been conferred upon me, and I feel a

delicacy--'



"MR. MORGAN Of Alabama (interrupting): 'I move the previous question.'



"The motion was carried, and further debate shut off, of course.  The

motion to elect officers was passed, and under it Mr. Gaston was chosen

chairman, Mr. Blake, secretary, Messrs.  Holcomb, Dyer, and Baldwin a

committee on nominations, and Mr. R. M. Howland, purveyor, to assist the

committee in making selections.



"A recess of half an hour was then taken, and some little caucusing

followed.  At the sound of the gavel the meeting reassembled, and the

committee reported in favor of Messrs. George Ferguson of Kentucky,

Lucien Herrman of Louisiana, and W. Messick of Colorado as candidates.

The report was accepted.



"MR. ROGERS of Missouri: 'Mr. President The report being properly before

the House now, I move to amend it by substituting for the name of Mr.

Herrman that of Mr. Lucius Harris of St.  Louis, who is well and

honorably known to us all.  I do not wish to be understood as casting the

least reflection upon the high character and standing of the gentleman

from Louisiana far from it.  I respect and esteem him as much as any

gentleman here present possibly can; but none of us can be blind to the

fact that he has lost more flesh during the week that we have lain here

than any among us--none of us can be blind to the fact that the committee

has been derelict in its duty, either through negligence or a graver

fault, in thus offering for our suffrages a gentleman who, however pure

his own motives may be, has really less nutriment in him--'



"THE CHAIR: 'The gentleman from Missouri will take his seat.  The Chair

cannot allow the integrity of the committee to be questioned save by the

regular course, under the rules.  What action will the House take upon

the gentleman's motion?'



"MR. HALLIDAY of Virginia: 'I move to further amend the report by

substituting Mr. Harvey Davis of Oregon for Mr. Messick.  It may be urged

by gentlemen that the hardships and privations of a frontier life have

rendered Mr.  Davis tough; but, gentlemen, is this a time to cavil at

toughness?  Is this a time to be fastidious concerning trifles?  Is this

a time to dispute about matters of paltry significance?  No, gentlemen,

bulk is what we desire--substance, weight, bulk--these are the supreme

requisites now--not talent, not genius, not education.  I insist upon my

motion.'



"MR. MORGAN (excitedly): 'Mr.  Chairman--I do most strenuously object to

this amendment.  The gentleman from Oregon is old, and furthermore is

bulky only in bone--not in flesh.  I ask the gentleman from Virginia if

it is soup we want instead of solid sustenance? if he would delude us

with shadows?  if he would mock our suffering with an Oregonian specter?

I ask him if he can look upon the anxious faces around him, if he can

gaze into our sad eyes, if he can listen to the beating of our expectant

hearts, and still thrust this famine-stricken fraud upon us?  I ask him

if he can think of our desolate state, of our past sorrows, of our dark

future, and still unpityingly foist upon us this wreck, this ruin, this

tottering swindle, this gnarled and blighted and sapless vagabond from

Oregon's hospitable shores?  Never!' [Applause.]



"The amendment was put to vote, after a fiery debate, and lost.  Mr.

Harris was substituted on the first amendment.  The balloting then began.

Five ballots were held without a choice.  On the sixth, Mr.  Harris was

elected, all voting for him but himself.  It was then moved that his

election should be ratified by acclamation, which was lost, in

consequence of his again voting against himself.



"MR. RADWAY moved that the House now take up the remaining candidates,

and go into an election for breakfast.  This was carried.



"On the first ballot--there was a tie, half the members favoring one

candidate on account of his youth, and half favoring the other on account

of his superior size.  The President gave the casting vote for the

latter, Mr. Messick.  This decision created considerable dissatisfaction

among the friends of Mr. Ferguson, the defeated candidate, and there was

some talk of demanding a new ballot; but in the midst of it a motion to

adjourn was carried, and the meeting broke up at once.



"The preparations for supper diverted the attention of the Ferguson

faction from the discussion of their grievance for a long time, and then,

when they would have taken it up again, the happy announcement that Mr.

Harris was ready drove all thought of it to the winds.



"We improvised tables by propping up the backs of car-seats, and sat down

with hearts full of gratitude to the finest supper that had blessed our

vision for seven torturing days.  How changed we were from what we had

been a few short hours before!  Hopeless, sad-eyed misery, hunger,

feverish anxiety, desperation, then; thankfulness, serenity, joy too deep

for utterance now.  That I know was the cheeriest hour of my eventful

life.  The winds howled, and blew the snow wildly about our prison house,

but they were powerless to distress us any more.  I liked Harris.  He

might have been better done, perhaps, but I am free to say that no man

ever agreed with me better than Harris, or afforded me so large a degree

of satisfaction.  Messick was very well, though rather high-flavored,

but for genuine nutritiousness and delicacy of fiber, give me Harris.

Messick had his good points--I will not attempt to deny it, nor do I wish

to do it but he was no more fitted for breakfast than a mummy would be,

sir--not a bit.  Lean?--why, bless me!--and tough?  Ah, he was very

tough!  You could not imagine it--you could never imagine anything like

it."



"Do you mean to tell me that--"



"Do not interrupt me, please.  After breakfast we elected a man by the

name of Walker, from Detroit, for supper.  He was very good.  I wrote his

wife so afterward.  He was worthy of all praise.  I shall always remember

Walker.  He was a little rare, but very good.  And then the next morning

we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I

ever sat down to handsome, educated, refined, spoke several languages

fluently a perfect gentleman he was a perfect gentleman, and singularly

juicy.  For supper we had that Oregon patriarch, and he was a fraud,

there is no question about it--old, scraggy, tough, nobody can picture

the reality.  I finally said, gentlemen, you can do as you like, but I

will wait for another election.  And Grimes of Illinois said, 'Gentlemen,

I will wait also.  When you elect a man that has something to recommend

him, I shall be glad to join you again.'  It soon became evident that

there was general dissatisfaction with Davis of Oregon, and so, to

preserve the good will that had prevailed so pleasantly since we had had

Harris, an election was called, and the result of it was that Baker of

Georgia was chosen.  He was splendid!  Well, well--after that we had

Doolittle, and Hawkins, and McElroy (there was some complaint about

McElroy, because he was uncommonly short and thin), and Penrod, and two

Smiths, and Bailey (Bailey had a wooden leg, which was clear loss, but he

was otherwise good), and an Indian boy, and an organ-grinder, and a

gentleman by the name of Buckminster--a poor stick of a vagabond that

wasn't any good for company and no account for breakfast.  We were glad

we got him elected before relief came."



"And so the blessed relief did come at last?"



"Yes, it came one bright, sunny morning, just after election.  John

Murphy was the choice, and there never was a better, I am willing to

testify; but John Murphy came home with us, in the train that came to

succor us, and lived to marry the widow Harris--"



"Relict of--"



"Relict of our first choice.  He married her, and is happy and respected

and prosperous yet.  Ah, it was like a novel, sir--it was like a romance.

This is my stopping-place, sir; I must bid you goodby.  Any time that you

can make it convenient to tarry a day or two with me, I shall be glad to

have you.  I like you, sir; I have conceived an affection for you.

I could like you as well as I liked Harris himself, sir.  Good day, sir,

and a pleasant journey."



He was gone.  I never felt so stunned, so distressed, so bewildered in my

life.  But in my soul I was glad he was gone.  With all his gentleness of

manner and his soft voice, I shuddered whenever he turned his hungry eye

upon me; and when I heard that I had achieved his perilous affection, and

that I stood almost with the late Harris in his esteem, my heart fairly

stood still!



I was bewildered beyond description.  I did not doubt his word; I could

not question a single item in a statement so stamped with the earnestness

of truth as his; but its dreadful details overpowered me, and threw my

thoughts into hopeless confusion.  I saw the conductor looking at me.

I said, "Who is that man?"



"He was a member of Congress once, and a good one.  But he got caught in

a snow-drift in the cars, and like to have been starved to death.  He got

so frost-bitten and frozen up generally, and used up for want of

something to eat, that he was sick and out of his head two or three

months afterward.  He is all right now, only he is a monomaniac, and when

he gets on that old subject he never stops till he has eat up that whole

car-load of people he talks about.  He would have finished the crowd by

this time, only he had to get out here.  He has got their names as pat as

A B C.  When he gets them all eat up but himself, he always says: 'Then

the hour for the usual election for breakfast having arrived; and there

being no opposition, I was duly elected, after which, there being no

objections offered, I resigned.  Thus I am here.'"



I felt inexpressibly relieved to know that I had only been listening to

the harmless vagaries of a madman instead of the genuine experiences of a

bloodthirsty cannibal.













THE KILLING OF JULIUS CAESAR "LOCALIZED"--[Written about 1865.]



Being the only true and reliable account ever published; taken from the

Roman "Daily Evening Fasces," of the date of that tremendous occurrence.



Nothing in the world affords a newspaper reporter so much satisfaction as

gathering up the details of a bloody and mysterious murder and writing

them up with aggravating circumstantiality.  He takes a living delight in

this labor of love--for such it is to him, especially if he knows that

all the other papers have gone to press, and his will be the only one

that will contain the dreadful intelligence.  A feeling of regret has

often come over me that I was not reporting in Rome when Caesar was

killed--reporting on an evening paper, and the only one in the city, and

getting at least twelve hours ahead of the morning-paper boys with this

most magnificent "item" that ever fell to the lot of the craft.  Other

events have happened as startling as this, but none that possessed so

peculiarly all the characteristics of the favorite "item" of the present

day, magnified into grandeur and sublimity by the high rank, fame, and

social and political standing of the actors in it.



However, as I was not permitted to report Caesar's assassination in the

regular way, it has at least afforded me rare satisfaction to translate

the following able account of it from the original Latin of the Roman

Daily Evening Fasces of that date--second edition:





Our usually quiet city of Rome was thrown into a state of wild excitement

yesterday by the occurrence of one of those bloody affrays which sicken

the heart and fill the soul with fear, while they inspire all thinking

men with forebodings for the future of a city where human life is held so

cheaply and the gravest laws are so openly set at defiance.  As the

result of that affray, it is our painful duty, as public journalists, to

record the death of one of our most esteemed citizens--a man whose name

is known wherever this paper circulates, and where fame it has been our

pleasure and our privilege to extend, and also to protect from the tongue

of slander and falsehood, to the best of our poor ability.  We refer to

Mr. J. Caesar, the Emperor-elect.



The facts of the case, as nearly as our reporter could determine them

from the conflicting statements of eye-witnesses, were about as follows:-

The affair was an election row, of course.  Nine-tenths of the ghastly

butcheries that disgrace the city nowadays grow out of the bickerings and

jealousies and animosities engendered by these accursed elections.  Rome

would be the gainer by it if her very constables were elected to serve a

century; for in our experience we have never even been able to choose a

dog-pelter without celebrating the event with a dozen knockdowns and a

general cramming of the station-house with drunken vagabonds overnight.

It is said that when the immense majority for Caesar at the polls in the

market was declared the other day, and the crown was offered to that

gentleman, even his amazing unselfishness in refusing it three times was

not sufficient to save him from the whispered insults of such men as

Casca, of the Tenth Ward, and other hirelings of the disappointed

candidate, hailing mostly from the Eleventh and Thirteenth and other

outside districts, who were overheard speaking ironically and

contemptuously of Mr. Caesar's conduct upon that occasion.



We are further informed that there are many among us who think they are

justified in believing that the assassination of Julius Caesar was a put-

up thing--a cut-and-dried arrangement, hatched by Marcus Brutus and a lot

of his hired roughs, and carried out only too faithfully according to the

program.  Whether there be good grounds for this suspicion or not, we

leave to the people to judge for themselves, only asking that they will

read the following account of the sad occurrence carefully and

dispassionately before they render that judgment.



The Senate was already in session, and Caesar was coming down the street

toward the capitol, conversing with some personal friends, and followed,

as usual, by a large number of citizens.  Just as he was passing in front

of Demosthenes and Thucydides' drug store, he was observing casually to a

gentleman, who, our informant thinks, is a fortune-teller, that the Ides

of March were come.  The reply was, "Yes, they are come, but not gone

yet."  At this moment Artemidorus stepped up and passed the time of day,

and asked Caesar to read a schedule or a tract or something of the kind,

which he had brought for his perusal.  Mr. Decius Brutus also said

something about an "humble suit" which he wanted read.  Artexnidorus

begged that attention might be paid to his first, because it was of

personal consequence to Caesar.  The latter replied that what concerned

himself should be read last, or words to that effect.  Artemidorus begged

and beseeched him to read the paper instantly!--[Mark that: It is hinted

by William Shakespeare, who saw the beginning and the end of the

unfortunate affray, that this "schedule" was simply a note discovering to

Caesar that a plot was brewing to take his life.]--However, Caesar

shook him off, and refused to read any petition in the street.  He then

entered the capitol, and the crowd followed him.



About this time the following conversation was overheard, and we consider

that, taken in connection with the events which succeeded it, it bears an

appalling significance:  Mr. Papilius Lena remarked to George W. Cassias

(commonly known as the "Nobby Boy of the Third Ward"), a bruiser in the

pay of the Opposition, that he hoped his enterprise to-day might thrive;

and when Cassias asked "What enterprise?" he only closed his left eye

temporarily and said with simulated indifference, "Fare you well," and

sauntered toward Caesar.  Marcus Brutus, who is suspected of being the

ringleader of the band that killed Caesar, asked what it was that Lena

had said.  Cassias told him, and added in a low tone, "I fear our purpose

is discovered."



Brutus told his wretched accomplice to keep an eye on Lena, and a moment

after Cassias urged that lean and hungry vagrant, Casca, whose reputation

here is none of the best, to be sudden, for he feared prevention.  He

then turned to Brutus, apparently much excited, and asked what should be

done, and swore that either he or Caesar would never turn back--he would

kill himself first.  At this time Caesar was talking to some of the back-

country members about the approaching fall elections, and paying little

attention to what was going on around him.  Billy Trebonius got into

conversation with the people's friend and Caesar's--Mark Antony--and

under some pretense or other got him away, and Brutus, Decius, Casca,

Cinna, Metellus Cimber, and others of the gang of infamous desperadoes

that infest Rome at present, closed around the doomed Caesar.  Then

Metellus Cimber knelt down and begged that his brother might be recalled

from banishment, but Caesar rebuked him for his fawning conduct, and

refused to grant his petition.  Immediately, at Cimber's request, first

Brutus and then Cassias begged for the return of the banished Publius;

but Caesar still refused.  He said he could not be moved; that he was as

fixed as the North Star, and proceeded to speak in the most complimentary

terms of the firmness of that star and its steady character.  Then he

said he was like it, and he believed he was the only man in the country

that was; therefore, since he was "constant" that Cimber should be

banished, he was also "constant" that he should stay banished, and he'd

be hanged if he didn't keep him so!



Instantly seizing upon this shallow pretext for a fight, Casca sprang at

Caesar and struck him with a dirk, Caesar grabbing him by the arm with

his right hand, and launching a blow straight from the shoulder with his

left, that sent the reptile bleeding to the earth.  He then backed up

against Pompey's statue, and squared himself to receive his assailants.

Cassias and Cimber and Cinna rushed, upon him with their daggers drawn,

and the former succeeded in inflicting a wound upon his body; but before

he could strike again, and before either of the others could strike at

all, Caesar stretched the three miscreants at his feet with as many blows

of his powerful fist.  By this time the Senate was in an indescribable

uproar; the throng of citizens is the lobbies had blockaded the doors in

their frantic efforts to escape from the building, the sergeant-at-arms

and his assistants were struggling with the assassins, venerable senators

had cast aside their encumbering robes, and were leaping over benches and

flying down the aisles in wild confusion toward the shelter of the

committee-rooms, and a thousand voices were shouting "Po-lice!  Po-lice!"

in discordant tones that rose above the frightful din like shrieking

winds above the roaring of a tempest.  And amid it all great Caesar stood

with his back against the statue, like a lion at bay, and fought his

assailants weaponless and hand to hand, with the defiant bearing and the

unwavering courage which he had shown before on many a bloody field.

Billy Trebonius and Caius Legarius struck him with their daggers and

fell, as their brother-conspirators before them had fallen.  But at last,

when Caesar saw his old friend Brutus step forward armed with a murderous

knife, it is said he seemed utterly overpowered with grief and amazement,

and, dropping his invincible left arm by his side, he hid his face in the

folds of his mantle and received the treacherous blow without an effort

to stay the hand that gave it.  He only said, "Et tu, Brute?" and fell

lifeless on the marble pavement.



We learn that the coat deceased had on when he was killed was the same

one he wore in his tent on the afternoon of the day he overcame the

Nervii, and that when it was removed from the corpse it was found to be

cut and gashed in no less than seven different places.  There was nothing

in the pockets.  It will be exhibited at the coroner's inquest, and will

be damning proof of the fact of the killing.  These latter facts may be

relied on, as we get them from Mark Antony, whose position enables him to

learn every item of news connected with the one subject of absorbing

interest of-to-day.



LATER: While the coroner was summoning a jury, Mark Antony and other

friends of the late Caesar got hold of the body, and lugged it off to the

Forum, and at last accounts Antony and Brutus were making speeches over

it and raising such a row among the people that, as we go to press, the

chief of police is satisfied there is going to be a riot, and is taking

measures accordingly.













THE WIDOW'S PROTEST



One of the saddest things that ever came under my notice (said the

banker's clerk) was there in Corning during the war.  Dan Murphy enlisted

as a private, and fought very bravely.  The boys all liked him, and when

a wound by and by weakened him down till carrying a musket was too heavy

work for him, they clubbed together and fixed him up as a sutler.  He

made money then, and sent it always to his wife to bank for him.  She was

a washer and ironer, and knew enough by hard experience to keep money

when she got it.  She didn't waste a penny.



On the contrary, she began to get miserly as her bank-account grew.  She

grieved to part with a cent, poor creature, for twice in her hard-working

life she had known what it was to be hungry, cold, friendless, sick, and

without a dollar in the world, and she had a haunting dread of suffering

so again.  Well, at last Dan died; and the boys, in testimony of their

esteem and respect for him, telegraphed to Mrs. Murphy to know if she

would like to have him embalmed and sent home; when you know the usual

custom was to dump a poor devil like him into a shallow hole, and then

inform his friends what had become of him.  Mrs.  Murphy jumped to the

conclusion that it would only cost two or three dollars to embalm her

dead husband, and so she telegraphed "Yes."  It was at the "wake" that

the bill for embalming arrived and was presented to the widow.



She uttered a wild, sad wail that pierced every heart, and said,

"Sivinty-foive dollars for stooffin' Dan, blister their sowls!  Did thim

divils suppose I was goin' to stairt a Museim, that I'd be dalin' in such

expinsive curiassities !"



The banker's clerk said there was not a dry eye in the house.













THE SCRIPTURAL PANORAMIST--[Written about 1866.]



There was a fellow traveling around in that country," said Mr.

Nickerson, "with a moral-religious show--a sort of scriptural panorama--

and he hired a wooden-headed old slab to play the piano for him.  After

the first night's performance the showman says:



"'My friend, you seem to know pretty much all the tunes there are, and

you worry along first rate.  But then, didn't you notice that sometimes

last night the piece you happened to be playing was a little rough on the

proprieties, so to speak--didn't seem to jibe with the general gait of

the picture that was passing at the time, as it were--was a little

foreign to the subject, you know--as if you didn't either trump or follow

suit, you understand?'



"'Well, no,' the fellow said; 'he hadn't noticed, but it might be; he had

played along just as it came handy.'



"So they put it up that the simple old dummy was to keep his eye on the

panorama after that, and as soon as a stunning picture was reeled out he

was to fit it to a dot with a piece of music that would help the audience

to get the idea of the subject, and warm them up like a camp-meeting

revival.  That sort of thing would corral their sympathies, the showman

said.



"There was a big audience that night-mostly middle-aged and old people

who belong to the church, and took a strong interest in Bible matters,

and the balance were pretty much young bucks and heifers--they always

come out strong on panoramas, you know, because it gives them a chance to

taste one another's complexions in the dark.



"Well, the showman began to swell himself up for his lecture, and the old

mud-Jobber tackled the piano and ran his fingers up and down once or

twice to see that she was all right, and the fellows behind the curtain

commenced to grind out the panorama.  The showman balanced his weight on

his right foot, and propped his hands over his hips, and flung his eyes

over his shoulder at the scenery, and said:



"'Ladies and gentlemen, the painting now before you illustrates the

beautiful and touching parable of the Prodigal Son.  Observe the happy

expression just breaking over the features of the poor, suffering youth--

so worn and weary with his long march; note also the ecstasy beaming from

the uplifted countenance of the aged father, and the joy that sparkles in

the eyes of the excited group of youths and maidens, and seems ready to

burst into the welcoming chorus from their lips.  The lesson, my friends,

is as solemn and instructive as the story is tender and beautiful.'



"The mud-Jobber was all ready, and when the second speech was finished,

struck up:



                    "Oh, we'll all get blind drunk

                    When Johnny comes marching home!



"Some of the people giggled, and some groaned a little.  The showman

couldn't say a word; he looked at the pianist sharp, but he was all

lovely and serene--he didn't know there was anything out of gear.



"The panorama moved on, and the showman drummed up his grit and started

in fresh.



"'Ladies and gentlemen, the fine picture now unfolding itself to your

gaze exhibits one of the most notable events in Bible history--our

Saviour and His disciples upon the Sea of Galilee.  How grand, how awe-

inspiring are the reflections which the subject invokes!  What sublimity

of faith is revealed to us in this lesson from the sacred writings!  The

Saviour rebukes the angry waves, and walks securely upon the bosom of the

deep!'



"All around the house they were whispering, 'Oh, how lovely, how

beautiful!' and the orchestra let himself out again:



                    "A life on the ocean wave,

                    And a home on the rolling deep!



"There was a good deal of honest snickering turned on this time, and

considerable groaning, and one or two old deacons got up and went out.

The showman grated his teeth, and cursed the piano man to himself; but

the fellow sat there like a knot on a log, and seemed to think he was

doing first-rate.



"After things got quiet the showman thought he would make one more

stagger at it, anyway, though his confidence was beginning to get mighty

shaky.  The supes started the panorama grinding along again, and he says:



"'Ladies and gentlemen, this exquisite painting represents the raising of

Lazarus from the dead by our Saviour.  The subject has been handled with

marvelous skill by the artist, and such touching sweetness and tenderness

of expression has he thrown into it that I have known peculiarly

sensitive persons to be even affected to tears by looking at it.  Observe

the half-confused, half-inquiring look upon the countenance of the

awakened Lazarus.  Observe, also, the attitude and expression of the

Saviour, who takes him gently by the sleeve of his shroud with one hand,

while He points with the other toward the distant city.'



"Before anybody could get off an opinion in the case the innocent old ass

at the piano struck up:



                    "Come rise up, William Ri-i-ley,

                    And go along with me!



"Whe-ew!  All the solemn old flats got up in a huff to go, and everybody

else laughed till the windows rattled.



"The showman went down and grabbed the orchestra and shook him up and

says:



"'That lets you out, you know, you chowder-headed old clam.  Go to the

doorkeeper and get your money, and cut your stick--vamose the ranch!

Ladies and gentlemen, circumstances over which I have no control compel

me prematurely to dismiss the house.'"













CURING A COLD--[Written about 1864]



It is a good thing, perhaps, to write for the amusement of the public,

but it is a far higher and nobler thing to write for their instruction,

their profit, their actual and tangible benefit.  The latter is the sole

object of this article.  If it prove the means of restoring to health one

solitary sufferer among my race, of lighting up once more the fire of

hope and joy in his faded eyes, or bringing back to his dead heart again

the quick, generous impulses of other days, I shall be amply rewarded for

my labor; my soul will be permeated with the sacred delight a Christian.

feels when he has done a good, unselfish deed.



Having led a pure and blameless life, I am justified in believing that no

man who knows me will reject the suggestions I am about to make, out of

fear that I am trying to deceive him.  Let the public do itself the honor

to read my experience in doctoring a cold, as herein set forth, and then

follow in my footsteps.



When the White House was burned in Virginia City, I lost my home, my

happiness, my constitution, and my trunk.  The loss of the two first

named articles was a matter of no great consequence, since a home without

a mother, or a sister, or a distant young female relative in it, to

remind you, by putting your soiled linen out of sight and taking your

boots down off the mantelpiece, that there are those who think about you

and care for you, is easily obtained.  And I cared nothing for the loss

of my happiness, because, not being a poet, it could not be possible that

melancholy would abide with me long.  But to lose a good constitution and

a better trunk were serious misfortunes.  On the day of the fire my

constitution succumbed to a severe cold, caused by undue exertion in

getting ready to do something.  I suffered to no purpose, too, because

the plan I was figuring at for the extinguishing of the fire was so

elaborate that I never got it completed until the middle of the following

week.



The first time I began to sneeze, a friend told me to go and bathe my

feet in hot water and go to bed.  I did so.  Shortly afterward, another

friend advised me to get up and take a cold shower-bath.  I did that

also.  Within the hour, another friend assured me that it was policy to

"feed a cold and starve a fever."  I had both.  So I thought it best to

fill myself up for the cold, and then keep dark and let the fever starve

awhile.



In a case of, this kind, I seldom do things by halves; I ate pretty

heartily; I conferred my custom upon a stranger who had just opened his

restaurant that morning; he waited near me in respectful silence until I

had finished feeding my cold, when he inquired if the people about

Virginia City were much afflicted with colds?  I told him I thought they

were.  He then went out and took in his sign.



I started down toward the office, and on the way encountered another

bosom friend, who told me that a quart of salt-water, taken warm, would

come as near curing a cold as anything in the world.  I hardly thought I

had room for it, but I tried it anyhow.  The result was surprising.  I

believed I had thrown up my immortal soul.



Now, as I am giving my experience only for the benefit of those who are

troubled with the distemper I am writing about, I feel that they will see

the propriety of my cautioning them against following such portions of it

as proved inefficient with me, and acting upon this conviction, I warn

them against warm salt-water.  It may be a good enough remedy, but I

think it is too severe.  If I had another cold in the head, and there

were no course left me but to take either an earthquake or a quart of

warm saltwater, I would take my chances on the earthquake.



After the storm which had been raging in my stomach had subsided, and no

more good Samaritans happening along, I went on borrowing handkerchiefs

again and blowing them to atoms, as had been my custom in the early

stages of my cold, until I came across a lady who had just arrived from

over the plains, and who said she had lived in a part of the country

where doctors were scarce, and had from necessity acquired considerable

skill in the treatment of simple "family complaints."  I knew she must

have had much experience, for she appeared to be a hundred and fifty

years old.



She mixed a decoction composed of molasses, aquafortis, turpentine, and

various other drugs, and instructed me to take a wine-glass full of it

every fifteen minutes.  I never took but one dose; that was enough; it

robbed me of all moral principle, and awoke every unworthy impulse of my

nature.  Under its malign influence my brain conceived miracles of

meanness, but my hands were too feeble to execute them; at that time, had

it not been that my strength had surrendered to a succession of assaults

from infallible remedies for my cold, I am satisfied that I would have

tried to rob the graveyard.  Like most other people, I often feel mean,

and act accordingly; but until I took that medicine I had never reveled

in such supernatural depravity, and felt proud of it.  At the end of two

days I was ready to go to doctoring again.  I took a few more unfailing

remedies, and finally drove my cold from my head to my lungs.



I got to coughing incessantly, and my voice fell below zero; I conversed

in a thundering bass, two octaves below my natural tone; I could only

compass my regular nightly repose by coughing myself down to a state of

utter exhaustion, and then the moment I began to talk in my sleep, my

discordant voice woke me up again.



My case grew more and more serious every day.  A Plain gin was

recommended; I took it.  Then gin and molasses; I took that also.  Then

gin and onions; I added the onions, and took all three.  I detected no

particular result, however, except that I had acquired a breath like a

buzzard's.



I found I had to travel for my health.  I went to Lake Bigler with my

reportorial comrade, Wilson.  It is gratifying to me to reflect that we

traveled in considerable style; we went in the Pioneer coach, and my

friend took all his baggage with him, consisting of two excellent silk

handkerchiefs and a daguerreotype of his grandmother.  We sailed and

hunted and fished and danced all day, and I doctored my cough all night.

By managing in this way, I made out to improve every hour in the twenty-

four.  But my disease continued to grow worse.



A sheet-bath was recommended.  I had never refused a remedy yet, and it

seemed poor policy to commence then; therefore I determined to take a

sheet-bath, notwithstanding I had no idea what sort of arrangement it

was.  It was administered at midnight, and the weather was very frosty.

My breast and back were bared, and a sheet (there appeared to be a

thousand yards of it) soaked in ice-water, was wound around me until I

resembled a swab for a Columbiad.



It is a cruel expedient.  When the chilly rag touches one's warm flesh,

it makes him start with sudden violence, and gasp for breath just as men

do in the death-agony.  It froze the marrow in my bones and stopped the

beating of my heart.  I thought my time had come.



Young Wilson said the circumstance reminded him of an anecdote about a

negro who was being baptized, and who slipped from the parson's grasp,

and came near being drowned.  He floundered around, though, and finally

rose up out of the water considerably strangled and furiously angry, and

started ashore at once, spouting water like a whale, and remarking, with

great asperity, that "one o' dese days some gen'l'man's nigger gwyne to

get killed wid jis' such damn foolishness as dis!"



Never take a sheet-bath-never.  Next to meeting a lady acquaintance who,

for reasons best known to herself, don't see you when she looks at you,

and don't know you when she does see you, it is the most uncomfortable

thing in the world.



But, as I was saying, when the sheet-bath failed to cure my cough,

a lady friend recommended the application of a mustard plaster to my

breast.  I believe that would have cured me effectually, if it had not

been for young Wilson.  When I went to bed, I put my mustard plaster--

which was a very gorgeous one, eighteen inches square--where I could

reach it when I was ready for it.  But young Wilson got hungry in the

night, and here is food for the imagination.



After sojourning a week at Lake Bigler, I went to Steamboat Springs, and,

besides the steam-baths, I took a lot of the vilest medicines that were

ever concocted.  They would have cured me, but I had to go back to

Virginia City, where, notwithstanding the variety of new remedies I

absorbed every day, I managed to aggravate my disease by carelessness and

undue exposure.



I finally concluded to visit San Francisco, and the, first day I got

there a lady at the hotel told me to drink a quart of whisky every

twenty-four hours, and a friend up-town recommended precisely the same

course.  Each advised me to take a quart; that made half a gallon.  I did

it, and still live.



Now, with the kindest motives in the world, I offer for the consideration

of consumptive patients the variegated course of treatment I have lately

gone through.  Let them try it; if it don't cure, it can't more than kill

them.













A CURIOUS PLEASURE EXCURSION



--[Published at the time of the "Comet Scare" in the summer of 1874]



[We have received the following advertisement, but, inasmuch as it

concerns a matter of deep and general interest, we feel fully justified

in inserting it in our reading-columns.  We are confident that our

conduct in this regard needs only explanation, not apology.--Ed., N. Y.

Herald.]





ADVERTISEMENT



This is to inform the public that in connection with Mr. Barnum I have

leased the comet for a term, of years; and I desire also to solicit the

public patronage in favor of a beneficial enterprise which we have in

view.



We propose to fit up comfortable, and even luxurious, accommodations in

the comet for as many persons as will honor us with their patronage, and

make an extended excursion among the heavenly bodies.  We shall prepare

1,000,000 state-rooms in the tail of the comet (with hot and cold water,

gas, looking-glass, parachute, umbrella, etc., in each), and shall

construct more if we meet with a sufficiently generous encouragement.

We shall have billiard-rooms, card-rooms, music-rooms, bowling-alleys and

many spacious theaters and free libraries; and on the main deck we

propose to have a driving park, with upward of 100,000 miles of roadway

in it.  We shall publish daily newspapers also.





                          DEPARTURE OF THE COMET



The comet will leave New York at 10 P.M.  on the 20th inst., and

therefore it will be desirable that the passengers be on board by eight

at the latest, to avoid confusion in getting under way.  It is not known

whether passports will be necessary or not, but it is deemed best that

passengers provide them, and so guard against all contingencies.  No dogs

will be allowed on board.  This rule has been made in deference to the

existing state of feeling regarding these animals, and will be strictly

adhered to.  The safety of the passengers will in all ways be jealously

looked to.  A substantial iron railing will be put up all around the

comet, and no one will be allowed to go to the edge and look over unless

accompanied by either my partner or myself.





                            THE POSTAL SERVICE



will be of the completest character.  Of course the telegraph, and the

telegraph only, will be employed; consequently friends occupying state-

rooms 20,000,000 and even 30,000,000 miles apart will be able to send a

message and receive a reply inside of eleven days.  Night messages will

be half-rate.  The whole of this vast postal system will be under the

personal superintendence of Mr. Hale of Maine.  Meals served at all

hours.  Meals served in staterooms charged extra.



Hostility is not apprehended from any great planet, but we have thought

it best to err on the safe side, and therefore have provided a proper

number of mortars, siege-guns, and boarding-pikes.  History shows that

small, isolated communities, such as the people of remote islands, are

prone to be hostile to strangers, and so the same may be the case with





                         THE INHABITANTS OF STARS



of the tenth or twentieth magnitude.  We shall in no case wantonly offend

the people of any star, but shall treat all alike with urbanity and

kindliness, never conducting ourselves toward an asteroid after a fashion

which we could not venture to assume toward Jupiter or Saturn.  I repeat

that we shall not wantonly offend any star; but at the same time we shall

promptly resent any injury that may be done us, or any insolence offered

us, by parties or governments residing in any star in the firmament.

Although averse to the shedding of blood, we shall still hold this course

rigidly and fearlessly, not only toward single stars, but toward

constellations.  We shall hope to leave a good impression of America

behind us in every nation we visit, from Venus to Uranus.  And, at all

events, if we cannot inspire love we shall at least compel respect for

our country wherever we go.  We shall take with us, free of charge,





                      A GREAT FORCE OF MISSIONARIES,



and shed the true light upon all the celestial orbs which, physically

aglow, are yet morally in darkness.  Sunday-schools will be established

wherever practicable.  Compulsory education will also be introduced.



The comet will visit Mars first, and proceed to Mercury, Jupiter, Venus,

and Saturn.  Parties connected with the government of the District of

Columbia and with the former city government of New York, who may desire

to inspect the rings, will be allowed time and every facility.  Every

star of prominent magnitude will be visited, and time allowed for

excursions to points of interest inland.





                               THE DOG STAR



has been stricken from the program.  Much time will be spent in the Great

Bear, and, indeed, in every constellation of importance.  So, also, with

the Sun and Moon and the Milky Pay, otherwise the Gulf Stream of the

Skies.  Clothing suitable for wear in the sun should be provided.  Our

program has been so arranged that we shall seldom go more than

100,000,000 of miles at a time without stopping at some star.  This will

necessarily make the stoppages frequent and preserve the interest of the

tourist.  Baggage checked through to any point on the route.  Parties

desiring to make only a part of the proposed tour, and thus save expense,

may stop over at any star they choose and wait for the return voyage.



After visiting all the most celebrated stars and constellations in our

system and personally, inspecting the remotest sparks that even the most

powerful telescope can now detect in the firmament, we shall proceed with

good heart upon





                           A STUPENDOUS VOYAGE



of discovery among the countless whirling worlds that make turmoil in the

mighty wastes of space that stretch their solemn solitudes, their

unimaginable vastness billions upon billions of miles away beyond the

farthest verge of telescopic vision, till by comparison the little

sparkling vault we used to gaze at on Earth shall seem like a remembered

phosphorescent flash of spangles which some tropical voyager's prow

stirred into life for a single instant, and which ten thousand miles of

phosphorescent seas and tedious lapse of time had since diminished to an

incident utterly trivial in his recollection.  Children occupying seats

at the first table will be charged full fare.





                             FIRST-CLASS FARE



from the Earth to Uranus, including visits to the Sun and Moon and all

the principal planets on the route, will be charged at the low rate of

$2 for every 50,000,000 miles of actual travel.  A great reduction will

be made where parties wish to make the round trip.  This comet is new and

in thorough repair and is now on her first voyage.  She is confessedly

the fastest on the line.  She makes 20,000,000 miles a day, with her

present facilities; but, with a picked American crew and good weather,

we are confident we can get 40,000,000 out of her.  Still, we shall never

push her to a dangerous speed, and we shall rigidly prohibit racing with

other comets.  Passengers desiring to diverge at any point or return will

be transferred to other comets.  We make close connections at all

principal points with all reliable lines.  Safety can be depended upon.

It is not to be denied that the heavens are infested with





                          OLD RAMSHACKLE COMETS



that have not been inspected or overhauled in 10,000 years, and which

ought long ago to have been destroyed or turned into hail-barges, but

with these we have no connection whatever.  Steerage passengers not

allowed abaft the main hatch.



Complimentary round-trip tickets have been tendered to General Butler,

Mr. Shepherd, Mr. Richardson, and other eminent gentlemen, whose public

services have entitled them to the rest and relaxation of a voyage of

this kind.  Parties desiring to make the round trip will have extra

accommodation.  The entire voyage will be completed, and the passengers

landed in New York again, on the 14th of December, 1991.  This is, at

least, forty years quicker than any other comet can do it in.  Nearly all

the back-pay members contemplate making the round trip with us in case

their constituents will allow them a holiday.  Every harmless amusement

will be allowed on board, but no pools permitted on the run of the comet

--no gambling of any kind.  All fixed stars will be respected by us, but

such stars as seem, to need fixing we shall fix.  If it makes trouble, we

shall be sorry, but firm.



Mr. Coggia having leased his comet to us, she will no longer be called by

his name, but by my partner's.  N. B.--Passengers by paying double fare

will be entitled to a share in all the new stars, suns, moons, comets,

meteors, and magazines of thunder and lightning we may discover.  Patent-

medicine people will take notice that





                         WE CARRY BULLETIN-BOARDS



and a paint-brush along for use in the constellations, and are open to

terms.  Cremationists are reminded that we are going straight to--some

hot places--and are open to terms.  To other parties our enterprise is a

pleasure excursion, but individually we mean business.  We shall fly our

comet for all it is worth.





                         FOR FURTHER PARTICULARS,



or for freight or passage, apply on board, or to my partner, but not to

me, since I do not take charge of the comet until she is under way.

It is necessary, at a time like this, that my mind should not be burdened

with small business details.



                                                       MARK TWAIN.













RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR--[Written about 1870.]



A few months ago I was nominated for Governor of the great state of New

York, to run against Mr. John T. Smith and Mr. Blank J. Blank on an

independent ticket.  I somehow felt that I had one prominent advantage

over these gentlemen, and that was--good character.  It was easy to see

by the newspapers that if ever they had known what it was to bear a good

name, that time had gone by.  It was plain that in these latter years

they had become familiar with all manner of shameful crimes.  But at the

very moment that I was exalting my advantage and joying in it in secret,

there was a muddy undercurrent of discomfort "riling" the deeps of my

happiness, and that was--the having to hear my name bandied about in

familiar connection with those of such people.  I grew more and more

disturbed.  Finally I wrote my grandmother about it.  Her answer came

quick and sharp.  She said:



     You have never done one single thing in all your life to be ashamed

     of--not one.  Look at the newspapers--look at them and comprehend

     what sort of characters Messrs.  Smith and Blank are, and then see

     if you are willing to lower yourself to their level and enter a

     public canvass with them.



It was my very thought!  I did not sleep a single moment that night.

But, after all, I could not recede.



I was fully committed, and must go on with the fight.  As I was looking

listlessly over the papers at breakfast I came across this paragraph,

and I may truly say I never was so confounded before.



     PERJURY.--Perhaps, now that Mr. Mark Twain is before the people as a

     candidate for Governor, he will condescend to explain how he came to

     be convicted of perjury by thirty-four witnesses in Wakawak, Cochin

     China, in 1863, the intent of which perjury being to rob a poor

     native widow and her helpless family of a meager plantain-patch,

     their only stay and support in their bereavement and desolation.

     Mr. Twain owes it to himself, as well as to the great people whose

     suffrages he asks, to clear this matter up.  Will he do it?



I thought I should burst with amazement!  Such a cruel, heartless charge!

I never had seen Cochin China!  I never had heard of Wakawak!  I didn't

know a plantain-patch from a kangaroo!  I did not know what to do.  I was

crazed and helpless.  I let the day slip away without doing anything at

all.  The next morning the same paper had this--nothing more:



     SIGNIFICANT.--Mr.  Twain, it will be observed, is suggestively

     silent about the Cochin China perjury.



[Mem.--During the rest of the campaign this paper never referred to me in

any other way than as "the infamous perjurer Twain."]



Next came the Gazette, with this:



     WANTED TO KNOW.--Will the new candidate for Governor deign to

     explain to certain of his fellow-citizens (who are suffering to vote

     for him!) the little circumstance of his cabin-mates in Montana

     losing small valuables from time to time, until at last, these

     things having been invariably found on Mr. Twain's person or in his

     "trunk" (newspaper he rolled his traps in), they felt compelled to

     give him a friendly admonition for his own good, and so tarred and

     feathered him, and rode him on a rail; and then advised him to leave

     a permanent vacuum in the place he usually occupied in the camp.

     Will he do this?



Could anything be more deliberately malicious than that?  For I never was

in Montana in my life.



[After this, this journal customarily spoke of me as, "Twain, the Montana

Thief."]



I got to picking up papers apprehensively--much as one would lift a

desired blanket which he had some idea might have a rattlesnake under it.

One day this met my eye:



     THE LIE NAILED.--By the sworn affidavits of Michael O'Flanagan,

     Esq., of the Five Points, and Mr. Snub Rafferty and Mr. Catty

     Mulligan, of Water Street, it is established that Mr. Mark Twain's

     vile statement that the lamented grandfather of our noble standard-

     bearer, Blank J. Blank, was hanged for highway robbery, is a brutal

     and gratuitous LIE, without a shadow of foundation in fact.  It is

     disheartening to virtuous men to see such shameful means resorted to

     to achieve political success as the attacking of the dead in their

     graves, and defiling their honored names with slander.  When we

     think of the anguish this miserable falsehood must cause the

     innocent relatives and friends of the deceased, we are almost driven

     to incite an outraged and insulted public to summary and unlawful

     vengeance upon the traducer.  But no! let us leave him to the agony

     of a lacerated conscience (though if passion should get the better

     of the public, and in its blind fury they should do the traducer

     bodily injury, it is but too obvious that no jury could convict and

     no court punish the perpetrators of the deed).



The ingenious closing sentence had the effect of moving me out of bed

with despatch that night, and out at the back door also, while the

"outraged and insulted public" surged in the front way, breaking

furniture and windows in their righteous indignation as they came,

and taking off such property as they could carry when they went.

And yet I can lay my hand upon the Book and say that I never slandered

Mr. Blank's grandfather.  More: I had never even heard of him or

mentioned him up to that day and date.



[I will state, in passing, that the journal above quoted from always

referred to me afterward as "Twain, the Body-Snatcher."]



The next newspaper article that attracted my attention was the following:



     A SWEET CANDIDATE.--Mr.  Mark Twain, who was to make such a

     blighting speech at the mass-meeting of the Independents last night,

     didn't come to time!  A telegram from his physician stated that he

     had been knocked down by a runaway team, and his leg broken in two

     places--sufferer lying in great agony, and so forth, and so forth,

     and a lot more bosh of the same sort.  And the Independents tried

     hard to swallow the wretched subterfuge, and pretend that they did

     not know what was the real reason of the absence of the abandoned

     creature whom they denominate their standard-bearer.  A certain man

     was seen to reel into Mr.  Twain's hotel last night in a state of

     beastly intoxication.  It is the imperative duty of the Independents

     to prove that this besotted brute was not Mark Twain himself.  We

     have them at last!  This is a case that admits of no shirking.  The

     voice of the people demands in thunder tones, "WHO WAS THAT MAN?"



It was incredible, absolutely incredible, for a moment, that it was

really my name that was coupled with this disgraceful suspicion.  Three

long years had passed over my head since I had tasted ale, beer, wine or

liquor or any kind.



[It shows what effect the times were having on me when I say that I saw

myself, confidently dubbed "Mr. Delirium Tremens Twain" in the next issue

of that journal without a pang--notwithstanding I knew that with

monotonous fidelity the paper would go on calling me so to the very end.]



By this time anonymous letters were getting to be an important part of my

mail matter.  This form was common



     How about that old woman you kiked of your premises which

     was beging.                             POL. PRY.



And this:



     There is things which you Have done which is unbeknowens to anybody

     but me.  You better trot out a few dots, to yours truly, or you'll

     hear through the papers from

                                             HANDY ANDY.



This is about the idea.  I could continue them till the reader was

surfeited, if desirable.



Shortly the principal Republican journal "convicted" me of wholesale

bribery, and the leading Democratic paper "nailed" an aggravated case of

blackmailing to me.



[In this way I acquired two additional names: "Twain the Filthy

Corruptionist" and "Twain the Loathsome Embracer."]



By this time there had grown to be such a clamor for an "answer" to all

the dreadful charges that were laid to me that the editors and leaders of

my party said it would be political ruin for me to remain silent any

longer.   As if to make their appeal the more imperative, the following

appeared in one of the papers the very next day:



     BEHOLD THE MAN!--The independent candidate still maintains silence.

     Because he dare not speak.  Every accusation against him has been

     amply proved, and they have been indorsed and reindorsed by his own

     eloquent silence, till at this day he stands forever convicted.

     Look upon your candidate, Independents!  Look upon the Infamous

     Perjurer!  the Montana Thief!  the Body-Snatcher!  Contemplate your

     incarnate Delirium Tremens!  your Filthy Corruptionist!  your

     Loathsome Embracer!  Gaze upon him--ponder him well--and then say if

     you can give your honest votes to a creature who has earned this

     dismal array of titles by his hideous crimes, and dares not open his

     mouth in denial of any one of them!



There was no possible way of getting out of it, and so, in deep

humiliation, I set about preparing to "answer" a mass of baseless charges

and mean and wicked falsehoods.  But I never finished the task, for the

very next morning a paper came out with a new horror, a fresh malignity,

and seriously charged me with burning a lunatic asylum with all its

inmates, because it obstructed the view from my house.  This threw me

into a sort of panic.  Then came the charge of poisoning my uncle to get

his property, with an imperative demand that the grave should be opened.

This drove me to the verge of distraction.  On top of this I was accused

of employing toothless and incompetent old relatives to prepare the food

for the foundling' hospital when I warden.  I was wavering--wavering.

And at last, as a due and fitting climax to the shameless persecution

that party rancor had inflicted upon me, nine little toddling children,

of all shades of color and degrees of raggedness, were taught to rush

onto the platform at a public meeting, and clasp me around the legs and

call me PA!



I gave it up.  I hauled down my colors and surrendered.  I was not equal

to the requirements of a Gubernatorial campaign in the state of New York,

and so I sent in my withdrawal from the candidacy, and in bitterness of

spirit signed it, "Truly yours, once a decent man, but now



                    "MARK TWAIN, LP., M.T., B.S., D.T., F.C., and L.E."













A MYSTERIOUS VISIT





The first notice that was taken of me when I "settled down" recently was

by a gentleman who said he was an assessor, and connected with the U. S.

Internal Revenue Department.  I said I had never heard of his branch of

business before, but I was very glad to see him all the same.  Would he

sit down?  He sat down.  I did not know anything particular to say, and

yet I felt that people who have arrived at the dignity of keeping house

must be conversational, must be easy and sociable in company.  So, in

default of anything else to say, I asked him if he was opening his shop

in our neighborhood.



He said he was.  [I did not wish to appear ignorant, but I had hoped he

would mention what he had for sale.]



I ventured to ask him "How was trade?"  And he said "So-so."



I then said we would drop in, and if we liked his house as well as any

other, we would give him our custom.



He said he thought we would like his establishment well enough to confine

ourselves to it--said he never saw anybody who would go off and hunt up

another man in his line after trading with him once.



That sounded pretty complacent, but barring that natural expression of

villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.



I do not know how it came about exactly, but gradually we appeared to

melt down and run together, conversationally speaking, and then

everything went along as comfortably as clockwork.



We talked, and talked, and talked--at least I did; and we laughed, and

laughed, and laughed--at least he did.  But all the time I had my

presence of mind about me--I had my native shrewdness turned on "full

head," as the engineers say.  I was determined to find out all about his

business in spite of his obscure answers--and I was determined I would

have it out of him without his suspecting what I was at.  I meant to trap

him with a deep, deep ruse.  I would tell him all about my own business,

and he would naturally so warm to me during this seductive burst of

confidence that he would forget himself, and tell me all about his

affairs before he suspected what I was about.  I thought to myself, My

son, you little know what an old fox you are dealing with.  I said:



"Now you never would guess what I made lecturing this winter and last

spring?"



"No--don't believe I could, to save me.  Let me see--let me see.   About

two thousand dollars, maybe?  But no; no, sir, I know you couldn't have

made that much.   Say seventeen hundred, maybe?"



"Ha! ha!  I knew you couldn't.  My lecturing receipts for last spring and

this winter were fourteen thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars.  What

do you think of that?"



"Why, it is amazing-perfectly amazing.  I will make a note of it.  And

you say even this wasn't all?"



"All!  Why bless you, there was my income from the Daily Warwhoop for

four months--about--about--well, what should you say to about eight

thousand dollars, for instance?"



"Say!  Why, I should say I should like to see myself rolling in just such

another ocean of affluence.  Eight thousand!  I'll make a note of it.

Why man!--and on top of all this am I to understand that you had still

more income?"



"Ha! ha! ha!  Why, you're only in the suburbs of it, so to speak.

There's my book, The Innocents Abroad price $3.50 to $5, according to the

binding.  Listen to me.  Look me in the eye.  During the last four months

and a half, saying nothing of sales before that, but just simply during

the four months and a half, we've sold ninety-five thousand copies of

that book.  Ninety-five thousand!  Think of it.  Average four dollars a

copy, say.  It's nearly four hundred thousand dollars, my son.  I get

half."



"The suffering Moses!  I'll set that down.  Fourteen-seven-fifty--eight-

two hundred.  Total, say--well, upon my word, the grand total is about

two hundred and thirteen or fourteen thousand dollars!  Is that

possible?"



"Possible!  If there's any mistake it's the other way.  Two hundred and

fourteen thousand, cash, is my income for this year if I know how to

cipher."



Then the gentleman got up to go.  It came over me most uncomfortably that

maybe I had made my revelations for nothing, besides being flattered into

stretching them considerably by the stranger's astonished exclamations.

But no; at the last moment the gentleman handed me a large envelope, and

said it contained his advertisement; and that I would find out all about

his business in it; and that he would be happy to have my custom-would,

in fact, be proud to have the custom of a man of such prodigious income;

and that he used to think there were several wealthy men in the city, but

when they came to trade with him he discovered that they barely had

enough to live on; and that, in truth, it had been such a weary, weary

age since he had seen a rich man face to face, and talked to him, and

touched him with his hands, that he could hardly refrain from embracing

me--in fact, would esteem it a great favor if I would let him embrace me.



This so pleased me that I did not try to resist, but allowed this simple-

hearted stranger to throw his arms about me and weep a few tranquilizing

tears down the back of my neck.  Then he went his way.



As soon as he was gone I opened his advertisement.  I studied it

attentively for four minutes.  I then called up the cook, and said:



"Hold me while I faint!  Let Marie turn the griddle-cakes."



By and by, when I came to, I sent down to the rum-mill on the corner and

hired an artist by the week to sit up nights and curse that stranger, and

give me a lift occasionally in the daytime when I came to a hard place.



Ah, what a miscreant he was!  His "advertisement"  was nothing in the

world but a wicked tax-return--a string of impertinent questions about

my private affairs, occupying the best part of four fools-cap pages of

fine print-questions, I may remark, gotten up with such marvelous

ingenuity that the oldest man in the world couldn't understand what the

most of them were driving at--questions, too, that were calculated to

make a man report about four times his actual income to keep from

swearing to a falsehood.  I looked for a loophole, but there did not

appear to be any.  Inquiry No. 1 covered my case as generously and as

amply as an umbrella could cover an ant-hill:



     What were your profits, during the past year, from any trade,

     business, or vocation, wherever carried on?



And that inquiry was backed up by thirteen others of an equally searching

nature, the most modest of which required information as to whether I had

committed any burglary or highway robbery, or, by any arson or other

secret source of emolument had acquired property which was not enumerated

in my statement of income as set opposite to inquiry No. 1.



It was plain that that stranger had enabled me to make a goose of myself.

It was very, very plain; and so I went out and hired another artist.

By working on my vanity, the stranger had seduced me into declaring an

income of two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars.  By law, one

thousand dollars of this was exempt from income tax--the only relief I

could see, and it was only a drop in the ocean.  At the legal five per

cent., I must pay to the government the sum of ten thousand six hundred

and fifty dollars, income tax!



[I may remark, in this place, that I did not do it.]



I am acquainted with a very opulent man, whose house is a palace, whose

table is regal, whose outlays are enormous, yet a man who has no income,

as I have often noticed by the revenue returns; and to him I went for

advice in my distress.  He took my dreadful exhibition of receipts, he

put on his glasses, he took his pen, and presto!--I was a pauper!  It was

the neatest thing that ever was.  He did it simply by deftly manipulating

the bill of "DEDUCTIONS."  He set down my "State, national, and municipal

taxes" at so much; my "losses by shipwreck; fire, etc.," at so much; my

"losses on sales of real estate"--on "live stock sold"--on "payments for

rent of homestead"--on "repairs, improvements, interest"--on "previously

taxed salary as an officer of the United States army, navy, revenue

service," and other things.  He got astonishing "deductions" out of each

and every one of these matters--each and every one of them.  And when he

was done he handed me the paper, and I saw at a glance that during the

year my income, in the way of profits, had been one thousand two hundred

and fifty dollars and forty cents.



"Now," said he, "the thousand dollars is exempt by law.  What you want to

do is to go and swear this document in and pay tax on the two hundred and

fifty dollars."



[While he was making this speech his little boy Willie lifted a two-

dollar greenback out of his vest pocket and vanished with it, and I would

wager; anything that if my stranger were to call on that little boy to-

morrow he would make a false return of his income.]



"Do you," said I, "do you always work up the 'deductions' after this

fashion in your own case, sir?"



"Well, I should say so!  If it weren't for those eleven saving clauses

under the head of 'Deductions' I should be beggared every year to support

this hateful and wicked, this extortionate and tyrannical government."



This gentleman stands away up among the very best of the solid men of the

city--the men of moral weight, of commercial integrity, of unimpeachable,

social spotlessness--and so I bowed to his example.  I went down to the

revenue office, and under the accusing eyes of my old visitor I stood up

and swore to lie after lie, fraud after fraud, villainy after villainy,

till my soul was coated inches and inches thick with perjury, and my

self-respect gone for ever and ever.



But what of it?  It is nothing more than thousands of the richest and

proudest, and most respected, honored, and courted men in America do

every year.  And so I don't care.  I am not ashamed.  I shall simply,

for the present, talk little and eschew fire-proof gloves, lest I fall

into certain dreadful habits irrevocably.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Sketches New and Old,

by Mark Twain













CURIOUS REPUBLIC OF GONDOUR



by Mark Twain









THE CURIOUS REPUBLIC OF GONDOUR AND OTHER WHIMSICAL SKETCHES





NOTE:



Most of the sketches in this volume were taken from a series the author

wrote for The Galaxy from May, 1870, to April, 1871.  The rest appeared

in The Buffalo Express.











TABLE OF CONTENTS



THE CURIOUS REPUBLIC OF GONDOUR

A MEMORY

INTRODUCTORY TO "MEMORANDA".

ABOUT SMELLS

A COUPLE OF SAD EXPERIENCES

DAN MURPHY

THE "TOURNAMENT" IN A.D. 1870

CURIOUS RELIC FOR SALE

A REMINISCENCE OF THE BACK SETTLEMENTS

A ROYAL COMPLIMENT

THE APPROACHING EPIDEMIC

THE TONE-IMPARTING COMMITTEE

OUR PRECIOUS LUNATIC

THE EUROPEAN WAR

THE WILD MAN INTERVIEWED

LAST WORDS OF GREAT MEN













THE CURIOUS REPUBLIC OF GONDOUR



As soon as I had learned to speak the language a little, I became greatly

interested in the people and the system of government.



I found that the nation had at first tried universal suffrage pure and

simple, but had thrown that form aside because the result was not

satisfactory.  It had seemed to deliver all power into the hands of the

ignorant and non-tax-paying classes; and of a necessity the responsible

offices were filled from these classes also.



A remedy was sought.  The people believed they had found it; not in the

destruction of universal suffrage, but in the enlargement of it.  It was

an odd idea, and ingenious.  You must understand, the constitution gave

every man a vote; therefore that vote was a vested right, and could not

be taken away.  But the constitution did not say that certain individuals

might not be given two votes, or ten!  So an amendatory clause was

inserted in a quiet way; a clause which authorised the enlargement of the

suffrage in certain cases to be specified by statute.  To offer to

"limit" the suffrage might have made instant trouble; the offer to

"enlarge" it had a pleasant aspect.  But of course the newspapers soon

began to suspect; and then out they came!  It was found, however, that

for once--and for the first time in the history of the republic--

property, character, and intellect were able to wield a political

influence; for once, money, virtue, and intelligence took a vital and a

united interest in a political question; for once these powers went to

the "primaries" in strong force; for once the best men in the nation were

put forward as candidates for that parliament whose business it should be

to enlarge the suffrage.  The weightiest half of the press quickly joined

forces with the new movement, and left the other half to rail about the

proposed "destruction of the liberties" of the bottom layer of society,

the hitherto governing class of the community.



The victory was complete.  The new law was framed and passed.  Under it

every citizen, howsoever poor or ignorant, possessed one vote,

so universal suffrage still reigned; but if a man possessed a good

common-school education and no money, he had two votes; a high-school

education gave him four; if he had property like wise, to the value of

three thousand 'sacos,' he wielded one more vote; for every fifty

thousand 'sacos' a man added to his property, he was entitled to another

vote; a university education entitled a man to nine votes, even though he

owned no property.  Therefore, learning being more prevalent and more

easily acquired than riches, educated men became a wholesome check upon

wealthy men, since they could outvote them.  Learning goes usually with

uprightness, broad views, and humanity; so the learned voters, possessing

the balance of power, became the vigilant and efficient protectors of the

great lower rank of society.



And now a curious thing developed itself--a sort of emulation, whose

object was voting power!  Whereas formerly a man was honored only

according to the amount of money he possessed, his grandeur was measured

now by the number of votes he wielded.  A man with only one vote was

conspicuously respectful to his neighbor who possessed three.  And if he

was a man above the common-place, he was as conspicuously energetic in

his determination to acquire three for himself.  This spirit of emulation

invaded all ranks.  Votes based upon capital were commonly called

"mortal" votes, because they could be lost; those based upon learning

were called "immortal," because they were permanent, and because of their

customarily imperishable character they were naturally more valued than

the other sort.  I say "customarily" for the reason that these votes were

not absolutely imperishable, since insanity could suspend them.



Under this system, gambling and speculation almost ceased in the

republic.  A man honoured as the possessor of great voting power could

not afford to risk the loss of it upon a doubtful chance.



It was curious to observe the manners and customs which the enlargement

plan produced.  Walking the street with a friend one day he delivered a

careless bow to a passer-by, and then remarked that that person possessed

only one vote and would probably never earn another; he was more

respectful to the next acquaintance he met; he explained that this salute

was a four-vote bow.  I tried to "average" the importance of the people

he accosted after that, by the-nature of his bows, but my success was

only partial, because of the somewhat greater homage paid to the

immortals than to the mortals.  My friend explained.  He said there was

no law to regulate this thing, except that most powerful of all laws,

custom.  Custom had created these varying bows, and in time they had

become easy and natural.  At this moment he delivered himself of a very

profound salute, and then said, "Now there's a man who began life as a

shoemaker's apprentice, and without education; now he swings twenty-two

mortal votes and two immortal ones; he expects to pass a high-school

examination this year and climb a couple of votes higher among the

immortals; mighty valuable citizen."



By and by my friend met a venerable personage, and not only made him a

most elaborate bow, but also took off his hat.  I took off mine, too,

with a mysterious awe.  I was beginning to be infected.



"What grandee is that?"



"That is our most illustrious astronomer.  He hasn't any money, but is

fearfully learned.  Nine immortals is his political weight!  He would

swing a hundred and fifty votes if our system were perfect."



"Is there any altitude of mere moneyed: grandeur that you take off your

hat to?"



"No.  Nine immortal votes is the only power we uncover for that is, in

civil life.  Very great officials receive that mark of homage, of

course."



It was common to hear people admiringly mention men who had begun life on

the lower levels and in time achieved great voting-power.  It was also

common to hear youths planning a future of ever so many votes for

themselves.  I heard shrewd mammas speak of certain young men as good

"catches" because they possessed such-and-such a number of votes.  I knew

of more than one case where an heiress was married to a youngster who had

but one vote; the argument being that he was gifted with such excellent

parts that in time he would acquire a good voting strength, and perhaps

in the long run be able to outvote his wife, if he had luck.



Competitive examinations were the rule and in all official grades.  I

remarked that the questions asked the candidates were wild, intricate,

and often required a sort of knowledge not needed in the office sought.



"Can a fool or an ignoramus answer them?" asked the person I was talking

with.



"Certainly not."



"Well, you will not find any fools or ignoramuses among our officials."



I felt rather cornered, but made shift to say:



"But these questions cover a good deal more ground than is necessary."



"No matter; if candidates can answer these it is tolerably fair evidence

that they can answer nearly any other question you choose to ask them."



There were some things in Gondour which one could not shut his eyes to.

One was, that ignorance and incompetence had no place in the government.

Brains and property managed the state.  A candidate for office must have

marked ability, education, and high character, or he stood no sort of

chance of election.  If a hod-carrier possessed these, he could succeed;

but the mere fact that he was a hod-carrier could not elect him, as in

previous times.



It was now a very great honour to be in the parliament or in office;

under the old system such distinction had only brought suspicion upon a

man and made him a helpless mark for newspaper contempt and scurrility.

Officials did not need to steal now, their salaries being vast in

comparison with the pittances paid in the days when parliaments were

created by hod-carriers, who viewed official salaries from a hod-carrying

point of view and compelled that view to be respected by their obsequious

servants.  Justice was wisely and rigidly administered; for a judge,

after once reaching his place through the specified line of promotions,

was a permanency during good behaviour.  He was not obliged to modify his

judgments according to the effect they might have upon the temper of a

reigning political party.



The country was mainly governed by a ministry which went out with the

administration that created it.  This was also the case with the chiefs

of the great departments.  Minor officials ascended to their several

positions through well-earned promotions, and not by a jump from gin-

mills or the needy families and friends of members of parliament.  Good

behaviour measured their terms of office.



The head of the governments the Grand Caliph, was elected for a term of

twenty years.  I questioned the wisdom of this.  I was answered that he

could do no harm, since the ministry and the parliament governed the

land, and he was liable to impeachment for misconduct.  This great office

had twice been ably filled by women, women as aptly fitted for it as some

of the sceptred queens of history.  Members of the cabinet, under many

administrations, had been women.



I found that the pardoning power was lodged in a court of pardons,

consisting of several great judges.  Under the old regime, this important

power was vested in a single official, and he usually took care to have a

general jail delivery in time for the next election.



I inquired about public schools.  There were plenty of them, and of free

colleges too.  I inquired about compulsory education.  This was received

with a smile, and the remark:



"When a man's child is able to make himself powerful and honoured

according to the amount of education he acquires, don't you suppose that

that parent will apply the compulsion himself?  Our free schools and free

colleges require no law to fill them."



There was a loving pride of country about this person's way of speaking

which annoyed me.  I had long been unused to the sound of it in my own.

The Gondour national airs were forever dinning in my ears; therefore I

was glad to leave that country and come back to my dear native land,

where one never hears that sort of music.













A MEMORY,



When I say that I never knew my austere father to be enamoured of but one

poem in all the long half century that he lived, persons who knew him

will easily believe me; when I say that I have never composed but one

poem in all the long third of a century that I have lived, persons who

know me will be sincerely grateful; and finally, when I say that the poem

which I composed was not the one which my father was enamoured of,

persons who may have known us both will not need to have this truth shot

into them with a mountain howitzer before they can receive it.  My father

and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy--a sort of

armed neutrality so to speak.  At irregular intervals this neutrality was

broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the

breaking and the suffering were always divided up with, strict

impartiality between us--which is to say, my father did the breaking, and

I did the suffering.  As a general thing I was a backward, cautious,

unadventurous boy; but I once jumped off a two-story table; another time

I gave an elephant a "plug" of tobacco and retired without waiting for an

answer; and still another time I pretended to be talking in my sleep, and

got off a portion of a very wretched original conundrum in the hearing of

my father.  Let us not pry into the result; it was of no consequence to

any one but me.



But the poem I have referred to as attracting my father's attention and

achieving his favour was "Hiawatha."  Some man who courted a sudden and

awful death presented him an early copy, and I never lost faith in my own

senses until I saw him sit down and go to reading it in cold blood--saw

him open the book, and heard him read these following lines, with the

same inflectionless judicial frigidity with which he always read his

charge to the jury, or administered an oath to a witness:



                   "Take your bow,

                    O Hiawatha,

                    Take your arrows, jasper-headed,

                    Take your war-club, Puggawaugun,

                    And your mittens, Minjekahwan,

                    And your birch canoe for sailing,

                    And the oil of Mishe-Nama."



Presently my father took out of his breast pocket an imposing "Warranty

Deed," and fixed his eyes upon it and dropped into meditation.  I knew

what it was.  A Texan lady and gentleman had given my half-brother, Orrin

Johnson, a handsome property in a town in the North, in gratitude to him

for having saved their lives by an act of brilliant heroism.



By and by my father looked towards me and sighed.  Then he said:



"If I had such a son as this poet, here were a subject worthier than the

traditions of these Indians."



"If you please, sir, where?"



"In this deed."



"Yes--in this very deed," said my father, throwing it on the table.

"There is more poetry, more romance, more sublimity, more splendid

imagery hidden away in that homely document than could be found in all

the traditions of all the savages that live."



"Indeed, sir?  Could I--could I get it out, sir?  Could I compose the

poem, sir, do you think?"



"You?"



I wilted.



Presently my father's face softened somewhat, and he said:



"Go and try.  But mind, curb folly.  No poetry at the expense of truth.

Keep strictly to the facts."



I said I would, and bowed myself out, and went upstairs.



"Hiawatha" kept droning in my head--and so did my father's remarks about

the sublimity and romance hidden in my subject, and also his injunction

to beware of wasteful and exuberant fancy.  I noticed, just here, that I

had heedlessly brought the deed away with me; now at this moment came to

me one of those rare moods of daring recklessness, such as I referred to

a while ago.  Without another thought, and in plain defiance of the fact

that I knew my father meant me to write the romantic story of my half-

brother's adventure and subsequent good fortune, I ventured to heed

merely the letter of his remarks and ignore their spirit.  I took the

stupid "Warranty Deed" itself and chopped it up into Hiawathian blank

verse without altering or leaving out three words, and without

transposing six.  It required loads of courage to go downstairs and face

my father with my performance.  I started three or four times before I

finally got my pluck to where it would stick.  But at last I said I would

go down and read it to him if he threw me over the church for it.

I stood up to begin, and he told me to come closer.  I edged up a little,

but still left as much neutral ground between us as I thought he would

stand.  Then I began.  It would be useless for me to try to tell what

conflicting emotions expressed themselves upon his face, nor how they

grew more and more intense, as I proceeded; nor how a fell darkness

descended upon his countenance, and he began to gag and swallow, and his

hands began to work and twitch, as I reeled off line after line, with the

strength ebbing out of me, and my legs trembling under me:



                    THE STORY OF A GALLANT DEED



                    THIS INDENTURE, made the tenth

                    Day of November, in the year

                    Of our Lord one thousand eight

                    Hundred six-and-fifty,



                    Between Joanna S. E. Gray

                    And Philip Gray, her husband,

                    Of Salem City in the State

                    Of Texas, of the first part,



                    And O. B. Johnson, of the town

                    Of Austin, ditto, WITNESSETH:

                    That said party of first part,

                    For and in consideration



                    Of the sum of Twenty Thousand

                    Dollars, lawful money of

                    The U. S.  of Americay,

                    To them in hand now paid by said



                    Party of the second part,

                    The due receipt whereof is here-

                    By confessed and acknowledg-ed

                    Having Granted, Bargained, Sold, Remised,



                    Released and Aliened and Conveyed,

                    Confirmed, and by these presents do

                    Grant and Bargain, Sell, Remise,

                    Alien, Release, Convey, and Con-



                    Firm unto the said aforesaid

                    Party of the second part,

                    And to his heirs and assigns

                    Forever and ever ALL



                    That certain lot or parcel of

                    LAND situate in city of

                    Dunkirk, County of Chautauqua,

                    And likewise furthermore in York State



                    Bounded and described, to-wit,

                    As follows, herein, namely

                    BEGINNING at the distance of

                    A hundred two-and-forty feet,



                    North-half-east, north-east-by north,

                    East-north-east and northerly

                    Of the northerly line of Mulligan street

                    On the westerly line of Brannigan street,



                    And running thence due northerly

                    On Brannigan street 200 feet,

                    Thence at right angles westerly,

                    North-west-by-west-and-west-half-west,



                    West-and-by-north, north-west-by-west,

                    About--



I kind of dodged, and the boot-jack broke the looking-glass.  I could

have waited to see what became of the other missiles if I had wanted to,

but I took no interest in such things.













INTRODUCTORY TO "MEMORANDA"



In taking upon myself the burden of editing a department in THE GALAXY

magazine, I have been actuated by a conviction that I was needed, almost

imperatively, in this particular field of literature.  I have long felt

that while the magazine literature of the day had much to recommend it,

it yet lacked stability, solidity, weight.  It seemed plain to me that

too much space was given to poetry and romance, and not enough to

statistics and agriculture.  This defect it shall be my earnest endeavour

to remedy.  If I succeed, the simple consciousness that I have done a

good deed will be a sufficient reward.**--[**Together with salary.]



In this department of mine the public may always rely upon finding

exhaustive statistical tables concerning the finances of the country,

the ratio of births and deaths; the percentage of increase of population,

etc., etc.--in a word, everything in the realm of statistics that can

make existence bright and beautiful.



Also, in my department will always be found elaborate condensations of

the Patent Office Reports, wherein a faithful endeavour will at all times

be made to strip the nutritious facts bare of that effulgence of

imagination and sublimity of diction which too often mar the excellence

of those great works.**--[** N. B.--No other magazine in the country

makes a specialty of the Patent Office Reports.]



In my department will always be found ample excerpts from those able

dissertations upon Political Economy which I have for a long time been

contributing to a great metropolitan journal, and which, for reasons

utterly incomprehensible to me, another party has chosen to usurp the

credit of composing.



And, finally, I call attention with pride to the fact that in my

department of the magazine the farmer will always find full market

reports, and also complete instructions about farming, even from the

grafting of the seed to the harrowing of the matured crop.  I shall throw

a pathos into the subject of Agriculture that will surprise and delight

the world.



Such is my programme; and I am persuaded that by adhering to it with

fidelity I shall succeed in materially changing the character of this

magazine.  Therefore I am emboldened to ask the assistance and

encouragement of all whose sympathies are with Progress and Reform.



In the other departments of the magazine will be found poetry, tales, and

other frothy trifles, and to these the reader can turn for relaxation

from time to time, and thus guard against overstraining the powers of his

mind.

                                                  M. T.



P. S.--1.  I have not sold out of the "Buffalo Express," and shall not;

neither shall I stop writing for it.  This remark seems necessary in a

business point of view.



2.  These MEMORANDA are not a "humorous" department.  I would not conduct

an exclusively and professedly humorous department for any one.  I would

always prefer to have the privilege of printing a serious and sensible

remark, in case one occurred to me, without the reader's feeling obliged

to consider himself outraged.  We cannot keep the same mood day after

day.  I am liable, some day, to want to print my opinion on

jurisprudence, or Homeric poetry, or international law, and I shall do

it.  It will be of small consequence to me whether the reader survive or

not.  I shall never go straining after jokes when in a cheerless mood, so

long as the unhackneyed subject of international law is open to me.

I will leave all that straining to people who edit professedly and

inexorably "humorous" departments and publications.



3.  I have chosen the general title of MEMORANDA for this department

because it is plain and simple, and makes no fraudulent promises.  I can

print under it statistics, hotel arrivals, or anything that comes handy,

without violating faith with the reader.



4.  Puns cannot be allowed a place in this department.  Inoffensive

ignorance, benignant stupidity, and unostentatious imbecility will always

be welcomed and cheerfully accorded a corner, and even the feeblest

humour will be admitted, when we can do no better; but no circumstances,

however dismal, will ever be considered a sufficient excuse for the

admission of that last--and saddest evidence of intellectual poverty, the

Pun.













ABOUT SMELLS



In a recent issue of the "Independent," the Rev. T. De Witt Talmage, of

Brooklyn, has the following utterance on the subject of "Smells":



     I have a good Christian friend who, if he sat in the front pew in

     church, and a working man should enter the door at the other end,

     would smell him instantly.  My friend is not to blame for the

     sensitiveness of his nose, any more than you would flog a pointer

     for being keener on the scent than a stupid watch dog.  The fact is,

     if you, had all the churches free, by reason of the mixing up of the

     common people with the uncommon, you would keep one-half of

     Christendom sick at their stomach.  If you are going to kill the

     church thus with bad smells, I will have nothing to do with this

     work of evangelization.



We have reason to believe that there will be labouring men in heaven; and

also a number of negroes, and Esquimaux, and Terra del Fuegans, and

Arabs, and a few Indians, and possibly even some Spaniards and

Portuguese.  All things are possible with God.  We shall have all these

sorts of people in heaven; but, alas! in getting them we shall lose the

society of Dr. Talmage.  Which is to say, we shall lose the company of

one who could give more real "tone" to celestial society than any other

contribution Brooklyn could furnish.  And what would eternal happiness be

without the Doctor?  Blissful, unquestionably--we know that well enough

but would it be 'distingue,' would it be 'recherche' without him?  St.

Matthew without stockings or sandals; St. Jerome bare headed, and with a

coarse brown blanket robe dragging the ground; St. Sebastian with

scarcely any raiment at all--these we should see, and should enjoy seeing

them; but would we not miss a spike-tailed coat and kids, and turn away

regretfully, and say to parties from the Orient: "These are well enough,

but you ought to see Talmage of Brooklyn."  I fear me that in the better

world we shall not even have Dr. Talmage's "good Christian friend."



For if he were sitting under the glory of the Throne, and the keeper of

the keys admitted a Benjamin Franklin or other labouring man, that

"friend," with his fine natural powers infinitely augmented by

emancipation from hampering flesh, would detect him with a single sniff,

and immediately take his hat and ask to be excused.



To all outward seeming, the Rev. T. De Witt Talmage is of the same

material as that used in the construction of his early predecessors in

the ministry; and yet one feels that there must be a difference somewhere

between him and the Saviour's first disciples.  It may be because here,

in the nineteenth century, Dr. T.  has had advantages which Paul and

Peter and the others could not and did not have.  There was a lack of

polish about them, and a looseness of etiquette, and a want of

exclusiveness, which one cannot help noticing.  They healed the very

beggars, and held intercourse with people of a villainous odour every

day.  If the subject of these remarks had been chosen among the original

Twelve Apostles, he would not have associated with the rest, because he

could not have stood the fishy smell of some of his comrades who came

from around the Sea of Galilee.  He would have resigned his commission

with some such remark as he makes in the extract quoted above: "Master,

if thou art going to kill the church thus with bad smells, I will have

nothing to do with this work of evangelization."  He is a disciple, and

makes that remark to the Master; the only difference is, that he makes it

in the nineteenth instead of the first century.



Is there a choir in Mr. T.'s church?  And does it ever occur that they

have no better manners than to sing that hymn which is so suggestive of

labourers and mechanics:



          "Son of the Carpenter! receive

          This humble work of mine?"



Now, can it be possible that in a handful of centuries the Christian

character has fallen away from an imposing heroism that scorned even the

stake, the cross, and the axe, to a poor little effeminacy that withers

and wilts under an unsavoury smell?  We are not prepared to believe so,

the reverend Doctor and his friend to the contrary notwithstanding.













A COUPLE OF SAD EXPERIENCES



When I published a squib recently in which I said I was going to edit an

Agricultural Department in this magazine, I certainly did not desire to

deceive anybody.  I had not the remotest desire to play upon any one's

confidence with a practical joke, for he is a pitiful creature indeed who

will degrade the dignity of his humanity to the contriving of the witless

inventions that go by that name.  I purposely wrote the thing as absurdly

and as extravagantly as it could be written, in order to be sure and not

mislead hurried or heedless readers: for I spoke of launching a triumphal

barge upon a desert, and planting a tree of prosperity in a mine--a tree

whose fragrance should slake the thirst of the naked, and whose branches

should spread abroad till they washed the chorea of, etc., etc.  I

thought that manifest lunacy like that would protect the reader.  But to

make assurance absolute, and show that I did not and could not seriously

mean to attempt an Agricultural Department, I stated distinctly in my

postscript that I did not know anything about Agriculture.  But alas!

right there is where I made my worst mistake--for that remark seems to

have recommended my proposed Agriculture more than anything else.  It

lets a little light in on me, and I fancy I perceive that the farmers

feel a little bored, sometimes, by the oracular profundity of

agricultural editors who "know it all."  In fact, one of my

correspondents suggests this (for that unhappy squib has deluged me with

letters about potatoes, and cabbages, and hominy, and vermicelli, and

maccaroni, and all the other fruits, cereals, and vegetables that ever

grew on earth; and if I get done answering questions about the best way

of raising these things before I go raving crazy, I shall be thankful,

and shall never write obscurely for fun any more).



Shall I tell the real reason why I have unintentionally succeeded in

fooling so many people?  It is because some of them only read a little of

the squib I wrote and jumped to the conclusion that it was serious, and

the rest did not read it at all, but heard of my agricultural venture at

second-hand.  Those cases I could not guard against, of course.  To write

a burlesque so wild that its pretended facts will not be accepted in

perfect good faith by somebody, is, very nearly an impossible thing to

do.  It is because, in some instances, the reader is a person who never

tries to deceive anybody himself, and therefore is not expecting any one

to wantonly practise a deception upon him; and in this case the only

person dishonoured is the man who wrote the burlesque.  In other

instances the "nub" or moral of the burlesque--if its object be to

enforce a truth--escapes notice in the superior glare of something in the

body of the burlesque itself.  And very often this "moral" is tagged on

at the bottom, and the reader, not knowing that it is the key of the

whole thing and the only important paragraph in the article, tranquilly

turns up his nose at it and leaves it unread.  One can deliver a satire

with telling force through the insidious medium of a travesty, if he is

careful not to overwhelm the satire with the extraneous interest of the

travesty, and so bury it from the reader's sight and leave him a joked

and defrauded victim, when the honest intent was to add to either his

knowledge or his wisdom.  I have had a deal of experience in burlesques

and their unfortunate aptness to deceive the public, and this is why I

tried hard to make that agricultural one so broad and so perfectly

palpable that even a one-eyed potato could see it; and yet, as I speak

the solemn truth, it fooled one of the ablest agricultural editors in

America!













DAN MURPHY



One of the saddest things that ever came under my notice (said the

banker's clerk) was there in Corning, during the war.  Dan Murphy

enlisted as a private, and fought very bravely.  The boys all liked him,

and when a wound by and by weakened him down till carrying a musket was

too heavy work for him, they clubbed together and fixed him up as a

sutler.  He made money then, and sent it always to his wife to bank for

him.  She was a washer and ironer, and knew enough by hard experience to

keep money when she got it.  She didn't waste a penny.  On the contrary,

she began to get miserly as her bank account grew.  She grieved to part

with a cent, poor creature, for twice in her hard-working life she had

known what it was to be hungry, cold, friendless, sick, and without a

dollar in the world, and she had a haunting dread of suffering so again.

Well, at last Dan died; and the boys, in testimony of their esteem and

respect for him, telegraphed to Mrs.  Murphy to know if she would like to

have him embalmed and sent home, when you know the usual custom was to

dump a poor devil like him into a shallow hole, and then inform his

friends what had become of him.  Mrs.  Murphy jumped to the conclusion

that it would only cost two or three dollars to embalm her dead husband,

and so she telegraphed "Yes."  It was at the "wake" that the bill for

embalming arrived and was presented to the widow.  She uttered a wild,

sad wail, that pierced every heart, and said: "Sivinty-foive dollars for

stoofhn' Dan, blister their sowls!  Did thim divils suppose I was goin'

to stairt a Museim, that I'd be dalin' in such expinsive curiassities!"



The banker's clerk said there was not a dry eye in the house.













THE "TOURNAMENT" IN A. D. 1870



Lately there appeared an item to this effect, and the same went the

customary universal round of the press:



     A telegraph station has just been established upon the traditional

     site of the Garden of Eden.



As a companion to that, nothing fits so aptly and so perfectly as this:



     Brooklyn has revived the knightly tournament of the Middle Ages.



It is hard to tell which is the most startling, the idea of that highest

achievement of human genius and intelligence, the telegraph, prating away

about the practical concerns of the world's daily life in the heart and

home of ancient indolence, ignorance, and savagery, or the idea of that

happiest expression of the brag, vanity, and mock-heroics of our

ancestors, the "tournament," coming out of its grave to flaunt its tinsel

trumpery and perform its "chivalrous" absurdities in the high noon of the

nineteenth century, and under the patronage of a great, broad-awake city

and an advanced civilisation.



A "tournament" in Lynchburg is a thing easily within the comprehension of

the average mind; but no commonly gifted person can conceive of such a

spectacle in Brooklyn without straining his powers.  Brooklyn is part and

parcel of the city of New York, and there is hardly romance enough in the

entire metropolis to re-supply a Virginia "knight" with "chivalry," in

case he happened to run out of it.  Let the reader calmly and

dispassionately picture to himself "lists" in Brooklyn; heralds,

pursuivants, pages, garter king-at-arms--in Brooklyn; the marshalling of

the fantastic hosts of "chivalry" in slashed doublets, velvet trunks,

ruffles, and plumes--in Brooklyn; mounted on omnibus and livery-stable

patriarchs, promoted, and referred to in cold blood as "steeds,"

"destriers," and "chargers," and divested of their friendly, humble names

these meek old "Jims" and "Bobs" and "Charleys," and renamed "Mohammed,"

"Bucephalus," and "Saladin"--in Brooklyn; mounted thus, and armed with

swords and shields and wooden lances, and cased in paste board hauberks,

morions, greaves, and gauntlets, and addressed as "Sir" Smith, and "Sir"

Jones, and bearing such titled grandeurs as "The Disinherited Knight,"

the "Knight of Shenandoah," the "Knight of the Blue Ridge," the "Knight

of Maryland," and the "Knight of the Secret Sorrow"--in Brooklyn; and at

the toot of the horn charging fiercely upon a helpless ring hung on a

post, and prodding at it in trepidly with their wooden sticks, and by and

by skewering it and cavorting back to the judges' stand covered with

glory this in Brooklyn; and each noble success like this duly and

promptly announced by an applauding toot from the herald's horn, and "the

band playing three bars of an old circus tune"--all in Brooklyn, in broad

daylight.  And let the reader remember, and also add to his picture, as

follows, to wit: when the show was all over, the party who had shed the

most blood and overturned and hacked to pieces the most knights, or at

least had prodded the most muffin-rings, was accorded the ancient

privilege of naming and crowning the Queen of Love and Beauty--which

naming had in reality been done for, him by the "cut-and-dried" process,

and long in advance, by a committee of ladies, but the crowning he did in

person, though suffering from loss of blood, and then was taken to the

county hospital on a shutter to have his wounds dressed--these curious

things all occurring in Brooklyn, and no longer ago than one or two

yesterdays.  It seems impossible, and yet it is true.



This was doubtless the first appearance of the "tournament" up here among

the rolling-mills and factories, and will probably be the last.  It will

be well to let it retire permanently to the rural districts of Virginia,

where, it is said, the fine mailed and plumed, noble-natured, maiden-

rescuing, wrong-redressing, adventure-seeking knight of romance is

accepted and believed in by the peasantry with pleasing simplicity, while

they reject with scorn the plain, unpolished verdict whereby history

exposes him as a braggart, a ruffian, a fantastic vagabond; and an

ignoramus.



All romance aside, what shape would our admiration of the heroes of Ashby

de la Zouch be likely to take, in this practical age, if those worthies

were to rise up and come here and perform again the chivalrous deeds of

that famous passage of arms?  Nothing but a New York jury and the

insanity plea could save them from hanging, from the amiable Bois-

Guilbert and the pleasant Front-de-Boeuf clear down to the nameless

ruffians that entered the riot with unpictured shields and did their

first murder and acquired their first claim to respect that day.  The

doings of the so-called "chivalry" of the Middle Ages were absurd enough,

even when they were brutally and bloodily in earnest, and when their

surroundings of castles and donjons, savage landscapes and half-savage

peoples, were in keeping; but those doings gravely reproduced with tinsel

decorations and mock pageantry, by bucolic gentlemen with broomstick

lances, and with muffin-rings to represent the foe, and all in the midst

of the refinement and dignity of a carefully-developed modern

civilisation, is absurdity gone crazy.



Now, for next exhibition, let us have a fine representation of one of

those chivalrous wholesale butcheries and burnings of Jewish women and

children, which the crusading heroes of romance used to indulge in in

their European homes, just before starting to the Holy Land, to seize and

take to their protection the Sepulchre and defend it from "pollution."













CURIOUS RELIC FOR SALE



     "For sale, for the benefit of the Fund for the Relief of the Widows

     and Orphans of Deceased Firemen, a Curious Ancient Bedouin Pipe,

     procured at the city of Endor in Palestine, and believed to have

     once belonged to the justly-renowned Witch of Endor.  Parties

     desiring to examine this singular relic with a view to purchasing,

     can do so by calling upon Daniel S.. 119 and 121 William street, New

     York"



As per advertisement in the "Herald."  A curious old relic indeed, as I

had a good personal right to know.  In a single instant of time, a long

drawn panorama of sights and scenes in the Holy Land flashed through my

memory--town and grove, desert, camp, and caravan clattering after each

other and disappearing, leaping me with a little of the surprised and

dizzy feeling which I have experienced at sundry times when a long

express train has overtaken me at some quiet curve and gone whizzing, car

by car, around the corner and out of sight.  In that prolific instant I

saw again all the country from the Sea of Galilee and Nazareth clear to

Jerusalem, and thence over the hills of Judea and through the Vale of

Sharon to Joppa, down by the ocean.  Leaving out unimportant stretches of

country and details of incident, I saw and experienced the following-

described matters and things.  Immediately three years fell away from my

age, and a vanished time was restored to me September, 1867.  It was a

flaming Oriental day--this one that had come up out of the past and

brought along its actors, its stage-properties, and scenic effects--and

our party had just ridden through the squalid hive of human vermin which

still holds the ancient Biblical name of Endor; I was bringing up the

rear on my grave four-dollar steed, who was about beginning to compose

himself for his usual noon nap.  My! only fifteen minutes before how the

black, mangy, nine-tenths naked, ten-tenths filthy, ignorant, bigoted,

besotted, hungry, lazy, malignant, screeching, crowding, struggling,

wailing, begging, cursing, hateful spawn of the original Witch had

swarmed out of the caves in the rocks and the holes and crevices in the

earth, and blocked our horses' way, besieged us, threw themselves in the

animals' path, clung to their manes, saddle-furniture, and tails, asking,

beseeching, demanding "bucksheesh!  bucksheesh!  BUCKSHEESH!"  We had

rained small copper Turkish coins among them, as fugitives fling coats

and hats to pursuing wolves, and then had spurred our way through as they

stopped to scramble for the largess.  I was fervently thankful when we

had gotten well up on the desolate hillside and outstripped them and left

them jawing and gesticulating in the rear.  What a tempest had seemingly

gone roaring and crashing by me and left its dull thunders pulsing in my

ears!



I was in the rear, as I was saying.  Our pack-mules and Arabs were far

ahead, and Dan, Jack, Moult, Davis, Denny, Church, and Birch (these names

will do as well as any to represent the boys) were following close after

them.  As my horse nodded to rest, I heard a sort of panting behind me,

and turned and saw that a tawny youth from the village had overtaken me

--a true remnant and representative of his ancestress the Witch--a

galvanised scurvy, wrought into the human shape and garnished with

ophthalmia and leprous scars--an airy creature with an invisible shirt-

front that reached below the pit of his stomach, and no other clothing to

speak of except a tobacco-pouch, an ammunition-pocket, and a venerable

gun, which was long enough to club any game with that came within

shooting distance, but far from efficient as an article of dress.



I thought to myself, "Now this disease with a human heart in it is going

to shoot me."  I smiled in derision at the idea of a Bedouin daring to

touch off his great-grandfather's rusty gun and getting his head blown

off for his pains.  But then it occurred to me, in simple school-boy

language, "Suppose he should take deliberate aim and 'haul off' and fetch

me with the butt-end of it?"  There was wisdom in that view of it, and I

stopped to parley.  I found he was only a friendly villain who wanted a

trifle of bucksheesh, and after begging what he could get in that way,

was perfectly willing to trade off everything he had for more.  I believe

he would have parted with his last shirt for bucksheesh if he had had

one.  He was smoking the "humbliest" pipe I ever saw--a dingy, funnel-

shaped, red-clay thing, streaked and grimed with oil and tears of

tobacco, and with all the different kinds of dirt there are, and thirty

per cent. of them peculiar and indigenous to Endor and perdition.  And

rank?  I never smelt anything like it.  It withered a cactus that stood

lifting its prickly hands aloft beside the trail.  It even woke up my

horse.  I said I would take that.  It cost me a franc, a Russian kopek,

a brass button, and a slate pencil; and my spendthrift lavishness so won

upon the son of the desert that he passed over his pouch of most

unspeakably villainous tobacco to me as a free gift.  What a pipe it was,

to be sure!  It had a rude brass-wire cover to it, and a little coarse

iron chain suspended from the bowl, with an iron splinter attached to

loosen up the tobacco and pick your teeth with.  The stem looked like the

half of a slender walking-stick with the bark on.



I felt that this pipe had belonged to the original Witch of Endor as soon

as I saw it; and as soon as I smelt it, I knew it.  Moreover, I asked the

Arab cub in good English if it was not so, and he answered in good Arabic

that it was.  I woke up my horse and went my way, smoking.  And presently

I said to myself reflectively, "If there is anything that could make a

man deliberately assault a dying cripple, I reckon may be an unexpected

whiff from this pipe would do it."  I smoked along till I found I was

beginning to lie, and project murder, and steal my own things out of one

pocket and hide them in another; and then I put up my treasure, took off

my spurs and put them under my horse's tail, and shortly came tearing

through our caravan like a hurricane.



From that time forward, going to Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, and the Jordan,

Bethany, Bethlehem, and everywhere, I loafed contentedly in the rear and

enjoyed my infamous pipe and revelled in imaginary villany.  But at the

end of two weeks we turned our faces toward the sea and journeyed over

the Judean hills, and through rocky defiles, and among the scenes that

Samson knew in his youth, and by and by we touched level ground just at

night, and trotted off cheerily over the plain of Sharon.  It was

perfectly jolly for three hours, and we whites crowded along together,

close after the chief Arab muleteer (all the pack-animals and the other

Arabs were miles in the rear), and we laughed, and chatted, and argued

hotly about Samson, and whether suicide was a sin or not, since Paul

speaks of Samson distinctly as being saved and in heaven.  But by and by

the night air, and the duskiness, and the weariness of eight hours in the

saddle, began to tell, and conversation flagged and finally died out

utterly.  The squeak-squeaking of the saddles grew very distinct;

occasionally somebody sighed, or started to hum a tune and gave it up;

now and then a horse sneezed.  These things only emphasised the solemnity

and the stillness.  Everybody got so listless that for once I and my

dreamer found ourselves in the lead.  It was a glad, new sensation, and

I longed to keep the place forevermore.  Every little stir in the dingy

cavalcade behind made me nervous.  Davis and I were riding side by side,

right after the Arab.  About 11 o'clock it had become really chilly, and

the dozing boys roused up and began to inquire how far it was to Ramlah

yet, and to demand that the Arab hurry along faster.  I gave it up then,

and my heart sank within me, because of course they would come up to

scold the Arab.  I knew I had to take the rear again.  In my sorrow I

unconsciously took to my pipe, my only comfort.  As I touched the match

to it the whole company came lumbering up and crowding my horse's rump

and flanks.  A whiff of smoke drifted back over my shoulder, and--



"The suffering Moses!"



"Whew!"



"By George, who opened that graveyard?"



"Boys, that Arab's been swallowing something dead!"



Right away there was a gap behind us.  Whiff after whiff sailed airily

back, and each one widened the breach.  Within fifteen seconds the

barking, and gasping, and sneezing, and coughing of the boys, and their

angry abuse of the Arab guide, had dwindled to a murmur, and Davis and I

were alone with the leader.  Davis did not know what the matter was, and

don't to this day.  Occasionally he caught a faint film of the smoke and

fell to scolding at the Arab and wondering how long he had been decaying

in that way.  Our boys kept on dropping back further and further, till at

last they were only in hearing, not in sight.  And every time they

started gingerly forward to reconnoitre or shoot the Arab, as they

proposed to do--I let them get within good fair range of my relic (she

would carry seventy yards with wonderful precision), and then wafted a

whiff among them that sent them gasping and strangling to the rear again.

I kept my gun well charged and ready, and twice within the hour I decoyed

the boys right up to my horse's tail, and then with one malarious blast

emptied the saddles, almost.  I never heard an Arab abused so in my life.

He really owed his preservation to me, because for one entire hour I

stood between him and certain death.  The boys would have killed him if

they could have got by me.



By and by, when the company were far in the rear, I put away my pipe--

I was getting fearfully dry and crisp about the gills and rather blown

with good diligent work--and spurred my animated trance up alongside the

Arab and stopped him and asked for water.  He unslung his little gourd-

shaped earthenware jug, and I put it under my moustache and took a long,

glorious, satisfying draught.  I was going to scour the mouth of the jug

a little, but I saw that I had brought the whole train together once more

by my delay, and that they were all anxious to drink too-and would have

been long ago if the Arab had not pretended that he was out of water.

So I hastened to pass the vessel to Davis.  He took a mouthful, and never

said a word, but climbed off his horse and lay down calmly in the road.

I felt sorry for Davis.  It was too late now, though, and Dan was

drinking.  Dan got down too, and hunted for a soft place.  I thought I

heard Dan say, "That Arab's friends ought to keep him in alcohol or else

take him out and bury him somewhere."  All the boys took a drink and

climbed down.  It is not well to go into further particulars.  Let us

draw the curtain upon this act.



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



Well, now, to think that after three changing years I should hear from

that curious old relic again, and see Dan advertising it for sale for the

benefit of a benevolent object.  Dan is not treating that present right.

I gave that pipe to him for a keepsake.  However, he probably finds that

it keeps away custom and interferes with business.  It is the most

convincing inanimate object in all this part of the world, perhaps.  Dan

and I were roommates in all that long "Quaker City" voyage, and whenever

I desired to have a little season of privacy I used to fire up on that

pipe and persuade Dan to go out; and he seldom waited to change his

clothes, either.  In about a quarter, or from that to three-quarters of a

minute, be would be propping up the smoke-stack on the upper deck and

cursing.  I wonder how the faithful old relic is going to sell?













A REMINISCENCE OF THE BACK SETTLEMENTS



"Now that corpse [said the undertaker, patting the folded hands of the

deceased approvingly] was a brick-every way you took him he was a brick.

He was so real accommodating, and so modest-like and simple in his last

moments.  Friends wanted metallic burial case--nothing else would do.

I couldn't get it.  There warn't going to be time anybody could see that.

Corpse said never mind, shake him up some kind of a box he could stretch

out in comfortable, he warn't particular 'bout the general style of it.

Said he went more on room than style, any way, in the last final

container.  Friends wanted a silver door-plate on the coffin, signifying

who he was and wher, he was from.  Now you know a fellow couldn't roust

out such a gaily thing as that in a little country town like this.  What

did corpse say?  Corpse said, whitewash his old canoe and dob his address

and general destination onto it with a blacking brush and a stencil

plate, long with a verse from some likely hymn or other, and pint him for

the tomb, and mark him C. O. D., and just let him skip along.  He warn't

distressed any more than you be--on the contrary just as carm and

collected as a hearse-horse; said he judged that wher' he was going to,

a body would find it considerable better to attract attention by a

picturesque moral character than a natty burial case with a swell

doorplate on it.  Splendid man, he was.  I'd druther do for a corpse like

that 'n any I've tackled in seven year.  There's some satisfaction in

buryin' a man like that.  You feel that what you're doing is appreciated.

Lord bless you, so's he got planted before he sp'iled, he was perfectly

satisfied; said his relations meant well, perfectly well, but all them

preparations was bound to delay the thing more or less, and he didn't

wish to be kept layin' round.  You never see such a clear head as what he

had--and so carm and so cool.  Just a hunk of brains that is what he was.

Perfectly awful.  It was a ripping distance from one end of that man's

head to t'other.  Often and over again he's had brain fever a-raging in

one place, and the rest of the pile didn't know anything about it--didn't

affect it any more than an Injun insurrection in Arizona affects the

Atlantic States.  Well, the relations they wanted a big funeral, but

corpse said he was down on flummery--didn't want any procession--fill the

hearse full of mourners, and get out a stern line and tow him behind.

He was the most down on style of any remains I ever struck.  A beautiful,

simple-minded creature--it was what he was, you can depend on that.  He

was just set on having things the way he wanted them, and he took a solid

comfort in laying his little plans.  He had me measure him and take a

whole raft of directions; then he had a minister stand up behind a long

box with a tablecloth over it and read his funeral sermon, saying

'Angcore, angcore!' at the good places, and making him scratch out every

bit of brag about him, and all the hifalutin; and then he made them trot

out the choir so's he could help them pick out the tunes for the

occasion, and he got them to sing 'Pop Goes the Weasel,' because he'd

always liked that tune when he was downhearted, and solemn music made him

sad; and when they sung that with tears in their eyes (because they all

loved him), and his relations grieving around, he just laid there as

happy as a bug, and trying to beat time and showing all over how much he

enjoyed it; and presently he got worked up and excited; and tried to join

in, for mind you he was pretty proud of his abilities in the singing

line; but the first time he opened his mouth and was just going to spread

himself, his breath took a walk.  I never see a man snuffed out so

sudden.  Ah, it was a great loss--it was a powerful loss to this poor

little one-horse town.  Well, well, well, I hain't got time to be

palavering along here--got to nail on the lid and mosey along with' him;

and if you'll just give me a lift we'll skeet him into the hearse and

meander along.  Relations bound to have it so--don't pay no attention to

dying injunctions, minute a corpse's gone; but if I had my way, if I

didn't respect his last wishes and tow him behind the hearse, I'll be

cuss'd.  I consider that whatever a corpse wants done for his comfort is

a little enough matter, and a man hain't got no right to deceive him or

take advantage of him--and whatever a corpse trusts me to do I'm a-going

to do, you know, even if it's to stuff him and paint him yaller and keep

him for a keepsake--you hear me!"



He cracked his whip and went lumbering away with his ancient ruin of a

hearse, and I continued my walk with a valuable lesson learned--that a

healthy and wholesome cheerfulness is not necessarily impossible to any

occupation.  The lesson is likely to be lasting, for it will take many

months to obliterate the memory of the remarks and circumstances that

impressed it.













A ROYAL COMPLIMENT



     The latest report about the Spanish crown is, that it will now be

     offered to Prince Alfonso, the second son of the King of Portugal,

     who is but five years of age.  The Spaniards have hunted through all

     the nations of Europe for a King.  They tried to get a Portuguese in

     the person of Dom-Luis, who is an old ex-monarch; they tried to get

     an Italian, in the person of Victor Emanuel's young son, the Duke of

     Genoa; they tried to get a Spaniard, in the person of Espartero, who

     is an octogenarian.  Some of them desired a French Bourbon,

     Montpensier; some of them a Spanish Bourbon, the Prince of Asturias;

     some of them an English prince, one of the sons of Queen Victoria.

     They have just tried to get the German Prince Leopold; but they have

     thought it better to give him up than take a war along with him.

     It is a long time since we first suggested to them to try an

     American ruler.  We can offer them a large number of able and

     experienced sovereigns to pick from-men skilled in statesmanship,

     versed in the science of government, and adepts in all the arts of

     administration--men who could wear the crown with dignity and rule

     the kingdom at a reasonable expense.



     There is not the least danger of Napoleon threatening them if they

     take an American sovereign; in fact, we have no doubt he would be

     pleased to support such a candidature.  We are unwilling to mention

     names--though we have a man in our eye whom we wish they had in

     theirs.--New York Tribune.



It would be but an ostentation of modesty to permit such a pointed

reference to myself to pass unnoticed.  This is the second time that 'The

Tribune' (no doubt sincerely looking to the best interests of Spain and

the world at large) has done me the great and unusual honour to propose

me as a fit person to fill the Spanish throne.  Why 'The Tribune' should

single me out in this way from the midst of a dozen Americans of higher

political prominence, is a problem which I cannot solve.  Beyond a

somewhat intimate knowledge of Spanish history and a profound veneration

for its great names and illustrious deeds, I feel that I possess no merit

that should peculiarly recommend me to this royal distinction.  I cannot

deny that Spanish history has always been mother's milk to me.  I am

proud of every Spanish achievement, from Hernando Cortes's victory at

Thermopylae down to Vasco Nunez de Balboa's discovery of the Atlantic

ocean; and of every splendid Spanish name, from Don Quixote and the Duke

of Wellington down to Don Caesar de Bazan.  However, these little graces

of erudition are of small consequence, being more showy than serviceable.



In case the Spanish sceptre is pressed upon me--and the indications

unquestionably are that it will be--I shall feel it necessary to have

certain things set down and distinctly understood beforehand.  For

instance:  My salary must be paid quarterly in advance.  In these

unsettled times it will not do to trust.  If Isabella had adopted this

plan, she would be roosting on her ancestral throne to-day, for the

simple reason that her subjects never could have raised three months of a

royal salary in advance, and of course they could not have discharged her

until they had squared up with her.  My salary must be paid in gold; when

greenbacks are fresh in a country, they are too fluctuating.  My salary

has got to be put at the ruling market rate; I am not going to cut under

on the trade, and they are not going to trail me a long way from home and

then practise on my ignorance and play me for a royal North Adams

Chinaman, by any means.  As I understand it, imported kings generally get

five millions a year and house-rent free.  Young George of Greece gets

that.  As the revenues only yield two millions, he has to take the

national note for considerable; but even with things in that sort of

shape he is better fixed than he was in Denmark, where he had to

eternally stand up because he had no throne to sit on, and had to give

bail for his board, because a royal apprentice gets no salary there while

he is learning his trade.  England is the place for that.  Fifty thousand

dollars a year Great Britain pays on each royal child that is born, and

this is increased from year to year as the child becomes more and more

indispensable to his country.  Look at Prince Arthur.  At first he only

got the usual birth-bounty; but now that he has got so that he can dance,

there is simply no telling what wages he gets.



I should have to stipulate that the Spanish people wash more and

endeavour to get along with less quarantine.  Do you know, Spain keeps

her ports fast locked against foreign traffic three-fourths of each year,

because one day she is scared about the cholera, and the next about the

plague, and next the measles, next the hooping cough, the hives, and the

rash? but she does not mind leonine leprosy and elephantiasis any more

than a great and enlightened civilisation minds freckles.  Soap would

soon remove her anxious distress about foreign distempers.  The reason

arable land is so scarce in Spain is because the people squander so much

of it on their persons, and then when they die it is improvidently buried

with them.



I should feel obliged to stipulate that Marshal Serrano be reduced to the

rank of constable, or even roundsman.  He is no longer fit to be City

Marshal.  A man who refused to be king because he was too old and feeble,

is ill qualified to help sick people to the station-house when they are

armed and their form of delirium tremens is of the exuberant and

demonstrative kind.



I should also require that a force be sent to chase the late Queen

Isabella out of France.  Her presence there can work no advantage to

Spain, and she ought to be made to move at once; though, poor thing, she

has been chaste enough heretofore--for a Spanish woman.



I should also require that--



I am at this moment authoritatively informed that "The Tribune" did not

mean me, after all.  Very well, I do not care two cents.













THE APPROACHING EPIDEMIC



One calamity to which the death of Mr. Dickens dooms this country has not

awakened the concern to which its gravity entitles it.  We refer to the

fact that the nation is to be lectured to death and read to death all

next winter, by Tom, Dick, and Harry, with poor lamented Dickens for a

pretext.  All the vagabonds who can spell will afflict the people with

"readings" from Pickwick and Copperfield, and all the insignificants who

have been ennobled by the notice of the great novelist or transfigured by

his smile will make a marketable commodity of it now, and turn the sacred

reminiscence to the practical use of procuring bread and butter.  The

lecture rostrums will fairly swarm with these fortunates.  Already the

signs of it are perceptible.  Behold how the unclean creatures are

wending toward the dead lion and gathering to the feast:



"Reminiscences of Dickens."  A lecture.  By John Smith, who heard him

read eight times.



"Remembrances of Charles Dickens."  A lecture.  By John Jones, who saw

him once in a street car and twice in a barber shop.



"Recollections of Mr. Dickens."  A lecture.  By John Brown, who gained a

wide fame by writing deliriously appreciative critiques and rhapsodies

upon the great author's public readings; and who shook hands with the

great author upon various occasions, and held converse with him several

times.



"Readings from Dickens."  By John White, who has the great delineator's

style and manner perfectly, having attended all his readings in this

country and made these things a study, always practising each reading

before retiring, and while it was hot from the great delineator's lips.

Upon this occasion Mr. W. will exhibit the remains of a cigar which he

saw Mr. Dickens smoke.  This Relic is kept in a solid silver box made

purposely for it.



"Sights and Sounds of the Great Novelist."  A popular lecture.  By John

Gray, who waited on his table all the time he was at the Grand Hotel,

New York, and still has in his possession and will exhibit to the

audience a fragment of the Last Piece of Bread which the lamented author

tasted in this country.



"Heart Treasures of Precious Moments with Literature's Departed Monarch."

A lecture.  By Miss Serena Amelia Tryphenia McSpadden, who still wears,

and will always wear, a glove upon the hand made sacred by the clasp of

Dickens.  Only Death shall remove it.



"Readings from Dickens."  By Mrs. J. O'Hooligan Murphy, who washed for

him.



"Familiar Talks with the Great Author."  A narrative lecture.  By John

Thomas, for two weeks his valet in America.



And so forth, and so on.  This isn't half the list.  The man who has a

"Toothpick once used by Charles Dickens" will have to have a hearing; and

the man who "once rode in an omnibus with Charles Dickens;" and the lady

to whom Charles Dickens "granted the hospitalities of his umbrella during

a storm;" and the person who "possesses a hole which once belonged in a

handkerchief owned by Charles Dickens."  Be patient and long-suffering,

good people, for even this does not fill up the measure of what you must

endure next winter.  There is no creature in all this land who has had

any personal relations with the late Mr. Dickens, however slight or

trivial, but will shoulder his way to the rostrum and inflict his

testimony upon his helpless countrymen.  To some people it is fatal to be

noticed by greatness.















THE TONE-IMPARTING COMMITTEE



I get old and ponderously respectable, only one thing will be able to

make me truly happy, and that will be to be put on the Venerable Tone-

Imparting committee of the city of New York, and have nothing to do but

sit on the platform, solemn and imposing, along with Peter Cooper, Horace

Greeley, etc., etc., and shed momentary fame at second hand on obscure

lecturers, draw public attention to lectures which would otherwise clack

eloquently to sounding emptiness, and subdue audiences into respectful

hearing of all sorts of unpopular and outlandish dogmas and isms.  That

is what I desire for the cheer and gratification of my gray hairs.  Let

me but sit up there with those fine relics of the Old Red Sandstone

Period and give Tone to an intellectual entertainment twice a week, and

be so reported, and my happiness will be complete.  Those men have been

my envy for long, long time.  And no memories of my life are so pleasant

as my reminiscence of their long and honorable career in the Tone-

imparting service.  I can recollect that first time I ever saw them on

the platforms just as well as I can remember the events of yesterday.

Horace Greeley sat on the right, Peter Cooper on the left, and Thomas

Jefferson, Red Jacket, Benjamin Franklin, and John Hancock sat between

them.  This was on the 22d of December, 1799, on the occasion of the

state' funeral of George Washington in New York.  It was a great day,

that--a great day, and a very, very sad one.  I remember that Broadway

was one mass of black crape from Castle Garden nearly up to where the

City Hall now stands.  The next time I saw these gentlemen officiate was

at a ball given for the purpose of procuring money and medicines for the

sick and wounded soldiers and sailors.  Horace Greeley occupied one side

of the platform on which the musicians were exalted, and Peter Cooper the

other.  There were other Tone-imparters attendant upon the two chiefs,

but I have forgotten their names now.  Horace Greeley, gray-haired and

beaming, was in sailor costume--white duck pants, blue shirt, open at the

breast, large neckerchief, loose as an ox-bow, and tied with a jaunty

sailor knot, broad turnover collar with star in the corner, shiny black

little tarpaulin hat roosting daintily far back on head, and flying two

gallant long ribbons.  Slippers on ample feet, round spectacles on

benignant nose, and pitchfork in hand, completed Mr.  Greeley, and made

him, in my boyish admiration, every inch a sailor, and worthy to be the

honored great-grandfather of the Neptune he was so ingeniously

representing.  I shall never forget him.  Mr. Cooper was dressed as a

general of militia, and was dismally and oppressively warlike.  I

neglected to remark, in the proper place, that the soldiers and sailors

in whose aid the ball was given had just been sent in from Boston--this

was during the war of 1812.  At the grand national reception of

Lafayette, in 1824, Horace  Greeley sat on the right and Peter Cooper to

the left.  The other Tone-imparters of the day are sleeping the sleep of

the just now.  I was in the audience when Horace Greeley Peter Cooper,

and other chief citizens imparted tone to the great meetings in favor of

French liberty, in 1848.  Then I never saw them any more until here

lately; but now that I am living tolerably near the city, I run down

every time I see it announced that "Horace Greeley, Peter Cooper, and

several other distinguished citizens will occupy seats on the platform;"

and next morning, when I read in the first paragraph of the phonographic

report that "Horace Greeley, Peter Cooper, and several other

distinguished citizens occupied seats on the platform," I say to myself,

"Thank God, I was present."  Thus I have been enabled to see these

substantial old friends of mine sit on the platform and give tone to

lectures on anatomy, and lectures on agriculture, and lectures on

stirpiculture, and lectures on astronomy, on chemistry, on miscegenation,

on "Is Man Descended from the Kangaroo?" on, veterinary matters, on all

kinds of religion, and several kinds of politics; and have seen them give

tone and grandeur to the Four-legged Girl, the Siamese Twins, the Great

Egyptian Sword Swallower, and the Old Original Jacobs.  Whenever somebody

is to lecture on a subject not of general interest, I know that my

venerated Remains of the Old Red Sandstone Period will be on the

platform; whenever a lecturer is to appear whom nobody has heard of

before, nor will be likely to seek to see, I know that the real

benevolence of my old friends will be taken advantage of, and that they

will be on the platform (and in the bills) as an advertisement; and

whenever any new and obnoxious deviltry in philosophy, morals, or

politics is to be sprung upon the people, I know perfectly well that

these intrepid old heroes will be on the platform too, in the interest

of full and free discussion, and to crush down all narrower and less

generous souls with the solid dead weight of their awful respectability.

And let us all remember that while these inveterate and imperishable

presiders (if you please) appear on the platform every night in the year

as regularly as the volunteered piano from Steinway's or Chickering's,

and have bolstered up and given tone to a deal of questionable merit and

obscure emptiness in their time, they have also diversified this

inconsequential service by occasional powerful uplifting and upholding of

great progressive ideas which smaller men feared to meddle with or

countenance.













OUR PRECIOUS LUNATIC



[From the Buffalo Express, Saturday, May 14, 1870.]



                                             New YORK, May 10.



The Richardson-McFarland jury had been out one hour and fifty minutes.

A breathless silence brooded over court and auditory--a silence and a

stillness so absolute, notwithstanding the vast multitude of human beings

packed together there, that when some one far away among the throng under

the northeast balcony cleared his throat with a smothered little cough it

startled everybody uncomfortably, so distinctly did it grate upon the

pulseless air.  At that imposing moment the bang of a door was heard,

then the shuffle of approaching feet, and then a sort of surging and

swaying disorder among the heads at the entrance from the jury-room told

them that the Twelve were coming.  Presently all was silent again, and

the foreman of the jury rose and said:



"Your  Honor and Gentleman:  We, the jury charged with the duty of

determining whether the prisoner at the bar, Daniel McFarland, has been

guilty of murder, in taking by surprise an unarmed man and shooting him

to death, or whether the prisoner is afflicted with a sad but

irresponsible insanity which at times can be cheered only by violent

entertainment with firearms, do find as follows, namely:



"That the prisoner, Daniel McFarland, is insane as above described.

Because:



"1.  His great grandfather's stepfather was tainted with insanity, and

frequently killed people who were distasteful to him.  Hence, insanity is

hereditary in the family.



"2.  For nine years the prisoner at the bar did not adequately support his

family.  Strong circumstantial evidence of insanity.



"3.  For nine years he made of his home, as a general thing, a poor-house;

sometimes (but very rarely) a cheery, happy habitation; frequently the

den of a beery, drivelling, stupefied animal; but never, as far as

ascertained, the abiding place of a gentleman.  These be evidences of

insanity.



"4.  He once took his young unmarried sister-in-law to the museum; while

there his hereditary insanity came upon him to such a degree that he

hiccupped and staggered; and afterward, on the way home, even made love

to the young girl he was protecting.  These are the acts of a person not

in his right mind.



"5.  For a good while his sufferings were so great that he had to submit

to the inconvenience of having his wife give public readings for the

family support; and at times, when he handed these shameful earnings to

the barkeeper, his haughty soul was so torn with anguish that he could

hardly stand without leaning against something.  At such times he has

been known to shed tears into his sustenance till it diluted to utter

inefficiency.  Inattention of this nature is not the act of a Democrat

unafflicted in mind.



"6.  He never spared expense in making his wife comfortable during her

occasional confinements.  Her father is able to testify to this.  There

was always an element of unsoundness about the prisoner's generosities

that is very suggestive at this time and before this court.



"7.  Two years ago the prisoner came fearlessly up behind Richardson in

the dark, and shot him in the leg.  The prisoner's brave and protracted

defiance of an adversity that for years had left him little to depend

upon for support but a wife who sometimes earned scarcely anything for

weeks at a time, is evidence that he would have appeared in front of

Richardson and shot him in the stomach if he had not been insane at the

time of the shooting.



"8.  Fourteen months ago the prisoner told Archibald Smith that he was

going to kill Richardson.  This is insanity.



"9.  Twelve months ago he told Marshall P. Jones that he was going to kill

Richardson.  Insanity.



"10.  Nine months ago he was lurking about Richardson's home in New

Jersey, and said he was going to kill Richardson.  Insanity.



"11.  Seven months ago he showed a pistol to Seth Brown and said that that

was for Richardson.  He said Brown testified that at that time it seemed

plain that something was the matter with McFarland, for he crossed the

street diagonally nine times in fifty yards, apparently without any

settled reason for doing so, and finally fell in the gutter and went to

sleep.  He remarked at the time that McFarland acted strange--believed he

was insane.  Upon hearing Brown's evidence, John W. Galen, M.D., affirmed

at once that McFarland was insane.



"12.  Five months ago, McFarland showed his customary pistol, in his

customary way, to his bed-fellow, Charles A. Dana, and told him he was

going to kill Richardson the first time an opportunity offered.  Evidence

of insanity.



"13.  Five months and two weeks ago McFarland asked John Morgan the time

of day, and turned and walked rapidly away without waiting for an answer.

Almost indubitable evidence of insanity.  And--



"14.  It is remarkable that exactly one week after this circumstance, the

prisoner, Daniel McFarland, confronted Albert D. Richardson suddenly and

without warning, and shot him dead.  This is manifest insanity.

Everything we know of the prisoner goes to show that if he had been sane

at the time, he would have shot his victim from behind.



"15.  There is an absolutely overwhelming mass of testimony to show that

an hour before the shooting, McFarland was ANXIOUS AND UNEASY, and that

five minutes after it he was EXCITED.  Thus the accumulating conjectures

and evidences of insanity culminate in this sublime and unimpeachable

proof of it.  Therefore--



"Your Honor and Gentlemen--We the jury pronounce the said Daniel McFarland

INNOCENT OF MURDER, BUT CALAMITOUSLY INSANE."



The scene that ensued almost defies description.  Hats, handkerchiefs and

bonnets were frantically waved above the massed heads in the courtroom,

and three tremendous cheers and a tiger told where the sympathies of the

court and people were.  Then a hundred pursed lips were advanced to kiss

the liberated prisoner, and many a hand thrust out to give him a

congratulatory shake--but presto! with a maniac's own quickness and a

maniac's own fury the lunatic assassin of Richardson fell upon his

friends with teeth and nails, boots and office furniture, and the amazing

rapidity with which he broke heads and limbs, and rent and sundered

bodies, till nearly a hundred citizens were reduced to mere quivering

heaps of fleshy odds and ends and crimson rags, was like nothing in this

world but the exultant frenzy of a plunging, tearing, roaring devil of a

steam machine when it snatches a human being and spins him and whirls him

till he shreds away to nothingness like a "Four o'clock" before the

breath of a child.



The destruction was awful.  It is said that within the space of eight

minutes McFarland killed and crippled some six score persons and tore

down a large portion of the City Hall building, carrying away and casting

into Broadway six or seven marble columns fifty-four feet long and

weighing nearly two tons each.  But he was finally captured and sent in

chains to the lunatic asylum for life.



(By late telegrams it appears that this is a mistake.--Editor Express.)



But the really curious part of this whole matter is yet to be told.  And

that is, that McFarland's most intimate friends believe that the very

next time that it ever occurred to him that the insanity plea was not a

mere politic pretense, was when the verdict came in.  They think that the

startling thought burst upon him then, that if twelve good and true men,

able to comprehend all the baseness of perjury, proclaimed under oath

that he was a lunatic, there was no gainsaying such evidence and that he

UNQUESTIONABLY WAS INSANE!



Possibly that was really the way of it.  It is dreadful to think that

maybe the most awful calamity that can befall a man, namely, loss of

reason, was precipitated upon this poor prisoner's head by a jury that

could have hanged him instead, and so done him a mercy and his country a

service.



                             POSTSCRIPT-LATER



May 11--I do not expect anybody to believe so astounding a thing, and yet

it is the solemn truth that instead of instantly sending the dangerous

lunatic to the insane asylum (which I naturally supposed they would do,

and so I prematurely said they had) the court has actually SET HIM AT

LIBERTY.  Comment is unnecessary.       M.  T.













THE EUROPEAN WARS--[From the Buffalo Express, July 25, 1870.]



                               First Day

                          THE EUROPEAN WAR!!!



                            NO BATTLE YET!!!

                        HOSTILITIES IMMINENT!!!

                         TREMENDOUS EXCITEMENT.

                            AUSTRIA ARMING!

                                                  BERLIN, Tuesday.



No battle has been fought yet.  But hostilities may burst forth any week.



There is tremendous excitement here over news from the front that two

companies of French soldiers are assembling there.



It is rumoured that Austria is arming--what with, is not known.



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



                               Second Day

                            THE EUROPEAN WAR



                             NO BATTLE YET!

                           FIGHTING IMMINENT.

                           AWFUL EXCITEMENT.

                       RUSSIA SIDES WITH PRUSSIA!

                           ENGLAND NEUTRAL!!

                          AUSTRIA NOT ARMING.

                                                  BERLIN, Wednesday.



No battle has been fought yet.  However, all thoughtful men feel that the

land may be drenched with blood before the Summer is over.



There is an awful excitement here over the rumour that two companies of

Prussian troops have concentrated on the border.  German confidence

remains unshaken!!



There is news to the effect that Russia espouses the cause of Prussia and

will bring 4,000,000 men to the field.



England proclaims strict neutrality.



The report that Austria is arming needs confirmation.



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



                               Third Day

                            THE EUROPEAN WAR



                             NO BATTLE YET!

                          BLOODSHED IMMINENT!!

                         ENORMOUS EXCITEMENT!!

                         INVASION OF PRUSSIA!!

                          INVASION OF FRANCE!!

                       RUSSIA SIDES WITH FRANCE.

                         ENGLAND STILL NEUTRAL!

                             FIRING HEARD!

                      THE EMPEROR TO TAKE COMMAND.

                                                  PARIS, Thursday.



No battle has been fought yet.  But Field Marshal McMahon telegraphs thus

to the Emperor:



"If the Frinch army survoives until Christmas there'll be throuble.

Forninst this fact it would be sagacious if the divil wint the rounds of

his establishment to prepare for the occasion, and tuk the precaution to

warrum up the Prussian depairtment a bit agin the day.

                                                  MIKE."



There is an enormous state of excitement here over news from the front to

the effect that yesterday France and Prussia were simultaneously invaded

by the two bodies of troops which lately assembled on the border.  Both

armies conducted their invasions secretly and are now hunting around for

each other on opposite sides of the border.



Russia espouses the cause of France.  She will bring 200,000 men to the

field.



England continues to remain neutral.



Firing was heard yesterday in the direction of Blucherberg, and for a

while the excitement was intense.  However the people reflected that the

country in that direction is uninhabitable, and impassable by anything

but birds, they became quiet again.



The Emperor sends his troops to the field with immense enthusiasm.  He

will lead them in person, when they return.



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



                               Fourth Day

                           THE EUROPEAN WAR!



                            NO BATTLE YET!!

                        THE TROOPS GROWING OLD!

                      BUT BITTER STRIFE IMMINENT!

                         PRODIGIOUS EXCITEMENT!

                THE INVASIONS SUCCESSFULLY ACCOMPLISHED

                         AND THE INVADERS SAFE!

                      RUSSIA SIDES WITH BOTH SIDES

                        ENGLAND WILL FIGHT BOTH!

                                                  LONDON, Friday.



No battle has been fought thus far, but a million impetuous soldiers are

gritting their teeth at each other across the border, and the most

serious fears entertained that if they do not die of old age first, there

will be bloodshed in this war yet.



The prodigious patriotic excitement goes on.  In Prussia, per Prussian

telegrams, though contradicted from France.  In France, per French

telegrams, though contradicted from Prussia.



The Prussian invasion of France was a magnificent success.  The military

failed to find the French, but made good their return to Prussia without

the loss of a single man.  The French invasion of Prussia is also

demonstrated to have been a brilliant and successful achievement.  The

army failed to find the Prussians, but made good their return to the

Vaterland without bloodshed, after having invaded as much as they wanted

to.



There is glorious news from Russia to the effect that she will side with

both sides.



Also from England--she will fight both sides.



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



LONDON, Thursday evening.



I rushed over too soon.  I shall return home on Tuesday's steamer and

wait until the war begins.         M. T.













THE WILD MAN INTERVIEWED

[From the Buffalo Express, September 18, 1869.]



There has been so much talk about the mysterious "wild man" out there in

the West for some time, that I finally felt it was my duty to go out and

interview him.  There was something peculiarly and touchingly romantic

about the creature and his strange actions, according to the newspaper

reports.  He was represented as being hairy, long-armed, and of great

strength and stature; ugly and cumbrous; avoiding men, but appearing

suddenly and unexpectedly to women and children; going armed with a club,

but never molesting any creature, except sheep, or other prey; fond of

eating and drinking, and not particular about the quality, quantity, or

character of the beverages and edibles; living in the woods like a wild

beast, but never angry; moaning, and sometimes howling, but never

uttering articulate sounds.



Such was "Old Shep" as the papers painted him.  I felt that the story of

his life must be a sad one--a story of suffering, disappointment, and

exile--a story of man's inhumanity to man in some shape or other--and I

longed to persuade the secret from him.



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



"Since you say you are a member of the press," said the wild man, "I am

willing to tell you all you wish to know.  Bye and bye you will

comprehend why it is that I wish to unbosom myself to a newspaper man

when I have so studiously avoided conversation with other people.  I will

now unfold my strange story.  I was born with the world we live upon,

almost.  I am the son of Cain."



"What?"



"I was present when the flood was announced."



"Which?"



"I am the father of the Wandering Jew."



"Sir?"



I moved out of range of his club, and went on taking notes, but keeping a

wary eye on him all the while.  He smiled a melancholy smile and resumed:



"When I glance back over the dreary waste of ages, I see many a

glimmering and mark that is familiar to my memory.  And oh, the leagues

I have travelled! the things I have seen! the events I have helped to

emphasise!  I was at the assassination of Caesar.  I marched upon Mecca

with Mahomet.  I was in the Crusades, and stood with Godfrey when he

planted the banner of the cross on the battlements of Jerusalem.  I--"



"One moment, please.  Have you given these items to any other journal?

Can I--"



"Silence.  I was in the Pinta's shrouds with Columbus when America burst

upon his vision. I saw Charles I beheaded.  I was in London when the

Gunpowder Plot was discovered.  I was present at the trial of Warren

Hastings.  I was on American soil when the battle of Lexington was fought

when the declaration was promulgated--when Cornwallis surrendered--

When Washington died.  I entered Paris with Napoleon after Elba.  I was

present when you mounted your guns and manned your fleets for the war of

1812--when the South fired upon Sumter--when Richmond fell--when the

President's life was taken.  In all the ages I have helped to celebrate

the triumphs of genius, the achievements of arms, the havoc of storm,

fire, pestilence, famine."



"Your career has been a stirring one.  Might I ask how you came to locate

in these dull Kansas woods, when you have been so accustomed to

excitement during what I might term so protracted a period, not to put

too fine a point on it?"



"Listen.  Once I was the honoured servitor of the noble and illustrious"

(here he heaved a sigh, and passed his hairy hand across his eyes) "but

in these degenerate days I am become the slave of quack doctors and

newspapers.  I am driven from pillar to post and hurried up and down,

sometimes with stencil-plate and paste-brush to defile the fences with

cabalistic legends, and sometimes in grotesque and extravagant character

at the behest of some driving journal.  I attended to that Ocean Bank

robbery some weeks ago, when I was hardly rested from finishing up the

pow-wow about the completion of the Pacific Railroad; immediately I was

spirited off to do an atrocious, murder for the benefit of the New York

papers; next to attend the wedding of a patriarchal millionaire; next to

raise a hurrah about the great boat race; and then, just when I had begun

to hope that my old bones would have a rest, I am bundled off to this

howling wilderness to strip, and jibber, and be ugly and hairy, and pull

down fences and waylay sheep, and waltz around with a club, and play

'Wild Man' generally--and all to gratify the whim of a bedlam of crazy

newspaper scribblers?  From one end of the continent to the other, I am

described as a gorilla, with a sort of human seeming about me--and all to

gratify this quill-driving scum of the earth!"



"Poor old carpet bagger!"



"I have been served infamously, often, in modern and semi-modern times.

I have been compelled by base men to create fraudulent history, and to

perpetrate all sorts of humbugs.  I wrote those crazy Junius letters, I

moped in a French dungeon for fifteen years, and wore a ridiculous Iron

Mask; I poked around your Northern forests, among your vagabond Indians,

a solemn French idiot, personating the ghost of a dead Dauphin, that the

gaping world might wonder if we had 'a Bourbon among us'; I have played

sea-serpent off Nahant, and Woolly-Horse and What-is-it for the museums;

I have interviewed politicians for the Sun, worked up all manner of

miracles for the Herald, ciphered up election returns for the World,

and thundered Political Economy through the Tribune.  I have done all the

extravagant things that the wildest invention could contrive, and done

them well, and this is my reward--playing Wild Man in Kansas without a

shirt!"



"Mysterious being, a light dawns vaguely upon me--it grows apace--what

--what is your name."



"SENSATION!"



"Hence, horrible shape!"



It spoke again:



"Oh pitiless fate, my destiny hounds me once more.  I am called.  I go.

Alas, is there no rest for me?"



In a moment the Wild Man's features seemed to soften and refine, and his

form to assume a more human grace and symmetry.  His club changed to a

spade, and he shouldered it and started away sighing profoundly and

shedding tears.



"Whither, poor shade?"



"TO DIG UP THE BYRON FAMILY!"



Such was the response that floated back upon the wind as the sad spirit

shook its ringlets to the breeze, flourished its shovel aloft, and

disappeared beyond the brow of the hill.



All of which is in strict accordance with the facts.



                                                            M. T.









LAST WORDS OF GREAT MEN--[From the Buffalo Express, September 11, 1889.]



     Marshal Neil's last words were: "L'armee fran-caise!" (The French

     army.)--Exchange.



What a sad thing it is to see a man close a grand career with a

plagiarism in his mouth.  Napoleon's last words were: "Tete d'armee."

(Head of the army.)  Neither of those remarks amounts to anything as

"last words," and reflect little credit upon the utterers.



A distinguished man should be as particular about his last words as he is

about his last breath.  He should write them out on a slip of paper and

take the judgment of his friends on them.  He should never leave such a

thing to the last hour of his life, and trust to an intellectual spirit

at the last moment to enable him to say something smart with his latest

gasp and launch into eternity with grandeur.  No--a man is apt to be too

much fagged and exhausted, both in body and mind, at such a time, to be

reliable; and maybe the very thing he wants to say, he cannot think of to

save him; and besides there are his weeping friends bothering around;

and worse than all as likely as not he may have to deliver his last gasp

before he is expecting to.  A man cannot always expect to think of a

natty thing to say under such circumstances, and so it is pure egotistic

ostentation to put it off.  There is hardly a case on record where a man

came to his last moment unprepared and said a good thing hardly a case

where a man trusted to that last moment and did not make a solemn botch

of it and go out of the world feeling absurd.



Now there was Daniel Webster.  Nobody could tell him anything.  He was

not afraid.  He could do something neat when the time came.  And how did

it turn out?  Why, his will had to be fixed over; and then all the

relations came; and first one thing and then another interfered, till at

last he only had a chance to say, "I still live," and up he went.



Of course he didn't still live, because he died--and so he might as well

have kept his last words to himself as to have gone and made such a

failure of it as that.  A week before that fifteen minutes of calm

reflection would have enabled that man to contrive some last words that

would have been a credit to himself and a comfort to his family for

generations to come.



And there was John Quincy Adams.  Relying on his splendid abilities and

his coolness in emergencies, he trusted to a happy hit at the last moment

to carry him through, and what was the result?  Death smote him in the

House of Representatives, and he observed, casually, "This is the last of

earth."  The last of earth!  Why "the last of earth" when there was so

much more left?  If he had said it was the last rose of summer or the

last run of shad, it would have had as much point in it.  What he meant

to say was, "Adam was the first and Adams is the last of earth," but he

put it off a trifle too long, and so he had to go with that unmeaning

observation on his lips.



And there we have Napoleon's "Tete d'armee."  That don't mean anything.

Taken by itself, "Head of the army," is no more important than "Head of

the police."  And yet that was a man who could have said a good thing if

he had barred out the doctor and studied over it a while.  Marshal Neil,

with half a century at his disposal, could not dash off anything better

in his last moments than a poor plagiarism of another man's words, which

were not worth plagiarizing in the first place.  "The French army."

Perfectly irrelevant--perfectly flat utterly pointless.  But if he had

closed one eye significantly, and said, "The subscriber has made it

lively for the French army," and then thrown a little of the comic into

his last gasp, it would have been a thing to remember with satisfaction

all the rest of his life.  I do wish our great men would quit saying

these flat things just at the moment they die.  Let us have their next-

to-the-last words for a while, and see if we cannot patch up from them

something that will be more satisfactory.



The public does not wish to be outraged in this way all the time.



But when we come to call to mind the last words of parties who took the

trouble to make the proper preparation for the occasion, we immediately

notice a happy difference in the result.



There was Chesterfield.  Lord Chesterfield had laboured all his life to

build up the most shining reputation for affability and elegance of

speech and manners the world has ever seen.  And could you suppose he

failed to appreciate the efficiency of characteristic "last words," in

the matter of seizing the successfully driven nail of such a reputation

and clinching on the other side for ever?  Not he.  He prepared himself.

He kept his eye on the clock and his finger on his pulse.  He awaited his

chance.  And at last, when he knew his time was come, he pretended to

think a new visitor had entered, and so, with the rattle in his throat

emphasised for dramatic effect, he said to the servant, "Shin around,

John, and get the gentleman a chair."  And so he died, amid thunders of

applause.



Next we have Benjamin Franklin.  Franklin, the author of Poor Richard's

quaint sayings; Franklin the immortal axiom-builder, who used to sit up

at nights reducing the rankest old threadbare platitudes to crisp and

snappy maxims that had a nice, varnished, original look in their

regimentals; who said, "Virtue is its own reward;" who said,

"Procrastination is the thief of time;" who said, "Time and tide wait for

no man" and "Necessity is the mother of invention;" good old Franklin,

the Josh Billings of the eighteenth century--though, sooth to say, the

latter transcends him in proverbial originality as much as he falls short

of him in correctness of orthography.  What sort of tactics did Franklin

pursue?  He pondered over his last words for as much as two weeks, and

then when the time came, he said, "None but the brave deserve the fair,"

and died happy.  He could not have said a sweeter thing if he had lived

till he was an idiot.



Byron made a poor business of it, and could not think of anything to say,

at the last moment but, "Augusta--sister--Lady Byron--tell Harriet

Beecher Stowe"--etc., etc.,--but Shakespeare was ready and said, "England

expects every man to do his duty!" and went off with splendid eclat.



And there are other instances of sagacious preparation for a felicitous

closing remark.  For instance:



Joan of Arc said, "Tramp, tramp, tramp the boys are marching."



Alexander the Great said, "Another of those Santa Cruz punches, if you

please."



The Empress Josephine said, "Not for Jo-" and could get no further.



Cleopatra said, "The Old Guard dies, but never surrenders."



Sir Walter Raleigh said, "Executioner, can I take your whetstone a

moment, please?" though what for is not clear.



John Smith said, "Alas, I am the last of my race."



Queen Elizabeth said, "Oh, I would give my kingdom for one moment more--

I have forgotten my last words."



And Red Jacket, the noblest Indian brave that ever wielded a tomahawk in

defence of a friendless and persecuted race, expired with these touching

words upon his lips, "Wawkawampanoosucwinnebayowallazvsagamoresa-

skatchewan."  There was not a dry eye in the wigwam.



Let not this lesson be lost upon our public men.  Let them take a healthy

moment for preparation, and contrive some last words that shall be neat

and to the point.  Let Louis Napoleon say,



"I am content to follow my uncle--still, I do not wish to improve upon

his last word.  Put me down for 'Tete d'armee.'"



And Garret Davis, "Let me recite the unabridged dictionary."



And H. G., "I desire, now, to say a few words on political economy."



And Mr. Bergh, "Only take part of me at a time, if the load will be

fatiguing to the hearse horses."



And Andrew Johnson, "I have been an alderman, Member of Congress,

Governor, Senator, Pres--adieu, you know the rest."



And Seward., "Alas!-ka."



And Grant, "O."



All of which is respectfully submitted, with the most honorable

intentions.

                                                       M. T.



P. S.--I am obliged to leave out the illustrations.  The artist finds it

impossible to make a picture of people's last words.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Curious Republic of Gondour

by Mark Twain













1601



by Mark Twain





                              MARK TWAIN'S

                              [Date, 1601]



                              Conversation

                    As it was by the Social Fireside

                       in the Time of the Tudors





INTRODUCTION



"Born irreverent," scrawled Mark Twain on a scratch pad, "--like all

other people I have ever known or heard of--I am hoping to remain so

while there are any reverent irreverences left to make fun of."

--[Holograph manuscript of Samuel L.  Clemens, in the collection of the

F. J. Meine]



Mark Twain was just as irreverent as he dared be, and 1601 reveals his

richest expression of sovereign contempt for overstuffed language,

genteel literature, and conventional idiocies.  Later, when a magazine

editor apostrophized, "O that we had a Rabelais!"  Mark impishly and

anonymously--submitted 1601; and that same editor, a praiser of Rabelais,

scathingly abused it and the sender.  In this episode, as in many others,

Mark Twain, the "bad boy" of American literature, revealed his huge

delight in blasting the shams of contemporary hypocrisy.  Too, there was

always the spirit of Tom Sawyer deviltry in Mark's make-up that prompted

him, as he himself boasted, to see how much holy indignation he could

stir up in the world.





WHO WROTE 1601?



The correct and complete title of 1601, as first issued, was: [Date,

1601.] 'Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of

the Tudors.'  For many years after its anonymous first issue in 1880,

its authorship was variously conjectured and widely disputed.  In Boston,

William T. Ball, one of the leading theatrical critics during the late

go's, asserted that it was originally written by an English actor (name

not divulged) who gave it to him.  Ball's original, it was said, looked

like a newspaper strip in the way it was printed, and may indeed have

been a proof pulled in some newspaper office.  In St. Louis, William

Marion Reedy, editor of the St. Louis Mirror, had seen this famous tour

de force circulated in the early 80's in galley-proof form; he first

learned from Eugene Field that it was from the pen of Mark Twain.



"Many people," said Reedy, "thought the thing was done by Field and

attributed, as a joke, to Mark Twain.  Field had a perfect genius for

that sort of thing, as many extant specimens attest, and for that sort of

practical joke; but to my thinking the humor of the piece is too mellow

--not hard and bright and bitter--to be Eugene Field's."  Reedy's opinion

hits off the fundamental difference between these two great humorists;

one half suspects that Reedy was thinking of Field's French Crisis.



But Twain first claimed his bantling from the fog of anonymity in 1906,

in a letter addressed to Mr. Charles Orr, librarian of Case Library,

Cleveland.  Said Clemens, in the course of his letter, dated July 30,

1906, from Dublin, New Hampshire:



"The title of the piece is 1601.  The piece is a supposititious

conversation which takes place in Queen Elizabeth's closet in that year,

between the Queen, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Duchess

of Bilgewater, and one or two others, and is not, as John Hay mistakenly

supposes, a serious effort to bring back our literature and philosophy to

the sober and chaste Elizabeth's time; if there is a decent word findable

in it, it is because I overlooked it.  I hasten to assure you that it is

not printed in my published writings."





TWITTING THE REV. JOSEPH TWICHELL



The circumstances of how 1601 came to be written have since been

officially revealed by Albert Bigelow Paine in 'Mark Twain,

A Bibliography' (1912), and in the publication of Mark Twain's Notebook

(1935).



1601 was written during the summer of 1876 when the Clemens family had

retreated to Quarry Farm in Elmira County, New York.  Here Mrs. Clemens

enjoyed relief from social obligations, the children romped over the

countryside, and Mark retired to his octagonal study, which, perched high

on the hill, looked out upon the valley below.  It was in the famous

summer of 1876, too, that Mark was putting the finishing touches to Tom

Sawyer.  Before the close of the same year he had already begun work on

'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', published in 1885.  It is

interesting to note the use of the title, the "Duke of Bilgewater," in

Huck Finn when the "Duchess of Bilgewater" had already made her

appearance in 1601.  Sandwiched between his two great masterpieces, Tom

Sawyer and Huck Finn, the writing of 1601 was indeed a strange interlude.



During this prolific period Mark wrote many minor items, most of them

rejected by Howells, and read extensively in one of his favorite books,

Pepys' Diary.  Like many another writer Mark was captivated by Pepys'

style and spirit, and "he determined," says Albert Bigelow Paine in his

'Mark Twain, A Biography', "to try his hand on an imaginary record of

conversation and court manners of a bygone day, written in the phrase of

the period.  The result was 'Fireside Conversation in the Time of Queen

Elizabeth', or as he later called it, '1601'.  The 'conversation'

recorded by a supposed Pepys of that period, was written with all the

outspoken coarseness and nakedness of that rank day, when fireside

sociabilities were limited only to the loosened fancy, vocabulary, and

physical performance, and not by any bounds of convention."



"It was written as a letter," continues Paine, "to that robust divine,

Rev. Joseph Twichell, who, unlike Howells, had no scruples about Mark's

'Elizabethan breadth of parlance.'"



The Rev.  Joseph Twichell, Mark's most intimate friend for over forty

years, was pastor of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church of Hartford,

which Mark facetiously called the "Church of the Holy Speculators,"

because of its wealthy parishioners.  Here Mark had first met "Joe" at a

social, and their meeting ripened into a glorious, life long friendship.

Twichell was a man of about Mark's own age, a profound scholar, a devout

Christian, "yet a man with an exuberant sense of humor, and a profound

understanding of the frailties of mankind."  The Rev. Mr. Twichell

performed the marriage ceremony for Mark Twain and solemnized the births

of his children; "Joe," his friend, counseled him on literary as well as

personal matters for the remainder of Mark's life.  It is important to

catch this brief glimpse of the man for whom this masterpiece was

written, for without it one can not fully understand the spirit in which

1601 was written, or the keen enjoyment which Mark and "Joe" derived from

it.





"SAVE ME ONE."



The story of the first issue of 1601 is one of finesse, state diplomacy,

and surreptitious printing.



The Rev. "Joe" Twichell, for whose delectation the piece had been

written, apparently had pocketed the document for four long years.  Then,

in 1880, it came into the hands of John Hay, later Secretary of State,

presumably sent to him by Mark Twain.  Hay pronounced the sketch a

masterpiece, and wrote immediately to his old Cleveland friend, Alexander

Gunn, prince of connoisseurs in art and literature.  The following

correspondence reveals the fine diplomacy which made the name of John Hay

known throughout the world.





                          DEPARTMENT OF STATE

                               Washington



                                                       June 21, 1880.

Dear Gunn:



Are you in Cleveland for all this week?  If you will say yes by return

mail, I have a masterpiece to submit to your consideration which is only

in my hands for a few days.



Yours, very much worritted by the depravity of Christendom,



                                        Hay





The second letter discloses Hay's own high opinion of the effort and his

deep concern for its safety.







                                                       June 24, 1880

My dear Gunn:



Here it is.  It was written by Mark Twain in a serious effort to bring

back our literature and philosophy to the sober and chaste Elizabethan

standard.  But the taste of the present day is too corrupt for anything

so classic.  He has not yet been able even to find a publisher.  The

Globe has not yet recovered from Downey's inroad, and they won't touch

it.



I send it to you as one of the few lingering relics of that race of

appreciative critics, who know a good thing when they see it.



Read it with reverence and gratitude and send it back to me; for Mark is

impatient to see once more his wandering offspring.



                                        Yours,

                                                  Hay.





In his third letter one can almost hear Hay's chuckle in the certainty

that his diplomatic, if somewhat wicked, suggestion would bear fruit.





                                                       Washington, D. C.

                                                       July 7, 1880

My dear Gunn:



I have your letter, and the proposition which you make to pull a few

proofs of the masterpiece is highly attractive, and of course highly

immoral.  I cannot properly consent to it, and I am afraid the great many

would think I was taking an unfair advantage of his confidence.  Please

send back the document as soon as you can, and if, in spite of my

prohibition, you take these proofs, save me one.



                              Very truly yours,

                                             John Hay.







Thus was this Elizabethan dialogue poured into the moulds of cold type.

According to Merle Johnson, Mark Twain's bibliographer, it was issued in

pamphlet form, without wrappers or covers; there were 8 pages of text and

the pamphlet measured 7 by 8 1/2 inches.  Only four copies are believed to

have been printed, one for Hay, one for Gunn, and two for Twain.



"In the matter of humor," wrote Clemens, referring to Hay's delicious

notes, "what an unsurpassable touch John Hay had!"





HUMOR AT WEST POINT



The first printing of 1601 in actual book form was "Donne at ye Academie

Press," in 1882, West Point, New York, under the supervision of Lieut.  C.

E. S. Wood, then adjutant of the U. S. Military Academy.



In 1882 Mark Twain and Joe Twichell visited their friend Lieut. Wood at

West Point, where they learned that Wood, as Adjutant, had under his

control a small printing establishment.  On Mark's return to Hartford,

Wood received a letter asking if he would do Mark a great favor by

printing something he had written, which he did not care to entrust to

the ordinary printer.  Wood replied that he would be glad to oblige.

On April 3, 1882, Mark sent the manuscript:



"I enclose the original of 1603 [sic] as you suggest.  I am afraid there

are errors in it, also, heedlessness in antiquated spelling--e's stuck on

often at end of words where they are not strickly necessary, etc.....

I would go through the manuscript but I am too much driven just now, and

it is not important anyway.  I wish you would do me the kindness to make

any and all corrections that suggest themselves to you.



                                   "Sincerely yours,

                                             "S.  L.  Clemens."





Charles Erskine Scott Wood recalled in a foreword, which he wrote for the

limited edition of 1601 issued by the Grabhorn Press, how he felt when he

first saw the original manuscript.  "When I read it," writes Wood,

"I felt that the character of it would be carried a little better by a

printing which pretended to the eye that it was contemporaneous with the

pretended 'conversation.'



"I wrote Mark that for literary effect I thought there should be a

species of forgery, though of course there was no effort to actually

deceive a scholar.  Mark answered that I might do as I liked;--that his

only object was to secure a number of copies, as the demand for it was

becoming burdensome, but he would be very grateful for any interest I

brought to the doing.



"Well, Tucker [foreman of the printing shop] and I soaked some handmade

linen paper in weak coffee, put it as a wet bundle into a warm room to

mildew, dried it to a dampness approved by Tucker and he printed the

'copy' on a hand press.  I had special punches cut for such Elizabethan

abbreviations as the a, e, o and u, when followed by m or n--and for the

(commonly and stupidly pronounced ye).



"The only editing I did was as to the spelling and a few old English

words introduced.  The spelling, if I remember correctly, is mine, but

the text is exactly as written by Mark.  I wrote asking his view of

making the spelling of the period and he was enthusiastic--telling me to

do whatever I thought best and he was greatly pleased with the result."



Thus was printed in a de luxe edition of fifty copies the most curious

masterpiece of American humor, at one of America's most dignified

institutions, the United States Military Academy at West Point.



"1601 was so be-praised by the archaeological scholars of a quarter of a

century ago," wrote Clemens in his letter to Charles Orr, "that I was

rather inordinately vain of it.  At that time it had been privately

printed in several countries, among them Japan.  A sumptuous edition on

large paper, rough-edged, was made by Lieut. C. E. S. Wood at West Point

--an edition of 50 copies--and distributed among popes and kings and such

people.  In England copies of that issue were worth twenty guineas when I

was there six years ago, and none to be had."





FROM THE DEPTHS



Mark Twain's irreverence should not be misinterpreted: it was an

irreverence which bubbled up from a deep, passionate insight into the

well-springs of human nature.  In 1601, as in 'The Man That Corrupted

Hadleyburg,' and in 'The Mysterious Stranger,' he tore the masks off

human beings and left them cringing before the public view.  With the

deftness of a master surgeon Clemens dealt with human emotions and

delighted in exposing human nature in the raw.



The spirit and the language of the Fireside Conversation were rooted deep

in Mark Twain's nature and in his life, as C. E. S. Wood, who printed

1601 at West Point, has pertinently observed,



"If I made a guess as to the intellectual ferment out of which 1601 rose

I would say that Mark's intellectual structure and subconscious graining

was from Anglo-Saxons as primitive as the common man of the Tudor period.

He came from the banks of the Mississippi--from the flatboatmen, pilots,

roustabouts, farmers and village folk of a rude, primitive people--as

Lincoln did.



"He was finished in the mining camps of the West among stage drivers,

gamblers and the men of '49.  The simple roughness of a frontier people

was in his blood and brain.



"Words vulgar and offensive to other ears were a common language to him.

Anyone who ever knew Mark heard him use them freely, forcibly,

picturesquely in his unrestrained conversation.  Such language is

forcible as all primitive words are.  Refinement seems to make for

weakness--or let us say a cutting edge--but the old vulgar monosyllabic

words bit like the blow of a pioneer's ax--and Mark was like that.  Then

I think 1601 came out of Mark's instinctive humor, satire and hatred of

puritanism.  But there is more than this; with all its humor there is a

sense of real delight in what may be called obscenity for its own sake.

Whitman and the Bible are no more obscene than Nature herself--no more

obscene than a manure pile, out of which come roses and cherries.  Every

word used in 1601 was used by our own rude pioneers as a part of their

vocabulary--and no word was ever invented by man with obscene intent, but

only as language to express his meaning.  No act of nature is obscene in

itself--but when such words and acts are dragged in for an ulterior

purpose they become offensive, as everything out of place is offensive.

I think he delighted, too, in shocking--giving resounding slaps on what

Chaucer would quite simply call 'the bare erse.'"



Quite aside from this Chaucerian "erse" slapping, Clemens had also a

semi-serious purpose, that of reproducing a past time as he saw it in

Shakespeare, Dekker, Jonson, and other writers of the Elizabethan era.

Fireside Conversation was an exercise in scholarship illumined by a keen

sense of character.  It was made especially effective by the artistic

arrangement of widely-gathered material into a compressed picture of a

phase of the manners and even the minds of the men and women "in the

spacious times of great Elizabeth."



Mark Twain made of 1601 a very smart and fascinating performance, carried

over almost to grotesqueness just to show it was not done for mere

delight in the frank naturalism of the functions with which it deals.

That Mark Twain had made considerable study of this frankness is apparent

from chapter four of 'A Yankee At King Arthur's Court,' where he refers

to the conversation at the famous Round Table thus:



"Many of the terms used in the most matter-of-fact way by this great

assemblage of the first ladies and gentlemen of the land would have made

a Comanche blush.  Indelicacy is too mild a term to convey the idea.

However, I had read Tom Jones and Roderick Random and other books of that

kind and knew that the highest and first ladies and gentlemen in England

had remained little or no cleaner in their talk, and in the morals and

conduct which such talk implies, clear up to one hundred years ago; in

fact clear into our own nineteenth century--in which century, broadly

speaking, the earliest samples of the real lady and the real gentleman

discoverable in English history,--or in European history, for that

matter--may be said to have made their appearance.  Suppose Sir Walter

[Scott] instead of putting the conversation into the mouths of his

characters, had allowed the characters to speak for themselves?  We

should have had talk from Rebecca and Ivanhoe and the soft lady Rowena

which would embarrass a tramp in our day.  However, to the unconsciously

indelicate all things are delicate."



Mark Twain's interest in history and in the depiction of historical

periods and characters is revealed through his fondness for historical

reading in preference to fiction, and through his other historical

writings.  Even in the hilarious, youthful days in San Francisco, Paine

reports that "Clemens, however, was never quite ready for sleep.  Then,

as ever, he would prop himself up in bed, light his pipe, and lose

himself in English or French history until his sleep conquered."  Paine

tells us, too, that Lecky's 'European Morals' was an old favorite.



The notes to 'The Prince and the Pauper' show again how carefully Clemens

examined his historical background, and his interest in these materials.

Some of the more important sources are noted: Hume's 'History of

England', Timbs' 'Curiosities of London', J. Hammond Trumbull's 'Blue

Laws, True and False'.  Apparently Mark Twain relished it, for as Bernard

DeVoto points out, "The book is always Mark Twain.  Its parodies of Tudor

speech lapse sometimes into a callow satisfaction in that idiom--Mark

hugely enjoys his nathlesses and beshrews and marrys."  The writing of

1601 foreshadows his fondness for this treatment.



     "Do you suppose the liberties and the Brawn of These States have to

     do only with delicate lady-words?  with gloved gentleman words"

                              Walt Whitman, 'An American Primer'.



Although 1601 was not matched by any similar sketch in his published

works, it was representative of Mark Twain the man.  He was no emaciated

literary tea-tosser.  Bronzed and weatherbeaten son of the West, Mark was

a man's man, and that significant fact is emphasized by the several

phases of Mark's rich life as steamboat pilot, printer, miner, and

frontier journalist.



On the Virginia City Enterprise Mark learned from editor R. M. Daggett

that "when it was necessary to call a man names, there were no expletives

too long or too expressive to be hurled in rapid succession to emphasize

the utter want of character of the man assailed....  There were

typesetters there who could hurl anathemas at bad copy which would have

frightened a Bengal tiger.  The news editor could damn a mutilated

dispatch in twenty-four languages."



In San Francisco in the sizzling sixties we catch a glimpse of Mark Twain

and his buddy, Steve Gillis, pausing in doorways to sing "The Doleful

Ballad of the Neglected Lover," an old piece of uncollected erotica.

One morning, when a dog began to howl, Steve awoke "to find his room-mate

standing in the door that opened out into a back garden, holding a big

revolver, his hand shaking with cold and excitement," relates Paine in

his Biography.



"'Come here, Steve,' he said.  'I'm so chilled through I can't get a bead

on him.'



"'Sam,' said Steve, 'don't shoot him.  Just swear at him.  You can easily

kill him at any range with your profanity.'



"Steve Gillis declares that Mark Twain let go such a scorching, singeing

blast that the brute's owner sold him the next day for a Mexican hairless

dog."



Nor did Mark's "geysers of profanity" cease spouting after these gay and

youthful days in San Francisco.  With Clemens it may truly be said that

profanity was an art--a pyrotechnic art that entertained nations.



"It was my duty to keep buttons on his shirts," recalled Katy Leary,

life-long housekeeper and friend in the Clemens menage, "and he'd swear

something terrible if I didn't.  If he found a shirt in his drawer

without a button on, he'd take every single shirt out of that drawer and

throw them right out of the window, rain or shine--out of the bathroom

window they'd go.  I used to look out every morning to see the

snowflakes--anything white.  Out they'd fly....  Oh! he'd swear at

anything when he was on a rampage.  He'd swear at his razor if it didn't

cut right, and Mrs. Clemens used to send me around to the bathroom door

sometimes to knock and ask him what was the matter.  Well, I'd go and

knock; I'd say, 'Mrs.  Clemens wants to know what's the matter.'  And

then he'd say to me (kind of low) in a whisper like, 'Did she hear me

Katy?'  'Yes,' I'd say, 'every word.'  Oh, well, he was ashamed then, he

was afraid of getting scolded for swearing like that, because Mrs.

Clemens hated swearing."  But his swearing never seemed really bad to

Katy Leary, "It was sort of funny, and a part of him, somehow," she said.

"Sort of amusing it was--and gay--not like real swearing, 'cause he swore

like an angel."



In his later years at Stormfield Mark loved to play his favorite

billiards.  "It was sometimes a wonderful and fearsome thing to watch Mr.

Clemens play billiards," relates Elizabeth Wallace.  "He loved the game,

and he loved to win, but he occasionally made a very bad stroke, and then

the varied, picturesque, and unorthodox vocabulary, acquired in his more

youthful years, was the only thing that gave him comfort.  Gently,

slowly, with no profane inflexions of voice, but irresistibly as though

they had the headwaters of the Mississippi for their source, came this

stream of unholy adjectives and choice expletives."



Mark's vocabulary ran the whole gamut of life itself.  In Paris, in his

appearance in 1879 before the Stomach Club, a jolly lot of gay wags,

Mark's address, reports Paine, "obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs

of the world, though no line of it, not even its title, has ever found

its way into published literature." It is rumored to have been called

"Some Remarks on the Science of Onanism."



In Berlin, Mark asked Henry W.  Fisher to accompany him on an exploration

of the Berlin Royal Library, where the librarian, having learned that

Clemens had been the Kaiser's guest at dinner, opened the secret treasure

chests for the famous visitor.  One of these guarded treasures was a

volume of grossly indecent verses by Voltaire, addressed to Frederick the

Great.  "Too much is enough," Mark is reported to have said, when Fisher

translated some of the verses, "I would blush to remember any of these

stanzas except to tell Krafft-Ebing about them when I get to Vienna."

When Fisher had finished copying a verse for him Mark put it into his

pocket, saying, "Livy [Mark's wife, Olivia] is so busy mispronouncing

German these days she can't even attempt to get at this."



In his letters, too, Howells observed, "He had the Southwestern, the

Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one

ought not to call coarse without calling one's self prudish; and I was

often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he

had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not bear

to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to

look at them.  I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that

in it he was Shakespearean."



          "With a nigger squat on her safety-valve"

                         John Hay, Pike County Ballads.



"Is there any other explanation," asks Van Wyck Brooks, "'of his

Elizabethan breadth of parlance?'  Mr.  Howells confesses that he

sometimes blushed over Mark Twain's letters, that there were some which,

to the very day when he wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he could not

bear to reread.  Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years,

while going over Mark Twain's proofs, upon 'having that swearing out in

an instant,' he would never had had cause to suffer from his having

'loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion.'  Mark Twain's verbal

Rabelaisianism was obviously the expression of that vital sap which, not

having been permitted to inform his work, had been driven inward and left

thereto ferment.  No wonder he was always indulging in orgies of

forbidden words.  Consider the famous book, 1601, that fireside

conversation in the time of Queen Elizabeth: is there any obsolete verbal

indecency in the English language that Mark Twain has not painstakingly

resurrected and assembled there?  He, whose blood was in constant ferment

and who could not contain within the narrow bonds that had been set for

him the roitous exuberance of his nature, had to have an escape-valve,

and he poured through it a fetid stream of meaningless obscenity--the

waste of a priceless psychic material!"  Thus, Brooks lumps 1601 with

Mark Twain's "bawdry," and interprets it simply as another indication of

frustration.





FIGS FOR FIG LEAVES!



Of course, the writing of such a piece as 1601 raised the question of

freedom of expression for the creative artist.



Although little discussed at that time, it was a question which intensely

interested Mark, and for a fuller appreciation of Mark's position one

must keep in mind the year in which 1601 was written, 1876.  There had

been nothing like it before in American literature; there had appeared no

Caldwells, no Faulkners, no Hemingways.  Victorian England was gushing

Tennyson.  In the United States polite letters was a cult of the Brahmins

of Boston, with William Dean Howells at the helm of the Atlantic.  Louisa

May Alcott published Little Women in 1868-69, and Little Men in 1871.  In

1873 Mark Twain led the van of the debunkers, scraping the gilt off the

lily in the Gilded Age.



In 1880 Mark took a few pot shots at license in Art and Literature in his

Tramp Abroad, "I wonder why some things are?  For instance, Art is

allowed as much indecent license to-day as in earlier times--but the

privileges of Literature in this respect have been sharply curtailed

within the past eighty or ninety years.  Fielding and Smollet could

portray the beastliness of their day in the beastliest language; we have

plenty of foul subjects to deal with in our day, but we are not allowed

to approach them very near, even with nice and guarded forms of speech.

But not so with Art.  The brush may still deal freely with any subject;

however revolting or indelicate.  It makes a body ooze sarcasm at every

pore, to go about Rome and Florence and see what this last generation has

been doing with the statues.  These works, which had stood in innocent

nakedness for ages, are all fig-leaved now.  Yes, every one of them.

Nobody noticed their nakedness before, perhaps; nobody can help noticing

it now, the fig-leaf makes it so conspicuous.  But the comical thing

about it all, is, that the fig-leaf is confined to cold and pallid

marble, which would be still cold and unsuggestive without this sham and

ostentatious symbol of modesty, whereas warm-blooded paintings which do

really need it have in no case been furnished with it.



"At the door of the Ufizzi, in Florence, one is confronted by statues of

a man and a woman, noseless, battered, black with accumulated grime--they

hardly suggest human beings--yet these ridiculous creatures have been

thoughtfully and conscientiously fig-leaved by this fastidious

generation.  You enter, and proceed to that most-visited little gallery

that exists in the world....  and there, against the wall, without

obstructing rag or leaf, you may look your fill upon the foulest, the

vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses--Titian's Venus.  It

isn't that she is naked and stretched out on a bed--no, it is the

attitude of one of her arms and hand.  If I ventured to describe the

attitude, there would be a fine howl--but there the Venus lies, for

anybody to gloat over that wants to--and there she has a right to lie,

for she is a work of art, and Art has its privileges.  I saw young girls

stealing furtive glances at her; I saw young men gaze long and absorbedly

at her; I saw aged, infirm men hang upon her charms with a pathetic

interest.  How I should like to describe her--just to see what a holy

indignation I could stir up in the world--just to hear the unreflecting

average man deliver himself about my grossness and coarseness, and all

that.



"In every gallery in Europe there are hideous pictures of blood, carnage,

oozing brains, putrefaction--pictures portraying intolerable suffering--

pictures alive with every conceivable horror, wrought out in dreadful

detail--and similar pictures are being put on the canvas every day and

publicly exhibited--without a growl from anybody--for they are innocent,

they are inoffensive, being works of art.  But suppose a literary artist

ventured to go into a painstaking and elaborate description of one of

these grisly things--the critics would skin him alive.  Well, let it go,

it cannot be helped; Art retains her privileges, Literature has lost

hers.  Somebody else may cipher out the whys and the wherefores and the

consistencies of it--I haven't got time."





PROFESSOR SCENTS PORNOGRAPHY



Unfortunately, 1601 has recently been tagged by Professor Edward

Wagenknecht as "the most famous piece of pornography in American

literature."  Like many another uninformed, Prof. W. is like the little

boy who is shocked to see "naughty" words chalked on the back fence,

and thinks they are pornography.  The initiated, after years of wading

through the mire, will recognize instantly the significant difference

between filthy filth and funny "filth."  Dirt for dirt's sake is

something else again.  Pornography, an eminent American jurist has

pointed out, is distinguished by the "leer of the sensualist."



"The words which are criticised as dirty," observed justice John M.

Woolsey in the United States District Court of New York, lifting the ban

on Ulysses by James Joyce, "are old Saxon words known to almost all men

and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally

and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical

and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe."  Neither was there

"pornographic intent," according to justice Woolsey, nor was Ulysses

obscene within the legal definition of that word.



"The meaning of the word 'obscene,'" the Justice indicated, "as legally

defined by the courts is: tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead to

sexually impure and lustful thoughts.



"Whether a particular book would tend to excite such impulses and

thoughts must be tested by the court's opinion as to its effect on a

person with average sex instincts--what the French would call 'l'homme

moyen sensuel'--who plays, in this branch of legal inquiry, the same role

of hypothetical reagent as does the 'reasonable man' in the law of torts

and 'the learned man in the art' on questions of invention in patent

law."



Obviously, it is ridiculous to say that the "leer of the sensualist"

lurks in the pages of Mark Twain's 1601.





DROLL STORY



"In a way," observed William Marion Reedy, "1601 is to Twain's whole

works what the 'Droll Stories' are to Balzac's.  It is better than the

privately circulated ribaldry and vulgarity of Eugene Field; is, indeed,

an essay in a sort of primordial humor such as we find in Rabelais, or in

the plays of some of the lesser stars that drew their light from

Shakespeare's urn.  It is humor or fun such as one expects, let us say,

from the peasants of Thomas Hardy, outside of Hardy's books.  And, though

it be filthy, it yet hath a splendor of mere animalism of good spirits...

I would say it is scatalogical rather than erotic, save for one touch

toward the end.  Indeed, it seems more of Rabelais than of Boccaccio or

Masuccio or Aretino--is brutally British rather than lasciviously

latinate, as to the subjects, but sumptuous as regards the language."



Immediately upon first reading, John Hay, later Secretary of State, had

proclaimed 1601 a masterpiece.  Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain's

biographer, likewise acknowledged its greatness, when he said, "1601 is a

genuine classic, as classics of that sort go.  It is better than the

gross obscenities of Rabelais, and perhaps in some day to come, the taste

that justified Gargantua and the Decameron will give this literary

refugee shelter and setting among the more conventional writing of Mark

Twain.  Human taste is a curious thing; delicacy is purely a matter of

environment and point of view."



"It depends on who writes a thing whether it is coarse or not," wrote

Clemens in his notebook in 1879.  "I built a conversation which could

have happened--I used words such as were used at that time--1601.  I sent

it anonymously to a magazine, and how the editor abused it and the

sender!"



But that man was a praiser of Rabelais and had been saying, 'O that we

had a Rabelais!' I judged that I could furnish him one.



"Then I took it to one of the greatest, best and most learned of Divines

[Rev. Joseph H. Twichell] and read it to him.  He came within an ace of

killing himself with laughter (for between you and me the thing was

dreadfully funny.  I don't often write anything that I laugh at myself,

but I can hardly think of that thing without laughing).  That old Divine

said it was a piece of the finest kind of literary art--and David Gray of

the Buffalo Courier said it ought to be printed privately and left behind

me when I died, and then my fame as a literary artist would last."



FRANKLIN J. MEINE











THE FIRST PRINTING

     Verbatim Reprint





[Date, 1601.]



CONVERSATION, AS IT WAS BY THE SOCIAL FIRESIDE, IN THE TIME OF THE

TUDORS.



[Mem.--The following is supposed to be an extract from the diary of the

Pepys of that day, the same being Queen Elizabeth's cup-bearer.  He is

supposed to be of ancient and noble lineage; that he despises these

literary canaille; that his soul consumes with wrath, to see the queen

stooping to talk with such; and that the old man feels that his nobility

is defiled by contact with Shakespeare, etc., and yet he has got to stay

there till her Majesty chooses to dismiss him.]







YESTERNIGHT

toke her maiste ye queene a fantasie such as she sometimes hath, and had

to her closet certain that doe write playes, bokes, and such like, these

being my lord Bacon, his worship Sir Walter Ralegh, Mr. Ben Jonson, and

ye child Francis Beaumonte, which being but sixteen, hath yet turned his

hand to ye doing of ye Lattin masters into our Englishe tong, with grete

discretion and much applaus.  Also came with these ye famous Shaxpur.  A

righte straunge mixing truly of mighty blode with mean, ye more in

especial since ye queenes grace was present, as likewise these following,

to wit: Ye Duchess of Bilgewater, twenty-two yeres of age; ye Countesse

of Granby, twenty-six; her doter, ye Lady Helen, fifteen; as also these

two maides of honor, to-wit, ye Lady Margery Boothy, sixty-five, and ye

Lady Alice Dilberry, turned seventy, she being two yeres ye queenes

graces elder.



I being her maites cup-bearer, had no choice but to remaine and beholde

rank forgot, and ye high holde converse wh ye low as uppon equal termes,

a grete scandal did ye world heare thereof.



In ye heat of ye talk it befel yt one did breake wind, yielding an

exceding mightie and distresfull stink, whereat all did laugh full sore,

and then--



Ye Queene.--Verily in mine eight and sixty yeres have I not heard the

fellow to this fart.  Meseemeth, by ye grete sound and clamour of it, it

was male; yet ye belly it did lurk behinde shoulde now fall lean and flat

against ye spine of him yt hath bene delivered of so stately and so waste

a bulk, where as ye guts of them yt doe quiff-splitters bear, stand

comely still and rounde.  Prithee let ye author confess ye offspring.

Will my Lady Alice testify?



Lady Alice.--Good your grace, an' I had room for such a thundergust

within mine ancient bowels, 'tis not in reason I coulde discharge ye same

and live to thank God for yt He did choose handmaid so humble whereby to

shew his power.  Nay, 'tis not I yt have broughte forth this rich

o'ermastering fog, this fragrant gloom, so pray you seeke ye further.



Ye Queene.--Mayhap ye Lady Margery hath done ye companie this favor?



Lady Margery.--So please you madam, my limbs are feeble wh ye weighte and

drouth of five and sixty winters, and it behoveth yt I be tender unto

them.  In ye good providence of God, an' I had contained this wonder,

forsoothe wolde I have gi'en 'ye whole evening of my sinking life to ye

dribbling of it forth, with trembling and uneasy soul, not launched it

sudden in its matchless might, taking mine own life with violence,

rending my weak frame like rotten rags.  It was not I, your maisty.



Ye Queene.--O' God's name, who hath favored us?  Hath it come to pass yt

a fart shall fart itself?  Not such a one as this, I trow.  Young Master

Beaumont--but no; 'twould have wafted him to heaven like down of goose's

boddy.  'Twas not ye little Lady Helen--nay, ne'er blush, my child;

thoul't tickle thy tender maidenhedde with many a mousie-squeak before

thou learnest to blow a harricane like this.  Wasn't you, my learned and

ingenious Jonson?



Jonson.--So fell a blast hath ne'er mine ears saluted, nor yet a stench

so all-pervading and immortal.  'Twas not a novice did it, good your

maisty, but one of veteran experience--else hadde he failed of

confidence.  In sooth it was not I.



Ye Queene.--My lord Bacon?



Lord Bacon.-Not from my leane entrailes hath this prodigy burst forth, so

please your grace.  Naught doth so befit ye grete as grete performance;

and haply shall ye finde yt 'tis not from mediocrity this miracle hath

issued.



[Tho' ye subjoct be but a fart, yet will this tedious sink of learning

pondrously phillosophize.  Meantime did the foul and deadly stink pervade

all places to that degree, yt never smelt I ye like, yet dare I not to

leave ye presence, albeit I was like to suffocate.]



Ye Queene.--What saith ye worshipful Master Shaxpur?



Shaxpur.--In the great hand of God I stand and so proclaim mine

innocence.  Though ye sinless hosts of heaven had foretold ye coming of

this most desolating breath, proclaiming it a work of uninspired man, its

quaking thunders, its firmament-clogging rottenness his own achievement

in due course of nature, yet had not I believed it; but had said the pit

itself hath furnished forth the stink, and heaven's artillery hath shook

the globe in admiration of it.



[Then was there a silence, and each did turn him toward the worshipful

Sr Walter Ralegh, that browned, embattled, bloody swashbuckler, who

rising up did smile, and simpering say,]



Sr W.--Most gracious maisty, 'twas I that did it, but indeed it was so

poor and frail a note, compared with such as I am wont to furnish, yt in

sooth I was ashamed to call the weakling mine in so august a presence.

It was nothing--less than nothing, madam--I did it but to clear my nether

throat; but had I come prepared, then had I delivered something worthy.

Bear with me, please your grace, till I can make amends.



[Then delivered he himself of such a godless and rock-shivering blast

that all were fain to stop their ears, and following it did come so dense

and foul a stink that that which went before did seem a poor and trifling

thing beside it.  Then saith he, feigning that he blushed and was

confused, I perceive that I am weak to-day, and cannot justice do unto my

powers; and sat him down as who should say, There, it is not much yet he

that hath an arse to spare, let him fellow that, an' he think he can.  By

God, an' I were ye queene, I would e'en tip this swaggering braggart out

o' the court, and let him air his grandeurs and break his intolerable

wind before ye deaf and such as suffocation pleaseth.]



Then fell they to talk about ye manners and customs of many peoples, and

Master Shaxpur spake of ye boke of ye sieur Michael de Montaine, wherein

was mention of ye custom of widows of Perigord to wear uppon ye

headdress, in sign of widowhood, a jewel in ye similitude of a man's

member wilted and limber, whereat ye queene did laugh and say widows in

England doe wear prickes too, but betwixt the thighs, and not wilted

neither, till coition hath done that office for them.  Master Shaxpur did

likewise observe how yt ye sieur de Montaine hath also spoken of a

certain emperor of such mighty prowess that he did take ten maidenheddes

in ye compass of a single night, ye while his empress did entertain two

and twenty lusty knights between her sheetes, yet was not satisfied;

whereat ye merrie Countess Granby saith a ram is yet ye emperor's

superior, sith he wil tup above a hundred yewes 'twixt sun and sun; and

after, if he can have none more to shag, will masturbate until he hath

enrich'd whole acres with his seed.



Then spake ye damned windmill, Sr Walter, of a people in ye uttermost

parts of America, yt capulate not until they be five and thirty yeres of

age, ye women being eight and twenty, and do it then but once in seven

yeres.



Ye Queene.--How doth that like my little Lady Helen?  Shall we send thee

thither and preserve thy belly?



Lady Helen.--Please your highnesses grace, mine old nurse hath told me

there are more ways of serving God than by locking the thighs together;

yet am I willing to serve him yt way too, sith your highnesses grace hath

set ye ensample.



Ye Queene.--God' wowndes a good answer, childe.



Lady Alice.--Mayhap 'twill weaken when ye hair sprouts below ye navel.



Lady Helen.--Nay, it sprouted two yeres syne; I can scarce more than

cover it with my hand now.



Ye Queene.--Hear Ye that, my little Beaumonte?  Have ye not a little

birde about ye that stirs at hearing tell of so sweete a neste?



Beaumonte.--'Tis not insensible, illustrious madam; but mousing owls and

bats of low degree may not aspire to bliss so whelming and ecstatic as is

found in ye downy nests of birdes of Paradise.



Ye Queene.--By ye gullet of God, 'tis a neat-turned compliment.  With

such a tongue as thine, lad, thou'lt spread the ivory thighs of many a

willing maide in thy good time, an' thy cod-piece be as handy as thy

speeche.



Then spake ye queene of how she met old Rabelais when she was turned of

fifteen, and he did tell her of a man his father knew that had a double

pair of bollocks, whereon a controversy followed as concerning the most

just way to spell the word, ye contention running high betwixt ye learned

Bacon and ye ingenious Jonson, until at last ye old Lady Margery,

wearying of it all, saith, 'Gentles, what mattereth it how ye shall spell

the word?  I warrant Ye when ye use your bollocks ye shall not think of

it; and my Lady Granby, be ye content; let the spelling be, ye shall

enjoy the beating of them on your buttocks just the same, I trow.  Before

I had gained my fourteenth year I had learnt that them that would explore

a cunt stop'd not to consider the spelling o't.'



Sr W.--In sooth, when a shift's turned up, delay is meet for naught but

dalliance.  Boccaccio hath a story of a priest that did beguile a maid

into his cell, then knelt him in a corner to pray for grace to be rightly

thankful for this tender maidenhead ye Lord had sent him; but ye abbot,

spying through ye key-hole, did see a tuft of brownish hair with fair

white flesh about it, wherefore when ye priest's prayer was done, his

chance was gone, forasmuch as ye little maid had but ye one cunt, and

that was already occupied to her content.



Then conversed they of religion, and ye mightie work ye old dead Luther

did doe by ye grace of God.  Then next about poetry, and Master Shaxpur

did rede a part of his King Henry IV., ye which, it seemeth unto me,

is not of ye value of an arsefull of ashes, yet they praised it bravely,

one and all.



Ye same did rede a portion of his "Venus and Adonis," to their prodigious

admiration, whereas I, being sleepy and fatigued withal, did deme it but

paltry stuff, and was the more discomforted in that ye blody bucanier had

got his wind again, and did turn his mind to farting with such villain

zeal that presently I was like to choke once more.  God damn this windy

ruffian and all his breed.  I wolde that hell mighte get him.



They talked about ye wonderful defense which old Sr. Nicholas Throgmorton

did make for himself before ye judges in ye time of Mary; which was

unlucky matter to broach, sith it fetched out ye quene with a 'Pity yt

he, having so much wit, had yet not enough to save his doter's

maidenhedde sound for her marriage-bed.'  And ye quene did give ye damn'd

Sr. Walter a look yt made hym wince--for she hath not forgot he was her

own lover it yt olde day.  There was silent uncomfortableness now; 'twas

not a good turn for talk to take, sith if ye queene must find offense in

a little harmless debauching, when pricks were stiff and cunts not loathe

to take ye stiffness out of them, who of this company was sinless;

behold, was not ye wife of Master Shaxpur four months gone with child

when she stood uppe before ye altar?  Was not her Grace of Bilgewater

roger'd by four lords before she had a husband?  Was not ye little Lady

Helen born on her mother's wedding-day?  And, beholde, were not ye Lady

Alice and ye Lady Margery there, mouthing religion, whores from ye

cradle?



In time came they to discourse of Cervantes, and of the new painter,

Rubens, that is beginning to be heard of.  Fine words and dainty-wrought

phrases from the ladies now, one or two of them being, in other days,

pupils of that poor ass, Lille, himself; and I marked how that Jonson and

Shaxpur did fidget to discharge some venom of sarcasm, yet dared they not

in the presence, the queene's grace being ye very flower of ye Euphuists

herself.  But behold, these be they yt, having a specialty, and admiring

it in themselves, be jealous when a neighbor doth essaye it, nor can

abide it in them long.  Wherefore 'twas observable yt ye quene waxed

uncontent; and in time labor'd grandiose speeche out of ye mouth of Lady

Alice, who manifestly did mightily pride herself thereon, did quite

exhauste ye quene's endurance, who listened till ye gaudy speeche was

done, then lifted up her brows, and with vaste irony, mincing saith 'O

shit!' Whereat they alle did laffe, but not ye Lady Alice, yt olde

foolish bitche.



Now was Sr. Walter minded of a tale he once did hear ye ingenious

Margrette of Navarre relate, about a maid, which being like to suffer

rape by an olde archbishoppe, did smartly contrive a device to save her

maidenhedde, and said to him, First, my lord, I prithee, take out thy

holy tool and piss before me; which doing, lo his member felle, and would

not rise again.













                               FOOTNOTES

                              To Frivolity



The historical consistency of 1601 indicates that Twain must have given

the subject considerable thought.  The author was careful to speak only

of men who conceivably might have been in the Virgin Queen's closet and

engaged in discourse with her.





THE CHARACTERS



At this time (1601) Queen Elizabeth was 68 years old.  She speaks of

having talked to "old Rabelais" in her youth.  This might have been

possible as Rabelais died in 1552, when the Queen was 19 years old.



Among those in the party were Shakespeare, at that time 37 years old; Ben

Jonson, 27; and Sir Walter Raleigh, 49.  Beaumont at the time was 17, not

16.  He was admitted as a member of the Inner Temple in 1600, and his

first translations, those from Ovid, were first published in 1602.

Therefore, if one were holding strictly to the year date, neither by age

nor by fame would Beaumont have been eligible to attend such a gathering

of august personages in the year 1601; but the point is unimportant.





THE ELIZABETHAN WRITERS



In the Conversation Shakespeare speaks of Montaigne's Essays.  These were

first published in 1580 and successive editions were issued in the years

following, the third volume being published in 1588.  "In England

Montaigne was early popular.  It was long supposed that the autograph of

Shakespeare in a copy of Florio's translation showed his study of the

Essays.  The autograph has been disputed, but divers passages, and

especially one in The Tempest, show that at first or second hand the poet

was acquainted with the essayist." (Encyclopedia Brittanica.)



The company at the Queen's fireside discoursed of Lilly (or Lyly),

English dramatist and novelist of the Elizabethan era, whose novel,

Euphues, published in two parts, 'Euphues', or the 'Anatomy of Wit'

(1579) and 'Euphues and His England' (1580) was a literary sensation.

It is said to have influenced literary style for more than a quarter of a

century, and traces of its influence are found in Shakespeare.  (Columbia

Encyclopedia).



The introduction of Ben Jonson into the party was wholly appropriate,

if one may call to witness some of Jonson's writings.  The subject under

discussion was one that Jonson was acquainted with, in The Alchemist:





Act. I, Scene I,



FACE:  Believe't I will.



SUBTLE:  Thy worst.  I fart at thee.



DOL COMMON:  Have you your wits?  Why, gentlemen, for love----





Act. 2, Scene I,



SIR EPICURE MAMMON: ....and then my poets, the same that writ so subtly

of the fart, whom I shall entertain still for that subject and again in

Bartholomew Fair



NIGHTENGALE: (sings a ballad)

     Hear for your love, and buy for your money.

     A delicate ballad o' the ferret and the coney.

     A preservative again' the punk's evil.

     Another goose-green starch, and the devil.

     A dozen of divine points, and the godly garter

     The fairing of good counsel, of an ell and three-quarters.

     What is't you buy?

     The windmill blown down by the witche's fart,

     Or Saint George, that, O! did break the dragon's heart.





GOOD OLD ENGLISH CUSTOM



That certain types of English society have not changed materially in

their freedom toward breaking wind in public can be noticed in some

comparatively recent literature.  Frank Harris in My Life, Vol. 2,

Ch. XIII, tells of Lady Marriott, wife of a judge Advocate General,

being compelled to leave her own table, at which she was entertaining Sir

Robert Fowler, then the Lord Mayor of London, because of the suffocating

and nauseating odors there.  He also tells of an instance in parliament,

and of a rather brilliant bon mot spoken upon that occasion.



"While Fowler was speaking Finch-Hatton had shewn signs of restlessness;

towards the end of the speech he had moved some three yards away from the

Baronet.  As soon as Fowler sat down Finch-Hatton sprang up holding his

handkerchief to his nose:



"'Mr. Speaker,' he began, and was at once acknowledged by the Speaker,

for it was a maiden speech, and as such was entitled to precedence by the

courteous custom of the House, 'I know why the Right Honourable Member

from the City did not conclude his speech with a proposal.  The only way

to conclude such a speech appropriately would be with a motion!'"





AEOLIAN CREPITATIONS



But society had apparently degenerated sadly in modern times, and even in

the era of Elizabeth, for at an earlier date it was a serious--nay,

capital--offense to break wind in the presence of majesty.  The Emperor

Claudius, hearing that one who had suppressed the urge while paying him

court had suffered greatly thereby, "intended to issue an edict, allowing

to all people the liberty of giving vent at table to any distension

occasioned by flatulence:"



Martial, too (Book XII, Epigram LXXVII), tells of the embarrassment of

one who broke wind while praying in the Capitol,



"One day, while standing upright, addressing his prayers to Jupiter,

Aethon farted in the Capitol.  Men laughed, but the Father of the Gods,

offended, condemned the guilty one to dine at home for three nights.

Since that time, miserable Aethon, when he wishes to enter the Capitol,

goes first to Paterclius' privies and farts ten or twenty times.  Yet, in

spite of this precautionary crepitation, he salutes Jove with constricted

buttocks."  Martial also (Book IV, Epigram LXXX), ridicules a woman who

was subject to the habit, saying,



"Your Bassa, Fabullus, has always a child at her side, calling it her

darling and her plaything; and yet--more wonder--she does not care for

children.  What is the reason then.  Bassa is apt to fart.  (For which

she could blame the unsuspecting infant.)"



The tale is told, too, of a certain woman who performed an aeolian

crepitation at a dinner attended by the witty Monsignieur Dupanloup,

Bishop of Orleans, and that when, to cover up her lapse, she began to

scrape her feet upon the floor, and to make similar noises, the Bishop

said, "Do not trouble to find a rhyme, Madam!"



Nay, worthier names than those of any yet mentioned have discussed the

matter.  Herodotus tells of one such which was the precursor to the fall

of an empire and a change of dynasty--that which Amasis discharges while

on horseback, and bids the envoy of Apries, King of Egypt, catch and

deliver to his royal master.  Even the exact manner and posture of

Amasis, author of this insult, is described.



St. Augustine (The City of God, XIV:24) cites the instance of a man who

could command his rear trumpet to sound at will, which his learned

commentator fortifies with the example of one who could do so in tune!



Benjamin Franklin, in his "Letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels" has

canvassed suggested remedies for alleviating the stench attendant upon

these discharges:



"My Prize Question therefore should be:  To discover some Drug, wholesome

and--not disagreeable, to be mixed with our common food, or sauces, that

shall render the natural discharges of Wind from our Bodies not only

inoffensive, but agreeable as Perfumes.



"That this is not a Chimerical Project & altogether impossible, may

appear from these considerations.  That we already have some knowledge of

means capable of varying that smell.  He that dines on stale Flesh,

especially with much Addition of Orions, shall be able to afford a stink

that no Company can tolerate; while he that has lived for some time on

Vegetables only, shall have that Breath so pure as to be insensible of

the most delicate Noses; and if he can manage so as to avoid the Report,

he may anywhere give vent to his Griefs, unnoticed.  But as there are

many to whom an entire Vegetable Diet would be inconvenient, & as a

little quick Lime thrown into a Jakes will correct the amazing Quantity

of fetid Air arising from the vast Mass of putrid Matter contained in

such Places, and render it pleasing to the Smell, who knows but that a

little Powder of Lime (or some other equivalent) taken in our Food, or

perhaps a Glass of Lime Water drank at Dinner, may have the same Effect

on the Air produced in and issuing from our Bowels?"



One curious commentary on the text is that Elizabeth should be so fond of

investigating into the authorship of the exhalation in question, when she

was inordinately fond of strong and sweet perfumes; in fact, she was

responsible for the tremendous increase in importations of scents into

England during her reign.





"YE BOKE OF YE SIEUR MICHAEL DE MONTAINE"



There is a curious admixture of error and misunderstanding in this part

of the sketch.  In the first place, the story is borrowed from Montaigne,

where it is told inaccurately, and then further corrupted in the telling.



It was not the good widows of Perigord who wore the phallus upon their

coifs; it was the young married women, of the district near Montaigne's

home, who paraded it to view upon their foreheads, as a symbol, says our

essayist, "of the joy they derived therefrom." If they became widows,

they reversed its position, and covered it up with the rest of their

head-dress.



The "emperor" mentioned was not an emperor; he was Procolus, a native of

Albengue, on the Genoese coast, who, with Bonosus, led the unsuccessful

rebellion in Gaul against Emperor Probus.  Even so keen a commentator as

Cotton has failed to note the error.



The empress (Montaigne does not say "his empress") was Messalina, third

wife of the Emperor Claudius, who was uncle of Caligula and foster-father

to Nero.  Furthermore, in her case the charge is that she copulated with

twenty-five in a single night, and not twenty-two, as appears in the

text.  Montaigne is right in his statistics, if original sources are

correct, whereas the author erred in transcribing the incident.



As for Proculus, it has been noted that he was associated with Bonosus,

who was as renowned in the field of Bacchus as was Proculus in that of

Venus (Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire).  The feat of

Proculus is told in his own words, in Vopiscus, (Hist. Augustine, p. 246)

where he recounts having captured one hundred Sarmatian virgins, and

unmaidened ten of them in one night, together with the happenings

subsequent thereto.



Concerning Messalina, there appears to be no question but that she was a

nymphomaniac, and that, while Empress of Rome, she participated in some

fearful debaucheries.  The question is what to believe, for much that we

have heard about her is almost certainly apocryphal.



The author from whom Montaigne took his facts is the elder Pliny, who,

in his Natural History, Book X, Chapter 83, says, "Other animals become

sated with veneral pleasures; man hardly knows any satiety.  Messalina,

the wife of Claudius Caesar, thinking this a palm quite worthy of an

empress, selected for the purpose of deciding the question, one of the

most notorious women who followed the profession of a hired prostitute;

and the empress outdid her, after continuous intercourse, night and day,

at the twenty-fifth embrace."



But Pliny, notwithstanding his great attainments, was often a retailer of

stale gossip, and in like case was Aurelius Victor, another writer who

heaped much odium on her name.  Again, there is a great hiatus in the

Annals of Tacitus, a true historian, at the period covering the earlier

days of the Empress; while Suetonius, bitter as he may be, is little more

than an anecdotist.  Juvenal, another of her detractors, is a prejudiced

witness, for he started out to satirize female vice, and naturally aimed

at high places.  Dio also tells of Messalina's misdeeds, but his work is

under the same limitations as that of Suetonius.  Furthermore, none but

Pliny mentions the excess under consideration.



However, "where there is much smoke there must be a little fire," and

based upon the superimposed testimony of the writers of the period, there

appears little doubt but that Messalina was a nymphomaniac, that she

prostituted herself in the public stews, naked, and with gilded nipples,

and that she did actually marry her chief adulterer, Silius, while

Claudius was absent at Ostia, and that the wedding was consummated in the

presence of a concourse of witnesses.  This was "the straw that broke the

camel's back."  Claudius hastened back to Rome, Silius was dispatched,

and Messalina, lacking the will-power to destroy herself, was killed when

an officer ran a sword through her abdomen, just as it appeared that

Claudius was about to relent.





"THEN SPAKE YE DAMNED WINDMILL, SIR WALTER"



Raleigh is thoroughly in character here; this observation is quite in

keeping with the general veracity of his account of his travels in

Guiana, one of the most mendacious accounts of adventure ever told.

Naturally, the scholarly researches of Westermarck have failed to

discover this people; perhaps Lady Helen might best be protected among

the Jibaros of Ecuador, where the men marry when approaching forty.



Ben Jonson in his Conversations observed "That Sr. W. Raughlye esteemed

more of fame than of conscience."





YE VIRGIN QUEENE



Grave historians have debated for centuries the pretensions of Elizabeth

to the title, "The Virgin Queen," and it is utterly impossible to dispose

of the issue in a note.  However, the weight of opinion appears to be in

the negative.  Many and great were the difficulties attending the

marriage of a Protestant princess in those troublous times, and Elizabeth

finally announced that she would become wedded to the English nation,

and she wore a ring in token thereof until her death.  However, more or

less open liaisons with Essex and Leicester, as well as a host of lesser

courtiers, her ardent temperament, and her imperious temper, are

indications that cannot be denied in determining any estimate upon the

point in question.



Ben Jonson in his Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden

says,



"Queen Elizabeth never saw herself after she became old in a true glass;

they painted her, and sometymes would vermillion her nose.  She had

allwayes about Christmass evens set dice that threw sixes or five, and

she knew not they were other, to make her win and esteame herself

fortunate.  That she had a membrana on her, which made her uncapable of

man, though for her delight she tried many.  At the comming over of

Monsieur, there was a French Chirurgion who took in hand to cut it, yett

fear stayed her, and his death."



It was a subject which again intrigued Clemens when he was abroad with

W. H. Fisher, whom Mark employed to "nose up" everything pertaining to

Queen Elizabeth's manly character.





"'BOCCACCIO HATH A STORY"



The author does not pay any great compliment to Raleigh's memory here.

There is no such tale in all Boccaccio.  The nearest related incident

forms the subject matter of Dineo's novel (the fourth) of the First day

of the Decameron.





OLD SR. NICHOLAS THROGMORTON



The incident referred to appears to be Sir Nicholas Throgmorton's trial

for complicity in the attempt to make Lady Jane Grey Queen of England,

a charge of which he was acquitted.  This so angered Queen Mary that she

imprisoned him in the Tower, and fined the jurors from one to two

thousand pounds each.  Her action terrified succeeding juries, so that

Sir Nicholas's brother was condemned on no stronger evidence than that

which had failed to prevail before.  While Sir Nicholas's defense may

have been brilliant, it must be admitted that the evidence was weak.

He was later released from the Tower, and under Elizabeth was one of a

group of commissioners sent by that princess into Scotland, to foment

trouble with Mary, Queen of Scots.  When the attempt became known,

Elizabeth repudiated the acts of her agents, but Sir Nicholas, having

anticipated this possibility, had sufficient foresight to secure

endorsement of his plan by the Council, and so outwitted Elizabeth, who

was playing a two-faced role, and Cecil, one of the greatest statesmen

who ever held the post of principal minister.  Perhaps it was this

incident to which the company referred, which might in part explain

Elizabeth's rejoinder.  However, he had been restored to confidence ere

this, and had served as ambassador to France.





"TO SAVE HIS DOTER'S MAIDENHEDDE"



Elizabeth Throckmorton (or Throgmorton), daughter of Sir Nicholas, was

one of Elizabeth's maids of honor.  When it was learned that she had been

debauched by Raleigh, Sir Walter was recalled from his command at sea by

the Queen, and compelled to marry the girl.  This was not "in that olde

daie," as the text has it, for it happened only eight years before the

date of this purported "conversation," when Elizabeth was sixty years

old.













PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY



The various printings of 1601 reveal how Mark Twain's 'Fireside

Conversation' has become a part of the American printer's lore.  But more

important, its many printings indicate that it has become a popular bit

of American folklore, particularly for men and women who have a feeling

for Mark Twain.  Apparently it appeals to the typographer, who devotes to

it his worthy art, as well as to the job printer, who may pull a crudely

printed proof.  The gay procession of curious printings of 1601 is unique

in the history of American printing.



Indeed, the story of the various printings of 1601 is almost legendary.

In the days of the "jour." printer, so I am told, well-thumbed copies

were carried from print shop to print shop.  For more than a quarter

century now it has been one of the chief sources of enjoyment for

printers' devils; and many a young rascal has learned about life from

this Fireside Conversation.  It has been printed all over the country,

and if report is to be believed, in foreign countries as well.  Because

of the many surreptitious and anonymous printings it is exceedingly

difficult, if not impossible, to compile a complete bibliography.  Many

printings lack the name of the publisher, the printer, the place or date

of printing.  In many instances some of the data, through the patient

questioning of fellow collectors, has been obtained and supplied.





1.  [Date, 1601.] Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the

Time of the Tudors.



DESCRIPTION: Pamphlet, pp. [ 1 ]-8, without wrappers or cover, measuring

7x8 inches.  The title is Set in caps. and small caps.



The excessively rare first printing, printed in Cleveland, 1880, at the

instance of Alexander Gunn, friend of John Hay.  Only four copies are

believed to have been printed, of which, it is said now, the only known

copy is located in the Willard S. Morse collection.





2.  Date 1601.  Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the

time of the Tudors.



(Mem.--The following is supposed to be an extract from the diary of the

Pepys of that day, the same being cup-bearer to Queen Elizabeth.  It is

supposed that he is of ancient and noble lineage; that he despises these

literary canaille; that his soul consumes with wrath to see the Queen

stooping to talk with such; and that the old man feels his nobility

defiled by contact with Shakespeare, etc., and yet he has got to stay

there till Her Majesty chooses to dismiss him.)



DESCRIPTION: Title as above, verso blank; pp. [i]-xi, text; verso p. xi

blank.  About 8 x 10 inches, printed on handmade linen paper soaked in

weak coffee, wrappers.  The title is set in caps and small caps.



COLOPHON: at the foot of p. xi: Done Att Ye Academie Preffe; M DCCC LXXX

II.



The privately printed West Point edition, the first printing of the text

authorized by Mark Twain, of which but fifty copies were printed.  The

story of this printing is fully told in the Introduction.





3.  Conversation As It Was By The Social Fire-side In The Time Of The

Tudors from Ye Diary of Ye Cupbearer to her Maisty Queen Elizabeth.

[design] Imprinted by Ye Puritan Press At Ye Sign of Ye Jolly Virgin

1601.



DESCRIPTION: 2 blank leaves; p. [i] blank, p. [ii] fronds., p. [iii]

title [as above], p. [iv] "Mem.", pp. 1-[25] text, I blank leaf.  4 3/4

by 6 1/4 inches, printed in a modern version of the Caxton black letter

type, on M.B.M.  French handmade paper.  The frontispiece, a woodcut by

A. E. Curtis, is a portrait of the cup-bearer.  Bound in buff-grey

boards, buckram back.  Cover title reads, in pale red ink, Caxton type,

Conversation As It Was By The Social Fire-side In The Time Of The Tudors.

[The Byway Press, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1901, 120 copies.]



Probably the first published edition.



Later, in 1916, a facsimile edition of this printing was published in

Chicago from plates.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of 1601

by Mark Twain













CARNIVAL OF CRIME IN CT.



by Mark Twain







THE FACTS CONCERNING THE RECENT CARNIVAL OF CRIME IN CONNECTICUT



I was feeling blithe, almost jocund.  I put a match to my cigar, and just

then the morning's mail was handed in.  The first superscription I

glanced at was in a handwriting that sent a thrill of pleasure through

and through me.  It was Aunt Mary's; and she was the person I loved and

honored most in all the world, outside of my own household.  She had been

my boyhood's idol; maturity, which is fatal to so many enchantments, had

not been able to dislodge her from her pedestal; no, it had only

justified her right to be there, and placed her dethronement permanently

among the impossibilities.  To show how strong her influence over me was,

I will observe that long after everybody else's "do-stop-smoking" had

ceased to affect me in the slightest degree, Aunt Mary could still stir

my torpid conscience into faint signs of life when she touched upon the

matter.  But all things have their limit in this world.  A happy day came

at last, when even Aunt Mary's words could no longer move me.  I was not

merely glad to see that day arrive; I was more than glad--I was grateful;

for when its sun had set, the one alloy that was able to mar my enjoyment

of my aunt's society was gone.  The remainder of her stay with us that

winter was in every way a delight.  Of course she pleaded with me just as

earnestly as ever, after that blessed day, to quit my pernicious habit,

but to no purpose whatever; the moment she opened the subject I at once

became calmly, peacefully, contentedly indifferent--absolutely,

adamantinely indifferent.  Consequently the closing weeks of that

memorable visit melted away as pleasantly as a dream, they were so

freighted for me with tranquil satisfaction.  I could not have enjoyed my

pet vice more if my gentle tormentor had been a smoker herself, and an

advocate of the practice.  Well, the sight of her handwriting reminded me

that I way getting very hungry to see her again.  I easily guessed what I

should find in her letter.  I opened it.  Good! just as I expected; she

was coming!  Coming this very day, too, and by the morning train; I might

expect her any moment.



I said to myself, "I am thoroughly happy and content now.  If my most

pitiless enemy could appear before me at this moment, I would freely

right any wrong I may have done him."



Straightway the door opened, and a shriveled, shabby dwarf entered.  He

was not more than two feet high.  He seemed to be about forty years old.

Every feature and every inch of him was a trifle out of shape; and so,

while one could not put his finger upon any particular part and say,

"This is a conspicuous deformity," the spectator perceived that this

little person was a deformity as a whole--a vague, general, evenly

blended, nicely adjusted deformity.  There was a fox-like cunning in the

face and the sharp little eyes, and also alertness and malice.  And yet,

this vile bit of human rubbish seemed to bear a sort of remote and

ill-defined resemblance to me!  It was dully perceptible in the mean

form, the countenance, and even the clothes, gestures, manner, and

attitudes of the creature.  He was a farfetched, dim suggestion of a

burlesque upon me, a caricature of me in little.  One thing about him

struck me forcibly and most unpleasantly: he was covered all over with a

fuzzy, greenish mold, such as one sometimes sees upon mildewed bread.

The sight of it was nauseating.



He stepped along with a chipper air, and flung himself into a doll's

chair in a very free-and-easy way, without waiting to be asked.  He

tossed his hat into the waste-basket.  He picked up my old chalk pipe

from the floor, gave the stem a wipe or two on his knee, filled the bowl

from the tobacco-box at his side, and said to me in a tone of pert

command:



"Gimme a match!"



I blushed to the roots of my hair; partly with indignation, but mainly

because it somehow seemed to me that this whole performance was very like

an exaggeration of conduct which I myself had sometimes been guilty of in

my intercourse with familiar friends--but never, never with strangers, I

observed to myself.  I wanted to kick the pygmy into the fire, but some

incomprehensible sense of being legally and legitimately under his

authority forced me to obey his order.  He applied the match to the pipe,

took a contemplative whiff or two, and remarked, in an irritatingly

familiar way:



"Seems to me it's devilish odd weather for this time of year."



I flushed again, and in anger and humiliation as before; for the language

was hardly an exaggeration of some that I have uttered in my day, and

moreover was delivered in a tone of voice and with an exasperating drawl

that had the seeming of a deliberate travesty of my style.  Now there is

nothing I am quite so sensitive about as a mocking imitation of my

drawling infirmity of speech.  I spoke up sharply and said:



"Look here, you miserable ash-cat!  you will have to give a little more

attention to your manners, or I will throw you out of the window!"



The manikin smiled a smile of malicious content and security, puffed a

whiff of smoke contemptuously toward me, and said, with a still more

elaborate drawl:



"Come--go gently now; don't put on too many airs with your betters."



This cool snub rasped me all over, but it seemed to subjugate me, too,

for a moment.  The pygmy contemplated me awhile with his weasel eyes,

and then said, in a peculiarly sneering way:



"You turned a tramp away from your door this morning."



I said crustily:



"Perhaps I did, perhaps I didn't.  How do you know?"



"Well, I know.  It isn't any matter how I know."



"Very well.  Suppose I did turn a tramp away from the door--what of it?"



"Oh, nothing; nothing in particular.  Only you lied to him."



"I didn't! That is, I--"



"Yes, but you did; you lied to him."



I felt a guilty pang--in truth, I had felt it forty times before that

tramp had traveled a block from my door--but still I resolved to make a

show of feeling slandered; so I said:



"This is a baseless impertinence.  I said to the tramp--"



"There--wait.  You were about to lie again.  I know what you said to him.

You said the cook was gone down-town and there was nothing left from

breakfast.  Two lies.  You knew the cook was behind the door, and plenty

of provisions behind her."



This astonishing accuracy silenced me; and it filled me with wondering

speculations, too, as to how this cub could have got his information.

Of course he could have culled the conversation from the tramp, but by

what sort of magic had he contrived to find out about the concealed cook?

Now the dwarf spoke again:



"It was rather pitiful, rather small, in you to refuse to read that poor

young woman's manuscript the other day, and give her an opinion as to its

literary value; and she had come so far, too, and so hopefully.  Now

wasn't it?"



I felt like a cur!  And I had felt so every time the thing had recurred

to my mind, I may as well confess.  I flushed hotly and said:



"Look here, have you nothing better to do than prowl around prying into

other people's business?   Did that girl tell you that?"



"Never mind whether she did or not.  The main thing is, you did that

contemptible thing.  And you felt ashamed of it afterward.  Aha! you feel

ashamed of it now!"



This was a sort of devilish glee.  With fiery earnestness I responded:



"I told that girl, in the kindest, gentlest way, that I could not consent

to deliver judgment upon any one's manuscript, because an individual's

verdict was worthless.  It might underrate a work of high merit and lose

it to the world, or it might overrate a trashy production and so open the

way for its infliction upon the world: I said that the great public was

the only tribunal competent to sit in judgment upon a literary effort,

and therefore it must be best to lay it before that tribunal in the

outset, since in the end it must stand or fall by that mighty court's

decision anyway."



"Yes, you said all that.  So you did, you juggling, small-souled

shuffler!  And yet when the happy hopefulness faded out of that poor

girl's face, when you saw her furtively slip beneath her shawl the scroll

she had so patiently and honestly scribbled at--so ashamed of her darling

now, so proud of it before--when you saw the gladness go out of her eyes

and the tears come there, when she crept away so humbly who had come

so--"



"Oh, peace!  peace! peace!  Blister your merciless tongue, haven't all

these thoughts tortured me enough without your coming here to fetch them

back again!"



Remorse! remorse!  It seemed to me that it would eat the very heart out

of me!  And yet that small fiend only sat there leering at me with joy

and contempt, and placidly chuckling.  Presently he began to speak again.

Every sentence was an accusation, and every accusation a truth.  Every

clause was freighted with sarcasm and derision, every slow-dropping word

burned like vitriol.  The dwarf reminded me of times when I had flown at

my children in anger and punished them for faults which a little inquiry

would have taught me that others, and not they, had committed.

He reminded me of how I had disloyally allowed old friends to be traduced

in my hearing, and been too craven to utter a word in their defense.

He reminded me of many dishonest things which I had done; of many which I

had procured to be done by children and other irresponsible persons; of

some which I had planned, thought upon, and longed to do, and been kept

from the performance by fear of consequences only.  With exquisite

cruelty he recalled to my mind, item by item, wrongs and unkindnesses I

had inflicted and humiliations I had put upon friends since dead, "who

died thinking of those injuries, maybe, and grieving over them," he

added, by way of poison to the stab.



"For instance," said he, "take the case of your younger brother, when you

two were boys together, many a long year ago.  He always lovingly trusted

in you with a fidelity that your manifold treacheries were not able to

shake.  He followed you about like a dog, content to suffer wrong and

abuse if he might only be with you; patient under these injuries so long

as it was your hand that inflicted them.  The latest picture you have of

him in health and strength must be such a comfort to you!  You pledged

your honor that if he would let you blindfold him no harm should come to

him; and then, giggling and choking over the rare fun of the joke, you

led him to a brook thinly glazed with ice, and pushed him in; and how you

did laugh!  Man, you will never forget the gentle, reproachful look he

gave you as he struggled shivering out, if you live a thousand years!

Oh! you see it now, you see it now!"



"Beast, I have seen it a million times, and shall see it a million more!

and may you rot away piecemeal, and suffer till doomsday what I suffer

now, for bringing it back to me again!"



The dwarf chuckled contentedly, and went on with his accusing history of

my career.  I dropped into a moody, vengeful state, and suffered in

silence under the merciless lash.  At last this remark of his gave me a

sudden rouse:



"Two months ago, on a Tuesday, you woke up, away in the night, and fell

to thinking, with shame, about a peculiarly mean and pitiful act of yours

toward a poor ignorant Indian in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains in the

winter of eighteen hundred and--"



"Stop a moment, devil!  Stop!  Do you mean to tell me that even my very

thoughts are not hidden from you?"



"It seems to look like that.  Didn't you think the thoughts I have just

mentioned?"



"If I didn't, I wish I may never breathe again!  Look here, friend--look

me in the eye.  Who are you?"



"Well, who do you think?"



"I think you are Satan himself.  I think you are the devil."



"No."



"No?  Then who can you be?"



"Would you really like to know?"



"Indeed I would."



"Well, I am your Conscience!"



In an instant I was in a blaze of joy and exultation.  I sprang at the

creature, roaring:



"Curse you, I have wished a hundred million times that you were tangible,

and that I could get my hands on your throat once!  Oh, but I will wreak

a deadly vengeance on--"



Folly!  Lightning does not move more quickly than my Conscience did!

He darted aloft so suddenly that in the moment my fingers clutched the

empty air he was already perched on the top of the high bookcase, with

his thumb at his nose in token of derision.  I flung the poker at him,

and missed.  I fired the bootjack.  In a blind rage I flew from place to

place, and snatched and hurled any missile that came handy; the storm of

books, inkstands, and chunks of coal gloomed the air and beat about the

manikin's perch relentlessly, but all to no purpose; the nimble figure

dodged every shot; and not only that, but burst into a cackle of

sarcastic and triumphant laughter as I sat down exhausted.  While I

puffed and gasped with fatigue and excitement, my Conscience talked to

this effect:



"My good slave, you are curiously witless--no, I mean characteristically

so.  In truth, you are always consistent, always yourself, always an ass.

Other wise it must have occurred to you that if you attempted this murder

with a sad heart and a heavy conscience, I would droop under the

burdening in influence instantly.  Fool, I should have weighed a ton, and

could not have budged from the floor; but instead, you are so cheerfully

anxious to kill me that your conscience is as light as a feather; hence I

am away up here out of your reach.  I can almost respect a mere ordinary

sort of fool; but you pah!"



I would have given anything, then, to be heavyhearted, so that I could

get this person down from there and take his life, but I could no more be

heavy-hearted over such a desire than I could have sorrowed over its

accomplishment.  So I could only look longingly up at my master, and rave

at the ill luck that denied me a heavy conscience the one only time that

I had ever wanted such a thing in my life.  By and by I got to musing

over the hour's strange adventure, and of course my human curiosity began

to work.  I set myself to framing in my mind some questions for this

fiend to answer.  Just then one of my boys entered, leaving the door open

behind him, and exclaimed:



"My!  what has been going on here?  The bookcase is all one riddle of--"



I sprang up in consternation, and shouted:



"Out of this!  Hurry!  jump!  Fly!  Shut the door!  Quick, or my

Conscience will get away!"



The door slammed to, and I locked it.  I glanced up and was grateful, to

the bottom of my heart, to see that my owner was still my prisoner.  I

said:



"Hang you, I might have lost you!  Children are the heedlessest

creatures.  But look here, friend, the boy did not seem to notice you at

all; how is that?"



"For a very good reason.  I am invisible to all but you."



I made a mental note of that piece of information with a good deal of

satisfaction.  I could kill this miscreant now, if I got a chance, and no

one would know it.  But this very reflection made me so lighthearted that

my Conscience could hardly keep his seat, but was like to float aloft

toward the ceiling like a toy balloon.  I said, presently:



"Come, my Conscience, let us be friendly.  Let us fly a flag of truce for

a while.  I am suffering to ask you some questions."



"Very well.  Begin."



"Well, then, in the first place, why were you never visible to me

before?"



"Because you never asked to see me before; that is, you never asked in

the right spirit and the proper form before.  You were just in the right

spirit this time, and when you called for your most pitiless enemy I was

that person by a very large majority, though you did not suspect it."



"Well, did that remark of mine turn you into flesh and blood?"



"No.  It only made me visible to you.  I am unsubstantial, just as other

spirits are."



This remark prodded me with a sharp misgiving.



If he was unsubstantial, how was I going to kill him?  But I dissembled,

and said persuasively:



"Conscience, it isn't sociable of you to keep at such a distance.  Come

down and take another smoke."



This was answered with a look that was full of derision, and with this

observation added:



"Come where you can get at me and kill me?  The invitation is declined

with thanks."



"All right," said I to myself; "so it seems a spirit can be killed, after

all; there will be one spirit lacking in this world, presently, or I lose

my guess."  Then I said aloud:



"Friend--"



"There; wait a bit.  I am not your friend.  I am your enemy; I am not

your equal, I am your master, Call me 'my lord,' if you please.  You are

too familiar."



"I don't like such titles.  I am willing to call you, sir.  That is as

far as--"



"We will have no argument about this.  Just obey, that is all.  Go on

with your chatter."



"Very well, my lord--since nothing but my lord will suit you--I was going

to ask you how long you will be visible to me?"



"Always!"



I broke out with strong indignation: "This is simply an outrage.  That is

what I think of it!  You have dogged, and dogged, and dogged me, all the

days of my life, invisible.  That was misery enough, now to have such a

looking thing as you tagging after me like another shadow all the rest of

my day is an intolerable prospect.  You have my opinion my lord, make the

most of it."



"My lad, there was never so pleased a conscience in this world as I was

when you made me visible.  It gives me an inconceivable advantage.  Now I

can look you straight in the eye, and call you names, and leer at you,

jeer at you, sneer at you; and you know what eloquence there is in

visible gesture and expression, more especially when the effect is

heightened by audible speech.  I shall always address you henceforth in

your o-w-n  s-n-i-v-e-l-i-n-g  d-r-a-w-l--baby!"



I let fly with the coal-hod.  No result.  My lord said:



"Come, come!  Remember the flag of truce!"



"Ah, I forgot that.  I will try to be civil; and you try it, too, for a

novelty.  The idea of a civil conscience!  It is a good joke; an

excellent joke.  All the consciences I have ever heard of were nagging,

badgering, fault-finding, execrable savages!  Yes; and always in a sweat

about some poor little insignificant trifle or other--destruction catch

the lot of them, I say!  I would trade mine for the smallpox and seven

kinds of consumption, and be glad of the chance.  Now tell me, why is it

that a conscience can't haul a man over the coals once, for an offense,

and then let him alone?  Why is it that it wants to keep on pegging at

him, day and night and night and day, week in and week out, forever and

ever, about the same old thing?  There is no sense in that, and no reason

in it.  I think a conscience that will act like that is meaner than the

very dirt itself."



"Well, WE like it; that suffices."



"Do you do it with the honest intent to improve a man?"



That question produced a sarcastic smile, and this reply:



"No, sir.  Excuse me.  We do it simply because it is 'business.'  It is

our trade.  The purpose of it is to improve the man, but we are merely

disinterested agents.  We are appointed by authority, and haven't

anything to say in the matter.  We obey orders and leave the consequences

where they belong.  But I am willing to admit this much: we do crowd the

orders a trifle when we get a chance, which is most of the time.

We enjoy it.  We are instructed to remind a man a few times of an error;

and I don't mind acknowledging that we try to give pretty good measure.

And when we get hold of a man of a peculiarly sensitive nature, oh, but

we do haze him!  I have consciences to come all the way from China and

Russia to see a person of that kind put through his paces, on a special

occasion.  Why, I knew a man of that sort who had accidentally crippled a

mulatto baby; the news went abroad, and I wish you may never commit

another sin if the consciences didn't flock from all over the earth to

enjoy the fun and help his master exorcise him.  That man walked the

floor in torture for forty-eight hours, without eating or sleeping, and

then blew his brains out.  The child was perfectly well again in three

weeks."



"Well, you are a precious crew, not to put it too strong.  I think I

begin to see now why you have always been a trifle inconsistent with me.

In your anxiety to get all the juice you can out of a sin, you make a man

repent of it in three or four different ways.  For instance, you found

fault with me for lying to that tramp, and I suffered over that.  But it

was only yesterday that I told a tramp the square truth, to wit, that,

it being regarded as bad citizenship to encourage vagrancy, I would give

him nothing.  What did you do then: Why, you made me say to myself, 'Ah,

it would have been so much kinder and more blameless to ease him off with

a little white lie, and send him away feeling that if he could not have

bread, the gentle treatment was at least something to be grateful for!'

Well, I suffered all day about that.  Three days before I had fed a

tramp, and fed him freely, supposing it a virtuous act.  Straight off you

said, 'Oh, false citizen, to have fed a tramp!' and I suffered as usual.

I gave a tramp work; you objected to it--after the contract was made,

of course; you never speak up beforehand.  Next, I refused a tramp work;

you objected to that.  Next, I proposed to kill a tramp; you kept me

awake all night, oozing remorse at every pore.  Sure I was going to be

right this time, I sent the next tramp away with my benediction; and I

wish you may live as long as I do, if you didn't make me smart all night

again because I didn't kill him.  Is there any way of satisfying that

malignant invention which is called a conscience?"



"Ha, ha! this is luxury!  Go on!"



"But come, now, answer me that question.  Is there any way?"



"Well, none that I propose to tell you, my son.  Ass!  I don't care what

act you may turn your hand to, I can straightway whisper a word in your

ear and make you think you have committed a dreadful meanness.  It is my

business--and my joy--to make you repent of everything you do.  If I have

fooled away any opportunities it was not intentional; I beg to assure you

it was not intentional!"



"Don't worry; you haven't missed a trick that I know of.  I never did a

thing in all my life, virtuous or otherwise, that I didn't repent of in

twenty-four hours.  In church last Sunday I listened to a charity sermon.

My first impulse was to give three hundred and fifty dollars; I repented

of that and reduced it a hundred; repented of that and reduced it another

hundred; repented of that and reduced it another hundred; repented of

that and reduced the remaining fifty to twenty-five; repented of that and

came down to fifteen; repented of that and dropped to two dollars and a

half; when the plate came around at last, I repented once more and

contributed ten cents.  Well, when I got home, I did wish to goodness I

had that ten cents back again!  You never did let me get through a

charity sermon without having something to sweat about."



"Oh, and I never shall, I never shall.  You can always depend on me."



"I think so.  Many and many's the restless night I've wanted to take you

by the neck.  If I could only get hold of you now!"



"Yes, no doubt.  But I am not an ass; I am only the saddle of an ass.

But go on, go on.  You entertain me more than I like to confess."



I am glad of that.  (You will not mind my lying a little, to keep in

practice.)  Look here; not to be too personal, I think you are about the

shabbiest and most contemptible little shriveled-up reptile that can be

imagined.  I am grateful enough that you are invisible to other people,

for I should die with shame to be seen with such a mildewed monkey of a

conscience as you are.  Now if you were five or six feet high, and--"



"Oh, come! who is to blame?"



"I don't know."



"Why, you are; nobody else."



"Confound you, I wasn't consulted about your personal appearance."



"I don't care, you had a good deal to do with it, nevertheless.  When you

were eight or nine years old, I was seven feet high, and as pretty as a

picture."



"I wish you had died young!  So you have grown the wrong way, have you?"



"Some of us grow one way and some the other.  You had a large conscience

once; if you've a small conscience now I reckon there are reasons for it.

However, both of us are to blame, you and I.  You see, you used to be

conscientious about a great many things; morbidly so, I may say.  It was

a great many years ago.  You probably do not remember it now.  Well,

I took a great interest in my work, and I so enjoyed the anguish which

certain pet sins of yours afflicted you with that I kept pelting at you

until I rather overdid the matter.  You began to rebel.  Of course I

began to lose ground, then, and shrivel a little--diminish in stature,

get moldy, and grow deformed.  The more I weakened, the more stubbornly

you fastened on to those particular sins; till at last the places on my

person that represent those vices became as callous as shark-skin.  Take

smoking, for instance.  I played that card a little too long, and I lost.

When people plead with you at this late day to quit that vice, that old

callous place seems to enlarge and cover me all over like a shirt of

mail.  It exerts a mysterious, smothering effect; and presently I, your

faithful hater, your devoted Conscience, go sound asleep!  Sound?  It is

no name for it.  I couldn't hear it thunder at such a time.  You have

some few other vices--perhaps eighty, or maybe ninety--that affect me in

much the same way."



"This is flattering; you must be asleep a good part of your time."



"Yes, of late years.  I should be asleep all the time but for the help I

get."



"Who helps you?"



"Other consciences.  Whenever a person whose conscience I am acquainted

with tries to plead with you about the vices you are callous to, I get my

friend to give his client a pang concerning some villainy of his own,

and that shuts off his meddling and starts him off to hunt personal

consolation.  My field of usefulness is about trimmed down to tramps,

budding authoresses, and that line of goods now; but don't you worry

--I'll harry you on theirs while they last!  Just you put your trust in

me."



"I think I can.  But if you had only been good enough to mention these

facts some thirty years ago, I should have turned my particular attention

to sin, and I think that by this time I should not only have had you

pretty permanently asleep on the entire list of human vices, but reduced

to the size of a homeopathic pill, at that.  That is about the style of

conscience I am pining for.  If I only had you shrunk you down to a

homeopathic pill, and could get my hands on you, would I put you in a

glass case for a keepsake?  No, sir.  I would give you to a yellow dog!

That is where you ought to be--you and all your tribe.  You are not fit

to be in society, in my opinion.  Now another question.  Do you know a

good many consciences in this section?"



"Plenty of them."



"I would give anything to see some of them!  Could you bring them here?

And would they be visible to me?"



"Certainly not."



"I suppose I ought to have known that without asking.  But no matter, you

can describe them.  Tell me about my neighbor Thompson's conscience,

please."



"Very well.  I know him intimately; have known him many years.  I knew

him when he was eleven feet high and of a faultless figure.  But he is

very pasty and tough and misshapen now, and hardly ever interests himself

about anything.  As to his present size--well, he sleeps in a cigar-box."



"Likely enough.  There are few smaller, meaner men in this region than

Hugh Thompson.  Do you know Robinson's conscience?"



"Yes.  He is a shade under four and a half feet high; used to be a blond;

is a brunette now, but still shapely and comely."



"Well, Robinson is a good fellow.  Do you know Tom Smith's conscience?"



"I have known him from childhood.  He was thirteen inches high, and

rather sluggish, when he was two years old--as nearly all of us are at

that age.  He is thirty-seven feet high now, and the stateliest figure in

America.  His legs are still racked with growing-pains, but he has a good

time, nevertheless.  Never sleeps.  He is the most active and energetic

member of the New England Conscience Club; is president of it.  Night and

day you can find him pegging away at Smith, panting with his labor,

sleeves rolled up, countenance all alive with enjoyment.  He has got his

victim splendidly dragooned now.  He can make poor Smith imagine that the

most innocent little thing he does is an odious sin; and then he sets to

work and almost tortures the soul out of him about it."



"Smith is the noblest man in all this section, and the purest; and yet is

always breaking his heart because he cannot be good!  Only a conscience

could find pleasure in heaping agony upon a spirit like that.  Do you

know my aunt Mary's conscience?"



"I have seen her at a distance, but am not acquainted with her.  She

lives in the open air altogether, because no door is large enough to

admit her."



"I can believe that.  Let me see.  Do you know the conscience of that

publisher who once stole some sketches of mine for a 'series' of his, and

then left me to pay the law expenses I had to incur in order to choke him

off?"



"Yes.  He has a wide fame.  He was exhibited, a month ago, with some

other antiquities, for the benefit of a recent Member of the Cabinet's

conscience that was starving in exile.  Tickets and fares were high, but

I traveled for nothing by pretending to be the conscience of an editor,

and got in for half-price by representing myself to be the conscience of

a clergyman.  However, the publisher's conscience, which was to have been

the main feature of the entertainment, was a failure--as an exhibition.

He was there, but what of that?  The management had provided a microscope

with a magnifying power of only thirty thousand diameters, and so nobody

got to see him, after all.  There was great and general dissatisfaction,

of course, but--"



Just here there was an eager footstep on the stair; I opened the door,

and my aunt Mary burst into the room.  It was a joyful meeting and a

cheery bombardment of questions and answers concerning family matters

ensued.  By and by my aunt said:



"But I am going to abuse you a little now.  You promised me, the day I

saw you last, that you would look after the needs of the poor family

around the corner as faithfully as I had done it myself.  Well, I found

out by accident that you failed of your promise.  Was that right?"



In simple truth, I never had thought of that family a second time!  And

now such a splintering pang of guilt shot through me!  I glanced up at my

Conscience.  Plainly, my heavy heart was affecting him.  His body was

drooping forward; he seemed about to fall from the bookcase.  My aunt

continued:



"And think how you have neglected my poor protege at the almshouse, you

dear, hard-hearted promise-breaker!"  I blushed scarlet, and my tongue

was tied.  As the sense of my guilty negligence waxed sharper and

stronger, my Conscience began to sway heavily back and forth; and when my

aunt, after a little pause, said in a grieved tone, "Since you never once

went to see her, maybe it will not distress you now to know that that

poor child died, months ago, utterly friendless and forsaken!"

My Conscience could no longer bear up under the weight of my sufferings,

but tumbled headlong from his high perch and struck the floor with a

dull, leaden thump.  He lay there writhing with pain and quaking with

apprehension, but straining every muscle in frantic efforts to get up.

In a fever of expectancy I sprang to the door, locked it, placed my back

against it, and bent a watchful gaze upon my struggling master.  Already

my fingers were itching to begin their murderous work.



"Oh, what can be the matter!" exclaimed by aunt, shrinking from me, and

following with her frightened eyes the direction of mine.  My breath was

coming in short, quick gasps now, and my excitement was almost

uncontrollable.  My aunt cried out:



"Oh, do not look so!  You appal me!  Oh, what can the matter be?  What is

it you see?  Why do you stare so?  Why do you work your fingers like

that?"



"Peace, woman!"  I said, in a hoarse whisper. "Look elsewhere; pay no

attention to me; it is nothing--nothing.  I am often this way.  It will

pass in a moment.  It comes from smoking too much."



My injured lord was up, wild-eyed with terror, and trying to hobble

toward the door.  I could hardly breathe, I was so wrought up.  My aunt

wrung her hands, and said:



"Oh, I knew how it would be; I knew it would come to this at last!

Oh, I implore you to crush out that fatal habit while it may yet be time!

You must not, you shall not be deaf to my supplications longer!"

My struggling Conscience showed sudden signs of weariness!  "Oh, promise

me you will throw off this hateful slavery of tobacco!"  My Conscience

began to reel drowsily, and grope with his hands--enchanting spectacle!

"I beg you, I beseech you, I implore you!  Your reason is deserting you!

There is madness in your eye!  It flames with frenzy!  Oh, hear me, hear

me, and be saved!  See, I plead with you on my very knees!"  As she sank

before me my Conscience reeled again, and then drooped languidly to the

floor, blinking toward me a last supplication for mercy, with heavy eyes.

"Oh, promise, or you are lost!  Promise, and be redeemed!  Promise!

Promise and live!"  With a long-drawn sigh my conquered Conscience closed

his eyes and fell fast asleep!



With an exultant shout I sprang past my aunt, and in an instant I had my

lifelong foe by the throat.  After so many years of waiting and longing,

he was mine at last.  I tore him to shreds and fragments.  I rent the

fragments to bits.  I cast the bleeding rubbish into the fire, and drew

into my nostrils the grateful incense of my burnt-offering.  At last, and

forever, my Conscience was dead!



I was a free man!  I turned upon my poor aunt, who was almost petrified

with terror, and shouted:



"Out of this with your paupers, your charities, your reforms, your

pestilent morals!  You behold before you a man whose life-conflict is

done, whose soul is at peace; a man whose heart is dead to sorrow, dead

to suffering, dead to remorse; a man WITHOUT A CONSCIENCE!  In my joy I

spare you, though I could throttle you and never feel a pang!  Fly!"



She fled.  Since that day my life is all bliss.  Bliss, unalloyed bliss.

Nothing in all the world could persuade me to have a conscience again.

I settled all my old outstanding scores, and began the world anew.

I killed thirty-eight persons during the first two weeks--all of them on

account of ancient grudges.  I burned a dwelling that interrupted my

view.  I swindled a widow and some orphans out of their last cow, which

is a very good one, though not thoroughbred, I believe.  I have also

committed scores of crimes, of various kinds, and have enjoyed my work

exceedingly, whereas it would formerly have broken my heart and turned my

hair gray, I have no doubt.



In conclusion, I wish to state, by way of advertisement, that medical

colleges desiring assorted tramps for scientific purposes, either by the

gross, by cord measurement, or per ton, will do well to examine the lot

in my cellar before purchasing elsewhere, as these were all selected and

prepared by myself, and can be had at a low rate, because I wish to

clear, out my stock and get ready for the spring trade.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Carnival of Crime in CT.

by Mark Twain













   The INTERNET WIRETAP First Electronic Edition of



            THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER

                         BY

                     MARK TWAIN

             (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)





    Electronic Edition by <dell@wiretap.spies.com>

           Released to the public June 1993







                   P R E F A C E



MOST of the adventures recorded in this book

really occurred; one or two were experiences of

my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates

of mine. Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer

also, but not from an individual -- he is a combina-

tion of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew,

and therefore belongs to the composite order of archi-

tecture.



The odd superstitions touched upon were all preva-

lent among children and slaves in the West at the

period of this story -- that is to say, thirty or

forty years ago.



Although my book is intended mainly for the en-

tertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be

shunned by men and women on that account, for

part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind

adults of what they once were themselves, and of

how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer

enterprises they sometimes engaged in.



                               THE AUTHOR.



HARTFORD, 1876.







                T O M   S A W Y E R





CHAPTER I



"TOM!"



No answer.



"TOM!"



No answer.



"What's gone with that boy,  I wonder? You TOM!"



No answer.



The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked

over them about the room; then she put them up and

looked out under them. She seldom or never looked

THROUGH them for so small a thing as a boy; they were

her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built

for "style," not service -- she could have seen through

a pair of stove-lids just as well. She looked perplexed

for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still

loud enough for the furniture to hear:



"Well, I lay if I get hold of you I'll --"



She did not finish, for by this time she was bending

down and punching under the bed with the broom,

and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches

with. She resurrected nothing but the cat.



"I never did see the beat of that boy!"



She went to the open door and stood in it and looked

out among the tomato vines and "jimpson" weeds that

constituted the garden. No Tom. So she lifted up

her voice at an angle calculated for distance and

shouted:



"Y-o-u-u TOM!"



There was a slight noise behind her and she turned

just in time to seize a small boy by the slack of his

roundabout and arrest his flight.



"There! I might 'a' thought of that closet. What

you been doing in there?"



"Nothing."



"Nothing! Look at your hands. And look at

your mouth. What IS that truck?"



"I don't know, aunt."



"Well, I know. It's jam -- that's what it is. Forty

times I've said if you didn't let that jam alone I'd skin

you. Hand me that switch."



The switch hovered in the air -- the peril was des-

perate --



"My! Look behind you, aunt!"



The old lady whirled round, and snatched her skirts

out of danger. The lad fled on the instant, scrambled

up the high board-fence, and disappeared over it.



His aunt Polly stood surprised a moment, and then

broke into a gentle laugh.



"Hang the boy, can't I never learn anything? Ain't

he played me tricks enough like that for me to be look-

ing out for him by this time? But old fools is the big-

gest fools there is. Can't learn an old dog new tricks,

as the saying is. But my goodness, he never plays

them alike, two days, and how is a body to know what's

coming? He 'pears to know just how long he can

torment me before I get my dander up, and he knows

if he can make out to put me off for a minute or make

me laugh, it's all down again and I can't hit him a lick.

I ain't doing my duty by that boy, and that's the Lord's

truth, goodness knows. Spare the rod and spile the

child, as the Good Book says. I'm a laying up sin and

suffering for us both, I know. He's full of the Old

Scratch, but laws-a-me! he's my own dead sister's boy,

poor thing, and I ain't got the heart to lash him, some-

how. Every time I let him off, my conscience does

hurt me so, and every time I hit him my old heart most

breaks. Well-a-well, man that is born of woman is of

few days and full of trouble, as the Scripture says, and

I reckon it's so. He'll play hookey this evening, * and

[* Southwestern for "afternoon"]

I'll just be obleeged to make him work, to-morrow, to

punish him. It's mighty hard to make him work

Saturdays, when all the boys is having holiday, but he

hates work more than he hates anything else, and I've

GOT to do some of my duty by him, or I'll be the ruination

of the child."



Tom did play hookey, and he had a very good time.

He got back home barely in season to help Jim, the

small colored boy, saw next-day's wood and split the

kindlings before supper -- at least he was there in

time to tell his adventures to Jim while Jim did

three-fourths of the work. Tom's younger brother

(or rather half-brother) Sid was already through

with his part of the work (picking up chips), for he

was a quiet boy, and had no adventurous, trouble-

some ways.



While Tom was eating his supper, and stealing

sugar as opportunity offered, Aunt Polly asked him

questions that were full of guile, and very deep -- for

she wanted to trap him into damaging revealments.

Like many other simple-hearted souls, it was her pet

vanity to believe she was endowed with a talent for

dark and mysterious diplomacy, and she loved to con-

template her most transparent devices as marvels of

low cunning. Said she:



"Tom, it was middling warm in school, warn't

it?"



"Yes'm."



"Powerful warm, warn't it?"



"Yes'm."



"Didn't you want to go in a-swimming, Tom?"



A bit of a scare shot through Tom -- a touch of

uncomfortable suspicion. He searched Aunt Polly's

face, but it told him nothing. So he said:



"No'm -- well, not very much."



The old lady reached out her hand and felt Tom's

shirt, and said:



"But you ain't too warm now, though." And

it flattered her to reflect that she had discovered that

the shirt was dry without anybody knowing that that

was what she had in her mind. But in spite of her,

Tom knew where the wind lay, now. So he forestalled

what might be the next move:



"Some of us pumped on our heads -- mine's damp

yet. See?"



Aunt Polly was vexed to think she had overlooked

that bit of circumstantial evidence, and missed a trick.

Then she had a new inspiration:



"Tom, you didn't have to undo your shirt collar

where I sewed it, to pump on your head, did you?

Unbutton your jacket!"



The trouble vanished out of Tom's face. He opened

his jacket. His shirt collar was securely sewed.



"Bother! Well, go 'long with you. I'd made sure

you'd played hookey and been a-swimming. But I

forgive ye, Tom. I reckon you're a kind of a singed

cat, as the saying is -- better'n you look. THIS time."



She was half sorry her sagacity had miscarried, and

half glad that Tom had stumbled into obedient con-

duct for once.



But Sidney said:



"Well, now, if I didn't think you sewed his collar

with white thread, but it's black."



"Why, I did sew it with white! Tom!"



But Tom did not wait for the rest. As he went out

at the door he said:



"Siddy, I'll lick you for that."



In a safe place Tom examined two large needles

which were thrust into the lapels of his jacket, and

had thread bound about them -- one needle carried

white thread and the other black. He said:



"She'd never noticed if it hadn't been for Sid.

Confound it! sometimes she sews it with white, and

sometimes she sews it with black. I wish to gee-

miny she'd stick to one or t'other -- I can't keep the

run of 'em. But I bet you I'll lam Sid for that. I'll

learn him!"



He was not the Model Boy of the village. He

knew the model boy very well though -- and loathed

him.



Within two minutes, or even less, he had forgotten

all his troubles. Not because his troubles were one

whit less heavy and bitter to him than a man's are to a

man, but because a new and powerful interest bore

them down and drove them out of his mind for the time

-- just as men's misfortunes are forgotten in the excite-

ment of new enterprises. This new interest was a

valued novelty in whistling, which he had just acquired

from a negro, and he was suffering to practise it un-

disturbed. It consisted in a peculiar bird-like turn, a

sort of liquid warble, produced by touching the tongue

to the roof of the mouth at short intervals in the midst of

the music -- the reader probably remembers how to

do it, if he has ever been a boy. Diligence and attention

soon gave him the knack of it, and he strode down the

street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full

of gratitude. He felt much as an astronomer feels who

has discovered a new planet -- no doubt, as far as strong,

deep, unalloyed pleasure is concerned, the advantage

was with the boy, not the astronomer.



The summer evenings were long. It was not dark,

yet. Presently Tom checked his whistle. A stranger

was before him -- a boy a shade larger than himself.

A new-comer of any age or either sex was an im-

pressive curiosity in the poor little shabby village of

St. Petersburg. This boy was well dressed, too --

well dressed on a week-day. This was simply as-

tounding. His cap was a dainty thing, his close-

buttoned blue cloth roundabout was new and natty,

and so were his pantaloons. He had shoes on --

and it was only Friday. He even wore a necktie, a

bright bit of ribbon. He had a citified air about him

that ate into Tom's vitals. The more Tom stared at

the splendid marvel, the higher he turned up his nose

at his finery and the shabbier and shabbier his own

outfit seemed to him to grow. Neither boy spoke. If

one moved, the other moved -- but only sidewise, in a

circle; they kept face to face and eye to eye all the time.

Finally Tom said:



"I can lick you!"



"I'd like to see you try it."



"Well, I can do it."



"No you can't, either."



"Yes I can."



"No you can't."



"I can."



"You can't."



"Can!"



"Can't!"



An uncomfortable pause. Then Tom said:



"What's your name?"



"'Tisn't any of your business, maybe."



"Well I 'low I'll MAKE it my business."



"Well why don't you?"



"If you say much, I will."



"Much -- much -- MUCH. There now."



"Oh, you think you're mighty smart, DON'T you?

I could lick you with one hand tied behind me, if I

wanted to."



"Well why don't you DO it? You SAY you can do it."



"Well I WILL, if you fool with me."



"Oh yes -- I've seen whole families in the same fix."



"Smarty! You think you're SOME, now, DON'T you?

Oh, what a hat!"



"You can lump that hat if you don't like it. I dare

you to knock it off -- and anybody that'll take a dare

will suck eggs."



"You're a liar!"



"You're another."



"You're a fighting liar and dasn't take it up."



"Aw -- take a walk!"



"Say -- if you give me much more of your sass I'll

take and bounce a rock off'n your head."



"Oh, of COURSE you will."



"Well I WILL."



"Well why don't you DO it then? What do you

keep SAYING you will for? Why don't you DO it? It's

because you're afraid."



"I AIN'T afraid."



"You are."



"I ain't."



"You are."



Another pause, and more eying and sidling around

each other. Presently they were shoulder to shoulder.

Tom said:



"Get away from here!"



"Go away yourself!"



"I won't."



"I won't either."



So they stood, each with a foot placed at an angle

as a brace, and both shoving with might and main,

and glowering at each other with hate. But neither

could get an advantage. After struggling till both

were hot and flushed, each relaxed his strain with

watchful caution, and Tom said:



"You're a coward and a pup. I'll tell my big

brother on you, and he can thrash you with his little

finger, and I'll make him do it, too."



"What do I care for your big brother? I've got

a brother that's bigger than he is -- and what's more,

he can throw him over that fence, too." [Both brothers

were imaginary.]



"That's a lie."



"YOUR saying so don't make it so."



Tom drew a line in the dust with his big toe, and

said:



"I dare you to step over that, and I'll lick you till

you can't stand up. Anybody that'll take a dare will

steal sheep."



The new boy stepped over promptly, and said:



"Now you said you'd do it, now let's see you do it."



"Don't you crowd me now; you better look out."



"Well, you SAID you'd do it -- why don't you do it?"



"By jingo! for two cents I WILL do it."



The new boy took two broad coppers out of his

pocket and held them out with derision. Tom struck

them to the ground. In an instant both boys were

rolling and tumbling in the dirt, gripped together like

cats; and for the space of a minute they tugged and tore

at each other's hair and clothes, punched and scratched

each other's nose, and covered themselves with dust

and glory. Presently the confusion took form, and

through the fog of battle Tom appeared, seated astride

the new boy, and pounding him with his fists.

"Holler 'nuff!" said he.



The boy only struggled to free himself. He was

crying -- mainly from rage.



"Holler 'nuff!" -- and the pounding went on.



At last the stranger got out a smothered "'Nuff!"

and Tom let him up and said:



"Now that'll learn you. Better look out who you're

fooling with next time."



The new boy went off brushing the dust from his

clothes, sobbing, snuffling, and occasionally looking

back and shaking his head and threatening what he

would do to Tom the "next time he caught him out."

To which Tom responded with jeers, and started off

in high feather, and as soon as his back was turned the

new boy snatched up a stone, threw it and hit him be-

tween the shoulders and then turned tail and ran like

an antelope. Tom chased the traitor home, and thus

found out where he lived. He then held a position at

the gate for some time, daring the enemy to come out-

side, but the enemy only made faces at him through

the window and declined. At last the enemy's mother

appeared, and called Tom a bad, vicious, vulgar child,

and ordered him away. So he went away; but he

said he "'lowed" to "lay" for that boy.



He got home pretty late that night, and when he

climbed cautiously in at the window, he uncovered

an ambuscade, in the person of his aunt; and when

she saw the state his clothes were in her resolution

to turn his Saturday holiday into captivity at hard

labor became adamantine in its firmness.





CHAPTER II



SATURDAY morning was come, and all

the summer world was bright and fresh,

and brimming with life. There was a

song in every heart; and if the heart was

young the music issued at the lips. There

was cheer in every face and a spring in

every step. The locust-trees were in bloom and the

fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. Cardiff

Hill, beyond the village and above it, was green with

vegetation and it lay just far enough away to seem

a Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.



Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of

whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed

the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep mel-

ancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards

of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed

hollow, and existence but a burden. Sighing, he

dipped his brush and passed it along the topmost plank;

repeated the operation; did it again; compared the in-

significant whitewashed streak with the far-reaching

continent of unwhitewashed fence, and sat down on a

tree-box discouraged. Jim came skipping out at the

gate with a tin pail, and singing Buffalo Gals. Bringing

water from the town pump had always been hateful

work in Tom's eyes, before, but now it did not strike

him so. He remembered that there was company

at the pump. White, mulatto, and negro boys and

girls were always there waiting their turns, resting,

trading playthings, quarrelling, fighting, skylarking.

And he remembered that although the pump was only

a hundred and fifty yards off, Jim never got back with

a bucket of water under an hour -- and even then some-

body generally had to go after him. Tom said:



"Say, Jim, I'll fetch the water if you'll whitewash

some."



Jim shook his head and said:



"Can't, Mars Tom. Ole missis, she tole me I

got to go an' git dis water an' not stop foolin' roun'

wid anybody. She say she spec' Mars Tom gwine

to ax me to whitewash, an' so she tole me go 'long

an' 'tend to my own business -- she 'lowed SHE'D 'tend

to de whitewashin'."



"Oh, never you mind what she said, Jim. That's

the way she always talks. Gimme the bucket -- I

won't be gone only a a minute. SHE won't ever know."



"Oh, I dasn't, Mars Tom. Ole missis she'd take

an' tar de head off'n me. 'Deed she would."



"SHE! She never licks anybody -- whacks 'em over

the head with her thimble -- and who cares for that,

I'd like to know. She talks awful, but talk don't

hurt -- anyways it don't if she don't cry. Jim, I'll give

you a marvel. I'll give you a white alley!"



Jim began to waver.



"White alley, Jim! And it's a bully taw."



"My! Dat's a mighty gay marvel, I tell you!

But Mars Tom I's powerful 'fraid ole missis --"



"And besides, if you will I'll show you my sore

toe."



Jim was only human -- this attraction was too much

for him. He put down his pail, took the white alley,

and bent over the toe with absorbing interest while the

bandage was being unwound. In another moment he

was flying down the street with his pail and a tingling

rear, Tom was whitewashing with vigor, and Aunt

Polly was retiring from the field with a slipper in her

hand and triumph in her eye.



But Tom's energy did not last. He began to think

of the fun he had planned for this day, and his sorrows

multiplied. Soon the free boys would come tripping

along on all sorts of delicious expeditions, and they

would make a world of fun of him for having to work

-- the very thought of it burnt him like fire. He got

out his worldly wealth and examined it -- bits of toys,

marbles, and trash; enough to buy an exchange of WORK,

maybe, but not half enough to buy so much as half an

hour of pure freedom. So he returned his straitened

means to his pocket, and gave up the idea of trying

to buy the boys. At this dark and hopeless moment

an inspiration burst upon him! Nothing less than a

great, magnificent inspiration.



He took up his brush and went tranquilly to work.

Ben Rogers hove in sight presently -- the very boy,

of all boys, whose ridicule he had been dreading.

Ben's gait was the hop-skip-and-jump -- proof enough

that his heart was light and his anticipations high. He

was eating an apple, and giving a long, melodious

whoop, at intervals, followed by a deep-toned ding-

dong-dong, ding-dong-dong, for he was personating a

steamboat. As he drew near, he slackened speed,

took the middle of the street, leaned far over to star-

board and rounded to ponderously and with laborious

pomp and circumstance -- for he was personating the

Big Missouri, and considered himself to be drawing

nine feet of water. He was boat and captain and

engine-bells combined, so he had to imagine himself

standing on his own hurricane-deck giving the orders

and executing them:



"Stop her, sir! Ting-a-ling-ling!" The headway ran

almost out, and he drew up slowly toward the sidewalk.



"Ship up to back! Ting-a-ling-ling!" His arms

straightened and stiffened down his sides.



"Set her back on the stabboard! Ting-a-ling-ling!

Chow! ch-chow-wow! Chow!" His right hand, mean-

time, describing stately circles -- for it was representing

a forty-foot wheel.



"Let her go back on the labboard! Ting-a-ling-

ling! Chow-ch-chow-chow!" The left hand began

to describe circles.



"Stop the stabboard! Ting-a-ling-ling! Stop the

labboard! Come ahead on the stabboard! Stop her!

Let your outside turn over slow! Ting-a-ling-ling!

Chow-ow-ow! Get out that head-line! LIVELY now!

Come -- out with your spring-line -- what're you about

there! Take a turn round that stump with the bight

of it! Stand by that stage, now -- let her go! Done

with the engines, sir! Ting-a-ling-ling! SH'T! S'H'T!

SH'T!" (trying the gauge-cocks).



Tom went on whitewashing -- paid no attention to

the steamboat. Ben stared a moment and then said:

"Hi-YI! YOU'RE up a stump, ain't you!"



No answer. Tom surveyed his last touch with the

eye of an artist, then he gave his brush another gentle

sweep and surveyed the result, as before. Ben ranged

up alongside of him. Tom's mouth watered for the

apple, but he stuck to his work. Ben said:



"Hello, old chap, you got to work, hey?"



Tom wheeled suddenly and said:



"Why, it's you, Ben! I warn't noticing."



"Say -- I'm going in a-swimming, I am. Don't

you wish you could? But of course you'd druther

WORK -- wouldn't you? Course you would!"



Tom contemplated the boy a bit, and said:



"What do you call work?"



"Why, ain't THAT work?"



Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered care-

lessly:



"Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain't. All I know,

is, it suits Tom Sawyer."



"Oh come, now, you don't mean to let on that you

LIKE it?"



The brush continued to move.



"Like it? Well, I don't see why I oughtn't to like it.

Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?"



That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped

nibbling his apple. Tom swept his brush daintily

back and forth -- stepped back to note the effect --

added a touch here and there -- criticised the effect

again -- Ben watching every move and getting more

and more interested, more and more absorbed. Pres-

ently he said:



"Say, Tom, let ME whitewash a little."



Tom considered, was about to consent; but he

altered his mind:



"No -- no -- I reckon it wouldn't hardly do, Ben.

You see, Aunt Polly's awful particular about this

fence -- right here on the street, you know -- but if it

was the back fence I wouldn't mind and SHE wouldn't.

Yes, she's awful particular about this fence; it's got to

be done very careful; I reckon there ain't one boy in a

thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way

it's got to be done."



"No -- is that so? Oh come, now -- lemme just

try. Only just a little -- I'd let YOU, if you was me,

Tom."



"Ben, I'd like to, honest injun; but Aunt Polly

-- well, Jim wanted to do it, but she wouldn't let him;

Sid wanted to do it, and she wouldn't let Sid. Now

don't you see how I'm fixed? If you was to tackle this

fence and anything was to happen to it --"



"Oh, shucks, I'll be just as careful. Now lemme try.

Say -- I'll give you the core of my apple."



"Well, here -- No, Ben, now don't. I'm afeard --"



"I'll give you ALL of it!"



Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face,

but alacrity in his heart. And while the late steamer

Big Missouri worked and sweated in the sun, the

retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by,

dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the

slaughter of more innocents. There was no lack

of material; boys happened along every little while;

they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash. By

the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next

chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair; and

when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in for a

dead rat and a string to swing it with -- and so on, and

so on, hour after hour. And when the middle of the

afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken

boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth.

He had besides the things before mentioned, twelve

marbles, part of a jews-harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass

to look through, a spool cannon, a key that wouldn't

unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper

of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six

fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door-

knob, a dog-collar -- but no dog -- the handle of a knife,

four pieces of orange-peel, and a dilapidated old window

sash.



He had had a nice, good, idle time all the while --

plenty of company -- and the fence had three coats of

whitewash on it! If he hadn't run out of whitewash he

would have bankrupted every boy in the village.



Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow

world, after all. He had discovered a great law of

human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in

order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only

necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If

he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the

writer of this book, he would now have comprehended

that Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to

do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not

obliged to do. And this would help him to understand

why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a

tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing

Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy

gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-

coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the

summer, because the privilege costs them considerable

money; but if they were offered wages for the service,

that would turn it into work and then they would

resign.



The boy mused awhile over the substantial change

which had taken place in his worldly circumstances,

and then wended toward headquarters to report.





CHAPTER III



TOM presented himself before Aunt Polly,

who was sitting by an open window in a

pleasant rearward apartment, which was

bedroom, breakfast-room, dining-room,

and library, combined. The balmy sum-

mer air, the restful quiet, the odor of the

flowers, and the drowsing murmur of the bees had

had their effect, and she was nodding over her knit-

ting -- for she had no company but the cat, and it was

asleep in her lap. Her spectacles were propped up

on her gray head for safety. She had thought that of

course Tom had deserted long ago, and she wondered

at seeing him place himself in her power again in this

intrepid way. He said: "Mayn't I go and play now,

aunt?"



"What, a'ready? How much have you done?"



"It's all done, aunt."



"Tom, don't lie to me -- I can't bear it."



"I ain't, aunt; it IS all done."



Aunt Polly placed small trust in such evidence.

She went out to see for herself; and she would have

been content to find twenty per cent. of Tom's state-

ment true. When she found the entire fence white-

washed, and not only whitewashed but elaborately

coated and recoated, and even a streak added to the

ground, her astonishment was almost unspeakable.

She said:



"Well, I never! There's no getting round it, you

can work when you're a mind to, Tom." And then

she diluted the compliment by adding, "But it's power-

ful seldom you're a mind to, I'm bound to say. Well,

go 'long and play; but mind you get back some time in

a week, or I'll tan you."



She was so overcome by the splendor of his achieve-

ment that she took him into the closet and selected a

choice apple and delivered it to him, along with an

improving lecture upon the added value and flavor

a treat took to itself when it came without sin through

virtuous effort. And while she closed with a happy

Scriptural flourish, he "hooked" a doughnut.



Then he skipped out, and saw Sid just starting up

the outside stairway that led to the back rooms on

the second floor. Clods were handy and the air was

full of them in a twinkling. They raged around Sid

like a hail-storm; and before Aunt Polly could collect

her surprised faculties and sally to the rescue, six or

seven clods had taken personal effect, and Tom was

over the fence and gone. There was a gate, but as a

general thing he was too crowded for time to make use

of it. His soul was at peace, now that he had settled

with Sid for calling attention to his black thread and

getting him into trouble.



Tom skirted the block, and came round into a

muddy alley that led by the back of his aunt's cow-

stable. He presently got safely beyond the reach

of capture and punishment, and hastened toward the

public square of the village, where two "military"

companies of boys had met for conflict, according

to previous appointment. Tom was General of one

of these armies, Joe Harper (a bosom friend) General

of the other. These two great commanders did not

condescend to fight in person -- that being better suited

to the still smaller fry -- but sat together on an eminence

and conducted the field operations by orders delivered

through aides-de-camp. Tom's army won a great

victory, after a long and hard-fought battle. Then

the dead were counted, prisoners exchanged, the terms

of the next disagreement agreed upon, and the day

for the necessary battle appointed; after which the

armies fell into line and marched away, and Tom turned

homeward alone.



As he was passing by the house where Jeff Thatcher

lived, he saw a new girl in the garden -- a lovely little

blue-eyed creature with yellow hair plaited into two

long-tails, white summer frock and embroidered pan-

talettes. The fresh-crowned hero fell without firing

a shot. A certain Amy Lawrence vanished out of his

heart and left not even a memory of herself behind.

He had thought he loved her to distraction; he had

regarded his passion as adoration; and behold it was

only a poor little evanescent partiality. He had been

months winning her; she had confessed hardly a week

ago; he had been the happiest and the proudest boy in

the world only seven short days, and here in one instant

of time she had gone out of his heart like a casual

stranger whose visit is done.



He worshipped this new angel with furtive eye, till

he saw that she had discovered him; then he pre-

tended he did not know she was present, and began

to "show off" in all sorts of absurd boyish ways, in

order to win her admiration. He kept up this grotesque

foolishness for some time; but by-and-by, while he was

in the midst of some dangerous gymnastic performances,

he glanced aside and saw that the little girl was wending

her way toward the house. Tom came up to the

fence and leaned on it, grieving, and hoping she would

tarry yet awhile longer. She halted a moment on the

steps and then moved toward the door. Tom heaved

a great sigh as she put her foot on the threshold. But

his face lit up, right away, for she tossed a pansy over the

fence a moment before she disappeared.



The boy ran around and stopped within a foot or

two of the flower, and then shaded his eyes with his

hand and began to look down street as if he had dis-

covered something of interest going on in that direction.

Presently he picked up a straw and began trying to

balance it on his nose, with his head tilted far back;

and as he moved from side to side, in his efforts, he

edged nearer and nearer toward the pansy; finally his

bare foot rested upon it, his pliant toes closed upon it,

and he hopped away with the treasure and disappeared

round the corner. But only for a minute -- only while

he could button the flower inside his jacket, next his

heart -- or next his stomach, possibly, for he was not

much posted in anatomy, and not hypercritical, any-

way.



He returned, now, and hung about the fence till

nightfall, "showing off," as before; but the girl never

exhibited herself again, though Tom comforted him-

self a little with the hope that she had been near some

window, meantime, and been aware of his attentions.

Finally he strode home reluctantly, with his poor head

full of visions.



All through supper his spirits were so high that

his aunt wondered "what had got into the child." He

took a good scolding about clodding Sid, and did not

seem to mind it in the least. He tried to steal sugar

under his aunt's very nose, and got his knuckles rapped

for it. He said:



"Aunt, you don't whack Sid when he takes it."



"Well, Sid don't torment a body the way you do.

You'd be always into that sugar if I warn't watching

you."



Presently she stepped into the kitchen, and Sid,

happy in his immunity, reached for the sugar-bowl --

a sort of glorying over Tom which was wellnigh un-

bearable. But Sid's fingers slipped and the bowl

dropped and broke. Tom was in ecstasies. In such

ecstasies that he even controlled his tongue and was

silent. He said to himself that he would not speak

a word, even when his aunt came in, but would sit per-

fectly still till she asked who did the mischief; and then

he would tell, and there would be nothing so good in

the world as to see that pet model "catch it." He was

so brimful of exultation that he could hardly hold him-

self when the old lady came back and stood above the

wreck discharging lightnings of wrath from over her

spectacles. He said to himself, "Now it's coming!"

And the next instant he was sprawling on the floor!

The potent palm was uplifted to strike again when

Tom cried out:



"Hold on, now, what 'er you belting ME for? -- Sid

broke it!"



Aunt Polly paused, perplexed, and Tom looked

for healing pity. But when she got her tongue again,

she only said:



"Umf! Well, you didn't get a lick amiss, I reckon.

You been into some other audacious mischief when I

wasn't around, like enough."



Then her conscience reproached her, and she yearned

to say something kind and loving; but she judged

that this would be construed into a confession that she

had been in the wrong, and discipline forbade that.

So she kept silence, and went about her affairs with

a troubled heart. Tom sulked in a corner and exalted

his woes. He knew that in her heart his aunt was on

her knees to him, and he was morosely gratified by the

consciousness of it. He would hang out no signals, he

would take notice of none. He knew that a yearning

glance fell upon him, now and then, through a film of

tears, but he refused recognition of it. He pictured him-

self lying sick unto death and his aunt bending over him

beseeching one little forgiving word, but he would

turn his face to the wall, and die with that word unsaid.

Ah, how would she feel then? And he pictured himself

brought home from the river, dead, with his curls all

wet, and his sore heart at rest. How she would throw

herself upon him, and how her tears would fall like

rain, and her lips pray God to give her back her boy

and she would never, never abuse him any more!

But he would lie there cold and white and make no

sign -- a poor little sufferer, whose griefs were at an

end. He so worked upon his feelings with the pathos

of these dreams, that he had to keep swallowing, he

was so like to choke; and his eyes swam in a blur of

water, which overflowed when he winked, and ran

down and trickled from the end of his nose. And such

a luxury to him was this petting of his sorrows, that he

could not bear to have any worldly cheeriness or any

grating delight intrude upon it; it was too sacred

for such contact; and so, presently, when his cousin

Mary danced in, all alive with the joy of seeing home

again after an age-long visit of one week to the country,

he got up and moved in clouds and darkness out at

one door as she brought song and sunshine in at the

other.



He wandered far from the accustomed haunts of

boys, and sought desolate places that were in har-

mony with his spirit. A log raft in the river invited

him, and he seated himself on its outer edge and

contemplated the dreary vastness of the stream, wish-

ing, the while, that he could only be drowned, all at

once and unconsciously, without undergoing the un-

comfortable routine devised by nature. Then he

thought of his flower. He got it out, rumpled and

wilted, and it mightily increased his dismal felicity.

He wondered if she would pity him if she knew?

Would she cry, and wish that she had a right to put

her arms around his neck and comfort him? Or

would she turn coldly away like all the hollow world?

This picture brought such an agony of pleasurable suf-

fering that he worked it over and over again in his mind

and set it up in new and varied lights, till he wore it

threadbare. At last he rose up sighing and departed

in the darkness.



About half-past nine or ten o'clock he came along

the deserted street to where the Adored Unknown

lived; he paused a moment; no sound fell upon his

listening ear; a candle was casting a dull glow upon

the curtain of a second-story window. Was the

sacred presence there? He climbed the fence, threaded

his stealthy way through the plants, till he stood under

that window; he looked up at it long, and with emotion;

then he laid him down on the ground under it, dis-

posing himself upon his back, with his hands clasped

upon his breast and holding his poor wilted flower.

And thus he would die -- out in the cold world, with no

shelter over his homeless head, no friendly hand to

wipe the death-damps from his brow, no loving face to

bend pityingly over him when the great agony came.

And thus SHE would see him when she looked out upon

the glad morning, and oh! would she drop one little

tear upon his poor, lifeless form, would she heave

one little sigh to see a bright young life so rudely blight-

ed, so untimely cut down?



The window went up, a maid-servant's discordant

voice profaned the holy calm, and a deluge of water

drenched the prone martyr's remains!



The strangling hero sprang up with a relieving

snort. There was a whiz as of a missile in the air,

mingled with the murmur of a curse, a sound as of

shivering glass followed, and a small, vague form went

over the fence and shot away in the gloom.



Not long after, as Tom, all undressed for bed, was

surveying his drenched garments by the light of a

tallow dip, Sid woke up; but if he had any dim idea of

making any "references to allusions," he thought better

of it and held his peace, for there was danger in Tom's

eye.



Tom turned in without the added vexation of prayers,

and Sid made mental note of the omission.





CHAPTER IV



THE sun rose upon a tranquil world, and

beamed down upon the peaceful village

like a benediction. Breakfast over, Aunt

Polly had family worship: it began with a

prayer built from the ground up of solid

courses of Scriptural quotations, welded

together with a thin mortar of originality; and from

the summit of this she delivered a grim chapter of the

Mosaic Law, as from Sinai.



Then Tom girded up his loins, so to speak, and

went to work to "get his verses." Sid had learned

his lesson days before. Tom bent all his energies to

the memorizing of five verses, and he chose part of

the Sermon on the Mount, because he could find no

verses that were shorter. At the end of half an hour

Tom had a vague general idea of his lesson, but no

more, for his mind was traversing the whole field of

human thought, and his hands were busy with dis-

tracting recreations. Mary took his book to hear

him recite, and he tried to find his way through the

fog:



"Blessed are the -- a -- a --"



"Poor" --



"Yes -- poor; blessed are the poor -- a -- a --"



"In spirit --"



"In spirit; blessed are the poor in spirit, for they --

they --"



"THEIRS --"



"For THEIRS. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs

is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn,

for they -- they --"



"Sh --"



"For they -- a --"



"S, H, A --"



"For they S, H -- Oh, I don't know what it is!"



"SHALL!"



"Oh, SHALL! for they shall -- for they shall -- a -- a --

shall mourn -- a-- a -- blessed are they that shall -- they

that -- a -- they that shall mourn, for they shall -- a -- shall

WHAT? Why don't you tell me, Mary? -- what do you

want to be so mean for?"



"Oh, Tom, you poor thick-headed thing, I'm not

teasing you. I wouldn't do that. You must go and

learn it again. Don't you be discouraged, Tom, you'll

manage it -- and if you do, I'll give you something ever

so nice. There, now, that's a good boy."



"All right! What is it, Mary, tell me what it is."



"Never you mind, Tom. You know if I say it's

nice, it is nice."



"You bet you that's so, Mary. All right, I'll tackle

it again."



And he did "tackle it again" -- and under the double

pressure of curiosity and prospective gain he did it

with such spirit that he accomplished a shining success.

Mary gave him a brand-new "Barlow" knife worth

twelve and a half cents; and the convulsion of delight

that swept his system shook him to his foundations.

True, the knife would not cut anything, but it was a

"sure-enough" Barlow, and there was inconceivable

grandeur in that -- though where the Western boys ever

got the idea that such a weapon could possibly be

counterfeited to its injury is an imposing mystery and

will always remain so, perhaps. Tom contrived to

scarify the cupboard with it, and was arranging to begin

on the bureau, when he was called off to dress for

Sunday-school.



Mary gave him a tin basin of water and a piece of

soap, and he went outside the door and set the basin

on a little bench there; then he dipped the soap in

the water and laid it down; turned up his sleeves;

poured out the water on the ground, gently, and then

entered the kitchen and began to wipe his face diligently

on the towel behind the door. But Mary removed

the towel and said:



"Now ain't you ashamed, Tom. You mustn't be

so bad. Water won't hurt you."



Tom was a trifle disconcerted. The basin was

refilled, and this time he stood over it a little while,

gathering resolution; took in a big breath and began.

When he entered the kitchen presently, with both

eyes shut and groping for the towel with his hands,

an honorable testimony of suds and water was dripping

from his face. But when he emerged from the towel,

he was not yet satisfactory, for the clean territory

stopped short at his chin and his jaws, like a mask;

below and beyond this line there was a dark expanse

of unirrigated soil that spread downward in front and

backward around his neck. Mary took him in hand,

and when she was done with him he was a man and a

brother, without distinction of color, and his saturated

hair was neatly brushed, and its short curls wrought

into a dainty and symmetrical general effect. [He

privately smoothed out the curls, with labor and dif-

ficulty, and plastered his hair close down to his head;

for he held curls to be effeminate, and his own filled his

life with bitterness.] Then Mary got out a suit of

his clothing that had been used only on Sundays during

two years -- they were simply called his "other clothes"

-- and so by that we know the size of his wardrobe.

The girl "put him to rights" after he had dressed him-

self; she buttoned his neat roundabout up to his chin,

turned his vast shirt collar down over his shoulders,

brushed him off and crowned him with his speckled

straw hat. He now looked exceedingly improved and

uncomfortable. He was fully as uncomfortable as he

looked; for there was a restraint about whole clothes

and cleanliness that galled him. He hoped that Mary

would forget his shoes, but the hope was blighted; she

coated them thoroughly with tallow, as was the custom,

and brought them out. He lost his temper and said

he was always being made to do everything he didn't

want to do. But Mary said, persuasively:



"Please, Tom -- that's a good boy."



So he got into the shoes snarling. Mary was soon

ready, and the three children set out for Sunday-school

-- a place that Tom hated with his whole heart; but Sid

and Mary were fond of it.



Sabbath-school hours were from nine to half-past

ten; and then church service. Two of the children

always remained for the sermon voluntarily, and the

other always remained too -- for stronger reasons.

The church's high-backed, uncushioned pews would

seat about three hundred persons; the edifice was but

a small, plain affair, with a sort of pine board tree-box

on top of it for a steeple. At the door Tom dropped

back a step and accosted a Sunday-dressed comrade:



"Say, Billy, got a yaller ticket?"



"Yes."



"What'll you take for her?"



"What'll you give?"



"Piece of lickrish and a fish-hook."



"Less see 'em."



Tom exhibited. They were satisfactory, and the

property changed hands. Then Tom traded a couple

of white alleys for three red tickets, and some small

trifle or other for a couple of blue ones. He waylaid

other boys as they came, and went on buying tickets

of various colors ten or fifteen minutes longer. He

entered the church, now, with a swarm of clean and

noisy boys and girls, proceeded to his seat and started

a quarrel with the first boy that came handy. The

teacher, a grave, elderly man, interfered; then turned his

back a moment and Tom pulled a boy's hair in the next

bench, and was absorbed in his book when the boy

turned around; stuck a pin in another boy, presently,

in order to hear him say "Ouch!" and got a new

reprimand from his teacher. Tom's whole class were

of a pattern -- restless, noisy, and troublesome. When

they came to recite their lessons, not one of them knew

his verses perfectly, but had to be prompted all along.

However, they worried through, and each got his reward

-- in small blue tickets, each with a passage of Scripture

on it; each blue ticket was pay for two verses of the

recitation. Ten blue tickets equalled a red one, and

could be exchanged for it; ten red tickets equalled a

yellow one; for ten yellow tickets the superintendent

gave a very plainly bound Bible (worth forty cents in

those easy times) to the pupil. How many of my

readers would have the industry and application to

memorize two thousand verses, even for a Dore Bible?

And yet Mary had acquired two Bibles in this way -- it

was the patient work of two years -- and a boy of Ger-

man parentage had won four or five. He once recited

three thousand verses without stopping; but the strain

upon his mental faculties was too great, and he was

little better than an idiot from that day forth -- a

grievous misfortune for the school, for on great occa-

sions, before company, the superintendent (as Tom

expressed it) had always made this boy come out

and "spread himself." Only the older pupils managed

to keep their tickets and stick to their tedious work long

enough to get a Bible, and so the delivery of one of these

prizes was a rare and noteworthy circumstance; the

successful pupil was so great and conspicuous for that

day that on the spot every scholar's heart was fired with

a fresh ambition that often lasted a couple of weeks.

It is possible that Tom's mental stomach had never

really hungered for one of those prizes, but unques-

tionably his entire being had for many a day longed for

the glory and the eclat that came with it.



In due course the superintendent stood up in front

of the pulpit, with a closed hymn-book in his hand

and his forefinger inserted between its leaves, and

commanded attention. When a Sunday-school superin-

tendent makes his customary little speech, a hymn-book

in the hand is as necessary as is the inevitable sheet of

music in the hand of a singer who stands forward on

the platform and sings a solo at a concert -- though

why, is a mystery: for neither the hymn-book nor the

sheet of music is ever referred to by the sufferer. This

superintendent was a slim creature of thirty-five, with

a sandy goatee and short sandy hair; he wore a stiff

standing-collar whose upper edge almost reached his

ears and whose sharp points curved forward abreast the

corners of his mouth -- a fence that compelled a straight

lookout ahead, and a turning of the whole body when a

side view was required; his chin was propped on a

spreading cravat which was as broad and as long as a

bank-note, and had fringed ends; his boot toes were

turned sharply up, in the fashion of the day, like sleigh-

runners -- an effect patiently and laboriously produced

by the young men by sitting with their toes pressed

against a wall for hours together. Mr. Walters was

very earnest of mien, and very sincere and honest at

heart; and he held sacred things and places in such

reverence, and so separated them from worldly matters,

that unconsciously to himself his Sunday-school voice

had acquired a peculiar intonation which was wholly

absent on week-days. He began after this fashion:



"Now, children, I want you all to sit up just as

straight and pretty as you can and give me all your

attention for a minute or two. There -- that is it.

That is the way good little boys and girls should do.

I see one little girl who is looking out of the window

-- I am afraid she thinks I am out there somewhere --

perhaps up in one of the trees making a speech to the

little birds. [Applausive titter.] I want to tell you

how good it makes me feel to see so many bright, clean

little faces assembled in a place like this, learning to

do right and be good." And so forth and so on. It

is not necessary to set down the rest of the oration.

It was of a pattern which does not vary, and so it is

familiar to us all.



The latter third of the speech was marred by the

resumption of fights and other recreations among

certain of the bad boys, and by fidgetings and whis-

perings that extended far and wide, washing even to

the bases of isolated and incorruptible rocks like

Sid and Mary. But now every sound ceased suddenly,

with the subsidence of Mr. Walters' voice, and the con-

clusion of the speech was received with a burst of silent

gratitude.



A good part of the whispering had been occasioned

by an event which was more or less rare -- the entrance

of visitors: lawyer Thatcher, accompanied by a very

feeble and aged man; a fine, portly, middle-aged gentle-

man with iron-gray hair; and a dignified lady who was

doubtless the latter's wife. The lady was leading a

child. Tom had been restless and full of chafings and

repinings; conscience-smitten, too -- he could not meet

Amy Lawrence's eye, he could not brook her loving

gaze. But when he saw this small new-comer his soul

was all ablaze with bliss in a moment. The next

moment he was "showing off" with all his might --

cuffing boys, pulling hair, making faces -- in a word,

using every art that seemed likely to fascinate a girl and

win her applause. His exaltation had but one alloy

-- the memory of his humiliation in this angel's garden

-- and that record in sand was fast washing out, under

the waves of happiness that were sweeping over it now.



The visitors were given the highest seat of honor,

and as soon as Mr. Walters' speech was finished, he

introduced them to the school. The middle-aged

man turned out to be a prodigious personage -- no less

a one than the county judge -- altogether the most

august creation these children had ever looked upon --

and they wondered what kind of material he was made

of -- and they half wanted to hear him roar, and were

half afraid he might, too. He was from Constantinople,

twelve miles away -- so he had travelled, and seen the

world -- these very eyes had looked upon the county

court-house -- which was said to have a tin roof. The

awe which these reflections inspired was attested by the

impressive silence and the ranks of staring eyes. This

was the great Judge Thatcher, brother of their own

lawyer. Jeff Thatcher immediately went forward, to

be familiar with the great man and be envied by the

school. It would have been music to his soul to hear

the whisperings:



"Look at him, Jim! He's a going up there. Say --

look! he's a going to shake hands with him -- he IS

shaking hands with him! By jings, don't you wish you

was Jeff?"



Mr. Walters fell to "showing off," with all sorts of

official bustlings and activities, giving orders, de-

livering judgments, discharging directions here, there,

everywhere that he could find a target. The librarian

"showed off" -- running hither and thither with his arms

full of books and making a deal of the splutter and

fuss that insect authority delights in. The young lady

teachers "showed off" -- bending sweetly over pupils

that were lately being boxed, lifting pretty warning

fingers at bad little boys and patting good ones lovingly.

The young gentlemen teachers "showed off" with

small scoldings and other little displays of authority

and fine attention to discipline -- and most of the

teachers, of both sexes, found business up at the library,

by the pulpit; and it was business that frequently had

to be done over again two or three times (with much

seeming vexation). The little girls "showed off" in

various ways, and the little boys "showed off" with such

diligence that the air was thick with paper wads and

the murmur of scufflings. And above it all the great

man sat and beamed a majestic judicial smile upon all

the house, and warmed himself in the sun of his own

grandeur -- for he was "showing off," too.



There was only one thing wanting to make Mr.

Walters' ecstasy complete, and that was a chance to

deliver a Bible-prize and exhibit a prodigy. Several

pupils had a few yellow tickets, but none had enough

-- he had been around among the star pupils inquiring.

He would have given worlds, now, to have that German

lad back again with a sound mind.



And now at this moment, when hope was dead,

Tom Sawyer came forward with nine yellow tickets,

nine red tickets, and ten blue ones, and demanded a

Bible. This was a thunderbolt out of a clear sky.

Walters was not expecting an application from this

source for the next ten years. But there was no

getting around it -- here were the certified checks,

and they were good for their face. Tom was there-

fore elevated to a place with the Judge and the other

elect, and the great news was announced from head-

quarters. It was the most stunning surprise of the

decade, and so profound was the sensation that it

lifted the new hero up to the judicial one's altitude,

and the school had two marvels to gaze upon in place

of one. The boys were all eaten up with envy -- but

those that suffered the bitterest pangs were those who

perceived too late that they themselves had contributed

to this hated splendor by trading tickets to Tom for

the wealth he had amassed in selling whitewashing

privileges. These despised themselves, as being the

dupes of a wily fraud, a guileful snake in the grass.



The prize was delivered to Tom with as much

effusion as the superintendent could pump up under

the circumstances; but it lacked somewhat of the true

gush, for the poor fellow's instinct taught him that there

was a mystery here that could not well bear the light,

perhaps; it was simply preposterous that this boy had

warehoused two thousand sheaves of Scriptural wisdom

on his premises -- a dozen would strain his capacity,

without a doubt.



Amy Lawrence was proud and glad, and she tried to

make Tom see it in her face -- but he wouldn't look.

She wondered; then she was just a grain troubled; next

a dim suspicion came and went -- came again; she

watched; a furtive glance told her worlds -- and then

her heart broke, and she was jealous, and angry, and

the tears came and she hated everybody. Tom most of

all (she thought).



Tom was introduced to the Judge; but his tongue

was tied, his breath would hardly come, his heart

quaked -- partly because of the awful greatness of

the man, but mainly because he was her parent. He

would have liked to fall down and worship him, if it

were in the dark. The Judge put his hand on Tom's

head and called him a fine little man, and asked him

what his name was. The boy stammered, gasped, and

got it out:



"Tom."



"Oh, no, not Tom -- it is --"



"Thomas."



"Ah, that's it. I thought there was more to it,

maybe. That's very well. But you've another one

I daresay, and you'll tell it to me, won't you?"



"Tell the gentleman your other name, Thomas,"

said Walters, "and say sir. You mustn't forget

your manners."



"Thomas Sawyer -- sir."



"That's it! That's a good boy. Fine boy. Fine,

manly little fellow. Two thousand verses is a great

many -- very, very great many. And you never can be

sorry for the trouble you took to learn them; for knowl-

edge is worth more than anything there is in the world;

it's what makes great men and good men; you'll be a

great man and a good man yourself, some day, Thomas,

and then you'll look back and say, It's all owing to the

precious Sunday-school privileges of my boyhood -- it's

all owing to my dear teachers that taught me to learn

-- it's all owing to the good superintendent, who en-

couraged me, and watched over me, and gave me

a beautiful Bible -- a splendid elegant Bible -- to keep

and have it all for my own, always -- it's all owing to

right bringing up! That is what you will say, Thomas

-- and you wouldn't take any money for those two

thousand verses -- no indeed you wouldn't. And now

you wouldn't mind telling me and this lady some of

the things you've learned -- no, I know you wouldn't

-- for we are proud of little boys that learn. Now, no

doubt you know the names of all the twelve disciples.

Won't you tell us the names of the first two that were

appointed?"



Tom was tugging at a button-hole and looking

sheepish. He blushed, now, and his eyes fell. Mr.

Walters' heart sank within him. He said to himself,

it is not possible that the boy can answer the simplest

question -- why DID the Judge ask him? Yet he felt

obliged to speak up and say:



"Answer the gentleman, Thomas -- don't be afraid."



Tom still hung fire.



"Now I know you'll tell me," said the lady. "The

names of the first two disciples were --"



"DAVID AND GOLIAH!"



Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of

the scene.





CHAPTER V



ABOUT half-past ten the cracked bell of

the small church began to ring, and pres-

ently the people began to gather for the

morning sermon. The Sunday-school

children distributed themselves about the

house and occupied pews with their par-

ents, so as to be under supervision. Aunt Polly came,

and Tom and Sid and Mary sat with her -- Tom being

placed next the aisle, in order that he might be as

far away from the open window and the seductive

outside summer scenes as possible. The crowd filed

up the aisles: the aged and needy postmaster, who

had seen better days; the mayor and his wife -- for

they had a mayor there, among other unnecessaries;

the justice of the peace; the widow Douglass, fair,

smart, and forty, a generous, good-hearted soul and

well-to-do, her hill mansion the only palace in the

town, and the most hospitable and much the most

lavish in the matter of festivities that St. Petersburg

could boast; the bent and venerable Major and Mrs.

Ward; lawyer Riverson, the new notable from a dis-

tance; next the belle of the village, followed by a troop

of lawn-clad and ribbon-decked young heart-breakers;

then all the young clerks in town in a body -- for they

had stood in the vestibule sucking their cane-heads, a

circling wall of oiled and simpering admirers, till the

last girl had run their gantlet; and last of all came

the Model Boy, Willie Mufferson, taking as heedful

care of his mother as if she were cut glass. He always

brought his mother to church, and was the pride of all

the matrons. The boys all hated him, he was so good.

And besides, he had been "thrown up to them" so

much. His white handkerchief was hanging out of his

pocket behind, as usual on Sundays -- accidentally.

Tom had no handkerchief, and he looked upon boys

who had as snobs.



The congregation being fully assembled, now, the

bell rang once more, to warn laggards and stragglers,

and then a solemn hush fell upon the church which

was only broken by the tittering and whispering of

the choir in the gallery. The choir always tittered

and whispered all through service. There was once

a church choir that was not ill-bred, but I have for-

gotten where it was, now. It was a great many years

ago, and I can scarcely remember anything about it,

but I think it was in some foreign country.



The minister gave out the hymn, and read it through

with a relish, in a peculiar style which was much ad-

mired in that part of the country. His voice began

on a medium key and climbed steadily up till it reached

a certain point, where it bore with strong emphasis upon

the topmost word and then plunged down as if from a

spring-board:



  Shall I be car-ri-ed toe the skies, on flow'ry BEDS

     of ease,



  Whilst others fight to win the prize, and sail thro' BLOOD-

     y seas?



He was regarded as a wonderful reader. At church

"sociables" he was always called upon to read poetry;

and when he was through, the ladies would lift up their

hands and let them fall helplessly in their laps, and

"wall" their eyes, and shake their heads, as much as

to say, "Words cannot express it; it is too beautiful,

TOO beautiful for this mortal earth."



After the hymn had been sung, the Rev. Mr. Sprague

turned himself into a bulletin-board, and read off

"notices" of meetings and societies and things till it

seemed that the list would stretch out to the crack of

doom -- a queer custom which is still kept up in America,

even in cities, away here in this age of abundant news-

papers. Often, the less there is to justify a traditional

custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.



And now the minister prayed. A good, generous

prayer it was, and went into details: it pleaded for

the church, and the little children of the church; for

the other churches of the village; for the village itself;

for the county; for the State; for the State officers; for

the United States; for the churches of the United States;

for Congress; for the President; for the officers of the

Government; for poor sailors, tossed by stormy seas;

for the oppressed millions groaning under the heel of

European monarchies and Oriental despotisms; for such

as have the light and the good tidings, and yet have not

eyes to see nor ears to hear withal; for the heathen in the

far islands of the sea; and closed with a supplication that

the words he was about to speak might find grace and

favor, and be as seed sown in fertile ground, yielding

in time a grateful harvest of good. Amen.



There was a rustling of dresses, and the standing

congregation sat down. The boy whose history this

book relates did not enjoy the prayer, he only en-

dured it -- if he even did that much. He was restive

all through it; he kept tally of the details of the prayer,

unconsciously -- for he was not listening, but he knew

the ground of old, and the clergyman's regular route

over it -- and when a little trifle of new matter was in-

terlarded, his ear detected it and his whole nature re-

sented it; he considered additions unfair, and scoun-

drelly. In the midst of the prayer a fly had lit on the

back of the pew in front of him and tortured his spirit

by calmly rubbing its hands together, embracing its

head with its arms, and polishing it so vigorously that

it seemed to almost part company with the body, and

the slender thread of a neck was exposed to view;

scraping its wings with its hind legs and smoothing

them to its body as if they had been coat-tails; going

through its whole toilet as tranquilly as if it knew it was

perfectly safe. As indeed it was; for as sorely as Tom's

hands itched to grab for it they did not dare -- he believed

his soul would be instantly destroyed if he did such

a thing while the prayer was going on. But with

the closing sentence his hand began to curve and steal

forward; and the instant the "Amen" was out the fly

was a prisoner of war. His aunt detected the act and

made him let it go.



The minister gave out his text and droned along

monotonously through an argument that was so prosy

that many a head by and by began to nod -- and yet

it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and

brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a

company so small as to be hardly worth the saving.

Tom counted the pages of the sermon; after church he

always knew how many pages there had been, but he

seldom knew anything else about the discourse. How-

ever, this time he was really interested for a little while.

The minister made a grand and moving picture of the

assembling together of the world's hosts at the millen-

nium when the lion and the lamb should lie down to-

gether and a little child should lead them. But the

pathos, the lesson, the moral of the great spectacle were

lost upon the boy; he only thought of the conspicuous-

ness of the principal character before the on-looking

nations; his face lit with the thought, and he said to

himself that he wished he could be that child, if it was

a tame lion.



Now he lapsed into suffering again, as the dry argu-

ment was resumed. Presently he bethought him of a

treasure he had and got it out. It was a large black

beetle with formidable jaws -- a "pinchbug," he called

it. It was in a percussion-cap box. The first thing

the beetle did was to take him by the finger. A natural

fillip followed, the beetle went floundering into the

aisle and lit on its back, and the hurt finger went into

the boy's mouth. The beetle lay there working its

helpless legs, unable to turn over. Tom eyed it, and

longed for it; but it was safe out of his reach. Other

people uninterested in the sermon found relief in the

beetle, and they eyed it too. Presently a vagrant poodle

dog came idling along, sad at heart, lazy with the

summer softness and the quiet, weary of captivity, sigh-

ing for change. He spied the beetle; the drooping tail

lifted and wagged. He surveyed the prize; walked

around it; smelt at it from a safe distance; walked around

it again; grew bolder, and took a closer smell; then

lifted his lip and made a gingerly snatch at it, just

missing it; made another, and another; began to enjoy

the diversion; subsided to his stomach with the beetle

between his paws, and continued his experiments; grew

weary at last, and then indifferent and absent-minded.

His head nodded, and little by little his chin descended

and touched the enemy, who seized it. There was a

sharp yelp, a flirt of the poodle's head, and the beetle

fell a couple of yards away, and lit on its back once

more. The neighboring spectators shook with a gentle

inward joy, several faces went behind fans and hand-

kerchiefs, and Tom was entirely happy. The dog

looked foolish, and probably felt so; but there was

resentment in his heart, too, and a craving for revenge.

So he went to the beetle and began a wary attack on it

again; jumping at it from every point of a circle, light-

ing with his fore-paws within an inch of the creature,

making even closer snatches at it with his teeth, and

jerking his head till his ears flapped again. But he

grew tired once more, after a while; tried to amuse him-

self with a fly but found no relief; followed an ant around,

with his nose close to the floor, and quickly wearied of

that; yawned, sighed, forgot the beetle entirely, and sat

down on it. Then there was a wild yelp of agony and

the poodle went sailing up the aisle; the yelps continued,

and so did the dog; he crossed the house in front of the

altar; he flew down the other aisle; he crossed before

the doors; he clamored up the home-stretch; his

anguish grew with his progress, till presently he was

but a woolly comet moving in its orbit with the gleam

and the speed of light. At last the frantic sufferer

sheered from its course, and sprang into its master's

lap; he flung it out of the window, and the voice of

distress quickly thinned away and died in the dis-

tance.



By this time the whole church was red-faced and

suffocating with suppressed laughter, and the sermon

had come to a dead standstill. The discourse was

resumed presently, but it went lame and halting, all

possibility of impressiveness being at an end; for even

the gravest sentiments were constantly being received

with a smothered burst of unholy mirth, under cover

of some remote pew-back, as if the poor parson had

said a rarely facetious thing. It was a genuine relief

to the whole congregation when the ordeal was over

and the benediction pronounced.



Tom Sawyer went home quite cheerful, thinking

to himself that there was some satisfaction about

divine service when there was a bit of variety in it.

He had but one marring thought; he was willing that

the dog should play with his pinchbug, but he did not

think it was upright in him to carry it off.





CHAPTER VI



MONDAY morning found Tom Sawyer

miserable. Monday morning always

found him so -- because it began another

week's slow suffering in school. He gen-

erally began that day with wishing he had

had no intervening holiday, it made the go-

ing into captivity and fetters again so much more odious.



Tom lay thinking. Presently it occurred to him

that he wished he was sick; then he could stay home

from school. Here was a vague possibility. He can-

vassed his system. No ailment was found, and he

investigated again. This time he thought he could

detect colicky symptoms, and he began to encourage

them with considerable hope. But they soon grew

feeble, and presently died wholly away. He reflected

further. Suddenly he discovered something. One of

his upper front teeth was loose. This was lucky; he

was about to begin to groan, as a "starter," as he called

it, when it occurred to him that if he came into court

with that argument, his aunt would pull it out, and that

would hurt. So he thought he would hold the tooth in

reserve for the present, and seek further. Nothing of-

fered for some little time, and then he remembered

hearing the doctor tell about a certain thing that laid

up a patient for two or three weeks and threatened to

make him lose a finger. So the boy eagerly drew his

sore toe from under the sheet and held it up for in-

spection. But now he did not know the necessary

symptoms. However, it seemed well worth while to

chance it, so he fell to groaning with considerable

spirit.



But Sid slept on unconscious.



Tom groaned louder, and fancied that he began to

feel pain in the toe.



No result from Sid.



Tom was panting with his exertions by this time.

He took a rest and then swelled himself up and fetched

a succession of admirable groans.



Sid snored on.



Tom was aggravated. He said, "Sid, Sid!" and

shook him. This course worked well, and Tom began

to groan again. Sid yawned, stretched, then brought

himself up on his elbow with a snort, and began to stare

at Tom. Tom went on groaning. Sid said:



"Tom! Say, Tom!" [No response.] "Here, Tom!

TOM! What is the matter, Tom?" And he shook

him and looked in his face anxiously.



Tom moaned out:



"Oh, don't, Sid. Don't joggle me."



"Why, what's the matter, Tom? I must call

auntie."



"No -- never mind. It'll be over by and by, maybe.

Don't call anybody."



"But I must! DON'T groan so, Tom, it's awful.

How long you been this way?"



"Hours. Ouch! Oh, don't stir so, Sid, you'll kill

me."



"Tom, why didn't you wake me sooner ? Oh, Tom,

DON'T! It makes my flesh crawl to hear you. Tom,

what is the matter?"



"I forgive you everything, Sid. [Groan.] Every-

thing you've ever done to me. When I'm gone --"



"Oh, Tom, you ain't dying, are you? Don't, Tom

-- oh, don't. Maybe --"



"I forgive everybody, Sid. [Groan.] Tell 'em so,

Sid. And Sid, you give my window-sash and my cat

with one eye to that new girl that's come to town, and

tell her --"



But Sid had snatched his clothes and gone. Tom

was suffering in reality, now, so handsomely was his

imagination working, and so his groans had gathered

quite a genuine tone.



Sid flew down-stairs and said:



"Oh, Aunt Polly, come! Tom's dying!"



"Dying!"



"Yes'm. Don't wait -- come quick!"



"Rubbage! I don't believe it!"



But she fled up-stairs, nevertheless, with Sid and

Mary at her heels. And her face grew white, too,

and her lip trembled. When she reached the bed-

side she gasped out:



"You, Tom! Tom, what's the matter with you?"



"Oh, auntie, I'm --"



"What's the matter with you -- what is the matter

with you, child?"



"Oh, auntie, my sore toe's mortified!"



The old lady sank down into a chair and laughed

a little, then cried a little, then did both together.

This restored her and she said:



"Tom, what a turn you did give me. Now you

shut up that nonsense and climb out of this."



The groans ceased and the pain vanished from the

toe. The boy felt a little foolish, and he said:



"Aunt Polly, it SEEMED mortified, and it hurt so I

never minded my tooth at all."



"Your tooth, indeed! What's the matter with your

tooth?"



"One of them's loose, and it aches perfectly awful."



"There, there, now, don't begin that groaning again.

Open your mouth. Well -- your tooth IS loose, but

you're not going to die about that. Mary, get me a

silk thread, and a chunk of fire out of the kitchen."



Tom said:



"Oh, please, auntie, don't pull it out. It don't

hurt any more. I wish I may never stir if it does.

Please don't, auntie. I don't want to stay home

from school."



"Oh, you don't, don't you? So all this row was

because you thought you'd get to stay home from

school and go a-fishing? Tom, Tom, I love you

so, and you seem to try every way you can to break

my old heart with your outrageousness." By this

time the dental instruments were ready. The old

lady made one end of the silk thread fast to Tom's

tooth with a loop and tied the other to the bedpost.

Then she seized the chunk of fire and suddenly thrust

it almost into the boy's face. The tooth hung dangling

by the bedpost, now.



But all trials bring their compensations. As Tom

wended to school after breakfast, he was the envy of

every boy he met because the gap in his upper row

of teeth enabled him to expectorate in a new and

admirable way. He gathered quite a following of

lads interested in the exhibition; and one that had

cut his finger and had been a centre of fascination

and homage up to this time, now found himself sud-

denly without an adherent, and shorn of his glory.

His heart was heavy, and he said with a disdain which

he did not feel that it wasn't anything to spit like

Tom Sawyer; but another boy said, "Sour grapes!"

and he wandered away a dismantled hero.



Shortly Tom came upon the juvenile pariah of the

village, Huckleberry Finn, son of the town drunkard.

Huckleberry was cordially hated and dreaded by all

the mothers of the town, because he was idle and law-

less and vulgar and bad -- and because all their children

admired him so, and delighted in his forbidden society,

and wished they dared to be like him. Tom was like

the rest of the respectable boys, in that he envied

Huckleberry his gaudy outcast condition, and was un-

der strict orders not to play with him. So he played

with him every time he got a chance. Huckleberry

was always dressed in the cast-off clothes of full-grown

men, and they were in perennial bloom and fluttering

with rags. His hat was a vast ruin with a wide crescent

lopped out of its brim; his coat, when he wore one,

hung nearly to his heels and had the rearward buttons

far down the back; but one suspender supported his

trousers; the seat of the trousers bagged low and con-

tained nothing, the fringed legs dragged in the dirt

when not rolled up.



Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will.

He slept on doorsteps in fine weather and in empty

hogsheads in wet; he did not have to go to school or

to church, or call any being master or obey anybody;

he could go fishing or swimming when and where he

chose, and stay as long as it suited him; nobody forbade

him to fight; he could sit up as late as he pleased; he

was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring

and the last to resume leather in the fall; he never had

to wash, nor put on clean clothes; he could swear

wonderfully. In a word, everything that goes to make

life precious that boy had. So thought every harassed,

hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg.



Tom hailed the romantic outcast:



"Hello, Huckleberry!"



"Hello yourself, and see how you like it."



"What's that you got?"



"Dead cat."



"Lemme see him, Huck. My, he's pretty stiff.

Where'd you get him ?"



"Bought him off'n a boy."



"What did you give?"



"I give a blue ticket and a bladder that I got at the

slaughter-house."



"Where'd you get the blue ticket?"



"Bought it off'n Ben Rogers two weeks ago for a

hoop-stick."



"Say -- what is dead cats good for, Huck?"



"Good for? Cure warts with."



"No! Is that so? I know something that's better."



"I bet you don't. What is it?"



"Why, spunk-water."



"Spunk-water! I wouldn't give a dern for spunk-

water."



"You wouldn't, wouldn't you? D'you ever try it?"



"No, I hain't. But Bob Tanner did."



"Who told you so!"



"Why, he told Jeff Thatcher, and Jeff told Johnny

Baker, and Johnny told Jim Hollis, and Jim told

Ben Rogers, and Ben told a nigger, and the nigger

told me. There now!"



"Well, what of it? They'll all lie. Leastways all

but the nigger. I don't know HIM. But I never see a

nigger that WOULDN'T lie. Shucks! Now you tell me

how Bob Tanner done it, Huck."



"Why, he took and dipped his hand in a rotten

stump where the rain-water was."



"In the daytime?"



"Certainly."



"With his face to the stump?"



"Yes. Least I reckon so."



"Did he say anything?"



"I don't reckon he did. I don't know."



"Aha! Talk about trying to cure warts with spunk-

water such a blame fool way as that! Why, that ain't

a-going to do any good. You got to go all by yourself,

to the middle of the woods, where you know there's

a spunk-water stump, and just as it's midnight you back

up against the stump and jam your hand in and say:



  'Barley-corn, barley-corn, injun-meal shorts,

   Spunk-water, spunk-water, swaller these warts,'



and then walk away quick, eleven steps, with your

eyes shut, and then turn around three times and walk

home without speaking to anybody. Because if you

speak the charm's busted."



"Well, that sounds like a good way; but that ain't

the way Bob Tanner done."



"No, sir, you can bet he didn't, becuz he's the

wartiest boy in this town; and he wouldn't have a

wart on him if he'd knowed how to work spunk-

water. I've took off thousands of warts off of my

hands that way, Huck. I play with frogs so much

that I've always got considerable many warts. Some-

times I take 'em off with a bean."



"Yes, bean's good. I've done that."



"Have you? What's your way?"



"You take and split the bean, and cut the wart so

as to get some blood, and then you put the blood on

one piece of the bean and take and dig a hole and

bury it 'bout midnight at the crossroads in the dark

of the moon, and then you burn up the rest of the bean.

You see that piece that's got the blood on it will keep

drawing and drawing, trying to fetch the other piece to

it, and so that helps the blood to draw the wart, and

pretty soon off she comes."



"Yes, that's it, Huck -- that's it; though when you're

burying it if you say 'Down bean; off wart; come no

more to bother me!' it's better. That's the way Joe

Harper does, and he's been nearly to Coonville and

most everywheres. But say -- how do you cure 'em

with dead cats?"



"Why, you take your cat and go and get in the grave-

yard 'long about midnight when somebody that was

wicked has been buried; and when it's midnight a devil

will come, or maybe two or three, but you can't see

'em, you can only hear something like the wind, or

maybe hear 'em talk; and when they're taking that feller

away, you heave your cat after 'em and say, 'Devil

follow corpse, cat follow devil, warts follow cat, I'm

done with ye!' That'll fetch ANY wart."



"Sounds right. D'you ever try it, Huck?"



"No, but old Mother Hopkins told me."



"Well, I reckon it's so, then. Becuz they say she's

a witch."



"Say! Why, Tom, I KNOW she is. She witched

pap. Pap says so his own self. He come along one

day, and he see she was a-witching him, so he took up

a rock, and if she hadn't dodged, he'd a got her. Well,

that very night he rolled off'n a shed wher' he was a

layin drunk, and broke his arm."



"Why, that's awful. How did he know she was

a-witching him?"



"Lord, pap can tell, easy. Pap says when they

keep looking at you right stiddy, they're a-witching

you. Specially if they mumble. Becuz when they

mumble they're saying the Lord's Prayer backards."



"Say, Hucky, when you going to try the cat?"



"To-night. I reckon they'll come after old Hoss

Williams to-night."



"But they buried him Saturday. Didn't they get

him Saturday night?"



"Why, how you talk! How could their charms

work till midnight? -- and THEN it's Sunday. Dev-

ils don't slosh around much of a Sunday, I don't

reckon."



"I never thought of that. That's so. Lemme go

with you?"



"Of course -- if you ain't afeard."



"Afeard! 'Tain't likely. Will you meow?"



"Yes -- and you meow back, if you get a chance.

Last time, you kep' me a-meowing around till old

Hays went to throwing rocks at me and says 'Dern

that cat!' and so I hove a brick through his window

-- but don't you tell."



"I won't. I couldn't meow that night, becuz auntie

was watching me, but I'll meow this time. Say --

what's that?"



"Nothing but a tick."



"Where'd you get him?"



"Out in the woods."



"What'll you take for him?"



"I don't know. I don't want to sell him."



"All right. It's a mighty small tick, anyway."



"Oh, anybody can run a tick down that don't belong

to them. I'm satisfied with it. It's a good enough

tick for me."



"Sho, there's ticks a plenty. I could have a thou-

sand of 'em if I wanted to."



"Well, why don't you? Becuz you know mighty

well you can't. This is a pretty early tick, I reckon.

It's the first one I've seen this year."



"Say, Huck -- I'll give you my tooth for him."



"Less see it."



Tom got out a bit of paper and carefully unrolled

it. Huckleberry viewed it wistfully. The tempta-

tion was very strong. At last he said:



"Is it genuwyne?"



Tom lifted his lip and showed the vacancy.



"Well, all right," said Huckleberry, "it's a trade."



Tom enclosed the tick in the percussion-cap box

that had lately been the pinchbug's prison, and the

boys separated, each feeling wealthier than before.



When Tom reached the little isolated frame school-

house, he strode in briskly, with the manner of one

who had come with all honest speed. He hung his

hat on a peg and flung himself into his seat with busi-

ness-like alacrity. The master, throned on high in his

great splint-bottom arm-chair, was dozing, lulled by the

drowsy hum of study. The interruption roused him.



"Thomas Sawyer!"



Tom knew that when his name was pronounced in

full, it meant trouble.



"Sir!"



"Come up here. Now, sir, why are you late again,

as usual?"



Tom was about to take refuge in a lie, when he

saw two long tails of yellow hair hanging down a back

that he recognized by the electric sympathy of love;

and by that form was THE ONLY VACANT PLACE on the

girls' side of the school-house. He instantly said:



"I STOPPED TO TALK WITH HUCKLEBERRY FINN!"



The master's pulse stood still, and he stared help-

lessly. The buzz of study ceased. The pupils won-

dered if this foolhardy boy had lost his mind. The

master said:



"You -- you did what?"



"Stopped to talk with Huckleberry Finn."



There was no mistaking the words.



"Thomas Sawyer, this is the most astounding con-

fession I have ever listened to. No mere ferule will

answer for this offence. Take off your jacket."



The master's arm performed until it was tired and

the stock of switches notably diminished. Then the

order followed:



"Now, sir, go and sit with the girls! And let this

be a warning to you."



The titter that rippled around the room appeared

to abash the boy, but in reality that result was caused

rather more by his worshipful awe of his unknown

idol and the dread pleasure that lay in his high good

fortune. He sat down upon the end of the pine bench

and the girl hitched herself away from him with a toss

of her head. Nudges and winks and whispers traversed

the room, but Tom sat still, with his arms upon the

long, low desk before him, and seemed to study his book.



By and by attention ceased from him, and the ac-

customed school murmur rose upon the dull air once

more. Presently the boy began to steal furtive glances

at the girl. She observed it, "made a mouth" at him

and gave him the back of her head for the space of a

minute. When she cautiously faced around again,

a peach lay before her. She thrust it away. Tom

gently put it back. She thrust it away again, but with

less animosity. Tom patiently returned it to its place.

Then she let it remain. Tom scrawled on his slate,

"Please take it -- I got more." The girl glanced at the

words, but made no sign. Now the boy began to draw

something on the slate, hiding his work with his left

hand. For a time the girl refused to notice; but her

human curiosity presently began to manifest itself by

hardly perceptible signs. The boy worked on, ap-

parently unconscious. The girl made a sort of non-

committal attempt to see, but the boy did not betray

that he was aware of it. At last she gave in and hesi-

tatingly whispered:



"Let me see it."



Tom partly uncovered a dismal caricature of a

house with two gable ends to it and a corkscrew of

smoke issuing from the chimney. Then the girl's

interest began to fasten itself upon the work and she

forgot everything else. When it was finished, she

gazed a moment, then whispered:



"It's nice -- make a man."



The artist erected a man in the front yard, that

resembled a derrick. He could have stepped over

the house; but the girl was not hypercritical; she was

satisfied with the monster, and whispered:



"It's a beautiful man -- now make me coming

along."



Tom drew an hour-glass with a full moon and straw

limbs to it and armed the spreading fingers with a

portentous fan. The girl said:



"It's ever so nice -- I wish I could draw."



"It's easy," whispered Tom, "I'll learn you."



"Oh, will you? When?"



"At noon. Do you go home to dinner?"



"I'll stay if you will."



"Good -- that's a whack. What's your name?"



"Becky Thatcher. What's yours? Oh, I know.

It's Thomas Sawyer."



"That's the name they lick me by. I'm Tom when

I'm good. You call me Tom, will you?"



"Yes."



Now Tom began to scrawl something on the slate,

hiding the words from the girl. But she was not

backward this time. She begged to see. Tom said:



"Oh, it ain't anything."



"Yes it is."



"No it ain't. You don't want to see."



"Yes I do, indeed I do. Please let me."



"You'll tell."



"No I won't -- deed and deed and double deed

won't."



"You won't tell anybody at all? Ever, as long as

you live?"



"No, I won't ever tell ANYbody. Now let me."



"Oh, YOU don't want to see!"



"Now that you treat me so, I WILL see." And she

put her small hand upon his and a little scuffle ensued,

Tom pretending to resist in earnest but letting his hand

slip by degrees till these words were revealed: "I LOVE

YOU."



"Oh, you bad thing!" And she hit his hand a

smart rap, but reddened and looked pleased, never-

theless.



Just at this juncture the boy felt a slow, fateful

grip closing on his ear, and a steady lifting impulse.

In that vise he was borne across the house and de-

posited in his own seat, under a peppering fire of

giggles from the whole school. Then the master

stood over him during a few awful moments, and

finally moved away to his throne without saying a

word. But although Tom's ear tingled, his heart

was jubilant.



As the school quieted down Tom made an honest

effort to study, but the turmoil within him was too

great. In turn he took his place in the reading class

and made a botch of it; then in the geography class

and turned lakes into mountains, mountains into rivers,

and rivers into continents, till chaos was come again;

then in the spelling class, and got "turned down," by

a succession of mere baby words, till he brought up at

the foot and yielded up the pewter medal which he had

worn with ostentation for months.





CHAPTER VII



THE harder Tom tried to fasten his mind

on his book, the more his ideas wandered.

So at last, with a sigh and a yawn, he gave

it up. It seemed to him that the noon

recess would never come. The air was

utterly dead. There was not a breath

stirring. It was the sleepiest of sleepy days. The

drowsing murmur of the five and twenty studying

scholars soothed the soul like the spell that is in the

murmur of bees. Away off in the flaming sunshine,

Cardiff Hill lifted its soft green sides through a shim-

mering veil of heat, tinted with the purple of distance;

a few birds floated on lazy wing high in the air; no other

living thing was visible but some cows, and they were

asleep. Tom's heart ached to be free, or else to have

something of interest to do to pass the dreary time.

His hand wandered into his pocket and his face lit up

with a glow of gratitude that was prayer, though he did

not know it. Then furtively the percussion-cap box

came out. He released the tick and put him on the

long flat desk. The creature probably glowed with a

gratitude that amounted to prayer, too, at this moment,

but it was premature: for when he started thankfully

to travel off, Tom turned him aside with a pin and made

him take a new direction.



Tom's bosom friend sat next him, suffering just

as Tom had been, and now he was deeply and grate-

fully interested in this entertainment in an instant.

This bosom friend was Joe Harper. The two boys

were sworn friends all the week, and embattled enemies

on Saturdays. Joe took a pin out of his lapel and

began to assist in exercising the prisoner. The sport

grew in interest momently. Soon Tom said that they

were interfering with each other, and neither getting

the fullest benefit of the tick. So he put Joe's slate on

the desk and drew a line down the middle of it from top

to bottom.



"Now," said he, "as long as he is on your side you

can stir him up and I'll let him alone; but if you let him

get away and get on my side, you're to leave him alone

as long as I can keep him from crossing over."



"All right, go ahead; start him up."



The tick escaped from Tom, presently, and crossed

the equator. Joe harassed him awhile, and then he

got away and crossed back again. This change of

base occurred often. While one boy was worrying the

tick with absorbing interest, the other would look on

with interest as strong, the two heads bowed together

over the slate, and the two souls dead to all things else.

At last luck seemed to settle and abide with Joe. The

tick tried this, that, and the other course, and got as

excited and as anxious as the boys themselves, but time

and again just as he would have victory in his very

grasp, so to speak, and Tom's fingers would be twitching

to begin, Joe's pin would deftly head him off, and keep

possession. At last Tom could stand it no longer.

The temptation was too strong. So he reached out

and lent a hand with his pin. Joe was angry in a

moment. Said he:



"Tom, you let him alone."



"I only just want to stir him up a little, Joe."



"No, sir, it ain't fair; you just let him alone."



"Blame it, I ain't going to stir him much."



"Let him alone, I tell you."



"I won't!"



"You shall -- he's on my side of the line."



"Look here, Joe Harper, whose is that tick?"



"I don't care whose tick he is -- he's on my side of

the line, and you sha'n't touch him."



"Well, I'll just bet I will, though. He's my tick

and I'll do what I blame please with him, or die!"



A tremendous whack came down on Tom's shoul-

ders, and its duplicate on Joe's; and for the space

of two minutes the dust continued to fly from the

two jackets and the whole school to enjoy it. The

boys had been too absorbed to notice the hush that had

stolen upon the school awhile before when the master

came tiptoeing down the room and stood over them.

He had contemplated a good part of the performance

before he contributed his bit of variety to it.



When school broke up at noon, Tom flew to Becky

Thatcher, and whispered in her ear:



"Put on your bonnet and let on you're going home;

and when you get to the corner, give the rest of 'em

the slip, and turn down through the lane and come back.

I'll go the other way and come it over 'em the same

way."



So the one went off with one group of scholars, and

the other with another. In a little while the two met

at the bottom of the lane, and when they reached the

school they had it all to themselves. Then they sat

together, with a slate before them, and Tom gave Becky

the pencil and held her hand in his, guiding it, and so

created another surprising house. When the interest

in art began to wane, the two fell to talking. Tom

was swimming in bliss. He said:



"Do you love rats?"



"No! I hate them!"



"Well, I do, too -- LIVE ones. But I mean dead

ones, to swing round your head with a string."



"No, I don't care for rats much, anyway. What

I like is chewing-gum."



"Oh, I should say so! I wish I had some now."



"Do you? I've got some. I'll let you chew it

awhile, but you must give it back to me."



That was agreeable, so they chewed it turn about,

and dangled their legs against the bench in excess of

contentment.



"Was you ever at a circus?" said Tom.



"Yes, and my pa's going to take me again some

time, if I'm good."



"I been to the circus three or four times -- lots of

times. Church ain't shucks to a circus. There's

things going on at a circus all the time. I'm going

to be a clown in a circus when I grow up."



"Oh, are you! That will be nice. They're so

lovely, all spotted up."



"Yes, that's so. And they get slathers of money

-- most a dollar a day, Ben Rogers says. Say, Becky,

was you ever engaged?"



"What's that?"



"Why, engaged to be married."



"No."



"Would you like to?"



"I reckon so. I don't know. What is it like?"



"Like? Why it ain't like anything. You only

just tell a boy you won't ever have anybody but him,

ever ever ever, and then you kiss and that's all. Any-

body can do it."



"Kiss? What do you kiss for?"



"Why, that, you know, is to -- well, they always

do that."



"Everybody?"



"Why, yes, everybody that's in love with each

other. Do you remember what I wrote on the slate?"



"Ye -- yes."



"What was it?"



"I sha'n't tell you."



"Shall I tell YOU?"



"Ye -- yes -- but some other time."



"No, now."



"No, not now -- to-morrow."



"Oh, no, NOW. Please, Becky -- I'll whisper it,

I'll whisper it ever so easy."



Becky hesitating, Tom took silence for consent,

and passed his arm about her waist and whispered

the tale ever so softly, with his mouth close to her

ear. And then he added:



"Now you whisper it to me -- just the same."



She resisted, for a while, and then said:



"You turn your face away so you can't see, and

then I will. But you mustn't ever tell anybody --

WILL you, Tom? Now you won't, WILL you?"



"No, indeed, indeed I won't. Now, Becky."



He turned his face away. She bent timidly around

till her breath stirred his curls and whispered, "I --

love -- you!"



Then she sprang away and ran around and around

the desks and benches, with Tom after her, and took

refuge in a corner at last, with her little white apron to

her face. Tom clasped her about her neck and pleaded:



"Now, Becky, it's all done -- all over but the kiss.

Don't you be afraid of that -- it ain't anything at all.

Please, Becky." And he tugged at her apron and the

hands.



By and by she gave up, and let her hands drop;

her face, all glowing with the struggle, came up and

submitted. Tom kissed the red lips and said:



"Now it's all done, Becky. And always after this,

you know, you ain't ever to love anybody but me, and

you ain't ever to marry anybody but me, ever never

and forever. Will you?"



"No, I'll never love anybody but you, Tom, and

I'll never marry anybody but you -- and you ain't to

ever marry anybody but me, either."



"Certainly. Of course. That's PART of it. And

always coming to school or when we're going home,

you're to walk with me, when there ain't anybody

looking -- and you choose me and I choose you at

parties, because that's the way you do when you're

engaged."



"It's so nice. I never heard of it before."



"Oh, it's ever so gay! Why, me and Amy

Lawrence --"



The big eyes told Tom his blunder and he stopped,

confused.



"Oh, Tom! Then I ain't the first you've ever

been engaged to!"



The child began to cry. Tom said:



"Oh, don't cry, Becky, I don't care for her any

more."



"Yes, you do, Tom -- you know you do."



Tom tried to put his arm about her neck, but she

pushed him away and turned her face to the wall,

and went on crying. Tom tried again, with sooth-

ing words in his mouth, and was repulsed again.

Then his pride was up, and he strode away and went

outside. He stood about, restless and uneasy, for a

while, glancing at the door, every now and then,

hoping she would repent and come to find him. But

she did not. Then he began to feel badly and fear

that he was in the wrong. It was a hard struggle

with him to make new advances, now, but he nerved

himself to it and entered. She was still standing back

there in the corner, sobbing, with her face to the wall.

Tom's heart smote him. He went to her and stood a

moment, not knowing exactly how to proceed. Then

he said hesitatingly:



"Becky, I -- I don't care for anybody but you."



No reply -- but sobs.



"Becky" -- pleadingly. "Becky, won't you say some-

thing?"



More sobs.



Tom got out his chiefest jewel, a brass knob from

the top of an andiron, and passed it around her so

that she could see it, and said:



"Please, Becky, won't you take it?"



She struck it to the floor. Then Tom marched

out of the house and over the hills and far away, to

return to school no more that day. Presently Becky

began to suspect. She ran to the door; he was not

in sight; she flew around to the play-yard; he was

not there. Then she called:



"Tom! Come back, Tom!"



She listened intently, but there was no answer.

She had no companions but silence and loneliness.

So she sat down to cry again and upbraid herself;

and by this time the scholars began to gather again,

and she had to hide her griefs and still her broken

heart and take up the cross of a long, dreary, aching

afternoon, with none among the strangers about her

to exchange sorrows with.





CHAPTER VIII



TOM dodged hither and thither through

lanes until he was well out of the track

of returning scholars, and then fell into a

moody jog. He crossed a small "branch"

two or three times, because of a prevailing

juvenile superstition that to cross water

baffled pursuit. Half an hour later he was disappear-

ing behind the Douglas mansion on the summit

of Cardiff Hill, and the school-house was hardly dis-

tinguishable away off in the valley behind him. He

entered a dense wood, picked his pathless way to the

centre of it, and sat down on a mossy spot under a

spreading oak. There was not even a zephyr stirring;

the dead noonday heat had even stilled the songs of

the birds; nature lay in a trance that was broken by no

sound but the occasional far-off hammering of a wood-

pecker, and this seemed to render the pervading silence

and sense of loneliness the more profound. The boy's

soul was steeped in melancholy; his feelings were in

happy accord with his surroundings. He sat long with

his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands,

meditating. It seemed to him that life was but a

trouble, at best, and he more than half envied Jimmy

Hodges, so lately released; it must be very peaceful, he

thought, to lie and slumber and dream forever and

ever, with the wind whispering through the trees and

caressing the grass and the flowers over the grave,

and nothing to bother and grieve about, ever any

more. If he only had a clean Sunday-school record

he could be willing to go, and be done with it all.

Now as to this girl. What had he done? Nothing.

He had meant the best in the world, and been treated

like a dog -- like a very dog. She would be sorry some

day -- maybe when it was too late. Ah, if he could only

die TEMPORARILY!



But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed

into one constrained shape long at a time. Tom

presently began to drift insensibly back into the con-

cerns of this life again. What if he turned his back,

now, and disappeared mysteriously? What if he went

away -- ever so far away, into unknown countries beyond

the seas -- and never came back any more! How

would she feel then! The idea of being a clown

recurred to him now, only to fill him with disgust.

For frivolity and jokes and spotted tights were an

offense, when they intruded themselves upon a spirit

that was exalted into the vague august realm of the

romantic. No, he would be a soldier, and return after

long years, all war-worn and illustrious. No -- better

still, he would join the Indians, and hunt buffaloes

and go on the warpath in the mountain ranges and the

trackless great plains of the Far West, and away in

the future come back a great chief, bristling with

feathers, hideous with paint, and prance into Sunday-

school, some drowsy summer morning, with a blood-

curdling war-whoop, and sear the eyeballs of all his

companions with unappeasable envy. But no, there

was something gaudier even than this. He would be

a pirate! That was it! NOW his future lay plain

before him, and glowing with unimaginable splendor.

How his name would fill the world, and make people

shudder! How gloriously he would go plowing the

dancing seas, in his long, low, black-hulled racer, the

Spirit of the Storm, with his grisly flag flying at

the fore! And at the zenith of his fame, how he would

suddenly appear at the old village and stalk into church,

brown and weather-beaten, in his black velvet doublet

and trunks, his great jack-boots, his crimson sash, his

belt bristling with horse-pistols, his crime-rusted cut-

lass at his side, his slouch hat with waving plumes,

his black flag unfurled, with the skull and crossbones

on it, and hear with swelling ecstasy the whisperings,

"It's Tom Sawyer the Pirate! -- the Black Avenger of

the Spanish Main!"



Yes, it was settled; his career was determined.

He would run away from home and enter upon it.

He would start the very next morning. Therefore

he must now begin to get ready. He would collect

his resources together. He went to a rotten log near

at hand and began to dig under one end of it with his

Barlow knife. He soon struck wood that sounded

hollow. He put his hand there and uttered this in-

cantation impressively:



"What hasn't come here, come! What's here, stay

here!"



Then he scraped away the dirt, and exposed a pine

shingle. He took it up and disclosed a shapely little

treasure-house whose bottom and sides were of shingles.

In it lay a marble. Tom's astonishment was bound-

less! He scratched his head with a perplexed air,

and said:



"Well, that beats anything!"



Then he tossed the marble away pettishly, and

stood cogitating. The truth was, that a superstition

of his had failed, here, which he and all his comrades

had always looked upon as infallible. If you buried

a marble with certain necessary incantations, and

left it alone a fortnight, and then opened the place

with the incantation he had just used, you would find

that all the marbles you had ever lost had gathered

themselves together there, meantime, no matter how

widely they had been separated. But now, this thing

had actually and unquestionably failed. Tom's whole

structure of faith was shaken to its foundations. He

had many a time heard of this thing succeeding but

never of its failing before. It did not occur to him

that he had tried it several times before, himself, but

could never find the hiding-places afterward. He

puzzled over the matter some time, and finally decided

that some witch had interfered and broken the charm.

He thought he would satisfy himself on that point; so

he searched around till he found a small sandy spot

with a little funnel-shaped depression in it. He laid

himself down and put his mouth close to this de-

pression and called --



"Doodle-bug, doodle-bug, tell me what I want to

know! Doodle-bug, doodle-bug, tell me what I want

to know!"



The sand began to work, and presently a small

black bug appeared for a second and then darted

under again in a fright.



"He dasn't tell! So it WAS a witch that done it. I

just knowed it."



He well knew the futility of trying to contend against

witches, so he gave up discouraged. But it occurred

to him that he might as well have the marble he had

just thrown away, and therefore he went and made

a patient search for it. But he could not find it.

Now he went back to his treasure-house and carefully

placed himself just as he had been standing when he

tossed the marble away; then he took another marble

from his pocket and tossed it in the same way, saying:



"Brother, go find your brother!"



He watched where it stopped, and went there and

looked. But it must have fallen short or gone too

far; so he tried twice more. The last repetition was

successful. The two marbles lay within a foot of each

other.



Just here the blast of a toy tin trumpet came faintly

down the green aisles of the forest. Tom flung off his

jacket and trousers, turned a suspender into a belt,

raked away some brush behind the rotten log, dis-

closing a rude bow and arrow, a lath sword and a tin

trumpet, and in a moment had seized these things

and bounded away, barelegged, with fluttering shirt.

He presently halted under a great elm, blew an answer-

ing blast, and then began to tiptoe and look warily out,

this way and that. He said cautiously -- to an imag-

inary company:



"Hold, my merry men! Keep hid till I blow."



Now appeared Joe Harper, as airily clad and elab-

orately armed as Tom. Tom called:



"Hold! Who comes here into Sherwood Forest

without my pass?"



"Guy of Guisborne wants no man's pass. Who

art thou that -- that --"



"Dares to hold such language," said Tom, prompt-

ing -- for they talked "by the book," from memory.



"Who art thou that dares to hold such language?"



"I, indeed! I am Robin Hood, as thy caitiff carcase

soon shall know."



"Then art thou indeed that famous outlaw? Right

gladly will I dispute with thee the passes of the merry

wood. Have at thee!"



They took their lath swords, dumped their other

traps on the ground, struck a fencing attitude, foot

to foot, and began a grave, careful combat, "two

up and two down." Presently Tom said:



"Now, if you've got the hang, go it lively!"



So they "went it lively," panting and perspiring

with the work. By and by Tom shouted:



"Fall! fall! Why don't you fall?"



"I sha'n't! Why don't you fall yourself? You're

getting the worst of it."



"Why, that ain't anything. I can't fall; that ain't

the way it is in the book. The book says, 'Then with

one back-handed stroke he slew poor Guy of Guis-

borne.' You're to turn around and let me hit you in

the back."



There was no getting around the authorities, so Joe

turned, received the whack and fell.



"Now," said Joe, getting up, "you got to let me

kill YOU. That's fair."



"Why, I can't do that, it ain't in the book."



"Well, it's blamed mean -- that's all."



"Well, say, Joe, you can be Friar Tuck or Much

the miller's son, and lam me with a quarter-staff; or

I'll be the Sheriff of Nottingham and you be Robin

Hood a little while and kill me."



This was satisfactory, and so these adventures

were carried out. Then Tom became Robin Hood

again, and was allowed by the treacherous nun to

bleed his strength away through his neglected wound.

And at last Joe, representing a whole tribe of weeping

outlaws, dragged him sadly forth, gave his bow into

his feeble hands, and Tom said, "Where this arrow

falls, there bury poor Robin Hood under the green-

wood tree." Then he shot the arrow and fell back

and would have died, but he lit on a nettle and sprang

up too gaily for a corpse.



The boys dressed themselves, hid their accoutre-

ments, and went off grieving that there were no out-

laws any more, and wondering what modern civiliza-

tion could claim to have done to compensate for their

loss. They said they would rather be outlaws a year

in Sherwood Forest than President of the United

States forever.





CHAPTER IX



AT half-past nine, that night, Tom and

Sid were sent to bed, as usual. They

said their prayers, and Sid was soon

asleep. Tom lay awake and waited, in

restless impatience. When it seemed to

him that it must be nearly daylight, he

heard the clock strike ten! This was despair. He

would have tossed and fidgeted, as his nerves demanded,

but he was afraid he might wake Sid. So he lay

still, and stared up into the dark. Everything was

dismally still. By and by, out of the stillness, little,

scarcely preceptible noises began to emphasize them-

selves. The ticking of the clock began to bring it-

self into notice. Old beams began to crack mysteri-

ously. The stairs creaked faintly. Evidently spirits

were abroad. A measured, muffled snore issued

from Aunt Polly's chamber. And now the tiresome

chirping of a cricket that no human ingenuity could

locate, began. Next the ghastly ticking of a death-

watch in the wall at the bed's head made Tom shudder

-- it meant that somebody's days were numbered.

Then the howl of a far-off dog rose on the night air,

and was answered by a fainter howl from a remoter

distance. Tom was in an agony. At last he was

satisfied that time had ceased and eternity begun; he

began to doze, in spite of himself; the clock chimed

eleven, but he did not hear it. And then there came,

mingling with his half-formed dreams, a most mel-

ancholy caterwauling. The raising of a neighboring

window disturbed him. A cry of "Scat! you devil!"

and the crash of an empty bottle against the back of

his aunt's woodshed brought him wide awake, and a

single minute later he was dressed and out of the win-

dow and creeping along the roof of the "ell" on all

fours. He "meow'd" with caution once or twice, as

he went; then jumped to the roof of the woodshed and

thence to the ground. Huckleberry Finn was there,

with his dead cat. The boys moved off and disap-

peared in the gloom. At the end of half an hour they

were wading through the tall grass of the graveyard.



It was a graveyard of the old-fashioned Western

kind. It was on a hill, about a mile and a half from

the village. It had a crazy board fence around it,

which leaned inward in places, and outward the rest

of the time, but stood upright nowhere. Grass and

weeds grew rank over the whole cemetery. All the

old graves were sunken in, there was not a tombstone

on the place; round-topped, worm-eaten boards stag-

gered over the graves, leaning for support and finding

none. "Sacred to the memory of" So-and-So had been

painted on them once, but it could no longer have been

read, on the most of them, now, even if there had

been light.



A faint wind moaned through the trees, and Tom

feared it might be the spirits of the dead, complain-

ing at being disturbed. The boys talked little, and

only under their breath, for the time and the place

and the pervading solemnity and silence oppressed

their spirits. They found the sharp new heap they

were seeking, and ensconced themselves within the

protection of three great elms that grew in a bunch

within a few feet of the grave.



Then they waited in silence for what seemed a long

time. The hooting of a distant owl was all the sound

that troubled the dead stillness. Tom's reflections

grew oppressive. He must force some talk. So he

said in a whisper:



"Hucky, do you believe the dead people like it for

us to be here?"



Huckleberry whispered:



"I wisht I knowed. It's awful solemn like, AIN'T it?"



"I bet it is."



There was a considerable pause, while the boys

canvassed this matter inwardly. Then Tom whis-

pered:



"Say, Hucky -- do you reckon Hoss Williams hears

us talking?"



"O' course he does. Least his sperrit does."



Tom, after a pause:



"I wish I'd said Mister Williams. But I never

meant any harm. Everybody calls him Hoss."



"A body can't be too partic'lar how they talk 'bout

these-yer dead people, Tom."



This was a damper, and conversation died again.



Presently Tom seized his comrade's arm and said:



"Sh!"



"What is it, Tom?" And the two clung together

with beating hearts.



"Sh! There 'tis again! Didn't you hear it?"



"I --"



"There! Now you hear it."



"Lord, Tom, they're coming! They're coming,

sure. What'll we do?"



"I dono. Think they'll see us?"



"Oh, Tom, they can see in the dark, same as cats.

I wisht I hadn't come."



"Oh, don't be afeard. I don't believe they'll bother

us. We ain't doing any harm. If we keep perfectly

still, maybe they won't notice us at all."



"I'll try to, Tom, but, Lord, I'm all of a shiver."



"Listen!"



The boys bent their heads together and scarcely

breathed. A muffled sound of voices floated up from

the far end of the graveyard.



"Look! See there!" whispered Tom. "What is it?"



"It's devil-fire. Oh, Tom, this is awful."



Some vague figures approached through the gloom,

swinging an old-fashioned tin lantern that freckled

the ground with innumerable little spangles of light.

Presently Huckleberry whispered with a shudder:



"It's the devils sure enough. Three of 'em! Lordy,

Tom, we're goners! Can you pray?"



"I'll try, but don't you be afeard. They ain't going

to hurt us. 'Now I lay me down to sleep, I --'"



"Sh!"



"What is it, Huck?"



"They're HUMANS! One of 'em is, anyway. One

of 'em's old Muff Potter's voice."



"No -- 'tain't so, is it?"



"I bet I know it. Don't you stir nor budge. He

ain't sharp enough to notice us. Drunk, the same as

usual, likely -- blamed old rip!"



"All right, I'll keep still. Now they're stuck.

Can't find it. Here they come again. Now they're

hot. Cold again. Hot again. Red hot! They're

p'inted right, this time. Say, Huck, I know another

o' them voices; it's Injun Joe."



"That's so -- that murderin' half-breed! I'd druther

they was devils a dern sight. What kin they be up

to?"



The whisper died wholly out, now, for the three

men had reached the grave and stood within a few

feet of the boys' hiding-place.



"Here it is," said the third voice; and the owner

of it held the lantern up and revealed the face of young

Doctor Robinson.



Potter and Injun Joe were carrying a handbarrow

with a rope and a couple of shovels on it. They cast

down their load and began to open the grave. The

doctor put the lantern at the head of the grave and came

and sat down with his back against one of the elm trees.

He was so close the boys could have touched him.



"Hurry, men!" he said, in a low voice; "the moon

might come out at any moment."



They growled a response and went on digging.

For some time there was no noise but the grating

sound of the spades discharging their freight of mould

and gravel. It was very monotonous. Finally a spade

struck upon the coffin with a dull woody accent, and

within another minute or two the men had hoisted it

out on the ground. They pried off the lid with their

shovels, got out the body and dumped it rudely on the

ground. The moon drifted from behind the clouds

and exposed the pallid face. The barrow was got ready

and the corpse placed on it, covered with a blanket,

and bound to its place with the rope. Potter took out

a large spring-knife and cut off the dangling end of the

rope and then said:



"Now the cussed thing's ready, Sawbones, and

you'll just out with another five, or here she stays."



"That's the talk!" said Injun Joe.



"Look here, what does this mean?" said the doctor.

"You required your pay in advance, and I've paid

you."



"Yes, and you done more than that," said Injun

Joe, approaching the doctor, who was now standing.

"Five years ago you drove me away from your father's

kitchen one night, when I come to ask for something

to eat, and you said I warn't there for any good; and

when I swore I'd get even with you if it took a hundred

years, your father had me jailed for a vagrant. Did

you think I'd forget? The Injun blood ain't in me for

nothing. And now I've GOT you, and you got to SETTLE,

you know!"



He was threatening the doctor, with his fist in his

face, by this time. The doctor struck out suddenly and

stretched the ruffian on the ground. Potter dropped

his knife, and exclaimed:



"Here, now, don't you hit my pard!" and the next

moment he had grappled with the doctor and the two

were struggling with might and main, trampling the

grass and tearing the ground with their heels. Injun

Joe sprang to his feet, his eyes flaming with passion,

snatched up Potter's knife, and went creeping, catlike

and stooping, round and round about the combatants,

seeking an opportunity. All at once the doctor flung

himself free, seized the heavy headboard of Williams'

grave and felled Potter to the earth with it -- and in the

same instant the half-breed saw his chance and drove

the knife to the hilt in the young man's breast. He

reeled and fell partly upon Potter, flooding him with his

blood, and in the same moment the clouds blotted out the

dreadful spectacle and the two frightened boys went

speeding away in the dark.



Presently, when the moon emerged again, Injun

Joe was standing over the two forms, contemplating

them. The doctor murmured inarticulately, gave a

long gasp or two and was still. The half-breed mut-

tered:



"THAT score is settled -- damn you."



Then he robbed the body. After which he put

the fatal knife in Potter's open right hand, and sat

down on the dismantled coffin. Three -- four -- five

minutes passed, and then Potter began to stir and

moan. His hand closed upon the knife; he raised

it, glanced at it, and let it fall, with a shudder. Then

he sat up, pushing the body from him, and gazed at it,

and then around him, confusedly. His eyes met Joe's.



"Lord, how is this, Joe?" he said.



"It's a dirty business," said Joe, without moving.



"What did you do it for?"



"I! I never done it!"



"Look here! That kind of talk won't wash."



Potter trembled and grew white.



"I thought I'd got sober. I'd no business to drink

to-night. But it's in my head yet -- worse'n when we

started here. I'm all in a muddle; can't recollect any-

thing of it, hardly. Tell me, Joe -- HONEST, now, old

feller -- did I do it? Joe, I never meant to -- 'pon my

soul and honor, I never meant to, Joe. Tell me how

it was, Joe. Oh, it's awful -- and him so young and

promising."



"Why, you two was scuffling, and he fetched you

one with the headboard and you fell flat; and then

up you come, all reeling and staggering like, and

snatched the knife and jammed it into him, just as

he fetched you another awful clip -- and here you've

laid, as dead as a wedge til now."



"Oh, I didn't know what I was a-doing. I wish

I may die this minute if I did. It was all on account

of the whiskey and the excitement, I reckon. I never

used a weepon in my life before, Joe. I've fought, but

never with weepons. They'll all say that. Joe, don't

tell! Say you won't tell, Joe -- that's a good feller. I

always liked you, Joe, and stood up for you, too. Don't

you remember? You WON'T tell, WILL you, Joe?" And

the poor creature dropped on his knees before the stolid

murderer, and clasped his appealing hands.



"No, you've always been fair and square with me,

Muff Potter, and I won't go back on you. There, now,

that's as fair as a man can say."



"Oh, Joe, you're an angel. I'll bless you for this

the longest day I live." And Potter began to cry.



"Come, now, that's enough of that. This ain't any

time for blubbering. You be off yonder way and I'll

go this. Move, now, and don't leave any tracks be-

hind you."



Potter started on a trot that quickly increased to a

run. The half-breed stood looking after him. He

muttered:



"If he's as much stunned with the lick and fud-

dled with the rum as he had the look of being, he

won't think of the knife till he's gone so far he'll be

afraid to come back after it to such a place by him-

self -- chicken-heart!"



Two or three minutes later the murdered man, the

blanketed corpse, the lidless coffin, and the open grave

were under no inspection but the moon's. The still-

ness was complete again, too.





CHAPTER X



THE two boys flew on and on, toward the

village, speechless with horror. They

glanced backward over their shoulders

from time to time, apprehensively, as

if they feared they might be followed.

Every stump that started up in their path

seemed a man and an enemy, and made them catch

their breath; and as they sped by some outlying cot-

tages that lay near the village, the barking of the

aroused watch-dogs seemed to give wings to their feet.



"If we can only get to the old tannery before we

break down!" whispered Tom, in short catches be-

tween breaths. "I can't stand it much longer."



Huckleberry's hard pantings were his only reply,

and the boys fixed their eyes on the goal of their hopes

and bent to their work to win it. They gained steadily

on it, and at last, breast to breast, they burst through

the open door and fell grateful and exhausted in the

sheltering shadows beyond. By and by their pulses

slowed down, and Tom whispered:



"Huckleberry, what do you reckon'll come of this?"



"If Doctor Robinson dies, I reckon hanging'll come

of it."



"Do you though?"



"Why, I KNOW it, Tom."



Tom thought a while, then he said:



"Who'll tell? We?"



"What are you talking about? S'pose something

happened and Injun Joe DIDN'T hang? Why, he'd

kill us some time or other, just as dead sure as we're

a laying here."



"That's just what I was thinking to myself, Huck."



"If anybody tells, let Muff Potter do it, if he's fool

enough. He's generally drunk enough."



Tom said nothing -- went on thinking. Presently

he whispered:



"Huck, Muff Potter don't know it. How can he

tell?"



"What's the reason he don't know it?"



"Because he'd just got that whack when Injun

Joe done it. D'you reckon he could see anything?

D'you reckon he knowed anything?"



"By hokey, that's so, Tom!"



"And besides, look-a-here -- maybe that whack done

for HIM!"



"No, 'taint likely, Tom. He had liquor in him;

I could see that; and besides, he always has. Well,

when pap's full, you might take and belt him over

the head with a church and you couldn't phase him.

He says so, his own self. So it's the same with Muff

Potter, of course. But if a man was dead sober,

I reckon maybe that whack might fetch him; I

dono."



After another reflective silence, Tom said:



"Hucky, you sure you can keep mum?"



"Tom, we GOT to keep mum. You know that.

That Injun devil wouldn't make any more of drownd-

ing us than a couple of cats, if we was to squeak 'bout

this and they didn't hang him. Now, look-a-here,

Tom, less take and swear to one another -- that's what

we got to do -- swear to keep mum."



"I'm agreed. It's the best thing. Would you

just hold hands and swear that we --"



"Oh no, that wouldn't do for this. That's good

enough for little rubbishy common things -- specially

with gals, cuz THEY go back on you anyway, and blab

if they get in a huff -- but there orter be writing 'bout

a big thing like this. And blood."



Tom's whole being applauded this idea. It was

deep, and dark, and awful; the hour, the circum-

stances, the surroundings, were in keeping with it.

He picked up a clean pine shingle that lay in the moon-

light, took a little fragment of "red keel" out of his

pocket, got the moon on his work, and painfully scrawl-

ed these lines, emphasizing each slow down-stroke by

clamping his tongue between his teeth, and letting up

the pressure on the up-strokes. [See next page.]



   "Huck Finn and

    Tom Sawyer swears

    they will keep mum

    about This and They

    wish They may Drop

    down dead in Their

    Tracks if They ever

    Tell and Rot.



Huckleberry was filled with admiration of Tom's

facility in writing, and the sublimity of his language.

He at once took a pin from his lapel and was going

to prick his flesh, but Tom said:



"Hold on! Don't do that. A pin's brass. It

might have verdigrease on it."



"What's verdigrease?"



"It's p'ison. That's what it is. You just swaller

some of it once -- you'll see."



So Tom unwound the thread from one of his needles,

and each boy pricked the ball of his thumb and squeezed

out a drop of blood. In time, after many squeezes,

Tom managed to sign his initials, using the ball of his

little finger for a pen. Then he showed Huckleberry

how to make an H and an F, and the oath was com-

plete. They buried the shingle close to the wall, with

some dismal ceremonies and incantations, and the

fetters that bound their tongues were considered to be

locked and the key thrown away.



A figure crept stealthily through a break in the

other end of the ruined building, now, but they did

not notice it.



"Tom," whispered Huckleberry, "does this keep

us from EVER telling -- ALWAYS?"



"Of course it does. It don't make any difference

WHAT happens, we got to keep mum. We'd drop

down dead -- don't YOU know that?"



"Yes, I reckon that's so."



They continued to whisper for some little time.

Presently a dog set up a long, lugubrious howl just

outside -- within ten feet of them. The boys clasped

each other suddenly, in an agony of fright.



"Which of us does he mean?" gasped Huckle-

berry.



"I dono -- peep through the crack. Quick!"



"No, YOU, Tom!"



"I can't -- I can't DO it, Huck!"



"Please, Tom. There 'tis again!"



"Oh, lordy, I'm thankful!" whispered Tom. "I

know his voice. It's Bull Harbison." *



[* If Mr. Harbison owned a slave named Bull, Tom

would have spoken of him as "Harbison's Bull," but

a son or a dog of that name was "Bull Harbison."]



"Oh, that's good -- I tell you, Tom, I was most

scared to death; I'd a bet anything it was a STRAY dog."



The dog howled again. The boys' hearts sank

once more.



"Oh, my! that ain't no Bull Harbison!" whispered

Huckleberry. "DO, Tom!"



Tom, quaking with fear, yielded, and put his eye

to the crack. His whisper was hardly audible when

he said:



"Oh, Huck, IT S A STRAY DOG!"



"Quick, Tom, quick! Who does he mean?"



"Huck, he must mean us both -- we're right to-

gether."



"Oh, Tom, I reckon we're goners. I reckon there

ain't no mistake 'bout where I'LL go to. I been so

wicked."



"Dad fetch it! This comes of playing hookey and

doing everything a feller's told NOT to do. I might a

been good, like Sid, if I'd a tried -- but no, I wouldn't,

of course. But if ever I get off this time, I lay I'll just

WALLER in Sunday-schools!" And Tom began to snuffle

a little.



"YOU bad!" and Huckleberry began to snuffle too.

"Consound it, Tom Sawyer, you're just old pie, 'long-

side o' what I am. Oh, LORDY, lordy, lordy, I wisht I

only had half your chance."



Tom choked off and whispered:



"Look, Hucky, look! He's got his BACK to us!"



Hucky looked, with joy in his heart.



"Well, he has, by jingoes! Did he before?"



"Yes, he did. But I, like a fool, never thought.

Oh, this is bully, you know. NOW who can he mean?"



The howling stopped. Tom pricked up his ears.



"Sh! What's that?" he whispered.



"Sounds like -- like hogs grunting. No -- it's some-

body snoring, Tom."



"That IS it! Where 'bouts is it, Huck?"



"I bleeve it's down at 'tother end. Sounds so,

anyway. Pap used to sleep there, sometimes, 'long

with the hogs, but laws bless you, he just lifts things

when HE snores. Besides, I reckon he ain't ever com-

ing back to this town any more."



The spirit of adventure rose in the boys' souls once

more.



"Hucky, do you das't to go if I lead?"



"I don't like to, much. Tom, s'pose it's Injun Joe!"



Tom quailed. But presently the temptation rose

up strong again and the boys agreed to try, with the

understanding that they would take to their heels if

the snoring stopped. So they went tiptoeing stealth-

ily down, the one behind the other. When they had

got to within five steps of the snorer, Tom stepped on

a stick, and it broke with a sharp snap. The man

moaned, writhed a little, and his face came into the

moonlight. It was Muff Potter. The boys' hearts

had stood still, and their hopes too, when the man

moved, but their fears passed away now. They tip-

toed out, through the broken weather-boarding, and

stopped at a little distance to exchange a parting word.

That long, lugubrious howl rose on the night air again!

They turned and saw the strange dog standing within

a few feet of where Potter was lying, and FACING Potter,

with his nose pointing heavenward.



"Oh, geeminy, it's HIM!" exclaimed both boys, in a

breath.



"Say, Tom -- they say a stray dog come howling

around Johnny Miller's house, 'bout midnight, as

much as two weeks ago; and a whippoorwill come

in and lit on the banisters and sung, the very same

evening; and there ain't anybody dead there yet."



"Well, I know that. And suppose there ain't.

Didn't Gracie Miller fall in the kitchen fire and burn

herself terrible the very next Saturday?"



"Yes, but she ain't DEAD. And what's more, she's

getting better, too."



"All right, you wait and see. She's a goner, just

as dead sure as Muff Potter's a goner. That's what

the niggers say, and they know all about these kind

of things, Huck."



Then they separated, cogitating. When Tom crept

in at his bedroom window the night was almost spent.

He undressed with excessive caution, and fell asleep

congratulating himself that nobody knew of his esca-

pade. He was not aware that the gently-snoring Sid

was awake, and had been so for an hour.



When Tom awoke, Sid was dressed and gone.

There was a late look in the light, a late sense in the

atmosphere. He was startled. Why had he not been

called -- persecuted till he was up, as usual? The

thought filled him with bodings. Within five minutes

he was dressed and down-stairs, feeling sore and

drowsy. The family were still at table, but they had

finished breakfast. There was no voice of rebuke;

but there were averted eyes; there was a silence and an

air of solemnity that struck a chill to the culprit's heart.

He sat down and tried to seem gay, but it was up-hill

work; it roused no smile, no response, and he lapsed

into silence and let his heart sink down to the depths.



After breakfast his aunt took him aside, and Tom

almost brightened in the hope that he was going to

be flogged; but it was not so. His aunt wept over

him and asked him how he could go and break her

old heart so; and finally told him to go on, and ruin

himself and bring her gray hairs with sorrow to the

grave, for it was no use for her to try any more. This

was worse than a thousand whippings, and Tom's

heart was sorer now than his body. He cried, he

pleaded for forgiveness, promised to reform over and

over again, and then received his dismissal, feeling that

he had won but an imperfect forgiveness and established

but a feeble confidence.



He left the presence too miserable to even feel re-

vengeful toward Sid; and so the latter's prompt retreat

through the back gate was unnecessary. He moped

to school gloomy and sad, and took his flogging, along

with Joe Harper, for playing hookey the day before,

with the air of one whose heart was busy with heavier

woes and wholly dead to trifles. Then he betook him-

self to his seat, rested his elbows on his desk and his

jaws in his hands, and stared at the wall with the stony

stare of suffering that has reached the limit and can

no further go. His elbow was pressing against some

hard substance. After a long time he slowly and

sadly changed his position, and took up this object

with a sigh. It was in a paper. He unrolled it. A

long, lingering, colossal sigh followed, and his heart

broke. It was his brass andiron knob!



This final feather broke the camel's back.





CHAPTER XI



CLOSE upon the hour of noon the whole

village was suddenly electrified with the

ghastly news. No need of the as yet un-

dreamed-of telegraph; the tale flew from

man to man, from group to group, from

house to house, with little less than tele-

graphic speed. Of course the schoolmaster gave holi-

day for that afternoon; the town would have thought

strangely of him if he had not.



A gory knife had been found close to the murdered

man, and it had been recognized by somebody as be-

longing to Muff Potter -- so the story ran. And it was

said that a belated citizen had come upon Potter wash-

ing himself in the "branch" about one or two o'clock

in the morning, and that Potter had at once sneaked

off -- suspicious circumstances, especially the washing

which was not a habit with Potter. It was also said

that the town had been ransacked for this "murderer"

(the public are not slow in the matter of sifting evidence

and arriving at a verdict), but that he could not be

found. Horsemen had departed down all the roads

in every direction, and the Sheriff "was confident"

that he would be captured before night.



All the town was drifting toward the graveyard.

Tom's heartbreak vanished and he joined the pro-

cession, not because he would not a thousand times

rather go anywhere else, but because an awful, un-

accountable fascination drew him on. Arrived at the

dreadful place, he wormed his small body through

the crowd and saw the dismal spectacle. It seemed

to him an age since he was there before. Somebody

pinched his arm. He turned, and his eyes met Huckle-

berry's. Then both looked elsewhere at once, and

wondered if anybody had noticed anything in their

mutual glance. But everybody was talking, and intent

upon the grisly spectacle before them.



"Poor fellow!" "Poor young fellow!" "This ought

to be a lesson to grave robbers!" "Muff Potter'll hang

for this if they catch him!" This was the drift of re-

mark; and the minister said, "It was a judgment; His

hand is here."



Now Tom shivered from head to heel; for his eye

fell upon the stolid face of Injun Joe. At this moment

the crowd began to sway and struggle, and voices

shouted, "It's him! it's him! he's coming himself!"



"Who? Who?" from twenty voices.



"Muff Potter!"



"Hallo, he's stopped! -- Look out, he's turning!

Don't let him get away!"



People in the branches of the trees over Tom's head

said he wasn't trying to get away -- he only looked

doubtful and perplexed.



"Infernal impudence!" said a bystander; "wanted

to come and take a quiet look at his work, I reckon --

didn't expect any company."



The crowd fell apart, now, and the Sheriff came

through, ostentatiously leading Potter by the arm.

The poor fellow's face was haggard, and his eyes

showed the fear that was upon him. When he stood

before the murdered man, he shook as with a palsy,

and he put his face in his hands and burst into tears.



"I didn't do it, friends," he sobbed; "'pon my word

and honor I never done it."



"Who's accused you?" shouted a voice.



This shot seemed to carry home. Potter lifted his

face and looked around him with a pathetic hope-

lessness in his eyes. He saw Injun Joe, and exclaimed:



"Oh, Injun Joe, you promised me you'd never --"



"Is that your knife?" and it was thrust before him

by the Sheriff.



Potter would have fallen if they had not caught him

and eased him to the ground. Then he said:



"Something told me 't if I didn't come back and

get --" He shuddered; then waved his nerveless hand

with a vanquished gesture and said, "Tell 'em, Joe,

tell 'em -- it ain't any use any more."



Then Huckleberry and Tom stood dumb and star-

ing, and heard the stony-hearted liar reel off his se-

rene statement, they expecting every moment that the

clear sky would deliver God's lightnings upon his head,

and wondering to see how long the stroke was delayed.

And when he had finished and still stood alive and

whole, their wavering impulse to break their oath and

save the poor betrayed prisoner's life faded and vanished

away, for plainly this miscreant had sold himself to

Satan and it would be fatal to meddle with the property

of such a power as that.



"Why didn't you leave? What did you want to

come here for?" somebody said.



"I couldn't help it -- I couldn't help it," Potter

moaned. "I wanted to run away, but I couldn't seem

to come anywhere but here." And he fell to sobbing

again.



Injun Joe repeated his statement, just as calmly,

a few minutes afterward on the inquest, under oath;

and the boys, seeing that the lightnings were still

withheld, were confirmed in their belief that Joe had

sold himself to the devil. He was now become, to

them, the most balefully interesting object they had

ever looked upon, and they could not take their fas-

cinated eyes from his face.



They inwardly resolved to watch him nights, when

opportunity should offer, in the hope of getting a glimpse

of his dread master.



Injun Joe helped to raise the body of the murdered

man and put it in a wagon for removal; and it was

whispered through the shuddering crowd that the

wound bled a little! The boys thought that this happy

circumstance would turn suspicion in the right direction;

but they were disappointed, for more than one villager

remarked:



"It was within three feet of Muff Potter when it

done it."



Tom's fearful secret and gnawing conscience dis-

turbed his sleep for as much as a week after this; and

at breakfast one morning Sid said:



"Tom, you pitch around and talk in your sleep so

much that you keep me awake half the time."



Tom blanched and dropped his eyes.



"It's a bad sign," said Aunt Polly, gravely. "What

you got on your mind, Tom?"



"Nothing. Nothing 't I know of." But the boy's

hand shook so that he spilled his coffee.



"And you do talk such stuff," Sid said. "Last

night you said, 'It's blood, it's blood, that's what it is!'

You said that over and over. And you said, 'Don't

torment me so -- I'll tell!' Tell WHAT? What is it you'll

tell?"



Everything was swimming before Tom. There is

no telling what might have happened, now, but luckily

the concern passed out of Aunt Polly's face and she

came to Tom's relief without knowing it. She said:



"Sho! It's that dreadful murder. I dream about

it most every night myself. Sometimes I dream it's

me that done it."



Mary said she had been affected much the same

way. Sid seemed satisfied. Tom got out of the

presence as quick as he plausibly could, and after that

he complained of toothache for a week, and tied up

his jaws every night. He never knew that Sid lay

nightly watching, and frequently slipped the bandage

free and then leaned on his elbow listening a good while

at a time, and afterward slipped the bandage back to

its place again. Tom's distress of mind wore off

gradually and the toothache grew irksome and was

discarded. If Sid really managed to make anything

out of Tom's disjointed mutterings, he kept it to him-

self.



It seemed to Tom that his schoolmates never would

get done holding inquests on dead cats, and thus

keeping his trouble present to his mind. Sid noticed

that Tom never was coroner at one of these inquiries,

though it had been his habit to take the lead in all

new enterprises; he noticed, too, that Tom never acted

as a witness -- and that was strange; and Sid did not

overlook the fact that Tom even showed a marked

aversion to these inquests, and always avoided them

when he could. Sid marvelled, but said nothing. How-

ever, even inquests went out of vogue at last, and ceased

to torture Tom's conscience.



Every day or two, during this time of sorrow, Tom

watched his opportunity and went to the little grated

jail-window and smuggled such small comforts through

to the "murderer" as he could get hold of. The jail

was a trifling little brick den that stood in a marsh at

the edge of the village, and no guards were afforded for

it; indeed, it was seldom occupied. These offerings

greatly helped to ease Tom's conscience.



The villagers had a strong desire to tar-and-feather

Injun Joe and ride him on a rail, for body-snatching,

but so formidable was his character that nobody could

be found who was willing to take the lead in the matter,

so it was dropped. He had been careful to begin both

of his inquest-statements with the fight, without con-

fessing the grave-robbery that preceded it; therefore

it was deemed wisest not to try the case in the courts

at present.





CHAPTER XII



ONE of the reasons why Tom's mind had

drifted away from its secret troubles was,

that it had found a new and weighty

matter to interest itself about. Becky

Thatcher had stopped coming to school.

Tom had struggled with his pride a few

days, and tried to "whistle her down the wind," but

failed. He began to find himself hanging around her

father's house, nights, and feeling very miserable. She

was ill. What if she should die! There was dis-

traction in the thought. He no longer took an interest

in war, nor even in piracy. The charm of life was

gone; there was nothing but dreariness left. He put

his hoop away, and his bat; there was no joy in them

any more. His aunt was concerned. She began to try

all manner of remedies on him. She was one of those

people who are infatuated with patent medicines and

all new-fangled methods of producing health or mending

it. She was an inveterate experimenter in these things.

When something fresh in this line came out she was in a

fever, right away, to try it; not on herself, for she was

never ailing, but on anybody else that came handy.

She was a subscriber for all the "Health" periodicals

and phrenological frauds; and the solemn ignorance

they were inflated with was breath to her nostrils.

All the "rot" they contained about ventilation, and

how to go to bed, and how to get up, and what to

eat, and what to drink, and how much exercise to

take, and what frame of mind to keep one's self in,

and what sort of clothing to wear, was all gospel to

her, and she never observed that her health-journals

of the current month customarily upset everything

they had recommended the month before. She was

as simple-hearted and honest as the day was long,

and so she was an easy victim. She gathered together

her quack periodicals and her quack medicines, and

thus armed with death, went about on her pale horse,

metaphorically speaking, with "hell following after."

But she never suspected that she was not an angel of

healing and the balm of Gilead in disguise, to the

suffering neighbors.



The water treatment was new, now, and Tom's low

condition was a windfall to her. She had him out at

daylight every morning, stood him up in the wood-

shed and drowned him with a deluge of cold water;

then she scrubbed him down with a towel like a

file, and so brought him to; then she rolled him

up in a wet sheet and put him away under blank-

ets till she sweated his soul clean and "the yel-

low stains of it came through his pores" -- as Tom

said.



Yet notwithstanding all this, the boy grew more

and more melancholy and pale and dejected. She

added hot baths, sitz baths, shower baths, and plunges.

The boy remained as dismal as a hearse. She began

to assist the water with a slim oatmeal diet and blister-

plasters. She calculated his capacity as she would a

jug's, and filled him up every day with quack cure-alls.



Tom had become indifferent to persecution by this

time. This phase filled the old lady's heart with

consternation. This indifference must be broken up

at any cost. Now she heard of Pain-killer for the

first time. She ordered a lot at once. She tasted it

and was filled with gratitude. It was simply fire in a

liquid form. She dropped the water treatment and

everything else, and pinned her faith to Pain-killer.

She gave Tom a teaspoonful and watched with the

deepest anxiety for the result. Her troubles were in-

stantly at rest, her soul at peace again; for the "in-

difference" was broken up. The boy could not have

shown a wilder, heartier interest, if she had built a fire

under him.



Tom felt that it was time to wake up; this sort of

life might be romantic enough, in his blighted con-

dition, but it was getting to have too little sentiment

and too much distracting variety about it. So he

thought over various plans for relief, and finally hit

pon that of professing to be fond of Pain-killer. He

asked for it so often that he became a nuisance, and

his aunt ended by telling him to help himself and quit

bothering her. If it had been Sid, she would have had

no misgivings to alloy her delight; but since it was Tom,

she watched the bottle clandestinely. She found that

the medicine did really diminish, but it did not occur

to her that the boy was mending the health of a crack

in the sitting-room floor with it.



One day Tom was in the act of dosing the crack

when his aunt's yellow cat came along, purring, ey-

ing the teaspoon avariciously, and begging for a taste.

Tom said:



"Don't ask for it unless you want it, Peter."



But Peter signified that he did want it.



"You better make sure."



Peter was sure.



"Now you've asked for it, and I'll give it to you,

because there ain't anything mean about me; but

if you find you don't like it, you mustn't blame any-

body but your own self."



Peter was agreeable. So Tom pried his mouth

open and poured down the Pain-killer. Peter sprang

a couple of yards in the air, and then delivered a

war-whoop and set off round and round the room,

banging against furniture, upsetting flower-pots, and

making general havoc. Next he rose on his hind

feet and pranced around, in a frenzy of enjoyment,

with his head over his shoulder and his voice pro-

claiming his unappeasable happiness. Then he went

tearing around the house again spreading chaos and

destruction in his path. Aunt Polly entered in time

to see him throw a few double summersets, deliver a

final mighty hurrah, and sail through the open window,

carrying the rest of the flower-pots with him. The

old lady stood petrified with astonishment, peering

over her glasses; Tom lay on the floor expiring with

laughter.



"Tom, what on earth ails that cat?"



"I don't know, aunt," gasped the boy.



"Why, I never see anything like it. What did make

him act so?"



"Deed I don't know, Aunt Polly; cats always act

so when they're having a good time."



"They do, do they?" There was something in the

tone that made Tom apprehensive.



"Yes'm. That is, I believe they do."



"You DO?"



"Yes'm."



The old lady was bending down, Tom watching,

with interest emphasized by anxiety. Too late he

divined her "drift." The handle of the telltale tea-

spoon was visible under the bed-valance. Aunt Polly

took it, held it up. Tom winced, and dropped his eyes.

Aunt Polly raised him by the usual handle -- his ear --

and cracked his head soundly with her thimble.



"Now, sir, what did you want to treat that poor

dumb beast so, for?"



"I done it out of pity for him -- because he hadn't

any aunt."



"Hadn't any aunt! -- you numskull. What has that

got to do with it?"



"Heaps. Because if he'd had one she'd a burnt

him out herself! She'd a roasted his bowels out of him

'thout any more feeling than if he was a human!"



Aunt Polly felt a sudden pang of remorse. This

was putting the thing in a new light; what was cruelty

to a cat MIGHT be cruelty to a boy, too. She began to

soften; she felt sorry. Her eyes watered a little, and

she put her hand on Tom's head and said gently:



"I was meaning for the best, Tom. And, Tom, it

DID do you good."



Tom looked up in her face with just a perceptible

twinkle peeping through his gravity.



"I know you was meaning for the best, aunty, and

so was I with Peter. It done HIM good, too. I never

see him get around so since --"



"Oh, go 'long with you, Tom, before you aggravate

me again. And you try and see if you can't be a good

boy, for once, and you needn't take any more medicine."



Tom reached school ahead of time. It was noticed

that this strange thing had been occurring every day

latterly. And now, as usual of late, he hung about

the gate of the schoolyard instead of playing with his

comrades. He was sick, he said, and he looked it.

He tried to seem to be looking everywhere but whither

he really was looking -- down the road. Presently

Jeff Thatcher hove in sight, and Tom's face lighted;

he gazed a moment, and then turned sorrowfully away.

When Jeff arrived, Tom accosted him; and "led up"

warily to opportunities for remark about Becky, but

the giddy lad never could see the bait. Tom watched

and watched, hoping whenever a frisking frock came in

sight, and hating the owner of it as soon as he saw she

was not the right one. At last frocks ceased to appear,

and he dropped hopelessly into the dumps; he entered

the empty schoolhouse and sat down to suffer. Then

one more frock passed in at the gate, and Tom's heart

gave a great bound. The next instant he was out,

and "going on" like an Indian; yelling, laughing,

chasing boys, jumping over the fence at risk of life and

limb, throwing handsprings, standing on his head --

doing all the heroic things he could conceive of, and

keeping a furtive eye out, all the while, to see if Becky

Thatcher was noticing. But she seemed to be un-

conscious of it all; she never looked. Could it be

possible that she was not aware that he was there?

He carried his exploits to her immediate vicinity; came

war-whooping around, snatched a boy's cap, hurled it

to the roof of the schoolhouse, broke through a group

of boys, tumbling them in every direction, and fell

sprawling, himself, under Becky's nose, almost upsetting

her -- and she turned, with her nose in the air, and he

heard her say: "Mf! some people think they're mighty

smart -- always showing off!"



Tom's cheeks burned. He gathered himself up and

sneaked off, crushed and crestfallen.





CHAPTER XIII



TOM'S mind was made up now. He was

gloomy and desperate. He was a for-

saken, friendless boy, he said; nobody

loved him; when they found out what they

had driven him to, perhaps they would

be sorry; he had tried to do right and get

along, but they would not let him; since nothing would

do them but to be rid of him, let it be so; and let them

blame HIM for the consequences -- why shouldn't they?

What right had the friendless to complain? Yes, they

had forced him to it at last: he would lead a life of crime.

There was no choice.



By this time he was far down Meadow Lane, and

the bell for school to "take up" tinkled faintly upon his

ear. He sobbed, now, to think he should never, never

hear that old familiar sound any more -- it was very

hard, but it was forced on him; since he was driven out

into the cold world, he must submit -- but he forgave

them. Then the sobs came thick and fast.



Just at this point he met his soul's sworn comrade,

Joe Harper -- hard-eyed, and with evidently a great

and dismal purpose in his heart. Plainly here were

"two souls with but a single thought." Tom, wiping

his eyes with his sleeve, began to blubber out something

about a resolution to escape from hard usage and lack

of sympathy at home by roaming abroad into the great

world never to return; and ended by hoping that Joe

would not forget him.



But it transpired that this was a request which Joe

had just been going to make of Tom, and had come

to hunt him up for that purpose. His mother had

whipped him for drinking some cream which he had

never tasted and knew nothing about; it was plain

that she was tired of him and wished him to go; if

she felt that way, there was nothing for him to do but

succumb; he hoped she would be happy, and never

regret having driven her poor boy out into the unfeeling

world to suffer and die.



As the two boys walked sorrowing along, they

made a new compact to stand by each other and be

brothers and never separate till death relieved them

of their troubles. Then they began to lay their plans.

Joe was for being a hermit, and living on crusts in a

remote cave, and dying, some time, of cold and want

and grief; but after listening to Tom, he conceded that

there were some conspicuous advantages about a life

of crime, and so he consented to be a pirate.



Three miles below St. Petersburg, at a point where

the Mississippi River was a trifle over a mile wide,

there was a long, narrow, wooded island, with a shallow

bar at the head of it, and this offered well as a ren-

dezvous. It was not inhabited; it lay far over toward

the further shore, abreast a dense and almost wholly

unpeopled forest. So Jackson's Island was chosen.

Who were to be the subjects of their piracies was a

matter that did not occur to them. Then they hunted

up Huckleberry Finn, and he joined them promptly,

for all careers were one to him; he was indifferent.

They presently separated to meet at a lonely spot on

the river-bank two miles above the village at the favorite

hour -- which was midnight. There was a small log

raft there which they meant to capture. Each would

bring hooks and lines, and such provision as he could

steal in the most dark and mysterious way -- as became

outlaws. And before the afternoon was done, they

had all managed to enjoy the sweet glory of spreading

the fact that pretty soon the town would "hear some-

thing." All who got this vague hint were cautioned to

"be mum and wait."



About midnight Tom arrived with a boiled ham

and a few trifles, and stopped in a dense undergrowth

on a small bluff overlooking the meeting-place. It

was starlight, and very still. The mighty river lay

like an ocean at rest. Tom listened a moment, but no

sound disturbed the quiet. Then he gave a low,

distinct whistle. It was answered from under the

bluff. Tom whistled twice more; these signals were

answered in the same way. Then a guarded voice

said:



"Who goes there?"



"Tom Sawyer, the Black Avenger of the Spanish

Main. Name your names."



"Huck Finn the Red-Handed, and Joe Harper the

Terror of the Seas." Tom had furnished these titles,

from his favorite literature.



"'Tis well. Give the countersign."



Two hoarse whispers delivered the same awful word

simultaneously to the brooding night:



"BLOOD!"



Then Tom tumbled his ham over the bluff and let

himself down after it, tearing both skin and clothes

to some extent in the effort. There was an easy, com-

fortable path along the shore under the bluff, but it

lacked the advantages of difficulty and danger so val-

ued by a pirate.



The Terror of the Seas had brought a side of bacon,

and had about worn himself out with getting it there.

Finn the Red-Handed had stolen a skillet and a quan-

tity of half-cured leaf tobacco, and had also brought a

few corn-cobs to make pipes with. But none of the

pirates smoked or "chewed" but himself. The Black

Avenger of the Spanish Main said it would never do to

start without some fire. That was a wise thought;

matches were hardly known there in that day. They

saw a fire smouldering upon a great raft a hundred

yards above, and they went stealthily thither and helped

themselves to a chunk. They made an imposing ad-

venture of it, saying, "Hist!" every now and then, and

suddenly halting with finger on lip; moving with hands

on imaginary dagger-hilts; and giving orders in dismal

whispers that if "the foe" stirred, to "let him have it

to the hilt," because "dead men tell no tales." They

knew well enough that the raftsmen were all down at

the village laying in stores or having a spree, but still

that was no excuse for their conducting this thing in an

unpiratical way.



They shoved off, presently, Tom in command, Huck

at the after oar and Joe at the forward. Tom stood

amidships, gloomy-browed, and with folded arms, and

gave his orders in a low, stern whisper:



"Luff, and bring her to the wind!"



"Aye-aye, sir!"



"Steady, steady-y-y-y!"



"Steady it is, sir!"



"Let her go off a point!"



"Point it is, sir!"



As the boys steadily and monotonously drove the

raft toward mid-stream it was no doubt under-

stood that these orders were given only for "style,"

and were not intended to mean anything in par-

ticular.



"What sail's she carrying?"



"Courses, tops'ls, and flying-jib, sir."



"Send the r'yals up! Lay out aloft, there, half a

dozen of ye -- foretopmaststuns'l! Lively, now!"



"Aye-aye, sir!"



"Shake out that maintogalans'l! Sheets and braces!

NOW my hearties!"



"Aye-aye, sir!"



"Hellum-a-lee -- hard a port! Stand by to meet

her when she comes! Port, port! NOW, men! With

a will! Stead-y-y-y!"



"Steady it is, sir!"



The raft drew beyond the middle of the river; the

boys pointed her head right, and then lay on their

oars. The river was not high, so there was not more

than a two or three mile current. Hardly a word was

said during the next three-quarters of an hour. Now

the raft was passing before the distant town. Two or

three glimmering lights showed where it lay, peacefully

sleeping, beyond the vague vast sweep of star-gemmed

water, unconscious of the tremendous event that was

happening. The Black Avenger stood still with folded

arms, "looking his last" upon the scene of his former

joys and his later sufferings, and wishing "she" could

see him now, abroad on the wild sea, facing peril and

death with dauntless heart, going to his doom with a

grim smile on his lips. It was but a small strain on his

imagination to remove Jackson's Island beyond eye-

shot of the village, and so he "looked his last" with a

broken and satisfied heart. The other pirates were

looking their last, too; and they all looked so long

that they came near letting the current drift them out

of the range of the island. But they discovered the

danger in time, and made shift to avert it. About two

o'clock in the morning the raft grounded on the bar

two hundred yards above the head of the island, and

they waded back and forth until they had landed their

freight. Part of the little raft's belongings consisted

of an old sail, and this they spread over a nook in the

bushes for a tent to shelter their provisions; but they

themselves would sleep in the open air in good weather,

as became outlaws.



They built a fire against the side of a great log twenty

or thirty steps within the sombre depths of the forest,

and then cooked some bacon in the frying-pan for sup-

per, and used up half of the corn "pone" stock they had

brought. It seemed glorious sport to be feasting in

that wild, free way in the virgin forest of an unex-

plored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of

men, and they said they never would return to civiliza-

tion. The climbing fire lit up their faces and threw its

ruddy glare upon the pillared tree-trunks of their forest

temple, and upon the varnished foliage and festooning

vines.



When the last crisp slice of bacon was gone, and the

last allowance of corn pone devoured, the boys stretched

themselves out on the grass, filled with contentment.

They could have found a cooler place, but they would

not deny themselves such a romantic feature as the

roasting camp-fire.



"AIN'T it gay?" said Joe.



"It's NUTS!" said Tom. "What would the boys say

if they could see us?"



"Say? Well, they'd just die to be here -- hey,

Hucky!"



"I reckon so," said Huckleberry; "anyways, I'm

suited. I don't want nothing better'n this. I don't

ever get enough to eat, gen'ally -- and here they can't

come and pick at a feller and bullyrag him so."



"It's just the life for me," said Tom. "You don't

have to get up, mornings, and you don't have to go to

school, and wash, and all that blame foolishness. You

see a pirate don't have to do ANYTHING, Joe, when he's

ashore, but a hermit HE has to be praying considerable,

and then he don't have any fun, anyway, all by himself

that way."



"Oh yes, that's so," said Joe, "but I hadn't thought

much about it, you know. I'd a good deal rather be a

pirate, now that I've tried it."



"You see," said Tom, "people don't go much on

hermits, nowadays, like they used to in old times, but

a pirate's always respected. And a hermit's got to

sleep on the hardest place he can find, and put sackcloth

and ashes on his head, and stand out in the rain, and --"



"What does he put sackcloth and ashes on his head

for?" inquired Huck.



"I dono. But they've GOT to do it. Hermits always

do. You'd have to do that if you was a hermit."



"Dern'd if I would," said Huck.



"Well, what would you do?"



"I dono. But I wouldn't do that."



"Why, Huck, you'd HAVE to. How'd you get around

it?"



"Why, I just wouldn't stand it. I'd run away."



"Run away! Well, you WOULD be a nice old slouch

of a hermit. You'd be a disgrace."



The Red-Handed made no response, being better

employed. He had finished gouging out a cob, and

now he fitted a weed stem to it, loaded it with tobacco,

and was pressing a coal to the charge and blowing a

cloud of fragrant smoke -- he was in the full bloom of

luxurious contentment. The other pirates envied him

this majestic vice, and secretly resolved to acquire it

shortly. Presently Huck said:



"What does pirates have to do?"



Tom said:



"Oh, they have just a bully time -- take ships and

burn them, and get the money and bury it in awful

places in their island where there's ghosts and things to

watch it, and kill everybody in the ships -- make 'em

walk a plank."



"And they carry the women to the island," said Joe;

"they don't kill the women."



"No," assented Tom, "they don't kill the women --

they're too noble. And the women's always beautiful,

too.



"And don't they wear the bulliest clothes! Oh no!

All gold and silver and di'monds," said Joe, with

enthusiasm.



"Who?" said Huck.



"Why, the pirates."



Huck scanned his own clothing forlornly.



"I reckon I ain't dressed fitten for a pirate," said

he, with a regretful pathos in his voice; "but I ain't

got none but these."



But the other boys told him the fine clothes would

come fast enough, after they should have begun their

adventures. They made him understand that his poor

rags would do to begin with, though it was customary

for wealthy pirates to start with a proper wardrobe.



Gradually their talk died out and drowsiness began

to steal upon the eyelids of the little waifs. The pipe

dropped from the fingers of the Red-Handed, and he

slept the sleep of the conscience-free and the weary.

The Terror of the Seas and the Black Avenger of the

Spanish Main had more difficulty in getting to sleep.

They said their prayers inwardly, and lying down, since

there was nobody there with authority to make them

kneel and recite aloud; in truth, they had a mind not

to say them at all, but they were afraid to proceed to

such lengths as that, lest they might call down a sudden

and special thunderbolt from heaven. Then at once

they reached and hovered upon the imminent verge of

sleep -- but an intruder came, now, that would not

"down." It was conscience. They began to feel a

vague fear that they had been doing wrong to run

away; and next they thought of the stolen meat, and

then the real torture came. They tried to argue it

away by reminding conscience that they had purloined

sweetmeats and apples scores of times; but conscience

was not to be appeased by such thin plausibilities;

it seemed to them, in the end, that there was no getting

around the stubborn fact that taking sweetmeats was

only "hooking," while taking bacon and hams and

such valuables was plain simple stealing -- and there was

a command against that in the Bible. So they inwardly

resolved that so long as they remained in the business,

their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime

of stealing. Then conscience granted a truce, and

these curiously inconsistent pirates fell peacefully to

sleep.





CHAPTER XIV



WHEN Tom awoke in the morning, he

wondered where he was. He sat up and

rubbed his eyes and looked around. Then

he comprehended. It was the cool gray

dawn, and there was a delicious sense of

repose and peace in the deep pervading

calm and silence of the woods. Not a leaf stirred; not a

sound obtruded upon great Nature's meditation. Bead-

ed dewdrops stood upon the leaves and grasses. A

white layer of ashes covered the fire, and a thin blue

breath of smoke rose straight into the air. Joe and

Huck still slept.



Now, far away in the woods a bird called; another

answered; presently the hammering of a woodpecker

was heard. Gradually the cool dim gray of the morn-

ing whitened, and as gradually sounds multiplied and

life manifested itself. The marvel of Nature shaking

off sleep and going to work unfolded itself to the musing

boy. A little green worm came crawling over a dewy

leaf, lifting two-thirds of his body into the air from time

to time and "sniffing around," then proceeding again --

for he was measuring, Tom said; and when the worm

approached him, of its own accord, he sat as still as a

stone, with his hopes rising and falling, by turns, as the

creature still came toward him or seemed inclined to

go elsewhere; and when at last it considered a painful

moment with its curved body in the air and then came

decisively down upon Tom's leg and began a journey

over him, his whole heart was glad -- for that meant

that he was going to have a new suit of clothes -- without

the shadow of a doubt a gaudy piratical uniform. Now

a procession of ants appeared, from nowhere in par-

ticular, and went about their labors; one struggled man-

fully by with a dead spider five times as big as itself in

its arms, and lugged it straight up a tree-trunk. A

brown spotted lady-bug climbed the dizzy height of a

grass blade, and Tom bent down close to it and said,

"Lady-bug, lady-bug, fly away home, your house is on

fire, your children's alone," and she took wing and went

off to see about it -- which did not surprise the boy, for

he knew of old that this insect was credulous about

conflagrations, and he had practised upon its simplicity

more than once. A tumblebug came next, heaving

sturdily at its ball, and Tom touched the creature, to

see it shut its legs against its body and pretend to be

dead. The birds were fairly rioting by this time. A

catbird, the Northern mocker, lit in a tree over Tom's

head, and trilled out her imitations of her neighbors in

a rapture of enjoyment; then a shrill jay swept down,

a flash of blue flame, and stopped on a twig almost

within the boy's reach, cocked his head to one side and

eyed the strangers with a consuming curiosity; a gray

squirrel and a big fellow of the "fox" kind came

skurrying along, sitting up at intervals to inspect and

chatter at the boys, for the wild things had probably

never seen a human being before and scarcely knew

whether to be afraid or not. All Nature was wide

awake and stirring, now; long lances of sunlight pierced

down through the dense foliage far and near, and a

few butterflies came fluttering upon the scene.



Tom stirred up the other pirates and they all clattered

away with a shout, and in a minute or two were stripped

and chasing after and tumbling over each other in the

shallow limpid water of the white sandbar. They felt

no longing for the little village sleeping in the distance

beyond the majestic waste of water. A vagrant cur-

rent or a slight rise in the river had carried off their

raft, but this only gratified them, since its going was

something like burning the bridge between them and

civilization.



They came back to camp wonderfully refreshed,

glad-hearted, and ravenous; and they soon had the

camp-fire blazing up again. Huck found a spring of

clear cold water close by, and the boys made cups of

broad oak or hickory leaves, and felt that water, sweet-

ened with such a wildwood charm as that, would be a

good enough substitute for coffee. While Joe was

slicing bacon for breakfast, Tom and Huck asked him

to hold on a minute; they stepped to a promising nook

in the river-bank and threw in their lines; almost im-

mediately they had reward. Joe had not had time to

get impatient before they were back again with some

handsome bass, a couple of sun-perch and a small

catfish -- provisions enough for quite a family. They

fried the fish with the bacon, and were astonished; for no

fish had ever seemed so delicious before. They did not

know that the quicker a fresh-water fish is on the fire

after he is caught the better he is; and they reflected

little upon what a sauce open-air sleeping, open-air

exercise, bathing, and a large ingredient of hunger

make, too.



They lay around in the shade, after breakfast, while

Huck had a smoke, and then went off through the woods

on an exploring expedition. They tramped gayly along,

over decaying logs, through tangled underbrush, among

solemn monarchs of the forest, hung from their crowns

to the ground with a drooping regalia of grape-vines.

Now and then they came upon snug nooks carpeted

with grass and jeweled with flowers.



They found plenty of things to be delighted with, but

nothing to be astonished at. They discovered that the

island was about three miles long and a quarter of a

mile wide, and that the shore it lay closest to was only

separated from it by a narrow channel hardly two hun-

dred yards wide. They took a swim about every hour,

so it was close upon the middle of the afternoon when

they got back to camp. They were too hungry to stop

to fish, but they fared sumptuously upon cold ham, and

then threw themselves down in the shade to talk. But

the talk soon began to drag, and then died. The

stillness, the solemnity that brooded in the woods, and

the sense of loneliness, began to tell upon the spirits

of the boys. They fell to thinking. A sort of unde-

fined longing crept upon them. This took dim shape,

presently -- it was budding homesickness. Even Finn

the Red-Handed was dreaming of his doorsteps and

empty hogsheads. But they were all ashamed of their

weakness, and none was brave enough to speak his

thought.



For some time, now, the boys had been dully con-

scious of a peculiar sound in the distance, just as one

sometimes is of the ticking of a clock which he takes no

distinct note of. But now this mysterious sound be-

came more pronounced, and forced a recognition. The

boys started, glanced at each other, and then each as-

sumed a listening attitude. There was a long silence,

profound and unbroken; then a deep, sullen boom

came floating down out of the distance.



"What is it!" exclaimed Joe, under his breath.



"I wonder," said Tom in a whisper.



"'Tain't thunder," said Huckleberry, in an awed

tone, "becuz thunder --"



"Hark!" said Tom. "Listen -- don't talk."



They waited a time that seemed an age, and then the

same muffled boom troubled the solemn hush.



"Let's go and see."



They sprang to their feet and hurried to the shore

toward the town. They parted the bushes on the bank

and peered out over the water. The little steam ferry-

boat was about a mile below the village, drifting with the

current. Her broad deck seemed crowded with people.

There were a great many skiffs rowing about or floating

with the stream in the neighborhood of the ferryboat,

but the boys could not determine what the men in them

were doing. Presently a great jet of white smoke burst

from the ferryboat's side, and as it expanded and rose

in a lazy cloud, that same dull throb of sound was borne

to the listeners again.



"I know now!" exclaimed Tom; "somebody's

drownded!"



"That's it!" said Huck; "they done that last summer,

when Bill Turner got drownded; they shoot a cannon

over the water, and that makes him come up to the top.

Yes, and they take loaves of bread and put quicksilver

in 'em and set 'em afloat, and wherever there's anybody

that's drownded, they'll float right there and stop."



"Yes, I've heard about that," said Joe. "I wonder

what makes the bread do that."



"Oh, it ain't the bread, so much," said Tom; "I

reckon it's mostly what they SAY over it before they start

it out."



"But they don't say anything over it," said Huck.

"I've seen 'em and they don't."



"Well, that's funny," said Tom. "But maybe

they say it to themselves. Of COURSE they do. Any-

body might know that."



The other boys agreed that there was reason in what

Tom said, because an ignorant lump of bread, un-

instructed by an incantation, could not be expected to

act very intelligently when set upon an errand of such

gravity.



"By jings, I wish I was over there, now," said Joe.



"I do too" said Huck "I'd give heaps to know

who it is."



The boys still listened and watched. Presently a

revealing thought flashed through Tom's mind, and

he exclaimed:



"Boys, I know who's drownded -- it's us!"



They felt like heroes in an instant. Here was a

gorgeous triumph; they were missed; they were mourned;

hearts were breaking on their account; tears were being

shed; accusing memories of unkindness to these poor

lost lads were rising up, and unavailing regrets and re-

morse were being indulged; and best of all, the depart-

ed were the talk of the whole town, and the envy of

all the boys, as far as this dazzling notoriety was con-

cerned. This was fine. It was worth while to be a

pirate, after all.



As twilight drew on, the ferryboat went back to her

accustomed business and the skiffs disappeared. The

pirates returned to camp. They were jubilant with

vanity over their new grandeur and the illustrious

trouble they were making. They caught fish, cooked

supper and ate it, and then fell to guessing at what the

village was thinking and saying about them; and the

pictures they drew of the public distress on their ac-

count were gratifying to look upon -- from their point

of view. But when the shadows of night closed them

in, they gradually ceased to talk, and sat gazing into the

fire, with their minds evidently wandering elsewhere.

The excitement was gone, now, and Tom and Joe could

not keep back thoughts of certain persons at home who

were not enjoying this fine frolic as much as they were.

Misgivings came; they grew troubled and unhappy;

a sigh or two escaped, unawares. By and by Joe

timidly ventured upon a roundabout "feeler" as to

how the others might look upon a return to civilization

-- not right now, but --



Tom withered him with derision! Huck, being un-

committed as yet, joined in with Tom, and the waverer

quickly "explained," and was glad to get out of the

scrape with as little taint of chicken-hearted home-

sickness clinging to his garments as he could. Mutiny

was effectually laid to rest for the moment.



As the night deepened, Huck began to nod, and

presently to snore. Joe followed next. Tom lay

upon his elbow motionless, for some time, watching

the two intently. At last he got up cautiously, on

his knees, and went searching among the grass and

the flickering reflections flung by the camp-fire. He

picked up and inspected several large semi-cylinders

of the thin white bark of a sycamore, and finally chose

two which seemed to suit him. Then he knelt by the

fire and painfully wrote something upon each of these

with his "red keel"; one he rolled up and put in his

jacket pocket, and the other he put in Joe's hat and

removed it to a little distance from the owner. And

he also put into the hat certain schoolboy treasures of

almost inestimable value -- among them a lump of

chalk, an India-rubber ball, three fishhooks, and one of

that kind of marbles known as a "sure 'nough crystal."

Then he tiptoed his way cautiously among the trees

till he felt that he was out of hearing, and straightway

broke into a keen run in the direction of the sandbar.





CHAPTER XV



A FEW minutes later Tom was in the shoal

water of the bar, wading toward the

Illinois shore. Before the depth reached

his middle he was half-way over; the cur-

rent would permit no more wading, now,

so he struck out confidently to swim the

remaining hundred yards. He swam quartering up-

stream, but still was swept downward rather faster

than he had expected. However, he reached the shore

finally, and drifted along till he found a low place and

drew himself out. He put his hand on his jacket pocket,

found his piece of bark safe, and then struck through

the woods, following the shore, with streaming garments.

Shortly before ten o'clock he came out into an open

place opposite the village, and saw the ferryboat lying

in the shadow of the trees and the high bank. Every-

thing was quiet under the blinking stars. He crept

down the bank, watching with all his eyes, slipped into

the water, swam three or four strokes and climbed into

the skiff that did "yawl" duty at the boat's stern. He

laid himself down under the thwarts and waited, panting.



Presently the cracked bell tapped and a voice gave

the order to "cast off." A minute or two later the

skiff's head was standing high up, against the boat's

swell, and the voyage was begun. Tom felt happy in

his success, for he knew it was the boat's last trip for

the night. At the end of a long twelve or fifteen minutes

the wheels stopped, and Tom slipped overboard and

swam ashore in the dusk, landing fifty yards down-

stream, out of danger of possible stragglers.



He flew along unfrequented alleys, and shortly found

himself at his aunt's back fence. He climbed over,

approached the "ell," and looked in at the sitting-room

window, for a light was burning there. There sat

Aunt Polly, Sid, Mary, and Joe Harper's mother,

grouped together, talking. They were by the bed, and

the bed was between them and the door. Tom went

to the door and began to softly lift the latch; then he

pressed gently and the door yielded a crack; he con-

tinued pushing cautiously, and quaking every time it

creaked, till he judged he might squeeze through on his

knees; so he put his head through and began, warily.



"What makes the candle blow so?" said Aunt

Polly. Tom hurried up. "Why, that door's open,

I believe. Why, of course it is. No end of strange

things now. Go 'long and shut it, Sid."



Tom disappeared under the bed just in time. He

lay and "breathed" himself for a time, and then crept

to where he could almost touch his aunt's foot.



"But as I was saying," said Aunt Polly, "he warn't

BAD, so to say -- only mischEEvous. Only just giddy,

and harum-scarum, you know. He warn't any more

responsible than a colt. HE never meant any harm,

and he was the best-hearted boy that ever was" -- and

she began to cry.



"It was just so with my Joe -- always full of his

devilment, and up to every kind of mischief, but he

was just as unselfish and kind as he could be -- and

laws bless me, to think I went and whipped him for

taking that cream, never once recollecting that I

throwed it out myself because it was sour, and I never

to see him again in this world, never, never, never, poor

abused boy!" And Mrs. Harper sobbed as if her

heart would break.



"I hope Tom's better off where he is," said Sid,

"but if he'd been better in some ways --"



"SID!" Tom felt the glare of the old lady's eye,

though he could not see it. "Not a word against my

Tom, now that he's gone! God'll take care of HIM --

never you trouble YOURself, sir! Oh, Mrs. Harper, I

don't know how to give him up! I don't know how to

give him up! He was such a comfort to me, although

he tormented my old heart out of me, 'most."



"The Lord giveth and the Lord hath taken away

-- Blessed be the name of the Lord! But it's so hard

-- Oh, it's so hard! Only last Saturday my Joe busted

a firecracker right under my nose and I knocked him

sprawling. Little did I know then, how soon -- Oh,

if it was to do over again I'd hug him and bless him

for it."



"Yes, yes, yes, I know just how you feel, Mrs.

Harper, I know just exactly how you feel. No longer

ago than yesterday noon, my Tom took and filled the

cat full of Pain-killer, and I did think the cretur would

tear the house down. And God forgive me, I cracked

Tom's head with my thimble, poor boy, poor dead boy.

But he's out of all his troubles now. And the last words

I ever heard him say was to reproach --"



But this memory was too much for the old lady,

and she broke entirely down. Tom was snuffling, now,

himself -- and more in pity of himself than anybody

else. He could hear Mary crying, and putting in a

kindly word for him from time to time. He began to

have a nobler opinion of himself than ever before.

Still, he was sufficiently touched by his aunt's grief to

long to rush out from under the bed and overwhelm

her with joy -- and the theatrical gorgeousness of the

thing appealed strongly to his nature, too, but he re-

sisted and lay still.



He went on listening, and gathered by odds and ends

that it was conjectured at first that the boys had got

drowned while taking a swim; then the small raft had

been missed; next, certain boys said the missing lads

had promised that the village should "hear some-

thing" soon; the wise-heads had "put this and that

together" and decided that the lads had gone off on

that raft and would turn up at the next town below,

presently; but toward noon the raft had been found,

lodged against the Missouri shore some five or six miles

below the village -- and then hope perished; they must

be drowned, else hunger would have driven them home

by nightfall if not sooner. It was believed that the

search for the bodies had been a fruitless effort merely

because the drowning must have occurred in mid-

channel, since the boys, being good swimmers, would

otherwise have escaped to shore. This was Wednesday

night. If the bodies continued missing until Sunday,

all hope would be given over, and the funerals would

be preached on that morning. Tom shuddered.



Mrs. Harper gave a sobbing good-night and turned

to go. Then with a mutual impulse the two bereaved

women flung themselves into each other's arms and had

a good, consoling cry, and then parted. Aunt Polly

was tender far beyond her wont, in her good-night to

Sid and Mary. Sid snuffled a bit and Mary went off

crying with all her heart.



Aunt Polly knelt down and prayed for Tom so touch-

ingly, so appealingly, and with such measureless love

in her words and her old trembling voice, that he was

weltering in tears again, long before she was through.



He had to keep still long after she went to bed, for

she kept making broken-hearted ejaculations from time

to time, tossing unrestfully, and turning over. But at

last she was still, only moaning a little in her sleep.

Now the boy stole out, rose gradually by the bedside,

shaded the candle-light with his hand, and stood re-

garding her. His heart was full of pity for her. He

took out his sycamore scroll and placed it by the candle.

But something occurred to him, and he lingered con-

sidering. His face lighted with a happy solution of his

thought; he put the bark hastily in his pocket. Then

he bent over and kissed the faded lips, and straightway

made his stealthy exit, latching the door behind him.



He threaded his way back to the ferry landing, found

nobody at large there, and walked boldly on board the

boat, for he knew she was tenantless except that there

was a watchman, who always turned in and slept like

a graven image. He untied the skiff at the stern,

slipped into it, and was soon rowing cautiously up-

stream. When he had pulled a mile above the village,

he started quartering across and bent himself stoutly to

his work. He hit the landing on the other side neatly,

for this was a familiar bit of work to him. He was

moved to capture the skiff, arguing that it might be

considered a ship and therefore legitimate prey for a

pirate, but he knew a thorough search would be made

for it and that might end in revelations. So he stepped

ashore and entered the woods.



He sat down and took a long rest, torturing him-

self meanwhile to keep awake, and then started warily

down the home-stretch. The night was far spent.

It was broad daylight before he found himself fairly

abreast the island bar. He rested again until the sun

was well up and gilding the great river with its splendor,

and then he plunged into the stream. A little later he

paused, dripping, upon the threshold of the camp,

and heard Joe say:



"No, Tom's true-blue, Huck, and he'll come back.

He won't desert. He knows that would be a disgrace

to a pirate, and Tom's too proud for that sort of thing.

He's up to something or other. Now I wonder what?"



"Well, the things is ours, anyway, ain't they?"



Pretty near, but not yet, Huck. The writing says

they are if he ain't back here to breakfast."



"Which he is!" exclaimed Tom, with fine dramatic

effect, stepping grandly into camp.



A sumptuous breakfast of bacon and fish was shortly

provided, and as the boys set to work upon it, Tom

recounted (and adorned) his adventures. They were

a vain and boastful company of heroes when the tale

was done. Then Tom hid himself away in a shady

nook to sleep till noon, and the other pirates got ready

to fish and explore.





CHAPTER XVI



AFTER dinner all the gang turned out to

hunt for turtle eggs on the bar. They

went about poking sticks into the sand,

and when they found a soft place they

went down on their knees and dug with

their hands. Sometimes they would take

fifty or sixty eggs out of one hole. They were perfectly

round white things a trifle smaller than an English

walnut. They had a famous fried-egg feast that night,

and another on Friday morning.



After breakfast they went whooping and prancing

out on the bar, and chased each other round and

round, shedding clothes as they went, until they were

naked, and then continued the frolic far away up the

shoal water of the bar, against the stiff current, which

latter tripped their legs from under them from time

to time and greatly increased the fun. And now and

then they stooped in a group and splashed water in

each other's faces with their palms, gradually approach-

ing each other, with averted faces to avoid the stran-

gling sprays, and finally gripping and struggling till the

best man ducked his neighbor, and then they all went

under in a tangle of white legs and arms and came up

blowing, sputtering, laughing, and gasping for breath

at one and the same time.



When they were well exhausted, they would run

out and sprawl on the dry, hot sand, and lie there and

cover themselves up with it, and by and by break for

the water again and go through the original perform-

ance once more. Finally it occurred to them that their

naked skin represented flesh-colored "tights" very

fairly; so they drew a ring in the sand and had a

circus -- with three clowns in it, for none would yield

this proudest post to his neighbor.



Next they got their marbles and played "knucks"

and "ring-taw" and "keeps" till that amusement

grew stale. Then Joe and Huck had another swim,

but Tom would not venture, because he found that

in kicking off his trousers he had kicked his string

of rattlesnake rattles off his ankle, and he wondered

how he had escaped cramp so long without the pro-

tection of this mysterious charm. He did not vent-

ure again until he had found it, and by that time

the other boys were tired and ready to rest. They

gradually wandered apart, dropped into the "dumps,"

and fell to gazing longingly across the wide river to

where the village lay drowsing in the sun. Tom found

himself writing "BECKY" in the sand with his big toe;

he scratched it out, and was angry with himself for his

weakness. But he wrote it again, nevertheless; he

could not help it. He erased it once more and then took

himself out of temptation by driving the other boys

together and joining them.



But Joe's spirits had gone down almost beyond

resurrection. He was so homesick that he could hardly

endure the misery of it. The tears lay very near the

surface. Huck was melancholy, too. Tom was down-

hearted, but tried hard not to show it. He had a secret

which he was not ready to tell, yet, but if this mutinous

depression was not broken up soon, he would have to

bring it out. He said, with a great show of cheerfulness:



"I bet there's been pirates on this island before,

boys. We'll explore it again. They've hid treasures

here somewhere. How'd you feel to light on a rotten

chest full of gold and silver -- hey?"



But it roused only faint enthusiasm, which faded

out, with no reply. Tom tried one or two other

seductions; but they failed, too. It was discouraging

work. Joe sat poking up the sand with a stick and

looking very gloomy. Finally he said:



"Oh, boys, let's give it up. I want to go home.

It's so lonesome."



"Oh no, Joe, you'll feel better by and by," said

Tom. "Just think of the fishing that's here."



"I don't care for fishing. I want to go home."



"But, Joe, there ain't such another swimming-place

anywhere."



"Swimming's no good. I don't seem to care for

it, somehow, when there ain't anybody to say I sha'n't

go in. I mean to go home."



"Oh, shucks! Baby! You want to see your mother,

I reckon."



"Yes, I DO want to see my mother -- and you would,

too, if you had one. I ain't any more baby than you

are." And Joe snuffled a little.



"Well, we'll let the cry-baby go home to his mother,

won't we, Huck? Poor thing -- does it want to see its

mother? And so it shall. You like it here, don't you,

Huck? We'll stay, won't we?"



Huck said, "Y-e-s" -- without any heart in it.



"I'll never speak to you again as long as I live,"

said Joe, rising. "There now!" And he moved

moodily away and began to dress himself.



"Who cares!" said Tom. "Nobody wants you to.

Go 'long home and get laughed at. Oh, you're a nice

pirate. Huck and me ain't cry-babies. We'll stay,

won't we, Huck? Let him go if he wants to. I reckon

we can get along without him, per'aps."



But Tom was uneasy, nevertheless, and was alarmed

to see Joe go sullenly on with his dressing. And then

it was discomforting to see Huck eying Joe's prepara-

tions so wistfully, and keeping up such an ominous

silence. Presently, without a parting word, Joe began

to wade off toward the Illinois shore. Tom's heart

began to sink. He glanced at Huck. Huck could

not bear the look, and dropped his eyes. Then he

said:



"I want to go, too, Tom. It was getting so lone-

some anyway, and now it'll be worse. Let's us go,

too, Tom."



"I won't! You can all go, if you want to. I mean

to stay."



"Tom, I better go."



"Well, go 'long -- who's hendering you."



Huck began to pick up his scattered clothes. He

said:



"Tom, I wisht you'd come, too. Now you think it

over. We'll wait for you when we get to shore."



"Well, you'll wait a blame long time, that's all."



Huck started sorrowfully away, and Tom stood

looking after him, with a strong desire tugging at his

heart to yield his pride and go along too. He hoped

the boys would stop, but they still waded slowly on.

It suddenly dawned on Tom that it was become very

lonely and still. He made one final struggle with his

pride, and then darted after his comrades, yelling:



"Wait! Wait! I want to tell you something!"



They presently stopped and turned around. When

he got to where they were, he began unfolding his

secret, and they listened moodily till at last they saw

the "point" he was driving at, and then they set

up a war-whoop of applause and said it was "splen-

did!" and said if he had told them at first, they wouldn't

have started away. He made a plausible excuse; but

his real reason had been the fear that not even the

secret would keep them with him any very great length

of time, and so he had meant to hold it in reserve as a

last seduction.



The lads came gayly back and went at their sports

again with a will, chattering all the time about Tom's

stupendous plan and admiring the genius of it. After

a dainty egg and fish dinner, Tom said he wanted to

learn to smoke, now. Joe caught at the idea and said

he would like to try, too. So Huck made pipes and

filled them. These novices had never smoked anything

before but cigars made of grape-vine, and they "bit"

the tongue, and were not considered manly anyway.



Now they stretched themselves out on their elbows

and began to puff, charily, and with slender confi-

dence. The smoke had an unpleasant taste, and

they gagged a little, but Tom said:



"Why, it's just as easy! If I'd a knowed this was

all, I'd a learnt long ago."



"So would I," said Joe. "It's just nothing."



"Why, many a time I've looked at people smoking,

and thought well I wish I could do that; but I never

thought I could," said Tom.



"That's just the way with me, hain't it, Huck?

You've heard me talk just that way -- haven't you,

Huck? I'll leave it to Huck if I haven't."



"Yes -- heaps of times," said Huck.



"Well, I have too," said Tom; "oh, hundreds of

times. Once down by the slaughter-house. Don't

you remember, Huck? Bob Tanner was there, and

Johnny Miller, and Jeff Thatcher, when I said it.

Don't you remember, Huck, 'bout me saying that?"



"Yes, that's so," said Huck. "That was the day

after I lost a white alley. No, 'twas the day before."



"There -- I told you so," said Tom. "Huck rec-

ollects it."



"I bleeve I could smoke this pipe all day," said Joe.

"I don't feel sick."



"Neither do I," said Tom. "I could smoke it all

day. But I bet you Jeff Thatcher couldn't."



"Jeff Thatcher! Why, he'd keel over just with two

draws. Just let him try it once. HE'D see!"



"I bet he would. And Johnny Miller -- I wish

could see Johnny Miller tackle it once."



"Oh, don't I!" said Joe. "Why, I bet you Johnny

Miller couldn't any more do this than nothing. Just

one little snifter would fetch HIM."



"'Deed it would, Joe. Say -- I wish the boys could

see us now."



"So do I."



"Say -- boys, don't say anything about it, and some

time when they're around, I'll come up to you and

say, 'Joe, got a pipe? I want a smoke.' And you'll

say, kind of careless like, as if it warn't anything, you'll

say, 'Yes, I got my OLD pipe, and another one, but my

tobacker ain't very good.' And I'll say, 'Oh, that's all

right, if it's STRONG enough.' And then you'll out with

the pipes, and we'll light up just as ca'm, and then just

see 'em look!"



"By jings, that'll be gay, Tom! I wish it was

NOW!"



"So do I! And when we tell 'em we learned when

we was off pirating, won't they wish they'd been

along?"



"Oh, I reckon not! I'll just BET they will!"



So the talk ran on. But presently it began to flag

a trifle, and grow disjointed. The silences widened;

the expectoration marvellously increased. Every pore

inside the boys' cheeks became a spouting fountain;

they could scarcely bail out the cellars under their

tongues fast enough to prevent an inundation; little

overflowings down their throats occurred in spite of all

they could do, and sudden retchings followed every

time. Both boys were looking very pale and miserable,

now. Joe's pipe dropped from his nerveless fingers.

Tom's followed. Both fountains were going furiously

and both pumps bailing with might and main. Joe

said feebly:



"I've lost my knife. I reckon I better go and find it."



Tom said, with quivering lips and halting utterance:



"I'll help you. You go over that way and I'll hunt

around by the spring. No, you needn't come, Huck --

we can find it."



So Huck sat down again, and waited an hour. Then

he found it lonesome, and went to find his comrades.

They were wide apart in the woods, both very pale, both

fast asleep. But something informed him that if they

had had any trouble they had got rid of it.



They were not talkative at supper that night. They

had a humble look, and when Huck prepared his pipe

after the meal and was going to prepare theirs, they

said no, they were not feeling very well -- something they

ate at dinner had disagreed with them.



About midnight Joe awoke, and called the boys.

There was a brooding oppressiveness in the air that

seemed to bode something. The boys huddled them-

selves together and sought the friendly companionship

of the fire, though the dull dead heat of the breathless

atmosphere was stifling. They sat still, intent and

waiting. The solemn hush continued. Beyond the

light of the fire everything was swallowed up in the

blackness of darkness. Presently there came a quiver-

ing glow that vaguely revealed the foliage for a moment

and then vanished. By and by another came, a little

stronger. Then another. Then a faint moan came

sighing through the branches of the forest and the boys

felt a fleeting breath upon their cheeks, and shuddered

with the fancy that the Spirit of the Night had gone by.

There was a pause. Now a weird flash turned night

into day and showed every little grass-blade, separate

and distinct, that grew about their feet. And it showed

three white, startled faces, too. A deep peal of thunder

went rolling and tumbling down the heavens and lost

itself in sullen rumblings in the distance. A sweep of

chilly air passed by, rustling all the leaves and snow-

ing the flaky ashes broadcast about the fire. Another

fierce glare lit up the forest and an instant crash followed

that seemed to rend the tree-tops right over the boys'

heads. They clung together in terror, in the thick

gloom that followed. A few big rain-drops fell patter-

ing upon the leaves.



"Quick! boys, go for the tent!" exclaimed Tom.



They sprang away, stumbling over roots and among

vines in the dark, no two plunging in the same direction.

A furious blast roared through the trees, making every-

thing sing as it went. One blinding flash after another

came, and peal on peal of deafening thunder. And now

a drenching rain poured down and the rising hurricane

drove it in sheets along the ground. The boys cried

out to each other, but the roaring wind and the boom-

ing thunder-blasts drowned their voices utterly. How-

ever, one by one they straggled in at last and took

shelter under the tent, cold, scared, and streaming

with water; but to have company in misery seemed

something to be grateful for. They could not talk, the

old sail flapped so furiously, even if the other noises

would have allowed them. The tempest rose higher

and higher, and presently the sail tore loose from its

fastenings and went winging away on the blast. The

boys seized each others' hands and fled, with many

tumblings and bruises, to the shelter of a great oak that

stood upon the river-bank. Now the battle was at its

highest. Under the ceaseless conflagration of lightning

that flamed in the skies, everything below stood out in

clean-cut and shadowless distinctness: the bending

trees, the billowy river, white with foam, the driving

spray of spume-flakes, the dim outlines of the high

bluffs on the other side, glimpsed through the drifting

cloud-rack and the slanting veil of rain. Every little

while some giant tree yielded the fight and fell crashing

through the younger growth; and the unflagging thunder-

peals came now in ear-splitting explosive bursts, keen

and sharp, and unspeakably appalling. The storm

culminated in one matchless effort that seemed likely

to tear the island to pieces, burn it up, drown it to the

tree-tops, blow it away, and deafen every creature in it,

all at one and the same moment. It was a wild night

for homeless young heads to be out in.



But at last the battle was done, and the forces re-

tired with weaker and weaker threatenings and grum-

blings, and peace resumed her sway. The boys went

back to camp, a good deal awed; but they found there

was still something to be thankful for, because the great

sycamore, the shelter of their beds, was a ruin, now,

blasted by the lightnings, and they were not under it

when the catastrophe happened.



Everything in camp was drenched, the camp-fire

as well; for they were but heedless lads, like their

generation, and had made no provision against rain.

Here was matter for dismay, for they were soaked

through and chilled. They were eloquent in their dis-

tress; but they presently discovered that the fire had

eaten so far up under the great log it had been built

against (where it curved upward and separated itself

from the ground), that a handbreadth or so of it had

escaped wetting; so they patiently wrought until, with

shreds and bark gathered from the under sides of shel-

tered logs, they coaxed the fire to burn again. Then

they piled on great dead boughs till they had a roar-

ing furnace, and were glad-hearted once more. They

dried their boiled ham and had a feast, and after that

they sat by the fire and expanded and glorified their

midnight adventure until morning, for there was not a

dry spot to sleep on, anywhere around.



As the sun began to steal in upon the boys, drowsiness

came over them, and they went out on the sandbar and

lay down to sleep. They got scorched out by and by,

and drearily set about getting breakfast. After the

meal they felt rusty, and stiff-jointed, and a little home-

sick once more. Tom saw the signs, and fell to cheer-

ing up the pirates as well as he could. But they cared

nothing for marbles, or circus, or swimming, or any-

thing. He reminded them of the imposing secret, and

raised a ray of cheer. While it lasted, he got them in-

terested in a new device. This was to knock off being

pirates, for a while, and be Indians for a change. They

were attracted by this idea; so it was not long before

they were stripped, and striped from head to heel with

black mud, like so many zebras -- all of them chiefs,

of course -- and then they went tearing through the

woods to attack an English settlement.



By and by they separated into three hostile tribes,

and darted upon each other from ambush with dread-

ful war-whoops, and killed and scalped each other by

thousands. It was a gory day. Consequently it was

an extremely satisfactory one.



They assembled in camp toward supper-time, hungry

and happy; but now a difficulty arose -- hostile Indians

could not break the bread of hospitality together with-

out first making peace, and this was a simple im-

possibility without smoking a pipe of peace. There

was no other process that ever they had heard of. Two

of the savages almost wished they had remained pirates.

However, there was no other way; so with such show of

cheerfulness as they could muster they called for the

pipe and took their whiff as it passed, in due form.



And behold, they were glad they had gone into

savagery, for they had gained something; they found

that they could now smoke a little without having to go

and hunt for a lost knife; they did not get sick enough

to be seriously uncomfortable. They were not likely

to fool away this high promise for lack of effort. No,

they practised cautiously, after supper, with right fair

success, and so they spent a jubilant evening. They

were prouder and happier in their new acquirement than

they would have been in the scalping and skinning of the

Six Nations. We will leave them to smoke and chat-

ter and brag, since we have no further use for them at

present.





CHAPTER XVII



BUT there was no hilarity in the little town

that same tranquil Saturday afternoon.

The Harpers, and Aunt Polly's family,

were being put into mourning, with great

grief and many tears. An unusual quiet

possessed the village, although it was or-

dinarily quiet enough, in all conscience. The villagers

conducted their concerns with an absent air, and

talked little; but they sighed often. The Saturday

holiday seemed a burden to the children. They had

no heart in their sports, and gradually gave them up.



In the afternoon Becky Thatcher found herself

moping about the deserted schoolhouse yard, and

feeling very melancholy. But she found nothing there

to comfort her. She soliloquized:



"Oh, if I only had a brass andiron-knob again! But

I haven't got anything now to remember him by."

And she choked back a little sob.



Presently she stopped, and said to herself:



"It was right here. Oh, if it was to do over again,

I wouldn't say that -- I wouldn't say it for the whole

world. But he's gone now; I'll never, never, never see

him any more."



This thought broke her down, and she wandered

away, with tears rolling down her cheeks. Then quite

a group of boys and girls -- playmates of Tom's and Joe's

-- came by, and stood looking over the paling fence

and talking in reverent tones of how Tom did so-and-so

the last time they saw him, and how Joe said this and

that small trifle (pregnant with awful prophecy, as they

could easily see now!) -- and each speaker pointed out

the exact spot where the lost lads stood at the time, and

then added something like "and I was a-standing just

so -- just as I am now, and as if you was him -- I was as

close as that -- and he smiled, just this way -- and then

something seemed to go all over me, like -- awful, you

know -- and I never thought what it meant, of course,

but I can see now!"



Then there was a dispute about who saw the dead

boys last in life, and many claimed that dismal dis-

tinction, and offered evidences, more or less tampered

with by the witness; and when it was ultimately decided

who DID see the departed last, and exchanged the last

words with them, the lucky parties took upon them-

selves a sort of sacred importance, and were gaped at

and envied by all the rest. One poor chap, who had no

other grandeur to offer, said with tolerably manifest

pride in the remembrance:



"Well, Tom Sawyer he licked me once."



But that bid for glory was a failure. Most of the

boys could say that, and so that cheapened the dis-

tinction too much. The group loitered away, still re-

calling memories of the lost heroes, in awed voices.



When the Sunday-school hour was finished, the next

morning, the bell began to toll, instead of ringing in

the usual way. It was a very still Sabbath, and the

mournful sound seemed in keeping with the musing

hush that lay upon nature. The villagers began to

gather, loitering a moment in the vestibule to converse

in whispers about the sad event. But there was no

whispering in the house; only the funereal rustling of

dresses as the women gathered to their seats disturbed

the silence there. None could remember when the

little church had been so full before. There was finally

a waiting pause, an expectant dumbness, and then Aunt

Polly entered, followed by Sid and Mary, and they by

the Harper family, all in deep black, and the whole

congregation, the old minister as well, rose reverently

and stood until the mourners were seated in the front

pew. There was another communing silence, broken

at intervals by muffled sobs, and then the minister

spread his hands abroad and prayed. A moving hymn

was sung, and the text followed: "I am the Resurrection

and the Life."



As the service proceeded, the clergyman drew such

pictures of the graces, the winning ways, and the rare

promise of the lost lads that every soul there, thinking

he recognized these pictures, felt a pang in remembering

that he had persistently blinded himself to them always

before, and had as persistently seen only faults and

flaws in the poor boys. The minister related many a

touching incident in the lives of the departed, too, which

illustrated their sweet, generous natures, and the people

could easily see, now, how noble and beautiful those

episodes were, and remembered with grief that at the

time they occurred they had seemed rank rascalities,

well deserving of the cowhide. The congregation be-

came more and more moved, as the pathetic tale went

on, till at last the whole company broke down and joined

the weeping mourners in a chorus of anguished sobs,

the preacher himself giving way to his feelings, and

crying in the pulpit.



There was a rustle in the gallery, which nobody

noticed; a moment later the church door creaked; the

minister raised his streaming eyes above his hand-

kerchief, and stood transfixed! First one and then

another pair of eyes followed the minister's, and then

almost with one impulse the congregation rose and

stared while the three dead boys came marching up

the aisle, Tom in the lead, Joe next, and Huck, a ruin

of drooping rags, sneaking sheepishly in the rear!

They had been hid in the unused gallery listening to

their own funeral sermon!



Aunt Polly, Mary, and the Harpers threw themselves

upon their restored ones, smothered them with kisses

and poured out thanksgivings, while poor Huck stood

abashed and uncomfortable, not knowing exactly what

to do or where to hide from so many unwelcoming eyes.

He wavered, and started to slink away, but Tom seized

him and said:



"Aunt Polly, it ain't fair. Somebody's got to be glad

to see Huck."



"And so they shall. I'm glad to see him, poor

motherless thing!" And the loving attentions Aunt

Polly lavished upon him were the one thing capable of

making him more uncomfortable than he was before.



Suddenly the minister shouted at the top of his voice:

"Praise God from whom all blessings flow -- SING! --

and put your hearts in it!"



And they did. Old Hundred swelled up with a

triumphant burst, and while it shook the rafters Tom

Sawyer the Pirate looked around upon the envying

juveniles about him and confessed in his heart that this

was the proudest moment of his life.



As the "sold" congregation trooped out they said

they would almost be willing to be made ridiculous

again to hear Old Hundred sung like that once more.



Tom got more cuffs and kisses that day -- according

to Aunt Polly's varying moods -- than he had earned

before in a year; and he hardly knew which expressed

the most gratefulness to God and affection for himself.





CHAPTER XVIII



THAT was Tom's great secret -- the scheme

to return home with his brother pirates

and attend their own funerals. They had

paddled over to the Missouri shore on

a log, at dusk on Saturday, landing five

or six miles below the village; they had

slept in the woods at the edge of the town till nearly day-

light, and had then crept through back lanes and alleys

and finished their sleep in the gallery of the church

among a chaos of invalided benches.



At breakfast, Monday morning, Aunt Polly and

Mary were very loving to Tom, and very attentive to

his wants. There was an unusual amount of talk. In

the course of it Aunt Polly said:



"Well, I don't say it wasn't a fine joke, Tom, to keep

everybody suffering 'most a week so you boys had a

good time, but it is a pity you could be so hard-hearted

as to let me suffer so. If you could come over on a log

to go to your funeral, you could have come over and

give me a hint some way that you warn't dead, but only

run off."



"Yes, you could have done that, Tom," said Mary;

"and I believe you would if you had thought of it."



"Would you, Tom?" said Aunt Polly, her face light-

ing wistfully. "Say, now, would you, if you'd thought

of it?"



"I -- well, I don't know. 'Twould 'a' spoiled every-

thing."



"Tom, I hoped you loved me that much," said Aunt

Polly, with a grieved tone that discomforted the boy.

"It would have been something if you'd cared enough

to THINK of it, even if you didn't DO it."



"Now, auntie, that ain't any harm," pleaded Mary;

"it's only Tom's giddy way -- he is always in such a rush

that he never thinks of anything."



"More's the pity. Sid would have thought. And

Sid would have come and DONE it, too. Tom, you'll

look back, some day, when it's too late, and wish you'd

cared a little more for me when it would have cost you

so little."



"Now, auntie, you know I do care for you," said

Tom.



"I'd know it better if you acted more like it."



"I wish now I'd thought," said Tom, with a re-

pentant tone; "but I dreamt about you, anyway.

That's something, ain't it?"



"It ain't much -- a cat does that much -- but it's bet-

ter than nothing. What did you dream?"



"Why, Wednesday night I dreamt that you was

sitting over there by the bed, and Sid was sitting by

the woodbox, and Mary next to him."



"Well, so we did. So we always do. I'm glad

your dreams could take even that much trouble about

us."



"And I dreamt that Joe Harper's mother was here."



"Why, she was here! Did you dream any more?"



"Oh, lots. But it's so dim, now."



"Well, try to recollect -- can't you?"



"Somehow it seems to me that the wind -- the wind

blowed the -- the --"



"Try harder, Tom! The wind did blow something.

Come!"



Tom pressed his fingers on his forehead an anxious

minute, and then said:



"I've got it now! I've got it now! It blowed the

candle!"



"Mercy on us! Go on, Tom -- go on!"



"And it seems to me that you said, 'Why, I believe

that that door --'"



"Go ON, Tom!"



"Just let me study a moment -- just a moment. Oh,

yes -- you said you believed the door was open."



"As I'm sitting here, I did! Didn't I, Mary! Go on!"



"And then -- and then -- well I won't be certain, but

it seems like as if you made Sid go and -- and --"



"Well? Well? What did I make him do, Tom?

What did I make him do?"



"You made him -- you -- Oh, you made him shut it."



"Well, for the land's sake! I never heard the beat

of that in all my days! Don't tell ME there ain't

anything in dreams, any more. Sereny Harper shall

know of this before I'm an hour older. I'd like to see

her get around THIS with her rubbage 'bout superstition.

Go on, Tom!"



"Oh, it's all getting just as bright as day, now.

Next you said I warn't BAD, only mischeevous and

harum-scarum, and not any more responsible than --

than -- I think it was a colt, or something."



"And so it was! Well, goodness gracious! Go on,

Tom!"



"And then you began to cry."



"So I did. So I did. Not the first time, neither.

And then --"



"Then Mrs. Harper she began to cry, and said Joe

was just the same, and she wished she hadn't whipped

him for taking cream when she'd throwed it out her

own self --"



"Tom! The sperrit was upon you! You was a

prophesying -- that's what you was doing! Land alive,

go on, Tom!"



"Then Sid he said -- he said --"



"I don't think I said anything," said Sid.



"Yes you did, Sid," said Mary.



"Shut your heads and let Tom go on! What did

he say, Tom?"



"He said -- I THINK he said he hoped I was better

off where I was gone to, but if I'd been better some-

times --"



"THERE, d'you hear that! It was his very words!"



"And you shut him up sharp."



"I lay I did! There must 'a' been an angel there.

There WAS an angel there, somewheres!"



"And Mrs. Harper told about Joe scaring her with

a firecracker, and you told about Peter and the Pain-

killer --"



"Just as true as I live!"



"And then there was a whole lot of talk 'bout drag-

ging the river for us, and 'bout having the funeral

Sunday, and then you and old Miss Harper hugged

and cried, and she went."



"It happened just so! It happened just so, as sure

as I'm a-sitting in these very tracks. Tom, you couldn't

told it more like if you'd 'a' seen it! And then what?

Go on, Tom!"



"Then I thought you prayed for me -- and I could

see you and hear every word you said. And you went

to bed, and I was so sorry that I took and wrote on a

piece of sycamore bark, 'We ain't dead -- we are only

off being pirates,' and put it on the table by the candle;

and then you looked so good, laying there asleep, that

I thought I went and leaned over and kissed you on

the lips."



"Did you, Tom, DID you! I just forgive you every-

thing for that!" And she seized the boy in a crushing

embrace that made him feel like the guiltiest of villains.



"It was very kind, even though it was only a --

dream," Sid soliloquized just audibly.



"Shut up, Sid! A body does just the same in a

dream as he'd do if he was awake. Here's a big

Milum apple I've been saving for you, Tom, if you

was ever found again -- now go 'long to school. I'm

thankful to the good God and Father of us all I've got

you back, that's long-suffering and merciful to them

that believe on Him and keep His word, though good-

ness knows I'm unworthy of it, but if only the worthy

ones got His blessings and had His hand to help them

over the rough places, there's few enough would smile

here or ever enter into His rest when the long night

comes. Go 'long Sid, Mary, Tom -- take yourselves

off -- you've hendered me long enough."



The children left for school, and the old lady to call

on Mrs. Harper and vanquish her realism with Tom's

marvellous dream. Sid had better judgment than to

utter the thought that was in his mind as he left the

house. It was this: "Pretty thin -- as long a dream as

that, without any mistakes in it!"



What a hero Tom was become, now! He did not

go skipping and prancing, but moved with a dignified

swagger as became a pirate who felt that the public

eye was on him. And indeed it was; he tried not to

seem to see the looks or hear the remarks as he passed

along, but they were food and drink to him. Smaller

boys than himself flocked at his heels, as proud to be

seen with him, and tolerated by him, as if he had been

the drummer at the head of a procession or the elephant

leading a menagerie into town. Boys of his own size

pretended not to know he had been away at all; but

they were consuming with envy, nevertheless. They

would have given anything to have that swarthy sun-

tanned skin of his, and his glittering notoriety; and

Tom would not have parted with either for a circus.



At school the children made so much of him and of

Joe, and delivered such eloquent admiration from their

eyes, that the two heroes were not long in becoming in-

sufferably "stuck-up." They began to tell their ad-

ventures to hungry listeners -- but they only began; it

was not a thing likely to have an end, with imaginations

like theirs to furnish material. And finally, when they

got out their pipes and went serenely puffing around,

the very summit of glory was reached.



Tom decided that he could be independent of Becky

Thatcher now. Glory was sufficient. He would live

for glory. Now that he was distinguished, maybe she

would be wanting to "make up." Well, let her -- she

should see that he could be as indifferent as some other

people. Presently she arrived. Tom pretended not to

see her. He moved away and joined a group of boys

and girls and began to talk. Soon he observed that she

was tripping gayly back and forth with flushed face and

dancing eyes, pretending to be busy chasing school-

mates, and screaming with laughter when she made a

capture; but he noticed that she always made her capt-

ures in his vicinity, and that she seemed to cast a con-

scious eye in his direction at such times, too. It grati-

fied all the vicious vanity that was in him; and so,

instead of winning him, it only "set him up" the more

and made him the more diligent to avoid betraying that

he knew she was about. Presently she gave over sky-

larking, and moved irresolutely about, sighing once or

twice and glancing furtively and wistfully toward Tom.

Then she observed that now Tom was talking more

particularly to Amy Lawrence than to any one else.

She felt a sharp pang and grew disturbed and uneasy

at once. She tried to go away, but her feet were

treacherous, and carried her to the group instead. She

said to a girl almost at Tom's elbow -- with sham

vivacity:



"Why, Mary Austin! you bad girl, why didn't you

come to Sunday-school?"



"I did come -- didn't you see me?"



"Why, no! Did you? Where did you sit?"



"I was in Miss Peters' class, where I always go.

I saw YOU."



"Did you? Why, it's funny I didn't see you. I

wanted to tell you about the picnic."



"Oh, that's jolly. Who's going to give it?"



"My ma's going to let me have one."



"Oh, goody; I hope she'll let ME come."



"Well, she will. The picnic's for me. She'll let any-

body come that I want, and I want you."



"That's ever so nice. When is it going to be?"



"By and by. Maybe about vacation."



"Oh, won't it be fun! You going to have all the

girls and boys?"



"Yes, every one that's friends to me -- or wants to

be"; and she glanced ever so furtively at Tom, but he

talked right along to Amy Lawrence about the terrible

storm on the island, and how the lightning tore the great

sycamore tree "all to flinders" while he was "standing

within three feet of it."



"Oh, may I come?" said Grace Miller.



"Yes."



"And me?" said Sally Rogers.



"Yes."



"And me, too?" said Susy Harper. "And Joe?"



"Yes."



And so on, with clapping of joyful hands till all the

group had begged for invitations but Tom and Amy.

Then Tom turned coolly away, still talking, and took

Amy with him. Becky's lips trembled and the tears

came to her eyes; she hid these signs with a forced gayety

and went on chattering, but the life had gone out of the

picnic, now, and out of everything else; she got away as

soon as she could and hid herself and had what her sex

call "a good cry." Then she sat moody, with wounded

pride, till the bell rang. She roused up, now, with a

vindictive cast in her eye, and gave her plaited tails a

shake and said she knew what SHE'D do.



At recess Tom continued his flirtation with Amy

with jubilant self-satisfaction. And he kept drifting

about to find Becky and lacerate her with the per-

formance. At last he spied her, but there was a

sudden falling of his mercury. She was sitting cosily

on a little bench behind the schoolhouse looking at a

picture-book with Alfred Temple -- and so absorbed

were they, and their heads so close together over

the book, that they did not seem to be conscious of

anything in the world besides. Jealousy ran red-hot

through Tom's veins. He began to hate himself for

throwing away the chance Becky had offered for a

reconciliation. He called himself a fool, and all the

hard names he could think of. He wanted to cry with

vexation. Amy chatted happily along, as they walked,

for her heart was singing, but Tom's tongue had lost

its function. He did not hear what Amy was saying, and

whenever she paused expectantly he could only stammer

an awkward assent, which was as often misplaced as

otherwise. He kept drifting to the rear of the school-

house, again and again, to sear his eyeballs with the

hateful spectacle there. He could not help it. And

it maddened him to see, as he thought he saw, that

Becky Thatcher never once suspected that he was even

in the land of the living. But she did see, nevertheless;

and she knew she was winning her fight, too, and was

glad to see him suffer as she had suffered.



Amy's happy prattle became intolerable. Tom hint-

ed at things he had to attend to; things that must

be done; and time was fleeting. But in vain -- the

girl chirped on. Tom thought, "Oh, hang her, ain't

I ever going to get rid of her?" At last he must be

attending to those things -- and she said artlessly that

she would be "around" when school let out. And he

hastened away, hating her for it.



"Any other boy!" Tom thought, grating his teeth.

"Any boy in the whole town but that Saint Louis

smarty that thinks he dresses so fine and is aristocracy!

Oh, all right, I licked you the first day you ever saw this

town, mister, and I'll lick you again! You just wait

till I catch you out! I'll just take and --"



And he went through the motions of thrashing an

imaginary boy -- pummelling the air, and kicking and

gouging. "Oh, you do, do you? You holler 'nough,

do you? Now, then, let that learn you!" And so the

imaginary flogging was finished to his satisfaction.



Tom fled home at noon. His conscience could

not endure any more of Amy's grateful happiness, and

his jealousy could bear no more of the other distress.

Becky resumed her picture inspections with Alfred,

but as the minutes dragged along and no Tom came to

suffer, her triumph began to cloud and she lost inter-

est; gravity and absent-mindedness followed, and then

melancholy; two or three times she pricked up her ear

at a footstep, but it was a false hope; no Tom came.

At last she grew entirely miserable and wished she

hadn't carried it so far. When poor Alfred, seeing

that he was losing her, he did not know how, kept ex-

claiming: "Oh, here's a jolly one! look at this!" she lost

patience at last, and said, "Oh, don't bother me! I

don't care for them!" and burst into tears, and got up

and walked away.



Alfred dropped alongside and was going to try to

comfort her, but she said:



"Go away and leave me alone, can't you! I hate

you!"



So the boy halted, wondering what he could have

done -- for she had said she would look at pictures all

through the nooning -- and she walked on, crying.

Then Alfred went musing into the deserted school-

house. He was humiliated and angry. He easily

guessed his way to the truth -- the girl had simply made

a convenience of him to vent her spite upon Tom

Sawyer. He was far from hating Tom the less when

this thought occurred to him. He wished there was

some way to get that boy into trouble without much

risk to himself. Tom's spelling-book fell under his

eye. Here was his opportunity. He gratefully opened

to the lesson for the afternoon and poured ink upon the

page.



Becky, glancing in at a window behind him at the

moment, saw the act, and moved on, without discover-

ing herself. She started homeward, now, intending to

find Tom and tell him; Tom would be thankful and

their troubles would be healed. Before she was half

way home, however, she had changed her mind. The

thought of Tom's treatment of her when she was talking

about her picnic came scorching back and filled her

with shame. She resolved to let him get whipped on

the damaged spelling-book's account, and to hate him

forever, into the bargain.





CHAPTER XIX



TOM arrived at home in a dreary mood,

and the first thing his aunt said to him

showed him that he had brought his

sorrows to an unpromising market:



"Tom, I've a notion to skin you alive!"



"Auntie, what have I done?"



"Well, you've done enough. Here I go over to Se-

reny Harper, like an old softy, expecting I'm going to

make her believe all that rubbage about that dream,

when lo and behold you she'd found out from Joe that

you was over here and heard all the talk we had that

night. Tom, I don't know what is to become of a boy

that will act like that. It makes me feel so bad to think

you could let me go to Sereny Harper and make such a

fool of myself and never say a word."



This was a new aspect of the thing. His smartness

of the morning had seemed to Tom a good joke be-

fore, and very ingenious. It merely looked mean and

shabby now. He hung his head and could not think

of anything to say for a moment. Then he said:



"Auntie, I wish I hadn't done it -- but I didn't think."



"Oh, child, you never think. You never think of

anything but your own selfishness. You could think

to come all the way over here from Jackson's Island in

the night to laugh at our troubles, and you could think

to fool me with a lie about a dream; but you couldn't

ever think to pity us and save us from sorrow."



"Auntie, I know now it was mean, but I didn't

mean to be mean. I didn't, honest. And besides, I

didn't come over here to laugh at you that night."



"What did you come for, then?"



"It was to tell you not to be uneasy about us, be-

cause we hadn't got drownded."



"Tom, Tom, I would be the thankfullest soul in this

world if I could believe you ever had as good a thought

as that, but you know you never did -- and I know it,

Tom."



"Indeed and 'deed I did, auntie -- I wish I may never

stir if I didn't."



"Oh, Tom, don't lie -- don't do it. It only makes

things a hundred times worse."



"It ain't a lie, auntie; it's the truth. I wanted to

keep you from grieving -- that was all that made me

come."



"I'd give the whole world to believe that -- it would

cover up a power of sins, Tom. I'd 'most be glad you'd

run off and acted so bad. But it ain't reasonable; be-

cause, why didn't you tell me, child?"



"Why, you see, when you got to talking about the

funeral, I just got all full of the idea of our coming and

hiding in the church, and I couldn't somehow bear to

spoil it. So I just put the bark back in my pocket and

kept mum."



"What bark?"



"The bark I had wrote on to tell you we'd gone

pirating. I wish, now, you'd waked up when I kissed

you -- I do, honest."



The hard lines in his aunt's face relaxed and a sud-

den tenderness dawned in her eyes.



"DID you kiss me, Tom?"



"Why, yes, I did."



"Are you sure you did, Tom?"



"Why, yes, I did, auntie -- certain sure."



"What did you kiss me for, Tom?"



"Because I loved you so, and you laid there moaning

and I was so sorry."



The words sounded like truth. The old lady could

not hide a tremor in her voice when she said:



"Kiss me again, Tom! -- and be off with you to

school, now, and don't bother me any more."



The moment he was gone, she ran to a closet and

got out the ruin of a jacket which Tom had gone

pirating in. Then she stopped, with it in her hand,

and said to herself:



"No, I don't dare. Poor boy, I reckon he's lied

about it -- but it's a blessed, blessed lie, there's such a

comfort come from it. I hope the Lord -- I KNOW the

Lord will forgive him, because it was such good-

heartedness in him to tell it. But I don't want to find

out it's a lie. I won't look."



She put the jacket away, and stood by musing a

minute. Twice she put out her hand to take the

garment again, and twice she refrained. Once more

she ventured, and this time she fortified herself with

the thought: "It's a good lie -- it's a good lie -- I won't

let it grieve me." So she sought the jacket pocket. A

moment later she was reading Tom's piece of bark

through flowing tears and saying: "I could forgive the

boy, now, if he'd committed a million sins!"





CHAPTER XX



THERE was something about Aunt Polly's

manner, when she kissed Tom, that swept

away his low spirits and made him light-

hearted and happy again. He started to

school and had the luck of coming upon

Becky Thatcher at the head of Meadow

Lane. His mood always determined his manner.

Without a moment's hesitation he ran to her and said:



"I acted mighty mean to-day, Becky, and I'm so

sorry. I won't ever, ever do that way again, as long

as ever I live -- please make up, won't you?"



The girl stopped and looked him scornfully in the

face:



"I'll thank you to keep yourself TO yourself, Mr.

Thomas Sawyer. I'll never speak to you again."



She tossed her head and passed on. Tom was so

stunned that he had not even presence of mind enough

to say "Who cares, Miss Smarty?" until the right time

to say it had gone by. So he said nothing. But he

was in a fine rage, nevertheless. He moped into the

schoolyard wishing she were a boy, and imagining

how he would trounce her if she were. He presently

encountered her and delivered a stinging remark as he

passed. She hurled one in return, and the angry

breach was complete. It seemed to Becky, in her hot

resentment, that she could hardly wait for school to

"take in," she was so impatient to see Tom flogged for

the injured spelling-book. If she had had any linger-

ing notion of exposing Alfred Temple, Tom's offensive

fling had driven it entirely away.



Poor girl, she did not know how fast she was near-

ing trouble herself. The master, Mr. Dobbins, had

reached middle age with an unsatisfied ambition. The

darling of his desires was, to be a doctor, but poverty

had decreed that he should be nothing higher than a

village schoolmaster. Every day he took a mysterious

book out of his desk and absorbed himself in it at times

when no classes were reciting. He kept that book un-

der lock and key. There was not an urchin in school

but was perishing to have a glimpse of it, but the chance

never came. Every boy and girl had a theory about

the nature of that book; but no two theories were alike,

and there was no way of getting at the facts in the case.

Now, as Becky was passing by the desk, which stood

near the door, she noticed that the key was in the lock!

It was a precious moment. She glanced around;

found herself alone, and the next instant she had the

book in her hands. The title-page -- Professor Some-

body's ANATOMY -- carried no information to her mind;

so she began to turn the leaves. She came at once upon

a handsomely engraved and colored frontispiece -- a hu-

man figure, stark naked. At that moment a shadow

fell on the page and Tom Sawyer stepped in at the

door and caught a glimpse of the picture. Becky

snatched at the book to close it, and had the hard luck

to tear the pictured page half down the middle. She

thrust the volume into the desk, turned the key, and

burst out crying with shame and vexation.



"Tom Sawyer, you are just as mean as you can

be, to sneak up on a person and look at what they're

looking at."



"How could I know you was looking at anything?"



"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Tom Sawyer;

you know you're going to tell on me, and oh, what shall

I do, what shall I do! I'll be whipped, and I never was

whipped in school."



Then she stamped her little foot and said:



"BE so mean if you want to! I know something

that's going to happen. You just wait and you'll see!

Hateful, hateful, hateful!" -- and she flung out of the

house with a new explosion of crying.



Tom stood still, rather flustered by this onslaught.

Presently he said to himself:



"What a curious kind of a fool a girl is! Never

been licked in school! Shucks! What's a licking!

That's just like a girl -- they're so thin-skinned and

chicken-hearted. Well, of course I ain't going to tell

old Dobbins on this little fool, because there's other

ways of getting even on her, that ain't so mean; but

what of it? Old Dobbins will ask who it was tore his

book. Nobody'll answer. Then he'll do just the way

he always does -- ask first one and then t'other, and

when he comes to the right girl he'll know it, without

any telling. Girls' faces always tell on them. They

ain't got any backbone. She'll get licked. Well, it's

a kind of a tight place for Becky Thatcher, because there

ain't any way out of it." Tom conned the thing a

moment longer, and then added: "All right, though;

she'd like to see me in just such a fix -- let her sweat it

out!"



Tom joined the mob of skylarking scholars outside.

In a few moments the master arrived and school "took

in." Tom did not feel a strong interest in his studies.

Every time he stole a glance at the girls' side of the

room Becky's face troubled him. Considering all

things, he did not want to pity her, and yet it was all

he could do to help it. He could get up no exultation

that was really worthy the name. Presently the spell-

ing-book discovery was made, and Tom's mind was en-

tirely full of his own matters for a while after that.

Becky roused up from her lethargy of distress and

showed good interest in the proceedings. She did not

expect that Tom could get out of his trouble by denying

that he spilt the ink on the book himself; and she was

right. The denial only seemed to make the thing worse

for Tom. Becky supposed she would be glad of that,

and she tried to believe she was glad of it, but she found

she was not certain. When the worst came to the

worst, she had an impulse to get up and tell on Alfred

Temple, but she made an effort and forced herself to

keep still -- because, said she to herself, "he'll tell about

me tearing the picture sure. I wouldn't say a word,

not to save his life!"



Tom took his whipping and went back to his seat

not at all broken-hearted, for he thought it was possible

that he had unknowingly upset the ink on the spelling-

book himself, in some skylarking bout -- he had denied

it for form's sake and because it was custom, and had

stuck to the denial from principle.



A whole hour drifted by, the master sat nodding in

his throne, the air was drowsy with the hum of study.

By and by, Mr. Dobbins straightened himself up, yawn-

ed, then unlocked his desk, and reached for his book,

but seemed undecided whether to take it out or leave it.

Most of the pupils glanced up languidly, but there were

two among them that watched his movements with in-

tent eyes. Mr. Dobbins fingered his book absently for

a while, then took it out and settled himself in his chair

to read! Tom shot a glance at Becky. He had seen a

hunted and helpless rabbit look as she did, with a gun

levelled at its head. Instantly he forgot his quarrel

with her. Quick -- something must be done! done in a

flash, too! But the very imminence of the emergency

paralyzed his invention. Good! -- he had an inspira-

tion! He would run and snatch the book, spring

through the door and fly. But his resolution shook

for one little instant, and the chance was lost -- the

master opened the volume. If Tom only had the

wasted opportunity back again! Too late. There was

no help for Becky now, he said. The next moment the

master faced the school. Every eye sank under his gaze.

There was that in it which smote even the innocent

with fear. There was silence while one might count ten

-- the master was gathering his wrath. Then he spoke:

"Who tore this book?"



There was not a sound. One could have heard a

pin drop. The stillness continued; the master searched

face after face for signs of guilt.



"Benjamin Rogers, did you tear this book?"



A denial. Another pause.



"Joseph Harper, did you?"



Another denial. Tom's uneasiness grew more and

more intense under the slow torture of these proceedings.

The master scanned the ranks of boys -- considered a

while, then turned to the girls:



"Amy Lawrence?"



A shake of the head.



"Gracie Miller?"



The same sign.



"Susan Harper, did you do this?"



Another negative. The next girl was Becky Thatcher.

Tom was trembling from head to foot with excitement

and a sense of the hopelessness of the situation.



"Rebecca Thatcher" [Tom glanced at her face -- it

was white with terror] -- "did you tear -- no, look me

in the face" [her hands rose in appeal] -- "did you tear

this book?"



A thought shot like lightning through Tom's brain.

He sprang to his feet and shouted -- "I done it!"



The school stared in perplexity at this incredible

folly. Tom stood a moment, to gather his dismem-

bered faculties; and when he stepped forward to go

to his punishment the surprise, the gratitude, the

adoration that shone upon him out of poor Becky's

eyes seemed pay enough for a hundred floggings.

Inspired by the splendor of his own act, he took without

an outcry the most merciless flaying that even Mr.

Dobbins had ever administered; and also received with

indifference the added cruelty of a command to remain

two hours after school should be dismissed -- for he

knew who would wait for him outside till his captivity

was done, and not count the tedious time as loss, either.



Tom went to bed that night planning vengeance

against Alfred Temple; for with shame and repentance

Becky had told him all, not forgetting her own treachery;

but even the longing for vengeance had to give way,

soon, to pleasanter musings, and he fell asleep at last

with Becky's latest words lingering dreamily in his ear --



"Tom, how COULD you be so noble!"





CHAPTER XXI



VACATION was approaching. The school-

master, always severe, grew severer and

more exacting than ever, for he wanted

the school to make a good showing on

"Examination" day. His rod and his

ferule were seldom idle now -- at least

among the smaller pupils. Only the biggest boys, and

young ladies of eighteen and twenty, escaped lashing.

Mr. Dobbins' lashings were very vigorous ones, too; for

although he carried, under his wig, a perfectly bald

and shiny head, he had only reached middle age, and

there was no sign of feebleness in his muscle. As

the great day approached, all the tyranny that was

in him came to the surface; he seemed to take a vin-

dictive pleasure in punishing the least shortcomings.

The consequence was, that the smaller boys spent their

days in terror and suffering and their nights in plotting

revenge. They threw away no opportunity to do the

master a mischief. But he kept ahead all the time.

The retribution that followed every vengeful success

was so sweeping and majestic that the boys always

retired from the field badly worsted. At last they con-

spired together and hit upon a plan that promised a

dazzling victory. They swore in the sign-painter's boy,

told him the scheme, and asked his help. He had his

own reasons for being delighted, for the master boarded

in his father's family and had given the boy ample

cause to hate him. The master's wife would go on a visit

to the country in a few days, and there would be nothing

to interfere with the plan; the master always pre-

pared himself for great occasions by getting pretty well

fuddled, and the sign-painter's boy said that when the

dominie had reached the proper condition on Examina-

tion Evening he would "manage the thing" while he

napped in his chair; then he would have him awakened

at the right time and hurried away to school.



In the fulness of time the interesting occasion ar-

rived. At eight in the evening the schoolhouse was

brilliantly lighted, and adorned with wreaths and fes-

toons of foliage and flowers. The master sat throned

in his great chair upon a raised platform, with his

blackboard behind him. He was looking tolerably

mellow. Three rows of benches on each side and six

rows in front of him were occupied by the dignitaries of

the town and by the parents of the pupils. To his left,

back of the rows of citizens, was a spacious temporary

platform upon which were seated the scholars who were

to take part in the exercises of the evening; rows of

small boys, washed and dressed to an intolerable state

of discomfort; rows of gawky big boys; snowbanks of

girls and young ladies clad in lawn and muslin and

conspicuously conscious of their bare arms, their grand-

mothers' ancient trinkets, their bits of pink and blue

ribbon and the flowers in their hair. All the rest of

the house was filled with non-participating scholars.



The exercises began. A very little boy stood up and

sheepishly recited, "You'd scarce expect one of my

age to speak in public on the stage," etc. -- accompany-

ing himself with the painfully exact and spasmodic

gestures which a machine might have used -- supposing

the machine to be a trifle out of order. But he got

through safely, though cruelly scared, and got a fine

round of applause when he made his manufactured

bow and retired.



A little shamefaced girl lisped, "Mary had a little

lamb," etc., performed a compassion-inspiring curtsy,

got her meed of applause, and sat down flushed and

happy.



Tom Sawyer stepped forward with conceited con-

fidence and soared into the unquenchable and inde-

structible "Give me liberty or give me death" speech,

with fine fury and frantic gesticulation, and broke down

in the middle of it. A ghastly stage-fright seized him,

his legs quaked under him and he was like to choke.

True, he had the manifest sympathy of the house but

he had the house's silence, too, which was even worse

than its sympathy. The master frowned, and this com-

pleted the disaster. Tom struggled awhile and then

retired, utterly defeated. There was a weak attempt

at applause, but it died early.



"The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" followed;

also "The Assyrian Came Down," and other declama-

tory gems. Then there were reading exercises, and a

spelling fight. The meagre Latin class recited with

honor. The prime feature of the evening was in order,

now -- original "compositions" by the young ladies.

Each in her turn stepped forward to the edge of the

platform, cleared her throat, held up her manuscript

(tied with dainty ribbon), and proceeded to read, with

labored attention to "expression" and punctuation.

The themes were the same that had been illuminated

upon similar occasions by their mothers before them,

their grandmothers, and doubtless all their ancestors in

the female line clear back to the Crusades. "Friend-

ship" was one; "Memories of Other Days"; "Religion

in History"; "Dream Land"; "The Advantages of

Culture"; "Forms of Political Government Compared

and Contrasted"; "Melancholy"; "Filial Love";

"Heart Longings," etc., etc.



A prevalent feature in these compositions was a

nursed and petted melancholy; another was a wasteful

and opulent gush of "fine language"; another was a

tendency to lug in by the ears particularly prized words

and phrases until they were worn entirely out; and

a peculiarity that conspicuously marked and marred

them was the inveterate and intolerable sermon that

wagged its crippled tail at the end of each and every

one of them. No matter what the subject might be, a

brain-racking effort was made to squirm it into some

aspect or other that the moral and religious mind could

contemplate with edification. The glaring insincerity

of these sermons was not sufficient to compass the

banishment of the fashion from the schools, and it is

not sufficient to-day; it never will be sufficient while

the world stands, perhaps. There is no school in all

our land where the young ladies do not feel obliged to

close their compositions with a sermon; and you will

find that the sermon of the most frivolous and the least

religious girl in the school is always the longest and the

most relentlessly pious. But enough of this. Homely

truth is unpalatable.



Let us return to the "Examination." The first

composition that was read was one entitled "Is this,

then, Life?" Perhaps the reader can endure an ex-

tract from it:



  "In the common walks of life, with what delightful

   emotions does the youthful mind look forward to some

   anticipated scene of festivity! Imagination is busy

   sketching rose-tinted pictures of joy. In fancy, the

   voluptuous votary of fashion sees herself amid the

   festive throng, 'the observed of all observers.' Her

   graceful form, arrayed in snowy robes, is whirling

   through the mazes of the joyous dance; her eye is

   brightest, her step is lightest in the gay assembly.



  "In such delicious fancies time quickly glides by,

   and the welcome hour arrives for her entrance into

   the Elysian world, of which she has had such bright

   dreams. How fairy-like does everything appear to

   her enchanted vision! Each new scene is more charming

   than the last. But after a while she finds that

   beneath this goodly exterior, all is vanity, the

   flattery which once charmed her soul, now grates

   harshly upon her ear; the ball-room has lost its

   charms; and with wasted health and imbittered heart,

   she turns away with the conviction that earthly

   pleasures cannot satisfy the longings of the soul!"



And so forth and so on. There was a buzz of grati-

fication from time to time during the reading, accom-

panied by whispered ejaculations of "How sweet!"

"How eloquent!" "So true!" etc., and after the thing

had closed with a peculiarly afflicting sermon the

applause was enthusiastic.



Then arose a slim, melancholy girl, whose face had

the "interesting" paleness that comes of pills and indi-

gestion, and read a "poem." Two stanzas of it will do:



   "A MISSOURI MAIDEN'S FAREWELL TO ALABAMA



   "Alabama, good-bye! I love thee well!

      But yet for a while do I leave thee now!

    Sad, yes, sad thoughts of thee my heart doth swell,

      And burning recollections throng my brow!

    For I have wandered through thy flowery woods;

      Have roamed and read near Tallapoosa's stream;

    Have listened to Tallassee's warring floods,

      And wooed on Coosa's side Aurora's beam.



   "Yet shame I not to bear an o'er-full heart,

      Nor blush to turn behind my tearful eyes;

    'Tis from no stranger land I now must part,

      'Tis to no strangers left I yield these sighs.

    Welcome and home were mine within this State,

      Whose vales I leave -- whose spires fade fast from me

    And cold must be mine eyes, and heart, and tete,

      When, dear Alabama! they turn cold on thee!"



There were very few there who knew what "tete"

meant, but the poem was very satisfactory, nevertheless.



Next appeared a dark-complexioned, black-eyed,

black-haired young lady, who paused an impressive

moment, assumed a tragic expression, and began to

read in a measured, solemn tone:



  "A VISION



   "Dark and tempestuous was night. Around the

   throne on high not a single star quivered; but

   the deep intonations of the heavy thunder

   constantly vibrated upon the ear; whilst the

   terrific lightning revelled in angry mood

   through the cloudy chambers of heaven, seeming

   to scorn the power exerted over its terror by

   the illustrious Franklin! Even the boisterous

   winds unanimously came forth from their mystic

   homes, and blustered about as if to enhance by

   their aid the wildness of the scene.



   "At such a time,so dark,so dreary, for human

   sympathy my very spirit sighed; but instead thereof,



   "'My dearest friend, my counsellor, my comforter

   and guide -- My joy in grief, my second bliss

   in joy,' came to my side. She moved like one of

   those bright beings pictured in the sunny walks

   of fancy's Eden by the romantic and young, a

   queen of beauty unadorned save by her own

   transcendent loveliness. So soft was her step, it

   failed to make even a sound, and but for the

   magical thrill imparted by her genial touch, as

   other unobtrusive beauties, she would have glided

   away un-perceived -- unsought. A strange sadness

   rested upon her features, like icy tears upon

   the robe of December, as she pointed to the

   contending elements without, and bade me contemplate

   the two beings presented."



This nightmare occupied some ten pages of manu-

script and wound up with a sermon so destructive of

all hope to non-Presbyterians that it took the first prize.

This composition was considered to be the very finest

effort of the evening. The mayor of the village, in

delivering the prize to the author of it, made a warm

speech in which he said that it was by far the most

"eloquent" thing he had ever listened to, and that

Daniel Webster himself might well be proud of it.



It may be remarked, in passing, that the number

of compositions in which the word "beauteous" was

over-fondled, and human experience referred to as

"life's page," was up to the usual average.



Now the master, mellow almost to the verge of

geniality, put his chair aside, turned his back to the

audience, and began to draw a map of America on

the blackboard, to exercise the geography class upon.

But he made a sad business of it with his unsteady hand,

and a smothered titter rippled over the house. He

knew what the matter was, and set himself to right it.

He sponged out lines and remade them; but he only

distorted them more than ever, and the tittering was

more pronounced. He threw his entire attention upon

his work, now, as if determined not to be put down by

the mirth. He felt that all eyes were fastened upon

him; he imagined he was succeeding, and yet the titter-

ing continued; it even manifestly increased. And well

it might. There was a garret above, pierced with a

scuttle over his head; and down through this scuttle

came a cat, suspended around the haunches by a

string; she had a rag tied about her head and jaws

to keep her from mewing; as she slowly descended she

curved upward and clawed at the string, she swung

downward and clawed at the intangible air. The

tittering rose higher and higher -- the cat was within

six inches of the absorbed teacher's head -- down, down,

a little lower, and she grabbed his wig with her desperate

claws, clung to it, and was snatched up into the garret

in an instant with her trophy still in her possession!

And how the light did blaze abroad from the master's

bald pate -- for the sign-painter's boy had GILDED it!



That broke up the meeting. The boys were avenged.

Vacation had come.



   NOTE:-- The pretended "compositions" quoted in

   this chapter are taken without alteration from a

   volume entitled "Prose and Poetry, by a Western

   Lady" -- but they are exactly and precisely after

   the schoolgirl pattern, and hence are much

   happier than any mere imitations could be.





CHAPTER XXII



TOM joined the new order of Cadets of

Temperance, being attracted by the showy

character of their "regalia." He promised

to abstain from smoking, chewing, and

profanity as long as he remained a mem-

ber. Now he found out a new thing --

namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest

way in the world to make a body want to go and do that

very thing. Tom soon found himself tormented with a

desire to drink and swear; the desire grew to be so

intense that nothing but the hope of a chance to dis-

play himself in his red sash kept him from withdrawing

from the order. Fourth of July was coming; but he

soon gave that up -- gave it up before he had worn his

shackles over forty-eight hours -- and fixed his hopes

upon old Judge Frazer, justice of the peace, who was

apparently on his deathbed and would have a big

public funeral, since he was so high an official. Dur-

ing three days Tom was deeply concerned about the

Judge's condition and hungry for news of it. Some-

times his hopes ran high -- so high that he would venture

to get out his regalia and practise before the looking-

glass. But the Judge had a most discouraging way

of fluctuating. At last he was pronounced upon the

mend -- and then convalescent. Tom was disgusted;

and felt a sense of injury, too. He handed in his res-

ignation at once -- and that night the Judge suffered a

relapse and died. Tom resolved that he would never

trust a man like that again.



The funeral was a fine thing. The Cadets paraded

in a style calculated to kill the late member with envy.

Tom was a free boy again, however -- there was some-

thing in that. He could drink and swear, now -- but

found to his surprise that he did not want to. The

simple fact that he could, took the desire away, and

the charm of it.



Tom presently wondered to find that his coveted

vacation was beginning to hang a little heavily on his

hands.



He attempted a diary -- but nothing happened dur-

ing three days, and so he abandoned it.



The first of all the negro minstrel shows came to

town, and made a sensation. Tom and Joe Harper

got up a band of performers and were happy for two

days.



Even the Glorious Fourth was in some sense a failure,

for it rained hard, there was no procession in con-

sequence, and the greatest man in the world (as Tom

supposed), Mr. Benton, an actual United States Senator,

proved an overwhelming disappointment -- for he was

not twenty-five feet high, nor even anywhere in the

neighborhood of it.



A circus came. The boys played circus for three

days afterward in tents made of rag carpeting -- ad-

mission, three pins for boys, two for girls -- and then

circusing was abandoned.



A phrenologist and a mesmerizer came -- and went

again and left the village duller and drearier than

ever.



There were some boys-and-girls' parties, but they

were so few and so delightful that they only made the

aching voids between ache the harder.



Becky Thatcher was gone to her Constantinople

home to stay with her parents during vacation -- so

there was no bright side to life anywhere.



The dreadful secret of the murder was a chronic

misery. It was a very cancer for permanency and

pain.



Then came the measles.



During two long weeks Tom lay a prisoner, dead

to the world and its happenings. He was very ill, he

was interested in nothing. When he got upon his feet

at last and moved feebly down-town, a melancholy

change had come over everything and every creature.

There had been a "revival," and everybody had "got

religion," not only the adults, but even the boys and

girls. Tom went about, hoping against hope for the

sight of one blessed sinful face, but disappointment

crossed him everywhere. He found Joe Harper study-

ing a Testament, and turned sadly away from the de-

pressing spectacle. He sought Ben Rogers, and found

him visiting the poor with a basket of tracts. He hunted

up Jim Hollis, who called his attention to the precious

blessing of his late measles as a warning. Every boy

he encountered added another ton to his depression;

and when, in desperation, he flew for refuge at last to

the bosom of Huckleberry Finn and was received with

a Scriptural quotation, his heart broke and he crept

home and to bed realizing that he alone of all the town

was lost, forever and forever.



And that night there came on a terrific storm, with

driving rain, awful claps of thunder and blinding sheets

of lightning. He covered his head with the bedclothes

and waited in a horror of suspense for his doom; for he

had not the shadow of a doubt that all this hubbub was

about him. He believed he had taxed the forbearance

of the powers above to the extremity of endurance and

that this was the result. It might have seemed to him

a waste of pomp and ammunition to kill a bug with a

battery of artillery, but there seemed nothing incon-

gruous about the getting up such an expensive thunder-

storm as this to knock the turf from under an insect like

himself.



By and by the tempest spent itself and died without

accomplishing its object. The boy's first impulse was

to be grateful, and reform. His second was to wait

-- for there might not be any more storms.



The next day the doctors were back; Tom had re-

lapsed. The three weeks he spent on his back this time

seemed an entire age. When he got abroad at last he

was hardly grateful that he had been spared, remem-

bering how lonely was his estate, how companionless

and forlorn he was. He drifted listlessly down the

street and found Jim Hollis acting as judge in a juvenile

court that was trying a cat for murder, in the presence

of her victim, a bird. He found Joe Harper and Huck

Finn up an alley eating a stolen melon. Poor lads!

they -- like Tom -- had suffered a relapse.





CHAPTER XXIII



AT last the sleepy atmosphere was stirred --

and vigorously: the murder trial came on

in the court. It became the absorbing

topic of village talk immediately. Tom

could not get away from it. Every ref-

erence to the murder sent a shudder to

his heart, for his troubled conscience and fears almost

persuaded him that these remarks were put forth in his

hearing as "feelers"; he did not see how he could be

suspected of knowing anything about the murder, but

still he could not be comfortable in the midst of this

gossip. It kept him in a cold shiver all the time. He

took Huck to a lonely place to have a talk with him.

It would be some relief to unseal his tongue for a little

while; to divide his burden of distress with another suf-

ferer. Moreover, he wanted to assure himself that

Huck had remained discreet.



"Huck, have you ever told anybody about -- that?"



"'Bout what?"



"You know what."



"Oh -- 'course I haven't."



"Never a word?"



"Never a solitary word, so help me. What makes

you ask?"



"Well, I was afeard."



"Why, Tom Sawyer, we wouldn't be alive two days

if that got found out. YOU know that."



Tom felt more comfortable. After a pause:



"Huck, they couldn't anybody get you to tell, could

they?"



"Get me to tell? Why, if I wanted that half-breed

devil to drownd me they could get me to tell. They

ain't no different way."



"Well, that's all right, then. I reckon we're safe

as long as we keep mum. But let's swear again, any-

way. It's more surer."



"I'm agreed."



So they swore again with dread solemnities.



"What is the talk around, Huck? I've heard a

power of it."



"Talk? Well, it's just Muff Potter, Muff Potter,

Muff Potter all the time. It keeps me in a sweat, con-

stant, so's I want to hide som'ers."



"That's just the same way they go on round me.

I reckon he's a goner. Don't you feel sorry for him,

sometimes?"



"Most always -- most always. He ain't no account;

but then he hain't ever done anything to hurt anybody.

Just fishes a little, to get money to get drunk on -- and

loafs around considerable; but lord, we all do that --

leastways most of us -- preachers and such like. But

he's kind of good -- he give me half a fish, once, when

there warn't enough for two; and lots of times he's kind

of stood by me when I was out of luck."



"Well, he's mended kites for me, Huck, and knitted

hooks on to my line. I wish we could get him out of

there."



"My! we couldn't get him out, Tom. And besides,

'twouldn't do any good; they'd ketch him again."



"Yes -- so they would. But I hate to hear 'em abuse

him so like the dickens when he never done -- that."



"I do too, Tom. Lord, I hear 'em say he's the

bloodiest looking villain in this country, and they won-

der he wasn't ever hung before."



"Yes, they talk like that, all the time. I've heard

'em say that if he was to get free they'd lynch him."



"And they'd do it, too."



The boys had a long talk, but it brought them little

comfort. As the twilight drew on, they found them-

selves hanging about the neighborhood of the little

isolated jail, perhaps with an undefined hope that

something would happen that might clear away their

difficulties. But nothing happened; there seemed to

be no angels or fairies interested in this luckless

captive.



The boys did as they had often done before -- went

to the cell grating and gave Potter some tobacco and

matches. He was on the ground floor and there were

no guards.



His gratitude for their gifts had always smote their

consciences before -- it cut deeper than ever, this time.

They felt cowardly and treacherous to the last degree

when Potter said:



"You've been mighty good to me, boys -- better'n any-

body else in this town. And I don't forget it, I don't.

Often I says to myself, says I, 'I used to mend all the

boys' kites and things, and show 'em where the good

fishin' places was, and befriend 'em what I could, and

now they've all forgot old Muff when he's in trouble;

but Tom don't, and Huck don't -- THEY don't forget him,

says I, 'and I don't forget them.' Well, boys, I done

an awful thing -- drunk and crazy at the time -- that's

the only way I account for it -- and now I got to swing

for it, and it's right. Right, and BEST, too, I reckon --

hope so, anyway. Well, we won't talk about that. I

don't want to make YOU feel bad; you've befriended me.

But what I want to say, is, don't YOU ever get drunk --

then you won't ever get here. Stand a litter furder west

-- so -- that's it; it's a prime comfort to see faces that's

friendly when a body's in such a muck of trouble, and

there don't none come here but yourn. Good friendly

faces -- good friendly faces. Git up on one another's

backs and let me touch 'em. That's it. Shake hands

-- yourn'll come through the bars, but mine's too big.

Little hands, and weak -- but they've helped Muff

Potter a power, and they'd help him more if they

could."



Tom went home miserable, and his dreams that

night were full of horrors. The next day and the day

after, he hung about the court-room, drawn by an al-

most irresistible impulse to go in, but forcing himself

to stay out. Huck was having the same experience.

They studiously avoided each other. Each wandered

away, from time to time, but the same dismal fascina-

tion always brought them back presently. Tom kept

his ears open when idlers sauntered out of the court-

room, but invariably heard distressing news -- the toils

were closing more and more relentlessly around poor

Potter. At the end of the second day the village talk

was to the effect that Injun Joe's evidence stood firm

and unshaken, and that there was not the slightest ques-

tion as to what the jury's verdict would be.



Tom was out late, that night, and came to bed through

the window. He was in a tremendous state of excite-

ment. It was hours before he got to sleep. All the

village flocked to the court-house the next morning, for

this was to be the great day. Both sexes were about

equally represented in the packed audience. After a

long wait the jury filed in and took their places; shortly

afterward, Potter, pale and haggard, timid and hopeless,

was brought in, with chains upon him, and seated where

all the curious eyes could stare at him; no less con-

spicuous was Injun Joe, stolid as ever. There was an-

other pause, and then the judge arrived and the sheriff

proclaimed the opening of the court. The usual whis-

perings among the lawyers and gathering together of

papers followed. These details and accompanying

delays worked up an atmosphere of preparation that

was as impressive as it was fascinating.



Now a witness was called who testified that he found

Muff Potter washing in the brook, at an early hour of

the morning that the murder was discovered, and that

he immediately sneaked away. After some further ques-

tioning, counsel for the prosecution said:



"Take the witness."



The prisoner raised his eyes for a moment, but

dropped them again when his own counsel said:



"I have no questions to ask him."



The next witness proved the finding of the knife

near the corpse. Counsel for the prosecution said:



"Take the witness."



"I have no questions to ask him," Potter's lawyer

replied.



A third witness swore he had often seen the knife in

Potter's possession.



"Take the witness."



Counsel for Potter declined to question him. The

faces of the audience began to betray annoyance.

Did this attorney mean to throw away his client's life

without an effort?



Several witnesses deposed concerning Potter's guilty

behavior when brought to the scene of the murder.

They were allowed to leave the stand without being

cross-questioned.



Every detail of the damaging circumstances that

occurred in the graveyard upon that morning which

all present remembered so well was brought out by

credible witnesses, but none of them were cross-

examined by Potter's lawyer. The perplexity and

dissatisfaction of the house expressed itself in mur-

murs and provoked a reproof from the bench. Counsel

for the prosecution now said:



"By the oaths of citizens whose simple word is

above suspicion, we have fastened this awful crime,

beyond all possibility of question, upon the unhappy

prisoner at the bar. We rest our case here."



A groan escaped from poor Potter, and he put his

face in his hands and rocked his body softly to and

fro, while a painful silence reigned in the court-room.

Many men were moved, and many women's com-

passion testified itself in tears. Counsel for the de-

fence rose and said:



"Your honor, in our remarks at the opening of this

trial, we foreshadowed our purpose to prove that our

client did this fearful deed while under the influence

of a blind and irresponsible delirium produced by drink.

We have changed our mind. We shall not offer that

plea." [Then to the clerk:] "Call Thomas Sawyer!"



A puzzled amazement awoke in every face in the

house, not even excepting Potter's. Every eye fast-

ened itself with wondering interest upon Tom as he

rose and took his place upon the stand. The boy

looked wild enough, for he was badly scared. The

oath was administered.



"Thomas Sawyer, where were you on the seventeenth

of June, about the hour of midnight?"



Tom glanced at Injun Joe's iron face and his tongue

failed him. The audience listened breathless, but the

words refused to come. After a few moments, however,

the boy got a little of his strength back, and managed

to put enough of it into his voice to make part of the

house hear:



"In the graveyard!"



"A little bit louder, please. Don't be afraid. You

were --"



"In the graveyard."



A contemptuous smile flitted across Injun Joe's face.



"Were you anywhere near Horse Williams' grave?"



"Yes, sir."



"Speak up -- just a trifle louder. How near were

you?"



"Near as I am to you."



"Were you hidden, or not?"



"I was hid."



"Where?"



"Behind the elms that's on the edge of the grave."



Injun Joe gave a barely perceptible start.



"Any one with you?"



"Yes, sir. I went there with --"



"Wait -- wait a moment. Never mind mentioning

your companion's name. We will produce him at the

proper time. Did you carry anything there with you."



Tom hesitated and looked confused.



"Speak out, my boy -- don't be diffident. The truth

is always respectable. What did you take there?"



"Only a -- a -- dead cat."



There was a ripple of mirth, which the court checked.



"We will produce the skeleton of that cat. Now,

my boy, tell us everything that occurred -- tell it in

your own way -- don't skip anything, and don't be

afraid."



Tom began -- hesitatingly at first, but as he warmed

to his subject his words flowed more and more easily;

in a little while every sound ceased but his own voice;

every eye fixed itself upon him; with parted lips and

bated breath the audience hung upon his words, taking

no note of time, rapt in the ghastly fascinations of the

tale. The strain upon pent emotion reached its climax

when the boy said:



"-- and as the doctor fetched the board around and

Muff Potter fell, Injun Joe jumped with the knife

and --"



Crash! Quick as lightning the half-breed sprang

for a window, tore his way through all opposers, and

was gone!





CHAPTER XXIV



TOM was a glittering hero once more -- the

pet of the old, the envy of the young.

His name even went into immortal print,

for the village paper magnified him.

There were some that believed he would

be President, yet, if he escaped hanging.



As usual, the fickle, unreasoning world took Muff

Potter to its bosom and fondled him as lavishly as it

had abused him before. But that sort of conduct is

to the world's credit; therefore it is not well to find

fault with it.



Tom's days were days of splendor and exultation

to him, but his nights were seasons of horror. Injun

Joe infested all his dreams, and always with doom

in his eye. Hardly any temptation could persuade

the boy to stir abroad after nightfall. Poor Huck

was in the same state of wretchedness and terror, for

Tom had told the whole story to the lawyer the night

before the great day of the trial, and Huck was sore

afraid that his share in the business might leak out,

yet, notwithstanding Injun Joe's flight had saved

him the suffering of testifying in court. The poor

fellow had got the attorney to promise secrecy, but

what of that? Since Tom's harassed conscience had

managed to drive him to the lawyer's house by night

and wring a dread tale from lips that had been sealed

with the dismalest and most formidable of oaths,

Huck's confidence in the human race was well-nigh

obliterated.



Daily Muff Potter's gratitude made Tom glad he

had spoken; but nightly he wished he had sealed up

his tongue.



Half the time Tom was afraid Injun Joe would

never be captured; the other half he was afraid he

would be. He felt sure he never could draw a safe

breath again until that man was dead and he had

seen the corpse.



Rewards had been offered, the country had been

scoured, but no Injun Joe was found. One of those

omniscient and awe-inspiring marvels, a detective,

came up from St. Louis, moused around, shook his

head, looked wise, and made that sort of astounding

success which members of that craft usually achieve.

That is to say, he "found a clew." But you can't

hang a "clew" for murder, and so after that detec-

tive had got through and gone home, Tom felt just

as insecure as he was before.



The slow days drifted on, and each left behind it

a slightly lightened weight of apprehension.





CHAPTER XXV



THERE comes a time in every rightly-

constructed boy's life when he has a

raging desire to go somewhere and dig

for hidden treasure. This desire sud-

denly came upon Tom one day. He sal-

lied out to find Joe Harper, but failed

of success. Next he sought Ben Rogers; he had gone

fishing. Presently he stumbled upon Huck Finn the

Red-Handed. Huck would answer. Tom took him to

a private place and opened the matter to him confi-

dentially. Huck was willing. Huck was always willing

to take a hand in any enterprise that offered enter-

tainment and required no capital, for he had a troub-

lesome superabundance of that sort of time which is

not money. "Where'll we dig?" said Huck.



"Oh, most anywhere."



"Why, is it hid all around?"



"No, indeed it ain't. It's hid in mighty particular

places, Huck -- sometimes on islands, sometimes in rot-

ten chests under the end of a limb of an old dead tree,

just where the shadow falls at midnight; but mostly

under the floor in ha'nted houses."



"Who hides it?"



"Why, robbers, of course -- who'd you reckon? Sun-

day-school sup'rintendents?"



"I don't know. If 'twas mine I wouldn't hide it;

I'd spend it and have a good time."



"So would I. But robbers don't do that way. They

always hide it and leave it there."



"Don't they come after it any more?"



"No, they think they will, but they generally forget

the marks, or else they die. Anyway, it lays there a

long time and gets rusty; and by and by somebody

finds an old yellow paper that tells how to find the

marks -- a paper that's got to be ciphered over about a

week because it's mostly signs and hy'roglyphics."



"HyroQwhich?"



"Hy'roglyphics -- pictures and things, you know, that

don't seem to mean anything."



"Have you got one of them papers, Tom?"



"No."



"Well then, how you going to find the marks?"



"I don't want any marks. They always bury it

under a ha'nted house or on an island, or under a

dead tree that's got one limb sticking out. Well,

we've tried Jackson's Island a little, and we can try

it again some time; and there's the old ha'nted house

up the Still-House branch, and there's lots of dead-

limb trees -- dead loads of 'em."



"Is it under all of them?"



"How you talk! No!"



"Then how you going to know which one to go for?"



"Go for all of 'em!"



"Why, Tom, it'll take all summer."



"Well, what of that? Suppose you find a brass

pot with a hundred dollars in it, all rusty and gray, or

rotten chest full of di'monds. How's that?"



Huck's eyes glowed.



"That's bully. Plenty bully enough for me. Just

you gimme the hundred dollars and I don't want no

di'monds."



"All right. But I bet you I ain't going to throw

off on di'monds. Some of 'em's worth twenty dol-

lars apiece -- there ain't any, hardly, but's worth six

bits or a dollar."



"No! Is that so?"



"Cert'nly -- anybody'll tell you so. Hain't you ever

seen one, Huck?"



"Not as I remember."



"Oh, kings have slathers of them."



"Well, I don' know no kings, Tom."



"I reckon you don't. But if you was to go to

Europe you'd see a raft of 'em hopping around."



"Do they hop?"



"Hop? -- your granny! No!"



"Well, what did you say they did, for?"



"Shucks, I only meant you'd SEE 'em -- not hopping,

of course -- what do they want to hop for? -- but I mean

you'd just see 'em -- scattered around, you know, in a

kind of a general way. Like that old humpbacked

Richard."



"Richard? What's his other name?"



"He didn't have any other name. Kings don't

have any but a given name."



"No?"



"But they don't."



"Well, if they like it, Tom, all right; but I don't want

to be a king and have only just a given name, like a

nigger. But say -- where you going to dig first?"



"Well, I don't know. S'pose we tackle that old

dead-limb tree on the hill t'other side of Still-House

branch?"



"I'm agreed."



So they got a crippled pick and a shovel, and set

out on their three-mile tramp. They arrived hot and

panting, and threw themselves down in the shade of a

neighboring elm to rest and have a smoke.



"I like this," said Tom.



"So do I."



"Say, Huck, if we find a treasure here, what you

going to do with your share?"



"Well, I'll have pie and a glass of soda every day,

and I'll go to every circus that comes along. I bet I'll

have a gay time."



"Well, ain't you going to save any of it?"



"Save it? What for?"



"Why, so as to have something to live on, by and

by."



"Oh, that ain't any use. Pap would come back to

thish-yer town some day and get his claws on it if I

didn't hurry up, and I tell you he'd clean it out pretty

quick. What you going to do with yourn, Tom?"



"I'm going to buy a new drum, and a sure-'nough

sword, and a red necktie and a bull pup, and get mar-

ried."



"Married!"



"That's it."



"Tom, you -- why, you ain't in your right mind."



"Wait -- you'll see."



"Well, that's the foolishest thing you could do.

Look at pap and my mother. Fight! Why, they used

to fight all the time. I remember, mighty well."



"That ain't anything. The girl I'm going to marry

won't fight."



"Tom, I reckon they're all alike. They'll all comb

a body. Now you better think 'bout this awhile. I

tell you you better. What's the name of the gal?"



"It ain't a gal at all -- it's a girl."



"It's all the same, I reckon; some says gal, some

says girl -- both's right, like enough. Anyway, what's

her name, Tom?"



"I'll tell you some time -- not now."



"All right -- that'll do. Only if you get married I'll

be more lonesomer than ever."



"No you won't. You'll come and live with me.

Now stir out of this and we'll go to digging."



They worked and sweated for half an hour. No

result. They toiled another half-hour. Still no result.

Huck said:



"Do they always bury it as deep as this?"



"Sometimes -- not always. Not generally. I reckon

we haven't got the right place."



So they chose a new spot and began again. The

labor dragged a little, but still they made progress.

They pegged away in silence for some time. Finally

Huck leaned on his shovel, swabbed the beaded drops

from his brow with his sleeve, and said:



"Where you going to dig next, after we get this

one?"



"I reckon maybe we'll tackle the old tree that's

over yonder on Cardiff Hill back of the widow's."



"I reckon that'll be a good one. But won't the

widow take it away from us, Tom? It's on her land."



"SHE take it away! Maybe she'd like to try it once.

Whoever finds one of these hid treasures, it belongs

to him. It don't make any difference whose land

it's on."



That was satisfactory. The work went on. By

and by Huck said:



"Blame it, we must be in the wrong place again.

What do you think?"



"It is mighty curious, Huck. I don't understand it.

Sometimes witches interfere. I reckon maybe that's

what's the trouble now."



"Shucks! Witches ain't got no power in the day-

time."



"Well, that's so. I didn't think of that. Oh, I

know what the matter is! What a blamed lot of fools

we are! You got to find out where the shadow of the

limb falls at midnight, and that's where you dig!"



"Then consound it, we've fooled away all this work

for nothing. Now hang it all, we got to come back

in the night. It's an awful long way. Can you get

out?"



"I bet I will. We've got to do it to-night, too, be-

cause if somebody sees these holes they'll know in a

minute what's here and they'll go for it."



"Well, I'll come around and maow to-night."



"All right. Let's hide the tools in the bushes."



The boys were there that night, about the appoint-

ed time. They sat in the shadow waiting. It was a

lonely place, and an hour made solemn by old traditions.

Spirits whispered in the rustling leaves, ghosts lurked

in the murky nooks, the deep baying of a hound floated

up out of the distance, an owl answered with his

sepulchral note. The boys were subdued by these

solemnities, and talked little. By and by they judged

that twelve had come; they marked where the shadow

fell, and began to dig. Their hopes commenced to rise.

Their interest grew stronger, and their industry kept

pace with it. The hole deepened and still deepened,

but every time their hearts jumped to hear the pick

strike upon something, they only suffered a new disap-

pointment. It was only a stone or a chunk. At last

Tom said:



"It ain't any use, Huck, we're wrong again."



"Well, but we CAN'T be wrong. We spotted the

shadder to a dot."



"I know it, but then there's another thing."



"What's that?".



"Why, we only guessed at the time. Like enough

it was too late or too early."



Huck dropped his shovel.



"That's it," said he. "That's the very trouble.

We got to give this one up. We can't ever tell the

right time, and besides this kind of thing's too awful,

here this time of night with witches and ghosts a-flut-

tering around so. I feel as if something's behind

me all the time;  and I'm afeard to turn around,

becuz maybe there's others in front a-waiting for a

chance. I been creeping all over, ever since I got

here."



"Well, I've been pretty much so, too, Huck. They

most always put in a dead man when they bury a

treasure under a tree, to look out for it."



"Lordy!"



"Yes, they do. I've always heard that."



"Tom, I don't like to fool around much where

there's dead people. A body's bound to get into

trouble with 'em, sure."



"I don't like to stir 'em up, either. S'pose this one

here was to stick his skull out and say something!"



"Don't Tom! It's awful."



"Well, it just is. Huck, I don't feel comfortable

a bit."



"Say, Tom, let's give this place up, and try some-

wheres else."



"All right, I reckon we better."



"What'll it be?"



Tom considered awhile; and then said:



"The ha'nted house. That's it!"



"Blame it, I don't like ha'nted houses, Tom. Why,

they're a dern sight worse'n dead people. Dead people

might talk, maybe, but they don't come sliding around

in a shroud, when you ain't noticing, and peep over

your shoulder all of a sudden and grit their teeth, the

way a ghost does. I couldn't stand such a thing as that,

Tom -- nobody could."



"Yes, but, Huck, ghosts don't travel around only

at night. They won't hender us from digging there in

the daytime."



"Well, that's so. But you know mighty well people

don't go about that ha'nted house in the day nor the

night."



"Well, that's mostly because they don't like to go

where a man's been murdered, anyway -- but nothing's

ever been seen around that house except in the night --

just some blue lights slipping by the windows -- no

regular ghosts."



"Well, where you see one of them blue lights flicker-

ing around, Tom, you can bet there's a ghost mighty

close behind it. It stands to reason. Becuz you know

that they don't anybody but ghosts use 'em."



"Yes, that's so. But anyway they don't come

around in the daytime, so what's the use of our being

afeard?"



"Well, all right. We'll tackle the ha'nted house

if you say so -- but I reckon it's taking chances."



They had started down the hill by this time. There

in the middle of the moonlit valley below them stood

the "ha'nted" house, utterly isolated, its fences gone

long ago, rank weeds smothering the very doorsteps,

the chimney crumbled to ruin, the window-sashes

vacant, a corner of the roof caved in. The boys gazed

awhile, half expecting to see a blue light flit past a

window; then talking in a low tone, as befitted the time

and the circumstances, they struck far off to the right,

to give the haunted house a wide berth, and took their

way homeward through the woods that adorned the

rearward side of Cardiff Hill.





CHAPTER XXVI



ABOUT noon the next day the boys ar-

rived at the dead tree; they had come

for their tools. Tom was impatient

to go to the haunted house; Huck

was measurably so, also -- but suddenly

said:



"Lookyhere, Tom, do you know what day it is?"



Tom mentally ran over the days of the week, and

then quickly lifted his eyes with a startled look in

them --



"My! I never once thought of it, Huck!"



"Well, I didn't neither, but all at once it popped

onto me that it was Friday."



"Blame it, a body can't be too careful, Huck. We

might 'a' got into an awful scrape, tackling such a thing

on a Friday."



"MIGHT! Better say we WOULD! There's some lucky

days, maybe, but Friday ain't."



"Any fool knows that. I don't reckon YOU was the

first that found it out, Huck."



"Well, I never said I was, did I? And Friday ain't

all, neither. I had a rotten bad dream last night --

dreampt about rats."



"No! Sure sign of trouble. Did they fight?"



"No."



"Well, that's good, Huck. When they don't fight

it's only a sign that there's trouble around, you know.

All we got to do is to look mighty sharp and keep out of

it. We'll drop this thing for to-day, and play. Do

you know Robin Hood, Huck?"



"No. Who's Robin Hood?"



"Why, he was one of the greatest men that was

ever in England -- and the best. He was a rob-

ber."



"Cracky, I wisht I was. Who did he rob?"



"Only sheriffs and bishops and rich people and kings,

and such like. But he never bothered the poor. He

loved 'em. He always divided up with 'em perfectly

square."



"Well, he must 'a' been a brick."



"I bet you he was, Huck. Oh, he was the noblest

man that ever was. They ain't any such men now, I

can tell you. He could lick any man in England, with

one hand tied behind him; and he could take his yew

bow and plug a ten-cent piece every time, a mile and a

half."



"What's a YEW bow?"



"I don't know. It's some kind of a bow, of course.

And if he hit that dime only on the edge he would set

down and cry -- and curse. But we'll play Robin Hood

-- it's nobby fun. I'll learn you."



"I'm agreed."



So they played Robin Hood all the afternoon, now

and then casting a yearning eye down upon the haunted

house and passing a remark about the morrow's pros-

pects and possibilities there. As the sun began to sink

into the west they took their way homeward athwart the

long shadows of the trees and soon were buried from

sight in the forests of Cardiff Hill.



On Saturday, shortly after noon, the boys were

at the dead tree again. They had a smoke and a

chat in the shade, and then dug a little in their last

hole, not with great hope, but merely because Tom

said there were so many cases where people had given

up a treasure after getting down within six inches of it,

and then somebody else had come along and turned

it up with a single thrust of a shovel. The thing failed

this time, however, so the boys shouldered their tools

and went away feeling that they had not trifled with

fortune, but had fulfilled all the requirements that be-

long to the business of treasure-hunting.



When they reached the haunted house there was

something so weird and grisly about the dead silence

that reigned there under the baking sun, and some-

thing so depressing about the loneliness and desola-

tion of the place, that they were afraid, for a mo-

ment, to venture in. Then they crept to the door and

took a trembling peep. They saw a weed-grown,

floorless room, unplastered, an ancient fireplace, va-

cant windows, a ruinous staircase; and here, there,

and everywhere hung ragged and abandoned cobwebs.

They presently entered, softly, with quickened pulses,

talking in whispers, ears alert to catch the slightest

sound, and muscles tense and ready for instant retreat.



In a little while familiarity modified their fears and

they gave the place a critical and interested exam-

ination, rather admiring their own boldness, and won-

dering at it, too. Next they wanted to look up-stairs.

This was something like cutting off retreat, but they got

to daring each other, and of course there could be but

one result -- they threw their tools into a corner and made

the ascent. Up there were the same signs of decay.

In one corner they found a closet that promised mystery,

but the promise was a fraud -- there was nothing in it.

Their courage was up now and well in hand. They

were about to go down and begin work when --



"Sh!" said Tom.



"What is it?" whispered Huck, blanching with fright.



"Sh! ... There! ... Hear it?"



"Yes! ... Oh, my! Let's run!"



"Keep still! Don't you budge! They're coming

right toward the door."



The boys stretched themselves upon the floor with

their eyes to knot-holes in the planking, and lay wait-

ing, in a misery of fear.



"They've stopped.... No -- coming.... Here they

are. Don't whisper another word, Huck. My good-

ness, I wish I was out of this!"



Two men entered. Each boy said to himself:

"There's the old deaf and dumb Spaniard that's been

about town once or twice lately -- never saw t'other

man before."



"T'other" was a ragged, unkempt creature, with

nothing very pleasant in his face. The Spaniard was

wrapped in a serape; he had bushy white whiskers; long

white hair flowed from under his sombrero, and he

wore green goggles. When they came in, "t'other" was

talking in a low voice; they sat down on the ground,

facing the door, with their backs to the wall, and the

speaker continued his remarks. His manner became

less guarded and his words more distinct as he proceeded:



"No," said he, "I've thought it all over, and I don't

like it. It's dangerous."



"Dangerous!" grunted the "deaf and dumb" Span-

iard -- to the vast surprise of the boys. "Milksop!"



This voice made the boys gasp and quake. It was

Injun Joe's! There was silence for some time. Then

Joe said:



"What's any more dangerous than that job up yon-

der -- but nothing's come of it."



"That's different. Away up the river so, and not

another house about. 'Twon't ever be known that we

tried, anyway, long as we didn't succeed."



"Well, what's more dangerous than coming here in

the daytime! -- anybody would suspicion us that saw us."



"I know that. But there warn't any other place as

handy after that fool of a job. I want to quit this

shanty. I wanted to yesterday, only it warn't any use

trying to stir out of here, with those infernal boys play-

ing over there on the hill right in full view."



"Those infernal boys" quaked again under the in-

spiration of this remark, and thought how lucky it was

that they had remembered it was Friday and concluded

to wait a day. They wished in their hearts they had

waited a year.



The two men got out some food and made a luncheon.

After a long and thoughtful silence, Injun Joe said:



"Look here, lad -- you go back up the river where

you belong. Wait there till you hear from me. I'll

take the chances on dropping into this town just once

more, for a look. We'll do that 'dangerous' job after

I've spied around a little and think things look well for

it. Then for Texas! We'll leg it together!"



This was satisfactory. Both men presently fell to

yawning, and Injun Joe said:



"I'm dead for sleep! It's your turn to watch."



He curled down in the weeds and soon began to

snore. His comrade stirred him once or twice and he

became quiet. Presently the watcher began to nod;

his head drooped lower and lower, both men began to

snore now.



The boys drew a long, grateful breath. Tom whis-

pered:



"Now's our chance -- come!"



Huck said:



"I can't -- I'd die if they was to wake."



Tom urged -- Huck held back. At last Tom rose

slowly and softly, and started alone. But the first

step he made wrung such a hideous creak from the

crazy floor that he sank down almost dead with fright.

He never made a second attempt. The boys lay there

counting the dragging moments till it seemed to them

that time must be done and eternity growing gray; and

then they were grateful to note that at last the sun was

setting.



Now one snore ceased. Injun Joe sat up, stared

around -- smiled grimly upon his comrade, whose head

was drooping upon his knees -- stirred him up with his

foot and said:



"Here! YOU'RE a watchman, ain't you! All right,

though -- nothing's happened."



"My! have I been asleep?"



"Oh, partly, partly. Nearly time for us to be mov-

ing, pard. What'll we do with what little swag we've

got left?"



"I don't know -- leave it here as we've always done,

I reckon. No use to take it away till we start

south. Six hundred and fifty in silver's something to

carry."



"Well -- all right -- it won't matter to come here once

more."



"No -- but I'd say come in the night as we used to do

-- it's better."



"Yes: but look here; it may be a good while before

I get the right chance at that job; accidents might hap-

pen; 'tain't in such a very good place; we'll just regularly

bury it -- and bury it deep."



"Good idea," said the comrade, who walked across

the room, knelt down, raised one of the rearward hearth-

stones and took out a bag that jingled pleasantly. He

subtracted from it twenty or thirty dollars for himself

and as much for Injun Joe, and passed the bag to the

latter, who was on his knees in the corner, now, digging

with his bowie-knife.



The boys forgot all their fears, all their miseries

in an instant. With gloating eyes they watched every

movement. Luck! -- the splendor of it was beyond all

imagination! Six hundred dollars was money enough

to make half a dozen boys rich! Here was treasure-

hunting under the happiest auspices -- there would not

be any bothersome uncertainty as to where to dig.

They nudged each other every moment -- eloquent

nudges and easily understood, for they simply meant --

"Oh, but ain't you glad NOW we're here!"



Joe's knife struck upon something.



"Hello!" said he.



"What is it?" said his comrade.



"Half-rotten plank -- no, it's a box, I believe. Here --

bear a hand and we'll see what it's here for. Never

mind, I've broke a hole."



He reached his hand in and drew it out --



"Man, it's money!"



The two men examined the handful of coins. They

were gold. The boys above were as excited as them-

selves, and as delighted.



Joe's comrade said:



"We'll make quick work of this. There's an old

rusty pick over amongst the weeds in the corner the

other side of the fireplace -- I saw it a minute ago."



He ran and brought the boys' pick and shovel. Injun

Joe took the pick, looked it over critically, shook his

head, muttered something to himself, and then began

to use it. The box was soon unearthed. It was not

very large; it was iron bound and had been very strong

before the slow years had injured it. The men con-

templated the treasure awhile in blissful silence.



"Pard, there's thousands of dollars here," said Injun

Joe.



"'Twas always said that Murrel's gang used to be

around here one summer," the stranger observed.



"I know it," said Injun Joe; "and this looks like it,

I should say."



"Now you won't need to do that job."



The half-breed frowned. Said he:



"You don't know me. Least you don't know all

about that thing. 'Tain't robbery altogether -- it's

REVENGE!" and a wicked light flamed in his eyes. "I'll

need your help in it. When it's finished -- then Texas.

Go home to your Nance and your kids, and stand by

till you hear from me."



"Well -- if you say so; what'll we do with this -- bury

it again?"



"Yes. [Ravishing delight overhead.] NO! by the

great Sachem, no! [Profound distress overhead.] I'd

nearly forgot. That pick had fresh earth on it! [The

boys were sick with terror in a moment.] What busi-

ness has a pick and a shovel here? What business with

fresh earth on them? Who brought them here -- and

where are they gone? Have you heard anybody? --

seen anybody? What! bury it again and leave them to

come and see the ground disturbed? Not exactly -- not

exactly. We'll take it to my den."



"Why, of course! Might have thought of that be-

fore. You mean Number One?"



"No -- Number Two -- under the cross. The other

place is bad -- too common."



"All right. It's nearly dark enough to start."



Injun Joe got up and went about from window to

window cautiously peeping out. Presently he said:



"Who could have brought those tools here? Do

you reckon they can be up-stairs?"



The boys' breath forsook them. Injun Joe put his

hand on his knife, halted a moment, undecided, and

then turned toward the stairway. The boys thought

of the closet, but their strength was gone. The steps

came creaking up the stairs -- the intolerable distress

of the situation woke the stricken resolution of the lads

-- they were about to spring for the closet, when there

was a crash of rotten timbers and Injun Joe landed on

the ground amid the debris of the ruined stairway. He

gathered himself up cursing, and his comrade said:



"Now what's the use of all that? If it's anybody,

and they're up there, let them STAY there -- who cares?

If they want to jump down, now, and get into trouble,

who objects? It will be dark in fifteen minutes -- and

then let them follow us if they want to. I'm willing.

In my opinion, whoever hove those things in here caught

a sight of us and took us for ghosts or devils or some-

thing. I'll bet they're running yet."



Joe grumbled awhile; then he agreed with his friend

that what daylight was left ought to be economized in

getting things ready for leaving. Shortly afterward

they slipped out of the house in the deepening twilight,

and moved toward the river with their precious box.



Tom and Huck rose up, weak but vastly relieved,

and stared after them through the chinks between the

logs of the house. Follow? Not they. They were

content to reach ground again without broken necks,

and take the townward track over the hill. They did

not talk much. They were too much absorbed in hating

themselves -- hating the ill luck that made them take

the spade and the pick there. But for that, Injun Joe

never would have suspected. He would have hidden

the silver with the gold to wait there till his "revenge"

was satisfied, and then he would have had the mis-

fortune to find that money turn up missing. Bitter,

bitter luck that the tools were ever brought there!



They resolved to keep a lookout for that Spaniard

when he should come to town spying out for chances

to do his revengeful job, and follow him to "Number

Two," wherever that might be. Then a ghastly thought

occurred to Tom.



"Revenge? What if he means US, Huck!"



"Oh, don't!" said Huck, nearly fainting.



They talked it all over, and as they entered town they

agreed to believe that he might possibly mean somebody

else -- at least that he might at least mean nobody but

Tom, since only Tom had testified.



Very, very small comfort it was to Tom to be alone

in danger! Company would be a palpable improve-

ment, he thought.





CHAPTER XXVII



THE adventure of the day mightily tor-

mented Tom's dreams that night. Four

times he had his hands on that rich

treasure and four times it wasted to

nothingness in his fingers as sleep for-

sook him and wakefulness brought back

the hard reality of his misfortune. As he lay in the

early morning recalling the incidents of his great ad-

venture, he noticed that they seemed curiously subdued

and far away -- somewhat as if they had happened in

another world, or in a time long gone by. Then it oc-

curred to him that the great adventure itself must be

a dream! There was one very strong argument in favor

of this idea -- namely, that the quantity of coin he had

seen was too vast to be real. He had never seen as

much as fifty dollars in one mass before, and he was

like all boys of his age and station in life, in that he

imagined that all references to "hundreds" and "thou-

sands" were mere fanciful forms of speech, and that

no such sums really existed in the world. He never had

supposed for a moment that so large a sum as a hun-

dred dollars was to be found in actual money in any

one's possession. If his notions of hidden treasure had

been analyzed, they would have been found to consist of

a handful of real dimes and a bushel of vague, splen-

did, ungraspable dollars.



But the incidents of his adventure grew sensibly

sharper and clearer under the attrition of thinking them

over, and so he presently found himself leaning to the

impression that the thing might not have been a dream,

after all. This uncertainty must be swept away. He

would snatch a hurried breakfast and go and find Huck.

Huck was sitting on the gunwale of a flatboat, list-

lessly dangling his feet in the water and looking very

melancholy. Tom concluded to let Huck lead up to

the subject. If he did not do it, then the adventure

would be proved to have been only a dream.



"Hello, Huck!"



"Hello, yourself."



Silence, for a minute.



"Tom, if we'd 'a' left the blame tools at the dead

tree, we'd 'a' got the money. Oh, ain't it awful!"



"'Tain't a dream, then, 'tain't a dream! Somehow

I most wish it was. Dog'd if I don't, Huck."



"What ain't a dream?"



"Oh, that thing yesterday. I been half thinking

it was."



"Dream! If them stairs hadn't broke down you'd

'a' seen how much dream it was! I've had dreams

enough all night -- with that patch-eyed Spanish devil

going for me all through 'em -- rot him!"



"No, not rot him. FIND him! Track the money!"



"Tom, we'll never find him. A feller don't have

only one chance for such a pile -- and that one's lost.

I'd feel mighty shaky if I was to see him, anyway."



"Well, so'd I; but I'd like to see him, anyway --

and track him out -- to his Number Two."



"Number Two -- yes, that's it. I been thinking

'bout that. But I can't make nothing out of it. What

do you reckon it is?"



"I dono. It's too deep. Say, Huck -- maybe it's

the number of a house!"



"Goody! ... No, Tom, that ain't it. If it is, it ain't

in this one-horse town. They ain't no numbers here."



"Well, that's so. Lemme think a minute. Here --

it's the number of a room -- in a tavern, you know!"



"Oh, that's the trick! They ain't only two taverns.

We can find out quick."



"You stay here, Huck, till I come."



Tom was off at once. He did not care to have

Huck's company in public places. He was gone half

an hour. He found that in the best tavern, No. 2

had long been occupied by a young lawyer, and was

still so occupied. In the less ostentatious house, No. 2

was a mystery. The tavern-keeper's young son said

it was kept locked all the time, and he never saw any-

body go into it or come out of it except at night; he

did not know any particular reason for this state of

things; had had some little curiosity, but it was rather

feeble; had made the most of the mystery by enter-

taining himself with the idea that that room was

"ha'nted"; had noticed that there was a light in there

the night before.



"That's what I've found out, Huck. I reckon

that's the very No. 2 we're after."



"I reckon it is, Tom. Now what you going to do?"



"Lemme think."



Tom thought a long time. Then he said:



"I'll tell you. The back door of that No. 2 is

the door that comes out into that little close alley

between the tavern and the old rattle trap of a brick

store. Now you get hold of all the door-keys you

can find, and I'll nip all of auntie's, and the first dark

night we'll go there and try 'em. And mind you,

keep a lookout for Injun Joe, because he said he was

going to drop into town and spy around once more

for a chance to get his revenge. If you see him, you

just follow him; and if he don't go to that No. 2,

that ain't the place."



"Lordy, I don't want to foller him by myself!"



"Why, it'll be night, sure. He mightn't ever see

you -- and if he did, maybe he'd never think anything."



"Well, if it's pretty dark I reckon I'll track him.

I dono -- I dono. I'll try."



"You bet I'll follow him, if it's dark, Huck. Why,

he might 'a' found out he couldn't get his revenge,

and be going right after that money."



"It's so, Tom, it's so. I'll foller him; I will, by

jingoes!"



"Now you're TALKING! Don't you ever weaken,

Huck, and I won't."





CHAPTER XXVIII



THAT night Tom and Huck were ready

for their adventure. They hung about

the neighborhood of the tavern until

after nine, one watching the alley at a

distance and the other the tavern door.

Nobody entered the alley or left it; no-

body resembling the Spaniard entered or left the tavern

door. The night promised to be a fair one; so Tom

went home with the understanding that if a consider-

able degree of darkness came on, Huck was to come

and "maow," whereupon he would slip out and try

the keys. But the night remained clear, and Huck

closed his watch and retired to bed in an empty sugar

hogshead about twelve.



Tuesday the boys had the same ill luck. Also

Wednesday. But Thursday night promised better.

Tom slipped out in good season with his aunt's old

tin lantern, and a large towel to blindfold it with.

He hid the lantern in Huck's sugar hogshead and the

watch began. An hour before midnight the tavern

closed up and its lights (the only ones thereabouts)

were put out. No Spaniard had been seen. Nobody

had entered or left the alley. Everything was auspi-

cious. The blackness of darkness reigned, the perfect

stillness was interrupted only by occasional mutterings

of distant thunder.



Tom got his lantern, lit it in the hogshead, wrapped

it closely in the towel, and the two adventurers crept

in the gloom toward the tavern. Huck stood sentry

and Tom felt his way into the alley. Then there was

a season of waiting anxiety that weighed upon Huck's

spirits like a mountain. He began to wish he could

see a flash from the lantern -- it would frighten him, but

it would at least tell him that Tom was alive yet. It

seemed hours since Tom had disappeared. Surely

he must have fainted; maybe he was dead; maybe

his heart had burst under terror and excitement. In

his uneasiness Huck found himself drawing closer

and closer to the alley; fearing all sorts of dreadful

things, and momentarily expecting some catastrophe

to happen that would take away his breath. There

was not much to take away, for he seemed only able

to inhale it by thimblefuls, and his heart would soon

wear itself out, the way it was beating. Suddenly

there was a flash of light and Tom came tearing by

him:

.

"Run!" said he; "run, for your life!"



He needn't have repeated it; once was enough;

Huck was making thirty or forty miles an hour before

the repetition was uttered. The boys never stopped

till they reached the shed of a deserted slaughter-

house at the lower end of the village. Just as they got

within its shelter the storm burst and the rain poured

down. As soon as Tom got his breath he said:



"Huck, it was awful! I tried two of the keys, just

as soft as I could; but they seemed to make such a

power of racket that I couldn't hardly get my breath

I was so scared. They wouldn't turn in the lock,

either. Well, without noticing what I was doing, I

took hold of the knob, and open comes the door! It

warn't locked! I hopped in, and shook off the towel,

and, GREAT CAESAR'S GHOST!"



"What! -- what'd you see, Tom?"



"Huck, I most stepped onto Injun Joe's hand!"



"No!"



"Yes! He was lying there, sound asleep on the

floor, with his old patch on his eye and his arms spread

out."



"Lordy, what did you do? Did he wake up?"



"No, never budged. Drunk, I reckon. I just

grabbed that towel and started!"



"I'd never 'a' thought of the towel, I bet!"



"Well, I would. My aunt would make me mighty

sick if I lost it."



"Say, Tom, did you see that box?"



"Huck, I didn't wait to look around. I didn't see

the box, I didn't see the cross. I didn't see anything

but a bottle and a tin cup on the floor by Injun Joe;

yes, I saw two barrels and lots more bottles in the

room. Don't you see, now, what's the matter with

that ha'nted room?"



"How?"



"Why, it's ha'nted with whiskey! Maybe ALL the

Temperance Taverns have got a ha'nted room, hey,

Huck?"



"Well, I reckon maybe that's so. Who'd 'a' thought

such a thing? But say, Tom, now's a mighty good

time to get that box, if Injun Joe's drunk."



"It is, that! You try it!"



Huck shuddered.



"Well, no -- I reckon not."



"And I reckon not, Huck. Only one bottle along-

side of Injun Joe ain't enough. If there'd been three,

he'd be drunk enough and I'd do it."



There was a long pause for reflection, and then

Tom said:



"Lookyhere, Huck, less not try that thing any

more till we know Injun Joe's not in there. It's too

scary. Now, if we watch every night, we'll be dead

sure to see him go out, some time or other, and then

we'll snatch that box quicker'n lightning."



"Well, I'm agreed. I'll watch the whole night long,

and I'll do it every night, too, if you'll do the other part

of the job."



"All right, I will. All you got to do is to trot up

Hooper Street a block and maow -- and if I'm asleep,

you throw some gravel at the window and that'll

fetch me."



"Agreed, and good as wheat!"



"Now, Huck, the storm's over, and I'll go home.

It'll begin to be daylight in a couple of hours. You go

back and watch that long, will you?"



"I said I would, Tom, and I will. I'll ha'nt that

tavern every night for a year! I'll sleep all day and

I'll stand watch all night."



"That's all right. Now, where you going to sleep?"



"In Ben Rogers' hayloft. He lets me, and so does

his pap's nigger man, Uncle Jake. I tote water for

Uncle Jake whenever he wants me to, and any time I

ask him he gives me a little something to eat if he

can spare it. That's a mighty good nigger, Tom. He

likes me, becuz I don't ever act as if I was above him.

Sometime I've set right down and eat WITH him. But

you needn't tell that. A body's got to do things when

he's awful hungry he wouldn't want to do as a steady

thing."



"Well, if I don't want you in the daytime, I'll let

you sleep. I won't come bothering around. Any

time you see something's up, in the night, just skip

right around and maow."





CHAPTER XXIX



THE first thing Tom heard on Friday

morning was a glad piece of news --

Judge Thatcher's family had come back

to town the night before. Both Injun

Joe and the treasure sunk into second-

ary importance for a moment, and Becky

took the chief place in the boy's interest. He saw her

and they had an exhausting good time playing "hi-

spy" and "gully-keeper" with a crowd of their school-

mates. The day was completed and crowned in a pe-

culiarly satisfactory way: Becky teased her mother to

appoint the next day for the long-promised and long-

delayed picnic, and she consented. The child's delight

was boundless; and Tom's not more moderate. The

invitations were sent out before sunset, and straightway

the young folks of the village were thrown into a fever

of preparation and pleasurable anticipation. Tom's

excitement enabled him to keep awake until a pretty

late hour, and he had good hopes of hearing Huck's

"maow," and of having his treasure to astonish Becky

and the picnickers with, next day; but he was dis-

appointed. No signal came that night.



Morning came, eventually, and by ten or eleven

o'clock a giddy and rollicking company were gathered

at Judge Thatcher's, and everything was ready for a

start. It was not the custom for elderly people to

mar the picnics with their presence. The children

were considered safe enough under the wings of a

few young ladies of eighteen and a few young gentlemen

of twenty-three or thereabouts. The old steam ferry-

boat was chartered for the occasion; presently the

gay throng filed up the main street laden with provision-

baskets. Sid was sick and had to miss the fun; Mary

remained at home to entertain him. The last thing

Mrs. Thatcher said to Becky, was:



"You'll not get back till late. Perhaps you'd better

stay all night with some of the girls that live near the

ferry-landing, child."



"Then I'll stay with Susy Harper, mamma."



"Very well. And mind and behave yourself and

don't be any trouble."



Presently, as they tripped along, Tom said to Becky:



"Say -- I'll tell you what we'll do. 'Stead of going

to Joe Harper's we'll climb right up the hill and stop

at the Widow Douglas'. She'll have ice-cream! She

has it most every day -- dead loads of it. And she'll be

awful glad to have us."



"Oh, that will be fun!"



Then Becky reflected a moment and said:



"But what will mamma say?"



"How'll she ever know?"



The girl turned the idea over in her mind, and said

reluctantly:



"I reckon it's wrong -- but --"



"But shucks! Your mother won't know, and so

what's the harm? All she wants is that you'll be safe;

and I bet you she'd 'a' said go there if she'd 'a' thought

of it. I know she would!"



The Widow Douglas' splendid hospitality was a

tempting bait. It and Tom's persuasions presently

carried the day. So it was decided to say nothing

anybody about the night's programme. Presently

it occurred to Tom that maybe Huck might come

this very night and give the signal. The thought took

a deal of the spirit out of his anticipations. Still he

could not bear to give up the fun at Widow Douglas'.

And why should he give it up, he reasoned -- the signal

did not come the night before, so why should it be any

more likely to come to-night? The sure fun of the

evening outweighed the uncertain treasure; and, boy-

like, he determined to yield to the stronger inclination

and not allow himself to think of the box of money

another time that day.



Three miles below town the ferryboat stopped at

the mouth of a woody hollow and tied up. The

crowd swarmed ashore and soon the forest distances

and craggy heights echoed far and near with shoutings

and laughter. All the different ways of getting hot

and tired were gone through with, and by-and-by the

rovers straggled back to camp fortified with responsible

appetites, and then the destruction of the good things

began. After the feast there was a refreshing season

of rest and chat in the shade of spreading oaks. By-

and-by somebody shouted:



"Who's ready for the cave?"



Everybody was. Bundles of candles were procured,

and straightway there was a general scamper up the

hill. The mouth of the cave was up the hillside -- an

opening shaped like a letter A. Its massive oaken

door stood unbarred. Within was a small chamber,

chilly as an ice-house, and walled by Nature with

solid limestone that was dewy with a cold sweat. It

was romantic and mysterious to stand here in the

deep gloom and look out upon the green valley shining

in the sun. But the impressiveness of the situation

quickly wore off, and the romping began again. The

moment a candle was lighted there was a general rush

upon the owner of it; a struggle and a gallant defence

followed, but the candle was soon knocked down or

blown out, and then there was a glad clamor of laughter

and a new chase. But all things have an end. By-and-

by the procession went filing down the steep descent

of the main avenue, the flickering rank of lights dimly

revealing the lofty walls of rock almost to their point

of junction sixty feet overhead. This main avenue

was not more than eight or ten feet wide. Every few

steps other lofty and still narrower crevices branched

from it on either hand -- for McDougal's cave was but

a vast labyrinth of crooked aisles that ran into each

other and out again and led nowhere. It was said that

one might wander days and nights together through

its intricate tangle of rifts and chasms, and never find

the end of the cave; and that he might go down, and

down, and still down, into the earth, and it was just

the same -- labyrinth under labyrinth, and no end to

any of them. No man "knew" the cave. That was

an impossible thing. Most of the young men knew a

portion of it, and it was not customary to venture much

beyond this known portion. Tom Sawyer knew as

much of the cave as any one.



The procession moved along the main avenue

some three-quarters of a mile, and then groups and

couples began to slip aside into branch avenues, fly

along the dismal corridors, and take each other by

surprise at points where the corridors joined again.

Parties were able to elude each other for the space of

half an hour without going beyond the "known"

ground.



By-and-by, one group after another came straggling

back to the mouth of the cave, panting, hilarious,

smeared from head to foot with tallow drippings,

daubed with clay, and entirely delighted with the

success of the day. Then they were astonished to

find that they had been taking no note of time and

that night was about at hand. The clanging bell had

been calling for half an hour. However, this sort of

close to the day's adventures was romantic and there-

fore satisfactory. When the ferryboat with her wild

freight pushed into the stream, nobody cared sixpence

for the wasted time but the captain of the craft.



Huck was already upon his watch when the ferry-

boat's lights went glinting past the wharf. He heard

no noise on board, for the young people were as sub-

dued and still as people usually are who are nearly

tired to death. He wondered what boat it was, and

why she did not stop at the wharf -- and then he dropped

her out of his mind and put his attention upon his

business. The night was growing cloudy and dark.

Ten o'clock came, and the noise of vehicles ceased,

scattered lights began to wink out, all straggling foot-

passengers disappeared, the village betook itself to

its slumbers and left the small watcher alone with the

silence and the ghosts. Eleven o'clock came, and the

tavern lights were put out; darkness everywhere, now.

Huck waited what seemed a weary long time, but noth-

ing happened. His faith was weakening. Was there

any use? Was there really any use? Why not give

it up and turn in?



A noise fell upon his ear. He was all attention in

an instant. The alley door closed softly. He sprang

to the corner of the brick store. The next moment

two men brushed by him, and one seemed to have

something under his arm. It must be that box! So

they were going to remove the treasure. Why call

Tom now? It would be absurd -- the men would get

away with the box and never be found again. No, he

would stick to their wake and follow them; he would

trust to the darkness for security from discovery. So

communing with himself, Huck stepped out and glided

along behind the men, cat-like, with bare feet, allowing

them to keep just far enough ahead not to be invisible.



They moved up the river street three blocks, then

turned to the left up a cross-street. They went straight

ahead, then, until they came to the path that led up

Cardiff Hill; this they took. They passed by the old

Welshman's house, half-way up the hill, without hesi-

tating, and still climbed upward. Good, thought Huck,

they will bury it in the old quarry. But they never

stopped at the quarry. They passed on, up the sum-

mit. They plunged into the narrow path between the

tall sumach bushes, and were at once hidden in the

gloom. Huck closed up and shortened his distance,

now, for they would never be able to see him. He

trotted along awhile; then slackened his pace, fearing

he was gaining too fast; moved on a piece, then stopped

altogether; listened; no sound; none, save that he

seemed to hear the beating of his own heart. The

hooting of an owl came over the hill -- ominous sound!

But no footsteps. Heavens, was everything lost! He

was about to spring with winged feet, when a man

cleared his throat not four feet from him! Huck's

heart shot into his throat, but he swallowed it again;

and then he stood there shaking as if a dozen agues

had taken charge of him at once, and so weak that he

thought he must surely fall to the ground. He knew

where he was. He knew he was within five steps of

the stile leading into Widow Douglas' grounds. Very

well, he thought, let them bury it there; it won't be

hard to find.



Now there was a voice -- a very low voice -- Injun

Joe's:



"Damn her, maybe she's got company -- there's

lights, late as it is."



"I can't see any."



This was that stranger's voice -- the stranger of the

haunted house. A deadly chill went to Huck's heart --

this, then, was the "revenge" job! His thought was,

to fly. Then he remembered that the Widow Douglas

had been kind to him more than once, and maybe these

men were going to murder her. He wished he dared

venture to warn her; but he knew he didn't dare -- they

might come and catch him. He thought all this and

more in the moment that elapsed between the stranger's

remark and Injun Joe's next -- which was --



"Because the bush is in your way. Now -- this way

-- now you see, don't you?"



"Yes. Well, there IS company there, I reckon.

Better give it up."



"Give it up, and I just leaving this country forever!

Give it up and maybe never have another chance. I

tell you again, as I've told you before, I don't care

for her swag -- you may have it. But her husband

was rough on me -- many times he was rough on me

-- and mainly he was the justice of the peace that

jugged me for a vagrant. And that ain't all. It

ain't a millionth part of it! He had me HORSEWHIPPED!

-- horsewhipped in front of the jail, like a nigger! --

with all the town looking on! HORSEWHIPPED! -- do

you understand? He took advantage of me and died.

But I'll take it out of HER."



"Oh, don't kill her! Don't do that!"



"Kill? Who said anything about killing? I would

kill HIM if he was here; but not her. When you want

to get revenge on a woman you don't kill her -- bosh!

you go for her looks. You slit her nostrils -- you notch

her ears like a sow!"



"By God, that's --"



"Keep your opinion to yourself! It will be safest

for you. I'll tie her to the bed. If she bleeds to

death, is that my fault? I'll not cry, if she does. My

friend, you'll help me in this thing -- for MY sake --

that's why you're here -- I mightn't be able alone. If

you flinch, I'll kill you. Do you understand that?

And if I have to kill you, I'll kill her -- and then I

reckon nobody'll ever know much about who done

this business."



"Well, if it's got to be done, let's get at it. The

quicker the better -- I'm all in a shiver."



"Do it NOW? And company there? Look here --

I'll get suspicious of you, first thing you know. No

-- we'll wait till the lights are out -- there's no hurry."



Huck felt that a silence was going to ensue -- a

thing still more awful than any amount of murderous

talk; so he held his breath and stepped gingerly back;

planted his foot carefully and firmly, after balancing,

one-legged, in a precarious way and almost toppling

over, first on one side and then on the other. He

took another step back, with the same elaboration

and the same risks; then another and another, and

-- a twig snapped under his foot! His breath stopped

and he listened. There was no sound -- the stillness

was perfect. His gratitude was measureless. Now he

turned in his tracks, between the walls of sumach

bushes -- turned himself as carefully as if he were a

ship -- and then stepped quickly but cautiously along.

When he emerged at the quarry he felt secure, and so he

picked up his nimble heels and flew. Down, down he

sped, till he reached the Welshman's. He banged at

the door, and presently the heads of the old man and

his two stalwart sons were thrust from windows.



"What's the row there? Who's banging? What

do you want?"



"Let me in -- quick! I'll tell everything."



"Why, who are you?"



"Huckleberry Finn -- quick, let me in!"



"Huckleberry Finn, indeed! It ain't a name to

open many doors, I judge! But let him in, lads, and

let's see what's the trouble."



"Please don't ever tell I told you," were Huck's

first words when he got in. "Please don't -- I'd be

killed, sure -- but the widow's been good friends to

me sometimes, and I want to tell -- I WILL tell if you'll

promise you won't ever say it was me."



"By George, he HAS got something to tell, or he

wouldn't act so!" exclaimed the old man; "out with

it and nobody here'll ever tell, lad."



Three minutes later the old man and his sons, well

armed, were up the hill, and just entering the sumach

path on tiptoe, their weapons in their hands. Huck

accompanied them no further. He hid behind a great

bowlder and fell to listening. There was a lagging,

anxious silence, and then all of a sudden there was

an explosion of firearms and a cry.



Huck waited for no particulars. He sprang away

and sped down the hill as fast as his legs could carry

him.





CHAPTER XXX



AS the earliest suspicion of dawn appeared

on Sunday morning, Huck came groping

up the hill and rapped gently at the old

Welshman's door. The inmates were

asleep, but it was a sleep that was set on

a hair-trigger, on account of the exciting

episode of the night. A call came from a window:



"Who's there!"



Huck's scared voice answered in a low tone:



"Please let me in! It's only Huck Finn!"



"It's a name that can open this door night or day,

lad! -- and welcome!"



These were strange words to the vagabond boy's

ears, and the pleasantest he had ever heard. He

could not recollect that the closing word had ever been

applied in his case before. The door was quickly

unlocked, and he entered. Huck was given a seat

and the old man and his brace of tall sons speedily

dressed themselves.



"Now, my boy, I hope you're good and hungry,

because breakfast will be ready as soon as the sun's

up, and we'll have a piping hot one, too -- make your-

self easy about that! I and the boys hoped you'd

turn up and stop here last night."



"I was awful scared," said Huck, "and I run. I

took out when the pistols went off, and I didn't stop

for three mile. I've come now becuz I wanted to know

about it, you know; and I come before daylight becuz

I didn't want to run across them devils, even if they

was dead."



"Well, poor chap, you do look as if you'd had a

hard night of it -- but there's a bed here for you when

you've had your breakfast. No, they ain't dead, lad

-- we are sorry enough for that. You see we knew

right where to put our hands on them, by your de-

scription; so we crept along on tiptoe till we got

within fifteen feet of them -- dark as a cellar that sumach

path was -- and just then I found I was going to sneeze.

It was the meanest kind of luck! I tried to keep it

back, but no use -- 'twas bound to come, and it did

come! I was in the lead with my pistol raised, and

when the sneeze started those scoundrels a-rustling to

get out of the path, I sung out, 'Fire boys!' and blazed

away at the place where the rustling was. So did the

boys. But they were off in a jiffy, those villains, and

we after them, down through the woods. I judge we

never touched them. They fired a shot apiece as they

started, but their bullets whizzed by and didn't do us

any harm. As soon as we lost the sound of their feet

we quit chasing, and went down and stirred up the

constables. They got a posse together, and went off

to guard the river bank, and as soon as it is light the

sheriff and a gang are going to beat up the woods. My

boys will be with them presently. I wish we had

some sort of description of those rascals -- 'twould help

a good deal. But you couldn't see what they were

like, in the dark, lad, I suppose?"



"Oh yes; I saw them down-town and follered

them."



"Splendid! Describe them -- describe them, my

boy!"



"One's the old deaf and dumb Spaniard that's ben

around here once or twice, and t'other's a mean-looking,

ragged --"



"That's enough, lad, we know the men! Hap-

pened on them in the woods back of the widow's one

day, and they slunk away. Off with you, boys, and

tell the sheriff -- get your breakfast to-morrow morning!"



The Welshman's sons departed at once. As they

were leaving the room Huck sprang up and exclaimed:



"Oh, please don't tell ANYbody it was me that

blowed on them! Oh, please!"



"All right if you say it, Huck, but you ought to

have the credit of what you did."



"Oh no, no! Please don't tell!"



When the young men were gone, the old Welshman

said:



"They won't tell -- and I won't. But why don't

you want it known?"



Huck would not explain, further than to say that

he already knew too much about one of those men

and would not have the man know that he knew any-

thing against him for the whole world -- he would be

killed for knowing it, sure.



The old man promised secrecy once more, and

said:



"How did you come to follow these fellows, lad?

Were they looking suspicious?"



Huck was silent while he framed a duly cautious

reply. Then he said:



"Well, you see, I'm a kind of a hard lot, -- least

everybody says so, and I don't see nothing agin it --

and sometimes I can't sleep much, on account of think-

ing about it and sort of trying to strike out a new

way of doing. That was the way of it last night. I

couldn't sleep, and so I come along up-street 'bout

midnight, a-turning it all over, and when I got to that

old shackly brick store by the Temperance Tavern,

I backed up agin the wall to have another think. Well,

just then along comes these two chaps slipping along

close by me, with something under their arm, and I

reckoned they'd stole it. One was a-smoking, and

t'other one wanted a light; so they stopped right before

me and the cigars lit up their faces and I see that the

big one was the deaf and dumb Spaniard, by his white

whiskers and the patch on his eye, and t'other one

was a rusty, ragged-looking devil."



"Could you see the rags by the light of the cigars?"



This staggered Huck for a moment. Then he

said:



"Well, I don't know -- but somehow it seems as if

I did."



"Then they went on, and you --"



"Follered 'em -- yes. That was it. I wanted to see

what was up -- they sneaked along so. I dogged 'em

to the widder's stile, and stood in the dark and heard

the ragged one beg for the widder, and the Spaniard

swear he'd spile her looks just as I told you and your

two --"



"What! The DEAF AND DUMB man said all that!"



Huck had made another terrible mistake! He was

trying his best to keep the old man from getting the

faintest hint of who the Spaniard might be, and yet

his tongue seemed determined to get him into trouble

in spite of all he could do. He made several efforts

to creep out of his scrape, but the old man's eye was

upon him and he made blunder after blunder. Pres-

ently the Welshman said:



"My boy, don't be afraid of me. I wouldn't hurt

a hair of your head for all the world. No -- I'd pro-

tect you -- I'd protect you. This Spaniard is not deaf

and dumb; you've let that slip without intending it;

you can't cover that up now. You know something

about that Spaniard that you want to keep dark.

Now trust me -- tell me what it is, and trust me -- I

won't betray you."



Huck looked into the old man's honest eyes a moment,

then bent over and whispered in his ear:



"'Tain't a Spaniard -- it's Injun Joe!"



The Welshman almost jumped out of his chair. In

a moment he said:



"It's all plain enough, now. When you talked

about notching ears and slitting noses I judged that

that was your own embellishment, because white

men don't take that sort of revenge. But an Injun!

That's a different matter altogether."



During breakfast the talk went on, and in the course

of it the old man said that the last thing which he and

his sons had done, before going to bed, was to get a

lantern and examine the stile and its vicinity for marks

of blood. They found none, but captured a bulky

bundle of --



"Of WHAT?"



If the words had been lightning they could not

have leaped with a more stunning suddenness from

Huck's blanched lips. His eyes were staring wide,

now, and his breath suspended -- waiting for the answer.

The Welshman started -- stared in return -- three seconds

-- five seconds -- ten -- then replied:



"Of burglar's tools. Why, what's the MATTER with

you?"



Huck sank back, panting gently, but deeply, un-

utterably grateful. The Welshman eyed him gravely,

curiously -- and presently said:



"Yes, burglar's tools. That appears to relieve

you a good deal. But what did give you that turn?

What were YOU expecting we'd found?"



Huck was in a close place -- the inquiring eye was

upon him -- he would have given anything for material

for a plausible answer -- nothing suggested itself -- the

inquiring eye was boring deeper and deeper -- a sense-

less reply offered -- there was no time to weigh it, so

at a venture he uttered it -- feebly:



"Sunday-school books, maybe."



Poor Huck was too distressed to smile, but the old

man laughed loud and joyously, shook up the details

of his anatomy from head to foot, and ended by saying

that such a laugh was money in a-man's pocket, be-

cause it cut down the doctor's bill like everything.

Then he added:



"Poor old chap, you're white and jaded -- you ain't

well a bit -- no wonder you're a little flighty and off

your balance. But you'll come out of it. Rest and

sleep will fetch you out all right, I hope."



Huck was irritated to think he had been such a

goose and betrayed such a suspicious excitement, for

he had dropped the idea that the parcel brought from

the tavern was the treasure, as soon as he had heard

the talk at the widow's stile. He had only thought

it was not the treasure, however -- he had not known

that it wasn't -- and so the suggestion of a captured

bundle was too much for his self-possession. But on

the whole he felt glad the little episode had happened,

for now he knew beyond all question that that bundle

was not THE bundle, and so his mind was at rest and

exceedingly comfortable. In fact, everything seemed

to be drifting just in the right direction, now; the

treasure must be still in No. 2, the men would be

captured and jailed that day, and he and Tom could

seize the gold that night without any trouble or any

fear of interruption.



Just as breakfast was completed there was a knock

at the door. Huck jumped for a hiding-place, for

he had no mind to be connected even remotely with

the late event. The Welshman admitted several

ladies and gentlemen, among them the Widow Douglas,

and noticed that groups of citizens were climbing up

the hill -- to stare at the stile. So the news had spread.

The Welshman had to tell the story of the night

to the visitors. The widow's gratitude for her preser-

vation was outspoken.



"Don't say a word about it, madam. There's

another that you're more beholden to than you are

to me and my boys, maybe, but he don't allow me

to tell his name. We wouldn't have been there but

for him."



Of course this excited a curiosity so vast that it

almost belittled the main matter -- but the Welshman

allowed it to eat into the vitals of his visitors, and

through them be transmitted to the whole town, for

he refused to part with his secret. When all else had

been learned, the widow said:



"I went to sleep reading in bed and slept straight

through all that noise. Why didn't you come and

wake me?"



"We judged it warn't worth while. Those fellows

warn't likely to come again -- they hadn't any tools

left to work with, and what was the use of waking

you up and scaring you to death? My three negro

men stood guard at your house all the rest of the night.

They've just come back."



More visitors came, and the story had to be told

and retold for a couple of hours more.



There was no Sabbath-school during day-school

vacation, but everybody was early at church. The

stirring event was well canvassed. News came that

not a sign of the two villains had been yet discovered.

When the sermon was finished, Judge Thatcher's

wife dropped alongside of Mrs. Harper as she moved

down the aisle with the crowd and said:



"Is my Becky going to sleep all day? I just ex-

pected she would be tired to death."



"Your Becky?"



"Yes," with a startled look -- "didn't she stay with

you last night?"



"Why, no."



Mrs. Thatcher turned pale, and sank into a pew,

just as Aunt Polly, talking briskly with a friend, passed

by. Aunt Polly said:



"Good-morning, Mrs. Thatcher. Good-morning,

Mrs. Harper. I've got a boy that's turned up missing.

I reckon my Tom stayed at your house last night --

one of you. And now he's afraid to come to church.

I've got to settle with him."



Mrs. Thatcher shook her head feebly and turned

paler than ever.



"He didn't stay with us," said Mrs. Harper, be-

ginning to look uneasy. A marked anxiety came into

Aunt Polly's face.



"Joe Harper, have you seen my Tom this morning?"



"No'm."



"When did you see him last?"



Joe tried to remember, but was not sure he could

say. The people had stopped moving out of church.

Whispers passed along, and a boding uneasiness took

possession of every countenance. Children were anx-

iously questioned, and young teachers. They all said

they had not noticed whether Tom and Becky were on

board the ferryboat on the homeward trip; it was dark;

no one thought of inquiring if any one was missing.

One young man finally blurted out his fear that they

were still in the cave! Mrs. Thatcher swooned away.

Aunt Polly fell to crying and wringing her hands.



The alarm swept from lip to lip, from group to

group, from street to street, and within five minutes

the bells were wildly clanging and the whole town was

up! The Cardiff Hill episode sank into instant in-

significance, the burglars were forgotten, horses were

saddled, skiffs were manned, the ferryboat ordered out,

and before the horror was half an hour old, two hundred

men were pouring down highroad and river toward the

cave.



All the long afternoon the village seemed empty

and dead. Many women visited Aunt Polly and Mrs.

Thatcher and tried to comfort them. They cried

with them, too, and that was still better than words.

All the tedious night the town waited for news; but

when the morning dawned at last, all the word that

came was, "Send more candles -- and send food." Mrs.

Thatcher was almost crazed; and Aunt Polly, also.

Judge Thatcher sent messages of hope and encourage-

ment from the cave, but they conveyed no real cheer.



The old Welshman came home toward daylight,

spattered with candle-grease, smeared with clay, and

almost worn out. He found Huck still in the bed

that had been provided for him, and delirious with

fever. The physicians were all at the cave, so the

Widow Douglas came and took charge of the patient.

She said she would do her best by him, because, whether

he was good, bad, or indifferent, he was the Lord's,

and nothing that was the Lord's was a thing to be

neglected. The Welshman said Huck had good spots

in him, and the widow said:



"You can depend on it. That's the Lord's mark.

He don't leave it off. He never does. Puts it some-

where on every creature that comes from his hands."



Early in the forenoon parties of jaded men began

to straggle into the village, but the strongest of the

citizens continued searching. All the news that could

be gained was that remotenesses of the cavern were

being ransacked that had never been visited before;

that every corner and crevice was going to be thoroughly

searched; that wherever one wandered through the

maze of passages, lights were to be seen flitting hither

and thither in the distance, and shoutings and pistol-

shots sent their hollow reverberations to the ear down

the sombre aisles. In one place, far from the section

usually traversed by tourists, the names "BECKY &

TOM" had been found traced upon the rocky wall

with candle-smoke, and near at hand a grease-soiled

bit of ribbon. Mrs. Thatcher recognized the ribbon

and cried over it. She said it was the last relic she

should ever have of her child; and that no other

memorial of her could ever be so precious, because

this one parted latest from the living body before the

awful death came. Some said that now and then, in

the cave, a far-away speck of light would glimmer, and

then a glorious shout would burst forth and a score of

men go trooping down the echoing aisle -- and then a

sickening disappointment always followed; the children

were not there; it was only a searcher's light.



Three dreadful days and nights dragged their tedious

hours along, and the village sank into a hopeless

stupor. No one had heart for anything. The acci-

dental discovery, just made, that the proprietor of the

Temperance Tavern kept liquor on his premises,

scarcely fluttered the public pulse, tremendous as the

fact was. In a lucid interval, Huck feebly led up to

the subject of taverns, and finally asked -- dimly

dreading the worst -- if anything had been discovered

at the Temperance Tavern since he had been ill.



"Yes," said the widow.



Huck started up in bed, wild-eyed:



"What? What was it?"



"Liquor! -- and the place has been shut up. Lie

down, child -- what a turn you did give me!"



"Only tell me just one thing -- only just one -- please!

Was it Tom Sawyer that found it?"



The widow burst into tears. "Hush, hush, child,

hush! I've told you before, you must NOT talk. You

are very, very sick!"



Then nothing but liquor had been found; there

would have been a great powwow if it had been the

gold. So the treasure was gone forever -- gone forever!

But what could she be crying about? Curious that

she should cry.



These thoughts worked their dim way through Huck's

mind, and under the weariness they gave him he fell

asleep. The widow said to herself:



"There -- he's asleep, poor wreck. Tom Sawyer

find it! Pity but somebody could find Tom Sawyer!

Ah, there ain't many left, now, that's got hope enough,

or strength enough, either, to go on searching."





CHAPTER XXXI



NOW to return to Tom and Becky's share

in the picnic. They tripped along the

murky aisles with the rest of the com-

pany, visiting the familiar wonders of the

cave -- wonders dubbed with rather over-

descriptive names, such as "The Draw-

ing-Room," "The Cathedral," "Aladdin's Palace," and

so on. Presently the hide-and-seek frolicking began,

and Tom and Becky engaged in it with zeal until the

exertion began to grow a trifle wearisome; then they

wandered down a sinuous avenue holding their candles

aloft and reading the tangled web-work of names,

dates, post-office addresses, and mottoes with which

the rocky walls had been frescoed (in candle-smoke).

Still drifting along and talking, they scarcely noticed

that they were now in a part of the cave whose walls

were not frescoed. They smoked their own names

under an overhanging shelf and moved on. Presently

they came to a place where a little stream of water,

trickling over a ledge and carrying a limestone sediment

with it, had, in the slow-dragging ages, formed a laced

and ruffled Niagara in gleaming and imperishable stone.

Tom squeezed his small body behind it in order to

illuminate it for Becky's gratification. He found that

it curtained a sort of steep natural stairway which was

enclosed between narrow walls, and at once the ambi-

tion to be a discoverer seized him. Becky responded

to his call, and they made a smoke-mark for future

guidance, and started upon their quest. They wound

this way and that, far down into the secret depths of

the cave, made another mark, and branched off in

search of novelties to tell the upper world about. In

one place they found a spacious cavern, from whose

ceiling depended a multitude of shining stalactites of

the length and circumference of a man's leg; they

walked all about it, wondering and admiring, and

presently left it by one of the numerous passages that

opened into it. This shortly brought them to a be-

witching spring, whose basin was incrusted with a

frostwork of glittering crystals; it was in the midst of

a cavern whose walls were supported by many fan-

tastic pillars which had been formed by the joining

of great stalactites and stalagmites together, the result

of the ceaseless water-drip of centuries. Under the

roof vast knots of bats had packed themselves together,

thousands in a bunch; the lights disturbed the creat-

ures and they came flocking down by hundreds,

squeaking and darting furiously at the candles. Tom

knew their ways and the danger of this sort of conduct.

He seized Becky's hand and hurried her into the first

corridor that offered; and none too soon, for a bat

struck Becky's light out with its wing while she was

passing out of the cavern. The bats chased the children

a good distance; but the fugitives plunged into every

new passage that offered, and at last got rid of the

perilous things. Tom found a subterranean lake,

shortly, which stretched its dim length away until its

shape was lost in the shadows. He wanted to explore

its borders, but concluded that it would be best to sit

down and rest awhile, first. Now, for the first time,

the deep stillness of the place laid a clammy hand

upon the spirits of the children. Becky said:



"Why, I didn't notice, but it seems ever so long since

I heard any of the others."



"Come to think, Becky, we are away down below

them -- and I don't know how far away north, or south,

or east, or whichever it is. We couldn't hear them

here."



Becky grew apprehensive.



"I wonder how long we've been down here, Tom?

We better start back."



"Yes, I reckon we better. P'raps we better."



"Can you find the way, Tom? It's all a mixed-up

crookedness to me."



"I reckon I could find it -- but then the bats. If

they put our candles out it will be an awful fix. Let's

try some other way, so as not to go through there."



"Well. But I hope we won't get lost. It would

be so awful!" and the girl shuddered at the thought

of the dreadful possibilities.



They started through a corridor, and traversed it

in silence a long way, glancing at each new opening,

to see if there was anything familiar about the look of

it; but they were all strange. Every time Tom made

an examination, Becky would watch his face for an

encouraging sign, and he would say cheerily:



"Oh, it's all right. This ain't the one, but we'll

come to it right away!"



But he felt less and less hopeful with each failure,

and presently began to turn off into diverging avenues

at sheer random, in desperate hope of finding the one

that was wanted. He still said it was "all right,"

but there was such a leaden dread at his heart that the

words had lost their ring and sounded just as if he had

said, "All is lost!" Becky clung to his side in an

anguish of fear, and tried hard to keep back the tears,

but they would come. At last she said:



"Oh, Tom, never mind the bats, let's go back that

way! We seem to get worse and worse off all the time."



"Listen!" said he.



Profound silence; silence so deep that even their

breathings were conspicuous in the hush. Tom shout-

ed. The call went echoing down the empty aisles and

died out in the distance in a faint sound that resembled

a ripple of mocking laughter.



"Oh, don't do it again, Tom, it is too horrid," said

Becky.



"It is horrid, but I better, Becky; they might hear

us, you know," and he shouted again.



The "might" was even a chillier horror than the

ghostly laughter, it so confessed a perishing hope.

The children stood still and listened; but there was

no result. Tom turned upon the back track at once,

and hurried his steps. It was but a little while be-

fore a certain indecision in his manner revealed an-

other fearful fact to Becky -- he could not find his way

back!



"Oh, Tom, you didn't make any marks!"



"Becky, I was such a fool! Such a fool! I never

thought we might want to come back! No -- I can't

find the way. It's all mixed up."



"Tom, Tom, we're lost! we're lost! We never can

get out of this awful place! Oh, why DID we ever leave

the others!"



She sank to the ground and burst into such a frenzy

of crying that Tom was appalled with the idea that

she might die, or lose her reason. He sat down by

her and put his arms around her; she buried her face

in his bosom, she clung to him, she poured out her

terrors, her unavailing regrets, and the far echoes turned

them all to jeering laughter. Tom begged her to pluck

up hope again, and she said she could not. He fell

to blaming and abusing himself for getting her into

this miserable situation; this had a better effect. She

said she would try to hope again, she would get up and

follow wherever he might lead if only he would not

talk like that any more. For he was no more to blame

than she, she said.



So they moved on again -- aimlessly -- simply at

random -- all they could do was to move, keep moving.

For a little while, hope made a show of reviving -- not

with any reason to back it, but only because it is its

nature to revive when the spring has not been taken

out of it by age and familiarity with failure.



By-and-by Tom took Becky's candle and blew it

out. This economy meant so much! Words were

not needed. Becky understood, and her hope died

again. She knew that Tom had a whole candle and

three or four pieces in his pockets -- yet he must econ-

omize.



By-and-by, fatigue began to assert its claims; the

children tried to pay attention, for it was dreadful

to think of sitting down when time was grown to be so

precious, moving, in some direction, in any direction,

was at least progress and might bear fruit; but to sit

down was to invite death and shorten its pursuit.



At last Becky's frail limbs refused to carry her

farther. She sat down. Tom rested with her, and

they talked of home, and the friends there, and the

comfortable beds and, above all, the light! Becky

cried, and Tom tried to think of some way of comfort-

ing her, but all his encouragements were grown thread-

bare with use, and sounded like sarcasms. Fatigue

bore so heavily upon Becky that she drowsed off to

sleep. Tom was grateful. He sat looking into her

drawn face and saw it grow smooth and natural under

the influence of pleasant dreams; and by-and-by a

smile dawned and rested there. The peaceful face

reflected somewhat of peace and healing into his own

spirit, and his thoughts wandered away to bygone

times and dreamy memories. While he was deep in

his musings, Becky woke up with a breezy little laugh

-- but it was stricken dead upon her lips, and a groan

followed it.



"Oh, how COULD I sleep! I wish I never, never

had waked! No! No, I don't, Tom! Don't look

so! I won't say it again."



"I'm glad you've slept, Becky; you'll feel rested,

now, and we'll find the way out."



"We can try, Tom; but I've seen such a beautiful

country in my dream. I reckon we are going there."



"Maybe not, maybe not. Cheer up, Becky, and

let's go on trying."



They rose up and wandered along, hand in hand

and hopeless. They tried to estimate how long they

had been in the cave, but all they knew was that it

seemed days and weeks, and yet it was plain that this

could not be, for their candles were not gone yet. A

long time after this -- they could not tell how long --

Tom said they must go softly and listen for dripping

water -- they must find a spring. They found one

presently, and Tom said it was time to rest again.

Both were cruelly tired, yet Becky said she thought

she could go a little farther. She was surprised to

hear Tom dissent. She could not understand it.

They sat down, and Tom fastened his candle to the

wall in front of them with some clay. Thought was

soon busy; nothing was said for some time. Then

Becky broke the silence:



"Tom, I am so hungry!"



Tom took something out of his pocket.



"Do you remember this?" said he.



Becky almost smiled.



"It's our wedding-cake, Tom."



"Yes -- I wish it was as big as a barrel, for it's all

we've got."



"I saved it from the picnic for us to dream on,

Tom, the way grown-up people do with wedding-

cake -- but it'll be our --"



She dropped the sentence where it was. Tom

divided the cake and Becky ate with good appetite,

while Tom nibbled at his moiety. There was abun-

dance of cold water to finish the feast with. By-and-by

Becky suggested that they move on again. Tom was

silent a moment. Then he said:



"Becky, can you bear it if I tell you something?"



Becky's face paled, but she thought she could.



"Well, then, Becky, we must stay here, where there's

water to drink. That little piece is our last candle!"



Becky gave loose to tears and wailings. Tom did

what he could to comfort her, but with little effect.

At length Becky said:



"Tom!"



"Well, Becky?"



"They'll miss us and hunt for us!"



"Yes, they will! Certainly they will!"



"Maybe they're hunting for us now, Tom."



"Why, I reckon maybe they are. I hope they are."



"When would they miss us, Tom?"



"When they get back to the boat, I reckon."



"Tom, it might be dark then -- would they notice

we hadn't come?"



"I don't know. But anyway, your mother would

miss you as soon as they got home."



A frightened look in Becky's face brought Tom to

his senses and he saw that he had made a blunder.

Becky was not to have gone home that night! The

children became silent and thoughtful. In a moment

a new burst of grief from Becky showed Tom that

the thing in his mind had struck hers also -- that the

Sabbath morning might be half spent before Mrs.

Thatcher discovered that Becky was not at Mrs.

Harper's.



The children fastened their eyes upon their bit of

candle and watched it melt slowly and pitilessly away;

saw the half inch of wick stand alone at last; saw the

feeble flame rise and fall, climb the thin column of

smoke, linger at its top a moment, and then -- the

horror of utter darkness reigned!



How long afterward it was that Becky came to a

slow consciousness that she was crying in Tom's arms,

neither could tell. All that they knew was, that after

what seemed a mighty stretch of time, both awoke

out of a dead stupor of sleep and resumed their miseries

once more. Tom said it might be Sunday, now --

maybe Monday. He tried to get Becky to talk, but her

sorrows were too oppressive, all her hopes were gone.

Tom said that they must have been missed long ago,

and no doubt the search was going on. He would

shout and maybe some one would come. He tried

it; but in the darkness the distant echoes sounded so

hideously that he tried it no more.



The hours wasted away, and hunger came to tor-

ment the captives again. A portion of Tom's half of

the cake was left; they divided and ate it. But they

seemed hungrier than before. The poor morsel of

food only whetted desire.



By-and-by Tom said:



"SH! Did you hear that?"



Both held their breath and listened. There was a

sound like the faintest, far-off shout. Instantly Tom

answered it, and leading Becky by the hand, started

groping down the corridor in its direction. Presently

he listened again; again the sound was heard, and

apparently a little nearer.



"It's them!" said Tom; "they're coming! Come

along, Becky -- we're all right now!"



The joy of the prisoners was almost overwhelming.

Their speed was slow, however, because pitfalls were

somewhat common, and had to be guarded against.

They shortly came to one and had to stop. It might

be three feet deep, it might be a hundred -- there was no

passing it at any rate. Tom got down on his breast

and reached as far down as he could. No bottom.

They must stay there and wait until the searchers came.

They listened; evidently the distant shoutings were

growing more distant! a moment or two more and they

had gone altogether. The heart-sinking misery of

it! Tom whooped until he was hoarse, but it was of

no use. He talked hopefully to Becky; but an age

of anxious waiting passed and no sounds came again.



The children groped their way back to the spring.

The weary time dragged on; they slept again, and

awoke famished and woe-stricken. Tom believed it

must be Tuesday by this time.



Now an idea struck him. There were some side

passages near at hand. It would be better to explore

some of these than bear the weight of the heavy time in

idleness. He took a kite-line from his pocket, tied it

to a projection, and he and Becky started, Tom in the

lead, unwinding the line as he groped along. At the

end of twenty steps the corridor ended in a "jumping-

off place." Tom got down on his knees and felt below,

and then as far around the corner as he could reach

with his hands conveniently; he made an effort to

stretch yet a little farther to the right, and at that

moment, not twenty yards away, a human hand,

holding a candle, appeared from behind a rock! Tom

lifted up a glorious shout, and instantly that hand was

followed by the body it belonged to -- Injun Joe's!

Tom was paralyzed; he could not move. He was

vastly gratified the next moment, to see the "Spaniard"

take to his heels and get himself out of sight. Tom

wondered that Joe had not recognized his voice and

come over and killed him for testifying in court. But

the echoes must have disguised the voice. Without

doubt, that was it, he reasoned. Tom's fright weak-

ened every muscle in his body. He said to himself

that if he had strength enough to get back to the

spring he would stay there, and nothing should tempt

him to run the risk of meeting Injun Joe again. He

was careful to keep from Becky what it was he had

seen. He told her he had only shouted "for luck."



But hunger and wretchedness rise superior to fears

in the long run. Another tedious wait at the spring

and another long sleep brought changes. The chil-

dren awoke tortured with a raging hunger. Tom

believed that it must be Wednesday or Thursday or

even Friday or Saturday, now, and that the search

had been given over. He proposed to explore another

passage. He felt willing to risk Injun Joe and all

other terrors. But Becky was very weak. She had

sunk into a dreary apathy and would not be roused.

She said she would wait, now, where she was, and die

-- it would not be long. She told Tom to go with the

kite-line and explore if he chose; but she implored him

to come back every little while and speak to her; and

she made him promise that when the awful time came,

he would stay by her and hold her hand until all was

over.



Tom kissed her, with a choking sensation in his

throat, and made a show of being confident of finding

the searchers or an escape from the cave; then he

took the kite-line in his hand and went groping down

one of the passages on his hands and knees, distressed

with hunger and sick with bodings of coming doom.





CHAPTER XXXII



TUESDAY afternoon came, and waned to

the twilight. The village of St. Peters-

burg still mourned. The lost children

had not been found. Public prayers

had been offered up for them, and many

and many a private prayer that had the

petitioner's whole heart in it; but still no good news

came from the cave. The majority of the searchers

had given up the quest and gone back to their daily

avocations, saying that it was plain the children could

never be found. Mrs. Thatcher was very ill, and a

great part of the time delirious. People said it was

heartbreaking to hear her call her child, and raise her

head and listen a whole minute at a time, then lay it

wearily down again with a moan. Aunt Polly had

drooped into a settled melancholy, and her gray hair

had grown almost white. The village went to its rest

on Tuesday night, sad and forlorn.



Away in the middle of the night a wild peal burst

from the village bells, and in a moment the streets were

swarming with frantic half-clad people, who shouted,

"Turn out! turn out! they're found! they're found!"

Tin pans and horns were added to the din, the popula-

tion massed itself and moved toward the river, met

the children coming in an open carriage drawn by

shouting citizens, thronged around it, joined its home-

ward march, and swept magnificently up the main

street roaring huzzah after huzzah!



The village was illuminated; nobody went to bed

again; it was the greatest night the little town had

ever seen. During the first half-hour a procession of

villagers filed through Judge Thatcher's house, seized

the saved ones and kissed them, squeezed Mrs. Thatch-

er's hand, tried to speak but couldn't -- and drifted out

raining tears all over the place.



Aunt Polly's happiness was complete, and Mrs.

Thatcher's nearly so. It would be complete, how-

ever, as soon as the messenger dispatched with the

great news to the cave should get the word to her

husband. Tom lay upon a sofa with an eager audi-

tory about him and told the history of the wonderful

adventure, putting in many striking additions to adorn

it withal; and closed with a description of how he

left Becky and went on an exploring expedition; how

he followed two avenues as far as his kite-line would

reach; how he followed a third to the fullest stretch

of the kite-line, and was about to turn back when he

glimpsed a far-off speck that looked like daylight;

dropped the line and groped toward it, pushed his

head and shoulders through a small hole, and saw the

broad Mississippi rolling by! And if it had only hap-

pened to be night he would not have seen that speck

of daylight and would not have explored that passage

any more! He told how he went back for Becky and

broke the good news and she told him not to fret her

with such stuff, for she was tired, and knew she was

going to die, and wanted to. He described how he

labored with her and convinced her; and how she

almost died for joy when she had groped to where she

actually saw the blue speck of daylight; how he pushed

his way out at the hole and then helped her out; how

they sat there and cried for gladness; how some men

came along in a skiff and Tom hailed them and told

them their situation and their famished condition; how

the men didn't believe the wild tale at first, "because,"

said they, "you are five miles down the river below the

valley the cave is in" -- then took them aboard, rowed to

a house, gave them supper, made them rest till two or

three hours after dark and then brought them home.



Before day-dawn, Judge Thatcher and the handful

of searchers with him were tracked out, in the cave, by

the twine clews they had strung behind them, and

informed of the great news.



Three days and nights of toil and hunger in the

cave were not to be shaken off at once, as Tom and

Becky soon discovered. They were bedridden all of

Wednesday and Thursday, and seemed to grow more

and more tired and worn, all the time. Tom got

about, a little, on Thursday, was down-town Friday,

and nearly as whole as ever Saturday; but Becky

did not leave her room until Sunday, and then she

looked as if she had passed through a wasting illness.



Tom learned of Huck's sickness and went to see

him on Friday, but could not be admitted to the

bedroom; neither could he on Saturday or Sunday.

He was admitted daily after that, but was warned to

keep still about his adventure and introduce no ex-

citing topic. The Widow Douglas stayed by to see

that he obeyed. At home Tom learned of the Cardiff

Hill event; also that the "ragged man's" body had

eventually been found in the river near the ferry-

landing; he had been drowned while trying to escape,

perhaps.



About a fortnight after Tom's rescue from the

cave, he started off to visit Huck, who had grown

plenty strong enough, now, to hear exciting talk, and

Tom had some that would interest him, he thought.

Judge Thatcher's house was on Tom's way, and he

stopped to see Becky. The Judge and some friends

set Tom to talking, and some one asked him ironically

if he wouldn't like to go to the cave again. Tom said

he thought he wouldn't mind it. The Judge said:



"Well, there are others just like you, Tom, I've not

the least doubt. But we have taken care of that.

Nobody will get lost in that cave any more."



"Why?"



"Because I had its big door sheathed with boiler

iron two weeks ago, and triple-locked -- and I've got

the keys."



Tom turned as white as a sheet.



"What's the matter, boy! Here, run, somebody!

Fetch a glass of water!"



The water was brought and thrown into Tom's

face.



"Ah, now you're all right. What was the matter

with you, Tom?"



"Oh, Judge, Injun Joe's in the cave!"





CHAPTER XXXIII



WITHIN a few minutes the news had

spread, and a dozen skiff-loads of men

were on their way to McDougal's cave,

and the ferryboat, well filled with pas-

sengers, soon followed. Tom Sawyer was

in the skiff that bore Judge Thatcher.



When the cave door was unlocked, a sorrowful

sight presented itself in the dim twilight of the place.

Injun Joe lay stretched upon the ground, dead, with

his face close to the crack of the door, as if his longing

eyes had been fixed, to the latest moment, upon the

light and the cheer of the free world outside. Tom

was touched, for he knew by his own experience how

this wretch had suffered. His pity was moved, but

nevertheless he felt an abounding sense of relief and

security, now, which revealed to him in a degree which

he had not fully appreciated before how vast a weight

of dread had been lying upon him since the day he

lifted his voice against this bloody-minded outcast.



Injun Joe's bowie-knife lay close by, its blade

broken in two. The great foundation-beam of the

door had been chipped and hacked through, with

tedious labor; useless labor, too, it was, for the native

rock formed a sill outside it, and upon that stubborn

material the knife had wrought no effect; the only

damage done was to the knife itself. But if there had

been no stony obstruction there the labor would have

been useless still, for if the beam had been wholly cut

away Injun Joe could not have squeezed his body

under the door, and he knew it. So he had only hacked

that place in order to be doing something -- in order to

pass the weary time -- in order to employ his tortured

faculties. Ordinarily one could find half a dozen bits

of candle stuck around in the crevices of this vestibule,

left there by tourists; but there were none now. The

prisoner had searched them out and eaten them. He

had also contrived to catch a few bats, and these,

also, he had eaten, leaving only their claws. The

poor unfortunate had starved to death. In one place,

near at hand, a stalagmite had been slowly growing

up from the ground for ages, builded by the water-drip

from a stalactite overhead. The captive had broken

off the stalagmite, and upon the stump had placed a

stone, wherein he had scooped a shallow hollow to

catch the precious drop that fell once in every three

minutes with the dreary regularity of a clock-tick -- a

dessertspoonful once in four and twenty hours. That

drop was falling when the Pyramids were new; when

Troy fell; when the foundations of Rome were laid

when Christ was crucified; when the Conqueror

created the British empire; when Columbus sailed;

when the massacre at Lexington was "news." It is

falling now; it will still be falling when all these things

shall have sunk down the afternoon of history, and

the twilight of tradition, and been swallowed up in

the thick night of oblivion. Has everything a purpose

and a mission? Did this drop fall patiently during

five thousand years to be ready for this flitting human

insect's need? and has it another important object to

accomplish ten thousand years to come? No matter.

It is many and many a year since the hapless half-breed

scooped out the stone to catch the priceless drops, but

to this day the tourist stares longest at that pathetic

stone and that slow-dropping water when he comes

to see the wonders of McDougal's cave. Injun Joe's

cup stands first in the list of the cavern's marvels; even

"Aladdin's Palace" cannot rival it.



Injun Joe was buried near the mouth of the cave;

and people flocked there in boats and wagons from

the towns and from all the farms and hamlets for

seven miles around; they brought their children, and

all sorts of provisions, and confessed that they had

had almost as satisfactory a time at the funeral as they

could have had at the hanging.



This funeral stopped the further growth of one

thing -- the petition to the governor for Injun Joe's

pardon. The petition had been largely signed; many

tearful and eloquent meetings had been held, and a

committee of sappy women been appointed to go in

deep mourning and wail around the governor, and

implore him to be a merciful ass and trample his duty

under foot. Injun Joe was believed to have killed five

citizens of the village, but what of that? If he had been

Satan himself there would have been plenty of weak-

lings ready to scribble their names to a pardon-petition,

and drip a tear on it from their permanently impaired

and leaky water-works.



The morning after the funeral Tom took Huck to

a private place to have an important talk. Huck had

learned all about Tom's adventure from the Welsh-

man and the Widow Douglas, by this time, but

Tom said he reckoned there was one thing they

had not told him; that thing was what he wanted

to talk about now. Huck's face saddened. He

said:



"I know what it is. You got into No. 2 and never

found anything but whiskey. Nobody told me it was

you; but I just knowed it must 'a' ben you, soon as

I heard 'bout that whiskey business; and I knowed you

hadn't got the money becuz you'd 'a' got at me some

way or other and told me even if you was mum to

everybody else. Tom, something's always told me

we'd never get holt of that swag."



"Why, Huck, I never told on that tavern-keeper.

YOU know his tavern was all right the Saturday I went

to the picnic. Don't you remember you was to watch

there that night?"



"Oh yes! Why, it seems 'bout a year ago. It

was that very night that I follered Injun Joe to the

widder's."



"YOU followed him?"



"Yes -- but you keep mum. I reckon Injun Joe's

left friends behind him, and I don't want 'em souring

on me and doing me mean tricks. If it hadn't ben for

me he'd be down in Texas now, all right."



Then Huck told his entire adventure in confidence

to Tom, who had only heard of the Welshman's part

of it before.



"Well," said Huck, presently, coming back to the

main question, "whoever nipped the whiskey in No. 2,

nipped the money, too, I reckon -- anyways it's a goner

for us, Tom."



"Huck, that money wasn't ever in No. 2!"



"What!" Huck searched his comrade's face keenly.

"Tom, have you got on the track of that money again?"



"Huck, it's in the cave!"



Huck's eyes blazed.



"Say it again, Tom."



"The money's in the cave!"



"Tom -- honest injun, now -- is it fun, or earnest?"



"Earnest, Huck -- just as earnest as ever I was in

my life. Will you go in there with me and help get

it out?"



"I bet I will! I will if it's where we can blaze our

way to it and not get lost."



"Huck, we can do that without the least little bit

of trouble in the world."



"Good as wheat! What makes you think the

money's --"



"Huck, you just wait till we get in there. If we

don't find it I'll agree to give you my drum and every

thing I've got in the world. I will, by jings."



"All right -- it's a whiz. When do you say?"



"Right now, if you say it. Are you strong enough?"



"Is it far in the cave? I ben on my pins a little,

three or four days, now, but I can't walk more'n a

mile, Tom -- least I don't think I could."



"It's about five mile into there the way anybody

but me would go, Huck, but there's a mighty short

cut that they don't anybody but me know about.

Huck, I'll take you right to it in a skiff. I'll float

the skiff down there, and I'll pull it back again all by

myself. You needn't ever turn your hand over."



"Less start right off, Tom."



"All right. We want some bread and meat, and

our pipes, and a little bag or two, and two or three

kite-strings, and some of these new-fangled things

they call lucifer matches. I tell you, many's the

time I wished I had some when I was in there before."



A trifle after noon the boys borrowed a small skiff

from a citizen who was absent, and got under way

at once. When they were several miles below "Cave

Hollow," Tom said:



"Now you see this bluff here looks all alike all the

way down from the cave hollow -- no houses, no wood-

yards, bushes all alike. But do you see that white

place up yonder where there's been a landslide?

Well, that's one of my marks. We'll get ashore,

now."



They landed.



"Now, Huck, where we're a-standing you could

touch that hole I got out of with a fishing-pole. See

if you can find it."



Huck searched all the place about, and found

nothing. Tom proudly marched into a thick clump of

sumach bushes and said:



"Here you are! Look at it, Huck; it's the snuggest

hole in this country. You just keep mum about it.

All along I've been wanting to be a robber, but I knew

I'd got to have a thing like this, and where to run across

it was the bother. We've got it now, and we'll keep it

quiet, only we'll let Joe Harper and Ben Rogers in --

because of course there's got to be a Gang, or else

there wouldn't be any style about it. Tom Sawyer's

Gang -- it sounds splendid, don't it, Huck?"



"Well, it just does, Tom. And who'll we rob?"



"Oh, most anybody. Waylay people -- that's mostly

the way."



"And kill them?"



"No, not always. Hive them in the cave till they

raise a ransom."



"What's a ransom?"



"Money. You make them raise all they can, off'n

their friends; and after you've kept them a year, if

it ain't raised then you kill them. That's the general

way. Only you don't kill the women. You shut up

the women, but you don't kill them. They're always

beautiful and rich, and awfully scared. You take

their watches and things, but you always take your

hat off and talk polite. They ain't anybody as polite

as robbers -- you'll see that in any book. Well, the

women get to loving you, and after they've been in the

cave a week or two weeks they stop crying and after

that you couldn't get them to leave. If you drove

them out they'd turn right around and come back.

It's so in all the books."



"Why, it's real bully, Tom. I believe it's better'n

to be a pirate."



"Yes, it's better in some ways, because it's close to

home and circuses and all that."



By this time everything was ready and the boys

entered the hole, Tom in the lead. They toiled their

way to the farther end of the tunnel, then made their

spliced kite-strings fast and moved on. A few steps

brought them to the spring, and Tom felt a shudder

quiver all through him. He showed Huck the frag-

ment of candle-wick perched on a lump of clay against

the wall, and described how he and Becky had watched

the flame struggle and expire.



The boys began to quiet down to whispers, now,

for the stillness and gloom of the place oppressed their

spirits. They went on, and presently entered and

followed Tom's other corridor until they reached the

"jumping-off place." The candles revealed the fact

that it was not really a precipice, but only a steep

clay hill twenty or thirty feet high. Tom whis-

pered:



"Now I'll show you something, Huck."



He held his candle aloft and said:



"Look as far around the corner as you can. Do

you see that? There -- on the big rock over yonder

-- done with candle-smoke."



"Tom, it's a CROSS!"



"NOW where's your Number Two? 'UNDER THE

CROSS,' hey? Right yonder's where I saw Injun Joe

poke up his candle, Huck!"



Huck stared at the mystic sign awhile, and then said

with a shaky voice:



"Tom, less git out of here!"



"What! and leave the treasure?"



"Yes -- leave it. Injun Joe's ghost is round about

there, certain."



"No it ain't, Huck, no it ain't. It would ha'nt the

place where he died -- away out at the mouth of the

cave -- five mile from here."



"No, Tom, it wouldn't. It would hang round the

money. I know the ways of ghosts, and so do you."



Tom began to fear that Huck was right. Mis-

givings gathered in his mind. But presently an idea

occurred to him --



"Lookyhere, Huck, what fools we're making of

ourselves! Injun Joe's ghost ain't a going to come

around where there's a cross!"



The point was well taken. It had its effect.



"Tom, I didn't think of that. But that's so. It's

luck for us, that cross is. I reckon we'll climb down

there and have a hunt for that box."



Tom went first, cutting rude steps in the clay hill

as he descended. Huck followed. Four avenues

opened out of the small cavern which the great rock

stood in. The boys examined three of them with no

result. They found a small recess in the one nearest

the base of the rock, with a pallet of blankets spread

down in it; also an old suspender, some bacon rind,

and the well-gnawed bones of two or three fowls. But

there was no money-box. The lads searched and re-

searched this place, but in vain. Tom said:



"He said UNDER the cross. Well, this comes nearest

to being under the cross. It can't be under the rock

itself, because that sets solid on the ground."



They searched everywhere once more, and then

sat down discouraged. Huck could suggest nothing.

By-and-by Tom said:



"Lookyhere, Huck, there's footprints and some can-

dle-grease on the clay about one side of this rock,

but not on the other sides. Now, what's that for?

I bet you the money IS under the rock. I'm going to

dig in the clay."



"That ain't no bad notion, Tom!" said Huck with

animation.



Tom's "real Barlow" was out at once, and he had

not dug four inches before he struck wood.



"Hey, Huck! -- you hear that?"



Huck began to dig and scratch now. Some boards

were soon uncovered and removed. They had con-

cealed a natural chasm which led under the rock. Tom

got into this and held his candle as far under the rock

as he could, but said he could not see to the end of the

rift. He proposed to explore. He stooped and passed

under; the narrow way descended gradually. He

followed its winding course, first to the right, then to

the left, Huck at his heels. Tom turned a short curve,

by-and-by, and exclaimed:



"My goodness, Huck, lookyhere!"



It was the treasure-box, sure enough, occupying a

snug little cavern, along with an empty powder-keg,

a couple of guns in leather cases, two or three pairs of

old moccasins, a leather belt, and some other rubbish

well soaked with the water-drip.



"Got it at last!" said Huck, ploughing among the tar-

nished coins with his hand. "My, but we're rich, Tom!"



"Huck, I always reckoned we'd get it. It's just

too good to believe, but we HAVE got it, sure! Say --

let's not fool around here. Let's snake it out. Lemme

see if I can lift the box."



It weighed about fifty pounds. Tom could lift it,

after an awkward fashion, but could not carry it

conveniently.



"I thought so," he said; "THEY carried it like it

was heavy, that day at the ha'nted house. I noticed

that. I reckon I was right to think of fetching the

little bags along."



The money was soon in the bags and the boys took

it up to the cross rock.



"Now less fetch the guns and things," said Huck.



"No, Huck -- leave them there. They're just the

tricks to have when we go to robbing. We'll keep them

there all the time, and we'll hold our orgies there, too.

It's an awful snug place for orgies."



"What orgies?"



"I dono. But robbers always have orgies, and of

course we've got to have them, too. Come along,

Huck, we've been in here a long time. It's getting

late, I reckon. I'm hungry, too. We'll eat and smoke

when we get to the skiff."



They presently emerged into the clump of sumach

bushes, looked warily out, found the coast clear, and

were soon lunching and smoking in the skiff. As

the sun dipped toward the horizon they pushed out

and got under way. Tom skimmed up the shore

through the long twilight, chatting cheerily with Huck,

and landed shortly after dark.



"Now, Huck," said Tom, "we'll hide the money

in the loft of the widow's woodshed, and I'll come

up in the morning and we'll count it and divide, and

then we'll hunt up a place out in the woods for it

where it will be safe. Just you lay quiet here and

watch the stuff till I run and hook Benny Taylor's

little wagon; I won't be gone a minute."



He disappeared, and presently returned with the

wagon, put the two small sacks into it, threw some

old rags on top of them, and started off, dragging his

cargo behind him. When the boys reached the Welsh-

man's house, they stopped to rest. Just as they were

about to move on, the Welshman stepped out and said:



"Hallo, who's that?"



"Huck and Tom Sawyer."



"Good! Come along with me, boys, you are keep-

ing everybody waiting. Here -- hurry up, trot ahead --

I'll haul the wagon for you. Why, it's not as light as

it might be. Got bricks in it? -- or old metal?"



"Old metal," said Tom.



"I judged so; the boys in this town will take more

trouble and fool away more time hunting up six bits'

worth of old iron to sell to the foundry than they would

to make twice the money at regular work. But that's

human nature -- hurry along, hurry along!"



The boys wanted to know what the hurry was about.



"Never mind; you'll see, when we get to the Widow

Douglas'."



Huck said with some apprehension -- for he was

long used to being falsely accused:



"Mr. Jones, we haven't been doing nothing."



The Welshman laughed.



"Well, I don't know, Huck, my boy. I don't know

about that. Ain't you and the widow good friends?"



"Yes. Well, she's ben good friends to me, anyway."



"All right, then. What do you want to be afraid

for?"



This question was not entirely answered in Huck's

slow mind before he found himself pushed, along

with Tom, into Mrs. Douglas' drawing-room. Mr.

Jones left the wagon near the door and followed.



The place was grandly lighted, and everybody that

was of any consequence in the village was there. The

Thatchers were there, the Harpers, the Rogerses, Aunt

Polly, Sid, Mary, the minister, the editor, and a great

many more, and all dressed in their best. The widow

received the boys as heartily as any one could well

receive two such looking beings. They were covered

with clay and candle-grease. Aunt Polly blushed

crimson with humiliation, and frowned and shook her

head at Tom. Nobody suffered half as much as the

two boys did, however. Mr. Jones said:



"Tom wasn't at home, yet, so I gave him up; but

I stumbled on him and Huck right at my door, and so

I just brought them along in a hurry."



"And you did just right," said the widow. "Come

with me, boys."



She took them to a bedchamber and said:



"Now wash and dress yourselves. Here are two

new suits of clothes -- shirts, socks, everything complete.

They're Huck's -- no, no thanks, Huck -- Mr. Jones

bought one and I the other. But they'll fit both of

you. Get into them. We'll wait -- come down when

you are slicked up enough."



Then she left.





CHAPTER XXXIV



HUCK said: "Tom, we can slope, if we

can find a rope. The window ain't high

from the ground."



"Shucks! what do you want to slope

for?"



"Well, I ain't used to that kind of a

crowd. I can't stand it. I ain't going down there, Tom."



"Oh, bother! It ain't anything. I don't mind it

a bit. I'll take care of you."



Sid appeared.



"Tom," said he, "auntie has been waiting for you

all the afternoon. Mary got your Sunday clothes

ready, and everybody's been fretting about you. Say

-- ain't this grease and clay, on your clothes?"



"Now, Mr. Siddy, you jist 'tend to your own business.

What's all this blow-out about, anyway?"



"It's one of the widow's parties that she's always

having. This time it's for the Welshman and his

sons, on account of that scrape they helped her out

of the other night. And say -- I can tell you something,

if you want to know."



"Well, what?"



"Why, old Mr. Jones is going to try to spring some-

thing on the people here to-night, but I overheard him

tell auntie to-day about it, as a secret, but I reckon

it's not much of a secret now. Everybody knows --

the widow, too, for all she tries to let on she don't.

Mr. Jones was bound Huck should be here -- couldn't

get along with his grand secret without Huck, you

know!"



"Secret about what, Sid?"



"About Huck tracking the robbers to the widow's.

I reckon Mr. Jones was going to make a grand time

over his surprise, but I bet you it will drop pretty flat."



Sid chuckled in a very contented and satisfied way.



"Sid, was it you that told?"



"Oh, never mind who it was. SOMEBODY told -- that's

enough."



"Sid, there's only one person in this town mean

enough to do that, and that's you. If you had been in

Huck's place you'd 'a' sneaked down the hill and never

told anybody on the robbers. You can't do any but

mean things, and you can't bear to see anybody praised

for doing good ones. There -- no thanks, as the widow

says" -- and Tom cuffed Sid's ears and helped him to

the door with several kicks. "Now go and tell auntie

if you dare -- and to-morrow you'll catch it!"



Some minutes later the widow's guests were at the

supper-table, and a dozen children were propped up

at little side-tables in the same room, after the fashion

of that country and that day. At the proper time

Mr. Jones made his little speech, in which he thanked

the widow for the honor she was doing himself and his

sons, but said that there was another person whose

modesty --



And so forth and so on. He sprung his secret

about Huck's share in the adventure in the finest

dramatic manner he was master of, but the surprise it

occasioned was largely counterfeit and not as clamorous

and effusive as it might have been under happier

circumstances. However, the widow made a pretty

fair show of astonishment, and heaped so many com-

pliments and so much gratitude upon Huck that he

almost forgot the nearly intolerable discomfort of his

new clothes in the entirely intolerable discomfort of

being set up as a target for everybody's gaze and

everybody's laudations.



The widow said she meant to give Huck a home

under her roof and have him educated; and that

when she could spare the money she would start him

in business in a modest way. Tom's chance was

come. He said:



"Huck don't need it. Huck's rich."



Nothing but a heavy strain upon the good manners

of the company kept back the due and proper com-

plimentary laugh at this pleasant joke. But the silence

was a little awkward. Tom broke it:



"Huck's got money. Maybe you don't believe it,

but he's got lots of it. Oh, you needn't smile -- I reckon

I can show you. You just wait a minute."



Tom ran out of doors. The company looked at

each other with a perplexed interest -- and inquiringly

at Huck, who was tongue-tied.



"Sid, what ails Tom?" said Aunt Polly. "He -- well,

there ain't ever any making of that boy out. I never --"



Tom entered, struggling with the weight of his sacks,

and Aunt Polly did not finish her sentence. Tom

poured the mass of yellow coin upon the table and said:



"There -- what did I tell you? Half of it's Huck's

and half of it's mine!"



The spectacle took the general breath away. All

gazed, nobody spoke for a moment. Then there was a

unanimous call for an explanation. Tom said he could

furnish it, and he did. The tale was long, but brimful

of interest. There was scarcely an interruption from

any one to break the charm of its flow. When he had

finished, Mr. Jones said:



"I thought I had fixed up a little surprise for this

occasion, but it don't amount to anything now. This

one makes it sing mighty small, I'm willing to allow."



The money was counted. The sum amounted to

a little over twelve thousand dollars. It was more

than any one present had ever seen at one time before,

though several persons were there who were worth

considerably more than that in property.





CHAPTER XXXV



THE reader may rest satisfied that Tom's

and Huck's windfall made a mighty stir

in the poor little village of St. Petersburg.

So vast a sum, all in actual cash, seemed

next to incredible. It was talked about,

gloated over, glorified, until the reason of

many of the citizens tottered under the strain of the

unhealthy excitement. Every "haunted" house in St.

Petersburg and the neighboring villages was dissected,

plank by plank, and its foundations dug up and ran-

sacked for hidden treasure -- and not by boys, but men

-- pretty grave, unromantic men, too, some of them.

Wherever Tom and Huck appeared they were courted,

admired, stared at. The boys were not able to remem-

ber that their remarks had possessed weight before;

but now their sayings were treasured and repeated;

everything they did seemed somehow to be regarded as

remarkable; they had evidently lost the power of doing

and saying commonplace things; moreover, their past

history was raked up and discovered to bear marks of

conspicuous originality. The village paper published

biographical sketches of the boys.



The Widow Douglas put Huck's money out at six

per cent., and Judge Thatcher did the same with

Tom's at Aunt Polly's request. Each lad had an in-

come, now, that was simply prodigious -- a dollar for

every week-day in the year and half of the Sundays.

It was just what the minister got -- no, it was what he

was promised -- he generally couldn't collect it. A

dollar and a quarter a week would board, lodge, and

school a boy in those old simple days -- and clothe him

and wash him, too, for that matter.



Judge Thatcher had conceived a great opinion of

Tom. He said that no commonplace boy would ever

have got his daughter out of the cave. When Becky

told her father, in strict confidence, how Tom had

taken her whipping at school, the Judge was visibly

moved; and when she pleaded grace for the mighty

lie which Tom had told in order to shift that whipping

from her shoulders to his own, the Judge said with a

fine outburst that it was a noble, a generous, a mag-

nanimous lie -- a lie that was worthy to hold up its head

and march down through history breast to breast with

George Washington's lauded Truth about the hatchet!

Becky thought her father had never looked so tall and

so superb as when he walked the floor and stamped

his foot and said that. She went straight off and told

Tom about it.



Judge Thatcher hoped to see Tom a great lawyer or

a great soldier some day. He said he meant to look

to it that Tom should be admitted to the National

Military Academy and afterward trained in the best

law school in the country, in order that he might be

ready for either career or both.



Huck Finn's wealth and the fact that he was now

under the Widow Douglas' protection introduced him

into society -- no, dragged him into it, hurled him into

it -- and his sufferings were almost more than he could

bear. The widow's servants kept him clean and neat,

combed and brushed, and they bedded him nightly in

unsympathetic sheets that had not one little spot or

stain which he could press to his heart and know for

a friend. He had to eat with a knife and fork; he had

to use napkin, cup, and plate; he had to learn his book,

he had to go to church; he had to talk so properly that

speech was become insipid in his mouth; whitherso-

ever he turned, the bars and shackles of civilization

shut him in and bound him hand and foot.



He bravely bore his miseries three weeks, and then

one day turned up missing. For forty-eight hours the

widow hunted for him everywhere in great distress.

The public were profoundly concerned; they searched

high and low, they dragged the river for his body.

Early the third morning Tom Sawyer wisely went

poking among some old empty hogsheads down behind

the abandoned slaughter-house, and in one of them

he found the refugee. Huck had slept there; he had

just breakfasted upon some stolen odds and ends of

food, and was lying off, now, in comfort, with his pipe.

He was unkempt, uncombed, and clad in the same old

ruin of rags that had made him picturesque in the days

when he was free and happy. Tom routed him out,

told him the trouble he had been causing, and urged

him to go home. Huck's face lost its tranquil content,

and took a melancholy cast. He said:



"Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it, and it

don't work; it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me;

I ain't used to it. The widder's good to me, and

friendly; but I can't stand them ways. She makes

me get up just at the same time every morning; she

makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she

won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear

them blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom;

they don't seem to any air git through 'em, somehow;

and they're so rotten nice that I can't set down, nor

lay down, nor roll around anywher's; I hain't slid on

a cellar-door for -- well, it 'pears to be years; I got

to go to church and sweat and sweat -- I hate them

ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in there, I can't

chaw. I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The widder

eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up

by a bell -- everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't

stand it."



"Well, everybody does that way, Huck."



"Tom, it don't make no difference. I ain't every-

body, and I can't STAND it. It's awful to be tied up so.

And grub comes too easy -- I don't take no interest in

vittles, that way. I got to ask to go a-fishing; I got

to ask to go in a-swimming -- dern'd if I hain't got to

ask to do everything. Well, I'd got to talk so nice it

wasn't no comfort -- I'd got to go up in the attic and

rip out awhile, every day, to git a taste in my mouth,

or I'd a died, Tom. The widder wouldn't let me

smoke; she wouldn't let me yell, she wouldn't let me

gape, nor stretch, nor scratch, before folks --" [Then

with a spasm of special irritation and injury] -- "And

dad fetch it, she prayed all the time! I never see such

a woman! I HAD to shove, Tom -- I just had to. And

besides, that school's going to open, and I'd a had to

go to it -- well, I wouldn't stand THAT, Tom. Looky-

here, Tom, being rich ain't what it's cracked up to be.

It's just worry and worry, and sweat and sweat, and

a-wishing you was dead all the time. Now these

clothes suits me, and this bar'l suits me, and I ain't

ever going to shake 'em any more. Tom, I wouldn't

ever got into all this trouble if it hadn't 'a' ben for

that money; now you just take my sheer of it along

with your'n, and gimme a ten-center sometimes -- not

many times, becuz I don't give a dern for a thing

'thout it's tollable hard to git -- and you go and beg off

for me with the widder."



"Oh, Huck, you know I can't do that. 'Tain't

fair; and besides if you'll try this thing just a while

longer you'll come to like it."



"Like it! Yes -- the way I'd like a hot stove if I

was to set on it long enough. No, Tom, I won't be

rich, and I won't live in them cussed smothery houses.

I like the woods, and the river, and hogsheads, and

I'll stick to 'em, too. Blame it all! just as we'd got

guns, and a cave, and all just fixed to rob, here this

dern foolishness has got to come up and spile it all!"



Tom saw his opportunity --



"Lookyhere, Huck, being rich ain't going to keep

me back from turning robber."



"No! Oh, good-licks; are you in real dead-wood

earnest, Tom?"



"Just as dead earnest as I'm sitting here. But

Huck, we can't let you into the gang if you ain't re-

spectable, you know."



Huck's joy was quenched.



"Can't let me in, Tom? Didn't you let me go for

a pirate?"



"Yes, but that's different. A robber is more high-

toned than what a pirate is -- as a general thing. In

most countries they're awful high up in the nobility --

dukes and such."



"Now, Tom, hain't you always ben friendly to me?

You wouldn't shet me out, would you, Tom? You

wouldn't do that, now, WOULD you, Tom?"



"Huck, I wouldn't want to, and I DON'T want to --

but what would people say? Why, they'd say, 'Mph!

Tom Sawyer's Gang! pretty low characters in it!'

They'd mean you, Huck. You wouldn't like that, and

I wouldn't."



Huck was silent for some time, engaged in a mental

struggle. Finally he said:



"Well, I'll go back to the widder for a month and

tackle it and see if I can come to stand it, if you'll

let me b'long to the gang, Tom."



"All right, Huck, it's a whiz! Come along, old

chap, and I'll ask the widow to let up on you a little,

Huck."



"Will you, Tom -- now will you? That's good. If

she'll let up on some of the roughest things, I'll smoke

private and cuss private, and crowd through or bust.

When you going to start the gang and turn robbers?"



"Oh, right off. We'll get the boys together and

have the initiation to-night, maybe."



"Have the which?"



"Have the initiation."



"What's that?"



"It's to swear to stand by one another, and never

tell the gang's secrets, even if you're chopped all to

flinders, and kill anybody and all his family that hurts

one of the gang."



"That's gay -- that's mighty gay, Tom, I tell you."



"Well, I bet it is. And all that swearing's got to

be done at midnight, in the lonesomest, awfulest place

you can find -- a ha'nted house is the best, but they're

all ripped up now."



"Well, midnight's good, anyway, Tom."



"Yes, so it is. And you've got to swear on a coffin,

and sign it with blood."



"Now, that's something LIKE! Why, it's a million

times bullier than pirating. I'll stick to the widder

till I rot, Tom; and if I git to be a reg'lar ripper of a

robber, and everybody talking 'bout it, I reckon she'll

be proud she snaked me in out of the wet."





CONCLUSION



SO endeth this chronicle. It being strictly

a history of a BOY, it must stop here; the

story could not go much further without

becoming the history of a MAN. When

one writes a novel about grown people, he

knows exactly where to stop -- that is,

with a marriage; but when he writes of juveniles, he

must stop where he best can.



Most of the characters that perform in this book

still live, and are prosperous and happy. Some day

it may seem worth while to take up the story of the

younger ones again and see what sort of men and

women they turned out to be; therefore it will be

wisest not to reveal any of that part of their lives at

present.



***



End of the Wiretap/Project Gutenberg Etext of

Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens













ALONZO FITZ AND OTHER STORIES



by Mark Twain







CONTENTS OF THIS VOLUME:



THE LOVES OF ALONZO FITZ CLARENCE AND ROSANNAH ETHELTON

ON THE DECAY OF THE ART OF LYING

ABOUT MAGNANIMOUS-INCIDENT LITERATURE

     THE GRATEFUL POODLE

     THE BENEVOLENT AUTHOR

     THE GRATEFUL HUSBAND

PUNCH, BROTHERS, PUNCH

THE GREAT REVOLUTION IN PITCAIRN

THE CANVASSER'S TALE

AN ENCOUNTER WITH AN INTERVIEWER

PARIS NOTES

LEGEND OF SAGENFELD, IN GERMANY

SPEECH ON THE BABIES

SPEECH ON THE WEATHER

CONCERNING THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

ROGERS









THE LOVES OF ALONZO FITZ CLARENCE AND ROSANNAH ETHELTON





It was well along in the forenoon of a bitter winter's day.  The town of

Eastport, in the state of Maine, lay buried under a deep snow that was

newly fallen.  The customary bustle in the streets was wanting.  One

could look long distances down them and see nothing but a dead-white

emptiness, with silence to match.  Of course I do not mean that you could

see the silence--no, you could only hear it.  The sidewalks were merely

long, deep ditches, with steep snow walls on either side.  Here and there

you might hear the faint, far scrape of a wooden shovel, and if you were

quick enough you might catch a glimpse of a distant black figure stooping

and disappearing in one of those ditches, and reappearing the next moment

with a motion which you would know meant the heaving out of a shovelful

of snow.  But you needed to be quick, for that black figure would not

linger, but would soar drop that shovel and scud for the house, thrashing

itself with its arms to warm them.  Yes, it was too venomously cold for

snow-shovelers or anybody else to stay out long.



Presently the sky darkened; then the wind rose and began to blow in

fitful, vigorous gusts, which sent clouds of powdery snow aloft, and

straight ahead, and everywhere.  Under the impulse of one of these gusts,

great white drifts banked themselves like graves across the streets; a

moment later another gust shifted them around the other way, driving a

fine spray of snow from their sharp crests, as the gale drives the spume

flakes from wave-crests at sea; a third gust swept that place as clean as

your hand, if it saw fit.  This was fooling, this was play; but each and

all of the gusts dumped some snow into the sidewalk ditches, for that was

business.



Alonzo Fitz Clarence was sitting in his snug and elegant little parlor,

in a lovely blue silk dressing-gown, with cuffs and facings of crimson

satin, elaborately quilted.  The remains of his breakfast were before

him, and the dainty and costly little table service added a harmonious

charm to the grace, beauty, and richness of the fixed appointments of the

room.  A cheery fire was blazing on the hearth.



A furious gust of wind shook the windows, and a great wave of snow washed

against them with a drenching sound, so to speak.  The handsome young

bachelor murmured:



"That means, no going out to-day.  Well, I am content.  But what to do

for company?  Mother is well enough, Aunt Susan is well enough; but

these, like the poor, I have with me always.  On so grim a day as this,

one needs a new interest, a fresh element, to whet the dull edge of

captivity.  That was very neatly said, but it doesn't mean anything.

One doesn't want the edge of captivity sharpened up, you know, but just

the reverse."



He glanced at his pretty French mantel-clock.



"That clock's wrong again.  That clock hardly ever knows what time it is;

and when it does know, it lies about it--which amounts to the same thing.

Alfred!"



There was no answer.



"Alfred!  .  .  .  Good servant, but as uncertain as the clock."



Alonzo touched an electric bell button in the wall.  He waited a moment,

then touched it again; waited a few moments more, and said:



"Battery out of order, no doubt.  But now that I have started, I will

find out what time it is."  He stepped to a speaking-tube in the wall,

blew its whistle, and called, "Mother!" and repeated it twice.



"Well, that's no use.  Mother's battery is out of order, too.  Can't

raise anybody down-stairs--that is plain."



He sat down at a rosewood desk, leaned his chin on the left-hand edge of

it and spoke, as if to the floor: "Aunt Susan!"



A low, pleasant voice answered, "Is that you, Alonzo?'



"Yes.  I'm too lazy and comfortable to go downstairs; I am in extremity,

and I can't seem to scare up any help."



"Dear me, what is the matter?"



"Matter enough, I can tell you!"



"Oh, don't keep me in suspense, dear!  What is it?"



"I want to know what time it is."



"You abominable boy, what a turn you did give me!  Is that all?"



"All--on my honor.  Calm yourself.  Tell me the time, and receive my

blessing."



"Just five minutes after nine.  No charge--keep your blessing."



"Thanks.  It wouldn't have impoverished me, aunty, nor so enriched you

that you could live without other means."



He got up, murmuring, "Just five minutes after nine," and faced his

clock.  "Ah," said he, "you are doing better than usual.  You are only

thirty-four minutes wrong.  Let me see .  .  , let me see.  .  .  .

Thirty-three and twenty-one are fifty-four; four times fifty-four are two

hundred and thirty-six.  One off, leaves two hundred and thirty-five.

That's right."



He turned the hands of his clock forward till they marked twenty-five

minutes to one, and said, "Now see if you can't keep right for a while

--else I'll raffle you!"



He sat down at the desk again, and said, "Aunt Susan!"



"Yes, dear."



"Had breakfast?"



"Yes, indeed, an hour ago."



"Busy?"



"No--except sewing.  Why?"



"Got any company?"



"No, but I expect some at half past nine."



"I wish I did.  I'm lonesome.  I want to talk to somebody."



"Very well, talk to me."



"But this is very private."



"Don't be afraid--talk right along, there's nobody here but me."



"I hardly know whether to venture or not, but--"



"But what?  Oh, don't stop there!  You know you can trust me, Alonzo--you

know, you can."



"I feel it, aunt, but this is very serious.  It affects me deeply--me,

and all the family---even the whole community."



"Oh, Alonzo, tell me!  I will never breathe a word of it.  What is it?"



"Aunt, if I might dare--"



"Oh, please go on!  I love you, and feel for you.  Tell me all.

Confide in me.  What is it?"



"The weather!"



"Plague take the weather!  I don't see how you can have the heart to

serve me so, Lon."



"There, there, aunty dear, I'm sorry; I am, on my honor.  I won't do it

again.  Do you forgive me?"



"Yes, since you seem so sincere about it, though I know I oughtn't to.

You will fool me again as soon as I have forgotten this time."



"No, I won't, honor bright.  But such weather, oh, such weather!  You've

got to keep your spirits up artificially.  It is snowy, and blowy, and

gusty, and bitter cold!  How is the weather with you?"



"Warm and rainy and melancholy.  The mourners go about the streets with

their umbrellas running streams from the end of every whalebone.  There's

an elevated double pavement of umbrellas, stretching down the sides of

the streets as far as I can see.  I've got a fire for cheerfulness, and

the windows open to keep cool.  But it is vain, it is useless: nothing

comes in but the balmy breath of December, with its burden of mocking

odors from the flowers that possess the realm outside, and rejoice in

their lawless profusion whilst the spirit of man is low, and flaunt their

gaudy splendors in his face while his soul is clothed in sackcloth and

ashes and his heart breaketh."



Alonzo opened his lips to say, "You ought to print that, and get it

framed," but checked himself, for he heard his aunt speaking to some one

else.  He went and stood at the window and looked out upon the wintry

prospect.  The storm was driving the snow before it more furiously than

ever; window-shutters were slamming and banging; a forlorn dog, with

bowed head and tail withdrawn from service, was pressing his quaking body

against a windward wall for shelter and protection; a young girl was

plowing knee-deep through the drifts, with her face turned from the

blast, and the cape of her waterproof blowing straight rearward over her

head.  Alonzo shuddered, and said with a sigh, "Better the slop, and the

sultry rain, and even the insolent flowers, than this!"



He turned from the window, moved a step, and stopped in a listening

attitude.  The faint, sweet notes of a familiar song caught his ear.  He

remained there, with his head unconsciously bent forward, drinking in the

melody, stirring neither hand nor foot, hardly breathing.  There was a

blemish in the execution of the song, but to Alonzo it seemed an added

charm instead of a defect.  This blemish consisted of a marked flatting

of the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh notes of the refrain or

chorus of the piece.  When the music ended, Alonzo drew a deep breath,

and said, "Ah, I never have heard 'In the Sweet By-and-by' sung like that

before!"



He stepped quickly to the desk, listened a moment, and said in a guarded,

confidential voice, "Aunty, who is this divine singer?"



"She is the company I was expecting.  Stays with me a month or two.

I will introduce you.  Miss--"



"For goodness' sake, wait a moment, Aunt Susan!  You never stop to think

what you are about!"



He flew to his bedchamber, and returned in a moment perceptibly changed

in his outward appearance, and remarking, snappishly:



"Hang it, she would have introduced me to this angel in that sky-blue

dressing-gown with red-hot lapels!  Women never think, when they get

a-going."



He hastened and stood by the desk, and said eagerly, "Now, Aunty, I am

ready," and fell to smiling and bowing with all the persuasiveness and

elegance that were in him.



"Very well.  Miss Rosannah Ethelton, let me introduce to you my favorite

nephew, Mr. Alonzo Fitz Clarence.  There!  You are both good people, and

I like you; so I am going to trust you together while I attend to a few

household affairs.  Sit down, Rosannah; sit down, Alonzo.  Good-by; I

sha'n't be gone long."



Alonzo had been bowing and smiling all the while, and motioning imaginary

young ladies to sit down in imaginary chairs, but now he took a seat

himself, mentally saying, "Oh, this is luck!  Let the winds blow now, and

the snow drive, and the heavens frown!  Little I care!"



While these young people chat themselves into an acquaintanceship, let us

take the liberty of inspecting the sweeter and fairer of the two.  She

sat alone, at her graceful ease, in a richly furnished apartment which

was manifestly the private parlor of a refined and sensible lady,

if signs and symbols may go for anything.  For instance, by a low,

comfortable chair stood a dainty, top-heavy workstand, whose summit was a

fancifully embroidered shallow basket, with varicolored crewels, and

other strings and odds, and ends protruding from under the gaping lid and

hanging down in negligent profusion.  On the floor lay bright shreds of

Turkey red, Prussian blue, and kindred fabrics, bits of ribbon, a spool

or two, a pair of scissors, and a roll or so of tinted silken stuffs.

On a luxurious sofa, upholstered with some sort of soft Indian goods

wrought in black and gold threads interwebbed with other threads not so

pronounced in color, lay a great square of coarse white stuff, upon whose

surface a rich bouquet of flowers was growing, under the deft cultivation

of the crochet-needle.  The household cat was asleep on this work of art.

In a bay-window stood an easel with an unfinished picture on it, and a

palette and brushes on a chair beside it.  There were books everywhere:

Robertson's Sermons, Tennyson, Moody and Sankey, Hawthorne, Rab and His

Friends, cook-books, prayer-books, pattern-books--and books about all

kinds of odious and exasperating pottery, of course.  There was a piano,

with a deck-load of music, and more in a tender.  There was a great

plenty of pictures on the walls, on the shelves of the mantelpiece, and

around generally; where coigns of vantage offered were statuettes, and

quaint and pretty gimcracks, and rare and costly specimens of peculiarly

devilish china.  The bay-window gave upon a garden that was ablaze with

foreign and domestic flowers and flowering shrubs.



But the sweet young girl was the daintiest thing these premises, within

or without, could offer for contemplation: delicately chiseled features,

of Grecian cast; her complexion the pure snow of a japonica that is

receiving a faint reflected enrichment from some scarlet neighbor of the

garden; great, soft blue eyes fringed with long, curving lashes; an

expression made up of the trustfulness of a child and the gentleness of

a fawn; a beautiful head crowned with its own prodigal gold; a lithe and

rounded figure, whose every attitude and movement was instinct with

native grace.



Her dress and adornment were marked by that exquisite harmony that can

come only of a fine natural taste perfected by culture.  Her gown was of

a simple magenta tulle, cut bias, traversed by three rows of light-blue

flounces, with the selvage edges turned up with ashes-of-roses chenille;

overdress of dark bay tarlatan with scarlet satin lambrequins; corn-

colored polonaise, en zanier, looped with mother-of-pearl buttons and

silver cord, and hauled aft and made fast by buff velvet lashings; basque

of lavender reps, picked out with valenciennes; low neck, short sleeves;

maroon velvet necktie edged with delicate pink silk; inside handkerchief

of some simple three-ply ingrain fabric of a soft saffron tint; coral

bracelets and locket-chain; coiffure of forget-me-nots and lilies-of-the

-valley massed around a noble calla.



This was all; yet even in this subdued attire she was divinely beautiful.

Then what must she have been when adorned for the festival or the ball?



All this time she had been busily chatting with Alonzo, unconscious of

our inspection.  The minutes still sped, and still she talked.  But by

and by she happened to look up, and saw the clock.  A crimson blush sent

its rich flood through her cheeks, and she exclaimed:



"There, good-by, Mr. Fitz Clarence; I must go now!"



She sprang from her chair with such haste that she hardly heard the young

man's answering good-by.  She stood radiant, graceful, beautiful, and

gazed, wondering, upon the accusing clock.  Presently her pouting lips

parted, and she said:



"Five minutes after eleven!  Nearly two hours, and it did not seem twenty

minutes!  Oh, dear, what will he think of me!"



At the self-same moment Alonzo was staring at his clock.  And presently

he said:



"Twenty-five minutes to three!  Nearly two hours, and I didn't believe it

was two minutes!  Is it possible that this clock is humbugging again?

Miss Ethelton!  Just one moment, please.  Are you there yet?"



"Yes, but be quick; I'm going right away."



"Would you be so kind as to tell me what time it is?"



The girl blushed again, murmured to herself, "It's right down cruel of

him to ask me!" and then spoke up and answered with admirably

counterfeited unconcern, "Five minutes after eleven."



"Oh, thank you!  You have to go, now, have you?"



"I'm sorry."



No reply.



"Miss Ethelton!"



"Well?"



"You you're there yet, ain't you?"



"Yes; but please hurry.  What did you want to say?"



"Well, I--well, nothing in particular.  It's very lonesome here.  It's

asking a great deal, I know, but would you mind talking with me again by

and by--that is, if it will not trouble you too much?"



"I don't know but I'll think about it.  I'll try."



"Oh, thanks!  Miss Ethelton!  .  .  .  Ah, me, she's gone, and here are

the black clouds and the whirling snow and the raging winds come again!

But she said good-by.  She didn't say good morning, she said good-by!....

The clock was right, after all.  What a lightning-winged two hours it

was!"



He sat down, and gazed dreamily into his fire for a while, then heaved a

sigh and said:



"How wonderful it is!  Two little hours ago I was a free man, and now my

heart's in San Francisco!"



About that time Rosannah Ethelton, propped in the window-seat of her

bedchamber, book in hand, was gazing vacantly out over the rainy seas

that washed the Golden Gate, and whispering to herself, "How different he

is from poor Burley, with his empty head and his single little antic

talent of mimicry!"





II



Four weeks later Mr. Sidney Algernon Burley was entertaining a gay

luncheon company, in a sumptuous drawing-room on Telegraph Hill, with

some capital imitations of the voices and gestures of certain popular

actors and San Franciscan literary people and Bonanza grandees.  He was

elegantly upholstered, and was a handsome fellow, barring a trifling cast

in his eye.  He seemed very jovial, but nevertheless he kept his eye on

the door with an expectant and uneasy watchfulness.  By and by a nobby.

lackey appeared, and delivered a message to the mistress, who nodded her

head understandingly.  That seemed to settle the thing for Mr. Burley;

his vivacity decreased little by little, and a dejected look began to

creep into one of his eyes and a sinister one into the other.



The rest of the company departed in due time, leaving him with the

mistress, to whom he said:



"There is no longer any question about it.  She avoids me.  She

continually excuses herself.  If I could see her, if I could speak to her

only a moment but this suspense--"



"Perhaps her seeming avoidance is mere accident, Mr. Burley.  Go to the

small drawing-room up-stairs and amuse yourself a moment.  I will

despatch a household order that is on my mind, and then I will go to her

room.  Without doubt she will be persuaded to see you."



Mr. Burley went up-stairs, intending to go to the small drawing-room, but

as he was passing "Aunt Susan's" private parlor, the door of which stood

slightly ajar, he heard a joyous laugh which he recognized; so without

knock or announcement he stepped confidently in.  But before he could

make his presence known he heard words that harrowed up his soul and

chilled his young blood, die heard a voice say:



"Darling, it has come!"



Then he heard Rosannah Ethelton, whose back was toward him, say:



"So has yours, dearest!"



He saw her bowed form bend lower; he heard her kiss something--not merely

once, but again and again!  His soul raged within him.  The heartbreaking

conversation went on:



"Rosannah, I knew you must be beautiful, but this is dazzling, this is

blinding, this is intoxicating!"



"Alonzo, it is such happiness to hear you say it.  I know it is not true,

but I am so grateful to have you think it is, nevertheless!  I knew you

must have a noble face, but the grace and majesty of the reality beggar

the poor creation of my fancy."



Burley heard that rattling shower of kisses again.



"Thank you, my Rosannah!  The photograph flatters me, but you must not

allow yourself to think of that.  Sweetheart?"



"Yes, Alonzo."



"I am so happy, Rosannah."



"Oh, Alonzo, none that have gone before me knew what love was, none that

come after me will ever know what happiness is.  I float in a gorgeous

cloud land, a boundless firmament of enchanted and bewildering ecstasy!"



"Oh, my Rosannah! for you are mine, are you not?"



"Wholly, oh, wholly yours, Alonzo, now and forever!  All the day long,

and all through my nightly dreams, one song sings itself, and its sweet

burden is, 'Alonzo Fitz Clarence, Alonzo Fitz Clarence, Eastport, state

of Maine!'"



"Curse him, I've got his address, anyway!" roared Burley, inwardly, and

rushed from the place.



Just behind the unconscious Alonzo stood his mother, a picture of

astonishment.  She was so muffled from head to heel in furs that nothing

of herself was visible but her eyes and nose.  She was a good allegory of

winter, for she was powdered all over with snow.



Behind the unconscious Rosannah stood "Aunt' Susan," another picture of

astonishment.  She was a good allegory of summer, for she was lightly

clad, and was vigorously cooling the perspiration on her face with a fan.



Both of these women had tears of joy in their eyes.



"Soho!" exclaimed Mrs.  Fitz Clarence, "this explains why nobody has been

able to drag you out of your room for six weeks, Alonzo!"



"So ho!" exclaimed Aunt Susan, "this explains why you have been a hermit

for the past six weeks, Rosannah!"



The young couple were on their feet in an instant, abashed, and standing

like detected dealers in stolen goods awaiting judge Lynch's doom.



"Bless you, my son!  I am happy in your happiness.  Come to your mother's

arms, Alonzo!"



"Bless you, Rosannah, for my dear nephew's sake!  Come to my arms!"



Then was there a mingling of hearts and of tears of rejoicing on

Telegraph Hill and in Eastport Square.



Servants were called by the elders, in both places.  Unto one was given

the order, "Pile this fire high, with hickory wood, and bring me a

roasting-hot lemonade."



Unto the other was given the order, "Put out this, fire, and bring me two

palm-leaf fans and a pitcher of ice-water."



Then the young people were dismissed, and the elders sat down to talk the

sweet surprise over and make the wedding plans.



Some minutes before this Mr. Burley rushed from the mansion on Telegraph

Hill without meeting or taking formal leave of anybody.  He hissed

through his teeth, in unconscious imitation of a popular favorite in

melodrama, "Him shall she never wed!  I have sworn it!  Ere great Nature

shall have doffed her winter's ermine to don the emerald gauds of spring,

she shall be mine!"





III



Two weeks later.  Every few hours, during same three or four days, a very

prim and devout-looking Episcopal clergyman, with a cast in his eye, had

visited Alonzo.  According to his card, he was the Rev. Melton Hargrave,

of Cincinnati.  He said he had retired from the ministry on account of

his health.  If he had said on account of ill-health, he would probably

have erred, to judge by his wholesome looks and firm build.  He was the

inventor of an improvement in telephones, and hoped to make his bread by

selling the privilege of using it.  "At present," he continued, "a man

may go and tap a telegraph wire which is conveying a song or a concert

from one state to another, and he can attach his private telephone and

steal a hearing of that music as it passes along.  My invention will stop

all that."



"Well," answered Alonzo, "if the owner of the music could not miss what

was stolen, why should he care?"



"He shouldn't care," said the Reverend.



"Well?" said Alonzo, inquiringly.



"Suppose," replied the Reverend, "suppose that, instead of music that was

passing along and being stolen, the burden of the wire was loving

endearments of the most private and sacred nature?"



Alonzo shuddered from head to heel.  "Sir, it is a priceless invention,"

said he; "I must have it at any cost."



But the invention was delayed somewhere on the road from Cincinnati, most

unaccountably.  The impatient Alonzo could hardly wait.  The thought of

Rosannah's sweet words being shared with him by some ribald thief was

galling to him.  The Reverend came frequently and lamented the delay, and

told of measures he had taken to hurry things up.  This was some little

comfort to Alonzo.



One forenoon the Reverend ascended the stairs and knocked at Alonzo's

door.  There was no response.  He entered, glanced eagerly around,.

closed the door softly, then ran to the telephone.  The exquisitely soft

and remote strains of the "Sweet By-and-by" came floating through the

instrument.  The singer was flatting, as usual, the five notes that

follow the first two in the chorus, when the Reverend interrupted her

with this word, in a voice which was an exact imitation of Alonzo's, with

just the faintest flavor of impatience added:



"Sweetheart?"



"Yes, Alonzo?"



"Please don't sing that any more this week-try something modern."



The agile step that goes with a happy heart was heard on the stairs, and

the Reverend, smiling diabolically, sought sudden refuge behind the heavy

folds of the velvet windowcurtains.  Alonzo entered and flew to the

telephone.  Said he:



"Rosannah, dear, shall we sing something together?"



"Something modern?" asked she, with sarcastic bitterness.



"Yes, if you prefer."



"Sing it yourself, if you like!"



This snappishness amazed and wounded the young man.  He said:



"Rosarmah, that was not like you."



"I suppose it becomes me as much as your very polite speech became you,

Mr. Fitz Clarence."



"Mister Fitz Clarence!  Rosannah, there was nothing impolite about my

speech."



"Oh, indeed!  Of course, then, I misunderstood you, and I most humbly beg

your pardon, ha-ha-ha!  No doubt you said, 'Don't sing it any more

to-day.'"



"Sing what any more to-day?"



"The song you mentioned, of course, How very obtuse we are, all of a

sudden!"



"I never mentioned any song."



"Oh, you didn't?"



"No, I didn't!"



"I am compelled to remark that you did."



"And I am obliged to reiterate that I didn't."



"A second rudeness!  That is sufficient, sir.  I will never forgive you.

All is over between us."



Then came a muffled sound of crying.  Alonzo hastened to say:



"Oh, Rosannah, unsay those words!  There is some dreadful mystery here,

some hideous mistake.  I am utterly earnest and sincere when I say I

never said anything about any song.  I would not hurt you for the whole

world .  .  .  .  Rosannah, dear speak to me, won't you?"



There was a pause; then Alonzo heard the girl's sobbings retreating, and

knew she had gone from the telephone.  He rose with a heavy sigh, and

hastened from the room, saying to himself, "I will ransack the charity

missions and the haunts of the poor for my mother.  She will persuade her

that I never meant to wound her."



A minute later the Reverend was crouching over the telephone like a cat

that knoweth the ways of the prey.  He had not very many minutes to wait.

A soft, repentant voice, tremulous with tears, said:



"Alonzo, dear, I have been wrong.  You could not have said so cruel a

thing.  It must have been some one who imitated your voice in malice or

in jest."



The Reverend coldly answered, in Alonzo's tones:



"You have said all was over between us.  So let it be.  I spurn your

proffered repentance, and despise it!"



Then he departed, radiant with fiendish triumph, to return no more with

his imaginary telephonic invention forever.



Four hours afterward Alonzo arrived with his mother from her favorite

haunts of poverty and vice.  They summoned the San Francisco household;

but there was no reply.  They waited, and continued to wait, upon the

voiceless telephone.



At length, when it was sunset in San Francisco, and three hours and a

half after dark in Eastport, an answer to the oft-repeated cry of

"Rosannah!"



But, alas, it was Aunt Susan's voice that spake.  She said:



"I have been out all day; just got in.  I will go and find her."



The watchers waited two minutes--five minutes--ten minutes.  Then came

these fatal words, in a frightened tone:



"She is gone, and her baggage with her.  To visit another friend, she

told the servants.  But I found this note on the table in her room.

Listen: 'I am gone; seek not to trace me out; my heart is broken; you

will never see me more.  Tell him I shall always think of him when I sing

my poor "Sweet By-and-by," but never of the unkind words he said about

it.' That is her note.  Alonzo, Alonzo, what does it mean?  What has

happened?"



But Alonzo sat white and cold as the dead.  His mother threw back the

velvet curtains and opened a window.  The cold air refreshed the

sufferer, and he told his aunt his dismal story.  Meantime his mother was

inspecting a card which had disclosed itself upon the floor when she cast

the curtains back.  It read, "Mr. Sidney Algernon Burley, San Francisco."



"The miscreant!" shouted Alonzo, and rushed forth to seek the false

Reverend and destroy him; for the card explained everything, since in the

course of the lovers' mutual confessions they had told each other all

about all the sweethearts they had ever had, and thrown no end of mud at

their failings and foibles for lovers always do that.  It has a

fascination that ranks next after billing and cooing.





IV



During the next two months many things happened.  It had early transpired

that Rosannah, poor suffering orphan, had neither returned to her

grandmother in Portland, Oregon, nor sent any word to her save a

duplicate of the woeful note she had left in the mansion on Telegraph

Hill.  Whosoever was sheltering her--if she was still alive--had been

persuaded not to betray her whereabouts, without doubt; for all efforts

to find trace of her had failed.



Did Alonzo give her up?  Not he.  He said to himself, "She will sing that

sweet song when she is sad; I shall find her."  So he took his carpet-

sack and a portable telephone, and shook the snow of his native city from

his arctics, and went forth into the world.  He wandered far and wide and

in many states.  Time and again, strangers were astounded to see a

wasted, pale, and woe-worn man laboriously climb a telegraph-pole in

wintry and lonely places, perch sadly there an hour, with his ear at a

little box, then come sighing down, and wander wearily away.  Sometimes

they shot at him, as peasants do at aeronauts, thinking him mad and

dangerous.  Thus his clothes were much shredded by bullets and his person

grievously lacerated.  But he bore it all patiently.



In the beginning of his pilgrimage he used often to say, "Ah, if I could

but hear the 'Sweet By-and-by'!"  But toward the end of it he used to

shed tears of anguish and say, "Ah, if I could but hear something else!"



Thus a month and three weeks drifted by, and at last some humane people

seized him and confined him in a private mad-house in New York.  He made

no  moan, for his strength was all gone, and with it all heart and all

hope.  The superintendent, in pity, gave up his own comfortable parlor

and bedchamber to him and nursed him with affectionate devotion.



At the end of a week the patient was able to leave his bed for the first

time.  He was lying, comfortably pillowed, on a sofa, listening to the

plaintive Miserere of the bleak March winds and the muffled sound of

tramping feet in the street below for it was about six in the evening,

and New York was going home from work.  He had a bright fire and the

added cheer of a couple of student-lamps.  So it was warm and snug

within, though bleak and raw without; it was light and bright within,

though outside it was as dark and dreary as if the world had been lit

with Hartford gas.  Alonzo smiled feebly to think how his loving vagaries

had made him a maniac in the eyes of the world, and was proceeding to

pursue his line of thought further, when a faint, sweet strain, the very

ghost of sound, so remote and attenuated it seemed, struck upon his ear.

His pulses stood still; he listened with parted lips and bated breath.

The song flowed on he waiting, listening, rising slowly and unconsciously

from his recumbent position.  At last he exclaimed:



"It is! it is she!  Oh, the divine hated notes!"



He dragged himself eagerly to the corner whence the sounds proceeded,

tore aside a curtain, and discovered a telephone.  He bent over, and as

the last note died away he burst forthwith the exclamation:



"Oh, thank Heaven, found at last!  Speak tome, Rosannah, dearest!  The

cruel mystery has been unraveled; it was the villain Burley who mimicked

my voice and wounded you with insolent speech!"



There was a breathless pause, a waiting age to Alonzo; then a faint sound

came, framing itself into language:



"Oh, say those precious words again, Alonzo!"



"They are the truth, the veritable truth, my Rosannah, and you shall have

the proof, ample and abundant proof!"



"Oh; Alonzo, stay by me!  Leave me not for a moment!  Let me feel that

you are near me!  Tell me we shall never be parted more!  Oh, this happy

hour, this blessed hour, this memorable hour!"



"We will make record of it, my Rosannah; every year, as this dear hour

chimes from the clock, we will celebrate it with thanksgivings, all the

years of our life."



"We will, we will, Alonzo!"



"Four minutes after six, in the evening, my Rosannah, shall henceforth--"



"Twenty-three minutes after twelve, afternoon shall--"



"Why; Rosannah, darling, where are you?"



"In Honolulu, Sandwich Islands.  And where are you?  Stay by me; do not

leave me for a moment.  I cannot bear it.  Are you at home?"



"No, dear, I am in New York--a patient in the doctor's hands."



An agonizing shriek came buzzing to Alonzo's ear, like the sharp buzzing

of a hurt gnat; it lost power in traveling five thousand miles.  Alonzo

hastened to say:



"Calm--yourself, my child.  It is nothing.  Already I am getting well

under the sweet healing of your presence.  Rosannah?"



"Yes, Alonzo?  Oh, how you terrified me!  Say on."



"Name the happy day, Rosannah!"



There was a little pause.  Then a diffident small voice replied,

"I blush--but it is with pleasure, it is with happiness.  Would--would

you like to have it soon?"



"This very night, Rosannah!  Oh, let us risk no more delays.  Let it be

now!--this very night, this very moment!"



"Oh, you impatient creature!  I have nobody here but my good old uncle,

a missionary for a generation, and now retired from service--nobody but

him and his wife.  I would so dearly like it if your mother and your Aunt

Susan--"



"Our mother and our Aunt Susan, my Rosannah."



"Yes, our mother and our Aunt Susan--I am content to word it so if it

pleases you; I would so like to have them present."



"So would I.  Suppose you telegraph Aunt Susan.  How long would it take

her to come?"



"The steamer leaves San Francisco day after tomorrow.  The passage is

eight days.  She would be here the 31st of March."



"Then name the 1st of April; do, Rosannah, dear."



"Mercy, it would make us April fools, Alonzo!"



"So we be the happiest ones that that day's suit looks down upon in the

whole broad expanse of the globe, why need we care?  Call it the 1st of

April, dear."



"Then the 1st of April at shall be, with all my heart!"



"Oh, happiness!  Name the hour, too, Rosannah."



"I like the morning, it is so blithe.  Will eight in the morning do,

Alonzo?"



"The loveliest hour in the day--since it will make you mine."



There was a feeble but frantic sound for some little time, as if

wool-upped, disembodied spirits were exchanging kisses; then Rosannah

said, "Excuse me just a moment, dear; I have an appointment, and am

called to meet it."



The young girl sought a large parlor and took her place at a window which

looked out upon a beautiful scene.  To the left one could view the

charming Nuuana Valley, fringed with its ruddy flush of tropical flowers

and its plumed and graceful cocoa palms; its rising foothills clothed in

the shining green of lemon, citron, and orange groves; its storied

precipice beyond, where the first Kamehameha drove his defeated foes over

to their destruction, a spot that had forgotten its grim history, no

doubt, for now it was smiling, as almost always at noonday, under the

glowing arches of a succession of rainbows. In front of the window one

could see the quaint town, and here and there a picturesque group of

dusky natives, enjoying the blistering weather; and far to the right lay

the restless ocean, tossing its white mane in the sunshine.



Rosannah stood there, in her filmy white raiment, fanning her flushed and

heated face, waiting.  A Kanaka boy, clothed in a damaged blue necktie

and part of a silk hat, thrust his head in at the door, and announced,

"'Frisco haole!"



"Show him in," said the girl, straightening herself up and assuming a

meaning dignity.  Mr. Sidney Algernon Burley entered, clad from head to

heel in dazzling snow--that is to say, in the lightest and whitest of

Irish linen.  He moved eagerly forward, but the girl made a gesture and

gave him a look which checked him suddenly.  She said, coldly, "I am

here, as I promised.  I believed your assertions, I yielded to your

importune lies, and said I would name the day.  I name the 1st of April-

-eight in the morning.  NOW GO!"



"Oh, my dearest, if the gratitude of a lifetime--"



"Not a word.  Spare me all sight of you, all communication with you,

until that hour.  No-no supplications; I will have it so."



When he was gone, she sank exhausted in a chair, for the long siege of

troubles she had undergone had wasted her strength.  Presently she said,

"What a narrow escape!  If the hour appointed had been an hour earlier

--Oh, horror, what an escape I have made!  And to think I had come to

imagine I was loving this beguiling, this truthless, this treacherous

monster!  Oh, he shall repent his villainy!"



Let us now draw this history to a close, for little more needs to be

told.  On the 2d of the ensuing April, the Honolulu Advertiser contained

this notice:



     MARRIED.--In this city, by telephone, yesterday morning,--at eight

     o'clock, by Rev. Nathan Hays, assisted by Rev. Nathaniel Davis, of

     New York, Mr. Alonzo Fitz Clarence, of Eastport, Maine, U. S., and

     Miss Rosannah Ethelton, of Portland, Oregon, U. S.  Mrs. Susan

     Howland, of San Francisco, a friend of the bride, was present, she

     being the guest of the Rev. Mr. Hays and wife, uncle and aunt of the

     bride.  Mr. Sidney Algernon Burley, of San Francisco, was also

     present but did not remain till the conclusion of the marriage

     service.  Captain Hawthorne's beautiful yacht, tastefully decorated,

     was in waiting, and the happy bride and her friends immediately

     departed on a bridal trip to Lahaina and Haleakala.



The New York papers of the same date contained this notice:



     MARRIED.--In this city, yesterday, by telephone, at half-past two in

     the morning, by Rev.  Nathaniel Davis, assisted by Rev. Nathan Hays,

     of Honolulu, Mr. Alonzo Fitz Clarence, of Eastport, Maine, and Miss

     Rosannah Ethelton, of Portland, Oregon.  The parents and several

     friends of the bridegroom were present, and enjoyed a sumptuous

     breakfast and much festivity until nearly sunrise, and then departed

     on a bridal trip to the Aquarium, the bridegroom's state of health

     not admitting of a more extended journey.



Toward the close of that memorable day Mr. and Mrs. Alonzo Fitz Clarence

were buried in sweet converse concerning the pleasures of their several

bridal tours, when suddenly the young wife exclaimed: "Oh, Lonny, I

forgot!  I did what I said I would."



"Did you, dear?"



"Indeed, I did.  I made him the April fool!  And I told him so, too!

Ah, it was a charming surprise!  There he stood, sweltering in a black

dress-suit, with the mercury leaking out of the top of the thermometer,

waiting to be married.  You should have seen the look he gave when I

whispered it in his ear.  Ah, his wickedness cost me many a heartache and

many a tear, but the score was all squared up, then.  So the vengeful

feeling went right out of my heart, and I begged him to stay, and said I

forgave him everything.  But he wouldn't.  He said he would live to be

avenged; said he would make our lives a curse to us.  But he can't, can

he, dear?"



"Never in this world, my Rosannah!"



Aunt Susan, the Oregonian grandmother, and the young couple and their

Eastport parents, are all happy at this writing, and likely to remain so.

Aunt Susan brought the bride from the islands, accompanied her across our

continent, and had the happiness of witnessing the rapturous meeting

between an adoring husband and wife who had never seen each other until

that moment.



A word about the wretched Burley, whose wicked machinations came so near

wrecking the hearts and lives of our poor young friends, will be

sufficient.  In a murderous attempt to seize a crippled and helpless

artisan who he fancied had done him some small offense, he fell into a

caldron of boiling oil and expired before he could be extinguished.













ON THE DECAY OF THE ART OF LYING



ESSAY, FOR DISCUSSION, READ AT A MEETING OF THE HISTORICAL AND

ANTIQUARIAN CLUB OF HARTFORD, AND OFFERED FOR THE THIRTY-DOLLAR PRIZE.

NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.--[Did not take the prize]



Observe, I do not mean to suggest that the custom of lying has suffered

any decay or interruption--no, for the Lie, as a Virtue, a Principle, is

eternal; the Lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need,

the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend, is

immortal, and cannot perish from the earth while this Club remains.  My

complaint simply concerns the decay of the art of lying.  No high-minded

man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly

lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so

prostituted.  In this veteran presence I naturally enter upon this scheme

with diffidence; it is like an old maid trying to teach nursery matters

to the mothers in Israel.  It would not become me to criticize you,

gentlemen, who are nearly all my elders--and my superiors, in this thing-

-and so, if I should here and there seem to do it, I trust it will in

most cases be more in a spirit of admiration than of fault-finding;

indeed, if this finest of the fine arts had everywhere received the

attention, encouragement, and conscientious practice and development

which this Club has devoted to it I should not need to utter this lament

or shed a single tear.  I do not say this to flatter: I say it in a

spirit of just and appreciative recognition.



[It had been my intention, at this point, to mention names and give

illustrative specimens, but indications observable about me admonished me

to beware of particulars and confine myself to generalities.]



No fact is more firmly established than that lying is a necessity of our

circumstances--the deduction that it is then a Virtue goes without

saying.  No virtue can reach its highest usefulness without careful and

diligent cultivation--therefore, it goes without saying that this one

ought to be taught in the public schools--at the fireside--even in the

newspapers.  What chance has the ignorant, uncultivated liar against the

educated expert?  What chance have I against Mr. Per-- against a lawyer?

Judicious lying is what the world needs.  I sometimes think it were even

better and safer not to lie at all than to lie injudiciously.  An

awkward, unscientific lie is often as ineffectual as the truth.



Now let us see what the philosophers say.  Note that venerable proverb:

Children and fools always speak the truth.  The deduction is plain

--adults and wise persons never speak it.  Parkman, the historian, says,

"The principle of truth may itself be carried into an absurdity." In

another place in the same chapter he says, "The saying is old that truth

should not be spoken at all times; and those whom a sick conscience

worries into habitual violation of the maxim are imbeciles and

nuisances."  It is strong language, but true.  None of us could live with

an habitual truth-teller; but, thank goodness, none of us has to.  An

habitual truth-teller is simply an impossible creature; he does not

exist; he never has existed.  Of course there are people who think they

never lie, but it is not so--and this ignorance is one of the very things

that shame our so-called civilization.  Everybody lies--every day; every

hour; awake; asleep; in his dreams; in his joy; in his mourning; if he

keeps his tongue still, his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude, will

convey deception--and purposely.  Even in sermons--but that is a

platitude.



In a far country where I once lived the ladies used to go around paying

calls, under the humane and kindly pretense of wanting to see each other;

and when they returned home, they would cry out with a glad voice,

saying, "We made sixteen calls and found fourteen of them out"--not

meaning that they found out anything against the fourteen--no, that was

only a colloquial phrase to signify that they were not at home--and their

manner of saying it--expressed their lively satisfaction in that fact.

Now, their pretense of wanting to see the fourteen--and the other two

whom they had been less lucky with--was that commonest and mildest form

of lying which is sufficiently described as a deflection from the truth.

Is it justifiable?  Most certainly.  It is beautiful, it is noble; for

its object is, not to reap profit, but to convey a pleasure to the

sixteen.  The iron-souled truth-monger would plainly manifest, or even

utter the fact, that he didn't want to see those people--and he would be

an ass, and inflict a totally unnecessary pain.  And next, those ladies

in that far country--but never mind, they had a thousand pleasant ways of

lying, that grew out of gentle impulses, and were a credit to their

intelligence and at honor to their hearts.  Let the particulars go.



The men in that far country were liars; every one.  Their mere howdy-do

was a lie, because they didn't care how you did, except they were

undertakers.  To the ordinary inquirer you lied in return; for you made

no conscientious diagnosis of your case, but answered at random, and

usually missed it considerably.  You lied to the undertaker, and said

your health was failing--a wholly commendable lie, since it cost you

nothing and pleased the other man.  If a stranger called and interrupted

you, you said with your hearty tongue, "I'm glad to see you," and said

with your heartier soul, "I wish you were with the cannibals and it was

dinner-time."  When he went, you said regretfully, "Must you go?" and

followed it with a "Call again"; but you did no harm, for you did not

deceive anybody nor inflict any hurt, whereas the truth would have made

you both unhappy.



I think that all this courteous lying is a sweet and loving art, and

should be cultivated, The highest perfection of politeness is only a

beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and

gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.



What I bemoan is the growing prevalence of the brutal truth.  Let us do

what we can to eradicate it.  An injurious truth has no merit over an

injurious lie.  Neither should ever be uttered.  The man who speaks an

injurious truth, lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should

reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving.  The man

who tells a lie to help a poor devil out of trouble is one of whom the

angels doubtless say, "Lo, here is an heroic soul who casts his own

welfare into jeopardy to succor his neighbor's; let us exalt this

magnanimous liar."



An injurious lie is an uncommendable thing; and so, also, and in the same

degree, is an injurious truth--a fact which is recognized by the law of

libel.



Among other common lies, we have the silent lie the deception which one

conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth.  Many obstinate

truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak

no lie, they lie not at all.  In that far country where I once lived,

there was a lovely spirit, a lady whose impulses were always high and

pure, and whose character answered to them.  One day I was there at

dinner, and remarked, in a general way, that we are all liars.  She was

amazed, and said, "Not all!"  It was before "Pinafore's" time so I did

not make the response which would naturally follow in our day, but

frankly said, "Yes, all--we are all liars; there are no exceptions."

She looked almost offended, and said, "Why, do you include me?"

"Certainly," I said, "I think you even rank as an expert." She said,

"'Sh!--'sh! the children!"



So the subject was changed in deference to the children's presence, and

we went on talking about other things.  But as soon as the young people

were out of the way, the lady came warmly back to the matter and said,

"I have made it the rule of my life to never tell a lie; and I have never

departed from it in a single instance."  I said, "I don't mean the least

harm or disrespect, but really you have been lying like smoke ever since

I've been sitting here.  It has caused me a good deal of pain, because I

am not used to it."  She required of me an instance--just a single

instance.  So I said:



"Well, here is the unfilled duplicate of the blank which the Oakland

hospital people sent to you by the hand of the sick-nurse when she came

here to nurse your little nephew through his dangerous illness.  This

blank asks all manner of questions as to the conduct of that sick-nurse:

'Did she ever sleep on her watch?  Did she ever forget to give the

medicine?' and so forth and so on.  You are warned to be very careful and

explicit in your answers, for the welfare of the service requires that

the nurses be promptly fined or otherwise punished for derelictions.

You told me you were perfectly delighted with that nurse--that she had a

thousand perfections and only one fault: you found you never could depend

on her wrapping Johnny up half sufficiently while he waited in a chilly

chair for her to rearrange the warm bed.  You filled up the duplicate of

this paper, and sent it back to the hospital by the hand of the nurse.

How did you answer this question--'Was the nurse at any time guilty of a

negligence which was likely to result in the patient's taking cold?'

Come--everything is decided by a bet here in California: ten dollars to

ten cents you lied when you answered that question."  She said, "I

didn't; I left it blank!"  "Just so--you have told a silent lie; you have

left it to be inferred that you had no fault to find in that matter."

She said, "Oh, was that a lie?  And how could I mention her one single

fault, and she so good?--it would have been cruel."  I said, "One ought

always to lie when one can do good by it; your impulse was right, but,

your judgment was crude; this comes of unintelligent practice.  Now

observe the result of this inexpert deflection of yours.  You know Mr.

Jones's Willie is lying very low with scarlet fever; well, your

recommendation was so enthusiastic that that girl is there nursing him,

and the worn-out family have all been trustingly sound asleep for the

last fourteen hours, leaving their darling with full confidence in those

fatal hands, because you, like young George Washington, have a reputa--

However, if you are not going to have anything to do, I will come around

to-morrow and we'll attend the funeral together, for, of course, you'll

naturally feel a peculiar interest in Willie's case--as personal a one,

in fact, as the undertaker."



But that was all lost.  Before I was half-way through she was in a

carriage and making thirty miles an hour toward the Jones mansion to save

what was left of Willie and tell all she knew about the deadly nurse.

All of which was unnecessary, as Willie wasn't sick; I had been lying

myself.  But that same day, all the same, she sent a line to the hospital

which filled up the neglected blank, and stated the facts, too, in the

squarest possible manner.



Now, you see, this lady's fault was not in lying, but only in lying

injudiciously.  She should have told the, truth, there, and made it up to

the nurse with a fraudulent compliment further along in the paper.  She

could have said, "In one respect the sick-nurse is perfection--when she

is on watch, she never snores."  Almost any little pleasant lie would

have taken the sting out of that troublesome but necessary expression of

the truth.



Lying is universal we all do it; we all must do it.  Therefore, the wise

thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully,

judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for

others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably,

humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and

graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely,

with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as

being ashamed of our high calling.  Then shall we be rid of the rank and

pestilent truth that is rotting the land; then shall we be great and good

and beautiful, and worthy dwellers in a world where even benign Nature

habitually lies, except when she promises execrable weather.  Then--But

I am but a new and feeble student in this gracious art; I can not

instruct this Club.



Joking aside, I think there is much need of wise examination into what

sorts of lies are best and wholesomest to be indulged, seeing we must all

lie and do all lie, and what sorts it may be best to avoid--and this is a

thing which I feel I can confidently put into the hands of this

experienced Club--a ripe body, who may be termed, in this regard, and

without undue flattery, Old Masters.













ABOUT MAGNANIMOUS-INCIDENT LITERATURE



All my life, from boyhood up, I have had the habit of reading a certain

set of anecdotes, written in the quaint vein of The World's ingenious

Fabulist, for the lesson they taught me and the pleasure they gave me.

They lay always convenient to my hand, and whenever I thought meanly of

my kind I turned to them, and they banished that sentiment; whenever I

felt myself to be selfish, sordid, and ignoble I turned to them, and they

told me what to do to win back my self-respect.  Many times I wished that

the charming anecdotes had not stopped with their happy climaxes, but had

continued the pleasing history of the several benefactors and

beneficiaries.  This wish rose in my breast so persistently that at last

I determined to satisfy it by seeking out the sequels of those anecdotes

myself.  So I set about it, and after great labor and tedious research

accomplished my task.  I will lay the result before you, giving you each

anecdote in its turn, and following it with its sequel as I gathered it

through my investigations.





                           THE GRATEFUL POODLE



One day a benevolent physician (who had read the books) having found a

stray poodle suffering from a broken leg, conveyed the poor creature to

his home, and after setting and bandaging the injured limb gave the

little outcast its liberty again, and thought no more about the matter.

But how great was his surprise, upon opening his door one morning, some

days later, to find the grateful poodle patiently waiting there, and in

its company another stray dog, one of whose legs, by some accident, had

been broken.  The kind physician at once relieved the distressed animal,

nor did he forget to admire the inscrutable goodness and mercy of God,

who had been willing to use so humble an instrument as the poor outcast

poodle for the inculcating of, etc., etc., etc.





                                  SEQUEL



The next morning the benevolent physician found the two dogs, beaming

with gratitude, waiting at his door, and with them two other

dogs-cripples.  The cripples were speedily healed, and the four went

their way, leaving the benevolent physician more overcome by pious wonder

than ever.  The day passed, the morning came.  There at the door sat now

the four reconstructed dogs, and with them four others requiring

reconstruction.  This day also passed, and another morning came; and now

sixteen dogs, eight of them newly crippled, occupied the sidewalk, and

the people were going around.  By noon the broken legs were all set, but

the pious wonder in the good physician's breast was beginning to get

mixed with involuntary profanity.  The sun rose once more, and exhibited

thirty-two dogs, sixteen of them with broken legs, occupying the sidewalk

and half of the street; the human spectators took up the rest of the

room.  The cries of the wounded, the songs of the healed brutes, and the

comments of the onlooking citizens made great and inspiring cheer, but

traffic was interrupted in that street.  The good physician hired a

couple of assistant surgeons and got through his benevolent work before

dark, first taking the precaution to cancel his church-membership, so

that he might express himself with the latitude which the case required.



But some things have their limits.  When once more the morning dawned,

and the good physician looked out upon a massed and far-reaching

multitude of clamorous and beseeching dogs, he said, "I might as well

acknowledge it, I have been fooled by the books; they only tell the

pretty part of the story, and then stop.  Fetch me the shotgun; this

thing has gone along far enough."



He issued forth with his weapon, and chanced to step upon the tail of the

original poodle, who promptly bit him in the leg.  Now the great and good

work which this poodle had been engaged in had engendered in him such a

mighty and augmenting enthusiasm as to turn his weak head at last and

drive him mad.  A month later, when the benevolent physician lay in the

death-throes of hydrophobia, he called his weeping friends about him, and

said:



"Beware of the books.  They tell but half of the story.  Whenever a poor

wretch asks you for help, and you feel a doubt as to what result may flow

from your benevolence, give yourself the benefit of the doubt and kill

the applicant."



And so saying he turned his face to the wall and gave up the ghost.







                          THE BENEVOLENT AUTHOR



A poor and young literary beginner had tried in vain to get his

manuscripts accepted.  At last, when the horrors of starvation were

staring him in the face, he laid his sad case before a celebrated author,

beseeching his counsel and assistance.  This generous man immediately put

aside his own matters and proceeded to peruse one of the despised

manuscripts.  Having completed his kindly task, he shook the poor young

man cordially by the hand, saying, "I perceive merit in this; come again

to me on Monday."  At the time specified, the celebrated author, with a

sweet smile, but saying nothing, spread open a magazine which was damp

from the press.  What was the poor young man's astonishment to discover

upon the printed page his own article.  "How can I ever," said he,

falling upon his knees and bursting into tears, "testify my gratitude for

this noble conduct!"



The celebrated author was the renowned Snodgrass; the poor young beginner

thus rescued from obscurity and starvation was the afterward equally

renowned Snagsby.  Let this pleasing incident admonish us to turn a

charitable ear to all beginners that need help.



                                  SEQUEL



The next week Snagsby was back with five rejected manuscripts.  The

celebrated author was a little surprised, because in the books the young

struggler had needed but one lift, apparently.  However, he plowed

through these papers, removing unnecessary flowers and digging up some

acres of adjective stumps, and then succeeded in getting two of the

articles accepted.



A week or so drifted by, and the grateful Snagsby arrived with another

cargo.  The celebrated author had felt a mighty glow of satisfaction

within himself the first time he had successfully befriended the poor

young struggler, and had compared himself with the generous people in the

books with high gratification; but he was beginning to suspect now that

he had struck upon something fresh in the noble-episode line.  His

enthusiasm took a chill.  Still, he could not bear to repulse this

struggling young author, who clung to him with such pretty simplicity and

trustfulness.



Well, the upshot of it all was that the celebrated author presently found

himself permanently freighted with the poor young beginner.  All his mild

efforts to unload this cargo went for nothing.  He had to give daily

counsel, daily encouragement; he had to keep on procuring magazine

acceptances, and then revamping the manuscripts to make them presentable.

When the young aspirant got a start at last, he rode into sudden fame by

describing the celebrated author's private life with such a caustic humor

and such minuteness of blistering detail that the book sold a prodigious

edition, and broke the celebrated author's heart with mortification.

With his latest gasp he said, "Alas, the books deceived me; they do not

tell the whole story.  Beware of the struggling young author, my friends.

Whom God sees fit to starve, let not man presumptuously rescue to his own

undoing."







                           THE GRATEFUL HUSBAND



One day a lady was driving through the principal street of a great city

with her little boy, when the horses took fright and dashed madly away,

hurling the coachman from his box and leaving the occupants of the

carnage paralyzed with terror.  But a brave youth who was driving a

grocery-wagon threw himself before the plunging animals, and succeeded in

arresting their flight at the peril of his own.--[This is probably a

misprint.--M. T.]--The grateful lady took his number, and upon arriving

at her home she related the heroic act to her husband (who had read the

books), who listened with streaming eyes to the moving recital, and who,

after returning thanks, in conjunction with his restored loved ones, to

Him who suffereth not even a sparrow to fall to the ground unnoticed,

sent for the brave young person, and, placing a check for five hundred

dollars in his hand, said, "Take this as a reward for your noble act,

William Ferguson, and if ever you shall need a, friend, remember that

Thompson McSpadden has a grateful heart."  Let us learn from this that

a good deed cannot fail to benefit the doer, however humble he may be.



                                  SEQUEL



William Ferguson called the next week and asked Mr. McSpadden to use his

influence to get him a higher employment, he feeling capable of better

things than driving a grocer's wagon.  Mr. McSpadden got him an

underclerkship at a good salary.



Presently William Ferguson's mother fell sick, and William--Well, to cut

the story short, Mr. McSpadden consented to take her into his house.

Before long she yearned for the society of her younger children; so Mary

and Julia were admitted also, and little Jimmy, their brother.  Jimmy had

a pocket knife, and he wandered into the drawing-room with it one day,

alone, and reduced ten thousand dollars' worth of furniture to an

indeterminable value in rather less than three-quarters of an hour.

A day or two later he fell down-stairs and broke his neck, and seventeen

of his family's relatives came to the house to attend the funeral.  This

made them acquainted, and they kept the kitchen occupied after that, and

likewise kept the McSpaddens busy hunting-up situations of various sorts

for them, and hunting up more when they wore these out.  The old woman

drank a good deal and swore a good deal; but the grateful McSpaddens knew

it was their duty to reform her, considering what her son had done for

them, so they clave nobly to their generous task.  William came often and

got decreasing sums of money, and asked for higher and more lucrative

employments--which the grateful McSpadden more or less promptly procured

for him.  McSpadden consented also, after some demur, to fit William for

college; but when the first vacation came and the hero requested to be

sent to Europe for his health, the persecuted McSpadden rose against the

tyrant and revolted.  He plainly and squarely refused.  William

Ferguson's mother was so astounded that she let her gin-bottle drop, and

her profane lips refused to do their office.  When she recovered she said

in a half-gasp, "Is this your gratitude?  Where would your wife and boy

be now, but for my son?"



William said, "Is this your gratitude?  Did I save your wife's life or

not?  Tell me that!"



Seven relations swarmed in from the kitchen and each said, "And this is

his gratitude!"



William's sisters stared, bewildered, and said, "And this is his grat--"

but were interrupted by their mother, who burst into tears and exclaimed,



"To think that my sainted little Jimmy threw away his life in the service

of such a reptile!"



Then the pluck of the revolutionary McSpadden rose to the occasion, and

he replied with fervor, "Out of my house, the whole beggarly tribe of

you!  I was beguiled by the books, but shall never be beguiled again

--once is sufficient for me."  And turning to William he shouted, "Yes,

you did save my, wife's life, and the next man that does it shall die in

his tracks!"





Not being a clergyman, I place my text at the end of my sermon instead of

at the beginning.  Here it is, from Mr. Noah Brooks's Recollections of

President Lincoln in Scribners Monthly:



     J.  H.  Hackett, in his part of Falstaff, was an actor who gave Mr.

     Lincoln great delight.  With his usual desire to signify to others

     his sense of obligation, Mr. Lincoln wrote a genial little note to

     the actor expressing his pleasure at witnessing his performance.

     Mr. Hackett, in reply, sent a book of some sort; perhaps it was one

     of his own authorship.  He also wrote several notes to the

     President.  One night, quite late, when the episode had passed out

     of my mind, I went to the white House in answer to a message.

     Passing into the President's office, I noticed, to my surprise,

     Hackett sitting in the anteroom as if waiting for an audience.  The

     President asked me if any one was outside.  On being told, he said,

     half sadly, "Oh, I can't see him, I can't see him; I was in hopes he

     had gone away."  Then he added, "Now this just illustrates the

     difficulty of having pleasant friends and acquaintances in this

     place.  You know how I liked Hackett as an actor, and how I wrote to

     tell him so.  He sent me that book, and there I thought the matter

     would end.  He is a master of his place in the profession, I

     suppose, and well fixed in it; but just because we had a little

     friendly correspondence, such as any two men might have, he wants

     something.  What do you suppose he wants?"  I could not guess, and

     Mr. Lincoln added, "well, he wants to be consul to London.  Oh,

     dear!"



I will observe, in conclusion, that the William Ferguson incident

occurred, and within my personal knowledge--though I have changed the

nature of the details, to keep William from recognizing himself in it.



All the readers of this article have in some sweet and gushing hour of

their lives played the role of Magnanimous-Incident hero.  I wish I knew

how many there are among them who are willing to talk about that episode

and like to be reminded of the consequences that flowed from it.













PUNCH, BROTHERS, PUNCH



Will the reader please to cast his eye over the following lines, and see

if he can discover anything harmful in them?



               Conductor, when you receive a fare,

               Punch in the presence of the passenjare!

               A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,

               A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,

               A pink trip slip for a three-cent, fare,

               Punch in the presence of the passenjare!



               CHORUS



               Punch, brothers!  punch with care!

               Punch in the presence of the passenjare!





I came across these jingling rhymes in a newspaper, a little while ago,

and read them a couple of times.  They took instant and entire possession

of me.  All through breakfast they went waltzing through my brain; and

when, at last, I rolled up my napkin, I could not tell whether I had

eaten anything or not.  I had carefully laid out my day's work the day

before--thrilling tragedy in the novel which I am writing.  I went to my

den to begin my deed of blood.  I took up my pen, but all I could get it

to say was, "Punch in the presence of the passenjare."  I fought hard for

an hour, but it was useless.  My head kept humming, "A blue trip slip for

an eight-cent fare, a buff trip slip for a six-cent fare," and so on and

so on, without peace or respite.  The day's work was ruined--I could see

that plainly enough.  I gave up and drifted down-town, and presently

discovered that my feet were keeping time to that relentless jingle.

When I could stand it no longer I altered my step.  But it did no good;

those rhymes accommodated themselves to the new step and went on

harassing me just as before.  I returned home, and suffered all the

afternoon; suffered all through an unconscious and unrefreshing dinner;

suffered, and cried, and jingled all through the evening; went to bed and

rolled, tossed, and jingled right along, the same as ever; got up at

midnight frantic, and tried to read; but there was nothing visible upon

the whirling page except "Punch! punch in the presence of the

passenjare."  By sunrise I was out of my mind, and everybody marveled and

was distressed at the idiotic burden of my ravings--"'Punch! oh, punch!

punch in the presence of the passenjare!"



Two days later, on Saturday morning, I arose, a tottering wreck, and went

forth to fulfil an engagement with a valued friend, the Rev.  Mr.------,

to walk to the Talcott Tower, ten miles distant.  He stared at me, but

asked no questions.  We started. Mr.------talked, talked, talked as is

his wont.  I said nothing; I heard nothing.  At the end of a mile,

Mr.------ said  "Mark, are you sick?  I never saw a man look so haggard

and worn and absent-minded.  Say something, do!"



Drearily, without enthusiasm, I said: "Punch brothers, punch with care!

Punch in the presence o the passenjare!"



My friend eyed me blankly, looked perplexed, they said:



"I do not think I get your drift, Mark.  Then does not seem to be any

relevancy in what you have said, certainly nothing sad; and yet--maybe it

was the way you said the words--I never heard anything that sounded so

pathetic.  What is--"



But I heard no more.  I was already far away with my pitiless,

heartbreaking "blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare, buff trip slip for

a six-cent fare, pink trip slip for a three-cent fare; punch in the

presence of the passenjare."  I do not know what occurred during the

other nine miles.  However, all of a sudden Mr.------ laid his hand on my

shoulder and shouted:



"Oh, wake up!  wake up!  wake up!  Don't sleep all day!  Here we are at

the Tower, man!  I have talked myself deaf and dumb and blind, and never

got a response.  Just look at this magnificent autumn landscape!  Look at

it!  look at it!  Feast your eye on it!  You have traveled; you have seen

boaster landscapes elsewhere.  Come, now, deliver an honest opinion.

What do you say to this?"



I sighed wearily; and murmured:



"A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare, a pink trip slip for a three-cent

fare, punch in the presence of the passenjare."



Rev.  Mr. ------ stood there, very grave, full of concern, apparently, and

looked long at me; then he said:



"Mark, there is something about this that I cannot understand.  Those are

about the same words you said before; there does not seem to be anything

in them, and yet they nearly break my heart when you say them.  Punch in

the--how is it they go?"



I began at the beginning and repeated all the lines.



My friend's face lighted with interest.  He said:



"Why, what a captivating jingle it is!  It is almost music.  It flows

along so nicely.  I have nearly caught the rhymes myself.  Say them over

just once more, and then I'll have them, sure."



I said them over.  Then Mr.------  said them.  He made one little

mistake, which I corrected.  The next time and the next he got them

right.  Now a great burden seemed to tumble from my shoulders.  That

torturing jingle departed out of my brain, and a grateful sense of rest

and peace descended upon me.  I was light-hearted enough to sing; and I

did sing for half an hour, straight along, as we went jogging homeward.

Then my freed tongue found blessed speech again, and the pent talk of

many a weary hour began to gush and flow.  It flowed on and on, joyously,

jubilantly, until the fountain was empty and dry.  As I wrung my friend's

hand at parting, I said:



"Haven't we had a royal good time!  But now I remember, you haven't said

a word for two hours.  Come, come, out with something!"



The Rev.  Mr.------ turned a lack-luster eye upon me, drew a deep sigh,

and said, without animation, without apparent consciousness:



"Punch, brothers, punch with care!  Punch in the presence of the

passenjare!"



A pang shot through me as I said to myself, "Poor fellow, poor fellow!

he has got it, now."



I did not see Mr.------ for two or three days after that.  Then, on

Tuesday evening, he staggered into my presence and sank dejectedly into a

seat.  He was pale, worn; he was a wreck.  He lifted his faded eyes to my

face and said:



"Ah, Mark, it was a ruinous investment that I made in those heartless

rhymes.  They have ridden me like a nightmare, day and night, hour after

hour, to this very moment.  Since I saw you I have suffered the torments

of the lost.  Saturday evening I had a sudden call, by telegraph, and

took the night train for Boston.  The occasion was the death of a valued

old friend who had requested that I should preach his funeral sermon.

I took my seat in the cars and set myself to framing the discourse.  But

I never got beyond the opening paragraph; for then the train started and

the car-wheels began their 'clack, clack-clack-clack-clack! clack-clack!

--clack-clack-clack!' and right away those odious rhymes fitted

themselves to that accompaniment.  For an hour I sat there and set a

syllable of those rhymes to every separate and distinct clack the

car-wheels made.  Why, I was as fagged out, then, as if I had been

chopping wood all day.  My skull was splitting with headache.  It seemed

to me that I must go mad if I sat there any longer; so I undressed and

went to bed.  I stretched myself out in my berth, and--well, you know

what the result was.  The thing went right along, just the same.

'Clack-clack clack, a blue trip slip, clack-clack-clack, for an eight

cent fare; clack-clack-clack, a buff trip slip, clack clack-clack, for a

six-cent fare, and so on, and so on, and so on punch in the presence of

the passenjare!'  Sleep?  Not a single wink!  I was almost a lunatic when

I got to Boston.  Don't ask me about the funeral.  I did the best I

could, but every solemn individual sentence was meshed and tangled and

woven in and out with 'Punch, brothers, punch with care, punch in the

presence of the passenjare.'  And the most distressing thing was that my

delivery dropped into the undulating rhythm of those pulsing rhymes, and

I could actually catch absent-minded people nodding time to the swing of

it with their stupid heads.  And, Mark, you may believe it or not, but

before I got through the entire assemblage were placidly bobbing their

heads in solemn unison, mourners, undertaker, and all.  The moment I had

finished, I fled to the anteroom in a state bordering on frenzy.  Of

course it would be my luck to find a sorrowing and aged maiden aunt of

the deceased there, who had arrived from Springfield too late to get into

the church.  She began to sob, and said:



"'Oh, oh, he is gone, he is gone, and I didn't see him before he died!'



"'Yes!' I said, 'he is gone, he is gone, he is gone--oh, will this

suffering never cease!'



"'You loved him, then!  Oh, you too loved him!'



"'Loved him!  Loved who?'



"'Why, my poor George! my poor nephew!'



"'Oh--him!  Yes--oh, yes, yes.  Certainly--certainly.  Punch--punch--oh,

this misery will kill me!'



"'Bless you!  bless you, sir, for these sweet words!  I, too, suffer in

this dear loss.  Were you present during his last moments?'



"'Yes.  I--whose last moments?'



"'His.  The dear departed's.'



"'Yes!  Oh, yes--yes--yes!  I suppose so, I think so, I don't know!  Oh,

certainly--I was there I was there!'



"'Oh, what a privilege!  what a precious privilege!  And his last words-

-oh, tell me, tell me his last words!  What did he say?'



"'He said--he said-oh, my head, my head, my head!  He said--he said--he

never said anything but Punch, punch, punch in the presence of the

passenjare!  Oh, leave me, madam!  In the name of all that is generous,

leave me to my madness, my misery, my despair! --a buff trip slip for a

six-cent fare, a pink trip slip for a three-cent fare--endu--rance can no

fur--ther go!--PUNCH in the presence of the passenjare!"



My friend's hopeless eyes rested upon mine a pregnant minute, and then he

said impressively:



"Mark, you do not say anything.  You do not offer me any hope.  But, ah

me, it is just as well--it is just as well.  You could not do me any

good.  The time has long gone by when words could comfort me.  Something

tells me that my tongue is doomed to wag forever to the jigger of that

remorseless jingle, There--there it is coming on me again: a blue trip

slip for an eight-cent fare, a buff trip slip for a--"



Thus murmuring faint and fainter, my friend sank into a peaceful trance

and forgot his sufferings in a blessed respite.



How did I finally save him from an asylum?  I took him to a neighboring

university and made him discharge the burden of his persecuting rhymes

into the eager ears of the poor, unthinking students.  How is it with

them, now?  The result is too sad to tell.  Why did I write this article?

It was for a worthy, even a noble, purpose.  It was to warn you, reader,

if you should came across those merciless rhymes, to avoid them--avoid

them as you would a pestilence.













THE GREAT REVOLUTION IN PITCAIRN



Let me refresh the reader's memory a little.  Nearly a hundred years ago

the crew of the British ship bounty mutinied, set the captain and his

officers adrift upon the open sea, took possession of the ship, and

sailed southward.  They procured wives for themselves among the natives

of Tahiti, then proceeded to a lonely little rock in mid-Pacific, called

Pitcairn's Island, wrecked the vessel, stripped her of everything that

might be useful to a new colony, and established themselves on shore.

Pitcairn's is so far removed from the track of commerce that it was many

years before another vessel touched there.  It had always been considered

an uninhabited island; so when a ship did at last drop its anchor there,

in 1808, the captain was greatly surprised to find the place peopled.

Although the mutineers had fought among themselves, and gradually killed

each other off until only two or three of the original stock remained,

these tragedies had not occurred before a number of children had been

born; so in 1808 the island had a population of twenty-seven persons.

John Adams, the chief mutineer, still survived, and was to live many

years yet, as governor and patriarch of the flock.  From being mutineer

and homicide, he had turned Christian and teacher, and his nation of

twenty-seven persons was now the purest and devoutest in Christendom.

Adams had long ago hoisted the British flag and constituted his island an

appanage of the British crown.



To-day the population numbers ninety persons--sixteen men, nineteen

women, twenty-five boys, and thirty girls--all descendants of the

mutineers, all bearing the family names of those mutineers, and all

speaking English, and English only.  The island stands high up out of the

sea, and has precipitous walls.  It is about three-quarters of a mile

long, and in places is as much as half a mile wide.  Such arable land as

it affords is held by the several families, according to a division made

many years ago.  There is some live stock--goats, pigs, chickens, and

cats; but no dogs, and no large animals.  There is one church-building

used also as a capitol, a schoolhouse, and a public library.  The title

of the governor has been, for a generation or two, "Magistrate and Chief

Ruler, in subordination to her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain."  It

was his province to make the laws, as well as execute them.  His office

was elective; everybody over seventeen years old had a vote--no matter

about the sex.



The sole occupations of the people were farming and fishing; their sole

recreation, religious services.  There has never been a shop in the

island, nor any money.  The habits and dress of the people have always

been primitive, and their laws simple to puerility.  They have lived in a

deep Sabbath tranquillity, far from the world and its ambitions and

vexations, and neither knowing nor caring what was going on in the mighty

empires that lie beyond their limitless ocean solitudes.  Once in three

or four years a ship touched there, moved them with aged news of bloody

battles, devastating epidemics, fallen thrones, and ruined dynasties,

then traded them some soap and flannel for some yams and breadfruit, and

sailed away, leaving them to retire into their peaceful dreams and pious

dissipations once more.



On the 8th of last September, Admiral de Horsey, commander-in-chief of

the British fleet in the Pacific, visited Pitcairn's Island, and speaks

as follows in his official report to the admiralty:



     They have beans, carrots, turnips, cabbages, and a little maize;

     pineapples, fig trees, custard-apples, and oranges; lemons, and

     cocoanuts.  Clothing is obtained alone from passing ships, in barter

     for refreshments.  There are no springs on the island, but as it

     rains generally once a month they have plenty of water, although at

     times in former years they have suffered from drought.  No alcoholic

     liquors, except for medicinal purposes, are used, and a drunkard is

     unknown....



     The necessary articles required by the islanders are best shown by

     those we furnished in barter for refreshments: namely, flannel,

     serge, drill, half-boots, combs, tobacco, and soap.  They also stand

     much in need of maps and slates for their school, and tools of any

     kind are most acceptable.  I caused them to be supplied from the

     public stores with a Union jack: for display on the arrival of

     ships, and a pit-saw, of which they were greatly in need.  This, I

     trust, will meet the approval of their lordships.  If the munificent

     people of England were only aware of the wants of this most

     deserving little colony, they would not long go unsupplied....



     Divine service is held every Sunday at 10.30 A.M.  and at 3 P.M.,

     in the house built and used by John Adams for that purpose until he

     died in 1829.  It is conducted strictly in accordance with the

     liturgy of the Church of England, by Mr. Simon Young, their selected

     pastor, who is much respected.  A Bible class is held every

     Wednesday, when all who conveniently can attend.  There is also a

     general meeting for prayer on the first Friday in every month.

     Family prayers are said in every house the first thing in the

     morning and the last thing in the evening, and no food is partaken

     of without asking God's blessing before and afterward.  Of these

     islanders' religious attributes no one can speak without deep

     respect.  A people whose greatest pleasure and privilege is to

     commune in prayer with their God, and to join in hymns of praise,

     and who are, moreover, cheerful, diligent, and probably freer from

     vice than any other community, need no priest among them.



Now I come to a sentence in the admiral's report which he dropped

carelessly from his pen, no doubt, and never gave the matter a second

thought.  He little imagined what a freight of tragic prophecy it bore!

This is the sentence:



     One stranger, an American, has settled on the island--a doubtful

     acquisition.



A doubtful acquisition, indeed!  Captain Ormsby, in the American ship

Hornet, touched at Pitcairn's nearly four months after the admiral's

visit, and from the facts which he gathered there we now know all about

that American.  Let us put these facts together in historical form.  The

American's name was Butterworth Stavely.  As soon as he had become well

acquainted with all the people--and this took but a few days, of course

--he began to ingratiate himself with them by all the arts he could

command.  He became exceedingly popular, and much looked up to; for one

of the first things he did was to forsake his worldly way of life, and

throw all his energies into religion.  He was always reading his Bible,

or praying, or singing hymns, or asking blessings.  In prayer, no one had

such "liberty" as he, no one could pray so long or so well.



At last, when he considered the time to be ripe, he began secretly to sow

the seeds of discontent among the people.  It was his deliberate purpose,

from the beginning, to subvert the government, but of course he kept that

to himself for a time.  He used different arts with different

individuals.  He awakened dissatisfaction in one quarter by calling

attention to the shortness of the Sunday services; he argued that there

should be three three-hour services on Sunday instead of only two.  Many

had secretly held this opinion before; they now privately banded

themselves into a party to work for it.  He showed certain of the women

that they were not allowed sufficient voice in the prayer-meetings; thus

another party was formed.  No weapon was beneath his notice; he even

descended to the children, and awoke discontent in their breasts

because--as he discovered for them--they had not enough Sunday-school.

This created a third party.



Now, as the chief of these parties, he found himself the strongest power

in the community.  So he proceeded to his next move-a no less important

one than the impeachment of the chief magistrate, James Russell Nickoy;

a man of character and ability, and possessed of great wealth, he being

the owner of a house with a parlor to it, three acres and a half of yam-

land, and the only boat in Pitcairn's, a whaleboat; and, most

unfortunately, a pretext for this impeachment offered itself at just the

right time.



One of the earliest and most precious laws of the island was the law

against trespass.  It was held in great reverence, and was regarded as

the palladium of the people's liberties.  About thirty years ago an

important case came before the courts under this law, in this wise: a

chicken belonging to Elizabeth Young (aged, at that time, fifty-eight,

a daughter of John Mills, one of the mutineers of the Bounty) trespassed

upon the grounds of Thursday October Christian (aged twenty-nine, a

grandson of Fletcher Christian, one of the mutineers).  Christian killed

the chicken. According to the law, Christian could keep the chicken; or,

if he preferred, he could restore its remains to the owner and receive

damages in "produce" to an amount equivalent to the waste and injury

wrought by the trespasser.  The court records set forth that "the said

Christian aforesaid did deliver the aforesaid remains to the said Eliza

beth Young, and did demand one bushel of yams in satisfaction of the

damage done."  But Elizabeth Young considered the demand exorbitant; the

parties could not agree; therefore Christian brought suit in the courts.

He lost his case in the justice's court; at least, he was awarded only a

half-peck of yams, which he considered insufficient, and in the nature of

a defeat.  He appealed.  The case lingered several years in an ascending

grade of courts, and always resulted in decrees sustaining the original

verdict; and finally the thing got into the supreme court, and there it

stuck for twenty years.  But last summer, even the supreme court managed

to arrive at a decision at last.  Once more the original verdict was

sustained.  Christian then said he was satisfied; but Stavely was

present, and whispered to him and to his lawyer, suggesting, "as a mere

form," that the original law be exhibited, in order to make sure that it

still existed.  It seemed an odd idea, but an ingenious one.  So the

demand was made.  A messenger was sent to the magistrate's house; he

presently returned with the tidings that it had disappeared from among

the state archives.



The court now pronounced its late decision void, since it had been made

under a law which had no actual existence.



Great excitement ensued immediately.  The news swept abroad over the

whole island that the palladium of the public liberties was lost--maybe

treasonably destroyed.  Within thirty minutes almost the entire nation

were in the court-room--that is to say, the church.  The impeachment of

the chief magistrate followed, upon Stavely's motion.  The accused met

his misfortune with the dignity which became his great office.  He did

not plead, or even argue; he offered the simple defense that he had not

meddled with the missing law; that he had kept the state archives in the

same candle-box that had been used as their depository from the

beginning; and that he was innocent of the removal or destruction of the

lost document.



But nothing could save him; he was found guilty of misprision of treason,

and degraded from his office, and all his property was confiscated.



The lamest part of the whole shameful matter was the reason suggested by

his enemies for his destruction of the law, to wit: that he did it to

favor Christian, because Christian was his cousin!  Whereas Stavely was

the only individual in the entire nation who was not his cousin.  The

reader must remember that all these people are the descendants of half a

dozen men; that the first children intermarried together and bore

grandchildren to the mutineers; that these grandchildren intermarried;

after them, great and great-great-grandchildren intermarried; so that to-

day everybody is blood kin to everybody.  Moreover, the relationships are

wonderfully, even astoundingly, mixed up and complicated.  A stranger,

for instance, says to an islander:



"You speak of that young woman as your cousin; a while ago you called her

your aunt."



"Well, she is my aunt, and my cousin, too.  And also my stepsister, my

niece, my fourth cousin, my thirty-third cousin, my forty-second cousin,

my great-aunt, my grandmother, my widowed sister-in-law--and next week

she will be my wife."



So the charge of nepotism against the chief magistrate was weak.  But no

matter; weak or strong, it suited Stavely.  Stavely was immediately

elected to the vacant magistracy, and, oozing reform from every pore, he

went vigorously to work.  In no long time religious services raged

everywhere and unceasingly.  By command, the second prayer of the Sunday

morning service, which had customarily endured some thirty-five or forty

minutes, and had pleaded for the world, first by continent and then by

national and tribal detail, was extended to an hour and a half, and made

to include supplications in behalf of the possible peoples in the several

planets.  Everybody was pleased with this; everybody said, "Now this is

something like."  By command, the usual three-hour sermons were doubled

in length.  The nation came in a body to testify their gratitude to the

new magistrate.  The old law forbidding cooking on the Sabbath was

extended to the prohibition of eating, also.  By command, Sunday-school

was privileged to spread over into the week.  The joy of all classes was

complete.  In one short month the new magistrate had become the people's

idol!



The time was ripe for this man's next move.  He began, cautiously at

first, to poison the public mind against England.  He took the chief

citizens aside, one by one, and conversed with them on this topic.

Presently he grew bolder, and spoke out.  He said the nation owed it to

itself, to its honor, to its great traditions, to rise in its might and

throw off "this galling English yoke."



But the simple islanders answered:



"We had not noticed that it galled.  How does it gall?  England sends a

ship once in three or four years to give us soap and clothing, and things

which we sorely need and gratefully receive; but she never troubles us;

she lets us go our own way."



"She lets you go your own way!  So slaves have felt and spoken in all the

ages!  This speech shows how fallen you are, how base, how brutalized you

have become, under this grinding tyranny!  What! has all manly pride

forsaken you?  Is liberty nothing?  Are you content to be a mere

appendage to a foreign and hateful sovereignty, when you might rise up

and take your rightful place in the august family of nations, great,

free, enlightened, independent, the minion of no sceptered master, but

the arbiter of your own destiny, and a voice and a power in decreeing the

destinies of your sister-sovereignties of the world?"



Speeches like this produced an effect by and by.  Citizens began to feel

the English yoke; they did not know exactly how or whereabouts they felt

it, but they were perfectly certain they did feel it.  They got to

grumbling a good deal, and chafing under their chains, and longing for

relief and release.  They presently fell to hating the English flag, that

sign and symbol of their nation's degradation; they ceased to glance up

at it as they passed the capitol, but averted their eyes and grated their

teeth; and one morning, when it was found trampled into the mud at the

foot of the staff, they left it there, and no man put his hand to it to

hoist it again.  A certain thing which was sure to happen sooner or later

happened now.  Some of the chief citizens went to the magistrate by

night, and said:



"We can endure this hated tyranny no longer.  How can we cast it off?"



"By a coup d'etat."



"How?"



"A coup d'etat.  It is like this: everything is got ready, and at the

appointed moment I, as the official head of the nation, publicly and

solemnly proclaim its independence, and absolve it from allegiance to any

and all other powers whatsoever."



"That sounds simple and easy.  We can do that right away.  Then what will

be the next thing to do?"



"Seize all the defenses and public properties of all kinds, establish

martial law, put the army and navy on a war footing, and proclaim the

empire!"



This fine program dazzled these innocents.  They said:



"This is grand--this is splendid; but will not England resist?"



"Let her.  This rock is a Gibraltar."



"True.  But about the empire?  Do we need an empire and an emperor?"



"What you need, my friends, is unification.  Look at Germany; look at

Italy.  They are unified.  Unification is the thing.  It makes living

dear.  That constitutes progress.  We must have a standing army and a

navy.  Taxes follow, as a matter of course.  All these things summed up

make grandeur.  With unification and grandeur, what more can you want?

Very well--only the empire can confer these boons."



So on the 8th day of December Pitcairn's Island was proclaimed a free and

independent nation; and on the same day the solemn coronation of

Butterworth I, Emperor of Pitcairn's Island, took place, amid great

rejoicings and festivities.  The entire nation, with the exception of

fourteen persons, mainly little children, marched past the throne in

single file, with banners and music, the procession being upward of

ninety feet long; and some said it was as much as three-quarters of a

minute passing a given point.  Nothing like it had ever been seen in the

history of the island before.  Public enthusiasm was measureless.



Now straightway imperial reforms began.  Orders of nobility were

instituted.  A minister of the navy was appointed, and the whale-boat put

in commission.  A minister of war was created, and ordered to proceed at

once with the formation of a standing army.  A first lord of the treasury

was named, and commanded to get up a taxation scheme, and also open

negotiations for treaties, offensive, defensive, and commercial, with

foreign powers.  Some generals and admirals were appointed; also some

chamberlains, some equerries in waiting, and some lords of the

bedchamber.



At this point all the material was used up.  The Grand Duke of Galilee,

minister of war, complained that all the sixteen grown men in the empire

had been given great offices, and consequently would not consent to serve

in the ranks; wherefore his standing army was at a standstill.  The

Marquis of Ararat, minister of the navy, made a similar complaint.  He

said he was willing to steer the whale-boat himself, but he must have

somebody to man her.



The emperor did the best he could in the circumstances: he took all the

boys above the age of ten years away from their mothers, and pressed them

into the army, thus constructing a corps of seventeen privates, officered

by one lieutenant-general and two major-generals.  This pleased the

minister of war, but procured the enmity of all the mothers in the land;

for they said their precious ones must now find bloody graves in the

fields of war, and he would be answerable for it.  Some of the more

heartbroken and unappeasable among them lay constantly wait for the

emperor and threw yams at him, unmindful of the body-guard.



On account of the extreme scarcity of material, it was found necessary to

require the Duke of Bethany postmaster-general, to pull stroke-oar in the

navy and thus sit in the rear of a noble of lower degree namely, Viscount

Canaan, lord justice of the common pleas.  This turned the Duke of

Bethany into tolerably open malcontent and a secret conspirator--a thing

which the emperor foresaw, but could not help.



Things went from bad to worse.  The emperor raised Nancy Peters to the

peerage on one day, and married her the next, notwithstanding, for

reasons of state, the cabinet had strenuously advised him to marry

Emmeline, eldest daughter of the Archbishop of Bethlehem.  This caused

trouble in a powerful quarter--the church.  The new empress secured the

support and friendship of two-thirds of the thirty-six grown women in the

nation by absorbing them into her court as maids of honor; but this made

deadly enemies of the remaining twelve.  The families of the maids of

honor soon began to rebel, because there was nobody at home to keep

house.  The twelve snubbed women refused to enter the imperial kitchen as

servants; so the empress had to require the Countess of Jericho and other

great court dames to fetch water, sweep the palace, and perform other

menial and equally distasteful services.  This made bad blood in that

department.



Everybody fell to complaining that the taxes levied for the support of

the army, the navy, and the rest of the imperial establishment were

intolerably burdensome, and were reducing the nation to beggary.  The

emperor's reply--"Look--Look at Germany; look at Italy.  Are you better

than they? and haven't you unification?"---did not satisfy them.  They

said, "People can't eat unification, and we are starving.  Agriculture

has ceased.  Everybody is in the army, everybody is in the navy,

everybody is in the public service, standing around in a uniform, with

nothing whatever to do, nothing to eat, and nobody to till the fields--"



"Look at Germany; look at Italy.  It is the same there.  Such is

unification, and there's no other way to get it--no other way to keep it

after you've got it," said the poor emperor always.



But the grumblers only replied, "We can't stand the taxes--we can't stand

them."



Now right on top of this the cabinet reported a national debt amounting

to upward of forty-five dollars--half a dollar to every individual in the

nation.  And they proposed to fund something.  They had heard that this

was always done in such emergencies.  They proposed duties on exports;

also on imports.  And they wanted to issue bonds; also paper money,

redeemable in yams and cabbages in fifty years.  They said the pay of the

army and of the navy and of the whole governmental machine was far in

arrears, and unless something was done, and done immediately, national

bankruptcy must ensue, and possibly insurrection and revolution.  The

emperor at once resolved upon a high-handed measure, and one of a nature

never before heard of in Pitcairn's Island.  He went in state to the

church on Sunday morning, with the army at his back, and commanded the

minister of the treasury to take up a collection.



That was the feather that broke the camel's back.  First one citizen, and

then another, rose and refused to submit to this unheard-of outrage

--and each refusal was followed by the immediate confiscation of the

malcontent's property.  This vigor soon stopped the refusals, and the

collection proceeded amid a sullen and ominous silence.  As the emperor

withdrew with the troops, he said, "I will teach you who is master here."

Several persons shouted, "Down with unification!"  They were at once

arrested and torn from the arms of their weeping friends by the soldiery.



But in the mean time, as any prophet might have foreseen, a Social

Democrat had been developed.  As the emperor stepped into the gilded

imperial wheelbarrow at the church door, the social democrat stabbed at

him fifteen or sixteen times with a harpoon, but fortunately with such a

peculiarly social democratic unprecision of aim as to do no damage.



That very night the convulsion came.  The nation rose as one man--though

forty-nine of the revolutionists were of the other sex.  The infantry

threw down their pitchforks; the artillery cast aside their cocoanuts;

the navy revolted; the emperor was seized, and bound hand and foot in his

palace.  He was very much depressed.  He said:



"I freed you from a grinding tyranny; I lifted yon up out of your

degradation, and made you a nation among nations; I gave you a strong,

compact, centralized government; and, more than all, I gave you the

blessing of blessings--unification.  I have done all this, and my reward

is hatred, insult, and these bonds.  Take me; do with me as you will.

I here resign my crown and all my dignities, and gladly do I release

myself from their too heavy burden.  For your sake I took them up; for

your sake I lay them down.  The imperial jewel is no more; now bruise and

defile as ye will the useless setting."



By a unanimous voice the people condemned the ex-emperor and the social

democrat to perpetual banishment from church services, or to perpetual

labor as galley-slaves in the whale-boat--whichever they might prefer.

The next day the nation assembled again, and rehoisted the British flag,

reinstated the British tyranny, reduced the nobility to the condition of

commoners again, and then straightway turned their diligent attention to

the weeding of the ruined and neglected yam patches, and the

rehabilitation of the old useful industries and the old healing and

solacing pieties.  The ex-emperor restored the lost trespass law, and

explained that he had stolen it not to injure any one, but to further his

political projects.  Therefore the nation gave the late chief magistrate

his office again, and also his alienated Property.



Upon reflection, the ex-emperor and the social democrat chose perpetual

banishment from religious services in preference to perpetual labor as

galley slaves "with perpetual religious services," as they phrased it;

wherefore the people believed that the poor fellows' troubles had

unseated their reason, and so they judged it best to confine them for the

present.  Which they did.



Such is the history of Pitcairn's "doubtful acquisition."













THE CANVASSER'S TALE



Poor, sad-eyed stranger!  There was that about his humble mien, his tired

look, his decayed-gentility clothes, that almost reached the mustard,

seed of charity that still remained, remote and lonely, in the empty

vastness of my heart, notwithstanding I observed a portfolio under his

arm, and said to myself, Behold, Providence hath delivered his servant

into the hands of another canvasser.



Well, these people always get one interested.  Before I well knew how it

came about, this one was telling me his history, and I was all attention

and sympathy.  He told it something like this:



My parents died, alas, when I was a little, sinless child.  My uncle

Ithuriel took me to his heart and reared me as his own.  He was my only

relative in the wide world; but he was good and rich and generous.  He

reared me in the lap of luxury.  I knew no want that money could satisfy.



In the fullness of time I was graduated, and went with two of my

servants--my chamberlain and my valet--to travel in foreign countries.

During four years I flitted upon careless wing amid the beauteous gardens

of the distant strand, if you will permit this form of speech in one

whose tongue was ever attuned to poesy; and indeed I so speak with

confidence, as one unto his kind, for I perceive by your eyes that you

too, sir, are gifted with the divine inflation.  In those far lands I

reveled in the ambrosial food that fructifies the soul, the mind, the

heart.  But of all things, that which most appealed to my inborn esthetic

taste was the prevailing custom there, among the rich, of making

collections of elegant and costly rarities, dainty objets de vertu, and

in an evil hour I tried to uplift my uncle Ithuriel to a plane of

sympathy with this exquisite employment.



I wrote and told him of one gentleman's vast collection of shells;

another's noble collection of meerschaum pipes; another's elevating and

refining collection of undecipherable autographs; another's priceless

collection of old china; another's enchanting collection of postage-

stamps--and so forth and so on.  Soon my letters yielded fruit.  My uncle

began to look about for something to make a collection of.  You may know,

perhaps, how fleetly a taste like this dilates.  His soon became a raging

fever, though I knew it not.  He began to neglect his great pork

business; presently he wholly retired and turned an elegant leisure into

a rabid search for curious things.  His wealth was vast, and he spared it

not.  First he tried cow-bells.  He made a collection which filled five

large salons, and comprehended all the different sorts of cow-bells that

ever had been contrived, save one.  That one--an antique, and the only

specimen extant--was possessed by another collector.  My uncle offered

enormous sums for it, but the gentleman would not sell.  Doubtless you

know what necessarily resulted.  A true collector attaches no value to

a collection that is not complete.  His great heart breaks, he sells his

hoard, he turns his mind to some field that seems unoccupied.



Thus did my uncle.  He next tried brickbats.  After piling up a vast and

intensely interesting collection, the former difficulty supervened; his

great heart broke again; he sold out his soul's idol to the retired

brewer who possessed the missing brick.  Then he tried flint hatchets and

other implements of Primeval Man, but by and by discovered that the

factory where they were made was supplying other collectors as well as

himself.  He tried Aztec inscriptions and stuffed whales--another

failure, after incredible labor and expense.  When his collection seemed

at last perfect, a stuffed whale arrived from Greenland and an Aztec

inscription from the Cundurango regions of Central America that made all

former specimens insignificant.  My uncle hastened to secure these noble

gems.  He got the stuffed whale, but another collector got the

inscription.  A real Cundurango, as possibly you know, is a possession of

such supreme value that, when once a collector gets it, he will rather

part with his family than with it.  So my uncle sold out, and saw his

darlings go forth, never more to return; and his coal-black hair turned

white as snow in a single night.



Now he waited, and thought.  He knew another disappointment might kill

him.  He was resolved that he would choose things next time that no other

man was collecting.  He carefully made up his mind, and once more entered

the field-this time to make a collection of echoes.



"Of what?" said I.



Echoes, sir.  His first purchase was an echo in Georgia that repeated

four times; his next was a six-repeater in Maryland; his next was a

thirteen-repeater in Maine; his next was a nine-repeater in Kansas; his

next was a twelve-repeater in Tennessee, which he got cheap, so to speak,

because it was out of repair, a portion of the crag which reflected it

having tumbled down.  He believed he could repair it at a cost of a few

thousand dollars, and, by increasing the elevation with masonry, treble

the repeating capacity; but the architect who undertook the job had never

built an echo before, and so he utterly spoiled this one.  Before he

meddled with it, it used to talk back like a mother-in-law, but now it

was only fit for the deaf-and-dumb asylum.  Well, next he bought a lot of

cheap little double-barreled echoes, scattered around over various states

and territories; he got them at twenty per cent. off by taking the lot.

Next he bought a perfect Gatling-gun of an echo in Oregon, and it cost a

fortune, I can tell you.  You may know, sir, that in the echo market the

scale of prices is cumulative, like the carat-scale in diamonds; in fact,

the same phraseology is used.  A single-carat echo is worth but ten

dollars over and above the value of the land it is on; a two-carat or

double-barreled echo is worth thirty dollars; a five-carat is worth nine

hundred and fifty; a ten-carat is worth thirteen thousand.  My uncle's

Oregon-echo, which he called the Great Pitt Echo, was a twenty-two carat

gem, and cost two hundred and sixteen thousand dollars--they threw the

land in, for it was four hundred miles from a settlement.



Well, in the mean time my path was a path of roses.  I was the accepted

suitor of the only and lovely daughter of an English earl, and was

beloved to distraction.  In that dear presence I swam in seas of bliss.

The family were content, for it was known that I was sole heir to an

uncle held to be worth five millions of dollars.  However, none of us

knew that my uncle had become a collector, at least in anything more than

a small way, for esthetic amusement.



Now gathered the clouds above my unconscious head.  That divine echo,

since known throughout the world as the Great Koh-i-noor, or Mountain of

Repetitions, was discovered.  It was a sixty-five carat gem.  You could

utter a word and it would talk back at you for fifteen minutes, when the

day was otherwise quiet.  But behold, another fact came to light at the

same time: another echo-collector was in the field.  The two rushed to

make the peerless purchase.  The property consisted of a couple of small

hills with a shallow swale between, out yonder among the back settlements

of New York State.  Both men arrived on the ground at the same time, and

neither knew the other was there.  The echo was not all owned by one man;

a person by the name of Williamson Bolivar Jarvis owned the east hill,

and a person by the name of Harbison J. Bledso owned the west hill; the

swale between was the dividing-line.  So while my uncle was buying

Jarvis's hill for three million two hundred and eighty-five thousand

dollars, the other party was buying Bledso's hill for a shade over three

million.



Now, do you perceive the natural result?  Why, the noblest collection of

echoes on earth was forever and ever incomplete, since it possessed but

the one-half of the king echo of the universe.  Neither man was content

with this divided ownership, yet neither would sell to the other.  There

were jawings, bickerings, heart-burnings.  And at last that other

collector, with a malignity which only a collector can ever feel toward a

man and a brother, proceeded to cut down his hill!



You see, as long as he could not have the echo, he was resolved that

nobody should have it.  He would remove his hill, and then there would be

nothing to reflect my uncle's echo.  My uncle remonstrated with him, but

the man said, "I own one end of this echo; I choose to kill my end; you

must take care of your own end yourself."



Well, my uncle got an injunction put an him.  The other man appealed and

fought it in a higher court.  They carried it on up, clear to the Supreme

Court of the United States.  It made no end of trouble there.  Two of the

judges believed that an echo was personal property, because it was

impalpable to sight and touch, and yet was purchasable, salable, and

consequently taxable; two others believed that an echo was real estate,

because it was manifestly attached to the land, and was not removable

from place to place; other of the judges contended that an echo was not

property at all.



It was finally decided that the echo was property; that the hills were

property; that the two men were separate and independent owners of the

two hills, but tenants in common in the echo; therefore defendant was at

full liberty to cut down his hill, since it belonged solely to him, but

must give bonds in three million dollars as indemnity for damages which

might result to my uncle's half of the echo.  This decision also debarred

my uncle from using defendant's hill to reflect his part of the echo,

without defendant's consent; he must use only his own hill; if his part

of the echo would not go, under these circumstances, it was sad, of

course, but the court could find no remedy.  The court also debarred

defendant from using my uncle's hill to reflect his end of the echo,

without consent.  You see the grand result!  Neither man would give

consent, and so that astonishing and most noble echo had to cease from

its great powers; and since that day that magnificent property is tied up

and unsalable.



A week before my wedding-day, while I was still swimming in bliss and the

nobility were gathering from far and near to honor our espousals, came

news of my uncle's death, and also a copy of his will, making me his sole

heir.  He was gone; alas, my dear benefactor was no more.  The thought

surcharges my heart even at this remote day.  I handed the will to the

earl; I could not read it for the blinding tears.  The earl read it; then

he sternly said, "Sir, do you call this wealth?--but doubtless you do in

your inflated country.  Sir, you are left sole heir to a vast collection

of echoes--if a thing can be called a collection that is scattered far

and wide over the huge length and breadth of the American continent; sir,

this is not all; you are head and ears in debt; there is not an echo in

the lot but has a mortgage on it; sir, I am not a hard man, but I must

look to my child's interest; if you had but one echo which you could

honestly call your own, if you had but one echo which was free from

incumbrance, so that you could retire to it with my child, and by humble,

painstaking industry cultivate and improve it, and thus wrest from it a

maintenance, I would not say you nay; but I cannot marry my child to a

beggar.  Leave his side, my darling; go, sir, take your mortgage-ridden

echoes and quit my sight forever."



My noble Celestine clung to me in tears, with loving arms, and swore she

would willingly, nay gladly, marry me, though I had not an echo in the

world.  But it could not be.  We were torn asunder, she to pine and die

within the twelvemonth, I to toil life's long journey sad and alone,

praying daily, hourly, for that release which shall join us together

again in that dear realm where the wicked cease from troubling and the

weary are at rest.  Now, sir, if you will be so kind as to look at these

maps and plans in my portfolio, I am sure I can sell you an echo for less

money than any man in the trade.  Now this one, which cost my uncle ten

dollars, thirty years ago, and is one of the sweetest things in Texas, I

will let you have for--



"Let me interrupt you," I said.  "My friend, I have not had a moment's

respite from canvassers this day.  I have bought a sewing-machine which I

did not want; I have bought a map which is mistaken in all its details;

I have bought a clock which will not go; I have bought a moth poison

which the moths prefer to any other beverage; I have bought no end of

useless inventions, and now I have had enough of this foolishness.

I would not have one of your echoes if you were even to give it to me.

I would not let it stay on the place.  I always hate a man that tries to

sell me echoes.  You see this gun?  Now take your collection and move on;

let us not have bloodshed."



But he only smiled a sad, sweet smile, and got out some more diagrams.

You know the result perfectly well, because you know that when you have

once opened the door to a canvasser, the trouble is done and you have got

to suffer defeat.



I compromised with this man at the end of an intolerable hour.  I bought

two double-barreled echoes in good condition, and he threw in another,

which he said was not salable because it only spoke German.  He said,

"She was a perfect polyglot once, but somehow her palate got down."













AN ENCOUNTER WITH AN INTERVIEWER



The nervous, dapper, "peart" young man took the chair I offered him, and

said he was connected with the Daily Thunderstorm, and added:



"Hoping it's no harm, I've come to interview you."



"Come to what?"



"Interview you."



"Ah!  I see.  Yes--yes.  Um!  Yes--yes."



I was not feeling bright that morning.  Indeed, my powers seemed a bit

under a cloud.  However, I went to the bookcase, and when I had been

looking six or seven minutes I found I was obliged to refer to the young

man.  I said:



"How do you spell it?"



"Spell what?"



"Interview."



"Oh, my goodness! what do you want to spell it for?"



"I don't want to spell it; I want to see what it means."



"Well, this is astonishing, I must say.  I can tell you what it means, if

you--if you--"



"Oh, all right!  That will answer, and much obliged to you, too."



"In, in, ter, ter, inter--"



"Then you spell it with an h"



Why certainly!"



"Oh, that is what took me so long."



"Why, my dear sir, what did you propose to spell it with?"



"Well, I--I--hardly know.  I had the Unabridged, and I was ciphering

around in the back end, hoping I might tree her among the pictures.

But it's a very old edition."



"Why, my friend, they wouldn't have a picture of it in even the latest

e---  My dear sir, I beg your pardon, I mean no harm in the world, but you

do not look as--as--intelligent as I had expected you would.  No harm--

I mean no harm at all."



"Oh, don't mention it!  It has often been said, and by people who would

not flatter and who could have no inducement to flatter, that I am quite

remarkable in that way.  Yes--yes; they always speak of it with rapture."



"I can easily imagine it.  But about this interview.  You know it is the

custom, now, to interview any man who has become notorious."



"Indeed, I had not heard of it before.  It must be very interesting.

What do you do it with?"



"Ah, well--well--well--this is disheartening.  It ought to be done with a

club in some cases; but customarily it consists in the interviewer asking

questions and the interviewed answering them.  It is all the rage now.

Will you let me ask you certain questions calculated to bring out the

salient points of your public and private history?"



"Oh, with pleasure--with pleasure.  I have a very bad memory, but I hope

you will not mind that.  That is to say, it is an irregular memory--

singularly irregular.  Sometimes it goes in a gallop, and then again it

will be as much as a fortnight passing a given point.  This is a great

grief to me."



"Oh, it is no matter, so you will try to do the best you can."



"I will.  I will put my whole mind on it."



"Thanks.  Are you ready to begin?"



"Ready."



Q.  How old are you?



A.  Nineteen, in June.



Q.  Indeed.  I would have taken you to be thirty-five or six.  Where were

you born?



A.  In Missouri.



Q.  When did you begin to write?



A.  In 1836.



Q.  Why, how could that be, if you are only nineteen now?



A.  I don't know.  It does seem curious, somehow.



Q.  It does, indeed.  Whom do you consider the most remarkable man you

ever met?



A.  Aaron Burr.



Q.  But you never could have met Aaron Burr, if you are only nineteen

years!



A.  Now, if you know more about me than I do, what do you ask me for?



Q.  Well, it was only a suggestion; nothing more.  How did you happen to

meet Burr?



A.  Well, I happened to be at his funeral one day, and he asked me to

make less noise, and--



Q.  But, good heavens!  if you were at his funeral, he must have been

dead, and if he was dead how could he care whether you made a noise or

not?



A.  I don't know.  He was always a particular kind of a man that way.



Q.  Still, I don't understand it at all, You say he spoke to you, and

that he was dead.



A.  I didn't say he was dead.



Q.  But wasn't he dead?



A.  Well, some said he was, some said he wasn't.



Q.  What did you think?



A.  Oh, it was none of my business!  It wasn't any of my funeral.



Q.  Did you--However, we can never get this matter straight.  Let me ask

about something else.  What was the date of your birth?



A.  Monday, October 31, 1693.



Q.  What!  Impossible!  That would make you a hundred and eighty years

old.  How do you account for that?



A.  I don't account for it at all.



Q.  But you said at first you were only nineteen, and now you make

yourself out to be one hundred and eighty.  It is an awful discrepancy.



A.  Why, have you noticed that?  (Shaking hands.) Many a time it has

seemed to me like a discrepancy, but somehow I couldn't make up my mind.

How quick you notice a thing!



Q.  Thank you for the compliment, as far as it goes.  Had you, or have

you, any brothers or sisters?



A.  Eh!  I--I--I think so--yes--but I don't remember.



Q.  Well, that is the most extraordinary statement I ever heard!



A.  Why, what makes you think that?



Q.  How could I think otherwise?  Why, look here!  Who is this a picture

of on the wall?  Isn't that a brother of yours?



A.  Oh, yes, yes, yes!  Now you remind me of it; that was a brother of

mine.  That's William--Bill we called him.  Poor old Bill!



Q.  Why?  Is he dead, then?



A.  Ah!  well, I suppose so.  We never could tell.  There was a great

mystery about it.



Q.  That is sad, very sad.  He disappeared, then?



A.  Well, yes, in a sort of general way.  We buried him.



Q.  Buried him!  Buried him, without knowing whether he was dead or not?



A.  Oh, no!  Not that.  He was dead enough.



Q.  Well, I confess that I can't understand this.  If you buried him, and

you knew he was dead



A.  No!  no!  We only thought he was.



Q.  Oh, I see!  He came to life again?



A.  I bet he didn't.



Q.  Well, I never heard anything like this.  Somebody was dead.  Somebody

was buried.  Now, where was the mystery?



A.  Ah!  that's just it!  That's it exactly.  You see, we were twins--

defunct--and I--and we got mixed in the bathtub when we were only two

weeks old, and one of us was drowned.  But we didn't know which.  Some

think it was Bill.  Some think it was me.



Q.  Well, that is remarkable.  What do you think?



A.  Goodness knows!  I would give whole worlds to know.  This solemn,

this awful mystery has cast a gloom over my whole life.  But I will tell

you a secret now, which I never have revealed to any creature before.

One of us had a peculiar mark--a large mole on the back of his left hand;

that was me.  That child was the one that was drowned!



Q.  Very well, then, I don't see that there is any mystery about it,

after all.



A.  You don't?  Well, I do.  Anyway, I don't see how they could ever have

been such a blundering lot as to go and bury the wrong child.  But, 'sh!

--don't mention it where the family can hear of it.  Heaven knows they

have heartbreaking troubles enough without adding this.



Q.  Well, I believe I have got material enough for the present, and I am

very much obliged to you for the pains you have taken.  But I was a good

deal interested in that account of Aaron Burr's funeral.  Would you mind

telling me what particular circumstance it was that made you think Burr

was such a remarkable man?



A.  Oh!  it was a mere trifle!  Not one man in fifty would have noticed

it at all.  When the sermon was over, and the procession all ready to

start for the cemetery, and the body all arranged nice in the hearse, he

said he wanted to take a last look at the scenery, and so he got up and

rode with the driver.



Then the young man reverently withdrew.  He was very pleasant company,

and I was sorry to see him go.













PARIS NOTES



--[Crowded out of "A Tramp Abroad" to make room for more vital

statistics.--M. T.]



The Parisian travels but little, he knows no language but his own, reads

no literature but his own, and consequently he is pretty narrow and

pretty self-sufficient.  However, let us not be too sweeping; there are

Frenchmen who know languages not their own: these are the waiters.  Among

the rest, they know English; that is, they know it on the European plan--

which is to say, they can speak it, but can't understand it.  They easily

make themselves understood, but it is next to impossible to word an

English sentence in such away as to enable them to comprehend it.  They

think they comprehend it; they pretend they do; but they don't.  Here is

a conversation which I had with one of these beings; I wrote it down at

the time, in order to have it exactly correct.



I.  These are fine oranges.  Where are they grown?



He.  More?  Yes, I will bring them.



I.  No, do not bring any more; I only want to know where they are from

where they are raised.



He.  Yes?  (with imperturbable mien and rising inflection.)



I.  Yes.  Can you tell me what country they are from?



He.  Yes?  (blandly, with rising inflection.)



I. (disheartened).  They are very nice.



He.  Good night.  (Bows, and retires, quite satisfied with himself.)



That young man could have become a good English scholar by taking the

right sort of pains, but he was French, and wouldn't do that.  How

different is the case with our people; they utilize every means that

offers.  There are some alleged French Protestants in Paris, and they

built a nice little church on one of the great avenues that lead away

from the Arch of Triumph, and proposed to listen to the correct thing,

preached in the correct way, there, in their precious French tongue, and

be happy.  But their little game does not succeed.  Our people are always

there ahead of them Sundays, and take up all the room.  When the minister

gets up to preach, he finds his house full of devout foreigners, each

ready and waiting, with his little book in his hand--a morocco-bound

Testament, apparently.  But only apparently; it is Mr. Bellows's

admirable and exhaustive little French-English dictionary, which in look

and binding and size is just like a Testament and those, people are there

to study French.  The building has been nicknamed "The Church of the

Gratis French Lesson."



These students probably acquire more language than general information,

for I am told that a French sermon is like a French speech--it never

names a historical event, but only the date of it; if you are not up in

dates, you get left.  A French speech is something like this:



     Comrades, citizens, brothers, noble parts of the only sublime and

     perfect nation, let us not forget that the 21st January cast off our

     chains; that the 10th August relieved us of the shameful presence of

     foreign spies; that the 5th September was its own justification

     before heaven and humanity; that the 18th Brumaire contained the

     seeds of its own punishment; that the 14th July was the mighty voice

     of liberty proclaiming the resurrection, the new day, and inviting

     the oppressed peoples of the earth to look upon the divine face of

     France and live; and let us here record our everlasting curse

     against the man of the 2d December, and declare in thunder tones,

     the native tones of France, that but for him there had been no 17th

     March in history, no 12th October, no 19th January, no 22d April,

     no 16th November, no 30th September, no 2d July, no 14th February,

     no 29th June, no 15th August, no 31st May--that but for him, France

     the pure, the grand, the peerless, had had a serene and vacant

     almanac today!



I have heard of one French sermon which closed in this odd yet eloquent

way:



     My hearers, we have sad cause to remember the man of the 13th

     January.  The results of the vast crime of the 13th January have

     been in just proportion to the magnitude of the set itself.  But for

     it there had been no 30 November--sorrowful spectacle!  The grisly

     deed of the 16th June had not been done but for it, nor had the man

     of the 16th June known existence; to it alone the 3d September was

     due, also the fatal 12th October.  Shall we, then, be grateful for

     the 13th January, with its freight of death for you and me and all

     that breathe?  Yes, my friends, for it gave us also that which had

     never come but for it, and it atone--the blessed 25th December.



It may be well enough to explain, though in the case of many of my

readers this will hardly be necessary.  The man of the 13th January is

Adam; the crime of that date was the eating of the apple; the sorrowful

spectacle of the 30th November was the expulsion from Eden; the grisly

deed of the 16th June was the murder of Abel; the act of the 3d September

was the beginning of the journey to the land of Nod; the 12th day of

October, the last mountain-tops disappeared under the flood.  When you go

to church in France, you want to take your almanac with you--annotated.













LEGEND OF SAGENFELD, IN GERMANY



[Left out of "A Tramp Abroad" because its authenticity seemed doubtful,

and could not at that time be proved.--M. T.]



More than a thousand years ago this small district was a kingdom

--a little bit of a kingdom, a sort of dainty little toy kingdom, as one

might say.  It was far removed from the jealousies, strifes, and turmoils

of that old warlike day, and so its life was a simple life, its people a

gentle and guileless race; it lay always in a deep dream of peace, a soft

Sabbath tranquillity; there was no malice, there was no envy, there was

no ambition, consequently there were no heart-burnings, there was no

unhappiness in the land.



In the course of time the old king died and his little son Hubert came to

the throne.  The people's love for him grew daily; he was so good and so

pure and so noble, that by and by his love became a passion, almost a

worship.  Now at his birth the soothsayers had diligently studied the

stars and found something written in that shining book to this effect:



     In Hubert's fourteenth year a pregnant event will happen; the animal

     whose singing shall sound sweetest in Hubert's ear shall save

     Hubert's life.  So long as the king and the nation shall honor this

     animal's race for this good deed, the ancient dynasty shall not fail

     of an heir, nor the nation know war or pestilence or poverty.  But

     beware an erring choice!



All through the king's thirteenth year but one thing was talked of by the

soothsayers, the statesmen, the little parliament, and the general

people.  That one thing was this: How is the last sentence of the

prophecy to be understood?  What goes before seems to mean that the

saving animal will choose itself at the proper time; but the closing

sentence seems to mean that the king must choose beforehand, and say what

singer among the animals pleases him best, and that if he choose wisely

the chosen animal will save his life, his dynasty, his people, but that

if he should make "an erring choice"--beware!



By the end of the year there were as many opinions about this matter as

there had been in the beginning; but a majority of the wise and the

simple were agreed that the safest plan would be for the little king to

make choice beforehand, and the earlier the better.  So an edict was sent

forth commanding all persons who owned singing creatures to bring them to

the great hall of the palace in the morning of the first day of the new

year.  This command was obeyed.  When everything was in readiness for the

trial, the king made his solemn entry with the great officers of the

crown, all clothed in their robes of state.  The king mounted his golden

throne and prepared to give judgment.  But he presently said:



"These creatures all sing at once; the noise is unendurable; no one can

choose in such a turmoil.  Take them all away, and bring back one at a

time."



This was done.  One sweet warbler after another charmed the young king's

ear and was removed to make way for another candidate.  The precious

minutes slipped by; among so many bewitching songsters he found it hard

to choose, and all the harder because the promised penalty for an error

was so terrible that it unsettled his judgment and made him afraid to

trust his own ears.  He grew nervous and his face showed distress.  His

ministers saw this, for they never took their eyes from him a moment.

Now they began to say in their hearts:



"He has lost courage--the cool head is gone--he will err--he and his

dynasty and his people are doomed!"



At the end of an hour the king sat silent awhile, and then said:



"Bring back the linnet."



The linnet trilled forth her jubilant music.  In the midst of it the king

was about to uplift his scepter in sign of choice, but checked himself

and said:



"But let us be sure.  Bring back the thrush; let them sing together."



The thrush was brought, and the two birds poured out their marvels of

song together.  The king wavered, then his inclination began to settle

and strengthen--one could see it in his countenance.  Hope budded in the

hearts of the old ministers, their pulses began to beat quicker, the

scepter began to rise slowly, when:  There was a hideous interruption!

It was a sound like this--just at the door:



"Waw .  .  .  he!  waw .  .  .  he!  waw-he!-waw

he!-waw-he!"



Everybody was sorely startled--and enraged at himself for showing it.



The next instant the dearest, sweetest, prettiest little peasant-maid of

nine years came tripping in, her brown eyes glowing with childish

eagerness; but when she saw that august company and those angry faces she

stopped and hung her head and put her poor coarse apron to her eyes.

Nobody gave her welcome, none pitied her.  Presently she looked up

timidly through her tears, and said:



"My lord the king, I pray you pardon me, for I meant no wrong.  I have no

father and no mother, but I have a goat and a donkey, and they are all in

all to me.  My goat gives me the sweetest milk, and when my dear good

donkey brays it seems to me there is no music like to it.  So when my

lord the king's jester said the sweetest singer among all the animals

should save the crown and nation, and moved me to bring him here--"



All the court burst into a rude laugh, and the child fled away crying,

without trying to finish her speech.  The chief minister gave a private

order that she and her disastrous donkey be flogged beyond the precincts

of the palace and commanded to come within them no more.



Then the trial of the birds was resumed.  The two birds sang their best,

but the scepter lay motionless in the king's hand.  Hope died slowly out

in the breasts of all.  An hour went by; two hours, still no decision.

The day waned to its close, and the waiting multitudes outside the palace

grew crazed with anxiety and apprehension.  The twilight came on, the

shadows fell deeper and deeper.  The king and his court could no longer

see each other's faces.  No one spoke--none called for lights.  The great

trial had been made; it had failed; each and all wished to hide their

faces from the light and cover up their deep trouble in their own hearts.



Finally-hark!  A rich, full strain of the divinest melody streamed forth

from a remote part of the hall the nightingale's voice!



"Up!" shouted the king, "let all the bells make proclamation to the

people, for the choice is made and we have not erred.  King, dynasty,

and nation are saved.  From henceforth let the nightingale be honored

throughout the land forever.  And publish it among all the people that

whosoever shall insult a nightingale, or injure it, shall suffer death.

The king hath spoken."



All that little world was drunk with joy.  The castle and the city blazed

with bonfires all night long, the people danced and drank and sang; and

the triumphant clamor of the bells never ceased.



From that day the nightingale was a sacred bird.  Its song was heard in

every house; the poets wrote its praises; the painters painted it; its

sculptured image adorned every arch and turret and fountain and public

building.  It was even taken into the king's councils; and no grave

matter of state was decided until the soothsayers had laid the thing

before the state nightingale and translated to the ministry what it was

that the bird had sung about it.





II



The young king was very fond of the chase.  When the summer was come he

rode forth with hawk and hound, one day, in a brilliant company of his

nobles.  He got separated from them by and by, in a great forest, and

took what he imagined a neat cut, to find them again; but it was a

mistake.  He rode on and on, hopefully at first, but with sinking courage

finally.  Twilight came on, and still he was plunging through a lonely

and unknown land.  Then came a catastrophe.  In the dim light he forced

his horse through a tangled thicket overhanging a steep and rocky

declivity.  When horse and rider reached the bottom, the former had a

broken neck and the latter a broken leg.  The poor little king lay there

suffering agonies of pain, and each hour seemed a long month to him.

He kept his ear strained to heat any sound that might promise hope of

rescue; but he heard no voice, no sound of horn or bay of hound.  So at

last he gave up all hope, and said, "Let death come, four come it must."



Just then the deep, sweet song of a nightingale swept across the still

wastes of the night.



"Saved!" the king said.  "Saved!  It is the sacred bird, and the prophecy

is come true.  The gods themselves protected me from error in the

choice."



He could hardly contain his joy; he could not word his gratitude.  Every

few moments, now he thought he caught the sound of approaching succor.

But each time it was a disappointment; no succor came.  The dull hours

drifted on.  Still no help came--but still the sacred bird sang on.  He

began to have misgivings about his choice, but he stifled them.  Toward

dawn the bird ceased.  The morning came, and with it thirst and hunger;

but no succor.  The day waxed and waned.  At last the king cursed the

nightingale.



Immediately the song of the thrush came from out the wood.  The king said

in his heart, "This was the true-bird--my choice was false--succor will

come now."



But it did not come.  Then he lay many hours insensible.  When he came to

himself, a linnet was singing.  He listened-with apathy.  His faith was

gone.  "These birds," he said, "can bring no help; I and my house and my

people are doomed."  He turned him about to die; for he was grown very

feeble from hunger and thirst and suffering, and felt that his end was

near.  In truth, he wanted to die, and be released from pain.  For long

hours he lay without thought or feeling or motion.  Then his senses

returned.  The dawn of the third morning was breaking.  Ah, the world

seemed very beautiful to those worn eyes.  Suddenly a great longing to

live rose up in the lad's heart, and from his soul welled a deep and

fervent prayer that Heaven would have mercy upon him and let him see his

home and his friends once more.  In that instant a soft, a faint, a far-

off sound, but oh, how inexpressibly sweet to his waiting ear, came

floating out of the distance:



"Waw .  .  .  he!  waw .  .  .  he!  waw-he!--waw-he!--waw-he!"



"That, oh, that song is sweeter, a thousand times sweeter than the voice

of the nightingale, thrush, or linnet, for it brings not mere hope, but

certainty of succor; and now, indeed, am I saved!  The sacred singer has

chosen itself, as the oracle intended; the prophecy is fulfilled, and my

life, my house, and my people are redeemed.  The ass shall be sacred from

this day!"



The divine music grew nearer and nearer, stronger and stronger and ever

sweeter and sweeter to the perishing sufferer's ear.  Down the declivity

the docile little donkey wandered, cropping herbage and singing as he

went; and when at last he saw the dead horse and the wounded king, he

came and snuffed at them with simple and marveling curiosity.  The king

petted him, and he knelt down as had been his wont when his little

mistress desired to mount.  With great labor and pain the lad drew

himself upon the creature's back, and held himself there by aid of the

generous ears.  The ass went singing forth from the place and carried the

king to the little peasant-maid's hut.  She gave him her pallet for a

bed, refreshed him with goat's milk, and then flew to tell the great news

to the first scouting-party of searchers she might meet.



The king got well.  His first act was to proclaim the sacredness and

inviolability of the ass; his second was to add this particular ass to

his cabinet and make him chief minister of the crown; his third was to

have all the statues and effigies of nightingales throughout his kingdom

destroyed, and replaced by statues and effigies of the sacred donkey;

and, his fourth was to announce that when the little peasant maid should

reach her fifteenth year he would make her his queen and he kept his

word.



Such is the legend.  This explains why the moldering image of the ass

adorns all these old crumbling walls and arches; and it explains why,

during many centuries, an ass was always the chief minister in that royal

cabinet, just as is still the case in most cabinets to this day; and it

also explains why, in that little kingdom, during many centuries, all

great poems, all great speeches, all great books, all public solemnities,

and all royal proclamations, always began with these stirring words:



"Waw .  .  .  he!  waw .  .  , he!--waw he!  Waw-he!"













SPEECH ON THE BABIES



AT THE BANQUET, IN CHICAGO, GIVEN BY THE ARMY OF THE TENNESSEE TO THEIR

FIRST COMMANDER, GENERAL U. S. GRANT, NOVEMBER, 1879



     The fifteenth regular toast was "The Babies--as they comfort us in

     our sorrows, let us not forget them in our festivities."



I like that.  We have not all had the good for tune to be ladies.  We

have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast

works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.  It is a shame that

for a thousand years the world's banquets have utterly ignored the baby,

as if he didn't amount to anything.  If you will stop and think a minute

--if you will go back fifty or one hundred years to your early married

life and recontemplate your first baby--you will remember that he

amounted to a great deal, and even something over.  You soldiers all know

that when the little fellow arrived at family, headquarters you had to

hand in your resignation.  He took entire command.  You became his

lackey, his mere body servant, and you had to stand around, too.  He was

not a commander who made allowances far time, distance, weather, or

anything else.  You had to execute his order whether it was possible or

mot.  And there was only one form of marching in his manual of tactics,

and that was the double-quick.  He treated you with every sort of

insolence and disrespect, and the bravest of you didn't dare to say a

word.  You could face the death-storm at Donelson and Vicksburg, and give

back blow for blow; but when he clawed your whiskers, and pulled your

hair, and twisted your nose, you had to take it.  When the thunders of

war were sounding in your ears you set your faces toward the batteries,

and advanced with steady tread; but when he turned on the terrors of his

war-whoop you advanced in the other direction, and mighty glad of the

chance, too.  When he called for soothing-syrup, did you venture to throw

out any side remarks about certain services being unbecoming an officer

and a gentleman?  No.  You got up and got it.  When he ordered his pap-

bottle and it was not warm, did you talk back?  Not you.  You went to

work and warmed it.  You even descended so far in your menial office as

to take a suck at that warm, insipid stuff yourself, to see if it was

right--three parts water to one of milk, a touch of sugar to modify the

colic, and a drop of peppermint to kill those hiccoughs.  I can taste

that stuff yet.  And how many things you learned as you went along!

Sentimental young folks still take stock in that beautiful old saying

that when the baby smiles in his sleep, it is because the angels are

whispering to him.  Very pretty, but too thin--simply wind on the

stomach, my friends.  If the baby proposed to take a walk at his usual

hour, two o'clock in the morning, didn't you rise up promptly and remark,

with a mental addition which would not improve a Sunday-school book much,

that that was the very thing you were about to propose yourself?  Oh!

you were under good discipline, and as you went fluttering up and down

the room in your undress uniform, you not only prattled undignified baby-

talk, but even tuned up your martial voices and tried to sing!--" Rock-a-

by baby in the treetop," for instance.  What a spectacle for an Army of

the Tennessee!  And what an affliction for the neighbors, too; for it is

not everybody within a mile around that likes military music at three in

the morning:  And when you had been keeping this sort of thing up two or

three hours, and your little velvet-head intimated that nothing suited

him like exercise and noise, what did you do?  ["Go on!"] You simply went

on until you dropped in the last ditch.  The idea that a baby doesn't

amount to anything!  Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full

by itself.  One baby can furnish more business than you and your whole

Interior Department can attend to.  He is enterprising, irrepressible,

brimful of lawless activities.  Do what you please, you can't make him

stay on the reservation.  Sufficient unto the day is one baby.  As long

as you are in your right mind don't you ever pray for twins.  Twins

amount to a permanent riot.  And there ain't any real difference between

triplets and an insurrection.



Yes, it was high time for a toast-master to recognize the importance of

the babies.  Think what is in store for the present crop!  Fifty years

from now we shall all be dead, I trust, and then this flag, if it still

survive (and let us hope it may), will be floating over a Republic

numbering 200,000,000 souls, according to the settled laws of our

increase.  Our present schooner of State will have grown into a political

leviathan--a Great Eastern.  The cradled babies of to-day will be on

deck.  Let them be well trained, for we are going to leave a big contract

on their hands.  Among the three or four million cradles now rocking in

the land are some which this nation would preserve for ages as sacred

things, if we could know which ones they are.  In one of them cradles the

unconscious Farragut of the future is at this moment teething--think of

it!--and putting in a world of dead earnest, unarticulated, but perfectly

justifiable profanity over it, too.  In another the future renowned

astronomer is blinking at the shining Milky Way with but a languid

interest--poor little chap!--and wondering what has become of that other

one they call the wet-nurse.  In another the future great historian is

lying--and doubtless will continue to lie until his earthly mission is

ended.  In another the future President is busying himself with no

profounder problem of state than what the mischief has become of his hair

so early; and in a mighty array of other cradles there are now some

60,000 future office-seekers, getting ready to furnish him occasion to

grapple with that same old problem a second time.  And in still one more

cradle, somewhere under the flag, the future illustrious commander-in-

chief of the American armies is so little burdened with his approaching

grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole strategic mind

at this moment to trying to find out some way to get his big toe into his

mouth--an achievement which, meaning no disrespect, the illustrious guest

of this evening turned his entire attention to some fifty-six years ago;

and if the child is but a prophecy of the man, there are mighty few who

will doubt that he succeeded.













SPEECH ON THE WEATHER



AT THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY'S SEVENTY-FIRST ANNUAL DINNER, NEW YORK CITY



     The next toast was: "The Oldest Inhabitant--The Weather of New

     England."



                    Who can lose it and forget it?

                    Who can have it and regret it?



                    Be interposes 'twixt us Twain.

                                   Merchant of Venice.



     To this Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) replied as follows:--





I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in

New England but the weather.  I don't know who makes that, but I think it

must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk's factory who experiment and

learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted

to make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take

their custom elsewhere if they don't get it.  There is a sumptuous

variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger's

admiration--and regret.  The weather is always doing something there;

always attending strictly to business; always getting up new designs and

trying them on the people to see how they will go.  But it gets through

more business in spring than in any other season.  In the spring I have

counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of

four-and-twenty hours.  It was I that made the fame and fortune of that

man that had that marvelous collection of weather on exhibition at the

Centennial, that so astounded the foreigners.  He was going to travel all

over the world and get specimens from all the climes.  I said, "Don't you

do it; you come to New England on a favorable spring day."  I told him

what we could do in the way of style, variety, and quantity.  Well, he

came and he made his collection in four days.  As to variety, why, he

confessed that he got hundreds of kinds of weather that he had never

heard of before.  And as to quantity--well, after he had picked out and

discarded all that was blemished in any way, he not only had weather

enough, but weather to spare; weather to hire out; weather to sell; to

deposit; weather to invest; weather to give to the poor.  The people of

New England are by nature patient and forbearing, but there are some

things which they will not stand.  Every year they kill a lot of poets

for writing about "Beautiful Spring."  These are generally casual

visitors, who bring their notions of spring from somewhere else, and

cannot, of course, know how the natives feel about spring.  And so the

first thing they know the opportunity to inquire how they feel has

permanently gone by.  Old Probabilities has a mighty reputation for

accurate prophecy, and thoroughly well deserves it.  You take up the

paper and observe how crisply and confidently he checks off what to-day's

weather is going to be on the Pacific, down South, in the Middle States,

in the Wisconsin region.  See him sail along in the joy and pride of his

power till he gets to New England, and then see-his tail drop.  He

doesn't know what the weather is going to be in New England.  Well, he

mulls over it, and by and by he gets out something about like this:

Probable northeast to southwest minds, varying to the southward and

westward and eastward, and points between, high and low barometer

swapping around from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail,

and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes, with thunder and

lightning.  Then he jots down this postscript from his wandering mind, to

cover accidents:  "But it is possible that the program may be wholly

changed in the mean time."  Yes, one of the brightest gems in the New

England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it.  There is only one

thing certain about it: you are certain there is going to be plenty of

it--a perfect grand review; but you never can tell which end of the

procession is going to move first.  You fix up for the drought; you leave

your umbrella in the house and sally out, and two to one you get drowned.

You make up your mind that the earthquake is due; you stand from under,

and take hold of something to steady yourself, and the first thing you

know you get struck by lightning.  These are great disappointments; but

they can't be helped.  The lightning there is peculiar; it is so

convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't leave enough of that

thing behind for you to tell whether--Well, you'd think it was something

valuable, and a Congressman had been there.  And the thunder.  When the

thunder begins to merely tune up and scrape and saw, and key up the

instruments for the performance, strangers say, "Why, what awful thunder

you have here!"  But when the baton is raised and the real concert

begins, you'll find that stranger down in the cellar with his head in the

ash-barrel.  Now as to the size of the weather in New England lengthways,

I mean.  It is utterly disproportioned to the size of that little

country.  Half the time, when it is packed as full as it can stick, you

will see that New England weather sticking out beyond the edges and

projecting around hundreds and hundreds of miles over the neighboring

states.  She can't hold a tenth part of her weather.  You can see cracks

all about where she has strained herself trying to do it.  I could speak

volumes about the inhuman perversity of the New England weather, but I

will give but a single specimen.  I like to hear rain on a tin roof.

So I covered part of my roof with tin, with an eye to that luxury. Well,

sir, do you think it ever rains on that tin? No, sir; skips it every

time.  Mind, in this speech I have been trying merely to do honor to the

New England weather--no language could do it justice.  But, after all,

there is at least one or two things about that weather (or, if you

please, effects produced, by it) which we residents would not like to

part with.  If we hadn't our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still

have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its

bullying vagaries the ice-storm: when a leafless tree is clothed with ice

from the bottom to the top--ice that is as bright and clear as crystal;

when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and

the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond

plume.  Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns

all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and

flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again

with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and

green to gold--the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of

dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest

possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable

magnificence.  One cannot make the words too strong.













CONCERNING THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE



--[Being part of a chapter which was crowded out of "A Tramp Abroad."--

M.T.]



There was as Englishman in our compartment, and he complimented me on--

on what?  But you would never guess.  He complimented me on my English.

He said Americans in general did not speak the English language as

correctly as I did.  I said I was obliged to him for his compliment,

since I knew he meant it for one, but that I was not fairly entitled to

it, for I did not speak English at all--I only spoke American.



He laughed, and said it was a distinction without a difference.  I said

no, the difference was not prodigious, but still it was considerable.

We fell into a friendly dispute over the matter.  I put my case as well

as I could, and said:



"The languages were identical several generations ago, but our changed

conditions and the spread of our people far to the south and far to the

west have made many alterations in our pronunciation, and have introduced

new words among us and changed the meanings of many old ones.  English

people talk through their noses; we do not.  We say know, English people

say nao; we say cow, the Briton says kaow; we--"



"Oh, come!  that is pure Yankee; everybody knows that."



"Yes, it is pure Yankee; that is true.  One cannot hear it in America

outside of the little corner called New England, which is Yankee land.

The English themselves planted it there, two hundred and fifty years ago,

and there it remains; it has never spread.  But England talks through her

nose yet; the Londoner and the backwoods New-Englander pronounce 'know'

and 'cow' alike, and then the Briton unconsciously satirizes himself by

making fun of the Yankee's pronunciation."



We argued this point at some length; nobody won; but no matter, the fact

remains Englishmen say nao and kaow for "know" and "cow," and that is

what the rustic inhabitant of a very small section of America does.



"You conferred your 'a' upon New England, too, and there it remains; it

has not traveled out of the narrow limits of those six little states in

all these two hundred and fifty years.  All England uses it, New

England's small population-say four millions-use it, but we have forty-

five millions who do not use it.  You say 'glahs of wawtah,' so does New

England; at least, New England says 'glahs.'  America at large flattens

the 'a', and says 'glass of water.' These sounds are pleasanter than

yours; you may think they are not right--well, in English they are not

right, but 'American' they are.  You say 'flahsk' and 'bahsket,' and

'jackahss'; we say 'flask,' 'basket,' 'jackass'--sounding the 'a' as it

is in 'tallow,' 'fallow,' and so on.  'Up to as late as 1847 Mr.

Webster's Dictionary had the impudence to still pronounce 'basket'

bahsket, when he knew that outside of his little New England all America

shortened the 'a' and paid no attention to his English broadening of it.

However, it called itself an English Dictionary, so it was proper enough

that it should stick to English forms, perhaps.  It still calls itself an

English Dictionary today, but it has quietly ceased to pronounce 'basket'

as if it were spelt 'bahsket.'  In the American language the 'h' is

respected; the 'h' is not dropped or added improperly."



"The same is the case in England--I mean among the educated classes, of

course."



"Yes, that is true; but a nation's language is a very large matter.

It is not simply a manner of speech obtaining among the educated handful;

the manner obtaining among the vast uneducated multitude must be

considered also.  Your uneducated masses speak English, you will not deny

that; our uneducated masses speak American it won't be fair for you to

deny that, for you can see, yourself, that when your stable-boy says,

'It isn't the 'unting that 'urts the 'orse, but the 'ammer, 'ammer,

'ammer on the 'ard 'ighway,' and our stable-boy makes the same remark

without suffocating a single h, these two people are manifestly talking

two different languages.  But if the signs are to be trusted, even your

educated classes used to drop the 'h.'  They say humble, now, and heroic,

and historic etc., but I judge that they used to drop those h's because

your writers still keep up  the fashion of patting an before those words

instead of a.  This is what Mr.  Darwin might call a 'rudimentary' sign

that as an was justifiable once, and useful when your educated classes

used to say 'umble, and 'eroic, and 'istorical.  Correct writers of the

American language do not put an before three words."



The English gentleman had something to say upon this matter, but never

mind what he said--I'm not arguing his case.  I have him at a

disadvantage, now.  I proceeded:



"In England you encourage an orator by exclaiming, 'H'yaah!  h'yaah!'

We pronounce it heer in some sections, 'h'yer' in others, and so on; but

our whites do not say 'h'yaah,' pronouncing the a's like the a in ah.

I have heard English ladies say 'don't you'--making two separate and

distinct words of it; your Mr. Burnand has satirized it.  But we always

say 'dontchu.'  This is much better.  Your ladies say, 'Oh, it's oful

nice!'  Ours say, 'Oh, it's awful nice!'  We say, 'Four hundred,' you say

'For'--as in the word or.  Your clergymen speak of 'the Lawd,' ours of

'the Lord'; yours speak of 'the gawds of the heathen,' ours of 'the gods

of the heathen.' When you are exhausted, you say you are 'knocked up.'

We don't.  When you say you will do a thing 'directly,' you mean

'immediately'; in the American language--generally speaking--the word

signifies 'after a little.'  When you say 'clever,' you mean 'capable';

with us the word used to mean 'accommodating,' but I don't know what it

means now.  Your word 'stout' means 'fleshy'; our word 'stout' usually

means 'strong.'  Your words 'gentleman' and 'lady' have a very restricted

meaning; with us they include the barmaid, butcher, burglar, harlot, and

horse-thief.  You say, 'I haven't got any stockings on,' 'I haven't got

any memory,' 'I haven't got any money in my purse; we usually say, 'I

haven't any stockings on,' 'I haven't any memory!' 'I haven't any money

in my purse.'  You say 'out of window'; we always put in a the.  If one

asks 'How old is that man?' the Briton answers, 'He will be about forty';

in the American language we should say, 'He is about forty.'  However,

I won't tire you, sir; but if I wanted to, I could pile up differences

here until I not only convinced you that English and American are

separate languages, but that when I speak my native tongue in its utmost

purity an Englishman can't understand me at all."



"I don't wish to flatter you, but it is about all I can do to understand

you now."



That was a very pretty compliment, and it put us on the pleasantest terms

directly--I use the word in the English sense.



[Later--1882.  Esthetes in many of our schools are now beginning to teach

the pupils to broaden the 'a,' and to say "don't you," in the elegant

foreign way.]













ROGERS



This Man Rogers happened upon me and introduced himself at the town

of -----, in the South of England, where I stayed awhile.  His stepfather

had married a distant relative of mine who was afterward hanged; and so

he seemed to think a blood relationship existed between us.  He came in

every day and sat down and talked.  Of all the bland, serene human

curiosities I ever saw, I think he was the chiefest.  He desired to look

at my new chimney-pot hat.  I was very willing, for I thought he would

notice the name of the great Oxford Street hatter in it, and respect me

accordingly.  But he turned it about with a sort of grave compassion,

pointed out two or three blemishes, and said that I, being so recently

arrived, could not be expected to know where to supply myself.  Said he

would send me the address of his hatter.  Then he said, "Pardon me," and

proceeded to cut a neat circle of red tissue paper; daintily notched the

edges of it; took the mucilage and pasted it in my hat so as to cover the

manufacturer's name.  He said, "No one will know now where you got it.

I will send you a hat-tip of my hatter, and you can paste it over this

tissue circle."  It was the calmest, coolest thing--I never admired a man

so much in my life.  Mind, he did this while his own hat sat offensively

near our noses, on the table--an ancient extinguisher of the "slouch"

pattern, limp and shapeless with age, discolored by vicissitudes of the

weather, and banded by an equator of bear's grease that had stewed

through.



Another time he examined my coat.  I had no terrors, for over my tailor's

door was the legend, "By Special Appointment Tailor to H. R. H. the

Prince of Wales," etc.  I did not know at the time that the most of the

tailor shops had the same sign out, and that whereas it takes nine

tailors to make an ordinary man, it takes a hundred and fifty to make a

prince.  He was full of compassion for my coat.  Wrote down the address

of his tailor for me.  Did not tell me to mention my nom de plume and the

tailor would put his best work on my garment, as complimentary people

sometimes do, but said his tailor would hardly trouble himself for an

unknown person (unknown person, when I thought I was so celebrated in

England!--that was the cruelest cut), but cautioned me to mention his

name, and it would be all right.  Thinking to be facetious, I said:



"But he might sit up all night and injure his health."



"Well, let him," said Rogers; "I've done enough for him, for him to show

some appreciation of it."



I might as well have tried to disconcert a mummy with my facetiousness.

Said Rogers: "I get all my coats there--they're the only coats fit to be

seen in."



I made one more attempt.  I said, "I wish you had brought one with you--

I would like to look at it."



"Bless your heart, haven't I got one on?--this article is Morgan's make."



I examined it.  The coat had been bought ready-made, of a Chatham Street

Jew, without any question--about 1848.  It probably cost four dollars

when it was new.  It was ripped, it was frayed, it was napless and

greasy.  I could not resist showing him where it was ripped.  It so

affected him that I was almost sorry I had done it.  First he seemed

plunged into a bottomless abyss of grief.  Then he roused himself, made a

feint with his hands as if waving off the pity of a nation, and said--

with what seemed to me a manufactured emotion--"No matter; no matter;

don't mind me; do not bother about it.  I can get another."



When he was thoroughly restored, so that he could examine the rip and

command his feelings, he said, ah, now he understood it--his servant must

have done it while dressing him that morning.



His servant! There was something awe-inspiring in effrontery like this.



Nearly every day he interested himself in some article of my clothing.

One would hardly have expected this sort of infatuation in a man who

always wore the same suit, and it a suit that seemed coeval with the

Conquest.



It was an unworthy ambition, perhaps, but I did wish I could make this

man admire something about me or something I did--you would have felt the

same way.  I saw my opportunity: I was about to return to London, and had

"listed" my soiled linen for the, wash. It made quite au imposing

mountain in the corner of the room--fifty-four pieces. I hoped he would

fancy it was the accumulation of a single week.  I took up the wash-list,

as if to see that it was all right, and then tossed it on the table, with

pretended forgetfulness.  Sure enough, he took it. up and ran his eye

along down to the grand total.  Then he said, "You get off easy," and

laid it down again.



His gloves were the saddest ruin, but he told me where I could get some

like them.  His shoes would hardly hold walnuts without leaking, but he

liked to put his feet up on the mantelpiece and contemplate them.

He wore a dim glass breastpin, which he called a "morphylitic diamond"--

whatever that may mean--and said only two of them had ever been found

--the Emperor of China had the other one.



Afterward, in London, it was a pleasure to me to see this fantastic

vagabond come marching into the lobby of the hotel in his grand-ducal

way, for he always had some new imaginary grandeur to develop--there was

nothing stale about him but his clothes.  If he addressed me when

strangers were about, he always raised his voice a little and called me

"Sir Richard," or "General," or "Your Lordship"--and when people began to

stare and look deferential, he would fall to inquiring in a casual way

why I disappointed the Duke of Argyll the night before; and then remind

me of our engagement at the Duke of Westminster's for the following day.

I think that for the time being these things were realities to him.  He

once came and invited me to go with him and spend the evening with the

Earl of Warwick at his town house.  I said I had received no formal

invitation.  He said that that was of no consequence, the Earl had no

formalities for him or his friends.  I asked if I could go just as I was.

He said no, that would hardly do; evening dress was requisite at night in

any gentleman's house.  He said he would wait while I dressed, and then

we would go to his apartments and I could take a bottle of champagne and

a cigar while he dressed.  I was very willing to see how this enterprise

would turn out, so I dressed, and we started to his lodgings.  He said if

I didn't mind we would walk.  So we tramped some four miles through the

mud and fog, and finally found his "apartments"; they consisted of a

single room over a barber's shop in a back street.  Two chairs, a small

table, an ancient valise, a wash-basin and pitcher (both on the floor in

a corner), an unmade bed, a fragment of a looking-glass, and a flower-

pot, with a perishing little rose geranium in it, which he called a

century plant, and said it had not bloomed now for upward of two

centuries--given to him by the late Lord Palmerston (been offered a

prodigious sum for it)--these were the contents of the room.  Also a

brass candlestick and a part of a candle.  Rogers lit the candle, and

told me to sit down and make myself at home.  He said he hoped I was

thirsty, because he would surprise my palate with an article of champagne

that seldom got into a commoner's system; or would I prefer sherry, or

port?  Said he had port in bottles that were swathed in stratified

cobwebs, every stratum representing a generation.  And as for his cigars-

-well, I should judge of them myself.  Then he put his head out at the

door and called:



"Sackville!"  No answer.



"Hi-Sackville!"  No answer.



"Now what the devil can have become of that butler?  I never allow a

servant to--Oh, confound that idiot, he's got the keys.  Can't get into

the other rooms without the keys."



(I was just wondering at his intrepidity in still keeping up the delusion

of the champagne, and trying to imagine how he was going to get out of

the difficulty.)



Now he stopped calling Sackville and began to call "Anglesy."  But

Anglesy didn't come.  He said, "This is the second time that that equerry

has been absent without leave.  To-morrow I'll discharge him."  Now he

began to whoop for "Thomas," but Thomas didn't answer.  Then for

"Theodore," but no Theodore replied.



"Well, I give it up," said Rogers.  "The servants never expect me at this

hour, and so they're all off on a lark.  Might get along without the

equerry and the page, but can't have any wine or cigars without the

butler, and can't dress without my valet."



I offered to help him dress, but he would not hear of it; and besides, he

said he would not feel comfortable unless dressed by a practised hand.

However, he finally concluded that he was such old friends with the Earl

that it would not make any difference how he was dressed.  So we took a

cab, he gave the driver some directions, and we started.  By and by we

stopped before a large house and got out.  I never had seen this man with

a collar on.  He now stepped under a lamp and got a venerable paper

collar out of his coat pocket, along with a hoary cravat, and put them

on.  He ascended the stoop, and entered.  Presently he reappeared,

descended rapidly, and said:



"Come-quick!"



We hurried away, and turned the corner.



"Now we're safe," he said, and took off his collar and cravat and

returned them to his pocket.



"Made a mighty narrow escape," said he.



"How?" said I.



"B' George, the Countess was there!"



"Well, what of that?--don't she know you?"



"Know me?  Absolutely worships me.  I just did happen to catch a glimpse

of her before she saw me--and out I shot.  Haven't seen her for two

months--to rush in on her without any warning might have been fatal.

She could not have stood it.  I didn't know she was in town--thought she

was at the castle.  Let me lean on you--just a moment--there; now I am

better--thank you; thank you ever so much.  Lord bless me, what an

escape!"



So I never got to call on the Earl, after all.  But I marked the house

for future reference.  It proved to be an ordinary family hotel, with

about a thousand plebeians roosting in it.



In most things Rogers was by no means a fool.  In some things it was

plain enough that he was a fool, but he certainly did not know it.

He was in the "deadest" earnest in these matters.  He died at sea, last

summer, as the "Earl of Ramsgate."









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Alonzo Fitz and Others,

by Mark Twain













SOME RAMBLING NOTES OF AN IDLE EXCURSION



by Mark Twain







All the journeyings I had ever done had been purely in the way of

business.  The pleasant May weather suggested a novelty namely, a trip

for pure recreation, the bread-and-butter element left out.  The Reverend

said he would go, too; a good man, one of the best of men, although a

clergyman.  By eleven at night we were in New Haven and on board the New

York boat.  We bought our tickets, and then went wandering around here

and there, in the solid comfort of being free and idle, and of putting

distance between ourselves and the mails and telegraphs.



After a while I went to my stateroom and undressed, but the night was too

enticing for bed.  We were moving down the bay now, and it was pleasant

to stand at the window and take the cool night breeze and watch the

gliding lights on shore.  Presently, two elderly men sat down under that

window and began a conversation.  Their talk was properly no business of

mine, yet I was feeling friendly toward the world and willing to be

entertained.  I soon gathered that they were brothers, that they were

from a small Connecticut village, and that the matter in hand concerned

the cemetery.  Said one:



"Now, John, we talked it all over amongst ourselves, and this is what

we've done.  You see, everybody was a-movin' from the old buryin'-ground,

and our folks was 'most about left to theirselves, as you may say.  They

was crowded, too, as you know; lot wa'n't big enough in the first place;

and last year, when Seth's wife died, we couldn't hardly tuck her in.

She sort o' overlaid Deacon Shorb's lot, and he soured on her, so to

speak, and on the rest of us, too.  So we talked it over, and I was for a

lay out in the new simitery on the hill.  They wa'n't unwilling, if it

was cheap.  Well, the two best and biggest plots was No. 8 and No. 9--

both of a size; nice comfortable room for twenty-six--twenty-six

full-growns, that is; but you reckon in children and other shorts, and

strike an everage, and I should say you might lay in thirty, or maybe

thirty-two or three, pretty genteel--no crowdin' to signify."



"That's a plenty, William.  Which one did you buy?"



"Well, I'm a-comin' to that, John.  You see, No. 8 was thirteen dollars,

No. 9 fourteen--"



"I see.  So's't you took No. 8."



"You wait.  I took No. 9.  And I'll tell you for why.  In the first

place, Deacon Shorb wanted it.  Well, after the way he'd gone on about

Seth's wife overlappin' his prem'ses, I'd 'a' beat him out of that No. 9

if I'd 'a' had to stand two dollars extra, let alone one.  That's the way

I felt about it.  Says I, what's a dollar, anyway?  Life's on'y a

pilgrimage, says I; we ain't here for good, and we can't take it with us,

says I.  So I just dumped it down, knowin' the Lord don't suffer a good

deed to go for nothin', and cal'latin' to take it out o' somebody in the

course o' trade.  Then there was another reason, John.  No. 9's a long

way the handiest lot in the simitery, and the likeliest for situation.

It lays right on top of a knoll in the dead center of the buryin' ground;

and you can see Millport from there, and Tracy's, and Hopper Mount, and a

raft o' farms, and so on.  There ain't no better outlook from a

buryin'-plot in the state.  Si Higgins says so, and I reckon he ought to

know.  Well, and that ain't all.  'Course Shorb had to take No. 8; wa'n't

no help for 't.  Now, No. 8 jines onto No. 9, but it's on the slope of

the hill, and every time it rains it 'll soak right down onto the Shorbs.

Si Higgins says 't when the deacon's time comes, he better take out fire

and marine insurance both on his remains."



Here there was the sound of a low, placid, duplicate chuckle of

appreciation and satisfaction.



"Now, John, here's a little rough draft of the ground that I've made on a

piece of paper.  Up here in the left-hand corner we've bunched the

departed; took them from the old graveyard and stowed them one alongside

o' t'other, on a first-come-first-served plan, no partialities, with

Gran'ther Jones for a starter, on'y because it happened so, and windin'

up indiscriminate with Seth's twins.  A little crowded towards the end of

the lay-out, maybe, but we reckoned 'twa'n't best to scatter the twins.

Well, next comes the livin'.  Here, where it's marked A, we're goin' to

put Mariar and her family, when they're called; B, that's for Brother

Hosea and hisn; C, Calvin and tribe.  What's left is these two lots

here--just the gem of the whole patch for general style and outlook;

they're for me and my folks, and you and yourn.  Which of them would you

rather be buried in?"



"I swan, you've took me mighty unexpected, William!  It sort of started

the shivers.  Fact is, I was thinkin' so busy about makin' things

comfortable for the others, I hadn't thought about being buried myself."



"Life's on'y a fleetin' show, John, as the sayin' is.  We've all got to

go, sooner or later.  To go with a clean record's the main thing.  Fact

is, it's the on'y thing worth strivin' for, John."



"Yes, that's so, William, that's so; there ain't no getting around it.

Which of these lots would you recommend?"



"Well, it depends, John.  Are you particular about outlook?"



"I don't say I am, William, I don't say I ain't.  Reely, I don't know.

But mainly, I reckon, I'd set store by a south exposure."



"That's easy fixed, John.  They're both south exposure.  They take the

sun, and the Shorbs get the shade."



"How about site, William?"



"D's a sandy sile, E's mostly loom."



"You may gimme E, then; William; a sandy sile caves in, more or less, and

costs for repairs."



"All right, set your name down here, John, under E.  Now, if you don't

mind payin' me your share of the fourteen dollars, John, while we're on

the business, everything's fixed."



After some Niggling and sharp bargaining the money was paid, and John

bade his brother good night and took his leave.  There was silence for

some moments; then a soft chuckle welled up from the lonely William, and

he muttered: "I declare for 't, if I haven't made a mistake!  It's D

that's mostly loom, not E.  And John's booked for a sandy site after

all."



There was another soft chuckle, and William departed to his rest also.



The next day, in New York, was a hot one.  Still we managed to get more

or less entertainment out of it.  Toward the middle of the afternoon we

arrived on board the stanch steamship Bermuda, with bag and baggage, and

hunted for a shady place.  It was blazing summer weather, until we were

half-way down the harbor.  Then I buttoned my coat closely; half an hour

later I put on a spring overcoat and buttoned that.  As we passed the

light-ship I added an ulster and tied a handkerchief around the collar to

hold it snug to my neck.  So rapidly had the summer gone and winter come

again?



By nightfall we were far out at sea, with no land in sight.  No telegrams

could come here, no letters, no news.  This was an uplifting thought.  It

was still more uplifting to reflect that the millions of harassed people

on shore behind us were suffering just as usual.



The next day brought us into the midst of the Atlantic solitudes--out of

smoke-colored sounding into fathomless deep blue; no ships visible

anywhere over the wide ocean; no company but Mother Carey's chickens

wheeling, darting, skimming the waves in the sun.  There were some

seafaring men among the passengers, and conversation drifted into matter

concerning ships and sailors.  One said that "true as the needle to the

pole" was a bad figure, since the needle seldom pointed to the pole.

He said a ship's compass was not faithful to any particular point, but

was the most fickle and treacherous of the servants of man.  It was

forever changing.  It changed every day in the year; consequently the

amount of the daily variation had to be ciphered out and allowance made

for it, else the mariner would go utterly astray.  Another said there was

a vast fortune waiting for the genius who should invent a compass that

would not be affected by the local influences of an iron ship.  He said

there was only one creature more fickle than a wooden ship's compass,

and that was the compass of an iron ship.  Then came reference to the

well known fact that an experienced mariner can look at the compass of a

new iron vessel, thousands of mile from her birthplace, and tell which

way her head was pointing when she was in process of building.



Now an ancient whale-ship master fell to talking about the sort of crews

they used to have in his early days.  Said he:



"Sometimes we'd have a batch of college students Queer lot.  Ignorant?

Why, they didn't know the catheads from the main brace.  But if you took

them for fools you'd get bit, sure.  They'd learn more in a month than

another man would in a year.  We had one, once, in the Mary Ann, that

came aboard with gold spectacles on.  And besides, he was rigged out from

main truck to keelson in the nobbiest clothes that ever saw a fo'castle.

He had a chestful, too: cloaks, and broadcloth coats, and velvet vests;

everything swell, you know; and didn't the saltwater fix them out for

him?  I guess not!  Well, going to sea, the mate told him to go aloft and

help shake out the foreto'gallants'l.  Up he shins to the foretop, with

his spectacles on, and in a minute down he comes again, looking insulted.

Says the mate, 'What did you come down for?' Says the chap, 'P'r'aps you

didn't notice that there ain't any ladders above there.'  You see we

hadn't any shrouds above the foretop.  The men bursted out in a laugh

such as I guess you never heard the like of.  Next night, which was dark

and rainy, the mate ordered this chap to go aloft about something, and

I'm dummed if he didn't start up with an umbrella and a lantern!  But no

matter; he made a mighty good sailor before the voyage was done, and we

had to hunt up something else to laugh at.  Years afterwards, when I had

forgot all about him, I comes into Boston, mate of a ship, and was

loafing around town with the second mate, and it so happened that we

stepped into the Revere House, thinking maybe we would chance the

salt-horse in that big diningroom for a flyer, as the boys say.  Some

fellows were talking just at our elbow, and one says, 'Yonder's the new

governor of Massachusetts--at that table over there with the ladies.'

We took a good look my mate and I, for we hadn't either of us ever see a

governor before.  I looked and looked at that face and then all of a

sudden it popped on me!  But didn't give any sign.  Says I, 'Mate, I've a

notion to go over and shake hands with him.'  Says he 'I think I see you

doing it, Tom.'  Says I, 'Mate I'm a-going to do it.'  Says he, 'Oh, yes,

I guess so.  Maybe you don't want to bet you will, Tom?'  Say I, 'I don't

mind going a V on it, mate.'  Says he 'Put it up.'  'Up she goes,' says

I, planking the cash.  This surprised him.  But he covered it, and say.

pretty sarcastic, 'Hadn't you better take your grub with the governor and

the ladies, Tom?'  Says I 'Upon second thoughts, I will.'  Says he, 'Well

Tom, you aye a dum fool.'  Says I, 'Maybe I am maybe I ain't; but the

main question is, do you wan to risk two and a half that I won't do it?'

'Make it a V,' says he.  'Done,' says I.  I started, him a giggling and

slapping his hand on his thigh, he felt so good.  I went over there and

leaned my knuckle: on the table a minute and looked the governor in the

face, and says I, 'Mr. Gardner, don't you know me?  He stared, and I

stared, and he stared.  Then all of a sudden he sings out, 'Tom Bowling,

by the holy poker!  Ladies, it's old Tom Bowling, that you've heard me

talk about--shipmate of mine in the Mary Ann.'  He rose up and shook

hands with me ever so hearty--I sort of glanced around and took a

realizing sense of my mate's saucer eyes--and then says the governor,

'Plant yourself, Tom, plant yourself; you can't cat your anchor again

till you've had a feed with me and the ladies!'  I planted myself

alongside the governor, and canted my eye around toward my mate.  Well,

sir, his dead-lights were bugged out like tompions; and his mouth stood

that wide open that you could have laid a ham in it without him noticing

it."



There was great applause at the conclusion of the old captain's story;

then, after a moment's silence, a grave, pale young man said:



"Had you ever met the governor before?"



The old captain looked steadily at this inquirer awhile, and then got up

and walked aft without making any reply.  One passenger after another

stole a furtive glance at the inquirer; but failed to make him out, and

so gave him up.  It took some little work to get the talk-machinery to

running smoothly again after this derangement; but at length a

conversation sprang up about that important and jealously guarded

instrument, a ship's timekeeper, its exceeding delicate accuracy, and the

wreck and destruction that have sometimes resulted from its varying a few

seemingly trifling moments from the true time; then, in due course, my

comrade, the Reverend, got off on a yarn, with a fair wind and everything

drawing.  It was a true story, too--about Captain Rounceville's shipwreck

--true in every detail.  It was to this effect:



Captain Rounceville's vessel was lost in mid-Atlantic, and likewise his

wife and his two little children.  Captain Rounceville and seven seamen

escaped with life, but with little else.  A small, rudely constructed

raft was to be their home for eight days.  They had neither provisions

nor water.  They had scarcely any clothing; no one had a coat but the

captain.  This coat was changing hands all the time, for the weather was

very cold.  Whenever a man became exhausted with the cold, they put the

coat on him and laid him down between two shipmates until the garment and

their bodies had warmed life into him again.  Among the sailors was a

Portuguese who knew no English.  He seemed to have no thought of his own

calamity, but was concerned only about the captain's bitter loss of wife

and children.  By day he would look his dumb compassion in the captain's

face; and by night, in the darkness and the driving spray and rain, he

would seek out the captain and try to comfort him with caressing pats on

the shoulder.  One day, when hunger and thirst were making their sure

inroad; upon the men's strength and spirits, a floating barrel was seen

at a distance.  It seemed a great find, for doubtless it contained food

of some sort.  A brave fellow swam to it, and after long and exhausting

effort got it to the raft.  It was eagerly opened.  It was a barrel of

magnesia!  On the fifth day an onion was spied.  A sailor swam off and

got it.  Although perishing with hunger, he brought it in its integrity

and put it into the captain's hand.  The history of the sea teaches that

among starving, shipwrecked men selfishness is rare, and a wonder-

compelling magnanimity the rule.  The onion was equally divided into

eight parts, and eaten with deep thanksgivings.  On the eighth day a

distant ship was sighted.  Attempts were made to hoist an oar, with

Captain Rounceville's coat on it for a signal.  There were many failures,

for the men were but skeletons now, and strengthless.  At last success

was achieved, but the signal brought no help.  The ship faded out of

sight and left despair behind her.  By and by another ship appeared,

and passed so near that the castaways, every eye eloquent with gratitude,

made ready to welcome the boat that would be sent to save them.  But this

ship also drove on, and left these men staring their unutterable surprise

and dismay into each other's ashen faces.  Late in the day, still another

ship came up out of the distance, but the men noted with a pang that her

course was one which would not bring her nearer.  Their remnant of life

was nearly spent; their lips and tongues were swollen, parched, cracked

with eight days' thirst; their bodies starved; and here was their last

chance gliding relentlessly from them; they would not be alive when the

next sun rose.  For a day or two past the men had lost their voices, but

now Captain Rounceville whispered, "Let us pray."  The Portuguese patted

him on the shoulder in sign of deep approval.  All knelt at the base of

the oar that was waving the signal-coat aloft, and bowed their heads.

The sea was tossing; the sun rested, a red, rayless disk, on the sea-line

in the west.  When the men presently raised their heads they would have

roared a hallelujah if they had had a voice--the ship's sails lay

wrinkled and flapping against her masts--she was going about!  Here was

rescue at last, and in the very last instant of time that was left for

it.  No, not rescue yet--only the imminent prospect of it.  The red disk

sank under the sea, and darkness blotted out the ship.  By and by came a

pleasant sound-oars moving in a boat's rowlocks.  Nearer it came, and

nearer-within thirty steps, but nothing visible.  Then a deep voice:

"Hol-lo!"  The castaways could not answer; their swollen tongues refused

voice.  The boat skirted round and round the raft, started away--the

agony of it!--returned, rested the oars, close at hand, listening, no

doubt.  The deep voice again: "Hol-lo!  Where are ye, shipmates?"

Captain Rounceville whispered to his men, saying: "Whisper your best,

boys! now-all at once!"  So they sent out an eightfold whisper in hoarse

concert: "Here!", There was life in it if it succeeded; death if it

failed.  After that supreme moment Captain Rounceville was conscious of

nothing until he came to himself on board the saving ship.  Said the

Reverend, concluding:



"There was one little moment of time in which that raft could be visible

from that ship, and only one.  If that one little fleeting moment had

passed unfruitful, those men's doom was sealed.  As close as that does

God shave events foreordained from the beginning of the world.  When the

sun reached the water's edge that day, the captain of that ship was

sitting on deck reading his prayer-book.  The book fell; he stooped to

pick it up, and happened to glance at the sun.  In that instant that far-

off raft appeared for a second against the red disk, its needlelike oar

and diminutive signal cut sharp and black against the bright surface, and

in the next instant was thrust away into the dusk again.  But that ship,

that captain, and that pregnant instant had had their work appointed for

them in the dawn of time and could not fail of the performance.  The

chronometer of God never errs!"



There was deep, thoughtful silence for some moments.  Then the grave,

pale young man said:



"What is the chronometer of God?"







II



At dinner, six o'clock, the same people assembled whom we had talked with

on deck and seen at luncheon and breakfast this second day out, and at

dinner the evening before.  That is to say, three journeying ship-

masters, a Boston merchant, and a returning Bermudian who had been absent

from his Bermuda thirteen years; these sat on the starboard side.  On the

port side sat the Reverend in the seat of honor; the pale young man next

to him; I next; next to me an aged Bermudian, returning to his sunny

islands after an absence of twenty-seven years.  Of course, our captain

was at the head of the table, the purser at the foot of it.  A small

company, but small companies are pleasantest.



No racks upon the table; the sky cloudless, the sun brilliant, the blue

sea scarcely ruffled; then what had become of the four married couples,

the three bachelors, and the active and obliging doctor from the rural

districts of Pennsylvania?--for all these were on deck when we sailed

down New York harbor.  This is the explanation.  I quote from my note-

book:



     Thursday, 3.30 P.M.  Under way, passing the Battery.  The large

     party, of four married couples, three bachelors, and a cheery,

     exhilarating doctor from the wilds of Pennsylvania, are evidently

     traveling together.  All but the doctor grouped in camp-chairs on

     deck.



     Passing principal fort.  The doctor is one of those people who has

     an infallible preventive of seasickness; is flitting from friend to

     friend administering it and saying, "Don't you be afraid; I know

     this medicine; absolutely infallible; prepared under my own

     supervision."  Takes a dose himself, intrepidly.



     4.15 P.M.  Two of those ladies have struck their colors,

     notwithstanding the "infallible."  They have gone below.  The other

     two begin to show distress.



     5 P.M.  Exit one husband and one bachelor.  These still had their

     infallible in cargo when they started, but arrived at the

     companionway without it.



     5.10.  Lady No. 3, two bachelors, and one married man have gone

     below with their own opinion of the infallible.



     5.20.  Passing Quarantine Hulk.  The infallible has done the

     business for all the party except the Scotchman's wife and the

     author of that formidable remedy.



     Nearing the Light-Ship.  Exit the Scotchman's wife, head drooped on

     stewardess's shoulder.



     Entering the open sea.  Exit doctor!





The rout seems permanent; hence the smallness of the company at table

since the voyage began.  Our captain is a grave, handsome Hercules of

thirty-five, with a brown hand of such majestic size that one cannot eat

for admiring it and wondering if a single kid or calf could furnish

material for gloving it.



Conversation not general; drones along between couples.  One catches a

sentence here and there. Like this, from Bermudian of thirteen years'

absence: "It is the nature of women to ask trivial, irrelevant, and

pursuing questions--questions that pursue you from a beginning in nothing

to a run-to-cover in nowhere."  Reply of Bermudian of twenty-seven years'

absence:  "Yes; and to think they have logical, analytical minds and

argumentative ability.  You see 'em begin to whet up whenever they smell

argument in the air."  Plainly these be philosophers.



Twice since we left port our engines have stopped for a couple of minutes

at a time.  Now they stop again.  Says the pale young man, meditatively,

"There!--that engineer is sitting down to rest again."



Grave stare from the captain, whose mighty jaws cease to work, and whose

harpooned potato stops in midair on its way to his open, paralyzed mouth.

Presently he says in measured tones, "Is it your idea that the engineer

of this ship propels her by a crank turned by his own hands?"



The pale young man studies over this a moment, then lifts up his

guileless eyes, and says, "Don't he?"



Thus gently falls the death-blow to further conversation, and the dinner

drags to its close in a reflective silence, disturbed by no sounds but

the murmurous wash of the sea and the subdued clash of teeth.



After a smoke and a promenade on deck, where is no motion to discompose

our steps, we think of a game of whist.  We ask the brisk and capable

stewardess from Ireland if there are any cards in the ship.



"Bless your soul, dear, indeed there is.  Not a whole pack, true for ye,

but not enough missing to signify."



However, I happened by accident to bethink me of a new pack in a morocco

case, in my trunk, which I had placed there by mistake, thinking it to be

a flask of something.  So a party of us conquered the tedium of the

evening with a few games and were ready for bed at six bells, mariner's

time, the signal for putting out the lights.



There was much chat in the smoking-cabin on the upper deck after luncheon

to-day, mostly whaler yarns from those old sea-captains.  Captain Tom

Bowling was garrulous.  He had that garrulous attention to minor detail

which is born of secluded farm life or life at sea on long voyages, where

there is little to do and time no object.  He would sail along till he

was right in the most exciting part of a yarn, and then say, "Well, as I

was saying, the rudder was fouled, ship driving before the gale, head-on,

straight for the iceberg, all hands holding their breath, turned to

stone, top-hamper giving 'way, sails blown to ribbons, first one stick

going, then another, boom! smash! crash! duck your head and stand from

under! when up comes Johnny Rogers, capstan-bar in hand, eyes a-blazing,

hair a-flying .  .  .  no, 'twa'n't Johnny Rogers.  .  .  lemme see .  .

seems to me Johnny Rogers wa'n't along that voyage; he was along one

voyage, I know that mighty well, but somehow it seems to me that he

signed the articles for this voyage, but--but--whether he come along or

not, or got left, or something happened--"



And so on and so on till the excitement all cooled down and nobody cared

whether the ship struck the iceberg or not.



In the course of his talk he rambled into a criticism upon New England

degrees of merit in ship building.  Said he, "You get a vessel built away

down Maine-way; Bath, for instance; what's the result?  First thing you

do, you want to heave her down for repairs--that's the result!  Well,

sir, she hain't been hove down a week till you can heave a dog through

her seams.  You send that vessel to sea, and what's the result?  She wets

her oakum the first trip!  Leave it to any man if 'tain't so.  Well, you

let our folks build you a vessel--down New Bedford-way.  What's the

result?  Well, sir, you might take that ship and heave her down, and keep

her hove down six months, and she'll never shed a tear!"



Everybody, landsmen and all, recognized the descriptive neatness of that

figure, and applauded, which greatly pleased the old man.  A moment

later, the meek eyes of the pale young fellow heretofore mentioned came

up slowly, rested upon the old man's face a moment, and the meek mouth

began to open.



"Shet your head!" shouted the old mariner.



It was a rather startling surprise to everybody, but it was effective in

the matter of its purpose.  So the conversation flowed on instead of

perishing.



There was some talk about the perils of the sea, and a landsman delivered

himself of the customary nonsense about the poor mariner wandering in far

oceans, tempest-tossed, pursued by dangers, every storm-blast and

thunderbolt in the home skies moving the friends by snug firesides to

compassion for that poor mariner, and prayers for his succor.  Captain

Bowling put up with this for a while, and then burst out with a new view

of the matter.



"Come, belay there!  I have read this kind of rot all my life in poetry

and tales and such-like rubbage.  Pity for the poor mariner! sympathy for

the poor mariner!  All right enough, but not in the way the poetry puts

it.  Pity for the mariner's wife! all right again, but not in the way the

poetry puts it.  Look-a here! whose life's the safest in the whole world

The poor mariner's.  You look at the statistics, you'll see.  So don't

you fool away any sympathy on the poor mariner's dangers and privations

and sufferings.  Leave that to the poetry muffs.  Now you look at the

other side a minute.  Here is Captain Brace, forty years old, been at sea

thirty.  On his way now to take command of his ship and sail south from

Bermuda.  Next week he'll be under way; easy times; comfortable quarters;

passengers, sociable company; just enough to do to keep his mind healthy

and not tire him; king over his ship, boss of everything and everybody;

thirty years' safety to learn him that his profession ain't a dangerous

one.  Now you look back at his home.  His wife's a feeble woman; she's a

stranger in New York; shut up in blazing hot or freezing cold lodgings,

according to the season; don't know anybody hardly; no company but her

lonesomeness and her thoughts; husband gone six months at a time.  She

has borne eight children; five of them she has buried without her husband

ever setting eyes on them.  She watches them all the long nights till

they died--he comfortable on the sea; she followed them to the grave she

heard the clods fall that broke her heart he comfortable on the sea; she

mourned at home, weeks and weeks, missing them every day and every hour--

he cheerful at sea, knowing nothing about it.  Now look at it a minute

--turn it over in your mind and size it: five children born, she among

strangers, and him not by to hearten her; buried, and him not by to

comfort her; think of that!  Sympathy for the poor mariner's perils is

rot; give it to his wife's hard lines, where it belongs!  Poetry makes

out that all the wife worries about is the dangers her husband's running.

She's got substantialer things to worry over, I tell you.  Poetry's

always pitying the poor mariner on account of his perils at sea; better a

blamed sight pity him for the nights he can't sleep for thinking of how

he had to leave his wife in her very birth pains, lonesome and

friendless, in the thick of disease and trouble and death.  If there's

one thing that can make me madder than another, it's this sappy, damned

maritime poetry!"



Captain Brace was a patient, gentle, seldom speaking man, with a pathetic

something in his bronzed face that had been a mystery up to this time,

but stood interpreted now since we had heard his story.  He had voyaged

eighteen times to the Mediterranean, seven times to India, once to the

arctic pole in a discovery-ship, and "between times" had visited all the

remote seas and ocean corners of the globe.  But he said that twelve

years ago, on account of his family, he "settled down," and ever since

then had ceased to roam.  And what do you suppose was this simple-

hearted, lifelong wanderer's idea of settling down and ceasing to roam?

Why, the making of two five-month voyages a year between Surinam and

Boston for sugar and molasses!



Among other talk to-day, it came out that whale-ships carry no doctor.

The captain adds the doctorship to his own duties.  He not only gives

medicines, but sets broken limbs after notions of his own, or saws them

off and sears the stump when amputation seems best.  The captain is

provided with a medicine-chest, with the medicines numbered instead of

named.  A book of directions goes with this.  It describes diseases and

symptoms, and says, "Give a teaspoonful of No. 9 once an hour," or "Give

ten grains of No. 12 every half-hour," etc.  One of our sea-captains came

across a skipper in the North Pacific who was in a state of great

surprise and perplexity.  Said he:



"There's something rotten about this medicine-chest business.  One of my

men was sick--nothing much the matter.  I looked in the book: it said

give him a teaspoonful of No. 15.  I went to the medicine-chest, and I

see I was out of No. 15.  I judged I'd got to get up a combination

somehow that would fill the bill; so I hove into the fellow half a

teaspoonful of No. 8 and half a teaspoonful of No. 7, and I'll be hanged

if it didn't kill him in fifteen minutes!  There's something about this

medicine-chest system that's too many for me!"



There was a good deal of pleasant gossip about old Captain "Hurricane"

Jones, of the Pacific Ocean--peace to his ashes!  Two or three of us

present had known him; I particularly well, for I had made four sea-

voyages with him.  He was a very remarkable man.  He was born in a ship;

he picked up what little education he had among his shipmates; he began

life in the forecastle, and climbed grade by grade to the captaincy.

More than fifty years of his sixty-five were spent at sea.  He had sailed

all oceans, seen all lands, and borrowed a tint from all climates.  When

a man has been fifty years at sea he necessarily knows nothing of men,

nothing of the world but its surface, nothing of the world's thought,

nothing of the world's learning but it's a B C, and that blurred and

distorted by the unfocused lenses of an untrained mind.  Such a man is

only a gray and bearded child.  That is what old Hurricane Jones was--

simply an innocent, lovable old infant.  When his spirit was in repose he

was as sweet and gentle as a girl; when his wrath was up he was a

hurricane that made his nickname seem tamely descriptive.  He was

formidable in a fight, for he was of powerful build and dauntless

courage.  He was frescoed from head to heel with pictures and mottoes

tattooed in red and blue India ink.  I was with him one voyage when he

got his last vacant space tattooed; this vacant space was around his left

ankle.  During three days he stumped about the ship with his ankle bare

and swollen, and this legend gleaming red and angry out from a clouding

of India ink: "Virtue is its own R'd."  (There was a lack of room.) He

was deeply and sincerely pious, and swore like a fishwoman.  He

considered swearing blameless, because sailors would not understand an

order unillumined by it.  He was a profound biblical scholar--that is,

he thought he was.  He believed everything in the Bible, but he had his

own methods of arriving at his beliefs.  He was of the "advanced" school

of thinkers, and applied natural laws to the interpretation of all

miracles, somewhat on the plan of the people who make the six days of

creation six geological epochs, and so forth.  Without being aware of it,

he was a rather severe satire on modern scientific religionists.  Such a

man as I have been describing is rabidly fond of disquisition and

argument; one knows that without being told it.



One trip the captain had a clergyman on board, but did not know he was a

clergyman, since the passenger-list did not betray the fact.  He took a

great liking to this Reverend Mr. Peters, and talked with him a great

deal; told him yarns, gave him toothsome scraps of personal history, and

wove a glittering streak of profanity through his garrulous fabric that

was refreshing to a spirit weary of the dull neutralities of undecorated

speech.  One day the captain said, "Peters, do you ever read the Bible?"



"Well--yes."



"I judge it ain't often, by the way you say it.  Now, you tackle it in

dead earnest once, and you'll find it 'll pay.  Don't you get

discouraged, but hang right on.  First, you won't understand it; but by

and by things will begin to clear up, and then you wouldn't lay it down

to eat."



"Yes, I have heard that said."



"And it's so, too.  There ain't a book that begins with it.  It lays over

'm all, Peters.  There's some pretty tough things in it--there ain't any

getting around that--but you stick to them and think them out, and when

once you get on the inside everything's plain as day."



"The miracles, too, captain?"



"Yes, sir!  the miracles, too.  Every one of them.  Now, there's that

business with the prophets of Baal; like enough that stumped you?"



"Well, I don't know but--"



"Own up now; it stumped you.  Well, I don't wonder.  You hadn't had any

experience in raveling such things out, and naturally it was too many for

you.  Would you like to have me explain that thing to you, and show you

how to get at the meat of these matters?"



"Indeed, I would, captain, if you don't mind."



Then the captain proceeded as follows: "I'll do it with pleasure.  First,

you see, I read and read, and thought and thought, till I got to

understand what sort of people they were in the old Bible times, and then

after that it was all clear and easy.  Now this was the way I put it up,

concerning Isaac--[This is the captain's own mistake]--and the prophets

of Baal.  There was some mighty sharp men among the public characters of

that old ancient day, and Isaac was one of them.  Isaac had his failings

--plenty of them, too; it ain't for me to apologize for Isaac; he played

it on the prophets of Baal, and like enough he was justifiable,

considering the odds that was against him.  No, all I say is, 'twa'n't

any miracle, and that I'll show you so's't you can see it yourself.



"Well, times had been getting rougher and rougher for prophets--that is,

prophets of Isaac's denomination.  There was four hundred and fifty

prophets of Baal in the community, and only one Presbyterian; that is,

if Isaac was a Presbyterian, which I reckon he was, but it don't say.

Naturally, the prophets of Baal took all the trade.  Isaac was pretty

low-spirited, I reckon, but he was a good deal of a man, and no doubt he

went a-prophesying around, letting on to be doing a land-office business,

but 'twa'n't any use; he couldn't run any opposition to amount to

anything.  By and by things got desperate with him; he sets his head to

work and thinks it all out, and then what does he do?  Why, he begins to

throw out hints that the other parties are this and that and t'other-

nothing very definite, maybe, but just kind of undermining their

reputation in a quiet way.  This made talk, of course, and finally got to

the king.  The king asked Isaac what he meant by his talk.  Says Isaac,

'Oh, nothing particular; only, can they pray-down fire from heaven on an

altar?  It ain't much, maybe, your majesty, only can they do it?  That's

the idea.'  So the king was a good deal disturbed, and he went to the

prophets of Baal, and they said, pretty airy, that if he had an altar

ready, they were ready; and they intimated he better get it insured, too.



"So next morning all the children of Israel and their parents and the

other people gathered themselves together.  Well, here was that great

crowd of prophets of Baal packed together on one side, and Isaac walking

up and down all alone on the other, putting up his job.  When time was

called, Isaac let on to be comfortable and indifferent; told the other

team to take the first innings.  So they went at it, the whole four

hundred and fifty, praying around the altar, very hopeful, and doing

their level best.  They prayed an hour--two hours--three hours--and so

on, plumb till noon.  It wa'n't any use; they hadn't took a trick.  Of

course they felt kind of ashamed before all those people, and well they

might.  Now, what would a magnanimous man do?  Keep still, wouldn't he?

Of course.  What did Isaac do?  He graveled the prophets of Baal every

way he could think of.  Says he, 'You don't speak up loud enough; your

god's asleep, like enough, or maybe he's taking a walk; you want to

holler, you know'--or words to that effect; I don't recollect the exact

language.  Mind, I don't apologize for Isaac; he had his faults.



"Well, the prophets of Baal prayed along the best they knew how all the

afternoon, and never raised, a spark.  At last, about sundown, they were

all tuckered out, and they owned up and quit.



"What does Isaac do now?  He steps up and says to some friends of his

there, 'Pour four barrels of water on the altar!'  Everybody was

astonished; for the other side had prayed at it dry, you know, and got

whitewashed.  They poured it on.  Says he, 'Heave on four more barrels.'

Then he says, 'Heave on four more.'  Twelve barrels, you see, altogether.

The water ran all over the altar, and all down the sides, and filled up a

trench around it that would hold a couple of hogsheads-'measures,' it

says; I reckon it means about a hogshead.  Some of the people were going

to put on their things and go, for they allowed he was crazy.  They

didn't know Isaac.  Isaac knelt down and began to pray; he strung along,

and strung along, about the heathen in distant lands, and about the

sister churches, and about the state and the country at large, and about

those that's in authority in the government, and all the usual program,

you know, till everybody had got tired and gone to thinking about

something else, and then, all of a sudden, when nobody was noticing, he

outs with a match and rakes it on the under side of his leg, and pff! up

the whole thing blazes like a house afire!  Twelve barrels of water?

Petroleum, sir, PETROLEUM! that's what it was!"



"Petroleum, captain?"



"Yes, sir, the country was full of it.  Isaac knew all about that.

You read the Bible.  Don't you worry about the tough places.  They ain't

tough when you come to think them out and throw light on them.  There

ain't a thing in the Bible but what is true; all you want is to go

prayerfully to work and cipher out how 'twas done."



At eight o'clock on the third morning out from New York, land was

sighted.  Away across the sunny waves one saw a faint dark stripe

stretched along under the horizon-or pretended to see it, for the credit

of his eyesight.  Even the Reverend said he saw it, a thing which was

manifestly not so.  But I never have seen any one who was morally strong

enough to confess that he could not see land when others claimed that

they could.



By and by the Bermuda Islands were easily visible.  The principal one lay

upon the water in the distance, a long, dull-colored body; scalloped with

slight hills and valleys.  We could not go straight at it, but had to

travel all the way around it, sixteen miles from shore, because it is

fenced with an invisible coral reef.  At last we sighted buoys, bobbing

here and there, and then we glided into a narrow channel among them,

"raised the reef," and came upon shoaling blue water that soon further

shoaled into pale green, with a surface scarcely rippled.  Now came the

resurrection hour; the berths gave up their dead.  Who are these pale

specters in plug-hats and silken flounces that file up the companionway

in melancholy procession and step upon the deck?  These are they which

took the infallible preventive of seasickness in New York harbor and then

disappeared and were forgotten.  Also there came two or three faces not

seen before until this moment.  One's impulse is to ask, "Where did you

come aboard?"



We followed the narrow channel a long time, with land on both sides-low

hills that might have been green and grassy, but had a faded look

instead.  However, the land-locked water was lovely, at any rate, with

its glittering belts of blue and green where moderate soundings were, and

its broad splotches of rich brown where the rocks lay near the surface.

Everybody was feeling so well that even the grave, pale young man (who,

by a sort of kindly common consent, had come latterly to be referred to

as "The Ass") received frequent and friendly notice--which was right

enough, for there was no harm in him.



At last we steamed between two island points whose rocky jaws allowed

only just enough room for the vessel's body, and now before us loomed

Hamilton on her clustered hillsides and summits, the whitest mass of

terraced architecture that exists in the world, perhaps.



It was Sunday afternoon, and on the pier were gathered one or two hundred

Bermudians, half of them black, half of them white, and all of them

nobbily dressed, as the poet says.



Several boats came off to the ship, bringing citizens.  One of these

citizens was a faded, diminutive old gentleman, who approached our most

ancient passenger with a childlike joy in his twinkling eyes, halted

before him, folded his arms, and said, smiling with all his might and

with all the simple delight that was in him, "You don't know me, John!

Come, out with it now; you know you don't!"



The ancient passenger scanned him perplexedly, scanned the napless,

threadbare costume of venerable fashion that had done Sunday service no

man knows how many years, contemplated the marvelous stovepipe hat of

still more ancient and venerable pattern, with its poor, pathetic old

stiff brim canted up "gallusly" in the wrong places, and said, with a

hesitation that indicated strong internal effort to "place" the gentle

old apparition, "Why .  .  .  let me see .  .  .  plague on it .  .  .

there's something about you that .  .  .  er .  .  .  er .  .  .  but

I've been gone from Bermuda for twenty-seven years, and .  .  .  hum, hum

.  .  .  I don't seem to get at it, somehow, but there's something about

you that is just as familiar to me as--"



"Likely it might be his hat," murmured the Ass, with innocent,

sympathetic interest.



So the Reverend and I had at last arrived at Hamilton, the principal town

in the Bermuda Islands.  A wonderfully white town; white as snow itself.

White as marble; white as flour.  Yet looking like none of these,

exactly.  Never mind, we said; we shall hit upon a figure by and by that

will describe this peculiar white.



It was a town that was compacted together upon the sides and tops of a

cluster of small hills.  Its outlying borders fringed off and thinned

away among the cedar forests, and there was no woody distance of curving

coast or leafy islet sleeping upon the dimpled, painted sea, but was

flecked with shining white points--half-concealed houses peeping out of

the foliage.  The architecture of the town was mainly Spanish, inherited

from the colonists of two hundred and fifty years ago.  Some ragged-

topped cocoa-palms, glimpsed here and there, gave the land a tropical

aspect.



There was an ample pier of heavy masonry; upon this, under shelter, were

some thousands of barrels containing that product which has carried the

fame of Bermuda to many lands, the potato.  With here and there an onion.

That last sentence is facetious; for they grow at least two onions in

Bermuda to one potato.  The onion is the pride and joy of Bermuda.  It is

her jewel, her gem of gems.  In her conversation, her pulpit, her

literature, it is her most frequent and eloquent figure.  In Bermuda

metaphor it stands for perfection-perfection absolute.



The Bermudian weeping over the departed exhausts praise when he says, "He

was an onion!"  The Bermudian extolling the living hero bankrupts

applause when he says, "He is an onion!"  The Bermudian setting his son

upon the stage of life to dare and do for himself climaxes all counsel,

supplication, admonition, comprehends all ambition, when he says, "Be an

onion!"



When parallel with the pier, and ten or fifteen steps outside it, we

anchored.  It was Sunday, bright and sunny.  The groups upon the pier-

men, youths, and boys-were whites and blacks in about equal proportion.

All were well and neatly dressed; many of them nattily, a few of them

very stylishly.  One would have to travel far before he would find

another town of twelve thousand inhabitants that could represent itself

so respectably, in the matter of clothes, on a freight-pier, without

premeditation or effort.  The women and young girls, black and white, who

occasionally passed by, were nicely clad, and many were elegantly and

fashionably so.  The men did not affect summer clothing much, but the

girls and women did, and their white garments were good to look at, after

so many months of familiarity with somber colors.



Around one isolated potato-barrel stood four young gentlemen, two black,

two white, becomingly dressed, each with the head of a slender cane

pressed against his teeth, and each with a foot propped up on the barrel.

Another young gentleman came up, looked longingly at the barrel, but saw

no rest for his foot there, and turned pensively away to seek another

barrel.  He wandered here and there, but without result.  Nobody sat upon

a barrel, as is the custom of the idle in other lands, yet all the

isolated barrels were humanly occupied.  Whosoever had a foot to spare

put it on a barrel, if all the places on it were not already taken.  The

habits of all peoples are determined by their circumstances.  The

Bermudians lean upon barrels because of the scarcity of lamp-posts.



Many citizens came on board and spoke eagerly to the officers--inquiring

about the Turco-Russian war news, I supposed.  However, by listening

judiciously I found that this was not so.  They said, "What is the price

of onions?" or, "How's onions?"  Naturally enough this was their first

interest; but they dropped into the war the moment it was satisfied.



We went ashore and found a novelty of a pleasant nature: there were no

hackmen, hacks, or omnibuses on the pier or about it anywhere, and nobody

offered his services to us, or molested us in any way.  I said it was

like being in heaven.  The Reverend rebukingly and rather pointedly

advised me to make the most of it, then.  We knew of a boarding-house,

and what we needed now was somebody to pilot us to it.  Presently a

little barefooted colored boy came along, whose raggedness was

conspicuously not Bermudian.  His rear was so marvelously bepatched with

colored squares and triangles that one was half persuaded he had got it

out of an atlas.  When the sun struck him right, he was as good to follow

as a lightning-bug.  We hired him and dropped into his wake.  He piloted

us through one picturesque street after another, and in due course

deposited us where we belonged.  He charged nothing for his map, and but

a trifle for his services: so the Reverend doubled it.  The little chap

received the money with a beaming applause in his eye which plainly said,

"This man's an onion!"



We had brought no letters of introduction; our names had been misspelled

in the passenger-list; nobody knew whether we were honest folk or

otherwise.  So we were expecting to have a good private time in case

there was nothing in our general aspect to close boarding-house doors

against us.  We had no trouble.  Bermuda has had but little experience of

rascals, and is not suspicious.  We got large, cool, well-lighted rooms

on a second floor, overlooking a bloomy display of flowers and flowering

shrubscalia and annunciation lilies, lantanas, heliotrope, jasmine,

roses, pinks, double geraniums, oleanders, pomegranates, blue morning-

glories of a great size, and many plants that were unknown to me.



We took a long afternoon walk, and soon found out that that exceedingly

white town was built of blocks of white coral.  Bermuda is a coral

island, With a six-inch crust of soil on top of it, and every man has a

quarry on his own premises.  Everywhere you go you see square recesses

gut into the hillsides, with perpendicular walls unmarred by crack or

crevice, and perhaps you fancy that a house grew out of the ground there,

and has been removed in a single piece from the mold.  If you do, you

err.  But the material for a house has been quarried there.  They cut

right down through the coral, to any depth that is convenient--ten to

twenty feet--and take it out in great square blocks.  This cutting is

done with a chisel that has a handle twelve or fifteen feet long, and is

used as one uses a crowbar when he is drilling a hole, or a dasher when

he is churning.  Thus soft is this stone.  Then with a common handsaw

they saw the great blocks into handsome, huge bricks that are two feet

long, a foot wide, and about six inches thick.  These stand loosely piled

during a month to harden; then the work of building begins.



The house is built of these blocks; it is roofed with broad coral slabs

an inch thick, whose edges lap upon each other, so that the roof looks

like a succession of shallow steps or terraces; the chimneys are built of

the coral blocks, and sawed into graceful and picturesque patterns; the

ground-floor veranda is paved with coral blocks; also the walk to the

gate; the fence is built of coral blocks--built in massive panels, with

broad capstones and heavy gate-posts, and the whole trimmed into easy

lines and comely shape with the saw.  Then they put a hard coat of

whitewash, as thick as your thumb-nail, on the fence and all over the

house, roof, chimneys, and all; the sun comes out and shines on this

spectacle, and it is time for you to shut your unaccustomed eyes, lest

they be put out.  It is the whitest white you can conceive of, and the

blindingest.  A Bermuda house does not look like marble; it is a much

intenser white than that; and, besides, there is a dainty, indefinable

something else about its look that is not marble-like.  We put in a great

deal of solid talk and reflection over this matter of trying to find a

figure that would describe the unique white of a Bermuda house, and we

contrived to hit upon it at last.  It is exactly the white of the icing

of a cake, and has the same unemphasized and scarcely perceptible polish.

The white of marble is modest and retiring compared with it.



After the house is cased in its hard scale of whitewash, not a crack, or

sign of a seam, or joining of the blocks is detectable, from base-stone

to chimney-top; the building looks as if it had been carved from a single

block of stone, and the doors and windows sawed out afterward.  A white

marble house has a cold, tomb-like, unsociable look, and takes the

conversation out of a body and depresses him.  Not so with a Bermuda

house.  There is something exhilarating, even hilarious, about its vivid

whiteness when the sun plays upon it.  If it be of picturesque shape and

graceful contour--and many of the Bermudian dwellings are--it will so

fascinate you that you will keep your eyes on it until they ache.  One of

those clean-cut, fanciful chimneys--too pure and white for this world--

with one side glowing in the sun and the other touched with a soft

shadow, is an object that will charm one's gaze by the hour.  I know of

no other country that has chimneys worthy to be gazed at and gloated

over.  One of those snowy houses, half concealed and half glimpsed

through green foliage, is a pretty thing to see; and if it takes one by

surprise and suddenly, as he turns a sharp corner of a country road, it

will wring an exclamation from him, sure.



Wherever you go, in town or country, you find those snowy houses, and

always with masses of bright-colored flowers about them, but with no

vines climbing their walls; vines cannot take hold of the smooth, hard

whitewash.  Wherever you go, in the town or along the country roads,

among little potato farms and patches or expensive country-seats, these

stainless white dwellings, gleaming out from flowers and foliage, meet

you at every turn.  The least little bit of a cottage is as white and

blemishless as the stateliest mansion.  Nowhere is there dirt or stench,

puddle or hog-wallow, neglect, disorder, or lack of trimness and

neatness.  The roads, the streets, the dwellings, the people, the

clothes--this neatness extends to everything that falls under the eye.

It is the tidiest country in the world.  And very much the tidiest, too.



Considering these things, the question came up, Where do the poor live?

No answer was arrived at.  Therefore, we agreed to leave this conundrum

for future statesmen to wrangle over.



What a bright and startling spectacle one of those blazing white country

palaces, with its brown-tinted window-caps and ledges, and green

shutters, and its wealth of caressing flowers and foliage, would be in

black London!  And what a gleaming surprise it would be in nearly any

American city one could mention, too!



Bermuda roads are made by cutting down a few inches into the solid white

coral--or a good many feet, where a hill intrudes itself--and smoothing

off the surface of the road-bed.  It is a simple and easy process.  The

grain of the coral is coarse and porous; the road-bed has the look of

being made of coarse white sugar.  Its excessive cleanness and whiteness

are a trouble in one way: the sun is reflected into your eyes with such

energy as you walk along that you want to sneeze all the time.  Old

Captain Tom Bowling found another difficulty.  He joined us in our walk,

but kept wandering unrestfully to the roadside.  Finally he explained.

Said he, "Well, I chew, you know, and the road's so plagued clean."



We walked several miles that afternoon in the bewildering glare of the

sun, the white roads, and the white buildings.  Our eyes got to paining

us a good deal.  By and by a soothing, blessed twilight spread its cool

balm around.  We looked up in pleased surprise and saw that it proceeded

from an intensely black negro who was going by.  We answered his military

salute in the grateful gloom of his near presence, and then passed on

into the pitiless white glare again.



The colored women whom we met usually bowed and spoke; so did the

children.  The colored men commonly gave the military salute.  They

borrow this fashion from the soldiers, no doubt; England has kept a

garrison here for generations.  The younger men's custom of carrying

small canes is also borrowed from the soldiers, I suppose, who always

carry a cane, in Bermuda as everywhere else in Britain's broad dominions.



The country roads curve and wind hither and thither in the delightfulest

way, unfolding pretty surprises at every turn: billowy masses of oleander

that seem to float out from behind distant projections like, the pink

cloud-banks of sunset; sudden plunges among cottages and gardens, life

and activity, followed by as sudden plunges into the somber twilight and

stillness of the woods; flitting visions of white fortresses and beacon

towers pictured against the sky on remote hilltops; glimpses of shining

green sea caught for a moment through opening headlands, then lost again;

more woods and solitude; and by and by another turn lays bare, without

warning, the full sweep of the inland ocean, enriched with its bars of

soft color and graced with its wandering sails.



Take any road you please, you may depend upon it you will not stay in it

half a mile. Your road is everything that a road ought to be: it is

bordered with trees, and with strange plants and flowers; it is shady and

pleasant, or sunny and still pleasant; it carries you by the prettiest

and peacefulest and most homelike of homes, and through stretches of

forest that lie in a deep hush sometimes, and sometimes are alive with

the music of birds; it curves always, which is a continual promise,

whereas straight roads reveal everything at a glance and kill interest.

Your road is all this, and yet you will not stay in it half a mile, for

the reason that little seductive, mysterious roads are always branching

out from it on either hand, and as these curve sharply also and hide what

is beyond, you cannot resist the temptation to desert your own chosen

road and explore them.  You are usually paid for your trouble;

consequently, your walk inland always turns out to be one of the most

crooked, involved, purposeless, and interesting experiences a body can

imagine. There is enough of variety.  Sometimes you are in the level

open, with marshes thick grown with flag-lances that are ten feet high on

the one hand, and potato and onion orchards on the other; next, you are

on a hilltop, with the ocean and the islands spread around you; presently

the road winds through a deep cut, shut in by perpendicular walls thirty

or forty feet high, marked with the oddest and abruptest stratum lines,

suggestive of sudden and eccentric old upheavals, and garnished with here

and there a clinging adventurous flower, and here and there a dangling

vine; and by and by your way is along the sea edge, and you may look down

a fathom or two through the transparent water and watch the diamond-like

flash and play of the light upon the rocks and sands on the bottom until

you are tired of it--if you are so constituted as to be able to get tired

of it.



You may march the country roads in maiden meditation, fancy free, by

field and farm, for no dog will plunge out at you from unsuspected gate,

with breath-taking surprise of ferocious bark, notwithstanding it is a

Christian land and a civilized.  We saw upward of a million cats in

Bermuda, but the people are very abstemious in the matter of dogs.  Two

or three nights we prowled the country far and wide, and never once were

accosted by a dog.  It is a great privilege to visit such a land.  The

cats were no offense when properly distributed, but when piled they

obstructed travel.



As we entered the edge of the town that Sunday afternoon, we stopped at a

cottage to get a drink of water.  The proprietor, a middle-aged man with

a good face, asked us to sit down and rest.  His dame brought chairs, and

we grouped ourselves in the shade of the trees by the door.  Mr. Smith--

that was not his name, but it will answer--questioned us about ourselves

and our country, and we answered him truthfully, as a general thing, and

questioned him in return.  It was all very simple and pleasant and

sociable.  Rural, too; for there was a pig and a small donkey and a hen

anchored out, close at hand, by cords to their legs, on a spot that

purported to be grassy.  Presently, a woman passed along, and although

she coldly said nothing she changed the drift of our talk.  Said Smith:



"She didn't look this way, you noticed?  Well, she is our next neighbor

on one side, and there's another family that's our next neighbors on the

other side; but there's a general coolness all around now, and we don't

speak.  Yet these three families, one generation and another, have lived

here side by side and been as friendly as weavers for a hundred and fifty

years, till about a year ago."



"Why, what calamity could have been powerful enough to break up so old a

friendship?"



"Well, it was too bad, but it couldn't be helped.  It happened like this:

About a year or more ago, the rats got to pestering my place a good deal,

and I set up a steel trap in my back yard.  Both of these neighbors run

considerable to cats, and so I warned them about the trap, because their

cats were pretty sociable around here nights, and they might get into

trouble without my intending it.  Well, they shut up their cats for a

while, but you know how it is with people; they got careless, and sure

enough one night the trap took Mrs.  Jones's principal tomcat into camp

and finished him up.  In the morning Mrs. Jones comes here with the

corpse in her arms, and cries and takes on the same as if it was a child.

It was a cat by the name of Yelverton--Hector G. Yelverton--a troublesome

old rip, with no more principle than an Injun, though you couldn't make

her believe it.  I said all a man could to comfort her, but no, nothing

would do but I must pay for him.  Finally, I said I warn't investing in

cats now as much as I was, and with that she walked off in a huff,

carrying the remains with her.  That closed our intercourse with the

Joneses.  Mrs. Jones joined another church and took her tribe with her.

She said she would not hold fellowship with assassins.  Well, by and by

comes Mrs. Brown's turn--she that went by here a minute ago.  She had a

disgraceful old yellow cat that she thought as much of as if he was

twins, and one night he tried that trap on his neck, and it fitted him

so, and was so sort of satisfactory, that he laid down and curled up and

stayed with it.  Such was the end of Sir John Baldwin."



"Was that the name of the cat?"



"The same.  There's cats around here with names that would surprise you.

"Maria" (to his wife), "what was that cat's name that eat a keg of

ratsbane by mistake over at Hooper's, and started home and got struck by

lightning and took the blind staggers and fell in the well and was 'most

drowned.  before they could fish him out?"



"That was that colored Deacon Jackson's cat.  I only remember the last

end of its name, which was Hold-The-Fort-For-I-Am-Coming Jackson."



"Sho! that ain't the one.  That's the one that eat up an entire box of

Seidlitz powders, and then hadn't any more judgment than to go and take a

drink.  He was considered to be a great loss, but I never could see it.

Well, no matter about the names.  Mrs. Brown wanted to be reasonable, but

Mrs. Jones wouldn't let her.  She put her up to going to law for damages.

So to law she went, and had the face to claim seven shillings and

sixpence.  It made a great stir.  All the neighbors went to court.

Everybody took sides.  It got hotter and hotter, and broke up all the

friendships for three hundred yards around friendships that had lasted

for generations and generations.



"Well, I proved by eleven witnesses that the cat was of a low character

and very ornery, and warn't worth a canceled postage-stamp, anyway,

taking the average of cats here; but I lost the case.  What could I

expect?  The system is all wrong here, and is bound to make revolution

and bloodshed some day.  You see, they give the magistrate a poor little

starvation salary, and then turn him loose on the public to gouge for

fees and costs to live on.  What is the natural result?  Why, he never

looks into the justice of a case--never once.  All he looks at is which

client has got the money.  So this one piled the fees and costs and

everything on to me.  I could pay specie, don't you see? and he knew

mighty well that if he put the verdict on to Mrs. Brown, where it

belonged, he'd have to take his swag in currency."



"Currency?  Why, has Bermuda a currency?"



"Yes-onions.  And they were forty per cent. discount, too, then, because

the season had been over as much as three months.  So I lost my case.

I had to pay for that cat.  But the general trouble the case made was the

worst thing about it.  Broke up so much good feeling.  The neighbors

don't speak to each other now.  Mrs. Brown had named a child after me.

But she changed its name right away.  She is a Baptist.  Well, in the

course of baptizing it over again it got drowned.  I was hoping we might

get to be friendly again some time or other, but of course this drowning

the child knocked that all out of the question.  It would have saved a

world of heartbreak and ill blood if she had named it dry."



I knew by the sigh that this was honest.  All this trouble and all this

destruction of confidence in the purity of the bench on account of a

seven-shilling lawsuit about a cat!  Somehow, it seemed to "size" the

country.



At this point we observed that an English flag had just been placed at

half-mast on a building a hundred yards away.  I and my friends were busy

in an instant trying to imagine whose death, among the island

dignitaries, could command such a mark of respect as this.  Then a

shudder shook them and me at the same moment, and I knew that we had

jumped to one and the same conclusion: "The governor has gone to England;

it is for the British admiral!"



At this moment Mr. Smith noticed the flag.  He said with emotion:



"That's on a boarding-house.  I judge there's a boarder dead."



A dozen other flags within view went to half-mast.



"It's a boarder, sure," said Smith.



"But would they half-mast the flags here for a boarder, Mr. Smith?"



"Why, certainly they would, if he was dead."



That seemed to size the country again.







IV



The early twilight of a Sunday evening in Hamilton, Bermuda, is an

alluring time.  There is just enough of whispering breeze, fragrance of

flowers, and sense of repose to raise one's thoughts heavenward; and just

enough amateur piano music to keep him, reminded of the other place.

There are many venerable pianos in Hamilton, and they all play at

twilight.  Age enlarges and enriches the powers of some musical

instruments--notably those of the violin--but it seems to set a piano's

teeth on edge.  Most of the music in vogue there is the same that those

pianos prattled in their innocent infancy; and there is something very

pathetic about it when they go over it now, in their asthmatic second

childhood, dropping a note here and there where a tooth is gone.



We attended evening service at the stately Episcopal church on the hill,

where five or six hundred people, half of them white and the other half

black, according to the usual Bermudian proportions; and all well

dressed--a thing which is also usual in Bermuda and to be confidently

expected.  There was good music, which we heard, and doubtless--a good

sermon, but there was a wonderful deal of coughing, and so only the high

parts of the argument carried over it.  As we came out, after service,

I overheard one young girl say to another:



"Why, you don't mean to say you pay duty on gloves and laces!  I only pay

postage; have them done up and sent in the Boston Advertiser."



There are; those that believe that the most difficult thing to create is

a woman who can comprehend that it is wrong to smuggle; and that an

impossible thing to create is a woman who will not smuggle, whether or

no, when she gets a chance.  But these may be errors.



We went wandering off toward the country, and were soon far down in the

lonely black depths of a road that was roofed over with the dense foliage

of a double rank of great cedars.  There was no sound of any kind there;

it was perfectly still.  And it was so dark that one could detect nothing

but somber outlines.  We strode farther and farther down this tunnel,

cheering the way with chat.



Presently the chat took this shape: "How insensibly the character of the

people and of a government makes its impress upon a stranger, and gives

him a sense of security or of insecurity without his taking deliberate

thought upon the matter or asking anybody a question!  We have been in

this land half a day; we have seen none but honest faces; we have noted

the British flag flying, which means efficient government and good order;

so without inquiry we plunge unarmed and with perfect confidence into

this dismal place, which in almost any other country would swarm with

thugs and garroters--"



'Sh!  What was that?  Stealthy footsteps!  Low voices!  We gasp, we close

up together, and wait.  A vague shape glides out of the dusk and

confronts us.  A voice speaks--demands money!



"A shilling, gentlemen, if you please, to help build the new Methodist

church."



Blessed sound!  Holy sound!  We contribute with thankful avidity to the

new Methodist church, and are happy to think how lucky it was that those

little colored Sunday-school scholars did not seize upon everything we

had with violence, before we recovered from our momentary helpless

condition.  By the light of cigars we write down the names of weightier

philanthropists than ourselves on the contribution cards, and then pass

on into the farther darkness, saying, What sort of a government do they

call this, where they allow little black pious children, with

contribution cards, to plunge out upon peaceable strangers in the dark

and scare them to death?



We prowled on several hours, sometimes by the seaside, sometimes inland,

and finally managed to get lost, which is a feat that requires talent in

Bermuda.  I had on new shoes.  They were No. 7's when I started, but were

not more than 5's now, and still diminishing.  I walked two hours in

those shoes after that, before we reached home.  Doubtless I could have

the reader's sympathy for the asking.  Many people have never had the

headache or the toothache, and I am one of those myself; but every body

has worn tight shoes for two or three hours, and known the luxury of

taking them off in a retired place and seeing his feet swell up and

obscure the firmament.  Once when I was a callow, bashful cub, I took a

plain, unsentimental country girl to a comedy one night.  I had known her

a day; she seemed divine; I wore my new boots.  At the end of the first

half-hour she said, "Why do you fidget so with your feet?"  I said, "Did

I?"  Then I put my attention there and kept still.  At the end of another

half-hour she said, "Why do you say, 'Yes, oh yes!' and 'Ha, ha, oh,

certainly!  very true!' to everything I say, when half the time those are

entirely irrelevant answers?"  I blushed, and explained that I had been a

little absent-minded.  At the end of another half-hour she said, "Please,

why do you grin so steadfastly at vacancy, and yet look so sad?"

I explained that I always did that when I was reflecting.  An hour

passed, and then she turned and contemplated me with her earnest eyes and

said, "Why do you cry all the time?"  I explained that very funny

comedies always made me cry.  At last human nature surrendered, and I

secretly slipped my boots off.  This was a mistake.  I was not able to

get them on any more.  It was a rainy night; there were no omnibuses

going our way; and as I walked home, burning up with shame, with the girl

on one arm and my boots under the other, I was an object worthy of some

compassion--especially in those moments of martyrdom when I had to pass

through the glare that fell upon the pavement from street-lamps.

Finally, this child of the forest said, "Where are your boots?" and being

taken unprepared, I put a fitting finish to the follies of the evening

with the stupid remark, "The higher classes do not wear them to the

theater."



The Reverend had been an army chaplain during the war, and while we were

hunting for a road that would lead to Hamilton he told a story about two

dying soldiers which interested me in spite of my feet.  He said that in

the Potomac hospitals rough pine coffins were furnished by government,

but that it was not always possible to keep up with the demand; so, when

a man died, if there was no coffin at hand he was buried without one.

One night, late, two soldiers lay dying in a ward.  A man came in with a

coffin on his shoulder, and stood trying to make up his mind which of

these two poor fellows would be likely to need it first.  Both of them

begged for it with their fading eyes--they were past talking.  Then one

of them protruded a wasted hand from his blankets and made a feeble

beckoning sign with the fingers, to signify, "Be a good fellow; put it

under my bed, please."  The man did it, and left.  The lucky soldier

painfully turned himself in his bed until he faced the other warrior,

raised himself partly on his elbow, and began to work up a mysterious

expression of some kind in his face.  Gradually, irksomely, but surely

and steadily, it developed, and at last it took definite form as a pretty

successful wink.  The sufferer fell back exhausted with his labor, but

bathed in glory.  Now entered a personal friend of No. 2, the despoiled

soldier.  No. 2 pleaded with him with eloquent eyes, till presently he

understood, and removed the coffin from under No. 1's bed and put it

under No. 2's.  No. 2 indicated his joy, and made some more signs; the

friend understood again, and put his arm under No. 2's shoulders and

lifted him partly up.  Then the dying hero turned the dim exultation of

his eye upon No. 1, and began a slow and labored work with his hands;

gradually he lifted one hand up toward his face; it grew weak and dropped

back again; once more he made the effort, but failed again.  He took a

rest; he gathered all the remnant of his strength, and this time he

slowly but surely carried his thumb to the side of his nose, spread the

gaunt fingers wide in triumph, and dropped back dead.  That picture

sticks by me yet.  The "situation" is unique.



The next morning, at what seemed a very early hour, the little white

table-waiter appeared suddenly in my room and shot a single word out of

himself "Breakfast!"



This was a remarkable boy in many ways.  He was about eleven years old;

he had alert, intent black eyes; he was quick of movement; there was no

hesitation, no uncertainty about him anywhere; there was a military

decision in his lip, his manner, his speech, that was an astonishing

thing to see in a little chap like him; he wasted no words; his answers

always came so quick and brief that they seemed to be part of the

question that had been asked instead of a reply to it.  When he stood at

table with his fly-brush, rigid, erect, his face set in a cast-iron

gravity, he was a statue till he detected a dawning want in somebody's

eye; then he pounced down, supplied it, and was instantly a statue again.

When he was sent to the kitchen for anything, he marched upright till he

got to the door; he turned hand-springs the rest of the way.



"Breakfast!"



I thought I would make one more effort to get some conversation out of

this being.



"Have you called the Reverend, or are--"



"Yes s'r!"



"Is it early, or is--"



"Eight-five."



"Do you have to do all the 'chores,' or is there somebody to give

you a--"



"Colored girl."



"Is there only one parish in this island, or are there--"



"Eight!"



"Is the big church on the hill a parish church, or is it--"



"Chapel-of-ease!"



"Is taxation here classified into poll, parish, town, and--"



"Don't know!"



Before I could cudgel another question out of my head, he was below,

hand-springing across the back yard.  He had slid down the balusters,

headfirst.  I gave up trying to provoke a discussion with him.  The

essential element of discussion had been left out of him; his answers

were so final and exact that they did not leave a doubt to hang

conversation on.  I suspect that there is the making of a mighty man or a

mighty rascal in this boy--according to circumstances--but they are going

to apprentice him to a carpenter.  It is the way the world uses its

opportunities.



During this day and the next we took carriage drives about the island and

over to the town of St. George's, fifteen or twenty miles away.  Such

hard, excellent roads to drive over are not to be found elsewhere out of

Europe.  An intelligent young colored man drove us, and acted as guide-

book.  In the edge of the town we saw five or six mountain-cabbage palms

(atrocious name!) standing in a straight row, and equidistant from each

other.  These were not the largest or the tallest trees I have ever seen,

but they were the stateliest, the most majestic.  That row of them must

be the nearest that nature has ever come to counterfeiting a colonnade.

These trees are all the same height, say sixty feet; the trunks as gray

as granite, with a very gradual and perfect taper; without sign of branch

or knot or flaw; the surface not looking like bark, but like granite that

has been dressed and not polished.  Thus all the way up the diminishing

shaft for fifty feet; then it begins to take the appearance of being

closely wrapped, spool-fashion, with gray cord, or of having been turned

in a lathe.  Above this point there is an outward swell, and thence

upward for six feet or more the cylinder is a bright, fresh green, and is

formed of wrappings like those of an ear of green Indian corn.  Then

comes the great, spraying palm plume, also green.  Other palm trees

always lean out of the perpendicular, or have a curve in them.  But the

plumb-line could not detect a deflection in any individual of this

stately row; they stand as straight as the colonnade of Baalbec; they

have its great height, they have its gracefulness, they have its dignity;

in moonlight or twilight, and shorn of their plumes, they would duplicate

it.



The birds we came across in the country were singularly tame; even that

wild creature, the quail, would pick around in the grass at ease while we

inspected it and talked about it at leisure.  A small bird of the canary

species had to be stirred up with the butt-end of the whip before it

would move, and then it moved only a couple of feet.  It is said that

even the suspicious flea is tame and sociable in Bermuda, and will allow

himself to be caught and caressed without misgivings.  This should be

taken with allowance, for doubtless there is more or less brag about it.

In San Francisco they used to claim that their native flea could kick a

child over, as if it were a merit in a flea to be able to do that; as if

the knowledge of it trumpeted abroad ought to entice immigration.  Such a

thing in nine cases out of ten would be almost sure to deter a thinking

man from coming.



We saw no bugs or reptiles to speak of, and so I was thinking of saying

in print, in a general way, that there were none at all; but one night

after I had gone to bed, the Reverend came into my room carrying

something, and asked, "Is this your boot?"  I said it was, and he said he

had met a spider going off with it.  Next morning he stated that just at

dawn the same spider raised his window and was coming in to get a shirt,

but saw him and fled.



I inquired, "Did he get the shirt?"



"No."



"How did you know it was a shirt he was after?"



"I could see it in his eye."



We inquired around, but could hear of no Bermudian spider capable of

doing these things.  Citizens said that their largest spiders could not

more than spread their legs over an ordinary saucer, and that they had

always been considered honest.  Here was testimony of a clergyman against

the testimony of mere worldlings--interested ones, too.  On the whole, I

judged it best to lock up my things.



Here and there on the country roads we found lemon, papaw, orange, lime,

and fig trees; also several sorts of palms, among them the cocoa, the

date, and the palmetto.  We saw some bamboos forty feet high, with stems

as thick as a man's arm.  Jungles of the mangrove tree stood up out of

swamps; propped on their interlacing roots as upon a tangle of stilts.

In drier places the noble tamarind sent down its grateful cloud of shade.

Here and there the blossomy tamarisk adorned the roadside.  There was a

curious gnarled and twisted black tree, without a single leaf on, it.

It might have passed itself off for a dead apple tree but for the fact

that it had a a star-like, red-hot flower sprinkled sparsely over its

person.  It had the scattery red glow that a constellation might have

when glimpsed through smoked glass, It is possible that our

constellations have been so constructed as to be invisible through smoked

glass; if this is so it is a great mistake.



We saw a tree that bears grapes, and just as calmly and unostentatiously

as a vine would do it.  We saw an India-rubber tree, but out of season,

possibly, so there were no shoes on it, nor suspenders, nor anything that

a person would properly expect to find there.  This gave it an

impressively fraudulent look.  There was exactly one mahogany tree on the

island.  I know this to be reliable, because I saw a man who said he had

counted it many a time and could not be mistaken.  He was a man with a

harelip and a pure heart, and everybody said he was as true as steel.

Such men are all too few.



One's eye caught near and far the pink cloud of the oleander and the red

blaze of the pomegranate blossom.  In one piece of wild wood the morning-

glory vines had wrapped the trees to their very tops, and decorated them

all over with couples and clusters of great bluebells-a fine and striking

spectacle, at a little distance.  But the dull cedar is everywhere, and

is the prevailing foliage.  One does not appreciate how dull it is until

the varnished, bright green attire of the infrequent lemon tree

pleasantly intrudes its contrast.  In one thing Bermuda is eminently

tropical--was in May, at least--the unbrilliant, slightly faded,

unrejoicing look of the landscape.  For forests arrayed in a blemishless

magnificence of glowing green foliage that seems to exult in its own

existence and can move the beholder to an enthusiasm that will make him

either shout or cry, one must go to countries that have malignant

winters.



We saw scores of colored farmers digging their crops of potatoes and

onions, their wives and children helping--entirely contented and

comfortable, if looks go for anything.  We never met a man, or woman, or

child anywhere in this sunny island who seemed to be unprosperous, or

discontented, or sorry about anything.  This sort of monotony became very

tiresome presently, and even something worse.  The spectacle of an entire

nation groveling in contentment is an infuriating thing.  We felt the

lack of something in this community--a vague, an indefinable, an elusive

something, and yet a lack.  But after considerable thought we made out

what it was--tramps.  Let them go there, right now, in a body.  It is

utterly virgin soil.  Passage is cheap.  Every true patriot in America

will help buy tickets.  Whole armies of these excellent beings can be

spared from our midst and our polls; they will find a delicious climate

and a green, kind-hearted people.  There are potatoes and onions for all,

and a generous welcome for the first batch that arrives, and elegant

graves for the second.



It was the Early Rose potato the people were digging.  Later in the year

they have another crop, which they call the Garnet.  We buy their

potatoes (retail) at fifteen dollars a barrel; and those colored farmers

buy ours for a song, and live on them.  Havana might exchange cigars with

Connecticut in the same advantageous way, if she thought of it.



We passed a roadside grocery with a sign up, "Potatoes Wanted."  An

ignorant stranger, doubtless.  He could not have gone thirty steps from

his place without finding plenty of them.



In several fields the arrowroot crop was already sprouting.  Bermuda used

to make a vast annual profit out of this staple before firearms came into

such general use.



The island is not large.  Somewhere in the interior a man ahead of us had

a very slow horse.  I suggested that we had better go by him; but the

driver said the man had but a little way to go.  I waited to see,

wondering how he could know.  Presently the man did turn down another

road.  I asked, "How did you know he would?"



"Because I knew the man, and where he lived."



I asked him, satirically, if he knew everybody in the island; he

answered, very simply, that he did.  This gives a body's mind a good

substantial grip on the dimensions of the place.



At the principal hotel at St. George's, a young girl, with a sweet,

serious face, said we could not be furnished with dinner, because we had

not been expected, and no preparation had been made.  Yet it was still an

hour before dinner-time.  We argued, she yielded not; we supplicated, she

was serene.  The hotel had not been expecting an inundation of two

people, and so it seemed that we should have to go home dinnerless.

I said we were not very hungry a fish would do.  My little maid answered,

it was not the market-day for fish.  Things began to look serious; but

presently the boarder who sustained the hotel came in, and when the case

was laid before him he was cheerfully willing to divide.  So we had much

pleasant chat at table about St. George's chief industry, the repairing

of damaged ships; and in between we had a soup that had something in it

that seemed to taste like the hereafter, but it proved to be only pepper

of a particularly vivacious kind.  And we had an iron-clad chicken that

was deliciously cooked, but not in the right way.  Baking was not the

thing to convince this sort.  He ought to have been put through a quartz-

mill until the "tuck" was taken out of him, and then boiled till we came

again.  We got a good deal of sport out of him, but not enough sustenance

to leave the victory on our side.  No matter; we had potatoes and a pie

and a sociable good time.  Then a ramble through the town, which is a

quaint one, with interesting, crooked streets, and narrow, crooked lanes,

with here and there a grain of dust.  Here, as in Hamilton, the dwellings

had Venetian blinds of a very sensible pattern.  They were not double

shutters, hinged at the sides, but a single broad shutter, hinged at the

top; you push it outward, from the bottom, and fasten it at any angle

required by the sun or desired by yourself.



All about the island one sees great white scars on the hill-slopes.

These are dished spaces where the soil has been scraped off and the coral

exposed and glazed with hard whitewash.  Some of these are a quarter-acre

in size.  They catch and carry the rainfall to reservoirs; for the wells

are few and poor, and there are no natural springs and no brooks.



They say that the Bermuda climate is mild and equable, with never any

snow or ice, and that one may be very comfortable in spring clothing the

year round, there.  We had delightful and decided summer weather in May,

with a flaming sun that permitted the thinnest of raiment, and yet there

was a constant breeze; consequently we were never discomforted by heat.

At four or five in the afternoon the mercury began to go down, and then

it became necessary to change to thick garments.  I went to St. George's

in the morning clothed in the thinnest of linen, and reached home at five

in the afternoon with two overcoats on.  The nights are said to be always

cool and bracing.  We had mosquito-nets, and the Reverend said the

mosquitoes persecuted him a good deal.  I often heard him slapping and

banging at these imaginary creatures with as much zeal as if they had

been real.  There are no mosquitoes in the Bermudas in May.



The poet Thomas Moore spent several months in Bermuda more than seventy

years ago.  He was sent out to be registrar of the admiralty.  I am not

quite clear as to the function of a registrar of the admiralty of

Bermuda, but I think it is his duty to keep a record of all the admirals

born there.  I will inquire into this.  There was not much doing in

admirals, and Moore got tired and went away.  A reverently preserved

souvenir of him is still one of the treasures of the islands: I gathered

the idea, vaguely, that it was a jug, but was persistently thwarted in

the twenty-two efforts I made to visit it.  However, it was no matter,

for I found out afterward that it was only a chair.



There are several "sights" in the Bermudas, of course, but they are

easily avoided.  This is a great advantage--one cannot have it in Europe.

Bermuda is the right country for a jaded man to "loaf" in.  There are no

harassments; the deep peace and quiet of the country sink into one's body

and bones and give his conscience a rest, and chloroform the legion of

invisible small devils that are always trying to whitewash his hair.

A good many Americans go there about the first of March and remain until

the early spring weeks have finished their villainies at home.



The Bermudians are hoping soon to have telegraphic communication with the

world.  But even after they shall have acquired this curse it will still

be a good country to go to for a vacation, for there are charming little

islets scattered about the inclosed sea where one could live secure from

interruption.  The telegraph-boy would have to come in a boat, and one

could easily kill him while he was making his landing.



We had spent four days in Bermuda--three bright ones out of doors and one

rainy one in the house, we being disappointed about getting a yacht for a

sail; and now our furlough was ended, and we entered into the ship again

and sailed homeward.



We made the run home to New York quarantine in three days and five hours,

and could have gone right along up to the city if we had had a health

permit.  But health permits are not granted after seven in the evening,

partly because a ship cannot be inspected and overhauled with exhaustive,

thoroughness except in daylight, and partly because health-officers are

liable to catch cold if they expose themselves to the night air.  Still,

you can buy a permit after hours for five dollars extra, and the officer

will do the inspecting next week.  Our ship and passengers lay under

expense and in humiliating captivity all night, under the very nose of

the little official reptile who is supposed to protect New York from

pestilence by his vigilant "inspections."  This imposing rigor gave

everybody a solemn and awful idea of the beneficent watchfulness of our

government, and there were some who wondered if anything finer could be

found in other countries.



In the morning we were all a-tiptoe to witness the intricate ceremony of

inspecting the ship.  But it was a disappointing thing.  The health-

officer's tug ranged alongside for a moment, our purser handed the lawful

three-dollar permit fee to the health-officer's bootblack, who passed us

a folded paper in a forked stick, and away we went.  The entire

"inspection" did not occupy thirteen seconds.



The health-officer's place is worth a hundred thousand dollars a year to

him.  His system of inspection is perfect, and therefore cannot be

improved on; but it seems to me that his system of collecting his fees

might be amended.  For a great ship to lie idle all night is a most

costly loss of time; for her passengers to have to do the same thing

works to them the same damage, with the addition of an amount of

exasperation and bitterness of soul that the spectacle of that health-

officer's ashes on a shovel could hardly sweeten.  Now why would it not

be better and simpler to let the ships pass in unmolested, and the fees

and permits be exchanged once a year by post.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Rambling Idle Excursion

by Mark Twain













THE STOLEN WHITE ELEPHANT



by Mark Twain







[Left out of A Tramp Abroad, because it was feared that some of the

particulars had been exaggerated, and that others were not true.  Before

these suspicions had been proven groundless, the book had gone to press.

--M.  T.]







The following curious history was related to me by a chance railway

acquaintance.  He was a gentleman more than seventy years of age, and his

thoroughly good and gentle face and earnest and sincere manner imprinted

the unmistakable stamp of truth upon every statement which fell from his

lips.  He said:



You know in what reverence the royal white elephant of Siam is held by

the people of that country.  You know it is sacred to kings, only kings

may possess it, and that it is, indeed, in a measure even superior to

kings, since it receives not merely honor but worship.  Very well; five

years ago, when the troubles concerning the frontier line arose between

Great Britain and Siam, it was presently manifest that Siam had been in

the wrong.  Therefore every reparation was quickly made, and the British

representative stated that he was satisfied and the past should be

forgotten.  This greatly relieved the King of Siam, and partly as a token

of gratitude, partly also, perhaps, to wipe out any little remaining

vestige of unpleasantness which England might feel toward him, he wished

to send the Queen a present--the sole sure way of propitiating an enemy,

according to Oriental ideas.  This present ought not only to be a royal

one, but transcendently royal.  Wherefore, what offering could be so meet

as that of a white elephant?  My position in the Indian civil service was

such that I was deemed peculiarly worthy of the honor of conveying the

present to her Majesty.  A ship was fitted out for me and my servants and

the officers and attendants of the elephant, and in due time I arrived in

New York harbor and placed my royal charge in admirable quarters in

Jersey City.  It was necessary to remain awhile in order to recruit, the

animal's health before resuming the voyage.



All went well during a fortnight--then my calamities began.  The white

elephant was stolen!  I was called up at dead of night and informed of

this fearful misfortune.  For some moments I was beside myself with

terror and anxiety; I was helpless.  Then I grew calmer and collected my

faculties.  I soon saw my course--for, indeed, there was but the one;

course for an intelligent man to pursue.  Late as it was, I flew to New

York and got a policeman to conduct me to the headquarters of the

detective force.  Fortunately I arrived in time, though the chief of the

force, the celebrated Inspector Blunt was just on the point of leaving

for his home.  He was a man of middle size and compact frame, and when he

was thinking deeply he had a way of kniting his brows and tapping his

forehead reflectively with his finger, which impressed you at once with

the conviction that you stood in the presence of a person of no common

order.  The very sight of him gave me confidence and made me hopeful.

I stated my errand.  It did not flurry him in the least; it had no more

visible effect upon his iron self-possession than if I had told him

somebody had stolen my dog.  He motioned me to a seat, and said, calmly:



"Allow me to think a moment, please."



So saying, he sat down at his office table and leaned his head upon his

hand.  Several clerks were at work at the other end of the room; the

scratching of their pens was all the sound I heard during the next six or

seven minutes.  Meantime the inspector sat there, buried in thought.

Finally he raised his head, and there was that in the firm lines of his

face which showed me that his brain had done its work and his plan was

made.  Said he--and his voice was low and impressive:



"This is no ordinary case.  Every step must be warily taken; each step

must be made sure before the next is ventured.  And secrecy must be

observed--secrecy profound and absolute.  Speak to no one about the

matter, not even the reporters.  I will take care of them; I will see

that they get only what it may suit my ends to let them know."  He

touched a bell; a youth appeared.  "Alaric, tell the reporters to remain

for the present."  The boy retired.  "Now let us proceed to business--and

systematically.  Nothing can be accomplished in this trade of mine

without strict and minute method."



He took a pen and some paper.  "Now--name of the elephant?"



"Hassan Ben Ali Ben Selim Abdallah Mohammed Moist Alhammal

Jamsetjejeebhoy Dhuleep Sultan Ebu Bhudpoor."



"Very well.  Given name?"



"Jumbo."



"Very well.  Place of birth?"



"The capital city of Siam."



"Parents living?"



"No--dead."



"Had they any other issue besides this one?"



"None.  He was an only child."



"Very well.  These matters are sufficient under that head.  Now please

describe the elephant, and leave out no particular, however

insignificant--that is, insignificant from your point of view.  To me in

my profession there are no insignificant particulars; they do not exist."



I described he wrote.  When I was done, he said:



"Now listen.  If I have made any mistakes, correct me."



He read as follows:



"Height, 19 feet; length from apex of forehead insertion of tail, 26

feet; length of trunk, 16 feet; length of tail, 6 feet; total length,

including trunk, and tail, 48 feet; length of tusks, 9 feet; ears

keeping with these dimensions; footprint resembles the mark left when one

up-ends a barrel in the snow; the color of the elephant, a dull white;

has a hole the size of a plate in each ear for the insertion of jewelry

and possesses the habit in a remarkable degree of squirting water upon

spectators and of maltreating with his trunk not only such persons as he

is acquainted with, but even entire strangers; limps slightly with his

right hind leg, and has a small scar in his left armpit caused by a

former boil; had on, when stolen, a castle containing seats for fifteen

persons, and a gold-cloth saddle-blanket the size of an ordinary carpet."



There were no mistakes.  The inspector touched the bell, handed the

description to Alaric, and said:



"Have fifty thousand copies of this printed at once and mailed to every

detective office and pawnbroker's shop on the continent."  Alaric

retired.  "There--so far, so good.  Next, I must have a photograph of the

property."



I gave him one.  He examined it critically, and said:



"It must do, since we can do no better; but he has his trunk curled up

and tucked into his mouth.  That is unfortunate, and is calculated to

mislead, for of course he does not usually have it in that position."

He touched his bell.



"Alaric, have fifty thousand copies of this photograph made the first

thing in the morning, and mail them with the descriptive circulars."



Alaric retired to execute his orders.  The inspector said:



"It will be necessary to offer a reward, of course.  Now as to the

amount?"



"What sum would you suggest?"



"To begin with, I should say--well, twenty-five thousand dollars.  It is

an intricate and difficult business; there are a thousand avenues of

escape and opportunities of concealment.  These thieves have friends and

pals everywhere--"



"Bless me, do you know who they are?"



The wary face, practised in concealing the thoughts and feelings within,

gave me no token, nor yet the replying words, so quietly uttered:



"Never mind about that.  I may, and I may not.  We generally gather a

pretty shrewd inkling of who our man is by the manner of his work and the

size of the game he goes after.  We are not dealing with a pickpocket or

a hall thief now, make up your mind to that.  This property was not

'lifted' by a novice.  But, as I was saying, considering the amount of

travel which will have to be done, and the diligence with which the

thieves will cover up their traces as they move along, twenty-five

thousand may be too small a sum to offer, yet I think it worth while to

start with that."



So we determined upon that figure as a beginning.  Then this man, whom

nothing escaped which could by any possibility be made to serve as a

clue, said:



"There are cases in detective history to show that criminals have been

detected through peculiarities, in their appetites.  Now, what does this

elephant eat, and how much?"



"Well, as to what he eats--he will eat anything.  He will eat a man, he

will eat a Bible--he will eat anything between a man and a Bible."



"Good very good, indeed, but too general.  Details are necessary--details

are the only valuable things in our trade.  Very well--as to men.  At one

meal--or, if you prefer, during one day--how man men will he eat, if

fresh?"



"He would not care whether they were fresh or not; at a single meal he

would eat five ordinary men.



"Very good; five men; we will put that down.  What nationalities would he

prefer?"



"He is indifferent about nationalities.  He prefers acquaintances, but is

not prejudiced against strangers."



"Very good.  Now, as to Bibles.  How many Bibles would he eat at a meal?"



"He would eat an entire edition."



"It is hardly succinct enough.  Do you mean the ordinary octavo, or the

family illustrated?"



"I think he would be indifferent to illustrations that is, I think he

would not value illustrations above simple letterpress."



"No, you do not get my idea.  I refer to bulk.  The ordinary octavo Bible

weighs about two pound; and a half, while the great quarto with the

illustrations weighs ten or twelve.  How many Dore Bibles would he eat at

a meal?"



"If you knew this elephant, you could not ask.  He would take what they

had."



"Well, put it in dollars and cents, then.  We must get at it somehow.

The Dore costs a hundred dollars a copy, Russia leather, beveled."



"He would require about fifty thousand dollars worth--say an edition of

five hundred copies."



"Now that is more exact.  I will put that down.  Very well; he likes men

and Bibles; so far, so good.  What else will he eat?  I want

particulars."



"He will leave Bibles to eat bricks, he will leave bricks to eat bottles,

he will leave bottles to eat clothing, he will leave clothing to eat

cats, he will leave cats to eat oysters, he will leave oysters to eat

ham, he will leave ham to eat sugar, he will leave sugar to eat pie, he

will leave pie to eat potatoes, he will leave potatoes to eat bran; he

will leave bran to eat hay, he will leave hay to eat oats, he will leave

oats to eat rice, for he was mainly raised on it.  There is nothing

whatever that he will not eat but European butter, and he would eat that

if he could taste it."



"Very good.  General quantity at a meal--say about--"



"Well, anywhere from a quarter to half a ton."



"And he drinks--"



"Everything that is fluid.  Milk, water, whisky, molasses, castor oil,

camphene, carbolic acid--it is no use to go into particulars; whatever

fluid occurs to you set it down.  He will drink anything that is fluid,

except European coffee."



"Very good.  As to quantity?"



"Put it down five to fifteen barrels--his thirst varies; his other

appetites do not."



"These things are unusual.  They ought to furnish quite good clues toward

tracing him."



He touched the bell.



"Alaric; summon Captain Burns."



Burns appeared.  Inspector Blunt unfolded the whole matter to him, detail

by detail.  Then he said in the clear, decisive tones of a man whose

plans are clearly defined in his head and who is accustomed to command:



"Captain Burns, detail Detectives Jones, Davis, Halsey, Bates, and

Hackett to shadow the elephant."



"Yes, sir."



"Detail Detectives Moses, Dakin, Murphy, Rogers, Tupper, Higgins, and

Bartholomew to shadow the thieves."



"Yes, sir."



"Place a strong guard--A guard of thirty picked men, with a relief of

thirty--over the place from whence the elephant was stolen, to keep

strict watch there night and day, and allow none to approach--except

reporters--without written authority from me."



"Yes, sir."



"Place detectives in plain clothes in the railway; steamship, and ferry

depots, and upon all roadways leading out of Jersey City, with orders to

search all suspicious persons."



"Yes, sir."



"Furnish all these men with photograph and accompanying description of

the elephant, and instruct them to search all trains and outgoing

ferryboats and other vessels."



"Yes, sir."



"If the elephant should be found, let him be seized, and the information

forwarded to me by telegraph."



"Yes, sir."



"Let me be informed at once if any clues should be found footprints of

the animal, or anything of that kind."



"Yes, sir."



"Get an order commanding the harbor police to patrol the frontages

vigilantly."



"Yes, sir."



"Despatch detectives in plain clothes over all the railways, north as far

as Canada, west as far as Ohio, south as far as Washington."



"Yes, sir."



"Place experts in all the telegraph offices to listen in to all messages;

and let them require that all cipher despatches be interpreted to them."



"Yes, sir."



"Let all these things be done with the utmost's secrecy--mind, the most

impenetrable secrecy."



"Yes, sir."



"Report to me promptly at the usual hour."



"Yes, Sir."



"Go!"



"Yes, sir."



He was gone.



Inspector Blunt was silent and thoughtful a moment, while the fire in his

eye cooled down and faded out.  Then he turned to me and said in a placid

voice:



"I am not given to boasting, it is not my habit; but--we shall find the

elephant."



I shook him warmly by the hand and thanked him; and I felt my thanks,

too.  The more I had seen of the man the more I liked him and the more I

admired him and marveled over the mysterious wonders of his profession.

Then we parted for the night, and I went home with a far happier heart

than I had carried with me to his office.





II



Next morning it was all in the newspapers, in the minutest detail.  It

even had additions--consisting of Detective This, Detective That, and

Detective The Other's "Theory" as to how the robbery was done, who the

robbers were, and whither they had flown with their booty.  There were

eleven of these theories, and they covered all the possibilities; and

this single fact shows what independent thinkers detectives are.  No two

theories were alike, or even much resembled each other, save in one

striking particular, and in that one all the other eleven theories were

absolutely agreed.  That was, that although the rear of my building was

torn out and the only door remained locked, the elephant had not been

removed through the rent, but by some other (undiscovered) outlet.

All agreed that the robbers had made that rent only to mislead the

detectives.  That never would have occurred to me or to any other layman,

perhaps, but it had not deceived the detectives for a moment.  Thus, what

I had supposed was the only thing that had no mystery about it was in

fact the very thing I had gone furthest astray in.  The eleven theories

all named the supposed robbers, but no two named the same robbers; the

total number of suspected persons was thirty-seven.  The various

newspaper accounts all closed with the most important opinion of all--

that of Chief Inspector Blunt.  A portion of this statement read as

follows:



     The chief knows who the two principals are, namely," Brick" Daffy

     and "Red" McFadden.  Ten days before the robbery was achieved he was

     already aware that it was to be attempted, and had quietly proceeded

     to shadow these two noted villains; but unfortunately on the night

     in question their track was lost, and before it could be found again

     the bird was flown--that is, the elephant.



     Daffy and McFadden are the boldest scoundrels in the profession; the

     chief has reasons for believing that they are the men who stole the

     stove out of the detective headquarters on a bitter night last

     winter--in consequence of which the chief and every detective

     present were in the hands of the physicians before morning, some

     with frozen feet, others with frozen fingers, ears, and other

     members.



When I read the first half of that I was more astonished than ever at the

wonderful sagacity of this strange man.  He not only saw everything in

the present with a clear eye, but even the future could not be hidden

from him.  I was soon at his office, and said I could not help wishing he

had had those men arrested, and so prevented the trouble and loss; but

his reply was simple and unanswerable:



"It is not our province to prevent crime, but to punish it.  We cannot

punish it until it is committed."



I remarked that the secrecy with which we had begun had been marred by

the newspapers; not only all our facts but all our plans and purposes had

been revealed; even all the suspected persons had been named; these would

doubtless disguise themselves now, or go into hiding.



"Let them.  They will find that when I am ready for them my hand will

descend upon them, in their secret places, as unerringly as the hand of

fate.  As to the newspapers, we must keep in with them.  Fame,

reputation, constant public mention--these are the detective's bread and

butter.  He must publish his facts, else he will be supposed to have

none; he must publish his theory, for nothing is so strange or striking

as a detective's theory, or brings him so much wonderful respect; we must

publish our plans, for these the journals insist upon having, and we

could not deny them without offending.  We must constantly show the

public what we are doing, or they will believe we are doing nothing.

It is much pleasanter to have a newspaper say, 'Inspector Blunt's

ingenious and extraordinary theory is as follows,' than to have it say

some harsh thing, or, worse still, some sarcastic one."



"I see the force of what you say.  But I noticed that in one part of your

remarks in the papers this morning you refused to reveal your opinion

upon a certain minor point."



"Yes, we always do that; it has a good effect.  Besides, I had not formed

any opinion on that point, anyway."



I deposited a considerable sum of money with the inspector, to meet

current expenses, and sat down to wait for news.  We were expecting the

telegrams to begin to arrive at any moment now.  Meantime I reread the

newspapers and also our descriptive circular, and observed that our

twenty-five thousand dollars reward seemed to be offered only to

detectives.  I said I thought it ought to be offered to anybody who would

catch the elephant.  The inspector said:



"It is the detectives who will find the elephant; hence the reward will

go to the right place.  If other people found the animal, it would only

be by watching the detectives and taking advantage of clues and

indications stolen from them, and that would entitle the detectives to

the reward, after all.  The proper office of a reward is to stimulate the

men who deliver up their time and their trained sagacities to this sort

of work, and not to confer benefits upon chance citizens who stumble upon

a capture without having earned the benefits by their own merits and

labors."



This was reasonable enough, certainly.  Now the telegraphic machine in

the corner began to click, and the following despatch was the result:



                         FLOWER STATION, N. Y., 7.30 A.M.

     Have got a clue.  Found a succession of deep tracks across a farm

     near here.  Followed them two miles east without result; think

     elephant went west.  Shall now shadow him in that direction.

                         DARLEY, Detective.



"Darley's one of the best men on the force," said the inspector.  "We

shall hear from him again before long."



Telegram No. 2 came:



                         BARKER'S, N. J., 7.40 A.M.

     Just arrived.  Glass factory broken open here during night, and

     eight hundred bottles taken.  Only water in large quantity near here

     is five miles distant.  Shall strike for there.  Elephant will be

     thirsty.  Bottles were empty.

                         DARLEY, Detective.



"That promises well, too," said the inspector.



"I told you the creature's appetites would not be bad clues."



Telegram No. 3:



                         TAYLORVILLE, L. I. 8.15 A.M.

     A haystack near here disappeared during night.  Probably eaten.

     Have got a clue, and am off.

                         HUBBARD, Detective.



"How he does move around!" said the inspector "I knew we had a difficult

job on hand, but we shall catch him yet."



                         FLOWER STATION, N. Y., 9 A.M.

     Shadowed the tracks three miles westward.  Large, deep, and ragged.

     Have just met a farmer who says they are not elephant-tracks.  Says

     they are holes where he dug up saplings for shade-trees when ground

     was frozen last winter.  Give me orders how to proceed.

                         DARLEY, Detective.



"Aha!  a confederate of the thieves!  The thing, grows warm," said the

inspector.



He dictated the following telegram to Darley:



     Arrest the man and force him to name his pals.  Continue to follow

     the tracks to the Pacific, if necessary.

                         Chief BLUNT.



Next telegram:



                         CONEY POINT, PA., 8.45 A.M.

     Gas office broken open here during night and three month; unpaid gas

     bills taken.  Have got a clue and am away.

                         MURPHY, Detective.



"Heavens!" said the inspector; "would he eat gas bills?"



"Through ignorance--yes; but they cannot support life.  At least,

unassisted."



Now came this exciting telegram:



                         IRONVILLE, N. Y., 9.30 A.M.

     Just arrived.  This village in consternation.  Elephant passed

     through here at five this morning.  Some say he went east some say

     west, some north, some south--but all say they did not wait to

     notice, particularly.  He killed a horse; have secure a piece of it

     for a clue.  Killed it with his trunk; from style of blow, think he

     struck it left-handed.  From position in which horse lies, think

     elephant traveled northward along line Berkley Railway.  Has four

     and a half hours' start, but I move on his track at once.

                         HAWES, Detective



I uttered exclamations of joy.  The inspector was as self-contained as a

graven image.  He calmly touched his bell.



"Alaric, send Captain Burns here."



Burns appeared.



"How many men are ready for instant orders?"



"Ninety-six, sir."



"Send them north at once.  Let them concentrate along the line of the

Berkley road north of Ironville."



"Yes, sir."



"Let them conduct their movements with the utmost secrecy.  As fast as

others are at liberty, hold them for orders."



"Yes, sir."



"Go!"



"Yes, sir."



Presently came another telegram:



                         SAGE CORNERS, N. Y., 10.30.

     Just arrived.  Elephant passed through here at 8.15.  All escaped

     from the town but a policeman.  Apparently elephant did not strike

     at policeman, but at the lamp-post.  Got both.  I have secured a

     portion of the policeman as clue.

                         STUMM, Detective.



"So the elephant has turned westward," said the inspector.  "However, he

will not escape, for my men are scattered all over that region."



The next telegram said:



                         GLOVER'S, 11.15

Just arrived.  Village deserted, except sick and aged.  Elephant passed

through three-quarters of an hour ago.  The anti-temperance mass-meeting

was in session; he put his trunk in at a window and washed it out with

water from cistern.  Some swallowed it--since dead; several drowned.

Detectives Cross and O'Shaughnessy were passing through town, but going

south--so missed elephant.  Whole region for many miles around in terror-

-people flying from their homes.  Wherever they turn they meet elephant,

and many are killed.

                         BRANT, Detective.



I could have shed tears, this havoc so distressed me.  But the inspector

only said:



"You see--we are closing in on him.  He feels our presence; he has turned

eastward again."



Yet further troublous news was in store for us.  The telegraph brought

this:



                         HOGANSPORT, 12.19.

     Just arrived.  Elephant passed through half an hour ago, creating

     wildest fright and excitement.  Elephant raged around streets; two

     plumbers going by, killed one--other escaped.  Regret general.

                         O'FLAHERTY, Detective.



"Now he is right in the midst of my men," said the inspector.  "Nothing

can save him."



A succession of telegrams came from detectives who were scattered through

New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and who were following clues consisting of

ravaged barns, factories, and Sunday-school libraries, with high

hopes-hopes amounting to certainties, indeed.  The inspector said:



"I wish I could communicate with them and order them north, but that is

impossible.  A detective only visits a telegraph office to send his

report; then he is off again, and you don't know where to put your hand

on him."



Now came this despatch:



                         BRIDGEPORT, CT., 12.15.

     Barnum offers rate of $4,000 a year for exclusive privilege of using

     elephant as traveling advertising medium from now till detectives

     find him.  Wants to paste circus-posters on him. Desires immediate

     answer.

                         BOGGS, Detective.



"That is perfectly absurd!" I exclaimed.



"Of course it is," said the inspector.  "Evidently Mr. Barnum, who thinks

he is so sharp, does not know me--but I know him."



Then he dictated this answer to the despatch:



     Mr. Barnum's offer declined.  Make it $7,000 or nothing.

                         Chief BLUNT.



"There.  We shall not have to wait long for an answer.  Mr.  Barnum is

not at home; he is in the telegraph office--it is his way when he has

business on hand.  Inside of three--"



     Done.--P. T. BARNUM.



So interrupted the clicking telegraphic instrument.  Before I could make

a comment upon this extraordinary episode, the following despatch carried

my thoughts into another and very distressing channel:



                         BOLIVIA, N. Y., 12.50.

     Elephant arrived here from the south and passed through toward the

     forest at 11.50, dispersing a funeral on the way, and diminishing

     the mourners by two.  Citizens fired some small cannon-balls into

     him, and they fled.  Detective Burke and I arrived ten minutes

     later, from the north, but mistook some excavations for footprints,

     and so lost a good deal of time; but at last we struck the right

     trail and followed it to the woods.  We then got down on our hands

     and knees and continued to keep a sharp eye on the track, and so

     shadowed it into the brush.  Burke was in advance.  Unfortunately

     the animal had stopped to rest; therefore, Burke having his head

     down, intent upon the track, butted up against the elephant's hind

     legs before he was aware of his vicinity.  Burke instantly arose to

     his feet, seized the tail, and exclaimed joyfully, "I claim the re--

     "but got no further, for a single blow of the huge trunk laid the

     brave fellow's fragments low in death.  I fled rearward, and the

     elephant turned and shadowed me to the edge of the wood, making

     tremendous speed, and I should inevitably have been lost, but that

     the remains of the funeral providentially intervened again and

     diverted his attention.  I have just learned that nothing of that

     funeral is now left; but this is no loss, for there is abundance of

     material for another.  Meantime, the elephant has disappeared again.

                         MULROONEY, Detective.



We heard no news except from the diligent and confident detectives

scattered about New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia--who

were all following fresh and encouraging clues--until shortly after

2 P.M., when this telegram came:



                         BAXTER CENTER, 2.15.

     Elephant been here, plastered over with circus-bills, any broke up a

     revival, striking down and damaging many who were on the point of

     entering upon a better life.  Citizens penned him up and established

     a guard.  When Detective Brown and I arrived, some time after, we

     entered inclosure and proceeded to identify elephant by photograph

     and description.  All masks tallied exactly except one, which we

     could not see--the boil-scar under armpit.  To make sure, Brown

     crept under to look, and was immediately brained--that is, head

     crushed and destroyed, though nothing issued from debris.  All fled

     so did elephant, striking right and left with much effect.  He

     escaped, but left bold blood-track from cannon-wounds.  Rediscovery

     certain.  He broke southward, through a dense forest.

                         BRENT, Detective.



That was the last telegram.  At nightfall a fog shut down which was so

dense that objects but three feet away could not be discerned.  This

lasted all night.  The ferry-boats and even the omnibuses had to stop

running.







III



Next morning the papers were as full of detective theories as before;

they had all our tragic facts in detail also, and a great many more which

they had received from their telegraphic correspondents.  Column after

column was occupied, a third of its way down, with glaring head-lines,

which it made my heart sick to read.  Their general tone was like this:



     THE WHITE ELEPHANT AT LARGE!  HE MOVES UPON HIS FATAL MARCH WHOLE

     VILLAGES DESERTED BY THEIR FRIGHT-STRICKEN OCCUPANTS!  PALE TERROR

     GOES BEFORE HIM, DEATH AND DEVASTATION FOLLOW AFTER!  AFTER THESE,

     THE DETECTIVES!  BARNS DESTROYED, FACTORIES GUTTED, HARVESTS

     DEVOURED, PUBLIC ASSEMBLAGES DISPERSED, ACCOMPANIED BY SCENES OF

     CARNAGE IMPOSSIBLE TO DESCRIBE!  THEORIES OF THIRTY-FOUR OF THE MOST

     DISTINGUISHED DETECTIVES ON THE FORCES!  THEORY OF CHIEF BLUNT!



"There!" said Inspector Blunt, almost betrayed into excitement, "this is

magnificent!  This is the greatest windfall that any detective

organization ever had.  The fame of it will travel to the ends of the

earth, and endure to the end of time, and my name with it."



But there was no joy for me.  I felt as if I had committed all those red

crimes, and that the elephant was only my irresponsible agent.  And how

the list had grown!  In one place he had "interfered with an election and

killed five repeaters."  He had followed this act with the destruction of

two pool fellows, named O'Donohue and McFlannigan, who had "found a

refuge in the home of the oppressed of all lands only the day before, and

were in the act of exercising for the first time the noble right of

American citizens at the polls, when stricken down by the relentless hand

of the Scourge of Siam."  In another, he had "found a crazy sensation-

preacher preparing his next season's heroic attacks on the dance, the

theater, and other things which can't strike back, and had stepped on

him."  And in still another place he had "killed a lightning-rod agent."

And so the list went on, growing redder and redder, and more and more

heartbreaking.  Sixty persons had been killed, and two hundred and forty

wounded.  All the accounts bore just testimony to the activity and

devotion of the detectives, and all closed with the remark that "three

hundred thousand citizen; and four detectives saw the dread creature, and

two of the latter he destroyed."



I dreaded to hear the telegraphic instrument begin to click again.

By and by the messages began to pour in, but I was happily disappointed

in they nature.  It was soon apparent that all trace of the elephant was

lost.  The fog had enabled him to search out a good hiding-place

unobserved.  Telegrams from the most absurdly distant points reported

that a dim vast mass had been glimpsed there through the fog at such and

such an hour, and was "undoubtedly the elephant."  This dim vast mass had

been glimpsed in New Haven, in New Jersey, in Pennsylvania, in interior

New York, in Brooklyn, and even in the city of New York itself!  But in

all cases the dim vast mass had vanished quickly and left no trace.

Every detective of the large force scattered over this huge extent of

country sent his hourly report, and each and every one of them had a

clue, and was shadowing something, and was hot upon the heels of it.



But the day passed without other result.



The next day the same.



The next just the same.



The newspaper reports began to grow monotonous with facts that amounted

to nothing, clues which led to nothing, and theories which had nearly

exhausted the elements which surprise and delight and dazzle.



By advice of the inspector I doubled the reward.



Four more dull days followed.  Then came a bitter blow to the poor,

hard-working detectives--the journalists declined to print their

theories, and coldly said, "Give us a rest."



Two weeks after the elephant's disappearance I raised the reward to

seventy-five thousand dollars by the inspector's advice.  It was a great

sum, but I felt that I would rather sacrifice my whole private fortune

than lose my credit with my government.  Now that the detectives were in

adversity, the newspapers turned upon them, and began to fling the most

stinging sarcasms at them.  This gave the minstrels an idea, and they

dressed themselves as detectives and hunted the elephant on the stage in

the most extravagant way.  The caricaturists made pictures of detectives

scanning the country with spy-glasses, while the elephant, at their

backs, stole apples out of their pockets.  And they made all sorts of

ridiculous pictures of the detective badge--you have seen that badge

printed in gold on the back of detective novels, no doubt it is a

wide-staring eye, with the legend, "WE NEVER SLEEP."  When detectives

called for a drink, the would-be facetious barkeeper resurrected an

obsolete form of expression and said, "Will you have an eye-opener?"

All the air was thick with sarcasms.



But there was one man who moved calm, untouched, unaffected, through it

all.  It was that heart of oak, the chief inspector.  His brave eye never

drooped, his serene confidence never wavered.  He always said:



"Let them rail on; he laughs best who laughs last."



My admiration for the man grew into a species of worship.  I was at his

side always.  His office had become an unpleasant place to me, and now

became daily more and more so.  Yet if he could endure it I meant to do

so also--at least, as long as I could.  So I came regularly, and stayed

--the only outsider who seemed to be capable of it.  Everybody wondered

how I could; and often it seemed to me that I must desert, but at such

times I looked into that calm and apparently unconscious face, and held

my ground.



About three weeks after the elephant's disappearance I was about to say,

one morning, that I should have to strike my colors and retire, when the

great detective arrested the thought by proposing one more superb and

masterly move.



This was to compromise with the robbers.  The fertility of this man's

invention exceeded anything I have ever seen, and I have had a wide

intercourse with the world's finest minds.  He said he was confident he

could compromise for one hundred thousand dollars and recover the

elephant.  I said I believed I could scrape the amount together, but what

would become of the poor detectives who had worked so faithfully?  He

said:



"In compromises they always get half."



This removed my only objection.  So the inspector wrote two notes, in

this form:



     DEAR MADAM,--Your husband can make a large sum of money (and be

     entirely protected from the law) by making an immediate, appointment

     with me.                           Chief BLUNT.



He sent one of these by his confidential messenger to the "reputed wife"

of Brick Duffy, and the other to the reputed wife of Red McFadden.



Within the hour these offensive answers came:



     YE OWLD FOOL: brick Duffys bin ded 2 yere.

                                        BRIDGET MAHONEY.



     CHIEF BAT,--Red McFadden is hung and in heving 18 month.  Any Ass

     but a detective know that.

                                        MARY O'HOOLIGAN.



"I had long suspected these facts," said the inspector; "this testimony

proves the unerring accuracy of my instinct."



The moment one resource failed him he was ready with another.  He

immediately wrote an advertisement for the morning papers, and I kept a

copy of it:



     A.--xWhlv.  242 ht.  Tjnd--fz328wmlg.  Ozpo,--2 m!  2m!.  M! ogw.



He said that if the thief was alive this would bring him to the usual

rendezvous.  He further explained that the usual rendezvous was a glare

where all business affairs between detectives and criminals were

conducted.  This meeting would take place at twelve the next night.



We could do nothing till then, and I lost no time in getting out of the

office, and was grateful indeed for the privilege.



At eleven the next night I brought one hundred thousand dollars in

bank-notes and put them into the chief's hands, and shortly afterward he

took his leave, with the brave old undimmed confidence in his eye.

An almost intolerable hour dragged to a close; then I heard his welcome

tread, and rose gasping and tottered to meet him.  How his fine eyes

flamed with triumph!  He said:



"We've compromised!  The jokers will sing a different tune to-morrow!

Follow me!"



He took a lighted candle and strode down into the vast vaulted basement

where sixty detectives always slept, and where a score were now playing

cards to while the time.  I followed close after him.  He walked swiftly

down to the dim and remote end of the place, and just as I succumbed to

the pangs of suffocation and was swooning away he stumbled and fell over

the outlying members of a mighty object, and I heard him exclaim as he

went down:



"Our noble profession is vindicated.  Here is your elephant!"



I was carried to the office above and restored with carbolic acid.  The

whole detective force swarmed in, and such another season of triumphant

rejoicing ensued as I had never witnessed before.  The reporters were

called, baskets of champagne were opened, toasts were drunk, the

handshakings and congratulations were continuous and enthusiastic.

Naturally the chief was the hero of the hour, and his happiness was so

complete and had been so patiently and worthily and bravely won that it

made me happy to see it, though I stood there a homeless beggar, my

priceless charge dead, and my position in my country's service lost to me

through what would always seem my fatally careless execution of a great

trust.  Many an eloquent eye testified its deep admiration for the chief,

and many a detective's voice murmured, "Look at him--just the king of the

profession; only give him a clue, it's all he wants, and there ain't

anything hid that he can't find."  The dividing of the fifty thousand

dollars made great pleasure; when it was finished the chief made a little

speech while he put his share in his pocket, in which he said, "Enjoy it,

boys, for you've earned it; and, more than that, you've earned for the

detective profession undying fame."



A telegram arrived, which read:



                         MONROE, MICH., 10 P.M.

First time I've struck a telegraph office in over three weeks.  Have

followed those footprints, horseback, through the woods, a thousand miles

to here, and they get stronger and bigger and fresher every day.  Don't

worry-inside of another week I'll have the elephant.  This is dead sure.

                         DARLEY, Detective.



The chief ordered three cheers for "Darley, one of the finest minds on

the force," and then commanded that he be telegraphed to come home and

receive his share of the reward.



So ended that marvelous episode of the stolen elephant.  The newspapers

were pleasant with praises once more, the next day, with one contemptible

exception.  This sheet said, "Great is the detective!  He may be a little

slow in finding a little thing like a mislaid elephant he may hunt him

all day and sleep with his rotting carcass all night for three weeks, but

he will find him at last if he can get the man who mislaid him to show

him the place!"



Poor Hassan was lost to me forever.  The cannonshots had wounded him

fatally, he had crept to that unfriendly place in the fog, and there,

surrounded by his enemies and in constant danger of detection, he had

wasted away with hunger and suffering till death gave him peace.



The compromise cost me one hundred thousand dollars; my detective

expenses were forty-two thousand dollars more; I never applied for a

place again under my government; I am a ruined man and a wanderer on the

earth but my admiration for that man, whom I believe to be the greatest

detective the world has ever produced, remains undimmed to this day, and

will so remain unto the end.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Stolen White Elephant,

by Mark Twain













                    A TRAMP ABROAD



                     By Mark Twain

                  (Samuel L. Clemens)



                First published in 1880



                      * * * * * *







CHAPTER I

[The Knighted Knave of Bergen]



One day it occurred to me that it had been many years

since the world had been afforded the spectacle of a man

adventurous enough to undertake a journey through Europe

on foot.  After much thought, I decided that I was

a person fitted to furnish to mankind this spectacle.

So I determined to do it.  This was in March, 1878.



I looked about me for the right sort of person to

accompany me in the capacity of agent, and finally

hired a Mr. Harris for this service.



It was also my purpose to study art while in Europe.

Mr. Harris was in sympathy with me in this.  He was as much

of an enthusiast in art as I was, and not less anxious

to learn to paint.  I desired to learn the German language;

so did Harris.



Toward the middle of April we sailed in the HOLSATIA,

Captain Brandt, and had a very peasant trip, indeed.



After a brief rest at Hamburg, we made preparations for

a long pedestrian trip southward in the soft spring weather,

but at the last moment we changed the program,

for private reasons, and took the express-train.



We made a short halt at Frankfort-on-the-Main, and found

it an interesting city.  I would have liked to visit

the birthplace of Gutenburg, but it could not be done,

as no memorandum of the site of the house has been kept.

So we spent an hour in the Goethe mansion instead.

The city permits this house to belong to private parties,

instead of gracing and dignifying herself with the honor

of possessing and protecting it.



Frankfort is one of the sixteen cities which have

the distinction of being the place where the following

incident occurred.  Charlemagne, while chasing the Saxons

(as HE said), or being chased by them (as THEY said),

arrived at the bank of the river at dawn, in a fog.

The enemy were either before him or behind him;

but in any case he wanted to get across, very badly.

He would have given anything for a guide, but none was to

be had.  Presently he saw a deer, followed by her young,

approach the water.  He watched her, judging that she

would seek a ford, and he was right.  She waded over,

and the army followed.  So a great Frankish victory or

defeat was gained or avoided; and in order to commemorate

the episode, Charlemagne commanded a city to be built there,

which he named Frankfort--the ford of the Franks.

None of the other cities where this event happened were

named for it.  This is good evidence that Frankfort was

the first place it occurred at.



Frankfort has another distinction--it is the birthplace

of the German alphabet; or at least of the German word

for alphabet --BUCHSTABEN. They say that the first movable

types were made on birch sticks--BUCHSTABE--hence the name.



I was taught a lesson in political economy in Frankfort.

I had brought from home a box containing a thousand

very cheap cigars.  By way of experiment, I stepped

into a little shop in a queer old back street, took four

gaily decorated boxes of wax matches and three cigars,

and laid down a silver piece worth 48 cents.  The man gave

me 43 cents change.



In Frankfort everybody wears clean clothes, and I think we

noticed that this strange thing was the case in Hamburg, too,

and in the villages along the road.  Even in the narrowest

and poorest and most ancient quarters of Frankfort neat

and clean clothes were the rule.  The little children

of both sexes were nearly always nice enough to take into

a body's lap.  And as for the uniforms of the soldiers,

they were newness and brightness carried to perfection.

One could never detect a smirch or a grain of dust

upon them.  The street-car conductors and drivers wore

pretty uniforms which seemed to be just out of the bandbox,

and their manners were as fine as their clothes.



In one of the shops I had the luck to stumble upon a book

which has charmed me nearly to death.  It is entitled

THE LEGENDS OF THE RHINE FROM BASLE TO ROTTERDAM,

by F. J. Kiefer; translated by L. W. Garnham, B.A.



All tourists MENTION the Rhine legends--in that sort of way

which quietly pretends that the mentioner has been familiar

with them all his life, and that the reader cannot possibly

be ignorant of them--but no tourist ever TELLS them.

So this little book fed me in a very hungry place; and I,

in my turn, intend to feed my reader, with one or two

little lunches from the same larder.  I shall not mar

Garnharn's translation by meddling with its English;

for the most toothsome thing about it is its quaint

fashion of building English sentences on the German plan--

and punctuating them accordingly to no plan at all.



In the chapter devoted to "Legends of Frankfort,"

I find the following:



"THE KNAVE OF BERGEN"



"In Frankfort at the Romer was a great mask-ball, at

the coronation festival, and in the illuminated saloon,

the clanging music invited to dance, and splendidly

appeared the rich toilets and charms of the ladies,

and the festively costumed Princes and Knights.

All seemed pleasure, joy, and roguish gaiety, only one of the

numerous guests had a gloomy exterior; but exactly the black

armor in which he walked about excited general attention,

and his tall figure, as well as the noble propriety of

his movements, attracted especially the regards of the ladies.

Who the Knight was? Nobody could guess, for his Vizier

was well closed, and nothing made him recognizable.

Proud and yet modest he advanced to the Empress; bowed on

one knee before her seat, and begged for the favor of a

waltz with the Queen of the festival.  And she allowed

his request.  With light and graceful steps he danced

through the long saloon, with the sovereign who thought

never to have found a more dexterous and excellent dancer.

But also by the grace of his manner, and fine conversation

he knew to win the Queen, and she graciously accorded him

a second dance for which he begged, a third, and a fourth,

as well as others were not refused him.  How all regarded

the happy dancer, how many envied him the high favor;

how increased curiosity, who the masked knight could be.



"Also the Emperor became more and more excited with curiosity,

and with great suspense one awaited the hour, when according

to mask-law, each masked guest must make himself known.

This moment came, but although all other unmasked;

the secret knight still refused to allow his features

to be seen, till at last the Queen driven by curiosity,

and vexed at the obstinate refusal; commanded him to open

his Vizier.  He opened it, and none of the high ladies

and knights knew him.  But from the crowded spectators,

2 officials advanced, who recognized the black dancer,

and horror and terror spread in the saloon, as they said who

the supposed knight was.  It was the executioner of Bergen.

But glowing with rage, the King commanded to seize the

criminal and lead him to death, who had ventured to dance,

with the queen; so disgraced the Empress, and insulted

the crown.  The culpable threw himself at the Emperor,

and said--



"'Indeed I have heavily sinned against all noble guests

assembled here, but most heavily against you my sovereign

and my queen.  The Queen is insulted by my haughtiness

equal to treason, but no punishment even blood, will not

be able to wash out the disgrace, which you have suffered

by me.  Therefore oh King! allow me to propose a remedy,

to efface the shame, and to render it as if not done.

Draw your sword and knight me, then I will throw down

my gauntlet, to everyone who dares to speak disrespectfully

of my king.'



"The Emperor was surprised at this bold proposal,

however it appeared the wisest to him; 'You are a knave

he replied after a moment's consideration, however your

advice is good, and displays prudence, as your offense

shows adventurous courage.  Well then, and gave him the

knight-stroke so I raise you to nobility, who begged for

grace for your offense now kneels before me, rise as knight;

knavish you have acted, and Knave of Bergen shall you

be called henceforth, and gladly the Black knight rose;

three cheers were given in honor of the Emperor,

and loud cries of joy testified the approbation with

which the Queen danced still once with the Knave of Bergen."







CHAPTER II

Heidelberg

[Landing a Monarch at Heidelberg]



We stopped at a hotel by the railway-station. Next morning,

as we sat in my room waiting for breakfast to come up,

we got a good deal interested in something which was

going on over the way, in front of another hotel.

First, the personage who is called the PORTIER (who is

not the PORTER, but is a sort of first-mate of a hotel)

[1. See Appendix A] appeared at the door in a spick-and-span

new blue cloth uniform, decorated with shining brass buttons,

and with bands of gold lace around his cap and wristbands;

and he wore white gloves, too.  He shed an official glance

upon the situation, and then began to give orders.

Two women-servants came out with pails and brooms

and brushes, and gave the sidewalk a thorough scrubbing;

meanwhile two others scrubbed the four marble steps

which led up to the door; beyond these we could see some

men-servants taking up the carpet of the grand staircase.

This carpet was carried away and the last grain of dust

beaten and banged and swept our of it; then brought back

and put down again.  The brass stair-rods received an

exhaustive polishing and were returned to their places.

Now a troop of servants brought pots and tubs

of blooming plants and formed them into a beautiful

jungle about the door and the base of the staircase.

Other servants adorned all the balconies of the various

stories with flowers and banners; others ascended

to the roof and hoisted a great flag on a staff there.

Now came some more chamber-maids and retouched the sidewalk,

and afterward wiped the marble steps with damp cloths

and finished by dusting them off with feather brushes.

Now a broad black carpet was brought out and laid down the

marble steps and out across the sidewalk to the curbstone.

The PORTIER cast his eye along it, and found it was not

absolutely straight; he commanded it to be straightened;

the servants made the effort--made several efforts,

in fact--but the PORTIER was not satisfied.  He finally

had it taken up, and then he put it down himself and got

it right.



At this stage of the proceedings, a narrow bright

red carpet was unrolled and stretched from the top

of the marble steps to the curbstone, along the center

of the black carpet.  This red path cost the PORTIER

more trouble than even the black one had done.  But he

patiently fixed and refixed it until it was exactly right

and lay precisely in the middle of the black carpet.

In New York these performances would have gathered a mighty

crowd of curious and intensely interested spectators;

but here it only captured an audience of half a dozen

little boys who stood in a row across the pavement,

some with their school-knapsacks on their backs and their

hands in their pockets, others with arms full of bundles,

and all absorbed in the show.  Occasionally one of them

skipped irreverently over the carpet and took up a position

on the other side.  This always visibly annoyed the PORTIER.



Now came a waiting interval.  The landlord, in plain clothes,

and bareheaded, placed himself on the bottom marble step,

abreast the PORTIER, who stood on the other end of the

same steps; six or eight waiters, gloved, bareheaded,

and wearing their whitest linen, their whitest cravats,

and their finest swallow-tails, grouped themselves

about these chiefs, but leaving the carpetway clear.

Nobody moved or spoke any more but only waited.



In a short time the shrill piping of a coming train was heard,

and immediately groups of people began to gather in the street.

Two or three open carriages arrived, and deposited some

maids of honor and some male officials at the hotel.

Presently another open carriage brought the Grand Duke

of Baden, a stately man in uniform, who wore the handsome

brass-mounted, steel-spiked helmet of the army on his head.

Last came the Empress of Germany and the Grand Duchess

of Baden in a closed carriage; these passed through the

low-bowing groups of servants and disappeared in the hotel,

exhibiting to us only the backs of their heads, and then

the show was over.



It appears to be as difficult to land a monarch as it

is to launch a ship.



But as to Heidelberg.  The weather was growing pretty warm,

--very warm, in fact.  So we left the valley and took

quarters at the Schloss Hotel, on the hill, above the Castle.



Heidelberg lies at the mouth of a narrow gorge--a gorge

the shape of a shepherd's crook; if one looks up it he

perceives that it is about straight, for a mile and a half,

then makes a sharp curve to the right and disappears.

This gorge--along whose bottom pours the swift Neckar--

is confined between (or cloven through) a couple of long,

steep ridges, a thousand feet high and densely wooded

clear to their summits, with the exception of one section

which has been shaved and put under cultivation.

These ridges are chopped off at the mouth of the gorge

and form two bold and conspicuous headlands, with Heidelberg

nestling between them; from their bases spreads away

the vast dim expanse of the Rhine valley, and into this

expanse the Neckar goes wandering in shining curves and is

presently lost to view.



Now if one turns and looks up the gorge once more, he will

see the Schloss Hotel on the right perched on a precipice

overlooking the Neckar--a precipice which is so sumptuously

cushioned and draped with foliage that no glimpse of the

rock appears.  The building seems very airily situated.

It has the appearance of being on a shelf half-way up

the wooded mountainside; and as it is remote and isolated,

and very white, it makes a strong mark against the lofty

leafy rampart at its back.



This hotel had a feature which was a decided novelty,

and one which might be adopted with advantage by any house

which is perched in a commanding situation.  This feature

may be described as a series of glass-enclosed parlors

CLINGING TO THE OUTSIDE OF THE HOUSE, one against each

and every bed-chamber and drawing-room. They are like long,

narrow, high-ceiled bird-cages hung against the building.

My room was a corner room, and had two of these things,

a north one and a west one.



From the north cage one looks up the Neckar gorge;

from the west one he looks down it.  This last affords

the most extensive view, and it is one of the loveliest

that can be imagined, too.  Out of a billowy upheaval of

vivid green foliage, a rifle-shot removed, rises the huge

ruin of Heidelberg Castle, [2. See Appendix B] with empty window

arches,

ivy-mailed battlements, moldering towers--the Lear of

inanimate nature--deserted, discrowned, beaten by the storms,

but royal still, and beautiful.  It is a fine sight to see

the evening sunlight suddenly strike the leafy declivity

at the Castle's base and dash up it and drench it as with

a luminous spray, while the adjacent groves are in deep shadow.



Behind the Castle swells a great dome-shaped hill,

forest-clad, and beyond that a nobler and loftier one.

The Castle looks down upon the compact brown-roofed town;

and from the town two picturesque old bridges span

the river.  Now the view broadens; through the gateway

of the sentinel headlands you gaze out over the wide

Rhine plain, which stretches away, softly and richly tinted,

grows gradually and dreamily indistinct, and finally melts

imperceptibly into the remote horizon.



I have never enjoyed a view which had such a serene

and satisfying charm about it as this one gives.



The first night we were there, we went to bed and to

sleep early; but I awoke at the end of two or three hours,

and lay a comfortable while listening to the soothing

patter of the rain against the balcony windows.

I took it to be rain, but it turned out to be only the

murmur of the restless Neckar, tumbling over her dikes

and dams far below, in the gorge.  I got up and went

into the west balcony and saw a wonderful sight.

Away down on the level under the black mass of the Castle,

the town lay, stretched along the river, its intricate

cobweb of streets jeweled with twinkling lights;

there were rows of lights on the bridges; these flung

lances of light upon the water, in the black shadows

of the arches; and away at the extremity of all this

fairy spectacle blinked and glowed a massed multitude

of gas-jets which seemed to cover acres of ground;

it was as if all the diamonds in the world had been spread

out there.  I did not know before, that a half-mile

of sextuple railway-tracks could be made such an adornment.



One thinks Heidelberg by day--with its surroundings--

is the last possibility of the beautiful; but when he

sees Heidelberg by night, a fallen Milky Way, with that

glittering railway constellation pinned to the border,

he requires time to consider upon the verdict.



One never tires of poking about in the dense woods that

clothe all these lofty Neckar hills to their beguiling

and impressive charm in any country; but German legends

and fairy tales have given these an added charm.

They have peopled all that region with gnomes, and dwarfs,

and all sorts of mysterious and uncanny creatures.

At the time I am writing of, I had been reading so much

of this literature that sometimes I was not sure but I

was beginning to believe in the gnomes and fairies

as realities.



One afternoon I got lost in the woods about a mile from

the hotel, and presently fell into a train of dreamy thought

about animals which talk, and kobolds, and enchanted folk,

and the rest of the pleasant legendary stuff; and so,

by stimulating my fancy, I finally got to imagining I

glimpsed small flitting shapes here and there down the

columned aisles of the forest.  It was a place which was

peculiarly meet for the occasion.  It was a pine wood,

with so thick and soft a carpet of brown needles that one's

footfall made no more sound than if he were treading

on wool; the tree-trunks were as round and straight

and smooth as pillars, and stood close together;

they were bare of branches to a point about twenty-five

feet above-ground, and from there upward so thick with

boughs that not a ray of sunlight could pierce through.

The world was bright with sunshine outside, but a deep

and mellow twilight reigned in there, and also a deep

silence so profound that I seemed to hear my own breathings.



When I had stood ten minutes, thinking and imagining,

and getting my spirit in tune with the place, and in the

right mood to enjoy the supernatural, a raven suddenly

uttered a horse croak over my head.  It made me start;

and then I was angry because I started.  I looked up,

and the creature was sitting on a limb right over me,

looking down at me.  I felt something of the same sense

of humiliation and injury which one feels when he finds

that a human stranger has been clandestinely inspecting

him in his privacy and mentally commenting upon him.

I eyed the raven, and the raven eyed me.  Nothing was said

during some seconds.  Then the bird stepped a little way

along his limb to get a better point of observation,

lifted his wings, stuck his head far down below his

shoulders toward me and croaked again--a croak with a

distinctly insulting expression about it.  If he had

spoken in English he could not have said any more plainly

that he did say in raven, "Well, what do YOU want here?"

I felt as foolish as if I had been caught in some mean act

by a responsible being, and reproved for it.  However, I

made no reply; I would not bandy words with a raven.

The adversary waited a while, with his shoulders still lifted,

his head thrust down between them, and his keen bright eye

fixed on me; then he threw out two or three more insults,

which I could not understand, further than that I

knew a portion of them consisted of language not used

in church.



I still made no reply.  Now the adversary raised his head

and called.  There was an answering croak from a little

distance in the wood--evidently a croak of inquiry.

The adversary explained with enthusiasm, and the other raven

dropped everything and came.  The two sat side by side

on the limb and discussed me as freely and offensively

as two great naturalists might discuss a new kind of bug.

The thing became more and more embarrassing.  They called

in another friend.  This was too much.  I saw that they

had the advantage of me, and so I concluded to get out

of the scrape by walking out of it.  They enjoyed my

defeat as much as any low white people could have done.

They craned their necks and laughed at me (for a raven

CAN laugh, just like a man), they squalled insulting remarks

after me as long as they could see me.  They were nothing

but ravens--I knew that--what they thought of me could

be a matter of no consequence--and yet when even a raven

shouts after you, "What a hat!" "Oh, pull down your vest!"

and that sort of thing, it hurts you and humiliates you,

and there is no getting around it with fine reasoning and

pretty arguments.



Animals talk to each other, of course.  There can be no

question about that; but I suppose there are very few

people who can understand them.  I never knew but one man

who could.  I knew he could, however, because he told

me so himself.  He was a middle-aged, simple-hearted

miner who had lived in a lonely corner of California,

among the woods and mountains, a good many years,

and had studied the ways of his only neighbors, the beasts

and the birds, until he believed he could accurately

translate any remark which they made.  This was Jim Baker.

According to Jim Baker, some animals have only a

limited education, and some use only simple words,

and scarcely ever a comparison or a flowery figure;

whereas, certain other animals have a large vocabulary,

a fine command of language and a ready and fluent delivery;

consequently these latter talk a great deal; they like it;

they are so conscious of their talent, and they enjoy

"showing off." Baker said, that after long and careful

observation, he had come to the conclusion that the bluejays

were the best talkers he had found among birds and beasts.  Said

he:



"There's more TO a bluejay than any other creature.

He has got more moods, and more different kinds

of feelings than other creatures; and, mind you,

whatever a bluejay feels, he can put into language.

And no mere commonplace language, either, but rattling,

out-and-out book-talk--and bristling with metaphor,

too--just bristling! And as for command of language--why

YOU never see a bluejay get stuck for a word.  No man

ever did.  They just boil out of him! And another thing:

I've noticed a good deal, and there's no bird, or cow,

or anything that uses as good grammar as a bluejay.

You may say a cat uses good grammar.  Well, a cat

does--but you let a cat get excited once; you let a cat

get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights,

and you'll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw.

Ignorant people think it's the NOISE which fighting

cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so;

it's the sickening grammar they use.  Now I've never heard

a jay use bad grammar but very seldom; and when they do,

they are as ashamed as a human; they shut right down

and leave.



"You may call a jay a bird.  Well, so he is, in a measure--

but he's got feathers on him, and don't belong to no church,

perhaps; but otherwise he is just as much human as you be.

And I'll tell you for why.  A jay's gifts, and instincts,

and feelings, and interests, cover the whole ground.

A jay hasn't got any more principle than a Congressman.

A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive,

a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay

will go back on his solemnest promise.  The sacredness

of an obligation is such a thing which you can't cram

into no bluejay's head.  Now, on top of all this,

there's another thing; a jay can out-swear any gentleman

in the mines.  You think a cat can swear.  Well, a cat can;

but you give a bluejay a subject that calls for his

reserve-powers, and where is your cat? Don't talk to ME--I

know too much about this thing; in the one little particular

of scolding--just good, clean, out-and-out scolding--

a bluejay can lay over anything, human or divine.

Yes, sir, a jay is everything that a man is.  A jay can cry,

a jay can laugh, a jay can feel shame, a jay can reason

and plan and discuss, a jay likes gossip and scandal,

a jay has got a sense of humor, a jay knows when he is

an ass just as well as you do--maybe better.  If a jay

ain't human, he better take in his sign, that's all.

Now I'm going to tell you a perfectly true fact about

some bluejays.







CHAPTER III

Baker's Bluejay Yarn

[What Stumped the Blue Jays]



"When I first begun to understand jay language correctly,

there was a little incident happened here.  Seven years ago,

the last man in this region but me moved away.  There stands

his house--been empty ever since; a log house, with a plank

roof--just one big room, and no more; no ceiling--nothing

between the rafters and the floor.  Well, one Sunday

morning I was sitting out here in front of my cabin,

with my cat, taking the sun, and looking at the blue hills,

and listening to the leaves rustling so lonely in the trees,

and thinking of the home away yonder in the states,

that I hadn't heard from in thirteen years, when a bluejay

lit on that house, with an acorn in his mouth, and says,

'Hello, I reckon I've struck something.' When he spoke,

the acorn dropped out of his mouth and rolled down the roof,

of course, but he didn't care; his mind was all on the

thing he had struck.  It was a knot-hole in the roof.

He cocked his head to one side, shut one eye and put the

other one to the hole, like a possum looking down a jug;

then he glanced up with his bright eyes, gave a wink

or two with his wings--which signifies gratification,

you understand--and says, 'It looks like a hole,

it's located like a hole--blamed if I don't believe it IS

a hole!'



"Then he cocked his head down and took another look;

he glances up perfectly joyful, this time; winks his wings

and his tail both, and says, 'Oh, no, this ain't no fat thing,

I reckon! If I ain't in luck! --Why it's a perfectly

elegant hole!' So he flew down and got that acorn,

and fetched it up and dropped it in, and was just tilting

his head back, with the heavenliest smile on his face,

when all of a sudden he was paralyzed into a listening

attitude and that smile faded gradually out of his

countenance like breath off'n a razor, and the queerest

look of surprise took its place.  Then he says, 'Why, I

didn't hear it fall!' He cocked his eye at the hole again,

and took a long look; raised up and shook his head;

stepped around to the other side of the hole and took

another look from that side; shook his head again.

He studied a while, then he just went into the Details--

walked round and round the hole and spied into it from every

point of the compass.  No use.  Now he took a thinking

attitude on the comb of the roof and scratched the back

of his head with his right foot a minute, and finally says,

'Well, it's too many for ME, that's certain; must be

a mighty long hole; however, I ain't got no time to fool

around here, I got to "tend to business"; I reckon it's

all right--chance it, anyway.'



"So he flew off and fetched another acorn and dropped

it in, and tried to flirt his eye to the hole quick

enough to see what become of it, but he was too late.

He held his eye there as much as a minute; then he raised

up and sighed, and says, 'Confound it, I don't seem

to understand this thing, no way; however, I'll tackle

her again.' He fetched another acorn, and done his level

best to see what become of it, but he couldn't. He says,

'Well, I never struck no such a hole as this before;

I'm of the opinion it's a totally new kind of a hole.'

Then he begun to get mad.  He held in for a spell,

walking up and down the comb of the roof and shaking

his head and muttering to himself; but his feelings got

the upper hand of him, presently, and he broke loose

and cussed himself black in the face.  I never see a bird

take on so about a little thing.  When he got through he

walks to the hole and looks in again for half a minute;

then he says, 'Well, you're a long hole, and a deep hole,

and a mighty singular hole altogether--but I've started

in to fill you, and I'm damned if I DON'T fill you, if it

takes a hundred years!'



"And with that, away he went.  You never see a bird work

so since you was born.  He laid into his work like a nigger,

and the way he hove acorns into that hole for about

two hours and a half was one of the most exciting and

astonishing spectacles I ever struck.  He never stopped

to take a look anymore--he just hove 'em in and went

for more.  Well, at last he could hardly flop his wings,

he was so tuckered out.  He comes a-dropping down, once more,

sweating like an ice-pitcher, dropped his acorn in and says,

'NOW I guess I've got the bulge on you by this time!'

So he bent down for a look.  If you'll believe me,

when his head come up again he was just pale with rage.

He says, 'I've shoveled acorns enough in there to keep

the family thirty years, and if I can see a sign of one

of 'em I wish I may land in a museum with a belly full

of sawdust in two minutes!'



"He just had strength enough to crawl up on to the

comb and lean his back agin the chimbly, and then he

collected his impressions and begun to free his mind.

I see in a second that what I had mistook for profanity

in the mines was only just the rudiments, as you may say.



"Another jay was going by, and heard him doing his devotions,

and stops to inquire what was up.  The sufferer told him

the whole circumstance, and says, 'Now yonder's the hole,

and if you don't believe me, go and look for yourself.'

So this fellow went and looked, and comes back and says,

"How many did you say you put in there?' 'Not any less

than two tons,' says the sufferer.  The other jay went

and looked again.  He couldn't seem to make it out, so he

raised a yell, and three more jays come.  They all examined

the hole, they all made the sufferer tell it over again,

then they all discussed it, and got off as many leather-headed

opinions about it as an average crowd of humans could

have done.



"They called in more jays; then more and more, till pretty

soon this whole region 'peared to have a blue flush about it.

There must have been five thousand of them; and such

another jawing and disputing and ripping and cussing,

you never heard.  Every jay in the whole lot put his

eye to the hole and delivered a more chuckle-headed

opinion about the mystery than the jay that went there

before him.  They examined the house all over, too.

The door was standing half open, and at last one old jay

happened to go and light on it and look in.  Of course,

that knocked the mystery galley-west in a second.

There lay the acorns, scattered all over the floor..

He flopped his wings and raised a whoop.  'Come here!'

he says, 'Come here, everybody; hang'd if this fool hasn't

been trying to fill up a house with acorns!' They all came

a-swooping down like a blue cloud, and as each fellow

lit on the door and took a glance, the whole absurdity

of the contract that that first jay had tackled hit him

home and he fell over backward suffocating with laughter,

and the next jay took his place and done the same.



"Well, sir, they roosted around here on the housetop

and the trees for an hour, and guffawed over that thing

like human beings.  It ain't any use to tell me a bluejay

hasn't got a sense of humor, because I know better.

And memory, too.  They brought jays here from all over

the United States to look down that hole, every summer

for three years.  Other birds, too.  And they could all

see the point except an owl that come from Nova Scotia

to visit the Yo Semite, and he took this thing in on

his way back.  He said he couldn't see anything funny

in it.  But then he was a good deal disappointed about

Yo Semite, too."







CHAPTER IV

Student Life

[The Laborious Beer King]



The summer semester was in full tide; consequently the

most frequent figure in and about Heidelberg was

the student.  Most of the students were Germans,

of course, but the representatives of foreign lands

were very numerous.  They hailed from every corner

of the globe--for instruction is cheap in Heidelberg,

and so is living, too.  The Anglo-American Club,

composed of British and American students, had twenty-five

members, and there was still much material left to draw from.



Nine-tenths of the Heidelberg students wore no badge

or uniform; the other tenth wore caps of various colors,

and belonged to social organizations called "corps." There

were five corps, each with a color of its own; there were

white caps, blue caps, and red, yellow, and green ones.

The famous duel-fighting is confined to the "corps" boys.

The "KNEIP" seems to be a specialty of theirs, too.

Kneips are held, now and then, to celebrate great occasions,

like the election of a beer king, for instance.

The solemnity is simple; the five corps assemble at night,

and at a signal they all fall loading themselves with beer,

out of pint-mugs, as fast as possible, and each man keeps

his own count--usually by laying aside a lucifer match

for each mud he empties.  The election is soon decided.

When the candidates can hold no more, a count is instituted

and the one who has drank the greatest number of pints is

proclaimed king.  I was told that the last beer king elected

by the corps--or by his own capabilities--emptied his mug

seventy-five times.  No stomach could hold all that quantity

at one time, of course--but there are ways of frequently

creating a vacuum, which those who have been much at sea

will understand.



One sees so many students abroad at all hours, that he

presently begins to wonder if they ever have any

working-hours. Some of them have, some of them haven't.

Each can choose for himself whether he will work or play;

for German university life is a very free life;

it seems to have no restraints.  The student does not live

in the college buildings, but hires his own lodgings,

in any locality he prefers, and he takes his meals when

and where he pleases.  He goes to bed when it suits him,

and does not get up at all unless he wants to.

He is not entered at the university for any particular

length of time; so he is likely to change about.

He passes no examinations upon entering college.

He merely pays a trifling fee of five or ten dollars,

receives a card entitling him to the privileges of

the university, and that is the end of it.  He is now ready

for business--or play, as he shall prefer.  If he elects

to work, he finds a large list of lectures to choose from.

He selects the subjects which he will study, and enters

his name for these studies; but he can skip attendance.



The result of this system is, that lecture-courses upon

specialties of an unusual nature are often delivered

to very slim audiences, while those upon more practical

and every-day matters of education are delivered to very

large ones.  I heard of one case where, day after day,

the lecturer's audience consisted of three students--and always

the same three.  But one day two of them remained away.

The lecturer began as usual --



"Gentlemen," --then, without a smile, he corrected himself,

saying --



"Sir," --and went on with his discourse.



It is said that the vast majority of the Heidelberg students

are hard workers, and make the most of their opportunities;

that they have no surplus means to spend in dissipation,

and no time to spare for frolicking.  One lecture follows

right on the heels of another, with very little time

for the student to get out of one hall and into the next;

but the industrious ones manage it by going on a trot.

The professors assist them in the saving of their time

by being promptly in their little boxed-up pulpits when the

hours strike, and as promptly out again when the hour finishes.

I entered an empty lecture-room one day just before the

clock struck.  The place had simple, unpainted pine desks

and benches for about two hundred persons.



About a minute before the clock struck, a hundred

and fifty students swarmed in, rushed to their seats,

immediately spread open their notebooks and dipped their

pens in ink.  When the clock began to strike, a burly

professor entered, was received with a round of applause,

moved swiftly down the center aisle, said "Gentlemen,"

and began to talk as he climbed his pulpit steps; and by

the time he had arrived in his box and faced his audience,

his lecture was well under way and all the pens were going.

He had no notes, he talked with prodigious rapidity and

energy for an hour--then the students began to remind

him in certain well-understood ways that his time was up;

he seized his hat, still talking, proceeded swiftly down

his pulpit steps, got out the last word of his discourse

as he struck the floor; everybody rose respectfully,

and he swept rapidly down the aisle and disappeared.

An instant rush for some other lecture-room followed,

and in a minute I was alone with the empty benches

once more.



Yes, without doubt, idle students are not the rule.

Out of eight hundred in the town, I knew the faces of only

about fifty; but these I saw everywhere, and daily.

They walked about the streets and the wooded hills,

they drove in cabs, they boated on the river, they sipped

beer and coffee, afternoons, in the Schloss gardens.

A good many of them wore colored caps of the corps.

They were finely and fashionably dressed, their manners

were quite superb, and they led an easy, careless,

comfortable life.  If a dozen of them sat together and a lady

or a gentleman passed whom one of them knew and saluted,

they all rose to their feet and took off their caps.

The members of a corps always received a fellow-member

in this way, too; but they paid no attention to members

of other corps; they did not seem to see them.  This was not

a discourtesy; it was only a part of the elaborate and rigid

corps etiquette.



There seems to be no chilly distance existing between the

German students and the professor; but, on the contrary,

a companionable intercourse, the opposite of chilliness

and reserve.  When the professor enters a beer-hall

in the evening where students are gathered together,

these rise up and take off their caps, and invite the old

gentleman to sit with them and partake.  He accepts,

and the pleasant talk and the beer flow for an hour or two,

and by and by the professor, properly charged and comfortable,

gives a cordial good night, while the students stand

bowing and uncovered; and then he moves on his happy

way homeward with all his vast cargo of learning afloat

in his hold.  Nobody finds fault or feels outraged;

no harm has been done.



It seemed to be a part of corps etiquette to keep a dog

or so, too.  I mean a corps dog--the common property of

the organization, like the corps steward or head servant;

then there are other dogs, owned by individuals.



On a summer afternoon in the Castle gardens, I have

seen six students march solemnly into the grounds,

in single file, each carrying a bright Chinese parasol

and leading a prodigious dog by a string.  It was a very

imposing spectacle.  Sometimes there would be as many

dogs around the pavilion as students; and of all breeds

and of all degrees of beauty and ugliness.  These dogs

had a rather dry time of it; for they were tied to the

benches and had no amusement for an hour or two at a time

except what they could get out of pawing at the gnats,

or trying to sleep and not succeeding.  However, they got

a lump of sugar occasionally--they were fond of that.



It seemed right and proper that students should indulge in dogs;

but everybody else had them, too--old men and young ones,

old women and nice young ladies.  If there is one spectacle

that is unpleasanter than another, it is that of an

elegantly dressed young lady towing a dog by a string.

It is said to be the sign and symbol of blighted love.

It seems to me that some other way of advertising it might

be devised, which would be just as conspicuous and yet

not so trying to the proprieties.



It would be a mistake to suppose that the easy-going

pleasure-seeking student carries an empty head.

Just the contrary.  He has spent nine years in the gymnasium,

under a system which allowed him no freedom, but vigorously

compelled him to work like a slave.  Consequently, he has

left the gymnasium with an education which is so extensive

and complete, that the most a university can do for it

is to perfect some of its profounder specialties.

It is said that when a pupil leaves the gymnasium, he not

only has a comprehensive education, but he KNOWS what he

knows--it is not befogged with uncertainty, it is burnt

into him so that it will stay.  For instance, he does not

merely read and write Greek, but speaks it; the same with

the Latin.  Foreign youth steer clear of the gymnasium;

its rules are too severe.  They go to the university

to put a mansard roof on their whole general education;

but the German student already has his mansard roof, so he

goes there to add a steeple in the nature of some specialty,

such as a particular branch of law, or diseases of the eye,

or special study of the ancient Gothic tongues.

So this German attends only the lectures which belong

to the chosen branch, and drinks his beer and tows his dog

around and has a general good time the rest of the day.

He has been in rigid bondage so long that the large liberty

of the university life is just what he needs and likes

and thoroughly appreciates; and as it cannot last forever,

he makes the most of it while it does last, and so lays

up a good rest against the day that must see him put on

the chains once more and enter the slavery of official

or professional life.







CHAPTER V

At the Students' Dueling-Ground

[Dueling by Wholesale]



One day in the interest of science my agent obtained

permission to bring me to the students' dueling-place. We

crossed the river and drove up the bank a few hundred yards,

then turned to the left, entered a narrow alley, followed it

a hundred yards and arrived at a two-story public house;

we were acquainted with its outside aspect, for it was

visible from the hotel.  We went upstairs and passed into

a large whitewashed apartment which was perhaps fifty feet

long by thirty feet wide and twenty or twenty-five high.

It was a well-lighted place.  There was no carpet.

Across one end and down both sides of the room extended a row

of tables, and at these tables some fifty or seventy-five

students [1. See Appendix C] were sitting.



Some of them were sipping wine, others were playing cards,

others chess, other groups were chatting together,

and many were smoking cigarettes while they waited for

the coming duels.  Nearly all of them wore colored caps;

there were white caps, green caps, blue caps, red caps,

and bright-yellow ones; so, all the five corps were

present in strong force.  In the windows at the vacant

end of the room stood six or eight, narrow-bladed swords

with large protecting guards for the hand, and outside

was a man at work sharpening others on a grindstone.

He understood his business; for when a sword left his hand

one could shave himself with it.



It was observable that the young gentlemen neither bowed

to nor spoke with students whose caps differed in color

from their own.  This did not mean hostility, but only an

armed neutrality.  It was considered that a person could

strike harder in the duel, and with a more earnest interest,

if he had never been in a condition of comradeship with

his antagonist; therefore, comradeship between the corps

was not permitted.  At intervals the presidents of the five

corps have a cold official intercourse with each other,

but nothing further.  For example, when the regular

dueling-day of one of the corps approaches, its president

calls for volunteers from among the membership to

offer battle; three or more respond--but there must not

be less than three; the president lays their names before

the other presidents, with the request that they furnish

antagonists for these challengers from among their corps.

This is promptly done.  It chanced that the present

occasion was the battle-day of the Red Cap Corps.

They were the challengers, and certain caps of other colors

had volunteered to meet them.  The students fight duels

in the room which I have described, TWO DAYS IN EVERY WEEK

DURING SEVEN AND A HALF OR EIGHT MONTHS IN EVERY YEAR.

This custom had continued in Germany two hundred and fifty years.





To return to my narrative.  A student in a white cap

met us and introduced us to six or eight friends of his

who also wore white caps, and while we stood conversing,

two strange-looking figures were led in from another room.

They were students panoplied for the duel.  They were bareheaded;

their eyes were protected by iron goggles which projected

an inch or more, the leather straps of which bound

their ears flat against their heads were wound around

and around with thick wrappings which a sword could not

cut through; from chin to ankle they were padded thoroughly

against injury; their arms were bandaged and rebandaged,

layer upon layer, until they looked like solid black logs.

These weird apparitions had been handsome youths,

clad in fashionable attire, fifteen minutes before,

but now they did not resemble any beings one ever sees

unless in nightmares.  They strode along, with their arms

projecting straight out from their bodies; they did

not hold them out themselves, but fellow-students walked

beside them and gave the needed support.



There was a rush for the vacant end of the room, now,

and we followed and got good places.  The combatants were

placed face to face, each with several members of his own

corps about him to assist; two seconds, well padded,

and with swords in their hands, took their stations;

a student belonging to neither of the opposing corps

placed himself in a good position to umpire the combat;

another student stood by with a watch and a memorandum-book

to keep record of the time and the number and nature of

the wounds; a gray-haired surgeon was present with his lint,

his bandages, and his instruments.  After a moment's pause

the duelists saluted the umpire respectfully, then one

after another the several officials stepped forward,

gracefully removed their caps and saluted him also,

and returned to their places.  Everything was ready now;

students stood crowded together in the foreground,

and others stood behind them on chairs and tables.

Every face was turned toward the center of attraction.



The combatants were watching each other with alert eyes;

a perfect stillness, a breathless interest reigned.

I felt that I was going to see some wary work.  But not so.

The instant the word was given, the two apparitions

sprang forward and began to rain blows down upon each

other with such lightning rapidity that I could not quite

tell whether I saw the swords or only flashes they made

in the air; the rattling din of these blows as they struck

steel or paddings was something wonderfully stirring,

and they were struck with such terrific force that I could

not understand why the opposing sword was not beaten

down under the assault.  Presently, in the midst of the

sword-flashes, I saw a handful of hair skip into the air

as if it had lain loose on the victim's head and a breath

of wind had puffed it suddenly away.



The seconds cried "Halt!" and knocked up the combatants'

swords with their own.  The duelists sat down; a student

official stepped forward, examined the wounded head

and touched the place with a sponge once or twice;

the surgeon came and turned back the hair from the wound--

and revealed a crimson gash two or three inches long,

and proceeded to bind an oval piece of leather and a bunch

of lint over it; the tally-keeper stepped up and tallied

one for the opposition in his book.



Then the duelists took position again; a small stream of

blood was flowing down the side of the injured man's head,

and over his shoulder and down his body to the floor,

but he did not seem to mind this.  The word was given,

and they plunged at each other as fiercely as before;

once more the blows rained and rattled and flashed;

every few moments the quick-eyed seconds would notice

that a sword was bent--then they called "Halt!" struck up

the contending weapons, and an assisting student straightened

the bent one.



The wonderful turmoil went on--presently a bright spark

sprung from a blade, and that blade broken in several pieces,

sent one of its fragments flying to the ceiling.

A new sword was provided and the fight proceeded.

The exercise was tremendous, of course, and in time

the fighters began to show great fatigue.  They were

allowed to rest a moment, every little while; they got

other rests by wounding each other, for then they could

sit down while the doctor applied the lint and bandages.

The laws is that the battle must continue fifteen minutes

if the men can hold out; and as the pauses do not count,

this duel was protracted to twenty or thirty minutes,

I judged.  At last it was decided that the men were too much

wearied to do battle longer.  They were led away drenched

with crimson from head to foot.  That was a good fight,

but it could not count, partly because it did not last

the lawful fifteen minutes (of actual fighting), and

partly because neither man was disabled by his wound.

It was a drawn battle, and corps law requires that drawn

battles shall be refought as soon as the adversaries are

well of their hurts.



During the conflict, I had talked a little, now and then,

with a young gentleman of the White Cap Corps, and he

had mentioned that he was to fight next--and had also

pointed out his challenger, a young gentleman who was

leaning against the opposite wall smoking a cigarette

and restfully observing the duel then in progress.



My acquaintanceship with a party to the coming contest

had the effect of giving me a kind of personal interest

in it; I naturally wished he might win, and it was

the reverse of pleasant to learn that he probably

would not, because, although he was a notable swordsman,

the challenger was held to be his superior.



The duel presently began and in the same furious way

which had marked the previous one.  I stood close by,

but could not tell which blows told and which did not,

they fell and vanished so like flashes of light.  They all

seemed to tell; the swords always bent over the opponents'

heads, from the forehead back over the crown, and seemed

to touch, all the way; but it was not so--a protecting

blade, invisible to me, was always interposed between.

At the end of ten seconds each man had struck twelve

or fifteen blows, and warded off twelve or fifteen,

and no harm done; then a sword became disabled, and a short

rest followed whilst a new one was brought.  Early in the

next round the White Corps student got an ugly wound on

the side of his head and gave his opponent one like it.

In the third round the latter received another bad wound

in the head, and the former had his under-lip divided.

After that, the White Corps student gave many severe wounds,

but got none of the consequence in return.  At the end

of five minutes from the beginning of the duel the surgeon

stopped it; the challenging party had suffered such

injuries that any addition to them might be dangerous.

These injuries were a fearful spectacle, but are better

left undescribed.  So, against expectation, my acquaintance

was the victor.







CHAPTER VI

[A Sport that Sometimes Kills]



The third duel was brief and bloody.  The surgeon stopped

it when he saw that one of the men had received such bad

wounds that he could not fight longer without endangering

his life.



The fourth duel was a tremendous encounter; but at the end

of five or six minutes the surgeon interfered once more:

another man so severely hurt as to render it unsafe to add

to his harms.  I watched this engagement as I watched

the others--with rapt interest and strong excitement,

and with a shrink and a shudder for every blow that laid

open a cheek or a forehead; and a conscious paling of my

face when I occasionally saw a wound of a yet more shocking

nature inflicted.  My eyes were upon the loser of this

duel when he got his last and vanquishing wound--it

was in his face and it carried away his--but no matter,

I must not enter into details.  I had but a glance, and then

turned quickly, but I would not have been looking at all if I

had known what was coming.  No, that is probably not true;

one thinks he would not look if he knew what was coming,

but the interest and the excitement are so powerful that

they would doubtless conquer all other feelings; and so,

under the fierce exhilaration of the clashing steel,

he would yield and look after all.  Sometimes spectators

of these duels faint--and it does seem a very reasonable

thing to do, too.



Both parties to this fourth duel were badly hurt so much

that the surgeon was at work upon them nearly or quite an

hour--a fact which is suggestive.  But this waiting interval

was not wasted in idleness by the assembled students.

It was past noon, therefore they ordered their landlord,

downstairs, to send up hot beefsteaks, chickens, and such things,

and these they ate, sitting comfortable at the several tables,

whilst they chatted, disputed and laughed.  The door to

the surgeon's room stood open, meantime, but the cutting,

sewing, splicing, and bandaging going on in there in

plain view did not seem to disturb anyone's appetite.

I went in and saw the surgeon labor awhile, but could

not enjoy; it was much less trying to see the wounds

given and received than to see them mended; the stir

and turmoil, and the music of the steel, were wanting

here--one's nerves were wrung by this grisly spectacle,

whilst the duel's compensating pleasurable thrill was lacking.



Finally the doctor finished, and the men who were to fight

the closing battle of the day came forth.  A good many

dinners were not completed, yet, but no matter, they could

be eaten cold, after the battle; therefore everybody

crowded forth to see.  This was not a love duel, but a

"satisfaction" affair.  These two students had quarreled,

and were here to settle it.  They did not belong to any of

the corps, but they were furnished with weapons and armor,

and permitted to fight here by the five corps as a courtesy.

Evidently these two young men were unfamiliar with the

dueling ceremonies, though they were not unfamiliar with

the sword.  When they were placed in position they thought

it was time to begin--and then did begin, too, and with

a most impetuous energy, without waiting for anybody

to give the word.  This vastly amused the spectators,

and even broke down their studied and courtly gravity

and surprised them into laughter.  Of course the seconds

struck up the swords and started the duel over again.

At the word, the deluge of blows began, but before long

the surgeon once more interfered--for the only reason

which ever permits him to interfere--and the day's

war was over.  It was now two in the afternoon, and I

had been present since half past nine in the morning.

The field of battle was indeed a red one by this time;

but some sawdust soon righted that.  There had been one

duel before I arrived.  In it one of the men received

many injuries, while the other one escaped without

a scratch.



I had seen the heads and faces of ten youths gashed

in every direction by the keen two-edged blades, and yet

had not seen a victim wince, nor heard a moan, or detected

any fleeting expression which confessed the sharp pain

the hurts were inflicting.  This was good fortitude,

indeed.  Such endurance is to be expected in savages

and prize-fighters, for they are born and educated to it;

but to find it in such perfection in these gently bred

and kindly natured young fellows is matter for surprise.

It was not merely under the excitement of the sword-play

that this fortitude was shown; it was shown in the surgeon's

room where an uninspiring quiet reigned, and where there

was no audience.  The doctor's manipulations brought

out neither grimaces nor moans.  And in the fights

it was observable that these lads hacked and slashed

with the same tremendous spirit, after they were covered

with streaming wounds, which they had shown in the beginning.



The world in general looks upon the college duels as very

farcical affairs: true, but considering that the college

duel is fought by boys; that the swords are real swords;

and that the head and face are exposed, it seems to me

that it is a farce which had quite a grave side to it.

People laugh at it mainly because they think the student

is so covered up with armor that he cannot be hurt.

But it is not so; his eyes are ears are protected,

but the rest of his face and head are bare.  He can not only

be badly wounded, but his life is in danger; and he would

sometimes lose it but for the interference of the surgeon.

It is not intended that his life shall be endangered.

Fatal accidents are possible, however.  For instance,

the student's sword may break, and the end of it fly

up behind his antagonist's ear and cut an artery which

could not be reached if the sword remained whole.

This has happened, sometimes, and death has resulted

on the spot.  Formerly the student's armpits were not

protected--and at that time the swords were pointed,

whereas they are blunt, now; so an artery in the armpit

was sometimes cut, and death followed.  Then in the days

of sharp-pointed swords, a spectator was an occasional

victim--the end of a broken sword flew five or ten

feet and buried itself in his neck or his heart,

and death ensued instantly.  The student duels in Germany

occasion two or three deaths every year, now, but this

arises only from the carelessness of the wounded men;

they eat or drink imprudently, or commit excesses in the

way of overexertion; inflammation sets in and gets such

a headway that it cannot be arrested.  Indeed, there is

blood and pain and danger enough about the college duel

to entitle it to a considerable degree of respect.



All the customs, all the laws, all the details,

pertaining to the student duel are quaint and naive.

The grave, precise, and courtly ceremony with which the

thing is conducted, invests it with a sort of antique charm.



This dignity and these knightly graces suggest the tournament,

not the prize-fight. The laws are as curious as they

are strict.  For instance, the duelist may step forward

from the line he is placed upon, if he chooses, but never

back of it.  If he steps back of it, or even leans back,

it is considered that he did it to avoid a blow or contrive

an advantage; so he is dismissed from his corps in disgrace.

It would seem natural to step from under a descending

sword unconsciously, and against one's will and intent--yet

this unconsciousness is not allowed.  Again: if under the

sudden anguish of a wound the receiver of it makes a grimace,

he falls some degrees in the estimation of his fellows;

his corps are ashamed of him: they call him "hare foot,"

which is the German equivalent for chicken-hearted.







CHAPTER VII

[How Bismark Fought]



In addition to the corps laws, there are some corps

usages which have the force of laws.



Perhaps the president of a corps notices that one of the

membership who is no longer an exempt--that is a freshman--

has remained a sophomore some little time without volunteering

to fight; some day, the president, instead of calling

for volunteers, will APPOINT this sophomore to measure

swords with a student of another corps; he is free

to decline--everybody says so--there is no compulsion.

This is all true--but I have not heard of any student

who DID decline; to decline and still remain in the corps

would make him unpleasantly conspicuous, and properly so,

since he knew, when he joined, that his main business,

as a member, would be to fight.  No, there is no law

against declining--except the law of custom, which is

confessedly stronger than written law, everywhere.



The ten men whose duels I had witnessed did not go away

when their hurts were dressed, as I had supposed they would,

but came back, one after another, as soon as they were free

of the surgeon, and mingled with the assemblage in the

dueling-room. The white-cap student who won the second

fight witnessed the remaining three, and talked with us

during the intermissions.  He could not talk very well,

because his opponent's sword had cut his under-lip in two,

and then the surgeon had sewed it together and overlaid it

with a profusion of white plaster patches; neither could

he eat easily, still he contrived to accomplish a slow

and troublesome luncheon while the last duel was preparing.

The man who was the worst hurt of all played chess

while waiting to see this engagement.  A good part of

his face was covered with patches and bandages, and all

the rest of his head was covered and concealed by them.

It is said that the student likes to appear on the street

and in other public places in this kind of array,

and that this predilection often keeps him out when

exposure to rain or sun is a positive danger for him.

Newly bandaged students are a very common spectacle

in the public gardens of Heidelberg.  It is also said

that the student is glad to get wounds in the face,

because the scars they leave will show so well there;

and it is also said that these face wounds are so prized

that youths have even been known to pull them apart

from time to time and put red wine in them to make

them heal badly and leave as ugly a scar as possible.

It does not look reasonable, but it is roundly asserted

and maintained, nevertheless; I am sure of one thing--scars

are plenty enough in Germany, among the young men;

and very grim ones they are, too.  They crisscross the face

in angry red welts, and are permanent and ineffaceable.

Some of these scars are of a very strange and dreadful aspect;

and the effect is striking when several such accent

the milder ones, which form a city map on a man's face;

they suggest the "burned district" then.  We had often

noticed that many of the students wore a colored silk

band or ribbon diagonally across their breasts.

It transpired that this signifies that the wearer has

fought three duels in which a decision was reached--duels

in which he either whipped or was whipped--for drawn

battles do not count.  [1] After a student has received

his ribbon, he is "free"; he can cease from fighting,

without reproach--except some one insult him; his president

cannot appoint him to fight; he can volunteer if he

wants to, or remain quiescent if he prefers to do so.

Statistics show that he does NOT prefer to remain quiescent.

They show that the duel has a singular fascination about

it somewhere, for these free men, so far from resting upon

the privilege of the badge, are always volunteering.

A corps student told me it was of record that Prince

Bismarck fought thirty-two of these duels in a single summer

term when he was in college.  So he fought twenty-nine

after his badge had given him the right to retire from

the field.



1.  FROM MY DIARY.--Dined in a hotel a few miles up the Neckar,

    in a room whose walls were hung all over with framed

    portrait-groups of the Five Corps; some were recent,

    but many antedated photography, and were pictured in

    lithography--the dates ranged back to forty or fifty

    years ago.  Nearly every individual wore the ribbon across

    his breast.  In one portrait-group representing (as each

    of these pictures did) an entire Corps, I took pains

    to count the ribbons: there were twenty-seven members,

    and twenty-one of them wore that significant badge.



The statistics may be found to possess interest in

several particulars.  Two days in every week are devoted

to dueling.  The rule is rigid that there must be three

duels on each of these days; there are generally more,

but there cannot be fewer.  There were six the day

I was present; sometimes there are seven or eight.

It is insisted that eight duels a week--four for each

of the two days--is too low an average to draw a

calculation from, but I will reckon from that basis,

preferring an understatement to an overstatement of the case.

This requires about four hundred and eighty or five hundred

duelists a year--for in summer the college term is about

three and a half months, and in winter it is four months

and sometimes longer.  Of the seven hundred and fifty

students in the university at the time I am writing of,

only eighty belonged to the five corps, and it is only

these corps that do the dueling; occasionally other

students borrow the arms and battleground of the five corps

in order to settle a quarrel, but this does not happen

every dueling-day. [2] Consequently eighty youths furnish

the material for some two hundred and fifty duels a year.

This average gives six fights a year to each of the eighty.

This large work could not be accomplished if the badge-holders

stood upon their privilege and ceased to volunteer.



2.  They have to borrow the arms because they could not

    get them elsewhere or otherwise.  As I understand it,

    the public authorities, all over Germany, allow the five

    Corps to keep swords, but DO NOT ALLOW THEM TO USE THEM.

    This is law is rigid; it is only the execution of it that

    is lax.



Of course, where there is so much fighting, the students

make it a point to keep themselves in constant practice

with the foil.  One often sees them, at the tables in the

Castle grounds, using their whips or canes to illustrate

some new sword trick which they have heard about;

and between the duels, on the day whose history I

have been writing, the swords were not always idle;

every now and then we heard a succession of the keen

hissing sounds which the sword makes when it is being

put through its paces in the air, and this informed us

that a student was practicing.  Necessarily, this unceasing

attention to the art develops an expert occasionally.

He becomes famous in his own university, his renown spreads

to other universities.  He is invited to Go"ttingen,

to fight with a Go"ttingen expert; if he is victorious,

he will be invited to other colleges, or those colleges will

send their experts to him.  Americans and Englishmen often

join one or another of the five corps.  A year or two ago,

the principal Heidelberg expert was a big Kentuckian;

he was invited to the various universities and left

a wake of victory behind him all about Germany;

but at last a little student in Strasburg defeated him.

There was formerly a student in Heidelberg who had picked

up somewhere and mastered a peculiar trick of cutting up

under instead of cleaving down from above.  While the trick

lasted he won in sixteen successive duels in his university;

but by that time observers had discovered what his charm was,

and how to break it, therefore his championship ceased.



A rule which forbids social intercourse between members

of different corps is strict.  In the dueling-house, in

the parks, on the street, and anywhere and everywhere that

the students go, caps of a color group themselves together.

If all the tables in a public garden were crowded

but one, and that one had two red-cap students at it

and ten vacant places, the yellow-caps, the blue-caps,

the white caps, and the green caps, seeking seats,

would go by that table and not seem to see it, nor seem

to be aware that there was such a table in the grounds.

The student by whose courtesy we had been enabled to visit

the dueling-place, wore the white cap--Prussian Corps.

He introduced us to many white caps, but to none of

another color.  The corps etiquette extended even to us,

who were strangers, and required us to group with the white

corps only, and speak only with the white corps, while we

were their guests, and keep aloof from the caps of the

other colors.  Once I wished to examine some of the swords,

but an American student said, "It would not be quite polite;

these now in the windows all have red hilts or blue;

they will bring in some with white hilts presently,

and those you can handle freely.  "When a sword was broken

in the first duel, I wanted a piece of it; but its hilt

was the wrong color, so it was considered best and politest

to await a properer season.  It was brought to me after

the room was cleared, and I will now make a "life-size"

sketch of it by tracing a line around it with my pen,

to show the width of the weapon.  [Figure 1] The length of

these swords is about three feet, and they are quite heavy.

One's disposition to cheer, during the course of the

duels or at their close, was naturally strong, but corps

etiquette forbade any demonstrations of this sort.

However brilliant a contest or a victory might be,

no sign or sound betrayed that any one was moved.

A dignified gravity and repression were maintained at

all times.



When the dueling was finished and we were ready to go,

the gentlemen of the Prussian Corps to whom we had been

introduced took off their caps in the courteous German way,

and also shook hands; their brethren of the same order

took off their caps and bowed, but without shaking hands;

the gentlemen of the other corps treated us just as

they would have treated white caps--they fell apart,

apparently unconsciously, and left us an unobstructed pathway,

but did not seem to see us or know we were there.

If we had gone thither the following week as guests of

another corps, the white caps, without meaning any offense,

would have observed the etiquette of their order and ignored

our presence.



[How strangely are comedy and tragedy blended in this life!

I had not been home a full half-hour, after witnessing

those playful sham-duels, when circumstances made it

necessary for me to get ready immediately to assist

personally at a real one--a duel with no effeminate

limitation in the matter of results, but a battle

to the death.  An account of it, in the next chapter,

will show the reader that duels between boys, for fun,

and duels between men in earnest, are very different affairs.]







CHAPTER VIII

The Great French Duel

[I Second Gambetta in a Terrific Duel]



Much as the modern French duel is ridiculed by certain

smart people, it is in reality one of the most dangerous

institutions of our day.  Since it is always fought in the

open air, the combatants are nearly sure to catch cold.

M. Paul de Cassagnac, the most inveterate of the French

duelists, had suffered so often in this way that he is at

last a confirmed invalid; and the best physician in Paris

has expressed the opinion that if he goes on dueling for

fifteen or twenty years more--unless he forms the habit

of fighting in a comfortable room where damps and draughts

cannot intrude--he will eventually endanger his life.

This ought to moderate the talk of those people who are

so stubborn in maintaining that the French duel is the

most health-giving of recreations because of the open-air

exercise it affords.  And it ought also to moderate that

foolish talk about French duelists and socialist-hated

monarchs being the only people who are immoral.



But it is time to get at my subject.  As soon as I heard

of the late fiery outbreak between M. Gambetta and M. Fourtou

in the French Assembly, I knew that trouble must follow.

I knew it because a long personal friendship with

M. Gambetta revealed to me the desperate and implacable

nature of the man.  Vast as are his physical proportions,

I knew that the thirst for revenge would penetrate

to the remotest frontiers of his person.



I did not wait for him to call on me, but went at once

to him.  As I had expected, I found the brave fellow

steeped in a profound French calm.  I say French calm,

because French calmness and English calmness have points

of difference.  He was moving swiftly back and forth

among the debris of his furniture, now and then staving

chance fragments of it across the room with his foot;

grinding a constant grist of curses through his set teeth;

and halting every little while to deposit another handful

of his hair on the pile which he had been building of it on

the table.



He threw his arms around my neck, bent me over his stomach

to his breast, kissed me on both cheeks, hugged me four

or five times, and then placed me in his own arm-chair.

As soon as I had got well again, we began business at once.



I said I supposed he would wish me to act as his second,

and he said, "Of course." I said I must be allowed

to act under a French name, so that I might be shielded

from obloquy in my country, in case of fatal results.

He winced here, probably at the suggestion that dueling was

not regarded with respect in America.  However, he agreed

to my requirement.  This accounts for the fact that in all

the newspaper reports M. Gambetta's second was apparently

a Frenchman.



First, we drew up my principal's will.  I insisted upon this,

and stuck to my point.  I said I had never heard of a man

in his right mind going out to fight a duel without

first making his will.  He said he had never heard

of a man in his right mind doing anything of the kind.

When he had finished the will, he wished to proceed

to a choice of his "last words." He wanted to know

how the following words, as a dying exclamation, struck me:



"I die for my God, for my country, for freedom of speech,

for progress, and the universal brotherhood of man!"



I objected that this would require too lingering a death;

it was a good speech for a consumptive, but not suited

to the exigencies of the field of honor.  We wrangled

over a good many ante-mortem outburts, but I finally got

him to cut his obituary down to this, which he copied

into his memorandum-book, purposing to get it by heart:



"I DIE THAT FRANCE MIGHT LIVE."



I said that this remark seemed to lack relevancy; but he

said relevancy was a matter of no consequence in last words,

what you wanted was thrill.



The next thing in order was the choice of weapons.

My principal said he was not feeling well, and would leave

that and the other details of the proposed meeting to me.

Therefore I wrote the following note and carried it to

M. Fourtou's friend:



Sir: M. Gambetta accepts M. Fourtou's challenge,

and authorizes me to propose Plessis-Piquet as the place

of meeting; tomorrow morning at daybreak as the time;

and axes as the weapons.



I am, sir, with great respect,



Mark Twain.



M. Fourtou's friend read this note, and shuddered.

Then he turned to me, and said, with a suggestion of

severity in his tone:



"Have you considered, sir, what would be the inevitable

result of such a meeting as this?"



"Well, for instance, what WOULD it be?"



"Bloodshed!"



"That's about the size of it," I said.  "Now, if it is

a fair question, what was your side proposing to shed?"



I had him there.  He saw he had made a blunder, so he hastened

to explain it away.  He said he had spoken jestingly.

Then he added that he and his principal would enjoy axes,

and indeed prefer them, but such weapons were barred

by the French code, and so I must change my proposal.



I walked the floor, turning the thing over in my mind,

and finally it occurred to me that Gatling-guns at fifteen

paces would be a likely way to get a verdict on the field

of honor.  So I framed this idea into a proposition.



But it was not accepted.  The code was in the way again.

I proposed rifles; then double-barreled shotguns;

then Colt's navy revolvers.  These being all rejected,

I reflected awhile, and sarcastically suggested brickbats

at three-quarters of a mile.  I always hate to fool away

a humorous thing on a person who has no perception of humor;

and it filled me with bitterness when this man went soberly

away to submit the last proposition to his principal.



He came back presently and said his principal was charmed

with the idea of brickbats at three-quarters of a mile,

but must decline on account of the danger to disinterested

parties passing between them.  Then I said:



"Well, I am at the end of my string, now.  Perhaps YOU

would be good enough to suggest a weapon? Perhaps you

have even had one in your mind all the time?"



His countenance brightened, and he said with alacrity:



"Oh, without doubt, monsieur!"



So he fell to hunting in his pockets--pocket after pocket,

and he had plenty of them--muttering all the while,

"Now, what could I have done with them?"



At last he was successful.  He fished out of his vest pocket

a couple of little things which I carried to the light

and ascertained to be pistols.  They were single-barreled

and silver-mounted, and very dainty and pretty.

I was not able to speak for emotion.  I silently hung

one of them on my watch-chain, and returned the other.

My companion in crime now unrolled a postage-stamp

containing several cartridges, and gave me one of them.

I asked if he meant to signify by this that our men were

to be allowed but one shot apiece.  He replied that the

French code permitted no more.  I then begged him to go

and suggest a distance, for my mind was growing weak

and confused under the strain which had been put upon it.

He named sixty-five yards.  I nearly lost my patience.

I said:



"Sixty-five yards, with these instruments? Squirt-guns

would be deadlier at fifty.  Consider, my friend,

you and I are banded together to destroy life, not make

it eternal."



But with all my persuasions, all my arguments, I was only

able to get him to reduce the distance to thirty-five yards;

and even this concession he made with reluctance,

and said with a sigh, "I wash my hands of this slaughter;

on your head be it."



There was nothing for me but to go home to my old

lion-heart and tell my humiliating story.  When I entered,

M. Gambetta was laying his last lock of hair upon the altar.

He sprang toward me, exclaiming:



"You have made the fatal arrangements--I see it in your eye!"



"I have."



His face paled a trifle, and he leaned upon the table

for support.  He breathed thick and heavily for a moment

or two, so tumultuous were his feelings; then he hoarsely

whispered:



"The weapon, the weapon! Quick! what is the weapon?"



"This!" and I displayed that silver-mounted thing.

He cast but one glance at it, then swooned ponderously

to the floor.



When he came to, he said mournfully:



"The unnatural calm to which I have subjected myself

has told upon my nerves.  But away with weakness!

I will confront my fate like a man and a Frenchman."



He rose to his feet, and assumed an attitude which

for sublimity has never been approached by man,

and has seldom been surpassed by statues.  Then he said,

in his deep bass tones:



"Behold, I am calm, I am ready; reveal to me the distance."



"Thirty-five yards." ...



I could not lift him up, of course; but I rolled him over,

and poured water down his back.  He presently came to,

and said:



"Thirty-five yards--without a rest? But why ask? Since

murder was that man's intention, why should he palter

with small details? But mark you one thing: in my fall

the world shall see how the chivalry of France meets death."



After a long silence he asked:



"Was nothing said about that man's family standing

up with him, as an offset to my bulk? But no matter;

I would not stoop to make such a suggestion; if he is

not noble enough to suggest it himself, he is welcome

to this advantage, which no honorable man would take."



He now sank into a sort of stupor of reflection,

which lasted some minutes; after which he broke silence with:



"The hour--what is the hour fixed for the collision?"



"Dawn, tomorrow."



He seemed greatly surprised, and immediately said:



"Insanity! I never heard of such a thing.  Nobody is

abroad at such an hour."



"That is the reason I named it.  Do you mean to say you

want an audience?"



"It is no time to bandy words.  I am astonished that M. Fourtou

should ever have agreed to so strange an innovation.

Go at once and require a later hour."



I ran downstairs, threw open the front door, and almost

plunged into the arms of M. Fourtou's second.  He said:



"I have the honor to say that my principal strenuously

objects to the hour chosen, and begs you will consent

to change it to half past nine."



"Any courtesy, sir, which it is in our power to extend

is at the service of your excellent principal.  We agree

to the proposed change of time."



"I beg you to accept the thanks of my client." Then he

turned to a person behind him, and said, "You hear, M. Noir,

the hour is altered to half past nine.  " Whereupon

M. Noir bowed, expressed his thanks, and went away.

My accomplice continued:



"If agreeable to you, your chief surgeons and ours shall

proceed to the field in the same carriage as is customary."



"It is entirely agreeable to me, and I am obliged

to you for mentioning the surgeons, for I am afraid

I should not have thought of them.  How many shall

I want? I supposed two or three will be enough?"



"Two is the customary number for each party.  I refer

to 'chief' surgeons; but considering the exalted positions

occupied by our clients, it will be well and decorous

that each of us appoint several consulting surgeons,

from among the highest in the profession.  These will

come in their own private carriages.  Have you engaged

a hearse?"



"Bless my stupidity, I never thought of it!" I will attend

to it right away.  I must seem very ignorant to you;

but you must try to overlook that, because I have never

had any experience of such a swell duel as this before.

I have had a good deal to do with duels on the Pacific coast,

but I see now that they were crude affairs.  A hearse--sho!

we used to leave the elected lying around loose, and let

anybody cord them up and cart them off that wanted to.

Have you anything further to suggest?"



"Nothing, except that the head undertakers shall ride together,

as is usual.  The subordinates and mutes will go on foot,

as is also usual.  I will see you at eight o'clock

in the morning, and we will then arrange the order

of the procession.  I have the honor to bid you a good day."



I returned to my client, who said, "Very well;

at what hour is the engagement to begin?"



"Half past nine."



"Very good indeed.; Have you sent the fact to the newspapers?"



"SIR! If after our long and intimate friendship you can

for a moment deem me capable of so base a treachery--"



"Tut, tut! What words are these, my dear friend? Have I

wounded you? Ah, forgive me; I am overloading you with labor.

Therefore go on with the other details, and drop this

one from your list.  The bloody-minded Fourtou will be

sure to attend to it.  Or I myself--yes, to make certain,

I will drop a note to my journalistic friend, M. Noir--"



"Oh, come to think of it, you may save yourself the trouble;

that other second has informed M. Noir."



"H'm! I might have known it.  It is just like that Fourtou,

who always wants to make a display."



At half past nine in the morning the procession approached

the field of Plessis-Piquet in the following order: first

came our carriage--nobody in it but M. Gambetta and myself;

then a carriage containing M. Fourtou and his second;

then a carriage containing two poet-orators who did

not believe in God, and these had MS.  funeral orations

projecting from their breast pockets; then a carriage

containing the head surgeons and their cases of instruments;

then eight private carriages containing consulting surgeons;

then a hack containing a coroner; then the two hearses;

then a carriage containing the head undertakers;

then a train of assistants and mutes on foot; and after

these came plodding through the fog a long procession

of camp followers, police, and citizens generally.

It was a noble turnout, and would have made a fine display

if we had had thinner weather.



There was no conversation.  I spoke several times to

my principal, but I judge he was not aware of it, for he

always referred to his note-book and muttered absently,

"I die that France might live."



"Arrived on the field, my fellow-second and I paced off

the thirty-five yards, and then drew lots for choice

of position.  This latter was but an ornamental ceremony,

for all the choices were alike in such weather.

These preliminaries being ended, I went to my principal

and asked him if he was ready.  He spread himself out

to his full width, and said in a stern voice, "Ready! Let

the batteries be charged."



The loading process was done in the presence of duly

constituted witnesses.  We considered it best to perform

this delicate service with the assistance of a lantern,

on account of the state of the weather.  We now placed

our men.



At this point the police noticed that the public had massed

themselves together on the right and left of the field;

they therefore begged a delay, while they should put

these poor people in a place of safety.



The request was granted.



The police having ordered the two multitudes to take

positions behind the duelists, we were once more ready.

The weather growing still more opaque, it was agreed between

myself and the other second that before giving the fatal

signal we should each deliver a loud whoop to enable

the combatants to ascertain each other's whereabouts.



I now returned to my principal, and was distressed

to observe that he had lost a good deal of his spirit.

I tried my best to hearten him.  I said, "Indeed, sir,

things are not as bad as they seem.  Considering the character

of the weapons, the limited number of shots allowed,

the generous distance, the impenetrable solidity of the fog,

and the added fact that one of the combatants is one-eyed

and the other cross-eyed and near-sighted, it seems to me

that this conflict need not necessarily be fatal.  There are

chances that both of you may survive.  Therefore, cheer up;

do not be downhearted."



This speech had so good an effect that my principal

immediately stretched forth his hand and said, "I am

myself again; give me the weapon."



I laid it, all lonely and forlorn, in the center of the vast

solitude of his palm.  He gazed at it and shuddered.

And still mournfully contemplating it, he murmured in a

broken voice:



"Alas, it is not death I dread, but mutilation."



I heartened him once more, and with such success that he

presently said, "Let the tragedy begin.  Stand at my back;

do not desert me in this solemn hour, my friend."



I gave him my promise.  I now assisted him to point

his pistol toward the spot where I judged his adversary

to be standing, and cautioned him to listen well and

further guide himself by my fellow-second's whoop.

Then I propped myself against M. Gambetta's back,

and raised a rousing "Whoop-ee!" This was answered from

out the far distances of the fog, and I immediately shouted:



"One--two--three--FIRE!"



Two little sounds like SPIT! SPIT! broke upon my ear,

and in the same instant I was crushed to the earth under

a mountain of flesh.  Bruised as I was, I was still able

to catch a faint accent from above, to this effect:



"I die for... for ... perdition take it,

what IS it I die for? ... oh, yes--FRANCE! I die

that France may live!"



The surgeons swarmed around with their probes in

their hands, and applied their microscopes to the whole

area of M. Gambetta's person, with the happy result of

finding nothing in the nature of a wound.  Then a scene

ensued which was in every way gratifying and inspiriting.



The two gladiators fell upon each other's neck, with floods

of proud and happy tears; that other second embraced me;

the surgeons, the orators, the undertakers, the police,

everybody embraced, everybody congratulated, everybody cried,

and the whole atmosphere was filled with praise and with

joy unspeakable.



It seems to me then that I would rather be a hero

of a French duel than a crowned and sceptered monarch.



When the commotion had somewhat subsided, the body

of surgeons held a consultation, and after a good deal

of debate decided that with proper care and nursing there

was reason to believe that I would survive my injuries.

My internal hurts were deemed the most serious, since it

was apparent that a broken rib had penetrated my left lung,

and that many of my organs had been pressed out so far

to one side or the other of where they belonged, that it

was doubtful if they would ever learn to perform their

functions in such remote and unaccustomed localities.

They then set my left arm in two places, pulled my right

hip into its socket again, and re-elevated my nose.

I was an object of great interest, and even admiration;

and many sincere and warm-hearted persons had themselves

introduced to me, and said they were proud to know

the only man who had been hurt in a French duel in

forty years.



I was placed in an ambulance at the very head of the procession;

and thus with gratifying 'ECLAT I was marched into Paris,

the most conspicuous figure in that great spectacle,

and deposited at the hospital.



The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred

upon me.  However, few escape that distinction.



Such is the true version of the most memorable private

conflict of the age.



I have no complaints to make against any one.  I acted

for myself, and I can stand the consequences.



Without boasting, I think I may say I am not afraid

to stand before a modern French duelist, but as long

as I keep in my right mind I will never consent to stand

behind one again.







CHAPTER IX

[What the Beautiful Maiden Said]



One day we took the train and went down to Mannheim

to see "King Lear" played in German.  It was a mistake.

We sat in our seats three whole hours and never understood

anything but the thunder and lightning; and even that

was reversed to suit German ideas, for the thunder came

first and the lightning followed after.



The behavior of the audience was perfect.  There were

no rustlings, or whisperings, or other little disturbances;

each act was listened to in silence, and the applauding

was done after the curtain was down.  The doors opened at

half past four, the play began promptly at half past five,

and within two minutes afterward all who were coming were

in their seats, and quiet reigned.  A German gentleman

in the train had said that a Shakespearian play was an

appreciated treat in Germany and that we should find the

house filled.  It was true; all the six tiers were filled,

and remained so to the end--which suggested that it is

not only balcony people who like Shakespeare in Germany,

but those of the pit and gallery, too.



Another time, we went to Mannheim and attended a shivaree--

otherwise an opera--the one called "Lohengrin." The

banging and slamming and booming and crashing were

something beyond belief.  The racking and pitiless

pain of it remains stored up in my memory alongside

the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed.

There were circumstances which made it necessary for me

to stay through the hour hours to the end, and I stayed;

but the recollection of that long, dragging, relentless season

of suffering is indestructible.  To have to endure it

in silence, and sitting still, made it all the harder.

I was in a railed compartment with eight or ten strangers,

of the two sexes, and this compelled repression;

yet at times the pain was so exquisite that I could hardly

keep the tears back.  At those times, as the howlings

and wailings and shrieking of the singers, and the ragings

and roarings and explosions of the vast orchestra rose

higher and higher, and wilder and wilder, and fiercer

and fiercer, I could have cried if I had been alone.

Those strangers would not have been surprised to see

a man do such a thing who was being gradually skinned,

but they would have marveled at it here, and made remarks

about it no doubt, whereas there was nothing in the

present case which was an advantage over being skinned.

There was a wait of half an hour at the end of the first act,

and I could not trust myself to do it, for I felt that I

should desert to stay out.  There was another wait

of half an hour toward nine o'clock, but I had gone

through so much by that time that I had no spirit left,

and so had no desire but to be let alone.



I do not wish to suggest that the rest of the people there

were like me, for, indeed, they were not.  Whether it

was that they naturally liked that noise, or whether it

was that they had learned to like it by getting used to it,

I did not at the time know; but they did like--this was

plain enough.  While it was going on they sat and looked

as rapt and grateful as cats do when one strokes their backs;

and whenever the curtain fell they rose to their feet,

in one solid mighty multitude, and the air was snowed thick

with waving handkerchiefs, and hurricanes of applause

swept the place.  This was not comprehensible to me.

Of course, there were many people there who were not

under compulsion to stay; yet the tiers were as full at

the close as they had been at the beginning.  This showed

that the people liked it.



It was a curious sort of a play.  In the manner

of costumes and scenery it was fine and showy enough;

but there was not much action.  That is to say,

there was not much really done, it was only talked about;

and always violently.  It was what one might call a

narrative play.  Everybody had a narrative and a grievance,

and none were reasonable about it, but all in an offensive

and ungovernable state.  There was little of that sort

of customary thing where the tenor and the soprano stand

down by the footlights, warbling, with blended voices,

and keep holding out their arms toward each other and drawing

them back and spreading both hands over first one breast

and then the other with a shake and a pressure--no,

it was every rioter for himself and no blending.

Each sang his indictive narrative in turn, accompanied by

the whole orchestra of sixty instruments, and when this had

continued for some time, and one was hoping they might come

to an understanding and modify the noise, a great chorus

composed entirely of maniacs would suddenly break forth,

and then during two minutes, and sometimes three, I lived

over again all that I suffered the time the orphan asylum burned

down.



We only had one brief little season of heaven and heaven's

sweet ecstasy and peace during all this long and diligent

and acrimonious reproduction of the other place.

This was while a gorgeous procession of people marched around

and around, in the third act, and sang the Wedding Chorus.

To my untutored ear that was music--almost divine music.

While my seared soul was steeped in the healing balm

of those gracious sounds, it seemed to me that I could

almost resuffer the torments which had gone before,

in order to be so healed again.  There is where the deep

ingenuity of the operatic idea is betrayed.  It deals so

largely in pain that its scattered delights are prodigiously

augmented by the contrasts.  A pretty air in an opera is

prettier there than it could be anywhere else, I suppose,

just as an honest man in politics shines more than he

would elsewhere.



I have since found out that there is nothing the Germans

like so much as an opera.  They like it, not in a mild

and moderate way, but with their whole hearts.

This is a legitimate result of habit and education.

Our nation will like the opera, too, by and by, no doubt.

One in fifty of those who attend our operas likes

it already, perhaps, but I think a good many of the other

forty-nine go in order to learn to like it, and the

rest in order to be able to talk knowingly about it.

The latter usually hum the airs while they are being sung,

so that their neighbors may perceive that they have been

to operas before.  The funerals of these do not occur

often enough.



A gentle, old-maidish person and a sweet young girl

of seventeen sat right in front of us that night at the

Mannheim opera.  These people talked, between the acts,

and I understood them, though I understood nothing

that was uttered on the distant stage.  At first they

were guarded in their talk, but after they had heard

my agent and me conversing in English they dropped their

reserve and I picked up many of their little confidences;

no, I mean many of HER little confidences--meaning

the elder party--for the young girl only listened,

and gave assenting nods, but never said a word.  How pretty

she was, and how sweet she was! I wished she would speak.

But evidently she was absorbed in her own thoughts,

her own young-girl dreams, and found a dearer pleasure

in silence.  But she was not dreaming sleepy dreams--no,

she was awake, alive, alert, she could not sit still

a moment.  She was an enchanting study.  Her gown was

of a soft white silky stuff that clung to her round

young figure like a fish's skin, and it was rippled

over with the gracefulest little fringy films of lace;

she had deep, tender eyes, with long, curved lashes;

and she had peachy cheeks, and a dimpled chin, and such

a dear little rosebud of a mouth; and she was so dovelike,

so pure, and so gracious, so sweet and so bewitching.

For long hours I did mightily wish she would speak.

And at last she did; the red lips parted, and out leaps her

thought--and with such a guileless and pretty enthusiasm,

too: "Auntie, I just KNOW I've got five hundred fleas

on me!"



That was probably over the average.  Yes, it must have been

very much over the average.  The average at that time

in the Grand Duchy of Baden was forty-five to a young

person (when alone), according to the official estimate

of the home secretary for that year; the average for older

people was shifty and indeterminable, for whenever a

wholesome young girl came into the presence of her elders

she immediately lowered their average and raised her own.

She became a sort of contribution-box. This dear young

thing in the theater had been sitting there unconsciously

taking up a collection.  Many a skinny old being in our

neighborhood was the happier and the restfuler for her coming.



In that large audience, that night, there were eight very

conspicuous people.  These were ladies who had their hats

or bonnets on.  What a blessed thing it would be if a lady

could make herself conspicuous in our theaters by wearing

her hat.  It is not usual in Europe to allow ladies

and gentlemen to take bonnets, hats, overcoats, canes,

or umbrellas into the auditorium, but in Mannheim this

rule was not enforced because the audiences were largely

made up of people from a distance, and among these were

always a few timid ladies who were afraid that if they had

to go into an anteroom to get their things when the play

was over, they would miss their train.  But the great mass

of those who came from a distance always ran the risk

and took the chances, preferring the loss of a train

to a breach of good manners and the discomfort of being

unpleasantly conspicuous during a stretch of three or four hours.









CHAPTER X

[How Wagner Operas Bang Along]



Three or four hours.  That is a long time to sit in one place,

whether one be conspicuous or not, yet some of Wagner's

operas bang along for six whole hours on a stretch!

But the people sit there and enjoy it all, and wish it

would last longer.  A German lady in Munich told me

that a person could not like Wagner's music at first,

but must go through the deliberate process of learning

to like it--then he would have his sure reward;

for when he had learned to like it he would hunger

for it and never be able to get enough of it.  She said

that six hours of Wagner was by no means too much.

She said that this composer had made a complete revolution

in music and was burying the old masters one by one.

And she said that Wagner's operas differed from all others

in one notable respect, and that was that they were not

merely spotted with music here and there, but were ALL music,

from the first strain to the last.  This surprised me.

I said I had attended one of his insurrections, and found

hardly ANY music in it except the Wedding Chorus.

She said "Lohengrin" was noisier than Wagner's other operas,

but that if I would keep on going to see it I would find

by and by that it was all music, and therefore would

then enjoy it.  I COULD have said, "But would you advise

a person to deliberately practice having a toothache

in the pit of his stomach for a couple of years in order

that he might then come to enjoy it?" But I reserved

that remark.



This lady was full of the praises of the head-tenor

who had performed in a Wagner opera the night before,

and went on to enlarge upon his old and prodigious fame,

and how many honors had been lavished upon him by the

princely houses of Germany.  Here was another surprise.

I had attended that very opera, in the person of my agent,

and had made close and accurate observations.  So I

said:



"Why, madam, MY experience warrants me in stating

that that tenor's voice is not a voice at all,

but only a shriek--the shriek of a hyena."



"That is very true," she said; "he cannot sing now;

it is already many years that he has lost his voice,

but in other times he sang, yes, divinely! So whenever

he comes now, you shall see, yes, that the theater

will not hold the people.  JAWOHL BEI GOTT! his voice

is WUNDERSCHO"N in that past time."



I said she was discovering to me a kindly trait in the

Germans which was worth emulating.  I said that over

the water we were not quite so generous; that with us,

when a singer had lost his voice and a jumper had lost

his legs, these parties ceased to draw.  I said I had been

to the opera in Hanover, once, and in Mannheim once,

and in Munich (through my authorized agent) once, and this

large experience had nearly persuaded me that the Germans

PREFERRED singers who couldn't sing.  This was not such

a very extravagant speech, either, for that burly Mannheim

tenor's praises had been the talk of all Heidelberg for

a week before his performance took place--yet his voice

was like the distressing noise which a nail makes when you

screech it across a window-pane. I said so to Heidelberg

friends the next day, and they said, in the calmest and

simplest way, that that was very true, but that in earlier

times his voice HAD been wonderfully fine.  And the tenor

in Hanover was just another example of this sort.

The English-speaking German gentleman who went with me

to the opera there was brimming with enthusiasm over that tenor.

He said:



"ACH GOTT! a great man! You shall see him.  He is so celebrate

in all Germany--and he has a pension, yes, from the government.

He not obliged to sing now, only twice every year;

but if he not sing twice each year they take him his pension

away."



Very well, we went.  When the renowned old tenor appeared,

I got a nudge and an excited whisper:



"Now you see him!"



But the "celebrate" was an astonishing disappointment to me.

If he had been behind a screen I should have supposed

they were performing a surgical operation on him.

I looked at my friend--to my great surprise he seemed

intoxicated with pleasure, his eyes were dancing

with eager delight.  When the curtain at last fell,

he burst into the stormiest applause, and kept it up--as

did the whole house--until the afflictive tenor had

come three times before the curtain to make his bow.

While the glowing enthusiast was swabbing the perspiration

from his face, I said:



"I don't mean the least harm, but really, now, do you

think he can sing?"



"Him? NO! GOTT IM HIMMEL, ABER, how he has been able to

sing twenty-five years ago?" [Then pensively.] "ACH, no,

NOW he not sing any more, he only cry.  When he think

he sing, now, he not sing at all, no, he only make

like a cat which is unwell."



Where and how did we get the idea that the Germans

are a stolid, phlegmatic race? In truth, they are

widely removed from that.  They are warm-hearted,

emotional, impulsive, enthusiastic, their tears come

at the mildest touch, and it is not hard to move them

to laughter.  They are the very children of impulse.

We are cold and self-contained, compared to the Germans.

They hug and kiss and cry and shout and dance and sing;

and where we use one loving, petting expressions they pour

out a score.  Their language is full of endearing diminutives;

nothing that they love escapes the application of a petting

diminutive--neither the house, nor the dog, nor the horse,

nor the grandmother, nor any other creature, animate or

inanimate.



In the theaters at Hanover, Hamburg, and Mannheim,

they had a wise custom.  The moment the curtain went up,

the light in the body of the house went down.

The audience sat in the cool gloom of a deep twilight,

which greatly enhanced the glowing splendors of the stage.

It saved gas, too, and people were not sweated to death.



When I saw "King Lear" played, nobody was allowed to see

a scene shifted; if there was nothing to be done but slide

a forest out of the way and expose a temple beyond, one did

not see that forest split itself in the middle and go

shrieking away, with the accompanying disenchanting spectacle

of the hands and heels of the impelling impulse--no,

the curtain was always dropped for an instant--one heard

not the least movement behind it--but when it went up,

the next instant, the forest was gone.  Even when the

stage was being entirely reset, one heard no noise.

During the whole time that "King Lear" was playing

the curtain was never down two minutes at any one time.

The orchestra played until the curtain was ready to go up

for the first time, then they departed for the evening.

Where the stage waits never each two minutes there is no

occasion for music.  I had never seen this two-minute

business between acts but once before, and that was when

the "Shaughraun" was played at Wallack's.



I was at a concert in Munich one night, the people

were streaming in, the clock-hand pointed to seven,

the music struck up, and instantly all movement in

the body of the house ceased--nobody was standing,

or walking up the aisles, or fumbling with a seat,

the stream of incomers had suddenly dried up at its source.

I listened undisturbed to a piece of music that was fifteen

minutes long--always expecting some tardy ticket-holders

to come crowding past my knees, and being continuously and

pleasantly disappointed--but when the last note was struck,

here came the stream again.  You see, they had made

those late comers wait in the comfortable waiting-parlor

from the time the music had begin until it was ended.



It was the first time I had ever seen this sort of

criminals denied the privilege of destroying the comfort

of a house full of their betters.  Some of these were

pretty fine birds, but no matter, they had to tarry

outside in the long parlor under the inspection of

a double rank of liveried footmen and waiting-maids

who supported the two walls with their backs and held

the wraps and traps of their masters and mistresses on their

arms.



We had no footmen to hold our things, and it was not

permissible to take them into the concert-room; but there

were some men and women to take charge of them for us.

They gave us checks for them and charged a fixed price,

payable in advance--five cents.



In Germany they always hear one thing at an opera

which has never yet been heard in America, perhaps--I

mean the closing strain of a fine solo or duet.

We always smash into it with an earthquake of applause.

The result is that we rob ourselves of the sweetest

part of the treat; we get the whiskey, but we don't get

the sugar in the bottom of the glass.



Our way of scattering applause along through an act seems

to me to be better than the Mannheim way of saving it

all up till the act is ended.  I do not see how an actor

can forget himself and portray hot passion before a cold

still audience.  I should think he would feel foolish.

It is a pain to me to this day, to remember how that old

German Lear raged and wept and howled around the stage,

with never a response from that hushed house, never a

single outburst till the act was ended.  To me there was

something unspeakably uncomfortable in the solemn dead

silences that always followed this old person's tremendous

outpourings of his feelings.  I could not help putting

myself in his place--I thought I knew how sick and flat

he felt during those silences, because I remembered a case

which came under my observation once, and which--but I

will tell the incident:



One evening on board a Mississippi steamboat, a boy of ten

years lay asleep in a berth--a long, slim-legged boy,

he was, encased in quite a short shirt; it was the first

time he had ever made a trip on a steamboat, and so he

was troubled, and scared, and had gone to bed with his

head filled with impending snaggings, and explosions,

and conflagrations, and sudden death.  About ten o'clock

some twenty ladies were sitting around about the ladies'

saloon, quietly reading, sewing, embroidering, and so on,

and among them sat a sweet, benignant old dame with round

spectacles on her nose and her busy knitting-needles

in her hands.  Now all of a sudden, into the midst of this

peaceful scene burst that slim-shanked boy in the brief shirt,

wild-eyed, erect-haired, and shouting, "Fire, fire!

JUMP AND RUN, THE BOAT'S AFIRE AND THERE AIN'T A MINUTE

TO LOSE!" All those ladies looked sweetly up and smiled,

nobody stirred, the old lady pulled her spectacles down,

looked over them, and said, gently:



"But you mustn't catch cold, child.  Run and put on

your breastpin, and then come and tell us all about it."



It was a cruel chill to give to a poor little devil's

gushing vehemence.  He was expecting to be a sort of

hero--the creator of a wild panic--and here everybody

sat and smiled a mocking smile, and an old woman made

fun of his bugbear.  I turned and crept away--for I

was that boy--and never even cared to discover whether

I had dreamed the fire or actually seen it.



I am told that in a German concert or opera, they hardly

ever encore a song; that though they may be dying to hear

it again, their good breeding usually preserves them

against requiring the repetition.



Kings may encore; that is quite another matter;

it delights everybody to see that the King is pleased;

and as to the actor encored, his pride and gratification

are simply boundless.  Still, there are circumstances

in which even a royal encore--



But it is better to illustrate.  The King of Bavaria is

a poet, and has a poet's eccentricities--with the advantage

over all other poets of being able to gratify them,

no matter what form they may take.  He is fond of opera,

but not fond of sitting in the presence of an audience;

therefore, it has sometimes occurred, in Munich,

that when an opera has been concluded and the players

were getting off their paint and finery, a command has

come to them to get their paint and finery on again.

Presently the King would arrive, solitary and alone,

and the players would begin at the beginning and do the

entire opera over again with only that one individual

in the vast solemn theater for audience.  Once he took

an odd freak into his head.  High up and out of sight,

over the prodigious stage of the court theater is a maze

of interlacing water-pipes, so pierced that in case

of fire, innumerable little thread-like streams of

water can be caused to descend; and in case of need,

this discharge can be augmented to a pouring flood.

American managers might want to make a note of that.

The King was sole audience.  The opera proceeded,

it was a piece with a storm in it; the mimic thunder

began to mutter, the mimic wind began to wail and sough,

and the mimic rain to patter.  The King's interest rose

higher and higher; it developed into enthusiasm.  He cried

out:



"It is very, very good, indeed! But I will have real

rain! Turn on the water!"



The manager pleaded for a reversal of the command; said it

would ruin the costly scenery and the splendid costumes,

but the King cried:



"No matter, no matter, I will have real rain! Turn

on the water!"



So the real rain was turned on and began to descend in

gossamer lances to the mimic flower-beds and gravel walks

of the stage.  The richly dressed actresses and actors

tripped about singing bravely and pretending not to mind it.

The King was delighted--his enthusiasm grew higher.

He cried out:



"Bravo, bravo! More thunder! more lightning! turn

on more rain!"



The thunder boomed, the lightning glared, the storm-winds raged,

the deluge poured down.  The mimic royalty on the stage,

with their soaked satins clinging to their bodies,

slopped about ankle-deep in water, warbling their sweetest

and best, the fiddlers under the eaves of the state sawed

away for dear life, with the cold overflow spouting down

the backs of their necks, and the dry and happy King sat

in his lofty box and wore his gloves to ribbons applauding.



"More yet!" cried the King; "more yet--let loose all

the thunder, turn on all the water! I will hang the man

that raises an umbrella!"



When this most tremendous and effective storm that had

ever been produced in any theater was at last over,

the King's approbation was measureless.  He cried:



"Magnificent, magnificent! ENCORE! Do it again!"



But the manager succeeded in persuading him to recall

the encore, and said the company would feel sufficiently

rewarded and complimented in the mere fact that the

encore was desired by his Majesty, without fatiguing

him with a repetition to gratify their own vanity.



During the remainder of the act the lucky performers

were those whose parts required changes of dress;

the others were a soaked, bedraggled, and uncomfortable lot,

but in the last degree picturesque.  The stage scenery

was ruined, trap-doors were so swollen that they wouldn't

work for a week afterward, the fine costumes were spoiled,

and no end of minor damages were done by that remarkable storm.



It was royal idea--that storm--and royally carried out.

But observe the moderation of the King; he did not

insist upon his encore.  If he had been a gladsome,

unreflecting American opera-audience, he probably would

have had his storm repeated and repeated until he drowned

all those people.







CHAPTER XI

[I Paint a "Turner"]



The summer days passed pleasantly in Heidelberg.

We had a skilled trainer, and under his instructions we

were getting our legs in the right condition for the

contemplated pedestrian tours; we were well satisfied

with the progress which we had made in the German language,

[1. See Appendix D for information concerning this

fearful tongue.] and more than satisfied with what we had

accomplished in art.  We had had the best instructors in

drawing and painting in Germany--Ha"mmerling, Vogel, Mu"ller,

Dietz, and Schumann.  Ha"mmerling taught us landscape-painting.

Vogel taught us figure-drawing, Mu"ller taught us to do

still-life, and Dietz and Schumann gave us a finishing

course in two specialties--battle-pieces and shipwrecks.

Whatever I am in Art I owe to these men.  I have something

of the manner of each and all of them; but they all said that I

had also a manner of my own, and that it was conspicuous.

They said there was a marked individuality about my

style--insomuch that if I ever painted the commonest

type of a dog, I should be sure to throw a something

into the aspect of that dog which would keep him from

being mistaken for the creation of any other artist.

Secretly I wanted to believe all these kind sayings,

but I could not; I was afraid that my masters'

partiality for me, and pride in me, biased their judgment.

So I resolved to make a test.  Privately, and unknown

to any one, I painted my great picture, "Heidelberg Castle

Illuminated"--my first really important work in oils--and

had it hung up in the midst of a wilderness of oil-pictures

in the Art Exhibition, with no name attached to it.  To my

great gratification it was instantly recognized as mine.

All the town flocked to see it, and people even came from

neighboring localities to visit it.  It made more stir than

any other work in the Exhibition.  But the most gratifying

thing of all was, that chance strangers, passing through,

who had not heard of my picture, were not only drawn to it,

as by a lodestone, the moment they entered the gallery,

but always took it for a "Turner."



Apparently nobody had ever done that.  There were ruined

castles on the overhanging cliffs and crags all the way;

these were said to have their legends, like those on the Rhine,

and what was better still, they had never been in print.

There was nothing in the books about that lovely region;

it had been neglected by the tourist, it was virgin soil for

the literary pioneer.



Meantime the knapsacks, the rough walking-suits and the stout

walking-shoes which we had ordered, were finished and brought

to us.  A Mr. X and a young Mr. Z had agreed to go with us.

We went around one evening and bade good-by to our friends,

and afterward had a little farewell banquet at the hotel.

We got to bed early, for we wanted to make an early start,

so as to take advantage of the cool of the morning.



We were out of bed at break of day, feeling fresh

and vigorous, and took a hearty breakfast, then plunged

down through the leafy arcades of the Castle grounds,

toward the town.  What a glorious summer morning it was,

and how the flowers did pour out their fragrance,

and how the birds did sing! It was just the time for a

tramp through the woods and mountains.



We were all dressed alike: broad slouch hats, to keep the

sun off; gray knapsacks; blue army shirts; blue overalls;

leathern gaiters buttoned tight from knee down to ankle;

high-quarter coarse shoes snugly laced.  Each man had

an opera-glass, a canteen, and a guide-book case slung

over his shoulder, and carried an alpenstock in one hand

and a sun-umbrella in the other.  Around our hats were

wound many folds of soft white muslin, with the ends

hanging and flapping down our backs--an idea brought

from the Orient and used by tourists all over Europe.

Harris carried the little watch-like machine called

a "pedometer," whose office is to keep count of a man's

steps and tell how far he has walked.  Everybody stopped

to admire our costumes and give us a hearty "Pleasant march

to you!"



When we got downtown I found that we could go by rail to

within five miles of Heilbronn.  The train was just starting,

so we jumped aboard and went tearing away in splendid spirits.

It was agreed all around that we had done wisely,

because it would be just as enjoyable to walk DOWN the Neckar

as up it, and it could not be needful to walk both ways.

There were some nice German people in our compartment.

I got to talking some pretty private matters presently,

and Harris became nervous; so he nudged me and said:



"Speak in German--these Germans may understand English."



I did so, it was well I did; for it turned out that there

was not a German in that party who did not understand

English perfectly.  It is curious how widespread our language

is in Germany.  After a while some of those folks got out

and a German gentleman and his two young daughters got in.

I spoke in German of one of the latter several times,

but without result.  Finally she said:



"ICH VERSTEHE NUR DEUTCH UND ENGLISHE,"--or words to

that effect.  That is, "I don't understand any language

but German and English."



And sure enough, not only she but her father and sister

spoke English.  So after that we had all the talk we wanted;

and we wanted a good deal, for they were agreeable people.

They were greatly interested in our customs; especially

the alpenstocks, for they had not seen any before.

They said that the Neckar road was perfectly level, so we

must be going to Switzerland or some other rugged country;

and asked us if we did not find the walking pretty fatiguing

in such warm weather.  But we said no.



We reached Wimpfen--I think it was Wimpfen--in about

three hours, and got out, not the least tired; found a

good hotel and ordered beer and dinner--then took

a stroll through the venerable old village.  It was very

picturesque and tumble-down, and dirty and interesting.

It had queer houses five hundred years old in it,

and a military tower 115 feet high, which had stood there

more than ten centuries.  I made a little sketch of it.

I kept a copy, but gave the original to the Burgomaster.

I think the original was better than the copy, because it

had more windows in it and the grass stood up better and had

a brisker look.  There was none around the tower, though;

I composed the grass myself, from studies I made in a field

by Heidelberg in Ha"mmerling's time.  The man on top,

looking at the view, is apparently too large, but I found

he could not be made smaller, conveniently.  I wanted

him there, and I wanted him visible, so I thought out a

way to manage it; I composed the picture from two points

of view; the spectator is to observe the man from bout

where that flag is, and he must observe the tower itself

from the ground.  This harmonizes the seeming discrepancy.

[Figure 2]



Near an old cathedral, under a shed, were three crosses

of stone--moldy and damaged things, bearing life-size

stone figures.  The two thieves were dressed in the fanciful

court costumes of the middle of the sixteenth century,

while the Saviour was nude, with the exception of a cloth

around the loins.



We had dinner under the green trees in a garden belonging

to the hotel and overlooking the Neckar; then, after a smoke,

we went to bed.  We had a refreshing nap, then got up

about three in the afternoon and put on our panoply.

As we tramped gaily out at the gate of the town,

we overtook a peasant's cart, partly laden with odds and

ends of cabbages and similar vegetable rubbish, and drawn

by a small cow and a smaller donkey yoked together.

It was a pretty slow concern, but it got us into Heilbronn

before dark--five miles, or possibly it was seven.



We stopped at the very same inn which the famous old

robber-knight and rough fighter Go"tz von Berlichingen,

abode in after he got out of captivity in the Square Tower

of Heilbronn between three hundred and fifty and four hundred

years ago.  Harris and I occupied the same room which he

had occupied and the same paper had not quite peeled off

the walls yet.  The furniture was quaint old carved stuff,

full four hundred years old, and some of the smells

were over a thousand.  There was a hook in the wall,

which the landlord said the terrific old Go"tz used to

hang his iron hand on when he took it off to go to bed.

This room was very large--it might be called immense--

and it was on the first floor; which means it was in

the second story, for in Europe the houses are so high

that they do not count the first story, else they

would get tired climbing before they got to the top.

The wallpaper was a fiery red, with huge gold figures in it,

well smirched by time, and it covered all the doors.

These doors fitted so snugly and continued the figures

of the paper so unbrokenly, that when they were closed

one had to go feeling and searching along the wall

to find them.  There was a stove in the corner--one

of those tall, square, stately white porcelain things

that looks like a monument and keeps you thinking

of death when you ought to be enjoying your travels.

The windows looked out on a little alley, and over that

into a stable and some poultry and pig yards in the rear

of some tenement-houses. There were the customary two beds

in the room, one in one end, the other in the other,

about an old-fashioned brass-mounted, single-barreled

pistol-shot apart.  They were fully as narrow as the usual

German bed, too, and had the German bed's ineradicable

habit of spilling the blankets on the floor every time

you forgot yourself and went to sleep.



A round table as large as King Arthur's stood in the

center of the room; while the waiters were getting

ready to serve our dinner on it we all went out to see

the renowned clock on the front of the municipal buildings.







CHAPTER XII

[What the Wives Saved]



The RATHHAUS, or municipal building, is of the quaintest

and most picturesque Middle-Age architecture.  It has a

massive portico and steps, before it, heavily balustraded,

and adorned with life-sized rusty iron knights in

complete armor.  The clock-face on the front of the building

is very large and of curious pattern.  Ordinarily, a gilded

angel strikes the hour on a big bell with a hammer;

as the striking ceases, a life-sized figure of Time raises

its hour-glass and turns it; two golden rams advance

and butt each other; a gilded cock lifts its wings;

but the main features are two great angels, who stand

on each side of the dial with long horns at their lips;

it was said that they blew melodious blasts on these

horns every hour--but they did not do it for us.

We were told, later, than they blew only at night,

when the town was still.



Within the RATHHAUS were a number of huge wild boars'

heads, preserved, and mounted on brackets along the wall;

they bore inscriptions telling who killed them and how many

hundred years ago it was done.  One room in the building

was devoted to the preservation of ancient archives.

There they showed us no end of aged documents; some were

signed by Popes, some by Tilly and other great generals,

and one was a letter written and subscribed by Go"tz von

Berlichingen in Heilbronn in 1519 just after his release

from the Square Tower.



This fine old robber-knight was a devoutly and sincerely

religious man, hospitable, charitable to the poor,

fearless in fight, active, enterprising, and possessed

of a large and generous nature.  He had in him a

quality of being able to overlook moderate injuries,

and being able to forgive and forget mortal ones as

soon as he had soundly trounced the authors of them.

He was prompt to take up any poor devil's quarrel and risk

his neck to right him.  The common folk held him dear,

and his memory is still green in ballad and tradition.

He used to go on the highway and rob rich wayfarers;

and other times he would swoop down from his high castle

on the hills of the Neckar and capture passing cargoes

of merchandise.  In his memoirs he piously thanks the

Giver of all Good for remembering him in his needs and

delivering sundry such cargoes into his hands at times

when only special providences could have relieved him.

He was a doughty warrior and found a deep joy in battle.

In an assault upon a stronghold in Bavaria when he was

only twenty-three years old, his right hand was shot away,

but he was so interested in the fight that he did not

observe it for a while.  He said that the iron hand

which was made for him afterward, and which he wore for

more than half a century, was nearly as clever a member

as the fleshy one had been.  I was glad to get a facsimile

of the letter written by this fine old German Robin Hood,

though I was not able to read it.  He was a better artist

with his sword than with his pen.



We went down by the river and saw the Square Tower.

It was a very venerable structure, very strong,

and very ornamental.  There was no opening near the ground.

They had to use a ladder to get into it, no doubt.



We visited the principal church, also--a curious

old structure, with a towerlike spire adorned with all

sorts of grotesque images.  The inner walls of the church

were placarded with large mural tablets of copper,

bearing engraved inscriptions celebrating the merits

of old Heilbronn worthies of two or three centuries ago,

and also bearing rudely painted effigies of themselves

and their families tricked out in the queer costumes of

those days.  The head of the family sat in the foreground,

and beyond him extended a sharply receding and diminishing

row of sons; facing him sat his wife, and beyond

her extended a low row of diminishing daughters.

The family was usually large, but the perspective bad.



Then we hired the hack and the horse which Go"tz von

Berlichingen used to use, and drove several miles into

the country to visit the place called WEIBERTREU--Wife's

Fidelity I suppose it means.  It was a feudal castle

of the Middle Ages.  When we reached its neighborhood we

found it was beautifully situated, but on top of a mound,

or hill, round and tolerably steep, and about two hundred

feet high.  Therefore, as the sun was blazing hot,

we did not climb up there, but took the place on trust,

and observed it from a distance while the horse leaned up

against a fence and rested.  The place has no interest

except that which is lent it by its legend, which is

a very pretty one--to this effect:



THE LEGEND



In the Middle Ages, a couple of young dukes, brothers,

took opposite sides in one of the wars, the one fighting

for the Emperor, the other against him.  One of them

owned the castle and village on top of the mound which I

have been speaking of, and in his absence his brother

came with his knights and soldiers and began a siege.

It was a long and tedious business, for the people

made a stubborn and faithful defense.  But at last

their supplies ran out and starvation began its work;

more fell by hunger than by the missiles of the enemy.

They by and by surrendered, and begged for charitable terms.

But the beleaguering prince was so incensed against them

for their long resistance that he said he would spare none

but the women and children--all men should be put to the

sword without exception, and all their goods destroyed.

Then the women came and fell on their knees and begged for

the lives of their husbands.



"No," said the prince, "not a man of them shall escape alive;

you yourselves shall go with your children into houseless

and friendless banishment; but that you may not starve

I grant you this one grace, that each woman may bear

with her from this place as much of her most valuable

property as she is able to carry."



Very well, presently the gates swung open and out filed

those women carrying their HUSBANDS on their shoulders.

The besiegers, furious at the trick, rushed forward

to slaughter the men, but the Duke stepped between and

said:



"No, put up your swords--a prince's word is inviolable."



When we got back to the hotel, King Arthur's Round Table

was ready for us in its white drapery, and the head waiter

and his first assistant, in swallow-tails and white cravats,

brought in the soup and the hot plates at once.



Mr. X had ordered the dinner, and when the wine came on,

he picked up a bottle, glanced at the label, and then turned

to the grave, the melancholy, the sepulchral head waiter

and said it was not the sort of wine he had asked for.

The head waiter picked up the bottle, cast his undertaker-eye

on it and said:



"It is true; I beg pardon." Then he turned on his

subordinate and calmly said, "Bring another label."



At the same time he slid the present label off with his hand

and laid it aside; it had been newly put on, its paste

was still wet.  When the new label came, he put it on;

our French wine being now turned into German wine,

according to desire, the head waiter went blandly about his

other duties, as if the working of this sort of miracle

was a common and easy thing to him.



Mr. X said he had not known, before, that there were

people honest enough to do this miracle in public,

but he was aware that thousands upon thousands of labels

were imported into America from Europe every year,

to enable dealers to furnish to their customers in a quiet

and inexpensive way all the different kinds of foreign

wines they might require.



We took a turn around the town, after dinner, and found

it fully as interesting in the moonlight as it had been

in the daytime.  The streets were narrow and roughly paved,

and there was not a sidewalk or a street-lamp anywhere.

The dwellings were centuries old, and vast enough for hotels.

They widened all the way up; the stories projected

further and further forward and aside as they ascended,

and the long rows of lighted windows, filled with little bits

of panes, curtained with figured white muslin and adorned

outside with boxes of flowers, made a pretty effect.

The moon was bright, and the light and shadow very strong;

and nothing could be more picturesque than those curving

streets, with their rows of huge high gables leaning

far over toward each other in a friendly gossiping way,

and the crowds below drifting through the alternating blots

of gloom and mellow bars of moonlight.  Nearly everybody

was abroad, chatting, singing, romping, or massed in lazy

comfortable attitudes in the doorways.



In one place there was a public building which was

fenced about with a thick, rusty chain, which sagged

from post to post in a succession of low swings.

The pavement, here, was made of heavy blocks of stone.

In the glare of the moon a party of barefooted children

were swinging on those chains and having a noisy good time.

They were not the first ones who have done that;

even their great-great-grandfathers had not been the first

to do it when they were children.  The strokes of the bare

feet had worn grooves inches deep in the stone flags;

it had taken many generations of swinging children to

accomplish that.  Everywhere in the town were the mold

and decay that go with antiquity, and evidence of it;

but I do not know that anything else gave us so vivid

a sense of the old age of Heilbronn as those footworn

grooves in the paving-stones.







CHAPTER XIII

[My Long Crawl in the Dark]



When we got back to the hotel I wound and set the

pedometer and put it in my pocket, for I was to carry

it next day and keep record of the miles we made.

The work which we had given the instrument to do during

which had just closed had not fatigued it perceptibly.



We were in bed by ten, for we wanted to be up and away on

our tramp homeward with the dawn.  I hung fire, but Harris

went to sleep at once.  I hate a man who goes to sleep

at once; there is a sort of indefinable something about it

which is not exactly an insult, and yet is an insolence;

and one which is hard to bear, too.  I lay there fretting

over this injury, and trying to go to sleep; but the harder

I tried, the wider awake I grew.  I got to feeling very lonely

in the dark, ith no company but an undigested dinner.

My mind got a start by and by, and began to consider the

beginning of every subject which has ever been thought of;

but it never went further than the beginning; it was touch

and go; it fled from topic to topic with a frantic speed.

At the end of an hour my head was in a perfect whirl and I

was dead tired, fagged out.



The fatigue was so great that it presently began to make some

head against the nervous excitement; while imagining myself

wide awake, I would really doze into momentary unconsciousness,

and come suddenly out of it with a physical jerk which nearly

wrenched my joints apart--the delusion of the instant

being that I was tumbling backward over a precipice.

After I had fallen over eight or nine precipices and thus

found out that one half of my brain had been asleep eight

or nine times without the wide-awake, hard-working other

half suspecting it, the periodical unconsciousnesses

began to extend their spell gradually over more of my

brain-territory, and at last I sank into a drowse which

grew deeper and deeper and was doubtless just on the very

point of being a solid, blessed dreamless stupor, when--what was

that?



My dulled faculties dragged themselves partly back to life

and took a receptive attitude.  Now out of an immense,

a limitless distance, came a something which grew and grew,

and approached, and presently was recognizable as a sound--

it had rather seemed to be a feeling, before.  This sound

was a mile away, now--perhaps it was the murmur of a storm;

and now it was nearer--not a quarter of a mile away;

was it the muffled rasping and grinding of distant

machinery? No, it came still nearer; was it the measured

tramp of a marching troop? But it came nearer still,

and still nearer--and at last it was right in the room: it

was merely a mouse gnawing the woodwork.  So I had held my

breath all that time for such a trifle.



Well, what was done could not be helped; I would go

to sleep at once and make up the lost time.  That was

a thoughtless thought.  Without intending it--hardly

knowing it--I fell to listening intently to that sound,

and even unconsciously counting the strokes of the mouse's

nutmeg-grater. Presently I was deriving exquisite suffering

from this employment, yet maybe I could have endured

it if the mouse had attended steadily to his work;

but he did not do that; he stopped every now and then,

and I suffered more while waiting and listening for

him to begin again than I did while he was gnawing.

Along at first I was mentally offering a reward

of five--six--seven--ten--dollars for that mouse;

but toward the last I was offering rewards which were

entirely beyond my means.  I close-reefed my ears--

that is to say, I bent the flaps of them down and furled

them into five or six folds, and pressed them against

the hearing-orifice--but it did no good: the faculty

was so sharpened by nervous excitement that it was become

a microphone and could hear through the overlays without trouble.





My anger grew to a frenzy.  I finally did what all persons

before me have done, clear back to Adam,--resolved to

throw something.  I reached down and got my walking-shoes,

then sat up in bed and listened, in order to exactly locate

the noise.  But I couldn't do it; it was as unlocatable

as a cricket's noise; and where one thinks that that is,

is always the very place where it isn't. So I presently

hurled a shoe at random, and with a vicious vigor.

It struck the wall over Harris's head and fell down on him;

I had not imagined I could throw so far.  It woke Harris,

and I was glad of it until I found he was not angry;

then I was sorry.  He soon went to sleep again,

which pleased me; but straightway the mouse began again,

which roused my temper once more.  I did not want to wake

Harris a second time, but the gnawing continued until I

was compelled to throw the other shoe.  This time I broke

a mirror--there were two in the room--I got the largest one,

of course.  Harris woke again, but did not complain,

and I was sorrier than ever.  I resolved that I would

suffer all possible torture before I would disturb him a

third time.



The mouse eventually retired, and by and by I was sinking

to sleep, when a clock began to strike; I counted till

it was done, and was about to drowse again when another

clock began; I counted; then the two great RATHHAUS clock

angels began to send forth soft, rich, melodious blasts

from their long trumpets.  I had never heard anything

that was so lovely, or weird, or mysterious--but when they

got to blowing the quarter-hours, they seemed to me to be

overdoing the thing.  Every time I dropped off for the moment,

a new noise woke me.  Each time I woke I missed my coverlet,

and had to reach down to the floor and get it again.



At last all sleepiness forsook me.  I recognized the fact

that I was hopelessly and permanently wide awake.

Wide awake, and feverish and thirsty.  When I had lain

tossing there as long as I could endure it, it occurred

to me that it would be a good idea to dress and go out in

the great square and take a refreshing wash in the fountain,

and smoke and reflect there until the remnant of the night

was gone.



I believed I could dress in the dark without waking Harris.

I had banished my shoes after the mouse, but my slippers

would do for a summer night.  So I rose softly, and gradually

got on everything--down to one sock.  I couldn't seem

to get on the track of that sock, any way I could fix it.

But I had to have it; so I went down on my hands and knees,

with one slipper on and the other in my hand, and began to

paw gently around and rake the floor, but with no success.

I enlarged my circle, and went on pawing and raking.

With every pressure of my knee, how the floor creaked!

and every time I chanced to rake against any article,

it seemed to give out thirty-five or thirty-six times

more noise than it would have done in the daytime.

In those cases I always stopped and held my breath till I

was sure Harris had not awakened--then I crept along again.

I moved on and on, but I could not find the sock;

I could not seem to find anything but furniture.

I could not remember that there was much furniture

in the room when I went to bed, but the place was alive

with it now --especially chairs--chairs everywhere--

had a couple of families moved in, in the mean time? And

I never could seem to GLANCE on one of those chairs,

but always struck it full and square with my head.

My temper rose, by steady and sure degrees, and as I

pawed on and on, I fell to making vicious comments under

my breath.



Finally, with a venomous access of irritation, I said I

would leave without the sock; so I rose up and made straight

for the door--as I supposed--and suddenly confronted my

dim spectral image in the unbroken mirror.  It startled

the breath out of me, for an instant; it also showed me

that I was lost, and had no sort of idea where I was.

When I realized this, I was so angry that I had to sit

down on the floor and take hold of something to keep

from lifting the roof off with an explosion of opinion.

If there had been only one mirror, it might possibly have

helped to locate me; but there were two, and two were as

bad as a thousand; besides, these were on opposite sides

of the room.  I could see the dim blur of the windows,

but in my turned-around condition they were exactly

where they ought not to be, and so they only confused me

instead of helping me.



I started to get up, and knocked down an umbrella;

it made a noise like a pistol-shot when it struck

that hard, slick, carpetless floor; I grated my teeth

and held my breath--Harris did not stir.  I set the

umbrella slowly and carefully on end against the wall,

but as soon as I took my hand away, its heel slipped

from under it, and down it came again with another bang.

I shrunk together and listened a moment in silent fury--

no harm done, everything quiet.  With the most painstaking

care and nicety, I stood the umbrella up once more,

took my hand away, and down it came again.



I have been strictly reared, but if it had not been

so dark and solemn and awful there in that lonely,

vast room, I do believe I should have said something

then which could not be put into a Sunday-school book

without injuring the sale of it.  If my reasoning powers

had not been already sapped dry by my harassments,

I would have known better than to try to set an umbrella

on end on one of those glassy German floors in the dark;

it can't be done in the daytime without four failures

to one success.  I had one comfort, though--Harris was

yet still and silent--he had not stirred.



The umbrella could not locate me--there were four

standing around the room, and all alike.  I thought I

would feel along the wall and find the door in that way.

I rose up and began this operation, but raked down

a picture.  It was not a large one, but it made noise

enough for a panorama.  Harris gave out no sound, but I

felt that if I experimented any further with the pictures

I should be sure to wake him.  Better give up trying to

get out.  Yes, I would find King Arthur's Round Table once

more--I had already found it several times--and use it

for a base of departure on an exploring tour for my bed;

if I could find my bed I could then find my water pitcher;

I would quench my raging thirst and turn in.  So I started

on my hands and knees, because I could go faster that way,

and with more confidence, too, and not knock down things.

By and by I found the table--with my head--rubbed the

bruise a little, then rose up and started, with hands

abroad and fingers spread, to balance myself.  I found

a chair; then a wall; then another chair; then a sofa;

then an alpenstock, then another sofa; this confounded me,

for I had thought there was only one sofa.  I hunted

up the table again and took a fresh start; found some

more chairs.



It occurred to me, now, as it ought to have done before,

that as the table was round, it was therefore of no

value as a base to aim from; so I moved off once more,

and at random among the wilderness of chairs and sofas--

wandering off into unfamiliar regions, and presently knocked

a candlestick and knocked off a lamp, grabbed at the lamp

and knocked off a water pitcher with a rattling crash,

and thought to myself, "I've found you at last--I

judged I was close upon you." Harris shouted "murder,"

and "thieves," and finished with "I'm absolutely drowned."



The crash had roused the house.  Mr. X pranced in,

in his long night-garment, with a candle, young Z after him

with another candle; a procession swept in at another door,

with candles and lanterns--landlord and two German guests

in their nightgowns and a chambermaid in hers.



I looked around; I was at Harris's bed, a Sabbath-day's

journey from my own.  There was only one sofa; it was against

the wall; there was only one chair where a body could get

at it--I had been revolving around it like a planet,

and colliding with it like a comet half the night.



I explained how I had been employing myself, and why.

Then the landlord's party left, and the rest of us set

about our preparations for breakfast, for the dawn was

ready to break.  I glanced furtively at my pedometer,

and found I had made 47 miles.  But I did not care, for I

had come out for a pedestrian tour anyway.







CHAPTER XIV

[Rafting Down the Neckar]



When the landlord learned that I and my agents were artists,

our party rose perceptibly in his esteem; we rose still

higher when he learned that we were making a pedestrian

tour of Europe.



He told us all about the Heidelberg road, and which

were the best places to avoid and which the best ones

to tarry at; he charged me less than cost for the things

I broke in the night; he put up a fine luncheon for us

and added to it a quantity of great light-green plums,

the pleasantest fruit in Germany; he was so anxious to do us

honor that he would not allow us to walk out of Heilbronn,

but called up Go"tz von Berlichingen's horse and cab

and made us ride.



I made a sketch of the turnout.  It is not a Work, it is only

what artists call a "study"--a thing to make a finished

picture from.  This sketch has several blemishes in it;

for instance, the wagon is not traveling as fast as the

horse is.  This is wrong.  Again, the person trying to get

out of the way is too small; he is out of perspective,

as we say.  The two upper lines are not the horse's back,

they are the reigns; there seems to be a wheel missing--

this would be corrected in a finished Work, of course.

This thing flying out behind is not a flag, it is a curtain.

That other thing up there is the sun, but I didn't get

enough distance on it.  I do not remember, now, what that

thing is that is in front of the man who is running,

but I think it is a haystack or a woman.  This study

was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1879, but did not

take any medal; they do not give medals for studies.

[Figure 3]



We discharged the carriage at the bridge.  The river was

full of logs--long, slender, barkless pine logs--and we

leaned on the rails of the bridge, and watched the men put

them together into rafts.  These rafts were of a shape

and construction to suit the crookedness and extreme

narrowness of the Neckar.  They were from fifty to one

hundred yards long, and they gradually tapered from a

nine-log breadth at their sterns, to a three-log breadth

at their bow-ends. The main part of the steering is done

at the bow, with a pole; the three-log breadth there

furnishes room for only the steersman, for these little logs

are not larger around than an average young lady's waist.

The connections of the several sections of the raft are

slack and pliant, so that the raft may be readily bent

into any sort of curve required by the shape of the river.



The Neckar is in many places so narrow that a person

can throw a dog across it, if he has one; when it is

also sharply curved in such places, the raftsman has

to do some pretty nice snug piloting to make the turns.

The river is not always allowed to spread over its whole

bed--which is as much as thirty, and sometimes forty yards

wide--but is split into three equal bodies of water,

by stone dikes which throw the main volume, depth, and current

into the central one.  In low water these neat narrow-edged

dikes project four or five inches above the surface,

like the comb of a submerged roof, but in high water

they are overflowed.  A hatful of rain makes high water

in the Neckar, and a basketful produces an overflow.



There are dikes abreast the Schloss Hotel, and the current

is violently swift at that point.  I used to sit for hours

in my glass cage, watching the long, narrow rafts slip

along through the central channel, grazing the right-bank

dike and aiming carefully for the middle arch of the stone

bridge below; I watched them in this way, and lost all this

time hoping to see one of them hit the bridge-pier and wreck

itself sometime or other, but was always disappointed.

One was smashed there one morning, but I had just stepped

into my room a moment to light a pipe, so I lost it.



While I was looking down upon the rafts that morning

in Heilbronn, the daredevil spirit of adventure came

suddenly upon me, and I said to my comrades:



"_I_ am going to Heidelberg on a raft.  Will you venture

with me?"



Their faces paled a little, but they assented with as

good a grace as they could.  Harris wanted to cable his

mother--thought it his duty to do that, as he was all

she had in this world--so, while he attended to this,

I went down to the longest and finest raft and hailed

the captain with a hearty "Ahoy, shipmate!" which put us

upon pleasant terms at once, and we entered upon business.

I said we were on a pedestrian tour to Heidelberg,

and would like to take passage with him.  I said this

partly through young Z, who spoke German very well,

and partly through Mr. X, who spoke it peculiarly.  I can

UNDERSTAND German as well as the maniac that invented it,

but I TALK it best through an interpreter.



The captain hitched up his trousers, then shifted

his quid thoughtfully.  Presently he said just what I

was expecting he would say--that he had no license

to carry passengers, and therefore was afraid the law

would be after him in case the matter got noised about

or any accident happened.  So I CHARTERED the raft

and the crew and took all the responsibilities on myself.



With a rattling song the starboard watch bent to their

work and hove the cable short, then got the anchor home,

and our bark moved off with a stately stride, and soon

was bowling along at about two knots an hour.



Our party were grouped amidships.  At first the talk was

a little gloomy, and ran mainly upon the shortness of life,

the uncertainty of it, the perils which beset it, and the

need and wisdom of being always prepared for the worst;

this shaded off into low-voiced references to the dangers

of the deep, and kindred matters; but as the gray east

began to redden and the mysterious solemnity and silence

of the dawn to give place to the joy-songs of the birds,

the talk took a cheerier tone, and our spirits began to

rise steadily.



Germany, in the summer, is the perfection of the beautiful,

but nobody has understood, and realized, and enjoyed

the utmost possibilities of this soft and peaceful

beauty unless he has voyaged down the Neckar on a raft.

The motion of a raft is the needful motion; it is gentle,

and gliding, and smooth, and noiseless; it calms down

all feverish activities, it soothes to sleep all nervous

hurry and impatience; under its restful influence all the

troubles and vexations and sorrows that harass the mind

vanish away, and existence becomes a dream, a charm,

a deep and tranquil ecstasy.  How it contrasts with hot

and perspiring pedestrianism, and dusty and deafening

railroad rush, and tedious jolting behind tired horses

over blinding white roads!



We went slipping silently along, between the green and

fragrant banks, with a sense of pleasure and contentment

that grew, and grew, all the time.  Sometimes the banks

were overhung with thick masses of willows that wholly

hid the ground behind; sometimes we had noble hills on

one hand, clothed densely with foliage to their tops,

and on the other hand open levels blazing with poppies,

or clothed in the rich blue of the corn-flower;

sometimes we drifted in the shadow of forests, and sometimes

along the margin of long stretches of velvety grass,

fresh and green and bright, a tireless charm to the eye.

And the birds!--they were everywhere; they swept back

and forth across the river constantly, and their jubilant

music was never stilled.



It was a deep and satisfying pleasure to see the sun

create the new morning, and gradually, patiently,

lovingly, clothe it on with splendor after splendor,

and glory after glory, till the miracle was complete.

How different is this marvel observed from a raft,

from what it is when one observes it through the dingy

windows of a railway-station in some wretched village

while he munches a petrified sandwich and waits for the train.







CHAPTER XV

Down the River

[Charming Waterside Pictures]



Men and women and cattle were at work in the dewy fields

by this time.  The people often stepped aboard the raft,

as we glided along the grassy shores, and gossiped with us

and with the crew for a hundred yards or so, then stepped

ashore again, refreshed by the ride.



Only the men did this; the women were too busy.

The women do all kinds of work on the continent.  They dig,

they hoe, they reap, they sow, they bear monstrous burdens

on their backs, they shove similar ones long distances

on wheelbarrows, they drag the cart when there is no dog

or lean cow to drag it--and when there is, they assist

the dog or cow.  Age is no matter--the older the woman

the stronger she is, apparently.  On the farm a woman's

duties are not defined--she does a little of everything;

but in the towns it is different, there she only does

certain things, the men do the rest.  For instance,

a hotel chambermaid has nothing to do but make beds and

fires in fifty or sixty rooms, bring towels and candles,

and fetch several tons of water up several flights of stairs,

a hundred pounds at a time, in prodigious metal pitchers.

She does not have to work more than eighteen or twenty hours

a day, and she can always get down on her knees and scrub

the floors of halls and closets when she is tired and needs

a rest.



As the morning advanced and the weather grew hot, we took

off our outside clothing and sat in a row along the edge

of the raft and enjoyed the scenery, with our sun-umbrellas

over our heads and our legs dangling in the water.

Every now and then we plunged in and had a swim.

Every projecting grassy cape had its joyous group

of naked children, the boys to themselves and the girls

to themselves, the latter usually in care of some motherly

dame who sat in the shade of a tree with her knitting.

The little boys swam out to us, sometimes, but the little

maids stood knee-deep in the water and stopped their splashing

and frolicking to inspect the raft with their innocent

eyes as it drifted by.  Once we turned a corner suddenly

and surprised a slender girl of twelve years or upward,

just stepping into the water.  She had not time to run,

but she did what answered just as well; she promptly

drew a lithe young willow bough athwart her white body

with one hand, and then contemplated us with a simple and

untroubled interest.  Thus she stood while we glided by.

She was a pretty creature, and she and her willow bough

made a very pretty picture, and one which could not

offend the modesty of the most fastidious spectator.

Her white skin had a low bank of fresh green willows for

background and effective contrast--for she stood against

them--and above and out of them projected the eager faces

and white shoulders of two smaller girls.



Toward noon we heard the inspiring cry:



"Sail ho!"



"Where away?" shouted the captain.



"Three points off the weather bow!"



We ran forward to see the vessel.  It proved to be

a steamboat--for they had begun to run a steamer up

the Neckar, for the first time in May.  She was a tug,

and one of a very peculiar build and aspect.  I had

often watched her from the hotel, and wondered how she

propelled herself, for apparently she had no propeller

or paddles.  She came churning along, now, making a deal

of noise of one kind or another, and aggravating it every

now and then by blowing a hoarse whistle.  She had nine

keel-boats hitched on behind and following after her

in a long, slender rank.  We met her in a narrow place,

between dikes, and there was hardly room for us both in the

cramped passage.  As she went grinding and groaning by,

we perceived the secret of her moving impulse.  She did

not drive herself up the river with paddles or propeller,

she pulled herself by hauling on a great chain.

This chain is laid in the bed of the river and is only

fastened at the two ends.  It is seventy miles long.

It comes in over the boat's bow, passes around a drum,

and is payed out astern.  She pulls on that chain,

and so drags herself up the river or down it.  She has

neither bow or stern, strictly speaking, for she has a

long-bladed rudder on each end and she never turns around.

She uses both rudders all the time, and they are powerful

enough to enable her to turn to the right or the left

and steer around curves, in spite of the strong resistance

of the chain.  I would not have believed that that impossible

thing could be done; but I saw it done, and therefore I

know that there is one impossible thing which CAN be done.

What miracle will man attempt next?



We met many big keel-boats on their way up, using sails,

mule power, and profanity--a tedious and laborious business.

A wire rope led from the foretopmast to the file of mules

on the tow-path a hundred yards ahead, and by dint

of much banging and swearing and urging, the detachment

of drivers managed to get a speed of two or three miles

an hour out of the mules against the stiff current.

The Neckar has always been used as a canal, and thus

has given employment to a great many men and animals;

but now that this steamboat is able, with a small crew

and a bushel or so of coal, to take nine keel-boats farther

up the river in one hour than thirty men and thirty mules

can do it in two, it is believed that the old-fashioned

towing industry is on its death-bed. A second steamboat

began work in the Neckar three months after the first one

was put in service.  [Figure 4]



At noon we stepped ashore and bought some bottled beer

and got some chickens cooked, while the raft waited;

then we immediately put to sea again, and had our

dinner while the beer was cold and the chickens hot.

There is no pleasanter place for such a meal than a raft

that is gliding down the winding Neckar past green meadows

and wooded hills, and slumbering villages, and craggy

heights graced with crumbling towers and battlements.



In one place we saw a nicely dressed German gentleman

without any spectacles.  Before I could come to anchor

he had got underway.  It was a great pity.  I so wanted

to make a sketch of him.  The captain comforted me

for my loss, however, by saying that the man was without

any doubt a fraud who had spectacles, but kept them

in his pocket in order to make himself conspicuous.



Below Hassmersheim we passed Hornberg, Go"tz von Berlichingen's

old castle.  It stands on a bold elevation two hundred feet

above the surface of the river; it has high vine-clad walls

enclosing trees, and a peaked tower about seventy-five

feet high.  The steep hillside, from the castle clear

down to the water's edge, is terraced, and clothed thick

with grape vines.  This is like farming a mansard roof.

All the steeps along that part of the river which furnish

the proper exposure, are given up to the grape.  That region

is a great producer of Rhine wines.  The Germans are

exceedingly fond of Rhine wines; they are put up in tall,

slender bottles, and are considered a pleasant beverage.

One tells them from vinegar by the label.



The Hornberg hill is to be tunneled, and the new railway

will pass under the castle.



THE CAVE OF THE SPECTER



Two miles below Hornberg castle is a cave in a low cliff,

which the captain of the raft said had once been occupied

by a beautiful heiress of Hornberg--the Lady Gertrude--

in the old times.  It was seven hundred years ago.

She had a number of rich and noble lovers and one poor

and obscure one, Sir Wendel Lobenfeld.  With the native

chuckleheadedness of the heroine of romance, she preferred

the poor and obscure lover.  With the native sound judgment

of the father of a heroine of romance, the von Berlichingen

of that day shut his daughter up in his donjon keep,

or his oubliette, or his culverin, or some such place,

and resolved that she should stay there until she selected

a husband from among her rich and noble lovers.  The latter

visited her and persecuted her with their supplications,

but without effect, for her heart was true to her poor

despised Crusader, who was fighting in the Holy Land.

Finally, she resolved that she would endure the attentions

of the rich lovers no longer; so one stormy night she escaped

and went down the river and hid herself in the cave on

the other side.  Her father ransacked the country for her,

but found not a trace of her.  As the days went by,

and still no tidings of her came, his conscience began

to torture him, and he caused proclamation to be made

that if she were yet living and would return, he would

oppose her no longer, she might marry whom she would.

The months dragged on, all hope forsook the old man,

he ceased from his customary pursuits and pleasures,

he devoted himself to pious works, and longed for the

deliverance of death.



Now just at midnight, every night, the lost heiress stood

in the mouth of her cave, arrayed in white robes, and sang

a little love ballad which her Crusader had made for her.

She judged that if he came home alive the superstitious

peasants would tell him about the ghost that sang in the cave,

and that as soon as they described the ballad he would know

that none but he and she knew that song, therefore he would

suspect that she was alive, and would come and find her.

As time went on, the people of the region became sorely

distressed about the Specter of the Haunted Cave.

It was said that ill luck of one kind or another always

overtook any one who had the misfortune to hear that song.

Eventually, every calamity that happened thereabouts was

laid at the door of that music.  Consequently, no boatmen

would consent to pass the cave at night; the peasants

shunned the place, even in the daytime.



But the faithful girl sang on, night after night,

month after month, and patiently waited; her reward

must come at last.  Five years dragged by, and still,

every night at midnight, the plaintive tones floated out

over the silent land, while the distant boatmen and peasants

thrust their fingers into their ears and shuddered out a prayer.



And now came the Crusader home, bronzed and battle-scarred,

but bringing a great and splendid fame to lay at the feet

of his bride.  The old lord of Hornberg received him as

his son, and wanted him to stay by him and be the comfort

and blessing of his age; but the tale of that young

girl's devotion to him and its pathetic consequences

made a changed man of the knight.  He could not enjoy

his well-earned rest.  He said his heart was broken,

he would give the remnant of his life to high deeds

in the cause of humanity, and so find a worthy death

and a blessed reunion with the brave true heart whose

love had more honored him than all his victories in war.



When the people heard this resolve of his, they came and told

him there was a pitiless dragon in human disguise in the

Haunted Cave, a dread creature which no knight had yet been

bold enough to face, and begged him to rid the land of its

desolating presence.  He said he would do it.  They told

him about the song, and when he asked what song it was,

they said the memory of it was gone, for nobody had been

hardy enough to listen to it for the past four years and more.



Toward midnight the Crusader came floating down the river

in a boat, with his trusty cross-bow in his hands.

He drifted silently through the dim reflections of the

crags and trees, with his intent eyes fixed upon the low

cliff which he was approaching.  As he drew nearer,

he discerned the black mouth of the cave.  Now--is that

a white figure? Yes.  The plaintive song begins to well

forth and float away over meadow and river--the cross-bow

is slowly raised to position, a steady aim is taken,

the bolt flies straight to the mark--the figure sinks down,

still singing, the knight takes the wool out of his ears,

and recognizes the old ballad--too late! Ah, if he had

only not put the wool in his ears!



The Crusader went away to the wars again, and presently

fell in battle, fighting for the Cross.  Tradition says

that during several centuries the spirit of the unfortunate

girl sang nightly from the cave at midnight, but the music

carried no curse with it; and although many listened

for the mysterious sounds, few were favored, since only

those could hear them who had never failed in a trust.

It is believed that the singing still continues, but it is

known that nobody has heard it during the present century.







CHAPTER XVI

An Ancient Legend of the Rhine

[The Lorelei]



The last legend reminds one of the "Lorelei"--a legend

of the Rhine.  There is a song called "The Lorelei."



Germany is rich in folk-songs, and the words and airs of

several of them are peculiarly beautiful--but "The Lorelei"

is the people's favorite.  I could not endure it at first,

but by and by it began to take hold of me, and now there

is no tune which I like so well.



It is not possible that it is much known in America, else I

should have heard it there.  The fact that I never heard

it there, is evidence that there are others in my country

who have fared likewise; therefore, for the sake of these,

I mean to print the words and music in this chapter.

And I will refresh the reader's memory by printing the legend

of the Lorelei, too.  I have it by me in the LEGENDS OF

THE RHINE, done into English by the wildly gifted Garnham,

Bachelor of Arts.  I print the legend partly to refresh

my own memory, too, for I have never read it before.



THE LEGEND



Lore (two syllables) was a water nymph who used to sit

on a high rock called the Ley or Lei (pronounced like our

word LIE) in the Rhine, and lure boatmen to destruction

in a furious rapid which marred the channel at that spot.

She so bewitched them with her plaintive songs and her

wonderful beauty that they forgot everything else to gaze

up at her, and so they presently drifted among the broken

reefs and were lost.



In those old, old times, the Count Bruno lived in a great

castle near there with his son, the Count Hermann, a youth

of twenty.  Hermann had heard a great deal about the

beautiful Lore, and had finally fallen very deeply in love

with her without having seen her.  So he used to wander

to the neighborhood of the Lei, evenings, with his Zither

and "Express his Longing in low Singing," as Garnham says.

On one of these occasions, "suddenly there hovered around

the top of the rock a brightness of unequaled clearness

and color, which, in increasingly smaller circles thickened,

was the enchanting figure of the beautiful Lore.



"An unintentional cry of Joy escaped the Youth, he let

his Zither fall, and with extended arms he called out

the name of the enigmatical Being, who seemed to stoop

lovingly to him and beckon to him in a friendly manner;

indeed, if his ear did not deceive him, she called his

name with unutterable sweet Whispers, proper to love.

Beside himself with delight the youth lost his Senses

and sank senseless to the earth."



After that he was a changed person.  He went dreaming about,

thinking only of his fairy and caring for naught else

in the world.  "The old count saw with affliction this

changement in his son," whose cause he could not divine,

and tried to divert his mind into cheerful channels,

but to no purpose.  Then the old count used authority.

He commanded the youth to betake himself to the camp.

Obedience was promised.  Garnham says:



"It was on the evening before his departure, as he

wished still once to visit the Lei and offer to the

Nymph of the Rhine his Sighs, the tones of his Zither,

and his Songs.  He went, in his boat, this time accompanied

by a faithful squire, down the stream.  The moon shed

her silvery light over the whole country; the steep

bank mountains appeared in the most fantastical shapes,

and the high oaks on either side bowed their Branches

on Hermann's passing.  As soon as he approached the Lei,

and was aware of the surf-waves, his attendant was seized

with an inexpressible Anxiety and he begged permission

to land; but the Knight swept the strings of his Guitar

and sang:



"Once I saw thee in dark night, In supernatural Beauty bright;

Of Light-rays, was the Figure wove, To share its light,

locked-hair strove.



"Thy Garment color wave-dove By thy hand the sign of love,

Thy eyes sweet enchantment, Raying to me, oh! enchantment.



"O, wert thou but my sweetheart, How willingly thy love

to part! With delight I should be bound To thy rocky

house in deep ground."



That Hermann should have gone to that place at all,

was not wise; that he should have gone with such a song

as that in his mouth was a most serious mistake.  The Lorelei

did not "call his name in unutterable sweet Whispers"

this time.  No, that song naturally worked an instant

and thorough "changement" in her; and not only that,

but it stirred the bowels of the whole afflicted region

around about there--for--



"Scarcely had these tones sounded, everywhere there

began tumult and sound, as if voices above and below

the water.  On the Lei rose flames, the Fairy stood above,

at that time, and beckoned with her right hand clearly

and urgently to the infatuated Knight, while with a staff

in her left hand she called the waves to her service.

They began to mount heavenward; the boat was upset,

mocking every exertion; the waves rose to the gunwale,

and splitting on the hard stones, the Boat broke into Pieces.

The youth sank into the depths, but the squire was thrown on

shore by a powerful wave."



The bitterest things have been said about the Lorelei

during many centuries, but surely her conduct upon this

occasion entitles her to our respect.  One feels drawn

tenderly toward her and is moved to forget her many crimes

and remember only the good deed that crowned and closed

her career.



"The Fairy was never more seen; but her enchanting tones have

often been heard.  In the beautiful, refreshing, still nights

of spring, when the moon pours her silver light over the Country,

the listening shipper hears from the rushing of the waves,

the echoing Clang of a wonderfully charming voice,

which sings a song from the crystal castle, and with sorrow

and fear he thinks on the young Count Hermann, seduced by the

Nymph."



Here is the music, and the German words by Heinrich Heine.

This song has been a favorite in Germany for forty years,

and will remain a favorite always, maybe.  [Figure 5]



I have a prejudice against people who print things

in a foreign language and add no translation.

When I am the reader, and the author considers me

able to do the translating myself, he pays me quite

a nice compliment--but if he would do the translating

for me I would try to get along without the compliment.



If I were at home, no doubt I could get a translation of

this poem, but I am abroad and can't; therefore I will make

a translation myself.  It may not be a good one, for poetry

is out of my line, but it will serve my purpose--which is,

to give the unGerman young girl a jingle of words to hang

the tune on until she can get hold of a good version,

made by some one who is a poet and knows how to convey

a poetical thought from one language to another.



THE LORELEI



I cannot divine what it meaneth, This haunting nameless

pain: A tale of the bygone ages Keeps brooding through

my brain:



The faint air cools in the glooming, And peaceful flows

the Rhine, The thirsty summits are drinking The sunset's

flooding wine;



The loveliest maiden is sitting High-throned in yon blue air,

Her golden jewels are shining, She combs her golden hair;



She combs with a comb that is golden, And sings a weird

refrain That steeps in a deadly enchantment The list'ner's

ravished brain:



The doomed in his drifting shallop, Is tranced with

the sad sweet tone, He sees not the yawning breakers,

He sees but the maid alone:



The pitiless billows engulf him!--So perish sailor and bark;

And this, with her baleful singing, Is the Lorelei's

gruesome work.



I have a translation by Garnham, Bachelor of Arts,

in the LEGENDS OF THE RHINE, but it would not answer

the purpose I mentioned above, because the measure is too

nobly irregular; it don't fit the tune snugly enough;

in places it hangs over at the ends too far, and in other

places one runs out of words before he gets to the end

of a bar.  Still, Garnham's translation has high merits,

and I am not dreaming of leaving it out of my book.

I believe this poet is wholly unknown in America and England;

I take peculiar pleasure in bringing him forward because I

consider that I discovered him:



THE LORELEI



Translated by L. W. Garnham, B.A.



I do not know what it signifies.  That I am so sorrowful?

A fable of old Times so terrifies, Leaves my heart

so thoughtful.



The air is cool and it darkens, And calmly flows the Rhine;

The summit of the mountain hearkens In evening sunshine line.



The most beautiful Maiden entrances Above wonderfully there,

Her beautiful golden attire glances, She combs her

golden hair.



With golden comb so lustrous, And thereby a song sings,

It has a tone so wondrous, That powerful melody rings.



The shipper in the little ship It effects with woe sad might;

He does not see the rocky slip, He only regards dreaded height.



I believe the turbulent waves Swallow the last shipper

and boat; She with her singing craves All to visit her

magic moat.



No translation could be closer.  He has got in all

the facts; and in their regular order, too.  There is not

a statistic wanting.  It is as succinct as an invoice.

That is what a translation ought to be; it should exactly

reflect the thought of the original.  You can't SING "Above

wonderfully there," because it simply won't go to the tune,

without damaging the singer; but it is a most clingingly exact

translation of DORT OBEN WUNDERBAR--fits it like a blister.

Mr. Garnham's reproduction has other merits--a hundred

of them--but it is not necessary to point them out.

They will be detected.



No one with a specialty can hope to have a monopoly of it.

Even Garnham has a rival.  Mr. X had a small pamphlet

with him which he had bought while on a visit to Munich.

It was entitled A CATALOGUE OF PICTURES IN THE OLD PINACOTEK,

and was written in a peculiar kind of English.  Here are

a few extracts:



"It is not permitted to make use of the work

in question to a publication of the same contents

as well as to the pirated edition of it."



"An evening landscape.  In the foreground near a pond

and a group of white beeches is leading a footpath

animated by travelers."



"A learned man in a cynical and torn dress holding an open

book in his hand."



"St. Bartholomew and the Executioner with the knife

to fulfil the martyr."



"Portrait of a young man.  A long while this picture

was thought to be Bindi Altoviti's portrait; now somebody

will again have it to be the self-portrait of Raphael."



"Susan bathing, surprised by the two old man.

In the background the lapidation of the condemned."



("Lapidation" is good; it is much more elegant than

"stoning.")



"St. Rochus sitting in a landscape with an angel who looks

at his plague-sore, whilst the dog the bread in his mouth

attents him."



"Spring. The Goddess Flora, sitting.  Behind her a fertile

valley perfused by a river."



"A beautiful bouquet animated by May-bugs, etc."



"A warrior in armor with a gypseous pipe in his hand leans

against a table and blows the smoke far away of himself."



"A Dutch landscape along a navigable river which perfuses

it till to the background."



"Some peasants singing in a cottage.  A woman lets drink

a child out of a cup."



"St. John's head as a boy--painted in fresco on a brick."

(Meaning a tile.)



"A young man of the Riccio family, his hair cut off

right at the end, dressed in black with the same cap.

Attributed to Raphael, but the signation is false."



"The Virgin holding the Infant.  It is very painted

in the manner of Sassoferrato."



"A Larder with greens and dead game animated by a cook-maid

and two kitchen-boys."



However, the English of this catalogue is at least

as happy as that which distinguishes an inscription

upon a certain picture in Rome--to wit:



"Revelations-View. St. John in Patterson's Island."



But meanwhile the raft is moving on.







CHAPTER XVII

[Why Germans Wear Spectacles]



A mile or two above Eberbach we saw a peculiar ruin projecting

above the foliage which clothed the peak of a high and

very steep hill.  This ruin consisted of merely a couple

of crumbling masses of masonry which bore a rude resemblance

to human faces; they leaned forward and touched foreheads,

and had the look of being absorbed in conversation.  This ruin

had nothing very imposing or picturesque about it, and there

was no great deal of it, yet it was called the "Spectacular

Ruin."



LEGEND OF THE "SPECTACULAR RUIN"



The captain of the raft, who was as full of history as he

could stick, said that in the Middle Ages a most prodigious

fire-breathing dragon used to live in that region,

and made more trouble than a tax-collector. He was as long

as a railway-train, and had the customary impenetrable

green scales all over him.  His breath bred pestilence

and conflagration, and his appetite bred famine.  He ate

men and cattle impartially, and was exceedingly unpopular.

The German emperor of that day made the usual offer:

he would grant to the destroyer of the dragon, any one

solitary thing he might ask for; for he had a surplusage

of daughters, and it was customary for dragon-killers

to take a daughter for pay.



So the most renowned knights came from the four corners

of the earth and retired down the dragon's throat one after

the other.  A panic arose and spread.  Heroes grew cautious.

The procession ceased.  The dragon became more destructive

than ever.  The people lost all hope of succor, and fled

to the mountains for refuge.



At last Sir Wissenschaft, a poor and obscure knight,

out of a far country, arrived to do battle with the monster.

A pitiable object he was, with his armor hanging in rags

about him, and his strange-shaped knapsack strapped

upon his back.  Everybody turned up their noses at him,

and some openly jeered him.  But he was calm.  He simply

inquired if the emperor's offer was still in force.

The emperor said it was--but charitably advised him to go

and hunt hares and not endanger so precious a life as his

in an attempt which had brought death to so many of the

world's most illustrious heroes.



But this tramp only asked--"Were any of these heroes

men of science?" This raised a laugh, of course,

for science was despised in those days.  But the tramp

was not in the least ruffled.  He said he might be a

little in advance of his age, but no matter--science

would come to be honored, some time or other.  He said

he would march against the dragon in the morning.

Out of compassion, then, a decent spear was offered him,

but he declined, and said, "spears were useless to men

of science." They allowed him to sup in the servants'

hall, and gave him a bed in the stables.



When he started forth in the morning, thousands were

gathered to see.  The emperor said:



"Do not be rash, take a spear, and leave off your knapsack."



But the tramp said:



"It is not a knapsack," and moved straight on.



The dragon was waiting and ready.  He was breathing forth

vast volumes of sulphurous smoke and lurid blasts of flame.

The ragged knight stole warily to a good position,

then he unslung his cylindrical knapsack--which was simply

the common fire-extinguisher known to modern times--

and the first chance he got he turned on his hose and shot

the dragon square in the center of his cavernous mouth.

Out went the fires in an instant, and the dragon curled up

and died.



This man had brought brains to his aid.  He had reared

dragons from the egg, in his laboratory, he had watched

over them like a mother, and patiently studied them

and experimented upon them while they grew.  Thus he had

found out that fire was the life principle of a dragon;

put out the dragon's fires and it could make steam

no longer, and must die.  He could not put out a fire

with a spear, therefore he invented the extinguisher.

The dragon being dead, the emperor fell on the hero's neck

and said:



"Deliverer, name your request," at the same time beckoning

out behind with his heel for a detachment of his daughters

to form and advance.  But the tramp gave them no observance.

He simply said:



"My request is, that upon me be conferred the monopoly

of the manufacture and sale of spectacles in Germany."



The emperor sprang aside and exclaimed:



"This transcends all the impudence I ever heard! A

modest demand, by my halidome! Why didn't you ask

for the imperial revenues at once, and be done with it?"



But the monarch had given his word, and he kept it.

To everybody's surprise, the unselfish monopolist immediately

reduced the price of spectacles to such a degree that a

great and crushing burden was removed from the nation.

The emperor, to commemorate this generous act, and to

testify his appreciation of it, issued a decree commanding

everybody to buy this benefactor's spectacles and wear them,

whether they needed them or not.



So originated the wide-spread custom of wearing

spectacles in Germany; and as a custom once established

in these old lands is imperishable, this one remains

universal in the empire to this day.  Such is the legend

of the monopolist's once stately and sumptuous castle,

now called the "Spectacular Ruin."



On the right bank, two or three miles below the Spectacular

Ruin, we passed by a noble pile of castellated buildings

overlooking the water from the crest of a lofty elevation.

A stretch of two hundred yards of the high front wall

was heavily draped with ivy, and out of the mass of

buildings within rose three picturesque old towers.

The place was in fine order, and was inhabited by a

family of princely rank.  This castle had its legend,

too, but I should not feel justified in repeating

it because I doubted the truth of some of its minor details.



Along in this region a multitude of Italian laborers

were blasting away the frontage of the hills to make

room for the new railway.  They were fifty or a hundred

feet above the river.  As we turned a sharp corner they

began to wave signals and shout warnings to us to look

out for the explosions.  It was all very well to warn us,

but what could WE do? You can't back a raft upstream,

you can't hurry it downstream, you can't scatter out

to one side when you haven't any room to speak of,

you won't take to the perpendicular cliffs on the other

shore when they appear to be blasting there, too.

Your resources are limited, you see.  There is simply

nothing for it but to watch and pray.



For some hours we had been making three and a half or four

miles an hour and we were still making that.  We had been

dancing right along until those men began to shout;

then for the next ten minutes it seemed to me that I had

never seen a raft go so slowly.  When the first blast went

off we raised our sun-umbrellas and waited for the result.

No harm done; none of the stones fell in the water.

Another blast followed, and another and another.

Some of the rubbish fell in the water just astern

of us.



We ran that whole battery of nine blasts in a row, and it

was certainly one of the most exciting and uncomfortable

weeks I ever spent, either aship or ashore.  Of course

we frequently manned the poles and shoved earnestly

for a second or so, but every time one of those spurts

of dust and debris shot aloft every man dropped his pole

and looked up to get the bearings of his share of it.

It was very busy times along there for a while.

It appeared certain that we must perish, but even that was

not the bitterest thought; no, the abjectly unheroic nature

of the death--that was the sting--that and the bizarre

wording of the resulting obituary: "SHOT WITH A ROCK,

ON A RAFT." There would be no poetry written about it.

None COULD be written about it.  Example:



NOT by war's shock, or war's shaft,--SHOT, with a rock,

on a raft.



No poet who valued his reputation would touch such a

theme as that.  I should be distinguished as the only

"distinguished dead" who went down to the grave unsonneted,

in 1878.



But we escaped, and I have never regretted it.

The last blast was peculiarly strong one, and after

the small rubbish was done raining around us and we

were just going to shake hands over our deliverance,

a later and larger stone came down amongst our little

group of pedestrians and wrecked an umbrella.  It did

no other harm, but we took to the water just the same.



It seems that the heavy work in the quarries and the

new railway gradings is done mainly by Italians.

That was a revelation.  We have the notion in our country

that Italians never do heavy work at all, but confine

themselves to the lighter arts, like organ-grinding,

operatic singing, and assassination.  We have blundered,

that is plain.



All along the river, near every village, we saw little

station-houses for the future railway.  They were

finished and waiting for the rails and business.

They were as trim and snug and pretty as they could be.

They were always of brick or stone; they were of graceful

shape, they had vines and flowers about them already,

and around them the grass was bright and green,

and showed that it was carefully looked after.  They were

a decoration to the beautiful landscape, not an offense.

Wherever one saw a pile of gravel or a pile of broken stone,

it was always heaped as trimly and exactly as a new grave

or a stack of cannon-balls; nothing about those stations

or along the railroad or the wagon-road was allowed

to look shabby or be unornamental.  The keeping a country

in such beautiful order as Germany exhibits, has a wise

practical side to it, too, for it keeps thousands of people

in work and bread who would otherwise be idle and mischievous.



As the night shut down, the captain wanted to tie up,

but I thought maybe we might make Hirschhorn, so we went on.

Presently the sky became overcast, and the captain came

aft looking uneasy.  He cast his eye aloft, then shook

his head, and said it was coming on to blow.  My party

wanted to land at once--therefore I wanted to go on.

The captain said we ought to shorten sail anyway,

out of common prudence.  Consequently, the larboard watch

was ordered to lay in his pole.  It grew quite dark,

now, and the wind began to rise.  It wailed through

the swaying branches of the trees, and swept our decks

in fitful gusts.  Things were taking on an ugly look.

The captain shouted to the steersman on the forward

log:



"How's she landing?"



The answer came faint and hoarse from far forward:



"Nor'-east-and-by-nor'--east-by-east, half-east, sir."



"Let her go off a point!"



"Aye-aye, sir!"



"What water have you got?"



"Shoal, sir.  Two foot large, on the stabboard,

two and a half scant on the labboard!"



"Let her go off another point!"



"Aye-aye, sir!"



"Forward, men, all of you! Lively, now! Stand by to crowd

her round the weather corner!"



"Aye-aye, sir!"



Then followed a wild running and trampling and hoarse shouting,

but the forms of the men were lost in the darkness and

the sounds were distorted and confused by the roaring

of the wind through the shingle-bundles. By this time

the sea was running inches high, and threatening every

moment to engulf the frail bark.  Now came the mate,

hurrying aft, and said, close to the captain's ear,

in a low, agitated voice:



"Prepare for the worst, sir--we have sprung a leak!"



"Heavens! where?"



"Right aft the second row of logs."



"Nothing but a miracle can save us! Don't let the men know,

or there will be a panic and mutiny! Lay her in shore

and stand by to jump with the stern-line the moment

she touches.  Gentlemen, I must look to you to second

my endeavors in this hour of peril.  You have hats--go

forward and bail for your lives!"



Down swept another mighty blast of wind, clothed in

spray and thick darkness.  At such a moment as this,

came from away forward that most appalling of all cries

that are ever heard at sea:



"MAN OVERBOARD!"



The captain shouted:



"Hard a-port! Never mind the man! Let him climb aboard

or wade ashore!"



Another cry came down the wind:



"Breakers ahead!"



"Where away?"



"Not a log's length off her port fore-foot!"



We had groped our slippery way forward, and were now

bailing with the frenzy of despair, when we heard

the mate's terrified cry, from far aft:



"Stop that dashed bailing, or we shall be aground!"



But this was immediately followed by the glad shout:



"Land aboard the starboard transom!"



"Saved!" cried the captain.  "Jump ashore and take a turn

around a tree and pass the bight aboard!"



The next moment we were all on shore weeping and embracing

for joy, while the rain poured down in torrents.

The captain said he had been a mariner for forty years

on the Neckar, and in that time had seen storms to make

a man's cheek blanch and his pulses stop, but he had never,

never seen a storm that even approached this one.

How familiar that sounded! For I have been at sea a good

deal and have heard that remark from captains with a

frequency accordingly.



We framed in our minds the usual resolution of thanks

and admiration and gratitude, and took the first

opportunity to vote it, and put it in writing and

present it to the captain, with the customary speech.

We tramped through the darkness and the drenching summer

rain full three miles, and reached "The Naturalist Tavern"

in the village of Hirschhorn just an hour before midnight,

almost exhausted from hardship, fatigue, and terror.

I can never forget that night.



The landlord was rich, and therefore could afford to be

crusty and disobliging; he did not at all like being

turned out of his warm bed to open his house for us.

But no matter, his household got up and cooked a quick

supper for us, and we brewed a hot punch for ourselves,

to keep off consumption.  After supper and punch we

had an hour's soothing smoke while we fought the naval

battle over again and voted the resolutions; then we

retired to exceedingly neat and pretty chambers upstairs

that had clean, comfortable beds in them with heirloom

pillowcases most elaborately and tastefully embroidered

by hand.



Such rooms and beds and embroidered linen are as frequent

in German village inns as they are rare in ours.

Our villages are superior to German villages in

more merits, excellences, conveniences, and privileges

than I can enumerate, but the hotels do not belong in the list.



"The Naturalist Tavern" was not a meaningless name; for all

the halls and all the rooms were lined with large glass

cases which were filled with all sorts of birds and animals,

glass-eyed, ably stuffed, and set up in the most natural

eloquent and dramatic attitudes.  The moment we were abed,

the rain cleared away and the moon came out.  I dozed off

to sleep while contemplating a great white stuffed owl

which was looking intently down on me from a high perch

with the air of a person who thought he had met me before,

but could not make out for certain.



But young Z did not get off so easily.  He said that as he was

sinking deliciously to sleep, the moon lifted away the shadows

and developed a huge cat, on a bracket, dead and stuffed,

but crouching, with every muscle tense, for a spring,

and with its glittering glass eyes aimed straight at him.

It made Z uncomfortable.  He tried closing his own eyes,

but that did not answer, for a natural instinct kept

making him open them again to see if the cat was still

getting ready to launch at him--which she always was.

He tried turning his back, but that was a failure;

he knew the sinister eyes were on him still.  So at

last he had to get up, after an hour or two of worry

and experiment, and set the cat out in the hall.  So he won,

that time.







CHAPTER XVIII

[The Kindly Courtesy of Germans]



In the morning we took breakfast in the garden,

under the trees, in the delightful German summer fashion.

The air was filled with the fragrance of flowers

and wild animals; the living portion of the menagerie

of the "Naturalist Tavern" was all about us.  There were

great cages populous with fluttering and chattering

foreign birds, and other great cages and greater wire pens,

populous with quadrupeds, both native and foreign.

There were some free creatures, too, and quite sociable

ones they were.  White rabbits went loping about the place,

and occasionally came and sniffed at our shoes and shins;

a fawn, with a red ribbon on its neck, walked up and

examined us fearlessly; rare breeds of chickens and

doves begged for crumbs, and a poor old tailless raven

hopped about with a humble, shamefaced mein which said,

"Please do not notice my exposure--think how you would

feel in my circumstances, and be charitable." If he

was observed too much, he would retire behind something

and stay there until he judged the party's interest had

found another object.  I never have seen another dumb

creature that was so morbidly sensitive.  Bayard Taylor,

who could interpret the dim reasonings of animals,

and understood their moral natures better than most men,

would have found some way to make this poor old chap forget

his troubles for a while, but we have not his kindly art,

and so had to leave the raven to his griefs.



After breakfast we climbed the hill and visited the ancient

castle of Hirschhorn, and the ruined church near it.

There were some curious old bas-reliefs leaning against

the inner walls of the church--sculptured lords of

Hirschhorn in complete armor, and ladies of Hirschhorn

in the picturesque court costumes of the Middle Ages.

These things are suffering damage and passing to decay,

for the last Hirschhorn has been dead two hundred years,

and there is nobody now who cares to preserve the family relics.

In the chancel was a twisted stone column, and the captain

told us a legend about it, of course, for in the matter

of legends he could not seem to restrain himself; but I

do not repeat his tale because there was nothing plausible

about it except that the Hero wrenched this column into its

present screw-shape with his hands --just one single wrench.

All the rest of the legend was doubtful.



But Hirschhorn is best seen from a distance, down the river.

Then the clustered brown towers perched on the green hilltop,

and the old battlemented stone wall, stretching up and over

the grassy ridge and disappearing in the leafy sea beyond,

make a picture whose grace and beauty entirely satisfy

the eye.



We descended from the church by steep stone stairways

which curved this way and that down narrow alleys

between the packed and dirty tenements of the village.

It was a quarter well stocked with deformed, leering,

unkempt and uncombed idiots, who held out hands or caps

and begged piteously.  The people of the quarter were not

all idiots, of course, but all that begged seemed to be,

and were said to be.



I was thinking of going by skiff to the next town,

Necharsteinach; so I ran to the riverside in advance of

the party and asked a man there if he had a boat to hire.

I suppose I must have spoken High German--Court German--I

intended it for that, anyway--so he did not understand me.

I turned and twisted my question around and about,

trying to strike that man's average, but failed.

He could not make out what I wanted.  Now Mr. X arrived,

faced this same man, looked him in the eye, and emptied

this sentence on him, in the most glib and confident way:

"Can man boat get here?"



The mariner promptly understood and promptly answered.

I can comprehend why he was able to understand that

particular sentence, because by mere accident all the

words in it except "get" have the same sound and the same

meaning in German that they have in English; but how he

managed to understand Mr. X's next remark puzzled me.

I will insert it, presently.  X turned away a moment,

and I asked the mariner if he could not find a board,

and so construct an additional seat.  I spoke in the

purest German, but I might as well have spoken in the

purest Choctaw for all the good it did.  The man tried

his best to understand me; he tried, and kept on trying,

harder and harder, until I saw it was really of no use,

and said:



"There, don't strain yourself--it is of no consequence."



Then X turned to him and crisply said:



"MACHEN SIE a flat board."



I wish my epitaph may tell the truth about me if the man

did not answer up at once, and say he would go and borrow

a board as soon as he had lit the pipe which he was filling.



We changed our mind about taking a boat, so we did not have

to go.  I have given Mr. X's two remarks just as he made them.

Four of the five words in the first one were English,

and that they were also German was only accidental,

not intentional; three out of the five words in the second

remark were English, and English only, and the two German

ones did not mean anything in particular, in such a connection.



X always spoke English to Germans, but his plan was

to turn the sentence wrong end first and upside down,

according to German construction, and sprinkle in a German

word without any essential meaning to it, here and there,

by way of flavor.  Yet he always made himself understood.

He could make those dialect-speaking raftsmen understand

him, sometimes, when even young Z had failed with them;

and young Z was a pretty good German scholar.  For one thing,

X always spoke with such confidence--perhaps that helped.

And possibly the raftsmen's dialect was what is called

PLATT-DEUTSCH, and so they found his English more familiar

to their ears than another man's German.  Quite indifferent

students of German can read Fritz Reuter's charming

platt-Deutch tales with some little facility because many

of the words are English.  I suppose this is the tongue

which our Saxon ancestors carried to England with them.

By and by I will inquire of some other philologist.



However, in the mean time it had transpired that the men

employed to calk the raft had found that the leak was not

a leak at all, but only a crack between the logs--a crack

that belonged there, and was not dangerous, but had been

magnified into a leak by the disordered imagination of

the mate.  Therefore we went aboard again with a good degree

of confidence, and presently got to sea without accident.

As we swam smoothly along between the enchanting shores,

we fell to swapping notes about manners and customs

in Germany and elsewhere.



As I write, now, many months later, I perceive that each of us,

by observing and noting and inquiring, diligently and day

by day, had managed to lay in a most varied and opulent

stock of misinformation.  But this is not surprising;

it is very difficult to get accurate details in any country.

For example, I had the idea once, in Heidelberg,

to find out all about those five student-corps. I started

with the White Cap corps.  I began to inquire of this

and that and the other citizen, and here is what I found

out:



1.  It is called the Prussian Corps, because none

but Prussians are admitted to it.



2.  It is called the Prussian Corps for no particular reason.

It has simply pleased each corps to name itself after

some German state.



3.  It is not named the Prussian Corps at all, but only

the White Cap Corps.



4.  Any student can belong to it who is a German by birth.



5.  Any student can belong to it who is European by birth.



6.  Any European-born student can belong to it, except he

be a Frenchman.



7.  Any student can belong to it, no matter where he

was born.



8.  No student can belong to it who is not of noble blood.



9.  No student can belong to it who cannot show three full

generations of noble descent.



10.  Nobility is not a necessary qualification.



11.  No moneyless student can belong to it.



12.  Money qualification is nonsense--such a thing has

never been thought of.



I got some of this information from students themselves--

students who did not belong to the corps.



I finally went to headquarters--to the White Caps--where I

would have gone in the first place if I had been acquainted.

But even at headquarters I found difficulties; I perceived

that there were things about the White Cap Corps which

one member knew and another one didn't. It was natural;

for very few members of any organization know ALL that can

be known about it.  I doubt there is a man or a woman

in Heidelberg who would not answer promptly and confidently

three out of every five questions about the White Cap Corps

which a stranger might ask; yet it is a very safe bet

that two of the three answers would be incorrect every time.



There is one German custom which is universal--the bowing

courteously to strangers when sitting down at table or

rising up from it.  This bow startles a stranger out of his

self-possession, the first time it occurs, and he is likely

to fall over a chair or something, in his embarrassment,

but it pleases him, nevertheless.  One soon learns to expect

this bow and be on the lookout and ready to return it;

but to learn to lead off and make the initial bow

one's self is a difficult matter for a diffident man.

One thinks, "If I rise to go, and tender my box,

and these ladies and gentlemen take it into their heads

to ignore the custom of their nation, and not return it,

how shall I feel, in case I survive to feel anything."

Therefore he is afraid to venture.  He sits out the dinner,

and makes the strangers rise first and originate the bowing.

A table d'ho^te dinner is a tedious affair for a man

who seldom touches anything after the three first courses;

therefore I used to do some pretty dreary waiting

because of my fears.  It took me months to assure myself

that those fears were groundless, but I did assure myself

at last by experimenting diligently through my agent.

I made Harris get up and bow and leave; invariably his bow

was returned, then I got up and bowed myself and retired.



Thus my education proceeded easily and comfortably for me,

but not for Harris.  Three courses of a table d'ho^te

dinner were enough for me, but Harris preferred thirteen.



Even after I had acquired full confidence, and no longer needed

the agent's help, I sometimes encountered difficulties.

Once at Baden-Baden I nearly lost a train because I could

not be sure that three young ladies opposite me at table

were Germans, since I had not heard them speak; they might

be American, they might be English, it was not safe to venture

a bow; but just as I had got that far with my thought,

one of them began a German remark, to my great relief

and gratitude; and before she got out her third word,

our bows had been delivered and graciously returned,

and we were off.



There is a friendly something about the German character

which is very winning.  When Harris and I were making

a pedestrian tour through the Black Forest, we stopped at

a little country inn for dinner one day; two young ladies

and a young gentleman entered and sat down opposite us.

They were pedestrians, too.  Our knapsacks were strapped

upon our backs, but they had a sturdy youth along to carry

theirs for them.  All parties were hungry, so there was

no talking.  By and by the usual bows were exchanged,

and we separated.



As we sat at a late breakfast in the hotel at Allerheiligen,

next morning, these young people and took places

near us without observing us; but presently they saw

us and at once bowed and smiled; not ceremoniously,

but with the gratified look of people who have found

acquaintances where they were expecting strangers.

Then they spoke of the weather and the roads.  We also

spoke of the weather and the roads.  Next, they said they

had had an enjoyable walk, notwithstanding the weather.

We said that that had been our case, too.  Then they said

they had walked thirty English miles the day before,

and asked how many we had walked.  I could not lie, so I

told Harris to do it.  Harris told them we had made thirty

English miles, too.  That was true; we had "made" them,

though we had had a little assistance here and there.



After breakfast they found us trying to blast some

information out of the dumb hotel clerk about routes,

and observing that we were not succeeding pretty well,

they went and got their maps and things, and pointed

out and explained our course so clearly that even a New

York detective could have followed it.  And when we

started they spoke out a hearty good-by and wished us

a pleasant journey.  Perhaps they were more generous

with us than they might have been with native wayfarers

because we were a forlorn lot and in a strange land;

I don't know; I only know it was lovely to be treated so.



Very well, I took an American young lady to one of the fine

balls in Baden-Baden, one night, and at the entrance-door

upstairs we were halted by an official--something about Miss

Jones's dress was not according to rule; I don't remember

what it was, now; something was wanting--her back hair,

or a shawl, or a fan, or a shovel, or something.

The official was ever so polite, and every so sorry,

but the rule was strict, and he could not let us in.

It was very embarrassing, for many eyes were on us.

But now a richly dressed girl stepped out of the ballroom,

inquired into the trouble, and said she could fix it in

a moment.  She took Miss Jones to the robing-room, and soon

brought her back in regulation trim, and then we entered

the ballroom with this benefactress unchallenged.



Being safe, now, I began to puzzle through my sincere

but ungrammatical thanks, when there was a sudden mutual

recognition --the benefactress and I had met at Allerheiligen.

Two weeks had not altered her good face, and plainly

her heart was in the right place yet, but there was such

a difference between these clothes and the clothes I

had seen her in before, when she was walking thirty miles

a day in the Black Forest, that it was quite natural

that I had failed to recognize her sooner.  I had on MY

other suit, too, but my German would betray me to a person

who had heard it once, anyway.  She brought her brother

and sister, and they made our way smooth for that evening.



Well--months afterward, I was driving through the streets

of Munich in a cab with a German lady, one day, when she

said:



"There, that is Prince Ludwig and his wife, walking along there."



Everybody was bowing to them--cabmen, little children,

and everybody else--and they were returning all the bows

and overlooking nobody, when a young lady met them and made

a deep courtesy.



"That is probably one of the ladies of the court,"

said my German friend.



I said:



"She is an honor to it, then.  I know her.  I don't know

her name, but I know HER.  I have known her at Allerheiligen

and Baden-Baden. She ought to be an Empress, but she

may be only a Duchess; it is the way things go in this way."



If one asks a German a civil question, he will be quite

sure to get a civil answer.  If you stop a German in the

street and ask him to direct you to a certain place,

he shows no sign of feeling offended.  If the place be

difficult to find, ten to one the man will drop his own

matters and go with you and show you.



In London, too, many a time, strangers have walked several

blocks with me to show me my way.



There is something very real about this sort of politeness.

Quite often, in Germany, shopkeepers who could not furnish

me the article I wanted have sent one of their employees

with me to show me a place where it could be had.







CHAPTER XIX

[The Deadly Jest of Dilsberg]



However, I wander from the raft.  We made the port

of Necharsteinach in good season, and went to the hotel

and ordered a trout dinner, the same to be ready

against our return from a two-hour pedestrian excursion

to the village and castle of Dilsberg, a mile distant,

on the other side of the river.  I do not mean that we

proposed to be two hours making two miles--no, we meant

to employ most of the time in inspecting Dilsberg.



For Dilsberg is a quaint place.  It is most quaintly

and picturesquely situated, too.  Imagine the beautiful

river before you; then a few rods of brilliant green sward

on its opposite shore; then a sudden hill--no preparatory

gently rising slopes, but a sort of instantaneous hill--

a hill two hundred and fifty or three hundred feet high,

as round as a bowl, with the same taper upward that an

inverted bowl has, and with about the same relation

of height to diameter that distinguishes a bowl of good

honest depth--a hill which is thickly clothed with

green bushes--a comely, shapely hill, rising abruptly

out of the dead level of the surrounding green plains,

visible from a great distance down the bends of the river,

and with just exactly room on the top of its head

for its steepled and turreted and roof-clustered cap

of architecture, which same is tightly jammed and compacted

within the perfectly round hoop of the ancient village wall.



There is no house outside the wall on the whole hill,

or any vestige of a former house; all the houses are

inside the wall, but there isn't room for another one.

It is really a finished town, and has been finished

a very long time.  There is no space between the wall

and the first circle of buildings; no, the village wall

is itself the rear wall of the first circle of buildings,

a nd the roofs jut a little over the wall a nd thus

furnish it with eaves.  The general level of the massed

roofs is gracefully broken and relieved by the dominating

towers of the ruined castle and the tall spires of a

couple of churches; so, from a distance Dilsberg has

rather more the look of a king's crown than a cap.

That lofty green eminence and its quaint coronet form

quite a striking picture, you may be sure, in the flush

of the evening sun.



We crossed over in a boat and began the ascent by a narrow,

steep path which plunged us at once into the leafy deeps

of the bushes.  But they were not cool deeps by any means,

for the sun's rays were weltering hot and there was

little or no breeze to temper them.  As we panted up

the sharp ascent, we met brown, bareheaded and barefooted

boys and girls, occasionally, and sometimes men;

they came upon us without warning, they gave us good day,

flashed out of sight in the bushes, and were gone as

suddenly and mysteriously as they had come.  They were

bound for the other side of the river to work.  This path

had been traveled by many generations of these people.

They have always gone down to the valley to earn their bread,

but they have always climbed their hill again to eat it,

and to sleep in their snug town.



It is said the the Dilsbergers do not emigrate much;

they find that living up there above the world, in their

peaceful nest, is pleasanter than living down in the

troublous world.  The seven hundred inhabitants are all

blood-kin to each other, too; they have always been blood-kin

to each other for fifteen hundred years; they are simply

one large family, and they like the home folks better than

they like strangers, hence they persistently stay at home.

It has been said that for ages Dilsberg has been merely

a thriving and diligent idiot-factory. I saw no idiots there,

but the captain said, "Because of late years the government

has taken to lugging them off to asylums and otherwheres;

and government wants to cripple the factory, too, and is

trying to get these Dilsbergers to marry out of the family,

but they don't like to."



The captain probably imagined all this, as modern science

denies that the intermarrying of relatives deteriorates

the stock.



Arrived within the wall, we found the usual village

sights and life.  We moved along a narrow, crooked lane

which had been paved in the Middle Ages.  A strapping,

ruddy girl was beating flax or some such stuff in a little

bit of a good-box of a barn, and she swung her flail

with a will--if it was a flail; I was not farmer enough

to know what she was at; a frowsy, barelegged girl was

herding half a dozen geese with a stick--driving them

along the lane and keeping them out of the dwellings;

a cooper was at work in a shop which I know he did not make

so large a thing as a hogshead in, for there was not room.

In the front rooms of dwellings girls and women were

cooking or spinning, and ducks and chickens were waddling

in and out, over the threshold, picking up chance crumbs

and holding pleasant converse; a very old and wrinkled man

sat asleep before his door, with his chin upon his breast

and his extinguished pipe in his lap; soiled children

were playing in the dirt everywhere along the lane,

unmindful of the sun.



Except the sleeping old man, everybody was at work,

but the place was very still and peaceful, nevertheless;

so still that the distant cackle of the successful hen smote

upon the ear but little dulled by intervening sounds.

That commonest of village sights was lacking here--the

public pump, with its great stone tank or trough of

limpid water, and its group of gossiping pitcher-bearers;

for there is no well or fountain or spring on this tall hill;

cisterns of rain-water are used.



Our alpenstocks and muslin tails compelled attention,

and as we moved through the village we gathered a considerable

procession of little boys and girls, and so went in some

state to the castle.  It proved to be an extensive pile of

crumbling walls, arches, and towers, massive, properly grouped

for picturesque effect, weedy, grass-grown, and satisfactory.

The children acted as guides; they walked us along the top

of the highest walls, then took us up into a high tower

and showed us a wide and beautiful landscape, made up

of wavy distances of woody hills, and a nearer prospect

of undulating expanses of green lowlands, on the one hand,

and castle-graced crags and ridges on the other,

with the shining curves of the Neckar flowing between.

But the principal show, the chief pride of the children,

was the ancient and empty well in the grass-grown court

of the castle.  Its massive stone curb stands up three

or four feet above-ground, and is whole and uninjured.

The children said that in the Middle Ages this well was

four hundred feet deep, and furnished all the village

with an abundant supply of water, in war and peace.

They said that in the old day its bottom was below the level

of the Neckar, hence the water-supply was inexhaustible.



But there were some who believed it had never been a well

at all, and was never deeper than it is now--eighty feet;

that at that depth a subterranean passage branched from it

and descended gradually to a remote place in the valley,

where it opened into somebody's cellar or other hidden recess,

and that the secret of this locality is now lost.

Those who hold this belief say that herein lies the

explanation that Dilsberg, besieged by Tilly and many

a soldier before him, was never taken: after the longest

and closest sieges the besiegers were astonished to

perceive that the besieged were as fat and hearty as ever,

and were well furnished with munitions of war--therefore

it must be that the Dilsbergers had been bringing these

things in through the subterranean passage all the time.



The children said that there was in truth a subterranean

outlet down there, and they would prove it.  So they set

a great truss of straw on fire and threw it down the well,

while we leaned on the curb and watched the glowing

mass descend.  It struck bottom and gradually burned out.

No smoke came up.  The children clapped their hands and

said:



"You see! Nothing makes so much smoke as burning straw--now

where did the smoke go to, if there is no subterranean outlet?"



So it seemed quite evident that the subterranean outlet

indeed existed.  But the finest thing within the ruin's

limits was a noble linden, which the children said was

four hundred years old, and no doubt it was.  It had

a mighty trunk and a mighty spread of limb and foliage.

The limbs near the ground were nearly the thickness

of a barrel.



That tree had witnessed the assaults of men in mail--

how remote such a time seems, and how ungraspable is the

fact that real men ever did fight in real armor!--and it

had seen the time when these broken arches and crumbling

battlements were a trim and strong and stately fortress,

fluttering its gay banners in the sun, and peopled with vigorous

humanity--how impossibly long ago that seems!--and here

it stands yet, and possibly may still be standing here,

sunning itself and dreaming its historical dreams,

when today shall have been joined to the days called "ancient."



Well, we sat down under the tree to smoke, and the captain

delivered himself of his legend:



THE LEGEND OF DILSBERG CASTLE



It was to this effect.  In the old times there was once

a great company assembled at the castle, and festivity

ran high.  Of course there was a haunted chamber

in the castle, and one day the talk fell upon that.

It was said that whoever slept in it would not wake again

for fifty years.  Now when a young knight named Conrad

von Geisberg heard this, he said that if the castle were

his he would destroy that chamber, so that no foolish

person might have the chance to bring so dreadful

a misfortune upon himself and afflict such as loved

him with the memory of it.  Straightway, the company

privately laid their heads together to contrive some

way to get this superstitious young man to sleep in that chamber.





And they succeeded--in this way.  They persuaded

his betrothed, a lovely mischievous young creature,

niece of the lord of the castle, to help them in their plot.

She presently took him aside and had speech with him.

She used all her persuasions, but could not shake him;

he said his belief was firm, that if he should sleep

there he would wake no more for fifty years, and it made

him shudder to think of it.  Catharina began to weep.

This was a better argument; Conrad could not out against it.

He yielded and said she should have her wish if she would only

smile and be happy again.  She flung her arms about his neck,

and the kisses she gave him showed that her thankfulness

and her pleasure were very real.  Then she flew to tell

the company her success, and the applause she received

made her glad and proud she had undertaken her mission,

since all alone she had accomplished what the multitude had

failed in.



At midnight, that night, after the usual feasting,

Conrad was taken to the haunted chamber and left there.

He fell asleep, by and by.



When he awoke again and looked about him, his heart

stood still with horror! The whole aspect of the chamber

was changed.  The walls were moldy and hung with

ancient cobwebs; the curtains and beddings were rotten;

the furniture was rickety and ready to fall to pieces.

He sprang out of bed, but his quaking knees sunk under

him and he fell to the floor.



"This is the weakness of age," he said.



He rose and sought his clothing.  It was clothing no longer.

The colors were gone, the garments gave way in many places

while he was putting them on.  He fled, shuddering,

into the corridor, and along it to the great hall.  Here he

was met by a middle-aged stranger of a kind countenance,

who stopped and gazed at him with surprise.  Conrad said:



"Good sir, will you send hither the lord Ulrich?"



The stranger looked puzzled a moment, then said:



"The lord Ulrich?"



"Yes--if you will be so good."



The stranger called--"Wilhelm!" A young serving-man came,

and the stranger said to him:



"Is there a lord Ulrich among the guests?"



"I know none of the name, so please your honor."



Conrad said, hesitatingly:



"I did not mean a guest, but the lord of the castle, sir."



The stranger and the servant exchanged wondering glances.

Then the former said:



"I am the lord of the castle."



"Since when, sir?"



"Since the death of my father, the good lord Ulrich

more than forty years ago."



Conrad sank upon a bench and covered his face with his

hands while he rocked his body to and fro and moaned.

The stranger said in a low voice to the servant:



"I fear me this poor old creature is mad.  Call some one."



In a moment several people came, and grouped themselves about,

talking in whispers.  Conrad looked up and scanned

the faces about him wistfully.



Then he shook his head and said, in a grieved voice:



"No, there is none among ye that I know.  I am old and alone

in the world.  They are dead and gone these many years

that cared for me.  But sure, some of these aged ones I see

about me can tell me some little word or two concerning them."



Several bent and tottering men and women came nearer

and answered his questions about each former friend

as he mentioned the names.  This one they said had been

dead ten years, that one twenty, another thirty.

Each succeeding blow struck heavier and heavier.

At last the sufferer said:



"There is one more, but I have not the courage to--O

my lost Catharina!"



One of the old dames said:



"Ah, I knew her well, poor soul.  A misfortune overtook

her lover, and she died of sorrow nearly fifty years ago.

She lieth under the linden tree without the court."



Conrad bowed his head and said:



"Ah, why did I ever wake! And so she died of grief for me,

poor child.  So young, so sweet, so good! She never wittingly

did a hurtful thing in all the little summer of her life.

Her loving debt shall be repaid--for I will die of grief

for her."



His head drooped upon his breast.  In the moment there

was a wild burst of joyous laughter, a pair of round

young arms were flung about Conrad's neck and a sweet

voice cried:



"There, Conrad mine, thy kind words kill me--the farce

shall go no further! Look up, and laugh with us--'twas

all a jest!"



And he did look up, and gazed, in a dazed wonderment--

for the disguises were stripped away, and the aged

men and women were bright and young and gay again.

Catharina's happy tongue ran on:



"'Twas a marvelous jest, and bravely carried out.

They gave you a heavy sleeping-draught before you went

to bed, and in the night they bore you to a ruined chamber

where all had fallen to decay, and placed these rags

of clothing by you.  And when your sleep was spent and you

came forth, two strangers, well instructed in their parts,

were here to meet you; and all we, your friends,

in our disguises, were close at hand, to see and hear,

you may be sure.  Ah, 'twas a gallant jest! Come, now,

and make thee ready for the pleasures of the day.

How real was thy misery for the moment, thou poor lad!

Look up and have thy laugh, now!"



He looked up, searched the merry faces about him

in a dreamy way, then sighed and said:



"I am aweary, good strangers, I pray you lead me to her grave."



All the smile vanished away, every cheek blanched,

Catharina sunk to the ground in a swoon.



All day the people went about the castle with troubled faces,

and communed together in undertones.  A painful hush

pervaded the place which had lately been so full of

cheery life.  Each in his turn tried to arouse Conrad

out of his hallucination and bring him to himself;

but all the answer any got was a meek, bewildered stare,

and then the words:



"Good stranger, I have no friends, all are at rest these

many years; ye speak me fair, ye mean me well, but I know

ye not; I am alone and forlorn in the world--prithee

lead me to her grave."



During two years Conrad spent his days, from the

early morning till the night, under the linden tree,

mourning over the imaginary grave of his Catharina.

Catharina was the only company of the harmless madman.

He was very friendly toward her because, as he said,

in some ways she reminded him of his Catharina whom he had

lost "fifty years ago." He often said:



"She was so gay, so happy-hearted--but you never smile;

and always when you think I am not looking, you cry."



When Conrad died, they buried him under the linden,

according to his directions, so that he might rest

"near his poor Catharina." Then Catharina sat under

the linden alone, every day and all day long, a great

many years, speaking to no one, and never smiling;

and at last her long repentance was rewarded with death,

and she was buried by Conrad's side.



Harris pleased the captain by saying it was good legend;

and pleased him further by adding:



"Now that I have seen this mighty tree, vigorous with

its four hundred years, I feel a desire to believe

the legend for ITS sake; so I will humor the desire,

and consider that the tree really watches over those poor

hearts and feels a sort of human tenderness for them."



We returned to Necharsteinach, plunged our hot heads

into the trough at the town pump, and then went to the

hotel and ate our trout dinner in leisurely comfort,

in the garden, with the beautiful Neckar flowing at our feet,

the quaint Dilsberg looming beyond, and the graceful

towers and battlements of a couple of medieval castles

(called the "Swallow's Nest" [1] and "The Brothers.")

assisting the rugged scenery of a bend of the river

down to our right.  We got to sea in season to make the

eight-mile run to Heidelberg before the night shut down.

We sailed by the hotel in the mellow glow of sunset,

and came slashing down with the mad current into the narrow

passage between the dikes.  I believed I could shoot the

bridge myself, and I went to the forward triplet of logs

and relieved the pilot of his pole and his responsibility.



1.  The seeker after information is referred to Appendix

    E for our captain's legend of the "Swallow's Nest"

    and "The Brothers."



We went tearing along in a most exhilarating way, and I

performed the delicate duties of my office very well indeed

for a first attempt; but perceiving, presently, that I

really was going to shoot the bridge itself instead

of the archway under it, I judiciously stepped ashore.

The next moment I had my long-coveted desire: I saw

a raft wrecked.  It hit the pier in the center and went

all to smash and scatteration like a box of matches

struck by lightning.



I was the only one of our party who saw this grand sight;

the others were attitudinizing, for the benefit of the long

rank of young ladies who were promenading on the bank,

and so they lost it.  But I helped to fish them out of

the river, down below the bridge, and then described it

to them as well as I could.



They were not interested, though.  They said they were

wet and felt ridiculous and did not care anything for

descriptions of scenery.  The young ladies, and other people,

crowded around and showed a great deal of sympathy,

but that did not help matters; for my friends said they

did not want sympathy, they wanted a back alley and solitude.







CHAPTER XX

[My Precious, Priceless Tear-Jug]



Next morning brought good news--our trunks had arrived

from Hamburg at last.  Let this be a warning to the reader.

The Germans are very conscientious, and this trait makes

them very particular.  Therefore if you tell a German you

want a thing done immediately, he takes you at your word;

he thinks you mean what you say; so he does that thing

immediately--according to his idea of immediately--

which is about a week; that is, it is a week if it refers

to the building of a garment, or it is an hour and a half

if it refers to the cooking of a trout.  Very well; if you

tell a German to send your trunk to you by "slow freight,"

he takes you at your word; he sends it by "slow freight,"

and you cannot imagine how long you will go on enlarging

your admiration of the expressiveness of that phrase

in the German tongue, before you get that trunk.

The hair on my trunk was soft and thick and youthful,

when I got it ready for shipment in Hamburg; it was baldheaded

when it reached Heidelberg.  However, it was still sound,

that was a comfort, it was not battered in the least;

the baggagemen seemed to be conscientiously careful,

in Germany, of the baggage entrusted to their hands.

There was nothing now in the way of our departure, therefore we

set about our preparations.



Naturally my chief solicitude was about my collection

of Ceramics.  Of course I could not take it with me,

that would be inconvenient, and dangerous besides.

I took advice, but the best brick-a-brackers were divided

as to the wisest course to pursue; some said pack the

collection and warehouse it; others said try to get it

into the Grand Ducal Museum at Mannheim for safe keeping.

So I divided the collection, and followed the advice of

both parties.  I set aside, for the Museum, those articles

which were the most frail and precious.



Among these was my Etruscan tear-jug. I have made a little

sketch of it here; [Figure 6] that thing creeping up

the side is not a bug, it is a hole.  I bought this

tear-jug of a dealer in antiquities for four hundred

and fifty dollars.  It is very rare.  The man said the

Etruscans used to keep tears or something in these things,

and that it was very hard to get hold of a broken one, now.

I also set aside my Henri II.  plate.  See sketch

from my pencil; [Figure 7] it is in the main correct,

though I think I have foreshortened one end of it a little

too much, perhaps.  This is very fine and rare; the shape

is exceedingly beautiful and unusual.  It has wonderful

decorations on it, but I am not able to reproduce them.

It cost more than the tear-jug, as the dealer said

there was not another plate just like it in the world.

He said there was much false Henri II ware around,

but that the genuineness of this piece was unquestionable.

He showed me its pedigree, or its history, if you please;

it was a document which traced this plate's movements

all the way down from its birth--showed who bought it,

from whom, and what he paid for it--from the first buyer

down to me, whereby I saw that it had gone steadily up

from thirty-five cents to seven hundred dollars.  He said

that the whole Ceramic world would be informed that it

was now in my possession and would make a note of it,

with the price paid.  [Figure 8]



There were Masters in those days, but, alas--it is not so now.

Of course the main preciousness of this piece lies in its color;

it is that old sensuous, pervading, ramifying, interpolating,

transboreal blue which is the despair of modern art.

The little sketch which I have made of this gem cannot

and does not do it justice, since I have been obliged

to leave out the color.  But I've got the expression, though.



However, I must not be frittering away the reader's time

with these details.  I did not intend to go into any

detail at all, at first, but it is the failing of the

true ceramiker, or the true devotee in any department

of brick-a-brackery, that once he gets his tongue or his

pen started on his darling theme, he cannot well stop

until he drops from exhaustion.  He has no more sense

of the flight of time than has any other lover when talking

of his sweetheart.  The very "marks" on the bottom

of a piece of rare crockery are able to throw me into

a gibbering ecstasy; and I could forsake a drowning

relative to help dispute about whether the stopple

of a departed Buon Retiro scent-bottle was genuine or spurious.



Many people say that for a male person, bric-a-brac hunting

is about as robust a business as making doll-clothes,

or decorating Japanese pots with decalcomanie butterflies

would be, and these people fling mud at the elegant Englishman,

Byng, who wrote a book called THE BRIC-A-BRAC HUNTER,

and make fun of him for chasing around after what they choose

to call "his despicable trifles"; and for "gushing" over

these trifles; and for exhibiting his "deep infantile delight"

in what they call his "tuppenny collection of beggarly

trivialities"; and for beginning his book with a picture

of himself seated, in a "sappy, self-complacent attitude,

in the midst of his poor little ridiculous bric-a-brac junk

shop."



It is easy to say these things; it is easy to revile us,

easy to despise us; therefore, let these people rail on;

they cannot feel as Byng and I feel--it is their loss,

not ours.  For my part I am content to be a brick-a-bracker

and a ceramiker--more, I am proud to be so named.

I am proud to know that I lose my reason as immediately

in the presence of a rare jug with an illustrious mark

on the bottom of it, as if I had just emptied that jug.

Very well; I packed and stored a part of my collection,

and the rest of it I placed in the care of the Grand Ducal

Museum i n Mannheim, by permission.  My Old Blue China

Cat remains there yet.  I presented it to that excellent

institution.



I had but one misfortune with my things.  An egg which I

had kept back from breakfast that morning, was broken

in packing.  It was a great pity.  I had shown it to the

best connoisseurs in Heidelberg, and they all said it

was an antique.  We spent a day or two in farewell visits,

and then left for Baden-Baden. We had a pleasant

trip to it, for the Rhine valley is always lovely.

The only trouble was that the trip was too short.

If I remember rightly it only occupied a couple of hours,

therefore I judge that the distance was very little,

if any, over fifty miles.  We quitted the train at Oos,

and walked the entire remaining distance to Baden-Baden,

with the exception of a lift of less than an hour which we

got on a passing wagon, the weather being exhaustingly warm.

We came into town on foot.



One of the first persons we encountered, as we walked

up the street, was the Rev. Mr. ------, an old friend

from America--a lucky encounter, indeed, for his is

a most gentle, refined, and sensitive nature, and his

company and companionship are a genuine refreshment.

We knew he had been in Europe some time, but were not

at all expecting to run across him.  Both parties burst

forth into loving enthusiasms, and Rev. Mr. ------said:



"I have got a brimful reservoir of talk to pour out

on you, and an empty one ready and thirsting to receive

what you have got; we will sit up till midnight

and have a good satisfying interchange, for I leave

here early in the morning." We agreed to that, of course.



I had been vaguely conscious, for a while, of a person

who was walking in the street abreast of us; I had glanced

furtively at him once or twice, and noticed that he

was a fine, large, vigorous young fellow, with an open,

independent countenance, faintly shaded with a pale

and even almost imperceptible crop of early down,

and that he was clothed from head to heel in cool and

enviable snow-white linen.  I thought I had also noticed

that his head had a sort of listening tilt to it.

Now about this time the Rev. Mr. ------said:



"The sidewalk is hardly wide enough for three, so I will

walk behind; but keep the talk going, keep the talk going,

there's no time to lose, and you may be sure I will do

my share." He ranged himself behind us, and straightway that

stately snow-white young fellow closed up to the sidewalk

alongside him, fetched him a cordial slap on the shoulder

with his broad palm, and sung out with a hearty cheeriness:



"AMERICANS for two-and-a-half and the money up! HEY?"



The Reverend winced, but said mildly:



"Yes--we are Americans."



"Lord love you, you can just bet that's what _I_ am,

every time! Put it there!"



He held out his Sahara of his palm, and the Reverend laid

his diminutive hand in it, and got so cordial a shake

that we heard his glove burst under it.



"Say, didn't I put you up right?"



"Oh, yes."



"Sho! I spotted you for MY kind the minute I heard

your clack.  You been over here long?"



"About four months.  Have you been over long?"



"LONG? Well, I should say so! Going on two YEARS,

by geeminy! Say, are you homesick?"



"No, I can't say that I am.  Are you?"



"Oh, HELL, yes!" This with immense enthusiasm.



The Reverend shrunk a little, in his clothes, and we

were aware, rather by instinct than otherwise, that he

was throwing out signals of distress to us; but we did

not interfere or try to succor him, for we were quite happy.



The young fellow hooked his arm into the Reverend's, now,

with the confiding and grateful air of a waif who has

been longing for a friend, and a sympathetic ear,

and a chance to lisp once more the sweet accents of the

mother-tongue--and then he limbered up the muscles

of his mouth and turned himself loose--and with such a

relish! Some of his words were not Sunday-school words,

so I am obliged to put blanks where they occur.



"Yes indeedy! If _I_ ain't an American there AIN'T

any Americans, that's all.  And when I heard you fellows

gassing away in the good old American language, I'm ------

if it wasn't all I could do to keep from hugging you! My

tongue's all warped with trying to curl it around these

------forsaken wind-galled nine-jointed German words here;

now I TELL you it's awful good to lay it over a Christian

word once more and kind of let the old taste soak it.

I'm from western New York.  My name is Cholley Adams.

I'm a student, you know.  Been here going on two years.

I'm learning to be a horse-doctor! I LIKE that part of it,

you know, but ------these people, they won't learn a fellow

in his own language, they make him learn in German; so before

I could tackle the horse-doctoring I had to tackle this

miserable language.



"First off, I thought it would certainly give me

the botts, but I don't mind now.  I've got it where the

hair's short, I think; and dontchuknow, they made me

learn Latin, too.  Now between you and me, I wouldn't

give a ------for all the Latin that was ever jabbered;

and the first thing _I_ calculate to do when I get through,

is to just sit down and forget it.  'Twon't take me long,

and I don't mind the time, anyway.  And I tell you what!

the difference between school-teaching over yonder and

school-teaching over here--sho! WE don't know anything

about it! Here you're got to peg and peg and peg and there

just ain't any let-up--and what you learn here, you've got

to KNOW, dontchuknow --or else you'll have one of these

------spavined, spectacles, ring-boned, knock-kneed old

professors in your hair.  I've been here long ENOUGH,

and I'm getting blessed tired of it, mind I TELL you.

The old man wrote me that he was coming over in June,

and said he'd take me home in August, whether I was done

with my education or not, but durn him, he didn't come;

never said why; just sent me a hamper of Sunday-school

books, and told me to be good, and hold on a while.

I don't take to Sunday-school books, dontchuknow--I

don't hanker after them when I can get pie--but I

READ them, anyway, because whatever the old man tells

me to do, that's the thing that I'm a-going to DO,

or tear something, you know.  I buckled in and read

all those books, because he wanted me to; but that kind

of thing don't excite ME, I like something HEARTY.

But I'm awful homesick.  I'm homesick from ear-socket

to crupper, and from crupper to hock-joint; but it ain't

any use, I've got to stay here, till the old man drops

the rag and give the word--yes, SIR, right here in this

------country I've got to linger till the old man says

COME!--and you bet your bottom dollar, Johnny, it AIN'T

just as easy as it is for a cat to have twins!"



At the end of this profane and cordial explosion he

fetched a prodigious "WHOOSH!" to relieve his lungs

and make recognition of the heat, and then he straightway

dived into his narrative again for "Johnny's" benefit,

beginning, "Well, ------it ain't any use talking,

some of those old American words DO have a kind

of a bully swing to them; a man can EXPRESS himself

with 'em--a man can get at what he wants to SAY, dontchuknow."



When we reached our hotel and it seemed that he was

about to lose the Reverend, he showed so much sorrow,

and begged so hard and so earnestly that the Reverend's heart

was not hard enough to hold out against the pleadings--

so he went away with the parent-honoring student, like a

right Christian, and took supper with him in his lodgings,

and sat in the surf-beat of his slang and profanity

till near midnight, and then left him--left him pretty

well talked out, but grateful "clear down to his frogs,"

as he expressed it.  The Reverend said it had transpired

during the interview that "Cholley" Adams's father

was an extensive dealer in horses in western New York;

this accounted for Cholley's choice of a profession.

The Reverend brought away a pretty high opinion of

Cholley as a manly young fellow, with stuff in him for

a useful citizen; he considered him rather a rough gem,

but a gem, nevertheless.







CHAPTER XXI

[Insolent Shopkeepers and Gabbling Americans]



Baden-Baden sits in the lap of the hills, and the natural

and artificial beauties of the surroundings are combined

effectively and charmingly.  The level strip of ground

which stretches through and beyond the town is laid

out in handsome pleasure grounds, shaded by noble trees

and adorned at intervals with lofty and sparkling

fountain-jets. Thrice a day a fine band makes music

in the public promenade before the Conversation House,

and in the afternoon and evening that locality is populous

with fashionably dressed people of both sexes, who march

back and forth past the great music-stand and look very

much bored, though they make a show of feeling otherwise.

It seems like a rather aimless and stupid existence.

A good many of these people are there for a real

purpose, however; they are racked with rheumatism,

and they are there to stew it out in the hot baths.

These invalids looked melancholy enough, limping about on

their canes and crutches, and apparently brooding over

all sorts of cheerless things.  People say that Germany,

with her damp stone houses, is the home of rheumatism.

If that is so, Providence must have foreseen that it

would be so, and therefore filled the land with the

healing baths.  Perhaps no other country is so generously

supplied with medicinal springs as Germany.  Some of

these baths are good for one ailment, some for another;

and again, peculiar ailments are conquered by combining

the individual virtues of several different baths.

For instance, for some forms of disease, the patient drinks

the native hot water of Baden-Baden, with a spoonful

of salt from the Carlsbad springs dissolved in it.

That is not a dose to be forgotten right away.



They don't SELL this hot water; no, you go into the

great Trinkhalle, and stand around, first on one foot

and then on the other, while two or three young girls

sit pottering at some sort of ladylike sewing-work

in your neighborhood and can't seem to see you --polite

as three-dollar clerks in government offices.



By and by one of these rises painfully, and

"stretches"--stretches

fists and body heavenward till she raises her heels from

the floor, at the same time refreshing herself with a yawn

of such comprehensiveness that the bulk of her face disappears

behind her upper lip and one is able to see how she is

constructed inside--then she slowly closes her cavern,

brings down her fists and her heels, comes languidly forward,

contemplates you contemptuously, draws you a glass of hot water

and sets it down where you can get it by reaching for it.  You

take it and say:



"How much?"--and she returns you, with elaborate indifference,

a beggar's answer:



"NACH BELIEBE" (what you please.)



This thing of using the common beggar's trick and the common

beggar's shibboleth to put you on your liberality when you

were expecting a simple straightforward commercial transaction,

adds a little to your prospering sense of irritation.

You ignore her reply, and ask again:



"How much?"



--and she calmly, indifferently, repeats:



"NACH BELIEBE."



You are getting angry, but you are trying not to show it;

you resolve to keep on asking your question till she changes

her answer, or at least her annoyingly indifferent manner.

Therefore, if your case be like mine, you two fools

stand there, and without perceptible emotion of any kind,

or any emphasis on any syllable, you look blandly into each

other's eyes, and hold the following idiotic conversation:



"How much?"



"NACH BELIEBE."



"How much?"



"NACH BELIEBE."



"How much?"



"NACH BELIEBE."



"How much?"



"NACH BELIEBE."



"How much?"



"NACH BELIEBE."



"How much?"



"NACH BELIEBE."



I do not know what another person would have done,

but at this point I gave up; that cast-iron indifference,

that tranquil contemptuousness, conquered me, and I struck

my colors.  Now I knew she was used to receiving about a

penny from manly people who care nothing about the opinions

of scullery-maids, and about tuppence from moral cowards;

but I laid a silver twenty-five cent piece within her

reach and tried to shrivel her up with this sarcastic

speech:



"If it isn't enough, will you stoop sufficiently from

your official dignity to say so?"



She did not shrivel.  Without deigning to look at me at all,

she languidly lifted the coin and bit it!--to see if it

was good.  Then she turned her back and placidly waddled

to her former roost again, tossing the money into an open

till as she went along.  She was victor to the last,

you see.



I have enlarged upon the ways of this girl because they

are typical; her manners are the manners of a goodly

number of the Baden-Baden shopkeepers.  The shopkeeper

there swindles you if he can, and insults you whether

he succeeds in swindling you or not.  The keepers of

baths also take great and patient pains to insult you.

The frowsy woman who sat at the desk in the lobby

of the great Friederichsbad and sold bath tickets,

not only insulted me twice every day, with rigid fidelity

to her great trust, but she took trouble enough to cheat

me out of a shilling, one day, to have fairly entitled

her to ten.  Baden-Baden's splendid gamblers are gone,

only her microscopic knaves remain.



An English gentleman who had been living there

several years, said:



"If you could disguise your nationality, you would not

find any insolence here.  These shopkeepers detest the

English and despise the Americans; they are rude to both,

more especially to ladies of your nationality and mine.

If these go shopping without a gentleman or a man-servant,

they are tolerably sure to be subjected to petty insolences--

insolences of manner and tone, rather than word,

though words that are hard to bear are not always wanting.

I know of an instance where a shopkeeper tossed a coin back

to an American lady with the remark, snappishly uttered,

'We don't take French money here.' And I know of a case

where an English lady said to one of these shopkeepers,

'Don't you think you ask too much for this article?'

and he replied with the question, 'Do you think you are

obliged to buy it?' However, these people are not impolite

to Russians or Germans.  And as to rank, they worship that,

for they have long been used to generals and nobles.

If you wish to see what abysses servility can descend,

present yourself before a Baden-Baden shopkeeper in the

character of a Russian prince."



It is an inane town, filled with sham, and petty fraud,

and snobbery, but the baths are good.  I spoke with

many people, and they were all agreed in that.  I had

the twinges of rheumatism unceasingly during three years,

but the last one departed after a fortnight's bathing there,

and I have never had one since.  I fully believe I left my

rheumatism in Baden-Baden. Baden-Baden is welcome to it.

It was little, but it was all I had to give.  I would

have preferred to leave something that was catching,

but it was not in my power.



There are several hot springs there, and during two

thousand years they have poured forth a never-diminishing

abundance of the healing water.  This water is conducted

in pipe to the numerous bath-houses, and is reduced to

an endurable temperature by the addition of cold water.

The new Friederichsbad is a very large and beautiful building,

and in it one may have any sort of bath that has ever

been invented, and with all the additions of herbs and

drugs that his ailment may need or that the physician

of the establishment may consider a useful thing to put

into the water.  You go there, enter the great door,

get a bow graduated to your style and clothes from the

gorgeous portier, and a bath ticket and an insult from

the frowsy woman for a quarter; she strikes a bell and a

serving-man conducts you down a long hall and shuts you

into a commodious room which has a washstand, a mirror,

a bootjack, and a sofa in it, and there you undress

at your leisure.



The room is divided by a great curtain; you draw this

curtain aside, and find a large white marble bathtub,

with its rim sunk to the level of the floor,

and with three white marble steps leading down to it.

This tub is full of water which is as clear as crystal,

and is tempered to 28 degrees Re'aumur (about 95 degrees

Fahrenheit). Sunk into the floor, by the tub, is a covered

copper box which contains some warm towels and a sheet.

You look fully as white as an angel when you are stretched

out in that limpid bath.  You remain in it ten minutes,

the first time, and afterward increase the duration from

day to day, till you reach twenty-five or thirty minutes.

There you stop.  The appointments of the place are

so luxurious, the benefit so marked, the price so moderate,

and the insults so sure, that you very soon find yourself

adoring the Friederichsbad and infesting it.



We had a plain, simple, unpretending, good hotel,

in Baden-Baden--the Ho^tel de France--and alongside my room

I had a giggling, cackling, chattering family who always

went to bed just two hours after me and always got up two

hours ahead of me.  But this is common in German hotels;

the people generally go to bed long after eleven and get

up long before eight.  The partitions convey sound

like a drum-head, and everybody knows it; but no matter,

a German family who are all kindness and consideration

in the daytime make apparently no effort to moderate

their noises for your benefit at night.  They will sing,

laugh, and talk loudly, and bang furniture around in a most

pitiless way.  If you knock on your wall appealingly,

they will quiet down and discuss the matter softly among

themselves for a moment--then, like the mice, they fall

to persecuting you again, and as vigorously as before.

They keep cruelly late and early hours, for such noisy folk.



Of course, when one begins to find fault with foreign

people's ways, he is very likely to get a reminder to look

nearer home, before he gets far with it.  I open my note-book

to see if I can find some more information of a valuable

nature about Baden-Baden, and the first thing I fall upon is

this:



"BADEN-BADEN (no date). Lot of vociferous Americans

at breakfast this morning.  Talking AT everybody,

while pretending to talk among themselves.  On their

first travels, manifestly.  Showing off.  The usual

signs--airy, easy-going references to grand distances

and foreign places.  'Well GOOD-by, old fellow--

if I don't run across you in Italy, you hunt me up in

London before you sail.'"



The next item which I find in my note-book is this one:



"The fact that a band of 6,000 Indians are now murdering

our frontiersmen at their impudent leisure, and that we

are only able to send 1,200 soldiers against them,

is utilized here to discourage emigration to America.

The common people think the Indians are in New Jersey."



This is a new and peculiar argument against keeping our army

down to a ridiculous figure in the matter of numbers.

It is rather a striking one, too.  I have not distorted

the truth in saying that the facts in the above item,

about the army and the Indians, are made use of to

discourage emigration to America.  That the common

people should be rather foggy in their geography,

and foggy as to the location of the Indians, is a matter

for amusement, maybe, but not of surprise.



There is an interesting old cemetery in Baden-Baden, and

we spent several pleasant hours in wandering through it

and spelling out the inscriptions on the aged tombstones.

Apparently after a man has laid there a century or two,

and has had a good many people buried on top of him,

it is considered that his tombstone is not needed by him

any longer.  I judge so from the fact that hundreds

of old gravestones have been removed from the graves

and placed against the inner walls of the cemetery.

What artists they had in the old times! They chiseled angels

and cherubs and devils and skeletons on the tombstones

in the most lavish and generous way--as to supply--but

curiously grotesque and outlandish as to form.  It is not

always easy to tell which of the figures belong among

the blest and which of them among the opposite party.

But there was an inscription, in French, on one of those

old stones, which was quaint and pretty, and was plainly

not the work of any other than a poet.  It was to this

effect:



    Here Reposes in God, Caroline de Clery, a Religieuse

    of St. Denis aged 83 years--and blind.  The light

    was restored to her in Baden the 5th of January, 1839



We made several excursions on foot to the neighboring villages,

over winding and beautiful roads and through enchanting

woodland scenery.  The woods and roads were similar to those

at Heidelberg, but not so bewitching.  I suppose that roads

and woods which are up to the Heidelberg mark are rare in the

world.



Once we wandered clear away to La Favorita Palace,

which is several miles from Baden-Baden. The grounds

about the palace were fine; the palace was a curiosity.

It was built by a Margravine in 1725, and remains as she

left it at her death.  We wandered through a great many

of its rooms, and they all had striking peculiarities

of decoration.  For instance, the walls of one room were

pretty completely covered with small pictures of the

Margravine in all conceivable varieties of fanciful costumes,

some of them male.



The walls of another room were covered with grotesquely

and elaborately figured hand-wrought tapestry.

The musty ancient beds remained in the chambers,

and their quilts and curtains and canopies were decorated

with curious handwork, and the walls and ceilings frescoed

with historical and mythological scenes in glaring colors.

There was enough crazy and rotten rubbish in the building

to make a true brick-a-bracker green with envy.

A painting in the dining-hall verged upon the indelicate--

but then the Margravine was herself a trifle indelicate.



It is in every way a wildly and picturesquely decorated house,

and brimful of interest as a reflection of the character

and tastes of that rude bygone time.



In the grounds, a few rods from the palace, stands the

Margravine's chapel, just as she left it--a coarse

wooden structure, wholly barren of ornament.  It is said

that the Margravine would give herself up to debauchery

and exceedingly fast living for several months at a time,

and then retire to this miserable wooden den and spend

a few months in repenting and getting ready for another

good time.  She was a devoted Catholic, and was perhaps

quite a model sort of a Christian as Christians went then,

in high life.



Tradition says she spent the last two years of her life in the

strange den I have been speaking of, after having indulged

herself in one final, triumphant, and satisfying spree.

She shut herself up there, without company, and without

even a servant, and so abjured and forsook the world.

In her little bit of a kitchen she did her own cooking;

she wore a hair shirt next the skin, and castigated herself

with whips--these aids to grace are exhibited there yet.

She prayed and told her beads, in another little room,

before a waxen Virgin niched in a little box against the wall;

she bedded herself like a slave.



In another small room is an unpainted wooden table,

and behind it sit half-life-size waxen figures of the

Holy Family, made by the very worst artist that ever

lived, perhaps, and clothed in gaudy, flimsy drapery.

[1] The margravine used to bring her meals to this table

and DINE WITH THE HOLY FAMILY.  What an idea that was!

What a grisly spectacle it must have been! Imagine it:

Those rigid, shock-headed figures, with corpsy complexions

and fish glass eyes, occupying one side of the table

in the constrained attitudes and dead fixedness that

distinquish all men that are born of wax, and this wrinkled,

smoldering old fire-eater occupying the other side,

mumbling her prayers and munching her sausages in the ghostly

stillness and shadowy indistinctness of a winter twilight.

It makes one feel crawly even to think of it.



1.  The Savior was represented as a lad of about fifteen

    years of age.  This figure had lost one eye.



In this sordid place, and clothed, bedded, and fed like

a pauper, this strange princess lived and worshiped during

two years, and in it she died.  Two or three hundred

years ago, this would have made the poor den holy ground;

and the church would have set up a miracle-factory there

and made plenty of money out of it.  The den could be moved

into some portions of France and made a good property even now.







CHAPTER XXII

[The Black Forest and Its Treasures]



From Baden-Baden we made the customary trip into the

Black Forest.  We were on foot most of the time.  One cannot

describe those noble woods, nor the feeling with which they

inspire him.  A feature of the feeling, however, is a deep

sense of contentment; another feature of it is a buoyant,

boyish gladness; and a third and very conspicuous feature

of it is one's sense of the remoteness of the work-day

world and his entire emancipation from it and its affairs.



Those woods stretch unbroken over a vast region;

and everywhere they are such dense woods, and so still,

and so piney and fragrant.  The stems of the trees are trim

and straight, and in many places all the ground is hidden

for miles under a thick cushion of moss of a vivid green color,

with not a decayed or ragged spot in its surface, and not

a fallen leaf or twig to mar its immaculate tidiness.

A rich cathedral gloom pervades the pillared aisles;

so the stray flecks of sunlight that strike a trunk

here and a bough yonder are strongly accented,

and when they strike the moss they fairly seem to burn.

But the weirdest effect, and the most enchanting is that

produced by the diffused light of the low afternoon sun;

no single ray is able to pierce its way in, then, but the

diffused light takes color from moss and foliage,

and pervades the place like a faint, greet-tinted mist,

the theatrical fire of fairyland.  The suggestion of mystery

and the supernatural which haunts the forest at all times

is intensified by this unearthly glow.



We found the Black Forest farmhouses and villages

all that the Black Forest stories have pictured them.

The first genuine specimen which we came upon was

the mansion of a rich farmer and member of the Common

Council of the parish or district.  He was an important

personage in the land and so was his wife also,

of course.  His daughter was the "catch" of the region,

and she may be already entering into immortality as the

heroine of one of Auerbach's novels, for all I know.

We shall see, for if he puts her in I shall recognize her

by her Black Forest clothes, and her burned complexion,

her plump figure, her fat hands, her dull expression,

her gentle spirit, her generous feet, her bonnetless head,

and the plaited tails of hemp-colored hair hanging down

her back.



The house was big enough for a hotel; it was a hundred

feet long and fifty wide, and ten feet high, from ground

to eaves; but from the eaves to the comb of the mighty roof

was as much as forty feet, or maybe even more.  This roof

was of ancient mud-colored straw thatch a foot thick,

and was covered all over, except in a few trifling spots,

with a thriving and luxurious growth of green vegetation,

mainly moss.  The mossless spots were places where

repairs had been made by the insertion of bright new

masses of yellow straw.  The eaves projected far down,

like sheltering, hospitable wings.  Across the gable that

fronted the road, and about ten feet above the ground,

ran a narrow porch, with a wooden railing; a row of

small windows filled with very small panes looked upon

the porch.  Above were two or three other little windows,

one clear up under the sharp apex of the roof.

Before the ground-floor door was a huge pile of manure.

The door of the second-story room on the side of the house

was open, and occupied by the rear elevation of a cow.

Was this probably the drawing-room? All of the front

half of the house from the ground up seemed to be

occupied by the people, the cows, and the chickens,

and all the rear half by draught-animals and hay.

But the chief feature, all around this house, was the big

heaps of manure.



We became very familiar with the fertilizer in the Forest.

We fell unconsciously into the habit of judging of a man's

station in life by this outward and eloquent sign.

Sometimes we said, "Here is a poor devil, this is manifest."

When we saw a stately accumulation, we said, "Here is

a banker." When we encountered a country-seat surrounded

by an Alpine pomp of manure, we said, "Doubtless a duke

lives here."



The importance of this feature has not been properly

magnified in the Black Forest stories.  Manure is evidently

the Black-Forester's main treasure--his coin, his jewel,

his pride, his Old Master, his ceramics, his bric-a-brac,

his darling, his title to public consideration,

envy, veneration, and his first solicitude when he gets

ready to make his will.  The true Black Forest novel,

if it is ever written, will be skeletoned somewhat in this way:



SKELETON FOR A BLACK FOREST NOVEL



Rich old farmer, named Huss.  Has inherited great wealth

of manure, and by diligence has added to it.  It is

double-starred in Baedeker.  [1] The Black forest artist

paints it--his masterpiece.  The king comes to see it.

Gretchen Huss, daughter and heiress.  Paul Hoch,

young neighbor, suitor for Gretchen's hand--ostensibly;

he really wants the manure.  Hoch has a good many cart-loads

of the Black Forest currency himself, and therefore is a

good catch; but he is sordid, mean, and without sentiment,

whereas Gretchen is all sentiment and poetry.

Hans Schmidt, young neighbor, full of sentiment,

full of poetry, loves Gretchen, Gretchen loves him.

But he has no manure.  Old Huss forbids him in the house.

His heart breaks, he goes away to die in the woods,

far from the cruel world--for he says, bitterly, "What is man,

without manure?"



1.  When Baedeker's guide-books mention a thing and put

    two stars (**) after it, it means well worth visiting.

    M.T.



[Interval of six months.]



Paul Hoch comes to old Huss and says, "I am at last

as rich as you required--come and view the pile."

Old Huss views it and says, "It is sufficient--take

her and be happy,"--meaning Gretchen.



[Interval of two weeks.]



Wedding party assembled in old Huss's drawing-room. Hoch

placid and content, Gretchen weeping over her hard fate.

Enter old Huss's head bookkeeper.  Huss says fiercely,

"I gave you three weeks to find out why your books

don't balance, and to prove that you are not a defaulter;

the time is up--find me the missing property or you go

to prison as a thief." Bookkeeper: "I have found it."

"Where?" Bookkeeper (sternly--tragically): "In the bridegroom's

pile!--behold the thief--see him blench and tremble!"

[Sensation.] Paul Hoch: Lost, lost!"--falls over the cow

in a swoon and is handcuffed.  Gretchen: "Saved!" Falls

over the calf in a swoon of joy, but is caught in the arms

of Hans Schmidt, who springs in at that moment.  Old Huss:

"What, you here, varlet? Unhand the maid and quit the place."

Hans (still supporting the insensible girl): "Never! Cruel

old man, know that I come with claims which even you

cannot despise."



Huss: "What, YOU? name them."



Hans: "Listen then.  The world has forsaken me, I forsook

the world, I wandered in the solitude of the forest,

longing for death but finding none.  I fed upon roots,

and in my bitterness I dug for the bitterest,

loathing the sweeter kind.  Digging, three days agone,

I struck a manure mine!--a Golconda, a limitless Bonanza,

of solid manure! I can buy you ALL, and have mountain

ranges of manure left! Ha-ha, NOW thou smilest a smile!"

[Immense sensation.] Exhibition of specimens from the mine.

Old Huss (enthusiastically): "Wake her up, shake her up,

noble young man, she is yours!" Wedding takes place on

the spot; bookkeeper restored to his office and emoluments;

Paul Hoch led off to jail.  The Bonanza king of the Black

Forest lives to a good old age, blessed with the love of his

wife and of his twenty-seven children, and the still sweeter

envy of everybody around.



We took our noon meal of fried trout one day at the Plow Inn,

in a very pretty village (Ottenho"fen), and then went into

the public room to rest and smoke.  There we found nine

or ten Black Forest grandees assembled around a table.

They were the Common Council of the parish.  They had

gathered there at eight o'clock that morning to elect

a new member, and they had now been drinking beer four

hours at the new member's expense.  They were men of fifty

or sixty years of age, with grave good-natures faces,

and were all dressed in the costume made familiar to us

by the Black Forest stories; broad, round-topped black felt

hats with the brims curled up all round; long red waistcoats

with large metal buttons, black alpaca coats with the

waists up between the shoulders.  There were no speeches,

there was but little talk, there were no frivolities;

the Council filled themselves gradually, steadily, but surely,

with beer, and conducted themselves with sedate decorum,

as became men of position, men of influence, men of manure.



We had a hot afternoon tramp up the valley, along the grassy

bank of a rushing stream of clear water, past farmhouses,

water-mills, and no end of wayside crucifixes and saints

and Virgins.  These crucifixes, etc., are set up in

memory of departed friends, by survivors, and are almost

as frequent as telegraph-poles are in other lands.



We followed the carriage-road, and had our usual luck;

we traveled under a beating sun, and always saw the shade

leave the shady places before we could get to them.

In all our wanderings we seldom managed to strike

a piece of road at its time for being shady.  We had a

particularly hot time of it on that particular afternoon,

and with no comfort but what we could get out of the fact

that the peasants at work away up on the steep mountainsides

above our heads were even worse off than we were.

By and by it became impossible to endure the intolerable

glare and heat any longer; so we struck across the ravine

and entered the deep cool twilight of the forest, to hunt

for what the guide-book called the "old road."



We found an old road, and it proved eventually to be the

right one, though we followed it at the time with the conviction

that it was the wrong one.  If it was the wrong one there

could be no use in hurrying; therefore we did not hurry,

but sat down frequently on the soft moss and enjoyed

the restful quiet and shade of the forest solitudes.

There had been distractions in the carriage-road--

school-children, peasants, wagons, troops of

pedestrianizing students from all over Germany--

but we had the old road to ourselves.



Now and then, while we rested, we watched the laborious

ant at his work.  I found nothing new in him--certainly

nothing to change my opinion of him.  It seems to me that

in the matter of intellect the ant must be a strangely

overrated bird.  During many summers, now, I have watched him,

when I ought to have been in better business, and I have

not yet come across a living ant that seemed to have any

more sense than a dead one.  I refer to the ordinary ant,

of course; I have had no experience of those wonderful

Swiss and African ones which vote, keep drilled armies,

hold slaves, and dispute about religion.  Those particular

ants may be all that the naturalist paints them,

but I am persuaded that the average ant is a sham.

I admit his industry, of course; he is the hardest-working

creature in the world--when anybody is looking--but his

leather-headedness is the point I make against him.

He goes out foraging, he makes a capture, and then what

does he do? Go home? No--he goes anywhere but home.

He doesn't know where home is.  His home may be only

three feet away--no matter, he can't find it.  He makes

his capture, as I have said; it is generally something

which can be of no sort of use to himself or anybody else;

it is usually seven times bigger than it ought to be;

he hunts out the awkwardest place to take hold of it;

he lifts it bodily up in the air by main force, and starts;

not toward home, but in the opposite direction; not calmly

and wisely, but with a frantic haste which is wasteful

of his strength; he fetches up against a pebble, and instead

of going around it, he climbs over it backward dragging

his booty after him, tumbles down on the other side,

jumps up in a passion, kicks the dust off his clothes,

moistens his hands, grabs his property viciously, yanks it

this way, then that, shoves it ahead of him a moment,

turns tail and lugs it after him another moment, gets madder

and madder, then presently hoists it into the air and goes

tearing away in an entirely new direction; comes to a weed;

it never occurs to him to go around it; no, he must climb it;

and he does climb it, dragging his worthless property

to the top--which is as bright a thing to do as it would

be for me to carry a sack of flour from Heidelberg to Paris

by way of Strasburg steeple; when he gets up there he

finds that that is not the place; takes a cursory glance

at the scenery and either climbs down again or tumbles down,

and starts off once more--as usual, in a new direction.

At the end of half an hour, he fetches up within six inches

of the place he started from and lays his burden down;

meantime he as been over all the ground for two yards around,

and climbed all the weeds and pebbles he came across.

Now he wipes the sweat from his brow, strokes his limbs,

and then marches aimlessly off, in as violently a hurry

as ever.  He does not remember to have ever seen it before;

he looks around to see which is not the way home, grabs his

bundle and starts; he goes through the same adventures he

had before; finally stops to rest, and a friend comes along.

Evidently the friend remarks that a last year's grasshopper

leg is a very noble acquisition, and inquires where he

got it.  Evidently the proprietor does not remember

exactly where he did get it, but thinks he got it "around

here somewhere." Evidently the friend contracts to help

him freight it home.  Then, with a judgment peculiarly

antic (pun not intended), then take hold of opposite ends

of that grasshopper leg a nd begin to tug with all their

might in opposite directions.  Presently they take a rest

and confer together.  They decide that something is wrong,

they can't make out what.  Then they go at it again,

just as before.  Same result.  Mutual recriminations follow.

Evidently each accuses the other of being an obstructionist.

They lock themselves together and chew each other's jaws

for a while; then they roll and tumble on the ground till

one loses a horn or a leg and has to haul off for repairs.

They make up and go to work again in the same old insane way,

but the crippled ant is at a disadvantage; tug as he may,

the other one drags off the booty and him at the end of it.

Instead of giving up, he hangs on, and gets his shins

bruised against every obstruction that comes in the way.

By and by, when that grasshopper leg has been dragged

all over the same old ground once more, it is finally

dumped at about the spot where it originally lay,

the two perspiring ants inspect it thoughtfully and decide

that dried grasshopper legs are a poor sort of property

after all, and then each starts off in a different

direction to see if he can't find an old nail or something

else that is heavy enough to afford entertainment and at

the same time valueless enough to make an ant want to own it.



There in the Black Forest, on the mountainside,

I saw an ant go through with such a performance as this

with a dead spider of fully ten times his own weight.

The spider was not quite dead, but too far gone to resist.

He had a round body the size of a pea.  The little ant--

observing that I was noticing--turned him on his back,

sunk his fangs into his throat, lifted him into the air and

started vigorously off with him, stumbling over little pebbles,

stepping on the spider's legs and tripping himself up,

dragging him backward, shoving him bodily ahead, dragging him

up stones six inches high instead of going around them,

climbing weeds twenty times his own height and jumping

from their summits--and finally leaving him in the middle

of the road to be confiscated by any other fool of an

ant that wanted him.  I measured the ground which this

ass traversed, and arrived at the conclusion that what he

had accomplished inside of twenty minutes would constitute

some such job as this--relatively speaking--for a man;

to wit: to strap two eight-hundred-pound horses together,

carry them eighteen hundred feet, mainly over (not around)

boulders averaging six feet high, and in the course

of the journey climb up and jump from the top of one

precipice like Niagara, and three steeples, each a hundred

and twenty feet high; and then put the horses down,

in an exposed place, without anybody to watch them,

and go off to indulge in some other idiotic miracle for

vanity's sake.



Science has recently discovered that the ant does not

lay up anything for winter use.  This will knock him

out of literature, to some extent.  He does not work,

except when people are looking, and only then when the

observer has a green, naturalistic look, and seems to be

taking notes.  This amounts to deception, and will injure

him for the Sunday-schools. He has not judgment enough

to know what is good to eat from what isn't. This amounts

to ignorance, and will impair the world's respect for him.

He cannot stroll around a stump and find his way home again.

This amounts to idiocy, and once the damaging fact

is established, thoughtful people will cease to look

up to him, the sentimental will cease to fondle him.

His vaunted industry is but a vanity and of no effect,

since he never gets home with anything he starts with.

This disposes of the last remnant of his reputation

and wholly destroys his main usefulness as a moral agent,

since it will make the sluggard hesitate to go to him

any more.  It is strange, beyond comprehension, that so

manifest a humbug as the ant has been able to fool so

many nations and keep it up so many ages without being

found out.



The ant is strong, but we saw another strong thing,

where we had not suspected the presence of much muscular

power before.  A toadstool--that vegetable which springs

to full growth in a single night--had torn loose and

lifted a matted mass of pine needles and dirt of twice

its own bulk into the air, and supported it there,

like a column supporting a shed.  Ten thousand toadstools,

with the right purchase, could lift a man, I suppose.

But what good would it do?



All our afternoon's progress had been uphill.  About five

or half past we reached the summit, and all of a sudden

the dense curtain of the forest parted and we looked

down into a deep and beautiful gorge and out over a

wide panorama of wooded mountains with their summits

shining in the sun and their glade-furrowed sides dimmed

with purple shade.  The gorge under our feet--called

Allerheiligen--afforded room in the grassy level at its

head for a cozy and delightful human nest, shut away

from the world and its botherations, and consequently

the monks of the old times had not failed to spy it out;

and here were the brown and comely ruins of their church

and convent to prove that priests had as fine an instinct

seven hundred years ago in ferreting out the choicest

nooks and corners in a land as priests have today.



A big hotel crowds the ruins a little, now, and drives

a brisk trade with summer tourists.  We descended

into the gorge and had a supper which would have been

very satisfactory if the trout had not been boiled.

The Germans are pretty sure to boil a trout or anything

else if left to their own devices.  This is an argument

of some value in support of the theory that they were

the original colonists of the wild islands of the coast

of Scotland.  A schooner laden with oranges was wrecked

upon one of those islands a few years ago, and the gentle

savages rendered the captain such willing assistance

that he gave them as many oranges as they wanted.

Next day he asked them how they liked them.  They shook

their heads and said:



"Baked, they were tough; and even boiled, they warn't

things for a hungry man to hanker after."



We went down the glen after supper.  It is beautiful--a

mixture of sylvan loveliness and craggy wildness.

A limpid torrent goes whistling down the glen, and toward

the foot of it winds through a narrow cleft between lofty

precipices and hurls itself over a succession of falls.

After one passes the last of these he has a backward

glimpse at the falls which is very pleasing--they rise

in a seven-stepped stairway of foamy and glittering cascades,

and make a picture which is as charming as it is unusual.







CHAPTER XXIII

[Nicodemus Dodge and the Skeleton]



We were satisfied that we could walk to Oppenau in

one day, now that we were in practice; so we set out

the next morning after breakfast determined to do it.

It was all the way downhill, and we had the loveliest

summer weather for it.  So we set the pedometer and then

stretched away on an easy, regular stride, down through

the cloven forest, drawing in the fragrant breath

of the morning in deep refreshing draughts, and wishing

we might never have anything to do forever but walk

to Oppenau and keep on doing it and then doing it over again.



Now, the true charm of pedestrianism does not lie

in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking.

The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by,

and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active;

the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon

a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace

to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes

from the talk.  It is no matter whether one talks wisdom

or nonsense, the case is the same, the bulk of the enjoyment

lies in the wagging of the gladsome jaw and the flapping

of the sympathetic ear.



And what motley variety of subjects a couple of people will

casually rake over in the course of a day's tramp! There

being no constraint, a change of subject is always in order,

and so a body is not likely to keep pegging at a single

topic until it grows tiresome.  We discussed everything

we knew, during the first fifteen or twenty minutes,

that morning, and then branched out into the glad, free,

boundless realm of the things we were not certain about.



Harris said that if the best writer in the world once got

the slovenly habit of doubling up his "haves" he could

never get rid of it while he lived.  That is to say,

if a man gets the habit of saying "I should have liked

to have known more about it" instead of saying simply

and sensibly, "I should have liked to know more about it,"

that man's disease is incurable.  Harris said that his sort

of lapse is to be found in every copy of every newspaper

that has ever been printed in English, and in almost all

of our books.  He said he had observed it in Kirkham's

grammar and in Macaulay.  Harris believed that milk-teeth

are commoner in men's mouths than those "doubled-up haves." [1]



1.  I do not know that there have not been moments in the

    course of the present session when I should have been

    very glad to have accepted the proposal of my noble friend,

    and to have exchanged parts in some of our evenings

    of work.--[From a Speech of the English Chancellor

    of the Exchequer, August, 1879.]



That changed the subject to dentistry.  I said I believed

the average man dreaded tooth-pulling more than amputation,

and that he would yell quicker under the former operation

than he would under the latter.  The philosopher Harris

said that the average man would not yell in either case

if he had an audience.  Then he continued:



"When our brigade first went into camp on the Potomac,

we used to be brought up standing, occasionally, by an

ear-splitting howl of anguish.  That meant that a soldier

was getting a tooth pulled in a tent.  But the surgeons

soon changed that; they instituted open-air dentistry.

There never was a howl afterward--that is, from the man

who was having the tooth pulled.  At the daily dental

hour there would always be about five hundred soldiers

gathered together in the neighborhood of that dental chair

waiting to see the performance--and help; and the moment

the surgeon took a grip on the candidate's tooth and began

to lift, every one of those five hundred rascals would

clap his hand to his jaw and begin to hop around on one

leg and howl with all the lungs he had! It was enough

to raise your hair to hear that variegated and enormous

unanimous caterwaul burst out! With so big and so derisive

an audience as that, a suffer wouldn't emit a sound though

you pulled his head off.  The surgeons said that pretty

often a patient was compelled to laugh, in the midst

of his pangs, but that had never caught one crying out,

after the open-air exhibition was instituted."



Dental surgeons suggested doctors, doctors suggested death,

death suggested skeletons--and so, by a logical process

the conversation melted out of one of these subjects

and into the next, until the topic of skeletons raised up

Nicodemus Dodge out of the deep grave in my memory where he

had lain buried and forgotten for twenty-five years.

When I was a boy in a printing-office in Missouri,

a loose-jointed, long-legged, tow-headed, jeans-clad

countrified cub of about sixteen lounged in one day,

and without removing his hands from the depths

of his trousers pockets or taking off his faded ruin

of a slouch hat, whose broken rim hung limp and ragged

about his eyes and ears like a bug-eaten cabbage leaf,

stared indifferently around, then leaned his hip

against the editor's table, crossed his mighty brogans,

aimed at a distant fly from a crevice in his upper teeth,

laid him low, and said with composure:



"Whar's the boss?"



"I am the boss," said the editor, following this curious

bit of architecture wonderingly along up to its clock-face

with his eye.



"Don't want anybody fur to learn the business, 'tain't likely?"



"Well, I don't know.  Would you like to learn it?"



"Pap's so po' he cain't run me no mo', so I want to git

a show somers if I kin, 'taint no diffunce what--I'm strong

and hearty, and I don't turn my back on no kind of work,

hard nur soft."



"Do you think you would like to learn the printing business?"



"Well, I don't re'ly k'yer a durn what I DO learn,

so's I git a chance fur to make my way.  I'd jist as soon

learn print'n's anything."



"Can you read?"



"Yes--middlin'."



"Write?"



"Well, I've seed people could lay over me thar."



"Cipher?"



"Not good enough to keep store, I don't reckon,

but up as fur as twelve-times-twelve I ain't no slouch.

'Tother side of that is what gits me."



"Where is your home?"



"I'm f'm old Shelby."



"What's your father's religious denomination?"



"Him? Oh, he's a blacksmith."



"No, no--I don't mean his trade.  What's his RELIGIOUS

DENOMINATION?"



"OH--I didn't understand you befo'. He's a Freemason."



"No, no, you don't get my meaning yet.  What I mean is,

does he belong to any CHURCH?"



"NOW you're talkin'! Couldn't make out what you was a-tryin'

to git through yo' head no way.  B'long to a CHURCH! Why,

boss, he's ben the pizenest kind of Free-will Babtis'

for forty year.  They ain't no pizener ones 'n what HE is.

Mighty good man, pap is.  Everybody says that.  If they

said any diffrunt they wouldn't say it whar _I_ wuz--

not MUCH they wouldn't."



"What is your own religion?"



"Well, boss, you've kind o' got me, there--and yit

you hain't got me so mighty much, nuther.  I think 't

if a feller he'ps another feller when he's in trouble,

and don't cuss, and don't do no mean things, nur noth'n'

he ain' no business to do, and don't spell the Saviour's

name with a little g, he ain't runnin' no resks--he's

about as saift as he b'longed to a church."



"But suppose he did spell it with a little g--what then?"



"Well, if he done it a-purpose, I reckon he wouldn't

stand no chance--he OUGHTN'T to have no chance, anyway,

I'm most rotten certain 'bout that."



"What is your name?"



"Nicodemus Dodge."



"I think maybe you'll do, Nicodemus.  We'll give you

a trial, anyway."



"All right."



"When would you like to begin?"



"Now."



So, within ten minutes after we had first glimpsed this

nondescript he was one of us, and with his coat off

and hard at it.



Beyond that end of our establishment which was furthest

from the street, was a deserted garden, pathless,

and thickly grown with the bloomy and villainous "jimpson"

weed and its common friend the stately sunflower.

In the midst of this mournful spot was a decayed and aged

little "frame" house with but one room, one window, and no

ceiling--it had been a smoke-house a generation before.

Nicodemus was given this lonely and ghostly den as a bedchamber.



The village smarties recognized a treasure in Nicodemus,

right away--a butt to play jokes on.  It was easy to see

that he was inconceivably green and confiding.  George Jones

had the glory of perpetrating the first joke on him;

he gave him a cigar with a firecracker in it and winked

to the crowd to come; the thing exploded presently and swept

away the bulk of Nicodemus's eyebrows and eyelashes.

He simply said:



"I consider them kind of seeg'yars dangersome,"--and

seemed to suspect nothing.  The next evening Nicodemus

waylaid George and poured a bucket of ice-water over him.



One day, while Nicodemus was in swimming, Tom McElroy

"tied" his clothes.  Nicodemus made a bonfire of Tom's

by way of retaliation.



A third joke was played upon Nicodemus a day or two later--he

walked up the middle aisle of the village church, Sunday night,

with a staring handbill pinned between his shoulders.

The joker spent the remainder of the night, after church,

in the cellar of a deserted house, and Nicodemus sat on

the cellar door till toward breakfast-time to make sure

that the prisoner remembered that if any noise was made,

some rough treatment would be the consequence.  The cellar

had two feet of stagnant water in it, and was bottomed

with six inches of soft mud.



But I wander from the point.  It was the subject of

skeletons that brought this boy back to my recollection.

Before a very long time had elapsed, the village smarties

began to feel an uncomfortable consciousness of not having

made a very shining success out of their attempts on the

simpleton from "old Shelby." Experimenters grew scarce

and chary.  Now the young doctor came to the rescue.

There was delight and applause when he proposed to scare

Nicodemus to death, and explained how he was going to do it.

He had a noble new skeleton--the skeleton of the late

and only local celebrity, Jimmy Finn, the village

drunkard--a grisly piece of property which he had bought

of Jimmy Finn himself, at auction, for fifty dollars,

under great competition, when Jimmy lay very sick in

the tan-yard a fortnight before his death.  The fifty

dollars had gone promptly for whiskey and had considerably

hurried up the change of ownership in the skeleton.

The doctor would put Jimmy Finn's skeleton in Nicodemus's

bed!



This was done--about half past ten in the evening.

About Nicodemus's usual bedtime--midnight--the village

jokers came creeping stealthily through the jimpson

weeds and sunflowers toward the lonely frame den.

They reached the window and peeped in.  There sat the

long-legged pauper, on his bed, in a very short shirt,

and nothing more; he was dangling his legs contentedly

back and forth, and wheezing the music of "Camptown Races"

out of a paper-overlaid comb which he was pressing

against his mouth; by him lay a new jewsharp, a new top,

and solid india-rubber ball, a handful of painted marbles,

five pounds of "store" candy, and a well-gnawed slab of

gingerbread as big and as thick as a volume of sheet-music.

He had sold the skeleton to a traveling quack for three

dollars and was enjoying the result!



Just as we had finished talking about skeletons and were

drifting into the subject of fossils, Harris and I heard

a shout, and glanced up the steep hillside.  We saw men

and women standing away up there looking frightened,

and there was a bulky object tumbling and floundering

down the steep slope toward us.  We got out of the way,

and when the object landed in the road it proved to be a boy.

He had tripped and fallen, and there was nothing for him

to do but trust to luck and take what might come.



When one starts to roll down a place like that, there is

no stopping till the bottom is reached.  Think of people

FARMING on a slant which is so steep that the best you can

say of it--if you want to be fastidiously accurate--is,

that it is a little steeper than a ladder and not quite

so steep as a mansard roof.  But that is what they do.

Some of the little farms on the hillside opposite Heidelberg

were stood up "edgeways." The boy was wonderfully jolted up,

and his head was bleeding, from cuts which it had got from

small stones on the way.



Harris and I gathered him up and set him on a stone,

and by that time the men and women had scampered down

and brought his cap.



Men, women, and children flocked out from neighboring

cottages and joined the crowd; the pale boy was petted,

and stared at, and commiserated, and water was

brought for him to drink and bathe his bruises in.

And such another clatter of tongues! All who had seen

the catastrophe were describing it at once, and each

trying to talk louder than his neighbor; and one youth

of a superior genius ran a little way up the hill,

called attention, tripped, fell, rolled down among us,

and thus triumphantly showed exactly how the thing had been done.





Harris and I were included in all the descriptions;

how we were coming along; how Hans Gross shouted;

how we looked up startled; how we saw Peter coming like

a cannon-shot; how judiciously we got out of the way,

and let him come; and with what presence of mind we

picked him up and brushed him off and set him on a rock

when the performance was over.  We were as much heroes

as anybody else, except Peter, and were so recognized;

we were taken with Peter and the populace to Peter's

mother's cottage, and there we ate bread and cheese,

and drank milk and beer with everybody, and had a most

sociable good time; and when we left we had a handshake

all around, and were receiving and shouting back LEB'

WOHL's until a turn in the road separated us from our

cordial and kindly new friends forever.



We accomplished our undertaking.  At half past eight

in the evening we stepped into Oppenau, just eleven

hours and a half out of Allerheiligen--one hundred

and forty-six miles.  This is the distance by pedometer;

the guide-book and the Imperial Ordinance maps make

it only ten and a quarter--a surprising blunder,

for these two authorities are usually singularly accurate

in the matter of distances.







CHAPTER XXIV

[I Protect the Empress of Germany]



That was a thoroughly satisfactory walk--and the only

one we were ever to have which was all the way downhill.

We took the train next morning and returned to Baden-Baden

through fearful fogs of dust.  Every seat was crowded, too;

for it was Sunday, and consequently everybody was taking

a "pleasure" excursion.  Hot! the sky was an oven--and

a sound one, too, with no cracks in it to let in any air.

An odd time for a pleasure excursion, certainly!



Sunday is the great day on the continent--the free day,

the happy day.  One can break the Sabbath in a hundred

ways without committing any sin.



We do not work on Sunday, because the commandment forbids it;

the Germans do not work on Sunday, because the commandment

forbids it.  We rest on Sunday, because the commandment

requires it; the Germans rest on Sunday because the

commandment requires it.  But in the definition

of the word "rest" lies all the difference.  With us,

its Sunday meaning is, stay in the house and keep still;

with the Germans its Sunday and week-day meanings seem

to be the same--rest the TIRED PART, and never mind the

other parts of the frame; rest the tired part, and use

the means best calculated to rest that particular part.

Thus: If one's duties have kept him in the house all the week,

it will rest him to be out on Sunday; if his duties

have required him to read weighty and serious matter all

the week, it will rest him to read light matter on Sunday;

if his occupation has busied him with death and funerals

all the week, it will rest him to go to the theater Sunday

night and put in two or three hours laughing at a comedy;

if he is tired with digging ditches or felling trees

all the week, it will rest him to lie quiet in the house

on Sunday; if the hand, the arm, the brain, the tongue,

or any other member, is fatigued with inanition,

it is not to be rested by added a day's inanition;

but if a member is fatigued with exertion, inanition is

the right rest for it.  Such is the way in which the Germans

seem to define the word "rest"; that is to say, they rest

a member by recreating, recuperating, restore its forces.

But our definition is less broad.  We all rest alike

on Sunday--by secluding ourselves and keeping still,

whether that is the surest way to rest the most of us

or not.  The Germans make the actors, the preachers,

etc., work on Sunday.  We encourage the preachers,

the editors, the printers, etc., to work on Sunday,

and imagine that none of the sin of it falls upon us;

but I do not know how we are going to get around the fact

that if it is wrong for the printer to work at his trade

on Sunday it must be equally wrong for the preacher to

work at his, since the commandment has made no exception

in his favor.  We buy Monday morning's paper and read it,

and thus encourage Sunday printing.  But I shall never do

it again.



The Germans remember the Sabbath-day to keep it holy,

by abstaining from work, as commanded; we keep it

holy by abstaining from work, as commanded, and by

also abstaining from play, which is not commanded.

Perhaps we constructively BREAK the command to rest,

because the resting we do is in most cases only a name,

and not a fact.



These reasonings have sufficed, in a measure, to mend

the rent in my conscience which I made by traveling to

Baden-Baden that Sunday.  We arrived in time to furbish

up and get to the English church before services began.

We arrived in considerable style, too, for the landlord

had ordered the first carriage that could be found,

since there was no time to lose, and our coachman was

so splendidly liveried that we were probably mistaken

for a brace of stray dukes; why else were we honored

with a pew all to ourselves, away up among the very elect

at the left of the chancel? That was my first thought.

In the pew directly in front of us sat an elderly lady,

plainly and cheaply dressed; at her side sat a young

lady with a very sweet face, and she also was quite

simply dressed; but around us and about us were clothes

and jewels which it would do anybody's heart good to

worship in.



I thought it was pretty manifest that the elderly lady

was embarrassed at finding herself in such a conspicuous

place arrayed in such cheap apparel; I began to feel sorry

for her and troubled about her.  She tried to seem very busy

with her prayer-book and her responses, and unconscious

that she was out of place, but I said to myself, "She is

not succeeding--there is a distressed tremulousness

in her voice which betrays increasing embarrassment."

Presently the Savior's name was mentioned, and in her flurry

she lost her head completely, and rose and courtesied,

instead of making a slight nod as everybody else did.

The sympathetic blood surged to my temples and I turned and gave

those fine birds what I intended to be a beseeching look,

but my feelings got the better of me and changed it into

a look which said, "If any of you pets of fortune laugh

at this poor soul, you will deserve to be flayed for it."

Things went from bad to worse, and I shortly found myself

mentally taking the unfriended lady under my protection.

My mind was wholly upon her.  I forgot all about the sermon.

Her embarrassment took stronger and stronger hold upon her;

she got to snapping the lid of her smelling-bottle--it

made a loud, sharp sound, but in her trouble she snapped

and snapped away, unconscious of what she was doing.

The last extremity was reached when the collection-plate

began its rounds; the moderate people threw in pennies,

the nobles and the rich contributed silver, but she laid

a twenty-mark gold piece upon the book-rest before her

with a sounding slap! I said to myself, "She has parted

with all her little hoard to buy the consideration of these

unpitying people--it is a sorrowful spectacle." I did not

venture to look around this time; but as the service closed,

I said to myself, "Let them laugh, it is their opportunity;

but at the door of this church they shall see her step

into our fine carriage with us, and our gaudy coachman

shall drive her home."



Then she rose--and all the congregation stood while she

walked down the aisle.  She was the Empress of Germany!



No--she had not been so much embarrassed as I had supposed.

My imagination had got started on the wrong scent, and that

is always hopeless; one is sure, then, to go straight

on misinterpreting everything, clear through to the end.

The young lady with her imperial Majesty was a maid of

honor--and I had been taking her for one of her boarders,

all the time.



This is the only time I have ever had an Empress under

my personal protection; and considering my inexperience,

I wonder I got through with it so well.  I should have

been a little embarrassed myself if I had known earlier

what sort of a contract I had on my hands.



We found that the Empress had been in Baden-Baden

several days.  It is said that she never attends

any but the English form of church service.



I lay abed and read and rested from my journey's fatigues

the remainder of that Sunday, but I sent my agent to represent

me at the afternoon service, for I never allow anything

to interfere with my habit of attending church twice every

Sunday.



There was a vast crowd in the public grounds that night

to hear the band play the "Fremersberg." This piece tells

one of the old legends of the region; how a great noble

of the Middle Ages got lost in the mountains, and wandered

about with his dogs in a violent storm, until at last

the faint tones of a monastery bell, calling the monks

to a midnight service, caught his ear, and he followed

the direction the sounds came from and was saved.

A beautiful air ran through the music, without ceasing,

sometimes loud and strong, sometimes so soft that it

could hardly be distinguished--but it was always there;

it swung grandly along through the shrill whistling

of the storm-wind, the rattling patter of the rain,

and the boom and crash of the thunder; it wound soft

and low through the lesser sounds, the distant ones,

such as the throbbing of the convent bell, the melodious

winding of the hunter's horn, the distressed bayings

of his dogs, and the solemn chanting of the monks;

it rose again, with a jubilant ring, and mingled itself

with the country songs and dances of the peasants assembled

in the convent hall to cheer up the rescued huntsman

while he ate his supper.  The instruments imitated all

these sounds with a marvelous exactness.  More than one

man started to raise his umbrella when the storm burst

forth and the sheets of mimic rain came driving by;

it was hardly possible to keep from putting your hand

to your hat when the fierce wind began to rage and shriek;

and it was NOT possible to refrain from starting when

those sudden and charmingly real thunder-crashes were

let loose.



I suppose the "Fremersberg" is a very low-grade music;

I know, indeed, that it MUST be low-grade music, because it

delighted me, warmed me, moved me, stirred me, uplifted me,

enraptured me, that I was full of cry all the time,

and mad with enthusiasm.  My soul had never had such a

scouring out since I was born.  The solemn and majestic

chanting of the monks was not done by instruments,

but by men's voices; and it rose and fell, and rose again

in that rich confusion of warring sounds, and pulsing bells,

and the stately swing of that ever-present enchanting air,

and it seemed to me that nothing but the very lowest

of low-grade music COULD be so divinely beautiful.

The great crowd which the "Fremersberg" had called out was

another evidence that it was low-grade music; for only

the few are educated up to a point where high-grade music

gives pleasure.  I have never heard enough classic music

to be able to enjoy it.  I dislike the opera because I want

to love it and can't.



I suppose there are two kinds of music--one kind which

one feels, just as an oyster might, and another sort

which requires a higher faculty, a faculty which must

be assisted and developed by teaching.  Yet if base music

gives certain of us wings, why should we want any other?

But we do.  We want it because the higher and better

like it.  We want it without giving it the necessary

time and trouble; so we climb into that upper tier,

that dress-circle, by a lie; we PRETEND we like it.

I know several of that sort of people--and I propose

to be one of them myself when I get home with my fine

European education.



And then there is painting.  What a red rag is to a bull,

Turner's "Slave Ship" was to me, before I studied art.

Mr. Ruskin is educated in art up to a point where that

picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of pleasure

as it used to throw me into one of rage, last year,

when I was ignorant.  His cultivation enables him--and me,

now--to see water in that glaring yellow mud, and natural

effects in those lurid explosions of mixed smoke and flame,

and crimson sunset glories; it reconciles him--and me,

now--to the floating of iron cable-chains and other

unfloatable things; it reconciles us to fishes swimming

around on top of the mud--I mean the water.  The most of

the picture is a manifest impossibility--that is to say,

a lie; and only rigid cultivation can enable a man to find

truth in a lie.  But it enabled Mr. Ruskin to do it,

and it has enabled me to do it, and I am thankful for it.

A Boston newspaper reporter went and took a look at the Slave

Ship floundering about in that fierce conflagration of reds

and yellows, and said it reminded him of a tortoise-shell

cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes.  In my then

uneducated state, that went home to my non-cultivation,

and I thought here is a man with an unobstructed eye.

Mr. Ruskin would have said: This person is an ass.

That is what I would say, now. [1]



1.  Months after this was written, I happened into the National

    Gallery in London, and soon became so fascinated with the

    Turner pictures that I could hardly get away from the place.

    I went there often, afterward, meaning to see the rest

    of the gallery, but the Turner spell was too strong;

    it could not be shaken off.  However, the Turners

    which attracted me most did not remind me of the Slave Ship.



However, our business in Baden-Baden this time,

was to join our courier.  I had thought it best

to hire one, as we should be in Italy, by and by,

and we did not know the language.  Neither did he.

We found him at the hotel, ready to take charge of us.

I asked him if he was "all fixed." He said he was.

That was very true.  He had a trunk, two small satchels,

and an umbrella.  I was to pay him fifty-five dollars

a month and railway fares.  On the continent the railway

fare on a trunk is about the same it is on a man.

Couriers do not have to pay any board and lodging.

This seems a great saving to the tourist--at first.

It does not occur to the tourist that SOMEBODY pays that

man's board and lodging.  It occurs to him by and by,

however, in one of his lucid moments.







CHAPTER XXV

[Hunted by the Little Chamois]



Next morning we left in the train for Switzerland,

and reached Lucerne about ten o'clock at night.

The first discovery I made was that the beauty of the lake

had not been exaggerated.  Within a day or two I made

another discovery.  This was, that the lauded chamois

is not a wild goat; that it is not a horned animal;

that it is not shy; that it does not avoid human society;

and that there is no peril in hunting it.  The chamois is

a black or brown creature no bigger than a mustard seed;

you do not have to go after it, it comes after you;

it arrives in vast herds and skips and scampers all over

your body, inside your clothes; thus it is not shy,

but extremely sociable; it is not afraid of man, on the

contrary, it will attack him; its bite is not dangerous,

but neither is it pleasant; its activity has not been

overstated --if you try to put your finger on it,

it will skip a thousand times its own length at one jump,

and no eye is sharp enough to see where it lights.

A great deal of romantic nonsense has been written

about the Swiss chamois and the perils of hunting it,

whereas the truth is that even women and children

hunt it, and fearlessly; indeed, everybody hunts it;

the hunting is going on all the time, day and night,

in bed and out of it.  It is poetic foolishness to hunt

it with a gun; very few people do that; there is not

one man in a million who can hit it with a gun.

It is much easier to catch it that it is to shoot it,

and only the experienced chamois-hunter can do either.

Another common piece of exaggeration is that about the

"scarcity" of the chamois.  It is the reverse of scarce.

Droves of one hundred million chamois are not unusual

in the Swiss hotels.  Indeed, they are so numerous

as to be a great pest.  The romancers always dress up

the chamois-hunter in a fanciful and picturesque costume,

whereas the best way to hut this game is to do it without

any costume at all.  The article of commerce called

chamois-skin is another fraud; nobody could skin a chamois,

it is too small.  The creature is a humbug in every way,

and everything which has been written about it is

sentimental exaggeration.  It was no pleasure to me to find

the chamois out, for he had been one of my pet illusions;

all my life it had been my dream to see him in his native

wilds some day, and engage in the adventurous sport

of chasing him from cliff to cliff.  It is no pleasure

to me to expose him, now, and destroy the reader's delight

in him and respect for him, but still it must be done,

for when an honest writer discovers an imposition it

is his simple duty to strip it bare and hurl it down

from its place of honor, no matter who suffers by it;

any other course would render him unworthy of the public

confidence.



Lucerne is a charming place.  It begins at the water's edge,

with a fringe of hotels, and scrambles up and spreads

itself over two or three sharp hills in a crowded,

disorderly, but picturesque way, offering to the eye

a heaped-up confusion of red roofs, quaint gables,

dormer windows, toothpick steeples, with here and there

a bit of ancient embattled wall bending itself over

the ridges, worm-fashion, and here and there an old square

tower of heavy masonry.  And also here and there a town

clock with only one hand--a hand which stretches across

the dial and has no joint in it; such a clock helps out

the picture, but you cannot tell the time of day by it.

Between the curving line of hotels and the lake is a broad

avenue with lamps and a double rank of low shade trees.

The lake-front is walled with masonry like a pier,

and has a railing, to keep people from walking overboard.

All day long the vehicles dash along the avenue, and nurses,

children, and tourists sit in the shade of the trees,

or lean on the railing and watch the schools of fishes

darting about in the clear water, or gaze out over the lake

at the stately border of snow-hooded mountains peaks.

Little pleasure steamers, black with people, are coming

and going all the time; and everywhere one sees young

girls and young men paddling about in fanciful rowboats,

or skimming along by the help of sails when there is any wind.

The front rooms of the hotels have little railed balconies,

where one may take his private luncheon in calm,

cool comfort and look down upon this busy and pretty

scene and enjoy it without having to do any of the work

connected with it.



Most of the people, both male and female, are in walking

costume, and carry alpenstocks.  Evidently, it is not

considered safe to go about in Switzerland, even in town,

without an alpenstock.  If the tourist forgets and

comes down to breakfast without his alpenstock he goes

back and gets it, and stands it up in the corner.

When his touring in Switzerland is finished, he does not

throw that broomstick away, but lugs it home with him,

to the far corners of the earth, although this costs him

more trouble and bother than a baby or a courier could.

You see, the alpenstock is his trophy; his name

is burned upon it; and if he has climbed a hill,

or jumped a brook, or traversed a brickyard with it,

he has the names of those places burned upon it, too.

Thus it is his regimental flag, so to speak, and bears

the record of his achievements.  It is worth three francs

when he buys it, but a bonanza could not purchase it

after his great deeds have been inscribed upon it.

There are artisans all about Switzerland whose trade it is

to burn these things upon the alpenstock of the tourist.

And observe, a man is respected in Switzerland according

to his alpenstock.  I found I could get no attention there,

while I carried an unbranded one.  However, branding is

not expected, so I soon remedied that.  The effect

upon the next detachment of tourists was very marked.

I felt repaid for my trouble.



Half of the summer horde in Switzerland is made up of

English people; the other half is made up of many nationalities,

the Germans leading and the Americans coming next.

The Americans were not as numerous as I had expected

they would be.



The seven-thirty table d'ho^te at the great Schweitzerhof

furnished a mighty array and variety of nationalities,

but it offered a better opportunity to observe costumes

than people, for the multitude sat at immensely long tables,

and therefore the faces were mainly seen in perspective;

but the breakfasts were served at small round tables,

and then if one had the fortune to get a table in the

midst of the assemblage he could have as many faces

to study as he could desire.  We used to try to guess out

the nationalities, and generally succeeded tolerably well.

Sometimes we tried to guess people's names; but that was

a failure; that is a thing which probably requires a good

deal of practice.  We presently dropped it and gave our

efforts to less difficult particulars.  One morning I

said:



"There is an American party."



Harris said:



"Yes--but name the state."



I named one state, Harris named another.  We agreed upon

one thing, however--that the young girl with the party

was very beautiful, and very tastefully dressed.

But we disagreed as to her age.  I said she was eighteen,

Harris said she was twenty.  The dispute between us

waxed warm, and I finally said, with a pretense of being

in earnest:



"Well, there is one way to settle the matter--I will go

and ask her."



Harris said, sarcastically, "Certainly, that is the thing

to do.  All you need to do is to use the common formula

over here: go and say, 'I'm an American!' Of course she

will be glad to see you."



Then he hinted that perhaps there was no great danger

of my venturing to speak to her.



I said, "I was only talking--I didn't intend to approach her,

but I see that you do not know what an intrepid person

I am.  I am not afraid of any woman that walks.

I will go and speak to this young girl."



The thing I had in my mind was not difficult.

I meant to address her in the most respectful way and ask

her to pardon me if her strong resemblance to a former

acquaintance of mine was deceiving me; and when she should

reply that the name I mentioned was not the name she bore,

I meant to beg pardon again, most respectfully, and retire.

There would be no harm done.  I walked to her table,

bowed to the gentleman, then turned to her and was about

to begin my little speech when she exclaimed:



"I KNEW I wasn't mistaken--I told John it was you!

John said it probably wasn't, but I knew I was right.

I said you would recognize me presently and come over;

and I'm glad you did, for I shouldn't have felt much flattered

if you had gone out of this room without recognizing me.

Sit down, sit down--how odd it is--you are the last person I

was ever expecting to see again."



This was a stupefying surprise.  It took my wits

clear away, for an instant.  However, we shook hands

cordially all around, and I sat down.  But truly this

was the tightest place I ever was in.  I seemed to vaguely

remember the girl's face, now, but I had no idea where I

had seen it before, or what named belonged with it.

I immediately tried to get up a diversion about Swiss scenery,

to keep her from launching into topics that might

betray that I did not know her, but it was of no use,

she went right along upon matters which interested her more:



"Oh dear, what a night that was, when the sea washed

the forward boats away--do you remember it?"



"Oh, DON'T I!" said I--but I didn't. I wished the sea

had washed the rudder and the smoke-stack and the captain

away--then I could have located this questioner.



"And don't you remember how frightened poor Mary was,

and how she cried?"



"Indeed I do!" said I. "Dear me, how it all comes back!"



I fervently wished it WOULD come back--but my memory was

a blank.  The wise way would have been to frankly own up;

but I could not bring myself to do that, after the young

girl had praised me so for recognizing her; so I went on,

deeper and deeper into the mire, hoping for a chance clue

but never getting one.  The Unrecognizable continued,

with vivacity:



"Do you know, George married Mary, after all?"



"Why, no! Did he?"



"Indeed he did.  He said he did not believe she was half

as much to blame as her father was, and I thought he

was right.  Didn't you?"



"Of course he was.  It was a perfectly plain case.

I always said so."



"Why, no you didn't!--at least that summer."



"Oh, no, not that summer.  No, you are perfectly right

about that.  It was the following winter that I said it."



"Well, as it turned out, Mary was not in the least

to blame --it was all her father's fault--at least

his and old Darley's."



It was necessary to say something--so I said:



"I always regarded Darley as a troublesome old thing."



"So he was, but then they always had a great affection

for him, although he had so many eccentricities.

You remember that when the weather was the least cold,

he would try to come into the house."



I was rather afraid to proceed.  Evidently Darley wa not

a man--he must be some other kind of animal--possibly

a dog, maybe an elephant.  However, tails are common

to all animals, so I ventured to say:



"And what a tail he had!"



"ONE! He had a thousand!"



This was bewildering.  I did not quite know what to say,

so I only said:



"Yes, he WAS rather well fixed in the matter of tails."



"For a negro, and a crazy one at that, I should say he was,"

said she.



It was getting pretty sultry for me.  I said to myself,

"Is it possible she is going to stop there, and wait for

me to speak? If she does, the conversation is blocked.

A negro with a thousand tails is a topic which a person

cannot talk upon fluently and instructively without more

or less preparation.  As to diving rashly into such a

vast subject--"



But here, to my gratitude, she interrupted my thoughts

by saying:



"Yes, when it came to tales of his crazy woes, there was

simply no end to them if anybody would listen.  His own

quarters were comfortable enough, but when the weather

was cold, the family were sure to have his company--nothing

could keep him out of the house.  But they always bore it

kindly because he had saved Tom's life, years before.

You remember Tom?



"Oh, perfectly.  Fine fellow he was, too."



"Yes he was.  And what a pretty little thing his child was!"



"You may well say that.  I never saw a prettier child."



"I used to delight to pet it and dandle it and play

with it."



"So did I."



"You named it.  What WAS that name? I can't call it

to mind."



It appeared to me that the ice was getting pretty

thin, here.  I would have given something to know

what the child's was.  However, I had the good luck

to think of a name that would fit either sex--so I brought it

out:



"I named it Frances."



"From a relative, I suppose? But you named the one that died,

too--one that I never saw.  What did you call that one?"



I was out of neutral names, but as the child was dead

and she had never seen it, I thought I might risk a name

for it and trust to luck.  Therefore I said:



"I called that one Thomas Henry."



She said, musingly:



"That is very singular ... very singular."



I sat still and let the cold sweat run down.  I was

in a good deal of trouble, but I believed I could worry

through if she wouldn't ask me to name any more children.

I wondered where the lightning was going to strike next.

She was still ruminating over that last child's title,

but presently she said:



"I have always been sorry you were away at the time--I

would have had you name my child."



"YOUR child! Are you married?"



"I have been married thirteen years."



"Christened, you mean."



`"No, married.  The youth by your side is my son."



"It seems incredible--even impossible.  I do not mean

any harm by it, but would you mind telling me if you

are any over eighteen?--that is to say, will you tell

me how old you are?"



"I was just nineteen the day of the storm we were

talking about.  That was my birthday."



That did not help matters, much, as I did not know

the date of the storm.  I tried to think of some

non-committal thing to say, to keep up my end of the talk,

and render my poverty in the matter of reminiscences

as little noticeable as possible, but I seemed to be

about out of non-committal things.  I was about to say,

"You haven't changed a bit since then"--but that was risky.

I thought of saying, "You have improved ever so much

since then"--but that wouldn't answer, of course.

I was about to try a shy at the weather, for a saving change,

when the girl slipped in ahead of me and said:



"How I have enjoyed this talk over those happy old times--

haven't you?"



"I never have spent such a half-hour in all my life before!"

said I, with emotion; and I could have added, with a

near approach to truth, "and I would rather be scalped

than spend another one like it." I was holily grateful

to be through with the ordeal, and was about to make

my good-bys and get out, when the girl said:



"But there is one thing that is ever so puzzling to me."



"Why, what is that?"



"That dead child's name.  What did you say it was?"



Here was another balmy place to be in: I had forgotten the

child's name; I hadn't imagined it would be needed again.

However, I had to pretend to know, anyway, so I said:



"Joseph William."



The youth at my side corrected me, and said:



"No, Thomas Henry."



I thanked him--in words--and said, with trepidation:



"O yes--I was thinking of another child that I named--I

have named a great many, and I get them confused--this

one was named Henry Thompson--"



"Thomas Henry," calmly interposed the boy.



I thanked him again--strictly in words--and stammered

out:



"Thomas Henry--yes, Thomas Henry was the poor child's name.

I named him for Thomas--er--Thomas Carlyle, the great author,

you know--and Henry--er--er--Henry the Eight.  The parents

were very grateful to have a child named Thomas Henry."



"That makes it more singular than ever," murmured my

beautiful friend.



"Does it? Why?"



"Because when the parents speak of that child now,

they always call it Susan Amelia."



That spiked my gun.  I could not say anything.  I was entirely

out of verbal obliquities; to go further would be to lie,

and that I would not do; so I simply sat still and suffered

--sat mutely and resignedly there, and sizzled--for I

was being slowly fried to death in my own blushes.

Presently the enemy laughed a happy laugh and said:



"I HAVE enjoyed this talk over old times, but you have not.

I saw very soon that you were only pretending to know me,

and so as I had wasted a compliment on you in the beginning,

I made up my mind to punish you.  And I have succeeded

pretty well.  I was glad to see that you knew George and Tom

and Darley, for I had never heard of them before and therefore

could not be sure that you had; and I was glad to learn

the names of those imaginary children, too.  One can get

quite a fund of information out of you if one goes at

it cleverly.  Mary and the storm, and the sweeping away

of the forward boats, were facts--all the rest was fiction.

Mary was my sister; her full name was Mary ------. NOW

do you remember me?"



"Yes," I said, "I do remember you now; and you are as

hard-headed as you were thirteen years ago in that ship,

else you wouldn't have punished me so.  You haven't

change your nature nor your person, in any way at all;

you look as young as you did then, you are just as beautiful

as you were then, and you have transmitted a deal

of your comeliness to this fine boy.  There--if that

speech moves you any, let's fly the flag of truce,

with the understanding that I am conquered and confess it."



All of which was agreed to and accomplished, on the spot.

When I went back to Harris, I said:



"Now you see what a person with talent and address can do."



"Excuse me, I see what a person of colossal ignorance and

simplicity can do.  The idea of your going and intruding

on a party of strangers, that way, and talking for half

an hour; why I never heard of a man in his right mind

doing such a thing before.  What did you say to them?"



I never said any harm.  I merely asked the girl what her

name was."



"I don't doubt it.  Upon my word I don't. I think you

were capable of it.  It was stupid in me to let you go

over there and make such an exhibition of yourself.

But you know I couldn't really believe you would do such

an inexcusable thing.  What will those people think

of us? But how did you say it?--I mean the manner of it.

I hope you were not abrupt."



"No, I was careful about that.  I said, 'My friend and I

would like to know what your name is, if you don't mind.'"



"No, that was not abrupt.  There is a polish about it that

does you infinite credit.  And I am glad you put me in;

that was a delicate attention which I appreciate at its

full value.  What did she do?"



"She didn't do anything in particular.  She told me

her name."



"Simply told you her name.  Do you mean to say she did

not show any surprise?"



"Well, now I come to think, she did show something;

maybe it was surprise; I hadn't thought of that--I took

it for gratification."



"Oh, undoubtedly you were right; it must have been gratification;

it could not be otherwise than gratifying to be assaulted

by a stranger with such a question as that.  Then what did you

do?"



"I offered my hand and the party gave me a shake."



"I saw it! I did not believe my own eyes, at the time.

Did the gentleman say anything about cutting your throat?"



"No, they all seemed glad to see me, as far as I could judge."



"And do you know, I believe they were.  I think they said

to themselves, 'Doubtless this curiosity has got away from

his keeper--let us amuse ourselves with him.' There is

no other way of accounting for their facile docility.

You sat down.  Did they ASK you to sit down?"



"No, they did not ask me, but I suppose they did not think

of it."



"You have an unerring instinct.  What else did you do?

What did you talk about?"



"Well, I asked the girl how old she was."



"UNdoubtedly. Your delicacy is beyond praise.  Go on,

go on--don't mind my apparent misery--I always look

so when I am steeped in a profound and reverent joy.

Go on--she told you her age?"



"Yes, she told me her age, and all about her mother,

and her grandmother, and her other relations, and all

about herself."



"Did she volunteer these statistics?"



"No, not exactly that.  I asked the questions and she

answered them."



"This is divine.  Go on--it is not possible that you

forgot to inquire into her politics?"



"No, I thought of that.  She is a democrat, her husband

is a republican, and both of them are Baptists."



"Her husband? Is that child married?"



"She is not a child.  She is married, and that is her

husband who is there with her."



"Has she any children."



"Yes--seven and a half."



"That is impossible."



"No, she has them.  She told me herself."



"Well, but seven and a HALF? How do you make out the half?

Where does the half come in?"



"There is a child which she had by another husband--

not this one but another one--so it is a stepchild,

and they do not count in full measure."



"Another husband? Has she another husband?"



"Yes, four.  This one is number four."



"I don't believe a word of it.  It is impossible,

upon its face.  Is that boy there her brother?"



"No, that is her son.  He is her youngest.  He is not

as old as he looked; he is only eleven and a half."



"These things are all manifestly impossible.  This is a

wretched business.  It is a plain case: they simply took

your measure, and concluded to fill you up.  They seem

to have succeeded.  I am glad I am not in the mess;

they may at least be charitable enough to think there

ain't a pair of us.  Are they going to stay here long?"



"No, they leave before noon."



"There is one man who is deeply grateful for that.

How did you find out? You asked, I suppose?"



"No, along at first I inquired into their plans, in a

general way, and they said they were going to be here

a week, and make trips round about; but toward the end

of the interview, when I said you and I would tour around

with them with pleasure, and offered to bring you over

and introduce you, they hesitated a little, and asked

if you were from the same establishment that I was.

I said you were, and then they said they had changed

their mind and considered it necessary to start at once

and visit a sick relative in Siberia."



"Ah, me, you struck the summit! You struck the loftiest

altitude of stupidity that human effort has ever reached.

You shall have a monument of jackasses' skulls as high

as the Strasburg spire if you die before I do.

They wanted to know I was from the same 'establishment'

that you hailed from, did they? What did they mean by

'establishment'?"



"I don't know; it never occurred to me to ask."



"Well _I_ know.  they meant an asylum--an IDIOT asylum,

do you understand? So they DO think there's a pair of us,

after all.  Now what do you think of yourself?"



"Well, I don't know.  I didn't know I was doing any harm;

I didn't MEAN to do any harm.  They were very nice people,

and they seemed to like me."



Harris made some rude remarks and left for his bedroom--

to break some furniture, he said.  He was a singularly

irascible man; any little thing would disturb his temper.



I had been well scorched by the young woman, but no matter,

I took it out on Harris.  One should always "get even"

in some way, else the sore place will go on hurting.







CHAPTER XXVI

[The Nest of the Cuckoo-clock]



The Hofkirche is celebrated for its organ concerts.

All summer long the tourists flock to that church about six

o'clock in the evening, and pay their franc, and listen

to the noise.  They don't stay to hear all of it, but get up

and tramp out over the sounding stone floor, meeting late

comers who tramp in in a sounding and vigorous way.

This tramping back and forth is kept up nearly all the time,

and is accented by the continuous slamming of the door,

and the coughing and barking and sneezing of the crowd.

Meantime, the big organ is booming and crashing and

thundering away, doing its best to prove that it is

the biggest and best organ in Europe, and that a tight

little box of a church is the most favorable place

to average and appreciate its powers in.  It is true,

there were some soft and merciful passages occasionally,

but the tramp-tramp of the tourists only allowed one to get

fitful glimpses of them, so to speak.  Then right away

the organist would let go another avalanche.



The commerce of Lucerne consists mainly in gimcrackery of the

souvenir sort; the shops are packed with Alpine crystals,

photographs of scenery, and wooden and ivory carvings.

I will not conceal the fact that miniature figures of the

Lion of Lucerne are to be had in them.  Millions of them.

But they are libels upon him, every one of them.

There is a subtle something about the majestic pathos

of the original which the copyist cannot get.  Even the sun

fails to get it; both the photographer and the carver give

you a dying lion, and that is all.  The shape is right,

the attitude is right, the proportions are right, but that

indescribable something which makes the Lion of Lucerne

the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world,

is wanting.



The Lion lies in his lair in the perpendicular face of a low

cliff--for he is carved from the living rock of the cliff.

His size is colossal, his attitude is noble.  How head

is bowed, the broken spear is sticking in his shoulder,

his protecting paw rests upon the lilies of France.

Vines hang down the cliff and wave in the wind, and a clear

stream trickles from above and empties into a pond at the base,

and in the smooth surface of the pond the lion is mirrored,

among the water-lilies.



Around about are green trees and grass.  The place is

a sheltered, reposeful woodland nook, remote from noise

and stir and confusion--and all this is fitting, for lions

do die in such places, and not on granite pedestals

in public squares fenced with fancy iron railings.

The Lion of Lucerne would be impressive anywhere,

but nowhere so impressive as where he is.



Martyrdom is the luckiest fate that can befall some people.

Louis XVI did not die in his bed, consequently history is

very gentle with him; she is charitable toward his failings,

and she finds in him high virtues which are not usually

considered to be virtues when they are lodged in kings.

She makes him out to be a person with a meek and modest

spirit, the heart of a female saint, and a wrong head.

None of these qualities are kingly but the last.

Taken together they make a character which would have fared

harshly at the hands of history if its owner had had the ill

luck to miss martyrdom.  With the best intentions to do

the right thing, he always managed to do the wrong one.

Moreover, nothing could get the female saint out of him.

He knew, well enough, that in national emergencies he must

not consider how he ought to act, as a man, but how he

ought to act as a king; so he honestly tried to sink

the man and be the king--but it was a failure, he only

succeeded in being the female saint.  He was not instant

in season, but out of season.  He could not be persuaded

to do a thing while it could do any good--he was iron,

he was adamant in his stubbornness then--but as soon as

the thing had reached a point where it would be positively

harmful to do it, do it he would, and nothing could

stop him.  He did not do it because it would be harmful,

but because he hoped it was not yet too late to achieve

by it the good which it would have done if applied earlier.

His comprehension was always a train or two behindhand.

If a national toe required amputating, he could not see

that it needed anything more than poulticing; when others

saw that the mortification had reached the knee, he first

perceived that the toe needed cutting off--so he cut it off;

and he severed the leg at the knee when others saw that the

disease had reached the thigh.  He was good, and honest,

and well meaning, in the matter of chasing national diseases,

but he never could overtake one.  As a private man,

he would have been lovable; but viewed as a king, he was

strictly contemptible.



His was a most unroyal career, but the most pitiable

spectacle in it was his sentimental treachery to his

Swiss guard on that memorable 10th of August, when he

allowed those heroes to be massacred in his cause,

and forbade them to shed the "sacred French blood"

purporting to be flowing in the veins of the red-capped

mob of miscreants that was raging around the palace.

He meant to be kingly, but he was only the female saint

once more.  Some of his biographers think that upon this

occasion the spirit of Saint Louis had descended upon him.

It must have found pretty cramped quarters.  If Napoleon

the First had stood in the shoes of Louis XVI that day,

instead of being merely a casual and unknown looker-on,

there would be no Lion of Lucerne, now, but there would

be a well-stocked Communist graveyard in Paris which would

answer just as well to remember the 10th of August by.



Martyrdom made a saint of Mary Queen of Scots three

hundred years ago, and she has hardly lost all of her

saintship yet.  Martyrdom made a saint of the trivial

and foolish Marie Antoinette, and her biographers still

keep her fragrant with the odor of sanctity to this day,

while unconsciously proving upon almost every page they write

that the only calamitous instinct which her husband lacked,

she supplied--the instinct to root out and get rid of

an honest, able, and loyal official, wherever she found him.

The hideous but beneficent French Revolution would have

been deferred, or would have fallen short of completeness,

or even might not have happened at all, if Marie

Antoinette had made the unwise mistake of not being born.

The world owes a great deal to the French Revolution,

and consequently to its two chief promoters, Louis the

Poor in Spirit and his queen.



We did not buy any wooden images of the Lion, nor any ivory

or ebony or marble or chalk or sugar or chocolate ones,

or even any photographic slanders of him.  The truth is,

these copies were so common, so universal, in the shops

and everywhere, that they presently became as intolerable

to the wearied eye as the latest popular melody usually

becomes to the harassed ear.  In Lucerne, too, the wood

carvings of other sorts, which had been so pleasant to look

upon when one saw them occasionally at home, soon began

to fatigue us.  We grew very tired of seeing wooden quails

and chickens picking and struting around clock-faces,

and still more tired of seeing wooden images of the alleged

chamois skipping about wooden rocks, or lying upon them

in family groups, or peering alertly up from behind them.

The first day, I would have bought a hundred and fifty

of these clocks if I had the money--and I did buy three--

but on the third day the disease had run its course,

I had convalesced, and was in the market once more--trying

to sell.  However, I had no luck; which was just as well,

for the things will be pretty enough, no doubt, when I get

them home.



For years my pet aversion had been the cuckoo clock;

now here I was, at last, right in the creature's home;

so wherever I went that distressing "HOO'hoo! HOO'hoo!

HOO'hoo!" was always in my ears.  For a nervous man,

this was a fine state of things.  Some sounds are hatefuler

than others, but no sound is quite so inane, and silly,

and aggravating as the "HOO'hoo" of a cuckoo clock, I think.

I bought one, and am carrying it home to a certain person;

for I have always said that if the opportunity ever happened,

I would do that man an ill turn.  What I meant, was, that I

would break one of his legs, or something of that sort;

but in Lucerne I instantly saw that I could impair his mind.

That would be more lasting, and more satisfactory every way.

So I bought the cuckoo clock; and if I ever get home

with it, he is "my meat," as they say in the mines.

I thought of another candidate--a book-reviewer whom

I could name if I wanted to--but after thinking

it over, I didn't buy him a clock.  I couldn't injure

his mind.



We visited the two long, covered wooden bridges which span

the green and brilliant Reuss just below where it goes

plunging and hurrahing out of the lake.  These rambling,

sway-backed tunnels are very attractive things, with their

alcoved outlooks upon the lovely and inspiriting water.

They contain two or three hundred queer old pictures,

by old Swiss masters--old boss sign-painters, who flourished

before the decadence of art.



The lake is alive with fishes, plainly visible to the eye,

for the water is very clear.  The parapets in front of the

hotels were usually fringed with fishers of all ages.

One day I thought I would stop and see a fish caught.

The result brought back to my mind, very forcibly,

a circumstance which I had not thought of before for

twelve years.  This one:



THE MAN WHO PUT UP AT GADSBY'S



When my odd friend Riley and I were newspaper correspondents

in Washington, in the winter of '67, we were coming down

Pennsylvania Avenue one night, near midnight, in a driving

storm of snow, when the flash of a street-lamp fell upon a man

who was eagerly tearing along in the opposite direction.

This is lucky! You are Mr. Riley, ain't you?"



Riley was the most self-possessed and solemnly deliberate

person in the republic.  He stopped, looked his man

over from head to foot, and finally said:



"I am Mr. Riley.  Did you happen to be looking for me?"



"That's just what I was doing," said the man, joyously,

"and it's the biggest luck in the world that I've found you.

My name is Lykins.  I'm one of the teachers of the high

school--San Francisco.  As soon as I heard the San Francisco

postmastership was vacant, I made up my mind to get it--and here

I am."



"Yes," said Riley, slowly, "as you have remarked ...

Mr. Lykins ... here you are.  And have you got it?"



"Well, not exactly GOT it, but the next thing to it.

I've brought a petition, signed by the Superintendent

of Public Instruction, and all the teachers, and by more

than two hundred other people.  Now I want you, if you'll

be so good, to go around with me to the Pacific delegation,

for I want to rush this thing through and get along home."



"If the matter is so pressing, you will prefer that we

visit the delegation tonight," said Riley, in a voice

which had nothing mocking in it--to an unaccustomed ear.



"Oh, tonight, by all means! I haven't got any time to

fool around.  I want their promise before I go to bed--

I ain't the talking kind, I'm the DOING kind!"



"Yes ... you've come to the right place for that.

When did you arrive?"



"Just an hour ago."



"When are you intending to leave?"



"For New York tomorrow evening--for San Francisco

next morning."



"Just so....  What are you going to do tomorrow?"



"DO! Why, I've got to go to the President with the petition

and the delegation, and get the appointment, haven't I?"



"Yes ... very true ... that is correct.  And then what?"



"Executive session of the Senate at 2 P.M.--got to get

the appointment confirmed--I reckon you'll grant that?"



"Yes ... yes," said Riley, meditatively, "you are

right again.  Then you take the train for New York in

the evening, and the steamer for San Francisco next morning?"



"That's it--that's the way I map it out!"



Riley considered a while, and then said:



"You couldn't stay ... a day ... well, say two

days longer?"



"Bless your soul, no! It's not my style.  I ain't a man

to go fooling around--I'm a man that DOES things,

I tell you."



The storm was raging, the thick snow blowing in gusts.

Riley stood silent, apparently deep in a reverie,

during a minute or more, then he looked up and said:



"Have you ever heard about that man who put up at Gadsby's,

once? ... But I see you haven't."



He backed Mr. Lykins against an iron fence, buttonholed him,

fastened him with his eye, like the Ancient Mariner,

and proceeded to unfold his narrative as placidly

and peacefully as if we were all stretched comfortably

in a blossomy summer meadow instead of being persecuted

by a wintry midnight tempest:



"I will tell you about that man.  It was in Jackson's time.

Gadsby's was the principal hotel, then.  Well, this man

arrived from Tennessee about nine o'clock, one morning,

with a black coachman and a splendid four-horse carriage and

an elegant dog, which he was evidently fond of and proud of;

he drove up before Gadsby's, and the clerk and the landlord

and everybody rushed out to take charge of him, but he said,

'Never mind,' and jumped out and told the coachman

to wait--said he hadn't time to take anything to eat,

he only had a little claim against the government to collect,

would run across the way, to the Treasury, and fetch

the money, and then get right along back to Tennessee,

for he was in considerable of a hurry.



"Well, about eleven o'clock that night he came back

and ordered a bed and told them to put the horses

up--said he would collect the claim in the morning.

This was in January, you understand--January, 1834--

the 3d of January--Wednesday.



"Well, on the 5th of February, he sold the fine carriage,

and bought a cheap second-hand one--said it would answer

just as well to take the money home in, and he didn't care

for style.



"On the 11th of August he sold a pair of the fine horses--

said he'd often thought a pair was better than four,

to go over the rough mountain roads with where a body

had to be careful about his driving--and there wasn't

so much of his claim but he could lug the money home

with a pair easy enough.



"On the 13th of December he sold another horse--said

two warn't necessary to drag that old light vehicle

with--in fact, one could snatch it along faster than

was absolutely necessary, now that it was good solid

winter weather and the roads in splendid condition.



"On the 17th of February, 1835, he sold the old carriage

and bought a cheap second-hand buggy--said a buggy

was just the trick to skim along mushy, slushy early

spring roads with, and he had always wanted to try

a buggy on those mountain roads, anyway.



"On the 1st August he sold the buggy and bought the

remains of an old sulky--said he just wanted to see

those green Tennesseans stare and gawk when they saw

him come a-ripping along in a sulky--didn't believe

they'd ever heard of a sulky in their lives.



"Well, on the 29th of August he sold his colored

coachman--said he didn't need a coachman for a sulky--

wouldn't be room enough for two in it anyway--and,

besides, it wasn't every day that Providence sent a man

a fool who was willing to pay nine hundred dollars for

such a third-rate negro as that--been wanting to get

rid of the creature for years, but didn't like to THROW him away.





"Eighteen months later--that is to say, on the 15th

of February, 1837--he sold the sulky and bought

a saddle--said horseback-riding was what the doctor

had always recommended HIM to take, and dog'd if he

wanted to risk HIS neck going over those mountain roads

on wheels in the dead of winter, not if he knew himself.



"On the 9th of April he sold the saddle--said he wasn't

going to risk HIS life with any perishable saddle-girth

that ever was made, over a rainy, miry April road,

while he could ride bareback and know and feel he was

safe--always HAD despised to ride on a saddle, anyway.



"On the 24th of April he sold his horse--said 'I'm just

fifty-seven today, hale and hearty--it would be a PRETTY

howdy-do for me to be wasting such a trip as that and such

weather as this, on a horse, when there ain't anything

in the world so splendid as a tramp on foot through

the fresh spring woods and over the cheery mountains,

to a man that IS a man--and I can make my dog carry my

claim in a little bundle, anyway, when it's collected.

So tomorrow I'll be up bright and early, make my little

old collection, and mosey off to Tennessee, on my own

hind legs, with a rousing good-by to Gadsby's.'



"On the 22d of June he sold his dog--said 'Dern a dog,

anyway, where you're just starting off on a rattling bully

pleasure tramp through the summer woods and hills--perfect

nuisance--chases the squirrels, barks at everything,

goes a-capering and splattering around in the fords--

man can't get any chance to reflect and enjoy nature--

and I'd a blamed sight ruther carry the claim myself,

it's a mighty sight safer; a dog's mighty uncertain

in a financial way- -always noticed it--well, GOOD-by,

boys--last call--I'm off for Tennessee with a good

leg and a gay heart, early in the morning.'"



There was a pause and a silence--except the noise

of the wind and the pelting snow.  Mr. Lykins said,

impatiently:



"Well?"



Riley said:



"Well,--that was thirty years ago."



"Very well, very well--what of it?"



"I'm great friends with that old patriarch.  He comes

every evening to tell me good-by. I saw him an hour ago--

he's off for Tennessee early tomorrow morning--as usual;

said he calculated to get his claim through and be off

before night-owls like me have turned out of bed.

The tears were in his eyes, he was so glad he was going

to see his old Tennessee and his friends once more."



Another silent pause.  The stranger broke it:



"Is that all?"



"That is all."



"Well, for the TIME of night, and the KIND of night,

it seems to me the story was full long enough.  But what's

it all FOR?"



"Oh, nothing in particular."



"Well, where's the point of it?"



"Oh, there isn't any particular point to it.  Only, if you

are not in TOO much of a hurry to rush off to San Francisco

with that post-office appointment, Mr. Lykins, I'd advise

you to 'PUT UP AT GADSBY'S' for a spell, and take it easy.

Good-by. GOD bless you!"



So saying, Riley blandly turned on his heel and left

the astonished school-teacher standing there, a musing

and motionless snow image shining in the broad glow

of the street-lamp.



He never got that post-office.



To go back to Lucerne and its fishers, I concluded,

after about nine hours' waiting, that the man who proposes

to tarry till he sees something hook one of those well-fed

and experienced fishes will find it wisdom to "put up

at Gadsby's" and take it easy.  It is likely that a fish

has not been caught on that lake pier for forty years;

but no matter, the patient fisher watches his cork there

all the day long, just the same, and seems to enjoy it.

One may see the fisher-loafers just as thick and contented

and happy and patient all along the Seine at Paris,

but tradition says that the only thing ever caught there

in modern times is a thing they don't fish for at all--the

recent dog and the translated cat.







CHAPTER XXVII

[I Spare an Awful Bore]



Close by the Lion of Lucerne is what they call the

"Glacier Garden"--and it is the only one in the world.

It is on high ground.  Four or five years ago,

some workmen who were digging foundations for a house

came upon this interesting relic of a long-departed age.

Scientific men perceived in it a confirmation of their

theories concerning the glacial period; so through

their persuasions the little tract of ground was bought

and permanently protected against being built upon.

The soil was removed, and there lay the rasped and guttered

track which the ancient glacier had made as it moved

along upon its slow and tedious journey.  This track

was perforated by huge pot-shaped holes in the bed-rock,

formed by the furious washing-around in them of boulders

by the turbulent torrent which flows beneath all glaciers.

These huge round boulders still remain in the holes;

they and the walls of the holes are worn smooth by

the long-continued chafing which they gave each other

in those old days.  It took a mighty force to churn

these big lumps of stone around in that vigorous way.

The neighboring country had a very different shape,

at that time--the valleys have risen up and become hills,

since, and the hills have become valleys.  The boulders

discovered in the pots had traveled a great distance,

for there is no rock like them nearer than the distant

Rhone Glacier.



For some days we were content to enjoy looking at the blue

lake Lucerne and at the piled-up masses of snow-mountains

that border it all around--an enticing spectacle,

this last, for there is a strange and fascinating beauty

and charm about a majestic snow-peak with the sun blazing

upon it or the moonlight softly enriching it--but finally

we concluded to try a bit of excursioning around on

a steamboat, and a dash on foot at the Rigi.  Very well,

we had a delightful trip to Fluelen, on a breezy, sunny day.

Everybody sat on the upper deck, on benches, under an awning;

everybody talked, laughed, and exclaimed at the wonder scenery;

in truth, a trip on that lake is almost the perfection

of pleasuring.  The mountains were a never-ceasing marvel.

Sometimes they rose straight up out of the lake,

and towered aloft and overshadowed our pygmy steamer

with their prodigious bulk in the most impressive way.

Not snow-clad mountains, these, yet they climbed high

enough toward the sky to meet the clouds and veil their

foreheads in them.  They were not barren and repulsive,

but clothed in green, and restful and pleasant to the eye.

And they were so almost straight-up-and-down, sometimes,

that one could not imagine a man being able to keep

his footing upon such a surface, yet there are paths,

and the Swiss people go up and down them every day.



Sometimes one of these monster precipices had the slight

inclination of the huge ship-houses in dockyards--

then high aloft, toward the sky, it took a little

stronger inclination, like that of a mansard roof--and

perched on this dizzy mansard one's eye detected little

things like martin boxes, and presently perceived that

these were the dwellings of peasants--an airy place

for a home, truly.  And suppose a peasant should walk

in his sleep, or his child should fall out of the front

yard?--the friends would have a tedious long journey down

out of those cloud-heights before they found the remains.

And yet those far-away homes looked ever so seductive,

they were so remote from the troubled world, they dozed

in such an atmosphere of peace and dreams--surely no one

who has learned to live up there would ever want

to live on a meaner level.



We swept through the prettiest little curving arms

of the lake, among these colossal green walls,

enjoying new delights, always, as the stately panorama

unfolded itself before us and rerolled and hid itself

behind us; and now and then we had the thrilling surprise

of bursting suddenly upon a tremendous white mass like the

distant and dominating Jungfrau, or some kindred giant,

looming head and shoulders above a tumbled waste of lesser Alps.



Once, while I was hungrily taking in one of these surprises,

and doing my best to get all I possibly could of it while it

should last, I was interrupted by a young and care-free voice:



"You're an American, I think--so'm I."



He was about eighteen, or possibly nineteen; slender and

of medium height; open, frank, happy face; a restless

but independent eye; a snub nose, which had the air

of drawing back with a decent reserve from the silky

new-born mustache below it until it should be introduced;

a loosely hung jaw, calculated to work easily in the sockets.

He wore a low-crowned, narrow-brimmed straw hat,

with a broad blue ribbon around it which had a white

anchor embroidered on it in front; nobby short-tailed

coat, pantaloons, vest, all trim and neat and up with

the fashion; red-striped stockings, very low-quarter

patent-leather shoes, tied with black ribbon; blue ribbon

around his neck, wide-open collar; tiny diamond studs;

wrinkleless kids; projecting cuffs, fastened with large

oxidized silver sleeve-buttons, bearing the device

of a dog's face--English pug.  He carries a slim cane,

surmounted with an English pug's head with red glass eyes.

Under his arm he carried a German grammar--Otto's. His hair

was short, straight, and smooth, and presently when he turned

his head a moment, I saw that it was nicely parted behind.

He took a cigarette out of a dainty box, stuck it into

a meerschaum holder which he carried in a morocco case,

and reached for my cigar.  While he was lighting, I said:



"Yes--I am an American."



"I knew it--I can always tell them.  What ship did you

come over in?"



"HOLSATIA."



"We came in the BATAVIA--Cunard, you know.  What kind

of passage did you have?"



"Tolerably rough."



"So did we.  Captain said he'd hardly ever seen it rougher.

Where are you from?"



"New England."



"So'm I. I'm from New Bloomfield.  Anybody with you?"



"Yes--a friend."



"Our whole family's along.  It's awful slow, going around

alone--don't you think so?"



"Rather slow."



"Ever been over here before?"



"Yes."



"I haven't. My first trip.  But we've been all around--Paris

and everywhere.  I'm to enter Harvard next year.

Studying German all the time, now.  Can't enter till I

know German.  I know considerable French--I get along

pretty well in Paris, or anywhere where they speak French.

What hotel are you stopping at?"



"Schweitzerhof."



"No! is that so? I never see you in the reception-room.

I go to the reception-room a good deal of the time,

because there's so many Americans there.  I make lots

of acquaintances.  I know an American as soon as I see

him--and so I speak to him and make his acquaintance.

I like to be always making acquaintances--don't you?"



"Lord, yes!"



"You see it breaks up a trip like this, first rate.

I never got bored on a trip like this, if I can

make acquaintances and have somebody to talk to.

But I think a trip like this would be an awful bore,

if a body couldn't find anybody to get acquainted with

and talk to on a trip like this.  I'm fond of talking,

ain't you?



"Passionately."



"Have you felt bored, on this trip?"



"Not all the time, part of it."



"That's it!--you see you ought to go around and get acquainted,

and talk.  That's my way.  That's the way I always do--I

just go 'round, 'round, 'round and talk, talk, talk--I

never get bored.  You been up the Rigi yet?"



"No."



"Going?"



"I think so."



"What hotel you going to stop at?"



"I don't know.  Is there more than one?"



"Three. You stop at the Schreiber--you'll find it full

of Americans.  What ship did you say you came over in?"



"CITY OF ANTWERP."



"German, I guess.  You going to Geneva?"



"Yes."



"What hotel you going to stop at?"



"Hotel de l''Ecu de G'en`eve."



"Don't you do it! No Americans there! You stop at one

of those big hotels over the bridge--they're packed

full of Americans."



"But I want to practice my Arabic."



"Good gracious, do you speak Arabic?"



"Yes--well enough to get along."



"Why, hang it, you won't get along in Geneva--THEY don't

speak Arabic, they speak French.  What hotel are you

stopping at here?"



"Hotel Pension-Beaurivage."



"Sho, you ought to stop at the Schweitzerhof.  Didn't you

know the Schweitzerhof was the best hotel in Switzerland?--

look at your Baedeker."



"Yes, I know--but I had an idea there warn't any

Americans there."



"No Americans! Why, bless your soul, it's just alive with

them! I'm in the great reception-room most all the time.

I make lots of acquaintances there.  Not as many as I did

at first, because now only the new ones stop in there--

the others go right along through.  Where are you from?"



"Arkansaw."



"Is that so? I'm from New England--New Bloomfield's my town

when I'm at home.  I'm having a mighty good time today,

ain't you?"



"Divine."



"That's what I call it.  I like this knocking around,

loose and easy, and making acquaintances and talking.

I know an American, soon as I see him; so I go and speak

to him and make his acquaintance.  I ain't ever bored,

on a trip like this, if I can make new acquaintances and talk.

I'm awful fond of talking when I can get hold of the right

kind of a person, ain't you?"



"I prefer it to any other dissipation."



"That's my notion, too.  Now some people like to take

a book and sit down and read, and read, and read, or moon

around yawping at the lake or these mountains and things,

but that ain't my way; no, sir, if they like it, let 'em do it,

I don't object; but as for me, talking's what _I_ like.

You been up the Rigi?"



"Yes."



"What hotel did you stop at?"



"Schreiber."



"That's the place!--I stopped there too.  FULL of Americans,

WASN'T it? It always is--always is.  That's what they say.

Everybody says that.  What ship did you come over in?"



"VILLE DE PARIS."



"French, I reckon.  What kind of a passage did ... excuse me

a minute, there's some Americans I haven't seen before."



And away he went.  He went uninjured, too--I had the murderous

impulse to harpoon him in the back with my alpenstock,

but as I raised the weapon the disposition left me;

I found I hadn't the heart to kill him, he was such

a joyous, innocent, good-natured numbskull.



Half an hour later I was sitting on a bench inspecting,

with strong interest, a noble monolith which we were

skimming by--a monolith not shaped by man, but by Nature's

free great hand--a massy pyramidal rock eighty feet high,

devised by Nature ten million years ago against the day

when a man worthy of it should need it for his monument.

The time came at last, and now this grand remembrancer

bears Schiller's name in huge letters upon its face.

Curiously enough, this rock was not degraded or defiled

in any way.  It is said that two years ago a stranger let

himself down from the top of it with ropes and pulleys,

and painted all over it, in blue letters bigger than those in

Schiller's name, these words:



"Try Sozodont;" "Buy Sun Stove Polish;" "Helmbold's Buchu;"

"Try Benzaline for the Blood."



He was captured and it turned out that he was an American.

Upon his trial the judge said to him:



"You are from a land where any insolent that wants to is

privileged to profane and insult Nature, and, through her,

Nature's God, if by so doing he can put a sordid penny

in his pocket.  But here the case is different.  Because you

are a foreigner and ignorant, I will make your sentence light;

if you were a native I would deal strenuously with you.

Hear and obey: --You will immediately remove every trace

of your offensive work from the Schiller monument; you pay

a fine of ten thousand francs; you will suffer two years'

imprisonment at hard labor; you will then be horsewhipped,

tarred and feathered, deprived of your ears, ridden on a

rail to the confines of the canton, and banished forever.

The severest penalties are omitted in your case--not as

a grace to you, but to that great republic which had the

misfortune to give you birth."



The steamer's benches were ranged back to back across

the deck.  My back hair was mingling innocently with

the back hair of a couple of ladies.  Presently they

were addressed by some one and I overheard this conversation:



"You are Americans, I think? So'm I."



"Yes--we are Americans."



"I knew it--I can always tell them.  What ship did you

come over in?"



"CITY OF CHESTER."



"Oh, yes--Inman line.  We came in the BATAVIA--Cunard

you know.  What kind of a passage did you have?"



"Pretty fair."



"That was luck.  We had it awful rough.  Captain said

he'd hardly seen it rougher.  Where are you from?"



"New Jersey."



"So'm I. No--I didn't mean that; I'm from New England.

New Bloomfield's my place.  These your children?--belong

to both of you?"



"Only to one of us; they are mine; my friend is not married."



"Single, I reckon? So'm I. Are you two ladies traveling alone?"



"No--my husband is with us."



"Our whole family's along.  It's awful slow, going around

alone--don't you think so?"



"I suppose it must be."



"Hi, there's Mount Pilatus coming in sight again.

Named after Pontius Pilate, you know, that shot the apple

off of William Tell's head.  Guide-book tells all about it,

they say.  I didn't read it--an American told me.  I don't

read when I'm knocking around like this, having a good time.

Did you ever see the chapel where William Tell used

to preach?"



"I did not know he ever preached there."



"Oh, yes, he did.  That American told me so.  He don't

ever shut up his guide-book. He knows more about this lake

than the fishes in it.  Besides, they CALL it 'Tell's

Chapel'--you know that yourself.  You ever been over here

before?"



"Yes."



"I haven't. It's my first trip.  But we've been all around

--Paris and everywhere.  I'm to enter Harvard next year.

Studying German all the time now.  Can't enter till I

know German.  This book's Otto's grammar.  It's a mighty

good book to get the ICH HABE GEHABT HABEN's out of.

But I don't really study when I'm knocking around this way.

If the notion takes me, I just run over my little

old ICH HAVE GEHABT, DU HAST GEHABT, ER HAT GEHABT,

WIR HABEN GEHABT, IHR HABEN GEHABT, SIE HABEN GEHABT

--kind of 'Now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep' fashion, you know,

and after that, maybe I don't buckle to it for three days.

It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is;

you want to take it in small doses, or first you know

your brains all run together, and you feel them sloshing

around in your head same as so much drawn butter.

But French is different; FRENCH ain't anything.  I ain't

any more afraid of French than a tramp's afraid of pie; I can

rattle off my little J'AI, TU AS, IL A, and the rest of it,

just as easy as a-b-c. I get along pretty well in Paris,

or anywhere where they speak French.  What hotel are you

stopping at?"



"The Schweitzerhof."



"No! is that so? I never see you in the big reception-room.

I go in there a good deal of the time, because there's

so many Americans there.  I make lots of acquaintances.

You been up the Rigi yet?"



"No."



"Going?"



"We think of it."



"What hotel you going to stop at?"



"I don't know."



"Well, then you stop at the Schreiber--it's full of Americans.

What ship did you come over in?"



"CITY OF CHESTER."



"Oh, yes, I remember I asked you that before.  But I

always ask everybody what ship they came over in, and so

sometimes I forget and ask again.  You going to Geneva?"



"Yes."



"What hotel you going to stop at?"



"We expect to stop in a pension."



"I don't hardly believe you'll like that; there's very few

Americans in the pensions.  What hotel are you stopping

at here?"



"The Schweitzerhof."



"Oh, yes.  I asked you that before, too.  But I always

ask everybody what hotel they're stopping at, and so I've

got my head all mixed up with hotels.  But it makes talk,

and I love to talk.  It refreshes me up so--don't it

you--on a trip like this?"



"Yes--sometimes."



"Well, it does me, too.  As long as I'm talking I never

feel bored--ain't that the way with you?"



"Yes--generally. But there are exception to the rule."



"Oh, of course.  _I_ don't care to talk to everybody, MYSELF.

If a person starts in to jabber-jabber-jabber about scenery,

and history, and pictures, and all sorts of tiresome things,

I get the fan-tods mighty soon.  I say 'Well, I must be going

now--hope I'll see you again'--and then I take a walk.  Where you

from?"



"New Jersey."



"Why, bother it all, I asked you THAT before, too.

Have you seen the Lion of Lucerne?"



"Not yet."



"Nor I, either.  But the man who told me about

Mount Pilatus says it's one of the things to see.

It's twenty-eight feet long.  It don't seem reasonable,

but he said so, anyway.  He saw it yesterday; said it

was dying, then, so I reckon it's dead by this time.

But that ain't any matter, of course they'll stuff it.

Did you say the children are yours--or HERS?"



"Mine."



"Oh, so you did.  Are you going up the ... no, I asked

you that.  What ship ... no, I asked you that, too.

What hotel are you ... no, you told me that.

Let me see ... um ....  Oh, what kind of voy ... no,

we've been over that ground, too.  Um ... um ... well,

I believe that is all.  BONJOUR--I am very glad to have

made your acquaintance, ladies.  GUTEN TAG."







CHAPTER XXVIII

[The Jodel and Its Native Wilds]



The Rigi-Kulm is an imposing Alpine mass, six thousand

feet high, which stands by itself, and commands a mighty

prospect of blue lakes, green valleys, and snowy mountains--

a compact and magnificent picture three hundred miles

in circumference.  The ascent is made by rail, or horseback,

or on foot, as one may prefer.  I and my agent panoplied

ourselves in walking-costume, one bright morning,

and started down the lake on the steamboat; we got ashore

at the village of Wa"ggis; three-quarters of an hour distant

from Lucerne.  This village is at the foot of the mountain.



We were soon tramping leisurely up the leafy mule-path,

and then the talk began to flow, as usual.  It was

twelve o'clock noon, and a breezy, cloudless day;

the ascent was gradual, and the glimpses, from under

the curtaining boughs, of blue water, and tiny sailboats,

and beetling cliffs, were as charming as glimpses of dreamland.

All the circumstances were perfect--and the anticipations,

too, for we should soon be enjoying, for the first time,

that wonderful spectacle, an Alpine sunrise--the object

of our journey.  There was (apparently) no real need

for hurry, for the guide-book made the walking-distance

from Wa"ggis to the summit only three hours and a quarter.

I say "apparently," because the guide-book had already

fooled us once--about the distance from Allerheiligen

to Oppenau--and for aught I knew it might be getting ready

to fool us again.  We were only certain as to the altitudes--

we calculated to find out for ourselves how many hours

it is from the bottom to the top.  The summit is six

thousand feet above the sea, but only forty-five hundred

feet above the lake.  When we had walked half an hour,

we were fairly into the swing and humor of the undertaking,

so we cleared for action; that is to say, we got a boy whom

we met to carry our alpenstocks and satchels and overcoats

and things for us; that left us free for business.

I suppose we must have stopped oftener to stretch out

on the grass in the shade and take a bit of a smoke

than this boy was used to, for presently he asked if it

had been our idea to hire him by the job, or by the year?

We told him he could move along if he was in a hurry.

He said he wasn't in such a very particular hurry,

but he wanted to get to the top while he was young.

We told him to clear out, then, and leave the things at

the uppermost hotel and say we should be along presently.

He said he would secure us a hotel if he could, but if they

were all full he would ask them to build another one

and hurry up and get the paint and plaster dry against

we arrived.  Still gently chaffing us, he pushed ahead,

up the trail, and soon disappeared.  By six o'clock we

were pretty high up in the air, and the view of lake

and mountains had greatly grown in breadth and interest.

We halted awhile at a little public house, where we

had bread and cheese and a quart or two of fresh milk,

out on the porch, with the big panorama all before us--and

then moved on again.



Ten minutes afterward we met a hot, red-faced man plunging

down the mountain, making mighty strides, swinging his

alpenstock ahead of him, and taking a grip on the ground

with its iron point to support these big strides.

He stopped, fanned himself with his hat, swabbed the

perspiration from his face and neck with a red handkerchief,

panted a moment or two, and asked how far to Wa"ggis.

I said three hours.  He looked surprised, and said:



"Why, it seems as if I could toss a biscuit into the lake

from here, it's so close by.  Is that an inn, there?"



I said it was.



"Well," said he, "I can't stand another three hours,

I've had enough today; I'll take a bed there."



I asked:



"Are we nearly to the top?"



"Nearly to the TOP?" Why, bless your soul, you haven't

really started, yet."



I said we would put up at the inn, too.  So we turned

back and ordered a hot supper, and had quite a jolly

evening of it with this Englishman.



The German landlady gave us neat rooms and nice beds,

and when I and my agent turned in, it was with the resolution

to be up early and make the utmost of our first Alpine sunrise.

But of course we were dead tired, and slept like policemen;

so when we awoke in the morning and ran to the window it

was already too late, because it was half past eleven.

It was a sharp disappointment.  However, we ordered

breakfast and told the landlady to call the Englishman,

but she said he was already up and off at daybreak--and

swearing like mad about something or other.  We could not

find out what the matter was.  He had asked the landlady

the altitude of her place above the level of the lake,

and she told him fourteen hundred and ninety-five feet.

That was all that was said; then he lost his temper.

He said that between ------fools and guide-books, a man

could acquire ignorance enough in twenty-four hours in a

country like this to last him a year.  Harris believed

our boy had been loading him up with misinformation;

and this was probably the case, for his epithet described

that boy to a dot.



We got under way about the turn of noon, and pulled out

for the summit again, with a fresh and vigorous step.

When we had gone about two hundred yards, and stopped

to rest, I glanced to the left while I was lighting my pipe,

and in the distance detected a long worm of black smoke

crawling lazily up the steep mountain.  Of course that was

the locomotive.  We propped ourselves on our elbows at once,

to gaze, for we had never seen a mountain railway yet.

Presently we could make out the train.  It seemed incredible

that that thing should creep straight up a sharp slant

like the roof of a house--but there it was, and it was doing

that very miracle.



In the course of a couple hours we reached a fine breezy

altitude where the little shepherd huts had big stones

all over their roofs to hold them down to the earth when

the great storms rage.  The country was wild and rocky

about here, but there were plenty of trees, plenty of moss,

and grass.



Away off on the opposite shore of the lake we could

see some villages, and now for the first time we could

observe the real difference between their proportions

and those of the giant mountains at whose feet they slept.

When one is in one of those villages it seems spacious,

and its houses seem high and not out of proportion to the

mountain that overhands them--but from our altitude,

what a change! The mountains were bigger and grander

than ever, as they stood there thinking their solemn

thoughts with their heads in the drifting clouds,

but the villages at their feet--when the painstaking

eye could trace them up and find them--were so reduced,

almost invisible, and lay so flat against the ground,

that the exactest simile I can devise is to compare

them to ant-deposits of granulated dirt overshadowed

by the huge bulk of a cathedral.  The steamboats skimming

along under the stupendous precipices were diminished

by distance to the daintiest little toys, the sailboats

and rowboats to shallops proper for fairies that keep

house in the cups of lilies and ride to court on the backs

of bumblebees.



Presently we came upon half a dozen sheep nibbling grass

in the spray of a stream of clear water that sprang

from a rock wall a hundred feet high, and all at once

our ears were startled with a melodious "Lul ...

l ... l l l llul-lul-LAhee-o-o-o!" pealing joyously

from a near but invisible source, and recognized that we

were hearing for the first time the famous Alpine JODEL

in its own native wilds.  And we recognized, also,

that it was that sort of quaint commingling of baritone

and falsetto which at home we call "Tyrolese warbling."



The jodeling (pronounced yOdling--emphasis on the O)

continued, and was very pleasant and inspiriting to hear.

Now the jodeler appeared--a shepherd boy of sixteen--

and in our gladness and gratitude we gave him a franc

to jodel some more.  So he jodeled and we listened.

We moved on, presently, and he generously jodeled us

out of sight.  After about fifteen minutes we came across

another shepherd boy who was jodeling, and gave him half

a franc to keep it up.  He also jodeled us out of sight.

After that, we found a jodeler every ten minutes;

we gave the first one eight cents, the second one

six cents, the third one four, the fourth one a penny,

contributed nothing to Nos.  5, 6, and 7, and during

the remainder of the day hired the rest of the jodelers,

at a franc apiece, not to jodel any more.  There is somewhat

too much of the jodeling in the Alps.



About the middle of the afternoon we passed through

a prodigious natural gateway called the Felsenthor,

formed by two enormous upright rocks, with a third lying

across the top.  There was a very attractive little

hotel close by, but our energies were not conquered yet,

so we went on.



Three hours afterward we came to the railway-track. It

was planted straight up the mountain with the slant

of a ladder that leans against a house, and it seemed

to us that man would need good nerves who proposed

to travel up it or down it either.



During the latter part of the afternoon we cooled our

roasting interiors with ice-cold water from clear streams,

the only really satisfying water we had tasted since we

left home, for at the hotels on the continent they

merely give you a tumbler of ice to soak your water in,

and that only modifies its hotness, doesn't make it cold.

Water can only be made cold enough for summer comfort by

being prepared in a refrigerator or a closed ice-pitcher.

Europeans say ice-water impairs digestion.  How do they

know?--they never drink any.



At ten minutes past six we reached the Kaltbad station,

where there is a spacious hotel with great verandas which

command a majestic expanse of lake and mountain scenery.

We were pretty well fagged out, now, but as we did

not wish to miss the Alpine sunrise, we got through our

dinner as quickly as possible and hurried off to bed.

It was unspeakably comfortable to stretch our weary limbs

between the cool, damp sheets.  And how we did sleep!--for

there is no opiate like Alpine pedestrianism.



In the morning we both awoke and leaped out of bed at the

same instant and ran and stripped aside the window-curtains;

but we suffered a bitter disappointment again: it

was already half past three in the afternoon.



We dressed sullenly and in ill spirits, each accusing

the other of oversleeping.  Harris said if we had brought

the courier along, as we ought to have done, we should

not have missed these sunrises.  I said he knew very well

that one of us would have to sit up and wake the courier;

and I added that we were having trouble enough to take

care of ourselves, on this climb, without having to take

care of a courier besides.



During breakfast our spirits came up a little, since we

found by this guide-book that in the hotels on the summit

the tourist is not left to trust to luck for his sunrise,

but is roused betimes by a man who goes through the halls

with a great Alpine horn, blowing blasts that would

raise the dead.  And there was another consoling thing:

the guide-book said that up there on the summit the guests

did not wait to dress much, but seized a red bed blanket

and sailed out arrayed like an Indian.  This was good;

this would be romantic; two hundred and fifty people

grouped on the windy summit, with their hair flying and

their red blankets flapping, in the solemn presence of the

coming sun, would be a striking and memorable spectacle.

So it was good luck, not ill luck, that we had missed

those other sunrises.



We were informed by the guide-book that we were now

3,228 feet above the level of the lake--therefore

full two-thirds of our journey had been accomplished.

We got away at a quarter past four, P.M.; a hundred yards

above the hotel the railway divided; one track went

straight up the steep hill, the other one turned square

off to the right, with a very slight grade.  We took

the latter, and followed it more than a mile, turned a

rocky corner, and came in sight of a handsome new hotel.

If we had gone on, we should have arrived at the summit,

but Harris preferred to ask a lot of questions--as usual,

of a man who didn't know anything--and he told us to go

back and follow the other route.  We did so.  We could ill

afford this loss of time.



We climbed and climbed; and we kept on climbing; we reached about

forty summits, but there was always another one just ahead.

It came on to rain, and it rained in dead earnest.

We were soaked through and it was bitter cold.  Next a

smoky fog of clouds covered the whole region densely,

and we took to the railway-ties to keep from getting lost.

Sometimes we slopped along in a narrow path on the left-hand

side of the track, but by and by when the fog blew as aside

a little and we saw that we were treading the rampart

of a precipice and that our left elbows were projecting

over a perfectly boundless and bottomless vacancy,

we gasped, and jumped for the ties again.



The night shut down, dark and drizzly and cold.

About eight in the evening the fog lifted and showed us

a well-worn path which led up a very steep rise to the left.

We took it, and as soon as we had got far enough from the

railway to render the finding it again an impossibility,

the fog shut down on us once more.



We were in a bleak, unsheltered place, now, and had

to trudge right along, in order to keep warm, though we

rather expected to go over a precipice, sooner or later.

About nine o'clock we made an important discovery--

that we were not in any path.  We groped around a while

on our hands and knees, but we could not find it;

so we sat down in the mud and the wet scant grass to wait.



We were terrified into this by being suddenly confronted

with a vast body which showed itself vaguely for an instant

and in the next instant was smothered in the fog again.

It was really the hotel we were after, monstrously magnified

by the fog, but we took it for the face of a precipice,

and decided not to try to claw up it.



We sat there an hour, with chattering teeth and quivering bodies,

and quarreled over all sorts of trifles, but gave most

of our attention to abusing each other for the stupidity

of deserting the railway-track. We sat with our backs

to the precipice, because what little wind there was

came from that quarter.  At some time or other the fog

thinned a little; we did not know when, for we were facing

the empty universe and the thinness could not show;

but at last Harris happened to look around, and there stood

a huge, dim, spectral hotel where the precipice had been.

One could faintly discern the windows and chimneys,

and a dull blur of lights.  Our first emotion was deep,

unutterable gratitude, our next was a foolish rage,

born of the suspicion that possibly the hotel had been

visible three-quarters of an hour while we sat there

in those cold puddles quarreling.



Yes, it was the Rigi-Kulm hotel--the one that occupies

the extreme summit, and whose remote little sparkle

of lights we had often seen glinting high aloft among

the stars from our balcony away down yonder in Lucerne.

The crusty portier and the crusty clerks gave us the surly

reception which their kind deal out in prosperous times,

but by mollifying them with an extra display of obsequiousness

and servility we finally got them to show us to the room

which our boy had engaged for us.



We got into some dry clothing, and while our supper was

preparing we loafed forsakenly through a couple of vast

cavernous drawing-rooms, one of which had a stove in it.

This stove was in a corner, and densely walled around

with people.  We could not get near the fire, so we moved

at large in the artic spaces, among a multitude of people

who sat silent, smileless, forlorn, and shivering--thinking

what fools they were to come, perhaps.  There were some

Americans and some Germans, but one could see that the

great majority were English.



We lounged into an apartment where there was a great crowd,

to see what was going on.  It was a memento-magazine.

The tourists were eagerly buying all sorts and styles of

paper-cutters, marked "Souvenir of the Rigi," with handles

made of the little curved horn of the ostensible chamois;

there were all manner of wooden goblets and such things,

similarly marked.  I was going to buy a paper-cutter, but I

believed I could remember the cold comfort of the Rigi-Kulm

without it, so I smothered the impulse.



Supper warmed us, and we went immediately to bed--but first,

as Mr. Baedeker requests all tourists to call his attention

to any errors which they may find in his guide-books, I

dropped him a line to inform him he missed it by just

about three days.  I had previously informed him of his

mistake about the distance from Allerheiligen to Oppenau,

and had also informed the Ordnance Depart of the German

government of the same error in the imperial maps.

I will add, here, that I never got any answer to those letters,

or any thanks from either of those sources; and, what is still

more discourteous, these corrections have not been made,

either in the maps or the guide-books. But I will write

again when I get time, for my letters may have miscarried.



We curled up in the clammy beds, and went to sleep without

rocking.

We were so sodden with fatigue that we never stirred nor

turned over till the blooming blasts of the Alpine horn

aroused us.  It may well be imagined that we did not lose

any time.  We snatched on a few odds and ends of clothing,

cocooned ourselves in the proper red blankets, and plunged

along the halls and out into the whistling wind bareheaded.

We saw a tall wooden scaffolding on the very peak

of the summit, a hundred yards away, and made for it.

We rushed up the stairs to the top of this scaffolding,

and stood there, above the vast outlying world, with hair

flying and ruddy blankets waving and cracking in the fierce

breeze.



"Fifteen minutes too late, at last!" said Harris,

in a vexed voice.  "The sun is clear above the horizon."



"No matter," I said, "it is a most magnificent spectacle,

and we will see it do the rest of its rising anyway."



In a moment we were deeply absorbed in the marvel before us,

and dead to everything else.  The great cloud-barred disk

of the sun stood just above a limitless expanse of tossing

white-caps--so to speak--a billowy chaos of massy mountain

domes and peaks draped in imperishable snow, and flooded

with an opaline glory of changing and dissolving splendors,

while through rifts in a black cloud-bank above the sun,

radiating lances of diamond dust shot to the zenith.

The cloven valleys of the lower world swam in a tinted

mist which veiled the ruggedness of their crags and ribs

and ragged forests, and turned all the forbidding region

into a soft and rich and sensuous paradise.



We could not speak.  We could hardly breathe.

We could only gaze in drunken ecstasy and drink in it.

Presently Harris exclaimed:



"Why--nation, it's going DOWN!"



Perfectly true.  We had missed the MORNING hornblow,

and slept all day.  This was stupefying.



Harris said:



"Look here, the sun isn't the spectacle--it's US--stacked

up here on top of this gallows, in these idiotic blankets,

and two hundred and fifty well-dressed men and women down

here gawking up at us and not caring a straw whether the sun

rises or sets, as long as they've got such a ridiculous

spectacle as this to set down in their memorandum-books.

They seem to be laughing their ribs loose, and there's

one girl there at appears to be going all to pieces.

I never saw such a man as you before.  I think you are

the very last possibility in the way of an ass."



"What have _I_ done?" I answered, with heat.



"What have you done?" You've got up at half past seven

o'clock in the evening to see the sun rise, that's what

you've done."



"And have you done any better, I'd like to know? I've

always used to get up with the lark, till I came under

the petrifying influence of your turgid intellect."



"YOU used to get up with the lark--Oh, no doubt--

you'll get up with the hangman one of these days.

But you ought to be ashamed to be jawing here like this,

in a red blanket, on a forty-foot scaffold on top

of the Alps.  And no end of people down here to boot;

this isn't any place for an exhibition of temper."



And so the customary quarrel went on.  When the sun

was fairly down, we slipped back to the hotel in the

charitable gloaming, and went to bed again.  We had

encountered the horn-blower on the way, and he had tried

to collect compensation, not only for announcing the sunset,

which we did see, but for the sunrise, which we had

totally missed; but we said no, we only took our solar

rations on the "European plan"--pay for what you get.

He promised to make us hear his horn in the morning,

if we were alive.







CHAPTER XXIX

[Looking West for Sunrise]



He kept his word.  We heard his horn and instantly got up.

It was dark and cold and wretched.  As I fumbled around

for the matches, knocking things down with my quaking hands,

I wished the sun would rise in the middle of the day,

when it was warm and bright and cheerful, and one

wasn't sleepy.  We proceeded to dress by the gloom of a

couple sickly candles, but we could hardly button anything,

our hands shook so.  I thought of how many happy people

there were in Europe, Asia, and America, and everywhere,

who were sleeping peacefully in their beds, and did not

have to get up and see the Rigi sunrise--people who did

not appreciate their advantage, as like as not, but would

get up in the morning wanting more boons of Providence.

While thinking these thoughts I yawned, in a rather ample way,

and my upper teeth got hitched on a nail over the door,

and while I was mounting a chair to free myself, Harris drew

the window-curtain, and said:



"Oh, this is luck! We shan't have to go out at all--

yonder are the mountains, in full view."



That was glad news, indeed.  It made us cheerful right away.

One could see the grand Alpine masses dimly outlined

against the black firmament, and one or two faint stars

blinking through rifts in the night.  Fully clothed,

and wrapped in blankets, and huddled ourselves up,

by the window, with lighted pipes, and fell into chat,

while we waited in exceeding comfort to see how an Alpine

sunrise was going to look by candlelight.  By and by

a delicate, spiritual sort of effulgence spread itself

by imperceptible degrees over the loftiest altitudes of

the snowy wastes--but there the effort seemed to stop.

I said, presently:



"There is a hitch about this sunrise somewhere.

It doesn't seem to go.  What do you reckon is the matter

with it?"



"I don't know.  It appears to hang fire somewhere.

I never saw a sunrise act like that before.  Can it be

that the hotel is playing anything on us?"



"Of course not.  The hotel merely has a property interest

in the sun, it has nothing to do with the management of it.

It is a precarious kind of property, too; a succession

of total eclipses would probably ruin this tavern.

Now what can be the matter with this sunrise?"



Harris jumped up and said:



"I've got it! I know what's the matter with it! We've

been looking at the place where the sun SET last night!"



"It is perfectly true! Why couldn't you have thought of

that sooner? Now we've lost another one! And all through

your blundering.  It was exactly like you to light a pipe

and sit down to wait for the sun to rise in the west."



"It was exactly like me to find out the mistake, too.

You never would have found it out.  I find out all the mistakes."



"You make them all, too, else your most valuable faculty

would be wasted on you.  But don't stop to quarrel,

now--maybe we are not too late yet."



But we were.  The sun was well up when we got to the

exhibition-ground.



On our way up we met the crowd returning--men and women

dressed in all sorts of queer costumes, and exhibiting

all degrees of cold and wretchedness in their gaits

and countenances.  A dozen still remained on the ground

when we reached there, huddled together about the scaffold

with their backs to the bitter wind.  They had their red

guide-books open at the diagram of the view, and were

painfully picking out the several mountains and trying

to impress their names and positions on their memories.

It was one of the saddest sights I ever saw.



Two sides of this place were guarded by railings,

to keep people from being blown over the precipices.

The view, looking sheer down into the broad valley,

eastward, from this great elevation--almost a perpendicular

mile--was very quaint and curious.  Counties, towns,

hilly ribs and ridges, wide stretches of green meadow,

great forest tracts, winding streams, a dozen blue lakes,

a block of busy steamboats--we saw all this little

world in unique circumstantiality of detail--saw it

just as the birds see it--and all reduced to the smallest

of scales and as sharply worked out and finished as a

steel engraving.  The numerous toy villages, with tiny

spires projecting out of them, were just as the children

might have left them when done with play the day before;

the forest tracts were diminished to cushions of moss;

one or two big lakes were dwarfed to ponds, the smaller

ones to puddles--though they did not look like puddles,

but like blue eardrops which had fallen and lodged

in slight depressions, conformable to their shapes,

among the moss-beds and the smooth levels of dainty

green farm-land; the microscopic steamboats glided along,

as in a city reservoir, taking a mighty time to cover

the distance between ports which seemed only a yard apart;

and the isthmus which separated two lakes looked as if

one might stretch out on it and lie with both elbows

in the water, yet we knew invisible wagons were toiling

across it and finding the distance a tedious one.

This beautiful miniature world had exactly the appearance

of those "relief maps" which reproduce nature precisely,

with the heights and depressions and other details graduated

to a reduced scale, and with the rocks, trees, lakes,

etc., colored after nature.



I believed we could walk down to Wa"ggis or Vitznau

in a day, but I knew we could go down by rail in about

an hour, so I chose the latter method.  I wanted to see

what it was like, anyway.  The train came along about

the middle of the afternoon, and an odd thing it was.

The locomotive-boiler stood on end, and it and the whole

locomotive-boiler stood on end, and it and the whole

locomotive were tiled sharply backward.  There were

two passenger-cars, roofed, but wide open all around.

These cars were not tilted back, but the seats were;

this enables the passenger to sit level while going down a

steep incline.



There are three railway-tracks; the central one is cogged;

the "lantern wheel" of the engine grips its way along

these cogs, and pulls the train up the hill or retards its

motion on the down trip.  About the same speed--three miles

an hour--is maintained both ways.  Whether going up or down,

the locomotive is always at the lower end of the train.

It pushes in the one case, braces back in the other.

The passenger rides backward going up, and faces forward

going down.



We got front seats, and while the train moved along

about fifty yards on level ground, I was not the

least frightened; but now it started abruptly downstairs,

and I caught my breath.  And I, like my neighbors,

unconsciously held back all I could, and threw my weight

to the rear, but, of course, that did no particular good.

I had slidden down the balusters when I was a boy,

and thought nothing of it, but to slide down the balusters

in a railway-train is a thing to make one's flesh creep.

Sometimes we had as much as ten yards of almost level

ground, and this gave us a few full breaths in comfort;

but straightway we would turn a corner and see a long steep

line of rails stretching down below us, and the comfort

was at an end.  One expected to see the locomotive pause,

or slack up a little, and approach this plunge cautiously,

but it did nothing of the kind; it went calmly on, and went

it reached the jumping-off place it made a sudden bow,

and went gliding smoothly downstairs, untroubled by

the circumstances.



It was wildly exhilarating to slide along the edge of

the precipices, after this grisly fashion, and look straight

down upon that far-off valley which I was describing a while ago.





There was no level ground at the Kaltbad station;

the railbed was as steep as a roof; I was curious

to see how the stop was going to be managed.

But it was very simple; the train came sliding down,

and when it reached the right spot it just stopped--that

was all there was "to it"--stopped on the steep incline,

and when the exchange of passengers and baggage had

been made, it moved off and went sliding down again.

The train can be stopped anywhere, at a moment's notice.



There was one curious effect, which I need not take the

trouble to describe--because I can scissor a description

of it out of the railway company's advertising pamphlet,

and say my ink:



"On the whole tour, particularly at the Descent, we undergo

an optical illusion which often seems to be incredible.

All the shrubs, fir trees, stables, houses, etc., seem to be bent

in a slanting direction, as by an immense pressure of air.

They are all standing awry, so much awry that the chalets

and cottages of the peasants seem to be tumbling down.

It is the consequence of the steep inclination of the line.

Those who are seated in the carriage do not observe that they

are doing down a declivity of twenty to twenty-five degrees

(their seats being adapted to this course of proceeding

and being bent down at their backs). They mistake their

carriage and its horizontal lines for a proper measure

of the normal plain, and therefore all the objects outside

which really are in a horizontal position must show a

disproportion of twenty to twenty-five degrees declivity,

in regard to the mountain."



By the time one reaches Kaltbad, he has acquired confidence

in the railway, and he now ceases to try to ease the

locomotive by holding back.  Thenceforth he smokes his

pipe in serenity, and gazes out upon the magnificent

picture below and about him with unfettered enjoyment.

There is nothing to interrupt the view or the breeze;

it is like inspecting the world on the wing.  However--to be

exact--there is one place where the serenity lapses for a while;

this is while one is crossing the Schnurrtobel Bridge,

a frail structure which swings its gossamer frame down

through the dizzy air, over a gorge, like a vagrant

spider-strand.



One has no difficulty in remembering his sins while

the train is creeping down this bridge; and he repents

of them, too; though he sees, when he gets to Vitznau,

that he need not have done it, the bridge was perfectly safe.



So ends the eventual trip which we made to the Rigi-Kulm

to see an Alpine sunrise.







CHAPTER XXX

[Harris Climbs Mountains for Me]



An hour's sail brought us to Lucerne again.  I judged

it best to go to bed and rest several days, for I knew

that the man who undertakes to make the tour of Europe

on foot must take care of himself.



Thinking over my plans, as mapped out, I perceived that

they did not take in the Furka Pass, the Rhone Glacier,

the Finsteraarhorn, the Wetterhorn, etc.  I immediately

examined the guide-book to see if these were important,

and found they were; in fact, a pedestrian tour of Europe

could not be complete without them.  Of course that decided

me at once to see them, for I never allow myself to do

things by halves, or in a slurring, slipshod way.



I called in my agent and instructed him to go without delay

and make a careful examination of these noted places,

on foot, and bring me back a written report of the result,

for insertion in my book.  I instructed him to go to Hospenthal

as quickly as possible, and make his grand start from there;

to extend his foot expedition as far as the Giesbach fall,

and return to me from thence by diligence or mule.

I told him to take the courier with him.



He objected to the courier, and with some show of reason,

since he was about to venture upon new and untried ground;

but I thought he might as well learn how to take care of

the courier now as later, therefore I enforced my point.

I said that the trouble, delay, and inconvenience

of traveling with a courier were balanced by the deep

respect which a courier's presence commands, and I must

insist that as much style be thrown into my journeys

as possible.



So the two assumed complete mountaineering costumes

and departed.  A week later they returned, pretty well

used up, and my agent handed me the following



Official Report



OF A VISIT TO THE FURKA REGION.  BY H. HARRIS, AGENT



About seven o'clock in the morning, with perfectly

fine weather, we started from Hospenthal, and arrived at

the MAISON on the Furka in a little under QUATRE hours.

The want of variety in the scenery from Hospenthal made

the KAHKAHPONEEKA wearisome; but let none be discouraged;

no one can fail to be completely R'ECOMPENS'EE for

his fatigue, when he sees, for the first time, the monarch

of the Oberland, the tremendous Finsteraarhorn.  A moment

before all was dullness, but a PAS further has placed us

on the summit of the Furka; and exactly in front of us,

at a HOPOW of only fifteen miles, this magnificent mountain

lifts its snow-wreathed precipices into the deep blue sky.

The inferior mountains on each side of the pass form

a sort of frame for the picture of their dread lord,

and close in the view so completely that no other prominent

feature in the Oberland is visible from this BONG-A-BONG;

nothing withdraws the attention from the solitary grandeur

of the Finsteraarhorn and the dependent spurs which form

the abutments of the central peak.



With the addition of some others, who were also bound

for the Grimsel, we formed a large XHVLOJ as we descended

the STEG which winds round the shoulder of a mountain

toward the Rhone Glacier.  We soon left the path and took

to the ice; and after wandering amongst the crevices UN PEU,

to admire the wonders of these deep blue caverns, and hear

the rushing of waters through their subglacial channels,

we struck out a course toward L'AUTRE CO^T'E and crossed

the glacier successfully, a little above the cave from

which the infant Rhone takes its first bound from under

the grand precipice of ice.  Half a mile below this

we began to climb the flowery side of the Meienwand.

One of our party started before the rest, but the HITZE

was so great, that we found IHM quite exhausted,

and lying at full length in the shade of a large GESTEIN.

We sat down with him for a time, for all felt the heat

exceedingly in the climb up this very steep BOLWOGGOLY,

and then we set out again together, and arrived at last

near the Dead Man's Lake, at the foot of the Sidelhorn.

This lonely spot, once used for an extempore burying-place,

after a sanguinary BATTUE between the French and Austrians,

is the perfection of desolation; there is nothing in sight

to mark the hand of man, except the line of weather-beaten

whitened posts, set up to indicate the direction of the pass

in the OWDAWAKK of winter.  Near this point the footpath joins

the wider track, which connects the Grimsel with the head

of the Rhone SCHNAWP; this has been carefully constructed,

and leads with a tortuous course among and over LES PIERRES,

down to the bank of the gloomy little SWOSH-SWOSH, which

almost washes against the walls of the Grimsel Hospice.

We arrived a little before four o'clock at the end

of our day's journey, hot enough to justify the step,

taking by most of the PARTIE, of plunging into the crystal

water of the snow-fed lake.



The next afternoon we started for a walk up the Unteraar glacier,

with the intention of, at all events, getting as far

as the HU"TTE which is used as a sleeping-place by most

of those who cross the Strahleck Pass to Grindelwald.

We got over the tedious collection of stones and DE'BRIS

which covers the PIED of the GLETCHER, and had walked

nearly three hours from the Grimsel, when, just as

we were thinking of crossing over to the right,

to climb the cliffs at the foot of the hut, the clouds,

which had for some time assumed a threatening appearance,

suddenly dropped, and a huge mass of them, driving toward

us from the Finsteraarhorn, poured down a deluge of

HABOOLONG and hail.  Fortunately, we were not far from

a very large glacier-table; it was a huge rock balanced

on a pedestal of ice high enough to admit of our all

creeping under it for GOWKARAK.  A stream of PUCKITTYPUKK

had furrowed a course for itself in the ice at its base,

and we were obliged to stand with one FUSS on each side

of this, and endeavor to keep ourselves CHAUD by cutting

steps in the steep bank of the pedestal, so as to get

a higher place for standing on, as the WASSER rose rapidly

in its trench.  A very cold BZZZZZZZZEEE accompanied

the storm, and made our position far from pleasant;

and presently came a flash of BLITZEN, apparently in the

middle of our little party, with an instantaneous clap

of YOKKY, sounding like a large gun fired close to our ears;

the effect was startling; but in a few seconds our attention

was fixed by the roaring echoes of the thunder against

the tremendous mountains which completely surrounded us.

This was followed by many more bursts, none of WELCHE,

however, was so dangerously near; and after waiting a long

DEMI-hour in our icy prison, we sallied out to talk through

a HABOOLONG which, though not so heavy as before, was quite

enough to give us a thorough soaking before our arrival at the

Hospice.



The Grimsel is CERTAINEMENT a wonderful place; situated at

the bottom of a sort of huge crater, the sides of which

are utterly savage GEBIRGE, composed of barren rocks

which cannot even support a single pine ARBRE, and afford

only scanty food for a herd of GMWKWLLOLP, it looks as

if it must be completely BEGRABEN in the winter snows.

Enormous avalanches fall against it every spring,

sometimes covering everything to the depth of thirty

or forty feet; and, in spite of walls four feet thick,

and furnished with outside shutters, the two men who stay here

when the VOYAGEURS are snugly quartered in their distant homes

can tell you that the snow sometimes shakes the house to its

foundations.



Next morning the HOGGLEBUMGULLUP still continued bad,

but we made up our minds to go on, and make the best of it.

Half an hour after we started, the REGEN thickened unpleasantly,

and we attempted to get shelter under a projecting rock,

but being far to NASS already to make standing at all

AGRE'ABLE, we pushed on for the Handeck, consoling ourselves

with the reflection that from the furious rushing

of the river Aar at our side, we should at all events

see the celebrated WASSERFALL in GRANDE PERFECTION.

Nor were we NAPPERSOCKET in our expectation; the water

was roaring down its leap of two hundred and fifty feet

in a most magnificent frenzy, while the trees which cling

to its rocky sides swayed to and fro in the violence of the

hurricane which it brought down with it; even the stream,

which falls into the main cascade at right angles,

and TOUTEFOIS forms a beautiful feature in the scene,

was now swollen into a raging torrent; and the violence

of this "meeting of the waters," about fifty feet below

the frail bridge where we stood, was fearfully grand.

While we were looking at it, GLU"CKLICHEWEISE a gleam

of sunshine came out, and instantly a beautiful rainbow

was formed by the spray, and hung in mid-air suspended over

the awful gorge.



On going into the CHALET above the fall, we were

informed that a BRU"CKE had broken down near Guttanen,

and that it would be impossible to proceed for some time;

accordingly we were kept in our drenched condition for

EIN STUNDE, when some VOYAGEURS arrived from Meiringen,

and told us that there had been a trifling accident,

ABER that we could now cross.  On arriving at the spot,

I was much inclined to suspect that the whole story was a ruse

to make us SLOWWK and drink the more at the Handeck Inn,

for only a few planks had been carried away, and though

there might perhaps have been some difficulty with mules,

the gap was certainly not larger than a MMBGLX might cross

with a very slight leap.  Near Guttanen the HABOOLONG

happily ceased, and we had time to walk ourselves tolerably

dry before arriving at Reichenback, WO we enjoyed a good DINE'

at the Hotel des Alps.



Next morning we walked to Rosenlaui, the BEAU ID'EAL

of Swiss scenery, where we spent the middle of the day

in an excursion to the glacier.  This was more beautiful

than words can describe, for in the constant progress

of the ice it has changed the form of its extremity

and formed a vast cavern, as blue as the sky above,

and rippled like a frozen ocean.  A few steps cut

in the WHOOPJAMBOREEHOO enabled us to walk completely

under this, and feast our eyes upon one of the loveliest

objects in creation.  The glacier was all around divided

by numberless fissures of the same exquisite color,

and the finest wood-ERDBEEREN were growing in abundance

but a few yards from the ice.  The inn stands in a CHARMANT

spot close to the C^OTE DE LA RIVIE`RE, which, lower down,

forms the Reichenbach fall, and embosomed in the richest

of pine woods, while the fine form of the Wellhorn

looking down upon it completes the enchanting BOPPLE.

In the afternoon we walked over the Great Scheideck

to Grindelwald, stopping to pay a visit to the Upper

glacier by the way; but we were again overtaken by bad

HOGGLEBUMGULLUP and arrived at the hotel in a SOLCHE

a state that the landlord's wardrobe was in great request.



The clouds by this time seemed to have done their worst,

for a lovely day succeeded, which we determined to devote

to an ascent of the Faulhorn.  We left Grindelwald just as

a thunder-storm was dying away, and we hoped to find GUTEN

WETTER up above; but the rain, which had nearly ceased,

began again, and we were struck by the rapidly increasing

FROID as we ascended.  Two-thirds of the way up were

completed when the rain was exchanged for GNILLIC,

with which the BODEN was thickly covered, and before we

arrived at the top the GNILLIC and mist became so thick

that we could not see one another at more than twenty

POOPOO distance, and it became difficult to pick our way over

the rough and thickly covered ground.  Shivering with cold,

we turned into bed with a double allowance of clothes,

and slept comfortably while the wind howled AUTOUR DE

LA MAISON; when I awoke, the wall and the window looked

equally dark, but in another hour I found I could just

see the form of the latter; so I jumped out of bed,

and forced it open, though with great difficulty from

the frost and the quantities of GNILLIC heaped up against it.



A row of huge icicles hung down from the edge of the roof,

and anything more wintry than the whole ANBLICK could

not well be imagined; but the sudden appearance of the

great mountains in front was so startling that I felt no

inclination to move toward bed again.  The snow which had

collected upon LA FENE^TRE had increased the FINSTERNISS

ODER DER DUNKELHEIT, so that when I looked out I was

surprised to find that the daylight was considerable,

and that the BALRAGOOMAH would evidently rise before long.

Only the brightest of LES E'TOILES were still shining;

the sky was cloudless overhead, though small curling

mists lay thousands of feet below us in the valleys,

wreathed around the feet of the mountains, and adding

to the splendor of their lofty summits.  We were soon

dressed and out of the house, watching the gradual approach

of dawn, thoroughly absorbed in the first near view

of the Oberland giants, which broke upon us unexpectedly

after the intense obscurity of the evening before.

"KABAUGWAKKO SONGWASHEE KUM WETTERHORN SNAWPO!" cried some one,

as that grand summit gleamed with the first rose of dawn;

and in a few moments the double crest of the Schreckhorn

followed its example; peak after peak seemed warmed

with life, the Jungfrau blushed even more beautifully

than her neighbors, and soon, from the Wetterhorn in the

east to the Wildstrubel in the west, a long row of fires

glowed upon mighty altars, truly worthy of the gods.

The WLGW was very severe; our sleeping-place could

hardly be DISTINGUEE' from the snow around it, which had

fallen to a depth of a FLIRK during the past evening,

and we heartily enjoyed a rough scramble EN BAS to the

Giesbach falls, where we soon found a warm climate.

At noon the day before Grindelwald the thermometer could

not have stood at less than 100 degrees Fahr.  in the sun;

and in the evening, judging from the icicles formed,

and the state of the windows, there must have been at least

twelve DINGBLATTER of frost, thus giving a change of 80

degrees during a few hours.



I said:



"You have done well, Harris; this report is concise,

compact, well expressed; the language is crisp,

the descriptions are vivid and not needlessly elaborated;

your report goes straight to the point, attends strictly

to business, and doesn't fool around.  It is in many

ways an excellent document.  But it has a fault--it

is too learned, it is much too learned.  What is 'DINGBLATTER'?



"'DINGBLATTER' is a Fiji word meaning 'degrees.'"



"You knew the English of it, then?"



"Oh, yes."



"What is 'GNILLIC'?



"That is the Eskimo term for 'snow.'"



"So you knew the English for that, too?"



"Why, certainly."



"What does 'MMBGLX' stand for?"



"That is Zulu for 'pedestrian.'"



"'While the form of the Wellhorn looking down upon it

completes the enchanting BOPPLE.' What is 'BOPPLE'?"



"'Picture.' It's Choctaw."



"What is 'SCHNAWP'?"



"'Valley.' That is Choctaw, also."



"What is 'BOLWOGGOLY'?"



"That is Chinese for 'hill.'"



"'KAHKAHPONEEKA'?"



"'Ascent.' Choctaw."



"'But we were again overtaken by bad HOGGLEBUMGULLUP.'

What does 'HOGGLEBUMGULLUP' mean?"



"That is Chinese for 'weather.'"



"Is 'HOGGLEBUMGULLUP' better than the English word? Is

it any more descriptive?"



"No, it means just the same."



"And 'DINGBLATTER' and 'GNILLIC,' and 'BOPPLE,'

and 'SCHNAWP'--are they better than the English words?"



"No, they mean just what the English ones do."



"Then why do you use them? Why have you used all this

Chinese and Choctaw and Zulu rubbish?"



"Because I didn't know any French but two or three words,

and I didn't know any Latin or Greek at all."



"That is nothing.  Why should you want to use foreign words,

anyhow?"



"They adorn my page.  They all do it."



"Who is 'all'?"



"Everybody. Everybody that writes elegantly.  Anybody has

a right to that wants to."



"I think you are mistaken." I then proceeded in the following

scathing manner.  "When really learned men write books

for other learned men to read, they are justified in using

as many learned words as they please--their audience

will understand them; but a man who writes a book for the

general public to read is not justified in disfiguring

his pages with untranslated foreign expressions.

It is an insolence toward the majority of the purchasers,

for it is a very frank and impudent way of saying,

'Get the translations made yourself if you want them,

this book is not written for the ignorant classes.' There are

men who know a foreign language so well and have used it

so long in their daily life that they seem to discharge whole

volleys of it into their English writings unconsciously,

and so they omit to translate, as much as half the time.

That is a great cruelty to nine out of ten of the

man's readers.  What is the excuse for this? The writer

would say he only uses the foreign language where the

delicacy of his point cannot be conveyed in English.

Very well, then he writes his best things for the tenth man,

and he ought to warn the nine other not to buy his book.

However, the excuse he offers is at least an excuse;

but there is another set of men who are like YOU;

they know a WORD here and there, of a foreign language,

or a few beggarly little three-word phrases, filched from

the back of the Dictionary, and these are continually

peppering into their literature, with a pretense of

knowing that language--what excuse can they offer? The

foreign words and phrases which they use have their exact

equivalents in a nobler language--English; yet they think

they 'adorn their page' when they say STRASSE for street,

and BAHNHOF for railway-station, and so on--flaunting

these fluttering rags of poverty in the reader's face

and imagining he will be ass enough to take them for the

sign of untold riches held in reserve.  I will let your

'learning' remain in your report; you have as much right,

I suppose, to 'adorn your page' with Zulu and Chinese

and Choctaw rubbish as others of your sort have to adorn

theirs with insolent odds and ends smouched from half

a dozen learned tongues whose A-B ABS they don't even know."



When the musing spider steps upon the red-hot shovel,

he first exhibits a wild surprise, then he shrivels up.

Similar was the effect of these blistering words upon the

tranquil and unsuspecting Agent.  I can be dreadfully rough

on a person when the mood takes me.







CHAPTER XXXI

[Alp-scaling by Carriage]



We now prepared for a considerable walk--from Lucerne

to Interlaken, over the Bru"nig Pass.  But at the last moment

the weather was so good that I changed my mind and hired

a four-horse carriage.  It was a huge vehicle, roomy, as easy

in its motion as a palanquin, and exceedingly comfortable.



We got away pretty early in the morning, after a hot breakfast,

and went bowling over a hard, smooth road, through the summer

loveliness of Switzerland, with near and distant lakes

and mountains before and about us for the entertainment

of the eye, and the music of multitudinous birds to charm

the ear.  Sometimes there was only the width of the road

between the imposing precipices on the right and the clear

cool water on the left with its shoals of uncatchable

fish skimming about through the bars of sun and shadow;

and sometimes, in place of the precipices, the grassy land

stretched away, in an apparently endless upward slant,

and was dotted everywhere with snug little chalets,

the peculiarly captivating cottage of Switzerland.



The ordinary chalet turns a broad, honest gable end

to the road, and its ample roof hovers over the home

in a protecting, caressing way, projecting its sheltering

eaves far outward.  The quaint windows are filled with

little panes, and garnished with white muslin curtains,

and brightened with boxes of blooming flowers.

Across the front of the house, and up the spreading eaves

and along the fanciful railings of the shallow porch,

are elaborate carvings--wreaths, fruits, arabesques,

verses from Scripture, names, dates, etc.  The building

is wholly of wood, reddish brown in tint, a very

pleasing color.  It generally has vines climbing over it.

Set such a house against the fresh green of the hillside,

and it looks ever so cozy and inviting and picturesque,

and is a decidedly graceful addition to the landscape.



One does not find out what a hold the chalet has taken

upon him, until he presently comes upon a new house--

a house which is aping the town fashions of Germany

and France, a prim, hideous, straight-up-and-down thing,

plastered all over on the outside to look like stone,

and altogether so stiff, and formal, and ugly, and forbidding,

and so out of tune with the gracious landscape, and so deaf

and dumb and dead to the poetry of its surroundings,

that it suggests an undertaker at a picnic, a corpse at

a wedding, a puritan in Paradise.



In the course of the morning we passed the spot where Pontius

Pilate is said to have thrown himself into the lake.

The legend goes that after the Crucifixion his conscience

troubled him, and he fled from Jerusalem and wandered

about the earth, weary of life and a prey to tortures of

the mind.  Eventually, he hid himself away, on the heights

of Mount Pilatus, and dwelt alone among the clouds and

crags for years; but rest and peace were still denied him,

so he finally put an end to his misery by drowning himself.



Presently we passed the place where a man of better odor

was born.  This was the children's friend, Santa Claus,

or St. Nicholas.  There are some unaccountable reputations

in the world.  This saint's is an instance.  He has

ranked for ages as the peculiar friend of children,

yet it appears he was not much of a friend to his own.

He had ten of them, and when fifty years old he left them,

and sought out as dismal a refuge from the world as possible,

and became a hermit in order that he might reflect upon

pious themes without being disturbed by the joyous and other

noises from the nursery, doubtless.



Judging by Pilate and St. Nicholas, there exists no rule

for the construction of hermits; they seem made out of all

kinds of material.  But Pilate attended to the matter of

expiating his sin while he was alive, whereas St. Nicholas

will probably have to go on climbing down sooty chimneys,

Christmas eve, forever, and conferring kindness on other

people's children, to make up for deserting his own.

His bones are kept in a church in a village (Sachseln)

which we visited, and are naturally held in great reverence.

His portrait is common in the farmhouses of the region,

but is believed by many to be but an indifferent likeness.

During his hermit life, according to legend, he partook

of the bread and wine of the communion once a month,

but all the rest of the month he fasted.



A constant marvel with us, as we sped along the bases

of the steep mountains on this journey, was, not that

avalanches occur, but that they are not occurring all

the time.  One does not understand why rocks and landslides

do not plunge down these declivities daily.  A landslip

occurred three quarters of a century ago, on the route

from Arth to Brunnen, which was a formidable thing.

A mass of conglomerate two miles long, a thousand feet broad,

and a hundred feet thick, broke away from a cliff three

thousand feet high and hurled itself into the valley below,

burying four villages and five hundred people, as in a grave.



We had such a beautiful day, and such endless pictures

of limpid lakes, and green hills and valleys,

and majestic mountains, and milky cataracts dancing

down the steeps and gleaming in the sun, that we could

not help feeling sweet toward all the world; so we tried

to drink all the milk, and eat all the grapes and apricots

and berries, and buy all the bouquets of wild flowers

which the little peasant boys and girls offered for sale;

but we had to retire from this contract, for it was too heavy.



At short distances--and they were entirely too short--all

along the road, were groups of neat and comely children,

with their wares nicely and temptingly set forth

in the grass under the shade trees, and as soon as we

approached they swarmed into the road, holding out their

baskets and milk bottles, and ran beside the carriage,

barefoot and bareheaded, and importuned us to buy.

They seldom desisted early, but continued to run and

insist--beside the wagon while they could, and behind

it until they lost breath.  Then they turned and chased

a returning carriage back to their trading-post again.

After several hours of this, without any intermission,

it becomes almost annoying.  I do not know what we

should have done without the returning carriages to draw

off the pursuit.  However, there were plenty of these,

loaded with dusty tourists and piled high with luggage.

Indeed, from Lucerne to Interlaken we had the spectacle,

among other scenery, of an unbroken procession of

fruit-peddlers and tourists carriages.



Our talk was mostly anticipatory of what we should see

on the down-grade of the Bru"nig, by and by, after we

should pass the summit.  All our friends in Lucerne had

said that to look down upon Meiringen, and the rushing

blue-gray river Aar, and the broad level green valley;

and across at the mighty Alpine precipices that rise

straight up to the clouds out of that valley; and up

at the microscopic chalets perched upon the dizzy eaves

of those precipices and winking dimly and fitfully

through the drifting veil of vapor; and still up and up,

at the superb Oltschiback and the other beautiful cascades

that leap from those rugged heights, robed in powdery spray,

ruffled with foam, and girdled with rainbows--to look upon

these things, they say, was to look upon the last possibility

of the sublime and the enchanting.  Therefore, as I say,

we talked mainly of these coming wonders; if we were conscious

of any impatience, it was to get there in favorable season;

if we felt any anxiety, it was that the day might

remain perfect, and enable us to see those marvels at their best.





As we approached the Kaiserstuhl, a part of the harness gave way.



We were in distress for a moment, but only a moment.

It was the fore-and-aft gear that was broken--the thing

that leads aft from the forward part of the horse and is

made fast to the thing that pulls the wagon.  In America

this would have been a heavy leathern strap; but, all over

the continent it is nothing but a piece of rope the size

of your little finger--clothes-line is what it is.

Cabs use it, private carriages, freight-carts and wagons,

all sorts of vehicles have it.  In Munich I afterward saw

it used on a long wagon laden with fifty-four half-barrels

of beer; I had before noticed that the cabs in Heidelberg

used it--not new rope, but rope that had been in use

since Abraham's time --and I had felt nervous, sometimes,

behind it when the cab was tearing down a hill.  But I

had long been accustomed to it now, and had even become

afraid of the leather strap which belonged in its place.

Our driver got a fresh piece of clothes-line out of his

locker and repaired the break in two minutes.



So much for one European fashion.  Every country has its

own ways.  It may interest the reader to know how they "put

horses to" on the continent.  The man stands up the horses

on each side of the thing that projects from the front end

of the wagon, and then throws the tangled mess of gear

forward through a ring, and hauls it aft, and passes the

other thing through the other ring and hauls it aft on the

other side of the other horse, opposite to the first one,

after crossing them and bringing the loose end back,

and then buckles the other thing underneath the horse,

and takes another thing and wraps it around the thing I spoke

of before, and puts another thing over each horse's head,

with broad flappers to it to keep the dust out of his eyes,

and puts the iron thing in his mouth for him to grit his

teeth on, uphill, and brings the ends of these things aft

over his back, after buckling another one around under

his neck to hold his head up, and hitching another thing

on a thing that goes over his shoulders to keep his head

up when he is climbing a hill, and then takes the slack

of the thing which I mentioned a while ago, and fetches it

aft and makes it fast to the thing that pulls the wagon,

and hands the other things up to the driver to steer with.

I never have buckled up a horse myself, but I do not think

we do it that way.



We had four very handsome horses, and the driver was very proud

of his turnout.  He would bowl along on a reasonable trot,

on the highway, but when he entered a village he did it on

a furious run, and accompanied it with a frenzy of ceaseless

whip-crackings that sounded like volleys of musketry.

He tore through the narrow streets and around the sharp

curves like a moving earthquake, showering his volleys

as he went, and before him swept a continuous tidal wave

of scampering children, ducks, cats, and mothers clasping

babies which they had snatched out of the way of the

coming destruction; and as this living wave washed aside,

along the walls, its elements, being safe, forgot their fears

and turned their admiring gaze upon that gallant driver

till he thundered around the next curve and was lost to sight.



He was a great man to those villagers, with his gaudy

clothes and his terrific ways.  Whenever he stopped

to have his cattle watered and fed with loaves of bread,

the villagers stood around admiring him while he

swaggered about, the little boys gazed up at his face with

humble homage, and the landlord brought out foaming mugs

of beer and conversed proudly with him while he drank.

Then he mounted his lofty box, swung his explosive whip,

and away he went again, like a storm.  I had not seen

anything like this before since I was a boy, and the

stage used to flourish the village with the dust flying

and the horn tooting.



When we reached the base of the Kaiserstuhl, we took

two more horses; we had to toil along with difficulty

for an hour and a half or two hours, for the ascent

was not very gradual, but when we passed the backbone

and approached the station, the driver surpassed all

his previous efforts in the way of rush and clatter.

He could not have six horses all the time, so he made

the most of his chance while he had it.



Up to this point we had been in the heart of the William

Tell region.  The hero is not forgotten, by any means,

or held in doubtful veneration.  His wooden image,

with his bow drawn, above the doors of taverns, was a

frequent feature of the scenery.



About noon we arrived at the foot of the Bru"nig Pass,

and made a two-hour stop at the village hotel, another of

those clean, pretty, and thoroughly well-kept inns which are

such an astonishment to people who are accustomed to hotels

of a dismally different pattern in remote country-towns.

There was a lake here, in the lap of the great mountains,

the green slopes that rose toward the lower crags

were graced with scattered Swiss cottages nestling

among miniature farms and gardens, and from out a leafy

ambuscade in the upper heights tumbled a brawling cataract.



Carriage after carriage, laden with tourists and trunks,

arrived, and the quiet hotel was soon populous.

We were early at the table d'ho^te and saw the people

all come in.  There were twenty-five, perhaps.  They were

of various nationalities, but we were the only Americans.

Next to me sat an English bride, and next to her sat her

new husband, whom she called "Neddy," though he was big

enough and stalwart enough to be entitled to his full name.

They had a pretty little lovers' quarrel over what wine

they should have.  Neddy was for obeying the guide-book

and taking the wine of the country; but the bride said:



"What, that nahsty stuff!"



"It isn't nahsty, pet, it's quite good."



"It IS nahsty."



"No, it ISN'T nahsty."



"It's Oful nahsty, Neddy, and I shahn't drink it."



Then the question was, what she must have.  She said he

knew very well that she never drank anything but champagne.



She added:



"You know very well papa always has champagne on his table,

and I've always been used to it."



Neddy made a playful pretense of being distressed about

the expense, and this amused her so much that she nearly

exhausted herself with laughter--and this pleased HIM

so much that he repeated his jest a couple of times,

and added new and killing varieties to it.  When the bride

finally recovered, she gave Neddy a love-box on the arm

with her fan, and said with arch severity:



"Well, you would HAVE me--nothing else would do--

so you'll have to make the best of a bad bargain.

DO order the champagne, I'm Oful dry."



So with a mock groan which made her laugh again,

Neddy ordered the champagne.



The fact that this young woman had never moistened

the selvedge edge of her soul with a less plebeian

tipple than champagne, had a marked and subduing effect

on Harris.  He believed she belonged to the royal family.

But I had my doubts.



We heard two or three different languages spoken by

people at the table and guessed out the nationalities

of most of the guests to our satisfaction, but we

failed with an elderly gentleman and his wife and a

young girl who sat opposite us, and with a gentleman

of about thirty-five who sat three seats beyond Harris.

We did not hear any of these speak.  But finally the

last-named gentleman left while we were not noticing,

but we looked up as he reached the far end of the table.

He stopped there a moment, and made his toilet with a

pocket comb.  So he was a German; or else he had lived

in German hotels long enough to catch the fashion.

When the elderly couple and the young girl rose to leave,

they bowed respectfully to us.  So they were Germans, too.

This national custom is worth six of the other one,

for export.



After dinner we talked with several Englishmen, and they

inflamed our desire to a hotter degree than ever,

to see the sights of Meiringen from the heights of

the Bru"nig Pass.  They said the view was marvelous,

and that one who had seen it once could never forget it.

They also spoke of the romantic nature of the road over

the pass, and how in one place it had been cut through

a flank of the solid rock, in such a way that the mountain

overhung the tourist as he passed by; and they furthermore

said that the sharp turns in the road and the abruptness

of the descent would afford us a thrilling experience,

for we should go down in a flying gallop and seem to be

spinning around the rings of a whirlwind, like a drop

of whiskey descending the spirals of a corkscrew.

I got all the information out of these gentlemen that we

could need; and then, to make everything complete, I asked

them if a body could get hold of a little fruit and milk

here and there, in case of necessity.  They threw up their

hands in speechless intimation that the road was simply paved

with refreshment-peddlers. We were impatient to get away,

now, and the rest of our two-hour stop rather dragged.

But finally the set time arrived and we began the ascent.

Indeed it was a wonderful road.  It was smooth, and compact,

and clean, and the side next the precipices was guarded

all along by dressed stone posts about three feet high,

placed at short distances apart.  The road could not have

been better built if Napoleon the First had built it.

He seems to have been the introducer of the sort of roads

which Europe now uses.  All literature which describes

life as it existed in England, France, and Germany up

to the close of the last century, is filled with pictures

of coaches and carriages wallowing through these three

countries in mud and slush half-wheel deep; but after

Napoleon had floundered through a conquered kingdom he

generally arranged things so that the rest of the world

could follow dry-shod.



We went on climbing, higher and higher, and curving hither

and thither, in the shade of noble woods, and with a rich

variety and profusion of wild flowers all about us;

and glimpses of rounded grassy backbones below us occupied

by trim chalets and nibbling sheep, and other glimpses

of far lower altitudes, where distance diminished the

chalets to toys and obliterated the sheep altogether;

and every now and then some ermined monarch of the Alps

swung magnificently into view for a moment, then drifted

past an intervening spur and disappeared again.



It was an intoxicating trip altogether; the exceeding

sense of satisfaction that follows a good dinner added

largely to the enjoyment; the having something especial

to look forward to and muse about, like the approaching

grandeurs of Meiringen, sharpened the zest.  Smoking was

never so good before, solid comfort was never solider;

we lay back against the thick cushions silent, meditative,

steeped in felicity.



I rubbed my eyes, opened them, and started.  I had been

dreaming I was at sea, and it was a thrilling surprise to wake

up and find land all around me.  It took me a couple seconds

to "come to," as you may say; then I took in the situation.

The horses were drinking at a trough in the edge of a town,

the driver was taking beer, Harris was snoring at my side,

the courier, with folded arms and bowed head, was sleeping

on the box, two dozen barefooted and bareheaded children

were gathered about the carriage, with their hands

crossed behind, gazing up with serious and innocent

admiration at the dozing tourists baking there in the sun.

Several small girls held night-capped babies nearly

as big as themselves in their arms, and even these fat

babies seemed to take a sort of sluggish interest in us.



We had slept an hour and a half and missed all the scenery!

I did not need anybody to tell me that.  If I had been

a girl, I could have cursed for vexation.  As it was,

I woke up the agent and gave him a piece of my mind.

Instead of being humiliated, he only upbraided me for being

so wanting in vigilance.  He said he had expected to improve

his mind by coming to Europe, but a man might travel to the

ends of the earth with me and never see anything, for I

was manifestly endowed with the very genius of ill luck.

He even tried to get up some emotion about that poor courier,

who never got a chance to see anything, on account of

my heedlessness.  But when I thought I had borne about

enough of this kind of talk, I threatened to make Harris

tramp back to the summit and make a report on that scenery,

and this suggestion spiked his battery.



We drove sullenly through Brienz, dead to the seductions

of its bewildering array of Swiss carvings and the

clamorous HOO-hooing of its cuckoo clocks, and had not

entirely recovered our spirits when we rattled across

a bridge over the rushing blue river and entered the

pretty town of Interlaken.  It was just about sunset,

and we had made the trip from Lucerne in ten hours.







CHAPTER XXXII

[The Jungfrau, the Bride, and the Piano]



We located ourselves at the Jungfrau Hotel, one of those

huge establishments which the needs of modern travel

have created in every attractive spot on the continent.

There was a great gathering at dinner, and, as usual,

one heard all sorts of languages.



The table d'ho^te was served by waitresses dressed

in the quaint and comely costume of the Swiss peasants.

This consists of a simple gros de laine, trimmed with ashes

of roses, with overskirt of scare bleu ventre saint gris,

cut bias on the off-side, with facings of petit polonaise

and narrow insertions of pa^te de foie gras backstitched

to the mise en sce`ne in the form of a jeu d'esprit. It gives

to the wearer a singularly piquant and alluring aspect.



One of these waitresses, a woman of forty,

had side-whiskers reaching half-way down her jaws.

They were two fingers broad, dark in color, pretty thick,

and the hairs were an inch long.  One sees many women on

the continent with quite conspicuous mustaches, but this

was the only woman I saw who had reached the dignity of whiskers.





After dinner the guests of both sexes distributed themselves

about the front porches and the ornamental grounds belonging

to the hotel, to enjoy the cool air; but, as the twilight

deepened toward darkness, they gathered themselves together

in that saddest and solemnest and most constrained of

all places, the great blank drawing-room which is the chief

feature of all continental summer hotels.  There they

grouped themselves about, in couples and threes, and mumbled

in bated voices, and looked timid and homeless and forlorn.



There was a small piano in this room, a clattery, wheezy,

asthmatic thing, certainly the very worst miscarriage

in the way of a piano that the world has seen.  In turn,

five or six dejected and homesick ladies approached

it doubtingly, gave it a single inquiring thump, and retired

with the lockjaw.  But the boss of that instrument was

to come, nevertheless; and from my own country--from Arkansaw.



She was a brand-new bride, innocent, girlish, happy in herself

and her grave and worshiping stripling of a husband; she was

about eighteen, just out of school, free from affections,

unconscious of that passionless multitude around her;

and the very first time she smote that old wreck one

recognized that it had met its destiny.  Her stripling

brought an armful of aged sheet-music from their room--

for this bride went "heeled," as you might say--and bent

himself lovingly over and got ready to turn the pages.



The bride fetched a swoop with her fingers from one end

of the keyboard to the other, just to get her bearings,

as it were, and you could see the congregation set their teeth

with the agony of it.  Then, without any more preliminaries,

she turned on all the horrors of the "Battle of Prague,"

that venerable shivaree, and waded chin-deep in the blood

of the slain.  She made a fair and honorable average

of two false notes in every five, but her soul was in arms

and she never stopped to correct.  The audience stood it

with pretty fair grit for a while, but when the cannonade

waxed hotter and fiercer, and the discord average

rose to four in five, the procession began to move.

A few stragglers held their ground ten minutes longer,

but when the girl began to wring the true inwardness out

of the "cries of the wounded," they struck their colors

and retired in a kind of panic.



There never was a completer victory; I was the only

non-combatant left on the field.  I would not have

deserted my countrywoman anyhow, but indeed I had no

desires in that direction.  None of us like mediocrity,

but we all reverence perfection.  This girl's music

was perfection in its way; it was the worst music that

had ever been achieved on our planet by a mere human being.



I moved up close, and never lost a strain.  When she

got through, I asked her to play it again.  She did it

with a pleased alacrity and a heightened enthusiasm.

She made it ALL discords, this time.  She got an amount

of anguish into the cries of the wounded that shed a new

light on human suffering.  She was on the war-path all

the evening.  All the time, crowds of people gathered on

the porches and pressed their noses against the windows

to look and marvel, but the bravest never ventured in.

The bride went off satisfied and happy with her young fellow,

when her appetite was finally gorged, and the tourists

swarmed in again.



What a change has come over Switzerland, and in fact

all Europe, during this century! Seventy or eighty years

ago Napoleon was the only man in Europe who could really

be called a traveler; he was the only man who had devoted

his attention to it and taken a powerful interest in it;

he was the only man who had traveled extensively;

but now everybody goes everywhere; and Switzerland,

and many other regions which were unvisited and unknown

remotenesses a hundred years ago, are in our days

a buzzing hive of restless strangers every summer.

But I digress.



In the morning, when we looked out of our windows,

we saw a wonderful sight.  Across the valley,

and apparently quite neighborly and close at hand,

the giant form of the Jungfrau rose cold and white into

the clear sky, beyond a gateway in the nearer highlands.

It reminded me, somehow, of one of those colossal billows

which swells suddenly up beside one's ship, at sea,

sometimes, with its crest and shoulders snowy white, and the

rest of its noble proportions streaked downward with creamy foam.





I took out my sketch-book and made a little picture

of the Jungfrau, merely to get the shape.  [Figure 9]



I do not regard this as one of my finished works, in fact I

do not rank it among my Works at all; it is only a study;

it is hardly more than what one might call a sketch.

Other artists have done me the grace to admire it; but I

am severe in my judgments of my own pictures, and this

one does not move me.



It was hard to believe that that lofty wooded rampart on

the left which so overtops the Jungfrau was not actually

the higher of the two, but it was not, of course.

It is only two or three thousand feet high, and of course

has no snow upon it in summer, whereas the Jungfrau is not

much shorter of fourteen thousand feet high and therefore

that lowest verge of snow on her side, which seems nearly

down to the valley level, is really about seven thousand feet

higher up in the air than the summit of that wooded rampart.

It is the distance that makes the deception.  The wooded

height is but four or five miles removed from us,

but the Jungfrau is four or five times that distance away.



Walking down the street of shops, in the fore-noon, I

was attracted by a large picture, carved, frame and all,

from a single block of chocolate-colored wood.

There are people who know everything.  Some of these had

told us that continental shopkeepers always raise their

prices on English and Americans.  Many people had told

us it was expensive to buy things through a courier,

whereas I had supposed it was just the reverse.

When I saw this picture, I conjectured that it was worth

more than the friend I proposed to buy it for would

like to pay, but still it was worth while to inquire;

so I told the courier to step in and ask the price, as if he

wanted it for himself; I told him not to speak in English,

and above all not to reveal the fact that he was a courier.

Then I moved on a few yards, and waited.



The courier came presently and reported the price.

I said to myself, "It is a hundred francs too much,"

and so dismissed the matter from my mind.  But in

the afternoon I was passing that place with Harris,

and the picture attracted me again.  We stepped in,

to see how much higher broken German would raise the price.

The shopwoman named a figure just a hundred francs lower

than the courier had named.  This was a pleasant surprise.

I said I would take it.  After I had given directions as to

where it was to be shipped, the shipped, the shopwoman said,

appealingly:



"If your please, do not let your courier know you bought it."



This was an unexpected remark.  I said:



"What makes you think I have a courier?"



"Ah, that is very simple; he told me himself."



"He was very thoughtful.  But tell me--why did you charge

him more than you are charging me?"



"That is very simple, also: I do not have to pay you

a percentage."



"Oh, I begin to see.  You would have had to pay the courier

a percentage."



"Undoubtedly. The courier always has his percentage.

In this case it would have been a hundred francs."



"Then the tradesman does not pay a part of it--

the purchaser pays all of it?"



"There are occasions when the tradesman and the courier

agree upon a price which is twice or thrice the value of

the article, then the two divide, and both get a percentage."



"I see.  But it seems to me that the purchaser does

all the paying, even then."



"Oh, to be sure! It goes without saying."



"But I have bought this picture myself; therefore why

shouldn't the courier know it?"



The woman exclaimed, in distress:



"Ah, indeed it would take all my little profit! He would

come and demand his hundred francs, and I should have

to pay."



"He has not done the buying.  You could refuse."



"I could not dare to refuse.  He would never bring

travelers here again.  More than that, he would denounce me

to the other couriers, they would divert custom from me,

and my business would be injured."



I went away in a thoughtful frame of mind.  I began to see why

a courier could afford to work for fifty-five dollars a month

and his fares.  A month or two later I was able to understand

why a courier did not have to pay any board and lodging,

and why my hotel bills were always larger when I had him

with me than when I left him behind, somewhere, for a few days.



Another thing was also explained, now, apparently.

In one town I had taken the courier to the bank to do

the translating when I drew some money.  I had sat

in the reading-room till the transaction was finished.

Then a clerk had brought the money to me in person,

and had been exceedingly polite, even going so far as to

precede me to the door and holding it open for me and bow

me out as if I had been a distinguished personage.

It was a new experience.  Exchange had been in my favor

ever since I had been in Europe, but just that one time.

I got simply the face of my draft, and no extra francs,

whereas I had expected to get quite a number of them.

This was the first time I had ever used the courier at

the bank.  I had suspected something then, and as long

as he remained with me afterward I managed bank matters

by myself.



Still, if I felt that I could afford the tax, I would

never travel without a courier, for a good courier is

a convenience whose value cannot be estimated in dollars

and cents.  Without him, travel is a bitter harassment,

a purgatory of little exasperating annoyances, a ceaseless

and pitiless punishment--I mean to an irascible man

who has no business capacity and is confused by details.



Without a courier, travel hasn't a ray of pleasure

in it, anywhere; but with him it is a continuous and

unruffled delight.  He is always at hand, never has to be

sent for; if your bell is not answered promptly--and it

seldom is--you have only to open the door and speak,

the courier will hear, and he will have the order attended

to or raise an insurrection.  You tell him what day

you will start, and whither you are going--leave all

the rest to him.  You need not inquire about trains,

or fares, or car changes, or hotels, or anything else.

At the proper time he will put you in a cab or an omnibus,

and drive you to the train or the boat; he has packed your

luggage and transferred it, he has paid all the bills.

Other people have preceded you half an hour to scramble

for impossible places and lose their tempers, but you can

take your time; the courier has secured your seats for you,

and you can occupy them at your leisure.



At the station, the crowd mash one another to pulp in the

effort to get the weigher's attention to their trunks;

they dispute hotly with these tyrants, who are cool

and indifferent; they get their baggage billets, at last,

and then have another squeeze and another rage over the

disheartening business of trying to get them recorded and

paid for, and still another over the equally disheartening

business of trying to get near enough to the ticket

office to buy a ticket; and now, with their tempers gone

to the dogs, they must stand penned up and packed together,

laden with wraps and satchels and shawl-straps, with the

weary wife and babies, in the waiting-room, till the doors

are thrown open--and then all hands make a grand final

rush to the train, find it full, and have to stand on

the platform and fret until some more cars are put on.

They are in a condition to kill somebody by this time.

Meantime, you have been sitting in your car, smoking,

and observing all this misery in the extremest comfort.



On the journey the guard is polite and watchful--won't

allow anybody to get into your compartment--tells them

you are just recovering from the small-pox and do not

like to be disturbed.  For the courier has made everything

right with the guard.  At way-stations the courier comes

to your compartment to see if you want a glass of water,

or a newspaper, or anything; at eating-stations he sends

luncheon out to you, while the other people scramble

and worry in the dining-rooms. If anything breaks about

the car you are in, and a station-master proposes to pack

you and your agent into a compartment with strangers,

the courier reveals to him confidentially that you are

a French duke born deaf and dumb, and the official comes

and makes affable signs that he has ordered a choice car

to be added to the train for you.



At custom-houses the multitude file tediously through,

hot and irritated, and look on while the officers

burrow into the trunks and make a mess of everything;

but you hand your keys to the courier and sit still.

Perhaps you arrive at your destination in a rain-storm

at ten at night--you generally do.  The multitude

spend half an hour verifying their baggage and getting

it transferred to the omnibuses; but the courier puts

you into a vehicle without a moment's loss of time,

and when you reach your hotel you find your rooms have been

secured two or three days in advance, everything is ready,

you can go at once to bed.  Some of those other people will

have to drift around to two or three hotels, in the rain,

before they find accommodations.



I have not set down half of the virtues that are

vested in a good courier, but I think I have set down

a sufficiency of them to show that an irritable man

who can afford one and does not employ him is not a

wise economist.  My courier was the worst one in Europe,

yet he was a good deal better than none at all.

It could not pay him to be a better one than he was,

because I could not afford to buy things through him.

He was a good enough courier for the small amount he

got out of his service.  Yes, to travel with a courier

is bliss, to travel without one is the reverse.



I have had dealings with some very bad couriers; but I have also

had dealings with one who might fairly be called perfection.

He was a young Polander, named Joseph N. Verey.  He spoke

eight languages, and seemed to be equally at home in all

of them; he was shrewd, prompt, posted, and punctual;

he was fertile in resources, and singularly gifted in

the matter of overcoming difficulties; he not only knew

how to do everything in his line, but he knew the best ways

and the quickest; he was handy with children and invalids;

all his employer needed to do was to take life easy

and leave everything to the courier.  His address is,

care of Messrs.  Gay & Son, Strand, London; he was formerly

a conductor of Gay's tourist parties.  Excellent couriers

are somewhat rare; if the reader is about to travel,

he will find it to his advantage to make a note of this one.







CHAPTER XXXIII

[We Climb Far--by Buggy]



The beautiful Giesbach Fall is near Interlaken, on the

other side of the lake of Brienz, and is illuminated

every night with those gorgeous theatrical fires whose

name I cannot call just at this moment.  This was said

to be a spectacle which the tourist ought by no means

to miss.  I was strongly tempted, but I could not go

there with propriety, because one goes in a boat.

The task which I had set myself was to walk over Europe

on foot, not skim over it in a boat.  I had made a tacit

contract with myself; it was my duty to abide by it.

I was willing to make boat trips for pleasure, but I could

not conscientiously make them in the way of business.



It cost me something of a pang to lose that fine sight,

but I lived down the desire, a nd gained in my self-respect

through the triumph.  I had a finer and a grander sight,

however, where I was.  This was the mighty dome of the Jungfrau

softly outlined against the sky and faintly silvered by

the starlight.  There was something subduing in the influence

of that silent and solemn and awful presence; one seemed

to meet the immutable, the indestructible, the eternal,

face to face, and to feel the trivial and fleeting nature

of his own existence the more sharply by the contrast.

One had the sense of being under the brooding contemplation

of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice--a spirit

which had looked down, through the slow drift of the ages,

upon a million vanished races of men, and judged them;

and would judge a million more--and still be there,

watching, unchanged and unchangeable, after all life

should be gone and the earth have become a vacant desolation.



While I was feeling these things, I was groping,

without knowing it, toward an understanding of what the

spell is which people find in the Alps, and in no other

mountains--that strange, deep, nameless influence, which,

once felt, cannot be forgotten--once felt, leaves always

behind it a restless longing to feel it again--a longing

which is like homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning

which will plead, implore, and persecute till it has its will.

I met dozens of people, imaginative and unimaginative,

cultivated and uncultivated, who had come from far countries

and roamed through the Swiss Alps year after year--they

could not explain why.  They had come first, they said,

out of idle curiosity, because everybody talked about it;

they had come since because they could not help it, and they

should keep on coming, while they lived, for the same reason;

they had tried to break their chains and stay away,

but it was futile; now, they had no desire to break them.

Others came nearer formulating what they felt; they said they

could find perfect rest and peace nowhere else when they

were troubled: all frets and worries and chafings sank to

sleep in the presence of the benignant serenity of the Alps;

the Great Spirit of the Mountain breathed his own peace

upon their hurt minds and sore hearts, and healed them;

they could not think base thoughts or do mean and sordid

things here, before the visible throne of God.



Down the road a piece was a Kursaal--whatever that may be--

and we joined the human tide to see what sort of enjoyment

it might afford.  It was the usual open-air concert,

in an ornamental garden, with wines, beer, milk, whey,

grapes, etc.--the whey and the grapes being necessaries

of life to certain invalids whom physicians cannot repair,

and who only continue to exist by the grace of whey

or grapes.  One of these departed spirits told me,

in a sad and lifeless way, that there is no way for him

to live but by whey, and dearly, dearly loved whey,

he didn't know whey he did, but he did.  After making

this pun he died--that is the whey it served him.



Some other remains, preserved from decomposition

by the grape system, told me that the grapes were of

a peculiar breed, highly medicinal in their nature,

and that they were counted out and administered by the

grape-doctors as methodically as if they were pills.

The new patient, if very feeble, began with one grape

before breakfast, took three during breakfast, a couple

between meals, five at luncheon, three in the afternoon,

seven at dinner, four for supper, and part of a grape

just before going to bed, by way of a general regulator.

The quantity was gradually and regularly increased,

according to the needs and capacities of the patient,

until by and by you would find him disposing of his one

grape per second all the day long, and his regular barrel

per day.



He said that men cured in this way, and enabled to discard

the grape system, never afterward got over the habit

of talking as if they were dictating to a slow amanuensis,

because they always made a pause between each two words

while they sucked the substance out of an imaginary grape.

He said these were tedious people to talk with.

He said that men who had been cured by the other process

were easily distinguished from the rest of mankind

because they always tilted their heads back, between every

two words, and swallowed a swig of imaginary whey.

He said it was an impressive thing to observe two men,

who had been cured by the two processes, engaged in

conversation--said their pauses and accompanying movements

were so continuous and regular that a stranger would think

himself in the presence of a couple of automatic machines.

One finds out a great many wonderful things, by traveling,

if he stumbles upon the right person.



I did not remain long at the Kursaal; the music was

good enough, but it seemed rather tame after the cyclone

of that Arkansaw expert.  Besides, my adventurous spirit

had conceived a formidable enterprise--nothing less

than a trip from Interlaken, by the Gemmi and Visp,

clear to Zermatt, on foot! So it was necessary to plan

the details, and get ready for an early start.  The courier

(this was not the one I have just been speaking of)

thought that the portier of the hotel would be able

to tell us how to find our way.  And so it turned out.

He showed us the whole thing, on a relief-map, and we could

see our route, with all its elevations and depressions,

its villages and its rivers, as clearly as if we were sailing

over it in a balloon.  A relief-map is a great thing.

The portier also wrote down each day's journey and the

nightly hotel on a piece of paper, and made our course

so plain that we should never be able to get lost without

high-priced outside help.



I put the courier in the care of a gentleman who was

going to Lausanne, and then we went to bed, after laying

out the walking-costumes and putting them into condition

for instant occupation in the morning.



However, when we came down to breakfast at 8 A.M., it

looked so much like rain that I hired a two-horse top-buggy

for the first third of the journey.  For two or three hours

we jogged along the level road which skirts the beautiful

lake of Thun, with a dim and dreamlike picture of watery

expanses and spectral Alpine forms always before us,

veiled in a mellowing mist.  Then a steady downpour

set in, and hid everything but the nearest objects.

We kept the rain out of our faces with umbrellas, and away

from our bodies with the leather apron of the buggy;

but the driver sat unsheltered and placidly soaked the weather

in and seemed to like it.  We had the road to ourselves,

and I never had a pleasanter excursion.



The weather began to clear while we were driving up

a valley called the Kienthal, and presently a vast black

cloud-bank in front of us dissolved away and uncurtained

the grand proportions and the soaring loftiness of the

Blumis Alp.  It was a sort of breath-taking surprise;

for we had not supposed there was anything behind

that low-hung blanket of sable cloud but level valley.

What we had been mistaking for fleeting glimpses of sky

away aloft there, were really patches of the Blumis's

snowy crest caught through shredded rents in the drifting

pall of vapor.



We dined in the inn at Frutigen, and our driver ought

to have dined there, too, but he would not have had

time to dine and get drunk both, so he gave his mind

to making a masterpiece of the latter, and succeeded.

A German gentleman and his two young-lady daughters had

been taking their nooning at the inn, and when they left,

just ahead of us, it was plain that their driver was

as drunk as ours, and as happy and good-natured, too,

which was saying a good deal.  These rascals overflowed

with attentions and information for their guests, and with

brotherly love for each other.  They tied their reins,

and took off their coats and hats, so that they might

be able to give unencumbered attention to conversation

and to the gestures necessary for its illustration.



The road was smooth; it led up and over and down a continual

succession of hills; but it was narrow, the horses were

used to it, and could not well get out of it anyhow;

so why shouldn't the drivers entertain themselves and us?

The noses of our horses projected sociably into the rear

of the forward carriage, and as we toiled up the long

hills our driver stood up and talked to his friend,

and his friend stood up and talked back to him, with his

rear to the scenery.  When the top was reached and we

went flying down the other side, there was no change in

the program.  I carry in my memory yet the picture of that

forward driver, on his knees on his high seat, resting his

elbows on its back, and beaming down on his passengers,

with happy eye, and flying hair, and jolly red face,

and offering his card to the old German gentleman while he

praised his hack and horses, and both teams were whizzing

down a long hill with nobody in a position to tell whether

we were bound to destruction or an undeserved safety.



Toward sunset we entered a beautiful green valley dotted

with chalets, a cozy little domain hidden away from the busy

world in a cloistered nook among giant precipices topped

with snowy peaks that seemed to float like islands above

the curling surf of the sea of vapor that severed them from

the lower world.  Down from vague and vaporous heights,

little ruffled zigzag milky currents came crawling,

and found their way to the verge of one of those tremendous

overhanging walls, whence they plunged, a shaft of silver,

shivered to atoms in mid-descent and turned to an air puff

of luminous dust.  Here and there, in grooved depressions

among the snowy desolations of the upper altitudes,

one glimpsed the extremity of a glacier, with its sea-green

and honeycombed battlements of ice.



Up the valley, under a dizzy precipice, nestled the

village of Kandersteg, our halting-place for the night.

We were soon there, and housed in the hotel.  But the waning

day had such an inviting influence that we did not remain

housed many moments, but struck out and followed a roaring

torrent of ice-water up to its far source in a sort of

little grass-carpeted parlor, walled in all around by vast

precipices and overlooked by clustering summits of ice.

This was the snuggest little croquet-ground imaginable;

it was perfectly level, and not more than a mile long

by half a mile wide.  The walls around it were so gigantic,

and everything about it was on so mighty a scale that it

was belittled, by contrast, to what I have likened it

to--a cozy and carpeted parlor.  It was so high above

the Kandersteg valley that there was nothing between it

and the snowy-peaks. I had never been in such intimate

relations with the high altitudes before; the snow-peaks

had always been remote and unapproachable grandeurs,

hitherto, but now we were hob-a-nob--if one may use

such a seemingly irreverent expression about creations

so august as these.



We could see the streams which fed the torrent we

had followed issuing from under the greenish ramparts

of glaciers; but two or three of these, instead of flowing

over the precipices, sank down into the rock and sprang

in big jets out of holes in the mid-face of the walls.



The green nook which I have been describing is called

the Gasternthal.  The glacier streams gather and flow through

it in a broad and rushing brook to a narrow cleft between

lofty precipices; here the rushing brook becomes a mad torrent

and goes booming and thundering down toward Kandersteg,

lashing and thrashing its way over and among monster boulders,

and hurling chance roots and logs about like straws.

There was no lack of cascades along this route.

The path by the side of the torrent was so narrow

that one had to look sharp, when he heard a cow-bell,

and hunt for a place that was wide enough to accommodate

a cow and a Christian side by side, and such places were

not always to be had at an instant's notice.  The cows

wear church-bells, and that is a good idea in the cows,

for where that torrent is, you couldn't hear an ordinary

cow-bell any further than you could hear the ticking of a watch.



I needed exercise, so I employed my agent in setting

stranded logs and dead trees adrift, and I sat on a

boulder and watched them go whirling and leaping head

over heels down the boiling torrent.  It was a wonderfully

exhilarating spectacle.  When I had had enough exercise,

I made the agent take some, by running a race with one

of those logs.  I made a trifle by betting on the log.



After dinner we had a walk up and down the Kandersteg valley,

in the soft gloaming, with the spectacle of the dying lights

of day playing about the crests and pinnacles of the still

and solemn upper realm for contrast, and text for talk.

There were no sounds but the dulled complaining of the

torrent and the occasional tinkling of a distant bell.

The spirit of the place was a sense of deep, pervading peace;

one might dream his life tranquilly away there, and not miss

it or mind it when it was gone.



The summer departed with the sun, and winter came with

the stars.  It grew to be a bitter night in that little hotel,

backed up against a precipice that had no visible top to it,

but we kept warm, and woke in time in the morning to find

that everybody else had left for Gemmi three hours before--

so our little plan of helping that German family (principally

the old man) over the pass, was a blocked generosity.







CHAPTER XXXIV

[The World's Highest Pig Farm]



We hired the only guide left, to lead us on our way.

He was over seventy, but he could have given me nine-tenths

of his strength and still had all his age entitled him to.

He shouldered our satchels, overcoats, and alpenstocks,

and we set out up the steep path.  It was hot work.

The old man soon begged us to hand over our coats

and waistcoats to him to carry, too, and we did it;

one could not refuse so little a thing to a poor old man

like that; he should have had them if he had been a hundred

and fifty.



When we began that ascent, we could see a microscopic

chalet perched away up against heaven on what seemed

to be the highest mountain near us.  It was on our right,

across the narrow head of the valley.  But when we got

up abreast it on its own level, mountains were towering

high above on every hand, and we saw that its altitude

was just about that of the little Gasternthal which we had

visited the evening before.  Still it seemed a long way up

in the air, in that waste and lonely wilderness of rocks.

It had an unfenced grass-plot in front of it which seemed

about as big as a billiard-table, and this grass-plot

slanted so sharply downward, and was so brief, and ended

so exceedingly soon at the verge of the absolute precipice,

that it was a shuddery thing to think of a person's venturing

to trust his foot on an incline so situated at all.

Suppose a man stepped on an orange peel in that yard;

there would be nothing for him to seize; nothing could

keep him from rolling; five revolutions would bring him

to the edge, and over he would go.  What a frightful distance

he would fall!--for there are very few birds that fly

as high as his starting-point. He would strike and bounce,

two or three times, on his way down, but this would be

no advantage to him.  I would as soon taking an airing

on the slant of a rainbow as in such a front yard.

I would rather, in fact, for the distance down would be about

the same, and it is pleasanter to slide than to bounce.

I could not see how the peasants got up to that chalet--

the region seemed too steep for anything but a balloon.



As we strolled on, climbing up higher and higher, we were

continually bringing neighboring peaks into view and lofty

prominence which had been hidden behind lower peaks before;

so by and by, while standing before a group of these giants,

we looked around for the chalet again; there it was,

away down below us, apparently on an inconspicuous ridge

in the valley! It was as far below us, now, as it had been

above us when we were beginning the ascent.



After a while the path led us along a railed precipice,

and we looked over--far beneath us was the snug parlor again,

the little Gasternthal, with its water jets spouting

from the face of its rock walls.  We could have dropped

a stone into it.  We had been finding the top of the world

all along--and always finding a still higher top stealing

into view in a disappointing way just ahead; when we looked

down into the Gasternthal we felt pretty sure that we

had reached the genuine top at last, but it was not so;

there were much higher altitudes to be scaled yet.

We were still in the pleasant shade of forest trees,

we were still in a region which was cushioned with beautiful

mosses and aglow with the many-tinted luster of innumerable

wild flowers.



We found, indeed, more interest in the wild flowers

than in anything else.  We gathered a specimen or two

of every kind which we were unacquainted with; so we

had sumptuous bouquets.  But one of the chief interests

lay in chasing the seasons of the year up the mountain,

and determining them by the presence of flowers and

berries which we were acquainted with.  For instance,

it was the end of August at the level of the sea;

in the Kandersteg valley at the base of the pass,

we found flowers which would not be due at the sea-level

for two or three weeks; higher up, we entered October,

and gathered fringed gentians.  I made no notes, and have

forgotten the details, but the construction of the floral

calendar was very entertaining while it lasted.



In the high regions we found rich store of the splendid

red flower called the Alpine rose, but we did not find

any examples of the ugly Swiss favorite called Edelweiss.

Its name seems to indicate that it is a noble flower

and that it is white.  It may be noble enough,

but it is not attractive, and it is not white.

The fuzzy blossom is the color of bad cigar ashes,

and appears to be made of a cheap quality of gray plush.

It has a noble and distant way of confining itself to the

high altitudes, but that is probably on account of its looks;

it apparently has no monopoly of those upper altitudes,

however, for they are sometimes intruded upon by some

of the loveliest of the valley families of wild flowers.

Everybody in the Alps wears a sprig of Edelweiss in his hat.

It is the native's pet, and also the tourist's.



All the morning, as we loafed along, having a good time,

other pedestrians went staving by us with vigorous strides,

and with the intent and determined look of men who were

walking for a wager.  These wore loose knee-breeches, long

yarn stockings, and hobnailed high-laced walking-shoes.

They were gentlemen who would go home to England or Germany

and tell how many miles they had beaten the guide-book

every day.  But I doubted if they ever had much real fun,

outside of the mere magnificent exhilaration of the

tramp through the green valleys and the breezy heights;

for they were almost always alone, and even the finest

scenery loses incalculably when there is no one to enjoy

it with.



All the morning an endless double procession of mule-mounted

tourists filed past us along the narrow path--the one

procession going, the other coming.  We had taken

a good deal of trouble to teach ourselves the kindly

German custom of saluting all strangers with doffed hat,

and we resolutely clung to it, that morning, although it

kept us bareheaded most of the time a nd was not always

responded to.  Still we found an interest in the thing,

because we naturally liked to know who were English

and Americans among the passers-by. All continental

natives responded of course; so did some of the English

and Americans, but, as a general thing, these two races

gave no sign.  Whenever a man or a woman showed us

cold neglect, we spoke up confidently in our own tongue

and asked for such information as we happened to need,

and we always got a reply in the same language.

The English and American folk are not less kindly than

other races, they are only more reserved, and that comes

of habit and education.  In one dreary, rocky waste,

away above the line of vegetation, we met a procession

of twenty-five mounted young men, all from America.

We got answering bows enough from these, of course,

for they were of an age to learn to do in Rome as Rome does,

without much effort.



At one extremity of this patch of desolation, overhung by bare

and forbidding crags which husbanded drifts of everlasting

snow in their shaded cavities, was a small stretch

of thin and discouraged grass, and a man and a family

of pigs were actually living here in some shanties.

Consequently this place could be really reckoned as

"property"; it had a money value, and was doubtless taxed.

I think it must have marked the limit of real estate

in this world.  It would be hard to set a money value

upon any piece of earth that lies between that spot

and the empty realm of space.  That man may claim the

distinction of owning the end of the world, for if there

is any definite end to the world he has certainly found it.



From here forward we moved through a storm-swept

and smileless desolation.  All about us rose gigantic

masses, crags, and ramparts of bare and dreary rock,

with not a vestige or semblance of plant or tree or

flower anywhere, or glimpse of any creature that had life.

The frost and the tempests of unnumbered ages had battered

and hacked at these cliffs, with a deathless energy,

destroying them piecemeal; so all the region about

their bases was a tumbled chaos of great fragments

which had been split off and hurled to the ground.

Soiled and aged banks of snow lay close about our path.

The ghastly desolation of the place was as tremendously

complete as if Dor'e had furnished the working-plans

for it.  But every now and then, through the stern

gateways around us we caught a view of some neighboring

majestic dome, sheathed with glittering ice, and displaying

its white purity at an elevation compared to which

ours was groveling and plebeian, and this spectacle

always chained one's interest and admiration at once,

and made him forget there was anything ugly in the world.



I have just said that there was nothing but death

and desolation in these hideous places, but I forgot.

In the most forlorn and arid and dismal one of all,

where the racked and splintered debris was thickest,

where the ancient patches of snow lay against the very path,

where the winds blew bitterest and the general aspect was

mournfulest and dreariest, and furthest from any suggestion

of cheer or hope, I found a solitary wee forget-me-not

flourishing away, not a droop about it anywhere,

but holding its bright blue star up with the prettiest

and gallantest air in the world, the only happy spirit,

the only smiling thing, in all that grisly desert.

She seemed to say, "Cheer up!--as long as we are here,

let us make the best of it." I judged she had earned

a right to a more hospitable place; so I plucked her up

and sent her to America to a friend who would respect

her for the fight she had made, all by her small self,

to make a whole vast despondent Alpine desolation stop

breaking its heart over the unalterable, and hold up its

head and look at the bright side of things for once.



We stopped for a nooning at a strongly built little inn

called the Schwarenbach.  It sits in a lonely spot among

the peaks, where it is swept by the trailing fringes

of the cloud-rack, and is rained on, and snowed on,

and pelted and persecuted by the storms, nearly every day

of its life.  It was the only habitation in the whole

Gemmi Pass.



Close at hand, now, was a chance for a blood-curdling

Alpine adventure.  Close at hand was the snowy mass

of the Great Altels cooling its topknot in the sky

and daring us to an ascent.  I was fired with the idea,

and immediately made up my mind to procure the necessary

guides, ropes, etc., and undertake it.  I instructed

Harris to go to the landlord of the inn and set him

about our preparations.  Meantime, I went diligently

to work to read up and find out what this much-talked-of

mountain-climbing was like, and how one should go about

it--for in these matters I was ignorant.  I opened

Mr. Hinchliff's SUMMER MONTHS AMONG THE ALPS (published

1857), and selected his account of his ascent of Monte Rosa.



It began:



    "It is very difficult to free the mind from excitement

    on the evening before a grand expedition--"



I saw that I was too calm; so I walked the room a while

and worked myself into a high excitement; but the book's

next remark --that the adventurer must get up at two

in the morning--came as near as anything to flatting it

all out again.  However, I reinforced it, and read on,

about how Mr. Hinchliff dressed by candle-light and was "soon

down among the guides, who were bustling about in the passage,

packing provisions, and making every preparation for the start";

and how he glanced out into the cold clear night and saw that--



"The whole sky was blazing with stars, larger and brighter

than they appear through the dense atmosphere breathed

by inhabitants of the lower parts of the earth.

They seemed actually suspended from the dark vault

of heaven, and their gentle light shed a fairylike gleam

over the snow-fields around the foot of the Matterhorn,

which raised its stupendous pinnacle on high, penetrating to

the heart of the Great Bear, and crowning itself with a

diadem of his magnificent stars.  Not a sound disturbed

the deep tranquillity of the night, except the distant

roar of streams which rush from the high plateau of the

St. Theodule glacier, and fall headlong over precipitous

rocks till they lose themselves in the mazes of

the Gorner glacier."



He took his hot toast and coffee, and then about

half past three his caravan of ten men filed away

from the Riffel Hotel, and began the steep climb.

At half past five he happened to turn around, and "beheld

the glorious spectacle of the Matterhorn, just touched

by the rosy-fingered morning, and looking like a huge

pyramid of fire rising out of the barren ocean of ice

and rock around it." Then the Breithorn and the Dent

Blanche caught the radiant glow; but "the intervening

mass of Monte Rosa made it necessary for us to climb many

long hours before we could hope to see the sun himself,

yet the whole air soon grew warmer after the splendid

birth of the day."



He gazed at the lofty crown of Monte Rosa and the wastes

of snow that guarded its steep approaches, and the chief

guide delivered the opinion that no man could conquer

their awful heights and put his foot upon that summit.

But the adventurers moved steadily on, nevertheless.



They toiled up, and up, and still up; they passed

the Grand Plateau; then toiled up a steep shoulder

of the mountain, clinging like flies to its rugged face;

and now they were confronted by a tremendous wall from

which great blocks of ice and snow were evidently in the

habit of falling.  They turned aside to skirt this wall,

and gradually ascended until their way was barred by a "maze

of gigantic snow crevices,"--so they turned aside again,

and "began a long climb of sufficient steepness to make

a zigzag course necessary."



Fatigue compelled them to halt frequently, for a moment

or two.  At one of these halts somebody called out,

"Look at Mont Blanc!" and "we were at once made aware

of the very great height we had attained by actually seeing

the monarch of the Alps and his attendant satellites

right over the top of the Breithorn, itself at least

14,000 feet high!"



These people moved in single file, and were all tied

to a strong rope, at regular distances apart, so that if

one of them slipped on those giddy heights, the others

could brace themselves on their alpenstocks and save him

from darting into the valley, thousands of feet below.

By and by they came to an ice-coated ridge which was tilted

up at a sharp angle, and had a precipice on one side of it.

They had to climb this, so the guide in the lead cut

steps in the ice with his hatchet, and as fast as he

took his toes out of one of these slight holes, the toes

of the man behind him occupied it.



"Slowly and steadily we kept on our way over this dangerous

part of the ascent, and I dare say it was fortunate for

some of us that attention was distracted from the head

by the paramount necessity of looking after the feet;

FOR, WHILE ON THE LEFT THE INCLINE OF ICE WAS SO STEEP

THAT IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR ANY MAN TO SAVE HIMSELF

IN CASE OF A SLIP, UNLESS THE OTHERS COULD HOLD HIM UP,

ON THE RIGHT WE MIGHT DROP A PEBBLE FROM THE HAND OVER

PRECIPICES OF UNKNOWN EXTENT DOWN UPON THE TREMENDOUS

GLACIER BELOW.



"Great caution, therefore, was absolutely necessary,

and in this exposed situation we were attacked by all

the fury of that grand enemy of aspirants to Monte

Rosa--a severe and bitterly cold wind from the north.

The fine powdery snow was driven past us in the clouds,

penetrating the interstices of our clothes, and the pieces

of ice which flew from the blows of Peter's ax were

whisked into the air, and then dashed over the precipice.

We had quite enough to do to prevent ourselves from being

served in the same ruthless fashion, and now and then,

in the more violent gusts of wind, were glad to stick our

alpenstocks into the ice and hold on hard."



Having surmounted this perilous steep, they sat down and

took a brief rest with their backs against a sheltering

rock and their heels dangling over a bottomless abyss;

then they climbed to the base of another ridge--a more

difficult and dangerous one still:



"The whole of the ridge was exceedingly narrow, and the

fall on each side desperately steep, but the ice in some

of these intervals between the masses of rock assumed

the form of a mere sharp edge, almost like a knife;

these places, though not more than three or four short

paces in length, looked uncommonly awkward; but, like the

sword leading true believers to the gates of Paradise,

they must needs be passed before we could attain to

the summit of our ambition.  These were in one or two

places so narrow, that in stepping over them with toes

well turned out for greater security, ONE END OF THE

FOOT PROJECTED OVER THE AWFUL PRECIPICE ON THE RIGHT,

WHILE THE OTHER WAS ON THE BEGINNING OF THE ICE SLOPE ON

THE LEFT, WHICH WAS SCARCELY LESS STEEP THAN THE ROCKS.

On these occasions Peter would take my hand, and each

of us stretching as far as we could, he was thus enabled

to get a firm footing two paces or rather more from me,

whence a spring would probably bring him to the rock

on the other side; then, turning around, he called

to me to come, and, taking a couple of steps carefully,

I was met at the third by his outstretched hand ready

to clasp mine, and in a moment stood by his side.

The others followed in much the same fashion.  Once my

right foot slipped on the side toward the precipice,

but I threw out my left arm in a moment so that it caught

the icy edge under my armpit as I fell, and supported

me considerably; at the same instant I cast my eyes

down the side on which I had slipped, and contrived

to plant my right foot on a piece of rock as large as a

cricket-ball, which chanced to protrude through the ice,

on the very edge of the precipice.  Being thus anchored

fore and aft, as it were, I believe I could easily have

recovered myself, even if I had been alone, though it must

be confessed the situation would have been an awful one;

as it was, however, a jerk from Peter settled the matter

very soon, and I was on my legs all right in an instant.

The rope is an immense help in places of this kind."



Now they arrived at the base of a great knob or dome

veneered with ice and powdered with snow--the utmost,

summit, the last bit of solidity between them and the hollow

vault of heaven.  They set to work with their hatchets,

and were soon creeping, insectlike, up its surface, with their

heels projecting over the thinnest kind of nothingness,

thickened up a little with a few wandering shreds and

films of cloud moving in a lazy procession far below.

Presently, one man's toe-hold broke and he fell! There he

dangled in mid-air at the end of the rope, like a spider,

till his friends above hauled him into place again.



A little bit later, the party stood upon the wee pedestal

of the very summit, in a driving wind, and looked out

upon the vast green expanses of Italy and a shoreless

ocean of billowy Alps.



When I had read thus far, Harris broke into the room

in a noble excitement and said the ropes and the guides

were secured, and asked if I was ready.  I said I

believed I wouldn't ascend the Altels this time.

I said Alp-climbing was a different thing from what I had

supposed it was, and so I judged we had better study its

points a little more before we went definitely into it.

But I told him to retain the guides and order them to

follow us to Zermatt, because I meant to use them there.

I said I could feel the spirit of adventure beginning

to stir in me, and was sure that the fell fascination

of Alp-climbing would soon be upon me.  I said he could

make up his mind to it that we would do a deed before we

were a week older which would make the hair of the timid

curl with fright.



This made Harris happy, and filled him with ambitious

anticipations.  He went at once to tell the guides to

follow us to Zermatt and bring all their paraphernalia

with them.







CHAPTER XXXV

[Swindling the Coroner]



A great and priceless thing is a new interest! How

it takes possession of a man! how it clings to him,

how it rides him! I strode onward from the Schwarenback

hostelry a changed man, a reorganized personality.

I walked into a new world, I saw with new eyes.

I had been looking aloft at the giant show-peaks only as

things to be worshiped for their grandeur and magnitude,

and their unspeakable grace of form; I looked up at

them now, as also things to be conquered and climbed.

My sense of their grandeur and their noble beauty

was neither lost nor impaired; I had gained a new

interest in the mountains without losing the old ones.

I followed the steep lines up, inch by inch, with my eye,

and noted the possibility or impossibility of following

them with my feet.  When I saw a shining helmet of ice

projecting above the clouds, I tried to imagine I saw

files of black specks toiling up it roped together with a

gossamer thread.



We skirted the lonely little lake called the Daubensee,

and presently passed close by a glacier on the right--

a thing like a great river frozen solid in its flow

and broken square off like a wall at its mouth.

I had never been so near a glacier before.



Here we came upon a new board shanty, and found some men

engaged in building a stone house; so the Schwarenback was

soon to have a rival.  We bought a bottle or so of beer here;

at any rate they called it beer, but I knew by the price

that it was dissolved jewelry, and I perceived by the

taste that dissolved jewelry is not good stuff to drink.



We were surrounded by a hideous desolation.  We stepped

forward to a sort of jumping-off place, and were confronted

by a startling contrast: we seemed to look down into fairyland.

Two or three thousand feet below us was a bright green level,

with a pretty town in its midst, and a silvery stream

winding among the meadows; the charming spot was walled

in on all sides by gigantic precipices clothed with pines;

and over the pines, out of the softened distances,

rose the snowy domes and peaks of the Monte Rosa region.

How exquisitely green and beautiful that little valley

down there was! The distance was not great enough to

obliterate details, it only made them little, and mellow,

and dainty, like landscapes and towns seen through the

wrong end of a spy-glass.



Right under us a narrow ledge rose up out of the valley,

with a green, slanting, bench-shaped top, and grouped

about upon this green-baize bench were a lot of black

and white sheep which looked merely like oversized worms.

The bench seemed lifted well up into our neighborhood,

but that was a deception--it was a long way down to it.



We began our descent, now, by the most remarkable road I

have ever seen.  It wound it corkscrew curves down the face

of the colossal precipice--a narrow way, with always

the solid rock wall at one elbow, and perpendicular

nothingness at the other.  We met an everlasting procession

of guides, porters, mules, litters, and tourists climbing

up this steep and muddy path, and there was no room

to spare when you had to pass a tolerably fat mule.

I always took the inside, when I heard or saw the

mule coming, and flattened myself against the wall.

I preferred the inside, of course, but I should have had

to take it anyhow, because the mule prefers the outside.

A mule's preference--on a precipice--is a thing to

be respected.  Well, his choice is always the outside.

His life is mostly devoted to carrying bulky panniers

and packages which rest against his body--therefore he

is habituated to taking the outside edge of mountain paths,

to keep his bundles from rubbing against rocks or banks

on the other.  When he goes into the passenger business he

absurdly clings to his old habit, and keeps one leg of his

passenger always dangling over the great deeps of the lower

world while that passenger's heart is in the highlands,

so to speak.  More than once I saw a mule's hind foot

cave over the outer edge and send earth and rubbish into

the bottom abyss; and I noticed that upon these occasions

the rider, whether male or female, looked tolerably unwell.



There was one place where an eighteen-inch breadth of

light masonry had been added to the verge of the path,

and as there was a very sharp turn here, a panel of fencing

had been set up there at some time, as a protection.

This panel was old and gray and feeble, and the light

masonry had been loosened by recent rains.  A young

American girl came along on a mule, and in making the turn

the mule's hind foot caved all the loose masonry and one

of the fence-posts overboard; the mule gave a violent lurch

inboard to save himself, and succeeded in the effort,

but that girl turned as white as the snows of Mont Blanc

for a moment.



The path was simply a groove cut into the face of

the precipice; there was a four-foot breadth of solid rock

under the traveler, and four-foot breadth of solid rock

just above his head, like the roof of a narrow porch;

he could look out from this gallery and see a sheer

summitless and bottomless wall of rock before him,

across a gorge or crack a biscuit's toss in width--

but he could not see the bottom of his own precipice

unless he lay down and projected his nose over the edge.

I did not do this, because I did not wish to soil my clothes.



Every few hundred yards, at particularly bad places,

one came across a panel or so of plank fencing; but they

were always old and weak, and they generally leaned

out over the chasm and did not make any rash promises

to hold up people who might need support.  There was one

of these panels which had only its upper board left;

a pedestrianizing English youth came tearing down the path,

was seized with an impulse to look over the precipice,

and without an instant's thought he threw his weight

upon that crazy board.  It bent outward a foot! I never

made a gasp before that came so near suffocating me.

The English youth's face simply showed a lively surprise,

but nothing more.  He went swinging along valleyward again,

as if he did not know he had just swindled a coroner by the

closest kind of a shave.



The Alpine litter is sometimes like a cushioned box

made fast between the middles of two long poles,

and sometimes it is a chair with a back to it and a support

for the feet.  It is carried by relays of strong porters.

The motion is easier than that of any other conveyance.

We met a few men and a great many ladies in litters;

it seemed to me that most of the ladies looked pale

and nauseated; their general aspect gave me the idea

that they were patiently enduring a horrible suffering.

As a rule, they looked at their laps, and left the scenery

to take care of itself.



But the most frightened creature I saw, was a led horse

that overtook us.  Poor fellow, he had been born and reared

in the grassy levels of the Kandersteg valley and had

never seen anything like this hideous place before.

Every few steps he would stop short, glance wildly out from

the dizzy height, and then spread his red nostrils wide

and pant as violently as if he had been running a race;

and all the while he quaked from head to heel as with

a palsy.  He was a handsome fellow, and he made a fine

statuesque picture of terror, but it was pitiful to see

him suffer so.



This dreadful path has had its tragedy.  Baedeker, with his

customary overterseness, begins and ends the tale thus:



"The descent on horseback should be avoided.

In 1861 a Comtesse d'Herlincourt fell from her saddle

over the precipice and was killed on the spot."



We looked over the precipice there, and saw the monument

which commemorates the event.  It stands in the bottom

of the gorge, in a place which has been hollowed out of

the rock to protect it from the torrent and the storms.

Our old guide never spoke but when spoken to, and then

limited himself to a syllable or two, but when we asked

him about this tragedy he showed a strong interest

in the matter.  He said the Countess was very pretty,

and very young--hardly out of her girlhood, in fact.

She was newly married, and was on her bridal tour.

The young husband was riding a little in advance; one guide

was leading the husband's horse, another was leading the

bride's.



The old man continued:



"The guide that was leading the husband's horse happened

to glance back, and there was that poor young thing sitting

up staring out over the precipice; and her face began

to bend downward a little, and she put up her two hands

slowly and met it--so,--and put them flat against her

eyes--so--and then she sank out of the saddle, with a

sharp shriek, and one caught only the flash of a dress,

and it was all over."



Then after a pause:



"Ah, yes, that guide saw these things--yes, he saw them all.

He saw them all, just as I have told you."



After another pause:



"Ah, yes, he saw them all.  My God, that was ME.

I was that guide!"



This had been the one event of the old man's life; so one

may be sure he had forgotten no detail connected with it.

We listened to all he had to say about what was done and what

happened and what was said after the sorrowful occurrence,

and a painful story it was.



When we had wound down toward the valley until we were about

on the last spiral of the corkscrew, Harris's hat blew

over the last remaining bit of precipice--a small cliff

a hundred or hundred and fifty feet high--and sailed down

toward a steep slant composed of rough chips and fragments

which the weather had flaked away from the precipices.

We went leisurely down there, expecting to find it without

any trouble, but we had made a mistake, as to that.

We hunted during a couple of hours--not because the old

straw hat was valuable, but out of curiosity to find out

how such a thing could manage to conceal itself in open

ground where there was nothing left for it to hide behind.

When one is reading in bed, and lays his paper-knife down,

he cannot find it again if it is smaller than a saber;

that hat was as stubborn as any paper-knife could have been,

and we finally had to give it up; but we found a fragment

that had once belonged to an opera-glass, and by digging

around and turning over the rocks we gradually collected

all the lenses and the cylinders and the various odds

and ends that go to making up a complete opera-glass.

We afterward had the thing reconstructed, and the owner

can have his adventurous lost-property by submitting

proofs and paying costs of rehabilitation.  We had hopes

of finding the owner there, distributed around amongst

the rocks, for it would have made an elegant paragraph;

but we were disappointed.  Still, we were far from

being disheartened, for there was a considerable area

which we had not thoroughly searched; we were satisfied he

was there, somewhere, so we resolved to wait over a day at

Leuk and come back and get him.



Then we sat down to polish off the perspiration and

arrange about what we would do with him when we got him.

Harris was for contributing him to the British Museum;

but I was for mailing him to his widow.  That is the difference

between Harris and me: Harris is all for display, I am

all for the simple right, even though I lose money by it.

Harris argued in favor of his proposition against mine,

I argued in favor of mine and against his.  The discussion

warmed into a dispute; the dispute warmed into a quarrel.

I finally said, very decidedly:



"My mind is made up.  He goes to the widow."



Harris answered sharply:



"And MY mind is made up.  He goes to the Museum."



I said, calmly:



"The museum may whistle when it gets him."



Harris retorted:



"The widow may save herself the trouble of whistling,

for I will see that she never gets him."



After some angry bandying of epithets, I said:



"It seems to me that you are taking on a good many airs

about these remains.  I don't quite see what YOU'VE got

to say about them?"



"I? I've got ALL to say about them.  They'd never have

been thought of if I hadn't found their opera-glass. The

corpse belongs to me, and I'll do as I please with him."



I was leader of the Expedition, and all discoveries

achieved by it naturally belonged to me.  I was entitled

to these remains, and could have enforced my right;

but rather than have bad blood about the matter,

I said we would toss up for them.  I threw heads and won,

but it was a barren victory, for although we spent all

the next day searching, we never found a bone.  I cannot

imagine what could ever have become of that fellow.



The town in the valley is called Leuk or Leukerbad.

We pointed our course toward it, down a verdant slope

which was adorned with fringed gentians and other flowers,

and presently entered the narrow alleys of the outskirts

and waded toward the middle of the town through liquid

"fertilizer." They ought to either pave that village or

organize a ferry.



Harris's body was simply a chamois-pasture; his person

was populous with the little hungry pests; his skin,

when he stripped, was splotched like a scarlet-fever patient's;

so, when we were about to enter one of the Leukerbad inns,

and he noticed its sign, "Chamois Hotel," he refused

to stop there.  He said the chamois was plentiful enough,

without hunting up hotels where they made a specialty of it.

I was indifferent, for the chamois is a creature that will

neither bite me nor abide with me; but to calm Harris,

we went to the Ho^tel des Alpes.



At the table d'ho^te, we had this, for an incident.

A very grave man--in fact his gravity amounted to solemnity,

and almost to austerity--sat opposite us and he was

"tight," but doing his best to appear sober.  He took up

a CORKED bottle of wine, tilted it over his glass awhile,

then set it out of the way, with a contented look, and went

on with his dinner.



Presently he put his glass to his mouth, and of course

found it empty.  He looked puzzled, and glanced furtively

and suspiciously out of the corner of his eye at a

benignant and unconscious old lady who sat at his right.

Shook his head, as much as to say, "No, she couldn't have

done it." He tilted the corked bottle over his glass again,

meantime searching around with his watery eye to see

if anybody was watching him.  He ate a few mouthfuls,

raised his glass to his lips, and of course it was

still empty.  He bent an injured and accusing side-glance

upon that unconscious old lady, which was a study to see.

She went on eating and gave no sign.  He took up his glass

and his bottle, with a wise private nod of his head,

and set them gravely on the left-hand side of his plate--

poured himself another imaginary drink--went to work

with his knife and fork once more--presently lifted

his glass with good confidence, and found it empty,

as usual.



This was almost a petrifying surprise.  He straightened

himself up in his chair and deliberately and sorrowfully

inspected the busy old ladies at his elbows, first one and

then the other.  At last he softly pushed his plate away,

set his glass directly in front of him, held on to it

with his left hand, and proceeded to pour with his right.

This time he observed that nothing came.  He turned the

bottle clear upside down; still nothing issued from it;

a plaintive look came into his face, and he said, as if

to himself,



" 'IC! THEY'VE GOT IT ALL!" Then he set the bottle down,

resignedly, and took the rest of his dinner dry.



It was at that table d'ho^te, too, that I had under inspection

the largest lady I have ever seen in private life.

She was over seven feet high, and magnificently proportioned.

What had first called my attention to her, was my stepping

on an outlying flange of her foot, and hearing, from up

toward the ceiling, a deep "Pardon, m'sieu, but you encroach!"



That was when we were coming through the hall, and the place

was dim, and I could see her only vaguely.  The thing

which called my attention to her the second time was,

that at a table beyond ours were two very pretty girls,

and this great lady came in and sat down between them

and me and blotted out my view.  She had a handsome face,

and she was very finely formed--perfected formed,

I should say.  But she made everybody around her look trivial

and commonplace.  Ladies near her looked like children,

and the men about her looked mean.  They looked like failures;

and they looked as if they felt so, too.  She sat with

her back to us.  I never saw such a back in my life.

I would have so liked to see the moon rise over it.

The whole congregation waited, under one pretext or another,

till she finished her dinner and went out; they wanted to see

her at full altitude, and they found it worth tarrying for.

She filled one's idea of what an empress ought to be,

when she rose up in her unapproachable grandeur and moved

superbly out of that place.



We were not at Leuk in time to see her at her heaviest weight.

She had suffered from corpulence and had come there to get

rid of her extra flesh in the baths.  Five weeks of soaking--

five uninterrupted hours of it every day--had accomplished

her purpose and reduced her to the right proportions.



Those baths remove fat, and also skin-diseases. The

patients remain in the great tanks for hours at a time.

A dozen gentlemen and ladies occupy a tank together,

and amuse themselves with rompings and various games.

They have floating desks and tables, and they read or lunch

or play chess in water that is breast-deep. The tourist

can step in and view this novel spectacle if he chooses.

There's a poor-box, and he will have to contribute.

There are several of these big bathing-houses, and you can

always tell when you are near one of them by the romping

noises and shouts of laughter that proceed from it.

The water is running water, and changes all the time,

else a patient with a ringworm might take the bath with only

a partial success, since, while he was ridding himself of

the ringworm, he might catch the itch.



The next morning we wandered back up the green valley,

leisurely, with the curving walls of those bare and

stupendous precipices rising into the clouds before us.

I had never seen a clean, bare precipice stretching up

five thousand feet above me before, and I never shall

expect to see another one.  They exist, perhaps, but not

in places where one can easily get close to them.

This pile of stone is peculiar.  From its base to the

soaring tops of its mighty towers, all its lines and

all its details vaguely suggest human architecture.

There are rudimentary bow-windows, cornices, chimneys,

demarcations of stories, etc.  One could sit and stare up

there and study the features and exquisite graces of this

grand structure, bit by bit, and day after day, and never

weary his interest.  The termination, toward the town,

observed in profile, is the perfection of shape.

It comes down out of the clouds in a succession of rounded,

colossal, terracelike projections--a stairway for the gods;

at its head spring several lofty storm-scarred towers,

one after another, with faint films of vapor curling

always about them like spectral banners.  If there were

a king whose realms included the whole world, here would

be the place meet and proper for such a monarch.  He would

only need to hollow it out and put in the electric light.

He could give audience to a nation at a time under its roof.



Our search for those remains having failed, we inspected with

a glass the dim and distant track of an old-time avalanche

that once swept down from some pine-grown summits behind

the town and swept away the houses and buried the people;

then we struck down the road that leads toward the Rhone,

to see the famous Ladders.  These perilous things are

built against the perpendicular face of a cliff two or

three hundred feet high.  The peasants, of both sexes,

were climbing up and down them, with heavy loads on

their backs.  I ordered Harris to make the ascent, so I

could put the thrill and horror of it in my book, and he

accomplished the feat successfully, though a subagent,

for three francs, which I paid.  It makes me shudder yet

when I think of what I felt when I was clinging there

between heaven and earth in the person of that proxy.

At times the world swam around me, and I could hardly keep

from letting go, so dizzying was the appalling danger.

Many a person would have given up and descended, but I stuck

to my task, and would not yield until I had accomplished it.

I felt a just pride in my exploit, but I would not

have repeated it for the wealth of the world.  I shall

break my neck yet with some such foolhardy performance,

for warnings never seem to have any lasting effect on me.

When the people of the hotel found that I had been

climbing those crazy Ladders, it made me an object of

considerable attention.



Next morning, early, we drove to the Rhone valley and took

the train for Visp.  There we shouldered our knapsacks

and things, and set out on foot, in a tremendous rain,

up the winding gorge, toward Zermatt.  Hour after hour we

slopped along, by the roaring torrent, and under noble

Lesser Alps which were clothed in rich velvety green

all the way up and had little atomy Swiss homes perched

upon grassy benches along their mist-dimmed heights.



The rain continued to pour and the torrent to boom, and we

continued to enjoy both.  At the one spot where this torrent

tossed its white mane highest, and thundered loudest,

and lashed the big boulders fiercest, the canton had done

itself the honor to build the flimsiest wooden bridge

that exists in the world.  While we were walking over it,

along with a party of horsemen, I noticed that even

the larger raindrops made it shake.  I called Harris's

attention to it, and he noticed it, too.  It seemed

to me that if I owned an elephant that was a keepsake,

and I thought a good deal of him, I would think twice

before I would ride him over that bridge.



We climbed up to the village of St. Nicholas, about half

past four in the afternoon, waded ankle-deep through

the fertilizer-juice, and stopped at a new and nice hotel

close by the little church.  We stripped and went to bed,

and sent our clothes down to be baked.  And the horde

of soaked tourists did the same.  That chaos of clothing

got mixed in the kitchen, and there were consequences.

I did not get back the same drawers I sent down, when our

things came up at six-fifteen; I got a pair on a new plan.

They were merely a pair of white ruffle-cuffed absurdities,

hitched together at the top with a narrow band, and they did

not come quite down to my knees.  They were pretty enough,

but they made me feel like two people, and disconnected

at that.  The man must have been an idiot that got himself

up like that, to rough it in the Swiss mountains.

The shirt they brought me was shorter than the drawers,

and hadn't any sleeves to it--at least it hadn't anything

more than what Mr. Darwin would call "rudimentary" sleeves;

these had "edging" around them, but the bosom was

ridiculously plain.  The knit silk undershirt they brought

me was on a new plan, and was really a sensible thing;

it opened behind, and had pockets in it to put your

shoulder-blades in; but they did not seem to fit mine,

and so I found it a sort of uncomfortable garment.

They gave my bobtail coat to somebody else, and sent me

an ulster suitable for a giraffe.  I had to tie my collar on,

because there was no button behind on that foolish little shirt

which I described a while ago.



When I was dressed for dinner at six-thirty, I was too loose

in some places and too tight in others, and altogether I

felt slovenly and ill-conditioned. However, the people

at the table d'ho^te were no better off than I was;

they had everybody's clothes but their own on.  A long

stranger recognized his ulster as soon as he saw the tail

of it following me in, but nobody claimed my shirt or

my drawers, though I described them as well as I was able.

I gave them to the chambermaid that night when I went

to bed, and she probably found the owner, for my own

things were on a chair outside my door in the morning.



There was a lovable English clergyman who did

not get to the table d'ho^te at all.  His breeches

had turned up missing, and without any equivalent.

He said he was not more particular than other people,

but he had noticed that a clergyman at dinner without

any breeches was almost sure to excite remark.







CHAPTER XXXVI

[The Fiendish Fun of Alp-climbing]



We did not oversleep at St. Nicholas.  The church-bell

began to ring at four-thirty in the morning, and from

the length of time it continued to ring I judged that it

takes the Swiss sinner a good while to get the invitation

through his head.  Most church-bells in the world

are of poor quality, and have a harsh and rasping

sound which upsets the temper and produces much sin,

but the St. Nicholas bell is a good deal the worst one

that has been contrived yet, and is peculiarly maddening

in its operation.  Still, it may have its right and its

excuse to exist, for the community is poor and not every

citizen can afford a clock, perhaps; but there cannot be

any excuse for our church-bells at home, for their is no

family in America without a clock, and consequently there

is no fair pretext for the usual Sunday medley of dreadful

sounds that issues from our steeples.  There is much more

profanity in America on Sunday than is all in the other six

days of the week put together, and it is of a more bitter

and malignant character than the week-day profanity, too.

It is produced by the cracked-pot clangor of the cheap

church-bells.



We build our churches almost without regard to cost;

we rear an edifice which is an adornment to the town, and we

gild it, and fresco it, and mortgage it, and do everything

we can think of to perfect it, and then spoil it all by

putting a bell on it which afflicts everybody who hears it,

giving some the headache, others St. Vitus's dance,

and the rest the blind staggers.



An American village at ten o'clock on a summer Sunday is

the quietest and peacefulest and holiest thing in nature;

but it is a pretty different thing half an hour later.

Mr. Poe's poem of the "Bells" stands incomplete to this day;

but it is well enough that it is so, for the public reciter

or "reader" who goes around trying to imitate the sounds

of the various sorts of bells with his voice would find

himself "up a stump" when he got to the church-bell--

as Joseph Addison would say.  The church is always trying

to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea

to reform itself a little, by way of example.  It is still

clinging to one or two things which were useful once,

but which are not useful now, neither are they ornamental.

One is the bell-ringing to remind a clock-caked town

that it is church-time, and another is the reading from

the pulpit of a tedious list of "notices" which everybody

who is interested has already read in the newspaper.

The clergyman even reads the hymn through--a relic

of an ancient time when hymn-books are scarce and costly;

but everybody has a hymn-book, now, and so the public reading

is no longer necessary.  It is not merely unnecessary,

it is generally painful; for the average clergyman could

not fire into his congregation with a shotgun and hit a worse

reader than himself, unless the weapon scattered shamefully.

I am not meaning to be flippant and irreverent, I am only

meaning to be truthful.  The average clergyman, in all

countries and of all denominations, is a very bad reader.

One would think he would at least learn how to read

the Lord's Prayer, by and by, but it is not so.  He races

through it as if he thought the quicker he got it in,

the sooner it would be answered.  A person who does not

appreciate the exceeding value of pauses, and does not know

how to measure their duration judiciously, cannot render

the grand simplicity and dignity of a composition like

that effectively.



We took a tolerably early breakfast, and tramped off

toward Zermatt through the reeking lanes of the village,

glad to get away from that bell.  By and by we had a fine

spectacle on our right.  It was the wall-like butt end of a

huge glacier, which looked down on us from an Alpine height

which was well up in the blue sky.  It was an astonishing

amount of ice to be compacted together in one mass.

We ciphered upon it and decided that it was not less than

several hundred feet from the base of the wall of solid

ice to the top of it--Harris believed it was really

twice that.  We judged that if St. Paul's, St. Peter's,

the Great Pyramid, the Strasburg Cathedral and the Capitol

in Washington were clustered against that wall, a man

sitting on its upper edge could not hang his hat on the top

of any one of them without reaching down three or four

hundred feet--a thing which, of course, no man could do.



To me, that mighty glacier was very beautiful.  I did

not imagine that anybody could find fault with it; but I

was mistaken.  Harris had been snarling for several days.

He was a rabid Protestant, and he was always saying:



"In the Protestant cantons you never see such poverty

and dirt and squalor as you do in this Catholic one;

you never see the lanes and alleys flowing with foulness;

you never see such wretched little sties of houses;

you never see an inverted tin turnip on top of a church

for a dome; and as for a church-bell, why, you never hear

a church-bell at all."



All this morning he had been finding fault, straight along.

First it was with the mud.  He said, "It ain't muddy in a

Protestant canton when it rains." Then it was with the dogs:

"They don't have those lop-eared dogs in a Protestant canton."

Then it was with the roads: "They don't leave the roads

to make themselves in a Protestant canton, the people make

them--and they make a road that IS a road, too." Next it

was the goats: "You never see a goat shedding tears

in a Protestant canton--a goat, there, is one of the

cheerfulest objects in nature." Next it was the chamois:

"You never see a Protestant chamois act like one of these--

they take a bite or two and go; but these fellows camp

with you and stay." Then it was the guide-boards: "In

a Protestant canton you couldn't get lost if you wanted to,

but you never see a guide-board in a Catholic canton."

Next, "You never see any flower-boxes in the windows,

here--never anything but now and then a cat--a torpid one;

but you take a Protestant canton: windows perfectly lovely

with flowers--and as for cats, there's just acres of them.

These folks in this canton leave a road to make itself,

and then fine you three francs if you 'trot' over it--

as if a horse could trot over such a sarcasm of a road."

Next about the goiter: "THEY talk about goiter!--I haven't

seen a goiter in this whole canton that I couldn't put

in a hat."



He had growled at everything, but I judged it would puzzle

him to find anything the matter with this majestic glacier.

I intimated as much; but he was ready, and said with surly

discontent: "You ought to see them in the Protestant cantons."



This irritated me.  But I concealed the feeling, and asked:



"What is the matter with this one?"



"Matter? Why, it ain't in any kind of condition.

They never take any care of a glacier here.  The moraine

has been spilling gravel around it, and got it all dirty."



"Why, man, THEY can't help that."



"THEY? You're right.  That is, they WON'T. They could

if they wanted to.  You never see a speck of dirt

on a Protestant glacier.  Look at the Rhone glacier.

It is fifteen miles long, and seven hundred feet think.

If this was a Protestant glacier you wouldn't see it looking

like this, I can tell you."



"That is nonsense.  What would they do with it?"



"They would whitewash it.  They always do."



I did not believe a word of this, but rather than have

trouble I let it go; for it is a waste of breath to argue

with a bigot.  I even doubted if the Rhone glacier WAS

in a Protestant canton; but I did not know, so I could

not make anything by contradicting a man who would

probably put me down at once with manufactured evidence.



About nine miles from St. Nicholas we crossed a bridge

over the raging torrent of the Visp, and came to a log

strip of flimsy fencing which was pretending to secure

people from tumbling over a perpendicular wall forty feet

high and into the river.  Three children were approaching;

one of them, a little girl, about eight years old,

was running; when pretty close to us she stumbled and fell,

and her feet shot under the rail of the fence and for a

moment projected over the stream.  It gave us a sharp shock,

for we thought she was gone, sure, for the ground slanted

steeply, and to save herself seemed a sheer impossibility;

but she managed to scramble up, and ran by us laughing.



We went forward and examined the place and saw the long

tracks which her feet had made in the dirt when they

darted over the verge.  If she had finished her trip she

would have struck some big rocks in the edge of the water,

and then the torrent would have snatched her downstream

among the half-covered boulders and she would have been

pounded to pulp in two minutes.  We had come exceedingly

near witnessing her death.



And now Harris's contrary nature and inborn selfishness

were striking manifested.  He has no spirit of self-denial.

He began straight off, and continued for an hour,

to express his gratitude that the child was not destroyed.

I never saw such a man.  That was the kind of person he was;

just so HE was gratified, he never cared anything about

anybody else.  I had noticed that trait in him, over and

over again.  Often, of course, it was mere heedlessness,

mere want of reflection.  Doubtless this may have been

the case in most instances, but it was not the less hard

to bar on that account--and after all, its bottom,

its groundwork, was selfishness.  There is no avoiding

that conclusion.  In the instance under consideration,

I did think the indecency of running on in that way might

occur to him; but no, the child was saved and he was glad,

that was sufficient--he cared not a straw for MY feelings,

or my loss of such a literary plum, snatched from my

very mouth at the instant it was ready to drop into it.

His selfishness was sufficient to place his own gratification

in being spared suffering clear before all concern for me,

his friend.  Apparently, he did not once reflect upon the

valuable details which would have fallen like a windfall

to me: fishing the child out--witnessing the surprise of

the family and the stir the thing would have made among the

peasants--then a Swiss funeral--then the roadside monument,

to be paid for by us and have our names mentioned in it.

And we should have gone into Baedeker and been immortal.

I was silent.  I was too much hurt to complain.  If he could

act so, and be so heedless and so frivolous at such a time,

and actually seem to glory in it, after all I had done for him,

I would have cut my hand off before I would let him see

that I was wounded.



We were approaching Zermatt; consequently, we were

approaching the renowned Matterhorn.  A month before,

this mountain had been only a name to us, but latterly

we had been moving through a steadily thickening double

row of pictures of it, done in oil, water, chromo, wood,

steel, copper, crayon, and photography, and so it had at

length become a shape to us--and a very distinct, decided,

and familiar one, too.  We were expecting to recognize

that mountain whenever or wherever we should run across it.

We were not deceived.  The monarch was far away when we

first saw him, but there was no such thing as mistaking him.

He has the rare peculiarity of standing by himself;

he is peculiarly steep, too, and is also most oddly shaped.

He towers into the sky like a colossal wedge, with the

upper third of its blade bent a little to the left.

The broad base of this monster wedge is planted upon

a grand glacier-paved Alpine platform whose elevation

is ten thousand feet above sea-level; as the wedge itself

is some five thousand feet high, it follows that its

apex is about fifteen thousand feet above sea-level.

So the whole bulk of this stately piece of rock, this

sky-cleaving monolith, is above the line of eternal snow.

Yet while all its giant neighbors have the look of being

built of solid snow, from their waists up, the Matterhorn

stands black and naked and forbidding, the year round,

or merely powdered or streaked with white in places,

for its sides are so steep that the snow cannot stay there.

Its strange form, its august isolation, and its majestic

unkinship with its own kind, make it--so to speak--the Napoleon

of the mountain world.  "Grand, gloomy, and peculiar,"

is a phrase which fits it as aptly as it fitted the great

captain.



Think of a monument a mile high, standing on a pedestal

two miles high! This is what the Matterhorn is--a monument.

Its office, henceforth, for all time, will be to keep

watch and ward over the secret resting-place of the young

Lord Douglas, who, in 1865, was precipitated from the

summit over a precipice four thousand feet high, and never

seen again.  No man ever had such a monument as this before;

the most imposing of the world's other monuments are

but atoms compared to it; and they will perish, and their

places will pass from memory, but this will remain. [1]



1.  The accident which cost Lord Douglas his life (see

    Chapter xii) also cost the lives of three other men.

    These three fell four-fifths of a mile, and their bodies

    were afterward found, lying side by side, upon a glacier,

    whence they were borne to Zermatt and buried in the

churchyard.

    The remains of Lord Douglas have never been found.

    The secret of his sepulture, like that of Moses, must remain

    a mystery always.



A walk from St. Nicholas to Zermatt is a wonderful experience.

Nature is built on a stupendous plan in that region.

One marches continually between walls that are piled

into the skies, with their upper heights broken into

a confusion of sublime shapes that gleam white and cold

against the background of blue; and here and there one

sees a big glacier displaying its grandeurs on the top

of a precipice, or a graceful cascade leaping and flashing

down the green declivities.  There is nothing tame,

or cheap, or trivial--it is all magnificent.  That short

valley is a picture-gallery of a notable kind, for it

contains no mediocrities; from end to end the Creator

has hung it with His masterpieces.



We made Zermatt at three in the afternoon, nine hours out

from St. Nicholas.  Distance, by guide-book, twelve miles;

by pedometer seventy-two. We were in the heart and home

of the mountain-climbers, now, as all visible things

testified.  The snow-peaks did not hold themselves aloof,

in aristocratic reserve; they nestled close around,

in a friendly, sociable way; guides, with the ropes and

axes and other implements of their fearful calling slung

about their persons, roosted in a long line upon a stone

wall in front of the hotel, and waited for customers;

sun-burnt climbers, in mountaineering costume, and followed

by their guides and porters, arrived from time to time,

from breakneck expeditions among the peaks and glaciers

of the High Alps; male and female tourists, on mules,

filed by, in a continuous procession, hotelward-bound from

wild adventures which would grow in grandeur very time

they were described at the English or American fireside,

and at last outgrow the possible itself.



We were not dreaming; this was not a make-believe home

of the Alp-climber, created by our heated imaginations;

no, for here was Mr. Girdlestone himself, the famous

Englishman who hunts his way to the most formidable Alpine

summits without a guide.  I was not equal to imagining

a Girdlestone; it was all I could do to even realize him,

while looking straight at him at short range.  I would rather

face whole Hyde Parks of artillery than the ghastly forms

of death which he has faced among the peaks and precipices

of the mountains.  There is probably no pleasure equal

to the pleasure of climbing a dangerous Alp; but it is

a pleasure which is confined strictly to people who can

find pleasure in it.  I have not jumped to this conclusion;

I have traveled to it per gravel-train, so to speak.

I have thought the thing all out, and am quite sure I

am right.  A born climber's appetite for climbing is hard

to satisfy; when it comes upon him he is like a starving

man with a feast before him; he may have other business

on hand, but it must wait.  Mr. Girdlestone had had

his usual summer holiday in the Alps, and had spent it

in his usual way, hunting for unique chances to break

his neck; his vacation was over, and his luggage packed

for England, but all of a sudden a hunger had come upon

him to climb the tremendous Weisshorn once more, for he

had heard of a new and utterly impossible route up it.

His baggage was unpacked at once, and now he and a friend,

laden with knapsacks, ice-axes, coils of rope, and canteens

of milk, were just setting out.  They would spend

the night high up among the snows, somewhere, and get

up at two in the morning and finish the enterprise.

I had a strong desire to go with them, but forced it down--

a feat which Mr. Girdlestone, with all his fortitude,

could not do.



Even ladies catch the climbing mania, and are unable to

throw it off.  A famous climber, of that sex, had attempted

the Weisshorn a few days before our arrival, and she

and her guides had lost their way in a snow-storm high up

among the peaks and glaciers and been forced to wander

around a good while before they could find a way down.

When this lady reached the bottom, she had been on her

feet twenty-three hours!



Our guides, hired on the Gemmi, were already at Zermatt

when we reached there.  So there was nothing to interfere

with our getting up an adventure whenever we should

choose the time and the object.  I resolved to devote

my first evening in Zermatt to studying up the subject

of Alpine climbing, by way of preparation.



I read several books, and here are some of the things

I found out.  One's shoes must be strong and heavy,

and have pointed hobnails in them.  The alpenstock

must be of the best wood, for if it should break,

loss of life might be the result.  One should carry an ax,

to cut steps in the ice with, on the great heights.

There must be a ladder, for there are steep bits of rock

which can be surmounted with this instrument--or this

utensil--but could not be surmounted without it;

such an obstruction has compelled the tourist to waste

hours hunting another route, when a ladder would have

saved him all trouble.  One must have from one hundred

and fifty to five hundred feet of strong rope, to be used

in lowering the party down steep declivities which are

too steep and smooth to be traversed in any other way.

One must have a steel hook, on another rope--a very

useful thing; for when one is ascending and comes to a low

bluff which is yet too high for the ladder, he swings

this rope aloft like a lasso, the hook catches at the top

of the bluff, and then the tourist climbs the rope,

hand over hand--being always particular to try and forget

that if the hook gives way he will never stop falling

till he arrives in some part of Switzerland where they

are not expecting him.  Another important thing--there

must be a rope to tie the whole party together with,

so that if one falls from a mountain or down a bottomless

chasm in a glacier, the others may brace back on the rope

and save him.  One must have a silk veil, to protect

his face from snow, sleet, hail and gale, and colored

goggles to protect his eyes from that dangerous enemy,

snow-blindness. Finally, there must be some porters,

to carry provisions, wine and scientific instruments,

and also blanket bags for the party to sleep in.



I closed my readings with a fearful adventure which

Mr. Whymper once had on the Matterhorn when he was prowling

around alone, five thousand feet above the town of Breil.

He was edging his way gingerly around the corner of a

precipice where the upper edge of a sharp declivity

of ice-glazed snow joined it.  This declivity swept

down a couple of hundred feet, into a gully which curved

around and ended at a precipice eight hundred feet high,

overlooking a glacier.  His foot slipped, and he fell.



He says:



"My knapsack brought my head down first, and I pitched into

some rocks about a dozen feet below; they caught something,

and tumbled me off the edge, head over heels, into the gully;

the baton was dashed from my hands, and I whirled downward

in a series of bounds, each longer than the last; now over ice,

now into rocks, striking my head four or five times,

each time with increased force.  The last bound sent me

spinning through the air in a leap of fifty or sixty feet,

from one side of the gully to the other, and I struck

the rocks, luckily, with the whole of my left side.

They caught my clothes for a moment, and I fell back on

to the snow with motion arrested.  My head fortunately

came the right side up, and a few frantic catches brought

me to a halt, in the neck of the gully and on the verge

of the precipice.  Baton, hat, and veil skimmed by

and disappeared, and the crash of the rocks--which I had

started--as they fell on to the glacier, told how narrow

had been the escape from utter destruction.  As it was,

I fell nearly two hundred feet in seven or eight bounds.

Ten feet more would have taken me in one gigantic leaps

of eight hundred feet on to the glacier below.



"The situation was sufficiently serious.  The rocks could

not be let go for a moment, and the blood was spurting

out of more than twenty cuts.  The most serious ones were

in the head, and I vainly tried to close them with one hand,

while holding on with the other.  It was useless;

the blood gushed out in blinding jets at each pulsation.

At last, in a moment of inspiration, I kicked out a big

lump of snow and struck it as plaster on my head.

The idea was a happy one, and the flow of blood diminished.

Then, scrambling up, I got, not a moment too soon, to a

place of safety, and fainted away.  The sun was setting

when consciousness returned, and it was pitch-dark before

the Great Staircase was descended; but by a combination

of luck and care, the whole four thousand seven hundred

feet of descent to Breil was accomplished without a slip,

or once missing the way."



His wounds kept him abed some days.  Then he got up

and climbed that mountain again.  That is the way with

a true Alp-climber; the more fun he has, the more he wants.







CHAPTER XXXVII

[Our Imposing Column Starts Upward]



After I had finished my readings, I was no longer myself;

I was tranced, uplifted, intoxicated, by the almost

incredible perils and adventures I had been following

my authors through, and the triumphs I had been sharing

with them.  I sat silent some time, then turned to Harris

and said:



"My mind is made up."



Something in my tone struck him: and when he glanced

at my eye and read what was written there, his face

paled perceptibly.  He hesitated a moment, then said:



"Speak."



I answered, with perfect calmness:



"I will ascend the Riffelberg."



If I had shot my poor friend he could not have fallen from

his chair more suddenly.  If I had been his father he could

not have pleaded harder to get me to give up my purpose.

But I turned a deaf ear to all he said.  When he perceived

at last that nothing could alter my determination,

he ceased to urge, and for a while the deep silence was

broken only by his sobs.  I sat in marble resolution,

with my eyes fixed upon vacancy, for in spirit I was already

wrestling with the perils of the mountains, and my friend

sat gazing at me in adoring admiration through his tears.

At last he threw himself upon me in a loving embrace and

exclaimed in broken tones:



"Your Harris will never desert you.  We will die together."



I cheered the noble fellow with praises, and soon his

fears were forgotten and he was eager for the adventure.

He wanted to summon the guides at once and leave at

two in the morning, as he supposed the custom was;

but I explained that nobody was looking at that hour;

and that the start in the dark was not usually made from

the village but from the first night's resting-place

on the mountain side.  I said we would leave the village

at 3 or 4 P.M. on the morrow; meantime he could notify

the guides, and also let the public know of the attempt

which we proposed to make.



I went to bed, but not to sleep.  No man can sleep when he

is about to undertake one of these Alpine exploits.

I tossed feverishly all night long, and was glad enough

when I heard the clock strike half past eleven and knew it

was time to get up for dinner.  I rose, jaded and rusty,

and went to the noon meal, where I found myself the center

of interest and curiosity; for the news was already abroad.

It is not easy to eat calmly when you are a lion; but it is

very pleasant, nevertheless.



As usual, at Zermatt, when a great ascent is about to

be undertaken, everybody, native and foreign, laid aside

his own projects and took up a good position to observe

the start.  The expedition consisted of 198 persons,

including the mules; or 205, including the cows.

As follows:



CHIEFS OF SERVICE SUBORDINATES



Myself 1 Veterinary Surgeon Mr. Harris 1 Butler 17

Guides 12 Waiters 4 Surgeons 1 Footman 1 Geologist 1

Barber 1 Botanist 1 Head Cook 3 Chaplains 9 Assistants

15 Barkeepers 1 Confectionery Artist 1 Latinist



TRANSPORTATION, ETC.



27 Porters 3 Coarse Washers and Ironers 44 Mules 1 Fine

ditto 44 Muleteers 7 Cows 2 Milkers



Total, 154 men, 51 animals.  Grand Total, 205.



RATIONS, ETC.  APPARATUS



16 Cases Hams 25 Spring Mattresses 2 Barrels Flour 2

Hair ditto 22 Barrels Whiskey Bedding for same 1 Barrel

Sugar 2 Mosquito-nets 1 Keg Lemons 29 Tents 2,000 Cigars

Scientific Instruments 1 Barrel Pies 97 Ice-axes 1 Ton

of Pemmican 5 Cases Dynamite 143 Pair Crutches 7 Cans

Nitroglycerin 2 Barrels Arnica 22 40-foot Ladders 1 Bale

of Lint 2 Miles of Rope 27 Kegs Paregoric 154 Umbrellas



It was full four o'clock in the afternoon before my cavalcade

was entirely ready.  At that hour it began to move.

In point of numbers and spectacular effect, it was the most

imposing expedition that had ever marched from Zermatt.



I commanded the chief guide to arrange the men and animals

in single file, twelve feet apart, and lash them all

together on a strong rope.  He objected that the first

two miles was a dead level, with plenty of room, and that

the rope was never used except in very dangerous places.

But I would not listen to that.  My reading had taught

me that many serious accidents had happened in the Alps

simply from not having the people tied up soon enough;

I was not going to add one to the list.  The guide then

obeyed my order.



When the procession stood at ease, roped together,

and ready to move, I never saw a finer sight.  It was 3,122

feet long--over half a mile; every man and me was on foot,

and had on his green veil and his blue goggles, and his

white rag around his hat, and his coil of rope over one

shoulder and under the other, and his ice-ax in his belt,

and carried his alpenstock in his left hand, his umbrella

(closed) in his right, and his crutches slung at his back.

The burdens of the pack-mules and the horns of the cows

were decked with the Edelweiss and the Alpine rose.



I and my agent were the only persons mounted.  We were

in the post of danger in the extreme rear, and tied

securely to five guides apiece.  Our armor-bearers carried

our ice-axes, alpenstocks, and other implements for us.

We were mounted upon very small donkeys, as a measure

of safety; in time of peril we could straighten our legs

and stand up, and let the donkey walk from under.

Still, I cannot recommend this sort of animal--at least

for excursions of mere pleasure--because his ears interrupt

the view.  I and my agent possessed the regulation

mountaineering costumes, but concluded to leave them behind.

Out of respect for the great numbers of tourists of both

sexes who would be assembled in front of the hotels

to see us pass, and also out of respect for the many

tourists whom we expected to encounter on our expedition,

we decided to make the ascent in evening dress.



We watered the caravan at the cold stream which rushes

down a trough near the end of the village, and soon

afterward left the haunts of civilization behind us.

About half past five o'clock we arrived at a bridge which

spans the Visp, and after throwing over a detachment to see

if it was safe, the caravan crossed without accident.

The way now led, by a gentle ascent, carpeted with

fresh green grass, to the church at Winkelmatten.

Without stopping to examine this edifice, I executed

a flank movement to the right and crossed the bridge

over the Findelenbach, after first testing its strength.

Here I deployed to the right again, and presently entered

an inviting stretch of meadowland which was unoccupied save

by a couple of deserted huts toward the furthest extremity.

These meadows offered an excellent camping-place. We

pitched our tents, supped, established a proper grade,

recorded the events of the day, and then went to bed.



We rose at two in the morning and dressed by candle-light. It

was a dismal and chilly business.  A few stars were shining,

but the general heavens were overcast, and the great shaft

of the Matterhorn was draped in a cable pall of clouds.

The chief guide advised a delay; he said he feared it

was going to rain.  We waited until nine o'clock, and then

got away in tolerably clear weather.



Our course led up some terrific steeps, densely wooded with

larches and cedars, and traversed by paths which the rains

had guttered and which were obstructed by loose stones.

To add to the danger and inconvenience, we were constantly

meeting returning tourists on foot and horseback,

and as constantly being crowded and battered by ascending

tourists who were in a hurry and wanted to get by.



Our troubles thickened.  About the middle of the afternoon

the seventeen guides called a halt and held a consultation.

After consulting an hour they said their first suspicion

remained intact--that is to say, they believed they

were lost.  I asked if they did not KNOW it? No, they said,

they COULDN'T absolutely know whether they were lost or not,

because none of them had ever been in that part of the

country before.  They had a strong instinct that they

were lost, but they had no proofs--except that they

did not know where they were.  They had met no tourists

for some time, and they considered that a suspicious sign.



Plainly we were in an ugly fix.  The guides were naturally

unwilling to go alone and seek a way out of the difficulty;

so we all went together.  For better security we moved

slow and cautiously, for the forest was very dense.

We did not move up the mountain, but around it, hoping to

strike across the old trail.  Toward nightfall, when we

were about tired out, we came up against a rock as big

as a cottage.  This barrier took all the remaining spirit

out of the men, and a panic of fear and despair ensued.

They moaned and wept, and said they should never see

their homes and their dear ones again.  Then they began

to upbraid me for bringing them upon this fatal expedition.

Some even muttered threats against me.



Clearly it was no time to show weakness.  So I made

a speech in which I said that other Alp-climbers had been

in as perilous a position as this, and yet by courage

and perseverance had escaped.  I promised to stand by them,

I promised to rescue them.  I closed by saying we had plenty

of provisions to maintain us for quite a siege--and did they

suppose Zermatt would allow half a mile of men and mules

to mysteriously disappear during any considerable time,

right above their noses, and make no inquiries? No,

Zermatt would send out searching-expeditions and we should be

saved.



This speech had a great effect.  The men pitched the tents

with some little show of cheerfulness, and we were snugly

under cover when the night shut down.  I now reaped

the reward of my wisdom in providing one article which is

not mentioned in any book of Alpine adventure but this.

I refer to the paregoric.  But for that beneficent drug,

would have not one of those men slept a moment during that

fearful night.  But for that gentle persuader they must

have tossed, unsoothed, the night through; for the whiskey

was for me.  Yes, they would have risen in the morning

unfitted for their heavy task.  As it was, everybody slept

but my agent and me--only we and the barkeepers.

I would not permit myself to sleep at such a time.

I considered myself responsible for all those lives.

I meant to be on hand and ready, in case of avalanches

up there, but I did not know it then.



We watched the weather all through that awful night,

and kept an eye on the barometer, to be prepared for

the least change.  There was not the slightest change

recorded by the instrument, during the whole time.

Words cannot describe the comfort that that friendly,

hopeful, steadfast thing was to me in that season

of trouble.  It was a defective barometer, and had no hand

but the stationary brass pointer, but I did not know that

until afterward.  If I should be in such a situation again,

I should not wish for any barometer but that one.



All hands rose at two in the morning and took breakfast,

and as soon as it was light we roped ourselves together

and went at that rock.  For some time we tried the hook-rope

and other means of scaling it, but without success--that is,

without perfect success.  The hook caught once, and Harris

started up it hand over hand, but the hold broke and if

there had not happened to be a chaplain sitting underneath

at the time, Harris would certainly have been crippled.

As it was, it was the chaplain.  He took to his crutches,

and I ordered the hook-rope to be laid aside.

It was too dangerous an implement where so many people

are standing around.



We were puzzled for a while; then somebody thought of

the ladders.  One of these was leaned against the rock,

and the men went up it tied together in couples.

Another ladder was sent up for use in descending.

At the end of half an hour everybody was over, and that rock

was conquered.  We gave our first grand shout of triumph.

But the joy was short-lived, for somebody asked how we were

going to get the animals over.



This was a serious difficulty; in fact, it was an impossibility.

The courage of the men began to waver immediately; once more

we were threatened with a panic.  But when the danger

was most imminent, we were saved in a mysterious way.

A mule which had attracted attention from the beginning

by its disposition to experiment, tried to eat a five-pound

can of nitroglycerin.  This happened right alongside

the rock.  The explosion threw us all to the ground,

and covered us with dirt and debris; it frightened

us extremely, too, for the crash it made was deafening,

and the violence of the shock made the ground tremble.

However, we were grateful, for the rock was gone.

Its place was occupied by a new cellar, about thirty

feet across, by fifteen feet deep.  The explosion was

heard as far as Zermatt; and an hour and a half afterward,

many citizens of that town were knocked down and quite

seriously injured by descending portions of mule meat,

frozen solid.  This shows, better than any estimate

in figures, how high the experimenter went.



We had nothing to do, now, but bridge the cellar and proceed

on our way.  With a cheer the men went at their work.

I attended to the engineering, myself.  I appointed a strong

detail to cut down trees with ice-axes and trim them for

piers to support the bridge.  This was a slow business,

for ice-axes are not good to cut wood with.  I caused

my piers to be firmly set up in ranks in the cellar,

and upon them I laid six of my forty-foot ladders,

side by side, and laid six more on top of them.

Upon this bridge I caused a bed of boughs to be spread,

and on top of the boughs a bed of earth six inches deep.

I stretched ropes upon either side to serve as railings,

and then my bridge was complete.  A train of elephants

could have crossed it in safety and comfort.  By nightfall

the caravan was on the other side and the ladders were

taken up.



Next morning we went on in good spirits for a while,

though our way was slow and difficult, by reason of the

steep and rocky nature of the ground and the thickness

of the forest; but at last a dull despondency crept into

the men's faces and it was apparent that not only they,

but even the guides, were now convinced that we were lost.

The fact that we still met no tourists was a circumstance

that was but too significant.  Another thing seemed to

suggest that we were not only lost, but very badly lost;

for there must surely be searching-parties on the road

before this time, yet we had seen no sign of them.



Demoralization was spreading; something must be done,

and done quickly, too.  Fortunately, I am not unfertile

in expedients.  I contrived one now which commended itself

to all, for it promised well.  I took three-quarters

of a mile of rope and fastened one end of it around

the waist of a guide, and told him to go find the road,

while the caravan waited.  I instructed him to guide himself

back by the rope, in case of failure; in case of success,

he was to give the rope a series of violent jerks,

whereupon the Expedition would go to him at once.

He departed, and in two minutes had disappeared among

the trees.  I payed out the rope myself, while everybody

watched the crawling thing with eager eyes.  The rope

crept away quite slowly, at times, at other times with

some briskness.  Twice or thrice we seemed to get the signal,

and a shout was just ready to break from the men's lips

when they perceived it was a false alarm.  But at last,

when over half a mile of rope had slidden away, it stopped

gliding and stood absolutely still--one minute--two

minutes--three--while we held our breath and watched.



Was the guide resting? Was he scanning the country from

some high point? Was he inquiring of a chance mountaineer?

Stop,--had he fainted from excess of fatigue and anxiety?



This thought gave us a shock.  I was in the very first act

of detailing an Expedition to succor him, when the cord

was assailed with a series of such frantic jerks that I

could hardly keep hold of it.  The huzza that went up,

then, was good to hear.  "Saved! saved!" was the word

that rang out, all down the long rank of the caravan.



We rose up and started at once.  We found the route to be

good enough for a while, but it began to grow difficult,

by and by, and this feature steadily increased.  When we

judged we had gone half a mile, we momently expected

to see the guide; but no, he was not visible anywhere;

neither was he waiting, for the rope was still moving,

consequently he was doing the same.  This argued that he

had not found the road, yet, but was marching to it

with some peasant.  There was nothing for us to do but

plod along--and this we did.  At the end of three hours

we were still plodding.  This was not only mysterious,

but exasperating.  And very fatiguing, too; for we had

tried hard, along at first, to catch up with the guide,

but had only fagged ourselves, in vain; for although he

was traveling slowly he was yet able to go faster than the

hampered caravan over such ground.



At three in the afternoon we were nearly dead with

exhaustion--and still the rope was slowly gliding out.

The murmurs against the guide had been growing steadily,

and at last they were become loud and savage.

A mutiny ensued.  The men refused to proceed.  They declared

that we had been traveling over and over the same ground

all day, in a kind of circle.  They demanded that our

end of the rope be made fast to a tree, so as to halt

the guide until we could overtake him and kill him.

This was not an unreasonable requirement, so I gave the order.



As soon as the rope was tied, the Expedition moved

forward with that alacrity which the thirst for

vengeance usually inspires.  But after a tiresome march

of almost half a mile, we came to a hill covered thick

with a crumbly rubbish of stones, and so steep that no

man of us all was now in a condition to climb it.

Every attempt failed, and ended in crippling somebody.

Within twenty minutes I had five men on crutches.

Whenever a climber tried to assist himself by the rope,

it yielded and let him tumble backward.  The frequency

of this result suggested an idea to me.  I ordered

the caravan to 'bout face and form in marching order;

I then made the tow-rope fast to the rear mule, and gave

the command:



"Mark time--by the right flank--forward--march!"



The procession began to move, to the impressive strains

of a battle-chant, and I said to myself, "Now, if the rope

don't break I judge THIS will fetch that guide into the camp."

I watched the rope gliding down the hill, and presently

when I was all fixed for triumph I was confronted

by a bitter disappointment; there was no guide tied

to the rope, it was only a very indignant old black ram.

The fury of the baffled Expedition exceeded all bounds.

They even wanted to wreak their unreasoning vengeance on this

innocent dumb brute.  But I stood between them and their prey,

menaced by a bristling wall of ice-axes and alpenstocks,

and proclaimed that there was but one road to this murder,

and it was directly over my corpse.  Even as I spoke I

saw that my doom was sealed, except a miracle supervened

to divert these madmen from their fell purpose.  I see

the sickening wall of weapons now; I see that advancing

host as I saw it then, I see the hate in those cruel eyes;

I remember how I drooped my head upon my breast,

I feel again the sudden earthquake shock in my rear,

administered by the very ram I was sacrificing myself to save;

I hear once more the typhoon of laughter that burst from

the assaulting column as I clove it from van to rear

like a Sepoy shot from a Rodman gun.



I was saved.  Yes, I was saved, and by the merciful instinct

of ingratitude which nature had planted in the breast

of that treacherous beast.  The grace which eloquence

had failed to work in those men's hearts, had been wrought

by a laugh.  The ram was set free and my life was spared.



We lived to find out that that guide had deserted us as soon

as he had placed a half-mile between himself and us.

To avert suspicion, he had judged it best that the line

should continue to move; so he caught that ram, and at

the time that he was sitting on it making the rope fast

to it, we were imagining that he was lying in a swoon,

overcome by fatigue and distress.  When he allowed the ram

to get up it fell to plunging around, trying to rid itself

of the rope, and this was the signal which we had risen

up with glad shouts to obey.  We had followed this ram

round and round in a circle all day--a thing which was

proven by the discovery that we had watered the Expedition

seven times at one and same spring in seven hours.

As expert a woodman as I am, I had somehow failed to notice

this until my attention was called to it by a hog.

This hog was always wallowing there, and as he was the

only hog we saw, his frequent repetition, together with

his unvarying similarity to himself, finally caused me

to reflect that he must be the same hog, and this led

me to the deduction that this must be the same spring,

also--which indeed it was.



I made a note of this curious thing, as showing

in a striking manner the relative difference between

glacial action and the action of the hog.  It is now

a well-established fact that glaciers move; I consider

that my observations go to show, with equal conclusiveness,

that a hog in a spring does not move.  I shall be glad

to receive the opinions of other observers upon this point.



To return, for an explanatory moment, to that guide,

and then I shall be done with him.  After leaving the ram

tied to the rope, he had wandered at large a while,

and then happened to run across a cow.  Judging that

a cow would naturally know more than a guide, he took

her by the tail, and the result justified his judgment.

She nibbled her leisurely way downhill till it was near

milking-time, then she struck for home and towed him

into Zermatt.







CHAPTER XXXVIII

[I Conquer the Gorner Grat]



We went into camp on that wild spot to which that ram

had brought us.  The men were greatly fatigued.

Their conviction that we were lost was forgotten in the cheer

of a good supper, and before the reaction had a chance

to set in, I loaded them up with paregoric and put them to bed.



Next morning I was considering in my mind our desperate

situation and trying to think of a remedy, when Harris

came to me with a Baedeker map which showed conclusively

that the mountain we were on was still in Switzerland--yes,

every part of it was in Switzerland.  So we were not lost,

after all.  This was an immense relief; it lifted the weight

of two such mountains from my breast.  I immediately

had the news disseminated and the map was exhibited.

The effect was wonderful.  As soon as the men saw with

their own eyes that they knew where they were, and that it

was only the summit that was lost and not themselves,

they cheered up instantly and said with one accord,

let the summit take care of itself.



Our distresses being at an end, I now determined to rest

the men in camp and give the scientific department of the

Expedition a chance.  First, I made a barometric observation,

to get our altitude, but I could not perceive that there

was any result.  I knew, by my scientific reading,

that either thermometers or barometers ought to be boiled,

to make them accurate; I did not know which it was,

so I boiled them both.  There was still no result;

so I examined these instruments and discovered that they

possessed radical blemishes: the barometer had no hand

but the brass pointer and the ball of the thermometer was

stuffed with tin-foil. I might have boiled those things

to rags, and never found out anything.



I hunted up another barometer; it was new and perfect.

I boiled it half an hour in a pot of bean soup which

the cooks were making.  The result was unexpected: the

instrument was not affecting at all, but there was such

a strong barometer taste to the soup that the head cook,

who was a most conscientious person, changed its name

in the bill of fare.  The dish was so greatly liked by all,

that I ordered the cook to have barometer soup every day.

It was believed that the barometer might eventually

be injured, but I did not care for that.  I had demonstrated

to my satisfaction that it could not tell how high

a mountain was, therefore I had no real use for it.

Changes in the weather I could take care of without it;

I did not wish to know when the weather was going to be good,

what I wanted to know was when it was going to be bad,

and this I could find out from Harris's corns.  Harris had

had his corns tested and regulated at the government

observatory in Heidelberg, and one could depend upon them

with confidence.  So I transferred the new barometer to

the cooking department, to be used for the official mess.

It was found that even a pretty fair article of soup could

be made from the defective barometer; so I allowed that one

to be transferred to the subordinate mess.



I next boiled the thermometer, and got a most excellent result;

the mercury went up to about 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

In the opinion of the other scientists of the Expedition,

this seemed to indicate that we had attained the extraordinary

altitude of two hundred thousand feet above sea-level.

Science places the line of eternal snow at about ten thousand

feet above sea-level. There was no snow where we were,

consequently it was proven that the eternal snow-line

ceases somewhere above the ten-thousand-foot level and

does not begin any more.  This was an interesting fact,

and one which had not been observed by any observer before.

It was as valuable as interesting, too, since it would open

up the deserted summits of the highest Alps to population

and agriculture.  It was a proud thing to be where we were,

yet it caused us a pang to reflect that but for that ram we

might just as well been two hundred thousand feet higher.



The success of my last experiment induced me to try an

experiment with my photographic apparatus.  I got it out,

and boiled one of my cameras, but the thing was a failure;

it made the wood swell up and burst, and I could not see

that the lenses were any better than they were before.



I now concluded to boil a guide.  It might improve him,

it could not impair his usefulness.  But I was not

allowed to proceed.  Guides have no feeling for science,

and this one would not consent to be made uncomfortable

in its interest.



In the midst of my scientific work, one of those

needless accidents happened which are always occurring

among the ignorant and thoughtless.  A porter shot

at a chamois and missed it and crippled the Latinist.

This was not a serious matter to me, for a Latinist's

duties are as well performed on crutches as otherwise--

but the fact remained that if the Latinist had not

happened to be in the way a mule would have got

that load.  That would have been quite another matter,

for when it comes down to a question of value there is

a palpable difference between a Latinist and a mule.

I could not depend on having a Latinist in the right

place every time; so, to make things safe, I ordered

that in the future the chamois must not be hunted within

limits of the camp with any other weapon than the forefinger.



My nerves had hardly grown quiet after this affair when

they got another shake-up--one which utterly unmanned

me for a moment: a rumor swept suddenly through the camp

that one of the barkeepers had fallen over a precipice!



However, it turned out that it was only a chaplain.

I had laid in an extra force of chaplains, purposely to

be prepared for emergencies like this, but by some

unaccountable oversight had come away rather short-handed

in the matter of barkeepers.



On the following morning we moved on, well refreshed and in

good spirits.  I remember this day with peculiar pleasure,

because it saw our road restored to us.  Yes, we found

our road again, and in quite an extraordinary way.

We had plodded along some two hours and a half, when we came

up against a solid mass of rock about twenty feet high.

I did not need to be instructed by a mule this time.

I was already beginning to know more than any mule in

the Expedition.  I at once put in a blast of dynamite,

and lifted that rock out of the way.  But to my surprise

and mortification, I found that there had been a chalet

on top of it.



I picked up such members of the family as fell in my vicinity,

and subordinates of my corps collected the rest.

None of these poor people were injured, happily, but they

were much annoyed.  I explained to the head chaleteer

just how the thing happened, and that I was only searching

for the road, and would certainly have given him timely

notice if I had known he was up there.  I said I had

meant no harm, and hoped I had not lowered myself in

his estimation by raising him a few rods in the air.

I said many other judicious things, and finally when I

offered to rebuild his chalet, and pay for the breakages,

and throw in the cellar, he was mollified and satisfied.

He hadn't any cellar at all, before; he would not have

as good a view, now, as formerly, but what he had lost

in view he had gained in cellar, by exact measurement.

He said there wasn't another hole like that in the mountains--

and he would have been right if the late mule had not tried

to eat up the nitroglycerin.



I put a hundred and sixteen men at work, and they rebuilt

the chalet from its own debris in fifteen minutes.

It was a good deal more picturesque than it was before,

too.  The man said we were now on the Feil-Stutz, above

the Schwegmatt--information which I was glad to get,

since it gave us our position to a degree of particularity

which we had not been accustomed to for a day or so.

We also learned that we were standing at the foot

of the Riffelberg proper, and that the initial chapter

of our work was completed.



We had a fine view, from here, of the energetic Visp,

as it makes its first plunge into the world from under a huge

arch of solid ice, worn through the foot-wall of the great

Gorner Glacier; and we could also see the Furggenbach,

which is the outlet of the Furggen Glacier.



The mule-road to the summit of the Riffelberg passed right

in front of the chalet, a circumstance which we almost

immediately noticed, because a procession of tourists was

filing along it pretty much all the time.  [1] The chaleteer's

business consisted in furnishing refreshments to tourists.

My blast had interrupted this trade for a few minutes,

by breaking all the bottles on the place; but I gave

the man a lot of whiskey to sell for Alpine champagne,

and a lot of vinegar which would answer for Rhine wine,

consequently trade was soon as brisk as ever.



1.  "Pretty much" may not be elegant English, but it is

    high time it was.  There is no elegant word or phrase

    which means just what it means.--M.T.



Leaving the Expedition outside to rest, I quartered myself

in the chalet, with Harris, proposing to correct my journals

and scientific observations before continuing the ascent.

I had hardly begun my work when a tall, slender, vigorous

American youth of about twenty-three, who was on his

way down the mountain, entered and came toward me with

that breeze self-complacency which is the adolescent's

idea of the well-bred ease of the man of the world.

His hair was short and parted accurately in the middle,

and he had all the look of an American person who would

be likely to begin his signature with an initial,

and spell his middle name out.  He introduced himself,

smiling a smirky smile borrowed from the courtiers

of the stage, extended a fair-skinned talon, and while

he gripped my hand in it he bent his body forward

three times at the hips, as the stage courtier does,

and said in the airiest and most condescending

and patronizing way--I quite remember his exact language:



"Very glad to make your acquaintance, 'm sure; very glad indeed,

assure you.  I've read all your little efforts and greatly

admired them, and when I heard you were here, I ..."



I indicated a chair, and he sat down.  This grandee was

the grandson of an American of considerable note in his day,

and not wholly forgotten yet--a man who came so near

being a great man that he was quite generally accounted

one while he lived.



I slowly paced the floor, pondering scientific problems,

and heard this conversation:



GRANDSON.  First visit to Europe?



HARRIS.  Mine? Yes.



G.S. (With a soft reminiscent sigh suggestive of bygone

joys that may be tasted in their freshness but once.)

Ah, I know what it is to you.  A first visit!--ah,

the romance of it! I wish I could feel it again.



H. Yes, I find it exceeds all my dreams.  It is enchantment.

I go...



G.S. (With a dainty gesture of the hand signifying "Spare

me your callow enthusiasms, good friend.") Yes, _I_ know,

I know; you go to cathedrals, and exclaim; and you drag

through league-long picture-galleries and exclaim; and you

stand here, and there, and yonder, upon historic ground,

and continue to exclaim; and you are permeated with

your first crude conceptions of Art, and are proud

and happy.  Ah, yes, proud and happy--that expresses it.

Yes-yes, enjoy it--it is right--it is an innocent revel.



H. And you? Don't you do these things now?



G.S. I! Oh, that is VERY good! My dear sir, when you

are as old a traveler as I am, you will not ask such

a question as that.  _I_ visit the regulation gallery,

moon around the regulation cathedral, do the worn round

of the regulation sights, YET?--Excuse me!



H. Well, what DO you do, then?



G.S. Do? I flit--and flit--for I am ever on the wing--but I

avoid the herd.  Today I am in Paris, tomorrow in Berlin,

anon in Rome; but you would look for me in vain in the

galleries of the Louvre or the common resorts of the

gazers in those other capitals.  If you would find me,

you must look in the unvisited nooks and corners where

others never think of going.  One day you will find me

making myself at home in some obscure peasant's cabin,

another day you will find me in some forgotten castle

worshiping some little gem or art which the careless eye

has overlooked and which the unexperienced would despise;

again you will find me as guest in the inner sanctuaries

of palaces while the herd is content to get a hurried

glimpse of the unused chambers by feeing a servant.



H. You are a GUEST in such places?



G.S. And a welcoming one.



H. It is surprising.  How does it come?



G.S. My grandfather's name is a passport to all the courts

in Europe.  I have only to utter that name and every

door is open to me.  I flit from court to court at my

own free will and pleasure, and am always welcome.

I am as much at home in the palaces of Europe as you are

among your relatives.  I know every titled person in Europe,

I think.  I have my pockets full of invitations all the time.

I am under promise to go to Italy, where I am to be the

guest of a succession of the noblest houses in the land.

In Berlin my life is a continued round of gaiety in the

imperial palace.  It is the same, wherever I go.



H. It must be very pleasant.  But it must make Boston

seem a little slow when you are at home.



G.S. Yes, of course it does.  But I don't go home much.

There's no life there--little to feed a man's higher nature.

Boston's very narrow, you know.  She doesn't know it, and you

couldn't convince her of it--so I say nothing when I'm

there: where's the use? Yes, Boston is very narrow, but she

has such a good opinion of herself that she can't see it.

A man who has traveled as much as I have, and seen as much

of the world, sees it plain enough, but he can't cure it,

you know, so the best is to leave it and seek a sphere

which is more in harmony with his tastes and culture.

I run across there, one a year, perhaps, when I have

nothing important on hand, but I'm very soon back again.

I spend my time in Europe.



H. I see.  You map out your plans and ...



G.S. No, excuse me.  I don't map out any plans.  I simply

follow the inclination of the day.  I am limited by no ties,

no requirements, I am not bound in any way.  I am too old

a traveler to hamper myself with deliberate purposes.

I am simply a traveler--an inveterate traveler--a man of

the world, in a word--I can call myself by no other name.

I do not say, "I am going here, or I am going there"--I

say nothing at all, I only act.  For instance, next week

you may find me the guest of a grandee of Spain, or you

may find me off for Venice, or flitting toward Dresden.

I shall probably go to Egypt presently; friends will say

to friends, "He is at the Nile cataracts"--and at that

very moment they will be surprised to learn that I'm away

off yonder in India somewhere.  I am a constant surprise

to people.  They are always saying, "Yes, he was in Jerusalem

when we heard of him last, but goodness knows where he

is now."



Presently the Grandson rose to leave--discovered he

had an appointment with some Emperor, perhaps.  He did

his graces over again: gripped me with one talon,

at arm's-length, pressed his hat against his stomach

with the other, bent his body in the middle three times,

murmuring:



"Pleasure, 'm sure; great pleasure, 'm sure.  Wish you

much success."



Then he removed his gracious presence.  It is a great

and solemn thing to have a grandfather.



I have not purposed to misrepresent this boy in any way,

for what little indignation he excited in me soon

passed and left nothing behind it but compassion.

One cannot keep up a grudge against a vacuum.

I have tried to repeat this lad's very words;

if I have failed anywhere I have at least not failed

to reproduce the marrow and meaning of what he said.

He and the innocent chatterbox whom I met on the Swiss

lake are the most unique and interesting specimens of

Young America I came across during my foreign tramping.

I have made honest portraits of them, not caricatures.

The Grandson of twenty-three referred to himself five

or six times as an "old traveler,"and as many as three

times (with a serene complacency which was maddening)

as a "man of the world." There was something very delicious

about his leaving Boston to her "narrowness," unreproved

and uninstructed.



I formed the caravan in marching order, presently,

and after riding down the line to see that it was

properly roped together, gave the command to proceed.

In a little while the road carried us to open, grassy land.

We were above the troublesome forest, now, and had an

uninterrupted view, straight before us, of our summit--

the summit of the Riffelberg.



We followed the mule-road, a zigzag course, now to the right,

now to the left, but always up, and always crowded and

incommoded by going and coming files of reckless tourists

who were never, in a single instance, tied together.

I was obliged to exert the utmost care and caution,

for in many places the road was not two yards wide,

and often the lower side of it sloped away in slanting

precipices eight and even nine feet deep.  I had to

encourage the men constantly, to keep them from giving

way to their unmanly fears.



We might have made the summit before night, but for a

delay caused by the loss of an umbrella.  I was allowing

the umbrella to remain lost, but the men murmured,

and with reason, for in this exposed region we stood

in peculiar need of protection against avalanches;

so I went into camp and detached a strong party to go

after the missing article.



The difficulties of the next morning were severe,

but our courage was high, for our goal was near.

At noon we conquered the last impediment--we stood

at last upon the summit, and without the loss of a

single man except the mule that ate the glycerin.

Our great achievement was achieved--the possibility of

the impossible was demonstrated, and Harris and I walked

proudly into the great dining-room of the Riffelberg

Hotel and stood our alpenstocks up in the corner.



Yes, I had made the grand ascent; but it was a mistake

to do it in evening dress.  The plug hats were battered,

the swallow-tails were fluttering rags, mud added no grace,

the general effect was unpleasant and even disreputable.



There were about seventy-five tourists at the hotel--

mainly ladies and little children--and they gave us

an admiring welcome which paid us for all our privations

and sufferings.  The ascent had been made, and the names

and dates now stand recorded on a stone monument there

to prove it to all future tourists.



I boiled a thermometer and took an altitude, with a most

curious result: THE SUMMIT WAS NOT AS HIGH AS THE POINT ON

THE MOUNTAINSIDE WHERE I HAD TAKEN THE FIRST ALTITUDE.

Suspecting that I had made an important discovery,

I prepared to verify it.  There happened to be a still

higher summit (called the Gorner Grat), above the hotel,

and notwithstanding the fact that it overlooks a glacier

from a dizzy height, and that the ascent is difficult

and dangerous, I resolved to venture up there and boil

a thermometer.  So I sent a strong party, with some

borrowed hoes, in charge of two chiefs of service, to dig

a stairway in the soil all the way up, and this I ascended,

roped to the guides.  This breezy height was the summit

proper--so I accomplished even more than I had originally

purposed to do.  This foolhardy exploit is recorded on

another stone monument.



I boiled my thermometer, and sure enough, this spot,

which purported to be two thousand feet higher than the

locality of the hotel, turned out to be nine thousand

feet LOWER.  Thus the fact was clearly demonstrated that,

ABOVE A CERTAIN POINT, THE HIGHER A POINT SEEMS TO BE,

THE LOWER IT ACTUALLY IS.  Our ascent itself was a

great achievement, but this contribution to science was

an inconceivably greater matter.



Cavilers object that water boils at a lower and lower

temperature the higher and higher you go, and hence the

apparent anomaly.  I answer that I do not base my theory

upon what the boiling water does, but upon what a boiled

thermometer says.  You can't go behind the thermometer.



I had a magnificent view of Monte Rosa, and apparently

all the rest of the Alpine world, from that high place.

All the circling horizon was piled high with a mighty

tumult of snowy crests.  One might have imagined he

saw before him the tented camps of a beleaguering host

of Brobdingnagians.



But lonely, conspicuous, and superb, rose that wonderful

upright wedge, the Matterhorn.  Its precipitous sides were

powdered over with snow, and the upper half hidden in thick

clouds which now and then dissolved to cobweb films and gave

brief glimpses of the imposing tower as through a veil.

[2] A little later the Matterhorn took to himself the

semblance of a volcano; he was stripped naked to his apex--

around this circled vast wreaths of white cloud which strung

slowly out and streamed away slantwise toward the sun,

a twenty-mile stretch of rolling and tumbling vapor,

and looking just as if it were pouring out of a crater.

Later again, one of the mountain's sides was clean and clear,

and another side densely clothed from base to summit in

thick smokelike cloud which feathered off and flew around

the shaft's sharp edge like the smoke around the corners of

a burning building.  The Matterhorn is always experimenting,

and always gets up fine effects, too.  In the sunset,

when all the lower world is palled in gloom, it points

toward heaven out of the pervading blackness like a finger

of fire.  In the sunrise--well, they say it is very fine

in the sunrise.



2.  NOTE.--I had the very unusual luck to catch one little

    momentary glimpse of the Matterhorn wholly unencumbered

    by clouds.  I leveled my photographic apparatus at it

    without the loss of an instant, and should have got

    an elegant picture if my donkey had not interfered.

    It was my purpose to draw this photograph all by myself

    for my book, but was obliged to put the mountain part

    of it into the hands of the professional artist because

    I found I could not do landscape well.



Authorities agree that there is no such tremendous "layout"

of snowy Alpine magnitude, grandeur, and sublimity to be

seen from any other accessible point as the tourist may see

from the summit of the Riffelberg.  Therefore, let the

tourist rope himself up and go there; for I have shown

that with nerve, caution, and judgment, the thing can be done.



I wish to add one remark, here--in parentheses, so to speak

--suggested by the word "snowy," which I have just used.

We have all seen hills and mountains and levels with snow

on them, and so we think we know all the aspects and

effects produced by snow.  But indeed we do not until

we have seen the Alps.  Possibly mass and distance add

something--at any rate, something IS added.  Among other

noticeable things, there is a dazzling, intense whiteness

about the distant Alpine snow, when the sun is on it,

which one recognizes as peculiar, and not familiar to

the eye.  The snow which one is accustomed to has a tint

to it--painters usually give it a bluish cast--but there

is no perceptible tint to the distant Alpine snow when it

is trying to look its whitest.  As to the unimaginable

splendor of it when the sun is blazing down on it--well,

it simply IS unimaginable.







CHAPTER XXXIX

[We Travel by Glacier]



A guide-book is a queer thing.  The reader has just seen

what a man who undertakes the great ascent from Zermatt

to the Riffelberg Hotel must experience.  Yet Baedeker

makes these strange statements concerning this matter:



1.  Distance--3 hours.

2.  The road cannot be mistaken.

3.  Guide unnecessary.

4.  Distance from Riffelberg Hotel to the Gorner Grat,

    one hour and a half.

5.  Ascent simple and easy.  Guide unnecessary.

6.  Elevation of Zermatt above sea-level, 5,315 feet.

7.  Elevation of Riffelberg Hotel above sea-level,

    8,429 feet.

8.  Elevation of the Gorner Grat above sea-level, 10,289 feet.



I have pretty effectually throttled these errors by sending

him the following demonstrated facts:



1.  Distance from Zermatt to Riffelberg Hotel, 7 days.

2.  The road CAN be mistaken.  If I am the first that did it,

    I want the credit of it, too.

3.  Guides ARE necessary, for none but a native can read

    those finger-boards.

4.  The estimate of the elevation of the several localities

    above sea-level is pretty correct--for Baedeker.

    He only misses it about a hundred and eighty or ninety

    thousand feet.



I found my arnica invaluable.  My men were suffering

excruciatingly, from the friction of sitting down so much.

During two or three days, not one of them was able to do

more than lie down or walk about; yet so effective was

the arnica, that on the fourth all were able to sit up.

I consider that, more than to anything else, I owe the

success of our great undertaking to arnica and paregoric.



My men are being restored to health and strength,

my main perplexity, now, was how to get them down

the mountain again.  I was not willing to expose the

brave fellows to the perils, fatigues, and hardships

of that fearful route again if it could be helped.

First I thought of balloons; but, of course, I had to

give that idea up, for balloons were not procurable.

I thought of several other expedients, but upon

consideration discarded them, for cause.  But at last

I hit it.  I was aware that the movement of glaciers

is an established fact, for I had read it in Baedeker;

so I resolved to take passage for Zermatt on the great

Gorner Glacier.



Very good.  The next thing was, how to get down the

glacier comfortably--for the mule-road to it was long,

and winding, and wearisome.  I set my mind at work,

and soon thought out a plan.  One looks straight down

upon the vast frozen river called the Gorner Glacier,

from the Gorner Grat, a sheer precipice twelve hundred

feet high.  We had one hundred and fifty-four umbrellas--

and what is an umbrella but a parachute?



I mentioned this noble idea to Harris, with enthusiasm,

and was about to order the Expedition to form on the

Gorner Grat, with their umbrellas, and prepare for

flight by platoons, each platoon in command of a guide,

when Harris stopped me and urged me not to be too hasty.

He asked me if this method of descending the Alps had

ever been tried before.  I said no, I had not heard

of an instance.  Then, in his opinion, it was a matter

of considerable gravity; in his opinion it would not be

well to send the whole command over the cliff at once;

a better way would be to send down a single individual,

first, and see how he fared.



I saw the wisdom in this idea instantly.  I said as much,

and thanked my agent cordially, and told him to take

his umbrella and try the thing right away, and wave

his hat when he got down, if he struck in a soft place,

and then I would ship the rest right along.



Harris was greatly touched with this mark of confidence,

and said so, in a voice that had a perceptible tremble in it;

but at the same time he said he did not feel himself worthy

of so conspicuous a favor; that it might cause jealousy

in the command, for there were plenty who would not hesitate

to say he had used underhanded means to get the appointment,

whereas his conscience would bear him witness that he

had not sought it at all, nor even, in his secret heart,

desired it.



I said these words did him extreme credit, but that he must not

throw away the imperishable distinction of being the first man

to descend an Alp per parachute, simply to save the feelings

of some envious underlings.  No, I said, he MUST accept

the appointment--it was no longer an invitation, it was a

command.



He thanked me with effusion, and said that putting

the thing in this form removed every objection.

He retired, and soon returned with his umbrella, his eye

flaming with gratitude and his cheeks pallid with joy.

Just then the head guide passed along.  Harris's expression

changed to one of infinite tenderness, and he said:



"That man did me a cruel injury four days ago, and I

said in my heart he should live to perceive and confess

that the only noble revenge a man can take upon his enemy

is to return good for evil.  I resign in his favor.

Appoint him."



I threw my arms around the generous fellow and said:



"Harris, you are the noblest soul that lives.  You shall

not regret this sublime act, neither shall the world

fail to know of it.  You shall have opportunity far

transcending this one, too, if I live--remember that."



I called the head guide to me and appointed him on

the spot.  But the thing aroused no enthusiasm in him.

He did not take to the idea at all.



He said:



"Tie myself to an umbrella and jump over the Gorner

Grat! Excuse me, there are a great many pleasanter roads

to the devil than that."



Upon a discussion of the subject with him, it appeared that he

considered the project distinctly and decidedly dangerous.

I was not convinced, yet I was not willing to try the

experiment in any risky way--that is, in a way that might

cripple the strength and efficiency of the Expedition.

I was about at my wits' end when it occurred to me to try

it on the Latinist.



He was called in.  But he declined, on the plea

of inexperience, diffidence in public, lack of curiosity,

and I didn't know what all.  Another man declined

on account of a cold in the head; thought he ought

to avoid exposure.  Another could not jump well--never

COULD jump well--did not believe he could jump so far

without long and patient practice.  Another was afraid it

was going to rain, and his umbrella had a hole in it.

Everybody had an excuse.  The result was what the reader

has by this time guessed: the most magnificent idea

that was ever conceived had to be abandoned, from sheer

lack of a person with enterprise enough to carry it out.

Yes, I actually had to give that thing up--while doubtless

I should live to see somebody use it and take all the credit from

me.



Well, I had to go overland--there was no other way.

I marched the Expedition down the steep and tedious mule-path

and took up as good a position as I could upon the middle

of the glacier--because Baedeker said the middle part

travels the fastest.  As a measure of economy, however,

I put some of the heavier baggage on the shoreward parts,

to go as slow freight.



I waited and waited, but the glacier did not move.

Night was coming on, the darkness began to gather--still we

did not budge.  It occurred to me then, that there might

be a time-table in Baedeker; it would be well to find out

the hours of starting.  I called for the book--it could not

be found.  Bradshaw would certainly contain a time-table;

but no Bradshaw could be found.



Very well, I must make the best of the situation.  So I

pitched the tents, picketed the animals, milked the cows,

had supper, paregoricked the men, established the watch,

and went to bed--with orders to call me as soon as we came

in sight of Zermatt.



I awoke about half past ten next morning, and looked around.

We hadn't budged a peg! At first I could not understand it;

then it occurred to me that the old thing must be aground.

So I cut down some trees and rigged a spar on the starboard

and another on the port side, and fooled away upward of

three hours trying to spar her off.  But it was no use.

She was half a mile wide and fifteen or twenty miles long,

and there was no telling just whereabouts she WAS aground.

The men began to show uneasiness, too, and presently they

came flying to me with ashy faces, saying she had sprung

a leak.



Nothing but my cool behavior at this critical time saved us

from another panic.  I order them to show me the place.

They led me to a spot where a huge boulder lay in a deep

pool of clear and brilliant water.  It did look like

a pretty bad leak, but I kept that to myself.  I made

a pump and set the men to work to pump out the glacier.

We made a success of it.  I perceived, then, that it was not

a leak at all.  This boulder had descended from a precipice

and stopped on the ice in the middle of the glacier,

and the sun had warmed it up, every day, and consequently

it had melted its way deeper and deeper into the ice,

until at last it reposed, as we had found it, in a deep

pool of the clearest and coldest water.



Presently Baedeker was found again, and I hunted eagerly

for the time-table. There was none.  The book simply said

the glacier was moving all the time.  This was satisfactory,

so I shut up the book and chose a good position to view

the scenery as we passed along.  I stood there some time

enjoying the trip, but at last it occurred to me that we did

not seem to be gaining any on the scenery.  I said to myself,

"This confounded old thing's aground again, sure,"--and

opened Baedeker to see if I could run across any remedy

for these annoying interruptions.  I soon found a sentence

which threw a dazzling light upon the matter.  It said,

"The Gorner Glacier travels at an average rate of a little

less than an inch a day." I have seldom felt so outraged.

I have seldom had my confidence so wantonly betrayed.

I made a small calculation: One inch a day, say thirty

feet a year; estimated distance to Zermatt, three and

one-eighteenth miles.  Time required to go by glacier,

A LITTLE OVER FIVE HUNDRED YEARS! I said to myself, "I can

WALK it quicker--and before I will patronize such a fraud

as this, I will do it."



When I revealed to Harris the fact that the passenger part

of this glacier--the central part--the lightning-express part,

so to speak--was not due in Zermatt till the summer

of 2378, and that the baggage, coming along the slow edge,

would not arrive until some generations later, he burst

out with:



"That is European management, all over! An inch a day--think

of that! Five hundred years to go a trifle over three miles!

But I am not a bit surprised.  It's a Catholic glacier.

You can tell by the look of it.  And the management."



I said, no, I believed nothing but the extreme end of it

was in a Catholic canton.



"Well, then, it's a government glacier," said Harris.

"It's all the same.  Over here the government runs

everything--so everything's slow; slow, and ill-managed. But

with us, everything's done by private enterprise--and then

there ain't much lolling around, you can depend on it.

I wish Tom Scott could get his hands on this torpid old

slab once--you'd see it take a different gait from this."



I said I was sure he would increase the speed, if there

was trade enough to justify it.



"He'd MAKE trade," said Harris.  "That's the difference

between governments and individuals.  Governments don't care,

individuals do.  Tom Scott would take all the trade;

in two years Gorner stock would go to two hundred,

and inside of two more you would see all the other glaciers

under the hammer for taxes." After a reflective pause,

Harris added, "A little less than an inch a day; a little

less than an INCH, mind you.  Well, I'm losing my reverence

for glaciers."



I was feeling much the same way myself.  I have traveled

by canal-boat, ox-wagon, raft, and by the Ephesus and

Smyrna railway; but when it comes down to good solid

honest slow motion, I bet my money on the glacier.

As a means of passenger transportation, I consider

the glacier a failure; but as a vehicle of slow freight,

I think she fills the bill.  In the matter of putting

the fine shades on that line of business, I judge she

could teach the Germans something.



I ordered the men to break camp and prepare for the land

journey to Zermatt.  At this moment a most interesting

find was made; a dark object, bedded in the glacial ice,

was cut out with the ice-axes, and it proved to be a piece

of the undressed skin of some animal--a hair trunk, perhaps;

but a close inspection disabled the hair-trunk theory,

and further discussion and examination exploded it

entirely--that is, in the opinion of all the scientists

except the one who had advanced it.  This one clung

to his theory with affectionate fidelity characteristic

of originators of scientific theories, and afterward won

many of the first scientists of the age to his view,

by a very able pamphlet which he wrote, entitled, "Evidences

going to show that the hair trunk, in a wild state,

belonged to the early glacial period, and roamed the wastes

of chaos in the company with the cave-bear, primeval man,

and the other Oo"litics of the Old Silurian family."



Each of our scientists had a theory of his own, and put

forward an animal of his own as a candidate for the skin.

I sided with the geologist of the Expedition in the

belief that this patch of skin had once helped to cover

a Siberian elephant, in some old forgotten age--but we

divided there, the geologist believing that this discovery

proved that Siberia had formerly been located where

Switzerland is now, whereas I held the opinion that it

merely proved that the primeval Swiss was not the dull

savage he is represented to have been, but was a being

of high intellectual development, who liked to go to the

menagerie.



We arrived that evening, after many hardships and adventures,

in some fields close to the great ice-arch where the mad

Visp boils and surges out from under the foot of the

great Gorner Glacier, and here we camped, our perils over

and our magnificent undertaking successfully completed.

We marched into Zermatt the next day, and were received

with the most lavish honors and applause.  A document,

signed and sealed by the authorities, was given to me

which established and endorsed the fact that I had made

the ascent of the Riffelberg.  This I wear around my neck,

and it will be buried with me when I am no more.







CHAPTER XL

[Piteous Relics at Chamonix]



I am not so ignorant about glacial movement, now, as I

was when I took passage on the Gorner Glacier.

I have "read up" since.  I am aware that these vast

bodies of ice do not travel at the same rate of speed;

while the Gorner Glacier makes less than an inch a day,

the Unter-Aar Glacier makes as much as eight; and still

other glaciers are said to go twelve, sixteen, and even

twenty inches a day.  One writer says that the slowest

glacier travels twenty-give feet a year, and the fastest

four hundred.



What is a glacier? It is easy to say it looks like a

frozen river which occupies the bed of a winding gorge

or gully between mountains.  But that gives no notion

of its vastness.  For it is sometimes six hundred

feet thick, and we are not accustomed to rivers six hundred

feet deep; no, our rivers are six feet, twenty feet,

and sometimes fifty feet deep; we are not quite able

to grasp so large a fact as an ice-river six hundred feet deep.



The glacier's surface is not smooth and level, but has

deep swales and swelling elevations, and sometimes has

the look of a tossing sea whose turbulent billows were

frozen hard in the instant of their most violent motion;

the glacier's surface is not a flawless mass, but is a river

with cracks or crevices, some narrow, some gaping wide.

Many a man, the victim of a slip or a misstep, has plunged

down on of these and met his death.  Men have been

fished out of them alive; but it was when they did not

go to a great depth; the cold of the great depths would

quickly stupefy a man, whether he was hurt or unhurt.

These cracks do not go straight down; one can seldom see

more than twenty to forty feet down them; consequently men

who have disappeared in them have been sought for,

in the hope that they had stopped within helping distance,

whereas their case, in most instances, had really been

hopeless from the beginning.



In 1864 a party of tourists was descending Mont Blanc,

and while picking their way over one of the mighty glaciers

of that lofty region, roped together, as was proper,

a young porter disengaged himself from the line and

started across an ice-bridge which spanned a crevice.

It broke under him with a crash, and he disappeared.

The others could not see how deep he had gone, so it might

be worthwhile to try and rescue him.  A brave young guide

named Michel Payot volunteered.



Two ropes were made fast to his leather belt and he bore

the end of a third one in his hand to tie to the victim

in case he found him.  He was lowered into the crevice,

he descended deeper and deeper between the clear blue

walls of solid ice, he approached a bend in the crack

and disappeared under it.  Down, and still down, he went,

into this profound grave; when he had reached a depth

of eighty feet he passed under another bend in the crack,

and thence descended eighty feet lower, as between

perpendicular precipices.  Arrived at this stage of one

hundred and sixty feet below the surface of the glacier,

he peered through the twilight dimness and perceived

that the chasm took another turn and stretched away at

a steep slant to unknown deeps, for its course was lost

in darkness.  What a place that was to be in--especially

if that leather belt should break! The compression

of the belt threatened to suffocate the intrepid fellow;

he called to his friends to draw him up, but could not make

them hear.  They still lowered him, deeper and deeper.

Then he jerked his third cord as vigorously as he could;

his friends understood, and dragged him out of those icy jaws

of death.



Then they attached a bottle to a cord and sent it down

two hundred feet, but it found no bottom.  It came up

covered with congelations--evidence enough that even if

the poor porter reached the bottom with unbroken bones,

a swift death from cold was sure, anyway.



A glacier is a stupendous, ever-progressing, resistless plow.

It pushes ahead of its masses of boulders which are

packed together, and they stretch across the gorge,

right in front of it, like a long grave or a long,

sharp roof.  This is called a moraine.  It also shoves

out a moraine along each side of its course.



Imposing as the modern glaciers are, they are not so

huge as were some that once existed.  For instance,

Mr. Whymper says:



"At some very remote period the Valley of Aosta was occupied

by a vast glacier, which flowed down its entire length from

Mont Blanc to the plain of Piedmont, remained stationary,

or nearly so, at its mouth for many centuries, and deposited

there enormous masses of debris.  The length of this

glacier exceeded EIGHTY MILES, and it drained a basin

twenty-five to thirty-five miles across, bounded by the

highest mountains in the Alps.  The great peaks rose

several thousand feet above the glaciers, and then, as now,

shattered by sun and frost, poured down their showers of

rocks and stones, in witness of which there are the immense

piles of angular fragments that constitute the moraines of Ivrea.





"The moraines around Ivrea are of extraordinary dimensions.

That which was on the left bank of the glacier is

about THIRTEEN MILES long, and in some places rises

to a height of TWO THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY FEET

above the floor of the valley! The terminal moraines

(those which are pushed in front of the glaciers)

cover something like twenty square miles of country.

At the mouth of the Valley of Aosta, the thickness of

the glacier must have been at least TWO THOUSAND feet,

and its width, at that part, FIVE MILES AND A QUARTER."



It is not easy to get at a comprehension of a mass of ice

like that.  If one could cleave off the butt end of such

a glacier--an oblong block two or three miles wide

by five and a quarter long and two thousand feet thick--

he could completely hide the city of New York under it,

and Trinity steeple would only stick up into it relatively

as far as a shingle-nail would stick up into the bottom

of a Saratoga trunk.



"The boulders from Mont Blanc, upon the plain below Ivrea,

assure us that the glacier which transported them existed

for a prodigious length of time.  Their present distance from

the cliffs from which they were derived is about 420,000 feet,

and if we assume that they traveled at the rate of 400 feet

per annum, their journey must have occupied them no less

than 1,055 years! In all probability they did not travel so

fast."



Glaciers are sometimes hurried out of their characteristic

snail-pace. A marvelous spectacle is presented then.

Mr. Whymper refers to a case which occurred in Iceland

in 1721:



"It seems that in the neighborhood of the mountain Kotlugja,

large bodies of water formed underneath, or within

the glaciers (either on account of the interior heat of

the earth, or from other causes), and at length acquired

irresistible power, tore the glaciers from their mooring on

the land, and swept them over every obstacle into the sea.

Prodigious masses of ice were thus borne for a distance

of about ten miles over land in the space of a few hours;

and their bulk was so enormous that they covered the sea

for seven miles from the shore, and remained aground

in six hundred feet of water! The denudation of the land

was upon a grand scale.  All superficial accumulations were

swept away, and the bedrock was exposed.  It was described,

in graphic language, how all irregularities and depressions

were obliterated, and a smooth surface of several miles'

area laid bare, and that this area had the appearance

of having been PLANED BY A PLANE."



The account translated from the Icelandic says that the

mountainlike ruins of this majestic glacier so covered

the sea that as far as the eye could reach no open water

was discoverable, even from the highest peaks.  A monster

wall or barrier of ice was built across a considerable

stretch of land, too, by this strange irruption:



"One can form some idea of the altitude of this barrier

of ice when it is mentioned that from Hofdabrekka farm,

which lies high up on a fjeld, one could not see

Hjorleifshofdi opposite, which is a fell six hundred and

forty feet in height; but in order to do so had to clamber

up a mountain slope east of Hofdabrekka twelve hundred feet

high."



These things will help the reader to understand why it is

that a man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel

tolerably insignificant by and by.  The Alps and the glaciers

together are able to take every bit of conceit out of a man

and reduce his self-importance to zero if he will only

remain within the influence of their sublime presence long

enough to give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work.



The Alpine glaciers move--that is granted, now, by everybody.

But there was a time when people scoffed at the idea;

they said you might as well expect leagues of solid rock

to crawl along the ground as expect leagues of ice to do it.

But proof after proof as furnished, and the finally the

world had to believe.



The wise men not only said the glacier moved, but they

timed its movement.  They ciphered out a glacier's gait,

and then said confidently that it would travel just

so far in so many years.  There is record of a striking

and curious example of the accuracy which may be attained

in these reckonings.



In 1820 the ascent of Mont Blanc was attempted by a Russian

and two Englishmen, with seven guides.  They had reached

a prodigious altitude, and were approaching the summit,

when an avalanche swept several of the party down a

sharp slope of two hundred feet and hurled five of them

(all guides) into one of the crevices of a glacier.

The life of one of the five was saved by a long barometer

which was strapped to his back--it bridged the crevice

and suspended him until help came.  The alpenstock

or baton of another saved its owner in a similar way.

Three men were lost--Pierre Balmat, Pierre Carrier,

and Auguste Tairraz.  They had been hurled down into the

fathomless great deeps of the crevice.



Dr. Forbes, the English geologist, had made frequent visits

to the Mont Blanc region, and had given much attention

to the disputed question of the movement of glaciers.

During one of these visits he completed his estimates

of the rate of movement of the glacier which had swallowed

up the three guides, and uttered the prediction that the

glacier would deliver up its dead at the foot of the

mountain thirty-five years from the time of the accident,

or possibly forty.



A dull, slow journey--a movement imperceptible to any eye--

but it was proceeding, nevertheless, and without cessation.

It was a journey which a rolling stone would make in a

few seconds--the lofty point of departure was visible

from the village below in the valley.



The prediction cut curiously close to the truth;

forty-one years after the catastrophe, the remains

were cast forth at the foot of the glacier.



I find an interesting account of the matter in the

HISTOIRE DU MONT BLANC, by Stephen d'Arve. I will

condense this account, as follows:



On the 12th of August, 1861, at the hour of the close of mass,

a guide arrived out of breath at the mairie of Chamonix,

and bearing on his shoulders a very lugubrious burden.

It was a sack filled with human remains which he had gathered

from the orifice of a crevice in the Glacier des Bossons.

He conjectured that these were remains of the victims

of the catastrophe of 1820, and a minute inquest,

immediately instituted by the local authorities,

soon demonstrated the correctness of his supposition.

The contents of the sack were spread upon a long table,

and officially inventoried, as follows:



Portions of three human skulls.  Several tufts of black and

blonde hair.  A human jaw, furnished with fine white teeth.

A forearm and hand, all the fingers of the latter intact.

The flesh was white and fresh, and both the arm and hand

preserved a degree of flexibility in the articulations.



The ring-finger had suffered a slight abrasion, and the

stain of the blood was still visible and unchanged after

forty-one years.  A left foot, the flesh white and fresh.



Along with these fragments were portions of waistcoats, hats,

hobnailed shoes, and other clothing; a wing of a pigeon,

with black feathers; a fragment of an alpenstock;

a tin lantern; and lastly, a boiled leg of mutton,

the only flesh among all the remains that exhaled an

unpleasant odor.  The guide said that the mutton had no

odor when he took it from the glacier; an hour's exposure

to the sun had already begun the work of decomposition upon it.



Persons were called for, to identify these poor pathetic relics,

and a touching scene ensured.  Two men were still living

who had witnessed the grim catastrophe of nearly half

a century before--Marie Couttet (saved by his baton)

and Julien Davouassoux (saved by the barometer). These aged

men entered and approached the table.  Davouassoux, more than

eighty years old, contemplated the mournful remains mutely

and with a vacant eye, for his intelligence and his memory

were torpid with age; but Couttet's faculties were still

perfect at seventy-two, and he exhibited strong emotion.  He

said:



"Pierre Balmat was fair; he wore a straw hat.  This bit of skull,

with the tuft of blond hair, was his; this is his hat.

Pierre Carrier was very dark; this skull was his, and this

felt hat.  This is Balmat's hand, I remember it so well!"

and the old man bent down and kissed it reverently,

then closed his fingers upon it in an affectionate grasp,

crying out, "I could never have dared to believe that

before quitting this world it would be granted me to

press once more the hand of one of those brave comrades,

the hand of my good friend Balmat."



There is something weirdly pathetic about the picture

of that white-haired veteran greeting with his loving

handshake this friend who had been dead forty years.

When these hands had met last, they were alike in the

softness and freshness of youth; now, one was brown and

wrinkled and horny with age, while the other was still

as young and fair and blemishless as if those forty years

had come and gone in a single moment, leaving no mark

of their passage.  Time had gone on, in the one case;

it had stood still in the other.  A man who has not seen

a friend for a generation, keeps him in mind always as he

saw him last, and is somehow surprised, and is also shocked,

to see the aging change the years have wrought when he

sees him again.  Marie Couttet's experience, in finding

his friend's hand unaltered from the image of it which he

had carried in his memory for forty years, is an experience

which stands alone in the history of man, perhaps.



Couttet identified other relics:



"This hat belonged to Auguste Tairraz.  He carried

the cage of pigeons which we proposed to set free upon

the summit.  Here is the wing of one of those pigeons.

And here is the fragment of my broken baton; it was by

grace of that baton that my life was saved.  Who could

have told me that I should one day have the satisfaction

to look again upon this bit of wood that supported me above

the grave that swallowed up my unfortunate companions!"



No portions of the body of Tairraz, other than a piece

of the skull, had been found.  A diligent search was made,

but without result.  However, another search was

instituted a year later, and this had better success.

Many fragments of clothing which had belonged to the lost

guides were discovered; also, part of a lantern, and a

green veil with blood-stains on it.  But the interesting

feature was this:



One of the searchers came suddenly upon a sleeved arm

projecting from a crevice in the ice-wall, with the hand

outstretched as if offering greeting! "The nails of this white

hand were still rosy, and the pose of the extended fingers

seemed to express an eloquent welcome to the long-lost light of

day."



The hand and arm were alone; there was no trunk.

After being removed from the ice the flesh-tints quickly

faded out and the rosy nails took on the alabaster

hue of death.  This was the third RIGHT hand found;

therefore, all three of the lost men were accounted for,

beyond cavil or question.



Dr. Hamel was the Russian gentleman of the party which

made the ascent at the time of the famous disaster.

He left Chamonix as soon as he conveniently could after

the descent; and as he had shown a chilly indifference

about the calamity, and offered neither sympathy nor

assistance to the widows and orphans, he carried with

him the cordial execrations of the whole community.

Four months before the first remains were found,

a Chamonix guide named Balmat--a relative of one of

the lost men--was in London, and one day encountered

a hale old gentleman in the British Museum, who said:



"I overheard your name.  Are you from Chamonix,

Monsieur Balmat?"



"Yes, sir."



"Haven't they found the bodies of my three guides,

yet? I am Dr. Hamel."



"Alas, no, monsieur."



"Well, you'll find them, sooner or later."



"Yes, it is the opinion of Dr. Forbes and Mr. Tyndall,

that the glacier will sooner or later restore to us the

remains of the unfortunate victims."



"Without a doubt, without a doubt.  And it will be a great

thing for Chamonix, in the matter of attracting tourists.

You can get up a museum with those remains that will draw!"



This savage idea has not improved the odor of Dr. Hamel's

name in Chamonix by any means.  But after all, the man

was sound on human nature.  His idea was conveyed

to the public officials of Chamonix, and they gravely

discussed it around the official council-table. They

were only prevented from carrying it into execution by

the determined opposition of the friends and descendants

of the lost guides, who insisted on giving the remains

Christian burial, and succeeded in their purpose.



A close watch had to be kept upon all the poor remnants

and fragments, to prevent embezzlement.  A few accessory

odds and ends were sold.  Rags and scraps of the coarse

clothing were parted with at the rate equal to about

twenty dollars a yard; a piece of a lantern and one or

two other trifles brought nearly their weight in gold;

and an Englishman offered a pound sterling for a single

breeches-button.







CHAPTER XLI

[The Fearful Disaster of 1865]



One of the most memorable of all the Alpine catastrophes

was that of July, 1865, on the Matterhorn--already

sighted referred to, a few pages back.  The details

of it are scarcely known in America.  To the vast

majority of readers they are not known at all.

Mr. Whymper's account is the only authentic one.

I will import the chief portion of it into this book,

partly because of its intrinsic interest, and partly

because it gives such a vivid idea of what the perilous

pastime of Alp-climbing is.  This was Mr. Whymper's

NINTH attempt during a series of years, to vanquish

that steep and stubborn pillar or rock; it succeeded,

the other eight were failures.  No man had ever accomplished

the ascent before, though the attempts had been numerous.



MR. WHYMPER'S NARRATIVE



We started from Zermatt on the 13th of July, at half

past five, on a brilliant and perfectly cloudless morning.

We were eight in number--Croz (guide), old Peter

Taugwalder (guide) and his two sons; Lord F. Douglas,

Mr. Hadow, Rev. Mr. Hudson, and I. To insure steady

motion, one tourist and one native walked together.

The youngest Taugwalder fell to my share.  The wine-bags

also fell to my lot to carry, and throughout the day,

after each drink, I replenished them secretly with water,

so that at the next halt they were found fuller than

before! This was considered a good omen, and little short

of miraculous.



On the first day we did not intend to ascend to any

great height, and we mounted, accordingly, very leisurely.

Before twelve o'clock we had found a good position

for the tent, at a height of eleven thousand feet.

We passed the remaining hours of daylight--some basking

in the sunshine, some sketching, some collecting;

Hudson made tea, I coffee, and at length we retired,

each one to his blanket bag.



We assembled together before dawn on the 14th

and started directly it was light enough to move.

One of the young Taugwalders returned to Zermatt.

In a few minutes we turned the rib which had intercepted

the view of the eastern face from our tent platform.

The whole of this great slope was now revealed, rising for

three thousand feet like a huge natural staircase.

Some parts were more, and others were less easy, but we

were not once brought to a halt by any serious impediment,

for when an obstruction was met in front it could always

be turned to the right or to the left.  For the greater part

of the way there was no occasion, indeed, for the rope,

and sometimes Hudson led, sometimes myself.  At six-twenty we

had attained a height of twelve thousand eight hundred feet,

and halted for half an hour; we then continued the ascent

without a break until nine-fifty-five, when we stopped

for fifty minutes, at a height of fourteen thousand feet.



We had now arrived at the foot of that part which, seen from

the Riffelberg, seems perpendicular or overhanging.

We could no longer continue on the eastern side.  For a little

distance we ascended by snow upon the ARE^TE--that is,

the ridge--then turned over to the right, or northern side.

The work became difficult, and required caution.  In some places

there was little to hold; the general slope of the mountain

was LESS than forty degrees, and snow had accumulated in,

and had filled up, the interstices of the rock-face, leaving

only occasional fragments projecting here and there.

These were at times covered with a thin film of ice.

It was a place which any fair mountaineer might pass

in safety.  We bore away nearly horizontally for about four

hundred feet, then ascended directly toward the summit

for about sixty feet, then doubled back to the ridge

which descends toward Zermatt.  A long stride round

a rather awkward corner brought us to snow once more.

That last doubt vanished! The Matterhorn was ours! Nothing

but two hundred feet of easy snow remained to be surmounted.



The higher we rose, the more intense became the excitement.

The slope eased off, at length we could be detached,

and Croz and I, dashed away, ran a neck-and-neck race,

which ended in a dead heat.  At 1:40 P.M., the world was at

our feet, and the Matterhorn was conquered!



The others arrived.  Croz now took the tent-pole, and

planted it in the highest snow.  "Yes," we said, "there is

the flag-staff, but where is the flag?" "Here it is,"

he answered, pulling off his blouse and fixing it to the stick.

It made a poor flag, and there was no wind to float it out,

yet it was seen all around.  They saw it at Zermatt--at

the Riffel--in the Val Tournanche... .



We remained on the summit for one hour--



One crowded hour of glorious life.



It passed away too quickly, and we began to prepare

for the descent.



Hudson and I consulted as to the best and safest arrangement

of the party.  We agreed that it was best for Croz

to go first, and Hadow second; Hudson, who was almost

equal to a guide in sureness of foot, wished to be third;

Lord Douglas was placed next, and old Peter, the strongest

of the remainder, after him.  I suggested to Hudson

that we should attach a rope to the rocks on our arrival

at the difficult bit, and hold it as we descended,

as an additional protection.  He approved the idea,

but it was not definitely decided that it should be done.

The party was being arranged in the above order while I

was sketching the summit, and they had finished,

and were waiting for me to be tied in line, when some one

remembered that our names had not been left in a bottle.

They requested me to write them down, and moved off

while it was being done.



A few minutes afterward I tied myself to young Peter,

ran down after the others, and caught them just as they

were commencing the descent of the difficult part.

Great care was being taken.  Only one man was moving at a time;

when he was firmly planted the next advanced, and so on.

They had not, however, attached the additional rope

to rocks, and nothing was said about it.  The suggestion

was not made for my own sake, and I am not sure that it

ever occurred to me again.  For some little distance we

two followed the others, detached from them, and should

have continued so had not Lord Douglas asked me, about 3

P.M., to tie on to old Peter, as he feared, he said,

that Taugwalder would not be able to hold his ground if a

slip occurred.



A few minutes later, a sharp-eyed lad ran into the Monte

Rosa Hotel, at Zermatt, saying that he had seen an avalanche

fall from the summit of the Matterhorn onto the Matterhorn

glacier.  The boy was reproved for telling idle stories;

he was right, nevertheless, and this was what he saw.



Michel Croz had laid aside his ax, and in order to give

Mr. Hadow greater security, was absolutely taking

hold of his legs, and putting his feet, one by one,

into their proper positions.  As far as I know, no one

was actually descending.  I cannot speak with certainty,

because the two leading men were partially hidden

from my sight by an intervening mass of rock, but it

is my belief, from the movements of their shoulders,

that Croz, having done as I said, was in the act

of turning round to go down a step or two himself;

at this moment Mr. Hadow slipped, fell against him,

and knocked him over.  I heard one startled exclamation

from Croz, then saw him and Mr. Hadow flying downward;

in another moment Hudson was dragged from his steps,

and Lord Douglas immediately after him.  All this was the

work of a moment.  Immediately we heard Croz's exclamation,

old Peter and I planted ourselves as firmly as the rocks

would permit; the rope was taut between us, and the jerk

came on us both as on one man.  We held; but the rope

broke midway between Taugwalder and Lord Francis Douglas.

For a few seconds we saw our unfortunate companions sliding

downward on their backs, and spreading out their hands,

endeavoring to save themselves.  They passed from our

sight uninjured, disappeared one by one, and fell from the

precipice to precipice onto the Matterhorn glacier below,

a distance of nearly four thousand feet in height.

From the moment the rope broke it was impossible to help them.

So perished our comrades!



For more than two hours afterward I thought almost every

moment that the next would be my last; for the Taugwalders,

utterly unnerved, were not only incapable of giving assistance,

but were in such a state that a slip might have been

expected from them at any moment.  After a time we were able

to do that which should have been done at first, and fixed

rope to firm rocks, in addition to being tied together.

These ropes were cut from time to time, and were left behind.

Even with their assurance the men were afraid to proceed,

and several times old Peter turned, with ashy face

and faltering limbs, and said, with terrible emphasis,

"I CANNOT!"



About 6 P.M., we arrived at the snow upon the ridge

descending toward Zermatt, and all peril was over.

We frequently looked, but in vain, for traces of our

unfortunate companions; we bent over the ridge and cried

to them, but no sound returned.  Convinced at last that

they were neither within sight nor hearing, we ceased

from our useless efforts; and, too cast down for speech,

silently gathered up our things, and the little effects

of those who were lost, and then completed the descent.



----------



Such is Mr. Whymper's graphic and thrilling narrative.

Zermatt gossip darkly hints that the elder Taugwalder

cut the rope, when the accident occurred, in order

to preserve himself from being dragged into the abyss;

but Mr. Whymper says that the ends of the rope showed

no evidence of cutting, but only of breaking.  He adds

that if Taugwalder had had the disposition to cut the rope,

he would not have had time to do it, the accident was so

sudden and unexpected.



Lord Douglas' body has never been found.  It probably

lodged upon some inaccessible shelf in the face of the

mighty precipice.  Lord Douglas was a youth of nineteen.

The three other victims fell nearly four thousand feet,

and their bodies lay together upon the glacier when found

by Mr. Whymper and the other searchers the next morning.

Their graves are beside the little church in Zermatt.







CHAPTER XLII

[Chillon has a Nice, Roomy Dungeon]



Switzerland is simply a large, humpy, solid rock,

with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.  Consequently,

they do not dig graves, they blast them out with power

and fuse.  They cannot afford to have large graveyards,

the grass skin is too circumscribed and too valuable.

It is all required for the support of the living.



The graveyard in Zermatt occupies only about one-eighth

of an acre.  The graves are sunk in the living rock, and are

very permanent; but occupation of them is only temporary;

the occupant can only stay till his grave is needed

by a later subject, he is removed, then, for they do not

bury one body on top of another.  As I understand it,

a family owns a grave, just as it owns a house.  A man dies

and leaves his house to his son--and at the same time,

this dead father succeeds to his own father's grave.

He moves out of the house and into the grave, and his

predecessor moves out of the grave and into the cellar

of the chapel.  I saw a black box lying in the churchyard,

with skull and cross-bones painted on it, and was told that

this was used in transferring remains to the cellar.



In that cellar the bones and skulls of several hundred of

former citizens were compactly corded up.  They made a pile

eighteen feet long, seven feet high, and eight feet wide.

I was told that in some of the receptacles of this kind

in the Swiss villages, the skulls were all marked,

and if a man wished to find the skulls of his ancestors

for several generations back, he could do it by these marks,

preserved in the family records.



An English gentleman who had lived some years in this region,

said it was the cradle of compulsory education.

But he said that the English idea that compulsory

education would reduce bastardy and intemperance was an

error--it has not that effect.  He said there was more

seduction in the Protestant than in the Catholic cantons,

because the confessional protected the girls.  I wonder

why it doesn't protect married women in France and Spain?



This gentleman said that among the poorer peasants in the Valais,

it was common for the brothers in a family to cast lots

to determine which of them should have the coveted privilege

of marrying, and his brethren--doomed bachelors--heroically

banded themselves together to help support the new family.



We left Zermatt in a wagon--and in a rain-storm, too--

for St. Nicholas about ten o'clock one morning.

Again we passed between those grass-clad prodigious cliffs,

specked with wee dwellings peeping over at us from

velvety green walls ten and twelve hundred feet high.

It did not seem possible that the imaginary chamois

even could climb those precipices.  Lovers on opposite

cliffs probably kiss through a spy-glass, and correspond

with a rifle.



In Switzerland the farmer's plow is a wide shovel,

which scrapes up and turns over the thin earthy skin of his

native rock--and there the man of the plow is a hero.

Now here, by our St. Nicholas road, was a grave, and it

had a tragic story.  A plowman was skinning his farm

one morning--not the steepest part of it, but still

a steep part--that is, he was not skinning the front

of his farm, but the roof of it, near the eaves--when he

absent-mindedly let go of the plow-handles to moisten

his hands, in the usual way; he lost his balance and fell

out of his farm backward; poor fellow, he never touched

anything till he struck bottom, fifteen hundred feet below.

[1] We throw a halo of heroism around the life of the

soldier and the sailor, because of the deadly dangers they

are facing all the time.  But we are not used to looking

upon farming as a heroic occupation.  This is because we

have not lived in Switzerland.



1.  This was on a Sunday.--M.T.



From St. Nicholas we struck out for Visp--or Vispach--on foot.

The rain-storms had been at work during several days,

and had done a deal of damage in Switzerland and Savoy.

We came to one place where a stream had changed its

course and plunged down a mountain in a new place,

sweeping everything before it.  Two poor but precious farms

by the roadside were ruined.  One was washed clear away,

and the bed-rock exposed; the other was buried out of sight

under a tumbled chaos of rocks, gravel, mud, and rubbish.

The resistless might of water was well exemplified.

Some saplings which had stood in the way were bent to the ground,

stripped clean of their bark, and buried under rocky debris.

The road had been swept away, too.



In another place, where the road was high up on the mountain's

face, and its outside edge protected by flimsy masonry,

we frequently came across spots where this masonry had

carved off and left dangerous gaps for mules to get over;

and with still more frequency we found the masonry

slightly crumbled, and marked by mule-hoofs, thus showing

that there had been danger of an accident to somebody.

When at last we came to a badly ruptured bit of masonry,

with hoof-prints evidencing a desperate struggle

to regain the lost foothold, I looked quite hopefully

over the dizzy precipice.  But there was nobody down there.



They take exceedingly good care of their rivers in Switzerland

and other portions of Europe.  They wall up both banks

with slanting solid stone masonry--so that from end

to end of these rivers the banks look like the wharves

at St. Louis and other towns on the Mississippi River.



It was during this walk from St. Nicholas, in the shadow

of the majestic Alps, that we came across some little

children amusing themselves in what seemed, at first,

a most odd and original way--but it wasn't; it was in

simply a natural and characteristic way.  They were roped

together with a string, they had mimic alpenstocks and

ice-axes, and were climbing a meek and lowly manure-pile

with a most blood-curdling amount of care and caution.

The "guide" at the head of the line cut imaginary steps,

in a laborious and painstaking way, and not a monkey

budged till the step above was vacated.  If we had waited

we should have witnessed an imaginary accident, no doubt;

and we should have heard the intrepid band hurrah when they

made the summit and looked around upon the "magnificent view,"

and seen them throw themselves down in exhausted attitudes

for a rest in that commanding situation.



In Nevada I used to see the children play at silver-mining.

Of course, the great thing was an accident in a mine,

and there were two "star" parts; that of the man

who fell down the mimic shaft, and that of the daring

hero who was lowered into the depths to bring him up.

I knew one small chap who always insisted on playing

BOTH of these parts--and he carried his point.

He would tumble into the shaft and die, and then come

to the surface and go back after his own remains.



It is the smartest boy that gets the hero part everywhere;

he is head guide in Switzerland, head miner in Nevada,

head bull-fighter in Spain, etc.; but I knew a preacher's son,

seven years old, who once selected a part for himself compared

to which those just mentioned are tame and unimpressive.

Jimmy's father stopped him from driving imaginary

horse-cars one Sunday--stopped him from playing captain

of an imaginary steamboat next Sunday--stopped him

from leading an imaginary army to battle the following

Sunday--and so on.  Finally the little fellow said:



"I've tried everything, and they won't any of them do.

What CAN I play?"



"I hardly know, Jimmy; but you MUST play only things

that are suitable to the Sabbath-day."



Next Sunday the preacher stepped softly to a back-room

door to see if the children were rightly employed.

He peeped in.  A chair occupied the middle of the room,

and on the back of it hung Jimmy's cap; one of his little

sisters took the cap down, nibbled at it, then passed it

to another small sister and said, "Eat of this fruit,

for it is good." The Reverend took in the situation--alas,

they were playing the Expulsion from Eden! Yet he found

one little crumb of comfort.  He said to himself, "For once

Jimmy has yielded the chief role--I have been wronging him,

I did not believe there was so much modesty in him;

I should have expected him to be either Adam or Eve."

This crumb of comfort lasted but a very little while;

he glanced around and discovered Jimmy standing in an

imposing attitude in a corner, with a dark and deadly frown

on his face.  What that meant was very plain--HE WAS

IMPERSONATING THE DEITY! Think of the guileless sublimity of

that idea.



We reached Vispach at 8 P.M., only about seven hours

out from St. Nicholas.  So we must have made fully

a mile and a half an hour, and it was all downhill,

too, and very muddy at that.  We stayed all night at

the Ho^tel de Soleil; I remember it because the landlady,

the portier, the waitress, and the chambermaid were not

separate persons, but were all contained in one neat and

chipper suit of spotless muslin, and she was the prettiest

young creature I saw in all that region.  She was the

landlord's daughter.  And I remember that the only native

match to her I saw in all Europe was the young daughter

of the landlord of a village inn in the Black Forest.

Why don't more people in Europe marry and keep hotel?



Next morning we left with a family of English friends

and went by train to Brevet, and thence by boat across

the lake to Ouchy (Lausanne).



Ouchy is memorable to me, not on account of its beautiful

situation and lovely surroundings--although these would

make it stick long in one's memory--but as the place

where _I_ caught the London TIMES dropping into humor.

It was NOT aware of it, though.  It did not do it on purpose.

An English friend called my attention to this lapse,

and cut out the reprehensible paragraph for me.  Think of

encountering a grin like this on the face of that grim

journal:



ERRATUM.--We are requested by Reuter's Telegram Company

to correct an erroneous announcement made in their Brisbane

telegram of the 2d inst., published in our impression of the 5th

inst., stating that "Lady Kennedy had given birth to twins,

the eldest being a son." The Company explain that the message

they received contained the words "Governor of Queensland,

TWINS FIRST SON." Being, however, subsequently informed

that Sir Arthur Kennedy was unmarried and that there

must be some mistake, a telegraphic repetition was at

once demanded.  It has been received today (11th inst.)

and shows that the words really telegraphed by Reuter's

agent were "Governor Queensland TURNS FIRST SOD,"

alluding to the Maryborough-Gympic Railway in course

of construction.  The words in italics were mutilated by

the telegraph in transmission from Australia, and reaching

the company in the form mentioned above gave rise to the mistake.





I had always had a deep and reverent compassion

for the sufferings of the "prisoner of Chillon,"

whose story Byron had told in such moving verse; so I took

the steamer and made pilgrimage to the dungeons of the

Castle of Chillon, to see the place where poor Bonnivard

endured his dreary captivity three hundred years ago.

I am glad I did that, for it took away some of the pain

I was feeling on the prisoner's account.  His dungeon

was a nice, cool, roomy place, and I cannot see why he

should have been dissatisfied with it.  If he had been

imprisoned in a St. Nicholas private dwelling, where the

fertilizer prevails, and the goat sleeps with the guest,

and the chickens roost on him and the cow comes in and

bothers him when he wants to muse, it would have been

another matter altogether; but he surely could not have

had a very cheerless time of it in that pretty dungeon.

It has romantic window-slits that let in generous bars

of light, and it has tall, noble columns, carved apparently

from the living rock; and what is more, they are written

all over with thousands of names; some of them--like

Byron's and Victor Hugo's--of the first celebrity.

Why didn't he amuse himself reading these names? Then

there are the couriers and tourists--swarms of them every

day--what was to hinder him from having a good time

with them? I think Bonnivard's sufferings have been overrated.



Next, we took the train and went to Martigny, on the way

to Mont Blanc.  Next morning we started, about eight

o'clock, on foot.  We had plenty of company, in the way

of wagon-loads and mule-loads of tourists--and dust.

This scattering procession of travelers was perhaps a

mile long.  The road was uphill--interminable uphill--and

tolerably steep.  The weather was blisteringly hot,

and the man or woman who had to sit on a creeping mule,

or in a crawling wagon, and broil in the beating sun,

was an object to be pitied.  We could dodge among the bushes,

and have the relief of shade, but those people could not.

They paid for a conveyance, and to get their money's worth

they rode.



We went by the way of the Te^te Noir, and after we

reached high ground there was no lack of fine scenery.

In one place the road was tunneled through a shoulder

of the mountain; from there one looked down into a gorge

with a rushing torrent in it, and on every hand was a

charming view of rocky buttresses and wooded heights.

There was a liberal allowance of pretty waterfalls, too,

on the Te^te Noir route.



About half an hour before we reached the village of

Argentie`re a vast dome of snow with the sun blazing on it

drifted into view and framed itself in a strong V-shaped

gateway of the mountains, and we recognized Mont Blanc,

the "monarch of the Alps." With every step, after that,

this stately dome rose higher and higher into the blue sky,

and at last seemed to occupy the zenith.



Some of Mont Blanc's neighbors--bare, light-brown, steeplelike

rocks--were very peculiarly shaped.  Some were whittled

to a sharp point, and slightly bent at the upper end,

like a lady's finger; one monster sugar-loaf resembled

a bishop's hat; it was too steep to hold snow on its sides,

but had some in the division.



While we were still on very high ground, and before

the descent toward Argentie`re began, we looked up

toward a neighboring mountain-top, and saw exquisite

prismatic colors playing about some white clouds which

were so delicate as to almost resemble gossamer webs.

The faint pinks and greens were peculiarly beautiful;

none of the colors were deep, they were the lightest shades.

They were bewitching commingled.  We sat down to study and

enjoy this singular spectacle.  The tints remained during

several minutes--fitting, changing, melting into each other;

paling almost away for a moment, then reflushing--a shifting,

restless, unstable succession of soft opaline gleams,

shimmering over that air film of white cloud, and turning

it into a fabric dainty enough to clothe an angel with.



By and by we perceived what those super-delicate colors,

and their continuous play and movement, reminded us of;

it is what one sees in a soap-bubble that is drifting along,

catching changes of tint from the objects it passes.

A soap-bubble is the most beautiful thing, and the

most exquisite, in nature; that lovely phantom fabric

in the sky was suggestive of a soap-bubble split open,

and spread out in the sun.  I wonder how much it would take

to buy a soap-bubble, if there was only one in the world?

One could buy a hatful of Koh-i-Noors with the same money,

no doubt.



We made the tramp from Martigny to Argentie`re in eight hours.

We beat all the mules and wagons; we didn't usually do that.

We hired a sort of open baggage-wagon for the trip down

the valley to Chamonix, and then devoted an hour to dining.

This gave the driver time to get drunk.  He had a friend

with him, and this friend also had had time to get drunk.



When we drove off, the driver said all the tourists had

arrived and gone by while we were at dinner; "but," said he,

impressively, "be not disturbed by that--remain tranquil--give

yourselves no uneasiness--their dust rises far before us--

rest you tranquil, leave all to me--I am the king of drivers.

Behold!"



Down came his whip, and away we clattered.  I never had such

a shaking up in my life.  The recent flooding rains had

washed the road clear away in places, but we never stopped,

we never slowed down for anything.  We tore right along,

over rocks, rubbish, gullies, open fields--sometimes with

one or two wheels on the ground, but generally with none.

Every now and then that calm, good-natured madman would

bend a majestic look over his shoulder at us and say,

"Ah, you perceive? It is as I have said --I am the

king of drivers." Every time we just missed going

to destruction, he would say, with tranquil happiness,

"Enjoy it, gentlemen, it is very rare, it is very unusual--

it is given to few to ride with the king of drivers--

and observe, it is as I have said, _I_ am he."



He spoke in French, and punctuated with hiccoughs.

His friend was French, too, but spoke in German--using

the same system of punctuation, however.  The friend

called himself the "Captain of Mont Blanc," and wanted us

to make the ascent with him.  He said he had made more

ascents than any other man--forty seven--and his brother

had made thirty-seven. His brother was the best guide

in the world, except himself--but he, yes, observe him

well--he was the "Captain of Mont Blanc"--that title

belonged to none other.



The "king" was as good as his word--he overtook that long

procession of tourists and went by it like a hurricane.

The result was that we got choicer rooms at the hotel

in Chamonix than we should have done if his majesty

had been a slower artist--or rather, if he hadn't most

providentially got drunk before he left Argentie`re.







CHAPTER XLIII

[My Poor Sick Friend Disappointed]



Everybody was out-of-doors; everybody was in the

principal street of the village--not on the sidewalks,

but all over the street; everybody was lounging, loafing,

chatting, waiting, alert, expectant, interested--for it

was train-time. That is to say, it was diligence-time--

the half-dozen big diligences would soon be arriving

from Geneva, and the village was interested, in many ways,

in knowing how many people were coming and what sort of

folk they might be.  It was altogether the livest-looking

street we had seen in any village on the continent.



The hotel was by the side of a booming torrent, whose music

was loud and strong; we could not see this torrent, for it

was dark, now, but one could locate it without a light.

There was a large enclosed yard in front of the hotel,

and this was filled with groups of villagers waiting to see

the diligences arrive, or to hire themselves to excursionists

for the morrow.  A telescope stood in the yard, with its

huge barrel canted up toward the lustrous evening star.

The long porch of the hotel was populous with tourists,

who sat in shawls and wraps under the vast overshadowing

bulk of Mont Blanc, and gossiped or meditated.



Never did a mountain seem so close; its big sides seemed

at one's very elbow, and its majestic dome, and the lofty

cluster of slender minarets that were its neighbors,

seemed to be almost over one's head.  It was night

in the streets, and the lamps were sparkling everywhere;

the broad bases and shoulders of the mountains were in

a deep gloom, but their summits swam in a strange rich

glow which was really daylight, and yet had a mellow

something about it which was very different from the hard

white glare of the kind of daylight I was used to.

Its radiance was strong and clear, but at the same time

it was singularly soft, and spiritual, and benignant.

No, it was not our harsh, aggressive, realistic daylight;

it seemed properer to an enchanted land--or to heaven.



I had seen moonlight and daylight together before, but I

had not seen daylight and black night elbow to elbow before.

At least I had not seen the daylight resting upon an object

sufficiently close at hand, before, to make the contrast

startling and at war with nature.



The daylight passed away.  Presently the moon rose up

behind some of those sky-piercing fingers or pinnacles

of bare rock of which I have spoken--they were a little

to the left of the crest of Mont Blanc, and right over

our heads--but she couldn't manage to climb high

enough toward heaven to get entirely above them.

She would show the glittering arch of her upper third,

occasionally, and scrape it along behind the comblike row;

sometimes a pinnacle stood straight up, like a statuette

of ebony, against that glittering white shield, then seemed

to glide out of it by its own volition and power,

and become a dim specter, while the next pinnacle glided

into its place and blotted the spotless disk with the black

exclamation-point of its presence.  The top of one pinnacle

took the shapely, clean-cut form of a rabbit's head,

in the inkiest silhouette, while it rested against the moon.

The unillumined peaks and minarets, hovering vague and

phantom-like above us while the others were painfully

white and strong with snow and moonlight, made a peculiar effect.





But when the moon, having passed the line of pinnacles,

was hidden behind the stupendous white swell of Mont Blanc,

the masterpiece of the evening was flung on the canvas.

A rich greenish radiance sprang into the sky from behind

the mountain, and in this same airy shreds and ribbons of vapor

floated about, and being flushed with that strange tint,

went waving to and fro like pale green flames.  After a while,

radiating bars--vast broadening fan-shaped shadows--grew up

and stretched away to the zenith from behind the mountain.

It was a spectacle to take one's breath, for the wonder of it,

and the sublimity.



Indeed, those mighty bars of alternate light and shadow

streaming up from behind that dark and prodigious form

and occupying the half of the dull and opaque heavens,

was the most imposing and impressive marvel I had ever

looked upon.  There is no simile for it, for nothing

is like it.  If a child had asked me what it was,

I should have said, "Humble yourself, in this presence,

it is the glory flowing from the hidden head of the Creator."

One falls shorter of the truth than that, sometimes,

in trying to explain mysteries to the little people.

I could have found out the cause of this awe-compelling

miracle by inquiring, for it is not infrequent at Mont

Blanc,--but I did not wish to know.  We have not the

reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has,

because we know how it is made.  We have lost as much as we

gained by prying into the matter.



We took a walk down street, a block or two, and a

place where four streets met and the principal shops

were clustered, found the groups of men in the roadway

thicker than ever--for this was the Exchange of Chamonix.

These men were in the costumes of guides and porters,

and were there to be hired.



The office of that great personage, the Guide-in-Chief

of the Chamonix Guild of Guides, was near by.  This guild

is a close corporation, and is governed by strict laws.

There are many excursion routes, some dangerous and

some not, some that can be made safely without a guide,

and some that cannot.  The bureau determines these things.

Where it decides that a guide is necessary, you are

forbidden to go without one.  Neither are you allowed to be

a victim of extortion: the law states what you are to pay.

The guides serve in rotation; you cannot select the man

who is to take your life into his hands, you must take

the worst in the lot, if it is his turn.  A guide's fee

ranges all the way up from a half-dollar (for some trifling

excursion of a few rods) to twenty dollars, according to

the distance traversed and the nature of the ground.

A guide's fee for taking a person to the summit of Mont

Blanc and back, is twenty dollars--and he earns it.

The time employed is usually three days, and there is

enough early rising in it to make a man far more "healthy

and wealthy and wise" than any one man has any right to be.

The porter's fee for the same trip is ten dollars.

Several fools--no, I mean several tourists--usually go together,

and divide up the expense, and thus make it light;

for if only one f--tourist, I mean--went, he would have

to have several guides and porters, and that would make the

matter costly.



We went into the Chief's office.  There were maps

of mountains on the walls; also one or two lithographs

of celebrated guides, and a portrait of the scientist

De Saussure.



In glass cases were some labeled fragments of boots

and batons, and other suggestive relics and remembrances

of casualties on Mount Blanc.  In a book was a record of all

the ascents which have ever been made, beginning with Nos.

1 and 2--being those of Jacques Balmat and De Saussure,

in 1787, and ending with No. 685, which wasn't cold yet.

In fact No. 685 was standing by the official table waiting

to receive the precious official diploma which should prove

to his German household and to his descendants that he had once

been indiscreet enough to climb to the top of Mont Blanc.

He looked very happy when he got his document; in fact,

he spoke up and said he WAS happy.



I tried to buy a diploma for an invalid friend at home

who had never traveled, and whose desire all his life has

been to ascend Mont Blanc, but the Guide-in-Chief rather

insolently refused to sell me one.  I was very much offended.

I said I did not propose to be discriminated against on

the account of my nationality; that he had just sold

a diploma to this German gentleman, and my money was

a good as his; I would see to it that he couldn't keep

his shop for Germans and deny his produce to Americans;

I would have his license taken away from him at the dropping

of a handkerchief; if France refused to break him, I would

make an international matter of it and bring on a war;

the soil should be drenched with blood; and not only that,

but I would set up an opposition show and sell diplomas

at half price.



For two cents I would have done these things, too;

but nobody offered me two cents.  I tried to move that

German's feelings, but it could not be done; he would

not give me his diploma, neither would he sell it to me.

I TOLD him my friend was sick and could not come himself,

but he said he did not care a VERDAMMTES PFENNIG,

he wanted his diploma for himself--did I suppose he was

going to risk his neck for that thing and then give it

to a sick stranger? Indeed he wouldn't, so he wouldn't.

I resolved, then, that I would do all I could to injure

Mont Blanc.



In the record-book was a list of all the fatal accidents

which happened on the mountain.  It began with the one

in 1820 when the Russian Dr. Hamel's three guides were

lost in a crevice of the glacier, and it recorded the

delivery of the remains in the valley by the slow-moving

glacier forty-one years later.  The latest catastrophe

bore the date 1877.



We stepped out and roved about the village awhile.

In front of the little church was a monument to the memory

of the bold guide Jacques Balmat, the first man who ever

stood upon the summit of Mont Blanc.  He made that wild

trip solitary and alone.  He accomplished the ascent

a number of times afterward.  A stretch of nearly half

a century lay between his first ascent and his last one.

At the ripe old age of seventy-two he was climbing

around a corner of a lofty precipice of the Pic du

Midi--nobody with him--when he slipped and fell.

So he died in the harness.



He had grown very avaricious in his old age, and used to go

off stealthily to hunt for non-existent and impossible

gold among those perilous peaks and precipices.

He was on a quest of that kind when he lost his life.

There was a statue to him, and another to De Saussure,

in the hall of our hotel, and a metal plate on the door

of a room upstairs bore an inscription to the effect

that that room had been occupied by Albert Smith.

Balmat and De Saussure discovered Mont Blanc--so to

speak--but it was Smith who made it a paying property.

His articles in BLACKWOOD and his lectures on Mont Blanc

in London advertised it and made people as anxious to see it

as if it owed them money.



As we strolled along the road we looked up and saw a red

signal-light glowing in the darkness of the mountainside.

It seemed but a trifling way up--perhaps a hundred yards,

a climb of ten minutes.  It was a lucky piece of sagacity

in us that we concluded to stop a man whom we met and get

a light for our pipes from him instead of continuing the climb

to that lantern to get a light, as had been our purpose.

The man said that that lantern was on the Grands Mulets,

some sixty-five hundred feet above the valley! I know

by our Riffelberg experience, that it would have taken us

a good part of a week to go up there.  I would sooner not

smoke at all, than take all that trouble for a light.



Even in the daytime the foreshadowing effect of this

mountain's close proximity creates curious deceptions.

For instance, one sees with the naked eye a cabin up

there beside the glacier, and a little above and beyond

he sees the spot where that red light was located;

he thinks he could throw a stone from the one place to

the other.  But he couldn't, for the difference between

the two altitudes is more than three thousand feet.

It looks impossible, from below, that this can be true,

but it is true, nevertheless.



While strolling around, we kept the run of the moon all

the time, and we still kept an eye on her after we got back

to the hotel portico.  I had a theory that the gravitation

of refraction, being subsidiary to atmospheric compensation,

the refrangibility of the earth's surface would emphasize

this effect in regions where great mountain ranges occur,

and possibly so even-handed impact the odic and idyllic

forces together, the one upon the other, as to prevent

the moon from rising higher than 12,200 feet above

sea-level. This daring theory had been received with frantic

scorn by some of my fellow-scientists, and with an eager

silence by others.  Among the former I may mention

Prof. H----y; and among the latter Prof. T----l. Such

is professional jealousy; a scientist will never show

any kindness for a theory which he did not start himself.

There is no feeling of brotherhood among these people.

Indeed, they always resent it when I call them brother.

To show how far their ungenerosity can carry them, I will

state that I offered to let Prof. H----y publish my great

theory as his own discovery; I even begged him to do it;

I even proposed to print it myself as his theory.

Instead of thanking me, he said that if I tried to

fasten that theory on him he would sue me for slander.

I was going to offer it to Mr. Darwin, whom I understood

to be a man without prejudices, but it occurred to me

that perhaps he would not be interested in it since it did

not concern heraldry.



But I am glad now, that I was forced to father my intrepid

theory myself, for, on the night of which I am writing,

it was triumphantly justified and established.  Mont Blanc

is nearly sixteen thousand feet high; he hid the moon utterly;

near him is a peak which is 12,216 feet high; the moon slid

along behind the pinnacles, and when she approached that

one I watched her with intense interest, for my reputation

as a scientist must stand or fall by its decision.

I cannot describe the emotions which surged like tidal

waves through my breast when I saw the moon glide behind

that lofty needle and pass it by without exposing more

than two feet four inches of her upper rim above it;

I was secure, then.  I knew she could rise no higher,

and I was right.  She sailed behind all the peaks and

never succeeded in hoisting her disk above a single one

of them.



While the moon was behind one of those sharp fingers,

its shadow was flung athwart the vacant heavens--

a long, slanting, clean-cut, dark ray--with a streaming

and energetic suggestion of FORCE about it, such as the

ascending jet of water from a powerful fire-engine affords.

It was curious to see a good strong shadow of an earthly

object cast upon so intangible a field as the atmosphere.



We went to bed, at last, and went quickly to sleep, but I

woke up, after about three hours, with throbbing temples,

and a head which was physically sore, outside and in.

I was dazed, dreamy, wretched, seedy, unrefreshed.

I recognized the occasion of all this: it was that torrent.

In the mountain villages of Switzerland, and along the roads,

one has always the roar of the torrent in his ears.

He imagines it is music, and he thinks poetic things

about it; he lies in his comfortable bed and is lulled

to sleep by it.  But by and by he begins to notice

that his head is very sore--he cannot account for it;

in solitudes where the profoundest silence reigns,

he notices a sullen, distant, continuous roar in his ears,

which is like what he would experience if he had sea-shells

pressed against them--he cannot account for it; he is

drowsy and absent-minded; there is no tenacity to his mind,

he cannot keep hold of a thought and follow it out;

i f he sits down to write, his vocabulary is empty,

no suitable words will come, he forgets what he started to do,

and remains there, pen in hand, head tilted up, eyes closed,

listening painfully to the muffled roar of a distant train

in his ears; in his soundest sleep the strain continues,

he goes on listening, always listening intently, anxiously,

and wakes at last, harassed, irritable, unrefreshed.

He cannot manage to account for these things.

Day after day he feels as if he had spent his nights

in a sleeping-car. It actually takes him weeks to find

out that it is those persecuting torrents that have been

making all the mischief.  It is time for him to get out

of Switzerland, then, for as soon as he has discovered

the cause, the misery is magnified several fold.  The roar

of the torrent is maddening, then, for his imagination

is assisting; the physical pain it inflicts is exquisite.

When he finds he is approaching one of those streams,

his dread is so lively that he is disposed to fly the track

and avoid the implacable foe.



Eight or nine months after the distress of the torrents

had departed from me, the roar and thunder of the

streets of Paris brought it all back again.  I moved

to the sixth story of the hotel to hunt for peace.

About midnight the noises dulled away, and I was

sinking to sleep, when I heard a new and curious sound;

I listened: evidently some joyous lunatic was softly

dancing a "double shuffle" in the room over my head.

I had to wait for him to get through, of course.  Five long,

long minutes he smoothly shuffled away--a pause followed,

then something fell with a thump on the floor.

I said to myself "There--he is pulling off his boots--

thank heavens he is done." Another slight pause--he went

to shuffling again! I said to myself, "Is he trying to see

what he can do with only one boot on?" Presently came

another pause and another thump on the floor.  I said

"Good, he has pulled off his other boot--NOW he is done."

But he wasn't. The next moment he was shuffling again.

I said, "Confound him, he is at it in his slippers!"

After a little came that same old pause, and right after

it that thump on the floor once more.  I said, "Hang him,

he had on TWO pair of boots!" For an hour that magician

went on shuffling and pulling off boots till he had shed

as many as twenty-five pair, and I was hovering on the verge

of lunacy.  I got my gun and stole up there.  The fellow

was in the midst of an acre of sprawling boots, and he had

a boot in his hand, shuffling it--no, I mean POLISHING it.

The mystery was explained.  He hadn't been dancing.

He was the "Boots" of the hotel, and was attending

to business.







CHAPTER XLIV

[I Scale Mont Blanc--by Telescope]



After breakfast, that next morning in Chamonix, we went

out in the yard and watched the gangs of excursioning

tourists arriving and departing with their mules and guides

and porters; they we took a look through the telescope

at the snowy hump of Mont Blanc.  It was brilliant

with sunshine, and the vast smooth bulge seemed hardly

five hundred yards away.  With the naked eye we could

dimly make out the house at the Pierre Pointue, which is

located by the side of the great glacier, and is more

than three thousand feet above the level of the valley;

but with the telescope we could see all its details.

While I looked, a woman rode by the house on a mule, and I

saw her with sharp distinctness; I could have described

her dress.  I saw her nod to the people of the house,

and rein up her mule, and put her hand up to shield

her eyes from the sun.  I was not used to telescopes;

in fact, I had never looked through a good one before;

it seemed incredible to me that this woman could be

so far away.  I was satisfied that I could see all

these details with my naked eye; but when I tried it,

that mule and those vivid people had wholly vanished,

and the house itself was become small and vague.  I tried

the telescope again, and again everything was vivid.

The strong black shadows of the mule and the woman were

flung against the side of the house, and I saw the mule's

silhouette wave its ears.



The telescopulist--or the telescopulariat--I do not know

which is right--said a party were making a grand ascent,

and would come in sight on the remote upper heights,

presently; so we waited to observe this performance.

Presently I had a superb idea.  I wanted to stand with

a party on the summit of Mont Blanc, merely to be able

to say I had done it, and I believed the telescope

could set me within seven feet of the uppermost man.

The telescoper assured me that it could.  I then asked

him how much I owed him for as far as I had got? He said,

one franc.  I asked him how much it would cost to make

the entire ascent? Three francs.  I at once determined

to make the entire ascent.  But first I inquired

if there was any danger? He said no--not by telescope;

said he had taken a great many parties to the summit,

and never lost a man.  I asked what he would charge to let

my agent go with me, together with such guides and porters

as might be necessary.  He said he would let Harris go

for two francs; and that unless we were unusually timid,

he should consider guides and porters unnecessary;

it was not customary to take them, when going by telescope,

for they were rather an encumbrance than a help.

He said that the party now on the mountain were approaching

the most difficult part, and if we hurried we should

overtake them within ten minutes, and could then join them

and have the benefit of their guides and porters without

their knowledge, and without expense to us.



I then said we would start immediately.  I believe I

said it calmly, though I was conscious of a shudder

and of a paling cheek, in view of the nature of the

exploit I was so unreflectingly engaged in.  But the old

daredevil spirit was upon me, and I said that as I

had committed myself I would not back down; I would

ascend Mont Blanc if it cost me my life.  I told the man

to slant his machine in the proper direction and let us be off.



Harris was afraid and did not want to go, but I heartened

him up and said I would hold his hand all the way; so he

gave his consent, though he trembled a little at first.

I took a last pathetic look upon the pleasant summer scene

about me, then boldly put my eye to the glass and prepared

to mount among the grim glaciers and the everlasting snows.



We took our way carefully and cautiously across the great

Glacier des Bossons, over yawning and terrific crevices

and among imposing crags and buttresses of ice which were

fringed with icicles of gigantic proportions.  The desert

of ice that stretched far and wide about us was wild and

desolate beyond description, and the perils which beset us

were so great that at times I was minded to turn back.

But I pulled my pluck together and pushed on.



We passed the glacier safely and began to mount

the steeps beyond, with great alacrity.  When we

were seven minutes out from the starting-point, we

reached an altitude where the scene took a new aspect;

an apparently limitless continent of gleaming snow was

tilted heavenward before our faces.  As my eye followed

that awful acclivity far away up into the remote skies,

it seemed to me that all I had ever seen before of sublimity

and magnitude was small and insignificant compared to this.



We rested a moment, and then began to mount with speed.

Within three minutes we caught sight of the party ahead of us,

and stopped to observe them.  They were toiling up a long,

slanting ridge of snow--twelve persons, roped together some

fifteen feet apart, marching in single file, and strongly

marked against the clear blue sky.  One was a woman.

We could see them lift their feet and put them down;

we saw them swing their alpenstocks forward in unison,

like so many pendulums, and then bear their weight

upon them; we saw the lady wave her handkerchief.

They dragged themselves upward in a worn and weary way,

for they had been climbing steadily from the Grand Mulets,

on the Glacier des Dossons, since three in the morning,

and it was eleven, now.  We saw them sink down in the

snow and rest, and drink something from a bottle.

After a while they moved on, and as they approached the final

short dash of the home-stretch we closed up on them and

joined them.



Presently we all stood together on the summit! What a view

was spread out below! Away off under the northwestern horizon

rolled the silent billows of the Farnese Oberland, their snowy

crests glinting softly in the subdued lights of distance;

in the north rose the giant form of the Wobblehorn,

draped from peak to shoulder in sable thunder-clouds;

beyond him, to the right, stretched the grand processional

summits of the Cisalpine Cordillera, drowned in a

sensuous haze; to the east loomed the colossal masses

of the Yodelhorn, the Fuddelhorn, and the Dinnerhorn,

their cloudless summits flashing white and cold in the sun;

beyond them shimmered the faint far line of the Ghauts

of Jubbelpore and the Aigulles des Alleghenies; in the

south towered the smoking peak of Popocatapetl and the

unapproachable altitudes of the peerless Scrabblehorn;

in the west-south the stately range of the Himalayas

lay dreaming in a purple gloom; and thence all around

the curving horizon the eye roved over a troubled sea

of sun-kissed Alps, and noted, here and there, the noble

proportions and the soaring domes of the Bottlehorn,

and the Saddlehorn, and the Shovelhorn, and the Powderhorn,

all bathed in the glory of noon and mottled with softly

gliding blots, the shadows flung from drifting clouds.



Overcome by the scene, we all raised a triumphant,

tremendous shout, in unison.  A startled man at my elbow

said:



"Confound you, what do you yell like that for, right here

in the street?"



That brought me down to Chamonix, like a flirt.

I gave that man some spiritual advice and disposed of him,

and then paid the telescope man his full fee, and said

that we were charmed with the trip and would remain down,

and not reascend and require him to fetch us down by telescope.

This pleased him very much, for of course we could have

stepped back to the summit and put him to the trouble

of bringing us home if we wanted to.



I judged we could get diplomas, now, anyhow; so we

went after them, but the Chief Guide put us off,

with one pretext or another, during all the time we stayed

in Chamonix, and we ended by never getting them at all.

So much for his prejudice against people's nationality.

However, we worried him enough to make him remember

us and our ascent for some time.  He even said, once,

that he wished there was a lunatic asylum in Chamonix.

This shows that he really had fears that we were going

to drive him mad.  It was what we intended to do,

but lack of time defeated it.



I cannot venture to advise the reader one way or the other,

as to ascending Mont Blanc.  I say only this: if he is at

all timid, the enjoyments of the trip will hardly make up

for the hardships and sufferings he will have to endure.

But, if he has good nerve, youth, health, and a bold,

firm will, and could leave his family comfortably provided

for in case the worst happened, he would find the ascent

a wonderful experience, and the view from the top a vision

to dream about, and tell about, and recall with exultation

all the days of his life.



While I do not advise such a person to attempt the ascent,

I do not advise him against it.  But if he elects to attempt it,

let him be warily careful of two things: chose a calm,

clear day; and do not pay the telescope man in advance.

There are dark stories of his getting advance payers on

the summit and then leaving them there to rot.



A frightful tragedy was once witnessed through the

Chamonix telescopes.  Think of questions and answers

like these, on an inquest:



CORONER.  You saw deceased lose his life?



WITNESS.  I did.



C. Where was he, at the time?



W. Close to the summit of Mont Blanc.



C. Where were you?



W. In the main street of Chamonix.



C. What was the distance between you?



W. A LITTLE OVER FIVE MILES, as the bird flies.



This accident occurred in 1866, a year and a month after the

disaster on the Matterhorn.  Three adventurous English gentlemen,

[1] of great experience in mountain-climbing, made up their

minds to ascend Mont Blanc without guides or porters.

All endeavors to dissuade them from their project failed.

Powerful telescopes are numerous in Chamonix.  These huge

brass tubes, mounted on their scaffoldings and pointed

skyward from every choice vantage-ground, have the

formidable look of artillery, and give the town the general

aspect of getting ready to repel a charge of angels.

The reader may easily believe that the telescopes

had plenty of custom on that August morning in 1866,

for everybody knew of the dangerous undertaking which was

on foot, and all had fears that misfortune would result.

All the morning the tubes remained directed toward the

mountain heights, each with its anxious group around it;

but the white deserts were vacant.



1.  Sir George Young and his brothers James and Albert.



At last, toward eleven o'clock, the people who were

looking through the telescopes cried out "There they

are!"--and sure enough, far up, on the loftiest terraces

of the Grand Plateau, the three pygmies appeared,

climbing with remarkable vigor and spirit.  They disappeared

in the "Corridor," and were lost to sight during an hour.

Then they reappeared, and were presently seen standing together

upon the extreme summit of Mont Blanc.  So, all was well.

They remained a few minutes on that highest point of land

in Europe, a target for all the telescopes, and were then

seen to begin descent.  Suddenly all three vanished.

An instant after, they appeared again, TWO THOUSAND FEET

BELOW!



Evidently, they had tripped and been shot down an almost

perpendicular slope of ice to a point where it joined

the border of the upper glacier.  Naturally, the distant

witness supposed they were now looking upon three corpses;

so they could hardly believe their eyes when they presently saw

two of the men rise to their feet and bend over the third.

During two hours and a half they watched the two busying

themselves over the extended form of their brother,

who seemed entirely inert.  Chamonix's affairs stood still;

everybody was in the street, all interest was centered

upon what was going on upon that lofty and isolated stage

five miles away.  Finally the two--one of them walking

with great difficulty--were seen to begin descent,

abandoning the third, who was no doubt lifeless.

Their movements were followed, step by step, until they

reached the "Corridor" and disappeared behind its ridge.

Before they had had time to traverse the "Corridor"

and reappear, twilight was come, and the power of the

telescope was at an end.



The survivors had a most perilous journey before

them in the gathering darkness, for they must get

down to the Grands Mulets before they would find

a safe stopping-place--a long and tedious descent,

and perilous enough even in good daylight.  The oldest

guides expressed the opinion that they could not succeed;

that all the chances were that they would lose their lives.



Yet those brave men did succeed.  They reached the Grands

Mulets in safety.  Even the fearful shock which their nerves

had sustained was not sufficient to overcome their coolness

and courage.  It would appear from the official account

that they were threading their way down through those

dangers from the closing in of twilight until two o'clock

in the morning, or later, because the rescuing party from

Chamonix reached the Grand Mulets about three in the morning

and moved thence toward the scene of the disaster under

the leadership of Sir George Young, "who had only just arrived."



After having been on his feet twenty-four hours,

in the exhausting work of mountain-climbing, Sir George

began the reascent at the head of the relief party

of six guides, to recover the corpse of his brother.

This was considered a new imprudence, as the number

was too few for the service required.  Another relief

party presently arrived at the cabin on the Grands

Mulets and quartered themselves there to await events.

Ten hours after Sir George's departure toward the summit,

this new relief were still scanning the snowy altitudes

above them from their own high perch among the ice

deserts ten thousand feet above the level of the sea,

but the whole forenoon had passed without a glimpse of any

living thing appearing up there.



This was alarming.  Half a dozen of their number set out,

then early in the afternoon, to seek and succor Sir George

and his guides.  The persons remaining at the cabin saw

these disappear, and then ensued another distressing wait.

Four hours passed, without tidings.  Then at five

o'clock another relief, consisting of three guides,

set forward from the cabin.  They carried food and

cordials for the refreshment of their predecessors;

they took lanterns with them, too; night was coming on,

and to make matters worse, a fine, cold rain had begun

to fall.



At the same hour that these three began their dangerous ascent,

the official Guide-in-Chief of the Mont Blanc region

undertook the dangerous descent to Chamonix, all alone,

to get reinforcements.  However, a couple of hours later,

at 7 P.M., the anxious solicitude came to an end,

and happily.  A bugle note was heard, and a cluster

of black specks was distinguishable against the snows

of the upper heights.  The watchers counted these specks

eagerly--fourteen--nobody was missing.  An hour and a half

later they were all safe under the roof of the cabin.

They had brought the corpse with them.  Sir George Young

tarried there but a few minutes, and then began the long

and troublesome descent from the cabin to Chamonix.

He probably reached there about two or three o'clock

in the morning, after having been afoot among the rocks

and glaciers during two days and two nights.  His endurance

was equal to his daring.



The cause of the unaccountable delay of Sir George and

the relief parties among the heights where the disaster

had happened was a thick fog--or, partly that and partly

the slow and difficult work of conveying the dead body

down the perilous steeps.



The corpse, upon being viewed at the inquest, showed

no bruises, and it was some time before the surgeons

discovered that the neck was broken.  One of the surviving

brothers had sustained some unimportant injuries,

but the other had suffered no hurt at all.  How these men

could fall two thousand feet, almost perpendicularly,

and live afterward, is a most strange and unaccountable thing.



A great many women have made the ascent of Mont Blanc.

An English girl, Miss Stratton, conceived the daring idea,

two or three years ago, of attempting the ascent in the

middle of winter.  She tried it--and she succeeded.

Moreover, she froze two of her fingers on the way up,

she fell in love with her guide on the summit,

and she married him when she got to the bottom again.

There is nothing in romance, in the way of a striking

"situation," which can beat this love scene in midheaven

on an isolated ice-crest with the thermometer at zero

and an Artic gale blowing.



The first woman who ascended Mont Blanc was a girl aged

twenty-two--Mlle. Maria Paradis--1809. Nobody was

with her but her sweetheart, and he was not a guide.

The sex then took a rest for about thirty years,

when a Mlle. d'Angeville made the ascent --1838. In

Chamonix I picked up a rude old lithograph of that day

which pictured her "in the act."



However, I value it less as a work of art than as a

fashion-plate. Miss d'Angeville put on a pair of men's

pantaloons to climb it, which was wise; but she cramped

their utility by adding her petticoat, which was idiotic.



One of the mournfulest calamities which men's disposition

to climb dangerous mountains has resulted in,

happened on Mont Blanc in September 1870.  M. D'Arve

tells the story briefly in his HISTOIRE DU MONT BLANC.

In the next chapter I will copy its chief features.







CHAPTER XLV

A Catastrophe Which Cost Eleven Lives

[Perished at the Verge of Safety]



On the 5th of September, 1870, a caravan of eleven persons

departed from Chamonix to make the ascent of Mont Blanc.

Three of the party were tourists; Messrs.  Randall and Bean,

Americans, and Mr. George Corkindale, a Scotch gentleman;

there were three guides and five porters.  The cabin

on the Grands Mulets was reached that day; the ascent

was resumed early the next morning, September 6th.

The day was fine and clear, and the movements of the party

were observed through the telescopes of Chamonix; at two

o'clock in the afternoon they were seen to reach the summit.

A few minutes later they were seen making the first steps

of the descent; then a cloud closed around them and hid

them from view.



Eight hours passed, the cloud still remained, night came,

no one had returned to the Grands Mulets.  Sylvain Couttet,

keeper of the cabin there, suspected a misfortune,

and sent down to the valley for help.  A detachment of

guides went up, but by the time they had made the tedious

trip and reached the cabin, a raging storm had set in.

They had to wait; nothing could be attempted in such

a tempest.



The wild storm lasted MORE THAN A WEEK, without ceasing;

but on the 17th, Couttet, with several guides, left the

cabin and succeeded in making the ascent.  In the snowy

wastes near the summit they came upon five bodies,

lying upon their sides in a reposeful attitude which

suggested that possibly they had fallen asleep there,

while exhausted with fatigue and hunger and benumbed with cold,

and never knew when death stole upon them.  Couttet moved

a few steps further and discovered five more bodies.

The eleventh corpse--that of a porter--was not found,

although diligent search was made for it.



In the pocket of Mr. Bean, one of the Americans, was found

a note-book in which had been penciled some sentences

which admit us, in flesh and spirit, as it were, to the

presence of these men during their last hours of life,

and to the grisly horrors which their fading vision looked

upon and their failing consciousness took cognizance of:



TUESDAY, SEPT.  6.  I have made the ascent of Mont Blanc,

with ten persons--eight guides, and Mr. Corkindale

and Mr. Randall.  We reached the summit at half past 2.

Immediately after quitting it, we were enveloped in clouds

of snow.  We passed the night in a grotto hollowed

in the snow, which afforded us but poor shelter, and I

was ill all night.



SEPT.  7--MORNING. The cold is excessive.  The snow falls

heavily and without interruption.  The guides take no rest.



EVENING.  My Dear Hessie, we have been two days on

Mont Blanc, in the midst of a terrible hurricane of snow,

we have lost our way, and are in a hole scooped in the snow,

at an altitude of 15,000 feet.  I have no longer any hope

of descending.



They had wandered around, and around, in the blinding

snow-storm, hopelessly lost, in a space only a hundred

yards square; and when cold and fatigue vanquished them

at last, they scooped their cave and lay down there

to die by inches, UNAWARE THAT FIVE STEPS MORE WOULD HAVE

BROUGHT THEM INTO THE TRUTH PATH.  They were so near

to life and safety as that, and did not suspect it.

The thought of this gives the sharpest pang that the tragic

story conveys.



The author of the HISTOIRE DU MONT BLANC introduced

the closing sentences of Mr. Bean's pathetic record thus:



"Here the characters are large and unsteady; the hand

which traces them is become chilled and torpid;

but the spirit survives, and the faith and resignation

of the dying man are expressed with a sublime simplicity."



Perhaps this note-book will be found and sent to you.

We have nothing to eat, my feet are already frozen,

and I am exhausted; I have strength to write only a few

words more.  I have left means for C's education; I know

you will employ them wisely.  I die with faith in God,

and with loving thoughts of you.  Farewell to all.

We shall meet again, in Heaven. ... I think of

you always.



It is the way of the Alps to deliver death to their victims

with a merciful swiftness, but here the rule failed.

These men suffered the bitterest death that has been

recorded in the history of those mountains, freighted as

that history is with grisly tragedies.







CHAPTER XLVI

[Meeting a Hog on a Precipice]



Mr. Harris and I took some guides and porters and ascended

to the Ho^tel des Pyramides, which is perched on the

high moraine which borders the Glacier des Bossons.

The road led sharply uphill, all the way, through grass

and flowers and woods, and was a pleasant walk,

barring the fatigue of the climb.



From the hotel we could view the huge glacier at very

close range.  After a rest we followed down a path

which had been made in the steep inner frontage

of the moraine, and stepped upon the glacier itself.

One of the shows of the place was a tunnel-like cavern,

which had been hewn in the glacier.  The proprietor

of this tunnel took candles and conducted us into it.

It was three or four feet wide and about six feet high.

Its walls of pure and solid ice emitted a soft and rich

blue light that produced a lovely effect, and suggested

enchanted caves, and that sort of thing.  When we had

proceeded some yards and were entering darkness, we turned

about and had a dainty sunlit picture of distant woods

and heights framed in the strong arch of the tunnel and seen

through the tender blue radiance of the tunnel's atmosphere.



The cavern was nearly a hundred yards long, and when we

reached its inner limit the proprietor stepped into a branch

tunnel with his candles and left us buried in the bowels

of the glacier, and in pitch-darkness. We judged his

purpose was murder and robbery; so we got out our matches

and prepared to sell our lives as dearly as possible

by setting the glacier on fire if the worst came to the

worst--but we soon perceived that this man had changed

his mind; he began to sing, in a deep, melodious voice,

and woke some curious and pleasing echoes.  By and by he

came back and pretended that that was what he had gone

behind there for.  We believed as much of that as we wanted to.



Thus our lives had been once more in imminent peril,

but by the exercise of the swift sagacity and cool courage

which had saved us so often, we had added another escape

to the long list.  The tourist should visit that ice-cavern,

by all means, for it is well worth the trouble; but I would

advise him to go only with a strong and well-armed force.

I do not consider artillery necessary, yet it would not be

unadvisable to take it along, if convenient.  The journey,

going and coming, is about three miles and a half, three of

which are on level ground.  We made it in less than a day,

but I would counsel the unpracticed--if not pressed

for time--to allow themselves two.  Nothing is gained

in the Alps by over-exertion; nothing is gained by crowding

two days' work into one for the poor sake of being able

to boast of the exploit afterward.  It will be found

much better, in the long run, to do the thing in two days,

and then subtract one of them from the narrative.

This saves fatigue, and does not injure the narrative.

All the more thoughtful among the Alpine tourists

do this.



We now called upon the Guide-in-Chief, and asked for a squadron

of guides and porters for the ascent of the Montanvert.

This idiot glared at us, and said:



"You don't need guides and porters to go to the Montanvert."



"What do we need, then?"



"Such as YOU?--an ambulance!"



I was so stung by this brutal remark that I took

my custom elsewhere.



Betimes, next morning, we had reached an altitude of five

thousand feet above the level of the sea.  Here we camped

and breakfasted.  There was a cabin there--the spot is

called the Caillet--and a spring of ice-cold water.

On the door of the cabin was a sign, in French, to the effect

that "One may here see a living chamois for fifty centimes."

We did not invest; what we wanted was to see a dead one.



A little after noon we ended the ascent and arrived at the

new hotel on the Montanvert, and had a view of six miles,

right up the great glacier, the famous Mer de Glace.

At this point it is like a sea whose deep swales and long,

rolling swells have been caught in mid-movement and

frozen solid; but further up it is broken up into wildly

tossing billows of ice.



We descended a ticklish path in the steep side of the moraine,

and invaded the glacier.  There were tourists of both

sexes scattered far and wide over it, everywhere, and it

had the festive look of a skating-rink.



The Empress Josephine came this far, once.  She ascended

the Montanvert in 1810--but not alone; a small army

of men preceded her to clear the path--and carpet it,

perhaps--and she followed, under the protection

of SIXTY-EIGHT guides.



Her successor visited Chamonix later, but in far different style.



It was seven weeks after the first fall of the Empire,

and poor Marie Louise, ex-Empress was a fugitive.

She came at night, and in a storm, with only two attendants,

and stood before a peasant's hut, tired, bedraggled,

soaked with rain, "the red print of her lost crown still

girdling her brow, " and implored admittance--and was

refused! A few days before, the adulations and applauses

of a nation were sounding in her ears, and now she was come to

this!



We crossed the Mer de Glace in safety, but we had misgivings.

The crevices in the ice yawned deep and blue and mysterious,

and it made one nervous to traverse them.  The huge

round waves of ice were slippery and difficult to climb,

and the chances of tripping and sliding down them and

darting into a crevice were too many to be comfortable.



In the bottom of a deep swale between two of the biggest

of the ice-waves, we found a fraud who pretended

to be cutting steps to insure the safety of tourists.

He was "soldiering" when we came upon him, but he hopped

up and chipped out a couple of steps about big enough

for a cat, and charged us a franc or two for it.

Then he sat down again, to doze till the next party

should come along.  He had collected blackmail from two

or three hundred people already, that day, but had not

chipped out ice enough to impair the glacier perceptibly.

I have heard of a good many soft sinecures, but it seems

to me that keeping toll-bridge on a glacier is the softest

one I have encountered yet.



That was a blazing hot day, and it brought a persistent

and persecuting thirst with it.  What an unspeakable luxury

it was to slake that thirst with the pure and limpid

ice-water of the glacier! Down the sides of every great rib

of pure ice poured limpid rills in gutters carved by their

own attrition; better still, wherever a rock had lain,

there was now a bowl-shaped hole, with smooth white sides

and bottom of ice, and this bowl was brimming with water

of such absolute clearness that the careless observer would

not see it at all, but would think the bowl was empty.

These fountains had such an alluring look that I often

stretched myself out when I was not thirsty and dipped my

face in and drank till my teeth ached.  Everywhere among

the Swiss mountains we had at hand the blessing--not

to be found in Europe EXCEPT in the mountains--of water

capable of quenching thirst.  Everywhere in the Swiss

highlands brilliant little rills of exquisitely cold water

went dancing along by the roadsides, and my comrade and I

were always drinking and always delivering our deep gratitude.



But in Europe everywhere except in the mountains, the water

is flat and insipid beyond the power of words to describe.

It is served lukewarm; but no matter, ice could not help it;

it is incurably flat, incurably insipid.  It is only good

to wash with; I wonder it doesn't occur to the average

inhabitant to try it for that.  In Europe the people

say contemptuously, "Nobody drinks water here." Indeed,

they have a sound and sufficient reason.  In many places

they even have what may be called prohibitory reasons.

In Paris and Munich, for instance, they say, "Don't drink

the water, it is simply poison."



Either America is healthier than Europe, notwithstanding her

"deadly" indulgence in ice-water, or she does not keep

the run of her death-rate as sharply as Europe does.

I think we do keep up the death statistics accurately;

and if we do, our cities are healthier than the cities

of Europe.  Every month the German government tabulates

the death-rate of the world and publishes it.  I scrap-booked

these reports during several months, and it was curious

to see how regular and persistently each city repeated

its same death-rate month after month.  The tables might

as well have been stereotyped, they varied so little.

These tables were based upon weekly reports showing the

average of deaths in each 1,000 population for a year.

Munich was always present with her 33 deaths in each

1,000 of her population (yearly average), Chicago was

as constant with her 15 or 17, Dublin with her 48--and

so on.



Only a few American cities appear in these tables, but they

are scattered so widely over the country that they furnish

a good general average of CITY health in the United States;

and I think it will be granted that our towns and villages

are healthier than our cities.



Here is the average of the only American cities reported

in the German tables:



Chicago, deaths in 1,000 population annually,

16; Philadelphia, 18; St. Louis, 18; San Francisco,

19; New York (the Dublin of America), 23.



See how the figures jump up, as soon as one arrives

at the transatlantic list:



Paris, 27; Glasgow, 27; London, 28; Vienna, 28;

Augsburg, 28; Braunschweig, 28; K:onigsberg, 29;

Cologne, 29; Dresden, 29; Hamburg, 29; Berlin, 30;

Bombay, 30; Warsaw, 31; Breslau, 31; Odessa, 32;

Munich, 33; Strasburg, 33, Pesth, 35; Cassel, 35;

Lisbon, 36; Liverpool, 36; Prague, 37; Madras, 37;

Bucharest, 39; St. Petersburg, 40; Trieste, 40;

Alexandria (Egypt), 43; Dublin, 48; Calcutta, 55.



Edinburgh is as healthy as New York--23; but there

is no CITY in the entire list which is healthier,

except Frankfort-on-the-Main--20. But Frankfort is not

as healthy as Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis, or Philadelphia.





Perhaps a strict average of the world might develop the fact

that where one in 1,000 of America's population dies,

two in 1,000 of the other populations of the earth succumb.



I do not like to make insinuations, but I do think

the above statistics darkly suggest that these people

over here drink this detestable water "on the sly."



We climbed the moraine on the opposite side of the glacier,

and then crept along its sharp ridge a hundred yards or so,

in pretty constant danger of a tumble to the glacier below.

The fall would have been only one hundred feet, but it

would have closed me out as effectually as one thousand,

therefore I respected the distance accordingly, and was

glad when the trip was done.  A moraine is an ugly thing

to assault head-first. At a distance it looks like an endless

grave of fine sand, accurately shaped and nicely smoothed;

but close by, it is found to be made mainly of rough

boulders of all sizes, from that of a man's head to that of

a cottage.



By and by we came to the Mauvais Pas, or the Villainous Road,

to translate it feelingly.  It was a breakneck path

around the face of a precipice forth or fifty feet high,

and nothing to hang on to but some iron railings.

I got along, slowly, safely, and uncomfortably, and finally

reached the middle.  My hopes began to rise a little,

but they were quickly blighted; for there I met a hog--a

long-nosed, bristly fellow, that held up his snout

and worked his nostrils at me inquiringly.  A hog on

a pleasure excursion in Switzerland--think of it! It is

striking and unusual; a body might write a poem about it.

He could not retreat, if he had been disposed to do it.

It would have been foolish to stand upon our dignity

in a place where there was hardly room to stand upon

our feet, so we did nothing of the sort.  There were

twenty or thirty ladies and gentlemen behind us; we all

turned about and went back, and the hog followed behind.

The creature did not seem set up by what he had done;

he had probably done it before.



We reached the restaurant on the height called the Chapeau

at four in the afternoon.  It was a memento-factory, and

the stock was large, cheap, and varied.  I bought the usual

paper-cutter to remember the place by, and had Mont Blanc,

the Mauvais Pas, and the rest of the region branded on

my alpenstock; then we descended to the valley and walked

home without being tied together.  This was not dangerous,

for the valley was five miles wide, and quite level.



We reached the hotel before nine o'clock. Next

morning we left for Geneva on top of the diligence,

under shelter of a gay awning.  If I remember rightly,

there were more than twenty people up there.

It was so high that the ascent was made by ladder.

The huge vehicle was full everywhere, inside and out.

Five other diligences left at the same time, all full.

We had engaged our seats two days beforehand, to make sure,

and paid the regulation price, five dollars each; but the

rest of the company were wiser; they had trusted Baedeker,

and waited; consequently some of them got their seats

for one or two dollars.  Baedeker knows all about hotels,

railway and diligence companies, and speaks his mind freely.

He is a trustworthy friend of the traveler.



We never saw Mont Blanc at his best until we were many

miles away; then he lifted his majestic proportions

high into the heavens, all white and cold and solemn,

and made the rest of the world seem little and plebeian,

and cheap and trivial.



As he passed out of sight at last, an old Englishman

settled himself in his seat and said:



"Well, I am satisfied, I have seen the principal features

of Swiss scenery--Mont Blanc and the goiter--now for home!"







CHAPTER XLVII

[Queer European Manners]



We spent a few pleasant restful days at Geneva,

that delightful city where accurate time-pieces are made

for all the rest of the world, but whose own clocks

never give the correct time of day by any accident.



Geneva is filled with pretty shops, and the shops are

filled with the most enticing gimacrackery, but if one

enters one of these places he is at once pounced upon,

and followed up, and so persecuted to buy this, that,

and the other thing, that he is very grateful to get

out again, and is not at all apt to repeat his experiment.

The shopkeepers of the smaller sort, in Geneva,

are as troublesome and persistent as are the salesmen

of that monster hive in Paris, the Grands Magasins du

Louvre--an establishment where ill-mannered pestering,

pursuing, and insistence have been reduced to a science.



In Geneva, prices in the smaller shops are very elastic--

that is another bad feature.  I was looking in at a window

at a very pretty string of beads, suitable for a child.

I was only admiring them; I had no use for them; I hardly

ever wear beads.  The shopwoman came out and offered

them to me for thirty-five francs.  I said it was cheap,

but I did not need them.



"Ah, but monsieur, they are so beautiful!"



I confessed it, but said they were not suitable for one

of my age and simplicity of character.  She darted in and

brought them out and tried to force them into my hands,

saying:



"Ah, but only see how lovely they are! Surely monsieur will

take them; monsieur shall have them for thirty francs.

There, I have said it--it is a loss, but one must live."



I dropped my hands, and tried to move her to respect

my unprotected situation.  But no, she dangled the beads

in the sun before my face, exclaiming, "Ah, monsieur

CANNOT resist them!" She hung them on my coat button,

folded her hand resignedly, and said: "Gone,--and for

thirty francs, the lovely things--it is incredible!--but

the good God will sanctify the sacrifice to me."



I removed them gently, returned them, and walked away,

shaking my head and smiling a smile of silly embarrassment

while the passers-by halted to observe.  The woman leaned

out of her door, shook the beads, and screamed after me:



"Monsieur shall have them for twenty-eight!"



I shook my head.



"Twenty-seven! It is a cruel loss, it is ruin--

but take them, only take them."



I still retreated, still wagging my head.



"MON DIEU, they shall even go for twenty-six! There,

I have said it.  Come!"



I wagged another negative.  A nurse and a little English girl

had been near me, and were following me, now.  The shopwoman

ran to the nurse, thrust the beads into her hands, and said:



"Monsieur shall have them for twenty-five! Take them

to the hotel--he shall send me the money tomorrow--

next day--when he likes." Then to the child: "When thy

father sends me the money, come thou also, my angel,

and thou shall have something oh so pretty!"



I was thus providentially saved.  The nurse refused

the beads squarely and firmly, and that ended the matter.



The "sights" of Geneva are not numerous.  I made one

attempt to hunt up the houses once inhabited by those

two disagreeable people, Rousseau and Calvin, but I had

no success.  Then I concluded to go home.  I found it was

easier to propose to do that than to do it; for that town

is a bewildering place.  I got lost in a tangle of narrow

and crooked streets, and stayed lost for an hour or two.

Finally I found a street which looked somewhat familiar,

and said to myself, "Now I am at home, I judge." But I

was wrong; this was "HELL street." Presently I found

another place which had a familiar look, and said to myself,

"Now I am at home, sure." It was another error.  This was

"PURGATORY street." After a little I said, "NOW I've got the

right place, anyway ... no, this is 'PARADISE street';

I'm further from home than I was in the beginning."

Those were queer names--Calvin was the author of them,

likely.  "Hell" and "Purgatory" fitted those two streets

like a glove, but the "Paradise" appeared to be sarcastic.



I came out on the lake-front, at last, and then I knew

where I was.  I was walking along before the glittering

jewelry shops when I saw a curious performance.

A lady passed by, and a trim dandy lounged across the walk

in such an apparently carefully timed way as to bring

himself exactly in front of her when she got to him;

he made no offer to step out of the way; he did not apologize;

he did not even notice her.  She had to stop still and let

him lounge by.  I wondered if he had done that piece

of brutality purposely.  He strolled to a chair and seated

himself at a small table; two or three other males were

sitting at similar tables sipping sweetened water.

I waited; presently a youth came by, and this fellow got

up and served him the same trick.  Still, it did not seem

possible that any one could do such a thing deliberately.

To satisfy my curiosity I went around the block, and,

sure enough, as I approached, at a good round speed, he got

up and lounged lazily across my path, fouling my course

exactly at the right moment to receive all my weight.

This proved that his previous performances had not

been accidental, but intentional.



I saw that dandy's curious game played afterward, in Paris,

but not for amusement; not with a motive of any sort, indeed,

but simply from a selfish indifference to other people's

comfort and rights.  One does not see it as frequently

in Paris as he might expect to, for there the law says,

in effect, "It is the business of the weak to get out of

the way of the strong." We fine a cabman if he runs over

a citizen; Paris fines the citizen for being run over.

At least so everybody says--but I saw something which

caused me to doubt; I saw a horseman run over an old woman

one day--the police arrested him and took him away.

That looked as if they meant to punish him.



It will not do for me to find merit in American manners--

for are they not the standing butt for the jests

of critical and polished Europe? Still, I must venture

to claim one little matter of superiority in our manners;

a lady may traverse our streets all day, going and coming

as she chooses, and she will never be molested by any man;

but if a lady, unattended, walks abroad in the streets

of London, even at noonday, she will be pretty likely

to be accosted and insulted--and not by drunken sailors,

but by men who carry the look and wear the dress of gentlemen.

It is maintained that these people are not gentlemen,

but are a lower sort, disguised as gentlemen.  The case

of Colonel Valentine Baker obstructs that argument,

for a man cannot become an officer in the British army

except he hold the rank of gentleman.  This person,

finding himself alone in a railway compartment with

an unprotected girl--but it is an atrocious story,

and doubtless the reader remembers it well enough.

London must have been more or less accustomed to Bakers,

and the ways of Bakers, else London would have been

offended and excited.  Baker was "imprisoned"--in a parlor;

and he could not have been more visited, or more overwhelmed

with attentions, if he had committed six murders and then--

while the gallows was preparing--"got religion"--after

the manner of the holy Charles Peace, of saintly memory.

Arkansaw--it seems a little indelicate to be trumpeting forth

our own superiorities, and comparisons are always odious,

but still--Arkansaw would certainly have hanged Baker.

I do not say she would have tried him first, but she would have

hanged him, anyway.



Even the most degraded woman can walk our streets unmolested,

her sex and her weakness being her sufficient protection.

She will encounter less polish than she would in the

old world, but she will run across enough humanity to make

up for it.



The music of a donkey awoke us early in the morning,

and we rose up and made ready for a pretty formidable

walk--to Italy; but the road was so level that we took

the train.. We lost a good deal of time by this, but it

was no matter, we were not in a hurry.  We were four

hours going to Chamb`ery. The Swiss trains go upward

of three miles an hour, in places, but they are quite safe.



That aged French town of Chamb`ery was as quaint and crooked

as Heilbronn.  A drowsy reposeful quiet reigned in the back

streets which made strolling through them very pleasant,

barring the almost unbearable heat of the sun.

In one of these streets, which was eight feet wide,

gracefully curved, and built up with small antiquated houses,

I saw three fat hogs lying asleep, and a boy (also asleep)

taking care of them.  From queer old-fashioned windows

along the curve projected boxes of bright flowers, and over

the edge of one of these boxes hung the head and shoulders

of a cat--asleep. The five sleeping creatures were the

only living things visible in that street.  There was not

a sound; absolute stillness prevailed.  It was Sunday;

one is not used to such dreamy Sundays on the continent.

In our part of the town it was different that night.

A regiment of brown and battered soldiers had arrived home

from Algiers, and I judged they got thirsty on the way.

They sang and drank till dawn, in the pleasant open air.



We left for Turin at ten the next morning by a railway which

was profusely decorated with tunnels.  We forgot to take

a lantern along, consequently we missed all the scenery.

Our compartment was full.  A ponderous tow-headed Swiss woman,

who put on many fine-lady airs, but was evidently more

used to washing linen than wearing it, sat in a corner

seat and put her legs across into the opposite one,

propping them intermediately with her up-ended valise.

In the seat thus pirated, sat two Americans, greatly incommoded

by that woman's majestic coffin-clad feet.  One of them

begged, politely, to remove them.  She opened her wide eyes

and gave him a stare, but answered nothing.  By and by he

preferred his request again, with great respectfulness.

She said, in good English, and in a deeply offended tone,

that she had paid her passage and was not going to be

bullied out of her "rights" by ill-bred foreigners,

even if she was alone and unprotected.



"But I have rights, also, madam.  My ticket entitles me

to a seat, but you are occupying half of it."



"I will not talk with you, sir.  What right have you

to speak to me? I do not know you.  One would know

you came from a land where there are no gentlemen.

No GENTLEMAN would treat a lady as you have treated me."



"I come from a region where a lady would hardly give me

the same provocation."



"You have insulted me, sir! You have intimated that I am

not a lady--and I hope I am NOT one, after the pattern

of your country."



"I beg that you will give yourself no alarm on that head,

madam; but at the same time I must insist--always

respectfully--that you let me have my seat."



Here the fragile laundress burst into tears and sobs.



"I never was so insulted before! Never, never! It

is shameful, it is brutal, it is base, to bully and abuse

an unprotected lady who has lost the use of her limbs

and cannot put her feet to the floor without agony!"



"Good heavens, madam, why didn't you say that at first! I

offer a thousand pardons.  And I offer them most sincerely.

I did not know--I COULD not know--anything was the matter.

You are most welcome to the seat, and would have been

from the first if I had only known.  I am truly sorry it

all happened, I do assure you."



But he couldn't get a word of forgiveness out of her.

She simply sobbed and sniffed in a subdued but wholly

unappeasable way for two long hours, meantime crowding

the man more than ever with her undertaker-furniture

and paying no sort of attention to his frequent and

humble little efforts to do something for her comfort.

Then the train halted at the Italian line and she hopped

up and marched out of the car with as firm a leg as any

washerwoman of all her tribe! And how sick I was, to see

how she had fooled me.



Turin is a very fine city.  In the matter of roominess

it transcends anything that was ever dreamed of before,

I fancy.  It sits in the midst of a vast dead-level, and one

is obliged to imagine that land may be had for the asking,

and no taxes to pay, so lavishly do they use it.

The streets are extravagantly wide, the paved squares

are prodigious, the houses are huge and handsome,

and compacted into uniform blocks that stretch away as

straight as an arrow, into the distance.  The sidewalks

are about as wide as ordinary European STREETS, and are

covered over with a double arcade supported on great stone

piers or columns.  One walks from one end to the other

of these spacious streets, under shelter all the time,

and all his course is lined with the prettiest of shops

and the most inviting dining-houses.



There is a wide and lengthy court, glittering with the

most wickedly enticing shops, which is roofed with glass,

high aloft overhead, and paved with soft-toned marbles

laid in graceful figures; and at night when the place

is brilliant with gas and populous with a sauntering

and chatting and laughing multitude of pleasure-seekers,

it is a spectacle worth seeing.



Everything is on a large scale; the public buildings,

for instance--and they are architecturally imposing,

too, as well as large.  The big squares have big bronze

monuments in them.  At the hotel they gave us rooms

that were alarming, for size, and parlor to match.

It was well the weather required no fire in the parlor,

for I think one might as well have tried to warm a park.

The place would have a warm look, though, in any weather,

for the window-curtains were of red silk damask,

and the walls were covered with the same fire-hued

goods--so, also, were the four sofas and the brigade

of chairs.  The furniture, the ornaments, the chandeliers,

the carpets, were all new and bright and costly.

We did not need a parlor at all, but they said it belonged

to the two bedrooms and we might use it if we chose.

Since it was to cost nothing, we were not averse to using it,

of course.



Turin must surely read a good deal, for it has more

book-stores to the square rod than any other town I

know of.  And it has its own share of military folk.

The Italian officers' uniforms are very much the most

beautiful I have ever seen; and, as a general thing,

the men in them were as handsome as the clothes.  They were

not large men, but they had fine forms, fine features,

rich olive complexions, and lustrous black eyes.



For several weeks I had been culling all the information

I could about Italy, from tourists.  The tourists were

all agreed upon one thing--one must expect to be cheated

at every turn by the Italians.  I took an evening walk

in Turin, and presently came across a little Punch and Judy

show in one of the great squares.  Twelve or fifteen

people constituted the audience.  This miniature theater

was not much bigger than a man's coffin stood on end;

the upper part was open and displayed a tinseled

parlor--a good-sized handkerchief would have answered

for a drop-curtain; the footlights consisted of a couple

of candle-ends an inch long; various manikins the size

of dolls appeared on the stage and made long speeches at

each other, gesticulating a good deal, and they generally

had a fight before they got through.  They were worked

by strings from above, and the illusion was not perfect,

for one saw not only the strings but the brawny hand

that manipulated them--and the actors and actresses all

talked in the same voice, too.  The audience stood in front

of the theater, and seemed to enjoy the performance heartily.



When the play was done, a youth in his shirt-sleeves started

around with a small copper saucer to make a collection.

I did not know how much to put in, but thought I would

be guided by my predecessors.  Unluckily, I only had two

of these, and they did not help me much because they

did not put in anything.  I had no Italian money,

so I put in a small Swiss coin worth about ten cents.

The youth finished his collection trip and emptied

the result on the stage; he had some very animated talk

with the concealed manager, then he came working his

way through the little crowd--seeking me, I thought.

I had a mind to slip away, but concluded I wouldn't;

I would stand my ground, and confront the villainy,

whatever it was.  The youth stood before me and held

up that Swiss coin, sure enough, and said something.

I did not understand him, but I judged he was requiring

Italian money of me.  The crowd gathered close,

to listen.  I was irritated, and said--in English,

of course:



"I know it's Swiss, but you'll take that or none.

I haven't any other."



He tried to put the coin in my hand, and spoke again.

I drew my hand away, and said:



"NO, sir.  I know all about you people.  You can't play

any of your fraudful tricks on me.  If there is a discount

on that coin, I am sorry, but I am not going to make

it good.  I noticed that some of the audience didn't pay

you anything at all.  You let them go, without a word,

but you come after me because you think I'm a stranger

and will put up with an extortion rather than have a scene.

But you are mistaken this time--you'll take that Swiss

money or none."



The youth stood there with the coin in his fingers,

nonplused and bewildered; of course he had not understood

a word.  An English-speaking Italian spoke up, now, and said:



"You are misunderstanding the boy.  He does not mean any harm.

He did not suppose you gave him so much money purposely,

so he hurried back to return you the coin lest you

might get away before you discovered your mistake.

Take it, and give him a penny--that will make everything

smooth again."



I probably blushed, then, for there was occasion.

Through the interpreter I begged the boy's pardon,

but I nobly refused to take back the ten cents.  I said

I was accustomed to squandering large sums in that way--

it was the kind of person I was.  Then I retired to make

a note to the effect that in Italy persons connected

with the drama do not cheat.



The episode with the showman reminds me of a dark chapter

in my history.  I once robbed an aged and blind beggar-woman

of four dollars--in a church.  It happened this way.

When I was out with the Innocents Abroad, the ship

stopped in the Russian port of Odessa and I went ashore,

with others, to view the town.  I got separated from the rest,

and wandered about alone, until late in the afternoon,

when I entered a Greek church to see what it was like.

When I was ready to leave, I observed two wrinkled old

women standing stiffly upright against the inner wall,

near the door, with their brown palms open to receive alms.

I contributed to the nearer one, and passed out.

I had gone fifty yards, perhaps, when it occurred to me

that I must remain ashore all night, as I had heard

that the ship's business would carry her away at four

o'clock and keep her away until morning.  It was a little

after four now.  I had come ashore with only two pieces

of money, both about the same size, but differing largely

in value--one was a French gold piece worth four dollars,

the other a Turkish coin worth two cents and a half.

With a sudden and horrified misgiving, I put my hand in

my pocket, now, and sure enough, I fetched out that Turkish

penny!



Here was a situation.  A hotel would require pay in

advance --I must walk the street all night, and perhaps

be arrested as a suspicious character.  There was but one

way out of the difficulty--I flew back to the church,

and softly entered.  There stood the old woman yet,

and in the palm of the nearest one still lay my gold piece.

I was grateful.  I crept close, feeling unspeakably mean;

I got my Turkish penny ready, and was extending a trembling

hand to make the nefarious exchange, when I heard a cough

behind me.  I jumped back as if I had been accused,

and stood quaking while a worshiper entered and passed up

the aisle.



I was there a year trying to steal that money; that is,

it seemed a year, though, of course, it must have been

much less.  The worshipers went and came; there were hardly

ever three in the church at once, but there was always one

or more.  Every time I tried to commit my crime somebody

came in or somebody started out, and I was prevented;

but at last my opportunity came; for one moment there

was nobody in the church but the two beggar-women and me.

I whipped the gold piece out of the poor old pauper's palm

and dropped my Turkish penny in its place.  Poor old thing,

she murmured her thanks--they smote me to the heart.

Then I sped away in a guilty hurry, and even when I was a mile

from the church I was still glancing back, every moment,

to see if I was being pursued.



That experience has been of priceless value and benefit

to me; for I resolved then, that as long as I lived I

would never again rob a blind beggar-woman in a church;

and I have always kept my word.  The most permanent lessons

in morals are those which come, not of booky teaching,

but of experience.







CHAPTER XLVIII

[Beauty of Women--and of Old Masters]



In Milan we spent most of our time in the vast and

beautiful Arcade or Gallery, or whatever it is called.

Blocks of tall new buildings of the most sumptuous sort,

rich with decoration and graced with statues, the streets

between these blocks roofed over with glass at a great height,

the pavements all of smooth and variegated marble,

arranged in tasteful patterns--little tables all over these

marble streets, people sitting at them, eating, drinking,

or smoking--crowds of other people strolling by--such

is the Arcade.  I should like to live in it all the time.

The windows of the sumptuous restaurants stand open,

and one breakfasts there and enjoys the passing show.



We wandered all over the town, enjoying whatever was going

on in the streets.  We took one omnibus ride, and as I

did not speak Italian and could not ask the price, I held

out some copper coins to the conductor, and he took two.

Then he went and got his tariff card and showed me that he

had taken only the right sum.  So I made a note--Italian

omnibus conductors do not cheat.



Near the Cathedral I saw another instance of probity.

An old man was peddling dolls and toy fans.  Two small

American children and one gave the old man a franc

and three copper coins, and both started away; but they

were called back, and the franc and one of the coppers

were restored to them.  Hence it is plain that in Italy,

parties connected with the drama and the omnibus and the toy

interests do not cheat.



The stocks of goods in the shops were not extensive, generally.

In the vestibule of what seemed to be a clothing store,

we saw eight or ten wooden dummies grouped together,

clothed in woolen business suits and each marked with its price.

One suit was marked forty-five francs--nine dollars.

Harris stepped in and said he wanted a suit like that.

Nothing easier: the old merchant dragged in the dummy,

brushed him off with a broom, stripped him, and shipped

the clothes to the hotel.  He said he did not keep two

suits of the same kind in stock, but manufactured a second

when it was needed to reclothe the dummy.



In another quarter we found six Italians engaged

in a violent quarrel.  They danced fiercely about,

gesticulating with their heads, their arms, their legs,

their whole bodies; they would rush forward occasionally

with a sudden access of passion and shake their fists

in each other's very faces.  We lost half an hour there,

waiting to help cord up the dead, but they finally embraced

each other affectionately, and the trouble was over.

The episode was interesting, but we could not have afforded

all the time to it if we had known nothing was going

to come of it but a reconciliation.  Note made--in Italy,

people who quarrel cheat the spectator.



We had another disappointment afterward.  We approached

a deeply interested crowd, and in the midst of it

found a fellow wildly chattering and gesticulating

over a box on the ground which was covered with a piece

of old blanket.  Every little while he would bend down

and take hold of the edge of the blanket with the extreme

tips of his fingertips, as if to show there was no

deception--chattering away all the while--but always,

just as I was expecting to see a wonder feat of legerdemain,

he would let go the blanket and rise to explain further.

However, at last he uncovered the box and got out a spoon

with a liquid in it, and held it fair and frankly around,

for people to see that it was all right and he was taking

no advantage--his chatter became more excited than ever.

I supposed he was going to set fire to the liquid and

swallow it, so I was greatly wrought up and interested.

I got a cent ready in one hand and a florin in the other,

intending to give him the former if he survived and the

latter if he killed himself--for his loss would be my gain

in a literary way, and I was willing to pay a fair price

for the item --but this impostor ended his intensely

moving performance by simply adding some powder to the

liquid and polishing the spoon! Then he held it aloft,

and he could not have shown a wilder exultation if he

had achieved an immortal miracle.  The crowd applauded

in a gratified way, and it seemed to me that history

speaks the truth when it says these children of the south

are easily entertained.



We spent an impressive hour in the noble cathedral, where long

shafts of tinted light were cleaving through the solemn

dimness from the lofty windows and falling on a pillar here,

a picture there, and a kneeling worshiper yonder.

The organ was muttering, censers were swinging, candles were

glinting on the distant altar and robed priests were

filing silently past them; the scene was one to sweep all

frivolous thoughts away and steep the soul in a holy calm.

A trim young American lady paused a yard or two from me,

fixed her eyes on the mellow sparks flecking the far-off altar,

bent her head reverently a moment, then straightened up,

kicked her train into the air with her heel, caught it

deftly in her hand, and marched briskly out.



We visited the picture-galleries and the other regulation

"sights"

of Milan--not because I wanted to write about them again,

but to see if I had learned anything in twelve years.

I afterward visited the great galleries of Rome and

Florence for the same purpose.  I found I had learned

one thing.  When I wrote about the Old Masters before,

I said the copies were better than the originals.

That was a mistake of large dimensions.  The Old Masters

were still unpleasing to me, but they were truly divine

contrasted with the copies.  The copy is to the original

as the pallid, smart, inane new wax-work group is to

the vigorous, earnest, dignified group of living men

and women whom it professes to duplicate.  There is a

mellow richness, a subdued color, in the old pictures,

which is to the eye what muffled and mellowed sound

is to the ear.  That is the merit which is most loudly

praised in the old picture, and is the one which the copy

most conspicuously lacks, and which the copyist must

not hope to compass.  It was generally conceded by the

artists with whom I talked, that that subdued splendor,

that mellow richness, is imparted to the picture by AGE.

Then why should we worship the Old Master for it,

who didn't impart it, instead of worshiping Old Time,

who did? Perhaps the picture was a clanging bell,

until Time muffled it and sweetened it.



In conversation with an artist in Venice, I asked: "What

is it that people see in the Old Masters? I have been in the

Doge's palace and I saw several acres of very bad drawing,

very bad perspective, and very incorrect proportions.

Paul Veronese's dogs to not resemble dogs; all the horses

look like bladders on legs; one man had a RIGHT leg on

the left side of his body; in the large picture where

the Emperor (Barbarossa?) is prostrate before the Pope,

there are three men in the foreground who are over

thirty feet high, if one may judge by the size of a

kneeling little boy in the center of the foreground;

and according to the same scale, the Pope is seven feet

high and the Doge is a shriveled dwarf of four feet."



The artist said:



"Yes, the Old Masters often drew badly; they did not

care much for truth and exactness in minor details;

but after all, in spite of bad drawing, bad perspective,

bad proportions, and a choice of subjects which no longer

appeal to people as strongly as they did three hundred

years ago, there is a SOMETHING about their pictures

which is divine--a something which is above and beyond

the art of any epoch since--a something which would be

the despair of artists but that they never hope or expect

to attain it, and therefore do not worry about it."



That is what he said--and he said what he believed;

and not only believed, but felt.



Reasoning--especially reasoning, without technical

knowledge--must be put aside, in cases of this kind.

It cannot assist the inquirer.  It will lead him,

in the most logical progression, to what, in the eyes

of artists, would be a most illogical conclusion.

Thus: bad drawing, bad proportion, bad perspective,

indifference to truthful detail, color which gets its

merit from time, and not from the artist--these things

constitute the Old Master; conclusion, the Old Master

was a bad painter, the Old Master was not an Old Master

at all, but an Old Apprentice.  Your friend the artist

will grant your premises, but deny your conclusion;

he will maintain that notwithstanding this formidable

list of confessed defects, there is still a something

that is divine and unapproachable about the Old Master,

and that there is no arguing the fact away by any system of

reasoning whatsoever.



I can believe that.  There are women who have an

indefinable charm in their faces which makes them

beautiful to their intimates, but a cold stranger

who tried to reason the matter out and find this beauty

would fail.  He would say to one of these women: This

chin is too short, this nose is too long, this forehead

is too high, this hair is too red, this complexion is

too pallid, the perspective of the entire composition

is incorrect; conclusion, the woman is not beautiful.

But her nearest friend might say, and say truly,

"Your premises are right, your logic is faultless,

but your conclusion is wrong, nevertheless; she is an Old

Master--she is beautiful, but only to such as know her;

it is a beauty which cannot be formulated, but it is there, just

the same."



I found more pleasure in contemplating the Old Masters

this time than I did when I was in Europe in former years,

but still it was a calm pleasure; there was nothing

overheated about it.  When I was in Venice before,

I think I found no picture which stirred me much,

but this time there were two which enticed me to the Doge's

palace day after day, and kept me there hours at a time.

One of these was Tintoretto's three-acre picture in the

Great Council Chamber.  When I saw it twelve years ago I

was not strongly attracted to it--the guide told me it

was an insurrection in heaven--but this was an error.



The movement of this great work is very fine.  There are

ten thousand figures, and they are all doing something.

There is a wonderful "go" to the whole composition.

Some of the figures are driving headlong downward,

with clasped hands, others are swimming through the

cloud-shoals--some on their faces, some on their backs--great

processions of bishops, martyrs, and angels are pouring swiftly

centerward from various outlying directions--everywhere

is enthusiastic joy, there is rushing movement everywhere.

There are fifteen or twenty figures scattered here and there,

with books, but they cannot keep their attention on

their reading--they offer the books to others, but no

one wishes to read, now.  The Lion of St. Mark is there

with his book; St. Mark is there with his pen uplifted;

he and the Lion are looking each other earnestly in the face,

disputing about the way to spell a word--the Lion

looks up in rapt admiration while St. Mark spells.

This is wonderfully interpreted by the artist.

It is the master-stroke of this imcomparable painting.

[Figure 10]



I visited the place daily, and never grew tired of

looking at that grand picture.  As I have intimated,

the movement is almost unimaginable vigorous; the figures

are singing, hosannahing, and many are blowing trumpets.

So vividly is noise suggested, that spectators who become

absorbed in the picture almost always fall to shouting

comments in each other's ears, making ear-trumpets of their

curved hands, fearing they may not otherwise be heard.

One often sees a tourist, with the eloquent tears pouring

down his cheeks, funnel his hands at his wife's ear,

and hears him roar through them, "OH, TO BE THERE AND

AT REST!"



None but the supremely great in art can produce effects

like these with the silent brush.



Twelve years ago I could not have appreciated this picture.

One year ago I could not have appreciated it.  My study

of Art in Heidelberg has been a noble education to me.

All that I am today in Art, I owe to that.



The other great work which fascinated me was Bassano's

immortal Hair Trunk.  This is in the Chamber of the Council

of Ten.  It is in one of the three forty-foot pictures

which decorate the walls of the room.  The composition

of this picture is beyond praise.  The Hair Trunk is not

hurled at the stranger's head--so to speak--as the chief

feature of an immortal work so often is; no, it is

carefully guarded from prominence, it is subordinated,

it is restrained, it is most deftly and cleverly held

in reserve, it is most cautiously and ingeniously led up to,

by the master, and consequently when the spectator reaches

it at last, he is taken unawares, he is unprepared,

and it bursts upon him with a stupefying surprise.



One is lost in wonder at all the thought and care which

this elaborate planning must have cost.  A general glance

at the picture could never suggest that there was a hair

trunk in it; the Hair Trunk is not mentioned in the title

even--which is, "Pope Alexander III.  and the Doge Ziani,

the Conqueror of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa";

you see, the title is actually utilized to help

divert attention from the Trunk; thus, as I say,

nothing suggests the presence of the Trunk, by any hint,

yet everything studiedly leads up to it, step by step.

Let us examine into this, and observe the exquisitely

artful artlessness of the plan.



At the extreme left end of the picture are a couple of women,

one of them with a child looking over her shoulder at

a wounded man sitting with bandaged head on the ground.

These people seem needless, but no, they are there

for a purpose; one cannot look at them without seeing

the gorgeous procession of grandees, bishops, halberdiers,

and banner-bearers which is passing along behind them;

one cannot see the procession without feeling the curiosity

to follow it and learn whither it is going; it leads him

to the Pope, in the center of the picture, who is talking

with the bonnetless Doge--talking tranquilly, too,

although within twelve feet of them a man is beating a drum,

and not far from the drummer two persons are blowing horns,

and many horsemen are plunging and rioting about--indeed,

twenty-two feet of this great work is all a deep and

happy holiday serenity and Sunday-school procession,

and then we come suddenly upon eleven and one-half feet

of turmoil and racket and insubordination.  This latter

state of things is not an accident, it has its purpose.

But for it, one would linger upon the Pope and the Doge,

thinking them to be the motive and supreme feature of

the picture; whereas one is drawn along, almost unconsciously,

to see what the trouble is about.  Now at the very END

of this riot, within four feet of the end of the picture,

and full thirty-six feet from the beginning of it,

the Hair Trunk bursts with an electrifying suddenness

upon the spectator, in all its matchless perfection,

and the great master's triumph is sweeping and complete.

From that moment no other thing in those forty feet of canvas

has any charm; one sees the Hair Trunk, and the Hair Trunk

only--and to see it is to worship it.  Bassano even placed

objects in the immediate vicinity of the Supreme Feature

whose pretended purpose was to divert attention from it yet

a little longer and thus delay and augment the surprise;

for instance, to the right of it he has placed a stooping

man with a cap so red that it is sure to hold the eye

for a moment--to the left of it, some six feet away,

he has placed a red-coated man on an inflated horse,

and that coat plucks your eye to that locality the next

moment--then, between the Trunk and the red horseman he

has intruded a man, naked to his waist, who is carrying

a fancy flour-sack on the middle of his back instead

of on his shoulder--this admirable feat interests you,

of course--keeps you at bay a little longer, like a sock

or a jacket thrown to the pursuing wolf--but at last,

in spite of all distractions and detentions, the eye

of even the most dull and heedless spectator is sure

to fall upon the World's Masterpiece, and in that

moment he totters to his chair or leans upon his guide

for support.



Descriptions of such a work as this must necessarily

be imperfect, yet they are of value.  The top of the Trunk

is arched; the arch is a perfect half-circle, in the Roman

style of architecture, for in the then rapid decadence

of Greek art, the rising influence of Rome was already

beginning to be felt in the art of the Republic.

The Trunk is bound or bordered with leather all around

where the lid joins the main body.  Many critics consider

this leather too cold in tone; but I consider this

its highest merit, since it was evidently made so to

emphasize by contrast the impassioned fervor of the hasp.

The highlights in this part of the work are cleverly managed,

the MOTIF is admirably subordinated to the ground tints,

and the technique is very fine.  The brass nail-heads

are in the purest style of the early Renaissance.

The strokes, here, are very firm and bold--every nail-head

is a portrait.  The handle on the end of the Trunk has

evidently been retouched--I think, with a piece of chalk--

but one can still see the inspiration of the Old Master

in the tranquil, almost too tranquil, hang of it.  The hair

of this Trunk is REAL hair--so to speak--white in patched,

brown in patches.  The details are finely worked out;

the repose proper to hair in a recumbent and inactive

attitude is charmingly expressed.  There is a feeling

about this part of the work which lifts it to the highest

altitudes of art; the sense of sordid realism vanishes

away--one recognizes that there is SOUL here.



View this Trunk as you will, it is a gem, it is a marvel,

it is a miracle.  Some of the effects are very daring,

approaching even to the boldest flights of the rococo,

the sirocco, and the Byzantine schools--yet the master's hand

never falters--it moves on, calm, majestic, confident--and,

with that art which conceals art, it finally casts over

the TOUT ENSEMBLE, by mysterious methods of its own,

a subtle something which refines, subdues, etherealizes the

arid components and endures them with the deep charm

and gracious witchery of poesy.



Among the art-treasures of Europe there are pictures

which approach the Hair Trunk--there are two which may

be said to equal it, possibly--but there is none that

surpasses it.  So perfect is the Hair Trunk that it moves

even persons who ordinarily have no feeling for art.

When an Erie baggagemaster saw it two years ago, he could

hardly keep from checking it; and once when a customs

inspector was brought into its presence, he gazed upon

it in silent rapture for some moments, then slowly

and unconsciously placed one hand behind him with the

palm uppermost, and got out his chalk with the other.

These facts speak for themselves.







CHAPTER XLIX

[Hanged with a Golden Rope]



One lingers about the Cathedral a good deal, in Venice.

There is a strong fascination about it--partly because

it is so old, and partly because it is so ugly.

Too many of the world's famous buildings fail of one

chief virtue--harmony; they are made up of a methodless

mixture of the ugly and the beautiful; this is bad;

it is confusing, it is unrestful.  One has a sense

of uneasiness, of distress, without knowing why.  But one

is calm before St. Mark's, one is calm in the cellar;

for its details are masterfully ugly, no misplaced

and impertinent beauties are intruded anywhere; and the

consequent result is a grand harmonious whole, of soothing,

entrancing, tranquilizing, soul-satisfying ugliness.

One's admiration of a perfect thing always grows,

never declines; and this is the surest evidence to him

that it IS perfect.  St. Mark's is perfect.  To me it

soon grew to be so nobly, so augustly ugly, that it was

difficult to stay away from it, even for a little while.

Every time its squat domes disappeared from my view,

I had a despondent feeling; whenever they reappeared,

I felt an honest rapture--I have not known any happier hours

than those I daily spent in front of Florian's, looking

across the Great Square at it.  Propped on its long row

of low thick-legged columns, its back knobbed with domes,

it seemed like a vast warty bug taking a meditative walk.



St. Mark's is not the oldest building in the world, of course,

but it seems the oldest, and looks the oldest--especially inside.



When the ancient mosaics in its walls become damaged,

they are repaired but not altered; the grotesque old

pattern is preserved.  Antiquity has a charm of its own,

and to smarten it up would only damage it.  One day I

was sitting on a red marble bench in the vestibule looking

up at an ancient piece of apprentice-work, in mosaic,

illustrative of the command to "multiply and replenish

the earth." The Cathedral itself had seemed very old;

but this picture was illustrating a period in history

which made the building seem young by comparison.

But I presently found an antique which was older than either

the battered Cathedral or the date assigned to the piece

of history; it was a spiral-shaped fossil as large as

the crown of a hat; it was embedded in the marble bench,

and had been sat upon by tourists until it was worn smooth.

Contrasted with the inconceivable antiquity of this

modest fossil, those other things were flippantly

modern--jejune--mere matters of day-before-yesterday.

The sense of the oldness of the Cathedral vanished away

under the influence of this truly venerable presence.



St. Mark's is monumental; it is an imperishable remembrancer

of the profound and simply piety of the Middle Ages.

Whoever could ravish a column from a pagan temple,

did it and contributed his swag to this Christian one.

So this fane is upheld by several hundred acquisitions

procured in that peculiar way.  In our day it would be

immoral to go on the highway to get bricks for a church,

but it was no sin in the old times.  St. Mark's was itself

the victim of a curious robbery once.  The thing is set

down in the history of Venice, but it might be smuggled

into the Arabian Nights and not seem out of place

there:



Nearly four hundred and fifty years ago, a Candian

named Stammato, in the suite of a prince of the house

of Este, was allowed to view the riches of St. Mark's.

His sinful eye was dazzled and he hid himself behind

an altar, with an evil purpose in his heart, but a priest

discovered him and turned him out.  Afterward he got

in again--by false keys, this time.  He went there,

night after night, and worked hard and patiently, all alone,

overcoming difficulty after difficulty with his toil,

and at last succeeded in removing a great brick of the marble

paneling which walled the lower part of the treasury;

this block he fixed so that he could take it out and put

it in at will.  After that, for weeks, he spent all

his midnights in his magnificent mine, inspecting it

in security, gloating over its marvels at his leisure,

and always slipping back to his obscure lodgings before dawn,

with a duke's ransom under his cloak.  He did not need

to grab, haphazard, and run--there was no hurry.

He could make deliberate and well-considered selections;

he could consult his esthetic tastes.  One comprehends

how undisturbed he was, and how safe from any danger

of interruption, when it is stated that he even carried off

a unicorn's horn--a mere curiosity--which would not pass

through the egress entire, but had to be sawn in two--

a bit of work which cost him hours of tedious labor.

He continued to store up his treasures at home until his

occupation lost the charm of novelty and became monotonous;

then he ceased from it, contented.  Well he might be;

for his collection, raised to modern values, represented nearly

fifty million dollars!



He could have gone home much the richest citizen of his country,

and it might have been years before the plunder was missed;

but he was human--he could not enjoy his delight alone,

he must have somebody to talk about it with.  So he

exacted a solemn oath from a Candian noble named Crioni,

then led him to his lodgings and nearly took his breath

away with a sight of his glittering hoard.  He detected

a look in his friend's face which excited his suspicion,

and was about to slip a stiletto into him when Crioni

saved himself by explaining that that look was only

an expression of supreme and happy astonishment.

Stammato made Crioni a present of one of the state's

principal jewels--a huge carbuncle, which afterward

figured in the Ducal cap of state--and the pair parted.

Crioni went at once to the palace, denounced the criminal,

and handed over the carbuncle as evidence.

Stammato was arrested, tried, and condemned, with the

old-time Venetian promptness.  He was hanged between

the two great columns in the Piazza--with a gilded rope,

out of compliment to his love of gold, perhaps.  He got

no good of his booty at all--it was ALL recovered.



In Venice we had a luxury which very seldom fell to our lot

on the continent--a home dinner with a private family.

If one could always stop with private families,

when traveling, Europe would have a charm which it

now lacks.  As it is, one must live in the hotels,

of course, and that is a sorrowful business.

A man accustomed to American food and American domestic

cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe;

but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die.



He would have to do without his accustomed morning meal.

That is too formidable a change altogether; he would

necessarily suffer from it.  He could get the shadow,

the sham, the base counterfeit of that meal; but it would

do him no good, and money could not buy the reality.



To particularize: the average American's simplest and

commonest form of breakfast consists of coffee and beefsteak;

well, in Europe, coffee is an unknown beverage.  You can

get what the European hotel-keeper thinks is coffee, but it

resembles the real thing as hypocrisy resembles holiness.

It is a feeble, characterless, uninspiring sort of stuff,

and almost as undrinkable as if it had been made in an

American hotel.  The milk used for it is what the French

call "Christian" milk--milk which has been baptized.



After a few months' acquaintance with European "coffee,"

one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins

to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted

layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream,

after all, and a thing which never existed.



Next comes the European bread--fair enough, good enough,

after a fashion, but cold; cold and tough, and unsympathetic;

and never any change, never any variety--always the same

tiresome thing.



Next, the butter--the sham and tasteless butter; no salt

in it, and made of goodness knows what.



Then there is the beefsteak.  They have it in Europe, but they

don't know how to cook it.  Neither will they cut it right.

It comes on the table in a small, round pewter platter.

It lies in the center of this platter, in a bordering

bed of grease-soaked potatoes; it is the size, shape,

and thickness of a man's hand with the thumb and fingers

cut off.  It is a little overdone, is rather dry,

it tastes pretty insipidly, it rouses no enthusiasm.



Imagine a poor exile contemplating that inert thing;

and imagine an angel suddenly sweeping down out of a better

land and setting before him a mighty porterhouse steak an

inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle;

dusted with a fragrant pepper; enriched with little

melting bits of butter of the most unimpeachable freshness

and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling

out and joining the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms;

a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing

an outlying district of this ample county of beefsteak;

the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the

tenderloin still in its place; and imagine that the angel

also adds a great cup of American home-made coffee,

with a cream a-froth on top, some real butter, firm and

yellow and fresh, some smoking hot-biscuits, a plate

of hot buckwheat cakes, with transparent syrup--could

words describe the gratitude of this exile?



The European dinner is better than the European breakfast,

but it has its faults and inferiorities; it does not satisfy.

He comes to the table eager and hungry; he swallows his

soup--there is an undefinable lack about it somewhere;

thinks the fish is going to be the thing he wants--

eats it and isn't sure; thinks the next dish is perhaps

the one that will hit the hungry place--tries it,

and is conscious that there was a something wanting

about it, also.  And thus he goes on, from dish to dish,

like a boy after a butterfly which just misses getting

caught every time it alights, but somehow doesn't get caught

after all; and at the end the exile and the boy have fared

about alike; the one is full, but grievously unsatisfied,

the other has had plenty of exercise, plenty of interest,

and a fine lot of hopes, but he hasn't got any butterfly.

There is here and there an American who will say he can remember

rising from a European table d'ho^te perfectly satisfied;

but we must not overlook the fact that there is also here

and there an American who will lie.



The number of dishes is sufficient; but then it is such

a monotonous variety of UNSTRIKING dishes.  It is an inane

dead-level of "fair-to-middling." There is nothing to

ACCENT it.  Perhaps if the roast of mutton or of beef--a big,

generous one--were brought on the table and carved in full

view of the client, that might give the right sense of

earnestness and reality to the thing; but they don't do that,

they pass the sliced meat around on a dish, and so you

are perfectly calm, it does not stir you in the least.

Now a vast roast turkey, stretched on the broad of his back,

with his heels in the air and the rich juices oozing

from his fat sides ... but I may as well stop there,

for they would not know how to cook him.  They can't

even cook a chicken respectably; and as for carving it,

they do that with a hatchet.



This is about the customary table d'ho^te bill in summer:



Soup (characterless).



Fish--sole, salmon, or whiting--usually tolerably good.



Roast--mutton or beef--tasteless--and some last year's potatoes.



A pa^te, or some other made dish--usually good--"considering."



One vegetable--brought on in state, and all alone--usually

insipid lentils, or string-beans, or indifferent asparagus.



Roast chicken, as tasteless as paper.



Lettuce-salad--tolerably good.



Decayed strawberries or cherries.



Sometimes the apricots and figs are fresh, but this is

no advantage, as these fruits are of no account anyway.



The grapes are generally good, and sometimes there

is a tolerably good peach, by mistake.



The variations of the above bill are trifling.  After a

fortnight one discovers that the variations are only apparent,

not real; in the third week you get what you had the first,

and in the fourth the week you get what you had the second.

Three or four months of this weary sameness will kill

the robustest appetite.



It has now been many months, at the present writing,

since I have had a nourishing meal, but I shall soon

have one--a modest, private affair, all to myself.

I have selected a few dishes, and made out a little bill

of fare, which will go home in the steamer that precedes me,

and be hot when I arrive--as follows:



Radishes.  Baked apples, with Brook-trout, from

Sierra cream.  Nevadas.  Fried oysters; stewed oysters.

Lake-trout, from Tahoe.  Frogs.  Sheepshead and croakers

from American coffee, with real cream.  New Orleans.

American butter.  Black-bass from the Mississippi.

Fried chicken, Southern style.  American roast beef.

Porterhouse steak.  Roast turkey, Thanksgiving Saratoga

potatoes.  style.  Broiled chicken, American style.

Cranberry sauce.  Celery.  Hot biscuits, Southern style.

Roast wild turkey.  Woodcock.  Hot wheat-bread, Southern

Canvasback-duck, from style.  Baltimore.  Hot buckwheat cakes.

Prairie-hens, from Illinois.  American toast.  Clear maple

Missouri partridges, broiled.  syrup.  Possum.  Coon.

Virginia bacon, broiled.  Boston bacon and beans.

Blue points, on the half shell.  Bacon and greens,

Southern style.  Cherry-stone clams.  Hominy.  Boiled onions.

San Francisco mussels, steamed.  Turnips.  Oyster soup.

Clam soup.  Pumpkin.  Squash.  Asparagus.  Philadelphia

Terrapin soup.  Butter-beans. Sweet-potatoes. Oysters

roasted in shell--Lettuce.  Succotash.  Northern style.

String-beans. Soft-shell crabs.  Connecticut Mashed potatoes.

Catsup.  shad.  Boiled potatoes, in their skins.

Baltimore perch.  New potatoes, minus the skins.

Early Rose potatoes, roasted in Hot egg-bread, Southern style.

the ashes, Southern style, Hot light-bread, Southern style.

served hot.  Buttermilk.  Iced sweet milk.  Sliced tomatoes,

with sugar or Apple dumplings, with real vinegar.

Stewed tomatoes.  cream.  Green corn, cut from the ear and

Apple pie.  Apple fritters.  served with butter and pepper.

Apple puffs, Southern style.  Green corn, on the ear.

Peach cobbler, Southern style.  Hot corn-pone, with chitlings,

Peach pie.  American mince pie.  Southern style.

Pumpkin pie.  Squash pie.  Hot hoe-cake, Southern style.

All sorts of American pastry.



Fresh American fruits of all sorts, including strawberries,

which are not to be doled out as if they were jewelry,

but in a more liberal way.



Ice-water--not prepared in the ineffectual goblet,

but in the sincere and capable refrigerator.



Americans intending to spend a year or so in European hotels,

will do well to copy this bill and carry it along.  They will

find it an excellent thing to get up an appetite with,

in the dispiriting presence of the squalid table d'ho^te.



Foreigners cannot enjoy our food, I suppose, any more than we

can enjoy theirs.  It is not strange; for tastes are made,

not born.  I might glorify my bill of fare until I was tired;

but after all, the Scotchman would shake his head and say,

"Where's your haggis?" and the Fijian would sigh and say,

"Where's your missionary?"



I have a neat talent in matters pertaining to nourishment.

This has met with professional recognition.  I have often

furnished recipes for cook-books. Here are some designs

for pies and things, which I recently prepared for a

friend's projected cook-book, but as I forgot to furnish

diagrams and perspectives, they had to be left out,

of course.



RECIPE FOR AN ASH-CAKE



Take a lot of water and add to it a lot of coarse

Indian-meal and about a quarter of a lot of salt.

Mix well together, knead into the form of a "pone," and let

the pone stand awhile--not on its edge, but the other way.

Rake away a place among the embers, lay it there,

and cover it an inch deep with hot ashes.  When it

is done, remove it; blow off all the ashes but one layer;

butter that one and eat.



N.B.--No household should ever be without this talisman.

It has been noticed that tramps never return for another

ash-cake.



----------



RECIPE FOR NEW ENGLISH PIE



To make this excellent breakfast dish, proceed as

follows: Take a sufficiency of water and a sufficiency

of flour, and construct a bullet-proof dough.

Work this into the form of a disk, with the edges turned

up some three-fourths of an inch.  Toughen and kiln-dry

in a couple days in a mild but unvarying temperature.

Construct a cover for this redoubt in the same way and

of the same material.  Fill with stewed dried apples;

aggravate with cloves, lemon-peel, and slabs of citron;

add two portions of New Orleans sugars, then solder

on the lid and set in a safe place till it petrifies.

Serve cold at breakfast and invite your enemy.



----------



RECIPE FOR GERMAN COFFEE



Take a barrel of water and bring it to a boil; rub a chicory

berry against a coffee berry, then convey the former

into the water.  Continue the boiling and evaporation

until the intensity of the flavor and aroma of the coffee

and chicory has been diminished to a proper degree;

then set aside to cool.  Now unharness the remains of a

once cow from the plow, insert them in a hydraulic press,

and when you shall have acquired a teaspoon of that

pale-blue juice which a German superstition regards

as milk, modify the malignity of its strength in a bucket

of tepid water and ring up the breakfast.  Mix the

beverage in a cold cup, partake with moderation, and keep

a wet rag around your head to guard against over-excitement.



----------



TO CARVE FOWLS IN THE GERMAN FASHION



Use a club, and avoid the joints.







CHAPTER L

[Titian Bad and Titian Good]



I wonder why some things are? For instance, Art is allowed

as much indecent license today as in earlier times--

but the privileges of Literature in this respect have been

sharply curtailed within the past eighty or ninety years.

Fielding and Smollett could portray the beastliness

of their day in the beastliest language; we have plenty

of foul subjects to deal with in our day, but we are

not allowed to approach them very near, even with nice

and guarded forms of speech.  But not so with Art.

The brush may still deal freely with any subject,

however revolting or indelicate.  It makes a body ooze

sarcasm at every pore, to go about Rome and Florence and see

what this last generation has been doing with the statues.

These works, which had stood in innocent nakedness for ages,

are all fig-leaved now.  Yes, every one of them.

Nobody noticed their nakedness before, perhaps; nobody can

help noticing it now, the fig-leaf makes it so conspicuous.

But the comical thing about it all, is, that the fig-leaf

is confined to cold and pallid marble, which would be still

cold and unsuggestive without this sham and ostentatious

symbol of modesty, whereas warm-blood paintings which do

really need it have in no case been furnished with it.



At the door of the Uffizzi, in Florence, one is confronted

by statues of a man and a woman, noseless, battered, black with

accumulated grime--they hardly suggest human beings--

yet these ridiculous creatures have been thoughtfully and

conscientiously fig-leaved by this fastidious generation.

You enter, and proceed to that most-visited little

gallery that exists in the world--the Tribune--and there,

against the wall, without obstructing rag or leaf,

you may look your fill upon the foulest, the vilest,

the obscenest picture the world possesses--Titian's Venus.

It isn't that she is naked and stretched out on a bed--no,

it is the attitude of one of her arms and hand.  If I

ventured to describe that attitude, there would be a fine

howl--but there the Venus lies, for anybody to gloat

over that wants to--and there she has a right to lie,

for she is a work of art, and Art has its privileges.

I saw young girls stealing furtive glances at her; I saw

young men gaze long and absorbedly at her; I saw aged,

infirm men hang upon her charms with a pathetic interest.

How I should like to describe her--just to see what a holy

indignation I could stir up in the world--just to hear

the unreflecting average man deliver himself about my

grossness and coarseness, and all that.  The world says

that no worded description of a moving spectacle is

a hundredth part as moving as the same spectacle seen

with one's own eyes--yet the world is willing to let its

son and its daughter and itself look at Titian's beast,

but won't stand a description of it in words.

Which shows that the world is not as consistent as it

might be.



There are pictures of nude women which suggest no impure

thought--I am well aware of that.  I am not railing

at such.  What I am trying to emphasize is the fact that

Titian's Venus is very far from being one of that sort.

Without any question it was painted for a bagnio and it

was probably refused because it was a trifle too strong.

In truth, it is too strong for any place but a public

Art Gallery.  Titian has two Venuses in the Tribune;

persons who have seen them will easily remember which one I am

referring to.



In every gallery in Europe there are hideous pictures

of blood, carnage, oozing brains, putrefaction--pictures

portraying intolerable suffering--pictures alive

with every conceivable horror, wrought out in dreadful

detail--and similar pictures are being put on the canvas

every day and publicly exhibited--without a growl from

anybody--for they are innocent, they are inoffensive,

being works of art.  But suppose a literary artist ventured

to go into a painstaking and elaborate description

of one of these grisly things--the critics would skin

him alive.  Well, let it go, it cannot be helped;

Art retains her privileges, Literature has lost hers.

Somebody else may cipher out the whys and the wherefores

and the consistencies of it--I haven't got time.



Titian's Venus defiles and disgraces the Tribune, there is

no softening that fact, but his "Moses" glorifies it.

The simple truthfulness of its noble work wins the heart

and the applause of every visitor, be he learned or ignorant.

After wearying one's self with the acres of stuffy,

sappy, expressionless babies that populate the canvases

of the Old Masters of Italy, it is refreshing to stand

before this peerless child and feel that thrill which tells

you you are at last in the presence of the real thing.

This is a human child, this is genuine.  You have seen him

a thousand times--you have seen him just as he is here--

and you confess, without reserve, that Titian WAS a Master.

The doll-faces of other painted babes may mean one thing,

they may mean another, but with the "Moses" the case

is different.  The most famous of all the art-critics

has said, "There is no room for doubt, here--plainly this

child is in trouble."



I consider that the "Moses" has no equal among the works

of the Old Masters, except it be the divine Hair Trunk

of Bassano.  I feel sure that if all the other Old Masters

were lost and only these two preserved, the world would

be the gainer by it.



My sole purpose in going to Florence was to see this

immortal "Moses," and by good fortune I was just in time,

for they were already preparing to remove it to a more

private and better-protected place because a fashion

of robbing the great galleries was prevailing in Europe

at the time.



I got a capable artist to copy the picture; Pannemaker,

the engraver of Dor'e's books, engraved it for me,

and I have the pleasure of laying it before the reader

in this volume.



We took a turn to Rome and some other Italian cities--

then to Munich, and thence to Paris--partly for exercise,

but mainly because these things were in our projected program,

and it was only right that we should be faithful to it.



From Paris I branched out and walked through Holland and Belgium,

procuring an occasional lift by rail or canal when tired,

and I had a tolerably good time of it "by and large."

I worked Spain and other regions through agents to save

time and shoe-leather.



We crossed to England, and then made the homeward

passage in the Cunarder GALLIA, a very fine ship.

I was glad to get home--immeasurably glad; so glad,

in fact, that it did not seem possible that anything

could ever get me out of the country again.  I had not

enjoyed a pleasure abroad which seemed to me to compare

with the pleasure I felt in seeing New York harbor again.

Europe has many advantages which we have not, but they

do not compensate for a good many still more valuable

ones which exist nowhere but in our own country.

Then we are such a homeless lot when we are over

there! So are Europeans themselves, for the matter.

They live in dark and chilly vast tombs--costly enough,

maybe, but without conveniences.  To be condemned to live

as the average European family lives would make life

a pretty heavy burden to the average American family.



On the whole, I think that short visits to Europe are

better for us than long ones.  The former preserve us from

becoming Europeanized; they keep our pride of country intact,

and at the same time they intensify our affection for our

country and our people; whereas long visits have the effect

of dulling those feelings--at least in the majority

of cases.  I think that one who mixes much with Americans

long resident abroad must arrive at this conclusion.







APPENDIX ----------



Nothing gives such weight and dignity to a book

as an Appendix.  HERODOTUS







APPENDIX A

The Portier



Omar Khay'am, the poet-prophet of Persia, writing more

than eight hundred years ago, has said:



"In the four parts of the earth are many that are able

to write learned books, many that are able to lead armies,

and many also that are able to govern kingdoms and empires;

but few there be that can keep a hotel."



A word about the European hotel PORTIER.  He is a most

admirable invention, a most valuable convenience.

He always wears a conspicuous uniform; he can always

be found when he is wanted, for he sticks closely to

his post at the front door; he is as polite as a duke;

he speaks from four to ten languages; he is your surest

help and refuge in time of trouble or perplexity.

He is not the clerk, he is not the landlord; he ranks above

the clerk, and represents the landlord, who is seldom seen.

Instead of going to the clerk for information, as we do at home,

you go to the portier.  It is the pride of our average

hotel clerk to know nothing whatever; it is the pride

of the portier to know everything.  You ask the portier

at what hours the trains leave--he tells you instantly;

or you ask him who is the best physician in town; or what

is the hack tariff; or how many children the mayor has;

or what days the galleries are open, and whether a permit

is required, and where you are to get it, and what you

must pay for it; or when the theaters open and close,

what the plays are to be, and the price of seats;

or what is the newest thing in hats; or how the bills

of mortality average; or "who struck Billy Patterson."

It does not matter what you ask him: in nine cases

out of ten he knows, and in the tenth case he will find

out for you before you can turn around three times.

There is nothing he will not put his hand to.  Suppose you

tell him you wish to go from Hamburg to Peking by the way

of Jericho, and are ignorant of routes and prices--

the next morning he will hand you a piece of paper with

the whole thing worked out on it to the last detail.

Before you have been long on European soil, you find

yourself still SAYING you are relying on Providence,

but when you come to look closer you will see that in reality

you are relying on the portier.  He discovers what is

puzzling you, or what is troubling you, or what your need is,

before you can get the half of it out, and he promptly says,

"Leave that to me." Consequently, you easily drift into

the habit of leaving everything to him.  There is a certain

embarrassment about applying to the average American

hotel clerk, a certain hesitancy, a sense of insecurity

against rebuff; but you feel no embarrassment in your

intercourse with the portier; he receives your propositions

with an enthusiasm which cheers, and plunges into their

accomplishment with an alacrity which almost inebriates.

The more requirements you can pile upon him, the better he

likes it.  Of course the result is that you cease from doing

anything for yourself.  He calls a hack when you want one;

puts you into it; tells the driver whither to take you;

receives you like a long-lost child when you return;

sends you about your business, does all the quarreling

with the hackman himself, and pays him his money out

of his own pocket.  He sends for your theater tickets,

and pays for them; he sends for any possible article

you can require, be it a doctor, an elephant, or a

postage stamp; and when you leave, at last, you will

find a subordinate seated with the cab-driver who will

put you in your railway compartment, buy your tickets,

have your baggage weighed, bring you the printed tags,

and tell you everything is in your bill and paid for.

At home you get such elaborate, excellent, and willing

service as this only in the best hotels of our large cities;

but in Europe you get it in the mere back country-towns just

as well.



What is the secret of the portier's devotion? It is

very simple: he gets FEES, AND NO SALARY.  His fee

is pretty closely regulated, too.  If you stay a week,

you give him five marks--a dollar and a quarter, or about

eighteen cents a day.  If you stay a month, you reduce

this average somewhat.  If you stay two or three months

or longer, you cut it down half, or even more than half.

If you stay only one day, you give the portier a mark.



The head waiter's fee is a shade less than the portier's;

the Boots, who not only blacks your boots and brushes

your clothes, but is usually the porter and handles your

baggage, gets a somewhat smaller fee than the head waiter;

the chambermaid's fee ranks below that of the Boots.

You fee only these four, and no one else.  A German

gentleman told me that when he remained a week in a hotel,

he gave the portier five marks, the head waiter four,

the Boots three, and the chambermaid two; and if he

stayed three months he divided ninety marks among them,

in about the above proportions.  Ninety marks make

$22.50.



None of these fees are ever paid until you leave the hotel,

though it be a year--except one of these four servants

should go away in the mean time; in that case he will

be sure to come and bid you good-by and give you the

opportunity to pay him what is fairly coming to him.

It is considered very bad policy to fee a servant while you

are still to remain longer in the hotel, because if you

gave him too little he might neglect you afterward,

and if you gave him too much he might neglect somebody

else to attend to you.  It is considered best to keep his

expectations "on a string" until your stay in concluded.



I do not know whether hotel servants in New York get any

wages or not, but I do know that in some of the hotels there

the feeing system in vogue is a heavy burden.  The waiter

expects a quarter at breakfast--and gets it.  You have

a different waiter at luncheon, and so he gets a quarter.

Your waiter at dinner is another stranger--consequently

he gets a quarter.  The boy who carries your satchel

to your room and lights your gas fumbles around and hangs

around significantly, and you fee him to get rid of him.

Now you may ring for ice-water; and ten minutes later

for a lemonade; and ten minutes afterward, for a cigar;

and by and by for a newspaper--and what is the result? Why,

a new boy has appeared every time and fooled and fumbled

around until you have paid him something.  Suppose you

boldly put your foot down, and say it is the hotel's

business to pay its servants? You will have to ring your

bell ten or fifteen times before you get a servant there;

and when he goes off to fill your order you will grow old

and infirm before you see him again.  You may struggle nobly

for twenty-four hours, maybe, if you are an adamantine

sort of person, but in the mean time you will have been

so wretchedly served, and so insolently, that you will

haul down your colors, and go to impoverishing yourself

with fees.



It seems to me that it would be a happy idea to import

the European feeing system into America.  I believe it

would result in getting even the bells of the Philadelphia

hotels answered, and cheerful service rendered.



The greatest American hotels keep a number of clerks

and a cashier, and pay them salaries which mount up

to a considerable total in the course of a year.

The great continental hotels keep a cashier on a trifling

salary, and a portier WHO PAYS THE HOTEL A SALARY.

By the latter system both the hotel and the public

save money and are better served than by our system.

One of our consuls told me that a portier of a great Berlin

hotel paid five thousand dollars a year for his position,

and yet cleared six thousand dollars for himself.

The position of portier in the chief hotels of Saratoga,

Long Branch, New York, and similar centers of resort,

would be one which the holder could afford to pay even more

than five thousand dollars for, perhaps.



When we borrowed the feeing fashion from Europe a dozen

years ago, the salary system ought to have been discontinued,

of course.  We might make this correction now, I should think.

And we might add the portier, too.  Since I first began

to study the portier, I have had opportunities to observe

him in the chief cities of Germany, Switzerland, and Italy;

and the more I have seen of him the more I have wished

that he might be adopted in America, and become there,

as he is in Europe, the stranger's guardian angel.



Yes, what was true eight hundred years ago, is just

as true today: "Few there be that can keep a hotel."

Perhaps it is because the landlords and their subordinates

have in too many cases taken up their trade without first

learning it.  In Europe the trade of hotel-keeper is taught.

The apprentice begins at the bottom of the ladder

and masters the several grades one after the other.

Just as in our country printing-offices the apprentice

first learns how to sweep out and bring water;

then learns to "roll"; then to sort "pi"; then to set type;

and finally rounds and completes his education with

job-work and press-work; so the landlord-apprentice serves

as call-boy; then as under-waiter; then as a parlor waiter;

then as head waiter, in which position he often has

to make out all the bills; then as clerk or cashier;

then as portier.  His trade is learned now, and by and

by he will assume the style and dignity of landlord,

and be found conducting a hotel of his own.



Now in Europe, the same as in America, when a man has

kept a hotel so thoroughly well during a number of years

as to give it a great reputation, he has his reward.

He can live prosperously on that reputation.  He can let

his hotel run down to the last degree of shabbiness and

yet have it full of people all the time.  For instance,

there is the Ho^tel de Ville, in Milan.  It swarms with mice

and fleas, and if the rest of the world were destroyed

it could furnish dirt enough to start another one with.

The food would create an insurrection in a poorhouse;

and yet if you go outside to get your meals that hotel

makes up its loss by overcharging you on all sorts

of trifles--and without making any denials or excuses

about it, either.  But the Ho^tel de Ville's old excellent

reputation still keeps its dreary rooms crowded with travelers

who would be elsewhere if they had only some wise friend

to warn them.







APPENDIX B

Heidelberg Castle



Heidelberg Castle must have been very beautiful before

the French battered and bruised and scorched it two hundred

years ago.  The stone is brown, with a pinkish tint,

and does not seem to stain easily.  The dainty and elaborate

ornamentation upon its two chief fronts is as delicately

carved as if it had been intended for the interior of a

drawing-room rather than for the outside of a house.

Many fruit and flower clusters, human heads and grim

projecting lions' heads are still as perfect in every detail

as if they were new.  But the statues which are ranked

between the windows have suffered.  These are life-size

statues of old-time emperors, electors, and similar

grandees, clad in mail and bearing ponderous swords.

Some have lost an arm, some a head, and one poor fellow

is chopped off at the middle.  There is a saying that if

a stranger will pass over the drawbridge and walk across

the court to the castle front without saying anything,

he can made a wish and it will be fulfilled.  But they

say that the truth of this thing has never had a chance

to be proved, for the reason that before any stranger can

walk from the drawbridge to the appointed place, the beauty

of the palace front will extort an exclamation of delight from

him.



A ruin must be rightly situated, to be effective.

This one could not have been better placed.  It stands

upon a commanding elevation, it is buried in green words,

there is no level ground about it, but, on the contrary,

there are wooded terraces upon terraces, and one looks

down through shining leaves into profound chasms and

abysses where twilight reigns and the sun cannot intrude.

Nature knows how to garnish a ruin to get the best effect.

One of these old towers is split down the middle, and one

half has tumbled aside.  It tumbled in such a way as to

establish itself in a picturesque attitude.  Then all it

lacked was a fitting drapery, and Nature has furnished that;

she has robed the rugged mass in flowers and verdure,

and made it a charm to the eye.  The standing half

exposes its arched and cavernous rooms to you, like open,

toothless mouths; there, too, the vines and flowers have

done their work of grace.  The rear portion of the tower

has not been neglected, either, but is clothed with a

clinging garment of polished ivy which hides the wounds

and stains of time.  Even the top is not left bare, but is

crowned with a flourishing group of trees and shrubs.

Misfortune has done for this old tower what it has done

for the human character sometimes--improved it.



A gentleman remarked, one day, that it might have been

fine to live in the castle in the day of its prime,

but that we had one advantage which its vanished

inhabitants lacked--the advantage of having a charming

ruin to visit and muse over.  But that was a hasty idea.

Those people had the advantage of US.  They had the fine

castle to live in, and they could cross the Rhine valley

and muse over the stately ruin of Trifels besides.

The Trifels people, in their day, five hundred years ago,

could go and muse over majestic ruins that have vanished,

now, to the last stone.  There have always been ruins,

no doubt; and there have always been pensive people to sigh

over them, and asses to scratch upon them their names

and the important date of their visit.  Within a hundred

years after Adam left Eden, the guide probably gave

the usual general flourish with his hand and said: "Place

where the animals were named, ladies and gentlemen;

place where the tree of the forbidden fruit stood;

exact spot where Adam and Eve first met; and here,

ladies and gentlemen, adorned and hallowed by the names

and addresses of three generations of tourists, we have

the crumbling remains of Cain's altar--fine old ruin!"

Then, no doubt, he taxed them a shekel apiece and let

them go.



An illumination of Heidelberg Castle is one of the

sights of Europe.  The Castle's picturesque shape;

its commanding situation, midway up the steep and

wooded mountainside; its vast size--these features combine

to make an illumination a most effective spectacle.

It is necessarily an expensive show, and consequently

rather infrequent.  Therefore whenever one of these exhibitions

is to take place, the news goes about in the papers and

Heidelberg is sure to be full of people on that night.

I and my agent had one of these opportunities, and improved it.



About half past seven on the appointed evening we

crossed the lower bridge, with some American students,

in a pouring rain, and started up the road which borders

the Neunheim side of the river.  This roadway was densely

packed with carriages and foot-passengers; the former

of all ages, and the latter of all ages and both sexes.

This black and solid mass was struggling painfully onward,

through the slop, the darkness, and the deluge.

We waded along for three-quarters of a mile, and finally

took up a position in an unsheltered beer-garden directly

opposite the Castle.  We could not SEE the Castle--or

anything else, for that matter--but we could dimly

discern the outlines of the mountain over the way,

through the pervading blackness, and knew whereabouts

the Castle was located.  We stood on one of the hundred

benches in the garden, under our umbrellas; the other

ninety-nine were occupied by standing men and women,

and they also had umbrellas.  All the region round about,

and up and down the river-road, was a dense wilderness of

humanity hidden under an unbroken pavement of carriage tops

and umbrellas.  Thus we stood during two drenching hours.

No rain fell on my head, but the converging whalebone

points of a dozen neighboring umbrellas poured little

cooling steams of water down my neck, and sometimes into

my ears, and thus kept me from getting hot and impatient.

I had the rheumatism, too, and had heard that this was

good for it.  Afterward, however, I was led to believe

that the water treatment is NOT good for rheumatism.

There were even little girls in that dreadful place.

A men held one in his arms, just in front of me, for as much

as an hour, with umbrella-drippings soaking into her clothing

all the time.



In the circumstances, two hours was a good while for us

to have to wait, but when the illumination did at last come,

we felt repaid.  It came unexpectedly, of course--things

always do, that have been long looked and longed for.

With a perfectly breath-taking suddenness several mast

sheaves of varicolored rockets were vomited skyward out

of the black throats of the Castle towers, accompanied by

a thundering crash of sound, and instantly every detail of

the prodigious ruin stood revealed against the mountainside

and glowing with an almost intolerable splendor of fire

and color.  For some little time the whole building was

a blinding crimson mass, the towers continued to spout

thick columns of rockets aloft, and overhead the sky

was radiant with arrowy bolts which clove their way to

the zenith, paused, curved gracefully downward, then burst

into brilliant fountain-sprays of richly colored sparks.

The red fires died slowly down, within the Castle,

and presently the shell grew nearly black outside;

the angry glare that shone out through the broken arches

and innumerable sashless windows, now, reproduced the

aspect which the Castle must have borne in the old time

when the French spoilers saw the monster bonfire which

they had made there fading and spoiling toward extinction.



While we still gazed and enjoyed, the ruin was suddenly

enveloped in rolling and rumbling volumes of vaporous

green fire; then in dazzling purple ones; then a mixture

of many colors followed, then drowned the great fabric

in its blended splendors.  Meantime the nearest bridge

had been illuminated, and from several rafts anchored

in the river, meteor showers of rockets, Roman candles,

bombs, serpents, and Catharine wheels were being discharged

in wasteful profusion into the sky--a marvelous sight indeed

to a person as little used to such spectacles as I was.

For a while the whole region about us seemed as bright as day,

and yet the rain was falling in torrents all the time.

The evening's entertainment presently closed, and we

joined the innumerable caravan of half-drowned strangers,

and waded home again.



The Castle grounds are very ample and very beautiful;

and as they joined the Hotel grounds, with no fences

to climb, but only some nobly shaded stone stairways

to descend, we spent a part of nearly every day in

idling through their smooth walks and leafy groves.

There was an attractive spot among the trees where were

a great many wooden tables and benches; and there one could

sit in the shade and pretend to sip at his foamy beaker

of beer while he inspected the crowd.  I say pretend,

because I only pretended to sip, without really sipping.

That is the polite way; but when you are ready to go,

you empty the beaker at a draught.  There was a brass band,

and it furnished excellent music every afternoon.

Sometimes so many people came that every seat was occupied,

every table filled.  And never a rough in the assemblace--all

nicely dressed fathers and mothers, young gentlemen

and ladies and children; and plenty of university

students and glittering officers; with here and there

a gray professor, or a peaceful old lady with her knitting;

and always a sprinkling of gawky foreigners.

Everybody had his glass of beer before him, or his cup

of coffee, or his bottle of wine, or his hot cutlet

and potatoes; young ladies chatted, or fanned themselves,

or wrought at their crocheting or embroidering;

the students fed sugar to their dogs, or discussed duels,

or illustrated new fencing tricks with their little canes;

and everywhere was comfort and enjoyment, and everywhere

peace and good-will to men.  The trees were jubilant

with birds, and the paths with rollicking children.

One could have a seat in that place and plenty of music,

any afternoon, for about eight cents, or a family ticket

for the season for two dollars.



For a change, when you wanted one, you could stroll

to the Castle, and burrow among its dungeons, or climb

about its ruined towers, or visit its interior shows--the

great Heidelberg Tun, for instance.  Everybody has heard

of the great Heidelberg Tun, and most people have seen it,

no doubt.  It is a wine-cask as big as a cottage, and some

traditions say it holds eighteen thousand bottles, and other

traditions say it holds eighteen hundred million barrels.

I think it likely that one of these statements is

a mistake, and the other is a lie.  However, the mere

matter of capacity is a thing of no sort of consequence,

since the cask is empty, and indeed has always been empty,

history says.  An empty cask the size of a cathedral could

excite but little emotion in me.  I do not see any wisdom

in building a monster cask to hoard up emptiness in,

when you can get a better quality, outside, any day,

free of expense.  What could this cask have been

built for? The more one studies over that, the more

uncertain and unhappy he becomes.  Some historians say

that thirty couples, some say thirty thousand couples,

can dance on the head of this cask at the same time.

Even this does not seem to me to account for the building

of it.  It does not even throw light on it.  A profound

and scholarly Englishman--a specialist--who had made

the great Heidelberg Tun his sole study for fifteen years,

told me he had at last satisfied himself that the ancients

built it to make German cream in.  He said that the average

German cow yielded from one to two and half teaspoons of milk,

when she was not worked in the plow or the hay-wagon

more than eighteen or nineteen hours a day.  This milk

was very sweet and good, and a beautiful transparent

bluish tint; but in order to get cream from it in the

most economical way, a peculiar process was necessary.

Now he believed that the habit of the ancients was to collect

several milkings in a teacup, pour it into the Great Tun,

fill up with water, and then skim off the cream from

time to time as the needs of the German Empire demanded.



This began to look reasonable.  It certainly began

to account for the German cream which I had encountered

and marveled over in so many hotels and restaurants.

But a thought struck me--



"Why did not each ancient dairyman take his own teacup

of milk and his own cask of water, and mix them,

without making a government matter of it?'



"Where could he get a cask large enough to contain

the right proportion of water?"



Very true.  It was plain that the Englishman had studied

the matter from all sides.  Still I thought I might catch

him on one point; so I asked him why the modern empire

did not make the nation's cream in the Heidelberg Tun,

instead of leaving it to rot away unused.  But he answered

as one prepared--



"A patient and diligent examination of the modern German cream

had satisfied me that they do not use the Great Tun now,

because they have got a BIGGER one hid away somewhere.

Either that is the case or they empty the spring milkings

into the mountain torrents and then skim the Rhine

all summer."



There is a museum of antiquities in the Castle, and among

its most treasured relics are ancient manuscripts connected

with German history.  There are hundreds of these,

and their dates stretch back through many centuries.

One of them is a decree signed and sealed by the hand

of a successor of Charlemagne, in the year 896.

A signature made by a hand which vanished out of this life

near a thousand years ago, is a more impressive thing than

even a ruined castle.  Luther's wedding-ring was shown me;

also a fork belonging to a time anterior to our era,

and an early bookjack.  And there was a plaster cast

of the head of a man who was assassinated about sixty

years ago.  The stab-wounds in the face were duplicated

with unpleasant fidelity.  One or two real hairs

still remained sticking in the eyebrows of the cast.

That trifle seemed to almost change the counterfeit into

a corpse.



There are many aged portraits--some valuable, some worthless;

some of great interest, some of none at all.  I bought a

couple--one a gorgeous duke of the olden time, and the other

a comely blue-eyed damsel, a princess, maybe.  I bought

them to start a portrait-gallery of my ancestors with.

I paid a dollar and a half for the duke and a half

for the princess.  One can lay in ancestors at even

cheaper rates than these, in Europe, if he will mouse

among old picture shops and look out for chances.







APPENDIX C

The College Prison



It seems that the student may break a good many of the public

laws without having to answer to the public authorities.

His case must come before the University for trial

and punishment.  If a policeman catches him in an unlawful

act and proceeds to arrest him, the offender proclaims that

he is a student, and perhaps shows his matriculation card,

whereupon the officer asks for his address, then goes

his way, and reports the matter at headquarters.  If the

offense is one over which the city has no jurisdiction,

the authorities report the case officially to the University,

and give themselves no further concern about it.

The University court send for the student, listen to

the evidence, and pronounce judgment.  The punishment

usually inflicted is imprisonment in the University prison.

As I understand it, a student's case is often tried

without his being present at all.  Then something

like this happens: A constable in the service of the

University visits the lodgings of the said student,

knocks, is invited to come in, does so, and says politely--



"If you please, I am here to conduct you to prison."



"Ah," says the student, "I was not expecting it.

What have I been doing?"



"Two weeks ago the public peace had the honor to be

disturbed by you."



"It is true; I had forgotten it.  Very well: I have been

complained of, tried, and found guilty--is that it?"



"Exactly. You are sentenced to two days' solitary confinement

in the College prison, and I am sent to fetch you."



STUDENT.  "O, I can't go today."



OFFICER.  "If you please--why?"



STUDENT.  "Because I've got an engagement."



OFFICER.  "Tomorrow, then, perhaps?"



STUDENT.  "No, I am going to the opera, tomorrow."



OFFICER.  "Could you come Friday?"



STUDENT.  (Reflectively.) "Let me see--Friday--Friday.

I don't seem to have anything on hand Friday."



OFFICER.  "Then, if you please, I will expect you on Friday."



STUDENT.  "All right, I'll come around Friday."



OFFICER.  "Thank you.  Good day, sir."



STUDENT.  "Good day."



So on Friday the student goes to the prison of his

own accord, and is admitted.



It is questionable if the world's criminal history can

show a custom more odd than this.  Nobody knows, now,

how it originated.  There have always been many noblemen

among the students, and it is presumed that all students

are gentlemen; in the old times it was usual to mar

the convenience of such folk as little as possible;

perhaps this indulgent custom owes its origin to this.



One day I was listening to some conversation upon this

subject when an American student said that for some time he

had been under sentence for a slight breach of the peace

and had promised the constable that he would presently

find an unoccupied day and betake himself to prison.

I asked the young gentleman to do me the kindness to go

to jail as soon as he conveniently could, so that I might

try to get in there and visit him, and see what college

captivity was like.  He said he would appoint the very

first day he could spare.



His confinement was to endure twenty-four hours.  He shortly

chose his day, and sent me word.  I started immediately.

When I reached the University Place, I saw two gentlemen

talking together, and, as they had portfolios under

their arms, I judged they were tutors or elderly students;

so I asked them in English to show me the college jail.

I had learned to take it for granted that anybody in Germany

who knows anything, knows English, so I had stopped

afflicting people with my German.  These gentlemen seemed

a trifle amused--and a trifle confused, too--but one

of them said he would walk around the corner with me

and show me the place.  He asked me why I wanted to get

in there, and I said to see a friend--and for curiosity.

He doubted if I would be admitted, but volunteered to put

in a word or two for me with the custodian.



He rang the bell, a door opened, and we stepped into a paved

way and then up into a small living-room, where we were

received by a hearty and good-natured German woman of fifty.

She threw up her hands with a surprised "ACH GOTT,

HERR PROFESSOR!" and exhibited a mighty deference for my

new acquaintance.  By the sparkle in her eye I judged

she was a good deal amused, too.  The "Herr Professor"

talked to her in German, and I understood enough of it

to know that he was bringing very plausible reasons to bear

for admitting me.  They were successful.  So the Herr

Professor received my earnest thanks and departed.

The old dame got her keys, took me up two or three flights

of stairs, unlocked a door, and we stood in the presence

of the criminal.  Then she went into a jolly and eager

description of all that had occurred downstairs, and what

the Herr Professor had said, and so forth and so on.

Plainly, she regarded it as quite a superior joke that I had

waylaid a Professor and employed him in so odd a service.

But I wouldn't have done it if I had known he was a Professor;

therefore my conscience was not disturbed.



Now the dame left us to ourselves.  The cell was not a roomy one;

still it was a little larger than an ordinary prison cell.

It had a window of good size, iron-grated; a small stove;

two wooden chairs; two oaken tables, very old and

most elaborately carved with names, mottoes, faces,

armorial bearings, etc.--the work of several generations

of imprisoned students; and a narrow wooden bedstead

with a villainous straw mattress, but no sheets, pillows,

blankets, or coverlets--for these the student must furnish

at his own cost if he wants them.  There was no carpet, of

course.



The ceiling was completely covered with names, dates,

and monograms, done with candle-smoke. The walls were

thickly covered with pictures and portraits (in profile),

some done with ink, some with soot, some with a pencil,

and some with red, blue, and green chalks; and whenever

an inch or two of space had remained between the pictures,

the captives had written plaintive verses, or names

and dates.  I do not think I was ever in a more elaborately

frescoed apartment.



Against the wall hung a placard containing the prison laws.

I made a note of one or two of these.  For instance:

The prisoner must pay, for the "privilege" of entering,

a sum equivalent to 20 cents of our money; for the privilege

of leaving, when his term had expired, 20 cents; for every

day spent in the prison, 12 cents; for fire and light,

12 cents a day.  The jailer furnishes coffee, mornings,

for a small sum; dinners and suppers may be ordered

from outside if the prisoner chooses--and he is allowed

to pay for them, too.



Here and there, on the walls, appeared the names

of American students, and in one place the American

arms and motto were displayed in colored chalks.



With the help of my friend I translated many of the inscriptions.



Some of them were cheerful, others the reverse.

I will give the reader a few specimens:



"In my tenth semester (my best one), I am cast here

through the complaints of others.  Let those who follow

me take warning."



"III TAGE OHNE GRUND ANGEBLICH AUS NEUGIERDE." Which is to say,

he had a curiosity to know what prison life was like;

so he made a breach in some law and got three days for it.

It is more than likely that he never had the same

curiosity again.



(TRANSLATION.) "E. Glinicke, four days for being too eager

a spectator of a row."



"F. Graf Bismarck--27-29, II, '74." Which means that

Count Bismarck, son of the great statesman, was a prisoner

two days in 1874.



(TRANSLATION.) "R. Diergandt--for Love--4 days."

Many people in this world have caught it heavier than

for the same indiscretion.



This one is terse.  I translate:



"Four weeks for MISINTERPRETED GALLANTRY." I wish

the sufferer had explained a little more fully.

A four-week term is a rather serious matter.



There were many uncomplimentary references, on the walls,

to a certain unpopular dignitary.  One sufferer had got

three days for not saluting him.  Another had "here two days

slept and three nights lain awake," on account of this

same "Dr. K." In one place was a picture of Dr. K. hanging

on a gallows.



Here and there, lonesome prisoners had eased the heavy time

by altering the records left by predecessors.  Leaving the

name standing, and the date and length of the captivity,

they had erased the description of the misdemeanor,

and written in its place, in staring capitals, "FOR THEFT!"

or "FOR MURDER!" or some other gaudy crime.  In one place,

all by itself, stood this blood-curdling word:



"Rache!" [1]



1.  "Revenge!"



There was no name signed, and no date.  It was an

inscription well calculated to pique curiosity.

One would greatly like to know the nature of the wrong

that had been done, and what sort of vengeance was wanted,

and whether the prisoner ever achieved it or not.

But there was no way of finding out these things.



Occasionally, a name was followed simply by the remark,

"II days, for disturbing the peace," and without comment

upon the justice or injustice of the sentence.



In one place was a hilarious picture of a student of the

green cap corps with a bottle of champagne in each hand;

and below was the legend: "These make an evil fate endurable."



There were two prison cells, and neither had space left on

walls or ceiling for another name or portrait or picture.

The inside surfaces of the two doors were completely

covered with CARTES DE VISITE of former prisoners,

ingeniously let into the wood and protected from dirt

and injury by glass.



I very much wanted one of the sorry old tables which

the prisoners had spent so many years in ornamenting

with their pocket-knives, but red tape was in the way.

The custodian could not sell one without an order from

a superior; and that superior would have to get it from

HIS superior; and this one would have to get it from

a higher one--and so on up and up until the faculty

should sit on the matter and deliver final judgment.

The system was right, and nobody could find fault with it;

but it did not seem justifiable to bother so many people,

so I proceeded no further.  It might have cost me more than

I could afford, anyway; for one of those prison tables,

which was at the time in a private museum in Heidelberg,

was afterward sold at auction for two hundred and fifty dollars.

It was not worth more than a dollar, or possibly a dollar

and half, before the captive students began their work

on it.  Persons who saw it at the auction said it was

so curiously and wonderfully carved that it was worth

the money that was paid for it.



Among them many who have tasted the college prison's

dreary hospitality was a lively young fellow from one

of the Southern states of America, whose first year's

experience of German university life was rather peculiar.

The day he arrived in Heidelberg he enrolled his name

on the college books, and was so elated with the fact

that his dearest hope had found fruition and he was

actually a student of the old and renowned university,

that he set to work that very night to celebrate the event

by a grand lark in company with some other students.

In the course of his lark he managed to make a wide

breach in one of the university's most stringent laws.

Sequel: before noon, next day, he was in the college

prison--booked for three months.  The twelve long weeks

dragged slowly by, and the day of deliverance came at last.

A great crowd of sympathizing fellow-students received

him with a rousing demonstration as he came forth,

and of course there was another grand lark--in the course

of which he managed to make a wide breach of the CITY'S

most stringent laws.  Sequel: before noon, next day,

he was safe in the city lockup--booked for three months.

This second tedious captivity drew to an end in the course

of time, and again a great crowd of sympathizing fellow

students gave him a rousing reception as he came forth;

but his delight in his freedom was so boundless that he

could not proceed soberly and calmly, but must go hopping

and skipping and jumping down the sleety street from sheer

excess of joy.  Sequel: he slipped and broke his leg,

and actually lay in the hospital during the next three

months!



When he at last became a free man again, he said he believed

he would hunt up a brisker seat of learning; the Heidelberg

lectures might be good, but the opportunities of attending

them were too rare, the educational process too slow;

he said he had come to Europe with the idea that the

acquirement of an education was only a matter of time,

but if he had averaged the Heidelberg system correctly,

it was rather a matter of eternity.







APPENDIX D

The Awful German Language



A little learning makes the whole world kin.

        --Proverbs xxxii, 7.



I went often to look at the collection of curiosities

in Heidelberg Castle, and one day I surprised the keeper

of it with my German.  I spoke entirely in that language.

He was greatly interested; and after I had talked a while

he said my German was very rare, possibly a "unique";

and wanted to add it to his museum.



If he had known what it had cost me to acquire my art,

he would also have known that it would break any

collector to buy it.  Harris and I had been hard at

work on our German during several weeks at that time,

and although we had made good progress, it had been

accomplished under great difficulty and annoyance,

for three of our teachers had died in the mean time.

A person who has not studied German can form no idea

of what a perplexing language it is.



Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod

and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp.

One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most

helpless way; and when at last he thinks he has captured

a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid

the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech,

he turns over the page and reads, "Let the pupil make

careful note of the following EXCEPTIONS." He runs his

eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the

rule than instances of it.  So overboard he goes again,

to hunt for another Ararat and find another quicksand.

Such has been, and continues to be, my experience.

Every time I think I have got one of these four confusing

"cases" where I am master of it, a seemingly insignificant

preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with

an awful and unsuspected power, and crumbles the ground

from under me.  For instance, my book inquires after

a certain bird--(it is always inquiring after things

which are of no sort of no consequence to anybody): "Where

is the bird?" Now the answer to this question--according

to the book--is that the bird is waiting in the blacksmith

shop on account of the rain.  Of course no bird would

do that, but then you must stick to the book.  Very well,

I begin to cipher out the German for that answer.  I begin

at the wrong end, necessarily, for that is the German idea.

I say to myself, "REGEN (rain) is masculine--or maybe it

is feminine--or possibly neuter--it is too much trouble

to look now.  Therefore, it is either DER (the) Regen,

or DIE (the) Regen, or DAS (the) Regen, according to which

gender it may turn out to be when I look.  In the interest

of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it

is masculine.  Very well--then THE rain is DER Regen,

if it is simply in the quiescent state of being MENTIONED,

without enlargement or discussion--Nominative case;

but if this rain is lying around, in a kind of a general

way on the ground, it is then definitely located,

it is DOING SOMETHING--that is, RESTING (which is one

of the German grammar's ideas of doing something), and

this throws the rain into the Dative case, and makes it

DEM Regen.  However, this rain is not resting, but is

doing something ACTIVELY,--it is falling--to interfere

with the bird, likely--and this indicates MOVEMENT,

which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case

and changing DEM Regen into DEN Regen." Having completed

the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer up

confidently and state in German that the bird is staying

in the blacksmith shop "wegen (on account of) DEN Regen."

Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark

that whenever the word "wegen" drops into a sentence,

it ALWAYS throws that subject into the GENITIVE case,

regardless of consequences--and therefore this bird stayed in

the blacksmith shop "wegen DES Regens."



N.B.--I was informed, later, by a higher authority,

that there was an "exception" which permits one to say "wegen

DEN Regen" in certain peculiar and complex circumstances,

but that this exception is not extended to anything

BUT rain.



There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome.

An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime

and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column;

it contains all the ten parts of speech--not in regular order,

but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed

by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any

dictionary--six or seven words compacted into one,

without joint or seam--that is, without hyphens;

it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects,

each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and

there extra parentheses, making pens with pens: finally,

all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together

between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed

in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other

in the middle of the last line of it--AFTER WHICH COMES

THE VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man

has been talking about; and after the verb--merely by way

of ornament, as far as I can make out--the writer shovels

in "HABEN SIND GEWESEN GEHABT HAVEN GEWORDEN SEIN,"

or words to that effect, and the monument is finished.

I suppose that this closing hurrah is in the nature of the

flourish to a man's signature--not necessary, but pretty.

German books are easy enough to read when you hold them

before the looking-glass or stand on your head--so as

to reverse the construction--but I think that to learn

to read and understand a German newspaper is a thing

which must always remain an impossibility to a foreigner.



Yet even the German books are not entirely free from attacks

of the Parenthesis distemper--though they are usually so mild

as to cover only a few lines, and therefore when you at

last get down to the verb it carries some meaning to your

mind because you are able to remember a good deal of what

has gone before.  Now here is a sentence from a popular

and excellent German novel--which a slight parenthesis

in it.  I will make a perfectly literal translation,

and throw in the parenthesis-marks and some hyphens

for the assistance of the reader--though in the original

there are no parenthesis-marks or hyphens, and the reader

is left to flounder through to the remote verb the best way he

can:



"But when he, upon the street, the (in-satin-and-silk-covered-

now-very-unconstrained-after-the-newest-fashioned-dressed)

government counselor's wife MET," etc., etc. [1]



1.  Wenn er aber auf der Strasse der in Sammt und Seide

    gehu"llten jetz sehr ungenirt nach der neusten mode

    gekleideten Regierungsrathin begegnet.



That is from THE OLD MAMSELLE'S SECRET, by Mrs. Marlitt.

And that sentence is constructed upon the most approved

German model.  You observe how far that verb is from

the reader's base of operations; well, in a German

newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page;

and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the

exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two,

they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting

to the verb at all.  Of course, then, the reader is left

in a very exhausted and ignorant state.



We have the Parenthesis disease in our literature, too; and one

may see cases of it every day in our books and newspapers:

but with us it is the mark and sign of an unpracticed

writer or a cloudy intellect, whereas with the Germans

it is doubtless the mark and sign of a practiced pen

and of the presence of that sort of luminous intellectual

fog which stands for clearness among these people.

For surely it is NOT clearness--it necessarily can't

be clearness.  Even a jury would have penetration enough

to discover that.  A writer's ideas must be a good

deal confused, a good deal out of line and sequence,

when he starts out to say that a man met a counselor's

wife in the street, and then right in the midst of this

so simple undertaking halts these approaching people

and makes them stand still until he jots down an inventory

of the woman's dress.  That is manifestly absurd.

It reminds a person of those dentists who secure your instant

and breathless interest in a tooth by taking a grip on it

with the forceps, and then stand there and drawl through

a tedious anecdote before they give the dreaded jerk.

Parentheses in literature and dentistry are in bad taste.



The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they

make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it

at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the OTHER

HALF at the end of it.  Can any one conceive of anything

more confusing than that? These things are called

"separable verbs." The German grammar is blistered

all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two

portions of one of them are spread apart, the better

the author of the crime is pleased with his performance.

A favorite one is REISTE AB--which means departed.

Here is an example which I culled from a novel and reduced

to English:



"The trunks being now ready, he DE- after kissing his

mother and sisters, and once more pressing to his bosom

his adored Gretchen, who, dressed in simple white muslin,

with a single tuberose in the ample folds of her rich

brown hair, had tottered feebly down the stairs, still pale

from the terror and excitement of the past evening,

but longing to lay her poor aching head yet once again

upon the breast of him whom she loved more dearly than

life itself, PARTED."



However, it is not well to dwell too much on the

separable verbs.  One is sure to lose his temper early;

and if he sticks to the subject, and will not be warned,

it will at last either soften his brain or petrify it.

Personal pronouns and adjectives are a fruitful nuisance

in this language, and should have been left out.

For instance, the same sound, SIE, means YOU, and it means SHE,

and it means HER, and it means IT, and it means THEY,

and it means THEM.  Think of the ragged poverty of a

language which has to make one word do the work of six--and

a poor little weak thing of only three letters at that.

But mainly, think of the exasperation of never knowing

which of these meanings the speaker is trying to convey.

This explains why, whenever a person says SIE to me,

I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.



Now observe the Adjective.  Here was a case where simplicity

would have been an advantage; therefore, for no other reason,

the inventor of this language complicated it all he could.

When we wish to speak of our "good friend or friends,"

in our enlightened tongue, we stick to the one form and have

no trouble or hard feeling about it; but with the German

tongue it is different.  When a German gets his hands

on an adjective, he declines it, and keeps on declining

it until the common sense is all declined out of it.

It is as bad as Latin.  He says, for instance:



SINGULAR



Nominative--Mein gutER Freund, my good friend.

Genitives--MeinES GutEN FreundES, of my good friend.

Dative--MeinEM gutEN Freund, to my good friend.

Accusative--MeinEN gutEN Freund, my good friend.



PLURAL



N.--MeinE gutEN FreundE, my good friends.  G.--MeinER gutEN

FreundE, of my good friends.  D.--MeinEN gutEN FreundEN,

to my good friends.  A.--MeinE gutEN FreundE, my good friends.



Now let the candidate for the asylum try to memorize

those variations, and see how soon he will be elected.

One might better go without friends in Germany than take

all this trouble about them.  I have shown what a bother

it is to decline a good (male) friend; well this is

only a third of the work, for there is a variety of new

distortions of the adjective to be learned when the object

is feminine, and still another when the object is neuter.

Now there are more adjectives in this language than there

are black cats in Switzerland, and they must all be as

elaborately declined as the examples above suggested.

Difficult?--troublesome?--these words cannot describe it.

I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of

his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks

than one German adjective.



The inventor of the language seems to have taken pleasure

in complicating it in every way he could think of.

For instance, if one is casually referring to a house,

HAUS, or a horse, PFERD, or a dog, HUND, he spells these

words as I have indicated; but if he is referring to them

in the Dative case, he sticks on a foolish and unnecessary

E and spells them HAUSE, PFERDE, HUNDE.  So, as an added

E often signifies the plural, as the S does with us,

the new student is likely to go on for a month making

twins out of a Dative dog before he discovers his mistake;

and on the other hand, many a new student who could ill

afford loss, has bought and paid for two dogs and only

got one of them, because he ignorantly bought that dog

in the Dative singular when he really supposed he was

talking plural--which left the law on the seller's side,

of course, by the strict rules of grammar, and therefore

a suit for recovery could not lie.



In German, all the Nouns begin with a capital letter.

Now that is a good idea; and a good idea, in this language,

is necessarily conspicuous from its lonesomeness.  I consider

this capitalizing of nouns a good idea, because by reason

of it you are almost always able to tell a noun the minute

you see it.  You fall into error occasionally, because you

mistake the name of a person for the name of a thing,

and waste a good deal of time trying to dig a meaning

out of it.  German names almost always do mean something,

and this helps to deceive the student.  I translated

a passage one day, which said that "the infuriated tigress

broke loose and utterly ate up the unfortunate fir forest"

(Tannenwald). When I was girding up my loins to doubt this,

I found out that Tannenwald in this instance was a

man's name.



Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system

in the distribution; so the gender of each must be

learned separately and by heart.  There is no other way.

To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book.

In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has.

Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip,

and what callous disrespect for the girl.  See how it

looks in print--I translate this from a conversation

in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:



"Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip?



"Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen.



"Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English

maiden?



Wilhelm.  It has gone to the opera."



To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds

are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless,

dogs are male, cats are female--tomcats included, of course;

a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet,

and body are of the male sex, and his head is male

or neuter according to the word selected to signify it,

and NOT according to the sex of the individual who wears

it--for in Germany all the women either male heads or

sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast,

hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair,

ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience

haven't any sex at all.  The inventor of the language

probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.



Now, by the above dissection, the reader will see that in

Germany a man may THINK he is a man, but when he comes to look

into the matter closely, he is bound to have his doubts;

he finds that in sober truth he is a most ridiculous mixture;

and if he ends by trying to comfort himself with the

thought that he can at least depend on a third of this

mess as being manly and masculine, the humiliating second

thought will quickly remind him that in this respect

he is no better off than any woman or cow in the land.



In the German it is true that by some oversight of the inventor

of the language, a Woman is a female; but a Wife (Weib)

is not--which is unfortunate.  A Wife, here, has no sex;

she is neuter; so, according to the grammar, a fish

is HE, his scales are SHE, but a fishwife is neither.

To describe a wife as sexless may be called under-description;

that is bad enough, but over-description is surely worse.

A German speaks of an Englishman as the ENGLA"NDER; to change

the sex, he adds INN, and that stands for Englishwoman--

ENGLA"NDERINN. That seems descriptive enough, but still

it is not exact enough for a German; so he precedes the

word with that article which indicates that the creature

to follow is feminine, and writes it down thus: "die

Engla"nderinn,"--which means "the she-Englishwoman."

I consider that that person is over-described.



Well, after the student has learned the sex of a great

number of nouns, he is still in a difficulty, because he

finds it impossible to persuade his tongue to refer

to things as "he" and "she," and "him" and "her," which

it has been always accustomed to refer to it as "it."

When he even frames a German sentence in his mind,

with the hims and hers in the right places, and then works

up his courage to the utterance-point, it is no use--

the moment he begins to speak his tongue files the track

and all those labored males and females come out as "its."

And even when he is reading German to himself, he always

calls those things "it," where as he ought to read in this way:



TALE OF THE FISHWIFE AND ITS SAD FATE [2]



2.  I capitalize the nouns, in the German (and

    ancient English) fashion.



It is a bleak Day.  Hear the Rain, how he pours, and the Hail,

how he rattles; and see the Snow, how he drifts along,

and of the Mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor Fishwife,

it is stuck fast in the Mire; it has dropped its Basket

of Fishes; and its Hands have been cut by the Scales

as it seized some of the falling Creatures; and one Scale

has even got into its Eye.  and it cannot get her out.

It opens its Mouth to cry for Help; but if any Sound comes

out of him, alas he is drowned by the raging of the Storm.

And now a Tomcat has got one of the Fishes and she

will surely escape with him.  No, she bites off a Fin,

she holds her in her Mouth--will she swallow her? No,

the Fishwife's brave Mother-dog deserts his Puppies and

rescues the Fin--which he eats, himself, as his Reward.

O, horror, the Lightning has struck the Fish-basket;

he sets him on Fire; see the Flame, how she licks the

doomed Utensil with her red and angry Tongue; now she

attacks the helpless Fishwife's Foot--she burns him up,

all but the big Toe, and even SHE is partly consumed;

and still she spreads, still she waves her fiery Tongues;

she attacks the Fishwife's Leg and destroys IT; she attacks

its Hand and destroys HER also; she attacks the Fishwife's Leg

and destroys HER also; she attacks its Body and consumes HIM;

she wreathes herself about its Heart and IT is consumed;

next about its Breast, and in a Moment SHE is a Cinder;

now she reaches its Neck--He goes; now its Chin--

IT goes; now its Nose--SHE goes.  In another Moment,

except Help come, the Fishwife will be no more.

Time presses--is there none to succor and save? Yes! Joy,

joy, with flying Feet the she-Englishwoman comes! But alas,

the generous she-Female is too late: where now is

the fated Fishwife? It has ceased from its Sufferings,

it has gone to a better Land; all that is left of it

for its loved Ones to lament over, is this poor smoldering

Ash-heap. Ah, woeful, woeful Ash-heap! Let us take him

up tenderly, reverently, upon the lowly Shovel, and bear

him to his long Rest, with the Prayer that when he rises

again it will be a Realm where he will have one good square

responsible Sex, and have it all to himself, instead of

having a mangy lot of assorted Sexes scattered all over him

in Spots.



-----------



There, now, the reader can see for himself that this pronoun

business is a very awkward thing for the unaccustomed tongue.

I suppose that in all languages the similarities of look

and sound between words which have no similarity in meaning

are a fruitful source of perplexity to the foreigner.

It is so in our tongue, and it is notably the case in

the German.  Now there is that troublesome word VERMA"HLT:

to me it has so close a resemblance--either real or

fancied--to three or four other words, that I never know

whether it means despised, painted, suspected, or married;

until I look in the dictionary, and then I find it means

the latter.  There are lots of such words and they are

a great torment.  To increase the difficulty there are

words which SEEM to resemble each other, and yet do not;

but they make just as much trouble as if they did.

For instance, there is the word VERMIETHEN (to let,

to lease, to hire); and the word VERHEIRATHEN (another way

of saying to marry). I heard of an Englishman who knocked

at a man's door in Heidelberg and proposed, in the best

German he could command, to "verheirathen" that house.

Then there are some words which mean one thing when you

emphasize the first syllable, but mean something very

different if you throw the emphasis on the last syllable.

For instance, there is a word which means a runaway,

or the act of glancing through a book, according to the

placing of the emphasis; and another word which signifies

to ASSOCIATE with a man, or to AVOID him, according to

where you put the emphasis--and you can generally depend

on putting it in the wrong place and getting into trouble.



There are some exceedingly useful words in this language.

SCHLAG, for example; and ZUG.  There are three-quarters

of a column of SCHLAGS in the dictonary, and a column

and a half of ZUGS.  The word SCHLAG means Blow, Stroke,

Dash, Hit, Shock, Clap, Slap, Time, Bar, Coin, Stamp, Kind,

Sort, Manner, Way, Apoplexy, Wood-cutting, Enclosure,

Field, Forest-clearing. This is its simple and EXACT

meaning--that is to say, its restricted, its fettered meaning;

but there are ways by which you can set it free,

so that it can soar away, as on the wings of the morning,

and never be at rest.  You can hang any word you please

to its tail, and make it mean anything you want to.

You can begin with SCHLAG-ADER, which means artery,

and you can hang on the whole dictionary, word by word,

clear through the alphabet to SCHLAG-WASSER, which means

bilge-water--and including SCHLAG-MUTTER, which means

mother-in-law.



Just the same with ZUG.  Strictly speaking, ZUG means Pull,

Tug, Draught, Procession, March, Progress, Flight, Direction,

Expedition, Train, Caravan, Passage, Stroke, Touch, Line,

Flourish, Trait of Character, Feature, Lineament, Chess-move,

Organ-stop, Team, Whiff, Bias, Drawer, Propensity, Inhalation,

Disposition: but that thing which it does NOT mean--when

all its legitimate pennants have been hung on, has not been

discovered yet.



One cannot overestimate the usefulness of SCHLAG and ZUG.

Armed just with these two, and the word ALSO, what cannot

the foreigner on German soil accomplish? The German word

ALSO is the equivalent of the English phrase "You know,"

and does not mean anything at all--in TALK, though it

sometimes does in print.  Every time a German opens his

mouth an ALSO falls out; and every time he shuts it he bites

one in two that was trying to GET out.



Now, the foreigner, equipped with these three noble words,

is master of the situation.  Let him talk right along,

fearlessly; let him pour his indifferent German forth,

and when he lacks for a word, let him heave a SCHLAG into

the vacuum; all the chances are that it fits it like a plug,

but if it doesn't let him promptly heave a ZUG after it;

the two together can hardly fail to bung the hole; but if,

by a miracle, they SHOULD fail, let him simply say ALSO!

and this will give him a moment's chance to think of the

needful word.  In Germany, when you load your conversational

gun it is always best to throw in a SCHLAG or two and a ZUG

or two, because it doesn't make any difference how much

the rest of the charge may scatter, you are bound to bag

something with THEM.  Then you blandly say ALSO, and load

up again.  Nothing gives such an air of grace and elegance

and unconstraint to a German or an English conversation

as to scatter it full of "Also's" or "You knows."



In my note-book I find this entry:



July 1.--In the hospital yesterday, a word of thirteen

syllables was successfully removed from a patient--a

North German from near Hamburg; but as most unfortunately

the surgeons had opened him in the wrong place, under the

impression that he contained a panorama, he died.

The sad event has cast a gloom over the whole community.



That paragraph furnishes a text for a few remarks about

one of the most curious and notable features of my

subject--the length of German words.  Some German words

are so long that they have a perspective.  Observe these

examples:



Freundschaftsbezeigungen.



Dilettantenaufdringlichkeiten.



Stadtverordnetenversammlungen.



These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions.

And they are not rare; one can open a German newspaper

at any time and see them marching majestically across

the page--and if he has any imagination he can see

the banners and hear the music, too.  They impart

a martial thrill to the meekest subject.  I take a

great interest in these curiosities.  Whenever I come

across a good one, I stuff it and put it in my museum.

In this way I have made quite a valuable collection.

When I get duplicates, I exchange with other collectors,

and thus increase the variety of my stock.  Here rare

some specimens which I lately bought at an auction sale

of the effects of a bankrupt bric-a-brac hunter:



Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen.



Alterthumswissenschaften.



Kinderbewahrungsanstalten.



Unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen.



Wiedererstellungbestrebungen.



Waffenstillstandsunterhandlungen.



Of course when one of these grand mountain ranges goes

stretching across the printed page, it adorns and ennobles

that literary landscape--but at the same time it is a great

distress to the new student, for it blocks up his way;

he cannot crawl under it, or climb over it, or tunnel

through it.  So he resorts to the dictionary for help,

but there is no help there.  The dictionary must draw

the line somewhere--so it leaves this sort of words out.

And it is right, because these long things are hardly

legitimate words, but are rather combinations of words,

and the inventor of them ought to have been killed.

They are compound words with the hyphens left out.

The various words used in building them are in the dictionary,

but in a very scattered condition; so you can hunt

the materials out, one by one, and get at the meaning

at last, but it is a tedious and harassing business.

I have tried this process upon some of the above examples.

"Freundshaftsbezeigungen" seems to be "Friendship

demonstrations,"

which is only a foolish and clumsy way of saying "demonstrations

of friendship." "Unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen" seems

to be "Independencedeclarations," which is no improvement

upon "Declarations of Independence," so far as I can see.

"Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen" seems to be

"General-statesrepresentativesmeetings," as nearly as I

can get at it--a mere rhythmical, gushy euphuism for

"meetings of the legislature," I judge.  We used to have

a good deal of this sort of crime in our literature,

but it has gone out now.  We used to speak of a things as a

"never-to-be-forgotten" circumstance, instead of cramping

it into the simple and sufficient word "memorable" and then

going calmly about our business as if nothing had happened.

In those days we were not content to embalm the thing

and bury it decently, we wanted to build a monument over it.



But in our newspapers the compounding-disease lingers

a little to the present day, but with the hyphens left out,

in the German fashion.  This is the shape it takes:

instead of saying "Mr. Simmons, clerk of the county and

district courts, was in town yesterday," the new form put

it thus: "Clerk of the County and District Courts Simmons

was in town yesterday." This saves neither time nor ink,

and has an awkward sound besides.  One often sees a remark

like this in our papers: "MRS. Assistant District Attorney

Johnson returned to her city residence yesterday for the season."

That is a case of really unjustifiable compounding;

because it not only saves no time or trouble, but confers

a title on Mrs. Johnson which she has no right to.

But these little instances are trifles indeed, contrasted

with the ponderous and dismal German system of piling

jumbled compounds together.  I wish to submit the following

local item, from a Mannheim journal, by way of illustration:



"In the daybeforeyesterdayshortlyaftereleveno'clock Night,

the inthistownstandingtavern called 'The Wagoner' was downburnt.

When the fire to the onthedownburninghouseresting Stork's

Nest reached, flew the parent Storks away.  But when

the bytheraging, firesurrounded Nest ITSELF caught Fire,

straightway plunged the quickreturning Mother-Stork into

the Flames and died, her Wings over her young ones outspread."



Even the cumbersome German construction is not able to

take the pathos out of that picture--indeed, it somehow

seems to strengthen it.  This item is dated away back

yonder months ago.  I could have used it sooner, but I

was waiting to hear from the Father-stork. I am still waiting.



"ALSO!" If I had not shown that the German is a

difficult language, I have at least intended to do so.

I have heard of an American student who was asked how he

was getting along with his German, and who answered

promptly: "I am not getting along at all.  I have worked

at it hard for three level months, and all I have got

to show for it is one solitary German phrase--'ZWEI GLAS'"

(two glasses of beer). He paused for a moment, reflectively;

then added with feeling: "But I've got that SOLID!"



And if I have not also shown that German is a harassing

and infuriating study, my execution has been at fault,

and not my intent.  I heard lately of a worn and sorely

tried American student who used to fly to a certain German

word for relief when he could bear up under his aggravations

no longer--the only word whose sound was sweet and

precious to his ear and healing to his lacerated spirit.

This was the word DAMIT.  It was only the SOUND that

helped him, not the meaning; [3] and so, at last, when he

learned that the emphasis was not on the first syllable,

his only stay and support was gone, and he faded away

and died.



3.  It merely means, in its general sense, "herewith."



I think that a description of any loud, stirring,

tumultuous episode must be tamer in German than in English.

Our descriptive words of this character have such

a deep, strong, resonant sound, while their German

equivalents do seem so thin and mild and energyless.

Boom, burst, crash, roar, storm, bellow, blow, thunder,

explosion; howl, cry, shout, yell, groan; battle, hell.

These are magnificent words; the have a force and magnitude

of sound befitting the things which they describe.

But their German equivalents would be ever so nice to sing

the children to sleep with, or else my awe-inspiring ears

were made for display and not for superior usefulness

in analyzing sounds.  Would any man want to die in a

battle which was called by so tame a term as a SCHLACHT?

Or would not a comsumptive feel too much bundled up,

who was about to go out, in a shirt-collar and a seal-ring,

into a storm which the bird-song word GEWITTER was employed

to describe? And observe the strongest of the several

German equivalents for explosion--AUSBRUCH.  Our word

Toothbrush is more powerful than that.  It seems to me

that the Germans could do worse than import it into their

language to describe particularly tremendous explosions with.

The German word for hell--Ho"lle--sounds more like HELLY

than anything else; therefore, how necessary chipper,

frivolous, and unimpressive it is.  If a man were told

in German to go there, could he really rise to thee

dignity of feeling insulted?



Having pointed out, in detail, the several vices of

this language, I now come to the brief and pleasant task

of pointing out its virtues.  The capitalizing of the nouns

I have already mentioned.  But far before this virtue stands

another--that of spelling a word according to the sound of it.

After one short lesson in the alphabet, the student can tell

how any German word is pronounced without having to ask;

whereas in our language if a student should inquire of us,

"What does B, O, W, spell?" we should be obliged to reply,

"Nobody can tell what it spells when you set if off by itself;

you can only tell by referring to the context and finding

out what it signifies--whether it is a thing to shoot

arrows with, or a nod of one's head, or the forward end of a

boat."



There are some German words which are singularly

and powerfully effective.  For instance, those which

describe lowly, peaceful, and affectionate home life;

those which deal with love, in any and all forms,

from mere kindly feeling and honest good will toward

the passing stranger, clear up to courtship; those which

deal with outdoor Nature, in its softest and loveliest

aspects--with meadows and forests, and birds and flowers,

the fragrance and sunshine of summer, and the moonlight

of peaceful winter nights; in a word, those which deal with

any and all forms of rest, respose, and peace; those also

which deal with the creatures and marvels of fairyland;

and lastly and chiefly, in those words which express pathos,

is the language surpassingly rich and affective.  There are

German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.

That shows that the SOUND of the words is correct--it

interprets the meanings with truth and with exactness;

and so the ear is informed, and through the ear, the heart.



The Germans do not seem to be afraid to repeat a word

when it is the right one.  they repeat it several times,

if they choose.  That is wise.  But in English, when we

have used a word a couple of times in a paragraph,

we imagine we are growing tautological, and so we are weak

enough to exchange it for some other word which only

approximates exactness, to escape what we wrongly fancy

is a greater blemish.  Repetition may be bad, but surely

inexactness is worse.



-----------



There are people in the world who will take a great

deal of trouble to point out the faults in a religion

or a language, and then go blandly about their business

without suggesting any remedy.  I am not that kind

of person.  I have shown that the German language

needs reforming.  Very well, I am ready to reform it.

At least I am ready to make the proper suggestions.

Such a course as this might be immodest in another; but I

have devoted upward of nine full weeks, first and last,

to a careful and critical study of this tongue, and thus

have acquired a confidence in my ability to reform it

which no mere superficial culture could have conferred

upon me.



In the first place, I would leave out the Dative case.

It confuses the plurals; and, besides, nobody ever knows

when he is in the Dative case, except he discover it

by accident--and then he does not know when or where it

was that he got into it, or how long he has been in it,

or how he is going to get out of it again.  The Dative case

is but an ornamental folly--it is better to discard it.



In the next place, I would move the Verb further up

to the front.  You may load up with ever so good a Verb,

but I notice that you never really bring down a subject

with it at the present German range--you only cripple it.

So I insist that this important part of speech should be

brought forward to a position where it may be easily seen

with the naked eye.



Thirdly, I would import some strong words from the English

tongue--to swear with, and also to use in describing

all sorts of vigorous things in a vigorous ways. [4]



4.  "Verdammt," and its variations and enlargements,

    are words which have plenty of meaning, but the SOUNDS

    are so mild and ineffectual that German ladies can use

    them without sin.  German ladies who could not be induced

    to commit a sin by any persuasion or compulsion, promptly rip

    out one of these harmless little words when they tear their

    dresses or don't like the soup.  It sounds about as wicked

    as our "My gracious." German ladies are constantly saying,

    "Ach! Gott!" "Mein Gott!" "Gott in Himmel!" "Herr Gott"

    "Der Herr Jesus!" etc.  They think our ladies have the

    same custom, perhaps; for I once heard a gentle and lovely

    old German lady say to a sweet young American girl:

    "The two languages are so alike--how pleasant that is;

    we say 'Ach! Gott!' you say 'Goddamn.'"



Fourthly, I would reorganizes the sexes, and distribute

them accordingly to the will of the creator.  This as

a tribute of respect, if nothing else.



Fifthly, I would do away with those great long

compounded words; or require the speaker to deliver

them in sections, with intermissions for refreshments.

To wholly do away with them would be best, for ideas are

more easily received and digested when they come one at

a time than when they come in bulk.  Intellectual food

is like any other; it is pleasanter and more beneficial

to take it with a spoon than with a shovel.



Sixthly, I would require a speaker to stop when he is done,

and not hang a string of those useless "haven sind gewesen

gehabt haben geworden seins" to the end of his oration.

This sort of gewgaws undignify a speech, instead of adding

a grace.  They are, therefore, an offense, and should

be discarded.



Seventhly, I would discard the Parenthesis.  Also the

reparenthesis,

the re-reparenthesis, and the re-re-re-re-re-reparentheses,

and likewise the final wide-reaching all-enclosing

king-parenthesis. I would require every individual,

be he high or low, to unfold a plain straightforward tale,

or else coil it and sit on it and hold his peace.

Infractions of this law should be punishable with death.



And eighthly, and last, I would retain ZUG and SCHLAG,

with their pendants, and discard the rest of the vocabulary.

This would simplify the language.



I have now named what I regard as the most necessary

and important changes.  These are perhaps all I could

be expected to name for nothing; but there are other

suggestions which I can and will make in case my proposed

application shall result in my being formally employed

by the government in the work of reforming the language.



My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person

ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing)

in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German

in thirty years.  It seems manifest, then, that the

latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired.

If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently

and reverently set aside among the dead languages,

for only the dead have time to learn it.



A FOURTH OF JULY ORATION IN THE GERMAN TONGUE, DELIVERED AT

A BANQUET OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN CLUB OF STUDENTS BY THE

AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK



Gentlemen: Since I arrived, a month ago, in this

old wonderland, this vast garden of Germany, my English

tongue has so often proved a useless piece of baggage

to me, and so troublesome to carry around, in a country

where they haven't the checking system for luggage, that I

finally set to work, and learned the German language.

Also! Es freut mich dass dies so ist, denn es muss,

in ein haupts:achlich degree, h:oflich sein, dass man

auf ein occasion like this, sein Rede in die Sprache des

Landes worin he boards, aussprechen soll.  Daf:ur habe ich,

aus reinische Verlegenheit--no, Vergangenheit--no, I

mean Hoflichkeit--aus reinishe Hoflichkeit habe ich

resolved to tackle this business in the German language,

um Gottes willen! Also! Sie mu"ssen so freundlich sein,

und verzeih mich die interlarding von ein oder zwei

Englischer Worte, hie und da, denn ich finde dass die

deutsche is not a very copious language, and so when

you've really got anything to say, you've got to draw

on a language that can stand the strain.



Wenn haber man kann nicht meinem Rede Verstehen, so werde

ich ihm sp:ater dasselbe :ubersetz, wenn er solche Dienst

verlangen wollen haben werden sollen sein h:atte. (I don't

know what wollen haben werden sollen sein ha"tte means,

but I notice they always put it at the end of a German

sentence--merely for general literary gorgeousness,

I suppose.)



This is a great and justly honored day--a day which is

worthy of the veneration in which it is held by the true

patriots of all climes and nationalities--a day which

offers a fruitful theme for thought and speech; und meinem

Freunde--no, meinEN FreundEN--meinES FreundES--well,

take your choice, they're all the same price; I don't

know which one is right--also! ich habe gehabt haben

worden gewesen sein, as Goethe says in his Paradise

Lost--ich--ich--that is to say--ich--but let us change cars.



Also! Die Anblich so viele Grossbrittanischer und Amerikanischer

hier zusammengetroffen in Bruderliche concord, ist zwar

a welcome and inspiriting spectacle.  And what has moved you

to it? Can the terse German tongue rise to the expression of

this impulse? Is it Freundschaftsbezeigungenstadtverordneten-

versammlungenfamilieneigenth:umlichkeiten? Nein,

o nein! This is a crisp and noble word, but it fails

to pierce the marrow of the impulse which has gathered

this friendly meeting and produced diese Anblick--eine

Anblich welche ist gut zu sehen--gut fu"r die Augen

in a foreign land and a far country--eine Anblick solche

als in die gew:ohnliche Heidelberger phrase nennt man ein

"scho"nes Aussicht!" Ja, freilich natu"rlich wahrscheinlich

ebensowohl! Also! Die Aussicht auf dem K:onigsstuhl

mehr gr:osser ist, aber geistlische sprechend nicht so

scho"n, lob' Gott! Because sie sind hier zusammengetroffen,

in Bruderlichem concord, ein grossen Tag zu feirn,

whose high benefits were not for one land and one locality,

but have conferred a measure of good upon all lands

that know liberty today, and love it.  Hundert Jahre

voru"ber, waren die Engla"nder und die Amerikaner Feinde;

aber heut sind sie herzlichen Freunde, Gott sei Dank!

May this good-fellowship endure; may these banners here

blended in amity so remain; may they never any more wave

over opposing hosts, or be stained with blood which

was kindred, is kindred, and always will be kindred,

until a line drawn upon a map shall be able to say:

"THIS bars the ancestral blood from flowing in the veins

of the descendant!"







APPENDIX E

Legend of the Castles



Called the "Swallow's Nest" and "The Brothers,"

as Condensed from the Captain's Tale



In the neighborhood of three hundred years ago the Swallow's

Nest and the larger castle between it and Neckarsteinach

were owned and occupied by two old knights who were

twin brothers, and bachelors.  They had no relatives.

They were very rich.  They had fought through the wars

and retired to private life--covered with honorable scars.

They were honest, honorable men in their dealings,

but the people had given them a couple of nicknames which

were very suggestive--Herr Givenaught and Herr Heartless.

The old knights were so proud of these names that if

a burgher called them by their right ones they would

correct them.



The most renowned scholar in Europe, at the time, was the

Herr Doctor Franz Reikmann, who lived in Heidelberg.

All Germany was proud of the venerable scholar, who lived

in the simplest way, for great scholars are always poor.

He was poor, as to money, but very rich in his sweet

young daughter Hildegarde and his library.  He had been

all his life collecting his library, book and book,

and he lived it as a miser loves his hoarded gold.

He said the two strings of his heart were rooted,

the one in his daughter, the other in his books; and that

if either were severed he must die.  Now in an evil hour,

hoping to win a marriage portion for his child, this simple

old man had entrusted his small savings to a sharper to be

ventured in a glittering speculation.  But that was not

the worst of it: he signed a paper--without reading it.

That is the way with poets and scholars; they always sign

without reading.  This cunning paper made him responsible

for heaps of things.  The rest was that one night he

found himself in debt to the sharper eight thousand

pieces of gold!--an amount so prodigious that it simply

stupefied him to think of it.  It was a night of woe in

that house.



"I must part with my library--I have nothing else.

So perishes one heartstring," said the old man.



"What will it bring, father?" asked the girl.



"Nothing! It is worth seven hundred pieces of gold;

but by auction it will go for little or nothing."



"Then you will have parted with the half of your heart

and the joy of your life to no purpose, since so mighty

of burden of debt will remain behind."



"There is no help for it, my child.  Our darlings must

pass under the hammer.  We must pay what we can."



"My father, I have a feeling that the dear Virgin will

come to our help.  Let us not lose heart."



"She cannot devise a miracle that will turn NOTHING into

eight thousand gold pieces, and lesser help will bring

us little peace."



"She can do even greater things, my father.  She will

save us, I know she will."



Toward morning, while the old man sat exhausted and asleep

in his chair where he had been sitting before his books

as one who watches by his beloved dead and prints the

features on his memory for a solace in the aftertime

of empty desolation, his daughter sprang into the room

and gently woke him, saying--



"My presentiment was true! She will save us.

Three times has she appeared to me in my dreams, and said,

'Go to the Herr Givenaught, go to the Herr Heartless,

ask them to come and bid.' There, did I not tell you she

would save us, the thrice blessed Virgin!"



Sad as the old man was, he was obliged to laugh.



"Thou mightest as well appeal to the rocks their

castles stand upon as to the harder ones that lie

in those men's breasts, my child.  THEY bid on books

writ in the learned tongues!--they can scarce read their own."



But Hildegarde's faith was in no wise shaken.

Bright and early she was on her way up the Neckar road,

as joyous as a bird.



Meantime Herr Givenaught and Herr Heartless were having

an early breakfast in the former's castle--the Sparrow's

Nest--and flavoring it with a quarrel; for although

these twins bore a love for each other which almost

amounted to worship, there was one subject upon which they

could not touch without calling each other hard names--

and yet it was the subject which they oftenest touched upon.



"I tell you," said Givenaught, "you will beggar yourself

yet with your insane squanderings of money upon

what you choose to consider poor and worthy objects.

All these years I have implored you to stop this foolish

custom and husband your means, but all in vain.

You are always lying to me about these secret benevolences,

but you never have managed to deceive me yet.  Every time

a poor devil has been set upon his feet I have detected

your hand in it--incorrigible ass!"



"Every time you didn't set him on his feet yourself,

you mean.  Where I give one unfortunate a little private lift,

you do the same for a dozen.  The idea of YOUR swelling

around the country and petting yourself with the nickname

of Givenaught--intolerable humbug! Before I would be

such a fraud as that, I would cut my right hand off.

Your life is a continual lie.  But go on, I have tried MY

best to save you from beggaring yourself by your riotous

charities--now for the thousandth time I wash my hands

of the consequences.  A maundering old fool! that's

what you are."



"And you a blethering old idiot!" roared Givenaught,

springing up.



"I won't stay in the presence of a man who has no more

delicacy than to call me such names.  Mannerless swine!"



So saying, Herr Heartless sprang up in a passion.

But some lucky accident intervened, as usual, to change

the subject, and the daily quarrel ended in the customary

daily living reconciliation.  The gray-headed old

eccentrics parted, and Herr Heartless walked off to his

own castle.



Half an hour later, Hildegarde was standing in the presence

of Herr Givenaught.  He heard her story, and said--



"I am sorry for you, my child, but I am very poor,

I care nothing for bookish rubbish, I shall not be there."



He said the hard words kindly, but they nearly broke poor

Hildegarde's heart, nevertheless.  When she was gone

the old heartbreaker muttered, rubbing his hands--



"It was a good stroke.  I have saved my brother's pocket

this time, in spite of him.  Nothing else would have

prevented his rushing off to rescue the old scholar,

the pride of Germany, from his trouble.  The poor child

won't venture near HIM after the rebuff she has received

from his brother the Givenaught."



But he was mistaken.  The Virgin had commanded,

and Hildegarde would obey.  She went to Herr Heartless

and told her story.  But he said coldly--



"I am very poor, my child, and books are nothing to me.

I wish you well, but I shall not come."



When Hildegarde was gone, he chuckled and said--



"How my fool of a soft-headed soft-hearted brother would

rage if he knew how cunningly I have saved his pocket.

How he would have flown to the old man's rescue! But the

girl won't venture near him now."



When Hildegarde reached home, her father asked her how she

had prospered.  She said--



"The Virgin has promised, and she will keep her word;

but not in the way I thought.  She knows her own ways,

and they are best."



The old man patted her on the head, and smiled a doubting

smile, but he honored her for her brave faith, nevertheless.



II



Next day the people assembled in the great hall

of the Ritter tavern, to witness the auction--for

the proprietor had said the treasure of Germany's most

honored son should be bartered away in no meaner place.

Hildegarde and her father sat close to the books,

silent and sorrowful, and holding each other's hands.

There was a great crowd of people present.  The bidding began--



"How much for this precious library, just as it stands,

all complete?" called the auctioneer.



"Fifty pieces of gold!"



"A hundred!"



"Two hundred."



"Three!"



"Four!"



"Five hundred!"



"Five twenty-five."



A brief pause.



"Five forty!"



A longer pause, while the auctioneer redoubled his persuasions.



"Five-forty-five!"



A heavy drag--the auctioneer persuaded, pleaded,

implored--it was useless, everybody remained silent--



"Well, then--going, going--one--two--"



"Five hundred and fifty!"



This in a shrill voice, from a bent old man, all hung

with rags, and with a green patch over his left eye.

Everybody in his vicinity turned and gazed at him.

It was Givenaught in disguise.  He was using a disguised

voice, too.



"Good!" cried the auctioneer.  "Going, going--one--two--"



"Five hundred and sixty!"



This, in a deep, harsh voice, from the midst of the

crowd at the other end of the room.  The people near

by turned, and saw an old man, in a strange costume,

supporting himself on crutches.  He wore a long white beard,

and blue spectacles.  It was Herr Heartless, in disguise,

and using a disguised voice.



"Good again! Going, going--one--"



"Six hundred!"



Sensation.  The crowd raised a cheer, and some one

cried out, "Go it, Green-patch!" This tickled the audience

and a score of voices shouted, "Go it, Green-patch!"



"Going--going--going--third and last call--one--two--"



"Seven hundred!"



"Huzzah!--well done, Crutches!" cried a voice.  The crowd

took it up, and shouted altogether, "Well done, Crutches!"



"Splendid, gentlemen! you are doing magnificently.

Going, going--"



"A thousand!"



"Three cheers for Green-patch! Up and at him, Crutches!"



"Going--going--"



"Two thousand!"



And while the people cheered and shouted, "Crutches" muttered,

"Who can this devil be that is fighting so to get these

useless books?--But no matter, he sha'n't have them.

The pride of Germany shall have his books if it beggars

me to buy them for him."



"Going, going, going--"



"Three thousand!"



"Come, everybody--give a rouser for Green-patch!"



And while they did it, "Green-patch" muttered, "This cripple

is plainly a lunatic; but the old scholar shall have

his books, nevertheless, though my pocket sweat for it."



"Going--going--"



"Four thousand!"



"Huzza!"



"Five thousand!"



"Huzza!"



"Six thousand!"



"Huzza!"



"Seven thousand!"



"Huzza!"



"EIGHT thousand!"



"We are saved, father! I told you the Holy Virgin

would keep her word!" "Blessed be her sacred name!"

said the old scholar, with emotion.  The crowd roared,

"Huzza, huzza, huzza--at him again, Green-patch!"



"Going--going--"



"TEN thousand!" As Givenaught shouted this, his excitement

was so great that he forgot himself and used his

natural voice.  He brother recognized it, and muttered,

under cover of the storm of cheers--



"Aha, you are there, are you, besotted old fool? Take

the books, I know what you'll do with them!"



So saying, he slipped out of the place and the auction was

at an end.  Givenaught shouldered his way to Hildegarde,

whispered a word in her ear, and then he also vanished.

The old scholar and his daughter embraced, and the former said,

"Truly the Holy Mother has done more than she promised,

child, for she has give you a splendid marriage portion--

think of it, two thousand pieces of gold!"



"And more still," cried Hildegarde, "for she has give

you back your books; the stranger whispered me that he

would none of them--'the honored son of Germany must

keep them,' so he said.  I would I might have asked

his name and kissed his hand and begged his blessing;

but he was Our Lady's angel, and it is not meet that we

of earth should venture speech with them that dwell above."







APPENDIX F

German Journals



The daily journals of Hamburg, Frankfort, Baden, Munich,

and Augsburg are all constructed on the same general plan.

I speak of these because I am more familiar with them

than with any other German papers.  They contain no

"editorials" whatever; no "personals"--and this is rather

a merit than a demerit, perhaps; no funny-paragraph column;

no police-court reports; no reports of proceedings

of higher courts; no information about prize-fights

or other dog-fights, horse-races, walking-machines,

yachting-contents, rifle-matches, or other sporting

matters of any sort; no reports of banquet speeches;

no department of curious odds and ends of floating fact

and gossip; no "rumors" about anything or anybody;

no prognostications or prophecies about anything or anybody;

no lists of patents granted or sought, or any reference

to such things; no abuse of public officials, big or little,

or complaints against them, or praises of them; no religious

columns Saturdays, no rehash of cold sermons Mondays;

no "weather indications"; no "local item" unveiling of

what is happening in town--nothing of a local nature,

indeed, is mentioned, beyond the movements of some prince,

or the proposed meeting of some deliberative body.



After so formidable a list of what one can't find

in a German daily, the question may well be asked,

What CAN be found in it? It is easily answered: A child's

handful of telegrams, mainly about European national and

international political movements; letter-correspondence about

the same things; market reports.  There you have it.

That is what a German daily is made of.  A German

daily is the slowest and saddest and dreariest of the

inventions of man.  Our own dailies infuriate the reader,

pretty often; the German daily only stupefies him.

Once a week the German daily of the highest class lightens

up its heavy columns--that is, it thinks it lightens

them up--with a profound, an abysmal, book criticism;

a criticism which carries you down, down, down into

the scientific bowels of the subject--for the German

critic is nothing if not scientific--and when you come

up at last and scent the fresh air and see the bonny

daylight once more, you resolve without a dissenting voice

that a book criticism is a mistaken way to lighten up

a German daily.  Sometimes, in place of the criticism,

the first-class daily gives you what it thinks is a gay

and chipper essay--about ancient Grecian funeral customs,

or the ancient Egyptian method of tarring a mummy,

or the reasons for believing that some of the peoples

who existed before the flood did not approve of cats.

These are not unpleasant subjects; they are not

uninteresting subjects; they are even exciting subjects--

until one of these massive scientists gets hold of them.

He soon convinces you that even these matters can

be handled in such a way as to make a person low-spirited.



As I have said, the average German daily is made up

solely of correspondences--a trifle of it by telegraph,

the rest of it by mail.  Every paragraph has the side-head,

"London," "Vienna," or some other town, and a date.

And always, before the name of the town, is placed a letter

or a sign, to indicate who the correspondent is, so that

the authorities can find him when they want to hang him.

Stars, crosses, triangles, squares, half-moons, suns--

such are some of the signs used by correspondents.



Some of the dailies move too fast, others too slowly.

For instance, my Heidelberg daily was always twenty-four

hours old when it arrived at the hotel; but one of my

Munich evening papers used to come a full twenty-four hours

before it was due.



Some of the less important dailies give one a tablespoonful

of a continued story every day; it is strung across

the bottom of the page, in the French fashion.

By subscribing for the paper for five years I judge that

a man might succeed in getting pretty much all of the story.



If you ask a citizen of Munich which is the best Munich

daily journal, he will always tell you that there is

only one good Munich daily, and that it is published

in Augsburg, forty or fifty miles away.  It is like saying

that the best daily paper in New York is published out

in New Jersey somewhere.  Yes, the Augsburg ALLGEMEINE

ZEITUNG is "the best Munich paper," and it is the one I

had in my mind when I was describing a "first-class

German daily" above.  The entire paper, opened out, is not

quite as large as a single page of the New York HERALD.

It is printed on both sides, of course; but in such large

type that its entire contents could be put, in HERALD type,

upon a single page of the HERALD--and there would still

be room enough on the page for the ZEITUNG's "supplement"

and some portion of the ZEITUNG's next day's contents.



Such is the first-class daily.  The dailies actually printed

in Munich are all called second-class by the public.

If you ask which is the best of these second-class

papers they say there is no difference; one is as good

as another.  I have preserved a copy of one of them;

it is called the MU"NCHENER TAGES-ANZEIGER, and bears

date January 25, 1879.  Comparisons are odious,

but they need not be malicious; and without any malice

I wish to compare this journals of other countries.

I know of no other way to enable the reader to "size"

the thing.



A column of an average daily paper in America contains

from 1,800 to 2,500 words; the reading-matter in a

single issue consists of from 25,000 to 50,000 words.

The reading-matter in my copy of the Munich journal

consists of a total of 1,654 words --for I counted them.

That would be nearly a column of one of our dailies.

A single issue of the bulkiest daily newspaper in the

world--the London TIMES--often contains 100,000 words

of reading-matter. Considering that the DAILY ANZEIGER

issues the usual twenty-six numbers per month, the reading

matter in a single number of the London TIMES would keep it

in "copy" two months and a half.



The ANZEIGER is an eight-page paper; its page is one

inch wider and one inch longer than a foolscap page;

that is to say, the dimensions of its page are somewhere

between those of a schoolboy's slate and a lady's

pocket handkerchief.  One-fourth of the first page is

taken up with the heading of the journal; this gives it

a rather top-heavy appearance; the rest of the first page

is reading-matter; all of the second page is reading-matter;

the other six pages are devoted to advertisements.



The reading-matter is compressed into two hundred

and five small-pica lines, and is lighted up with eight

pica headlines.  The bill of fare is as follows: First,

under a pica headline, to enforce attention and respect,

is a four-line sermon urging mankind to remember that,

although they are pilgrims here below, they are yet heirs

of heaven; and that "When they depart from earth they soar

to heaven." Perhaps a four-line sermon in a Saturday paper

is the sufficient German equivalent of the eight or ten

columns of sermons which the New-Yorkers get in their

Monday morning papers.  The latest news (two days old)

follows the four-line sermon, under the pica headline

"Telegrams"--these are "telegraphed" with a pair of

scissors out of the AUGSBURGER ZEITUNG of the day before.

These telegrams consist of fourteen and two-thirds lines

from Berlin, fifteen lines from Vienna, and two and five-eights

lines from Calcutta.  Thirty-three small-pica lines news

in a daily journal in a King's Capital of one hundred and

seventy thousand inhabitants is surely not an overdose.

Next we have the pica heading, "News of the Day,"

under which the following facts are set forth: Prince

Leopold is going on a visit to Vienna, six lines;

Prince Arnulph is coming back from Russia, two lines;

the Landtag will meet at ten o'clock in the morning and

consider an election law, three lines and one word over;

a city government item, five and one-half lines;

prices of tickets to the proposed grand Charity Ball,

twenty-three lines--for this one item occupies almost

one-fourth of the entire first page; there is to be

a wonderful Wagner concert in Frankfurt-on-the-Main,

with an orchestra of one hundred and eight instruments,

seven and one-half lines.  That concludes the first page.

Eighty-five lines, altogether, on that page,

including three headlines.  About fifty of those lines,

as one perceives, deal with local matters; so the reporters

are not overworked.



Exactly one-half of the second page is occupied with

an opera criticism, fifty-three lines (three of them

being headlines), and "Death Notices," ten lines.



The other half of the second page is made up of two

paragraphs under the head of "Miscellaneous News."

One of these paragraphs tells about a quarrel between the Czar

of Russia and his eldest son, twenty-one and a half lines;

and the other tells about the atrocious destruction of a

peasant child by its parents, forty lines, or one-fifth

of the total of the reading-matter contained in the paper.



Consider what a fifth part of the reading-matter of an American

daily paper issued in a city of one hundred and seventy

thousand inhabitants amounts to! Think what a mass it is.

Would any one suppose I could so snugly tuck away such a

mass in a chapter of this book that it would be difficult

to find it again in the reader lost his place? Surely not.

I will translate that child-murder word for word,

to give the reader a realizing sense of what a fifth

part of the reading-matter of a Munich daily actually

is when it comes under measurement of the eye:



"From Oberkreuzberg, January 21st, the DONAU ZEITUNG

receives a long account of a crime, which we shortened

as follows: In Rametuach, a village near Eppenschlag,

lived a young married couple with two children, one of which,

a boy aged five, was born three years before the marriage.

For this reason, and also because a relative at Iggensbach

had bequeathed M400 ($100) to the boy, the heartless

father considered him in the way; so the unnatural

parents determined to sacrifice him in the cruelest

possible manner.  They proceeded to starve him slowly

to death, meantime frightfully maltreating him--as the

village people now make known, when it is too late.

The boy was shut in a hole, and when people passed

by he cried, and implored them to give him bread.

His long-continued tortures and deprivations destroyed

him at last, on the third of January.  The sudden (sic)

death of the child created suspicion, the more so as the

body was immediately clothed and laid upon the bier.

Therefore the coroner gave notice, and an inquest was held

on the 6th.  What a pitiful spectacle was disclosed then!

The body was a complete skeleton.  The stomach and intestines

were utterly empty; they contained nothing whatsoever.

The flesh on the corpse was not as thick as the back of

a knife, and incisions in it brought not one drop of blood.

There was not a piece of sound skin the size of a dollar

on the whole body; wounds, scars, bruises, discolored

extravasated blood, everywhere--even on the soles of

the feet there were wounds.  The cruel parents asserted

that the boy had been so bad that they had been obliged

to use severe punishments, and that he finally fell over

a bench and broke his neck.  However, they were arrested

two weeks after the inquest and put in the prison at Deggendorf."



Yes, they were arrested "two weeks after the inquest."

What a home sound that has.  That kind of police briskness

rather more reminds me of my native land than German

journalism does.



I think a German daily journal doesn't do any good to

speak of, but at the same time it doesn't do any harm.

That is a very large merit, and should not be lightly

weighted nor lightly thought of.



The German humorous papers are beautifully printed upon

fine paper, and the illustrations are finely drawn,

finely engraved, and are not vapidly funny, but deliciously so.

So also, generally speaking, are the two or three terse

sentences which accompany the pictures.  I remember one

of these pictures: A most dilapidated tramp is ruefully

contemplating some coins which lie in his open palm.

He says: "Well, begging is getting played out.  Only about

five marks ($1.25) for the whole day; many an official

makes more!" And I call to mind a picture of a commercial

traveler who is about to unroll his samples:



MERCHANT (pettishly).--NO, don't. I don't want to buy anything!



DRUMMER.--If you please, I was only going to show you--



MERCHANT.--But I don't wish to see them!



DRUMMER (after a pause, pleadingly).--But do you you mind

letting ME look at them! I haven't seen them for three weeks!





End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of Twain's A Tramp Abroad













THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER



by Mark Twain









Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, to Lord Cromwell, on the birth

of the Prince of Wales (afterward Edward VI.).



From the National Manuscripts preserved by the British Government.



Ryght honorable, Salutem in Christo Jesu, and Syr here ys no lesse

joynge and rejossynge in thes partees for the byrth of our prynce,

hoom we hungurde for so longe, then ther was (I trow), inter

vicinos att the byrth of S. J. Baptyste, as thys berer, Master

Erance, can telle you.  Gode gyffe us alle grace, to yelde dew

thankes to our Lorde Gode, Gode of Inglonde, for verely He hathe

shoyd Hym selff Gode of Inglonde, or rather an Inglyssh Gode, yf

we consydyr and pondyr welle alle Hys procedynges with us from

tyme to tyme.  He hath over cumme alle our yllnesse with Hys

excedynge goodnesse, so that we are now moor then compellyd to

serve Hym, seke Hys glory, promott Hys wurde, yf the Devylle of

alle Devylles be natt in us.  We have now the stooppe of vayne

trustes ande the stey of vayne expectations; lett us alle pray for

hys preservatione.  Ande I for my partt wylle wyssh that hys Grace

allways have, and evyn now from the begynynge, Governares,

Instructores and offyceres of ryght jugmente, ne optimum ingenium

non optima educatione deprevetur.



Butt whatt a grett fowlle am I!  So, whatt devotione shoyth many

tymys butt lytelle dyscretione!  Ande thus the Gode of Inglonde be

ever with you in alle your procedynges.



The 19 of October.



Youres, H. L. B. of Wurcestere, now att Hartlebury.



Yf you wolde excytt thys berere to be moore hartye ayen the abuse

of ymagry or mor forwarde to promotte the veryte, ytt myght doo

goode.  Natt that ytt came of me, butt of your selffe, etc.



(Addressed)

To the Ryght Honorable Loorde P. Sealle hys synguler gode Lorde.







To those good-mannered and agreeable children

Susie and Clara Clemens

this book is affectionately inscribed by their father.







I will set down a tale as it was told to me by one who had it of

his father, which latter had it of HIS father, this last having in

like manner had it of HIS father--and so on, back and still back,

three hundred years and more, the fathers transmitting it to the

sons and so preserving it.  It may be history, it may be only a

legend, a tradition.  It may have happened, it may not have

happened:  but it COULD have happened.  It may be that the wise

and the learned believed it in the old days; it may be that only

the unlearned and the simple loved it and credited it.





Contents.



I.      The birth of the Prince and the Pauper.

II.     Tom's early life.

III.    Tom's meeting with the Prince.

IV.     The Prince's troubles begin.

V.      Tom as a patrician.

VI.     Tom receives instructions.

VII.    Tom's first royal dinner.

VIII.   The question of the Seal.

IX.     The river pageant.

X.      The Prince in the toils.

XI.     At Guildhall.

XII.    The Prince and his deliverer.

XIII.   The disappearance of the Prince.

XIV.    'Le Roi est mort--vive le Roi.'

XV.     Tom as King.

XVI.    The state dinner.

XVII.   Foo-foo the First.

XVIII.  The Prince with the tramps.

XIX.    The Prince with the peasants.

XX.     The Prince and the hermit.

XXI.    Hendon to the rescue.

XXII.   A victim of treachery.

XXIII.  The Prince a prisoner.

XXIV.   The escape.

XXV.    Hendon Hall.

XXVI.   Disowned.

XXVII.  In prison.

XXVIII. The sacrifice.

XXIX.   To London.

XXX.    Tom's progress.

XXXI.   The Recognition procession.

XXXII.  Coronation Day.

XXXIII. Edward as King.

Conclusion. Justice and Retribution.

Notes.







     'The quality of mercy . . . is twice bless'd;

      It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes;

      'Tis mightiest in the mightiest:  it becomes

      The thron-ed monarch better than his crown'.

                                   Merchant of Venice.







Chapter I. The birth of the Prince and the Pauper.



In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the

second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor

family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.  On the same

day another English child was born to a rich family of the name of

Tudor, who did want him.  All England wanted him too.  England had

so longed for him, and hoped for him, and prayed God for him,

that, now that he was really come, the people went nearly mad for

joy.  Mere acquaintances hugged and kissed each other and cried.

Everybody took a holiday, and high and low, rich and poor, feasted

and danced and sang, and got very mellow; and they kept this up

for days and nights together.  By day, London was a sight to see,

with gay banners waving from every balcony and housetop, and

splendid pageants marching along.  By night, it was again a sight

to see, with its great bonfires at every corner, and its troops of

revellers making merry around them.  There was no talk in all

England but of the new baby, Edward Tudor, Prince of Wales, who

lay lapped in silks and satins, unconscious of all this fuss, and

not knowing that great lords and ladies were tending him and

watching over him--and not caring, either.  But there was no talk

about the other baby, Tom Canty, lapped in his poor rags, except

among the family of paupers whom he had just come to trouble with

his presence.







Chapter II. Tom's early life.



Let us skip a number of years.



London was fifteen hundred years old, and was a great town--for

that day.  It had a hundred thousand inhabitants--some think

double as many.  The streets were very narrow, and crooked, and

dirty, especially in the part where Tom Canty lived, which was not

far from London Bridge.  The houses were of wood, with the second

story projecting over the first, and the third sticking its elbows

out beyond the second.  The higher the houses grew, the broader

they grew.  They were skeletons of strong criss-cross beams, with

solid material between, coated with plaster.  The beams were

painted red or blue or black, according to the owner's taste, and

this gave the houses a very picturesque look.  The windows were

small, glazed with little diamond-shaped panes, and they opened

outward, on hinges, like doors.



The house which Tom's father lived in was up a foul little pocket

called Offal Court, out of Pudding Lane.  It was small, decayed,

and rickety, but it was packed full of wretchedly poor families.

Canty's tribe occupied a room on the third floor.  The mother and

father had a sort of bedstead in the corner; but Tom, his

grandmother, and his two sisters, Bet and Nan, were not

restricted--they had all the floor to themselves, and might sleep

where they chose.  There were the remains of a blanket or two, and

some bundles of ancient and dirty straw, but these could not

rightly be called beds, for they were not organised; they were

kicked into a general pile, mornings, and selections made from the

mass at night, for service.



Bet and Nan were fifteen years old--twins.  They were good-hearted

girls, unclean, clothed in rags, and profoundly ignorant.  Their

mother was like them.  But the father and the grandmother were a

couple of fiends.  They got drunk whenever they could; then they

fought each other or anybody else who came in the way; they cursed

and swore always, drunk or sober; John Canty was a thief, and his

mother a beggar.  They made beggars of the children, but failed to

make thieves of them.  Among, but not of, the dreadful rabble that

inhabited the house, was a good old priest whom the King had

turned out of house and home with a pension of a few farthings,

and he used to get the children aside and teach them right ways

secretly.  Father Andrew also taught Tom a little Latin, and how

to read and write; and would have done the same with the girls,

but they were afraid of the jeers of their friends, who could not

have endured such a queer accomplishment in them.



All Offal Court was just such another hive as Canty's house.

Drunkenness, riot and brawling were the order, there, every night

and nearly all night long.  Broken heads were as common as hunger

in that place.  Yet little Tom was not unhappy.  He had a hard

time of it, but did not know it.  It was the sort of time that all

the Offal Court boys had, therefore he supposed it was the correct

and comfortable thing.  When he came home empty-handed at night,

he knew his father would curse him and thrash him first, and that

when he was done the awful grandmother would do it all over again

and improve on it; and that away in the night his starving mother

would slip to him stealthily with any miserable scrap or crust she

had been able to save for him by going hungry herself,

notwithstanding she was often caught in that sort of treason and

soundly beaten for it by her husband.



No, Tom's life went along well enough, especially in summer.  He

only begged just enough to save himself, for the laws against

mendicancy were stringent, and the penalties heavy; so he put in a

good deal of his time listening to good Father Andrew's charming

old tales and legends about giants and fairies, dwarfs and genii,

and enchanted castles, and gorgeous kings and princes.  His head

grew to be full of these wonderful things, and many a night as he

lay in the dark on his scant and offensive straw, tired, hungry,

and smarting from a thrashing, he unleashed his imagination and

soon forgot his aches and pains in delicious picturings to himself

of the charmed life of a petted prince in a regal palace.  One

desire came in time to haunt him day and night:  it was to see a

real prince, with his own eyes.  He spoke of it once to some of

his Offal Court comrades; but they jeered him and scoffed him so

unmercifully that he was glad to keep his dream to himself after

that.



He often read the priest's old books and got him to explain and

enlarge upon them.  His dreamings and readings worked certain

changes in him, by-and-by.  His dream-people were so fine that he

grew to lament his shabby clothing and his dirt, and to wish to be

clean and better clad.  He went on playing in the mud just the

same, and enjoying it, too; but, instead of splashing around in

the Thames solely for the fun of it, he began to find an added

value in it because of the washings and cleansings it afforded.



Tom could always find something going on around the Maypole in

Cheapside, and at the fairs; and now and then he and the rest of

London had a chance to see a military parade when some famous

unfortunate was carried prisoner to the Tower, by land or boat.

One summer's day he saw poor Anne Askew and three men burned at

the stake in Smithfield, and heard an ex-Bishop preach a sermon to

them which did not interest him.  Yes, Tom's life was varied and

pleasant enough, on the whole.



By-and-by Tom's reading and dreaming about princely life wrought

such a strong effect upon him that he began to ACT the prince,

unconsciously.  His speech and manners became curiously

ceremonious and courtly, to the vast admiration and amusement of

his intimates.  But Tom's influence among these young people began

to grow now, day by day; and in time he came to be looked up to,

by them, with a sort of wondering awe, as a superior being.  He

seemed to know so much! and he could do and say such marvellous

things! and withal, he was so deep and wise!  Tom's remarks, and

Tom's performances, were reported by the boys to their elders; and

these, also, presently began to discuss Tom Canty, and to regard

him as a most gifted and extraordinary creature.  Full-grown

people brought their perplexities to Tom for solution, and were

often astonished at the wit and wisdom of his decisions.  In fact

he was become a hero to all who knew him except his own family--

these, only, saw nothing in him.



Privately, after a while, Tom organised a royal court!  He was the

prince; his special comrades were guards, chamberlains, equerries,

lords and ladies in waiting, and the royal family.  Daily the mock

prince was received with elaborate ceremonials borrowed by Tom

from his romantic readings; daily the great affairs of the mimic

kingdom were discussed in the royal council, and daily his mimic

highness issued decrees to his imaginary armies, navies, and

viceroyalties.



After which, he would go forth in his rags and beg a few

farthings, eat his poor crust, take his customary cuffs and abuse,

and then stretch himself upon his handful of foul straw, and

resume his empty grandeurs in his dreams.



And still his desire to look just once upon a real prince, in the

flesh, grew upon him, day by day, and week by week, until at last

it absorbed all other desires, and became the one passion of his

life.



One January day, on his usual begging tour, he tramped

despondently up and down the region round about Mincing Lane and

Little East Cheap, hour after hour, bare-footed and cold, looking

in at cook-shop windows and longing for the dreadful pork-pies and

other deadly inventions displayed there--for to him these were

dainties fit for the angels; that is, judging by the smell, they

were--for it had never been his good luck to own and eat one.

There was a cold drizzle of rain; the atmosphere was murky; it was

a melancholy day.  At night Tom reached home so wet and tired and

hungry that it was not possible for his father and grandmother to

observe his forlorn condition and not be moved--after their

fashion; wherefore they gave him a brisk cuffing at once and sent

him to bed.  For a long time his pain and hunger, and the swearing

and fighting going on in the building, kept him awake; but at last

his thoughts drifted away to far, romantic lands, and he fell

asleep in the company of jewelled and gilded princelings who live

in vast palaces, and had servants salaaming before them or flying

to execute their orders.  And then, as usual, he dreamed that HE

was a princeling himself.



All night long the glories of his royal estate shone upon him; he

moved among great lords and ladies, in a blaze of light, breathing

perfumes, drinking in delicious music, and answering the reverent

obeisances of the glittering throng as it parted to make way for

him, with here a smile, and there a nod of his princely head.



And when he awoke in the morning and looked upon the wretchedness

about him, his dream had had its usual effect--it had intensified

the sordidness of his surroundings a thousandfold.  Then came

bitterness, and heart-break, and tears.







Chapter III. Tom's meeting with the Prince.



Tom got up hungry, and sauntered hungry away, but with his

thoughts busy with the shadowy splendours of his night's dreams.

He wandered here and there in the city, hardly noticing where he

was going, or what was happening around him.  People jostled him,

and some gave him rough speech; but it was all lost on the musing

boy.  By-and-by he found himself at Temple Bar, the farthest from

home he had ever travelled in that direction.  He stopped and

considered a moment, then fell into his imaginings again, and

passed on outside the walls of London.  The Strand had ceased to

be a country-road then, and regarded itself as a street, but by a

strained construction; for, though there was a tolerably compact

row of houses on one side of it, there were only some scattered

great buildings on the other, these being palaces of rich nobles,

with ample and beautiful grounds stretching to the river--grounds

that are now closely packed with grim acres of brick and stone.



Tom discovered Charing Village presently, and rested himself at

the beautiful cross built there by a bereaved king of earlier

days; then idled down a quiet, lovely road, past the great

cardinal's stately palace, toward a far more mighty and majestic

palace beyond--Westminster.  Tom stared in glad wonder at the vast

pile of masonry, the wide-spreading wings, the frowning bastions

and turrets, the huge stone gateway, with its gilded bars and its

magnificent array of colossal granite lions, and other the signs

and symbols of English royalty.  Was the desire of his soul to be

satisfied at last?  Here, indeed, was a king's palace.  Might he

not hope to see a prince now--a prince of flesh and blood, if

Heaven were willing?



At each side of the gilded gate stood a living statue--that is to

say, an erect and stately and motionless man-at-arms, clad from

head to heel in shining steel armour.  At a respectful distance

were many country folk, and people from the city, waiting for any

chance glimpse of royalty that might offer.  Splendid carriages,

with splendid people in them and splendid servants outside, were

arriving and departing by several other noble gateways that

pierced the royal enclosure.



Poor little Tom, in his rags, approached, and was moving slowly

and timidly past the sentinels, with a beating heart and a rising

hope, when all at once he caught sight through the golden bars of

a spectacle that almost made him shout for joy.  Within was a

comely boy, tanned and brown with sturdy outdoor sports and

exercises, whose clothing was all of lovely silks and satins,

shining with jewels; at his hip a little jewelled sword and

dagger; dainty buskins on his feet, with red heels; and on his

head a jaunty crimson cap, with drooping plumes fastened with a

great sparkling gem.  Several gorgeous gentlemen stood near--his

servants, without a doubt.  Oh! he was a prince--a prince, a

living prince, a real prince--without the shadow of a question;

and the prayer of the pauper-boy's heart was answered at last.



Tom's breath came quick and short with excitement, and his eyes

grew big with wonder and delight.  Everything gave way in his mind

instantly to one desire:  that was to get close to the prince, and

have a good, devouring look at him.  Before he knew what he was

about, he had his face against the gate-bars.  The next instant

one of the soldiers snatched him rudely away, and sent him

spinning among the gaping crowd of country gawks and London

idlers.  The soldier said,--



"Mind thy manners, thou young beggar!"



The crowd jeered and laughed; but the young prince sprang to the

gate with his face flushed, and his eyes flashing with

indignation, and cried out,--



"How dar'st thou use a poor lad like that?  How dar'st thou use

the King my father's meanest subject so?  Open the gates, and let

him in!"



You should have seen that fickle crowd snatch off their hats then.

You should have heard them cheer, and shout, "Long live the Prince

of Wales!"



The soldiers presented arms with their halberds, opened the gates,

and presented again as the little Prince of Poverty passed in, in

his fluttering rags, to join hands with the Prince of Limitless

Plenty.



Edward Tudor said--



"Thou lookest tired and hungry:  thou'st been treated ill.  Come

with me."



Half a dozen attendants sprang forward to--I don't know what;

interfere, no doubt.  But they were waved aside with a right royal

gesture, and they stopped stock still where they were, like so

many statues.  Edward took Tom to a rich apartment in the palace,

which he called his cabinet.  By his command a repast was brought

such as Tom had never encountered before except in books.  The

prince, with princely delicacy and breeding, sent away the

servants, so that his humble guest might not be embarrassed by

their critical presence; then he sat near by, and asked questions

while Tom ate.



"What is thy name, lad?"



"Tom Canty, an' it please thee, sir."



"'Tis an odd one.  Where dost live?"



"In the city, please thee, sir.  Offal Court, out of Pudding

Lane."



"Offal Court!  Truly 'tis another odd one.  Hast parents?"



"Parents have I, sir, and a grand-dam likewise that is but

indifferently precious to me, God forgive me if it be offence to

say it--also twin sisters, Nan and Bet."



"Then is thy grand-dam not over kind to thee, I take it?"



"Neither to any other is she, so please your worship.  She hath a

wicked heart, and worketh evil all her days."



"Doth she mistreat thee?"



"There be times that she stayeth her hand, being asleep or

overcome with drink; but when she hath her judgment clear again,

she maketh it up to me with goodly beatings."



A fierce look came into the little prince's eyes, and he cried

out--



"What!  Beatings?"



"Oh, indeed, yes, please you, sir."



"BEATINGS!--and thou so frail and little.  Hark ye:  before the

night come, she shall hie her to the Tower.  The King my father"--



"In sooth, you forget, sir, her low degree.  The Tower is for the

great alone."



"True, indeed.  I had not thought of that.  I will consider of her

punishment.  Is thy father kind to thee?"



"Not more than Gammer Canty, sir."



"Fathers be alike, mayhap.  Mine hath not a doll's temper.  He

smiteth with a heavy hand, yet spareth me:  he spareth me not

always with his tongue, though, sooth to say.  How doth thy mother

use thee?"



"She is good, sir, and giveth me neither sorrow nor pain of any

sort.  And Nan and Bet are like to her in this."



"How old be these?"



"Fifteen, an' it please you, sir."



"The Lady Elizabeth, my sister, is fourteen, and the Lady Jane

Grey, my cousin, is of mine own age, and comely and gracious

withal; but my sister the Lady Mary, with her gloomy mien and--

Look you:  do thy sisters forbid their servants to smile, lest the

sin destroy their souls?"



"They?  Oh, dost think, sir, that THEY have servants?"



The little prince contemplated the little pauper gravely a moment,

then said--



"And prithee, why not?  Who helpeth them undress at night?  Who

attireth them when they rise?"



"None, sir.  Would'st have them take off their garment, and sleep

without--like the beasts?"



"Their garment!  Have they but one?"



"Ah, good your worship, what would they do with more?  Truly they

have not two bodies each."



"It is a quaint and marvellous thought!  Thy pardon, I had not

meant to laugh.  But thy good Nan and thy Bet shall have raiment

and lackeys enow, and that soon, too:  my cofferer shall look to

it.  No, thank me not; 'tis nothing.  Thou speakest well; thou

hast an easy grace in it.  Art learned?"



"I know not if I am or not, sir.  The good priest that is called

Father Andrew taught me, of his kindness, from his books."



"Know'st thou the Latin?"



"But scantly, sir, I doubt."



"Learn it, lad:  'tis hard only at first.  The Greek is harder;

but neither these nor any tongues else, I think, are hard to the

Lady Elizabeth and my cousin.  Thou should'st hear those damsels

at it!  But tell me of thy Offal Court.  Hast thou a pleasant life

there?"



"In truth, yes, so please you, sir, save when one is hungry.

There be Punch-and-Judy shows, and monkeys--oh such antic

creatures! and so bravely dressed!--and there be plays wherein

they that play do shout and fight till all are slain, and 'tis so

fine to see, and costeth but a farthing--albeit 'tis main hard to

get the farthing, please your worship."



"Tell me more."



"We lads of Offal Court do strive against each other with the

cudgel, like to the fashion of the 'prentices, sometimes."



The prince's eyes flashed.  Said he--



"Marry, that would not I mislike.  Tell me more."



"We strive in races, sir, to see who of us shall be fleetest."



"That would I like also.  Speak on."



"In summer, sir, we wade and swim in the canals and in the river,

and each doth duck his neighbour, and splatter him with water, and

dive and shout and tumble and--"



"'Twould be worth my father's kingdom but to enjoy it once!

Prithee go on."



"We dance and sing about the Maypole in Cheapside; we play in the

sand, each covering his neighbour up; and times we make mud

pastry--oh the lovely mud, it hath not its like for delightfulness

in all the world!--we do fairly wallow in the mud, sir, saving

your worship's presence."



"Oh, prithee, say no more, 'tis glorious!  If that I could but

clothe me in raiment like to thine, and strip my feet, and revel

in the mud once, just once, with none to rebuke me or forbid,

meseemeth I could forego the crown!"



"And if that I could clothe me once, sweet sir, as thou art clad--

just once--"



"Oho, would'st like it?  Then so shall it be.  Doff thy rags, and

don these splendours, lad!  It is a brief happiness, but will be

not less keen for that.  We will have it while we may, and change

again before any come to molest."



A few minutes later the little Prince of Wales was garlanded with

Tom's fluttering odds and ends, and the little Prince of Pauperdom

was tricked out in the gaudy plumage of royalty.  The two went and

stood side by side before a great mirror, and lo, a miracle:

there did not seem to have been any change made!  They stared at

each other, then at the glass, then at each other again.  At last

the puzzled princeling said--



"What dost thou make of this?"



"Ah, good your worship, require me not to answer.  It is not meet

that one of my degree should utter the thing."



"Then will _I_ utter it.  Thou hast the same hair, the same eyes,

the same voice and manner, the same form and stature, the same

face and countenance that I bear.  Fared we forth naked, there is

none could say which was you, and which the Prince of Wales.  And,

now that I am clothed as thou wert clothed, it seemeth I should be

able the more nearly to feel as thou didst when the brute soldier-

-Hark ye, is not this a bruise upon your hand?"



"Yes; but it is a slight thing, and your worship knoweth that the

poor man-at-arms--"



"Peace!  It was a shameful thing and a cruel!" cried the little

prince, stamping his bare foot.  "If the King--Stir not a step

till I come again!  It is a command!"



In a moment he had snatched up and put away an article of national

importance that lay upon a table, and was out at the door and

flying through the palace grounds in his bannered rags, with a hot

face and glowing eyes.  As soon as he reached the great gate, he

seized the bars, and tried to shake them, shouting--



"Open!  Unbar the gates!"



The soldier that had maltreated Tom obeyed promptly; and as the

prince burst through the portal, half-smothered with royal wrath,

the soldier fetched him a sounding box on the ear that sent him

whirling to the roadway, and said--



"Take that, thou beggar's spawn, for what thou got'st me from his

Highness!"



The crowd roared with laughter.  The prince picked himself out of

the mud, and made fiercely at the sentry, shouting--



"I am the Prince of Wales, my person is sacred; and thou shalt

hang for laying thy hand upon me!"



The soldier brought his halberd to a present-arms and said

mockingly--



"I salute your gracious Highness."  Then angrily--  "Be off, thou

crazy rubbish!"



Here the jeering crowd closed round the poor little prince, and

hustled him far down the road, hooting him, and shouting--



"Way for his Royal Highness!  Way for the Prince of Wales!"







Chapter IV. The Prince's troubles begin.



After hours of persistent pursuit and persecution, the little

prince was at last deserted by the rabble and left to himself.  As

long as he had been able to rage against the mob, and threaten it

royally, and royally utter commands that were good stuff to laugh

at, he was very entertaining; but when weariness finally forced

him to be silent, he was no longer of use to his tormentors, and

they sought amusement elsewhere.  He looked about him, now, but

could not recognise the locality.  He was within the city of

London--that was all he knew.  He moved on, aimlessly, and in a

little while the houses thinned, and the passers-by were

infrequent.  He bathed his bleeding feet in the brook which flowed

then where Farringdon Street now is; rested a few moments, then

passed on, and presently came upon a great space with only a few

scattered houses in it, and a prodigious church.  He recognised

this church.  Scaffoldings were about, everywhere, and swarms of

workmen; for it was undergoing elaborate repairs.  The prince took

heart at once--he felt that his troubles were at an end, now.  He

said to himself, "It is the ancient Grey Friars' Church, which the

king my father hath taken from the monks and given for a home for

ever for poor and forsaken children, and new-named it Christ's

Church.  Right gladly will they serve the son of him who hath done

so generously by them--and the more that that son is himself as

poor and as forlorn as any that be sheltered here this day, or

ever shall be."



He was soon in the midst of a crowd of boys who were running,

jumping, playing at ball and leap-frog, and otherwise disporting

themselves, and right noisily, too.  They were all dressed alike,

and in the fashion which in that day prevailed among serving-men

and 'prentices{1}--that is to say, each had on the crown of his

head a flat black cap about the size of a saucer, which was not

useful as a covering, it being of such scanty dimensions, neither

was it ornamental; from beneath it the hair fell, unparted, to the

middle of the forehead, and was cropped straight around; a

clerical band at the neck; a blue gown that fitted closely and

hung as low as the knees or lower; full sleeves; a broad red belt;

bright yellow stockings, gartered above the knees; low shoes with

large metal buckles.  It was a sufficiently ugly costume.



The boys stopped their play and flocked about the prince, who said

with native dignity--



"Good lads, say to your master that Edward Prince of Wales

desireth speech with him."



A great shout went up at this, and one rude fellow said--



"Marry, art thou his grace's messenger, beggar?"



The prince's face flushed with anger, and his ready hand flew to

his hip, but there was nothing there.  There was a storm of

laughter, and one boy said--



"Didst mark that?  He fancied he had a sword--belike he is the

prince himself."



This sally brought more laughter.  Poor Edward drew himself up

proudly and said--



"I am the prince; and it ill beseemeth you that feed upon the king

my father's bounty to use me so."



This was vastly enjoyed, as the laughter testified.  The youth who

had first spoken, shouted to his comrades--



"Ho, swine, slaves, pensioners of his grace's princely father,

where be your manners?  Down on your marrow bones, all of ye, and

do reverence to his kingly port and royal rags!"



With boisterous mirth they dropped upon their knees in a body and

did mock homage to their prey.  The prince spurned the nearest boy

with his foot, and said fiercely--



"Take thou that, till the morrow come and I build thee a gibbet!"



Ah, but this was not a joke--this was going beyond fun.  The

laughter ceased on the instant, and fury took its place.  A dozen

shouted--



"Hale him forth!  To the horse-pond, to the horse-pond!  Where be

the dogs?  Ho, there, Lion! ho, Fangs!"



Then followed such a thing as England had never seen before--the

sacred person of the heir to the throne rudely buffeted by

plebeian hands, and set upon and torn by dogs.



As night drew to a close that day, the prince found himself far

down in the close-built portion of the city.  His body was

bruised, his hands were bleeding, and his rags were all besmirched

with mud.  He wandered on and on, and grew more and more

bewildered, and so tired and faint he could hardly drag one foot

after the other.  He had ceased to ask questions of anyone, since

they brought him only insult instead of information.  He kept

muttering to himself, "Offal Court--that is the name; if I can but

find it before my strength is wholly spent and I drop, then am I

saved--for his people will take me to the palace and prove that I

am none of theirs, but the true prince, and I shall have mine own

again."  And now and then his mind reverted to his treatment by

those rude Christ's Hospital boys, and he said, "When I am king,

they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out

of books; for a full belly is little worth where the mind is

starved, and the heart.  I will keep this diligently in my

remembrance, that this day's lesson be not lost upon me, and my

people suffer thereby; for learning softeneth the heart and

breedeth gentleness and charity. {1}



The lights began to twinkle, it came on to rain, the wind rose,

and a raw and gusty night set in.  The houseless prince, the

homeless heir to the throne of England, still moved on, drifting

deeper into the maze of squalid alleys where the swarming hives of

poverty and misery were massed together.



Suddenly a great drunken ruffian collared him and said--



"Out to this time of night again, and hast not brought a farthing

home, I warrant me!  If it be so, an' I do not break all the bones

in thy lean body, then am I not John Canty, but some other."



The prince twisted himself loose, unconsciously brushed his

profaned shoulder, and eagerly said--



"Oh, art HIS father, truly?  Sweet heaven grant it be so--then

wilt thou fetch him away and restore me!"



"HIS father?  I know not what thou mean'st; I but know I am THY

father, as thou shalt soon have cause to--"



"Oh, jest not, palter not, delay not!--I am worn, I am wounded, I

can bear no more.  Take me to the king my father, and he will make

thee rich beyond thy wildest dreams.  Believe me, man, believe

me!--I speak no lie, but only the truth!--put forth thy hand and

save me!  I am indeed the Prince of Wales!"



The man stared down, stupefied, upon the lad, then shook his head

and muttered--



"Gone stark mad as any Tom o' Bedlam!"--then collared him once

more, and said with a coarse laugh and an oath, "But mad or no

mad, I and thy Gammer Canty will soon find where the soft places

in thy bones lie, or I'm no true man!"



With this he dragged the frantic and struggling prince away, and

disappeared up a front court followed by a delighted and noisy

swarm of human vermin.







Chapter V. Tom as a patrician.



Tom Canty, left alone in the prince's cabinet, made good use of

his opportunity.  He turned himself this way and that before the

great mirror, admiring his finery; then walked away, imitating the

prince's high-bred carriage, and still observing results in the

glass.  Next he drew the beautiful sword, and bowed, kissing the

blade, and laying it across his breast, as he had seen a noble

knight do, by way of salute to the lieutenant of the Tower, five

or six weeks before, when delivering the great lords of Norfolk

and Surrey into his hands for captivity.  Tom played with the

jewelled dagger that hung upon his thigh; he examined the costly

and exquisite ornaments of the room; he tried each of the

sumptuous chairs, and thought how proud he would be if the Offal

Court herd could only peep in and see him in his grandeur.  He

wondered if they would believe the marvellous tale he should tell

when he got home, or if they would shake their heads, and say his

overtaxed imagination had at last upset his reason.



At the end of half an hour it suddenly occurred to him that the

prince was gone a long time; then right away he began to feel

lonely; very soon he fell to listening and longing, and ceased to

toy with the pretty things about him; he grew uneasy, then

restless, then distressed.  Suppose some one should come, and

catch him in the prince's clothes, and the prince not there to

explain.  Might they not hang him at once, and inquire into his

case afterward?  He had heard that the great were prompt about

small matters.  His fear rose higher and higher; and trembling he

softly opened the door to the antechamber, resolved to fly and

seek the prince, and, through him, protection and release.  Six

gorgeous gentlemen-servants and two young pages of high degree,

clothed like butterflies, sprang to their feet and bowed low

before him.  He stepped quickly back and shut the door.  He said--



"Oh, they mock at me!  They will go and tell.  Oh! why came I here

to cast away my life?"



He walked up and down the floor, filled with nameless fears,

listening, starting at every trifling sound.  Presently the door

swung open, and a silken page said--



"The Lady Jane Grey."



The door closed and a sweet young girl, richly clad, bounded

toward him.  But she stopped suddenly, and said in a distressed

voice--



"Oh, what aileth thee, my lord?"



Tom's breath was nearly failing him; but he made shift to stammer

out--



"Ah, be merciful, thou!  In sooth I am no lord, but only poor Tom

Canty of Offal Court in the city.  Prithee let me see the prince,

and he will of his grace restore to me my rags, and let me hence

unhurt.  Oh, be thou merciful, and save me!"



By this time the boy was on his knees, and supplicating with his

eyes and uplifted hands as well as with his tongue.  The young

girl seemed horror-stricken.  She cried out--



"O my lord, on thy knees?--and to ME!"



Then she fled away in fright; and Tom, smitten with despair, sank

down, murmuring--



"There is no help, there is no hope.  Now will they come and take

me."



Whilst he lay there benumbed with terror, dreadful tidings were

speeding through the palace.  The whisper--for it was whispered

always--flew from menial to menial, from lord to lady, down all

the long corridors, from story to story, from saloon to saloon,

"The prince hath gone mad, the prince hath gone mad!"  Soon every

saloon, every marble hall, had its groups of glittering lords and

ladies, and other groups of dazzling lesser folk, talking

earnestly together in whispers, and every face had in it dismay.

Presently a splendid official came marching by these groups,

making solemn proclamation--



                    "IN THE NAME OF THE KING!



Let none list to this false and foolish matter, upon pain of

death, nor discuss the same, nor carry it abroad.  In the name of

the King!"



The whisperings ceased as suddenly as if the whisperers had been

stricken dumb.



Soon there was a general buzz along the corridors, of "The prince!

See, the prince comes!"



Poor Tom came slowly walking past the low-bowing groups, trying to

bow in return, and meekly gazing upon his strange surroundings

with bewildered and pathetic eyes.  Great nobles walked upon each

side of him, making him lean upon them, and so steady his steps.

Behind him followed the court-physicians and some servants.



Presently Tom found himself in a noble apartment of the palace and

heard the door close behind him.  Around him stood those who had

come with him.  Before him, at a little distance, reclined a very

large and very fat man, with a wide, pulpy face, and a stern

expression.  His large head was very grey; and his whiskers, which

he wore only around his face, like a frame, were grey also.  His

clothing was of rich stuff, but old, and slightly frayed in

places.  One of his swollen legs had a pillow under it, and was

wrapped in bandages.  There was silence now; and there was no head

there but was bent in reverence, except this man's.  This stern-

countenanced invalid was the dread Henry VIII.  He said--and his

face grew gentle as he began to speak--



"How now, my lord Edward, my prince?  Hast been minded to cozen

me, the good King thy father, who loveth thee, and kindly useth

thee, with a sorry jest?"



Poor Tom was listening, as well as his dazed faculties would let

him, to the beginning of this speech; but when the words 'me, the

good King' fell upon his ear, his face blanched, and he dropped as

instantly upon his knees as if a shot had brought him there.

Lifting up his hands, he exclaimed--



"Thou the KING?  Then am I undone indeed!"



This speech seemed to stun the King.  His eyes wandered from face

to face aimlessly, then rested, bewildered, upon the boy before

him.  Then he said in a tone of deep disappointment--



"Alack, I had believed the rumour disproportioned to the truth;

but I fear me 'tis not so."  He breathed a heavy sigh, and said in

a gentle voice, "Come to thy father, child:  thou art not well."



Tom was assisted to his feet, and approached the Majesty of

England, humble and trembling.  The King took the frightened face

between his hands, and gazed earnestly and lovingly into it

awhile, as if seeking some grateful sign of returning reason

there, then pressed the curly head against his breast, and patted

it tenderly.  Presently he said--



"Dost not know thy father, child?  Break not mine old heart; say

thou know'st me.  Thou DOST know me, dost thou not?"



"Yea:  thou art my dread lord the King, whom God preserve!"



"True, true--that is well--be comforted, tremble not so; there is

none here would hurt thee; there is none here but loves thee.

Thou art better now; thy ill dream passeth--is't not so?  Thou

wilt not miscall thyself again, as they say thou didst a little

while agone?"



"I pray thee of thy grace believe me, I did but speak the truth,

most dread lord; for I am the meanest among thy subjects, being a

pauper born, and 'tis by a sore mischance and accident I am here,

albeit I was therein nothing blameful.  I am but young to die, and

thou canst save me with one little word.  Oh speak it, sir!"



"Die?  Talk not so, sweet prince--peace, peace, to thy troubled

heart--thou shalt not die!"



Tom dropped upon his knees with a glad cry--



"God requite thy mercy, O my King, and save thee long to bless thy

land!"  Then springing up, he turned a joyful face toward the two

lords in waiting, and exclaimed, "Thou heard'st it!  I am not to

die:  the King hath said it!"  There was no movement, save that

all bowed with grave respect; but no one spoke.  He hesitated, a

little confused, then turned timidly toward the King, saying, "I

may go now?"



"Go?  Surely, if thou desirest.  But why not tarry yet a little?

Whither would'st go?"



Tom dropped his eyes, and answered humbly--



"Peradventure I mistook; but I did think me free, and so was I

moved to seek again the kennel where I was born and bred to

misery, yet which harboureth my mother and my sisters, and so is

home to me; whereas these pomps and splendours whereunto I am not

used--oh, please you, sir, to let me go!"



The King was silent and thoughtful a while, and his face betrayed

a growing distress and uneasiness.  Presently he said, with

something of hope in his voice--



"Perchance he is but mad upon this one strain, and hath his wits

unmarred as toucheth other matter.  God send it may be so!  We

will make trial."



Then he asked Tom a question in Latin, and Tom answered him lamely

in the same tongue.  The lords and doctors manifested their

gratification also.  The King said--



"'Twas not according to his schooling and ability, but showeth

that his mind is but diseased, not stricken fatally.  How say you,

sir?"



The physician addressed bowed low, and replied--



"It jumpeth with my own conviction, sire, that thou hast divined

aright."



The King looked pleased with this encouragement, coming as it did

from so excellent authority, and continued with good heart--



"Now mark ye all:  we will try him further."



He put a question to Tom in French.  Tom stood silent a moment,

embarrassed by having so many eyes centred upon him, then said

diffidently--



"I have no knowledge of this tongue, so please your majesty."



The King fell back upon his couch.  The attendants flew to his

assistance; but he put them aside, and said--



"Trouble me not--it is nothing but a scurvy faintness.  Raise me!

There, 'tis sufficient.  Come hither, child; there, rest thy poor

troubled head upon thy father's heart, and be at peace.  Thou'lt

soon be well:  'tis but a passing fantasy.  Fear thou not; thou'lt

soon be well."  Then he turned toward the company:  his gentle

manner changed, and baleful lightnings began to play from his

eyes.  He said--



"List ye all!  This my son is mad; but it is not permanent.  Over-

study hath done this, and somewhat too much of confinement.  Away

with his books and teachers! see ye to it.  Pleasure him with

sports, beguile him in wholesome ways, so that his health come

again."  He raised himself higher still, and went on with energy,

"He is mad; but he is my son, and England's heir; and, mad or

sane, still shall he reign!  And hear ye further, and proclaim it:

whoso speaketh of this his distemper worketh against the peace and

order of these realms, and shall to the gallows! . . . Give me to

drink--I burn:  this sorrow sappeth my strength. . . . There, take

away the cup. . . . Support me.  There, that is well.  Mad, is he?

Were he a thousand times mad, yet is he Prince of Wales, and I the

King will confirm it.  This very morrow shall he be installed in

his princely dignity in due and ancient form.  Take instant order

for it, my lord Hertford."



One of the nobles knelt at the royal couch, and said--



"The King's majesty knoweth that the Hereditary Great Marshal of

England lieth attainted in the Tower.  It were not meet that one

attainted--"



"Peace!  Insult not mine ears with his hated name.  Is this man to

live for ever?  Am I to be baulked of my will?  Is the prince to

tarry uninstalled, because, forsooth, the realm lacketh an Earl

Marshal free of treasonable taint to invest him with his honours?

No, by the splendour of God!  Warn my Parliament to bring me

Norfolk's doom before the sun rise again, else shall they answer

for it grievously!" {1}



Lord Hertford said--



"The King's will is law;" and, rising, returned to his former

place.



Gradually the wrath faded out of the old King's face, and he said-

-



"Kiss me, my prince.  There . . . what fearest thou?  Am I not thy

loving father?"



"Thou art good to me that am unworthy, O mighty and gracious lord:

that in truth I know.  But--but--it grieveth me to think of him

that is to die, and--"



"Ah, 'tis like thee, 'tis like thee!  I know thy heart is still

the same, even though thy mind hath suffered hurt, for thou wert

ever of a gentle spirit.  But this duke standeth between thee and

thine honours:  I will have another in his stead that shall bring

no taint to his great office.  Comfort thee, my prince:  trouble

not thy poor head with this matter."



"But is it not I that speed him hence, my liege?  How long might

he not live, but for me?"



"Take no thought of him, my prince:  he is not worthy.  Kiss me

once again, and go to thy trifles and amusements; for my malady

distresseth me.  I am aweary, and would rest.  Go with thine uncle

Hertford and thy people, and come again when my body is

refreshed."



Tom, heavy-hearted, was conducted from the presence, for this last

sentence was a death-blow to the hope he had cherished that now he

would be set free.  Once more he heard the buzz of low voices

exclaiming, "The prince, the prince comes!"



His spirits sank lower and lower as he moved between the

glittering files of bowing courtiers; for he recognised that he

was indeed a captive now, and might remain for ever shut up in

this gilded cage, a forlorn and friendless prince, except God in

his mercy take pity on him and set him free.



And, turn where he would, he seemed to see floating in the air the

severed head and the remembered face of the great Duke of Norfolk,

the eyes fixed on him reproachfully.



His old dreams had been so pleasant; but this reality was so

dreary!







Chapter VI. Tom receives instructions.



Tom was conducted to the principal apartment of a noble suite, and

made to sit down--a thing which he was loth to do, since there

were elderly men and men of high degree about him.  He begged them

to be seated also, but they only bowed their thanks or murmured

them, and remained standing.  He would have insisted, but his

'uncle' the Earl of Hertford whispered in his ear--



"Prithee, insist not, my lord; it is not meet that they sit in thy

presence."



The Lord St. John was announced, and after making obeisance to

Tom, he said--



"I come upon the King's errand, concerning a matter which

requireth privacy.  Will it please your royal highness to dismiss

all that attend you here, save my lord the Earl of Hertford?"



Observing that Tom did not seem to know how to proceed, Hertford

whispered him to make a sign with his hand, and not trouble

himself to speak unless he chose.  When the waiting gentlemen had

retired, Lord St. John said--



"His majesty commandeth, that for due and weighty reasons of

state, the prince's grace shall hide his infirmity in all ways

that be within his power, till it be passed and he be as he was

before.  To wit, that he shall deny to none that he is the true

prince, and heir to England's greatness; that he shall uphold his

princely dignity, and shall receive, without word or sign of

protest, that reverence and observance which unto it do appertain

of right and ancient usage; that he shall cease to speak to any of

that lowly birth and life his malady hath conjured out of the

unwholesome imaginings of o'er-wrought fancy; that he shall strive

with diligence to bring unto his memory again those faces which he

was wont to know--and where he faileth he shall hold his peace,

neither betraying by semblance of surprise or other sign that he

hath forgot; that upon occasions of state, whensoever any matter

shall perplex him as to the thing he should do or the utterance he

should make, he shall show nought of unrest to the curious that

look on, but take advice in that matter of the Lord Hertford, or

my humble self, which are commanded of the King to be upon this

service and close at call, till this commandment be dissolved.

Thus saith the King's majesty, who sendeth greeting to your royal

highness, and prayeth that God will of His mercy quickly heal you

and have you now and ever in His holy keeping."



The Lord St. John made reverence and stood aside.  Tom replied

resignedly--



"The King hath said it.  None may palter with the King's command,

or fit it to his ease, where it doth chafe, with deft evasions.

The King shall be obeyed."



Lord Hertford said--



"Touching the King's majesty's ordainment concerning books and

such like serious matters, it may peradventure please your

highness to ease your time with lightsome entertainment, lest you

go wearied to the banquet and suffer harm thereby."



Tom's face showed inquiring surprise; and a blush followed when he

saw Lord St. John's eyes bent sorrowfully upon him.  His lordship

said--



"Thy memory still wrongeth thee, and thou hast shown surprise--but

suffer it not to trouble thee, for 'tis a matter that will not

bide, but depart with thy mending malady.  My Lord of Hertford

speaketh of the city's banquet which the King's majesty did

promise, some two months flown, your highness should attend.  Thou

recallest it now?"



"It grieves me to confess it had indeed escaped me," said Tom, in

a hesitating voice; and blushed again.



At this moment the Lady Elizabeth and the Lady Jane Grey were

announced.  The two lords exchanged significant glances, and

Hertford stepped quickly toward the door.  As the young girls

passed him, he said in a low voice--



"I pray ye, ladies, seem not to observe his humours, nor show

surprise when his memory doth lapse--it will grieve you to note

how it doth stick at every trifle."



Meantime Lord St. John was saying in Tom's ear--



"Please you, sir, keep diligently in mind his majesty's desire.

Remember all thou canst--SEEM to remember all else.  Let them not

perceive that thou art much changed from thy wont, for thou

knowest how tenderly thy old play-fellows bear thee in their

hearts and how 'twould grieve them.  Art willing, sir, that I

remain?--and thine uncle?"



Tom signified assent with a gesture and a murmured word, for he

was already learning, and in his simple heart was resolved to

acquit himself as best he might, according to the King's command.



In spite of every precaution, the conversation among the young

people became a little embarrassing at times.  More than once, in

truth, Tom was near to breaking down and confessing himself

unequal to his tremendous part; but the tact of the Princess

Elizabeth saved him, or a word from one or the other of the

vigilant lords, thrown in apparently by chance, had the same happy

effect.  Once the little Lady Jane turned to Tom and dismayed him

with this question,--



"Hast paid thy duty to the Queen's majesty to-day, my lord?"



Tom hesitated, looked distressed, and was about to stammer out

something at hazard, when Lord St. John took the word and answered

for him with the easy grace of a courtier accustomed to encounter

delicate difficulties and to be ready for them--



"He hath indeed, madam, and she did greatly hearten him, as

touching his majesty's condition; is it not so, your highness?"



Tom mumbled something that stood for assent, but felt that he was

getting upon dangerous ground.  Somewhat later it was mentioned

that Tom was to study no more at present, whereupon her little

ladyship exclaimed--



"'Tis a pity, 'tis a pity!  Thou wert proceeding bravely.  But

bide thy time in patience:  it will not be for long.  Thou'lt yet

be graced with learning like thy father, and make thy tongue

master of as many languages as his, good my prince."



"My father!" cried Tom, off his guard for the moment.  "I trow he

cannot speak his own so that any but the swine that kennel in the

styes may tell his meaning; and as for learning of any sort

soever--"



He looked up and encountered a solemn warning in my Lord St.

John's eyes.



He stopped, blushed, then continued low and sadly: "Ah, my malady

persecuteth me again, and my mind wandereth.  I meant the King's

grace no irreverence."



"We know it, sir," said the Princess Elizabeth, taking her

'brother's' hand between her two palms, respectfully but

caressingly; "trouble not thyself as to that.  The fault is none

of thine, but thy distemper's."



"Thou'rt a gentle comforter, sweet lady," said Tom, gratefully,

"and my heart moveth me to thank thee for't, an' I may be so

bold."



Once the giddy little Lady Jane fired a simple Greek phrase at

Tom.  The Princess Elizabeth's quick eye saw by the serene

blankness of the target's front that the shaft was overshot; so

she tranquilly delivered a return volley of sounding Greek on

Tom's behalf, and then straightway changed the talk to other

matters.



Time wore on pleasantly, and likewise smoothly, on the whole.

Snags and sandbars grew less and less frequent, and Tom grew more

and more at his ease, seeing that all were so lovingly bent upon

helping him and overlooking his mistakes.  When it came out that

the little ladies were to accompany him to the Lord Mayor's

banquet in the evening, his heart gave a bound of relief and

delight, for he felt that he should not be friendless, now, among

that multitude of strangers; whereas, an hour earlier, the idea of

their going with him would have been an insupportable terror to

him.



Tom's guardian angels, the two lords, had had less comfort in the

interview than the other parties to it.  They felt much as if they

were piloting a great ship through a dangerous channel; they were

on the alert constantly, and found their office no child's play.

Wherefore, at last, when the ladies' visit was drawing to a close

and the Lord Guilford Dudley was announced, they not only felt

that their charge had been sufficiently taxed for the present, but

also that they themselves were not in the best condition to take

their ship back and make their anxious voyage all over again.  So

they respectfully advised Tom to excuse himself, which he was very

glad to do, although a slight shade of disappointment might have

been observed upon my Lady Jane's face when she heard the splendid

stripling denied admittance.



There was a pause now, a sort of waiting silence which Tom could

not understand.  He glanced at Lord Hertford, who gave him a sign-

-but he failed to understand that also.  The ready Elizabeth came

to the rescue with her usual easy grace.  She made reverence and

said--



"Have we leave of the prince's grace my brother to go?"



Tom said--



"Indeed your ladyships can have whatsoever of me they will, for

the asking; yet would I rather give them any other thing that in

my poor power lieth, than leave to take the light and blessing of

their presence hence.  Give ye good den, and God be with ye!"

Then he smiled inwardly at the thought, "'Tis not for nought I

have dwelt but among princes in my reading, and taught my tongue

some slight trick of their broidered and gracious speech withal!"



When the illustrious maidens were gone, Tom turned wearily to his

keepers and said--



"May it please your lordships to grant me leave to go into some

corner and rest me?"



Lord Hertford said--



"So please your highness, it is for you to command, it is for us

to obey.  That thou should'st rest is indeed a needful thing,

since thou must journey to the city presently."



He touched a bell, and a page appeared, who was ordered to desire

the presence of Sir William Herbert.  This gentleman came

straightway, and conducted Tom to an inner apartment.  Tom's first

movement there was to reach for a cup of water; but a silk-and-

velvet servitor seized it, dropped upon one knee, and offered it

to him on a golden salver.



Next the tired captive sat down and was going to take off his

buskins, timidly asking leave with his eye, but another silk-and-

velvet discomforter went down upon his knees and took the office

from him.  He made two or three further efforts to help himself,

but being promptly forestalled each time, he finally gave up, with

a sigh of resignation and a murmured "Beshrew me, but I marvel

they do not require to breathe for me also!"  Slippered, and

wrapped in a sumptuous robe, he laid himself down at last to rest,

but not to sleep, for his head was too full of thoughts and the

room too full of people.  He could not dismiss the former, so they

stayed; he did not know enough to dismiss the latter, so they

stayed also, to his vast regret--and theirs.





Tom's departure had left his two noble guardians alone.  They

mused a while, with much head-shaking and walking the floor, then

Lord St. John said--



"Plainly, what dost thou think?"



"Plainly, then, this.  The King is near his end; my nephew is mad-

-mad will mount the throne, and mad remain.  God protect England,

since she will need it!"



"Verily it promiseth so, indeed.  But . . . have you no misgivings

as to . . . as to . . ."



The speaker hesitated, and finally stopped.  He evidently felt

that he was upon delicate ground.  Lord Hertford stopped before

him, looked into his face with a clear, frank eye, and said--



"Speak on--there is none to hear but me.  Misgivings as to what?"



"I am full loth to word the thing that is in my mind, and thou so

near to him in blood, my lord.  But craving pardon if I do offend,

seemeth it not strange that madness could so change his port and

manner?--not but that his port and speech are princely still, but

that they DIFFER, in one unweighty trifle or another, from what

his custom was aforetime.  Seemeth it not strange that madness

should filch from his memory his father's very lineaments; the

customs and observances that are his due from such as be about

him; and, leaving him his Latin, strip him of his Greek and

French?  My lord, be not offended, but ease my mind of its

disquiet and receive my grateful thanks.  It haunteth me, his

saying he was not the prince, and so--"



"Peace, my lord, thou utterest treason!  Hast forgot the King's

command?  Remember I am party to thy crime if I but listen."



St. John paled, and hastened to say--



"I was in fault, I do confess it.  Betray me not, grant me this

grace out of thy courtesy, and I will neither think nor speak of

this thing more.  Deal not hardly with me, sir, else am I ruined."



"I am content, my lord.  So thou offend not again, here or in the

ears of others, it shall be as though thou hadst not spoken.  But

thou need'st not have misgivings.  He is my sister's son; are not

his voice, his face, his form, familiar to me from his cradle?

Madness can do all the odd conflicting things thou seest in him,

and more.  Dost not recall how that the old Baron Marley, being

mad, forgot the favour of his own countenance that he had known

for sixty years, and held it was another's; nay, even claimed he

was the son of Mary Magdalene, and that his head was made of

Spanish glass; and, sooth to say, he suffered none to touch it,

lest by mischance some heedless hand might shiver it?  Give thy

misgivings easement, good my lord.  This is the very prince--I

know him well--and soon will be thy king; it may advantage thee to

bear this in mind, and more dwell upon it than the other."



After some further talk, in which the Lord St. John covered up his

mistake as well as he could by repeated protests that his faith

was thoroughly grounded now, and could not be assailed by doubts

again, the Lord Hertford relieved his fellow-keeper, and sat down

to keep watch and ward alone.  He was soon deep in meditation, and

evidently the longer he thought, the more he was bothered.  By-

and-by he began to pace the floor and mutter.



"Tush, he MUST be the prince!  Will any he in all the land

maintain there can be two, not of one blood and birth, so

marvellously twinned?  And even were it so, 'twere yet a stranger

miracle that chance should cast the one into the other's place.

Nay, 'tis folly, folly, folly!"



Presently he said--



"Now were he impostor and called himself prince, look you THAT

would be natural; that would be reasonable.  But lived ever an

impostor yet, who, being called prince by the king, prince by the

court, prince by all, DENIED his dignity and pleaded against his

exaltation?  NO!  By the soul of St. Swithin, no!  This is the

true prince, gone mad!"







Chapter VII. Tom's first royal dinner.



Somewhat after one in the afternoon, Tom resignedly underwent the

ordeal of being dressed for dinner.  He found himself as finely

clothed as before, but everything different, everything changed,

from his ruff to his stockings.  He was presently conducted with

much state to a spacious and ornate apartment, where a table was

already set for one.  Its furniture was all of massy gold, and

beautified with designs which well-nigh made it priceless, since

they were the work of Benvenuto.  The room was half-filled with

noble servitors.  A chaplain said grace, and Tom was about to fall

to, for hunger had long been constitutional with him, but was

interrupted by my lord the Earl of Berkeley, who fastened a napkin

about his neck; for the great post of Diaperers to the Prince of

Wales was hereditary in this nobleman's family.  Tom's cupbearer

was present, and forestalled all his attempts to help himself to

wine.  The Taster to his highness the Prince of Wales was there

also, prepared to taste any suspicious dish upon requirement, and

run the risk of being poisoned.  He was only an ornamental

appendage at this time, and was seldom called upon to exercise his

function; but there had been times, not many generations past,

when the office of taster had its perils, and was not a grandeur

to be desired.  Why they did not use a dog or a plumber seems

strange; but all the ways of royalty are strange.  My Lord d'Arcy,

First Groom of the Chamber, was there, to do goodness knows what;

but there he was--let that suffice.  The Lord Chief Butler was

there, and stood behind Tom's chair, overseeing the solemnities,

under command of the Lord Great Steward and the Lord Head Cook,

who stood near.  Tom had three hundred and eighty-four servants

beside these; but they were not all in that room, of course, nor

the quarter of them; neither was Tom aware yet that they existed.



All those that were present had been well drilled within the hour

to remember that the prince was temporarily out of his head, and

to be careful to show no surprise at his vagaries.  These

'vagaries' were soon on exhibition before them; but they only

moved their compassion and their sorrow, not their mirth.  It was

a heavy affliction to them to see the beloved prince so stricken.



Poor Tom ate with his fingers mainly; but no one smiled at it, or

even seemed to observe it.  He inspected his napkin curiously, and

with deep interest, for it was of a very dainty and beautiful

fabric, then said with simplicity--



"Prithee, take it away, lest in mine unheedfulness it be soiled."



The Hereditary Diaperer took it away with reverent manner, and

without word or protest of any sort.



Tom examined the turnips and the lettuce with interest, and asked

what they were, and if they were to be eaten; for it was only

recently that men had begun to raise these things in England in

place of importing them as luxuries from Holland. {1}  His

question was answered with grave respect, and no surprise

manifested.  When he had finished his dessert, he filled his

pockets with nuts; but nobody appeared to be aware of it, or

disturbed by it.  But the next moment he was himself disturbed by

it, and showed discomposure; for this was the only service he had

been permitted to do with his own hands during the meal, and he

did not doubt that he had done a most improper and unprincely

thing.  At that moment the muscles of his nose began to twitch,

and the end of that organ to lift and wrinkle.  This continued,

and Tom began to evince a growing distress.  He looked

appealingly, first at one and then another of the lords about him,

and tears came into his eyes.  They sprang forward with dismay in

their faces, and begged to know his trouble.  Tom said with

genuine anguish--



"I crave your indulgence:  my nose itcheth cruelly.  What is the

custom and usage in this emergence?  Prithee, speed, for 'tis but

a little time that I can bear it."



None smiled; but all were sore perplexed, and looked one to the

other in deep tribulation for counsel.  But behold, here was a

dead wall, and nothing in English history to tell how to get over

it.  The Master of Ceremonies was not present:  there was no one

who felt safe to venture upon this uncharted sea, or risk the

attempt to solve this solemn problem.  Alas! there was no

Hereditary Scratcher.  Meantime the tears had overflowed their

banks, and begun to trickle down Tom's cheeks.  His twitching nose

was pleading more urgently than ever for relief.  At last nature

broke down the barriers of etiquette:  Tom lifted up an inward

prayer for pardon if he was doing wrong, and brought relief to the

burdened hearts of his court by scratching his nose himself.



His meal being ended, a lord came and held before him a broad,

shallow, golden dish with fragrant rosewater in it, to cleanse his

mouth and fingers with; and my lord the Hereditary Diaperer stood

by with a napkin for his use.  Tom gazed at the dish a puzzled

moment or two, then raised it to his lips, and gravely took a

draught.  Then he returned it to the waiting lord, and said--



"Nay, it likes me not, my lord:  it hath a pretty flavour, but it

wanteth strength."



This new eccentricity of the prince's ruined mind made all the

hearts about him ache; but the sad sight moved none to merriment.



Tom's next unconscious blunder was to get up and leave the table

just when the chaplain had taken his stand behind his chair, and

with uplifted hands, and closed, uplifted eyes, was in the act of

beginning the blessing.  Still nobody seemed to perceive that the

prince had done a thing unusual.



By his own request our small friend was now conducted to his

private cabinet, and left there alone to his own devices.  Hanging

upon hooks in the oaken wainscoting were the several pieces of a

suit of shining steel armour, covered all over with beautiful

designs exquisitely inlaid in gold.  This martial panoply belonged

to the true prince--a recent present from Madam Parr the Queen.

Tom put on the greaves, the gauntlets, the plumed helmet, and such

other pieces as he could don without assistance, and for a while

was minded to call for help and complete the matter, but bethought

him of the nuts he had brought away from dinner, and the joy it

would be to eat them with no crowd to eye him, and no Grand

Hereditaries to pester him with undesired services; so he restored

the pretty things to their several places, and soon was cracking

nuts, and feeling almost naturally happy for the first time since

God for his sins had made him a prince.  When the nuts were all

gone, he stumbled upon some inviting books in a closet, among them

one about the etiquette of the English court.  This was a prize.

He lay down upon a sumptuous divan, and proceeded to instruct

himself with honest zeal.  Let us leave him there for the present.







Chapter VIII. The question of the Seal.



About five o'clock Henry VIII. awoke out of an unrefreshing nap,

and muttered to himself, "Troublous dreams, troublous dreams!

Mine end is now at hand:  so say these warnings, and my failing

pulses do confirm it."  Presently a wicked light flamed up in his

eye, and he muttered, "Yet will not I die till HE go before."



His attendants perceiving that he was awake, one of them asked his

pleasure concerning the Lord Chancellor, who was waiting without.



"Admit him, admit him!" exclaimed the King eagerly.



The Lord Chancellor entered, and knelt by the King's couch,

saying--



"I have given order, and, according to the King's command, the

peers of the realm, in their robes, do now stand at the bar of the

House, where, having confirmed the Duke of Norfolk's doom, they

humbly wait his majesty's further pleasure in the matter."



The King's face lit up with a fierce joy.  Said he--



"Lift me up!  In mine own person will I go before my Parliament,

and with mine own hand will I seal the warrant that rids me of--"



His voice failed; an ashen pallor swept the flush from his cheeks;

and the attendants eased him back upon his pillows, and hurriedly

assisted him with restoratives.  Presently he said sorrowfully--



"Alack, how have I longed for this sweet hour! and lo, too late it

cometh, and I am robbed of this so coveted chance.  But speed ye,

speed ye! let others do this happy office sith 'tis denied to me.

I put my Great Seal in commission:  choose thou the lords that

shall compose it, and get ye to your work.  Speed ye, man!  Before

the sun shall rise and set again, bring me his head that I may see

it."



"According to the King's command, so shall it be.  Will't please

your majesty to order that the Seal be now restored to me, so that

I may forth upon the business?"



"The Seal?  Who keepeth the Seal but thou?"



"Please your majesty, you did take it from me two days since,

saying it should no more do its office till your own royal hand

should use it upon the Duke of Norfolk's warrant."



"Why, so in sooth I did:  I do remember . . . What did I with it?

. . . I am very feeble . . . So oft these days doth my memory play

the traitor with me . . . 'Tis strange, strange--"



The King dropped into inarticulate mumblings, shaking his grey

head weakly from time to time, and gropingly trying to recollect

what he had done with the Seal.  At last my Lord Hertford ventured

to kneel and offer information--



"Sire, if that I may be so bold, here be several that do remember

with me how that you gave the Great Seal into the hands of his

highness the Prince of Wales to keep against the day that--"



"True, most true!" interrupted the King.  "Fetch it!  Go:  time

flieth!"



Lord Hertford flew to Tom, but returned to the King before very

long, troubled and empty-handed.  He delivered himself to this

effect--



"It grieveth me, my lord the King, to bear so heavy and unwelcome

tidings; but it is the will of God that the prince's affliction

abideth still, and he cannot recall to mind that he received the

Seal.  So came I quickly to report, thinking it were waste of

precious time, and little worth withal, that any should attempt to

search the long array of chambers and saloons that belong unto his

royal high--"



A groan from the King interrupted the lord at this point.  After a

little while his majesty said, with a deep sadness in his tone--



"Trouble him no more, poor child.  The hand of God lieth heavy

upon him, and my heart goeth out in loving compassion for him, and

sorrow that I may not bear his burden on mine old trouble-weighted

shoulders, and so bring him peace."



He closed his eyes, fell to mumbling, and presently was silent.

After a time he opened his eyes again, and gazed vacantly around

until his glance rested upon the kneeling Lord Chancellor.

Instantly his face flushed with wrath--



"What, thou here yet!  By the glory of God, an' thou gettest not

about that traitor's business, thy mitre shall have holiday the

morrow for lack of a head to grace withal!"



The trembling Chancellor answered--



"Good your Majesty, I cry you mercy!  I but waited for the Seal."



"Man, hast lost thy wits?  The small Seal which aforetime I was

wont to take with me abroad lieth in my treasury.  And, since the

Great Seal hath flown away, shall not it suffice?  Hast lost thy

wits?  Begone!  And hark ye--come no more till thou do bring his

head."



The poor Chancellor was not long in removing himself from this

dangerous vicinity; nor did the commission waste time in giving

the royal assent to the work of the slavish Parliament, and

appointing the morrow for the beheading of the premier peer of

England, the luckless Duke of Norfolk. {1}







Chapter IX. The river pageant.



At nine in the evening the whole vast river-front of the palace

was blazing with light.  The river itself, as far as the eye could

reach citywards, was so thickly covered with watermen's boats and

with pleasure-barges, all fringed with coloured lanterns, and

gently agitated by the waves, that it resembled a glowing and

limitless garden of flowers stirred to soft motion by summer

winds.  The grand terrace of stone steps leading down to the

water, spacious enough to mass the army of a German principality

upon, was a picture to see, with its ranks of royal halberdiers in

polished armour, and its troops of brilliantly costumed servitors

flitting up and down, and to and fro, in the hurry of preparation.



Presently a command was given, and immediately all living

creatures vanished from the steps.  Now the air was heavy with the

hush of suspense and expectancy.  As far as one's vision could

carry, he might see the myriads of people in the boats rise up,

and shade their eyes from the glare of lanterns and torches, and

gaze toward the palace.



A file of forty or fifty state barges drew up to the steps.  They

were richly gilt, and their lofty prows and sterns were

elaborately carved.  Some of them were decorated with banners and

streamers; some with cloth-of-gold and arras embroidered with

coats-of-arms; others with silken flags that had numberless little

silver bells fastened to them, which shook out tiny showers of

joyous music whenever the breezes fluttered them; others of yet

higher pretensions, since they belonged to nobles in the prince's

immediate service, had their sides picturesquely fenced with

shields gorgeously emblazoned with armorial bearings.  Each state

barge was towed by a tender.  Besides the rowers, these tenders

carried each a number of men-at-arms in glossy helmet and

breastplate, and a company of musicians.



The advance-guard of the expected procession now appeared in the

great gateway, a troop of halberdiers.  'They were dressed in

striped hose of black and tawny, velvet caps graced at the sides

with silver roses, and doublets of murrey and blue cloth,

embroidered on the front and back with the three feathers, the

prince's blazon, woven in gold.  Their halberd staves were covered

with crimson velvet, fastened with gilt nails, and ornamented with

gold tassels.  Filing off on the right and left, they formed two

long lines, extending from the gateway of the palace to the

water's edge.  A thick rayed cloth or carpet was then unfolded,

and laid down between them by attendants in the gold-and-crimson

liveries of the prince.  This done, a flourish of trumpets

resounded from within.  A lively prelude arose from the musicians

on the water; and two ushers with white wands marched with a slow

and stately pace from the portal.  They were followed by an

officer bearing the civic mace, after whom came another carrying

the city's sword; then several sergeants of the city guard, in

their full accoutrements, and with badges on their sleeves; then

the Garter King-at-arms, in his tabard; then several Knights of

the Bath, each with a white lace on his sleeve; then their

esquires; then the judges, in their robes of scarlet and coifs;

then the Lord High Chancellor of England, in a robe of scarlet,

open before, and purfled with minever; then a deputation of

aldermen, in their scarlet cloaks; and then the heads of the

different civic companies, in their robes of state.  Now came

twelve French gentlemen, in splendid habiliments, consisting of

pourpoints of white damask barred with gold, short mantles of

crimson velvet lined with violet taffeta, and carnation coloured

hauts-de-chausses, and took their way down the steps.  They were

of the suite of the French ambassador, and were followed by twelve

cavaliers of the suite of the Spanish ambassador, clothed in black

velvet, unrelieved by any ornament.  Following these came several

great English nobles with their attendants.'



There was a flourish of trumpets within; and the Prince's uncle,

the future great Duke of Somerset, emerged from the gateway,

arrayed in a 'doublet of black cloth-of-gold, and a cloak of

crimson satin flowered with gold, and ribanded with nets of

silver.'  He turned, doffed his plumed cap, bent his body in a low

reverence, and began to step backward, bowing at each step.  A

prolonged trumpet-blast followed, and a proclamation, "Way for the

high and mighty the Lord Edward, Prince of Wales!"  High aloft on

the palace walls a long line of red tongues of flame leapt forth

with a thunder-crash; the massed world on the river burst into a

mighty roar of welcome; and Tom Canty, the cause and hero of it

all, stepped into view and slightly bowed his princely head.



He was 'magnificently habited in a doublet of white satin, with a

front-piece of purple cloth-of-tissue, powdered with diamonds, and

edged with ermine.  Over this he wore a mantle of white cloth-of-

gold, pounced with the triple-feathered crest, lined with blue

satin, set with pearls and precious stones, and fastened with a

clasp of brilliants.  About his neck hung the order of the Garter,

and several princely foreign orders;' and wherever light fell upon

him jewels responded with a blinding flash.  O Tom Canty, born in

a hovel, bred in the gutters of London, familiar with rags and

dirt and misery, what a spectacle is this!







Chapter X. The Prince in the toils.



We left John Canty dragging the rightful prince into Offal Court,

with a noisy and delighted mob at his heels.  There was but one

person in it who offered a pleading word for the captive, and he

was not heeded; he was hardly even heard, so great was the

turmoil.  The Prince continued to struggle for freedom, and to

rage against the treatment he was suffering, until John Canty lost

what little patience was left in him, and raised his oaken cudgel

in a sudden fury over the Prince's head.  The single pleader for

the lad sprang to stop the man's arm, and the blow descended upon

his own wrist.  Canty roared out--



"Thou'lt meddle, wilt thou?  Then have thy reward."



His cudgel crashed down upon the meddler's head:  there was a

groan, a dim form sank to the ground among the feet of the crowd,

and the next moment it lay there in the dark alone.  The mob

pressed on, their enjoyment nothing disturbed by this episode.



Presently the Prince found himself in John Canty's abode, with the

door closed against the outsiders.  By the vague light of a tallow

candle which was thrust into a bottle, he made out the main

features of the loathsome den, and also the occupants of it.  Two

frowsy girls and a middle-aged woman cowered against the wall in

one corner, with the aspect of animals habituated to harsh usage,

and expecting and dreading it now.  From another corner stole a

withered hag with streaming grey hair and malignant eyes.  John

Canty said to this one--



"Tarry!  There's fine mummeries here.  Mar them not till thou'st

enjoyed them:  then let thy hand be heavy as thou wilt.  Stand

forth, lad.  Now say thy foolery again, an thou'st not forgot it.

Name thy name.  Who art thou?"



The insulted blood mounted to the little prince's cheek once more,

and he lifted a steady and indignant gaze to the man's face and

said--



"'Tis but ill-breeding in such as thou to command me to speak.  I

tell thee now, as I told thee before, I am Edward, Prince of

Wales, and none other."



The stunning surprise of this reply nailed the hag's feet to the

floor where she stood, and almost took her breath.  She stared at

the Prince in stupid amazement, which so amused her ruffianly son,

that he burst into a roar of laughter.  But the effect upon Tom

Canty's mother and sisters was different.  Their dread of bodily

injury gave way at once to distress of a different sort.  They ran

forward with woe and dismay in their faces, exclaiming--



"Oh, poor Tom, poor lad!"



The mother fell on her knees before the Prince, put her hands upon

his shoulders, and gazed yearningly into his face through her

rising tears.  Then she said--



"Oh, my poor boy!  Thy foolish reading hath wrought its woeful

work at last, and ta'en thy wit away.  Ah! why did'st thou cleave

to it when I so warned thee 'gainst it?  Thou'st broke thy

mother's heart."



The Prince looked into her face, and said gently--



"Thy son is well, and hath not lost his wits, good dame.  Comfort

thee:  let me to the palace where he is, and straightway will the

King my father restore him to thee."



"The King thy father!  Oh, my child! unsay these words that be

freighted with death for thee, and ruin for all that be near to

thee.  Shake of this gruesome dream.  Call back thy poor wandering

memory.  Look upon me.  Am not I thy mother that bore thee, and

loveth thee?"



The Prince shook his head and reluctantly said--



"God knoweth I am loth to grieve thy heart; but truly have I never

looked upon thy face before."



The woman sank back to a sitting posture on the floor, and,

covering her eyes with her hands, gave way to heart-broken sobs

and wailings.



"Let the show go on!" shouted Canty.  "What, Nan!--what, Bet!

mannerless wenches! will ye stand in the Prince's presence?  Upon

your knees, ye pauper scum, and do him reverence!"



He followed this with another horse-laugh.  The girls began to

plead timidly for their brother; and Nan said--



"An thou wilt but let him to bed, father, rest and sleep will heal

his madness:  prithee, do."



"Do, father," said Bet; "he is more worn than is his wont.  To-

morrow will he be himself again, and will beg with diligence, and

come not empty home again."



This remark sobered the father's joviality, and brought his mind

to business.  He turned angrily upon the Prince, and said--



"The morrow must we pay two pennies to him that owns this hole;

two pennies, mark ye--all this money for a half-year's rent, else

out of this we go.  Show what thou'st gathered with thy lazy

begging."



The Prince said--



"Offend me not with thy sordid matters.  I tell thee again I am

the King's son."



A sounding blow upon the Prince's shoulder from Canty's broad palm

sent him staggering into goodwife Canty's arms, who clasped him to

her breast, and sheltered him from a pelting rain of cuffs and

slaps by interposing her own person.  The frightened girls

retreated to their corner; but the grandmother stepped eagerly

forward to assist her son.  The Prince sprang away from Mrs.

Canty, exclaiming--



"Thou shalt not suffer for me, madam.  Let these swine do their

will upon me alone."



This speech infuriated the swine to such a degree that they set

about their work without waste of time.  Between them they

belaboured the boy right soundly, and then gave the girls and

their mother a beating for showing sympathy for the victim.



"Now," said Canty, "to bed, all of ye.  The entertainment has

tired me."



The light was put out, and the family retired.  As soon as the

snorings of the head of the house and his mother showed that they

were asleep, the young girls crept to where the Prince lay, and

covered him tenderly from the cold with straw and rags; and their

mother crept to him also, and stroked his hair, and cried over

him, whispering broken words of comfort and compassion in his ear

the while.  She had saved a morsel for him to eat, also; but the

boy's pains had swept away all appetite--at least for black and

tasteless crusts.  He was touched by her brave and costly defence

of him, and by her commiseration; and he thanked her in very noble

and princely words, and begged her to go to her sleep and try to

forget her sorrows.  And he added that the King his father would

not let her loyal kindness and devotion go unrewarded.  This

return to his 'madness' broke her heart anew, and she strained him

to her breast again and again, and then went back, drowned in

tears, to her bed.



As she lay thinking and mourning, the suggestion began to creep

into her mind that there was an undefinable something about this

boy that was lacking in Tom Canty, mad or sane.  She could not

describe it, she could not tell just what it was, and yet her

sharp mother-instinct seemed to detect it and perceive it.  What

if the boy were really not her son, after all?  Oh, absurd!  She

almost smiled at the idea, spite of her griefs and troubles.  No

matter, she found that it was an idea that would not 'down,' but

persisted in haunting her.  It pursued her, it harassed her, it

clung to her, and refused to be put away or ignored.  At last she

perceived that there was not going to be any peace for her until

she should devise a test that should prove, clearly and without

question, whether this lad was her son or not, and so banish these

wearing and worrying doubts.  Ah, yes, this was plainly the right

way out of the difficulty; therefore she set her wits to work at

once to contrive that test.  But it was an easier thing to propose

than to accomplish.  She turned over in her mind one promising

test after another, but was obliged to relinquish them all--none

of them were absolutely sure, absolutely perfect; and an imperfect

one could not satisfy her.  Evidently she was racking her head in

vain--it seemed manifest that she must give the matter up.  While

this depressing thought was passing through her mind, her ear

caught the regular breathing of the boy, and she knew he had

fallen asleep.  And while she listened, the measured breathing was

broken by a soft, startled cry, such as one utters in a troubled

dream.  This chance occurrence furnished her instantly with a plan

worth all her laboured tests combined.  She at once set herself

feverishly, but noiselessly, to work to relight her candle,

muttering to herself, "Had I but seen him THEN, I should have

known!  Since that day, when he was little, that the powder burst

in his face, he hath never been startled of a sudden out of his

dreams or out of his thinkings, but he hath cast his hand before

his eyes, even as he did that day; and not as others would do it,

with the palm inward, but always with the palm turned outward--I

have seen it a hundred times, and it hath never varied nor ever

failed.  Yes, I shall soon know, now!"



By this time she had crept to the slumbering boy's side, with the

candle, shaded, in her hand.  She bent heedfully and warily over

him, scarcely breathing in her suppressed excitement, and suddenly

flashed the light in his face and struck the floor by his ear with

her knuckles.  The sleeper's eyes sprang wide open, and he cast a

startled stare about him--but he made no special movement with his

hands.



The poor woman was smitten almost helpless with surprise and

grief; but she contrived to hide her emotions, and to soothe the

boy to sleep again; then she crept apart and communed miserably

with herself upon the disastrous result of her experiment.  She

tried to believe that her Tom's madness had banished this habitual

gesture of his; but she could not do it.  "No," she said, "his

HANDS are not mad; they could not unlearn so old a habit in so

brief a time.  Oh, this is a heavy day for me!"



Still, hope was as stubborn now as doubt had been before; she

could not bring herself to accept the verdict of the test; she

must try the thing again--the failure must have been only an

accident; so she startled the boy out of his sleep a second and a

third time, at intervals--with the same result which had marked

the first test; then she dragged herself to bed, and fell

sorrowfully asleep, saying, "But I cannot give him up--oh no, I

cannot, I cannot--he MUST be my boy!"



The poor mother's interruptions having ceased, and the Prince's

pains having gradually lost their power to disturb him, utter

weariness at last sealed his eyes in a profound and restful sleep.

Hour after hour slipped away, and still he slept like the dead.

Thus four or five hours passed.  Then his stupor began to lighten.

Presently, while half asleep and half awake, he murmured--



"Sir William!"



After a moment--



"Ho, Sir William Herbert!  Hie thee hither, and list to the

strangest dream that ever . . . Sir William! dost hear?  Man, I

did think me changed to a pauper, and . . . Ho there!  Guards!

Sir William!  What! is there no groom of the chamber in waiting?

Alack! it shall go hard with--"



"What aileth thee?" asked a whisper near him.  "Who art thou

calling?"



"Sir William Herbert.  Who art thou?"



"I?  Who should I be, but thy sister Nan?  Oh, Tom, I had forgot!

Thou'rt mad yet--poor lad, thou'rt mad yet:  would I had never

woke to know it again!  But prithee master thy tongue, lest we be

all beaten till we die!"



The startled Prince sprang partly up, but a sharp reminder from

his stiffened bruises brought him to himself, and he sank back

among his foul straw with a moan and the ejaculation--



"Alas! it was no dream, then!"



In a moment all the heavy sorrow and misery which sleep had

banished were upon him again, and he realised that he was no

longer a petted prince in a palace, with the adoring eyes of a

nation upon him, but a pauper, an outcast, clothed in rags,

prisoner in a den fit only for beasts, and consorting with beggars

and thieves.



In the midst of his grief he began to be conscious of hilarious

noises and shoutings, apparently but a block or two away.  The

next moment there were several sharp raps at the door; John Canty

ceased from snoring and said--



"Who knocketh?  What wilt thou?"



A voice answered--



"Know'st thou who it was thou laid thy cudgel on?"



"No.  Neither know I, nor care."



"Belike thou'lt change thy note eftsoons.  An thou would save thy

neck, nothing but flight may stead thee.  The man is this moment

delivering up the ghost.  'Tis the priest, Father Andrew!"



"God-a-mercy!" exclaimed Canty.  He roused his family, and

hoarsely commanded, "Up with ye all and fly--or bide where ye are

and perish!"



Scarcely five minutes later the Canty household were in the street

and flying for their lives.  John Canty held the Prince by the

wrist, and hurried him along the dark way, giving him this caution

in a low voice--



"Mind thy tongue, thou mad fool, and speak not our name.  I will

choose me a new name, speedily, to throw the law's dogs off the

scent.  Mind thy tongue, I tell thee!"



He growled these words to the rest of the family--



"If it so chance that we be separated, let each make for London

Bridge; whoso findeth himself as far as the last linen-draper's

shop on the bridge, let him tarry there till the others be come,

then will we flee into Southwark together."



At this moment the party burst suddenly out of darkness into

light; and not only into light, but into the midst of a multitude

of singing, dancing, and shouting people, massed together on the

river frontage.  There was a line of bonfires stretching as far as

one could see, up and down the Thames; London Bridge was

illuminated; Southwark Bridge likewise; the entire river was aglow

with the flash and sheen of coloured lights; and constant

explosions of fireworks filled the skies with an intricate

commingling of shooting splendours and a thick rain of dazzling

sparks that almost turned night into day; everywhere were crowds

of revellers; all London seemed to be at large.



John Canty delivered himself of a furious curse and commanded a

retreat; but it was too late.  He and his tribe were swallowed up

in that swarming hive of humanity, and hopelessly separated from

each other in an instant.  We are not considering that the Prince

was one of his tribe; Canty still kept his grip upon him.  The

Prince's heart was beating high with hopes of escape, now.  A

burly waterman, considerably exalted with liquor, found himself

rudely shoved by Canty in his efforts to plough through the crowd;

he laid his great hand on Canty's shoulder and said--



"Nay, whither so fast, friend?  Dost canker thy soul with sordid

business when all that be leal men and true make holiday?"



"Mine affairs are mine own, they concern thee not," answered

Canty, roughly; "take away thy hand and let me pass."



"Sith that is thy humour, thou'lt NOT pass, till thou'st drunk to

the Prince of Wales, I tell thee that," said the waterman, barring

the way resolutely.



"Give me the cup, then, and make speed, make speed!"



Other revellers were interested by this time.  They cried out--



"The loving-cup, the loving-cup! make the sour knave drink the

loving-cup, else will we feed him to the fishes."



So a huge loving-cup was brought; the waterman, grasping it by one

of its handles, and with the other hand bearing up the end of an

imaginary napkin, presented it in due and ancient form to Canty,

who had to grasp the opposite handle with one of his hands and

take off the lid with the other, according to ancient custom. {1}

This left the Prince hand-free for a second, of course.  He wasted

no time, but dived among the forest of legs about him and

disappeared.  In another moment he could not have been harder to

find, under that tossing sea of life, if its billows had been the

Atlantic's and he a lost sixpence.



He very soon realised this fact, and straightway busied himself

about his own affairs without further thought of John Canty.  He

quickly realised another thing, too.  To wit, that a spurious

Prince of Wales was being feasted by the city in his stead.  He

easily concluded that the pauper lad, Tom Canty, had deliberately

taken advantage of his stupendous opportunity and become a

usurper.



Therefore there was but one course to pursue--find his way to the

Guildhall, make himself known, and denounce the impostor.  He also

made up his mind that Tom should be allowed a reasonable time for

spiritual preparation, and then be hanged, drawn and quartered,

according to the law and usage of the day in cases of high

treason.







Chapter XI. At Guildhall.



The royal barge, attended by its gorgeous fleet, took its stately

way down the Thames through the wilderness of illuminated boats.

The air was laden with music; the river banks were beruffled with

joy-flames; the distant city lay in a soft luminous glow from its

countless invisible bonfires; above it rose many a slender spire

into the sky, incrusted with sparkling lights, wherefore in their

remoteness they seemed like jewelled lances thrust aloft; as the

fleet swept along, it was greeted from the banks with a continuous

hoarse roar of cheers and the ceaseless flash and boom of

artillery.



To Tom Canty, half buried in his silken cushions, these sounds and

this spectacle were a wonder unspeakably sublime and astonishing.

To his little friends at his side, the Princess Elizabeth and the

Lady Jane Grey, they were nothing.



Arrived at the Dowgate, the fleet was towed up the limpid Walbrook

(whose channel has now been for two centuries buried out of sight

under acres of buildings) to Bucklersbury, past houses and under

bridges populous with merry-makers and brilliantly lighted, and at

last came to a halt in a basin where now is Barge Yard, in the

centre of the ancient city of London.  Tom disembarked, and he and

his gallant procession crossed Cheapside and made a short march

through the Old Jewry and Basinghall Street to the Guildhall.



Tom and his little ladies were received with due ceremony by the

Lord Mayor and the Fathers of the City, in their gold chains and

scarlet robes of state, and conducted to a rich canopy of state at

the head of the great hall, preceded by heralds making

proclamation, and by the Mace and the City Sword.  The lords and

ladies who were to attend upon Tom and his two small friends took

their places behind their chairs.



At a lower table the Court grandees and other guests of noble

degree were seated, with the magnates of the city; the commoners

took places at a multitude of tables on the main floor of the

hall.  From their lofty vantage-ground the giants Gog and Magog,

the ancient guardians of the city, contemplated the spectacle

below them with eyes grown familiar to it in forgotten

generations.  There was a bugle-blast and a proclamation, and a

fat butler appeared in a high perch in the leftward wall, followed

by his servitors bearing with impressive solemnity a royal baron

of beef, smoking hot and ready for the knife.



After grace, Tom (being instructed) rose--and the whole house with

him--and drank from a portly golden loving-cup with the Princess

Elizabeth; from her it passed to the Lady Jane, and then traversed

the general assemblage.  So the banquet began.



By midnight the revelry was at its height.  Now came one of those

picturesque spectacles so admired in that old day.  A description

of it is still extant in the quaint wording of a chronicler who

witnessed it:



'Space being made, presently entered a baron and an earl appareled

after the Turkish fashion in long robes of bawdkin powdered with

gold; hats on their heads of crimson velvet, with great rolls of

gold, girded with two swords, called scimitars, hanging by great

bawdricks of gold.  Next came yet another baron and another earl,

in two long gowns of yellow satin, traversed with white satin, and

in every bend of white was a bend of crimson satin, after the

fashion of Russia, with furred hats of gray on their heads; either

of them having an hatchet in their hands, and boots with pykes'

(points a foot long), 'turned up.  And after them came a knight,

then the Lord High Admiral, and with him five nobles, in doublets

of crimson velvet, voyded low on the back and before to the

cannell-bone, laced on the breasts with chains of silver; and over

that, short cloaks of crimson satin, and on their heads hats after

the dancers' fashion, with pheasants' feathers in them.  These

were appareled after the fashion of Prussia.  The torchbearers,

which were about an hundred, were appareled in crimson satin and

green, like Moors, their faces black.  Next came in a mommarye.

Then the minstrels, which were disguised, danced; and the lords

and ladies did wildly dance also, that it was a pleasure to

behold.'



And while Tom, in his high seat, was gazing upon this 'wild'

dancing, lost in admiration of the dazzling commingling of

kaleidoscopic colours which the whirling turmoil of gaudy figures

below him presented, the ragged but real little Prince of Wales

was proclaiming his rights and his wrongs, denouncing the

impostor, and clamouring for admission at the gates of Guildhall!

The crowd enjoyed this episode prodigiously, and pressed forward

and craned their necks to see the small rioter.  Presently they

began to taunt him and mock at him, purposely to goad him into a

higher and still more entertaining fury.  Tears of mortification

sprang to his eyes, but he stood his ground and defied the mob

right royally.  Other taunts followed, added mockings stung him,

and he exclaimed--



"I tell ye again, you pack of unmannerly curs, I am the Prince of

Wales!  And all forlorn and friendless as I be, with none to give

me word of grace or help me in my need, yet will not I be driven

from my ground, but will maintain it!"



"Though thou be prince or no prince, 'tis all one, thou be'st a

gallant lad, and not friendless neither!  Here stand I by thy side

to prove it; and mind I tell thee thou might'st have a worser

friend than Miles Hendon and yet not tire thy legs with seeking.

Rest thy small jaw, my child; I talk the language of these base

kennel-rats like to a very native."



The speaker was a sort of Don Caesar de Bazan in dress, aspect,

and bearing.  He was tall, trim-built, muscular.  His doublet and

trunks were of rich material, but faded and threadbare, and their

gold-lace adornments were sadly tarnished; his ruff was rumpled

and damaged; the plume in his slouched hat was broken and had a

bedraggled and disreputable look; at his side he wore a long

rapier in a rusty iron sheath; his swaggering carriage marked him

at once as a ruffler of the camp.  The speech of this fantastic

figure was received with an explosion of jeers and laughter.  Some

cried, "'Tis another prince in disguise!"  "'Ware thy tongue,

friend:  belike he is dangerous!"  "Marry, he looketh it--mark his

eye!"  "Pluck the lad from him--to the horse-pond wi' the cub!"



Instantly a hand was laid upon the Prince, under the impulse of

this happy thought; as instantly the stranger's long sword was out

and the meddler went to the earth under a sounding thump with the

flat of it.  The next moment a score of voices shouted, "Kill the

dog!  Kill him!  Kill him!" and the mob closed in on the warrior,

who backed himself against a wall and began to lay about him with

his long weapon like a madman.  His victims sprawled this way and

that, but the mob-tide poured over their prostrate forms and

dashed itself against the champion with undiminished fury.  His

moments seemed numbered, his destruction certain, when suddenly a

trumpet-blast sounded, a voice shouted, "Way for the King's

messenger!" and a troop of horsemen came charging down upon the

mob, who fled out of harm's reach as fast as their legs could

carry them.  The bold stranger caught up the Prince in his arms,

and was soon far away from danger and the multitude.



Return we within the Guildhall.  Suddenly, high above the jubilant

roar and thunder of the revel, broke the clear peal of a bugle-

note.  There was instant silence--a deep hush; then a single voice

rose--that of the messenger from the palace--and began to pipe

forth a proclamation, the whole multitude standing listening.



The closing words, solemnly pronounced, were--



"The King is dead!"



The great assemblage bent their heads upon their breasts with one

accord; remained so, in profound silence, a few moments; then all

sank upon their knees in a body, stretched out their hands toward

Tom, and a mighty shout burst forth that seemed to shake the

building--



"Long live the King!"



Poor Tom's dazed eyes wandered abroad over this stupefying

spectacle, and finally rested dreamily upon the kneeling

princesses beside him, a moment, then upon the Earl of Hertford.

A sudden purpose dawned in his face.  He said, in a low tone, at

Lord Hertford's ear--



"Answer me truly, on thy faith and honour!  Uttered I here a

command, the which none but a king might hold privilege and

prerogative to utter, would such commandment be obeyed, and none

rise up to say me nay?"



"None, my liege, in all these realms.  In thy person bides the

majesty of England.  Thou art the king--thy word is law."



Tom responded, in a strong, earnest voice, and with great

animation--



"Then shall the king's law be law of mercy, from this day, and

never more be law of blood!  Up from thy knees and away!  To the

Tower, and say the King decrees the Duke of Norfolk shall not

die!" {1}



The words were caught up and carried eagerly from lip to lip far

and wide over the hall, and as Hertford hurried from the presence,

another prodigious shout burst forth--



"The reign of blood is ended!  Long live Edward, King of England!"







Chapter XII. The Prince and his deliverer.



As soon as Miles Hendon and the little prince were clear of the

mob, they struck down through back lanes and alleys toward the

river.  Their way was unobstructed until they approached London

Bridge; then they ploughed into the multitude again, Hendon

keeping a fast grip upon the Prince's--no, the King's--wrist.  The

tremendous news was already abroad, and the boy learned it from a

thousand voices at once--"The King is dead!"  The tidings struck a

chill to the heart of the poor little waif, and sent a shudder

through his frame.  He realised the greatness of his loss, and was

filled with a bitter grief; for the grim tyrant who had been such

a terror to others had always been gentle with him.  The tears

sprang to his eyes and blurred all objects.  For an instant he

felt himself the most forlorn, outcast, and forsaken of God's

creatures--then another cry shook the night with its far-reaching

thunders:  "Long live King Edward the Sixth!" and this made his

eyes kindle, and thrilled him with pride to his fingers' ends.

"Ah," he thought, "how grand and strange it seems--I AM KING!"



Our friends threaded their way slowly through the throngs upon the

bridge.  This structure, which had stood for six hundred years,

and had been a noisy and populous thoroughfare all that time, was

a curious affair, for a closely packed rank of stores and shops,

with family quarters overhead, stretched along both sides of it,

from one bank of the river to the other.  The Bridge was a sort of

town to itself; it had its inn, its beer-houses, its bakeries, its

haberdasheries, its food markets, its manufacturing industries,

and even its church.  It looked upon the two neighbours which it

linked together--London and Southwark--as being well enough as

suburbs, but not otherwise particularly important.  It was a close

corporation, so to speak; it was a narrow town, of a single street

a fifth of a mile long, its population was but a village

population and everybody in it knew all his fellow-townsmen

intimately, and had known their fathers and mothers before them--

and all their little family affairs into the bargain.  It had its

aristocracy, of course--its fine old families of butchers, and

bakers, and what-not, who had occupied the same old premises for

five or six hundred years, and knew the great history of the

Bridge from beginning to end, and all its strange legends; and who

always talked bridgy talk, and thought bridgy thoughts, and lied

in a long, level, direct, substantial bridgy way.  It was just the

sort of population to be narrow and ignorant and self-conceited.

Children were born on the Bridge, were reared there, grew to old

age, and finally died without ever having set a foot upon any part

of the world but London Bridge alone.  Such people would naturally

imagine that the mighty and interminable procession which moved

through its street night and day, with its confused roar of shouts

and cries, its neighings and bellowing and bleatings and its

muffled thunder-tramp, was the one great thing in this world, and

themselves somehow the proprietors of it.  And so they were, in

effect--at least they could exhibit it from their windows, and

did--for a consideration--whenever a returning king or hero gave

it a fleeting splendour, for there was no place like it for

affording a long, straight, uninterrupted view of marching

columns.



Men born and reared upon the Bridge found life unendurably dull

and inane elsewhere.  History tells of one of these who left the

Bridge at the age of seventy-one and retired to the country.  But

he could only fret and toss in his bed; he could not go to sleep,

the deep stillness was so painful, so awful, so oppressive.  When

he was worn out with it, at last, he fled back to his old home, a

lean and haggard spectre, and fell peacefully to rest and pleasant

dreams under the lulling music of the lashing waters and the boom

and crash and thunder of London Bridge.



In the times of which we are writing, the Bridge furnished 'object

lessons' in English history for its children--namely, the livid

and decaying heads of renowned men impaled upon iron spikes atop

of its gateways.  But we digress.



Hendon's lodgings were in the little inn on the Bridge.  As he

neared the door with his small friend, a rough voice said--



"So, thou'rt come at last!  Thou'lt not escape again, I warrant

thee; and if pounding thy bones to a pudding can teach thee

somewhat, thou'lt not keep us waiting another time, mayhap"--and

John Canty put out his hand to seize the boy.



Miles Hendon stepped in the way and said--



"Not too fast, friend.  Thou art needlessly rough, methinks.  What

is the lad to thee?"



"If it be any business of thine to make and meddle in others'

affairs, he is my son."



"'Tis a lie!" cried the little King, hotly.



"Boldly said, and I believe thee, whether thy small headpiece be

sound or cracked, my boy.  But whether this scurvy ruffian be thy

father or no, 'tis all one, he shall not have thee to beat thee

and abuse, according to his threat, so thou prefer to bide with

me."



"I do, I do--I know him not, I loathe him, and will die before I

will go with him."



"Then 'tis settled, and there is nought more to say."



"We will see, as to that!" exclaimed John Canty, striding past

Hendon to get at the boy; "by force shall he--"



"If thou do but touch him, thou animated offal, I will spit thee

like a goose!" said Hendon, barring the way and laying his hand

upon his sword hilt.  Canty drew back.  "Now mark ye," continued

Hendon, "I took this lad under my protection when a mob of such as

thou would have mishandled him, mayhap killed him; dost imagine I

will desert him now to a worser fate?--for whether thou art his

father or no--and sooth to say, I think it is a lie--a decent

swift death were better for such a lad than life in such brute

hands as thine.  So go thy ways, and set quick about it, for I

like not much bandying of words, being not over-patient in my

nature."



John Canty moved off, muttering threats and curses, and was

swallowed from sight in the crowd.  Hendon ascended three flights

of stairs to his room, with his charge, after ordering a meal to

be sent thither.  It was a poor apartment, with a shabby bed and

some odds and ends of old furniture in it, and was vaguely lighted

by a couple of sickly candles.  The little King dragged himself to

the bed and lay down upon it, almost exhausted with hunger and

fatigue.  He had been on his feet a good part of a day and a night

(for it was now two or three o'clock in the morning), and had

eaten nothing meantime.  He murmured drowsily--



"Prithee call me when the table is spread," and sank into a deep

sleep immediately.



A smile twinkled in Hendon's eye, and he said to himself--



"By the mass, the little beggar takes to one's quarters and usurps

one's bed with as natural and easy a grace as if he owned them--

with never a by-your-leave or so-please-it-you, or anything of the

sort.  In his diseased ravings he called himself the Prince of

Wales, and bravely doth he keep up the character.  Poor little

friendless rat, doubtless his mind has been disordered with ill-

usage.  Well, I will be his friend; I have saved him, and it

draweth me strongly to him; already I love the bold-tongued little

rascal.  How soldier-like he faced the smutty rabble and flung

back his high defiance!  And what a comely, sweet and gentle face

he hath, now that sleep hath conjured away its troubles and its

griefs.  I will teach him; I will cure his malady; yea, I will be

his elder brother, and care for him and watch over him; and whoso

would shame him or do him hurt may order his shroud, for though I

be burnt for it he shall need it!"



He bent over the boy and contemplated him with kind and pitying

interest, tapping the young cheek tenderly and smoothing back the

tangled curls with his great brown hand.  A slight shiver passed

over the boy's form.  Hendon muttered--



"See, now, how like a man it was to let him lie here uncovered and

fill his body with deadly rheums.  Now what shall I do? 'twill

wake him to take him up and put him within the bed, and he sorely

needeth sleep."



He looked about for extra covering, but finding none, doffed his

doublet and wrapped the lad in it, saying, "I am used to nipping

air and scant apparel, 'tis little I shall mind the cold!"--then

walked up and down the room, to keep his blood in motion,

soliloquising as before.



"His injured mind persuades him he is Prince of Wales; 'twill be

odd to have a Prince of Wales still with us, now that he that WAS

the prince is prince no more, but king--for this poor mind is set

upon the one fantasy, and will not reason out that now it should

cast by the prince and call itself the king. . . If my father

liveth still, after these seven years that I have heard nought

from home in my foreign dungeon, he will welcome the poor lad and

give him generous shelter for my sake; so will my good elder

brother, Arthur; my other brother, Hugh--but I will crack his

crown an HE interfere, the fox-hearted, ill-conditioned animal!

Yes, thither will we fare--and straightway, too."



A servant entered with a smoking meal, disposed it upon a small

deal table, placed the chairs, and took his departure, leaving

such cheap lodgers as these to wait upon themselves.  The door

slammed after him, and the noise woke the boy, who sprang to a

sitting posture, and shot a glad glance about him; then a grieved

look came into his face and he murmured to himself, with a deep

sigh, "Alack, it was but a dream, woe is me!"  Next he noticed

Miles Hendon's doublet--glanced from that to Hendon, comprehended

the sacrifice that had been made for him, and said, gently--



"Thou art good to me, yes, thou art very good to me.  Take it and

put it on--I shall not need it more."



Then he got up and walked to the washstand in the corner and stood

there, waiting.  Hendon said in a cheery voice--



"We'll have a right hearty sup and bite, now, for everything is

savoury and smoking hot, and that and thy nap together will make

thee a little man again, never fear!"



The boy made no answer, but bent a steady look, that was filled

with grave surprise, and also somewhat touched with impatience,

upon the tall knight of the sword.  Hendon was puzzled, and said--



"What's amiss?"



"Good sir, I would wash me."



"Oh, is that all?  Ask no permission of Miles Hendon for aught

thou cravest.  Make thyself perfectly free here, and welcome, with

all that are his belongings."



Still the boy stood, and moved not; more, he tapped the floor once

or twice with his small impatient foot.  Hendon was wholly

perplexed.  Said he--



"Bless us, what is it?"



"Prithee pour the water, and make not so many words!"



Hendon, suppressing a horse-laugh, and saying to himself, "By all

the saints, but this is admirable!" stepped briskly forward and

did the small insolent's bidding; then stood by, in a sort of

stupefaction, until the command, "Come--the towel!" woke him

sharply up.  He took up a towel, from under the boy's nose, and

handed it to him without comment.  He now proceeded to comfort his

own face with a wash, and while he was at it his adopted child

seated himself at the table and prepared to fall to.  Hendon

despatched his ablutions with alacrity, then drew back the other

chair and was about to place himself at table, when the boy said,

indignantly--



"Forbear!  Wouldst sit in the presence of the King?"



This blow staggered Hendon to his foundations.  He muttered to

himself, "Lo, the poor thing's madness is up with the time!  It

hath changed with the great change that is come to the realm, and

now in fancy is he KING!  Good lack, I must humour the conceit,

too--there is no other way--faith, he would order me to the Tower,

else!"



And pleased with this jest, he removed the chair from the table,

took his stand behind the King, and proceeded to wait upon him in

the courtliest way he was capable of.



While the King ate, the rigour of his royal dignity relaxed a

little, and with his growing contentment came a desire to talk.

He said--"I think thou callest thyself Miles Hendon, if I heard

thee aright?"



"Yes, Sire," Miles replied; then observed to himself, "If I MUST

humour the poor lad's madness, I must 'Sire' him, I must 'Majesty'

him, I must not go by halves, I must stick at nothing that

belongeth to the part I play, else shall I play it ill and work

evil to this charitable and kindly cause."



The King warmed his heart with a second glass of wine, and said--

"I would know thee--tell me thy story.  Thou hast a gallant way

with thee, and a noble--art nobly born?"



"We are of the tail of the nobility, good your Majesty.  My father

is a baronet--one of the smaller lords by knight service {2}--Sir

Richard Hendon of Hendon Hall, by Monk's Holm in Kent."



"The name has escaped my memory.  Go on--tell me thy story."



"'Tis not much, your Majesty, yet perchance it may beguile a short

half-hour for want of a better.  My father, Sir Richard, is very

rich, and of a most generous nature.  My mother died whilst I was

yet a boy.  I have two brothers:  Arthur, my elder, with a soul

like to his father's; and Hugh, younger than I, a mean spirit,

covetous, treacherous, vicious, underhanded--a reptile.  Such was

he from the cradle; such was he ten years past, when I last saw

him--a ripe rascal at nineteen, I being twenty then, and Arthur

twenty-two.  There is none other of us but the Lady Edith, my

cousin--she was sixteen then--beautiful, gentle, good, the

daughter of an earl, the last of her race, heiress of a great

fortune and a lapsed title.  My father was her guardian.  I loved

her and she loved me; but she was betrothed to Arthur from the

cradle, and Sir Richard would not suffer the contract to be

broken.  Arthur loved another maid, and bade us be of good cheer

and hold fast to the hope that delay and luck together would some

day give success to our several causes.  Hugh loved the Lady

Edith's fortune, though in truth he said it was herself he loved--

but then 'twas his way, alway, to say the one thing and mean the

other.  But he lost his arts upon the girl; he could deceive my

father, but none else.  My father loved him best of us all, and

trusted and believed him; for he was the youngest child, and

others hated him--these qualities being in all ages sufficient to

win a parent's dearest love; and he had a smooth persuasive

tongue, with an admirable gift of lying--and these be qualities

which do mightily assist a blind affection to cozen itself.  I was

wild--in troth I might go yet farther and say VERY wild, though

'twas a wildness of an innocent sort, since it hurt none but me,

brought shame to none, nor loss, nor had in it any taint of crime

or baseness, or what might not beseem mine honourable degree.



"Yet did my brother Hugh turn these faults to good account--he

seeing that our brother Arthur's health was but indifferent, and

hoping the worst might work him profit were I swept out of the

path--so--but 'twere a long tale, good my liege, and little worth

the telling.  Briefly, then, this brother did deftly magnify my

faults and make them crimes; ending his base work with finding a

silken ladder in mine apartments--conveyed thither by his own

means--and did convince my father by this, and suborned evidence

of servants and other lying knaves, that I was minded to carry off

my Edith and marry with her in rank defiance of his will.



"Three years of banishment from home and England might make a

soldier and a man of me, my father said, and teach me some degree

of wisdom.  I fought out my long probation in the continental

wars, tasting sumptuously of hard knocks, privation, and

adventure; but in my last battle I was taken captive, and during

the seven years that have waxed and waned since then, a foreign

dungeon hath harboured me.  Through wit and courage I won to the

free air at last, and fled hither straight; and am but just

arrived, right poor in purse and raiment, and poorer still in

knowledge of what these dull seven years have wrought at Hendon

Hall, its people and belongings.  So please you, sir, my meagre

tale is told."



"Thou hast been shamefully abused!" said the little King, with a

flashing eye.  "But I will right thee--by the cross will I!  The

King hath said it."



Then, fired by the story of Miles's wrongs, he loosed his tongue

and poured the history of his own recent misfortunes into the ears

of his astonished listener.  When he had finished, Miles said to

himself--



"Lo, what an imagination he hath!  Verily, this is no common mind;

else, crazed or sane, it could not weave so straight and gaudy a

tale as this out of the airy nothings wherewith it hath wrought

this curious romaunt.  Poor ruined little head, it shall not lack

friend or shelter whilst I bide with the living.  He shall never

leave my side; he shall be my pet, my little comrade.  And he

shall be cured!--ay, made whole and sound--then will he make

himself a name--and proud shall I be to say, 'Yes, he is mine--I

took him, a homeless little ragamuffin, but I saw what was in him,

and I said his name would be heard some day--behold him, observe

him--was I right?'"



The King spoke--in a thoughtful, measured voice--



"Thou didst save me injury and shame, perchance my life, and so my

crown.  Such service demandeth rich reward.  Name thy desire, and

so it be within the compass of my royal power, it is thine."



This fantastic suggestion startled Hendon out of his reverie.  He

was about to thank the King and put the matter aside with saying

he had only done his duty and desired no reward, but a wiser

thought came into his head, and he asked leave to be silent a few

moments and consider the gracious offer--an idea which the King

gravely approved, remarking that it was best to be not too hasty

with a thing of such great import.



Miles reflected during some moments, then said to himself, "Yes,

that is the thing to do--by any other means it were impossible to

get at it--and certes, this hour's experience has taught me

'twould be most wearing and inconvenient to continue it as it is.

Yes, I will propose it; 'twas a happy accident that I did not

throw the chance away."  Then he dropped upon one knee and said--



"My poor service went not beyond the limit of a subject's simple

duty, and therefore hath no merit; but since your Majesty is

pleased to hold it worthy some reward, I take heart of grace to

make petition to this effect.  Near four hundred years ago, as

your grace knoweth, there being ill blood betwixt John, King of

England, and the King of France, it was decreed that two champions

should fight together in the lists, and so settle the dispute by

what is called the arbitrament of God.  These two kings, and the

Spanish king, being assembled to witness and judge the conflict,

the French champion appeared; but so redoubtable was he, that our

English knights refused to measure weapons with him.  So the

matter, which was a weighty one, was like to go against the

English monarch by default.  Now in the Tower lay the Lord de

Courcy, the mightiest arm in England, stripped of his honours and

possessions, and wasting with long captivity.  Appeal was made to

him; he gave assent, and came forth arrayed for battle; but no

sooner did the Frenchman glimpse his huge frame and hear his

famous name but he fled away, and the French king's cause was

lost.  King John restored De Courcy's titles and possessions, and

said, 'Name thy wish and thou shalt have it, though it cost me

half my kingdom;' whereat De Courcy, kneeling, as I do now, made

answer, 'This, then, I ask, my liege; that I and my successors may

have and hold the privilege of remaining covered in the presence

of the kings of England, henceforth while the throne shall last.'

The boon was granted, as your Majesty knoweth; and there hath been

no time, these four hundred years, that that line has failed of an

heir; and so, even unto this day, the head of that ancient house

still weareth his hat or helm before the King's Majesty, without

let or hindrance, and this none other may do. {3}  Invoking this

precedent in aid of my prayer, I beseech the King to grant to me

but this one grace and privilege--to my more than sufficient

reward--and none other, to wit:  that I and my heirs, for ever,

may SIT in the presence of the Majesty of England!"



"Rise, Sir Miles Hendon, Knight," said the King, gravely--giving

the accolade with Hendon's sword--"rise, and seat thyself.  Thy

petition is granted.  Whilst England remains, and the crown

continues, the privilege shall not lapse."



His Majesty walked apart, musing, and Hendon dropped into a chair

at table, observing to himself, "'Twas a brave thought, and hath

wrought me a mighty deliverance; my legs are grievously wearied.

An I had not thought of that, I must have had to stand for weeks,

till my poor lad's wits are cured."  After a little, he went on,

"And so I am become a knight of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows!

A most odd and strange position, truly, for one so matter-of-fact

as I.  I will not laugh--no, God forbid, for this thing which is

so substanceless to me is REAL to him.  And to me, also, in one

way, it is not a falsity, for it reflects with truth the sweet and

generous spirit that is in him."  After a pause:  "Ah, what if he

should call me by my fine title before folk!--there'd be a merry

contrast betwixt my glory and my raiment!  But no matter, let him

call me what he will, so it please him; I shall be content."







Chapter XIII. The disappearance of the Prince.



A heavy drowsiness presently fell upon the two comrades.  The King

said--



"Remove these rags"--meaning his clothing.



Hendon disapparelled the boy without dissent or remark, tucked him

up in bed, then glanced about the room, saying to himself,

ruefully, "He hath taken my bed again, as before--marry, what

shall _I_ do?"  The little King observed his perplexity, and

dissipated it with a word.  He said, sleepily--



"Thou wilt sleep athwart the door, and guard it."  In a moment

more he was out of his troubles, in a deep slumber.



"Dear heart, he should have been born a king!" muttered Hendon,

admiringly; "he playeth the part to a marvel."



Then he stretched himself across the door, on the floor, saying

contentedly--



"I have lodged worse for seven years; 'twould be but ill gratitude

to Him above to find fault with this."



He dropped asleep as the dawn appeared.  Toward noon he rose,

uncovered his unconscious ward--a section at a time--and took his

measure with a string.  The King awoke, just as he had completed

his work, complained of the cold, and asked what he was doing.



"'Tis done, now, my liege," said Hendon; "I have a bit of business

outside, but will presently return; sleep thou again--thou needest

it.  There--let me cover thy head also--thou'lt be warm the

sooner."



The King was back in dreamland before this speech was ended.

Miles slipped softly out, and slipped as softly in again, in the

course of thirty or forty minutes, with a complete second-hand

suit of boy's clothing, of cheap material, and showing signs of

wear; but tidy, and suited to the season of the year.  He seated

himself, and began to overhaul his purchase, mumbling to himself--



"A longer purse would have got a better sort, but when one has not

the long purse one must be content with what a short one may do--



     "'There was a woman in our town,

        In our town did dwell--'



"He stirred, methinks--I must sing in a less thunderous key; 'tis

not good to mar his sleep, with this journey before him, and he so

wearied out, poor chap . . . This garment--'tis well enough--a

stitch here and another one there will set it aright.  This other

is better, albeit a stitch or two will not come amiss in it,

likewise . . . THESE be very good and sound, and will keep his

small feet warm and dry--an odd new thing to him, belike, since he

has doubtless been used to foot it bare, winters and summers the

same . . . Would thread were bread, seeing one getteth a year's

sufficiency for a farthing, and such a brave big needle without

cost, for mere love.  Now shall I have the demon's own time to

thread it!"



And so he had.  He did as men have always done, and probably

always will do, to the end of time--held the needle still, and

tried to thrust the thread through the eye, which is the opposite

of a woman's way.  Time and time again the thread missed the mark,

going sometimes on one side of the needle, sometimes on the other,

sometimes doubling up against the shaft; but he was patient,

having been through these experiences before, when he was

soldiering.  He succeeded at last, and took up the garment that

had lain waiting, meantime, across his lap, and began his work.



"The inn is paid--the breakfast that is to come, included--and

there is wherewithal left to buy a couple of donkeys and meet our

little costs for the two or three days betwixt this and the plenty

that awaits us at Hendon Hall--



     "'She loved her hus--'



"Body o' me!  I have driven the needle under my nail! . . . It

matters little--'tis not a novelty--yet 'tis not a convenience,

neither . . .We shall be merry there, little one, never doubt it!

Thy troubles will vanish there, and likewise thy sad distemper--



     "'She loved her husband dearilee,

       But another man--'



"These be noble large stitches!"--holding the garment up and

viewing it admiringly--"they have a grandeur and a majesty that do

cause these small stingy ones of the tailor-man to look mightily

paltry and plebeian--



     "'She loved her husband dearilee,

       But another man he loved she,--'



"Marry, 'tis done--a goodly piece of work, too, and wrought with

expedition.  Now will I wake him, apparel him, pour for him, feed

him, and then will we hie us to the mart by the Tabard Inn in

Southwark and--be pleased to rise, my liege!--he answereth not--

what ho, my liege!--of a truth must I profane his sacred person

with a touch, sith his slumber is deaf to speech.  What!"



He threw back the covers--the boy was gone!



He stared about him in speechless astonishment for a moment;

noticed for the first time that his ward's ragged raiment was also

missing; then he began to rage and storm and shout for the

innkeeper.  At that moment a servant entered with the breakfast.



"Explain, thou limb of Satan, or thy time is come!" roared the man

of war, and made so savage a spring toward the waiter that this

latter could not find his tongue, for the instant, for fright and

surprise.  "Where is the boy?"



In disjointed and trembling syllables the man gave the information

desired.



"You were hardly gone from the place, your worship, when a youth

came running and said it was your worship's will that the boy come

to you straight, at the bridge-end on the Southwark side.  I

brought him hither; and when he woke the lad and gave his message,

the lad did grumble some little for being disturbed 'so early,' as

he called it, but straightway trussed on his rags and went with

the youth, only saying it had been better manners that your

worship came yourself, not sent a stranger--and so--"



"And so thou'rt a fool!--a fool and easily cozened--hang all thy

breed!  Yet mayhap no hurt is done.  Possibly no harm is meant the

boy.  I will go fetch him.  Make the table ready.  Stay! the

coverings of the bed were disposed as if one lay beneath them--

happened that by accident?"



"I know not, good your worship.  I saw the youth meddle with them-

-he that came for the boy."



"Thousand deaths!  'Twas done to deceive me--'tis plain 'twas done

to gain time.  Hark ye!  Was that youth alone?"



"All alone, your worship."



"Art sure?"



"Sure, your worship."



"Collect thy scattered wits--bethink thee--take time, man."



After a moment's thought, the servant said--



"When he came, none came with him; but now I remember me that as

the two stepped into the throng of the Bridge, a ruffian-looking

man plunged out from some near place; and just as he was joining

them--"



"What THEN?--out with it!" thundered the impatient Hendon,

interrupting.



"Just then the crowd lapped them up and closed them in, and I saw

no more, being called by my master, who was in a rage because a

joint that the scrivener had ordered was forgot, though I take all

the saints to witness that to blame ME for that miscarriage were

like holding the unborn babe to judgment for sins com--"



"Out of my sight, idiot!  Thy prating drives me mad!  Hold!

Whither art flying?  Canst not bide still an instant?  Went they

toward Southwark?"



"Even so, your worship--for, as I said before, as to that

detestable joint, the babe unborn is no whit more blameless than--

"



"Art here YET!  And prating still!  Vanish, lest I throttle thee!"

The servitor vanished.  Hendon followed after him, passed him, and

plunged down the stairs two steps at a stride, muttering, "'Tis

that scurvy villain that claimed he was his son.  I have lost

thee, my poor little mad master--it is a bitter thought--and I had

come to love thee so!  No! by book and bell, NOT lost!  Not lost,

for I will ransack the land till I find thee again.  Poor child,

yonder is his breakfast--and mine, but I have no hunger now; so,

let the rats have it--speed, speed! that is the word!"  As he

wormed his swift way through the noisy multitudes upon the Bridge

he several times said to himself--clinging to the thought as if it

were a particularly pleasing one--"He grumbled, but he WENT--he

went, yes, because he thought Miles Hendon asked it, sweet lad--he

would ne'er have done it for another, I know it well."







Chapter XIV. 'Le Roi est mort--vive le Roi.'



Toward daylight of the same morning, Tom Canty stirred out of a

heavy sleep and opened his eyes in the dark.  He lay silent a few

moments, trying to analyse his confused thoughts and impressions,

and get some sort of meaning out of them; then suddenly he burst

out in a rapturous but guarded voice--



"I see it all, I see it all!  Now God be thanked, I am indeed

awake at last!  Come, joy! vanish, sorrow!  Ho, Nan! Bet! kick off

your straw and hie ye hither to my side, till I do pour into your

unbelieving ears the wildest madcap dream that ever the spirits of

night did conjure up to astonish the soul of man withal! . . . Ho,

Nan, I say!  Bet!"



A dim form appeared at his side, and a voice said--



"Wilt deign to deliver thy commands?"



"Commands? . . . O, woe is me, I know thy voice!  Speak thou--who

am I?"



"Thou?  In sooth, yesternight wert thou the Prince of Wales; to-

day art thou my most gracious liege, Edward, King of England."



Tom buried his head among his pillows, murmuring plaintively--



"Alack, it was no dream!  Go to thy rest, sweet sir--leave me to

my sorrows."



Tom slept again, and after a time he had this pleasant dream.  He

thought it was summer, and he was playing, all alone, in the fair

meadow called Goodman's Fields, when a dwarf only a foot high,

with long red whiskers and a humped back, appeared to him suddenly

and said, "Dig by that stump."  He did so, and found twelve bright

new pennies--wonderful riches!  Yet this was not the best of it;

for the dwarf said--



"I know thee.  Thou art a good lad, and a deserving; thy

distresses shall end, for the day of thy reward is come.  Dig here

every seventh day, and thou shalt find always the same treasure,

twelve bright new pennies.  Tell none--keep the secret."



Then the dwarf vanished, and Tom flew to Offal Court with his

prize, saying to himself, "Every night will I give my father a

penny; he will think I begged it, it will glad his heart, and I

shall no more be beaten.  One penny every week the good priest

that teacheth me shall have; mother, Nan, and Bet the other four.

We be done with hunger and rags, now, done with fears and frets

and savage usage."



In his dream he reached his sordid home all out of breath, but

with eyes dancing with grateful enthusiasm; cast four of his

pennies into his mother's lap and cried out--



"They are for thee!--all of them, every one!--for thee and Nan and

Bet--and honestly come by, not begged nor stolen!"



The happy and astonished mother strained him to her breast and

exclaimed--



"It waxeth late--may it please your Majesty to rise?"



Ah! that was not the answer he was expecting.  The dream had

snapped asunder--he was awake.



He opened his eyes--the richly clad First Lord of the Bedchamber

was kneeling by his couch.  The gladness of the lying dream faded

away--the poor boy recognised that he was still a captive and a

king.  The room was filled with courtiers clothed in purple

mantles--the mourning colour--and with noble servants of the

monarch.  Tom sat up in bed and gazed out from the heavy silken

curtains upon this fine company.



The weighty business of dressing began, and one courtier after

another knelt and paid his court and offered to the little King

his condolences upon his heavy loss, whilst the dressing

proceeded.  In the beginning, a shirt was taken up by the Chief

Equerry in Waiting, who passed it to the First Lord of the

Buckhounds, who passed it to the Second Gentleman of the

Bedchamber, who passed it to the Head Ranger of Windsor Forest,

who passed it to the Third Groom of the Stole, who passed it to

the Chancellor Royal of the Duchy of Lancaster, who passed it to

the Master of the Wardrobe, who passed it to Norroy King-at-Arms,

who passed it to the Constable of the Tower, who passed it to the

Chief Steward of the Household, who passed it to the Hereditary

Grand Diaperer, who passed it to the Lord High Admiral of England,

who passed it to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who passed it to

the First Lord of the Bedchamber, who took what was left of it and

put it on Tom.  Poor little wondering chap, it reminded him of

passing buckets at a fire.



Each garment in its turn had to go through this slow and solemn

process; consequently Tom grew very weary of the ceremony; so

weary that he felt an almost gushing gratefulness when he at last

saw his long silken hose begin the journey down the line and knew

that the end of the matter was drawing near.  But he exulted too

soon.  The First Lord of the Bedchamber received the hose and was

about to encase Tom's legs in them, when a sudden flush invaded

his face and he hurriedly hustled the things back into the hands

of the Archbishop of Canterbury with an astounded look and a

whispered, "See, my lord!" pointing to a something connected with

the hose.  The Archbishop paled, then flushed, and passed the hose

to the Lord High Admiral, whispering, "See, my lord!"  The Admiral

passed the hose to the Hereditary Grand Diaperer, and had hardly

breath enough in his body to ejaculate, "See, my lord!"  The hose

drifted backward along the line, to the Chief Steward of the

Household, the Constable of the Tower, Norroy King-at-Arms, the

Master of the Wardrobe, the Chancellor Royal of the Duchy of

Lancaster, the Third Groom of the Stole, the Head Ranger of

Windsor Forest, the Second Gentleman of the Bedchamber, the First

Lord of the Buckhounds,--accompanied always with that amazed and

frightened "See! see!"--till they finally reached the hands of the

Chief Equerry in Waiting, who gazed a moment, with a pallid face,

upon what had caused all this dismay, then hoarsely whispered,

"Body of my life, a tag gone from a truss-point!--to the Tower

with the Head Keeper of the King's Hose!"--after which he leaned

upon the shoulder of the First Lord of the Buckhounds to regather

his vanished strength whilst fresh hose, without any damaged

strings to them, were brought.



But all things must have an end, and so in time Tom Canty was in a

condition to get out of bed.  The proper official poured water,

the proper official engineered the washing, the proper official

stood by with a towel, and by-and-by Tom got safely through the

purifying stage and was ready for the services of the Hairdresser-

royal.  When he at length emerged from this master's hands, he was

a gracious figure and as pretty as a girl, in his mantle and

trunks of purple satin, and purple-plumed cap.  He now moved in

state toward his breakfast-room, through the midst of the courtly

assemblage; and as he passed, these fell back, leaving his way

free, and dropped upon their knees.



After breakfast he was conducted, with regal ceremony, attended by

his great officers and his guard of fifty Gentlemen Pensioners

bearing gilt battle-axes, to the throne-room, where he proceeded

to transact business of state.  His 'uncle,' Lord Hertford, took

his stand by the throne, to assist the royal mind with wise

counsel.



The body of illustrious men named by the late King as his

executors appeared, to ask Tom's approval of certain acts of

theirs--rather a form, and yet not wholly a form, since there was

no Protector as yet.  The Archbishop of Canterbury made report of

the decree of the Council of Executors concerning the obsequies of

his late most illustrious Majesty, and finished by reading the

signatures of the Executors, to wit:  the Archbishop of

Canterbury; the Lord Chancellor of England; William Lord St. John;

John Lord Russell; Edward Earl of Hertford; John Viscount Lisle;

Cuthbert Bishop of Durham--



Tom was not listening--an earlier clause of the document was

puzzling him.  At this point he turned and whispered to Lord

Hertford--



"What day did he say the burial hath been appointed for?"



"The sixteenth of the coming month, my liege."



"'Tis a strange folly.  Will he keep?"



Poor chap, he was still new to the customs of royalty; he was used

to seeing the forlorn dead of Offal Court hustled out of the way

with a very different sort of expedition.  However, the Lord

Hertford set his mind at rest with a word or two.



A secretary of state presented an order of the Council appointing

the morrow at eleven for the reception of the foreign ambassadors,

and desired the King's assent.



Tom turned an inquiring look toward Hertford, who whispered--



"Your Majesty will signify consent.  They come to testify their

royal masters' sense of the heavy calamity which hath visited your

Grace and the realm of England."



Tom did as he was bidden.  Another secretary began to read a

preamble concerning the expenses of the late King's household,

which had amounted to 28,000 pounds during the preceding six

months--a sum so vast that it made Tom Canty gasp; he gasped again

when the fact appeared that 20,000 pounds of this money was still

owing and unpaid; {4} and once more when it appeared that the

King's coffers were about empty, and his twelve hundred servants

much embarrassed for lack of the wages due them.  Tom spoke out,

with lively apprehension--



"We be going to the dogs, 'tis plain.  'Tis meet and necessary

that we take a smaller house and set the servants at large, sith

they be of no value but to make delay, and trouble one with

offices that harass the spirit and shame the soul, they

misbecoming any but a doll, that hath nor brains nor hands to help

itself withal.  I remember me of a small house that standeth over

against the fish-market, by Billingsgate--"



A sharp pressure upon Tom's arm stopped his foolish tongue and

sent a blush to his face; but no countenance there betrayed any

sign that this strange speech had been remarked or given concern.



A secretary made report that forasmuch as the late King had

provided in his will for conferring the ducal degree upon the Earl

of Hertford and raising his brother, Sir Thomas Seymour, to the

peerage, and likewise Hertford's son to an earldom, together with

similar aggrandisements to other great servants of the Crown, the

Council had resolved to hold a sitting on the 16th of February for

the delivering and confirming of these honours, and that meantime,

the late King not having granted, in writing, estates suitable to

the support of these dignities, the Council, knowing his private

wishes in that regard, had thought proper to grant to Seymour '500

pound lands,' and to Hertford's son '800 pound lands, and 300

pound of the next bishop's lands which should fall vacant,'--his

present Majesty being willing. {5}



Tom was about to blurt out something about the propriety of paying

the late King's debts first, before squandering all this money,

but a timely touch upon his arm, from the thoughtful Hertford,

saved him this indiscretion; wherefore he gave the royal assent,

without spoken comment, but with much inward discomfort.  While he

sat reflecting a moment over the ease with which he was doing

strange and glittering miracles, a happy thought shot into his

mind:  why not make his mother Duchess of Offal Court, and give

her an estate?  But a sorrowful thought swept it instantly away:

he was only a king in name, these grave veterans and great nobles

were his masters; to them his mother was only the creature of a

diseased mind; they would simply listen to his project with

unbelieving ears, then send for the doctor.



The dull work went tediously on.  Petitions were read, and

proclamations, patents, and all manner of wordy, repetitious, and

wearisome papers relating to the public business; and at last Tom

sighed pathetically and murmured to himself, "In what have I

offended, that the good God should take me away from the fields

and the free air and the sunshine, to shut me up here and make me

a king and afflict me so?"  Then his poor muddled head nodded a

while and presently drooped to his shoulder; and the business of

the empire came to a standstill for want of that august factor,

the ratifying power.  Silence ensued around the slumbering child,

and the sages of the realm ceased from their deliberations.



During the forenoon, Tom had an enjoyable hour, by permission of

his keepers, Hertford and St. John, with the Lady Elizabeth and

the little Lady Jane Grey; though the spirits of the princesses

were rather subdued by the mighty stroke that had fallen upon the

royal house; and at the end of the visit his 'elder sister'--

afterwards the 'Bloody Mary' of history--chilled him with a solemn

interview which had but one merit in his eyes, its brevity.  He

had a few moments to himself, and then a slim lad of about twelve

years of age was admitted to his presence, whose clothing, except

his snowy ruff and the laces about his wrists, was of black,--

doublet, hose, and all.  He bore no badge of mourning but a knot

of purple ribbon on his shoulder.  He advanced hesitatingly, with

head bowed and bare, and dropped upon one knee in front of Tom.

Tom sat still and contemplated him soberly a moment.  Then he

said--



"Rise, lad.  Who art thou.  What wouldst have?"



The boy rose, and stood at graceful ease, but with an aspect of

concern in his face.  He said--



"Of a surety thou must remember me, my lord.  I am thy whipping-

boy."



"My WHIPPING-boy?"



"The same, your Grace.  I am Humphrey--Humphrey Marlow."



Tom perceived that here was someone whom his keepers ought to have

posted him about.  The situation was delicate.  What should he

do?--pretend he knew this lad, and then betray by his every

utterance that he had never heard of him before?  No, that would

not do.  An idea came to his relief:  accidents like this might be

likely to happen with some frequency, now that business urgencies

would often call Hertford and St. John from his side, they being

members of the Council of Executors; therefore perhaps it would be

well to strike out a plan himself to meet the requirements of such

emergencies.  Yes, that would be a wise course--he would practise

on this boy, and see what sort of success he might achieve.  So he

stroked his brow perplexedly a moment or two, and presently said--



"Now I seem to remember thee somewhat--but my wit is clogged and

dim with suffering--"



"Alack, my poor master!" ejaculated the whipping-boy, with

feeling; adding, to himself, "In truth 'tis as they said--his mind

is gone--alas, poor soul!  But misfortune catch me, how am I

forgetting!  They said one must not seem to observe that aught is

wrong with him."



"'Tis strange how my memory doth wanton with me these days," said

Tom.  "But mind it not--I mend apace--a little clue doth often

serve to bring me back again the things and names which had

escaped me.  (And not they, only, forsooth, but e'en such as I

ne'er heard before--as this lad shall see.)  Give thy business

speech."



"'Tis matter of small weight, my liege, yet will I touch upon it,

an' it please your Grace.  Two days gone by, when your Majesty

faulted thrice in your Greek--in the morning lessons,--dost

remember it?"



"Y-e-s--methinks I do.  (It is not much of a lie--an' I had

meddled with the Greek at all, I had not faulted simply thrice,

but forty times.)  Yes, I do recall it, now--go on."



"The master, being wroth with what he termed such slovenly and

doltish work, did promise that he would soundly whip me for it--

and--"



"Whip THEE!" said Tom, astonished out of his presence of mind.

"Why should he whip THEE for faults of mine?"



"Ah, your Grace forgetteth again.  He always scourgeth me when

thou dost fail in thy lessons."



"True, true--I had forgot.  Thou teachest me in private--then if I

fail, he argueth that thy office was lamely done, and--"



"Oh, my liege, what words are these?  I, the humblest of thy

servants, presume to teach THEE?"



"Then where is thy blame?  What riddle is this?  Am I in truth

gone mad, or is it thou?  Explain--speak out."



"But, good your Majesty, there's nought that needeth simplifying.-

-None may visit the sacred person of the Prince of Wales with

blows; wherefore, when he faulteth, 'tis I that take them; and

meet it is and right, for that it is mine office and my

livelihood." {1}



Tom stared at the tranquil boy, observing to himself, "Lo, it is a

wonderful thing,--a most strange and curious trade; I marvel they

have not hired a boy to take my combings and my dressings for me--

would heaven they would!--an' they will do this thing, I will take

my lashings in mine own person, giving God thanks for the change."

Then he said aloud--



"And hast thou been beaten, poor friend, according to the

promise?"



"No, good your Majesty, my punishment was appointed for this day,

and peradventure it may be annulled, as unbefitting the season of

mourning that is come upon us; I know not, and so have made bold

to come hither and remind your Grace about your gracious promise

to intercede in my behalf--"



"With the master?  To save thee thy whipping?"



"Ah, thou dost remember!"



"My memory mendeth, thou seest.  Set thy mind at ease--thy back

shall go unscathed--I will see to it."



"Oh, thanks, my good lord!" cried the boy, dropping upon his knee

again.  "Mayhap I have ventured far enow; and yet--"



Seeing Master Humphrey hesitate, Tom encouraged him to go on,

saying he was "in the granting mood."



"Then will I speak it out, for it lieth near my heart.  Sith thou

art no more Prince of Wales but King, thou canst order matters as

thou wilt, with none to say thee nay; wherefore it is not in

reason that thou wilt longer vex thyself with dreary studies, but

wilt burn thy books and turn thy mind to things less irksome.

Then am I ruined, and mine orphan sisters with me!"



"Ruined?  Prithee how?"



"My back is my bread, O my gracious liege! if it go idle, I

starve.  An' thou cease from study mine office is gone thou'lt

need no whipping-boy.  Do not turn me away!"



Tom was touched with this pathetic distress.  He said, with a

right royal burst of generosity--



"Discomfort thyself no further, lad.  Thine office shall be

permanent in thee and thy line for ever."  Then he struck the boy

a light blow on the shoulder with the flat of his sword,

exclaiming, "Rise, Humphrey Marlow, Hereditary Grand Whipping-Boy

to the Royal House of England!  Banish sorrow--I will betake me to

my books again, and study so ill that they must in justice treble

thy wage, so mightily shall the business of thine office be

augmented."



The grateful Humphrey responded fervidly--



"Thanks, O most noble master, this princely lavishness doth far

surpass my most distempered dreams of fortune.  Now shall I be

happy all my days, and all the house of Marlow after me."



Tom had wit enough to perceive that here was a lad who could be

useful to him.  He encouraged Humphrey to talk, and he was nothing

loath.  He was delighted to believe that he was helping in Tom's

'cure'; for always, as soon as he had finished calling back to

Tom's diseased mind the various particulars of his experiences and

adventures in the royal school-room and elsewhere about the

palace, he noticed that Tom was then able to 'recall' the

circumstances quite clearly.  At the end of an hour Tom found

himself well freighted with very valuable information concerning

personages and matters pertaining to the Court; so he resolved to

draw instruction from this source daily; and to this end he would

give order to admit Humphrey to the royal closet whenever he might

come, provided the Majesty of England was not engaged with other

people.  Humphrey had hardly been dismissed when my Lord Hertford

arrived with more trouble for Tom.



He said that the Lords of the Council, fearing that some

overwrought report of the King's damaged health might have leaked

out and got abroad, they deemed it wise and best that his Majesty

should begin to dine in public after a day or two--his wholesome

complexion and vigorous step, assisted by a carefully guarded

repose of manner and ease and grace of demeanour, would more

surely quiet the general pulse--in case any evil rumours HAD gone

about--than any other scheme that could be devised.



Then the Earl proceeded, very delicately, to instruct Tom as to

the observances proper to the stately occasion, under the rather

thin disguise of 'reminding' him concerning things already known

to him; but to his vast gratification it turned out that Tom

needed very little help in this line--he had been making use of

Humphrey in that direction, for Humphrey had mentioned that within

a few days he was to begin to dine in public; having gathered it

from the swift-winged gossip of the Court.  Tom kept these facts

to himself, however.



Seeing the royal memory so improved, the Earl ventured to apply a

few tests to it, in an apparently casual way, to find out how far

its amendment had progressed.  The results were happy, here and

there, in spots--spots where Humphrey's tracks remained--and on

the whole my lord was greatly pleased and encouraged.  So

encouraged was he, indeed, that he spoke up and said in a quite

hopeful voice--



"Now am I persuaded that if your Majesty will but tax your memory

yet a little further, it will resolve the puzzle of the Great

Seal--a loss which was of moment yesterday, although of none to-

day, since its term of service ended with our late lord's life.

May it please your Grace to make the trial?"



Tom was at sea--a Great Seal was something which he was totally

unacquainted with.  After a moment's hesitation he looked up

innocently and asked--



"What was it like, my lord?"



The Earl started, almost imperceptibly, muttering to himself,

"Alack, his wits are flown again!--it was ill wisdom to lead him

on to strain them"--then he deftly turned the talk to other

matters, with the purpose of sweeping the unlucky seal out of

Tom's thoughts--a purpose which easily succeeded.







Chapter XV. Tom as King.



The next day the foreign ambassadors came, with their gorgeous

trains; and Tom, throned in awful state, received them.  The

splendours of the scene delighted his eye and fired his

imagination at first, but the audience was long and dreary, and so

were most of the addresses--wherefore, what began as a pleasure

grew into weariness and home-sickness by-and-by.  Tom said the

words which Hertford put into his mouth from time to time, and

tried hard to acquit himself satisfactorily, but he was too new to

such things, and too ill at ease to accomplish more than a

tolerable success.  He looked sufficiently like a king, but he was

ill able to feel like one.  He was cordially glad when the

ceremony was ended.



The larger part of his day was 'wasted'--as he termed it, in his

own mind--in labours pertaining to his royal office.  Even the two

hours devoted to certain princely pastimes and recreations were

rather a burden to him than otherwise, they were so fettered by

restrictions and ceremonious observances.  However, he had a

private hour with his whipping-boy which he counted clear gain,

since he got both entertainment and needful information out of it.



The third day of Tom Canty's kingship came and went much as the

others had done, but there was a lifting of his cloud in one way--

he felt less uncomfortable than at first; he was getting a little

used to his circumstances and surroundings; his chains still

galled, but not all the time; he found that the presence and

homage of the great afflicted and embarrassed him less and less

sharply with every hour that drifted over his head.



But for one single dread, he could have seen the fourth day

approach without serious distress--the dining in public; it was to

begin that day.  There were greater matters in the programme--for

on that day he would have to preside at a council which would take

his views and commands concerning the policy to be pursued toward

various foreign nations scattered far and near over the great

globe; on that day, too, Hertford would be formally chosen to the

grand office of Lord Protector; other things of note were

appointed for that fourth day, also; but to Tom they were all

insignificant compared with the ordeal of dining all by himself

with a multitude of curious eyes fastened upon him and a multitude

of mouths whispering comments upon his performance,--and upon his

mistakes, if he should be so unlucky as to make any.



Still, nothing could stop that fourth day, and so it came.  It

found poor Tom low-spirited and absent-minded, and this mood

continued; he could not shake it off.  The ordinary duties of the

morning dragged upon his hands, and wearied him.  Once more he

felt the sense of captivity heavy upon him.



Late in the forenoon he was in a large audience-chamber,

conversing with the Earl of Hertford and dully awaiting the

striking of the hour appointed for a visit of ceremony from a

considerable number of great officials and courtiers.



After a little while, Tom, who had wandered to a window and become

interested in the life and movement of the great highway beyond

the palace gates--and not idly interested, but longing with all

his heart to take part in person in its stir and freedom--saw the

van of a hooting and shouting mob of disorderly men, women, and

children of the lowest and poorest degree approaching from up the

road.



"I would I knew what 'tis about!" he exclaimed, with all a boy's

curiosity in such happenings.



"Thou art the King!" solemnly responded the Earl, with a

reverence.  "Have I your Grace's leave to act?"



"O blithely, yes!  O gladly, yes!" exclaimed Tom excitedly, adding

to himself with a lively sense of satisfaction, "In truth, being a

king is not all dreariness--it hath its compensations and

conveniences."



The Earl called a page, and sent him to the captain of the guard

with the order--



"Let the mob be halted, and inquiry made concerning the occasion

of its movement.  By the King's command!"



A few seconds later a long rank of the royal guards, cased in

flashing steel, filed out at the gates and formed across the

highway in front of the multitude.  A messenger returned, to

report that the crowd were following a man, a woman, and a young

girl to execution for crimes committed against the peace and

dignity of the realm.



Death--and a violent death--for these poor unfortunates!  The

thought wrung Tom's heart-strings.  The spirit of compassion took

control of him, to the exclusion of all other considerations; he

never thought of the offended laws, or of the grief or loss which

these three criminals had inflicted upon their victims; he could

think of nothing but the scaffold and the grisly fate hanging over

the heads of the condemned.  His concern made him even forget, for

the moment, that he was but the false shadow of a king, not the

substance; and before he knew it he had blurted out the command--



"Bring them here!"



Then he blushed scarlet, and a sort of apology sprung to his lips;

but observing that his order had wrought no sort of surprise in

the Earl or the waiting page, he suppressed the words he was about

to utter.  The page, in the most matter-of-course way, made a

profound obeisance and retired backwards out of the room to

deliver the command.  Tom experienced a glow of pride and a

renewed sense of the compensating advantages of the kingly office.

He said to himself, "Truly it is like what I was used to feel when

I read the old priest's tales, and did imagine mine own self a

prince, giving law and command to all, saying 'Do this, do that,'

whilst none durst offer let or hindrance to my will."



Now the doors swung open; one high-sounding title after another

was announced, the personages owning them followed, and the place

was quickly half-filled with noble folk and finery.  But Tom was

hardly conscious of the presence of these people, so wrought up

was he and so intensely absorbed in that other and more

interesting matter.  He seated himself absently in his chair of

state, and turned his eyes upon the door with manifestations of

impatient expectancy; seeing which, the company forbore to trouble

him, and fell to chatting a mixture of public business and court

gossip one with another.



In a little while the measured tread of military men was heard

approaching, and the culprits entered the presence in charge of an

under-sheriff and escorted by a detail of the king's guard.  The

civil officer knelt before Tom, then stood aside; the three doomed

persons knelt, also, and remained so; the guard took position

behind Tom's chair.  Tom scanned the prisoners curiously.

Something about the dress or appearance of the man had stirred a

vague memory in him.  "Methinks I have seen this man ere now . . .

but the when or the where fail me"--such was Tom's thought.  Just

then the man glanced quickly up and quickly dropped his face

again, not being able to endure the awful port of sovereignty; but

the one full glimpse of the face which Tom got was sufficient.  He

said to himself:  "Now is the matter clear; this is the stranger

that plucked Giles Witt out of the Thames, and saved his life,

that windy, bitter, first day of the New Year--a brave good deed--

pity he hath been doing baser ones and got himself in this sad

case . . . I have not forgot the day, neither the hour; by reason

that an hour after, upon the stroke of eleven, I did get a hiding

by the hand of Gammer Canty which was of so goodly and admired

severity that all that went before or followed after it were but

fondlings and caresses by comparison."



Tom now ordered that the woman and the girl be removed from the

presence for a little time; then addressed himself to the under-

sheriff, saying--



"Good sir, what is this man's offence?"



The officer knelt, and answered--



"So please your Majesty, he hath taken the life of a subject by

poison."



Tom's compassion for the prisoner, and admiration of him as the

daring rescuer of a drowning boy, experienced a most damaging

shock.



"The thing was proven upon him?" he asked.



"Most clearly, sire."



Tom sighed, and said--



"Take him away--he hath earned his death.  'Tis a pity, for he was

a brave heart--na--na, I mean he hath the LOOK of it!"



The prisoner clasped his hands together with sudden energy, and

wrung them despairingly, at the same time appealing imploringly to

the 'King' in broken and terrified phrases--



"O my lord the King, an' thou canst pity the lost, have pity upon

me!  I am innocent--neither hath that wherewith I am charged been

more than but lamely proved--yet I speak not of that; the judgment

is gone forth against me and may not suffer alteration; yet in

mine extremity I beg a boon, for my doom is more than I can bear.

A grace, a grace, my lord the King! in thy royal compassion grant

my prayer--give commandment that I be hanged!"



Tom was amazed.  This was not the outcome he had looked for.



"Odds my life, a strange BOON!  Was it not the fate intended

thee?"



"O good my liege, not so!  It is ordered that I be BOILED ALIVE!"



The hideous surprise of these words almost made Tom spring from

his chair.  As soon as he could recover his wits he cried out--



"Have thy wish, poor soul! an' thou had poisoned a hundred men

thou shouldst not suffer so miserable a death."



The prisoner bowed his face to the ground and burst into

passionate expressions of gratitude--ending with--



"If ever thou shouldst know misfortune--which God forefend!--may

thy goodness to me this day be remembered and requited!"



Tom turned to the Earl of Hertford, and said--



"My lord, is it believable that there was warrant for this man's

ferocious doom?"



"It is the law, your Grace--for poisoners.  In Germany coiners be

boiled to death in OIL--not cast in of a sudden, but by a rope let

down into the oil by degrees, and slowly; first the feet, then the

legs, then--"



"O prithee no more, my lord, I cannot bear it!" cried Tom,

covering his eyes with his hands to shut out the picture.  "I

beseech your good lordship that order be taken to change this law-

-oh, let no more poor creatures be visited with its tortures."



The Earl's face showed profound gratification, for he was a man of

merciful and generous impulses--a thing not very common with his

class in that fierce age.  He said--



"These your Grace's noble words have sealed its doom.  History

will remember it to the honour of your royal house."



The under-sheriff was about to remove his prisoner; Tom gave him a

sign to wait; then he said--



"Good sir, I would look into this matter further.  The man has

said his deed was but lamely proved.  Tell me what thou knowest."



"If the King's grace please, it did appear upon the trial that

this man entered into a house in the hamlet of Islington where one

lay sick--three witnesses say it was at ten of the clock in the

morning, and two say it was some minutes later--the sick man being

alone at the time, and sleeping--and presently the man came forth

again and went his way.  The sick man died within the hour, being

torn with spasms and retchings."



"Did any see the poison given?  Was poison found?"



"Marry, no, my liege."



"Then how doth one know there was poison given at all?"



"Please your Majesty, the doctors testified that none die with

such symptoms but by poison."



Weighty evidence, this, in that simple age.  Tom recognised its

formidable nature, and said--



"The doctor knoweth his trade--belike they were right.  The matter

hath an ill-look for this poor man."



"Yet was not this all, your Majesty; there is more and worse.

Many testified that a witch, since gone from the village, none

know whither, did foretell, and speak it privately in their ears,

that the sick man WOULD DIE BY POISON--and more, that a stranger

would give it--a stranger with brown hair and clothed in a worn

and common garb; and surely this prisoner doth answer woundily to

the bill.  Please your Majesty to give the circumstance that

solemn weight which is its due, seeing it was FORETOLD."



This was an argument of tremendous force in that superstitious

day.  Tom felt that the thing was settled; if evidence was worth

anything, this poor fellow's guilt was proved.  Still he offered

the prisoner a chance, saying--



"If thou canst say aught in thy behalf, speak."



"Nought that will avail, my King.  I am innocent, yet cannot I

make it appear.  I have no friends, else might I show that I was

not in Islington that day; so also might I show that at that hour

they name I was above a league away, seeing I was at Wapping Old

Stairs; yea more, my King, for I could show, that whilst they say

I was TAKING life, I was SAVING it.  A drowning boy--"



"Peace!  Sheriff, name the day the deed was done!"



"At ten in the morning, or some minutes later, the first day of

the New Year, most illustrious--"



"Let the prisoner go free--it is the King's will!"



Another blush followed this unregal outburst, and he covered his

indecorum as well as he could by adding--



"It enrageth me that a man should be hanged upon such idle, hare-

brained evidence!"



A low buzz of admiration swept through the assemblage.  It was not

admiration of the decree that had been delivered by Tom, for the

propriety or expediency of pardoning a convicted poisoner was a

thing which few there would have felt justified in either

admitting or admiring--no, the admiration was for the intelligence

and spirit which Tom had displayed.  Some of the low-voiced

remarks were to this effect--



"This is no mad king--he hath his wits sound."



"How sanely he put his questions--how like his former natural self

was this abrupt imperious disposal of the matter!"



"God be thanked, his infirmity is spent!  This is no weakling, but

a king.  He hath borne himself like to his own father."



The air being filled with applause, Tom's ear necessarily caught a

little of it.  The effect which this had upon him was to put him

greatly at his ease, and also to charge his system with very

gratifying sensations.



However, his juvenile curiosity soon rose superior to these

pleasant thoughts and feelings; he was eager to know what sort of

deadly mischief the woman and the little girl could have been

about; so, by his command, the two terrified and sobbing creatures

were brought before him.



"What is it that these have done?" he inquired of the sheriff.



"Please your Majesty, a black crime is charged upon them, and

clearly proven; wherefore the judges have decreed, according to

the law, that they be hanged.  They sold themselves to the devil--

such is their crime."



Tom shuddered.  He had been taught to abhor people who did this

wicked thing.  Still, he was not going to deny himself the

pleasure of feeding his curiosity for all that; so he asked--



"Where was this done?--and when?"



"On a midnight in December, in a ruined church, your Majesty."



Tom shuddered again.



"Who was there present?"



"Only these two, your grace--and THAT OTHER."



"Have these confessed?"



"Nay, not so, sire--they do deny it."



"Then prithee, how was it known?"



"Certain witness did see them wending thither, good your Majesty;

this bred the suspicion, and dire effects have since confirmed and

justified it.  In particular, it is in evidence that through the

wicked power so obtained, they did invoke and bring about a storm

that wasted all the region round about.  Above forty witnesses

have proved the storm; and sooth one might have had a thousand,

for all had reason to remember it, sith all had suffered by it."



"Certes this is a serious matter."  Tom turned this dark piece of

scoundrelism over in his mind a while, then asked--



"Suffered the woman also by the storm?"



Several old heads among the assemblage nodded their recognition of

the wisdom of this question.  The sheriff, however, saw nothing

consequential in the inquiry; he answered, with simple directness-

-



"Indeed did she, your Majesty, and most righteously, as all aver.

Her habitation was swept away, and herself and child left

shelterless."



"Methinks the power to do herself so ill a turn was dearly bought.

She had been cheated, had she paid but a farthing for it; that she

paid her soul, and her child's, argueth that she is mad; if she is

mad she knoweth not what she doth, therefore sinneth not."



The elderly heads nodded recognition of Tom's wisdom once more,

and one individual murmured, "An' the King be mad himself,

according to report, then is it a madness of a sort that would

improve the sanity of some I wot of, if by the gentle providence

of God they could but catch it."



"What age hath the child?" asked Tom.



"Nine years, please your Majesty."



"By the law of England may a child enter into covenant and sell

itself, my lord?" asked Tom, turning to a learned judge.



"The law doth not permit a child to make or meddle in any weighty

matter, good my liege, holding that its callow wit unfitteth it to

cope with the riper wit and evil schemings of them that are its

elders.  The DEVIL may buy a child, if he so choose, and the child

agree thereto, but not an Englishman--in this latter case the

contract would be null and void."



"It seemeth a rude unchristian thing, and ill contrived, that

English law denieth privileges to Englishmen to waste them on the

devil!" cried Tom, with honest heat.



This novel view of the matter excited many smiles, and was stored

away in many heads to be repeated about the Court as evidence of

Tom's originality as well as progress toward mental health.



The elder culprit had ceased from sobbing, and was hanging upon

Tom's words with an excited interest and a growing hope.  Tom

noticed this, and it strongly inclined his sympathies toward her

in her perilous and unfriended situation.  Presently he asked--



"How wrought they to bring the storm?"



"BY PULLING OFF THEIR STOCKINGS, sire."



This astonished Tom, and also fired his curiosity to fever heat.

He said, eagerly--



"It is wonderful!  Hath it always this dread effect?"



"Always, my liege--at least if the woman desire it, and utter the

needful words, either in her mind or with her tongue."



Tom turned to the woman, and said with impetuous zeal--



"Exert thy power--I would see a storm!"



There was a sudden paling of cheeks in the superstitious

assemblage, and a general, though unexpressed, desire to get out

of the place--all of which was lost upon Tom, who was dead to

everything but the proposed cataclysm.  Seeing a puzzled and

astonished look in the woman's face, he added, excitedly--



"Never fear--thou shalt be blameless.  More--thou shalt go free--

none shall touch thee.  Exert thy power."



"Oh, my lord the King, I have it not--I have been falsely

accused."



"Thy fears stay thee.  Be of good heart, thou shalt suffer no

harm.  Make a storm--it mattereth not how small a one--I require

nought great or harmful, but indeed prefer the opposite--do this

and thy life is spared--thou shalt go out free, with thy child,

bearing the King's pardon, and safe from hurt or malice from any

in the realm."



The woman prostrated herself, and protested, with tears, that she

had no power to do the miracle, else she would gladly win her

child's life alone, and be content to lose her own, if by

obedience to the King's command so precious a grace might be

acquired.



Tom urged--the woman still adhered to her declarations.  Finally

he said--



"I think the woman hath said true.  An' MY mother were in her

place and gifted with the devil's functions, she had not stayed a

moment to call her storms and lay the whole land in ruins, if the

saving of my forfeit life were the price she got!  It is argument

that other mothers are made in like mould.  Thou art free,

goodwife--thou and thy child--for I do think thee innocent.  NOW

thou'st nought to fear, being pardoned--pull off thy stockings!--

an' thou canst make me a storm, thou shalt be rich!"



The redeemed creature was loud in her gratitude, and proceeded to

obey, whilst Tom looked on with eager expectancy, a little marred

by apprehension; the courtiers at the same time manifesting

decided discomfort and uneasiness.  The woman stripped her own

feet and her little girl's also, and plainly did her best to

reward the King's generosity with an earthquake, but it was all a

failure and a disappointment.  Tom sighed, and said--



"There, good soul, trouble thyself no further, thy power is

departed out of thee.  Go thy way in peace; and if it return to

thee at any time, forget me not, but fetch me a storm." {13}







Chapter XVI. The State Dinner.



The dinner hour drew near--yet strangely enough, the thought

brought but slight discomfort to Tom, and hardly any terror.  The

morning's experiences had wonderfully built up his confidence; the

poor little ash-cat was already more wonted to his strange garret,

after four days' habit, than a mature person could have become in

a full month.  A child's facility in accommodating itself to

circumstances was never more strikingly illustrated.



Let us privileged ones hurry to the great banqueting-room and have

a glance at matters there whilst Tom is being made ready for the

imposing occasion.  It is a spacious apartment, with gilded

pillars and pilasters, and pictured walls and ceilings.  At the

door stand tall guards, as rigid as statues, dressed in rich and

picturesque costumes, and bearing halberds.  In a high gallery

which runs all around the place is a band of musicians and a

packed company of citizens of both sexes, in brilliant attire.  In

the centre of the room, upon a raised platform, is Tom's table.

Now let the ancient chronicler speak:



"A gentleman enters the room bearing a rod, and along with him

another bearing a tablecloth, which, after they have both kneeled

three times with the utmost veneration, he spreads upon the table,

and after kneeling again they both retire; then come two others,

one with the rod again, the other with a salt-cellar, a plate, and

bread; when they have kneeled as the others had done, and placed

what was brought upon the table, they too retire with the same

ceremonies performed by the first; at last come two nobles, richly

clothed, one bearing a tasting-knife, who, after prostrating

themselves three times in the most graceful manner, approach and

rub the table with bread and salt, with as much awe as if the King

had been present." {6}



So end the solemn preliminaries.  Now, far down the echoing

corridors we hear a bugle-blast, and the indistinct cry, "Place

for the King!  Way for the King's most excellent majesty!"  These

sounds are momently repeated--they grow nearer and nearer--and

presently, almost in our faces, the martial note peals and the cry

rings out, "Way for the King!"  At this instant the shining

pageant appears, and files in at the door, with a measured march.

Let the chronicler speak again:--



"First come Gentlemen, Barons, Earls, Knights of the Garter, all

richly dressed and bareheaded; next comes the Chancellor, between

two, one of which carries the royal sceptre, the other the Sword

of State in a red scabbard, studded with golden fleurs-de-lis, the

point upwards; next comes the King himself--whom, upon his

appearing, twelve trumpets and many drums salute with a great

burst of welcome, whilst all in the galleries rise in their

places, crying 'God save the King!'  After him come nobles

attached to his person, and on his right and left march his guard

of honour, his fifty Gentlemen Pensioners, with gilt battle-axes."



This was all fine and pleasant.  Tom's pulse beat high, and a glad

light was in his eye.  He bore himself right gracefully, and all

the more so because he was not thinking of how he was doing it,

his mind being charmed and occupied with the blithe sights and

sounds about him--and besides, nobody can be very ungraceful in

nicely-fitting beautiful clothes after he has grown a little used

to them--especially if he is for the moment unconscious of them.

Tom remembered his instructions, and acknowledged his greeting

with a slight inclination of his plumed head, and a courteous "I

thank ye, my good people."



He seated himself at table, without removing his cap; and did it

without the least embarrassment; for to eat with one's cap on was

the one solitary royal custom upon which the kings and the Cantys

met upon common ground, neither party having any advantage over

the other in the matter of old familiarity with it.  The pageant

broke up and grouped itself picturesquely, and remained

bareheaded.



Now to the sound of gay music the Yeomen of the Guard entered,--

"the tallest and mightiest men in England, they being carefully

selected in this regard"--but we will let the chronicler tell

about it:--



"The Yeomen of the Guard entered, bareheaded, clothed in scarlet,

with golden roses upon their backs; and these went and came,

bringing in each turn a course of dishes, served in plate.  These

dishes were received by a gentleman in the same order they were

brought, and placed upon the table, while the taster gave to each

guard a mouthful to eat of the particular dish he had brought, for

fear of any poison."



Tom made a good dinner, notwithstanding he was conscious that

hundreds of eyes followed each morsel to his mouth and watched him

eat it with an interest which could not have been more intense if

it had been a deadly explosive and was expected to blow him up and

scatter him all about the place.  He was careful not to hurry, and

equally careful not to do anything whatever for himself, but wait

till the proper official knelt down and did it for him.  He got

through without a mistake--flawless and precious triumph.



When the meal was over at last and he marched away in the midst of

his bright pageant, with the happy noises in his ears of blaring

bugles, rolling drums, and thundering acclamations, he felt that

if he had seen the worst of dining in public it was an ordeal

which he would be glad to endure several times a day if by that

means he could but buy himself free from some of the more

formidable requirements of his royal office.







Chapter XVII. Foo-foo the First.



Miles Hendon hurried along toward the Southwark end of the bridge,

keeping a sharp look-out for the persons he sought, and hoping and

expecting to overtake them presently.  He was disappointed in

this, however.  By asking questions, he was enabled to track them

part of the way through Southwark; then all traces ceased, and he

was perplexed as to how to proceed.  Still, he continued his

efforts as best he could during the rest of the day.  Nightfall

found him leg-weary, half-famished, and his desire as far from

accomplishment as ever; so he supped at the Tabard Inn and went to

bed, resolved to make an early start in the morning, and give the

town an exhaustive search.  As he lay thinking and planning, he

presently began to reason thus:  The boy would escape from the

ruffian, his reputed father, if possible; would he go back to

London and seek his former haunts?  No, he would not do that, he

would avoid recapture.  What, then, would he do?  Never having had

a friend in the world, or a protector, until he met Miles Hendon,

he would naturally try to find that friend again, provided the

effort did not require him to go toward London and danger.  He

would strike for Hendon Hall, that is what he would do, for he

knew Hendon was homeward bound and there he might expect to find

him.  Yes, the case was plain to Hendon--he must lose no more time

in Southwark, but move at once through Kent, toward Monk's Holm,

searching the wood and inquiring as he went.  Let us return to the

vanished little King now.



The ruffian whom the waiter at the inn on the bridge saw 'about to

join' the youth and the King did not exactly join them, but fell

in close behind them and followed their steps.  He said nothing.

His left arm was in a sling, and he wore a large green patch over

his left eye; he limped slightly, and used an oaken staff as a

support.  The youth led the King a crooked course through

Southwark, and by-and-by struck into the high road beyond.  The

King was irritated, now, and said he would stop here--it was

Hendon's place to come to him, not his to go to Hendon.  He would

not endure such insolence; he would stop where he was.  The youth

said--



"Thou'lt tarry here, and thy friend lying wounded in the wood

yonder?  So be it, then."



The King's manner changed at once.  He cried out--



"Wounded?  And who hath dared to do it?  But that is apart; lead

on, lead on!  Faster, sirrah!  Art shod with lead?  Wounded, is

he?  Now though the doer of it be a duke's son he shall rue it!"



It was some distance to the wood, but the space was speedily

traversed.  The youth looked about him, discovered a bough

sticking in the ground, with a small bit of rag tied to it, then

led the way into the forest, watching for similar boughs and

finding them at intervals; they were evidently guides to the point

he was aiming at.  By-and-by an open place was reached, where were

the charred remains of a farm-house, and near them a barn which

was falling to ruin and decay.  There was no sign of life

anywhere, and utter silence prevailed.  The youth entered the

barn, the King following eagerly upon his heels.  No one there!

The King shot a surprised and suspicious glance at the youth, and

asked--



"Where is he?"



A mocking laugh was his answer.  The King was in a rage in a

moment; he seized a billet of wood and was in the act of charging

upon the youth when another mocking laugh fell upon his ear.  It

was from the lame ruffian who had been following at a distance.

The King turned and said angrily--



"Who art thou?  What is thy business here?"



"Leave thy foolery," said the man, "and quiet thyself.  My

disguise is none so good that thou canst pretend thou knowest not

thy father through it."



"Thou art not my father.  I know thee not.  I am the King.  If

thou hast hid my servant, find him for me, or thou shalt sup

sorrow for what thou hast done."



John Canty replied, in a stern and measured voice--



"It is plain thou art mad, and I am loath to punish thee;  but if

thou provoke me, I must.  Thy prating doth no harm here, where

there are no ears that need to mind thy follies; yet it is well to

practise thy tongue to wary speech, that it may do no hurt when

our quarters change.  I have done a murder, and may not tarry at

home--neither shalt thou, seeing I need thy service.  My name is

changed, for wise reasons; it is Hobbs--John Hobbs; thine is Jack-

-charge thy memory accordingly.  Now, then, speak.  Where is thy

mother?  Where are thy sisters?  They came not to the place

appointed--knowest thou whither they went?"



The King answered sullenly--



"Trouble me not with these riddles.  My mother is dead; my sisters

are in the palace."



The youth near by burst into a derisive laugh, and the King would

have assaulted him, but Canty--or Hobbs, as he now called himself-

-prevented him, and said--



"Peace, Hugo, vex him not; his mind is astray, and thy ways fret

him.  Sit thee down, Jack, and quiet thyself; thou shalt have a

morsel to eat, anon."



Hobbs and Hugo fell to talking together, in low voices, and the

King removed himself as far as he could from their disagreeable

company.  He withdrew into the twilight of the farther end of the

barn, where he found the earthen floor bedded a foot deep with

straw.  He lay down here, drew straw over himself in lieu of

blankets, and was soon absorbed in thinking.  He had many griefs,

but the minor ones were swept almost into forgetfulness by the

supreme one, the loss of his father.  To the rest of the world the

name of Henry VIII. brought a shiver, and suggested an ogre whose

nostrils breathed destruction and whose hand dealt scourgings and

death; but to this boy the name brought only sensations of

pleasure; the figure it invoked wore a countenance that was all

gentleness and affection.  He called to mind a long succession of

loving passages between his father and himself, and dwelt fondly

upon them, his unstinted tears attesting how deep and real was the

grief that possessed his heart.  As the afternoon wasted away, the

lad, wearied with his troubles, sank gradually into a tranquil and

healing slumber.



After a considerable time--he could not tell how long--his senses

struggled to a half-consciousness, and as he lay with closed eyes

vaguely wondering where he was and what had been happening, he

noted a murmurous sound, the sullen beating of rain upon the roof.

A snug sense of comfort stole over him, which was rudely broken,

the next moment, by a chorus of piping cackles and coarse

laughter.  It startled him disagreeably, and he unmuffled his head

to see whence this interruption proceeded.  A grim and unsightly

picture met his eye.  A bright fire was burning in the middle of

the floor, at the other end of the barn; and around it, and lit

weirdly up by the red glare, lolled and sprawled the motliest

company of tattered gutter-scum and ruffians, of both sexes, he

had ever read or dreamed of.  There were huge stalwart men, brown

with exposure, long-haired, and clothed in fantastic rags; there

were middle-sized youths, of truculent countenance, and similarly

clad; there were blind mendicants, with patched or bandaged eyes;

crippled ones, with wooden legs and crutches; diseased ones, with

running sores peeping from ineffectual wrappings; there was a

villain-looking pedlar with his pack; a knife-grinder, a tinker,

and a barber-surgeon, with the implements of their trades; some of

the females were hardly-grown girls, some were at prime, some were

old and wrinkled hags, and all were loud, brazen, foul-mouthed;

and all soiled and slatternly; there were three sore-faced babies;

there were a couple of starveling curs, with strings about their

necks, whose office was to lead the blind.



The night was come, the gang had just finished feasting, an orgy

was beginning; the can of liquor was passing from mouth to mouth.

A general cry broke forth--



"A song! a song from the Bat and Dick and Dot-and-go-One!"



One of the blind men got up, and made ready by casting aside the

patches that sheltered his excellent eyes, and the pathetic

placard which recited the cause of his calamity.  Dot-and-go-One

disencumbered himself of his timber leg and took his place, upon

sound and healthy limbs, beside his fellow-rascal; then they

roared out a rollicking ditty, and were reinforced by the whole

crew, at the end of each stanza, in a rousing chorus.  By the time

the last stanza was reached, the half-drunken enthusiasm had risen

to such a pitch, that everybody joined in and sang it clear

through from the beginning, producing a volume of villainous sound

that made the rafters quake.  These were the inspiring words:--



     'Bien Darkman's then, Bouse Mort and Ken,

      The bien Coves bings awast,

      On Chates to trine by Rome Coves dine

      For his long lib at last.

      Bing'd out bien Morts and toure, and toure,

      Bing out of the Rome vile bine,

      And toure the Cove that cloy'd your duds,

      Upon the Chates to trine.'

                           (From 'The English Rogue.' London,

1665.)



Conversation followed; not in the thieves' dialect of the song,

for that was only used in talk when unfriendly ears might be

listening.  In the course of it, it appeared that 'John Hobbs' was

not altogether a new recruit, but had trained in the gang at some

former time.  His later history was called for, and when he said

he had 'accidentally' killed a man, considerable satisfaction was

expressed; when he added that the man was a priest, he was roundly

applauded, and had to take a drink with everybody.  Old

acquaintances welcomed him joyously, and new ones were proud to

shake him by the hand.  He was asked why he had 'tarried away so

many months.'  He answered--



"London is better than the country, and safer, these late years,

the laws be so bitter and so diligently enforced.  An' I had not

had that accident, I had stayed there.  I had resolved to stay,

and never more venture country-wards--but the accident has ended

that."



He inquired how many persons the gang numbered now.  The

'ruffler,' or chief, answered--



"Five and twenty sturdy budges, bulks, files, clapperdogeons and

maunders, counting the dells and doxies and other morts. {7}  Most

are here, the rest are wandering eastward, along the winter lay.

We follow at dawn."



"I do not see the Wen among the honest folk about me.  Where may

he be?"



"Poor lad, his diet is brimstone, now, and over hot for a delicate

taste.  He was killed in a brawl, somewhere about midsummer."



"I sorrow to hear that; the Wen was a capable man, and brave."



"That was he, truly.  Black Bess, his dell, is of us yet, but

absent on the eastward tramp; a fine lass, of nice ways and

orderly conduct, none ever seeing her drunk above four days in the

seven."



"She was ever strict--I remember it well--a goodly wench and

worthy all commendation.  Her mother was more free and less

particular; a troublesome and ugly-tempered beldame, but furnished

with a wit above the common."



"We lost her through it.  Her gift of palmistry and other sorts of

fortune-telling begot for her at last a witch's name and fame.

The law roasted her to death at a slow fire.  It did touch me to a

sort of tenderness to see the gallant way she met her lot--cursing

and reviling all the crowd that gaped and gazed around her, whilst

the flames licked upward toward her face and catched her thin

locks and crackled about her old gray head--cursing them! why an'

thou should'st live a thousand years thoud'st never hear so

masterful a cursing.  Alack, her art died with her.  There be base

and weakling imitations left, but no true blasphemy."



The Ruffler sighed; the listeners sighed in sympathy; a general

depression fell upon the company for a moment, for even hardened

outcasts like these are not wholly dead to sentiment, but are able

to feel a fleeting sense of loss and affliction at wide intervals

and under peculiarly favouring circumstances--as in cases like to

this, for instance, when genius and culture depart and leave no

heir.  However, a deep drink all round soon restored the spirits

of the mourners.



"Have any others of our friends fared hardly?" asked Hobbs.



"Some--yes.  Particularly new comers--such as small husbandmen

turned shiftless and hungry upon the world because their farms

were taken from them to be changed to sheep ranges.  They begged,

and were whipped at the cart's tail, naked from the girdle up,

till the blood ran; then set in the stocks to be pelted; they

begged again, were whipped again, and deprived of an ear; they

begged a third time--poor devils, what else could they do?--and

were branded on the cheek with a red-hot iron, then sold for

slaves; they ran away, were hunted down, and hanged.  'Tis a brief

tale, and quickly told.  Others of us have fared less hardly.

Stand forth, Yokel, Burns, and Hodge--show your adornments!"



These stood up and stripped away some of their rags, exposing

their backs, criss-crossed with ropy old welts left by the lash;

one turned up his hair and showed the place where a left ear had

once been; another showed a brand upon his shoulder--the letter V-

-and a mutilated ear; the third said--



"I am Yokel, once a farmer and prosperous, with loving wife and

kids--now am I somewhat different in estate and calling; and the

wife and kids are gone; mayhap they are in heaven, mayhap in--in

the other place--but the kindly God be thanked, they bide no more

in ENGLAND!  My good old blameless mother strove to earn bread by

nursing the sick; one of these died, the doctors knew not how, so

my mother was burnt for a witch, whilst my babes looked on and

wailed.  English law!--up, all, with your cups!--now all together

and with a cheer!--drink to the merciful English law that

delivered HER from the English hell!  Thank you, mates, one and

all.  I begged, from house to house--I and the wife--bearing with

us the hungry kids--but it was crime to be hungry in England--so

they stripped us and lashed us through three towns.  Drink ye all

again to the merciful English law!--for its lash drank deep of my

Mary's blood and its blessed deliverance came quick.  She lies

there, in the potter's field, safe from all harms.  And the kids--

well, whilst the law lashed me from town to town, they starved.

Drink, lads--only a drop--a drop to the poor kids, that never did

any creature harm.  I begged again--begged, for a crust, and got

the stocks and lost an ear--see, here bides the stump; I begged

again, and here is the stump of the other to keep me minded of it.

And still I begged again, and was sold for a slave--here on my

cheek under this stain, if I washed it off, ye might see the red S

the branding-iron left there!  A SLAVE!  Do you understand that

word?  An English SLAVE!--that is he that stands before ye.  I

have run from my master, and when I am found--the heavy curse of

heaven fall on the law of the land that hath commanded it!--I

shall hang!" {1}



A ringing voice came through the murky air--



"Thou shalt NOT!--and this day the end of that law is come!"



All turned, and saw the fantastic figure of the little King

approaching hurriedly; as it emerged into the light and was

clearly revealed, a general explosion of inquiries broke out--



"Who is it?  WHAT is it?  Who art thou, manikin?"



The boy stood unconfused in the midst of all those surprised and

questioning eyes, and answered with princely dignity--



"I am Edward, King of England."



A wild burst of laughter followed, partly of derision and partly

of delight in the excellence of the joke.  The King was stung.  He

said sharply--



"Ye mannerless vagrants, is this your recognition of the royal

boon I have promised?"



He said more, with angry voice and excited gesture, but it was

lost in a whirlwind of laughter and mocking exclamations.  'John

Hobbs' made several attempts to make himself heard above the din,

and at last succeeded--saying--



"Mates, he is my son, a dreamer, a fool, and stark mad--mind him

not--he thinketh he IS the King."



"I AM the King," said Edward, turning toward him, "as thou shalt

know to thy cost, in good time.  Thou hast confessed a murder--

thou shalt swing for it."



"THOU'LT betray me?--THOU?  An' I get my hands upon thee--"



"Tut-tut!" said the burley Ruffler, interposing in time to save

the King, and emphasising this service by knocking Hobbs down with

his fist, "hast respect for neither Kings NOR Rufflers?  An' thou

insult my presence so again, I'll hang thee up myself."  Then he

said to his Majesty, "Thou must make no threats against thy mates,

lad; and thou must guard thy tongue from saying evil of them

elsewhere.  BE King, if it please thy mad humour, but be not

harmful in it.  Sink the title thou hast uttered--'tis treason; we

be bad men in some few trifling ways, but none among us is so base

as to be traitor to his King; we be loving and loyal hearts, in

that regard.  Note if I speak truth.  Now--all together:  'Long

live Edward, King of England!'"



"LONG LIVE EDWARD, KING OF ENGLAND!"



The response came with such a thundergust from the motley crew

that the crazy building vibrated to the sound.  The little King's

face lighted with pleasure for an instant, and he slightly

inclined his head, and said with grave simplicity--



"I thank you, my good people."



This unexpected result threw the company into convulsions of

merriment.  When something like quiet was presently come again,

the Ruffler said, firmly, but with an accent of good nature--



"Drop it, boy, 'tis not wise, nor well.  Humour thy fancy, if thou

must, but choose some other title."



A tinker shrieked out a suggestion--



"Foo-foo the First, King of the Mooncalves!"



The title 'took,' at once, every throat responded, and a roaring

shout went up, of--



"Long live Foo-foo the First, King of the Mooncalves!" followed by

hootings, cat-calls, and peals of laughter.



"Hale him forth, and crown him!"



"Robe him!"



"Sceptre him!"



"Throne him!"



These and twenty other cries broke out at once! and almost before

the poor little victim could draw a breath he was crowned with a

tin basin, robed in a tattered blanket, throned upon a barrel, and

sceptred with the tinker's soldering-iron.  Then all flung

themselves upon their knees about him and sent up a chorus of

ironical wailings, and mocking supplications, whilst they swabbed

their eyes with their soiled and ragged sleeves and aprons--



"Be gracious to us, O sweet King!"



"Trample not upon thy beseeching worms, O noble Majesty!"



"Pity thy slaves, and comfort them with a royal kick!"



"Cheer us and warm us with thy gracious rays, O flaming sun of

sovereignty!"



"Sanctify the ground with the touch of thy foot, that we may eat

the dirt and be ennobled!"



"Deign to spit upon us, O Sire, that our children's children may

tell of thy princely condescension, and be proud and happy for

ever!"



But the humorous tinker made the 'hit' of the evening and carried

off the honours.  Kneeling, he pretended to kiss the King's foot,

and was indignantly spurned; whereupon he went about begging for a

rag to paste over the place upon his face which had been touched

by the foot, saying it must be preserved from contact with the

vulgar air, and that he should make his fortune by going on the

highway and exposing it to view at the rate of a hundred shillings

a sight.  He made himself so killingly funny that he was the envy

and admiration of the whole mangy rabble.



Tears of shame and indignation stood in the little monarch's eyes;

and the thought in his heart was, "Had I offered them a deep wrong

they could not be more cruel--yet have I proffered nought but to

do them a kindness--and it is thus they use me for it!"







Chapter XVIII. The Prince with the tramps.



The troop of vagabonds turned out at early dawn, and set forward

on their march.  There was a lowering sky overhead, sloppy ground

under foot, and a winter chill in the air.  All gaiety was gone

from the company; some were sullen and silent, some were irritable

and petulant, none were gentle-humoured, all were thirsty.



The Ruffler put 'Jack' in Hugo's charge, with some brief

instructions, and commanded John Canty to keep away from him and

let him alone; he also warned Hugo not to be too rough with the

lad.



After a while the weather grew milder, and the clouds lifted

somewhat.  The troop ceased to shiver, and their spirits began to

improve.  They grew more and more cheerful, and finally began to

chaff each other and insult passengers along the highway.  This

showed that they were awaking to an appreciation of life and its

joys once more.  The dread in which their sort was held was

apparent in the fact that everybody gave them the road, and took

their ribald insolences meekly, without venturing to talk back.

They snatched linen from the hedges, occasionally in full view of

the owners, who made no protest, but only seemed grateful that

they did not take the hedges, too.



By-and-by they invaded a small farmhouse and made themselves at

home while the trembling farmer and his people swept the larder

clean to furnish a breakfast for them.  They chucked the housewife

and her daughters under the chin whilst receiving the food from

their hands, and made coarse jests about them, accompanied with

insulting epithets and bursts of horse-laughter.  They threw bones

and vegetables at the farmer and his sons, kept them dodging all

the time, and applauded uproariously when a good hit was made.

They ended by buttering the head of one of the daughters who

resented some of their familiarities.  When they took their leave

they threatened to come back and burn the house over the heads of

the family if any report of their doings got to the ears of the

authorities.



About noon, after a long and weary tramp, the gang came to a halt

behind a hedge on the outskirts of a considerable village.  An

hour was allowed for rest, then the crew scattered themselves

abroad to enter the village at different points to ply their

various trades--'Jack' was sent with Hugo.  They wandered hither

and thither for some time, Hugo watching for opportunities to do a

stroke of business, but finding none--so he finally said--



"I see nought to steal; it is a paltry place.  Wherefore we will

beg."



"WE, forsooth!  Follow thy trade--it befits thee.  But _I_ will

not beg."



"Thou'lt not beg!" exclaimed Hugo, eyeing the King with surprise.

"Prithee, since when hast thou reformed?"



"What dost thou mean?"



"Mean?  Hast thou not begged the streets of London all thy life?"



"I?  Thou idiot!"



"Spare thy compliments--thy stock will last the longer.  Thy

father says thou hast begged all thy days.  Mayhap he lied.

Peradventure you will even make so bold as to SAY he lied,"

scoffed Hugo.



"Him YOU call my father?  Yes, he lied."



"Come, play not thy merry game of madman so far, mate; use it for

thy amusement, not thy hurt.  An' I tell him this, he will scorch

thee finely for it."



"Save thyself the trouble.  I will tell him."



"I like thy spirit, I do in truth; but I do not admire thy

judgment.  Bone-rackings and bastings be plenty enow in this life,

without going out of one's way to invite them.  But a truce to

these matters; _I_ believe your father.  I doubt not he can lie; I

doubt not he DOTH lie, upon occasion, for the best of us do that;

but there is no occasion here.  A wise man does not waste so good

a commodity as lying for nought.  But come; sith it is thy humour

to give over begging, wherewithal shall we busy ourselves?  With

robbing kitchens?"



The King said, impatiently--



"Have done with this folly--you weary me!"



Hugo replied, with temper--



"Now harkee, mate; you will not beg, you will not rob; so be it.

But I will tell you what you WILL do.  You will play decoy whilst

_I_ beg.  Refuse, an' you think you may venture!"



The King was about to reply contemptuously, when Hugo said,

interrupting--



"Peace!  Here comes one with a kindly face.  Now will I fall down

in a fit.  When the stranger runs to me, set you up a wail, and

fall upon your knees, seeming to weep; then cry out as all the

devils of misery were in your belly, and say, 'Oh, sir, it is my

poor afflicted brother, and we be friendless; o' God's name cast

through your merciful eyes one pitiful look upon a sick, forsaken,

and most miserable wretch; bestow one little penny out of thy

riches upon one smitten of God and ready to perish!'--and mind

you, keep you ON wailing, and abate not till we bilk him of his

penny, else shall you rue it."



Then immediately Hugo began to moan, and groan, and roll his eyes,

and reel and totter about; and when the stranger was close at

hand, down he sprawled before him, with a shriek, and began to

writhe and wallow in the dirt, in seeming agony.



"O, dear, O dear!" cried the benevolent stranger, "O poor soul,

poor soul, how he doth suffer!  There--let me help thee up."



"O noble sir, forbear, and God love you for a princely gentleman--

but it giveth me cruel pain to touch me when I am taken so.  My

brother there will tell your worship how I am racked with anguish

when these fits be upon me.  A penny, dear sir, a penny, to buy a

little food; then leave me to my sorrows."



"A penny! thou shalt have three, thou hapless creature"--and he

fumbled in his pocket with nervous haste and got them out.

"There, poor lad, take them and most welcome.  Now come hither, my

boy, and help me carry thy stricken brother to yon house, where--"



"I am not his brother," said the King, interrupting.



"What! not his brother?"



"Oh, hear him!" groaned Hugo, then privately ground his teeth.

"He denies his own brother--and he with one foot in the grave!"



"Boy, thou art indeed hard of heart, if this is thy brother.  For

shame!--and he scarce able to move hand or foot.  If he is not thy

brother, who is he, then?"



"A beggar and a thief!  He has got your money and has picked your

pocket likewise.  An' thou would'st do a healing miracle, lay thy

staff over his shoulders and trust Providence for the rest."



But Hugo did not tarry for the miracle.  In a moment he was up and

off like the wind, the gentleman following after and raising the

hue and cry lustily as he went.  The King, breathing deep

gratitude to Heaven for his own release, fled in the opposite

direction, and did not slacken his pace until he was out of harm's

reach.  He took the first road that offered, and soon put the

village behind him.  He hurried along, as briskly as he could,

during several hours, keeping a nervous watch over his shoulder

for pursuit; but his fears left him at last, and a grateful sense

of security took their place.  He recognised, now, that he was

hungry, and also very tired.  So he halted at a farmhouse; but

when he was about to speak, he was cut short and driven rudely

away.  His clothes were against him.



He wandered on, wounded and indignant, and was resolved to put

himself in the way of like treatment no more.  But hunger is

pride's master; so, as the evening drew near, he made an attempt

at another farmhouse; but here he fared worse than before; for he

was called hard names and was promised arrest as a vagrant except

he moved on promptly.



The night came on, chilly and overcast; and still the footsore

monarch laboured slowly on.  He was obliged to keep moving, for

every time he sat down to rest he was soon penetrated to the bone

with the cold.  All his sensations and experiences, as he moved

through the solemn gloom and the empty vastness of the night, were

new and strange to him.  At intervals he heard voices approach,

pass by, and fade into silence; and as he saw nothing more of the

bodies they belonged to than a sort of formless drifting blur,

there was something spectral and uncanny about it all that made

him shudder.  Occasionally he caught the twinkle of a light--

always far away, apparently--almost in another world; if he heard

the tinkle of a sheep's bell, it was vague, distant, indistinct;

the muffled lowing of the herds floated to him on the night wind

in vanishing cadences, a mournful sound; now and then came the

complaining howl of a dog over viewless expanses of field and

forest; all sounds were remote; they made the little King feel

that all life and activity were far removed from him, and that he

stood solitary, companionless, in the centre of a measureless

solitude.



He stumbled along, through the gruesome fascinations of this new

experience, startled occasionally by the soft rustling of the dry

leaves overhead, so like human whispers they seemed to sound; and

by-and-by he came suddenly upon the freckled light of a tin

lantern near at hand.  He stepped back into the shadows and

waited.  The lantern stood by the open door of a barn.  The King

waited some time--there was no sound, and nobody stirring.  He got

so cold, standing still, and the hospitable barn looked so

enticing, that at last he resolved to risk everything and enter.

He started swiftly and stealthily, and just as he was crossing the

threshold he heard voices behind him.  He darted behind a cask,

within the barn, and stooped down.  Two farm-labourers came in,

bringing the lantern with them, and fell to work, talking

meanwhile.  Whilst they moved about with the light, the King made

good use of his eyes and took the bearings of what seemed to be a

good-sized stall at the further end of the place, purposing to

grope his way to it when he should be left to himself.  He also

noted the position of a pile of horse blankets, midway of the

route, with the intent to levy upon them for the service of the

crown of England for one night.



By-and-by the men finished and went away, fastening the door

behind them and taking the lantern with them.  The shivering King

made for the blankets, with as good speed as the darkness would

allow; gathered them up, and then groped his way safely to the

stall.  Of two of the blankets he made a bed, then covered himself

with the remaining two.  He was a glad monarch, now, though the

blankets were old and thin, and not quite warm enough; and besides

gave out a pungent horsey odour that was almost suffocatingly

powerful.



Although the King was hungry and chilly, he was also so tired and

so drowsy that these latter influences soon began to get the

advantage of the former, and he presently dozed off into a state

of semi-consciousness.  Then, just as he was on the point of

losing himself wholly, he distinctly felt something touch him!  He

was broad awake in a moment, and gasping for breath.  The cold

horror of that mysterious touch in the dark almost made his heart

stand still.  He lay motionless, and listened, scarcely breathing.

But nothing stirred, and there was no sound.  He continued to

listen, and wait, during what seemed a long time, but still

nothing stirred, and there was no sound.  So he began to drop into

a drowse once more, at last; and all at once he felt that

mysterious touch again!  It was a grisly thing, this light touch

from this noiseless and invisible presence; it made the boy sick

with ghostly fears.  What should he do?  That was the question;

but he did not know how to answer it.  Should he leave these

reasonably comfortable quarters and fly from this inscrutable

horror?  But fly whither?  He could not get out of the barn; and

the idea of scurrying blindly hither and thither in the dark,

within the captivity of the four walls, with this phantom gliding

after him, and visiting him with that soft hideous touch upon

cheek or shoulder at every turn, was intolerable.  But to stay

where he was, and endure this living death all night--was that

better?  No.  What, then, was there left to do?  Ah, there was but

one course; he knew it well--he must put out his hand and find

that thing!



It was easy to think this; but it was hard to brace himself up to

try it.  Three times he stretched his hand a little way out into

the dark, gingerly; and snatched it suddenly back, with a gasp--

not because it had encountered anything, but because he had felt

so sure it was just GOING to.  But the fourth time, he groped a

little further, and his hand lightly swept against something soft

and warm.  This petrified him, nearly, with fright; his mind was

in such a state that he could imagine the thing to be nothing else

than a corpse, newly dead and still warm.  He thought he would

rather die than touch it again.  But he thought this false thought

because he did not know the immortal strength of human curiosity.

In no long time his hand was tremblingly groping again--against

his judgment, and without his consent--but groping persistently

on, just the same.  It encountered a bunch of long hair; he

shuddered, but followed up the hair and found what seemed to be a

warm rope; followed up the rope and found an innocent calf!--for

the rope was not a rope at all, but the calf's tail.



The King was cordially ashamed of himself for having gotten all

that fright and misery out of so paltry a matter as a slumbering

calf; but he need not have felt so about it, for it was not the

calf that frightened him, but a dreadful non-existent something

which the calf stood for; and any other boy, in those old

superstitious times, would have acted and suffered just as he had

done.



The King was not only delighted to find that the creature was only

a calf, but delighted to have the calf's company; for he had been

feeling so lonesome and friendless that the company and

comradeship of even this humble animal were welcome.  And he had

been so buffeted, so rudely entreated by his own kind, that it was

a real comfort to him to feel that he was at last in the society

of a fellow-creature that had at least a soft heart and a gentle

spirit, whatever loftier attributes might be lacking.  So he

resolved to waive rank and make friends with the calf.



While stroking its sleek warm back--for it lay near him and within

easy reach--it occurred to him that this calf might be utilised in

more ways than one.  Whereupon he re-arranged his bed, spreading

it down close to the calf; then he cuddled himself up to the

calf's back, drew the covers up over himself and his friend, and

in a minute or two was as warm and comfortable as he had ever been

in the downy couches of the regal palace of Westminster.



Pleasant thoughts came at once; life took on a cheerfuller

seeming.  He was free of the bonds of servitude and crime, free of

the companionship of base and brutal outlaws; he was warm; he was

sheltered; in a word, he was happy.  The night wind was rising; it

swept by in fitful gusts that made the old barn quake and rattle,

then its forces died down at intervals, and went moaning and

wailing around corners and projections--but it was all music to

the King, now that he was snug and comfortable:  let it blow and

rage, let it batter and bang, let it moan and wail, he minded it

not, he only enjoyed it.  He merely snuggled the closer to his

friend, in a luxury of warm contentment, and drifted blissfully

out of consciousness into a deep and dreamless sleep that was full

of serenity and peace.  The distant dogs howled, the melancholy

kine complained, and the winds went on raging, whilst furious

sheets of rain drove along the roof; but the Majesty of England

slept on, undisturbed, and the calf did the same, it being a

simple creature, and not easily troubled by storms or embarrassed

by sleeping with a king.







Chapter XIX. The Prince with the peasants.



When the King awoke in the early morning, he found that a wet but

thoughtful rat had crept into the place during the night and made

a cosy bed for itself in his bosom.  Being disturbed now, it

scampered away.  The boy smiled, and said, "Poor fool, why so

fearful?  I am as forlorn as thou.  'Twould be a sham in me to

hurt the helpless, who am myself so helpless.  Moreover, I owe you

thanks for a good omen; for when a king has fallen so low that the

very rats do make a bed of him, it surely meaneth that his

fortunes be upon the turn, since it is plain he can no lower go."



He got up and stepped out of the stall, and just then he heard the

sound of children's voices.  The barn door opened and a couple of

little girls came in.  As soon as they saw him their talking and

laughing ceased, and they stopped and stood still, gazing at him

with strong curiosity; they presently began to whisper together,

then they approached nearer, and stopped again to gaze and

whisper.  By-and-by they gathered courage and began to discuss him

aloud.  One said--



"He hath a comely face."



The other added--



"And pretty hair."



"But is ill clothed enow."



"And how starved he looketh."



They came still nearer, sidling shyly around and about him,

examining him minutely from all points, as if he were some strange

new kind of animal, but warily and watchfully the while, as if

they half feared he might be a sort of animal that would bite,

upon occasion.  Finally they halted before him, holding each

other's hands for protection, and took a good satisfying stare

with their innocent eyes; then one of them plucked up all her

courage and inquired with honest directness--



"Who art thou, boy?"



"I am the King," was the grave answer.



The children gave a little start, and their eyes spread themselves

wide open and remained so during a speechless half minute.  Then

curiosity broke the silence--



"The KING?  What King?"



"The King of England."



The children looked at each other--then at him--then at each other

again--wonderingly, perplexedly; then one said--



"Didst hear him, Margery?--he said he is the King.  Can that be

true?"



"How can it be else but true, Prissy?  Would he say a lie?  For

look you, Prissy, an' it were not true, it WOULD be a lie.  It

surely would be.  Now think on't.  For all things that be not

true, be lies--thou canst make nought else out of it."



It was a good tight argument, without a leak in it anywhere; and

it left Prissy's half-doubts not a leg to stand on.  She

considered a moment, then put the King upon his honour with the

simple remark--



"If thou art truly the King, then I believe thee."



"I am truly the King."



This settled the matter.  His Majesty's royalty was accepted

without further question or discussion, and the two little girls

began at once to inquire into how he came to be where he was, and

how he came to be so unroyally clad, and whither he was bound, and

all about his affairs.  It was a mighty relief to him to pour out

his troubles where they would not be scoffed at or doubted; so he

told his tale with feeling, forgetting even his hunger for the

time; and it was received with the deepest and tenderest sympathy

by the gentle little maids.  But when he got down to his latest

experiences and they learned how long he had been without food,

they cut him short and hurried him away to the farmhouse to find a

breakfast for him.



The King was cheerful and happy now, and said to himself, "When I

am come to mine own again, I will always honour little children,

remembering how that these trusted me and believed in me in my

time of trouble; whilst they that were older, and thought

themselves wiser, mocked at me and held me for a liar."



The children's mother received the King kindly, and was full of

pity; for his forlorn condition and apparently crazed intellect

touched her womanly heart.  She was a widow, and rather poor;

consequently she had seen trouble enough to enable her to feel for

the unfortunate.  She imagined that the demented boy had wandered

away from his friends or keepers; so she tried to find out whence

he had come, in order that she might take measures to return him;

but all her references to neighbouring towns and villages, and all

her inquiries in the same line went for nothing--the boy's face,

and his answers, too, showed that the things she was talking of

were not familiar to him.  He spoke earnestly and simply about

court matters, and broke down, more than once, when speaking of

the late King 'his father'; but whenever the conversation changed

to baser topics, he lost interest and became silent.



The woman was mightily puzzled; but she did not give up.  As she

proceeded with her cooking, she set herself to contriving devices

to surprise the boy into betraying his real secret.  She talked

about cattle--he showed no concern; then about sheep--the same

result:  so her guess that he had been a shepherd boy was an

error; she talked about mills; and about weavers, tinkers, smiths,

trades and tradesmen of all sorts; and about Bedlam, and jails,

and charitable retreats:  but no matter, she was baffled at all

points.  Not altogether, either; for she argued that she had

narrowed the thing down to domestic service.  Yes, she was sure

she was on the right track, now; he must have been a house

servant.  So she led up to that.  But the result was discouraging.

The subject of sweeping appeared to weary him; fire-building

failed to stir him; scrubbing and scouring awoke no enthusiasm.

The goodwife touched, with a perishing hope, and rather as a

matter of form, upon the subject of cooking.  To her surprise, and

her vast delight, the King's face lighted at once!  Ah, she had

hunted him down at last, she thought; and she was right proud,

too, of the devious shrewdness and tact which had accomplished it.



Her tired tongue got a chance to rest, now; for the King's,

inspired by gnawing hunger and the fragrant smells that came from

the sputtering pots and pans, turned itself loose and delivered

itself up to such an eloquent dissertation upon certain toothsome

dishes, that within three minutes the woman said to herself, "Of a

truth I was right--he hath holpen in a kitchen!"  Then he

broadened his bill of fare, and discussed it with such

appreciation and animation, that the goodwife said to herself,

"Good lack! how can he know so many dishes, and so fine ones

withal?  For these belong only upon the tables of the rich and

great.  Ah, now I see! ragged outcast as he is, he must have

served in the palace before his reason went astray; yes, he must

have helped in the very kitchen of the King himself!  I will test

him."



Full of eagerness to prove her sagacity, she told the King to mind

the cooking a moment--hinting that he might manufacture and add a

dish or two, if he chose; then she went out of the room and gave

her children a sign to follow after.  The King muttered--



"Another English king had a commission like to this, in a bygone

time--it is nothing against my dignity to undertake an office

which the great Alfred stooped to assume.  But I will try to

better serve my trust than he; for he let the cakes burn."



The intent was good, but the performance was not answerable to it,

for this King, like the other one, soon fell into deep thinkings

concerning his vast affairs, and the same calamity resulted--the

cookery got burned.  The woman returned in time to save the

breakfast from entire destruction; and she promptly brought the

King out of his dreams with a brisk and cordial tongue-lashing.

Then, seeing how troubled he was over his violated trust, she

softened at once, and was all goodness and gentleness toward him.



The boy made a hearty and satisfying meal, and was greatly

refreshed and gladdened by it.  It was a meal which was

distinguished by this curious feature, that rank was waived on

both sides; yet neither recipient of the favour was aware that it

had been extended.  The goodwife had intended to feed this young

tramp with broken victuals in a corner, like any other tramp or

like a dog; but she was so remorseful for the scolding she had

given him, that she did what she could to atone for it by allowing

him to sit at the family table and eat with his betters, on

ostensible terms of equality with them; and the King, on his side,

was so remorseful for having broken his trust, after the family

had been so kind to him, that he forced himself to atone for it by

humbling himself to the family level, instead of requiring the

woman and her children to stand and wait upon him, while he

occupied their table in the solitary state due to his birth and

dignity.  It does us all good to unbend sometimes.  This good

woman was made happy all the day long by the applauses which she

got out of herself for her magnanimous condescension to a tramp;

and the King was just as self-complacent over his gracious

humility toward a humble peasant woman.



When breakfast was over, the housewife told the King to wash up

the dishes.  This command was a staggerer, for a moment, and the

King came near rebelling; but then he said to himself, "Alfred the

Great watched the cakes; doubtless he would have washed the dishes

too--therefore will I essay it."



He made a sufficiently poor job of it; and to his surprise too,

for the cleaning of wooden spoons and trenchers had seemed an easy

thing to do.  It was a tedious and troublesome piece of work, but

he finished it at last.  He was becoming impatient to get away on

his journey now; however, he was not to lose this thrifty dame's

society so easily.  She furnished him some little odds and ends of

employment, which he got through with after a fair fashion and

with some credit.  Then she set him and the little girls to paring

some winter apples; but he was so awkward at this service that she

retired him from it and gave him a butcher knife to grind.

Afterwards she kept him carding wool until he began to think he

had laid the good King Alfred about far enough in the shade for

the present in the matter of showy menial heroisms that would read

picturesquely in story-books and histories, and so he was half-

minded to resign.  And when, just after the noonday dinner, the

goodwife gave him a basket of kittens to drown, he did resign.  At

least he was just going to resign--for he felt that he must draw

the line somewhere, and it seemed to him that to draw it at

kitten-drowning was about the right thing--when there was an

interruption.  The interruption was John Canty--with a peddler's

pack on his back--and Hugo.



The King discovered these rascals approaching the front gate

before they had had a chance to see him; so he said nothing about

drawing the line, but took up his basket of kittens and stepped

quietly out the back way, without a word.  He left the creatures

in an out-house, and hurried on, into a narrow lane at the rear.







Chapter XX. The Prince and the hermit.



The high hedge hid him from the house, now; and so, under the

impulse of a deadly fright, he let out all his forces and sped

toward a wood in the distance.  He never looked back until he had

almost gained the shelter of the forest; then he turned and

descried two figures in the distance.  That was sufficient; he did

not wait to scan them critically, but hurried on, and never abated

his pace till he was far within the twilight depths of the wood.

Then he stopped; being persuaded that he was now tolerably safe.

He listened intently, but the stillness was profound and solemn--

awful, even, and depressing to the spirits.  At wide intervals his

straining ear did detect sounds, but they were so remote, and

hollow, and mysterious, that they seemed not to be real sounds,

but only the moaning and complaining ghosts of departed ones.  So

the sounds were yet more dreary than the silence which they

interrupted.



It was his purpose, in the beginning, to stay where he was the

rest of the day; but a chill soon invaded his perspiring body, and

he was at last obliged to resume movement in order to get warm.

He struck straight through the forest, hoping to pierce to a road

presently, but he was disappointed in this.  He travelled on and

on; but the farther he went, the denser the wood became,

apparently.  The gloom began to thicken, by-and-by, and the King

realised that the night was coming on.  It made him shudder to

think of spending it in such an uncanny place; so he tried to

hurry faster, but he only made the less speed, for he could not

now see well enough to choose his steps judiciously; consequently

he kept tripping over roots and tangling himself in vines and

briers.



And how glad he was when at last he caught the glimmer of a light!

He approached it warily, stopping often to look about him and

listen.  It came from an unglazed window-opening in a shabby

little hut.  He heard a voice, now, and felt a disposition to run

and hide; but he changed his mind at once, for this voice was

praying, evidently.  He glided to the one window of the hut,

raised himself on tiptoe, and stole a glance within.  The room was

small; its floor was the natural earth, beaten hard by use; in a

corner was a bed of rushes and a ragged blanket or two; near it

was a pail, a cup, a basin, and two or three pots and pans; there

was a short bench and a three-legged stool; on the hearth the

remains of a faggot fire were smouldering; before a shrine, which

was lighted by a single candle, knelt an aged man, and on an old

wooden box at his side lay an open book and a human skull.  The

man was of large, bony frame; his hair and whiskers were very long

and snowy white; he was clothed in a robe of sheepskins which

reached from his neck to his heels.



"A holy hermit!" said the King to himself; "now am I indeed

fortunate."



The hermit rose from his knees; the King knocked.  A deep voice

responded--



"Enter!--but leave sin behind, for the ground whereon thou shalt

stand is holy!"



The King entered, and paused.  The hermit turned a pair of

gleaming, unrestful eyes upon him, and said--



"Who art thou?"



"I am the King," came the answer, with placid simplicity.



"Welcome, King!" cried the hermit, with enthusiasm.  Then,

bustling about with feverish activity, and constantly saying,

"Welcome, welcome," he arranged his bench, seated the King on it,

by the hearth, threw some faggots on the fire, and finally fell to

pacing the floor with a nervous stride.



"Welcome!  Many have sought sanctuary here, but they were not

worthy, and were turned away.  But a King who casts his crown

away, and despises the vain splendours of his office, and clothes

his body in rags, to devote his life to holiness and the

mortification of the flesh--he is worthy, he is welcome!--here

shall he abide all his days till death come."  The King hastened

to interrupt and explain, but the hermit paid no attention to him-

-did not even hear him, apparently, but went right on with his

talk, with a raised voice and a growing energy.  "And thou shalt

be at peace here.  None shall find out thy refuge to disquiet thee

with supplications to return to that empty and foolish life which

God hath moved thee to abandon.  Thou shalt pray here; thou shalt

study the Book; thou shalt meditate upon the follies and delusions

of this world, and upon the sublimities of the world to come; thou

shalt feed upon crusts and herbs, and scourge thy body with whips,

daily, to the purifying of thy soul.  Thou shalt wear a hair shirt

next thy skin; thou shalt drink water only; and thou shalt be at

peace; yes, wholly at peace; for whoso comes to seek thee shall go

his way again, baffled; he shall not find thee, he shall not

molest thee."



The old man, still pacing back and forth, ceased to speak aloud,

and began to mutter.  The King seized this opportunity to state

his case; and he did it with an eloquence inspired by uneasiness

and apprehension.  But the hermit went on muttering, and gave no

heed.  And still muttering, he approached the King and said

impressively--



"'Sh!  I will tell you a secret!"  He bent down to impart it, but

checked himself, and assumed a listening attitude.  After a moment

or two he went on tiptoe to the window-opening, put his head out,

and peered around in the gloaming, then came tiptoeing back again,

put his face close down to the King's, and whispered--



"I am an archangel!"



The King started violently, and said to himself, "Would God I were

with the outlaws again; for lo, now am I the prisoner of a

madman!"  His apprehensions were heightened, and they showed

plainly in his face.  In a low excited voice the hermit continued-

-



"I see you feel my atmosphere!  There's awe in your face!  None

may be in this atmosphere and not be thus affected; for it is the

very atmosphere of heaven.  I go thither and return, in the

twinkling of an eye.  I was made an archangel on this very spot,

it is five years ago, by angels sent from heaven to confer that

awful dignity.  Their presence filled this place with an

intolerable brightness.  And they knelt to me, King! yes, they

knelt to me! for I was greater than they.  I have walked in the

courts of heaven, and held speech with the patriarchs.  Touch my

hand--be not afraid--touch it.  There--now thou hast touched a

hand which has been clasped by Abraham and Isaac and Jacob!  For I

have walked in the golden courts; I have seen the Deity face to

face!"  He paused, to give this speech effect; then his face

suddenly changed, and he started to his feet again saying, with

angry energy, "Yes, I am an archangel; A MERE ARCHANGEL!--I that

might have been pope!  It is verily true.  I was told it from

heaven in a dream, twenty years ago; ah, yes, I was to be pope!--

and I SHOULD have been pope, for Heaven had said it--but the King

dissolved my religious house, and I, poor obscure unfriended monk,

was cast homeless upon the world, robbed of my mighty destiny!"

Here he began to mumble again, and beat his forehead in futile

rage, with his fist; now and then articulating a venomous curse,

and now and then a pathetic "Wherefore I am nought but an

archangel--I that should have been pope!"



So he went on, for an hour, whilst the poor little King sat and

suffered.  Then all at once the old man's frenzy departed, and he

became all gentleness.  His voice softened, he came down out of

his clouds, and fell to prattling along so simply and so humanly,

that he soon won the King's heart completely.  The old devotee

moved the boy nearer to the fire and made him comfortable;

doctored his small bruises and abrasions with a deft and tender

hand; and then set about preparing and cooking a supper--chatting

pleasantly all the time, and occasionally stroking the lad's cheek

or patting his head, in such a gently caressing way that in a

little while all the fear and repulsion inspired by the archangel

were changed to reverence and affection for the man.



This happy state of things continued while the two ate the supper;

then, after a prayer before the shrine, the hermit put the boy to

bed, in a small adjoining room, tucking him in as snugly and

lovingly as a mother might; and so, with a parting caress, left

him and sat down by the fire, and began to poke the brands about

in an absent and aimless way.  Presently he paused; then tapped

his forehead several times with his fingers, as if trying to

recall some thought which had escaped from his mind.  Apparently

he was unsuccessful.  Now he started quickly up, and entered his

guest's room, and said--



"Thou art King?"



"Yes," was the response, drowsily uttered.



"What King?"



"Of England."



"Of England?  Then Henry is gone!"



"Alack, it is so.  I am his son."



A black frown settled down upon the hermit's face, and he clenched

his bony hands with a vindictive energy.  He stood a few moments,

breathing fast and swallowing repeatedly, then said in a husky

voice--



"Dost know it was he that turned us out into the world houseless

and homeless?"



There was no response.  The old man bent down and scanned the

boy's reposeful face and listened to his placid breathing.  "He

sleeps--sleeps soundly;" and the frown vanished away and gave

place to an expression of evil satisfaction.  A smile flitted

across the dreaming boy's features.  The hermit muttered, "So--his

heart is happy;" and he turned away.  He went stealthily about the

place, seeking here and there for something; now and then halting

to listen, now and then jerking his head around and casting a

quick glance toward the bed; and always muttering, always mumbling

to himself.  At last he found what he seemed to want--a rusty old

butcher knife and a whetstone.  Then he crept to his place by the

fire, sat himself down, and began to whet the knife softly on the

stone, still muttering, mumbling, ejaculating.  The winds sighed

around the lonely place, the mysterious voices of the night

floated by out of the distances.  The shining eyes of venturesome

mice and rats peered out at the old man from cracks and coverts,

but he went on with his work, rapt, absorbed, and noted none of

these things.



At long intervals he drew his thumb along the edge of his knife,

and nodded his head with satisfaction.  "It grows sharper," he

said; "yes, it grows sharper."



He took no note of the flight of time, but worked tranquilly on,

entertaining himself with his thoughts, which broke out

occasionally in articulate speech--



"His father wrought us evil, he destroyed us--and is gone down

into the eternal fires!  Yes, down into the eternal fires!  He

escaped us--but it was God's will, yes it was God's will, we must

not repine.  But he hath not escaped the fires!  No, he hath not

escaped the fires, the consuming, unpitying, remorseless fires--

and THEY are everlasting!"



And so he wrought, and still wrought--mumbling, chuckling a low

rasping chuckle at times--and at times breaking again into words--



"It was his father that did it all.  I am but an archangel; but

for him I should be pope!"



The King stirred.  The hermit sprang noiselessly to the bedside,

and went down upon his knees, bending over the prostrate form with

his knife uplifted.  The boy stirred again; his eyes came open for

an instant, but there was no speculation in them, they saw

nothing; the next moment his tranquil breathing showed that his

sleep was sound once more.



The hermit watched and listened, for a time, keeping his position

and scarcely breathing; then he slowly lowered his arms, and

presently crept away, saying,--



"It is long past midnight; it is not best that he should cry out,

lest by accident someone be passing."



He glided about his hovel, gathering a rag here, a thong there,

and another one yonder; then he returned, and by careful and

gentle handling he managed to tie the King's ankles together

without waking him.  Next he essayed to tie the wrists; he made

several attempts to cross them, but the boy always drew one hand

or the other away, just as the cord was ready to be applied; but

at last, when the archangel was almost ready to despair, the boy

crossed his hands himself, and the next moment they were bound.

Now a bandage was passed under the sleeper's chin and brought up

over his head and tied fast--and so softly, so gradually, and so

deftly were the knots drawn together and compacted, that the boy

slept peacefully through it all without stirring.







Chapter XXI. Hendon to the rescue.



The old man glided away, stooping, stealthy, cat-like, and brought

the low bench.  He seated himself upon it, half his body in the

dim and flickering light, and the other half in shadow; and so,

with his craving eyes bent upon the slumbering boy, he kept his

patient vigil there, heedless of the drift of time, and softly

whetted his knife, and mumbled and chuckled; and in aspect and

attitude he resembled nothing so much as a grizzly, monstrous

spider, gloating over some hapless insect that lay bound and

helpless in his web.



After a long while, the old man, who was still gazing,--yet not

seeing, his mind having settled into a dreamy abstraction,--

observed, on a sudden, that the boy's eyes were open! wide open

and staring!--staring up in frozen horror at the knife.  The smile

of a gratified devil crept over the old man's face, and he said,

without changing his attitude or his occupation--



"Son of Henry the Eighth, hast thou prayed?"



The boy struggled helplessly in his bonds, and at the same time

forced a smothered sound through his closed jaws, which the hermit

chose to interpret as an affirmative answer to his question.



"Then pray again.  Pray the prayer for the dying!"



A shudder shook the boy's frame, and his face blenched.  Then he

struggled again to free himself--turning and twisting himself this

way and that; tugging frantically, fiercely, desperately--but

uselessly--to burst his fetters; and all the while the old ogre

smiled down upon him, and nodded his head, and placidly whetted

his knife; mumbling, from time to time, "The moments are precious,

they are few and precious--pray the prayer for the dying!"



The boy uttered a despairing groan, and ceased from his struggles,

panting.  The tears came, then, and trickled, one after the other,

down his face; but this piteous sight wrought no softening effect

upon the savage old man.



The dawn was coming now; the hermit observed it, and spoke up

sharply, with a touch of nervous apprehension in his voice--



"I may not indulge this ecstasy longer!  The night is already

gone.  It seems but a moment--only a moment; would it had endured

a year!  Seed of the Church's spoiler, close thy perishing eyes,

an' thou fearest to look upon--"



The rest was lost in inarticulate mutterings.  The old man sank

upon his knees, his knife in his hand, and bent himself over the

moaning boy.



Hark!  There was a sound of voices near the cabin--the knife

dropped from the hermit's hand; he cast a sheepskin over the boy

and started up, trembling.  The sounds increased, and presently

the voices became rough and angry; then came blows, and cries for

help; then a clatter of swift footsteps, retreating.  Immediately

came a succession of thundering knocks upon the cabin door,

followed by--



"Hullo-o-o!  Open!  And despatch, in the name of all the devils!"



Oh, this was the blessedest sound that had ever made music in the

King's ears; for it was Miles Hendon's voice!



The hermit, grinding his teeth in impotent rage, moved swiftly out

of the bedchamber, closing the door behind him; and straightway

the King heard a talk, to this effect, proceeding from the

'chapel':--



"Homage and greeting, reverend sir!  Where is the boy--MY boy?"



"What boy, friend?"



"What boy!  Lie me no lies, sir priest, play me no deceptions!--I

am not in the humour for it.  Near to this place I caught the

scoundrels who I judged did steal him from me, and I made them

confess; they said he was at large again, and they had tracked him

to your door.  They showed me his very footprints.  Now palter no

more; for look you, holy sir, an' thou produce him not--Where is

the boy?"



"O good sir, peradventure you mean the ragged regal vagrant that

tarried here the night.  If such as you take an interest in such

as he, know, then, that I have sent him of an errand.  He will be

back anon."



"How soon?  How soon?  Come, waste not the time--cannot I overtake

him?  How soon will he be back?"



"Thou need'st not stir; he will return quickly."



"So be it, then.  I will try to wait.  But stop!--YOU sent him of

an errand?--you!  Verily this is a lie--he would not go.  He would

pull thy old beard, an' thou didst offer him such an insolence.

Thou hast lied, friend; thou hast surely lied!  He would not go

for thee, nor for any man."



"For any MAN--no; haply not.  But I am not a man."



"WHAT!  Now o' God's name what art thou, then?"



"It is a secret--mark thou reveal it not.  I am an archangel!"



There was a tremendous ejaculation from Miles Hendon--not

altogether unprofane--followed by--



"This doth well and truly account for his complaisance!  Right

well I knew he would budge nor hand nor foot in the menial service

of any mortal; but, lord, even a king must obey when an archangel

gives the word o' command!  Let me--'sh!  What noise was that?"



All this while the little King had been yonder, alternately

quaking with terror and trembling with hope; and all the while,

too, he had thrown all the strength he could into his anguished

moanings, constantly expecting them to reach Hendon's ear, but

always realising, with bitterness, that they failed, or at least

made no impression.  So this last remark of his servant came as

comes a reviving breath from fresh fields to the dying; and he

exerted himself once more, and with all his energy, just as the

hermit was saying--



"Noise?  I heard only the wind."



"Mayhap it was.  Yes, doubtless that was it.  I have been hearing

it faintly all the--there it is again!  It is not the wind!  What

an odd sound!  Come, we will hunt it out!"



Now the King's joy was nearly insupportable.  His tired lungs did

their utmost--and hopefully, too--but the sealed jaws and the

muffling sheepskin sadly crippled the effort.  Then the poor

fellow's heart sank, to hear the hermit say--



"Ah, it came from without--I think from the copse yonder.  Come, I

will lead the way."



The King heard the two pass out, talking; heard their footsteps

die quickly away--then he was alone with a boding, brooding, awful

silence.



It seemed an age till he heard the steps and voices approaching

again--and this time he heard an added sound,--the trampling of

hoofs, apparently.  Then he heard Hendon say--



"I will not wait longer.  I CANNOT wait longer.  He has lost his

way in this thick wood.  Which direction took he?  Quick--point it

out to me."



"He--but wait; I will go with thee."



"Good--good!  Why, truly thou art better than thy looks.  Marry I

do not think there's not another archangel with so right a heart

as thine.  Wilt ride?  Wilt take the wee donkey that's for my boy,

or wilt thou fork thy holy legs over this ill-conditioned slave of

a mule that I have provided for myself?--and had been cheated in

too, had he cost but the indifferent sum of a month's usury on a

brass farthing let to a tinker out of work."



"No--ride thy mule, and lead thine ass; I am surer on mine own

feet, and will walk."



"Then prithee mind the little beast for me while I take my life in

my hands and make what success I may toward mounting the big one."



Then followed a confusion of kicks, cuffs, tramplings and

plungings, accompanied by a thunderous intermingling of volleyed

curses, and finally a bitter apostrophe to the mule, which must

have broken its spirit, for hostilities seemed to cease from that

moment.



With unutterable misery the fettered little King heard the voices

and footsteps fade away and die out.  All hope forsook him, now,

for the moment, and a dull despair settled down upon his heart.

"My only friend is deceived and got rid of," he said; "the hermit

will return and--"  He finished with a gasp; and at once fell to

struggling so frantically with his bonds again, that he shook off

the smothering sheepskin.



And now he heard the door open!  The sound chilled him to the

marrow--already he seemed to feel the knife at his throat.  Horror

made him close his eyes; horror made him open them again--and

before him stood John Canty and Hugo!



He would have said "Thank God!" if his jaws had been free.



A moment or two later his limbs were at liberty, and his captors,

each gripping him by an arm, were hurrying him with all speed

through the forest.







Chapter XXII. A victim of treachery.



Once more 'King Foo-foo the First' was roving with the tramps and

outlaws, a butt for their coarse jests and dull-witted railleries,

and sometimes the victim of small spitefulness at the hands of

Canty and Hugo when the Ruffler's back was turned.  None but Canty

and Hugo really disliked him.  Some of the others liked him, and

all admired his pluck and spirit.  During two or three days, Hugo,

in whose ward and charge the King was, did what he covertly could

to make the boy uncomfortable; and at night, during the customary

orgies, he amused the company by putting small indignities upon

him--always as if by accident.  Twice he stepped upon the King's

toes--accidentally--and the King, as became his royalty, was

contemptuously unconscious of it and indifferent to it; but the

third time Hugo entertained himself in that way, the King felled

him to the ground with a cudgel, to the prodigious delight of the

tribe.  Hugo, consumed with anger and shame, sprang up, seized a

cudgel, and came at his small adversary in a fury.  Instantly a

ring was formed around the gladiators, and the betting and

cheering began.  But poor Hugo stood no chance whatever.  His

frantic and lubberly 'prentice-work found but a poor market for

itself when pitted against an arm which had been trained by the

first masters of Europe in single-stick, quarter-staff, and every

art and trick of swordsmanship.  The little King stood, alert but

at graceful ease, and caught and turned aside the thick rain of

blows with a facility and precision which set the motley on-

lookers wild with admiration; and every now and then, when his

practised eye detected an opening, and a lightning-swift rap upon

Hugo's head followed as a result, the storm of cheers and laughter

that swept the place was something wonderful to hear.  At the end

of fifteen minutes, Hugo, all battered, bruised, and the target

for a pitiless bombardment of ridicule, slunk from the field; and

the unscathed hero of the fight was seized and borne aloft upon

the shoulders of the joyous rabble to the place of honour beside

the Ruffler, where with vast ceremony he was crowned King of the

Game-Cocks; his meaner title being at the same time solemnly

cancelled and annulled, and a decree of banishment from the gang

pronounced against any who should thenceforth utter it.



All attempts to make the King serviceable to the troop had failed.

He had stubbornly refused to act; moreover, he was always trying

to escape.  He had been thrust into an unwatched kitchen, the

first day of his return; he not only came forth empty-handed, but

tried to rouse the housemates.  He was sent out with a tinker to

help him at his work; he would not work; moreover, he threatened

the tinker with his own soldering-iron; and finally both Hugo and

the tinker found their hands full with the mere matter of keeping

his from getting away.  He delivered the thunders of his royalty

upon the heads of all who hampered his liberties or tried to force

him to service.  He was sent out, in Hugo's charge, in company

with a slatternly woman and a diseased baby, to beg; but the

result was not encouraging--he declined to plead for the

mendicants, or be a party to their cause in any way.



Thus several days went by; and the miseries of this tramping life,

and the weariness and sordidness and meanness and vulgarity of it,

became gradually and steadily so intolerable to the captive that

he began at last to feel that his release from the hermit's knife

must prove only a temporary respite from death, at best.



But at night, in his dreams, these things were forgotten, and he

was on his throne, and master again.  This, of course, intensified

the sufferings of the awakening--so the mortifications of each

succeeding morning of the few that passed between his return to

bondage and the combat with Hugo, grew bitterer and bitterer, and

harder and harder to bear.



The morning after that combat, Hugo got up with a heart filled

with vengeful purposes against the King.  He had two plans, in

particular.  One was to inflict upon the lad what would be, to his

proud spirit and 'imagined' royalty, a peculiar humiliation; and

if he failed to accomplish this, his other plan was to put a crime

of some kind upon the King, and then betray him into the

implacable clutches of the law.



In pursuance of the first plan, he purposed to put a 'clime' upon

the King's leg; rightly judging that that would mortify him to the

last and perfect degree; and as soon as the clime should operate,

he meant to get Canty's help, and FORCE the King to expose his leg

in the highway and beg for alms.  'Clime' was the cant term for a

sore, artificially created.  To make a clime, the operator made a

paste or poultice of unslaked lime, soap, and the rust of old

iron, and spread it upon a piece of leather, which was then bound

tightly upon the leg.  This would presently fret off the skin, and

make the flesh raw and angry-looking; blood was then rubbed upon

the limb, which, being fully dried, took on a dark and repulsive

colour.  Then a bandage of soiled rags was put on in a cleverly

careless way which would allow the hideous ulcer to be seen, and

move the compassion of the passer-by. {8}



Hugo got the help of the tinker whom the King had cowed with the

soldering-iron; they took the boy out on a tinkering tramp, and as

soon as they were out of sight of the camp they threw him down and

the tinker held him while Hugo bound the poultice tight and fast

upon his leg.



The King raged and stormed, and promised to hang the two the

moment the sceptre was in his hand again; but they kept a firm

grip upon him and enjoyed his impotent struggling and jeered at

his threats.  This continued until the poultice began to bite; and

in no long time its work would have been perfected, if there had

been no interruption.  But there was; for about this time the

'slave' who had made the speech denouncing England's laws,

appeared on the scene, and put an end to the enterprise, and

stripped off the poultice and bandage.



The King wanted to borrow his deliverer's cudgel and warm the

jackets of the two rascals on the spot; but the man said no, it

would bring trouble--leave the matter till night; the whole tribe

being together, then, the outside world would not venture to

interfere or interrupt.  He marched the party back to camp and

reported the affair to the Ruffler, who listened, pondered, and

then decided that the King should not be again detailed to beg,

since it was plain he was worthy of something higher and better--

wherefore, on the spot he promoted him from the mendicant rank and

appointed him to steal!



Hugo was overjoyed.  He had already tried to make the King steal,

and failed; but there would be no more trouble of that sort, now,

for of course the King would not dream of defying a distinct

command delivered directly from head-quarters.  So he planned a

raid for that very afternoon, purposing to get the King in the

law's grip in the course of it; and to do it, too, with such

ingenious strategy, that it should seem to be accidental and

unintentional; for the King of the Game-Cocks was popular now, and

the gang might not deal over-gently with an unpopular member who

played so serious a treachery upon him as the delivering him over

to the common enemy, the law.



Very well.  All in good time Hugo strolled off to a neighbouring

village with his prey; and the two drifted slowly up and down one

street after another, the one watching sharply for a sure chance

to achieve his evil purpose, and the other watching as sharply for

a chance to dart away and get free of his infamous captivity for

ever.



Both threw away some tolerably fair-looking opportunities; for

both, in their secret hearts, were resolved to make absolutely

sure work this time, and neither meant to allow his fevered

desires to seduce him into any venture that had much uncertainty

about it.



Hugo's chance came first.  For at last a woman approached who

carried a fat package of some sort in a basket.  Hugo's eyes

sparkled with sinful pleasure as he said to himself, "Breath o' my

life, an' I can but put THAT upon him, 'tis good-den and God keep

thee, King of the Game-Cocks!"  He waited and watched--outwardly

patient, but inwardly consuming with excitement--till the woman

had passed by, and the time was ripe; then said, in a low voice--



"Tarry here till I come again," and darted stealthily after the

prey.



The King's heart was filled with joy--he could make his escape,

now, if Hugo's quest only carried him far enough away.



But he was to have no such luck.  Hugo crept behind the woman,

snatched the package, and came running back, wrapping it in an old

piece of blanket which he carried on his arm.  The hue and cry was

raised in a moment, by the woman, who knew her loss by the

lightening of her burden, although she had not seen the pilfering

done.  Hugo thrust the bundle into the King's hands without

halting, saying--



"Now speed ye after me with the rest, and cry 'Stop thief!' but

mind ye lead them astray!"



The next moment Hugo turned a corner and darted down a crooked

alley--and in another moment or two he lounged into view again,

looking innocent and indifferent, and took up a position behind a

post to watch results.



The insulted King threw the bundle on the ground; and the blanket

fell away from it just as the woman arrived, with an augmenting

crowd at her heels; she seized the King's wrist with one hand,

snatched up her bundle with the other, and began to pour out a

tirade of abuse upon the boy while he struggled, without success,

to free himself from her grip.



Hugo had seen enough--his enemy was captured and the law would get

him, now--so he slipped away, jubilant and chuckling, and wended

campwards, framing a judicious version of the matter to give to

the Ruffler's crew as he strode along.



The King continued to struggle in the woman's strong grasp, and

now and then cried out in vexation--



"Unhand me, thou foolish creature; it was not I that bereaved thee

of thy paltry goods."



The crowd closed around, threatening the King and calling him

names; a brawny blacksmith in leather apron, and sleeves rolled to

his elbows, made a reach for him, saying he would trounce him

well, for a lesson; but just then a long sword flashed in the air

and fell with convincing force upon the man's arm, flat side down,

the fantastic owner of it remarking pleasantly, at the same time--



"Marry, good souls, let us proceed gently, not with ill blood and

uncharitable words.  This is matter for the law's consideration,

not private and unofficial handling.  Loose thy hold from the boy,

goodwife."



The blacksmith averaged the stalwart soldier with a glance, then

went muttering away, rubbing his arm; the woman released the boy's

wrist reluctantly; the crowd eyed the stranger unlovingly, but

prudently closed their mouths.  The King sprang to his deliverer's

side, with flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes, exclaiming--



"Thou hast lagged sorely, but thou comest in good season, now, Sir

Miles; carve me this rabble to rags!"







Chapter XXIII. The Prince a prisoner.



Hendon forced back a smile, and bent down and whispered in the

King's ear--



"Softly, softly, my prince, wag thy tongue warily--nay, suffer it

not to wag at all.  Trust in me--all shall go well in the end."

Then he added to himself:  "SIR Miles!  Bless me, I had totally

forgot I was a knight!  Lord, how marvellous a thing it is, the

grip his memory doth take upon his quaint and crazy fancies! . . .

An empty and foolish title is mine, and yet it is something to

have deserved it; for I think it is more honour to be held worthy

to be a spectre-knight in his Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows, than

to be held base enough to be an earl in some of the REAL kingdoms

of this world."



The crowd fell apart to admit a constable, who approached and was

about to lay his hand upon the King's shoulder, when Hendon said--



"Gently, good friend, withhold your hand--he shall go peaceably; I

am responsible for that.  Lead on, we will follow."



The officer led, with the woman and her bundle; Miles and the King

followed after, with the crowd at their heels.  The King was

inclined to rebel; but Hendon said to him in a low voice--



"Reflect, Sire--your laws are the wholesome breath of your own

royalty; shall their source resist them, yet require the branches

to respect them?  Apparently one of these laws has been broken;

when the King is on his throne again, can it ever grieve him to

remember that when he was seemingly a private person he loyally

sank the king in the citizen and submitted to its authority?"



"Thou art right; say no more; thou shalt see that whatsoever the

King of England requires a subject to suffer, under the law, he

will himself suffer while he holdeth the station of a subject."



When the woman was called upon to testify before the justice of

the peace, she swore that the small prisoner at the bar was the

person who had committed the theft; there was none able to show

the contrary, so the King stood convicted.  The bundle was now

unrolled, and when the contents proved to be a plump little

dressed pig, the judge looked troubled, whilst Hendon turned pale,

and his body was thrilled with an electric shiver of dismay; but

the King remained unmoved, protected by his ignorance.  The judge

meditated, during an ominous pause, then turned to the woman, with

the question--



"What dost thou hold this property to be worth?"



The woman courtesied and replied--



"Three shillings and eightpence, your worship--I could not abate a

penny and set forth the value honestly."



The justice glanced around uncomfortably upon the crowd, then

nodded to the constable, and said--



"Clear the court and close the doors."



It was done.  None remained but the two officials, the accused,

the accuser, and Miles Hendon.  This latter was rigid and

colourless, and on his forehead big drops of cold sweat gathered,

broke and blended together, and trickled down his face.  The judge

turned to the woman again, and said, in a compassionate voice--



"'Tis a poor ignorant lad, and mayhap was driven hard by hunger,

for these be grievous times for the unfortunate; mark you, he hath

not an evil face--but when hunger driveth--Good woman! dost know

that when one steals a thing above the value of thirteenpence

ha'penny the law saith he shall HANG for it?"



The little King started, wide-eyed with consternation, but

controlled himself and held his peace; but not so the woman.  She

sprang to her feet, shaking with fright, and cried out--



"Oh, good lack, what have I done!  God-a-mercy, I would not hang

the poor thing for the whole world!  Ah, save me from this, your

worship--what shall I do, what CAN I do?"



The justice maintained his judicial composure, and simply said--



"Doubtless it is allowable to revise the value, since it is not

yet writ upon the record."



"Then in God's name call the pig eightpence, and heaven bless the

day that freed my conscience of this awesome thing!"



Miles Hendon forgot all decorum in his delight; and surprised the

King and wounded his dignity, by throwing his arms around him and

hugging him.  The woman made her grateful adieux and started away

with her pig; and when the constable opened the door for her, he

followed her out into the narrow hall.  The justice proceeded to

write in his record book.  Hendon, always alert, thought he would

like to know why the officer followed the woman out; so he slipped

softly into the dusky hall and listened.  He heard a conversation

to this effect--



"It is a fat pig, and promises good eating; I will buy it of thee;

here is the eightpence."



"Eightpence, indeed!  Thou'lt do no such thing.  It cost me three

shillings and eightpence, good honest coin of the last reign, that

old Harry that's just dead ne'er touched or tampered with.  A fig

for thy eightpence!"



"Stands the wind in that quarter?  Thou wast under oath, and so

swore falsely when thou saidst the value was but eightpence.  Come

straightway back with me before his worship, and answer for the

crime!--and then the lad will hang."



"There, there, dear heart, say no more, I am content.  Give me the

eightpence, and hold thy peace about the matter."



The woman went off crying:  Hendon slipped back into the court

room, and the constable presently followed, after hiding his prize

in some convenient place.  The justice wrote a while longer, then

read the King a wise and kindly lecture, and sentenced him to a

short imprisonment in the common jail, to be followed by a public

flogging.  The astounded King opened his mouth, and was probably

going to order the good judge to be beheaded on the spot; but he

caught a warning sign from Hendon, and succeeded in closing his

mouth again before he lost anything out of it.  Hendon took him by

the hand, now, made reverence to the justice, and the two departed

in the wake of the constable toward the jail.  The moment the

street was reached, the inflamed monarch halted, snatched away his

hand, and exclaimed--



"Idiot, dost imagine I will enter a common jail ALIVE?"



Hendon bent down and said, somewhat sharply--



"WILL you trust in me?  Peace! and forbear to worsen our chances

with dangerous speech.  What God wills, will happen; thou canst

not hurry it, thou canst not alter it; therefore wait, and be

patient--'twill be time enow to rail or rejoice when what is to

happen has happened." {1}







Chapter XXIV. The escape.



The short winter day was nearly ended.  The streets were deserted,

save for a few random stragglers, and these hurried straight

along, with the intent look of people who were only anxious to

accomplish their errands as quickly as possible, and then snugly

house themselves from the rising wind and the gathering twilight.

They looked neither to the right nor to the left; they paid no

attention to our party, they did not even seem to see them.

Edward the Sixth wondered if the spectacle of a king on his way to

jail had ever encountered such marvellous indifference before.

By-and-by the constable arrived at a deserted market-square, and

proceeded to cross it.  When he had reached the middle of it,

Hendon laid his hand upon his arm, and said in a low voice--



"Bide a moment, good sir, there is none in hearing, and I would

say a word to thee."



"My duty forbids it, sir; prithee hinder me not, the night comes

on."



"Stay, nevertheless, for the matter concerns thee nearly.  Turn

thy back a moment and seem not to see:  LET THIS POOR LAD ESCAPE."



"This to me, sir!  I arrest thee in--"



"Nay, be not too hasty.  See thou be careful and commit no foolish

error"--then he shut his voice down to a whisper, and said in the

man's ear--"the pig thou hast purchased for eightpence may cost

thee thy neck, man!"



The poor constable, taken by surprise, was speechless, at first,

then found his tongue and fell to blustering and threatening; but

Hendon was tranquil, and waited with patience till his breath was

spent; then said--



"I have a liking to thee, friend, and would not willingly see thee

come to harm.  Observe, I heard it all--every word.  I will prove

it to thee."  Then he repeated the conversation which the officer

and the woman had had together in the hall, word for word, and

ended with--



"There--have I set it forth correctly?  Should not I be able to

set it forth correctly before the judge, if occasion required?"



The man was dumb with fear and distress, for a moment; then he

rallied, and said with forced lightness--



"'Tis making a mighty matter, indeed, out of a jest; I but plagued

the woman for mine amusement."



"Kept you the woman's pig for amusement?"



The man answered sharply--



"Nought else, good sir--I tell thee 'twas but a jest."



"I do begin to believe thee," said Hendon, with a perplexing

mixture of mockery and half-conviction in his tone; "but tarry

thou here a moment whilst I run and ask his worship--for nathless,

he being a man experienced in law, in jests, in--"



He was moving away, still talking; the constable hesitated,

fidgeted, spat out an oath or two, then cried out--



"Hold, hold, good sir--prithee wait a little--the judge!  Why,

man, he hath no more sympathy with a jest than hath a dead

corpse!--come, and we will speak further.  Ods body!  I seem to be

in evil case--and all for an innocent and thoughtless pleasantry.

I am a man of family; and my wife and little ones--  List to

reason, good your worship:  what wouldst thou of me?"



"Only that thou be blind and dumb and paralytic whilst one may

count a hundred thousand--counting slowly," said Hendon, with the

expression of a man who asks but a reasonable favour, and that a

very little one.



"It is my destruction!" said the constable despairingly.  "Ah, be

reasonable, good sir; only look at this matter, on all its sides,

and see how mere a jest it is--how manifestly and how plainly it

is so.  And even if one granted it were not a jest, it is a fault

so small that e'en the grimmest penalty it could call forth would

be but a rebuke and warning from the judge's lips."



Hendon replied with a solemnity which chilled the air about him--



"This jest of thine hath a name, in law,--wot you what it is?"



"I knew it not!  Peradventure I have been unwise.  I never dreamed

it had a name--ah, sweet heaven, I thought it was original."



"Yes, it hath a name.  In the law this crime is called Non compos

mentis lex talionis sic transit gloria mundi."



"Ah, my God!"



"And the penalty is death!"



"God be merciful to me a sinner!"



"By advantage taken of one in fault, in dire peril, and at thy

mercy, thou hast seized goods worth above thirteenpence ha'penny,

paying but a trifle for the same; and this, in the eye of the law,

is constructive barratry, misprision of treason, malfeasance in

office, ad hominem expurgatis in statu quo--and the penalty is

death by the halter, without ransom, commutation, or benefit of

clergy."



"Bear me up, bear me up, sweet sir, my legs do fail me!  Be thou

merciful--spare me this doom, and I will turn my back and see

nought that shall happen."



"Good! now thou'rt wise and reasonable.  And thou'lt restore the

pig?"



"I will, I will indeed--nor ever touch another, though heaven send

it and an archangel fetch it.  Go--I am blind for thy sake--I see

nothing.  I will say thou didst break in and wrest the prisoner

from my hands by force.  It is but a crazy, ancient door--I will

batter it down myself betwixt midnight and the morning."



"Do it, good soul, no harm will come of it; the judge hath a

loving charity for this poor lad, and will shed no tears and break

no jailer's bones for his escape."







Chapter XXV. Hendon Hall.



As soon as Hendon and the King were out of sight of the constable,

his Majesty was instructed to hurry to a certain place outside the

town, and wait there, whilst Hendon should go to the inn and

settle his account.  Half an hour later the two friends were

blithely jogging eastward on Hendon's sorry steeds.  The King was

warm and comfortable, now, for he had cast his rags and clothed

himself in the second-hand suit which Hendon had bought on London

Bridge.



Hendon wished to guard against over-fatiguing the boy; he judged

that hard journeys, irregular meals, and illiberal measures of

sleep would be bad for his crazed mind; whilst rest, regularity,

and moderate exercise would be pretty sure to hasten its cure; he

longed to see the stricken intellect made well again and its

diseased visions driven out of the tormented little head;

therefore he resolved to move by easy stages toward the home

whence he had so long been banished, instead of obeying the

impulse of his impatience and hurrying along night and day.



When he and the King had journeyed about ten miles, they reached a

considerable village, and halted there for the night, at a good

inn.  The former relations were resumed; Hendon stood behind the

King's chair, while he dined, and waited upon him; undressed him

when he was ready for bed; then took the floor for his own

quarters, and slept athwart the door, rolled up in a blanket.



The next day, and the day after, they jogged lazily along talking

over the adventures they had met since their separation, and

mightily enjoying each other's narratives.  Hendon detailed all

his wide wanderings in search of the King, and described how the

archangel had led him a fool's journey all over the forest, and

taken him back to the hut, finally, when he found he could not get

rid of him.  Then--he said--the old man went into the bedchamber

and came staggering back looking broken-hearted, and saying he had

expected to find that the boy had returned and laid down in there

to rest, but it was not so.  Hendon had waited at the hut all day;

hope of the King's return died out, then, and he departed upon the

quest again.



"And old Sanctum Sanctorum WAS truly sorry your highness came not

back," said Hendon; "I saw it in his face."



"Marry I will never doubt THAT!" said the King--and then told his

own story; after which, Hendon was sorry he had not destroyed the

archangel.



During the last day of the trip, Hendon's spirits were soaring.

His tongue ran constantly.  He talked about his old father, and

his brother Arthur, and told of many things which illustrated

their high and generous characters; he went into loving frenzies

over his Edith, and was so glad-hearted that he was even able to

say some gentle and brotherly things about Hugh.  He dwelt a deal

on the coming meeting at Hendon Hall; what a surprise it would be

to everybody, and what an outburst of thanksgiving and delight

there would be.



It was a fair region, dotted with cottages and orchards, and the

road led through broad pasture lands whose receding expanses,

marked with gentle elevations and depressions, suggested the

swelling and subsiding undulations of the sea.  In the afternoon

the returning prodigal made constant deflections from his course

to see if by ascending some hillock he might not pierce the

distance and catch a glimpse of his home.  At last he was

successful, and cried out excitedly--



"There is the village, my Prince, and there is the Hall close by!

You may see the towers from here; and that wood there--that is my

father's park.  Ah, NOW thou'lt know what state and grandeur be!

A house with seventy rooms--think of that!--and seven and twenty

servants!  A brave lodging for such as we, is it not so?  Come,

let us speed--my impatience will not brook further delay."



All possible hurry was made; still, it was after three o'clock

before the village was reached.  The travellers scampered through

it, Hendon's tongue going all the time.  "Here is the church--

covered with the same ivy--none gone, none added."  "Yonder is the

inn, the old Red Lion,--and yonder is the market-place."  "Here is

the Maypole, and here the pump--nothing is altered; nothing but

the people, at any rate; ten years make a change in people; some

of these I seem to know, but none know me."  So his chat ran on.

The end of the village was soon reached; then the travellers

struck into a crooked, narrow road, walled in with tall hedges,

and hurried briskly along it for half a mile, then passed into a

vast flower garden through an imposing gateway, whose huge stone

pillars bore sculptured armorial devices.  A noble mansion was

before them.



"Welcome to Hendon Hall, my King!" exclaimed Miles.  "Ah, 'tis a

great day!  My father and my brother, and the Lady Edith will be

so mad with joy that they will have eyes and tongue for none but

me in the first transports of the meeting, and so thou'lt seem but

coldly welcomed--but mind it not; 'twill soon seem otherwise; for

when I say thou art my ward, and tell them how costly is my love

for thee, thou'lt see them take thee to their breasts for Miles

Hendon's sake, and make their house and hearts thy home for ever

after!"



The next moment Hendon sprang to the ground before the great door,

helped the King down, then took him by the hand and rushed within.

A few steps brought him to a spacious apartment; he entered,

seated the King with more hurry than ceremony, then ran toward a

young man who sat at a writing-table in front of a generous fire

of logs.



"Embrace me, Hugh," he cried, "and say thou'rt glad I am come

again! and call our father, for home is not home till I shall

touch his hand, and see his face, and hear his voice once more!"



But Hugh only drew back, after betraying a momentary surprise, and

bent a grave stare upon the intruder--a stare which indicated

somewhat of offended dignity, at first, then changed, in response

to some inward thought or purpose, to an expression of marvelling

curiosity, mixed with a real or assumed compassion.  Presently he

said, in a mild voice--



"Thy wits seem touched, poor stranger; doubtless thou hast

suffered privations and rude buffetings at the world's hands; thy

looks and dress betoken it.  Whom dost thou take me to be?"



"Take thee?  Prithee for whom else than whom thou art?  I take

thee to be Hugh Hendon," said Miles, sharply.



The other continued, in the same soft tone--



"And whom dost thou imagine thyself to be?"



"Imagination hath nought to do with it!  Dost thou pretend thou

knowest me not for thy brother Miles Hendon?"



An expression of pleased surprise flitted across Hugh's face, and

he exclaimed--



"What! thou art not jesting? can the dead come to life?  God be

praised if it be so!  Our poor lost boy restored to our arms after

all these cruel years!  Ah, it seems too good to be true, it IS

too good to be true--I charge thee, have pity, do not trifle with

me!  Quick--come to the light--let me scan thee well!"



He seized Miles by the arm, dragged him to the window, and began

to devour him from head to foot with his eyes, turning him this

way and that, and stepping briskly around him and about him to

prove him from all points of view; whilst the returned prodigal,

all aglow with gladness, smiled, laughed, and kept nodding his

head and saying--



"Go on, brother, go on, and fear not; thou'lt find nor limb nor

feature that cannot bide the test.  Scour and scan me to thy

content, my good old Hugh--I am indeed thy old Miles, thy same old

Miles, thy lost brother, is't not so?  Ah, 'tis a great day--I

SAID 'twas a great day!  Give me thy hand, give me thy cheek--

lord, I am like to die of very joy!"



He was about to throw himself upon his brother; but Hugh put up

his hand in dissent, then dropped his chin mournfully upon his

breast, saying with emotion--



"Ah, God of his mercy give me strength to bear this grievous

disappointment!"



Miles, amazed, could not speak for a moment; then he found his

tongue, and cried out--



"WHAT disappointment?  Am I not thy brother?"



Hugh shook his head sadly, and said--



"I pray heaven it may prove so, and that other eyes may find the

resemblances that are hid from mine.  Alack, I fear me the letter

spoke but too truly."



"What letter?"



"One that came from over sea, some six or seven years ago.  It

said my brother died in battle."



"It was a lie!  Call thy father--he will know me."



"One may not call the dead."



"Dead?" Miles's voice was subdued, and his lips trembled.  "My

father dead!--oh, this is heavy news.  Half my new joy is withered

now.  Prithee let me see my brother Arthur--he will know me; he

will know me and console me."



"He, also, is dead."



"God be merciful to me, a stricken man!  Gone,--both gone--the

worthy taken and the worthless spared, in me!  Ah! I crave your

mercy!--do not say the Lady Edith--"



"Is dead?  No, she lives."



"Then, God be praised, my joy is whole again!  Speed thee,

brother--let her come to me!  An' SHE say I am not myself--but she

will not; no, no, SHE will know me, I were a fool to doubt it.

Bring her--bring the old servants; they, too, will know me."



"All are gone but five--Peter, Halsey, David, Bernard, and

Margaret."



So saying, Hugh left the room.  Miles stood musing a while, then

began to walk the floor, muttering--



"The five arch-villains have survived the two-and-twenty leal and

honest--'tis an odd thing."



He continued walking back and forth, muttering to himself; he had

forgotten the King entirely.  By-and-by his Majesty said gravely,

and with a touch of genuine compassion, though the words

themselves were capable of being interpreted ironically--



"Mind not thy mischance, good man; there be others in the world

whose identity is denied, and whose claims are derided.  Thou hast

company."



"Ah, my King," cried Hendon, colouring slightly, "do not thou

condemn me--wait, and thou shalt see.  I am no impostor--she will

say it; you shall hear it from the sweetest lips in England.  I an

impostor?  Why, I know this old hall, these pictures of my

ancestors, and all these things that are about us, as a child

knoweth its own nursery.  Here was I born and bred, my lord; I

speak the truth; I would not deceive thee; and should none else

believe, I pray thee do not THOU doubt me--I could not bear it."



"I do not doubt thee," said the King, with a childlike simplicity

and faith.



"I thank thee out of my heart!" exclaimed Hendon with a fervency

which showed that he was touched.  The King added, with the same

gentle simplicity--



"Dost thou doubt ME?"



A guilty confusion seized upon Hendon, and he was grateful that

the door opened to admit Hugh, at that moment, and saved him the

necessity of replying.



A beautiful lady, richly clothed, followed Hugh, and after her

came several liveried servants.  The lady walked slowly, with her

head bowed and her eyes fixed upon the floor.  The face was

unspeakably sad.  Miles Hendon sprang forward, crying out--



"Oh, my Edith, my darling--"



But Hugh waved him back, gravely, and said to the lady--



"Look upon him.  Do you know him?"



At the sound of Miles's voice the woman had started slightly, and

her cheeks had flushed; she was trembling now.  She stood still,

during an impressive pause of several moments; then slowly lifted

up her head and looked into Hendon's eyes with a stony and

frightened gaze; the blood sank out of her face, drop by drop,

till nothing remained but the grey pallor of death; then she said,

in a voice as dead as the face, "I know him not!" and turned, with

a moan and a stifled sob, and tottered out of the room.



Miles Hendon sank into a chair and covered his face with his

hands.  After a pause, his brother said to the servants--



"You have observed him.  Do you know him?"



They shook their heads; then the master said--



"The servants know you not, sir.  I fear there is some mistake.

You have seen that my wife knew you not."



"Thy WIFE!"  In an instant Hugh was pinned to the wall, with an

iron grip about his throat.  "Oh, thou fox-hearted slave, I see it

all!  Thou'st writ the lying letter thyself, and my stolen bride

and goods are its fruit.  There--now get thee gone, lest I shame

mine honourable soldiership with the slaying of so pitiful a

mannikin!"



Hugh, red-faced, and almost suffocated, reeled to the nearest

chair, and commanded the servants to seize and bind the murderous

stranger.  They hesitated, and one of them said--



"He is armed, Sir Hugh, and we are weaponless."



"Armed!  What of it, and ye so many?  Upon him, I say!"



But Miles warned them to be careful what they did, and added--



"Ye know me of old--I have not changed; come on, an' it like you."



This reminder did not hearten the servants much; they still held

back.



"Then go, ye paltry cowards, and arm yourselves and guard the

doors, whilst I send one to fetch the watch!" said Hugh.  He

turned at the threshold, and said to Miles, "You'll find it to

your advantage to offend not with useless endeavours at escape."



"Escape?  Spare thyself discomfort, an' that is all that troubles

thee.  For Miles Hendon is master of Hendon Hall and all its

belongings.  He will remain--doubt it not."







Chapter XXVI. Disowned.



The King sat musing a few moments, then looked up and said--



"'Tis strange--most strange.  I cannot account for it."



"No, it is not strange, my liege.  I know him, and this conduct is

but natural.  He was a rascal from his birth."



"Oh, I spake not of HIM, Sir Miles."



"Not of him?  Then of what?  What is it that is strange?"



"That the King is not missed."



"How?  Which?  I doubt I do not understand."



"Indeed?  Doth it not strike you as being passing strange that the

land is not filled with couriers and proclamations describing my

person and making search for me?  Is it no matter for commotion

and distress that the Head of the State is gone; that I am

vanished away and lost?"



"Most true, my King, I had forgot."  Then Hendon sighed, and

muttered to himself, "Poor ruined mind--still busy with its

pathetic dream."



"But I have a plan that shall right us both--I will write a paper,

in three tongues--Latin, Greek and English--and thou shalt haste

away with it to London in the morning.  Give it to none but my

uncle, the Lord Hertford; when he shall see it, he will know and

say I wrote it.  Then he will send for me."



"Might it not be best, my Prince, that we wait here until I prove

myself and make my rights secure to my domains?  I should be so

much the better able then to--"



The King interrupted him imperiously--



"Peace!  What are thy paltry domains, thy trivial interests,

contrasted with matters which concern the weal of a nation and the

integrity of a throne?"  Then, he added, in a gentle voice, as if

he were sorry for his severity, "Obey, and have no fear; I will

right thee, I will make thee whole--yes, more than whole.  I shall

remember, and requite."



So saying, he took the pen, and set himself to work.  Hendon

contemplated him lovingly a while, then said to himself--



"An' it were dark, I should think it WAS a king that spoke;

there's no denying it, when the humour's upon on him he doth

thunder and lighten like your true King; now where got he that

trick?  See him scribble and scratch away contentedly at his

meaningless pot-hooks, fancying them to be Latin and Greek--and

except my wit shall serve me with a lucky device for diverting him

from his purpose, I shall be forced to pretend to post away to-

morrow on this wild errand he hath invented for me."



The next moment Sir Miles's thoughts had gone back to the recent

episode.  So absorbed was he in his musings, that when the King

presently handed him the paper which he had been writing, he

received it and pocketed it without being conscious of the act.

"How marvellous strange she acted," he muttered.  "I think she

knew me--and I think she did NOT know me.  These opinions do

conflict, I perceive it plainly; I cannot reconcile them, neither

can I, by argument, dismiss either of the two, or even persuade

one to outweigh the other.  The matter standeth simply thus:  she

MUST have known my face, my figure, my voice, for how could it be

otherwise?  Yet she SAID she knew me not, and that is proof

perfect, for she cannot lie.  But stop--I think I begin to see.

Peradventure he hath influenced her, commanded her, compelled her

to lie.  That is the solution.  The riddle is unriddled.  She

seemed dead with fear--yes, she was under his compulsion.  I will

seek her; I will find her; now that he is away, she will speak her

true mind.  She will remember the old times when we were little

playfellows together, and this will soften her heart, and she will

no more betray me, but will confess me.  There is no treacherous

blood in her--no, she was always honest and true.  She has loved

me, in those old days--this is my security; for whom one has

loved, one cannot betray."



He stepped eagerly toward the door; at that moment it opened, and

the Lady Edith entered.  She was very pale, but she walked with a

firm step, and her carriage was full of grace and gentle dignity.

Her face was as sad as before.



Miles sprang forward, with a happy confidence, to meet her, but

she checked him with a hardly perceptible gesture, and he stopped

where he was.  She seated herself, and asked him to do likewise.

Thus simply did she take the sense of old comradeship out of him,

and transform him into a stranger and a guest.  The surprise of

it, the bewildering unexpectedness of it, made him begin to

question, for a moment, if he WAS the person he was pretending to

be, after all.  The Lady Edith said--



"Sir, I have come to warn you.  The mad cannot be persuaded out of

their delusions, perchance; but doubtless they may be persuaded to

avoid perils.  I think this dream of yours hath the seeming of

honest truth to you, and therefore is not criminal--but do not

tarry here with it; for here it is dangerous."  She looked

steadily into Miles's face a moment, then added, impressively, "It

is the more dangerous for that you ARE much like what our lost lad

must have grown to be if he had lived."



"Heavens, madam, but I AM he!"



"I truly think you think it, sir.  I question not your honesty in

that; I but warn you, that is all.  My husband is master in this

region; his power hath hardly any limit; the people prosper or

starve, as he wills.  If you resembled not the man whom you

profess to be, my husband might bid you pleasure yourself with

your dream in peace; but trust me, I know him well; I know what he

will do; he will say to all that you are but a mad impostor, and

straightway all will echo him."  She bent upon Miles that same

steady look once more, and added:  "If you WERE Miles Hendon, and

he knew it and all the region knew it--consider what I am saying,

weigh it well--you would stand in the same peril, your punishment

would be no less sure; he would deny you and denounce you, and

none would be bold enough to give you countenance."



"Most truly I believe it," said Miles, bitterly.  "The power that

can command one life-long friend to betray and disown another, and

be obeyed, may well look to be obeyed in quarters where bread and

life are on the stake and no cobweb ties of loyalty and honour are

concerned."



A faint tinge appeared for a moment in the lady's cheek, and she

dropped her eyes to the floor; but her voice betrayed no emotion

when she proceeded--



"I have warned you--I must still warn you--to go hence.  This man

will destroy you, else.  He is a tyrant who knows no pity.  I, who

am his fettered slave, know this.  Poor Miles, and Arthur, and my

dear guardian, Sir Richard, are free of him, and at rest:  better

that you were with them than that you bide here in the clutches of

this miscreant.  Your pretensions are a menace to his title and

possessions; you have assaulted him in his own house:  you are

ruined if you stay.  Go--do not hesitate.  If you lack money, take

this purse, I beg of you, and bribe the servants to let you pass.

Oh, be warned, poor soul, and escape while you may."



Miles declined the purse with a gesture, and rose up and stood

before her.



"Grant me one thing," he said.  "Let your eyes rest upon mine, so

that I may see if they be steady.  There--now answer me.  Am I

Miles Hendon?"



"No.  I know you not."



"Swear it!"



The answer was low, but distinct--



"I swear."



"Oh, this passes belief!"



"Fly!  Why will you waste the precious time?  Fly, and save

yourself."



At that moment the officers burst into the room, and a violent

struggle began; but Hendon was soon overpowered and dragged away.

The King was taken also, and both were bound and led to prison.







Chapter XXVII. In prison.



The cells were all crowded; so the two friends were chained in a

large room where persons charged with trifling offences were

commonly kept.  They had company, for there were some twenty

manacled and fettered prisoners here, of both sexes and of varying

ages,--an obscene and noisy gang.  The King chafed bitterly over

the stupendous indignity thus put upon his royalty, but Hendon was

moody and taciturn.  He was pretty thoroughly bewildered; he had

come home, a jubilant prodigal, expecting to find everybody wild

with joy over his return; and instead had got the cold shoulder

and a jail.  The promise and the fulfilment differed so widely

that the effect was stunning; he could not decide whether it was

most tragic or most grotesque.  He felt much as a man might who

had danced blithely out to enjoy a rainbow, and got struck by

lightning.



But gradually his confused and tormenting thoughts settled down

into some sort of order, and then his mind centred itself upon

Edith.  He turned her conduct over, and examined it in all lights,

but he could not make anything satisfactory out of it.  Did she

know him--or didn't she know him?  It was a perplexing puzzle, and

occupied him a long time; but he ended, finally, with the

conviction that she did know him, and had repudiated him for

interested reasons.  He wanted to load her name with curses now;

but this name had so long been sacred to him that he found he

could not bring his tongue to profane it.



Wrapped in prison blankets of a soiled and tattered condition,

Hendon and the King passed a troubled night.  For a bribe the

jailer had furnished liquor to some of the prisoners; singing of

ribald songs, fighting, shouting, and carousing was the natural

consequence.  At last, a while after midnight, a man attacked a

woman and nearly killed her by beating her over the head with his

manacles before the jailer could come to the rescue.  The jailer

restored peace by giving the man a sound clubbing about the head

and shoulders--then the carousing ceased; and after that, all had

an opportunity to sleep who did not mind the annoyance of the

moanings and groanings of the two wounded people.



During the ensuing week, the days and nights were of a monotonous

sameness as to events; men whose faces Hendon remembered more or

less distinctly, came, by day, to gaze at the 'impostor' and

repudiate and insult him; and by night the carousing and brawling

went on with symmetrical regularity.  However, there was a change

of incident at last.  The jailer brought in an old man, and said

to him--



"The villain is in this room--cast thy old eyes about and see if

thou canst say which is he."



Hendon glanced up, and experienced a pleasant sensation for the

first time since he had been in the jail.  He said to himself,

"This is Blake Andrews, a servant all his life in my father's

family--a good honest soul, with a right heart in his breast.

That is, formerly.  But none are true now; all are liars.  This

man will know me--and will deny me, too, like the rest."



The old man gazed around the room, glanced at each face in turn,

and finally said--



"I see none here but paltry knaves, scum o' the streets.  Which is

he?"



The jailer laughed.



"Here," he said; "scan this big animal, and grant me an opinion."



The old man approached, and looked Hendon over, long and

earnestly, then shook his head and said--



"Marry, THIS is no Hendon--nor ever was!"



"Right!  Thy old eyes are sound yet.  An' I were Sir Hugh, I would

take the shabby carle and--"



The jailer finished by lifting himself a-tip-toe with an imaginary

halter, at the same time making a gurgling noise in his throat

suggestive of suffocation.  The old man said, vindictively--



"Let him bless God an' he fare no worse.  An' _I_ had the handling

o' the villain he should roast, or I am no true man!"



The jailer laughed a pleasant hyena laugh, and said--



"Give him a piece of thy mind, old man--they all do it.  Thou'lt

find it good diversion."



Then he sauntered toward his ante-room and disappeared.  The old

man dropped upon his knees and whispered--



"God be thanked, thou'rt come again, my master!  I believed thou

wert dead these seven years, and lo, here thou art alive!  I knew

thee the moment I saw thee; and main hard work it was to keep a

stony countenance and seem to see none here but tuppenny knaves

and rubbish o' the streets.  I am old and poor, Sir Miles; but say

the word and I will go forth and proclaim the truth though I be

strangled for it."



"No," said Hendon; "thou shalt not.  It would ruin thee, and yet

help but little in my cause.  But I thank thee, for thou hast

given me back somewhat of my lost faith in my kind."



The old servant became very valuable to Hendon and the King; for

he dropped in several times a day to 'abuse' the former, and

always smuggled in a few delicacies to help out the prison bill of

fare; he also furnished the current news.  Hendon reserved the

dainties for the King; without them his Majesty might not have

survived, for he was not able to eat the coarse and wretched food

provided by the jailer.  Andrews was obliged to confine himself to

brief visits, in order to avoid suspicion; but he managed to

impart a fair degree of information each time--information

delivered in a low voice, for Hendon's benefit, and interlarded

with insulting epithets delivered in a louder voice for the

benefit of other hearers.



So, little by little, the story of the family came out.  Arthur

had been dead six years.  This loss, with the absence of news from

Hendon, impaired the father's health; he believed he was going to

die, and he wished to see Hugh and Edith settled in life before he

passed away; but Edith begged hard for delay, hoping for Miles's

return; then the letter came which brought the news of Miles's

death; the shock prostrated Sir Richard; he believed his end was

very near, and he and Hugh insisted upon the marriage; Edith

begged for and obtained a month's respite, then another, and

finally a third; the marriage then took place by the death-bed of

Sir Richard.  It had not proved a happy one.  It was whispered

about the country that shortly after the nuptials the bride found

among her husband's papers several rough and incomplete drafts of

the fatal letter, and had accused him of precipitating the

marriage--and Sir Richard's death, too--by a wicked forgery.

Tales of cruelty to the Lady Edith and the servants were to be

heard on all hands; and since the father's death Sir Hugh had

thrown off all soft disguises and become a pitiless master toward

all who in any way depended upon him and his domains for bread.



There was a bit of Andrew's gossip which the King listened to with

a lively interest--



"There is rumour that the King is mad.  But in charity forbear to

say _I_ mentioned it, for 'tis death to speak of it, they say."



His Majesty glared at the old man and said--



"The King is NOT mad, good man--and thou'lt find it to thy

advantage to busy thyself with matters that nearer concern thee

than this seditious prattle."



"What doth the lad mean?" said Andrews, surprised at this brisk

assault from such an unexpected quarter.  Hendon gave him a sign,

and he did not pursue his question, but went on with his budget--



"The late King is to be buried at Windsor in a day or two--the

16th of the month--and the new King will be crowned at Westminster

the 20th."



"Methinks they must needs find him first," muttered his Majesty;

then added, confidently, "but they will look to that--and so also

shall I."



"In the name of--"



But the old man got no further--a warning sign from Hendon checked

his remark.  He resumed the thread of his gossip--



"Sir Hugh goeth to the coronation--and with grand hopes.  He

confidently looketh to come back a peer, for he is high in favour

with the Lord Protector."



"What Lord Protector?" asked his Majesty.



"His Grace the Duke of Somerset."



"What Duke of Somerset?"



"Marry, there is but one--Seymour, Earl of Hertford."



The King asked sharply--



"Since when is HE a duke, and Lord Protector?"



"Since the last day of January."



"And prithee who made him so?"



"Himself and the Great Council--with help of the King."



His Majesty started violently.  "The KING!" he cried.  "WHAT king,

good sir?"



"What king, indeed! (God-a-mercy, what aileth the boy?)  Sith we

have but one, 'tis not difficult to answer--his most sacred

Majesty King Edward the Sixth--whom God preserve!  Yea, and a dear

and gracious little urchin is he, too; and whether he be mad or

no--and they say he mendeth daily--his praises are on all men's

lips; and all bless him, likewise, and offer prayers that he may

be spared to reign long in England; for he began humanely with

saving the old Duke of Norfolk's life, and now is he bent on

destroying the cruellest of the laws that harry and oppress the

people."



This news struck his Majesty dumb with amazement, and plunged him

into so deep and dismal a reverie that he heard no more of the old

man's gossip.  He wondered if the 'little urchin' was the beggar-

boy whom he left dressed in his own garments in the palace.  It

did not seem possible that this could be, for surely his manners

and speech would betray him if he pretended to be the Prince of

Wales--then he would be driven out, and search made for the true

prince.  Could it be that the Court had set up some sprig of the

nobility in his place?  No, for his uncle would not allow that--he

was all-powerful and could and would crush such a movement, of

course.  The boy's musings profited him nothing; the more he tried

to unriddle the mystery the more perplexed he became, the more his

head ached, and the worse he slept.  His impatience to get to

London grew hourly, and his captivity became almost unendurable.



Hendon's arts all failed with the King--he could not be comforted;

but a couple of women who were chained near him succeeded better.

Under their gentle ministrations he found peace and learned a

degree of patience.  He was very grateful, and came to love them

dearly and to delight in the sweet and soothing influence of their

presence.  He asked them why they were in prison, and when they

said they were Baptists, he smiled, and inquired--



"Is that a crime to be shut up for in a prison?  Now I grieve, for

I shall lose ye--they will not keep ye long for such a little

thing."



They did not answer; and something in their faces made him uneasy.

He said, eagerly--



"You do not speak; be good to me, and tell me--there will be no

other punishment?  Prithee tell me there is no fear of that."



They tried to change the topic, but his fears were aroused, and he

pursued it--



"Will they scourge thee?  No, no, they would not be so cruel!  Say

they would not.  Come, they WILL not, will they?"



The women betrayed confusion and distress, but there was no

avoiding an answer, so one of them said, in a voice choked with

emotion--



"Oh, thou'lt break our hearts, thou gentle spirit!--God will help

us to bear our--"



"It is a confession!" the King broke in.  "Then they WILL scourge

thee, the stony-hearted wretches!  But oh, thou must not weep, I

cannot bear it.  Keep up thy courage--I shall come to my own in

time to save thee from this bitter thing, and I will do it!"



When the King awoke in the morning, the women were gone.



"They are saved!" he said, joyfully; then added, despondently,

"but woe is me!--for they were my comforters."



Each of them had left a shred of ribbon pinned to his clothing, in

token of remembrance.  He said he would keep these things always;

and that soon he would seek out these dear good friends of his and

take them under his protection.



Just then the jailer came in with some subordinates, and commanded

that the prisoners be conducted to the jail-yard.  The King was

overjoyed--it would be a blessed thing to see the blue sky and

breathe the fresh air once more.  He fretted and chafed at the

slowness of the officers, but his turn came at last, and he was

released from his staple and ordered to follow the other prisoners

with Hendon.



The court or quadrangle was stone-paved, and open to the sky.  The

prisoners entered it through a massive archway of masonry, and

were placed in file, standing, with their backs against the wall.

A rope was stretched in front of them, and they were also guarded

by their officers.  It was a chill and lowering morning, and a

light snow which had fallen during the night whitened the great

empty space and added to the general dismalness of its aspect.

Now and then a wintry wind shivered through the place and sent the

snow eddying hither and thither.



In the centre of the court stood two women, chained to posts.  A

glance showed the King that these were his good friends.  He

shuddered, and said to himself, "Alack, they are not gone free, as

I had thought.  To think that such as these should know the lash!-

-in England!  Ay, there's the shame of it--not in Heathennesse,

Christian England!  They will be scourged; and I, whom they have

comforted and kindly entreated, must look on and see the great

wrong done; it is strange, so strange, that I, the very source of

power in this broad realm, am helpless to protect them.  But let

these miscreants look well to themselves, for there is a day

coming when I will require of them a heavy reckoning for this

work.  For every blow they strike now, they shall feel a hundred

then."



A great gate swung open, and a crowd of citizens poured in.  They

flocked around the two women, and hid them from the King's view.

A clergyman entered and passed through the crowd, and he also was

hidden.  The King now heard talking, back and forth, as if

questions were being asked and answered, but he could not make out

what was said.  Next there was a deal of bustle and preparation,

and much passing and repassing of officials through that part of

the crowd that stood on the further side of the women; and whilst

this proceeded a deep hush gradually fell upon the people.



Now, by command, the masses parted and fell aside, and the King

saw a spectacle that froze the marrow in his bones.  Faggots had

been piled about the two women, and a kneeling man was lighting

them!



The women bowed their heads, and covered their faces with their

hands; the yellow flames began to climb upward among the snapping

and crackling faggots, and wreaths of blue smoke to stream away on

the wind; the clergyman lifted his hands and began a prayer--just

then two young girls came flying through the great gate, uttering

piercing screams, and threw themselves upon the women at the

stake.  Instantly they were torn away by the officers, and one of

them was kept in a tight grip, but the other broke loose, saying

she would die with her mother; and before she could be stopped she

had flung her arms about her mother's neck again.  She was torn

away once more, and with her gown on fire.  Two or three men held

her, and the burning portion of her gown was snatched off and

thrown flaming aside, she struggling all the while to free

herself, and saying she would be alone in the world, now; and

begging to be allowed to die with her mother.  Both the girls

screamed continually, and fought for freedom; but suddenly this

tumult was drowned under a volley of heart-piercing shrieks of

mortal agony--the King glanced from the frantic girls to the

stake, then turned away and leaned his ashen face against the

wall, and looked no more.  He said, "That which I have seen, in

that one little moment, will never go out from my memory, but will

abide there; and I shall see it all the days, and dream of it all

the nights, till I die.  Would God I had been blind!"



Hendon was watching the King.  He said to himself, with

satisfaction, "His disorder mendeth; he hath changed, and groweth

gentler.  If he had followed his wont, he would have stormed at

these varlets, and said he was King, and commanded that the women

be turned loose unscathed.  Soon his delusion will pass away and

be forgotten, and his poor mind will be whole again.  God speed

the day!"



That same day several prisoners were brought in to remain over

night, who were being conveyed, under guard, to various places in

the kingdom, to undergo punishment for crimes committed.  The King

conversed with these--he had made it a point, from the beginning,

to instruct himself for the kingly office by questioning prisoners

whenever the opportunity offered--and the tale of their woes wrung

his heart.  One of them was a poor half-witted woman who had

stolen a yard or two of cloth from a weaver--she was to be hanged

for it.  Another was a man who had been accused of stealing a

horse; he said the proof had failed, and he had imagined that he

was safe from the halter; but no--he was hardly free before he was

arraigned for killing a deer in the King's park; this was proved

against him, and now he was on his way to the gallows.  There was

a tradesman's apprentice whose case particularly distressed the

King; this youth said he found a hawk, one evening, that had

escaped from its owner, and he took it home with him, imagining

himself entitled to it; but the court convicted him of stealing

it, and sentenced him to death.



The King was furious over these inhumanities, and wanted Hendon to

break jail and fly with him to Westminster, so that he could mount

his throne and hold out his sceptre in mercy over these

unfortunate people and save their lives.  "Poor child," sighed

Hendon, "these woeful tales have brought his malady upon him

again; alack, but for this evil hap, he would have been well in a

little time."



Among these prisoners was an old lawyer--a man with a strong face

and a dauntless mien.  Three years past, he had written a pamphlet

against the Lord Chancellor, accusing him of injustice, and had

been punished for it by the loss of his ears in the pillory, and

degradation from the bar, and in addition had been fined 3,000

pounds and sentenced to imprisonment for life.  Lately he had

repeated his offence; and in consequence was now under sentence to

lose WHAT REMAINED OF HIS EARS, pay a fine of 5,000 pounds, be

branded on both cheeks, and remain in prison for life.



"These be honourable scars," he said, and turned back his grey

hair and showed the mutilated stubs of what had once been his

ears.



The King's eye burned with passion.  He said--



"None believe in me--neither wilt thou.  But no matter--within the

compass of a month thou shalt be free; and more, the laws that

have dishonoured thee, and shamed the English name, shall be swept

from the statute books.  The world is made wrong; kings should go

to school to their own laws, at times, and so learn mercy." {1}







Chapter XXVIII. The sacrifice.



Meantime Miles was growing sufficiently tired of confinement and

inaction.  But now his trial came on, to his great gratification,

and he thought he could welcome any sentence provided a further

imprisonment should not be a part of it.  But he was mistaken

about that.  He was in a fine fury when he found himself described

as a 'sturdy vagabond' and sentenced to sit two hours in the

stocks for bearing that character and for assaulting the master of

Hendon Hall.  His pretensions as to brothership with his

prosecutor, and rightful heirship to the Hendon honours and

estates, were left contemptuously unnoticed, as being not even

worth examination.



He raged and threatened on his way to punishment, but it did no

good; he was snatched roughly along by the officers, and got an

occasional cuff, besides, for his irreverent conduct.



The King could not pierce through the rabble that swarmed behind;

so he was obliged to follow in the rear, remote from his good

friend and servant.  The King had been nearly condemned to the

stocks himself for being in such bad company, but had been let off

with a lecture and a warning, in consideration of his youth.  When

the crowd at last halted, he flitted feverishly from point to

point around its outer rim, hunting a place to get through; and at

last, after a deal of difficulty and delay, succeeded.  There sat

his poor henchman in the degrading stocks, the sport and butt of a

dirty mob--he, the body servant of the King of England!  Edward

had heard the sentence pronounced, but he had not realised the

half that it meant.  His anger began to rise as the sense of this

new indignity which had been put upon him sank home; it jumped to

summer heat, the next moment, when he saw an egg sail through the

air and crush itself against Hendon's cheek, and heard the crowd

roar its enjoyment of the episode.  He sprang across the open

circle and confronted the officer in charge, crying--



"For shame!  This is my servant--set him free!  I am the--"



"Oh, peace!" exclaimed Hendon, in a panic, "thou'lt destroy

thyself.  Mind him not, officer, he is mad."



"Give thyself no trouble as to the matter of minding him, good

man, I have small mind to mind him; but as to teaching him

somewhat, to that I am well inclined."  He turned to a subordinate

and said, "Give the little fool a taste or two of the lash, to

mend his manners."



"Half a dozen will better serve his turn," suggested Sir Hugh, who

had ridden up, a moment before, to take a passing glance at the

proceedings.



The King was seized.  He did not even struggle, so paralysed was

he with the mere thought of the monstrous outrage that was

proposed to be inflicted upon his sacred person.  History was

already defiled with the record of the scourging of an English

king with whips--it was an intolerable reflection that he must

furnish a duplicate of that shameful page.  He was in the toils,

there was no help for him; he must either take this punishment or

beg for its remission.  Hard conditions; he would take the

stripes--a king might do that, but a king could not beg.



But meantime, Miles Hendon was resolving the difficulty.  "Let the

child go," said he; "ye heartless dogs, do ye not see how young

and frail he is?  Let him go--I will take his lashes."



"Marry, a good thought--and thanks for it," said Sir Hugh, his

face lighting with a sardonic satisfaction.  "Let the little

beggar go, and give this fellow a dozen in his place--an honest

dozen, well laid on."  The King was in the act of entering a

fierce protest, but Sir Hugh silenced him with the potent remark,

"Yes, speak up, do, and free thy mind--only, mark ye, that for

each word you utter he shall get six strokes the more."



Hendon was removed from the stocks, and his back laid bare; and

whilst the lash was applied the poor little King turned away his

face and allowed unroyal tears to channel his cheeks unchecked.

"Ah, brave good heart," he said to himself, "this loyal deed shall

never perish out of my memory.  I will not forget it--and neither

shall THEY!" he added, with passion.  Whilst he mused, his

appreciation of Hendon's magnanimous conduct grew to greater and

still greater dimensions in his mind, and so also did his

gratefulness for it.  Presently he said to himself, "Who saves his

prince from wounds and possible death--and this he did for me--

performs high service; but it is little--it is nothing--oh, less

than nothing!--when 'tis weighed against the act of him who saves

his prince from SHAME!"



Hendon made no outcry under the scourge, but bore the heavy blows

with soldierly fortitude.  This, together with his redeeming the

boy by taking his stripes for him, compelled the respect of even

that forlorn and degraded mob that was gathered there; and its

gibes and hootings died away, and no sound remained but the sound

of the falling blows.  The stillness that pervaded the place, when

Hendon found himself once more in the stocks, was in strong

contrast with the insulting clamour which had prevailed there so

little a while before.  The King came softly to Hendon's side, and

whispered in his ear--



"Kings cannot ennoble thee, thou good, great soul, for One who is

higher than kings hath done that for thee; but a king can confirm

thy nobility to men."  He picked up the scourge from the ground,

touched Hendon's bleeding shoulders lightly with it, and

whispered, "Edward of England dubs thee Earl!"



Hendon was touched.  The water welled to his eyes, yet at the same

time the grisly humour of the situation and circumstances so

undermined his gravity that it was all he could do to keep some

sign of his inward mirth from showing outside.  To be suddenly

hoisted, naked and gory, from the common stocks to the Alpine

altitude and splendour of an Earldom, seemed to him the last

possibility in the line of the grotesque.  He said to himself,

"Now am I finely tinselled, indeed!  The spectre-knight of the

Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows is become a spectre-earl--a dizzy

flight for a callow wing!  An' this go on, I shall presently be

hung like a very maypole with fantastic gauds and make-believe

honours.  But I shall value them, all valueless as they are, for

the love that doth bestow them.  Better these poor mock dignities

of mine, that come unasked, from a clean hand and a right spirit,

than real ones bought by servility from grudging and interested

power."



The dreaded Sir Hugh wheeled his horse about, and as he spurred

away, the living wall divided silently to let him pass, and as

silently closed together again.  And so remained; nobody went so

far as to venture a remark in favour of the prisoner, or in

compliment to him; but no matter--the absence of abuse was a

sufficient homage in itself.  A late comer who was not posted as

to the present circumstances, and who delivered a sneer at the

'impostor,' and was in the act of following it with a dead cat,

was promptly knocked down and kicked out, without any words, and

then the deep quiet resumed sway once more.







Chapter XXIX. To London.



When Hendon's term of service in the stocks was finished, he was

released and ordered to quit the region and come back no more.

His sword was restored to him, and also his mule and his donkey.

He mounted and rode off, followed by the King, the crowd opening

with quiet respectfulness to let them pass, and then dispersing

when they were gone.



Hendon was soon absorbed in thought.  There were questions of high

import to be answered.  What should he do?  Whither should he go?

Powerful help must be found somewhere, or he must relinquish his

inheritance and remain under the imputation of being an impostor

besides.  Where could he hope to find this powerful help?  Where,

indeed!  It was a knotty question.  By-and-by a thought occurred

to him which pointed to a possibility--the slenderest of slender

possibilities, certainly, but still worth considering, for lack of

any other that promised anything at all.  He remembered what old

Andrews had said about the young King's goodness and his generous

championship of the wronged and unfortunate.  Why not go and try

to get speech of him and beg for justice?  Ah, yes, but could so

fantastic a pauper get admission to the august presence of a

monarch?  Never mind--let that matter take care of itself; it was

a bridge that would not need to be crossed till he should come to

it.  He was an old campaigner, and used to inventing shifts and

expedients:  no doubt he would be able to find a way.  Yes, he

would strike for the capital.  Maybe his father's old friend Sir

Humphrey Marlow would help him--'good old Sir Humphrey, Head

Lieutenant of the late King's kitchen, or stables, or something'--

Miles could not remember just what or which.  Now that he had

something to turn his energies to, a distinctly defined object to

accomplish, the fog of humiliation and depression which had

settled down upon his spirits lifted and blew away, and he raised

his head and looked about him.  He was surprised to see how far he

had come; the village was away behind him.  The King was jogging

along in his wake, with his head bowed; for he, too, was deep in

plans and thinkings.  A sorrowful misgiving clouded Hendon's new-

born cheerfulness:  would the boy be willing to go again to a city

where, during all his brief life, he had never known anything but

ill-usage and pinching want?  But the question must be asked; it

could not be avoided; so Hendon reined up, and called out--



"I had forgotten to inquire whither we are bound.  Thy commands,

my liege!"



"To London!"



Hendon moved on again, mightily contented with the answer--but

astounded at it too.



The whole journey was made without an adventure of importance.

But it ended with one.  About ten o'clock on the night of the 19th

of February they stepped upon London Bridge, in the midst of a

writhing, struggling jam of howling and hurrahing people, whose

beer-jolly faces stood out strongly in the glare from manifold

torches--and at that instant the decaying head of some former duke

or other grandee tumbled down between them, striking Hendon on the

elbow and then bounding off among the hurrying confusion of feet.

So evanescent and unstable are men's works in this world!--the

late good King is but three weeks dead and three days in his

grave, and already the adornments which he took such pains to

select from prominent people for his noble bridge are falling.  A

citizen stumbled over that head, and drove his own head into the

back of somebody in front of him, who turned and knocked down the

first person that came handy, and was promptly laid out himself by

that person's friend.  It was the right ripe time for a free

fight, for the festivities of the morrow--Coronation Day--were

already beginning; everybody was full of strong drink and

patriotism; within five minutes the free fight was occupying a

good deal of ground; within ten or twelve it covered an acre of

so, and was become a riot.  By this time Hendon and the King were

hopelessly separated from each other and lost in the rush and

turmoil of the roaring masses of humanity.  And so we leave them.







Chapter XXX. Tom's progress.



Whilst the true King wandered about the land poorly clad, poorly

fed, cuffed and derided by tramps one while, herding with thieves

and murderers in a jail another, and called idiot and impostor by

all impartially, the mock King Tom Canty enjoyed quite a different

experience.



When we saw him last, royalty was just beginning to have a bright

side for him.  This bright side went on brightening more and more

every day:  in a very little while it was become almost all

sunshine and delightfulness.  He lost his fears; his misgivings

faded out and died; his embarrassments departed, and gave place to

an easy and confident bearing.  He worked the whipping-boy mine to

ever-increasing profit.



He ordered my Lady Elizabeth and my Lady Jane Grey into his

presence when he wanted to play or talk, and dismissed them when

he was done with them, with the air of one familiarly accustomed

to such performances.  It no longer confused him to have these

lofty personages kiss his hand at parting.



He came to enjoy being conducted to bed in state at night, and

dressed with intricate and solemn ceremony in the morning.  It

came to be a proud pleasure to march to dinner attended by a

glittering procession of officers of state and gentlemen-at-arms;

insomuch, indeed, that he doubled his guard of gentlemen-at-arms,

and made them a hundred.  He liked to hear the bugles sounding

down the long corridors, and the distant voices responding, "Way

for the King!"



He even learned to enjoy sitting in throned state in council, and

seeming to be something more than the Lord Protector's mouthpiece.

He liked to receive great ambassadors and their gorgeous trains,

and listen to the affectionate messages they brought from

illustrious monarchs who called him brother.  O happy Tom Canty,

late of Offal Court!



He enjoyed his splendid clothes, and ordered more:  he found his

four hundred servants too few for his proper grandeur, and trebled

them.  The adulation of salaaming courtiers came to be sweet music

to his ears.  He remained kind and gentle, and a sturdy and

determined champion of all that were oppressed, and he made

tireless war upon unjust laws:  yet upon occasion, being offended,

he could turn upon an earl, or even a duke, and give him a look

that would make him tremble.  Once, when his royal 'sister,' the

grimly holy Lady Mary, set herself to reason with him against the

wisdom of his course in pardoning so many people who would

otherwise be jailed, or hanged, or burned, and reminded him that

their august late father's prisons had sometimes contained as high

as sixty thousand convicts at one time, and that during his

admirable reign he had delivered seventy-two thousand thieves and

robbers over to death by the executioner, {9} the boy was filled

with generous indignation, and commanded her to go to her closet,

and beseech God to take away the stone that was in her breast, and

give her a human heart.



Did Tom Canty never feel troubled about the poor little rightful

prince who had treated him so kindly, and flown out with such hot

zeal to avenge him upon the insolent sentinel at the palace-gate?

Yes; his first royal days and nights were pretty well sprinkled

with painful thoughts about the lost prince, and with sincere

longings for his return, and happy restoration to his native

rights and splendours.  But as time wore on, and the prince did

not come, Tom's mind became more and more occupied with his new

and enchanting experiences, and by little and little the vanished

monarch faded almost out of his thoughts; and finally, when he did

intrude upon them at intervals, he was become an unwelcome

spectre, for he made Tom feel guilty and ashamed.



Tom's poor mother and sisters travelled the same road out of his

mind.  At first he pined for them, sorrowed for them, longed to

see them, but later, the thought of their coming some day in their

rags and dirt, and betraying him with their kisses, and pulling

him down from his lofty place, and dragging him back to penury and

degradation and the slums, made him shudder.  At last they ceased

to trouble his thoughts almost wholly.  And he was content, even

glad:  for, whenever their mournful and accusing faces did rise

before him now, they made him feel more despicable than the worms

that crawl.



At midnight of the 19th of February, Tom Canty was sinking to

sleep in his rich bed in the palace, guarded by his loyal vassals,

and surrounded by the pomps of royalty, a happy boy; for tomorrow

was the day appointed for his solemn crowning as King of England.

At that same hour, Edward, the true king, hungry and thirsty,

soiled and draggled, worn with travel, and clothed in rags and

shreds--his share of the results of the riot--was wedged in among

a crowd of people who were watching with deep interest certain

hurrying gangs of workmen who streamed in and out of Westminster

Abbey, busy as ants:  they were making the last preparation for

the royal coronation.







Chapter XXXI. The Recognition procession.



When Tom Canty awoke the next morning, the air was heavy with a

thunderous murmur:  all the distances were charged with it.  It

was music to him; for it meant that the English world was out in

its strength to give loyal welcome to the great day.



Presently Tom found himself once more the chief figure in a

wonderful floating pageant on the Thames; for by ancient custom

the 'recognition procession' through London must start from the

Tower, and he was bound thither.



When he arrived there, the sides of the venerable fortress seemed

suddenly rent in a thousand places, and from every rent leaped a

red tongue of flame and a white gush of smoke; a deafening

explosion followed, which drowned the shoutings of the multitude,

and made the ground tremble; the flame-jets, the smoke, and the

explosions, were repeated over and over again with marvellous

celerity, so that in a few moments the old Tower disappeared in

the vast fog of its own smoke, all but the very top of the tall

pile called the White Tower; this, with its banners, stood out

above the dense bank of vapour as a mountain-peak projects above a

cloud-rack.



Tom Canty, splendidly arrayed, mounted a prancing war-steed, whose

rich trappings almost reached to the ground; his 'uncle,' the Lord

Protector Somerset, similarly mounted, took place in his rear; the

King's Guard formed in single ranks on either side, clad in

burnished armour; after the Protector followed a seemingly

interminable procession of resplendent nobles attended by their

vassals; after these came the lord mayor and the aldermanic body,

in crimson velvet robes, and with their gold chains across their

breasts; and after these the officers and members of all the

guilds of London, in rich raiment, and bearing the showy banners

of the several corporations.  Also in the procession, as a special

guard of honour through the city, was the Ancient and Honourable

Artillery Company--an organisation already three hundred years old

at that time, and the only military body in England possessing the

privilege (which it still possesses in our day) of holding itself

independent of the commands of Parliament.  It was a brilliant

spectacle, and was hailed with acclamations all along the line, as

it took its stately way through the packed multitudes of citizens.

The chronicler says, 'The King, as he entered the city, was

received by the people with prayers, welcomings, cries, and tender

words, and all signs which argue an earnest love of subjects

toward their sovereign; and the King, by holding up his glad

countenance to such as stood afar off, and most tender language to

those that stood nigh his Grace, showed himself no less thankful

to receive the people's goodwill than they to offer it.  To all

that wished him well, he gave thanks.  To such as bade "God save

his Grace," he said in return, "God save you all!" and added that

"he thanked them with all his heart."  Wonderfully transported

were the people with the loving answers and gestures of their

King.'



In Fenchurch Street a 'fair child, in costly apparel,' stood on a

stage to welcome his Majesty to the city.  The last verse of his

greeting was in these words--



     'Welcome, O King! as much as hearts can think;

        Welcome, again, as much as tongue can tell,--

      Welcome to joyous tongues, and hearts that will not shrink:

        God thee preserve, we pray, and wish thee ever well.'



The people burst forth in a glad shout, repeating with one voice

what the child had said.  Tom Canty gazed abroad over the surging

sea of eager faces, and his heart swelled with exultation; and he

felt that the one thing worth living for in this world was to be a

king, and a nation's idol.  Presently he caught sight, at a

distance, of a couple of his ragged Offal Court comrades--one of

them the lord high admiral in his late mimic court, the other the

first lord of the bedchamber in the same pretentious fiction; and

his pride swelled higher than ever.  Oh, if they could only

recognise him now!  What unspeakable glory it would be, if they

could recognise him, and realise that the derided mock king of the

slums and back alleys was become a real King, with illustrious

dukes and princes for his humble menials, and the English world at

his feet!  But he had to deny himself, and choke down his desire,

for such a recognition might cost more than it would come to:  so

he turned away his head, and left the two soiled lads to go on

with their shoutings and glad adulations, unsuspicious of whom it

was they were lavishing them upon.



Every now and then rose the cry, "A largess! a largess!" and Tom

responded by scattering a handful of bright new coins abroad for

the multitude to scramble for.



The chronicler says, 'At the upper end of Gracechurch Street,

before the sign of the Eagle, the city had erected a gorgeous

arch, beneath which was a stage, which stretched from one side of

the street to the other.  This was an historical pageant,

representing the King's immediate progenitors.  There sat

Elizabeth of York in the midst of an immense white rose, whose

petals formed elaborate furbelows around her; by her side was

Henry VII., issuing out of a vast red rose, disposed in the same

manner:  the hands of the royal pair were locked together, and the

wedding-ring ostentatiously displayed.  From the red and white

roses proceeded a stem, which reached up to a second stage,

occupied by Henry VIII., issuing from a red and white rose, with

the effigy of the new King's mother, Jane Seymour, represented by

his side.  One branch sprang from this pair, which mounted to a

third stage, where sat the effigy of Edward VI. himself, enthroned

in royal majesty; and the whole pageant was framed with wreaths of

roses, red and white.'



This quaint and gaudy spectacle so wrought upon the rejoicing

people, that their acclamations utterly smothered the small voice

of the child whose business it was to explain the thing in

eulogistic rhymes.  But Tom Canty was not sorry; for this loyal

uproar was sweeter music to him than any poetry, no matter what

its quality might be.  Whithersoever Tom turned his happy young

face, the people recognised the exactness of his effigy's likeness

to himself, the flesh and blood counterpart; and new whirlwinds of

applause burst forth.



The great pageant moved on, and still on, under one triumphal arch

after another, and past a bewildering succession of spectacular

and symbolical tableaux, each of which typified and exalted some

virtue, or talent, or merit, of the little King's.  'Throughout

the whole of Cheapside, from every penthouse and window, hung

banners and streamers; and the richest carpets, stuffs, and cloth-

of-gold tapestried the streets--specimens of the great wealth of

the stores within; and the splendour of this thoroughfare was

equalled in the other streets, and in some even surpassed.'



"And all these wonders and these marvels are to welcome me--me!"

murmured Tom Canty.



The mock King's cheeks were flushed with excitement, his eyes were

flashing, his senses swam in a delirium of pleasure.  At this

point, just as he was raising his hand to fling another rich

largess, he caught sight of a pale, astounded face, which was

strained forward out of the second rank of the crowd, its intense

eyes riveted upon him.  A sickening consternation struck through

him; he recognised his mother! and up flew his hand, palm outward,

before his eyes--that old involuntary gesture, born of a forgotten

episode, and perpetuated by habit.  In an instant more she had

torn her way out of the press, and past the guards, and was at his

side.  She embraced his leg, she covered it with kisses, she

cried, "O my child, my darling!" lifting toward him a face that

was transfigured with joy and love.  The same instant an officer

of the King's Guard snatched her away with a curse, and sent her

reeling back whence she came with a vigorous impulse from his

strong arm.  The words "I do not know you, woman!" were falling

from Tom Canty's lips when this piteous thing occurred; but it

smote him to the heart to see her treated so; and as she turned

for a last glimpse of him, whilst the crowd was swallowing her

from his sight, she seemed so wounded, so broken-hearted, that a

shame fell upon him which consumed his pride to ashes, and

withered his stolen royalty.  His grandeurs were stricken

valueless:  they seemed to fall away from him like rotten rags.



The procession moved on, and still on, through ever augmenting

splendours and ever augmenting tempests of welcome; but to Tom

Canty they were as if they had not been.  He neither saw nor

heard.  Royalty had lost its grace and sweetness; its pomps were

become a reproach.  Remorse was eating his heart out.  He said,

"Would God I were free of my captivity!"



He had unconsciously dropped back into the phraseology of the

first days of his compulsory greatness.



The shining pageant still went winding like a radiant and

interminable serpent down the crooked lanes of the quaint old

city, and through the huzzaing hosts; but still the King rode with

bowed head and vacant eyes, seeing only his mother's face and that

wounded look in it.



"Largess, largess!"  The cry fell upon an unheeding ear.



"Long live Edward of England!"  It seemed as if the earth shook

with the explosion; but there was no response from the King.  He

heard it only as one hears the thunder of the surf when it is

blown to the ear out of a great distance, for it was smothered

under another sound which was still nearer, in his own breast, in

his accusing conscience--a voice which kept repeating those

shameful words, "I do not know you, woman!"



The words smote upon the King's soul as the strokes of a funeral

bell smite upon the soul of a surviving friend when they remind

him of secret treacheries suffered at his hands by him that is

gone.



New glories were unfolded at every turning; new wonders, new

marvels, sprang into view; the pent clamours of waiting batteries

were released; new raptures poured from the throats of the waiting

multitudes:  but the King gave no sign, and the accusing voice

that went moaning through his comfortless breast was all the sound

he heard.



By-and-by the gladness in the faces of the populace changed a

little, and became touched with a something like solicitude or

anxiety:  an abatement in the volume of the applause was

observable too.  The Lord Protector was quick to notice these

things:  he was as quick to detect the cause.  He spurred to the

King's side, bent low in his saddle, uncovered, and said--



"My liege, it is an ill time for dreaming.  The people observe thy

downcast head, thy clouded mien, and they take it for an omen.  Be

advised:  unveil the sun of royalty, and let it shine upon these

boding vapours, and disperse them.  Lift up thy face, and smile

upon the people."



So saying, the Duke scattered a handful of coins to right and

left, then retired to his place.  The mock King did mechanically

as he had been bidden.  His smile had no heart in it, but few eyes

were near enough or sharp enough to detect that.  The noddings of

his plumed head as he saluted his subjects were full of grace and

graciousness; the largess which he delivered from his hand was

royally liberal:  so the people's anxiety vanished, and the

acclamations burst forth again in as mighty a volume as before.



Still once more, a little before the progress was ended, the Duke

was obliged to ride forward, and make remonstrance.  He whispered-

-



"O dread sovereign! shake off these fatal humours; the eyes of the

world are upon thee."  Then he added with sharp annoyance,

"Perdition catch that crazy pauper! 'twas she that hath disturbed

your Highness."



The gorgeous figure turned a lustreless eye upon the Duke, and

said in a dead voice--



"She was my mother!"



"My God!" groaned the Protector as he reined his horse backward to

his post, "the omen was pregnant with prophecy.  He is gone mad

again!"







Chapter XXXII. Coronation Day.



Let us go backward a few hours, and place ourselves in Westminster

Abbey, at four o'clock in the morning of this memorable Coronation

Day.  We are not without company; for although it is still night,

we find the torch-lighted galleries already filling up with people

who are well content to sit still and wait seven or eight hours

till the time shall come for them to see what they may not hope to

see twice in their lives--the coronation of a King.  Yes, London

and Westminster have been astir ever since the warning guns boomed

at three o'clock, and already crowds of untitled rich folk who

have bought the privilege of trying to find sitting-room in the

galleries are flocking in at the entrances reserved for their

sort.



The hours drag along tediously enough.  All stir has ceased for

some time, for every gallery has long ago been packed.  We may

sit, now, and look and think at our leisure.  We have glimpses,

here and there and yonder, through the dim cathedral twilight, of

portions of many galleries and balconies, wedged full with other

people, the other portions of these galleries and balconies being

cut off from sight by intervening pillars and architectural

projections.  We have in view the whole of the great north

transept--empty, and waiting for England's privileged ones.  We

see also the ample area or platform, carpeted with rich stuffs,

whereon the throne stands.  The throne occupies the centre of the

platform, and is raised above it upon an elevation of four steps.

Within the seat of the throne is enclosed a rough flat rock--the

stone of Scone--which many generations of Scottish kings sat on to

be crowned, and so it in time became holy enough to answer a like

purpose for English monarchs.  Both the throne and its footstool

are covered with cloth of gold.



Stillness reigns, the torches blink dully, the time drags heavily.

But at last the lagging daylight asserts itself, the torches are

extinguished, and a mellow radiance suffuses the great spaces.

All features of the noble building are distinct now, but soft and

dreamy, for the sun is lightly veiled with clouds.



At seven o'clock the first break in the drowsy monotony occurs;

for on the stroke of this hour the first peeress enters the

transept, clothed like Solomon for splendour, and is conducted to

her appointed place by an official clad in satins and velvets,

whilst a duplicate of him gathers up the lady's long train,

follows after, and, when the lady is seated, arranges the train

across her lap for her.  He then places her footstool according to

her desire, after which he puts her coronet where it will be

convenient to her hand when the time for the simultaneous

coroneting of the nobles shall arrive.



By this time the peeresses are flowing in in a glittering stream,

and the satin-clad officials are flitting and glinting everywhere,

seating them and making them comfortable.  The scene is animated

enough now.  There is stir and life, and shifting colour

everywhere.  After a time, quiet reigns again; for the peeresses

are all come and are all in their places, a solid acre or such a

matter, of human flowers, resplendent in variegated colours, and

frosted like a Milky Way with diamonds.  There are all ages here:

brown, wrinkled, white-haired dowagers who are able to go back,

and still back, down the stream of time, and recall the crowning

of Richard III. and the troublous days of that old forgotten age;

and there are handsome middle-aged dames; and lovely and gracious

young matrons; and gentle and beautiful young girls, with beaming

eyes and fresh complexions, who may possibly put on their jewelled

coronets awkwardly when the great time comes; for the matter will

be new to them, and their excitement will be a sore hindrance.

Still, this may not happen, for the hair of all these ladies has

been arranged with a special view to the swift and successful

lodging of the crown in its place when the signal comes.



We have seen that this massed array of peeresses is sown thick

with diamonds, and we also see that it is a marvellous spectacle--

but now we are about to be astonished in earnest.  About nine, the

clouds suddenly break away and a shaft of sunshine cleaves the

mellow atmosphere, and drifts slowly along the ranks of ladies;

and every rank it touches flames into a dazzling splendour of

many-coloured fires, and we tingle to our finger-tips with the

electric thrill that is shot through us by the surprise and the

beauty of the spectacle!  Presently a special envoy from some

distant corner of the Orient, marching with the general body of

foreign ambassadors, crosses this bar of sunshine, and we catch

our breath, the glory that streams and flashes and palpitates

about him is so overpowering; for he is crusted from head to heel

with gems, and his slightest movement showers a dancing radiance

all around him.



Let us change the tense for convenience.  The time drifted along--

one hour--two hours--two hours and a half; then the deep booming

of artillery told that the King and his grand procession had

arrived at last; so the waiting multitude rejoiced.  All knew that

a further delay must follow, for the King must be prepared and

robed for the solemn ceremony; but this delay would be pleasantly

occupied by the assembling of the peers of the realm in their

stately robes.  These were conducted ceremoniously to their seats,

and their coronets placed conveniently at hand; and meanwhile the

multitude in the galleries were alive with interest, for most of

them were beholding for the first time, dukes, earls, and barons,

whose names had been historical for five hundred years.  When all

were finally seated, the spectacle from the galleries and all

coigns of vantage was complete; a gorgeous one to look upon and to

remember.



Now the robed and mitred great heads of the church, and their

attendants, filed in upon the platform and took their appointed

places; these were followed by the Lord Protector and other great

officials, and these again by a steel-clad detachment of the

Guard.



There was a waiting pause; then, at a signal, a triumphant peal of

music burst forth, and Tom Canty, clothed in a long robe of cloth

of gold, appeared at a door, and stepped upon the platform.  The

entire multitude rose, and the ceremony of the Recognition ensued.



Then a noble anthem swept the Abbey with its rich waves of sound;

and thus heralded and welcomed, Tom Canty was conducted to the

throne.  The ancient ceremonies went on, with impressive

solemnity, whilst the audience gazed; and as they drew nearer and

nearer to completion, Tom Canty grew pale, and still paler, and a

deep and steadily deepening woe and despondency settled down upon

his spirits and upon his remorseful heart.



At last the final act was at hand.  The Archbishop of Canterbury

lifted up the crown of England from its cushion and held it out

over the trembling mock-King's head.  In the same instant a

rainbow-radiance flashed along the spacious transept; for with one

impulse every individual in the great concourse of nobles lifted a

coronet and poised it over his or her head--and paused in that

attitude.



A deep hush pervaded the Abbey.  At this impressive moment, a

startling apparition intruded upon the scene--an apparition

observed by none in the absorbed multitude, until it suddenly

appeared, moving up the great central aisle.  It was a boy,

bareheaded, ill shod, and clothed in coarse plebeian garments that

were falling to rags.  He raised his hand with a solemnity which

ill comported with his soiled and sorry aspect, and delivered this

note of warning--



"I forbid you to set the crown of England upon that forfeited

head.  I am the King!"



In an instant several indignant hands were laid upon the boy; but

in the same instant Tom Canty, in his regal vestments, made a

swift step forward, and cried out in a ringing voice--



"Loose him and forbear!  He IS the King!"



A sort of panic of astonishment swept the assemblage, and they

partly rose in their places and stared in a bewildered way at one

another and at the chief figures in this scene, like persons who

wondered whether they were awake and in their senses, or asleep

and dreaming.  The Lord Protector was as amazed as the rest, but

quickly recovered himself, and exclaimed in a voice of authority--



"Mind not his Majesty, his malady is upon him again--seize the

vagabond!"



He would have been obeyed, but the mock-King stamped his foot and

cried out--



"On your peril!  Touch him not, he is the King!"



The hands were withheld; a paralysis fell upon the house; no one

moved, no one spoke; indeed, no one knew how to act or what to

say, in so strange and surprising an emergency.  While all minds

were struggling to right themselves, the boy still moved steadily

forward, with high port and confident mien; he had never halted

from the beginning; and while the tangled minds still floundered

helplessly, he stepped upon the platform, and the mock-King ran

with a glad face to meet him; and fell on his knees before him and

said--



"Oh, my lord the King, let poor Tom Canty be first to swear fealty

to thee, and say, 'Put on thy crown and enter into thine own

again!'"



The Lord Protector's eye fell sternly upon the new-comer's face;

but straightway the sternness vanished away, and gave place to an

expression of wondering surprise.  This thing happened also to the

other great officers.  They glanced at each other, and retreated a

step by a common and unconscious impulse.  The thought in each

mind was the same:  "What a strange resemblance!"



The Lord Protector reflected a moment or two in perplexity, then

he said, with grave respectfulness--



"By your favour, sir, I desire to ask certain questions which--"



"I will answer them, my lord."



The Duke asked him many questions about the Court, the late King,

the prince, the princesses--the boy answered them correctly and

without hesitating.  He described the rooms of state in the

palace, the late King's apartments, and those of the Prince of

Wales.



It was strange; it was wonderful; yes, it was unaccountable--so

all said that heard it.  The tide was beginning to turn, and Tom

Canty's hopes to run high, when the Lord Protector shook his head

and said--



"It is true it is most wonderful--but it is no more than our lord

the King likewise can do."  This remark, and this reference to

himself as still the King, saddened Tom Canty, and he felt his

hopes crumbling from under him.  "These are not PROOFS," added the

Protector.



The tide was turning very fast now, very fast indeed--but in the

wrong direction; it was leaving poor Tom Canty stranded on the

throne, and sweeping the other out to sea.  The Lord Protector

communed with himself--shook his head--the thought forced itself

upon him, "It is perilous to the State and to us all, to entertain

so fateful a riddle as this; it could divide the nation and

undermine the throne."  He turned and said--



"Sir Thomas, arrest this--No, hold!"  His face lighted, and he

confronted the ragged candidate with this question--



"Where lieth the Great Seal?  Answer me this truly, and the riddle

is unriddled; for only he that was Prince of Wales CAN so answer!

On so trivial a thing hang a throne and a dynasty!"



It was a lucky thought, a happy thought.  That it was so

considered by the great officials was manifested by the silent

applause that shot from eye to eye around their circle in the form

of bright approving glances.  Yes, none but the true prince could

dissolve the stubborn mystery of the vanished Great Seal--this

forlorn little impostor had been taught his lesson well, but here

his teachings must fail, for his teacher himself could not answer

THAT question--ah, very good, very good indeed; now we shall be

rid of this troublesome and perilous business in short order!  And

so they nodded invisibly and smiled inwardly with satisfaction,

and looked to see this foolish lad stricken with a palsy of guilty

confusion.  How surprised they were, then, to see nothing of the

sort happen--how they marvelled to hear him answer up promptly, in

a confident and untroubled voice, and say--



"There is nought in this riddle that is difficult."  Then, without

so much as a by-your-leave to anybody, he turned and gave this

command, with the easy manner of one accustomed to doing such

things: "My Lord St. John, go you to my private cabinet in the

palace--for none knoweth the place better than you--and, close

down to the floor, in the left corner remotest from the door that

opens from the ante-chamber, you shall find in the wall a brazen

nail-head; press upon it and a little jewel-closet will fly open

which not even you do know of--no, nor any sould else in all the

world but me and the trusty artisan that did contrive it for me.

The first thing that falleth under your eye will be the Great

Seal--fetch it hither."



All the company wondered at this speech, and wondered still more

to see the little mendicant pick out this peer without hesitancy

or apparent fear of mistake, and call him by name with such a

placidly convincing air of having known him all his life.  The

peer was almost surprised into obeying.  He even made a movement

as if to go, but quickly recovered his tranquil attitude and

confessed his blunder with a blush.  Tom Canty turned upon him and

said, sharply--



"Why dost thou hesitate?  Hast not heard the King's command?  Go!"



The Lord St. John made a deep obeisance--and it was observed that

it was a significantly cautious and non-committal one, it not

being delivered at either of the kings, but at the neutral ground

about half-way between the two--and took his leave.



Now began a movement of the gorgeous particles of that official

group which was slow, scarcely perceptible, and yet steady and

persistent--a movement such as is observed in a kaleidoscope that

is turned slowly, whereby the components of one splendid cluster

fall away and join themselves to another--a movement which, little

by little, in the present case, dissolved the glittering crowd

that stood about Tom Canty and clustered it together again in the

neighbourhood of the new-comer.  Tom Canty stood almost alone.

Now ensued a brief season of deep suspense and waiting--during

which even the few faint hearts still remaining near Tom Canty

gradually scraped together courage enough to glide, one by one,

over to the majority.  So at last Tom Canty, in his royal robes

and jewels, stood wholly alone and isolated from the world, a

conspicuous figure, occupying an eloquent vacancy.



Now the Lord St. John was seen returning.  As he advanced up the

mid-aisle the interest was so intense that the low murmur of

conversation in the great assemblage died out and was succeeded by

a profound hush, a breathless stillness, through which his

footfalls pulsed with a dull and distant sound.  Every eye was

fastened upon him as he moved along.  He reached the platform,

paused a moment, then moved toward Tom Canty with a deep

obeisance, and said--



"Sire, the Seal is not there!"



A mob does not melt away from the presence of a plague-patient

with more haste than the band of pallid and terrified courtiers

melted away from the presence of the shabby little claimant of the

Crown.  In a moment he stood all alone, without friend or

supporter, a target upon which was concentrated a bitter fire of

scornful and angry looks.  The Lord Protector called out fiercely-

-



"Cast the beggar into the street, and scourge him through the

town--the paltry knave is worth no more consideration!"



Officers of the guard sprang forward to obey, but Tom Canty waved

them off and said--



"Back!  Whoso touches him perils his life!"



The Lord Protector was perplexed in the last degree.  He said to

the Lord St. John--



"Searched you well?--but it boots not to ask that.  It doth seem

passing strange.  Little things, trifles, slip out of one's ken,

and one does not think it matter for surprise; but how so bulky a

thing as the Seal of England can vanish away and no man be able to

get track of it again--a massy golden disk--"



Tom Canty, with beaming eyes, sprang forward and shouted--



"Hold, that is enough!  Was it round?--and thick?--and had it

letters and devices graved upon it?--yes?  Oh, NOW I know what

this Great Seal is that there's been such worry and pother about.

An' ye had described it to me, ye could have had it three weeks

ago.  Right well I know where it lies; but it was not I that put

it there--first."



"Who, then, my liege?" asked the Lord Protector.



"He that stands there--the rightful King of England.  And he shall

tell you himself where it lies--then you will believe he knew it

of his own knowledge.  Bethink thee, my King--spur thy memory--it

was the last, the very LAST thing thou didst that day before thou

didst rush forth from the palace, clothed in my rags, to punish

the soldier that insulted me."



A silence ensued, undisturbed by a movement or a whisper, and all

eyes were fixed upon the new-comer, who stood, with bent head and

corrugated brow, groping in his memory among a thronging multitude

of valueless recollections for one single little elusive fact,

which, found, would seat him upon a throne--unfound, would leave

him as he was, for good and all--a pauper and an outcast.  Moment

after moment passed--the moments built themselves into minutes--

still the boy struggled silently on, and gave no sign.  But at

last he heaved a sigh, shook his head slowly, and said, with a

trembling lip and in a despondent voice--



"I call the scene back--all of it--but the Seal hath no place in

it."  He paused, then looked up, and said with gentle dignity, "My

lords and gentlemen, if ye will rob your rightful sovereign of his

own for lack of this evidence which he is not able to furnish, I

may not stay ye, being powerless.  But--"



"Oh, folly, oh, madness, my King!" cried Tom Canty, in a panic,

"wait!--think!  Do not give up!--the cause is not lost!  Nor SHALL

be, neither!  List to what I say--follow every word--I am going to

bring that morning back again, every hap just as it happened.  We

talked--I told you of my sisters, Nan and Bet--ah, yes, you

remember that; and about mine old grandam--and the rough games of

the lads of Offal Court--yes, you remember these things also; very

well, follow me still, you shall recall everything.  You gave me

food and drink, and did with princely courtesy send away the

servants, so that my low breeding might not shame me before them--

ah, yes, this also you remember."



As Tom checked off his details, and the other boy nodded his head

in recognition of them, the great audience and the officials

stared in puzzled wonderment; the tale sounded like true history,

yet how could this impossible conjunction between a prince and a

beggar-boy have come about?  Never was a company of people so

perplexed, so interested, and so stupefied, before.



"For a jest, my prince, we did exchange garments.  Then we stood

before a mirror; and so alike were we that both said it seemed as

if there had been no change made--yes, you remember that.  Then

you noticed that the soldier had hurt my hand--look! here it is, I

cannot yet even write with it, the fingers are so stiff.  At this

your Highness sprang up, vowing vengeance upon that soldier, and

ran towards the door--you passed a table--that thing you call the

Seal lay on that table--you snatched it up and looked eagerly

about, as if for a place to hide it--your eye caught sight of--"



"There, 'tis sufficient!--and the good God be thanked!" exclaimed

the ragged claimant, in a mighty excitement.  "Go, my good St.

John--in an arm-piece of the Milanese armour that hangs on the

wall, thou'lt find the Seal!"



"Right, my King! right!" cried Tom Canty; "NOW the sceptre of

England is thine own; and it were better for him that would

dispute it that he had been born dumb!  Go, my Lord St. John, give

thy feet wings!"



The whole assemblage was on its feet now, and well-nigh out of its

mind with uneasiness, apprehension, and consuming excitement.  On

the floor and on the platform a deafening buzz of frantic

conversation burst forth, and for some time nobody knew anything

or heard anything or was interested in anything but what his

neighbour was shouting into his ear, or he was shouting into his

neighbour's ear.  Time--nobody knew how much of it--swept by

unheeded and unnoted.  At last a sudden hush fell upon the house,

and in the same moment St. John appeared upon the platform, and

held the Great Seal aloft in his hand.  Then such a shout went up-

-



"Long live the true King!"



For five minutes the air quaked with shouts and the crash of

musical instruments, and was white with a storm of waving

handkerchiefs; and through it all a ragged lad, the most

conspicuous figure in England, stood, flushed and happy and proud,

in the centre of the spacious platform, with the great vassals of

the kingdom kneeling around him.



Then all rose, and Tom Canty cried out--



"Now, O my King, take these regal garments back, and give poor

Tom, thy servant, his shreds and remnants again."



The Lord Protector spoke up--



"Let the small varlet be stripped and flung into the Tower."



But the new King, the true King, said--



"I will not have it so.  But for him I had not got my crown again-

-none shall lay a hand upon him to harm him.  And as for thee, my

good uncle, my Lord Protector, this conduct of thine is not

grateful toward this poor lad, for I hear he hath made thee a

duke"--the Protector blushed--"yet he was not a king; wherefore

what is thy fine title worth now?  To-morrow you shall sue to me,

THROUGH HIM, for its confirmation, else no duke, but a simple

earl, shalt thou remain."



Under this rebuke, his Grace the Duke of Somerset retired a little

from the front for the moment.  The King turned to Tom, and said

kindly--"My poor boy, how was it that you could remember where I

hid the Seal when I could not remember it myself?"



"Ah, my King, that was easy, since I used it divers days."



"Used it--yet could not explain where it was?"



"I did not know it was THAT they wanted.  They did not describe

it, your Majesty."



"Then how used you it?"



The red blood began to steal up into Tom's cheeks, and he dropped

his eyes and was silent.



"Speak up, good lad, and fear nothing," said the King.  "How used

you the Great Seal of England?"



Tom stammered a moment, in a pathetic confusion, then got it out--



"To crack nuts with!"



Poor child, the avalanche of laughter that greeted this nearly

swept him off his feet.  But if a doubt remained in any mind that

Tom Canty was not the King of England and familiar with the august

appurtenances of royalty, this reply disposed of it utterly.



Meantime the sumptuous robe of state had been removed from Tom's

shoulders to the King's, whose rags were effectually hidden from

sight under it.  Then the coronation ceremonies were resumed; the

true King was anointed and the crown set upon his head, whilst

cannon thundered the news to the city, and all London seemed to

rock with applause.







Chapter XXXIII. Edward as King.



Miles Hendon was picturesque enough before he got into the riot on

London Bridge--he was more so when he got out of it.  He had but

little money when he got in, none at all when he got out.  The

pickpockets had stripped him of his last farthing.



But no matter, so he found his boy.  Being a soldier, he did not

go at his task in a random way, but set to work, first of all, to

arrange his campaign.



What would the boy naturally do?  Where would he naturally go?

Well--argued Miles--he would naturally go to his former haunts,

for that is the instinct of unsound minds, when homeless and

forsaken, as well as of sound ones.  Whereabouts were his former

haunts?  His rags, taken together with the low villain who seemed

to know him and who even claimed to be his father, indicated that

his home was in one or another of the poorest and meanest

districts of London.  Would the search for him be difficult, or

long?  No, it was likely to be easy and brief.  He would not hunt

for the boy, he would hunt for a crowd; in the centre of a big

crowd or a little one, sooner or later, he should find his poor

little friend, sure; and the mangy mob would be entertaining

itself with pestering and aggravating the boy, who would be

proclaiming himself King, as usual.  Then Miles Hendon would

cripple some of those people, and carry off his little ward, and

comfort and cheer him with loving words, and the two would never

be separated any more.



So Miles started on his quest.  Hour after hour he tramped through

back alleys and squalid streets, seeking groups and crowds, and

finding no end of them, but never any sign of the boy.  This

greatly surprised him, but did not discourage him.  To his notion,

there was nothing the matter with his plan of campaign; the only

miscalculation about it was that the campaign was becoming a

lengthy one, whereas he had expected it to be short.



When daylight arrived, at last, he had made many a mile, and

canvassed many a crowd, but the only result was that he was

tolerably tired, rather hungry and very sleepy.  He wanted some

breakfast, but there was no way to get it.  To beg for it did not

occur to him; as to pawning his sword, he would as soon have

thought of parting with his honour; he could spare some of his

clothes--yes, but one could as easily find a customer for a

disease as for such clothes.



At noon he was still tramping--among the rabble which followed

after the royal procession, now; for he argued that this regal

display would attract his little lunatic powerfully.  He followed

the pageant through all its devious windings about London, and all

the way to Westminster and the Abbey.  He drifted here and there

amongst the multitudes that were massed in the vicinity for a

weary long time, baffled and perplexed, and finally wandered off,

thinking, and trying to contrive some way to better his plan of

campaign.  By-and-by, when he came to himself out of his musings,

he discovered that the town was far behind him and that the day

was growing old.  He was near the river, and in the country; it

was a region of fine rural seats--not the sort of district to

welcome clothes like his.



It was not at all cold; so he stretched himself on the ground in

the lee of a hedge to rest and think.  Drowsiness presently began

to settle upon his senses; the faint and far-off boom of cannon

was wafted to his ear, and he said to himself, "The new King is

crowned," and straightway fell asleep.  He had not slept or

rested, before, for more than thirty hours.  He did not wake again

until near the middle of the next morning.



He got up, lame, stiff, and half famished, washed himself in the

river, stayed his stomach with a pint or two of water, and trudged

off toward Westminster, grumbling at himself for having wasted so

much time.  Hunger helped him to a new plan, now; he would try to

get speech with old Sir Humphrey Marlow and borrow a few marks,

and--but that was enough of a plan for the present; it would be

time enough to enlarge it when this first stage should be

accomplished.



Toward eleven o'clock he approached the palace; and although a

host of showy people were about him, moving in the same direction,

he was not inconspicuous--his costume took care of that.  He

watched these people's faces narrowly, hoping to find a charitable

one whose possessor might be willing to carry his name to the old

lieutenant--as to trying to get into the palace himself, that was

simply out of the question.



Presently our whipping-boy passed him, then wheeled about and

scanned his figure well, saying to himself, "An' that is not the

very vagabond his Majesty is in such a worry about, then am I an

ass--though belike I was that before.  He answereth the

description to a rag--that God should make two such would be to

cheapen miracles by wasteful repetition.  I would I could contrive

an excuse to speak with him."



Miles Hendon saved him the trouble; for he turned about, then, as

a man generally will when somebody mesmerises him by gazing hard

at him from behind; and observing a strong interest in the boy's

eyes, he stepped toward him and said--



"You have just come out from the palace; do you belong there?"



"Yes, your worship."



"Know you Sir Humphrey Marlow?"



The boy started, and said to himself, "Lord! mine old departed

father!"  Then he answered aloud, "Right well, your worship."



"Good--is he within?"



"Yes," said the boy; and added, to himself, "within his grave."



"Might I crave your favour to carry my name to him, and say I beg

to say a word in his ear?"



"I will despatch the business right willingly, fair sir."



"Then say Miles Hendon, son of Sir Richard, is here without--I

shall be greatly bounden to you, my good lad."



The boy looked disappointed.  "The King did not name him so," he

said to himself; "but it mattereth not, this is his twin brother,

and can give his Majesty news of t'other Sir-Odds-and-Ends, I

warrant."  So he said to Miles, "Step in there a moment, good sir,

and wait till I bring you word."



Hendon retired to the place indicated--it was a recess sunk in the

palace wall, with a stone bench in it--a shelter for sentinels in

bad weather.  He had hardly seated himself when some halberdiers,

in charge of an officer, passed by.  The officer saw him, halted

his men, and commanded Hendon to come forth.  He obeyed, and was

promptly arrested as a suspicious character prowling within the

precincts of the palace.  Things began to look ugly.  Poor Miles

was going to explain, but the officer roughly silenced him, and

ordered his men to disarm him and search him.



"God of his mercy grant that they find somewhat," said poor Miles;

"I have searched enow, and failed, yet is my need greater than

theirs."



Nothing was found but a document.  The officer tore it open, and

Hendon smiled when he recognised the 'pot-hooks' made by his lost

little friend that black day at Hendon Hall.  The officer's face

grew dark as he read the English paragraph, and Miles blenched to

the opposite colour as he listened.



"Another new claimant of the Crown!" cried the officer.  "Verily

they breed like rabbits, to-day.  Seize the rascal, men, and see

ye keep him fast whilst I convey this precious paper within and

send it to the King."



He hurried away, leaving the prisoner in the grip of the

halberdiers.



"Now is my evil luck ended at last," muttered Hendon, "for I shall

dangle at a rope's end for a certainty, by reason of that bit of

writing.  And what will become of my poor lad!--ah, only the good

God knoweth."



By-and-by he saw the officer coming again, in a great hurry; so he

plucked his courage together, purposing to meet his trouble as

became a man.  The officer ordered the men to loose the prisoner

and return his sword to him; then bowed respectfully, and said--



"Please you, sir, to follow me."



Hendon followed, saying to himself, "An' I were not travelling to

death and judgment, and so must needs economise in sin, I would

throttle this knave for his mock courtesy."



The two traversed a populous court, and arrived at the grand

entrance of the palace, where the officer, with another bow,

delivered Hendon into the hands of a gorgeous official, who

received him with profound respect and led him forward through a

great hall, lined on both sides with rows of splendid flunkeys

(who made reverential obeisance as the two passed along, but fell

into death-throes of silent laughter at our stately scarecrow the

moment his back was turned), and up a broad staircase, among

flocks of fine folk, and finally conducted him into a vast room,

clove a passage for him through the assembled nobility of England,

then made a bow, reminded him to take his hat off, and left him

standing in the middle of the room, a mark for all eyes, for

plenty of indignant frowns, and for a sufficiency of amused and

derisive smiles.



Miles Hendon was entirely bewildered.  There sat the young King,

under a canopy of state, five steps away, with his head bent down

and aside, speaking with a sort of human bird of paradise--a duke,

maybe.  Hendon observed to himself that it was hard enough to be

sentenced to death in the full vigour of life, without having this

peculiarly public humiliation added.  He wished the King would

hurry about it--some of the gaudy people near by were becoming

pretty offensive.  At this moment the King raised his head

slightly, and Hendon caught a good view of his face.  The sight

nearly took his breath away!--He stood gazing at the fair young

face like one transfixed; then presently ejaculated--



"Lo, the Lord of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows on his throne!"



He muttered some broken sentences, still gazing and marvelling;

then turned his eyes around and about, scanning the gorgeous

throng and the splendid saloon, murmuring, "But these are REAL--

verily these are REAL--surely it is not a dream."



He stared at the King again--and thought, "IS it a dream . . . or

IS he the veritable Sovereign of England, and not the friendless

poor Tom o' Bedlam I took him for--who shall solve me this

riddle?"



A sudden idea flashed in his eye, and he strode to the wall,

gathered up a chair, brought it back, planted it on the floor, and

sat down in it!



A buzz of indignation broke out, a rough hand was laid upon him

and a voice exclaimed--



"Up, thou mannerless clown! would'st sit in the presence of the

King?"



The disturbance attracted his Majesty's attention, who stretched

forth his hand and cried out--



"Touch him not, it is his right!"



The throng fell back, stupefied.  The King went on--



"Learn ye all, ladies, lords, and gentlemen, that this is my

trusty and well-beloved servant, Miles Hendon, who interposed his

good sword and saved his prince from bodily harm and possible

death--and for this he is a knight, by the King's voice.  Also

learn, that for a higher service, in that he saved his sovereign

stripes and shame, taking these upon himself, he is a peer of

England, Earl of Kent, and shall have gold and lands meet for the

dignity.  More--the privilege which he hath just exercised is his

by royal grant; for we have ordained that the chiefs of his line

shall have and hold the right to sit in the presence of the

Majesty of England henceforth, age after age, so long as the crown

shall endure.  Molest him not."



Two persons, who, through delay, had only arrived from the country

during this morning, and had now been in this room only five

minutes, stood listening to these words and looking at the King,

then at the scarecrow, then at the King again, in a sort of torpid

bewilderment.  These were Sir Hugh and the Lady Edith.  But the

new Earl did not see them.  He was still staring at the monarch,

in a dazed way, and muttering--



"Oh, body o' me!  THIS my pauper!  This my lunatic!  This is he

whom _I_ would show what grandeur was, in my house of seventy

rooms and seven-and-twenty servants!  This is he who had never

known aught but rags for raiment, kicks for comfort, and offal for

diet!  This is he whom _I_ adopted and would make respectable!

Would God I had a bag to hide my head in!"



Then his manners suddenly came back to him, and he dropped upon

his knees, with his hands between the King's, and swore allegiance

and did homage for his lands and titles.  Then he rose and stood

respectfully aside, a mark still for all eyes--and much envy, too.



Now the King discovered Sir Hugh, and spoke out with wrathful

voice and kindling eye--



"Strip this robber of his false show and stolen estates, and put

him under lock and key till I have need of him."



The late Sir Hugh was led away.



There was a stir at the other end of the room, now; the assemblage

fell apart, and Tom Canty, quaintly but richly clothed, marched

down, between these living walls, preceded by an usher.  He knelt

before the King, who said--



"I have learned the story of these past few weeks, and am well

pleased with thee.  Thou hast governed the realm with right royal

gentleness and mercy.  Thou hast found thy mother and thy sisters

again?  Good; they shall be cared for--and thy father shall hang,

if thou desire it and the law consent.  Know, all ye that hear my

voice, that from this day, they that abide in the shelter of

Christ's Hospital and share the King's bounty shall have their

minds and hearts fed, as well as their baser parts; and this boy

shall dwell there, and hold the chief place in its honourable body

of governors, during life.  And for that he hath been a king, it

is meet that other than common observance shall be his due;

wherefore note this his dress of state, for by it he shall be

known, and none shall copy it; and wheresoever he shall come, it

shall remind the people that he hath been royal, in his time, and

none shall deny him his due of reverence or fail to give him

salutation.  He hath the throne's protection, he hath the crown's

support, he shall be known and called by the honourable title of

the King's Ward."



The proud and happy Tom Canty rose and kissed the King's hand, and

was conducted from the presence.  He did not waste any time, but

flew to his mother, to tell her and Nan and Bet all about it and

get them to help him enjoy the great news. {1}







Conclusion. Justice and retribution.



When the mysteries were all cleared up, it came out, by confession

of Hugh Hendon, that his wife had repudiated Miles by his command,

that day at Hendon Hall--a command assisted and supported by the

perfectly trustworthy promise that if she did not deny that he was

Miles Hendon, and stand firmly to it, he would have her life;

whereupon she said, "Take it!"--she did not value it--and she

would not repudiate Miles; then the husband said he would spare

her life but have Miles assassinated!  This was a different

matter; so she gave her word and kept it.



Hugh was not prosecuted for his threats or for stealing his

brother's estates and title, because the wife and brother would

not testify against him--and the former would not have been

allowed to do it, even if she had wanted to.  Hugh deserted his

wife and went over to the continent, where he presently died; and

by-and-by the Earl of Kent married his relict.  There were grand

times and rejoicings at Hendon village when the couple paid their

first visit to the Hall.



Tom Canty's father was never heard of again.



The King sought out the farmer who had been branded and sold as a

slave, and reclaimed him from his evil life with the Ruffler's

gang, and put him in the way of a comfortable livelihood.



He also took that old lawyer out of prison and remitted his fine.

He provided good homes for the daughters of the two Baptist women

whom he saw burned at the stake, and roundly punished the official

who laid the undeserved stripes upon Miles Hendon's back.



He saved from the gallows the boy who had captured the stray

falcon, and also the woman who had stolen a remnant of cloth from

a weaver; but he was too late to save the man who had been

convicted of killing a deer in the royal forest.



He showed favour to the justice who had pitied him when he was

supposed to have stolen a pig, and he had the gratification of

seeing him grow in the public esteem and become a great and

honoured man.



As long as the King lived he was fond of telling the story of his

adventures, all through, from the hour that the sentinel cuffed

him away from the palace gate till the final midnight when he

deftly mixed himself into a gang of hurrying workmen and so

slipped into the Abbey and climbed up and hid himself in the

Confessor's tomb, and then slept so long, next day, that he came

within one of missing the Coronation altogether.  He said that the

frequent rehearsing of the precious lesson kept him strong in his

purpose to make its teachings yield benefits to his people; and

so, whilst his life was spared he should continue to tell the

story, and thus keep its sorrowful spectacles fresh in his memory

and the springs of pity replenished in his heart.



Miles Hendon and Tom Canty were favourites of the King, all

through his brief reign, and his sincere mourners when he died.

The good Earl of Kent had too much sense to abuse his peculiar

privilege; but he exercised it twice after the instance we have

seen of it before he was called from this world--once at the

accession of Queen Mary, and once at the accession of Queen

Elizabeth.  A descendant of his exercised it at the accession of

James I.  Before this one's son chose to use the privilege, near a

quarter of a century had elapsed, and the 'privilege of the Kents'

had faded out of most people's memories; so, when the Kent of that

day appeared before Charles I. and his court and sat down in the

sovereign's presence to assert and perpetuate the right of his

house, there was a fine stir indeed!  But the matter was soon

explained, and the right confirmed.  The last Earl of the line

fell in the wars of the Commonwealth fighting for the King, and

the odd privilege ended with him.



Tom Canty lived to be a very old man, a handsome, white-haired old

fellow, of grave and benignant aspect.  As long as he lasted he

was honoured; and he was also reverenced, for his striking and

peculiar costume kept the people reminded that 'in his time he had

been royal;' so, wherever he appeared the crowd fell apart, making

way for him, and whispering, one to another, "Doff thy hat, it is

the King's Ward!"--and so they saluted, and got his kindly smile

in return--and they valued it, too, for his was an honourable

history.



Yes, King Edward VI. lived only a few years, poor boy, but he

lived them worthily.  More than once, when some great dignitary,

some gilded vassal of the crown, made argument against his

leniency, and urged that some law which he was bent upon amending

was gentle enough for its purpose, and wrought no suffering or

oppression which any one need mightily mind, the young King turned

the mournful eloquence of his great compassionate eyes upon him

and answered--



"What dost THOU know of suffering and oppression?  I and my people

know, but not thou."



The reign of Edward VI. was a singularly merciful one for those

harsh times.  Now that we are taking leave of him, let us try to

keep this in our minds, to his credit.







FOOTNOTES AND TWAIN'S NOTES







{1}  For Mark Twain's note see below under the relevant chapter

heading.



{2}  He refers to the order of baronets, or baronettes; the

barones minores, as distinct from the parliamentary barons--not,

it need hardly be said, to the baronets of later creation.



{3}  The lords of Kingsale, descendants of De Courcy, still enjoy

this curious privilege.



{4}  Hume.



{5}  Ib.



{6}  Leigh Hunt's 'The Town,' p.408, quotation from an early

tourist.



{7}  Canting terms for various kinds of thieves, beggars and

vagabonds, and their female companions.



{8}  From 'The English Rogue.'  London, 1665.



{9}  Hume's England.



{10}  See Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull's Blue Laws, True and False, p.

11.



NOTE 1, Chapter IV. Christ's Hospital Costume.



It is most reasonable to regard the dress as copied from the

costume of the citizens of London of that period, when long blue

coats were the common habit of apprentices and serving-men, and

yellow stockings were generally worn; the coat fits closely to the

body, but has loose sleeves, and beneath is worn a sleeveless

yellow under-coat; around the waist is a red leathern girdle; a

clerical band around the neck, and a small flat black cap, about

the size of a saucer, completes the costume.--Timbs' Curiosities

of London.



NOTE 2, Chapter IV.



It appears that Christ's Hospital was not originally founded as a

SCHOOL; its object was to rescue children from the streets, to

shelter, feed, clothe them.

--Timbs' Curiosities of London.



NOTE 3, Chapter V. The Duke of Norfolk's Condemnation commanded.



The King was now approaching fast towards his end; and fearing

lest Norfolk should escape him, he sent a message to the Commons,

by which he desired them to hasten the Bill, on pretence that

Norfolk enjoyed the dignity of Earl Marshal, and it was necessary

to appoint another, who might officiate at the ensuing ceremony of

installing his son Prince of Wales.--Hume's History of England,

vol. iii. p. 307.



NOTE 4, Chapter VII.



It was not till the end of this reign (Henry VIII.) that any

salads, carrots, turnips, or other edible roots were produced in

England.  The little of these vegetables that was used was

formerly imported from Holland and Flanders.  Queen Catherine,

when she wanted a salad, was obliged to despatch a messenger

thither on purpose.--Hume's History of England, vol. iii. p. 314.



NOTE 5, Chapter VIII. Attainder of Norfolk.



The House of Peers, without examining the prisoner, without trial

or evidence, passed a Bill of Attainder against him and sent it

down to the Commons . . . The obsequious Commons obeyed his (the

King's) directions; and the King, having affixed the Royal assent

to the Bill by commissioners, issued orders for the execution of

Norfolk on the morning of January 29 (the next day).--Hume's

History of England, vol iii. p 306.



NOTE 6, Chapter X. The Loving-cup.



The loving-cup, and the peculiar ceremonies observed in drinking

from it, are older than English history.  It is thought that both

are Danish importations.  As far back as knowledge goes, the

loving-cup has always been drunk at English banquets.  Tradition

explains the ceremonies in this way.  In the rude ancient times it

was deemed a wise precaution to have both hands of both drinkers

employed, lest while the pledger pledged his love and fidelity to

the pledgee, the pledgee take that opportunity to slip a dirk into

him!



NOTE 7, Chapter XI. The Duke of Norfolk's narrow Escape.



Had Henry VIII. survived a few hours longer, his order for the

duke's execution would have been carried into effect. 'But news

being carried to the Tower that the King himself had expired that

night, the lieutenant deferred obeying the warrant; and it was not

thought advisable by the Council to begin a new reign by the death

of the greatest nobleman in the kingdom, who had been condemned by

a sentence so unjust and tyrannical.'--Hume's History of England,

vol. iii, p. 307.



NOTE 8, Chapter XIV. The Whipping-boy.



James I. and Charles II. had whipping-boys, when they were little

fellows, to take their punishment for them when they fell short in

their lessons; so I have ventured to furnish my small prince with

one, for my own purposes.



NOTES to Chapter XV.



Character of Hertford.



The young King discovered an extreme attachment to his uncle, who

was, in the main, a man of moderation and probity.--Hume's History

of England, vol. iii.p324.



But if he (the Protector) gave offence by assuming too much state,

he deserves great praise on account of the laws passed this

session, by which the rigour of former statutes was much

mitigated, and some security given to the freedom of the

constitution.  All laws were repealed which extended the crime of

treason beyond the statute of the twenty-fifth of Edward III.; all

laws enacted during the late reign extending the crime of felony;

all the former laws against Lollardy or heresy, together with the

statute of the Six Articles.  None were to be accused for words,

but within a month after they were spoken.  By these repeals

several of the most rigorous laws that ever had passed in England

were annulled; and some dawn, both of civil and religious liberty,

began to appear to the people.  A repeal also passed of that law,

the destruction of all laws, by which the King's proclamation was

made of equal force with a statute.--Ibid. vol. iii. p. 339.



Boiling to Death.



In the reign of Henry VIII. poisoners were, by Act of Parliament,

condemned to be BOILED TO DEATH.  This Act was repealed in the

following reign.



In Germany, even in the seventeenth century, this horrible

punishment was inflicted on coiners and counterfeiters.  Taylor,

the Water Poet, describes an execution he witnessed in Hamburg in

1616.  The judgment pronounced against a coiner of false money was

that he should 'BE BOILED TO DEATH IN OIL; not thrown into the

vessel at once, but with a pulley or rope to be hanged under the

armpits, and then let down into the oil BY DEGREES; first the

feet, and next the legs, and so to boil his flesh from his bones

alive.'--Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull's Blue Laws, True and False, p.

13.



The Famous Stocking Case.



A woman and her daughter, NINE YEARS OLD, were hanged in

Huntingdon for selling their souls to the devil, and raising a

storm by pulling off their stockings!--Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull's

Blue Laws, True and False, p. 20.



NOTE 10, Chapter XVII. Enslaving.



So young a King and so ignorant a peasant were likely to make

mistakes; and this is an instance in point.  This peasant was

suffering from this law BY ANTICIPATION; the King was venting his

indignation against a law which was not yet in existence; for this

hideous statute was to have birth in this little King's OWN REIGN.

However, we know, from the humanity of his character, that it

could never have been suggested by him.



NOTES to Chapter XXIII. Death for Trifling Larcenies.



When Connecticut and New Haven were framing their first codes,

larceny above the value of twelve pence was a capital crime in

England--as it had been since the time of Henry I.--Dr. J. Hammond

Trumbull's Blue Laws, True and False, p. 17.



The curious old book called The English Rogue makes the limit

thirteen pence ha'penny:  death being the portion of any who steal

a thing 'above the value of thirteen pence ha'penny.'



NOTES to Chapter XXVII.



From many descriptions of larceny the law expressly took away the

benefit of clergy:  to steal a horse, or a HAWK, or woollen cloth

from the weaver, was a hanging matter.  So it was to kill a deer

from the King's forest, or to export sheep from the kingdom.--Dr.

J. Hammond Trumbull's Blue Laws, True and False, p.13.



William Prynne, a learned barrister, was sentenced (long after

Edward VI.'s time) to lose both his ears in the pillory, to

degradation from the bar, a fine of 3,000 pounds, and imprisonment

for life.  Three years afterwards he gave new offence to Laud by

publishing a pamphlet against the hierarchy.  He was again

prosecuted, and was sentenced to lose WHAT REMAINED OF HIS EARS,

to pay a fine of 5,000 pounds, to be BRANDED ON BOTH HIS CHEEKS

with the letters S. L. (for Seditious Libeller), and to remain in

prison for life.  The severity of this sentence was equalled by

the savage rigour of its execution.--Ibid. p. 12.



NOTES to Chapter XXXIII.



Christ's Hospital, or Bluecoat School, 'the noblest institution in

the world.'



The ground on which the Priory of the Grey Friars stood was

conferred by Henry VIII. on the Corporation of London (who caused

the institution there of a home for poor boys and girls).

Subsequently, Edward VI. caused the old Priory to be properly

repaired, and founded within it that noble establishment called

the Bluecoat School, or Christ's Hospital, for the EDUCATION and

maintenance of orphans and the children of indigent persons . . .

Edward would not let him (Bishop Ridley) depart till the letter

was written (to the Lord Mayor), and then charged him to deliver

it himself, and signify his special request and commandment that

no time might be lost in proposing what was convenient, and

apprising him of the proceedings.  The work was zealously

undertaken, Ridley himself engaging in it; and the result was the

founding of Christ's Hospital for the education of poor children.

(The King endowed several other charities at the same time.)

"Lord God," said he, "I yield Thee most hearty thanks that Thou

hast given me life thus long to finish this work to the glory of

Thy name!"  That innocent and most exemplary life was drawing

rapidly to its close, and in a few days he rendered up his spirit

to his Creator, praying God to defend the realm from Papistry.--J.

Heneage Jesse's London:  its Celebrated Characters and Places.



In the Great Hall hangs a large picture of King Edward VI. seated

on his throne, in a scarlet and ermined robe, holding the sceptre

in his left hand, and presenting with the other the Charter to the

kneeling Lord Mayor.  By his side stands the Chancellor, holding

the seals, and next to him are other officers of state.  Bishop

Ridley kneels before him with uplifted hands, as if supplicating a

blessing on the event; whilst the Aldermen, etc., with the Lord

Mayor, kneel on both sides, occupying the middle ground of the

picture; and lastly, in front, are a double row of boys on one

side and girls on the other, from the master and matron down to

the boy and girl who have stepped forward from their respective

rows, and kneel with raised hands before the King.--Timbs'

Curiosities of London, p. 98.



Christ's Hospital, by ancient custom, possesses the privilege of

addressing the Sovereign on the occasion of his or her coming into

the City to partake of the hospitality of the Corporation of

London.--Ibid.



The Dining Hall, with its lobby and organ-gallery, occupies the

entire storey, which is 187 feet long, 51 feet wide, and 47 feet

high; it is lit by nine large windows, filled with stained glass

on the south side; and is, next to Westminster Hall, the noblest

room in the metropolis.  Here the boys, now about 800 in number,

dine; and here are held the 'Suppings in Public,' to which

visitors are admitted by tickets issued by the Treasurer and by

the Governors of Christ's Hospital.  The tables are laid with

cheese in wooden bowls, beer in wooden piggins, poured from

leathern jacks, and bread brought in large baskets.  The official

company enter; the Lord Mayor, or President, takes his seat in a

state chair made of oak from St. Catherine's Church, by the Tower;

a hymn is sung, accompanied by the organ; a 'Grecian,' or head

boy, reads the prayers from the pulpit, silence being enforced by

three drops of a wooden hammer.  After prayer the supper

commences, and the visitors walk between the tables.  At its close

the 'trade-boys' take up the baskets, bowls, jacks, piggins, and

candlesticks, and pass in procession, the bowing to the Governors

being curiously formal.  This spectacle was witnessed by Queen

Victoria and Prince Albert in 1845.



Among the more eminent Bluecoat boys are Joshua Barnes, editor of

Anacreon and Euripides; Jeremiah Markland, the eminent critic,

particularly in Greek Literature; Camden, the antiquary; Bishop

Stillingfleet; Samuel Richardson, the novelist; Thomas Mitchell,

the translator of Aristophanes; Thomas Barnes, many years editor

of the London Times; Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and Leigh Hunt.



No boy is admitted before he is seven years old, or after he is

nine; and no boy can remain in the school after he is fifteen,

King's boys and 'Grecians' alone excepted.  There are about 500

Governors, at the head of whom are the Sovereign and the Prince of

Wales.  The qualification for a Governor is payment of 500

pounds.--Ibid.





GENERAL NOTE.





One hears much about the 'hideous Blue Laws of Connecticut,' and

is accustomed to shudder piously when they are mentioned.  There

are people in America--and even in England!--who imagine that they

were a very monument of malignity, pitilessness, and inhumanity;

whereas in reality they were about the first SWEEPING DEPARTURE

FROM JUDICIAL ATROCITY which the 'civilised' world had seen.  This

humane and kindly Blue Law Code, of two hundred and forty years

ago, stands all by itself, with ages of bloody law on the further

side of it, and a century and three-quarters of bloody English law

on THIS side of it.



There has never been a time--under the Blue Laws or any other--

when above FOURTEEN crimes were punishable by death in

Connecticut.  But in England, within the memory of men who are

still hale in body and mind, TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY-THREE crimes

were punishable by death! {10}  These facts are worth knowing--and

worth thinking about, too.











End of Project Gutenberg Etext The Prince and the Pauper, by Mark Twain













                         LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI



                              BY MARK TWAIN







                        THE 'BODY OF THE NATION'



BUT the basin of the Mississippi is the BODY OF THE NATION.

All the other parts are but members, important in themselves,

yet more important in their relations to this.  Exclusive of

the Lake basin and of 300,000 square miles in Texas and New Mexico,

which in many aspects form a part of it, this basin contains

about 1,250,000 square miles.  In extent it is the second great

valley of the world, being exceeded only by that of the Amazon.

The valley of the frozen Obi approaches it in extent;

that of La Plata comes next in space, and probably in

habitable capacity, having about eight-ninths of its area;

then comes that of the Yenisei, with about seven-ninths;

the Lena, Amoor, Hoang-ho, Yang-tse-kiang, and Nile, five-ninths;

the Ganges, less than one-half; the Indus, less than one-third;

the Euphrates, one-fifth; the Rhine, one-fifteenth. It exceeds in

extent the whole of Europe, exclusive of Russia, Norway, and Sweden.

IT WOULD CONTAIN AUSTRIA FOUR TIMES, GERMANY OR SPAIN FIVE TIMES,

FRANCE SIX TIMES, THE BRITISH ISLANDS OR ITALY TEN TIMES.

Conceptions formed from the river-basins of Western Europe

are rudely shocked when we consider the extent of the valley

of the Mississippi; nor are those formed from the sterile basins

of the great rivers of Siberia, the lofty plateaus of Central Asia,

or the mighty sweep of the swampy Amazon more adequate.

Latitude, elevation, and rainfall all combine to render every part

of the Mississippi Valley capable of supporting a dense population.

AS A DWELLING-PLACE FOR CIVILIZED MAN IT IS BY FAR THE FIRST UPON

OUR GLOBE.



EDITOR'S TABLE, HARPER'S MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY 1863







                                Chapter 1

                        The River and Its History



THE Mississippi is well worth reading about.  It is not a

commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable.

Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest

river in the world--four thousand three hundred miles.

It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world,

since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred

miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six

hundred and seventy-five. It discharges three times as much water

as the St. Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine,

and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames.

No other river has so vast a drainage-basin:  it draws its water

supply from twenty-eight States and Territories; from Delaware,

on the Atlantic seaboard, and from all the country between that and Idaho

on the Pacific slope--a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude.

The Mississippi receives and carries to the Gulf water from

fifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable by steamboats,

and from some hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels.

The area of its drainage-basin is as great as the combined areas

of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany,

Austria, Italy, and Turkey; and almost all this wide region is fertile;

the Mississippi valley, proper, is exceptionally so.



It is a remarkable river in this:  that instead of widening toward its mouth,

it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper.  From the junction of the Ohio

to a point half way down to the sea, the width averages a mile in high water:

thence to the sea the width steadily diminishes, until, at the 'Passes,' above

the mouth, it is but little over half a mile.  At the junction of the Ohio

the Mississippi's depth is eighty-seven feet; the depth increases gradually,

reaching one hundred and twenty-nine just above the mouth.



The difference in rise and fall is also remarkable--not in the upper,

but in the lower river.  The rise is tolerably uniform down to Natchez

(three hundred and sixty miles above the mouth)--about fifty feet.

But at Bayou La Fourche the river rises only twenty-four feet;

at New Orleans only fifteen, and just above the mouth only two

and one half.



An article in the New Orleans 'Times-Democrat,' based upon reports

of able engineers, states that the river annually empties four hundred

and six million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico--which brings to mind

Captain Marryat's rude name for the Mississippi--'the Great Sewer.'

This mud, solidified, would make a mass a mile square and two hundred

and forty-one feet high.



The mud deposit gradually extends the land--but only gradually;

it has extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two hundred

years which have elapsed since the river took its place in history.

The belief of the scientific people is, that the mouth used to be

at Baton Rouge, where the hills cease, and that the two hundred

miles of land between there and the Gulf was built by the river.

This gives us the age of that piece of country, without any

trouble at all--one hundred and twenty thousand years.

Yet it is much the youthfullest batch of country that lies

around there anywhere.



The Mississippi is remarkable in still another way--

its disposition to make prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow

necks of land, and thus straightening and shortening itself.

More than once it has shortened itself thirty miles at

a single jump!  These cut-offs have had curious effects:

they have thrown several river towns out into the rural districts,

and built up sand bars and forests in front of them.

The town of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg:

a recent cutoff has radically changed the position, and Delta is now TWO

MILES ABOVE Vicksburg.



Both of these river towns have been retired to the country by that

cut-off. A cut-off plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions:

for instance, a man is living in the State of Mississippi to-day,

a cut-off occurs to-night, and to-morrow the man finds himself

and his land over on the other side of the river, within the

boundaries and subject to the laws of the State of Louisiana!

Such a thing, happening in the upper river in the old times,

could have transferred a slave from Missouri to Illinois and made

a free man of him.



The Mississippi does not alter its locality by cut-offs alone:

it is always changing its habitat BODILY--is always moving bodily SIDEWISE.

At Hard Times, La., the river is two miles west of the region it

used to occupy.  As a result, the original SITE of that settlement

is not now in Louisiana at all, but on the other side of the river,

in the State of Mississippi.  NEARLY THE WHOLE OF THAT ONE THOUSAND

THREE HUNDRED MILES OF OLD MISSISSIPPI RIVER WHICH LA SALLE FLOATED DOWN

IN HIS CANOES, TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO, IS GOOD SOLID DRY GROUND NOW.

The river lies to the right of it, in places, and to the left of it

in other places.



Although the Mississippi's mud builds land but slowly, down at

the mouth, where the Gulfs billows interfere with its work,

it builds fast enough in better protected regions higher up:

for instance, Prophet's Island contained one thousand five

hundred acres of land thirty years ago; since then the river has

added seven hundred acres to it.



But enough of these examples of the mighty stream's eccentricities

for the present--I will give a few more of them further along

in the book.



Let us drop the Mississippi's physical history, and say a word

about its historical history--so to speak.  We can glance briefly

at its slumbrous first epoch in a couple of short chapters;

at its second and wider-awake epoch in a couple more; at its

flushest and widest-awake epoch in a good many succeeding chapters;

and then talk about its comparatively tranquil present epoch

in what shall be left of the book.



The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use,

the word 'new' in connection with our country, that we early get and

permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it.

We do of course know that there are several comparatively old dates in

American history, but the mere figures convey to our minds no just idea,

no distinct realization, of the stretch of time which they represent.

To say that De Soto, the first white man who ever saw the Mississippi River,

saw it in 1542, is a remark which states a fact without interpreting it:

it is something like giving the dimensions of a sunset by astronomical

measurements, and cataloguing the colors by their scientific names;--as a

result, you get the bald fact of the sunset, but you don't see the sunset.

It would have been better to paint a picture of it.



The date 1542, standing by itself, means little or nothing to us;

but when one groups a few neighboring historical dates and facts

around it, he adds perspective and color, and then realizes that this

is one of the American dates which is quite respectable for age.



For instance, when the Mississippi was first seen by a white man, less than

a quarter of a century had elapsed since Francis I.'s defeat at Pavia;

the death of Raphael; the death of Bayard, SANS PEUR ET SANS REPROCHE;

the driving out of the Knights-Hospitallers from Rhodes by the Turks;

and the placarding of the Ninety-Five Propositions,--the act which

began the Reformation.  When De Soto took his glimpse of the river,

Ignatius Loyola was an obscure name; the order of the Jesuits was not

yet a year old; Michael Angelo's paint was not yet dry on the Last

Judgment in the Sistine Chapel; Mary Queen of Scots was not yet born,

but would be before the year closed.  Catherine de Medici was a child;

Elizabeth of England was not yet in her teens; Calvin, Benvenuto Cellini,

and the Emperor Charles V. were at the top of their fame,

and each was manufacturing history after his own peculiar fashion;

Margaret of Navarre was writing the 'Heptameron' and some religious books,--

the first survives, the others are forgotten, wit and indelicacy

being sometimes better literature preservers than holiness;

lax court morals and the absurd chivalry business were in full feather,

and the joust and the tournament were the frequent pastime of titled fine

gentlemen who could fight better than they could spell, while religion

was the passion of their ladies, and classifying their offspring

into children of full rank and children by brevet their pastime.

In fact, all around, religion was in a peculiarly blooming condition:

the Council of Trent was being called; the Spanish Inquisition was roasting,

and racking, and burning, with a free hand; elsewhere on the continent

the nations were being persuaded to holy living by the sword and fire;

in England, Henry VIII. had suppressed the monasteries, burnt Fisher

and another bishop or two, and was getting his English reformation

and his harem effectively started.  When De Soto stood on the banks

of the Mississippi, it was still two years before Luther's death;

eleven years before the burning of Servetus; thirty years before

the St. Bartholomew slaughter; Rabelais was not yet published;

'Don Quixote' was not yet written; Shakespeare was not yet born;

a hundred long years must still elapse before Englishmen would hear the name

of Oliver Cromwell.



Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable

fact which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness

of our country, and gives her a most respectable outside-aspect

of rustiness and antiquity.



De Soto merely glimpsed the river, then died and was buried

in it by his priests and soldiers.  One would expect the priests

and the soldiers to multiply the river's dimensions by ten--

the Spanish custom of the day--and thus move other adventurers

to go at once and explore it.  On the contrary, their narratives

when they reached home, did not excite that amount of curiosity.

The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites during a term

of years which seems incredible in our energetic days.

One may 'sense' the interval to his mind, after a fashion,

by dividing it up in this way:  After De Soto glimpsed the river,

a fraction short of a quarter of a century elapsed, and then

Shakespeare was born; lived a trifle more than half a century,

then died; and when he had been in his grave considerably more

than half a century, the SECOND white man saw the Mississippi.

In our day we don't allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse

between glimpses of a marvel.  If somebody should discover

a creek in the county next to the one that the North Pole is in,

Europe and America would start fifteen costly expeditions thither:

one to explore the creek, and the other fourteen to hunt

for each other.



For more than a hundred and fifty years there had been white

settlements on our Atlantic coasts.  These people were in intimate

communication with the Indians:  in the south the Spaniards

were robbing, slaughtering, enslaving and converting them;

higher up, the English were trading beads and blankets to them

for a consideration, and throwing in civilization and whiskey,

'for lagniappe;' and in Canada the French were schooling them

in a rudimentary way, missionarying among them, and drawing whole

populations of them at a time to Quebec, and later to Montreal,

to buy furs of them.  Necessarily, then, these various clusters

of whites must have heard of the great river of the far west;

and indeed, they did hear of it vaguely,--so vaguely and indefinitely,

that its course, proportions, and locality were hardly even guessable.

The mere mysteriousness of the matter ought to have fired

curiosity and compelled exploration; but this did not occur.

Apparently nobody happened to want such a river, nobody needed it,

nobody was curious about it; so, for a century and a half

the Mississippi remained out of the market and undisturbed.

When De Soto found it, he was not hunting for a river, and had

no present occasion for one; consequently he did not value it

or even take any particular notice of it.



But at last La Salle the Frenchman conceived the idea of

seeking out that river and exploring it.  It always happens

that when a man seizes upon a neglected and important idea,

people inflamed with the same notion crop up all around.

It happened so in this instance.



Naturally the question suggests itself, Why did these people want the river

now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding generations?

Apparently it was because at this late day they thought they

had discovered a way to make it useful; for it had come to be

believed that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California,

and therefore afforded a short cut from Canada to China.

Previously the supposition had been that it emptied into the Atlantic,

or Sea of Virginia.











                                Chapter 2

                       The River and Its Explorers



LA SALLE himself sued for certain high privileges, and they

were graciously accorded him by Louis XIV of inflated memory.

Chief among them was the privilege to explore, far and wide,

and build forts, and stake out continents, and hand the same over

to the king, and pay the expenses himself; receiving, in return,

some little advantages of one sort or another; among them

the monopoly of buffalo hides.  He spent several years and

about all of his money, in making perilous and painful trips

between Montreal and a fort which he had built on the Illinois,

before he at last succeeded in getting his expedition in such

a shape that he could strike for the Mississippi.



And meantime other parties had had better fortune.

In 1673 Joliet the merchant, and Marquette the priest,

crossed the country and reached the banks of the Mississippi.

They went by way of the Great Lakes; and from Green Bay,

in canoes, by way of Fox River and the Wisconsin.  Marquette had

solemnly contracted, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception,

that if the Virgin would permit him to discover the great river,

he would name it Conception, in her honor.  He kept his word.

In that day, all explorers traveled with an outfit of priests.

De Soto had twenty-four with him.  La Salle had several, also.

The expeditions were often out of meat, and scant of clothes,

but they always had the furniture and other requisites for the mass;

they were always prepared, as one of the quaint chroniclers of the time

phrased it, to 'explain hell to the savages.'



On the 17th of June, 1673, the canoes of Joliet and Marquette and their five

subordinates reached the junction of the Wisconsin with the Mississippi.

Mr. Parkman says:  'Before them a wide and rapid current coursed athwart

their way, by the foot of lofty heights wrapped thick in forests.'

He continues:  'Turning southward, they paddled down the stream, through a

solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man.'



A big cat-fish collided with Marquette's canoe, and startled him;

and reasonably enough, for he had been warned by the Indians that

he was on a foolhardy journey, and even a fatal one, for the river

contained a demon 'whose roar could be heard at a great distance,

and who would engulf them in the abyss where he dwelt.'

I have seen a Mississippi cat-fish that was more than six feet long,

and weighed two hundred and fifty pounds; and if Marquette's fish

was the fellow to that one, he had a fair right to think the river's

roaring demon was come.



'At length the buffalo began to appear, grazing in herds on the great prairies

which then bordered the river; and Marquette describes the fierce and stupid

look of the old bulls as they stared at the intruders through the tangled

mane which nearly blinded them.'



The voyagers moved cautiously:  'Landed at night and made a fire

to cook their evening meal; then extinguished it, embarked again,

paddled some way farther, and anchored in the stream, keeping a man

on the watch till morning.'



They did this day after day and night after night;

and at the end of two weeks they had not seen a human being.

The river was an awful solitude, then.  And it is now, over most

of its stretch.



But at the close of the fortnight they one day came upon

the footprints of men in the mud of the western bank--a Robinson

Crusoe experience which carries an electric shiver with it yet,

when one stumbles on it in print.  They had been warned that the

river Indians were as ferocious and pitiless as the river demon,

and destroyed all comers without waiting for provocation;

but no matter, Joliet and Marquette struck into the country

to hunt up the proprietors of the tracks.  They found them,

by and by, and were hospitably received and well treated--

if to be received by an Indian chief who has taken off his last rag

in order to appear at his level best is to be received hospitably;

and if to be treated abundantly to fish, porridge, and other game,

including dog, and have these things forked into one's mouth

by the ungloved fingers of Indians is to be well treated.

In the morning the chief and six hundred of his tribesmen escorted

the Frenchmen to the river and bade them a friendly farewell.



On the rocks above the present city of Alton they found some

rude and fantastic Indian paintings, which they describe.

A short distance below 'a torrent of yellow mud rushed furiously

athwart the calm blue current of the Mississippi, boiling and surging

and sweeping in its course logs, branches, and uprooted trees.'

This was the mouth of the Missouri, 'that savage river,'

which 'descending from its mad career through a vast unknown

of barbarism, poured its turbid floods into the bosom of

its gentle sister.'



By and by they passed the mouth of the Ohio; they passed cane-brakes;

they fought mosquitoes; they floated along, day after day,

through the deep silence and loneliness of the river, drowsing in

the scant shade of makeshift awnings, and broiling with the heat;

they encountered and exchanged civilities with another party

of Indians; and at last they reached the mouth of the Arkansas

(about a month out from their starting-point), where a tribe

of war-whooping savages swarmed out to meet and murder them;

but they appealed to the Virgin for help; so in place of a fight

there was a feast, and plenty of pleasant palaver and fol-de-rol.



They had proved to their satisfaction, that the Mississippi did

not empty into the Gulf of California, or into the Atlantic.

They believed it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico.

They turned back, now, and carried their great news to Canada.



But belief is not proof.  It was reserved for La Salle to furnish the proof.

He was provokingly delayed, by one misfortune after another, but at last

got his expedition under way at the end of the year 1681.  In the dead

of winter he and Henri de Tonty, son of Lorenzo Tonty, who invented

the tontine, his lieutenant, started down the Illinois, with a following

of eighteen Indians brought from New England, and twenty-three Frenchmen.

They moved in procession down the surface of the frozen river, on foot,

and dragging their canoes after them on sledges.



At Peoria Lake they struck open water, and paddled thence

to the Mississippi and turned their prows southward.

They plowed through the fields of floating ice, past the mouth

of the Missouri; past the mouth of the Ohio, by-and-by;

'and, gliding by the wastes of bordering swamp, landed on

the 24th of February near the Third Chickasaw Bluffs,'

where they halted and built Fort Prudhomme.



'Again,' says Mr. Parkman, 'they embarked; and with every stage of their

adventurous progress, the mystery of this vast new world was more

and more unveiled.  More and more they entered the realms of spring.

The hazy sunlight, the warm and drowsy air, the tender foliage,

the opening flowers, betokened the reviving life of nature.'



Day by day they floated down the great bends, in the shadow

of the dense forests, and in time arrived at the mouth

of the Arkansas.  First, they were greeted by the natives

of this locality as Marquette had before been greeted by them--

with the booming of the war drum and the flourish of arms.

The Virgin composed the difficulty in Marquette's case;

the pipe of peace did the same office for La Salle.  The white man

and the red man struck hands and entertained each other during

three days.  Then, to the admiration of the savages, La Salle set

up a cross with the arms of France on it, and took possession

of the whole country for the king--the cool fashion of the time--

while the priest piously consecrated the robbery with a hymn.

The priest explained the mysteries of the faith 'by signs,'

for the saving of the savages; thus compensating them with

possible possessions in Heaven for the certain ones on earth

which they had just been robbed of.  And also, by signs,

La Salle drew from these simple children of the forest

acknowledgments of fealty to Louis the Putrid, over the water.

Nobody smiled at these colossal ironies.



These performances took place on the site of the future town of Napoleon,

Arkansas, and there the first confiscation-cross was raised on the banks

of the great river.  Marquette's and Joliet's voyage of discovery

ended at the same spot--the site of the future town of Napoleon.

When De Soto took his fleeting glimpse of the river, away back in the dim

early days, he took it from that same spot--the site of the future town

of Napoleon, Arkansas.  Therefore, three out of the four memorable

events connected with the discovery and exploration of the mighty river,

occurred, by accident, in one and the same place.  It is a most

curious distinction, when one comes to look at it and think about it.

France stole that vast country on that spot, the future Napoleon;

and by and by Napoleon himself was to give the country back again!--

make restitution, not to the owners, but to their white American heirs.



The voyagers journeyed on, touching here and there; 'passed the sites,

since become historic, of Vicksburg and Grand Gulf,'

and visited an imposing Indian monarch in the Teche country,

whose capital city was a substantial one of sun-baked bricks

mixed with straw--better houses than many that exist there now.

The chiefs house contained an audience room forty feet square;

and there he received Tonty in State, surrounded by sixty old

men clothed in white cloaks.  There was a temple in the town,

with a mud wall about it ornamented with skulls of enemies sacrificed

to the sun.



The voyagers visited the Natchez Indians, near the site of the present

city of that name, where they found a 'religious and political despotism,

a privileged class descended from the sun, a temple and a sacred fire.'

It must have been like getting home again; it was home with an advantage,

in fact, for it lacked Louis XIV.



A few more days swept swiftly by, and La Salle stood in the shadow

of his confiscating cross, at the meeting of the waters from Delaware,

and from Itaska, and from the mountain ranges close upon the Pacific, with the

waters of the Gulf of Mexico, his task finished, his prodigy achieved.

Mr. Parkman, in closing his fascinating narrative, thus sums up:



'On that day, the realm of France received on parchment

a stupendous accession.  The fertile plains of Texas;

the vast basin of the Mississippi, from its frozen northern

springs to the sultry borders of the Gulf; from the woody ridges

of the Alleghanies to the bare peaks of the Rocky Mountains--

a region of savannas and forests, sun-cracked deserts and

grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers, ranged by a

thousand warlike tribes, passed beneath the scepter of the Sultan

of Versailles; and all by virtue of a feeble human voice,

inaudible at half a mile.'









                                Chapter 3

                         Frescoes from the Past



APPARENTLY the river was ready for business, now.  But no,

the distribution of a population along its banks was as calm

and deliberate and time-devouring a process as the discovery

and exploration had been.



Seventy years elapsed, after the exploration, before the

river's borders had a white population worth considering;

and nearly fifty more before the river had a commerce.

Between La Salle's opening of the river and the time when it

may be said to have become the vehicle of anything like a regular

and active commerce, seven sovereigns had occupied the throne

of England, America had become an independent nation, Louis XIV.

and Louis XV. had rotted and died, the French monarchy had gone

down in the red tempest of the revolution, and Napoleon was a name

that was beginning to be talked about.  Truly, there were snails

in those days.



The river's earliest commerce was in great barges--keelboats, broadhorns.

They floated and sailed from the upper rivers to New Orleans,

changed cargoes there, and were tediously warped and poled back

by hand.  A voyage down and back sometimes occupied nine months.

In time this commerce increased until it gave employment to hordes

of rough and hardy men; rude, uneducated, brave, suffering terrific

hardships with sailor-like stoicism; heavy drinkers, coarse frolickers

in moral sties like the Natchez-under-the-hill of that day,

heavy fighters, reckless fellows, every one, elephantinely jolly,

foul-witted, profane; prodigal of their money, bankrupt at the end

of the trip, fond of barbaric finery, prodigious braggarts;

yet, in the main, honest, trustworthy, faithful to promises and duty,

and often picturesquely magnanimous.



By and by the steamboat intruded.  Then for fifteen or twenty years,

these men continued to run their keelboats down-stream, and the steamers

did all of the upstream business, the keelboatmen selling their boats

in New Orleans, and returning home as deck passengers in the steamers.



But after a while the steamboats so increased in number and

in speed that they were able to absorb the entire commerce;

and then keelboating died a permanent death.  The keelboatman

became a deck hand, or a mate, or a pilot on the steamer;

and when steamer-berths were not open to him, he took a berth

on a Pittsburgh coal-flat, or on a pine-raft constructed

in the forests up toward the sources of the Mississippi.



In the heyday of the steamboating prosperity, the river from end

to end was flaked with coal-fleets and timber rafts, all managed

by hand, and employing hosts of the rough characters whom I

have been trying to describe.  I remember the annual processions

of mighty rafts that used to glide by Hannibal when I was a boy,--

an acre or so of white, sweet-smelling boards in each raft,

a crew of two dozen men or more, three or four wigwams scattered

about the raft's vast level space for storm-quarters,--and I

remember the rude ways and the tremendous talk of their big crews,

the ex-keelboatmen and their admiringly patterning successors;

for we used to swim out a quarter or third of a mile and get on

these rafts and have a ride.



By way of illustrating keelboat talk and manners, and that

now-departed and hardly-remembered raft-life, I will throw in,

in this place, a chapter from a book which I have been working at,

by fits and starts, during the past five or six years,

and may possibly finish in the course of five or six more.

The book is a story which details some passages in the life

of an ignorant village boy, Huck Finn, son of the town

drunkard of my time out west, there.  He has run away from

his persecuting father, and from a persecuting good widow who

wishes to make a nice, truth-telling, respectable boy of him;

and with him a slave of the widow's has also escaped.

They have found a fragment of a lumber raft (it is high

water and dead summer time), and are floating down the river

by night, and hiding in the willows by day,--bound for Cairo,--

whence the negro will seek freedom in the heart of the free States.

But in a fog, they pass Cairo without knowing it.

By and by they begin to suspect the truth, and Huck Finn is

persuaded to end the dismal suspense by swimming down to a huge

raft which they have seen in the distance ahead of them,

creeping aboard under cover of the darkness, and gathering

the needed information by eavesdropping:--



But you know a young person can't wait very well when he is

impatient to find a thing out.  We talked it over, and by and by

Jim said it was such a black night, now, that it wouldn't be no

risk to swim down to the big raft and crawl aboard and listen--

they would talk about Cairo, because they would be calculating

to go ashore there for a spree, maybe, or anyway they would

send boats ashore to buy whiskey or fresh meat or something.

Jim had a wonderful level head, for a nigger:  he could most always

start a good plan when you wanted one.



I stood up and shook my rags off and jumped into the river,

and struck out for the raft's light.  By and by, when I got

down nearly to her, I eased up and went slow and cautious.

But everything was all right--nobody at the sweeps.

So I swum down along the raft till I was most abreast the camp

fire in the middle, then I crawled aboard and inched along and got

in amongst some bundles of shingles on the weather side of the fire.

There was thirteen men there--they was the watch on deck of course.

And a mighty rough-looking lot, too.  They had a jug, and tin cups,

and they kept the jug moving.  One man was singing--roaring, you may say;

and it wasn't a nice song--for a parlor anyway.  He roared through

his nose, and strung out the last word of every line very long.

When he was done they all fetched a kind of Injun war-whoop, and then

another was sung.  It begun:--



     'There was a woman in our towdn,

       In our towdn did dwed'l (dwell,)

     She loved her husband dear-i-lee,

       But another man twyste as wed'l.



     Singing too, riloo, riloo, riloo,

       Ri-too, riloo, rilay - - - e,

     She loved her husband dear-i-lee,

       But another man twyste as wed'l.



And so on--fourteen verses.  It was kind of poor, and when he was

going to start on the next verse one of them said it was the tune

the old cow died on; and another one said, 'Oh, give us a rest.'

And another one told him to take a walk.  They made fun of him

till he got mad and jumped up and begun to cuss the crowd,

and said he could lame any thief in the lot.



They was all about to make a break for him, but the biggest man

there jumped up and says--



'Set whar you are, gentlemen.  Leave him to me; he's my meat.'



Then he jumped up in the air three times and cracked his heels

together every time.  He flung off a buckskin coat that was all hung

with fringes, and says, 'You lay thar tell the chawin-up's done;'

and flung his hat down, which was all over ribbons, and says,

'You lay thar tell his sufferin's is over.'



Then he jumped up in the air and cracked his heels together again

and shouted out--



'Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted,

copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!--Look at me!

I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation!

Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to

the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother's side!

Look at me!  I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskey

for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes

and a dead body when I'm ailing!  I split the everlasting

rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak!

Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength!

Blood's my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear!

Cast your eye on me, gentlemen!--and lay low and hold your breath,

for I'm bout to turn myself loose!'



All the time he was getting this off, he was shaking his head

and looking fierce, and kind of swelling around in a little circle,

tucking up his wrist-bands, and now and then straightening up and

beating his breast with his fist, saying, 'Look at me, gentlemen!'

When he got through, he jumped up and cracked his heels together

three times, and let off a roaring 'Whoo-oop! I'm the bloodiest son

of a wildcat that lives!'



Then the man that had started the row tilted his old slouch

hat down over his right eye; then he bent stooping forward,

with his back sagged and his south end sticking out far,

and his fists a-shoving out and drawing in in front of him,

and so went around in a little circle about three times,

swelling himself up and breathing hard.  Then he straightened,

and jumped up and cracked his heels together three times,

before he lit again (that made them cheer), and he begun to

shout like this--



'Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the kingdom of sorrow's

a-coming! Hold me down to the earth, for I feel my powers

a-working! whoo-oop! I'm a child of sin, don't let me get a start!

Smoked glass, here, for all!  Don't attempt to look at me

with the naked eye, gentlemen!  When I'm playful I use

the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine,

and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales!  I scratch my head

with the lightning, and purr myself to sleep with the thunder!

When I'm cold, I bile the Gulf of Mexico and bathe in it;

when I'm hot I fan myself with an equinoctial storm;

when I'm thirsty I reach up and suck a cloud dry like a sponge;

when I range the earth hungry, famine follows in my tracks!

Whoo-oop! Bow your neck and spread!  I put my hand on the sun's

face and make it night in the earth; I bite a piece out of the moon

and hurry the seasons; I shake myself and crumble the mountains!

Contemplate me through leather--don't use the naked eye!

I'm the man with a petrified heart and biler-iron bowels!

The massacre of isolated communities is the pastime of my idle moments,

the destruction of nationalities the serious business of my life!

The boundless vastness of the great American desert is my

enclosed property, and I bury my dead on my own premises!'

He jumped up and cracked his heels together three times before he lit

(they cheered him again), and as he come down he shouted out:

'Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the pet child of

calamity's a-coming! '



Then the other one went to swelling around and blowing again--the first one--

the one they called Bob; next, the Child of Calamity chipped in again,

bigger than ever; then they both got at it at the same time, swelling round

and round each other and punching their fists most into each other's faces,

and whooping and jawing like Injuns; then Bob called the Child names,

and the Child called him names back again:  next, Bob called him a heap

rougher names and the Child come back at him with the very worst kind

of language; next, Bob knocked the Child's hat off, and the Child picked it

up and kicked Bob's ribbony hat about six foot; Bob went and got it and said

never mind, this warn't going to be the last of this thing, because he was

a man that never forgot and never forgive, and so the Child better look out,

for there was a time a-coming, just as sure as he was a living man,

that he would have to answer to him with the best blood in his body.

The Child said no man was willinger than he was for that time to come,

and he would give Bob fair warning, now, never to cross his path again,

for he could never rest till he had waded in his blood, for such was

his nature, though he was sparing him now on account of his family,

if he had one.



Both of them was edging away in different directions, growling and

shaking their heads and going on about what they was going to do;

but a little black-whiskered chap skipped up and says--



'Come back here, you couple of chicken-livered cowards,

and I'll thrash the two of ye!'



And he done it, too.  He snatched them, he jerked them this way and that,

he booted them around, he knocked them sprawling faster than they could

get up.  Why, it warn't two minutes till they begged like dogs--and how

the other lot did yell and laugh and clap their hands all the way through,

and shout 'Sail in, Corpse-Maker!' 'Hi! at him again, Child of Calamity!'

'Bully for you, little Davy!'  Well, it was a perfect pow-wow for a while.

Bob and the Child had red noses and black eyes when they got through.

Little Davy made them own up that they were sneaks and cowards and not fit

to eat with a dog or drink with a nigger; then Bob and the Child shook

hands with each other, very solemn, and said they had always respected

each other and was willing to let bygones be bygones.  So then they washed

their faces in the river; and just then there was a loud order to stand

by for a crossing, and some of them went forward to man the sweeps there,

and the rest went aft to handle the after-sweeps.



I laid still and waited for fifteen minutes, and had a smoke out of a pipe

that one of them left in reach; then the crossing was finished, and they

stumped back and had a drink around and went to talking and singing again.

Next they got out an old fiddle, and one played and another patted juba,

and the rest turned themselves loose on a regular old-fashioned keel-boat

break-down. They couldn't keep that up very long without getting winded,

so by and by they settled around the jug again.



They sung 'jolly, jolly raftman's the life for me,' with a

musing chorus, and then they got to talking about differences

betwixt hogs, and their different kind of habits; and next about

women and their different ways:  and next about the best ways

to put out houses that was afire; and next about what ought

to be done with the Injuns; and next about what a king had to do,

and how much he got; and next about how to make cats fight;

and next about what to do when a man has fits; and next about

differences betwixt clear-water rivers and muddy-water ones.

The man they called Ed said the muddy Mississippi water

was wholesomer to drink than the clear water of the Ohio;

he said if you let a pint of this yaller Mississippi water settle,

you would have about a half to three-quarters of an inch

of mud in the bottom, according to the stage of the river,

and then it warn't no better than Ohio water--what you wanted

to do was to keep it stirred up--and when the river was low,

keep mud on hand to put in and thicken the water up the way it

ought to be.



The Child of Calamity said that was so; he said there was nutritiousness

in the mud, and a man that drunk Mississippi water could grow corn in his

stomach if he wanted to.  He says--



'You look at the graveyards; that tells the tale.  Trees won't

grow worth chucks in a Cincinnati graveyard, but in a Sent

Louis graveyard they grow upwards of eight hundred foot high.

It's all on account of the water the people drunk before they laid up.

A Cincinnati corpse don't richen a soil any.'



And they talked about how Ohio water didn't like to mix with

Mississippi water.  Ed said if you take the Mississippi on a rise

when the Ohio is low, you'll find a wide band of clear water all the way

down the east side of the Mississippi for a hundred mile or more,

and the minute you get out a quarter of a mile from shore and pass

the line, it is all thick and yaller the rest of the way across.

Then they talked about how to keep tobacco from getting moldy,

and from that they went into ghosts and told about a lot that other

folks had seen; but Ed says--



'Why don't you tell something that you've seen yourselves?

Now let me have a say.  Five years ago I was on a raft as big

as this, and right along here it was a bright moonshiny night,

and I was on watch and boss of the stabboard oar forrard, and one

of my pards was a man named Dick Allbright, and he come along

to where I was sitting, forrard--gaping and stretching, he was--

and stooped down on the edge of the raft and washed his face

in the river, and come and set down by me and got out his pipe,

and had just got it filled, when he looks up and says--



' "Why looky-here," he says, "ain't that Buck Miller's place,

over yander in the bend."



' "Yes," says I, "it is--why."  He laid his pipe down and leant

his head on his hand, and says--



' "I thought we'd be furder down."  I says--



' "I thought it too, when I went off watch"--we was standing

six hours on and six off--"but the boys told me," I says,

"that the raft didn't seem to hardly move, for the last hour,"

says I, "though she's a slipping along all right, now," says I. He

give a kind of a groan, and says--



' "I've seed a raft act so before, along here," he says, " 'pears

to me the current has most quit above the head of this bend durin'

the last two years," he says.



'Well, he raised up two or three times, and looked away off

and around on the water.  That started me at it, too.  A body is

always doing what he sees somebody else doing, though there mayn't

be no sense in it.  Pretty soon I see a black something floating

on the water away off to stabboard and quartering behind us.

I see he was looking at it, too.  I says--



' "What's that?'  He says, sort of pettish,--



' "Tain't nothing but an old empty bar'l.



' "An empty bar'l!" says I, "why," says I, "a spy-glass is a fool

to your eyes.  How can you tell it's an empty bar'l?" He says--



' "I don't know; I reckon it ain't a bar'l, but I thought it

might be," says he.



' "Yes," I says, "so it might be, and it might be anything else, too; a body

can't tell nothing about it, such a distance as that," I says.



'We hadn't nothing else to do, so we kept on watching it.

By and by I says--



' "Why looky-here, Dick Allbright, that thing's a-gaining on us,

 I believe."



'He never said nothing.  The thing gained and gained,

and I judged it must be a dog that was about tired out.

Well, we swung down into the crossing, and the thing floated

across the bright streak of the moonshine, and, by George,

it was bar'l. Says I--



' "Dick Allbright, what made you think that thing was a bar'l,

when it was a half a mile off," says I. Says he--



' "I don't know."  Says I--



' "You tell me, Dick Allbright."  He says--



' "Well, I knowed it was a bar'l; I've seen it before; lots has seen it;

they says it's a haunted bar'l."



'I called the rest of the watch, and they come and stood there,

and I told them what Dick said.  It floated right along abreast,

now, and didn't gain any more.  It was about twenty foot off.

Some was for having it aboard, but the rest didn't want to.

Dick Allbright said rafts that had fooled with it had got bad luck

by it.  The captain of the watch said he didn't believe in it.

He said he reckoned the bar'l gained on us because it was in a little

better current than what we was.  He said it would leave by and by.



'So then we went to talking about other things, and we had a song,

and then a breakdown; and after that the captain of the watch called

for another song; but it was clouding up, now, and the bar'l stuck right

thar in the same place, and the song didn't seem to have much warm-up

to it, somehow, and so they didn't finish it, and there warn't any cheers,

but it sort of dropped flat, and nobody said anything for a minute.

Then everybody tried to talk at once, and one chap got off a joke,

but it warn't no use, they didn't laugh, and even the chap

that made the joke didn't laugh at it, which ain't usual.

We all just settled down glum, and watched the bar'l, and was oneasy

and oncomfortable.  Well, sir, it shut down black and still,

and then the wind begin to moan around, and next the lightning begin

to play and the thunder to grumble.  And pretty soon there was

a regular storm, and in the middle of it a man that was running aft

stumbled and fell and sprained his ankle so that he had to lay up.

This made the boys shake their heads.  And every time the lightning come,

there was that bar'l with the blue lights winking around it.

We was always on the look-out for it.  But by and by, towards dawn,

she was gone.  When the day come we couldn't see her anywhere, and we

warn't sorry, neither.



'But next night about half-past nine, when there was songs and high

jinks going on, here she comes again, and took her old roost on the

stabboard side.  There warn't no more high jinks.  Everybody got solemn;

nobody talked; you couldn't get anybody to do anything but set

around moody and look at the bar'l. It begun to cloud up again.

When the watch changed, the off watch stayed up, 'stead of turning in.

The storm ripped and roared around all night, and in the middle of it

another man tripped and sprained his ankle, and had to knock off.

The bar'l left towards day, and nobody see it go.



'Everybody was sober and down in the mouth all day.  I don't mean

the kind of sober that comes of leaving liquor alone--not that.

They was quiet, but they all drunk more than usual--not together--

but each man sidled off and took it private, by himself.



'After dark the off watch didn't turn in; nobody sung,

nobody talked; the boys didn't scatter around, neither; they sort

of huddled together, forrard; and for two hours they set there,

perfectly still, looking steady in the one direction, and heaving

a sigh once in a while.  And then, here comes the bar'l again.

She took up her old place.  She staid there all night;

nobody turned in.  The storm come on again, after midnight.

It got awful dark; the rain poured down; hail, too; the thunder

boomed and roared and bellowed; the wind blowed a hurricane;

and the lightning spread over everything in big sheets of glare,

and showed the whole raft as plain as day; and the river

lashed up white as milk as far as you could see for miles,

and there was that bar'l jiggering along, same as ever.

The captain ordered the watch to man the after sweeps for a crossing,

and nobody would go--no more sprained ankles for them, they said.

They wouldn't even walk aft.  Well then, just then the sky split

wide open, with a crash, and the lightning killed two men of the

after watch, and crippled two more.  Crippled them how, says you?

Why, sprained their ankles



'The bar'l left in the dark betwixt lightnings, towards dawn.

Well, not a body eat a bite at breakfast that morning.

After that the men loafed around, in twos and threes, and talked

low together.  But none of them herded with Dick Allbright.

They all give him the cold shake.  If he come around

where any of the men was, they split up and sidled away.

They wouldn't man the sweeps with him.  The captain had all

the skiffs hauled up on the raft, alongside of his wigwam,

and wouldn't let the dead men be took ashore to be planted;

he didn't believe a man that got ashore would come back;

and he was right.



'After night come, you could see pretty plain that there was going to be

trouble if that bar'l come again; there was such a muttering going on.

A good many wanted to kill Dick Allbright, because he'd seen the bar'l

on other trips, and that had an ugly look.  Some wanted to put him ashore.

Some said, let's all go ashore in a pile, if the bar'l comes again.



'This kind of whispers was still going on, the men being bunched

together forrard watching for the bar'l, when, lo and behold you,

here she comes again.  Down she comes, slow and steady,

and settles into her old tracks.  You could a heard a pin drop.

Then up comes the captain, and says:--



' "Boys, don't be a pack of children and fools; I don't

want this bar'l to be dogging us all the way to Orleans,

and YOU don't; well, then, how's the best way to stop it?

Burn it up,--that's the way.  I'm going to fetch it aboard," he says.

And before anybody could say a word, in he went.



'He swum to it, and as he come pushing it to the raft, the men spread

to one side.  But the old man got it aboard and busted in the head,

and there was a baby in it!  Yes, sir, a stark naked baby.

It was Dick Allbright's baby; he owned up and said so.



' "Yes," he says, a-leaning over it, "yes, it is my own

lamented darling, my poor lost Charles William Allbright deceased,"

says he,--for he could curl his tongue around the bulliest

words in the language when he was a mind to, and lay them

before you without a jint started, anywheres.  Yes, he said

he used to live up at the head of this bend, and one night

he choked his child, which was crying, not intending to

kill it,--which was prob'ly a lie,--and then he was scared,

and buried it in a bar'l, before his wife got home, and off

he went, and struck the northern trail and went to rafting;

and this was the third year that the bar'l had chased him.

He said the bad luck always begun light, and lasted till four men

was killed, and then the bar'l didn't come any more after that.

He said if the men would stand it one more night,--

and was a-going on like that,--but the men had got enough.

They started to get out a boat to take him ashore and lynch him,

but he grabbed the little child all of a sudden and jumped

overboard with it hugged up to his breast and shedding tears,

and we never see him again in this life, poor old suffering soul,

nor Charles William neither.'



'WHO was shedding tears?' says Bob; 'was it Allbright or the baby?'



'Why, Allbright, of course; didn't I tell you the baby was dead.

Been dead three years--how could it cry?'



'Well, never mind how it could cry--how could it KEEP all that time?'

says Davy.  'You answer me that.'



'I don't know how it done it,' says Ed.  'It done it though--

that's all I know about it.'



'Say--what did they do with the bar'l?' says the Child of Calamity.



'Why, they hove it overboard, and it sunk like a chunk of lead.'



'Edward, did the child look like it was choked?' says one.



'Did it have its hair parted?' says another.



'What was the brand on that bar'l, Eddy?' says a fellow they called Bill.



'Have you got the papers for them statistics, Edmund?' says Jimmy.



'Say, Edwin, was you one of the men that was killed by the lightning.'

says Davy.



'Him?  O, no, he was both of 'em,' says Bob.  Then they all haw-hawed.



'Say, Edward, don't you reckon you'd better take a pill?

You look bad--don't you feel pale?' says the Child of Calamity.



'O, come, now, Eddy,' says Jimmy, 'show up; you must a kept part of that bar'l

to prove the thing by.  Show us the bunghole--do--and we'll all believe you.'



'Say, boys,' says Bill, 'less divide it up.  Thar's thirteen of us.

I can swaller a thirteenth of the yarn, if you can worry down the rest.'



Ed got up mad and said they could all go to some place which he ripped

out pretty savage, and then walked off aft cussing to himself,

and they yelling and jeering at him, and roaring and laughing so you

could hear them a mile.



'Boys, we'll split a watermelon on that,' says the Child of Calamity;

and he come rummaging around in the dark amongst the shingle bundles

where I was, and put his hand on me.  I was warm and soft and naked;

so he says 'Ouch!' and jumped back.



'Fetch a lantern or a chunk of fire here, boys--there's a snake

here as big as a cow!'



So they run there with a lantern and crowded up and looked in on me.



'Come out of that, you beggar!' says one.



'Who are you?' says another.



'What are you after here?  Speak up prompt, or overboard you go.



'Snake him out, boys.  Snatch him out by the heels.'



I began to beg, and crept out amongst them trembling.

They looked me over, wondering, and the Child of Calamity says--



'A cussed thief!  Lend a hand and less heave him overboard!'



'No,' says Big Bob, 'less get out the paint-pot and paint him a sky

blue all over from head to heel, and then heave him over! '



'Good, that 's it.  Go for the paint, Jimmy.'



When the paint come, and Bob took the brush and was just going to begin,

the others laughing and rubbing their hands, I begun to cry, and that sort

of worked on Davy, and he says--



' 'Vast there!  He 's nothing but a cub.  'I'll paint the man

that tetches him!'



So I looked around on them, and some of them grumbled and growled,

and Bob put down the paint, and the others didn't take it up.



'Come here to the fire, and less see what you're up to here,'

says Davy.  'Now set down there and give an account of yourself.

How long have you been aboard here?'



'Not over a quarter of a minute, sir,' says I.



'How did you get dry so quick?'



'I don't know, sir.  I'm always that way, mostly.'



'Oh, you are, are you.  What's your name?'



I warn't going to tell my name.  I didn't know what to say,

so I just says--



'Charles William Allbright, sir.'



Then they roared--the whole crowd; and I was mighty glad I said that,

because maybe laughing would get them in a better humor.



When they got done laughing, Davy says--



'It won't hardly do, Charles William.  You couldn't have growed this

much in five year, and you was a baby when you come out of the bar'l,

you know, and dead at that.  Come, now, tell a straight story,

and nobody'll hurt you, if you ain't up to anything wrong.

What IS your name?'



'Aleck Hopkins, sir.  Aleck James Hopkins.'



'Well, Aleck, where did you come from, here?'



'From a trading scow.  She lays up the bend yonder.

I was born on her.  Pap has traded up and down here all his life;

and he told me to swim off here, because when you went by he said

he would like to get some of you to speak to a Mr. Jonas Turner,

in Cairo, and tell him--'



'Oh, come!'



'Yes, sir; it's as true as the world; Pap he says--'



'Oh, your grandmother!'



They all laughed, and I tried again to talk, hut they broke in on me

and stopped me.



'Now, looky-here,' says Davy; 'you're scared, and so you talk wild.

Honest, now, do you live in a scow, or is it a lie?'



'Yes, sir, in a trading scow.  She lays up at the head of the bend.

But I warn't born in her.  It's our first trip.'



'Now you're talking!  What did you come aboard here, for?  To steal?'



'No, sir, I didn't.--It was only to get a ride on the raft.

All boys does that.'



'Well, I know that.  But what did you hide for?'



'Sometimes they drive the boys off.'



'So they do.  They might steal.  Looky-here; if we let you off this time,

will you keep out of these kind of scrapes hereafter?'



''Deed I will, boss.  You try me.'



'All right, then.  You ain't but little ways from shore.

Overboard with you, and don't you make a fool of yourself

another time this way.--Blast it, boy, some raftsmen would

rawhide you till you were black and blue!'



I didn't wait to kiss good-bye, but went overboard and broke for shore.

When Jim come along by and by, the big raft was away out of sight around

the point.  I swum out and got aboard, and was mighty glad to see home again.





The boy did not get the information he was after, but his adventure

has furnished the glimpse of the departed raftsman and keelboatman

which I desire to offer in this place.



I now come to a phase of the Mississippi River life of the flush

times of steamboating, which seems to me to warrant full examination--

the marvelous science of piloting, as displayed there.

I believe there has been nothing like it elsewhere in the world.









                                Chapter 4

                           The Boys' Ambition



WHEN I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my

comrades in our village<footnote [1. Hannibal, Missouri]> on the west

bank of the Mississippi River.  That was, to be a steamboatman.

We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient.

When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns;

the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us

all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope

that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a

steamboatman always remained.



Once a day a cheap, gaudy packet arrived upward from St. Louis,

and another downward from Keokuk.  Before these events, the day

was glorious with expectancy; after them, the day was a dead and

empty thing.  Not only the boys, but the whole village, felt this.

After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now,

just as it was then:  the white town drowsing in the sunshine

of a summer's morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so;

one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores,

with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall,

chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep--

with shingle-shavings enough around to show what broke them down;

a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk,

doing a good business in watermelon rinds and seeds; two or

three lonely little freight piles scattered about the 'levee;'

a pile of 'skids' on the slope of the stone-paved wharf,

and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them;

two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody

to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them;

the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi,

rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense

forest away on the other side; the 'point' above the town,

and the 'point' below, bounding the river-glimpse and turning

it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant

and lonely one.  Presently a film of dark smoke appears above

one of those remote 'points;' instantly a negro drayman,

famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up

the cry, 'S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin'!' and the scene changes!

The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious

clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours

out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead

town is alive and moving.  Drays, carts, men, boys, all go

hurrying from many quarters to a common center, the wharf.

Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming

boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time.

And the boat IS rather a handsome sight, too.  She is long and sharp

and trim and pretty; she has two tall, fancy-topped chimneys,

with a gilded device of some kind swung between them;

a fanciful pilot-house, a glass and 'gingerbread', perched on top

of the 'texas' deck behind them; the paddle-boxes are gorgeous

with a picture or with gilded rays above the boat's name;

the boiler deck, the hurricane deck, and the texas deck

are fenced and ornamented with clean white railings;

there is a flag gallantly flying from the jack-staff;

the furnace doors are open and the fires glaring bravely;

the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands

by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes

of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys--

a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch pine just before

arriving at a town; the crew are grouped on the forecastle;

the broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied

deckhand stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil

of rope in his hand; the pent steam is screaming through

the gauge-cocks, the captain lifts his hand, a bell rings,

the wheels stop; then they turn back, churning the water to foam,

and the steamer is at rest.  Then such a scramble as there

is to get aboard, and to get ashore, and to take in freight

and to discharge freight, all at one and the same time;

and such a yelling and cursing as the mates facilitate it all with!

Ten minutes later the steamer is under way again, with no flag

on the jack-staff and no black smoke issuing from the chimneys.

After ten more minutes the town is dead again, and the town

drunkard asleep by the skids once more.



My father was a justice of the peace, and I supposed he possessed

the power of life and death over all men and could hang anybody that

offended him.  This was distinction enough for me as a general thing;

but the desire to be a steamboatman kept intruding, nevertheless.

I first wanted to be a cabin-boy, so that I could come out with a white

apron on and shake a tablecloth over the side, where all my old comrades

could see me; later I thought I would rather be the deckhand who stood

on the end of the stage-plank with the coil of rope in his hand,

because he was particularly conspicuous.  But these were only day-dreams,--

they were too heavenly to be contemplated as real possibilities.

By and by one of our boys went away.  He was not heard of for a long time.

At last he turned up as apprentice engineer or 'striker' on a steamboat.

This thing shook the bottom out of all my Sunday-school teachings.

That boy had been notoriously worldly, and I just the reverse;

yet he was exalted to this eminence, and I left in obscurity and misery.

There was nothing generous about this fellow in his greatness.

He would always manage to have a rusty bolt to scrub while his boat

tarried at our town, and he would sit on the inside guard and

scrub it, where we could all see him and envy him and loathe him.

And whenever his boat was laid up he would come home and swell around

the town in his blackest and greasiest clothes, so that nobody could

help remembering that he was a steamboatman; and he used all sorts

of steamboat technicalities in his talk, as if he were so used

to them that he forgot common people could not understand them.

He would speak of the 'labboard' side of a horse in an easy, natural way

that would make one wish he was dead.  And he was always talking about

'St. Looy' like an old citizen; he would refer casually to occasions

when he 'was coming down Fourth Street,' or when he was 'passing

by the Planter's House,' or when there was a fire and he took a turn

on the brakes of 'the old Big Missouri;' and then he would go on and lie

about how many towns the size of ours were burned down there that day.

Two or three of the boys had long been persons of consideration among

us because they had been to St. Louis once and had a vague general

knowledge of its wonders, but the day of their glory was over now.

They lapsed into a humble silence, and learned to disappear when the ruthless

'cub'-engineer approached.  This fellow had money, too, and hair oil.

Also an ignorant silver watch and a showy brass watch chain.

He wore a leather belt and used no suspenders.  If ever a youth

was cordially admired and hated by his comrades, this one was.

No girl could withstand his charms.  He 'cut out' every boy in the village.

When his boat blew up at last, it diffused a tranquil contentment

among us such as we had not known for months.  But when he came

home the next week, alive, renowned, and appeared in church all

battered up and bandaged, a shining hero, stared at and wondered

over by everybody, it seemed to us that the partiality of Providence

for an undeserving reptile had reached a point where it was open to

criticism.



This creature's career could produce but one result, and it

speedily followed.  Boy after boy managed to get on the river.

The minister's son became an engineer.  The doctor's and the

post-master's sons became 'mud clerks;' the wholesale liquor

dealer's son became a barkeeper on a boat; four sons of the

chief merchant, and two sons of the county judge, became pilots.

Pilot was the grandest position of all.  The pilot, even in those days

of trivial wages, had a princely salary--from a hundred and fifty

to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay.

Two months of his wages would pay a preacher's salary for a year.

Now some of us were left disconsolate.  We could not get on the river--

at least our parents would not let us.



So by and by I ran away.  I said I never would come home again till I

was a pilot and could come in glory.  But somehow I could not manage it.

I went meekly aboard a few of the boats that lay packed together like sardines

at the long St. Louis wharf, and very humbly inquired for the pilots,

but got only a cold shoulder and short words from mates and clerks.

I had to make the best of this sort of treatment for the time being,

but I had comforting daydreams of a future when I should be a great and

honored pilot, with plenty of money, and could kill some of these mates

and clerks and pay for them.









                                Chapter 5

                        I Want to be a Cub-pilot



MONTHS afterward the hope within me struggled to a reluctant death,

and I found myself without an ambition.  But I was ashamed to go home.

I was in Cincinnati, and I set to work to map out a new career.

I had been reading about the recent exploration of the river Amazon

by an expedition sent out by our government.  It was said that

the expedition, owing to difficulties, had not thoroughly explored a part

of the country lying about the head-waters, some four thousand miles

from the mouth of the river.  It was only about fifteen hundred miles

from Cincinnati to New Orleans, where I could doubtless get a ship.

I had thirty dollars left; I would go and complete the exploration

of the Amazon.  This was all the thought I gave to the subject.

I never was great in matters of detail.  I packed my valise, and took

passage on an ancient tub called the 'Paul Jones,' for New Orleans.

For the sum of sixteen dollars I had the scarred and tarnished splendors

of 'her' main saloon principally to myself, for she was not a creature to

attract the eye of wiser travelers.



When we presently got under way and went poking down the broad Ohio,

I became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration.

I was a traveler!  A word never had tasted so good in my mouth before.

I had an exultant sense of being bound for mysterious lands and distant

climes which I never have felt in so uplifting a degree since.

I was in such a glorified condition that all ignoble feelings departed

out of me, and I was able to look down and pity the untraveled

with a compassion that had hardly a trace of contempt in it.

Still, when we stopped at villages and wood-yards, I could not help

lolling carelessly upon the railings of the boiler deck to enjoy

the envy of the country boys on the bank.  If they did not seem

to discover me, I presently sneezed to attract their attention,

or moved to a position where they could not help seeing me.

And as soon as I knew they saw me I gaped and stretched, and gave other

signs of being mightily bored with traveling.



I kept my hat off all the time, and stayed where the wind

and the sun could strike me, because I wanted to get

the bronzed and weather-beaten look of an old traveler.

Before the second day was half gone I experienced a joy

which filled me with the purest gratitude; for I saw that

the skin had begun to blister and peel off my face and neck.

I wished that the boys and girls at home could see me now.



We reached Louisville in time--at least the neighborhood of it.

We stuck hard and fast on the rocks in the middle of the river,

and lay there four days.  I was now beginning to feel a strong

sense of being a part of the boat's family, a sort of infant

son to the captain and younger brother to the officers.

There is no estimating the pride I took in this grandeur,

or the affection that began to swell and grow in me for

those people.  I could not know how the lordly steamboatman

scorns that sort of presumption in a mere landsman.

I particularly longed to acquire the least trifle of notice

from the big stormy mate, and I was on the alert for an

opportunity to do him a service to that end.  It came at last.

The riotous powwow of setting a spar was going on down on

the forecastle, and I went down there and stood around in the way--

or mostly skipping out of it--till the mate suddenly roared

a general order for somebody to bring him a capstan bar.

I sprang to his side and said:  'Tell me where it is--

I'll fetch it!'



If a rag-picker had offered to do a diplomatic service for the Emperor

of Russia, the monarch could not have been more astounded than the mate was.

He even stopped swearing.  He stood and stared down at me.

It took him ten seconds to scrape his disjointed remains together again.

Then he said impressively:  'Well, if this don't beat hell!'

and turned to his work with the air of a man who had been confronted

with a problem too abstruse for solution.



I crept away, and courted solitude for the rest of the day.

I did not go to dinner; I stayed away from supper until everybody else

had finished.  I did not feel so much like a member of the boat's

family now as before.  However, my spirits returned, in installments,

as we pursued our way down the river.  I was sorry I hated the mate so,

because it was not in (young) human nature not to admire him.

He was huge and muscular, his face was bearded and whiskered all over;

he had a red woman and a blue woman tattooed on his right arm,--

one on each side of a blue anchor with a red rope to it;

and in the matter of profanity he was sublime.  When he was getting

out cargo at a landing, I was always where I could see and hear.

He felt all the majesty of his great position, and made the world

feel it, too.  When he gave even the simplest order, he discharged

it like a blast of lightning, and sent a long, reverberating peal

of profanity thundering after it.  I could not help contrasting

the way in which the average landsman would give an order,

with the mate's way of doing it.  If the landsman should wish

the gang-plank moved a foot farther forward, he would probably say:

'James, or William, one of you push that plank forward, please;' but put

the mate in his place and he would roar out:  'Here, now, start that

gang-plank for'ard! Lively, now!  WHAT're you about!  Snatch it!

SNATCH it!  There! there!  Aft again! aft again! don't you hear me.

Dash it to dash! are you going to SLEEP over it!  'VAST heaving.

'Vast heaving, I tell you!  Going to heave it clear astern?

WHERE're you going with that barrel!  FOR'ARD with it 'fore I make

you swallow it, you dash-dash-dash-DASHED split between a tired

mud-turtle and a crippled hearse-horse!'



I wished I could talk like that.



When the soreness of my adventure with the mate had somewhat worn off,

I began timidly to make up to the humblest official connected

with the boat--the night watchman.  He snubbed my advances

at first, but I presently ventured to offer him a new chalk pipe;

and that softened him.  So he allowed me to sit with him by the big

bell on the hurricane deck, and in time he melted into conversation.

He could not well have helped it, I hung with such homage on his

words and so plainly showed that I felt honored by his notice.

He told me the names of dim capes and shadowy islands as we glided

by them in the solemnity of the night, under the winking stars,

and by and by got to talking about himself.  He seemed

over-sentimental for a man whose salary was six dollars a week--

or rather he might have seemed so to an older person than I. But

I drank in his words hungrily, and with a faith that might

have moved mountains if it had been applied judiciously.

What was it to me that he was soiled and seedy and fragrant with gin?

What was it to me that his grammar was bad, his construction worse,

and his profanity so void of art that it was an element of weakness

rather than strength in his conversation?  He was a wronged man,

a man who had seen trouble, and that was enough for me.

As he mellowed into his plaintive history his tears dripped

upon the lantern in his lap, and I cried, too, from sympathy.

He said he was the son of an English nobleman--either an earl

or an alderman, he could not remember which, but believed was both;

his father, the nobleman, loved him, but his mother hated him

from the cradle; and so while he was still a little boy he was sent

to 'one of them old, ancient colleges'--he couldn't remember which;

and by and by his father died and his mother seized the property

and 'shook' him as he phrased it.  After his mother shook him,

members of the nobility with whom he was acquainted used their

influence to get him the position of 'loblolly-boy in a ship;'

and from that point my watchman threw off all trammels of date

and locality and branched out into a narrative that bristled all

along with incredible adventures; a narrative that was so reeking

with bloodshed and so crammed with hair-breadth escapes and the most

engaging and unconscious personal villainies, that I sat speechless,

enjoying, shuddering, wondering, worshipping.



It was a sore blight to find out afterwards that he was

a low, vulgar, ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug,

an untraveled native of the wilds of Illinois, who had

absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated its marvels,

until in time he had woven odds and ends of the mess into

this yarn, and then gone on telling it to fledglings like me,

until he had come to believe it himself.









                                Chapter 6

                        A Cub-pilot's Experience



WHAT with lying on the rocks four days at Louisville, and some

other delays, the poor old 'Paul Jones' fooled away about two

weeks in making the voyage from Cincinnati to New Orleans.

This gave me a chance to get acquainted with one of the pilots,

and he taught me how to steer the boat, and thus made the fascination

of river life more potent than ever for me.



It also gave me a chance to get acquainted with a youth who had taken

deck passage--more's the pity; for he easily borrowed six dollars of me

on a promise to return to the boat and pay it back to me the day after

we should arrive.  But he probably died or forgot, for he never came.

It was doubtless the former, since he had said his parents were wealthy,

and he only traveled deck passage because it was cooler.<footnote [1.

'Deck' Passage, i.e. steerage passage.]>



I soon discovered two things.  One was that a vessel would not be

likely to sail for the mouth of the Amazon under ten or twelve years;

and the other was that the nine or ten dollars still left

in my pocket would not suffice for so imposing an exploration

as I had planned, even if I could afford to wait for a ship.

Therefore it followed that I must contrive a new career.

The 'Paul Jones' was now bound for St. Louis.  I planned a siege

against my pilot, and at the end of three hard days he surrendered.

He agreed to teach me the Mississippi River from New Orleans

to St. Louis for five hundred dollars, payable out of the first

wages I should receive after graduating.  I entered upon the small

enterprise of 'learning' twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great

Mississippi River with the easy confidence of my time of life.

If I had really known what I was about to require of my faculties,

I should not have had the courage to begin.  I supposed

that all a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river,

and I did not consider that that could be much of a trick,

since it was so wide.



The boat backed out from New Orleans at four in the afternoon,

and it was 'our watch' until eight.  Mr. Bixby, my chief,

'straightened her up,' plowed her along past the sterns of the other

boats that lay at the Levee, and then said, 'Here, take her;

shave those steamships as close as you'd peel an apple.'

I took the wheel, and my heart-beat fluttered up into

the hundreds; for it seemed to me that we were about to scrape

the side off every ship in the line, we were so close.

I held my breath and began to claw the boat away from the danger;

and I had my own opinion of the pilot who had known no better

than to get us into such peril, but I was too wise to express it.

In half a minute I had a wide margin of safety intervening

between the 'Paul Jones' and the ships; and within ten seconds

more I was set aside in disgrace, and Mr. Bixby was going into

danger again and flaying me alive with abuse of my cowardice.

I was stung, but I was obliged to admire the easy confidence with

which my chief loafed from side to side of his wheel, and trimmed

the ships so closely that disaster seemed ceaselessly imminent.

When he had cooled a little he told me that the easy water

was close ashore and the current outside, and therefore we must

hug the bank, up-stream, to get the benefit of the former,

and stay well out, down-stream, to take advantage of the latter.

In my own mind I resolved to be a down-stream pilot and leave

the up-streaming to people dead to prudence.



Now and then Mr. Bixby called my attention to certain things.

Said he, 'This is Six-Mile Point.'  I assented.  It was pleasant

enough information, but I could not see the bearing of it.

I was not conscious that it was a matter of any interest to me.

Another time he said, 'This is Nine-Mile Point.'

Later he said, 'This is Twelve-Mile Point.'  They were

all about level with the water's edge; they all looked

about alike to me; they were monotonously unpicturesque.

I hoped Mr. Bixby would change the subject.  But no; he would

crowd up around a point, hugging the shore with affection,

and then say:  'The slack water ends here, abreast this bunch

of China-trees; now we cross over.'  So he crossed over.

He gave me the wheel once or twice, but I had no luck.

I either came near chipping off the edge of a sugar plantation,

or I yawed too far from shore, and so dropped back into disgrace again

and got abused.



The watch was ended at last, and we took supper and went to bed.

At midnight the glare of a lantern shone in my eyes, and the

night watchman said--



'Come! turn out!'



And then he left.  I could not understand this extraordinary procedure;

so I presently gave up trying to, and dozed off to sleep.

Pretty soon the watchman was back again, and this time he was gruff.

I was annoyed.  I said:--



'What do you want to come bothering around here in the middle of

the night for.  Now as like as not I'll not get to sleep again to-night.'



The watchman said--



'Well, if this an't good, I'm blest.'



The 'off-watch' was just turning in, and I heard some brutal

laughter from them, and such remarks as 'Hello, watchman!

an't the new cub turned out yet?  He's delicate, likely.

Give him some sugar in a rag and send for the chambermaid to sing

rock-a-by-baby to him.'



About this time Mr. Bixby appeared on the scene.

Something like a minute later I was climbing the pilot-house

steps with some of my clothes on and the rest in my arms.

Mr. Bixby was close behind, commenting.  Here was something fresh--

this thing of getting up in the middle of the night to go to work.

It was a detail in piloting that had never occurred to me at all.

I knew that boats ran all night, but somehow I had never happened

to reflect that somebody had to get up out of a warm bed to run them.

I began to fear that piloting was not quite so romantic as I

had imagined it was; there was something very real and work-like

about this new phase of it.



It was a rather dingy night, although a fair number of stars were out.

The big mate was at the wheel, and he had the old tub pointed at

a star and was holding her straight up the middle of the river.

The shores on either hand were not much more than half a mile apart,

but they seemed wonderfully far away and ever so vague and indistinct.

The mate said:--



'We've got to land at Jones's plantation, sir.'



The vengeful spirit in me exulted.  I said to myself,

I wish you joy of your job, Mr. Bixby; you'll have a good

time finding Mr. Jones's plantation such a night as this;

and I hope you never WILL find it as long as you live.



Mr. Bixby said to the mate:--



'Upper end of the plantation, or the lower.?'



'Upper.'



'I can't do it.  The stumps there are out of water at this stage:

It's no great distance to the lower, and you'll have to get

along with that.'



'All right, sir.  If Jones don't like it he'll have to lump it,

 I reckon.'



And then the mate left.  My exultation began to cool and my wonder

to come up.  Here was a man who not only proposed to find this

plantation on such a night, but to find either end of it you preferred.

I dreadfully wanted to ask a question, but I was carrying about as many

short answers as my cargo-room would admit of, so I held my peace.

All I desired to ask Mr. Bixby was the simple question whether he was

ass enough to really imagine he was going to find that plantation on

a night when all plantations were exactly alike and all the same color.

But I held in.  I used to have fine inspirations of prudence

in those days.



Mr. Bixby made for the shore and soon was scraping it, just the same as if it

had been daylight.  And not only that, but singing--



     'Father in heaven, the day is declining,' etc."



It seemed to me that I had put my life in the keeping of a peculiarly

reckless outcast.  Presently he turned on me and said:--



'What's the name of the first point above New Orleans?'



I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did.

I said I didn't know.



'Don't KNOW?'



This manner jolted me.  I was down at the foot again, in a moment.

But I had to say just what I had said before.



'Well, you're a smart one,' said Mr. Bixby.  'What's the name

of the NEXT point?'



Once more I didn't know.



'Well, this beats anything.  Tell me the name of ANY point or place

I told you.'



I studied a while and decided that I couldn't.



'Look here!  What do you start out from, above Twelve-Mile Point,

to cross over?'



'I--I-- don't know.'



'You--you--don't know?' mimicking my drawling manner of speech.

'What DO you know?'



'I--I-- nothing, for certain.'



'By the great Caesar's ghost, I believe you!  You're the stupidest

dunderhead I ever saw or ever heard of, so help me Moses!

The idea of you being a pilot--you!  Why, you don't know enough

to pilot a cow down a lane.'



Oh, but his wrath was up!  He was a nervous man, and he shuffled

from one side of his wheel to the other as if the floor was hot.

He would boil a while to himself, and then overflow and scald me again.



'Look here!  What do you suppose I told you the names of those points for?'



I tremblingly considered a moment, and then the devil of temptation

provoked me to say:--



'Well--to--to--be entertaining, I thought.'



This was a red rag to the bull.  He raged and stormed so (he was

crossing the river at the time) that I judge it made him blind,

because he ran over the steering-oar of a trading-scow. Of

course the traders sent up a volley of red-hot profanity.

Never was a man so grateful as Mr. Bixby was:

because he was brim full, and here were subjects who would

TALK BACK.  He threw open a window, thrust his head out,

and such an irruption followed as I never had heard before.

The fainter and farther away the scowmen's curses drifted,

the higher Mr. Bixby lifted his voice and the weightier his

adjectives grew.  When he closed the window he was empty.

You could have drawn a seine through his system and not caught curses

enough to disturb your mother with.  Presently he said to me in

the gentlest way--



'My boy, you must get a little memorandum book, and every time I

tell you a thing, put it down right away.  There's only one way

to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart.

You have to know it just like A B C.'



That was a dismal revelation to me; for my memory was never

loaded with anything but blank cartridges.  However, I did

not feel discouraged long.  I judged that it was best to make

some allowances, for doubtless Mr. Bixby was 'stretching.'

Presently he pulled a rope and struck a few strokes on the big bell.

The stars were all gone now, and the night was as black as ink.

I could hear the wheels churn along the bank, but I was not entirely

certain that I could see the shore.  The voice of the invisible

watchman called up from the hurricane deck--



'What's this, sir?'



'Jones's plantation.'



I said to myself, I wish I might venture to offer a small bet

that it isn't. But I did not chirp.  I only waited to see.

Mr. Bixby handled the engine bells, and in due time the boat's

nose came to the land, a torch glowed from the forecastle,

a man skipped ashore, a darky's voice on the bank said,

'Gimme de k'yarpet-bag, Mars' Jones,' and the next moment we

were standing up the river again, all serene.  I reflected

deeply awhile, and then said--but not aloud--'Well, the finding

of that plantation was the luckiest accident that ever happened;

but it couldn't happen again in a hundred years.'  And I fully

believed it was an accident, too.



By the time we had gone seven or eight hundred miles up the river,

I had learned to be a tolerably plucky up-stream steersman,

in daylight, and before we reached St. Louis I had made

a trifle of progress in night-work, but only a trifle.

I had a note-book that fairly bristled with the names of towns,

'points,' bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc.; but the information

was to be found only in the notebook--none of it was in my head.

It made my heart ache to think I had only got half of the river

set down; for as our watch was four hours off and four hours on,

day and night, there was a long four-hour gap in my book for every

time I had slept since the voyage began.



My chief was presently hired to go on a big New Orleans boat, and I packed

my satchel and went with him.  She was a grand affair.  When I stood

in her pilot-house I was so far above the water that I seemed perched on

a mountain; and her decks stretched so far away, fore and aft, below me,

that I wondered how I could ever have considered the little 'Paul Jones'

a large craft.  There were other differences, too.  The 'Paul Jones's'

pilot-house was a cheap, dingy, battered rattle-trap, cramped for room:

but here was a sumptuous glass temple; room enough to have a dance in;

showy red and gold window-curtains; an imposing sofa; leather cushions

and a back to the high bench where visiting pilots sit, to spin yarns

and 'look at the river;' bright, fanciful 'cuspadores' instead of a

broad wooden box filled with sawdust; nice new oil-cloth on the floor;

a hospitable big stove for winter; a wheel as high as my head,

costly with inlaid work; a wire tiller-rope; bright brass knobs

for the bells; and a tidy, white-aproned, black 'texas-tender,' to

bring up tarts and ices and coffee during mid-watch, day and night.

Now this was 'something like,' and so I began to take heart once more

to believe that piloting was a romantic sort of occupation after all.

The moment we were under way I began to prowl about the great steamer

and fill myself with joy.  She was as clean and as dainty as a drawing-room;

when I looked down her long, gilded saloon, it was like gazing through

a splendid tunnel; she had an oil-picture, by some gifted sign-painter,

on every stateroom door; she glittered with no end of prism-fringed

chandeliers; the clerk's office was elegant, the bar was marvelous,

and the bar-keeper had been barbered and upholstered at incredible cost.

The boiler deck (i.e. the second story of the boat, so to speak)

was as spacious as a church, it seemed to me; so with the forecastle;

and there was no pitiful handful of deckhands, firemen, and roustabouts

down there, but a whole battalion of men.  The fires were fiercely glaring

from a long row of furnaces, and over them were eight huge boilers!

This was unutterable pomp.  The mighty engines--but enough of this.

I had never felt so fine before.  And when I found that the regiment

of natty servants respectfully 'sir'd' me, my satisfaction was complete.









                                Chapter 7

                              A Daring Deed



WHEN I returned to the pilot-house St. Louis was gone and I was lost.

Here was a piece of river which was all down in my book,

but I could make neither head nor tail of it:  you understand,

it was turned around.  I had seen it when coming up-stream, but I

had never faced about to see how it looked when it was behind me.

My heart broke again, for it was plain that I had got to learn this

troublesome river BOTH WAYS.



The pilot-house was full of pilots, going down to 'look at the river.'

What is called the 'upper river' (the two hundred miles between St. Louis

and Cairo, where the Ohio comes in) was low; and the Mississippi changes

its channel so constantly that the pilots used to always find it

necessary to run down to Cairo to take a fresh look, when their boats

were to lie in port a week; that is, when the water was at a low stage.

A deal of this 'looking at the river' was done by poor fellows who seldom

had a berth, and whose only hope of getting one lay in their being

always freshly posted and therefore ready to drop into the shoes

of some reputable pilot, for a single trip, on account of such pilot's

sudden illness, or some other necessity.  And a good many of them

constantly ran up and down inspecting the river, not because they ever

really hoped to get a berth, but because (they being guests of the boat)

it was cheaper to 'look at the river' than stay ashore and pay board.

In time these fellows grew dainty in their tastes, and only infested

boats that had an established reputation for setting good tables.

All visiting pilots were useful, for they were always ready and willing,

winter or summer, night or day, to go out in the yawl and help buoy

the channel or assist the boat's pilots in any way they could.

They were likewise welcome because all pilots are tireless talkers,

when gathered together, and as they talk only about the river they

are always understood and are always interesting.  Your true pilot

cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride

in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings.



We had a fine company of these river-inspectors along, this trip.

There were eight or ten; and there was abundance of room for them in our

great pilot-house. Two or three of them wore polished silk hats, elaborate

shirt-fronts, diamond breast-pins, kid gloves, and patent-leather boots.

They were choice in their English, and bore themselves with a dignity

proper to men of solid means and prodigious reputation as pilots.

The others were more or less loosely clad, and wore upon their heads tall

felt cones that were suggestive of the days of the Commonwealth.



I was a cipher in this august company, and felt subdued, not to say torpid.

I was not even of sufficient consequence to assist at the wheel when it

was necessary to put the tiller hard down in a hurry; the guest that stood

nearest did that when occasion required--and this was pretty much all

the time, because of the crookedness of the channel and the scant water.

I stood in a corner; and the talk I listened to took the hope all out of me.

One visitor said to another--



'Jim, how did you run Plum Point, coming up?'



'It was in the night, there, and I ran it the way one of the boys

on the "Diana" told me; started out about fifty yards above

the wood pile on the false point, and held on the cabin

under Plum Point till I raised the reef--quarter less twain--

then straightened up for the middle bar till I got well abreast

the old one-limbed cotton-wood in the bend, then got my stern

on the cotton-wood and head on the low place above the point,

and came through a-booming--nine and a half.'



'Pretty square crossing, an't it?'



'Yes, but the upper bar 's working down fast.'



Another pilot spoke up and said--



'I had better water than that, and ran it lower down;

started out from the false point--mark twain--raised the second

reef abreast the big snag in the bend, and had quarter less twain.'



One of the gorgeous ones remarked--



'I don't want to find fault with your leadsmen, but that's a good deal

of water for Plum Point, it seems to me.'



There was an approving nod all around as this quiet snub dropped on

the boaster and 'settled' him.  And so they went on talk-talk-talking.

Meantime, the thing that was running in my mind was, 'Now if my ears

hear aright, I have not only to get the names of all the towns and islands

and bends, and so on, by heart, but I must even get up a warm personal

acquaintanceship with every old snag and one-limbed cotton-wood and obscure

wood pile that ornaments the banks of this river for twelve hundred miles;

and more than that, I must actually know where these things are in the dark,

unless these guests are gifted with eyes that can pierce through two miles

of solid blackness; I wish the piloting business was in Jericho and I had

never thought of it.'



At dusk Mr. Bixby tapped the big bell three times (the signal

to land), and the captain emerged from his drawing-room

in the forward end of the texas, and looked up inquiringly.

Mr. Bixby said--



'We will lay up here all night, captain.'



'Very well, sir.'



That was all.  The boat came to shore and was tied up for the night.

It seemed to me a fine thing that the pilot could do as he pleased,

without asking so grand a captain's permission.  I took my supper and went

immediately to bed, discouraged by my day's observations and experiences.

My late voyage's note-booking was but a confusion of meaningless names.

It had tangled me all up in a knot every time I had looked at it in

the daytime.  I now hoped for respite in sleep; but no, it reveled all

through my head till sunrise again, a frantic and tireless nightmare.



Next morning I felt pretty rusty and low-spirited. We went booming along,

taking a good many chances, for we were anxious to 'get out of the river'

(as getting out to Cairo was called) before night should overtake us.

But Mr. Bixby's partner, the other pilot, presently grounded the boat,

and we lost so much time in getting her off that it was plain that

darkness would overtake us a good long way above the mouth.  This was a

great misfortune, especially to certain of our visiting pilots, whose boats

would have to wait for their return, no matter how long that might be.

It sobered the pilot-house talk a good deal.  Coming up-stream, pilots did

not mind low water or any kind of darkness; nothing stopped them but fog.

But down-stream work was different; a boat was too nearly helpless,

with a stiff current pushing behind her; so it was not customary to run

down-stream at night in low water.



There seemed to be one small hope, however:  if we could get through

the intricate and dangerous Hat Island crossing before night, we could

venture the rest, for we would have plainer sailing and better water.

But it would be insanity to attempt Hat Island at night.

So there was a deal of looking at watches all the rest of the day,

and a constant ciphering upon the speed we were making; Hat Island

was the eternal subject; sometimes hope was high and sometimes

we were delayed in a bad crossing, and down it went again.

For hours all hands lay under the burden of this suppressed excitement;

it was even communicated to me, and I got to feeling so

solicitous about Hat Island, and under such an awful pressure

of responsibility, that I wished I might have five minutes on shore

to draw a good, full, relieving breath, and start over again.

We were standing no regular watches.  Each of our pilots ran

such portions of the river as he had run when coming up-stream,

because of his greater familiarity with it; but both remained in

the pilot house constantly.



An hour before sunset, Mr. Bixby took the wheel and Mr. W----

stepped aside.  For the next thirty minutes every man held

his watch in his hand and was restless, silent, and uneasy.

At last somebody said, with a doomful sigh--



'Well, yonder's Hat Island--and we can't make it.'

All the watches closed with a snap, everybody sighed

and muttered something about its being 'too bad, too bad--

ah, if we could only have got here half an hour sooner!'

and the place was thick with the atmosphere of disappointment.

Some started to go out, but loitered, hearing no bell-tap to land.

The sun dipped behind the horizon, the boat went on.

Inquiring looks passed from one guest to another;

and one who had his hand on the door-knob and had

turned it, waited, then presently took away his hand and let

the knob turn back again.  We bore steadily down the bend.

More looks were exchanged, and nods of surprised admiration--

but no words.  Insensibly the men drew together behind Mr. Bixby,

as the sky darkened and one or two dim stars came out.

The dead silence and sense of waiting became oppressive.

Mr. Bixby pulled the cord, and two deep, mellow notes

from the big bell floated off on the night.  Then a pause,

and one more note was struck.  The watchman's voice followed,

from the hurricane deck--



'Labboard lead, there!  Stabboard lead!'



The cries of the leadsmen began to rise out of the distance,

and were gruffly repeated by the word-passers on the hurricane deck.



'M-a-r-k three!.... M-a-r-k three!.... Quarter-less three! .... Half

twain! .... Quarter twain! .... M-a-r-k twain! .... Quarter-less--'



Mr. Bixby pulled two bell-ropes, and was answered by faint

jinglings far below in the engine room, and our speed slackened.

The steam began to whistle through the gauge-cocks. The cries of

the leadsmen went on--and it is a weird sound, always, in the night.

Every pilot in the lot was watching now, with fixed eyes, and talking

under his breath.  Nobody was calm and easy but Mr. Bixby.

He would put his wheel down and stand on a spoke, and as the steamer

swung into her (to me) utterly invisible marks--for we seemed to be in

the midst of a wide and gloomy sea--he would meet and fasten her there.

Out of the murmur of half-audible talk, one caught a coherent sentence

now and then--such as--



'There; she's over the first reef all right!'



After a pause, another subdued voice--



'Her stern's coming down just exactly right, by George!'



'Now she's in the marks; over she goes!'



Somebody else muttered--



'Oh, it was done beautiful--BEAUTIFUL!'



Now the engines were stopped altogether, and we drifted

with the current.  Not that I could see the boat drift,

for I could not, the stars being all gone by this time.

This drifting was the dismalest work; it held one's heart still.

Presently I discovered a blacker gloom than that which surrounded us.

It was the head of the island.  We were closing right down upon it.

We entered its deeper shadow, and so imminent seemed the peril

that I was likely to suffocate; and I had the strongest

impulse to do SOMETHING, anything, to save the vessel.

But still Mr. Bixby stood by his wheel, silent, intent as a cat,

and all the pilots stood shoulder to shoulder at his back.



'She'll not make it!' somebody whispered.



The water grew shoaler and shoaler, by the leadsman's cries,

till it was down to--



'Eight-and-a-half!.... E-i-g-h-t feet!.... E-i-g-h-t feet!.... Seven-and--'



Mr. Bixby said warningly through his speaking tube to the engineer--



'Stand by, now!'



'Aye-aye, sir!'



'Seven-and-a-half! Seven feet!  Six-and--'



We touched bottom!  Instantly Mr. Bixby set a lot of bells ringing,

shouted through the tube, 'NOW, let her have it--every ounce you've got!'

then to his partner, 'Put her hard down! snatch her! snatch her!'

The boat rasped and ground her way through the sand, hung upon the apex

of disaster a single tremendous instant, and then over she went!

And such a shout as went up at Mr. Bixby's back never loosened the roof of

a pilot-house before!



There was no more trouble after that.  Mr. Bixby was a hero that night;

and it was some little time, too, before his exploit ceased to be talked

about by river men.



Fully to realize the marvelous precision required in laying

the great steamer in her marks in that murky waste of water,

one should know that not only must she pick her intricate

way through snags and blind reefs, and then shave the head

of the island so closely as to brush the overhanging foliage

with her stern, but at one place she must pass almost within

arm's reach of a sunken and invisible wreck that would snatch

the hull timbers from under her if she should strike it,

and destroy a quarter of a million dollars' worth of steam-boat

and cargo in five minutes, and maybe a hundred and fifty human

lives into the bargain.



The last remark I heard that night was a compliment to Mr. Bixby,

uttered in soliloquy and with unction by one of our guests.  He said--



'By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!'









                                Chapter 8

                           Perplexing Lessons



At the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had managed to pack my head

full of islands, towns, bars, 'points,' and bends; and a curiously

inanimate mass of lumber it was, too.  However, inasmuch as I

could shut my eyes and reel off a good long string of these names

without leaving out more than ten miles of river in every fifty,

I began to feel that I could take a boat down to New Orleans if I

could make her skip those little gaps.  But of course my complacency

could hardly get start enough to lift my nose a trifle into the air,

before Mr. Bixby would think of something to fetch it down again.

One day he turned on me suddenly with this settler--



'What is the shape of Walnut Bend?'



He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm.

I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't know it had any

particular shape.  My gunpowdery chief went off with a bang, of course,

and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives.



I had learned long ago that he only carried just so many rounds

of ammunition, and was sure to subside into a very placable and

even remorseful old smooth-bore as soon as they were all gone.

That word 'old' is merely affectionate; he was not more than

thirty-four. I waited.  By and by he said--



'My boy, you've got to know the SHAPE of the river perfectly.

It is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night.

Everything else is blotted out and gone.  But mind you, it hasn't

the same shape in the night that it has in the day-time.'



'How on earth am I ever going to learn it, then?'



'How do you follow a hall at home in the dark.  Because you know

the shape of it.  You can't see it.'



'Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million trifling variations

of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as I know the shape

of the front hall at home?'



'On my honor, you've got to know them BETTER than any man ever

did know the shapes of the halls in his own house.'



'I wish I was dead!'



'Now I don't want to discourage you, but----'



'Well, pile it on me; I might as well have it now as another time.'



'You see, this has got to be learned; there isn't any getting

around it.  A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows

that if you didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly you would

claw away from every bunch of timber, because you would take

the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and you see you would

be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch.

You would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you

ought to be within fifty feet of it.  You can't see a snag

in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is,

and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it.

Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a very different

shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night.

All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too;

and you'd RUN them for straight lines only you know better.

You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid,

straight wall (you knowing very well that in reality there is

a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way for you.

Then there's your gray mist.  You take a night when there's one

of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any

particular shape to a shore.  A gray mist would tangle the head

of the oldest man that ever lived.  Well, then, different kinds

of MOONLIGHT change the shape of the river in different ways.

You see----'



'Oh, don't say any more, please!  Have I got to learn the shape of the river

according to all these five hundred thousand different ways?  If I tried

to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me stoop-shouldered.'



'NO! you only learn THE shape of the river, and you learn it with such

absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's IN YOUR HEAD,

and never mind the one that's before your eyes.'



'Very well, I'll try it; but after I have learned it can I depend on it.

Will it keep the same form and not go fooling around?'



Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W---- came in to take the watch,

and he said--



'Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's Island and all

that country clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens.

The banks are caving and the shape of the shores changing

like everything.  Why, you wouldn't know the point above 40.

You can go up inside the old sycamore-snag, now.<footnote [1.

It may not be necessary, but still it can do no harm to explain

that 'inside' means between the snag and the shore.--M.T.]>



So that question was answered.  Here were leagues of shore changing shape.

My spirits were down in the mud again.  Two things seemed pretty apparent

to me.  One was, that in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more than

any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was, that he must learn

it all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours.



That night we had the watch until twelve.  Now it was an ancient river

custom for the two pilots to chat a bit when the watch changed.

While the relieving pilot put on his gloves and lit his cigar,

his partner, the retiring pilot, would say something like this--



'I judge the upper bar is making down a little at Hale's Point;

had quarter twain with the lower lead and mark twain<footnote [Two fathoms.

'Quarter twain' is two-and-a-quarter fathoms, thirteen-and-a-half feet.

'Mark three' is three fathoms.]> with the other.'



'Yes, I thought it was making down a little, last trip.

Meet any boats?'



'Met one abreast the head of 21, but she was away over hugging the bar,

and I couldn't make her out entirely.  I took her for the "Sunny South"--

hadn't any skylights forward of the chimneys.'



And so on.  And as the relieving pilot took the wheel his

partner<footnote ['Partner' is a technical term for 'the other

pilot'.]> would mention that we were in such-and-such a bend,

and say we were abreast of such-and-such a man's wood-yard

or plantation.  This was courtesy; I supposed it was necessity.

But Mr. W---- came on watch full twelve minutes late on

this particular night,--a tremendous breach of etiquette;

in fact, it is the unpardonable sin among pilots.

So Mr. Bixby gave him no greeting whatever, but simply surrendered

the wheel and marched out of the pilot-house without a word.

I was appalled; it was a villainous night for blackness,

we were in a particularly wide and blind part of the river,

where there was no shape or substance to anything, and it

seemed incredible that Mr. Bixby should have left that poor

fellow to kill the boat trying to find out where he was.

But I resolved that I would stand by him any way.

He should find that he was not wholly friendless.

So I stood around, and waited to be asked where we were.

But Mr. W---- plunged on serenely through the solid firmament of black

cats that stood for an atmosphere, and never opened his mouth.

Here is a proud devil, thought I; here is a limb of Satan that

would rather send us all to destruction than put himself under

obligations to me, because I am not yet one of the salt of the earth

and privileged to snub captains and lord it over everything dead

and alive in a steamboat.  I presently climbed up on the bench;

I did not think it was safe to go to sleep while this lunatic

was on watch.



However, I must have gone to sleep in the course of time,

because the next thing I was aware of was the fact that day

was breaking, Mr. W---- gone, and Mr. Bixby at the wheel again.

So it was four o'clock and all well--but me; I felt like a skinful

of dry bones and all of them trying to ache at once.



Mr. Bixby asked me what I had stayed up there for.  I confessed

that it was to do Mr. W---- a benevolence,--tell him where he was.

It took five minutes for the entire preposterousness of the thing

to filter into Mr. Bixby's system, and then I judge it filled

him nearly up to the chin; because he paid me a compliment--

and not much of a one either.  He said,



'Well, taking you by-and-large, you do seem to be more

different kinds of an ass than any creature I ever saw before.

What did you suppose he wanted to know for?'



I said I thought it might be a convenience to him.



'Convenience D-nation! Didn't I tell you that a man's got to know the river

in the night the same as he'd know his own front hall?'



'Well, I can follow the front hall in the dark if I know it IS the front hall;

but suppose you set me down in the middle of it in the dark and not tell me

which hall it is; how am I to know?'



'Well you've GOT to, on the river!'



'All right.  Then I'm glad I never said anything to Mr. W----'



'I should say so.  Why, he'd have slammed you through the window and utterly

ruined a hundred dollars' worth of window-sash and stuff.'



I was glad this damage had been saved, for it would have made

me unpopular with the owners.  They always hated anybody

who had the name of being careless, and injuring things.



I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding

and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands on,

that was the chief.  I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded point that

projected far into the river some miles ahead of me, and go to laboriously

photographing its shape upon my brain; and just as I was beginning to

succeed to my satisfaction, we would draw up toward it and the exasperating

thing would begin to melt away and fold back into the bank!  If there

had been a conspicuous dead tree standing upon the very point of the cape,

I would find that tree inconspicuously merged into the general forest,

and occupying the middle of a straight shore, when I got abreast of it!

No prominent hill would stick to its shape long enough for me to make up

my mind what its form really was, but it was as dissolving and changeful

as if it had been a mountain of butter in the hottest corner of the tropics.

Nothing ever had the same shape when I was coming downstream that it had

borne when I went up.  I mentioned these little difficulties to Mr. Bixby.

He said--



'That's the very main virtue of the thing.  If the shapes

didn't change every three seconds they wouldn't be of any use.

Take this place where we are now, for instance.

As long as that hill over yonder is only one hill, I can boom

right along the way I'm going; but the moment it splits at

the top and forms a V, I know I've got to scratch to starboard

in a hurry, or I'll bang this boat's brains out against a rock;

and then the moment one of the prongs of the V swings behind

the other, I've got to waltz to larboard again, or I'll have

a misunderstanding with a snag that would snatch the keelson out

of this steamboat as neatly as if it were a sliver in your hand.

If that hill didn't change its shape on bad nights there

would be an awful steamboat grave-yard around here inside

of a year.'



It was plain that I had got to learn the shape of the river

in all the different ways that could be thought of,--upside down,

wrong end first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and 'thortships,'--and then

know what to do on gray nights when it hadn't any shape at all.

So I set about it.  In the course of time I began to get the best of this

knotty lesson, and my self-complacency moved to the front once more.

Mr. Bixby was all fixed, and ready to start it to the rear again.

He opened on me after this fashion--



'How much water did we have in the middle crossing at Hole-in-the-Wall,

trip before last?'



I considered this an outrage.  I said--



'Every trip, down and up, the leadsmen are singing through

that tangled place for three-quarters of an hour on a stretch.

How do you reckon I can remember such a mess as that?'



'My boy, you've got to remember it.  You've got to remember

the exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had

the shoalest water, in everyone of the five hundred shoal places

between St. Louis and New Orleans; and you mustn't get the shoal

soundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the shoal soundings

and marks of another, either, for they're not often twice alike.

You must keep them separate.'



When I came to myself again, I said--



'When I get so that I can do that, I'll be able to raise the dead,

and then I won't have to pilot a steamboat to make a living.

I want to retire from this business.  I want a slush-bucket and a brush;

I'm only fit for a roustabout.  I haven't got brains enough to be a pilot;

and if I had I wouldn't have strength enough to carry them around,

unless I went on crutches.'



'Now drop that!  When I say I'll learn<footnote ['Teach' is

not in the river vocabulary.]> a man the river, I mean it.

And you can depend on it, I'll learn him or kill him.'









                                Chapter 9

                         Continued Perplexities



THERE was no use in arguing with a person like this.  I promptly

put such a strain on my memory that by and by even the shoal

water and the countless crossing-marks began to stay with me.

But the result was just the same.  I never could more than get

one knotty thing learned before another presented itself.

Now I had often seen pilots gazing at the water and pretending to read

it as if it were a book; but it was a book that told me nothing.

A time came at last, however, when Mr. Bixby seemed to think me far

enough advanced to bear a lesson on water-reading. So he began--



'Do you see that long slanting line on the face of the water?  Now,

that's a reef.  Moreover, it's a bluff reef.  There is a solid sand-bar

under it that is nearly as straight up and down as the side of a house.

There is plenty of water close up to it, but mighty little on top of it.

If you were to hit it you would knock the boat's brains out.

Do you see where the line fringes out at the upper end and begins to

fade away?'



'Yes, sir.'



'Well, that is a low place; that is the head of the reef.

You can climb over there, and not hurt anything.  Cross over,

now, and follow along close under the reef--easy water there--

not much current.'



I followed the reef along till I approached the fringed end.

Then Mr. Bixby said--



'Now get ready.  Wait till I give the word.  She won't want to mount the reef;

a boat hates shoal water.  Stand by--wait--WAIT--keep her well in hand.

NOW cramp her down!  Snatch her! snatch her!'



He seized the other side of the wheel and helped to spin

it around until it was hard down, and then we held it so.

The boat resisted, and refused to answer for a while, and next she

came surging to starboard, mounted the reef, and sent a long,

angry ridge of water foaming away from her bows.



'Now watch her; watch her like a cat, or she'll get away from you.

When she fights strong and the tiller slips a little,

in a jerky, greasy sort of way, let up on her a trifle;

it is the way she tells you at night that the water is too shoal;

but keep edging her up, little by little, toward the point.

You are well up on the bar, now; there is a bar under every point,

because the water that comes down around it forms an eddy

and allows the sediment to sink.  Do you see those fine lines

on the face of the water that branch out like the ribs of a fan.

Well, those are little reefs; you want to just miss the ends

of them, but run them pretty close.  Now look out--look out!

Don't you crowd that slick, greasy-looking place; there ain't

nine feet there; she won't stand it.  She begins to smell it;

look sharp, I tell you!  Oh blazes, there you go!

Stop the starboard wheel!  Quick!  Ship up to back!

Set her back!



The engine bells jingled and the engines answered promptly,

shooting white columns of steam far aloft out of the 'scape pipes,

but it was too late.  The boat had 'smelt' the bar in good earnest;

the foamy ridges that radiated from her bows suddenly disappeared,

a great dead swell came rolling forward and swept ahead of her,

she careened far over to larboard, and went tearing away

toward the other shore as if she were about scared to death.

We were a good mile from where we ought to have been, when we

finally got the upper hand of her again.



During the afternoon watch the next day, Mr. Bixby asked me if I

knew how to run the next few miles.  I said--



'Go inside the first snag above the point, outside the next one,

start out from the lower end of Higgins's wood-yard, make

a square crossing and----'



'That's all right.  I'll be back before you close up on the next point.'



But he wasn't. He was still below when I rounded it and entered upon

a piece of river which I had some misgivings about.  I did not know

that he was hiding behind a chimney to see how I would perform.

I went gaily along, getting prouder and prouder, for he had never

left the boat in my sole charge such a length of time before.

I even got to 'setting' her and letting the wheel go, entirely, while I

vaingloriously turned my back and inspected the stem marks and hummed a tune,

a sort of easy indifference which I had prodigiously admired in Bixby

and other great pilots.  Once I inspected rather long, and when I faced

to the front again my heart flew into my mouth so suddenly that if I hadn't

clapped my teeth together I should have lost it.  One of those frightful

bluff reefs was stretching its deadly length right across our bows!

My head was gone in a moment; I did not know which end I stood on;

I gasped and could not get my breath; I spun the wheel down with such

rapidity that it wove itself together like a spider's web; the boat

answered and turned square away from the reef, but the reef followed her!

I fled, and still it followed, still it kept--right across my bows!

I never looked to see where I was going, I only fled.

The awful crash was imminent--why didn't that villain come!

If I committed the crime of ringing a bell, I might get thrown overboard.

But better that than kill the boat.  So in blind desperation I started

such a rattling 'shivaree' down below as never had astounded an engineer

in this world before, I fancy.  Amidst the frenzy of the bells the engines

began to back and fill in a furious way, and my reason forsook its throne--

we were about to crash into the woods on the other side of the river.

Just then Mr. Bixby stepped calmly into view on the hurricane deck.

My soul went out to him in gratitude.  My distress vanished; I would have

felt safe on the brink of Niagara, with Mr. Bixby on the hurricane deck.

He blandly and sweetly took his tooth-pick out of his mouth between

his fingers, as if it were a cigar--we were just in the act of climbing

an overhanging big tree, and the passengers were scudding astern like rats--

and lifted up these commands to me ever so gently--



'Stop the starboard.  Stop the larboard.  Set her back on both.'



The boat hesitated, halted, pressed her nose among the boughs

a critical instant, then reluctantly began to back away.



'Stop the larboard.  Come ahead on it.  Stop the starboard.

Come ahead on it.  Point her for the bar.'



I sailed away as serenely as a summer's morning Mr. Bixby came in and said,

with mock simplicity--



'When you have a hail, my boy, you ought to tap the big bell three times

before you land, so that the engineers can get ready.'



I blushed under the sarcasm, and said I hadn't had any hail.



'Ah!  Then it was for wood, I suppose.  The officer of the watch

will tell you when he wants to wood up.'



I went on consuming and said I wasn't after wood.



'Indeed?  Why, what could you want over here in the bend, then?

Did you ever know of a boat following a bend up-stream at this

stage of the river?'



'No sir,--and I wasn't trying to follow it.  I was getting away

from a bluff reef.'



'No, it wasn't a bluff reef; there isn't one within three miles

of where you were.'



'But I saw it.  It was as bluff as that one yonder.'



'Just about.  Run over it!'



'Do you give it as an order?'



'Yes.  Run over it.'



'If I don't, I wish I may die.'



'All right; I am taking the responsibility.'  I was just as

anxious to kill the boat, now, as I had been to save her before.

I impressed my orders upon my memory, to be used at the inquest,

and made a straight break for the reef.  As it disappeared under

our bows I held my breath; but we slid over it like oil.



'Now don't you see the difference?  It wasn't anything but a WIND reef.

The wind does that.'



'So I see.  But it is exactly like a bluff reef.

How am I ever going to tell them apart?'



'I can't tell you.  It is an instinct.  By and by you will just naturally

KNOW one from the other, but you never will be able to explain why or how you

know them apart'



It turned out to be true.  The face of the water, in time,

became a wonderful book--a book that was a dead language to the

uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve,

delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered

them with a voice.  And it was not a book to be read once

and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.

Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page

that was void of interest, never one that you could leave

unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip,

thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing.

There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one

whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparkingly

renewed with every re-perusal. The passenger who could not read it

was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface

(on the rare occasions when he did not overlook it altogether);

but to the pilot that was an ITALICIZED passage; indeed, it was

more than that, it was a legend of the largest capitals,

with a string of shouting exclamation points at the end of it;

for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could

tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated.

It is the faintest and simplest expression the water ever makes,

and the most hideous to a pilot's eye.  In truth, the passenger

who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty

pictures in it painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds,

whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all,

but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading-matter.



Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know

every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I

knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition.

But I had lost something, too.  I had lost something which could never

be restored to me while I lived.  All the grace, the beauty, the poetry

had gone out of the majestic river!  I still keep in mind a certain

wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me.

A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance

the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating,

black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon

the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings,

that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest,

was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines,

ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded,

and the somber shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place

by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest

wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed

like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun.

There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances;

and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted

steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring.



I stood like one bewitched.  I drank it in, in a speechless rapture.

The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home.

But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories

and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon

the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them.

Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon

it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after

this fashion:  This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow;

that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it;

that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going

to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching

out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing

channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder

are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously;

that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the 'break' from a new snag,

and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found

to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch,

is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through

this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark.



No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river.

All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount

of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting

of a steamboat.  Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart.

What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor

but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease.

Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him

the signs and symbols of hidden decay?  Does he ever see her

beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally,

and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself?

And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost

most by learning his trade?









                               Chapter 10

                         Completing My Education



WHOSOEVER has done me the courtesy to read my chapters which have preceded

this may possibly wonder that I deal so minutely with piloting as a science.

It was the prime purpose of those chapters; and I am not quite done yet.

I wish to show, in the most patient and painstaking way, what a wonderful

science it is.  Ship channels are buoyed and lighted, and therefore it is

a comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run them; clear-water rivers,

with gravel bottoms, change their channels very gradually, and therefore

one needs to learn them but once; but piloting becomes another matter

when you apply it to vast streams like the Mississippi and the Missouri,

whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always

hunting up new quarters, whose sand-bars are never at rest, whose channels

are for ever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions must be

confronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a single

light-house or a single buoy; for there is neither light nor buoy to be

found anywhere in all this three or four thousand miles of villainous

river.<footnote [True at the time referred to; not true now (1882).]>  I

feel justified in enlarging upon this great science for the reason that I

feel sure no one has ever yet written a paragraph about it who had piloted

a steamboat himself, and so had a practical knowledge of the subject.

If the theme were hackneyed, I should be obliged to deal gently with

the reader; but since it is wholly new, I have felt at liberty to take up

a considerable degree of room with it.



When I had learned the name and position of every visible

feature of the river; when I had so mastered its shape that I

could shut my eyes and trace it from St. Louis to New Orleans;

when I had learned to read the face of the water as one would

cull the news from the morning paper; and finally, when I

had trained my dull memory to treasure up an endless array

of soundings and crossing-marks, and keep fast hold of them,

I judged that my education was complete:  so I got to tilting

my cap to the side of my head, and wearing a tooth-pick in my

mouth at the wheel.  Mr. Bixby had his eye on these airs.

One day he said--



'What is the height of that bank yonder, at Burgess's?'



'How can I tell, sir.  It is three-quarters of a mile away.'



'Very poor eye--very poor.  Take the glass.'



I took the glass, and presently said--'I can't tell.

I suppose that that bank is about a foot and a half high.'



'Foot and a half!  That's a six-foot bank.  How high was the bank

along here last trip?'



'I don't know; I never noticed.'



'You didn't? Well, you must always do it hereafter.'



'Why?'



'Because you'll have to know a good many things that it tells you.

For one thing, it tells you the stage of the river--tells you whether

there's more water or less in the river along here than there

was last trip.'



'The leads tell me that.'  I rather thought I had the advantage

of him there.



'Yes, but suppose the leads lie?  The bank would tell you so,

and then you'd stir those leadsmen up a bit.  There was a ten-foot

bank here last trip, and there is only a six-foot bank now.

What does that signify?'



'That the river is four feet higher than it was last trip.'



'Very good.  Is the river rising or falling?'



'Rising.'



'No it ain't.'



'I guess I am right, sir.  Yonder is some drift-wood floating

down the stream.'



'A rise starts the drift-wood, but then it keeps on floating a while after

the river is done rising.  Now the bank will tell you about this.  Wait till

you come to a place where it shelves a little.  Now here; do you see this

narrow belt of fine sediment That was deposited while the water was higher.

You see the driftwood begins to strand, too.  The bank helps in other ways.

Do you see that stump on the false point?'



'Ay, ay, sir.'



'Well, the water is just up to the roots of it.

You must make a note of that.'



'Why?'



'Because that means that there's seven feet in the chute of 103.'



'But 103 is a long way up the river yet.'



'That's where the benefit of the bank comes in.  There is water

enough in 103 NOW, yet there may not be by the time we get there;

but the bank will keep us posted all along.  You don't run close

chutes on a falling river, up-stream, and there are precious few

of them that you are allowed to run at all down-stream. There's

a law of the United States against it.  The river may be rising

by the time we get to 103, and in that case we'll run it.

We are drawing--how much?'



'Six feet aft,--six and a half forward.'



'Well, you do seem to know something.'



'But what I particularly want to know is, if I have got to keep up an

everlasting measuring of the banks of this river, twelve hundred miles,

month in and month out?'



'Of course!'



My emotions were too deep for words for a while.

Presently I said--'



And how about these chutes.  Are there many of them?'



'I should say so.  I fancy we shan't run any of the river this trip

as you've ever seen it run before--so to speak.  If the river begins

to rise again, we'll go up behind bars that you've always seen

standing out of the river, high and dry like the roof of a house;

we'll cut across low places that you've never noticed at all,

right through the middle of bars that cover three hundred acres of river;

we'll creep through cracks where you've always thought was solid land;

we'll dart through the woods and leave twenty-five miles of river

off to one side; we'll see the hind-side of every island between New

Orleans and Cairo.'



'Then I've got to go to work and learn just as much more river

as I already know.'



'Just about twice as much more, as near as you can come at it.'



'Well, one lives to find out.  I think I was a fool when I went

into this business.'



'Yes, that is true.  And you are yet.  But you'll not be

when you've learned it.'



'Ah, I never can learn it.'



'I will see that you DO.'



By and by I ventured again--



'Have I got to learn all this thing just as I know the rest of the river--

shapes and all--and so I can run it at night?'



'Yes.  And you've got to have good fair marks from one end

of the river to the other, that will help the bank tell you

when there is water enough in each of these countless places--

like that stump, you know.  When the river first begins

to rise, you can run half a dozen of the deepest of them;

when it rises a foot more you can run another dozen;

the next foot will add a couple of dozen, and so on:

so you see you have to know your banks and marks to a dead

moral certainty, and never get them mixed; for when you start

through one of those cracks, there's no backing out again,

as there is in the big river; you've got to go through,

or stay there six months if you get caught on a falling river.

There are about fifty of these cracks which you can't run at all

except when the river is brim full and over the banks.'



'This new lesson is a cheerful prospect.'



'Cheerful enough.  And mind what I've just told you; when you

start into one of those places you've got to go through.

They are too narrow to turn around in, too crooked to back out of,

and the shoal water is always up at the head; never elsewhere.

And the head of them is always likely to be filling up, little by little,

so that the marks you reckon their depth by, this season, may not

answer for next.'



'Learn a new set, then, every year?'



'Exactly.  Cramp her up to the bar!  What are you standing up

through the middle of the river for?'



The next few months showed me strange things.  On the same day that we held

the conversation above narrated, we met a great rise coming down the river.

The whole vast face of the stream was black with drifting dead logs,

broken boughs, and great trees that had caved in and been washed away.

It required the nicest steering to pick one's way through this

rushing raft, even in the day-time, when crossing from point to point;

and at night the difficulty was mightily increased; every now and then

a huge log, lying deep in the water, would suddenly appear right

under our bows, coming head-on; no use to try to avoid it then;

we could only stop the engines, and one wheel would walk over that log

from one end to the other, keeping up a thundering racket and careening

the boat in a way that was very uncomfortable to passengers.

Now and then we would hit one of these sunken logs a rattling bang,

dead in the center, with a full head of steam, and it would stun the boat

as if she had hit a continent.  Sometimes this log would lodge, and stay

right across our nose, and back the Mississippi up before it; we would

have to do a little craw-fishing, then, to get away from the obstruction.

We often hit WHITE logs, in the dark, for we could not see them till we

were right on them; but a black log is a pretty distinct object at night.

A white snag is an ugly customer when the daylight is gone.



Of course, on the great rise, down came a swarm of prodigious

timber-rafts from the head waters of the Mississippi,

coal barges from Pittsburgh, little trading scows from everywhere,

and broad-horns from 'Posey County,' Indiana, freighted with 'fruit

and furniture'--the usual term for describing it, though in plain

English the freight thus aggrandized was hoop-poles and pumpkins.

Pilots bore a mortal hatred to these craft; and it was returned

with usury.  The law required all such helpless traders to keep

a light burning, but it was a law that was often broken.

All of a sudden, on a murky night, a light would hop up,

right under our bows, almost, and an agonized voice,

with the backwoods 'whang' to it, would wail out--



'Whar'n the ---- you goin' to!  Cain't you see nothin', you dash-dashed

aig-suckin', sheep-stealin', one-eyed son of a stuffed monkey!'



Then for an instant, as we whistled by, the red glare from our furnaces

would reveal the scow and the form of the gesticulating orator

as if under a lightning-flash, and in that instant our firemen and

deck-hands would send and receive a tempest of missiles and profanity,

one of our wheels would walk off with the crashing fragments

of a steering-oar, and down the dead blackness would shut again.

And that flatboatman would be sure to go into New Orleans and sue

our boat, swearing stoutly that he had a light burning all the time,

when in truth his gang had the lantern down below to sing and lie

and drink and gamble by, and no watch on deck.  Once, at night, in one

of those forest-bordered crevices (behind an island) which steamboatmen

intensely describe with the phrase 'as dark as the inside of a cow,'

we should have eaten up a Posey County family, fruit, furniture, and all,

but that they happened to be fiddling down below, and we just caught

the sound of the music in time to sheer off, doing no serious damage,

unfortunately, but coming so near it that we had good hopes for a moment.

These people brought up their lantern, then, of course; and as we backed

and filled to get away, the precious family stood in the light of it--

both sexes and various ages--and cursed us till everything turned blue.

Once a coalboatman sent a bullet through our pilot-house, when we borrowed a

steering oar of him in a very narrow place.









                               Chapter 11

                             The River Rises



DURING this big rise these small-fry craft were an intolerable nuisance.

We were running chute after chute,--a new world to me,--and if there was

a particularly cramped place in a chute, we would be pretty sure to meet

a broad-horn there; and if he failed to be there, we would find him in a

still worse locality, namely, the head of the chute, on the shoal water.

And then there would be no end of profane cordialities exchanged.



Sometimes, in the big river, when we would be feeling our way

cautiously along through a fog, the deep hush would suddenly

be broken by yells and a clamor of tin pans, and all in instant

a log raft would appear vaguely through the webby veil,

close upon us; and then we did not wait to swap knives,

but snatched our engine bells out by the roots and piled

on all the steam we had, to scramble out of the way!

One doesn't hit a rock or a solid log craft with a steamboat

when he can get excused.



You will hardly believe it, but many steamboat clerks always

carried a large assortment of religious tracts with them

in those old departed steamboating days.  Indeed they did.

Twenty times a day we would be cramping up around a bar,

while a string of these small-fry rascals were drifting down into

the head of the bend away above and beyond us a couple of miles.

Now a skiff would dart away from one of them, and come fighting

its laborious way across the desert of water.  It would 'ease all,'

in the shadow of our forecastle, and the panting oarsmen would shout,

'Gimme a pa-a-per!' as the skiff drifted swiftly astern.

The clerk would throw over a file of New Orleans journals.

If these were picked up without comment, you might notice that now a dozen

other skiffs had been drifting down upon us without saying anything.

You understand, they had been waiting to see how No. 1 was going to fare.

No. 1 making no comment, all the rest would bend to their oars

and come on, now; and as fast as they came the clerk would

heave over neat bundles of religious tracts, tied to shingles.

The amount of hard swearing which twelve packages of religious literature

will command when impartially divided up among twelve raftsmen's crews,

who have pulled a heavy skiff two miles on a hot day to get them,

is simply incredible.



As I have said, the big rise brought a new world under my vision.

By the time the river was over its banks we had forsaken our old paths and

were hourly climbing over bars that had stood ten feet out of water before;

we were shaving stumpy shores, like that at the foot of Madrid Bend, which I

had always seen avoided before; we were clattering through chutes like that

of 82, where the opening at the foot was an unbroken wall of timber till our

nose was almost at the very spot.  Some of these chutes were utter solitudes.

The dense, untouched forest overhung both banks of the crooked little crack,

and one could believe that human creatures had never intruded there before.

The swinging grape-vines, the grassy nooks and vistas glimpsed as we swept by,

the flowering creepers waving their red blossoms from the tops of dead trunks,

and all the spendthrift richness of the forest foliage, were wasted and thrown

away there.  The chutes were lovely places to steer in; they were deep,

except at the head; the current was gentle; under the 'points' the water

was absolutely dead, and the invisible banks so bluff that where the tender

willow thickets projected you could bury your boat's broadside in them as you

tore along, and then you seemed fairly to fly.



Behind other islands we found wretched little farms, and wretcheder

little log-cabins; there were crazy rail fences sticking a foot

or two above the water, with one or two jeans-clad, chills-racked,

yellow-faced male miserables roosting on the top-rail, elbows

on knees, jaws in hands, grinding tobacco and discharging

the result at floating chips through crevices left by lost teeth;

while the rest of the family and the few farm-animals were huddled

together in an empty wood-flat riding at her moorings close at hand.

In this flat-boat the family would have to cook and eat

and sleep for a lesser or greater number of days (or possibly

weeks), until the river should fall two or three feet and let

them get back to their log-cabin and their chills again--

chills being a merciful provision of an all-wise Providence

to enable them to take exercise without exertion.

And this sort of watery camping out was a thing which these people

were rather liable to be treated to a couple of times a year:

by the December rise out of the Ohio, and the June rise out

of the Mississippi.  And yet these were kindly dispensations,

for they at least enabled the poor things to rise from the dead

now and then, and look upon life when a steamboat went by.

They appreciated the blessing, too, for they spread their mouths

and eyes wide open and made the most of these occasions.

Now what COULD these banished creatures find to do to keep from dying

of the blues during the low-water season!



Once, in one of these lovely island chutes, we found

our course completely bridged by a great fallen tree.

This will serve to show how narrow some of the chutes were.

The passengers had an hour's recreation in a virgin wilderness,

while the boat-hands chopped the bridge away; for there was no such

thing as turning back, you comprehend.



From Cairo to Baton Rouge, when the river is over its banks, you have

no particular trouble in the night, for the thousand-mile wall of dense

forest that guards the two banks all the way is only gapped with a farm

or wood-yard opening at intervals, and so you can't 'get out of the river'

much easier than you could get out of a fenced lane; but from Baton

Rouge to New Orleans it is a different matter.  The river is more than

a mile wide, and very deep--as much as two hundred feet, in places.

Both banks, for a good deal over a hundred miles, are shorn of their timber

and bordered by continuous sugar plantations, with only here and there

a scattering sapling or row of ornamental China-trees. The timber is

shorn off clear to the rear of the plantations, from two to four miles.

When the first frost threatens to come, the planters snatch off

their crops in a hurry.  When they have finished grinding the cane,

they form the refuse of the stalks (which they call BAGASSE)

into great piles and set fire to them, though in other sugar countries

the bagasse is used for fuel in the furnaces of the sugar mills.

Now the piles of damp bagasse burn slowly, and smoke like Satan's own kitchen.



An embankment ten or fifteen feet high guards both banks of the Mississippi

all the way down that lower end of the river, and this embankment is set

back from the edge of the shore from ten to perhaps a hundred feet,

according to circumstances; say thirty or forty feet, as a general thing.

Fill that whole region with an impenetrable gloom of smoke from a hundred

miles of burning bagasse piles, when the river is over the banks, and turn

a steamboat loose along there at midnight and see how she will feel.

And see how you will feel, too!  You find yourself away out in the midst

of a vague dim sea that is shoreless, that fades out and loses itself

in the murky distances; for you cannot discern the thin rib of embankment,

and you are always imagining you see a straggling tree when you don't. The

plantations themselves are transformed by the smoke, and look like a part

of the sea.  All through your watch you are tortured with the exquisite misery

of uncertainty.  You hope you are keeping in the river, but you do not know.

All that you are sure about is that you are likely to be within six feet of

the bank and destruction, when you think you are a good half-mile from shore.

And you are sure, also, that if you chance suddenly to fetch up against

the embankment and topple your chimneys overboard, you will have the small

comfort of knowing that it is about what you were expecting to do.

One of the great Vicksburg packets darted out into a sugar plantation

one night, at such a time, and had to stay there a week.  But there was no

novelty about it; it had often been done before.



I thought I had finished this chapter, but I wish

to add a curious thing, while it is in my mind.

It is only relevant in that it is connected with piloting.

There used to be an excellent pilot on the river, a Mr. X.,

who was a somnambulist.  It was said that if his mind was

troubled about a bad piece of river, he was pretty sure

to get up and walk in his sleep and do strange things.

He was once fellow-pilot for a trip or two with George Ealer,

on a great New Orleans passenger packet.  During a considerable

part of the first trip George was uneasy, but got over it

by and by, as X. seemed content to stay in his bed when asleep.

Late one night the boat was approaching Helena, Arkansas; the water

was low, and the crossing above the town in a very blind and

tangled condition.  X. had seen the crossing since Ealer had,

and as the night was particularly drizzly, sullen, and dark,

Ealer was considering whether he had not better have X. called to

assist in running the place, when the door opened and X. walked in.

Now on very dark nights, light is a deadly enemy to piloting;

you are aware that if you stand in a lighted room, on such

a night, you cannot see things in the street to any purpose;

but if you put out the lights and stand in the gloom you can make

out objects in the street pretty well.  So, on very dark nights,

pilots do not smoke; they allow no fire in the pilot-house

stove if there is a crack which can allow the least ray

to escape; they order the furnaces to be curtained with huge

tarpaulins and the sky-lights to be closely blinded.

Then no light whatever issues from the boat.  The undefinable

shape that now entered the pilot-house had Mr. X.'s voice.

This said--



'Let me take her, George; I've seen this place since you have,

and it is so crooked that I reckon I can run it myself easier

than I could tell you how to do it.'



'It is kind of you, and I swear _I_ am willing.

I haven't got another drop of perspiration left in me.

I have been spinning around and around the wheel like a squirrel.

It is so dark I can't tell which way she is swinging till she is

coming around like a whirligig.'



So Ealer took a seat on the bench, panting and breathless.

The black phantom assumed the wheel without saying anything,

steadied the waltzing steamer with a turn or two, and then stood

at ease, coaxing her a little to this side and then to that,

as gently and as sweetly as if the time had been noonday.

When Ealer observed this marvel of steering, he wished he had

not confessed!  He stared, and wondered, and finally said--



'Well, I thought I knew how to steer a steamboat, but that was

another mistake of mine.'



X. said nothing, but went serenely on with his work.  He rang for the leads;

he rang to slow down the steam; he worked the boat carefully and neatly

into invisible marks, then stood at the center of the wheel and peered

blandly out into the blackness, fore and aft, to verify his position;

as the leads shoaled more and more, he stopped the engines entirely,

and the dead silence and suspense of 'drifting' followed when the shoalest

water was struck, he cracked on the steam, carried her handsomely over,

and then began to work her warily into the next system of shoal marks;

the same patient, heedful use of leads and engines followed, the boat

slipped through without touching bottom, and entered upon the third and

last intricacy of the crossing; imperceptibly she moved through the gloom,

crept by inches into her marks, drifted tediously till the shoalest water

was cried, and then, under a tremendous head of steam, went swinging over

the reef and away into deep water and safety!



Ealer let his long-pent breath pour out in a great, relieving sigh, and said--



'That's the sweetest piece of piloting that was ever done on

the Mississippi River!  I wouldn't believed it could be done,

if I hadn't seen it.'



There was no reply, and he added--



'Just hold her five minutes longer, partner, and let me run down and get

a cup of coffee.'



A minute later Ealer was biting into a pie, down in the 'texas,'

and comforting himself with coffee.  Just then the night watchman

happened in, and was about to happen out again, when he noticed

Ealer and exclaimed--



'Who is at the wheel, sir?'



'X.'



'Dart for the pilot-house, quicker than lightning!'



The next moment both men were flying up the pilot-house companion way,

three steps at a jump!  Nobody there!  The great steamer was

whistling down the middle of the river at her own sweet will!

The watchman shot out of the place again; Ealer seized the wheel,

set an engine back with power, and held his breath while the boat

reluctantly swung away from a 'towhead' which she was about to knock

into the middle of the Gulf of Mexico!



By and by the watchman came back and said--



'Didn't that lunatic tell you he was asleep, when he first came up here?'



'NO.'



'Well, he was.  I found him walking along on top of the railings

just as unconcerned as another man would walk a pavement;

and I put him to bed; now just this minute there he was again,

away astern, going through that sort of tight-rope deviltry

the same as before.'



'Well, I think I'll stay by, next time he has one of those fits.

But I hope he'll have them often.  You just ought to have seen him take

this boat through Helena crossing.  I never saw anything so gaudy before.

And if he can do such gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond-breastpin piloting

when he is sound asleep, what COULDN'T he do if he was dead!'









                               Chapter 12

                                Sounding



WHEN the river is very low, and one's steamboat is 'drawing all the water'

there is in the channel,--or a few inches more, as was often the case

in the old times,--one must be painfully circumspect in his piloting.

We used to have to 'sound' a number of particularly bad places almost every

trip when the river was at a very low stage.



Sounding is done in this way.  The boat ties up at the shore, just above

the shoal crossing; the pilot not on watch takes his 'cub' or steersman

and a picked crew of men (sometimes an officer also), and goes out

in the yawl--provided the boat has not that rare and sumptuous luxury,

a regularly-devised 'sounding-boat'--and proceeds to hunt for the best water,

the pilot on duty watching his movements through a spy-glass, meantime,

and in some instances assisting by signals of the boat's whistle,

signifying 'try higher up' or 'try lower down;' for the surface of

the water, like an oil-painting, is more expressive and intelligible

when inspected from a little distance than very close at hand.

The whistle signals are seldom necessary, however; never, perhaps, except when

the wind confuses the significant ripples upon the water's surface.

When the yawl has reached the shoal place, the speed is slackened,

the pilot begins to sound the depth with a pole ten or twelve feet long,

and the steersman at the tiller obeys the order to 'hold her up

to starboard;' or, 'let her fall off to larboard;'<footnote [The

term 'larboard' is never used at sea now, to signify the left hand;

but was always used on the river in my time]> or 'steady--steady

as you go.'



When the measurements indicate that the yawl is approaching

the shoalest part of the reef, the command is given to 'ease all!'

Then the men stop rowing and the yawl drifts with the current.

The next order is, 'Stand by with the buoy!'  The moment

the shallowest point is reached, the pilot delivers the order,

'Let go the buoy!' and over she goes.  If the pilot is

not satisfied, he sounds the place again; if he finds better water

higher up or lower down, he removes the buoy to that place.

Being finally satisfied, he gives the order, and all the men

stand their oars straight up in the air, in line; a blast from

the boat's whistle indicates that the signal has been seen;

then the men 'give way' on their oars and lay the yawl

alongside the buoy; the steamer comes creeping carefully down,

is pointed straight at the buoy, husbands her power for

the coming struggle, and presently, at the critical moment,

turns on all her steam and goes grinding and wallowing over

the buoy and the sand, and gains the deep water beyond.

Or maybe she doesn't; maybe she 'strikes and swings.'

Then she has to while away several hours (or days)

sparring herself off.



Sometimes a buoy is not laid at all, but the yawl goes ahead,

hunting the best water, and the steamer follows along in its wake.

Often there is a deal of fun and excitement about sounding,

especially if it is a glorious summer day, or a blustering night.

But in winter the cold and the peril take most of the fun out of it.



A buoy is nothing but a board four or five feet long,

with one end turned up; it is a reversed school-house bench,

with one of the supports left and the other removed.

It is anchored on the shoalest part of the reef by a

rope with a heavy stone made fast to the end of it.

But for the resistance of the turned-up end of the reversed bench,

the current would pull the buoy under water.  At night, a paper

lantern with a candle in it is fastened on top of the buoy,

and this can be seen a mile or more, a little glimmering spark in

the waste of blackness.



Nothing delights a cub so much as an opportunity to go out sounding.

There is such an air of adventure about it; often there is danger;

it is so gaudy and man-of-war-like to sit up in the stern-sheets and steer

a swift yawl; there is something fine about the exultant spring of the boat

when an experienced old sailor crew throw their souls into the oars;

it is lovely to see the white foam stream away from the bows; there is

music in the rush of the water; it is deliciously exhilarating, in summer,

to go speeding over the breezy expanses of the river when the world

of wavelets is dancing in the sun.  It is such grandeur, too, to the cub,

to get a chance to give an order; for often the pilot will simply say,

'Let her go about!' and leave the rest to the cub, who instantly cries,

in his sternest tone of command, 'Ease starboard!  Strong on the larboard!

Starboard give way!  With a will, men!'  The cub enjoys sounding

for the further reason that the eyes of the passengers are watching all

the yawl's movements with absorbing interest if the time be daylight;

and if it be night he knows that those same wondering eyes are fastened

upon the yawl's lantern as it glides out into the gloom and dims away

in the remote distance.



One trip a pretty girl of sixteen spent her time in our pilot-house

with her uncle and aunt, every day and all day long.  I fell in love

with her.  So did Mr. Thornburg's cub, Tom G----. Tom and I had been

bosom friends until this time; but now a coolness began to arise.

I told the girl a good many of my river adventures, and made

myself out a good deal of a hero; Tom tried to make himself appear

to be a hero, too, and succeeded to some extent, but then he always

had a way of embroidering.  However, virtue is its own reward,

so I was a barely perceptible trifle ahead in the contest.

About this time something happened which promised handsomely for me:

the pilots decided to sound the crossing at the head of 21.

This would occur about nine or ten o'clock at night, when the

passengers would be still up; it would be Mr. Thornburg's watch,

therefore my chief would have to do the sounding.  We had a perfect

love of a sounding-boat--long, trim, graceful, and as fleet as

a greyhound; her thwarts were cushioned; she carried twelve oarsmen;

one of the mates was always sent in her to transmit orders to her crew,

for ours was a steamer where no end of 'style' was put on.



We tied up at the shore above 21, and got ready.  It was a foul night,

and the river was so wide, there, that a landsman's uneducated

eyes could discern no opposite shore through such a gloom.

The passengers were alert and interested; everything was satisfactory.

As I hurried through the engine-room, picturesquely gotten up

in storm toggery, I met Tom, and could not forbear delivering

myself of a mean speech--



'Ain't you glad YOU don't have to go out sounding?'



Tom was passing on, but he quickly turned, and said--



'Now just for that, you can go and get the sounding-pole yourself.

I was going after it, but I'd see you in Halifax, now, before I'd do it.'



'Who wants you to get it?  I don't. It's in the sounding-boat.'



'It ain't, either.  It's been new-painted; and it's been up on the ladies'

cabin guards two days, drying.'



I flew back, and shortly arrived among the crowd of watching

and wondering ladies just in time to hear the command:



'Give way, men!'



I looked over, and there was the gallant sounding-boat booming away,

the unprincipled Tom presiding at the tiller, and my chief sitting by him

with the sounding-pole which I had been sent on a fool's errand to fetch.

Then that young girl said to me--



'Oh, how awful to have to go out in that little boat on such a night!

Do you think there is any danger?'



I would rather have been stabbed.  I went off, full of venom,

to help in the pilot-house. By and by the boat's lantern disappeared,

and after an interval a wee spark glimmered upon the face of the water

a mile away.  Mr. Thornburg blew the whistle, in acknowledgment,

backed the steamer out, and made for it.  We flew along for a while,

then slackened steam and went cautiously gliding toward the spark.

Presently Mr. Thornburg exclaimed--



'Hello, the buoy-lantern's out!'



He stopped the engines.  A moment or two later he said--



'Why, there it is again!'



So he came ahead on the engines once more, and rang for the leads.

Gradually the water shoaled up, and then began to deepen again!

Mr. Thornburg muttered--



'Well, I don't understand this.  I believe that buoy has drifted

off the reef.  Seems to be a little too far to the left.

No matter, it is safest to run over it anyhow.'



So, in that solid world of darkness we went creeping down on the light.

Just as our bows were in the act of plowing over it, Mr. Thornburg seized

the bell-ropes, rang a startling peal, and exclaimed--



'My soul, it's the sounding-boat!'



A sudden chorus of wild alarms burst out far below--a pause--

and then the sound of grinding and crashing followed.

Mr. Thornburg exclaimed--



'There! the paddle-wheel has ground the sounding-boat

to lucifer matches!  Run!  See who is killed!'



I was on the main deck in the twinkling of an eye.  My chief and the third

mate and nearly all the men were safe.  They had discovered their danger

when it was too late to pull out of the way; then, when the great guards

overshadowed them a moment later, they were prepared and knew what to do;

at my chiefs order they sprang at the right instant, seized the guard,

and were hauled aboard.  The next moment the sounding-yawl swept aft

to the wheel and was struck and splintered to atoms.  Two of the men and

the cub Tom, were missing--a fact which spread like wildfire over the boat.

The passengers came flocking to the forward gangway, ladies and all,

anxious-eyed, white-faced, and talked in awed voices of the dreadful thing.

And often and again I heard them say, 'Poor fellows! poor boy, poor boy!'



By this time the boat's yawl was manned and away, to search

for the missing.  Now a faint call was heard, off to the left.

The yawl had disappeared in the other direction.  Half the people

rushed to one side to encourage the swimmer with their shouts;

the other half rushed the other way to shriek to the yawl to turn about.

By the callings, the swimmer was approaching, but some said the sound

showed failing strength.  The crowd massed themselves against

the boiler-deck railings, leaning over and staring into the gloom;

and every faint and fainter cry wrung from them such words as,

'Ah, poor fellow, poor fellow! is there no way to save him?'



But still the cries held out, and drew nearer, and presently

the voice said pluckily--



'I can make it!  Stand by with a rope!'



What a rousing cheer they gave him!  The chief mate took his stand

in the glare of a torch-basket, a coil of rope in his hand,

and his men grouped about him.  The next moment the swimmer's face

appeared in the circle of light, and in another one the owner of it

was hauled aboard, limp and drenched, while cheer on cheer went up.

It was that devil Tom.



The yawl crew searched everywhere, but found no sign of the two men.

They probably failed to catch the guard, tumbled back, and were struck

by the wheel and killed.  Tom had never jumped for the guard at all,

but had plunged head-first into the river and dived under the wheel.

It was nothing; I could have done it easy enough, and I said so;

but everybody went on just the same, making a wonderful to do over that ass,

as if he had done something great.  That girl couldn't seem to have

enough of that pitiful 'hero' the rest of the trip; but little I cared;

I loathed her, any way.



The way we came to mistake the sounding-boat's lantern for the

buoy-light was this.  My chief said that after laying the buoy

he fell away and watched it till it seemed to be secure; then he took

up a position a hundred yards below it and a little to one side of

the steamer's course, headed the sounding-boat up-stream, and waited.

Having to wait some time, he and the officer got to talking;

he looked up when he judged that the steamer was about on the reef;

saw that the buoy was gone, but supposed that the steamer had already

run over it; he went on with his talk; he noticed that the steamer

was getting very close on him, but that was the correct thing;

it was her business to shave him closely, for convenience in taking

him aboard; he was expecting her to sheer off, until the last moment;

then it flashed upon him that she was trying to run him down,

mistaking his lantern for the buoy-light; so he sang out,

'Stand by to spring for the guard, men!' and the next instant the

jump was made.









                               Chapter 13

                             A Pilot's Needs



BUT I am wandering from what I was intending to do, that is,

make plainer than perhaps appears in the previous chapters,

some of the peculiar requirements of the science of piloting.

First of all, there is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly

cultivate until he has brought it to absolute perfection.

Nothing short of perfection will do.  That faculty is memory.

He cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is so and so;

he must know it; for this is eminently one of the 'exact' sciences.

With what scorn a pilot was looked upon, in the old times,

if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble phrase 'I think,'

instead of the vigorous one 'I know!'  One cannot easily realize

what a tremendous thing it is to know every trivial detail of twelve

hundred miles of river and know it with absolute exactness.

If you will take the longest street in New York, and travel up

and down it, conning its features patiently until you know every

house and window and door and lamp-post and big and little sign

by heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantly

name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random

in that street in the middle of an inky black night, you will then

have a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of a

pilot's knowledge who carries the Mississippi River in his head.

And then if you will go on until you know every street crossing,

the character, size, and position of the crossing-stones,

and the varying depth of mud in each of those numberless places,

you will have some idea of what the pilot must know in order

to keep a Mississippi steamer out of trouble.  Next, if you

will take half of the signs in that long street, and CHANGE THEIR

PLACES once a month, and still manage to know their new positions

accurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated changes

without making any mistakes, you will understand what is required

of a pilot's peerless memory by the fickle Mississippi.



I think a pilot's memory is about the most wonderful thing

in the world.  To know the Old and New Testaments by heart,

and be able to recite them glibly, forward or backward,

or begin at random anywhere in the book and recite both ways

and never trip or make a mistake, is no extravagant mass

of knowledge, and no marvelous facility, compared to a pilot's

massed knowledge of the Mississippi and his marvelous facility

in the handling of it.  I make this comparison deliberately,

and believe I am not expanding the truth when I do it.

Many will think my figure too strong, but pilots will not.



And how easily and comfortably the pilot's memory does its work;

how placidly effortless is its way; how UNCONSCIOUSLY it lays up

its vast stores, hour by hour, day by day, and never loses or

mislays a single valuable package of them all!  Take an instance.

Let a leadsman cry, 'Half twain! half twain! half twain! half twain!

half twain!' until it become as monotonous as the ticking of a clock;

let conversation be going on all the time, and the pilot be doing

his share of the talking, and no longer consciously listening

to the leadsman; and in the midst of this endless string of half

twains let a single 'quarter twain!' be interjected, without emphasis,

and then the half twain cry go on again, just as before:

two or three weeks later that pilot can describe with precision

the boat's position in the river when that quarter twain

was uttered, and give you such a lot of head-marks, stern-marks,

and side-marks to guide you, that you ought to be able to take

the boat there and put her in that same spot again yourself!

The cry of 'quarter twain' did not really take his mind from his talk,

but his trained faculties instantly photographed the bearings,

noted the change of depth, and laid up the important details for future

reference without requiring any assistance from him in the matter.

If you were walking and talking with a friend, and another friend

at your side kept up a monotonous repetition of the vowel sound A,

for a couple of blocks, and then in the midst interjected an R,

thus, A, A, A, A, A, R, A, A, A, etc., and gave the R no emphasis,

you would not be able to state, two or three weeks afterward,

that the R had been put in, nor be able to tell what objects you

were passing at the moment it was done.  But you could if your

memory had been patiently and laboriously trained to do that sort

of thing mechanically.



Give a man a tolerably fair memory to start with, and piloting

will develop it into a very colossus of capability.

But ONLY IN THE MATTERS IT IS DAILY DRILLED IN.

A time would come when the man's faculties could not help

noticing landmarks and soundings, and his memory could not

help holding on to them with the grip of a vise; but if you

asked that same man at noon what he had had for breakfast,

it would be ten chances to one that he could not tell you.

Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will

devote it faithfully to one particular line of business.



At the time that wages soared so high on the Missouri River, my chief,

Mr. Bixby, went up there and learned more than a thousand miles

of that stream with an ease and rapidity that were astonishing.

When he had seen each division once in the daytime and once at night,

his education was so nearly complete that he took out a 'daylight' license;

a few trips later he took out a full license, and went to piloting day

and night--and he ranked A 1, too.



Mr. Bixby placed me as steersman for a while under a pilot whose feats

of memory were a constant marvel to me.  However, his memory was born

in him, I think, not built.  For instance, somebody would mention a name.

Instantly Mr. Brown would break in--



'Oh, I knew HIM.  Sallow-faced, red-headed fellow, with a

little scar on the side of his throat, like a splinter under

the flesh.  He was only in the Southern trade six months.

That was thirteen years ago.  I made a trip with him.

There was five feet in the upper river then; the "Henry Blake"

grounded at the foot of Tower Island drawing four and a half;

the "George Elliott" unshipped her rudder on the wreck

of the "Sunflower"----'



'Why, the "Sunflower" didn't sink until----'



'I know when she sunk; it was three years before that, on the 2nd of December;

Asa Hardy was captain of her, and his brother John was first clerk;

and it was his first trip in her, too; Tom Jones told me these things

a week afterward in New Orleans; he was first mate of the "Sunflower."

Captain Hardy stuck a nail in his foot the 6th of July of the next year,

and died of the lockjaw on the 15th.  His brother died two years after

3rd of March,--erysipelas.  I never saw either of the Hardys,--they were

Alleghany River men,--but people who knew them told me all these things.

And they said Captain Hardy wore yarn socks winter and summer just the same,

and his first wife's name was Jane Shook--she was from New England--

and his second one died in a lunatic asylum.  It was in the blood.

She was from Lexington, Kentucky.  Name was Horton before she was married.'



And so on, by the hour, the man's tongue would go.

He could NOT forget any thing.  It was simply impossible.

The most trivial details remained as distinct and luminous in his head,

after they had lain there for years, as the most memorable events.

His was not simply a pilot's memory; its grasp was universal.

If he were talking about a trifling letter he had received seven

years before, he was pretty sure to deliver you the entire screed

from memory.  And then without observing that he was departing

from the true line of his talk, he was more than likely to hurl

in a long-drawn parenthetical biography of the writer of that letter;

and you were lucky indeed if he did not take up that writer's relatives,

one by one, and give you their biographies, too.



Such a memory as that is a great misfortune.  To it, all occurrences

are of the same size.  Its possessor cannot distinguish an interesting

circumstance from an uninteresting one.  As a talker, he is bound

to clog his narrative with tiresome details and make himself

an insufferable bore.  Moreover, he cannot stick to his subject.

He picks up every little grain of memory he discerns in his way,

and so is led aside.  Mr. Brown would start out with the honest

intention of telling you a vastly funny anecdote about a dog.

He would be 'so full of laugh' that he could hardly begin; then his

memory would start with the dog's breed and personal appearance;

drift into a history of his owner; of his owner's family,

with descriptions of weddings and burials that had occurred in it,

together with recitals of congratulatory verses and obituary poetry

provoked by the same:  then this memory would recollect that one

of these events occurred during the celebrated 'hard winter'

of such and such a year, and a minute description of that winter

would follow, along with the names of people who were frozen to death,

and statistics showing the high figures which pork and hay went up to.

Pork and hay would suggest corn and fodder; corn and fodder would

suggest cows and horses; cows and horses would suggest the circus

and certain celebrated bare-back riders; the transition from

the circus to the menagerie was easy and natural; from the elephant

to equatorial Africa was but a step; then of course the heathen

savages would suggest religion; and at the end of three or four hours'

tedious jaw, the watch would change, and Brown would go out

of the pilot-house muttering extracts from sermons he had heard

years before about the efficacy of prayer as a means of grace.

And the original first mention would be all you had learned about that dog,

after all this waiting and hungering.



A pilot must have a memory; but there are two higher qualities

which he must also have.  He must have good and quick judgment

and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake.

Give a man the merest trifle of pluck to start with, and by the time

he has become a pilot he cannot be unmanned by any danger a steamboat

can get into; but one cannot quite say the same for judgment.

Judgment is a matter of brains, and a man must START with a good

stock of that article or he will never succeed as a pilot.



The growth of courage in the pilot-house is steady all the time,

but it does not reach a high and satisfactory condition until

some time after the young pilot has been 'standing his own watch,'

alone and under the staggering weight of all the responsibilities

connected with the position.  When an apprentice has become pretty

thoroughly acquainted with the river, he goes clattering along

so fearlessly with his steamboat, night or day, that he presently

begins to imagine that it is HIS courage that animates him;

but the first time the pilot steps out and leaves him to his

own devices he finds out it was the other man's. He discovers

that the article has been left out of his own cargo altogether.

The whole river is bristling with exigencies in a moment;

he is not prepared for them; he does not know how to meet them;

all his knowledge forsakes him; and within fifteen minutes

he is as white as a sheet and scared almost to death.

Therefore pilots wisely train these cubs by various strategic

tricks to look danger in the face a little more calmly.

A favorite way of theirs is to play a friendly swindle upon

the candidate.



Mr. Bixby served me in this fashion once, and for years afterward

I used to blush even in my sleep when I thought of it.

I had become a good steersman; so good, indeed, that I had all

the work to do on our watch, night and day; Mr. Bixby seldom

made a suggestion to me; all he ever did was to take the wheel

on particularly bad nights or in particularly bad crossings,

land the boat when she needed to be landed, play gentleman

of leisure nine-tenths of the watch, and collect the wages.

The lower river was about bank-full, and if anybody had questioned

my ability to run any crossing between Cairo and New Orleans

without help or instruction, I should have felt irreparably hurt.

The idea of being afraid of any crossing in the lot,

in the DAY-TIME, was a thing too preposterous for contemplation.

Well, one matchless summer's day I was bowling down the bend

above island 66, brimful of self-conceit and carrying my nose

as high as a giraffe's, when Mr. Bixby said--



'I am going below a while.  I suppose you know the next crossing?'



This was almost an affront.  It was about the plainest and simplest crossing

in the whole river.  One couldn't come to any harm, whether he ran it

right or not; and as for depth, there never had been any bottom there.

I knew all this, perfectly well.



'Know how to RUN it?  Why, I can run it with my eyes shut.'



'How much water is there in it?'



'Well, that is an odd question.  I couldn't get bottom there

with a church steeple.'



'You think so, do you?'



The very tone of the question shook my confidence.

That was what Mr. Bixby was expecting.  He left, without saying

anything more.  I began to imagine all sorts of things.

Mr. Bixby, unknown to me, of course, sent somebody down to

the forecastle with some mysterious instructions to the leadsmen,

another messenger was sent to whisper among the officers,

and then Mr. Bixby went into hiding behind a smoke-stack where

he could observe results.  Presently the captain stepped out on

the hurricane deck; next the chief mate appeared; then a clerk.

Every moment or two a straggler was added to my audience;

and before I got to the head of the island I had fifteen

or twenty people assembled down there under my nose.

I began to wonder what the trouble was.  As I started across,

the captain glanced aloft at me and said, with a sham uneasiness

in his voice--



'Where is Mr. Bixby?'



'Gone below, sir.'



But that did the business for me.  My imagination began to construct

dangers out of nothing, and they multiplied faster than I could keep

the run of them.  All at once I imagined I saw shoal water ahead!

The wave of coward agony that surged through me then came near dislocating

every joint in me.  All my confidence in that crossing vanished.

I seized the bell-rope; dropped it, ashamed; seized it again;

dropped it once more; clutched it tremblingly one again,

and pulled it so feebly that I could hardly hear the stroke myself.

Captain and mate sang out instantly, and both together--



'Starboard lead there! and quick about it!'



This was another shock.  I began to climb the wheel like a squirrel;

but I would hardly get the boat started to port before I would see new

dangers on that side, and away I would spin to the other; only to find

perils accumulating to starboard, and be crazy to get to port again.

Then came the leadsman's sepulchral cry--



'D-e-e-p four!'



Deep four in a bottomless crossing!  The terror of it took my breath away.



'M-a-r-k three!... M-a-r-k three... Quarter less three!...

 Half twain!'



This was frightful!  I seized the bell-ropes and stopped the engines.



'Quarter twain!  Quarter twain!  MARK twain!'



I was helpless.  I did not know what in the world to do.

I was quaking from head to foot, and I could have hung my hat on

my eyes, they stuck out so far.



'Quarter LESS twain!  Nine and a HALF!'



We were DRAWING nine!  My hands were in a nerveless flutter.

I could not ring a bell intelligibly with them.  I flew to the

speaking-tube and shouted to the engineer--



'Oh, Ben, if you love me, BACK her!  Quick, Ben!  Oh, back the immortal

SOUL out of her! '



I heard the door close gently.  I looked around, and there stood

Mr. Bixby, smiling a bland, sweet smile.  Then the audience on

the hurricane deck sent up a thundergust of humiliating laughter.

I saw it all, now, and I felt meaner than the meanest man in

human history.  I laid in the lead, set the boat in her marks,

came ahead on the engines, and said--



'It was a fine trick to play on an orphan, WASN'T it?

I suppose I'll never hear the last of how I was ass enough to heave

the lead at the head of 66.'



'Well, no, you won't, maybe.  In fact I hope you won't;

for I want you to learn something by that experience.

Didn't you KNOW there was no bottom in that crossing?'



'Yes, sir, I did.'



'Very well, then.  You shouldn't have allowed me or anybody else

to shake your confidence in that knowledge.  Try to remember that.

And another thing:  when you get into a dangerous place, don't turn coward.

That isn't going to help matters any.'



It was a good enough lesson, but pretty hardly learned.

Yet about the hardest part of it was that for months I so often had

to hear a phrase which I had conceived a particular distaste for.

It was, 'Oh, Ben, if you love me, back her!'









                               Chapter 14

                      Rank and Dignity of Piloting



IN my preceding chapters I have tried, by going into the minutiae

of the science of piloting, to carry the reader step by step

to a comprehension of what the science consists of; and at

the same time I have tried to show him that it is a very curious

and wonderful science, too, and very worthy of his attention.

If I have seemed to love my subject, it is no surprising thing,

for I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since,

and I took a measureless pride in it.  The reason is plain:

a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and

entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.

Kings are but the hampered servants of parliament and people;

parliaments sit in chains forged by their constituency;

the editor of a newspaper cannot be independent, but must

work with one hand tied behind him by party and patrons,

and be content to utter only half or two-thirds of his mind;

no clergyman is a free man and may speak the whole truth,

regardless of his parish's opinions; writers of all kinds are

manacled servants of the public.  We write frankly and fearlessly,

but then we 'modify' before we print.  In truth, every man and

woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude;

but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none.

The captain could stand upon the hurricane deck, in the pomp

of a very brief authority, and give him five or six orders while

the vessel backed into the stream, and then that skipper's reign

was over.  The moment that the boat was under way in the river,

she was under the sole and unquestioned control of the pilot.

He could do with her exactly as he pleased, run her when and whither

he chose, and tie her up to the bank whenever his judgment said

that that course was best.  His movements were entirely free;

he consulted no one, he received commands from nobody,

he promptly resented even the merest suggestions.  Indeed, the law

of the United States forbade him to listen to commands

or suggestions, rightly considering that the pilot necessarily

knew better how to handle the boat than anybody could tell him.

So here was the novelty of a king without a keeper, an absolute monarch

who was absolute in sober truth and not by a fiction of words.

I have seen a boy of eighteen taking a great steamer serenely

into what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain

standing mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless

to interfere.  His interference, in that particular instance,

might have been an excellent thing, but to permit it would

have been to establish a most pernicious precedent.  It will

easily be guessed, considering the pilot's boundless authority,

that he was a great personage in the old steamboating days.

He was treated with marked courtesy by the captain and with marked

deference by all the officers and servants; and this deferential

spirit was quickly communicated to the passengers, too.  I think

pilots were about the only people I ever knew who failed to show,

in some degree, embarrassment in the presence of traveling

foreign princes.  But then, people in one's own grade of life

are not usually embarrassing objects.



By long habit, pilots came to put all their wishes in the form of commands.

It 'gravels' me, to this day, to put my will in the weak shape of

a request, instead of launching it in the crisp language of an order.

In those old days, to load a steamboat at St. Louis, take her to New

Orleans and back, and discharge cargo, consumed about twenty-five days,

on an average.  Seven or eight of these days the boat spent at the wharves

of St. Louis and New Orleans, and every soul on board was hard at work,

except the two pilots; they did nothing but play gentleman up town,

and receive the same wages for it as if they had been on duty.

The moment the boat touched the wharf at either city, they were ashore;

and they were not likely to be seen again till the last bell was ringing and

everything in readiness for another voyage.



When a captain got hold of a pilot of particularly high reputation,

he took pains to keep him.  When wages were four hundred dollars

a month on the Upper Mississippi, I have known a captain

to keep such a pilot in idleness, under full pay, three months

at a time, while the river was frozen up.  And one must remember

that in those cheap times four hundred dollars was a salary

of almost inconceivable splendor.  Few men on shore got such pay

as that, and when they did they were mightily looked up to.

When pilots from either end of the river wandered into our small

Missouri village, they were sought by the best and the fairest,

and treated with exalted respect.  Lying in port under wages

was a thing which many pilots greatly enjoyed and appreciated;

especially if they belonged in the Missouri River in the heyday

of that trade (Kansas times), and got nine hundred dollars a trip,

which was equivalent to about eighteen hundred dollars a month.

Here is a conversation of that day.  A chap out of the Illinois River,

with a little stern-wheel tub, accosts a couple of ornate and gilded

Missouri River pilots--



'Gentlemen, I've got a pretty good trip for the upcountry,

and shall want you about a month.  How much will it be?'



'Eighteen hundred dollars apiece.'



'Heavens and earth!  You take my boat, let me have your wages,

and I'll divide!'



I will remark, in passing, that Mississippi steamboatmen were

important in landsmen's eyes (and in their own, too, in a degree)

according to the dignity of the boat they were on.

For instance, it was a proud thing to be of the crew of such

stately craft as the 'Aleck Scott' or the 'Grand Turk.'

Negro firemen, deck hands, and barbers belonging to those boats

were distinguished personages in their grade of life, and they were

well aware of that fact too.  A stalwart darkey once gave offense

at a negro ball in New Orleans by putting on a good many airs.

Finally one of the managers bustled up to him and said--



'Who IS you, any way?  Who is you? dat's what I

wants to know!'



The offender was not disconcerted in the least, but swelled himself up

and threw that into his voice which showed that he knew he was not putting

on all those airs on a stinted capital.



'Who IS I?  Who IS I?  I let you know mighty quick who I is!

I want you niggers to understan' dat I fires de middle do'<footnote

[Door]> on de "Aleck Scott!" '



That was sufficient.



The barber of the 'Grand Turk' was a spruce young negro,

who aired his importance with balmy complacency,

and was greatly courted by the circle in which he moved.

The young colored population of New Orleans were much given

to flirting, at twilight, on the banquettes of the back streets.

Somebody saw and heard something like the following,

one evening, in one of those localities.  A middle-aged negro

woman projected her head through a broken pane and shouted

(very willing that the neighbors should hear and envy), 'You

Mary Ann, come in de house dis minute!  Stannin' out dah foolin'

'long wid dat low trash, an' heah's de barber offn de "Gran' Turk"

wants to conwerse wid you! '



My reference, a moment ago, to the fact that a pilot's peculiar

official position placed him out of the reach of criticism or command,

brings Stephen W---- naturally to my mind.  He was a gifted pilot,

a good fellow, a tireless talker, and had both wit and humor in him.

He had a most irreverent independence, too, and was deliciously

easy-going and comfortable in the presence of age, official dignity,

and even the most august wealth.  He always had work, he never

saved a penny, he was a most persuasive borrower, he was in debt

to every pilot on the river, and to the majority of the captains.

He could throw a sort of splendor around a bit of harum-scarum,

devil-may-care piloting, that made it almost fascinating--

but not to everybody.  He made a trip with good old Captain Y----

once, and was 'relieved' from duty when the boat got to New Orleans.

Somebody expressed surprise at the discharge.  Captain Y----

shuddered at the mere mention of Stephen.  Then his poor, thin old

voice piped out something like this:--



'Why, bless me!  I wouldn't have such a wild creature on my boat

for the world--not for the whole world!  He swears, he sings,

he whistles, he yells--I never saw such an Injun to yell.

All times of the night--it never made any difference to him.

He would just yell that way, not for anything in particular,

but merely on account of a kind of devilish comfort he got out of it.

I never could get into a sound sleep but he would fetch me

out of bed, all in a cold sweat, with one of those dreadful

war-whoops. A queer being--very queer being; no respect

for anything or anybody.  Sometimes he called me "Johnny."

And he kept a fiddle, and a cat.  He played execrably.

This seemed to distress the cat, and so the cat would howl.

Nobody could sleep where that man--and his family--was.

And reckless.  There never was anything like it.

Now you may believe it or not, but as sure as I am sitting here,

he brought my boat a-tilting down through those awful snags

at Chicot under a rattling head of steam, and the wind a-blowing

like the very nation, at that!  My officers will tell you so.

They saw it.  And, sir, while he was a-tearing right down

through those snags, and I a-shaking in my shoes and praying,

I wish I may never speak again if he didn't pucker up his mouth

and go to WHISTLING!  Yes, sir; whistling "Buffalo gals,

can't you come out tonight, can't you come out to-night,

can't you come out to-night;" and doing it as calmly as if we

were attending a funeral and weren't related to the corpse.

And when I remonstrated with him about it, he smiled down on me

as if I was his child, and told me to run in the house and try

to be good, and not be meddling with my superiors!"



Once a pretty mean captain caught Stephen in New Orleans out of work

and as usual out of money.  He laid steady siege to Stephen, who was

in a very 'close place,' and finally persuaded him to hire with him

at one hundred and twenty-five dollars per month, just half wages,

the captain agreeing not to divulge the secret and so bring down the contempt

of all the guild upon the poor fellow.  But the boat was not more than

a day out of New Orleans before Stephen discovered that the captain

was boasting of his exploit, and that all the officers had been told.

Stephen winced, but said nothing.  About the middle of the afternoon

the captain stepped out on the hurricane deck, cast his eye around,

and looked a good deal surprised.  He glanced inquiringly aloft at Stephen,

but Stephen was whistling placidly, and attending to business.

The captain stood around a while in evident discomfort, and once or twice

seemed about to make a suggestion; but the etiquette of the river taught

him to avoid that sort of rashness, and so he managed to hold his peace.

He chafed and puzzled a few minutes longer, then retired to his apartments.

But soon he was out again, and apparently more perplexed than ever.

Presently he ventured to remark, with deference--



'Pretty good stage of the river now, ain't it, sir?'



'Well, I should say so!  Bank-full IS a pretty liberal stage.'



'Seems to be a good deal of current here.'



'Good deal don't describe it!  It's worse than a mill-race.'



'Isn't it easier in toward shore than it is out here in the middle?'



'Yes, I reckon it is; but a body can't be too careful with a steamboat.

It's pretty safe out here; can't strike any bottom here, you can

depend on that.'



The captain departed, looking rueful enough.  At this rate,

he would probably die of old age before his boat got to St. Louis.

Next day he appeared on deck and again found Stephen faithfully

standing up the middle of the river, fighting the whole vast

force of the Mississippi, and whistling the same placid tune.

This thing was becoming serious.  In by the shore was a slower boat

clipping along in the easy water and gaining steadily; she began

to make for an island chute; Stephen stuck to the middle of the river.

Speech was WRUNG from the captain.  He said--



'Mr. W----, don't that chute cut off a good deal of distance?'



'I think it does, but I don't know.'



'Don't know!  Well, isn't there water enough in it now to go through?'



'I expect there is, but I am not certain.'



'Upon my word this is odd!  Why, those pilots on that boat yonder are going

to try it.  Do you mean to say that you don't know as much as they do?'



'THEY!  Why, THEY are two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pilots!

But don't you be uneasy; I know as much as any man can afford

to know for a hundred and twenty-five!'



The captain surrendered.



Five minutes later Stephen was bowling through the chute and showing

the rival boat a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pair of heels.









                               Chapter 15

                          The Pilots' Monopoly



ONE day, on board the 'Aleck Scott,' my chief, Mr. Bixby,

was crawling carefully through a close place at Cat Island,

both leads going, and everybody holding his breath.  The captain,

a nervous, apprehensive man, kept still as long as he could,

but finally broke down and shouted from the hurricane deck--



'For gracious' sake, give her steam, Mr. Bixby! give her steam!

She'll never raise the reef on this headway!'



For all the effect that was produced upon Mr. Bixby, one would have supposed

that no remark had been made.  But five minutes later, when the danger

was past and the leads laid in, he burst instantly into a consuming fury,

and gave the captain the most admirable cursing I ever listened to.

No bloodshed ensued; but that was because the captain's cause was weak;

for ordinarily he was not a man to take correction quietly.



Having now set forth in detail the nature of the science of piloting,

and likewise described the rank which the pilot held among the fraternity

of steamboatmen, this seems a fitting place to say a few words about an

organization which the pilots once formed for the protection of their guild.

It was curious and noteworthy in this, that it was perhaps the compactest,

the completest, and the strongest commercial organization ever

formed among men.



For a long time wages had been two hundred and fifty dollars a month;

but curiously enough, as steamboats multiplied and business increased,

the wages began to fall little by little.  It was easy to discover

the reason of this.  Too many pilots were being 'made.'  It was nice

to have a 'cub,' a steersman, to do all the hard work for a couple

of years, gratis, while his master sat on a high bench and smoked;

all pilots and captains had sons or nephews who wanted to be pilots.  By and

by it came to pass that nearly every pilot on the river had a steersman.

When a steersman had made an amount of progress that was satisfactory

to any two pilots in the trade, they could get a pilot's license for him

by signing an application directed to the United States Inspector.

Nothing further was needed; usually no questions were asked, no proofs

of capacity required.



Very well, this growing swarm of new pilots presently

began to undermine the wages, in order to get berths.

Too late--apparently--the knights of the tiller perceived

their mistake.  Plainly, something had to be done, and quickly;

but what was to be the needful thing.  A close organization.

Nothing else would answer.  To compass this seemed an impossibility;

so it was talked, and talked, and then dropped.

It was too likely to ruin whoever ventured to move

in the matter.  But at last about a dozen of the boldest--

and some of them the best--pilots on the river launched

themselves into the enterprise and took all the chances.

They got a special charter from the legislature, with large powers,

under the name of the Pilots' Benevolent Association;

elected their officers, completed their organization,

contributed capital, put 'association' wages up to two hundred

and fifty dollars at once--and then retired to their homes,

for they were promptly discharged from employment.

But there were two or three unnoticed trifles in their by-laws

which had the seeds of propagation in them.  For instance,

all idle members of the association, in good standing,

were entitled to a pension of twenty-five dollars per month.

This began to bring in one straggler after another from the ranks

of the new-fledged pilots, in the dull (summer) season.

Better have twenty-five dollars than starve; the initiation

fee was only twelve dollars, and no dues required

from the unemployed.



Also, the widows of deceased members in good standing could

draw twenty-five dollars per month, and a certain sum for each

of their children.  Also, the said deceased would be buried

at the association's expense.  These things resurrected all

the superannuated and forgotten pilots in the Mississippi Valley.

They came from farms, they came from interior villages, they came

from everywhere.  They came on crutches, on drays, in ambulances,--

any way, so they got there.  They paid in their twelve dollars,

and straightway began to draw out twenty-five dollars a month,

and calculate their burial bills.



By and by, all the useless, helpless pilots, and a dozen first-class ones,

were in the association, and nine-tenths of the best pilots out of it

and laughing at it.  It was the laughing-stock of the whole river.

Everybody joked about the by-law requiring members to pay ten per cent.

of their wages, every month, into the treasury for the support

of the association, whereas all the members were outcast and tabooed,

and no one would employ them.  Everybody was derisively grateful

to the association for taking all the worthless pilots out of the way

and leaving the whole field to the excellent and the deserving;

and everybody was not only jocularly grateful for that, but for a

result which naturally followed, namely, the gradual advance of wages

as the busy season approached.  Wages had gone up from the low figure

of one hundred dollars a month to one hundred and twenty-five, and in

some cases to one hundred and fifty; and it was great fun to enlarge

upon the fact that this charming thing had been accomplished by a body

of men not one of whom received a particle of benefit from it.

Some of the jokers used to call at the association rooms and have

a good time chaffing the members and offering them the charity

of taking them as steersmen for a trip, so that they could see what

the forgotten river looked like.  However, the association was content;

or at least it gave no sign to the contrary.  Now and then it

captured a pilot who was 'out of luck,' and added him to its list;

and these later additions were very valuable, for they were good pilots;

the incompetent ones had all been absorbed before.  As business freshened,

wages climbed gradually up to two hundred and fifty dollars--

the association figure--and became firmly fixed there; and still

without benefiting a member of that body, for no member was hired.

The hilarity at the association's expense burst all bounds, now.

There was no end to the fun which that poor martyr had to

put up with.



However, it is a long lane that has no turning.  Winter approached,

business doubled and trebled, and an avalanche of Missouri,

Illinois and Upper Mississippi River boats came pouring down

to take a chance in the New Orleans trade.  All of a sudden

pilots were in great demand, and were correspondingly scarce.

The time for revenge was come.  It was a bitter pill to have to

accept association pilots at last, yet captains and owners agreed

that there was no other way.  But none of these outcasts offered!

So there was a still bitterer pill to be swallowed:

they must be sought out and asked for their services.

Captain ---- was the first man who found it necessary to take

the dose, and he had been the loudest derider of the organization.

He hunted up one of the best of the association pilots and said--



'Well, you boys have rather got the best of us for a

little while, so I'll give in with as good a grace as I can.

I've come to hire you; get your trunk aboard right away.

I want to leave at twelve o'clock.'



'I don't know about that.  Who is your other pilot?'



'I've got I. S----. Why?'



'I can't go with him.  He don't belong to the association.'



'What!'



'It's so.'



'Do you mean to tell me that you won't turn a wheel with one of the very best

and oldest pilots on the river because he don't belong to your association?'



'Yes, I do.'



'Well, if this isn't putting on airs!  I supposed I was doing you

a benevolence; but I begin to think that I am the party that wants

a favor done.  Are you acting under a law of the concern?'



'Yes.'



'Show it to me.'



So they stepped into the association rooms, and the secretary

soon satisfied the captain, who said--



'Well, what am I to do?  I have hired Mr. S---- for the entire season.'



'I will provide for you,' said the secretary.  'I will detail a pilot

to go with you, and he shall be on board at twelve o'clock.'



'But if I discharge S----, he will come on me for the whole season's wages.'



'Of course that is a matter between you and Mr. S----, captain.

We cannot meddle in your private affairs.'



The captain stormed, but to no purpose.  In the end he had to discharge

S----, pay him about a thousand dollars, and take an association pilot

in his place.  The laugh was beginning to turn the other way now.

Every day, thenceforward, a new victim fell; every day some outraged

captain discharged a non-association pet, with tears and profanity,

and installed a hated association man in his berth.  In a very

little while, idle non-associationists began to be pretty plenty,

brisk as business was, and much as their services were desired.

The laugh was shifting to the other side of their mouths most palpably.

These victims, together with the captains and owners, presently ceased

to laugh altogether, and began to rage about the revenge they would take

when the passing business 'spurt' was over.



Soon all the laughers that were left were the owners

and crews of boats that had two non-association pilots.

But their triumph was not very long-lived. For this reason:

It was a rigid rule of the association that its members should never,

under any circumstances whatever, give information about the channel

to any 'outsider.'  By this time about half the boats had none

but association pilots, and the other half had none but outsiders.

At the first glance one would suppose that when it came

to forbidding information about the river these two parties

could play equally at that game; but this was not so.

At every good-sized town from one end of the river to the other,

there was a 'wharf-boat' to land at, instead of a wharf or a pier.

Freight was stored in it for transportation; waiting passengers slept

in its cabins.  Upon each of these wharf-boats the association's

officers placed a strong box fastened with a peculiar lock which was

used in no other service but one--the United States mail service.

It was the letter-bag lock, a sacred governmental thing.

By dint of much beseeching the government had been

persuaded to allow the association to use this lock.

Every association man carried a key which would open these boxes.

That key, or rather a peculiar way of holding it in the hand

when its owner was asked for river information by a stranger--

for the success of the St. Louis and New Orleans association

had now bred tolerably thriving branches in a dozen neighboring

steamboat trades--was the association man's sign and diploma

of membership; and if the stranger did not respond by producing

a similar key and holding it in a certain manner duly prescribed,

his question was politely ignored.  From the association's secretary

each member received a package of more or less gorgeous blanks,

printed like a billhead, on handsome paper, properly ruled in columns;

a bill-head worded something like this--



                         STEAMER GREAT REPUBLIC.



                            JOHN SMITH MASTER



                PILOTS, JOHN JONES AND THOMAS BROWN.



      +-------------------------------------------------------------+



      |   CROSSINGS.   |   SOUNDINGS.   |   MARKS.   |   REMARKS.   |



      +-------------------------------------------------------------+



These blanks were filled up, day by day, as the voyage

progressed, and deposited in the several wharf-boat boxes.

For instance, as soon as the first crossing, out from St. Louis,

was completed, the items would be entered upon the blank,

under the appropriate headings, thus--



'St. Louis.  Nine and a half (feet). Stern on court-house, head

on dead cottonwood above wood-yard, until you raise the first reef,

then pull up square.'  Then under head of Remarks:  'Go just outside

the wrecks; this is important.  New snag just where you straighten down;

go above it.'



The pilot who deposited that blank in the Cairo box (after adding

to it the details of every crossing all the way down from St. Louis)

took out and read half a dozen fresh reports (from upward-bound steamers)

concerning the river between Cairo and Memphis, posted himself thoroughly,

returned them to the box, and went back aboard his boat again so armed

against accident that he could not possibly get his boat into trouble

without bringing the most ingenious carelessness to his aid.



Imagine the benefits of so admirable a system in a piece of river twelve

or thirteen hundred miles long, whose channel was shifting every day!

The pilot who had formerly been obliged to put up with seeing a shoal

place once or possibly twice a month, had a hundred sharp eyes to watch it

for him, now, and bushels of intelligent brains to tell him how to run it.

His information about it was seldom twenty-four hours old.  If the reports

in the last box chanced to leave any misgivings on his mind concerning

a treacherous crossing, he had his remedy; he blew his steam-whistle

in a peculiar way as soon as he saw a boat approaching; the signal was

answered in a peculiar way if that boat's pilots were association men;

and then the two steamers ranged alongside and all uncertainties were swept

away by fresh information furnished to the inquirer by word of mouth and

in minute detail.



The first thing a pilot did when he reached New Orleans or St. Louis

was to take his final and elaborate report to the association parlors

and hang it up there,--after which he was free to visit his family.

In these parlors a crowd was always gathered together, discussing

changes in the channel, and the moment there was a fresh arrival,

everybody stopped talking till this witness had told the newest news

and settled the latest uncertainty.  Other craftsmen can 'sink the shop,'

sometimes, and interest themselves in other matters.  Not so with a pilot;

he must devote himself wholly to his profession and talk of nothing else;

for it would be small gain to be perfect one day and imperfect the next.

He has no time or words to waste if he would keep 'posted.'



But the outsiders had a hard time of it.  No particular place

to meet and exchange information, no wharf-boat reports,

none but chance and unsatisfactory ways of getting news.

The consequence was that a man sometimes had to run five hundred

miles of river on information that was a week or ten days old.

At a fair stage of the river that might have answered; but when the

dead low water came it was destructive.



Now came another perfectly logical result.  The outsiders began

to ground steamboats, sink them, and get into all sorts of trouble,

whereas accidents seemed to keep entirely away from the association men.

Wherefore even the owners and captains of boats furnished

exclusively with outsiders, and previously considered to be wholly

independent of the association and free to comfort themselves

with brag and laughter, began to feel pretty uncomfortable.

Still, they made a show of keeping up the brag, until one black day

when every captain of the lot was formally ordered to immediately

discharge his outsiders and take association pilots in their stead.

And who was it that had the dashing presumption to do that?  Alas, it came

from a power behind the throne that was greater than the throne itself.

It was the underwriters!



It was no time to 'swap knives.'  Every outsider had to take his trunk

ashore at once.  Of course it was supposed that there was collusion

between the association and the underwriters, but this was not so.

The latter had come to comprehend the excellence of the 'report' system

of the association and the safety it secured, and so they had made their

decision among themselves and upon plain business principles.



There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in

the camp of the outsiders now.  But no matter, there was

but one course for them to pursue, and they pursued it.

They came forward in couples and groups, and proffered their

twelve dollars and asked for membership.  They were surprised

to learn that several new by-laws had been long ago added.

For instance, the initiation fee had been raised to fifty dollars;

that sum must be tendered, and also ten per cent.

of the wages which the applicant had received each and every

month since the founding of the association.  In many cases this

amounted to three or four hundred dollars.  Still, the association

would not entertain the application until the money was present.

Even then a single adverse vote killed the application.

Every member had to vote 'Yes' or 'No' in person and before witnesses;

so it took weeks to decide a candidacy, because many pilots

were so long absent on voyages.  However, the repentant

sinners scraped their savings together, and one by one,

by our tedious voting process, they were added to the fold.

A time came, at last, when only about ten remained outside.

They said they would starve before they would apply.

They remained idle a long while, because of course nobody could venture

to employ them.



By and by the association published the fact that upon a certain

date the wages would be raised to five hundred dollars per month.

All the branch associations had grown strong, now, and the Red

River one had advanced wages to seven hundred dollars a month.

Reluctantly the ten outsiders yielded, in view of these things,

and made application.  There was another new by-law, by this time,

which required them to pay dues not only on all the wages they

had received since the association was born, but also on what they

would have received if they had continued at work up to the time

of their application, instead of going off to pout in idleness.

It turned out to be a difficult matter to elect them, but it

was accomplished at last.  The most virulent sinner of this

batch had stayed out and allowed 'dues' to accumulate against

him so long that he had to send in six hundred and twenty-five

dollars with his application.



The association had a good bank account now, and was very strong.

There was no longer an outsider.  A by-law was added forbidding

the reception of any more cubs or apprentices for five years;

after which time a limited number would be taken, not by individuals,

but by the association, upon these terms:  the applicant must

not be less than eighteen years old, and of respectable family

and good character; he must pass an examination as to education,

pay a thousand dollars in advance for the privilege of becoming

an apprentice, and must remain under the commands of the association

until a great part of the membership (more than half, I think)

should be willing to sign his application for a pilot's license.



All previously-articled apprentices were now taken away from their

masters and adopted by the association.  The president and secretary

detailed them for service on one boat or another, as they chose,

and changed them from boat to boat according to certain rules.

If a pilot could show that he was in infirm health and needed assistance,

one of the cubs would be ordered to go with him.



The widow and orphan list grew, but so did the association's

financial resources.  The association attended its own

funerals in state, and paid for them.  When occasion demanded,

it sent members down the river upon searches for the bodies

of brethren lost by steamboat accidents; a search of this kind

sometimes cost a thousand dollars.



The association procured a charter and went into the insurance

business, also.  It not only insured the lives of its members,

but took risks on steamboats.



The organization seemed indestructible.  It was the tightest monopoly

in the world.  By the United States law, no man could become

a pilot unless two duly licensed pilots signed his application;

and now there was nobody outside of the association competent

to sign.  Consequently the making of pilots was at an end.

Every year some would die and others become incapacitated by age

and infirmity; there would be no new ones to take their places.

In time, the association could put wages up to any figure it chose;

and as long as it should be wise enough not to carry the thing

too far and provoke the national government into amending

the licensing system, steamboat owners would have to submit,

since there would be no help for it.



The owners and captains were the only obstruction that lay between

the association and absolute power; and at last this one was removed.

Incredible as it may seem, the owners and captains deliberately

did it themselves.  When the pilots' association announced,

months beforehand, that on the first day of September, 1861,

wages would be advanced to five hundred dollars per month, the owners

and captains instantly put freights up a few cents, and explained

to the farmers along the river the necessity of it, by calling their

attention to the burdensome rate of wages about to be established.

It was a rather slender argument, but the farmers did not seem to detect it.

It looked reasonable to them that to add five cents freight on a bushel

of corn was justifiable under the circumstances, overlooking the fact

that this advance on a cargo of forty thousand sacks was a good deal

more than necessary to cover the new wages.



So, straightway the captains and owners got up an association

of their own, and proposed to put captains' wages up to five

hundred dollars, too, and move for another advance in freights.

It was a novel idea, but of course an effect which had been

produced once could be produced again.  The new association decreed

(for this was before all the outsiders had been taken

into the pilots' association) that if any captain employed

a non-association pilot, he should be forced to discharge him,

and also pay a fine of five hundred dollars.  Several of these

heavy fines were paid before the captains' organization grew

strong enough to exercise full authority over its membership;

but that all ceased, presently.  The captains tried to get the pilots

to decree that no member of their corporation should serve under

a non-association captain; but this proposition was declined.

The pilots saw that they would be backed up by the captains and

the underwriters anyhow, and so they wisely refrained from entering

into entangling alliances.



As I have remarked, the pilots' association was now the compactest

monopoly in the world, perhaps, and seemed simply indestructible.

And yet the days of its glory were numbered.  First, the new

railroad stretching up through Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky,

to Northern railway centers, began to divert the passenger travel

from the steamers; next the war came and almost entirely annihilated

the steamboating industry during several years, leaving most of

the pilots idle, and the cost of living advancing all the time;

then the treasurer of the St. Louis association put his hand

into the till and walked off with every dollar of the ample fund;

and finally, the railroads intruding everywhere, there was little

for steamers to do, when the war was over, but carry freights;

so straightway some genius from the Atlantic coast introduced the plan

of towing a dozen steamer cargoes down to New Orleans at the tail

of a vulgar little tug-boat; and behold, in the twinkling of an eye,

as it were, the association and the noble science of piloting were

things of the dead and pathetic past!









                               Chapter 16

                               Racing Days



IT was always the custom for the boats to leave New

Orleans between four and five o'clock in the afternoon.

From three o'clock onward they would be burning rosin and pitch pine

(the sign of preparation), and so one had the picturesque spectacle

of a rank, some two or three miles long, of tall, ascending columns

of coal-black smoke; a colonnade which supported a sable roof of

the same smoke blended together and spreading abroad over the city.

Every outward-bound boat had its flag flying at the jack-staff,

and sometimes a duplicate on the verge staff astern.

Two or three miles of mates were commanding and swearing with more

than usual emphasis; countless processions of freight barrels

and boxes were spinning athwart the levee and flying aboard

the stage-planks, belated passengers were dodging and skipping

among these frantic things, hoping to reach the forecastle

companion way alive, but having their doubts about it;

women with reticules and bandboxes were trying to keep up

with husbands freighted with carpet-sacks and crying babies,

and making a failure of it by losing their heads in the whirl

and roar and general distraction; drays and baggage-vans were

clattering hither and thither in a wild hurry, every now and

then getting blocked and jammed together, and then during ten

seconds one could not see them for the profanity, except vaguely

and dimly; every windlass connected with every forehatch,

from one end of that long array of steamboats to the other,

was keeping up a deafening whiz and whir, lowering freight

into the hold, and the half-naked crews of perspiring negroes

that worked them were roaring such songs as 'De Las' Sack!

De Las' Sack!'--inspired to unimaginable exaltation by the chaos

of turmoil and racket that was driving everybody else mad.

By this time the hurricane and boiler decks of the steamers

would be packed and black with passengers.  The 'last bells'

would begin to clang, all down the line, and then the powwow

seemed to double; in a moment or two the final warning came,--

a simultaneous din of Chinese gongs, with the cry,

'All dat ain't goin', please to git asho'!'--and behold,

the powwow quadrupled!  People came swarming ashore,

overturning excited stragglers that were trying to swarm aboard.

One more moment later a long array of stage-planks was being

hauled in, each with its customary latest passenger clinging

to the end of it with teeth, nails, and everything else,

and the customary latest procrastinator making a wild spring

shoreward over his head.



Now a number of the boats slide backward into the stream,

leaving wide gaps in the serried rank of steamers.

Citizens crowd the decks of boats that are not to go, in order

to see the sight.  Steamer after steamer straightens herself up,

gathers all her strength, and presently comes swinging by,

under a tremendous head of steam, with flag flying,

black smoke rolling, and her entire crew of firemen and deck-hands

(usually swarthy negroes) massed together on the forecastle,

the best 'voice' in the lot towering from the midst

(being mounted on the capstan), waving his hat or a flag,

and all roaring a mighty chorus, while the parting cannons boom

and the multitudinous spectators swing their hats and huzza!

Steamer after steamer falls into line, and the stately procession goes

winging its flight up the river.



In the old times, whenever two fast boats started out on a race,

with a big crowd of people looking on, it was inspiring to hear

the crews sing, especially if the time were night-fall, and the forecastle

lit up with the red glare of the torch-baskets. Racing was royal fun.

The public always had an idea that racing was dangerous; whereas the opposite

was the case--that is, after the laws were passed which restricted

each boat to just so many pounds of steam to the square inch.

No engineer was ever sleepy or careless when his heart was in a race.

He was constantly on the alert, trying gauge-cocks and watching things.

The dangerous place was on slow, plodding boats, where the engineers drowsed

around and allowed chips to get into the 'doctor' and shut off the water

supply from the boilers.



In the 'flush times' of steamboating, a race between two notoriously

fleet steamers was an event of vast importance.  The date was set

for it several weeks in advance, and from that time forward, the whole

Mississippi Valley was in a state of consuming excitement.  Politics and

the weather were dropped, and people talked only of the coming race.

As the time approached, the two steamers 'stripped' and got ready.

Every encumbrance that added weight, or exposed a resisting surface

to wind or water, was removed, if the boat could possibly do without it.

The 'spars,' and sometimes even their supporting derricks, were sent ashore,

and no means left to set the boat afloat in case she got aground.

When the 'Eclipse' and the 'A. L. Shotwell' ran their great race many

years ago, it was said that pains were taken to scrape the gilding off

the fanciful device which hung between the 'Eclipse's' chimneys, and that for

that one trip the captain left off his kid gloves and had his head shaved.

But I always doubted these things.



If the boat was known to make her best speed when drawing five and a half feet

forward and five feet aft, she was carefully loaded to that exact figure--

she wouldn't enter a dose of homoeopathic pills on her manifest after that.

Hardly any passengers were taken, because they not only add weight but they

never will 'trim boat.'  They always run to the side when there is anything

to see, whereas a conscientious and experienced steamboatman would stick to

the center of the boat and part his hair in the middle with a spirit level.



No way-freights and no way-passengers were allowed, for the racers would

stop only at the largest towns, and then it would be only 'touch and go.'

Coal flats and wood flats were contracted for beforehand, and these were

kept ready to hitch on to the flying steamers at a moment's warning.

Double crews were carried, so that all work could be quickly done.



The chosen date being come, and all things in readiness,

the two great steamers back into the stream, and lie there

jockeying a moment, and apparently watching each other's

slightest movement, like sentient creatures; flags drooping,

the pent steam shrieking through safety-valves, the black smoke

rolling and tumbling from the chimneys and darkening all the air.

People, people everywhere; the shores, the house-tops,

the steamboats, the ships, are packed with them, and you know

that the borders of the broad Mississippi are going to be

fringed with humanity thence northward twelve hundred miles,

to welcome these racers.



Presently tall columns of steam burst from the 'scape-pipes

of both steamers, two guns boom a good-bye, two red-shirted heroes

mounted on capstans wave their small flags above the massed crews

on the forecastles, two plaintive solos linger on the air a few

waiting seconds, two mighty choruses burst forth--and here they come!

Brass bands bray Hail Columbia, huzza after huzza thunders from

the shores, and the stately creatures go whistling by like the wind.



Those boats will never halt a moment between New Orleans and St. Louis,

except for a second or two at large towns, or to hitch thirty-cord

wood-boats alongside.  You should be on board when they take a couple

of those wood-boats in tow and turn a swarm of men into each;

by the time you have wiped your glasses and put them on, you will be

wondering what has become of that wood.



Two nicely matched steamers will stay in sight of each other day after day.

They might even stay side by side, but for the fact that pilots are not

all alike, and the smartest pilots will win the race.  If one of the boats has

a 'lightning' pilot, whose 'partner' is a trifle his inferior, you can tell

which one is on watch by noting whether that boat has gained ground or lost

some during each four-hour stretch.  The shrewdest pilot can delay a boat

if he has not a fine genius for steering.  Steering is a very high art.

One must not keep a rudder dragging across a boat's stem if he wants to get up

the river fast.



There is a great difference in boats, of course.  For a long time I was on

a boat that was so slow we used to forget what year it was we left port in.

But of course this was at rare intervals.  Ferryboats used to lose

valuable trips because their passengers grew old and died, waiting for us

to get by.  This was at still rarer intervals.  I had the documents

for these occurrences, but through carelessness they have been mislaid.

This boat, the 'John J. Roe,' was so slow that when she finally sunk

in Madrid Bend, it was five years before the owners heard of it.

That was always a confusing fact to me, but it is according to the record,

any way.  She was dismally slow; still, we often had pretty

exciting times racing with islands, and rafts, and such things.

One trip, however, we did rather well.  We went to St. Louis in sixteen days.

But even at this rattling gait I think we changed watches three times

in Fort Adams reach, which is five miles long.  A 'reach' is a piece

of straight river, and of course the current drives through such a place

in a pretty lively way.



That trip we went to Grand Gulf, from New Orleans, in four days

(three hundred and forty miles); the 'Eclipse' and 'Shotwell'

did it in one.  We were nine days out, in the chute of 63

(seven hundred miles); the 'Eclipse' and 'Shotwell' went

there in two days.  Something over a generation ago,

a boat called the 'J. M. White' went from New Orleans

to Cairo in three days, six hours, and forty-four minutes.

In 1853 the 'Eclipse' made the same trip in three days,

three hours, and twenty minutes.<footnote [Time disputed.

Some authorities add 1 hour and 16 minutes to this.]>  In

1870 the 'R. E. Lee' did it in three days and ONE hour.

This last is called the fastest trip on record.

I will try to show that it was not.  For this reason:

the distance between New Orleans and Cairo, when the 'J. M. White'

ran it, was about eleven hundred and six miles; consequently her

average speed was a trifle over fourteen miles per hour.

In the 'Eclipse's' day the distance between the two ports had become

reduced to one thousand and eighty miles; consequently her average

speed was a shade under fourteen and three-eighths miles per hour.

In the 'R. E. Lee's' time the distance had diminished

to about one thousand and thirty miles; consequently her

average was about fourteen and one-eighth miles per hour.

Therefore the 'Eclipse's' was conspicuously the fastest time that has

ever been made.







                          THE RECORD OF SOME FAMOUS



                                    TRIPS



                   (From Commodore Rollingpin's Almanack.)





                       FAST TIME ON THE WESTERN WATERS







                   FROM NEW ORLEANS TO NATCHEZ--268 MILES



                                       D.   H.   M.

 1814 Orleans      made the run in      6    6   40

 1814 Comet          "     "            5   10

 1815 Enterprise     "     "            4   11   20

 1817 Washington     "     "            4

 1817 Shelby         "     "            3   20

 1818 Paragon        "     "            3    8

 1828 Tecumseh       "     "            3    1   20

 1834 Tuscarora      "     "            1   21

 1838 Natchez        "     "            1   17

 1840 Ed. Shippen    "     "            1    8

 1842 Belle of the West    "            1   18

 1844 Sultana        "     "                19   45

 1851 Magnolia       "     "                19   50

 1853 A. L. Shotwell "     "                19   49

 1853 Southern Belle "     "                20    3

 1853 Princess (No. 4)     "                20   26

 1853 Eclipse        "     "                19   47

 1855 Princess (New) "     "                18   53

 1855 Natchez (New)  "     "                17   30

 1856 Princess (New) "     "                17   30

 1870 Natchez        "     "                17   17

 1870 R. E. Lee      "     "                17   11





                  FROM NEW ORLEANS TO CAIRO--1,024 MILES



                                       D.   H.   M.

 1844 J. M. White  made the run in      3    6   44

 1852 Reindeer       "     "            3   12   45

 1853 Eclipse        "     "            3    4    4

 1853 A. L. Shotwell "     "            3    3   40

 1869 Dexter         "     "            3    6   20

 1870 Natchez        "     "            3    4   34

 1870 R. E. Lee      "     "            3    1





                 FROM NEW ORLEANS TO LOUISVILLE--1,440 MILES



                                        D.   H.   M.

 1815 Enterprise   made the run in     25    2   40

 1817 Washington     "     "           25

 1817. Shelby        "     "           20    4   20

 1818 Paragon        "     "           18   10

 1828 Tecumseh       "     "            8    4

 1834 Tuscarora      "     "            7   16

 1837 Gen. Brown     "     "            6   22

 1837 Randolph       "     "            6   22

 1837 Empress        "     "            6   17

 1837 Sultana        "     "            6   15

 1840 Ed. Shippen    "     "            5   14

 1842 Belle of the West    "            6   14

 1843 Duke of Orleans"     "            5   23

 1844 Sultana        "     "            5   12

 1849 Bostona        "     "            5    8

 1851 Belle Key      "     "            3    4   23

 1852 Reindeer       "     "            4   20   45

 1852 Eclipse        "     "            4   19

 1853 A. L. Shotwell "     "            4   10   20

 1853 Eclipse        "     "            4    9   30





               FROM NEW ORLEANS TO DONALDSONVILLE--78 MILES



                                            H.   M.

 1852 A. L. Shotwell made the run in         5   42

 1852 Eclipse        "     "                 5   42

 1854 Sultana        "     "                 4   51

 1860 Atlantic       "     "                 5   11

 1860 Gen. Quitman   "     "                 5    6

 1865 Ruth           "     "                 4   43

 1870 R. E. Lee      "     "                 4   59





                FROM NEW ORLEANS TO ST. LOUIS--1,218 MILES



                                       D.   H.   M.

 1844 J. M. White  made the run in      3   23    9

 1849 Missouri       "     "            4   19

 1869 Dexter         "     "            4    9

 1870 Natchez        "     "            3   21   58

 1870 R. E. Lee      "     "            3   18   14





                 FROM LOUISVILLE TO CINCINNATI--141 MILES



                                       D.   H.   M.

 1819 Gen. Pike      made the run in    1   16

 1819 Paragon         "        "        1   14   20

 1822 Wheeling Packet "        "        1   10

 1837 Moselle         "        "            12

 1843 Duke of Orleans "        "            12

 1843 Congress        "        "            12   20

 1846 Ben Franklin (No. 6)     "            11   45

 1852 Alleghaney      "        "            10   38

 1852 Pittsburgh      "        "            10   23

 1853 Telegraph No. 3 "        "             9   52





                  FROM LOUISVILLE TO ST. LOUIS--750 MILES



                                       D.   H.   M.

 1843 Congress     made the run in      2    1

 1854 Pike           "       "          1   23

 1854 Northerner     "       "          1   22   30

 1855 Southemer      "       "          1   19





                 FROM CINCINNATI TO PITTSBURGH--490 MILES



                                       D.   H.

 1850 Telegraph No. 2 made the run in   1   17

 1851 Buckeye State     "       "       1   16

 1852 Pittsburgh        "       "       1   15





                     FROM ST. LOUIS TO ALTON--30 MILES



                                       D.    M.

 1853 Altona       made the run in      1   35

 1876 Golden Eagle   "       "          1   37

 1876 War Eagle      "       "          1   37





                           MISCELLANEOUS RUNS



In June, 1859, the St. Louis and Keokuk Packet, City of Louisiana,

made the run from St. Louis to Keokuk (214 miles) in 16 hours

and 20 minutes, the best time on record.



In 1868 the steamer Hawkeye State, of the Northern Packet Company,

made the run from St. Louis to St. Paul (800 miles) in 2 days and 20 hours.

Never was beaten.



In 1853 the steamer Polar Star made the run from St. Louis to St. Joseph,

on the Missouri River, in 64 hours.  In July, 1856, the steamer Jas.

H. Lucas, Andy Wineland, Master, made the same run in 60 hours

and 57 minutes.  The distance between the ports is 600 miles,

and when the difficulties of navigating the turbulent Missouri

are taken into consideration, the performance of the Lucas

deserves especial mention.



                      THE RUN OF THE ROBERT E. LEE



The time made by the R. E. Lee from New Orleans to St. Louis

in 1870, in her famous race with the Natchez, is the best

on record, and, inasmuch as the race created a national interest,

we give below her time table from port to port.



Left New Orleans, Thursday, June 30th, 1870, at 4 o'clock

and 55 minutes, p.m.; reached



                                 D.  H.  M.

 Carrollton                              27<half>

 Harry Hills                         1   00<half>

 Red Church                          1   39

 Bonnet Carre                        2   38

 College Point                       3   50<half>

 Donaldsonville                      4   59

 Plaquemine                          7   05<half>

 Baton Rouge                         8   25

 Bayou Sara                         10   26

 Red River                          12   56

 Stamps                             13   56

 Bryaro                             15   51<half>

 Hinderson's                        16   29

 Natchez                            17   11

 Cole's Creek                       19   21

 Waterproof                         18   53

 Rodney                             20   45

 St. Joseph                         21   02

 Grand Gulf                         22   06

 Hard Times                         22   18

 Half Mile below Warrenton       1

 Vicksburg                       1       38

 Milliken's Bend                 1   2   37

 Bailey's                        1   3   48

 Lake Providence                 1   5   47

 Greenville                      1  10   55

 Napoleon                        1  16   22

 White River                     1  16   56

 Australia                       1  19

 Helena                          1  23   25

 Half Mile Below St. Francis     2

 Memphis                         2   6    9

 Foot of Island 37               2   9

 Foot of Island 26               2  13   30

 Tow-head, Island 14             2  17   23

 New Madrid                      2  19   50

 Dry Bar No. 10                  2  20   37

 Foot of Island 8                2  21   25

 Upper Tow-head--Lucas Bend      3

 Cairo                           3   1

 St. Louis                       3  18   14



The Lee landed at St. Louis at 11.25 A.M., on July 4th, 1870--6 hours

and 36 minutes ahead of the Natchez.  The officers of the Natchez claimed

7 hours and 1 minute stoppage on account of fog and repairing machinery.

The R. E. Lee was commanded by Captain John W. Cannon, and the Natchez was in

charge of that veteran Southern boatman, Captain Thomas P. Leathers.













                               Chapter 17

                          Cut-offs and Stephen



THESE dry details are of importance in one particular.

They give me an opportunity of introducing one of the Mississippi's

oddest peculiarities,--that of shortening its length from time to time.

If you will throw a long, pliant apple-paring over your shoulder,

it will pretty fairly shape itself into an average section

of the Mississippi River; that is, the nine or ten hundred miles

stretching from Cairo, Illinois, southward to New Orleans,

the same being wonderfully crooked, with a brief straight bit

here and there at wide intervals.  The two hundred-mile stretch

from Cairo northward to St. Louis is by no means so crooked,

that being a rocky country which the river cannot cut much.



The water cuts the alluvial banks of the 'lower' river into deep

horseshoe curves; so deep, indeed, that in some places if you were to get

ashore at one extremity of the horseshoe and walk across the neck,

half or three quarters of a mile, you could sit down and rest a couple

of hours while your steamer was coming around the long elbow,

at a speed of ten miles an hour, to take you aboard again.

When the river is rising fast, some scoundrel whose plantation

is back in the country, and therefore of inferior value,

has only to watch his chance, cut a little gutter across the narrow

neck of land some dark night, and turn the water into it,

and in a wonderfully short time a miracle has happened:  to wit,

the whole Mississippi has taken possession of that little ditch,

and placed the countryman's plantation on its bank (quadrupling its

value), and that other party's formerly valuable plantation finds

itself away out yonder on a big island; the old watercourse around

it will soon shoal up, boats cannot approach within ten miles

of it, and down goes its value to a fourth of its former worth.

Watches are kept on those narrow necks, at needful times,

and if a man happens to be caught cutting a ditch across them,

the chances are all against his ever having another opportunity to

cut a ditch.



Pray observe some of the effects of this ditching business.

Once there was a neck opposite Port Hudson, Louisiana, which was only

half a mile across, in its narrowest place.  You could walk across

there in fifteen minutes; but if you made the journey around the cape

on a raft, you traveled thirty-five miles to accomplish the same thing.

In 1722 the river darted through that neck, deserted its old bed,

and thus shortened itself thirty-five miles.  In the same way it

shortened itself twenty-five miles at Black Hawk Point in 1699.

Below Red River Landing, Raccourci cut-off was made (forty or fifty

years ago, I think). This shortened the river twenty-eight miles.

In our day, if you travel by river from the southernmost of these

three cut-offs to the northernmost, you go only seventy miles.

To do the same thing a hundred and seventy-six years ago, one had

to go a hundred and fifty-eight miles!--shortening of eighty-eight

miles in that trifling distance.  At some forgotten time in the past,

cut-offs were made above Vidalia, Louisiana; at island 92; at island 84;

and at Hale's Point.  These shortened the river, in the aggregate,

seventy-seven miles.



Since my own day on the Mississippi, cut-offs have been made at

Hurricane Island; at island 100; at Napoleon, Arkansas; at Walnut Bend;

and at Council Bend.  These shortened the river, in the aggregate,

sixty-seven miles.  In my own time a cut-off was made at American Bend,

which shortened the river ten miles or more.



Therefore, the Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve

hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago.

It was eleven hundred and eighty after the cut-off of 1722.

It was one thousand and forty after the American Bend cut-off. It has

lost sixty-seven miles since.  Consequently its length is only nine

hundred and seventy-three miles at present.



Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and 'let on'

to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred

in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the far future

by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is here!

Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from!

Nor 'development of species,' either!  Glacial epochs are great things,

but they are vague--vague.  Please observe:--



In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower

Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles.

That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year.

Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic,

can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period,' just a million

years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards

of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out

over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token

any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now

the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long,

and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together,

and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual

board of aldermen.  There is something fascinating about science.

One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling

investment of fact.



When the water begins to flow through one of those ditches I

have been speaking of, it is time for the people thereabouts

to move.  The water cleaves the banks away like a knife.

By the time the ditch has become twelve or fifteen feet wide,

the calamity is as good as accomplished, for no power on earth

can stop it now.  When the width has reached a hundred yards,

the banks begin to peel off in slices half an acre wide.

The current flowing around the bend traveled formerly

only five miles an hour; now it is tremendously increased

by the shortening of the distance.  I was on board the first

boat that tried to go through the cut-off at American Bend,

but we did not get through.  It was toward midnight, and a wild

night it was--thunder, lightning, and torrents of rain.

It was estimated that the current in the cut-off was making

about fifteen or twenty miles an hour; twelve or thirteen

was the best our boat could do, even in tolerably slack water,

therefore perhaps we were foolish to try the cut-off. However,

Mr. Brown was ambitious, and he kept on trying.

The eddy running up the bank, under the 'point,' was about

as swift as the current out in the middle; so we would

go flying up the shore like a lightning express train,

get on a big head of steam, and 'stand by for a surge'

when we struck the current that was whirling by the point.

But all our preparations were useless.  The instant the current hit

us it spun us around like a top, the water deluged the forecastle,

and the boat careened so far over that one could hardly keep

his feet.  The next instant we were away down the river,

clawing with might and main to keep out of the woods.

We tried the experiment four times.  I stood on the forecastle

companion way to see.  It was astonishing to observe how

suddenly the boat would spin around and turn tail the moment

she emerged from the eddy and the current struck her nose.

The sounding concussion and the quivering would have been

about the same if she had come full speed against a sand-bank.

Under the lightning flashes one could see the plantation cabins

and the goodly acres tumble into the river; and the crash they

made was not a bad effort at thunder.  Once, when we spun around,

we only missed a house about twenty feet, that had a light burning

in the window; and in the same instant that house went overboard.

Nobody could stay on our forecastle; the water swept across

it in a torrent every time we plunged athwart the current.

At the end of our fourth effort we brought up in the woods two miles

below the cut-off; all the country there was overflowed, of course.

A day or two later the cut-off was three-quarters of a mile wide,

and boats passed up through it without much difficulty, and so

saved ten miles.



The old Raccourci cut-off reduced the river's length twenty-eight miles.

There used to be a tradition connected with it.  It was said that a boat

came along there in the night and went around the enormous elbow

the usual way, the pilots not knowing that the cut-off had been made.

It was a grisly, hideous night, and all shapes were vague and distorted.

The old bend had already begun to fill up, and the boat got to

running away from mysterious reefs, and occasionally hitting one.

The perplexed pilots fell to swearing, and finally uttered the entirely

unnecessary wish that they might never get out of that place.

As always happens in such cases, that particular prayer was answered,

and the others neglected.  So to this day that phantom steamer is still

butting around in that deserted river, trying to find her way out.

More than one grave watchman has sworn to me that on drizzly,

dismal nights, he has glanced fearfully down that forgotten river

as he passed the head of the island, and seen the faint glow

of the specter steamer's lights drifting through the distant gloom,

and heard the muffled cough of her 'scape-pipes and the plaintive cry

of her leadsmen.



In the absence of further statistics, I beg to close this chapter

with one more reminiscence of 'Stephen.'



Most of the captains and pilots held Stephen's note for

borrowed sums, ranging from two hundred and fifty dollars upward.

Stephen never paid one of these notes, but he was very prompt

and very zealous about renewing them every twelve months.



Of course there came a time, at last, when Stephen could

no longer borrow of his ancient creditors; so he was

obliged to lie in wait for new men who did not know him.

Such a victim was good-hearted, simple natured young Yates

(I use a fictitious name, but the real name began, as this

one does, with a Y). Young Yates graduated as a pilot,

got a berth, and when the month was ended and he stepped

up to the clerk's office and received his two hundred

and fifty dollars in crisp new bills, Stephen was there!

His silvery tongue began to wag, and in a very little while

Yates's two hundred and fifty dollars had changed hands.

The fact was soon known at pilot headquarters, and the amusement

and satisfaction of the old creditors were large and generous.

But innocent Yates never suspected that Stephen's promise

to pay promptly at the end of the week was a worthless one.

Yates called for his money at the stipulated time;

Stephen sweetened him up and put him off a week.  He called then,

according to agreement, and came away sugar-coated again,

but suffering under another postponement.  So the thing went on.

Yates haunted Stephen week after week, to no purpose, and at last

gave it up.  And then straightway Stephen began to haunt Yates!

Wherever Yates appeared, there was the inevitable Stephen.

And not only there, but beaming with affection and gushing

with apologies for not being able to pay.  By and by,

whenever poor Yates saw him coming, he would turn and fly,

and drag his company with him, if he had company; but it

was of no use; his debtor would run him down and corner him.

Panting and red-faced, Stephen would come, with outstretched hands

and eager eyes, invade the conversation, shake both of Yates's

arms loose in their sockets, and begin--



'My, what a race I've had!  I saw you didn't see me,

and so I clapped on all steam for fear I'd miss you entirely.

And here you are! there, just stand so, and let me

look at you! just the same old noble countenance.'

[To Yates's friend:] 'Just look at him!  LOOK at him!

Ain't it just GOOD to look at him!  AIN'T it now?  Ain't he just

a picture!  SOME call him a picture; I call him a panorama!

That's what he is--an entire panorama.  And now I'm reminded!

How I do wish I could have seen you an hour earlier!

For twenty-four hours I've been saving up that two hundred

and fifty dollars for you; been looking for you everywhere.

I waited at the Planter's from six yesterday evening till two o'clock

this morning, without rest or food; my wife says, "Where have you

been all night?"  I said, "This debt lies heavy on my mind."

She says, "In all my days I never saw a man take a debt to heart

the way you do."  I said, "It's my nature; how can I change it?"

She says, "Well, do go to bed and get some rest."  I said,

"Not till that poor, noble young man has got his money."

So I set up all night, and this morning out I shot, and the first

man I struck told me you had shipped on the "Grand Turk"

and gone to New Orleans.  Well, sir, I had to lean up against

a building and cry.  So help me goodness, I couldn't help it.

The man that owned the place come out cleaning up with a rag,

and said he didn't like to have people cry against his building,

and then it seemed to me that the whole world had turned

against me, and it wasn't any use to live any more; and coming

along an hour ago, suffering no man knows what agony, I met Jim

Wilson and paid him the two hundred and fifty dollars on account;

and to think that here you are, now, and I haven't got a cent!

But as sure as I am standing here on this ground on this

particular brick,--there, I've scratched a mark on the brick

to remember it by,--I'll borrow that money and pay it over

to you at twelve o'clock sharp, tomorrow!  Now, stand so;

let me look at you just once more.'



And so on.  Yates's life became a burden to him.  He could not escape his

debtor and his debtor's awful sufferings on account of not being able to pay.

He dreaded to show himself in the street, lest he should find Stephen lying

in wait for him at the comer.



Bogart's billiard saloon was a great resort for pilots in those days.

They met there about as much to exchange river news as to play.

One morning Yates was there; Stephen was there, too, but kept out

of sight.  But by and by, when about all the pilots had arrived

who were in town, Stephen suddenly appeared in the midst, and rushed

for Yates as for a long-lost brother.



'OH, I am so glad to see you!  Oh my soul, the sight of you is

such a comfort to my eyes!  Gentlemen, I owe all of you money;

among you I owe probably forty thousand dollars.  I want to pay it;

I intend to pay it every last cent of it.  You all know,

without my telling you, what sorrow it has cost me to remain so long

under such deep obligations to such patient and generous friends;

but the sharpest pang I suffer--by far the sharpest--is from

the debt I owe to this noble young man here; and I have come to this

place this morning especially to make the announcement that I

have at last found a method whereby I can pay off all my debts!

And most especially I wanted HIM to be here when I announced it.

Yes, my faithful friend,--my benefactor, I've found the method!

I've found the method to pay off all my debts, and you'll get your money!'

Hope dawned in Yates's eye; then Stephen, beaming benignantly,

and placing his hand upon Yates's head, added, 'I am going to pay them

off in alphabetical order!'



Then he turned and disappeared.  The full significance of Stephen's 'method'

did not dawn upon the perplexed and musing crowd for some two minutes;

and then Yates murmured with a sigh--



'Well, the Y's stand a gaudy chance.  He won't get any further than the C's

in THIS world, and I reckon that after a good deal of eternity has wasted

away in the next one, I'll still be referred to up there as "that poor,

ragged pilot that came here from St. Louis in the early days!"









                               Chapter 18

                       I Take a Few Extra Lessons



DURING the two or two and a half years of my apprenticeship,

I served under many pilots, and had experience of many

kinds of steamboatmen and many varieties of steamboats;

for it was not always convenient for Mr. Bixby to have me

with him, and in such cases he sent me with somebody else.

I am to this day profiting somewhat by that experience;

for in that brief, sharp schooling, I got personally and familiarly

acquainted with about all the different types of human nature

that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history.

The fact is daily borne in upon me, that the average shore-employment

requires as much as forty years to equip a man with this sort

of an education.  When I say I am still profiting by this thing,

I do not mean that it has constituted me a judge of men--

no, it has not done that; for judges of men are born, not made.

My profit is various in kind and degree; but the feature of it

which I value most is the zest which that early experience has

given to my later reading.  When I find a well-drawn character

in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal

interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before--

met him on the river.



The figure that comes before me oftenest, out of the shadows of that

vanished time, is that of Brown, of the steamer 'Pennsylvania'--the man

referred to in a former chapter, whose memory was so good and tiresome.

He was a middle-aged, long, slim, bony, smooth-shaven, horse-faced, ignorant,

stingy, malicious, snarling, fault hunting, mote-magnifying tyrant.

I early got the habit of coming on watch with dread at my heart.

No matter how good a time I might have been having with the off-watch below,

and no matter how high my spirits might be when I started aloft, my soul

became lead in my body the moment I approached the pilot-house.



I still remember the first time I ever entered the presence of that man.

The boat had backed out from St. Louis and was 'straightening down;'

I ascended to the pilot-house in high feather, and very proud

to be semi-officially a member of the executive family of so fast

and famous a boat.  Brown was at the wheel.  I paused in the middle

of the room, all fixed to make my bow, but Brown did not look around.

I thought he took a furtive glance at me out of the corner of his eye,

but as not even this notice was repeated, I judged I had been mistaken.

By this time he was picking his way among some dangerous 'breaks' abreast

the woodyards; therefore it would not be proper to interrupt him; so I

stepped softly to the high bench and took a seat.



There was silence for ten minutes; then my new boss turned

and inspected me deliberately and painstakingly from head

to heel for about--as it seemed to me--a quarter of an hour.

After which he removed his countenance and I saw it no more

for some seconds; then it came around once more, and this

question greeted me--



'Are you Horace Bigsby's cub?'



'Yes, sir.'



After this there was a pause and another inspection.  Then--



'What's your name?'



I told him.  He repeated it after me.  It was probably the only

thing he ever forgot; for although I was with him many months

he never addressed himself to me in any other way than 'Here!'

and then his command followed.



'Where was you born?'



'In Florida, Missouri.'



A pause.  Then--



'Dern sight better staid there!'



By means of a dozen or so of pretty direct questions, he pumped

my family history out of me.



The leads were going now, in the first crossing.  This interrupted

the inquest.  When the leads had been laid in, he resumed--



'How long you been on the river?'



I told him.  After a pause--



'Where'd you get them shoes?'



I gave him the information.



'Hold up your foot!'



I did so.  He stepped back, examined the shoe minutely and contemptuously,

scratching his head thoughtfully, tilting his high sugar-loaf hat well forward

to facilitate the operation, then ejaculated, 'Well, I'll be dod derned!'

and returned to his wheel.



What occasion there was to be dod derned about it is a thing

which is still as much of a mystery to me now as it was then.

It must have been all of fifteen minutes--fifteen minutes

of dull, homesick silence--before that long horse-face

swung round upon me again--and then, what a change!

It was as red as fire, and every muscle in it was working.

Now came this shriek--



'Here!--You going to set there all day?'



I lit in the middle of the floor, shot there by the electric

suddenness of the surprise.  As soon as I could get my voice I said,

apologetically:--'I have had no orders, sir.'



'You've had no ORDERS!  My, what a fine bird we are!  We must have ORDERS!

Our father was a GENTLEMAN--owned slaves--and we've been to SCHOOL.

Yes, WE are a gentleman, TOO, and got to have ORDERS!  ORDERS, is it?

ORDERS is what you want!  Dod dern my skin, I'LL learn you to swell yourself

up and blow around here about your dod-derned ORDERS!  G'way from the wheel!'

(I had approached it without knowing it.)



I moved back a step or two, and stood as in a dream, all my senses

stupefied by this frantic assault.



'What you standing there for?  Take that ice-pitcher down to

the texas-tender-come, move along, and don't you be all day about it!'



The moment I got back to the pilot-house, Brown said--



'Here!  What was you doing down there all this time?'



'I couldn't find the texas-tender; I had to go all the way to the pantry.'



'Derned likely story!  Fill up the stove.'



I proceeded to do so.  He watched me like a cat.

Presently he shouted--



'Put down that shovel!  Deadest numskull I ever saw--

ain't even got sense enough to load up a stove.'



All through the watch this sort of thing went on.  Yes, and the

subsequent watches were much like it, during a stretch of months.

As I have said, I soon got the habit of coming on duty with dread.

The moment I was in the presence, even in the darkest night,

I could feel those yellow eyes upon me, and knew their owner

was watching for a pretext to spit out some venom on me.

Preliminarily he would say-



'Here!  Take the wheel.'



Two minutes later--



'WHERE in the nation you going to?  Pull her down! pull her down!'



After another moment--



'Say!  You going to hold her all day?  Let her go--meet her! meet her!'



Then he would jump from the bench, snatch the wheel from me,

and meet her himself, pouring out wrath upon me all the time.



George Ritchie was the other pilot's cub.  He was having

good times now; for his boss, George Ealer, was as kindhearted

as Brown wasn't. Ritchie had steeled for Brown the season before;

consequently he knew exactly how to entertain himself and plague me,

all by the one operation.  Whenever I took the wheel for a moment

on Ealer's watch, Ritchie would sit back on the bench and play Brown,

with continual ejaculations of 'Snatch her! snatch her!

Derndest mud-cat I ever saw!'  'Here!  Where you going NOW?

Going to run over that snag?'  'Pull her DOWN!  Don't you hear me?

Pull her DOWN!'  'There she goes!  JUST as I expected!

I TOLD you not to cramp that reef.  G'way from the wheel!'



So I always had a rough time of it, no matter whose watch it was;

and sometimes it seemed to me that Ritchie's good-natured badgering

was pretty nearly as aggravating as Brown's dead-earnest nagging.



I often wanted to kill Brown, but this would not answer.

A cub had to take everything his boss gave, in the way of

vigorous comment and criticism; and we all believed that there

was a United States law making it a penitentiary offense to

strike or threaten a pilot who was on duty.  However, I could

IMAGINE myself killing Brown; there was no law against that;

and that was the thing I used always to do the moment I was abed.

Instead of going over my river in my mind as was my duty,

I threw business aside for pleasure, and killed Brown.

I killed Brown every night for months; not in old, stale,

commonplace ways, but in new and picturesque ones;--ways that were

sometimes surprising for freshness of design and ghastliness of

situation and environment.



Brown was ALWAYS watching for a pretext to find fault;

and if he could find no plausible pretext, he would invent one.

He would scold you for shaving a shore, and for not shaving it;

for hugging a bar, and for not hugging it; for 'pulling down'

when not invited, and for not pulling down when not invited;

for firing up without orders, and for waiting FOR orders.  In a word,

it was his invariable rule to find fault with EVERYTHING you did;

and another invariable rule of his was to throw all his remarks

(to you) into the form of an insult.



One day we were approaching New Madrid, bound down and heavily laden.

Brown was at one side of the wheel, steering; I was at the other,

standing by to 'pull down' or 'shove up.'  He cast a furtive glance at me

every now and then.  I had long ago learned what that meant; viz., he was

trying to invent a trap for me.  I wondered what shape it was going to take.

By and by he stepped back from the wheel and said in his usual snarly way--



'Here!--See if you've got gumption enough to round her to.'



This was simply BOUND to be a success; nothing could prevent it;

for he had never allowed me to round the boat to before;

consequently, no matter how I might do the thing, he could

find free fault with it.  He stood back there with his greedy

eye on me, and the result was what might have been foreseen:

I lost my head in a quarter of a minute, and didn't know what I

was about; I started too early to bring the boat around,

but detected a green gleam of joy in Brown's eye, and corrected

my mistake; I started around once more while too high up,

but corrected myself again in time; I made other false moves,

and still managed to save myself; but at last I grew so confused

and anxious that I tumbled into the very worst blunder of all--

I got too far down before beginning to fetch the boat around.

Brown's chance was come.



His face turned red with passion; he made one bound,

hurled me across the house with a sweep of his arm,

spun the wheel down, and began to pour out a stream of

vituperation upon me which lasted till he was out of breath.

In the course of this speech he called me all the different

kinds of hard names he could think of, and once or twice I

thought he was even going to swear--but he didn't this time.

'Dod dern' was the nearest he ventured to the luxury of swearing,

for he had been brought up with a wholesome respect for future

fire and brimstone.



That was an uncomfortable hour; for there was a big audience

on the hurricane deck.  When I went to bed that night,

I killed Brown in seventeen different ways--all of them new.









                               Chapter 19

                    Brown and I Exchange Compliments



Two trips later, I got into serious trouble.  Brown was steering;

I was 'pulling down.'  My younger brother appeared on the hurricane deck,

and shouted to Brown to stop at some landing or other a mile or so below.

Brown gave no intimation that he had heard anything.  But that was

his way:  he never condescended to take notice of an under clerk.

The wind was blowing; Brown was deaf (although he always pretended

he wasn't), and I very much doubted if he had heard the order.

If I had two heads, I would have spoken; but as I had only one, it seemed

judicious to take care of it; so I kept still.



Presently, sure enough, we went sailing by that plantation.

Captain Klinefelter appeared on the deck, and said--



'Let her come around, sir, let her come around.

Didn't Henry tell you to land here?'



'NO, sir!'



'I sent him up to do, it.'



'He did come up; and that's all the good it done, the dod-derned fool.

He never said anything.'



'Didn't YOU hear him?' asked the captain of me.



Of course I didn't want to be mixed up in this business,

but there was no way to avoid it; so I said--



'Yes, sir.'



I knew what Brown's next remark would be, before he uttered it; it was--



'Shut your mouth! you never heard anything of the kind.'



I closed my mouth according to instructions.  An hour later,

Henry entered the pilot-house, unaware of what had been going on.

He was a thoroughly inoffensive boy, and I was sorry to see

him come, for I knew Brown would have no pity on him.

Brown began, straightway--



'Here! why didn't you tell me we'd got to land at that plantation?'



'I did tell you, Mr. Brown.'



'It's a lie!'



I said--



'You lie, yourself.  He did tell you.'



Brown glared at me in unaffected surprise; and for as much as a moment

he was entirely speechless; then he shouted to me--



'I'll attend to your case in half a minute!' then to Henry,

'And you leave the pilot-house; out with you!'



It was pilot law, and must be obeyed.  The boy started out,

and even had his foot on the upper step outside the door, when Brown,

with a sudden access of fury, picked up a ten-pound lump of coal

and sprang after him; but I was between, with a heavy stool,

and I hit Brown a good honest blow which stretched-him out.



I had committed the crime of crimes--I had lifted my hand against

a pilot on duty!  I supposed I was booked for the penitentiary sure,

and couldn't be booked any surer if I went on and squared my long account

with this person while I had the chance; consequently I stuck to him

and pounded him with my fists a considerable time--I do not know how long,

the pleasure of it probably made it seem longer than it really was;--

but in the end he struggled free and jumped up and sprang to the wheel:

a very natural solicitude, for, all this time, here was this steamboat

tearing down the river at the rate of fifteen miles an hour and nobody at

the helm!  However, Eagle Bend was two miles wide at this bank-full stage,

and correspondingly long and deep; and the boat was steering herself

straight down the middle and taking no chances.  Still, that was only luck--

a body MIGHT have found her charging into the woods.



Perceiving, at a glance, that the 'Pennsylvania' was in no danger,

Brown gathered up the big spy-glass, war-club fashion, and ordered

me out of the pilot-house with more than Comanche bluster.

But I was not afraid of him now; so, instead of going, I tarried,

and criticized his grammar; I reformed his ferocious speeches for him,

and put them into good English, calling his attention to the advantage

of pure English over the bastard dialect of the Pennsylvanian

collieries whence he was extracted.  He could have done his part

to admiration in a cross-fire of mere vituperation, of course;

but he was not equipped for this species of controversy;

so he presently laid aside his glass and took the wheel,

muttering and shaking his head; and I retired to the bench.

The racket had brought everybody to the hurricane deck, and I trembled

when I saw the old captain looking up from the midst of the crowd.

I said to myself, 'Now I AM done for!'--For although, as a rule,

he was so fatherly and indulgent toward the boat's family,

and so patient of minor shortcomings, he could be stern enough when

the fault was worth it.



I tried to imagine what he WOULD do to a cub pilot who had been guilty

of such a crime as mine, committed on a boat guard-deep with costly freight

and alive with passengers.  Our watch was nearly ended.  I thought I would

go and hide somewhere till I got a chance to slide ashore.  So I slipped

out of the pilot-house, and down the steps, and around to the texas door--

and was in the act of gliding within, when the captain confronted me!

I dropped my head, and he stood over me in silence a moment or two,

then said impressively--



'Follow me.'



I dropped into his wake; he led the way to his parlor in the forward

end of the texas.  We were alone, now.  He closed the after door;

then moved slowly to the forward one and closed that.  He sat down;

I stood before him.  He looked at me some little time, then said--



'So you have been fighting Mr. Brown?'



I answered meekly--



'Yes, sir.'



'Do you know that that is a very serious matter?'



'Yes, sir.'



'Are you aware that this boat was plowing down the river fully

five minutes with no one at the wheel?'



'Yes, sir.'



'Did you strike him first?'



'Yes, sir.'



'What with?'



'A stool, sir.'



'Hard?'



'Middling, sir.'



'Did it knock him down?'



'He--he fell, sir.'



'Did you follow it up?  Did you do anything further?'



'Yes, sir.'



'What did you do?'



'Pounded him, sir.'



'Pounded him?'



'Yes, sir.'



'Did you pound him much?--that is, severely?'



'One might call it that, sir, maybe.'



'I'm deuced glad of it!  Hark ye, never mention that I said that.

You have been guilty of a great crime; and don't you ever be

guilty of it again, on this boat.  BUT--lay for him ashore!

Give him a good sound thrashing, do you hear?  I'll pay the expenses.

Now go--and mind you, not a word of this to anybody.  Clear out with you!--

you've been guilty of a great crime, you whelp!'



I slid out, happy with the sense of a close shave and a mighty deliverance;

and I heard him laughing to himself and slapping his fat thighs after I had

closed his door.



When Brown came off watch he went straight to the captain,

who was talking with some passengers on the boiler deck,

and demanded that I be put ashore in New Orleans--and added--



'I'll never turn a wheel on this boat again while that cub stays.'



The captain said--



'But he needn't come round when you are on watch, Mr. Brown.



'I won't even stay on the same boat with him.  One of us has

got to go ashore.'



'Very well,' said the captain, 'let it be yourself;'

and resumed his talk with the passengers.



During the brief remainder of the trip, I knew how an emancipated slave feels;

for I was an emancipated slave myself.  While we lay at landings,

I listened to George Ealer's flute; or to his readings from his two bibles,

that is to say, Goldsmith and Shakespeare; or I played chess with him--

and would have beaten him sometimes, only he always took back his last move

and ran the game out differently.









                               Chapter 20

                              A Catastrophe



WE lay three days in New Orleans, but the captain did not succeed

in finding another pilot; so he proposed that I should stand

a daylight watch, and leave the night watches to George Ealer.

But I was afraid; I had never stood a watch of any sort by myself,

and I believed I should be sure to get into trouble in the head of

some chute, or ground the boat in a near cut through some bar or other.

Brown remained in his place; but he would not travel with me.

So the captain gave me an order on the captain of the 'A. T. Lacey,'

for a passage to St. Louis, and said he would find a new

pilot there and my steersman's berth could then be resumed.

The 'Lacey' was to leave a couple of days after the 'Pennsylvania.'



The night before the 'Pennsylvania' left, Henry and I sat

chatting on a freight pile on the levee till midnight.

The subject of the chat, mainly, was one which I think we

had not exploited before--steamboat disasters.  One was then

on its way to us, little as we suspected it; the water which

was to make the steam which should cause it, was washing past

some point fifteen hundred miles up the river while we talked;--

but it would arrive at the right time and the right place.

We doubted if persons not clothed with authority were of much

use in cases of disaster and attendant panic; still, they might

be of SOME use; so we decided that if a disaster ever fell

within our experience we would at least stick to the boat,

and give such minor service as chance might throw in the way.

Henry remembered this, afterward, when the disaster came,

and acted accordingly.



The 'Lacey' started up the river two days behind the 'Pennsylvania.'

We touched at Greenville, Mississippi, a couple of days out,

and somebody shouted--



'The "Pennsylvania" is blown up at Ship Island, and a hundred

and fifty lives lost!'



At Napoleon, Arkansas, the same evening, we got an extra,

issued by a Memphis paper, which gave some particulars.

It mentioned my brother, and said he was not hurt.



Further up the river we got a later extra.  My brother was

again mentioned; but this time as being hurt beyond help.

We did not get full details of the catastrophe until we reached Memphis.

This is the sorrowful story--



It was six o'clock on a hot summer morning.  The 'Pennsylvania'

was creeping along, north of Ship Island, about sixty miles below

Memphis on a half-head of steam, towing a wood-flat which was fast

being emptied.  George Ealer was in the pilot-house-alone, I think;

the second engineer and a striker had the watch in the engine room;

the second mate had the watch on deck; George Black, Mr. Wood,

and my brother, clerks, were asleep, as were also Brown and

the head engineer, the carpenter, the chief mate, and one striker;

Captain Klinefelter was in the barber's chair, and the barber was

preparing to shave him.  There were a good many cabin passengers aboard,

and three or four hundred deck passengers--so it was said at the time--

and not very many of them were astir.  The wood being nearly all out

of the flat now, Ealer rang to 'come ahead' full steam, and the next

moment four of the eight boilers exploded with a thunderous crash,

and the whole forward third of the boat was hoisted toward the sky!

The main part of the mass, with the chimneys, dropped upon the boat again,

a mountain of riddled and chaotic rubbish--and then, after a little,

fire broke out.



Many people were flung to considerable distances, and fell in the river;

among these were Mr. Wood and my brother, and the carpenter.

The carpenter was still stretched upon his mattress when he struck

the water seventy-five feet from the boat.  Brown, the pilot,

and George Black, chief clerk, were never seen or heard of after

the explosion.  The barber's chair, with Captain Klinefelter

in it and unhurt, was left with its back overhanging vacancy--

everything forward of it, floor and all, had disappeared;

and the stupefied barber, who was also unhurt, stood with one toe

projecting over space, still stirring his lather unconsciously,

and saying, not a word.



When George Ealer saw the chimneys plunging aloft in front of him,

he knew what the matter was; so he muffled his face in the lapels of

his coat, and pressed both hands there tightly to keep this protection

in its place so that no steam could get to his nose or mouth.

He had ample time to attend to these details while he was going up

and returning.  He presently landed on top of the unexploded boilers,

forty feet below the former pilot-house, accompanied by his wheel

and a rain of other stuff, and enveloped in a cloud of scalding steam.

All of the many who breathed that steam, died; none escaped.

But Ealer breathed none of it.  He made his way to the free air

as quickly as he could; and when the steam cleared away he returned

and climbed up on the boilers again, and patiently hunted

out each and every one of his chessmen and the several joints

of his flute.



By this time the fire was beginning to threaten.  Shrieks and

groans filled the air.  A great many persons had been scalded,

a great many crippled; the explosion had driven an iron crowbar

through one man's body--I think they said he was a priest.

He did not die at once, and his sufferings were very dreadful.

A young French naval cadet, of fifteen, son of a French admiral,

was fearfully scalded, but bore his tortures manfully.

Both mates were badly scalded, but they stood to their

posts, nevertheless.  They drew the wood-boat aft, and they

and the captain fought back the frantic herd of frightened

immigrants till the wounded could be brought there and placed

in safety first.



When Mr. Wood and Henry fell in the water, they struck out for shore,

which was only a few hundred yards away; but Henry presently said

he believed he was not hurt (what an unaccountable error!), and

therefore would swim back to the boat and help save the wounded.

So they parted, and Henry returned.



By this time the fire was making fierce headway, and several

persons who were imprisoned under the ruins were begging piteously

for help.  All efforts to conquer the fire proved fruitless;

so the buckets were presently thrown aside and the officers

fell-to with axes and tried to cut the prisoners out.

A striker was one of the captives; he said he was not injured,

but could not free himself; and when he saw that the fire was

likely to drive away the workers, he begged that some one would

shoot him, and thus save him from the more dreadful death.

The fire did drive the axmen away, and they had to listen,

helpless, to this poor fellow's supplications till the flames

ended his miseries.



The fire drove all into the wood-flat that could be accommodated there;

it was cut adrift, then, and it and the burning steamer floated

down the river toward Ship Island.  They moored the flat at the head

of the island, and there, unsheltered from the blazing sun,

the half-naked occupants had to remain, without food or stimulants,

or help for their hurts, during the rest of the day.  A steamer

came along, finally, and carried the unfortunates to Memphis,

and there the most lavish assistance was at once forthcoming.

By this time Henry was insensible.  The physicians examined his

injuries and saw that they were fatal, and naturally turned their

main attention to patients who could be saved.



Forty of the wounded were placed upon pallets on the floor of a great

public hall, and among these was Henry.  There the ladies of Memphis

came every day, with flowers, fruits, and dainties and delicacies

of all kinds, and there they remained and nursed the wounded.

All the physicians stood watches there, and all the medical students;

and the rest of the town furnished money, or whatever else was wanted.

And Memphis knew how to do all these things well; for many a

disaster like the 'Pennsylvania's' had happened near her doors,

and she was experienced, above all other cities on the river,

in the gracious office of the Good Samaritan'



The sight I saw when I entered that large hall was new and strange to me.

Two long rows of prostrate forms--more than forty, in all--and every face

and head a shapeless wad of loose raw cotton.  It was a gruesome spectacle.

I watched there six days and nights, and a very melancholy experience it was.

There was one daily incident which was peculiarly depressing:

this was the removal of the doomed to a chamber apart.  It was done

in order that the MORALE of the other patients might not be injuriously

affected by seeing one of their number in the death-agony. The fated one

was always carried out with as little stir as possible, and the stretcher

was always hidden from sight by a wall of assistants; but no matter:

everybody knew what that cluster of bent forms, with its muffled

step and its slow movement meant; and all eyes watched it wistfully,

and a shudder went abreast of it like a wave.



I saw many poor fellows removed to the 'death-room,' and saw them no

more afterward.  But I saw our chief mate carried thither more than once.

His hurts were frightful, especially his scalds.  He was clothed in

linseed oil and raw cotton to his waist, and resembled nothing human.

He was often out of his mind; and then his pains would make him rave

and shout and sometimes shriek.  Then, after a period of dumb exhaustion,

his disordered imagination would suddenly transform the great apartment

into a forecastle, and the hurrying throng of nurses into the crew;

and he would come to a sitting posture and shout, 'Hump yourselves,

HUMP yourselves, you petrifactions, snail-bellies, pall-bearers! going

to be all DAY getting that hatful of freight out?' and supplement

this explosion with a firmament-obliterating irruption or profanity

which nothing could stay or stop till his crater was empty.  And now

and then while these frenzies possessed him, he would tear off handfuls

of the cotton and expose his cooked flesh to view.  It was horrible.

It was bad for the others, of course--this noise and these exhibitions;

so the doctors tried to give him morphine to quiet him.  But, in his mind

or out of it, he would not take it.  He said his wife had been killed

by that treacherous drug, and he would die before he would take it.

He suspected that the doctors were concealing it in his ordinary medicines

and in his water--so he ceased from putting either to his lips.

Once, when he had been without water during two sweltering days,

he took the dipper in his hand, and the sight of the limpid fluid,

and the misery of his thirst, tempted him almost beyond his strength;

but he mastered himself and threw it away, and after that he allowed

no more to be brought near him.  Three times I saw him carried

to the death-room, insensible and supposed to be dying; but each time

he revived, cursed his attendants, and demanded to be taken back.

He lived to be mate of a steamboat again.



But he was the only one who went to the death-room and returned alive.

Dr. Peyton, a principal physician, and rich in all the attributes

that go to constitute high and flawless character, did all that

educated judgment and trained skill could do for Henry; but, as the

newspapers had said in the beginning, his hurts were past help.

On the evening of the sixth day his wandering mind busied itself with

matters far away, and his nerveless fingers 'picked at his coverlet.'

His hour had struck; we bore him to the death-room, poor boy.









                               Chapter 2I

                        A Section in My Biography



IN due course I got my license.  I was a pilot now, full fledged.

I dropped into casual employments; no misfortunes resulting,

intermittent work gave place to steady and protracted engagements.

Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed--and hoped--

that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die

at the wheel when my mission was ended.  But by and by the war came,

commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone.



I had to seek another livelihood.  So I became a silver miner

in Nevada; next, a newspaper reporter; next, a gold miner,

in California; next, a reporter in San Francisco; next, a special

correspondent in the Sandwich Islands; next, a roving correspondent

in Europe and the East; next, an instructional torch-bearer on

the lecture platform; and, finally, I became a scribbler of books,

and an immovable fixture among the other rocks of New England.



In so few words have I disposed of the twenty-one slow-drifting

years that have come and gone since I last looked from the windows

of a pilot-house.



Let us resume, now.









                               Chapter 22

                         I Return to My Muttons



AFTER twenty-one years' absence, I felt a very strong desire

to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of

the boys as might be left; so I resolved to go out there.

I enlisted a poet for company, and a stenographer to 'take him down,'

and started westward about the middle of April.



As I proposed to make notes, with a view to printing,

I took some thought as to methods of procedure.

I reflected that if I were recognized, on the river, I should

not be as free to go and come, talk, inquire, and spy around,

as I should be if unknown; I remembered that it was the custom

of steamboatmen in the old times to load up the confiding

stranger with the most picturesque and admirable lies, and put

the sophisticated friend off with dull and ineffectual facts:

so I concluded, that, from a business point of view, it would

be an advantage to disguise our party with fictitious names.

The idea was certainly good, but it bred infinite bother;

for although Smith, Jones, and Johnson are easy names

to remember when there is no occasion to remember them,

it is next to impossible to recollect them when they are wanted.

How do criminals manage to keep a brand-new ALIAS in mind?

This is a great mystery.  I was innocent; and yet was seldom

able to lay my hand on my new name when it was needed;

and it seemed to me that if I had had a crime on my conscience

to further confuse me, I could never have kept the name by me

at all.



We left per Pennsylvania Railroad, at 8 A.M. April 18.



'EVENING.  Speaking of dress.  Grace and picturesqueness drop

gradually out of it as one travels away from New York.'



I find that among my notes.  It makes no difference

which direction you take, the fact remains the same.

Whether you move north, south, east, or west, no matter:

you can get up in the morning and guess how far you have come,

by noting what degree of grace and picturesqueness is by

that time lacking in the costumes of the new passengers,--

I do not mean of the women alone, but of both sexes.

It may be that CARRIAGE is at the bottom of this thing;

and I think it is; for there are plenty of ladies and gentlemen

in the provincial cities whose garments are all made by the best

tailors and dressmakers of New York; yet this has no perceptible

effect upon the grand fact:  the educated eye never mistakes

those people for New-Yorkers. No, there is a godless grace,

and snap, and style about a born and bred New-Yorker which mere

clothing cannot effect.



'APRIL 19.  This morning, struck into the region of full goatees--sometimes

accompanied by a mustache, but only occasionally.'



It was odd to come upon this thick crop of an obsolete and

uncomely fashion; it was like running suddenly across a forgotten

acquaintance whom you had supposed dead for a generation.

The goatee extends over a wide extent of country; and is accompanied

by an iron-clad belief in Adam and the biblical history of creation,

which has not suffered from the assaults of the scientists.



'AFTERNOON.  At the railway stations the loafers carry BOTH

hands in their breeches pockets; it was observable, heretofore,

that one hand was sometimes out of doors,--here, never.

This is an important fact in geography.'



If the loafers determined the character of a country, it would

be still more important, of course.



'Heretofore, all along, the station-loafer has been often observed to scratch

one shin with the other foot; here, these remains of activity are wanting.

This has an ominous look.'



By and by, we entered the tobacco-chewing region.

Fifty years ago, the tobacco-chewing region covered the Union.

It is greatly restricted now.



Next, boots began to appear.  Not in strong force, however.

Later--away down the Mississippi--they became the rule.

They disappeared from other sections of the Union with the mud;

no doubt they will disappear from the river villages, also,

when proper pavements come in.



We reached St. Louis at ten o'clock at night.  At the counter

of the hotel I tendered a hurriedly-invented fictitious name,

with a miserable attempt at careless ease.  The clerk paused,

and inspected me in the compassionate way in which one inspects

a respectable person who is found in doubtful circumstances;

then he said--



'It's all right; I know what sort of a room you want.

Used to clerk at the St. James, in New York.'



An unpromising beginning for a fraudulent career.  We started to

the supper room, and met two other men whom I had known elsewhere.

How odd and unfair it is:  wicked impostors go around lecturing under

my NOM DE GUERRE and nobody suspects them; but when an honest man

attempts an imposture, he is exposed at once.



One thing seemed plain:  we must start down the river the next day,

if people who could not be deceived were going to crop up at this rate:

an unpalatable disappointment, for we had hoped to have a week in St. Louis.

The Southern was a good hotel, and we could have had a comfortable

time there.  It is large, and well conducted, and its decorations do

not make one cry, as do those of the vast Palmer House, in Chicago.

True, the billiard-tables were of the Old Silurian Period, and the cues and

balls of the Post-Pliocene; but there was refreshment in this, not discomfort;

for there is rest and healing in the contemplation of antiquities.



The most notable absence observable in the billiard-room, was the

absence of the river man.  If he was there he had taken in his sign,

he was in disguise.  I saw there none of the swell airs and graces,

and ostentatious displays of money, and pompous squanderings of it,

which used to distinguish the steamboat crowd from the dry-land crowd

in the bygone days, in the thronged billiard-rooms of St. Louis.

In those times, the principal saloons were always populous with river men;

given fifty players present, thirty or thirty-five were likely

to be from the river.  But I suspected that the ranks were thin now,

and the steamboatmen no longer an aristocracy.  Why, in my time they

used to call the 'barkeep' Bill, or Joe, or Tom, and slap him on

the shoulder; I watched for that.  But none of these people did it.

Manifestly a glory that once was had dissolved and vanished away in

these twenty-one years.



When I went up to my room, I found there the young man called Rogers, crying.

Rogers was not his name; neither was Jones, Brown, Dexter, Ferguson, Bascom,

nor Thompson; but he answered to either of these that a body found handy

in an emergency; or to any other name, in fact, if he perceived that you

meant him.  He said--



'What is a person to do here when he wants a drink of water?--

drink this slush?'



'Can't you drink it?'



'I could if I had some other water to wash it with.'



Here was a thing which had not changed; a score of years had not affected

this water's mulatto complexion in the least; a score of centuries

would succeed no better, perhaps.  It comes out of the turbulent,

bank-caving Missouri, and every tumblerful of it holds nearly an acre

of land in solution.  I got this fact from the bishop of the diocese.

If you will let your glass stand half an hour, you can separate

the land from the water as easy as Genesis; and then you will find

them both good:  the one good to eat, the other good to drink.

The land is very nourishing, the water is thoroughly wholesome.

The one appeases hunger; the other, thirst.  But the natives

do not take them separately, but together, as nature mixed them.

When they find an inch of mud in the bottom of a glass,

they stir it up, and then take the draught as they would gruel.

It is difficult for a stranger to get used to this batter, but once

used to it he will prefer it to water.  This is really the case.

It is good for steamboating, and good to drink; but it is worthless

for all other purposes, except baptizing.



Next morning, we drove around town in the rain.

The city seemed but little changed.  It WAS greatly changed,

but it did not seem so; because in St. Louis, as in London

and Pittsburgh, you can't persuade a new thing to look new;

the coal smoke turns it into an antiquity the moment you take

your hand off it.  The place had just about doubled its size,

since I was a resident of it, and was now become a city

of 400,000 inhabitants; still, in the solid business parts,

it looked about as it had looked formerly.  Yet I am sure there

is not as much smoke in St. Louis now as there used to be.

The smoke used to bank itself in a dense billowy black canopy over

the town, and hide the sky from view.  This shelter is very much

thinner now; still, there is a sufficiency of smoke there, I think.

I heard no complaint.



However, on the outskirts changes were apparent enough; notably in

dwelling-house architecture.  The fine new homes are noble and beautiful

and modern.  They stand by themselves, too, with green lawns around them;

whereas the dwellings of a former day are packed together in blocks,

and are all of one pattern, with windows all alike, set in an arched

frame-work of twisted stone; a sort of house which was handsome enough

when it was rarer.



There was another change--the Forest Park.  This was new to me.

It is beautiful and very extensive, and has the excellent merit

of having been made mainly by nature.  There are other parks,

and fine ones, notably Tower Grove and the Botanical Gardens;

for St. Louis interested herself in such improvements at an earlier

day than did the most of our cities.



The first time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for six

million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it.

It was bitter now to look abroad over this domed and steepled metropolis,

this solid expanse of bricks and mortar stretching away on every hand

into dim, measure-defying distances, and remember that I had allowed

that opportunity to go by.  Why I should have allowed it to go by seems,

of course, foolish and inexplicable to-day, at a first glance; yet there

were reasons at the time to justify this course.



A Scotchman, Hon. Charles Augustus Murray, writing some forty-five or fifty

years ago, said--'The streets are narrow, ill paved and ill lighted.'

Those streets are narrow still, of course; many of them are ill paved yet;

but the reproach of ill lighting cannot be repeated, now.  The 'Catholic

New Church' was the only notable building then, and Mr. Murray was confidently

called upon to admire it, with its 'species of Grecian portico, surmounted by

a kind of steeple, much too diminutive in its proportions, and surmounted

by sundry ornaments' which the unimaginative Scotchman found himself 'quite

unable to describe;' and therefore was grateful when a German tourist helped

him out with the exclamation--'By ----, they look exactly like bed-posts!'

St. Louis is well equipped with stately and noble public buildings now,

and the little church, which the people used to be so proud of, lost its

importance a long time ago.  Still, this would not surprise Mr. Murray,

if he could come back; for he prophesied the coming greatness of St. Louis

with strong confidence.



The further we drove in our inspection-tour, the more sensibly I

realized how the city had grown since I had seen it last; changes in

detail became steadily more apparent and frequent than at first, too:

changes uniformly evidencing progress, energy, prosperity.



But the change of changes was on the 'levee.'  This time,

a departure from the rule.  Half a dozen sound-asleep steamboats

where I used to see a solid mile of wide-awake ones!

This was melancholy, this was woeful.  The absence of the pervading

and jocund steamboatman from the billiard-saloon was explained.

He was absent because he is no more.  His occupation is gone,

his power has passed away, he is absorbed into the common herd,

he grinds at the mill, a shorn Samson and inconspicuous.

Half a dozen lifeless steamboats, a mile of empty wharves,

a negro fatigued with whiskey stretched asleep, in a wide and

soundless vacancy, where the serried hosts of commerce used to

contend!<footnote [Capt. Marryat, writing forty-five years ago says:

'St. Louis has 20,000 inhabitants.  THE RIVER ABREAST OF THE TOWN

IS CROWDED WITH STEAMBOATS, LYING IN TWO OR THREE TIERS.']>  Here

was desolation, indeed.



     'The old, old sea, as one in tears,

       Comes murmuring, with foamy lips,

     And knocking at the vacant piers,

       Calls for his long-lost multitude of ships.'



The towboat and the railroad had done their work, and done it

well and completely.  The mighty bridge, stretching along over

our heads, had done its share in the slaughter and spoliation.

Remains of former steamboatmen told me, with wan satisfaction,

that the bridge doesn't pay.  Still, it can be no sufficient

compensation to a corpse, to know that the dynamite that laid him

out was not of as good quality as it had been supposed to be.



The pavements along the river front were bad:  the sidewalks

were rather out of repair; there was a rich abundance of mud.

All this was familiar and satisfying; but the ancient armies of drays,

and struggling throngs of men, and mountains of freight, were gone;

and Sabbath reigned in their stead.  The immemorial mile of cheap

foul doggeries remained, but business was dull with them;

the multitudes of poison-swilling Irishmen had departed, and in

their places were a few scattering handfuls of ragged negroes,

some drinking, some drunk, some nodding, others asleep.

St. Louis is a great and prosperous and advancing city;

but the river-edge of it seems dead past resurrection.



Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812; at the end of thirty years,

it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty more,

it was dead!  A strangely short life for so majestic a creature.

Of course it is not absolutely dead, neither is a crippled octogenarian

who could once jump twenty-two feet on level ground; but as contrasted

with what it was in its prime vigor, Mississippi steamboating may

be called dead.



It killed the old-fashioned keel-boating, by reducing

the freight-trip to New Orleans to less than a week.

The railroads have killed the steamboat passenger traffic by doing

in two or three days what the steamboats consumed a week in doing;

and the towing-fleets have killed the through-freight traffic

by dragging six or seven steamer-loads of stuff down the river

at a time, at an expense so trivial that steamboat competition

was out of the question.



Freight and passenger way-traffic remains to the steamers.

This is in the hands--along the two thousand miles of river between

St. Paul and New Orleans---of two or three close corporations well

fortified with capital; and by able and thoroughly business-like

management and system, these make a sufficiency of money out

of what is left of the once prodigious steamboating industry.

I suppose that St. Louis and New Orleans have not suffered materially

by the change, but alas for the wood-yard man!



He used to fringe the river all the way; his close-ranked merchandise

stretched from the one city to the other, along the banks,

and he sold uncountable cords of it every year for cash on the nail;

but all the scattering boats that are left burn coal now,

and the seldomest spectacle on the Mississippi to-day is a wood-pile.

Where now is the once wood-yard man?









                               Chapter 23

                           Traveling Incognito



MY idea was, to tarry a while in every town between St. Louis

and New Orleans.  To do this, it would be necessary to go from place

to place by the short packet lines.  It was an easy plan to make,

and would have been an easy one to follow, twenty years ago--but not now.

There are wide intervals between boats, these days.



I wanted to begin with the interesting old French settlements

of St. Genevieve and Kaskaskia, sixty miles below St. Louis.

There was only one boat advertised for that section--

a Grand Tower packet.  Still, one boat was enough; so we went

down to look at her.  She was a venerable rack-heap, and a fraud

to boot; for she was playing herself for personal property,

whereas the good honest dirt was so thickly caked all over

her that she was righteously taxable as real estate.

There are places in New England where her hurricane deck

would be worth a hundred and fifty dollars an acre.

The soil on her forecastle was quite good--the new crop of wheat

was already springing from the cracks in protected places.

The companionway was of a dry sandy character, and would

have been well suited for grapes, with a southern exposure

and a little subsoiling.  The soil of the boiler deck

was thin and rocky, but good enough for grazing purposes.

A colored boy was on watch here--nobody else visible.

We gathered from him that this calm craft would go, as advertised,

'if she got her trip;' if she didn't get it, she would wait

for it.



'Has she got any of her trip?'



'Bless you, no, boss.  She ain't unloadened, yit.  She only come

in dis mawnin'.'



He was uncertain as to when she might get her trip, but thought it

might be to-morrow or maybe next day.  This would not answer at all;

so we had to give up the novelty of sailing down the river on a farm.

We had one more arrow in our quiver:  a Vicksburg packet, the 'Gold Dust,'

was to leave at 5 P.M. We took passage in her for Memphis, and gave

up the idea of stopping off here and there, as being impracticable.

She was neat, clean, and comfortable.  We camped on the boiler deck,

and bought some cheap literature to kill time with.  The vender was a

venerable Irishman with a benevolent face and a tongue that worked easily

in the socket, and from him we learned that he had lived in St. Louis

thirty-four years and had never been across the river during that period.

Then he wandered into a very flowing lecture, filled with classic names

and allusions, which was quite wonderful for fluency until the fact became

rather apparent that this was not the first time, nor perhaps the fiftieth,

that the speech had been delivered.  He was a good deal of a character,

and much better company than the sappy literature he was selling.

A random remark, connecting Irishmen and beer, brought this nugget of

information out of him--



They don't drink it, sir.  They can't drink it, sir.

Give an Irishman lager for a month, and he's a dead man.

An Irishman is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it.

But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him, sir.'



At eight o'clock, promptly, we backed out and crossed the river.

As we crept toward the shore, in the thick darkness, a blinding

glory of white electric light burst suddenly from our forecastle,

and lit up the water and the warehouses as with a noon-day glare.

Another big change, this--no more flickering, smoky, pitch-dripping,

ineffectual torch-baskets, now:  their day is past.  Next, instead of

calling out a score of hands to man the stage, a couple of men and a

hatful of steam lowered it from the derrick where it was suspended,

launched it, deposited it in just the right spot, and the whole thing

was over and done with before a mate in the olden time could have

got his profanity-mill adjusted to begin the preparatory services.

Why this new and simple method of handling the stages was not thought

of when the first steamboat was built, is a mystery which helps one to

realize what a dull-witted slug the average human being is.



We finally got away at two in the morning, and when I turned out

at six, we were rounding to at a rocky point where there was an old

stone warehouse--at any rate, the ruins of it; two or three decayed

dwelling-houses were near by, in the shelter of the leafy hills;

but there were no evidences of human or other animal life to be seen.

I wondered if I had forgotten the river; for I had no recollection whatever

of this place; the shape of the river, too, was unfamiliar; there was

nothing in sight, anywhere, that I could remember ever having seen before.

I was surprised, disappointed, and annoyed.



We put ashore a well-dressed lady and gentleman, and two well-dressed,

lady-like young girls, together with sundry Russia-leather bags.

A strange place for such folk!  No carriage was waiting.

The party moved off as if they had not expected any, and struck

down a winding country road afoot.



But the mystery was explained when we got under way again;

for these people were evidently bound for a large town which lay

shut in behind a tow-head (i.e., new island) a couple of miles

below this landing.  I couldn't remember that town; I couldn't

place it, couldn't call its name.  So I lost part of my temper.

I suspected that it might be St. Genevieve--and so it proved

to be.  Observe what this eccentric river had been about:

it had built up this huge useless tow-head directly

in front of this town, cut off its river communications,

fenced it away completely, and made a 'country' town of it.

It is a fine old place, too, and deserved a better fate.

It was settled by the French, and is a relic of a time when one

could travel from the mouths of the Mississippi to Quebec and be

on French territory and under French rule all the way.



Presently I ascended to the hurricane deck and cast a longing

glance toward the pilot-house.









                               Chapter 24

                        My Incognito is Exploded



AFTER a close study of the face of the pilot on watch, I was satisfied that I

had never seen him before; so I went up there.  The pilot inspected me;

I re-inspected the pilot.  These customary preliminaries over, I sat

down on the high bench, and he faced about and went on with his work.

Every detail of the pilot-house was familiar to me, with one exception,--

a large-mouthed tube under the breast-board. I puzzled over that thing a

considerable time; then gave up and asked what it was for.



'To hear the engine-bells through.'



It was another good contrivance which ought to have been invented

half a century sooner.  So I was thinking, when the pilot asked--



'Do you know what this rope is for?'



I managed to get around this question, without committing myself.



'Is this the first time you were ever in a pilot-house?'



I crept under that one.



'Where are you from?'



'New England.'



'First time you have ever been West?'



I climbed over this one.



'If you take an interest in such things, I can tell you what all

these things are for.'



I said I should like it.



'This,' putting his hand on a backing-bell rope, 'is to sound the fire-alarm;

this,' putting his hand on a go-ahead bell, 'is to call the texas-tender;

this one,' indicating the whistle-lever, 'is to call the captain'--

and so he went on, touching one object after another, and reeling off

his tranquil spool of lies.



I had never felt so like a passenger before.

I thanked him, with emotion, for each new fact, and wrote it

down in my note-book. The pilot warmed to his opportunity,

and proceeded to load me up in the good old-fashioned way.

At times I was afraid he was going to rupture his invention;

but it always stood the strain, and he pulled through all right.

He drifted, by easy stages, into revealments of the river's

marvelous eccentricities of one sort and another,

and backed them up with some pretty gigantic illustrations.

For instance-



'Do you see that little boulder sticking out of the water yonder? well,

when I first came on the river, that was a solid ridge of rock,

over sixty feet high and two miles long.  All washed away but that.'

[This with a sigh.)



I had a mighty impulse to destroy him, but it seemed to me that killing,

in any ordinary way, would be too good for him.



Once, when an odd-looking craft, with a vast coal-scuttle slanting

aloft on the end of a beam, was steaming by in the distance,

he indifferently drew attention to it, as one might to an object

grown wearisome through familiarity, and observed that it was

an 'alligator boat.'



'An alligator boat?  What's it for?'



'To dredge out alligators with.'



'Are they so thick as to be troublesome?'



'Well, not now, because the Government keeps them down.

But they used to be.  Not everywhere; but in favorite places,

here and there, where the river is wide and shoal-like Plum Point,

and Stack Island, and so on--places they call alligator beds.'



'Did they actually impede navigation?'



'Years ago, yes, in very low water; there was hardly a trip, then, that we

didn't get aground on alligators.'



It seemed to me that I should certainly have to get out my tomahawk.

However, I restrained myself and said--



'It must have been dreadful.'



'Yes, it was one of the main difficulties about piloting.

It was so hard to tell anything about the water; the damned

things shift around so--never lie still five minutes at a time.

You can tell a wind-reef, straight off, by the look of it;

you can tell a break; you can tell a sand-reef--that's all easy;

but an alligator reef doesn't show up, worth anything.

Nine times in ten you can't tell where the water is;

and when you do see where it is, like as not it ain't there

when YOU get there, the devils have swapped around so, meantime.

Of course there were some few pilots that could judge of

alligator water nearly as well as they could of any other kind,

but they had to have natural talent for it; it wasn't a thing

a body could learn, you had to be born with it.  Let me see:

there was Ben Thornburg, and Beck Jolly, and Squire Bell,

and Horace Bixby, and Major Downing, and John Stevenson,

and Billy Gordon, and Jim Brady, and George Ealer,

and Billy Youngblood--all A 1 alligator pilots.  THEY could tell

alligator water as far as another Christian could tell whiskey.

Read it?--Ah, COULDN'T they, though!  I only wish I had as many

dollars as they could read alligator water a mile and a half off.

Yes, and it paid them to do it, too.  A good alligator pilot could

always get fifteen hundred dollars a month.  Nights, other people

had to lay up for alligators, but those fellows never laid

up for alligators; they never laid up for anything but fog.

They could SMELL the best alligator water it was said;

I don't know whether it was so or not, and I think a body's got

his hands full enough if he sticks to just what he knows himself,

without going around backing up other people's say-so's,

though there's a plenty that ain't backward about doing it,

as long as they can roust out something wonderful to tell.

Which is not the style of Robert Styles, by as much as

three fathom--maybe quarter-LESS.'



[My! Was this Rob Styles?--This mustached and stately figure?-A slim

enough cub, in my time.  How he has improved in comeliness in five-and-twenty

year and in the noble art of inflating his facts.] After these musings,

I said aloud-



'I should think that dredging out the alligators wouldn't have done much good,

because they could come back again right away.'



'If you had had as much experience of alligators as I have, you wouldn't

talk like that.  You dredge an alligator once and he's CONVINCED.

It's the last you hear of HIM.  He wouldn't come back for pie.

If there's one thing that an alligator is more down on than another,

it's being dredged.  Besides, they were not simply shoved

out of the way; the most of the scoopful were scooped aboard;

they emptied them into the hold; and when they had got a trip,

they took them to Orleans to the Government works.'



'What for?'



'Why, to make soldier-shoes out of their hides.

All the Government shoes are made of alligator hide.

It makes the best shoes in the world.  They last five years,

and they won't absorb water.  The alligator fishery is a

Government monopoly.  All the alligators are Government property--

just like the live-oaks. You cut down a live-oak, and

Government fines you fifty dollars; you kill an alligator,

and up you go for misprision of treason--lucky duck if they

don't hang you, too.  And they will, if you're a Democrat.

The buzzard is the sacred bird of the South, and you can't

touch him; the alligator is the sacred bird of the Government,

and you've got to let him alone.'



'Do you ever get aground on the alligators now?'



'Oh, no! it hasn't happened for years.'



'Well, then, why do they still keep the alligator boats in service?'



'Just for police duty--nothing more.  They merely go up and down

now and then.  The present generation of alligators know them

as easy as a burglar knows a roundsman; when they see one coming,

they break camp and go for the woods.'



After rounding-out and finishing-up and polishing-off the alligator business,

he dropped easily and comfortably into the historical vein, and told of some

tremendous feats of half-a-dozen old-time steamboats of his acquaintance,

dwelling at special length upon a certain extraordinary performance of his

chief favorite among this distinguished fleet--and then adding--



'That boat was the "Cyclone,"--last trip she ever made--she sunk,

that very trip--captain was Tom Ballou, the most immortal liar that ever

I struck.  He couldn't ever seem to tell the truth, in any kind of weather.

Why, he would make you fairly shudder.  He WAS the most scandalous liar!

I left him, finally; I couldn't stand it.  The proverb says, "like master,

like man;" and if you stay with that kind of a man, you'll come under

suspicion by and by, just as sure as you live.  He paid first-class wages;

but said I, What's wages when your reputation's in danger?  So I let

the wages go, and froze to my reputation.  And I've never regretted it.

Reputation's worth everything, ain't it?  That's the way I look at it.

He had more selfish organs than any seven men in the world--all packed

in the stern-sheets of his skull, of course, where they belonged.

They weighed down the back of his head so that it made his nose tilt up

in the air.  People thought it was vanity, but it wasn't, it was malice.

If you only saw his foot, you'd take him to be nineteen feet high,

but he wasn't; it was because his foot was out of drawing.

He was intended to be nineteen feet high, no doubt, if his foot

was made first, but he didn't get there; he was only five feet ten.

That's what he was, and that's what he is.  You take the lies out of him,

and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him,

and he'll disappear.  That "Cyclone" was a rattler to go, and the sweetest

thing to steer that ever walked the waters.  Set her amidships,

in a big river, and just let her go; it was all you had to do.

She would hold herself on a star all night, if you let her alone.

You couldn't ever feel her rudder.  It wasn't any more labor to steer

her than it is to count the Republican vote in a South Carolina election.

One morning, just at daybreak, the last trip she ever made, they took

her rudder aboard to mend it; I didn't know anything about it; I backed

her out from the wood-yard and went a-weaving down the river all serene.

When I had gone about twenty-three miles, and made four horribly crooked

crossings----'



'Without any rudder?'



'Yes--old Capt. Tom appeared on the roof and began to find fault

with me for running such a dark night--'



'Such a DARK NIGHT ?--Why, you said----'



'Never mind what I said,--'twas as dark as Egypt now, though pretty

soon the moon began to rise, and----'



'You mean the SUN--because you started out just at break of---- look here!

Was this BEFORE you quitted the captain on account of his lying, or----'



'It was before--oh, a long time before.  And as I was saying, he----'



'But was this the trip she sunk, or was----'



'Oh, no!--months afterward.  And so the old man, he----'



'Then she made TWO last trips, because you said----'



He stepped back from the wheel, swabbing away his perspiration,

 and said--



'Here!' (calling me by name), 'YOU take her and lie a while--

you're handier at it than I am.  Trying to play yourself for a stranger

and an innocent!--why, I knew you before you had spoken seven words;

and I made up my mind to find out what was your little game.

It was to DRAW ME OUT.  Well, I let you, didn't I?

Now take the wheel and finish the watch; and next time play fair,

and you won't have to work your passage.'



Thus ended the fictitious-name business.  And not six hours out

from St. Louis! but I had gained a privilege, any way, for I had

been itching to get my hands on the wheel, from the beginning.

I seemed to have forgotten the river, but I hadn't forgotten

how to steer a steamboat, nor how to enjoy it, either.









                               Chapter 25

                          From Cairo to Hickman



THE scenery, from St. Louis to Cairo--two hundred miles--is varied

and beautiful.  The hills were clothed in the fresh foliage of spring now,

and were a gracious and worthy setting for the broad river flowing between.

Our trip began auspiciously, with a perfect day, as to breeze and sunshine,

and our boat threw the miles out behind her with satisfactory despatch.



We found a railway intruding at Chester, Illinois; Chester has

also a penitentiary now, and is otherwise marching on.  At Grand

Tower, too, there was a railway; and another at Cape Girardeau.

The former town gets its name from a huge, squat pillar of rock,

which stands up out of the water on the Missouri side of the river--

a piece of nature's fanciful handiwork--and is one of the

most picturesque features of the scenery of that region.

For nearer or remoter neighbors, the Tower has the Devil's

Bake Oven--so called, perhaps, because it does not powerfully

resemble anybody else's bake oven; and the Devil's Tea Table--

this latter a great smooth-surfaced mass of rock, with diminishing

wine-glass stem, perched some fifty or sixty feet above the river,

beside a beflowered and garlanded precipice, and sufficiently

like a tea-table to answer for anybody, Devil or Christian.

Away down the river we have the Devil's Elbow and the Devil's

Race-course, and lots of other property of his which I cannot now

call to mind.



The Town of Grand Tower was evidently a busier place than it

had been in old times, but it seemed to need some repairs

here and there, and a new coat of whitewash all over.

Still, it was pleasant to me to see the old coat once more.

'Uncle' Mumford, our second officer, said the place had been

suffering from high water, and consequently was not looking

its best now.  But he said it was not strange that it didn't

waste white-wash on itself, for more lime was made there,

and of a better quality, than anywhere in the West;

and added--'On a dairy farm you never can get any milk

for your coffee, nor any sugar for it on a sugar plantation;

and it is against sense to go to a lime town to hunt for white-wash.'

In my own experience I knew the first two items to be true;

and also that people who sell candy don't care for candy;

therefore there was plausibility in Uncle Mumford's final observation

that 'people who make lime run more to religion than whitewash.'

Uncle Mumford said, further, that Grand Tower was a great coaling

center and a prospering place.



Cape Girardeau is situated on a hillside, and makes a handsome appearance.

There is a great Jesuit school for boys at the foot of the town by the river.

Uncle Mumford said it had as high a reputation for thoroughness as any

similar institution in Missouri ' There was another college higher up on

an airy summit--a bright new edifice, picturesquely and peculiarly towered

and pinnacled--a sort of gigantic casters, with the cruets all complete.

Uncle Mumford said that Cape Girardeau was the Athens of Missouri,

and contained several colleges besides those already mentioned; and all of

them on a religious basis of one kind or another.  He directed my attention

to what he called the 'strong and pervasive religious look of the town,'

but I could not see that it looked more religious than the other hill

towns with the same slope and built of the same kind of bricks.

Partialities often make people see more than really exists.



Uncle Mumford has been thirty years a mate on the river.

He is a man of practical sense and a level head; has observed;

has had much experience of one sort and another; has opinions;

has, also, just a perceptible dash of poetry in his composition,

an easy gift of speech, a thick growl in his voice, and an oath

or two where he can get at them when the exigencies of his

office require a spiritual lift.  He is a mate of the blessed

old-time kind; and goes gravely damning around, when there

is work to the fore, in a way to mellow the ex-steamboatman's

heart with sweet soft longings for the vanished days that shall

come no more.  'GIT up there you!  Going to be all day?

Why d'n't you SAY you was petrified in your hind legs,

before you shipped!'



He is a steady man with his crew; kind and just, but firm;

so they like him, and stay with him.  He is still in the slouchy

garb of the old generation of mates; but next trip the Anchor

Line will have him in uniform--a natty blue naval uniform,

with brass buttons, along with all the officers of the line--

and then he will be a totally different style of scenery from what

he is now.



Uniforms on the Mississippi!  It beats all the other changes

put together, for surprise.  Still, there is another surprise--

that it was not made fifty years ago.  It is so manifestly sensible,

that it might have been thought of earlier, one would suppose.

During fifty years, out there, the innocent passenger in need

of help and information, has been mistaking the mate for

the cook, and the captain for the barber--and being roughly

entertained for it, too.  But his troubles are ended now.

And the greatly improved aspect of the boat's staff is another

advantage achieved by the dress-reform period.



Steered down the bend below Cape Girardeau.  They used to call it

'Steersman's Bend;' plain sailing and plenty of water in it, always;

about the only place in the Upper River that a new cub was allowed

to take a boat through, in low water.



Thebes, at the head of the Grand Chain, and Commerce at the foot

of it, were towns easily rememberable, as they had not undergone

conspicuous alteration.  Nor the Chain, either--in the nature

of things; for it is a chain of sunken rocks admirably

arranged to capture and kill steamboats on bad nights.

A good many steamboat corpses lie buried there, out of sight;

among the rest my first friend the 'Paul Jones;' she knocked her

bottom out, and went down like a pot, so the historian told me--

Uncle Mumford.  He said she had a gray mare aboard, and a preacher.

To me, this sufficiently accounted for the disaster; as it did,

of course, to Mumford, who added--



'But there are many ignorant people who would scoff at such

a matter, and call it superstition.  But you will always notice

that they are people who have never traveled with a gray mare

and a preacher.  I went down the river once in such company.

We grounded at Bloody Island; we grounded at Hanging Dog;

we grounded just below this same Commerce; we jolted Beaver

Dam Rock; we hit one of the worst breaks in the 'Graveyard'

behind Goose Island; we had a roustabout killed in a fight;

we burnt a boiler; broke a shaft; collapsed a flue; and went into

Cairo with nine feet of water in the hold--may have been more,

may have been less.  I remember it as if it were yesterday.

The men lost their heads with terror.  They painted the mare blue,

in sight of town, and threw the preacher overboard, or we should

not have arrived at all.  The preacher was fished out and saved.

He acknowledged, himself, that he had been to blame.

I remember it all, as if it were yesterday.'



That this combination--of preacher and gray mare--should breed calamity,

seems strange, and at first glance unbelievable; but the fact is fortified

by so much unassailable proof that to doubt is to dishonor reason.

I myself remember a case where a captain was warned by numerous friends

against taking a gray mare and a preacher with him, but persisted in his

purpose in spite of all that could be said; and the same day--it may have

been the next, and some say it was, though I think it was the same day--

he got drunk and fell down the hatchway, and was borne to his home a corpse.

This is literally true.



No vestige of Hat Island is left now; every shred of it is washed away.

I do not even remember what part of the river it used to be in,

except that it was between St. Louis and Cairo somewhere.

It was a bad region--all around and about Hat Island, in early days.

A farmer who lived on the Illinois shore there, said that twenty-nine

steamboats had left their bones strung along within sight from his house.

Between St. Louis and Cairo the steamboat wrecks average one to the mile;--

two hundred wrecks, altogether.



I could recognize big changes from Commerce down.  Beaver Dam Rock was

out in the middle of the river now, and throwing a prodigious 'break;'

it used to be close to the shore, and boats went down outside of it.

A big island that used to be away out in mid-river, has retired

to the Missouri shore, and boats do not go near it any more.

The island called Jacket Pattern is whittled down to a wedge now,

and is booked for early destruction.  Goose Island is all gone

but a little dab the size of a steamboat.  The perilous 'Graveyard,'

among whose numberless wrecks we used to pick our way so slowly

and gingerly, is far away from the channel now, and a terror to nobody.

One of the islands formerly called the Two Sisters is gone entirely;

the other, which used to lie close to the Illinois shore, is now on

the Missouri side, a mile away; it is joined solidly to the shore,

and it takes a sharp eye to see where the seam is--but it is

Illinois ground yet, and the people who live on it have to ferry

themselves over and work the Illinois roads and pay Illinois taxes:

singular state of things!



Near the mouth of the river several islands were missing--washed away.

Cairo was still there--easily visible across the long, flat point upon

whose further verge it stands; but we had to steam a long way around

to get to it.  Night fell as we were going out of the 'Upper River'

and meeting the floods of the Ohio.  We dashed along without anxiety;

for the hidden rock which used to lie right in the way has moved up

stream a long distance out of the channel; or rather, about one county

has gone into the river from the Missouri point, and the Cairo point has

'made down' and added to its long tongue of territory correspondingly.

The Mississippi is a just and equitable river; it never tumbles one man's farm

overboard without building a new farm just like it for that man's neighbor.

This keeps down hard feelings.



Going into Cairo, we came near killing a steamboat which paid

no attention to our whistle and then tried to cross our bows.

By doing some strong backing, we saved him; which was a great loss,

for he would have made good literature.



Cairo is a brisk town now; and is substantially built, and has a city

look about it which is in noticeable contrast to its former estate,

as per Mr. Dickens's portrait of it.  However, it was already

building with bricks when I had seen it last--which was when Colonel

(now General) Grant was drilling his first command there.

Uncle Mumford says the libraries and Sunday-schools have

done a good work in Cairo, as well as the brick masons.

Cairo has a heavy railroad and river trade, and her situation at

the junction of the two great rivers is so advantageous that she

cannot well help prospering.



When I turned out, in the morning, we had passed Columbus, Kentucky,

and were approaching Hickman, a pretty town, perched on a handsome hill.

Hickman is in a rich tobacco region, and formerly enjoyed a great

and lucrative trade in that staple, collecting it there in her

warehouses from a large area of country and shipping it by boat;

but Uncle Mumford says she built a railway to facilitate this commerce

a little more, and he thinks it facilitated it the wrong way--

took the bulk of the trade out of her hands by 'collaring it along

the line without gathering it at her doors.'









                               Chapter 26

                               Under Fire



TALK began to run upon the war now, for we were getting down

into the upper edge of the former battle-stretch by this time.

Columbus was just behind us, so there was a good deal said

about the famous battle of Belmont.  Several of the boat's

officers had seen active service in the Mississippi war-fleet. I

gathered that they found themselves sadly out of their element

in that kind of business at first, but afterward got accustomed

to it, reconciled to it, and more or less at home in it.

One of our pilots had his first war experience in the Belmont

fight, as a pilot on a boat in the Confederate service.

I had often had a curiosity to know how a green hand might feel,

in his maiden battle, perched all solitary and alone on high

in a pilot house, a target for Tom, Dick and Harry, and nobody at

his elbow to shame him from showing the white feather when matters

grew hot and perilous around him; so, to me his story was valuable--

it filled a gap for me which all histories had left till

that time empty.





                        THE PILOT'S FIRST BATTLE





He said--



It was the 7th of November.  The fight began at seven in the morning.

I was on the 'R. H. W. Hill.'  Took over a load of troops from Columbus.

Came back, and took over a battery of artillery.  My partner said he was going

to see the fight; wanted me to go along.  I said, no, I wasn't anxious,

I would look at it from the pilot-house. He said I was a coward, and left.



That fight was an awful sight.  General Cheatham made his men strip

their coats off and throw them in a pile, and said, 'Now follow me

to hell or victory!'  I heard him say that from the pilot-house;

and then he galloped in, at the head of his troops.  Old General Pillow,

with his white hair, mounted on a white horse, sailed in, too, leading his

troops as lively as a boy.  By and by the Federals chased the rebels back,

and here they came! tearing along, everybody for himself and Devil take

the hindmost! and down under the bank they scrambled, and took shelter.

I was sitting with my legs hanging out of the pilot-house window.

All at once I noticed a whizzing sound passing my ear.

Judged it was a bullet.  I didn't stop to think about anything,

I just tilted over backwards and landed on the floor, and staid there.

The balls came booming around.  Three cannon-balls went through the chimney;

one ball took off the corner of the pilot-house; shells were screaming

and bursting all around.  Mighty warm times--I wished I hadn't come.

I lay there on the pilot-house floor, while the shots came faster and faster.

I crept in behind the big stove, in the middle of the pilot-house.

Presently a minie-ball came through the stove, and just grazed my head,

and cut my hat.  I judged it was time to go away from there.  The captain

was on the roof with a red-headed major from Memphis--a fine-looking man.

I heard him say he wanted to leave here, but 'that pilot is killed.'

I crept over to the starboard side to pull the bell to set her back;

raised up and took a look, and I saw about fifteen shot holes

through the window panes; had come so lively I hadn't noticed them.

I glanced out on the water, and the spattering shot were like a hailstorm.

I thought best to get out of that place.  I went down the pilot-house guy,

head first--not feet first but head first--slid down--before I struck

the deck, the captain said we must leave there.  So I climbed up the guy

and got on the floor again.  About that time, they collared my partner

and were bringing him up to the pilot-house between two soldiers.

Somebody had said I was killed.  He put his head in and saw me on the floor

reaching for the backing bells.  He said, 'Oh, hell, he ain't shot,'

and jerked away from the men who had him by the collar, and ran below.

We were there until three o'clock in the afternoon, and then got away all

right.



The next time I saw my partner, I said, 'Now, come out, be honest,

and tell me the truth.  Where did you go when you went to see that battle?'

He says, 'I went down in the hold.'



All through that fight I was scared nearly to death.

I hardly knew anything, I was so frightened; but you see,

nobody knew that but me.  Next day General Polk sent for me,

and praised me for my bravery and gallant conduct.

I never said anything, I let it go at that.  I judged it wasn't so,

but it was not for me to contradict a general officer.



Pretty soon after that I was sick, and used up, and had to go

off to the Hot Springs.  When there, I got a good many

letters from commanders saying they wanted me to come back.

I declined, because I wasn't well enough or strong enough;

but I kept still, and kept the reputation I had made.



A plain story, straightforwardly told; but Mumford told me

that that pilot had 'gilded that scare of his, in spots;'

that his subsequent career in the war was proof of it.



We struck down through the chute of Island No. 8, and I went below

and fell into conversation with a passenger, a handsome man,

with easy carriage and an intelligent face.  We were approaching

Island No. 10, a place so celebrated during the war.

This gentleman's home was on the main shore in its neighborhood.

I had some talk with him about the war times; but presently

the discourse fell upon 'feuds,' for in no part of the South

has the vendetta flourished more briskly, or held out longer

between warring families, than in this particular region.

This gentleman said--



'There's been more than one feud around here, in old times, but I

reckon the worst one was between the Darnells and the Watsons.

Nobody don't know now what the first quarrel was about, it's so long ago;

the Darnells and the Watsons don't know, if there's any of them living,

which I don't think there is.  Some says it was about a horse or a cow--

anyway, it was a little matter; the money in it wasn't of no consequence--

none in the world--both families was rich.  The thing could have been

fixed up, easy enough; but no, that wouldn't do.  Rough words had been passed;

and so, nothing but blood could fix it up after that.  That horse

or cow, whichever it was, cost sixty years of killing and crippling!

Every year or so somebody was shot, on one side or the other; and as fast

as one generation was laid out, their sons took up the feud and kept

it a-going. And it's just as I say; they went on shooting each other,

year in and year out--making a kind of a religion of it, you see--

till they'd done forgot, long ago, what it was all about.  Wherever a

Darnell caught a Watson, or a Watson caught a Darnell, one of 'em was going

to get hurt--only question was, which of them got the drop on the other.

They'd shoot one another down, right in the presence of the family.

They didn't hunt for each other, but when they happened to meet,

they puffed and begun.  Men would shoot boys, boys would shoot men.

A man shot a boy twelve years old--happened on him in the woods,

and didn't give him no chance.  If he HAD 'a' given him a chance,

the boy'd 'a' shot him.  Both families belonged to the same church

(everybody around here is religious); through all this fifty or

sixty years' fuss, both tribes was there every Sunday, to worship.

They lived each side of the line, and the church was at a landing

called Compromise.  Half the church and half the aisle was in Kentucky,

the other half in Tennessee.  Sundays you'd see the families drive up,

all in their Sunday clothes, men, women, and children, and file up the aisle,

and set down, quiet and orderly, one lot on the Tennessee side of the church

and the other on the Kentucky side; and the men and boys would lean their guns

up against the wall, handy, and.  then all hands would join in with the prayer

and praise; though they say the man next the aisle didn't kneel down,

along with the rest of the family; kind of stood guard.  I don't know;

never was at that church in my life; but I remember that that's what used

to be said.



'Twenty or twenty-five years ago, one of the feud families

caught a young man of nineteen out and killed him.

Don't remember whether it was the Darnells and Watsons,

or one of the other feuds; but anyway, this young man rode up--

steamboat laying there at the time--and the first thing

he saw was a whole gang of the enemy.  He jumped down behind

a wood-pile, but they rode around and begun on him, he firing back,

and they galloping and cavorting and yelling and banging away

with all their might.  Think he wounded a couple of them;

but they closed in on him and chased him into the river;

and as he swum along down stream, they followed along the bank

and kept on shooting at him; and when he struck shore he was dead.

Windy Marshall told me about it.  He saw it.  He was captain

of the boat.



'Years ago, the Darnells was so thinned out that the old man

and his two sons concluded they'd leave the country.  They started

to take steamboat just above No. 10; but the Watsons got wind of it;

and they arrived just as the two young Darnells was walking up

the companion-way with their wives on their arms.  The fight

begun then, and they never got no further--both of them killed.

After that, old Darnell got into trouble with the man that run

the ferry, and the ferry-man got the worst of it--and died.

But his friends shot old Darnell through and through--filled him

full of bullets, and ended him.'



The country gentleman who told me these things had been reared

in ease and comfort, was a man of good parts, and was college bred.

His loose grammar was the fruit of careless habit, not ignorance.

This habit among educated men in the West is not universal, but it

is prevalent--prevalent in the towns, certainly, if not in the cities;

and to a degree which one cannot help noticing, and marveling at.

I heard a Westerner who would be accounted a highly educated man

in any country, say 'never mind, it DON'T MAKE NO DIFFERENCE, anyway.'

A life-long resident who was present heard it, but it made no impression

upon her.  She was able to recall the fact afterward, when reminded of it;

but she confessed that the words had not grated upon her ear at the time--

a confession which suggests that if educated people can hear such

blasphemous grammar, from such a source, and be unconscious of the deed,

the crime must be tolerably common--so common that the general ear has

become dulled by familiarity with it, and is no longer alert, no longer

sensitive to such affronts.



No one in the world speaks blemishless grammar; no one has

ever written it--NO one, either in the world or out of it

(taking the Scriptures for evidence on the latter point);

therefore it would not be fair to exact grammatical perfection

from the peoples of the Valley; but they and all other peoples

may justly be required to refrain from KNOWINGLY and PURPOSELY

debauching their grammar.



I found the river greatly changed at Island No. 10.

The island which I remembered was some three miles long

and a quarter of a mile wide, heavily timbered, and lay

near the Kentucky shore--within two hundred yards of it,

I should say.  Now, however, one had to hunt for it with

a spy-glass. Nothing was left of it but an insignificant

little tuft, and this was no longer near the Kentucky shore;

it was clear over against the opposite shore, a mile away.

In war times the island had been an important place,

for it commanded the situation; and, being heavily fortified,

there was no getting by it.  It lay between the upper and lower

divisions of the Union forces, and kept them separate, until a

junction was finally effected across the Missouri neck of land;

but the island being itself joined to that neck now, the wide river

is without obstruction.



In this region the river passes from Kentucky into Tennessee,

back into Missouri, then back into Kentucky, and thence into Tennessee again.

So a mile or two of Missouri sticks over into Tennessee.



The town of New Madrid was looking very unwell;

but otherwise unchanged from its former condition and aspect.

Its blocks of frame-houses were still grouped in the same

old flat plain, and environed by the same old forests.

It was as tranquil as formerly, and apparently had neither grown

nor diminished in size.  It was said that the recent high water

had invaded it and damaged its looks.  This was surprising news;

for in low water the river bank is very high there (fifty feet), and

in my day an overflow had always been considered an impossibility.

This present flood of 1882 Will doubtless be celebrated

in the river's history for several generations before a deluge

of like magnitude shall be seen.  It put all the unprotected

low lands under water, from Cairo to the mouth; it broke down

the levees in a great many places, on both sides of the river;

and in some regions south, when the flood was at its highest,

the Mississippi was SEVENTY MILES wide! a number of lives

were lost, and the destruction of property was fearful.

The crops were destroyed, houses washed away, and shelterless men

and cattle forced to take refuge on scattering elevations here

and there in field and forest, and wait in peril and suffering

until the boats put in commission by the national and local

governments and by newspaper enterprise could come and rescue them.

The properties of multitudes of people were under water for months,

and the poorer ones must have starved by the hundred if succor

had not been promptly afforded.<footnote [For a detailed and

interesting description of the great flood, written on board

of the New Orleans TIMES-DEMOCRAT'S relief-boat, see Appendix

A]> The water had been falling during a considerable time now,

yet as a rule we found the banks still under water.









                               Chapter 27

                         Some Imported Articles



WE met two steamboats at New Madrid.  Two steamboats in sight

at once! an infrequent spectacle now in the lonesome Mississippi.

The loneliness of this solemn, stupendous flood is impressive--

and depressing.  League after league, and still league after league,

it pours its chocolate tide along, between its solid forest walls,

its almost untenanted shores, with seldom a sail or a moving

object of any kind to disturb the surface and break the monotony

of the blank, watery solitude; and so the day goes, the night comes,

and again the day--and still the same, night after night

and day after day--majestic, unchanging sameness of serenity,

repose, tranquillity, lethargy, vacancy--symbol of eternity,

realization of the heaven pictured by priest and prophet,

and longed for by the good and thoughtless!



Immediately after the war of 1812, tourists began to come

to America, from England; scattering ones at first, then a sort

of procession of them--a procession which kept up its plodding,

patient march through the land during many, many years.

Each tourist took notes, and went home and published a book--

a book which was usually calm, truthful, reasonable, kind;

but which seemed just the reverse to our tender-footed progenitors.

A glance at these tourist-books shows us that in certain of its

aspects the Mississippi has undergone no change since those

strangers visited it, but remains to-day about as it was then.

The emotions produced in those foreign breasts by these aspects

were not all formed on one pattern, of course; they HAD

to be various, along at first, because the earlier tourists

were obliged to originate their emotions, whereas in older

countries one can always borrow emotions from one's predecessors.

And, mind you, emotions are among the toughest things in

the world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier to

manufacture seven facts than one emotion.  Captain Basil Hall.

R.N., writing fifty-five years ago, says--





'Here I caught the first glimpse of the object I had so long wished

to behold, and felt myself amply repaid at that moment for all

the trouble I had experienced in coming so far; and stood looking at

the river flowing past till it was too dark to distinguish anything.

But it was not till I had visited the same spot a dozen times,

that I came to a right comprehension of the grandeur of the scene.'





Following are Mrs. Trollope's emotions.  She is writing a few months later

in the same year, 1827, and is coming in at the mouth of the Mississippi--





'The first indication of our approach to land was the appearance

of this mighty river pouring forth its muddy mass of waters,

and mingling with the deep blue of the Mexican Gulf.  I never beheld

a scene so utterly desolate as this entrance of the Mississippi.

Had Dante seen it, he might have drawn images of another Bolgia from

its horrors.  One only object rears itself above the eddying waters;

this is the mast of a vessel long since wrecked in attempting to cross

the bar, and it still stands, a dismal witness of the destruction

that has been, and a boding prophet of that which is to come.'





Emotions of Hon. Charles Augustus Murray (near St. Louis), seven years later--





'It is only when you ascend the mighty current for fifty or a

hundred miles, and use the eye of imagination as well as that

of nature, that you begin to understand all his might and majesty.

You see him fertilizing a boundless valley, bearing along in his course

the trophies of his thousand victories over the shattered forest--

here carrying away large masses of soil with all their growth,

and there forming islands, destined at some future period to be

the residence of man; and while indulging in this prospect,

it is then time for reflection to suggest that the current

before you has flowed through two or three thousand miles, and has

yet to travel one thousand three hundred more before reaching

its ocean destination.'





Receive, now, the emotions of Captain Marryat, R.N. author of the sea tales,

writing in 1837, three years after Mr. Murray--





'Never, perhaps, in the records of nations, was there an instance of a

century of such unvarying and unmitigated crime as is to be collected

from the history of the turbulent and blood-stained Mississippi.

The stream itself appears as if appropriate for the deeds which have

been committed.  It is not like most rivers, beautiful to the sight,

bestowing fertility in its course; not one that the eye loves

to dwell upon as it sweeps along, nor can you wander upon

its banks, or trust yourself without danger to its stream.

It is a furious, rapid, desolating torrent, loaded with alluvial soil;

and few of those who are received into its waters ever rise again,

<footnote [There was a foolish superstition of some little prevalence

in that day, that the Mississippi would neither buoy up a swimmer,

nor permit a drowned person's body to rise to the surface.]> or can

support themselves long upon its surface without assistance from

some friendly log.  It contains the coarsest and most uneatable

of fish, such as the cat-fish and such genus, and as you descend,

its banks are occupied with the fetid alligator, while the panther

basks at its edge in the cane-brakes, almost impervious to man.

Pouring its impetuous waters through wild tracks covered with

trees of little value except for firewood, it sweeps down whole

forests in its course, which disappear in tumultuous confusion,

whirled away by the stream now loaded with the masses of soil

which nourished their roots, often blocking up and changing

for a time the channel of the river, which, as if in anger at its

being opposed, inundates and devastates the whole country round;

and as soon as it forces its way through its former channel,

plants in every direction the uprooted monarchs of the forest

(upon whose branches the bird will never again perch, or the raccoon,

the opossum, or the squirrel climb) as traps to the adventurous

navigators of its waters by steam, who, borne down upon these concealed

dangers which pierce through the planks, very often have not time

to steer for and gain the shore before they sink to the bottom.

There are no pleasing associations connected with the great common sewer

of the Western America, which pours out its mud into the Mexican Gulf,

polluting the clear blue sea for many miles beyond its mouth.

It is a river of desolation; and instead of reminding you,

like other beautiful rivers, of an angel which has descended

for the benefit of man, you imagine it a devil, whose energies

have been only overcome by the wonderful power of steam.'





It is pretty crude literature for a man accustomed to

handling a pen; still, as a panorama of the emotions sent

weltering through this noted visitor's breast by the aspect

and traditions of the 'great common sewer,' it has a value.

A value, though marred in the matter of statistics by inaccuracies;

for the catfish is a plenty good enough fish for anybody,

and there are no panthers that are 'impervious to man.'





Later still comes Alexander Mackay, of the Middle Temple, Barrister at Law,

with a better digestion, and no catfish dinner aboard, and feels as follows--





'The Mississippi!  It was with indescribable emotions that I first felt myself

afloat upon its waters.  How often in my schoolboy dreams, and in my waking

visions afterwards, had my imagination pictured to itself the lordly stream,

rolling with tumultuous current through the boundless region to which it

has given its name, and gathering into itself, in its course to the ocean,

the tributary waters of almost every latitude in the temperate zone!

Here it was then in its reality, and I, at length, steaming against its tide.

I looked upon it with that reverence with which everyone must regard a great

feature of external nature.'





So much for the emotions.  The tourists, one and all, remark upon

the deep, brooding loneliness and desolation of the vast river.

Captain Basil Hall, who saw it at flood-stage, says--





'Sometimes we passed along distances of twenty or thirty miles without

seeing a single habitation.  An artist, in search of hints for a painting

of the deluge, would here have found them in abundance.'





The first shall be last, etc.  just two hundred years ago,

the old original first and gallantest of all the foreign tourists,

pioneer, head of the procession, ended his weary and tedious

discovery-voyage down the solemn stretches of the great river--

La Salle, whose name will last as long as the river itself shall last.

We quote from Mr. Parkman-





'And now they neared their journey's end.  On the sixth

of April, the river divided itself into three broad channels.

La Salle followed that of the west, and D'Autray

that of the east; while Tonty took the middle passage.

As he drifted down the turbid current, between the low

and marshy shores, the brackish water changed to brine,

and the breeze grew fresh with the salt breath of the sea.

Then the broad bosom of the great Gulf opened on his sight,

tossing its restless billows, limitless, voiceless, lonely as when

born of chaos, without a sail, without a sign of life.'





Then, on a spot of solid ground, La Salle reared a column 'bearing

the arms of France; the Frenchmen were mustered under arms;

and while the New England Indians and their squaws looked on

in wondering silence, they chanted the TE DEUM, THE EXAUDIAT,

and the DOMINE SALVUM FAC REGEM.'



Then, whilst the musketry volleyed and rejoicing shouts burst forth,

the victorious discoverer planted the column, and made proclamation

in a loud voice, taking formal possession of the river and

the vast countries watered by it, in the name of the King.

The column bore this inscription-





 LOUIS LE GRAND, ROY DE FRANCE ET DE NAVARRE, REGNE; LE NEUVIEME AVRIL,

                                  1682.





New Orleans intended to fittingly celebrate, this present year,

the bicentennial anniversary of this illustrious event;

but when the time came, all her energies and surplus money were

required in other directions, for the flood was upon the land then,

making havoc and devastation everywhere.









                               Chapter 28

                          Uncle Mumford Unloads



ALL day we swung along down the river, and had the stream almost

wholly to ourselves.  Formerly, at such a stage of the water,

we should have passed acres of lumber rafts, and dozens of big

coal barges; also occasional little trading-scows, peddling

along from farm to farm, with the peddler's family on board;

possibly, a random scow, bearing a humble Hamlet and Co.

on an itinerant dramatic trip.  But these were all absent.

Far along in the day, we saw one steamboat; just one, and no more.

She was lying at rest in the shade, within the wooded mouth

of the Obion River.  The spy-glass revealed the fact that she

was named for me--or HE was named for me, whichever you prefer.

As this was the first time I had ever encountered this species

of honor, it seems excusable to mention it, and at the same time

call the attention of the authorities to the tardiness of my

recognition of it.



Noted a big change in the river, at Island 21.  It was a very large island,

and used to be out toward mid-stream; but it is joined fast to the main

shore now, and has retired from business as an island.



As we approached famous and formidable Plum Point, darkness fell,

but that was nothing to shudder about--in these modern times.

For now the national government has turned the Mississippi

into a sort of two-thousand-mile torchlight procession.

In the head of every crossing, and in the foot of every

crossing, the government has set up a clear-burning lamp.

You are never entirely in the dark, now; there is always a beacon

in sight, either before you, or behind you, or abreast.

One might almost say that lamps have been squandered there.

Dozens of crossings are lighted which were not shoal

when they were created, and have never been shoal since;

crossings so plain, too, and also so straight, that a steamboat

can take herself through them without any help, after she has been

through once.  Lamps in such places are of course not wasted;

it is much more convenient and comfortable for a pilot to hold

on them than on a spread of formless blackness that won't

stay still; and money is saved to the boat, at the same time,

for she can of course make more miles with her rudder

amidships than she can with it squared across her stern and

holding her back.



But this thing has knocked the romance out of piloting, to a large extent.

It, and some other things together, have knocked all the romance out of it.

For instance, the peril from snags is not now what it once was.

The government's snag-boats go patrolling up and down, in these

matter-of-fact days, pulling the river's teeth; they have rooted out

all the old clusters which made many localities so formidable; and they

allow no new ones to collect.  Formerly, if your boat got away from you,

on a black night, and broke for the woods, it was an anxious time with you;

so was it also, when you were groping your way through solidified

darkness in a narrow chute; but all that is changed now--you flash out

your electric light, transform night into day in the twinkling of an eye,

and your perils and anxieties are at an end.  Horace Bixby and George

Ritchie have charted the crossings and laid out the courses by compass;

they have invented a lamp to go with the chart, and have patented the whole.

With these helps, one may run in the fog now, with considerable security,

and with a confidence unknown in the old days.



With these abundant beacons, the banishment of snags, plenty of

daylight in a box and ready to be turned on whenever needed,

and a chart and compass to fight the fog with, piloting, at a good

stage of water, is now nearly as safe and simple as driving stage,

and is hardly more than three times as romantic.



And now in these new days, these days of infinite change, the Anchor

Line have raised the captain above the pilot by giving him the bigger

wages of the two.  This was going far, but they have not stopped there.

They have decreed that the pilot shall remain at his post, and stand his

watch clear through, whether the boat be under way or tied up to the shore.

We, that were once the aristocrats of the river, can't go to bed now,

as we used to do, and sleep while a hundred tons of freight are

lugged aboard; no, we must sit in the pilot-house; and keep awake, too.

Verily we are being treated like a parcel of mates and engineers.

The Government has taken away the romance of our calling; the Company has

taken away its state and dignity.



Plum Point looked as it had always looked by night, with the

exception that now there were beacons to mark the crossings,

and also a lot of other lights on the Point and along its shore;

these latter glinting from the fleet of the United States

River Commission, and from a village which the officials have built

on the land for offices and for the employes of the service.

The military engineers of the Commission have taken upon

their shoulders the job of making the Mississippi over again--

a job transcended in size by only the original job of creating it.

They are building wing-dams here and there, to deflect the current;

and dikes to confine it in narrower bounds; and other dikes to make

it stay there; and for unnumbered miles along the Mississippi,

they are felling the timber-front for fifty yards back,

with the purpose of shaving the bank down to low-water mark

with the slant of a house roof, and ballasting it with stones;

and in many places they have protected the wasting shores with rows

of piles.  One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver--

not aloud, but to himself--that ten thousand River Commissions,

with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that

lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it,

Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore

which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction

which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at.

But a discreet man will not put these things into spoken words;

for the West Point engineers have not their superiors anywhere;

they know all that can be known of their abstruse science;

and so, since they conceive that they can fetter and handcuff

that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific man

to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it.  Captain Eads,

with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi

which seemed clearly impossible; so we do not feel full confidence

now to prophesy against like impossibilities.  Otherwise one would

pipe out and say the Commission might as well bully the comets

in their courses and undertake to make them behave, as try to bully

the Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct.



I consulted Uncle Mumford concerning this and cognate matters;

and I give here the result, stenographically reported, and therefore

to be relied on as being full and correct; except that I have

here and there left out remarks which were addressed to the men,

such as 'where in blazes are you going with that barrel now?'

and which seemed to me to break the flow of the written statement,

without compensating by adding to its information or its clearness.

Not that I have ventured to strike out all such interjections;

I have removed only those which were obviously irrelevant;

wherever one occurred which I felt any question about, I have

judged it safest to let it remain.





                       UNCLE MUMFORD'S IMPRESSIONS





Uncle Mumford said--



'As long as I have been mate of a steamboat--thirty years--

I have watched this river and studied it.  Maybe I could have learnt

more about it at West Point, but if I believe it I wish I may be WHAT

ARE YOU SUCKING YOUR FINGERS THERE FOR ?--COLLAR THAT KAG OF NAILS!

Four years at West Point, and plenty of books and schooling, will learn

a man a good deal, I reckon, but it won't learn him the river.

You turn one of those little European rivers over to this Commission,

with its hard bottom and clear water, and it would just be a holiday

job for them to wall it, and pile it, and dike it, and tame it down,

and boss it around, and make it go wherever they wanted it to,

and stay where they put it, and do just as they said, every time.

But this ain't that kind of a river.  They have started in here

with big confidence, and the best intentions in the world;

but they are going to get left.  What does Ecclesiastes vii.  13 say?

Says enough to knock THEIR little game galley-west, don't it?

Now you look at their methods once.  There at Devil's Island,

in the Upper River, they wanted the water to go one way, the water wanted

to go another.  So they put up a stone wall.  But what does the river

care for a stone wall?  When it got ready, it just bulged through it.

Maybe they can build another that will stay; that is, up there--

but not down here they can't. Down here in the Lower River, they drive

some pegs to turn the water away from the shore and stop it from slicing

off the bank; very well, don't it go straight over and cut somebody

else's bank?  Certainly.  Are they going to peg all the banks?

Why, they could buy ground and build a new Mississippi cheaper.

They are pegging Bulletin Tow-head now.  It won't do any good.

If the river has got a mortgage on that island, it will foreclose,

sure, pegs or no pegs.  Away down yonder, they have driven two rows

of piles straight through the middle of a dry bar half a mile long,

which is forty foot out of the water when the river is low.

What do you reckon that is for?  If I know, I wish I may land

in-HUMP YOURSELF, YOU SON OF AN UNDERTAKER!--OUT WITH THAT COAL-OIL, NOW,

LIVELY, LIVELY!  And just look at what they are trying to do down

there at Milliken's Bend.  There's been a cut-off in that section,

and Vicksburg is left out in the cold.  It's a country town now.

The river strikes in below it; and a boat can't go up to the town

except in high water.  Well, they are going to build wing-dams in

the bend opposite the foot of 103, and throw the water over and cut

off the foot of the island and plow down into an old ditch where

the river used to be in ancient times; and they think they can persuade

the water around that way, and get it to strike in above Vicksburg,

as it used to do, and fetch the town back into the world again.

That is, they are going to take this whole Mississippi,

and twist it around and make it run several miles UP STREAM.

Well you've got to admire men that deal in ideas of that size and can

tote them around without crutches; but you haven't got to believe

they can DO such miracles, have you!  And yet you ain't absolutely

obliged to believe they can't. I reckon the safe way, where a man

can afford it, is to copper the operation, and at the same time buy

enough property in Vicksburg to square you up in case they win.

Government is doing a deal for the Mississippi, now--spending loads

of money on her.  When there used to be four thousand steamboats

and ten thousand acres of coal-barges, and rafts and trading scows,

there wasn't a lantern from St. Paul to New Orleans, and the snags

were thicker than bristles on a hog's back; and now when there's

three dozen steamboats and nary barge or raft, Government has

snatched out all the snags, and lit up the shores like Broadway,

and a boat's as safe on the river as she'd be in heaven.

And I reckon that by the time there ain't any boats left at all,

the Commission will have the old thing all reorganized, and dredged out,

and fenced in, and tidied up, to a degree that will make navigation

just simply perfect, and absolutely safe and profitable; and all

the days will be Sundays, and all the mates will be Sunday-school

su-WHAT-IN-THE-NATION-YOU-FOOLING-AROUND-THERE-FOR, YOU SONS

OF UNRIGHTEOUSNESS, HEIRS OF PERDITION !  GOING TO BE A YEAR GETTING THAT

HOGSHEAD ASHORE ?'





During our trip to New Orleans and back, we had many conversations with

river men, planters, journalists, and officers of the River Commission--

with conflicting and confusing results.  To wit:-



1.  Some believed in the Commission's scheme to arbitrarily

and permanently confine (and thus deepen) the channel,

preserve threatened shores, etc.



2.  Some believed that the Commission's money ought to be spent

only on building and repairing the great system of levees.



3.  Some believed that the higher you build your levee,

the higher the river's bottom will rise; and that consequently

the levee system is a mistake.



4.  Some believed in the scheme to relieve the river, in flood-time,

by turning its surplus waters off into Lake Borgne, etc.



5.  Some believed in the scheme of northern lake-reservoirs to replenish

the Mississippi in low-water seasons.



Wherever you find a man down there who believes in one of these

theories you may turn to the next man and frame your talk upon

the hypothesis that he does not believe in that theory; and after

you have had experience, you do not take this course doubtfully,

or hesitatingly, but with the confidence of a dying murderer--

converted one, I mean.  For you will have come to know, with a deep

and restful certainty, that you are not going to meet two people

sick of the same theory, one right after the other.  No, there will

always be one or two with the other diseases along between.

And as you proceed, you will find out one or two other things.

You will find out that there is no distemper of the lot but

is contagious; and you cannot go where it is without catching it.

You may vaccinate yourself with deterrent facts as much as you please--

it will do no good; it will seem to 'take,' but it doesn't;

the moment you rub against any one of those theorists, make up

your mind that it is time to hang out your yellow flag.



Yes, you are his sure victim:  yet his work is not all to your hurt--

only part of it; for he is like your family physician, who comes

and cures the mumps, and leaves the scarlet-fever behind.

If your man is a Lake-Borgne-relief theorist, for instance,

he will exhale a cloud of deadly facts and statistics which will lay

you out with that disease, sure; but at the same time he will cure

you of any other of the five theories that may have previously got

into your system.



I have had all the five; and had them 'bad;' but ask me not,

in mournful numbers, which one racked me hardest, or which

one numbered the biggest sick list, for I do not know.

In truth, no one can answer the latter question.

Mississippi Improvement is a mighty topic, down yonder.

Every man on the river banks, south of Cairo, talks about it

every day, during such moments as he is able to spare from

talking about the war; and each of the several chief theories

has its host of zealous partisans; but, as I have said,

it is not possible to determine which cause numbers

the most recruits.



All were agreed upon one point, however:  if Congress would make

a sufficient appropriation, a colossal benefit would result.

Very well; since then the appropriation has been made--

possibly a sufficient one, certainly not too large a one.

Let us hope that the prophecy will be amply fulfilled.



One thing will be easily granted by the reader; that an opinion from

Mr. Edward Atkinson, upon any vast national commercial matter, comes as near

ranking as authority, as can the opinion of any individual in the Union.

What he has to say about Mississippi River Improvement will be found

in the Appendix.<footnote [See Appendix B.]>



Sometimes, half a dozen figures will reveal, as with a lightning-flash,

the importance of a subject which ten thousand labored words,

with the same purpose in view, had left at last but dim and uncertain.

Here is a case of the sort--paragraph from the 'Cincinnati Commercial'-





'The towboat "Jos.  B. Williams" is on her way to New Orleans with

a tow of thirty-two barges, containing six hundred thousand bushels

(seventy-six pounds to the bushel) of coal exclusive of her own fuel,

being the largest tow ever taken to New Orleans or anywhere else

in the world.  Her freight bill, at 3 cents a bushel, amounts to

$18,000. It would take eighteen hundred cars, of three hundred and

thirty-three bushels to the car, to transport this amount of coal.

At $10 per ton, or $100 per car, which would be a fair price for

the distance by rail, the freight bill would amount to $180,000,

or $162,000 more by rail than by river.  The tow will be taken

from Pittsburg to New Orleans in fourteen or fifteen days.

It would take one hundred trains of eighteen cars to the train

to transport this one tow of six hundred thousand bushels of coal,

and even if it made the usual speed of fast freight lines, it would

take one whole summer to put it through by rail.'





When a river in good condition can enable one to save $162,000 and a whole

summer's time, on a single cargo, the wisdom of taking measures to keep

the river in good condition is made plain to even the uncommercial mind.









                               Chapter 29

                          A Few Specimen Bricks



WE passed through the Plum Point region, turned Craighead's Point,

and glided unchallenged by what was once the formidable Fort Pillow,

memorable because of the massacre perpetrated there during the war.

Massacres are sprinkled with some frequency through the histories

of several Christian nations, but this is almost the only one

that can be found in American history; perhaps it is the only one

which rises to a size correspondent to that huge and somber title.

We have the 'Boston Massacre,' where two or three people were killed;

but we must bunch Anglo-Saxon history together to find the fellow

to the Fort Pillow tragedy; and doubtless even then we must travel

back to the days and the performances of Coeur de Lion, that fine

'hero,' before we accomplish it.



More of the river's freaks.  In times past, the channel used

to strike above Island 37, by Brandywine Bar, and down towards

Island 39.  Afterward, changed its course and went from

Brandywine down through Vogelman's chute in the Devil's Elbow,

to Island 39--part of this course reversing the old order;

the river running UP four or five miles, instead of down,

and cutting off, throughout, some fifteen miles of distance.

This in 1876.  All that region is now called Centennial Island.



There is a tradition that Island 37 was one of the principal abiding

places of the once celebrated 'Murel's Gang.'  This was a colossal

combination of robbers, horse-thieves, negro-stealers, and counterfeiters,

engaged in business along the river some fifty or sixty years ago.

While our journey across the country towards St. Louis was in

progress we had had no end of Jesse James and his stirring history;

for he had just been assassinated by an agent of the Governor of Missouri,

and was in consequence occupying a good deal of space in the newspapers.

Cheap histories of him were for sale by train boys.  According to these,

he was the most marvelous creature of his kind that had ever existed.

It was a mistake.  Murel was his equal in boldness; in pluck; in rapacity;

in cruelty, brutality, heartlessness, treachery, and in general and

comprehensive vileness and shamelessness; and very much his superior

in some larger aspects.  James was a retail rascal; Murel, wholesale.

James's modest genius dreamed of no loftier flight than the planning

of raids upon cars, coaches, and country banks; Murel projected

negro insurrections and the capture of New Orleans; and furthermore,

on occasion, this Murel could go into a pulpit and edify the congregation.

What are James and his half-dozen vulgar rascals compared with this

stately old-time criminal, with his sermons, his meditated insurrections

and city-captures, and his majestic following of ten hundred men,

sworn to do his evil will!



Here is a paragraph or two concerning this big operator,

from a now forgotten book which was published half a century ago--



He appears to have been a most dexterous as well as consummate villain.

When he traveled, his usual disguise was that of an itinerant preacher;

and it is said that his discourses were very 'soul-moving'--interesting

the hearers so much that they forgot to look after their horses,

which were carried away by his confederates while he was preaching.

But the stealing of horses in one State, and selling them in another,

was but a small portion of their business; the most lucrative

was the enticing slaves to run away from their masters, that they

might sell them in another quarter.  This was arranged as follows;

they would tell a negro that if he would run away from his master,

and allow them to sell him, he should receive a portion of the money

paid for him, and that upon his return to them a second time they would

send him to a free State, where he would be safe.  The poor wretches

complied with this request, hoping to obtain money and freedom;

they would be sold to another master, and run away again, to their employers;

sometimes they would be sold in this manner three or four times,

until they had realized three or four thousand dollars by them;

but as, after this, there was fear of detection, the usual custom was

to get rid of the only witness that could be produced against them,

which was the negro himself, by murdering him, and throwing his body into

the Mississippi.  Even if it was established that they had stolen a negro,

before he was murdered, they were always prepared to evade punishment;

for they concealed the negro who had run away, until he was advertised,

and a reward offered to any man who would catch him.  An advertisement

of this kind warrants the person to take the property, if found.

And then the negro becomes a property in trust, when, therefore,

they sold the negro, it only became a breach of trust, not stealing;

and for a breach of trust, the owner of the property can only have redress

by a civil action, which was useless, as the damages were never paid.

It may be inquired, how it was that Murel escaped Lynch law under

such circumstances This will be easily understood when it is stated

that he had MORE THAN A THOUSAND SWORN CONFEDERATES, all ready at

a moment's notice to support any of the gang who might be in trouble.

The names of all the principal confederates of Murel were obtained

from himself, in a manner which I shall presently explain.

The gang was composed of two classes:  the Heads or Council, as they

were called, who planned and concerted, but seldom acted; they amounted

to about four hundred.  The other class were the active agents,

and were termed strikers, and amounted to about six hundred and fifty.

These were the tools in the hands of the others; they ran all the risk,

and received but a small portion of the money; they were in the power

of the leaders of the gang, who would sacrifice them at any time by handing

them over to justice, or sinking their bodies in the Mississippi.

The general rendezvous of this gang of miscreants was on the Arkansas

side of the river, where they concealed their negroes in the morasses and

cane-brakes.



The depredations of this extensive combination were severely felt;

but so well were their plans arranged, that although Murel,

who was always active, was everywhere suspected, there was no proof

to be obtained.  It so happened, however, that a young man of the name

of Stewart, who was looking after two slaves which Murel had decoyed

away, fell in with him and obtained his confidence, took the oath,

and was admitted into the gang as one of the General Council.

By this means all was discovered; for Stewart turned traitor,

although he had taken the oath, and having obtained every information,

exposed the whole concern, the names of all the parties, and finally

succeeded in bringing home sufficient evidence against Murel,

to procure his conviction and sentence to the Penitentiary

(Murel was sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment); so many

people who were supposed to be honest, and bore a respectable

name in the different States, were found to be among the list

of the Grand Council as published by Stewart, that every attempt

was made to throw discredit upon his assertions--his character

was vilified, and more than one attempt was made to assassinate him.

He was obliged to quit the Southern States in consequence.

It is, however, now well ascertained to have been all true;

and although some blame Mr. Stewart for having violated his oath,

they no longer attempt to deny that his revelations were correct.

I will quote one or two portions of Murel's confessions to

Mr. Stewart, made to him when they were journeying together.

I ought to have observed, that the ultimate intentions of Murel

and his associates were, by his own account, on a very extended scale;

having no less an object in view than RAISING THE BLACKS AGAINST

THE WHITES, TAKING POSSESSION OF, AND PLUNDERING NEW ORLEANS,

AND MAKING THEMSELVES POSSESSORS OF THE TERRITORY.  The following are

a few extracts:--



'I collected all my friends about New Orleans at one of our friends'

houses in that place, and we sat in council three days before we

got all our plans to our notion; we then determined to undertake

the rebellion at every hazard, and make as many friends as we

could for that purpose.  Every man's business being assigned him,

I started to Natchez on foot, having sold my horse in New Orleans,--

with the intention of stealing another after I started.

I walked four days, and no opportunity offered for me to get a horse.

The fifth day, about twelve, I had become tired, and stopped at a creek

to get some water and rest a little.  While I was sitting on a log,

looking down the road the way that I had come, a man came in sight

riding on a good-looking horse.  The very moment I saw him, I was

determined to have his horse, if he was in the garb of a traveler.

He rode up, and I saw from his equipage that he was a traveler.

I arose and drew an elegant rifle pistol on him and ordered him to dismount.

He did so, and I took his horse by the bridle and pointed down the creek,

and ordered him to walk before me.  He went a few hundred yards

and stopped.  I hitched his horse, and then made him undress himself,

all to his shirt and drawers, and ordered him to turn his back to me.

He said, 'If you are determined to kill me, let me have time to pray

before I die,' I told him I had no time to hear him pray.  He turned around

and dropped on his knees, and I shot him through the back of the head.

I ripped open his belly and took out his entrails, and sunk him in the creek.

I then searched his pockets, and found four hundred dollars and thirty-seven

cents, and a number of papers that I did not take time to examine.

I sunk the pocket-book and papers and his hat, in the creek.

His boots were brand-new, and fitted me genteelly; and I put

them on and sunk my old shoes in the creek, to atone for them.

I rolled up his clothes and put them into his portmanteau, as they were

brand-new cloth of the best quality.  I mounted as fine a horse as ever

I straddled, and directed my course for Natchez in much better style

than I had been for the last five days.



'Myself and a fellow by the name of Crenshaw gathered four good

horses and started for Georgia.  We got in company with a young

South Carolinian just before we got to Cumberland Mountain,

and Crenshaw soon knew all about his business.  He had been

to Tennessee to buy a drove of hogs, but when he got there pork

was dearer than he calculated, and he declined purchasing.

We concluded he was a prize.  Crenshaw winked at me; I understood

his idea.  Crenshaw had traveled the road before, but I never had;

we had traveled several miles on the mountain, when he passed

near a great precipice; just before we passed it Crenshaw asked

me for my whip, which had a pound of lead in the butt; I handed

it to him, and he rode up by the side of the South Carolinian,

and gave him a blow on the side of the head and tumbled him

from his horse; we lit from our horses and fingered his pockets;

we got twelve hundred and sixty-two dollars.  Crenshaw said

he knew a place to hide him, and he gathered him under his arms,

and I by his feet, and conveyed him to a deep crevice in the brow

of the precipice, and tumbled him into it, and he went out of sight;

we then tumbled in his saddle, and took his horse with us, which was

worth two hundred dollars.



'We were detained a few days, and during that time our friend went

to a little village in the neighborhood and saw the negro advertised

(a negro in our possession), and a description of the two men of whom

he had been purchased, and giving his suspicions of the men.

It was rather squally times, but any port in a storm:

we took the negro that night on the bank of a creek which runs

by the farm of our friend, and Crenshaw shot him through the head.

We took out his entrails and sunk him in the creek.



'He had sold the other negro the third time on Arkansaw River for upwards

of five hundred dollars; and then stole him and delivered him into the hand

of his friend, who conducted him to a swamp, and veiled the tragic scene,

and got the last gleanings and sacred pledge of secrecy; as a game of that

kind will not do unless it ends in a mystery to all but the fraternity.

He sold the negro, first and last, for nearly two thousand dollars,

and then put him for ever out of the reach of all pursuers; and they can

never graze him unless they can find the negro; and that they cannot do,

for his carcass has fed many a tortoise and catfish before this time,

and the frogs have sung this many a long day to the silent repose

of his skeleton.'



We were approaching Memphis, in front of which city, and witnessed by

its people, was fought the most famous of the river battles of the Civil War.

Two men whom I had served under, in my river days, took part in that fight:

Mr. Bixby, head pilot of the Union fleet, and Montgomery, Commodore of the

Confederate fleet.  Both saw a great deal of active service during the war,

and achieved high reputations for pluck and capacity.



As we neared Memphis, we began to cast about for an excuse to stay

with the 'Gold Dust' to the end of her course--Vicksburg.  We were

so pleasantly situated, that we did not wish to make a change.

I had an errand of considerable importance to do at Napoleon, Arkansas,

but perhaps I could manage it without quitting the 'Gold Dust.'

I said as much; so we decided to stick to present quarters.



The boat was to tarry at Memphis till ten the next morning.  It is a

beautiful city, nobly situated on a commanding bluff overlooking the river.

The streets are straight and spacious, though not paved in a way to incite

distempered admiration.  No, the admiration must be reserved for the town's

sewerage system, which is called perfect; a recent reform, however, for it

was just the other way, up to a few years ago--a reform resulting from

the lesson taught by a desolating visitation of the yellow-fever. In

those awful days the people were swept off by hundreds, by thousands;

and so great was the reduction caused by flight and by death together,

that the population was diminished three-fourths, and so remained for a time.

Business stood nearly still, and the streets bore an empty Sunday aspect.



Here is a picture of Memphis, at that disastrous time,

drawn by a German tourist who seems to have been an eye-witness

of the scenes which he describes.  It is from Chapter VII,

of his book, just published, in Leipzig, 'Mississippi-Fahrten, von

Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg.'--



'In August the yellow-fever had reached its extremest height.

Daily, hundreds fell a sacrifice to the terrible epidemic.

The city was become a mighty graveyard, two-thirds of the population

had deserted the place, and only the poor, the aged and the sick,

remained behind, a sure prey for the insidious enemy.

The houses were closed:  little lamps burned in front of many--

a sign that here death had entered.  Often, several lay

dead in a single house; from the windows hung black crape.

The stores were shut up, for their owners were gone away or dead.



'Fearful evil!  In the briefest space it struck down and swept away

even the most vigorous victim.  A slight indisposition, then an hour

of fever, then the hideous delirium, then--the Yellow Death !

On the street corners, and in the squares, lay sick men, suddenly overtaken

by the disease; and even corpses, distorted and rigid.  Food failed.

Meat spoiled in a few hours in the fetid and pestiferous air,

and turned black.



'Fearful clamors issue from many houses; then after a season

they cease, and all is still:  noble, self-sacrificing men come

with the coffin, nail it up, and carry it away, to the graveyard.

In the night stillness reigns.  Only the physicians and the

hearses hurry through the streets; and out of the distance,

at intervals, comes the muffled thunder of the railway train,

which with the speed of the wind, and as if hunted by furies,

flies by the pest-ridden city without halting.'



But there is life enough there now.  The population exceeds forty thousand

and is augmenting, and trade is in a flourishing condition.  We drove

about the city; visited the park and the sociable horde of squirrels there;

saw the fine residences, rose-clad and in other ways enticing to the eye;

and got a good breakfast at the hotel.



A thriving place is the Good Samaritan City of the Mississippi:

has a great wholesale jobbing trade; foundries, machine shops;

and manufactories of wagons, carriages, and cotton-seed oil;

and is shortly to have cotton mills and elevators.



Her cotton receipts reached five hundred thousand bales last year--

an increase of sixty thousand over the year before.  Out from

her healthy commercial heart issue five trunk lines of railway;

and a sixth is being added.



This is a very different Memphis from the one which the vanished

and unremembered procession of foreign tourists used to put

into their books long time ago.  In the days of the now

forgotten but once renowned and vigorously hated Mrs. Trollope,

Memphis seems to have consisted mainly of one long street of

log-houses, with some outlying cabins sprinkled around rearward

toward the woods; and now and then a pig, and no end of mud.

That was fifty-five years ago.  She stopped at the hotel.

Plainly it was not the one which gave us our breakfast.

She says--



'The table was laid for fifty persons, and was nearly full.

They ate in perfect silence, and with such astonishing rapidity

that their dinner was over literally before ours was begun;

the only sounds heard were those produced by the knives and forks,

with the unceasing chorus of coughing, ETC.'



'Coughing, etc.'  The 'etc.'  stands for an unpleasant word there,

a word which she does not always charitably cover up, but sometimes prints.

You will find it in the following description of a steamboat dinner

which she ate in company with a lot of aristocratic planters;

wealthy, well-born, ignorant swells they were, tinselled with the usual

harmless military and judicial titles of that old day of cheap shams

and windy pretense--



'The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table;

the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized

and devoured; the strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation;

the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it

was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful

manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade

seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful

manner of cleaning the teeth afterward with a pocket knife,

soon forced us to feel that we were not surrounded

by the generals, colonels, and majors of the old world;

and that the dinner hour was to be anything rather than an

hour of enjoyment.'









                               Chapter 3O

                           Sketches by the Way



IT was a big river, below Memphis; banks brimming full, everywhere,

and very frequently more than full, the waters pouring out over

the land, flooding the woods and fields for miles into the interior;

and in places, to a depth of fifteen feet; signs, all about,

of men's hard work gone to ruin, and all to be done

over again, with straitened means and a weakened courage.

A melancholy picture, and a continuous one;--hundreds of miles of it.

Sometimes the beacon lights stood in water three feet deep,

in the edge of dense forests which extended for miles without farm,

wood-yard, clearing, or break of any kind; which meant that

the keeper of the light must come in a skiff a great distance

to discharge his trust,--and often in desperate weather.

Yet I was told that the work is faithfully performed,

in all weathers; and not always by men, sometimes by women,

if the man is sick or absent.  The Government furnishes oil,

and pays ten or fifteen dollars a month for the lighting and tending.

A Government boat distributes oil and pays wages once a month.



The Ship Island region was as woodsy and tenantless as ever.

The island has ceased to be an island; has joined itself compactly

to the main shore, and wagons travel, now, where the steamboats used

to navigate.  No signs left of the wreck of the 'Pennsylvania.'

Some farmer will turn up her bones with his plow one day, no doubt,

and be surprised.



We were getting down now into the migrating negro region.

These poor people could never travel when they were slaves;

so they make up for the privation now.  They stay on a plantation till

the desire to travel seizes them; then they pack up, hail a steamboat,

and clear out.  Not for any particular place; no, nearly any

place will answer; they only want to be moving.  The amount

of money on hand will answer the rest of the conundrum for them.

If it will take them fifty miles, very well; let it be fifty.

If not, a shorter flight will do.



During a couple of days, we frequently answered these hails.

Sometimes there was a group of high-water-stained, tumble-down cabins,

populous with colored folk, and no whites visible; with grassless

patches of dry ground here and there; a few felled trees,

with skeleton cattle, mules, and horses, eating the leaves and

gnawing the bark--no other food for them in the flood-wasted land.

Sometimes there was a single lonely landing-cabin; near it

the colored family that had hailed us; little and big, old and young,

roosting on the scant pile of household goods; these consisting

of a rusty gun, some bed-ticks, chests, tinware, stools, a crippled

looking-glass, a venerable arm-chair, and six or eight base-born

and spiritless yellow curs, attached to the family by strings.

They must have their dogs; can't go without their dogs.

Yet the dogs are never willing; they always object; so, one after another,

in ridiculous procession, they are dragged aboard; all four feet

braced and sliding along the stage, head likely to be pulled off;

but the tugger marching determinedly forward, bending to his work,

with the rope over his shoulder for better purchase.

Sometimes a child is forgotten and left on the bank; but never

a dog.



The usual river-gossip going on in the pilot-house. Island No. 63--

an island with a lovely 'chute,' or passage, behind it in the former times.

They said Jesse Jamieson, in the 'Skylark,' had a visiting pilot

with him one trip--a poor old broken-down, superannuated fellow--

left him at the wheel, at the foot of 63, to run off the watch.

The ancient mariner went up through the chute, and down the river outside;

and up the chute and down the river again; and yet again and again;

and handed the boat over to the relieving pilot, at the end of three

hours of honest endeavor, at the same old foot of the island where

he had originally taken the wheel!  A darkey on shore who had observed

the boat go by, about thirteen times, said, ' 'clar to gracious,

I wouldn't be s'prised if dey's a whole line o' dem Sk'ylarks! '



Anecdote illustrative of influence of reputation in the changing

of opinion.  The 'Eclipse' was renowned for her swiftness.

One day she passed along; an old darkey on shore, absorbed in

his own matters, did not notice what steamer it was.

Presently someone asked--



'Any boat gone up?'



'Yes, sah.'



'Was she going fast?'



'Oh, so-so--loafin' along.'



'Now, do you know what boat that was?'



'No, sah.'



'Why, uncle, that was the "Eclipse."  '



'No!  Is dat so?  Well, I bet it was--cause she jes' went by here a-SPARKLIN'!'



Piece of history illustrative of the violent style of some of the people

down along here, During the early weeks of high water, A's fence rails

washed down on B's ground, and B's rails washed up in the eddy and landed

on A's ground.  A said, 'Let the thing remain so; I will use your rails,

and you use mine.'  But B objected--wouldn't have it so.  One day,

A came down on B's ground to get his rails.  B said, 'I'll kill you!'

and proceeded for him with his revolver.  A said, 'I'm not armed.'

So B, who wished to do only what was right, threw down his revolver;

then pulled a knife, and cut A's throat all around, but gave his

principal attention to the front, and so failed to sever the jugular.

Struggling around, A managed to get his hands on the discarded revolver,

and shot B dead with it--and recovered from his own injuries.



Further gossip;--after which, everybody went below to get

afternoon coffee, and left me at the wheel, alone,

Something presently reminded me of our last hour in St. Louis,

part of which I spent on this boat's hurricane deck, aft.

I was joined there by a stranger, who dropped into conversation

with me--a brisk young fellow, who said he was born in a town

in the interior of Wisconsin, and had never seen a steamboat

until a week before.  Also said that on the way down from La

Crosse he had inspected and examined his boat so diligently

and with such passionate interest that he had mastered the whole

thing from stem to rudder-blade. Asked me where I was from.

I answered, New England.  'Oh, a Yank!' said he; and went

chatting straight along, without waiting for assent or denial.

He immediately proposed to take me all over the boat and tell

me the names of her different parts, and teach me their uses.

Before I could enter protest or excuse, he was already

rattling glibly away at his benevolent work; and when I

perceived that he was misnaming the things, and inhospitably

amusing himself at the expense of an innocent stranger from

a far country, I held my peace, and let him have his way.

He gave me a world of misinformation; and the further he went,

the wider his imagination expanded, and the more he enjoyed

his cruel work of deceit.  Sometimes, after palming off

a particularly fantastic and outrageous lie upon me, he was

so 'full of laugh' that he had to step aside for a minute,

upon one pretext or another, to keep me from suspecting.

I staid faithfully by him until his comedy was finished.

Then he remarked that he had undertaken to 'learn' me

all about a steamboat, and had done it; but that if he had

overlooked anything, just ask him and he would supply the lack.

'Anything about this boat that you don't know the name

of or the purpose of, you come to me and I'll tell you.'

I said I would, and took my departure; disappeared, and approached

him from another quarter, whence he could not see me.

There he sat, all alone, doubling himself up and writhing

this way and that, in the throes of unappeasable laughter.

He must have made himself sick; for he was not publicly visible

afterward for several days.  Meantime, the episode dropped out

of my mind.



The thing that reminded me of it now, when I was alone at the wheel,

was the spectacle of this young fellow standing in the pilot-house door,

with the knob in his hand, silently and severely inspecting me.

I don't know when I have seen anybody look so injured as he did.

He did not say anything--simply stood there and looked;

reproachfully looked and pondered.  Finally he shut the door,

and started away; halted on the texas a minute; came slowly back

and stood in the door again, with that grieved look in his face;

gazed upon me awhile in meek rebuke, then said--



'You let me learn you all about a steamboat, didn't you?'



'Yes,' I confessed.



'Yes, you did--DIDN'T you?'



'Yes.'



' You are the feller that--that-- --'



Language failed.  Pause--impotent struggle for further words--

then he gave it up, choked out a deep, strong oath, and departed for good.

Afterward I saw him several times below during the trip; but he was cold--

would not look at me.  Idiot, if he had not been in such a sweat

to play his witless practical joke upon me, in the beginning,

I would have persuaded his thoughts into some other direction,

and saved him from committing that wanton and silly impoliteness.



I had myself called with the four o'clock watch, mornings,

for one cannot see too many summer sunrises on the Mississippi.

They are enchanting.  First, there is the eloquence of silence;

for a deep hush broods everywhere.  Next, there is the haunting

sense of loneliness, isolation, remoteness from the worry

and bustle of the world.  The dawn creeps in stealthily;

the solid walls of black forest soften to gray, and vast

stretches of the river open up and reveal themselves; the water

is glass-smooth, gives off spectral little wreaths of white mist,

there is not the faintest breath of wind, nor stir of leaf;

the tranquillity is profound and infinitely satisfying.

Then a bird pipes up, another follows, and soon the pipings

develop into a jubilant riot of music.  You see none of the birds;

you simply move through an atmosphere of song which seems

to sing itself.  When the light has become a little stronger,

you have one of the fairest and softest pictures imaginable.

You have the intense green of the massed and crowded foliage

near by; you see it paling shade by shade in front of you;

upon the next projecting cape, a mile off or more, the tint

has lightened to the tender young green of spring; the cape

beyond that one has almost lost color, and the furthest one,

miles away under the horizon, sleeps upon the water a mere

dim vapor, and hardly separable from the sky above it

and about it.  And all this stretch of river is a mirror,

and you have the shadowy reflections of the leafage and

the curving shores and the receding capes pictured in it.

Well, that is all beautiful; soft and rich and beautiful;

and when the sun gets well up, and distributes a pink flush

here and a powder of gold yonder and a purple haze where it will

yield the best effect, you grant that you have seen something

that is worth remembering.



We had the Kentucky Bend country in the early morning--

scene of a strange and tragic accident in the old times,

Captain Poe had a small stern-wheel boat, for years the home

of himself and his wife.  One night the boat struck a snag in

the head of Kentucky Bend, and sank with astonishing suddenness;

water already well above the cabin floor when the captain got aft.

So he cut into his wife's state-room from above with an ax;

she was asleep in the upper berth, the roof a flimsier one than

was supposed; the first blow crashed down through the rotten

boards and clove her skull.



This bend is all filled up now--result of a cut-off; and the same

agent has taken the great and once much-frequented Walnut Bend,

and set it away back in a solitude far from the accustomed track

of passing steamers.



Helena we visited, and also a town I had not heard of before, it being

of recent birth--Arkansas City.  It was born of a railway; the Little Rock,

Mississippi River and Texas Railroad touches the river there.

We asked a passenger who belonged there what sort of a place it was.

'Well,' said he, after considering, and with the air of one who

wishes to take time and be accurate, 'It's a hell of a place.'

A description which was photographic for exactness.  There were

several rows and clusters of shabby frame-houses, and a supply of mud

sufficient to insure the town against a famine in that article

for a hundred years; for the overflow had but lately subsided.

There were stagnant ponds in the streets, here and there, and a dozen

rude scows were scattered about, lying aground wherever they happened

to have been when the waters drained off and people could do their

visiting and shopping on foot once more.  Still, it is a thriving place,

with a rich country behind it, an elevator in front of it,

and also a fine big mill for the manufacture of cotton-seed oil.

I had never seen this kind of a mill before.



Cotton-seed was comparatively valueless in my time; but it

is worth $12 or $13 a ton now, and none of it is thrown away.

The oil made from it is colorless, tasteless, and almost if not

entirely odorless.  It is claimed that it can, by proper manipulation,

be made to resemble and perform the office of any and all oils,

and be produced at a cheaper rate than the cheapest of the originals.

Sagacious people shipped it to Italy, doctored it, labeled it,

and brought it back as olive oil.  This trade grew to be so formidable

that Italy was obliged to put a prohibitory impost upon it to keep it

from working serious injury to her oil industry.



Helena occupies one of the prettiest situations on the Mississippi.

Her perch is the last, the southernmost group of hills which one sees

on that side of the river.  In its normal condition it is a pretty town;

but the flood (or possibly the seepage) had lately been ravaging it;

whole streets of houses had been invaded by the muddy water,

and the outsides of the buildings were still belted with a broad stain

extending upwards from the foundations.  Stranded and discarded scows lay

all about; plank sidewalks on stilts four feet high were still standing;

the board sidewalks on the ground level were loose and ruinous,--

a couple of men trotting along them could make a blind man think

a cavalry charge was coming; everywhere the mud was black and deep,

and in many places malarious pools of stagnant water were standing.

A Mississippi inundation is the next most wasting and desolating

infliction to a fire.



We had an enjoyable time here, on this sunny Sunday:

two full hours' liberty ashore while the boat discharged freight.

In the back streets but few white people were visible,

but there were plenty of colored folk--mainly women and girls;

and almost without exception upholstered in bright new clothes

of swell and elaborate style and cut--a glaring and hilarious

contrast to the mournful mud and the pensive puddles.



Helena is the second town in Arkansas, in point of population--

which is placed at five thousand.  The country about it is

exceptionally productive.  Helena has a good cotton trade;

handles from forty to sixty thousand bales annually; she has

a large lumber and grain commerce; has a foundry, oil mills,

machine shops and wagon factories--in brief has $1,000,000

invested in manufacturing industries.  She has two railways,

and is the commercial center of a broad and prosperous region.

Her gross receipts of money, annually, from all sources, are placed by

the New Orleans 'Times-Democrat' at $4,000,000.









                               Chapter 31

                    A Thumb-print and What Came of It



WE were approaching Napoleon, Arkansas.  So I began to think

about my errand there.  Time, noonday; and bright and sunny.

This was bad--not best, anyway; for mine was not

(preferably) a noonday kind of errand.  The more I thought,

the more that fact pushed itself upon me--now in one form,

now in another.  Finally, it took the form of a distinct question:

is it good common sense to do the errand in daytime, when, by a

little sacrifice of comfort and inclination, you can have night

for it, and no inquisitive eyes around.  This settled it.

Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out

of most perplexities.



I got my friends into my stateroom, and said I was sorry to create

annoyance and disappointment, but that upon reflection it really

seemed best that we put our luggage ashore and stop over at Napoleon.

Their disapproval was prompt and loud; their language mutinous.

Their main argument was one which has always been the first to come

to the surface, in such cases, since the beginning of time:

'But you decided and AGREED to stick to this boat, etc.; as if,

having determined to do an unwise thing, one is thereby bound to go ahead

and make TWO unwise things of it, by carrying out that determination.



I tried various mollifying tactics upon them, with reasonably good success:

under which encouragement, I increased my efforts; and, to show them that I

had not created this annoying errand, and was in no way to blame for it,

I presently drifted into its history--substantially as follows:



Toward the end of last year, I spent a few months in Munich, Bavaria.

In November I was living in Fraulein Dahlweiner's PENSION,

1a, Karlstrasse; but my working quarters were a mile from there,

in the house of a widow who supported herself by taking lodgers.

She and her two young children used to drop in every morning and talk

German to me--by request.  One day, during a ramble about the city,

I visited one of the two establishments where the Government keeps and

watches corpses until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead,

and not in a trance state.  It was a grisly place, that spacious room.

There were thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their

backs on slightly slanted boards, in three long rows--all of them

with wax-white, rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds.

Along the sides of the room were deep alcoves, like bay windows;

and in each of these lay several marble-visaged babes, utterly hidden and

buried under banks of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands.

Around a finger of each of these fifty still forms, both great

and small, was a ring; and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling,

and thence to a bell in a watch-room yonder, where, day and night,

a watchman sits always alert and ready to spring to the aid of any

of that pallid company who, waking out of death, shall make a movement--

for any, even the slightest, movement will twitch the wire and ring

that fearful bell.  I imagined myself a death-sentinel drowsing

there alone, far in the dragging watches of some wailing, gusty night,

and having in a twinkling all my body stricken to quivering jelly by

the sudden clamor of that awful summons!  So I inquired about this thing;

asked what resulted usually? if the watchman died, and the restored

corpse came and did what it could to make his last moments easy.

But I was rebuked for trying to feed an idle and frivolous curiosity

in so solemn and so mournful a place; and went my way with

a humbled crest.



Next morning I was telling the widow my adventure, when she exclaimed--



'Come with me!  I have a lodger who shall tell you all you want to know.

He has been a night-watchman there.'



He was a living man, but he did not look it.  He was abed, and had

his head propped high on pillows; his face was wasted and colorless,

his deep-sunken eyes were shut; his hand, lying on his breast,

was talon-like, it was so bony and long-fingered. The widow

began her introduction of me.  The man's eyes opened slowly,

and glittered wickedly out from the twilight of their caverns;

he frowned a black frown; he lifted his lean hand and waved us

peremptorily away.  But the widow kept straight on, till she

had got out the fact that I was a stranger and an American.

The man's face changed at once; brightened, became even eager--

and the next moment he and I were alone together.



I opened up in cast-iron German; he responded in quite flexible English;

thereafter we gave the German language a permanent rest.



This consumptive and I became good friends.  I visited him every day, and we

talked about everything.  At least, about everything but wives and children.

Let anybody's wife or anybody's child be mentioned, and three things

always followed:  the most gracious and loving and tender light glimmered

in the man's eyes for a moment; faded out the next, and in its place came

that deadly look which had flamed there the first time I ever saw his

lids unclose; thirdly, he ceased from speech, there and then for that day;

lay silent, abstracted, and absorbed; apparently heard nothing that I said;

took no notice of my good-byes, and plainly did not know, by either sight

or hearing, when I left the room.



When I had been this Karl Ritter's daily and sole intimate during two months,

he one day said, abruptly--



'I will tell you my story.'



                        A DYING MAN S CONFESSION



Then he went on as follows:--



I have never given up, until now.  But now I have given up.

I am going to die.  I made up my mind last night that it

must be, and very soon, too.  You say you are going to

revisit your river, by-and-bye, when you find opportunity.

Very well; that, together with a certain strange experience

which fell to my lot last night, determines me to tell you

my history--for you will see Napoleon, Arkansas; and for my

sake you will stop there, and do a certain thing for me--

a thing which you will willingly undertake after you shall have

heard my narrative.



Let us shorten the story wherever we can, for it will need it, being long.

You already know how I came to go to America, and how I came to settle

in that lonely region in the South.  But you do not know that I had a wife.

My wife was young, beautiful, loving, and oh, so divinely good and

blameless and gentle!  And our little girl was her mother in miniature.

It was the happiest of happy households.



One night--it was toward the close of the war--I woke up

out of a sodden lethargy, and found myself bound and gagged,

and the air tainted with chloroform!  I saw two men in the room,

and one was saying to the other, in a hoarse whisper, 'I told

her I would, if she made a noise, and as for the child--'



The other man interrupted in a low, half-crying voice--



'You said we'd only gag them and rob them, not hurt them;

or I wouldn't have come.'



'Shut up your whining; had to change the plan when they waked up;

you done all you could to protect them, now let that satisfy you;

come, help rummage.'



Both men were masked, and wore coarse, ragged 'nigger' clothes;

they had a bull's-eye lantern, and by its light I noticed

that the gentler robber had no thumb on his right hand.

They rummaged around my poor cabin for a moment; the head bandit

then said, in his stage whisper--



'It's a waste of time--he shall tell where it's hid.

Undo his gag, and revive him up.'



The other said--



'All right--provided no clubbing.'



'No clubbing it is, then--provided he keeps still.'



They approached me; just then there was a sound outside;

a sound of voices and trampling hoofs; the robbers held their

breath and listened; the sounds came slowly nearer and nearer;

then came a shout--



'HELLO, the house!  Show a light, we want water.'



'The captain's voice, by G----!' said the stage-whispering ruffian,

and both robbers fled by the way of the back door, shutting off

their bull's-eye as they ran.



The strangers shouted several times more, then rode by--

there seemed to be a dozen of the horses--and I heard nothing more.



I struggled, but could not free myself from my bonds.

I tried to speak, but the gag was effective; I could not make a sound.

I listened for my wife's voice and my child's--listened long and intently,

but no sound came from the other end of the room where their bed was.

This silence became more and more awful, more and more ominous,

every moment.  Could you have endured an hour of it, do you think?

Pity me, then, who had to endure three.  Three hours--? it was three ages!

Whenever the clock struck, it seemed as if years had gone by since I

had heard it last.  All this time I was struggling in my bonds;

and at last, about dawn, I got myself free, and rose up and stretched

my stiff limbs.  I was able to distinguish details pretty well.

The floor was littered with things thrown there by the robbers

during their search for my savings.  The first object that caught

my particular attention was a document of mine which I had seen

the rougher of the two ruffians glance at and then cast away.

It had blood on it!  I staggered to the other end of the room.

Oh, poor unoffending, helpless ones, there they lay, their troubles ended,

mine begun!



Did I appeal to the law--I?  Does it quench the pauper's thirst if the King

drink for him?  Oh, no, no, no--I wanted no impertinent interference of

the law.  Laws and the gallows could not pay the debt that was owing to me!

Let the laws leave the matter in my hands, and have no fears:  I would

find the debtor and collect the debt.  How accomplish this, do you say?

How accomplish it, and feel so sure about it, when I had neither seen

the robbers' faces, nor heard their natural voices, nor had any idea

who they might be?  Nevertheless, I WAS sure--quite sure, quite confident.

I had a clue--a clue which you would not have valued--a clue which would

not have greatly helped even a detective, since he would lack the secret

of how to apply it.  I shall come to that, presently--you shall see.

Let us go on, now, taking things in their due order.  There was one

circumstance which gave me a slant in a definite direction to begin with:

Those two robbers were manifestly soldiers in tramp disguise; and not

new to military service, but old in it--regulars, perhaps; they did

not acquire their soldierly attitude, gestures, carriage, in a day,

nor a month, nor yet in a year.  So I thought, but said nothing.

And one of them had said, 'the captain's voice, by G----!'--the one whose

life I would have.  Two miles away, several regiments were in camp,

and two companies of U.S. cavalry.  When I learned that Captain Blakely,

of Company C had passed our way, that night, with an escort, I said nothing,

but in that company I resolved to seek my man.  In conversation I studiously

and persistently described the robbers as tramps, camp followers;

and among this class the people made useless search, none suspecting the

soldiers but me.



Working patiently, by night, in my desolated home, I made

a disguise for myself out of various odds and ends of clothing;

in the nearest village I bought a pair of blue goggles.

By-and-bye, when the military camp broke up, and Company C was

ordered a hundred miles north, to Napoleon, I secreted my small

hoard of money in my belt, and took my departure in the night.

When Company C arrived in Napoleon, I was already there.

Yes, I was there, with a new trade--fortune-teller. Not to seem partial,

I made friends and told fortunes among all the companies

garrisoned there; but I gave Company C the great bulk of my attentions.

I made myself limitlessly obliging to these particular men;

they could ask me no favor, put upon me no risk, which I would decline.

I became the willing butt of their jokes; this perfected my popularity;

I became a favorite.



I early found a private who lacked a thumb--what joy it was to me!

And when I found that he alone, of all the company, had lost

a thumb, my last misgiving vanished; I was SURE I was on

the right track.  This man's name was Kruger, a German.

There were nine Germans in the company.  I watched, to see who might

be his intimates; but he seemed to have no especial intimates.

But I was his intimate; and I took care to make the intimacy grow.

Sometimes I so hungered for my revenge that I could hardly

restrain myself from going on my knees and begging him to point

out the man who had murdered my wife and child; but I managed

to bridle my tongue.  I bided my time, and went on telling fortunes,

as opportunity offered.



My apparatus was simple:  a little red paint and a bit of white paper.

I painted the ball of the client's thumb, took a print of it on the paper,

studied it that night, and revealed his fortune to him next day.

What was my idea in this nonsense?  It was this:  When I was a youth,

I knew an old Frenchman who had been a prison-keeper for thirty years,

and he told me that there was one thing about a person which never changed,

from the cradle to the grave--the lines in the ball of the thumb;

and he said that these lines were never exactly alike in the thumbs

of any two human beings.  In these days, we photograph the new criminal,

and hang his picture in the Rogues' Gallery for future reference;

but that Frenchman, in his day, used to take a print of the ball of a new

prisoner's thumb and put that away for future reference.  He always said

that pictures were no good--future disguises could make them useless;

'The thumb's the only sure thing,' said he; 'you can't disguise that.'

And he used to prove his theory, too, on my friends and acquaintances;

it always succeeded.



I went on telling fortunes.  Every night I shut myself in, all alone,

and studied the day's thumb-prints with a magnifying-glass. Imagine

the devouring eagerness with which I pored over those mazy red spirals,

with that document by my side which bore the right-hand thumb-and-finger-marks

of that unknown murderer, printed with the dearest blood--to me--

that was ever shed on this earth!  And many and many a time I had to repeat

the same old disappointed remark, 'will they NEVER correspond!'



But my reward came at last.  It was the print of the thumb of the forty-third

man of Company C whom I had experimented on--Private Franz Adler.

An hour before, I did not know the murderer's name, or voice,

or figure, or face, or nationality; but now I knew all these things!

I believed I might feel sure; the Frenchman's repeated demonstrations

being so good a warranty.  Still, there was a way to MAKE sure.

I had an impression of Kruger's left thumb.  In the morning I took him aside

when he was off duty; and when we were out of sight and hearing of witnesses,

I said, impressively-



'A part of your fortune is so grave, that I thought it would be

better for you if I did not tell it in public.  You and another man,

whose fortune I was studying last night,--Private Adler,--

have been murdering a woman and a child!  You are being dogged:

within five days both of you will be assassinated.'



He dropped on his knees, frightened out of his wits;

and for five minutes he kept pouring out the same set of words,

like a demented person, and in the same half-crying way which

was one of my memories of that murderous night in my cabin--



'I didn't do it; upon my soul I didn't do it; and I tried

to keep HIM from doing it; I did, as God is my witness.

He did it alone.'



This was all I wanted.  And I tried to get rid of the fool; but no,

he clung to me, imploring me to save him from the assassin.  He said--



'I have money--ten thousand dollars--hid away, the fruit of loot

and thievery; save me--tell me what to do, and you shall

have it, every penny.  Two-thirds of it is my cousin Adler's;

but you can take it all.  We hid it when we first came here.

But I hid it in a new place yesterday, and have not told him--

shall not tell him.  I was going to desert, and get away with it all.

It is gold, and too heavy to carry when one is running and dodging;

but a woman who has been gone over the river two days to prepare

my way for me is going to follow me with it; and if I got no chance

to describe the hiding-place to her I was going to slip my silver

watch into her hand, or send it to her, and she would understand.

There's a piece of paper in the back of the case, which tells it all.

Here, take the watch--tell me what to do!'



He was trying to press his watch upon me, and was exposing the paper

and explaining it to me, when Adler appeared on the scene,

about a dozen yards away.  I said to poor Kruger--



'Put up your watch, I don't want it.  You shan't come

to any harm.  Go, now; I must tell Adler his fortune.

Presently I will tell you how to escape the assassin;

meantime I shall have to examine your thumbmark again.

Say nothing to Adler about this thing--say nothing to anybody.'



He went away filled with fright and gratitude, poor devil.

I told Adler a long fortune--purposely so long that I could

not finish it; promised to come to him on guard, that night,

and tell him the really important part of it--the tragical

part of it, I said--so must be out of reach of eavesdroppers.

They always kept a picket-watch outside the town--mere discipline

and ceremony--no occasion for it, no enemy around.



Toward midnight I set out, equipped with the countersign,

and picked my way toward the lonely region where Adler was

to keep his watch.  It was so dark that I stumbled right on

a dim figure almost before I could get out a protecting word.

The sentinel hailed and I answered, both at the same moment.

I added, 'It's only me--the fortune-teller.' Then I slipped to the poor

devil's side, and without a word I drove my dirk into his heart!

YA WOHL, laughed I, it WAS the tragedy part of his fortune, indeed!

As he fell from his horse, he clutched at me, and my blue goggles

remained in his hand; and away plunged the beast dragging him,

with his foot in the stirrup.



I fled through the woods, and made good my escape, leaving the accusing

goggles behind me in that dead man's hand.



This was fifteen or sixteen years ago.  Since then I have wandered

aimlessly about the earth, sometimes at work, sometimes idle;

sometimes with money, sometimes with none; but always tired of life,

and wishing it was done, for my mission here was finished, with the act

of that night; and the only pleasure, solace, satisfaction I had,

in all those tedious years, was in the daily reflection,

'I have killed him!'



Four years ago, my health began to fail.  I had wandered into Munich,

in my purposeless way.  Being out of money, I sought work,

and got it; did my duty faithfully about a year, and was then

given the berth of night watchman yonder in that dead-house

which you visited lately.  The place suited my mood.  I liked it.

I liked being with the dead--liked being alone with them.

I used to wander among those rigid corpses, and peer into

their austere faces, by the hour.  The later the time,

the more impressive it was; I preferred the late time.

Sometimes I turned the lights low:  this gave perspective, you see;

and the imagination could play; always, the dim receding ranks

of the dead inspired one with weird and fascinating fancies.

Two years ago--I had been there a year then--I was sitting all alone

in the watch-room, one gusty winter's night, chilled, numb, comfortless;

drowsing gradually into unconsciousness; the sobbing of the wind

and the slamming of distant shutters falling fainter and fainter

upon my dulling ear each moment, when sharp and suddenly

that dead-bell rang out a blood-curdling alarum over my head!

The shock of it nearly paralyzed me; for it was the first time I had

ever heard it.



I gathered myself together and flew to the corpse-room. About midway

down the outside rank, a shrouded figure was sitting upright,

wagging its head slowly from one side to the other--a grisly spectacle!

Its side was toward me.  I hurried to it and peered into its face.

Heavens, it was Adler!



Can you divine what my first thought was?  Put into words,

it was this:  'It seems, then, you escaped me once:

there will be a different result this time!'



Evidently this creature was suffering unimaginable terrors.

Think what it must have been to wake up in the midst of that

voiceless hush, and, look out over that grim congregation

of the dead!  What gratitude shone in his skinny white face

when he saw a living form before him!  And how the fervency

of this mute gratitude was augmented when his eyes fell

upon the life-giving cordials which I carried in my hands!

Then imagine the horror which came into this pinched face when I

put the cordials behind me, and said mockingly--



'Speak up, Franz Adler--call upon these dead.  Doubtless they will listen

and have pity; but here there is none else that will.'



He tried to speak, but that part of the shroud which bound his jaws,

held firm and would not let him.  He tried to lift imploring hands,

but they were crossed upon his breast and tied.  I said-



'Shout, Franz Adler; make the sleepers in the distant

streets hear you and bring help.  Shout--and lose no time,

for there is little to lose.  What, you cannot?  That is a pity;

but it is no matter--it does not always bring help.

When you and your cousin murdered a helpless woman and child

in a cabin in Arkansas--my wife, it was, and my child!--

they shrieked for help, you remember; but it did no good;

you remember that it did no good, is it not so?  Your teeth chatter--

then why cannot you shout?  Loosen the bandages with your hands--

then you can.  Ah, I see--your hands are tied, they cannot aid you.

How strangely things repeat themselves, after long years;

for MY hands were tied, that night, you remember?  Yes, tied much

as yours are now--how odd that is.  I could not pull free.

It did not occur to you to untie me; it does not occur

to me to untie you.  Sh----! there's a late footstep.

It is coming this way.  Hark, how near it is!  One can count

the footfalls--one--two--three.  There--it is just outside.

Now is the time!  Shout, man, shout!--it is the one sole chance

between you and eternity!  Ah, you see you have delayed too long--

it is gone by.  There--it is dying out.  It is gone!  Think of it--

reflect upon it--you have heard a human footstep for the last time.

How curious it must be, to listen to so common a sound as that,

and know that one will never hear the fellow to it again.'



Oh, my friend, the agony in that shrouded face was ecstasy to see!

I thought of a new torture, and applied it--assisting myself with a trifle

of lying invention--



'That poor Kruger tried to save my wife and child, and I

did him a grateful good turn for it when the time came.

I persuaded him to rob you; and I and a woman helped him to desert,

and got him away in safety.'  A look as of surprise and triumph

shone out dimly through the anguish in my victim's face.

I was disturbed, disquieted.  I said--



'What, then--didn't he escape?'



A negative shake of the head.



'No?  What happened, then?'



The satisfaction in the shrouded face was still plainer.

The man tried to mumble out some words--could not succeed;

tried to express something with his obstructed hands--failed;

paused a moment, then feebly tilted his head, in a meaning way,

toward the corpse that lay nearest him.



'Dead?'  I asked.  'Failed to escape?--caught in the act and shot?'



Negative shake of the head.



'How, then?'



Again the man tried to do something with his hands.  I watched closely,

but could not guess the intent.  I bent over and watched still more intently.

He had twisted a thumb around and was weakly punching at his breast with it.

'Ah--stabbed, do you mean?'



Affirmative nod, accompanied by a spectral smile of such

peculiar devilishness, that it struck an awakening light

through my dull brain, and I cried--



'Did I stab him, mistaking him for you?--for that stroke was meant

for none but you.'



The affirmative nod of the re-dying rascal was as joyous as his failing

strength was able to put into its expression.



'O, miserable, miserable me, to slaughter the pitying soul that,

stood a friend to my darlings when they were helpless, and would

have saved them if he could! miserable, oh, miserable, miserable me!'



I fancied I heard the muffled gurgle of a, mocking laugh.

I took my face out of my hands, and saw my enemy sinking back upon

his inclined board.



He was a satisfactory long time dying.  He had a wonderful vitality,

an astonishing constitution.  Yes, he was a pleasant long time at it.

I got a chair and a newspaper, and sat down by him and read.

Occasionally I took a sip of brandy.  This was necessary,

on account of the cold.  But I did it partly because I saw,

that along at first, whenever I reached for the bottle,

he thought I was going to give him some.  I read aloud:

mainly imaginary accounts of people snatched from the grave's

threshold and restored to life and vigor by a few spoonsful

of liquor and a warm bath.  Yes, he had a long, hard death of it--

three hours and six minutes, from the time he rang his bell.



It is believed that in all these eighteen years that have elapsed since

the institution of the corpse-watch, no shrouded occupant of the Bavarian

dead-houses has ever rung its bell.  Well, it is a harmless belief.

Let it stand at that.



The chill of that death-room had penetrated my bones.

It revived and fastened upon me the disease which had been

afflicting me, but which, up to that night, had been

steadily disappearing.  That man murdered my wife and my child;

and in three days hence he will have added me to his list.

No matter--God! how delicious the memory of it!--I caught him

escaping from his grave, and thrust him back into it.



After that night, I was confined to my bed for a week;

but as soon as I could get about, I went to the dead-house

books and got the number of the house which Adler had died in.

A wretched lodging-house, it was.  It was my idea that he would

naturally have gotten hold of Kruger's effects, being his cousin;

and I wanted to get Kruger's watch, if I could.  But while I was sick,

Adler's things had been sold and scattered, all except a few old letters,

and some odds and ends of no value.  However, through those letters,

I traced out a son of Kruger's, the only relative left.

He is a man of thirty now, a shoemaker by trade, and living at

No. 14 Konigstrasse, Mannheim--widower, with several small children.

Without explaining to him why, I have furnished two-thirds of

his support, ever since.



Now, as to that watch--see how strangely things happen!

I traced it around and about Germany for more than a year,

at considerable cost in money and vexation; and at last I got it.

Got it, and was unspeakably glad; opened it, and found nothing

in it!  Why, I might have known that that bit of paper was not

going to stay there all this time.  Of course I gave up that ten

thousand dollars then; gave it up, and dropped it out of my mind:

and most sorrowfully, for I had wanted it for Kruger's son.



Last night, when I consented at last that I must die, I began to

make ready.  I proceeded to burn all useless papers; and sure enough,

from a batch of Adler's, not previously examined with thoroughness,

out dropped that long-desired scrap!  I recognized it in a moment.

Here it is--I will translate it:



'Brick livery stable, stone foundation, middle of town, corner of Orleans

and Market.  Corner toward Court-house. Third stone, fourth row.

Stick notice there, saying how many are to come.'





There--take it, and preserve it.  Kruger explained that that stone

was removable; and that it was in the north wall of the foundation,

fourth row from the top, and third stone from the west.

The money is secreted behind it.  He said the closing sentence was

a blind, to mislead in case the paper should fall into wrong hands.

It probably performed that office for Adler.



Now I want to beg that when you make your intended journey down the river,

you will hunt out that hidden money, and send it to Adam Kruger, care of

the Mannheim address which I have mentioned.  It will make a rich man of him,

and I shall sleep the sounder in my grave for knowing that I have done

what I could for the son of the man who tried to save my wife and child--

albeit my hand ignorantly struck him down, whereas the impulse of my heart

would have been to shield and serve him.









                               Chapter 32

                        The Disposal of a Bonanza



'SUCH was Ritter's narrative,' said I to my two friends.

There was a profound and impressive silence, which lasted

a considerable time; then both men broke into a fusillade

of exciting and admiring ejaculations over the strange incidents

of the tale; and this, along with a rattling fire of questions,

was kept up until all hands were about out of breath.

Then my friends began to cool down, and draw off,

under shelter of occasional volleys, into silence and

abysmal reverie.  For ten minutes now, there was stillness.

Then Rogers said dreamily--



'Ten thousand dollars.'



Adding, after a considerable pause--



'Ten thousand.  It is a heap of money.'



Presently the poet inquired--



'Are you going to send it to him right away?'



'Yes,' I said.  'It is a queer question.'



No reply.  After a little, Rogers asked, hesitatingly:



'ALL of it?--That is--I mean----'



'Certainly, all of it.'



I was going to say more, but stopped--was stopped by a

train of thought which started up in me.  Thompson spoke,

but my mind was absent, and I did not catch what he said.

But I heard Rogers answer--



'Yes, it seems so to me.  It ought to be quite sufficient;

for I don't see that he has done anything.'



Presently the poet said--



'When you come to look at it, it is more than sufficient.  Just look at it--

five thousand dollars!  Why, he couldn't spend it in a lifetime!

And it would injure him, too; perhaps ruin him--you want to look at that.

In a little while he would throw his last away, shut up his shop, maybe take

to drinking, maltreat his motherless children, drift into other evil courses,

go steadily from bad to worse----'



'Yes, that's it,' interrupted Rogers, fervently, 'I've seen it

a hundred times--yes, more than a hundred.  You put money into

the hands of a man like that, if you want to destroy him, that's all;

just put money into his hands, it's all you've got to do;

and if it don't pull him down, and take all the usefulness out of him,

and all the self-respect and everything, then I don't know human nature--

ain't that so, Thompson?  And even if we were to give him a THIRD

of it; why, in less than six months--'



'Less than six WEEKS, you'd better say!' said I, warming up and breaking in.

'Unless he had that three thousand dollars in safe hands where he couldn't

touch it, he would no more last you six weeks than---- '



'Of COURSE he wouldn't,' said Thompson; 'I've edited books for that

kind of people; and the moment they get their hands on the royalty--

maybe it's three thousand, maybe it's two thousand----'



'What business has that shoemaker with two thousand dollars,

I should like to know?' broke in Rogers, earnestly.  'A man perhaps

perfectly contented now, there in Mannheim, surrounded by his own class,

eating his bread with the appetite which laborious industry alone

can give, enjoying his humble life, honest, upright, pure in heart;

and BLEST!--yes, I say blest! blest above all the myriads that go

in silk attire and walk the empty artificial round of social folly--

but just you put that temptation before him once! just you lay fifteen

hundred dollars before a man like that, and say----'



'Fifteen hundred devils!' cried I, 'FIVE hundred would rot his principles,

paralyze his industry, drag him to the rumshop, thence to the gutter,

thence to the almshouse, thence to----'



'WHY put upon ourselves this crime, gentlemen?' interrupted the poet

earnestly and appealingly.  'He is happy where he is, and AS he is.

Every sentiment of honor, every sentiment of charity, every sentiment

of high and sacred benevolence warns us, beseeches us, commands us to leave

him undisturbed.  That is real friendship, that is true friendship.

We could follow other courses that would be more showy; but none that would

be so truly kind and wise, depend upon it.'



After some further talk, it became evident that each of us, down in his heart,

felt some misgivings over this settlement of the matter.  It was manifest

that we all felt that we ought to send the poor shoemaker SOMETHING.

There was long and thoughtful discussion of this point; and we finally decided

to send him a chromo.



Well, now that everything seemed to be arranged satisfactorily

to everybody concerned, a new trouble broke out:  it transpired that

these two men were expecting to share equally in the money with me.

That was not my idea.  I said that if they got half of it between them

they might consider themselves lucky.  Rogers said--



'Who would have had ANY if it hadn't been for me?  I flung out the first hint--

but for that it would all have gone to the shoemaker.'



Thompson said that he was thinking of the thing himself at the very moment

that Rogers had originally spoken.



I retorted that the idea would have occurred to me plenty soon enough,

and without anybody's help.  I was slow about thinking, maybe, but I was sure.



This matter warmed up into a quarrel; then into a fight; and each man

got pretty badly battered.  As soon as I had got myself mended up after

a fashion, I ascended to the hurricane deck in a pretty sour humor.

I found Captain McCord there, and said, as pleasantly as my humor would permit--



'I have come to say good-bye, captain.  I wish to go ashore at Napoleon.'



'Go ashore where?'



'Napoleon.'



The captain laughed; but seeing that I was not in a jovial mood,

stopped that and said--



'But are you serious?'



'Serious?  I certainly am.'



The captain glanced up at the pilot-house and said--



'He wants to get off at Napoleon!'



'Napoleon ?'



'That's what he says.'



'Great Caesar's ghost!'



Uncle Mumford approached along the deck.  The captain said--



'Uncle, here's a friend of yours wants to get off at Napoleon!'



'Well, by ----?'



I said--



'Come, what is all this about?  Can't a man go ashore at Napoleon

if he wants to?'



'Why, hang it, don't you know?  There ISN'T any Napoleon any more.

Hasn't been for years and years.  The Arkansas River burst through it,

tore it all to rags, and emptied it into the Mississippi!'



'Carried the WHOLE town away?-banks, churches, jails,

newspaper-offices, court-house, theater, fire department,

livery stable EVERYTHING ?'



'Everything.  just a fifteen-minute job.'  or such a matter.

Didn't leave hide nor hair, shred nor shingle of it, except the

fag-end of a shanty and one brick chimney.  This boat is paddling

along right now, where the dead-center of that town used to be;

yonder is the brick chimney-all that's left of Napoleon.

These dense woods on the right used to be a mile back of the town.

Take a look behind you--up-stream--now you begin to recognize

this country, don't you?'



'Yes, I do recognize it now.  It is the most wonderful thing I ever heard of;

by a long shot the most wonderful--and unexpected.'



Mr. Thompson and Mr. Rogers had arrived, meantime, with satchels

and umbrellas, and had silently listened to the captain's news.

Thompson put a half-dollar in my hand and said softly--



'For my share of the chromo.'



Rogers followed suit.



Yes, it was an astonishing thing to see the Mississippi rolling

between unpeopled shores and straight over the spot where I

used to see a good big self-complacent town twenty years ago.

Town that was county-seat of a great and important county; town with

a big United States marine hospital; town of innumerable fights--

an inquest every day; town where I had used to know the prettiest girl,

and the most accomplished in the whole Mississippi Valley;

town where we were handed the first printed news of the 'Pennsylvania's'

mournful disaster a quarter of a century ago; a town no more--

swallowed up, vanished, gone to feed the fishes; nothing left but a

fragment of a shanty and a crumbling brick chimney!









                               Chapter 33

                         Refreshments and Ethics



IN regard to Island 74, which is situated not far from the former Napoleon,

a freak of the river here has sorely perplexed the laws of men and made

them a vanity and a jest.  When the State of Arkansas was chartered,

she controlled 'to the center of the river'--a most unstable line.  The State

of Mississippi claimed 'to the channel'--another shifty and unstable line.

No. 74 belonged to Arkansas.  By and by a cut-off threw this big island out

of Arkansas, and yet not within Mississippi.  'Middle of the river' on one

side of it, 'channel' on the other.  That is as I understand the problem.

Whether I have got the details right or wrong, this FACT remains:

that here is this big and exceedingly valuable island of four thousand acres,

thrust out in the cold, and belonging to neither the one State nor the other;

paying taxes to neither, owing allegiance to neither.  One man owns

the whole island, and of right is 'the man without a country.'



Island 92 belongs to Arkansas.  The river moved it over

and joined it to Mississippi.  A chap established a whiskey

shop there, without a Mississippi license, and enriched

himself upon Mississippi custom under Arkansas protection

(where no license was in those days required).



We glided steadily down the river in the usual privacy--

steamboat or other moving thing seldom seen.  Scenery as always:

stretch upon stretch of almost unbroken forest, on both sides

of the river; soundless solitude.  Here and there a cabin or two,

standing in small openings on the gray and grassless banks--

cabins which had formerly stood a quarter or half-mile farther

to the front, and gradually been pulled farther and farther back

as the shores caved in.  As at Pilcher's Point, for instance,

where the cabins had been moved back three hundred yards

in three months, so we were told; but the caving banks had

already caught up with them, and they were being conveyed

rearward once more.



Napoleon had but small opinion of Greenville, Mississippi, in the old times;

but behold, Napoleon is gone to the cat-fishes, and here is Greenville full

of life and activity, and making a considerable flourish in the Valley;

having three thousand inhabitants, it is said, and doing a gross trade of

$2,500,000 annually.  A growing town.



There was much talk on the boat about the Calhoun Land Company,

an enterprise which is expected to work wholesome results.

Colonel Calhoun, a grandson of the statesman, went to Boston

and formed a syndicate which purchased a large tract of land on

the river, in Chicot County, Arkansas--some ten thousand acres--

for cotton-growing. The purpose is to work on a cash basis:

buy at first hands, and handle their own product; supply their negro

laborers with provisions and necessaries at a trifling profit,

say 8 or 10 per cent.; furnish them comfortable quarters,

etc., and encourage them to save money and remain on the place.

If this proves a financial success, as seems quite certain,

they propose to establish a banking-house in Greenville,

and lend money at an unburdensome rate of interest--6 per cent.

is spoken of.



The trouble heretofore has been--I am quoting remarks of planters

and steamboatmen--that the planters, although owning the land,

were without cash capital; had to hypothecate both land and crop

to carry on the business.  Consequently, the commission dealer

who furnishes the money takes some risk and demands big interest--

usually 10 per cent., and 2<half> per cent.  for negotiating the loan.

The planter has also to buy his supplies through the same dealer,

paying commissions and profits.  Then when he ships his crop,

the dealer adds his commissions, insurance, etc.  So, taking it

by and large, and first and last, the dealer's share of that crop

is about 25 per cent.'<footnote ['But what can the State do

where the people are under subjection to rates of interest ranging

from 18 to 30 per cent., and are also under the necessity of

purchasing their crops in advance even of planting, at these rates,

for the privilege of purchasing all their supplies at 100 per cent.

profit?'--EDWARD ATKINSON.]>



A cotton-planter's estimate of the average margin of profit

on planting, in his section:  One man and mule will raise ten

acres of cotton, giving ten bales cotton, worth, say, $500; cost

of producing, say $350; net profit, $150, or $15 per acre.

There is also a profit now from the cotton-seed, which formerly

had little value--none where much transportation was necessary.

In sixteen hundred pounds crude cotton four hundred are lint,

worth, say, ten cents a pound; and twelve hundred pounds of seed,

worth $12 or $13 per ton.  Maybe in future even the stems will

not be thrown away.  Mr. Edward Atkinson says that for each

bale of cotton there are fifteen hundred pounds of stems,

and that these are very rich in phosphate of lime and potash;

that when ground and mixed with ensilage or cotton-seed meal

(which is too rich for use as fodder in large quantities),

the stem mixture makes a superior food, rich in all the

elements needed for the production of milk, meat, and bone.

Heretofore the stems have been considered a nuisance.



Complaint is made that the planter remains grouty toward the former slave,

since the war; will have nothing but a chill business relation with him,

no sentiment permitted to intrude, will not keep a 'store' himself,

and supply the negro's wants and thus protect the negro's pocket

and make him able and willing to stay on the place and an advantage

to him to do it, but lets that privilege to some thrifty Israelite,

who encourages the thoughtless negro and wife to buy all sorts

of things which they could do without--buy on credit, at big prices,

month after month, credit based on the negro's share of the growing crop;

and at the end of the season, the negro's share belongs to the Israelite,'

the negro is in debt besides, is discouraged, dissatisfied, restless, and both

he and the planter are injured; for he will take steamboat and migrate,

and the planter must get a stranger in his place who does not know him,

does not care for him, will fatten the Israelite a season, and follow his

predecessor per steamboat.



It is hoped that the Calhoun Company will show, by its

humane and protective treatment of its laborers, that its

method is the most profitable for both planter and negro;

and it is believed that a general adoption of that method

will then follow.



And where so many are saying their say, shall not the

barkeeper testify?  He is thoughtful, observant, never drinks;

endeavors to earn his salary, and WOULD earn it if there

were custom enough.  He says the people along here in

Mississippi and Louisiana will send up the river to buy

vegetables rather than raise them, and they will come

aboard at the landings and buy fruits of the barkeeper.

Thinks they 'don't know anything but cotton;' believes they

don't know how to raise vegetables and fruit--'at least the most

of them.'  Says 'a nigger will go to H for a watermelon'

('H' is all I find in the stenographer's report--

means Halifax probably, though that seems a good way to go

for a watermelon). Barkeeper buys watermelons for five cents

up the river, brings them down and sells them for fifty.

'Why does he mix such elaborate and picturesque drinks for the

nigger hands on the boat?'  Because they won't have any other.

'They want a big drink; don't make any difference what

you make it of, they want the worth of their money.

You give a nigger a plain gill of half-a-dollar brandy for

five cents--will he touch it?  No. Ain't size enough to it.

But you put up a pint of all kinds of worthless rubbish, and heave

in some red stuff to make it beautiful--red's the main thing--

and he wouldn't put down that glass to go to a circus.'

All the bars on this Anchor Line are rented and owned

by one firm.  They furnish the liquors from their

own establishment, and hire the barkeepers 'on salary.'

Good liquors?  Yes, on some of the boats, where there are

the kind of passengers that want it and can pay for it.

On the other boats?  No. Nobody but the deck hands and firemen

to drink it.  'Brandy?  Yes, I've got brandy, plenty of it;

but you don't want any of it unless you've made your will.'

It isn't as it used to be in the old times.  Then everybody traveled

by steamboat, everybody drank, and everybody treated everybody else.

'Now most everybody goes by railroad, and the rest don't drink.'

In the old times the barkeeper owned the bar himself, 'and was

gay and smarty and talky and all jeweled up, and was the toniest

aristocrat on the boat; used to make $2,000 on a trip.

A father who left his son a steamboat bar, left him a fortune.

Now he leaves him board and lodging; yes, and washing,

if a shirt a trip will do.  Yes, indeedy, times are changed.

Why, do you know, on the principal line of boats on

the Upper Mississippi, they don't have any bar at all!

Sounds like poetry, but it's the petrified truth.'









                               Chapter 34

                               Tough Yarns



STACK ISLAND.  I remembered Stack Island; also Lake Providence,

Louisiana--which is the first distinctly Southern-looking town

you come to, downward-bound; lies level and low, shade-trees hung

with venerable gray beards of Spanish moss; 'restful, pensive,

Sunday aspect about the place,' comments Uncle Mumford, with feeling--

also with truth.



A Mr. H. furnished some minor details of fact concerning this

region which I would have hesitated to believe if I had not

known him to be a steamboat mate.  He was a passenger of ours,

a resident of Arkansas City, and bound to Vicksburg to join his boat,

a little Sunflower packet.  He was an austere man, and had

the reputation of being singularly unworldly, for a river man.

Among other things, he said that Arkansas had been injured and kept

back by generations of exaggerations concerning the mosquitoes here.

One may smile, said he, and turn the matter off as being a small thing;

but when you come to look at the effects produced, in the way

of discouragement of immigration, and diminished values of property,

it was quite the opposite of a small thing, or thing in any wise

to be coughed down or sneered at.  These mosquitoes had been

persistently represented as being formidable and lawless;

whereas 'the truth is, they are feeble, insignificant in size,

diffident to a fault, sensitive'--and so on, and so on; you would

have supposed he was talking about his family.  But if he was soft

on the Arkansas mosquitoes, he was hard enough on the mosquitoes

of Lake Providence to make up for it--'those Lake Providence colossi,'

as he finely called them.  He said that two of them could whip a dog,

and that four of them could hold a man down; and except help come,

they would kill him--'butcher him,' as he expressed it.

Referred in a sort of casual way--and yet significant way--

to 'the fact that the life policy in its simplest form is unknown

in Lake Providence--they take out a mosquito policy besides.'

He told many remarkable things about those lawless insects.

Among others, said he had seen them try to vote.  Noticing that

this statement seemed to be a good deal of a strain on us,

he modified it a little:  said he might have been mistaken,

as to that particular, but knew he had seen them around

the polls 'canvassing.'



There was another passenger--friend of H.'s--who backed up the harsh

evidence against those mosquitoes, and detailed some stirring adventures

which he had had with them.  The stories were pretty sizable,

merely pretty sizable; yet Mr. H. was continually interrupting with

a cold, inexorable 'Wait--knock off twenty-five per cent.  of that;

now go on;' or, 'Wait--you are getting that too strong; cut it down,

cut it down--you get a leetle too much costumery on to your statements:

always dress a fact in tights, never in an ulster;' or, 'Pardon, once more:

if you are going to load anything more on to that statement, you want

to get a couple of lighters and tow the rest, because it's drawing

all the water there is in the river already; stick to facts--just stick

to the cold facts; what these gentlemen want for a book is the frozen truth--

ain't that so, gentlemen?'  He explained privately that it was necessary

to watch this man all the time, and keep him within bounds; it would

not do to neglect this precaution, as he, Mr. H., 'knew to his sorrow.'

Said he, 'I will not deceive you; he told me such a monstrous lie once,

that it swelled my left ear up, and spread it so that I was actually not able

to see out around it; it remained so for months, and people came miles to see

me fan myself with it.'









                               Chapter 35

                      Vicksburg During the Trouble



WE used to plow past the lofty hill-city, Vicksburg, down-stream;

but we cannot do that now.  A cut-off has made a country town of it,

like Osceola, St. Genevieve, and several others.  There is

currentless water--also a big island--in front of Vicksburg now.

You come down the river the other side of the island,

then turn and come up to the town; that is, in high water:

in low water you can't come up, but must land some distance below it.



Signs and scars still remain, as reminders of Vicksburg's

tremendous war experiences; earthworks, trees crippled by

the cannon balls, cave-refuges in the clay precipices, etc.

The caves did good service during the six weeks'

bombardment of the city--May 8 to July 4, 1863.  They were

used by the non-combatants--mainly by the women and children;

not to live in constantly, but to fly to for safety on occasion.

They were mere holes, tunnels, driven into the perpendicular

clay bank, then branched Y shape, within the hill.

Life in Vicksburg, during the six weeks was perhaps--but wait;

here are some materials out of which to reproduce it:--



Population, twenty-seven thousand soldiers and three

thousand non-combatants; the city utterly cut off from the world--

walled solidly in, the frontage by gunboats, the rear by soldiers

and batteries; hence, no buying and selling with the outside;

no passing to and fro; no God-speeding a parting guest,

no welcoming a coming one; no printed acres of world-wide news

to be read at breakfast, mornings--a tedious dull absence of

such matter, instead; hence, also, no running to see steamboats

smoking into view in the distance up or down, and plowing toward

the town--for none came, the river lay vacant and undisturbed;

no rush and turmoil around the railway station, no struggling

over bewildered swarms of passengers by noisy mobs of hackmen--

all quiet there; flour two hundred dollars a barrel, sugar thirty,

corn ten dollars a bushel, bacon five dollars a pound,

rum a hundred dollars a gallon; other things in proportion:

consequently, no roar and racket of drays and carriages tearing

along the streets; nothing for them to do, among that handful

of non-combatants of exhausted means; at three o'clock in

the morning, silence; silence so dead that the measured tramp

of a sentinel can be heard a seemingly impossible distance; out of

hearing of this lonely sound, perhaps the stillness is absolute:

all in a moment come ground-shaking thunder-crashes of artillery,

the sky is cobwebbed with the crisscrossing red lines streaming

from soaring bomb-shells, and a rain of iron fragments

descends upon the city; descends upon the empty streets:

streets which are not empty a moment later, but mottled with dim

figures of frantic women and children scurrying from home and bed

toward the cave dungeons--encouraged by the humorous grim soldiery,

who shout 'Rats, to your holes!' and laugh.



The cannon-thunder rages, shells scream and crash overhead, the iron

rain pours down, one hour, two hours, three, possibly six, then stops;

silence follows, but the streets are still empty; the silence continues;

by-and-bye a head projects from a cave here and there and yonder,

and reconnoitres, cautiously; the silence still continuing,

bodies follow heads, and jaded, half smothered creatures group

themselves about, stretch their cramped limbs, draw in deep draughts

of the grateful fresh air, gossip with the neighbors from the next cave;

maybe straggle off home presently, or take a lounge through the town,

if the stillness continues; and will scurry to the holes again,

by-and-bye, when the war-tempest breaks forth once more.



There being but three thousand of these cave-dwellers--

merely the population of a village--would they not come

to know each other, after a week or two, and familiarly;

insomuch that the fortunate or unfortunate experiences of one

would be of interest to all?



Those are the materials furnished by history.  From them might not almost

anybody reproduce for himself the life of that time in Vicksburg?

Could you, who did not experience it, come nearer to reproducing it

to the imagination of another non-participant than could a Vicksburger

who did experience it?  It seems impossible; and yet there are reasons

why it might not really be.  When one makes his first voyage in a ship,

it is an experience which multitudinously bristles with striking novelties;

novelties which are in such sharp contrast with all this person's former

experiences that they take a seemingly deathless grip upon his imagination

and memory.  By tongue or pen he can make a landsman live that strange

and stirring voyage over with him; make him see it all and feel it all.

But if he wait?  If he make ten voyages in succession--what then?

Why, the thing has lost color, snap, surprise; and has become commonplace.

The man would have nothing to tell that would quicken a landsman's pulse.



Years ago, I talked with a couple of the Vicksburg non-combatants--

a man and his wife.  Left to tell their story in their own way,

those people told it without fire, almost without interest.



A week of their wonderful life there would have made their tongues eloquent

for ever perhaps; but they had six weeks of it, and that wore the novelty

all out; they got used to being bomb-shelled out of home and into the ground;

the matter became commonplace.  After that, the possibility of their

ever being startlingly interesting in their talks about it was gone.

What the man said was to this effect:--



'It got to be Sunday all the time.  Seven Sundays in the week--to us, anyway.

We hadn't anything to do, and time hung heavy.  Seven Sundays, and all

of them broken up at one time or another, in the day or in the night,

by a few hours of the awful storm of fire and thunder and iron.  At first

we used to shin for the holes a good deal faster than we did afterwards.

The first time, I forgot the children, and Maria fetched them both along.

When she was all safe in the cave she fainted.  Two or three weeks afterwards,

when she was running for the holes, one morning, through a shell-shower, a big

shell burst near her, and covered her all over with dirt, and a piece of

the iron carried away her game-bag of false hair from the back of her head.

Well, she stopped to get that game-bag before she shoved along again!

Was getting used to things already, you see.  We all got so that we could

tell a good deal about shells; and after that we didn't always go under

shelter if it was a light shower.  Us men would loaf around and talk;

and a man would say, 'There she goes!' and name the kind of shell it was from

the sound of it, and go on talking--if there wasn't any danger from it.

If a shell was bursting close over us, we stopped talking and stood still;--

uncomfortable, yes, but it wasn't safe to move.  When it let go, we went

on talking again, if nobody hurt--maybe saying, 'That was a ripper!'

or some such commonplace comment before we resumed; or, maybe, we would

see a shell poising itself away high in the air overhead.  In that case,

every fellow just whipped out a sudden, 'See you again, gents!' and shoved.

Often and often I saw gangs of ladies promenading the streets, looking as

cheerful as you please, and keeping an eye canted up watching the shells;

and I've seen them stop still when they were uncertain about what a

shell was going to do, and wait and make certain; and after that they

sa'ntered along again, or lit out for shelter, according to the verdict.

Streets in some towns have a litter of pieces of paper, and odds and ends

of one sort or another lying around.  Ours hadn't; they had IRON litter.

Sometimes a man would gather up all the iron fragments and unbursted

shells in his neighborhood, and pile them into a kind of monument

in his front yard--a ton of it, sometimes.  No glass left;

glass couldn't stand such a bombardment; it was all shivered out.

Windows of the houses vacant--looked like eye-holes in a skull.

WHOLE panes were as scarce as news.



'We had church Sundays.  Not many there, along at first; but by-and-bye

pretty good turnouts.  I've seen service stop a minute, and everybody

sit quiet--no voice heard, pretty funeral-like then--and all the more

so on account of the awful boom and crash going on outside and overhead;

and pretty soon, when a body could be heard, service would go on again.

Organs and church-music mixed up with a bombardment is a powerful

queer combination--along at first.  Coming out of church, one morning,

we had an accident--the only one that happened around me on a Sunday.

I was just having a hearty handshake with a friend I hadn't seen for

a while, and saying, 'Drop into our cave to-night, after bombardment;

we've got hold of a pint of prime wh--.' Whiskey, I was going to say,

you know, but a shell interrupted.  A chunk of it cut the man's arm off,

and left it dangling in my hand.  And do you know the thing that is

going to stick the longest in my memory, and outlast everything else,

little and big, I reckon, is the mean thought I had then?  It was 'the

whiskey IS SAVED.'  And yet, don't you know, it was kind of excusable;

because it was as scarce as diamonds, and we had only just that little;

never had another taste during the siege.



'Sometimes the caves were desperately crowded, and always hot and close.

Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it;

no turning-room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn't have made

a candle burn in it.  A child was born in one of those caves one night,

Think of that; why, it was like having it born in a trunk.



'Twice we had sixteen people in our cave; and a number of times we

had a dozen.  Pretty suffocating in there.  We always had eight;

eight belonged there.  Hunger and misery and sickness and fright

and sorrow, and I don't know what all, got so loaded into them that

none of them were ever rightly their old selves after the siege.

They all died but three of us within a couple of years.

One night a shell burst in front of the hole and caved it in and

stopped it up.  It was lively times, for a while, digging out.

Some of us came near smothering.  After that we made two openings--

ought to have thought of it at first.



'Mule meat.  No, we only got down to that the last day or two.

Of course it was good; anything is good when you are starving.



This man had kept a diary during--six weeks?  No, only the first six days.

The first day, eight close pages; the second, five; the third, one--

loosely written; the fourth, three or four lines; a line or two the fifth

and sixth days; seventh day, diary abandoned; life in terrific Vicksburg

having now become commonplace and matter of course.



The war history of Vicksburg has more about it to interest the general

reader than that of any other of the river-towns. It is full of variety,

full of incident, full of the picturesque.  Vicksburg held out longer

than any other important river-town, and saw warfare in all its phases,

both land and water--the siege, the mine, the assault, the repulse,

the bombardment, sickness, captivity, famine.



The most beautiful of all the national cemeteries is here.

Over the great gateway is this inscription:--



              "HERE REST IN PEACE 16,600 WHO DIED FOR THEIR

                   COUNTRY IN THE YEARS 1861 TO 1865"



The grounds are nobly situated; being very high and commanding a wide

prospect of land and river.  They are tastefully laid out in broad terraces,

with winding roads and paths; and there is profuse adornment in the way

of semi-tropical shrubs and flowers,' and in one part is a piece of native

wild-wood, left just as it grew, and, therefore, perfect in its charm.

Everything about this cemetery suggests the hand of the national Government.

The Government's work is always conspicuous for excellence, solidity,

thoroughness, neatness.  The Government does its work well in the first place,

and then takes care of it.



By winding-roads--which were often cut to so great a depth between

perpendicular walls that they were mere roofless tunnels--we drove

out a mile or two and visited the monument which stands upon the scene

of the surrender of Vicksburg to General Grant by General Pemberton.

Its metal will preserve it from the hackings and chippings which

so defaced its predecessor, which was of marble; but the brick

foundations are crumbling, and it will tumble down by-and-bye. It

overlooks a picturesque region of wooded hills and ravines; and is

not unpicturesque itself, being well smothered in flowering weeds.

The battered remnant of the marble monument has been removed to

the National Cemetery.



On the road, a quarter of a mile townward, an aged colored man showed us,

with pride, an unexploded bomb-shell which has lain in his yard since the day

it fell there during the siege.



'I was a-stannin' heah, an' de dog was a-stannin' heah; de dog

he went for de shell, gwine to pick a fuss wid it; but I didn't;

I says, "Jes' make you'seff at home heah; lay still whah you is,

or bust up de place, jes' as you's a mind to, but I's got business

out in de woods, I has!"'



Vicksburg is a town of substantial business streets and pleasant residences;

it commands the commerce of the Yazoo and Sunflower Rivers; is pushing

railways in several directions, through rich agricultural regions,

and has a promising future of prosperity and importance.



Apparently, nearly all the river towns, big and little, have made

up their minds that they must look mainly to railroads for wealth

and upbuilding, henceforth.  They are acting upon this idea.

The signs are, that the next twenty years will bring about some

noteworthy changes in the Valley, in the direction of increased

population and wealth, and in the intellectual advancement

and the liberalizing of opinion which go naturally with these.

And yet, if one may judge by the past, the river towns will manage to find

and use a chance, here and there, to cripple and retard their progress.

They kept themselves back in the days of steamboating supremacy,

by a system of wharfage-dues so stupidly graded as to prohibit

what may be called small RETAIL traffic in freights and passengers.

Boats were charged such heavy wharfage that they could not afford

to land for one or two passengers or a light lot of freight.

Instead of encouraging the bringing of trade to their doors, the towns

diligently and effectively discouraged it.  They could have had many

boats and low rates; but their policy rendered few boats and high

rates compulsory.  It was a policy which extended--and extends--

from New Orleans to St. Paul.



We had a strong desire to make a trip up the Yazoo and the Sunflower--

an interesting region at any time, but additionally interesting at this time,

because up there the great inundation was still to be seen in force--

but we were nearly sure to have to wait a day or more for a New Orleans boat

on our return; so we were obliged to give up the project.



Here is a story which I picked up on board the boat that night.

I insert it in this place merely because it is a good story,

not because it belongs here--for it doesn't. It was told by a passenger--

a college professor--and was called to the surface in the course

of a general conversation which began with talk about horses,

drifted into talk about astronomy, then into talk about the lynching

of the gamblers in Vicksburg half a century ago, then into talk

about dreams and superstitions; and ended, after midnight,

in a dispute over free trade and protection.









                               Chapter 36

                          The Professor's Yarn



IT was in the early days.  I was not a college professor then.

I was a humble-minded young land-surveyor, with the world before me--

to survey, in case anybody wanted it done.  I had a contract to survey

a route for a great mining-ditch in California, and I was on my way thither,

by sea--a three or four weeks' voyage.  There were a good many passengers,

but I had very little to say to them; reading and dreaming were my passions,

and I avoided conversation in order to indulge these appetites.

There were three professional gamblers on board--rough, repulsive fellows.

I never had any talk with them, yet I could not help seeing them

with some frequency, for they gambled in an upper-deck stateroom every

day and night, and in my promenades I often had glimpses of them

through their door, which stood a little ajar to let out the surplus

tobacco smoke and profanity.  They were an evil and hateful presence,

but I had to put up with it, of course,



There was one other passenger who fell under my eye a good deal,

for he seemed determined to be friendly with me, and I could not have

gotten rid of him without running some chance of hurting his feelings,

and I was far from wishing to do that.  Besides, there was something engaging

in his countrified simplicity and his beaming good-nature. The first time

I saw this Mr. John Backus, I guessed, from his clothes and his looks,

that he was a grazier or farmer from the backwoods of some western State--

doubtless Ohio--and afterward when he dropped into his personal history

and I discovered that he WAS a cattle-raiser from interior Ohio,

I was so pleased with my own penetration that I warmed toward him for

verifying my instinct.



He got to dropping alongside me every day, after breakfast,

to help me make my promenade; and so, in the course of time,

his easy-working jaw had told me everything about his business,

his prospects, his family, his relatives, his politics--

in fact everything that concerned a Backus, living or dead.

And meantime I think he had managed to get out of me everything

I knew about my trade, my tribe, my purposes, my prospects,

and myself.  He was a gentle and persuasive genius, and this thing

showed it; for I was not given to talking about my matters.

I said something about triangulation, once; the stately word

pleased his ear; he inquired what it meant; I explained;

after that he quietly and inoffensively ignored my name,

and always called me Triangle.



What an enthusiast he was in cattle!  At the bare name of a bull or a cow,

his eye would light and his eloquent tongue would turn itself loose.  As long

as I would walk and listen, he would walk and talk; he knew all breeds,

he loved all breeds, he caressed them all with his affectionate tongue.

I tramped along in voiceless misery whilst the cattle question was up;

when I could endure it no longer, I used to deftly insert a scientific topic

into the conversation; then my eye fired and his faded; my tongue fluttered,

his stopped; life was a joy to me, and a sadness to him.



One day he said, a little hesitatingly, and with somewhat of diffidence--



'Triangle, would you mind coming down to my stateroom a minute,

and have a little talk on a certain matter?'



I went with him at once.  Arrived there, he put his head out, glanced up

and down the saloon warily, then closed the door and locked it.

He sat down on the sofa, and he said--



'I'm a-going to make a little proposition to you, and if it strikes

you favorable, it'll be a middling good thing for both of us.

You ain't a-going out to Californy for fun, nuther am I--

it's business, ain't that so?  Well, you can do me a good turn,

and so can I you, if we see fit.  I've raked and scraped and saved,

a considerable many years, and I've got it all here.'

He unlocked an old hair trunk, tumbled a chaos of shabby

clothes aside, and drew a short stout bag into view for a moment,

then buried it again and relocked the trunk.  Dropping his voice

to a cautious low tone, he continued, 'She's all there--a round

ten thousand dollars in yellow-boys; now this is my little idea:

What I don't know about raising cattle, ain't worth knowing.

There's mints of money in it, in Californy.  Well, I know,

and you know, that all along a line that 's being surveyed,

there 's little dabs of land that they call "gores," that fall

to the surveyor free gratis for nothing.  All you've got to do,

on your side, is to survey in such a way that the "gores" will fall

on good fat land, then you turn 'em over to me, I stock 'em with cattle,

in rolls the cash, I plank out your share of the dollars regular,

right along, and--'



I was sorry to wither his blooming enthusiasm, but it could not be helped.

I interrupted, and said severely--



'I am not that kind of a surveyor.  Let us change the subject, Mr. Backus.'



It was pitiful to see his confusion and hear his awkward

and shamefaced apologies.  I was as much distressed as he was--

especially as he seemed so far from having suspected

that there was anything improper in his proposition.

So I hastened to console him and lead him on to forget his

mishap in a conversational orgy about cattle and butchery.

We were lying at Acapulco; and, as we went on deck, it happened

luckily that the crew were just beginning to hoist some beeves

aboard in slings.  Backus's melancholy vanished instantly,

and with it the memory of his late mistake.



'Now only look at that!' cried he; 'My goodness, Triangle, what WOULD they say

to it in OHIO.  Wouldn't their eyes bug out, to see 'em handled like that?--

wouldn't they, though?'



All the passengers were on deck to look--even the gamblers--

and Backus knew them all, and had afflicted them all with his pet topic.

As I moved away, I saw one of the gamblers approach and accost him;

then another of them; then the third.  I halted; waited; watched;

the conversation continued between the four men; it grew earnest;

Backus drew gradually away; the gamblers followed, and kept at his elbow.

I was uncomfortable.  However, as they passed me presently, I heard

Backus say, with a tone of persecuted annoyance--



'But it ain't any use, gentlemen; I tell you again, as I've

told you a half a dozen times before, I warn't raised to it,

and I ain't a-going to resk it.'



I felt relieved.  'His level head will be his sufficient protection,'

I said to myself.



During the fortnight's run from Acapulco to San Francisco I

several times saw the gamblers talking earnestly with Backus,

and once I threw out a gentle warning to him.  He chuckled

comfortably and said--



'Oh, yes! they tag around after me considerable--want me to play

a little, just for amusement, they say--but laws-a-me, if my folks

have told me once to look out for that sort of live-stock, they've

told me a thousand times, I reckon.'



By-and-bye, in due course, we were approaching San Francisco.

It was an ugly black night, with a strong wind blowing, but there

was not much sea.  I was on deck, alone.  Toward ten I started below.

A figure issued from the gamblers' den, and disappeared in the darkness.

I experienced a shock, for I was sure it was Backus.

I flew down the companion-way, looked about for him, could not

find him, then returned to the deck just in time to catch a glimpse

of him as he re-entered that confounded nest of rascality.

Had he yielded at last?  I feared it.  What had he gone below for?--

His bag of coin?  Possibly.  I drew near the door, full of bodings.

It was a-crack, and I glanced in and saw a sight that made

me bitterly wish I had given my attention to saving my poor

cattle-friend, instead of reading and dreaming my foolish time away.

He was gambling.  Worse still, he was being plied with champagne,

and was already showing some effect from it.  He praised the 'cider,'

as he called it, and said now that he had got a taste of it

he almost believed he would drink it if it was spirits, it was

so good and so ahead of anything he had ever run across before.

Surreptitious smiles, at this, passed from one rascal to another,

and they filled all the glasses, and whilst Backus honestly drained

his to the bottom they pretended to do the same, but threw the wine

over their shoulders.



I could not bear the scene, so I wandered forward and tried

to interest myself in the sea and the voices of the wind.

But no, my uneasy spirit kept dragging me back at

quarter-hour intervals; and always I saw Backus drinking his wine--

fairly and squarely, and the others throwing theirs away.

It was the painfullest night I ever spent.



The only hope I had was that we might reach our anchorage

with speed--that would break up the game.  I helped the ship

along all I could with my prayers.  At last we went booming

through the Golden Gate, and my pulses leaped for joy.

I hurried back to that door and glanced in.  Alas, there was

small room for hope--Backus's eyes were heavy and bloodshot,

his sweaty face was crimson, his speech maudlin and thick,

his body sawed drunkenly about with the weaving motion of the ship.

He drained another glass to the dregs, whilst the cards

were being dealt.



He took his hand, glanced at it, and his dull eyes lit up for a moment.

The gamblers observed it, and showed their gratification by

hardly perceptible signs.



'How many cards?'



'None! ' said Backus.



One villain--named Hank Wiley--discarded one card, the others three each.

The betting began.  Heretofore the bets had been trifling--

a dollar or two; but Backus started off with an eagle now,

Wiley hesitated a moment, then 'saw it' and 'went ten dollars better.'

The other two threw up their hands.



Backus went twenty better.  Wiley said--



'I see that, and go you a hundred better!' then smiled and reached

for the money.



'Let it alone,' said Backus, with drunken gravity.



'What! you mean to say you're going to cover it?'



'Cover it?  Well, I reckon I am--and lay another hundred on top

of it, too.'



He reached down inside his overcoat and produced the required sum.



'Oh, that's your little game, is it?  I see your raise,

and raise it five hundred!' said Wiley.



'Five hundred better.'  said the foolish bull-driver,

and pulled out the amount and showered it on the pile.

The three conspirators hardly tried to conceal their exultation.



All diplomacy and pretense were dropped now, and the sharp exclamations

came thick and fast, and the yellow pyramid grew higher and higher.

At last ten thousand dollars lay in view.  Wiley cast a bag of coin on

the table, and said with mocking gentleness--



'Five thousand dollars better, my friend from the rural districts--

what do you say NOW?'



'I CALL you!' said Backus, heaving his golden shot-bag on the pile.

'What have you got?'



'Four kings, you d--d fool!' and Wiley threw down his cards and surrounded

the stakes with his arms.



'Four ACES, you ass!' thundered Backus, covering his man

with a cocked revolver.  'I'M A PROFESSIONAL GAMBLER MYSELF,

AND I'VE BEEN LAYING FOR YOU DUFFERS ALL THIS VOYAGE!'



Down went the anchor, rumbledy-dum-dum! and the long trip was ended.



Well--well, it is a sad world.  One of the three gamblers was Backus's 'pal.'

It was he that dealt the fateful hands.  According to an understanding with

the two victims, he was to have given Backus four queens, but alas, he didn't.



A week later, I stumbled upon Backus--arrayed in the height of fashion--

in Montgomery Street.  He said, cheerily, as we were parting--



'Ah, by-the-way, you needn't mind about those gores.  I don't really

know anything about cattle, except what I was able to pick up

in a week's apprenticeship over in Jersey just before we sailed.

My cattle-culture and cattle-enthusiasm have served their turn--

I shan't need them any more.'



Next day we reluctantly parted from the 'Gold Dust' and her officers,

hoping to see that boat and all those officers again, some day.

A thing which the fates were to render tragically impossible!









                               Chapter 37

                       The End of the 'Gold Dust'



FOR, three months later, August 8, while I was writing one of these

foregoing chapters, the New York papers brought this telegram--



                          A TERRIBLE DISASTER.



SEVENTEEN PERSONS KILLED BY AN EXPLOSION ON THE STEAMER 'GOLD DUST.'



'NASHVILLE, Aug. 7.--A despatch from Hickman, Ky., says--



'The steamer "Gold Dust" exploded her boilers at

three o'clock to-day, just after leaving Hickman.

Forty-seven persons were scalded and seventeen are missing.

The boat was landed in the eddy just above the town,

and through the exertions of the citizens the cabin passengers,

officers, and part of the crew and deck passengers were

taken ashore and removed to the hotels and residences.

Twenty-four of the injured were lying in Holcomb's dry-goods

store at one time, where they received every attention before

being removed to more comfortable places.'



A list of the names followed, whereby it appeared that of the seventeen dead,

one was the barkeeper; and among the forty-seven wounded, were the captain,

chief mate, second mate, and second and third clerks; also Mr. Lem S. Gray,

pilot, and several members of the crew.



In answer to a private telegram, we learned that none of these was

severely hurt, except Mr. Gray.  Letters received afterward confirmed

this news, and said that Mr. Gray was improving and would get well.

Later letters spoke less hopefully of his case; and finally came one

announcing his death.  A good man, a most companionable and manly man,

and worthy of a kindlier fate.









                               Chapter 38

                           The House Beautiful



WE took passage in a Cincinnati boat for New Orleans; or on a Cincinnati boat--

either is correct; the former is the eastern form of putting it,

the latter the western.



Mr. Dickens declined to agree that the Mississippi steamboats

were 'magnificent,' or that they were 'floating palaces,'--

terms which had always been applied to them; terms which did not

over-express the admiration with which the people viewed them.



Mr. Dickens's position was unassailable, possibly; the people's

position was certainly unassailable.  If Mr. Dickens was

comparing these boats with the crown jewels; or with the Taj,

or with the Matterhorn; or with some other priceless or wonderful

thing which he had seen, they were not magnificent--he was right.

The people compared them with what they had seen; and, thus measured,

thus judged, the boats were magnificent--the term was the correct one,

it was not at all too strong.  The people were as right as was

Mr. Dickens.  The steamboats were finer than anything on shore.

Compared with superior dwelling-houses and first-class hotels in

the Valley, they were indubitably magnificent, they were 'palaces.'

To a few people living in New Orleans and St. Louis, they were

not magnificent, perhaps; not palaces; but to the great majority

of those populations, and to the entire populations spread over

both banks between Baton Rouge and St. Louis, they were palaces;

they tallied with the citizen's dream of what magnificence was,

and satisfied it.



Every town and village along that vast stretch of double

river-frontage had a best dwelling, finest dwelling, mansion,--

the home of its wealthiest and most conspicuous citizen.

It is easy to describe it:  large grassy yard, with paling

fence painted white--in fair repair; brick walk from gate

to door; big, square, two-story 'frame' house, painted white

and porticoed like a Grecian temple--with this difference,

that the imposing fluted columns and Corinthian capitals

were a pathetic sham, being made of white pine, and painted;

iron knocker; brass door knob--discolored, for lack

of polishing.  Within, an uncarpeted hall, of planed boards;

opening out of it, a parlor, fifteen feet by fifteen--

in some instances five or ten feet larger; ingrain carpet;

mahogany center-table; lamp on it, with green-paper shade--

standing on a gridiron, so to speak, made of high-colored yarns,

by the young ladies of the house, and called a lamp-mat;

several books, piled and disposed, with cast-iron exactness,

according to an inherited and unchangeable plan; among them,

Tupper, much penciled; also, 'Friendship's Offering,'

and 'Affection's Wreath,' with their sappy inanities illustrated

in die-away mezzotints; also, Ossian; 'Alonzo and Melissa:'

maybe 'Ivanhoe:'  also 'Album,' full of original 'poetry'

of the Thou-hast-wounded-the-spirit-that-loved-thee breed;

two or three goody-goody works--'Shepherd of Salisbury Plain,'

etc.; current number of the chaste and innocuous Godey's

'Lady's Book,' with painted fashion-plate of wax-figure

women with mouths all alike--lips and eyelids the same size--

each five-foot woman with a two-inch wedge sticking from

under her dress and letting-on to be half of her foot.

Polished air-tight stove (new and deadly invention), with

pipe passing through a board which closes up the discarded

good old fireplace.  On each end of the wooden mantel,

over the fireplace, a large basket of peaches and other fruits,

natural size, all done in plaster, rudely, or in wax,

and painted to resemble the originals--which they don't. Over

middle of mantel, engraving--Washington Crossing the Delaware;

on the wall by the door, copy of it done in thunder-and-lightning

crewels by one of the young ladies--work of art which would

have made Washington hesitate about crossing, if he could

have foreseen what advantage was going to be taken of it.

Piano--kettle in disguise--with music, bound and unbound,

piled on it, and on a stand near by:  Battle of Prague;

Bird Waltz; Arkansas Traveler; Rosin the Bow; Marseilles Hymn;

On a Lone Barren Isle (St. Helena); The Last Link is Broken;

She wore a Wreath of Roses the Night when last we met;

Go, forget me, Why should Sorrow o'er that Brow a Shadow fling;

Hours there were to Memory Dearer; Long, Long Ago; Days of Absence;

A Life on the Ocean Wave, a Home on the Rolling Deep; Bird at Sea;

and spread open on the rack, where the plaintive singer has left it,

RO-holl on, silver MOO-hoon, guide the TRAV-el-lerr his WAY, etc.

Tilted pensively against the piano, a guitar--guitar capable

of playing the Spanish Fandango by itself, if you give it a start.

Frantic work of art on the wall--pious motto, done on the premises,

sometimes in colored yarns, sometimes in faded grasses:

progenitor of the 'God Bless Our Home' of modern commerce.

Framed in black moldings on the wall, other works of arts,

conceived and committed on the premises, by the young ladies;

being grim black-and-white crayons; landscapes, mostly:

lake, solitary sail-boat, petrified clouds, pre-geological trees

on shore, anthracite precipice; name of criminal conspicuous

in the corner.  Lithograph, Napoleon Crossing the Alps.

Lithograph, The Grave at St. Helena.  Steel-plates, Trumbull's

Battle of Bunker Hill, and the Sally from Gibraltar.

Copper-plates, Moses Smiting the Rock, and Return of the

Prodigal Son.  In big gilt frame, slander of the family in oil:

papa holding a book ('Constitution of the United States');

guitar leaning against mamma, blue ribbons fluttering from its neck;

the young ladies, as children, in slippers and scalloped pantelettes,

one embracing toy horse, the other beguiling kitten with ball

of yarn, and both simpering up at mamma, who simpers back.

These persons all fresh, raw, and red--apparently skinned.

Opposite, in gilt frame, grandpa and grandma, at thirty and

twenty-two, stiff, old-fashioned, high-collared, puff-sleeved,

glaring pallidly out from a background of solid Egyptian night.

Under a glass French clock dome, large bouquet of stiff

flowers done in corpsy-white wax.  Pyramidal what-not

in the corner, the shelves occupied chiefly with bric-a-brac

of the period, disposed with an eye to best effect:

shell, with the Lord's Prayer carved on it; another shell--

of the long-oval sort, narrow, straight orifice, three inches long,

running from end to end--portrait of Washington carved on it;

not well done; the shell had Washington's mouth, originally--

artist should have built to that.  These two are memorials of

the long-ago bridal trip to New Orleans and the French Market.

Other bric-a-brac: Californian 'specimens'--quartz,

with gold wart adhering; old Guinea-gold locket, with circlet

of ancestral hair in it; Indian arrow-heads, of flint;

pair of bead moccasins, from uncle who crossed the Plains;

three 'alum' baskets of various colors--being skeleton-frame of wire,

clothed-on with cubes of crystallized alum in the rock-candy style--

works of art which were achieved by the young ladies; their doubles

and duplicates to be found upon all what-nots in the land;

convention of desiccated bugs and butterflies pinned to a card;

painted toy-dog, seated upon bellows-attachment--drops its

under jaw and squeaks when pressed upon; sugar-candy rabbit--

limbs and features merged together, not strongly defined;

pewter presidential-campaign medal; miniature card-board wood-sawyer,

to be attached to the stove-pipe and operated by the heat;

small Napoleon, done in wax; spread-open daguerreotypes

of dim children, parents, cousins, aunts, and friends,

in all attitudes but customary ones; no templed portico at back,

and manufactured landscape stretching away in the distance--

that came in later, with the photograph; all these vague figures

lavishly chained and ringed--metal indicated and secured

from doubt by stripes and splashes of vivid gold bronze;

all of them too much combed, too much fixed up; and all of them

uncomfortable in inflexible Sunday-clothes of a pattern which

the spectator cannot realize could ever have been in fashion;

husband and wife generally grouped together--husband sitting,

wife standing, with hand on his shoulder--and both preserving,

all these fading years, some traceable effect of the daguerreotypist's

brisk 'Now smile, if you please!'  Bracketed over what-not--

place of special sacredness--an outrage in water-color, done

by the young niece that came on a visit long ago, and died.

Pity, too; for she might have repented of this in time.

Horse-hair chairs, horse-hair sofa which keeps sliding from

under you.  Window shades, of oil stuff, with milk-maids

and ruined castles stenciled on them in fierce colors.

Lambrequins dependent from gaudy boxings of beaten tin, gilded.

Bedrooms with rag carpets; bedsteads of the 'corded' sort,

with a sag in the middle, the cords needing tightening;

snuffy feather-bed--not aired often enough; cane-seat chairs,

splint-bottomed rocker; looking-glass on wall, school-slate size,

veneered frame; inherited bureau; wash-bowl and pitcher, possibly--

but not certainly; brass candlestick, tallow candle, snuffers.

Nothing else in the room.  Not a bathroom in the house;

and no visitor likely to come along who has ever seen

one.



That was the residence of the principal citizen, all the way from

the suburbs of New Orleans to the edge of St. Louis.  When he stepped

aboard a big fine steamboat, he entered a new and marvelous world:

chimney-tops cut to counterfeit a spraying crown of plumes--

and maybe painted red; pilot-house, hurricane deck, boiler-deck guards,

all garnished with white wooden filigree work of fanciful patterns;

gilt acorns topping the derricks; gilt deer-horns over the big bell;

gaudy symbolical picture on the paddle-box, possibly; big roomy

boiler-deck, painted blue, and furnished with Windsor armchairs;

inside, a far-receding snow-white 'cabin;' porcelain knob and oil-picture

on every stateroom door; curving patterns of filigree-work touched

up with gilding, stretching overhead all down the converging vista;

big chandeliers every little way, each an April shower of

glittering glass-drops; lovely rainbow-light falling everywhere

from the colored glazing of the skylights; the whole a long-drawn,

resplendent tunnel, a bewildering and soul-satisfying spectacle!

In the ladies' cabin a pink and white Wilton carpet, as soft as mush,

and glorified with a ravishing pattern of gigantic flowers.

Then the Bridal Chamber--the animal that invented that idea was still

alive and unhanged, at that day--Bridal Chamber whose pretentious

flummery was necessarily overawing to the now tottering intellect

of that hosannahing citizen.  Every state-room had its couple

of cozy clean bunks, and perhaps a looking-glass and a snug closet;

and sometimes there was even a washbowl and pitcher, and part

of a towel which could be told from mosquito netting by an expert--

though generally these things were absent, and the shirt-sleeved

passengers cleansed themselves at a long row of stationary bowls

in the barber shop, where were also public towels, public combs,

and public soap.



Take the steamboat which I have just described, and you have her

in her highest and finest, and most pleasing, and comfortable,

and satisfactory estate.  Now cake her over with a layer

of ancient and obdurate dirt, and you have the Cincinnati

steamer awhile ago referred to.  Not all over--only inside;

for she was ably officered in all departments except the steward's.



But wash that boat and repaint her, and she would be about the

counterpart of the most complimented boat of the old flush times:

for the steamboat architecture of the West has undergone no change;

neither has steamboat furniture and ornamentation undergone any.









                               Chapter 39

                       Manufactures and Miscreants



WHERE the river, in the Vicksburg region, used to be corkscrewed,

it is now comparatively straight--made so by cut-off;

a former distance of seventy miles is reduced to thirty-five. It

is a change which threw Vicksburg's neighbor, Delta, Louisiana,

out into the country and ended its career as a river town.

Its whole river-frontage is now occupied by a vast sand-bar,

thickly covered with young trees--a growth which will magnify

itself into a dense forest by-and-bye, and completely hide

the exiled town.



In due time we passed Grand Gulf and Rodney, of war fame, and reached Natchez,

the last of the beautiful hill-cities--for Baton Rouge, yet to come,

is not on a hill, but only on high ground.  Famous Natchez-under-the-hill

has not changed notably in twenty years; in outward aspect--

judging by the descriptions of the ancient procession of foreign tourists--

it has not changed in sixty; for it is still small, straggling, and shabby.

It had a desperate reputation, morally, in the old keel-boating and

early steamboating times--plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffing,

and killing there, among the riff-raff of the river, in those days.

But Natchez-on-top-of-the-hill is attractive; has always been attractive.

Even Mrs. Trollope (1827) had to confess its charms:



'At one or two points the wearisome level line is relieved

by bluffs, as they call the short intervals of high ground.

The town of Natchez is beautifully situated on one of those high spots.

The contrast that its bright green hill forms with the dismal line of black

forest that stretches on every side, the abundant growth of the pawpaw,

palmetto and orange, the copious variety of sweet-scented flowers

that flourish there, all make it appear like an oasis in the desert.

Natchez is the furthest point to the north at which oranges

ripen in the open air, or endure the winter without shelter.

With the exception of this sweet spot, I thought all the little towns

and villages we passed wretched-looking in the extreme.'



Natchez, like her near and far river neighbors, has railways now,

and is adding to them--pushing them hither and thither into all

rich outlying regions that are naturally tributary to her.

And like Vicksburg and New Orleans, she has her ice-factory:

she makes thirty tons of ice a day.  In Vicksburg and Natchez,

in my time, ice was jewelry; none but the rich could wear it.

But anybody and everybody can have it now.  I visited one of

the ice-factories in New Orleans, to see what the polar regions

might look like when lugged into the edge of the tropics.

But there was nothing striking in the aspect of the place.

It was merely a spacious house, with some innocent steam machinery

in one end of it and some big porcelain pipes running here and there.

No, not porcelain--they merely seemed to be; they were iron,

but the ammonia which was being breathed through them had coated

them to the thickness of your hand with solid milk-white ice.

It ought to have melted; for one did not require winter clothing

in that atmosphere:  but it did not melt; the inside of the pipe

was too cold.



Sunk into the floor were numberless tin boxes, a foot square and two

feet long, and open at the top end.  These were full of clear water;

and around each box, salt and other proper stuff was packed; also, the ammonia

gases were applied to the water in some way which will always remain

a secret to me, because I was not able to understand the process.

While the water in the boxes gradually froze, men gave it a stir or

two with a stick occasionally--to liberate the air-bubbles, I think.

Other men were continually lifting out boxes whose contents had become

hard frozen.  They gave the box a single dip into a vat of boiling water,

to melt the block of ice free from its tin coffin, then they shot

the block out upon a platform car, and it was ready for market.

These big blocks were hard, solid, and crystal-clear. In certain of them,

big bouquets of fresh and brilliant tropical flowers had been frozen-in;

in others, beautiful silken-clad French dolls, and other pretty objects.

These blocks were to be set on end in a platter, in the center of

dinner-tables, to cool the tropical air; and also to be ornamental,

for the flowers and things imprisoned in them could be seen as through

plate glass.  I was told that this factory could retail its ice, by wagon,

throughout New Orleans, in the humblest dwelling-house quantities,

at six or seven dollars a ton, and make a sufficient profit.

This being the case, there is business for ice-factories in the North;

for we get ice on no such terms there, if one take less than three hundred

and fifty pounds at a delivery.



The Rosalie Yarn Mill, of Natchez, has a capacity of 6,000 spindles and

160 looms, and employs 100 hands.  The Natchez Cotton Mills Company began

operations four years ago in a two-story building of 50 x 190 feet, with 4,000

spindles and 128 looms; capital $105,000, all subscribed in the town.

Two years later, the same stockholders increased their capital to $225,000;

added a third story to the mill, increased its length to 317 feet;

added machinery to increase the capacity to 10,300 spindles and 304 looms.

The company now employ 250 operatives, many of whom are citizens of Natchez.

'The mill works 5,000 bales of cotton annually and manufactures

the best standard quality of brown shirtings and sheetings and drills,

turning out 5,000,000 yards of these goods per year.'<footnote [New

Orleans Times-Democrat, 26 Aug, 1882.]> A close corporation--stock held

at $5,000 per share, but none in the market.



The changes in the Mississippi River are great and strange,

yet were to be expected; but I was not expecting to live to see

Natchez and these other river towns become manufacturing

strongholds and railway centers.



Speaking of manufactures reminds me of a talk upon that topic

which I heard--which I overheard--on board the Cincinnati boat.

I awoke out of a fretted sleep, with a dull confusion of voices in my ears.

I listened--two men were talking; subject, apparently, the great inundation.

I looked out through the open transom.  The two men were eating

a late breakfast; sitting opposite each other; nobody else around.

They closed up the inundation with a few words--having used it,

evidently, as a mere ice-breaker and acquaintanceship-breeder--

then they dropped into business.  It soon transpired that they

were drummers--one belonging in Cincinnati, the other in New Orleans.

Brisk men, energetic of movement and speech; the dollar their god,

how to get it their religion.



'Now as to this article,' said Cincinnati, slashing into the ostensible

butter and holding forward a slab of it on his knife-blade,

'it's from our house; look at it--smell of it--taste it.

Put any test on it you want to.  Take your own time--no hurry--

make it thorough.  There now--what do you say? butter, ain't it.

Not by a thundering sight--it's oleomargarine!  Yes, sir, that's what

it is--oleomargarine.  You can't tell it from butter; by George,

an EXPERT can't. It's from our house.  We supply most of the boats

in the West; there's hardly a pound of butter on one of them.

We are crawling right along--JUMPING right along is the word.

We are going to have that entire trade.  Yes, and the hotel trade, too.

You are going to see the day, pretty soon, when you can't find

an ounce of butter to bless yourself with, in any hotel in

the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys, outside of the biggest cities.

Why, we are turning out oleomargarine NOW by the thousands of tons.

And we can sell it so dirt-cheap that the whole country has

GOT to take it--can't get around it you see.  Butter don't

stand any show--there ain't any chance for competition.

Butter's had its DAY--and from this out, butter goes to the wall.

There's more money in oleomargarine than--why, you can't

imagine the business we do.  I've stopped in every town from

Cincinnati to Natchez; and I've sent home big orders from every

one of them.'



And so-forth and so-on, for ten minutes longer, in the same fervid strain.

Then New Orleans piped up and said--



Yes, it's a first-rate imitation, that's a certainty;

but it ain't the only one around that's first-rate. For instance,

they make olive-oil out of cotton-seed oil, nowadays, so that you

can't tell them apart.'



'Yes, that's so,' responded Cincinnati, 'and it was a tip-top

business for a while.  They sent it over and brought it back from

France and Italy, with the United States custom-house mark on it

to indorse it for genuine, and there was no end of cash in it;

but France and Italy broke up the game--of course they naturally would.

Cracked on such a rattling impost that cotton-seed olive-oil couldn't

stand the raise; had to hang up and quit.'



'Oh, it DID, did it?  You wait here a minute.'



Goes to his state-room, brings back a couple of long bottles,

and takes out the corks--says:



'There now, smell them, taste them, examine the bottles, inspect the labels.

One of 'm's from Europe, the other's never been out of this country.

One's European olive-oil, the other's American cotton-seed olive-oil.

Tell 'm apart?  'Course you can't. Nobody can.  People that want to,

can go to the expense and trouble of shipping their oils to Europe and back--

it's their privilege; but our firm knows a trick worth six of that.

We turn out the whole thing--clean from the word go--in our factory

in New Orleans:  labels, bottles, oil, everything.  Well, no, not labels:

been buying them abroad--get them dirt-cheap there.  You see,

there's just one little wee speck, essence, or whatever it is,

in a gallon of cotton-seed oil, that give it a smell, or a flavor,

or something--get that out, and you're all right--perfectly easy then

to turn the oil into any kind of oil you want to, and there ain't anybody

that can detect the true from the false.  Well, we know how to get

that one little particle out--and we're the only firm that does.

And we turn out an olive-oil that is just simply perfect--undetectable!

We are doing a ripping trade, too--as I could easily show you by my

order-book for this trip.  Maybe you'll butter everybody's bread pretty soon,

but we'll cotton-seed his salad for him from the Gulf to Canada, and that's

a dead-certain thing.'



Cincinnati glowed and flashed with admiration.

The two scoundrels exchanged business-cards, and rose.

As they left the table, Cincinnati said--



'But you have to have custom-house marks, don't you?

How do you manage that?'



I did not catch the answer.



We passed Port Hudson, scene of two of the most terrific episodes of the war--

the night-battle there between Farragut's fleet and the Confederate

land batteries, April 14th, 1863; and the memorable land battle,

two months later, which lasted eight hours--eight hours of exceptionally

fierce and stubborn fighting--and ended, finally, in the repulse

of the Union forces with great slaughter.









                               Chapter 4O

                           Castles and Culture



BATON ROUGE was clothed in flowers, like a bride--no, much more so;

like a greenhouse.  For we were in the absolute South now--

no modifications, no compromises, no half-way measures.

The magnolia-trees in the Capitol grounds were lovely and fragrant,

with their dense rich foliage and huge snow-ball blossoms.

The scent of the flower is very sweet, but you want distance on it,

because it is so powerful.  They are not good bedroom blossoms--

they might suffocate one in his sleep.  We were certainly in the South

at last; for here the sugar region begins, and the plantations--

vast green levels, with sugar-mill and negro quarters clustered together

in the middle distance--were in view.  And there was a tropical sun

overhead and a tropical swelter in the air.



And at this point, also, begins the pilot's paradise:

a wide river hence to New Orleans, abundance of water from shore

to shore, and no bars, snags, sawyers, or wrecks in his road.



Sir Walter Scott is probably responsible for the Capitol building;

for it is not conceivable that this little sham castle would

ever have been built if he had not run the people mad, a couple

of generations ago, with his medieval romances.  The South has

not yet recovered from the debilitating influence of his books.

Admiration of his fantastic heroes and their grotesque

'chivalry' doings and romantic juvenilities still survives here,

in an atmosphere in which is already perceptible the wholesome

and practical nineteenth-century smell of cotton-factories

and locomotives; and traces of its inflated language and other

windy humbuggeries survive along with it.  It is pathetic enough,

that a whitewashed castle, with turrets and things--materials all

ungenuine within and without, pretending to be what they are not--

should ever have been built in this otherwise honorable place;

but it is much more pathetic to see this architectural falsehood

undergoing restoration and perpetuation in our day, when it

would have been so easy to let dynamite finish what a charitable

fire began, and then devote this restoration-money to the building

of something genuine.



Baton Rouge has no patent on imitation castles, however, and no monopoly

of them.  Here is a picture from the advertisement of the 'Female Institute'

of Columbia; Tennessee.  The following remark is from the same advertisement--



'The Institute building has long been famed as a model of striking

and beautiful architecture.  Visitors are charmed with its resemblance

to the old castles of song and story, with its towers, turreted walls,

and ivy-mantled porches.'



Keeping school in a castle is a romantic thing; as romantic as keeping

hotel in a castle.



By itself the imitation castle is doubtless harmless, and well enough;

but as a symbol and breeder and sustainer of maudlin Middle-Age romanticism

here in the midst of the plainest and sturdiest and infinitely greatest

and worthiest of all the centuries the world has seen, it is necessarily

a hurtful thing and a mistake.



Here is an extract from the prospectus of a Kentucky 'Female College.'

Female college sounds well enough; but since the phrasing it in

that unjustifiable way was done purely in the interest of brevity,

it seems to me that she-college would have been still better--

because shorter, and means the same thing:  that is, if either phrase

means anything at all--



'The president is southern by birth, by rearing, by education,

and by sentiment; the teachers are all southern in sentiment,

and with the exception of those born in Europe were born and raised

in the south.  Believing the southern to be the highest type of

civilization this continent has seen,' the young<footnote (long one)

[Illustrations of it thoughtlessly omitted by the advertiser:



KNOXVILLE, Tenn., October 19.--This morning a few minutes

after ten o'clock, General Joseph A. Mabry, Thomas O'Connor,

and Joseph A. Mabry, Jr., were killed in a shooting affray.

The difficulty began yesterday afternoon by General Mabry

attacking Major O'Connor and threatening to kill him.

This was at the fair grounds, and O'Connor told Mabry

that it was not the place to settle their difficulties.

Mabry then told O'Connor he should not live.

It seems that Mabry was armed and O'Connor was not.

The cause of the difficulty was an old feud about the transfer

of some property from Mabry to O'Connor. Later in the afternoon

Mabry sent word to O'Connor that he would kill him on sight.

This morning Major O'Connor was standing in the door of

the Mechanics' National Bank, of which he was president.

General Mabry and another gentleman walked down Gay Street on

the opposite side from the bank.  O'Connor stepped into the bank,

got a shot gun, took deliberate aim at General Mabry and fired.

Mabry fell dead, being shot in the left side.  As he fell

O'Connor fired again, the shot taking effect in Mabry's thigh.

O'Connor then reached into the bank and got another shot gun.

About this time Joseph A. Mabry, Jr., son of General Mabry,

came rushing down the street, unseen by O'Connor until within

forty feet, when the young man fired a pistol, the shot taking

effect in O'Connor's right breast, passing through the body near

the heart.  The instant Mabry shot, O'Connor turned and fired,

the load taking effect in young Mabry's right breast and side.

Mabry fell pierced with twenty buckshot, and almost instantly

O'Connor fell dead without a struggle.  Mabry tried to rise,

but fell back dead.  The whole tragedy occurred within

two minutes, and neither of the three spoke after he was shot.

General Mabry had about thirty buckshot in his body.

A bystander was painfully wounded in the thigh with a buckshot,

and another was wounded in the arm.  Four other men had their

clothing pierced by buckshot.  The affair caused great excitement,

and Gay Street was thronged with thousands of people.

General Mabry and his son Joe were acquitted only a few

days ago of the murder of Moses Lusby and Don Lusby,

father and son, whom they killed a few weeks ago.

Will Mabry was killed by Don Lusby last Christmas.  Major Thomas

O'Connor was President of the Mechanics' National Bank here,

and was the wealthiest man in the State.--ASSOCIATED PRESS

TELEGRAM.



One day last month, Professor Sharpe, of the Somerville,

Tenn., Female College, 'a quiet and gentlemanly man,' was told that

his brother-in-law, a Captain Burton, had threatened to kill him.

Burton, t seems, had already killed one man and driven his knife

into another.  The Professor armed himself with a double-barreled

shot gun, started out in search of his brother-in-law, found

him playing billiards in a saloon, and blew his brains out.

The 'Memphis Avalanche' reports that the Professor's course met

with pretty general approval in the community; knowing that the law

was powerless, in the actual condition of public sentiment,

to protect him, he protected himself.



About the same time, two young men in North Carolina quarreled

about a girl, and 'hostile messages' were exchanged.

Friends tried to reconcile them, but had their labor for their pains.

On the 24th the young men met in the public highway.

One of them had a heavy club in his hand, the other an ax.

The man with the club fought desperately for his life, but it

was a hopeless fight from the first.  A well-directed blow

sent his club whirling out of his grasp, and the next moment

he was a dead man.



About the same time, two 'highly connected' young Virginians,

clerks in a hardware store at Charlottesville, while 'skylarking,'

came to blows.  Peter Dick threw pepper in Charles Roads's eyes;

Roads demanded an apology; Dick refused to give it, and it

was agreed that a duel was inevitable, but a difficulty arose;

the parties had no pistols, and it was too late at night

to procure them.  One of them suggested that butcher-knives

would answer the purpose, and the other accepted the suggestion;

the result was that Roads fell to the floor with a gash

in his abdomen that may or may not prove fatal.

If Dick has been arrested, the news has not reached us.

He 'expressed deep regret,' and we are told by a Staunton

correspondent of the PHILADELPHIA PRESS that 'every effort has

been made to hush the matter up.'--EXTRACTS FROM THE PUBLIC

JOURNALS.]> ladies are trained according to the southern ideas

of delicacy, refinement, womanhood, religion, and propriety;

hence we offer a first-class female college for the south and

solicit southern patronage.'



What, warder, ho! the man that can blow so complacent a blast as that,

probably blows it from a castle.



From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the great sugar plantations border

both sides of the river all the way, and stretch their league-wide

levels back to the dim forest-walls of bearded cypress in the rear.

Shores lonely no longer.  Plenty of dwellings all the way,

on both banks--standing so close together, for long distances,

that the broad river lying between the two rows, becomes a sort

of spacious street.  A most home-like and happy-looking region.

And now and then you see a pillared and porticoed great manor-house,

embowered in trees.  Here is testimony of one or two of the procession

of foreign tourists that filed along here half a century ago.

Mrs. Trollope says--



'The unbroken flatness of the banks of the Mississippi continued unvaried

for many miles above New Orleans; but the graceful and luxuriant palmetto,

the dark and noble ilex, and the bright orange, were everywhere to be seen,

and it was many days before we were weary of looking at them.'



Captain Basil Hall--



'The district of country which lies adjacent to the Mississippi,

in the lower parts of Louisiana, is everywhere thickly

peopled by sugar planters, whose showy houses, gay piazzas,

trig gardens, and numerous slave-villages, all clean and neat,

gave an exceedingly thriving air to the river scenery.



All the procession paint the attractive picture in the same way.

The descriptions of fifty years ago do not need to have a word

changed in order to exactly describe the same region as it

appears to-day--except as to the 'trigness' of the houses.

The whitewash is gone from the negro cabins now; and many,

possibly most, of the big mansions, once so shining white,

have worn out their paint and have a decayed, neglected look.

It is the blight of the war.  Twenty-one years ago everything was

trim and trig and bright along the 'coast,' just as it had been

in 1827, as described by those tourists.



Unfortunate tourists!  People humbugged them with stupid and silly lies,

and then laughed at them for believing and printing the same.

They told Mrs. Trollope that the alligators--or crocodiles, as she calls them--

were terrible creatures; and backed up the statement with a blood-curdling

account of how one of these slandered reptiles crept into a squatter

cabin one night, and ate up a woman and five children.  The woman,

by herself, would have satisfied any ordinarily-impossible alligator;

but no, these liars must make him gorge the five children besides.

One would not imagine that jokers of this robust breed would be sensitive--

but they were.  It is difficult, at this day, to understand,

and impossible to justify, the reception which the book of the grave,

honest, intelligent, gentle, manly, charitable, well-meaning Capt. Basil

Hall got.  Mrs. Trollope's account of it may perhaps entertain the reader;

therefore I have put it in the Appendix.<footnote [See Appendix C.]>









                               Chapter 41

                       The Metropolis of the South



THE approaches to New Orleans were familiar; general aspects were unchanged.

When one goes flying through London along a railway propped in the air on

tall arches, he may inspect miles of upper bedrooms through the open windows,

but the lower half of the houses is under his level and out of sight.

Similarly, in high-river stage, in the New Orleans region, the water is up

to the top of the enclosing levee-rim, the flat country behind it lies low--

representing the bottom of a dish--and as the boat swims along, high on

the flood, one looks down upon the houses and into the upper windows.

There is nothing but that frail breastwork of earth between the people

and destruction.



The old brick salt-warehouses clustered at the upper end of the city

looked as they had always looked; warehouses which had had a kind

of Aladdin's lamp experience, however, since I had seen them;

for when the war broke out the proprietor went to bed one night

leaving them packed with thousands of sacks of vulgar salt,

worth a couple of dollars a sack, and got up in the morning and found

his mountain of salt turned into a mountain of gold, so to speak,

so suddenly and to so dizzy a height had the war news sent up

the price of the article.



The vast reach of plank wharves remained unchanged, and there were

as many ships as ever:  but the long array of steamboats had vanished;

not altogether, of course, but not much of it was left.



The city itself had not changed--to the eye.  It had greatly increased

in spread and population, but the look of the town was not altered.

The dust, waste-paper-littered, was still deep in the streets;

the deep, trough-like gutters alongside the curbstones were still half

full of reposeful water with a dusty surface; the sidewalks were still--

in the sugar and bacon region--encumbered by casks and barrels

and hogsheads; the great blocks of austerely plain commercial houses

were as dusty-looking as ever.



Canal Street was finer, and more attractive and stirring than formerly,

with its drifting crowds of people, its several processions of hurrying

street-cars, and--toward evening--its broad second-story verandas crowded

with gentlemen and ladies clothed according to the latest mode.



Not that there is any 'architecture' in Canal Street:  to speak

in broad, general terms, there is no architecture in New Orleans,

except in the cemeteries.  It seems a strange thing to say of a wealthy,

far-seeing, and energetic city of a quarter of a million inhabitants,

but it is true.  There is a huge granite U.S. Custom-house--costly enough,

genuine enough, but as a decoration it is inferior to a gasometer.

It looks like a state prison.  But it was built before the war.

Architecture in America may be said to have been born since the war.

New Orleans, I believe, has had the good luck--and in a sense the bad luck--

to have had no great fire in late years.  It must be so.  If the opposite

had been the case, I think one would be able to tell the 'burnt district'

by the radical improvement in its architecture over the old forms.

One can do this in Boston and Chicago.  The 'burnt district' of Boston

was commonplace before the fire; but now there is no commercial district

in any city in the world that can surpass it--or perhaps even rival it--

in beauty, elegance, and tastefulness.



However, New Orleans has begun--just this moment, as one may say.

When completed, the new Cotton Exchange will be a stately and

beautiful building; massive, substantial, full of architectural graces;

no shams or false pretenses or uglinesses about it anywhere.

To the city, it will be worth many times its cost, for it will

breed its species.  What has been lacking hitherto, was a model

to build toward; something to educate eye and taste; a SUGGESTER,

so to speak.



The city is well outfitted with progressive men--thinking, sagacious,

long-headed men.  The contrast between the spirit of the city and

the city's architecture is like the contrast between waking and sleep.

Apparently there is a 'boom' in everything but that one dead feature.

The water in the gutters used to be stagnant and slimy, and a potent

disease-breeder; but the gutters are flushed now, two or three times a day,

by powerful machinery; in many of the gutters the water never stands still,

but has a steady current.  Other sanitary improvements have been made;

and with such effect that New Orleans claims to be (during the long

intervals between the occasional yellow-fever assaults) one of the

healthiest cities in the Union.  There's plenty of ice now for everybody,

manufactured in the town.  It is a driving place commercially, and has

a great river, ocean, and railway business.  At the date of our visit,

it was the best lighted city in the Union, electrically speaking.

The New Orleans electric lights were more numerous than those of New York,

and very much better.  One had this modified noonday not only in Canal

and some neighboring chief streets, but all along a stretch of five

miles of river frontage.  There are good clubs in the city now--

several of them but recently organized--and inviting modern-style pleasure

resorts at West End and Spanish Fort.  The telephone is everywhere.

One of the most notable advances is in journalism.  The newspapers,

as I remember them, were not a striking feature.  Now they are.

Money is spent upon them with a free hand.  They get the news, let it cost

what it may.  The editorial work is not hack-grinding, but literature.

As an example of New Orleans journalistic achievement, it may be

mentioned that the 'Times-Democrat' of August 26, 1882, contained a

report of the year's business of the towns of the Mississippi Valley,

from New Orleans all the way to St. Paul--two thousand miles.

That issue of the paper consisted of forty pages; seven columns to the page;

two hundred and eighty columns in all; fifteen hundred words to the column;

an aggregate of four hundred and twenty thousand words.  That is to say,

not much short of three times as many words as there are in this book.

One may with sorrow contrast this with the architecture of New Orleans.



I have been speaking of public architecture only.  The domestic

article in New Orleans is reproachless, notwithstanding it

remains as it always was.  All the dwellings are of wood--

in the American part of the town, I mean--and all have a

comfortable look.  Those in the wealthy quarter are spacious;

painted snow-white usually, and generally have wide verandas,

or double-verandas, supported by ornamental columns.

These mansions stand in the center of large grounds,

and rise, garlanded with roses, out of the midst of swelling

masses of shining green foliage and many-colored blossoms.

No houses could well be in better harmony with their surroundings,

or more pleasing to the eye, or more home-like and comfortable-looking.



One even becomes reconciled to the cistern presently; this is a mighty cask,

painted green, and sometimes a couple of stories high, which is propped

against the house-corner on stilts.  There is a mansion-and-brewery

suggestion about the combination which seems very incongruous at first.

But the people cannot have wells, and so they take rain-water. Neither

can they conveniently have cellars, or graves,<footnote [The Israelites

are buried in graves--by permission, I take it, not requirement;

but none else, except the destitute, who are buried at public expense.

The graves are but three or four feet deep.]> the town being built upon

'made' ground; so they do without both, and few of the living complain,

and none of the others.









                               Chapter 42

                          Hygiene and Sentiment



THEY bury their dead in vaults, above the ground.  These vaults

have a resemblance to houses--sometimes to temples; are built

of marble, generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely;

they face the walks and driveways of the cemetery; and when one

moves through the midst of a thousand or so of them and sees their

white roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand,

the phrase 'city of the dead' has all at once a meaning to him.

Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order.

When one goes from the levee or the business streets near it,

to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down there

would live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead,

they would find many advantages in it; and besides, their quarter would

be the wonder and admiration of the business world.  Fresh flowers,

in vases of water, are to be seen at the portals of many of the vaults:

placed there by the pious hands of bereaved parents and children,

husbands and wives, and renewed daily.  A milder form of sorrow finds

its inexpensive and lasting remembrancer in the coarse and ugly

but indestructible 'immortelle'--which is a wreath or cross or some

such emblem, made of rosettes of black linen, with sometimes a yellow

rosette at the conjunction of the cross's bars--kind of sorrowful

breast-pin, so to say.  The immortelle requires no attention:

you just hang it up, and there you are; just leave it alone, it will take

care of your grief for you, and keep it in mind better than you can;

stands weather first-rate, and lasts like boiler-iron.



On sunny days, pretty little chameleons--gracefullest of legged reptiles--

creep along the marble fronts of the vaults, and catch flies.  Their changes

of color--as to variety--are not up to the creature's reputation.

They change color when a person comes along and hangs up an immortelle;

but that is nothing:  any right-feeling reptile would do that.



I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards.  I have been

trying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it,

but I cannot accomplish it.  I think there is no genuinely

sentimental part to it.  It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible.

Graveyards may have been justifiable in the bygone ages,

when nobody knew that for every dead body put into the ground,

to glut the earth and the plant-roots, and the air with

disease-germs, five or fifty, or maybe a hundred persons must die

before their proper time; but they are hardly justifiable now,

when even the children know that a dead saint enters upon

a century-long career of assassination the moment the earth

closes over his corpse.  It is a grim sort of a thought.

The relics of St. Anne, up in Canada, have now, after nineteen

hundred years, gone to curing the sick by the dozen.

But it is merest matter-of-course that these same relics,

within a generation after St. Anne's death and burial,

MADE several thousand people sick.  Therefore these

miracle-performances are simply compensation, nothing more.

St. Anne is somewhat slow pay, for a Saint, it is true;

but better a debt paid after nineteen hundred years,

and outlawed by the statute of limitations, than not paid at all;

and most of the knights of the halo do not pay at all.

Where you find one that pays--like St. Anne--you find

a hundred and fifty that take the benefit of the statute.

And none of them pay any more than the principal of what they owe--

they pay none of the interest either simple or compound.

A Saint can never QUITE return the principal, however;

for his dead body KILLS people, whereas his relics HEAL only--

they never restore the dead to life.  That part of the account is

always left unsettled.



'Dr. F. Julius Le Moyne, after fifty years of medical practice, wrote:

"The inhumation of human bodies, dead from infectious diseases,

results in constantly loading the atmosphere, and polluting the waters,

with not only the germs that rise from simply putrefaction, but also with

the SPECIFIC germs of the diseases from which death resulted."



'The gases (from buried corpses) will rise to the surface

through eight or ten feet of gravel, just as coal-gas will do,

and there is practically no limit to their power of escape.



'During the epidemic in New Orleans in 1853, Dr. E. H. Barton

reported that in the Fourth District the mortality was four hundred

and fifty-two per thousand--more than double that of any other.

In this district were three large cemeteries, in which during

the previous year more than three thousand bodies had been buried.

In other districts the proximity of cemeteries seemed to

aggravate the disease.



'In 1828 Professor Bianchi demonstrated how the fearful reappearance

of the plague at Modena was caused by excavations in ground where,

THREE HUNDRED YEARS PREVIOUSLY, the victims of the pestilence had

been buried.  Mr. Cooper, in explaining the causes of some epidemics,

remarks that the opening of the plague burial-grounds at Eyam resulted

in an immediate outbreak of disease.'--NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, NO.

3, VOL.  135.



In an address before the Chicago Medical Society, in advocacy of cremation,

Dr. Charles W. Purdy made some striking comparisons to show what a burden

is laid upon society by the burial of the dead:--



'One and one-fourth times more money is expended annually in funerals in

the United States than the Government expends for public-school purposes.

Funerals cost this country in 1880 enough money to pay the liabilities

of all the commercial failures in the United States during the same year,

and give each bankrupt a capital of $8,630 with which to resume business.

Funerals cost annually more money than the value of the combined

gold and silver yield of the United States in the year 1880!

These figures do not include the sums invested in burial-grounds

and expended in tombs and monuments, nor the loss from depreciation

of property in the vicinity of cemeteries.'



For the rich, cremation would answer as well as burial;

for the ceremonies connected with it could be made as costly

and ostentatious as a Hindu suttee; while for the poor,

cremation would be better than burial, because so cheap<footnote

[Four or five dollars is the minimum cost.]>--so cheap until

the poor got to imitating the rich, which they would do

by-and-bye. The adoption of cremation would relieve us of a muck

of threadbare burial-witticisms; but, on the other hand,

it would resurrect a lot of mildewed old cremation-jokes

that have had a rest for two thousand years.



I have a colored acquaintance who earns his living by odd jobs and heavy

manual labor.  He never earns above four hundred dollars in a year,

and as he has a wife and several young children, the closest scrimping

is necessary to get him through to the end of the twelve months debtless.

To such a man a funeral is a colossal financial disaster.  While I was

writing one of the preceding chapters, this man lost a little child.

He walked the town over with a friend, trying to find a coffin that

was within his means.  He bought the very cheapest one he could find,

plain wood, stained.  It cost him twenty-six dollars.  It would have cost

less than four, probably, if it had been built to put something useful into.

He and his family will feel that outlay a good many months.









                               Chapter 43

                          The Art of Inhumation



ABOUT the same time, I encountered a man in the street,

whom I had not seen for six or seven years; and something

like this talk followed.  I said--



'But you used to look sad and oldish; you don't now.

Where did you get all this youth and bubbling cheerfulness?

Give me the address.'



He chuckled blithely, took off his shining tile, pointed to a notched

pink circlet of paper pasted into its crown, with something lettered

on it, and went on chuckling while I read, 'J. B ----, UNDERTAKER.'

Then he clapped his hat on, gave it an irreverent tilt to leeward,

and cried out--



'That's what's the matter!  It used to be rough times with me when you

knew me--insurance-agency business, you know; mighty irregular.

Big fire, all right--brisk trade for ten days while people scared;

after that, dull policy-business till next fire.  Town like this don't

have fires often enough--a fellow strikes so many dull weeks in a row

that he gets discouraged.  But you bet you, this is the business!

People don't wait for examples to die.  No, sir, they drop off

right along--there ain't any dull spots in the undertaker line.

I just started in with two or three little old coffins and

a hired hearse, and now look at the thing!  I've worked up

a business here that would satisfy any man, don't care who he is.

Five years ago, lodged in an attic; live in a swell house now,

with a mansard roof, and all the modern inconveniences.'



'Does a coffin pay so well.  Is there much profit on a coffin?'



'Go-way! How you talk!'  Then, with a confidential wink, a dropping

of the voice, and an impressive laying of his hand on my arm;

'Look here; there's one thing in this world which isn't ever cheap.

That's a coffin.  There's one thing in this world which a person don't

ever try to jew you down on.  That's a coffin.  There's one thing

in this world which a person don't say--"I'll look around a little,

and if I find I can't do better I'll come back and take it."

That's a coffin.  There's one thing in this world which a person

won't take in pine if he can go walnut; and won't take in walnut

if he can go mahogany; and won't take in mahogany if he can go an iron

casket with silver door-plate and bronze handles.  That's a coffin.

And there's one thing in this world which you don't have to worry

around after a person to get him to pay for.  And that's a coffin.

Undertaking?--why it's the dead-surest business in Christendom,

and the nobbiest.



'Why, just look at it.  A rich man won't have anything but your very best;

and you can just pile it on, too--pile it on and sock it to him--he won't

ever holler.  And you take in a poor man, and if you work him right he'll

bust himself on a single lay-out. Or especially a woman.  F'r instance:

Mrs. O'Flaherty comes in--widow--wiping her eyes and kind of moaning.

Unhandkerchiefs one eye, bats it around tearfully over the stock; says--



' "And fhat might ye ask for that wan?"



' "Thirty-nine dollars, madam," says I.



' "It 's a foine big price, sure, but Pat shall be buried like

a gintleman, as he was, if I have to work me fingers off for it.

I'll have that wan, sor."



' "Yes, madam," says I, "and it is a very good one, too; not costly,

to be sure, but in this life we must cut our garment to our clothes,

as the saying is."  And as she starts out, I heave in, kind of casually,

"This one with the white satin lining is a beauty, but I am afraid--

well, sixty-five dollars is a rather--rather--but no matter, I felt

obliged to say to Mrs. O'Shaughnessy--"



' "D'ye mane to soy that Bridget O'Shaughnessy bought the mate

to that joo-ul box to ship that dhrunken divil to Purgatory in?"



' "Yes, madam."



' "Then Pat shall go to heaven in the twin to it, if it takes

the last rap the O'Flaherties can raise; and moind you,

stick on some extras, too, and I'll give ye another dollar."



'And as I lay-in with the livery stables, of course I don't forget to mention

that Mrs. O'Shaughnessy hired fifty-four dollars' worth of hacks and flung

as much style into Dennis's funeral as if he had been a duke or an assassin.

And of course she sails in and goes the O'Shaughnessy about four hacks

and an omnibus better.  That used to be, but that's all played now;

that is, in this particular town.  The Irish got to piling up hacks so,

on their funerals, that a funeral left them ragged and hungry for

two years afterward; so the priest pitched in and broke it all up.

He don't allow them to have but two hacks now, and sometimes only one.'



'Well,' said I, 'if you are so light-hearted and jolly in ordinary times,

what must you be in an epidemic?'



He shook his head.



'No, you're off, there.  We don't like to see an epidemic.

An epidemic don't pay.  Well, of course I don't mean that, exactly;

but it don't pay in proportion to the regular thing.

Don't it occur to you, why?'



No.



'Think.'



'I can't imagine.  What is it?'



'It's just two things.'



'Well, what are they?'



'One's Embamming.'



'And what's the other?'



'Ice.'



'How is that?'



'Well, in ordinary times, a person dies, and we lay him up in ice;

one day two days, maybe three, to wait for friends to come.

Takes a lot of it--melts fast.  We charge jewelry rates for that ice,

and war-prices for attendance.  Well, don't you know, when there's

an epidemic, they rush 'em to the cemetery the minute the breath's out.

No market for ice in an epidemic.  Same with Embamming.

You take a family that's able to embam, and you've got a soft thing.

You can mention sixteen different ways to do it--though there

AIN'T only one or two ways, when you come down to the bottom facts

of it--and they'll take the highest-priced way, every time.

It's human nature--human nature in grief.  It don't reason, you see.

Time being, it don't care a dam.  All it wants is physical immortality

for deceased, and they're willing to pay for it.  All you've got

to do is to just be ca'm and stack it up--they'll stand the racket.

Why, man, you can take a defunct that you couldn't GIVE away; and get

your embamming traps around you and go to work; and in a couple of hours

he is worth a cool six hundred--that's what HE'S worth.  There ain't

anything equal to it but trading rats for di'monds in time of famine.

Well, don't you see, when there's an epidemic, people don't wait to embam.

No, indeed they don't; and it hurts the business like hell-th, as we say--

hurts it like hell-th, HEALTH, see?--Our little joke in the trade.

Well, I must be going.  Give me a call whenever you need any--I mean,

when you're going by, sometime.'



In his joyful high spirits, he did the exaggerating himself,

if any has been done.  I have not enlarged on him.



With the above brief references to inhumation, let us leave the subject.

As for me, I hope to be cremated.  I made that remark to my pastor once,

who said, with what he seemed to think was an impressive manner--



'I wouldn't worry about that, if I had your chances.'

Much he knew about it--the family all so opposed to it.









                               Chapter 44

                               City Sights



THE old French part of New Orleans--anciently the Spanish part--

bears no resemblance to the American end of the city:

the American end which lies beyond the intervening

brick business-center. The houses are massed in blocks;

are austerely plain and dignified; uniform of pattern,

with here and there a departure from it with pleasant effect;

all are plastered on the outside, and nearly all have long,

iron-railed verandas running along the several stories.

Their chief beauty is the deep, warm, varicolored stain

with which time and the weather have enriched the plaster.

It harmonizes with all the surroundings, and has as natural

a look of belonging there as has the flush upon sunset clouds.

This charming decoration cannot be successfully imitated;

neither is it to be found elsewhere in America.



The iron railings are a specialty, also.  The pattern is often

exceedingly light and dainty, and airy and graceful--with a large

cipher or monogram in the center, a delicate cobweb of baffling,

intricate forms, wrought in steel.  The ancient railings are hand-made,

and are now comparatively rare and proportionately valuable.

They are become BRIC-A-BRAC.



The party had the privilege of idling through this ancient

quarter of New Orleans with the South's finest literary genius,

the author of 'the Grandissimes.'  In him the South has found

a masterly delineator of its interior life and its history.

In truth, I find by experience, that the untrained eye and

vacant mind can inspect it, and learn of it, and judge of it,

more clearly and profitably in his books than by personal

contact with it.



With Mr. Cable along to see for you, and describe and explain and illuminate,

a jog through that old quarter is a vivid pleasure.  And you have a vivid

sense as of unseen or dimly seen things--vivid, and yet fitful and darkling;

you glimpse salient features, but lose the fine shades or catch them

imperfectly through the vision of the imagination:  a case, as it were,

of ignorant near-sighted stranger traversing the rim of wide vague horizons

of Alps with an inspired and enlightened long-sighted native.



We visited the old St. Louis Hotel, now occupied by municipal offices.

There is nothing strikingly remarkable about it; but one can say of it

as of the Academy of Music in New York, that if a broom or a shovel has ever

been used in it there is no circumstantial evidence to back up the fact.

It is curious that cabbages and hay and things do not grow in the Academy

of Music; but no doubt it is on account of the interruption of the light by

the benches, and the impossibility of hoeing the crop except in the aisles.

The fact that the ushers grow their buttonhole-bouquets on the premises

shows what might be done if they had the right kind of an agricultural head

to the establishment.



We visited also the venerable Cathedral, and the pretty square in front of it;

the one dim with religious light, the other brilliant with the worldly sort,

and lovely with orange-trees and blossomy shrubs; then we drove in the hot sun

through the wilderness of houses and out on to the wide dead level beyond,

where the villas are, and the water wheels to drain the town, and the commons

populous with cows and children; passing by an old cemetery where we were

told lie the ashes of an early pirate; but we took him on trust, and did

not visit him.  He was a pirate with a tremendous and sanguinary history;

and as long as he preserved unspotted, in retirement, the dignity of his

name and the grandeur of his ancient calling, homage and reverence were his

from high and low; but when at last he descended into politics and became

a paltry alderman, the public 'shook' him, and turned aside and wept.

When he died, they set up a monument over him; and little by little he has

come into respect again; but it is respect for the pirate, not the alderman.

To-day the loyal and generous remember only what he was, and charitably forget

what he became.



Thence, we drove a few miles across a swamp, along a raised shell road,

with a canal on one hand and a dense wood on the other; and here and there,

in the distance, a ragged and angular-limbed and moss-bearded cypress,

top standing out, clear cut against the sky, and as quaint of form as the

apple-trees in Japanese pictures--such was our course and the surroundings

of it.  There was an occasional alligator swimming comfortably along

in the canal, and an occasional picturesque colored person on the bank,

flinging his statue-rigid reflection upon the still water and watching

for a bite.



And by-and-bye we reached the West End, a collection of hotels of

the usual light summer-resort pattern, with broad verandas all around,

and the waves of the wide and blue Lake Pontchartrain lapping the thresholds.

We had dinner on a ground-veranda over the water--the chief dish the renowned

fish called the pompano, delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.



Thousands of people come by rail and carriage to West End and

to Spanish Fort every evening, and dine, listen to the bands,

take strolls in the open air under the electric lights,

go sailing on the lake, and entertain themselves in various

and sundry other ways.



We had opportunities on other days and in other places to test the pompano.

Notably, at an editorial dinner at one of the clubs in the city.

He was in his last possible perfection there, and justified his fame.

In his suite was a tall pyramid of scarlet cray-fish--large ones; as large

as one's thumb--delicate, palatable, appetizing.  Also deviled whitebait;

also shrimps of choice quality; and a platter of small soft-shell crabs

of a most superior breed.  The other dishes were what one might get

at Delmonico's, or Buckingham Palace; those I have spoken of can be had

in similar perfection in New Orleans only, I suppose.



In the West and South they have a new institution--the Broom Brigade.

It is composed of young ladies who dress in a uniform costume,

and go through the infantry drill, with broom in place of musket.

It is a very pretty sight, on private view.  When they perform

on the stage of a theater, in the blaze of colored fires,

it must be a fine and fascinating spectacle.  I saw them go through

their complex manual with grace, spirit, and admirable precision.

I saw them do everything which a human being can possibly do with a broom,

except sweep.  I did not see them sweep.  But I know they could learn.

What they have already learned proves that.  And if they ever

should learn, and should go on the war-path down Tchoupitoulas

or some of those other streets around there, those thoroughfares

would bear a greatly improved aspect in a very few minutes.

But the girls themselves wouldn't; so nothing would be really gained,

after all.



The drill was in the Washington Artillery building.

In this building we saw many interesting relics of the war.

Also a fine oil-painting representing Stonewall Jackson's

last interview with General Lee.  Both men are on horseback.

Jackson has just ridden up, and is accosting Lee.

The picture is very valuable, on account of the portraits,

which are authentic.  But, like many another historical picture,

it means nothing without its label.  And one label will fit it

as well as another--



First Interview between Lee and Jackson.



Last Interview between Lee and Jackson.



Jackson Introducing Himself to Lee.



Jackson Accepting Lee's Invitation to Dinner.



Jackson Declining Lee's Invitation to Dinner--with Thanks.



Jackson Apologizing for a Heavy Defeat.



Jackson Reporting a Great Victory.



Jackson Asking Lee for a Match.



It tells ONE story, and a sufficient one; for it says quite

plainly and satisfactorily, 'Here are Lee and Jackson together.'

The artist would have made it tell that this is Lee and Jackson's last

interview if he could have done it.  But he couldn't, for there wasn't

any way to do it.  A good legible label is usually worth, for information,

a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture.

In Rome, people with fine sympathetic natures stand up and weep in front

of the celebrated 'Beatrice Cenci the Day before her Execution.'

It shows what a label can do.  If they did not know the picture,

they would inspect it unmoved, and say, 'Young girl with hay fever;

young girl with her head in a bag.'



I found the half-forgotten Southern intonations and

elisions as pleasing to my ear as they had formerly been.

A Southerner talks music.  At least it is music to me,

but then I was born in the South.  The educated Southerner

has no use for an r, except at the beginning of a word.

He says 'honah,' and 'dinnah,' and 'Gove'nuh,' and 'befo' the waw,'

and so on.  The words may lack charm to the eye, in print,

but they have it to the ear.  When did the r disappear

from Southern speech, and how did it come to disappear?

The custom of dropping it was not borrowed from the North,

nor inherited from England.  Many Southerners--most Southerners--

put a y into occasional words that begin with the k sound.

For instance, they say Mr. K'yahtah (Carter) and speak

of playing k'yahds or of riding in the k'yahs. And they

have the pleasant custom--long ago fallen into decay in

the North--of frequently employing the respectful 'Sir.'

Instead of the curt Yes, and the abrupt No, they say 'Yes, Suh',

'No, Suh.'



But there are some infelicities.  Such as 'like' for 'as,'

and the addition of an 'at' where it isn't needed.

I heard an educated gentleman say, 'Like the flag-officer did.'

His cook or his butler would have said, 'Like the flag-officer done.'

You hear gentlemen say, 'Where have you been at?'  And here is

the aggravated form--heard a ragged street Arab say it to a comrade:

'I was a-ask'n' Tom whah you was a-sett'n' at.'  The very elect

carelessly say 'will' when they mean 'shall'; and many of them say,

'I didn't go to do it,' meaning 'I didn't mean to do it.'

The Northern word 'guess'--imported from England, where it

used to be common, and now regarded by satirical Englishmen

as a Yankee original--is but little used among Southerners.

They say 'reckon.'  They haven't any 'doesn't' in their language;

they say 'don't' instead.  The unpolished often use 'went' for 'gone.'

It is nearly as bad as the Northern 'hadn't ought.'  This reminds me

that a remark of a very peculiar nature was made here in my neighborhood

(in the North) a few days ago:  'He hadn't ought to have went.'

How is that?  Isn't that a good deal of a triumph?

One knows the orders combined in this half-breed's architecture

without inquiring:  one parent Northern, the other Southern.

To-day I heard a schoolmistress ask, 'Where is John gone?'

This form is so common--so nearly universal, in fact--that if she

had used 'whither' instead of 'where,' I think it would have sounded

like an affectation.



We picked up one excellent word--a word worth traveling to New

Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word--'lagniappe.'

They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish--so they said.

We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in

the Picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second;

inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility

in swinging it the fourth.  It has a restricted meaning,

but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose.

It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a 'baker's dozen.'

It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure.

The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the city.

When a child or a servant buys something in a shop--

or even the mayor or the governor, for aught I know--he finishes

the operation by saying--



'Give me something for lagniappe.'



The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of licorice-root,

gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor--

I don't know what he gives the governor; support, likely.



When you are invited to drink, and this does occur now and then

in New Orleans--and you say, 'What, again?--no, I've had enough;'

the other party says, 'But just this one time more--this is for lagniappe.'

When the beau perceives that he is stacking his compliments a trifle too high,

and sees by the young lady's countenance that the edifice would have been

better with the top compliment left off, he puts his 'I beg pardon--

no harm intended,' into the briefer form of 'Oh, that's for lagniappe.'

If the waiter in the restaurant stumbles and spills a gill of coffee down

the back of your neck, he says 'For lagniappe, sah,' and gets you another cup

without extra charge.









                               Chapter 45

                             Southern Sports



IN the North one hears the war mentioned, in social conversation,

once a month; sometimes as often as once a week; but as a distinct

subject for talk, it has long ago been relieved of duty.  There are

sufficient reasons for this.  Given a dinner company of six gentlemen

to-day, it can easily happen that four of them--and possibly five--

were not in the field at all.  So the chances are four to two,

or five to one, that the war will at no time during the evening

become the topic of conversation; and the chances are still greater

that if it become the topic it will remain so but a little while.

If you add six ladies to the company, you have added six people

who saw so little of the dread realities of the war that they ran

out of talk concerning them years ago, and now would soon weary of

the war topic if you brought it up.



The case is very different in the South.  There, every man you

meet was in the war; and every lady you meet saw the war.

The war is the great chief topic of conversation.  The interest in it

is vivid and constant; the interest in other topics is fleeting.

Mention of the war will wake up a dull company and set

their tongues going, when nearly any other topic would fail.

In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere:  they date from it.

All day long you hear things 'placed' as having happened since the waw;

or du'in' the waw; or befo' the waw; or right aftah the waw;

or 'bout two yeahs or five yeahs or ten yeahs befo' the waw

or aftah the waw.  It shows how intimately every individual

was visited, in his own person, by that tremendous episode.

It gives the inexperienced stranger a better idea of what a vast

and comprehensive calamity invasion is than he can ever get by reading

books at the fireside.



At a club one evening, a gentleman turned to me and said,

in an aside--



'You notice, of course, that we are nearly always talking about the war.

It isn't because we haven't anything else to talk about, but because nothing

else has so strong an interest for us.  And there is another reason:

In the war, each of us, in his own person, seems to have sampled

all the different varieties of human experience; as a consequence,

you can't mention an outside matter of any sort but it will certainly

remind some listener of something that happened during the war--

and out he comes with it.  Of course that brings the talk back to the war.

You may try all you want to, to keep other subjects before the house,

and we may all join in and help, but there can be but one result:

the most random topic would load every man up with war reminiscences,

and shut him up, too; and talk would be likely to stop presently,

because you can't talk pale inconsequentialities when you've

got a crimson fact or fancy in your head that you are burning

to fetch out.'



The poet was sitting some little distance away; and presently

he began to speak--about the moon.



The gentleman who had been talking to me remarked in an 'aside:'

'There, the moon is far enough from the seat of war, but you

will see that it will suggest something to somebody about the war;

in ten minutes from now the moon, as a topic, will be shelved.'



The poet was saying he had noticed something which was a surprise

to him; had had the impression that down here, toward the equator,

the moonlight was much stronger and brighter than up North;

had had the impression that when he visited New Orleans,

many years ago, the moon--



Interruption from the other end of the room--



'Let me explain that.  Reminds me of an anecdote.

Everything is changed since the war, for better or for worse;

but you'll find people down here born grumblers, who see no

change except the change for the worse.  There was an old negro

woman of this sort.  A young New-Yorker said in her presence,

"What a wonderful moon you have down here!"  She sighed and said,

"Ah, bless yo' heart, honey, you ought to seen dat moon befo'

de waw!" '



The new topic was dead already.  But the poet resurrected it,

and gave it a new start.



A brief dispute followed, as to whether the difference between

Northern and Southern moonlight really existed or was only imagined.

Moonlight talk drifted easily into talk about artificial

methods of dispelling darkness.  Then somebody remembered

that when Farragut advanced upon Port Hudson on a dark night--

and did not wish to assist the aim of the Confederate gunners--

he carried no battle-lanterns, but painted the decks of his ships white,

and thus created a dim but valuable light, which enabled his

own men to grope their way around with considerable facility.

At this point the war got the floor again--the ten minutes not

quite up yet.



I was not sorry, for war talk by men who have been in a war

is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has

not been in the moon is likely to be dull.



We went to a cockpit in New Orleans on a Saturday afternoon.

I had never seen a cock-fight before.  There were men and boys there

of all ages and all colors, and of many languages and nationalities.

But I noticed one quite conspicuous and surprising absence:

the traditional brutal faces.  There were no brutal faces.

With no cock-fighting going on, you could have played the gathering

on a stranger for a prayer-meeting; and after it began,

for a revival--provided you blindfolded your stranger--

for the shouting was something prodigious.



A negro and a white man were in the ring; everybody else outside.

The cocks were brought in in sacks; and when time was called,

they were taken out by the two bottle-holders, stroked,

caressed, poked toward each other, and finally liberated.

The big black cock plunged instantly at the little gray one and struck

him on the head with his spur.  The gray responded with spirit.

Then the Babel of many-tongued shoutings broke out, and ceased

not thenceforth.  When the cocks had been fighting some little time,

I was expecting them momently to drop dead, for both were blind,

red with blood, and so exhausted that they frequently fell down.

Yet they would not give up, neither would they die.

The negro and the white man would pick them up every few seconds,

wipe them off, blow cold water on them in a fine spray,

and take their heads in their mouths and hold them there

a moment--to warm back the perishing life perhaps;

I do not know.  Then, being set down again, the dying

creatures would totter gropingly about, with dragging wings,

find each other, strike a guesswork blow or two, and fall

exhausted once more.



I did not see the end of the battle.  I forced myself to endure

it as long as I could, but it was too pitiful a sight;

so I made frank confession to that effect, and we retired.

We heard afterward that the black cock died in the ring,

and fighting to the last.



Evidently there is abundant fascination about this 'sport' for such

as have had a degree of familiarity with it.  I never saw people

enjoy anything more than this gathering enjoyed this fight.

The case was the same with old gray-heads and with boys of ten.

They lost themselves in frenzies of delight.  The 'cocking-main'

is an inhuman sort of entertainment, there is no question

about that; still, it seems a much more respectable and far

less cruel sport than fox-hunting--for the cocks like it;

they experience, as well as confer enjoyment; which is not

the fox's case.



We assisted--in the French sense--at a mule race, one day.

I believe I enjoyed this contest more than any other mule there.

I enjoyed it more than I remember having enjoyed any other animal

race I ever saw.  The grand-stand was well filled with the beauty

and the chivalry of New Orleans.  That phrase is not original with me.

It is the Southern reporter's. He has used it for two generations.

He uses it twenty times a day, or twenty thousand times a day;

or a million times a day--according to the exigencies.

He is obliged to use it a million times a day, if he have

occasion to speak of respectable men and women that often;

for he has no other phrase for such service except that single one.

He never tires of it; it always has a fine sound to him.

There is a kind of swell medieval bulliness and tinsel about it

that pleases his gaudy barbaric soul.  If he had been in Palestine

in the early times, we should have had no references to 'much people'

out of him.  No, he would have said 'the beauty and the chivalry

of Galilee' assembled to hear the Sermon on the Mount.

It is likely that the men and women of the South are sick enough

of that phrase by this time, and would like a change, but there is no

immediate prospect of their getting it.



The New Orleans editor has a strong, compact, direct, unflowery style;

wastes no words, and does not gush.  Not so with his average correspondent.

In the Appendix I have quoted a good letter, penned by a trained hand;

but the average correspondent hurls a style which differs from that.

For instance--



The 'Times-Democrat' sent a relief-steamer up one of the bayous, last April.

This steamer landed at a village, up there somewhere, and the Captain

invited some of the ladies of the village to make a short trip with him.

They accepted and came aboard, and the steamboat shoved out up the creek.

That was all there was 'to it.'  And that is all that the editor

of the 'Times-Democrat' would have got out of it.  There was nothing

in the thing but statistics, and he would have got nothing else out of it.

He would probably have even tabulated them, partly to secure

perfect clearness of statement, and partly to save space.

But his special correspondent knows other methods of handling statistics.

He just throws off all restraint and wallows in them--



'On Saturday, early in the morning, the beauty of the place graced our cabin,

and proud of her fair freight the gallant little boat glided up the bayou.'



Twenty-two words to say the ladies came aboard and the boat

shoved out up the creek, is a clean waste of ten good words,

and is also destructive of compactness of statement.



The trouble with the Southern reporter is--Women.  They unsettle him;

they throw him off his balance.  He is plain, and sensible,

and satisfactory, until a woman heaves in sight.  Then he goes

all to pieces; his mind totters, he becomes flowery and idiotic.

From reading the above extract, you would imagine that this student

of Sir Walter Scott is an apprentice, and knows next to nothing

about handling a pen.  On the contrary, he furnishes plenty of proofs,

in his long letter, that he knows well enough how to handle it when

the women are not around to give him the artificial-flower complaint.

For instance--



'At 4 o'clock ominous clouds began to gather in the south-east, and presently

from the Gulf there came a blow which increased in severity every moment.

It was not safe to leave the landing then, and there was a delay.

The oaks shook off long tresses of their mossy beards to the tugging

of the wind, and the bayou in its ambition put on miniature waves

in mocking of much larger bodies of water.  A lull permitted a start,

and homewards we steamed, an inky sky overhead and a heavy wind blowing.

As darkness crept on, there were few on board who did not wish

themselves nearer home.'



There is nothing the matter with that.  It is good description,

compactly put.  Yet there was great temptation, there, to drop

into lurid writing.



But let us return to the mule.  Since I left him, I have rummaged

around and found a full report of the race.  In it I find confirmation

of the theory which I broached just now--namely, that the trouble

with the Southern reporter is Women:  Women, supplemented by Walter

Scott and his knights and beauty and chivalry, and so on.

This is an excellent report, as long as the women stay out of it.

But when they intrude, we have this frantic result--



'It will be probably a long time before the ladies'

stand presents such a sea of foam-like loveliness as it

did yesterday.  The New Orleans women are always charming,

but never so much so as at this time of the year, when.

in their dainty spring costumes they bring with them a breath

of balmy freshness and an odor of sanctity unspeakable.

The stand was so crowded with them that, walking at their feet

and seeing no possibility of approach, many a man appreciated

as he never did before the Peri's feeling at the Gates of Paradise,

and wondered what was the priceless boon that would admit him

to their sacred presence.  Sparkling on their white-robed

breasts or shoulders were the colors of their favorite knights,

and were it not for the fact that the doughty heroes appeared

on unromantic mules, it would have been easy to imagine one of

King Arthur's gala-days.'



There were thirteen mules in the first heat; all sorts of mules,

they were; all sorts of complexions, gaits, dispositions, aspects.

Some were handsome creatures, some were not; some were sleek,

some hadn't had their fur brushed lately; some were innocently

gay and frisky; some were full of malice and all unrighteousness;

guessing from looks, some of them thought the matter on hand was war,

some thought it was a lark, the rest took it for a religious occasion.

And each mule acted according to his convictions.  The result was an

absence of harmony well compensated by a conspicuous presence of variety--

variety of a picturesque and entertaining sort.



All the riders were young gentlemen in fashionable society.

If the reader has been wondering why it is that the ladies of New Orleans

attend so humble an orgy as a mule-race, the thing is explained now.

It is a fashion-freak; all connected with it are people of fashion.



It is great fun, and cordially liked.  The mule-race is one of the marked

occasions of the year.  It has brought some pretty fast mules to the front.

One of these had to be ruled out, because he was so fast that he turned

the thing into a one-mule contest, and robbed it of one of its

best features--variety.  But every now and then somebody disguises him

with a new name and a new complexion, and rings him in again.



The riders dress in full jockey costumes of bright-colored silks,

satins, and velvets.



The thirteen mules got away in a body, after a couple

of false starts, and scampered off with prodigious spirit.

As each mule and each rider had a distinct opinion of his own

as to how the race ought to be run, and which side of the track

was best in certain circumstances, and how often the track ought

to be crossed, and when a collision ought to be accomplished,

and when it ought to be avoided, these twenty-six conflicting

opinions created a most fantastic and picturesque confusion,

and the resulting spectacle was killingly comical.



Mile heat; time 2:22. Eight of the thirteen mules distanced.

I had a bet on a mule which would have won if the procession

had been reversed.  The second heat was good fun; and so was

the 'consolation race for beaten mules,' which followed later;

but the first heat was the best in that respect.



I think that much the most enjoyable of all races is

a steamboat race; but, next to that, I prefer the gay

and joyous mule-rush. Two red-hot steamboats raging along,

neck-and-neck, straining every nerve--that is to say,

every rivet in the boilers--quaking and shaking and groaning

from stem to stern, spouting white steam from the pipes,

pouring black smoke from the chimneys, raining down sparks,

parting the river into long breaks of hissing foam--this is

sport that makes a body's very liver curl with enjoyment.

A horse-race is pretty tame and colorless in comparison.

Still, a horse-race might be well enough, in its way,

perhaps, if it were not for the tiresome false starts.

But then, nobody is ever killed.  At least, nobody was ever killed

when I was at a horse-race. They have been crippled, it is true;

but this is little to the purpose.









                               Chapter 46

                       Enchantments and Enchanters



THE largest annual event in New Orleans is a something which we

arrived too late to sample--the Mardi-Gras festivities.

I saw the procession of the Mystic Crew of Comus there,

twenty-four years ago--with knights and nobles and so on,

clothed in silken and golden Paris-made gorgeousnesses,

planned and bought for that single night's use; and in their

train all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other

diverting grotesquerie--a startling and wonderful sort of show,

as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the light

of its smoking and flickering torches; but it is said that

in these latter days the spectacle is mightily augmented,

as to cost, splendor, and variety.  There is a chief personage--'Rex;'

and if I remember rightly, neither this king nor any of his

great following of subordinates is known to any outsider.

All these people are gentlemen of position and consequence;

and it is a proud thing to belong to the organization; so the mystery

in which they hide their personality is merely for romance's sake,

and not on account of the police.



Mardi-Gras is of course a relic of the French and Spanish occupation; but I

judge that the religious feature has been pretty well knocked out of it now.

Sir Walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl and rosary,

and he will stay.  His medieval business, supplemented by the monsters and

the oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy-land, is finer to look

at than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the reveling rabble

of the priest's day, and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the day

and admonish men that the grace-line between the worldly season and the holy

one is reached.



This Mardi-Gras pageant was the exclusive possession of New

Orleans until recently.  But now it has spread to Memphis and

St. Louis and Baltimore.  It has probably reached its limit.

It is a thing which could hardly exist in the practical North;

would certainly last but a very brief time; as brief a time

as it would last in London.  For the soul of it is the romantic,

not the funny and the grotesque.  Take away the romantic

mysteries, the kings and knights and big-sounding titles,

and Mardi-Gras would die, down there in the South.

The very feature that keeps it alive in the South--

girly-girly romance--would kill it in the North or in London.

Puck and Punch, and the press universal, would fall upon it

and make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would be

also its last.



Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte

may be set two compensating benefactions:  the Revolution

broke the chains of the ANCIEN REGIME and of the Church,

and made of a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen;

and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth,

and also so completely stripped the divinity from royalty,

that whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before,

they are only men, since, and can never be gods again,

but only figureheads, and answerable for their acts like common clay.

Such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm which

Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debt

to them for these great and permanent services to liberty,

humanity, and progress.



Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his

single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back;

sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish

forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government;

with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds,

and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.

He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any

other individual that ever wrote.  Most of the world has now

outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them;

but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still.  Not so

forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully.

There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth

century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter

Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical,

common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up

with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an

absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried.

But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner--

or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it--

would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed,

and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is.

It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major

or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it

was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations.

For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also

reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them.

Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and

contributions of Sir Walter.



Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed

before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.

It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had

any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might,

perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition.  The Southerner of

the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War:

but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman.

The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter's

influence than to that of any other thing or person.



One may observe, by one or two signs, how deeply

that influence penetrated, and how strongly it holds.

If one take up a Northern or Southern literary periodical

of forty or fifty years ago, he will find it filled with wordy,

windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality--

all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly done, too--

innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact.

This sort of literature being the fashion in both sections of

the country, there was opportunity for the fairest competition;

and as a consequence, the South was able to show as many

well-known literary names, proportioned to population,

as the North could.



But a change has come, and there is no opportunity

now for a fair competition between North and South.

For the North has thrown out that old inflated style,

whereas the Southern writer still clings to it--clings to it

and has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence.

There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as ever

there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency

under present conditions; the authors write for the past,

not the present; they use obsolete forms, and a dead language.

But when a Southerner of genius writes modern English,

his book goes upon crutches no longer, but upon wings;

and they carry it swiftly all about America and England,

and through the great English reprint publishing houses of Germany--

as witness the experience of Mr. Cable and Uncle Remus, two of the

very few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style.

Instead of three or four widely-known literary names, the South

ought to have a dozen or two--and will have them when Sir Walter's

time is out.



A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for

good or harm is shown in the effects wrought by 'Don Quixote'

and those wrought by 'Ivanhoe.'  The first swept the world's

admiration for the medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence;

and the other restored it.  As far as our South is concerned,

the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter,

so effectually has Scott's pernicious work undermined it.









                               Chapter 47

                        Uncle Remus and Mr. Cable



MR.  JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS ('Uncle Remus') was to arrive from Atlanta

at seven o'clock Sunday morning; so we got up and received him.

We were able to detect him among the crowd of arrivals at

the hotel-counter by his correspondence with a description

of him which had been furnished us from a trustworthy source.

He was said to be undersized, red-haired, and somewhat freckled.

He was the only man in the party whose outside tallied with this

bill of particulars.  He was said to be very shy.  He is a shy man.

Of this there is no doubt.  It may not show on the surface,

but the shyness is there.  After days of intimacy one wonders

to see that it is still in about as strong force as ever.

There is a fine and beautiful nature hidden behind it, as all know

who have read the Uncle Remus book; and a fine genius, too, as all know

by the same sign.  I seem to be talking quite freely about this neighbor;

but in talking to the public I am but talking to his personal friends,

and these things are permissible among friends.



He deeply disappointed a number of children who had flocked

eagerly to Mr. Cable's house to get a glimpse of the illustrious

sage and oracle of the nation's nurseries.  They said--



'Why, he 's white! '



They were grieved about it.  So, to console them, the book was brought,

that they might hear Uncle Remus's Tar-Baby story from the lips of Uncle

Remus himself--or what, in their outraged eyes, was left of him.

But it turned out that he had never read aloud to people, and was too shy

to venture the attempt now.  Mr. Cable and I read from books of ours,

to show him what an easy trick it was; but his immortal shyness was

proof against even this sagacious strategy, so we had to read about

Brer Rabbit ourselves.



Mr. Harris ought to be able to read the negro dialect better

than anybody else, for in the matter of writing it he is the only

master the country has produced.  Mr. Cable is the only master

in the writing of French dialects that the country has produced;

and he reads them in perfection.  It was a great treat to hear him

read about Jean-ah Poquelin, and about Innerarity and his famous

'pigshoo' representing 'Louisihanna RIF-fusing to Hanter the Union,'

along with passages of nicely-shaded German dialect from a novel

which was still in manuscript.



It came out in conversation, that in two different instances

Mr. Cable got into grotesque trouble by using, in his books,

next-to-impossible French names which nevertheless happened

to be borne by living and sensitive citizens of New Orleans.

His names were either inventions or were borrowed from

the ancient and obsolete past, I do not now remember which;

but at any rate living bearers of them turned up, and were

a good deal hurt at having attention directed to themselves

and their affairs in so excessively public a manner.



Mr. Warner and I had an experience of the same sort when we wrote the book

called 'The Gilded Age.'  There is a character in it called 'Sellers.'

I do not remember what his first name was, in the beginning;

but anyway, Mr. Warner did not like it, and wanted it improved.

He asked me if I was able to imagine a person named 'Eschol Sellers.'

Of course I said I could not, without stimulants.  He said that away

out West, once, he had met, and contemplated, and actually shaken

hands with a man bearing that impossible name--'Eschol Sellers.'

He added--



'It was twenty years ago; his name has probably carried him off

before this; and if it hasn't, he will never see the book anyhow.

We will confiscate his name.  The name you are using is common,

and therefore dangerous; there are probably a thousand Sellerses

bearing it, and the whole horde will come after us; but Eschol

Sellers is a safe name--it is a rock.'



So we borrowed that name; and when the book had been out about a week,

one of the stateliest and handsomest and most aristocratic looking

white men that ever lived, called around, with the most formidable

libel suit in his pocket that ever--well, in brief, we got his

permission to suppress an edition of ten million<footnote [Figures

taken from memory, and probably incorrect.  Think it was more.]>

copies of the book and change that name to 'Mulberry Sellers'

in future editions.









                               Chapter 48

                            Sugar and Postage



ONE day, on the street, I encountered the man whom, of all men,

I most wished to see--Horace Bixby; formerly pilot under me--

or rather, over me--now captain of the great steamer 'City of

Baton Rouge,' the latest and swiftest addition to the Anchor Line.

The same slender figure, the same tight curls, the same springy step,

the same alertness, the same decision of eye and answering decision

of hand, the same erect military bearing; not an inch gained or lost

in girth, not an ounce gained or lost in weight, not a hair turned.

It is a curious thing, to leave a man thirty-five years old, and come

back at the end of twenty-one years and find him still only thirty-five.

I have not had an experience of this kind before, I believe.

There were some crow's-feet, but they counted for next to nothing,

since they were inconspicuous.



His boat was just in.  I had been waiting several days for her,

purposing to return to St. Louis in her.  The captain and I

joined a party of ladies and gentlemen, guests of Major Wood,

and went down the river fifty-four miles, in a swift tug,

to ex-Governor Warmouth's sugar plantation.  Strung along below

the city, were a number of decayed, ram-shackly, superannuated

old steamboats, not one of which had I ever seen before.

They had all been built, and worn out, and thrown aside,

since I was here last.  This gives one a realizing sense

of the frailness of a Mississippi boat and the briefness

of its life.



Six miles below town a fat and battered brick chimney, sticking above

the magnolias and live-oaks, was pointed out as the monument erected

by an appreciative nation to celebrate the battle of New Orleans--

Jackson's victory over the British, January 8, 1815.  The war had ended,

the two nations were at peace, but the news had not yet reached New Orleans.

If we had had the cable telegraph in those days, this blood would

not have been spilt, those lives would not have been wasted;

and better still, Jackson would probably never have been president.

We have gotten over the harms done us by the war of 1812, but not over some

of those done us by Jackson's presidency.



The Warmouth plantation covers a vast deal of ground, and the hospitality

of the Warmouth mansion is graduated to the same large scale.

We saw steam-plows at work, here, for the first time.  The traction engine

travels about on its own wheels, till it reaches the required spot;

then it stands still and by means of a wire rope pulls the huge plow toward

itself two or three hundred yards across the field, between the rows of cane.

The thing cuts down into the black mold a foot and a half deep.

The plow looks like a fore-and-aft brace of a Hudson river steamer, inverted.

When the negro steersman sits on one end of it, that end tilts down near

the ground, while the other sticks up high in air.  This great see-saw goes

rolling and pitching like a ship at sea, and it is not every circus rider

that could stay on it.



The plantation contains two thousand six hundred acres;

six hundred and fifty are in cane; and there is a fruitful

orange grove of five thousand trees.  The cane is

cultivated after a modern and intricate scientific fashion,

too elaborate and complex for me to attempt to describe;

but it lost $40,000 last year.  I forget the other details.

However, this year's crop will reach ten or twelve hundred

tons of sugar, consequently last year's loss will not matter.

These troublesome and expensive scientific methods achieve a yield

of a ton and a half and from that to two tons, to the acre;

which is three or four times what the yield of an acre was

in my time.



The drainage-ditches were everywhere alive with

little crabs--'fiddlers.'  One saw them scampering sidewise

in every direction whenever they heard a disturbing noise.

Expensive pests, these crabs; for they bore into the levees,

and ruin them.



The great sugar-house was a wilderness of tubs and tanks

and vats and filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery.

The process of making sugar is exceedingly interesting.

First, you heave your cane into the centrifugals and grind out

the juice; then run it through the evaporating pan to extract

the fiber; then through the bone-filter to remove the alcohol;

then through the clarifying tanks to discharge the molasses;

then through the granulating pipe to condense it; then through

the vacuum pan to extract the vacuum.  It is now ready for market.

I have jotted these particulars down from memory.

The thing looks simple and easy.  Do not deceive yourself.

To make sugar is really one of the most difficult things

in the world.  And to make it right, is next to impossible.

If you will examine your own supply every now and then

for a term of years, and tabulate the result, you will find

that not two men in twenty can make sugar without getting sand

into it.



We could have gone down to the mouth of the river and visited Captain Eads'

great work, the 'jetties,' where the river has been compressed between walls,

and thus deepened to twenty-six feet; but it was voted useless to go,

since at this stage of the water everything would be covered up and invisible.



We could have visited that ancient and singular burg,

'Pilot-town,' which stands on stilts in the water--so they say;

where nearly all communication is by skiff and canoe, even to

the attending of weddings and funerals; and where the littlest

boys and girls are as handy with the oar as unamphibious

children are with the velocipede.



We could have done a number of other things; but on account of limited time,

we went back home.  The sail up the breezy and sparkling river was

a charming experience, and would have been satisfyingly sentimental

and romantic but for the interruptions of the tug's pet parrot,

whose tireless comments upon the scenery and the guests were always

this-worldly, and often profane.  He had also a superabundance

of the discordant, ear-splitting, metallic laugh common to his breed--

a machine-made laugh, a Frankenstein laugh, with the soul left out of it.

He applied it to every sentimental remark, and to every pathetic song.

He cackled it out with hideous energy after 'Home again, home again

from a foreign shore,' and said he 'wouldn't give a damn for a tug-load

of such rot.'  Romance and sentiment cannot long survive this sort

of discouragement; so the singing and talking presently ceased; which so

delighted the parrot that he cursed himself hoarse for joy.



Then the male members of the party moved to the forecastle,

to smoke and gossip.  There were several old steamboatmen along,

and I learned from them a great deal of what had been

happening to my former river friends during my long absence.

I learned that a pilot whom I used to steer for is become

a spiritualist, and for more than fifteen years has been

receiving a letter every week from a deceased relative,

through a New York spiritualist medium named Manchester--

postage graduated by distance:  from the local post-office

in Paradise to New York, five dollars; from New York to

St. Louis, three cents.  I remember Mr. Manchester very well.

I called on him once, ten years ago, with a couple of friends,

one of whom wished to inquire after a deceased uncle.

This uncle had lost his life in a peculiarly violent and

unusual way, half a dozen years before:  a cyclone blew him

some three miles and knocked a tree down with him which was

four feet through at the butt and sixty-five feet high.

He did not survive this triumph.  At the </s<e acute>ance/>

just referred to, my friend questioned his late uncle,

through Mr. Manchester, and the late uncle wrote down his replies,

using Mr. Manchester's hand and pencil for that purpose.

The following is a fair example of the questions asked,

and also of the sloppy twaddle in the way of answers, furnished by

Manchester under the pretense that it came from the specter.

If this man is not the paltriest fraud that lives, I owe him an

apology--



QUESTION.  Where are you?



ANSWER.  In the spirit world.



Q. Are you happy?



A. Very happy.  Perfectly happy.



Q. How do you amuse yourself?



A. Conversation with friends, and other spirits.



Q. What else?



A. Nothing else.  Nothing else is necessary.



Q. What do you talk about?



A. About how happy we are; and about friends left behind in the earth,

and how to influence them for their good.



Q. When your friends in the earth all get to the spirit land,

what shall you have to talk about then?--nothing but about

how happy you all are?



No reply.  It is explained that spirits will not answer frivolous questions.



Q. How is it that spirits that are content to spend an eternity

in frivolous employments, and accept it as happiness,

are so fastidious about frivolous questions upon the subject?



No reply.



Q. Would you like to come back?



A. No.



Q. Would you say that under oath?



A. Yes.



Q. What do you eat there?



A. We do not eat.



Q. What do you drink?



A. We do not drink.



Q. What do you smoke?



A. We do not smoke.



Q. What do you read?



A. We do not read.



Q. Do all the good people go to your place?



A. Yes.



Q. You know my present way of life.  Can you suggest any additions to it,

in the way of crime, that will reasonably insure my going to some other place.



A. No reply.



Q. When did you die?



A. I did not die, I passed away.



Q. Very well, then, when did you pass away?  How long have you

been in the spirit land?



A. We have no measurements of time here.



Q. Though you may be indifferent and uncertain as to dates

and times in your present condition and environment,

this has nothing to do with your former condition.

You had dates then.  One of these is what I ask for.

You departed on a certain day in a certain year.

Is not this true?



A. Yes.



Q. Then name the day of the month.



(Much fumbling with pencil, on the part of the medium, accompanied by

violent spasmodic jerkings of his head and body, for some little time.

Finally, explanation to the effect that spirits often forget dates,

such things being without importance to them.)



Q. Then this one has actually forgotten the date of its translation

to the spirit land?



This was granted to be the case.



Q. This is very curious.  Well, then, what year was it?



(More fumbling, jerking, idiotic spasms, on the part of the medium.

Finally, explanation to the effect that the spirit has forgotten the year.)



Q. This is indeed stupendous.  Let me put one more question,

one last question, to you, before we part to meet no more;--

for even if I fail to avoid your asylum, a meeting there will go

for nothing as a meeting, since by that time you will easily

have forgotten me and my name:  did you die a natural death,

or were you cut off by a catastrophe?



A. (After long hesitation and many throes and spasms.) NATURAL DEATH.



This ended the interview.  My friend told the medium that when his relative

was in this poor world, he was endowed with an extraordinary intellect

and an absolutely defectless memory, and it seemed a great pity that he had

not been allowed to keep some shred of these for his amusement in the realms

of everlasting contentment, and for the amazement and admiration of the rest

of the population there.



This man had plenty of clients--has plenty yet.  He receives

letters from spirits located in every part of the spirit world,

and delivers them all over this country through the United States mail.

These letters are filled with advice--advice from 'spirits' who don't

know as much as a tadpole--and this advice is religiously followed

by the receivers.  One of these clients was a man whom the spirits

(if one may thus plurally describe the ingenious Manchester)

were teaching how to contrive an improved railway car-wheel. It

is coarse employment for a spirit, but it is higher and wholesomer

activity than talking for ever about 'how happy we are.'









                               Chapter 49

                         Episodes in Pilot Life



IN the course of the tug-boat gossip, it came out that out

of every five of my former friends who had quitted the river,

four had chosen farming as an occupation.  Of course this was not

because they were peculiarly gifted, agriculturally, and thus

more likely to succeed as farmers than in other industries:

the reason for their choice must be traced to some other source.

Doubtless they chose farming because that life is private

and secluded from irruptions of undesirable strangers--

like the pilot-house hermitage.  And doubtless they also chose

it because on a thousand nights of black storm and danger

they had noted the twinkling lights of solitary farm-houses,

as the boat swung by, and pictured to themselves the serenity

and security and coziness of such refuges at such times,

and so had by-and-bye come to dream of that retired and peaceful

life as the one desirable thing to long for, anticipate, earn, and

at last enjoy.



But I did not learn that any of these pilot-farmers had astonished anybody

with their successes.  Their farms do not support them:  they support

their farms.  The pilot-farmer disappears from the river annually,

about the breaking of spring, and is seen no more till next frost.

Then he appears again, in damaged homespun, combs the hayseed

out of his hair, and takes a pilot-house berth for the winter.

In this way he pays the debts which his farming has achieved during

the agricultural season.  So his river bondage is but half broken;

he is still the river's slave the hardest half of the year.



One of these men bought a farm, but did not retire to it.

He knew a trick worth two of that.  He did not propose to pauperize

his farm by applying his personal ignorance to working it.

No, he put the farm into the hands of an agricultural

expert to be worked on shares--out of every three loads

of corn the expert to have two and the pilot the third.

But at the end of the season the pilot received no corn.

The expert explained that his share was not reached.  The farm

produced only two loads.



Some of the pilots whom I had known had had adventures--

the outcome fortunate, sometimes, but not in all cases.

Captain Montgomery, whom I had steered for when he was a pilot,

commanded the Confederate fleet in the great battle before Memphis;

when his vessel went down, he swam ashore, fought his way through

a squad of soldiers, and made a gallant and narrow escape.

He was always a cool man; nothing could disturb his serenity.

Once when he was captain of the 'Crescent City,' I was bringing

the boat into port at New Orleans, and momently expecting orders

from the hurricane deck, but received none.  I had stopped

the wheels, and there my authority and responsibility ceased.

It was evening--dim twilight--the captain's hat was perched upon

the big bell, and I supposed the intellectual end of the captain

was in it, but such was not the case.  The captain was very strict;

therefore I knew better than to touch a bell without orders.

My duty was to hold the boat steadily on her calamitous course,

and leave the consequences to take care of themselves--which I did.

So we went plowing past the sterns of steamboats and getting closer

and closer--the crash was bound to come very soon--and still that hat

never budged; for alas, the captain was napping in the texas....

Things were becoming exceedingly nervous and uncomfortable.

It seemed to me that the captain was not going to appear in time

to see the entertainment.  But he did.  Just as we were walking

into the stern of a steamboat, he stepped out on deck, and said,

with heavenly serenity, 'Set her back on both'--which I did;

but a trifle late, however, for the next moment we went smashing through

that other boat's flimsy outer works with a most prodigious racket.

The captain never said a word to me about the matter afterwards,

except to remark that I had done right, and that he hoped I would not

hesitate to act in the same way again in like circumstances.



One of the pilots whom I had known when I was on the river

had died a very honorable death.  His boat caught fire,

and he remained at the wheel until he got her safe to land.

Then he went out over the breast-board with his clothing

in flames, and was the last person to get ashore.

He died from his injuries in the course of two or three hours,

and his was the only life lost.



The history of Mississippi piloting affords six or seven instances of this

sort of martyrdom, and half a hundred instances of escapes from a like fate

which came within a second or two of being fatally too late; BUT THERE

IS NO INSTANCE OF A PILOT DESERTING HIS POST TO SAVE HIS LIFE WHILE BY

REMAINING AND SACRIFICING IT HE MIGHT SECURE OTHER LIVES FROM DESTRUCTION.

It is well worth while to set down this noble fact, and well worth while to

put it in italics, too.



The 'cub' pilot is early admonished to despise all perils

connected with a pilot's calling, and to prefer any sort

of death to the deep dishonor of deserting his post

while there is any possibility of his being useful in it.

And so effectively are these admonitions inculcated,

that even young and but half-tried pilots can be depended upon

to stick to the wheel, and die there when occasion requires.

In a Memphis graveyard is buried a young fellow who perished

at the wheel a great many years ago, in White River, to save

the lives of other men.  He said to the captain that if the fire

would give him time to reach a sand bar, some distance away,

all could be saved, but that to land against the bluff bank

of the river would be to insure the loss of many lives.

He reached the bar and grounded the boat in shallow water;

but by that time the flames had closed around him,

and in escaping through them he was fatally burned.

He had been urged to fly sooner, but had replied as became

a pilot to reply--



'I will not go.  If I go, nobody will be saved; if I stay,

no one will be lost but me.  I will stay.'



There were two hundred persons on board, and no life was lost but the pilot's.

There used to be a monument to this young fellow, in that Memphis graveyard.

While we tarried in Memphis on our down trip, I started out to look for it,

but our time was so brief that I was obliged to turn back before my

object was accomplished.



The tug-boat gossip informed me that Dick Kennet was dead--

blown up, near Memphis, and killed; that several others whom

I had known had fallen in the war--one or two of them shot

down at the wheel; that another and very particular friend,

whom I had steered many trips for, had stepped out of his house

in New Orleans, one night years ago, to collect some money

in a remote part of the city, and had never been seen again--

was murdered and thrown into the river, it was thought; that Ben

Thornburgh was dead long ago; also his wild 'cub' whom I used

to quarrel with, all through every daylight watch.  A heedless,

reckless creature he was, and always in hot water, always in mischief.

An Arkansas passenger brought an enormous bear aboard, one day,

and chained him to a life-boat on the hurricane deck.

Thornburgh's 'cub' could not rest till he had gone there and unchained

the bear, to 'see what he would do.'  He was promptly gratified.

The bear chased him around and around the deck, for miles and miles,

with two hundred eager faces grinning through the railings

for audience, and finally snatched off the lad's coat-tail

and went into the texas to chew it.  The off-watch turned

out with alacrity, and left the bear in sole possession.

He presently grew lonesome, and started out for recreation.

He ranged the whole boat--visited every part of it, with an

advance guard of fleeing people in front of him and a voiceless

vacancy behind him; and when his owner captured him at last,

those two were the only visible beings anywhere; everybody else

was in hiding, and the boat was a solitude.



I was told that one of my pilot friends fell dead at the wheel,

from heart disease, in 1869.  The captain was on the roof at the time.

He saw the boat breaking for the shore; shouted, and got no answer;

ran up, and found the pilot lying dead on the floor.



Mr. Bixby had been blown up, in Madrid bend; was not injured,

but the other pilot was lost.



George Ritchie had been blown up near Memphis--blown into

the river from the wheel, and disabled.  The water was

very cold; he clung to a cotton bale--mainly with his teeth--

and floated until nearly exhausted, when he was rescued

by some deck hands who were on a piece of the wreck.

They tore open the bale and packed him in the cotton,

and warmed the life back into him, and got him safe to Memphis.

He is one of Bixby's pilots on the 'Baton Rouge' now.



Into the life of a steamboat clerk, now dead, had dropped a bit

of romance--somewhat grotesque romance, but romance nevertheless.

When I knew him he was a shiftless young spendthrift, boisterous,

goodhearted, full of careless generosities, and pretty conspicuously

promising to fool his possibilities away early, and come to nothing.

In a Western city lived a rich and childless old foreigner and his wife;

and in their family was a comely young girl--sort of friend, sort of servant.

The young clerk of whom I have been speaking--whose name was not

George Johnson, but who shall be called George Johnson for the purposes

of this narrative--got acquainted with this young girl, and they sinned;

and the old foreigner found them out, and rebuked them.  Being ashamed,

they lied, and said they were married; that they had been privately married.

Then the old foreigner's hurt was healed, and he forgave and blessed them.

After that, they were able to continue their sin without concealment.

By-and-bye the foreigner's wife died; and presently he followed after her.

Friends of the family assembled to mourn; and among the mourners

sat the two young sinners.  The will was opened and solemnly read.

It bequeathed every penny of that old man's great wealth to MRS.

GEORGE JOHNSON!



And there was no such person.  The young sinners fled forth then,

and did a very foolish thing:  married themselves before an

obscure Justice of the Peace, and got him to antedate the thing.

That did no sort of good.  The distant relatives flocked in and exposed

the fraudful date with extreme suddenness and surprising ease,

and carried off the fortune, leaving the Johnsons very legitimately,

and legally, and irrevocably chained together in honorable marriage,

but with not so much as a penny to bless themselves withal.

Such are the actual facts; and not all novels have for a base so

telling a situation.









                               Chapter 50

                          The 'Original Jacobs'



WE had some talk about Captain Isaiah Sellers, now many years dead.

He was a fine man, a high-minded man, and greatly respected both ashore and on

the river.  He was very tall, well built, and handsome; and in his old age--

as I remember him--his hair was as black as an Indian's, and his eye

and hand were as strong and steady and his nerve and judgment as firm

and clear as anybody's, young or old, among the fraternity of pilots.

He was the patriarch of the craft; he had been a keelboat pilot before the day

of steamboats; and a steamboat pilot before any other steamboat pilot,

still surviving at the time I speak of, had ever turned a wheel.

Consequently his brethren held him in the sort of awe in which illustrious

survivors of a bygone age are always held by their associates.

He knew how he was regarded, and perhaps this fact added some trifle

of stiffening to his natural dignity, which had been sufficiently stiff

in its original state.



He left a diary behind him; but apparently it did not date back

to his first steamboat trip, which was said to be 1811, the year

the first steamboat disturbed the waters of the Mississippi.

At the time of his death a correspondent of the 'St. Louis Republican'

culled the following items from the diary--



'In February, 1825, he shipped on board the steamer "Rambler," at Florence,

Ala., and made during that year three trips to New Orleans and back--

this on the "Gen. Carrol," between Nashville and New Orleans.  It was during

his stay on this boat that Captain Sellers introduced the tap of the bell

as a signal to heave the lead, previous to which time it was the custom

for the pilot to speak to the men below when soundings were wanted.

The proximity of the forecastle to the pilot-house, no doubt, rendered this

an easy matter; but how different on one of our palaces of the present day.



'In 1827 we find him on board the "President," a boat of two

hundred and eighty-five tons burden, and plying between Smithland

and New Orleans.  Thence he joined the "Jubilee" in 1828,

and on this boat he did his first piloting in the St. Louis trade;

his first watch extending from Herculaneum to St. Genevieve.

On May 26, 1836, he completed and left Pittsburgh in charge

of the steamer "Prairie," a boat of four hundred tons, and the

first steamer with a STATE-ROOM CABIN ever seen at St. Louis.

In 1857 he introduced the signal for meeting boats, and which has,

with some slight change, been the universal custom of this day;

in fact, is rendered obligatory by act of Congress.



'As general items of river history, we quote the following marginal

notes from his general log--



'In March, 1825, Gen. Lafayette left New Orleans for St. Louis

on the low-pressure steamer "Natchez."



'In January, 1828, twenty-one steamers left the New Orleans wharf

to celebrate the occasion of Gen. Jackson's visit to that city.



'In 1830 the "North American" made the run from New Orleans

to Memphis in six days--best time on record to that date.

It has since been made in two days and ten hours.



'In 1831 the Red River cut-off formed.



'In 1832 steamer "Hudson" made the run from White River

to Helena, a distance of seventy-five miles, in twelve hours.

This was the source of much talk and speculation among

parties directly interested.



'In 1839 Great Horseshoe cut-off formed.



'Up to the present time, a term of thirty-five years, we ascertain,

by reference to the diary, he has made four hundred and sixty round

trips to New Orleans, which gives a distance of one million one hundred

and four thousand miles, or an average of eighty-six miles a day.'



Whenever Captain Sellers approached a body of gossiping pilots,

a chill fell there, and talking ceased.  For this reason:

whenever six pilots were gathered together, there would always

be one or two newly fledged ones in the lot, and the elder

ones would be always 'showing off' before these poor fellows;

making them sorrowfully feel how callow they were, how recent

their nobility, and how humble their degree, by talking

largely and vaporously of old-time experiences on the river;

always making it a point to date everything back as far as they could,

so as to make the new men feel their newness to the sharpest

degree possible, and envy the old stagers in the like degree.

And how these complacent baldheads WOULD swell, and brag, and lie,

and date back--ten, fifteen, twenty years,--and how they did enjoy

the effect produced upon the marveling and envying youngsters!



And perhaps just at this happy stage of the proceedings,

the stately figure of Captain Isaiah Sellers, that real and only

genuine Son of Antiquity, would drift solemnly into the midst.

Imagine the size of the silence that would result on the instant.

And imagine the feelings of those bald-heads, and the exultation

of their recent audience when the ancient captain would begin

to drop casual and indifferent remarks of a reminiscent nature--

about islands that had disappeared, and cutoffs that had been made,

a generation before the oldest bald-head in the company had ever set

his foot in a pilot-house!



Many and many a time did this ancient mariner appear on the scene

in the above fashion, and spread disaster and humiliation around him.

If one might believe the pilots, he always dated his islands back to

the misty dawn of river history; and he never used the same island twice;

and never did he employ an island that still existed, or give one

a name which anybody present was old enough to have heard of before.

If you might believe the pilots, he was always conscientiously particular

about little details; never spoke of 'the State of Mississippi,'

for instance--no, he would say, 'When the State of Mississippi was

where Arkansas now is," and would never speak of Louisiana or Missouri

in a general way, and leave an incorrect impression on your mind--

no, he would say, 'When Louisiana was up the river farther,' or 'When

Missouri was on the Illinois side.'



The old gentleman was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot

down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river,

and sign them 'MARK TWAIN,' and give them to the 'New Orleans Picayune.'

They related to the stage and condition of the river, and were

accurate and valuable; and thus far, they contained no poison.

But in speaking of the stage of the river to-day, at a given point,

the captain was pretty apt to drop in a little remark about this

being the first time he had seen the water so high or so low at

that particular point for forty-nine years; and now and then he would

mention Island So-and-so, and follow it, in parentheses, with some

such observation as 'disappeared in 1807, if I remember rightly.'

In these antique interjections lay poison and bitterness for

the other old pilots, and they used to chaff the 'Mark Twain'

paragraphs with unsparing mockery.



It so chanced that one of these paragraphs<footnote [The original MS.

of it, in the captain's own hand, has been sent to me from New Orleans.

It reads as follows--



                                                  VICKSBURG May 4, 1859.



'My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans:

The water is higher this far up than it has been since 8.

My opinion is that the water will be feet deep in Canal street

before the first of next June.  Mrs. Turner's plantation at

the head of Big Black Island is all under water, and it has not

been since 1815.



                                                         'I. Sellers.']>



became the text for my first newspaper article.  I burlesqued

it broadly, very broadly, stringing my fantastics out to the extent

of eight hundred or a thousand words.  I was a 'cub' at the time.

I showed my performance to some pilots, and they eagerly rushed it into

print in the 'New Orleans True Delta.'  It was a great pity; for it did

nobody any worthy service, and it sent a pang deep into a good man's heart.

There was no malice in my rubbish; but it laughed at the captain.

It laughed at a man to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful.

I did not know then, though I do now, that there is no suffering comparable

with that which a private person feels when he is for the first time

pilloried in print.



Captain Sellers did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day forth.

When I say he did me the honor, I am not using empty words.

It was a very real honor to be in the thoughts of so great a man as

Captain Sellers, and I had wit enough to appreciate it and be proud of it.

It was distinction to be loved by such a man; but it was a much greater

distinction to be hated by him, because he loved scores of people;

but he didn't sit up nights to hate anybody but me.



He never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again

signed 'Mark Twain' to anything.  At the time that the telegraph

brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast.

I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre;

so I confiscated the ancient mariner's discarded one,

and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands--

a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its

company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I

have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say.



The captain had an honorable pride in his profession

and an abiding love for it.  He ordered his monument

before he died, and kept it near him until he did die.

It stands over his grave now, in Bellefontaine cemetery, St. Louis.

It is his image, in marble, standing on duty at the pilot wheel;

and worthy to stand and confront criticism, for it represents a man

who in life would have stayed there till he burned to a cinder,

if duty required it.



The finest thing we saw on our whole Mississippi trip, we saw as we approached

New Orleans in the steam-tug. This was the curving frontage of the crescent

city lit up with the white glare of five miles of electric lights.

It was a wonderful sight, and very beautiful.









                               Chapter 51

                              Reminiscences



WE left for St. Louis in the 'City of Baton Rouge,' on a delightfully

hot day, but with the main purpose of my visit but lamely accomplished.

I had hoped to hunt up and talk with a hundred steamboatmen,

but got so pleasantly involved in the social life of the town that I

got nothing more than mere five-minute talks with a couple of dozen

of the craft.



I was on the bench of the pilot-house when we backed out and

'straightened up' for the start--the boat pausing for a 'good ready,'

in the old-fashioned way, and the black smoke piling out of the chimneys

equally in the old-fashioned way.  Then we began to gather momentum,

and presently were fairly under way and booming along.

It was all as natural and familiar--and so were the shoreward sights--

as if there had been no break in my river life.  There was a 'cub,'

and I judged that he would take the wheel now; and he did.

Captain Bixby stepped into the pilot-house. Presently the cub

closed up on the rank of steamships.  He made me nervous,

for he allowed too much water to show between our boat and the ships.

I knew quite well what was going to happen, because I could date

back in my own life and inspect the record.  The captain looked on,

during a silent half-minute, then took the wheel himself,

and crowded the boat in, till she went scraping along within

a band-breadth of the ships.  It was exactly the favor which he had

done me, about a quarter of a century before, in that same spot,

the first time I ever steamed out of the port of New Orleans.

It was a very great and sincere pleasure to me to see the thing repeated--

with somebody else as victim.



We made Natchez (three hundred miles) in twenty-two hours and a half--

much the swiftest passage I have ever made over that piece of water.



The next morning I came on with the four o'clock watch, and saw Ritchie

successfully run half a dozen crossings in a fog, using for his

guidance the marked chart devised and patented by Bixby and himself.

This sufficiently evidenced the great value of the chart.



By and by, when the fog began to clear off, I noticed that the reflection

of a tree in the smooth water of an overflowed bank, six hundred

yards away, was stronger and blacker than the ghostly tree itself.

The faint spectral trees, dimly glimpsed through the shredding fog,

were very pretty things to see.



We had a heavy thunder-storm at Natchez, another at Vicksburg,

and still another about fifty miles below Memphis.  They had

an old-fashioned energy which had long been unfamiliar to me.

This third storm was accompanied by a raging wind.  We tied up to the bank

when we saw the tempest coming, and everybody left the pilot-house but me.

The wind bent the young trees down, exposing the pale underside

of the leaves; and gust after gust followed, in quick succession,

thrashing the branches violently up and down, and to this side and that,

and creating swift waves of alternating green and white according

to the side of the leaf that was exposed, and these waves raced

after each other as do their kind over a wind-tossed field of oats.

No color that was visible anywhere was quite natural--all tints

were charged with a leaden tinge from the solid cloud-bank overhead.

The river was leaden; all distances the same; and even the far-reaching

ranks of combing white-caps were dully shaded by the dark,

rich atmosphere through which their swarming legions marched.

The thunder-peals were constant and deafening; explosion followed explosion

with but inconsequential intervals between, and the reports grew steadily

sharper and higher-keyed, and more trying to the ear; the lightning

was as diligent as the thunder, and produced effects which enchanted

the eye and sent electric ecstasies of mixed delight and apprehension

shivering along every nerve in the body in unintermittent procession.

The rain poured down in amazing volume; the ear-splitting thunder-peals

broke nearer and nearer; the wind increased in fury and began to wrench

off boughs and tree-tops and send them sailing away through space;

the pilot-house fell to rocking and straining and cracking and surging,

and I went down in the hold to see what time it was.



People boast a good deal about Alpine thunderstorms;

but the storms which I have had the luck to see in the Alps were not

the equals of some which I have seen in the Mississippi Valley.

I may not have seen the Alps do their best, of course,

and if they can beat the Mississippi, I don't wish to.



On this up trip I saw a little towhead (infant island) half a

mile long, which had been formed during the past nineteen years.

Since there was so much time to spare that nineteen years

of it could be devoted to the construction of a mere towhead,

where was the use, originally, in rushing this whole globe through

in six days?  It is likely that if more time had been taken,

in the first place, the world would have been made right, and this

ceaseless improving and repairing would not be necessary now.

But if you hurry a world or a house, you are nearly sure to find

out by and by that you have left out a towhead, or a broom-closet,

or some other little convenience, here and there, which has

got to be supplied, no matter how much expense and vexation

it may cost.



We had a succession of black nights, going up the river, and it was observable

that whenever we landed, and suddenly inundated the trees with the intense

sunburst of the electric light, a certain curious effect was always produced:

hundreds of birds flocked instantly out from the masses of shining

green foliage, and went careering hither and thither through the white rays,

and often a song-bird tuned up and fell to singing.  We judged that

they mistook this superb artificial day for the genuine article.

We had a delightful trip in that thoroughly well-ordered steamer,

and regretted that it was accomplished so speedily.  By means of diligence

and activity, we managed to hunt out nearly all the old friends.

One was missing, however; he went to his reward, whatever it was,

two years ago.  But I found out all about him.  His case helped me

to realize how lasting can be the effect of a very trifling occurrence.

When he was an apprentice-blacksmith in our village, and I a schoolboy,

a couple of young Englishmen came to the town and sojourned a while;

and one day they got themselves up in cheap royal finery and did

the Richard III swordfight with maniac energy and prodigious powwow,

in the presence of the village boys.  This blacksmith cub was there,

and the histrionic poison entered his bones.  This vast, lumbering, ignorant,

dull-witted lout was stage-struck, and irrecoverably.  He disappeared,

and presently turned up in St. Louis.  I ran across him there, by and by.

He was standing musing on a street corner, with his left hand on his hip,

the thumb of his right supporting his chin, face bowed and frowning,

slouch hat pulled down over his forehead--imagining himself to be Othello

or some such character, and imagining that the passing crowd marked his

tragic bearing and were awestruck.



I joined him, and tried to get him down out of the clouds,

but did not succeed.  However, he casually informed me, presently,

that he was a member of the Walnut Street theater company--

and he tried to say it with indifference, but the indifference

was thin, and a mighty exultation showed through it.

He said he was cast for a part in Julius Caesar, for that night,

and if I should come I would see him.  IF I should come!

I said I wouldn't miss it if I were dead.



I went away stupefied with astonishment, and saying to myself,

'How strange it is!  WE always thought this fellow a fool;

yet the moment he comes to a great city, where intelligence

and appreciation abound, the talent concealed in this shabby

napkin is at once discovered, and promptly welcomed and honored.'



But I came away from the theater that night disappointed and offended;

for I had had no glimpse of my hero, and his name was not in the bills.

I met him on the street the next morning, and before I could speak, he asked--



'Did you see me?'



'No, you weren't there.'



He looked surprised and disappointed.  He said--



'Yes, I was.  Indeed I was.  I was a Roman soldier.'



'Which one?'



'Why didn't you see them Roman soldiers that stood back there in a rank,

and sometimes marched in procession around the stage?'



'Do you mean the Roman army?--those six sandaled roustabouts

in nightshirts, with tin shields and helmets, that marched around

treading on each other's heels, in charge of a spider-legged

consumptive dressed like themselves? '



'That's it! that's it!  I was one of them Roman soldiers.

I was the next to the last one.  A half a year ago I used to always

be the last one; but I've been promoted.'



Well, they told me that that poor fellow remained a Roman soldier to the last--

a matter of thirty-four years.  Sometimes they cast him for a 'speaking part,'

but not an elaborate one.  He could be trusted to go and say, 'My lord,

the carriage waits,' but if they ventured to add a sentence or two to this,

his memory felt the strain and he was likely to miss fire.  Yet, poor devil,

he had been patiently studying the part of Hamlet for more than thirty years,

and he lived and died in the belief that some day he would be invited

to play it!



And this is what came of that fleeting visit of those young

Englishmen to our village such ages and ages ago!  What noble

horseshoes this man might have made, but for those Englishmen;

and what an inadequate Roman soldier he DID make!



A day or two after we reached St. Louis, I was walking along Fourth

Street when a grizzly-headed man gave a sort of start as he passed me,

then stopped, came back, inspected me narrowly, with a clouding brow,

and finally said with deep asperity--



'Look here, HAVE YOU GOT THAT DRINK YET?'



A maniac, I judged, at first.  But all in a flash I recognized him.

I made an effort to blush that strained every muscle in me,

and answered as sweetly and winningly as ever I knew how--



'Been a little slow, but am just this minute closing in on the place

where they keep it.  Come in and help.'



He softened, and said make it a bottle of champagne and he was agreeable.

He said he had seen my name in the papers, and had put all his affairs

aside and turned out, resolved to find me or die; and make me answer

that question satisfactorily, or kill me; though the most of his late

asperity had been rather counterfeit than otherwise.



This meeting brought back to me the St. Louis riots of about

thirty years ago.  I spent a week there, at that time,

in a boarding-house, and had this young fellow for a neighbor

across the hall.  We saw some of the fightings and killings;

and by and by we went one night to an armory where two

hundred young men had met, upon call, to be armed and go

forth against the rioters, under command of a military man.

We drilled till about ten o'clock at night; then news came

that the mob were in great force in the lower end of the town,

and were sweeping everything before them.  Our column moved at once.

It was a very hot night, and my musket was very heavy.

We marched and marched; and the nearer we approached the seat

of war, the hotter I grew and the thirstier I got.  I was behind

my friend; so, finally, I asked him to hold my musket while I

dropped out and got a drink.  Then I branched off and went home.

I was not feeling any solicitude about him of course,

because I knew he was so well armed, now, that he could take

care of himself without any trouble.  If I had had any doubts

about that, I would have borrowed another musket for him.

I left the city pretty early the next morning, and if this

grizzled man had not happened to encounter my name in the papers

the other day in St. Louis, and felt moved to seek me out,

I should have carried to my grave a heart-torturing uncertainty

as to whether he ever got out of the riots all right or not.

I ought to have inquired, thirty years ago; I know that.

And I would have inquired, if I had had the muskets; but, in the

circumstances, he seemed better fixed to conduct the investigations

than I was.



One Monday, near the time of our visit to St. Louis,

the 'Globe-Democrat' came out with a couple of pages of Sunday

statistics, whereby it appeared that 119,448 St. Louis people

attended the morning and evening church services the day before,

and 23,102 children attended Sunday-school. Thus 142,550 persons,

out of the city's total of 400,000 population, respected the day

religious-wise. I found these statistics, in a condensed form,

in a telegram of the Associated Press, and preserved them.

They made it apparent that St. Louis was in a higher state

of grace than she could have claimed to be in my time.

But now that I canvass the figures narrowly, I suspect

that the telegraph mutilated them.  It cannot be that there

are more than 150,000 Catholics in the town; the other 250,000

must be classified as Protestants.  Out of these 250,000,

according to this questionable telegram, only 26,362 attended

church and Sunday-school, while out of the 150,000 Catholics,

116,188 went to church and Sunday-school.









                               Chapter 52

                             A Burning Brand



ALL at once the thought came into my mind, 'I have not sought

out Mr. Brown.'



Upon that text I desire to depart from the direct line of my subject,

and make a little excursion.  I wish to reveal a secret which I have

carried with me nine years, and which has become burdensome.



Upon a certain occasion, nine years ago, I had said, with strong feeling,

'If ever I see St. Louis again, I will seek out Mr. Brown, the great

grain merchant, and ask of him the privilege of shaking him by the hand.'



The occasion and the circumstances were as follows.

A friend of mine, a clergyman, came one evening and said--



'I have a most remarkable letter here, which I want to read to you,

if I can do it without breaking down.  I must preface it with

some explanations, however.  The letter is written by an ex-thief

and ex-vagabond of the lowest origin and basest rearing, a man

all stained with crime and steeped in ignorance; but, thank God,

with a mine of pure gold hidden away in him, as you shall see.

His letter is written to a burglar named Williams, who is serving

a nine-year term in a certain State prison, for burglary.

Williams was a particularly daring burglar, and plied

that trade during a number of years; but he was caught

at last and jailed, to await trial in a town where he had

broken into a house at night, pistol in hand, and forced

the owner to hand over to him $8,000 in government bonds.

Williams was not a common sort of person, by any means; he was

a graduate of Harvard College, and came of good New England stock.

His father was a clergyman.  While lying in jail, his health

began to fail, and he was threatened with consumption.

This fact, together with the opportunity for reflection afforded

by solitary confinement, had its effect--its natural effect.

He fell into serious thought; his early training asserted itself with

power, and wrought with strong influence upon his mind and heart.

He put his old life behind him, and became an earnest Christian.

Some ladies in the town heard of this, visited him,

and by their encouraging words supported him in his good

resolutions and strengthened him to continue in his new life.

The trial ended in his conviction and sentence to the State

prison for the term of nine years, as I have before said.

In the prison he became acquainted with the poor wretch

referred to in the beginning of my talk, Jack Hunt,

the writer of the letter which I am going to read.

You will see that the acquaintanceship bore fruit for Hunt.

When Hunt's time was out, he wandered to St. Louis;

and from that place he wrote his letter to Williams.

The letter got no further than the office of the prison warden,

of course; prisoners are not often allowed to receive letters

from outside.  The prison authorities read this letter,

but did not destroy it.  They had not the heart to do it.

They read it to several persons, and eventually it fell

into the hands of those ladies of whom I spoke a while ago.

The other day I came across an old friend of mine--

a clergyman--who had seen this letter, and was full of it.

The mere remembrance of it so moved him that he could

not talk of it without his voice breaking.  He promised

to get a copy of it for me; and here it is--an exact copy,

with all the imperfections of the original preserved.

It has many slang expressions in it--thieves' argot--but their

meaning has been interlined, in parentheses, by the prison

authorities'--



                                               St. Louis, June 9th 1872.



Mr. W---- friend Charlie if i may call you so:  i no you are surprised

to get a letter from me, but i hope you won't be mad at my writing to you.

i want to tell you my thanks for the way you talked to me when i was

in prison--it has led me to try and be a better man; i guess you thought

i did not cair for what you said, & at the first go off I didn't, but i

noed you was a man who had don big work with good men & want no sucker,

nor want gasing & all the boys knod it.



I used to think at nite what you said, & for it i nocked off swearing months

before my time was up, for i saw it want no good, nohow--the day my time

was up you told me if i would shake the cross (QUIT STEALING) & live on

the square for months, it would be the best job i ever done in my life.

The state agent give me a ticket to here, & on the car i thought more of

what you said to me, but didn't make up my mind.  When we got to Chicago

on the cars from there to here, I pulled off an old woman's leather;

(ROBBED HER OF HER POCKETBOOK) i hadn't no more than got it off when i

wished i hadn't done it, for awhile before that i made up my mind

to be a square bloke, for months on your word, but forgot it when i saw

the leather was a grip (EASY TO GET)--but i kept clos to her & when she

got out of the cars at a way place i said, marm have you lost anything.

& she tumbled (DISCOVERED) her leather was off (GONE)--is this it says i,

giving it to her--well if you aint honest, says she, but i hadn't got

cheak enough to stand that sort of talk, so i left her in a hurry.

When i got here i had $1 and 25 cents left & i didn't get no work for 3

days as i aint strong enough for roust about on a steam bote (FOR A

DECK HAND)--The afternoon of the 3rd day I spent my last 10 cts for moons

(LARGE, ROUND SEA-BISCUIT) & cheese & i felt pretty rough & was thinking

i would have to go on the dipe (PICKING POCKETS) again, when i thought

of what you once said about a fellows calling on the Lord when he was

in hard luck, & i thought i would try it once anyhow, but when i tryed

it i got stuck on the start, & all i could get off wos, Lord give a poor

fellow a chance to square it for 3 months for Christ's sake, amen; & i

kept a thinking, of it over and over as i went along--about an hour after

that i was in 4th St. & this is what happened & is the cause of my being

where i am now & about which i will tell you before i get done writing.

As i was walking along herd a big noise & saw a horse running away with a

carriage with 2 children in it, & I grabed up a peace of box cover from

the side walk & run in the middle of the street, & when the horse came up i

smashed him over the head as hard as i could drive--the bord split to peces

& the horse checked up a little & I grabbed the reigns & pulled his head

down until he stopped--the gentleman what owned him came running up & soon

as he saw the children were all rite, he shook hands with me and gave

me a $50 green back, & my asking the Lord to help me come into my head,

& i was so thunderstruck i couldn't drop the reigns nor say nothing--

he saw something was up, & coming back to me said, my boy are you hurt?

& the thought come into my head just then to ask him for work; & i asked

him to take back the bill and give me a job--says he, jump in here &

lets talk about it, but keep the money--he asked me if i could take care

of horses & i said yes, for i used to hang round livery stables & often

would help clean & drive horses, he told me he wanted a man for that work,

& would give me $16 a month & bord me.  You bet i took that chance at once.

that nite in my little room over the stable i sat a long time thinking

over my past life & of what had just happened & i just got down on

my nees & thanked the Lord for the job & to help me to square it,

& to bless you for putting me up to it, & the next morning i done it

again & got me some new togs (CLOTHES) & a bible for i made up my mind

after what the Lord had done for me i would read the bible every nite

and morning, & ask him to keep an eye on me.  When I had been there

about a week Mr. Brown (that's his name) came in my room one nite and saw

me reading the bible--he asked me if i was a Christian & i told him no--

he asked me how it was i read the bible instead of papers & books--

Well Charlie i thought i had better give him a square deal in the start,

so i told him all about my being in prison & about you, & how i had almost

done give up looking for work & how the Lord got me the job when I asked him;

& the only way i had to pay him back was to read the bible & square it,

& i asked him to give me a chance for 3 months--he talked to me like a father

for a long time, & told me i could stay & then i felt better than ever

i had done in my life, for i had given Mr. Brown a fair start with me &

now i didn't fear no one giving me a back cap (EXPOSING HIS PAST LIFE)

& running me off the job--the next morning he called me into the library

& gave me another square talk, & advised me to study some every day,

& he would help me one or 2 hours every nite, & he gave me a Arithmetic,

a spelling book, a Geography & a writing book, & he hers me every nite--

he lets me come into the house to prayers every morning, & got me put in a

bible class in the Sunday School which i likes very much for it helps me

to understand my bible better.



Now, Charlie the 3 months on the square are up 2 months ago,

& as you said, it is the best job i ever did in my life,

& i commenced another of the same sort right away, only it

is to God helping me to last a lifetime Charlie--i wrote

this letter to tell you I do think God has forgiven my sins

& herd your prayers, for you told me you should pray for me--

i no i love to read his word & tell him all my troubles &

he helps me i know for i have plenty of chances to steal

but i don't feel to as i once did & now i take more pleasure

in going to church than to the theater & that wasnt so once--

our minister and others often talk with me & a month ago

they wanted me to join the church, but I said no, not now,

i may be mistaken in my feelings, i will wait awhile,

but now i feel that God has called me & on the first Sunday

in July i will join the church--dear friend i wish i could

write to you as i feel, but i cant do it yet--you no i learned

to read and write while prisons & i aint got well enough along

to write as i would talk; i no i aint spelled all the words rite

in this & lots of other mistakes but you will excuse it i no,

for you no i was brought up in a poor house until i run away,

& that i never new who my father and mother was & i dont

no my right name, & i hope you wont be mad at me, but i have

as much rite to one name as another & i have taken your name,

for you wont use it when you get out i no, & you are the man

i think most of in the world; so i hope you wont be mad--

I am doing well, i put $10 a month in bank with $25 of the $50--

if you ever want any or all of it let me know, & it is yours.

i wish you would let me send you some now.  I send you with this

a receipt for a year of Littles Living Age, i didn't know

what you would like & i told Mr. Brown & he said he thought you

would like it--i wish i was nere you so i could send you chuck

(REFRESHMENTS) on holidays; it would spoil this weather

from here, but i will send you a box next thanksgiving any way--

next week Mr. Brown takes me into his store as lite

porter & will advance me as soon as i know a little more--

he keeps a big granary store, wholesale--i forgot to tell

you of my mission school, sunday school class--the school

is in the sunday afternoon, i went out two sunday afternoons,

and picked up seven kids (LITTLE BOYS) & got them to come in.

two of them new as much as i did & i had them put in a class

where they could learn something.  i dont no much myself,

but as these kids cant read i get on nicely with them.

i make sure of them by going after them every Sunday

hour before school time, I also got 4 girls to come.

tell Mack and Harry about me, if they will come out here

when their time is up i will get them jobs at once.

i hope you will excuse this long letter & all mistakes,

i wish i could see you for i cant write as i would talk--

i hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good--

i was afraid when you was bleeding you would die--

give my respects to all the boys and tell them how i am doing--

i am doing well and every one here treats me as kind as they can--

Mr. Brown is going to write to you sometime--i hope some day

you will write to me, this letter is from your very true

friend



                                                              C----W----



                                              who you know as Jack Hunt.



I send you Mr. Brown's card.  Send my letter to him.



Here was true eloquence; irresistible eloquence;

and without a single grace or ornament to help it out.

I have seldom been so deeply stirred by any piece of writing.

The reader of it halted, all the way through, on a lame and broken voice;

yet he had tried to fortify his feelings by several private

readings of the letter before venturing into company with it.

He was practising upon me to see if there was any hope of his

being able to read the document to his prayer-meeting with

anything like a decent command over his feelings.  The result

was not promising.  However, he determined to risk it; and did.

He got through tolerably well; but his audience broke down early,

and stayed in that condition to the end.



The fame of the letter spread through the town.  A brother

minister came and borrowed the manuscript, put it bodily into

a sermon, preached the sermon to twelve hundred people on a

Sunday morning, and the letter drowned them in their own tears.

Then my friend put it into a sermon and went before his Sunday

morning congregation with it.  It scored another triumph.

The house wept as one individual.



My friend went on summer vacation up into the fishing regions

of our northern British neighbors, and carried this sermon

with him, since he might possibly chance to need a sermon.

He was asked to preach, one day.  The little church was full.

Among the people present were the late Dr. J. G. Holland,

the late Mr. Seymour of the 'New York Times,' Mr. Page,

the philanthropist and temperance advocate, and, I think,

Senator Frye, of Maine.  The marvelous letter did its wonted work;

all the people were moved, all the people wept; the tears

flowed in a steady stream down Dr. Holland's cheeks, and nearly

the same can be said with regard to all who were there.

Mr. Page was so full of enthusiasm over the letter that he said

he would not rest until he made pilgrimage to that prison,

and had speech with the man who had been able to inspire a

fellow-unfortunate to write so priceless a tract.



Ah, that unlucky Page!--and another man.  If they had only been in Jericho,

that letter would have rung through the world and stirred all the hearts of

all the nations for a thousand years to come, and nobody might ever have found

out that it was the confoundedest, brazenest, ingeniousest piece of fraud

and humbuggery that was ever concocted to fool poor confiding mortals with!



The letter was a pure swindle, and that is the truth.

And take it by and large, it was without a compeer among swindles.

It was perfect, it was rounded, symmetrical, complete, colossal!



The reader learns it at this point; but we didn't learn it

till some miles and weeks beyond this stage of the affair.

My friend came back from the woods, and he and other clergymen

and lay missionaries began once more to inundate audiences

with their tears and the tears of said audiences; I begged hard

for permission to print the letter in a magazine and tell the watery

story of its triumphs; numbers of people got copies of the letter,

with permission to circulate them in writing, but not in print;

copies were sent to the Sandwich Islands and other far regions.



Charles Dudley Warner was at church, one day, when the worn letter was read

and wept over.  At the church door, afterward, he dropped a peculiarly cold

iceberg down the clergyman's back with the question--



'Do you know that letter to be genuine?'



It was the first suspicion that had ever been voiced;

but it had that sickening effect which first-uttered suspicions

against one's idol always have.  Some talk followed--



'Why--what should make you suspect that it isn't genuine?'



'Nothing that I know of, except that it is too neat, and compact, and fluent,

and nicely put together for an ignorant person, an unpractised hand.

I think it was done by an educated man.'



The literary artist had detected the literary machinery.

If you will look at the letter now, you will detect it yourself--

it is observable in every line.



Straightway the clergyman went off, with this seed of suspicion

sprouting in him, and wrote to a minister residing in that town

where Williams had been jailed and converted; asked for light;

and also asked if a person in the literary line (meaning me)

might be allowed to print the letter and tell its history.

He presently received this answer--



Rev. -----



MY DEAR FRIEND,--In regard to that 'convict's letter' there can be

no doubt as to its genuineness.  'Williams,' to whom it was written,

lay in our jail and professed to have been converted, and Rev. Mr.----,

the chaplain, had great faith in the genuineness of the change--

as much as one can have in any such case.



The letter was sent to one of our ladies, who is a Sunday-school teacher,--

sent either by Williams himself, or the chaplain of the State's

prison, probably.  She has been greatly annoyed in having so much publicity,

lest it might seem a breach of confidence, or be an injury to Williams.

In regard to its publication, I can give no permission; though if the names

and places were omitted, and especially if sent out of the country,

I think you might take the responsibility and do it.



It is a wonderful letter, which no Christian genius, much less

one unsanctified, could ever have written.  As showing the work

of grace in a human heart, and in a very degraded and wicked one,

it proves its own origin and reproves our weak faith in its power

to cope with any form of wickedness.



'Mr. Brown' of St. Louis, some one said, was a Hartford man.

Do all whom you send from Hartford serve their Master as well?



P.S.--Williams is still in the State's prison, serving out a

long sentence--of nine years, I think.  He has been sick and threatened

with consumption, but I have not inquired after him lately.

This lady that I speak of corresponds with him, I presume,

and will be quite sure to look after him.



This letter arrived a few days after it was written--and up went

Mr. Williams's stock again.  Mr. Warner's low-down suspicion

was laid in the cold, cold grave, where it apparently belonged.

It was a suspicion based upon mere internal evidence, anyway;

and when you come to internal evidence, it's a big field and a game

that two can play at:  as witness this other internal evidence,

discovered by the writer of the note above quoted, that 'it

is a wonderful letter--which no Christian genius, much less

one unsanctified, could ever have written.'



I had permission now to print--provided I suppressed names

and places and sent my narrative out of the country.

So I chose an Australian magazine for vehicle, as being far

enough out of the country, and set myself to work on my article.

And the ministers set the pumps going again, with the letter to

work the handles.



But meantime Brother Page had been agitating.

He had not visited the penitentiary, but he had sent a copy

of the illustrious letter to the chaplain of that institution,

and accompanied it with--apparently inquiries.  He got an answer,

dated four days later than that other Brother's reassuring epistle;

and before my article was complete, it wandered into my hands.

The original is before me, now, and I here append it.

It is pretty well loaded with internal evidence of the most

solid description--



                       STATE'S PRISON, CHAPLAIN'S OFFICE, July 11, 1873.



DEAR BRO.  PAGE,--Herewith please find the letter kindly loaned me.

I am afraid its genuineness cannot be established.

It purports to be addressed to some prisoner here.  No such letter

ever came to a prisoner here.  All letters received are carefully

read by officers of the prison before they go into the hands

of the convicts, and any such letter could not be forgotten.

Again, Charles Williams is not a Christian man, but a dissolute,

cunning prodigal, whose father is a minister of the gospel.

His name is an assumed one.  I am glad to have made your acquaintance.

I am preparing a lecture upon life seen through prison bars,

and should like to deliver the same in your vicinity.



And so ended that little drama.  My poor article went into the fire;

for whereas the materials for it were now more abundant and

infinitely richer than they had previously been, there were parties

all around me, who, although longing for the publication before,

were a unit for suppression at this stage and complexion of the game.

They said:  'Wait--the wound is too fresh, yet.'  All the copies

of the famous letter except mine disappeared suddenly; and from that

time onward, the aforetime same old drought set in in the churches.

As a rule, the town was on a spacious grin for a while, but there

were places in it where the grin did not appear, and where it was

dangerous to refer to the ex-convict's letter.



A word of explanation.  'Jack Hunt,' the professed writer of the letter,

was an imaginary person.  The burglar Williams--Harvard graduate,

son of a minister--wrote the letter himself, to himself:  got it smuggled

out of the prison; got it conveyed to persons who had supported and

encouraged him in his conversion--where he knew two things would happen:

the genuineness of the letter would not be doubted or inquired into;

and the nub of it would be noticed, and would have valuable effect--

the effect, indeed, of starting a movement to get Mr. Williams pardoned

out of prison.



That 'nub' is so ingeniously, so casually, flung in, and immediately

left there in the tail of the letter, undwelt upon, that an indifferent

reader would never suspect that it was the heart and core of the epistle,

if he even took note of it at all, This is the 'nub'--



'i hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good--I WAS AFRAID

WHEN YOU WAS BLEEDING YOU WOULD DIE--give my respects,' etc.



That is all there is of it--simply touch and go--no dwelling upon it.

Nevertheless it was intended for an eye that would be swift to see it;

and it was meant to move a kind heart to try to effect the liberation of a

poor reformed and purified fellow lying in the fell grip of consumption.



When I for the first time heard that letter read, nine years ago,

I felt that it was the most remarkable one I had ever encountered.

And it so warmed me toward Mr. Brown of St. Louis that I said that if ever

I visited that city again, I would seek out that excellent man and kiss

the hem of his garment if it was a new one.  Well, I visited St. Louis,

but I did not hunt for Mr. Brown; for, alas! the investigations

of long ago had proved that the benevolent Brown, like 'Jack Hunt,'

was not a real person, but a sheer invention of that gifted rascal,

Williams--burglar, Harvard graduate, son of a clergyman.









                               Chapter 53

                            My Boyhood's Home



WE took passage in one of the fast boats of the St. Louis and St. Paul

Packet Company, and started up the river.



When I, as a boy, first saw the mouth of the Missouri River, it was twenty-two

or twenty-three miles above St. Louis, according to the estimate of pilots;

the wear and tear of the banks have moved it down eight miles since then;

and the pilots say that within five years the river will cut through and

move the mouth down five miles more, which will bring it within ten miles

of St. Louis.



About nightfall we passed the large and flourishing town

of Alton, Illinois; and before daylight next morning the town

of Louisiana, Missouri, a sleepy village in my day, but a brisk

railway center now; however, all the towns out there are

railway centers now.  I could not clearly recognize the place.

This seemed odd to me, for when I retired from the rebel army

in '61 I retired upon Louisiana in good order; at least in good

enough order for a person who had not yet learned how to retreat

according to the rules of war, and had to trust to native genius.

It seemed to me that for a first attempt at a retreat it was

not badly done.  I had done no advancing in all that campaign

that was at all equal to it.



There was a railway bridge across the river here well sprinkled

with glowing lights, and a very beautiful sight it was.



At seven in the morning we reached Hannibal, Missouri, where my boyhood

was spent.  I had had a glimpse of it fifteen years ago, and another glimpse

six years earlier, but both were so brief that they hardly counted.

The only notion of the town that remained in my mind was the memory

of it as I had known it when I first quitted it twenty-nine years ago.

That picture of it was still as clear and vivid to me as a photograph.

I stepped ashore with the feeling of one who returns out of a

dead-and-gone generation.  I had a sort of realizing sense of what

the Bastille prisoners must have felt when they used to come out

and look upon Paris after years of captivity, and note how curiously

the familiar and the strange were mixed together before them.

I saw the new houses--saw them plainly enough--but they did not

affect the older picture in my mind, for through their solid bricks

and mortar I saw the vanished houses, which had formerly stood there,

with perfect distinctness.



It was Sunday morning, and everybody was abed yet.  So I passed

through the vacant streets, still seeing the town as it was,

and not as it is, and recognizing and metaphorically shaking

hands with a hundred familiar objects which no longer exist;

and finally climbed Holiday's Hill to get a comprehensive view.

The whole town lay spread out below me then, and I could mark and fix

every locality, every detail.  Naturally, I was a good deal moved.

I said, 'Many of the people I once knew in this tranquil refuge of my

childhood are now in heaven; some, I trust, are in the other place.'

The things about me and before me made me feel like a boy again--

convinced me that I was a boy again, and that I had simply been

dreaming an unusually long dream; but my reflections spoiled all that;

for they forced me to say, 'I see fifty old houses down yonder,

into each of which I could enter and find either a man or a woman

who was a baby or unborn when I noticed those houses last, or a

grandmother who was a plump young bride at that time.'



From this vantage ground the extensive view up and down the river,

and wide over the wooded expanses of Illinois, is very beautiful--

one of the most beautiful on the Mississippi, I think; which is

a hazardous remark to make, for the eight hundred miles of river

between St. Louis and St. Paul afford an unbroken succession

of lovely pictures.  It may be that my affection for the one in

question biases my judgment in its favor; I cannot say as to that.

No matter, it was satisfyingly beautiful to me, and it had this

advantage over all the other friends whom I was about to greet again:

it had suffered no change; it was as young and fresh and comely and gracious

as ever it had been; whereas, the faces of the others would be old,

and scarred with the campaigns of life, and marked with their griefs

and defeats, and would give me no upliftings of spirit.



An old gentleman, out on an early morning walk, came along, and we

discussed the weather, and then drifted into other matters.  I could not

remember his face.  He said he had been living here twenty-eight years.

So he had come after my time, and I had never seen him before.

I asked him various questions; first about a mate of mine in Sunday school--

what became of him?



'He graduated with honor in an Eastern college, wandered off into

the world somewhere, succeeded at nothing, passed out of knowledge

and memory years ago, and is supposed to have gone to the dogs.'



'He was bright, and promised well when he was a boy.'



'Yes, but the thing that happened is what became of it all.'



I asked after another lad, altogether the brightest in our village

school when I was a boy.



'He, too, was graduated with honors, from an Eastern college;

but life whipped him in every battle, straight along, and he died

in one of the Territories, years ago, a defeated man.'



I asked after another of the bright boys.



'He is a success, always has been, always will be, I think.'



I inquired after a young fellow who came to the town to study

for one of the professions when I was a boy.



'He went at something else before he got through--went from medicine

to law, or from law to medicine--then to some other new thing;

went away for a year, came back with a young wife; fell to drinking,

then to gambling behind the door; finally took his wife and two young

children to her father's, and went off to Mexico; went from bad

to worse, and finally died there, without a cent to buy a shroud,

and without a friend to attend the funeral.'



'Pity, for he was the best-natured, and most cheery and hopeful

young fellow that ever was.'



I named another boy.



'Oh, he is all right.  Lives here yet; has a wife and children,

and is prospering.'



Same verdict concerning other boys.



I named three school-girls.



'The first two live here, are married and have children;

the other is long ago dead--never married.'



I named, with emotion, one of my early sweethearts.



'She is all right.  Been married three times; buried two husbands,

divorced from the third, and I hear she is getting ready to marry

an old fellow out in Colorado somewhere.  She's got children scattered

around here and there, most everywheres.'



The answer to several other inquiries was brief and simple--



'Killed in the war.'



I named another boy.



'Well, now, his case is curious!  There wasn't a human being

in this town but knew that that boy was a perfect chucklehead;

perfect dummy; just a stupid ass, as you may say.

Everybody knew it, and everybody said it.  Well, if that very

boy isn't the first lawyer in the State of Missouri to-day,

I'm a Democrat!'



'Is that so?'



'It's actually so.  I'm telling you the truth.'



'How do you account for it?'



'Account for it?  There ain't any accounting for it,

except that if you send a damned fool to St. Louis, and you

don't tell them he's a damned fool they'll never find it out.

There's one thing sure--if I had a damned fool I should know

what to do with him:  ship him to St. Louis--it's the noblest

market in the world for that kind of property.  Well, when you

come to look at it all around, and chew at it and think it over,

don't it just bang anything you ever heard of?'



'Well, yes, it does seem to.  But don't you think maybe it

was the Hannibal people who were mistaken about the boy,

and not the St. Louis people'



'Oh, nonsense!  The people here have known him from the very cradle--

they knew him a hundred times better than the St. Louis idiots could

have known him.  No, if you have got any damned fools that you want

to realize on, take my advice--send them to St. Louis.'



I mentioned a great number of people whom I had formerly known.

Some were dead, some were gone away, some had prospered,

some had come to naught; but as regarded a dozen or so of the lot,

the answer was comforting:



'Prosperous--live here yet--town littered with their children.'



I asked about Miss ----



Died in the insane asylum three or four years ago--never was out of it

from the time she went in; and was always suffering, too; never got

a shred of her mind back.'



If he spoke the truth, here was a heavy tragedy, indeed.

Thirty-six years in a madhouse, that some young fools might have some fun!

I was a small boy, at the time; and I saw those giddy young ladies come

tiptoeing into the room where Miss ---- sat reading at midnight by a lamp.

The girl at the head of the file wore a shroud and a doughface,

she crept behind the victim, touched her on the shoulder,

and she looked up and screamed, and then fell into convulsions.

She did not recover from the fright, but went mad.  In these days it

seems incredible that people believed in ghosts so short a time ago.

But they did.



After asking after such other folk as I could call to mind,

I finally inquired about MYSELF:



'Oh, he succeeded well enough--another case of damned fool.

If they'd sent him to St. Louis, he'd have succeeded sooner.'



It was with much satisfaction that I recognized the wisdom

of having told this candid gentleman, in the beginning,

that my name was Smith.









                               Chapter 54

                            Past and Present



Being left to myself, up there, I went on picking out old houses in the

distant town, and calling back their former inmates out of the moldy past.

Among them I presently recognized the house of the father of Lem Hackett

(fictitious name). It carried me back more than a generation in a moment,

and landed me in the midst of a time when the happenings of life were not

the natural and logical results of great general laws, but of special orders,

and were freighted with very precise and distinct purposes--partly punitive

in intent, partly admonitory; and usually local in application.



When I was a small boy, Lem Hackett was drowned--on a Sunday.

He fell out of an empty flat-boat, where he was playing.

Being loaded with sin, he went to the bottom like an anvil.

He was the only boy in the village who slept that night.

We others all lay awake, repenting.  We had not needed the information,

delivered from the pulpit that evening, that Lem's was a case

of special judgment--we knew that, already.  There was a ferocious

thunder-storm, that night, and it raged continuously until near dawn.

The winds blew, the windows rattled, the rain swept along the roof

in pelting sheets, and at the briefest of intervals the inky blackness

of the night vanished, the houses over the way glared out white

and blinding for a quivering instant, then the solid darkness shut

down again and a splitting peal of thunder followed, which seemed

to rend everything in the neighborhood to shreds and splinters.

I sat up in bed quaking and shuddering, waiting for the destruction

of the world, and expecting it.  To me there was nothing strange

or incongruous in heaven's making such an uproar about Lem Hackett.

Apparently it was the right and proper thing to do.

Not a doubt entered my mind that all the angels were grouped together,

discussing this boy's case and observing the awful bombardment

of our beggarly little village with satisfaction and approval.

There was one thing which disturbed me in the most serious way;

that was the thought that this centering of the celestial interest

on our village could not fail to attract the attention of the observers

to people among us who might otherwise have escaped notice for years.

I felt that I was not only one of those people, but the very one most

likely to be discovered.  That discovery could have but one result:

I should be in the fire with Lem before the chill of the river

had been fairly warmed out of him.  I knew that this would be

only just and fair.  I was increasing the chances against myself

all the time, by feeling a secret bitterness against Lem for having

attracted this fatal attention to me, but I could not help it--

this sinful thought persisted in infesting my breast in spite of me.

Every time the lightning glared I caught my breath, and judged I was gone.

In my terror and misery, I meanly began to suggest other boys,

and mention acts of theirs which were wickeder than mine, and peculiarly

needed punishment--and I tried to pretend to myself that I was simply

doing this in a casual way, and without intent to divert the heavenly

attention to them for the purpose of getting rid of it myself.

With deep sagacity I put these mentions into the form of sorrowing

recollections and left-handed sham-supplications that the sins of those

boys might be allowed to pass unnoticed--'Possibly they may repent.'

'It is true that Jim Smith broke a window and lied about it--

but maybe he did not mean any harm.  And although Tom Holmes

says more bad words than any other boy in the village,

he probably intends to repent--though he has never said he would.

And whilst it is a fact that John Jones did fish a little

on Sunday, once, he didn't really catch anything but only just one

small useless mud-cat; and maybe that wouldn't have been so awful

if he had thrown it back--as he says he did, but he didn't. Pity

but they would repent of these dreadful things--and maybe they will

yet.'



But while I was shamefully trying to draw attention to these poor chaps--

who were doubtless directing the celestial attention to me at the same moment,

though I never once suspected that--I had heedlessly left my candle burning.

It was not a time to neglect even trifling precautions.  There was no occasion

to add anything to the facilities for attracting notice to me--so I put

the light out.



It was a long night to me, and perhaps the most distressful one I ever spent.

I endured agonies of remorse for sins which I knew I had committed,

and for others which I was not certain about, yet was sure that they had

been set down against me in a book by an angel who was wiser than I and did

not trust such important matters to memory.  It struck me, by and by,

that I had been making a most foolish and calamitous mistake, in one respect:

doubtless I had not only made my own destruction sure by directing attention

to those other boys, but had already accomplished theirs!--Doubtless the

lightning had stretched them all dead in their beds by this time!

The anguish and the fright which this thought gave me made my previous

sufferings seem trifling by comparison.



Things had become truly serious.  I resolved to turn over

a new leaf instantly; I also resolved to connect myself

with the church the next day, if I survived to see its

sun appear.  I resolved to cease from sin in all its forms,

and to lead a high and blameless life for ever after.

I would be punctual at church and Sunday-school; visit the sick;

carry baskets of victuals to the poor (simply to fulfil

the regulation conditions, although I knew we had none among us

so poor but they would smash the basket over my head for my pains);

I would instruct other boys in right ways, and take the resulting

trouncings meekly; I would subsist entirely on tracts;

I would invade the rum shop and warn the drunkard--and finally,

if I escaped the fate of those who early become too good to live,

I would go for a missionary.



The storm subsided toward daybreak, and I dozed gradually to sleep

with a sense of obligation to Lem Hackett for going to eternal suffering

in that abrupt way, and thus preventing a far more dreadful disaster--

my own loss.



But when I rose refreshed, by and by, and found that those other boys

were still alive, I had a dim sense that perhaps the whole thing

was a false alarm; that the entire turmoil had been on Lem's account

and nobody's else.  The world looked so bright and safe that there

did not seem to be any real occasion to turn over a new leaf.

I was a little subdued, during that day, and perhaps the next;

after that, my purpose of reforming slowly dropped out of my mind,

and I had a peaceful, comfortable time again, until the next storm.



That storm came about three weeks later; and it was the most

unaccountable one, to me, that I had ever experienced;

for on the afternoon of that day, 'Dutchy' was drowned.

Dutchy belonged to our Sunday-school. He was a German

lad who did not know enough to come in out of the rain;

but he was exasperatingly good, and had a prodigious memory.

One Sunday he made himself the envy of all the youth and the talk

of all the admiring village, by reciting three thousand verses of

Scripture without missing a word; then he went off the very next day

and got drowned.



Circumstances gave to his death a peculiar impressiveness.

We were all bathing in a muddy creek which had a deep hole

in it, and in this hole the coopers had sunk a pile of green

hickory hoop poles to soak, some twelve feet under water.

We were diving and 'seeing who could stay under longest.'

We managed to remain down by holding on to the hoop poles.

Dutchy made such a poor success of it that he was hailed with

laughter and derision every time his head appeared above water.

At last he seemed hurt with the taunts, and begged us

to stand still on the bank and be fair with him and give him

an honest count--'be friendly and kind just this once, and not

miscount for the sake of having the fun of laughing at him.'

Treacherous winks were exchanged, and all said 'All right, Dutchy--

go ahead, we'll play fair.'



Dutchy plunged in, but the boys, instead of beginning to count,

followed the lead of one of their number and scampered

to a range of blackberry bushes close by and hid behind it.

They imagined Dutchy's humiliation, when he should rise after

a superhuman effort and find the place silent and vacant,

nobody there to applaud.  They were 'so full of laugh' with the idea,

that they were continually exploding into muffled cackles.

Time swept on, and presently one who was peeping through the briers,

said, with surprise--



'Why, he hasn't come up, yet!'



The laughing stopped.



'Boys, it 's a splendid dive,' said one.



'Never mind that,' said another, 'the joke on him is all the better for it.'



There was a remark or two more, and then a pause.

Talking ceased, and all began to peer through the vines.

Before long, the boys' faces began to look uneasy, then anxious,

then terrified.  Still there was no movement of the placid water.

Hearts began to beat fast, and faces to turn pale.

We all glided out, silently, and stood on the bank, our horrified

eyes wandering back and forth from each other's countenances

to the water.



'Somebody must go down and see!'



Yes, that was plain; but nobody wanted that grisly task.



'Draw straws!'



So we did--with hands which shook so, that we hardly knew

what we were about.  The lot fell to me, and I went down.

The water was so muddy I could not see anything, but I felt around

among the hoop poles, and presently grasped a limp wrist which

gave me no response--and if it had I should not have known it,

I let it go with such a frightened suddenness.



The boy had been caught among the hoop poles and entangled

there, helplessly.  I fled to the surface and told the awful news.

Some of us knew that if the boy were dragged out at once he might

possibly be resuscitated, but we never thought of that.  We did not

think of anything; we did not know what to do, so we did nothing--

except that the smaller lads cried, piteously, and we all struggled

frantically into our clothes, putting on anybody's that came handy,

and getting them wrong-side-out and upside-down, as a rule.

Then we scurried away and gave the alarm, but none of us went back to see

the end of the tragedy.  We had a more important thing to attend to:

we all flew home, and lost not a moment in getting ready to lead

a better life.



The night presently closed down.  Then came on that tremendous

and utterly unaccountable storm.  I was perfectly dazed; I could

not understand it.  It seemed to me that there must be some mistake.

The elements were turned loose, and they rattled and banged and blazed

away in the most blind and frantic manner.  All heart and hope went

out of me, and the dismal thought kept floating through my brain,

'If a boy who knows three thousand verses by heart is not satisfactory,

what chance is there for anybody else?'



Of course I never questioned for a moment that the storm was

on Dutchy's account, or that he or any other inconsequential

animal was worthy of such a majestic demonstration from on high;

the lesson of it was the only thing that troubled me;

for it convinced me that if Dutchy, with all his perfections,

was not a delight, it would be vain for me to turn over a new leaf,

for I must infallibly fall hopelessly short of that boy,

no matter how hard I might try.  Nevertheless I did turn it over--

a highly educated fear compelled me to do that--but succeeding

days of cheerfulness and sunshine came bothering around,

and within a month I had so drifted backward that again I

was as lost and comfortable as ever.



Breakfast time approached while I mused these musings and called

these ancient happenings back to mind; so I got me back into

the present and went down the hill.



On my way through town to the hotel, I saw the house which was

my home when I was a boy.  At present rates, the people who now

occupy it are of no more value than I am; but in my time they

would have been worth not less than five hundred dollars apiece.

They are colored folk.



After breakfast, I went out alone again, intending to hunt up some

of the Sunday-schools and see how this generation of pupils might

compare with their progenitors who had sat with me in those places

and had probably taken me as a model--though I do not remember

as to that now.  By the public square there had been in my day

a shabby little brick church called the 'Old Ship of Zion,'

which I had attended as a Sunday-school scholar; and I found

the locality easily enough, but not the old church; it was gone,

and a trig and rather hilarious new edifice was in its place.

The pupils were better dressed and better looking than were those

of my time; consequently they did not resemble their ancestors;

and consequently there was nothing familiar to me in their faces.

Still, I contemplated them with a deep interest and a yearning wistfulness,

and if I had been a girl I would have cried; for they were the offspring,

and represented, and occupied the places, of boys and girls some

of whom I had loved to love, and some of whom I had loved to hate,

but all of whom were dear to me for the one reason or the other,

so many years gone by--and, Lord, where be they now!



I was mightily stirred, and would have been grateful to be allowed

to remain unmolested and look my fill; but a bald-summited superintendent

who had been a tow-headed Sunday-school mate of mine on that spot

in the early ages, recognized me, and I talked a flutter of wild

nonsense to those children to hide the thoughts which were in me,

and which could not have been spoken without a betrayal of feeling

that would have been recognized as out of character with me.



Making speeches without preparation is no gift of mine;

and I was resolved to shirk any new opportunity, but in

the next and larger Sunday-school I found myself in the rear

of the assemblage; so I was very willing to go on the platform

a moment for the sake of getting a good look at the scholars.

On the spur of the moment I could not recall any of the old idiotic

talks which visitors used to insult me with when I was a pupil there;

and I was sorry for this, since it would have given me time

and excuse to dawdle there and take a long and satisfying look

at what I feel at liberty to say was an array of fresh young

comeliness not matchable in another Sunday-school of the same size.

As I talked merely to get a chance to inspect; and as I strung

out the random rubbish solely to prolong the inspection,

I judged it but decent to confess these low motives,

and I did so.



If the Model Boy was in either of these Sunday-schools, I did not see him.

The Model Boy of my time--we never had but the one--was perfect:

perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in

   filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness; but at bottom he was a

   prig; and as for the contents of his skull, they could have changed

place with the contents of a pie and nobody would have been the worse off

for it but the pie.  This fellow's reproachlessness was a standing

 reproach to every lad in the village. He was the admiration of all the

 mothers, and the detestation of all their sons. I was told what became

   of him, but as it was a disappointment to me, I will not enter into

                     details. He succeeded in life.





                               Chapter 55

                       A Vendetta and Other Things



DURING my three days' stay in the town, I woke up every morning

with the impression that I was a boy--for in my dreams the faces

were all young again, and looked as they had looked in the old times--

but I went to bed a hundred years old, every night--for meantime I

had been seeing those faces as they are now.



Of course I suffered some surprises, along at first,

before I had become adjusted to the changed state of things.

I met young ladies who did not seem to have changed at all;

but they turned out to be the daughters of the young ladies

I had in mind--sometimes their grand-daughters. When you

are told that a stranger of fifty is a grandmother, there is

nothing surprising about it; but if, on the contrary, she is

a person whom you knew as a little girl, it seems impossible.

You say to yourself, 'How can a little girl be a grandmother.'

It takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that while you

have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still,

in that matter.



I noticed that the greatest changes observable were with the women,

not the men.  I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly;

but their wives had grown old.  These were good women; it is very wearing

to be good.



There was a saddler whom I wished to see; but he was gone.

Dead, these many years, they said.  Once or twice a day,

the saddler used to go tearing down the street, putting on his

coat as he went; and then everybody knew a steamboat was coming.

Everybody knew, also, that John Stavely was not expecting anybody

by the boat--or any freight, either; and Stavely must have known

that everybody knew this, still it made no difference to him;

he liked to seem to himself to be expecting a hundred thousand

tons of saddles by this boat, and so he went on all his life,

enjoying being faithfully on hand to receive and receipt

for those saddles, in case by any miracle they should come.

A malicious Quincy paper used always to refer to this town, in derision

as 'Stavely's Landing.'  Stavely was one of my earliest admirations;

I envied him his rush of imaginary business, and the display

he was able to make of it, before strangers, as he went flying

down the street struggling with his fluttering coat.



But there was a carpenter who was my chiefest hero.  He was a mighty liar,

but I did not know that; I believed everything he said.  He was a romantic,

sentimental, melodramatic fraud, and his bearing impressed me with awe.

I vividly remember the first time he took me into his confidence.  He was

planing a board, and every now and then he would pause and heave a deep sigh;

and occasionally mutter broken sentences--confused and not intelligible--

but out of their midst an ejaculation sometimes escaped which made me shiver

and did me good:  one was, 'O God, it is his blood!'  I sat on the tool-chest

and humbly and shudderingly admired him; for I judged he was full of crime.

At last he said in a low voice--



'My little friend, can you keep a secret?'



I eagerly said I could.



'A dark and dreadful one?'



I satisfied him on that point.



'Then I will tell you some passages in my history; for oh,

I MUST relieve my burdened soul, or I shall die! '



He cautioned me once more to be 'as silent as the grave;'

then he told me he was a 'red-handed murderer.'

He put down his plane, held his hands out before him,

contemplated them sadly, and said--



'Look--with these hands I have taken the lives of thirty human beings!'



The effect which this had upon me was an inspiration to him,

and he turned himself loose upon his subject with interest and energy.

He left generalizing, and went into details,--began with his first murder;

described it, told what measures he had taken to avert suspicion;

then passed to his second homicide, his third, his fourth, and so on.

He had always done his murders with a bowie-knife, and he made all my

hairs rise by suddenly snatching it out and showing it to me.



At the end of this first seance I went home with six of his

fearful secrets among my freightage, and found them a great

help to my dreams, which had been sluggish for a while back.

I sought him again and again, on my Saturday holidays; in fact I

spent the summer with him--all of it which was valuable to me.

His fascinations never diminished, for he threw something fresh

and stirring, in the way of horror, into each successive murder.

He always gave names, dates, places--everything.  This by and by enabled

me to note two things:  that he had killed his victims in every

quarter of the globe, and that these victims were always named Lynch.

The destruction of the Lynches went serenely on, Saturday after Saturday,

until the original thirty had multiplied to sixty--and more to be

heard from yet; then my curiosity got the better of my timidity,

and I asked how it happened that these justly punished persons all bore

the same name.



My hero said he had never divulged that dark secret to any

living being; but felt that he could trust me, and therefore

he would lay bare before me the story of his sad and blighted life.

He had loved one 'too fair for earth,' and she had reciprocated

'with all the sweet affection of her pure and noble nature.'

But he had a rival, a 'base hireling' named Archibald Lynch,

who said the girl should be his, or he would 'dye his hands

in her heart's best blood.'  The carpenter, 'innocent and

happy in love's young dream,' gave no weight to the threat,

but led his 'golden-haired darling to the altar,' and there,

the two were made one; there also, just as the minister's hands

were stretched in blessing over their heads, the fell deed was done--

with a knife--and the bride fell a corpse at her husband's feet.

And what did the husband do?  He plucked forth that knife,

and kneeling by the body of his lost one, swore to 'consecrate

his life to the extermination of all the human scum that bear

the hated name of Lynch.'



That was it.  He had been hunting down the Lynches and slaughtering them,

from that day to this--twenty years.  He had always used that same

consecrated knife; with it he had murdered his long array of Lynches,

and with it he had left upon the forehead of each victim a peculiar mark--

a cross, deeply incised.  Said he--



'The cross of the Mysterious Avenger is known in Europe, in America,

in China, in Siam, in the Tropics, in the Polar Seas, in the deserts of Asia,

in all the earth.  Wherever in the uttermost parts of the globe, a Lynch

has penetrated, there has the Mysterious Cross been seen, and those who

have seen it have shuddered and said, "It is his mark, he has been here."

You have heard of the Mysterious Avenger--look upon him, for before you

stands no less a person!  But beware--breathe not a word to any soul.

Be silent, and wait.  Some morning this town will flock aghast to view

a gory corpse; on its brow will be seen the awful sign, and men will tremble

and whisper, "He has been here--it is the Mysterious Avenger's mark!"

You will come here, but I shall have vanished; you will see me no more.'



This ass had been reading the 'Jibbenainosay,' no doubt,

and had had his poor romantic head turned by it; but as I had

not yet seen the book then, I took his inventions for truth,

and did not suspect that he was a plagiarist.



However, we had a Lynch living in the town; and the more I

reflected upon his impending doom, the more I could not sleep.

It seemed my plain duty to save him, and a still plainer

and more important duty to get some sleep for myself,

so at last I ventured to go to Mr. Lynch and tell him

what was about to happen to him--under strict secrecy.

I advised him to 'fly,' and certainly expected him to do it.

But he laughed at me; and he did not stop there; he led me

down to the carpenter's shop, gave the carpenter a jeering and

scornful lecture upon his silly pretensions, slapped his face,

made him get down on his knees and beg--then went off and

left me to contemplate the cheap and pitiful ruin of what,

in my eyes, had so lately been a majestic and incomparable hero.

The carpenter blustered, flourished his knife, and doomed this

Lynch in his usual volcanic style, the size of his fateful

words undiminished; but it was all wasted upon me; he was a hero

to me no longer, but only a poor, foolish, exposed humbug.

I was ashamed of him, and ashamed of myself; I took no further

interest in him, and never went to his shop any more.  He was a

heavy loss to me, for he was the greatest hero I had ever known.

The fellow must have had some talent; for some of his imaginary

murders were so vividly and dramatically described that I remember all

their details yet.



The people of Hannibal are not more changed than is the town.

It is no longer a village; it is a city, with a mayor, and a council,

and water-works, and probably a debt.  It has fifteen thousand people,

is a thriving and energetic place, and is paved like the rest

of the west and south--where a well-paved street and a good sidewalk

are things so seldom seen, that one doubts them when he does see them.

The customary half-dozen railways center in Hannibal now,

and there is a new depot which cost a hundred thousand dollars.

In my time the town had no specialty, and no commercial grandeur;

the daily packet usually landed a passenger and bought a catfish,

and took away another passenger and a hatful of freight; but now a huge

commerce in lumber has grown up and a large miscellaneous commerce

is one of the results.  A deal of money changes hands there now.



Bear Creek--so called, perhaps, because it was always so particularly

bare of bears--is hidden out of sight now, under islands and

continents of piled lumber, and nobody but an expert can find it.

I used to get drowned in it every summer regularly, and be

drained out, and inflated and set going again by some chance enemy;

but not enough of it is unoccupied now to drown a person in.

It was a famous breeder of chills and fever in its day.

I remember one summer when everybody in town had this

disease at once.  Many chimneys were shaken down, and all

the houses were so racked that the town had to be rebuilt.

The chasm or gorge between Lover's Leap and the hill west of it

is supposed by scientists to have been caused by glacial action.

This is a mistake.



There is an interesting cave a mile or two below Hannibal, among the bluffs.

I would have liked to revisit it, but had not time.  In my time the person

who then owned it turned it into a mausoleum for his daughter, aged fourteen.

The body of this poor child was put into a copper cylinder filled with

alcohol, and this was suspended in one of the dismal avenues of the cave.

The top of the cylinder was removable; and it was said to be a common thing

for the baser order of tourists to drag the dead face into view and examine it

and comment upon it.









                               Chapter 56

                            A Question of Law



THE slaughter-house is gone from the mouth of Bear Creek and so is

the small jail (or 'calaboose') which once stood in its neighborhood.

A citizen asked, 'Do you remember when Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard,

was burned to death in the calaboose?'



Observe, now, how history becomes defiled, through lapse of time

and the help of the bad memories of men.  Jimmy Finn was not

burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat,

of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion.

When I say natural death, I mean it was a natural death for

Jimmy Finn to die.  The calaboose victim was not a citizen;

he was a poor stranger, a harmless whiskey-sodden tramp.

I know more about his case than anybody else; I knew too much of it,

in that bygone day, to relish speaking of it.  That tramp was wandering

about the streets one chilly evening, with a pipe in his mouth,

and begging for a match; he got neither matches nor courtesy;

on the contrary, a troop of bad little boys followed him

around and amused themselves with nagging and annoying him.

I assisted; but at last, some appeal which the wayfarer made

for forbearance, accompanying it with a pathetic reference to his

forlorn and friendless condition, touched such sense of shame

and remnant of right feeling as were left in me, and I went away

and got him some matches, and then hied me home and to bed,

heavily weighted as to conscience, and unbuoyant in spirit.

An hour or two afterward, the man was arrested and locked up

in the calaboose by the marshal--large name for a constable,

but that was his title.  At two in the morning, the church bells rang

for fire, and everybody turned out, of course--I with the rest.

The tramp had used his matches disastrously:  he had set his straw

bed on fire, and the oaken sheathing of the room had caught.

When I reached the ground, two hundred men, women, and children

stood massed together, transfixed with horror, and staring

at the grated windows of the jail.  Behind the iron bars,

and tugging frantically at them, and screaming for help,

stood the tramp; he seemed like a black object set against

a sun, so white and intense was the light at his back.

That marshal could not be found, and he had the only key.

A battering-ram was quickly improvised, and the thunder of its

blows upon the door had so encouraging a sound that the spectators

broke into wild cheering, and believed the merciful battle won.

But it was not so.  The timbers were too strong; they did not yield.

It was said that the man's death-grip still held fast to the bars

after he was dead; and that in this position the fires wrapped him

about and consumed him.  As to this, I do not know.  What was seen

after I recognized the face that was pleading through the bars

was seen by others, not by me.



I saw that face, so situated, every night for a long time afterward;

and I believed myself as guilty of the man's death as if I had given

him the matches purposely that he might burn himself up with them.

I had not a doubt that I should be hanged if my connection with

this tragedy were found out.  The happenings and the impressions

of that time are burnt into my memory, and the study of them

entertains me as much now as they themselves distressed me then.

If anybody spoke of that grisly matter, I was all ears in a moment,

and alert to hear what might be said, for I was always dreading

and expecting to find out that I was suspected; and so fine

and so delicate was the perception of my guilty conscience,

that it often detected suspicion in the most purposeless remarks,

and in looks, gestures, glances of the eye which had no significance,

but which sent me shivering away in a panic of fright, just the same.

And how sick it made me when somebody dropped, howsoever carelessly

and barren of intent, the remark that 'murder will out!'

For a boy of ten years, I was carrying a pretty weighty cargo.



All this time I was blessedly forgetting one thing--

the fact that I was an inveterate talker in my sleep.

But one night I awoke and found my bed-mate--my younger brother--

sitting up in bed and contemplating me by the light of the moon.

I said--



'What is the matter?'



'You talk so much I can't sleep.'



I came to a sitting posture in an instant, with my kidneys in my throat

and my hair on end.



'What did I say.  Quick--out with it--what did I say?'



'Nothing much.'



'It's a lie--you know everything.'



'Everything about what?'



'You know well enough.  About THAT.'



'About WHAT?--I don't know what you are talking about.

I think you are sick or crazy or something.  But anyway,

you're awake, and I'll get to sleep while I've got a chance.'



He fell asleep and I lay there in a cold sweat, turning this

new terror over in the whirling chaos which did duty as my mind.

The burden of my thought was, How much did I divulge?

How much does he know?--what a distress is this uncertainty!

But by and by I evolved an idea--I would wake my brother and probe him

with a supposititious case.  I shook him up, and said--



'Suppose a man should come to you drunk--'



'This is foolish--I never get drunk.'



'I don't mean you, idiot--I mean the man.  Suppose a MAN

should come to you drunk, and borrow a knife, or a tomahawk,

or a pistol, and you forgot to tell him it was loaded, and--'



'How could you load a tomahawk?'



'I don't mean the tomahawk, and I didn't say the tomahawk; I said the pistol.

Now don't you keep breaking in that way, because this is serious.

There's been a man killed.'



'What! in this town?'



'Yes, in this town.'



'Well, go on--I won't say a single word.'



'Well, then, suppose you forgot to tell him to be careful with it,

because it was loaded, and he went off and shot himself with that pistol--

fooling with it, you know, and probably doing it by accident, being drunk.

Well, would it be murder?'



'No--suicide.'



'No, no.  I don't mean HIS act, I mean yours:  would you be a murderer

for letting him have that pistol?'



After deep thought came this answer--



'Well, I should think I was guilty of something--maybe murder--

yes, probably murder, but I don't quite know.'



This made me very uncomfortable.  However, it was not a decisive verdict.

I should have to set out the real case--there seemed to be no other way.

But I would do it cautiously, and keep a watch out for suspicious effects.

I said--



'I was supposing a case, but I am coming to the real one now.

Do you know how the man came to be burned up in the calaboose?'



'No.'



'Haven't you the least idea?'



'Not the least.'



'Wish you may die in your tracks if you have?'



'Yes, wish I may die in my tracks.'



'Well, the way of it was this.  The man wanted some matches to light

his pipe.  A boy got him some.  The man set fire to the calaboose

with those very matches, and burnt himself up.'



'Is that so?'



'Yes, it is.  Now, is that boy a murderer, do you think?'



'Let me see.  The man was drunk?'



'Yes, he was drunk.'



'Very drunk?'



'Yes.'



'And the boy knew it?'



'Yes, he knew it.'



There was a long pause.  Then came this heavy verdict--



'If the man was drunk, and the boy knew it, the boy murdered that man.

This is certain.'



Faint, sickening sensations crept along all the fibers of my body,

and I seemed to know how a person feels who hears his death sentence

pronounced from the bench.  I waited to hear what my brother would say next.

I believed I knew what it would be, and I was right.  He said--



'I know the boy.'



I had nothing to say; so I said nothing.  I simply shuddered.

Then he added--



'Yes, before you got half through telling about the thing,

I knew perfectly well who the boy was; it was Ben Coontz! '



I came out of my collapse as one who rises from the dead.

I said, with admiration--



'Why, how in the world did you ever guess it?'



'You told it in your sleep.'



I said to myself, 'How splendid that is!  This is a habit

which must be cultivated.'



My brother rattled innocently on--



'When you were talking in your sleep, you kept mumbling something

about "matches," which I couldn't make anything out of; but just now,

when you began to tell me about the man and the calaboose and the matches,

I remembered that in your sleep you mentioned Ben Coontz two or three times;

so I put this and that together, you see, and right away I knew it was Ben

that burnt that man up.'



I praised his sagacity effusively.  Presently he asked--



'Are you going to give him up to the law?'



'No,' I said; 'I believe that this will be a lesson to him.

I shall keep an eye on him, of course, for that is but right;

but if he stops where he is and reforms, it shall never be said that

I betrayed him.'



'How good you are!'



'Well, I try to be.  It is all a person can do in a world like this.'



And now, my burden being shifted to other shoulders, my terrors

soon faded away.



The day before we left Hannibal, a curious thing fell under my notice--

the surprising spread which longitudinal time undergoes there.

I learned it from one of the most unostentatious of men--the colored

coachman of a friend of mine, who lives three miles from town.

He was to call for me at the Park Hotel at 7.30 P.M., and drive me out.

But he missed it considerably--did not arrive till ten.  He excused

himself by saying--



'De time is mos' an hour en a half slower in de country en

what it is in de town; you'll be in plenty time, boss.

Sometimes we shoves out early for church, Sunday, en fetches up

dah right plum in de middle er de sermon.  Diffunce in de time.

A body can't make no calculations 'bout it.'



I had lost two hours and a half; but I had learned a fact worth four.









                               Chapter 57

                              An Archangel



FROM St. Louis northward there are all the enlivening signs of

the presence of active, energetic, intelligent, prosperous, practical

nineteenth-century populations.  The people don't dream, they work.

The happy result is manifest all around in the substantial outside

aspect of things, and the suggestions of wholesome life and comfort

that everywhere appear.



Quincy is a notable example--a brisk, handsome, well-ordered city;

and now, as formerly, interested in art, letters, and other high things.



But Marion City is an exception.  Marion City has gone backwards

in a most unaccountable way.  This metropolis promised

so well that the projectors tacked 'city' to its name in the

very beginning, with full confidence; but it was bad prophecy.

When I first saw Marion City, thirty-five years ago,

it contained one street, and nearly or quite six houses.

It contains but one house now, and this one, in a state of ruin,

is getting ready to follow the former five into the river.

Doubtless Marion City was too near to Quincy.  It had

another disadvantage:  it was situated in a flat mud bottom,

below high-water mark, whereas Quincy stands high up on the slope

of a hill.



In the beginning Quincy had the aspect and ways of a model New England town:

and these she has yet:  broad, clean streets, trim, neat dwellings

and lawns, fine mansions, stately blocks of commercial buildings.

And there are ample fair-grounds, a well kept park, and many

attractive drives; library, reading-rooms, a couple of colleges,

some handsome and costly churches, and a grand court-house, with grounds

which occupy a square.  The population of the city is thirty thousand.

There are some large factories here, and manufacturing, of many sorts,

is done on a great scale.



La Grange and Canton are growing towns, but I missed Alexandria;

was told it was under water, but would come up to blow in the summer.



Keokuk was easily recognizable.  I lived there in 1857--an extraordinary

year there in real-estate matters.  The 'boom' was something wonderful.

Everybody bought, everybody sold--except widows and preachers;

they always hold on; and when the tide ebbs, they get left.

Anything in the semblance of a town lot, no matter how situated,

was salable, and at a figure which would still have been high if the ground

had been sodded with greenbacks.



The town has a population of fifteen thousand now, and is progressing with

a healthy growth.  It was night, and we could not see details, for which we

were sorry, for Keokuk has the reputation of being a beautiful city.

It was a pleasant one to live in long ago, and doubtless has advanced,

not retrograded, in that respect.



A mighty work which was in progress there in my day is finished now.

This is the canal over the Rapids.  It is eight miles long,

three hundred feet wide, and is in no place less than six feet deep.

Its masonry is of the majestic kind which the War Department

usually deals in, and will endure like a Roman aqueduct.

The work cost four or five millions.



After an hour or two spent with former friends, we started up

the river again.  Keokuk, a long time ago, was an occasional

loafing-place of that erratic genius, Henry Clay Dean.

I believe I never saw him but once; but he was much talked of

when I lived there.  This is what was said of him--



He began life poor and without education.  But he educated himself--

on the curbstones of Keokuk.  He would sit down on a curbstone

with his book, careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerce

and the tramp of the passing crowds, and bury himself in his

studies by the hour, never changing his position except to draw

in his knees now and then to let a dray pass unobstructed;

and when his book was finished, its contents, however abstruse,

had been burnt into his memory, and were his permanent possession.

In this way he acquired a vast hoard of all sorts of learning,

and had it pigeon-holed in his head where he could put his intellectual

hand on it whenever it was wanted.



His clothes differed in no respect from a 'wharf-rat's,' except that

they were raggeder, more ill-assorted and inharmonious (and therefore

more extravagantly picturesque), and several layers dirtier.

Nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice from

the edifice itself.



He was an orator--by nature in the first place, and later by the training

of experience and practice.  When he was out on a canvass, his name was

a lodestone which drew the farmers to his stump from fifty miles around.

His theme was always politics.  He used no notes, for a volcano does

not need notes.  In 1862, a son of Keokuk's late distinguished citizen,

Mr. Claggett, gave me this incident concerning Dean--



The war feeling was running high in Keokuk (in '61), and a great

mass meeting was to be held on a certain day in the new Athenaeum.

A distinguished stranger was to address the house.

After the building had been packed to its utmost capacity with

sweltering folk of both sexes, the stage still remained vacant--

the distinguished stranger had failed to connect.

The crowd grew impatient, and by and by indignant and rebellious.

About this time a distressed manager discovered Dean on a curb-stone,

explained the dilemma to him, took his book away from him,

rushed him into the building the back way, and told him to make

for the stage and save his country.



Presently a sudden silence fell upon the grumbling audience, and everybody's

eyes sought a single point--the wide, empty, carpetless stage.  A figure

appeared there whose aspect was familiar to hardly a dozen persons present.

It was the scarecrow Dean--in foxy shoes, down at the heels; socks of

odd colors, also 'down;' damaged trousers, relics of antiquity, and a world

too short, exposing some inches of naked ankle; an unbuttoned vest,

also too short, and exposing a zone of soiled and wrinkled linen

between it and the waistband; shirt bosom open; long black handkerchief,

wound round and round the neck like a bandage; bob-tailed blue coat,

reaching down to the small of the back, with sleeves which left four

inches of forearm unprotected; small, stiff-brimmed soldier-cap hung on

a corner of the bump of--whichever bump it was.  This figure moved gravely

out upon the stage and, with sedate and measured step, down to the front,

where it paused, and dreamily inspected the house, saying no word.

The silence of surprise held its own for a moment, then was broken by a just

audible ripple of merriment which swept the sea of faces like the wash

of a wave.  The figure remained as before, thoughtfully inspecting.

Another wave started--laughter, this time.  It was followed by another,

then a third--this last one boisterous.



And now the stranger stepped back one pace, took off his soldier-cap,

tossed it into the wing, and began to speak, with deliberation,

nobody listening, everybody laughing and whispering.

The speaker talked on unembarrassed, and presently delivered

a shot which went home, and silence and attention resulted.

He followed it quick and fast, with other telling things; warmed to

his work and began to pour his words out, instead of dripping them;

grew hotter and hotter, and fell to discharging lightnings

and thunder--and now the house began to break into applause,

to which the speaker gave no heed, but went hammering straight on;

unwound his black bandage and cast it away, still thundering;

presently discarded the bob tailed coat and flung it aside,

firing up higher and higher all the time; finally flung the vest

after the coat; and then for an untimed period stood there,

like another Vesuvius, spouting smoke and flame, lava and ashes,

raining pumice-stone and cinders, shaking the moral earth with

intellectual crash upon crash, explosion upon explosion, while the mad

multitude stood upon their feet in a solid body, answering back

with a ceaseless hurricane of cheers, through a thrashing snowstorm

of waving handkerchiefs.



'When Dean came,' said Claggett, 'the people thought

he was an escaped lunatic; but when he went, they thought

he was an escaped archangel.'



Burlington, home of the sparkling Burdette, is another hill city;

and also a beautiful one; unquestionably so; a fine and flourishing city,

with a population of twenty-five thousand, and belted with busy factories

of nearly every imaginable description.  It was a very sober city, too--

for the moment--for a most sobering bill was pending; a bill to forbid

the manufacture, exportation, importation, purchase, sale, borrowing,

lending, stealing, drinking, smelling, or possession, by conquest,

inheritance, intent, accident, or otherwise, in the State of Iowa, of each

and every deleterious beverage known to the human race, except water.

This measure was approved by all the rational people in the State;

but not by the bench of Judges.



Burlington has the progressive modern city's full equipment of devices

for right and intelligent government; including a paid fire department,

a thing which the great city of New Orleans is without, but still employs

that relic of antiquity, the independent system.



In Burlington, as in all these Upper-River towns, one breathes

a go-ahead atmosphere which tastes good in the nostrils.

An opera-house has lately been built there which is in strong

contrast with the shabby dens which usually do duty as theaters

in cities of Burlington's size.



We had not time to go ashore in Muscatine, but had a daylight

view of it from the boat.  I lived there awhile, many years ago,

but the place, now, had a rather unfamiliar look; so I

suppose it has clear outgrown the town which I used to know.

In fact, I know it has; for I remember it as a small place--

which it isn't now.  But I remember it best for a lunatic

who caught me out in the fields, one Sunday, and extracted

a butcher-knife from his boot and proposed to carve me up with it,

unless I acknowledged him to be the only son of the Devil.

I tried to compromise on an acknowledgment that he was the only

member of the family I had met; but that did not satisfy him;

he wouldn't have any half-measures; I must say he was the sole

and only son of the Devil--he whetted his knife on his boot.

It did not seem worth while to make trouble about a little thing

like that; so I swung round to his view of the matter and saved

my skin whole.  Shortly afterward, he went to visit his father;

and as he has not turned up since, I trust he is there yet.



And I remember Muscatine--still more pleasantly--for its summer sunsets.

I have never seen any, on either side of the ocean, that equaled them.

They used the broad smooth river as a canvas, and painted on it every

imaginable dream of color, from the mottled daintinesses and delicacies

of the opal, all the way up, through cumulative intensities, to blinding

purple and crimson conflagrations which were enchanting to the eye,

but sharply tried it at the same time.  All the Upper Mississippi

region has these extraordinary sunsets as a familiar spectacle.

It is the true Sunset Land:  I am sure no other country can show so good

a right to the name.  The sunrises are also said to be exceedingly fine.

I do not know.









                               Chapter 58

                           On the Upper River



THE big towns drop in, thick and fast, now:  and between stretch

processions of thrifty farms, not desolate solitude.  Hour by hour,

the boat plows deeper and deeper into the great and populous North-west;

and with each successive section of it which is revealed,

one's surprise and respect gather emphasis and increase.

Such a people, and such achievements as theirs, compel homage.

This is an independent race who think for themselves, and who are

competent to do it, because they are educated and enlightened;

they read, they keep abreast of the best and newest thought,

they fortify every weak place in their land with a school,

a college, a library, and a newspaper; and they live under law.

Solicitude for the future of a race like this is not in order.



This region is new; so new that it may be said to be still in its babyhood.

By what it has accomplished while still teething, one may forecast

what marvels it will do in the strength of its maturity.  It is so new

that the foreign tourist has not heard of it yet; and has not visited it.

For sixty years, the foreign tourist has steamed up and down the river

between St. Louis and New Orleans, and then gone home and written his book,

believing he had seen all of the river that was worth seeing or that

had anything to see.  In not six of all these books is there mention

of these Upper River towns--for the reason that the five or six tourists

who penetrated this region did it before these towns were projected.

The latest tourist of them all (1878) made the same old regulation trip--

he had not heard that there was anything north of St. Louis.



Yet there was.  There was this amazing region, bristling with great towns,

projected day before yesterday, so to speak, and built next morning.

A score of them number from fifteen hundred to five thousand people.

Then we have Muscatine, ten thousand; Winona, ten thousand; Moline,

ten thousand; Rock Island, twelve thousand; La Crosse, twelve thousand;

Burlington, twenty-five thousand; Dubuque, twenty-five thousand;

Davenport, thirty thousand; St. Paul, fifty-eight thousand, Minneapolis,

sixty thousand and upward.



The foreign tourist has never heard of these; there is no note of them

in his books.  They have sprung up in the night, while he slept.

So new is this region, that I, who am comparatively young,

am yet older than it is.  When I was born, St. Paul had a population

of three persons, Minneapolis had just a third as many.

The then population of Minneapolis died two years ago; and when

he died he had seen himself undergo an increase, in forty years,

of fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine persons.

He had a frog's fertility.



I must explain that the figures set down above, as the population of St. Paul

and Minneapolis, are several months old.  These towns are far larger now.

In fact, I have just seen a newspaper estimate which gives the former

seventy-one thousand, and the latter seventy-eight thousand.

This book will not reach the public for six or seven months yet;

none of the figures will be worth much then.



We had a glimpse of Davenport, which is another beautiful city,

crowning a hill--a phrase which applies to all these towns; for they

are all comely, all well built, clean, orderly, pleasant to the eye,

and cheering to the spirit; and they are all situated upon hills.

Therefore we will give that phrase a rest.  The Indians have a tradition

that Marquette and Joliet camped where Davenport now stands, in 1673.

The next white man who camped there, did it about a hundred and seventy

years later--in 1834.  Davenport has gathered its thirty thousand

people within the past thirty years.  She sends more children to her

schools now, than her whole population numbered twenty-three years ago.

She has the usual Upper River quota of factories, newspapers,

and institutions of learning; she has telephones, local telegraphs,

an electric alarm, and an admirable paid fire department,

consisting of six hook and ladder companies, four steam fire engines,

and thirty churches.  Davenport is the official residence of two bishops--

Episcopal and Catholic.



Opposite Davenport is the flourishing town of Rock Island,

which lies at the foot of the Upper Rapids.  A great railroad

bridge connects the two towns--one of the thirteen which fret

the Mississippi and the pilots, between St. Louis and St. Paul.



The charming island of Rock Island, three miles long and half

a mile wide, belongs to the United States, and the Government has

turned it into a wonderful park, enhancing its natural attractions

by art, and threading its fine forests with many miles of drives.

Near the center of the island one catches glimpses, through the trees,

of ten vast stone four-story buildings, each of which covers an acre

of ground.  These are the Government workshops; for the Rock Island

establishment is a national armory and arsenal.



We move up the river--always through enchanting scenery,

there being no other kind on the Upper Mississippi--

and pass Moline, a center of vast manufacturing industries;

and Clinton and Lyons, great lumber centers; and presently

reach Dubuque, which is situated in a rich mineral region.

The lead mines are very productive, and of wide extent.

Dubuque has a great number of manufacturing establishments; among them

a plow factory which has for customers all Christendom in general.

At least so I was told by an agent of the concern who was on

the boat.  He said--



'You show me any country under the sun where they really know how to plow,

and if I don't show you our mark on the plow they use, I'll eat that plow;

and I won't ask for any Woostershyre sauce to flavor it up with, either.'



All this part of the river is rich in Indian history and traditions.

Black Hawk's was once a puissant name hereabouts; as was Keokuk's,

further down.  A few miles below Dubuque is the Tete de Mort--

Death's-head rock, or bluff--to the top of which the French drove

a band of Indians, in early times, and cooped them up there,

with death for a certainty, and only the manner of it matter

of choice--to starve, or jump off and kill themselves.

Black Hawk adopted the ways of the white people, toward the end

of his life; and when he died he was buried, near Des Moines,

in Christian fashion, modified by Indian custom; that is to say,

clothed in a Christian military uniform, and with a Christian cane

in his hand, but deposited in the grave in a sitting posture.

Formerly, a horse had always been buried with a chief.

The substitution of the cane shows that Black Hawk's haughty nature

was really humbled, and he expected to walk when he got over.



We noticed that above Dubuque the water of the Mississippi was

olive-green--rich and beautiful and semi-transparent, with the sun on it.

Of course the water was nowhere as clear or of as fine a complexion as it

is in some other seasons of the year; for now it was at flood stage,

and therefore dimmed and blurred by the mud manufactured from caving banks.



The majestic bluffs that overlook the river, along through this region,

charm one with the grace and variety of their forms, and the soft

beauty of their adornment.  The steep verdant slope, whose base

is at the water's edge is topped by a lofty rampart of broken,

turreted rocks, which are exquisitely rich and mellow in color--

mainly dark browns and dull greens, but splashed with other tints.

And then you have the shining river, winding here and there and yonder,

its sweep interrupted at intervals by clusters of wooded islands

threaded by silver channels; and you have glimpses of distant villages,

asleep upon capes; and of stealthy rafts slipping along in the shade

of the forest walls; and of white steamers vanishing around remote points.

And it is all as tranquil and reposeful as dreamland, and has nothing

this-worldly about it--nothing to hang a fret or a worry upon.



Until the unholy train comes tearing along--which it presently does,

ripping the sacred solitude to rags and tatters with its devil's

warwhoop and the roar and thunder of its rushing wheels--and straightway

you are back in this world, and with one of its frets ready to hand

for your entertainment:  for you remember that this is the very road

whose stock always goes down after you buy it, and always goes up

again as soon as you sell it.  It makes me shudder to this day,

to remember that I once came near not getting rid of my stock at all.

It must be an awful thing to have a railroad left on your hands.



The locomotive is in sight from the deck of the steamboat almost

the whole way from St. Louis to St. Paul--eight hundred miles.

These railroads have made havoc with the steamboat commerce.

The clerk of our boat was a steamboat clerk before these roads

were built.  In that day the influx of population was so great,

and the freight business so heavy, that the boats were not able

to keep up with the demands made upon their carrying capacity;

consequently the captains were very independent and airy--

pretty 'biggity,' as Uncle Remus would say.  The clerk nut-shelled the

contrast between the former time and the present, thus--



'Boat used to land--captain on hurricane roof--mighty stiff and straight--

iron ramrod for a spine--kid gloves, plug tile, hair parted behind--

man on shore takes off hat and says--



' "Got twenty-eight tons of wheat, cap'n--be great favor if you

can take them."



'Captain says--



' " 'll take two of them"--and don't even condescend to look at him.



'But nowadays the captain takes off his old slouch, and smiles

all the way around to the back of his ears, and gets off a bow

which he hasn't got any ramrod to interfere with, and says--



' "Glad to see you, Smith, glad to see you--you're looking well--

haven't seen you looking so well for years--what you got for us?"



' "Nuth'n", says Smith; and keeps his hat on, and just turns

his back and goes to talking with somebody else.



'Oh, yes, eight years ago, the captain was on top; but it's Smith's turn now.

Eight years ago a boat used to go up the river with every stateroom full,

and people piled five and six deep on the cabin floor; and a solid

deck-load of immigrants and harvesters down below, into the bargain.

To get a first-class stateroom, you'd got to prove sixteen quarterings

of nobility and four hundred years of descent, or be personally

acquainted with the nigger that blacked the captain's boots.

But it's all changed now; plenty staterooms above, no harvesters below--

there's a patent self-binder now, and they don't have harvesters

any more; they've gone where the woodbine twineth--and they didn't go

by steamboat, either; went by the train.'



Up in this region we met massed acres of lumber rafts coming down--

but not floating leisurely along, in the old-fashioned way,

manned with joyous and reckless crews of fiddling,

song-singing, whiskey-drinking, breakdown-dancing rapscallions;

no, the whole thing was shoved swiftly along by a powerful

stern-wheeler, modern fashion, and the small crews were quiet,

orderly men, of a sedate business aspect, with not a suggestion

of romance about them anywhere.



Along here, somewhere, on a black night, we ran some exceedingly

narrow and intricate island-chutes by aid of the electric light.

Behind was solid blackness--a crackless bank of it; ahead, a narrow

elbow of water, curving between dense walls of foliage that almost

touched our bows on both sides; and here every individual leaf,

and every individual ripple stood out in its natural color,

and flooded with a glare as of noonday intensified.

The effect was strange, and fine, and very striking.



We passed Prairie du Chien, another of Father Marquette's camping-places;

and after some hours of progress through varied and beautiful scenery,

reached La Crosse.  Here is a town of twelve or thirteen thousand population,

with electric lighted streets, and with blocks of buildings which are stately

enough, and also architecturally fine enough, to command respect in any city.

It is a choice town, and we made satisfactory use of the hour allowed us,

in roaming it over, though the weather was rainier than necessary.









                               Chapter 59

                           Legends and Scenery



WE added several passengers to our list, at La Crosse; among others

an old gentleman who had come to this north-western region

with the early settlers, and was familiar with every part of it.

Pardonably proud of it, too.  He said--



'You'll find scenery between here and St. Paul that can give

the Hudson points.  You'll have the Queen's Bluff--seven hundred

feet high, and just as imposing a spectacle as you can find anywheres;

and Trempeleau Island, which isn't like any other island in America,

I believe, for it is a gigantic mountain, with precipitous sides,

and is full of Indian traditions, and used to be full of rattlesnakes;

if you catch the sun just right there, you will have a picture that

will stay with you.  And above Winona you'll have lovely prairies;

and then come the Thousand Islands, too beautiful for anything;

green? why you never saw foliage so green, nor packed so thick;

it's like a thousand plush cushions afloat on a looking-glass--

when the water 's still; and then the monstrous bluffs on both sides of

the river--ragged, rugged, dark-complected--just the frame that's wanted;

you always want a strong frame, you know, to throw up the nice points

of a delicate picture and make them stand out.'



The old gentleman also told us a touching Indian legend or two--

but not very powerful ones.



After this excursion into history, he came back to the scenery,

and described it, detail by detail, from the Thousand Islands

to St. Paul; naming its names with such facility, tripping along

his theme with such nimble and confident ease, slamming in a

three-ton word, here and there, with such a complacent air of 't

isn't-anything,-I-can-do-it-any-time-I-want-to, and letting off

fine surprises of lurid eloquence at such judicious intervals,

that I presently began to suspect--



But no matter what I began to suspect.  Hear him--



'Ten miles above Winona we come to Fountain City, nestling sweetly at the feet

of cliffs that lift their awful fronts, Jovelike, toward the blue depths

of heaven, bathing them in virgin atmospheres that have known no other contact

save that of angels' wings.



'And next we glide through silver waters, amid lovely and stupendous

aspects of nature that attune our hearts to adoring admiration,

about twelve miles, and strike Mount Vernon, six hundred feet high,

with romantic ruins of a once first-class hotel perched

far among the cloud shadows that mottle its dizzy heights--

sole remnant of once-flourishing Mount Vernon, town of early days,

now desolate and utterly deserted.



'And so we move on.  Past Chimney Rock we fly--noble shaft of six

hundred feet; then just before landing at Minnieska our attention is

attracted by a most striking promontory rising over five hundred feet--

the ideal mountain pyramid.  Its conic shape--thickly-wooded surface

girding its sides, and its apex like that of a cone, cause the spectator

to wonder at nature's workings.  From its dizzy heights superb views

of the forests, streams, bluffs, hills and dales below and beyond

for miles are brought within its focus.  What grander river scenery

can be conceived, as we gaze upon this enchanting landscape,

from the uppermost point of these bluffs upon the valleys below?

The primeval wildness and awful loneliness of these sublime creations

of nature and nature's God, excite feelings of unbounded admiration,

and the recollection of which can never be effaced from the memory,

as we view them in any direction.



'Next we have the Lion's Head and the Lioness's Head, carved by

nature's hand, to adorn and dominate the beauteous stream;

and then anon the river widens, and a most charming and magnificent

view of the valley before us suddenly bursts upon our vision;

rugged hills, clad with verdant forests from summit to base,

level prairie lands, holding in their lap the beautiful Wabasha,

City of the Healing Waters, puissant foe of Bright's disease,

and that grandest conception of nature's works, incomparable Lake Pepin--

these constitute a picture whereon the tourist's eye may gaze

uncounted hours, with rapture unappeased and unappeasable.



'And so we glide along; in due time encountering those majestic domes,

the mighty Sugar Loaf, and the sublime Maiden's Rock--which latter,

romantic superstition has invested with a voice; and oft-times

as the birch canoe glides near, at twilight, the dusky paddler

fancies he hears the soft sweet music of the long-departed Winona,

darling of Indian song and story.



'Then Frontenac looms upon our vision, delightful resort of jaded

summer tourists; then progressive Red Wing; and Diamond Bluff, impressive and

preponderous in its lone sublimity; then Prescott and the St. Croix;

and anon we see bursting upon us the domes and steeples of St. Paul,

giant young chief of the North, marching with seven-league stride in

the van of progress, banner-bearer of the highest and newest civilization,

carving his beneficent way with the tomahawk of commercial enterprise,

sounding the warwhoop of Christian culture, tearing off the reeking scalp

of sloth and superstition to plant there the steam-plow and the school-house--

ever in his front stretch arid lawlessness, ignorance, crime, despair;

ever in his wake bloom the jail, the gallows, and the pulpit; and ever----'



'Have you ever traveled with a panorama?'



'I have formerly served in that capacity.'



My suspicion was confirmed.



'Do you still travel with it?'



'No, she is laid up till the fall season opens.  I am helping now to work up

the materials for a Tourist's Guide which the St. Louis and St. Paul Packet

Company are going to issue this summer for the benefit of travelers who go

by that line.'



'When you were talking of Maiden's Rock, you spoke of

the long-departed Winona, darling of Indian song and story.

Is she the maiden of the rock?--and are the two connected by legend?'



'Yes, and a very tragic and painful one.  Perhaps the most celebrated,

as well as the most pathetic, of all the legends of the Mississippi.'



We asked him to tell it.  He dropped out of his conversational

vein and back into his lecture-gait without an effort,

and rolled on as follows--



'A little distance above Lake City is a famous point known

as Maiden's Rock, which is not only a picturesque spot, but is

full of romantic interest from the event which gave it its name,

Not many years ago this locality was a favorite resort for the Sioux

Indians on account of the fine fishing and hunting to be had there,

and large numbers of them were always to be found in this locality.

Among the families which used to resort here, was one belonging

to the tribe of Wabasha.  We-no-na (first-born) was the name

of a maiden who had plighted her troth to a lover belonging

to the same band.  But her stern parents had promised her hand

to another, a famous warrior, and insisted on her wedding him.

The day was fixed by her parents, to her great grief.

She appeared to accede to the proposal and accompany them to

the rock, for the purpose of gathering flowers for the feast.

On reaching the rock, We-no-na ran to its summit and standing on

its edge upbraided her parents who were below, for their cruelty,

and then singing a death-dirge, threw herself from the precipice and

dashed them in pieces on the rock below.'



'Dashed who in pieces--her parents?'



'Yes.'



'Well, it certainly was a tragic business, as you say.

And moreover, there is a startling kind of dramatic surprise

about it which I was not looking for.  It is a distinct

improvement upon the threadbare form of Indian legend.

There are fifty Lover's Leaps along the Mississippi from whose

summit disappointed Indian girls have jumped, but this is the only

jump in the lot hat turned out in the right and satisfactory way.

What became of Winona?'



'She was a good deal jarred up and jolted:  but she got herself

together and disappeared before the coroner reached the fatal spot;

and 'tis said she sought and married her true love, and wandered

with him to some distant clime, where she lived happy ever after,

her gentle spirit mellowed and chastened by the romantic incident

which had so early deprived her of the sweet guidance of a mother's

love and a father's protecting arm, and thrown her, all unfriended,

upon the cold charity of a censorious world.'



I was glad to hear the lecturer's description of the scenery,

for it assisted my appreciation of what I saw of it, and enabled

me to imagine such of it as we lost by the intrusion of night.



As the lecturer remarked, this whole region is blanketed with Indian

tales and traditions.  But I reminded him that people usually merely

mention this fact--doing it in a way to make a body's mouth water--

and judiciously stopped there.  Why?  Because the impression left,

was that these tales were full of incident and imagination--a pleasant

impression which would be promptly dissipated if the tales were told.

I showed him a lot of this sort of literature which I had been collecting,

and he confessed that it was poor stuff, exceedingly sorry rubbish;

and I ventured to add that the legends which he had himself told us

were of this character, with the single exception of the admirable

story of Winona.  He granted these facts, but said that if I would

hunt up Mr. Schoolcraft's book, published near fifty years ago,

and now doubtless out of print, I would find some Indian inventions

in it that were very far from being barren of incident and imagination;

that the tales in Hiawatha were of this sort, and they came from

Schoolcraft's book; and that there were others in the same book

which Mr. Longfellow could have turned into verse with good effect.

For instance, there was the legend of 'The Undying Head.'

He could not tell it, for many of the details had grown dim

in his memory; but he would recommend me to find it and enlarge

my respect for the Indian imagination.  He said that this tale,

and most of the others in the book, were current among the Indians

along this part of the Mississippi when he first came here;

and that the contributors to Schoolcraft's book had got them directly

from Indian lips, and had written them down with strict exactness,

and without embellishments of their own.



I have found the book.  The lecturer was right.  There are several

legends in it which confirm what he said.  I will offer two of them--'The

Undying Head,' and 'Peboan and Seegwun, an Allegory of the Seasons.'

The latter is used in Hiawatha; but it is worth reading in the original form,

if only that one may see how effective a genuine poem can be without

the helps and graces of poetic measure and rhythm--



                           PEBOAN AND SEEGWUN.



An old man was sitting alone in his lodge, by the side

of a frozen stream.  It was the close of winter, and his fire

was almost out, He appeared very old and very desolate.

His locks were white with age, and he trembled in every joint.

Day after day passed in solitude, and he heard nothing but the sound

of the tempest, sweeping before it the new-fallen snow.



One day, as his fire was just dying, a handsome young man approached

and entered his dwelling.  His cheeks were red with the blood of youth,

his eyes sparkled with animation, and a smile played upon his lips.

He walked with a light and quick step.  His forehead was bound

with a wreath of sweet grass, in place of a warrior's frontlet,

and he carried a bunch of flowers in his hand.



'Ah, my son,' said the old man, 'I am happy to see you.

Come in.  Come and tell me of your adventures, and what strange

lands you have been to see.  Let us pass the night together.

I will tell you of my prowess and exploits, and what I can perform.

You shall do the same, and we will amuse ourselves.'



He then drew from his sack a curiously wrought antique pipe,

and having filled it with tobacco, rendered mild by a mixture

of certain leaves, handed it to his guest.  When this ceremony

was concluded they began to speak.



'I blow my breath,' said the old man, 'and the stream stands still.

The water becomes stiff and hard as clear stone.'



'I breathe,' said the young man, 'and flowers spring up over the plain.'



'I shake my locks,' retorted the old man, 'and snow covers the land.

The leaves fall from the trees at my command, and my breath blows them away.

The birds get up from the water, and fly to a distant land.

The animals hide themselves from my breath, and the very ground becomes as

hard as flint.'



'I shake my ringlets,' rejoined the young man, 'and warm showers

of soft rain fall upon the earth.  The plants lift up their heads

out of the earth, like the eyes of children glistening with delight.

My voice recalls the birds.  The warmth of my breath unlocks the streams.

Music fills the groves wherever I walk, and all nature rejoices.'



At length the sun began to rise.  A gentle warmth came

over the place.  The tongue of the old man became silent.

The robin and bluebird began to sing on the top of the lodge.

The stream began to murmur by the door, and the fragrance of growing

herbs and flowers came softly on the vernal breeze.



Daylight fully revealed to the young man the character of his entertainer.

When he looked upon him, he had the icy visage of Peboan.<footnote

[Winter.]> Streams began to flow from his eyes.  As the sun increased,

he grew less and less in stature, and anon had melted completely away.

Nothing remained on the place of his lodge-fire but the miskodeed,<footnote

[The trailing arbutus.]> a small white flower, with a pink border, which is

one of the earliest species of northern plants.



'The Undying Head' is a rather long tale, but it makes up in weird conceits,

fairy-tale prodigies, variety of incident, and energy of movement,

for what it lacks in brevity.<footnote [See appendix D.]>









                               Chapter 60

                      Speculations and Conclusions



WE reached St. Paul, at the head of navigation of the Mississippi,

and there our voyage of two thousand miles from New Orleans ended.  It is

about a ten-day trip by steamer.  It can probably be done quicker by rail.

I judge so because I know that one may go by rail from St. Louis to Hannibal--

a distance of at least a hundred and twenty miles--in seven hours.

This is better than walking; unless one is in a hurry.



The season being far advanced when we were in New Orleans, the roses

and magnolia blossoms were falling; but here in St. Paul it was the snow,

In New Orleans we had caught an occasional withering breath from over

a crater, apparently; here in St. Paul we caught a frequent benumbing

one from over a glacier, apparently.





But I wander from my theme.  St. Paul is a wonderful town.

It is put together in solid blocks of honest brick and stone,

and has the air of intending to stay.  Its post-office was established

thirty-six years ago; and by and by, when the postmaster received

a letter, he carried it to Washington, horseback, to inquire what

was to be done with it.  Such is the legend.  Two frame houses were

built that year, and several persons were added to the population.

A recent number of the leading St. Paul paper, the 'Pioneer Press,'

gives some statistics which furnish a vivid contrast to that old

state of things, to wit:  Population, autumn of the present year

(1882), 71,000; number of letters handled, first half of

the year, 1,209,387; number of houses built during three-quarters

of the year, 989; their cost, $3,186,000. The increase of letters

over the corresponding six months of last year was fifty per cent.

Last year the new buildings added to the city cost above $4,500,000.

St. Paul's strength lies in her commerce--I mean his commerce.

He is a manufacturing city, of course--all the cities of that

region are--but he is peculiarly strong in the matter of commerce.

Last year his jobbing trade amounted to upwards of $52,000,000.



He has a custom-house, and is building a costly capitol to replace

the one recently burned--for he is the capital of the State.

He has churches without end; and not the cheap poor kind,

but the kind that the rich Protestant puts up, the kind that

the poor Irish 'hired-girl' delights to erect.  What a passion

for building majestic churches the Irish hired-girl has.

It is a fine thing for our architecture but too often we enjoy

her stately fanes without giving her a grateful thought.

In fact, instead of reflecting that 'every brick and every stone

in this beautiful edifice represents an ache or a pain, and a handful

of sweat, and hours of heavy fatigue, contributed by the back

and forehead and bones of poverty,' it is our habit to forget

these things entirely, and merely glorify the mighty temple itself,

without vouchsafing one praiseful thought to its humble builder,

whose rich heart and withered purse it symbolizes.



This is a land of libraries and schools.  St. Paul has three public libraries,

and they contain, in the aggregate, some forty thousand books.

He has one hundred and sixteen school-houses, and pays out more than

seventy thousand dollars a year in teachers' salaries.



There is an unusually fine railway station; so large is it,

in fact, that it seemed somewhat overdone, in the matter

of size, at first; but at the end of a few months it was

perceived that the mistake was distinctly the other way.

The error is to be corrected.



The town stands on high ground; it is about seven hundred feet

above the sea level.  It is so high that a wide view of river

and lowland is offered from its streets.



It is a very wonderful town indeed, and is not finished yet.

All the streets are obstructed with building material,

and this is being compacted into houses as fast as possible,

to make room for more--for other people are anxious to build,

as soon as they can get the use of the streets to pile up their bricks

and stuff in.



How solemn and beautiful is the thought, that the earliest pioneer

of civilization, the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat,

never the railroad, never the newspaper, never the Sabbath-school,

never the missionary--but always whiskey!  Such is the case.

Look history over; you will see.  The missionary comes after the whiskey--

I mean he arrives after the whiskey has arrived; next comes

the poor immigrant, with ax and hoe and rifle; next, the trader;

next, the miscellaneous rush; next, the gambler, the desperado,

the highwayman, and all their kindred in sin of both sexes; and next,

the smart chap who has bought up an old grant that covers all the land;

this brings the lawyer tribe; the vigilance committee brings the undertaker.

All these interests bring the newspaper; the newspaper starts up politics

and a railroad; all hands turn to and build a church and a jail--

and behold, civilization is established for ever in the land.

But whiskey, you see, was the van-leader in this beneficent work.

It always is.  It was like a foreigner--and excusable in a foreigner--

to be ignorant of this great truth, and wander off into astronomy

to borrow a symbol.  But if he had been conversant with the facts,

he would have said--



                Westward the Jug of Empire takes its way.



This great van-leader arrived upon the ground which St. Paul now occupies,

in June 1837.  Yes, at that date, Pierre Parrant, a Canadian, built the

first cabin, uncorked his jug, and began to sell whiskey to the Indians.

The result is before us.



All that I have said of the newness, briskness, swift progress,

wealth, intelligence, fine and substantial architecture,

and general slash and go, and energy of St. Paul, will apply

to his near neighbor, Minneapolis--with the addition

that the latter is the bigger of the two cities.



These extraordinary towns were ten miles apart, a few months ago,

but were growing so fast that they may possibly be joined now,

and getting along under a single mayor.  At any rate, within five years

from now there will be at least such a substantial ligament of buildings

stretching between them and uniting them that a stranger will not be able

to tell where the one Siamese twin leaves off and the other begins.

Combined, they will then number a population of two hundred and

fifty thousand, if they continue to grow as they are now growing.

Thus, this center of population at the head of Mississippi navigation,

will then begin a rivalry as to numbers, with that center of population

at the foot of it--New Orleans.



Minneapolis is situated at the falls of St. Anthony, which stretch across

the river, fifteen hundred feet, and have a fall of eighty-two feet--

a waterpower which, by art, has been made of inestimable value,

business-wise, though somewhat to the damage of the Falls as a spectacle,

or as a background against which to get your photograph taken.



Thirty flouring-mills turn out two million barrels of the very

choicest of flour every year; twenty sawmills produce two hundred

million feet of lumber annually; then there are woolen mills,

cotton mills, paper and oil mills; and sash, nail, furniture,

barrel, and other factories, without number, so to speak.

The great flouring-mills here and at St. Paul use the 'new process'

and mash the wheat by rolling, instead of grinding it.



Sixteen railroads meet in Minneapolis, and sixty-five passenger trains arrive

and depart daily.  In this place, as in St. Paul, journalism thrives.

Here there are three great dailies, ten weeklies, and three monthlies.



There is a university, with four hundred students--and, better still,

its good efforts are not confined to enlightening the one sex.

There are sixteen public schools, with buildings which cost $500,000;

there are six thousand pupils and one hundred and twenty-eight teachers.

There are also seventy churches existing, and a lot more projected.

The banks aggregate a capital of $3,000,000, and the wholesale jobbing trade

of the town amounts to $50,000,000 a year.



Near St. Paul and Minneapolis are several points of interest--

Fort Snelling, a fortress occupying a river-bluff a hundred

feet high; the falls of Minnehaha, White-bear Lake, and so forth.

The beautiful falls of Minnehaha are sufficiently celebrated--

they do not need a lift from me, in that direction.

The White-bear Lake is less known.  It is a lovely sheet of water,

and is being utilized as a summer resort by the wealth and fashion

of the State.  It has its club-house, and its hotel, with the modern

improvements and conveniences; its fine summer residences;

and plenty of fishing, hunting, and pleasant drives.

There are a dozen minor summer resorts around about St. Paul

and Minneapolis, but the White-bear Lake is the resort.

Connected with White-bear Lake is a most idiotic Indian legend.

I would resist the temptation to print it here, if I could,

but the task is beyond my strength.  The guide-book names the preserver

of the legend, and compliments his 'facile pen.'  Without further

comment or delay then, let us turn the said facile pen loose

upon the reader--



                      A LEGEND OF WHITE-BEAR LAKE.



Every spring, for perhaps a century, or as long as there has been a nation

of red men, an island in the middle of White-bear Lake has been visited

by a band of Indians for the purpose of making maple sugar.



Tradition says that many springs ago, while upon this island,

a young warrior loved and wooed the daughter of his chief,

and it is said, also, the maiden loved the warrior.

He had again and again been refused her hand by her parents,

the old chief alleging that he was no brave, and his old consort

called him a woman!



The sun had again set upon the 'sugar-bush,' and the bright moon rose

high in the bright blue heavens, when the young warrior took down his

flute and went out alone, once more to sing the story of his love,

the mild breeze gently moved the two gay feathers in his head-dress,

and as he mounted on the trunk of a leaning tree, the damp snow fell

from his feet heavily.  As he raised his flute to his lips, his blanket

slipped from his well-formed shoulders, and lay partly on the snow beneath.

He began his weird, wild love-song, but soon felt that he was cold,

and as he reached back for his blanket, some unseen hand laid it gently

on his shoulders; it was the hand of his love, his guardian angel.

She took her place beside him, and for the present they were happy;

for the Indian has a heart to love, and in this pride he is as noble

as in his own freedom, which makes him the child of the forest.

As the legend runs, a large white-bear, thinking, perhaps, that polar snows

and dismal winter weather extended everywhere, took up his journey southward.

He at length approached the northern shore of the lake which now bears

his name, walked down the bank and made his way noiselessly through

the deep heavy snow toward the island.  It was the same spring ensuing

that the lovers met.  They had left their first retreat, and were now

seated among the branches of a large elm which hung far over the lake.

(The same tree is still standing, and excites universal curiosity

and interest.) For fear of being detected, they talked almost in a whisper,

and now, that they might get back to camp in good time and thereby

avoid suspicion, they were just rising to return, when the maiden uttered

a shriek which was heard at the camp, and bounding toward the young brave,

she caught his blanket, but missed the direction of her foot and fell,

bearing the blanket with her into the great arms of the ferocious monster.

Instantly every man, woman, and child of the band were upon the bank,

but all unarmed.  Cries and wailings went up from every mouth.

What was to be done'? In the meantime this white and savage beast held

the breathless maiden in his huge grasp, and fondled with his precious

prey as if he were used to scenes like this.  One deafening yell from

the lover warrior is heard above the cries of hundreds of his tribe,

and dashing away to his wigwam he grasps his faithful knife,

returns almost at a single bound to the scene of fear and fright,

rushes out along the leaning tree to the spot where his treasure fell,

and springing with the fury of a mad panther, pounced upon his prey.

The animal turned, and with one stroke of his huge paw brought

the lovers heart to heart, but the next moment the warrior, with one

plunge of the blade of his knife, opened the crimson sluices of death,

and the dying bear relaxed his hold.



That night there was no more sleep for the band or the lovers,

and as the young and the old danced about the carcass of the dead monster,

the gallant warrior was presented with another plume, and ere

another moon had set he had a living treasure added to his heart.

Their children for many years played upon the skin of the white-bear--

from which the lake derives its name--and the maiden and the brave

remembered long the fearful scene and rescue that made them one,

for Kis-se-me-pa and Ka-go-ka could never forget their fearful

encounter with the huge monster that came so near sending them to

the happy hunting-ground.



It is a perplexing business.  First, she fell down out of the tree--

she and the blanket; and the bear caught her and fondled her--

her and the blanket; then she fell up into the tree again--

leaving the blanket; meantime the lover goes war-whooping

home and comes back 'heeled,' climbs the tree, jumps down on

the bear, the girl jumps down after him--apparently, for she

was up the tree--resumes her place in the bear's arms along

with the blanket, the lover rams his knife into the bear,

and saves--whom, the blanket?  No--nothing of the sort.

You get yourself all worked up and excited about that blanket,

and then all of a sudden, just when a happy climax seems

imminent you are let down flat--nothing saved but the girl.

Whereas, one is not interested in the girl; she is not

the prominent feature of the legend.  Nevertheless, there you

are left, and there you must remain; for if you live

a thousand years you will never know who got the blanket.

A dead man could get up a better legend than this one.

I don't mean a fresh dead man either; I mean a man that's been dead

weeks and weeks.



We struck the home-trail now, and in a few hours were in that

astonishing Chicago--a city where they are always rubbing the lamp,

and fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new impossibilities.

It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago--

she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them.

She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you

passed through the last time.  The Pennsylvania road rushed us to New

York without missing schedule time ten minutes anywhere on the route;

and there ended one of the most enjoyable five-thousand-mile journeys I have

ever had the good fortune to make.









                               APPENDIX A



      (FROM THE NEW ORLEANS TIMES DEMOCRAT OF MARCH 29, 1882.)



   VOYAGE OF THE TIMES-DEMOCRAT'S RELIEF BOAT THROUGH THE INUNDATED

                                REGIONS



IT was nine o'clock Thursday morning when the 'Susie'

left the Mississippi and entered Old River, or what is

now called the mouth of the Red.  Ascending on the left,

a flood was pouring in through and over the levees on

the Chandler plantation, the most northern point in Pointe

Coupee parish.  The water completely covered the place,

although the levees had given way but a short time before.

The stock had been gathered in a large flat-boat, where,

without food, as we passed, the animals were huddled together,

waiting for a boat to tow them off.  On the right-hand side

of the river is Turnbull's Island, and on it is a large plantation

which formerly was pronounced one of the most fertile in the State.

The water has hitherto allowed it to go scot-free in usual floods,

but now broad sheets of water told only where fields were.

The top of the protecting levee could be seen here and there,

but nearly all of it was submerged.



The trees have put on a greener foliage since the water has poured in,

and the woods look bright and fresh, but this pleasant aspect to the eye

is neutralized by the interminable waste of water.  We pass mile after mile,

and it is nothing but trees standing up to their branches in water.

A water-turkey now and again rises and flies ahead into the long avenue

of silence.  A pirogue sometimes flits from the bushes and crosses

the Red River on its way out to the Mississippi, but the sad-faced

paddlers never turn their heads to look at our boat.  The puffing

of the boat is music in this gloom, which affects one most curiously.

It is not the gloom of deep forests or dark caverns, but a peculiar kind of

solemn silence and impressive awe that holds one perforce to its recognition.

We passed two negro families on a raft tied up in the willows this morning.

They were evidently of the well-to-do class, as they had a supply of meal

and three or four hogs with them.  Their rafts were about twenty feet square,

and in front of an improvised shelter earth had been placed, on which they

built their fire.



The current running down the Atchafalaya was very swift,

the Mississippi showing a predilection in that direction,

which needs only to be seen to enforce the opinion of that

river's desperate endeavors to find a short way to the Gulf.

Small boats, skiffs, pirogues, etc., are in great demand,

and many have been stolen by piratical negroes,

who take them where they will bring the greatest price.

From what was told me by Mr. C. P. Ferguson, a planter

near Red River Landing, whose place has just gone under,

there is much suffering in the rear of that place.

The negroes had given up all thoughts of a crevasse there,

as the upper levee had stood so long, and when it did

come they were at its mercy.  On Thursday a number were

taken out of trees and off of cabin roofs and brought in,

many yet remaining.



One does not appreciate the sight of earth until he has traveled

through a flood.  At sea one does not expect or look for it,

but here, with fluttering leaves, shadowy forest aisles, house-tops

barely visible, it is expected.  In fact a grave-yard, if the mounds

were above water, would be appreciated.  The river here is known

only because there is an opening in the trees, and that is all.

It is in width, from Fort Adams on the left bank of the Mississippi

to the bank of Rapides Parish, a distance of about sixty miles.

A large portion of this was under cultivation, particularly along

the Mississippi and back of the Red.  When Red River proper

was entered, a strong current was running directly across it,

pursuing the same direction as that of the Mississippi.



After a run of some hours, Black River was reached.

Hardly was it entered before signs of suffering became visible.

All the willows along the banks were stripped of their leaves.

One man, whom your correspondent spoke to, said that he had had one

hundred and fifty head of cattle and one hundred head of hogs.

At the first appearance of water he had started to drive

them to the high lands of Avoyelles, thirty-five miles off,

but he lost fifty head of the beef cattle and sixty hogs.

Black River is quite picturesque, even if its shores are under water.

A dense growth of ash, oak, gum, and hickory make the shores

almost impenetrable, and where one can get a view down some

avenue in the trees, only the dim outlines of distant trunks

can be barely distinguished in the gloom.



A few miles up this river, the depth of water on the banks

was fully eight feet, and on all sides could be seen,

still holding against the strong current, the tops of cabins.

Here and there one overturned was surrounded by drift-wood, forming

the nucleus of possibly some future island.



In order to save coal, as it was impossible to get that fuel at any point

to be touched during the expedition, a look-out was kept for a wood-pile.

On rounding a point a pirogue, skilfully paddled by a youth, shot out,

and in its bow was a girl of fifteen, of fair face, beautiful black eyes,

and demure manners.  The boy asked for a paper, which was thrown to him,

and the couple pushed their tiny craft out into the swell of the boat.



Presently a little girl, not certainly over twelve years, paddled out

in the smallest little canoe and handled it with all the deftness

of an old voyageur.  The little one looked more like an Indian

than a white child, and laughed when asked if she were afraid.

She had been raised in a pirogue and could go anywhere.

She was bound out to pick willow leaves for the stock, and she pointed

to a house near by with water three inches deep on the floors.

At its back door was moored a raft about thirty feet square,

with a sort of fence built upon it, and inside of this some sixteen

cows and twenty hogs were standing.  The family did not complain,

except on account of losing their stock, and promptly brought a

supply of wood in a flat.



From this point to the Mississippi River, fifteen miles, there is not a spot

of earth above water, and to the westward for thirty-five miles there

is nothing but the river's flood.  Black River had risen during Thursday,

the 23rd, 1<three-quarters> inches, and was going up at night still.

As we progress up the river habitations become more frequent,

but are yet still miles apart.  Nearly all of them are deserted,

and the out-houses floated off.  To add to the gloom, almost every

living thing seems to have departed, and not a whistle of a bird

nor the bark of the squirrel can be heard in this solitude.

Sometimes a morose gar will throw his tail aloft and disappear in the river,

but beyond this everything is quiet--the quiet of dissolution.

Down the river floats now a neatly whitewashed hen-house, then

a cluster of neatly split fence-rails, or a door and a bloated carcass,

solemnly guarded by a pair of buzzards, the only bird to be seen,

which feast on the carcass as it bears them along.  A picture-frame

in which there was a cheap lithograph of a soldier on horseback,

as it floated on told of some hearth invaded by the water and despoiled

of this ornament.



At dark, as it was not prudent to run, a place alongside the woods was hunted

and to a tall gum-tree the boat was made fast for the night.



A pretty quarter of the moon threw a pleasant light over forest and river,

making a picture that would be a delightful piece of landscape study,

could an artist only hold it down to his canvas.  The motion of

the engines had ceased, the puffing of the escaping steam was stilled,

and the enveloping silence closed upon us, and such silence it was!

Usually in a forest at night one can hear the piping of frogs,

the hum of insects, or the dropping of limbs; but here nature was dumb.

The dark recesses, those aisles into this cathedral, gave forth no sound,

and even the ripplings of the current die away.



At daylight Friday morning all hands were up, and up the Black we started.

The morning was a beautiful one, and the river, which is remarkably

straight, put on its loveliest garb.  The blossoms of the haw perfumed

the air deliciously, and a few birds whistled blithely along the banks.

The trees were larger, and the forest seemed of older growth than below.

More fields were passed than nearer the mouth, but the same scene

presented itself--smoke-houses drifting out in the pastures, negro quarters

anchored in confusion against some oak, and the modest residence just

showing its eaves above water.  The sun came up in a glory of carmine,

and the trees were brilliant in their varied shades of green.

Not a foot of soil is to be seen anywhere, and the water is apparently growing

deeper and deeper, for it reaches up to the branches of the largest trees.

All along, the bordering willows have been denuded of leaves, showing how long

the people have been at work gathering this fodder for their animals.  An old

man in a pirogue was asked how the willow leaves agreed with his cattle.

He stopped in his work, and with an ominous shake of his head replied:

'Well, sir, it 's enough to keep warmth in their bodies and that's

all we expect, but it's hard on the hogs, particularly the small ones.

They is dropping off powerful fast.  But what can you do?  It 's

all we've got.'



At thirty miles above the mouth of Black River the water

extends from Natchez on the Mississippi across to the pine

hills of Louisiana, a distance of seventy-three miles,

and there is hardly a spot that is not ten feet under it.

The tendency of the current up the Black is toward the west.

In fact, so much is this the case, the waters of Red River

have been driven down from toward the Calcasieu country,

and the waters of the Black enter the Red some fifteen miles

above the mouth of the former, a thing never before seen by even

the oldest steamboatmen.  The water now in sight of us is entirely

from the Mississippi.



Up to Trinity, or rather Troy, which is but a short

distance below, the people have nearly all moved out,

those remaining having enough for their present personal needs.

Their cattle, though, are suffering and dying off quite fast,

as the confinement on rafts and the food they get breeds disease.



After a short stop we started, and soon came to a section where

there were many open fields and cabins thickly scattered about.

Here were seen more pictures of distress.  On the inside of the houses

the inmates had built on boxes a scaffold on which they placed

the furniture.  The bed-posts were sawed off on top, as the ceiling

was not more than four feet from the improvised floor.  The buildings

looked very insecure, and threatened every moment to float off.

Near the houses were cattle standing breast high in the water,

perfectly impassive.  They did not move in their places, but stood

patiently waiting for help to come.  The sight was a distressing one,

and the poor creatures will be sure to die unless speedily rescued.

Cattle differ from horses in this peculiar quality.  A horse,

after finding no relief comes, will swim off in search of food,

whereas a beef will stand in its tracks until with exhaustion it drops in

the water and drowns.



At half-past twelve o'clock a hail was given from a flat-boat

inside the line of the bank.  Rounding to we ran alongside,

and General York stepped aboard.  He was just then engaged

in getting off stock, and welcomed the 'Times-Democrat'

boat heartily, as he said there was much need for her.

He said that the distress was not exaggerated in the least.

People were in a condition it was difficult even for one to imagine.

The water was so high there was great danger of their houses

being swept away.  It had already risen so high that it was

approaching the eaves, and when it reaches this point there is

always imminent risk of their being swept away.  If this occurs,

there will be great loss of life.  The General spoke of the gallant

work of many of the people in their attempts to save their stock,

but thought that fully twenty-five per cent.  had perished.

Already twenty-five hundred people had received rations from Troy,

on Black River, and he had towed out a great many cattle,

but a very great quantity remained and were in dire need.

The water was now eighteen inches higher than in 1874, and there was

no land between Vidalia and the hills of Catahoula.



At two o'clock the 'Susie' reached Troy, sixty-five miles above

the mouth of Black River.  Here on the left comes in Little River;

just beyond that the Ouachita, and on the right the Tensas.

These three rivers form the Black River.  Troy, or a portion

of it, is situated on and around three large Indian mounds,

circular in shape, which rise above the present water

about twelve feet.  They are about one hundred and fifty

feet in diameter, and are about two hundred yards apart.

The houses are all built between these mounds, and hence are all

flooded to a depth of eighteen inches on their floors.



These elevations, built by the aborigines, hundreds of years ago,

are the only points of refuge for miles.  When we arrived we found them

crowded with stock, all of which was thin and hardly able to stand up.

They were mixed together, sheep, hogs, horses, mules, and cattle.

One of these mounds has been used for many years as the grave-yard,

and to-day we saw attenuated cows lying against the marble tomb-stones,

chewing their cud in contentment, after a meal of corn furnished

by General York.  Here, as below, the remarkable skill of the women

and girls in the management of the smaller pirogues was noticed.

Children were paddling about in these most ticklish crafts with all the

nonchalance of adepts.



General York has put into operation a perfect system in regard

to furnishing relief.  He makes a personal inspection of the place

where it is asked, sees what is necessary to be done, and then,

having two boats chartered, with flats, sends them promptly

to the place, when the cattle are loaded and towed to the pine

hills and uplands of Catahoula.  He has made Troy his headquarters,

and to this point boats come for their supply of feed for cattle.

On the opposite side of Little River, which branches to the left

out of Black, and between it and the Ouachita, is situated

the town of Trinity, which is hourly threatened with destruction.

It is much lower than Troy, and the water is eight and nine

feet deep in the houses.  A strong current sweeps through it,

and it is remarkable that all of its houses have not gone before.

The residents of both Troy and Trinity have been cared for, yet some

of their stock have to be furnished with food.



As soon as the 'Susie' reached Troy, she was turned over to General York,

and placed at his disposition to carry out the work of relief more rapidly.

Nearly all her supplies were landed on one of the mounds to lighten her,

and she was headed down stream to relieve those below.  At Tom Hooper's place,

a few miles from Troy, a large flat, with about fifty head of stock on board,

was taken in tow.  The animals were fed, and soon regained some strength.

To-day we go on Little River, where the suffering is greatest.



                            DOWN BLACK RIVER



                                             Saturday Evening, March 25.



We started down Black River quite early, under the direction of General York,

to bring out what stock could be reached.  Going down river a flat

in tow was left in a central locality, and from there men poled her back

in the rear of plantations, picking up the animals wherever found.

In the loft of a gin-house there were seventeen head found, and after

a gangway was built they were led down into the flat without difficulty.

Taking a skiff with the General, your reporter was pulled up to a little

house of two rooms, in which the water was standing two feet on the floors.

In one of the large rooms were huddled the horses and cows of the place,

while in the other the Widow Taylor and her son were seated on a scaffold

raised on the floor.  One or two dug-outs were drifting about in the roam

ready to be put in service at any time.  When the flat was brought up,

the side of the house was cut away as the only means of getting

the animals out, and the cattle were driven on board the boat.

General York, in this as in every case, inquired if the family desired

to leave, informing them that Major Burke, of 'The Times-Democrat,'

has sent the 'Susie' up for that purpose.  Mrs. Taylor said she thanked

Major Burke, but she would try and hold out.  The remarkable tenacity

of the people here to their homes is beyond all comprehension.  Just below,

at a point sixteen miles from Troy, information was received that the house

of Mr. Tom Ellis was in danger, and his family were all in it.  We steamed

there immediately, and a sad picture was presented.  Looking out of the half

of the window left above water, was Mrs. Ellis, who is in feeble health,

whilst at the door were her seven children, the oldest not fourteen years.

One side of the house was given up to the work animals, some twelve head,

besides hogs.  In the next room the family lived, the water coming within two

inches of the bed-rail. The stove was below water, and the cooking was done

on a fire on top of it.  The house threatened to give way at any moment:

one end of it was sinking, and, in fact, the building looked a mere shell.

As the boat rounded to, Mr. Ellis came out in a dug-out, and General

York told him that he had come to his relief; that 'The Times-Democrat'

boat was at his service, and would remove his family at once to the hills,

and on Monday a flat would take out his stock, as, until that time,

they would be busy.  Notwithstanding the deplorable situation himself

and family were in, Mr. Ellis did not want to leave.  He said he thought

he would wait until Monday, and take the risk of his house falling.

The children around the door looked perfectly contented, seeming to care

little for the danger they were in.  These are but two instances of the many.

After weeks of privation and suffering, people still cling to their houses

and leave only when there is not room between the water and the ceiling

to build a scaffold on which to stand.  It seemed to be incomprehensible,

yet the love for the old place was stronger than that for safety.



After leaving the Ellis place, the next spot touched at

was the Oswald place.  Here the flat was towed alongside

the gin-house where there were fifteen head standing in water;

and yet, as they stood on scaffolds, their heads were above

the top of the entrance.  It was found impossible to get

them out without cutting away a portion of the front;

and so axes were brought into requisition and a gap made.

After much labor the horses and mules were securely placed

on the flat.



At each place we stop there are always three, four, or more dug-outs

arriving, bringing information of stock in other places in need.

Notwithstanding the fact that a great many had driven a part of their

stock to the hills some time ago, there yet remains a large quantity,

which General York, who is working with indomitable energy, will get

landed in the pine hills by Tuesday.



All along Black River the 'Susie' has been visited by scores

of planters, whose tales are the repetition of those already

heard of suffering and loss.  An old planter, who has lived on

the river since 1844, said there never was such a rise, and he was

satisfied more than one quarter of the stock has been lost.

Luckily the people cared first for their work stock, and when they

could find it horses and mules were housed in a place of safety.

The rise which still continues, and was two inches last night,

compels them to get them out to the hills; hence it is

that the work of General York is of such a great value.

From daylight to late at night he is going this way and that,

cheering by his kindly words and directing with calm judgment

what is to be done.  One unpleasant story, of a certain

merchant in New Orleans, is told all along the river.

It appears for some years past the planters have been dealing

with this individual, and many of them had balances in his hands.

When the overflow came they wrote for coffee, for meal, and,

in fact, for such little necessities as were required.

No response to these letters came, and others were written,

and yet these old customers, with plantations under water,

were refused even what was necessary to sustain life.  It is needless

to say he is not popular now on Back River.



The hills spoken of as the place of refuge for the people and stock on Black

River are in Catahoula parish, twenty-four miles from Black River.



After filling the flat with cattle we took on board the family

of T. S. Hooper, seven in number, who could not longer remain

in their dwelling, and we are now taking them up Little River

to the hills.



                         THE FLOOD STILL RISING



                                             Troy: March 27, 1882, noon.



The flood here is rising about three and a half inches every

twenty-four hours, and rains have set in which will increase this.

General York feels now that our efforts ought to be directed towards

saving life, as the increase of the water has jeopardized many houses.

We intend to go up the Tensas in a few minutes, and then we

will return and go down Black River to take off families.

There is a lack of steam transportation here to meet the emergency.

The General has three boats chartered, with flats in tow,

but the demand for these to tow out stock is greater than they

can meet with promptness.  All are working night and day,

and the 'Susie' hardly stops for more than an hour anywhere.

The rise has placed Trinity in a dangerous plight, and momentarily

it is expected that some of the houses will float off.

Troy is a little higher, yet all are in the water.

Reports have come in that a woman and child have been

washed away below here, and two cabins floated off.

Their occupants are the same who refused to come off day

before yesterday.  One would not believe the utter passiveness

of the people.



As yet no news has been received of the steamer 'Delia,' which is

supposed to be the one sunk in yesterday's storm on Lake Catahoula.

She is due here now, but has not arrived.  Even the mail here is

most uncertain, and this I send by skiff to Natchez to get it to you.

It is impossible to get accurate data as to past crops, etc., as

those who know much about the matter have gone, and those who remain

are not well versed in the production of this section.



General York desires me to say that the amount of rations

formerly sent should be duplicated and sent at once.

It is impossible to make any estimate, for the people are fleeing

to the hills, so rapid is the rise.  The residents here are

in a state of commotion that can only be appreciated when seen,

and complete demoralization has set in,



If rations are drawn for any particular section hereabouts, they would

not be certain to be distributed, so everything should be sent to Troy

as a center, and the General will have it properly disposed of.

He has sent for one hundred tents, and, if all go to the hills who are

in motion now, two hundred will be required.









                               APPENDIX B



                  THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER COMMISSION



THE condition of this rich valley of the Lower Mississippi,

immediately after and since the war, constituted one

of the disastrous effects of war most to be deplored.

Fictitious property in slaves was not only righteously destroyed,

but very much of the work which had depended upon the slave labor

was also destroyed or greatly impaired, especially the levee system.



It might have been expected by those who have not investigated the subject,

that such important improvements as the construction and maintenance

of the levees would have been assumed at once by the several States.

But what can the State do where the people are under subjection to

rates of interest ranging from 18 to 30 per cent., and are also under

the necessity of pledging their crops in advance even of planting,

at these rates, for the privilege of purchasing all of their supplies at 100

per cent.  profit?



It has needed but little attention to make it perfectly obvious

that the control of the Mississippi River, if undertaken at all,

must be undertaken by the national government, and cannot

be compassed by States.  The river must be treated as a unit;

its control cannot be compassed under a divided or separate

system of administration.



Neither are the States especially interested competent

to combine among themselves for the necessary operations.

The work must begin far up the river; at least as far as Cairo,

if not beyond; and must be conducted upon a consistent general plan

throughout the course of the river.



It does not need technical or scientific knowledge to comprehend the elements

of the case if one will give a little time and attention to the subject,

and when a Mississippi River commission has been constituted, as the existing

commission is, of thoroughly able men of different walks in life,

may it not be suggested that their verdict in the case should be accepted

as conclusive, so far as any a priori theory of construction or control

can be considered conclusive?



It should be remembered that upon this board are General Gilmore,

General Comstock, and General Suter, of the United States Engineers;

Professor Henry Mitchell (the most competent authority on the question

of hydrography), of the United States Coast Survey; B. B. Harrod,

the State Engineer of Louisiana; Jas.  B. Eads, whose success

with the jetties at New Orleans is a warrant of his competency,

and Judge Taylor, of Indiana.



It would be presumption on the part of any single man, however skilled,

to contest the judgment of such a board as this.



The method of improvement proposed by the commission is at

once in accord with the results of engineering experience

and with observations of nature where meeting our wants.

As in nature the growth of trees and their proneness where undermined

to fall across the slope and support the bank secures at some

points a fair depth of channel and some degree of permanence,

so in the project of the engineer the use of timber and brush

and the encouragement of forest growth are the main features.

It is proposed to reduce the width where excessive by brushwood dykes,

at first low, but raised higher and higher as the mud of the river

settles under their shelter, and finally slope them back at

the angle upon which willows will grow freely.  In this work there

are many details connected with the forms of these shelter dykes,

their arrangements so as to present a series of settling basins,

etc., a description of which would only complicate the conception.

Through the larger part of the river works of contraction

will not be required, but nearly all the banks on the concave

side of the beds must be held against the wear of the stream,

and much of the opposite banks defended at critical points.

The works having in view this conservative object may be

generally designated works of revetment; and these also

will be largely of brushwood, woven in continuous carpets,

or twined into wire-netting. This veneering process has been

successfully employed on the Missouri River; and in some cases

they have so covered themselves with sediments, and have become

so overgrown with willows, that they may be regarded as permanent.

In securing these mats rubble-stone is to be used in small quantities,

and in some instances the dressed slope between high and low river

will have to be more or less paved with stone.



Any one who has been on the Rhine will have observed operations not unlike

those to which we have just referred; and, indeed, most of the rivers

of Europe flowing among their own alluvia have required similar treatment

in the interest of navigation and agriculture.



The levee is the crowning work of bank revetment, although not necessarily

in immediate connection.  It may be set back a short distance from

the revetted bank; but it is, in effect, the requisite parapet.

The flood river and the low river cannot be brought into register,

and compelled to unite in the excavation of a single permanent channel,

without a complete control of all the stages; and even the abnormal

rise must be provided against, because this would endanger the levee,

and once in force behind the works of revetment would tear them also away.



Under the general principle that the local slope of a river

is the result and measure of the resistance of its bed, it is

evident that a narrow and deep stream should have less slope,

because it has less frictional surface in proportion to capacity;

i.e., less perimeter in proportion to area of cross section.

The ultimate effect of levees and revetments confining

the floods and bringing all the stages of the river into

register is to deepen the channel and let down the slope.

The first effect of the levees is to raise the surface;

but this, by inducing greater velocity of flow, inevitably

causes an enlargement of section, and if this enlargement

is prevented from being made at the expense of the banks,

the bottom must give way and the form of the waterway

be so improved as to admit this flow with less rise.

The actual experience with levees upon the Mississippi River,

with no attempt to hold the banks, has been favorable,

and no one can doubt, upon the evidence furnished in the reports

of the commission, that if the earliest levees had been

accompanied by revetment of banks, and made complete,

we should have to-day a river navigable at low water,

and an adjacent country safe from inundation.



Of course it would be illogical to conclude that the constrained river

can ever lower its flood slope so as to make levees unnecessary,

but it is believed that, by this lateral constraint, the river

as a conduit may be so improved in form that even those rare

floods which result from the coincident rising of many tributaries

will find vent without destroying levees of ordinary height.

That the actual capacity of a channel through alluvium depends

upon its service during floods has been often shown, but this

capacity does not include anomalous, but recurrent, floods.



It is hardly worth while to consider the projects for relieving

the Mississippi River floods by creating new outlets,

since these sensational propositions have commended themselves

only to unthinking minds, and have no support among engineers.

Were the river bed cast-iron, a resort to openings for surplus

waters might be a necessity; but as the bottom is yielding,

and the best form of outlet is a single deep channel,

as realizing the least ratio of perimeter to area of cross section,

there could not well be a more unphilosophical method of treatment

than the multiplication of avenues of escape.



In the foregoing statement the attempt has been made to condense

in as limited a space as the importance of the subject would permit,

the general elements of the problem, and the general features

of the proposed method of improvement which has been adopted

by the Mississippi River Commission.



The writer cannot help feeling that it is somewhat presumptuous on

his part to attempt to present the facts relating to an enterprise

which calls for the highest scientific skill; but it is a matter

which interests every citizen of the United States, and is one

of the methods of reconstruction which ought to be approved.

It is a war claim which implies no private gain, and no compensation

except for one of the cases of destruction incident to war,

which may well be repaired by the people of the whole country.



                                                        EDWARD ATKINSON.



Boston:  April 14, 1882.









                               APPENDIX C



     RECEPTION OF CAPTAIN BASIL HALL'S BOOK IN THE UNITED STATES



HAVING now arrived nearly at the end of our travels,

I am induced, ere I conclude, again to mention what I consider

as one of the most remarkable traits in the national character

of the Americans; namely, their exquisite sensitiveness and

soreness respecting everything said or written concerning them.

Of this, perhaps, the most remarkable example I can give is

the effect produced on nearly every class of readers by the

appearance of Captain Basil Hall's 'Travels in North America.'

In fact, it was a sort of moral earthquake, and the vibration it

occasioned through the nerves of the republic, from one corner

of the Union to the other, was by no means over when I left

the country in July 1831, a couple of years after the shock.



I was in Cincinnati when these volumes came out, but it

was not till July 1830, that I procured a copy of them.

One bookseller to whom I applied told me that he had had a few

copies before he understood the nature of the work, but that,

after becoming acquainted with it, nothing should induce

him to sell another.  Other persons of his profession must,

however, have been less scrupulous; for the book was read

in city, town, village, and hamlet, steamboat, and stage-coach,

and a sort of war-whoop was sent forth perfectly unprecedented

in my recollection upon any occasion whatever.



An ardent desire for approbation, and a delicate sensitiveness under censure,

have always, I believe, been considered as amiable traits of character;

but the condition into which the appearance of Captain Hall's work threw

the republic shows plainly that these feelings, if carried to excess,

produce a weakness which amounts to imbecility.



It was perfectly astonishing to hear men who, on other subjects,

were of some judgment, utter their opinions upon this.

I never heard of any instance in which the commonsense generally

found in national criticism was so overthrown by passion.

I do not speak of the want of justice, and of fair and

liberal interpretation:  these, perhaps, were hardly to be expected.

Other nations have been called thin-skinned, but the citizens

of the Union have, apparently, no skins at all; they wince if a

breeze blows over them, unless it be tempered with adulation.

It was not, therefore, very surprising that the acute and forcible

observations of a traveler they knew would be listened to should be

received testily.  The extraordinary features of the business were,

first, the excess of the rage into which they lashed themselves;

and, secondly, the puerility of the inventions by which they

attempted to account for the severity with which they fancied they

had been treated.



Not content with declaring that the volumes contained no word of truth,

from beginning to end (which is an assertion I heard made very nearly

as often as they were mentioned), the whole country set to work

to discover the causes why Captain Hall had visited the United States,

and why he had published his book.



I have heard it said with as much precision and gravity

as if the statement had been conveyed by an official report,

that Captain Hall had been sent out by the British Government

expressly for the purpose of checking the growing admiration

of England for the Government of the United States,--

that it was by a commission from the treasury he had come,

and that it was only in obedience to orders that he had found

anything to object to.



I do not give this as the gossip of a coterie; I am persuaded that it

is the belief of a very considerable portion of the country.

So deep is the conviction of this singular people that they cannot

be seen without being admired, that they will not admit the possibility

that any one should honestly and sincerely find aught to disapprove

in them or their country.



The American Reviews are, many of them, I believe, well known in England;

I need not, therefore, quote them here, but I sometimes wondered

that they, none of them, ever thought of translating Obadiah's

curse into classic American; if they had done so, on placing

(he, Basil Hall) between brackets, instead of (he, Obadiah)

it would have saved them a world of trouble.



I can hardly describe the curiosity with which I sat down at length

to peruse these tremendous volumes; still less can I do justice to my

surprise at their contents.  To say that I found not one exaggerated

statement throughout the work is by no means saying enough.

It is impossible for any one who knows the country not to see that

Captain Hall earnestly sought out things to admire and commend.

When he praises, it is with evident pleasure; and when he finds fault,

it is with evident reluctance and restraint, excepting where motives

purely patriotic urge him to state roundly what it is for the benefit

of his country should be known.



In fact, Captain Hall saw the country to the greatest possible advantage.

Furnished, of course, with letters of introduction to the most

distinguished individuals, and with the still more influential

recommendation of his own reputation, he was received in full

drawing-room style and state from one end of the Union to the other.

He saw the country in full dress, and had little or no opportunity

of judging of it unhouselled, unanointed, unannealed, with all its

imperfections on its head, as I and my family too often had.



Captain Hall had certainly excellent opportunities of making

himself acquainted with the form of the government and the laws;

and of receiving, moreover, the best oral commentary upon them,

in conversation with the most distinguished citizens.

Of these opportunities he made excellent use; nothing important met

his eye which did not receive that sort of analytical attention

which an experienced and philosophical traveler alone can give.

This has made his volumes highly interesting and valuable;

but I am deeply persuaded, that were a man of equal penetration

to visit the United States with no other means of becoming

acquainted with the national character than the ordinary working-day

intercourse of life, he would conceive an infinitely lower idea

of the moral atmosphere of the country than Captain Hall appears

to have done; and the internal conviction on my mind is strong,

that if Captain Hall had not placed a firm restraint on himself,

he must have given expression to far deeper indignation than any he has

uttered against many points in the American character, with which

he shows from other circumstances that he was well acquainted.

His rule appears to have been to state just so much of the truth

as would leave on the mind of his readers a correct impression,

at the least cost of pain to the sensitive folks he was writing about.

He states his own opinions and feelings, and leaves it to be

inferred that he has good grounds for adopting them; but he spares

the Americans the bitterness which a detail of the circumstances

would have produced.



If any one chooses to say that some wicked antipathy to twelve

millions of strangers is the origin of my opinion, I must

bear it; and were the question one of mere idle speculation,

I certainly would not court the abuse I must meet for stating it.

But it is not so.



                              . . . . . . .



The candor which he expresses, and evidently feels, they mistake for irony,

or totally distrust; his unwillingness to give pain to persons from

whom he has received kindness, they scornfully reject as affectation,

and although they must know right well, in their own secret hearts,

how infinitely more they lay at his mercy than he has chosen to betray;

they pretend, even to themselves, that he has exaggerated the bad points

of their character and institutions; whereas, the truth is, that he has

let them off with a degree of tenderness which may be quite suitable

for him to exercise, however little merited; while, at the same time,

he has most industriously magnified their merits, whenever he could possibly

find anything favorable.









                               APPENDIX D



                          THE UNDYING HEAD



IN a remote part of the North lived a man and his sister,

who had never seen a human being.  Seldom, if ever, had the man

any cause to go from home; for, as his wants demanded food,

he had only to go a little distance from the lodge, and there,

in some particular spot, place his arrows, with their barbs

in the ground.  Telling his sister where they had been placed,

every morning she would go in search, and never fail of

finding each stuck through the heart of a deer.  She had then

only to drag them into the lodge and prepare their food.

Thus she lived till she attained womanhood, when one day

her brother, whose name was Iamo, said to her:  'Sister, the time

is at hand when you will be ill.  Listen to my advice.

If you do not, it will probably be the cause of my death.

Take the implements with which we kindle our fires.

Go some distance from our lodge and build a separate fire.

When you are in want of food, I will tell you where to find it.

You must cook for yourself, and I will for myself.

When you are ill, do not attempt to come near the lodge,

or bring any of the utensils you use.  Be sure always

to fasten to your belt the implements you need, for you

do not know when the time will come.  As for myself, I must

do the best I can.'  His sister promised to obey him in all

he had said.



Shortly after, her brother had cause to go from home.

She was alone in her lodge, combing her hair.  She had just untied

the belt to which the implements were fastened, when suddenly

the event, to which her brother had alluded, occurred.

She ran out of the lodge, but in her haste forgot the belt.

Afraid to return, she stood for some time thinking.

Finally, she decided to enter the lodge and get it.

For, thought she, my brother is not at home, and I will

stay but a moment to catch hold of it.  She went back.

Running in suddenly, she caught hold of it, and was coming out

when her brother came in sight.  He knew what was the matter.

'Oh,' he said, 'did I not tell you to take care.

But now you have killed me.'  She was going on her way,

but her brother said to her, 'What can you do there now.

The accident has happened.  Go in, and stay where you

have always stayed.  And what will become of you?

You have killed me.'



He then laid aside his hunting-dress and accoutrements, and soon

after both his feet began to turn black, so that he could not move.

Still he directed his sister where to place the arrows,

that she might always have food.  The inflammation continued

to increase, and had now reached his first rib; and he said:

'Sister, my end is near.  You must do as I tell you.

You see my medicine-sack, and my war-club tied to it.  It contains

all my medicines, and my war-plumes, and my paints of all colors.

As soon as the inflammation reaches my breast, you will take

my war-club. It has a sharp point, and you will cut off my head.

When it is free from my body, take it, place its neck in the sack,

which you must open at one end.  Then hang it up in its former place.

Do not forget my bow and arrows.  One of the last you

will take to procure food.  The remainder, tie in my sack,

and then hang it up, so that I can look towards the door.

Now and then I will speak to you, but not often.'  His sister again

promised to obey.



In a little time his breast was affected.  'Now,' said he,

'take the club and strike off my head.'  She was afraid, but he told

her to muster courage.  'Strike,' said he, and a smile was on his face.

Mustering all her courage, she gave the blow and cut off the head.

'Now,' said the head, 'place me where I told you.'

And fearfully she obeyed it in all its commands.

Retaining its animation, it looked around the lodge as usual,

and it would command its sister to go in such places as it thought

would procure for her the flesh of different animals she needed.

One day the head said:  'The time is not distant when I shall be freed

from this situation, and I shall have to undergo many sore evils.

So the superior manito decrees, and I must bear all patiently.'

In this situation we must leave the head.



In a certain part of the country was a village inhabited by a

numerous and warlike band of Indians.  In this village was a family

of ten young men--brothers.  It was in the spring of the year

that the youngest of these blackened his face and fasted.

His dreams were propitious.  Having ended his fast, he went

secretly for his brothers at night, so that none in the village

could overhear or find out the direction they intended to go.

Though their drum was heard, yet that was a common occurrence.

Having ended the usual formalities, he told how favorable

his dreams were, and that he had called them together

to know if they would accompany him in a war excursion.

They all answered they would.  The third brother from the eldest,

noted for his oddities, coming up with his war-club when his brother

had ceased speaking, jumped up.  'Yes,' said he, 'I will go,

and this will be the way I will treat those I am going to fight;'

and he struck the post in the center of the lodge, and gave a yell.

The others spoke to him, saying:  'Slow, slow, Mudjikewis, when you

are in other people's lodges.'  So he sat down.  Then, in turn,

they took the drum, and sang their songs, and closed with a feast.

The youngest told them not to whisper their intention

to their wives, but secretly to prepare for their journey.

They all promised obedience, and Mudjikewis was the first

to say so.



The time for their departure drew near.  Word was given to

assemble on a certain night, when they would depart immediately.

Mudjikewis was loud in his demands for his moccasins.

Several times his wife asked him the reason.  'Besides,' said she,

'you have a good pair on.'  'Quick, quick,' said he, 'since you

must know, we are going on a war excursion; so be quick.'

He thus revealed the secret.  That night they met and started.

The snow was on the ground, and they traveled all night, lest others

should follow them.  When it was daylight, the leader took snow

and made a ball of it, then tossing it into the air, he said:

'It was in this way I saw snow fall in a dream, so that I could not

be tracked.'  And he told them to keep close to each other for fear

of losing themselves, as the snow began to fall in very large flakes.

Near as they walked, it was with difficulty they could see each other.

The snow continued falling all that day and the following night,

so it was impossible to track them.



They had now walked for several days, and Mudjikewis was

always in the rear.  One day, running suddenly forward,

he gave the SAW-SAW-QUAN,<footnote [War-whoop.]> and struck

a tree with his war-club, and it broke into pieces as if struck

with lightning.  'Brothers,' said he, 'this will be the way I

will serve those we are going to fight.'  The leader answered,

'Slow, slow, Mudjikewis, the one I lead you to is not to be thought

of so lightly.'  Again he fell back and thought to himself:

'What! what! who can this be he is leading us to?'

He felt fearful and was silent.  Day after day they traveled on,

till they came to an extensive plain, on the borders of which

human bones were bleaching in the sun.  The leader spoke:

'They are the bones of those who have gone before us.

None has ever yet returned to tell the sad tale of their fate.'

Again Mudjikewis became restless, and, running forward,

gave the accustomed yell.  Advancing to a large rock which

stood above the ground, he struck it, and it fell to pieces.

'See, brothers,' said he, 'thus will I treat those whom we are

going to fight.'  'Still, still,' once more said the leader;

'he to whom I am leading you is not to be compared

to the rock.'



Mudjikewis fell back thoughtful, saying to himself:  'I wonder

who this can be that he is going to attack;' and he was afraid.

Still they continued to see the remains of former warriors,

who had been to the place where they were now going,

some of whom had retreated as far back as the place where they

first saw the bones, beyond which no one had ever escaped.

At last they came to a piece of rising ground, from which they

plainly distinguished, sleeping on a distant mountain,

a mammoth bear.



The distance between them was very great, but the size of the animal

caused him to be plainly seen.  'There,' said the leader,

'it is he to whom I am leading you; here our troubles will commence,

for he is a mishemokwa and a manito.  It is he who has that we

prize so dearly (i.e. wampum), to obtain which, the warriors whose

bones we saw, sacrificed their lives.  You must not be fearful:

be manly.  We shall find him asleep.'  Then the leader went

forward and touched the belt around the animal's neck.

'This,' said he, 'is what we must get.  It contains the wampum.'

Then they requested the eldest to try and slip the belt over

the bear's head, who appeared to be fast asleep, as he was not

in the least disturbed by the attempt to obtain the belt.

All their efforts were in vain, till it came to the one

next the youngest.  He tried, and the belt moved nearly

over the monster's head, but he could get it no farther.

Then the youngest one, and the leader, made his attempt, and succeeded.

Placing it on the back of the oldest, he said, 'Now we must run,'

and off they started.  When one became fatigued with its weight,

another would relieve him.  Thus they ran till they had passed

the bones of all former warriors, and were some distance beyond,

when looking back, they saw the monster slowly rising.

He stood some time before he missed his wampum.  Soon they heard his

tremendous howl, like distant thunder, slowly filling all the sky;

and then they heard him speak and say, 'Who can it be that has

dared to steal my wampum? earth is not so large but that I

can find them;' and he descended from the hill in pursuit.

As if convulsed, the earth shook with every jump he made.

Very soon he approached the party.  They, however, kept the belt,

exchanging it from one to another, and encouraging each other;

but he gained on them fast.  'Brothers,' said the leader,

'has never any one of you, when fasting, dreamed of some friendly

spirit who would aid you as a guardian?'  A dead silence followed.

'Well,' said he, 'fasting, I dreamed of being in danger

of instant death, when I saw a small lodge, with smoke curling

from its top.  An old man lived in it, and I dreamed he helped me;

and may it be verified soon,' he said, running forward and

giving the peculiar yell, and a howl as if the sounds came

from the depths of his stomach, and what is called CHECAUDUM.

Getting upon a piece of rising ground, behold! a lodge, with smoke

curling from its top, appeared.  This gave them all new strength,

and they ran forward and entered it.  The leader spoke to

the old man who sat in the lodge, saying, 'Nemesho, help us;

we claim your protection, for the great bear will kill us.'

'Sit down and eat, my grandchildren,' said the old man.

'Who is a great manito?' said he.  'There is none but me;

but let me look,' and he opened the door of the lodge, when,

lo! at a little distance he saw the enraged animal coming on,

with slow but powerful leaps.  He closed the door.

'Yes,' said he, 'he is indeed a great manito:  my grandchildren,

you will be the cause of my losing my life; you asked my protection,

and I granted it; so now, come what may, I will protect you.

When the bear arrives at the door, you must run out of the other

door of the lodge.'  Then putting his hand to the side of

the lodge where he sat, he brought out a bag which he opened.

Taking out two small black dogs, he placed them before him.

'These are the ones I use when I fight,' said he; and he commenced

patting with both hands the sides of one of them, and he began

to swell out, so that he soon filled the lodge by his bulk;

and he had great strong teeth.  When he attained his full

size he growled, and from that moment, as from instinct,

he jumped out at the door and met the bear, who in another leap

would have reached the lodge.  A terrible combat ensued.

The skies rang with the howls of the fierce monsters.

The remaining dog soon took the field.  The brothers, at the onset,

took the advice of the old man, and escaped through the opposite

side of the lodge.  They had not proceeded far before they heard

the dying cry of one of the dogs, and soon after of the other.

'Well,' said the leader, 'the old man will share their fate:

so run; he will soon be after us.'  They started with fresh vigor,

for they had received food from the old man:  but very soon the bear

came in sight, and again was fast gaining upon them.  Again the leader

asked the brothers if they could do nothing for their safety.

All were silent.  The leader, running forward, did as before.

'I dreamed,' he cried, 'that, being in great trouble, an old

man helped me who was a manito; we shall soon see his lodge.'

Taking courage, they still went on.  After going a short distance

they saw the lodge of the old manito.  They entered immediately

and claimed his protection, telling him a manito was after them.

The old man, setting meat before them, said:  'Eat! who is a

manito? there is no manito but me; there is none whom I fear;'

and the earth trembled as the monster advanced.  The old man

opened the door and saw him coming.  He shut it slowly, and said:

'Yes, my grandchildren, you have brought trouble upon me.'

Procuring his medicine-sack, he took out his small war-clubs of

black stone, and told the young men to run through the other side

of the lodge.  As he handled the clubs, they became very large,

and the old man stepped out just as the bear reached the door.

Then striking him with one of the clubs, it broke in pieces;

the bear stumbled.  Renewing the attempt with the other

war-club, that also was broken, but the bear fell senseless.

Each blow the old man gave him sounded like a clap of thunder,

and the howls of the bear ran along till they filled the

heavens.



The young men had now run some distance, when they looked back.

They could see that the bear was recovering from the blows.

First he moved his paws, and soon they saw him rise

on his feet.  The old man shared the fate of the first,

for they now heard his cries as he was torn in pieces.

Again the monster was in pursuit, and fast overtaking them.

Not yet discouraged, the young men kept on their way;

but the bear was now so close, that the leader once more applied

to his brothers, but they could do nothing.  'Well,' said he,

'my dreams will soon be exhausted; after this I have but one more.'

He advanced, invoking his guardian spirit to aid him.

'Once,' said he, 'I dreamed that, being sorely pressed, I came to a

large lake, on the shore of which was a canoe, partly out of water,

having ten paddles all in readiness.  Do not fear,' he cried,

'we shall soon get it.'  And so it was, even as he had said.

Coming to the lake, they saw the canoe with ten paddles,

and immediately they embarked.  Scarcely had they reached the center

of the lake, when they saw the bear arrive at its borders.

Lifting himself on his hind legs, he looked all around.

Then he waded into the water; then losing his footing he turned back,

and commenced making the circuit of the lake.  Meantime the party

remained stationary in the center to watch his movements.

He traveled all around, till at last he came to the place from

whence he started.  Then he commenced drinking up the water,

and they saw the current fast setting in towards his open mouth.

The leader encouraged them to paddle hard for the opposite shore.

When only a short distance from land, the current had increased

so much, that they were drawn back by it, and all their efforts

to reach it were in vain.



Then the leader again spoke, telling them to meet their fates manfully.

'Now is the time, Mudjikewis,' said he, 'to show your prowess.

Take courage and sit at the bow of the canoe; and when it approaches

his mouth, try what effect your club will have on his head.'

He obeyed, and stood ready to give the blow; while the leader,

who steered, directed the canoe for the open mouth of the monster.



Rapidly advancing, they were just about to enter his mouth, when Mudjikewis

struck him a tremendous blow on the head, and gave the SAW-SAW-QUAN.

The bear's limbs doubled under him, and he fell, stunned by the blow.

But before Mudjikewis could renew it, the monster disgorged all

the water he had drank, with a force which sent the canoe with great

velocity to the opposite shore.  Instantly leaving the canoe,

again they fled, and on they went till they were completely exhausted.

The earth again shook, and soon they saw the monster hard

after them.  Their spirits drooped, and they felt discouraged.

The leader exerted himself, by actions and words, to cheer them up;

and once more he asked them if they thought of nothing, or could

do nothing for their rescue; and, as before, all were silent.

'Then,' he said, 'this is the last time I can apply to my guardian spirit.

Now, if we do not succeed, our fates are decided.'  He ran forward,

invoking his spirit with great earnestness, and gave the yell.

'We shall soon arrive,' said he to his brothers, 'at the place where

my last guardian spirit dwells.  In him I place great confidence.

Do not, do not be afraid, or your limbs will be fear-bound. We shall

soon reach his lodge.  Run, run,' he cried.



Returning now to Iamo, he had passed all the time in the same

condition we had left him, the head directing his sister,

in order to procure food, where to place the magic arrows,

and speaking at long intervals.  One day the sister saw the eyes

of the head brighten, as if with pleasure.  At last it spoke.

'Oh, sister,' it said, 'in what a pitiful situation you

have been the cause of placing me!  Soon, very soon, a party

of young men will arrive and apply to me for aid; but alas!

How can I give what I would have done with so much pleasure?

Nevertheless, take two arrows, and place them where you have

been in the habit of placing the others, and have meat prepared

and cooked before they arrive.  When you hear them coming

and calling on my name, go out and say, "Alas! it is long

ago that an accident befell him.  I was the cause of it."

If they still come near, ask them in, and set meat before them.

And now you must follow my directions strictly.  When the bear

is near, go out and meet him.  You will take my medicine-sack, bows

and arrows, and my head.  You must then untie the sack, and spread

out before you my paints of all colors, my war-eagle feathers,

my tufts of dried hair, and whatever else it contains.

As the bear approaches, you will take all these articles,

one by one, and say to him, "This is my deceased brother's paint,"

and so on with all the other articles, throwing each of them

as far as you can.  The virtues contained in them will cause

him to totter; and, to complete his destruction, you will take

my head, and that too you will cast as far off as you can,

crying aloud, "See, this is my deceased brother's head."

He will then fall senseless.  By this time the young men

will have eaten, and you will call them to your assistance.

You must then cut the carcass into pieces, yes, into small pieces,

and scatter them to the four winds; for, unless you do this,

he will again revive.'  She promised that all should be

done as he said.  She had only time to prepare the meat,

when the voice of the leader was heard calling upon Iamo for aid.

The woman went out and said as her brother had directed.

But the war party being closely pursued, came up to the lodge.

She invited them in, and placed the meat before them.

While they were eating, they heard the bear approaching.

Untying the medicine-sack and taking the head, she had all

in readiness for his approach.  When he came up she did

as she had been told; and, before she had expended the paints

and feathers, the bear began to totter, but, still advancing,

came close to the woman.  Saying as she was commanded, she then

took the head, and cast it as far from her as she could.

As it rolled along the ground, the blood, excited by the feelings

of the head in this terrible scene, gushed from the nose and mouth.

The bear, tottering, soon fell with a tremendous noise.

Then she cried for help, and the young men came

rushing out, having partially regained their strength and

spirits.



Mudjikewis, stepping up, gave a yell and struck him a blow upon

the head.  This he repeated, till it seemed like a mass of brains,

while the others, as quick as possible, cut him into very small pieces,

which they then scattered in every direction.  While thus employed,

happening to look around where they had thrown the meat,

wonderful to behold, they saw starting up and turning off in every

direction small black bears, such as are seen at the present day.

The country was soon overspread with these black animals.

And it was from this monster that the present race of bears

derived their origin.



Having thus overcome their pursuer, they returned to the lodge.

In the meantime, the woman, gathering the implements she had used,

and the head, placed them again in the sack.  But the head did not

speak again, probably from its great exertion to overcome the monster.



Having spent so much time and traversed so vast a country in their flight,

the young men gave up the idea of ever returning to their own country,

and game being plenty, they determined to remain where they now were.

One day they moved off some distance from the lodge for the

purpose of hunting, having left the wampum with the woman.

They were very successful, and amused themselves, as all young

men do when alone, by talking and jesting with each other.

One of them spoke and said, 'We have all this sport to ourselves;

let us go and ask our sister if she will not let us bring the head

to this place, as it is still alive.  It may be pleased to hear us talk,

and be in our company.  In the meantime take food to our sister.'

They went and requested the head.  She told them to take it,

and they took it to their hunting-grounds, and tried to amuse it,

but only at times did they see its eyes beam with pleasure.

One day, while busy in their encampment, they were unexpectedly attacked

by unknown Indians.  The skirmish was long contested and bloody;

many of their foes were slain, but still they were thirty to one.

The young men fought desperately till they were all killed.

The attacking party then retreated to a height of ground,

to muster their men, and to count the number of missing and slain.

One of their young men had stayed away, and, in endeavoring

to overtake them, came to the place where the head was hung up.

Seeing that alone retain animation, he eyed it for some time

with fear and surprise.  However, he took it down and opened

the sack, and was much pleased to see the beautiful feathers,

one of which he placed on his head.



Starting off, it waved gracefully over him till he reached his party,

when he threw down the head and sack, and told them how he had

found it, and that the sack was full of paints and feathers.

They all looked at the head and made sport of it.

Numbers of the young men took the paint and painted themselves,

and one of the party took the head by the hair and said--



'Look, you ugly thing, and see your paints on the faces of warriors.'



But the feathers were so beautiful, that numbers of them

also placed them on their heads.  Then again they used all

kinds of indignity to the head, for which they were in turn

repaid by the death of those who had used the feathers.

Then the chief commanded them to throw away all except the head.

'We will see,' said he, 'when we get home, what we can do with it.

We will try to make it shut its eyes.'



When they reached their homes they took it to the council-lodge,

and hung it up before the fire, fastening it with raw hide soaked,

which would shrink and become tightened by the action of the fire.

'We will then see,' they said, 'if we cannot make it shut its eyes.'



Meantime, for several days, the sister had been waiting for the young

men to bring back the head; till, at last, getting impatient,

she went in search of it.  The young men she found lying within

short distances of each other, dead, and covered with wounds.

Various other bodies lay scattered in different directions around them.

She searched for the head and sack, but they were nowhere to be found.

She raised her voice and wept, and blackened her face.  Then she

walked in different directions, till she came to the place from whence

the head had been taken.  Then she found the magic bow and arrows,

where the young men, ignorant of their qualities, had left them.

She thought to herself that she would find her brother's head, and came

to a piece of rising ground, and there saw some of his paints and feathers.

These she carefully put up, and hung upon the branch of a tree till

her return.



At dusk she arrived at the first lodge of a very extensive village.

Here she used a charm, common among Indians when they wish to meet

with a kind reception.  On applying to the old man and woman

of the lodge, she was kindly received.  She made known her errand.

The old man promised to aid her, and told her the head was hung up before

the council-fire, and that the chiefs of the village, with their young men,

kept watch over it continually.  The former are considered as manitoes.

She said she only wished to see it, and would be satisfied if she could only

get to the door of the lodge.  She knew she had not sufficient power to take

it by force.  'Come with me,' said the Indian, 'I will take you there.'

They went, and they took their seats near the door.  The council-lodge

was filled with warriors, amusing themselves with games, and constantly

keeping up a fire to smoke the head, as they said, to make dry meat.

They saw the head move, and not knowing what to make of it, one spoke

and said:  'Ha! ha!  It is beginning to feel the effects of the smoke.'

The sister looked up from the door, and her eyes met those of her brother,

and tears rolled down the cheeks of the head.  'Well,' said the chief,

'I thought we would make you do something at last.  Look! look at it--

shedding tears,' said he to those around him; and they all laughed and passed

their jokes upon it.  The chief, looking around, and observing the woman,

after some time said to the man who came with her:  'Who have you got there?

I have never seen that woman before in our village.'  'Yes,' replied the man,

'you have seen her; she is a relation of mine, and seldom goes out.  She stays

at my lodge, and asked me to allow her to come with me to this place.'

In the center of the lodge sat one of those young men who are always forward,

and fond of boasting and displaying themselves before others.

'Why,' said he, 'I have seen her often, and it is to this lodge I go almost

every night to court her.'  All the others laughed and continued their games.

The young man did not know he was telling a lie to the woman's advantage,

who by that means escaped.



She returned to the man's lodge, and immediately set out for her

own country.  Coming to the spot where the bodies of her adopted

brothers lay, she placed them together, their feet toward the east.

Then taking an ax which she had, she cast it up into the air,

crying out, 'Brothers, get up from under it, or it will fall on you.'

This she repeated three times, and the third time the brothers all arose

and stood on their feet.



Mudjikewis commenced rubbing his eyes and stretching himself.

'Why,' said he, 'I have overslept myself.'  'No, indeed,'

said one of the others, 'do you not know we were all killed,

and that it is our sister who has brought us to life?'

The young men took the bodies of their enemies and burned them.

Soon after, the woman went to procure wives for them,

in a distant country, they knew not where; but she returned

with ten young women, which she gave to the ten young men,

beginning with the eldest.  Mudjikewis stepped to and fro,

uneasy lest he should not get the one he liked.

But he was not disappointed, for she fell to his lot.

And they were well matched, for she was a female magician.

They then all moved into a very large lodge, and their sister

told them that the women must now take turns in going

to her brother's head every night, trying to untie it.

They all said they would do so with pleasure.  The eldest

made the first attempt, and with a rushing noise she fled

through the air.



Toward daylight she returned.  She had been unsuccessful, as she succeeded

in untying only one of the knots.  All took their turns regularly,

and each one succeeded in untying only one knot each time.

But when the youngest went, she commenced the work as soon

as she reached the lodge; although it had always been occupied,

still the Indians never could see any one.  For ten nights now,

the smoke had not ascended, but filled the lodge and drove them out.

This last night they were all driven out, and the young woman carried

off the head.



The young people and the sister heard the young woman

coming high through the air, and they heard her saying:

'Prepare the body of our brother.'  And as soon as they heard it,

they went to a small lodge where the black body of Iamo lay.

His sister commenced cutting the neck part, from which the neck

had been severed.  She cut so deep as to cause it to bleed;

and the others who were present, by rubbing the body and

applying medicines, expelled the blackness.  In the meantime,

the one who brought it, by cutting the neck of the head, caused that

also to bleed.



As soon as she arrived, they placed that close to the body,

and, by aid of medicines and various other means, succeeded in

restoring Iamo to all his former beauty and manliness.

All rejoiced in the happy termination of their troubles,

and they had spent some time joyfully together, when Iamo said:

'Now I will divide the wampum,' and getting the belt which contained

it, he commenced with the eldest, giving it in equal portions.

But the youngest got the most splendid and beautiful,

as the bottom of the belt held the richest and rarest.



They were told that, since they had all once died, and were

restored to life, they were no longer mortal, but spirits,

and they were assigned different stations in the invisible world.

Only Mudjikewis's place was, however, named.  He was to direct

the west wind, hence generally called Kebeyun, there to remain for ever.

They were commanded, as they had it in their power, to do good

to the inhabitants of the earth, and, forgetting their sufferings

in procuring the wampum, to give all things with a liberal hand.

And they were also commanded that it should also be held by them sacred;

those grains or shells of the pale hue to be emblematic of peace,

while those of the darker hue would lead to evil and war.



The spirits then, amid songs and shouts, took their flight to their

respective abodes on high; while Iamo, with his sister Iamoqua,

descended into the depths below.









End of the Project Gutenberg Edition of 'Life on the Mississippi'.













         THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

               (Tom Sawyer's Comrade)

                         BY

                     MARK TWAIN

                (Samuel L. Clemens)





NOTICE



PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narra-

tive will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a

moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to

find a plot in it will be shot.



                  BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR,

                     Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.





EXPLANATORY



IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit:

the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the

backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike

County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this

last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-

hazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly,

and with the trustworthy guidance and support of

personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.



I make this explanation for the reason that without

it many readers would suppose that all these characters

were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.



                                      THE AUTHOR.







HUCKLEBERRY FINN



Scene: The Mississippi Valley

Time: Forty to fifty years ago





CHAPTER I.



YOU don't know about me without you have read a

book by the name of The Adventures of Tom

Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was

made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth,

mainly. There was things which he stretched, but

mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never

seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it

was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt

Polly -- Tom's Aunt Polly, she is -- and Mary, and

the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book,

which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as

I said before.



Now the way that the book winds up is this: Tom

and me found the money that the robbers hid in the

cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars

apiece -- all gold. It was an awful sight of money

when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher he took

it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar

a day apiece all the year round -- more than a body

could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglas she

took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize

me; but it was rough living in the house all the time,

considering how dismal regular and decent the widow

was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it

no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my

sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied. But

Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going

to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would

go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went

back.



The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor

lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names,

too, but she never meant no harm by it. She put me

in them new clothes again, and I couldn't do nothing

but sweat and sweat, and feel all cramped up. Well,

then, the old thing commenced again. The widow

rung a bell for supper, and you had to come to time.

When you got to the table you couldn't go right to

eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck

down her head and grumble a little over the victuals,

though there warn't really anything the matter with

them, -- that is, nothing only everything was cooked

by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different;

things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps

around, and the things go better.



After supper she got out her book and learned me

about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat

to find out all about him; but by and by she let it out

that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so

then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't

take no stock in dead people.



Pretty soon I wanted to smoke, and asked the widow

to let me. But she wouldn't. She said it was a mean

practice and wasn't clean, and I must try to not do it

any more. That is just the way with some people.

They get down on a thing when they don't know

nothing about it. Here she was a-bothering about

Moses, which was no kin to her, and no use to any-

body, being gone, you see, yet finding a power of

fault with me for doing a thing that had some good in

it. And she took snuff, too; of course that was all

right, because she done it herself.



Her sister, Miss Watson, a tolerable slim old maid,

with goggles on, had just come to live with her, and

took a set at me now with a spelling-book. She

worked me middling hard for about an hour, and then

the widow made her ease up. I couldn't stood it

much longer. Then for an hour it was deadly dull,

and I was fidgety. Miss Watson would say, "Don't

put your feet up there, Huckleberry;" and "Don't

scrunch up like that, Huckleberry -- set up straight;"

and pretty soon she would say, "Don't gap and stretch

like that, Huckleberry -- why don't you try to be-

have?" Then she told me all about the bad place,

and I said I wished I was there. She got mad then,

but I didn't mean no harm. All I wanted was to go

somewheres; all I wanted was a change, I warn't

particular. She said it was wicked to say what I said;

said she wouldn't say it for the whole world; she was

going to live so as to go to the good place. Well, I

couldn't see no advantage in going where she was

going, so I made up my mind I wouldn't try for it.

But I never said so, because it would only make

trouble, and wouldn't do no good.



Now she had got a start, and she went on and told

me all about the good place. She said all a body

would have to do there was to go around all day long

with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn't

think much of it. But I never said so. I asked her if

she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there, and she

said not by a considerable sight. I was glad about

that, because I wanted him and me to be together.



Miss Watson she kept pecking at me, and it got

tiresome and lonesome. By and by they fetched the

niggers in and had prayers, and then everybody was

off to bed. I went up to my room with a piece of

candle, and put it on the table. Then I set down in a

chair by the window and tried to think of something

cheerful, but it warn't no use. I felt so lonesome I

most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and

the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and

I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about some-

body that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog cry-

ing about somebody that was going to die; and the

wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I

couldn't make out what it was, and so it made the cold

shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I

heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it

wants to tell about something that's on its mind and

can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in

its grave, and has to go about that way every night

grieving. I got so down-hearted and scared I did wish

I had some company. Pretty soon a spider went

crawling up my shoulder, and I flipped it off and it lit

in the candle; and before I could budge it was all

shriveled up. I didn't need anybody to tell me that

that was an awful bad sign and would fetch me some

bad luck, so I was scared and most shook the clothes

off of me. I got up and turned around in my tracks

three times and crossed my breast every time; and

then I tied up a little lock of my hair with a thread to

keep witches away. But I hadn't no confidence.

You do that when you've lost a horseshoe that you've

found, instead of nailing it up over the door, but I

hadn't ever heard anybody say it was any way to keep

off bad luck when you'd killed a spider.



I set down again, a-shaking all over, and got out my

pipe for a smoke; for the house was all as still as

death now, and so the widow wouldn't know. Well,

after a long time I heard the clock away off in the

town go boom -- boom -- boom -- twelve licks; and

all still again -- stiller than ever. Pretty soon I heard

a twig snap down in the dark amongst the trees --

something was a stirring. I set still and listened.

Directly I could just barely hear a "me-yow! me-

yow!" down there. That was good! Says I, "me-

yow! me-yow!" as soft as I could, and then I put

out the light and scrambled out of the window on to

the shed. Then I slipped down to the ground and

crawled in among the trees, and, sure enough, there

was Tom Sawyer waiting for me.





CHAPTER II.



WE went tiptoeing along a path amongst the trees

back towards the end of the widow's garden,

stooping down so as the branches wouldn't scrape our

heads. When we was passing by the kitchen I fell

over a root and made a noise. We scrouched down

and laid still. Miss Watson's big nigger, named Jim,

was setting in the kitchen door; we could see him

pretty clear, because there was a light behind him.

He got up and stretched his neck out about a minute,

listening. Then he says:



"Who dah?"



He listened some more; then he come tiptoeing

down and stood right between us; we could a touched

him, nearly. Well, likely it was minutes and minutes

that there warn't a sound, and we all there so close

together. There was a place on my ankle that got to

itching, but I dasn't scratch it; and then my ear begun

to itch; and next my back, right between my shoul-

ders. Seemed like I'd die if I couldn't scratch. Well,

I've noticed that thing plenty times since. If you are

with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to

sleep when you ain't sleepy -- if you are anywheres

where it won't do for you to scratch, why you will itch

all over in upwards of a thousand places. Pretty soon

Jim says:



"Say, who is you? Whar is you? Dog my cats

ef I didn' hear sumf'n. Well, I know what I's gwyne

to do: I's gwyne to set down here and listen tell I

hears it agin."



So he set down on the ground betwixt me and Tom.

He leaned his back up against a tree, and stretched his

legs out till one of them most touched one of mine.

My nose begun to itch. It itched till the tears come

into my eyes. But I dasn't scratch. Then it begun

to itch on the inside. Next I got to itching under-

neath. I didn't know how I was going to set still.

This miserableness went on as much as six or seven

minutes; but it seemed a sight longer than that. I

was itching in eleven different places now. I reckoned

I couldn't stand it more'n a minute longer, but I set

my teeth hard and got ready to try. Just then Jim

begun to breathe heavy; next he begun to snore --

and then I was pretty soon comfortable again.



Tom he made a sign to me -- kind of a little noise

with his mouth -- and we went creeping away on our

hands and knees. When we was ten foot off Tom

whispered to me, and wanted to tie Jim to the tree for

fun. But I said no; he might wake and make a dis-

turbance, and then they'd find out I warn't in. Then

Tom said he hadn't got candles enough, and he would

slip in the kitchen and get some more. I didn't want

him to try. I said Jim might wake up and come.

But Tom wanted to resk it; so we slid in there and got

three candles, and Tom laid five cents on the table for

pay. Then we got out, and I was in a sweat to get

away; but nothing would do Tom but he must crawl

to where Jim was, on his hands and knees, and play

something on him. I waited, and it seemed a good

while, everything was so still and lonesome.



As soon as Tom was back we cut along the path,

around the garden fence, and by and by fetched up on

the steep top of the hill the other side of the house.

Tom said he slipped Jim's hat off of his head and hung

it on a limb right over him, and Jim stirred a little, but

he didn't wake. Afterwards Jim said the witches be-

witched him and put him in a trance, and rode him all

over the State, and then set him under the trees again,

and hung his hat on a limb to show who done it. And

next time Jim told it he said they rode him down to

New Orleans; and, after that, every time he told it he

spread it more and more, till by and by he said they

rode him all over the world, and tired him most to

death, and his back was all over saddle-boils. Jim

was monstrous proud about it, and he got so he

wouldn't hardly notice the other niggers. Niggers

would come miles to hear Jim tell about it, and he was

more looked up to than any nigger in that country.

Strange niggers would stand with their mouths open

and look him all over, same as if he was a wonder.

Niggers is always talking about witches in the dark by

the kitchen fire; but whenever one was talking and

letting on to know all about such things, Jim would

happen in and say, "Hm! What you know 'bout

witches?" and that nigger was corked up and had to

take a back seat. Jim always kept that five-center

piece round his neck with a string, and said it was a

charm the devil give to him with his own hands, and

told him he could cure anybody with it and fetch

witches whenever he wanted to just by saying some-

thing to it; but he never told what it was he said to it.

Niggers would come from all around there and give

Jim anything they had, just for a sight of that five-

center piece; but they wouldn't touch it, because the

devil had had his hands on it. Jim was most ruined

for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of

having seen the devil and been rode by witches.



Well, when Tom and me got to the edge of the hill-

top we looked away down into the village and could

see three or four lights twinkling, where there was sick

folks, maybe; and the stars over us was sparkling ever

so fine; and down by the village was the river, a whole

mile broad, and awful still and grand. We went down

the hill and found Jo Harper and Ben Rogers, and

two or three more of the boys, hid in the old tanyard.

So we unhitched a skiff and pulled down the river two

mile and a half, to the big scar on the hillside, and

went ashore.



We went to a clump of bushes, and Tom made

everybody swear to keep the secret, and then showed

them a hole in the hill, right in the thickest part of the

bushes. Then we lit the candles, and crawled in on

our hands and knees. We went about two hundred

yards, and then the cave opened up. Tom poked

about amongst the passages, and pretty soon ducked

under a wall where you wouldn't a noticed that there

was a hole. We went along a narrow place and got

into a kind of room, all damp and sweaty and cold,

and there we stopped. Tom says:



"Now, we'll start this band of robbers and call it

Tom Sawyer's Gang. Everybody that wants to join

has got to take an oath, and write his name in blood."



Everybody was willing. So Tom got out a sheet of

paper that he had wrote the oath on, and read it. It

swore every boy to stick to the band, and never tell

any of the secrets; and if anybody done anything to

any boy in the band, whichever boy was ordered to

kill that person and his family must do it, and he

mustn't eat and he mustn't sleep till he had killed them

and hacked a cross in their breasts, which was the sign

of the band. And nobody that didn't belong to the

band could use that mark, and if he did he must be

sued; and if he done it again he must be killed. And

if anybody that belonged to the band told the secrets,

he must have his throat cut, and then have his carcass

burnt up and the ashes scattered all around, and his

name blotted off of the list with blood and never men-

tioned again by the gang, but have a curse put on it

and be forgot forever.



Everybody said it was a real beautiful oath, and

asked Tom if he got it out of his own head. He said,

some of it, but the rest was out of pirate-books and

robber-books, and every gang that was high-toned

had it.



Some thought it would be good to kill the FAMILIES

of boys that told the secrets. Tom said it was a good

idea, so he took a pencil and wrote it in. Then Ben

Rogers says:



"Here's Huck Finn, he hain't got no family; what

you going to do 'bout him?"



"Well, hain't he got a father?" says Tom Sawyer.



"Yes, he's got a father, but you can't never find

him these days. He used to lay drunk with the hogs

in the tanyard, but he hain't been seen in these parts

for a year or more."



They talked it over, and they was going to rule me

out, because they said every boy must have a family

or somebody to kill, or else it wouldn't be fair and

square for the others. Well, nobody could think of

anything to do -- everybody was stumped, and set

still. I was most ready to cry; but all at once I

thought of a way, and so I offered them Miss Watson

-- they could kill her. Everybody said:



"Oh, she'll do. That's all right. Huck can come

in."



Then they all stuck a pin in their fingers to get

blood to sign with, and I made my mark on the paper.



"Now," says Ben Rogers, "what's the line of busi-

ness of this Gang?"



"Nothing only robbery and murder," Tom said.



"But who are we going to rob? -- houses, or cattle,

or --"



"Stuff! stealing cattle and such things ain't rob-

bery; it's burglary," says Tom Sawyer. "We ain't

burglars. That ain't no sort of style. We are high-

waymen. We stop stages and carriages on the road,

with masks on, and kill the people and take their

watches and money."



"Must we always kill the people?"



"Oh, certainly. It's best. Some authorities think

different, but mostly it's considered best to kill them --

except some that you bring to the cave here, and keep

them till they're ransomed."



"Ransomed? What's that?"



"I don't know. But that's what they do. I've

seen it in books; and so of course that's what we've

got to do."



"But how can we do it if we don't know what it is?"



"Why, blame it all, we've GOT to do it. Don't I tell

you it's in the books? Do you want to go to doing

different from what's in the books, and get things all

muddled up?"



"Oh, that's all very fine to SAY, Tom Sawyer, but

how in the nation are these fellows going to be ran-

somed if we don't know how to do it to them? -- that's

the thing I want to get at. Now, what do you reckon

it is?"



"Well, I don't know. But per'aps if we keep them

till they're ransomed, it means that we keep them till

they're dead. "



"Now, that's something LIKE. That'll answer.

Why couldn't you said that before? We'll keep them

till they're ransomed to death; and a bothersome lot

they'll be, too -- eating up everything, and always

trying to get loose."



"How you talk, Ben Rogers. How can they get

loose when there's a guard over them, ready to shoot

them down if they move a peg?"



"A guard! Well, that IS good. So somebody's

got to set up all night and never get any sleep, just so

as to watch them. I think that's foolishness. Why

can't a body take a club and ransom them as soon as

they get here?"



"Because it ain't in the books so -- that's why.

Now, Ben Rogers, do you want to do things regular,

or don't you? -- that's the idea. Don't you reckon

that the people that made the books knows what's the

correct thing to do? Do you reckon YOU can learn

'em anything? Not by a good deal. No, sir, we'll

just go on and ransom them in the regular way."



"All right. I don't mind; but I say it's a fool

way, anyhow. Say, do we kill the women, too?"



"Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I

wouldn't let on. Kill the women? No; nobody ever

saw anything in the books like that. You fetch them

to the cave, and you're always as polite as pie to them;

and by and by they fall in love with you, and never

want to go home any more."



"Well, if that's the way I'm agreed, but I don't

take no stock in it. Mighty soon we'll have the cave

so cluttered up with women, and fellows waiting to be

ransomed, that there won't be no place for the rob-

bers. But go ahead, I ain't got nothing to say."



Little Tommy Barnes was asleep now, and when

they waked him up he was scared, and cried, and said

he wanted to go home to his ma, and didn't want to

be a robber any more.



So they all made fun of him, and called him cry-

baby, and that made him mad, and he said he would

go straight and tell all the secrets. But Tom give him

five cents to keep quiet, and said we would all go home

and meet next week, and rob somebody and kill some

people.



Ben Rogers said he couldn't get out much, only

Sundays, and so he wanted to begin next Sunday; but

all the boys said it would be wicked to do it on Sunday,

and that settled the thing. They agreed to get to-

gether and fix a day as soon as they could, and then

we elected Tom Sawyer first captain and Jo Harper

second captain of the Gang, and so started home.



I clumb up the shed and crept into my window just

before day was breaking. My new clothes was all

greased up and clayey, and I was dog-tired.





CHAPTER III.



WELL, I got a good going-over in the morning

from old Miss Watson on account of my

clothes; but the widow she didn't scold, but only

cleaned off the grease and clay, and looked so sorry

that I thought I would behave awhile if I could. Then

Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but

nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day,

and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn't

so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks.

It warn't any good to me without hooks. I tried for

the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn't

make it work. By and by, one day, I asked Miss

Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She

never told me why, and I couldn't make it out no way.



I set down one time back in the woods, and had a

long think about it. I says to myself, if a body can

get anything they pray for, why don't Deacon Winn

get back the money he lost on pork? Why can't the

widow get back her silver snuffbox that was stole?

Why can't Miss Watson fat up? No, says I to my

self, there ain't nothing in it. I went and told the

widow about it, and she said the thing a body could

get by praying for it was "spiritual gifts." This was

too many for me, but she told me what she meant -- I

must help other people, and do everything I could for

other people, and look out for them all the time, and

never think about myself. This was including Miss

Watson, as I took it. I went out in the woods and

turned it over in my mind a long time, but I couldn't

see no advantage about it -- except for the other peo-

ple; so at last I reckoned I wouldn't worry about it

any more, but just let it go. Sometimes the widow

would take me one side and talk about Providence in a

way to make a body's mouth water; but maybe next

day Miss Watson would take hold and knock it all

down again. I judged I could see that there was two

Providences, and a poor chap would stand considerable

show with the widow's Providence, but if Miss Wat-

son's got him there warn't no help for him any more.

I thought it all out, and reckoned I would belong to

the widow's if he wanted me, though I couldn't make

out how he was a-going to be any better off then than

what he was before, seeing I was so ignorant, and so

kind of low-down and ornery.



Pap he hadn't been seen for more than a year, and

that was comfortable for me; I didn't want to see him

no more. He used to always whale me when he was

sober and could get his hands on me; though I used

to take to the woods most of the time when he was

around. Well, about this time he was found in the

river drownded, about twelve mile above town, so

people said. They judged it was him, anyway; said

this drownded man was just his size, and was ragged,

and had uncommon long hair, which was all like pap;

but they couldn't make nothing out of the face, be-

cause it had been in the water so long it warn't much

like a face at all. They said he was floating on his

back in the water. They took him and buried him on

the bank. But I warn't comfortable long, because I

happened to think of something. I knowed mighty

well that a drownded man don't float on his back, but

on his face. So I knowed, then, that this warn't pap,

but a woman dressed up in a man's clothes. So I was

uncomfortable again. I judged the old man would

turn up again by and by, though I wished he wouldn't.



We played robber now and then about a month, and

then I resigned. All the boys did. We hadn't robbed

nobody, hadn't killed any people, but only just pre-

tended. We used to hop out of the woods and go

charging down on hog-drivers and women in carts

taking garden stuff to market, but we never hived any

of them. Tom Sawyer called the hogs "ingots," and

he called the turnips and stuff "julery," and we would

go to the cave and powwow over what we had done,

and how many people we had killed and marked. But

I couldn't see no profit in it. One time Tom sent a

boy to run about town with a blazing stick, which he

called a slogan (which was the sign for the Gang to

get together), and then he said he had got secret news

by his spies that next day a whole parcel of Spanish

merchants and rich A-rabs was going to camp in Cave

Hollow with two hundred elephants, and six hundred

camels, and over a thousand "sumter" mules, all

loaded down with di'monds, and they didn't have only

a guard of four hundred soldiers, and so we would lay

in ambuscade, as he called it, and kill the lot and

scoop the things. He said we must slick up our swords

and guns, and get ready. He never could go after

even a turnip-cart but he must have the swords and

guns all scoured up for it, though they was only lath

and broomsticks, and you might scour at them till you

rotted, and then they warn't worth a mouthful of ashes

more than what they was before. I didn't believe we

could lick such a crowd of Spaniards and A-rabs, but

I wanted to see the camels and elephants, so I was on

hand next day, Saturday, in the ambuscade; and when

we got the word we rushed out of the woods and down

the hill. But there warn't no Spaniards and A-rabs,

and there warn't no camels nor no elephants. It

warn't anything but a Sunday-school picnic, and only

a primer-class at that. We busted it up, and chased

the children up the hollow; but we never got anything

but some doughnuts and jam, though Ben Rogers got

a rag doll, and Jo Harper got a hymn-book and a

tract; and then the teacher charged in, and made us

drop everything and cut. I didn't see no di'monds,

and I told Tom Sawyer so. He said there was loads

of them there, anyway; and he said there was A-rabs

there, too, and elephants and things. I said, why

couldn't we see them, then? He said if I warn't so

ignorant, but had read a book called Don Quixote, I

would know without asking. He said it was all done

by enchantment. He said there was hundreds of

soldiers there, and elephants and treasure, and so on,

but we had enemies which he called magicians; and

they had turned the whole thing into an infant Sunday-

school, just out of spite. I said, all right; then the

thing for us to do was to go for the magicians. Tom

Sawyer said I was a numskull.



"Why," said he, "a magician could call up a lot

of genies, and they would hash you up like nothing

before you could say Jack Robinson. They are as tall

as a tree and as big around as a church."



"Well," I says, "s'pose we got some genies to

help US -- can't we lick the other crowd then?"



"How you going to get them?"



"I don't know. How do THEY get them?"



"Why, they rub an old tin lamp or an iron ring,

and then the genies come tearing in, with the thunder

and lightning a-ripping around and the smoke a-rolling,

and everything they're told to do they up and do it.

They don't think nothing of pulling a shot-tower up

by the roots, and belting a Sunday-school superinten-

dent over the head with it -- or any other man."



"Who makes them tear around so?"



"Why, whoever rubs the lamp or the ring. They

belong to whoever rubs the lamp or the ring, and

they've got to do whatever he says. If he tells them

to build a palace forty miles long out of di'monds, and

fill it full of chewing-gum, or whatever you want, and

fetch an emperor's daughter from China for you to

marry, they've got to do it -- and they've got to do it

before sun-up next morning, too. And more: they've

got to waltz that palace around over the country

wherever you want it, you understand."



"Well," says I, "I think they are a pack of flat-

heads for not keeping the palace themselves 'stead of

fooling them away like that. And what's more -- if I

was one of them I would see a man in Jericho before I

would drop my business and come to him for the rub-

bing of an old tin lamp."



"How you talk, Huck Finn. Why, you'd HAVE to

come when he rubbed it, whether you wanted to or

not."



"What! and I as high as a tree and as big as a

church? All right, then; I WOULD come; but I lay

I'd make that man climb the highest tree there was in

the country."



"Shucks, it ain't no use to talk to you, Huck Finn.

You don't seem to know anything, somehow -- perfect

saphead."



I thought all this over for two or three days, and

then I reckoned I would see if there was anything in it.

I got an old tin lamp and an iron ring, and went out in

the woods and rubbed and rubbed till I sweat like an

Injun, calculating to build a palace and sell it; but it

warn't no use, none of the genies come. So then I

judged that all that stuff was only just one of Tom

Sawyer's lies. I reckoned he believed in the A-rabs

and the elephants, but as for me I think different. It

had all the marks of a Sunday-school.





CHAPTER IV.



WELL, three or four months run along, and it was

well into the winter now. I had been to school

most all the time and could spell and read and write

just a little, and could say the multiplication table up

to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I

could ever get any further than that if I was to live

forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, any-

way.



At first I hated the school, but by and by I got so I

could stand it. Whenever I got uncommon tired I

played hookey, and the hiding I got next day done me

good and cheered me up. So the longer I went to

school the easier it got to be. I was getting sort of

used to the widow's ways, too, and they warn't so

raspy on me. Living in a house and sleeping in a bed

pulled on me pretty tight mostly, but before the cold

weather I used to slide out and sleep in the woods

sometimes, and so that was a rest to me. I liked the

old ways best, but I was getting so I liked the new

ones, too, a little bit. The widow said I was coming

along slow but sure, and doing very satisfactory. She

said she warn't ashamed of me.



One morning I happened to turn over the salt-cellar

at breakfast. I reached for some of it as quick as I

could to throw over my left shoulder and keep off the

bad luck, but Miss Watson was in ahead of me, and

crossed me off. She says, "Take your hands away,

Huckleberry; what a mess you are always making!"

The widow put in a good word for me, but that warn't

going to keep off the bad luck, I knowed that well

enough. I started out, after breakfast, feeling worried

and shaky, and wondering where it was going to fall

on me, and what it was going to be. There is ways to

keep off some kinds of bad luck, but this wasn't one

of them kind; so I never tried to do anything, but just

poked along low-spirited and on the watch-out.



I went down to the front garden and clumb over the

stile where you go through the high board fence.

There was an inch of new snow on the ground, and I

seen somebody's tracks. They had come up from the

quarry and stood around the stile a while, and then

went on around the garden fence. It was funny they

hadn't come in, after standing around so. I couldn't

make it out. It was very curious, somehow. I was

going to follow around, but I stooped down to look at

the tracks first. I didn't notice anything at first, but

next I did. There was a cross in the left boot-heel

made with big nails, to keep off the devil.



I was up in a second and shinning down the hill. I

looked over my shoulder every now and then, but I

didn't see nobody. I was at Judge Thatcher's as quick

as I could get there. He said:



"Why, my boy, you are all out of breath. Did

you come for your interest?"



"No, sir," I says; "is there some for me?"



"Oh, yes, a half-yearly is in last night -- over a

hundred and fifty dollars. Quite a fortune for you.

You had better let me invest it along with your six

thousand, because if you take it you'll spend it."



"No, sir," I says, "I don't want to spend it. I

don't want it at all -- nor the six thousand, nuther.

I want you to take it; I want to give it to you -- the

six thousand and all."



He looked surprised. He couldn't seem to make

it out. He says:



"Why, what can you mean, my boy?"



I says, "Don't you ask me no questions about it,

please. You'll take it -- won't you?"



He says:



"Well, I'm puzzled. Is something the matter?"



"Please take it," says I, "and don't ask me noth-

ing -- then I won't have to tell no lies."



He studied a while, and then he says:



"Oho-o! I think I see. You want to SELL all your

property to me -- not give it. That's the correct

idea."



Then he wrote something on a paper and read it

over, and says:



"There; you see it says 'for a consideration.' That

means I have bought it of you and paid you for it.

Here's a dollar for you. Now you sign it."



So I signed it, and left.



Miss Watson's nigger, Jim, had a hair-ball as big as

your fist, which had been took out of the fourth

stomach of an ox, and he used to do magic with it.

He said there was a spirit inside of it, and it knowed

everything. So I went to him that night and told him

pap was here again, for I found his tracks in the snow.

What I wanted to know was, what he was going to do,

and was he going to stay? Jim got out his hair-ball

and said something over it, and then he held it up and

dropped it on the floor. It fell pretty solid, and only

rolled about an inch. Jim tried it again, and then

another time, and it acted just the same. Jim got

down on his knees, and put his ear against it and

listened. But it warn't no use; he said it wouldn't

talk. He said sometimes it wouldn't talk without

money. I told him I had an old slick counterfeit

quarter that warn't no good because the brass showed

through the silver a little, and it wouldn't pass nohow,

even if the brass didn't show, because it was so slick

it felt greasy, and so that would tell on it every time.

(I reckoned I wouldn't say nothing about the dollar I

got from the judge.) I said it was pretty bad money,

but maybe the hair-ball would take it, because maybe

it wouldn't know the difference. Jim smelt it and bit

it and rubbed it, and said he would manage so the

hair-ball would think it was good. He said he would

split open a raw Irish potato and stick the quarter in

between and keep it there all night, and next morning

you couldn't see no brass, and it wouldn't feel greasy

no more, and so anybody in town would take it in a

minute, let alone a hair-ball. Well, I knowed a potato

would do that before, but I had forgot it.



Jim put the quarter under the hair-ball, and got

down and listened again. This time he said the hair-

ball was all right. He said it would tell my whole

fortune if I wanted it to. I says, go on. So the hair-

ball talked to Jim, and Jim told it to me. He says:



"Yo' ole father doan' know yit what he's a-gwyne

to do. Sometimes he spec he'll go 'way, en den agin

he spec he'll stay. De bes' way is to res' easy en let

de ole man take his own way. Dey's two angels

hoverin' roun' 'bout him. One uv 'em is white en

shiny, en t'other one is black. De white one gits him

to go right a little while, den de black one sail in en

bust it all up. A body can't tell yit which one gwyne

to fetch him at de las'. But you is all right. You

gwyne to have considable trouble in yo' life, en con-

sidable joy. Sometimes you gwyne to git hurt, en

sometimes you gwyne to git sick; but every time you's

gwyne to git well agin. Dey's two gals flyin' 'bout

you in yo' life. One uv 'em's light en t'other one is

dark. One is rich en t'other is po'. You's gwyne to

marry de po' one fust en de rich one by en by. You

wants to keep 'way fum de water as much as you kin,

en don't run no resk, 'kase it's down in de bills dat

you's gwyne to git hung."



When I lit my candle and went up to my room that

night there sat pap -- his own self!





CHAPTER V.



I HAD shut the door to. Then I turned around.

and there he was. I used to be scared of him all

the time, he tanned me so much. I reckoned I was

scared now, too; but in a minute I see I was mistaken

-- that is, after the first jolt, as you may say, when

my breath sort of hitched, he being so unexpected;

but right away after I see I warn't scared of him worth

bothring about.



He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was

long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you

could see his eyes shining through like he was behind

vines. It was all black, no gray; so was his long,

mixed-up whiskers. There warn't no color in his face,

where his face showed; it was white; not like another

man's white, but a white to make a body sick, a white

to make a body's flesh crawl -- a tree-toad white, a

fish-belly white. As for his clothes -- just rags, that

was all. He had one ankle resting on t'other knee;

the boot on that foot was busted, and two of his toes

stuck through, and he worked them now and then.

His hat was laying on the floor -- an old black slouch

with the top caved in, like a lid.



I stood a-looking at him; he set there a-looking at

me, with his chair tilted back a little. I set the candle

down. I noticed the window was up; so he had clumb

in by the shed. He kept a-looking me all over. By

and by he says:



"Starchy clothes -- very. You think you're a good

deal of a big-bug, DON'T you?"



"Maybe I am, maybe I ain't," I says.



"Don't you give me none o' your lip," says he.

"You've put on considerable many frills since I been

away. I'll take you down a peg before I get done

with you. You're educated, too, they say -- can read

and write. You think you're better'n your father,

now, don't you, because he can't? I'LL take it out of

you. Who told you you might meddle with such

hifalut'n foolishness, hey? -- who told you you could?"



"The widow. She told me."



"The widow, hey? -- and who told the widow she

could put in her shovel about a thing that ain't none of

her business?"



"Nobody never told her."



"Well, I'll learn her how to meddle. And looky

here -- you drop that school, you hear? I'll learn

people to bring up a boy to put on airs over his own

father and let on to be better'n what HE is. You lemme

catch you fooling around that school again, you hear?

Your mother couldn't read, and she couldn't write,

nuther, before she died. None of the family couldn't

before THEY died. I can't; and here you're a-swelling

yourself up like this. I ain't the man to stand it --

you hear? Say, lemme hear you read."



I took up a book and begun something about Gen-

eral Washington and the wars. When I'd read about

a half a minute, he fetched the book a whack with his

hand and knocked it across the house. He says:



"It's so. You can do it. I had my doubts when

you told me. Now looky here; you stop that putting

on frills. I won't have it. I'll lay for you, my

smarty; and if I catch you about that school I'll tan

you good. First you know you'll get religion, too. I

never see such a son.



He took up a little blue and yaller picture of some

cows and a boy, and says:



"What's this?"



"It's something they give me for learning my

lessons good."



He tore it up, and says:



"I'll give you something better -- I'll give you a

cowhide.



He set there a-mumbling and a-growling a minute,

and then he says:



"AIN'T you a sweet-scented dandy, though? A

bed; and bedclothes; and a look'n'-glass; and a piece

of carpet on the floor -- and your own father got to

sleep with the hogs in the tanyard. I never see such a

son. I bet I'll take some o' these frills out o' you

before I'm done with you. Why, there ain't no end to

your airs -- they say you're rich. Hey? -- how's that?"



"They lie -- that's how."



"Looky here -- mind how you talk to me; I'm a-

standing about all I can stand now -- so don't gimme

no sass. I've been in town two days, and I hain't

heard nothing but about you bein' rich. I heard

about it away down the river, too. That's why I

come. You git me that money to-morrow -- I want

it."



"I hain't got no money."



"It's a lie. Judge Thatcher's got it. You git it.

I want it."



"I hain't got no money, I tell you. You ask Judge

Thatcher; he'll tell you the same."



"All right. I'll ask him; and I'll make him pungle,

too, or I'll know the reason why. Say, how much

you got in your pocket? I want it."



"I hain't got only a dollar, and I want that to --"



"It don't make no difference what you want it for

-- you just shell it out."



He took it and bit it to see if it was good, and then

he said he was going down town to get some whisky;

said he hadn't had a drink all day. When he had got

out on the shed he put his head in again, and cussed

me for putting on frills and trying to be better than

him; and when I reckoned he was gone he come back

and put his head in again, and told me to mind about

that school, because he was going to lay for me and

lick me if I didn't drop that.



Next day he was drunk, and he went to Judge

Thatcher's and bullyragged him, and tried to make

him give up the money; but he couldn't, and then he

swore he'd make the law force him.



The judge and the widow went to law to get the

court to take me away from him and let one of them

be my guardian; but it was a new judge that had just

come, and he didn't know the old man; so he said

courts mustn't interfere and separate families if they

could help it; said he'd druther not take a child away

from its father. So Judge Thatcher and the widow

had to quit on the business.



That pleased the old man till he couldn't rest. He

said he'd cowhide me till I was black and blue if I

didn't raise some money for him. I borrowed three

dollars from Judge Thatcher, and pap took it and got

drunk, and went a-blowing around and cussing and

whooping and carrying on; and he kept it up all over

town, with a tin pan, till most midnight; then they

jailed him, and next day they had him before court,

and jailed him again for a week. But he said HE was

satisfied; said he was boss of his son, and he'd make

it warm for HIM.



When he got out the new judge said he was a-going

to make a man of him. So he took him to his

own house, and dressed him up clean and nice, and

had him to breakfast and dinner and supper with the

family, and was just old pie to him, so to speak. And

after supper he talked to him about temperance and

such things till the old man cried, and said he'd been a

fool, and fooled away his life; but now he was a-going

to turn over a new leaf and be a man nobody wouldn't

be ashamed of, and he hoped the judge would help

him and not look down on him. The judge said he

could hug him for them words; so he cried, and his

wife she cried again; pap said he'd been a man that had

always been misunderstood before, and the judge said

he believed it. The old man said that what a man

wanted that was down was sympathy, and the judge

said it was so; so they cried again. And when it was

bedtime the old man rose up and held out his hand,

and says:



"Look at it, gentlemen and ladies all; take a-hold

of it; shake it. There's a hand that was the hand of

a hog; but it ain't so no more; it's the hand of a man

that's started in on a new life, and'll die before he'll

go back. You mark them words -- don't forget I said

them. It's a clean hand now; shake it -- don't be

afeard."



So they shook it, one after the other, all around, and

cried. The judge's wife she kissed it. Then the old

man he signed a pledge -- made his mark. The judge

said it was the holiest time on record, or something

like that. Then they tucked the old man into a beauti-

ful room, which was the spare room, and in the night

some time he got powerful thirsty and clumb out on to

the porch-roof and slid down a stanchion and traded his

new coat for a jug of forty-rod, and clumb back again

and had a good old time; and towards daylight he

crawled out again, drunk as a fiddler, and rolled off

the porch and broke his left arm in two places, and

was most froze to death when somebody found him

after sun-up. And when they come to look at that

spare room they had to take soundings before they

could navigate it.



The judge he felt kind of sore. He said he reckoned

a body could reform the old man with a shotgun,

maybe, but he didn't know no other way.





CHAPTER VI.



WELL, pretty soon the old man was up and around

again, and then he went for Judge Thatcher in

the courts to make him give up that money, and he

went for me, too, for not stopping school. He catched

me a couple of times and thrashed me, but I went to

school just the same, and dodged him or outrun him

most of the time. I didn't want to go to school much

before, but I reckoned I'd go now to spite pap. That

law trial was a slow business -- appeared like they

warn't ever going to get started on it; so every now

and then I'd borrow two or three dollars off of the

judge for him, to keep from getting a cowhiding.

Every time he got money he got drunk; and every

time he got drunk he raised Cain around town; and

every time he raised Cain he got jailed. He was just

suited -- this kind of thing was right in his line.



He got to hanging around the widow's too much

and so she told him at last that if he didn't quit using

around there she would make trouble for him. Well,

WASN'T he mad? He said he would show who was

Huck Finn's boss. So he watched out for me one day

in the spring, and catched me, and took me up the

river about three mile in a skiff, and crossed over to

the Illinois shore where it was woody and there warn't

no houses but an old log hut in a place where the

timber was so thick you couldn't find it if you didn't

know where it was.



He kept me with him all the time, and I never got a

chance to run off. We lived in that old cabin, and he

always locked the door and put the key under his head

nights. He had a gun which he had stole, I reckon,

and we fished and hunted, and that was what we lived

on. Every little while he locked me in and went down

to the store, three miles, to the ferry, and traded fish

and game for whisky, and fetched it home and got

drunk and had a good time, and licked me. The

widow she found out where I was by and by, and she

sent a man over to try to get hold of me; but pap

drove him off with the gun, and it warn't long after

that till I was used to being where I was, and liked

it -- all but the cowhide part.



It was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable

all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study.

Two months or more run along, and my clothes got to

be all rags and dirt, and I didn't see how I'd ever got

to like it so well at the widow's, where you had to

wash, and eat on a plate, and comb up, and go to bed

and get up regular, and be forever bothering over a

book, and have old Miss Watson pecking at you all the

time. I didn't want to go back no more. I had

stopped cussing, because the widow didn't like it; but

now I took to it again because pap hadn't no objec-

tions. It was pretty good times up in the woods

there, take it all around.



But by and by pap got too handy with his hick'ry,

and I couldn't stand it. I was all over welts. He got

to going away so much, too, and locking me in. Once

he locked me in and was gone three days. It was

dreadful lonesome. I judged he had got drowned,

and I wasn't ever going to get out any more. I was

scared. I made up my mind I would fix up some way

to leave there. I had tried to get out of that cabin

many a time, but I couldn't find no way. There

warn't a window to it big enough for a dog to get

through. I couldn't get up the chimbly; it was too

narrow. The door was thick, solid oak slabs. Pap

was pretty careful not to leave a knife or anything in

the cabin when he was away; I reckon I had hunted

the place over as much as a hundred times; well, I

was most all the time at it, because it was about the

only way to put in the time. But this time I found

something at last; I found an old rusty wood-saw

without any handle; it was laid in between a rafter

and the clapboards of the roof. I greased it up and

went to work. There was an old horse-blanket nailed

against the logs at the far end of the cabin behind the

table, to keep the wind from blowing through the

chinks and putting the candle out. I got under the

table and raised the blanket, and went to work to saw

a section of the big bottom log out -- big enough to

let me through. Well, it was a good long job, but I

was getting towards the end of it when I heard pap's

gun in the woods. I got rid of the signs of my work,

and dropped the blanket and hid my saw, and pretty

soon pap come in.



Pap warn't in a good humor -- so he was his natural

self. He said he was down town, and everything was

going wrong. His lawyer said he reckoned he would

win his lawsuit and get the money if they ever got

started on the trial; but then there was ways to put it

off a long time, and Judge Thatcher knowed how to do

it And he said people allowed there'd be another

trial to get me away from him and give me to the

widow for my guardian, and they guessed it would win

this time. This shook me up considerable, because I

didn't want to go back to the widow's any more and

be so cramped up and sivilized, as they called it.

Then the old man got to cussing, and cussed every-

thing and everybody he could think of, and then cussed

them all over again to make sure he hadn't skipped

any, and after that he polished off with a kind of a

general cuss all round, including a considerable parcel

of people which he didn't know the names of, and so

called them what's-his-name when he got to them, and

went right along with his cussing.



He said he would like to see the widow get me.

He said he would watch out, and if they tried to come

any such game on him he knowed of a place six or

seven mile off to stow me in, where they might hunt

till they dropped and they couldn't find me. That

made me pretty uneasy again, but only for a minute;

I reckoned I wouldn't stay on hand till he got that

chance.



The old man made me go to the skiff and fetch the

things he had got. There was a fifty-pound sack of

corn meal, and a side of bacon, ammunition, and a

four-gallon jug of whisky, and an old book and two

newspapers for wadding, besides some tow. I toted

up a load, and went back and set down on the bow of

the skiff to rest. I thought it all over, and I reckoned

I would walk off with the gun and some lines, and take

to the woods when I run away. I guessed I wouldn't

stay in one place, but just tramp right across the

country, mostly night times, and hunt and fish to keep

alive, and so get so far away that the old man nor the

widow couldn't ever find me any more. I judged I

would saw out and leave that night if pap got drunk

enough, and I reckoned he would. I got so full of it

I didn't notice how long I was staying till the old man

hollered and asked me whether I was asleep or

drownded.



I got the things all up to the cabin, and then it was

about dark. While I was cooking supper the old man

took a swig or two and got sort of warmed up, and

went to ripping again. He had been drunk over in

town, and laid in the gutter all night, and he was a

sight to look at. A body would a thought he was

Adam -- he was just all mud. Whenever his liquor

begun to work he most always went for the govment.

his time he says:



"Call this a govment! why, just look at it and see

what it's like. Here's the law a-standing ready to take

a man's son away from him -- a man's own son, which

he has had all the trouble and all the anxiety and all

the expense of raising. Yes, just as that man has got

that son raised at last, and ready to go to work and

begin to do suthin' for HIM and give him a rest, the law

up and goes for him. And they call THAT govment!

That ain't all, nuther. The law backs that old Judge

Thatcher up and helps him to keep me out o' my

property. Here's what the law does: The law takes a

man worth six thousand dollars and up'ards, and jams

him into an old trap of a cabin like this, and lets him

go round in clothes that ain't fitten for a hog. They

call that govment! A man can't get his rights in a

govment like this. Sometimes I've a mighty notion to

just leave the country for good and all. Yes, and I

TOLD 'em so; I told old Thatcher so to his face. Lots

of 'em heard me, and can tell what I said. Says I,

for two cents I'd leave the blamed country and never

come a-near it agin. Them's the very words. I says

look at my hat -- if you call it a hat -- but the lid

raises up and the rest of it goes down till it's below

my chin, and then it ain't rightly a hat at all, but more

like my head was shoved up through a jint o' stove-

pipe. Look at it, says I -- such a hat for me to wear

-- one of the wealthiest men in this town if I could git

my rights.



"Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful.

Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from

Ohio -- a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He

had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the

shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in that town that's

got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold

watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane -- the awful-

est old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do

you think? They said he was a p'fessor in a college,

and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed

everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he

could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me

out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It

was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote

myself if I warn't too drunk to get there; but when

they told me there was a State in this country where

they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll

never vote agin. Them's the very words I said; they

all heard me; and the country may rot for all me --

I'll never vote agin as long as I live. And to see the

cool way of that nigger -- why, he wouldn't a give me

the road if I hadn't shoved him out o' the way. I

says to the people, why ain't this nigger put up at

auction and sold? -- that's what I want to know. And

what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he

couldn't be sold till he'd been in the State six months,

and he hadn't been there that long yet. There, now --

that's a specimen. They call that a govment that can't

sell a free nigger till he's been in the State six months.

Here's a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets

on to be a govment, and thinks it is a govment, and

yet's got to set stock-still for six whole months before

it can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal,

white-shirted free nigger, and --"



Pap was agoing on so he never noticed where his

old limber legs was taking him to, so he went head over

heels over the tub of salt pork and barked both shins,

and the rest of his speech was all the hottest kind of

language -- mostly hove at the nigger and the gov-

ment, though he give the tub some, too, all along,

here and there. He hopped around the cabin con-

siderable, first on one leg and then on the other, hold-

ing first one shin and then the other one, and at last he

let out with his left foot all of a sudden and fetched

the tub a rattling kick. But it warn't good judgment,

because that was the boot that had a couple of his toes

leaking out of the front end of it; so now he raised a

howl that fairly made a body's hair raise, and down he

went in the dirt, and rolled there, and held his toes;

and the cussing he done then laid over anything he

had ever done previous. He said so his own self after-

wards. He had heard old Sowberry Hagan in his

best days, and he said it laid over him, too; but I

reckon that was sort of piling it on, maybe.



After supper pap took the jug, and said he had

enough whisky there for two drunks and one delirium

tremens. That was always his word. I judged he

would be blind drunk in about an hour, and then I

would steal the key, or saw myself out, one or t'other.

He drank and drank, and tumbled down on his

blankets by and by; but luck didn't run my way. He

didn't go sound asleep, but was uneasy. He groaned

and moaned and thrashed around this way and that for

a long time. At last I got so sleepy I couldn't keep

my eyes open all I could do, and so before I knowed

what I was about I was sound asleep, and the candle

burning.



I don't know how long I was asleep, but all of a

sudden there was an awful scream and I was up.

There was pap looking wild, and skipping around every

which way and yelling about snakes. He said they

was crawling up his legs; and then he would give a

jump and scream, and say one had bit him on the

cheek -- but I couldn't see no snakes. He started

and run round and round the cabin, hollering "Take

him off! take him off! he's biting me on the neck!"

I never see a man look so wild in the eyes. Pretty

soon he was all fagged out, and fell down panting;

then he rolled over and over wonderful fast, kicking

things every which way, and striking and grabbing at

the air with his hands, and screaming and saying there

was devils a-hold of him. He wore out by and by,

and laid still a while, moaning. Then he laid stiller,

and didn't make a sound. I could hear the owls and

the wolves away off in the woods, and it seemed terri-

ble still. He was laying over by the corner. By and

by he raised up part way and listened, with his head

to one side. He says, very low:



"Tramp -- tramp -- tramp; that's the dead; tramp

-- tramp -- tramp; they're coming after me; but I

won't go. Oh, they're here! don't touch me -- don't!

hands off -- they're cold; let go. Oh, let a poor devil

alone!"



Then he went down on all fours and crawled off,

begging them to let him alone, and he rolled himself

up in his blanket and wallowed in under the old pine

table, still a-begging; and then he went to crying. I

could hear him through the blanket.



By and by he rolled out and jumped up on his feet

looking wild, and he see me and went for me. He

chased me round and round the place with a clasp-

knife, calling me the Angel of Death, and saying he

would kill me, and then I couldn't come for him no

more. I begged, and told him I was only Huck; but

he laughed SUCH a screechy laugh, and roared and

cussed, and kept on chasing me up. Once when I

turned short and dodged under his arm he made a

grab and got me by the jacket between my shoulders,

and I thought I was gone; but I slid out of the jacket

quick as lightning, and saved myself. Pretty soon he

was all tired out, and dropped down with his back

against the door, and said he would rest a minute and

then kill me. He put his knife under him, and said

he would sleep and get strong, and then he would see

who was who.



So he dozed off pretty soon. By and by I got the

old split-bottom chair and clumb up as easy as I could,

not to make any noise, and got down the gun. I

slipped the ramrod down it to make sure it was loaded,

then I laid it across the turnip barrel, pointing

towards pap, and set down behind it to wait for him to

stir. And how slow and still the time did drag along.





CHAPTER VII.



RGIT up! What you 'bout?"



I opened my eyes and looked around, trying

to make out where I was. It was after sun-up, and I

had been sound asleep. Pap was standing over me

looking sourQand sick, too. He says:



"What you doin' with this gun?"



I judged he didn't know nothing about what he had

been doing, so I says:



"Somebody tried to get in, so I was laying for

him."



"Why didn't you roust me out?"



"Well, I tried to, but I couldn't; I couldn't budge

you."



"Well, all right. Don't stand there palavering all

day, but out with you and see if there's a fish on the

lines for breakfast. I'll be along in a minute."



He unlocked the door, and I cleared out up the

river-bank. I noticed some pieces of limbs and such

things floating down, and a sprinkling of bark; so I

knowed the river had begun to rise. I reckoned I

would have great times now if I was over at the town.

The June rise used to be always luck for me; because

as soon as that rise begins here comes cordwood float-

ing down, and pieces of log rafts -- sometimes a dozen

logs together; so all you have to do is to catch them

and sell them to the wood-yards and the sawmill.



I went along up the bank with one eye out for pap

and t'other one out for what the rise might fetch

along. Well, all at once here comes a canoe; just a

beauty, too, about thirteen or fourteen foot long,

riding high like a duck. I shot head-first off of the

bank like a frog, clothes and all on, and struck out for

the canoe. I just expected there'd be somebody lay-

ing down in it, because people often done that to fool

folks, and when a chap had pulled a skiff out most to

it they'd raise up and laugh at him. But it warn't so

this time. It was a drift-canoe sure enough, and I

clumb in and paddled her ashore. Thinks I, the old

man will be glad when he sees this -- she's worth ten

dollars. But when I got to shore pap wasn't in sight

yet, and as I was running her into a little creek like a

gully, all hung over with vines and willows, I struck

another idea: I judged I'd hide her good, and then,

'stead of taking to the woods when I run off, I'd go

down the river about fifty mile and camp in one place

for good, and not have such a rough time tramping on

foot.



It was pretty close to the shanty, and I thought I

heard the old man coming all the time; but I got her

hid; and then I out and looked around a bunch of

willows, and there was the old man down the path

a piece just drawing a bead on a bird with his gun. So

he hadn't seen anything.



When he got along I was hard at it taking up a

"trot" line. He abused me a little for being so slow;

but I told him I fell in the river, and that was what

made me so long. I knowed he would see I was wet,

and then he would be asking questions. We got five

catfish off the lines and went home.



While we laid off after breakfast to sleep up, both of

us being about wore out, I got to thinking that if I could

fix up some way to keep pap and the widow from trying

to follow me, it would be a certainer thing than trust-

ing to luck to get far enough off before they missed

me; you see, all kinds of things might happen. Well,

I didn't see no way for a while, but by and by pap

raised up a minute to drink another barrel of water,

and he says:



"Another time a man comes a-prowling round here

you roust me out, you hear? That man warn't here

for no good. I'd a shot him. Next time you roust

me out, you hear?"



Then he dropped down and went to sleep again; but

what he had been saying give me the very idea I

wanted. I says to myself, I can fix it now so nobody

won't think of following me.



About twelve o'clock we turned out and went along

up the bank. The river was coming up pretty fast,

and lots of driftwood going by on the rise. By and

by along comes part of a log raft -- nine logs fast

together. We went out with the skiff and towed it

ashore. Then we had dinner. Anybody but pap

would a waited and seen the day through, so as to

catch more stuff; but that warn't pap's style. Nine

logs was enough for one time; he must shove right

over to town and sell. So he locked me in and took

the skiff, and started off towing the raft about half-

past three. I judged he wouldn't come back that

night. I waited till I reckoned he had got a good

start; then I out with my saw, and went to work on

that log again. Before he was t'other side of the river

I was out of the hole; him and his raft was just a

speck on the water away off yonder.



I took the sack of corn meal and took it to where

the canoe was hid, and shoved the vines and branches

apart and put it in; then I done the same with the

side of bacon; then the whisky-jug. I took all the

coffee and sugar there was, and all the ammunition; I

took the wadding; I took the bucket and gourd; I

took a dipper and a tin cup, and my old saw and two

blankets, and the skillet and the coffee-pot. I took

fish-lines and matches and other things -- everything

that was worth a cent. I cleaned out the place. I

wanted an axe, but there wasn't any, only the one out

at the woodpile, and I knowed why I was going to leave

that. I fetched out the gun, and now I was done.



I had wore the ground a good deal crawling out of

the hole and dragging out so many things. So I

fixed that as good as I could from the outside by

scattering dust on the place, which covered up the

smoothness and the sawdust. Then I fixed the piece

of log back into its place, and put two rocks under it

and one against it to hold it there, for it was bent up

at that place and didn't quite touch ground. If you

stood four or five foot away and didn't know it was

sawed, you wouldn't never notice it; and besides, this

was the back of the cabin, and it warn't likely anybody

would go fooling around there.



It was all grass clear to the canoe, so I hadn't left a

track. I followed around to see. I stood on the

bank and looked out over the river. All safe. So I

took the gun and went up a piece into the woods, and

was hunting around for some birds when I see a wild

pig; hogs soon went wild in them bottoms after they

had got away from the prairie farms. I shot this fel-

low and took him into camp.



I took the axe and smashed in the door. I beat it

and hacked it considerable a-doing it. I fetched the

pig in, and took him back nearly to the table and

hacked into his throat with the axe, and laid him down

on the ground to bleed; I say ground because it was

ground -- hard packed, and no boards. Well, next I

took an old sack and put a lot of big rocks in it -- all I

could drag -- and I started it from the pig, and dragged

it to the door and through the woods down to the river

and dumped it in, and down it sunk, out of sight.

You could easy see that something had been dragged

over the ground. I did wish Tom Sawyer was there;

I knowed he would take an interest in this kind of

business, and throw in the fancy touches. Nobody

could spread himself like Tom Sawyer in such a thing

as that.



Well, last I pulled out some of my hair, and blooded

the axe good, and stuck it on the back side, and slung

the axe in the corner. Then I took up the pig and held

him to my breast with my jacket (so he couldn't drip)

till I got a good piece below the house and then

dumped him into the river. Now I thought of some-

thing else. So I went and got the bag of meal

and my old saw out of the canoe, and fetched

them to the house. I took the bag to where it

used to stand, and ripped a hole in the bottom of it

with the saw, for there warn't no knives and forks on

the place -- pap done everything with his clasp-knife

about the cooking. Then I carried the sack about a

hundred yards across the grass and through the willows

east of the house, to a shallow lake that was five mile

wide and full of rushes -- and ducks too, you might

say, in the season. There was a slough or a creek

leading out of it on the other side that went miles away,

I don't know where, but it didn't go to the river. The

meal sifted out and made a little track all the way to

the lake. I dropped pap's whetstone there too, so as

to look like it had been done by accident. Then I tied

up the rip in the meal sack with a string, so it wouldn't

leak no more, and took it and my saw to the canoe

again.



It was about dark now; so I dropped the canoe

down the river under some willows that hung over the

bank, and waited for the moon to rise. I made fast to

a willow; then I took a bite to eat, and by and by laid

down in the canoe to smoke a pipe and lay out a plan.

I says to myself, they'll follow the track of that sack-

ful of rocks to the shore and then drag the river for

me. And they'll follow that meal track to the lake

and go browsing down the creek that leads out of it to

find the robbers that killed me and took the things.

They won't ever hunt the river for anything but my

dead carcass. They'll soon get tired of that, and

won't bother no more about me. All right; I can

stop anywhere I want to. Jackson's Island is good

enough for me; I know that island pretty well, and

nobody ever comes there. And then I can paddle

over to town nights, and slink around and pick up

things I want. Jackson's Island's the place.



I was pretty tired, and the first thing I knowed I

was asleep. When I woke up I didn't know where I

was for a minute. I set up and looked around, a little

scared. Then I remembered. The river looked miles

and miles across. The moon was so bright I could a

counted the drift logs that went a-slipping along, black

and still, hundreds of yards out from shore. Every-

thing was dead quiet, and it looked late, and SMELT

late. You know what I mean -- I don't know the

words to put it in.



I took a good gap and a stretch, and was just going

to unhitch and start when I heard a sound away over

the water. I listened. Pretty soon I made it out. It

was that dull kind of a regular sound that comes from

oars working in rowlocks when it's a still night. I

peeped out through the willow branches, and there it

was -- a skiff, away across the water. I couldn't tell

how many was in it. It kept a-coming, and when it

was abreast of me I see there warn't but one man in it.

Think's I, maybe it's pap, though I warn't expecting

him. He dropped below me with the current, and

by and by he came a-swinging up shore in the easy

water, and he went by so close I could a reached out

the gun and touched him. Well, it WAS pap, sure

enough -- and sober, too, by the way he laid his oars.



I didn't lose no time. The next minute I was a-

spinning down stream soft but quick in the shade of

the bank. I made two mile and a half, and then

struck out a quarter of a mile or more towards the

middle of the river, because pretty soon I would be

passing the ferry landing, and people might see me

and hail me. I got out amongst the driftwood, and

then laid down in the bottom of the canoe and let her

float. I laid there, and had a good rest and a smoke

out of my pipe, looking away into the sky; not a

cloud in it. The sky looks ever so deep when you lay

down on your back in the moonshine; I never knowed

it before. And how far a body can hear on the water

such nights! I heard people talking at the ferry land-

ing. I heard what they said, too -- every word of it.

One man said it was getting towards the long days and

the short nights now. T'other one said THIS warn't

one of the short ones, he reckoned -- and then they

laughed, and he said it over again, and they laughed

again; then they waked up another fellow and told

him, and laughed, but he didn't laugh; he ripped out

something brisk, and said let him alone. The first

fellow said he 'lowed to tell it to his old woman -- she

would think it was pretty good; but he said that

warn't nothing to some things he had said in his time.

I heard one man say it was nearly three o'clock, and

he hoped daylight wouldn't wait more than about a

week longer. After that the talk got further and

further away, and I couldn't make out the words any

more; but I could hear the mumble, and now and then

a laugh, too, but it seemed a long ways off.



I was away below the ferry now. I rose up, and

there was Jackson's Island, about two mile and a half

down stream, heavy timbered and standing up out of

the middle of the river, big and dark and solid, like a

steamboat without any lights. There warn't any signs

of the bar at the head -- it was all under water now.



It didn't take me long to get there. I shot past the

head at a ripping rate, the current was so swift, and

then I got into the dead water and landed on the side

towards the Illinois shore. I run the canoe into a deep

dent in the bank that I knowed about; I had to part

the willow branches to get in; and when I made fast

nobody could a seen the canoe from the outside.



I went up and set down on a log at the head of the

island, and looked out on the big river and the black

driftwood and away over to the town, three mile

away, where there was three or four lights twinkling.

A monstrous big lumber-raft was about a mile up

stream, coming along down, with a lantern in the

middle of it. I watched it come creeping down, and

when it was most abreast of where I stood I heard a

man say, "Stern oars, there! heave her head to stab-

board!" I heard that just as plain as if the man was

by my side.



There was a little gray in the sky now; so I stepped

into the woods, and laid down for a nap before break-

fast.





CHAPTER VIII.



THE sun was up so high when I waked that I judged

it was after eight o'clock. I laid there in the

grass and the cool shade thinking about things, and

feeling rested and ruther comfortable and satisfied. I

could see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly

it was big trees all about, and gloomy in there amongst

them. There was freckled places on the ground where

the light sifted down through the leaves, and the

freckled places swapped about a little, showing there

was a little breeze up there. A couple of squirrels set

on a limb and jabbered at me very friendly.



I was powerful lazy and comfortable -- didn't want

to get up and cook breakfast. Well, I was dozing off

again when I thinks I hears a deep sound of "boom!"

away up the river. I rouses up, and rests on my elbow

and listens; pretty soon I hears it again. I hopped

up, and went and looked out at a hole in the leaves,

and I see a bunch of smoke laying on the water a long

ways up -- about abreast the ferry. And there was

the ferryboat full of people floating along down. I

knowed what was the matter now. "Boom!" I see

the white smoke squirt out of the ferryboat's side.

You see, they was firing cannon over the water, trying

to make my carcass come to the top.



I was pretty hungry, but it warn't going to do for

me to start a fire, because they might see the smoke.

So I set there and watched the cannon-smoke and

listened to the boom. The river was a mile wide there,

and it always looks pretty on a summer morning -- so

I was having a good enough time seeing them hunt for

my remainders if I only had a bite to eat. Well, then

I happened to think how they always put quicksilver

in loaves of bread and float them off, because they

always go right to the drownded carcass and stop

there. So, says I, I'll keep a lookout, and if any of

them's floating around after me I'll give them a show.

I changed to the Illinois edge of the island to see what

luck I could have, and I warn't disappointed. A big

double loaf come along, and I most got it with a long

stick, but my foot slipped and she floated out further.

Of course I was where the current set in the closest to

the shore -- I knowed enough for that. But by and

by along comes another one, and this time I won. I

took out the plug and shook out the little dab of quick-

silver, and set my teeth in. It was "baker's bread"

-- what the quality eat; none of your low-down

corn-pone.



I got a good place amongst the leaves, and set there

on a log, munching the bread and watching the ferry-

boat, and very well satisfied. And then something

struck me. I says, now I reckon the widow or the

parson or somebody prayed that this bread would find

me, and here it has gone and done it. So there ain't

no doubt but there is something in that thing -- that is,

there's something in it when a body like the widow or

the parson prays, but it don't work for me, and I

reckon it don't work for only just the right kind.



I lit a pipe and had a good long smoke, and went

on watching. The ferryboat was floating with the

current, and I allowed I'd have a chance to see who

was aboard when she come along, because she would

come in close, where the bread did. When she'd got

pretty well along down towards me, I put out my pipe

and went to where I fished out the bread, and laid

down behind a log on the bank in a little open place.

Where the log forked I could peep through.



By and by she come along, and she drifted in so

close that they could a run out a plank and walked

ashore. Most everybody was on the boat. Pap, and

Judge Thatcher, and Bessie Thatcher, and Jo Harper,

and Tom Sawyer, and his old Aunt Polly, and Sid and

Mary, and plenty more. Everybody was talking about

the murder, but the captain broke in and says:



"Look sharp, now; the current sets in the closest

here, and maybe he's washed ashore and got tangled

amongst the brush at the water's edge. I hope so,

anyway."



"I didn't hope so. They all crowded up and leaned

over the rails, nearly in my face, and kept still, watch-

ing with all their might. I could see them first-rate,

but they couldn't see me. Then the captain sung out:



"Stand away!" and the cannon let off such a blast

right before me that it made me deef with the noise and

pretty near blind with the smoke, and I judged I was

gone. If they'd a had some bullets in, I reckon

they'd a got the corpse they was after. Well, I see I

warn't hurt, thanks to goodness. The boat floated on

and went out of sight around the shoulder of the island.

I could hear the booming now and then, further and

further off, and by and by, after an hour, I didn't hear

it no more. The island was three mile long. I judged

they had got to the foot, and was giving it up. But

they didn't yet a while. They turned around the foot

of the island and started up the channel on the Mis-

souri side, under steam, and booming once in a while

as they went. I crossed over to that side and watched

them. When they got abreast the head of the island

they quit shooting and dropped over to the Missouri

shore and went home to the town.



I knowed I was all right now. Nobody else would

come a-hunting after me. I got my traps out of the

canoe and made me a nice camp in the thick woods. I

made a kind of a tent out of my blankets to put my

things under so the rain couldn't get at them. I

catched a catfish and haggled him open with my saw,

and towards sundown I started my camp fire and had

supper. Then I set out a line to catch some fish for

breakfast.



When it was dark I set by my camp fire smoking,

and feeling pretty well satisfied; but by and by it got

sort of lonesome, and so I went and set on the bank

and listened to the current swashing along, and counted

the stars and drift logs and rafts that come down, and

then went to bed; there ain't no better way to put in

time when you are lonesome; you can't stay so, you

soon get over it.



And so for three days and nights. No difference --

just the same thing. But the next day I went explor-

ing around down through the island. I was boss of it;

it all belonged to me, so to say, and I wanted to know

all about it; but mainly I wanted to put in the time.

I found plenty strawberries, ripe and prime; and green

summer grapes, and green razberries; and the green

blackberries was just beginning to show. They would

all come handy by and by, I judged.



Well, I went fooling along in the deep woods till I

judged I warn't far from the foot of the island. I had

my gun along, but I hadn't shot nothing; it was for

protection; thought I would kill some game nigh

home. About this time I mighty near stepped on a

good-sized snake, and it went sliding off through the

grass and flowers, and I after it, trying to get a shot at

it. I clipped along, and all of a sudden I bounded

right on to the ashes of a camp fire that was still

smoking.



My heart jumped up amongst my lungs. I never

waited for to look further, but uncocked my gun and

went sneaking back on my tiptoes as fast as ever I

could. Every now and then I stopped a second amongst

the thick leaves and listened, but my breath come so

hard I couldn't hear nothing else. I slunk along an-

other piece further, then listened again; and so on,

and so on. If I see a stump, I took it for a man; if I

trod on a stick and broke it, it made me feel like a

person had cut one of my breaths in two and I only

got half, and the short half, too.



When I got to camp I warn't feeling very brash,

there warn't much sand in my craw; but I says, this

ain't no time to be fooling around. So I got all my

traps into my canoe again so as to have them out of

sight, and I put out the fire and scattered the ashes

around to look like an old last year's camp, and then

clumb a tree.



I reckon I was up in the tree two hours; but I

didn't see nothing, I didn't hear nothing -- I only

THOUGHT I heard and seen as much as a thousand

things. Well, I couldn't stay up there forever; so at

last I got down, but I kept in the thick woods and on

the lookout all the time. All I could get to eat was

berries and what was left over from breakfast.



By the time it was night I was pretty hungry. So

when it was good and dark I slid out from shore before

moonrise and paddled over to the Illinois bank -- about

a quarter of a mile. I went out in the woods and

cooked a supper, and I had about made up my mind

I would stay there all night when I hear a PLUNKETY-

PLUNK, PLUNKETY-PLUNK, and says to myself, horses

coming; and next I hear people's voices. I got

everything into the canoe as quick as I could, and then

went creeping through the woods to see what I could

find out. I hadn't got far when I hear a man say:



"We better camp here if we can find a good place;

the horses is about beat out. Let's look around."



I didn't wait, but shoved out and paddled away

easy. I tied up in the old place, and reckoned I would

sleep in the canoe.



I didn't sleep much. I couldn't, somehow, for

thinking. And every time I waked up I thought

somebody had me by the neck. So the sleep didn't

do me no good. By and by I says to myself, I can't

live this way; I'm a-going to find out who it is that's

here on the island with me; I'll find it out or bust.

Well, I felt better right off.



So I took my paddle and slid out from shore just a

step or two, and then let the canoe drop along down

amongst the shadows. The moon was shining, and out-

side of the shadows it made it most as light as day. I

poked along well on to an hour, everything still as

rocks and sound asleep. Well, by this time I was

most down to the foot of the island. A little ripply,

cool breeze begun to blow, and that was as good as

saying the night was about done. I give her a turn

with the paddle and brung her nose to shore; then I

got my gun and slipped out and into the edge of the

woods. I sat down there on a log, and looked out

through the leaves. I see the moon go off watch, and

the darkness begin to blanket the river. But in a little

while I see a pale streak over the treetops, and knowed

the day was coming. So I took my gun and slipped

off towards where I had run across that camp fire,

stopping every minute or two to listen. But I hadn't

no luck somehow; I couldn't seem to find the place.

But by and by, sure enough, I catched a glimpse of

fire away through the trees. I went for it, cautious

and slow. By and by I was close enough to have a

look, and there laid a man on the ground. It most

give me the fantods. He had a blanket around his

head, and his head was nearly in the fire. I set there

behind a clump of bushes in about six foot of him,

and kept my eyes on him steady. It was getting gray

daylight now. Pretty soon he gapped and stretched

himself and hove off the blanket, and it was Miss

Watson's Jim! I bet I was glad to see him. I says:



"Hello, Jim!" and skipped out.



He bounced up and stared at me wild. Then he

drops down on his knees, and puts his hands together

and says:



"Doan' hurt me -- don't! I hain't ever done no

harm to a ghos'. I alwuz liked dead people, en done

all I could for 'em. You go en git in de river agin,

whah you b'longs, en doan' do nuffn to Ole Jim, 'at

'uz awluz yo' fren'."



Well, I warn't long making him understand I warn't

dead. I was ever so glad to see Jim. I warn't lone-

some now. I told him I warn't afraid of HIM telling

the people where I was. I talked along, but he only

set there and looked at me; never said nothing. Then

I says:



"It's good daylight. Le's get breakfast. Make up

your camp fire good."



"What's de use er makin' up de camp fire to cook

strawbries en sich truck? But you got a gun, hain't

you? Den we kin git sumfn better den strawbries."



"Strawberries and such truck," I says. "Is that

what you live on?"



"I couldn' git nuffn else," he says.



"Why, how long you been on the island, Jim?"



"I come heah de night arter you's killed."



"What, all that time?"



"Yes -- indeedy."



"And ain't you had nothing but that kind of rub-

bage to eat?"



"No, sah -- nuffn else."



"Well, you must be most starved, ain't you?"



"I reck'n I could eat a hoss. I think I could.

How long you ben on de islan'?"



"Since the night I got killed."



"No! W'y, what has you lived on? But you got

a gun. Oh, yes, you got a gun. Dat's good. Now

you kill sumfn en I'll make up de fire."



So we went over to where the canoe was, and while

he built a fire in a grassy open place amongst the trees,

I fetched meal and bacon and coffee, and coffee-pot

and frying-pan, and sugar and tin cups, and the nigger

was set back considerable, because he reckoned it was

all done with witchcraft. I catched a good big catfish,

too, and Jim cleaned him with his knife, and fried

him.



When breakfast was ready we lolled on the grass and

eat it smoking hot. Jim laid it in with all his might,

for he was most about starved. Then when we had

got pretty well stuffed, we laid off and lazied.

By and by Jim says:



"But looky here, Huck, who wuz it dat 'uz killed

in dat shanty ef it warn't you?"



Then I told him the whole thing, and he said it was

smart. He said Tom Sawyer couldn't get up no better

plan than what I had. Then I says:



"How do you come to be here, Jim, and how'd you

get here?"



He looked pretty uneasy, and didn't say nothing for

a minute. Then he says:



"Maybe I better not tell."



"Why, Jim?"



"Well, dey's reasons. But you wouldn' tell on me

ef I uz to tell you, would you, Huck?"



"Blamed if I would, Jim."



"Well, I b'lieve you, Huck. I -- I RUN OFF."



"Jim!"



"But mind, you said you wouldn' tell -- you know

you said you wouldn' tell, Huck."



"Well, I did. I said I wouldn't, and I'll stick to it.

Honest INJUN, I will. People would call me a low-

down Abolitionist and despise me for keeping mum --

but that don't make no difference. I ain't a-going to

tell, and I ain't a-going back there, anyways. So,

now, le's know all about it."



"Well, you see, it 'uz dis way. Ole missus -- dat's

Miss Watson -- she pecks on me all de time, en treats

me pooty rough, but she awluz said she wouldn' sell

me down to Orleans. But I noticed dey wuz a nigger

trader roun' de place considable lately, en I begin to

git oneasy. Well, one night I creeps to de do' pooty

late, en de do' warn't quite shet, en I hear old missus

tell de widder she gwyne to sell me down to Orleans,

but she didn' want to, but she could git eight hund'd

dollars for me, en it 'uz sich a big stack o' money she

couldn' resis'. De widder she try to git her to say

she wouldn' do it, but I never waited to hear de res'.

I lit out mighty quick, I tell you.



"I tuck out en shin down de hill, en 'spec to steal a

skift 'long de sho' som'ers 'bove de town, but dey wuz

people a-stirring yit, so I hid in de ole tumble-down

cooper-shop on de bank to wait for everybody to go

'way. Well, I wuz dah all night. Dey wuz somebody

roun' all de time. 'Long 'bout six in de mawnin'

skifts begin to go by, en 'bout eight er nine every

skift dat went 'long wuz talkin' 'bout how yo' pap

come over to de town en say you's killed. Dese las'

skifts wuz full o' ladies en genlmen a-goin' over for to

see de place. Sometimes dey'd pull up at de sho' en

take a res' b'fo' dey started acrost, so by de talk I got

to know all 'bout de killin'. I 'uz powerful sorry

you's killed, Huck, but I ain't no mo' now.



"I laid dah under de shavin's all day. I 'uz

hungry, but I warn't afeard; bekase I knowed ole

missus en de widder wuz goin' to start to de camp-

meet'n' right arter breakfas' en be gone all day, en

dey knows I goes off wid de cattle 'bout daylight, so

dey wouldn' 'spec to see me roun' de place, en so dey

wouldn' miss me tell arter dark in de evenin'. De

yuther servants wouldn' miss me, kase dey'd shin out

en take holiday soon as de ole folks 'uz out'n de way.



"Well, when it come dark I tuck out up de river

road, en went 'bout two mile er more to whah dey

warn't no houses. I'd made up my mine 'bout what

I's agwyne to do. You see, ef I kep' on tryin' to git

away afoot, de dogs 'ud track me; ef I stole a skift to

cross over, dey'd miss dat skift, you see, en dey'd

know 'bout whah I'd lan' on de yuther side, en whah

to pick up my track. So I says, a raff is what I's

arter; it doan' MAKE no track.



"I see a light a-comin' roun' de p'int bymeby, so I

wade' in en shove' a log ahead o' me en swum more'n

half way acrost de river, en got in 'mongst de drift-

wood, en kep' my head down low, en kinder swum

agin de current tell de raff come along. Den I swum

to de stern uv it en tuck a-holt. It clouded up en 'uz

pooty dark for a little while. So I clumb up en laid

down on de planks. De men 'uz all 'way yonder in

de middle, whah de lantern wuz. De river wuz a-

risin', en dey wuz a good current; so I reck'n'd 'at

by fo' in de mawnin' I'd be twenty-five mile down de

river, en den I'd slip in jis b'fo' daylight en swim

asho', en take to de woods on de Illinois side.



"But I didn' have no luck. When we 'uz mos'

down to de head er de islan' a man begin to come aft

wid de lantern, I see it warn't no use fer to wait, so I

slid overboard en struck out fer de islan'. Well, I had

a notion I could lan' mos' anywhers, but I couldn't --

bank too bluff. I 'uz mos' to de foot er de islan'

b'fo' I found' a good place. I went into de woods en

jedged I wouldn' fool wid raffs no mo', long as dey

move de lantern roun' so. I had my pipe en a plug er

dog-leg, en some matches in my cap, en dey warn't

wet, so I 'uz all right."



"And so you ain't had no meat nor bread to eat all

this time? Why didn't you get mud-turkles?"



"How you gwyne to git 'm? You can't slip up on

um en grab um; en how's a body gwyne to hit um

wid a rock? How could a body do it in de night?

En I warn't gwyne to show mysef on de bank in de

daytime."



"Well, that's so. You've had to keep in the woods

all the time, of course. Did you hear 'em shooting

the cannon?"



"Oh, yes. I knowed dey was arter you. I see um

go by heah -- watched um thoo de bushes."



Some young birds come along, flying a yard or two

at a time and lighting. Jim said it was a sign it was

going to rain. He said it was a sign when young

chickens flew that way, and so he reckoned it was the

same way when young birds done it. I was going to

catch some of them, but Jim wouldn't let me. He

said it was death. He said his father laid mighty sick

once, and some of them catched a bird, and his old

granny said his father would die, and he did.



And Jim said you mustn't count the things you are

going to cook for dinner, because that would bring

bad luck. The same if you shook the table-cloth after

sundown. And he said if a man owned a beehive and

that man died, the bees must be told about it before

sun-up next morning, or else the bees would all

weaken down and quit work and die. Jim said bees

wouldn't sting idiots; but I didn't believe that, be-

cause I had tried them lots of times myself, and they

wouldn't sting me.



I had heard about some of these things before, but

not all of them. Jim knowed all kinds of signs. He

said he knowed most everything. I said it looked to

me like all the signs was about bad luck, and so I

asked him if there warn't any good-luck signs. He

says:



"Mighty few -- an' DEY ain't no use to a body.

What you want to know when good luck's a-comin'

for? Want to keep it off?" And he said: "Ef you's

got hairy arms en a hairy breas', it's a sign dat you's

agwyne to be rich. Well, dey's some use in a sign

like dat, 'kase it's so fur ahead. You see, maybe

you's got to be po' a long time fust, en so you might

git discourage' en kill yo'sef 'f you didn' know by de

sign dat you gwyne to be rich bymeby."



"Have you got hairy arms and a hairy breast,

Jim?"



"What's de use to ax dat question? Don't you

see I has?"



"Well, are you rich?"



"No, but I ben rich wunst, and gwyne to be rich

agin. Wunst I had foteen dollars, but I tuck to

specalat'n', en got busted out."



"What did you speculate in, Jim?"



"Well, fust I tackled stock."



"What kind of stock?"



"Why, live stock -- cattle, you know. I put ten

dollars in a cow. But I ain' gwyne to resk no mo'

money in stock. De cow up 'n' died on my han's."



"So you lost the ten dollars."



"No, I didn't lose it all. I on'y los' 'bout nine of

it. I sole de hide en taller for a dollar en ten cents."



"You had five dollars and ten cents left. Did you

speculate any more?"



"Yes. You know that one-laigged nigger dat

b'longs to old Misto Bradish? Well, he sot up a

bank, en say anybody dat put in a dollar would git fo'

dollars mo' at de en' er de year. Well, all de niggers

went in, but dey didn't have much. I wuz de on'y

one dat had much. So I stuck out for mo' dan fo'

dollars, en I said 'f I didn' git it I'd start a bank my-

sef. Well, o' course dat nigger want' to keep me out

er de business, bekase he says dey warn't business

'nough for two banks, so he say I could put in my five

dollars en he pay me thirty-five at de en' er de year.



"So I done it. Den I reck'n'd I'd inves' de

thirty-five dollars right off en keep things a-movin'.

Dey wuz a nigger name' Bob, dat had ketched a wood-

flat, en his marster didn' know it; en I bought it off'n

him en told him to take de thirty-five dollars when de

en' er de year come; but somebody stole de wood-flat

dat night, en nex day de one-laigged nigger say de

bank's busted. So dey didn' none uv us git no

money."



"What did you do with the ten cents, Jim?"



"Well, I 'uz gwyne to spen' it, but I had a dream,

en de dream tole me to give it to a nigger name'

Balum -- Balum's Ass dey call him for short; he's

one er dem chuckleheads, you know. But he's lucky,

dey say, en I see I warn't lucky. De dream say let

Balum inves' de ten cents en he'd make a raise for me.

Well, Balum he tuck de money, en when he wuz in

church he hear de preacher say dat whoever give to de

po' len' to de Lord, en boun' to git his money back a

hund'd times. So Balum he tuck en give de ten cents

to de po', en laid low to see what wuz gwyne to come

of it."



"Well, what did come of it, Jim?"



"Nuffn never come of it. I couldn' manage to

k'leck dat money no way; en Balum he couldn'. I

ain' gwyne to len' no mo' money 'dout I see de

security. Boun' to git yo' money back a hund'd

times, de preacher says! Ef I could git de ten CENTS

back, I'd call it squah, en be glad er de chanst."



"Well, it's all right anyway, Jim, long as you're

going to be rich again some time or other."



"Yes; en I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns

mysef, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars. I wisht I

had de money, I wouldn' want no mo'."





CHAPTER IX.



I WANTED to go and look at a place right about the

middle of the island that I'd found when I was

exploring; so we started and soon got to it, because

the island was only three miles long and a quarter of a

mile wide.



This place was a tolerable long, steep hill or ridge

about forty foot high. We had a rough time getting

to the top, the sides was so steep and the bushes so

thick. We tramped and clumb around all over it, and

by and by found a good big cavern in the rock, most

up to the top on the side towards Illinois. The cavern

was as big as two or three rooms bunched together,

and Jim could stand up straight in it. It was cool in

there. Jim was for putting our traps in there right

away, but I said we didn't want to be climbing up and

down there all the time.



Jim said if we had the canoe hid in a good place,

and had all the traps in the cavern, we could rush there

if anybody was to come to the island, and they would

never find us without dogs. And, besides, he said

them little birds had said it was going to rain, and did

I want the things to get wet?



So we went back and got the canoe, and paddled up

abreast the cavern, and lugged all the traps up there.

Then we hunted up a place close by to hide the canoe

in, amongst the thick willows. We took some fish off

of the lines and set them again, and begun to get ready

for dinner.



The door of the cavern was big enough to roll a

hogshead in, and on one side of the door the floor

stuck out a little bit, and was flat and a good place to

build a fire on. So we built it there and cooked

dinner.



We spread the blankets inside for a carpet, and eat

our dinner in there. We put all the other things handy

at the back of the cavern. Pretty soon it darkened up,

and begun to thunder and lighten; so the birds was

right about it. Directly it begun to rain, and it rained

like all fury, too, and I never see the wind blow so.

It was one of these regular summer storms. It would

get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and

lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick

that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-

webby; and here would come a blast of wind that

would bend the trees down and turn up the pale under-

side of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust

would follow along and set the branches to tossing

their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it

was just about the bluest and blackest -- FST! it was as

bright as glory, and you'd have a little glimpse of tree-

tops a-plunging about away off yonder in the storm,

hundreds of yards further than you could see before;

dark as sin again in a second, and now you'd hear the

thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rum-

bling, grumbling, tumbling, down the sky towards the

under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels

down stairs -- where it's long stairs and they bounce a

good deal, you know.



"Jim, this is nice," I says. "I wouldn't want to

be nowhere else but here. Pass me along another

hunk of fish and some hot corn-bread."



"Well, you wouldn't a ben here 'f it hadn't a ben

for Jim. You'd a ben down dah in de woods widout

any dinner, en gittn' mos' drownded, too; dat you

would, honey. Chickens knows when it's gwyne to

rain, en so do de birds, chile."



The river went on raising and raising for ten or

twelve days, till at last it was over the banks. The

water was three or four foot deep on the island in the

low places and on the Illinois bottom. On that side it

was a good many miles wide, but on the Missouri side

it was the same old distance across -- a half a mile --

because the Missouri shore was just a wall of high

bluffs.



Daytimes we paddled all over the island in the canoe,

It was mighty cool and shady in the deep woods, even

if the sun was blazing outside. We went winding in

and out amongst the trees, and sometimes the vines

hung so thick we had to back away and go some other

way. Well, on every old broken-down tree you could

see rabbits and snakes and such things; and when

the island had been overflowed a day or two they got

so tame, on account of being hungry, that you could

paddle right up and put your hand on them if you

wanted to; but not the snakes and turtles -- they would

slide off in the water. The ridge our cavern was in

was full of them. We could a had pets enough if we'd

wanted them.



One night we catched a little section of a lumber

raft -- nice pine planks. It was twelve foot wide and

about fifteen or sixteen foot long, and the top stood

above water six or seven inches -- a solid, level floor.

We could see saw-logs go by in the daylight some-

times, but we let them go; we didn't show ourselves

in daylight.



Another night when we was up at the head of the

island, just before daylight, here comes a frame-house

down, on the west side. She was a two-story, and

tilted over considerable. We paddled out and got

aboard -- clumb in at an upstairs window. But it was

too dark to see yet, so we made the canoe fast and set

in her to wait for daylight.



The light begun to come before we got to the foot

of the island. Then we looked in at the window. We

could make out a bed, and a table, and two old chairs,

and lots of things around about on the floor, and there

was clothes hanging against the wall. There was

something laying on the floor in the far corner that

looked like a man. So Jim says:



"Hello, you!"



But it didn't budge. So I hollered again, and then

Jim says:



"De man ain't asleep -- he's dead. You hold still

-- I'll go en see."



He went, and bent down and looked, and says:



"It's a dead man. Yes, indeedy; naked, too.

He's ben shot in de back. I reck'n he's ben dead

two er three days. Come in, Huck, but doan' look at

his face -- it's too gashly."



I didn't look at him at all. Jim throwed some old

rags over him, but he needn't done it; I didn't want

to see him. There was heaps of old greasy cards

scattered around over the floor, and old whisky bottles,

and a couple of masks made out of black cloth; and

all over the walls was the ignorantest kind of words

and pictures made with charcoal. There was two old

dirty calico dresses, and a sun-bonnet, and some

women's underclothes hanging against the wall, and

some men's clothing, too. We put the lot into the

canoe -- it might come good. There was a boy's old

speckled straw hat on the floor; I took that, too.

And there was a bottle that had had milk in it, and it

had a rag stopper for a baby to suck. We would a

took the bottle, but it was broke. There was a seedy

old chest, and an old hair trunk with the hinges broke.

They stood open, but there warn't nothing left in them

that was any account. The way things was scattered

about we reckoned the people left in a hurry, and

warn't fixed so as to carry off most of their stuff.



We got an old tin lantern, and a butcher-knife with-

out any handle, and a bran-new Barlow knife worth

two bits in any store, and a lot of tallow candles, and a

tin candlestick, and a gourd, and a tin cup, and a ratty

old bedquilt off the bed, and a reticule with needles

and pins and beeswax and buttons and thread and all

such truck in it, and a hatchet and some nails, and a

fishline as thick as my little finger with some mon-

strous hooks on it, and a roll of buckskin, and a

leather dog-collar, and a horseshoe, and some vials of

medicine that didn't have no label on them; and just

as we was leaving I found a tolerable good curry-comb,

and Jim he found a ratty old fiddle-bow, and a wooden

leg. The straps was broke off of it, but, barring that,

it was a good enough leg, though it was too long for

me and not long enough for Jim, and we couldn't find

the other one, though we hunted all around.



And so, take it all around, we made a good haul.

When we was ready to shove off we was a quarter of a

mile below the island, and it was pretty broad day; so

I made Jim lay down in the canoe and cover up with

the quilt, because if he set up people could tell he was

a nigger a good ways off. I paddled over to the

Illinois shore, and drifted down most a half a mile

doing it. I crept up the dead water under the bank,

and hadn't no accidents and didn't see nobody. We

got home all safe.





CHAPTER X.



AFTER breakfast I wanted to talk about the dead

man and guess out how he come to be killed, but

Jim didn't want to. He said it would fetch bad luck;

and besides, he said, he might come and ha'nt us; he

said a man that warn't buried was more likely to go a-

ha'nting around than one that was planted and com-

fortable. That sounded pretty reasonable, so I didn't

say no more; but I couldn't keep from studying over

it and wishing I knowed who shot the man, and what

they done it for.



We rummaged the clothes we'd got, and found eight

dollars in silver sewed up in the lining of an old blanket

overcoat. Jim said he reckoned the people in that

house stole the coat, because if they'd a knowed the

money was there they wouldn't a left it. I said I

reckoned they killed him, too; but Jim didn't want to

talk about that. I says:



"Now you think it's bad luck; but what did you

say when I fetched in the snake-skin that I found on

the top of the ridge day before yesterday? You said

it was the worst bad luck in the world to touch a

snake-skin with my hands. Well, here's your bad

luck! We've raked in all this truck and eight dollars

besides. I wish we could have some bad luck like this

every day, Jim."



"Never you mind, honey, never you mind. Don't

you git too peart. It's a-comin'. Mind I tell you,

it's a-comin'."



It did come, too. It was a Tuesday that we had

that talk. Well, after dinner Friday we was laying

around in the grass at the upper end of the ridge, and

got out of tobacco. I went to the cavern to get some,

and found a rattlesnake in there. I killed him, and

curled him up on the foot of Jim's blanket, ever so

natural, thinking there'd be some fun when Jim found

him there. Well, by night I forgot all about the

snake, and when Jim flung himself down on the blanket

while I struck a light the snake's mate was there, and

bit him.



He jumped up yelling, and the first thing the light

showed was the varmint curled up and ready for

another spring. I laid him out in a second with a

stick, and Jim grabbed pap's whisky-jug and begun to

pour it down.



He was barefooted, and the snake bit him right on

the heel. That all comes of my being such a fool as

to not remember that wherever you leave a dead snake

its mate always comes there and curls around it. Jim

told me to chop off the snake's head and throw it

away, and then skin the body and roast a piece of it.

I done it, and he eat it and said it would help cure

him. He made me take off the rattles and tie them

around his wrist, too. He said that that would help.

Then I slid out quiet and throwed the snakes clear

away amongst the bushes; for I warn't going to let

Jim find out it was all my fault, not if I could help it.



Jim sucked and sucked at the jug, and now and then

he got out of his head and pitched around and yelled;

but every time he come to himself he went to sucking

at the jug again. His foot swelled up pretty big, and

so did his leg; but by and by the drunk begun to

come, and so I judged he was all right; but I'd

druther been bit with a snake than pap's whisky.



Jim was laid up for four days and nights. Then

the swelling was all gone and he was around again. I

made up my mind I wouldn't ever take a-holt of a

snake-skin again with my hands, now that I see what

had come of it. Jim said he reckoned I would believe

him next time. And he said that handling a snake-

skin was such awful bad luck that maybe we hadn't

got to the end of it yet. He said he druther see the

new moon over his left shoulder as much as a thousand

times than take up a snake-skin in his hand. Well, I

was getting to feel that way myself, though I've always

reckoned that looking at the new moon over your left

shoulder is one of the carelessest and foolishest things

a body can do. Old Hank Bunker done it once, and

bragged about it; and in less than two years he got

drunk and fell off of the shot-tower, and spread him-

self out so that he was just a kind of a layer, as you

may say; and they slid him edgeways between two

barn doors for a coffin, and buried him so, so they

say, but I didn't see it. Pap told me. But anyway

it all come of looking at the moon that way, like a

fool.



Well, the days went along, and the river went down

between its banks again; and about the first thing we

done was to bait one of the big hooks with a skinned

rabbit and set it and catch a catfish that was as big as

a man, being six foot two inches long, and weighed

over two hundred pounds. We couldn't handle him,

of course; he would a flung us into Illinois. We just

set there and watched him rip and tear around till he

drownded. We found a brass button in his stomach

and a round ball, and lots of rubbage. We split the

ball open with the hatchet, and there was a spool in it.

Jim said he'd had it there a long time, to coat it over

so and make a ball of it. It was as big a fish as was

ever catched in the Mississippi, I reckon. Jim said he

hadn't ever seen a bigger one. He would a been

worth a good deal over at the village. They peddle

out such a fish as that by the pound in the market-

house there; everybody buys some of him; his meat's

as white as snow and makes a good fry.



Next morning I said it was getting slow and dull,

and I wanted to get a stirring up some way. I said I

reckoned I would slip over the river and find out what

was going on. Jim liked that notion; but he said I

must go in the dark and look sharp. Then he studied

it over and said, couldn't I put on some of them old

things and dress up like a girl? That was a good

notion, too. So we shortened up one of the calico

gowns, and I turned up my trouser-legs to my knees

and got into it. Jim hitched it behind with the hooks,

and it was a fair fit. I put on the sun-bonnet and tied

it under my chin, and then for a body to look in and

see my face was like looking down a joint of stove-

pipe. Jim said nobody would know me, even in the

daytime, hardly. I practiced around all day to get

the hang of the things, and by and by I could do

pretty well in them, only Jim said I didn't walk like a

girl; and he said I must quit pulling up my gown to

get at my britches-pocket. I took notice, and done

better.



I started up the Illinois shore in the canoe just after

dark.



I started across to the town from a little below the

ferry-landing, and the drift of the current fetched me

in at the bottom of the town. I tied up and started

along the bank. There was a light burning in a little

shanty that hadn't been lived in for a long time, and I

wondered who had took up quarters there. I slipped

up and peeped in at the window. There was a woman

about forty year old in there knitting by a candle that

was on a pine table. I didn't know her face; she was

a stranger, for you couldn't start a face in that town

that I didn't know. Now this was lucky, because I

was weakening; I was getting afraid I had come;

people might know my voice and find me out. But if

this woman had been in such a little town two days

she could tell me all I wanted to know; so I knocked

at the door, and made up my mind I wouldn't forget I

was a girl.





CHAPTER XI.



"COME in," says the woman, and I did. She

says: "Take a cheer."



I done it. She looked me all over with her little

shiny eyes, and says:



"What might your name be?"



"Sarah Williams."



"Where 'bouts do you live? In this neighbor-

hood?'



"No'm. In Hookerville, seven mile below. I've

walked all the way and I'm all tired out."



"Hungry, too, I reckon. I'll find you something."



"No'm, I ain't hungry. I was so hungry I had to

stop two miles below here at a farm; so I ain't hungry

no more. It's what makes me so late. My mother's

down sick, and out of money and everything, and I

come to tell my uncle Abner Moore. He lives at the

upper end of the town, she says. I hain't ever been

here before. Do you know him?"



"No; but I don't know everybody yet. I haven't

lived here quite two weeks. It's a considerable ways

to the upper end of the town. You better stay here

all night. Take off your bonnet."



"No," I says; "I'll rest a while, I reckon, and go

on. I ain't afeared of the dark."



She said she wouldn't let me go by myself, but her

husband would be in by and by, maybe in a hour and

a half, and she'd send him along with me. Then she

got to talking about her husband, and about her rela-

tions up the river, and her relations down the river,

and about how much better off they used to was, and

how they didn't know but they'd made a mistake

coming to our town, instead of letting well alone --

and so on and so on, till I was afeard I had made a

mistake coming to her to find out what was going on

in the town; but by and by she dropped on to pap

and the murder, and then I was pretty willing to let

her clatter right along. She told about me and Tom

Sawyer finding the six thousand dollars (only she got

it ten) and all about pap and what a hard lot he was,

and what a hard lot I was, and at last she got down to

where I was murdered. I says:



"Who done it? We've heard considerable about

these goings on down in Hookerville, but we don't

know who 'twas that killed Huck Finn."



"Well, I reckon there's a right smart chance of

people HERE that'd like to know who killed him. Some

think old Finn done it himself."



"No -- is that so?"



"Most everybody thought it at first. He'll never

know how nigh he come to getting lynched. But

before night they changed around and judged it was

done by a runaway nigger named Jim."



"Why HE --"



I stopped. I reckoned I better keep still. She run

on, and never noticed I had put in at all:



"The nigger run off the very night Huck Finn was

killed. So there's a reward out for him -- three hun-

dred dollars. And there's a reward out for old Finn,

too -- two hundred dollars. You see, he come to town

the morning after the murder, and told about it, and

was out with 'em on the ferryboat hunt, and right

away after he up and left. Before night they wanted

to lynch him, but he was gone, you see. Well, next

day they found out the nigger was gone; they found

out he hadn't ben seen sence ten o'clock the night the

murder was done. So then they put it on him, you

see; and while they was full of it, next day, back

comes old Finn, and went boo-hooing to Judge

Thatcher to get money to hunt for the nigger all over

Illinois with. The judge gave him some, and that

evening he got drunk, and was around till after mid-

night with a couple of mighty hard-looking strangers,

and then went off with them. Well, he hain't come

back sence, and they ain't looking for him back till

this thing blows over a little, for people thinks now

that he killed his boy and fixed things so folks would

think robbers done it, and then he'd get Huck's money

without having to bother a long time with a lawsuit.

People do say he warn't any too good to do it. Oh,

he's sly, I reckon. If he don't come back for a year

he'll be all right. You can't prove anything on him,

you know; everything will be quieted down then, and

he'll walk in Huck's money as easy as nothing."



"Yes, I reckon so, 'm. I don't see nothing in the

way of it. Has everybody guit thinking the nigger

done it?"



"Oh, no, not everybody. A good many thinks he

done it. But they'll get the nigger pretty soon now,

and maybe they can scare it out of him."



"Why, are they after him yet?"



"Well, you're innocent, ain't you! Does three

hundred dollars lay around every day for people to

pick up? Some folks think the nigger ain't far from

here. I'm one of them -- but I hain't talked it around.

A few days ago I was talking with an old couple that

lives next door in the log shanty, and they happened

to say hardly anybody ever goes to that island over

yonder that they call Jackson's Island. Don't any-

body live there? says I. No, nobody, says they. I

didn't say any more, but I done some thinking. I

was pretty near certain I'd seen smoke over there,

about the head of the island, a day or two before that,

so I says to myself, like as not that nigger's hiding

over there; anyway, says I, it's worth the trouble to

give the place a hunt. I hain't seen any smoke sence,

so I reckon maybe he's gone, if it was him; but

husband's going over to see -- him and another man.

He was gone up the river; but he got back to-day,

and I told him as soon as he got here two hours ago."



I had got so uneasy I couldn't set still. I had to do

something with my hands; so I took up a needle off of

the table and went to threading it. My hands shook,

and I was making a bad job of it. When the woman

stopped talking I looked up, and she was looking at

me pretty curious and smiling a little. I put down the

needle and thread, and let on to be interested -- and I

was, too -- and says:



"Three hundred dollars is a power of money. I

wish my mother could get it. Is your husband going

over there to-night?"



"Oh, yes. He went up-town with the man I was

telling you of, to get a boat and see if they could

borrow another gun. They'll go over after midnight."



"Couldn't they see better if they was to wait till

daytime?"



"Yes. And couldn't the nigger see better, too?

After midnight he'll likely be asleep, and they can slip

around through the woods and hunt up his camp fire

all the better for the dark, if he's got one."



"I didn't think of that."



The woman kept looking at me pretty curious, and

I didn't feel a bit comfortable. Pretty soon she says"



"What did you say your name was, honey?"



"M -- Mary Williams."



Somehow it didn't seem to me that I said it was

Mary before, so I didn't look up -- seemed to me I

said it was Sarah; so I felt sort of cornered, and was

afeared maybe I was looking it, too. I wished the

woman would say something more; the longer she set

still the uneasier I was. But now she says:



"Honey, I thought you said it was Sarah when

you first come in?"



"Oh, yes'm, I did. Sarah Mary Williams. Sarah's

my first name. Some calls me Sarah, some calls me

Mary."



"Oh, that's the way of it?"



"Yes'm."



I was feeling better then, but I wished I was out of

there, anyway. I couldn't look up yet.



Well, the woman fell to talking about how hard

times was, and how poor they had to live, and how the

rats was as free as if they owned the place, and so

forth and so on, and then I got easy again. She was

right about the rats. You'd see one stick his nose out

of a hole in the corner every little while. She said she

had to have things handy to throw at them when she

was alone, or they wouldn't give her no peace. She

showed me a bar of lead twisted up into a knot, and

said she was a good shot with it generly, but she'd

wrenched her arm a day or two ago, and didn't know

whether she could throw true now. But she watched

for a chance, and directly banged away at a rat; but

she missed him wide, and said "Ouch!" it hurt her

arm so. Then she told me to try for the next one. I

wanted to be getting away before the old man got

back, but of course I didn't let on. I got the thing,

and the first rat that showed his nose I let drive, and

if he'd a stayed where he was he'd a been a tolerable

sick rat. She said that was first-rate, and she reckoned

I would hive the next one. She went and got the

lump of lead and fetched it back, and brought along a

hank of yarn which she wanted me to help her with.

I held up my two hands and she put the hank over

them, and went on talking about her and her husband's

matters. But she broke off to say:



"Keep your eye on the rats. You better have the

lead in your lap, handy."



So she dropped the lump into my lap just at that

moment, and I clapped my legs together on it and she

went on talking. But only about a minute. Then

she took off the hank and looked me straight in the

face, and very pleasant, and says:



"Come, now, what's your real name?"



"Wh -- what, mum?"



"What's your real name? Is it Bill, or Tom, or

Bob? -- or what is it?"



I reckon I shook like a leaf, and I didn't know

hardly what to do. But I says:



"Please to don't poke fun at a poor girl like me,

mum. If I'm in the way here, I'll --"



"No, you won't. Set down and stay where you

are. I ain't going to hurt you, and I ain't going to

tell on you, nuther. You just tell me your secret, and

trust me. I'll keep it; and, what's more, I'll help

you. So'll my old man if you want him to. You

see, you're a runaway 'prentice, that's all. It ain't

anything. There ain't no harm in it. You've been

treated bad, and you made up your mind to cut.

Bless you, child, I wouldn't tell on you. Tell me all

about it now, that's a good boy."



So I said it wouldn't be no use to try to play it any

longer, and I would just make a clean breast and tell

her everything, but she musn't go back on her promise.

Then I told her my father and mother was dead, and

the law had bound me out to a mean old farmer in the

country thirty mile back from the river, and he treated

me so bad I couldn't stand it no longer; he went away

to be gone a couple of days, and so I took my chance

and stole some of his daughter's old clothes and

cleared out, and I had been three nights coming the

thirty miles. I traveled nights, and hid daytimes and

slept, and the bag of bread and meat I carried from

home lasted me all the way, and I had a-plenty. I

said I believed my uncle Abner Moore would take care

of me, and so that was why I struck out for this town

of Goshen.



"Goshen, child? This ain't Goshen. This is St.

Petersburg. Goshen's ten mile further up the river.

Who told you this was Goshen?"



"Why, a man I met at daybreak this morning, just

as I was going to turn into the woods for my regular

sleep. He told me when the roads forked I must take

the right hand, and five mile would fetch me to

Goshen."



"He was drunk, I reckon. He told you just ex-

actly wrong."



"Well,,he did act like he was drunk, but it ain't no

matter now. I got to be moving along. I'll fetch

Goshen before daylight."



"Hold on a minute. I'll put you up a snack to eat.

You might want it."



So she put me up a snack, and says:



"Say, when a cow's laying down, which end of her

gets up first? Answer up prompt now -- don't stop

to study over it. Which end gets up first?"



"The hind end, mum."



"Well, then, a horse?"



"The for'rard end, mum."



"Which side of a tree does the moss grow on?"



"North side."



"If fifteen cows is browsing on a hillside, how

many of them eats with their heads pointed the same

direction?"



"The whole fifteen, mum."



"Well, I reckon you HAVE lived in the country. I

thought maybe you was trying to hocus me again.

What's your real name, now?"



"George Peters, mum."



"Well, try to remember it, George. Don't forget

and tell me it's Elexander before you go, and then get

out by saying it's George Elexander when I catch you.

And don't go about women in that old calico. You

do a girl tolerable poor, but you might fool men,

maybe. Bless you, child, when you set out to thread

a needle don't hold the thread still and fetch the needle

up to it; hold the needle still and poke the thread at

it; that's the way a woman most always does, but a

man always does t'other way. And when you throw

at a rat or anything, hitch yourself up a tiptoe and

fetch your hand up over your head as awkward as you

can, and miss your rat about six or seven foot. Throw

stiff-armed from the shoulder, like there was a pivot

there for it to turn on, like a girl; not from the wrist

and elbow, with your arm out to one side, like a boy.

And, mind you, when a girl tries to catch anything in

her lap she throws her knees apart; she don't clap

them together, the way you did when you catched the

lump of lead. Why, I spotted you for a boy when

you was threading the needle; and I contrived the

other things just to make certain. Now trot along to

your uncle, Sarah Mary Williams George Elexander

Peters, and if you get into trouble you send word to

Mrs. Judith Loftus, which is me, and I'll do what I

can to get you out of it. Keep the river road all the

way, and next time you tramp take shoes and socks

with you. The river road's a rocky one, and your

feet'll be in a condition when you get to Goshen, I

reckon."



I went up the bank about fifty yards, and then I

doubled on my tracks and slipped back to where my

canoe was, a good piece below the house. I jumped

in, and was off in a hurry. I went up-stream far

enough to make the head of the island, and then

started across. I took off the sun-bonnet, for I didn't

want no blinders on then. When I was about the

middle I heard the clock begin to strike, so I stops

and listens; the sound come faint over the water but

clear -- eleven. When I struck the head of the island

I never waited to blow, though I was most winded, but

I shoved right into the timber where my old camp used

to be, and started a good fire there on a high and dry

spot.



Then I jumped in the canoe and dug out for our

place, a mile and a half below, as hard as I could go.

I landed, and slopped through the timber and up the

ridge and into the cavern. There Jim laid, sound

asleep on the ground. I roused him out and says:



"Git up and hump yourself, Jim! There ain't a

minute to lose. They're after us!"



Jim never asked no questions, he never said a word;

but the way he worked for the next half an hour

showed about how he was scared. By that time every-

thing we had in the world was on our raft, and she was

ready to be shoved out from the willow cove where she

was hid. We put out the camp fire at the cavern the

first thing, and didn't show a candle outside after that.



I took the canoe out from the shore a little piece,

and took a look; but if there was a boat around I

couldn't see it, for stars and shadows ain't good to see

by. Then we got out the raft and slipped along down

in the shade, past the foot of the island dead still --

never saying a word.





CHAPTER XII.



IT must a been close on to one o'clock when we

got below the island at last, and the raft did seem

to go mighty slow. If a boat was to come along we

was going to take to the canoe and break for the

Illinois shore; and it was well a boat didn't come, for

we hadn't ever thought to put the gun in the canoe,

or a fishing-line, or anything to eat. We was in

ruther too much of a sweat to think of so many things.

It warn't good judgment to put EVERYTHING on the raft.



If the men went to the island I just expect they

found the camp fire I built, and watched it all night for

Jim to come. Anyways, they stayed away from us,

and if my building the fire never fooled them it warn't

no fault of mine. I played it as low down on them as

I could.



When the first streak of day began to show we tied

up to a towhead in a big bend on the Illinois side, and

hacked off cottonwood branches with the hatchet,

and covered up the raft with them so she looked like

there had been a cave-in in the bank there. A tow-

head is a sandbar that has cottonwoods on it as thick

as harrow-teeth.



We had mountains on the Missouri shore and heavy

timber on the Illinois side, and the channel was down

the Missouri shore at that place, so we warn't afraid of

anybody running across us. We laid there all day,

and watched the rafts and steamboats spin down the

Missouri shore, and up-bound steamboats fight the big

river in the middle. I told Jim all about the time I

had jabbering with that woman; and Jim said she was

a smart one, and if she was to start after us herself she

wouldn't set down and watch a camp fire -- no, sir,

she'd fetch a dog. Well, then, I said, why couldn't

she tell her husband to fetch a dog? Jim said he bet

she did think of it by the time the men was ready to

start, and he believed they must a gone up-town to get

a dog and so they lost all that time, or else we

wouldn't be here on a towhead sixteen or seventeen

mile below the village -- no, indeedy, we would be in

that same old town again. So I said I didn't care

what was the reason they didn't get us as long as they

didn't.



When it was beginning to come on dark we poked

our heads out of the cottonwood thicket, and looked

up and down and across; nothing in sight; so Jim

took up some of the top planks of the raft and built a

snug wigwam to get under in blazing weather and

rainy, and to keep the things dry. Jim made a floor

for the wigwam, and raised it a foot or more above the

level of the raft, so now the blankets and all the traps

was out of reach of steamboat waves. Right in the

middle of the wigwam we made a layer of dirt about

five or six inches deep with a frame around it for to

hold it to its place; this was to build a fire on in

sloppy weather or chilly; the wigwam would keep it

from being seen. We made an extra steering-oar,

too, because one of the others might get broke on a

snag or something. We fixed up a short forked stick

to hang the old lantern on, because we must always

light the lantern whenever we see a steamboat coming

down-stream, to keep from getting run over; but we

wouldn't have to light it for up-stream boats unless we

see we was in what they call a "crossing"; for the

river was pretty high yet, very low banks being still a

little under water; so up-bound boats didn't always

run the channel, but hunted easy water.



This second night we run between seven and eight

hours, with a current that was making over four mile

an hour. We catched fish and talked, and we took a

swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was

kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, lay-

ing on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't

ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we

laughed -- only a little kind of a low chuckle. We

had mighty good weather as a general thing, and noth-

ing ever happened to us at all -- that night, nor the

next, nor the next.



Every night we passed towns, some of them away

up on black hillsides, nothing but just a shiny bed of

lights; not a house could you see. The fifth night we

passed St. Louis, and it was like the whole world lit

up. In St. Petersburg they used to say there was

twenty or thirty thousand people in St. Louis, but I

never believed it till I see that wonderful spread of

lights at two o'clock that still night. There warn't a

sound there; everybody was asleep.



Every night now I used to slip ashore towards ten

o'clock at some little village, and buy ten or fifteen

cents' worth of meal or bacon or other stuff to eat;

and sometimes I lifted a chicken that warn't roosting

comfortable, and took him along. Pap always said,

take a chicken when you get a chance, because if you

don't want him yourself you can easy find somebody

that does, and a good deed ain't ever forgot. I never

see pap when he didn't want the chicken himself, but

that is what he used to say, anyway.



Mornings before daylight I slipped into cornfields

and borrowed a watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a

punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind.

Pap always said it warn't no harm to borrow things if

you was meaning to pay them back some time; but

the widow said it warn't anything but a soft name for

stealing, and no decent body would do it. Jim said he

reckoned the widow was partly right and pap was partly

right; so the best way would be for us to pick out two

or three things from the list and say we wouldn't borrow

them any more -- then he reckoned it wouldn't be no

harm to borrow the others. So we talked it over all

one night, drifting along down the river, trying to

make up our minds whether to drop the watermelons,

or the cantelopes, or the mushmelons, or what. But

towards daylight we got it all settled satisfactory, and

concluded to drop crabapples and p'simmons. We

warn't feeling just right before that, but it was all

comfortable now. I was glad the way it come out,

too, because crabapples ain't ever good, and the

p'simmons wouldn't be ripe for two or three months

yet.



We shot a water-fowl now and then that got up too

early in the morning or didn't go to bed early enough

in the evening. Take it all round, we lived pretty high.



The fifth night below St. Louis we had a big storm

after midnight, with a power of thunder and lightning,

and the rain poured down in a solid sheet. We stayed

in the wigwam and let the raft take care of itself.

When the lightning glared out we could see a big

straight river ahead, and high, rocky bluffs on both

sides. By and by says I, "Hel-LO, Jim, looky yon-

der!" It was a steamboat that had killed herself on a

rock. We was drifting straight down for her. The

lightning showed her very distinct. She was leaning

over, with part of her upper deck above water, and

you could see every little chimbly-guy clean and clear,

and a chair by the big bell, with an old slouch hat

hanging on the back of it, when the flashes come.



Well, it being away in the night and stormy, and all

so mysterious-like, I felt just the way any other boy

would a felt when I see that wreck laying there so

mournful and lonesome in the middle of the river. I

wanted to get aboard of her and slink around a little,

and see what there was there. So I says:



"Le's land on her, Jim."



But Jim was dead against it at first. He says:



"I doan' want to go fool'n 'long er no wrack.

We's doin' blame' well, en we better let blame' well

alone, as de good book says. Like as not dey's a

watchman on dat wrack."



"Watchman your grandmother," I says; "there

ain't nothing to watch but the texas and the pilot-

house; and do you reckon anybody's going to resk his

life for a texas and a pilot-house such a night as this,

when it's likely to break up and wash off down the

river any minute?" Jim couldn't say nothing to that,

so he didn't try. "And besides," I says, "we might

borrow something worth having out of the captain's

stateroom. Seegars, I bet you -- and cost five cents

apiece, solid cash. Steamboat captains is always rich,

and get sixty dollars a month, and THEY don't care a

cent what a thing costs, you know, long as they want

it. Stick a candle in your pocket; I can't rest, Jim,

till we give her a rummaging. Do you reckon Tom

Sawyer would ever go by this thing? Not for pie, he

wouldn't. He'd call it an adventure -- that's what

he'd call it; and he'd land on that wreck if it was his

last act. And wouldn't he throw style into it? --

wouldn't he spread himself, nor nothing? Why,

you'd think it was Christopher C'lumbus discovering

Kingdom-Come. I wish Tom Sawyer WAS here."



Jim he grumbled a little, but give in. He said we

mustn't talk any more than we could help, and then

talk mighty low. The lightning showed us the wreck

again just in time, and we fetched the stabboard

derrick, and made fast there.



The deck was high out here. We went sneaking down

the slope of it to labboard, in the dark, towards the

texas, feeling our way slow with our feet, and spreading

our hands out to fend off the guys, for it was so dark

we couldn't see no sign of them. Pretty soon we

struck the forward end of the skylight, and clumb on

to it; and the next step fetched us in front of the

captain's door, which was open, and by Jimminy,

away down through the texas-hall we see a light! and

all in the same second we seem to hear low voices in

yonder!



Jim whispered and said he was feeling powerful

sick, and told me to come along. I says, all right,

and was going to start for the raft; but just then I

heard a voice wail out and say:



"Oh, please don't, boys; I swear I won't ever

tell!"



Another voice said, pretty loud:



"It's a lie, Jim Turner. You've acted this way

before. You always want more'n your share of the

truck, and you've always got it, too, because you've

swore 't if you didn't you'd tell. But this time you've

said it jest one time too many. You're the meanest,

treacherousest hound in this country."



By this time Jim was gone for the raft. I was just

a-biling with curiosity; and I says to myself, Tom

Sawyer wouldn't back out now, and so I won't either;

I'm a-going to see what's going on here. So I

dropped on my hands and knees in the little passage,

and crept aft in the dark till there warn't but one

stateroom betwixt me and the cross-hall of the texas.

Then in there I see a man stretched on the floor and

tied hand and foot, and two men standing over him,

and one of them had a dim lantern in his hand, and

the other one had a pistol. This one kept pointing

the pistol at the man's head on the floor, and saying:



"I'd LIKE to! And I orter, too -- a mean skunk!"



The man on the floor would shrivel up and say,

"Oh, please don't, Bill; I hain't ever goin' to tell."



And every time he said that the man with the lantern

would laugh and say:



"'Deed you AIN'T! You never said no truer thing

'n that, you bet you." And once he said: "Hear

him beg! and yit if we hadn't got the best of him and

tied him he'd a killed us both. And what FOR? Jist

for noth'n. Jist because we stood on our RIGHTS --

that's what for. But I lay you ain't a-goin' to threaten

nobody any more, Jim Turner. Put UP that pistol,

Bill."



Bill says:



"I don't want to, Jake Packard. I'm for killin'

him -- and didn't he kill old Hatfield jist the same

way -- and don't he deserve it?"



"But I don't WANT him killed, and I've got my

reasons for it."



"Bless yo' heart for them words, Jake Packard!

I'll never forgit you long's I live!" says the man on

the floor, sort of blubbering.



Packard didn't take no notice of that, but hung up

his lantern on a nail and started towards where I was

there in the dark, and motioned Bill to come. I

crawfished as fast as I could about two yards, but the

boat slanted so that I couldn't make very good time;

so to keep from getting run over and catched I crawled

into a stateroom on the upper side. The man came a-

pawing along in the dark, and when Packard got to

my stateroom, he says:



"Here -- come in here."



And in he come, and Bill after him. But before

they got in I was up in the upper berth, cornered, and

sorry I come. Then they stood there, with their hands

on the ledge of the berth, and talked. I couldn't see

them, but I could tell where they was by the whisky

they'd been having. I was glad I didn't drink whisky;

but it wouldn't made much difference anyway, because

most of the time they couldn't a treed me because I

didn't breathe. I was too scared. And, besides, a

body COULDN'T breathe and hear such talk. They

talked low and earnest. Bill wanted to kill Turner.

He says:



"He's said he'll tell, and he will. If we was to

give both our shares to him NOW it wouldn't make no

difference after the row and the way we've served him.

Shore's you're born, he'll turn State's evidence; now

you hear ME. I'm for putting him out of his troubles."



"So'm I," says Packard, very quiet.



"Blame it, I'd sorter begun to think you wasnUt.

Well, then, that's all right. Le's go and do it."



"Hold on a minute; I hain't had my say yit. You

listen to me. Shooting's good, but there's quieter

ways if the thing's GOT to be done. But what I say is

this: it ain't good sense to go court'n around after a

halter if you can git at what you're up to in some

way that's jist as good and at the same time don't

bring you into no resks. Ain't that so?"



"You bet it is. But how you goin' to manage it

this time?"



"Well, my idea is this: we'll rustle around and gather

up whatever pickins we've overlooked in the state-

rooms, and shove for shore and hide the truck. Then

we'll wait. Now I say it ain't a-goin' to be more'n

two hours befo' this wrack breaks up and washes off

down the river. See? He'll be drownded, and won't

have nobody to blame for it but his own self. I

reckon that's a considerble sight better 'n killin' of

him. I'm unfavorable to killin' a man as long as you

can git aroun' it; it ain't good sense, it ain't good

morals. Ain't I right?"



"Yes, I reck'n you are. But s'pose she DON'T

break up and wash off?"



"Well, we can wait the two hours anyway and see,

can't we?"



"All right, then; come along."



So they started, and I lit out, all in a cold sweat,

and scrambled forward. It was dark as pitch there;

but I said, in a kind of a coarse whisper, "Jim !" and

he answered up, right at my elbow, with a sort of a

moan, and I says:



"Quick, Jim, it ain't no time for fooling around

and moaning; there's a gang of murderers in yonder,

and if we don't hunt up their boat and set her drifting

down the river so these fellows can't get away from the

wreck there's one of 'em going to be in a bad fix.

But if we find their boat we can put ALL of 'em in a

bad fix -- for the sheriff 'll get 'em. Quick -- hurry!

I'll hunt the labboard side, you hunt the stabboard.

You start at the raft, and --"



"Oh, my lordy, lordy! RAF'? Dey ain' no raf'

no mo'; she done broke loose en gone I -- en here

we is!"





CHAPTER XIII.



WELL, I catched my breath and most fainted.

Shut up on a wreck with such a gang as that!

But it warn't no time to be sentimentering. We'd GOT

to find that boat now -- had to have it for ourselves.

So we went a-quaking and shaking down the stabboard

side, and slow work it was, too -- seemed a week be-

fore we got to the stern. No sign of a boat. Jim

said he didn't believe he could go any further -- so

scared he hadn't hardly any strength left, he said.

But I said, come on, if we get left on this wreck we

are in a fix, sure. So on we prowled again. We

struck for the stern of the texas, and found it, and

then scrabbled along forwards on the skylight, hanging

on from shutter to shutter, for the edge of the skylight

was in the water. When we got pretty close to the

cross-hall door there was the skiff, sure enough! I

could just barely see her. I felt ever so thankful. In

another second I would a been aboard of her, but just

then the door opened. One of the men stuck his head

out only about a couple of foot from me, and I thought

I was gone; but he jerked it in again, and says:



"Heave that blame lantern out o' sight, Bill!"



He flung a bag of something into the boat, and then

got in himself and set down. It was Packard. Then

Bill HE come out and got in. Packard says, in a low

voice:



"All ready -- shove off!"



I couldn't hardly hang on to the shutters, I was so

weak. But Bill says:



"Hold on -- 'd you go through him?"



"No. Didn't you?"



"No. So he's got his share o' the cash yet."



"Well, then, come along; no use to take truck and

leave money."



"Say, won't he suspicion what we're up to?"



"Maybe he won't. But we got to have it anyway.

Come along."



So they got out and went in.



The door slammed to because it was on the careened

side; and in a half second I was in the boat, and Jim

come tumbling after me. I out with my knife and cut

the rope, and away we went!



We didn't touch an oar, and we didn't speak nor

whisper, nor hardly even breathe. We went gliding

swift along, dead silent, past the tip of the paddle-

box, and past the stern; then in a second or two more

we was a hundred yards below the wreck, and the

darkness soaked her up, every last sign of her, and we

was safe, and knowed it.



When we was three or four hundred yards down-

stream we see the lantern show like a little spark at the

texas door for a second, and we knowed by that that

the rascals had missed their boat, and was beginning

to understand that they was in just as much trouble now

as Jim Turner was.



Then Jim manned the oars, and we took out after

our raft. Now was the first time that I begun to worry

about the men -- I reckon I hadn't had time to before.

I begun to think how dreadful it was, even for mur-

derers, to be in such a fix. I says to myself, there

ain't no telling but I might come to be a murderer

myself yet, and then how would I like it? So says I

to Jim:



"The first light we see we'll land a hundred yards

below it or above it, in a place where it's a good

hiding-place for you and the skiff, and then I'll go and

fix up some kind of a yarn, and get somebody to go

for that gang and get them out of their scrape, so they

can be hung when their time comes."



But that idea was a failure; for pretty soon it begun

to storm again, and this time worse than ever. The

rain poured down, and never a light showed; every-

body in bed, I reckon. We boomed along down the

river, watching for lights and watching for our raft.

After a long time the rain let up, but the clouds

stayed, and the lightning kept whimpering, and by and

by a flash showed us a black thing ahead, floating, and

we made for it.



It was the raft, and mighty glad was we to get

aboard of it again. We seen a light now away down

to the right, on shore. So I said I would go for it.

The skiff was half full of plunder which that gang had

stole there on the wreck. We hustled it on to the raft

in a pile, and I told Jim to float along down, and show

a light when he judged he had gone about two mile,

and keep it burning till I come; then I manned my

oars and shoved for the light. As I got down towards

it three or four more showed -- up on a hillside. It

was a village. I closed in above the shore light, and

laid on my oars and floated. As I went by I see it

was a lantern hanging on the jackstaff of a double-hull

ferryboat. I skimmed around for the watchman, a-

wondering whereabouts he slept; and by and by I

found him roosting on the bitts forward, with his head

down between his knees. I gave his shoulder two or

three little shoves, and begun to cry.



He stirred up in a kind of a startlish way; but when

he see it was only me he took a good gap and stretch,

and then he says:



"Hello, what's up? Don't cry, bub. What's the

trouble?"



I says:



"Pap, and mam, and sis, and --"



Then I broke down. He says:



"Oh, dang it now, DON'T take on so; we all has to

have our troubles, and this 'n 'll come out all right.

What's the matter with 'em?"



"They're -- they're -- are you the watchman of the

boat?"



"Yes," he says, kind of pretty-well-satisfied like.

"I'm the captain and the owner and the mate and the

pilot and watchman and head deck-hand; and some-

times I'm the freight and passengers. I ain't as rich

as old Jim Hornback, and I can't be so blame' gener-

ous and good to Tom, Dick, and Harry as what he is,

and slam around money the way he does; but I've

told him a many a time 't I wouldn't trade places with

him; for, says I, a sailor's life's the life for me, and

I'm derned if I'D live two mile out o' town, where

there ain't nothing ever goin' on, not for all his spon-

dulicks and as much more on top of it. Says I --"



I broke in and says:



"They're in an awful peck of trouble, and --"



"WHO is?"



"Why, pap and mam and sis and Miss Hooker;

and if you'd take your ferryboat and go up there --"



"Up where? Where are they?"



"On the wreck."



"What wreck?"



"Why, there ain't but one."



"What, you don't mean the Walter Scott?"



"Yes."



"Good land! what are they doin' THERE, for gracious

sakes?"



"Well, they didn't go there a-purpose."



"I bet they didn't! Why, great goodness, there

ain't no chance for 'em if they don't git off mighty

quick! Why, how in the nation did they ever git into

such a scrape?"



"Easy enough. Miss Hooker was a-visiting up

there to the town --"



"Yes, Booth's Landing -- go on."



"She was a-visiting there at Booth's Landing, and

just in the edge of the evening she started over with

her nigger woman in the horse-ferry to stay all night

at her friend's house, Miss What-you-may-call-herQI

disremember her name -- and they lost their steering-

oar, and swung around and went a-floating down,

stern first, about two mile, and saddle-baggsed on the

wreck, and the ferryman and the nigger woman and

the horses was all lost, but Miss Hooker she made a

grab and got aboard the wreck. Well, about an hour

after dark we come along down in our trading-scow,

and it was so dark we didn't notice the wreck till we

was right on it; and so WE saddle-baggsed; but all of

us was saved but Bill Whipple -- and oh, he WAS the

best cretur ! -- I most wish 't it had been me, I do."



"My George! It's the beatenest thing I ever

struck. And THEN what did you all do?"



"Well, we hollered and took on, but it's so wide

there we couldn't make nobody hear. So pap said

somebody got to get ashore and get help somehow. I

was the only one that could swim, so I made a dash

for it, and Miss Hooker she said if I didn't strike help

sooner, come here and hunt up her uncle, and he'd

fix the thing. I made the land about a mile below,

and been fooling along ever since, trying to get people

to do something, but they said, 'What, in such a night

and such a current? There ain't no sense in it; go

for the steam ferry.' Now if you'll go and --"



"By Jackson, I'd LIKE to, and, blame it, I don't

know but I will; but who in the dingnation's a-going'

to PAY for it? Do you reckon your pap --"



"Why THAT'S all right. Miss Hooker she tole me,

PARTICULAR, that her uncle Hornback --"



"Great guns! is HE her uncle? Looky here, you

break for that light over yonder-way, and turn out

west when you git there, and about a quarter of a mile

out you'll come to the tavern; tell 'em to dart you

out to Jim Hornback's, and he'll foot the bill. And

don't you fool around any, because he'll want to know

the news. Tell him I'll have his niece all safe before

he can get to town. Hump yourself, now; I'm a-

going up around the corner here to roust out my

engineer."



I struck for the light, but as soon as he turned the

corner I went back and got into my skiff and bailed her

out, and then pulled up shore in the easy water about

six hundred yards, and tucked myself in among some

woodboats; for I couldn't rest easy till I could see

the ferryboat start. But take it all around, I was feel-

ing ruther comfortable on accounts of taking all this

trouble for that gang, for not many would a done it.

I wished the widow knowed about it. I judged she

would be proud of me for helping these rapscallions,

because rapscallions and dead beats is the kind the

widow and good people takes the most interest in.



Well, before long here comes the wreck, dim and

dusky, sliding along down! A kind of cold shiver

went through me, and then I struck out for her. She

was very deep, and I see in a minute there warn't much

chance for anybody being alive in her. I pulled all

around her and hollered a little, but there wasn't any

answer; all dead still. I felt a little bit heavy-hearted

about the gang, but not much, for I reckoned if they

could stand it I could.



Then here comes the ferryboat; so I shoved for the

middle of the river on a long down-stream slant; and

when I judged I was out of eye-reach I laid on my

oars, and looked back and see her go and smell around

the wreck for Miss Hooker's remainders, because the

captain would know her uncle Hornback would want

them; and then pretty soon the ferryboat give it up

and went for the shore, and I laid into my work and

went a-booming down the river.



It did seem a powerful long time before Jim's light

showed up; and when it did show it looked like it was

a thousand mile off. By the time I got there the sky

was beginning to get a little gray in the east; so we

struck for an island, and hid the raft, and sunk the

skiff, and turned in and slept like dead people.





CHAPTER XIV.



BY and by, when we got up, we turned over the

truck the gang had stole off of the wreck, and

found boots, and blankets, and clothes, and all sorts of

other things, and a lot of books, and a spyglass, and

three boxes of seegars. We hadn't ever been this rich

before in neither of our lives. The seegars was prime.

We laid off all the afternoon in the woods talking, and

me reading the books, and having a general good time.

I told Jim all about what happened inside the wreck

and at the ferryboat, and I said these kinds of things

was adventures; but he said he didn't want no more

adventures. He said that when I went in the texas

and he crawled back to get on the raft and found her

gone he nearly died, because he judged it was all up

with HIM anyway it could be fixed; for if he didn't get

saved he would get drownded; and if he did get

saved, whoever saved him would send him back home

so as to get the reward, and then Miss Watson would

sell him South, sure. Well, he was right; he was

most always right; he had an uncommon level head

for a nigger.



I read considerable to Jim about kings and dukes

and earls and such, and how gaudy they dressed, and

how much style they put on, and called each other

your majesty, and your grace, and your lordship, and

so on, 'stead of mister; and Jim's eyes bugged out,

and he was interested. He says:



"I didn' know dey was so many un um. I hain't

hearn 'bout none un um, skasely, but ole King Soller-

mun, onless you counts dem kings dat's in a pack er

k'yards. How much do a king git?"



"Get?" I says; "why, they get a thousand dollars

a month if they want it; they can have just as much

as they want; everything belongs to them."



"AIN' dat gay? En what dey got to do, Huck?"



"THEY don't do nothing! Why, how you talk!

They just set around."



"No; is dat so?"



"Of course it is. They just set around -- except,

maybe, when there's a war; then they go to the war.

But other times they just lazy around; or go hawking

-- just hawking and sp -- Sh! -- d' you hear a noise?"



We skipped out and looked; but it warn't nothing

but the flutter of a steamboat's wheel away down,

coming around the point; so we come back.



"Yes," says I, "and other times, when things is

dull, they fuss with the parlyment; and if everybody

don't go just so he whacks their heads off. But

mostly they hang round the harem."



"Roun' de which?"



"Harem."



"What's de harem?"



"The place where he keeps his wives. Don't you

know about the harem? Solomon had one; he had

about a million wives."



"Why, yes, dat's so; I -- I'd done forgot it. A

harem's a bo'd'n-house, I reck'n. Mos' likely dey

has rackety times in de nussery. En I reck'n de wives

quarrels considable; en dat 'crease de racket. Yit dey

say Sollermun de wises' man dat ever live'. I doan'

take no stock in dat. Bekase why: would a wise man

want to live in de mids' er sich a blim-blammin' all de

time? No -- 'deed he wouldn't. A wise man 'ud take

en buil' a biler-factry; en den he could shet DOWN de

biler-factry when he want to res'."



"Well, but he WAS the wisest man, anyway; be-

cause the widow she told me so, her own self."



"I doan k'yer what de widder say, he WARN'T no

wise man nuther. He had some er de dad-fetchedes'

ways I ever see. Does you know 'bout dat chile dat

he 'uz gwyne to chop in two?"



"Yes, the widow told me all about it."



"WELL, den! Warn' dat de beatenes' notion in de

worl'? You jes' take en look at it a minute. Dah's

de stump, dah -- dat's one er de women; heah's you

-- dat's de yuther one; I's Sollermun; en dish yer

dollar bill's de chile. Bofe un you claims it. What

does I do? Does I shin aroun' mongs' de neighbors

en fine out which un you de bill DO b'long to, en han'

it over to de right one, all safe en soun', de way dat

anybody dat had any gumption would? No; I take

en whack de bill in TWO, en give half un it to you, en

de yuther half to de yuther woman. Dat's de way

Sollermun was gwyne to do wid de chile. Now I

want to ast you: what's de use er dat half a bill? --

can't buy noth'n wid it. En what use is a half a

chile? I wouldn' give a dern for a million un um."



"But hang it, Jim, you've clean missed the point --

blame it, you've missed it a thousand mile."



"Who? Me? Go 'long. Doan' talk to me 'bout

yo' pints. I reck'n I knows sense when I sees it; en

dey ain' no sense in sich doin's as dat. De 'spute

warn't 'bout a half a chile, de 'spute was 'bout a

whole chile; en de man dat think he kin settle a

'spute 'bout a whole chile wid a half a chile doan'

know enough to come in out'n de rain. Doan' talk

to me 'bout Sollermun, Huck, I knows him by de back."



"But I tell you you don't get the point."



"Blame de point! I reck'n I knows what I knows.

En mine you, de REAL pint is down furder -- it's down

deeper. It lays in de way Sollermun was raised.

You take a man dat's got on'y one or two chillen; is

dat man gwyne to be waseful o' chillen? No, he

ain't; he can't 'ford it. HE know how to value 'em.

But you take a man dat's got 'bout five million chillen

runnin' roun' de house, en it's diffunt. HE as soon

chop a chile in two as a cat. Dey's plenty mo'. A

chile er two, mo' er less, warn't no consekens to

Sollermun, dad fatch him!"



I never see such a nigger. If he got a notion in his

head once, there warn't no getting it out again. He

was the most down on Solomon of any nigger I ever

see. So I went to talking about other kings, and let

Solomon slide. I told about Louis Sixteenth that got

his head cut off in France long time ago; and about

his little boy the dolphin, that would a been a king,

but they took and shut him up in jail, and some say he

died there.



"Po' little chap."



"But some says he got out and got away, and come

to America."



"Dat's good! But he'll be pooty lonesome -- dey

ain' no kings here, is dey, Huck?"



"No."



"Den he cain't git no situation. What he gwyne

to do?"



"Well, I don't know. Some of them gets on the

police, and some of them learns people how to talk

French."



"Why, Huck, doan' de French people talk de same

way we does?"



"NO, Jim; you couldn't understand a word they

said -- not a single word."



"Well, now, I be ding-busted! How do dat

come?"



"I don't know; but it's so. I got some of their

jabber out of a book. S'pose a man was to come to

you and say Polly-voo-franzy -- what would you

think?"



"I wouldn' think nuff'n; I'd take en bust him over

de head -- dat is, if he warn't white. I wouldn't 'low

no nigger to call me dat."



"Shucks, it ain't calling you anything. It's only

saying, do you know how to talk French?"



"Well, den, why couldn't he SAY it?"



"Why, he IS a-saying it. That's a Frenchman's

WAY of saying it."



"Well, it's a blame ridicklous way, en I doan' want

to hear no mo' 'bout it. Dey ain' no sense in it."



"Looky here, Jim; does a cat talk like we do?"



"No, a cat don't."



"Well, does a cow?"



"No, a cow don't, nuther."



"Does a cat talk like a cow, or a cow talk like a

cat?"



"No, dey don't."



"It's natural and right for 'em to talk different from

each other, ain't it?"



"Course."



"And ain't it natural and right for a cat and a cow

to talk different from US?"



"Why, mos' sholy it is."



"Well, then, why ain't it natural and right for a

FRENCHMAN to talk different from us? You answer me

that."



"Is a cat a man, Huck?"



"No."



"Well, den, dey ain't no sense in a cat talkin' like a

man. Is a cow a man? -- er is a cow a cat?"



"No, she ain't either of them."



"Well, den, she ain't got no business to talk like

either one er the yuther of 'em. Is a Frenchman a

man?"



"Yes."



"WELL, den! Dad blame it, why doan' he TALK like

a man? You answer me DAT!"



I see it warn't no use wasting words -- you can't

learn a nigger to argue. So I quit.





CHAPTER XV.



WE judged that three nights more would fetch us to

Cairo, at the bottom of Illinois, where the Ohio

River comes in, and that was what we was after. We

would sell the raft and get on a steamboat and go way

up the Ohio amongst the free States, and then be out

of trouble.



Well, the second night a fog begun to come on, and

we made for a towhead to tie to, for it wouldn't do to

try to run in a fog; but when I paddled ahead in the

canoe, with the line to make fast, there warn't any-

thing but little saplings to tie to. I passed the line

around one of them right on the edge of the cut bank,

but there was a stiff current, and the raft come boom-

ing down so lively she tore it out by the roots and

away she went. I see the fog closing down, and it

made me so sick and scared I couldn't budge for most

a half a minute it seemed to me -- and then there warn't

no raft in sight; you couldn't see twenty yards. I

jumped into the canoe and run back to the stern, and

grabbed the paddle and set her back a stroke. But

she didn't come. I was in such a hurry I hadn't

untied her. I got up and tried to untie her, but I was

so excited my hands shook so I couldn't hardly do

anything with them.



As soon as I got started I took out after the raft,

hot and heavy, right down the towhead. That was

all right as far as it went, but the towhead warn't

sixty yards long, and the minute I flew by the foot of

it I shot out into the solid white fog, and hadn't no

more idea which way I was going than a dead man.



Thinks I, it won't do to paddle; first I know I'll

run into the bank or a towhead or something; I got

to set still and float, and yet it's mighty fidgety busi-

ness to have to hold your hands still at such a time. I

whooped and listened. Away down there somewheres

I hears a small whoop, and up comes my spirits. I

went tearing after it, listening sharp to hear it again.

The next time it come I see I warn't heading for it,

but heading away to the right of it. And the next

time I was heading away to the left of it -- and not

gaining on it much either, for I was flying around, this

way and that and t'other, but it was going straight

ahead all the time.



I did wish the fool would think to beat a tin pan,

and beat it all the time, but he never did, and it was

the still places between the whoops that was making

the trouble for me. Well, I fought along, and directly

I hears the whoop BEHIND me. I was tangled good

now. That was somebody else's whoop, or else I was

turned around.



I throwed the paddle down. I heard the whoop

again; it was behind me yet, but in a different place;

it kept coming, and kept changing its place, and I kept

answering, till by and by it was in front of me again,

and I knowed the current had swung the canoe's head

down-stream, and I was all right if that was Jim and

not some other raftsman hollering. I couldn't tell

nothing about voices in a fog, for nothing don't look

natural nor sound natural in a fog.



The whooping went on, and in about a minute I

come a-booming down on a cut bank with smoky

ghosts of big trees on it, and the current throwed me

off to the left and shot by, amongst a lot of snags that

fairly roared, the currrent was tearing by them so swift.



In another second or two it was solid white and still

again. I set perfectly still then, listening to my heart

thump, and I reckon I didn't draw a breath while it

thumped a hundred.



I just give up then. I knowed what the matter was.

That cut bank was an island, and Jim had gone down

t'other side of it. It warn't no towhead that you

could float by in ten minutes. It had the big timber

of a regular island; it might be five or six miles long

and more than half a mile wide.



I kept quiet, with my ears cocked, about fifteen

minutes, I reckon. I was floating along, of course,

four or five miles an hour; but you don't ever think

of that. No, you FEEL like you are laying dead still on

the water; and if a little glimpse of a snag slips by

you don't think to yourself how fast YOU'RE going, but

you catch your breath and think, my! how that snag's

tearing along. If you think it ain't dismal and lone-

some out in a fog that way by yourself in the night,

you try it once -- you'll see.



Next, for about a half an hour, I whoops now and

then; at last I hears the answer a long ways off, and

tries to follow it, but I couldn't do it, and directly I

judged I'd got into a nest of towheads, for I had little

dim glimpses of them on both sides of me -- sometimes

just a narrow channel between, and some that I

couldn't see I knowed was there because I'd hear the

wash of the current against the old dead brush and

trash that hung over the banks. Well, I warn't long

loosing the whoops down amongst the towheads; and

I only tried to chase them a little while, anyway, be-

cause it was worse than chasing a Jack-o'-lantern.

You never knowed a sound dodge around so, and

swap places so quick and so much.



I had to claw away from the bank pretty lively four

or five times, to keep from knocking the islands out of

the river; and so I judged the raft must be butting

into the bank every now and then, or else it would get

further ahead and clear out of hearing -- it was floating

a little faster than what I was.



Well, I seemed to be in the open river again by and

by, but I couldn't hear no sign of a whoop nowheres.

I reckoned Jim had fetched up on a snag, maybe, and

it was all up with him. I was good and tired, so I laid

down in the canoe and said I wouldn't bother no

more. I didn't want to go to sleep, of course; but I

was so sleepy I couldn't help it; so I thought I would

take jest one little cat-nap.



But I reckon it was more than a cat-nap, for when I

waked up the stars was shining bright, the fog was all

gone, and I was spinning down a big bend stern first.

First I didn't know where I was; I thought I was

dreaming; and when things began to come back to me

they seemed to come up dim out of last week.



It was a monstrous big river here, with the tallest

and the thickest kind of timber on both banks; just a

solid wall, as well as I could see by the stars. I looked

away down-stream, and seen a black speck on the

water. I took after it; but when I got to it it warn't

nothing but a couple of sawlogs made fast together.

Then I see another speck, and chased that; then

another, and this time I was right. It was the raft.



When I got to it Jim was setting there with his head

down between his knees, asleep, with his right arm

hanging over the steering-oar. The other oar was

smashed off, and the raft was littered up with leaves

and branches and dirt. So she'd had a rough time.



I made fast and laid down under Jim's nose on the

raft, and began to gap, and stretch my fists out against

Jim, and says:



"Hello, Jim, have I been asleep? Why didn't you

stir me up?"



"Goodness gracious, is dat you, Huck? En you

ain' dead -- you ain' drownded -- you's back agin?

It's too good for true, honey, it's too good for true.

Lemme look at you chile, lemme feel o' you. No,

you ain' dead! you's back agin, 'live en soun', jis de

same ole Huck -- de same ole Huck, thanks to good-

ness!"



"What's the matter with you, Jim? You been a-

drinking?"



"Drinkin'? Has I ben a-drinkin'? Has I had a

chance to be a-drinkin'?"



"Well, then, what makes you talk so wild?"



"How does I talk wild?"



"HOW? Why, hain't you been talking about my

coming back, and all that stuff, as if I'd been gone

away?"



"Huck -- Huck Finn, you look me in de eye; look

me in de eye. HAIN'T you ben gone away?"



"Gone away? Why, what in the nation do you

mean? I hain't been gone anywheres. Where would

I go to?"



"Well, looky here, boss, dey's sumf'n wrong, dey

is. Is I ME, or who IS I? Is I heah, or whah IS I?

Now dat's what I wants to know."



"Well, I think you're here, plain enough, but I

think you're a tangle-headed old fool, Jim."



"I is, is I? Well, you answer me dis: Didn't you

tote out de line in de canoe fer to make fas' to de tow-

head?"



"No, I didn't. What tow-head? I hain't see no

tow-head."



"You hain't seen no towhead? Looky here, didn't

de line pull loose en de raf' go a-hummin' down de

river, en leave you en de canoe behine in de fog?"



"What fog?"



"Why, de fog! -- de fog dat's been aroun' all night.

En didn't you whoop, en didn't I whoop, tell we got

mix' up in de islands en one un us got los' en t'other

one was jis' as good as los', 'kase he didn' know whah

he wuz? En didn't I bust up agin a lot er dem islands

en have a turrible time en mos' git drownded? Now

ain' dat so, boss -- ain't it so? You answer me dat."



"Well, this is too many for me, Jim. I hain't seen

no fog, nor no islands, nor no troubles, nor nothing.

I been setting here talking with you all night till you

went to sleep about ten minutes ago, and I reckon I

done the same. You couldn't a got drunk in that

time, so of course you've been dreaming."



"Dad fetch it, how is I gwyne to dream all dat in

ten minutes?"



"Well, hang it all, you did dream it, because there

didn't any of it happen."



"But, Huck, it's all jis' as plain to me as --"



"It don't make no difference how plain it is; there

ain't nothing in it. I know, because I've been here

all the time."



Jim didn't say nothing for about five minutes, but

set there studying over it. Then he says:



"Well, den, I reck'n I did dream it, Huck; but

dog my cats ef it ain't de powerfullest dream I ever

see. En I hain't ever had no dream b'fo' dat's tired

me like dis one."



"Oh, well, that's all right, because a dream does

tire a body like everything sometimes. But this one

was a staving dream; tell me all about it, Jim."



So Jim went to work and told me the whole thing

right through, just as it happened, only he painted it

up considerable. Then he said he must start in and

"'terpret" it, because it was sent for a warning. He

said the first towhead stood for a man that would try

to do us some good, but the current was another man

that would get us away from him. The whoops was

warnings that would come to us every now and then,

and if we didn't try hard to make out to understand

them they'd just take us into bad luck, 'stead of keep-

ing us out of it. The lot of towheads was troubles

we was going to get into with quarrelsome people and

all kinds of mean folks, but if we minded our business

and didn't talk back and aggravate them, we would

pull through and get out of the fog and into the big

clear river, which was the free States, and wouldn't

have no more trouble.



It had clouded up pretty dark just after I got on to

the raft, but it was clearing up again now.



"Oh, well, that's all interpreted well enough as far

as it goes, Jim," I says; "but what does THESE things

stand for?"



It was the leaves and rubbish on the raft and the

smashed oar. You could see them first-rate now.



Jim looked at the trash, and then looked at me, and

back at the trash again. He had got the dream fixed

so strong in his head that he couldn't seem to shake it

loose and get the facts back into its place again right

away. But when he did get the thing straightened

around he looked at me steady without ever smiling,

and says:



"What do dey stan' for? I'se gwyne to tell you.

When I got all wore out wid work, en wid de callin'

for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos' broke

bekase you wuz los', en I didn' k'yer no' mo' what

become er me en de raf'. En when I wake up en fine

you back agin, all safe en soun', de tears come, en I

could a got down on my knees en kiss yo' foot, I's so

thankful. En all you wuz thinkin' 'bout wuz how you

could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah

is TRASH; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de

head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed."



Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam,

and went in there without saying anything but that.

But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I

could almost kissed HIS foot to get him to take it back.



It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up

to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it,

and I warn't ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I

didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn't

done that one if I'd a knowed it would make him feel

that way.





CHAPTER XVI.



WE slept most all day, and started out at night, a

little ways behind a monstrous long raft that

was as long going by as a procession. She had four

long sweeps at each end, so we judged she carried as

many as thirty men, likely. She had five big wigwams

aboard, wide apart, and an open camp fire in the mid-

dle, and a tall flag-pole at each end. There was a

power of style about her. It AMOUNTED to something

being a raftsman on such a craft as that.



We went drifting down into a big bend, and the

night clouded up and got hot. The river was very

wide, and was walled with solid timber on both sides;

you couldn't see a break in it hardly ever, or a light.

We talked about Cairo, and wondered whether we

would know it when we got to it. I said likely we

wouldn't, because I had heard say there warn't but

about a dozen houses there, and if they didn't happen

to have them lit up, how was we going to know we

was passing a town? Jim said if the two big rivers

joined together there, that would show. But I said

maybe we might think we was passing the foot of an

island and coming into the same old river again. That

disturbed Jim -- and me too. So the question was,

what to do? I said, paddle ashore the first time a

light showed, and tell them pap was behind, coming

along with a trading-scow, and was a green hand at

the business, and wanted to know how far it was to

Cairo. Jim thought it was a good idea, so we took a

smoke on it and waited.



There warn't nothing to do now but to look out

sharp for the town, and not pass it without seeing it.

He said he'd be mighty sure to see it, because he'd be

a free man the minute he seen it, but if he missed it

he'd be in a slave country again and no more show for

freedom. Every little while he jumps up and says:



"Dah she is?"



But it warn't. It was Jack-o'-lanterns, or lightning

bugs; so he set down again, and went to watching,

same as before. Jim said it made him all over trembly

and feverish to be so close to freedom. Well, I can

tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too,

to hear him, because I begun to get it through my

head that he WAS most free -- and who was to blame

for it? Why, ME. I couldn't get that out of my con-

science, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me

so I couldn't rest; I couldn't stay still in one place.

It hadn't ever come home to me before, what this

thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it

stayed with me, and scorched me more and more. I

tried to make out to myself that I warn't to blame,

because I didn't run Jim off from his rightful owner;

but it warn't no use, conscience up and says, every

time, "But you knowed he was running for his free-

dom, and you could a paddled ashore and told some-

body." That was so -- I couldn't get around that

noway. That was where it pinched. Conscience says

to me, "What had poor Miss Watson done to you

that you could see her nigger go off right under your

eyes and never say one single word? What did that

poor old woman do to you that you could treat her so

mean? Why, she tried to learn you your book, she tried

to learn you your manners, she tried to be good to you

every way she knowed how. THAT'S what she done."



I got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most wished

I was dead. I fidgeted up and down the raft, abusing

myself to myself, and Jim was fidgeting up and down

past me. We neither of us could keep still. Every

time he danced around and says, "Dah's Cairo!" it

went through me like a shot, and I thought if it WAS

Cairo I reckoned I would die of miserableness.



Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking

to myself. He was saying how the first thing he

would do when he got to a free State he would go to

saving up money and never spend a single cent, and

when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was

owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived;

and then they would both work to buy the two chil-

dren, and if their master wouldn't sell them, they'd

get an Ab'litionist to go and steal them.



It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn't

ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just

see what a difference it made in him the minute he

judged he was about free. It was according to the old

saying, "Give a nigger an inch and he'll take an ell."

Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking.

Here was this nigger, which I had as good as helped

to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying

he would steal his children -- children that belonged to

a man I didn't even know; a man that hadn't ever

done me no harm.



I was sorry to hear Jim say that, it was such a

lowering of him. My conscience got to stirring me up

hotter than ever, until at last I says to it, "Let up on

me -- it ain't too late yet -- I'll paddle ashore at the

first light and tell." I felt easy and happy and light

as a feather right off. All my troubles was gone. I

went to looking out sharp for a light, and sort of sing-

ing to myself. By and by one showed. Jim sings

out:



"We's safe, Huck, we's safe! Jump up and crack

yo' heels! Dat's de good ole Cairo at las', I jis knows

it!"



I says:



"I'll take the canoe and go and see, Jim. It

mightn't be, you know."



He jumped and got the canoe ready, and put his old

coat in the bottom for me to set on, and give me the

paddle; and as I shoved off, he says:



"Pooty soon I'll be a-shout'n' for joy, en I'll say,

it's all on accounts o' Huck; I's a free man, en I

couldn't ever ben free ef it hadn' ben for Huck; Huck

done it. Jim won't ever forgit you, Huck; you's de

bes' fren' Jim's ever had; en you's de ONLY fren' ole

Jim's got now."



I was paddling off, all in a sweat to tell on him; but

when he says this, it seemed to kind of take the tuck

all out of me. I went along slow then, and I warn't

right down certain whether I was glad I started or

whether I warn't. When I was fifty yards off, Jim

says:



"Dah you goes, de ole true Huck; de on'y white

genlman dat ever kep' his promise to ole Jim."



Well, I just felt sick. But I says, I GOT to do it -- I

can't get OUT of it. Right then along comes a skiff

with two men in it with guns, and they stopped and I

stopped. One of them says:



"What's that yonder?"



"A piece of a raft," I says.



"Do you belong on it?"



"Yes, sir."



"Any men on it?"



"Only one, sir."



"Well, there's five niggers run off to-night up yon-

der, above the head of the bend. Is your man white

or black?"



I didn't answer up prompt. I tried to, but the

words wouldn't come. I tried for a second or two to

brace up and out with it, but I warn't man enough --

hadn't the spunk of a rabbit. I see I was weakening;

so I just give up trying, and up and says:



"He's white."



"I reckon we'll go and see for ourselves."



"I wish you would," says I, "because it's pap

that's there, and maybe you'd help me tow the raft

ashore where the light is. He's sick -- and so is mam

and Mary Ann."



"Oh, the devil! we're in a hurry, boy. But I

s'pose we've got to. Come, buckle to your paddle,

and let's get along."



I buckled to my paddle and they laid to their oars.

When we had made a stroke or two, I says:



"Pap'll be mighty much obleeged to you, I can

tell you. Everybody goes away when I want them to

help me tow the raft ashore, and I can't do it by

myself."



"Well, that's infernal mean. Odd, too. Say, boy,

what's the matter with your father?"



"It's the -- a -- the -- well, it ain't anything much."



They stopped pulling. It warn't but a mighty little

ways to the raft now. One says:



"Boy, that's a lie. What IS the matter with your

pap? Answer up square now, and it'll be the better

for you."



"I will, sir, I will, honest -- but don't leave us,

please. It's the -- the -- Gentlemen, if you'll only

pull ahead, and let me heave you the headline, you

won't have to come a-near the raft -- please do."



"Set her back, John, set her back!" says one.

They backed water. "Keep away, boy -- keep to

looard. Confound it, I just expect the wind has

blowed it to us. Your pap's got the small-pox, and

you know it precious well. Why didn't you come out

and say so? Do you want to spread it all over?"



"Well," says I, a-blubbering, "I've told every-

body before, and they just went away and left us."



"Poor devil, there's something in that. We are

right down sorry for you, but we -- well, hang it, we

don't want the small-pox, you see. Look here, I'll

tell you what to do. Don't you try to land by your-

self, or you'll smash everything to pieces. You float

along down about twenty miles, and you'll come to a

town on the left-hand side of the river. It will be

long after sun-up then, and when you ask for help

you tell them your folks are all down with chills and

fever. Don't be a fool again, and let people guess

what is the matter. Now we're trying to do you a

kindness; so you just put twenty miles between us,

that's a good boy. It wouldn't do any good to land

yonder where the light is -- it's only a wood-yard.

Say, I reckon your father's poor, and I'm bound to

say he's in pretty hard luck. Here, I'll put a twenty-

dollar gold piece on this board, and you get it when it

floats by. I feel mighty mean to leave you; but my

kingdom! it won't do to fool with small-pox, don't

you see?"



"Hold on, Parker," says the other man, "here's a

twenty to put on the board for me. Good-bye, boy;

you do as Mr. Parker told you, and you'll be all

right."



"That's so, my boy -- good-bye, good-bye. If you

see any runaway niggers you get help and nab them,

and you can make some money by it."



"Good-bye, sir," says I; "I won't let no runaway

niggers get by me if I can help it."



They went off and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad

and low, because I knowed very well I had done

wrong, and I see it warn't no use for me to try to

learn to do right; a body that don't get STARTED right

when he's little ain't got no show -- when the pinch

comes there ain't nothing to back him up and keep

him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought

a minute, and says to myself, hold on; s'pose you'd a

done right and give Jim up, would you felt better than

what you do now? No, says I, I'd feel bad -- I'd feel

just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I,

what's the use you learning to do right when it's

troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do

wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck.

I couldn't answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn't

bother no more about it, but after this always do

whichever come handiest at the time.



I went into the wigwam; Jim warn't there. I looked

all around; he warn't anywhere. I says:



"Jim!"



"Here I is, Huck. Is dey out o' sight yit? Don't

talk loud."



He was in the river under the stern oar, with just

his nose out. I told him they were out of sight, so he

come aboard. He says:



"I was a-listenin' to all de talk, en I slips into de

river en was gwyne to shove for sho' if dey come

aboard. Den I was gwyne to swim to de raf' agin

when dey was gone. But lawsy, how you did fool

'em, Huck! Dat WUZ de smartes' dodge! I tell you,

chile, I'spec it save' ole Jim -- ole Jim ain't going to

forgit you for dat, honey."



Then we talked about the money. It was a pretty

good raise -- twenty dollars apiece. Jim said we could

take deck passage on a steamboat now, and the money

would last us as far as we wanted to go in the free

States. He said twenty mile more warn't far for the

raft to go, but he wished we was already there.



Towards daybreak we tied up, and Jim was mighty

particular about hiding the raft good. Then he worked

all day fixing things in bundles, and getting all ready

to quit rafting.



That night about ten we hove in sight of the lights

of a town away down in a left-hand bend.



I went off in the canoe to ask about it. Pretty soon I

found a man out in the river with a skiff, setting a trot-

line. I ranged up and says:



"Mister, is that town Cairo?"



"Cairo? no. You must be a blame' fool."



"What town is it, mister?"



"If you want to know, go and find out. If you

stay here botherin' around me for about a half a minute

longer you'll get something you won't want."



I paddled to the raft. Jim was awful disappointed,

but I said never mind, Cairo would be the next place,

I reckoned.



We passed another town before daylight, and I was

going out again; but it was high ground, so I didn't

go. No high ground about Cairo, Jim said. I had

forgot it. We laid up for the day on a towhead

tolerable close to the left-hand bank. I begun to

suspicion something. So did Jim. I says:



"Maybe we went by Cairo in the fog that night."



He says:



"Doan' le's talk about it, Huck. Po' niggers can't

have no luck. I awluz 'spected dat rattlesnake-skin

warn't done wid its work."



"I wish I'd never seen that snake-skin, Jim -- I do

wish I'd never laid eyes on it."



"It ain't yo' fault, Huck; you didn' know. Don't

you blame yo'self 'bout it."



When it was daylight, here was the clear Ohio water

inshore, sure enough, and outside was the old regular

Muddy! So it was all up with Cairo.



We talked it all over. It wouldn't do to take to the

shore; we couldn't take the raft up the stream, of

course. There warn't no way but to wait for dark,

and start back in the canoe and take the chances. So

we slept all day amongst the cottonwood thicket, so

as to be fresh for the work, and when we went back to

the raft about dark the canoe was gone!



We didn't say a word for a good while. There

warn't anything to say. We both knowed well enough

it was some more work of the rattlesnake-skin; so

what was the use to talk about it? It would only look

like we was finding fault, and that would be bound to

fetch more bad luck -- and keep on fetching it, too, till

we knowed enough to keep still.



By and by we talked about what we better do, and

found there warn't no way but just to go along down

with the raft till we got a chance to buy a canoe to go

back in. We warn't going to borrow it when there

warn't anybody around, the way pap would do, for

that might set people after us.



So we shoved out after dark on the raft.



Anybody that don't believe yet that it's foolishness to

handle a snake-skin, after all that that snake-skin done

for us, will believe it now if they read on and see what

more it done for us.



The place to buy canoes is off of rafts laying up at

shore. But we didn't see no rafts laying up; so we

went along during three hours and more. Well, the

night got gray and ruther thick, which is the next

meanest thing to fog. You can't tell the shape of the

river, and you can't see no distance. It got to be

very late and still, and then along comes a steamboat

up the river. We lit the lantern, and judged she would

see it. Up-stream boats didn't generly come close to

us; they go out and follow the bars and hunt for easy

water under the reefs; but nights like this they bull

right up the channel against the whole river.



We could hear her pounding along, but we didn't

see her good till she was close. She aimed right for

us. Often they do that and try to see how close they

can come without touching; sometimes the wheel bites

off a sweep, and then the pilot sticks his head out and

laughs, and thinks he's mighty smart. Well, here she

comes, and we said she was going to try and shave us;

but she didn't seem to be sheering off a bit. She was

a big one, and she was coming in a hurry, too, looking

like a black cloud with rows of glow-worms around it;

but all of a sudden she bulged out, big and scary, with

a long row of wide-open furnace doors shining like

red-hot teeth, and her monstrous bows and guards

hanging right over us. There was a yell at us, and a

jingling of bells to stop the engines, a powwow of

cussing, and whistling of steam -- and as Jim went

overboard on one side and I on the other, she come

smashing straight through the raft.



I dived -- and I aimed to find the bottom, too, for a

thirty-foot wheel had got to go over me, and I wanted

it to have plenty of room. I could always stay under

water a minute; this time I reckon I stayed under a

minute and a half. Then I bounced for the top in a

hurry, for I was nearly busting. I popped out to my

armpits and blowed the water out of my nose, and

puffed a bit. Of course there was a booming current;

and of course that boat started her engines again ten

seconds after she stopped them, for they never cared

much for raftsmen; so now she was churning along up

the river, out of sight in the thick weather, though I

could hear her.



I sung out for Jim about a dozen times, but I didn't

get any answer; so I grabbed a plank that touched me

while I was "treading water," and struck out for

shore, shoving it ahead of me. But I made out to

see that the drift of the current was towards the left-

hand shore, which meant that I was in a crossing; so

I changed off and went that way.



It was one of these long, slanting, two-mile cross-

ings; so I was a good long time in getting over. I

made a safe landing, and clumb up the bank. I couldn't

see but a little ways, but I went poking along over

rough ground for a quarter of a mile or more, and

then I run across a big old-fashioned double log-house

before I noticed it. I was going to rush by and get

away, but a lot of dogs jumped out and went to howl-

ing and barking at me, and I knowed better than to

move another peg.





CHAPTER XVII.



IN about a minute somebody spoke out of a window

without putting his head out, and says:



"Be done, boys! Who's there?"



I says:



"It's me."



"Who's me?"



"George Jackson, sir."



"What do you want?"



"I don't want nothing, sir. I only want to go

along by, but the dogs won't let me."



"What are you prowling around here this time of

night for -- hey?"



"I warn't prowling around, sir, I fell overboard off

of the steamboat."



"Oh, you did, did you? Strike a light there, some-

body. What did you say your name was?"



"George Jackson, sir. I'm only a boy."



"Look here, if you're telling the truth you needn't

be afraid -- nobody'll hurt you. But don't try to

budge; stand right where you are. Rouse out Bob

and Tom, some of you, and fetch the guns. George

Jackson, is there anybody with you?"



"No, sir, nobody."



I heard the people stirring around in the house now,

and see a light. The man sung out:



"Snatch that light away, Betsy, you old fool -- ain't

you got any sense? Put it on the floor behind the

front door. Bob, if you and Tom are ready, take

your places."



"All ready."



"Now, George Jackson, do you know the Shepherd-

sons?"



"No, sir; I never heard of them."



"Well, that may be so, and it mayn't. Now, all

ready. Step forward, George Jackson. And mind,

don't you hurry -- come mighty slow. If there's any-

body with you, let him keep back -- if he shows him-

self he'll be shot. Come along now. Come slow;

push the door open yourself -- just enough to squeeze

in, d' you hear?"



I didn't hurry; I couldn't if I'd a wanted to. I

took one slow step at a time and there warn't a sound,

only I thought I could hear my heart. The dogs were

as still as the humans, but they followed a little behind

me. When I got to the three log doorsteps I heard

them unlocking and unbarring and unbolting. I put

my hand on the door and pushed it a little and a little

more till somebody said, "There, that's enough -- put

your head in." I done it, but I judged they would

take it off.



The candle was on the floor, and there they all was,

looking at me, and me at them, for about a quarter of

a minute: Three big men with guns pointed at me,

which made me wince, I tell you; the oldest, gray and

about sixty, the other two thirty or more -- all of them

fine and handsome -- and the sweetest old gray-headed

lady, and back of her two young women which I

couldn't see right well. The old gentleman says:



"There; I reckon it's all right. Come in."



As soon as I was in the old gentleman he locked the

door and barred it and bolted it, and told the young

men to come in with their guns, and they all went in a

big parlor that had a new rag carpet on the floor, and

got together in a corner that was out of the range of

the front windows -- there warn't none on the side.

They held the candle, and took a good look at me,

and all said, "Why, HE ain't a Shepherdson -- no,

there ain't any Shepherdson about him." Then the

old man said he hoped I wouldn't mind being searched

for arms, because he didn't mean no harm by it -- it

was only to make sure. So he didn't pry into my

pockets, but only felt outside with his hands, and said

it was all right. He told me to make myself easy and

at home, and tell all about myself; but the old lady

says:



"Why, bless you, Saul, the poor thing's as wet as

he can be; and don't you reckon it may be he's

hungry?"



"True for you, Rachel -- I forgot."



So the old lady says:



"Betsy" (this was a nigger woman), you fly around

and get him something to eat as quick as you can, poor

thing; and one of you girls go and wake up Buck and

tell him -- oh, here he is himself. Buck, take this

little stranger and get the wet clothes off from him and

dress him up in some of yours that's dry."



Buck looked about as old as me -- thirteen or four-

teen or along there, though he was a little bigger than

me. He hadn't on anything but a shirt, and he was

very frowzy-headed. He came in gaping and digging

one fist into his eyes, and he was dragging a gun along

with the other one. He says:



"Ain't they no Shepherdsons around?"



They said, no, 'twas a false alarm.



"Well," he says, "if they'd a ben some, I reckon

I'd a got one."



They all laughed, and Bob says:



"Why, Buck, they might have scalped us all, you've

been so slow in coming."



"Well, nobody come after me, and it ain't right

I'm always kept down; I don't get no show."



"Never mind, Buck, my boy," says the old man,

"you'll have show enough, all in good time, don't

you fret about that. Go 'long with you now, and do

as your mother told you."



When we got up-stairs to his room he got me a

coarse shirt and a roundabout and pants of his, and I

put them on. While I was at it he asked me what my

name was, but before I could tell him he started to tell

me about a bluejay and a young rabbit he had catched

in the woods day before yesterday, and he asked me

where Moses was when the candle went out. I said I

didn't know; I hadn't heard about it before, no way.



"Well, guess," he says.



"How'm I going to guess," says I, "when I never

heard tell of it before?"



"But you can guess, can't you? It's just as easy."



"WHICH candle?" I says.



"Why, any candle," he says.



"I don't know where he was," says I; "where

was he?"



"Why, he was in the DARK! That's where he was!"



"Well, if you knowed where he was, what did you

ask me for?"



"Why, blame it, it's a riddle, don't you see? Say,

how long are you going to stay here? You got to

stay always. We can just have booming times -- they

don't have no school now. Do you own a dog?

I've got a dog -- and he'll go in the river and bring

out chips that you throw in. Do you like to comb up

Sundays, and all that kind of foolishness? You bet I

don't, but ma she makes me. Confound these ole

britches! I reckon I'd better put 'em on, but I'd

ruther not, it's so warm. Are you all ready? All

right. Come along, old hoss."



Cold corn-pone, cold corn-beef, butter and butter-

milk -- that is what they had for me down there, and

there ain't nothing better that ever I've come across

yet. Buck and his ma and all of them smoked cob

pipes, except the nigger woman, which was gone, and

the two young women. They all smoked and talked,

and I eat and talked. The young women had quilts

around them, and their hair down their backs. They

all asked me questions, and I told them how pap and

me and all the family was living on a little farm down

at the bottom of Arkansaw, and my sister Mary Ann

run off and got married and never was heard of no

more, and Bill went to hunt them and he warn't heard

of no more, and Tom and Mort died, and then there

warn't nobody but just me and pap left, and he was

just trimmed down to nothing, on account of his

troubles; so when he died I took what there was left,

because the farm didn't belong to us, and started up

the river, deck passage, and fell overboard; and that

was how I come to be here. So they said I could

have a home there as long as I wanted it. Then it

was most daylight and everybody went to bed, and I

went to bed with Buck, and when I waked up in the

morning, drat it all, I had forgot what my name was.

So I laid there about an hour trying to think, and

when Buck waked up I says:



"Can you spell, Buck?"



"Yes," he says.



"I bet you can't spell my name," says I.



"I bet you what you dare I can," says he.



"All right," says I, "go ahead."



"G-e-o-r-g-e J-a-x-o-n -- there now," he says.



"Well," says I, "you done it, but I didn't think

you could. It ain't no slouch of a name to spell --

right off without studying."



I set it down, private, because somebody might want

ME to spell it next, and so I wanted to be handy with

it and rattle it off like I was used to it.



It was a mighty nice family, and a mighty nice

house, too. I hadn't seen no house out in the country

before that was so nice and had so much style. It

didn't have an iron latch on the front door, nor a

wooden one with a buckskin string, but a brass knob

to turn, the same as houses in town. There warn't no

bed in the parlor, nor a sign of a bed; but heaps of

parlors in towns has beds in them. There was a big

fireplace that was bricked on the bottom, and the

bricks was kept clean and red by pouring water on

them and scrubbing them with another brick; some-

times they wash them over with red water-paint that

they call Spanish-brown, same as they do in town.

They had big brass dog-irons that could hold up a saw-

log. There was a clock on the middle of the mantel-

piece, with a picture of a town painted on the bottom

half of the glass front, and a round place in the middle

of it for the sun, and you could see the pendulum

swinging behind it. It was beautiful to hear that clock

tick; and sometimes when one of these peddlers had

been along and scoured her up and got her in good

shape, she would start in and strike a hundred and

fifty before she got tuckered out. They wouldn't took

any money for her.



Well, there was a big outlandish parrot on each side

of the clock, made out of something like chalk, and

painted up gaudy. By one of the parrots was a cat

made of crockery, and a crockery dog by the other;

and when you pressed down on them they squeaked,

but didn't open their mouths nor look different nor

interested. They squeaked through underneath. There

was a couple of big wild-turkey-wing fans spread out

behind those things. On the table in the middle of

the room was a kind of a lovely crockery basket that

bad apples and oranges and peaches and grapes piled

up in it, which was much redder and yellower and

prettier than real ones is, but they warn't real because

you could see where pieces had got chipped off and

showed the white chalk, or whatever it was, under-

neath.



This table had a cover made out of beautiful oilcloth,

with a red and blue spread-eagle painted on it, and a

painted border all around. It come all the way from

Philadelphia, they said. There was some books, too,

piled up perfectly exact, on each corner of the table.

One was a big family Bible full of pictures. One was

Pilgrim's Progress, about a man that left his family, it

didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and

then. The statements was interesting, but tough.

Another was Friendship's Offering, full of beautiful

stuff and poetry; but I didn't read the poetry. An-

other was Henry Clay's Speeches, and another was

Dr. Gunn's Family Medicine, which told you all about

what to do if a body was sick or dead. There was a

hymn book, and a lot of other books. And there was

nice split-bottom chairs, and perfectly sound, too --

not bagged down in the middle and busted, like an

old basket.



They had pictures hung on the walls -- mainly

Washingtons and Lafayettes, and battles, and High-

land Marys, and one called "Signing the Declaration."

There was some that they called crayons, which one of

the daughters which was dead made her own self when

she was only fifteen years old. They was different

from any pictures I ever see before -- blacker, mostly,

than is common. One was a woman in a slim black

dress, belted small under the armpits, with bulges like

a cabbage in the middle of the sleeves, and a large

black scoop-shovel bonnet with a black veil, and white

slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very

wee black slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning

pensive on a tombstone on her right elbow, under a

weeping willow, and her other hand hanging down her

side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and

underneath the picture it said "Shall I Never See Thee

More Alas." Another one was a young lady with her

hair all combed up straight to the top of her head, and

knotted there in front of a comb like a chair-back, and

she was crying into a handkerchief and had a dead

bird laying on its back in her other hand with its heels

up, and underneath the picture it said "I Shall Never

Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas." There was one

where a young lady was at a window looking up at the

moon, and tears running down her cheeks; and she

had an open letter in one hand with black sealing wax

showing on one edge of it, and she was mashing a

locket with a chain to it against her mouth, and under-

neath the picture it said "And Art Thou Gone Yes

Thou Art Gone Alas." These was all nice pictures, I

reckon, but I didn't somehow seem to take to them,

because if ever I was down a little they always give me

the fan-tods. Everybody was sorry she died, because

she had laid out a lot more of these pictures to do,

and a body could see by what she had done what they

had lost. But I reckoned that with her disposition she

was having a better time in the graveyard. She was

at work on what they said was her greatest picture

when she took sick, and every day and every night it

was her prayer to be allowed to live till she got it

done, but she never got the chance. It was a picture

of a young woman in a long white gown, standing on

the rail of a bridge all ready to jump off, with her hair

all down her back, and looking up to the moon, with

the tears running down her face, and she had two arms

folded across her breast, and two arms stretched out in

front, and two more reaching up towards the moon --

and the idea was to see which pair would look best,

and then scratch out all the other arms; but, as I was

saying, she died before she got her mind made up,

and now they kept this picture over the head of the

bed in her room, and every time her birthday come

they hung flowers on it. Other times it was hid with

a little curtain. The young woman in the picture had a

kind of a nice sweet face, but there was so many arms

it made her look too spidery, seemed to me.



This young girl kept a scrap-book when she was

alive, and used to paste obituaries and accidents and

cases of patient suffering in it out of the Presbyterian

Observer, and write poetry after them out of her own

head. It was very good poetry. This is what she

wrote about a boy by the name of Stephen Dowling

Bots that fell down a well and was drownded:



  ODE TO STEPHEN DOWLING BOTS, DEC'D



  And did young Stephen sicken,

    And did young Stephen die?

  And did the sad hearts thicken,

    And did the mourners cry?



  No; such was not the fate of

    Young Stephen Dowling Bots;

  Though sad hearts round him thickened,

    'Twas not from sickness' shots.



  No whooping-cough did rack his frame,

    Nor measles drear with spots;

  Not these impaired the sacred name

    Of Stephen Dowling Bots.



  Despised love struck not with woe

    That head of curly knots,

  Nor stomach troubles laid him low,

    Young Stephen Dowling Bots.



  O no. Then list with tearful eye,

    Whilst I his fate do tell.

  His soul did from this cold world fly

    By falling down a well.



  They got him out and emptied him;

    Alas it was too late;

  His spirit was gone for to sport aloft

    In the realms of the good and great.



If Emmeline Grangerford could make poetry like

that before she was fourteen, there ain't no telling

what she could a done by and by. Buck said she

could rattle off poetry like nothing. She didn't ever

have to stop to think. He said she would slap down a

line, and if she couldn't find anything to rhyme with it

would just scratch it out and slap down another one,

and go ahead. She warn't particular; she could write

about anything you choose to give her to write about

just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a

woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand

with her "tribute" before he was cold. She called

them tributes. The neighbors said it was the doctor

first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker -- the under-

taker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and

then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person's

name, which was Whistler. She warn't ever the same

after that; she never complained, but she kinder pined

away and did not live long. Poor thing, many's the

time I made myself go up to the little room that used

to be hers and get out her poor old scrap-book and

read in it when her pictures had been aggravating me

and I had soured on her a little. I liked all that

family, dead ones and all, and warn't going to let any-

thing come between us. Poor Emmeline made poetry

about all the dead people when she was alive, and it

didn't seem right that there warn't nobody to make

some about her now she was gone; so I tried to sweat

out a verse or two myself, but I couldn't seem to make

it go somehow. They kept Emmeline's room trim

and nice, and all the things fixed in it just the way

she liked to have them when she was alive, and nobody

ever slept there. The old lady took care of the room

herself, though there was plenty of niggers, and she

sewed there a good deal and read her Bible there

mostly.



Well, as I was saying about the parlor, there was

beautiful curtains on the windows: white, with pictures

painted on them of castles with vines all down the

walls, and cattle coming down to drink. There was a

little old piano, too, that had tin pans in it, I reckon,

and nothing was ever so lovely as to hear the young

ladies sing "The Last Link is Broken" and play "The

Battle of Prague" on it. The walls of all the rooms

was plastered, and most had carpets on the floors, and

the whole house was whitewashed on the outside.



It was a double house, and the big open place be-

twixt them was roofed and floored, and sometimes the

table was set there in the middle of the day, and it was

a cool, comfortable place. Nothing couldn't be better.

And warn't the cooking good, and just bushels of it

too!





CHAPTER XVIII.



COL. GRANGERFORD was a gentleman, you see.

He was a gentleman all over; and so was his

family. He was well born, as the saying is, and that's

worth as much in a man as it is in a horse, so the

Widow Douglas said, and nobody ever denied that she

was of the first aristocracy in our town; and pap he

always said it, too, though he warn't no more quality

than a mudcat himself. Col. Grangerford was very tall

and very slim, and had a darkish-paly complexion, not

a sign of red in it anywheres; he was clean shaved

every morning all over his thin face, and he had the

thinnest kind of lips, and the thinnest kind of nostrils,

and a high nose, and heavy eyebrows, and the blackest

kind of eyes, sunk so deep back that they seemed like

they was looking out of caverns at you, as you may

say. His forehead was high, and his hair was black

and straight and hung to his shoulders. His hands

was long and thin, and every day of his life he put on

a clean shirt and a full suit from head to foot made

out of linen so white it hurt your eyes to look at it;

and on Sundays he wore a blue tail-coat with brass

buttons on it. He carried a mahogany cane with a

silver head to it. There warn't no frivolishness about

him, not a bit, and he warn't ever loud. He was as

kind as he could be -- you could feel that, you know,

and so you had confidence. Sometimes he smiled,

and it was good to see; but when he straightened him-

self up like a liberty-pole, and the lightning begun to

flicker out from under his eyebrows, you wanted to

climb a tree first, and find out what the matter was

afterwards. He didn't ever have to tell anybody to

mind their manners -- everybody was always good-

mannered where he was. Everybody loved to have

him around, too; he was sunshine most always -- I

mean he made it seem like good weather. When he

turned into a cloudbank it was awful dark for half a

minute, and that was enough; there wouldn't nothing

go wrong again for a week.



When him and the old lady come down in the morn-

ing all the family got up out of their chairs and give

them good-day, and didn't set down again till they had

set down. Then Tom and Bob went to the sideboard

where the decanter was, and mixed a glass of bitters

and handed it to him, and he held it in his hand and

waited till Tom's and Bob's was mixed, and then they

bowed and said, "Our duty to you, sir, and madam;"

and THEY bowed the least bit in the world and said

thank you, and so they drank, all three, and Bob and

Tom poured a spoonful of water on the sugar and the

mite of whisky or apple brandy in the bottom of their

tumblers, and give it to me and Buck, and we drank to

the old people too.



Bob was the oldest and Tom next -- tall, beautiful

men with very broad shoulders and brown faces, and

long black hair and black eyes. They dressed in white

linen from head to foot, like the old gentleman, and

wore broad Panama hats.



Then there was Miss Charlotte; she was twenty-

five, and tall and proud and grand, but as good as she

could be when she warn't stirred up; but when she

was she had a look that would make you wilt in your

tracks, like her father. She was beautiful.



So was her sister, Miss Sophia, but it was a different

kind. She was gentle and sweet like a dove, and she

was only twenty.



Each person had their own nigger to wait on them --

Buck too. My nigger had a monstrous easy time, be-

cause I warn't used to having anybody do anything

for me, but Buck's was on the jump most of the time.



This was all there was of the family now, but there

used to be more -- three sons; they got killed; and

Emmeline that died.



The old gentleman owned a lot of farms and over a

hundred niggers. Sometimes a stack of people would

come there, horseback, from ten or fifteen mile around,

and stay five or six days, and have such junketings

round about and on the river, and dances and picnics

in the woods daytimes, and balls at the house nights.

These people was mostly kinfolks of the family. The

men brought their guns with them. It was a hand-

some lot of quality, I tell you.



There was another clan of aristocracy around there

-- five or six families -- mostly of the name of Shep-

herdson. They was as high-toned and well born and

rich and grand as the tribe of Grangerfords. The

Shepherdsons and Grangerfords used the same steam-

boat landing, which was about two mile above our

house; so sometimes when I went up there with a lot

of our folks I used to see a lot of the Shepherdsons

there on their fine horses.



One day Buck and me was away out in the woods

hunting, and heard a horse coming. We was crossing

the road. Buck says:



"Quick! Jump for the woods!"



We done it, and then peeped down the woods

through the leaves. Pretty soon a splendid young

man come galloping down the road, setting his horse

easy and looking like a soldier. He had his gun across

his pommel. I had seen him before. It was young

Harney Shepherdson. I heard Buck's gun go off at

my ear, and Harney's hat tumbled off from his head.

He grabbed his gun and rode straight to the place

where we was hid. But we didn't wait. We started

through the woods on a run. The woods warn't thick,

so I looked over my shoulder to dodge the bullet, and

twice I seen Harney cover Buck with his gun; and

then he rode away the way he come -- to get his hat,

I reckon, but I couldn't see. We never stopped run-

ning till we got home. The old gentleman's eyes

blazed a minute -- 'twas pleasure, mainly, I judged --

then his face sort of smoothed down, and he says,

kind of gentle:



"I don't like that shooting from behind a bush.

Why didn't you step into the road, my boy?"



"The Shepherdsons don't, father. They always

take advantage."



Miss Charlotte she held her head up like a queen

while Buck was telling his tale, and her nostrils spread

and her eyes snapped. The two young men looked

dark, but never said nothing. Miss Sophia she turned

pale, but the color come back when she found the

man warn't hurt.



Soon as I could get Buck down by the corn-cribs

under the trees by ourselves, I says:



"Did you want to kill him, Buck?"



"Well, I bet I did."



"What did he do to you?"



"Him? He never done nothing to me."



"Well, then, what did you want to kill him for?"



"Why, nothing -- only it's on account of the feud."



"What's a feud?"



"Why, where was you raised? Don't you know

what a feud is?"



"Never heard of it before -- tell me about it."



"Well," says Buck, "a feud is this way: A man

has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then

that other man's brother kills HIM; then the other

brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then

the COUSINS chip in -- and by and by everybody's killed

off, and there ain't no more feud. But it's kind of

slow, and takes a long time."



"Has this one been going on long, Buck?"



"Well, I should RECKON! It started thirty year ago,

or som'ers along there. There was trouble 'bout

something, and then a lawsuit to settle it; and the

suit went agin one of the men, and so he up and shot

the man that won the suit -- which he would naturally

do, of course. Anybody would."



"What was the trouble about, Buck? -- land?"



"I reckon maybe -- I don't know."



"Well, who done the shooting? Was it a Granger-

ford or a Shepherdson?"



"Laws, how do I know? It was so long ago."



"Don't anybody know?"



"Oh, yes, pa knows, I reckon, and some of the

other old people; but they don't know now what the

row was about in the first place."



"Has there been many killed, Buck?"



"Yes; right smart chance of funerals. But they

don't always kill. Pa's got a few buckshot in him;

but he don't mind it 'cuz he don't weigh much, any-

way. Bob's been carved up some with a bowie, and

Tom's been hurt once or twice."



"Has anybody been killed this year, Buck?"



"Yes; we got one and they got one. 'Bout three

months ago my cousin Bud, fourteen year old, was

riding through the woods on t'other side of the river,

and didn't have no weapon with him, which was blame'

foolishness, and in a lonesome place he hears a horse

a-coming behind him, and sees old Baldy Shepherdson

a-linkin' after him with his gun in his hand and his

white hair a-flying in the wind; and 'stead of jumping

off and taking to the brush, Bud 'lowed he could out-

run him; so they had it, nip and tuck, for five mile or

more, the old man a-gaining all the time; so at last

Bud seen it warn't any use, so he stopped and faced

around so as to have the bullet holes in front, you

know, and the old man he rode up and shot him

down. But he didn't git much chance to enjoy his

luck, for inside of a week our folks laid HIM out."



"I reckon that old man was a coward, Buck."



"I reckon he WARN'T a coward. Not by a blame'

sight. There ain't a coward amongst them Shepherd-

sons -- not a one. And there ain't no cowards amongst

the Grangerfords either. Why, that old man kep' up

his end in a fight one day for half an hour against

three Grangerfords, and come out winner. They was

all a-horseback; he lit off of his horse and got behind

a little woodpile, and kep' his horse before him to stop

the bullets; but the Grangerfords stayed on their

horses and capered around the old man, and peppered

away at him, and he peppered away at them. Him

and his horse both went home pretty leaky and crip-

pled, but the Grangerfords had to be FETCHED home --

and one of 'em was dead, and another died the next

day. No, sir; if a body's out hunting for cowards he

don't want to fool away any time amongst them Shep-

herdsons, becuz they don't breed any of that KIND."



Next Sunday we all went to church, about three

mile, everybody a-horseback. The men took their

guns along, so did Buck, and kept them between their

knees or stood them handy against the wall. The

Shepherdsons done the same. It was pretty ornery

preaching -- all about brotherly love, and such-like

tiresomeness; but everybody said it was a good ser-

mon, and they all talked it over going home, and had

such a powerful lot to say about faith and good works

and free grace and preforeordestination, and I don't

know what all, that it did seem to me to be one of the

roughest Sundays I had run across yet.



About an hour after dinner everybody was dozing

around, some in their chairs and some in their rooms,

and it got to be pretty dull. Buck and a dog was

stretched out on the grass in the sun sound asleep. I

went up to our room, and judged I would take a nap

myself. I found that sweet Miss Sophia standing in

her door, which was next to ours, and she took me in

her room and shut the door very soft, and asked me if

I liked her, and I said I did; and she asked me if I

would do something for her and not tell anybody,

and I said I would. Then she said she'd forgot her

Testament, and left it in the seat at church between two

other books, and would I slip out quiet and go there

and fetch it to her, and not say nothing to nobody. I

said I would. So I slid out and slipped off up the

road, and there warn't anybody at the church, except

maybe a hog or two, for there warn't any lock on the

door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time

because it's cool. If you notice, most folks don't go

to church only when they've got to; but a hog is

different.



Says I to myself, something's up; it ain't natural

for a girl to be in such a sweat about a Testament.

So I give it a shake, and out drops a little piece of

paper with "HALF-PAST TWO" wrote on it with a pencil.

I ransacked it, but couldn't find anything else. I

couldn't make anything out of that, so I put the paper

in the book again, and when I got home and upstairs

there was Miss Sophia in her door waiting for me.

She pulled me in and shut the door; then she looked

in the Testament till she found the paper, and as soon

as she read it she looked glad; and before a body

could think she grabbed me and give me a squeeze,

and said I was the best boy in the world, and not to

tell anybody. She was mighty red in the face for a

minute, and her eyes lighted up, and it made her

powerful pretty. I was a good deal astonished, but

when I got my breath I asked her what the paper was

about, and she asked me if I had read it, and I said

no, and she asked me if I could read writing, and I

told her "no, only coarse-hand," and then she said

the paper warn't anything but a book-mark to keep

her place, and I might go and play now.



I went off down to the river, studying over this

thing, and pretty soon I noticed that my nigger was

following along behind. When we was out of sight of

the house he looked back and around a second, and

then comes a-running, and says:



"Mars Jawge, if you'll come down into de swamp

I'll show you a whole stack o' water-moccasins."



Thinks I, that's mighty curious; he said that yester-

day. He oughter know a body don't love water-

moccasins enough to go around hunting for them.

What is he up to, anyway? So I says:



"All right; trot ahead."



I followed a half a mile; then he struck out over the

swamp, and waded ankle deep as much as another

half-mile. We come to a little flat piece of land which

was dry and very thick with trees and bushes and

vines, and he says:



"You shove right in dah jist a few steps, Mars

Jawge; dah's whah dey is. I's seed 'm befo'; I

don't k'yer to see 'em no mo'."



Then he slopped right along and went away, and

pretty soon the trees hid him. I poked into the place

a-ways and come to a little open patch as big as a

bedroom all hung around with vines, and found a man

laying there asleep -- and, by jings, it was my old Jim!



I waked him up, and I reckoned it was going to be

a grand surprise to him to see me again, but it warn't.

He nearly cried he was so glad, but he warn't sur-

prised. Said he swum along behind me that night,

and heard me yell every time, but dasn't answer, be-

cause he didn't want nobody to pick HIM up and take

him into slavery again. Says he:



"I got hurt a little, en couldn't swim fas', so I wuz

a considable ways behine you towards de las'; when

you landed I reck'ned I could ketch up wid you on de

lan' 'dout havin' to shout at you, but when I see dat

house I begin to go slow. I 'uz off too fur to hear

what dey say to you -- I wuz 'fraid o' de dogs; but

when it 'uz all quiet agin I knowed you's in de house,

so I struck out for de woods to wait for day. Early

in de mawnin' some er de niggers come along, gwyne

to de fields, en dey tuk me en showed me dis place,

whah de dogs can't track me on accounts o' de water,

en dey brings me truck to eat every night, en tells me

how you's a-gitt'n along."



"Why didn't you tell my Jack to fetch me here

sooner, Jim?"



"Well, 'twarn't no use to 'sturb you, Huck, tell we

could do sumfn -- but we's all right now. I ben a-

buyin' pots en pans en vittles, as I got a chanst, en a-

patchin' up de raf' nights when --"



"WHAT raft, Jim?"



"Our ole raf'."



"You mean to say our old raft warn't smashed all

to flinders?"



"No, she warn't. She was tore up a good deal --

one en' of her was; but dey warn't no great harm

done, on'y our traps was mos' all los'. Ef we hadn'

dive' so deep en swum so fur under water, en de night

hadn' ben so dark, en we warn't so sk'yerd, en ben

sich punkin-heads, as de sayin' is, we'd a seed de raf'.

But it's jis' as well we didn't, 'kase now she's all fixed

up agin mos' as good as new, en we's got a new lot o'

stuff, in de place o' what 'uz los'."



"Why, how did you get hold of the raft again, Jim

-- did you catch her?"



"How I gwyne to ketch her en I out in de woods?

No; some er de niggers foun' her ketched on a snag

along heah in de ben', en dey hid her in a crick

'mongst de willows, en dey wuz so much jawin' 'bout

which un 'um she b'long to de mos' dat I come to

heah 'bout it pooty soon, so I ups en settles de trouble

by tellin' 'um she don't b'long to none uv um, but to

you en me; en I ast 'm if dey gwyne to grab a young

white genlman's propaty, en git a hid'n for it? Den I

gin 'm ten cents apiece, en dey 'uz mighty well satis-

fied, en wisht some mo' raf's 'ud come along en make

'm rich agin. Dey's mighty good to me, dese niggers

is, en whatever I wants 'm to do fur me I doan' have

to ast 'm twice, honey. Dat Jack's a good nigger, en

pooty smart."



"Yes, he is. He ain't ever told me you was here;

told me to come, and he'd show me a lot of water-

moccasins. If anything happens HE ain't mixed up in

it. He can say he never seen us together, and it 'll

be the truth."



I don't want to talk much about the next day. I

reckon I'll cut it pretty short. I waked up about

dawn, and was a-going to turn over and go to sleep

again when I noticed how still it was -- didn't seem

to be anybody stirring. That warn't usual. Next I

noticed that Buck was up and gone. Well, I gets up,

a-wondering, and goes down stairs -- nobody around;

everything as still as a mouse. Just the same outside.

Thinks I, what does it mean? Down by the wood-

pile I comes across my Jack, and says:



"What's it all about?"



Says he:



"Don't you know, Mars Jawge?"



"No," says I, "I don't."



"Well, den, Miss Sophia's run off! 'deed she has.

She run off in de night some time -- nobody don't

know jis' when; run off to get married to dat young

Harney Shepherdson, you know -- leastways, so dey

'spec. De fambly foun' it out 'bout half an hour

ago -- maybe a little mo' -- en' I TELL you dey warn't

no time los'. Sich another hurryin' up guns en hosses

YOU never see! De women folks has gone for to stir

up de relations, en ole Mars Saul en de boys tuck dey

guns en rode up de river road for to try to ketch dat

young man en kill him 'fo' he kin git acrost de river

wid Miss Sophia. I reck'n dey's gwyne to be mighty

rough times."



"Buck went off 'thout waking me up."



"Well, I reck'n he DID! Dey warn't gwyne to mix

you up in it. Mars Buck he loaded up his gun en

'lowed he's gwyne to fetch home a Shepherdson or

bust. Well, dey'll be plenty un 'm dah, I reck'n, en

you bet you he'll fetch one ef he gits a chanst."



I took up the river road as hard as I could put. By

and by I begin to hear guns a good ways off. When

I came in sight of the log store and the woodpile

where the steamboats lands I worked along under the

trees and brush till I got to a good place, and then I

clumb up into the forks of a cottonwood that was out

of reach, and watched. There was a wood-rank four

foot high a little ways in front of the tree, and first I

was going to hide behind that; but maybe it was

luckier I didn't.



There was four or five men cavorting around on their

horses in the open place before the log store, cussing

and yelling, and trying to get at a couple of young

chaps that was behind the wood-rank alongside of

the steamboat landing; but they couldn't come it.

Every time one of them showed himself on the river

side of the woodpile he got shot at. The two boys

was squatting back to back behind the pile, so they

could watch both ways.



By and by the men stopped cavorting around and

yelling. They started riding towards the store; then

up gets one of the boys, draws a steady bead over the

wood-rank, and drops one of them out of his saddle.

All the men jumped off of their horses and grabbed the

hurt one and started to carry him to the store; and

that minute the two boys started on the run. They

got half way to the tree I was in before the men

noticed. Then the men see them, and jumped on

their horses and took out after them. They gained on

the boys, but it didn't do no good, the boys had too

good a start; they got to the woodpile that was in

front of my tree, and slipped in behind it, and so they

had the bulge on the men again. One of the boys

was Buck, and the other was a slim young chap about

nineteen years old.



The men ripped around awhile, and then rode away.

As soon as they was out of sight I sung out to Buck

and told him. He didn't know what to make of my

voice coming out of the tree at first. He was awful

surprised. He told me to watch out sharp and let him

know when the men come in sight again; said they

was up to some devilment or other -- wouldn't be gone

long. I wished I was out of that tree, but I dasn't

come down. Buck begun to cry and rip, and 'lowed

that him and his cousin Joe (that was the other young

chap) would make up for this day yet. He said his

father and his two brothers was killed, and two or

three of the enemy. Said the Shepherdsons laid for

them in ambush. Buck said his father and brothers

ought to waited for their relations -- the Shepherdsons

was too strong for them. I asked him what was be-

come of young Harney and Miss Sophia. He said

they'd got across the river and was safe. I was glad

of that; but the way Buck did take on because he

didn't manage to kill Harney that day he shot at him

-- I hain't ever heard anything like it.



All of a sudden, bang! bang! bang! goes three or

four guns -- the men had slipped around through the

woods and come in from behind without their horses!

The boys jumped for the river -- both of them hurt --

and as they swum down the current the men run along

the bank shooting at them and singing out, "Kill

them, kill them!" It made me so sick I most fell out

of the tree. I ain't a-going to tell ALL that happened --

it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I

wished I hadn't ever come ashore that night to see

such things. I ain't ever going to get shut of them --

lots of times I dream about them.



I stayed in the tree till it begun to get dark, afraid

to come down. Sometimes I heard guns away off in

the woods; and twice I seen little gangs of men gallop

past the log store with guns; so I reckoned the trouble

was still a-going on. I was mighty downhearted; so I

made up my mind I wouldn't ever go anear that house

again, because I reckoned I was to blame, somehow.

I judged that that piece of paper meant that Miss

Sophia was to meet Harney somewheres at half-past

two and run off; and I judged I ought to told her

father about that paper and the curious way she acted,

and then maybe he would a locked her up, and this

awful mess wouldn't ever happened.



When I got down out of the tree I crept along down

the river bank a piece, and found the two bodies laying

in the edge of the water, and tugged at them till I got

them ashore; then I covered up their faces, and got

away as quick as I could. I cried a little when I was

covering up Buck's face, for he was mighty good to me.



It was just dark now. I never went near the house,

but struck through the woods and made for the

swamp. Jim warn't on his island, so I tramped off in

a hurry for the crick, and crowded through the willows,

red-hot to jump aboard and get out of that awful

country. The raft was gone! My souls, but I was

scared! I couldn't get my breath for most a minute.

Then I raised a yell. A voice not twenty-five foot

from me says:



"Good lan'! is dat you, honey? Doan' make no

noise."



It was Jim's voice -- nothing ever sounded so good

before. I run along the bank a piece and got aboard,

and Jim he grabbed me and hugged me, he was so glad

to see me. He says:



"Laws bless you, chile, I 'uz right down sho' you's

dead agin. Jack's been heah; he say he reck'n you's

ben shot, kase you didn' come home no mo'; so I's

jes' dis minute a startin' de raf' down towards de mouf

er de crick, so's to be all ready for to shove out en

leave soon as Jack comes agin en tells me for certain

you IS dead. Lawsy, I's mighty glad to git you back

again, honey.



I says:



"All right -- that's mighty good; they won't find

me, and they'll think I've been killed, and floated down

the river -- there's something up there that 'll help them

think so -- so don't you lose no time, Jim, but just

shove off for the big water as fast as ever you can."



I never felt easy till the raft was two mile below

there and out in the middle of the Mississippi. Then

we hung up our signal lantern, and judged that we was

free and safe once more. I hadn't had a bite to eat

since yesterday, so Jim he got out some corn-dodgers

and buttermilk, and pork and cabbage and greens --

there ain't nothing in the world so good when it's

cooked right -- and whilst I eat my supper we talked

and had a good time. I was powerful glad to get

away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away from

the swamp. We said there warn't no home like a

raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up

and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free

and easy and comfortable on a raft.





CHAPTER XIX.



TWO or three days and nights went by; I reckon I

might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet

and smooth and lovely. Here is the way we put in

the time. It was a monstrous big river down there --

sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and

laid up and hid daytimes; soon as night was most

gone we stopped navigating and tied up -- nearly

always in the dead water under a towhead; and then

cut young cottonwoods and willows, and hid the raft

with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid

into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and

cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where

the water was about knee deep, and watched the day-

light come. Not a sound anywheres -- perfectly still

-- just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes

the bullfrogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to

see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull

line -- that was the woods on t'other side; you

couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in

the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then

the river softened up away off, and warn't black any

more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting

along ever so far away -- trading scows, and such

things; and long black streaks -- rafts; sometimes

you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up

voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by

and by you could see a streak on the water which you

know by the look of the streak that there's a snag

there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes

that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl

up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the

river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of

the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the

river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them

cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres;

then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning

you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to

smell on account of the woods and the flowers; but

sometimes not that way, because they've left dead fish

laying around, gars and such, and they do get pretty

rank; and next you've got the full day, and every-

thing smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just

going it!



A little smoke couldn't be noticed now, so we would

take some fish off of the lines and cook up a hot break-

fast. And afterwards we would watch the lonesome-

ness of the river, and kind of lazy along, and by and

by lazy off to sleep. Wake up by and by, and look to

see what done it, and maybe see a steamboat coughing

along up-stream, so far off towards the other side you

couldn't tell nothing about her only whether she was a

stern-wheel or side-wheel; then for about an hour there

wouldn't be nothing to hear nor nothing to see -- just

solid lonesomeness. Next you'd see a raft sliding by,

away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping,

because they're most always doing it on a raft; you'd

see the axe flash and come down -- you don't

hear nothing; you see that axe go up again, and by

the time it's above the man's head then you hear the

K'CHUNK! -- it had took all that time to come over the

water. So we would put in the day, lazying around,

listening to the stillness. Once there was a thick fog,

and the rafts and things that went by was beating tin

pans so the steamboats wouldn't run over them. A

scow or a raft went by so close we could hear them

talking and cussing and laughing -- heard them plain;

but we couldn't see no sign of them; it made you feel

crawly; it was like spirits carrying on that way in the

air. Jim said he believed it was spirits; but I says:



"No; spirits wouldn't say, 'Dern the dern fog.'"



Soon as it was night out we shoved; when we got

her out to about the middle we let her alone, and let

her float wherever the current wanted her to; then we

lit the pipes, and dangled our legs in the water, and

talked about all kinds of things -- we was always

naked, day and night, whenever the mosquitoes would

let us -- the new clothes Buck's folks made for me was

too good to be comfortable, and besides I didn't go

much on clothes, nohow.



Sometimes we'd have that whole river all to ourselves

for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the

islands, across the water; and maybe a spark -- which

was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the

water you could see a spark or two -- on a raft or a

scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle

or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It's

lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all

speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs

and look up at them, and discuss about whether they

was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed

they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged

it would have took too long to MAKE so many. Jim

said the moon could a LAID them; well, that looked

kind of reasonable, so I didn't say nothing against it,

because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of

course it could be done. We used to watch the stars

that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed

they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.



Once or twice of a night we would see a steamboat

slipping along in the dark, and now and then she

would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her

chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and

look awful pretty; then she would turn a corner and

her lights would wink out and her powwow shut off

and leave the river still again; and by and by her

waves would get to us, a long time after she was gone,

and joggle the raft a bit, and after that you wouldn't

hear nothing for you couldn't tell how long, except

maybe frogs or something.



After midnight the people on shore went to bed,

and then for two or three hours the shores was black --

no more sparks in the cabin windows. These sparks

was our clock -- the first one that showed again meant

morning was coming, so we hunted a place to hide and

tie up right away.



One morning about daybreak I found a canoe and

crossed over a chute to the main shore -- it was only

two hundred yards -- and paddled about a mile up a

crick amongst the cypress woods, to see if I couldn't

get some berries. Just as I was passing a place where

a kind of a cowpath crossed the crick, here comes a

couple of men tearing up the path as tight as they

could foot it. I thought I was a goner, for whenever

anybody was after anybody I judged it was ME -- or

maybe Jim. I was about to dig out from there in a

hurry, but they was pretty close to me then, and sung

out and begged me to save their lives -- said they

hadn't been doing nothing, and was being chased for

it -- said there was men and dogs a-coming. They

wanted to jump right in, but I says:



"Don't you do it. I don't hear the dogs and horses

yet; you've got time to crowd through the brush and

get up the crick a little ways; then you take to the

water and wade down to me and get in -- that'll throw

the dogs off the scent."



They done it, and soon as they was aboard I lit

out for our towhead, and in about five or ten minutes

we heard the dogs and the men away off, shouting.

We heard them come along towards the crick, but

couldn't see them; they seemed to stop and fool

around a while; then, as we got further and further

away all the time, we couldn't hardly hear them at all;

by the time we had left a mile of woods behind us and

struck the river, everything was quiet, and we paddled

over to the towhead and hid in the cottonwoods and

was safe.



One of these fellows was about seventy or upwards,

and had a bald head and very gray whiskers. He had

an old battered-up slouch hat on, and a greasy blue

woollen shirt, and ragged old blue jeans britches stuffed

into his boot-tops, and home-knit galluses -- no, he

only had one. He had an old long-tailed blue jeans

coat with slick brass buttons flung over his arm, and

both of them had big, fat, ratty-looking carpet-bags.



The other fellow was about thirty, and dressed about

as ornery. After breakfast we all laid off and talked,

and the first thing that come out was that these chaps

didn't know one another.



"What got you into trouble?" says the baldhead to

t'other chap.



"Well, I'd been selling an article to take the tartar

off the teeth -- and it does take it off, too, and generly

the enamel along with it -- but I stayed about one

night longer than I ought to, and was just in the act of

sliding out when I ran across you on the trail this side

of town, and you told me they were coming, and begged

me to help you to get off. So I told you I was ex-

pecting trouble myself, and would scatter out WITH you.

That's the whole yarn -- what's yourn?



"Well, I'd ben a-running' a little temperance revival

thar 'bout a week, and was the pet of the women

folks, big and little, for I was makin' it mighty warm

for the rummies, I TELL you, and takin' as much as five

or six dollars a night -- ten cents a head, children and

niggers free -- and business a-growin' all the time,

when somehow or another a little report got around

last night that I had a way of puttin' in my time with

a private jug on the sly. A nigger rousted me out

this mornin', and told me the people was getherin' on

the quiet with their dogs and horses, and they'd be

along pretty soon and give me 'bout half an hour's

start, and then run me down if they could; and if they

got me they'd tar and feather me and ride me on a

rail, sure. I didn't wait for no breakfast -- I warn't

hungry."



"Old man," said the young one, "I reckon we

might double-team it together; what do you think?"



"I ain't undisposed. What's your line -- mainly?"



"Jour printer by trade; do a little in patent medi-

cines; theater-actor -- tragedy, you know; take a turn

to mesmerism and phrenology when there's a chance;

teach singing-geography school for a change; sling a

lecture sometimes -- oh, I do lots of things -- most

anything that comes handy, so it ain't work. What's

your lay?"



"I've done considerble in the doctoring way in my

time. Layin' on o' hands is my best holt -- for cancer

and paralysis, and sich things; and I k'n tell a fortune

pretty good when I've got somebody along to find out

the facts for me. Preachin's my line, too, and

workin' camp-meetin's, and missionaryin' around."



Nobody never said anything for a while; then the

young man hove a sigh and says:



"Alas!"



"What 're you alassin' about?" says the bald-

head.



"To think I should have lived to be leading such a

life, and be degraded down into such company." And

he begun to wipe the corner of his eye with a rag.



"Dern your skin, ain't the company good enough

for you?" says the baldhead, pretty pert and uppish.



" Yes, it IS good enough for me; it's as good as I

deserve; for who fetched me so low when I was so

high? I did myself. I don't blame YOU, gentlemen --

far from it; I don't blame anybody. I deserve it all.

Let the cold world do its worst; one thing I know --

there's a grave somewhere for me. The world may

go on just as it's always done, and take everything

from me -- loved ones, property, everything; but it

can't take that. Some day I'll lie down in it and for-

get it all, and my poor broken heart will be at rest."

He went on a-wiping.



"Drot your pore broken heart," says the baldhead;

"what are you heaving your pore broken heart at US

f'r? WE hain't done nothing."



"No, I know you haven't. I ain't blaming you,

gentlemen. I brought myself down -- yes, I did it

myself. It's right I should suffer -- perfectly right --

I don't make any moan."



"Brought you down from whar? Whar was you

brought down from?"



"Ah, you would not believe me; the world never

believes -- let it pass -- 'tis no matter. The secret of

my birth --"



"The secret of your birth! Do you mean to say --"



"Gentlemen," says the young man, very solemn,

"I will reveal it to you, for I feel I may have confi-

dence in you. By rights I am a duke!"



Jim's eyes bugged out when he heard that; and I

reckon mine did, too. Then the baldhead says:

"No! you can't mean it?"



"Yes. My great-grandfather, eldest son of the

Duke of Bridgewater, fled to this country about the

end of the last century, to breathe the pure air of free-

dom; married here, and died, leaving a son, his own

father dying about the same time. The second son of

the late duke seized the titles and estates -- the infant

real duke was ignored. I am the lineal descendant of

that infant -- I am the rightful Duke of Bridgewater;

and here am I, forlorn, torn from my high estate,

hunted of men, despised by the cold world, ragged,

worn, heart-broken, and degraded to the companion-

ship of felons on a raft!"



Jim pitied him ever so much, and so did I. We

tried to comfort him, but he said it warn't much use,

he couldn't be much comforted; said if we was a mind

to acknowledge him, that would do him more good

than most anything else; so we said we would, if he

would tell us how. He said we ought to bow when

we spoke to him, and say "Your Grace," or "My

Lord," or "Your Lordship" -- and he wouldn't mind

it if we called him plain "Bridgewater," which, he

said, was a title anyway, and not a name; and one of

us ought to wait on him at dinner, and do any little

thing for him he wanted done.



Well, that was all easy, so we done it. All through

dinner Jim stood around and waited on him, and says,

"Will yo' Grace have some o' dis or some o' dat?"

and so on, and a body could see it was mighty pleasing

to him.



But the old man got pretty silent by and by -- didn't

have much to say, and didn't look pretty comfortable

over all that petting that was going on around that

duke. He seemed to have something on his mind.

So, along in the afternoon, he says:



"Looky here, Bilgewater," he says, "I'm nation

sorry for you, but you ain't the only person that's had

troubles like that."



"No?"



"No you ain't. You ain't the only person that's

ben snaked down wrongfully out'n a high place."



"Alas!"



"No, you ain't the only person that's had a secret

of his birth." And, by jings, HE begins to cry.



"Hold! What do you mean?"



"Bilgewater, kin I trust you?" says the old man,

still sort of sobbing.



"To the bitter death!" He took the old man by

the hand and squeezed it, and says, "That secret of

your being: speak!"



"Bilgewater, I am the late Dauphin!"



You bet you, Jim and me stared this time. Then

the duke says:



"You are what?"



"Yes, my friend, it is too true -- your eyes is look-

in' at this very moment on the pore disappeared

Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Six-

teen and Marry Antonette."



"You! At your age! No! You mean you're

the late Charlemagne; you must be six or seven hun-

dred years old, at the very least."



"Trouble has done it, Bilgewater, trouble has done

it; trouble has brung these gray hairs and this prema-

ture balditude. Yes, gentlemen, you see before you,

in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin', exiled, tram-

pled-on, and sufferin' rightful King of France."



Well, he cried and took on so that me and Jim

didn't know hardly what to do, we was so sorry -- and

so glad and proud we'd got him with us, too. So we

set in, like we done before with the duke, and tried to

comfort HIM. But he said it warn't no use, nothing

but to be dead and done with it all could do him any

good; though he said it often made him feel easier and

better for a while if people treated him according to

his rights, and got down on one knee to speak to him,

and always called him "Your Majesty," and waited

on him first at meals, and didn't set down in his

presence till he asked them. So Jim and me set to

majestying him, and doing this and that and t'other

for him, and standing up till he told us we might set

down. This done him heaps of good, and so he got

cheerful and comfortable. But the duke kind of soured

on him, and didn't look a bit satisfied with the way

things was going; still, the king acted real friendly

towards him, and said the duke's great-grandfather

and all the other Dukes of Bilgewater was a good deal

thought of by HIS father, and was allowed to come to

the palace considerable; but the duke stayed huffy a

good while, till by and by the king says:



"Like as not we got to be together a blamed long

time on this h-yer raft, Bilgewater, and so what's the

use o' your bein' sour? It 'll only make things on-

comfortable. It ain't my fault I warn't born a duke,

it ain't your fault you warn't born a king -- so what's

the use to worry? Make the best o' things the way

you find 'em, says I -- that's my motto. This ain't

no bad thing that we've struck here -- plenty grub

and an easy life -- come, give us your hand, duke, and

le's all be friends."



The duke done it, and Jim and me was pretty glad

to see it. It took away all the uncomfortableness and

we felt mighty good over it, because it would a been a

miserable business to have any unfriendliness on the

raft; for what you want, above all things, on a raft, is

for everybody to be satisfied, and feel right and kind

towards the others.



It didn't take me long to make up my mind that

these liars warn't no kings nor dukes at all, but just

low-down humbugs and frauds. But I never said

nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it's the best

way; then you don't have no quarrels, and don't get

into no trouble. If they wanted us to call them kings

and dukes, I hadn't no objections, 'long as it would

keep peace in the family; and it warn't no use to tell

Jim, so I didn't tell him. If I never learnt nothing

else out of pap, I learnt that the best way to get along

with his kind of people is to let them have their own

way.





CHAPTER XX.



THEY asked us considerable many questions; wanted

to know what we covered up the raft that way

for, and laid by in the daytime instead of running --

was Jim a runaway nigger? Says I:



"Goodness sakes! would a runaway nigger run

SOUTH?"



No, they allowed he wouldn't. I had to account

for things some way, so I says:



"My folks was living in Pike County, in Missouri,

where I was born, and they all died off but me and pa

and my brother Ike. Pa, he 'lowed he'd break up

and go down and live with Uncle Ben, who's got a

little one-horse place on the river, forty-four mile

below Orleans. Pa was pretty poor, and had some

debts; so when he'd squared up there warn't nothing

left but sixteen dollars and our nigger, Jim. That

warn't enough to take us fourteen hundred mile, deck

passage nor no other way. Well, when the river rose

pa had a streak of luck one day; he ketched this piece

of a raft; so we reckoned we'd go down to Orleans on

it. Pa's luck didn't hold out; a steamboat run over

the forrard corner of the raft one night, and we all

went overboard and dove under the wheel; Jim and

me come up all right, but pa was drunk, and Ike was

only four years old, so they never come up no more.

Well, for the next day or two we had considerable

trouble, because people was always coming out in skiffs

and trying to take Jim away from me, saying they be-

lieved he was a runaway nigger. We don't run day-

times no more now; nights they don't bother us."



The duke says:



"Leave me alone to cipher out a way so we can run

in the daytime if we want to. I'll think the thing

over -- I'll invent a plan that'll fix it. We'll let it

alone for to-day, because of course we don't want to

go by that town yonder in daylight -- it mightn't be

healthy."



Towards night it begun to darken up and look like

rain; the heat lightning was squirting around low down

in the sky, and the leaves was beginning to shiver -- it

was going to be pretty ugly, it was easy to see that.

So the duke and the king went to overhauling our

wigwam, to see what the beds was like. My bed was

a straw tickQbetter than Jim's, which was a corn-

shuck tick; there's always cobs around about in a

shuck tick, and they poke into you and hurt; and

when you roll over the dry shucks sound like you was

rolling over in a pile of dead leaves; it makes such a

rustling that you wake up. Well, the duke allowed he

would take my bed; but the king allowed he wouldn't.

He says:



"I should a reckoned the difference in rank would a

sejested to you that a corn-shuck bed warn't just fitten

for me to sleep on. Your Grace 'll take the shuck

bed yourself."



Jim and me was in a sweat again for a minute, being

afraid there was going to be some more trouble

amongst them; so we was pretty glad when the duke

says:



"'Tis my fate to be always ground into the mire

under the iron heel of oppression. Misfortune has

broken my once haughty spirit; I yield, I submit; 'tis

my fate. I am alone in the world -- let me suffer;

can bear it."



We got away as soon as it was good and dark. The

king told us to stand well out towards the middle of

the river, and not show a light till we got a long ways

below the town. We come in sight of the little bunch

of lights by and by -- that was the town, you know --

and slid by, about a half a mile out, all right. When

we was three-quarters of a mile below we hoisted up

our signal lantern; and about ten o'clock it come on

to rain and blow and thunder and lighten like every-

thing; so the king told us to both stay on watch till

the weather got better; then him and the duke crawled

into the wigwam and turned in for the night. It was

my watch below till twelve, but I wouldn't a turned in

anyway if I'd had a bed, because a body don't see

such a storm as that every day in the week, not by a

long sight. My souls, how the wind did scream along!

And every second or two there'd come a glare that lit

up the white-caps for a half a mile around, and you'd

see the islands looking dusty through the rain, and the

trees thrashing around in the wind; then comes a

H-WHACK! -- bum! bum! bumble-umble-um-bum-bum-

bum-bum -- and the thunder would go rumbling and

grumbling away, and quit -- and then RIP comes an-

other flash and another sockdolager. The waves most

washed me off the raft sometimes, but I hadn't any

clothes on, and didn't mind. We didn't have no

trouble about snags; the lightning was glaring and

flittering around so constant that we could see them

plenty soon enough to throw her head this way or that

and miss them.



I had the middle watch, you know, but I was pretty

sleepy by that time, so Jim he said he would stand the

first half of it for me; he was always mighty good

that way, Jim was. I crawled into the wigwam, but

the king and the duke had their legs sprawled around

so there warn't no show for me; so I laid outside -- I

didn't mind the rain, because it was warm, and the

waves warn't running so high now. About two they

come up again, though, and Jim was going to call me;

but he changed his mind, because he reckoned they

warn't high enough yet to do any harm; but he was

mistaken about that, for pretty soon all of a sudden

along comes a regular ripper and washed me over-

board. It most killed Jim a-laughing. He was the

easiest nigger to laugh that ever was, anyway.



I took the watch, and Jim he laid down and snored

away; and by and by the storm let up for good and

all; and the first cabin-light that showed I rousted him

out, and we slid the raft into hiding quarters for the

day.



The king got out an old ratty deck of cards after

breakfast, and him and the duke played seven-up a

while, five cents a game. Then they got tired of it,

and allowed they would "lay out a campaign," as

they called it. The duke went down into his carpet-

bag, and fetched up a lot of little printed bills and

read them out loud. One bill said, "The celebrated

Dr. Armand de Montalban, of Paris," would "lecture

on the Science of Phrenology" at such and such a

place, on the blank day of blank, at ten cents admis-

sion, and "furnish charts of character at twenty-five

cents apiece." The duke said that was HIM. In an-

other bill he was the "world-renowned Shakespearian

tragedian, Garrick the Younger, of Drury Lane, Lon-

don." In other bills he had a lot of other names and

done other wonderful things, like finding water and

gold with a "divining-rod," "dissipating witch

spells," and so on. By and by he says:



"But the histrionic muse is the darling. Have you

ever trod the boards, Royalty?"



"No," says the king.



"You shall, then, before you're three days older,

Fallen Grandeur," says the duke. "The first good

town we come to we'll hire a hall and do the sword

fight in Richard III. and the balcony scene in Romeo

and Juliet. How does that strike you?"



"I'm in, up to the hub, for anything that will pay,

Bilgewater; but, you see, I don't know nothing about

play-actin', and hain't ever seen much of it. I was too

small when pap used to have 'em at the palace. Do

you reckon you can learn me?"



"Easy!"



"All right. I'm jist a-freezn' for something fresh,

anyway. Le's commence right away."



So the duke he told him all about who Romeo was

and who Juliet was, and said he was used to being

Romeo, so the king could be Juliet.



"But if Juliet's such a young gal, duke, my peeled

head and my white whiskers is goin' to look oncommon

odd on her, maybe."



"No, don't you worry; these country jakes won't

ever think of that. Besides, you know, you'll be in

costume, and that makes all the difference in the

world; Juliet's in a balcony, enjoying the moonlight

before she goes to bed, and she's got on her night-

gown and her ruffled nightcap. Here are the costumes

for the parts."



He got out two or three curtain-calico suits, which

he said was meedyevil armor for Richard III. and

t'other chap, and a long white cotton nightshirt and a

ruffled nightcap to match. The king was satisfied; so

the duke got out his book and read the parts over in

the most splendid spread-eagle way, prancing around

and acting at the same time, to show how it had got to

be done; then he give the book to the king and told

him to get his part by heart.



There was a little one-horse town about three mile

down the bend, and after dinner the duke said he had

ciphered out his idea about how to run in daylight

without it being dangersome for Jim; so he allowed

he would go down to the town and fix that thing.

The king allowed he would go, too, and see if he

couldn't strike something. We was out of coffee, so

Jim said I better go along with them in the canoe and

get some.



When we got there there warn't nobody stirring;

streets empty, and perfectly dead and still, like Sun-

day. We found a sick nigger sunning himself in a

back yard, and he said everybody that warn't too

young or too sick or too old was gone to camp-

meeting, about two mile back in the woods. The king

got the directions, and allowed he'd go and work that

camp-meeting for all it was worth, and I might go,

too.



The duke said what he was after was a printing-

office. We found it; a little bit of a concern, up over

a carpenter shop -- carpenters and printers all gone to

the meeting, and no doors locked. It was a dirty,

littered-up place, and had ink marks, and handbills

with pictures of horses and runaway niggers on them,

all over the walls. The duke shed his coat and said he

was all right now. So me and the king lit out for the

camp-meeting.



We got there in about a half an hour fairly dripping,

for it was a most awful hot day. There was as much

as a thousand people there from twenty mile around.

The woods was full of teams and wagons, hitched

everywheres, feeding out of the wagon-troughs and

stomping to keep off the flies. There was sheds made

out of poles and roofed over with branches, where they

had lemonade and gingerbread to sell, and piles of

watermelons and green corn and such-like truck.



The preaching was going on under the same kinds

of sheds, only they was bigger and held crowds of

people. The benches was made out of outside slabs

of logs, with holes bored in the round side to drive

sticks into for legs. They didn't have no backs.

The preachers had high platforms to stand on at one

end of the sheds. The women had on sun-bonnets;

and some had linsey-woolsey frocks, some gingham

ones, and a few of the young ones had on calico.

Some of the young men was barefooted, and some of

the children didn't have on any clothes but just a tow-

linen shirt. Some of the old women was knitting, and

some of the young folks was courting on the sly.



The first shed we come to the preacher was lining

out a hymn. He lined out two lines, everybody sung

it, and it was kind of grand to hear it, there was so

many of them and they done it in such a rousing way;

then he lined out two more for them to sing -- and so

on. The people woke up more and more, and sung

louder and louder; and towards the end some begun

to groan, and some begun to shout. Then the preacher

begun to preach, and begun in earnest, too; and went

weaving first to one side of the platform and then the

other, and then a-leaning down over the front of it,

with his arms and his body going all the time, and

shouting his words out with all his might; and every

now and then he would hold up his Bible and spread it

open, and kind of pass it around this way and that,

shouting, "It's the brazen serpent in the wilderness!

Look upon it and live!" And people would shout

out, "Glory! -- A-a-MEN!" And so he went on, and

the people groaning and crying and saying amen:



"Oh, come to the mourners' bench! come, black

with sin! (AMEN!) come, sick and sore! (AMEN!)

come, lame and halt and blind! (AMEN!) come, pore

and needy, sunk in shame! (A-A-MEN!) come, all

that's worn and soiled and suffering! -- come with a

broken spirit! come with a contrite heart! come in

your rags and sin and dirt! the waters that cleanse is

free, the door of heaven stands open -- oh, enter in

and be at rest!" (A-A-MEN! GLORY, GLORY HALLELUJAH!)



And so on. You couldn't make out what the

preacher said any more, on account of the shouting

and crying. Folks got up everywheres in the crowd,

and worked their way just by main strength to the

mourners' bench, with the tears running down their

faces; and when all the mourners had got up there to

the front benches in a crowd, they sung and shouted

and flung themselves down on the straw, just crazy

and wild.



Well, the first I knowed the king got a-going, and

you could hear him over everybody; and next he

went a-charging up on to the platform, and the

preacher he begged him to speak to the people, and

he done it. He told them he was a pirate -- been a

pirate for thirty years out in the Indian Ocean -- and

his crew was thinned out considerable last spring in a

fight, and he was home now to take out some fresh

men, and thanks to goodness he'd been robbed last

night and put ashore off of a steamboat without a cent,

and he was glad of it; it was the blessedest thing that

ever happened to him, because he was a changed man

now, and happy for the first time in his life; and,

poor as he was, he was going to start right off and

work his way back to the Indian Ocean, and put in the

rest of his life trying to turn the pirates into the true

path; for he could do it better than anybody else,

being acquainted with all pirate crews in that ocean;

and though it would take him a long time to get

there without money, he would get there anyway, and

every time he convinced a pirate he would say to him,

"Don't you thank me, don't you give me no credit;

it all belongs to them dear people in Pokeville camp-

meeting, natural brothers and benefactors of the race,

and that dear preacher there, the truest friend a pirate

ever had!"



And then he busted into tears, and so did everybody.

Then somebody sings out, "Take up a collection for

him, take up a collection!" Well, a half a dozen

made a jump to do it, but somebody sings out, "Let

HIM pass the hat around!" Then everybody said it,

the preacher too.



So the king went all through the crowd with his hat

swabbing his eyes, and blessing the people and praising

them and thanking them for being so good to the poor

pirates away off there; and every little while the

prettiest kind of girls, with the tears running down

their cheeks, would up and ask him would he let them

kiss him for to remember him by; and he always done

it; and some of them he hugged and kissed as many

as five or six times -- and he was invited to stay a

week; and everybody wanted him to live in their

houses, and said they'd think it was an honor; but he

said as this was the last day of the camp-meeting he

couldn't do no good, and besides he was in a sweat to

get to the Indian Ocean right off and go to work on

the pirates.



When we got back to the raft and he come to count

up he found he had collected eighty-seven dollars and

seventy-five cents. And then he had fetched away a

three-gallon jug of whisky, too, that he found under a

wagon when he was starting home through the woods.

The king said, take it all around, it laid over any day

he'd ever put in in the missionarying line. He said it

warn't no use talking, heathens don't amount to shucks

alongside of pirates to work a camp-meeting with.



The duke was thinking HE'D been doing pretty well

till the king come to show up, but after that he didn't

think so so much. He had set up and printed off two

little jobs for farmers in that printing-office -- horse

bills -- and took the money, four dollars. And he

had got in ten dollars' worth of advertisements for the

paper, which he said he would put in for four dollars

if they would pay in advance -- so they done it. The

price of the paper was two dollars a year, but he took

in three subscriptions for half a dollar apiece on con-

dition of them paying him in advance; they were going

to pay in cordwood and onions as usual, but he said

he had just bought the concern and knocked down the

price as low as he could afford it, and was going to

run it for cash. He set up a little piece of poetry,

which he made, himself, out of his own head -- three

verses -- kind of sweet and saddish -- the name of it

was, "Yes, crush, cold world, this breaking heart" --

and he left that all set up and ready to print in the

paper, and didn't charge nothing for it. Well, he

took in nine dollars and a half, and said he'd done a

pretty square day's work for it.



Then he showed us another little job he'd printed

and hadn't charged for, because it was for us. It had

a picture of a runaway nigger with a bundle on a stick

over his shoulder, and "$200 reward" under it. The

reading was all about Jim, and just described him to a

dot. It said he run away from St. Jacques' planta-

tion, forty mile below New Orleans, last winter, and

likely went north, and whoever would catch him and

send him back he could have the reward and expenses.



"Now," says the duke, "after to-night we can run

in the daytime if we want to. Whenever we see any-

body coming we can tie Jim hand and foot with a rope,

and lay him in the wigwam and show this handbill and

say we captured him up the river, and were too poor

to travel on a steamboat, so we got this little raft on

credit from our friends and are going down to get the

reward. Handcuffs and chains would look still better

on Jim, but it wouldn't go well with the story of us

being so poor. Too much like jewelry. Ropes are

the correct thing -- we must preserve the unities, as we

say on the boards."



We all said the duke was pretty smart, and there

couldn't be no trouble about running daytimes. We

judged we could make miles enough that night to get

out of the reach of the powwow we reckoned the duke's

work in the printing office was going to make in that

little town; then we could boom right along if we

wanted to.



We laid low and kept still, and never shoved out till

nearly ten o'clock; then we slid by, pretty wide away

from the town, and didn't hoist our lantern till we was

clear out of sight of it.



When Jim called me to take the watch at four in the

morning, he says:



"Huck, does you reck'n we gwyne to run acrost

any mo' kings on dis trip?"



"No," I says, "I reckon not."



"Well," says he, "dat's all right, den. I doan'

mine one er two kings, but dat's enough. Dis one's

powerful drunk, en de duke ain' much better."



I found Jim had been trying to get him to talk

French, so he could hear what it was like; but he said

he had been in this country so long, and had so much

trouble, he'd forgot it.





CHAPTER XXI.



IT was after sun-up now, but we went right on and

didn't tie up. The king and the duke turned out

by and by looking pretty rusty; but after they'd

jumped overboard and took a swim it chippered them

up a good deal. After breakfast the king he took a

seat on the corner of the raft, and pulled off his boots

and rolled up his britches, and let his legs dangle in

the water, so as to be comfortable, and lit his pipe, and

went to getting his Romeo and Juliet by heart. When

he had got it pretty good him and the duke begun to

practice it together. The duke had to learn him over

and over again how to say every speech; and he made

him sigh, and put his hand on his heart, and after a

while he said he done it pretty well; "only," he says,

"you mustn't bellow out ROMEO! that way, like a

bull -- you must say it soft and sick and languishy,

so -- R-o-o-meo! that is the idea; for Juliet's a dear

sweet mere child of a girl, you know, and she doesn't

bray like a jackass."



Well, next they got out a couple of long swords that

the duke made out of oak laths, and begun to practice

the sword fight -- the duke called himself Richard

III.; and the way they laid on and pranced around

the raft was grand to see. But by and by the king

tripped and fell overboard, and after that they took a

rest, and had a talk about all kinds of adventures

they'd had in other times along the river.



After dinner the duke says:



"Well, Capet, we'll want to make this a first-class

show, you know, so I guess we'll add a little more to

it. We want a little something to answer encores

with, anyway."



"What's onkores, Bilgewater?"



The duke told him, and then says:



"I'll answer by doing the Highland fling or the

sailor's hornpipe; and you -- well, let me see -- oh,

I've got it -- you can do Hamlet's soliloquy."



"Hamlet's which?"



"Hamlet's soliloquy, you know; the most celebrated

thing in Shakespeare. Ah, it's sublime, sublime! Al-

ways fetches the house. I haven't got it in the book

-- I've only got one volume -- but I reckon I can

piece it out from memory. I'll just walk up and down

a minute, and see if I can call it back from recollec-

tion's vaults."



So he went to marching up and down, thinking, and

frowning horrible every now and then; then he would

hoist up his eyebrows; next he would squeeze his hand

on his forehead and stagger back and kind of moan;

next he would sigh, and next he'd let on to drop a

tear. It was beautiful to see him. By and by he got

it. He told us to give attention. Then he strikes a

most noble attitude, with one leg shoved forwards, and

his arms stretched away up, and his head tilted back,

looking up at the sky; and then he begins to rip and

rave and grit his teeth; and after that, all through his

speech, he howled, and spread around, and swelled up

his chest, and just knocked the spots out of any acting

ever I see before. This is the speech -- I learned it,

easy enough, while he was learning it to the king:



   To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin

   That makes calamity of so long life;

   For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do

     come to Dunsinane,

   But that the fear of something after death

   Murders the innocent sleep,

   Great nature's second course,

   And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune

   Than fly to others that we know not of.

   There's the respect must give us pause:

   Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst;

   For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

   The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

   The law's delay, and the quietus which his

     pangs might take,

   In the dead waste and middle of the night,

     when churchyards yawn

   In customary suits of solemn black,

   But that the undiscovered country from whose

     bourne no traveler returns,

   Breathes forth contagion on the world,

   And thus the native hue of resolution, like

     the poor cat i' the adage,

   Is sicklied o'er with care,

   And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops,

   With this regard their currents turn awry,

   And lose the name of action.

   'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

     But soft you, the fair Ophelia:

   Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,

   But get thee to a nunnery -- go!



Well, the old man he liked that speech, and he

mighty soon got it so he could do it first-rate. It

seemed like he was just born for it; and when he had

his hand in and was excited, it was perfectly lovely

the way he would rip and tear and rair up behind

when he was getting it off.



The first chance we got the duke he had some show-

bills printed; and after that, for two or three days as

we floated along, the raft was a most uncommon lively

place, for there warn't nothing but sword fighting and

rehearsing -- as the duke called it -- going on all the

time. One morning, when we was pretty well down

the State of Arkansaw, we come in sight of a little

one-horse town in a big bend; so we tied up about

three-quarters of a mile above it, in the mouth of a

crick which was shut in like a tunnel by the cypress

trees, and all of us but Jim took the canoe and went

down there to see if there was any chance in that place

for our show.



We struck it mighty lucky; there was going to be a

circus there that afternoon, and the country people was

already beginning to come in, in all kinds of old

shackly wagons, and on horses. The circus would

leave before night, so our show would have a pretty

good chance. The duke he hired the courthouse, and

we went around and stuck up our bills. They read

like this:



               Shaksperean Revival ! ! !

                 Wonderful Attraction!

                  For One Night Only!

             The world renowned tragedians,

  David Garrick the Younger, of Drury Lane Theatre London,

                         and

   Edmund Kean the elder, of the Royal Haymarket Theatre,

   Whitechapel, Pudding Lane, Piccadilly, London, and the

        Royal Continental Theatres, in their sublime

            Shaksperean Spectacle entitled

                  The Balcony Scene

                         in

                Romeo and Juliet ! ! !

          Romeo...................Mr. Garrick

          Juliet..................Mr. Kean

      Assisted by the whole strength of the company!

        New costumes, new scenes, new appointments!

                         Also:

        The thrilling, masterly, and blood-curdling

                 Broad-sword conflict

                 In Richard III. ! ! !

          Richard III.............Mr. Garrick

          Richmond................Mr. Kean

                         Also:

                 (by special request)

            Hamlet's Immortal Soliloquy ! !

               By The Illustrious Kean!

      Done by him 300 consecutive nights in Paris!

                  For One Night Only,

     On account of imperative European engagements!

  Admission 25 cents; children and servants, 10 cents.



Then we went loafing around town. The stores and

houses was most all old, shackly, dried up frame con-

cerns that hadn't ever been painted; they was set up

three or four foot above ground on stilts, so as to be

out of reach of the water when the river was over-

flowed. The houses had little gardens around them,

but they didn't seem to raise hardly anything in them

but jimpson-weeds, and sunflowers, and ash piles, and

old curled-up boots and shoes, and pieces of bottles,

and rags, and played-out tinware. The fences was

made of different kinds of boards, nailed on at dif-

ferent times; and they leaned every which way, and

had gates that didn't generly have but one hinge -- a

leather one. Some of the fences had been white-

washed some time or another, but the duke said it was

in Clumbus' time, like enough. There was generly

hogs in the garden, and people driving them out.



All the stores was along one street. They had

white domestic awnings in front, and the country peo-

ple hitched their horses to the awning-posts. There

was empty drygoods boxes under the awnings, and

loafers roosting on them all day long, whittling them

with their Barlow knives; and chawing tobacco, and

gaping and yawning and stretching -- a mighty ornery

lot. They generly had on yellow straw hats most as

wide as an umbrella, but didn't wear no coats nor

waistcoats, they called one another Bill, and Buck,

and Hank, and Joe, and Andy, and talked lazy and

drawly, and used considerable many cuss words.

There was as many as one loafer leaning up against

every awning-post, and he most always had his hands

in his britches-pockets, except when he fetched them

out to lend a chaw of tobacco or scratch. What a

body was hearing amongst them all the time was:



"Gimme a chaw 'v tobacker, Hank "



"Cain't; I hain't got but one chaw left. Ask Bill."



Maybe Bill he gives him a chaw; maybe he lies and

says he ain't got none. Some of them kinds of

loafers never has a cent in the world, nor a chaw of

tobacco of their own. They get all their chawing by

borrowing; they say to a fellow, "I wisht you'd len'

me a chaw, Jack, I jist this minute give Ben Thompson

the last chaw I had" -- which is a lie pretty much

everytime; it don't fool nobody but a stranger; but

Jack ain't no stranger, so he says:



"YOU give him a chaw, did you? So did your

sister's cat's grandmother. You pay me back the

chaws you've awready borry'd off'n me, Lafe Buckner,

then I'll loan you one or two ton of it, and won't

charge you no back intrust, nuther."



"Well, I DID pay you back some of it wunst."



"Yes, you did -- 'bout six chaws. You borry'd

store tobacker and paid back nigger-head."



Store tobacco is flat black plug, but these fellows

mostly chaws the natural leaf twisted. When they

borrow a chaw they don't generly cut it off with a

knife, but set the plug in between their teeth, and gnaw

with their teeth and tug at the plug with their hands

till they get it in two; then sometimes the one that

owns the tobacco looks mournful at it when it's

handed back, and says, sarcastic:



"Here, gimme the CHAW, and you take the PLUG."



All the streets and lanes was just mud; they warn't

nothing else BUT mud -- mud as black as tar and nigh

about a foot deep in some places, and two or three

inches deep in ALL the places. The hogs loafed and

grunted around everywheres. You'd see a muddy

sow and a litter of pigs come lazying along the street

and whollop herself right down in the way, where folks

had to walk around her, and she'd stretch out and shut

her eyes and wave her ears whilst the pigs was milking

her, and look as happy as if she was on salary. And

pretty soon you'd hear a loafer sing out, "Hi! SO

boy! sick him, Tige!" and away the sow would go,

squealing most horrible, with a dog or two swinging to

each ear, and three or four dozen more a-coming; and

then you would see all the loafers get up and watch

the thing out of sight, and laugh at the fun and look

grateful for the noise. Then they'd settle back again

till there was a dog fight. There couldn't anything

wake them up all over, and make them happy all over,

like a dog fight -- unless it might be putting turpentine

on a stray dog and setting fire to him, or tying a tin

pan to his tail and see him run himself to death.



On the river front some of the houses was sticking

out over the bank, and they was bowed and bent, and

about ready to tumble in, The people had moved out

of them. The bank was caved away under one corner

of some others, and that corner was hanging over.

People lived in them yet, but it was dangersome, be-

cause sometimes a strip of land as wide as a house

caves in at a time. Sometimes a belt of land a quarter

of a mile deep will start in and cave along and cave

along till it all caves into the river in one summer.

Such a town as that has to be always moving back,

and back, and back, because the river's always gnawing

at it.



The nearer it got to noon that day the thicker and

thicker was the wagons and horses in the streets, and

more coming all the time. Families fetched their

dinners with them from the country, and eat them in

the wagons. There was considerable whisky drinking

going on, and I seen three fights. By and by some-

body sings out:



"Here comes old Boggs! -- in from the country for

his little old monthly drunk; here he comes, boys!"



All the loafers looked glad; I reckoned they was

used to having fun out of Boggs. One of them says:



"Wonder who he's a-gwyne to chaw up this time.

If he'd a-chawed up all the men he's ben a-gwyne to

chaw up in the last twenty year he'd have considerable

ruputation now."



Another one says, "I wisht old Boggs 'd threaten

me, 'cuz then I'd know I warn't gwyne to die for a

thousan' year."



Boggs comes a-tearing along on his horse, whooping

and yelling like an Injun, and singing out:



"Cler the track, thar. I'm on the waw-path, and

the price uv coffins is a-gwyne to raise."



He was drunk, and weaving about in his saddle; he

was over fifty year old, and had a very red face.

Everybody yelled at him and laughed at him and sassed

him, and he sassed back, and said he'd attend to them

and lay them out in their regular turns, but he couldn't

wait now because he'd come to town to kill old

Colonel Sherburn, and his motto was, "Meat first,

and spoon vittles to top off on."



He see me, and rode up and says:



"Whar'd you come f'm, boy? You prepared to

die?"



Then he rode on. I was scared, but a man says:



"He don't mean nothing; he's always a-carryin'

on like that when he's drunk. He's the best natured-

est old fool in Arkansaw -- never hurt nobody, drunk

nor sober."



Boggs rode up before the biggest store in town, and

bent his head down so he could see under the curtain

of the awning and yells:



"Come out here, Sherburn! Come out and meet

the man you've swindled. You're the houn' I'm after,

and I'm a-gwyne to have you, too!"



And so he went on, calling Sherburn everything he

could lay his tongue to, and the whole street packed

with people listening and laughing and going on. By

and by a proud-looking man about fifty-five -- and he

was a heap the best dressed man in that town, too --

steps out of the store, and the crowd drops back on

each side to let him come. He says to Boggs, mighty

ca'm and slow -- he says:



"I'm tired of this, but I'll endure it till one o'clock.

Till one o'clock, mind -- no longer. If you open your

mouth against me only once after that time you can't

travel so far but I will find you."



Then he turns and goes in. The crowd looked

mighty sober; nobody stirred, and there warn't no

more laughing. Boggs rode off blackguarding Sher-

burn as loud as he could yell, all down the street; and

pretty soon back he comes and stops before the store,

still keeping it up. Some men crowded around him

and tried to get him to shut up, but he wouldn't; they

told him it would be one o'clock in about fifteen min-

utes, and so he MUST go home -- he must go right

away. But it didn't do no good. He cussed away

with all his might, and throwed his hat down in the

mud and rode over it, and pretty soon away he went

a-raging down the street again, with his gray hair a-

flying. Everybody that could get a chance at him

tried their best to coax him off of his horse so they

could lock him up and get him sober; but it warn't no

use -- up the street he would tear again, and give

Sherburn another cussing. By and by somebody says:



"Go for his daughter! -- quick, go for his daughter;

sometimes he'll listen to her. If anybody can persuade

him, she can."



So somebody started on a run. I walked down

street a ways and stopped. In about five or ten min-

utes here comes Boggs again, but not on his horse.

He was a-reeling across the street towards me, bare-

headed, with a friend on both sides of him a-holt of

his arms and hurrying him along. He was quiet, and

looked uneasy; and he warn't hanging back any, but

was doing some of the hurrying himself. Somebody

sings out:



"Boggs!"



I looked over there to see who said it, and it was

that Colonel Sherburn. He was standing perfectly

still in the street, and had a pistol raised in his right

hand -- not aiming it, but holding it out with the barrel

tilted up towards the sky. The same second I see a

young girl coming on the run, and two men with her.

Boggs and the men turned round to see who called

him, and when they see the pistol the men jumped

to one side, and the pistol-barrel come down slow

and steady to a level -- both barrels cocked. Boggs

throws up both of his hands and says, "O Lord, don't

shoot!" Bang! goes the first shot, and he staggers

back, clawing at the air -- bang! goes the second one,

and he tumbles backwards on to the ground, heavy

and solid, with his arms spread out. That young girl

screamed out and comes rushing, and down she throws

herself on her father, crying, and saying, "Oh, he's

killed him, he's killed him!" The crowd closed up

around them, and shouldered and jammed one another,

with their necks stretched, trying to see, and people

on the inside trying to shove them back and shouting,

"Back, back! give him air, give him air!"



Colonel Sherburn he tossed his pistol on to the

ground, and turned around on his heels and walked off.



They took Boggs to a little drug store, the crowd

pressing around just the same, and the whole town

following, and I rushed and got a good place at the

window, where I was close to him and could see in.

They laid him on the floor and put one large Bible

under his head, and opened another one and spread it

on his breast; but they tore open his shirt first, and I

seen where one of the bullets went in. He made

about a dozen long gasps, his breast lifting the Bible

up when he drawed in his breath, and letting it down

again when he breathed it out -- and after that he laid

still; he was dead. Then they pulled his daughter

away from him, screaming and crying, and took her

off. She was about sixteen, and very sweet and gentle

looking, but awful pale and scared.



Well, pretty soon the whole town was there, squirm-

ing and scrouging and pushing and shoving to get at

the window and have a look, but people that had the

places wouldn't give them up, and folks behind them

was saying all the time, "Say, now, you've looked

enough, you fellows; 'tain't right and 'tain't fair for

you to stay thar all the time, and never give nobody a

chance; other folks has their rights as well as you."



There was considerable jawing back, so I slid out,

thinking maybe there was going to be trouble. The

streets was full, and everybody was excited. Every-

body that seen the shooting was telling how it hap-

pened, and there was a big crowd packed around each

one of these fellows, stretching their necks and listen-

ing. One long, lanky man, with long hair and a big

white fur stovepipe hat on the back of his head, and a

crooked-handled cane, marked out the places on the

ground where Boggs stood and where Sherburn stood,

and the people following him around from one place

to t'other and watching everything he done, and bob-

bing their heads to show they understood, and stoop-

ing a little and resting their hands on their thighs to

watch him mark the places on the ground with his

cane; and then he stood up straight and stiff where

Sherburn had stood, frowning and having his hat-brim

down over his eyes, and sung out, "Boggs!" and then

fetched his cane down slow to a level, and says

"Bang!" staggered backwards, says "Bang!" again,

and fell down flat on his back. The people that had

seen the thing said he done it perfect; said it was just

exactly the way it all happened. Then as much as a

dozen people got out their bottles and treated him.



Well, by and by somebody said Sherburn ought to

be lynched. In about a minute everybody was saying

it; so away they went, mad and yelling, and snatching

down every clothes-line they come to to do the hang-

ing with.





CHAPTER XXII.



THEY swarmed up towards Sherburn's house, a-

whooping and raging like Injuns, and everything

had to clear the way or get run over and tromped to

mush, and it was awful to see. Children was heeling

it ahead of the mob, screaming and trying to get out

of the way; and every window along the road was full

of women's heads, and there was nigger boys in every

tree, and bucks and wenches looking over every fence;

and as soon as the mob would get nearly to them they

would break and skaddle back out of reach. Lots of

the women and girls was crying and taking on, scared

most to death.



They swarmed up in front of Sherburn's palings as

thick as they could jam together, and you couldn't

hear yourself think for the noise. It was a little

twenty-foot yard. Some sung out "Tear down the

fence! tear down the fence!" Then there was a

racket of ripping and tearing and smashing, and down

she goes, and the front wall of the crowd begins to

roll in like a wave.



Just then Sherburn steps out on to the roof of his

little front porch, with a double-barrel gun in his hand,

and takes his stand, perfectly ca'm and deliberate, not

saying a word. The racket stopped, and the wave

sucked back.



Sherburn never said a word -- just stood there, look-

ing down. The stillness was awful creepy and uncom-

fortable. Sherburn run his eye slow along the crowd;

and wherever it struck the people tried a little to out-

gaze him, but they couldn't; they dropped their eyes

and looked sneaky. Then pretty soon Sherburn sort

of laughed; not the pleasant kind, but the kind that

makes you feel like when you are eating bread that's

got sand in it.



Then he says, slow and scornful:



"The idea of YOU lynching anybody! It's amusing.

The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to

lynch a MAN! Because you're brave enough to tar and

feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along

here, did that make you think you had grit enough to

lay your hands on a MAN? Why, a MAN'S safe in the

hands of ten thousand of your kind -- as long as it's

daytime and you're not behind him.



"Do I know you? I know you clear through

was born and raised in the South, and I've lived in the

North; so I know the average all around. The

average man's a coward. In the North he lets anybody

walk over him that wants to, and goes home and prays

for a humble spirit to bear it. In the South one man

all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men in the

daytime, and robbed the lot. Your newspapers call

you a brave people so much that you think you are

braver than any other people -- whereas you're just AS

brave, and no braver. Why don't your juries hang

murderers? Because they're afraid the man's friends

will shoot them in the back, in the dark -- and it's just

what they WOULD do.



"So they always acquit; and then a MAN goes in

the night, with a hundred masked cowards at his back

and lynches the rascal. Your mistake is, that you

didn't bring a man with you; that's one mistake, and

the other is that you didn't come in the dark and fetch

your masks. You brought PART of a man -- Buck

Harkness, there -- and if you hadn't had him to start

you, you'd a taken it out in blowing.



"You didn't want to come. The average man

don't like trouble and danger. YOU don't like trouble

and danger. But if only HALF a man -- like Buck

Harkness, there -- shouts 'Lynch him! lynch him!'

you're afraid to back down -- afraid you'll be found

out to be what you are -- COWARDS -- and so you raise

a yell, and hang yourselves on to that half-a-man's

coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big

things you're going to do. The pitifulest thing out is

a mob; that's what an army is -- a mob; they don't

fight with courage that's born in them, but with cour-

age that's borrowed from their mass, and from their

officers. But a mob without any MAN at the head of

it is BENEATH pitifulness. Now the thing for YOU to do

is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a

hole. If any real lynching's going to be done it will

be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they

come they'll bring their masks, and fetch a MAN along.

Now LEAVE -- and take your half-a-man with you" --

tossing his gun up across his left arm and cocking it

when he says this.



The crowd washed back sudden, and then broke all

apart, and went tearing off every which way, and Buck

Harkness he heeled it after them, looking tolerable cheap.

I could a stayed if I wanted to, but I didn't want to.



I went to the circus and loafed around the back side

till the watchman went by, and then dived in under the

tent. I had my twenty-dollar gold piece and some

other money, but I reckoned I better save it, because

there ain't no telling how soon you are going to need

it, away from home and amongst strangers that way.

You can't be too careful. I ain't opposed to spending

money on circuses when there ain't no other way, but

there ain't no use in WASTING it on them.



It was a real bully circus. It was the splendidest

sight that ever was when they all come riding in, two

and two, a gentleman and lady, side by side, the men

just in their drawers and undershirts, and no shoes nor

stirrups, and resting their hands on their thighs easy

and comfortable -- there must a been twenty of them

-- and every lady with a lovely complexion, and per-

fectly beautiful, and looking just like a gang of real

sure-enough queens, and dressed in clothes that cost

millions of dollars, and just littered with diamonds. It

was a powerful fine sight; I never see anything so

lovely. And then one by one they got up and stood,

and went a-weaving around the ring so gentle and

wavy and graceful, the men looking ever so tall and airy

and straight, with their heads bobbing and skimming

along, away up there under the tent-roof, and every

lady's rose-leafy dress flapping soft and silky around

her hips, and she looking like the most loveliest parasol.



And then faster and faster they went, all of them

dancing, first one foot out in the air and then the other,

the horses leaning more and more, and the ringmaster

going round and round the center-pole, cracking his

whip and shouting "Hi! -- hi!" and the clown crack-

ing jokes behind him; and by and by all hands dropped

the reins, and every lady put her knuckles on her hips

and every gentleman folded his arms, and then how

the horses did lean over and hump themselves! And

so one after the other they all skipped off into the

ring, and made the sweetest bow I ever see, and then

scampered out, and everybody clapped their hands and

went just about wild.



Well, all through the circus they done the most

astonishing things; and all the time that clown carried

on so it most killed the people. The ringmaster

couldn't ever say a word to him but he was back at

him quick as a wink with the funniest things a body

ever said; and how he ever COULD think of so many of

them, and so sudden and so pat, was what I couldn't

noway understand. Why, I couldn't a thought of

them in a year. And by and by a drunk man tried to

get into the ring -- said he wanted to ride; said he

could ride as well as anybody that ever was. They

argued and tried to keep him out, but he wouldn't

listen, and the whole show come to a standstill. Then

the people begun to holler at him and make fun of

him, and that made him mad, and he begun to rip

and tear; so that stirred up the people, and a lot of

men begun to pile down off of the benches and swarm

towards the ring, saying, "Knock him down! throw

him out!" and one or two women begun to scream.

So, then, the ringmaster he made a little speech, and

said he hoped there wouldn't be no disturbance, and if

the man would promise he wouldn't make no more

trouble he would let him ride if he thought he could

stay on the horse. So everybody laughed and said all

right, and the man got on. The minute he was on,

the horse begun to rip and tear and jump and cavort

around, with two circus men hanging on to his bridle

trying to hold him, and the drunk man hanging on to

his neck, and his heels flying in the air every jump,

and the whole crowd of people standing up shouting

and laughing till tears rolled down. And at last, sure

enough, all the circus men could do, the horse broke

loose, and away he went like the very nation, round

and round the ring, with that sot laying down on him

and hanging to his neck, with first one leg hanging

most to the ground on one side, and then t'other one

on t'other side, and the people just crazy. It warn't

funny to me, though; I was all of a tremble to see his

danger. But pretty soon he struggled up astraddle

and grabbed the bridle, a-reeling this way and that; and

the next minute he sprung up and dropped the bridle

and stood! and the horse a-going like a house afire

too. He just stood up there, a-sailing around as easy

and comfortable as if he warn't ever drunk in his life

-- and then he begun to pull off his clothes and sling

them. He shed them so thick they kind of clogged

up the air, and altogether he shed seventeen suits.

And, then, there he was, slim and handsome, and

dressed the gaudiest and prettiest you ever saw, and

he lit into that horse with his whip and made him fairly

hum -- and finally skipped off, and made his bow and

danced off to the dressing-room, and everybody just

a-howling with pleasure and astonishment.



Then the ringmaster he see how he had been fooled,

and he WAS the sickest ringmaster you ever see, I

reckon. Why, it was one of his own men! He had

got up that joke all out of his own head, and never let

on to nobody. Well, I felt sheepish enough to be

took in so, but I wouldn't a been in that ringmaster's

place, not for a thousand dollars. I don't know;

there may be bullier circuses than what that one was,

but I never struck them yet. Anyways, it was plenty

good enough for ME; and wherever I run across it, it

can have all of MY custom every time.



Well, that night we had OUR show; but there warn't

only about twelve people there -- just enough to pay

expenses. And they laughed all the time, and that

made the duke mad; and everybody left, anyway,

before the show was over, but one boy which was

asleep. So the duke said these Arkansaw lunkheads

couldn't come up to Shakespeare; what they wanted

was low comedy -- and maybe something ruther worse

than low comedy, he reckoned. He said he could

size their style. So next morning he got some big

sheets of wrapping paper and some black paint, and

drawed off some handbills, and stuck them up all over

the village. The bills said:



            AT THE COURT HOUSE!

            FOR 3 NIGHTS ONLY!

      The World-Renowned Tragedians

        DAVID GARRICK THE YOUNGER!

                    AND

          EDMUND KEAN THE ELDER!

      Of the London and Continental

                 Theatres,

      In their Thrilling Tragedy of

          THE KING'S CAMELEOPARD,

                    OR

         THE ROYAL NONESUCH ! ! !

            Admission 50 cents.



Then at the bottom was the biggest line of all, which

said:



LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED.



"There," says he, "if that line don't fetch them, I

don't know Arkansaw!"





CHAPTER XXIII.



WELL, all day him and the king was hard at it,

rigging up a stage and a curtain and a row of

candles for footlights; and that night the house was

jam full of men in no time. When the place couldn't

hold no more, the duke he quit tending door and went

around the back way and come on to the stage and

stood up before the curtain and made a little speech,

and praised up this tragedy, and said it was the most

thrillingest one that ever was; and so he went on a-

bragging about the tragedy, and about Edmund Kean

the Elder, which was to play the main principal part

in it; and at last when he'd got everybody's expecta-

tions up high enough, he rolled up the curtain, and

the next minute the king come a-prancing out on all

fours, naked; and he was painted all over, ring-

streaked-and-striped, all sorts of colors, as splendid

as a rainbow. And -- but never mind the rest of his

outfit; it was just wild, but it was awful funny. The

people most killed themselves laughing; and when the

king got done capering and capered off behind the

scenes, they roared and clapped and stormed and haw-

hawed till he come back and done it over again, and

after that they made him do it another time. Well, it

would make a cow laugh to see the shines that old

idiot cut.



Then the duke he lets the curtain down, and bows to

the people, and says the great tragedy will be per-

formed only two nights more, on accounts of pressing

London engagements, where the seats is all sold already

for it in Drury Lane; and then he makes them another

bow, and says if he has succeeded in pleasing them

and instructing them, he will be deeply obleeged if

they will mention it to their friends and get them to

come and see it.



Twenty people sings out:



"What, is it over? Is that ALL?"



The duke says yes. Then there was a fine time.

Everybody sings out, "Sold!" and rose up mad, and

was a-going for that stage and them tragedians. But a

big, fine looking man jumps up on a bench and

shouts:



"Hold on! Just a word, gentlemen." They stopped

to listen. "We are sold -- mighty badly sold. But

we don't want to be the laughing stock of this whole

town, I reckon, and never hear the last of this thing as

long as we live. NO. What we want is to go out of

here quiet, and talk this show up, and sell the REST of

the town! Then we'll all be in the same boat. Ain't

that sensible?" ("You bet it is! -- the jedge is

right!" everybody sings out.) "All right, then --

not a word about any sell. Go along home, and ad-

vise everybody to come and see the tragedy."



Next day you couldn't hear nothing around that

town but how splendid that show was. House was

jammed again that night, and we sold this crowd the

same way. When me and the king and the duke got

home to the raft we all had a supper; and by and by,

about midnight, they made Jim and me back her out

and float her down the middle of the river, and fetch

her in and hide her about two mile below town.



The third night the house was crammed again -- and

they warn't new-comers this time, but people that was

at the show the other two nights. I stood by the duke

at the door, and I see that every man that went in had

his pockets bulging, or something muffled up under

his coat -- and I see it warn't no perfumery, neither,

not by a long sight. I smelt sickly eggs by the barrel,

and rotten cabbages, and such things; and if I know

the signs of a dead cat being around, and I bet I do,

there was sixty-four of them went in. I shoved in

there for a minute, but it was too various for me; I

couldn't stand it. Well, when the place couldn't hold

no more people the duke he give a fellow a quarter

and told him to tend door for him a minute, and then

he started around for the stage door, I after him; but

the minute we turned the corner and was in the dark

he says:



"Walk fast now till you get away from the houses,

and then shin for the raft like the dickens was after

you!"



I done it, and he done the same. We struck the

raft at the same time, and in less than two seconds we

was gliding down stream, all dark and still, and edging

towards the middle of the river, nobody saying a word.

I reckoned the poor king was in for a gaudy time of it

with the audience, but nothing of the sort; pretty

soon he crawls out from under the wigwam, and says:



"Well, how'd the old thing pan out this time,

duke?" He hadn't been up-town at all.



We never showed a light till we was about ten mile

below the village. Then we lit up and had a supper,

and the king and the duke fairly laughed their bones

loose over the way they'd served them people. The

duke says:



"Greenhorns, flatheads! I knew the first house

would keep mum and let the rest of the town get roped

in; and I knew they'd lay for us the third night, and

consider it was THEIR turn now. Well, it IS their turn,

and I'd give something to know how much they'd take

for it. I WOULD just like to know how they're putting

in their opportunity. They can turn it into a picnic if

they want to -- they brought plenty provisions."



Them rapscallions took in four hundred and sixty-

five dollars in that three nights. I never see money

hauled in by the wagon-load like that before.

By and by, when they was asleep and snoring, Jim

says:



"Don't it s'prise you de way dem kings carries on,

Huck?"



"No," I says, "it don't."



"Why don't it, Huck?"



"Well, it don't, because it's in the breed. I reckon

they're all alike,"



"But, Huck, dese kings o' ourn is reglar rapscal-

lions; dat's jist what dey is; dey's reglar rapscallions."



"Well, that's what I'm a-saying; all kings is

mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out."



"Is dat so?"



"You read about them once -- you'll see. Look

at Henry the Eight; this 'n 's a Sunday-school Super-

intendent to HIM. And look at Charles Second, and

Louis Fourteen, and Louis Fifteen, and James Second,

and Edward Second, and Richard Third, and forty

more; besides all them Saxon heptarchies that used

to rip around so in old times and raise Cain. My,

you ought to seen old Henry the Eight when he was

in bloom. He WAS a blossom. He used to marry a

new wife every day, and chop off her head next morn-

ing. And he would do it just as indifferent as if he

was ordering up eggs. 'Fetch up Nell Gwynn,' he

says. They fetch her up. Next morning, 'Chop off

her head!' And they chop it off. 'Fetch up Jane

Shore,' he says; and up she comes, Next morning,

'Chop off her head' -- and they chop it off. 'Ring

up Fair Rosamun.' Fair Rosamun answers the bell.

Next morning, 'Chop off her head.' And he made

every one of them tell him a tale every night; and he

kept that up till he had hogged a thousand and one

tales that way, and then he put them all in a book,

and called it Domesday Book -- which was a good

name and stated the case. You don't know kings,

Jim, but I know them; and this old rip of ourn is one

of the cleanest I've struck in history. Well, Henry

he takes a notion he wants to get up some trouble with

this country. How does he go at it -- give notice? --

give the country a show? No. All of a sudden he

heaves all the tea in Boston Harbor overboard, and

whacks out a declaration of independence, and dares

them to come on. That was HIS style -- he never give

anybody a chance. He had suspicions of his father,

the Duke of Wellington. Well, what did he do? Ask

him to show up? No -- drownded him in a butt of

mamsey, like a cat. S'pose people left money laying

around where he was -- what did he do? He collared

it. S'pose he contracted to do a thing, and you paid

him, and didn't set down there and see that he done

it -- what did he do? He always done the other thing.

S'pose he opened his mouth -- what then? If he

didn't shut it up powerful quick he'd lose a lie every

time. That's the kind of a bug Henry was; and if

we'd a had him along 'stead of our kings he'd a fooled

that town a heap worse than ourn done. I don't say

that ourn is lambs, because they ain't, when you come

right down to the cold facts; but they ain't nothing to

THAT old ram, anyway. All I say is, kings is kings,

and you got to make allowances. Take them all

around, they're a mighty ornery lot. It's the way

they're raised."



"But dis one do SMELL so like de nation, Huck."



"Well, they all do, Jim. We can't help the way a

king smells; history don't tell no way."



"Now de duke, he's a tolerble likely man in some

ways."



"Yes, a duke's different. But not very different.

This one's a middling hard lot for a duke. When

he's drunk there ain't no near-sighted man could tell

him from a king."



"Well, anyways, I doan' hanker for no mo' un um,

Huck. Dese is all I kin stan'."



"It's the way I feel, too, Jim. But we've got them

on our hands, and we got to remember what they are,

and make allowances. Sometimes I wish we could

hear of a country that's out of kings."



What was the use to tell Jim these warn't real kings

and dukes? It wouldn't a done no good; and, be-

sides, it was just as I said: you couldn't tell them from

the real kind.



I went to sleep, and Jim didn't call me when it was

my turn. He often done that. When I waked up

just at daybreak he was sitting there with his head

down betwixt his knees, moaning and mourning to

himself. I didn't take notice nor let on. I knowed

what it was about. He was thinking about his wife

and his children, away up yonder, and he was low and

homesick; because he hadn't ever been away from

home before in his life; and I do believe he cared just

as much for his people as white folks does for their'n.

It don't seem natural, but I reckon it's so. He was

often moaning and mourning that way nights, when

he judged I was asleep, and saying, "Po' little 'Liza-

beth! po' little Johnny! it's mighty hard; I spec' I

ain't ever gwyne to see you no mo', no mo'!" He

was a mighty good nigger, Jim was.



But this time I somehow got to talking to him about

his wife and young ones; and by and by he says:



"What makes me feel so bad dis time 'uz bekase I

hear sumpn over yonder on de bank like a whack, er

a slam, while ago, en it mine me er de time I treat my

little 'Lizabeth so ornery. She warn't on'y 'bout fo'

year ole, en she tuck de sk'yarlet fever, en had a

powful rough spell; but she got well, en one day she

was a-stannin' aroun', en I says to her, I says:



"'Shet de do'.'



"She never done it; jis' stood dah, kiner smilin' up

at me. It make me mad; en I says agin, mighty loud,

I says:



"'Doan' you hear me? Shet de do'!'



"She jis stood de same way, kiner smilin' up. I

was a-bilin'! I says:



"'I lay I MAKE you mine!'



"En wid dat I fetch' her a slap side de head dat

sont her a-sprawlin'. Den I went into de yuther

room, en 'uz gone 'bout ten minutes; en when I

come back dah was dat do' a-stannin' open YIT, en

dat chile stannin' mos' right in it, a-lookin' down and

mournin', en de tears runnin' down. My, but I WUZ

mad! I was a-gwyne for de chile, but jis' den -- it

was a do' dat open innerds -- jis' den, 'long come de

wind en slam it to, behine de chile, ker-BLAM! -- en my

lan', de chile never move'! My breff mos' hop outer

me; en I feel so -- so -- I doan' know HOW I feel. I

crope out, all a-tremblin', en crope aroun' en open de

do' easy en slow, en poke my head in behine de chile,

sof' en still, en all uv a sudden I says POW! jis' as

loud as I could yell. SHE NEVER BUDGE! Oh, Huck, I

bust out a-cryin' en grab her up in my arms, en say,

'Oh, de po' little thing! De Lord God Amighty

fogive po' ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to fogive his-

self as long's he live!' Oh, she was plumb deef en

dumb, Huck, plumb deef en dumb -- en I'd ben a-

treat'n her so!"





CHAPTER XXIV.



NEXT day, towards night, we laid up under a little

willow towhead out in the middle, where there

was a village on each side of the river, and the duke

and the king begun to lay out a plan for working them

towns. Jim he spoke to the duke, and said he hoped

it wouldn't take but a few hours, because it got mighty

heavy and tiresome to him when he had to lay all day

in the wigwam tied with the rope. You see, when we

left him all alone we had to tie him, because if any-

body happened on to him all by himself and not tied

it wouldn't look much like he was a runaway nigger,

you know. So the duke said it WAS kind of hard to

have to lay roped all day, and he'd cipher out some

way to get around it.



He was uncommon bright, the duke was, and he

soon struck it. He dressed Jim up in King Lear's

outfit -- it was a long curtain-calico gown, and a white

horse-hair wig and whiskers; and then he took his

theater paint and painted Jim's face and hands and

ears and neck all over a dead, dull, solid blue, like a

man that's been drownded nine days. Blamed if he

warn't the horriblest looking outrage I ever see. Then

the duke took and wrote out a sign on a shingle so:



  Sick Arab -- but harmless when not out of his head.



And he nailed that shingle to a lath, and stood the

lath up four or five foot in front of the wigwam. Jim

was satisfied. He said it was a sight better than lying

tied a couple of years every day, and trembling all

over every time there was a sound. The duke told

him to make himself free and easy, and if anybody

ever come meddling around, he must hop out of the

wigwam, and carry on a little, and fetch a howl or two

like a wild beast, and he reckoned they would light out

and leave him alone. Which was sound enough judg-

ment; but you take the average man, and he wouldn't

wait for him to howl. Why, he didn't only look like

he was dead, he looked considerable more than that.



These rapscallions wanted to try the Nonesuch again,

because there was so much money in it, but they

judged it wouldn't be safe, because maybe the news

might a worked along down by this time. They

couldn't hit no project that suited exactly; so at last

the duke said he reckoned he'd lay off and work his

brains an hour or two and see if he couldn't put up

something on the Arkansaw village; and the king he

allowed he would drop over to t'other village without

any plan, but just trust in Providence to lead him the

profitable way -- meaning the devil, I reckon. We

had all bought store clothes where we stopped last;

and now the king put his'n on, and he told me to put

mine on. I done it, of course. The king's duds was

all black, and he did look real swell and starchy. I

never knowed how clothes could change a body be-

fore. Why, before, he looked like the orneriest old

rip that ever was; but now, when he'd take off his new

white beaver and make a bow and do a smile, he

looked that grand and good and pious that you'd say

he had walked right out of the ark, and maybe was old

Leviticus himself. Jim cleaned up the canoe, and I

got my paddle ready. There was a big steamboat lay-

ing at the shore away up under the point, about three

mile above the town -- been there a couple of hours,

taking on freight. Says the king:



"Seein' how I'm dressed, I reckon maybe I better

arrive down from St. Louis or Cincinnati, or some

other big place. Go for the steamboat, Huckleberry;

we'll come down to the village on her."



I didn't have to be ordered twice to go and take a

steamboat ride. I fetched the shore a half a mile

above the village, and then went scooting along the

bluff bank in the easy water. Pretty soon we come to

a nice innocent-looking young country jake setting on

a log swabbing the sweat off of his face, for it was

powerful warm weather; and he had a couple of big

carpet-bags by him.



"Run her nose in shore," says the king. I done

it. "Wher' you bound for, young man?"



"For the steamboat; going to Orleans."



"Git aboard," says the king. "Hold on a minute,

my servant 'll he'p you with them bags. Jump out

and he'p the gentleman, Adolphus" -- meaning me, I

see.



I done so, and then we all three started on again.

The young chap was mighty thankful; said it was

tough work toting his baggage such weather. He

asked the king where he was going, and the king told

him he'd come down the river and landed at the other

village this morning, and now he was going up a few

mile to see an old friend on a farm up there. The

young fellow says:



"When I first see you I says to myself, 'It's Mr.

Wilks, sure, and he come mighty near getting here in

time.' But then I says again, 'No, I reckon it ain't

him, or else he wouldn't be paddling up the river.'

You AIN'T him, are you?"



"No, my name's Blodgett -- Elexander Blodgett --

REVEREND Elexander Blodgett, I s'pose I must say, as

I'm one o' the Lord's poor servants. But still I'm

jist as able to be sorry for Mr. Wilks for not arriving

in time, all the same, if he's missed anything by it --

which I hope he hasn't."



"Well, he don't miss any property by it, because

he'll get that all right; but he's missed seeing his

brother Peter die -- which he mayn't mind, nobody

can tell as to that -- but his brother would a give

anything in this world to see HIM before he died;

never talked about nothing else all these three weeks;

hadn't seen him since they was boys together -- and

hadn't ever seen his brother William at all -- that's the

deef and dumb one -- William ain't more than thirty

or thirty-five. Peter and George were the only ones

that come out here; George was the married brother;

him and his wife both died last year. Harvey and

William's the only ones that's left now; and, as I was

saying, they haven't got here in time."



"Did anybody send 'em word?"



"Oh, yes; a month or two ago, when Peter was

first took; because Peter said then that he sorter felt

like he warn't going to get well this time. You see,

he was pretty old, and George's g'yirls was too young

to be much company for him, except Mary Jane, the

red-headed one; and so he was kinder lonesome after

George and his wife died, and didn't seem to care

much to live. He most desperately wanted to see

Harvey -- and William, too, for that matter -- because

he was one of them kind that can't bear to make a

will. He left a letter behind for Harvey, and said

he'd told in it where his money was hid, and how he

wanted the rest of the property divided up so George's

g'yirls would be all right -- for George didn't leave

nothing. And that letter was all they could get him

to put a pen to."



"Why do you reckon Harvey don't come? Wher'

does he live?"



"Oh, he lives in England -- Sheffield -- preaches

there -- hasn't ever been in this country. He hasn't

had any too much time -- and besides he mightn't a

got the letter at all, you know."



"Too bad, too bad he couldn't a lived to see his

brothers, poor soul. You going to Orleans, you say?"



"Yes, but that ain't only a part of it. I'm going

in a ship, next Wednesday, for Ryo Janeero, where

my uncle lives."



"It's a pretty long journey. But it'll be lovely;

wisht I was a-going. Is Mary Jane the oldest? How

old is the others?"



"Mary Jane's nineteen, Susan's fifteen, and Joanna's

about fourteen -- that's the one that gives herself to

good works and has a hare-lip."



"Poor things! to be left alone in the cold world

so."



"Well, they could be worse off. Old Peter had

friends, and they ain't going to let them come to no

harm. There's Hobson, the Babtis' preacher; and

Deacon Lot Hovey, and Ben Rucker, and Abner

Shackleford, and Levi Bell, the lawyer; and Dr. Rob-

inson, and their wives, and the widow Bartley, and --

well, there's a lot of them; but these are the ones that

Peter was thickest with, and used to write about some-

times, when he wrote home; so Harvey 'll know where

to look for friends when he gets here."



Well, the old man went on asking questions till he

just fairly emptied that young fellow. Blamed if he

didn't inquire about everybody and everything in that

blessed town, and all about the Wilkses; and about

Peter's business -- which was a tanner; and about

George's -- which was a carpenter; and about Har-

vey's -- which was a dissentering minister; and so on,

and so on. Then he says:



"What did you want to walk all the way up to the

steamboat for?"



"Because she's a big Orleans boat, and I was afeard

she mightn't stop there. When they're deep they

won't stop for a hail. A Cincinnati boat will, but this

is a St. Louis one."



"Was Peter Wilks well off?"



"Oh, yes, pretty well off. He had houses and

land, and it's reckoned he left three or four thousand

in cash hid up som'ers."



"When did you say he died?"



"I didn't say, but it was last night."



"Funeral to-morrow, likely?"



"Yes, 'bout the middle of the day."



"Well, it's all terrible sad; but we've all got to go,

one time or another. So what we want to do is to be

prepared; then we're all right."



"Yes, sir, it's the best way. Ma used to always

say that."



When we struck the boat she was about done load-

ing, and pretty soon she got off. The king never said

nothing about going aboard, so I lost my ride, after

all. When the boat was gone the king made me pad-

dle up another mile to a lonesome place, and then he

got ashore and says:



"Now hustle back, right off, and fetch the duke up

here, and the new carpet-bags. And if he's gone over

to t'other side, go over there and git him. And tell

him to git himself up regardless. Shove along, now."



I see what HE was up to; but I never said nothing,

of course. When I got back with the duke we hid the

canoe, and then they set down on a log, and the king

told him everything, just like the young fellow had

said it -- every last word of it. And all the time he

was a-doing it he tried to talk like an Englishman;

and he done it pretty well, too, for a slouch. I can't

imitate him, and so I ain't a-going to try to; but he

really done it pretty good. Then he says:



"How are you on the deef and dumb, Bilgewater?"



The duke said, leave him alone for that; said he had

played a deef and dumb person on the histronic boards.

So then they waited for a steamboat.



About the middle of the afternoon a couple of little

boats come along, but they didn't come from high

enough up the river; but at last there was a big one,

and they hailed her. She sent out her yawl, and we

went aboard, and she was from Cincinnati; and when

they found we only wanted to go four or five mile

they was booming mad, and gave us a cussing, and

said they wouldn't land us. But the king was ca'm.

He says:



"If gentlemen kin afford to pay a dollar a mile

apiece to be took on and put off in a yawl, a steam-

boat kin afford to carry 'em, can't it?"



So they softened down and said it was all right;

and when we got to the village they yawled us ashore.

About two dozen men flocked down when they see the

yawl a-coming, and when the king says:



"Kin any of you gentlemen tell me wher' Mr. Peter

Wilks lives?" they give a glance at one another, and

nodded their heads, as much as to say, "What d' I

tell you?" Then one of them says, kind of soft and

gentle:



"I'm sorry. sir, but the best we can do is to tell

you where he DID live yesterday evening."



Sudden as winking the ornery old cretur went an

to smash, and fell up against the man, and put his

chin on his shoulder, and cried down his back, and

says:



"Alas, alas, our poor brother -- gone, and we never

got to see him; oh, it's too, too hard!"



Then he turns around, blubbering, and makes a lot

of idiotic signs to the duke on his hands, and blamed

if he didn't drop a carpet-bag and bust out a-crying.

If they warn't the beatenest lot, them two frauds, that

ever I struck.



Well, the men gathered around and sympathized

with them, and said all sorts of kind things to them,

and carried their carpet-bags up the hill for them, and

let them lean on them and cry, and told the king all

about his brother's last moments, and the king he told

it all over again on his hands to the duke, and both of

them took on about that dead tanner like they'd lost

the twelve disciples. Well, if ever I struck anything

like it, I'm a nigger. It was enough to make a body

ashamed of the human race.





CHAPTER XXV.



THE news was all over town in two minutes, and

you could see the people tearing down on the

run from every which way, some of them putting on

their coats as they come. Pretty soon we was in the

middle of a crowd, and the noise of the tramping was

like a soldier march. The windows and dooryards was

full; and every minute somebody would say, over a

fence:



"Is it THEM?"



And somebody trotting along with the gang would

answer back and say:



"You bet it is."



When we got to the house the street in front of it

was packed, and the three girls was standing in the

door. Mary Jane WAS red-headed, but that don't make

no difference, she was most awful beautiful, and her

face and her eyes was all lit up like glory, she was so

glad her uncles was come. The king he spread his

arms, and Marsy Jane she jumped for them, and the

hare-lip jumped for the duke, and there they HAD it!

Everybody most, leastways women, cried for joy to

see them meet again at last and have such good times.



Then the king he hunched the duke private -- I see

him do it -- and then he looked around and see the

coffin, over in the corner on two chairs; so then him

and the duke, with a hand across each other's shoul-

der, and t'other hand to their eyes, walked slow and

solemn over there, everybody dropping back to give

them room, and all the talk and noise stopping, people

saying "Sh!" and all the men taking their hats off and

drooping their heads, so you could a heard a pin fall.

And when they got there they bent over and looked in

the coffin, and took one sight, and then they bust out

a-crying so you could a heard them to Orleans, most;

and then they put their arms around each other's

necks, and hung their chins over each other's shoul-

ders; and then for three minutes, or maybe four, I

never see two men leak the way they done. And,

mind you, everybody was doing the same; and the

place was that damp I never see anything like it.

Then one of them got on one side of the coffin, and

t'other on t'other side, and they kneeled down and

rested their foreheads on the coffin, and let on to pray

all to themselves. Well, when it come to that it

worked the crowd like you never see anything like it,

and everybody broke down and went to sobbing right

out loud -- the poor girls, too; and every woman,

nearly, went up to the girls, without saying a word,

and kissed them, solemn, on the forehead, and then

put their hand on their head, and looked up towards

the sky, with the tears running down, and then busted

out and went off sobbing and swabbing, and give the

next woman a show. I never see anything so dis-

gusting.



Well, by and by the king he gets up and comes for-

ward a little, and works himself up and slobbers out a

speech, all full of tears and flapdoodle about its being

a sore trial for him and his poor brother to lose the

diseased, and to miss seeing diseased alive after the

long journey of four thousand mile, but it's a trial

that's sweetened and sanctified to us by this dear sym-

pathy and these holy tears, and so he thanks them out

of his heart and out of his brother's heart, because out

of their mouths they can't, words being too weak and

cold, and all that kind of rot and slush, till it was just

sickening; and then he blubbers out a pious goody-

goody Amen, and turns himself loose and goes to cry-

ing fit to bust.



And the minute the words were out of his mouth

somebody over in the crowd struck up the doxolojer,

and everybody joined in with all their might, and it

just warmed you up and made you feel as good as

church letting out. Music is a good thing; and after

all that soul-butter and hogwash I never see it freshen

up things so, and sound so honest and bully.



Then the king begins to work his jaw again, and

says how him and his nieces would be glad if a few of

the main principal friends of the family would take

supper here with them this evening, and help set up

with the ashes of the diseased; and says if his poor

brother laying yonder could speak he knows who he

would name, for they was names that was very dear to

him, and mentioned often in his letters; and so he will

name the same, to wit, as follows, vizz.: -- Rev. Mr.

Hobson, and Deacon Lot Hovey, and Mr. Ben Rucker,

and Abner Shackleford, and Levi Bell, and Dr. Robin-

son, and their wives, and the widow Bartley.



Rev. Hobson and Dr. Robinson was down to the

end of the town a-hunting together -- that is, I mean

the doctor was shipping a sick man to t'other world,

and the preacher was pinting him right. Lawyer Bell

was away up to Louisville on business. But the rest

was on hand, and so they all come and shook hands

with the king and thanked him and talked to him; and

then they shook hands with the duke and didn't say

nothing, but just kept a-smiling and bobbing their

heads like a passel of sapheads whilst he made all sorts

of signs with his hands and said "Goo-goo -- goo-goo-

goo" all the time, like a baby that can't talk.



So the king he blattered along, and managed to

inquire about pretty much everybody and dog in town,

by his name, and mentioned all sorts of little things

that happened one time or another in the town, or to

George's family, or to Peter. And he always let on

that Peter wrote him the things; but that was a lie:

he got every blessed one of them out of that young

flathead that we canoed up to the steamboat.



Then Mary Jane she fetched the letter her father

left behind, and the king he read it out loud and cried

over it. It give the dwelling-house and three thousand

dollars, gold, to the girls; and it give the tanyard

(which was doing a good business), along with some

other houses and land (worth about seven thousand),

and three thousand dollars in gold to Harvey and

William, and told where the six thousand cash was hid

down cellar. So these two frauds said they'd go and

fetch it up, and have everything square and above-

board; and told me to come with a candle. We shut

the cellar door behind us, and when they found the

bag they spilt it out on the floor, and it was a lovely

sight, all them yaller-boys. My, the way the king's

eyes did shine! He slaps the duke on the shoulder

and says:



"Oh, THIS ain't bully nor noth'n! Oh, no, I reckon

not! Why, Biljy, it beats the Nonesuch, DON'T it?"



The duke allowed it did. They pawed the yaller-

boys, and sifted them through their fingers and let

them jingle down on the floor; and the king says:



"It ain't no use talkin'; bein' brothers to a rich

dead man and representatives of furrin heirs that's got

left is the line for you and me, Bilge. Thish yer

comes of trust'n to Providence. It's the best way, in

the long run. I've tried 'em all, and ther' ain't no

better way."



Most everybody would a been satisfied with the pile,

and took it on trust; but no, they must count it. So

they counts it, and it comes out four hundred and

fifteen dollars short. Says the king:



"Dern him, I wonder what he done with that four

hundred and fifteen dollars?"



They worried over that awhile, and ransacked all

around for it. Then the duke says:



"Well, he was a pretty sick man, and likely he

made a mistake -- I reckon that's the way of it. The

best way's to let it go, and keep still about it. We

can spare it."



"Oh, shucks, yes, we can SPARE it. I don't k'yer

noth'n 'bout that -- it's the COUNT I'm thinkin' about.

We want to be awful square and open and above-board

here, you know. We want to lug this h-yer money

up stairs and count it before everybody -- then ther'

ain't noth'n suspicious. But when the dead man says

ther's six thous'n dollars, you know, we don't want

to --"



"Hold on," says the duke. "Le's make up the

deffisit," and he begun to haul out yaller-boys out of

his pocket.



"It's a most amaz'n' good idea, duke -- you HAVE

got a rattlin' clever head on you," says the king.

"Blest if the old Nonesuch ain't a heppin' us out

agin," and HE begun to haul out yaller-jackets and

stack them up.



It most busted them, but they made up the six

thousand clean and clear.



"Say," says the duke, "I got another idea. Le's

go up stairs and count this money, and then take and

GIVE IT TO THE GIRLS."



"Good land, duke, lemme hug you! It's the most

dazzling idea 'at ever a man struck. You have cert'nly

got the most astonishin' head I ever see. Oh, this is

the boss dodge, ther' ain't no mistake 'bout it. Let

'em fetch along their suspicions now if they want to --

this 'll lay 'em out."



When we got up-stairs everybody gethered around

the table, and the king he counted it and stacked it up,

three hundred dollars in a pile -- twenty elegant little

piles. Everybody looked hungry at it, and licked their

chops. Then they raked it into the bag again, and I

see the king begin to swell himself up for another

speech. He says:



"Friends all, my poor brother that lays yonder has

done generous by them that's left behind in the vale of

sorrers. He has done generous by these yer poor

little lambs that he loved and sheltered, and that's left

fatherless and motherless. Yes, and we that knowed

him knows that he would a done MORE generous by 'em

if he hadn't ben afeard o' woundin' his dear William

and me. Now, WOULDN'T he? Ther' ain't no question

'bout it in MY mind. Well, then, what kind o' brothers

would it be that 'd stand in his way at sech a time?

And what kind o' uncles would it be that 'd rob -- yes,

ROB -- sech poor sweet lambs as these 'at he loved so at

sech a time? If I know William -- and I THINK I do --

he -- well, I'll jest ask him." He turns around and

begins to make a lot of signs to the duke with his

hands, and the duke he looks at him stupid and leather-

headed a while; then all of a sudden he seems to catch

his meaning, and jumps for the king, goo-gooing with

all his might for joy, and hugs him about fifteen times

before he lets up. Then the king says, "I knowed

it; I reckon THAT 'll convince anybody the way HE feels

about it. Here, Mary Jane, Susan, Joanner, take the

money -- take it ALL. It's the gift of him that lays

yonder, cold but joyful."



Mary Jane she went for him, Susan and the hare-lip

went for the duke, and then such another hugging and

kissing I never see yet. And everybody crowded up

with the tears in their eyes, and most shook the hands

off of them frauds, saying all the time:



"You DEAR good souls! -- how LOVELY! -- how COULD

you!"



Well, then, pretty soon all hands got to talking

about the diseased again, and how good he was, and

what a loss he was, and all that; and before long a big

iron-jawed man worked himself in there from outside,

and stood a-listening and looking, and not saying any-

thing; and nobody saying anything to him either,

because the king was talking and they was all busy

listening. The king was saying -- in the middle of

something he'd started in on --



"-- they bein' partickler friends o' the diseased.

That's why they're invited here this evenin'; but to-

morrow we want ALL to come -- everybody; for he

respected everybody, he liked everybody, and so it's

fitten that his funeral orgies sh'd be public."



And so he went a-mooning on and on, liking to hear

himself talk, and every little while he fetched in his

funeral orgies again, till the duke he couldn't stand it

no more; so he writes on a little scrap of paper,

"OBSEQUIES, you old fool," and folds it up, and goes

to goo-gooing and reaching it over people's heads to

him. The king he reads it and puts it in his pocket,

and says:



"Poor William, afflicted as he is, his HEART'S aluz

right. Asks me to invite everybody to come to the

funeral -- wants me to make 'em all welcome. But he

needn't a worried -- it was jest what I was at."



Then he weaves along again, perfectly ca'm, and

goes to dropping in his funeral orgies again every now

and then, just like he done before. And when he

done it the third time he says:



"I say orgies, not because it's the common term,

because it ain't -- obsequies bein' the common term --

but because orgies is the right term. Obsequies ain't

used in England no more now -- it's gone out. We

say orgies now in England. Orgies is better, because

it means the thing you're after more exact. It's a

word that's made up out'n the Greek ORGO, outside,

open, abroad; and the Hebrew JEESUM, to plant, cover

up; hence inTER. So, you see, funeral orgies is an

open er public funeral."



He was the WORST I ever struck. Well, the iron-

jawed man he laughed right in his face. Everybody

was shocked. Everybody says, "Why, DOCTOR!" and

Abner Shackleford says:



"Why, Robinson, hain't you heard the news? This

is Harvey Wilks."



The king he smiled eager, and shoved out his

flapper, and says:



"Is it my poor brother's dear good friend and phy-

sician? I --"



"Keep your hands off of me!" says the doctor.

"YOU talk like an Englishman, DON'T you? It's the

worst imitation I ever heard. YOU Peter Wilks's

brother! You're a fraud, that's what you are!"



Well, how they all took on! They crowded around

the doctor and tried to quiet him down, and tried to

explain to him and tell him how Harvey 'd showed in

forty ways that he WAS Harvey, and knowed every-

body by name, and the names of the very dogs, and

begged and BEGGED him not to hurt Harvey's feelings

and the poor girl's feelings, and all that. But it warn't

no use; he stormed right along, and said any man that

pretended to be an Englishman and couldn't imitate

the lingo no better than what he did was a fraud and a

liar. The poor girls was hanging to the king and cry-

ing; and all of a sudden the doctor ups and turns on

THEM. He says:



"I was your father's friend, and I'm your friend;

and I warn you as a friend, and an honest one that

wants to protect you and keep you out of harm and

trouble, to turn your backs on that scoundrel and have

nothing to do with him, the ignorant tramp, with his

idiotic Greek and Hebrew, as he calls it. He is the

thinnest kind of an impostor -- has come here with a

lot of empty names and facts which he picked up

somewheres, and you take them for PROOFS, and are

helped to fool yourselves by these foolish friends here,

who ought to know better. Mary Jane Wilks, you

know me for your friend, and for your unselfish friend,

too. Now listen to me; turn this pitiful rascal out --

I BEG you to do it. Will you?"



Mary Jane straightened herself up, and my, but she

was handsome! She says:



"HERE is my answer." She hove up the bag of

money and put it in the king's hands, and says,

"Take this six thousand dollars, and invest for me

and my sisters any way you want to, and don't give

us no receipt for it."



Then she put her arm around the king on one side,

and Susan and the hare-lip done the same on the

other. Everybody clapped their hands and stomped

on the floor like a perfect storm, whilst the king held

up his head and smiled proud. The doctor says:



"All right; I wash MY hands of the matter. But I

warn you all that a time 's coming when you're going

to feel sick whenever you think of this day." And

away he went.



"All right, doctor," says the king, kinder mocking

him; "we'll try and get 'em to send for you;" which

made them all laugh, and they said it was a prime

good hit.





CHAPTER XXVI.



WELL, when they was all gone the king he asks

Mary Jane how they was off for spare rooms,

and she said she had one spare room, which would do

for Uncle William, and she'd give her own room to

Uncle Harvey, which was a little bigger, and she would

turn into the room with her sisters and sleep on a cot;

and up garret was a little cubby, with a pallet in it.

The king said the cubby would do for his valley --

meaning me.



So Mary Jane took us up, and she showed them

their rooms, which was plain but nice. She said she'd

have her frocks and a lot of other traps took out of

her room if they was in Uncle Harvey's way, but he

said they warn't. The frocks was hung along the wall,

and before them was a curtain made out of calico that

hung down to the floor. There was an old hair trunk

in one corner, and a guitar-box in another, and all

sorts of little knickknacks and jimcracks around, like

girls brisken up a room with. The king said it was all

the more homely and more pleasanter for these fixings,

and so don't disturb them. The duke's room was

pretty small, but plenty good enough, and so was my

cubby.



That night they had a big supper, and all them men

and women was there, and I stood behind the king and

the duke's chairs and waited on them, and the niggers

waited on the rest. Mary Jane she set at the head of

the table, with Susan alongside of her, and said how

bad the biscuits was, and how mean the preserves was,

and how ornery and tough the fried chickens was --

and all that kind of rot, the way women always do for

to force out compliments; and the people all knowed

everything was tiptop, and said so -- said "How DO

you get biscuits to brown so nice?" and "Where, for

the land's sake, DID you get these amaz'n pickles?"

and all that kind of humbug talky-talk, just the way

people always does at a supper, you know.



And when it was all done me and the hare-lip had

supper in the kitchen off of the leavings, whilst the others

was helping the niggers clean up the things. The

hare-lip she got to pumping me about England, and

blest if I didn't think the ice was getting mighty thin

sometimes. She says:



"Did you ever see the king?"



"Who? William Fourth? Well, I bet I have -- he

goes to our church." I knowed he was dead years

ago, but I never let on. So when I says he goes to

our church, she says:



"What -- regular?"



"Yes -- regular. His pew's right over opposite

ourn -- on t'other side the pulpit."



"I thought he lived in London?"



"Well, he does. Where WOULD he live?"



"But I thought YOU lived in Sheffield?"



I see I was up a stump. I had to let on to get

choked with a chicken bone, so as to get time to think

how to get down again. Then I says:



"I mean he goes to our church regular when he's in

Sheffield. That's only in the summer time, when he

comes there to take the sea baths."



"Why, how you talk -- Sheffield ain't on the sea."



"Well, who said it was?"



"Why, you did."



"I DIDN'T nuther."



"You did!"



"I didn't."



"You did."



"I never said nothing of the kind."



"Well, what DID you say, then?"



"Said he come to take the sea BATHS -- that's what I

said."



"Well, then, how's he going to take the sea baths if

it ain't on the sea?"



"Looky here," I says; "did you ever see any

Congress-water?"



"Yes."



"Well, did you have to go to Congress to get

it?"



"Why, no."



"Well, neither does William Fourth have to go to

the sea to get a sea bath."



"How does he get it, then?"



"Gets it the way people down here gets Congress-

water -- in barrels. There in the palace at Sheffield

they've got furnaces, and he wants his water hot.

They can't bile that amount of water away off there at

the sea. They haven't got no conveniences for it."



"Oh, I see, now. You might a said that in the first

place and saved time."



When she said that I see I was out of the woods

again, and so I was comfortable and glad. Next, she

says:



"Do you go to church, too?"



"Yes -- regular."



"Where do you set?"



"Why, in our pew."



"WHOSE pew?"



"Why, OURN -- your Uncle Harvey's."



"His'n? What does HE want with a pew?"



"Wants it to set in. What did you RECKON he wanted

with it?"



"Why, I thought he'd be in the pulpit."



Rot him, I forgot he was a preacher. I see I was

up a stump again, so I played another chicken bone

and got another think. Then I says:



"Blame it, do you suppose there ain't but one

preacher to a church?"



"Why, what do they want with more?"



"What! -- to preach before a king? I never did

see such a girl as you. They don't have no less than

seventeen."



"Seventeen! My land! Why, I wouldn't set out

such a string as that, not if I NEVER got to glory. It

must take 'em a week."



"Shucks, they don't ALL of 'em preach the same

day -- only ONE of 'em."





"Well, then, what does the rest of 'em do?"



"Oh, nothing much. Loll around, pass the plate

-- and one thing or another. But mainly they don't

do nothing."



"Well, then, what are they FOR?"



"Why, they're for STYLE. Don't you know noth-

ing?"



"Well, I don't WANT to know no such foolishness as

that. How is servants treated in England? Do they

treat 'em better 'n we treat our niggers?"



"NO! A servant ain't nobody there. They treat

them worse than dogs."



"Don't they give 'em holidays, the way we do,

Christmas and New Year's week, and Fourth of July?"



"Oh, just listen! A body could tell YOU hain't ever

been to England by that. Why, Hare-l -- why, Joanna,

they never see a holiday from year's end to year's

end; never go to the circus, nor theater, nor nigger

shows, nor nowheres."



"Nor church?"



"Nor church."



"But YOU always went to church."



Well, I was gone up again. I forgot I was the old

man's servant. But next minute I whirled in on a

kind of an explanation how a valley was different from

a common servant and HAD to go to church whether

he wanted to or not, and set with the family, on ac-

count of its being the law. But I didn't do it pretty

good, and when I got done I see she warn't satisfied.

She says:



"Honest injun, now, hain't you been telling me a

lot of lies?"



"Honest injun," says I.



"None of it at all?"



"None of it at all. Not a lie in it," says I.



"Lay your hand on this book and say it."



I see it warn't nothing but a dictionary, so I laid my

hand on it and said it. So then she looked a little

better satisfied, and says:



"Well, then, I'll believe some of it; but I hope to

gracious if I'll believe the rest."



"What is it you won't believe, Joe?" says Mary

Jane, stepping in with Susan behind her. "It ain't

right nor kind for you to talk so to him, and him a

stranger and so far from his people. How would you

like to be treated so?"



"That's always your way, Maim -- always sailing in

to help somebody before they're hurt. I hain't done

nothing to him. He's told some stretchers, I reckon,

and I said I wouldn't swallow it all; and that's every

bit and grain I DID say. I reckon he can stand a little

thing like that, can't he?"



"I don't care whether 'twas little or whether 'twas

big; he's here in our house and a stranger, and it

wasn't good of you to say it. If you was in his place

it would make you feel ashamed; and so you oughtn't

to say a thing to another person that will make THEM

feel ashamed."



"Why, Maim, he said --"



"It don't make no difference what he SAID -- that

ain't the thing. The thing is for you to treat him

KIND, and not be saying things to make him remember

he ain't in his own country and amongst his own

folks."



I says to myself, THIS is a girl that I'm letting that

old reptle rob her of her money!



Then Susan SHE waltzed in; and if you'll believe

me, she did give Hare-lip hark from the tomb!



Says I to myself, and this is ANOTHER one that I'm

letting him rob her of her money!



Then Mary Jane she took another inning, and went

in sweet and lovely again -- which was her way; but

when she got done there warn't hardly anything left o'

poor Hare-lip. So she hollered.



"All right, then," says the other girls; "you just

ask his pardon."



She done it, too; and she done it beautiful. She

done it so beautiful it was good to hear; and I wished

I could tell her a thousand lies, so she could do it

again.



I says to myself, this is ANOTHER one that I'm letting

him rob her of her money. And when she got through

they all jest laid theirselves out to make me feel at

home and know I was amongst friends. I felt so

ornery and low down and mean that I says to myself,

my mind's made up; I'll hive that money for them or

bust.



So then I lit out -- for bed, I said, meaning some

time or another. When I got by myself I went to

thinking the thing over. I says to myself, shall I go

to that doctor, private, and blow on these frauds?

No -- that won't do. He might tell who told him;

then the king and the duke would make it warm for

me. Shall I go, private, and tell Mary Jane? No --

I dasn't do it. Her face would give them a hint,

sure; they've got the money, and they'd slide right

out and get away with it. If she was to fetch in help

I'd get mixed up in the business before it was done

with, I judge. No; there ain't no good way but one.

I got to steal that money, somehow; and I got to

steal it some way that they won't suspicion that I done

it. They've got a good thing here, and they ain't

a-going to leave till they've played this family and this

town for all they're worth, so I'll find a chance time

enough. I'll steal it and hide it; and by and by,

when I'm away down the river, I'll write a letter and

tell Mary Jane where it's hid. But I better hive it to-

night if I can, because the doctor maybe hasn't let up

as much as he lets on he has; he might scare them

out of here yet.



So, thinks I, I'll go and search them rooms. Up-

stairs the hall was dark, but I found the duke's room,

and started to paw around it with my hands; but I

recollected it wouldn't be much like the king to let

anybody else take care of that money but his own self;

so then I went to his room and begun to paw around

there. But I see I couldn't do nothing without a

candle, and I dasn't light one, of course. So I judged

I'd got to do the other thing -- lay for them and

eavesdrop. About that time I hears their footsteps

coming, and was going to skip under the bed; I

reached for it, but it wasn't where I thought it would

be; but I touched the curtain that hid Mary Jane's

frocks, so I jumped in behind that and snuggled in

amongst the gowns, and stood there perfectly still.



They come in and shut the door; and the first thing

the duke done was to get down and look under the

bed. Then I was glad I hadn't found the bed when I

wanted it. And yet, you know, it's kind of natural to

hide under the bed when you are up to anything

private. They sets down then, and the king says:



"Well, what is it? And cut it middlin' short, be-

cause it's better for us to be down there a-whoopin'

up the mournin' than up here givin' 'em a chance to

talk us over."



"Well, this is it, Capet. I ain't easy; I ain't com-

fortable. That doctor lays on my mind. I wanted to

know your plans. I've got a notion, and I think it's a

sound one."



"What is it, duke?"



"That we better glide out of this before three in the

morning, and clip it down the river with what we've

got. Specially, seeing we got it so easy -- GIVEN back

to us, flung at our heads, as you may say, when of

course we allowed to have to steal it back. I'm for

knocking off and lighting out."



That made me feel pretty bad. About an hour or

two ago it would a been a little different, but now it

made me feel bad and disappointed, The king rips out

and says:



"What! And not sell out the rest o' the property?

March off like a passel of fools and leave eight or nine

thous'n' dollars' worth o' property layin' around jest

sufferin' to be scooped in? -- and all good, salable

stuff, too."



The duke he grumbled; said the bag of gold was

enough, and he didn't want to go no deeper -- didn't

want to rob a lot of orphans of EVERYTHING they had.



"Why, how you talk!" says the king. "We

sha'n't rob 'em of nothing at all but jest this money.

The people that BUYS the property is the suff'rers;

because as soon 's it's found out 'at we didn't own

it -- which won't be long after we've slid -- the sale

won't be valid, and it 'll all go back to the estate.

These yer orphans 'll git their house back agin, and

that's enough for THEM; they're young and spry, and

k'n easy earn a livin'. THEY ain't a-goin to suffer.

Why, jest think -- there's thous'n's and thous'n's that

ain't nigh so well off. Bless you, THEY ain't got noth'n'

to complain of."



Well, the king he talked him blind; so at last he

give in, and said all right, but said he believed it was

blamed foolishness to stay, and that doctor hanging

over them. But the king says:



"Cuss the doctor! What do we k'yer for HIM?

Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And

ain't that a big enough majority in any town?"



So they got ready to go down stairs again. The

duke says:



"I don't think we put that money in a good place."



That cheered me up. I'd begun to think I warn't

going to get a hint of no kind to help me. The king

says:



"Why?"



"Because Mary Jane 'll be in mourning from this

out; and first you know the nigger that does up the

rooms will get an order to box these duds up and put

'em away; and do you reckon a nigger can run across

money and not borrow some of it?"



"Your head's level agin, duke," says the king; and

he comes a-fumbling under the curtain two or three

foot from where I was. I stuck tight to the wall and

kept mighty still, though quivery; and I wondered

what them fellows would say to me if they catched

me; and I tried to think what I'd better do if they did

catch me. But the king he got the bag before I could

think more than about a half a thought, and he never

suspicioned I was around. They took and shoved the

bag through a rip in the straw tick that was under the

feather-bed, and crammed it in a foot or two amongst

the straw and said it was all right now, because a

nigger only makes up the feather-bed, and don't turn

over the straw tick only about twice a year, and so it

warn't in no danger of getting stole now.



But I knowed better. I had it out of there before

they was half-way down stairs. I groped along up to

my cubby, and hid it there till I could get a chance

to do better. I judged I better hide it outside of the

house somewheres, because if they missed it they would

give the house a good ransacking: I knowed that very

well. Then I turned in, with my clothes all on; but I

couldn't a gone to sleep if I'd a wanted to, I was in

such a sweat to get through with the business. By

and by I heard the king and the duke come up; so I

rolled off my pallet and laid with my chin at the top of

my ladder, and waited to see if anything was going to

happen. But nothing did.



So I held on till all the late sounds had quit and the

early ones hadn't begun yet; and then I slipped down

the ladder.





CHAPTER XXVII.



I CREPT to their doors and listened; they was snor-

ing. So I tiptoed along, and got down stairs all

right. There warn't a sound anywheres. I peeped

through a crack of the dining-room door, and see the

men that was watching the corpse all sound asleep on

their chairs. The door was open into the parlor, where

the corpse was laying, and there was a candle in both

rooms. I passed along, and the parlor door was open;

but I see there warn't nobody in there but the re-

mainders of Peter; so I shoved on by; but the front

door was locked, and the key wasn't there. Just then

I heard somebody coming down the stairs, back behind

me. I run in the parlor and took a swift look around,

and the only place I see to hide the bag was in the

coffin. The lid was shoved along about a foot, show-

ing the dead man's face down in there, with a wet

cloth over it, and his shroud on. I tucked the money-

bag in under the lid, just down beyond where his

hands was crossed, which made me creep, they was so

cold, and then I run back across the room and in

behind the door.



The person coming was Mary Jane. She went to

the coffin, very soft, and kneeled down and looked in;

then she put up her handkerchief, and I see she begun

to cry, though I couldn't hear her, and her back was

to me. I slid out, and as I passed the dining-room I

thought I'd make sure them watchers hadn't seen me;

so I looked through the crack, and everything was all

right. They hadn't stirred.



I slipped up to bed, feeling ruther blue, on accounts

of the thing playing out that way after I had took so

much trouble and run so much resk about it. Says I,

if it could stay where it is, all right; because when we

get down the river a hundred mile or two I could write

back to Mary Jane, and she could dig him up again

and get it; but that ain't the thing that's going to

happen; the thing that's going to happen is, the

money 'll be found when they come to screw on the

lid. Then the king 'll get it again, and it 'll be a long

day before he gives anybody another chance to smouch

it from him. Of course I WANTED to slide down and

get it out of there, but I dasn't try it. Every minute

it was getting earlier now, and pretty soon some of

them watchers would begin to stir, and I might get

catched -- catched with six thousand dollars in my

hands that nobody hadn't hired me to take care of. I

don't wish to be mixed up in no such business as that,

I says to myself.



When I got down stairs in the morning the parlor

was shut up, and the watchers was gone. There warn't

nobody around but the family and the widow Bartley

and our tribe. I watched their faces to see if anything

had been happening, but I couldn't tell.



Towards the middle of the day the undertaker come

with his man, and they set the coffin in the middle of

the room on a couple of chairs, and then set all our

chairs in rows, and borrowed more from the neighbors

till the hall and the parlor and the dining-room was

full. I see the coffin lid was the way it was before,

but I dasn't go to look in under it, with folks around.



Then the people begun to flock in, and the beats

and the girls took seats in the front row at the head of

the coffin, and for a half an hour the people filed

around slow, in single rank, and looked down at the

dead man's face a minute, and some dropped in a tear,

and it was all very still and solemn, only the girls and

the beats holding handkerchiefs to their eyes and keep-

ing their heads bent, and sobbing a little. There

warn't no other sound but the scraping of the feet on

the floor and blowing noses -- because people always

blows them more at a funeral than they do at other

places except church.



When the place was packed full the undertaker he

slid around in his black gloves with his softy soother-

ing ways, putting on the last touches, and getting

people and things all ship-shape and comfortable, and

making no more sound than a cat. He never spoke;

he moved people around, he squeezed in late ones, he

opened up passageways, and done it with nods, and

signs with his hands. Then he took his place over

against the wall. He was the softest, glidingest,

stealthiest man I ever see; and there warn't no more

smile to him than there is to a ham.



They had borrowed a melodeum -- a sick one; and

when everything was ready a young woman set down

and worked it, and it was pretty skreeky and colicky,

and everybody joined in and sung, and Peter was the

only one that had a good thing, according to my

notion. Then the Reverend Hobson opened up, slow

and solemn, and begun to talk; and straight off the

most outrageous row busted out in the cellar a body

ever heard; it was only one dog, but he made a most

powerful racket, and he kept it up right along; the

parson he had to stand there, over the coffin, and wait

-- you couldn't hear yourself think. It was right

down awkward, and nobody didn't seem to know what

to do. But pretty soon they see that long-legged

undertaker make a sign to the preacher as much as to

say, "Don't you worry -- just depend on me." Then

he stooped down and begun to glide along the wall,

just his shoulders showing over the people's heads.

So he glided along, and the powwow and racket get-

ting more and more outrageous all the time; and at

last, when he had gone around two sides of the room,

he disappears down cellar. Then in about two seconds

we heard a whack, and the dog he finished up with a

most amazing howl or two, and then everything was

dead still, and the parson begun his solemn talk where

he left off. In a minute or two here comes this under-

taker's back and shoulders gliding along the wall

again; and so he glided and glided around three sides

of the room, and then rose up, and shaded his mouth

with his hands, and stretched his neck out towards the

preacher, over the people's heads, and says, in a kind

of a coarse whisper, "HE HAD A RAT!" Then he

drooped down and glided along the wall again to his

place. You could see it was a great satisfaction to the

people, because naturally they wanted to know. A

little thing like that don't cost nothing, and it's just the

little things that makes a man to be looked up to and

liked. There warn't no more popular man in town

than what that undertaker was.



Well, the funeral sermon was very good, but pison

long and tiresome; and then the king he shoved in and

got off some of his usual rubbage, and at last the job

was through, and the undertaker begun to sneak up on

the coffin with his screw-driver. I was in a sweat

then, and watched him pretty keen. But he never

meddled at all; just slid the lid along as soft as mush,

and screwed it down tight and fast. So there I was!

I didn't know whether the money was in there or not.

So, says I, s'pose somebody has hogged that bag on

the sly? -- now how do I know whether to write to

Mary Jane or not? S'pose she dug him up and didn't

find nothing, what would she think of me? Blame it,

I says, I might get hunted up and jailed; I'd better

lay low and keep dark, and not write at all; the thing's

awful mixed now; trying to better it, I've worsened it

a hundred times, and I wish to goodness I'd just let it

alone, dad fetch the whole business!



They buried him, and we come back home, and I

went to watching faces again -- I couldn't help it, and

I couldn't rest easy. But nothing come of it; the

faces didn't tell me nothing.



The king he visited around in the evening, and

sweetened everybody up, and made himself ever so

friendly; and he give out the idea that his congrega-

tion over in England would be in a sweat about him,

so he must hurry and settle up the estate right away

and leave for home. He was very sorry he was so

pushed, and so was everybody; they wished he could

stay longer, but they said they could see it couldn't be

done. And he said of course him and William would

take the girls home with them; and that pleased every-

body too, because then the girls would be well fixed and

amongst their own relations; and it pleased the girls,

too -- tickled them so they clean forgot they ever had

a trouble in the world; and told him to sell out as

quick as he wanted to, they would be ready. Them

poor things was that glad and happy it made my heart

ache to see them getting fooled and lied to so, but I

didn't see no safe way for me to chip in and change

the general tune.



Well, blamed if the king didn't bill the house and

the niggers and all the property for auction straight

off -- sale two days after the funeral; but anybody

could buy private beforehand if they wanted to.



So the next day after the funeral, along about noon-

time, the girls' joy got the first jolt. A couple of

nigger traders come along, and the king sold them the

niggers reasonable, for three-day drafts as they called

it, and away they went, the two sons up the river to

Memphis, and their mother down the river to Orleans.

I thought them poor girls and them niggers would

break their hearts for grief; they cried around each

other, and took on so it most made me down sick to

see it. The girls said they hadn't ever dreamed of

seeing the family separated or sold away from the

town. I can't ever get it out of my memory, the

sight of them poor miserable girls and niggers hanging

around each other's necks and crying; and I reckon I

couldn't a stood it all, but would a had to bust out

and tell on our gang if I hadn't knowed the sale warn't

no account and the niggers would be back home in a

week or two.



The thing made a big stir in the town, too, and a

good many come out flatfooted and said it was scandal-

ous to separate the mother and the children that way.

It injured the frauds some; but the old fool he bulled

right along, spite of all the duke could say or do, and

I tell you the duke was powerful uneasy.



Next day was auction day. About broad day in the

morning the king and the duke come up in the garret

and woke me up, and I see by their look that there

was trouble. The king says:



"Was you in my room night before last?"



"No, your majesty" -- which was the way I always

called him when nobody but our gang warn't around.



"Was you in there yisterday er last night?"



"No, your majesty."



"Honor bright, now -- no lies."



"Honor bright, your majesty, I'm telling you the

truth. I hain't been a-near your room since Miss Mary

Jane took you and the duke and showed it to you."



The duke says:



"Have you seen anybody else go in there?"



"No, your grace, not as I remember, I believe."



"Stop and think."



I studied awhile and see my chance; then I says:



"Well, I see the niggers go in there several times."



Both of them gave a little jump, and looked like

they hadn't ever expected it, and then like they HAD.

Then the duke says:



"What, all of them?"



"No -- leastways, not all at once -- that is, I don't

think I ever see them all come OUT at once but just one

time."



"Hello! When was that?"



"It was the day we had the funeral. In the morn-

ing. It warn't early, because I overslept. I was just

starting down the ladder, and I see them."



"Well, go on, GO on! What did they do? How'd

they act?"



"They didn't do nothing. And they didn't act

anyway much, as fur as I see. They tiptoed away;

so I seen, easy enough, that they'd shoved in there to

do up your majesty's room, or something, s'posing

you was up; and found you WARN'T up, and so they

was hoping to slide out of the way of trouble without

waking you up, if they hadn't already waked you up."



"Great guns, THIS is a go!" says the king; and

both of them looked pretty sick and tolerable silly.

They stood there a-thinking and scratching their heads

a minute, and the duke he bust into a kind of a little

raspy chuckle, and says:



"It does beat all how neat the niggers played their

hand. They let on to be SORRY they was going out of

this region! And I believed they WAS sorry, and so

did you, and so did everybody. Don't ever tell ME

any more that a nigger ain't got any histrionic talent.

Why, the way they played that thing it would fool

ANYBODY. In my opinion, there's a fortune in 'em. If

I had capital and a theater, I wouldn't want a better

lay-out than that -- and here we've gone and sold 'em

for a song. Yes, and ain't privileged to sing the song

yet. Say, where IS that song -- that draft?"



"In the bank for to be collected. Where WOULD it

be?"



"Well, THAT'S all right then, thank goodness."



Says I, kind of timid-like:



"Is something gone wrong?"



The king whirls on me and rips out:



"None o' your business! You keep your head

shet, and mind y'r own affairs -- if you got any.

Long as you're in this town don't you forgit THAT --

you hear?" Then he says to the duke, "We got to

jest swaller it and say noth'n': mum's the word for US."



As they was starting down the ladder the duke he

chuckles again, and says:



"Quick sales AND small profits! It's a good busi-

ness -- yes."



The king snarls around on him and says:



"I was trying to do for the best in sellin' 'em out

so quick. If the profits has turned out to be none,

lackin' considable, and none to carry, is it my fault

any more'n it's yourn?"



"Well, THEY'D be in this house yet and we WOULDN'T

if I could a got my advice listened to."



The king sassed back as much as was safe for him,

and then swapped around and lit into ME again. He

give me down the banks for not coming and TELLING

him I see the niggers come out of his room acting that

way -- said any fool would a KNOWED something was

up. And then waltzed in and cussed HIMSELF awhile,

and said it all come of him not laying late and taking

his natural rest that morning, and he'd be blamed if he'd

ever do it again. So they went off a-jawing; and I

felt dreadful glad I'd worked it all off on to the niggers,

and yet hadn't done the niggers no harm by it.





CHAPTER XXVIII.



BY and by it was getting-up time. So I come down

the ladder and started for down-stairs; but as I

come to the girls' room the door was open, and I see

Mary Jane setting by her old hair trunk, which was

open and she'd been packing things in it -- getting

ready to go to England. But she had stopped now

with a folded gown in her lap, and had her face in her

hands, crying. I felt awful bad to see it; of course

anybody would. I went in there and says:



"Miss Mary Jane, you can't a-bear to see people

in trouble, and I can't -- most always. Tell me

about it."



So she done it. And it was the niggers -- I just

expected it. She said the beautiful trip to England

was most about spoiled for her; she didn't know HOW

she was ever going to be happy there, knowing the

mother and the children warn't ever going to see

each other no more -- and then busted out bitterer

than ever, and flung up her hands, and says:



"Oh, dear, dear, to think they ain't EVER going to

see each other any more!"



"But they WILL -- and inside of two weeks -- and I

KNOW it!" says I.



Laws, it was out before I could think! And before

I could budge she throws her arms around my neck

and told me to say it AGAIN, say it AGAIN, say it AGAIN!



I see I had spoke too sudden and said too much,

and was in a close place. I asked her to let me think

a minute; and she set there, very impatient and ex-

cited and handsome, but looking kind of happy and

eased-up, like a person that's had a tooth pulled out.

So I went to studying it out. I says to myself, I

reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is

in a tight place is taking considerable many resks,

though I ain't had no experience, and can't say for

certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here's

a case where I'm blest if it don't look to me like the

truth is better and actuly SAFER than a lie. I must lay

it by in my mind, and think it over some time or

other, it's so kind of strange and unregular. I never

see nothing like it. Well, I says to myself at last,

I'm a-going to chance it; I'll up and tell the truth this

time, though it does seem most like setting down on a

kag of powder and touching it off just to see where

you'll go to. Then I says:



"Miss Mary Jane, is there any place out of town a

little ways where you could go and stay three or four

days?"



"Yes; Mr. Lothrop's. Why?"



"Never mind why yet. If I'll tell you how I know

the niggers will see each other again inside of two

weeks -- here in this house -- and PROVE how I know

it -- will you go to Mr. Lothrop's and stay four days?"



"Four days!" she says; "I'll stay a year!"



"All right," I says, "I don't want nothing more

out of YOU than just your word -- I druther have it than

another man's kiss-the-Bible." She smiled and red-

dened up very sweet, and I says, "If you don't mind

it, I'll shut the door -- and bolt it."



Then I come back and set down again, and says:



"Don't you holler. Just set still and take it like a

man. I got to tell the truth, and you want to brace

up, Miss Mary, because it's a bad kind, and going to

be hard to take, but there ain't no help for it. These

uncles of yourn ain't no uncles at all; they're a couple

of frauds -- regular dead-beats. There, now we're

over the worst of it, you can stand the rest middling

easy."



It jolted her up like everything, of course; but I

was over the shoal water now, so I went right along,

her eyes a-blazing higher and higher all the time, and

told her every blame thing, from where we first struck

that young fool going up to the steamboat, clear

through to where she flung herself on to the king's

breast at the front door and he kissed her sixteen or

seventeen times -- and then up she jumps, with her

face afire like sunset, and says:



"The brute! Come, don't waste a minute -- not a

SECOND -- we'll have them tarred and feathered, and

flung in the river!"



Says I:



"Cert'nly. But do you mean BEFORE you go to Mr.

Lothrop's, or --"



"Oh," she says, "what am I THINKING about!"

she says, and set right down again. "Don't mind

what I said -- please don't -- you WON'T, now, WILL

you?" Laying her silky hand on mine in that kind

of a way that I said I would die first. "I never

thought, I was so stirred up," she says; "now go on,

and I won't do so any more. You tell me what to do,

and whatever you say I'll do it."



"Well," I says, "it's a rough gang, them two

frauds, and I'm fixed so I got to travel with them a

while longer, whether I want to or not -- I druther not

tell you why; and if you was to blow on them this

town would get me out of their claws, and I'd be all

right; but there'd be another person that you don't

know about who'd be in big trouble. Well, we got

to save HIM, hain't we? Of course. Well, then, we

won't blow on them."



Saying them words put a good idea in my head. I

see how maybe I could get me and Jim rid of the

frauds; get them jailed here, and then leave. But I

didn't want to run the raft in the daytime without any-

body aboard to answer questions but me; so I didn't

want the plan to begin working till pretty late to-night.

I says:



"Miss Mary Jane, I'll tell you what we'll do, and

you won't have to stay at Mr. Lothrop's so long,

nuther. How fur is it?"



"A little short of four miles -- right out in the

country, back here."



"Well, that 'll answer. Now you go along out there,

and lay low till nine or half-past to-night, and then get

them to fetch you home again -- tell them you've

thought of something. If you get here before eleven

put a candle in this window, and if I don't turn up

wait TILL eleven, and THEN if I don't turn up it means

I'm gone, and out of the way, and safe. Then you

come out and spread the news around, and get these

beats jailed."



"Good," she says, "I'll do it."



"And if it just happens so that I don't get away,

but get took up along with them, you must up and say

I told you the whole thing beforehand, and you must

stand by me all you can."



"Stand by you! indeed I will. They sha'n't touch

a hair of your head!" she says, and I see her nostrils

spread and her eyes snap when she said it, too.



"If I get away I sha'n't be here," I says, "to

prove these rapscallions ain't your uncles, and I

couldn't do it if I WAS here. I could swear they was

beats and bummers, that's all, though that's worth

something. Well, there's others can do that better than

what I can, and they're people that ain't going to be

doubted as quick as I'd be. I'll tell you how to find

them. Gimme a pencil and a piece of paper. There

-- 'Royal Nonesuch, Bricksville.' Put it away, and

don't lose it. When the court wants to find out some-

thing about these two, let them send up to Bricksville

and say they've got the men that played the Royal

Nonesuch, and ask for some witnesses -- why, you'll

have that entire town down here before you can hardly

wink, Miss Mary. And they'll come a-biling, too."



I judged we had got everything fixed about right

now. So I says:



"Just let the auction go right along, and don't

worry. Nobody don't have to pay for the things they

buy till a whole day after the auction on accounts of

the short notice, and they ain't going out of this till

they get that money; and the way we've fixed it the

sale ain't going to count, and they ain't going to get

no money. It's just like the way it was with the

niggers -- it warn't no sale, and the niggers will be

back before long. Why, they can't collect the money

for the NIGGERS yet -- they're in the worst kind of a

fix, Miss Mary."



"Well," she says, "I'll run down to breakfast now,

and then I'll start straight for Mr. Lothrop's."



"'Deed, THAT ain't the ticket, Miss Mary Jane," I

says, "by no manner of means; go BEFORE breakfast."



"Why?"



"What did you reckon I wanted you to go at all

for, Miss Mary?"



"Well, I never thought -- and come to think, I

don't know. What was it?"



"Why, it's because you ain't one of these leather-

face people. I don't want no better book than what

your face is. A body can set down and read it off

like coarse print. Do you reckon you can go and

face your uncles when they come to kiss you good-

morning, and never --"



"There, there, don't! Yes, I'll go before break-

fast -- I'll be glad to. And leave my sisters with

them?"



"Yes; never mind about them. They've got to

stand it yet a while. They might suspicion something

if all of you was to go. I don't want you to see them,

nor your sisters, nor nobody in this town; if a neigh-

bor was to ask how is your uncles this morning your

face would tell something. No, you go right along,

Miss Mary Jane, and I'll fix it with all of them. I'll

tell Miss Susan to give your love to your uncles and

say you've went away for a few hours for to get a

little rest and change, or to see a friend, and you'll be

back to-night or early in the morning."



"Gone to see a friend is all right, but I won't have

my love given to them."



"Well, then, it sha'n't be." It was well enough to

tell HER so -- no harm in it. It was only a little thing

to do, and no trouble; and it's the little things that

smooths people's roads the most, down here below; it

would make Mary Jane comfortable, and it wouldn't

cost nothing. Then I says: "There's one more thing

-- that bag of money."



"Well, they've got that; and it makes me feel

pretty silly to think HOW they got it."



"No, you're out, there. They hain't got it."



"Why, who's got it?"



"I wish I knowed, but I don't. I HAD it, because I

stole it from them; and I stole it to give to you; and

I know where I hid it, but I'm afraid it ain't there no

more. I'm awful sorry, Miss Mary Jane, I'm just as

sorry as I can be; but I done the best I could; I did

honest. I come nigh getting caught, and I had to

shove it into the first place I come to, and run -- and

it warn't a good place."



"Oh, stop blaming yourself -- it's too bad to do it,

and I won't allow it -- you couldn't help it; it wasn't

your fault. Where did you hide it?"



I didn't want to set her to thinking about her

troubles again; and I couldn't seem to get my mouth

to tell her what would make her see that corpse laying

in the coffin with that bag of money on his stomach.

So for a minute I didn't say nothing; then I says:



"I'd ruther not TELL you where I put it, Miss Mary

Jane, if you don't mind letting me off; but I'll write it

for you on a piece of paper, and you can read it along

the road to Mr. Lothrop's, if you want to. Do you

reckon that 'll do?"



"Oh, yes."



So I wrote: "I put it in the coffin. It was in

there when you was crying there, away in the night.

I was behind the door, and I was mighty sorry for

you, Miss Mary Jane."



It made my eyes water a little to remember her cry-

ing there all by herself in the night, and them devils

laying there right under her own roof, shaming her

and robbing her; and when I folded it up and give it

to her I see the water come into her eyes, too; and

she shook me by the hand, hard, and says:



"GOOD-bye. I'm going to do everything just as

you've told me; and if I don't ever see you again, I

sha'n't ever forget you. and I'll think of you a many

and a many a time, and I'll PRAY for you, too!" -- and

she was gone.



Pray for me! I reckoned if she knowed me she'd

take a job that was more nearer her size. But I bet

she done it, just the same -- she was just that kind.

She had the grit to pray for Judus if she took the

notion -- there warn't no back-down to her, I judge.

You may say what you want to, but in my opinion

she had more sand in her than any girl I ever see; in

my opinion she was just full of sand. It sounds like

flattery, but it ain't no flattery. And when it comes

to beauty -- and goodness, too -- she lays over them

all. I hain't ever seen her since that time that I see

her go out of that door; no, I hain't ever seen her

since, but I reckon I've thought of her a many and a

many a million times, and of her saying she would

pray for me; and if ever I'd a thought it would do

any good for me to pray for HER, blamed if I wouldn't

a done it or bust.



Well, Mary Jane she lit out the back way, I reckon;

because nobody see her go. When I struck Susan

and the hare-lip, I says:



"What's the name of them people over on t'other

side of the river that you all goes to see sometimes?"



They says:



"There's several; but it's the Proctors, mainly."



"That's the name," I says; "I most forgot it.

Well, Miss Mary Jane she told me to tell you she's

gone over there in a dreadful hurry -- one of them's

sick."



"Which one?"



"I don't know; leastways, I kinder forget; but I

thinks it's --"



"Sakes alive, I hope it ain't HANNER?"



"I'm sorry to say it," I says, "but Hanner's the

very one."



"My goodness, and she so well only last week! Is

she took bad?"



"It ain't no name for it. They set up with her all

night, Miss Mary Jane said, and they don't think she'll

last many hours."



"Only think of that, now! What's the matter with

her?"



I couldn't think of anything reasonable, right off

that way, so I says:



"Mumps."



"Mumps your granny! They don't set up with

people that's got the mumps."



"They don't, don't they? You better bet they do

with THESE mumps. These mumps is different. It's a

new kind, Miss Mary Jane said."



"How's it a new kind?"



"Because it's mixed up with other things."



"What other things?"



"Well, measles, and whooping-cough, and erysiplas,

and consumption, and yaller janders, and brain-fever,

and I don't know what all."



"My land! And they call it the MUMPS?"



"That's what Miss Mary Jane said."



"Well, what in the nation do they call it the MUMPS

for?"



"Why, because it IS the mumps. That's what it

starts with."



"Well, ther' ain't no sense in it. A body might

stump his toe, and take pison, and fall down the well,

and break his neck, and bust his brains out, and some-

body come along and ask what killed him, and some

numskull up and say, 'Why, he stumped his TOE.'

Would ther' be any sense in that? NO. And ther'

ain't no sense in THIS, nuther. Is it ketching?"



"Is it KETCHING? Why, how you talk. Is a HARROW

catching -- in the dark? If you don't hitch on to one

tooth, you're bound to on another, ain't you? And

you can't get away with that tooth without fetching

the whole harrow along, can you? Well, these kind

of mumps is a kind of a harrow, as you may say -- and

it ain't no slouch of a harrow, nuther, you come to

get it hitched on good."



"Well, it's awful, I think," says the hare-lip.

"I'll go to Uncle Harvey and --"



"Oh, yes," I says, "I WOULD. Of COURSE I would.

I wouldn't lose no time."



"Well, why wouldn't you?"



"Just look at it a minute, and maybe you can see.

Hain't your uncles obleegd to get along home to Eng-

land as fast as they can? And do you reckon they'd

be mean enough to go off and leave you to go all that

journey by yourselves? YOU know they'll wait for

you. So fur, so good. Your uncle Harvey's a

preacher, ain't he? Very well, then; is a PREACHER

going to deceive a steamboat clerk? is he going to

deceive a SHIP CLERK? -- so as to get them to let Miss

Mary Jane go aboard? Now YOU know he ain't.

What WILL he do, then? Why, he'll say, 'It's a great

pity, but my church matters has got to get along the

best way they can; for my niece has been exposed to

the dreadful pluribus-unum mumps, and so it's my

bounden duty to set down here and wait the three

months it takes to show on her if she's got it.' But

never mind, if you think it's best to tell your uncle

Harvey --"



"Shucks, and stay fooling around here when we

could all be having good times in England whilst we

was waiting to find out whether Mary Jane's got it or

not? Why, you talk like a muggins."



"Well, anyway, maybe you'd better tell some of

the neighbors."



"Listen at that, now. You do beat all for natural

stupidness. Can't you SEE that THEY'D go and tell?

Ther' ain't no way but just to not tell anybody at ALL."



"Well, maybe you're right -- yes, I judge you ARE

right."



"But I reckon we ought to tell Uncle Harvey she's

gone out a while, anyway, so he won't be uneasy

about her?"



"Yes, Miss Mary Jane she wanted you to do that.

She says, 'Tell them to give Uncle Harvey and

William my love and a kiss, and say I've run over the

river to see Mr.' -- Mr. -- what IS the name of that

rich family your uncle Peter used to think so much

of? -- I mean the one that --"



"Why, you must mean the Apthorps, ain't it?"



"Of course; bother them kind of names, a body

can't ever seem to remember them, half the time,

somehow. Yes, she said, say she has run over for to

ask the Apthorps to be sure and come to the auction

and buy this house, because she allowed her uncle

Peter would ruther they had it than anybody else;

and she's going to stick to them till they say they'll

come, and then, if she ain't too tired, she's coming

home; and if she is, she'll be home in the morning

anyway. She said, don't say nothing about the Proc-

tors, but only about the Apthorps -- which 'll be per-

fectly true, because she is going there to speak about

their buying the house; I know it, because she told

me so herself."



"All right," they said, and cleared out to lay for

their uncles, and give them the love and the kisses,

and tell them the message.



Everything was all right now. The girls wouldn't

say nothing because they wanted to go to England;

and the king and the duke would ruther Mary Jane was

off working for the auction than around in reach of

Doctor Robinson. I felt very good; I judged I had

done it pretty neat -- I reckoned Tom Sawyer couldn't

a done it no neater himself. Of course he would a

throwed more style into it, but I can't do that very

handy, not being brung up to it.



Well, they held the auction in the public square,

along towards the end of the afternoon, and it strung

along, and strung along, and the old man he was on

hand and looking his level pisonest, up there longside

of the auctioneer, and chipping in a little Scripture

now and then, or a little goody-goody saying of some

kind, and the duke he was around goo-gooing for sym-

pathy all he knowed how, and just spreading himself

generly.



But by and by the thing dragged through, and

everything was sold -- everything but a little old trifling

lot in the graveyard. So they'd got to work that off

-- I never see such a girafft as the king was for want-

ing to swallow EVERYTHING. Well, whilst they was at it

a steamboat landed, and in about two minutes up

comes a crowd a-whooping and yelling and laughing

and carrying on, and singing out:



"HERE'S your opposition line! here's your two sets

o' heirs to old Peter Wilks -- and you pays your

money and you takes your choice!"





CHAPTER XXIX.



THEY was fetching a very nice-looking old gentle-

man along, and a nice-looking younger one, with

his right arm in a sling. And, my souls, how the

people yelled and laughed, and kept it up. But I didn't

see no joke about it, and I judged it would strain the

duke and the king some to see any. I reckoned

they'd turn pale. But no, nary a pale did THEY turn.

The duke he never let on he suspicioned what was

up, but just went a goo-gooing around, happy and

satisfied, like a jug that's googling out buttermilk;

and as for the king, he just gazed and gazed down

sorrowful on them new-comers like it give him the

stomach-ache in his very heart to think there could be

such frauds and rascals in the world. Oh, he done it

admirable. Lots of the principal people gethered

around the king, to let him see they was on his side.

That old gentleman that had just come looked all puz-

zled to death. Pretty soon he begun to speak, and I

see straight off he pronounced LIKE an Englishman --

not the king's way, though the king's WAS pretty good

for an imitation. I can't give the old gent's words,

nor I can't imitate him; but he turned around to the

crowd, and says, about like this:



"This is a surprise to me which I wasn't looking

for; and I'll acknowledge, candid and frank, I ain't

very well fixed to meet it and answer it; for my

brother and me has had misfortunes; he's broke his

arm, and our baggage got put off at a town above here

last night in the night by a mistake. I am Peter

Wilks' brother Harvey, and this is his brother William,

which can't hear nor speak -- and can't even make

signs to amount to much, now't he's only got one

hand to work them with. We are who we say we are;

and in a day or two, when I get the baggage, I can

prove it. But up till then I won't say nothing more,

but go to the hotel and wait."



So him and the new dummy started off; and the king

he laughs, and blethers out:



"Broke his arm -- VERY likely, AIN'T it? -- and very

convenient, too, for a fraud that's got to make signs,

and ain't learnt how. Lost their baggage! That's

MIGHTY good! -- and mighty ingenious -- under the

CIRCUMSTANCES!



So he laughed again; and so did everybody else,

except three or four, or maybe half a dozen. One of

these was that doctor; another one was a sharp-

looking gentleman, with a carpet-bag of the old-

fashioned kind made out of carpet-stuff, that had just

come off of the steamboat and was talking to him in a

low voice, and glancing towards the king now and then

and nodding their heads -- it was Levi Bell, the lawyer

that was gone up to Louisville; and another one was

a big rough husky that come along and listened to

all the old gentleman said, and was listening to the

king now. And when the king got done this husky

up and says:



"Say, looky here; if you are Harvey Wilks, when'd

you come to this town?"



"The day before the funeral, friend," says the king.



"But what time o' day?"



"In the evenin' -- 'bout an hour er two before sun-

down."



"HOW'D you come?"



"I come down on the Susan Powell from Cincin-

nati."



"Well, then, how'd you come to be up at the Pint

in the MORNIN' -- in a canoe?"



"I warn't up at the Pint in the mornin'."



"It's a lie."



Several of them jumped for him and begged him not

to talk that way to an old man and a preacher.



"Preacher be hanged, he's a fraud and a liar. He

was up at the Pint that mornin'. I live up there, don't

I? Well, I was up there, and he was up there. I see

him there. He come in a canoe, along with Tim

Collins and a boy."



The doctor he up and says:



"Would you know the boy again if you was to see

him, Hines?"



"I reckon I would, but I don't know. Why,

yonder he is, now. I know him perfectly easy."



It was me he pointed at. The doctor says:



"Neighbors, I don't know whether the new couple

is frauds or not; but if THESE two ain't frauds, I am an

idiot, that's all. I think it's our duty to see that they

don't get away from here till we've looked into this

thing. Come along, Hines; come along, the rest of

you. We'll take these fellows to the tavern and

affront them with t'other couple, and I reckon we'll

find out SOMETHING before we get through."



It was nuts for the crowd, though maybe not for

the king's friends; so we all started. It was about

sundown. The doctor he led me along by the hand,

and was plenty kind enough, but he never let go my

hand.



We all got in a big room in the hotel, and lit up

some candles, and fetched in the new couple. First,

the doctor says:



"I don't wish to be too hard on these two men, but

I think they're frauds, and they may have complices

that we don't know nothing about. If they have,

won't the complices get away with that bag of gold

Peter Wilks left? It ain't unlikely. If these men

ain't frauds, they won't object to sending for that

money and letting us keep it till they prove they're

all right -- ain't that so?"



Everybody agreed to that. So I judged they had

our gang in a pretty tight place right at the outstart.

But the king he only looked sorrowful, and says:



"Gentlemen, I wish the money was there, for I

ain't got no disposition to throw anything in the way

of a fair, open, out-and-out investigation o' this

misable business; but, alas, the money ain't there;

you k'n send and see, if you want to."



"Where is it, then?"



"Well, when my niece give it to me to keep for her

I took and hid it inside o' the straw tick o' my bed,

not wishin' to bank it for the few days we'd be here,

and considerin' the bed a safe place, we not bein' used

to niggers, and suppos'n' 'em honest, like servants in

England. The niggers stole it the very next mornin'

after I had went down stairs; and when I sold 'em I

hadn't missed the money yit, so they got clean away

with it. My servant here k'n tell you 'bout it, gentle-

men."



The doctor and several said "Shucks!" and I see

nobody didn't altogether believe him. One man asked

me if I see the niggers steal it. I said no, but I see

them sneaking out of the room and hustling away, and

I never thought nothing, only I reckoned they was

afraid they had waked up my master and was trying to

get away before he made trouble with them. That

was all they asked me. Then the doctor whirls on me

and says:



"Are YOU English, too?"



I says yes; and him and some others laughed, and

said, "Stuff!"



Well, then they sailed in on the general investiga-

tion, and there we had it, up and down, hour in, hour

out, and nobody never said a word about supper, nor

ever seemed to think about it -- and so they kept it

up, and kept it up; and it WAS the worst mixed-up

thing you ever see. They made the king tell his yarn,

and they made the old gentleman tell his'n; and any-

body but a lot of prejudiced chuckleheads would a SEEN

that the old gentleman was spinning truth and t'other

one lies. And by and by they had me up to tell what

I knowed. The king he give me a left-handed look

out of the corner of his eye, and so I knowed enough

to talk on the right side. I begun to tell about

Sheffield, and how we lived there, and all about the

English Wilkses, and so on; but I didn't get pretty

fur till the doctor begun to laugh; and Levi Bell, the

lawyer, says:



"Set down, my boy; I wouldn't strain myself if I

was you. I reckon you ain't used to lying, it don't

seem to come handy; what you want is practice. You

do it pretty awkward."



I didn't care nothing for the compliment, but I was

glad to be let off, anyway.



The doctor he started to say something, and turns

and says:



"If you'd been in town at first, Levi Bell --

"

The king broke in and reached out his hand, and

says:



"Why, is this my poor dead brother's old friend

that he's wrote so often about?"



The lawyer and him shook hands, and the lawyer

smiled and looked pleased, and they talked right along

awhile, and then got to one side and talked low; and

at last the lawyer speaks up and says:



"That 'll fix it. I'll take the order and send it,

along with your brother's, and then they'll know it's

all right."



So they got some paper and a pen, and the king he

set down and twisted his head to one side, and chawed

his tongue, and scrawled off something; and then they

give the pen to the duke -- and then for the first time

the duke looked sick. But he took the pen and wrote.

So then the lawyer turns to the new old gentleman and

says:



"You and your brother please write a line or two

and sign your names."



The old gentleman wrote, but nobody couldn't read

it. The lawyer looked powerful astonished, and says:



"Well, it beats ME -- and snaked a lot of old letters

out of his pocket, and examined them, and then ex-

amined the old man's writing, and then THEM again;

and then says: "These old letters is from Harvey

Wilks; and here's THESE two handwritings, and any-

body can see they didn't write them" (the king and

the duke looked sold and foolish, I tell you, to see

how the lawyer had took them in), "and here's THIS old

gentleman's hand writing, and anybody can tell, easy

enough, HE didn't write them -- fact is, the scratches

he makes ain't properly WRITING at all. Now, here's

some letters from --"



The new old gentleman says:



"If you please, let me explain. Nobody can read

my hand but my brother there -- so he copies for me.

It's HIS hand you've got there, not mine."



"WELL!" says the lawyer, "this IS a state of

things. I've got some of William's letters, too; so if

you'll get him to write a line or so we can com --"



"He CAN'T write with his left hand," says the old

gentleman. "If he could use his right hand, you

would see that he wrote his own letters and mine

too. Look at both, please -- they're by the same

hand."



The lawyer done it, and says:



"I believe it's so -- and if it ain't so, there's a heap

stronger resemblance than I'd noticed before, anyway.

Well, well, well! I thought we was right on the track

of a slution, but it's gone to grass, partly. But any-

way, one thing is proved -- THESE two ain't either of

'em Wilkses" -- and he wagged his head towards the

king and the duke.



Well, what do you think? That muleheaded old

fool wouldn't give in THEN! Indeed he wouldn't.

Said it warn't no fair test. Said his brother William

was the cussedest joker in the world, and hadn't tried

to write -- HE see William was going to play one of his

jokes the minute he put the pen to paper. And so he

warmed up and went warbling right along till he was

actuly beginning to believe what he was saying HIM-

SELF; but pretty soon the new gentleman broke in, and

says:



"I've thought of something. Is there anybody

here that helped to lay out my br -- helped to lay out

the late Peter Wilks for burying?"



"Yes," says somebody, "me and Ab Turner done

it. We're both here."



Then the old man turns towards the king, and

says:



"Peraps this gentleman can tell me what was

tattooed on his breast?"



Blamed if the king didn't have to brace up mighty

quick, or he'd a squshed down like a bluff bank that

the river has cut under, it took him so sudden; and,

mind you, it was a thing that was calculated to make

most ANYBODY sqush to get fetched such a solid one as

that without any notice, because how was HE going to

know what was tattooed on the man? He whitened a

little; he couldn't help it; and it was mighty still in

there, and everybody bending a little forwards and

gazing at him. Says I to myself, NOW he'll throw up

the sponge -- there ain't no more use. Well, did he?

A body can't hardly believe it, but he didn't. I

reckon he thought he'd keep the thing up till he tired

them people out, so they'd thin out, and him and the

duke could break loose and get away. Anyway, he

set there, and pretty soon he begun to smile, and says:



"Mf! It's a VERY tough question, AIN'T it! YES,

sir, I k'n tell you what's tattooed on his breast. It's

jest a small, thin, blue arrow -- that's what it is; and

if you don't look clost, you can't see it. NOW what

do you say -- hey?"



Well, I never see anything like that old blister for

clean out-and-out cheek.



The new old gentleman turns brisk towards Ab

Turner and his pard, and his eye lights up like he

judged he'd got the king THIS time, and says:



"There -- you've heard what he said! Was there

any such mark on Peter Wilks' breast?"



Both of them spoke up and says:



"We didn't see no such mark."



"Good!" says the old gentleman. "Now, what

you DID see on his breast was a small dim P, and a B

(which is an initial he dropped when he was young),

and a W, with dashes between them, so: P -- B --

W" -- and he marked them that way on a piece of

paper. "Come, ain't that what you saw?"



Both of them spoke up again, and says:



"No, we DIDN'T. We never seen any marks at all."



Well, everybody WAS in a state of mind now, and

they sings out:



"The whole BILIN' of 'm 's frauds! Le's duck

'em! le's drown 'em! le's ride 'em on a rail!" and

everybody was whooping at once, and there was a rat-

tling powwow. But the lawyer he jumps on the table

and yells, and says:



"Gentlemen -- gentleMEN! Hear me just a word --

just a SINGLE word -- if you PLEASE! There's one way

yet -- let's go and dig up the corpse and look."



That took them.



"Hooray!" they all shouted, and was starting right

off; but the lawyer and the doctor sung out:



"Hold on, hold on! Collar all these four men and

the boy, and fetch THEM along, too!"



"We'll do it!" they all shouted; "and if we don't

find them marks we'll lynch the whole gang!"



I WAS scared, now, I tell you. But there warn't no

getting away, you know. They gripped us all, and

marched us right along, straight for the graveyard,

which was a mile and a half down the river, and the

whole town at our heels, for we made noise enough,

and it was only nine in the evening.



As we went by our house I wished I hadn't sent

Mary Jane out of town; because now if I could tip her

the wink she'd light out and save me, and blow on our

dead-beats.



Well, we swarmed along down the river road, just

carrying on like wildcats; and to make it more scary

the sky was darking up, and the lightning beginning to

wink and flitter, and the wind to shiver amongst the

leaves. This was the most awful trouble and most

dangersome I ever was in; and I was kinder stunned;

everything was going so different from what I had

allowed for; stead of being fixed so I could take my

own time if I wanted to, and see all the fun, and have

Mary Jane at my back to save me and set me free

when the close-fit come, here was nothing in the

world betwixt me and sudden death but just them

tattoo-marks. If they didn't find them --



I couldn't bear to think about it; and yet, some-

how, I couldn't think about nothing else. It got

darker and darker, and it was a beautiful time to give

the crowd the slip; but that big husky had me by the

wrist -- Hines -- and a body might as well try to give

Goliar the slip. He dragged me right along, he was so

excited, and I had to run to keep up.



When they got there they swarmed into the grave-

yard and washed over it like an overflow. And when

they got to the grave they found they had about a

hundred times as many shovels as they wanted, but

nobody hadn't thought to fetch a lantern. But they

sailed into digging anyway by the flicker of the light-

ning, and sent a man to the nearest house, a half a

mile off, to borrow one.



So they dug and dug like everything; and it got

awful dark, and the rain started, and the wind swished

and swushed along, and the lightning come brisker and

brisker, and the thunder boomed; but them people

never took no notice of it, they was so full of this

business; and one minute you could see everything

and every face in that big crowd, and the shovelfuls of

dirt sailing up out of the grave, and the next second

the dark wiped it all out, and you couldn't see nothing

at all.



At last they got out the coffin and begun to unscrew

the lid, and then such another crowding and shoulder-

ing and shoving as there was, to scrouge in and get a

sight, you never see; and in the dark, that way, it was

awful. Hines he hurt my wrist dreadful pulling and

tugging so, and I reckon he clean forgot I was in the

world, he was so excited and panting.



All of a sudden the lightning let go a perfect sluice

of white glare, and somebody sings out:



"By the living jingo, here's the bag of gold on his

breast!"



Hines let out a whoop, like everybody else, and

dropped my wrist and give a big surge to bust his way

in and get a look, and the way I lit out and shinned

for the road in the dark there ain't nobody can tell.



I had the road all to myself, and I fairly flew --

leastways, I had it all to myself except the solid dark,

and the now-and-then glares, and the buzzing of the

rain, and the thrashing of the wind, and the splitting

of the thunder; and sure as you are born I did clip it

along!



When I struck the town I see there warn't nobody

out in the storm, so I never hunted for no back streets,

but humped it straight through the main one; and

when I begun to get towards our house I aimed my

eye and set it. No light there; the house all dark --

which made me feel sorry and disappointed, I didn't

know why. But at last, just as I was sailing by, FLASH

comes the light in Mary Jane's window! and my heart

swelled up sudden, like to bust; and the same second

the house and all was behind me in the dark, and

wasn't ever going to be before me no more in this

world. She WAS the best girl I ever see, and had the

most sand.



The minute I was far enough above the town to see

I could make the towhead, I begun to look sharp for

a boat to borrow, and the first time the lightning

showed me one that wasn't chained I snatched it and

shoved. It was a canoe, and warn't fastened with

nothing but a rope. The towhead was a rattling big

distance off, away out there in the middle of the river,

but I didn't lose no time; and when I struck the raft

at last I was so fagged I would a just laid down to

blow and gasp if I could afforded it. But I didn't.

As I sprung aboard I sung out:



"Out with you, Jim, and set her loose! Glory be

to goodness, we're shut of them!"



Jim lit out, and was a-coming for me with both arms

spread, he was so full of joy; but when I glimpsed

him in the lightning my heart shot up in my mouth

and I went overboard backwards; for I forgot he was

old King Lear and a drownded A-rab all in one, and it

most scared the livers and lights out of me. But Jim

fished me out, and was going to hug me and bless me,

and so on, he was so glad I was back and we was shut

of the king and the duke, but I says:



"Not now; have it for breakfast, have it for break-

fast! Cut loose and let her slide!"



So in two seconds away we went a-sliding down the

river, and it DID seem so good to be free again and all

by ourselves on the big river, and nobody to bother

us. I had to skip around a bit, and jump up and

crack my heels a few times -- I couldn't help it; but

about the third crack I noticed a sound that I knowed

mighty well, and held my breath and listened and

waited; and sure enough, when the next flash busted

out over the water, here they come! -- and just a-

laying to their oars and making their skiff hum! It

was the king and the duke.



So I wilted right down on to the planks then, and

give up; and it was all I could do to keep from crying.





CHAPTER XXX.



WHEN they got aboard the king went for me, and

shook me by the collar, and says:



"Tryin' to give us the slip, was ye, you pup!

Tired of our company, hey?"



I says:



"No, your majesty, we warn't -- PLEASE don't, your

majesty!"



"Quick, then, and tell us what WAS your idea, or

I'll shake the insides out o' you!"



"Honest, I'll tell you everything just as it hap-

pened, your majesty. The man that had a-holt of me

was very good to me, and kept saying he had a boy

about as big as me that died last year, and he was

sorry to see a boy in such a dangerous fix; and when

they was all took by surprise by finding the gold, and

made a rush for the coffin, he lets go of me and whis-

pers, 'Heel it now, or they'll hang ye, sure!' and I

lit out. It didn't seem no good for ME to stay -- I

couldn't do nothing, and I didn't want to be hung if

I could get away. So I never stopped running till I

found the canoe; and when I got here I told Jim to

hurry, or they'd catch me and hang me yet, and said I

was afeard you and the duke wasn't alive now, and

I was awful sorry, and so was Jim, and was awful glad

when we see you coming; you may ask Jim if I

didn't."



Jim said it was so; and the king told him to shut

up, and said, "Oh, yes, it's MIGHTY likely!" and

shook me up again, and said he reckoned he'd drownd

me. But the duke says:



"Leggo the boy, you old idiot! Would YOU a done

any different? Did you inquire around for HIM when

you got loose? I don't remember it."



So the king let go of me, and begun to cuss that

town and everybody in it. But the duke says:



"You better a blame' sight give YOURSELF a good

cussing, for you're the one that's entitled to it most.

You hain't done a thing from the start that had any

sense in it, except coming out so cool and cheeky with

that imaginary blue-arrow mark. That WAS bright --

it was right down bully; and it was the thing that

saved us. For if it hadn't been for that they'd a jailed

us till them Englishmen's baggage come -- and then --

the penitentiary, you bet! But that trick took 'em to

the graveyard, and the gold done us a still bigger

kindness; for if the excited fools hadn't let go all

holts and made that rush to get a look we'd a slept in

our cravats to-night -- cravats warranted to WEAR, too

-- longer than WE'D need 'em."



They was still a minute -- thinking; then the king

says, kind of absent-minded like:



"Mf! And we reckoned the NIGGERS stole it!"



That made me squirm!



"Yes," says the duke, kinder slow and deliberate

and sarcastic, "WE did."



After about a half a minute the king drawls out:



"Leastways, I did."



The duke says, the same way:



"On the contrary, I did."



The king kind of ruffles up, and says:



"Looky here, Bilgewater, what'r you referrin' to?"



The duke says, pretty brisk:



"When it comes to that, maybe you'll let me ask,

what was YOU referring to?"



"Shucks!" says the king, very sarcastic; "but I

don't know -- maybe you was asleep, and didn't know

what you was about."



The duke bristles up now, and says:



"Oh, let UP on this cussed nonsense; do you take

me for a blame' fool? Don't you reckon I know who

hid that money in that coffin?"



"YES, sir! I know you DO know, because you done

it yourself!"



"It's a lie!" -- and the duke went for him. The

king sings out:



"Take y'r hands off! -- leggo my throat! -- I take it

all back!"



The duke says:



"Well, you just own up, first, that you DID hide

that money there, intending to give me the slip one of

these days, and come back and dig it up, and have it

all to yourself."



"Wait jest a minute, duke -- answer me this one

question, honest and fair; if you didn't put the money

there, say it, and I'll b'lieve you, and take back every-

thing I said."



"You old scoundrel, I didn't, and you know I

didn't. There, now!"



"Well, then, I b'lieve you. But answer me only

jest this one more -- now DON'T git mad; didn't you

have it in your mind to hook the money and hide it?"



The duke never said nothing for a little bit; then he

says:



"Well, I don't care if I DID, I didn't DO it, anyway.

But you not only had it in mind to do it, but you

DONE it."



"I wisht I never die if I done it, duke, and that's

honest. I won't say I warn't goin' to do it, because I

WAS; but you -- I mean somebody -- got in ahead o'

me."



"It's a lie! You done it, and you got to SAY you

done it, or --"



The king began to gurgle, and then he gasps out:



"'Nough! -- I OWN UP!"



I was very glad to hear him say that; it made me

feel much more easier than what I was feeling before.

So the duke took his hands off and says:



"If you ever deny it again I'll drown you. It's

WELL for you to set there and blubber like a baby -- it's

fitten for you, after the way you've acted. I never

see such an old ostrich for wanting to gobble every-

thing -- and I a-trusting you all the time, like you was

my own father. You ought to been ashamed of your-

self to stand by and hear it saddled on to a lot of poor

niggers, and you never say a word for 'em. It makes

me feel ridiculous to think I was soft enough to BELIEVE

that rubbage. Cuss you, I can see now why you was

so anxious to make up the deffisit -- you wanted to

get what money I'd got out of the Nonesuch and one

thing or another, and scoop it ALL!"



The king says, timid, and still a-snuffling:



"Why, duke, it was you that said make up the

deffisit; it warn't me."



"Dry up! I don't want to hear no more out of

you!" says the duke. "And NOW you see what you

GOT by it. They've got all their own money back, and

all of OURN but a shekel or two BESIDES. G'long to bed,

and don't you deffersit ME no more deffersits, long 's

YOU live!"



So the king sneaked into the wigwam and took to

his bottle for comfort, and before long the duke tackled

HIS bottle; and so in about a half an hour they was as

thick as thieves again, and the tighter they got the

lovinger they got, and went off a-snoring in each

other's arms. They both got powerful mellow, but I

noticed the king didn't get mellow enough to forget to

remember to not deny about hiding the money-bag

again. That made me feel easy and satisfied. Of

course when they got to snoring we had a long gabble,

and I told Jim everything.





CHAPTER XXXI.



WE dasn't stop again at any town for days and

days; kept right along down the river. We

was down south in the warm weather now, and a

mighty long ways from home. We begun to come to

trees with Spanish moss on them, hanging down from

the limbs like long, gray beards. It was the first I

ever see it growing, and it made the woods look solemn

and dismal. So now the frauds reckoned they was out

of danger, and they begun to work the villages again.



First they done a lecture on temperance; but they

didn't make enough for them both to get drunk on.

Then in another village they started a dancing-school;

but they didn't know no more how to dance than a

kangaroo does; so the first prance they made the

general public jumped in and pranced them out of

town. Another time they tried to go at yellocution;

but they didn't yellocute long till the audience got up

and give them a solid good cussing, and made them

skip out. They tackled missionarying, and mesmeriz-

ing, and doctoring, and telling fortunes, and a little of

everything; but they couldn't seem to have no luck.

So at last they got just about dead broke, and laid

around the raft as she floated along, thinking and

thinking, and never saying nothing, by the half a day

at a time, and dreadful blue and desperate.



And at last they took a change and begun to lay

their heads together in the wigwam and talk low and

confidential two or three hours at a time. Jim and me

got uneasy. We didn't like the look of it. We judged

they was studying up some kind of worse deviltry than

ever. We turned it over and over, and at last we made

up our minds they was going to break into somebody's

house or store, or was going into the counterfeit-

money business, or something. So then we was pretty

scared, and made up an agreement that we wouldn't

have nothing in the world to do with such actions, and

if we ever got the least show we would give them the

cold shake and clear out and leave them behind.

Well, early one morning we hid the raft in a good,

safe place about two mile below a little bit of a shabby

village named Pikesville, and the king he went ashore

and told us all to stay hid whilst he went up to town

and smelt around to see if anybody had got any wind

of the Royal Nonesuch there yet. ("House to rob,

you MEAN," says I to myself; "and when you get

through robbing it you'll come back here and wonder

what has become of me and Jim and the raft -- and

you'll have to take it out in wondering.") And he

said if he warn't back by midday the duke and me

would know it was all right, and we was to come along.



So we stayed where we was. The duke he fretted

and sweated around, and was in a mighty sour way.

He scolded us for everything, and we couldn't seem to

do nothing right; he found fault with every little

thing. Something was a-brewing, sure. I was good

and glad when midday come and no king; we could

have a change, anyway -- and maybe a chance for THE

chance on top of it. So me and the duke went up to

the village, and hunted around there for the king, and

by and by we found him in the back room of a little

low doggery, very tight, and a lot of loafers bullyrag-

ging him for sport, and he a-cussing and a-threatening

with all his might, and so tight he couldn't walk, and

couldn't do nothing to them. The duke he begun to

abuse him for an old fool, and the king begun to sass

back, and the minute they was fairly at it I lit out and

shook the reefs out of my hind legs, and spun down

the river road like a deer, for I see our chance; and I

made up my mind that it would be a long day before

they ever see me and Jim again. I got down there all

out of breath but loaded up with joy, and sung out:



"Set her loose, Jim! we're all right now!"



But there warn't no answer, and nobody come out

of the wigwam. Jim was gone! I set up a shout --

and then another -- and then another one; and run

this way and that in the woods, whooping and screech-

ing; but it warn't no use -- old Jim was gone. Then

I set down and cried; I couldn't help it. But I

couldn't set still long. Pretty soon I went out on the

road, trying to think what I better do, and I run across

a boy walking, and asked him if he'd seen a strange

nigger dressed so and so, and he says:



"Yes."



"Whereabouts?" says I.



"Down to Silas Phelps' place, two mile below

here. He's a runaway nigger, and they've got him.

Was you looking for him?"



"You bet I ain't! I run across him in the woods

about an hour or two ago, and he said if I hollered

he'd cut my livers out -- and told me to lay down and

stay where I was; and I done it. Been there ever

since; afeard to come out."



"Well," he says, "you needn't be afeard no more,

becuz they've got him. He run off f'm down South,

som'ers."



"It's a good job they got him."



"Well, I RECKON! There's two hunderd dollars re-

ward on him. It's like picking up money out'n the

road."



"Yes, it is -- and I could a had it if I'd been big

enough; I see him FIRST. Who nailed him?"



"It was an old fellow -- a stranger -- and he sold

out his chance in him for forty dollars, becuz he's got

to go up the river and can't wait. Think o' that,

now! You bet I'D wait, if it was seven year."



"That's me, every time," says I. "But maybe his

chance ain't worth no more than that, if he'll sell it so

cheap. Maybe there's something ain't straight about

it."



"But it IS, though -- straight as a string. I see the

handbill myself. It tells all about him, to a dot --

paints him like a picture, and tells the plantation he's

frum, below NewrLEANS. No-sirree-BOB, they ain't no

trouble 'bout THAT speculation, you bet you. Say,

gimme a chaw tobacker, won't ye?"



I didn't have none, so he left. I went to the raft,

and set down in the wigwam to think. But I couldn't

come to nothing. I thought till I wore my head sore,

but I couldn't see no way out of the trouble. After

all this long journey, and after all we'd done for them

scoundrels, here it was all come to nothing, everything

all busted up and ruined, because they could have the

heart to serve Jim such a trick as that, and make him

a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too,

for forty dirty dollars.



Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times

better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family

was, as long as he'd GOT to be a slave, and so I'd better

write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss

Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion

for two things: she'd be mad and disgusted at his

rascality and ungratefulness for leaving her, and so

she'd sell him straight down the river again; and if

she didn't, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful

nigger, and they'd make Jim feel it all the time, and so

he'd feel ornery and disgraced. And then think of

ME! It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a

nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see

anybody from that town again I'd be ready to get

down and lick his boots for shame. That's just the

way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he

don't want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as

long as he can hide, it ain't no disgrace. That was

my fix exactly. The more I studied about this the

more my conscience went to grinding me, and the

more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feel-

ing. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that

here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in

the face and letting me know my wickedness was being

watched all the time from up there in heaven,whilst I

was stealing a poor old woman's nigger that hadn't

ever done me no harm, and now was showing me

there's One that's always on the lookout, and ain't a-

going to allow no such miserable doings to go only

just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my

tracks I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I could

to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I

was brung up wicked, and so I warn't so much to

blame; but something inside of me kept saying,

"There was the Sunday-school, you could a gone to

it; and if you'd a done it they'd a learnt you there

that people that acts as I'd been acting about that

nigger goes to everlasting fire."



It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind

to pray, and see if I couldn't try to quit being the kind

of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down.

But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they?

It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor

from ME, neither. I knowed very well why they

wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right;

it was because I warn't square; it was because I was

playing double. I was letting ON to give up sin, but

away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one

of all. I was trying to make my mouth SAY I would

do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write

to that nigger's owner and tell where he was; but deep

down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it.

You can't pray a lie -- I found that out.



So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and

didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I

says, I'll go and write the letter -- and then see if I can

pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light

as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all

gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all

glad and excited, and set down and wrote:



   Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down

   here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps

   has got him and he will give him up for the

   reward if you send.



                                  HUCK FINN.



I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first

time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I

could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but

laid the paper down and set there thinking -- thinking

how good it was all this happened so, and how near I

come to being lost and going to hell. And went on

thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the

river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the

day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, some-

times storms, and we a-floating along, talking and

singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem

to strike no places to harden me against him, but only

the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top

of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleep-

ing; and see him how glad he was when I come back

out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the

swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like

times; and would always call me honey, and pet me

and do everything he could think of for me, and how

good he always was; and at last I struck the time I

saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard,

and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend

old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he's

got now; and then I happened to look around and see

that paper.



It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in

my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to de-

cide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I

studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then

says to myself:



"All right, then, I'll GO to hell" -- and tore it up.



It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was

said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no

more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out

of my head, and said I would take up wickedness

again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and

the other warn't. And for a starter I would go to

work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could

think up anything worse, I would do that, too; be-

cause as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as

well go the whole hog.



Then I set to thinking over how to get at it, and

turned over some considerable many ways in my mind;

and at last fixed up a plan that suited me. So then I

took the bearings of a woody island that was down

the river a piece, and as soon as it was fairly dark I

crept out with my raft and went for it, and hid it

there, and then turned in. I slept the night through,

and got up before it was light, and had my breakfast,

and put on my store clothes, and tied up some others

and one thing or another in a bundle, and took the

canoe and cleared for shore. I landed below where I

judged was Phelps's place, and hid my bundle in the

woods, and then filled up the canoe with water, and

loaded rocks into her and sunk her where I could find

her again when I wanted her, about a quarter of a

mile below a little steam sawmill that was on the bank.



Then I struck up the road, and when I passed the

mill I see a sign on it, "Phelps's Sawmill," and when

I come to the farm-houses, two or three hundred yards

further along, I kept my eyes peeled, but didn't see

nobody around, though it was good daylight now.

But I didn't mind, because I didn't want to see nobody

just yet -- I only wanted to get the lay of the land.

According to my plan, I was going to turn up there

from the village, not from below. So I just took a

look, and shoved along, straight for town. Well, the

very first man I see when I got there was the duke.

He was sticking up a bill for the Royal Nonesuch --

three-night performance -- like that other time. They

had the cheek, them frauds! I was right on him be-

fore I could shirk. He looked astonished, and says:



"Hel-LO! Where'd YOU come from?" Then he

says, kind of glad and eager, "Where's the raft? --

got her in a good place?"



I says:



"Why, that's just what I was going to ask your

grace."



Then he didn't look so joyful, and says:



"What was your idea for asking ME?" he says.



"Well," I says, "when I see the king in that dog-

gery yesterday I says to myself, we can't get him

home for hours, till he's soberer; so I went a-loafing

around town to put in the time and wait. A man up

and offered me ten cents to help him pull a skiff over

the river and back to fetch a sheep, and so I went

along; but when we was dragging him to the boat, and

the man left me a-holt of the rope and went behind

him to shove him along, he was too strong for me and

jerked loose and run, and we after him. We didn't

have no dog, and so we had to chase him all over the

country till we tired him out. We never got him till

dark; then we fetched him over, and I started down

for the raft. When I got there and see it was gone, I

says to myself, 'They've got into trouble and had to

leave; and they've took my nigger, which is the only

nigger I've got in the world, and now I'm in a strange

country, and ain't got no property no more, nor noth-

ing, and no way to make my living;' so I set down

and cried. I slept in the woods all night. But what

DID become of the raft, then? -- and Jim -- poor Jim!"



"Blamed if I know -- that is, what's become of the

raft. That old fool had made a trade and got forty

dollars, and when we found him in the doggery the

loafers had matched half-dollars with him and got

every cent but what he'd spent for whisky; and when

I got him home late last night and found the raft gone,

we said, 'That little rascal has stole our raft and shook

us, and run off down the river.'"



"I wouldn't shake my NIGGER, would I? -- the only

nigger I had in the world, and the only property."



"We never thought of that. Fact is, I reckon we'd

come to consider him OUR nigger; yes, we did consider

him so -- goodness knows we had trouble enough for

him. So when we see the raft was gone and we flat

broke, there warn't anything for it but to try the

Royal Nonesuch another shake. And I've pegged

along ever since, dry as a powder-horn. Where's that

ten cents? Give it here."



I had considerable money, so I give him ten cents,

but begged him to spend it for something to eat, and

give me some, because it was all the money I had, and

I hadn't had nothing to eat since yesterday. He never

said nothing. The next minute he whirls on me and

says:



"Do you reckon that nigger would blow on us?

We'd skin him if he done that!"



"How can he blow? Hain't he run off?"



"No! That old fool sold him, and never divided

with me, and the money's gone."



"SOLD him?" I says, and begun to cry; "why, he

was MY nigger, and that was my money. Where is

he? -- I want my nigger."



"Well, you can't GET your nigger, that's all -- so

dry up your blubbering. Looky here -- do you think

YOU'D venture to blow on us? Blamed if I think I'd

trust you. Why, if you WAS to blow on us --"



He stopped, but I never see the duke look so ugly out

of his eyes before. I went on a-whimpering, and says:



"I don't want to blow on nobody; and I ain't got

no time to blow, nohow. I got to turn out and find

my nigger."



He looked kinder bothered, and stood there with his

bills fluttering on his arm, thinking, and wrinkling up

his forehead. At last he says:



"I'll tell you something. We got to be here three

days. If you'll promise you won't blow, and won't

let the nigger blow, I'll tell you where to find him."



So I promised, and he says:



"A farmer by the name of Silas Ph----" and then

he stopped. You see, he started to tell me the truth;

but when he stopped that way, and begun to study and

think again, I reckoned he was changing his mind.

And so he was. He wouldn't trust me; he wanted to

make sure of having me out of the way the whole

three days. So pretty soon he says:



"The man that bought him is named Abram Foster

-- Abram G. Foster -- and he lives forty mile back

here in the country, on the road to Lafayette."



"All right," I says, "I can walk it in three days.

And I'll start this very afternoon."



"No you wont, you'll start NOW; and don't you

lose any time about it, neither, nor do any gabbling by

the way. Just keep a tight tongue in your head and

move right along, and then you won't get into trouble

with US, d'ye hear?"



That was the order I wanted, and that was the one I

played for. I wanted to be left free to work my plans.



"So clear out," he says; "and you can tell Mr.

Foster whatever you want to. Maybe you can get

him to believe that Jim IS your nigger -- some idiots

don't require documents -- leastways I've heard there's

such down South here. And when you tell him the

handbill and the reward's bogus, maybe he'll believe

you when you explain to him what the idea was for

getting 'em out. Go 'long now, and tell him anything

you want to; but mind you don't work your jaw any

BETWEEN here and there."



So I left, and struck for the back country. I didn't

look around, but I kinder felt like he was watching me.

But I knowed I could tire him out at that. I went

straight out in the country as much as a mile before I

stopped; then I doubled back through the woods

towards Phelps'. I reckoned I better start in on my

plan straight off without fooling around, because I

wanted to stop Jim's mouth till these fellows could get

away. I didn't want no trouble with their kind. I'd

seen all I wanted to of them, and wanted to get entirely

shut of them.





CHAPTER XXXII.



WHEN I got there it was all still and Sunday-like,

and hot and sunshiny; the hands was gone to

the fields; and there was them kind of faint dronings

of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lone-

some and like everybody's dead and gone; and if a

breeze fans along and quivers the leaves it makes you

feel mournful, because you feel like it's spirits whisper-

ing -- spirits that's been dead ever so many years --

and you always think they're talking about YOU. As a

general thing it makes a body wish HE was dead, too,

and done with it all.



Phelps' was one of these little one-horse cotton plan-

tations, and they all look alike. A rail fence round a

two-acre yard; a stile made out of logs sawed off and

up-ended in steps, like barrels of a different length, to

climb over the fence with, and for the women to stand

on when they are going to jump on to a horse; some

sickly grass-patches in the big yard, but mostly it was

bare and smooth, like an old hat with the nap rubbed

off; big double log-house for the white folks -- hewed

logs, with the chinks stopped up with mud or mortar,

and these mud-stripes been whitewashed some time or

another; round-log kitchen, with a big broad, open

but roofed passage joining it to the house; log smoke-

house back of the kitchen; three little log nigger-cabins

in a row t'other side the smoke-house; one little hut

all by itself away down against the back fence, and

some outbuildings down a piece the other side; ash-

hopper and big kettle to bile soap in by the little hut;

bench by the kitchen door, with bucket of water and a

gourd; hound asleep there in the sun; more hounds

asleep round about; about three shade trees away off

in a corner; some currant bushes and gooseberry

bushes in one place by the fence; outside of the fence

a garden and a watermelon patch; then the cotton

fields begins, and after the fields the woods.



I went around and clumb over the back stile by the

ash-hopper, and started for the kitchen. When I got

a little ways I heard the dim hum of a spinning-wheel

wailing along up and sinking along down again; and

then I knowed for certain I wished I was dead -- for

that IS the lonesomest sound in the whole world.



I went right along, not fixing up any particular plan,

but just trusting to Providence to put the right words

in my mouth when the time come; for I'd noticed that

Providence always did put the right words in my mouth

if I left it alone.



When I got half-way, first one hound and then

another got up and went for me, and of course I

stopped and faced them, and kept still. And such

another powwow as they made! In a quarter of a

minute I was a kind of a hub of a wheel, as you may

say -- spokes made out of dogs -- circle of fifteen

of them packed together around me, with their necks

and noses stretched up towards me, a-barking and

howling; and more a-coming; you could see them sail-

ing over fences and around corners from everywheres.



A nigger woman come tearing out of the kitchen with

a rolling-pin in her hand, singing out, "Begone YOU

Tige! you Spot! begone sah!" and she fetched first

one and then another of them a clip and sent them

howling, and then the rest followed; and the next

second half of them come back, wagging their tails

around me, and making friends with me. There ain't

no harm in a hound, nohow.



And behind the woman comes a little nigger girl and

two little nigger boys without anything on but tow-linen

shirts, and they hung on to their mother's gown, and

peeped out from behind her at me, bashful, the way

they always do. And here comes the white woman

running from the house, about forty-five or fifty year

old, bareheaded, and her spinning-stick in her hand;

and behind her comes her little white children, acting

the same way the little niggers was going. She was

smiling all over so she could hardly stand -- and says:



"It's YOU, at last! -- AIN'T it?"



I out with a "Yes'm" before I thought.



She grabbed me and hugged me tight; and then

gripped me by both hands and shook and shook; and

the tears come in her eyes, and run down over; and

she couldn't seem to hug and shake enough, and kept

saying, "You don't look as much like your mother as

I reckoned you would; but law sakes, I don't care for

that, I'm so glad to see you! Dear, dear, it does seem

like I could eat you up! Children, it's your cousin

Tom! -- tell him howdy."



But they ducked their heads, and put their fingers in

their mouths, and hid behind her. So she run on:



"Lize, hurry up and get him a hot breakfast right

away -- or did you get your breakfast on the boat?"



I said I had got it on the boat. So then she started

for the house, leading me by the hand, and the children

tagging after. When we got there she set me down in

a split-bottomed chair, and set herself down on a little

low stool in front of me, holding both of my hands,

and says:



"Now I can have a GOOD look at you; and, laws-a-

me, I've been hungry for it a many and a many a time,

all these long years, and it's come at last! We been

expecting you a couple of days and more. What kep'

you? -- boat get aground?"



"Yes'm -- she --"



"Don't say yes'm -- say Aunt Sally. Where'd she

get aground?"



I didn't rightly know what to say, because I didn't

know whether the boat would be coming up the river

or down. But I go a good deal on instinct; and my

instinct said she would be coming up -- from down

towards Orleans. That didn't help me much, though;

for I didn't know the names of bars down that way. I

see I'd got to invent a bar, or forget the name of the

one we got aground on -- or -- Now I struck an idea,

and fetched it out:



"It warn't the grounding -- that didn't keep us back

but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head."



"Good gracious! anybody hurt?"



"No'm. Killed a nigger."



"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get

hurt. Two years ago last Christmas your uncle Silas

was coming up from Newrleans on the old Lally Rook,

and she blowed out a cylinder-head and crippled a man.

And I think he died afterwards. He was a Baptist.

Your uncle Silas knowed a family in Baton Rouge

that knowed his people very well. Yes, I remember

now, he DID die. Mortification set in, and they had to

amputate him. But it didn't save him. Yes, it was

mortification -- that was it. He turned blue all over,

and died in the hope of a glorious resurrection. They

say he was a sight to look at. Your uncle's been up

to the town every day to fetch you. And he's gone

again, not more'n an hour ago; he'll be back any

minute now. You must a met him on the road, didn't

you? -- oldish man, with a --"



"No, I didn't see nobody, Aunt Sally. The boat

landed just at daylight, and I left my baggage on the

wharf-boat and went looking around the town and out

a piece in the country, to put in the time and not get

here too soon; and so I come down the back way."



"Who'd you give the baggage to?"



"Nobody."



"Why, child, it 'll be stole!"



"Not where I hid it I reckon it won't," I says.



"How'd you get your breakfast so early on the

boat?"



It was kinder thin ice, but I says:



"The captain see me standing around, and told me

I better have something to eat before I went ashore;

so he took me in the texas to the officers' lunch, and

give me all I wanted."



I was getting so uneasy I couldn't listen good. I

had my mind on the children all the time; I wanted to

get them out to one side and pump them a little, and

find out who I was. But I couldn't get no show, Mrs.

Phelps kept it up and run on so. Pretty soon she made

the cold chills streak all down my back, because she

says:



"But here we're a-running on this way, and you

hain't told me a word about Sis, nor any of them.

Now I'll rest my works a little, and you start up yourn;

just tell me EVERYTHING -- tell me all about 'm all

every one of 'm; and how they are, and what they're

doing, and what they told you to tell me; and every

last thing you can think of."



Well, I see I was up a stump -- and up it good.

Providence had stood by me this fur all right, but I

was hard and tight aground now. I see it warn't a bit

of use to try to go ahead -- I'd got to throw up my

hand. So I says to myself, here's another place where

I got to resk the truth. I opened my mouth to begin;

but she grabbed me and hustled me in behind the bed,

and says:



"Here he comes! Stick your head down lower --

there, that'll do; you can't be seen now. Don't you

let on you're here. I'll play a joke on him. Children,

don't you say a word."



I see I was in a fix now. But it warn't no use to

worry; there warn't nothing to do but just hold still,

and try and be ready to stand from under when the

lightning struck.



I had just one little glimpse of the old gentleman

when he come in; then the bed hid him. Mrs. Phelps

she jumps for him, and says:



"Has he come?"



"No," says her husband.



"Good-NESS gracious!" she says, "what in the

warld can have become of him?"



"I can't imagine," says the old gentleman; "and

I must say it makes me dreadful uneasy."



"Uneasy!" she says; "I'm ready to go distracted!

He MUST a come; and you've missed him along the

road. I KNOW it's so -- something tells me so."



"Why, Sally, I COULDN'T miss him along the road --

YOU know that."



"But oh, dear, dear, what WILL Sis say! He must a

come! You must a missed him. He --"



"Oh, don't distress me any more'n I'm already dis-

tressed. I don't know what in the world to make of it.

I'm at my wit's end, and I don't mind acknowledging

't I'm right down scared. But there's no hope that

he's come; for he COULDN'T come and me miss him.

Sally, it's terrible -- just terrible -- something's hap-

pened to the boat, sure!"



"Why, Silas! Look yonder! -- up the road! -- ain't

that somebody coming?"



He sprung to the window at the head of the bed,

and that give Mrs. Phelps the chance she wanted. She

stooped down quick at the foot of the bed and give me

a pull, and out I come; and when he turned back

from the window there she stood, a-beaming and a-smil-

ing like a house afire, and I standing pretty meek and

sweaty alongside. The old gentleman stared, and

says:



"Why, who's that?"



"Who do you reckon 't is?"



"I hain't no idea. Who IS it?"



"It's TOM SAWYER!"



By jings, I most slumped through the floor! But

there warn't no time to swap knives; the old man

grabbed me by the hand and shook, and kept on shak-

ing; and all the time how the woman did dance around

and laugh and cry; and then how they both did fire off

questions about Sid, and Mary, and the rest of the

tribe.



But if they was joyful, it warn't nothing to what I

was; for it was like being born again, I was so glad to

find out who I was. Well, they froze to me for two

hours; and at last, when my chin was so tired it

couldn't hardly go any more, I had told them more

about my family -- I mean the Sawyer family -- than

ever happened to any six Sawyer families. And I ex-

plained all about how we blowed out a cylinder-head at

the mouth of White River, and it took us three days to

fix it. Which was all right, and worked first-rate; be-

cause THEY didn't know but what it would take three

days to fix it. If I'd a called it a bolthead it would a

done just as well.



Now I was feeling pretty comfortable all down one

side, and pretty uncomfortable all up the other. Be-

ing Tom Sawyer was easy and comfortable, and it

stayed easy and comfortable till by and by I hear a

steamboat coughing along down the river. Then I

says to myself, s'pose Tom Sawyer comes down on that

boat? And s'pose he steps in here any minute, and

sings out my name before I can throw him a wink to

keep quiet?



Well, I couldn't HAVE it that way; it wouldn't do at

all. I must go up the road and waylay him. So I

told the folks I reckoned I would go up to the town

and fetch down my baggage. The old gentleman was

for going along with me, but I said no, I could drive

the horse myself, and I druther he wouldn't take no

trouble about me.





CHAPTER XXXIII.



SO I started for town in the wagon, and when I was

half-way I see a wagon coming, and sure enough it

was Tom Sawyer, and I stopped and waited till he come

along. I says "Hold on!" and it stopped alongside,

and his mouth opened up like a trunk, and stayed so;

and he swallowed two or three times like a person that's

got a dry throat, and then says:



"I hain't ever done you no harm. You know that.

So, then, what you want to come back and ha'nt ME

for?"



I says:



"I hain't come back -- I hain't been GONE."



When he heard my voice it righted him up some, but

he warn't quite satisfied yet. He says:



"Don't you play nothing on me, because I wouldn't

on you. Honest injun, you ain't a ghost?"



"Honest injun, I ain't," I says.



"Well -- I -- I -- well, that ought to settle it, of

course; but I can't somehow seem to understand it no

way. Looky here, warn't you ever murdered AT ALL?"



"No. I warn't ever murdered at all -- I played it

on them. You come in here and feel of me if you

don't believe me."



So he done it; and it satisfied him; and he was that

glad to see me again he didn't know what to do. And

he wanted to know all about it right off, because it was

a grand adventure, and mysterious, and so it hit him

where he lived. But I said, leave it alone till by and

by; and told his driver to wait, and we drove off a little

piece, and I told him the kind of a fix I was in, and what

did he reckon we better do? He said, let him alone a

minute, and don't disturb him. So he thought and

thought, and pretty soon he says:



"It's all right; I've got it. Take my trunk in your

wagon, and let on it's your'n; and you turn back and

fool along slow, so as to get to the house about the

time you ought to; and I'll go towards town a piece,

and take a fresh start, and get there a quarter or a half

an hour after you; and you needn't let on to know

me at first."



I says:



"All right; but wait a minute. There's one more

thing -- a thing that NOBODY don't know but me. And

that is, there's a nigger here that I'm a-trying to steal

out of slavery, and his name is JIM -- old Miss Wat-

son's Jim."



He says:



" What ! Why, Jim is --"



He stopped and went to studying. I says:



"I know what you'll say. You'll say it's dirty, low-

down business; but what if it is? I'm low down; and

I'm a-going to steal him, and I want you keep mum

and not let on. Will you?"



His eye lit up, and he says:



"I'll HELP you steal him!"



Well, I let go all holts then, like I was shot. It

was the most astonishing speech I ever heard -- and

I'm bound to say Tom Sawyer fell considerable in my

estimation. Only I couldn't believe it. Tom Sawyer a

NIGGER-STEALER!



"Oh, shucks!" I says; "you're joking."



"I ain't joking, either."



"Well, then," I says, "joking or no joking, if you

hear anything said about a runaway nigger, don't for-

get to remember that YOU don't know nothing about

him, and I don't know nothing about him."



Then we took the trunk and put it in my wagon, and

he drove off his way and I drove mine. But of course

I forgot all about driving slow on accounts of being glad

and full of thinking; so I got home a heap too quick

for that length of a trip. The old gentleman was at

the door, and he says:



"Why, this is wonderful! Whoever would a

thought it was in that mare to do it? I wish we'd

a timed her. And she hain't sweated a hair -- not a

hair. It's wonderful. Why, I wouldn't take a hundred

dollars for that horse now -- I wouldn't, honest; and

yet I'd a sold her for fifteen before, and thought 'twas

all she was worth."



That's all he said. He was the innocentest, best old

soul I ever see. But it warn't surprising; because he

warn't only just a farmer, he was a preacher, too, and

had a little one-horse log church down back of the

plantation, which he built it himself at his own expense,

for a church and schoolhouse, and never charged noth-

ing for his preaching, and it was worth it, too. There

was plenty other farmer-preachers like that, and done

the same way, down South.



In about half an hour Tom's wagon drove up to the

front stile, and Aunt Sally she see it through the win-

dow, because it was only about fifty yards, and says:



"Why, there's somebody come! I wonder who

'tis? Why, I do believe it's a stranger. Jimmy "

(that's one of the children)' "run and tell Lize to put

on another plate for dinner."



Everybody made a rush for the front door, because,

of course, a stranger don't come EVERY year, and so he

lays over the yaller-fever, for interest, when he does

come. Tom was over the stile and starting for the

house; the wagon was spinning up the road for the

village, and we was all bunched in the front door. Tom

had his store clothes on, and an audience -- and that

was always nuts for Tom Sawyer. In them circum-

stances it warn't no trouble to him to throw in an

amount of style that was suitable. He warn't a boy to

meeky along up that yard like a sheep; no, he come

ca'm and important, like the ram. When he got a-front

of us he lifts his hat ever so gracious and dainty, like it

was the lid of a box that had butterflies asleep in it and

he didn't want to disturb them, and says:



"Mr. Archibald Nichols, I presume?"



"No, my boy," says the old gentleman, "I'm sorry

to say 't your driver has deceived you; Nichols's place

is down a matter of three mile more. Come in, come

in."



Tom he took a look back over his shoulder, and says,

"Too late -- he's out of sight."



"Yes, he's gone, my son, and you must come in

and eat your dinner with us; and then we'll hitch up

and take you down to Nichols's."



"Oh, I CAN'T make you so much trouble; I couldn't

think of it. I'll walk -- I don't mind the distance."



"But we won't LET you walk -- it wouldn't be South-

ern hospitality to do it. Come right in."



"Oh, DO," says Aunt Sally; "it ain't a bit of

trouble to us, not a bit in the world. You must stay.

It's a long, dusty three mile, and we can't let you walk.

And, besides, I've already told 'em to put on another

plate when I see you coming; so you mustn't disap-

point us. Come right in and make yourself at home."



So Tom he thanked them very hearty and handsome,

and let himself be persuaded, and come in; and when

he was in he said he was a stranger from Hicksville,

Ohio, and his name was William Thompson -- and he

made another bow.



Well, he run on, and on, and on, making up stuff

about Hicksville and everybody in it he could invent,

and I getting a little nervious, and wondering how this

was going to help me out of my scrape; and at last,

still talking along, he reached over and kissed Aunt

Sally right on the mouth, and then settled back again

in his chair comfortable, and was going on talking; but

she jumped up and wiped it off with the back of her

hand, and says:



"You owdacious puppy!"



He looked kind of hurt, and says:



"I'm surprised at you, m'am."



"You're s'rp -- Why, what do you reckon I am?

I've a good notion to take and -- Say, what do you

mean by kissing me?"



He looked kind of humble, and says:



"I didn't mean nothing, m'am. I didn't mean no

harm. I -- I -- thought you'd like it."



"Why, you born fool!" She took up the spinning

stick, and it looked like it was all she could do to keep

from giving him a crack with it. "What made you

think I'd like it?"



"Well, I don't know. Only, they -- they -- told

me you would."



"THEY told you I would. Whoever told you's

ANOTHER lunatic. I never heard the beat of it. Who's

THEY?"



"Why, everybody. They all said so, m'am."



It was all she could do to hold in; and her eyes

snapped, and her fingers worked like she wanted to

scratch him; and she says:



"Who's 'everybody'? Out with their names, or

ther'll be an idiot short."



He got up and looked distressed, and fumbled his

hat, and says:



"I'm sorry, and I warn't expecting it. They told

me to. They all told me to. They all said, kiss her;

and said she'd like it. They all said it -- every one of

them. But I'm sorry, m'am, and I won't do it no

more -- I won't, honest."



"You won't, won't you? Well, I sh'd RECKON you

won't!"



"No'm, I'm honest about it; I won't ever do it

again -- till you ask me."



"Till I ASK you! Well, I never see the beat of it in

my born days! I lay you'll be the Methusalem-num-

skull of creation before ever I ask you -- or the likes of

you."



"Well," he says, "it does surprise me so. I can't

make it out, somehow. They said you would, and I

thought you would. But --" He stopped and looked

around slow, like he wished he could run across a

friendly eye somewheres, and fetched up on the old

gentleman's, and says, "Didn't YOU think she'd like

me to kiss her, sir?"



"Why, no; I -- I -- well, no, I b'lieve I didn't."



Then he looks on around the same way to me, and

says:



"Tom, didn't YOU think Aunt Sally 'd open out her

arms and say, 'Sid Sawyer --'"



"My land!" she says, breaking in and jumping for

him, "you impudent young rascal, to fool a body

so --" and was going to hug him, but he fended her

off, and says:



"No, not till you've asked me first."



So she didn't lose no time, but asked him; and

hugged him and kissed him over and over again, and

then turned him over to the old man, and he took what

was left. And after they got a little quiet again she says:



"Why, dear me, I never see such a surprise. We

warn't looking for YOU at all, but only Tom. Sis never

wrote to me about anybody coming but him."



"It's because it warn't INTENDED for any of us to

come but Tom," he says; "but I begged and begged,

and at the last minute she let me come, too; so, com-

ing down the river, me and Tom thought it would be

a first-rate surprise for him to come here to the house

first, and for me to by and by tag along and drop in,

and let on to be a stranger. But it was a mistake,

Aunt Sally. This ain't no healthy place for a stranger

to come."



"No -- not impudent whelps, Sid. You ought to

had your jaws boxed; I hain't been so put out since I

don't know when. But I don't care, I don't mind

the terms -- I'd be willing to stand a thousand such

jokes to have you here. Well, to think of that per-

formance! I don't deny it, I was most putrified with

astonishment when you give me that smack."



We had dinner out in that broad open passage be-

twixt the house and the kitchen; and there was things

enough on that table for seven families -- and all hot,

too; none of your flabby, tough meat that's laid in a

cupboard in a damp cellar all night and tastes like a

hunk of old cold cannibal in the morning. Uncle

Silas he asked a pretty long blessing over it, but it was

worth it; and it didn't cool it a bit, neither, the way

I've seen them kind of interruptions do lots of times.

There was a considerable good deal of talk all the

afternoon, and me and Tom was on the lookout all the

time; but it warn't no use, they didn't happen to say

nothing about any runaway nigger, and we was afraid

to try to work up to it. But at supper, at night, one

of the little boys says:



"Pa, mayn't Tom and Sid and me go to the show?"



"No," says the old man, "I reckon there ain't go-

ing to be any; and you couldn't go if there was; be-

cause the runaway nigger told Burton and me all about

that scandalous show, and Burton said he would tell the

people; so I reckon they've drove the owdacious loaf-

ers out of town before this time."



So there it was! -- but I couldn't help it. Tom and

me was to sleep in the same room and bed; so, being

tired, we bid good-night and went up to bed right after

supper, and clumb out of the window and down the

lightning-rod, and shoved for the town; for I didn't

believe anybody was going to give the king and the

duke a hint, and so if I didn't hurry up and give them

one they'd get into trouble sure.



On the road Tom he told me all about how it was

reckoned I was murdered, and how pap disappeared

pretty soon, and didn't come back no more, and what

a stir there was when Jim run away; and I told Tom

all about our Royal Nonesuch rapscallions, and as

much of the raft voyage as I had time to; and as we

struck into the town and up through the  -- here comes a

raging rush of people with torches, and an awful

whooping and yelling, and banging tin pans and blow-

ing horns; and we jumped to one side to let them go

by; and as they went by I see they had the king and

the duke astraddle of a rail -- that is, I knowed it WAS

the king and the duke, though they was all over tar and

feathers, and didn't look like nothing in the world that

was human -- just looked like a couple of monstrous

big soldier-plumes. Well, it made me sick to see it;

and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed

like I couldn't ever feel any hardness against them any

more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see.

Human beings CAN be awful cruel to one another.



We see we was too late -- couldn't do no good. We

asked some stragglers about it, and they said everybody

went to the show looking very innocent; and laid

low and kept dark till the poor old king was in the

middle of his cavortings on the stage; then somebody

give a signal, and the house rose up and went for

them.



So we poked along back home, and I warn't feeling

so brash as I was before, but kind of ornery, and

humble, and to blame, somehow -- though I hadn't

done nothing. But that's always the way; it don't

make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a

person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for

him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know

no more than a person's conscience does I would pison

him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a

person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow. Tom

Sawyer he says the same.





CHAPTER XXXIV.



WE stopped talking, and got to thinking. By and by

Tom says:



"Looky here, Huck, what fools we are to not think

of it before! I bet I know where Jim is."



"No! Where?"



"In that hut down by the ash-hopper. Why, looky

here. When we was at dinner, didn't you see a nigger

man go in there with some vittles?"



"Yes."



"What did you think the vittles was for?"



"For a dog."



"So 'd I. Well, it wasn't for a dog."



"Why?"



"Because part of it was watermelon."



"So it was -- I noticed it. Well, it does beat all

that I never thought about a dog not eating water-

melon. It shows how a body can see and don't see at

the same time."



"Well, the nigger unlocked the padlock when he

went in, and he locked it again when he came out. He

fetched uncle a key about the time we got up from

table -- same key, I bet. Watermelon shows man,

lock shows prisoner; and it ain't likely there's two

prisoners on such a little plantation, and where the

people's all so kind and good. Jim's the prisoner.

All right -- I'm glad we found it out detective fashion;

I wouldn't give shucks for any other way. Now you

work your mind, and study out a plan to steal Jim, and

I will study out one, too; and we'll take the one we

like the best."



What a head for just a boy to have! If I had Tom

Sawyer's head I wouldn't trade it off to be a duke, nor

mate of a steamboat, nor clown in a circus, nor nothing

I can think of. I went to thinking out a plan, but only

just to be doing something; I knowed very well where

the right plan was going to come from. Pretty soon

Tom says:



"Ready?"



"Yes," I says.



"All right -- bring it out."



"My plan is this," I says. "We can easy find out

if it's Jim in there. Then get up my canoe to-morrow

night, and fetch my raft over from the island. Then

the first dark night that comes steal the key out of the

old man's britches after he goes to bed, and shove off

down the river on the raft with Jim, hiding daytimes

and running nights, the way me and Jim used to do be-

fore. Wouldn't that plan work?"



"WORK? Why, cert'nly it would work, like rats

a-fighting. But it's too blame' simple; there ain't

nothing TO it. What's the good of a plan that ain't no

more trouble than that? It's as mild as goose-milk.

Why, Huck, it wouldn't make no more talk than break-

ing into a soap factory."



I never said nothing, because I warn't expecting noth-

ing different; but I knowed mighty well that whenever

he got HIS plan ready it wouldn't have none of them

objections to it.



And it didn't. He told me what it was, and I see in

a minute it was worth fifteen of mine for style, and

would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and

maybe get us all killed besides. So I was satisfied, and

said we would waltz in on it. I needn't tell what it

was here, because I knowed it wouldn't stay the way, it

was. I knowed he would be changing it around every

which way as we went along, and heaving in new bull-

inesses wherever he got a chance. And that is what

he done.



Well, one thing was dead sure, and that was that Tom

Sawyer was in earnest, and was actuly going to help

steal that nigger out of slavery. That was the thing

that was too many for me. Here was a boy that was

respectable and well brung up; and had a character to

lose; and folks at home that had characters; and he

was bright and not leather-headed; and knowing and

not ignorant; and not mean, but kind; and yet here

he was, without any more pride, or rightness, or feel-

ing, than to stoop to this business, and make himself a

shame, and his family a shame, before everybody. I

COULDN'T understand it no way at all. It was outra-

geous, and I knowed I ought to just up and tell him so;

and so be his true friend, and let him quit the thing

right where he was and save himself. And I DID start

to tell him; but he shut me up, and says:



"Don't you reckon I know what I'm about? Don't

I generly know what I'm about?"



"Yes."



"Didn't I SAY I was going to help steal the nigger?"



"Yes."



"WELL, then."



That's all he said, and that's all I said. It warn't no

use to say any more; because when he said he'd do a

thing, he always done it. But I couldn't make out

how he was willing to go into this thing; so I just let it

go, and never bothered no more about it. If he was

bound to have it so, I couldn't help it.



When we got home the house was all dark and still;

so we went on down to the hut by the ash-hopper for

to examine it. We went through the yard so as to see

what the hounds would do. They knowed us, and

didn't make no more noise than country dogs is always

doing when anything comes by in the night. When

we got to the cabin we took a look at the front and the

two sides; and on the side I warn't acquainted with --

which was the north side -- we found a square window-

hole, up tolerable high, with just one stout board nailed

across it. I says:



"Here's the ticket. This hole's big enough for Jim

to get through if we wrench off the board."



Tom says:



"It's as simple as tit-tat-toe, three-in-a-row, and as

easy as playing hooky. I should HOPE we can find a

way that's a little more complicated than THAT, Huck

Finn."



"Well, then," I says, "how 'll it do to saw him out,

the way I done before I was murdered that time?"



"That's more LIKE," he says. "It's real mysterious,

and troublesome, and good," he says; "but I bet we

can find a way that's twice as long. There ain't no

hurry; le's keep on looking around."



Betwixt the hut and the fence, on the back side, was

a lean-to that joined the hut at the eaves, and was made

out of plank. It was as long as the hut, but narrow

-- only about six foot wide. The door to it was at the

south end, and was padlocked. Tom he went to the

soap-kettle and searched around, and fetched back the

iron thing they lift the lid with; so he took it and

prized out one of the staples. The chain fell down,

and we opened the door and went in, and shut it, and

struck a match, and see the shed was only built against

a cabin and hadn't no connection with it; and there

warn't no floor to the shed, nor nothing in it but some

old rusty played-out hoes and spades and picks and

a crippled plow. The match went out, and so did we,

and shoved in the staple again, and the door was locked

as good as ever. Tom was joyful. He says;



"Now we're all right. We'll DIG him out. It 'll

take about a week!"



Then we started for the house, and I went in the

back door -- you only have to pull a buckskin latch-

string, they don't fasten the doors -- but that warn't

romantical enough for Tom Sawyer; no way would do

him but he must climb up the lightning-rod. But after

he got up half way about three times, and missed fire

and fell every time, and the last time most busted his

brains out, he thought he'd got to give it up; but after

he was rested he allowed he would give her one more

turn for luck, and this time he made the trip.



In the morning we was up at break of day, and down

to the nigger cabins to pet the dogs and make friends

with the nigger that fed Jim -- if it WAS Jim that was

being fed. The niggers was just getting through break-

fast and starting for the fields; and Jim's nigger was

piling up a tin pan with bread and meat and things;

and whilst the others was leaving, the key come from

the house.



This nigger had a good-natured, chuckle-headed face,

and his wool was all tied up in little bunches with

thread. That was to keep witches off. He said the

witches was pestering him awful these nights, and mak-

ing him see all kinds of strange things, and hear all kinds

of strange words and noises, and he didn't believe he

was ever witched so long before in his life. He got

so worked up, and got to running on so about his

troubles, he forgot all about what he'd been a-going to

do. So Tom says:



"What's the vittles for? Going to feed the dogs?"



The nigger kind of smiled around graduly over his

face, like when you heave a brickbat in a mud-puddle,

and he says:



"Yes, Mars Sid, A dog. Cur'us dog, too. Does

you want to go en look at 'im?"



"Yes."



I hunched Tom, and whispers:



"You going, right here in the daybreak? THAT

warn't the plan."



"No, it warn't; but it's the plan NOW."



So, drat him, we went along, but I didn't like it

much. When we got in we couldn't hardly see any-

thing, it was so dark; but Jim was there, sure enough,

and could see us; and he sings out:



"Why, HUCK! En good LAN'! ain' dat Misto Tom?"



I just knowed how it would be; I just expected it.

I didn't know nothing to do; and if I had I couldn't

a done it, because that nigger busted in and says:



"Why, de gracious sakes! do he know you genl-

men?"



We could see pretty well now. Tom he looked at

the nigger, steady and kind of wondering, and says:



"Does WHO know us?"



"Why, dis-yer runaway nigger."



"I don't reckon he does; but what put that into

your head?"



"What PUT it dar? Didn' he jis' dis minute sing

out like he knowed you?"



Tom says, in a puzzled-up kind of way:



"Well, that's mighty curious. WHO sung out?

WHEN did he sing out? WHAT did he sing out?"

And turns to me, perfectly ca'm, and says, "Did

YOU hear anybody sing out?"



Of course there warn't nothing to be said but the one

thing; so I says:



"No; I ain't heard nobody say nothing."



Then he turns to Jim, and looks him over like he

never see him before, and says:



"Did you sing out?"



"No, sah," says Jim; " I hain't said nothing, sah."



"Not a word?"



"No, sah, I hain't said a word."



"Did you ever see us before?"



"No, sah; not as I knows on."



So Tom turns to the nigger, which was looking wild

and distressed, and says, kind of severe:



"What do you reckon's the matter with you, any-

way? What made you think somebody sung out?"



"Oh, it's de dad-blame' witches, sah, en I wisht I

was dead, I do. Dey's awluz at it, sah, en dey do

mos' kill me, dey sk'yers me so. Please to don't tell

nobody 'bout it sah, er ole Mars Silas he'll scole me;

'kase he say dey AIN'T no witches. I jis' wish to good-

ness he was heah now -- DEN what would he say! I

jis' bet he couldn' fine no way to git aroun' it DIS time.

But it's awluz jis' so; people dat's SOT, stays sot; dey

won't look into noth'n'en fine it out f'r deyselves, en

when YOU fine it out en tell um 'bout it, dey doan'

b'lieve you."



Tom give him a dime, and said we wouldn't tell no-

body; and told him to buy some more thread to tie up

his wool with; and then looks at Jim, and says:



"I wonder if Uncle Silas is going to hang this nigger.

If I was to catch a nigger that was ungrateful enough

to run away, I wouldn't give him up, I'd hang him."

And whilst the nigger stepped to the door to look at

the dime and bite it to see if it was good, he whispers

to Jim and says:



"Don't ever let on to know us. And if you hear

any digging going on nights, it's us; we're going to

set you free."



Jim only had time to grab us by the hand and squeeze

it; then the nigger come back, and we said we'd

come again some time if the nigger wanted us to; and

he said he would, more particular if it was dark, be-

cause the witches went for him mostly in the dark, and

it was good to have folks around then.





CHAPTER XXXV.



IT would be most an hour yet till breakfast, so we left

and struck down into the woods; because Tom said

we got to have SOME light to see how to dig by, and a

lantern makes too much, and might get us into trouble;

what we must have was a lot of them rotten chunks

that's called fox-fire, and just makes a soft kind of a

glow when you lay them in a dark place. We fetched

an armful and hid it in the weeds, and set down to rest,

and Tom says, kind of dissatisfied:



"Blame it, this whole thing is just as easy and

awkward as it can be. And so it makes it so rotten

difficult to get up a difficult plan. There ain't no watch-

man to be drugged -- now there OUGHT to be a watch-

man. There ain't even a dog to give a sleeping-mix-

ture to. And there's Jim chained by one leg, with a

ten-foot chain, to the leg of his bed: why, all you got

to do is to lift up the bedstead and slip off the chain.

And Uncle Silas he trusts everybody; sends the key

to the punkin-headed nigger, and don't send nobody to

watch the nigger. Jim could a got out of that window-

hole before this, only there wouldn't be no use trying

to travel with a ten-foot chain on his leg. Why, drat

it, Huck, it's the stupidest arrangement I ever see.

You got to invent ALL the difficulties. Well, we can't

help it; we got to do the best we can with the materials

we've got. Anyhow, there's one thing -- there's more

honor in getting him out through a lot of difficulties

and dangers, where there warn't one of them furnished

to you by the people who it was their duty to furnish

them, and you had to contrive them all out of your

own head. Now look at just that one thing of the

lantern. When you come down to the cold facts, we

simply got to LET ON that a lantern's resky. Why, we

could work with a torchlight procession if we wanted

to, I believe. Now, whilst I think of it, we got to

hunt up something to make a saw out of the first

chance we get."



"What do we want of a saw?"



"What do we WANT of a saw? Hain't we got to

saw the leg of Jim's bed off, so as to get the chain

loose?"



"Why, you just said a body could lift up the bed-

stead and slip the chain off."



"Well, if that ain't just like you, Huck Finn. You

CAN get up the infant-schooliest ways of going at a

thing. Why, hain't you ever read any books at all?

-- Baron Trenck, nor Casanova, nor Benvenuto Chel-

leeny, nor Henri IV., nor none of them heroes? Who

ever heard of getting a prisoner loose in such an old-

maidy way as that? No; the way all the best authori-

ties does is to saw the bed-leg in two, and leave it just

so, and swallow the sawdust, so it can't be found, and

put some dirt and grease around the sawed place so the

very keenest seneskal can't see no sign of it's being

sawed, and thinks the bed-leg is perfectly sound. Then,

the night you're ready, fetch the leg a kick, down she

goes; slip off your chain, and there you are. Nothing

to do but hitch your rope ladder to the battlements, shin

down it, break your leg in the moat -- because a rope

ladder is nineteen foot too short, you know -- and there's

your horses and your trusty vassles, and they scoop

you up and fling you across a saddle, and away you go

to your native Langudoc, or Navarre, or wherever it is.

It's gaudy, Huck. I wish there was a moat to this

cabin. If we get time, the night of the escape,

we'll dig one."



I says:



"What do we want of a moat when we're going to

snake him out from under the cabin?"



But he never heard me. He had forgot me and

everything else. He had his chin in his hand, thinking.

Pretty soon he sighs and shakes his head; then sighs

again, and says:



"No, it wouldn't do -- there ain't necessity enough

for it."



"For what?" I says.



"Why, to saw Jim's leg off," he says.



"Good land!" I says; "why, there ain't NO neces-

sity for it. And what would you want to saw his leg

off for, anyway?"



"Well, some of the best authorities has done it.

They couldn't get the chain off, so they just cut their

hand off and shoved. And a leg would be better still.

But we got to let that go. There ain't necessity

enough in this case; and, besides, Jim's a nigger, and

wouldn't understand the reasons for it, and how it's the

custom in Europe; so we'll let it go. But there's one

thing -- he can have a rope ladder; we can tear up our

sheets and make him a rope ladder easy enough. And

we can send it to him in a pie; it's mostly done that

way. And I've et worse pies."



"Why, Tom Sawyer, how you talk," I says; "Jim

ain't got no use for a rope ladder."



"He HAS got use for it. How YOU talk, you better

say; you don't know nothing about it. He's GOT to

have a rope ladder; they all do."



"What in the nation can he DO with it?"



"DO with it? He can hide it in his bed, can't he?"

That's what they all do; and HE'S got to, too.

Huck, you don't ever seem to want to do anything

that's regular; you want to be starting something fresh

all the time. S'pose he DON'T do nothing with it? ain't

it there in his bed, for a clew, after he's gone? and

don't you reckon they'll want clews? Of course they

will. And you wouldn't leave them any? That would

be a PRETTY howdy-do, WOULDN'T it! I never heard of

such a thing."



"Well," I says, "if it's in the regulations, and he's

got to have it, all right, let him have it; because I

don't wish to go back on no regulations; but there's

one thing, Tom Sawyer -- if we go to tearing up our

sheets to make Jim a rope ladder, we're going to get

into trouble with Aunt Sally, just as sure as you're

born. Now, the way I look at it, a hickry-bark ladder

don't cost nothing, and don't waste nothing, and is

just as good to load up a pie with, and hide in a straw

tick, as any rag ladder you can start; and as for Jim,

he ain't had no experience, and so he don't care what

kind of a --"



"Oh, shucks, Huck Finn, if I was as ignorant as

you I'd keep still -- that's what I'D do. Who ever

heard of a state prisoner escaping by a hickry-bark

ladder? Why, it's perfectly ridiculous."



"Well, all right, Tom, fix it your own way; but if

you'll take my advice, you'll let me borrow a sheet off

of the clothesline."



He said that would do. And that gave him another

idea, and he says:



"Borrow a shirt, too."



"What do we want of a shirt, Tom?"



"Want it for Jim to keep a journal on."



"Journal your granny -- JIM can't write."



"S'pose he CAN'T write -- he can make marks on

the shirt, can't he, if we make him a pen out of

an old pewter spoon or a piece of an old iron barrel-

hoop?"



"Why, Tom, we can pull a feather out of a goose

and make him a better one; and quicker, too."



"PRISONERS don't have geese running around the

donjon-keep to pull pens out of, you muggins. They

ALWAYS make their pens out of the hardest, toughest,

troublesomest piece of old brass candlestick or some-

thing like that they can get their hands on; and it

takes them weeks and weeks and months and months

to file it out, too, because they've got to do it by rub-

bing it on the wall. THEY wouldn't use a goose-quill if

they had it. It ain't regular."



"Well, then, what'll we make him the ink out of?"



"Many makes it out of iron-rust and tears; but

that's the common sort and women; the best authori-

ties uses their own blood. Jim can do that; and when

he wants to send any little common ordinary mysterious

message to let the world know where he's captivated,

he can write it on the bottom of a tin plate with a fork

and throw it out of the window. The Iron Mask

always done that, and it's a blame' good way, too."



"Jim ain't got no tin plates. They feed him in a

pan."



"That ain't nothing; we can get him some."



"Can't nobody READ his plates."



"That ain't got anything to DO with it, Huck Finn.

All HE'S got to do is to write on the plate and throw

it out. You don't HAVE to be able to read it. Why,

half the time you can't read anything a prisoner writes

on a tin plate, or anywhere else."



"Well, then, what's the sense in wasting the plates?"



"Why, blame it all, it ain't the PRISONER'S plates."



"But it's SOMEBODY'S plates, ain't it?"



"Well, spos'n it is? What does the PRISONER care

whose --"



He broke off there, because we heard the breakfast-

horn blowing. So we cleared out for the house.



Along during the morning I borrowed a sheet and a

white shirt off of the clothes-line; and I found an old

sack and put them in it, and we went down and got the

fox-fire, and put that in too. I called it borrowing,

because that was what pap always called it; but Tom

said it warn't borrowing, it was stealing. He said we

was representing prisoners; and prisoners don't care

how they get a thing so they get it, and nobody don't

blame them for it, either. It ain't no crime in a

prisoner to steal the thing he needs to get away with,

Tom said; it's his right; and so, as long as we was

representing a prisoner, we had a perfect right to steal

anything on this place we had the least use for to get

ourselves out of prison with. He said if we warn't

prisoners it would be a very different thing, and nobody

but a mean, ornery person would steal when he warn't

a prisoner. So we allowed we would steal every-

thing there was that come handy. And yet he made

a mighty fuss, one day, after that, when I stole a

watermelon out of the nigger-patch and eat it; and he

made me go and give the niggers a dime without telling

them what it was for. Tom said that what he meant

was, we could steal anything we NEEDED. Well, I says,

I needed the watermelon. But he said I didn't need it

to get out of prison with; there's where the difference

was. He said if I'd a wanted it to hide a knife in, and

smuggle it to Jim to kill the seneskal with, it would a

been all right. So I let it go at that, though I couldn't

see no advantage in my representing a prisoner if I got

to set down and chaw over a lot of gold-leaf distinctions

like that every time I see a chance to hog a watermelon.



Well, as I was saying, we waited that morning till

everybody was settled down to business, and nobody

in sight around the yard; then Tom he carried the

sack into the lean-to whilst I stood off a piece to keep

watch. By and by he come out, and we went and set

down on the woodpile to talk. He says:



"Everything's all right now except tools; and that's

easy fixed."



"Tools?" I says.



"Yes."



"Tools for what?"



"Why, to dig with. We ain't a-going to GNAW him

out, are we?"



"Ain't them old crippled picks and things in there

good enough to dig a nigger out with?" I says.



He turns on me, looking pitying enough to make a

body cry, and says:



"Huck Finn, did you EVER hear of a prisoner having

picks and shovels, and all the modern conveniences in

his wardrobe to dig himself out with? Now I want to

ask you -- if you got any reasonableness in you at all

-- what kind of a show would THAT give him to be a

hero? Why, they might as well lend him the key and

done with it. Picks and shovels -- why, they wouldn't

furnish 'em to a king."



"Well, then," I says, "if we don't want the picks

and shovels, what do we want?"



"A couple of case-knives."



"To dig the foundations out from under that cabin

with?"



"Yes."



"Confound it, it's foolish, Tom."



"It don't make no difference how foolish it is, it's

the RIGHT way -- and it's the regular way. And there

ain't no OTHER way, that ever I heard of, and I've read

all the books that gives any information about these

things. They always dig out with a case-knife -- and

not through dirt, mind you; generly it's through solid

rock. And it takes them weeks and weeks and weeks,

and for ever and ever. Why, look at one of them

prisoners in the bottom dungeon of the Castle Deef, in

the harbor of Marseilles, that dug himself out that way;

how long was HE at it, you reckon?"



"I don't know."



"Well, guess."



"I don't know. A month and a half."



"THIRTY-SEVEN YEAR -- and he come out in China.

THAT'S the kind. I wish the bottom of THIS fortress

was solid rock."



"JIM don't know nobody in China."



"What's THAT got to do with it? Neither did that

other fellow. But you're always a-wandering off on a

side issue. Why can't you stick to the main point?"



"All right -- I don't care where he comes out, so he

COMES out; and Jim don't, either, I reckon. But

there's one thing, anyway -- Jim's too old to be dug

out with a case-knife. He won't last."



"Yes he will LAST, too. You don't reckon it's going

to take thirty-seven years to dig out through a DIRT

foundation, do you?"



"How long will it take, Tom?"



"Well, we can't resk being as long as we ought to,

because it mayn't take very long for Uncle Silas to hear

from down there by New Orleans. He'll hear Jim ain't

from there. Then his next move will be to advertise Jim,

or something like that. So we can't resk being as long

digging him out as we ought to. By rights I reckon

we ought to be a couple of years; but we can't.

Things being so uncertain, what I recommend is this:

that we really dig right in, as quick as we can; and

after that, we can LET ON, to ourselves, that we was at

it thirty-seven years. Then we can snatch him out and

rush him away the first time there's an alarm. Yes, I

reckon that 'll be the best way."



"Now, there's SENSE in that," I says. "Letting on

don't cost nothing; letting on ain't no trouble; and if

it's any object, I don't mind letting on we was at it a

hundred and fifty year. It wouldn't strain me none,

after I got my hand in. So I'll mosey along now, and

smouch a couple of case-knives."



"Smouch three," he says; "we want one to make

a saw out of."



"Tom, if it ain't unregular and irreligious to sejest

it," I says, "there's an old rusty saw-blade around

yonder sticking under the weather-boarding behind the

smoke-house."



He looked kind of weary and discouraged-like, and

says:



"It ain't no use to try to learn you nothing, Huck.

Run along and smouch the knives -- three of them."

So I done it.





CHAPTER XXXVI.



AS soon as we reckoned everybody was asleep that

night we went down the lightning-rod, and shut

ourselves up in the lean-to, and got out our pile of

fox-fire, and went to work. We cleared everything

out of the way, about four or five foot along the mid-

dle of the bottom log. Tom said we was right behind

Jim's bed now, and we'd dig in under it, and when we

got through there couldn't nobody in the cabin ever

know there was any hole there, because Jim's counter-

pin hung down most to the ground, and you'd have to

raise it up and look under to see the hole. So we dug

and dug with the case-knives till most midnight; and

then we was dog-tired, and our hands was blistered,

and yet you couldn't see we'd done anything hardly.

At last I says:



"This ain't no thirty-seven year job; this is a

thirty-eight year job, Tom Sawyer."



He never said nothing. But he sighed, and pretty

soon he stopped digging, and then for a good little

while I knowed that he was thinking. Then he says:



"It ain't no use, Huck, it ain't a-going to work. If

we was prisoners it would, because then we'd have as

many years as we wanted, and no hurry; and we

wouldn't get but a few minutes to dig, every day,

while they was changing watches, and so our hands

wouldn't get blistered, and we could keep it up right

along, year in and year out, and do it right, and the

way it ought to be done. But WE can't fool along;

we got to rush; we ain't got no time to spare. If we

was to put in another night this way we'd have to

knock off for a week to let our hands get well --

couldn't touch a case-knife with them sooner."



"Well, then, what we going to do, Tom?"



"I'll tell you. It ain't right, and it ain't moral,  .

and I wouldn't like it to get out; but there ain't only

just the one way: we got to dig him out with the

picks, and LET ON it's case-knives."



"NOW you're TALKING!" I says; "your head gets

leveler and leveler all the time, Tom Sawyer," I

says. "Picks is the thing, moral or no moral; and as

for me, I don't care shucks for the morality of it,

nohow. When I start in to steal a nigger, or a water-

melon, or a Sunday-school book, I ain't no ways

particular how it's done so it's done. What I want is

my nigger; or what I want is my watermelon; or what

I want is my Sunday-school book; and if a pick's the

handiest thing, that's the thing I'm a-going to dig that

nigger or that watermelon or that Sunday-school book

out with; and I don't give a dead rat what the au-

thorities thinks about it nuther."



"Well," he says, "there's excuse for picks and

letting-on in a case like this; if it warn't so, I wouldn't

approve of it, nor I wouldn't stand by and see the

rules broke -- because right is right, and wrong is

wrong, and a body ain't got no business doing wrong

when he ain't ignorant and knows better. It might

answer for YOU to dig Jim out with a pick, WITHOUT any

letting on, because you don't know no better; but it

wouldn't for me, because I do know better. Gimme

a case-knife."



He had his own by him, but I handed him mine.

He flung it down, and says:



"Gimme a CASE-KNIFE."



I didn't know just what to do -- but then I thought.

I scratched around amongst the old tools, and got a

pickaxe and give it to him, and he took it and went to

work, and never said a word.



He was always just that particular. Full of principle.



So then I got a shovel, and then we picked and

shoveled, turn about, and made the fur fly. We stuck

to it about a half an hour, which was as long as we

could stand up; but we had a good deal of a hole to

show for it. When I got up stairs I looked out at the

window and see Tom doing his level best with the

lightning-rod, but he couldn't come it, his hands was

so sore. At last he says:



"It ain't no use, it can't be done. What you

reckon I better do? Can't you think of no way?"



"Yes," I says, "but I reckon it ain't regular.

Come up the stairs, and let on it's a lightning-rod."



So he done it.



Next day Tom stole a pewter spoon and a brass

candlestick in the house, for to make some pens for

Jim out of, and six tallow candles; and I hung around

the nigger cabins and laid for a chance, and stole three

tin plates. Tom says it wasn't enough; but I said

nobody wouldn't ever see the plates that Jim throwed

out, because they'd fall in the dog-fennel and jimpson

weeds under the window-hole -- then we could tote

them back and he could use them over again. So

Tom was satisfied. Then he says:



"Now, the thing to study out is, how to get the

things to Jim."



"Take them in through the hole," I says, "when

we get it done."



He only just looked scornful, and said something

about nobody ever heard of such an idiotic idea, and

then he went to studying. By and by he said he had

ciphered out two or three ways, but there warn't no

need to decide on any of them yet. Said we'd got to

post Jim first.



That night we went down the lightning-rod a little

after ten, and took one of the candles along, and

listened under the window-hole, and heard Jim snoring;

so we pitched it in, and it didn't wake him. Then we

whirled in with the pick and shovel, and in about two

hours and a half the job was done. We crept in under

Jim's bed and into the cabin, and pawed around and

found the candle and lit it, and stood over Jim awhile,

and found him looking hearty and healthy, and then

we woke him up gentle and gradual. He was so glad to

see us he most cried; and called us honey, and all the

pet names he could think of; and was for having us

hunt up a cold-chisel to cut the chain off of his leg

with right away, and clearing out without losing any

time. But Tom he showed him how unregular it

would be, and set down and told him all about our

plans, and how we could alter them in a minute any

time there was an alarm; and not to be the least afraid,

because we would see he got away, SURE. So Jim he

said it was all right, and we set there and talked over

old times awhile, and then Tom asked a lot of ques-

tions, and when Jim told him Uncle Silas come in

every day or two to pray with him, and Aunt Sally

come in to see if he was comfortable and had plenty to

eat, and both of them was kind as they could be, Tom

says:



"NOW I know how to fix it. We'll send you some

things by them."



I said, "Don't do nothing of the kind; it's one of

the most jackass ideas I ever struck;" but he never

paid no attention to me; went right on. It was his

way when he'd got his plans set.



So he told Jim how we'd have to smuggle in the

rope-ladder pie and other large things by Nat, the

nigger that fed him, and he must be on the lookout,

and not be surprised, and not let Nat see him open

them; and we would put small things in uncle's coat-

pockets and he must steal them out; and we would tie

things to aunt's apron-strings or put them in her

apron-pocket, if we got a chance; and told him what

they would be and what they was for. And told him

how to keep a journal on the shirt with his blood, and

all that. He told him everything. Jim he couldn't

see no sense in the most of it, but he allowed we was

white folks and knowed better than him; so he was

satisfied, and said he would do it all just as Tom said.



Jim had plenty corn-cob pipes and tobacco; so

we had a right down good sociable time; then we

crawled out through the hole, and so home to bed,

with hands that looked like they'd been chawed. Tom

was in high spirits. He said it was the best fun he

ever had in his life, and the most intellectural; and

said if he only could see his way to it we would keep it

up all the rest of our lives and leave Jim to our children

to get out; for he believed Jim would come to like it

better and better the more he got used to it. He said

that in that way it could be strung out to as much as

eighty year, and would be the best time on record.

And he said it would make us all celebrated that had a

hand in it.



In the morning we went out to the woodpile and

chopped up the brass candlestick into handy sizes, and

Tom put them and the pewter spoon in his pocket.

Then we went to the nigger cabins, and while I got

Nat's notice off, Tom shoved a piece of candlestick

into the middle of a corn-pone that was in Jim's pan,

and we went along with Nat to see how it would work,

and it just worked noble; when Jim bit into it it most

mashed all his teeth out; and there warn't ever any-

thing could a worked better. Tom said so himself.

Jim he never let on but what it was only just a piece of

rock or something like that that's always getting into

bread, you know; but after that he never bit into

nothing but what he jabbed his fork into it in three or

four places first.



And whilst we was a-standing there in the dimmish

light, here comes a couple of the hounds bulging in

from under Jim's bed; and they kept on piling in till

there was eleven of them, and there warn't hardly

room in there to get your breath. By jings, we forgot

to fasten that lean-to door! The nigger Nat he only

just hollered "Witches" once, and keeled over on to

the floor amongst the dogs, and begun to groan like

he was dying. Tom jerked the door open and flung

out a slab of Jim's meat, and the dogs went for it, and

in two seconds he was out himself and back again and

shut the door, and I knowed he'd fixed the other door

too. Then he went to work on the nigger, coaxing

him and petting him, and asking him if he'd been

imagining he saw something again. He raised up, and

blinked his eyes around, and says:



"Mars Sid, you'll say I's a fool, but if I didn't

b'lieve I see most a million dogs, er devils, er some'n,

I wisht I may die right heah in dese tracks. I did,

mos' sholy. Mars Sid, I FELT um -- I FELT um, sah;

dey was all over me. Dad fetch it, I jis' wisht I

could git my han's on one er dem witches jis' wunst --

on'y jis' wunst -- it's all I'd ast. But mos'ly I wisht

dey'd lemme 'lone, I does."



Tom says:



"Well, I tell you what I think. What makes them

come here just at this runaway nigger's breakfast-time?

It's because they're hungry; that's the reason. You

make them a witch pie; that's the thing for YOU to

do."



"But my lan', Mars Sid, how's I gwyne to make

'm a witch pie? I doan' know how to make it. I

hain't ever hearn er sich a thing b'fo'."



"Well, then, I'll have to make it myself."



"Will you do it, honey? -- Qwill you? I'll wusshup

de groun' und' yo' foot, I will!"



"All right, I'll do it, seeing it's you, and you've

been good to us and showed us the runaway nigger.

But you got to be mighty careful. When we come

around, you turn your back; and then whatever we've

put in the pan, don't you let on you see it at all. And

don't you look when Jim unloads the pan -- something

might happen, I don't know what. And above all,

don't you HANDLE the witch-things."



"HANNEL 'm, Mars Sid? What IS you a-talkin'

'bout? I wouldn' lay de weight er my finger on

um, not f'r ten hund'd thous'n billion dollars, I

wouldn't."





CHAPTER XXXVII.



THAT was all fixed. So then we went away and

went to the rubbage-pile in the back yard, where

they keep the old boots, and rags, and pieces of

bottles, and wore-out tin things, and all such truck,

and scratched around and found an old tin washpan,

and stopped up the holes as well as we could, to bake

the pie in, and took it down cellar and stole it full of

flour and started for breakfast, and found a couple of

shingle-nails that Tom said would be handy for a

prisoner to scrabble his name and sorrows on the

dungeon walls with, and dropped one of them in Aunt

Sally's apron-pocket which was hanging on a chair,

and t'other we stuck in the band of Uncle Silas's hat,

which was on the bureau, because we heard the chil-

dren say their pa and ma was going to the runaway

nigger's house this morning, and then went to break-

fast, and Tom dropped the pewter spoon in Uncle

Silas's coat-pocket, and Aunt Sally wasn't come yet,

so we had to wait a little while.



And when she come she was hot and red and cross,

and couldn't hardly wait for the blessing; and then

she went to sluicing out coffee with one hand and

cracking the handiest child's head with her thimble

with the other, and says:



"I've hunted high and I've hunted low, and it does

beat all what HAS become of your other shirt."



My heart fell down amongst my lungs and livers

and things, and a hard piece of corn-crust started down

my throat after it and got met on the road with a

cough, and was shot across the table, and took one

of the children in the eye and curled him up like a

fishing-worm, and let a cry out of him the size of a

warwhoop, and Tom he turned kinder blue around the

gills, and it all amounted to a considerable state of

things for about a quarter of a minute or as much as

that, and I would a sold out for half price if there was

a bidder. But after that we was all right again -- it

was the sudden surprise of it that knocked us so kind

of cold. Uncle Silas he says:



"It's most uncommon curious, I can't understand

it. I know perfectly well I took it OFF, because --"



"Because you hain't got but one ON. Just LISTEN at

the man! I know you took it off, and know it by a

better way than your wool-gethering memory, too,

because it was on the clo's-line yesterday -- I see it

there myself. But it's gone, that's the long and the

short of it, and you'll just have to change to a red

flann'l one till I can get time to make a new one.

And it 'll be the third I've made in two years. It just

keeps a body on the jump to keep you in shirts; and

whatever you do manage to DO with 'm all is more'n I

can make out. A body 'd think you WOULD learn to

take some sort of care of 'em at your time of life."



"I know it, Sally, and I do try all I can. But it

oughtn't to be altogether my fault, because, you know,

I don't see them nor have nothing to do with them

except when they're on me; and I don't believe I've

ever lost one of them OFF of me."



"Well, it ain't YOUR fault if you haven't, Silas;

you'd a done it if you could, I reckon. And the shirt

ain't all that's gone, nuther. Ther's a spoon gone;

and THAT ain't all. There was ten, and now ther's only

nine. The calf got the shirt, I reckon, but the calf

never took the spoon, THAT'S certain."



"Why, what else is gone, Sally?"



"Ther's six CANDLES gone -- that's what. The rats

could a got the candles, and I reckon they did; I

wonder they don't walk off with the whole place, the

way you're always going to stop their holes and don't

do it; and if they warn't fools they'd sleep in your

hair, Silas -- YOU'D never find it out; but you can't lay

the SPOON on the rats, and that I know."



"Well, Sally, I'm in fault, and I acknowledge it;

I've been remiss; but I won't let to-morrow go by

without stopping up them holes."



"Oh, I wouldn't hurry; next year 'll do. Matilda

Angelina Araminta PHELPS!"



Whack comes the thimble, and the child snatches

her claws out of the sugar-bowl without fooling around

any. Just then the nigger woman steps on to the

passage, and says:



"Missus, dey's a sheet gone."



"A SHEET gone! Well, for the land's sake!"



"I'll stop up them holes to-day," says Uncle Silas,

looking sorrowful.



"Oh, DO shet up! -- s'pose the rats took the SHEET?

WHERE'S it gone, Lize?"



"Clah to goodness I hain't no notion, Miss' Sally.

She wuz on de clo'sline yistiddy, but she done gone:

she ain' dah no mo' now."



"I reckon the world IS coming to an end. I NEVER

see the beat of it in all my born days. A shirt, and a

sheet, and a spoon, and six can --"



"Missus," comes a young yaller wench, "dey's a

brass cannelstick miss'n."



"Cler out from here, you hussy, er I'll take a skillet

to ye!"



Well, she was just a-biling. I begun to lay for a

chance; I reckoned I would sneak out and go for the

woods till the weather moderated. She kept a-raging

right along, running her insurrection all by herself,

and everybody else mighty meek and quiet; and at

last Uncle Silas, looking kind of foolish, fishes up that

spoon out of his pocket. She stopped, with her mouth

open and her hands up; and as for me, I wished I was

in Jeruslem or somewheres. But not long, because

she says:



"It's JUST as I expected. So you had it in your

pocket all the time; and like as not you've got the

other things there, too. How'd it get there?"



"I reely don't know, Sally," he says, kind of

apologizing, "or you know I would tell. I was a-

studying over my text in Acts Seventeen before break-

fast, and I reckon I put it in there, not noticing,

meaning to put my Testament in, and it must be so,

because my Testament ain't in; but I'll go and see;

and if the Testament is where I had it, I'll know I

didn't put it in, and that will show that I laid the

Testament down and took up the spoon, and --"



"Oh, for the land's sake! Give a body a rest!

Go 'long now, the whole kit and biling of ye; and

don't come nigh me again till I've got back my peace

of mind."



I'D a heard her if she'd a said it to herself, let alone

speaking it out; and I'd a got up and obeyed her if

I'd a been dead. As we was passing through the

setting-room the old man he took up his hat, and the

shingle-nail fell out on the floor, and he just merely

picked it up and laid it on the mantel-shelf, and never

said nothing, and went out. Tom see him do it, and

remembered about the spoon, and says:



"Well, it ain't no use to send things by HIM no

more, he ain't reliable." Then he says: "But he

done us a good turn with the spoon, anyway, without

knowing it, and so we'll go and do him one without

HIM knowing it -- stop up his rat-holes."



There was a noble good lot of them down cellar, and

it took us a whole hour, but we done the job tight and

good and shipshape. Then we heard steps on the

stairs, and blowed out our light and hid; and here

comes the old man, with a candle in one hand and a

bundle of stuff in t'other, looking as absent-minded as

year before last. He went a mooning around, first to

one rat-hole and then another, till he'd been to them

all. Then he stood about five minutes, picking tallow-

drip off of his candle and thinking. Then he turns off

slow and dreamy towards the stairs, saying:



"Well, for the life of me I can't remember when I

done it. I could show her now that I warn't to blame

on account of the rats. But never mind -- let it go. I

reckon it wouldn't do no good."



And so he went on a-mumbling up stairs, and then

we left. He was a mighty nice old man. And

always is.



Tom was a good deal bothered about what to do for

a spoon, but he said we'd got to have it; so he took a

think. When he had ciphered it out he told me how

we was to do; then we went and waited around the

spoon-basket till we see Aunt Sally coming, and then

Tom went to counting the spoons and laying them out

to one side, and I slid one of them up my sleeve, and

Tom says:



"Why, Aunt Sally, there ain't but nine spoons

YET."



She says:



"Go 'long to your play, and don't bother me. I

know better, I counted 'm myself."



"Well, I've counted them twice, Aunty, and I can't

make but nine."



She looked out of all patience, but of course she

come to count -- anybody would.



"I declare to gracious ther' AIN'T but nine!" she

says. "Why, what in the world -- plague TAKE the

things, I'll count 'm again."



So I slipped back the one I had, and when she got

done counting, she says:



"Hang the troublesome rubbage, ther's TEN now!"

and she looked huffy and bothered both. But Tom

says:



"Why, Aunty, I don't think there's ten."



"You numskull, didn't you see me COUNT 'm?"



"I know, but --"



"Well, I'll count 'm AGAIN."



So I smouched one, and they come out nine, same

as the other time. Well, she WAS in a tearing way --

just a-trembling all over, she was so mad. But she

counted and counted till she got that addled she'd start

to count in the basket for a spoon sometimes; and so,

three times they come out right, and three times they

come out wrong. Then she grabbed up the basket

and slammed it across the house and knocked the cat

galley-west; and she said cle'r out and let her have

some peace, and if we come bothering around her

again betwixt that and dinner she'd skin us. So we

had the odd spoon, and dropped it in her apron-pocket

whilst she was a-giving us our sailing orders, and Jim

got it all right, along with her shingle nail, before

noon. We was very well satisfied with this business,

and Tom allowed it was worth twice the trouble it

took, because he said NOW she couldn't ever count

them spoons twice alike again to save her life; and

wouldn't believe she'd counted them right if she DID;

and said that after she'd about counted her head off

for the next three days he judged she'd give it up and

offer to kill anybody that wanted her to ever count

them any more.



So we put the sheet back on the line that night, and

stole one out of her closet; and kept on putting it

back and stealing it again for a couple of days till she

didn't know how many sheets she had any more, and

she didn't CARE, and warn't a-going to bullyrag the rest

of her soul out about it, and wouldn't count them

again not to save her life; she druther die first.



So we was all right now, as to the shirt and the

sheet and the spoon and the candles, by the help of

the calf and the rats and the mixed-up counting; and

as to the candlestick, it warn't no consequence, it

would blow over by and by.



But that pie was a job; we had no end of trouble

with that pie. We fixed it up away down in the

woods, and cooked it there; and we got it done at

last, and very satisfactory, too; but not all in one

day; and we had to use up three wash-pans full of

flour before we got through, and we got burnt pretty

much all over, in places, and eyes put out with the

smoke; because, you see, we didn't want nothing but

a crust, and we couldn't prop it up right, and she

would always cave in. But of course we thought of

the right way at last -- which was to cook the ladder,

too, in the pie. So then we laid in with Jim the

second night, and tore up the sheet all in little strings

and twisted them together, and long before daylight we

had a lovely rope that you could a hung a person with.

We let on it took nine months to make it.



And in the forenoon we took it down to the woods,

but it wouldn't go into the pie. Being made of a

whole sheet, that way, there was rope enough for forty

pies if we'd a wanted them, and plenty left over for

soup, or sausage, or anything you choose. We could

a had a whole dinner.



But we didn't need it. All we needed was just

enough for the pie, and so we throwed the rest away.

We didn't cook none of the pies in the wash-pan --

afraid the solder would melt; but Uncle Silas he had a

noble brass warming-pan which he thought consider-

able of, because it belonged to one of his ancesters

with a long wooden handle that come over from Eng-

land with William the Conqueror in the Mayflower or

one of them early ships and was hid away up garret

with a lot of other old pots and things that was

valuable, not on account of being any account, be-

cause they warn't, but on account of them being

relicts, you know, and we snaked her out, private, and

took her down there, but she failed on the first pies,

because we didn't know how, but she come up smiling

on the last one. We took and lined her with dough,

and set her in the coals, and loaded her up with rag

rope, and put on a dough roof, and shut down the lid,

and put hot embers on top, and stood off five foot,

with the long handle, cool and comfortable, and in

fifteen minutes she turned out a pie that was a satisfac-

tion to look at. But the person that et it would want

to fetch a couple of kags of toothpicks along, for if

that rope ladder wouldn't cramp him down to business

I don't know nothing what I'm talking about, and lay

him in enough stomach-ache to last him till next time,

too.



Nat didn't look when we put the witch pie in Jim's

pan; and we put the three tin plates in the bottom of

the pan under the vittles; and so Jim got everything

all right, and as soon as he was by himself he busted

into the pie and hid the rope ladder inside of his straw

tick, and scratched some marks on a tin plate and

throwed it out of the window-hole.





CHAPTER XXXVIII.



MAKING them pens was a distressid tough job,

and so was the saw; and Jim allowed the in-

scription was going to be the toughest of all. That's

the one which the prisoner has to scrabble on the wall.

But he had to have it; Tom said he'd GOT to; there

warn't no case of a state prisoner not scrabbling his

inscription to leave behind, and his coat of arms.



"Look at Lady Jane Grey," he says; "look at

Gilford Dudley; look at old Northumberland! Why,

Huck, s'pose it IS considerble trouble? -- what you

going to do? -- how you going to get around it?

Jim's GOT to do his inscription and coat of arms. They

all do."



Jim says:



"Why, Mars Tom, I hain't got no coat o' arm; I

hain't got nuffn but dish yer ole shirt, en you knows

I got to keep de journal on dat."



"Oh, you don't understand, Jim; a coat of arms is

very different."



"Well," I says, "Jim's right, anyway, when he

says he ain't got no coat of arms, because he hain't."



"I reckon I knowed that," Tom says, "but you

bet he'll have one before he goes out of this -- because

he's going out RIGHT, and there ain't going to be no

flaws in his record."



So whilst me and Jim filed away at the pens on a

brickbat apiece, Jim a-making his'n out of the brass

and I making mine out of the spoon, Tom set to work

to think out the coat of arms. By and by he said he'd

struck so many good ones he didn't hardly know

which to take, but there was one which he reckoned

he'd decide on. He says:



"On the scutcheon we'll have a bend OR in the

dexter base, a saltire MURREY in the fess, with a dog,

couchant, for common charge, and under his foot a

chain embattled, for slavery, with a chevron VERT in a

chief engrailed, and three invected lines on a field

AZURE, with the nombril points rampant on a dancette

indented; crest, a runaway nigger, SABLE, with his

bundle over his shoulder on a bar sinister; and a

couple of gules for supporters, which is you and me;

motto, MAGGIORE FRETTA, MINORE OTTO. Got it out of a

book -- means the more haste the less speed."



"Geewhillikins," I says, "but what does the rest of

it mean?"



"We ain't got no time to bother over that," he

says; "we got to dig in like all git-out."



"Well, anyway," I says, "what's SOME of it?

What's a fess?"



"A fess -- a fess is -- YOU don't need to know what

a fess is. I'll show him how to make it when he gets

to it."



"Shucks, Tom," I says, "I think you might tell a

person. What's a bar sinister?"



"Oh, I don't know. But he's got to have it. All

the nobility does."



That was just his way. If it didn't suit him to ex-

plain a thing to you, he wouldn't do it. You might

pump at him a week, it wouldn't make no difference.



He'd got all that coat of arms business fixed, so

now he started in to finish up the rest of that part of

the work, which was to plan out a mournful inscrip-

tion -- said Jim got to have one, like they all done.

He made up a lot, and wrote them out on a paper, and

read them off, so:



   1. Here a captive heart busted.

   2. Here a poor prisoner, forsook by the world

      and friends, fretted his sorrowful life.

   3. Here a lonely heart broke, and a worn spirit

      went to its rest, after thirty-seven years

      of solitary captivity.

   4. Here, homeless and friendless, after

      thirty-seven years of bitter captivity,

      perished a noble stranger, natural son of

      Louis XIV.



Tom's voice trembled whilst he was reading them,

and he most broke down. When he got done he

couldn't no way make up his mind which one for Jim

to scrabble on to the wall, they was all so good; but

at last he allowed he would let him scrabble them all

on. Jim said it would take him a year to scrabble

such a lot of truck on to the logs with a nail, and he

didn't know how to make letters, besides; but Tom

said he would block them out for him, and then he

wouldn't have nothing to do but just follow the lines.

Then pretty soon he says:



"Come to think, the logs ain't a-going to do; they

don't have log walls in a dungeon: we got to dig the

inscriptions into a rock. We'll fetch a rock."



Jim said the rock was worse than the logs; he said

it would take him such a pison long time to dig them

into a rock he wouldn't ever get out. But Tom said

he would let me help him do it. Then he took a look

to see how me and Jim was getting along with the

pens. It was most pesky tedious hard work and slow,

and didn't give my hands no show to get well of the

sores, and we didn't seem to make no headway, hardly;

so Tom says:



"I know how to fix it. We got to have a rock for

the coat of arms and mournful inscriptions, and we can

kill two birds with that same rock. There's a gaudy

big grindstone down at the mill, and we'll smouch it,

and carve the things on it, and file out the pens and

the saw on it, too."



It warn't no slouch of an idea; and it warn't no

slouch of a grindstone nuther; but we allowed we'd

tackle it. It warn't quite midnight yet, so we cleared

out for the mill, leaving Jim at work. We smouched

the grindstone, and set out to roll her home, but it

was a most nation tough job. Sometimes, do what we

could, we couldn't keep her from falling over, and she

come mighty near mashing us every time. Tom said

she was going to get one of us, sure, before we got

through. We got her half way; and then we was

plumb played out, and most drownded with sweat.

We see it warn't no use; we got to go and fetch Jim

So he raised up his bed and slid the chain off of the

bed-leg, and wrapt it round and round his neck, and

we crawled out through our hole and down there, and

Jim and me laid into that grindstone and walked

her along like nothing; and Tom superintended.

He could out-superintend any boy I ever see. He

knowed how to do everything.



Our hole was pretty big, but it warn't big enough to

get the grindstone through; but Jim he took the pick

and soon made it big enough. Then Tom marked out

them things on it with the nail, and set Jim to work on

them, with the nail for a chisel and an iron bolt from

the rubbage in the lean-to for a hammer, and told him

to work till the rest of his candle quit on him, and then

he could go to bed, and hide the grindstone under his

straw tick and sleep on it. Then we helped him fix

his chain back on the bed-leg, and was ready for bed

ourselves. But Tom thought of something, and says:



"You got any spiders in here, Jim?"



"No, sah, thanks to goodness I hain't, Mars Tom."



"All right, we'll get you some."



"But bless you, honey, I doan' WANT none. I's

afeard un um. I jis' 's soon have rattlesnakes aroun'."



Tom thought a minute or two, and says:



"It's a good idea. And I reckon it's been done.

It MUST a been done; it stands to reason. Yes, it's a

prime good idea. Where could you keep it?"



"Keep what, Mars Tom?"



"Why, a rattlesnake."



"De goodness gracious alive, Mars Tom! Why, if

dey was a rattlesnake to come in heah I'd take en bust

right out thoo dat log wall, I would, wid my head."



Why, Jim, you wouldn't be afraid of it after a

little. You could tame it."



"TAME it!"



"Yes -- easy enough. Every animal is grateful for

kindness and petting, and they wouldn't THINK of hurt-

ing a person that pets them. Any book will tell you

that. You try -- that's all I ask; just try for two or

three days. Why, you can get him so in a little while

that he'll love you; and sleep with you; and won't

stay away from you a minute; and will let you wrap

him round your neck and put his head in your mouth."



"PLEASE, Mars Tom -- DOAN' talk so! I can't STAN'

it! He'd LET me shove his head in my mouf -- fer a

favor, hain't it? I lay he'd wait a pow'ful long time

'fo' I AST him. En mo' en dat, I doan' WANT him to

sleep wid me."



"Jim, don't act so foolish. A prisoner's GOT to

have some kind of a dumb pet, and if a rattlesnake

hain't ever been tried, why, there's more glory to be

gained in your being the first to ever try it than any

other way you could ever think of to save your life."



"Why, Mars Tom, I doan' WANT no sich glory.

Snake take 'n bite Jim's chin off, den WHAH is de

glory? No, sah, I doan' want no sich doin's."



"Blame it, can't you TRY? I only WANT you to try

-- you needn't keep it up if it don't work."



"But de trouble all DONE ef de snake bite me while

I's a tryin' him. Mars Tom, I's willin' to tackle mos'

anything 'at ain't onreasonable, but ef you en Huck

fetches a rattlesnake in heah for me to tame, I's

gwyne to LEAVE, dat's SHORE."



"Well, then, let it go, let it go, if you're so bull-

headed about it. We can get you some garter-snakes,

and you can tie some buttons on their tails, and let on

they're rattlesnakes, and I reckon that 'll have to do."



"I k'n stan' DEM, Mars Tom, but blame' 'f I

couldn' get along widout um, I tell you dat. I never

knowed b'fo' 't was so much bother and trouble to be

a prisoner."



"Well, it ALWAYS is when it's done right. You got

any rats around here?"



"No, sah, I hain't seed none."



"Well, we'll get you some rats."



"Why, Mars Tom, I doan' WANT no rats. Dey's

de dadblamedest creturs to 'sturb a body, en rustle

roun' over 'im, en bite his feet, when he's tryin' to

sleep, I ever see. No, sah, gimme g'yarter-snakes, 'f

I's got to have 'm, but doan' gimme no rats; I hain'

got no use f'r um, skasely."



"But, Jim, you GOT to have 'em -- they all do. So

don't make no more fuss about it. Prisoners ain't

ever without rats. There ain't no instance of it. And

they train them, and pet them, and learn them tricks,

and they get to be as sociable as flies. But you got to

play music to them. You got anything to play music

on?"



"I ain' got nuffn but a coase comb en a piece o'

paper, en a juice-harp; but I reck'n dey wouldn' take

no stock in a juice-harp."



"Yes they would. THEY don't care what kind of

music 'tis. A jews-harp's plenty good enough for a

rat. All animals like music -- in a prison they dote

on it. Specially, painful music; and you can't get no

other kind out of a jews-harp. It always interests

them; they come out to see what's the matter with

you. Yes, you're all right; you're fixed very well.

You want to set on your bed nights before you go to

sleep, and early in the mornings, and play your jews-

harp; play 'The Last Link is Broken' -- that's the

thing that 'll scoop a rat quicker 'n anything else; and

when you've played about two minutes you'll see all

the rats, and the snakes, and spiders, and things begin

to feel worried about you, and come. And they'll

just fairly swarm over you, and have a noble good

time."



"Yes, DEY will, I reck'n, Mars Tom, but what kine

er time is JIM havin'? Blest if I kin see de pint. But

I'll do it ef I got to. I reck'n I better keep de animals

satisfied, en not have no trouble in de house."



Tom waited to think it over, and see if there wasn't

nothing else; and pretty soon he says:



"Oh, there's one thing I forgot. Could you raise

a flower here, do you reckon?"



"I doan know but maybe I could, Mars Tom; but

it's tolable dark in heah, en I ain' got no use f'r no

flower, nohow, en she'd be a pow'ful sight o' trouble."



"Well, you try it, anyway. Some other prisoners

has done it."



"One er dem big cat-tail-lookin' mullen-stalks would

grow in heah, Mars Tom, I reck'n, but she wouldn't

be wuth half de trouble she'd coss."



"Don't you believe it. We'll fetch you a little one

and you plant it in the corner over there, and raise it.

And don't call it mullen, call it Pitchiola -- that's its

right name when it's in a prison. And you want to

water it with your tears."



"Why, I got plenty spring water, Mars Tom."



"You don't WANT spring water; you want to water

it with your tears. It's the way they always do."



"Why, Mars Tom, I lay I kin raise one er dem

mullen-stalks twyste wid spring water whiles another

man's a START'N one wid tears."



"That ain't the idea. You GOT to do it with tears."



"She'll die on my han's, Mars Tom, she sholy

will; kase I doan' skasely ever cry."



So Tom was stumped. But he studied it over, and

then said Jim would have to worry along the best he

could with an onion. He promised he would go to the

nigger cabins and drop one, private, in Jim's coffee-

pot, in the morning. Jim said he would "jis' 's soon

have tobacker in his coffee;" and found so much fault

with it, and with the work and bother of raising the

mullen, and jews-harping the rats, and petting and

flattering up the snakes and spiders and things, on top

of all the other work he had to do on pens, and in-

scriptions, and journals, and things, which made it

more trouble and worry and responsibility to be a

prisoner than anything he ever undertook, that Tom

most lost all patience with him; and said he was just

loadened down with more gaudier chances than a

prisoner ever had in the world to make a name for

himself, and yet he didn't know enough to appreciate

them, and they was just about wasted on him. So

Jim he was sorry, and said he wouldn't behave so no

more, and then me and Tom shoved for bed.





CHAPTER XXXIX.



IN the morning we went up to the village and bought

a wire rat-trap and fetched it down, and unstopped

the best rat-hole, and in about an hour we had fifteen

of the bulliest kind of ones; and then we took it and

put it in a safe place under Aunt Sally's bed. But

while we was gone for spiders little Thomas Franklin

Benjamin Jefferson Elexander Phelps found it there,

and opened the door of it to see if the rats would come

out, and they did; and Aunt Sally she come in, and

when we got back she was a-standing on top of the bed

raising Cain, and the rats was doing what they could to

keep off the dull times for her. So she took and

dusted us both with the hickry, and we was as much

as two hours catching another fifteen or sixteen, drat

that meddlesome cub, and they warn't the likeliest,

nuther, because the first haul was the pick of the flock.

I never see a likelier lot of rats than what that first

haul was.



We got a splendid stock of sorted spiders, and bugs,

and frogs, and caterpillars, and one thing or another;

and we like to got a hornet's nest, but we didn't. The

family was at home. We didn't give it right up, but

stayed with them as long as we could; because we

allowed we'd tire them out or they'd got to tire us

out, and they done it. Then we got allycumpain and

rubbed on the places, and was pretty near all right

again, but couldn't set down convenient. And so we

went for the snakes, and grabbed a couple of dozen

garters and house-snakes, and put them in a bag, and

put it in our room, and by that time it was supper-

time, and a rattling good honest day's work: and

hungry? -- oh, no, I reckon not! And there warn't a

blessed snake up there when we went back -- we didn't

half tie the sack, and they worked out somehow, and

left. But it didn't matter much, because they was

still on the premises somewheres. So we judged we

could get some of them again. No, there warn't no

real scarcity of snakes about the house for a consider-

able spell. You'd see them dripping from the rafters

and places every now and then; and they generly

landed in your plate, or down the back of your neck,

and most of the time where you didn't want them.

Well, they was handsome and striped, and there warn't

no harm in a million of them; but that never made no

difference to Aunt Sally; she despised snakes, be the

breed what they might, and she couldn't stand them

no way you could fix it; and every time one of them

flopped down on her, it didn't make no difference what

she was doing, she would just lay that work down and

light out. I never see such a woman. And you could

hear her whoop to Jericho. You couldn't get her to

take a-holt of one of them with the tongs. And if she

turned over and found one in bed she would scramble

out and lift a howl that you would think the house was

afire. She disturbed the old man so that he said he

could most wish there hadn't ever been no snakes

created. Why, after every last snake had been gone

clear out of the house for as much as a week Aunt

Sally warn't over it yet; she warn't near over it; when

she was setting thinking about something you could

touch her on the back of her neck with a feather and

she would jump right out of her stockings. It was

very curious. But Tom said all women was just so.

He said they was made that way for some reason or

other.



We got a licking every time one of our snakes come

in her way, and she allowed these lickings warn't noth-

ing to what she would do if we ever loaded up the

place again with them. I didn't mind the lickings,

because they didn't amount to nothing; but I minded

the trouble we had to lay in another lot. But we got

them laid in, and all the other things; and you never

see a cabin as blithesome as Jim's was when they'd all

swarm out for music and go for him. Jim didn't like

the spiders, and the spiders didn't like Jim; and so

they'd lay for him, and make it mighty warm for him.

And he said that between the rats and the snakes and

the grindstone there warn't no room in bed for him,

skasely; and when there was, a body couldn't sleep, it

was so lively, and it was always lively, he said, because

THEY never all slept at one time, but took turn about,

so when the snakes was asleep the rats was on deck,

and when the rats turned in the snakes come on watch,

so he always had one gang under him, in his way, and

t'other gang having a circus over him, and if he got

up to hunt a new place the spiders would take a chance

at him as he crossed over. He said if he ever got out

this time he wouldn't ever be a prisoner again, not for

a salary.



Well, by the end of three weeks everything was in

pretty good shape. The shirt was sent in early, in a

pie, and every time a rat bit Jim he would get up and

write a little in his journal whilst the ink was fresh; the

pens was made, the inscriptions and so on was all

carved on the grindstone; the bed-leg was sawed in

two, and we had et up the sawdust, and it give us a

most amazing stomach-ache. We reckoned we was all

going to die, but didn't. It was the most undigestible

sawdust I ever see; and Tom said the same. But as I

was saying, we'd got all the work done now, at last;

and we was all pretty much fagged out, too, but mainly

Jim. The old man had wrote a couple of times to the

plantation below Orleans to come and get their run-

away nigger, but hadn't got no answer, because there

warn't no such plantation; so he allowed he would ad-

vertise Jim in the St. Louis and New Orleans papers;

and when he mentioned the St. Louis ones it give me

the cold shivers, and I see we hadn't no time to lose.

So Tom said, now for the nonnamous letters.



"What's them?" I says.



"Warnings to the people that something is up.

Sometimes it's done one way, sometimes another.

But there's always somebody spying around that gives

notice to the governor of the castle. When Louis

XVI. was going to light out of the Tooleries a servant-

girl done it. It's a very good way, and so is the

nonnamous letters. We'll use them both. And it's

usual for the prisoner's mother to change clothes with

him, and she stays in, and he slides out in her clothes.

We'll do that, too."



"But looky here, Tom, what do we want to WARN

anybody for that something's up? Let them find it

out for themselves -- it's their lookout."



"Yes, I know; but you can't depend on them.

It's the way they've acted from the very start -- left

us to do EVERYTHING. They're so confiding and mullet-

headed they don't take notice of nothing at all. So if

we don't GIVE them notice there won't be nobody nor

nothing to interfere with us, and so after all our hard

work and trouble this escape 'll go off perfectly flat;

won't amount to nothing -- won't be nothing TO it."



"Well, as for me, Tom, that's the way I'd like."



"Shucks!" he says, and looked disgusted. So I

says:



"But I ain't going to make no complaint. Any

way that suits you suits me. What you going to do

about the servant-girl?"



"You'll be her. You slide in, in the middle of the

night, and hook that yaller girl's frock."



"Why, Tom, that 'll make trouble next morning;

because, of course, she prob'bly hain't got any but

that one."



"I know; but you don't want it but fifteen minutes,

to carry the nonnamous letter and shove it under the

front door."



"All right, then, I'll do it; but I could carry it just

as handy in my own togs."



"You wouldn't look like a servant-girl THEN, would

you?"



"No, but there won't be nobody to see what I look

like, ANYWAY."



"That ain't got nothing to do with it. The thing

for us to do is just to do our DUTY, and not worry

about whether anybody SEES us do it or not. Hain't

you got no principle at all?"



"All right, I ain't saying nothing; I'm the servant-

girl. Who's Jim's mother?"



"I'm his mother. I'll hook a gown from Aunt

Sally."



"Well, then, you'll have to stay in the cabin when

me and Jim leaves."



"Not much. I'll stuff Jim's clothes full of straw

and lay it on his bed to represent his mother in dis-

guise, and Jim 'll take the nigger woman's gown off of

me and wear it, and we'll all evade together. When a

prisoner of style escapes it's called an evasion. It's

always called so when a king escapes, f'rinstance.

And the same with a king's son; it don't make no differ-

ence whether he's a natural one or an unnatural one."



So Tom he wrote the nonnamous letter, and I

smouched the yaller wench's frock that night, and put

it on, and shoved it under the front door, the way Tom

told me to. It said:



   Beware. Trouble is brewing. Keep a sharp lookout.

                                        UNKNOWN FRIEND.



Next night we stuck a picture, which Tom drawed

in blood, of a skull and crossbones on the front door;

and next night another one of a coffin on the back

door. I never see a family in such a sweat. They

couldn't a been worse scared if the place had a been

full of ghosts laying for them behind everything and

under the beds and shivering through the air. If a

door banged, Aunt Sally she jumped and said

"ouch!" if anything fell, she jumped and said

"ouch!" if you happened to touch her, when she

warn't noticing, she done the same; she couldn't face

noway and be satisfied, because she allowed there was

something behind her every time -- so she was always

a-whirling around sudden, and saying "ouch," and

before she'd got two-thirds around she'd whirl back

again, and say it again; and she was afraid to go to bed,

but she dasn't set up. So the thing was working

very well, Tom said; he said he never see a thing

work more satisfactory. He said it showed it was

done right.



So he said, now for the grand bulge! So the very

next morning at the streak of dawn we got another

letter ready, and was wondering what we better do with

it, because we heard them say at supper they was

going to have a nigger on watch at both doors all

night. Tom he went down the lightning-rod to spy

around; and the nigger at the back door was asleep,

and he stuck it in the back of his neck and come back.

This letter said:





   Don't betray me, I wish to be your friend. There

   is a desprate gang of cut-throats from over in the

   Indian Territory going to steal your runaway

   nigger to-night, and they have been trying to scare

   you so as you will stay in the house and not bother

   them. I am one of the gang, but have got religgion

   and wish to quit it and lead an honest life again,

   and will betray the helish design. They will sneak

   down from northards, along the fence, at midnight

   exact, with a false key, and go in the nigger's

   cabin to get him. I am to be off a piece and blow

   a tin horn if I see any danger; but stead of that I

   will BA like a sheep soon as they get in and not

   blow at all; then whilst they are getting his chains

   loose, you slip there and lock them in, and can

   kill them at your leasure. Don't do anything but

   just the way I am telling you; if you do they will

   suspicion something and raise whoop-jamboreehoo. I

   do not wish any reward but to know I have done the

   right thing.

                                   UNKNOWN FRIEND.







CHAPTER XL.



WE was feeling pretty good after breakfast, and

took my canoe and went over the river a-fishing,

with a lunch, and had a good time, and took a look at

the raft and found her all right, and got home late to

supper, and found them in such a sweat and worry

they didn't know which end they was standing on, and

made us go right off to bed the minute we was done

supper, and wouldn't tell us what the trouble was, and

never let on a word about the new letter, but didn't

need to, because we knowed as much about it as

anybody did, and as soon as we was half up stairs and

her back was turned we slid for the cellar cubboard

and loaded up a good lunch and took it up to our

room and went to bed, and got up about half-past

eleven, and Tom put on Aunt Sally's dress that he

stole and was going to start with the lunch, but says:



"Where's the butter?"



"I laid out a hunk of it," I says, "on a piece of a

corn-pone."



"Well, you LEFT it laid out, then -- it ain't here."



"We can get along without it," I says.



"We can get along WITH it, too," he says; "just

you slide down cellar and fetch it. And then mosey

right down the lightning-rod and come along. I'll go

and stuff the straw into Jim's clothes to represent his

mother in disguise, and be ready to BA like a sheep

and shove soon as you get there."



So out he went, and down cellar went I. The hunk

of butter, big as a person's fist, was where I had left

it, so I took up the slab of corn-pone with it on, and

blowed out my light, and started up stairs very

stealthy, and got up to the main floor all right, but

here comes Aunt Sally with a candle, and I clapped

the truck in my hat, and clapped my hat on my head,

and the next second she see me; and she says:



"You been down cellar?"



"Yes'm."



"What you been doing down there?"



"Noth'n."



"NOTH'N!"



"No'm."



"Well, then, what possessed you to go down there

this time of night?"



"I don't know 'm."



"You don't KNOW? Don't answer me that way.

Tom, I want to know what you been DOING down

there."



"I hain't been doing a single thing, Aunt Sally, I

hope to gracious if I have."



I reckoned she'd let me go now, and as a generl

thing she would; but I s'pose there was so many

strange things going on she was just in a sweat about

every little thing that warn't yard-stick straight; so she

says, very decided:



"You just march into that setting-room and stay

there till I come. You been up to something you no

business to, and I lay I'll find out what it is before I'M

done with you."



So she went away as I opened the door and walked

into the setting-room. My, but there was a crowd

there! Fifteen farmers, and every one of them had a

gun. I was most powerful sick, and slunk to a chair

and set down. They was setting around, some of them

talking a little, in a low voice, and all of them fidgety

and uneasy, but trying to look like they warn't; but I

knowed they was, because they was always taking off

their hats, and putting them on, and scratching their

heads, and changing their seats, and fumbling with

their buttons. I warn't easy myself, but I didn't take

my hat off, all the same.



I did wish Aunt Sally would come, and get done

with me, and lick me, if she wanted to, and let me get

away and tell Tom how we'd overdone this thing, and

what a thundering hornet's-nest we'd got ourselves

into, so we could stop fooling around straight off, and

clear out with Jim before these rips got out of patience

and come for us.



At last she come and begun to ask me questions,

but I COULDN'T answer them straight, I didn't know

which end of me was up; because these men was in

such a fidget now that some was wanting to start right

NOW and lay for them desperadoes, and saying it warn't

but a few minutes to midnight; and others was trying

to get them to hold on and wait for the sheep-signal;

and here was Aunty pegging away at the questions,

and me a-shaking all over and ready to sink down in

my tracks I was that scared; and the place getting

hotter and hotter, and the butter beginning to melt and

run down my neck and behind my ears; and pretty

soon, when one of them says, "I'M for going and

getting in the cabin FIRST and right NOW, and catching

them when they come," I most dropped; and a streak

of butter come a-trickling down my forehead, and

Aunt Sally she see it, and turns white as a sheet, and

says:



"For the land's sake, what IS the matter with the

child? He's got the brain-fever as shore as you're

born, and they're oozing out!"



And everybody runs to see, and she snatches off my

hat, and out comes the bread and what was left of the

butter, and she grabbed me, and hugged me, and

says:



"Oh, what a turn you did give me! and how glad

and grateful I am it ain't no worse; for luck's against

us, and it never rains but it pours, and when I see that

truck I thought we'd lost you, for I knowed by the

color and all it was just like your brains would be if --

Dear, dear, whyd'nt you TELL me that was what you'd

been down there for, I wouldn't a cared. Now cler

out to bed, and don't lemme see no more of you till

morning!"



I was up stairs in a second, and down the lightning-

rod in another one, and shinning through the dark for

the lean-to. I couldn't hardly get my words out, I

was so anxious; but I told Tom as quick as I could

we must jump for it now, and not a minute to lose --

the house full of men, yonder, with guns!



His eyes just blazed; and he says:



"No! -- is that so? AIN'T it bully! Why, Huck,

if it was to do over again, I bet I could fetch two hun-

dred! If we could put it off till --"



"Hurry! HURRY!" I says. "Where's Jim?"



"Right at your elbow; if you reach out your arm

you can touch him. He's dressed, and everything's

ready. Now we'll slide out and give the sheep-

signal."



But then we heard the tramp of men coming to the

door, and heard them begin to fumble with the pad-

lock, and heard a man say:



"I TOLD you we'd be too soon; they haven't come

-- the door is locked. Here, I'll lock some of you

into the cabin, and you lay for 'em in the dark and kill

'em when they come; and the rest scatter around a

piece, and listen if you can hear 'em coming."



So in they come, but couldn't see us in the dark, and

most trod on us whilst we was hustling to get under

the bed. But we got under all right, and out through

the hole, swift but soft -- Jim first, me next, and Tom

last, which was according to Tom's orders. Now we

was in the lean-to, and heard trampings close by out-

side. So we crept to the door, and Tom stopped us

there and put his eye to the crack, but couldn't make

out nothing, it was so dark; and whispered and said

he would listen for the steps to get further, and when

he nudged us Jim must glide out first, and him last.

So he set his ear to the crack and listened, and

listened, and listened, and the steps a-scraping around

out there all the time; and at last he nudged us, and

we slid out, and stooped down, not breathing, and not

making the least noise, and slipped stealthy towards the

fence in Injun file, and got to it all right, and me and

Jim over it; but Tom's britches catched fast on a splinter

on the top rail, and then he hear the steps coming, so he

had to pull loose, which snapped the splinter and made

a noise; and as he dropped in our tracks and started

somebody sings out:



"Who's that? Answer, or I'll shoot!"



But we didn't answer; we just unfurled our heels

and shoved. Then there was a rush, and a BANG, BANG,

BANG! and the bullets fairly whizzed around us! We

heard them sing out:



"Here they are! They've broke for the river!

After 'em, boys, and turn loose the dogs!"



So here they come, full tilt. We could hear them

because they wore boots and yelled, but we didn't wear

no boots and didn't yell. We was in the path to the

mill; and when they got pretty close on to us we

dodged into the bush and let them go by, and then

dropped in behind them. They'd had all the dogs

shut up, so they wouldn't scare off the robbers; but

by this time somebody had let them loose, and here

they come, making powwow enough for a million; but

they was our dogs; so we stopped in our tracks till

they catched up; and when they see it warn't nobody

but us, and no excitement to offer them, they only just

said howdy, and tore right ahead towards the shouting

and clattering; and then we up-steam again, and

whizzed along after them till we was nearly to the

mill, and then struck up through the bush to where

my canoe was tied, and hopped in and pulled for dear

life towards the middle of the river, but didn't make

no more noise than we was obleeged to. Then we

struck out, easy and comfortable, for the island where

my raft was; and we could hear them yelling and

barking at each other all up and down the bank, till we

was so far away the sounds got dim and died out.

And when we stepped on to the raft I says:



"NOW, old Jim, you're a free man again, and I bet

you won't ever be a slave no more."



"En a mighty good job it wuz, too, Huck. It 'uz

planned beautiful, en it 'uz done beautiful; en dey

ain't NOBODY kin git up a plan dat's mo' mixed-up en

splendid den what dat one wuz."



We was all glad as we could be, but Tom was the

gladdest of all because he had a bullet in the calf of

his leg.



When me and Jim heard that we didn't feel so brash

as what we did before. It was hurting him consider-

able, and bleeding; so we laid him in the wigwam and

tore up one of the duke's shirts for to bandage him,

but he says:



"Gimme the rags; I can do it myself. Don't stop

now; don't fool around here, and the evasion booming

along so handsome; man the sweeps, and set her

loose! Boys, we done it elegant! -- 'deed we did. I

wish WE'D a had the handling of Louis XVI., there

wouldn't a been no 'Son of Saint Louis, ascend to

heaven!' wrote down in HIS biography; no, sir, we'd

a whooped him over the BORDER -- that's what we'd a

done with HIM -- and done it just as slick as nothing

at all, too. Man the sweeps -- man the sweeps!"



But me and Jim was consulting -- and thinking.

And after we'd thought a minute, I says:



"Say it, Jim."



So he says:



"Well, den, dis is de way it look to me, Huck. Ef

it wuz HIM dat 'uz bein' sot free, en one er de boys

wuz to git shot, would he say, 'Go on en save me,

nemmine 'bout a doctor f'r to save dis one?' Is dat

like Mars Tom Sawyer? Would he say dat? You BET

he wouldn't! WELL, den, is JIM gywne to say it?

No, sah -- I doan' budge a step out'n dis place 'dout

a DOCTOR, not if it's forty year!"



I knowed he was white inside, and I reckoned he'd

say what he did say -- so it was all right now, and I

told Tom I was a-going for a doctor. He raised con-

siderable row about it, but me and Jim stuck to it and

wouldn't budge; so he was for crawling out and set-

ting the raft loose himself; but we wouldn't let him.

Then he give us a piece of his mind, but it didn't do

no good.



So when he sees me getting the canoe ready, he

says:



"Well, then, if you re bound to go, I'll tell you the

way to do when you get to the village. Shut the door

and blindfold the doctor tight and fast, and make him

swear to be silent as the grave, and put a purse full of

gold in his hand, and then take and lead him all around

the back alleys and everywheres in the dark, and then

fetch him here in the canoe, in a roundabout way

amongst the islands, and search him and take his chalk

away from him, and don't give it back to him till

you get him back to the village, or else he will chalk

this raft so he can find it again. It's the way they

all do."



So I said I would, and left, and Jim was to hide in

the woods when he see the doctor coming till he was

gone again.





CHAPTER XLI.



THE doctor was an old man; a very nice, kind-look-

ing old man when I got him up. I told him

me and my brother was over on Spanish Island hunt-

ing yesterday afternoon, and camped on a piece of a

raft we found, and about midnight he must a kicked his

gun in his dreams, for it went off and shot him in the

leg, and we wanted him to go over there and fix it and

not say nothing about it, nor let anybody know, be-

cause we wanted to come home this evening and sur-

prise the folks.



"Who is your folks?" he says.



"The Phelpses, down yonder."



"Oh," he says. And after a minute, he says:



"How'd you say he got shot?"



"He had a dream," I says, "and it shot him."



"Singular dream," he says.



So he lit up his lantern, and got his saddle-bags, and

we started. But when he sees the canoe he didn't like

the look of her -- said she was big enough for one, but

didn't look pretty safe for two. I says:



"Oh, you needn't be afeard, sir, she carried the

three of us easy enough."



"What three?"



"Why, me and Sid, and -- and -- and THE GUNS;

that's what I mean."



"Oh," he says.



But he put his foot on the gunnel and rocked her,

and shook his head, and said he reckoned he'd look

around for a bigger one. But they was all locked and

chained; so he took my canoe, and said for me to wait

till he come back, or I could hunt around further, or

maybe I better go down home and get them ready for

the surprise if I wanted to. But I said I didn't; so

I told him just how to find the raft, and then he started.



I struck an idea pretty soon. I says to myself,

spos'n he can't fix that leg just in three shakes of a

sheep's tail, as the saying is? spos'n it takes him three

or four days? What are we going to do? -- lay around

there till he lets the cat out of the bag? No, sir; I

know what I'LL do. I'll wait, and when he comes back

if he says he's got to go any more I'll get down there,

too, if I swim; and we'll take and tie him, and keep

him, and shove out down the river; and when Tom's

done with him we'll give him what it's worth, or all

we got, and then let him get ashore.



So then I crept into a lumber-pile to get some sleep;

and next time I waked up the sun was away up over

my head! I shot out and went for the doctor's

house, but they told me he'd gone away in the night

some time or other, and warn't back yet. Well, thinks

I, that looks powerful bad for Tom, and I'll dig out

for the island right off. So away I shoved, and turned

the corner, and nearly rammed my head into Uncle

Silas's stomach! He says:



"Why, TOM! Where you been all this time, you

rascal?"



"I hain't been nowheres," I says, "only just hunt-

ing for the runaway nigger -- me and Sid."



"Why, where ever did you go?" he says. "Your

aunt's been mighty uneasy."



"She needn't," I says, "because we was all right.

We followed the men and the dogs, but they outrun us,

and we lost them; but we thought we heard them on

the water, so we got a canoe and took out after them

and crossed over, but couldn't find nothing of them;

so we cruised along up-shore till we got kind of tired

and beat out; and tied up the canoe and went to sleep,

and never waked up till about an hour ago; then we

paddled over here to hear the news, and Sid's at the

post-office to see what he can hear, and I'm a-branch-

ing out to get something to eat for us, and then we're

going home."



So then we went to the post-office to get "Sid"; but

just as I suspicioned, he warn't there; so the old man

he got a letter out of the office, and we waited awhile

longer, but Sid didn't come; so the old man said,

come along, let Sid foot it home, or canoe it, when he

got done fooling around -- but we would ride. I

couldn't get him to let me stay and wait for Sid; and

he said there warn't no use in it, and I must come

along, and let Aunt Sally see we was all right.



When we got home Aunt Sally was that glad to see

me she laughed and cried both, and hugged me, and

give me one of them lickings of hern that don't amount

to shucks, and said she'd serve Sid the same when he

come.



And the place was plum full of farmers and farmers'

wives, to dinner; and such another clack a body never

heard. Old Mrs. Hotchkiss was the worst; her tongue

was a-going all the time. She says:



"Well, Sister Phelps, I've ransacked that-air cabin

over, an' I b'lieve the nigger was crazy. I says to

Sister Damrell -- didn't I, Sister Damrell? -- s'I, he's

crazy, s'I -- them's the very words I said. You all

hearn me: he's crazy, s'I; everything shows it, s'I.

Look at that-air grindstone, s'I; want to tell ME't any

cretur 't's in his right mind 's a goin' to scrabble all

them crazy things onto a grindstone, s'I? Here sich 'n'

sich a person busted his heart; 'n' here so 'n' so

pegged along for thirty-seven year, 'n' all that --

natcherl son o' Louis somebody, 'n' sich everlast'n

rubbage. He's plumb crazy, s'I; it's what I says in

the fust place, it's what I says in the middle, 'n' it's

what I says last 'n' all the time -- the nigger's crazy --

crazy 's Nebokoodneezer, s'I."



"An' look at that-air ladder made out'n rags, Sister

Hotchkiss," says old Mrs. Damrell; "what in the

name o' goodness COULD he ever want of --"



"The very words I was a-sayin' no longer ago th'n

this minute to Sister Utterback, 'n' she'll tell you so

herself. Sh-she, look at that-air rag ladder, sh-she;

'n' s'I, yes, LOOK at it, s'I -- what COULD he a-wanted

of it, s'I. Sh-she, Sister Hotchkiss, sh-she --"



"But how in the nation'd they ever GIT that grind-

stone IN there, ANYWAY? 'n' who dug that-air HOLE? 'n'

who --"



"My very WORDS, Brer Penrod! I was a-sayin' --

pass that-air sasser o' m'lasses, won't ye? -- I was

a-sayin' to Sister Dunlap, jist this minute, how DID they

git that grindstone in there, s'I. Without HELP, mind

you -- 'thout HELP! THAT'S wher 'tis. Don't tell ME,

s'I; there WUZ help, s'I; 'n' ther' wuz a PLENTY help,

too, s'I; ther's ben a DOZEN a-helpin' that nigger, 'n' I

lay I'd skin every last nigger on this place but I'D find

out who done it, s'I; 'n' moreover, s'I --"



"A DOZEN says you! -- FORTY couldn't a done every

thing that's been done. Look at them case-knife saws

and things, how tedious they've been made; look at

that bed-leg sawed off with 'm, a week's work for six

men; look at that nigger made out'n straw on the bed;

and look at --"



"You may WELL say it, Brer Hightower! It's jist as

I was a-sayin' to Brer Phelps, his own self. S'e, what

do YOU think of it, Sister Hotchkiss, s'e? Think o'

what, Brer Phelps, s'I? Think o' that bed-leg sawed

off that a way, s'e? THINK of it, s'I? I lay it never

sawed ITSELF off, s'I -- somebody SAWED it, s'I; that's

my opinion, take it or leave it, it mayn't be no 'count,

s'I, but sich as 't is, it's my opinion, s'I, 'n' if any

body k'n start a better one, s'I, let him DO it, s'I,

that's all. I says to Sister Dunlap, s'I --"



"Why, dog my cats, they must a ben a house-full o'

niggers in there every night for four weeks to a done

all that work, Sister Phelps. Look at that shirt --

every last inch of it kivered over with secret African

writ'n done with blood! Must a ben a raft uv 'm at it

right along, all the time, amost. Why, I'd give two

dollars to have it read to me; 'n' as for the niggers

that wrote it, I 'low I'd take 'n' lash 'm t'll --"



"People to HELP him, Brother Marples! Well, I

reckon you'd THINK so if you'd a been in this house for

a while back. Why, they've stole everything they

could lay their hands on -- and we a-watching all the

time, mind you. They stole that shirt right off o' the

line! and as for that sheet they made the rag ladder out

of, ther' ain't no telling how many times they DIDN'T

steal that; and flour, and candles, and candlesticks,

and spoons, and the old warming-pan, and most a

thousand things that I disremember now, and my new

calico dress; and me and Silas and my Sid and Tom

on the constant watch day AND night, as I was a-telling

you, and not a one of us could catch hide nor hair nor

sight nor sound of them; and here at the last minute,

lo and behold you, they slides right in under our noses

and fools us, and not only fools US but the Injun Terri-

tory robbers too, and actuly gets AWAY with that nigger

safe and sound, and that with sixteen men and twenty-

two dogs right on their very heels at that very time!

I tell you, it just bangs anything I ever HEARD of.

Why, SPERITS couldn't a done better and been no

smarter. And I reckon they must a BEEN sperits -- be-

cause, YOU know our dogs, and ther' ain't no better;

well, them dogs never even got on the TRACK of 'm

once! You explain THAT to me if you can! -- ANY of

you!"



"Well, it does beat --"



"Laws alive, I never --"



"So help me, I wouldn't a be --"



"HOUSE-thieves as well as --"



"Goodnessgracioussakes, I'd a ben afeard to live in

sich a --"



"'Fraid to LIVE! -- why, I was that scared I dasn't

hardly go to bed, or get up, or lay down, or SET down,

Sister Ridgeway. Why, they'd steal the very -- why,

goodness sakes, you can guess what kind of a fluster I

was in by the time midnight come last night. I hope

to gracious if I warn't afraid they'd steal some o' the

family! I was just to that pass I didn't have no reason-

ing faculties no more. It looks foolish enough NOW, in

the daytime; but I says to myself, there's my two poor

boys asleep, 'way up stairs in that lonesome room, and

I declare to goodness I was that uneasy 't I crep' up

there and locked 'em in! I DID. And anybody would.

Because, you know, when you get scared that way,

and it keeps running on, and getting worse and worse

all the time, and your wits gets to addling, and you get

to doing all sorts o' wild things, and by and by you

think to yourself, spos'n I was a boy, and was away up

there, and the door ain't locked, and you --" She

stopped, looking kind of wondering, and then she

turned her head around slow, and when her eye lit on

me -- I got up and took a walk.



Says I to myself, I can explain better how we come

to not be in that room this morning if I go out to one

side and study over it a little. So I done it. But I

dasn't go fur, or she'd a sent for me. And when it

was late in the day the people all went, and then I

come in and told her the noise and shooting waked up

me and "Sid," and the door was locked, and we

wanted to see the fun, so we went down the lightning-

rod, and both of us got hurt a little, and we didn't never

want to try THAT no more. And then I went on and

told her all what I told Uncle Silas before; and then

she said she'd forgive us, and maybe it was all right

enough anyway, and about what a body might expect

of boys, for all boys was a pretty harum-scarum lot as

fur as she could see; and so, as long as no harm hadn't

come of it, she judged she better put in her time being

grateful we was alive and well and she had us still, stead

of fretting over what was past and done. So then she

kissed me, and patted me on the head, and dropped

into a kind of a brown study; and pretty soon jumps

up, and says:



"Why, lawsamercy, it's most night, and Sid not

come yet! What HAS become of that boy?"



I see my chance; so I skips up and says:



"I'll run right up to town and get him," I says.



"No you won't," she says. "You'll stay right

wher' you are; ONE'S enough to be lost at a time. If

he ain't here to supper, your uncle 'll go."



Well, he warn't there to supper; so right after

supper uncle went.



He come back about ten a little bit uneasy; hadn't

run across Tom's track. Aunt Sally was a good DEAL

uneasy; but Uncle Silas he said there warn't no occa-

sion to be -- boys will be boys, he said, and you'll see

this one turn up in the morning all sound and right.

So she had to be satisfied. But she said she'd set up

for him a while anyway, and keep a light burning so he

could see it.



And then when I went up to bed she come up with

me and fetched her candle, and tucked me in, and

mothered me so good I felt mean, and like I couldn't

look her in the face; and she set down on the bed and

talked with me a long time, and said what a splendid

boy Sid was, and didn't seem to want to ever stop

talking about him; and kept asking me every now and

then if I reckoned he could a got lost, or hurt, or

maybe drownded, and might be laying at this minute

somewheres suffering or dead, and she not by him to

help him, and so the tears would drip down silent, and

I would tell her that Sid was all right, and would be

home in the morning, sure; and she would squeeze my

hand, or maybe kiss me, and tell me to say it again,

and keep on saying it, because it done her good, and

she was in so much trouble. And when she was going

away she looked down in my eyes so steady and gentle,

and says:



"The door ain't going to be locked, Tom, and

there's the window and the rod; but you'll be good,

WON'T you? And you won't go? For MY sake."



Laws knows I WANTED to go bad enough to see about

Tom, and was all intending to go; but after that I

wouldn't a went, not for kingdoms.



But she was on my mind and Tom was on my mind,

so I slept very restless. And twice I went down the

rod away in the night, and slipped around front, and

see her setting there by her candle in the window with

her eyes towards the road and the tears in them; and

I wished I could do something for her, but I couldn't,

only to swear that I wouldn't never do nothing to

grieve her any more. And the third time I waked up

at dawn, and slid down, and she was there yet, and

her candle was most out, and her old gray head was

resting on her hand, and she was asleep.





CHAPTER XLII.



THE old man was uptown again before breakfast, but

couldn't get no track of Tom; and both of them

set at the table thinking, and not saying nothing, and

looking mournful, and their coffee getting cold, and

not eating anything. And by and by the old man

says:



"Did I give you the letter?"



"What letter?"



"The one I got yesterday out of the post-office."



"No, you didn't give me no letter."



"Well, I must a forgot it."



So he rummaged his pockets, and then went off some-

wheres where he had laid it down, and fetched it, and

give it to her. She says:



"Why, it's from St. Petersburg -- it's from Sis."



I allowed another walk would do me good; but I

couldn't stir. But before she could break it open she

dropped it and run -- for she see something. And so

did I. It was Tom Sawyer on a mattress; and that old

doctor; and Jim, in HER calico dress, with his hands

tied behind him; and a lot of people. I hid the letter

behind the first thing that come handy, and rushed.

She flung herself at Tom, crying, and says:



"Oh, he's dead, he's dead, I know he's dead!"



And Tom he turned his head a little, and muttered

something or other, which showed he warn't in his

right mind; then she flung up her hands, and says:



"He's alive, thank God! And that's enough!"

and she snatched a kiss of him, and flew for the house

to get the bed ready, and scattering orders right and left

at the niggers and everybody else, as fast as her tongue

could go, every jump of the way.



I followed the men to see what they was going to do

with Jim; and the old doctor and Uncle Silas followed

after Tom into the house. The men was very huffy,

and some of them wanted to hang Jim for an example

to all the other niggers around there, so they wouldn't

be trying to run away like Jim done, and making such

a raft of trouble, and keeping a whole family scared

most to death for days and nights. But the others said,

don't do it, it wouldn't answer at all; he ain't our

nigger, and his owner would turn up and make us pay

for him, sure. So that cooled them down a little, be-

cause the people that's always the most anxious for to

hang a nigger that hain't done just right is always the

very ones that ain't the most anxious to pay for him

when they've got their satisfaction out of him.



They cussed Jim considerble, though, and give him

a cuff or two side the head once in a while, but Jim

never said nothing, and he never let on to know me,

and they took him to the same cabin, and put his own

clothes on him, and chained him again, and not to no

bed-leg this time, but to a big staple drove into the bot-

tom log, and chained his hands, too, and both legs, and

said he warn't to have nothing but bread and water to

eat after this till his owner come, or he was sold at auc-

tion because he didn't come in a certain length of time,

and filled up our hole, and said a couple of farmers

with guns must stand watch around about the cabin

every night, and a bulldog tied to the door in the day-

time; and about this time they was through with the

job and was tapering off with a kind of generl good-bye

cussing, and then the old doctor comes and takes a

look, and says:



"Don't be no rougher on him than you're obleeged

to, because he ain't a bad nigger. When I got to

where I found the boy I see I couldn't cut the bullet

out without some help, and he warn't in no condition

for me to leave to go and get help; and he got a little

worse and a little worse, and after a long time he went

out of his head, and wouldn't let me come a-nigh him

any more, and said if I chalked his raft he'd kill me,

and no end of wild foolishness like that, and I see I

couldn't do anything at all with him; so I says, I got

to have HELP somehow; and the minute I says it out

crawls this nigger from somewheres and says he'll help,

and he done it, too, and done it very well. Of course

I judged he must be a runaway nigger, and there I WAS!

and there I had to stick right straight along all the rest

of the day and all night. It was a fix, I tell you! I

had a couple of patients with the chills, and of course

I'd of liked to run up to town and see them, but I

dasn't, because the nigger might get away, and then I'd

be to blame; and yet never a skiff come close enough

for me to hail. So there I had to stick plumb until

daylight this morning; and I never see a nigger that

was a better nuss or faithfuller, and yet he was risking

his freedom to do it, and was all tired out, too, and I

see plain enough he'd been worked main hard lately.

I liked the nigger for that; I tell you, gentlemen, a

nigger like that is worth a thousand dollars -- and kind

treatment, too. I had everything I needed, and the

boy was doing as well there as he would a done at

home -- better, maybe, because it was so quiet; but

there I WAS, with both of 'm on my hands, and there

I had to stick till about dawn this morning; then some

men in a skiff come by, and as good luck would have

it the nigger was setting by the pallet with his head

propped on his knees sound asleep; so I motioned

them in quiet, and they slipped up on him and grabbed

him and tied him before he knowed what he was

about, and we never had no trouble. And the boy

being in a kind of a flighty sleep, too, we muffled the

oars and hitched the raft on, and towed her over very

nice and quiet, and the nigger never made the least

row nor said a word from the start. He ain't no bad

nigger, gentlemen; that's what I think about him."



Somebody says:



"Well, it sounds very good, doctor, I'm obleeged to

say."



Then the others softened up a little, too, and I was

mighty thankful to that old doctor for doing Jim that

good turn; and I was glad it was according to my judg-

ment of him, too; because I thought he had a good

heart in him and was a good man the first time I see

him. Then they all agreed that Jim had acted very

well, and was deserving to have some notice took of

it, and reward. So every one of them promised, right

out and hearty, that they wouldn't cuss him no more.



Then they come out and locked him up. I hoped

they was going to say he could have one or two of the

chains took off, because they was rotten heavy, or could

have meat and greens with his bread and water; but

they didn't think of it, and I reckoned it warn't best

for me to mix in, but I judged I'd get the doctor's yarn

to Aunt Sally somehow or other as soon as I'd got

through the breakers that was laying just ahead of me --

explanations, I mean, of how I forgot to mention about

Sid being shot when I was telling how him and me put

in that dratted night paddling around hunting the run-

away nigger.



But I had plenty time. Aunt Sally she stuck to the

sick-room all day and all night, and every time I see

Uncle Silas mooning around I dodged him.



Next morning I heard Tom was a good deal better,

and they said Aunt Sally was gone to get a nap. So

I slips to the sick-room, and if I found him awake I

reckoned we could put up a yarn for the family that

would wash. But he was sleeping, and sleeping very

peaceful, too; and pale, not fire-faced the way he was

when he come. So I set down and laid for him to

wake. In about half an hour Aunt Sally comes gliding

in, and there I was, up a stump again! She motioned

me to be still, and set down by me, and begun to

whisper, and said we could all be joyful now, because

all the symptoms was first-rate, and he'd been sleeping

like that for ever so long, and looking better and peace-

fuller all the time, and ten to one he'd wake up in his

right mind.



So we set there watching, and by and by he stirs a

bit, and opened his eyes very natural, and takes a look,

and says:



"Hello! -- why, I'm at HOME! How's that?

Where's the raft?"



"It's all right," I says.



"And JIM?"



"The same," I says, but couldn't say it pretty

brash. But he never noticed, but says:



"Good! Splendid! NOW we're all right and safe!

Did you tell Aunty?"



I was going to say yes; but she chipped in and says:

"About what, Sid?"



"Why, about the way the whole thing was done."



"What whole thing?"



"Why, THE whole thing. There ain't but one; how

we set the runaway nigger free -- me and Tom."



"Good land! Set the run -- What IS the child

talking about! Dear, dear, out of his head again!"



"NO, I ain't out of my HEAD; I know all what I'm

talking about. We DID set him free -- me and Tom.

We laid out to do it, and we DONE it. And we done

it elegant, too." He'd got a start, and she never

checked him up, just set and stared and stared, and let

him clip along, and I see it warn't no use for ME to put

in. "Why, Aunty, it cost us a power of work --

weeks of it -- hours and hours, every night, whilst you

was all asleep. And we had to steal candles, and the

sheet, and the shirt, and your dress, and spoons, and

tin plates, and case-knives, and the warming-pan, and

the grindstone, and flour, and just no end of things, and

you can't think what work it was to make the saws, and

pens, and inscriptions, and one thing or another, and

you can't think HALF the fun it was. And we had to

make up the pictures of coffins and things, and non-

namous letters from the robbers, and get up and down

the lightning-rod, and dig the hole into the cabin, and

made the rope ladder and send it in cooked up in a pie,

and send in spoons and things to work with in your

apron pocket --"



"Mercy sakes!"



"-- and load up the cabin with rats and snakes and

so on, for company for Jim; and then you kept Tom

here so long with the butter in his hat that you come

near spiling the whole business, because the men come

before we was out of the cabin, and we had to rush,

and they heard us and let drive at us, and I got my

share, and we dodged out of the path and let them go

by, and when the dogs come they warn't interested in

us, but went for the most noise, and we got our canoe,

and made for the raft, and was all safe, and Jim was

a free man, and we done it all by ourselves, and WASN'T

it bully, Aunty!"



"Well, I never heard the likes of it in all my born

days! So it was YOU, you little rapscallions, that's been

making all this trouble, and turned everybody's wits

clean inside out and scared us all most to death. I've as

good a notion as ever I had in my life to take it out o'

you this very minute. To think, here I've been, night

after night, a -- YOU just get well once, you young

scamp, and I lay I'll tan the Old Harry out o' both o'

ye!"



But Tom, he WAS so proud and joyful, he just COULDN'T

hold in, and his tongue just WENT it -- she a-chipping

in, and spitting fire all along, and both of them going

it at once, like a cat convention; and she says:



"WELL, you get all the enjoyment you can out of it

NOW, for mind I tell you if I catch you meddling with

him again --"



"Meddling with WHO?" Tom says, dropping his

smile and looking surprised.



"With WHO? Why, the runaway nigger, of course.

Who'd you reckon?"



Tom looks at me very grave, and says:



"Tom, didn't you just tell me he was all right?

Hasn't he got away?"



"HIM?" says Aunt Sally; "the runaway nigger?

'Deed he hasn't. They've got him back, safe and

sound, and he's in that cabin again, on bread and

water, and loaded down with chains, till he's claimed

or sold!"



Tom rose square up in bed, with his eye hot, and

his nostrils opening and shutting like gills, and sings

out to me:



"They hain't no RIGHT to shut him up! SHOVE! --

and don't you lose a minute. Turn him loose! he

ain't no slave; he's as free as any cretur that walks

this earth!"



"What DOES the child mean?"



"I mean every word I SAY, Aunt Sally, and if some-

body don't go, I'LL go. I've knowed him all his life,

and so has Tom, there. Old Miss Watson died two

months ago, and she was ashamed she ever was going

to sell him down the river, and SAID so; and she set

him free in her will."



"Then what on earth did YOU want to set him free

for, seeing he was already free?"



"Well, that IS a question, I must say; and just like

women! Why, I wanted the ADVENTURE of it; and I'd

a waded neck-deep in blood to -- goodness alive, AUNT

POLLY!"



If she warn't standing right there, just inside the

door, looking as sweet and contented as an angel half

full of pie, I wish I may never!



Aunt Sally jumped for her, and most hugged the

head off of her, and cried over her, and I found a

good enough place for me under the bed, for it was

getting pretty sultry for us, seemed to me. And I

peeped out, and in a little while Tom's Aunt Polly

shook herself loose and stood there looking across at

Tom over her spectacles -- kind of grinding him into

the earth, you know. And then she says:



"Yes, you BETTER turn y'r head away -- I would if I

was you, Tom."



"Oh, deary me!" says Aunt Sally; "IS he changed

so? Why, that ain't TOM, it's Sid; Tom's -- Tom's

-- why, where is Tom? He was here a minute ago."



"You mean where's Huck FINN -- that's what you

mean! I reckon I hain't raised such a scamp as my

Tom all these years not to know him when I SEE him.

That WOULD be a pretty howdy-do. Come out from

under that bed, Huck Finn."



So I done it. But not feeling brash.



Aunt Sally she was one of the mixed-upest-looking

persons I ever see -- except one, and that was Uncle

Silas, when he come in and they told it all to him. It

kind of made him drunk, as you may say, and he

didn't know nothing at all the rest of the day, and

preached a prayer-meeting sermon that night that gave

him a rattling ruputation, because the oldest man in

the world couldn't a understood it. So Tom's Aunt

Polly, she told all about who I was, and what; and I

had to up and tell how I was in such a tight place that

when Mrs. Phelps took me for Tom Sawyer -- she

chipped in and says, "Oh, go on and call me Aunt

Sally, I'm used to it now, and 'tain't no need to

change" -- that when Aunt Sally took me for Tom

Sawyer I had to stand it -- there warn't no other way,

and I knowed he wouldn't mind, because it would be

nuts for him, being a mystery, and he'd make an ad-

venture out of it, and be perfectly satisfied. And so

it turned out, and he let on to be Sid, and made things

as soft as he could for me.



And his Aunt Polly she said Tom was right about

old Miss Watson setting Jim free in her will; and so,

sure enough, Tom Sawyer had gone and took all that

trouble and bother to set a free nigger free! and I

couldn't ever understand before, until that minute and

that talk, how he COULD help a body set a nigger free

with his bringing-up.



Well, Aunt Polly she said that when Aunt Sally

wrote to her that Tom and SID had come all right and

safe, she says to herself:



"Look at that, now! I might have expected it,

letting him go off that way without anybody to watch

him. So now I got to go and trapse all the way down

the river, eleven hundred mile, and find out what that

creetur's up to THIS time, as long as I couldn't seem to

get any answer out of you about it."



"Why, I never heard nothing from you," says

Aunt Sally.



"Well, I wonder! Why, I wrote you twice to ask

you what you could mean by Sid being here."



"Well, I never got 'em, Sis."



Aunt Polly she turns around slow and severe, and

says:



"You, Tom!"



"Well -- WHAT?" he says, kind of pettish.



"Don t you what ME, you impudent thing -- hand

out them letters."



"What letters?"



"THEM letters. I be bound, if I have to take a-

holt of you I'll --"



"They're in the trunk. There, now. And they're

just the same as they was when I got them out of the

office. I hain't looked into them, I hain't touched

them. But I knowed they'd make trouble, and I

thought if you warn't in no hurry, I'd --"



"Well, you DO need skinning, there ain't no mistake

about it. And I wrote another one to tell you I was

coming; and I s'pose he --"



"No, it come yesterday; I hain't read it yet, but

IT'S all right, I've got that one."



I wanted to offer to bet two dollars she hadn't, but I

reckoned maybe it was just as safe to not to. So I

never said nothing.





CHAPTER THE LAST



THE first time I catched Tom private I asked him

what was his idea, time of the evasion? -- what it

was he'd planned to do if the evasion worked all right

and he managed to set a nigger free that was already

free before? And he said, what he had planned in his

head from the start, if we got Jim out all safe, was for

us to run him down the river on the raft, and have

adventures plumb to the mouth of the river, and then

tell him about his being free, and take him back up

home on a steamboat, in style, and pay him for his

lost time, and write word ahead and get out all the

niggers around, and have them waltz him into town

with a torchlight procession and a brass-band, and then

he would be a hero, and so would we. But I reckoned

it was about as well the way it was.



We had Jim out of the chains in no time, and when

Aunt Polly and Uncle Silas and Aunt Sally found out

how good he helped the doctor nurse Tom, they made

a heap of fuss over him, and fixed him up prime, and

give him all he wanted to eat, and a good time, and

nothing to do. And we had him up to the sick-room,

and had a high talk; and Tom give Jim forty dollars

for being prisoner for us so patient, and doing it up so

good, and Jim was pleased most to death, and busted

out, and says:



"DAH, now, Huck, what I tell you? -- what I tell

you up dah on Jackson islan'? I TOLE you I got a

hairy breas', en what's de sign un it; en I TOLE you I

ben rich wunst, en gwineter to be rich AGIN; en it's

come true; en heah she is! DAH, now! doan' talk

to ME -- signs is SIGNS, mine I tell you; en I knowed

jis' 's well 'at I 'uz gwineter be rich agin as I's a-

stannin' heah dis minute!"



And then Tom he talked along and talked along,

and says, le's all three slide out of here one of these

nights and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures

amongst the Injuns, over in the Territory, for a couple

of weeks or two; and I says, all right, that suits me,

but I ain't got no money for to buy the outfit, and I

reckon I couldn't get none from home, because it's

likely pap's been back before now, and got it all away

from Judge Thatcher and drunk it up.



"No, he hain't," Tom says; "it's all there yet --

six thousand dollars and more; and your pap hain't

ever been back since. Hadn't when I come away,

anyhow."



Jim says, kind of solemn:



"He ain't a-comin' back no mo', Huck."



I says:



"Why, Jim?"



"Nemmine why, Huck -- but he ain't comin' back

no mo."



But I kept at him; so at last he says:



"Doan' you 'member de house dat was float'n down

de river, en dey wuz a man in dah, kivered up, en I

went in en unkivered him and didn' let you come in?

Well, den, you kin git yo' money when you wants it,

kase dat wuz him."



Tom's most well now, and got his bullet around his

neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always

seeing what time it is, and so there ain't nothing more

to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if

I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I

wouldn't a tackled it, and ain't a-going to no more.

But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead

of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt

me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there

before.



                       THE END













A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT



by



MARK TWAIN

(Samuel L. Clemens)







From the Internet Wiretap collection, June 1993





[Transcriber's note for edition 12: the formatting has been

changed to current Gutenberg standards, with word-breaks

removed at line-ends. A few typos were corrected.  Both

capitals and italics were used in the original; italics

are now indicated _with underscores_, while the capitals

remain capitals. The "newsprint" and "proclamation"

sections have inverted and misplaced letters in the

original, as the work of an unskilled typesetter; the

Wiretap transcription of this to ASCII has been entirely

retained.]







PREFACE



The ungentle laws and customs touched upon in this tale are

historical, and the episodes which are used to illustrate them

are also historical.  It is not pretended that these laws and

customs existed in England in the sixth century; no, it is only

pretended that inasmuch as they existed in the English and other

civilizations of far later times, it is safe to consider that it is

no libel upon the sixth century to suppose them to have been in

practice in that day also.  One is quite justified in inferring

that whatever one of these laws or customs was lacking in that

remote time, its place was competently filled by a worse one.



The question as to whether there is such a thing as divine right

of kings is not settled in this book.  It was found too difficult.

That the executive head of a nation should be a person of lofty

character and extraordinary ability, was manifest and indisputable;

that none but the Deity could select that head unerringly, was

also manifest and indisputable; that the Deity ought to make that

selection, then, was likewise manifest and indisputable; consequently,

that He does make it, as claimed, was an unavoidable deduction.

I mean, until the author of this book encountered the Pompadour,

and Lady Castlemaine, and some other executive heads of that kind;

these were found so difficult to work into the scheme, that it

was judged better to take the other tack in this book (which

must be issued this fall), and then go into training and settle

the question in another book.  It is, of course, a thing which

ought to be settled, and I am not going to have anything particular

to do next winter anyway.



MARK TWAIN









A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT









A WORD OF EXPLANATION



It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger

whom I am going to talk about.  He attracted me by three things:

his candid simplicity, his marvelous familiarity with ancient armor,

and the restfulness of his company--for he did all the talking.

We fell together, as modest people will, in the tail of the herd

that was being shown through, and he at once began to say things

which interested me.  As he talked along, softly, pleasantly,

flowingly, he seemed to drift away imperceptibly out of this world

and time, and into some remote era and old forgotten country;

and so he gradually wove such a spell about me that I seemed

to move among the specters and shadows and dust and mold of a gray

antiquity, holding speech with a relic of it!  Exactly as I would

speak of my nearest personal friends or enemies, or my most familiar

neighbors, he spoke of Sir Bedivere, Sir Bors de Ganis, Sir Launcelot

of the Lake, Sir Galahad, and all the other great names of the

Table Round--and how old, old, unspeakably old and faded and dry

and musty and ancient he came to look as he went on!  Presently

he turned to me and said, just as one might speak of the weather,

or any other common matter--



"You know about transmigration of souls; do you know about

transposition of epochs--and bodies?"



I said I had not heard of it.  He was so little interested--just

as when people speak of the weather--that he did not notice

whether I made him any answer or not. There was half a moment

of silence, immediately interrupted by the droning voice of the

salaried cicerone:



"Ancient hauberk, date of the sixth century, time of King Arthur

and the Round Table; said to have belonged to the knight Sir Sagramor

le Desirous; observe the round hole through the chain-mail in

the left breast; can't be accounted for; supposed to have been

done with a bullet since invention of firearms--perhaps maliciously

by Cromwell's soldiers."



My acquaintance smiled--not a modern smile, but one that must

have gone out of general use many, many centuries ago--and muttered

apparently to himself:



"Wit ye well, _I saw it done_."  Then, after a pause, added:

"I did it myself."



By the time I had recovered from the electric surprise of this

remark, he was gone.



All that evening I sat by my fire at the Warwick Arms, steeped

in a dream of the olden time, while the rain beat upon the windows,

and the wind roared about the eaves and corners.  From time to

time I dipped into old Sir Thomas Malory's enchanting book, and

fed at its rich feast of prodigies and adventures, breathed in

the fragrance of its obsolete names, and dreamed again.  Midnight

being come at length, I read another tale, for a nightcap--this

which here follows, to wit:



HOW SIR LAUNCELOT SLEW TWO GIANTS, AND MADE A CASTLE FREE



   Anon withal came there upon him two great giants,

   well armed, all save the heads, with two horrible

   clubs in their hands.  Sir Launcelot put his shield

   afore him, and put the stroke away of the one

   giant, and with his sword he clave his head asunder.

   When his fellow saw that, he ran away as he were

   wood [*demented], for fear of the horrible strokes,

   and Sir Launcelot after him with all his might,

   and smote him on the shoulder, and clave him to

   the middle.  Then Sir Launcelot went into the hall,

   and there came afore him three score ladies and

   damsels, and all kneeled unto him, and thanked

   God and him of their deliverance.  For, sir, said

   they, the most part of us have been here this

   seven year their prisoners, and we have worked all

   manner of silk works for our meat, and we are all

   great gentle-women born, and blessed be the time,

   knight, that ever thou wert born; for thou hast

   done the most worship that ever did knight in the

   world, that will we bear record, and we all pray

   you to tell us your name, that we may tell our

   friends who delivered us out of prison.  Fair

   damsels, he said, my name is Sir Launcelot du

   Lake.  And so he departed from them and betaught

   them unto God.  And then he mounted upon his

   horse, and rode into many strange and wild

   countries, and through many waters and valleys,

   and evil was he lodged.  And at the last by

   fortune him happened against a night to come to

   a fair courtilage, and therein he found an old

   gentle-woman that lodged him with a good-will,

   and there he had good cheer for him and his horse.

   And when time was, his host brought him into a

   fair garret over the gate to his bed. There

   Sir Launcelot unarmed him, and set his harness

   by him, and went to bed, and anon he fell on

   sleep. So, soon after there came one on

   horseback, and knocked at the gate in great

   haste.  And when Sir Launcelot heard this he rose

   up, and looked out at the window, and saw by the

   moonlight three knights come riding after that

   one man, and all three lashed on him at once

   with swords, and that one knight turned on them

   knightly again and defended him. Truly, said

   Sir Launcelot, yonder one knight shall I help,

   for it were shame for me to see three knights

   on one, and if he be slain I am partner of his

   death.  And therewith he took his harness and

   went out at a window by a sheet down to the four

   knights, and then Sir Launcelot said on high,

   Turn you knights unto me, and leave your

   fighting with that knight. And then they all

   three left Sir Kay, and turned unto Sir Launcelot,

   and there began great battle, for they alight

   all three, and strake many strokes at Sir

   Launcelot, and assailed him on every side. Then

   Sir Kay dressed him for to have holpen Sir

   Launcelot.  Nay, sir, said he, I will none of

   your help, therefore as ye will have my help

   let me alone with them.  Sir Kay for the pleasure

   of the knight suffered him for to do his will,

   and so stood aside. And then anon within six

   strokes Sir Launcelot had stricken them to the earth.



   And then they all three cried, Sir Knight, we

   yield us unto you as man of might matchless.  As

   to that, said Sir Launcelot, I will not take

   your yielding unto me, but so that ye yield

   you unto Sir Kay the seneschal, on that covenant

   I will save your lives and else not.  Fair knight,

   said they, that were we loath to do; for as for

   Sir Kay we chased him hither, and had overcome

   him had ye not been; therefore, to yield us unto

   him it were no reason.  Well, as to that, said

   Sir Launcelot, advise you well, for ye may

   choose whether ye will die or live, for an ye be

   yielden, it shall be unto Sir Kay.  Fair knight,

   then they said, in saving our lives we will do

   as thou commandest us.  Then shall ye, said Sir

   Launcelot, on Whitsunday next coming go unto the

   court of King Arthur, and there shall ye yield

   you unto Queen Guenever, and put you all three

   in her grace and mercy, and say that Sir Kay

   sent you thither to be her prisoners.  On the morn

   Sir Launcelot arose early, and left Sir Kay

   sleeping; and Sir Launcelot took Sir Kay's armor

   and his shield and armed him, and so he went to

   the stable and took his horse, and took his leave

   of his host, and so he departed.  Then soon after

   arose Sir Kay and missed Sir Launcelot; and

   then he espied that he had his armor and his

   horse. Now by my faith I know well that he will

   grieve some of the court of King Arthur; for on

   him knights will be bold, and deem that it is I,

   and that will beguile them; and because of his

   armor and shield I am sure I shall ride in peace.

   And then soon after departed Sir Kay, and

   thanked his host.





As I laid the book down there was a knock at the door, and my

stranger came in.  I gave him a pipe and a chair, and made him

welcome.  I also comforted him with a hot Scotch whisky; gave him

another one; then still another--hoping always for his story.

After a fourth persuader, he drifted into it himself, in a quite

simple and natural way:







THE STRANGER'S HISTORY



I am an American.  I was born and reared in Hartford, in the State

of Connecticut--anyway, just over the river, in the country.  So

I am a Yankee of the Yankees--and practical; yes, and nearly

barren of sentiment, I suppose--or poetry, in other words.  My

father was a blacksmith, my uncle was a horse doctor, and I was

both, along at first.  Then I went over to the great arms factory

and learned my real trade; learned all there was to it; learned

to make everything:  guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all

sorts of labor-saving machinery.  Why, I could make anything

a body wanted--anything in the world, it didn't make any difference

what; and if there wasn't any quick new-fangled way to make a thing,

I could invent one--and do it as easy as rolling off a log.  I became

head superintendent; had a couple of thousand men under me.



Well, a man like that is a man that is full of fight--that goes

without saying.  With a couple of thousand rough men under one,

one has plenty of that sort of amusement.  I had, anyway.  At last

I met my match, and I got my dose.  It was during a misunderstanding

conducted with crowbars with a fellow we used to call Hercules.

He laid me out with a crusher alongside the head that made everything

crack, and seemed to spring every joint in my skull and made it

overlap its neighbor.  Then the world went out in darkness, and

I didn't feel anything more, and didn't know anything at all--

at least for a while.



When I came to again, I was sitting under an oak tree, on the

grass, with a whole beautiful and broad country landscape all

to myself--nearly.  Not entirely; for there was a fellow on a horse,

looking down at me--a fellow fresh out of a picture-book.  He was

in old-time iron armor from head to heel, with a helmet on his

head the shape of a nail-keg with slits in it; and he had a shield,

and a sword, and a prodigious spear; and his horse had armor on,

too, and a steel horn projecting from his forehead, and gorgeous

red and green silk trappings that hung down all around him like

a bedquilt, nearly to the ground.



"Fair sir, will ye just?" said this fellow.



"Will I which?"



"Will ye try a passage of arms for land or lady or for--"



"What are you giving me?" I said.  "Get along back to your circus,

or I'll report you."



Now what does this man do but fall back a couple of hundred yards

and then come rushing at me as hard as he could tear, with his

nail-keg bent down nearly to his horse's neck and his long spear

pointed straight ahead.  I saw he meant business, so I was up

the tree when he arrived.



He allowed that I was his property, the captive of his spear.

There was argument on his side--and the bulk of the advantage--

so I judged it best to humor him.  We fixed up an agreement

whereby I was to go with him and he was not to hurt me.  I came

down, and we started away, I walking by the side of his horse.

We marched comfortably along, through glades and over brooks which

I could not remember to have seen before--which puzzled me and

made me wonder--and yet we did not come to any circus or sign of

a circus.  So I gave up the idea of a circus, and concluded he was

from an asylum.  But we never came to an asylum--so I was up

a stump, as you may say.  I asked him how far we were from Hartford.

He said he had never heard of the place; which I took to be a lie,

but allowed it to go at that.  At the end of an hour we saw a

far-away town sleeping in a valley by a winding river; and beyond

it on a hill, a vast gray fortress, with towers and turrets,

the first I had ever seen out of a picture.



"Bridgeport?" said I, pointing.



"Camelot," said he.





My stranger had been showing signs of sleepiness.  He caught

himself nodding, now, and smiled one of those pathetic, obsolete

smiles of his, and said:



"I find I can't go on; but come with me, I've got it all written

out, and you can read it if you like."



In his chamber, he said:  "First, I kept a journal; then by and by,

after years, I took the journal and turned it into a book. How

long ago that was!"



He handed me his manuscript, and pointed out the place where

I should begin:



"Begin here--I've already told you what goes before."  He was

steeped in drowsiness by this time.  As I went out at his door

I heard him murmur sleepily:  "Give you good den, fair sir."



I sat down by my fire and examined my treasure.  The first part

of it--the great bulk of it--was parchment, and yellow with age.

I scanned a leaf particularly and saw that it was a palimpsest.

Under the old dim writing of the Yankee historian appeared traces

of a penmanship which was older and dimmer still--Latin words

and sentences:  fragments from old monkish legends, evidently.

I turned to the place indicated by my stranger and began to read--

as follows:









THE TALE OF THE LOST LAND









CHAPTER I



CAMELOT



"Camelot--Camelot," said I to myself.  "I don't seem to remember

hearing of it before.  Name of the asylum, likely."



It was a soft, reposeful summer landscape, as lovely as a dream,

and as lonesome as Sunday.  The air was full of the smell of

flowers, and the buzzing of insects, and the twittering of birds,

and there were no people, no wagons, there was no stir of life,

nothing going on.  The road was mainly a winding path with hoof-prints

in it, and now and then a faint trace of wheels on either side in

the grass--wheels that apparently had a tire as broad as one's hand.



Presently a fair slip of a girl, about ten years old, with a cataract

of golden hair streaming down over her shoulders, came along.

Around her head she wore a hoop of flame-red poppies. It was as

sweet an outfit as ever I saw, what there was of it.  She walked

indolently along, with a mind at rest, its peace reflected in her

innocent face.  The circus man paid no attention to her; didn't

even seem to see her.  And she--she was no more startled at his

fantastic make-up than if she was used to his like every day of

her life.  She was going by as indifferently as she might have gone

by a couple of cows; but when she happened to notice me, _then_

there was a change!  Up went her hands, and she was turned to stone;

her mouth dropped open, her eyes stared wide and timorously, she

was the picture of astonished curiosity touched with fear.  And

there she stood gazing, in a sort of stupefied fascination, till

we turned a corner of the wood and were lost to her view.  That

she should be startled at me instead of at the other man, was too

many for me; I couldn't make head or tail of it.  And that she

should seem to consider me a spectacle, and totally overlook her

own merits in that respect, was another puzzling thing, and a

display of magnanimity, too, that was surprising in one so young.

There was food for thought here.  I moved along as one in a dream.



As we approached the town, signs of life began to appear.  At

intervals we passed a wretched cabin, with a thatched roof, and

about it small fields and garden patches in an indifferent state of

cultivation.  There were people, too; brawny men, with long, coarse,

uncombed hair that hung down over their faces and made them look

like animals.  They and the women, as a rule, wore a coarse

tow-linen robe that came well below the knee, and a rude sort of

sandal, and many wore an iron collar.  The small boys and girls

were always naked; but nobody seemed to know it.  All of these

people stared at me, talked about me, ran into the huts and fetched

out their families to gape at me; but nobody ever noticed that

other fellow, except to make him humble salutation and get no

response for their pains.



In the town were some substantial windowless houses of stone

scattered among a wilderness of thatched cabins; the streets were

mere crooked alleys, and unpaved; troops of dogs and nude children

played in the sun and made life and noise; hogs roamed and rooted

contentedly about, and one of them lay in a reeking wallow in

the middle of the main thoroughfare and suckled her family.

Presently there was a distant blare of military music; it came

nearer, still nearer, and soon a noble cavalcade wound into view,

glorious with plumed helmets and flashing mail and flaunting banners

and rich doublets and horse-cloths and gilded spearheads; and

through the muck and swine, and naked brats, and joyous dogs, and

shabby huts, it took its gallant way, and in its wake we followed.

Followed through one winding alley and then another,--and climbing,

always climbing--till at last we gained the breezy height where

the huge castle stood.  There was an exchange of bugle blasts;

then a parley from the walls, where men-at-arms, in hauberk and

morion, marched back and forth with halberd at shoulder under

flapping banners with the rude figure of a dragon displayed upon

them; and then the great gates were flung open, the drawbridge

was lowered, and the head of the cavalcade swept forward under

the frowning arches; and we, following, soon found ourselves in

a great paved court, with towers and turrets stretching up into

the blue air on all the four sides; and all about us the dismount

was going on, and much greeting and ceremony, and running to and

fro, and a gay display of moving and intermingling colors, and

an altogether pleasant stir and noise and confusion.







CHAPTER II



KING ARTHUR'S COURT



The moment I got a chance I slipped aside privately and touched

an ancient common looking man on the shoulder and said, in an

insinuating, confidential way:



"Friend, do me a kindness.  Do you belong to the asylum, or are

you just on a visit or something like that?"



He looked me over stupidly, and said:



"Marry, fair sir, me seemeth--"



"That will do," I said; "I reckon you are a patient."



I moved away, cogitating, and at the same time keeping an eye

out for any chance passenger in his right mind that might come

along and give me some light.  I judged I had found one, presently;

so I drew him aside and said in his ear:



"If I could see the head keeper a minute--only just a minute--"



"Prithee do not let me."



"Let you _what_?"



"_Hinder_ me, then, if the word please thee better.  Then he went

on to say he was an under-cook and could not stop to gossip,

though he would like it another time; for it would comfort his

very liver to know where I got my clothes.  As he started away he

pointed and said yonder was one who was idle enough for my purpose,

and was seeking me besides, no doubt.  This was an airy slim boy

in shrimp-colored tights that made him look like a forked carrot,

the rest of his gear was blue silk and dainty laces and ruffles;

and he had long yellow curls, and wore a plumed pink satin cap

tilted complacently over his ear.  By his look, he was good-natured;

by his gait, he was satisfied with himself.  He was pretty enough

to frame.  He arrived, looked me over with a smiling and impudent

curiosity; said he had come for me, and informed me that he was a page.



"Go 'long," I said; "you ain't more than a paragraph."



It was pretty severe, but I was nettled.  However, it never phazed

him; he didn't appear to know he was hurt.  He began to talk and

laugh, in happy, thoughtless, boyish fashion, as we walked along,

and made himself old friends with me at once; asked me all sorts

of questions about myself and about my clothes, but never waited

for an answer--always chattered straight ahead, as if he didn't

know he had asked a question and wasn't expecting any reply, until

at last he happened to mention that he was born in the beginning

of the year 513.



It made the cold chills creep over me!  I stopped and said,

a little faintly:



"Maybe I didn't hear you just right.  Say it again--and say it

slow.  What year was it?"



"513."



"513!  You don't look it!  Come, my boy, I am a stranger and

friendless; be honest and honorable with me.  Are you in your

right mind?"



He said he was.



"Are these other people in their right minds?"



He said they were.



"And this isn't an asylum?  I mean, it isn't a place where they

cure crazy people?"



He said it wasn't.



"Well, then," I said, "either I am a lunatic, or something just

as awful has happened.  Now tell me, honest and true, where am I?"



"IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT."



I waited a minute, to let that idea shudder its way home,

and then said:



"And according to your notions, what year is it now?"



"528--nineteenth of June."



I felt a mournful sinking at the heart, and muttered:  "I shall

never see my friends again--never, never again.  They will not

be born for more than thirteen hundred years yet."



I seemed to believe the boy, I didn't know why.  _Something_ in me

seemed to believe him--my consciousness, as you may say; but my

reason didn't.  My reason straightway began to clamor; that was

natural.  I didn't know how to go about satisfying it, because

I knew that the testimony of men wouldn't serve--my reason would

say they were lunatics, and throw out their evidence.  But all

of a sudden I stumbled on the very thing, just by luck.  I knew

that the only total eclipse of the sun in the first half of the

sixth century occurred on the 21st of June, A.D. 528, O.S., and

began at 3 minutes after 12 noon.  I also knew that no total eclipse

of the sun was due in what to _me_ was the present year--i.e., 1879.

So, if I could keep my anxiety and curiosity from eating the heart

out of me for forty-eight hours, I should then find out for certain

whether this boy was telling me the truth or not.



Wherefore, being a practical Connecticut man, I now shoved this

whole problem clear out of my mind till its appointed day and hour

should come, in order that I might turn all my attention to the

circumstances of the present moment, and be alert and ready to

make the most out of them that could be made.  One thing at a time,

is my motto--and just play that thing for all it is worth, even

if it's only two pair and a jack.  I made up my mind to two things:

if it was still the nineteenth century and I was among lunatics

and couldn't get away, I would presently boss that asylum or know

the reason why; and if, on the other hand, it was really the sixth

century, all right, I didn't want any softer thing:  I would boss

the whole country inside of three months; for I judged I would

have the start of the best-educated man in the kingdom by a matter

of thirteen hundred years and upward.  I'm not a man to waste

time after my mind's made up and there's work on hand; so I said

to the page:



"Now, Clarence, my boy--if that might happen to be your name--

I'll get you to post me up a little if you don't mind.  What is

the name of that apparition that brought me here?"



"My master and thine?  That is the good knight and great lord

Sir Kay the Seneschal, foster brother to our liege the king."



"Very good; go on, tell me everything."



He made a long story of it; but the part that had immediate interest

for me was this:  He said I was Sir Kay's prisoner, and that

in the due course of custom I would be flung into a dungeon and

left there on scant commons until my friends ransomed me--unless

I chanced to rot, first.  I saw that the last chance had the best

show, but I didn't waste any bother about that; time was too

precious.  The page said, further, that dinner was about ended

in the great hall by this time, and that as soon as the sociability

and the heavy drinking should begin, Sir Kay would have me in and

exhibit me before King Arthur and his illustrious knights seated at

the Table Round, and would brag about his exploit in capturing

me, and would probably exaggerate the facts a little, but it

wouldn't be good form for me to correct him, and not over safe,

either; and when I was done being exhibited, then ho for the

dungeon; but he, Clarence, would find a way to come and see me every

now and then, and cheer me up, and help me get word to my friends.



Get word to my friends!  I thanked him; I couldn't do less; and

about this time a lackey came to say I was wanted; so Clarence

led me in and took me off to one side and sat down by me.



Well, it was a curious kind of spectacle, and interesting. It was

an immense place, and rather naked--yes, and full of loud contrasts.

It was very, very lofty; so lofty that the banners depending from

the arched beams and girders away up there floated in a sort of

twilight; there was a stone-railed gallery at each end, high up,

with musicians in the one, and women, clothed in stunning colors,

in the other.  The floor was of big stone flags laid in black and

white squares, rather battered by age and use, and needing repair.

As to ornament, there wasn't any, strictly speaking; though on

the walls hung some huge tapestries which were probably taxed

as works of art; battle-pieces, they were, with horses shaped like

those which children cut out of paper or create in gingerbread;

with men on them in scale armor whose scales are represented by

round holes--so that the man's coat looks as if it had been done

with a biscuit-punch.  There was a fireplace big enough to camp in;

and its projecting sides and hood, of carved and pillared stonework,

had the look of a cathedral door.  Along the walls stood men-at-arms,

in breastplate and morion, with halberds for their only weapon--

rigid as statues; and that is what they looked like.



In the middle of this groined and vaulted public square was an oaken

table which they called the Table Round.  It was as large as

a circus ring; and around it sat a great company of men dressed

in such various and splendid colors that it hurt one's eyes to look

at them.  They wore their plumed hats, right along, except that

whenever one addressed himself directly to the king, he lifted

his hat a trifle just as he was beginning his remark.



Mainly they were drinking--from entire ox horns; but a few were

still munching bread or gnawing beef bones.  There was about

an average of two dogs to one man; and these sat in expectant

attitudes till a spent bone was flung to them, and then they went

for it by brigades and divisions, with a rush, and there ensued

a fight which filled the prospect with a tumultuous chaos of

plunging heads and bodies and flashing tails, and the storm of

howlings and barkings deafened all speech for the time; but that

was no matter, for the dog-fight was always a bigger interest

anyway; the men rose, sometimes, to observe it the better and bet

on it, and the ladies and the musicians stretched themselves out

over their balusters with the same object; and all broke into

delighted ejaculations from time to time. In the end, the winning

dog stretched himself out comfortably with his bone between his

paws, and proceeded to growl over it, and gnaw it, and grease

the floor with it, just as fifty others were already doing; and the

rest of the court resumed their previous industries and entertainments.



As a rule, the speech and behavior of these people were gracious

and courtly; and I noticed that they were good and serious listeners

when anybody was telling anything--I mean in a dog-fightless

interval.  And plainly, too, they were a childlike and innocent lot;

telling lies of the stateliest pattern with a most gentle and

winning naivety, and ready and willing to listen to anybody else's

lie, and believe it, too.  It was hard to associate them with

anything cruel or dreadful; and yet they dealt in tales of blood

and suffering with a guileless relish that made me almost forget

to shudder.



I was not the only prisoner present.  There were twenty or more.

Poor devils, many of them were maimed, hacked, carved, in a frightful

way; and their hair, their faces, their clothing, were caked with

black and stiffened drenchings of blood.  They were suffering

sharp physical pain, of course; and weariness, and hunger and

thirst, no doubt; and at least none had given them the comfort

of a wash, or even the poor charity of a lotion for their wounds;

yet you never heard them utter a moan or a groan, or saw them show

any sign of restlessness, or any disposition to complain.  The

thought was forced upon me:  "The rascals--_they_ have served other

people so in their day; it being their own turn, now, they were

not expecting any better treatment than this; so their philosophical

bearing is not an outcome of mental training, intellectual fortitude,

reasoning; it is mere animal training; they are white Indians."







CHAPTER III



KNIGHTS OF THE TABLE ROUND



Mainly the Round Table talk was monologues--narrative accounts

of the adventures in which these prisoners were captured and their

friends and backers killed and stripped of their steeds and armor.

As a general thing--as far as I could make out--these murderous

adventures were not forays undertaken to avenge injuries, nor to

settle old disputes or sudden fallings out; no, as a rule they were

simply duels between strangers--duels between people who had never

even been introduced to each other, and between whom existed no

cause of offense whatever.  Many a time I had seen a couple of boys,

strangers, meet by chance, and say simultaneously, "I can lick you,"

and go at it on the spot; but I had always imagined until now that

that sort of thing belonged to children only, and was a sign and

mark of childhood; but here were these big boobies sticking to it

and taking pride in it clear up into full age and beyond.  Yet there

was something very engaging about these great simple-hearted

creatures, something attractive and lovable.  There did not seem

to be brains enough in the entire nursery, so to speak, to bait

a fish-hook with; but you didn't seem to mind that, after a little,

because you soon saw that brains were not needed in a society

like that, and indeed would have marred it, hindered it, spoiled

its symmetry--perhaps rendered its existence impossible.



There was a fine manliness observable in almost every face; and

in some a certain loftiness and sweetness that rebuked your

belittling criticisms and stilled them.  A most noble benignity

and purity reposed in the countenance of him they called Sir Galahad,

and likewise in the king's also; and there was majesty and greatness

in the giant frame and high bearing of Sir Launcelot of the Lake.



There was presently an incident which centered the general interest

upon this Sir Launcelot.  At a sign from a sort of master of

ceremonies, six or eight of the prisoners rose and came forward

in a body and knelt on the floor and lifted up their hands toward

the ladies' gallery and begged the grace of a word with the queen.

The most conspicuously situated lady in that massed flower-bed

of feminine show and finery inclined her head by way of assent,

and then the spokesman of the prisoners delivered himself and his

fellows into her hands for free pardon, ransom, captivity, or death,

as she in her good pleasure might elect; and this, as he said, he

was doing by command of Sir Kay the Seneschal, whose prisoners

they were, he having vanquished them by his single might and

prowess in sturdy conflict in the field.



Surprise and astonishment flashed from face to face all over

the house; the queen's gratified smile faded out at the name of

Sir Kay, and she looked disappointed; and the page whispered in

my ear with an accent and manner expressive of extravagant derision--



"Sir _Kay_, forsooth!  Oh, call me pet names, dearest, call me

a marine!  In twice a thousand years shall the unholy invention

of man labor at odds to beget the fellow to this majestic lie!"



Every eye was fastened with severe inquiry upon Sir Kay. But he

was equal to the occasion.  He got up and played his hand like

a major--and took every trick.  He said he would state the case

exactly according to the facts; he would tell the simple

straightforward tale, without comment of his own; "and then,"

said he, "if ye find glory and honor due, ye will give it unto him

who is the mightiest man of his hands that ever bare shield or

strake with sword in the ranks of Christian battle--even him that

sitteth there!" and he pointed to Sir Launcelot.  Ah, he fetched

them; it was a rattling good stroke.  Then he went on and told

how Sir Launcelot, seeking adventures, some brief time gone by,

killed seven giants at one sweep of his sword, and set a hundred

and forty-two captive maidens free; and then went further, still

seeking adventures, and found him (Sir Kay) fighting a desperate

fight against nine foreign knights, and straightway took the battle

solely into his own hands, and conquered the nine; and that night

Sir Launcelot rose quietly, and dressed him in Sir Kay's armor and

took Sir Kay's horse and gat him away into distant lands, and

vanquished sixteen knights in one pitched battle and thirty-four

in another; and all these and the former nine he made to swear

that about Whitsuntide they would ride to Arthur's court and yield

them to Queen Guenever's hands as captives of Sir Kay the Seneschal,

spoil of his knightly prowess; and now here were these half dozen,

and the rest would be along as soon as they might be healed of

their desperate wounds.



Well, it was touching to see the queen blush and smile, and look

embarrassed and happy, and fling furtive glances at Sir Launcelot

that would have got him shot in Arkansas, to a dead certainty.



Everybody praised the valor and magnanimity of Sir Launcelot; and

as for me, I was perfectly amazed, that one man, all by himself,

should have been able to beat down and capture such battalions

of practiced fighters.  I said as much to Clarence; but this mocking

featherhead only said:



"An Sir Kay had had time to get another skin of sour wine into him,

ye had seen the accompt doubled."



I looked at the boy in sorrow; and as I looked I saw the cloud of

a deep despondency settle upon his countenance.  I followed the

direction of his eye, and saw that a very old and white-bearded

man, clothed in a flowing black gown, had risen and was standing

at the table upon unsteady legs, and feebly swaying his ancient

head and surveying the company with his watery and wandering eye.

The same suffering look that was in the page's face was observable

in all the faces around--the look of dumb creatures who know that

they must endure and make no moan.



"Marry, we shall have it again," sighed the boy; "that same old

weary tale that he hath told a thousand times in the same words,

and that he _will_ tell till he dieth, every time he hath gotten his

barrel full and feeleth his exaggeration-mill a-working.  Would

God I had died or I saw this day!"



"Who is it?"



"Merlin, the mighty liar and magician, perdition singe him for

the weariness he worketh with his one tale!  But that men fear

him for that he hath the storms and the lightnings and all the

devils that be in hell at his beck and call, they would have dug

his entrails out these many years ago to get at that tale and

squelch it.  He telleth it always in the third person, making

believe he is too modest to glorify himself--maledictions light

upon him, misfortune be his dole!  Good friend, prithee call me

for evensong."



The boy nestled himself upon my shoulder and pretended to go

to sleep.  The old man began his tale; and presently the lad was

asleep in reality; so also were the dogs, and the court, the lackeys,

and the files of men-at-arms.  The droning voice droned on; a soft

snoring arose on all sides and supported it like a deep and subdued

accompaniment of wind instruments.  Some heads were bowed upon

folded arms, some lay back with open mouths that issued unconscious

music; the flies buzzed and bit, unmolested, the rats swarmed

softly out from a hundred holes, and pattered about, and made

themselves at home everywhere; and one of them sat up like a

squirrel on the king's head and held a bit of cheese in its hands

and nibbled it, and dribbled the crumbs in the king's face with

naive and impudent irreverence.  It was a tranquil scene, and

restful to the weary eye and the jaded spirit.



This was the old man's tale.  He said:



"Right so the king and Merlin departed, and went until an hermit

that was a good man and a great leech.  So the hermit searched

all his wounds and gave him good salves; so the king was there

three days, and then were his wounds well amended that he might

ride and go, and so departed.  And as they rode, Arthur said,

I have no sword.  No force* [*Footnote from M.T.: No matter.],

said Merlin, hereby is a sword that shall be yours and I may.

So they rode till they came to a lake, the which was a fair water

and broad, and in the midst of the lake Arthur was ware of an arm

clothed in white samite, that held a fair sword in that hand.

Lo, said Merlin, yonder is that sword that I spake of.  With that

they saw a damsel going upon the lake.  What damsel is that?

said Arthur.  That is the Lady of the lake, said Merlin; and within

that lake is a rock, and therein is as fair a place as any on earth,

and richly beseen, and this damsel will come to you anon, and then

speak ye fair to her that she will give you that sword.  Anon

withal came the damsel unto Arthur and saluted him, and he her

again.  Damsel, said Arthur, what sword is that, that yonder

the arm holdeth above the water?  I would it were mine, for I have

no sword.  Sir Arthur King, said the damsel, that sword is mine,

and if ye will give me a gift when I ask it you, ye shall have it.

By my faith, said Arthur, I will give you what gift ye will ask.

Well, said the damsel, go ye into yonder barge and row yourself

to the sword, and take it and the scabbard with you, and I will ask

my gift when I see my time.  So Sir Arthur and Merlin alight, and

tied their horses to two trees, and so they went into the ship,

and when they came to the sword that the hand held, Sir Arthur

took it up by the handles, and took it with him.  And the arm

and the hand went under the water; and so they came unto the land

and rode forth.  And then Sir Arthur saw a rich pavilion.  What

signifieth yonder pavilion?  It is the knight's pavilion, said

Merlin, that ye fought with last, Sir Pellinore, but he is out,

he is not there; he hath ado with a knight of yours, that hight

Egglame, and they have fought together, but at the last Egglame

fled, and else he had been dead, and he hath chased him even

to Carlion, and we shall meet with him anon in the highway.  That

is well said, said Arthur, now have I a sword, now will I wage

battle with him, and be avenged on him.  Sir, ye shall not so,

said Merlin, for the knight is weary of fighting and chasing, so

that ye shall have no worship to have ado with him; also, he will

not lightly be matched of one knight living; and therefore it is my

counsel, let him pass, for he shall do you good service in short

time, and his sons, after his days.  Also ye shall see that day

in short space ye shall be right glad to give him your sister

to wed.  When I see him, I will do as ye advise me, said Arthur.

Then Sir Arthur looked on the sword, and liked it passing well.

Whether liketh you better, said Merlin, the sword or the scabbard?

Me liketh better the sword, said Arthur.  Ye are more unwise,

said Merlin, for the scabbard is worth ten of the sword, for while

ye have the scabbard upon you ye shall never lose no blood, be ye

never so sore wounded; therefore, keep well the scabbard always

with you.  So they rode into Carlion, and by the way they met with

Sir Pellinore; but Merlin had done such a craft that Pellinore saw

not Arthur, and he passed by without any words.  I marvel, said

Arthur, that the knight would not speak.  Sir, said Merlin, he saw

you not; for and he had seen you ye had not lightly departed.  So

they came unto Carlion, whereof his knights were passing glad.

And when they heard of his adventures they marveled that he would

jeopard his person so alone.  But all men of worship said it was

merry to be under such a chieftain that would put his person in

adventure as other poor knights did."







CHAPTER IV



SIR DINADAN THE HUMORIST



It seemed to me that this quaint lie was most simply and beautifully

told; but then I had heard it only once, and that makes a difference;

it was pleasant to the others when it was fresh, no doubt.



Sir Dinadan the Humorist was the first to awake, and he soon roused

the rest with a practical joke of a sufficiently poor quality.

He tied some metal mugs to a dog's tail and turned him loose,

and he tore around and around the place in a frenzy of fright,

with all the other dogs bellowing after him and battering and

crashing against everything that came in their way and making

altogether a chaos of confusion and a most deafening din and

turmoil; at which every man and woman of the multitude laughed

till the tears flowed, and some fell out of their chairs and

wallowed on the floor in ecstasy.  It was just like so many children.

Sir Dinadan was so proud of his exploit that he could not keep

from telling over and over again, to weariness, how the immortal

idea happened to occur to him; and as is the way with humorists

of his breed, he was still laughing at it after everybody else had

got through.  He was so set up that he concluded to make a speech--

of course a humorous speech.  I think I never heard so many old

played-out jokes strung together in my life.  He was worse than

the minstrels, worse than the clown in the circus.  It seemed

peculiarly sad to sit here, thirteen hundred years before I was

born, and listen again to poor, flat, worm-eaten jokes that had

given me the dry gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years

afterwards.  It about convinced me that there isn't any such thing

as a new joke possible.  Everybody laughed at these antiquities--

but then they always do; I had noticed that, centuries later.

However, of course the scoffer didn't laugh--I mean the boy.  No,

he scoffed; there wasn't anything he wouldn't scoff at. He said

the most of Sir Dinadan's jokes were rotten and the rest were

petrified.  I said "petrified" was good; as I believed, myself,

that the only right way to classify the majestic ages of some of

those jokes was by geologic periods.  But that neat idea hit

the boy in a blank place, for geology hadn't been invented yet.

However, I made a note of the remark, and calculated to educate

the commonwealth up to it if I pulled through.  It is no use

to throw a good thing away merely because the market isn't ripe yet.



Now Sir Kay arose and began to fire up on his history-mill with me

for fuel.  It was time for me to feel serious, and I did.  Sir Kay

told how he had encountered me in a far land of barbarians, who

all wore the same ridiculous garb that I did--a garb that was a work

of enchantment, and intended to make the wearer secure from hurt

by human hands.  However he had nullified the force of the

enchantment by prayer, and had killed my thirteen knights in

a three hours' battle, and taken me prisoner, sparing my life

in order that so strange a curiosity as I was might be exhibited

to the wonder and admiration of the king and the court.  He spoke

of me all the time, in the blandest way, as "this prodigious giant,"

and "this horrible sky-towering monster," and "this tusked and

taloned man-devouring ogre", and everybody took in all this bosh

in the naivest way, and never smiled or seemed to notice that

there was any discrepancy between these watered statistics and me.

He said that in trying to escape from him I sprang into the top of

a tree two hundred cubits high at a single bound, but he dislodged

me with a stone the size of a cow, which "all-to brast" the most

of my bones, and then swore me to appear at Arthur's court for

sentence.  He ended by condemning me to die at noon on the 21st;

and was so little concerned about it that he stopped to yawn before

he named the date.



I was in a dismal state by this time; indeed, I was hardly enough

in my right mind to keep the run of a dispute that sprung up as

to how I had better be killed, the possibility of the killing being

doubted by some, because of the enchantment in my clothes. And yet

it was nothing but an ordinary suit of fifteen-dollar slop-shops.

Still, I was sane enough to notice this detail, to wit:  many of

the terms used in the most matter-of-fact way by this great

assemblage of the first ladies and gentlemen in the land would

have made a Comanche blush.  Indelicacy is too mild a term to convey

the idea.  However, I had read "Tom Jones," and "Roderick Random,"

and other books of that kind, and knew that the highest and first

ladies and gentlemen in England had remained little or no cleaner

in their talk, and in the morals and conduct which such talk

implies, clear up to a hundred years ago; in fact clear into our

own nineteenth century--in which century, broadly speaking,

the earliest samples of the real lady and real gentleman discoverable

in English history--or in European history, for that matter--may be

said to have made their appearance.  Suppose Sir Walter, instead

of putting the conversations into the mouths of his characters,

had allowed the characters to speak for themselves?  We should

have had talk from Rebecca and Ivanhoe and the soft lady Rowena

which would embarrass a tramp in our day.  However, to the

unconsciously indelicate all things are delicate.  King Arthur's

people were not aware that they were indecent and I had presence

of mind enough not to mention it.



They were so troubled about my enchanted clothes that they were

mightily relieved, at last, when old Merlin swept the difficulty

away for them with a common-sense hint.  He asked them why they

were so dull--why didn't it occur to them to strip me.  In half a

minute I was as naked as a pair of tongs!  And dear, dear, to think

of it: I was the only embarrassed person there.  Everybody discussed

me; and did it as unconcernedly as if I had been a cabbage.

Queen Guenever was as naively interested as the rest, and said

she had never seen anybody with legs just like mine before.  It was

the only compliment I got--if it was a compliment.



Finally I was carried off in one direction, and my perilous clothes

in another.  I was shoved into a dark and narrow cell in a dungeon,

with some scant remnants for dinner, some moldy straw for a bed,

and no end of rats for company.







CHAPTER V



AN INSPIRATION



I was so tired that even my fears were not able to keep me awake long.



When I next came to myself, I seemed to have been asleep a very

long time.  My first thought was, "Well, what an astonishing dream

I've had!  I reckon I've waked only just in time to keep from

being hanged or drowned or burned or something....  I'll nap again

till the whistle blows, and then I'll go down to the arms factory

and have it out with Hercules."



But just then I heard the harsh music of rusty chains and bolts,

a light flashed in my eyes, and that butterfly, Clarence, stood

before me!  I gasped with surprise; my breath almost got away from me.



"What!" I said, "you here yet?  Go along with the rest of

the dream! scatter!"



But he only laughed, in his light-hearted way, and fell to making

fun of my sorry plight.



"All right," I said resignedly, "let the dream go on; I'm in no hurry."



"Prithee what dream?"



"What dream?  Why, the dream that I am in Arthur's court--a person

who never existed; and that I am talking to you, who are nothing

but a work of the imagination."



"Oh, la, indeed! and is it a dream that you're to be burned

to-morrow?  Ho-ho--answer me that!"



The shock that went through me was distressing.  I now began

to reason that my situation was in the last degree serious, dream

or no dream; for I knew by past experience of the lifelike intensity

of dreams, that to be burned to death, even in a dream, would be

very far from being a jest, and was a thing to be avoided, by any

means, fair or foul, that I could contrive.  So I said beseechingly:



"Ah, Clarence, good boy, only friend I've got,--for you _are_ my

friend, aren't you?--don't fail me; help me to devise some way

of escaping from this place!"



"Now do but hear thyself!  Escape?  Why, man, the corridors are

in guard and keep of men-at-arms."



"No doubt, no doubt.  But how many, Clarence?  Not many, I hope?"



"Full a score.  One may not hope to escape."  After a pause--

hesitatingly:  "and there be other reasons--and weightier."



"Other ones? What are they?"



"Well, they say--oh, but I daren't, indeed daren't!"



"Why, poor lad, what is the matter?  Why do you blench?  Why do

you tremble so?"



"Oh, in sooth, there is need!  I do want to tell you, but--"



"Come, come, be brave, be a man--speak out, there's a good lad!"



He hesitated, pulled one way by desire, the other way by fear;

then he stole to the door and peeped out, listening; and finally

crept close to me and put his mouth to my ear and told me his

fearful news in a whisper, and with all the cowering apprehension

of one who was venturing upon awful ground and speaking of things

whose very mention might be freighted with death.



"Merlin, in his malice, has woven a spell about this dungeon, and

there bides not the man in these kingdoms that would be desperate

enough to essay to cross its lines with you!  Now God pity me,

I have told it!  Ah, be kind to me, be merciful to a poor boy who

means thee well; for an thou betray me I am lost!"



I laughed the only really refreshing laugh I had had for some time;

and shouted:



"Merlin has wrought a spell!  _Merlin_, forsooth!  That cheap old

humbug, that maundering old ass?  Bosh, pure bosh, the silliest bosh

in the world!  Why, it does seem to me that of all the childish,

idiotic, chuckle-headed, chicken-livered superstitions that ev--

oh, damn Merlin!"



But Clarence had slumped to his knees before I had half finished,

and he was like to go out of his mind with fright.



"Oh, beware!  These are awful words!  Any moment these walls

may crumble upon us if you say such things.  Oh call them back

before it is too late!"



Now this strange exhibition gave me a good idea and set me to

thinking.  If everybody about here was so honestly and sincerely

afraid of Merlin's pretended magic as Clarence was, certainly

a superior man like me ought to be shrewd enough to contrive

some way to take advantage of such a state of things.  I went

on thinking, and worked out a plan. Then I said:



"Get up.  Pull yourself together; look me in the eye.  Do you

know why I laughed?"



"No--but for our blessed Lady's sake, do it no more."



"Well, I'll tell you why I laughed.  Because I'm a magician myself."



"Thou!"  The boy recoiled a step, and caught his breath, for

the thing hit him rather sudden; but the aspect which he took

on was very, very respectful.  I took quick note of that; it

indicated that a humbug didn't need to have a reputation in this

asylum; people stood ready to take him at his word, without that.

I resumed.



"I've know Merlin seven hundred years, and he--"



"Seven hun--"



"Don't interrupt me.  He has died and come alive again thirteen

times, and traveled under a new name every time:  Smith, Jones,

Robinson, Jackson, Peters, Haskins, Merlin--a new alias every

time he turns up.  I knew him in Egypt three hundred years ago;

I knew him in India five hundred years ago--he is always blethering

around in my way, everywhere I go; he makes me tired.  He don't

amount to shucks, as a magician; knows some of the old common

tricks, but has never got beyond the rudiments, and never will.

He is well enough for the provinces--one-night stands and that

sort of thing, you know--but dear me, _he_ oughtn't to set up for

an expert--anyway not where there's a real artist.  Now look here,

Clarence, I am going to stand your friend, right along, and in

return you must be mine.  I want you to do me a favor.  I want

you to get word to the king that I am a magician myself--and the

Supreme Grand High-yu-Muck-amuck and head of the tribe, at that;

and I want him to be made to understand that I am just quietly

arranging a little calamity here that will make the fur fly in these

realms if Sir Kay's project is carried out and any harm comes

to me.  Will you get that to the king for me?"



The poor boy was in such a state that he could hardly answer me.

It was pitiful to see a creature so terrified, so unnerved, so

demoralized.  But he promised everything; and on my side he made

me promise over and over again that I would remain his friend, and

never turn against him or cast any enchantments upon him. Then

he worked his way out, staying himself with his hand along the

wall, like a sick person.



Presently this thought occurred to me:  how heedless I have been!

When the boy gets calm, he will wonder why a great magician like me

should have begged a boy like him to help me get out of this place;

he will put this and that together, and will see that I am a humbug.



I worried over that heedless blunder for an hour, and called myself

a great many hard names, meantime.  But finally it occurred to me

all of a sudden that these animals didn't reason; that _they_ never

put this and that together; that all their talk showed that they

didn't know a discrepancy when they saw it.  I was at rest, then.



But as soon as one is at rest, in this world, off he goes on

something else to worry about.  It occurred to me that I had made

another blunder:  I had sent the boy off to alarm his betters with

a threat--I intending to invent a calamity at my leisure; now

the people who are the readiest and eagerest and willingest to

swallow miracles are the very ones who are hungriest to see you

perform them; suppose I should be called on for a sample?  Suppose

I should be asked to name my calamity?  Yes, I had made a blunder;

I ought to have invented my calamity first.  "What shall I do?

what can I say, to gain a little time?"  I was in trouble again;

in the deepest kind of trouble...



"There's a footstep!--they're coming.  If I had only just a moment

to think....  Good, I've got it.  I'm all right."



You see, it was the eclipse.  It came into my mind in the nick

of time, how Columbus, or Cortez, or one of those people, played

an eclipse as a saving trump once, on some savages, and I saw my

chance.  I could play it myself, now, and it wouldn't be any

plagiarism, either, because I should get it in nearly a thousand

years ahead of those parties.



Clarence came in, subdued, distressed, and said:



"I hasted the message to our liege the king, and straightway he

had me to his presence.  He was frighted even to the marrow,

and was minded to give order for your instant enlargement, and

that you be clothed in fine raiment and lodged as befitted one so

great; but then came Merlin and spoiled all; for he persuaded

the king that you are mad, and know not whereof you speak; and

said your threat is but foolishness and idle vaporing.  They

disputed long, but in the end, Merlin, scoffing, said, 'Wherefore

hath he not _named_ his brave calamity?  Verily it is because he

cannot.'  This thrust did in a most sudden sort close the king's

mouth, and he could offer naught to turn the argument; and so,

reluctant, and full loth to do you the discourtesy, he yet prayeth

you to consider his perplexed case, as noting how the matter stands,

and name the calamity--if so be you have determined the nature

of it and the time of its coming.  Oh, prithee delay not; to delay

at such a time were to double and treble the perils that already

compass thee about.  Oh, be thou wise--name the calamity!"



I allowed silence to accumulate while I got my impressiveness

together, and then said:



"How long have I been shut up in this hole?"



"Ye were shut up when yesterday was well spent.  It is 9 of

the morning now."



"No!  Then I have slept well, sure enough.  Nine in the morning

now!  And yet it is the very complexion of midnight, to a shade.

This is the 20th, then?"



"The 20th--yes."



"And I am to be burned alive to-morrow."  The boy shuddered.



"At what hour?"



"At high noon."



"Now then, I will tell you what to say."  I paused, and stood over

that cowering lad a whole minute in awful silence; then, in a voice

deep, measured, charged with doom, I began, and rose by dramatically

graded stages to my colossal climax, which I delivered in as sublime

and noble a way as ever I did such a thing in my life:  "Go back

and tell the king that at that hour I will smother the whole world

in the dead blackness of midnight; I will blot out the sun, and he

shall never shine again; the fruits of the earth shall rot for lack

of light and warmth, and the peoples of the earth shall famish

and die, to the last man!"



I had to carry the boy out myself, he sunk into such a collapse.

I handed him over to the soldiers, and went back.







CHAPTER VI



THE ECLIPSE



In the stillness and the darkness, realization soon began to

supplement knowledge.  The mere knowledge of a fact is pale; but

when you come to _realize_ your fact, it takes on color. It is

all the difference between hearing of a man being stabbed to

the heart, and seeing it done.  In the stillness and the darkness,

the knowledge that I was in deadly danger took to itself deeper

and deeper meaning all the time; a something which was realization

crept inch by inch through my veins and turned me cold.



But it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these,

as soon as a man's mercury has got down to a certain point there

comes a revulsion, and he rallies.  Hope springs up, and cheerfulness

along with it, and then he is in good shape to do something for

himself, if anything can be done.  When my rally came, it came with

a bound.  I said to myself that my eclipse would be sure to save me,

and make me the greatest man in the kingdom besides; and straightway

my mercury went up to the top of the tube, and my solicitudes

all vanished.  I was as happy a man as there was in the world.

I was even impatient for to-morrow to come, I so wanted to gather

in that great triumph and be the center of all the nation's wonder

and reverence.  Besides, in a business way it would be the making

of me; I knew that.



Meantime there was one thing which had got pushed into the background

of my mind.  That was the half-conviction that when the nature

of my proposed calamity should be reported to those superstitious

people, it would have such an effect that they would want to

compromise.  So, by and by when I heard footsteps coming, that

thought was recalled to me, and I said to myself, "As sure as

anything, it's the compromise.  Well, if it is good, all right,

I will accept; but if it isn't, I mean to stand my ground and play

my hand for all it is worth."



The door opened, and some men-at-arms appeared.  The leader said:



"The stake is ready. Come!"



The stake!  The strength went out of me, and I almost fell down.

It is hard to get one's breath at such a time, such lumps come into

one's throat, and such gaspings; but as soon as I could speak, I said:



"But this is a mistake--the execution is to-morrow."



"Order changed; been set forward a day.  Haste thee!"



I was lost.  There was no help for me.  I was dazed, stupefied;

I had no command over myself, I only wandered purposely about,

like one out of his mind; so the soldiers took hold of me, and

pulled me along with them, out of the cell and along the maze of

underground corridors, and finally into the fierce glare of daylight

and the upper world.  As we stepped into the vast enclosed court

of the castle I got a shock; for the first thing I saw was the stake,

standing in the center, and near it the piled fagots and a monk.

On all four sides of the court the seated multitudes rose rank

above rank, forming sloping terraces that were rich with color.

The king and the queen sat in their thrones, the most conspicuous

figures there, of course.



To note all this, occupied but a second.  The next second Clarence

had slipped from some place of concealment and was pouring news

into my ear, his eyes beaming with triumph and gladness.  He said:



"Tis through _me_ the change was wrought!  And main hard have I worked

to do it, too.  But when I revealed to them the calamity in store,

and saw how mighty was the terror it did engender, then saw I also

that this was the time to strike!  Wherefore I diligently pretended,

unto this and that and the other one, that your power against the sun

could not reach its full until the morrow; and so if any would save

the sun and the world, you must be slain to-day, while your

enchantments are but in the weaving and lack potency.  Odsbodikins,

it was but a dull lie, a most indifferent invention, but you should

have seen them seize it and swallow it, in the frenzy of their

fright, as it were salvation sent from heaven; and all the while

was I laughing in my sleeve the one moment, to see them so cheaply

deceived, and glorifying God the next, that He was content to let

the meanest of His creatures be His instrument to the saving of

thy life.  Ah how happy has the matter sped!  You will not need

to do the sun a _real_ hurt--ah, forget not that, on your soul forget

it not!  Only make a little darkness--only the littlest little

darkness, mind, and cease with that.  It will be sufficient.  They

will see that I spoke falsely,--being ignorant, as they will fancy--

and with the falling of the first shadow of that darkness you

shall see them go mad with fear; and they will set you free and

make you great!  Go to thy triumph, now!  But remember--ah, good

friend, I implore thee remember my supplication, and do the blessed

sun no hurt.  For _my_ sake, thy true friend."



I choked out some words through my grief and misery; as much as

to say I would spare the sun; for which the lad's eyes paid me back

with such deep and loving gratitude that I had not the heart

to tell him his good-hearted foolishness had ruined me and sent me

to my death.



As the soldiers assisted me across the court the stillness was

so profound that if I had been blindfold I should have supposed

I was in a solitude instead of walled in by four thousand people.

There was not a movement perceptible in those masses of humanity;

they were as rigid as stone images, and as pale; and dread sat

upon every countenance.  This hush continued while I was being

chained to the stake; it still continued while the fagots were

carefully and tediously piled about my ankles, my knees, my thighs,

my body.  Then there was a pause, and a deeper hush, if possible,

and a man knelt down at my feet with a blazing torch; the multitude

strained forward, gazing, and parting slightly from their seats

without knowing it; the monk raised his hands above my head, and

his eyes toward the blue sky, and began some words in Latin; in

this attitude he droned on and on, a little while, and then stopped.

I waited two or three moments; then looked up; he was standing

there petrified.  With a common impulse the multitude rose slowly

up and stared into the sky.  I followed their eyes, as sure as guns,

there was my eclipse beginning!  The life went boiling through

my veins; I was a new man!  The rim of black spread slowly into

the sun's disk, my heart beat higher and higher, and still the

assemblage and the priest stared into the sky, motionless.  I knew

that this gaze would be turned upon me, next.  When it was, I was

ready.  I was in one of the most grand attitudes I ever struck,

with my arm stretched up pointing to the sun.  It was a noble

effect.  You could _see_ the shudder sweep the mass like a wave.

Two shouts rang out, one close upon the heels of the other:



"Apply the torch!"



"I forbid it!"



The one was from Merlin, the other from the king.  Merlin started

from his place--to apply the torch himself, I judged.  I said:



"Stay where you are.  If any man moves--even the king--before

I give him leave, I will blast him with thunder, I will consume

him with lightnings!"



The multitude sank meekly into their seats, and I was just expecting

they would.  Merlin hesitated a moment or two, and I was on pins

and needles during that little while.  Then he sat down, and I took

a good breath; for I knew I was master of the situation now.

The king said:



"Be merciful, fair sir, and essay no further in this perilous matter,

lest disaster follow.  It was reported to us that your powers could

not attain unto their full strength until the morrow; but--"



"Your Majesty thinks the report may have been a lie?  It _was_ a lie."



That made an immense effect; up went appealing hands everywhere,

and the king was assailed with a storm of supplications that

I might be bought off at any price, and the calamity stayed.

The king was eager to comply. He said:



"Name any terms, reverend sir, even to the halving of my kingdom;

but banish this calamity, spare the sun!"



My fortune was made.  I would have taken him up in a minute, but

I couldn't stop an eclipse; the thing was out of the question.  So

I asked time to consider.  The king said:



"How long--ah, how long, good sir?  Be merciful; look, it groweth

darker, moment by moment.  Prithee how long?"



"Not long.  Half an hour--maybe an hour."



There were a thousand pathetic protests, but I couldn't shorten up

any, for I couldn't remember how long a total eclipse lasts.  I was

in a puzzled condition, anyway, and wanted to think.  Something

was wrong about that eclipse, and the fact was very unsettling.

If this wasn't the one I was after, how was I to tell whether this

was the sixth century, or nothing but a dream?  Dear me, if I could

only prove it was the latter!  Here was a glad new hope.  If the boy

was right about the date, and this was surely the 20th, it _wasn't_

the sixth century.  I reached for the monk's sleeve, in considerable

excitement, and asked him what day of the month it was.



Hang him, he said it was the _twenty-first_!  It made me turn cold

to hear him.  I begged him not to make any mistake about it; but

he was sure; he knew it was the 21st.  So, that feather-headed

boy had botched things again!  The time of the day was right

for the eclipse; I had seen that for myself, in the beginning,

by the dial that was near by.  Yes, I was in King Arthur's court,

and I might as well make the most out of it I could.



The darkness was steadily growing, the people becoming more and

more distressed.  I now said:



"I have reflected, Sir King.  For a lesson, I will let this darkness

proceed, and spread night in the world; but whether I blot out

the sun for good, or restore it, shall rest with you.  These are

the terms, to wit:  You shall remain king over all your dominions,

and receive all the glories and honors that belong to the kingship;

but you shall appoint me your perpetual minister and executive,

and give me for my services one per cent of such actual increase

of revenue over and above its present amount as I may succeed

in creating for the state.  If I can't live on that, I sha'n't ask

anybody to give me a lift.  Is it satisfactory?"



There was a prodigious roar of applause, and out of the midst

of it the king's voice rose, saying:



"Away with his bonds, and set him free! and do him homage, high

and low, rich and poor, for he is become the king's right hand,

is clothed with power and authority, and his seat is upon the highest

step of the throne!  Now sweep away this creeping night, and bring

the light and cheer again, that all the world may bless thee."



But I said:



"That a common man should be shamed before the world, is nothing;

but it were dishonor to the _king_ if any that saw his minister naked

should not also see him delivered from his shame.  If I might ask

that my clothes be brought again--"



"They are not meet," the king broke in.  "Fetch raiment of another

sort; clothe him like a prince!"



My idea worked.  I wanted to keep things as they were till the

eclipse was total, otherwise they would be trying again to get

me to dismiss the darkness, and of course I couldn't do it.  Sending

for the clothes gained some delay, but not enough.  So I had to make

another excuse.  I said it would be but natural if the king should

change his mind and repent to some extent of what he had done

under excitement; therefore I would let the darkness grow a while,

and if at the end of a reasonable time the king had kept his mind

the same, the darkness should be dismissed.  Neither the king nor

anybody else was satisfied with that arrangement, but I had

to stick to my point.



It grew darker and darker and blacker and blacker, while I struggled

with those awkward sixth-century clothes.  It got to be pitch dark,

at last, and the multitude groaned with horror to feel the cold

uncanny night breezes fan through the place and see the stars

come out and twinkle in the sky.  At last the eclipse was total,

and I was very glad of it, but everybody else was in misery; which

was quite natural. I said:



"The king, by his silence, still stands to the terms."  Then

I lifted up my hands--stood just so a moment--then I said, with

the most awful solemnity:  "Let the enchantment dissolve and

pass harmless away!"



There was no response, for a moment, in that deep darkness and

that graveyard hush.  But when the silver rim of the sun pushed

itself out, a moment or two later, the assemblage broke loose with

a vast shout and came pouring down like a deluge to smother me

with blessings and gratitude; and Clarence was not the last of

the wash, to be sure.







CHAPTER VII



MERLIN'S TOWER



Inasmuch as I was now the second personage in the Kingdom, as far

as political power and authority were concerned, much was made

of me.  My raiment was of silks and velvets and cloth of gold,

and by consequence was very showy, also uncomfortable.  But habit

would soon reconcile me to my clothes; I was aware of that.  I was

given the choicest suite of apartments in the castle, after

the king's.  They were aglow with loud-colored silken hangings,

but the stone floors had nothing but rushes on them for a carpet,

and they were misfit rushes at that, being not all of one breed.

As for conveniences, properly speaking, there weren't any.  I mean

_little_ conveniences; it is the little conveniences that make

the real comfort of life.  The big oaken chairs, graced with rude

carvings, were well enough, but that was the stopping place.

There was no soap, no matches, no looking-glass--except a metal

one, about as powerful as a pail of water.  And not a chromo.

I had been used to chromos for years, and I saw now that without

my suspecting it a passion for art had got worked into the fabric

of my being, and was become a part of me.  It made me homesick

to look around over this proud and gaudy but heartless barrenness

and remember that in our house in East Hartford, all unpretending

as it was, you couldn't go into a room but you would find an

insurance-chromo, or at least a three-color God-Bless-Our-Home

over the door; and in the parlor we had nine.  But here, even in

my grand room of state, there wasn't anything in the nature of

a picture except a thing the size of a bedquilt, which was either

woven or knitted (it had darned places in it), and nothing in it

was the right color or the right shape; and as for proportions,

even Raphael himself couldn't have botched them more formidably,

after all his practice on those nightmares they call his "celebrated

Hampton Court cartoons."  Raphael was a bird.  We had several

of his chromos; one was his "Miraculous Draught of Fishes," where

he puts in a miracle of his own--puts three men into a canoe which

wouldn't have held a dog without upsetting.  I always admired

to study R.'s art, it was so fresh and unconventional.



There wasn't even a bell or a speaking-tube in the castle.  I had

a great many servants, and those that were on duty lolled in the

anteroom; and when I wanted one of them I had to go and call for him.

There was no gas, there were no candles; a bronze dish half full

of boarding-house butter with a blazing rag floating in it was

the thing that produced what was regarded as light.  A lot of

these hung along the walls and modified the dark, just toned it

down enough to make it dismal.  If you went out at night, your

servants carried torches.  There were no books, pens, paper or

ink, and no glass in the openings they believed to be windows.

It is a little thing--glass is--until it is absent, then it becomes

a big thing.  But perhaps the worst of all was, that there wasn't

any sugar, coffee, tea, or tobacco.  I saw that I was just another

Robinson Crusoe cast away on an uninhabited island, with no society

but some more or less tame animals, and if I wanted to make life

bearable I must do as he did--invent, contrive, create, reorganize

things; set brain and hand to work, and keep them busy.  Well,

that was in my line.



One thing troubled me along at first--the immense interest which

people took in me.  Apparently the whole nation wanted a look

at me.  It soon transpired that the eclipse had scared the British

world almost to death; that while it lasted the whole country,

from one end to the other, was in a pitiable state of panic, and

the churches, hermitages, and monkeries overflowed with praying

and weeping poor creatures who thought the end of the world was

come.  Then had followed the news that the producer of this awful

event was a stranger, a mighty magician at Arthur's court; that he

could have blown out the sun like a candle, and was just going

to do it when his mercy was purchased, and he then dissolved

his enchantments, and was now recognized and honored as the man

who had by his unaided might saved the globe from destruction and

its peoples from extinction.  Now if you consider that everybody

believed that, and not only believed it, but never even dreamed

of doubting it, you will easily understand that there was not

a person in all Britain that would not have walked fifty miles

to get a sight of me.  Of course I was all the talk--all other

subjects were dropped; even the king became suddenly a person of

minor interest and notoriety.  Within twenty-four hours the

delegations began to arrive, and from that time onward for a fortnight

they kept coming.  The village was crowded, and all the countryside.

I had to go out a dozen times a day and show myself to these

reverent and awe-stricken multitudes.  It came to be a great burden,

as to time and trouble, but of course it was at the same time

compensatingly agreeable to be so celebrated and such a center

of homage.  It turned Brer Merlin green with envy and spite, which

was a great satisfaction to me.  But there was one thing I couldn't

understand--nobody had asked for an autograph.  I spoke to Clarence

about it.  By George!  I had to explain to him what it was.  Then

he said nobody in the country could read or write but a few dozen

priests.  Land! think of that.



There was another thing that troubled me a little.  Those multitudes

presently began to agitate for another miracle.  That was natural.

To be able to carry back to their far homes the boast that they

had seen the man who could command the sun, riding in the heavens,

and be obeyed, would make them great in the eyes of their neighbors,

and envied by them all; but to be able to also say they had seen

him work a miracle themselves--why, people would come a distance

to see _them_.  The pressure got to be pretty strong.  There was

going to be an eclipse of the moon, and I knew the date and hour,

but it was too far away.  Two years.  I would have given a good

deal for license to hurry it up and use it now when there was

a big market for it.  It seemed a great pity to have it wasted so,

and come lagging along at a time when a body wouldn't have any

use for it, as like as not.  If it had been booked for only a month

away, I could have sold it short; but, as matters stood, I couldn't

seem to cipher out any way to make it do me any good, so I gave up

trying.  Next, Clarence found that old Merlin was making himself

busy on the sly among those people.  He was spreading a report that

I was a humbug, and that the reason I didn't accommodate the people

with a miracle was because I couldn't.  I saw that I must do

something.  I presently thought out a plan.



By my authority as executive I threw Merlin into prison--the same

cell I had occupied myself.  Then I gave public notice by herald

and trumpet that I should be busy with affairs of state for

a fortnight, but about the end of that time I would take a moment's

leisure and blow up Merlin's stone tower by fires from heaven;

in the meantime, whoso listened to evil reports about me, let him

beware.  Furthermore, I would perform but this one miracle at

this time, and no more; if it failed to satisfy and any murmured,

I would turn the murmurers into horses, and make them useful.

Quiet ensued.



I took Clarence into my confidence, to a certain degree, and we

went to work privately.  I told him that this was a sort of miracle

that required a trifle of preparation, and that it would be sudden

death to ever talk about these preparations to anybody.  That made

his mouth safe enough.  Clandestinely we made a few bushels of

first-rate blasting powder, and I superintended my armorers while

they constructed a lightning-rod and some wires.  This old stone

tower was very massive--and rather ruinous, too, for it was Roman,

and four hundred years old.  Yes, and handsome, after a rude

fashion, and clothed with ivy from base to summit, as with a shirt

of scale mail.  It stood on a lonely eminence, in good view from

the castle, and about half a mile away.



Working by night, we stowed the powder in the tower--dug stones

out, on the inside, and buried the powder in the walls themselves,

which were fifteen feet thick at the base.  We put in a peck

at a time, in a dozen places.  We could have blown up the Tower

of London with these charges.  When the thirteenth night was come

we put up our lightning-rod, bedded it in one of the batches of

powder, and ran wires from it to the other batches.  Everybody

had shunned that locality from the day of my proclamation, but

on the morning of the fourteenth I thought best to warn the people,

through the heralds, to keep clear away--a quarter of a mile away.

Then added, by command, that at some time during the twenty-four

hours I would consummate the miracle, but would first give a brief

notice; by flags on the castle towers if in the daytime, by

torch-baskets in the same places if at night.



Thunder-showers had been tolerably frequent of late, and I was

not much afraid of a failure; still, I shouldn't have cared for

a delay of a day or two; I should have explained that I was busy

with affairs of state yet, and the people must wait.



Of course, we had a blazing sunny day--almost the first one without

a cloud for three weeks; things always happen so.  I kept secluded,

and watched the weather.  Clarence dropped in from time to time

and said the public excitement was growing and growing all the

time, and the whole country filling up with human masses as far

as one could see from the battlements.  At last the wind sprang up

and a cloud appeared--in the right quarter, too, and just at

nightfall.  For a little while I watched that distant cloud spread

and blacken, then I judged it was time for me to appear.  I ordered

the torch-baskets to be lit, and Merlin liberated and sent to me.

A quarter of an hour later I ascended the parapet and there found

the king and the court assembled and gazing off in the darkness

toward Merlin's Tower.  Already the darkness was so heavy that

one could not see far; these people and the old turrets, being

partly in deep shadow and partly in the red glow from the great

torch-baskets overhead, made a good deal of a picture.



Merlin arrived in a gloomy mood.  I said:



"You wanted to burn me alive when I had not done you any harm,

and latterly you have been trying to injure my professional

reputation.  Therefore I am going to call down fire and blow up

your tower, but it is only fair to give you a chance; now if you

think you can break my enchantments and ward off the fires, step

to the bat, it's your innings."



"I can, fair sir, and I will. Doubt it not."



He drew an imaginary circle on the stones of the roof, and burnt

a pinch of powder in it, which sent up a small cloud of aromatic

smoke, whereat everybody fell back and began to cross themselves

and get uncomfortable.  Then he began to mutter and make passes

in the air with his hands.  He worked himself up slowly and

gradually into a sort of frenzy, and got to thrashing around with

his arms like the sails of a windmill.  By this time the storm had

about reached us; the gusts of wind were flaring the torches and

making the shadows swash about, the first heavy drops of rain

were falling, the world abroad was black as pitch, the lightning

began to wink fitfully.  Of course, my rod would be loading itself

now.  In fact, things were imminent. So I said:



"You have had time enough.  I have given you every advantage,

and not interfered.  It is plain your magic is weak. It is only

fair that I begin now."



I made about three passes in the air, and then there was an awful

crash and that old tower leaped into the sky in chunks, along

with a vast volcanic fountain of fire that turned night to noonday,

and showed a thousand acres of human beings groveling on the ground

in a general collapse of consternation.  Well, it rained mortar and

masonry the rest of the week.  This was the report; but probably

the facts would have modified it.



It was an effective miracle.  The great bothersome temporary

population vanished.  There were a good many thousand tracks

in the mud the next morning, but they were all outward bound.

If I had advertised another miracle I couldn't have raised an

audience with a sheriff.



Merlin's stock was flat.  The king wanted to stop his wages; he

even wanted to banish him, but I interfered.  I said he would be

useful to work the weather, and attend to small matters like that,

and I would give him a lift now and then when his poor little

parlor-magic soured on him.  There wasn't a rag of his tower left,

but I had the government rebuild it for him, and advised him

to take boarders; but he was too high-toned for that.  And as for

being grateful, he never even said thank you.  He was a rather

hard lot, take him how you might; but then you couldn't fairly

expect a man to be sweet that had been set back so.







CHAPTER VIII



THE BOSS



To be vested with enormous authority is a fine thing; but to have

the on-looking world consent to it is a finer.  The tower episode

solidified my power, and made it impregnable.  If any were perchance

disposed to be jealous and critical before that, they experienced

a change of heart, now.  There was not any one in the kingdom

who would have considered it good judgment to meddle with my matters.



I was fast getting adjusted to my situation and circumstances.

For a time, I used to wake up, mornings, and smile at my "dream,"

and listen for the Colt's factory whistle; but that sort of thing

played itself out, gradually, and at last I was fully able to realize

that I was actually living in the sixth century, and in Arthur's

court, not a lunatic asylum.  After that, I was just as much

at home in that century as I could have been in any other; and

as for preference, I wouldn't have traded it for the twentieth.

Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains,

pluck, and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country.

The grandest field that ever was; and all my own; not a competitor;

not a man who wasn't a baby to me in acquirements and capacities;

whereas, what would I amount to in the twentieth century?  I should

be foreman of a factory, that is about all; and could drag a seine

down street any day and catch a hundred better men than myself.



What a jump I had made!  I couldn't keep from thinking about it,

and contemplating it, just as one does who has struck oil.  There

was nothing back of me that could approach it, unless it might be

Joseph's case; and Joseph's only approached it, it didn't equal

it, quite.  For it stands to reason that as Joseph's splendid

financial ingenuities advantaged nobody but the king, the general

public must have regarded him with a good deal of disfavor, whereas

I had done my entire public a kindness in sparing the sun, and was

popular by reason of it.



I was no shadow of a king; I was the substance; the king himself

was the shadow.  My power was colossal; and it was not a mere

name, as such things have generally been, it was the genuine

article.  I stood here, at the very spring and source of the second

great period of the world's history; and could see the trickling

stream of that history gather and deepen and broaden, and roll

its mighty tides down the far centuries; and I could note the

upspringing of adventurers like myself in the shelter of its long

array of thrones:  De Montforts, Gavestons, Mortimers, Villierses;

the war-making, campaign-directing wantons of France, and Charles

the Second's scepter-wielding drabs; but nowhere in the procession

was my full-sized fellow visible.  I was a Unique; and glad to know

that that fact could not be dislodged or challenged for thirteen

centuries and a half, for sure.  Yes, in power I was equal to

the king.  At the same time there was another power that was

a trifle stronger than both of us put together.  That was the Church.

I do not wish to disguise that fact.  I couldn't, if I wanted to.

But never mind about that, now; it will show up, in its proper

place, later on.  It didn't cause me any trouble in the beginning--

at least any of consequence.



Well, it was a curious country, and full of interest.  And the

people!  They were the quaintest and simplest and trustingest race;

why, they were nothing but rabbits.  It was pitiful for a person

born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble

and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church

and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honor

king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor

the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him!

Why, dear me, _any_ kind of royalty, howsoever modified, _any_ kind

of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you

are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably

never find it out for yourself, and don't believe it when somebody

else tells you.  It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race

to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones

without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people

that have always figured as its aristocracies--a company of monarchs

and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and

obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions.



The most of King Arthur's British nation were slaves, pure and

simple, and bore that name, and wore the iron collar on their

necks; and the rest were slaves in fact, but without the name;

they imagined themselves men and freemen, and called themselves

so.  The truth was, the nation as a body was in the world for one

object, and one only:  to grovel before king and Church and noble;

to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might

be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that

they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and

jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them,

be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures

of adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselves

the gods of this world.  And for all this, the thanks they got were

cuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were they that they took

even this sort of attention as an honor.



Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe

and examine.  I had mine, the king and his people had theirs.

In both cases they flowed in ruts worn deep by time and habit,

and the man who should have proposed to divert them by reason

and argument would have had a long contract on his hands.  For

instance, those people had inherited the idea that all men without

title and a long pedigree, whether they had great natural gifts

and acquirements or hadn't, were creatures of no more consideration

than so many animals, bugs, insects; whereas I had inherited the idea

that human daws who can consent to masquerade in the peacock-shams

of inherited dignities and unearned titles, are of no good but

to be laughed at.  The way I was looked upon was odd, but it was

natural.  You know how the keeper and the public regard the elephant

in the menagerie:  well, that is the idea.  They are full of

admiration of his vast bulk and his prodigious strength; they

speak with pride of the fact that he can do a hundred marvels

which are far and away beyond their own powers; and they speak

with the same pride of the fact that in his wrath he is able

to drive a thousand men before him.  But does that make him one

of _them_?  No; the raggedest tramp in the pit would smile at

the idea.  He couldn't comprehend it; couldn't take it in; couldn't

in any remote way conceive of it.  Well, to the king, the nobles,

and all the nation, down to the very slaves and tramps, I was

just that kind of an elephant, and nothing more.  I was admired,

also feared; but it was as an animal is admired and feared.

The animal is not reverenced, neither was I; I was not even

respected.  I had no pedigree, no inherited title; so in the king's

and nobles' eyes I was mere dirt; the people regarded me with

wonder and awe, but there was no reverence mixed with it; through

the force of inherited ideas they were not able to conceive of

anything being entitled to that except pedigree and lordship.

There you see the hand of that awful power, the Roman Catholic

Church.  In two or three little centuries it had converted a nation

of men to a nation of worms.  Before the day of the Church's

supremacy in the world, men were men, and held their heads up,

and had a man's pride and spirit and independence; and what

of greatness and position a person got, he got mainly by achievement,

not by birth.  But then the Church came to the front, with an axe

to grind; and she was wise, subtle, and knew more than one way

to skin a cat--or a nation; she invented "divine right of kings,"

and propped it all around, brick by brick, with the Beatitudes--

wrenching them from their good purpose to make them fortify

an evil one; she preached (to the commoner) humility, obedience

to superiors, the beauty of self-sacrifice; she preached (to the

commoner) meekness under insult; preached (still to the commoner,

always to the commoner) patience, meanness of spirit, non-resistance

under oppression; and she introduced heritable ranks and

aristocracies, and taught all the Christian populations of the earth

to bow down to them and worship them.  Even down to my birth-century

that poison was still in the blood of Christendom, and the best

of English commoners was still content to see his inferiors

impudently continuing to hold a number of positions, such as

lordships and the throne, to which the grotesque laws of his country

did not allow him to aspire; in fact, he was not merely contented

with this strange condition of things, he was even able to persuade

himself that he was proud of it.  It seems to show that there isn't

anything you can't stand, if you are only born and bred to it.

Of course that taint, that reverence for rank and title, had been

in our American blood, too--I know that; but when I left America

it had disappeared--at least to all intents and purposes.  The

remnant of it was restricted to the dudes and dudesses.  When

a disease has worked its way down to that level, it may fairly

be said to be out of the system.



But to return to my anomalous position in King Arthur's kingdom.

Here I was, a giant among pigmies, a man among children, a master

intelligence among intellectual moles:  by all rational measurement

the one and only actually great man in that whole British world;

and yet there and then, just as in the remote England of my

birth-time, the sheep-witted earl who could claim long descent

from a king's leman, acquired at second-hand from the slums of

London, was a better man than I was.  Such a personage was fawned

upon in Arthur's realm and reverently looked up to by everybody,

even though his dispositions were as mean as his intelligence,

and his morals as base as his lineage.  There were times when

_he_ could sit down in the king's presence, but I couldn't.  I could

have got a title easily enough, and that would have raised me

a large step in everybody's eyes; even in the king's, the giver

of it.  But I didn't ask for it; and I declined it when it was

offered.  I couldn't have enjoyed such a thing with my notions;

and it wouldn't have been fair, anyway, because as far back as

I could go, our tribe had always been short of the bar sinister.

I couldn't have felt really and satisfactorily fine and proud

and set-up over any title except one that should come from the nation

itself, the only legitimate source; and such an one I hoped to win;

and in the course of years of honest and honorable endeavor, I did

win it and did wear it with a high and clean pride.  This title

fell casually from the lips of a blacksmith, one day, in a village,

was caught up as a happy thought and tossed from mouth to mouth

with a laugh and an affirmative vote; in ten days it had swept

the kingdom, and was become as familiar as the king's name.  I was

never known by any other designation afterward, whether in the

nation's talk or in grave debate upon matters of state at the

council-board of the sovereign.  This title, translated into modern

speech, would be THE BOSS.  Elected by the nation.  That suited me.

And it was a pretty high title.  There were very few THE'S, and

I was one of them.  If you spoke of the duke, or the earl, or

the bishop, how could anybody tell which one you meant?  But if

you spoke of The King or The Queen or The Boss, it was different.



Well, I liked the king, and as king I respected him--respected

the office; at least respected it as much as I was capable of

respecting any unearned supremacy; but as MEN I looked down upon

him and his nobles--privately.  And he and they liked me, and

respected my office; but as an animal, without birth or sham title,

they looked down upon me--and were not particularly private about it,

either.  I didn't charge for my opinion about them, and they didn't

charge for their opinion about me:  the account was square, the

books balanced, everybody was satisfied.







CHAPTER IX



THE TOURNAMENT



They were always having grand tournaments there at Camelot; and

very stirring and picturesque and ridiculous human bull-fights

they were, too, but just a little wearisome to the practical mind.

However, I was generally on hand--for two reasons:  a man must

not hold himself aloof from the things which his friends and his

community have at heart if he would be liked--especially as

a statesman; and both as business man and statesman I wanted

to study the tournament and see if I couldn't invent an improvement

on it.  That reminds me to remark, in passing, that the very first

official thing I did, in my administration--and it was on the very

first day of it, too--was to start a patent office; for I knew

that a country without a patent office and good patent laws was

just a crab, and couldn't travel any way but sideways or backways.



Things ran along, a tournament nearly every week; and now and then

the boys used to want me to take a hand--I mean Sir Launcelot and

the rest--but I said I would by and by; no hurry yet, and too much

government machinery to oil up and set to rights and start a-going.



We had one tournament which was continued from day to day during

more than a week, and as many as five hundred knights took part

in it, from first to last.  They were weeks gathering.  They came

on horseback from everywhere; from the very ends of the country,

and even from beyond the sea; and many brought ladies, and all

brought squires and troops of servants.  It was a most gaudy and

gorgeous crowd, as to costumery, and very characteristic of the

country and the time, in the way of high animal spirits, innocent

indecencies of language, and happy-hearted indifference to morals.

It was fight or look on, all day and every day; and sing, gamble,

dance, carouse half the night every night.  They had a most noble

good time.  You never saw such people.  Those banks of beautiful

ladies, shining in their barbaric splendors, would see a knight

sprawl from his horse in the lists with a lanceshaft the thickness

of your ankle clean through him and the blood spouting, and instead

of fainting they would clap their hands and crowd each other for a

better view; only sometimes one would dive into her handkerchief,

and look ostentatiously broken-hearted, and then you could lay

two to one that there was a scandal there somewhere and she was

afraid the public hadn't found it out.



The noise at night would have been annoying to me ordinarily, but

I didn't mind it in the present circumstances, because it kept me

from hearing the quacks detaching legs and arms from the day's

cripples.  They ruined an uncommon good old cross-cut saw for me,

and broke the saw-buck, too, but I let it pass.  And as for my

axe--well, I made up my mind that the next time I lent an axe

to a surgeon I would pick my century.



I not only watched this tournament from day to day, but detailed

an intelligent priest from my Department of Public Morals and

Agriculture, and ordered him to report it; for it was my purpose

by and by, when I should have gotten the people along far enough,

to start a newspaper.  The first thing you want in a new country,

is a patent office; then work up your school system; and after that,

out with your paper.  A newspaper has its faults, and plenty of them,

but no matter, it's hark from the tomb for a dead nation, and don't

you forget it.  You can't resurrect a dead nation without it; there

isn't any way.  So I wanted to sample things, and be finding out

what sort of reporter-material I might be able to rake together out

of the sixth century when I should come to need it.



Well, the priest did very well, considering.  He got in all

the details, and that is a good thing in a local item:  you see,

he had kept books for the undertaker-department of his church

when he was younger, and there, you know, the money's in the details;

the more details, the more swag:  bearers, mutes, candles, prayers--

everything counts; and if the bereaved don't buy prayers enough

you mark up your candles with a forked pencil, and your bill

shows up all right.  And he had a good knack at getting in the

complimentary thing here and there about a knight that was likely

to advertise--no, I mean a knight that had influence; and he also

had a neat gift of exaggeration, for in his time he had kept door

for a pious hermit who lived in a sty and worked miracles.



Of course this novice's report lacked whoop and crash and lurid

description, and therefore wanted the true ring; but its antique

wording was quaint and sweet and simple, and full of the fragrances

and flavors of the time, and these little merits made up in a measure

for its more important lacks.  Here is an extract from it:



  Then Sir Brian de les Isles and Grummore Grummorsum,

  knights of the castle, encountered with Sir Aglovale and

  Sir Tor, and Sir Tor smote down Sir Grummore Grummorsum

  to the earth.  Then came Sir Carados of the dolorous

  tower, and Sir Turquine, knights of the castle, and

  there encountered with them Sir Percivale de Galis

  and Sir Lamorak de Galis, that were two brethren, and

  there encountered Sir Percivale with Sir Carados, and

  either brake their spears unto their hands, and then

  Sir Turquine with Sir Lamorak, and either of them smote

  down other, horse and all, to the earth, and either

  parties rescued other and horsed them again.  And Sir

  Arnold, and Sir Gauter, knights of the castle,

  encountered with Sir Brandiles and Sir Kay, and these

  four knights encountered mightily, and brake their

  spears to their hands.  Then came Sir Pertolope from

  the castle, and there encountered with him Sir Lionel,

  and there Sir Pertolope the green knight smote down Sir

  Lionel, brother to Sir Launcelot.  All this was marked

  by noble heralds, who bare him best, and their names.

  Then Sir Bleobaris brake his spear upon Sir Gareth,

  but of that stroke Sir Bleobaris fell to the earth.

  When Sir Galihodin saw that, he bad Sir Gareth keep him,

  and Sir Gareth smote him to the earth.  Then Sir Galihud

  gat a spear to avenge his brother, and in the same wise

  Sir Gareth served him, and Sir Dinadan and his brother

  La Cote Male Taile, and Sir Sagramore le Disirous, and

  Sir Dodinas le Savage; all these he bare down with one

  spear.  When King Aswisance of Ireland saw Sir Gareth

  fare so he marvelled what he might be, that one time

  seemed green, and another time, at his again coming,

  he seemed blue.  And thus at every course that he rode

  to and fro he changed his color, so that there might

  neither king nor knight have ready cognizance of him.

  Then Sir Agwisance the King of Ireland encountered

  with Sir Gareth, and there Sir Gareth smote him from

  his horse, saddle and all.  And then came King Carados

  of Scotland, and Sir Gareth smote him down horse and

  man.  And in the same wise he served King Uriens of the

  land of Gore.  And then there came in Six Bagdemagus,

  and Sir Gareth smote him down horse and man to the

  earth.  And Bagdemagus's son Meliganus brake a spear

  upon Sir Gareth mightily and knightly.  And then Sir

  Galahault the noble prince cried on high, Knight with

  the many colors, well hast thou justed; now make thee

  ready that I may just with thee.  Sir Gareth heard him,

  and he gat a great spear, and so they encountered

  together, and there the prince brake his spear; but Sir

  Gareth smote him upon the left side of the helm, that

  he reeled here and there, and he had fallen down had not

  his men recovered him.  Truly, said King Arthur, that

  knight with the many colors is a good knight.  Wherefore

  the king called unto him Sir Launcelot, and prayed him

  to encounter with that knight.  Sir, said Launcelot, I

  may as well find in my heart for to forbear him at

  this time, for he hath had travail enough this day, and

  when a good knight doth so well upon some day, it is

  no good knight's part to let him of his worship, and,

  namely, when he seeth a knight hath done so great

  labour; for peradventure, said Sir Launcelot, his

  quarrel is here this day, and peradventure he is best

  beloved with this lady of all that be here, for I see

  well he paineth himself and enforceth him to do great

  deeds, and therefore, said Sir Launcelot, as for me,

  this day he shall have the honour; though it lay in my

  power to put him from it, I would not.



There was an unpleasant little episode that day, which for reasons

of state I struck out of my priest's report.  You will have noticed

that Garry was doing some great fighting in the engagement.  When

I say Garry I mean Sir Gareth.  Garry was my private pet name

for him; it suggests that I had a deep affection for him, and that

was the case.  But it was a private pet name only, and never spoken

aloud to any one, much less to him; being a noble, he would not

have endured a familiarity like that from me.  Well, to proceed:

I sat in the private box set apart for me as the king's minister.

While Sir Dinadan was waiting for his turn to enter the lists,

he came in there and sat down and began to talk; for he was always

making up to me, because I was a stranger and he liked to have

a fresh market for his jokes, the most of them having reached that

stage of wear where the teller has to do the laughing himself while

the other person looks sick.  I had always responded to his efforts

as well as I could, and felt a very deep and real kindness for him,

too, for the reason that if by malice of fate he knew the one

particular anecdote which I had heard oftenest and had most hated

and most loathed all my life, he had at least spared it me.  It was

one which I had heard attributed to every humorous person who

had ever stood on American soil, from Columbus down to Artemus Ward.

It was about a humorous lecturer who flooded an ignorant audience

with the killingest jokes for an hour and never got a laugh; and

then when he was leaving, some gray simpletons wrung him gratefully

by the hand and said it had been the funniest thing they had ever

heard, and "it was all they could do to keep from laughin' right

out in meetin'."  That anecdote never saw the day that it was

worth the telling; and yet I had sat under the telling of it

hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of times, and

cried and cursed all the way through.  Then who can hope to know

what my feelings were, to hear this armor-plated ass start in on

it again, in the murky twilight of tradition, before the dawn of

history, while even Lactantius might be referred to as "the late

Lactantius," and the Crusades wouldn't be born for five hundred

years yet?  Just as he finished, the call-boy came; so, haw-hawing

like a demon, he went rattling and clanking out like a crate of

loose castings, and I knew nothing more.  It was some minutes

before I came to, and then I opened my eyes just in time to see

Sir Gareth fetch him an awful welt, and I unconsciously out with

the prayer, "I hope to gracious he's killed!"  But by ill-luck,

before I had got half through with the words, Sir Gareth crashed

into Sir Sagramor le Desirous and sent him thundering over his

horse's crupper, and Sir Sagramor caught my remark and thought

I meant it for _him_.



Well, whenever one of those people got a thing into his head,

there was no getting it out again.  I knew that, so I saved my

breath, and offered no explanations.  As soon as Sir Sagramor

got well, he notified me that there was a little account to settle

between us, and he named a day three or four years in the future;

place of settlement, the lists where the offense had been given.

I said I would be ready when he got back.  You see, he was going

for the Holy Grail.  The boys all took a flier at the Holy Grail

now and then.  It was a several years' cruise.  They always put in

the long absence snooping around, in the most conscientious way,

though none of them had any idea where the Holy Grail really was,

and I don't think any of them actually expected to find it, or

would have known what to do with it if he _had_ run across it.

You see, it was just the Northwest Passage of that day, as you may

say; that was all.  Every year expeditions went out holy grailing,

and next year relief expeditions went out to hunt for _them_.  There

was worlds of reputation in it, but no money.  Why, they actually

wanted _me_ to put in!  Well, I should smile.







CHAPTER X



BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION



The Round Table soon heard of the challenge, and of course it was

a good deal discussed, for such things interested the boys.

The king thought I ought now to set forth in quest of adventures,

so that I might gain renown and be the more worthy to meet

Sir Sagramor when the several years should have rolled away.

I excused myself for the present; I said it would take me three

or four years yet to get things well fixed up and going smoothly;

then I should be ready; all the chances were that at the end of

that time Sir Sagramor would still be out grailing, so no valuable

time would be lost by the postponement; I should then have been

in office six or seven years, and I believed my system and machinery

would be so well developed that I could take a holiday without

its working any harm.



I was pretty well satisfied with what I had already accomplished.

In various quiet nooks and corners I had the beginnings of all

sorts of industries under way--nuclei of future vast factories,

the iron and steel missionaries of my future civilization.  In these

were gathered together the brightest young minds I could find,

and I kept agents out raking the country for more, all the time.

I was training a crowd of ignorant folk into experts--experts

in every sort of handiwork and scientific calling.  These nurseries

of mine went smoothly and privately along undisturbed in their

obscure country retreats, for nobody was allowed to come into their

precincts without a special permit--for I was afraid of the Church.



I had started a teacher-factory and a lot of Sunday-schools the

first thing; as a result, I now had an admirable system of graded

schools in full blast in those places, and also a complete variety

of Protestant congregations all in a prosperous and growing

condition.  Everybody could be any kind of a Christian he wanted

to; there was perfect freedom in that matter.  But I confined public

religious teaching to the churches and the Sunday-schools, permitting

nothing of it in my other educational buildings.  I could have

given my own sect the preference and made everybody a Presbyterian

without any trouble, but that would have been to affront a law

of human nature:  spiritual wants and instincts are as various in

the human family as are physical appetites, complexions, and

features, and a man is only at his best, morally, when he is

equipped with the religious garment whose color and shape and

size most nicely accommodate themselves to the spiritual complexion,

angularities, and stature of the individual who wears it; and,

besides, I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a mighty power,

the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into

selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to

human liberty and paralysis to human thought.



All mines were royal property, and there were a good many of them.

They had formerly been worked as savages always work mines--holes

grubbed in the earth and the mineral brought up in sacks of hide by

hand, at the rate of a ton a day; but I had begun to put the mining

on a scientific basis as early as I could.



Yes, I had made pretty handsome progress when Sir Sagramor's

challenge struck me.



Four years rolled by--and then!  Well, you would never imagine

it in the world.  Unlimited power is the ideal thing when it is in

safe hands.  The despotism of heaven is the one absolutely perfect

government.  An earthly despotism would be the absolutely perfect

earthly government, if the conditions were the same, namely, the

despot the perfectest individual of the human race, and his lease

of life perpetual.  But as a perishable perfect man must die, and

leave his despotism in the hands of an imperfect successor, an

earthly despotism is not merely a bad form of government, it is

the worst form that is possible.



My works showed what a despot could do with the resources of

a kingdom at his command.  Unsuspected by this dark land, I had

the civilization of the nineteenth century booming under its very

nose!  It was fenced away from the public view, but there it was,

a gigantic and unassailable fact--and to be heard from, yet, if

I lived and had luck.  There it was, as sure a fact and as substantial

a fact as any serene volcano, standing innocent with its smokeless

summit in the blue sky and giving no sign of the rising hell in its

bowels.  My schools and churches were children four years before;

they were grown-up now; my shops of that day were vast factories

now; where I had a dozen trained men then, I had a thousand now;

where I had one brilliant expert then, I had fifty now.  I stood

with my hand on the cock, so to speak, ready to turn it on and

flood the midnight world with light at any moment.  But I was not

going to do the thing in that sudden way.  It was not my policy.

The people could not have stood it; and, moreover, I should have

had the Established Roman Catholic Church on my back in a minute.



No, I had been going cautiously all the while.  I had had confidential

agents trickling through the country some time, whose office was

to undermine knighthood by imperceptible degrees, and to gnaw

a little at this and that and the other superstition, and so prepare

the way gradually for a better order of things.  I was turning on

my light one-candle-power at a time, and meant to continue to do so.



I had scattered some branch schools secretly about the kingdom,

and they were doing very well.  I meant to work this racket more

and more, as time wore on, if nothing occurred to frighten me.

One of my deepest secrets was my West Point--my military academy.

I kept that most jealously out of sight; and I did the same with my

naval academy which I had established at a remote seaport.  Both

were prospering to my satisfaction.



Clarence was twenty-two now, and was my head executive, my right

hand.  He was a darling; he was equal to anything; there wasn't

anything he couldn't turn his hand to.  Of late I had been training

him for journalism, for the time seemed about right for a start

in the newspaper line; nothing big, but just a small weekly for

experimental circulation in my civilization-nurseries.  He took

to it like a duck; there was an editor concealed in him, sure.

Already he had doubled himself in one way; he talked sixth century

and wrote nineteenth.  His journalistic style was climbing,

steadily; it was already up to the back settlement Alabama mark,

and couldn't be told from the editorial output of that region

either by matter or flavor.



We had another large departure on hand, too.  This was a telegraph

and a telephone; our first venture in this line.  These wires were

for private service only, as yet, and must be kept private until

a riper day should come.  We had a gang of men on the road, working

mainly by night.  They were stringing ground wires; we were afraid

to put up poles, for they would attract too much inquiry.  Ground

wires were good enough, in both instances, for my wires were

protected by an insulation of my own invention which was perfect.

My men had orders to strike across country, avoiding roads, and

establishing connection with any considerable towns whose lights

betrayed their presence, and leaving experts in charge. Nobody

could tell you how to find any place in the kingdom, for nobody

ever went intentionally to any place, but only struck it by

accident in his wanderings, and then generally left it without

thinking to inquire what its name was.  At one time and another

we had sent out topographical expeditions to survey and map the

kingdom, but the priests had always interfered and raised trouble.

So we had given the thing up, for the present; it would be poor

wisdom to antagonize the Church.



As for the general condition of the country, it was as it had been

when I arrived in it, to all intents and purposes.  I had made

changes, but they were necessarily slight, and they were not

noticeable.  Thus far, I had not even meddled with taxation,

outside of the taxes which provided the royal revenues.  I had

systematized those, and put the service on an effective and

righteous basis.  As a result, these revenues were already quadrupled,

and yet the burden was so much more equably distributed than

before, that all the kingdom felt a sense of relief, and the praises

of my administration were hearty and general.



Personally, I struck an interruption, now, but I did not mind it,

it could not have happened at a better time.  Earlier it could

have annoyed me, but now everything was in good hands and swimming

right along.  The king had reminded me several times, of late, that

the postponement I had asked for, four years before, had about

run out now.  It was a hint that I ought to be starting out to seek

adventures and get up a reputation of a size to make me worthy

of the honor of breaking a lance with Sir Sagramor, who was still

out grailing, but was being hunted for by various relief expeditions,

and might be found any year, now.  So you see I was expecting

this interruption; it did not take me by surprise.







CHAPTER XI



THE YANKEE IN SEARCH OF ADVENTURES



There never was such a country for wandering liars; and they were

of both sexes.  Hardly a month went by without one of these tramps

arriving; and generally loaded with a tale about some princess or

other wanting help to get her out of some far-away castle where

she was held in captivity by a lawless scoundrel, usually a giant.

Now you would think that the first thing the king would do after

listening to such a novelette from an entire stranger, would be

to ask for credentials--yes, and a pointer or two as to locality

of castle, best route to it, and so on.  But nobody ever thought

of so simple and common-sense a thing at that.  No, everybody

swallowed these people's lies whole, and never asked a question

of any sort or about anything.  Well, one day when I was not

around, one of these people came along--it was a she one, this

time--and told a tale of the usual pattern.  Her mistress was

a captive in a vast and gloomy castle, along with forty-four other

young and beautiful girls, pretty much all of them princesses;

they had been languishing in that cruel captivity for twenty-six

years; the masters of the castle were three stupendous brothers,

each with four arms and one eye--the eye in the center of the

forehead, and as big as a fruit.  Sort of fruit not mentioned;

their usual slovenliness in statistics.



Would you believe it?  The king and the whole Round Table were

in raptures over this preposterous opportunity for adventure.

Every knight of the Table jumped for the chance, and begged for it;

but to their vexation and chagrin the king conferred it upon me,

who had not asked for it at all.



By an effort, I contained my joy when Clarence brought me the news.

But he--he could not contain his.  His mouth gushed delight and

gratitude in a steady discharge--delight in my good fortune,

gratitude to the king for this splendid mark of his favor for me.

He could keep neither his legs nor his body still, but pirouetted

about the place in an airy ecstasy of happiness.



On my side, I could have cursed the kindness that conferred upon

me this benefaction, but I kept my vexation under the surface

for policy's sake, and did what I could to let on to be glad.

Indeed, I _said_ I was glad.  And in a way it was true; I was as

glad as a person is when he is scalped.



Well, one must make the best of things, and not waste time with

useless fretting, but get down to business and see what can be

done.  In all lies there is wheat among the chaff; I must get at

the wheat in this case:  so I sent for the girl and she came.  She

was a comely enough creature, and soft and modest, but, if signs

went for anything, she didn't know as much as a lady's watch.  I said:



"My dear, have you been questioned as to particulars?"



She said she hadn't.



"Well, I didn't expect you had, but I thought I would ask, to make

sure; it's the way I've been raised.  Now you mustn't take it

unkindly if I remind you that as we don't know you, we must go

a little slow.  You may be all right, of course, and we'll hope

that you are; but to take it for granted isn't business.  _You_

understand that.  I'm obliged to ask you a few questions; just

answer up fair and square, and don't be afraid.  Where do you

live, when you are at home?"



"In the land of Moder, fair sir."



"Land of Moder.  I don't remember hearing of it before.

Parents living?"



"As to that, I know not if they be yet on live, sith it is many

years that I have lain shut up in the castle."



"Your name, please?"



"I hight the Demoiselle Alisande la Carteloise, an it please you."



"Do you know anybody here who can identify you?"



"That were not likely, fair lord, I being come hither now for

the first time."



"Have you brought any letters--any documents--any proofs that

you are trustworthy and truthful?"



"Of a surety, no; and wherefore should I?  Have I not a tongue,

and cannot I say all that myself?"



"But _your_ saying it, you know, and somebody else's saying it,

is different."



"Different?  How might that be?  I fear me I do not understand."



"Don't _understand_?  Land of--why, you see--you see--why, great Scott,

can't you understand a little thing like that?  Can't you understand

the difference between your--_why_ do you look so innocent and idiotic!"



"I?  In truth I know not, but an it were the will of God."



"Yes, yes, I reckon that's about the size of it.  Don't mind my

seeming excited; I'm not.  Let us change the subject.  Now as

to this castle, with forty-five princesses in it, and three ogres

at the head of it, tell me--where is this harem?"



"Harem?"



"The _castle_, you understand; where is the castle?"



"Oh, as to that, it is great, and strong, and well beseen, and

lieth in a far country.  Yes, it is many leagues."



"_How_ many?"



"Ah, fair sir, it were woundily hard to tell, they are so many,

and do so lap the one upon the other, and being made all in the

same image and tincted with the same color, one may not know

the one league from its fellow, nor how to count them except

they be taken apart, and ye wit well it were God's work to do

that, being not within man's capacity; for ye will note--"



"Hold on, hold on, never mind about the distance; _whereabouts_

does the castle lie?  What's the direction from here?"



"Ah, please you sir, it hath no direction from here; by reason

that the road lieth not straight, but turneth evermore; wherefore

the direction of its place abideth not, but is some time under

the one sky and anon under another, whereso if ye be minded that

it is in the east, and wend thitherward, ye shall observe that

the way of the road doth yet again turn upon itself by the space

of half a circle, and this marvel happing again and yet again and

still again, it will grieve you that you had thought by vanities

of the mind to thwart and bring to naught the will of Him that

giveth not a castle a direction from a place except it pleaseth

Him, and if it please Him not, will the rather that even all castles

and all directions thereunto vanish out of the earth, leaving the

places wherein they tarried desolate and vacant, so warning His

creatures that where He will He will, and where He will not He--"



"Oh, that's all right, that's all right, give us a rest; never mind

about the direction, _hang_ the direction--I beg pardon, I beg

a thousand pardons, I am not well to-day; pay no attention when

I soliloquize, it is an old habit, an old, bad habit, and hard

to get rid of when one's digestion is all disordered with eating

food that was raised forever and ever before he was born; good

land! a man can't keep his functions regular on spring chickens

thirteen hundred years old.  But come--never mind about that;

let's--have you got such a thing as a map of that region about

you?  Now a good map--"



"Is it peradventure that manner of thing which of late the unbelievers

have brought from over the great seas, which, being boiled in oil,

and an onion and salt added thereto, doth--"



"What, a map?  What are you talking about?  Don't you know what

a map is?  There, there, never mind, don't explain, I hate

explanations; they fog a thing up so that you can't tell anything

about it.  Run along, dear; good-day; show her the way, Clarence."



Oh, well, it was reasonably plain, now, why these donkeys didn't

prospect these liars for details.  It may be that this girl had

a fact in her somewhere, but I don't believe you could have sluiced

it out with a hydraulic; nor got it with the earlier forms of

blasting, even; it was a case for dynamite.  Why, she was a perfect

ass; and yet the king and his knights had listened to her as if

she had been a leaf out of the gospel.  It kind of sizes up the

whole party.  And think of the simple ways of this court:  this

wandering wench hadn't any more trouble to get access to the king

in his palace than she would have had to get into the poorhouse

in my day and country.  In fact, he was glad to see her, glad

to hear her tale; with that adventure of hers to offer, she was

as welcome as a corpse is to a coroner.



Just as I was ending-up these reflections, Clarence came back.

I remarked upon the barren result of my efforts with the girl;

hadn't got hold of a single point that could help me to find

the castle.  The youth looked a little surprised, or puzzled,

or something, and intimated that he had been wondering to himself

what I had wanted to ask the girl all those questions for.



"Why, great guns," I said, "don't I want to find the castle?  And

how else would I go about it?"



"La, sweet your worship, one may lightly answer that, I ween.

She will go with thee.  They always do.  She will ride with thee."



"Ride with me?  Nonsense!"



"But of a truth she will.  She will ride with thee.  Thou shalt see."



"What?  She browse around the hills and scour the woods with me--

alone--and I as good as engaged to be married?  Why, it's scandalous.

Think how it would look."



My, the dear face that rose before me!  The boy was eager to know

all about this tender matter.  I swore him to secrecy and then

whispered her name--"Puss Flanagan."  He looked disappointed,

and said he didn't remember the countess.  How natural it was for

the little courtier to give her a rank.  He asked me where she lived.



"In East Har--" I came to myself and stopped, a little confused;

then I said, "Never mind, now; I'll tell you some time."



And might he see her?  Would I let him see her some day?



It was but a little thing to promise--thirteen hundred years

or so--and he so eager; so I said Yes.  But I sighed; I couldn't

help it.  And yet there was no sense in sighing, for she wasn't

born yet.  But that is the way we are made:  we don't reason,

where we feel; we just feel.



My expedition was all the talk that day and that night, and the

boys were very good to me, and made much of me, and seemed to have

forgotten their vexation and disappointment, and come to be as

anxious for me to hive those ogres and set those ripe old virgins

loose as if it were themselves that had the contract.  Well, they

_were_ good children--but just children, that is all.  And they

gave me no end of points about how to scout for giants, and how

to scoop them in; and they told me all sorts of charms against

enchantments, and gave me salves and other rubbish to put on my

wounds.  But it never occurred to one of them to reflect that if

I was such a wonderful necromancer as I was pretending to be,

I ought not to need salves or instructions, or charms against

enchantments, and, least of all, arms and armor, on a foray of any

kind--even against fire-spouting dragons, and devils hot from

perdition, let alone such poor adversaries as these I was after,

these commonplace ogres of the back settlements.



I was to have an early breakfast, and start at dawn, for that was

the usual way; but I had the demon's own time with my armor,

and this delayed me a little.  It is troublesome to get into, and

there is so much detail.  First you wrap a layer or two of blanket

around your body, for a sort of cushion and to keep off the cold

iron; then you put on your sleeves and shirt of chain mail--these

are made of small steel links woven together, and they form a fabric

so flexible that if you toss your shirt onto the floor, it slumps

into a pile like a peck of wet fish-net; it is very heavy and

is nearly the uncomfortablest material in the world for a night

shirt, yet plenty used it for that--tax collectors, and reformers,

and one-horse kings with a defective title, and those sorts of

people; then you put on your shoes--flat-boats roofed over with

interleaving bands of steel--and screw your clumsy spurs into

the heels.  Next you buckle your greaves on your legs, and your

cuisses on your thighs; then come your backplate and your breastplate,

and you begin to feel crowded; then you hitch onto the breastplate

the half-petticoat of broad overlapping bands of steel which hangs

down in front but is scolloped out behind so you can sit down,

and isn't any real improvement on an inverted coal scuttle, either

for looks or for wear, or to wipe your hands on; next you belt

on your sword; then you put your stove-pipe joints onto your arms,

your iron gauntlets onto your hands, your iron rat-trap onto your

head, with a rag of steel web hitched onto it to hang over the back

of your neck--and there you are, snug as a candle in a candle-mould.

This is no time to dance.  Well, a man that is packed away like

that is a nut that isn't worth the cracking, there is so little of

the meat, when you get down to it, by comparison with the shell.



The boys helped me, or I never could have got in.  Just as we

finished, Sir Bedivere happened in, and I saw that as like as not

I hadn't chosen the most convenient outfit for a long trip.  How

stately he looked; and tall and broad and grand.  He had on his

head a conical steel casque that only came down to his ears, and

for visor had only a narrow steel bar that extended down to his

upper lip and protected his nose; and all the rest of him, from

neck to heel, was flexible chain mail, trousers and all.  But

pretty much all of him was hidden under his outside garment, which

of course was of chain mail, as I said, and hung straight from his

shoulders to his ankles; and from his middle to the bottom, both

before and behind, was divided, so that he could ride and let the

skirts hang down on each side.  He was going grailing, and it was

just the outfit for it, too.  I would have given a good deal for

that ulster, but it was too late now to be fooling around.  The sun

was just up, the king and the court were all on hand to see me off

and wish me luck; so it wouldn't be etiquette for me to tarry.

You don't get on your horse yourself; no, if you tried it you

would get disappointed.  They carry you out, just as they carry

a sun-struck man to the drug store, and put you on, and help get

you to rights, and fix your feet in the stirrups; and all the while

you do feel so strange and stuffy and like somebody else--like

somebody that has been married on a sudden, or struck by lightning,

or something like that, and hasn't quite fetched around yet, and

is sort of numb, and can't just get his bearings.  Then they

stood up the mast they called a spear, in its socket by my left

foot, and I gripped it with my hand; lastly they hung my shield

around my neck, and I was all complete and ready to up anchor

and get to sea.  Everybody was as good to me as they could be,

and a maid of honor gave me the stirrup-cup her own self.  There was

nothing more to do now, but for that damsel to get up behind me on

a pillion, which she did, and put an arm or so around me to hold on.



And so we started, and everybody gave us a goodbye and waved their

handkerchiefs or helmets.  And everybody we met, going down the hill

and through the village was respectful to us, except some shabby

little boys on the outskirts.  They said:



"Oh, what a guy!"  And hove clods at us.



In my experience boys are the same in all ages.  They don't respect

anything, they don't care for anything or anybody.  They say

"Go up, baldhead" to the prophet going his unoffending way in

the gray of antiquity; they sass me in the holy gloom of the

Middle Ages; and I had seen them act the same way in Buchanan's

administration; I remember, because I was there and helped.  The

prophet had his bears and settled with his boys; and I wanted

to get down and settle with mine, but it wouldn't answer, because

I couldn't have got up again.  I hate a country without a derrick.







CHAPTER XII



SLOW TORTURE



Straight off, we were in the country.  It was most lovely and

pleasant in those sylvan solitudes in the early cool morning

in the first freshness of autumn.  From hilltops we saw fair

green valleys lying spread out below, with streams winding through

them, and island groves of trees here and there, and huge lonely

oaks scattered about and casting black blots of shade; and beyond

the valleys we saw the ranges of hills, blue with haze, stretching

away in billowy perspective to the horizon, with at wide intervals

a dim fleck of white or gray on a wave-summit, which we knew was

a castle.  We crossed broad natural lawns sparkling with dew,

and we moved like spirits, the cushioned turf giving out no sound

of footfall; we dreamed along through glades in a mist of green

light that got its tint from the sun-drenched roof of leaves

overhead, and by our feet the clearest and coldest of runlets

went frisking and gossiping over its reefs and making a sort of

whispering music, comfortable to hear; and at times we left the

world behind and entered into the solemn great deeps and rich

gloom of the forest, where furtive wild things whisked and scurried

by and were gone before you could even get your eye on the place

where the noise was; and where only the earliest birds were turning

out and getting to business with a song here and a quarrel yonder

and a mysterious far-off hammering and drumming for worms on

a tree trunk away somewhere in the impenetrable remotenesses of

the woods.  And by and by out we would swing again into the glare.



About the third or fourth or fifth time that we swung out into

the glare--it was along there somewhere, a couple of hours or so

after sun-up--it wasn't as pleasant as it had been.  It was

beginning to get hot.  This was quite noticeable.  We had a very

long pull, after that, without any shade.  Now it is curious how

progressively little frets grow and multiply after they once get

a start.  Things which I didn't mind at all, at first, I began

to mind now--and more and more, too, all the time.  The first

ten or fifteen times I wanted my handkerchief I didn't seem to care;

I got along, and said never mind, it isn't any matter, and dropped

it out of my mind.  But now it was different; I wanted it all

the time; it was nag, nag, nag, right along, and no rest; I couldn't

get it out of my mind; and so at last I lost my temper and said

hang a man that would make a suit of armor without any pockets

in it.  You see I had my handkerchief in my helmet; and some other

things; but it was that kind of a helmet that you can't take off

by yourself.  That hadn't occurred to me when I put it there;

and in fact I didn't know it.  I supposed it would be particularly

convenient there.  And so now, the thought of its being there,

so handy and close by, and yet not get-at-able, made it all the

worse and the harder to bear.  Yes, the thing that you can't get

is the thing that you want, mainly; every one has noticed that.

Well, it took my mind off from everything else; took it clear off,

and centered it in my helmet; and mile after mile, there it stayed,

imagining the handkerchief, picturing the handkerchief; and it

was bitter and aggravating to have the salt sweat keep trickling

down into my eyes, and I couldn't get at it.  It seems like a little

thing, on paper, but it was not a little thing at all; it was

the most real kind of misery.  I would not say it if it was not so.

I made up my mind that I would carry along a reticule next time,

let it look how it might, and people say what they would.  Of course

these iron dudes of the Round Table would think it was scandalous,

and maybe raise Sheol about it, but as for me, give me comfort

first, and style afterwards.  So we jogged along, and now and then

we struck a stretch of dust, and it would tumble up in clouds and

get into my nose and make me sneeze and cry; and of course I said

things I oughtn't to have said, I don't deny that.  I am not

better than others.



We couldn't seem to meet anybody in this lonesome Britain, not

even an ogre; and, in the mood I was in then, it was well for

the ogre; that is, an ogre with a handkerchief.  Most knights

would have thought of nothing but getting his armor; but so I got

his bandanna, he could keep his hardware, for all of me.



Meantime, it was getting hotter and hotter in there.  You see,

the sun was beating down and warming up the iron more and more

all the time.  Well, when you are hot, that way, every little thing

irritates you.  When I trotted, I rattled like a crate of dishes,

and that annoyed me; and moreover I couldn't seem to stand that

shield slatting and banging, now about my breast, now around my

back; and if I dropped into a walk my joints creaked and screeched

in that wearisome way that a wheelbarrow does, and as we didn't

create any breeze at that gait, I was like to get fried in that

stove; and besides, the quieter you went the heavier the iron

settled down on you and the more and more tons you seemed to weigh

every minute.  And you had to be always changing hands, and passing

your spear over to the other foot, it got so irksome for one hand

to hold it long at a time.



Well, you know, when you perspire that way, in rivers, there comes

a time when you--when you--well, when you itch.  You are inside,

your hands are outside; so there you are; nothing but iron between.

It is not a light thing, let it sound as it may.  First it is one

place; then another; then some more; and it goes on spreading and

spreading, and at last the territory is all occupied, and nobody

can imagine what you feel like, nor how unpleasant it is.  And

when it had got to the worst, and it seemed to me that I could

not stand anything more, a fly got in through the bars and settled

on my nose, and the bars were stuck and wouldn't work, and I

couldn't get the visor up; and I could only shake my head, which

was baking hot by this time, and the fly--well, you know how a fly

acts when he has got a certainty--he only minded the shaking enough

to change from nose to lip, and lip to ear, and buzz and buzz

all around in there, and keep on lighting and biting, in a way

that a person, already so distressed as I was, simply could not

stand.  So I gave in, and got Alisande to unship the helmet and

relieve me of it.  Then she emptied the conveniences out of it

and fetched it full of water, and I drank and then stood up, and

she poured the rest down inside the armor. One cannot think how

refreshing it was.  She continued to fetch and pour until I was

well soaked and thoroughly comfortable.



It was good to have a rest--and peace.  But nothing is quite

perfect in this life, at any time.  I had made a pipe a while back,

and also some pretty fair tobacco; not the real thing, but what

some of the Indians use:  the inside bark of the willow, dried.

These comforts had been in the helmet, and now I had them again,

but no matches.



Gradually, as the time wore along, one annoying fact was borne in

upon my understanding--that we were weather-bound.  An armed novice

cannot mount his horse without help and plenty of it.  Sandy was

not enough; not enough for me, anyway.  We had to wait until

somebody should come along.  Waiting, in silence, would have been

agreeable enough, for I was full of matter for reflection, and

wanted to give it a chance to work.  I wanted to try and think out

how it was that rational or even half-rational men could ever

have learned to wear armor, considering its inconveniences; and

how they had managed to keep up such a fashion for generations

when it was plain that what I had suffered to-day they had had

to suffer all the days of their lives.  I wanted to think that out;

and moreover I wanted to think out some way to reform this evil

and persuade the people to let the foolish fashion die out; but

thinking was out of the question in the circumstances.  You couldn't

think, where Sandy was.



She was a quite biddable creature and good-hearted, but she had

a flow of talk that was as steady as a mill, and made your head

sore like the drays and wagons in a city.  If she had had a cork

she would have been a comfort.  But you can't cork that kind;

they would die.  Her clack was going all day, and you would think

something would surely happen to her works, by and by; but no,

they never got out of order; and she never had to slack up for

words.  She could grind, and pump, and churn, and buzz by the week,

and never stop to oil up or blow out.  And yet the result was just

nothing but wind.  She never had any ideas, any more than a fog

has.  She was a perfect blatherskite; I mean for jaw, jaw, jaw,

talk, talk, talk, jabber, jabber, jabber; but just as good as she

could be.  I hadn't minded her mill that morning, on account of

having that hornets' nest of other troubles; but more than once

in the afternoon I had to say:



"Take a rest, child; the way you are using up all the domestic air,

the kingdom will have to go to importing it by to-morrow, and it's

a low enough treasury without that."







CHAPTER XIII



FREEMEN



Yes, it is strange how little a while at a time a person can be

contented.  Only a little while back, when I was riding and

suffering, what a heaven this peace, this rest, this sweet serenity

in this secluded shady nook by this purling stream would have

seemed, where I could keep perfectly comfortable all the time

by pouring a dipper of water into my armor now and then; yet

already I was getting dissatisfied; partly because I could not

light my pipe--for, although I had long ago started a match factory,

I had forgotten to bring matches with me--and partly because we

had nothing to eat.  Here was another illustration of the childlike

improvidence of this age and people.  A man in armor always trusted

to chance for his food on a journey, and would have been scandalized

at the idea of hanging a basket of sandwiches on his spear.  There

was probably not a knight of all the Round Table combination who

would not rather have died than been caught carrying such a thing

as that on his flagstaff.  And yet there could not be anything more

sensible.  It had been my intention to smuggle a couple of sandwiches

into my helmet, but I was interrupted in the act, and had to make

an excuse and lay them aside, and a dog got them.



Night approached, and with it a storm.  The darkness came on fast.

We must camp, of course.  I found a good shelter for the demoiselle

under a rock, and went off and found another for myself.  But

I was obliged to remain in my armor, because I could not get it off

by myself and yet could not allow Alisande to help, because it

would have seemed so like undressing before folk.  It would not

have amounted to that in reality, because I had clothes on

underneath; but the prejudices of one's breeding are not gotten

rid of just at a jump, and I knew that when it came to stripping

off that bob-tailed iron petticoat I should be embarrassed.



With the storm came a change of weather; and the stronger the wind

blew, and the wilder the rain lashed around, the colder and colder

it got.  Pretty soon, various kinds of bugs and ants and worms

and things began to flock in out of the wet and crawl down inside

my armor to get warm; and while some of them behaved well enough,

and snuggled up amongst my clothes and got quiet, the majority

were of a restless, uncomfortable sort, and never stayed still,

but went on prowling and hunting for they did not know what;

especially the ants, which went tickling along in wearisome

procession from one end of me to the other by the hour, and are

a kind of creatures which I never wish to sleep with again.

It would be my advice to persons situated in this way, to not roll

or thrash around, because this excites the interest of all the

different sorts of animals and makes every last one of them want

to turn out and see what is going on, and this makes things worse

than they were before, and of course makes you objurgate harder,

too, if you can.  Still, if one did not roll and thrash around

he would die; so perhaps it is as well to do one way as the other;

there is no real choice.  Even after I was frozen solid I could

still distinguish that tickling, just as a corpse does when he is

taking electric treatment.  I said I would never wear armor

after this trip.



All those trying hours whilst I was frozen and yet was in a living

fire, as you may say, on account of that swarm of crawlers, that

same unanswerable question kept circling and circling through my

tired head:  How do people stand this miserable armor?  How have

they managed to stand it all these generations?  How can they sleep

at night for dreading the tortures of next day?



When the morning came at last, I was in a bad enough plight:  seedy,

drowsy, fagged, from want of sleep; weary from thrashing around,

famished from long fasting; pining for a bath, and to get rid of

the animals; and crippled with rheumatism.  And how had it fared

with the nobly born, the titled aristocrat, the Demoiselle Alisande

la Carteloise?  Why, she was as fresh as a squirrel; she had slept

like the dead; and as for a bath, probably neither she nor any

other noble in the land had ever had one, and so she was not

missing it.  Measured by modern standards, they were merely modified

savages, those people.  This noble lady showed no impatience to get

to breakfast--and that smacks of the savage, too.  On their journeys

those Britons were used to long fasts, and knew how to bear them;

and also how to freight up against probable fasts before starting,

after the style of the Indian and the anaconda.  As like as not,

Sandy was loaded for a three-day stretch.



We were off before sunrise, Sandy riding and I limping along

behind.  In half an hour we came upon a group of ragged poor

creatures who had assembled to mend the thing which was regarded

as a road.  They were as humble as animals to me; and when I

proposed to breakfast with them, they were so flattered, so

overwhelmed by this extraordinary condescension of mine that

at first they were not able to believe that I was in earnest.

My lady put up her scornful lip and withdrew to one side; she said

in their hearing that she would as soon think of eating with the

other cattle--a remark which embarrassed these poor devils merely

because it referred to them, and not because it insulted or offended

them, for it didn't.  And yet they were not slaves, not chattels.

By a sarcasm of law and phrase they were freemen.  Seven-tenths

of the free population of the country were of just their class and

degree:  small "independent" farmers, artisans, etc.; which is

to say, they were the nation, the actual Nation; they were about

all of it that was useful, or worth saving, or really respect-worthy,

and to subtract them would have been to subtract the Nation and

leave behind some dregs, some refuse, in the shape of a king,

nobility and gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with

the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of use or value

in any rationally constructed world.  And yet, by ingenious

contrivance, this gilded minority, instead of being in the tail

of the procession where it belonged, was marching head up and

banners flying, at the other end of it; had elected itself to be

the Nation, and these innumerable clams had permitted it so long

that they had come at last to accept it as a truth; and not only

that, but to believe it right and as it should be.  The priests

had told their fathers and themselves that this ironical state

of things was ordained of God; and so, not reflecting upon how

unlike God it would be to amuse himself with sarcasms, and especially

such poor transparent ones as this, they had dropped the matter

there and become respectfully quiet.



The talk of these meek people had a strange enough sound in

a formerly American ear.  They were freemen, but they could not

leave the estates of their lord or their bishop without his

permission; they could not prepare their own bread, but must have

their corn ground and their bread baked at his mill and his bakery,

and pay roundly for the same; they could not sell a piece of their

own property without paying him a handsome percentage of the

proceeds, nor buy a piece of somebody else's without remembering

him in cash for the privilege; they had to harvest his grain for him

gratis, and be ready to come at a moment's notice, leaving their

own crop to destruction by the threatened storm; they had to let

him plant fruit trees in their fields, and then keep their indignation

to themselves when his heedless fruit-gatherers trampled the grain

around the trees; they had to smother their anger when his hunting

parties galloped through their fields laying waste the result of

their patient toil; they were not allowed to keep doves themselves,

and when the swarms from my lord's dovecote settled on their crops

they must not lose their temper and kill a bird, for awful would

the penalty be; when the harvest was at last gathered, then came

the procession of robbers to levy their blackmail upon it:  first

the Church carted off its fat tenth, then the king's commissioner

took his twentieth, then my lord's people made a mighty inroad

upon the remainder; after which, the skinned freeman had liberty

to bestow the remnant in his barn, in case it was worth the trouble;

there were taxes, and taxes, and taxes, and more taxes, and taxes

again, and yet other taxes--upon this free and independent pauper,

but none upon his lord the baron or the bishop, none upon the

wasteful nobility or the all-devouring Church; if the baron would

sleep unvexed, the freeman must sit up all night after his day's

work and whip the ponds to keep the frogs quiet; if the freeman's

daughter--but no, that last infamy of monarchical government is

unprintable; and finally, if the freeman, grown desperate with his

tortures, found his life unendurable under such conditions, and

sacrificed it and fled to death for mercy and refuge, the gentle

Church condemned him to eternal fire, the gentle law buried him

at midnight at the cross-roads with a stake through his back,

and his master the baron or the bishop confiscated all his property

and turned his widow and his orphans out of doors.



And here were these freemen assembled in the early morning to work

on their lord the bishop's road three days each--gratis; every

head of a family, and every son of a family, three days each,

gratis, and a day or so added for their servants.  Why, it was

like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable

and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such

villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood--one:  a settlement

of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for

each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of

that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and

shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell.

There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it

and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other

in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had

lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand

persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are

all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror,

so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe,

compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty,

and heart-break?  What is swift death by lightning compared with

death by slow fire at the stake?  A city cemetery could contain the

coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so

diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could

hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror--

that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has

been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.



These poor ostensible freemen who were sharing their breakfast

and their talk with me, were as full of humble reverence for their

king and Church and nobility as their worst enemy could desire.

There was something pitifully ludicrous about it.  I asked them

if they supposed a nation of people ever existed, who, with a free

vote in every man's hand, would elect that a single family and its

descendants should reign over it forever, whether gifted or boobies,

to the exclusion of all other families--including the voter's; and

would also elect that a certain hundred families should be raised

to dizzy summits of rank, and clothed on with offensive transmissible

glories and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation's

families--_including his own_.



They all looked unhit, and said they didn't know; that they had

never thought about it before, and it hadn't ever occurred to them

that a nation could be so situated that every man _could_ have

a say in the government.  I said I had seen one--and that it would

last until it had an Established Church.  Again they were all

unhit--at first.  But presently one man looked up and asked me

to state that proposition again; and state it slowly, so it could

soak into his understanding.  I did it; and after a little he had

the idea, and he brought his fist down and said _he_ didn't believe

a nation where every man had a vote would voluntarily get down

in the mud and dirt in any such way; and that to steal from a nation

its will and preference must be a crime and the first of all crimes.

I said to myself:



"This one's a man.  If I were backed by enough of his sort, I would

make a strike for the welfare of this country, and try to prove

myself its loyalest citizen by making a wholesome change in its

system of government."



You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to

its institutions or its office-holders.  The country is the real

thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing

to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are

extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out,

become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body

from winter, disease, and death.  To be loyal to rags, to shout

for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags--that is a loyalty

of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented

by monarchy; let monarchy keep it.  I was from Connecticut, whose

Constitution declares "that all political power is inherent in

the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority

and instituted for their benefit; and that they have _at all times_

an undeniable and indefeasible right to _alter their form of

government_ in such a manner as they may think expedient."



Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the

commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his

peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is

a traitor.  That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this

decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway, and

it is the duty of the others to vote him down if they do not see

the matter as he does.



And now here I was, in a country where a right to say how the

country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each

thousand of its population.  For the nine hundred and ninety-four

to express dissatisfaction with the regnant system and propose

to change it, would have made the whole six shudder as one man,

it would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black

treason.  So to speak, I was become a stockholder in a corporation

where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all

the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves

a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends.  It seemed

to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was

a new deal.  The thing that would have best suited the circus side

of my nature would have been to resign the Boss-ship and get up

an insurrection and turn it into a revolution; but I knew that the

Jack Cade or the Wat Tyler who tries such a thing without first

educating his materials up to revolution grade is almost absolutely

certain to get left.  I had never been accustomed to getting left,

even if I do say it myself.  Wherefore, the "deal" which had been

for some time working into shape in my mind was of a quite different

pattern from the Cade-Tyler sort.



So I did not talk blood and insurrection to that man there who sat

munching black bread with that abused and mistaught herd of human

sheep, but took him aside and talked matter of another sort to him.

After I had finished, I got him to lend me a little ink from his

veins; and with this and a sliver I wrote on a piece of bark--



   Put him in the Man-factory--



and gave it to him, and said:



"Take it to the palace at Camelot and give it into the hands of

Amyas le Poulet, whom I call Clarence, and he will understand."



"He is a priest, then," said the man, and some of the enthusiasm

went out of his face.



"How--a priest?  Didn't I tell you that no chattel of the Church,

no bond-slave of pope or bishop can enter my Man-Factory?  Didn't

I tell you that _you_ couldn't enter unless your religion, whatever

it might be, was your own free property?"



"Marry, it is so, and for that I was glad; wherefore it liked me not,

and bred in me a cold doubt, to hear of this priest being there."



"But he isn't a priest, I tell you."



The man looked far from satisfied.  He said:



"He is not a priest, and yet can read?"



"He is not a priest and yet can read--yes, and write, too, for that

matter.  I taught him myself." The man's face cleared.  "And it is

the first thing that you yourself will be taught in that Factory--"



"I?  I would give blood out of my heart to know that art.  Why,

I will be your slave, your--"



"No you won't, you won't be anybody's slave.  Take your family

and go along.  Your lord the bishop will confiscate your small

property, but no matter.  Clarence will fix you all right."







CHAPTER XIV



"DEFEND THEE, LORD"



I paid three pennies for my breakfast, and a most extravagant

price it was, too, seeing that one could have breakfasted a dozen

persons for that money; but I was feeling good by this time, and

I had always been a kind of spendthrift anyway; and then these

people had wanted to give me the food for nothing, scant as

their provision was, and so it was a grateful pleasure to emphasize

my appreciation and sincere thankfulness with a good big financial

lift where the money would do so much more good than it would

in my helmet, where, these pennies being made of iron and not

stinted in weight, my half-dollar's worth was a good deal of a

burden to me.  I spent money rather too freely in those days,

it is true; but one reason for it was that I hadn't got the

proportions of things entirely adjusted, even yet, after so long

a sojourn in Britain--hadn't got along to where I was able to

absolutely realize that a penny in Arthur's land and a couple of

dollars in Connecticut were about one and the same thing:  just

twins, as you may say, in purchasing power.  If my start from

Camelot could have been delayed a very few days I could have paid

these people in beautiful new coins from our own mint, and that

would have pleased me; and them, too, not less.  I had adopted

the American values exclusively.  In a week or two now, cents,

nickels, dimes, quarters, and half-dollars, and also a trifle of

gold, would be trickling in thin but steady streams all through

the commercial veins of the kingdom, and I looked to see this

new blood freshen up its life.



The farmers were bound to throw in something, to sort of offset

my liberality, whether I would or no; so I let them give me a flint

and steel; and as soon as they had comfortably bestowed Sandy

and me on our horse, I lit my pipe.  When the first blast of smoke

shot out through the bars of my helmet, all those people broke

for the woods, and Sandy went over backwards and struck the ground

with a dull thud.  They thought I was one of those fire-belching

dragons they had heard so much about from knights and other

professional liars.  I had infinite trouble to persuade those people

to venture back within explaining distance.  Then I told them that

this was only a bit of enchantment which would work harm to none

but my enemies.  And I promised, with my hand on my heart, that

if all who felt no enmity toward me would come forward and pass

before me they should see that only those who remained behind would

be struck dead.  The procession moved with a good deal of promptness.

There were no casualties to report, for nobody had curiosity enough

to remain behind to see what would happen.



I lost some time, now, for these big children, their fears gone,

became so ravished with wonder over my awe-compelling fireworks

that I had to stay there and smoke a couple of pipes out before

they would let me go.  Still the delay was not wholly unproductive,

for it took all that time to get Sandy thoroughly wonted to the new

thing, she being so close to it, you know.  It plugged up her

conversation mill, too, for a considerable while, and that was

a gain.  But above all other benefits accruing, I had learned

something.  I was ready for any giant or any ogre that might come

along, now.



We tarried with a holy hermit, that night, and my opportunity

came about the middle of the next afternoon.  We were crossing

a vast meadow by way of short-cut, and I was musing absently,

hearing nothing, seeing nothing, when Sandy suddenly interrupted

a remark which she had begun that morning, with the cry:



"Defend thee, lord!--peril of life is toward!"



And she slipped down from the horse and ran a little way and stood.

I looked up and saw, far off in the shade of a tree, half a dozen

armed knights and their squires; and straightway there was bustle

among them and tightening of saddle-girths for the mount.  My pipe

was ready and would have been lit, if I had not been lost in

thinking about how to banish oppression from this land and restore

to all its people their stolen rights and manhood without disobliging

anybody.  I lit up at once, and by the time I had got a good head

of reserved steam on, here they came.  All together, too; none of

those chivalrous magnanimities which one reads so much about--

one courtly rascal at a time, and the rest standing by to see fair

play.  No, they came in a body, they came with a whirr and a rush,

they came like a volley from a battery; came with heads low down,

plumes streaming out behind, lances advanced at a level.  It was

a handsome sight, a beautiful sight--for a man up a tree.  I laid

my lance in rest and waited, with my heart beating, till the iron

wave was just ready to break over me, then spouted a column of

white smoke through the bars of my helmet.  You should have seen

the wave go to pieces and scatter!  This was a finer sight than

the other one.



But these people stopped, two or three hundred yards away, and

this troubled me.  My satisfaction collapsed, and fear came;

I judged I was a lost man.  But Sandy was radiant; and was going

to be eloquent--but I stopped her, and told her my magic had

miscarried, somehow or other, and she must mount, with all despatch,

and we must ride for life.  No, she wouldn't.  She said that my

enchantment had disabled those knights; they were not riding on,

because they couldn't; wait, they would drop out of their saddles

presently, and we would get their horses and harness.  I could not

deceive such trusting simplicity, so I said it was a mistake; that

when my fireworks killed at all, they killed instantly; no, the men

would not die, there was something wrong about my apparatus,

I couldn't tell what; but we must hurry and get away, for those

people would attack us again, in a minute.  Sandy laughed, and said:



"Lack-a-day, sir, they be not of that breed!  Sir Launcelot will

give battle to dragons, and will abide by them, and will assail

them again, and yet again, and still again, until he do conquer

and destroy them; and so likewise will Sir Pellinore and Sir Aglovale

and Sir Carados, and mayhap others, but there be none else that

will venture it, let the idle say what the idle will.  And, la,

as to yonder base rufflers, think ye they have not their fill,

but yet desire more?"



"Well, then, what are they waiting for?  Why don't they leave?

Nobody's hindering.  Good land, I'm willing to let bygones be

bygones, I'm sure."



"Leave, is it?  Oh, give thyself easement as to that.  They dream

not of it, no, not they.  They wait to yield them."



"Come--really, is that 'sooth'--as you people say?  If they want to,

why don't they?"



"It would like them much; but an ye wot how dragons are esteemed,

ye would not hold them blamable. They fear to come."



"Well, then, suppose I go to them instead, and--"



"Ah, wit ye well they would not abide your coming.  I will go."



And she did.  She was a handy person to have along on a raid.

I would have considered this a doubtful errand, myself.  I presently

saw the knights riding away, and Sandy coming back.  That was

a relief.  I judged she had somehow failed to get the first innings

--I mean in the conversation; otherwise the interview wouldn't have

been so short.  But it turned out that she had managed the business

well; in fact, admirably.  She said that when she told those people

I was The Boss, it hit them where they lived:  "smote them sore

with fear and dread" was her word; and then they were ready to

put up with anything she might require.  So she swore them to appear

at Arthur's court within two days and yield them, with horse and

harness, and be my knights henceforth, and subject to my command.

How much better she managed that thing than I should have done

it myself!  She was a daisy.







CHAPTER XV



SANDY'S TALE



"And so I'm proprietor of some knights," said I, as we rode off.

"Who would ever have supposed that I should live to list up assets

of that sort.  I shan't know what to do with them; unless I raffle

them off.  How many of them are there, Sandy?"



"Seven, please you, sir, and their squires."



"It is a good haul.  Who are they?  Where do they hang out?"



"Where do they hang out?"



"Yes, where do they live?"



"Ah, I understood thee not.  That will I tell eftsoons."  Then she

said musingly, and softly, turning the words daintily over her

tongue:  "Hang they out--hang they out--where hang--where do they

hang out; eh, right so; where do they hang out.  Of a truth the

phrase hath a fair and winsome grace, and is prettily worded

withal.  I will repeat it anon and anon in mine idlesse, whereby

I may peradventure learn it.  Where do they hang out.  Even so!

already it falleth trippingly from my tongue, and forasmuch as--"



"Don't forget the cowboys, Sandy."



"Cowboys?"



"Yes; the knights, you know:  You were going to tell me about them.

A while back, you remember.  Figuratively speaking, game's called."



"Game--"



"Yes, yes, yes!  Go to the bat.  I mean, get to work on your

statistics, and don't burn so much kindling getting your fire

started.  Tell me about the knights."



"I will well, and lightly will begin.  So they two departed and

rode into a great forest.  And--"



"Great Scott!"



You see, I recognized my mistake at once.  I had set her works

a-going; it was my own fault; she would be thirty days getting down

to those facts.  And she generally began without a preface and

finished without a result.  If you interrupted her she would either

go right along without noticing, or answer with a couple of words,

and go back and say the sentence over again.  So, interruptions

only did harm; and yet I had to interrupt, and interrupt pretty

frequently, too, in order to save my life; a person would die if

he let her monotony drip on him right along all day.



"Great Scott!" I said in my distress.  She went right back and

began over again:



"So they two departed and rode into a great forest.  And--"



"_Which_ two?"



"Sir Gawaine and Sir Uwaine.  And so they came to an abbey of monks,

and there were well lodged.  So on the morn they heard their masses

in the abbey, and so they rode forth till they came to a great

forest; then was Sir Gawaine ware in a valley by a turret, of

twelve fair damsels, and two knights armed on great horses, and

the damsels went to and fro by a tree.  And then was Sir Gawaine

ware how there hung a white shield on that tree, and ever as the

damsels came by it they spit upon it, and some threw mire upon

the shield--"



"Now, if I hadn't seen the like myself in this country, Sandy,

I wouldn't believe it.  But I've seen it, and I can just see those

creatures now, parading before that shield and acting like that.

The women here do certainly act like all possessed.  Yes, and

I mean your best, too, society's very choicest brands.  The humblest

hello-girl along ten thousand miles of wire could teach gentleness,

patience, modesty, manners, to the highest duchess in Arthur's land."



"Hello-girl?"



"Yes, but don't you ask me to explain; it's a new kind of a girl;

they don't have them here; one often speaks sharply to them when

they are not the least in fault, and he can't get over feeling

sorry for it and ashamed of himself in thirteen hundred years,

it's such shabby mean conduct and so unprovoked; the fact is,

no gentleman ever does it--though I--well, I myself, if I've got

to confess--"



"Peradventure she--"



"Never mind her; never mind her; I tell you I couldn't ever explain

her so you would understand."



"Even so be it, sith ye are so minded.  Then Sir Gawaine and

Sir Uwaine went and saluted them, and asked them why they did that

despite to the shield.  Sirs, said the damsels, we shall tell you.

There is a knight in this country that owneth this white shield,

and he is a passing good man of his hands, but he hateth all

ladies and gentlewomen, and therefore we do all this despite to

the shield.  I will say you, said Sir Gawaine, it beseemeth evil

a good knight to despise all ladies and gentlewomen, and peradventure

though he hate you he hath some cause, and peradventure he loveth

in some other places ladies and gentlewomen, and to be loved again,

and he such a man of prowess as ye speak of--"



"Man of prowess--yes, that is the man to please them, Sandy.

Man of brains--that is a thing they never think of.  Tom Sayers--

John Heenan--John L. Sullivan--pity but you could be here.  You

would have your legs under the Round Table and a 'Sir' in front

of your names within the twenty-four hours; and you could bring

about a new distribution of the married princesses and duchesses

of the Court in another twenty-four.  The fact is, it is just

a sort of polished-up court of Comanches, and there isn't a squaw

in it who doesn't stand ready at the dropping of a hat to desert

to the buck with the biggest string of scalps at his belt."



"--and he be such a man of prowess as ye speak of, said Sir Gawaine.

Now, what is his name?  Sir, said they, his name is Marhaus the

king's son of Ireland."



"Son of the king of Ireland, you mean; the other form doesn't mean

anything.  And look out and hold on tight, now, we must jump

this gully....  There, we are all right now.  This horse belongs in

the circus; he is born before his time."



"I know him well, said Sir Uwaine, he is a passing good knight as

any is on live."



"_On live_.  If you've got a fault in the world, Sandy, it is that

you are a shade too archaic.  But it isn't any matter."



"--for I saw him once proved at a justs where many knights were

gathered, and that time there might no man withstand him.  Ah, said

Sir Gawaine, damsels, methinketh ye are to blame, for it is to

suppose he that hung that shield there will not be long therefrom,

and then may those knights match him on horseback, and that is

more your worship than thus; for I will abide no longer to see

a knight's shield dishonored.  And therewith Sir Uwaine and

Sir Gawaine departed a little from them, and then were they ware

where Sir Marhaus came riding on a great horse straight toward

them.  And when the twelve damsels saw Sir Marhaus they fled into

the turret as they were wild, so that some of them fell by the way.

Then the one of the knights of the tower dressed his shield, and

said on high, Sir Marhaus defend thee.  And so they ran together

that the knight brake his spear on Marhaus, and Sir Marhaus smote

him so hard that he brake his neck and the horse's back--"



"Well, that is just the trouble about this state of things,

it ruins so many horses."



"That saw the other knight of the turret, and dressed him toward

Marhaus, and they went so eagerly together, that the knight of

the turret was soon smitten down, horse and man, stark dead--"



"_Another_ horse gone; I tell you it is a custom that ought to be

broken up.  I don't see how people with any feeling can applaud

and support it."



    .   .   .   .



"So these two knights came together with great random--"



I saw that I had been asleep and missed a chapter, but I didn't

say anything.  I judged that the Irish knight was in trouble with

the visitors by this time, and this turned out to be the case.



"--that Sir Uwaine smote Sir Marhaus that his spear brast in pieces

on the shield, and Sir Marhaus smote him so sore that horse and

man he bare to the earth, and hurt Sir Uwaine on the left side--"



"The truth is, Alisande, these archaics are a little _too_ simple;

the vocabulary is too limited, and so, by consequence, descriptions

suffer in the matter of variety; they run too much to level Saharas

of fact, and not enough to picturesque detail; this throws about

them a certain air of the monotonous; in fact the fights are all

alike:  a couple of people come together with great random--

random is a good word, and so is exegesis, for that matter, and

so is holocaust, and defalcation, and usufruct and a hundred others,

but land! a body ought to discriminate--they come together with

great random, and a spear is brast, and one party brake his shield

and the other one goes down, horse and man, over his horse-tail

and brake his neck, and then the next candidate comes randoming in,

and brast _his_ spear, and the other man brast his shield, and down

_he_ goes, horse and man, over his horse-tail, and brake _his_ neck,

and then there's another elected, and another and another and still

another, till the material is all used up; and when you come to

figure up results, you can't tell one fight from another, nor who

whipped; and as a _picture_, of living, raging, roaring battle,

sho! why, it's pale and noiseless--just ghosts scuffling in a fog.

Dear me, what would this barren vocabulary get out of the mightiest

spectacle?--the burning of Rome in Nero's time, for instance?

Why, it would merely say, 'Town burned down; no insurance; boy

brast a window, fireman brake his neck!'  Why, _that_ ain't a picture!"



It was a good deal of a lecture, I thought, but it didn't disturb

Sandy, didn't turn a feather; her steam soared steadily up again,

the minute I took off the lid:



"Then Sir Marhaus turned his horse and rode toward Gawaine with

his spear.  And when Sir Gawaine saw that, he dressed his shield,

and they aventred their spears, and they came together with all

the might of their horses, that either knight smote other so hard

in the midst of their shields, but Sir Gawaine's spear brake--"



"I knew it would."



--"but Sir Marhaus's spear held; and therewith Sir Gawaine and

his horse rushed down to the earth--"



"Just so--and brake his back."



--"and lightly Sir Gawaine rose upon his feet and pulled out

his sword, and dressed him toward Sir Marhaus on foot, and therewith

either came unto other eagerly, and smote together with their

swords, that their shields flew in cantels, and they bruised their

helms and their hauberks, and wounded either other.  But Sir Gawaine,

fro it passed nine of the clock, waxed by the space of three hours

ever stronger and stronger and thrice his might was increased.

All this espied Sir Marhaus, and had great wonder how his might

increased, and so they wounded other passing sore; and then when

it was come noon--"



The pelting sing-song of it carried me forward to scenes and

sounds of my boyhood days:



"N-e-e-ew Haven! ten minutes for refreshments--knductr'll strike

the gong-bell two minutes before train leaves--passengers for

the Shore line please take seats in the rear k'yar, this k'yar

don't go no furder--_ahh_-pls, _aw_-rnjz, b'_nan_ners,

_s-a-n-d-'ches, p--_op_-corn!"



--"and waxed past noon and drew toward evensong.  Sir Gawaine's

strength feebled and waxed passing faint, that unnethes he might

dure any longer, and Sir Marhaus was then bigger and bigger--"



"Which strained his armor, of course; and yet little would one

of these people mind a small thing like that."



--"and so, Sir Knight, said Sir Marhaus, I have well felt that

ye are a passing good knight, and a marvelous man of might as ever

I felt any, while it lasteth, and our quarrels are not great, and

therefore it were a pity to do you hurt, for I feel you are passing

feeble.  Ah, said Sir Gawaine, gentle knight, ye say the word

that I should say.  And therewith they took off their helms and

either kissed other, and there they swore together either to love

other as brethren--"



But I lost the thread there, and dozed off to slumber, thinking

about what a pity it was that men with such superb strength--

strength enabling them to stand up cased in cruelly burdensome

iron and drenched with perspiration, and hack and batter and bang

each other for six hours on a stretch--should not have been born

at a time when they could put it to some useful purpose.  Take

a jackass, for instance:  a jackass has that kind of strength, and

puts it to a useful purpose, and is valuable to this world because

he is a jackass; but a nobleman is not valuable because he is

a jackass.  It is a mixture that is always ineffectual, and should

never have been attempted in the first place.  And yet, once you

start a mistake, the trouble is done and you never know what is

going to come of it.



When I came to myself again and began to listen, I perceived that

I had lost another chapter, and that Alisande had wandered a long

way off with her people.



"And so they rode and came into a deep valley full of stones,

and thereby they saw a fair stream of water; above thereby was

the head of the stream, a fair fountain, and three damsels sitting

thereby. In this country, said Sir Marhaus, came never knight

since it was christened, but he found strange adventures--"



"This is not good form, Alisande.  Sir Marhaus the king's son of

Ireland talks like all the rest; you ought to give him a brogue,

or at least a characteristic expletive; by this means one would

recognize him as soon as he spoke, without his ever being named.

It is a common literary device with the great authors.  You should

make him say, 'In this country, be jabers, came never knight since

it was christened, but he found strange adventures, be jabers.'

You see how much better that sounds."



--"came never knight but he found strange adventures, be jabers.

Of a truth it doth indeed, fair lord, albeit 'tis passing hard

to say, though peradventure that will not tarry but better speed

with usage.  And then they rode to the damsels, and either saluted

other, and the eldest had a garland of gold about her head, and

she was threescore winter of age or more--"



"The _damsel_ was?"



"Even so, dear lord--and her hair was white under the garland--"



"Celluloid teeth, nine dollars a set, as like as not--the loose-fit

kind, that go up and down like a portcullis when you eat, and

fall out when you laugh."



"The second damsel was of thirty winter of age, with a circlet of

gold about her head.  The third damsel was but fifteen year of age--"



Billows of thought came rolling over my soul, and the voice faded

out of my hearing!



Fifteen!  Break--my heart! oh, my lost darling!  Just her age

who was so gentle, and lovely, and all the world to me, and whom

I shall never see again!  How the thought of her carries me back

over wide seas of memory to a vague dim time, a happy time, so many,

many centuries hence, when I used to wake in the soft summer

mornings, out of sweet dreams of her, and say "Hello, Central!"

just to hear her dear voice come melting back to me with a

"Hello, Hank!" that was music of the spheres to my enchanted ear.

She got three dollars a week, but she was worth it.



I could not follow Alisande's further explanation of who our

captured knights were, now--I mean in case she should ever get

to explaining who they were.  My interest was gone, my thoughts

were far away, and sad.  By fitful glimpses of the drifting tale,

caught here and there and now and then, I merely noted in a vague

way that each of these three knights took one of these three damsels

up behind him on his horse, and one rode north, another east,

the other south, to seek adventures, and meet again and lie, after

year and day.  Year and day--and without baggage.  It was of

a piece with the general simplicity of the country.



The sun was now setting.  It was about three in the afternoon when

Alisande had begun to tell me who the cowboys were; so she had made

pretty good progress with it--for her.  She would arrive some time

or other, no doubt, but she was not a person who could be hurried.



We were approaching a castle which stood on high ground; a huge,

strong, venerable structure, whose gray towers and battlements were

charmingly draped with ivy, and whose whole majestic mass was

drenched with splendors flung from the sinking sun.  It was the

largest castle we had seen, and so I thought it might be the one

we were after, but Sandy said no.  She did not know who owned it;

she said she had passed it without calling, when she went down

to Camelot.







CHAPTER XVI



MORGAN LE FAY



If knights errant were to be believed, not all castles were desirable

places to seek hospitality in.  As a matter of fact, knights errant

were _not_ persons to be believed--that is, measured by modern

standards of veracity; yet, measured by the standards of their own

time, and scaled accordingly, you got the truth.  It was very

simple:  you discounted a statement ninety-seven per cent; the rest

was fact.  Now after making this allowance, the truth remained

that if I could find out something about a castle before ringing

the door-bell--I mean hailing the warders--it was the sensible

thing to do.  So I was pleased when I saw in the distance a horseman

making the bottom turn of the road that wound down from this castle.



As we approached each other, I saw that he wore a plumed helmet,

and seemed to be otherwise clothed in steel, but bore a curious

addition also--a stiff square garment like a herald's tabard.

However, I had to smile at my own forgetfulness when I got nearer

and read this sign on his tabard:



  "Persimmon's Soap -- All the Prime-Donna Use It."



That was a little idea of my own, and had several wholesome purposes

in view toward the civilizing and uplifting of this nation.  In the

first place, it was a furtive, underhand blow at this nonsense

of knight errantry, though nobody suspected that but me.  I had

started a number of these people out--the bravest knights I could

get--each sandwiched between bulletin-boards bearing one device

or another, and I judged that by and by when they got to be numerous

enough they would begin to look ridiculous; and then, even the

steel-clad ass that _hadn't_ any board would himself begin to look

ridiculous because he was out of the fashion.



Secondly, these missionaries would gradually, and without creating

suspicion or exciting alarm, introduce a rudimentary cleanliness

among the nobility, and from them it would work down to the people,

if the priests could be kept quiet.  This would undermine the Church.

I mean would be a step toward that.  Next, education--next, freedom--

and then she would begin to crumble.  It being my conviction that

any Established Church is an established crime, an established

slave-pen, I had no scruples, but was willing to assail it in

any way or with any weapon that promised to hurt it.  Why, in my

own former day--in remote centuries not yet stirring in the womb

of time--there were old Englishmen who imagined that they had been

born in a free country:  a "free" country with the Corporation Act

and the Test still in force in it--timbers propped against men's

liberties and dishonored consciences to shore up an Established

Anachronism with.



My missionaries were taught to spell out the gilt signs on their

tabards--the showy gilding was a neat idea, I could have got the

king to wear a bulletin-board for the sake of that barbaric

splendor--they were to spell out these signs and then explain to

the lords and ladies what soap was; and if the lords and ladies

were afraid of it, get them to try it on a dog.  The missionary's

next move was to get the family together and try it on himself;

he was to stop at no experiment, however desperate, that could

convince the nobility that soap was harmless; if any final doubt

remained, he must catch a hermit--the woods were full of them;

saints they called themselves, and saints they were believed to be.

They were unspeakably holy, and worked miracles, and everybody

stood in awe of them.  If a hermit could survive a wash, and that

failed to convince a duke, give him up, let him alone.



Whenever my missionaries overcame a knight errant on the road

they washed him, and when he got well they swore him to go and

get a bulletin-board and disseminate soap and civilization the rest

of his days.  As a consequence the workers in the field were

increasing by degrees, and the reform was steadily spreading.

My soap factory felt the strain early.  At first I had only two

hands; but before I had left home I was already employing fifteen,

and running night and day; and the atmospheric result was getting

so pronounced that the king went sort of fainting and gasping

around and said he did not believe he could stand it much longer,

and Sir Launcelot got so that he did hardly anything but walk up

and down the roof and swear, although I told him it was worse up

there than anywhere else, but he said he wanted plenty of air; and

he was always complaining that a palace was no place for a soap

factory anyway, and said if a man was to start one in his house

he would be damned if he wouldn't strangle him.  There were ladies

present, too, but much these people ever cared for that; they would

swear before children, if the wind was their way when the factory

was going.



This missionary knight's name was La Cote Male Taile, and he said

that this castle was the abode of Morgan le Fay, sister of

King Arthur, and wife of King Uriens, monarch of a realm about

as big as the District of Columbia--you could stand in the middle

of it and throw bricks into the next kingdom.  "Kings" and "Kingdoms"

were as thick in Britain as they had been in little Palestine in

Joshua's time, when people had to sleep with their knees pulled up

because they couldn't stretch out without a passport.



La Cote was much depressed, for he had scored here the worst

failure of his campaign.  He had not worked off a cake; yet he had

tried all the tricks of the trade, even to the washing of a hermit;

but the hermit died.  This was, indeed, a bad failure, for this

animal would now be dubbed a martyr, and would take his place

among the saints of the Roman calendar.  Thus made he his moan,

this poor Sir La Cote Male Taile, and sorrowed passing sore.  And

so my heart bled for him, and I was moved to comfort and stay him.

Wherefore I said:



"Forbear to grieve, fair knight, for this is not a defeat.  We have

brains, you and I; and for such as have brains there are no defeats,

but only victories.  Observe how we will turn this seeming disaster

into an advertisement; an advertisement for our soap; and the

biggest one, to draw, that was ever thought of; an advertisement

that will transform that Mount Washington defeat into a Matterhorn

victory.  We will put on your bulletin-board, '_Patronized by the

elect_.'  How does that strike you?"



"Verily, it is wonderly bethought!"



"Well, a body is bound to admit that for just a modest little

one-line ad, it's a corker."



So the poor colporteur's griefs vanished away.  He was a brave

fellow, and had done mighty feats of arms in his time.  His chief

celebrity rested upon the events of an excursion like this one

of mine, which he had once made with a damsel named Maledisant,

who was as handy with her tongue as was Sandy, though in a different

way, for her tongue churned forth only railings and insult, whereas

Sandy's music was of a kindlier sort.  I knew his story well, and so

I knew how to interpret the compassion that was in his face when he

bade me farewell.  He supposed I was having a bitter hard time of it.



Sandy and I discussed his story, as we rode along, and she said

that La Cote's bad luck had begun with the very beginning of that

trip; for the king's fool had overthrown him on the first day,

and in such cases it was customary for the girl to desert to the

conqueror, but Maledisant didn't do it; and also persisted afterward

in sticking to him, after all his defeats.  But, said I, suppose

the victor should decline to accept his spoil?  She said that that

wouldn't answer--he must.  He couldn't decline; it wouldn't be

regular.  I made a note of that.  If Sandy's music got to be too

burdensome, some time, I would let a knight defeat me, on the chance

that she would desert to him.



In due time we were challenged by the warders, from the castle

walls, and after a parley admitted.  I have nothing pleasant to

tell about that visit.  But it was not a disappointment, for I knew

Mrs. le Fay by reputation, and was not expecting anything pleasant.

She was held in awe by the whole realm, for she had made everybody

believe she was a great sorceress.  All her ways were wicked, all

her instincts devilish.  She was loaded to the eyelids with cold

malice.  All her history was black with crime; and among her crimes

murder was common.  I was most curious to see her; as curious as

I could have been to see Satan.  To my surprise she was beautiful;

black thoughts had failed to make her expression repulsive, age

had failed to wrinkle her satin skin or mar its bloomy freshness.

She could have passed for old Uriens' granddaughter, she could

have been mistaken for sister to her own son.



As soon as we were fairly within the castle gates we were ordered

into her presence.  King Uriens was there, a kind-faced old man

with a subdued look; and also the son, Sir Uwaine le Blanchemains,

in whom I was, of course, interested on account of the tradition

that he had once done battle with thirty knights, and also on

account of his trip with Sir Gawaine and Sir Marhaus, which Sandy

had been aging me with.  But Morgan was the main attraction, the

conspicuous personality here; she was head chief of this household,

that was plain.  She caused us to be seated, and then she began,

with all manner of pretty graces and graciousnesses, to ask me

questions.  Dear me, it was like a bird or a flute, or something,

talking.  I felt persuaded that this woman must have been

misrepresented, lied about.  She trilled along, and trilled along,

and presently a handsome young page, clothed like the rainbow, and

as easy and undulatory of movement as a wave, came with something

on a golden salver, and, kneeling to present it to her, overdid

his graces and lost his balance, and so fell lightly against her

knee.  She slipped a dirk into him in as matter-of-course a way as

another person would have harpooned a rat!



Poor child! he slumped to the floor, twisted his silken limbs in

one great straining contortion of pain, and was dead.  Out of the

old king was wrung an involuntary "O-h!" of compassion.  The look

he got, made him cut it suddenly short and not put any more hyphens

in it.  Sir Uwaine, at a sign from his mother, went to the anteroom

and called some servants, and meanwhile madame went rippling sweetly

along with her talk.



I saw that she was a good housekeeper, for while she talked she

kept a corner of her eye on the servants to see that they made

no balks in handling the body and getting it out; when they came

with fresh clean towels, she sent back for the other kind; and

when they had finished wiping the floor and were going, she indicated

a crimson fleck the size of a tear which their duller eyes had

overlooked.  It was plain to me that La Cote Male Taile had failed

to see the mistress of the house.  Often, how louder and clearer

than any tongue, does dumb circumstantial evidence speak.



Morgan le Fay rippled along as musically as ever.  Marvelous woman.

And what a glance she had:  when it fell in reproof upon those

servants, they shrunk and quailed as timid people do when the

lightning flashes out of a cloud.  I could have got the habit

myself.  It was the same with that poor old Brer Uriens; he was

always on the ragged edge of apprehension; she could not even turn

toward him but he winced.



In the midst of the talk I let drop a complimentary word about

King Arthur, forgetting for the moment how this woman hated her

brother.  That one little compliment was enough.  She clouded up

like storm; she called for her guards, and said:



"Hale me these varlets to the dungeons."



That struck cold on my ears, for her dungeons had a reputation.

Nothing occurred to me to say--or do.  But not so with Sandy.

As the guard laid a hand upon me, she piped up with the tranquilest

confidence, and said:



"God's wounds, dost thou covet destruction, thou maniac?  It is

The Boss!"



Now what a happy idea that was!--and so simple; yet it would never

have occurred to me.  I was born modest; not all over, but in spots;

and this was one of the spots.



The effect upon madame was electrical.  It cleared her countenance

and brought back her smiles and all her persuasive graces and

blandishments; but nevertheless she was not able to entirely cover up

with them the fact that she was in a ghastly fright. She said:



"La, but do list to thine handmaid! as if one gifted with powers

like to mine might say the thing which I have said unto one who

has vanquished Merlin, and not be jesting.  By mine enchantments

I foresaw your coming, and by them I knew you when you entered

here.  I did but play this little jest with hope to surprise you

into some display of your art, as not doubting you would blast

the guards with occult fires, consuming them to ashes on the spot,

a marvel much beyond mine own ability, yet one which I have long

been childishly curious to see."



The guards were less curious, and got out as soon as they got permission.







CHAPTER XVII



A ROYAL BANQUET



Madame, seeing me pacific and unresentful, no doubt judged that

I was deceived by her excuse; for her fright dissolved away, and

she was soon so importunate to have me give an exhibition and kill

somebody, that the thing grew to be embarrassing.  However, to my

relief she was presently interrupted by the call to prayers.  I will

say this much for the nobility:  that, tyrannical, murderous,

rapacious, and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and

enthusiastically religious.  Nothing could divert them from the

regular and faithful performance of the pieties enjoined by the

Church.  More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his

enemy at a disadvantage, stop to pray before cutting his throat;

more than once I had seen a noble, after ambushing and despatching

his enemy, retire to the nearest wayside shrine and humbly give

thanks, without even waiting to rob the body.  There was to be

nothing finer or sweeter in the life of even Benvenuto Cellini,

that rough-hewn saint, ten centuries later.  All the nobles of

Britain, with their families, attended divine service morning and

night daily, in their private chapels, and even the worst of them

had family worship five or six times a day besides.  The credit

of this belonged entirely to the Church.  Although I was no friend

to that Catholic Church, I was obliged to admit this.  And often,

in spite of me, I found myself saying, "What would this country

be without the Church?"



After prayers we had dinner in a great banqueting hall which was

lighted by hundreds of grease-jets, and everything was as fine and

lavish and rudely splendid as might become the royal degree of the

hosts.  At the head of the hall, on a dais, was the table of the

king, queen, and their son, Prince Uwaine.  Stretching down the hall

from this, was the general table, on the floor.  At this, above

the salt, sat the visiting nobles and the grown members of their

families, of both sexes,--the resident Court, in effect--sixty-one

persons; below the salt sat minor officers of the household, with

their principal subordinates:  altogether a hundred and eighteen

persons sitting, and about as many liveried servants standing

behind their chairs, or serving in one capacity or another.  It was

a very fine show.  In a gallery a band with cymbals, horns, harps,

and other horrors, opened the proceedings with what seemed to be

the crude first-draft or original agony of the wail known to later

centuries as "In the Sweet Bye and Bye."  It was new, and ought

to have been rehearsed a little more.  For some reason or other

the queen had the composer hanged, after dinner.



After this music, the priest who stood behind the royal table said

a noble long grace in ostensible Latin.  Then the battalion of

waiters broke away from their posts, and darted, rushed, flew,

fetched and carried, and the mighty feeding began; no words

anywhere, but absorbing attention to business.  The rows of chops

opened and shut in vast unison, and the sound of it was like to

the muffled burr of subterranean machinery.



The havoc continued an hour and a half, and unimaginable was the

destruction of substantials.  Of the chief feature of the feast--

the huge wild boar that lay stretched out so portly and imposing

at the start--nothing was left but the semblance of a hoop-skirt;

and he was but the type and symbol of what had happened to all

the other dishes.



With the pastries and so on, the heavy drinking began--and the talk.

Gallon after gallon of wine and mead disappeared, and everybody

got comfortable, then happy, then sparklingly joyous--both sexes,--

and by and by pretty noisy.  Men told anecdotes that were terrific

to hear, but nobody blushed; and when the nub was sprung, the

assemblage let go with a horse-laugh that shook the fortress.

Ladies answered back with historiettes that would almost have made

Queen Margaret of Navarre or even the great Elizabeth of England

hide behind a handkerchief, but nobody hid here, but only laughed--

howled, you may say.  In pretty much all of these dreadful stories,

ecclesiastics were the hardy heroes, but that didn't worry the

chaplain any, he had his laugh with the rest; more than that, upon

invitation he roared out a song which was of as daring a sort as

any that was sung that night.



By midnight everybody was fagged out, and sore with laughing; and,

as a rule, drunk:  some weepingly, some affectionately, some

hilariously, some quarrelsomely, some dead and under the table.

Of the ladies, the worst spectacle was a lovely young duchess, whose

wedding-eve this was; and indeed she was a spectacle, sure enough.

Just as she was she could have sat in advance for the portrait of the

young daughter of the Regent d'Orleans, at the famous dinner whence

she was carried, foul-mouthed, intoxicated, and helpless, to her bed,

in the lost and lamented days of the Ancient Regime.



Suddenly, even while the priest was lifting his hands, and all

conscious heads were bowed in reverent expectation of the coming

blessing, there appeared under the arch of the far-off door at

the bottom of the hall an old and bent and white-haired lady,

leaning upon a crutch-stick; and she lifted the stick and pointed it

toward the queen and cried out:



"The wrath and curse of God fall upon you, woman without pity,

who have slain mine innocent grandchild and made desolate this

old heart that had nor chick, nor friend nor stay nor comfort in

all this world but him!"



Everybody crossed himself in a grisly fright, for a curse was an

awful thing to those people; but the queen rose up majestic, with

the death-light in her eye, and flung back this ruthless command:



"Lay hands on her!  To the stake with her!"



The guards left their posts to obey.  It was a shame; it was a

cruel thing to see.  What could be done?  Sandy gave me a look;

I knew she had another inspiration.  I said:



"Do what you choose."



She was up and facing toward the queen in a moment.  She indicated

me, and said:



"Madame, _he_ saith this may not be.  Recall the commandment, or he

will dissolve the castle and it shall vanish away like the instable

fabric of a dream!"



Confound it, what a crazy contract to pledge a person to!  What if

the queen--



But my consternation subsided there, and my panic passed off;

for the queen, all in a collapse, made no show of resistance but

gave a countermanding sign and sunk into her seat.  When she reached

it she was sober.  So were many of the others.  The assemblage rose,

whiffed ceremony to the winds, and rushed for the door like a mob;

overturning chairs, smashing crockery, tugging, struggling,

shouldering, crowding--anything to get out before I should change

my mind and puff the castle into the measureless dim vacancies of

space.  Well, well, well, they _were_ a superstitious lot.  It is

all a body can do to conceive of it.



The poor queen was so scared and humbled that she was even afraid

to hang the composer without first consulting me.  I was very sorry

for her--indeed, any one would have been, for she was really

suffering; so I was willing to do anything that was reasonable, and

had no desire to carry things to wanton extremities.  I therefore

considered the matter thoughtfully, and ended by having the

musicians ordered into our presence to play that Sweet Bye and

Bye again, which they did.  Then I saw that she was right, and

gave her permission to hang the whole band.  This little relaxation

of sternness had a good effect upon the queen.  A statesman gains

little by the arbitrary exercise of iron-clad authority upon all

occasions that offer, for this wounds the just pride of his

subordinates, and thus tends to undermine his strength.  A little

concession, now and then, where it can do no harm, is the wiser policy.



Now that the queen was at ease in her mind once more, and measurably

happy, her wine naturally began to assert itself again, and it got

a little the start of her.  I mean it set her music going--her silver

bell of a tongue.  Dear me, she was a master talker.  It would not

become me to suggest that it was pretty late and that I was a tired

man and very sleepy.  I wished I had gone off to bed when I had

the chance.  Now I must stick it out; there was no other way.  So

she tinkled along and along, in the otherwise profound and ghostly

hush of the sleeping castle, until by and by there came, as if

from deep down under us, a far-away sound, as of a muffled shriek--

with an expression of agony about it that made my flesh crawl.

The queen stopped, and her eyes lighted with pleasure; she tilted

her graceful head as a bird does when it listens.  The sound bored

its way up through the stillness again.



"What is it?" I said.



"It is truly a stubborn soul, and endureth long.  It is many hours now."



"Endureth what?"



"The rack.  Come--ye shall see a blithe sight.  An he yield not

his secret now, ye shall see him torn asunder."



What a silky smooth hellion she was; and so composed and serene,

when the cords all down my legs were hurting in sympathy with that

man's pain.  Conducted by mailed guards bearing flaring torches,

we tramped along echoing corridors, and down stone stairways dank

and dripping, and smelling of mould and ages of imprisoned night--

a chill, uncanny journey and a long one, and not made the shorter

or the cheerier by the sorceress's talk, which was about this

sufferer and his crime.  He had been accused by an anonymous

informer, of having killed a stag in the royal preserves.  I said:



"Anonymous testimony isn't just the right thing, your Highness.

It were fairer to confront the accused with the accuser."



"I had not thought of that, it being but of small consequence.

But an I would, I could not, for that the accuser came masked by

night, and told the forester, and straightway got him hence again,

and so the forester knoweth him not."



"Then is this Unknown the only person who saw the stag killed?"



"Marry, _no_ man _saw_ the killing, but this Unknown saw this hardy

wretch near to the spot where the stag lay, and came with right

loyal zeal and betrayed him to the forester."



"So the Unknown was near the dead stag, too?  Isn't it just possible

that he did the killing himself?  His loyal zeal--in a mask--looks

just a shade suspicious.  But what is your highness's idea for

racking the prisoner?  Where is the profit?"



"He will not confess, else; and then were his soul lost.  For his

crime his life is forfeited by the law--and of a surety will I see

that he payeth it!--but it were peril to my own soul to let him

die unconfessed and unabsolved.  Nay, I were a fool to fling me

into hell for _his_ accommodation."



"But, your Highness, suppose he has nothing to confess?"



"As to that, we shall see, anon.  An I rack him to death and he

confess not, it will peradventure show that he had indeed naught

to confess--ye will grant that that is sooth?  Then shall I not be

damned for an unconfessed man that had naught to confess--

wherefore, I shall be safe."



It was the stubborn unreasoning of the time.  It was useless to

argue with her.  Arguments have no chance against petrified

training; they wear it as little as the waves wear a cliff.  And

her training was everybody's.  The brightest intellect in the land

would not have been able to see that her position was defective.



As we entered the rack-cell I caught a picture that will not go

from me; I wish it would.  A native young giant of thirty or

thereabouts lay stretched upon the frame on his back, with his

wrists and ankles tied to ropes which led over windlasses at either

end.  There was no color in him; his features were contorted and

set, and sweat-drops stood upon his forehead.  A priest bent over

him on each side; the executioner stood by; guards were on duty;

smoking torches stood in sockets along the walls; in a corner

crouched a poor young creature, her face drawn with anguish,

a half-wild and hunted look in her eyes, and in her lap lay a little

child asleep.  Just as we stepped across the threshold the

executioner gave his machine a slight turn, which wrung a cry

from both the prisoner and the woman; but I shouted, and the

executioner released the strain without waiting to see who spoke.

I could not let this horror go on; it would have killed me to

see it.  I asked the queen to let me clear the place and speak

to the prisoner privately; and when she was going to object I spoke

in a low voice and said I did not want to make a scene before

her servants, but I must have my way; for I was King Arthur's

representative, and was speaking in his name.  She saw she had

to yield.  I asked her to indorse me to these people, and then

leave me.  It was not pleasant for her, but she took the pill;

and even went further than I was meaning to require.  I only wanted

the backing of her own authority; but she said:



"Ye will do in all things as this lord shall command.  It is The Boss."



It was certainly a good word to conjure with:  you could see it

by the squirming of these rats.  The queen's guards fell into line,

and she and they marched away, with their torch-bearers, and woke

the echoes of the cavernous tunnels with the measured beat of their

retreating footfalls.  I had the prisoner taken from the rack and

placed upon his bed, and medicaments applied to his hurts, and

wine given him to drink.  The woman crept near and looked on,

eagerly, lovingly, but timorously,--like one who fears a repulse;

indeed, she tried furtively to touch the man's forehead, and jumped

back, the picture of fright, when I turned unconsciously toward

her.  It was pitiful to see.



"Lord," I said, "stroke him, lass, if you want to.  Do anything

you're a mind to; don't mind me."



Why, her eyes were as grateful as an animal's, when you do it

a kindness that it understands.  The baby was out of her way and

she had her cheek against the man's in a minute and her hands

fondling his hair, and her happy tears running down.  The man

revived and caressed his wife with his eyes, which was all he

could do.  I judged I might clear the den, now, and I did; cleared

it of all but the family and myself.  Then I said:



"Now, my friend, tell me your side of this matter; I know

the other side."



The man moved his head in sign of refusal.  But the woman looked

pleased--as it seemed to me--pleased with my suggestion.  I went on--



"You know of me?"



"Yes.  All do, in Arthur's realms."



"If my reputation has come to you right and straight, you should

not be afraid to speak."



The woman broke in, eagerly:



"Ah, fair my lord, do thou persuade him!  Thou canst an thou wilt.

Ah, he suffereth so; and it is for me--for _me_!  And how can I bear it?

I would I might see him die--a sweet, swift death; oh, my Hugo,

I cannot bear this one!"



And she fell to sobbing and grovelling about my feet, and still

imploring.  Imploring what?  The man's death?  I could not quite

get the bearings of the thing.  But Hugo interrupted her and said:



"Peace!  Ye wit not what ye ask.  Shall I starve whom I love,

to win a gentle death?  I wend thou knewest me better."



"Well," I said, "I can't quite make this out.  It is a puzzle.  Now--"



"Ah, dear my lord, an ye will but persuade him!  Consider how

these his tortures wound me!  Oh, and he will not speak!--whereas,

the healing, the solace that lie in a blessed swift death--"



"What _are_ you maundering about?  He's going out from here a free

man and whole--he's not going to die."



The man's white face lit up, and the woman flung herself at me

in a most surprising explosion of joy, and cried out:



"He is saved!--for it is the king's word by the mouth of the king's

servant--Arthur, the king whose word is gold!"



"Well, then you do believe I can be trusted, after all.  Why

didn't you before?"



"Who doubted?  Not I, indeed; and not she."



"Well, why wouldn't you tell me your story, then?"



"Ye had made no promise; else had it been otherwise."



"I see, I see....  And yet I believe I don't quite see, after all.

You stood the torture and refused to confess; which shows plain

enough to even the dullest understanding that you had nothing

to confess--"



"I, my lord?  How so?  It was I that killed the deer!"



"You _did_?  Oh, dear, this is the most mixed-up business that ever--"



"Dear lord, I begged him on my knees to confess, but--"



"You _did_!  It gets thicker and thicker.  What did you want him

to do that for?"



"Sith it would bring him a quick death and save him all this

cruel pain."



"Well--yes, there is reason in that.  But _he_ didn't want the

quick death."



"He?  Why, of a surety he _did_."



"Well, then, why in the world _didn't_ he confess?"



"Ah, sweet sir, and leave my wife and chick without bread and shelter?"



"Oh, heart of gold, now I see it!  The bitter law takes the convicted

man's estate and beggars his widow and his orphans.  They could

torture you to death, but without conviction or confession they

could not rob your wife and baby.  You stood by them like a man;

and _you_--true wife and the woman that you are--you would have

bought him release from torture at cost to yourself of slow

starvation and death--well, it humbles a body to think what your

sex can do when it comes to self-sacrifice.  I'll book you both

for my colony; you'll like it there; it's a Factory where I'm going

to turn groping and grubbing automata into _men_."







CHAPTER XVIII



IN THE QUEEN'S DUNGEONS



Well, I arranged all that; and I had the man sent to his home.

I had a great desire to rack the executioner; not because he was

a good, painstaking and paingiving official,--for surely it was

not to his discredit that he performed his functions well--but to

pay him back for wantonly cuffing and otherwise distressing that

young woman.  The priests told me about this, and were generously

hot to have him punished.  Something of this disagreeable sort

was turning up every now and then.  I mean, episodes that showed

that not all priests were frauds and self-seekers, but that many,

even the great majority, of these that were down on the ground

among the common people, were sincere and right-hearted, and

devoted to the alleviation of human troubles and sufferings.

Well, it was a thing which could not be helped, so I seldom fretted

about it, and never many minutes at a time; it has never been my

way to bother much about things which you can't cure.  But I did

not like it, for it was just the sort of thing to keep people

reconciled to an Established Church.  We _must_ have a religion--

it goes without saying--but my idea is, to have it cut up into

forty free sects, so that they will police each other, as had been

the case in the United States in my time.  Concentration of power

in a political machine is bad; and and an Established Church is

only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed,

cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and

does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered

condition.  That wasn't law; it wasn't gospel:  it was only

an opinion--my opinion, and I was only a man, one man: so it wasn't

worth any more than the pope's--or any less, for that matter.



Well, I couldn't rack the executioner, neither would I overlook

the just complaint of the priests.  The man must be punished

somehow or other, so I degraded him from his office and made him

leader of the band--the new one that was to be started.  He begged

hard, and said he couldn't play--a plausible excuse, but too thin;

there wasn't a musician in the country that could.



The queen was a good deal outraged, next morning when she found

she was going to have neither Hugo's life nor his property.  But

I told her she must bear this cross; that while by law and custom

she certainly was entitled to both the man's life and his property,

there were extenuating circumstances, and so in Arthur the king's

name I had pardoned him.  The deer was ravaging the man's fields,

and he had killed it in sudden passion, and not for gain; and he

had carried it into the royal forest in the hope that that might make

detection of the misdoer impossible.  Confound her, I couldn't

make her see that sudden passion is an extenuating circumstance

in the killing of venison--or of a person--so I gave it up and let

her sulk it out.  I _did_ think I was going to make her see it by

remarking that her own sudden passion in the case of the page

modified that crime.



"Crime!" she exclaimed.  "How thou talkest!  Crime, forsooth!

Man, I am going to _pay_ for him!"



Oh, it was no use to waste sense on her.  Training--training is

everything; training is all there is _to_ a person.  We speak of

nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we

call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training.

We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are

transmitted to us, trained into us.  All that is original in us,

and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable to us, can be

covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the

rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession

of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam

or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously

and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed.  And as for me,

all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this

pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly

live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one

microscopic atom in me that is truly _me_:  the rest may land in

Sheol and welcome for all I care.



No, confound her, her intellect was good, she had brains enough,

but her training made her an ass--that is, from a many-centuries-later

point of view.  To kill the page was no crime--it was her right;

and upon her right she stood, serenely and unconscious of offense.

She was a result of generations of training in the unexamined and

unassailed belief that the law which permitted her to kill a subject

when she chose was a perfectly right and righteous one.



Well, we must give even Satan his due.  She deserved a compliment

for one thing; and I tried to pay it, but the words stuck in my

throat.  She had a right to kill the boy, but she was in no wise

obliged to pay for him.  That was law for some other people, but

not for her.  She knew quite well that she was doing a large and

generous thing to pay for that lad, and that I ought in common

fairness to come out with something handsome about it, but I

couldn't--my mouth refused.  I couldn't help seeing, in my fancy,

that poor old grandma with the broken heart, and that fair young

creature lying butchered, his little silken pomps and vanities

laced with his golden blood.  How could she _pay_ for him!  _Whom_

could she pay?  And so, well knowing that this woman, trained

as she had been, deserved praise, even adulation, I was yet not

able to utter it, trained as I had been.  The best I could do was

to fish up a compliment from outside, so to speak--and the pity

of it was, that it was true:



"Madame, your people will adore you for this."



Quite true, but I meant to hang her for it some day if I lived.

Some of those laws were too bad, altogether too bad.  A master

might kill his slave for nothing--for mere spite, malice, or

to pass the time--just as we have seen that the crowned head could

do it with _his_ slave, that is to say, anybody.  A gentleman could

kill a free commoner, and pay for him--cash or garden-truck.

A noble could kill a noble without expense, as far as the law was

concerned, but reprisals in kind were to be expected.  _Any_body

could kill _some_body, except the commoner and the slave; these had

no privileges.  If they killed, it was murder, and the law wouldn't

stand murder.  It made short work of the experimenter--and of

his family, too, if he murdered somebody who belonged up among

the ornamental ranks.  If a commoner gave a noble even so much

as a Damiens-scratch which didn't kill or even hurt, he got Damiens'

dose for it just the same; they pulled him to rags and tatters

with horses, and all the world came to see the show, and crack

jokes, and have a good time; and some of the performances of the

best people present were as tough, and as properly unprintable,

as any that have been printed by the pleasant Casanova in his

chapter about the dismemberment of Louis XV's poor awkward enemy.



I had had enough of this grisly place by this time, and wanted

to leave, but I couldn't, because I had something on my mind that

my conscience kept prodding me about, and wouldn't let me forget.

If I had the remaking of man, he wouldn't have any conscience.

It is one of the most disagreeable things connected with a person;

and although it certainly does a great deal of good, it cannot

be said to pay, in the long run; it would be much better to have

less good and more comfort.  Still, this is only my opinion, and

I am only one man; others, with less experience, may think

differently.  They have a right to their view.  I only stand

to this:  I have noticed my conscience for many years, and I know

it is more trouble and bother to me than anything else I started

with.  I suppose that in the beginning I prized it, because we

prize anything that is ours; and yet how foolish it was to think so.

If we look at it in another way, we see how absurd it is:  if I had

an anvil in me would I prize it?  Of course not.  And yet when you

come to think, there is no real difference between a conscience

and an anvil--I mean for comfort.  I have noticed it a thousand

times.  And you could dissolve an anvil with acids, when you

couldn't stand it any longer; but there isn't any way that you can

work off a conscience--at least so it will stay worked off; not

that I know of, anyway.



There was something I wanted to do before leaving, but it was

a disagreeable matter, and I hated to go at it.  Well, it bothered

me all the morning.  I could have mentioned it to the old king,

but what would be the use?--he was but an extinct volcano; he had

been active in his time, but his fire was out, this good while,

he was only a stately ash-pile now; gentle enough, and kindly

enough for my purpose, without doubt, but not usable.  He was

nothing, this so-called king:  the queen was the only power there.

And she was a Vesuvius.  As a favor, she might consent to warm

a flock of sparrows for you, but then she might take that very

opportunity to turn herself loose and bury a city.  However,

I reflected that as often as any other way, when you are expecting

the worst, you get something that is not so bad, after all.



So I braced up and placed my matter before her royal Highness.

I said I had been having a general jail-delivery at Camelot and

among neighboring castles, and with her permission I would like

to examine her collection, her bric-a-brac--that is to say, her

prisoners.  She resisted; but I was expecting that.  But she finally

consented.  I was expecting that, too, but not so soon.  That about

ended my discomfort.  She called her guards and torches, and

we went down into the dungeons.  These were down under the castle's

foundations, and mainly were small cells hollowed out of the living

rock.  Some of these cells had no light at all.  In one of them was

a woman, in foul rags, who sat on the ground, and would not answer

a question or speak a word, but only looked up at us once or twice,

through a cobweb of tangled hair, as if to see what casual thing

it might be that was disturbing with sound and light the meaningless

dull dream that was become her life; after that, she sat bowed,

with her dirt-caked fingers idly interlocked in her lap, and gave

no further sign.  This poor rack of bones was a woman of middle

age, apparently; but only apparently; she had been there nine

years, and was eighteen when she entered.  She was a commoner,

and had been sent here on her bridal night by Sir Breuse Sance Pite,

a neighboring lord whose vassal her father was, and to which said

lord she had refused what has since been called le droit du

seigneur, and, moreover, had opposed violence to violence and spilt

half a gill of his almost sacred blood.  The young husband had

interfered at that point, believing the bride's life in danger,

and had flung the noble out into the midst of the humble and

trembling wedding guests, in the parlor, and left him there

astonished at this strange treatment, and implacably embittered

against both bride and groom.  The said lord being cramped for

dungeon-room had asked the queen to accommodate his two criminals,

and here in her bastile they had been ever since; hither, indeed,

they had come before their crime was an hour old, and had never

seen each other since.  Here they were, kenneled like toads in the

same rock; they had passed nine pitch dark years within fifty feet

of each other, yet neither knew whether the other was alive or not.

All the first years, their only question had been--asked with

beseechings and tears that might have moved stones, in time,

perhaps, but hearts are not stones:  "Is he alive?"  "Is she alive?"

But they had never got an answer; and at last that question was

not asked any more--or any other.



I wanted to see the man, after hearing all this.  He was thirty-four

years old, and looked sixty.  He sat upon a squared block of

stone, with his head bent down, his forearms resting on his knees,

his long hair hanging like a fringe before his face, and he was

muttering to himself.  He raised his chin and looked us slowly

over, in a listless dull way, blinking with the distress of the

torchlight, then dropped his head and fell to muttering again

and took no further notice of us.  There were some pathetically

suggestive dumb witnesses present.  On his wrists and ankles were

cicatrices, old smooth scars, and fastened to the stone on which

he sat was a chain with manacles and fetters attached; but this

apparatus lay idle on the ground, and was thick with rust.  Chains

cease to be needed after the spirit has gone out of a prisoner.



I could not rouse the man; so I said we would take him to her,

and see--to the bride who was the fairest thing in the earth to him,

once--roses, pearls, and dew made flesh, for him; a wonder-work,

the master-work of nature:  with eyes like no other eyes, and voice

like no other voice, and a freshness, and lithe young grace, and

beauty, that belonged properly to the creatures of dreams--as he

thought--and to no other.  The sight of her would set his stagnant

blood leaping; the sight of her--



But it was a disappointment.  They sat together on the ground and

looked dimly wondering into each other's faces a while, with a

sort of weak animal curiosity; then forgot each other's presence,

and dropped their eyes, and you saw that they were away again and

wandering in some far land of dreams and shadows that we know

nothing about.



I had them taken out and sent to their friends.  The queen did not

like it much.  Not that she felt any personal interest in the matter,

but she thought it disrespectful to Sir Breuse Sance Pite.  However,

I assured her that if he found he couldn't stand it I would fix him

so that he could.



I set forty-seven prisoners loose out of those awful rat-holes,

and left only one in captivity.  He was a lord, and had killed

another lord, a sort of kinsman of the queen.  That other lord

had ambushed him to assassinate him, but this fellow had got the

best of him and cut his throat.  However, it was not for that that

I left him jailed, but for maliciously destroying the only public

well in one of his wretched villages.  The queen was bound to hang

him for killing her kinsman, but I would not allow it:  it was no

crime to kill an assassin.  But I said I was willing to let her

hang him for destroying the well; so she concluded to put up with

that, as it was better than nothing.



Dear me, for what trifling offenses the most of those forty-seven

men and women were shut up there!  Indeed, some were there for

no distinct offense at all, but only to gratify somebody's spite;

and not always the queen's by any means, but a friend's.  The newest

prisoner's crime was a mere remark which he had made.  He said

he believed that men were about all alike, and one man as good

as another, barring clothes.  He said he believed that if you were

to strip the nation naked and send a stranger through the crowd, he

couldn't tell the king from a quack doctor, nor a duke from a hotel

clerk.  Apparently here was a man whose brains had not been reduced

to an ineffectual mush by idiotic training.  I set him loose and

sent him to the Factory.



Some of the cells carved in the living rock were just behind the

face of the precipice, and in each of these an arrow-slit had been

pierced outward to the daylight, and so the captive had a thin

ray from the blessed sun for his comfort.  The case of one of

these poor fellows was particularly hard.  From his dusky swallow's

hole high up in that vast wall of native rock he could peer out

through the arrow-slit and see his own home off yonder in the

valley; and for twenty-two years he had watched it, with heartache

and longing, through that crack.  He could see the lights shine

there at night, and in the daytime he could see figures go in and

come out--his wife and children, some of them, no doubt, though

he could not make out at that distance.  In the course of years

he noted festivities there, and tried to rejoice, and wondered

if they were weddings or what they might be.  And he noted funerals;

and they wrung his heart.  He could make out the coffin, but he

could not determine its size, and so could not tell whether it was

wife or child.  He could see the procession form, with priests

and mourners, and move solemnly away, bearing the secret with

them.  He had left behind him five children and a wife; and in

nineteen years he had seen five funerals issue, and none of them

humble enough in pomp to denote a servant.  So he had lost five

of his treasures; there must still be one remaining--one now

infinitely, unspeakably precious,--but _which_ one? wife, or child?

That was the question that tortured him, by night and by day,

asleep and awake.  Well, to have an interest, of some sort, and

half a ray of light, when you are in a dungeon, is a great support

to the body and preserver of the intellect.  This man was in pretty

good condition yet.  By the time he had finished telling me his

distressful tale, I was in the same state of mind that you would

have been in yourself, if you have got average human curiosity;

that is to say, I was as burning up as he was to find out which

member of the family it was that was left.  So I took him over

home myself; and an amazing kind of a surprise party it was, too--

typhoons and cyclones of frantic joy, and whole Niagaras of happy

tears; and by George! we found the aforetime young matron graying

toward the imminent verge of her half century, and the babies all

men and women, and some of them married and experimenting familywise

themselves--for not a soul of the tribe was dead!  Conceive of the

ingenious devilishness of that queen:  she had a special hatred for

this prisoner, and she had _invented_ all those funerals herself,

to scorch his heart with; and the sublimest stroke of genius of

the whole thing was leaving the family-invoice a funeral _short_,

so as to let him wear his poor old soul out guessing.



But for me, he never would have got out.  Morgan le Fay hated him

with her whole heart, and she never would have softened toward him.

And yet his crime was committed more in thoughtlessness than

deliberate depravity.  He had said she had red hair.  Well, she

had; but that was no way to speak of it.  When red-headed people

are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.



Consider it:  among these forty-seven captives there were five

whose names, offenses, and dates of incarceration were no longer

known!  One woman and four men--all bent, and wrinkled, and

mind-extinguished patriarchs.  They themselves had long ago forgotten

these details; at any rate they had mere vague theories about them,

nothing definite and nothing that they repeated twice in the same

way.  The succession of priests whose office it had been to pray

daily with the captives and remind them that God had put them

there, for some wise purpose or other, and teach them that patience,

humbleness, and submission to oppression was what He loved to see

in parties of a subordinate rank, had traditions about these poor

old human ruins, but nothing more.  These traditions went but

little way, for they concerned the length of the incarceration only,

and not the names of the offenses.  And even by the help of

tradition the only thing that could be proven was that none of

the five had seen daylight for thirty-five years:  how much longer

this privation has lasted was not guessable.  The king and the queen

knew nothing about these poor creatures, except that they were

heirlooms, assets inherited, along with the throne, from the former

firm.  Nothing of their history had been transmitted with their

persons, and so the inheriting owners had considered them of no

value, and had felt no interest in them.  I said to the queen:



"Then why in the world didn't you set them free?"



The question was a puzzler.  She didn't know _why_ she hadn't, the

thing had never come up in her mind.  So here she was, forecasting

the veritable history of future prisoners of the Castle d'If,

without knowing it.  It seemed plain to me now, that with her

training, those inherited prisoners were merely property--nothing

more, nothing less.  Well, when we inherit property, it does not

occur to us to throw it away, even when we do not value it.



When I brought my procession of human bats up into the open world

and the glare of the afternoon sun--previously blindfolding them,

in charity for eyes so long untortured by light--they were a

spectacle to look at.  Skeletons, scarecrows, goblins, pathetic

frights, every one; legitimatest possible children of Monarchy

by the Grace of God and the Established Church.  I muttered absently:



"I _wish_ I could photograph them!"



You have seen that kind of people who will never let on that they

don't know the meaning of a new big word.  The more ignorant they

are, the more pitifully certain they are to pretend you haven't

shot over their heads.  The queen was just one of that sort, and

was always making the stupidest blunders by reason of it.  She

hesitated a moment; then her face brightened up with sudden

comprehension, and she said she would do it for me.



I thought to myself:  She? why what can she know about photography?

But it was a poor time to be thinking.  When I looked around, she

was moving on the procession with an axe!



Well, she certainly was a curious one, was Morgan le Fay.  I have

seen a good many kinds of women in my time, but she laid over them

all for variety.  And how sharply characteristic of her this episode

was.  She had no more idea than a horse of how to photograph

a procession; but being in doubt, it was just like her to try

to do it with an axe.







CHAPTER XIX



KNIGHT-ERRANTRY AS A TRADE



Sandy and I were on the road again, next morning, bright and early.

It was so good to open up one's lungs and take in whole luscious

barrels-ful of the blessed God's untainted, dew-fashioned, woodland-

scented air once more, after suffocating body and mind for two

days and nights in the moral and physical stenches of that intolerable

old buzzard-roost!  I mean, for me:  of course the place was all

right and agreeable enough for Sandy, for she had been used to

high life all her days.



Poor girl, her jaws had had a wearisome rest now for a while,

and I was expecting to get the consequences.  I was right; but she

had stood by me most helpfully in the castle, and had mightily

supported and reinforced me with gigantic foolishnesses which were

worth more for the occasion than wisdoms double their size; so

I thought she had earned a right to work her mill for a while,

if she wanted to, and I felt not a pang when she started it up:



"Now turn we unto Sir Marhaus that rode with the damsel of thirty

winter of age southward--"



"Are you going to see if you can work up another half-stretch on

the trail of the cowboys, Sandy?"



"Even so, fair my lord."



"Go ahead, then.  I won't interrupt this time, if I can help it.

Begin over again; start fair, and shake out all your reefs, and

I will load my pipe and give good attention."



"Now turn we unto Sir Marhaus that rode with the damsel of thirty

winter of age southward.  And so they came into a deep forest,

and by fortune they were nighted, and rode along in a deep way,

and at the last they came into a courtelage where abode the duke

of South Marches, and there they asked harbour.  And on the morn

the duke sent unto Sir Marhaus, and bad him make him ready.  And

so Sir Marhaus arose and armed him, and there was a mass sung

afore him, and he brake his fast, and so mounted on horseback in

the court of the castle, there they should do the battle.  So there

was the duke already on horseback, clean armed, and his six sons

by him, and every each had a spear in his hand, and so they

encountered, whereas the duke and his two sons brake their spears

upon him, but Sir Marhaus held up his spear and touched none of

them.  Then came the four sons by couples, and two of them brake

their spears, and so did the other two.  And all this while

Sir Marhaus touched them not.  Then Sir Marhaus ran to the duke,

and smote him with his spear that horse and man fell to the earth.

And so he served his sons.  And then Sir Marhaus alight down, and

bad the duke yield him or else he would slay him.  And then some

of his sons recovered, and would have set upon Sir Marhaus.  Then

Sir Marhaus said to the duke, Cease thy sons, or else I will do

the uttermost to you all.  When the duke saw he might not escape

the death, he cried to his sons, and charged them to yield them

to Sir Marhaus.  And they kneeled all down and put the pommels

of their swords to the knight, and so he received them.  And then

they holp up their father, and so by their common assent promised

unto Sir Marhaus never to be foes unto King Arthur, and thereupon

at Whitsuntide after, to come he and his sons, and put them in

the king's grace.*



[*Footnote:  The story is borrowed, language and all, from the

Morte d'Arthur. --M.T.]



"Even so standeth the history, fair Sir Boss.  Now ye shall wit

that that very duke and his six sons are they whom but few days

past you also did overcome and send to Arthur's court!"



"Why, Sandy, you can't mean it!"



"An I speak not sooth, let it be the worse for me."



"Well, well, well,--now who would ever have thought it?  One

whole duke and six dukelets; why, Sandy, it was an elegant haul.

Knight-errantry is a most chuckle-headed trade, and it is tedious

hard work, too, but I begin to see that there _is_ money in it,

after all, if you have luck.  Not that I would ever engage in it

as a business, for I wouldn't.  No sound and legitimate business

can be established on a basis of speculation.  A successful whirl

in the knight-errantry line--now what is it when you blow away

the nonsense and come down to the cold facts?  It's just a corner

in pork, that's all, and you can't make anything else out of it.

You're rich--yes,--suddenly rich--for about a day, maybe a week;

then somebody corners the market on _you_, and down goes your

bucket-shop; ain't that so, Sandy?"



"Whethersoever it be that my mind miscarrieth, bewraying simple

language in such sort that the words do seem to come endlong

and overthwart--"



"There's no use in beating about the bush and trying to get around

it that way, Sandy, it's _so_, just as I say.  I _know_ it's so.  And,

moreover, when you come right down to the bedrock, knight-errantry

is _worse_ than pork; for whatever happens, the pork's left, and

so somebody's benefited anyway; but when the market breaks, in a

knight-errantry whirl, and every knight in the pool passes in his

checks, what have you got for assets?  Just a rubbish-pile of

battered corpses and a barrel or two of busted hardware.  Can you

call _those_ assets?  Give me pork, every time.  Am I right?"



"Ah, peradventure my head being distraught by the manifold matters

whereunto the confusions of these but late adventured haps and

fortunings whereby not I alone nor you alone, but every each of us,

meseemeth--"



"No, it's not your head, Sandy.  Your head's all right, as far as

it goes, but you don't know business; that's where the trouble

is.  It unfits you to argue about business, and you're wrong

to be always trying.  However, that aside, it was a good haul,

anyway, and will breed a handsome crop of reputation in Arthur's

court.  And speaking of the cowboys, what a curious country this

is for women and men that never get old.  Now there's Morgan le Fay,

as fresh and young as a Vassar pullet, to all appearances, and

here is this old duke of the South Marches still slashing away with

sword and lance at his time of life, after raising such a family

as he has raised.  As I understand it, Sir Gawaine killed seven

of his sons, and still he had six left for Sir Marhaus and me to

take into camp.  And then there was that damsel of sixty winter

of age still excursioning around in her frosty bloom--How old

are you, Sandy?"



It was the first time I ever struck a still place in her.  The mill

had shut down for repairs, or something.







CHAPTER XX



THE OGRE'S CASTLE



Between six and nine we made ten miles, which was plenty for a

horse carrying triple--man, woman, and armor; then we stopped

for a long nooning under some trees by a limpid brook.



Right so came by and by a knight riding; and as he drew near he

made dolorous moan, and by the words of it I perceived that he

was cursing and swearing; yet nevertheless was I glad of his

coming, for that I saw he bore a bulletin-board whereon in letters

all of shining gold was writ:



    "USE PETERSON'S PROPHYLACTIC TOOTH-BRUSH--ALL THE GO."



I was glad of his coming, for even by this token I knew him for

knight of mine.  It was Sir Madok de la Montaine, a burly great

fellow whose chief distinction was that he had come within an ace

of sending Sir Launcelot down over his horse-tail once.  He was

never long in a stranger's presence without finding some pretext

or other to let out that great fact.  But there was another fact

of nearly the same size, which he never pushed upon anybody unasked,

and yet never withheld when asked:  that was, that the reason he

didn't quite succeed was, that he was interrupted and sent down

over horse-tail himself.  This innocent vast lubber did not see

any particular difference between the two facts.  I liked him,

for he was earnest in his work, and very valuable.  And he was so

fine to look at, with his broad mailed shoulders, and the grand

leonine set of his plumed head, and his big shield with its quaint

device of a gauntleted hand clutching a prophylactic tooth-brush,

with motto:  "Try Noyoudont."  This was a tooth-wash that I was

introducing.



He was aweary, he said, and indeed he looked it; but he would not

alight.  He said he was after the stove-polish man; and with this

he broke out cursing and swearing anew.  The bulletin-boarder

referred to was Sir Ossaise of Surluse, a brave knight, and of

considerable celebrity on account of his having tried conclusions

in a tournament once, with no less a Mogul than Sir Gaheris

himself--although not successfully.  He was of a light and laughing

disposition, and to him nothing in this world was serious.  It was

for this reason that I had chosen him to work up a stove-polish

sentiment.  There were no stoves yet, and so there could be nothing

serious about stove-polish.  All that the agent needed to do was

to deftly and by degrees prepare the public for the great change,

and have them established in predilections toward neatness against

the time when the stove should appear upon the stage.



Sir Madok was very bitter, and brake out anew with cursings.  He

said he had cursed his soul to rags; and yet he would not get down

from his horse, neither would he take any rest, or listen to any

comfort, until he should have found Sir Ossaise and settled this

account.  It appeared, by what I could piece together of the

unprofane fragments of his statement, that he had chanced upon

Sir Ossaise at dawn of the morning, and been told that if he would

make a short cut across the fields and swamps and broken hills and

glades, he could head off a company of travelers who would be rare

customers for prophylactics and tooth-wash.  With characteristic

zeal Sir Madok had plunged away at once upon this quest, and after

three hours of awful crosslot riding had overhauled his game.  And

behold, it was the five patriarchs that had been released from the

dungeons the evening before!  Poor old creatures, it was all of

twenty years since any one of them had known what it was to be

equipped with any remaining snag or remnant of a tooth.



"Blank-blank-blank him," said Sir Madok, "an I do not stove-polish

him an I may find him, leave it to me; for never no knight that

hight Ossaise or aught else may do me this disservice and bide

on live, an I may find him, the which I have thereunto sworn a

great oath this day."



And with these words and others, he lightly took his spear and

gat him thence.  In the middle of the afternoon we came upon one

of those very patriarchs ourselves, in the edge of a poor village.

He was basking in the love of relatives and friends whom he had not

seen for fifty years; and about him and caressing him were also

descendants of his own body whom he had never seen at all till now;

but to him these were all strangers, his memory was gone, his mind

was stagnant.  It seemed incredible that a man could outlast half

a century shut up in a dark hole like a rat, but here were his old

wife and some old comrades to testify to it.  They could remember

him as he was in the freshness and strength of his young manhood,

when he kissed his child and delivered it to its mother's hands

and went away into that long oblivion.  The people at the castle

could not tell within half a generation the length of time the man

had been shut up there for his unrecorded and forgotten offense;

but this old wife knew; and so did her old child, who stood there

among her married sons and daughters trying to realize a father

who had been to her a name, a thought, a formless image, a tradition,

all her life, and now was suddenly concreted into actual flesh

and blood and set before her face.



It was a curious situation; yet it is not on that account that

I have made room for it here, but on account of a thing which

seemed to me still more curious.  To wit, that this dreadful matter

brought from these downtrodden people no outburst of rage against

these oppressors.  They had been heritors and subjects of cruelty

and outrage so long that nothing could have startled them but

a kindness.  Yes, here was a curious revelation, indeed, of the

depth to which this people had been sunk in slavery.  Their entire

being was reduced to a monotonous dead level of patience, resignation,

dumb uncomplaining acceptance of whatever might befall them in

this life.  Their very imagination was dead.  When you can say

that of a man, he has struck bottom, I reckon; there is no lower

deep for him.



I rather wished I had gone some other road.  This was not the sort

of experience for a statesman to encounter who was planning out

a peaceful revolution in his mind.  For it could not help bringing

up the unget-aroundable fact that, all gentle cant and philosophizing

to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in the world ever did

achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion:

it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed must

_begin_ in blood, whatever may answer afterward.  If history teaches

anything, it teaches that.  What this folk needed, then, was a

Reign of Terror and a guillotine, and I was the wrong man for them.



Two days later, toward noon, Sandy began to show signs of excitement

and feverish expectancy.  She said we were approaching the ogre's

castle.  I was surprised into an uncomfortable shock.  The object

of our quest had gradually dropped out of my mind; this sudden

resurrection of it made it seem quite a real and startling thing

for a moment, and roused up in me a smart interest.  Sandy's

excitement increased every moment; and so did mine, for that sort

of thing is catching.  My heart got to thumping.  You can't reason

with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which

the intellect scorns.  Presently, when Sandy slid from the horse,

motioned me to stop, and went creeping stealthily, with her head

bent nearly to her knees, toward a row of bushes that bordered

a declivity, the thumpings grew stronger and quicker.  And they

kept it up while she was gaining her ambush and getting her glimpse

over the declivity; and also while I was creeping to her side on

my knees.  Her eyes were burning now, as she pointed with her

finger, and said in a panting whisper:



"The castle!  The castle!  Lo, where it looms!"



What a welcome disappointment I experienced!  I said:



"Castle?  It is nothing but a pigsty; a pigsty with a wattled

fence around it."



She looked surprised and distressed.  The animation faded out of

her face; and during many moments she was lost in thought and

silent.  Then:



"It was not enchanted aforetime," she said in a musing fashion,

as if to herself.  "And how strange is this marvel, and how awful--

that to the one perception it is enchanted and dight in a base

and shameful aspect; yet to the perception of the other it is not

enchanted, hath suffered no change, but stands firm and stately

still, girt with its moat and waving its banners in the blue air

from its towers.  And God shield us, how it pricks the heart to

see again these gracious captives, and the sorrow deepened in their

sweet faces!  We have tarried along, and are to blame."



I saw my cue.  The castle was enchanted to _me_, not to her. It would

be wasted time to try to argue her out of her delusion, it couldn't

be done; I must just humor it.  So I said:



"This is a common case--the enchanting of a thing to one eye and

leaving it in its proper form to another.  You have heard of it

before, Sandy, though you haven't happened to experience it.

But no harm is done.  In fact, it is lucky the way it is.  If these

ladies were hogs to everybody and to themselves, it would be

necessary to break the enchantment, and that might be impossible

if one failed to find out the particular process of the enchantment.

And hazardous, too; for in attempting a disenchantment without the

true key, you are liable to err, and turn your hogs into dogs,

and the dogs into cats, the cats into rats, and so on, and end by

reducing your materials to nothing finally, or to an odorless gas

which you can't follow--which, of course, amounts to the same

thing.  But here, by good luck, no one's eyes but mine are under

the enchantment, and so it is of no consequence to dissolve it.

These ladies remain ladies to you, and to themselves, and to

everybody else; and at the same time they will suffer in no way

from my delusion, for when I know that an ostensible hog is a

lady, that is enough for me, I know how to treat her."



"Thanks, oh, sweet my lord, thou talkest like an angel.  And I know

that thou wilt deliver them, for that thou art minded to great

deeds and art as strong a knight of your hands and as brave to will

and to do, as any that is on live."



"I will not leave a princess in the sty, Sandy.  Are those three

yonder that to my disordered eyes are starveling swine-herds--"



"The ogres, Are _they_ changed also?  It is most wonderful.  Now

am I fearful; for how canst thou strike with sure aim when five of

their nine cubits of stature are to thee invisible?  Ah, go warily,

fair sir; this is a mightier emprise than I wend."



"You be easy, Sandy.  All I need to know is, how _much_ of an ogre

is invisible; then I know how to locate his vitals.  Don't you be

afraid, I will make short work of these bunco-steerers.  Stay

where you are."



I left Sandy kneeling there, corpse-faced but plucky and hopeful,

and rode down to the pigsty, and struck up a trade with the

swine-herds.  I won their gratitude by buying out all the hogs

at the lump sum of sixteen pennies, which was rather above latest

quotations.  I was just in time; for the Church, the lord of the

manor, and the rest of the tax-gatherers would have been along

next day and swept off pretty much all the stock, leaving the

swine-herds very short of hogs and Sandy out of princesses.  But

now the tax people could be paid in cash, and there would be

a stake left besides.  One of the men had ten children; and he

said that last year when a priest came and of his ten pigs took

the fattest one for tithes, the wife burst out upon him, and offered

him a child and said:



"Thou beast without bowels of mercy, why leave me my child, yet

rob me of the wherewithal to feed it?"



How curious.  The same thing had happened in the Wales of my day,

under this same old Established Church, which was supposed by many

to have changed its nature when it changed its disguise.



I sent the three men away, and then opened the sty gate and beckoned

Sandy to come--which she did; and not leisurely, but with the rush

of a prairie fire.  And when I saw her fling herself upon those

hogs, with tears of joy running down her cheeks, and strain them

to her heart, and kiss them, and caress them, and call them

reverently by grand princely names, I was ashamed of her, ashamed

of the human race.



We had to drive those hogs home--ten miles; and no ladies were

ever more fickle-minded or contrary.  They would stay in no road,

no path; they broke out through the brush on all sides, and flowed

away in all directions, over rocks, and hills, and the roughest

places they could find.  And they must not be struck, or roughly

accosted; Sandy could not bear to see them treated in ways unbecoming

their rank.  The troublesomest old sow of the lot had to be called

my Lady, and your Highness, like the rest.  It is annoying and

difficult to scour around after hogs, in armor.  There was one

small countess, with an iron ring in her snout and hardly any hair

on her back, that was the devil for perversity.  She gave me a race

of an hour, over all sorts of country, and then we were right where

we had started from, having made not a rod of real progress.

I seized her at last by the tail, and brought her along squealing.

When I overtook Sandy she was horrified, and said it was in the

last degree indelicate to drag a countess by her train.



We got the hogs home just at dark--most of them.  The princess

Nerovens de Morganore was missing, and two of her ladies in waiting:

namely, Miss Angela Bohun, and the Demoiselle Elaine Courtemains,

the former of these two being a young black sow with a white star

in her forehead, and the latter a brown one with thin legs and a

slight limp in the forward shank on the starboard side--a couple

of the tryingest blisters to drive that I ever saw.  Also among

the missing were several mere baronesses--and I wanted them to

stay missing; but no, all that sausage-meat had to be found; so

servants were sent out with torches to scour the woods and hills

to that end.



Of course, the whole drove was housed in the house, and, great

guns!--well, I never saw anything like it.  Nor ever heard anything

like it.  And never smelt anything like it.  It was like an

insurrection in a gasometer.







CHAPTER XXI



THE PILGRIMS



When I did get to bed at last I was unspeakably tired; the stretching

out, and the relaxing of the long-tense muscles, how luxurious,

how delicious! but that was as far as I could get--sleep was out of

the question for the present.  The ripping and tearing and squealing

of the nobility up and down the halls and corridors was pandemonium

come again, and kept me broad awake.  Being awake, my thoughts

were busy, of course; and mainly they busied themselves with Sandy's

curious delusion.  Here she was, as sane a person as the kingdom

could produce; and yet, from my point of view she was acting like

a crazy woman.  My land, the power of training! of influence!

of education!  It can bring a body up to believe anything.  I had

to put myself in Sandy's place to realize that she was not a

lunatic.  Yes, and put her in mine, to demonstrate how easy it is

to seem a lunatic to a person who has not been taught as you have

been taught.  If I had told Sandy I had seen a wagon, uninfluenced

by enchantment, spin along fifty miles an hour; had seen a man,

unequipped with magic powers, get into a basket and soar out of

sight among the clouds; and had listened, without any necromancer's

help, to the conversation of a person who was several hundred miles

away, Sandy would not merely have supposed me to be crazy, she

would have thought she knew it.  Everybody around her believed in

enchantments; nobody had any doubts; to doubt that a castle could

be turned into a sty, and its occupants into hogs, would have been

the same as my doubting among Connecticut people the actuality

of the telephone and its wonders,--and in both cases would be

absolute proof of a diseased mind, an unsettled reason.  Yes, Sandy

was sane; that must be admitted.  If I also would be sane--to Sandy--

I must keep my superstitions about unenchanted and unmiraculous

locomotives, balloons, and telephones, to myself.  Also, I believed

that the world was not flat, and hadn't pillars under it to support

it, nor a canopy over it to turn off a universe of water that

occupied all space above; but as I was the only person in the kingdom

afflicted with such impious and criminal opinions, I recognized

that it would be good wisdom to keep quiet about this matter, too,

if I did not wish to be suddenly shunned and forsaken by everybody

as a madman.



The next morning Sandy assembled the swine in the dining-room and

gave them their breakfast, waiting upon them personally and

manifesting in every way the deep reverence which the natives of

her island, ancient and modern, have always felt for rank, let its

outward casket and the mental and moral contents be what they may.

I could have eaten with the hogs if I had had birth approaching my

lofty official rank; but I hadn't, and so accepted the unavoidable

slight and made no complaint.  Sandy and I had our breakfast at

the second table.  The family were not at home.  I said:



"How many are in the family, Sandy, and where do they keep themselves?"



"Family?"



"Yes."



"Which family, good my lord?"



"Why, this family; your own family."



"Sooth to say, I understand you not.  I have no family."



"No family?  Why, Sandy, isn't this your home?"



"Now how indeed might that be?  I have no home."



"Well, then, whose house is this?"



"Ah, wit you well I would tell you an I knew myself."



"Come--you don't even know these people?  Then who invited us here?"



"None invited us.  We but came; that is all."



"Why, woman, this is a most extraordinary performance.  The

effrontery of it is beyond admiration.  We blandly march into

a man's house, and cram it full of the only really valuable nobility

the sun has yet discovered in the earth, and then it turns out

that we don't even know the man's name.  How did you ever venture

to take this extravagant liberty?  I supposed, of course, it was

your home.  What will the man say?"



"What will he say?  Forsooth what can he say but give thanks?"



"Thanks for what?"



Her face was filled with a puzzled surprise:



"Verily, thou troublest mine understanding with strange words.

Do ye dream that one of his estate is like to have the honor twice

in his life to entertain company such as we have brought to grace

his house withal?"



"Well, no--when you come to that.  No, it's an even bet that this

is the first time he has had a treat like this."



"Then let him be thankful, and manifest the same by grateful speech

and due humility; he were a dog, else, and the heir and ancestor

of dogs."



To my mind, the situation was uncomfortable.  It might become more so.

It might be a good idea to muster the hogs and move on.  So I said:



"The day is wasting, Sandy.  It is time to get the nobility together

and be moving."



"Wherefore, fair sir and Boss?"



"We want to take them to their home, don't we?"



"La, but list to him!  They be of all the regions of the earth!

Each must hie to her own home; wend you we might do all these

journeys in one so brief life as He hath appointed that created

life, and thereto death likewise with help of Adam, who by sin

done through persuasion of his helpmeet, she being wrought upon

and bewrayed by the beguilements of the great enemy of man, that

serpent hight Satan, aforetime consecrated and set apart unto that

evil work by overmastering spite and envy begotten in his heart

through fell ambitions that did blight and mildew a nature erst

so white and pure whenso it hove with the shining multitudes

its brethren-born in glade and shade of that fair heaven wherein

all such as native be to that rich estate and--"



"Great Scott!"



"My lord?"



"Well, you know we haven't got time for this sort of thing.  Don't

you see, we could distribute these people around the earth in less

time than it is going to take you to explain that we can't.  We

mustn't talk now, we must act.  You want to be careful; you mustn't

let your mill get the start of you that way, at a time like this.

To business now--and sharp's the word.  Who is to take the

aristocracy home?"



"Even their friends.  These will come for them from the far parts

of the earth."



This was lightning from a clear sky, for unexpectedness; and the

relief of it was like pardon to a prisoner.  She would remain to

deliver the goods, of course.



"Well, then, Sandy, as our enterprise is handsomely and successfully

ended, I will go home and report; and if ever another one--"



"I also am ready; I will go with thee."



This was recalling the pardon.



"How?  You will go with me?  Why should you?"



"Will I be traitor to my knight, dost think?  That were dishonor.

I may not part from thee until in knightly encounter in the field

some overmatching champion shall fairly win and fairly wear me.

I were to blame an I thought that that might ever hap."



"Elected for the long term," I sighed to myself.  "I may as well

make the best of it."  So then I spoke up and said:



"All right; let us make a start."



While she was gone to cry her farewells over the pork, I gave that

whole peerage away to the servants.  And I asked them to take

a duster and dust around a little where the nobilities had mainly

lodged and promenaded; but they considered that that would be

hardly worth while, and would moreover be a rather grave departure

from custom, and therefore likely to make talk.  A departure from

custom--that settled it; it was a nation capable of committing any

crime but that.  The servants said they would follow the fashion,

a fashion grown sacred through immemorial observance; they would

scatter fresh rushes in all the rooms and halls, and then the

evidence of the aristocratic visitation would be no longer visible.

It was a kind of satire on Nature:  it was the scientific method,

the geologic method; it deposited the history of the family in

a stratified record; and the antiquary could dig through it and

tell by the remains of each period what changes of diet the family

had introduced successively for a hundred years.



The first thing we struck that day was a procession of pilgrims.

It was not going our way, but we joined it, nevertheless; for it

was hourly being borne in upon me now, that if I would govern

this country wisely, I must be posted in the details of its life,

and not at second hand, but by personal observation and scrutiny.



This company of pilgrims resembled Chaucer's in this:  that it

had in it a sample of about all the upper occupations and professions

the country could show, and a corresponding variety of costume.

There were young men and old men, young women and old women,

lively folk and grave folk.  They rode upon mules and horses, and

there was not a side-saddle in the party; for this specialty was

to remain unknown in England for nine hundred years yet.



It was a pleasant, friendly, sociable herd; pious, happy, merry and

full of unconscious coarsenesses and innocent indecencies.  What

they regarded as the merry tale went the continual round and caused

no more embarrassment than it would have caused in the best English

society twelve centuries later.  Practical jokes worthy of the

English wits of the first quarter of the far-off nineteenth century

were sprung here and there and yonder along the line, and compelled

the delightedest applause; and sometimes when a bright remark was

made at one end of the procession and started on its travels toward

the other, you could note its progress all the way by the sparkling

spray of laughter it threw off from its bows as it plowed along;

and also by the blushes of the mules in its wake.



Sandy knew the goal and purpose of this pilgrimage, and she posted

me.  She said:



"They journey to the Valley of Holiness, for to be blessed of the

godly hermits and drink of the miraculous waters and be cleansed

from sin."



"Where is this watering place?"



"It lieth a two-day journey hence, by the borders of the land that

hight the Cuckoo Kingdom."



"Tell me about it.  Is it a celebrated place?"



"Oh, of a truth, yes.  There be none more so.  Of old time there

lived there an abbot and his monks.  Belike were none in the world

more holy than these; for they gave themselves to study of pious

books, and spoke not the one to the other, or indeed to any, and

ate decayed herbs and naught thereto, and slept hard, and prayed

much, and washed never; also they wore the same garment until it

fell from their bodies through age and decay.  Right so came they

to be known of all the world by reason of these holy austerities,

and visited by rich and poor, and reverenced."



"Proceed."



"But always there was lack of water there.  Whereas, upon a time,

the holy abbot prayed, and for answer a great stream of clear

water burst forth by miracle in a desert place.  Now were the

fickle monks tempted of the Fiend, and they wrought with their

abbot unceasingly by beggings and beseechings that he would construct

a bath; and when he was become aweary and might not resist more,

he said have ye your will, then, and granted that they asked.

Now mark thou what 'tis to forsake the ways of purity the which

He loveth, and wanton with such as be worldly and an offense.

These monks did enter into the bath and come thence washed as

white as snow; and lo, in that moment His sign appeared, in

miraculous rebuke! for His insulted waters ceased to flow, and

utterly vanished away."



"They fared mildly, Sandy, considering how that kind of crime

is regarded in this country."



"Belike; but it was their first sin; and they had been of perfect

life for long, and differing in naught from the angels.  Prayers,

tears, torturings of the flesh, all was vain to beguile that water

to flow again.  Even processions; even burnt-offerings; even votive

candles to the Virgin, did fail every each of them; and all in

the land did marvel."



"How odd to find that even this industry has its financial panics,

and at times sees its assignats and greenbacks languish to zero,

and everything come to a standstill.  Go on, Sandy."



"And so upon a time, after year and day, the good abbot made humble

surrender and destroyed the bath.  And behold, His anger was in that

moment appeased, and the waters gushed richly forth again, and even

unto this day they have not ceased to flow in that generous measure."



"Then I take it nobody has washed since."



"He that would essay it could have his halter free; yes, and

swiftly would he need it, too."



"The community has prospered since?"



"Even from that very day.  The fame of the miracle went abroad

into all lands.  From every land came monks to join; they came

even as the fishes come, in shoals; and the monastery added building

to building, and yet others to these, and so spread wide its arms

and took them in.  And nuns came, also; and more again, and yet

more; and built over against the monastery on the yon side of the

vale, and added building to building, until mighty was that nunnery.

And these were friendly unto those, and they joined their loving

labors together, and together they built a fair great foundling

asylum midway of the valley between."



"You spoke of some hermits, Sandy."



"These have gathered there from the ends of the earth.  A hermit

thriveth best where there be multitudes of pilgrims.  Ye shall not

find no hermit of no sort wanting.  If any shall mention a hermit

of a kind he thinketh new and not to be found but in some far

strange land, let him but scratch among the holes and caves and

swamps that line that Valley of Holiness, and whatsoever be his

breed, it skills not, he shall find a sample of it there."



I closed up alongside of a burly fellow with a fat good-humored

face, purposing to make myself agreeable and pick up some further

crumbs of fact; but I had hardly more than scraped acquaintance

with him when he began eagerly and awkwardly to lead up, in the

immemorial way, to that same old anecdote--the one Sir Dinadan

told me, what time I got into trouble with Sir Sagramor and was

challenged of him on account of it.  I excused myself and dropped

to the rear of the procession, sad at heart, willing to go hence

from this troubled life, this vale of tears, this brief day of

broken rest, of cloud and storm, of weary struggle and monotonous

defeat; and yet shrinking from the change, as remembering how long

eternity is, and how many have wended thither who know that anecdote.



Early in the afternoon we overtook another procession of pilgrims;

but in this one was no merriment, no jokes, no laughter, no playful

ways, nor any happy giddiness, whether of youth or age.  Yet both

were here, both age and youth; gray old men and women, strong men

and women of middle age, young husbands, young wives, little boys

and girls, and three babies at the breast.  Even the children were

smileless; there was not a face among all these half a hundred

people but was cast down, and bore that set expression of hopelessness

which is bred of long and hard trials and old acquaintance with

despair.  They were slaves.  Chains led from their fettered feet

and their manacled hands to a sole-leather belt about their waists;

and all except the children were also linked together in a file

six feet apart, by a single chain which led from collar to collar

all down the line.  They were on foot, and had tramped three

hundred miles in eighteen days, upon the cheapest odds and ends

of food, and stingy rations of that.  They had slept in these

chains every night, bundled together like swine.  They had upon

their bodies some poor rags, but they could not be said to be

clothed.  Their irons had chafed the skin from their ankles and

made sores which were ulcerated and wormy.  Their naked feet were

torn, and none walked without a limp.  Originally there had been a

hundred of these unfortunates, but about half had been sold on

the trip.  The trader in charge of them rode a horse and carried

a whip with a short handle and a long heavy lash divided into

several knotted tails at the end.  With this whip he cut the

shoulders of any that tottered from weariness and pain, and

straightened them up.  He did not speak; the whip conveyed his

desire without that.  None of these poor creatures looked up as

we rode along by; they showed no consciousness of our presence.

And they made no sound but one; that was the dull and awful clank

of their chains from end to end of the long file, as forty-three

burdened feet rose and fell in unison.  The file moved in a cloud

of its own making.



All these faces were gray with a coating of dust.  One has seen

the like of this coating upon furniture in unoccupied houses, and

has written his idle thought in it with his finger.  I was reminded

of this when I noticed the faces of some of those women, young

mothers carrying babes that were near to death and freedom, how

a something in their hearts was written in the dust upon their

faces, plain to see, and lord, how plain to read! for it was the

track of tears.  One of these young mothers was but a girl, and

it hurt me to the heart to read that writing, and reflect that it

was come up out of the breast of such a child, a breast that ought

not to know trouble yet, but only the gladness of the morning of

life; and no doubt--



She reeled just then, giddy with fatigue, and down came the lash

and flicked a flake of skin from her naked shoulder.  It stung me

as if I had been hit instead.  The master halted the file and

jumped from his horse.  He stormed and swore at this girl, and

said she had made annoyance enough with her laziness, and as this

was the last chance he should have, he would settle the account now.

She dropped on her knees and put up her hands and began to beg,

and cry, and implore, in a passion of terror, but the master gave

no attention.  He snatched the child from her, and then made the

men-slaves who were chained before and behind her throw her on

the ground and hold her there and expose her body; and then he

laid on with his lash like a madman till her back was flayed, she

shrieking and struggling the while piteously.  One of the men who

was holding her turned away his face, and for this humanity he was

reviled and flogged.



All our pilgrims looked on and commented--on the expert way in

which the whip was handled.  They were too much hardened by lifelong

everyday familiarity with slavery to notice that there was anything

else in the exhibition that invited comment.  This was what slavery

could do, in the way of ossifying what one may call the superior

lobe of human feeling; for these pilgrims were kind-hearted people,

and they would not have allowed that man to treat a horse like that.



I wanted to stop the whole thing and set the slaves free, but that

would not do.  I must not interfere too much and get myself a name

for riding over the country's laws and the citizen's rights

roughshod.  If I lived and prospered I would be the death of

slavery, that I was resolved upon; but I would try to fix it so

that when I became its executioner it should be by command of

the nation.



Just here was the wayside shop of a smith; and now arrived a landed

proprietor who had bought this girl a few miles back, deliverable

here where her irons could be taken off.  They were removed; then

there was a squabble between the gentleman and the dealer as to

which should pay the blacksmith.  The moment the girl was delivered

from her irons, she flung herself, all tears and frantic sobbings,

into the arms of the slave who had turned away his face when she

was whipped.  He strained her to his breast, and smothered her

face and the child's with kisses, and washed them with the rain

of his tears.  I suspected.  I inquired.  Yes, I was right; it was

husband and wife.  They had to be torn apart by force; the girl

had to be dragged away, and she struggled and fought and shrieked

like one gone mad till a turn of the road hid her from sight; and

even after that, we could still make out the fading plaint of those

receding shrieks.  And the husband and father, with his wife and

child gone, never to be seen by him again in life?--well, the look

of him one might not bear at all, and so I turned away; but I knew

I should never get his picture out of my mind again, and there

it is to this day, to wring my heartstrings whenever I think of it.



We put up at the inn in a village just at nightfall, and when

I rose next morning and looked abroad, I was ware where a knight

came riding in the golden glory of the new day, and recognized him

for knight of mine--Sir Ozana le Cure Hardy.  He was in the

gentlemen's furnishing line, and his missionarying specialty was

plug hats.  He was clothed all in steel, in the beautifulest armor

of the time--up to where his helmet ought to have been; but he

hadn't any helmet, he wore a shiny stove-pipe hat, and was ridiculous

a spectacle as one might want to see.  It was another of my

surreptitious schemes for extinguishing knighthood by making it

grotesque and absurd.  Sir Ozana's saddle was hung about with

leather hat boxes, and every time he overcame a wandering knight

he swore him into my service and fitted him with a plug and made

him wear it.  I dressed and ran down to welcome Sir Ozana and

get his news.



"How is trade?" I asked.



"Ye will note that I have but these four left; yet were they sixteen

whenas I got me from Camelot."



"Why, you have certainly done nobly, Sir Ozana.  Where have you

been foraging of late?"



"I am but now come from the Valley of Holiness, please you sir."



"I am pointed for that place myself.  Is there anything stirring

in the monkery, more than common?"



"By the mass ye may not question it!....  Give him good feed,

boy, and stint it not, an thou valuest thy crown; so get ye lightly

to the stable and do even as I bid....  Sir, it is parlous news

I bring, and--be these pilgrims?  Then ye may not do better, good

folk, than gather and hear the tale I have to tell, sith it

concerneth you, forasmuch as ye go to find that ye will not find,

and seek that ye will seek in vain, my life being hostage for my

word, and my word and message being these, namely:  That a hap

has happened whereof the like has not been seen no more but once

this two hundred years, which was the first and last time that

that said misfortune strake the holy valley in that form by

commandment of the Most High whereto by reasons just and causes

thereunto contributing, wherein the matter--"



"The miraculous fount hath ceased to flow!"  This shout burst from

twenty pilgrim mouths at once.



"Ye say well, good people.  I was verging to it, even when ye spake."



"Has somebody been washing again?"



"Nay, it is suspected, but none believe it.  It is thought to be

some other sin, but none wit what."



"How are they feeling about the calamity?"



"None may describe it in words.  The fount is these nine days dry.

The prayers that did begin then, and the lamentations in sackcloth

and ashes, and the holy processions, none of these have ceased

nor night nor day; and so the monks and the nuns and the foundlings

be all exhausted, and do hang up prayers writ upon parchment,

sith that no strength is left in man to lift up voice.  And at last

they sent for thee, Sir Boss, to try magic and enchantment; and

if you could not come, then was the messenger to fetch Merlin,

and he is there these three days now, and saith he will fetch that

water though he burst the globe and wreck its kingdoms to accomplish

it; and right bravely doth he work his magic and call upon his

hellions to hie them hither and help, but not a whiff of moisture

hath he started yet, even so much as might qualify as mist upon

a copper mirror an ye count not the barrel of sweat he sweateth

betwixt sun and sun over the dire labors of his task; and if ye--"



Breakfast was ready.  As soon as it was over I showed to Sir Ozana

these words which I had written on the inside of his hat:  Chemical

Department, Laboratory extension, Section G. Pxxp.  Send two of

first size, two of No. 3, and six of No. 4, together with the proper

complementary details--and two of my trained assistants."  And I said:



"Now get you to Camelot as fast as you can fly, brave knight, and

show the writing to Clarence, and tell him to have these required

matters in the Valley of Holiness with all possible dispatch."



"I will well, Sir Boss," and he was off.







CHAPTER XXII



THE HOLY FOUNTAIN



The pilgrims were human beings.  Otherwise they would have acted

differently.  They had come a long and difficult journey, and now

when the journey was nearly finished, and they learned that the main

thing they had come for had ceased to exist, they didn't do as

horses or cats or angle-worms would probably have done--turn back

and get at something profitable--no, anxious as they had before

been to see the miraculous fountain, they were as much as forty

times as anxious now to see the place where it had used to be.

There is no accounting for human beings.



We made good time; and a couple of hours before sunset we stood

upon the high confines of the Valley of Holiness, and our eyes

swept it from end to end and noted its features.  That is, its

large features.  These were the three masses of buildings.  They

were distant and isolated temporalities shrunken to toy constructions

in the lonely waste of what seemed a desert--and was.  Such a scene

is always mournful, it is so impressively still, and looks so

steeped in death.  But there was a sound here which interrupted

the stillness only to add to its mournfulness; this was the faint

far sound of tolling bells which floated fitfully to us on the

passing breeze, and so faintly, so softly, that we hardly knew

whether we heard it with our ears or with our spirits.



We reached the monastery before dark, and there the males were

given lodging, but the women were sent over to the nunnery.  The

bells were close at hand now, and their solemn booming smote

upon the ear like a message of doom.  A superstitious despair

possessed the heart of every monk and published itself in his

ghastly face.  Everywhere, these black-robed, soft-sandaled,

tallow-visaged specters appeared, flitted about and disappeared,

noiseless as the creatures of a troubled dream, and as uncanny.



The old abbot's joy to see me was pathetic.  Even to tears; but

he did the shedding himself.  He said:



"Delay not, son, but get to thy saving work.  An we bring not

the water back again, and soon, we are ruined, and the good work

of two hundred years must end.  And see thou do it with enchantments

that be holy, for the Church will not endure that work in her cause

be done by devil's magic."



"When I work, Father, be sure there will be no devil's work

connected with it.  I shall use no arts that come of the devil,

and no elements not created by the hand of God.  But is Merlin

working strictly on pious lines?"



"Ah, he said he would, my son, he said he would, and took oath

to make his promise good."



"Well, in that case, let him proceed."



"But surely you will not sit idle by, but help?"



"It will not answer to mix methods, Father; neither would it be

professional courtesy.  Two of a trade must not underbid each

other.  We might as well cut rates and be done with it; it would

arrive at that in the end.  Merlin has the contract; no other

magician can touch it till he throws it up."



"But I will take it from him; it is a terrible emergency and the

act is thereby justified.  And if it were not so, who will give

law to the Church?  The Church giveth law to all; and what she

wills to do, that she may do, hurt whom it may.  I will take it

from him; you shall begin upon the moment."



"It may not be, Father.  No doubt, as you say, where power is

supreme, one can do as one likes and suffer no injury; but we poor

magicians are not so situated.  Merlin is a very good magician

in a small way, and has quite a neat provincial reputation.  He

is struggling along, doing the best he can, and it would not be

etiquette for me to take his job until he himself abandons it."



The abbot's face lighted.



"Ah, that is simple.  There are ways to persuade him to abandon it."



"No-no, Father, it skills not, as these people say.  If he were

persuaded against his will, he would load that well with a malicious

enchantment which would balk me until I found out its secret.

It might take a month.  I could set up a little enchantment of

mine which I call the telephone, and he could not find out its

secret in a hundred years.  Yes, you perceive, he might block me

for a month.  Would you like to risk a month in a dry time like this?"



"A month!  The mere thought of it maketh me to shudder.  Have it

thy way, my son.  But my heart is heavy with this disappointment.

Leave me, and let me wear my spirit with weariness and waiting,

even as I have done these ten long days, counterfeiting thus

the thing that is called rest, the prone body making outward sign

of repose where inwardly is none."



Of course, it would have been best, all round, for Merlin to waive

etiquette and quit and call it half a day, since he would never be

able to start that water, for he was a true magician of the time;

which is to say, the big miracles, the ones that gave him his

reputation, always had the luck to be performed when nobody but

Merlin was present; he couldn't start this well with all this crowd

around to see; a crowd was as bad for a magician's miracle in

that day as it was for a spiritualist's miracle in mine; there was

sure to be some skeptic on hand to turn up the gas at the crucial

moment and spoil everything.  But I did not want Merlin to retire

from the job until I was ready to take hold of it effectively

myself; and I could not do that until I got my things from Camelot,

and that would take two or three days.



My presence gave the monks hope, and cheered them up a good deal;

insomuch that they ate a square meal that night for the first time

in ten days.  As soon as their stomachs had been properly reinforced

with food, their spirits began to rise fast; when the mead began to

go round they rose faster.  By the time everybody was half-seas over,

the holy community was in good shape to make a night of it; so we

stayed by the board and put it through on that line.  Matters got

to be very jolly.  Good old questionable stories were told that made

the tears run down and cavernous mouths stand wide and the round

bellies shake with laughter; and questionable songs were bellowed out

in a mighty chorus that drowned the boom of the tolling bells.



At last I ventured a story myself; and vast was the success of it.

Not right off, of course, for the native of those islands does

not, as a rule, dissolve upon the early applications of a humorous

thing; but the fifth time I told it, they began to crack in places;

the eight time I told it, they began to crumble; at the twelfth

repetition they fell apart in chunks; and at the fifteenth they

disintegrated, and I got a broom and swept them up.  This language

is figurative.  Those islanders--well, they are slow pay at first,

in the matter of return for your investment of effort, but in the end

they make the pay of all other nations poor and small by contrast.



I was at the well next day betimes.  Merlin was there, enchanting

away like a beaver, but not raising the moisture.  He was not in

a pleasant humor; and every time I hinted that perhaps this contract

was a shade too hefty for a novice he unlimbered his tongue and

cursed like a bishop--French bishop of the Regency days, I mean.



Matters were about as I expected to find them.  The "fountain" was

an ordinary well, it had been dug in the ordinary way, and stoned up

in the ordinary way.  There was no miracle about it.  Even the lie

that had created its reputation was not miraculous; I could have

told it myself, with one hand tied behind me.  The well was in a

dark chamber which stood in the center of a cut-stone chapel, whose

walls were hung with pious pictures of a workmanship that would

have made a chromo feel good; pictures historically commemorative

of curative miracles which had been achieved by the waters when

nobody was looking.  That is, nobody but angels; they are always

on deck when there is a miracle to the fore--so as to get put in

the picture, perhaps.  Angels are as fond of that as a fire company;

look at the old masters.



The well-chamber was dimly lighted by lamps; the water was drawn

with a windlass and chain by monks, and poured into troughs which

delivered it into stone reservoirs outside in the chapel--when

there was water to draw, I mean--and none but monks could enter

the well-chamber.  I entered it, for I had temporary authority

to do so, by courtesy of my professional brother and subordinate.

But he hadn't entered it himself.  He did everything by incantations;

he never worked his intellect.  If he had stepped in there and used

his eyes, instead of his disordered mind, he could have cured

the well by natural means, and then turned it into a miracle in

the customary way; but no, he was an old numskull, a magician who

believed in his own magic; and no magician can thrive who is

handicapped with a superstition like that.



I had an idea that the well had sprung a leak; that some of the

wall stones near the bottom had fallen and exposed fissures that

allowed the water to escape.  I measured the chain--98 feet.  Then

I called in a couple of monks, locked the door, took a candle, and

made them lower me in the bucket.  When the chain was all paid out,

the candle confirmed my suspicion; a considerable section of the

wall was gone, exposing a good big fissure.



I almost regretted that my theory about the well's trouble was

correct, because I had another one that had a showy point or two

about it for a miracle.  I remembered that in America, many

centuries later, when an oil well ceased to flow, they used to

blast it out with a dynamite torpedo.  If I should find this well

dry and no explanation of it, I could astonish these people most

nobly by having a person of no especial value drop a dynamite

bomb into it.  It was my idea to appoint Merlin.  However, it was

plain that there was no occasion for the bomb.  One cannot have

everything the way he would like it.  A man has no business to

be depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up his

mind to get even.  That is what I did.  I said to myself, I am in no

hurry, I can wait; that bomb will come good yet.  And it did, too.



When I was above ground again, I turned out the monks, and let down

a fish-line; the well was a hundred and fifty feet deep, and there

was forty-one feet of water in it.  I called in a monk and asked:



"How deep is the well?"



"That, sir, I wit not, having never been told."



"How does the water usually stand in it?"



"Near to the top, these two centuries, as the testimony goeth,

brought down to us through our predecessors."



It was true--as to recent times at least--for there was witness

to it, and better witness than a monk; only about twenty or thirty

feet of the chain showed wear and use, the rest of it was unworn

and rusty.  What had happened when the well gave out that other

time?  Without doubt some practical person had come along and

mended the leak, and then had come up and told the abbot he had

discovered by divination that if the sinful bath were destroyed

the well would flow again.  The leak had befallen again now, and

these children would have prayed, and processioned, and tolled

their bells for heavenly succor till they all dried up and blew

away, and no innocent of them all would ever have thought to drop

a fish-line into the well or go down in it and find out what was

really the matter.  Old habit of mind is one of the toughest things

to get away from in the world.  It transmits itself like physical

form and feature; and for a man, in those days, to have had an idea

that his ancestors hadn't had, would have brought him under suspicion

of being illegitimate.  I said to the monk:



"It is a difficult miracle to restore water in a dry well, but we

will try, if my brother Merlin fails.  Brother Merlin is a very

passable artist, but only in the parlor-magic line, and he may

not succeed; in fact, is not likely to succeed.  But that should

be nothing to his discredit; the man that can do _this_ kind of

miracle knows enough to keep hotel."



"Hotel?  I mind not to have heard--"



"Of hotel?  It's what you call hostel.  The man that can do this

miracle can keep hostel.  I can do this miracle; I shall do this

miracle; yet I do not try to conceal from you that it is a miracle

to tax the occult powers to the last strain."



"None knoweth that truth better than the brotherhood, indeed; for

it is of record that aforetime it was parlous difficult and took

a year.  Natheless, God send you good success, and to that end

will we pray."



As a matter of business it was a good idea to get the notion around

that the thing was difficult.  Many a small thing has been made

large by the right kind of advertising.  That monk was filled up

with the difficulty of this enterprise; he would fill up the others.

In two days the solicitude would be booming.



On my way home at noon, I met Sandy.  She had been sampling the

hermits.  I said:



"I would like to do that myself.  This is Wednesday.  Is there

a matinee?"



"A which, please you, sir?"



"Matinee.  Do they keep open afternoons?"



"Who?"



"The hermits, of course."



"Keep open?"



"Yes, keep open.  Isn't that plain enough?  Do they knock off at noon?"



"Knock off?"



"Knock off?--yes, knock off.  What is the matter with knock off?

I never saw such a dunderhead; can't you understand anything at all?

In plain terms, do they shut up shop, draw the game, bank the fires--"



"Shut up shop, draw--"



"There, never mind, let it go; you make me tired.  You can't seem

to understand the simplest thing."



"I would I might please thee, sir, and it is to me dole and sorrow

that I fail, albeit sith I am but a simple damsel and taught of

none, being from the cradle unbaptized in those deep waters of

learning that do anoint with a sovereignty him that partaketh of

that most noble sacrament, investing him with reverend state to

the mental eye of the humble mortal who, by bar and lack of that

great consecration seeth in his own unlearned estate but a symbol

of that other sort of lack and loss which men do publish to the

pitying eye with sackcloth trappings whereon the ashes of grief

do lie bepowdered and bestrewn, and so, when such shall in the

darkness of his mind encounter these golden phrases of high mystery,

these shut-up-shops, and draw-the-game, and bank-the-fires, it is

but by the grace of God that he burst not for envy of the mind that

can beget, and tongue that can deliver so great and mellow-sounding

miracles of speech, and if there do ensue confusion in that humbler

mind, and failure to divine the meanings of these wonders, then

if so be this miscomprehension is not vain but sooth and true,

wit ye well it is the very substance of worshipful dear homage and

may not lightly be misprized, nor had been, an ye had noted this

complexion of mood and mind and understood that that I would

I could not, and that I could not I might not, nor yet nor might

_nor_ could, nor might-not nor could-not, might be by advantage

turned to the desired _would_, and so I pray you mercy of my fault,

and that ye will of your kindness and your charity forgive it, good

my master and most dear lord."



I couldn't make it all out--that is, the details--but I got the

general idea; and enough of it, too, to be ashamed.  It was not

fair to spring those nineteenth century technicalities upon the

untutored infant of the sixth and then rail at her because she

couldn't get their drift; and when she was making the honest best

drive at it she could, too, and no fault of hers that she couldn't

fetch the home plate; and so I apologized.  Then we meandered

pleasantly away toward the hermit holes in sociable converse

together, and better friends than ever.



I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence

for this girl; nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station

and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless

transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that

I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German

Language.  I was so impressed with this, that sometimes when she

began to empty one of these sentences on me I unconsciously took

the very attitude of reverence, and stood uncovered; and if words

had been water, I had been drowned, sure.  She had exactly the

German way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a

mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war,

she would get it into a single sentence or die.  Whenever the literary

German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see

of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his

verb in his mouth.



We drifted from hermit to hermit all the afternoon.  It was a most

strange menagerie.  The chief emulation among them seemed to be,

to see which could manage to be the uncleanest and most prosperous

with vermin.  Their manner and attitudes were the last expression

of complacent self-righteousness.  It was one anchorite's pride

to lie naked in the mud and let the insects bite him and blister

him unmolested; it was another's to lean against a rock, all day

long, conspicuous to the admiration of the throng of pilgrims

and pray; it was another's to go naked and crawl around on all fours;

it was another's to drag about with him, year in and year out,

eighty pounds of iron; it was another's to never lie down when

he slept, but to stand among the thorn-bushes and snore when there

were pilgrims around to look; a woman, who had the white hair of

age, and no other apparel, was black from crown to heel with

forty-seven years of holy abstinence from water.  Groups of gazing

pilgrims stood around all and every of these strange objects, lost

in reverent wonder, and envious of the fleckless sanctity which

these pious austerities had won for them from an exacting heaven.



By and by we went to see one of the supremely great ones.  He was

a mighty celebrity; his fame had penetrated all Christendom; the

noble and the renowned journeyed from the remotest lands on the globe

to pay him reverence.  His stand was in the center of the widest part

of the valley; and it took all that space to hold his crowds.



His stand was a pillar sixty feet high, with a broad platform on

the top of it.  He was now doing what he had been doing every day

for twenty years up there--bowing his body ceaselessly and rapidly

almost to his feet.  It was his way of praying.  I timed him with a

stop watch, and he made 1,244 revolutions in 24 minutes and

46 seconds.  It seemed a pity to have all this power going to waste.

It was one of the most useful motions in mechanics, the pedal

movement; so I made a note in my memorandum book, purposing some

day to apply a system of elastic cords to him and run a sewing

machine with it.  I afterward carried out that scheme, and got

five years' good service out of him; in which time he turned out

upward of eighteen thousand first-rate tow-linen shirts, which

was ten a day.  I worked him Sundays and all; he was going, Sundays,

the same as week days, and it was no use to waste the power.

These shirts cost me nothing but just the mere trifle for the

materials--I furnished those myself, it would not have been right

to make him do that--and they sold like smoke to pilgrims at a

dollar and a half apiece, which was the price of fifty cows or

a blooded race horse in Arthurdom.  They were regarded as a perfect

protection against sin, and advertised as such by my knights

everywhere, with the paint-pot and stencil-plate; insomuch that

there was not a cliff or a bowlder or a dead wall in England but

you could read on it at a mile distance:



"Buy the only genuine St. Stylite; patronized by the Nobility.

Patent applied for."



There was more money in the business than one knew what to do with.

As it extended, I brought out a line of goods suitable for kings,

and a nobby thing for duchesses and that sort, with ruffles down

the forehatch and the running-gear clewed up with a featherstitch

to leeward and then hauled aft with a back-stay and triced up with

a half-turn in the standing rigging forward of the weather-gaskets.

Yes, it was a daisy.



But about that time I noticed that the motive power had taken to

standing on one leg, and I found that there was something the matter

with the other one; so I stocked the business and unloaded, taking

Sir Bors de Ganis into camp financially along with certain of his

friends; for the works stopped within a year, and the good saint

got him to his rest.  But he had earned it.  I can say that for him.



When I saw him that first time--however, his personal condition

will not quite bear description here.  You can read it in the

Lives of the Saints.*



[*All the details concerning the hermits, in this chapter, are from

Lecky--but greatly modified.  This book not being a history but

only a tale, the majority of the historian's frank details were too

strong for reproduction in it. --_Editor_]







CHAPTER XXIII



RESTORATION OF THE FOUNTAIN



Saturday noon I went to the well and looked on a while.  Merlin

was still burning smoke-powders, and pawing the air, and muttering

gibberish as hard as ever, but looking pretty down-hearted, for

of course he had not started even a perspiration in that well yet.

Finally I said:



"How does the thing promise by this time, partner?"



"Behold, I am even now busied with trial of the powerfulest

enchantment known to the princes of the occult arts in the lands

of the East; an it fail me, naught can avail.  Peace, until I finish."



He raised a smoke this time that darkened all the region, and must

have made matters uncomfortable for the hermits, for the wind

was their way, and it rolled down over their dens in a dense and

billowy fog.  He poured out volumes of speech to match, and contorted

his body and sawed the air with his hands in a most extraordinary

way.  At the end of twenty minutes he dropped down panting, and

about exhausted.  Now arrived the abbot and several hundred monks

and nuns, and behind them a multitude of pilgrims and a couple of

acres of foundlings, all drawn by the prodigious smoke, and all

in a grand state of excitement.  The abbot inquired anxiously for

results.  Merlin said:



"If any labor of mortal might break the spell that binds these

waters, this which I have but just essayed had done it.  It has

failed; whereby I do now know that that which I had feared is

a truth established; the sign of this failure is, that the most

potent spirit known to the magicians of the East, and whose name

none may utter and live, has laid his spell upon this well.  The

mortal does not breathe, nor ever will, who can penetrate the secret

of that spell, and without that secret none can break it.  The

water will flow no more forever, good Father.  I have done what

man could.  Suffer me to go."



Of course this threw the abbot into a good deal of a consternation.

He turned to me with the signs of it in his face, and said:



"Ye have heard him. Is it true?"



"Part of it is."



"Not all, then, not all!  What part is true?"



"That that spirit with the Russian name has put his spell

upon the well."



"God's wownds, then are we ruined!"



"Possibly."



"But not certainly?  Ye mean, not certainly?"



"That is it."



"Wherefore, ye also mean that when he saith none can break the spell--"



"Yes, when he says that, he says what isn't necessarily true.

There are conditions under which an effort to break it may have

some chance--that is, some small, some trifling chance--of success."



"The conditions--"



"Oh, they are nothing difficult.  Only these:  I want the well

and the surroundings for the space of half a mile, entirely to

myself from sunset to-day until I remove the ban--and nobody

allowed to cross the ground but by my authority."



"Are these all?"



"Yes."



"And you have no fear to try?"



"Oh, none.  One may fail, of course; and one may also succeed.

One can try, and I am ready to chance it.  I have my conditions?"



"These and all others ye may name.  I will issue commandment

to that effect."



"Wait," said Merlin, with an evil smile.  "Ye wit that he that

would break this spell must know that spirit's name?"



"Yes, I know his name."



"And wit you also that to know it skills not of itself, but ye

must likewise pronounce it?  Ha-ha!  Knew ye that?"



"Yes, I knew that, too."



"You had that knowledge!  Art a fool?  Are ye minded to utter

that name and die?"



"Utter it?  Why certainly.  I would utter it if it was Welsh."



"Ye are even a dead man, then; and I go to tell Arthur."



"That's all right.  Take your gripsack and get along.  The thing

for _you_ to do is to go home and work the weather, John W. Merlin."



It was a home shot, and it made him wince; for he was the worst

weather-failure in the kingdom.  Whenever he ordered up the

danger-signals along the coast there was a week's dead calm, sure,

and every time he prophesied fair weather it rained brickbats.

But I kept him in the weather bureau right along, to undermine

his reputation.  However, that shot raised his bile, and instead

of starting home to report my death, he said he would remain

and enjoy it.



My two experts arrived in the evening, and pretty well fagged,

for they had traveled double tides.  They had pack-mules along,

and had brought everything I needed--tools, pump, lead pipe,

Greek fire, sheaves of big rockets, roman candles, colored fire

sprays, electric apparatus, and a lot of sundries--everything

necessary for the stateliest kind of a miracle.  They got their

supper and a nap, and about midnight we sallied out through a

solitude so wholly vacant and complete that it quite overpassed

the required conditions.  We took possession of the well and its

surroundings.  My boys were experts in all sorts of things, from

the stoning up of a well to the constructing of a mathematical

instrument.  An hour before sunrise we had that leak mended in

ship-shape fashion, and the water began to rise.  Then we stowed our

fireworks in the chapel, locked up the place, and went home to bed.



Before the noon mass was over, we were at the well again; for there

was a deal to do yet, and I was determined to spring the miracle

before midnight, for business reasons:  for whereas a miracle

worked for the Church on a week-day is worth a good deal, it is

worth six times as much if you get it in on a Sunday.  In nine hours

the water had risen to its customary level--that is to say, it was

within twenty-three feet of the top.  We put in a little iron pump,

one of the first turned out by my works near the capital; we bored

into a stone reservoir which stood against the outer wall of the

well-chamber and inserted a section of lead pipe that was long

enough to reach to the door of the chapel and project beyond

the threshold, where the gushing water would be visible to the

two hundred and fifty acres of people I was intending should be

present on the flat plain in front of this little holy hillock at

the proper time.



We knocked the head out of an empty hogshead and hoisted this

hogshead to the flat roof of the chapel, where we clamped it down

fast, poured in gunpowder till it lay loosely an inch deep on the

bottom, then we stood up rockets in the hogshead as thick as they

could loosely stand, all the different breeds of rockets there are;

and they made a portly and imposing sheaf, I can tell you.  We

grounded the wire of a pocket electrical battery in that powder,

we placed a whole magazine of Greek fire on each corner of the

roof--blue on one corner, green on another, red on another, and

purple on the last--and grounded a wire in each.



About two hundred yards off, in the flat, we built a pen of

scantlings, about four feet high, and laid planks on it, and so

made a platform.  We covered it with swell tapestries borrowed

for the occasion, and topped it off with the abbot's own throne.

When you are going to do a miracle for an ignorant race, you want

to get in every detail that will count; you want to make all the

properties impressive to the public eye; you want to make matters

comfortable for your head guest; then you can turn yourself loose

and play your effects for all they are worth.  I know the value of

these things, for I know human nature.  You can't throw too much

style into a miracle.  It costs trouble, and work, and sometimes

money; but it pays in the end.  Well, we brought the wires to

the ground at the chapel, and then brought them under the ground

to the platform, and hid the batteries there.  We put a rope fence

a hundred feet square around the platform to keep off the common

multitude, and that finished the work.  My idea was, doors open

at 10:30, performance to begin at 11:25 sharp.  I wished I could

charge admission, but of course that wouldn't answer.  I instructed

my boys to be in the chapel as early as 10, before anybody was

around, and be ready to man the pumps at the proper time, and

make the fur fly.  Then we went home to supper.



The news of the disaster to the well had traveled far by this time;

and now for two or three days a steady avalanche of people had

been pouring into the valley.  The lower end of the valley was

become one huge camp; we should have a good house, no question

about that.  Criers went the rounds early in the evening and

announced the coming attempt, which put every pulse up to fever

heat.  They gave notice that the abbot and his official suite would

move in state and occupy the platform at 10:30, up to which time

all the region which was under my ban must be clear; the bells

would then cease from tolling, and this sign should be permission

to the multitudes to close in and take their places.



I was at the platform and all ready to do the honors when the

abbot's solemn procession hove in sight--which it did not do till

it was nearly to the rope fence, because it was a starless black

night and no torches permitted.  With it came Merlin, and took

a front seat on the platform; he was as good as his word for once.

One could not see the multitudes banked together beyond the ban,

but they were there, just the same.  The moment the bells stopped,

those banked masses broke and poured over the line like a vast

black wave, and for as much as a half hour it continued to flow,

and then it solidified itself, and you could have walked upon

a pavement of human heads to--well, miles.



We had a solemn stage-wait, now, for about twenty minutes--a thing

I had counted on for effect; it is always good to let your audience

have a chance to work up its expectancy.  At length, out of the

silence a noble Latin chant--men's voices--broke and swelled up

and rolled away into the night, a majestic tide of melody.  I had

put that up, too, and it was one of the best effects I ever invented.

When it was finished I stood up on the platform and extended my

hands abroad, for two minutes, with my face uplifted--that always

produces a dead hush--and then slowly pronounced this ghastly word

with a kind of awfulness which caused hundreds to tremble, and

many women to faint:



"Constantinopolitanischerdudelsackspfeifenmachersgesellschafft!"



Just as I was moaning out the closing hunks of that word, I touched

off one of my electric connections and all that murky world of

people stood revealed in a hideous blue glare!  It was immense--

that effect!  Lots of people shrieked, women curled up and quit

in every direction, foundlings collapsed by platoons.  The abbot

and the monks crossed themselves nimbly and their lips fluttered

with agitated prayers.  Merlin held his grip, but he was astonished

clear down to his corns; he had never seen anything to begin

with that, before.  Now was the time to pile in the effects.  I lifted

my hands and groaned out this word--as it were in agony:



"Nihilistendynamittheaterkaestchenssprengungsattentaetsversuchungen!"



--and turned on the red fire!  You should have heard that Atlantic

of people moan and howl when that crimson hell joined the blue!

After sixty seconds I shouted:



"Transvaaltruppentropentransporttrampelthiertreibertrauungsthraenentragoedie!"



--and lit up the green fire!  After waiting only forty seconds this

time, I spread my arms abroad and thundered out the devastating

syllables of this word of words:



"Mekkamuselmannenmassenmenchenmoerdermohrenmuttermarmormonumentenmacher!"



--and whirled on the purple glare!  There they were, all going

at once, red, blue, green, purple!--four furious volcanoes pouring

vast clouds of radiant smoke aloft, and spreading a blinding

rainbowed noonday to the furthest confines of that valley.  In

the distance one could see that fellow on the pillar standing rigid

against the background of sky, his seesaw stopped for the first

time in twenty years.  I knew the boys were at the pump now and

ready.  So I said to the abbot:



"The time is come, Father.  I am about to pronounce the dread name

and command the spell to dissolve.  You want to brace up, and take

hold of something."  Then I shouted to the people:  "Behold, in

another minute the spell will be broken, or no mortal can break it.

If it break, all will know it, for you will see the sacred water

gush from the chapel door!"



I stood a few moments, to let the hearers have a chance to spread

my announcement to those who couldn't hear, and so convey it

to the furthest ranks, then I made a grand exhibition of extra

posturing and gesturing, and shouted:



"Lo, I command the fell spirit that possesses the holy fountain

to now disgorge into the skies all the infernal fires that still

remain in him, and straightway dissolve his spell and flee hence

to the pit, there to lie bound a thousand years.  By his own dread

name I command it--BGWJJILLIGKKK!"



Then I touched off the hogshead of rockets, and a vast fountain of

dazzling lances of fire vomited itself toward the zenith with a

hissing rush, and burst in mid-sky into a storm of flashing jewels!

One mighty groan of terror started up from the massed people--

then suddenly broke into a wild hosannah of joy--for there, fair

and plain in the uncanny glare, they saw the freed water leaping

forth!  The old abbot could not speak a word, for tears and the

chokings in his throat; without utterance of any sort, he folded me

in his arms and mashed me.  It was more eloquent than speech.

And harder to get over, too, in a country where there were really

no doctors that were worth a damaged nickel.



You should have seen those acres of people throw themselves down

in that water and kiss it; kiss it, and pet it, and fondle it, and

talk to it as if it were alive, and welcome it back with the dear

names they gave their darlings, just as if it had been a friend who

was long gone away and lost, and was come home again.  Yes, it was

pretty to see, and made me think more of them than I had done before.



I sent Merlin home on a shutter.  He had caved in and gone down

like a landslide when I pronounced that fearful name, and had

never come to since.  He never had heard that name before,--neither

had I--but to him it was the right one.  Any jumble would have

been the right one.  He admitted, afterward, that that spirit's own

mother could not have pronounced that name better than I did.

He never could understand how I survived it, and I didn't tell

him.  It is only young magicians that give away a secret like that.

Merlin spent three months working enchantments to try to find out

the deep trick of how to pronounce that name and outlive it.

But he didn't arrive.



When I started to the chapel, the populace uncovered and fell back

reverently to make a wide way for me, as if I had been some kind

of a superior being--and I was.  I was aware of that.  I took along

a night shift of monks, and taught them the mystery of the pump,

and set them to work, for it was plain that a good part of the

people out there were going to sit up with the water all night,

consequently it was but right that they should have all they wanted

of it.  To those monks that pump was a good deal of a miracle

itself, and they were full of wonder over it; and of admiration,

too, of the exceeding effectiveness of its performance.



It was a great night, an immense night.  There was reputation in it.

I could hardly get to sleep for glorying over it.







CHAPTER XXIV



A RIVAL MAGICIAN



My influence in the Valley of Holiness was something prodigious

now.  It seemed worth while to try to turn it to some valuable

account.  The thought came to me the next morning, and was suggested

by my seeing one of my knights who was in the soap line come

riding in.  According to history, the monks of this place two

centuries before had been worldly minded enough to want to wash.

It might be that there was a leaven of this unrighteousness still

remaining.  So I sounded a Brother:



"Wouldn't you like a bath?"



He shuddered at the thought--the thought of the peril of it to

the well--but he said with feeling:



"One needs not to ask that of a poor body who has not known that

blessed refreshment sith that he was a boy.  Would God I might

wash me! but it may not be, fair sir, tempt me not; it is forbidden."



And then he sighed in such a sorrowful way that I was resolved

he should have at least one layer of his real estate removed,

if it sized up my whole influence and bankrupted the pile.  So I

went to the abbot and asked for a permit for this Brother.  He

blenched at the idea--I don't mean that you could see him blench,

for of course you couldn't see it without you scraped him, and

I didn't care enough about it to scrape him, but I knew the blench

was there, just the same, and within a book-cover's thickness of

the surface, too--blenched, and trembled.  He said:



"Ah, son, ask aught else thou wilt, and it is thine, and freely

granted out of a grateful heart--but this, oh, this!  Would you

drive away the blessed water again?"



"No, Father, I will not drive it away.  I have mysterious knowledge

which teaches me that there was an error that other time when

it was thought the institution of the bath banished the fountain."

A large interest began to show up in the old man's face.  "My

knowledge informs me that the bath was innocent of that misfortune,

which was caused by quite another sort of sin."



"These are brave words--but--but right welcome, if they be true."



"They are true, indeed.  Let me build the bath again, Father.

Let me build it again, and the fountain shall flow forever."



"You promise this?--you promise it?  Say the word--say you promise it!"



"I do promise it."



"Then will I have the first bath myself!  Go--get ye to your work.

Tarry not, tarry not, but go."



I and my boys were at work, straight off.  The ruins of the old

bath were there yet in the basement of the monastery, not a stone

missing.  They had been left just so, all these lifetimes, and

avoided with a pious fear, as things accursed.  In two days we

had it all done and the water in--a spacious pool of clear pure

water that a body could swim in.  It was running water, too.

It came in, and went out, through the ancient pipes.  The old abbot

kept his word, and was the first to try it.  He went down black

and shaky, leaving the whole black community above troubled and

worried and full of bodings; but he came back white and joyful,

and the game was made! another triumph scored.



It was a good campaign that we made in that Valley of Holiness,

and I was very well satisfied, and ready to move on now, but

I struck a disappointment.  I caught a heavy cold, and it started

up an old lurking rheumatism of mine.  Of course the rheumatism

hunted up my weakest place and located itself there.  This was

the place where the abbot put his arms about me and mashed me, what

time he was moved to testify his gratitude to me with an embrace.



When at last I got out, I was a shadow.  But everybody was full

of attentions and kindnesses, and these brought cheer back into

my life, and were the right medicine to help a convalescent swiftly

up toward health and strength again; so I gained fast.



Sandy was worn out with nursing; so I made up my mind to turn out

and go a cruise alone, leaving her at the nunnery to rest up.

My idea was to disguise myself as a freeman of peasant degree

and wander through the country a week or two on foot.  This would

give me a chance to eat and lodge with the lowliest and poorest

class of free citizens on equal terms.  There was no other way

to inform myself perfectly of their everyday life and the operation

of the laws upon it.  If I went among them as a gentleman, there

would be restraints and conventionalities which would shut me out

from their private joys and troubles, and I should get no further

than the outside shell.



One morning I was out on a long walk to get up muscle for my trip,

and had climbed the ridge which bordered the northern extremity

of the valley, when I came upon an artificial opening in the face

of a low precipice, and recognized it by its location as a hermitage

which had often been pointed out to me from a distance as the den

of a hermit of high renown for dirt and austerity.  I knew he had

lately been offered a situation in the Great Sahara, where lions

and sandflies made the hermit-life peculiarly attractive and

difficult, and had gone to Africa to take possession, so I thought

I would look in and see how the atmosphere of this den agreed

with its reputation.



My surprise was great:  the place was newly swept and scoured.

Then there was another surprise.  Back in the gloom of the cavern

I heard the clink of a little bell, and then this exclamation:



"Hello Central!  Is this you, Camelot?--Behold, thou mayst glad

thy heart an thou hast faith to believe the wonderful when that

it cometh in unexpected guise and maketh itself manifest in

impossible places--here standeth in the flesh his mightiness

The Boss, and with thine own ears shall ye hear him speak!"



Now what a radical reversal of things this was; what a jumbling

together of extravagant incongruities; what a fantastic conjunction

of opposites and irreconcilables--the home of the bogus miracle

become the home of a real one, the den of a mediaeval hermit turned

into a telephone office!



The telephone clerk stepped into the light, and I recognized one

of my young fellows.  I said:



"How long has this office been established here, Ulfius?"



"But since midnight, fair Sir Boss, an it please you.  We saw many

lights in the valley, and so judged it well to make a station,

for that where so many lights be needs must they indicate a town

of goodly size."



"Quite right.  It isn't a town in the customary sense, but it's

a good stand, anyway.  Do you know where you are?"



"Of that I have had no time to make inquiry; for whenas my

comradeship moved hence upon their labors, leaving me in charge,

I got me to needed rest, purposing to inquire when I waked, and

report the place's name to Camelot for record."



"Well, this is the Valley of Holiness."



It didn't take; I mean, he didn't start at the name, as I had

supposed he would.  He merely said:



"I will so report it."



"Why, the surrounding regions are filled with the noise of late

wonders that have happened here!  You didn't hear of them?"



"Ah, ye will remember we move by night, and avoid speech with all.

We learn naught but that we get by the telephone from Camelot."



"Why _they_ know all about this thing.  Haven't they told you anything

about the great miracle of the restoration of a holy fountain?"



"Oh, _that_?  Indeed yes.  But the name of _this_ valley doth woundily

differ from the name of _that_ one; indeed to differ wider were not pos--"



"What was that name, then?"



"The Valley of Hellishness."



"_That_ explains it.  Confound a telephone, anyway.  It is the very

demon for conveying similarities of sound that are miracles of

divergence from similarity of sense.  But no matter, you know

the name of the place now.  Call up Camelot."



He did it, and had Clarence sent for.  It was good to hear my boy's

voice again.  It was like being home.  After some affectionate

interchanges, and some account of my late illness, I said:



"What is new?"



"The king and queen and many of the court do start even in this

hour, to go to your valley to pay pious homage to the waters ye

have restored, and cleanse themselves of sin, and see the place

where the infernal spirit spouted true hell-flames to the clouds--

an ye listen sharply ye may hear me wink and hear me likewise

smile a smile, sith 'twas I that made selection of those flames

from out our stock and sent them by your order."



"Does the king know the way to this place?"



"The king?--no, nor to any other in his realms, mayhap; but the lads

that holp you with your miracle will be his guide and lead the way,

and appoint the places for rests at noons and sleeps at night."



"This will bring them here--when?"



"Mid-afternoon, or later, the third day."



"Anything else in the way of news?"



"The king hath begun the raising of the standing army ye suggested

to him; one regiment is complete and officered."



"The mischief!  I wanted a main hand in that myself.  There is

only one body of men in the kingdom that are fitted to officer

a regular army."



"Yes--and now ye will marvel to know there's not so much as one

West Pointer in that regiment."



"What are you talking about?  Are you in earnest?"



"It is truly as I have said."



"Why, this makes me uneasy.  Who were chosen, and what was the

method?  Competitive examination?"



"Indeed, I know naught of the method.  I but know this--these

officers be all of noble family, and are born--what is it you

call it?--chuckleheads."



"There's something wrong, Clarence."



"Comfort yourself, then; for two candidates for a lieutenancy do

travel hence with the king--young nobles both--and if you but wait

where you are you will hear them questioned."



"That is news to the purpose.  I will get one West Pointer in,

anyway.  Mount a man and send him to that school with a message;

let him kill horses, if necessary, but he must be there before

sunset to-night and say--"



"There is no need.  I have laid a ground wire to the school.

Prithee let me connect you with it."



It sounded good!  In this atmosphere of telephones and lightning

communication with distant regions, I was breathing the breath

of life again after long suffocation.  I realized, then, what a

creepy, dull, inanimate horror this land had been to me all these

years, and how I had been in such a stifled condition of mind as

to have grown used to it almost beyond the power to notice it.



I gave my order to the superintendent of the Academy personally.

I also asked him to bring me some paper and a fountain pen and

a box or so of safety matches.  I was getting tired of doing

without these conveniences.  I could have them now, as I wasn't

going to wear armor any more at present, and therefore could get

at my pockets.



When I got back to the monastery, I found a thing of interest

going on.  The abbot and his monks were assembled in the great

hall, observing with childish wonder and faith the performances

of a new magician, a fresh arrival.  His dress was the extreme of

the fantastic; as showy and foolish as the sort of thing an Indian

medicine-man wears.  He was mowing, and mumbling, and gesticulating,

and drawing mystical figures in the air and on the floor,--the

regular thing, you know.  He was a celebrity from Asia--so he

said, and that was enough.  That sort of evidence was as good

as gold, and passed current everywhere.



How easy and cheap it was to be a great magician on this fellow's

terms.  His specialty was to tell you what any individual on the

face of the globe was doing at the moment; and what he had done

at any time in the past, and what he would do at any time in the

future.  He asked if any would like to know what the Emperor of

the East was doing now?  The sparkling eyes and the delighted rubbing

of hands made eloquent answer--this reverend crowd _would_ like to

know what that monarch was at, just as this moment.  The fraud

went through some more mummery, and then made grave announcement:



"The high and mighty Emperor of the East doth at this moment put

money in the palm of a holy begging friar--one, two, three pieces,

and they be all of silver."



A buzz of admiring exclamations broke out, all around:



"It is marvelous!"  "Wonderful!"  "What study, what labor, to have

acquired a so amazing power as this!"



Would they like to know what the Supreme Lord of Inde was doing?

Yes.  He told them what the Supreme Lord of Inde was doing.  Then

he told them what the Sultan of Egypt was at; also what the King

of the Remote Seas was about.  And so on and so on; and with each

new marvel the astonishment at his accuracy rose higher and higher.

They thought he must surely strike an uncertain place some time;

but no, he never had to hesitate, he always knew, and always with

unerring precision.  I saw that if this thing went on I should lose

my supremacy, this fellow would capture my following, I should

be left out in the cold.  I must put a cog in his wheel, and do it

right away, too.  I said:



"If I might ask, I should very greatly like to know what a certain

person is doing."



"Speak, and freely.  I will tell you."



"It will be difficult--perhaps impossible."



"My art knoweth not that word.  The more difficult it is, the more

certainly will I reveal it to you."



You see, I was working up the interest.  It was getting pretty

high, too; you could see that by the craning necks all around,

and the half-suspended breathing.  So now I climaxed it:



"If you make no mistake--if you tell me truly what I want to

know--I will give you two hundred silver pennies."



"The fortune is mine!  I will tell you what you would know."



"Then tell me what I am doing with my right hand."



"Ah-h!"  There was a general gasp of surprise.  It had not occurred

to anybody in the crowd--that simple trick of inquiring about

somebody who wasn't ten thousand miles away.  The magician was

hit hard; it was an emergency that had never happened in his

experience before, and it corked him; he didn't know how to meet

it.  He looked stunned, confused; he couldn't say a word.  "Come,"

I said, "what are you waiting for?  Is it possible you can answer up,

right off, and tell what anybody on the other side of the earth is

doing, and yet can't tell what a person is doing who isn't three

yards from you?  Persons behind me know what I am doing with my

right hand--they will indorse you if you tell correctly."  He was

still dumb.  "Very well, I'll tell you why you don't speak up and

tell; it is because you don't know.  _You_ a magician!  Good friends,

this tramp is a mere fraud and liar."



This distressed the monks and terrified them.  They were not used

to hearing these awful beings called names, and they did not know

what might be the consequence.  There was a dead silence now;

superstitious bodings were in every mind.  The magician began to

pull his wits together, and when he presently smiled an easy,

nonchalant smile, it spread a mighty relief around; for it indicated

that his mood was not destructive.  He said:



"It hath struck me speechless, the frivolity of this person's

speech.  Let all know, if perchance there be any who know it not,

that enchanters of my degree deign not to concern themselves with

the doings of any but kings, princes, emperors, them that be born

in the purple and them only.  Had ye asked me what Arthur the great

king is doing, it were another matter, and I had told ye; but the

doings of a subject interest me not."



"Oh, I misunderstood you.  I thought you said 'anybody,' and so

I supposed 'anybody' included--well, anybody; that is, everybody."



"It doth--anybody that is of lofty birth; and the better if

he be royal."



"That, it meseemeth, might well be," said the abbot, who saw his

opportunity to smooth things and avert disaster, "for it were not

likely that so wonderful a gift as this would be conferred for

the revelation of the concerns of lesser beings than such as be

born near to the summits of greatness.  Our Arthur the king--"



"Would you know of him?" broke in the enchanter.



"Most gladly, yea, and gratefully."



Everybody was full of awe and interest again right away, the

incorrigible idiots.  They watched the incantations absorbingly,

and looked at me with a "There, now, what can you say to that?"

air, when the announcement came:



"The king is weary with the chase, and lieth in his palace these

two hours sleeping a dreamless sleep."



"God's benison upon him!" said the abbot, and crossed himself;

"may that sleep be to the refreshment of his body and his soul."



"And so it might be, if he were sleeping," I said, "but the king

is not sleeping, the king rides."



Here was trouble again--a conflict of authority.  Nobody knew which

of us to believe; I still had some reputation left.  The magician's

scorn was stirred, and he said:



"Lo, I have seen many wonderful soothsayers and prophets and

magicians in my life days, but none before that could sit idle and

see to the heart of things with never an incantation to help."



"You have lived in the woods, and lost much by it.  I use incantations

myself, as this good brotherhood are aware--but only on occasions

of moment."



When it comes to sarcasming, I reckon I know how to keep my end up.

That jab made this fellow squirm.  The abbot inquired after the

queen and the court, and got this information:



"They be all on sleep, being overcome by fatigue, like as to the king."



I said:



"That is merely another lie.  Half of them are about their amusements,

the queen and the other half are not sleeping, they ride.  Now

perhaps you can spread yourself a little, and tell us where the king

and queen and all that are this moment riding with them are going?"



"They sleep now, as I said; but on the morrow they will ride,

for they go a journey toward the sea."



"And where will they be the day after to-morrow at vespers?"



"Far to the north of Camelot, and half their journey will be done."



"That is another lie, by the space of a hundred and fifty miles.

Their journey will not be merely half done, it will be all done,

and they will be _here_, in this valley."



_That_ was a noble shot!  It set the abbot and the monks in a whirl

of excitement, and it rocked the enchanter to his base.  I followed

the thing right up:



"If the king does not arrive, I will have myself ridden on a rail:

if he does I will ride you on a rail instead."



Next day I went up to the telephone office and found that the king

had passed through two towns that were on the line.  I spotted

his progress on the succeeding day in the same way.  I kept these

matters to myself.  The third day's reports showed that if he

kept up his gait he would arrive by four in the afternoon.  There

was still no sign anywhere of interest in his coming; there seemed

to be no preparations making to receive him in state; a strange

thing, truly.  Only one thing could explain this:  that other

magician had been cutting under me, sure.  This was true.  I asked

a friend of mine, a monk, about it, and he said, yes, the magician

had tried some further enchantments and found out that the court

had concluded to make no journey at all, but stay at home.  Think

of that!  Observe how much a reputation was worth in such a country.

These people had seen me do the very showiest bit of magic in

history, and the only one within their memory that had a positive

value, and yet here they were, ready to take up with an adventurer

who could offer no evidence of his powers but his mere unproven word.



However, it was not good politics to let the king come without

any fuss and feathers at all, so I went down and drummed up a

procession of pilgrims and smoked out a batch of hermits and

started them out at two o'clock to meet him.  And that was the

sort of state he arrived in.  The abbot was helpless with rage

and humiliation when I brought him out on a balcony and showed

him the head of the state marching in and never a monk on hand to

offer him welcome, and no stir of life or clang of joy-bell to glad

his spirit.  He took one look and then flew to rouse out his forces.

The next minute the bells were dinning furiously, and the various

buildings were vomiting monks and nuns, who went swarming in a

rush toward the coming procession; and with them went that magician--

and he was on a rail, too, by the abbot's order; and his reputation

was in the mud, and mine was in the sky again.  Yes, a man can

keep his trademark current in such a country, but he can't sit

around and do it; he has got to be on deck and attending to business

right along.







CHAPTER XXV



A COMPETITIVE EXAMINATION



When the king traveled for change of air, or made a progress, or

visited a distant noble whom he wished to bankrupt with the cost

of his keep, part of the administration moved with him.  It was

a fashion of the time.  The Commission charged with the examination

of candidates for posts in the army came with the king to the

Valley, whereas they could have transacted their business just

as well at home.  And although this expedition was strictly a

holiday excursion for the king, he kept some of his business

functions going just the same.  He touched for the evil, as usual;

he held court in the gate at sunrise and tried cases, for he was

himself Chief Justice of the King's Bench.



He shone very well in this latter office.  He was a wise and humane

judge, and he clearly did his honest best and fairest,--according

to his lights.  That is a large reservation.  His lights--I mean

his rearing--often colored his decisions.  Whenever there was a

dispute between a noble or gentleman and a person of lower degree,

the king's leanings and sympathies were for the former class always,

whether he suspected it or not.  It was impossible that this should

be otherwise.  The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's

moral perceptions are known and conceded, the world over; and a

privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders

under another name.  This has a harsh sound, and yet should not

be offensive to any--even to the noble himself--unless the fact

itself be an offense:  for the statement simply formulates a fact.

The repulsive feature of slavery is the _thing_, not its name.  One

needs but to hear an aristocrat speak of the classes that are below

him to recognize--and in but indifferently modified measure--

the very air and tone of the actual slaveholder; and behind these

are the slaveholder's spirit, the slaveholder's blunted feeling.

They are the result of the same cause in both cases:  the possessor's

old and inbred custom of regarding himself as a superior being.

The king's judgments wrought frequent injustices, but it was merely

the fault of his training, his natural and unalterable sympathies.

He was as unfitted for a judgeship as would be the average mother

for the position of milk-distributor to starving children in

famine-time; her own children would fare a shade better than the rest.



One very curious case came before the king.  A young girl, an

orphan, who had a considerable estate, married a fine young fellow

who had nothing.  The girl's property was within a seigniory held

by the Church.  The bishop of the diocese, an arrogant scion of

the great nobility, claimed the girl's estate on the ground that

she had married privately, and thus had cheated the Church out

of one of its rights as lord of the seigniory--the one heretofore

referred to as le droit du seigneur.  The penalty of refusal or

avoidance was confiscation.  The girl's defense was, that the

lordship of the seigniory was vested in the bishop, and the

particular right here involved was not transferable, but must be

exercised by the lord himself or stand vacated; and that an older

law, of the Church itself, strictly barred the bishop from exercising

it.  It was a very odd case, indeed.



It reminded me of something I had read in my youth about the

ingenious way in which the aldermen of London raised the money

that built the Mansion House.  A person who had not taken the

Sacrament according to the Anglican rite could not stand as a

candidate for sheriff of London.  Thus Dissenters were ineligible;

they could not run if asked, they could not serve if elected.

The aldermen, who without any question were Yankees in disguise,

hit upon this neat device:  they passed a by-law imposing a fine

of L400 upon any one who should refuse to be a candidate for

sheriff, and a fine of L600 upon any person who, after being

elected sheriff, refused to serve.  Then they went to work and

elected a lot of Dissenters, one after another, and kept it up

until they had collected L15,000 in fines; and there stands the

stately Mansion House to this day, to keep the blushing citizen

in mind of a long past and lamented day when a band of Yankees

slipped into London and played games of the sort that has given

their race a unique and shady reputation among all truly good

and holy peoples that be in the earth.



The girl's case seemed strong to me; the bishop's case was just

as strong.  I did not see how the king was going to get out of

this hole.  But he got out.  I append his decision:



"Truly I find small difficulty here, the matter being even a

child's affair for simpleness.  An the young bride had conveyed

notice, as in duty bound, to her feudal lord and proper master

and protector the bishop, she had suffered no loss, for the said

bishop could have got a dispensation making him, for temporary

conveniency, eligible to the exercise of his said right, and thus

would she have kept all she had.  Whereas, failing in her first

duty, she hath by that failure failed in all; for whoso, clinging

to a rope, severeth it above his hands, must fall; it being no

defense to claim that the rest of the rope is sound, neither any

deliverance from his peril, as he shall find.  Pardy, the woman's

case is rotten at the source.  It is the decree of the court that

she forfeit to the said lord bishop all her goods, even to the

last farthing that she doth possess, and be thereto mulcted in

the costs.  Next!"



Here was a tragic end to a beautiful honeymoon not yet three months

old.  Poor young creatures!  They had lived these three months

lapped to the lips in worldly comforts.  These clothes and trinkets

they were wearing were as fine and dainty as the shrewdest stretch

of the sumptuary laws allowed to people of their degree; and in

these pretty clothes, she crying on his shoulder, and he trying

to comfort her with hopeful words set to the music of despair,

they went from the judgment seat out into the world homeless,

bedless, breadless; why, the very beggars by the roadsides were

not so poor as they.



Well, the king was out of the hole; and on terms satisfactory to

the Church and the rest of the aristocracy, no doubt.  Men write

many fine and plausible arguments in support of monarchy, but

the fact remains that where every man in a State has a vote, brutal

laws are impossible.  Arthur's people were of course poor material

for a republic, because they had been debased so long by monarchy;

and yet even they would have been intelligent enough to make short

work of that law which the king had just been administering if it

had been submitted to their full and free vote.  There is a phrase

which has grown so common in the world's mouth that it has come

to seem to have sense and meaning--the sense and meaning implied

when it is used; that is the phrase which refers to this or that or

the other nation as possibly being "capable of self-government";

and the implied sense of it is, that there has been a nation

somewhere, some time or other which _wasn't_ capable of it--wasn't as

able to govern itself as some self-appointed specialists were or

would be to govern it.  The master minds of all nations, in all

ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation,

and from the mass of the nation only--not from its privileged

classes; and so, no matter what the nation's intellectual grade

was; whether high or low, the bulk of its ability was in the long

ranks of its nameless and its poor, and so it never saw the day

that it had not the material in abundance whereby to govern itself.

Which is to assert an always self-proven fact:  that even the best

governed and most free and most enlightened monarchy is still

behind the best condition attainable by its people; and that the

same is true of kindred governments of lower grades, all the way

down to the lowest.



King Arthur had hurried up the army business altogether beyond

my calculations.  I had not supposed he would move in the matter

while I was away; and so I had not mapped out a scheme for determining

the merits of officers; I had only remarked that it would be wise

to submit every candidate to a sharp and searching examination;

and privately I meant to put together a list of military qualifications

that nobody could answer to but my West Pointers.  That ought

to have been attended to before I left; for the king was so taken

with the idea of a standing army that he couldn't wait but must

get about it at once, and get up as good a scheme of examination

as he could invent out of his own head.



I was impatient to see what this was; and to show, too, how much

more admirable was the one which I should display to the Examining

Board.  I intimated this, gently, to the king, and it fired his

curiosity.  When the Board was assembled, I followed him in; and

behind us came the candidates.  One of these candidates was a bright

young West Pointer of mine, and with him were a couple of my

West Point professors.



When I saw the Board, I did not know whether to cry or to laugh.

The head of it was the officer known to later centuries as Norroy

King-at-Arms!  The two other members were chiefs of bureaus in

his department; and all three were priests, of course; all officials

who had to know how to read and write were priests.



My candidate was called first, out of courtesy to me, and the head

of the Board opened on him with official solemnity:



"Name?"



"Mal-ease."



"Son of?"



"Webster."



"Webster--Webster.  H'm--I--my memory faileth to recall the

name.  Condition?"



"Weaver."



"Weaver!--God keep us!"



The king was staggered, from his summit to his foundations; one

clerk fainted, and the others came near it.  The chairman pulled

himself together, and said indignantly:



"It is sufficient.  Get you hence."



But I appealed to the king.  I begged that my candidate might be

examined.  The king was willing, but the Board, who were all

well-born folk, implored the king to spare them the indignity of

examining the weaver's son.  I knew they didn't know enough to

examine him anyway, so I joined my prayers to theirs and the king

turned the duty over to my professors.  I had had a blackboard

prepared, and it was put up now, and the circus began.  It was

beautiful to hear the lad lay out the science of war, and wallow

in details of battle and siege, of supply, transportation, mining

and countermining, grand tactics, big strategy and little strategy,

signal service, infantry, cavalry, artillery, and all about siege

guns, field guns, gatling guns, rifled guns, smooth bores, musket

practice, revolver practice--and not a solitary word of it all

could these catfish make head or tail of, you understand--and it

was handsome to see him chalk off mathematical nightmares on the

blackboard that would stump the angels themselves, and do it like

nothing, too--all about eclipses, and comets, and solstices, and

constellations, and mean time, and sidereal time, and dinner time,

and bedtime, and every other imaginable thing above the clouds or

under them that you could harry or bullyrag an enemy with and make

him wish he hadn't come--and when the boy made his military salute

and stood aside at last, I was proud enough to hug him, and all

those other people were so dazed they looked partly petrified,

partly drunk, and wholly caught out and snowed under.  I judged

that the cake was ours, and by a large majority.



Education is a great thing.  This was the same youth who had come

to West Point so ignorant that when I asked him, "If a general

officer should have a horse shot under him on the field of battle,

what ought he to do?" answered up naively and said:



"Get up and brush himself."



One of the young nobles was called up now.  I thought I would

question him a little myself.  I said:



"Can your lordship read?"



His face flushed indignantly, and he fired this at me:



"Takest me for a clerk?  I trow I am not of a blood that--"



"Answer the question!"



He crowded his wrath down and made out to answer "No."



"Can you write?"



He wanted to resent this, too, but I said:



"You will confine yourself to the questions, and make no comments.

You are not here to air your blood or your graces, and nothing

of the sort will be permitted.  Can you write?"



"No."



"Do you know the multiplication table?"



"I wit not what ye refer to."



"How much is 9 times 6?"



"It is a mystery that is hidden from me by reason that the emergency

requiring the fathoming of it hath not in my life-days occurred,

and so, not having no need to know this thing, I abide barren

of the knowledge."



"If A trade a barrel of onions to B, worth 2 pence the bushel,

in exchange for a sheep worth 4 pence and a dog worth a penny,

and C kill the dog before delivery, because bitten by the same,

who mistook him for D, what sum is still due to A from B, and

which party pays for the dog, C or D, and who gets the money?

If A, is the penny sufficient, or may he claim consequential damages

in the form of additional money to represent the possible profit

which might have inured from the dog, and classifiable as earned

increment, that is to say, usufruct?"



"Verily, in the all-wise and unknowable providence of God, who

moveth in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, have I never

heard the fellow to this question for confusion of the mind and

congestion of the ducts of thought.  Wherefore I beseech you let

the dog and the onions and these people of the strange and godless

names work out their several salvations from their piteous and

wonderful difficulties without help of mine, for indeed their

trouble is sufficient as it is, whereas an I tried to help I should

but damage their cause the more and yet mayhap not live myself

to see the desolation wrought."



"What do you know of the laws of attraction and gravitation?"



"If there be such, mayhap his grace the king did promulgate them

whilst that I lay sick about the beginning of the year and thereby

failed to hear his proclamation."



"What do you know of the science of optics?"



"I know of governors of places, and seneschals of castles, and

sheriffs of counties, and many like small offices and titles of

honor, but him you call the Science of Optics I have not heard

of before; peradventure it is a new dignity."



"Yes, in this country."



Try to conceive of this mollusk gravely applying for an official

position, of any kind under the sun!  Why, he had all the earmarks

of a typewriter copyist, if you leave out the disposition to

contribute uninvited emendations of your grammar and punctuation.

It was unaccountable that he didn't attempt a little help of that

sort out of his majestic supply of incapacity for the job.  But that

didn't prove that he hadn't material in him for the disposition,

it only proved that he wasn't a typewriter copyist yet.  After

nagging him a little more, I let the professors loose on him and

they turned him inside out, on the line of scientific war, and

found him empty, of course.  He knew somewhat about the warfare

of the time--bushwhacking around for ogres, and bull-fights in

the tournament ring, and such things--but otherwise he was empty

and useless.  Then we took the other young noble in hand, and he

was the first one's twin, for ignorance and incapacity.  I delivered

them into the hands of the chairman of the Board with the comfortable

consciousness that their cake was dough.  They were examined in

the previous order of precedence.



"Name, so please you?"



"Pertipole, son of Sir Pertipole, Baron of Barley Mash."



"Grandfather?"



"Also Sir Pertipole, Baron of Barley Mash."



"Great-grandfather?"



"The same name and title."



"Great-great-grandfather?"



"We had none, worshipful sir, the line failing before it had

reached so far back."



"It mattereth not.  It is a good four generations, and fulfilleth

the requirements of the rule."



"Fulfills what rule?" I asked.



"The rule requiring four generations of nobility or else the

candidate is not eligible."



"A man not eligible for a lieutenancy in the army unless he can

prove four generations of noble descent?"



"Even so; neither lieutenant nor any other officer may be commissioned

without that qualification."



"Oh, come, this is an astonishing thing.  What good is such a

qualification as that?"



"What good?  It is a hardy question, fair sir and Boss, since it doth

go far to impugn the wisdom of even our holy Mother Church herself."



"As how?"



"For that she hath established the self-same rule regarding

saints.  By her law none may be canonized until he hath lain dead

four generations."



"I see, I see--it is the same thing.  It is wonderful.  In the one

case a man lies dead-alive four generations--mummified in ignorance

and sloth--and that qualifies him to command live people, and take

their weal and woe into his impotent hands; and in the other case,

a man lies bedded with death and worms four generations, and that

qualifies him for office in the celestial camp.  Does the king's

grace approve of this strange law?"



The king said:



"Why, truly I see naught about it that is strange.  All places of

honor and of profit do belong, by natural right, to them that be

of noble blood, and so these dignities in the army are their

property and would be so without this or any rule.  The rule is

but to mark a limit.  Its purpose is to keep out too recent blood,

which would bring into contempt these offices, and men of lofty

lineage would turn their backs and scorn to take them.  I were

to blame an I permitted this calamity.  _You_ can permit it an you

are minded so to do, for you have the delegated authority, but

that the king should do it were a most strange madness and not

comprehensible to any."



"I yield.  Proceed, sir Chief of the Herald's College."



The chairman resumed as follows:



"By what illustrious achievement for the honor of the Throne and

State did the founder of your great line lift himself to the

sacred dignity of the British nobility?"



"He built a brewery."



"Sire, the Board finds this candidate perfect in all the requirements

and qualifications for military command, and doth hold his case

open for decision after due examination of his competitor."



The competitor came forward and proved exactly four generations

of nobility himself.  So there was a tie in military qualifications

that far.



He stood aside a moment, and Sir Pertipole was questioned further:



"Of what condition was the wife of the founder of your line?"



"She came of the highest landed gentry, yet she was not noble;

she was gracious and pure and charitable, of a blameless life and

character, insomuch that in these regards was she peer of the

best lady in the land."



"That will do.  Stand down."  He called up the competing lordling

again, and asked:  "What was the rank and condition of the

great-grandmother who conferred British nobility upon your

great house?"



"She was a king's leman and did climb to that splendid eminence

by her own unholpen merit from the sewer where she was born."



"Ah, this, indeed, is true nobility, this is the right and perfect

intermixture.  The lieutenancy is yours, fair lord.  Hold it not in

contempt; it is the humble step which will lead to grandeurs more

worthy of the splendor of an origin like to thine."



I was down in the bottomless pit of humiliation.  I had promised

myself an easy and zenith-scouring triumph, and this was the outcome!



I was almost ashamed to look my poor disappointed cadet in the

face.  I told him to go home and be patient, this wasn't the end.



I had a private audience with the king, and made a proposition.

I said it was quite right to officer that regiment with nobilities,

and he couldn't have done a wiser thing.  It would also be a good

idea to add five hundred officers to it; in fact, add as many

officers as there were nobles and relatives of nobles in the

country, even if there should finally be five times as many officers

as privates in it; and thus make it the crack regiment, the envied

regiment, the King's Own regiment, and entitled to fight on its

own hook and in its own way, and go whither it would and come

when it pleased, in time of war, and be utterly swell and independent.

This would make that regiment the heart's desire of all the

nobility, and they would all be satisfied and happy.  Then we

would make up the rest of the standing army out of commonplace

materials, and officer it with nobodies, as was proper--nobodies

selected on a basis of mere efficiency--and we would make this

regiment toe the line, allow it no aristocratic freedom from

restraint, and force it to do all the work and persistent hammering,

to the end that whenever the King's Own was tired and wanted to go

off for a change and rummage around amongst ogres and have a good

time, it could go without uneasiness, knowing that matters were in

safe hands behind it, and business going to be continued at the

old stand, same as usual.  The king was charmed with the idea.



When I noticed that, it gave me a valuable notion.  I thought

I saw my way out of an old and stubborn difficulty at last.  You

see, the royalties of the Pendragon stock were a long-lived race

and very fruitful.  Whenever a child was born to any of these--

and it was pretty often--there was wild joy in the nation's mouth,

and piteous sorrow in the nation's heart.  The joy was questionable,

but the grief was honest.  Because the event meant another call

for a Royal Grant.  Long was the list of these royalties, and

they were a heavy and steadily increasing burden upon the treasury

and a menace to the crown.  Yet Arthur could not believe this

latter fact, and he would not listen to any of my various projects

for substituting something in the place of the royal grants.  If I

could have persuaded him to now and then provide a support for

one of these outlying scions from his own pocket, I could have

made a grand to-do over it, and it would have had a good effect

with the nation; but no, he wouldn't hear of such a thing.  He had

something like a religious passion for royal grant; he seemed to

look upon it as a sort of sacred swag, and one could not irritate

him in any way so quickly and so surely as by an attack upon that

venerable institution.  If I ventured to cautiously hint that there

was not another respectable family in England that would humble

itself to hold out the hat--however, that is as far as I ever got;

he always cut me short there, and peremptorily, too.



But I believed I saw my chance at last.  I would form this crack

regiment out of officers alone--not a single private.  Half of it

should consist of nobles, who should fill all the places up to

Major-General, and serve gratis and pay their own expenses; and

they would be glad to do this when they should learn that the rest

of the regiment would consist exclusively of princes of the blood.

These princes of the blood should range in rank from Lieutenant-General

up to Field Marshal, and be gorgeously salaried and equipped and

fed by the state.  Moreover--and this was the master stroke--

it should be decreed that these princely grandees should be always

addressed by a stunningly gaudy and awe-compelling title (which

I would presently invent), and they and they only in all England

should be so addressed.  Finally, all princes of the blood should

have free choice; join that regiment, get that great title, and

renounce the royal grant, or stay out and receive a grant.  Neatest

touch of all:  unborn but imminent princes of the blood could be

_born_ into the regiment, and start fair, with good wages and a

permanent situation, upon due notice from the parents.



All the boys would join, I was sure of that; so, all existing

grants would be relinquished; that the newly born would always

join was equally certain.  Within sixty days that quaint and

bizarre anomaly, the Royal Grant, would cease to be a living fact,

and take its place among the curiosities of the past.







CHAPTER XXVI



THE FIRST NEWSPAPER



When I told the king I was going out disguised as a petty freeman

to scour the country and familiarize myself with the humbler life

of the people, he was all afire with the novelty of the thing

in a minute, and was bound to take a chance in the adventure

himself--nothing should stop him--he would drop everything and

go along--it was the prettiest idea he had run across for many

a day.  He wanted to glide out the back way and start at once;

but I showed him that that wouldn't answer.  You see, he was billed

for the king's-evil--to touch for it, I mean--and it wouldn't be

right to disappoint the house and it wouldn't make a delay worth

considering, anyway, it was only a one-night stand.  And I thought

he ought to tell the queen he was going away.  He clouded up at

that and looked sad.  I was sorry I had spoken, especially when

he said mournfully:



"Thou forgettest that Launcelot is here; and where Launcelot is,

she noteth not the going forth of the king, nor what day he returneth."



Of course, I changed the Subject.  Yes, Guenever was beautiful,

it is true, but take her all around she was pretty slack.  I never

meddled in these matters, they weren't my affair, but I did hate

to see the way things were going on, and I don't mind saying that

much.  Many's the time she had asked me, "Sir Boss, hast seen

Sir Launcelot about?" but if ever she went fretting around for

the king I didn't happen to be around at the time.



There was a very good lay-out for the king's-evil business--very

tidy and creditable.  The king sat under a canopy of state; about

him were clustered a large body of the clergy in full canonicals.

Conspicuous, both for location and personal outfit, stood Marinel,

a hermit of the quack-doctor species, to introduce the sick.  All

abroad over the spacious floor, and clear down to the doors,

in a thick jumble, lay or sat the scrofulous, under a strong light.

It was as good as a tableau; in fact, it had all the look of being

gotten up for that, though it wasn't.  There were eight hundred

sick people present.  The work was slow; it lacked the interest

of novelty for me, because I had seen the ceremonies before;

the thing soon became tedious, but the proprieties required me

to stick it out.  The doctor was there for the reason that in all

such crowds there were many people who only imagined something

was the matter with them, and many who were consciously sound

but wanted the immortal honor of fleshly contact with a king, and

yet others who pretended to illness in order to get the piece of

coin that went with the touch.  Up to this time this coin had been

a wee little gold piece worth about a third of a dollar.  When you

consider how much that amount of money would buy, in that age

and country, and how usual it was to be scrofulous, when not dead,

you would understand that the annual king's-evil appropriation was

just the River and Harbor bill of that government for the grip it

took on the treasury and the chance it afforded for skinning the

surplus.  So I had privately concluded to touch the treasury itself

for the king's-evil.  I covered six-sevenths of the appropriation

into the treasury a week before starting from Camelot on my

adventures, and ordered that the other seventh be inflated into

five-cent nickels and delivered into the hands of the head clerk

of the King's Evil Department; a nickel to take the place of each

gold coin, you see, and do its work for it.  It might strain the

nickel some, but I judged it could stand it.  As a rule, I do not

approve of watering stock, but I considered it square enough

in this case, for it was just a gift, anyway.  Of course, you can

water a gift as much as you want to; and I generally do.  The old

gold and silver coins of the country were of ancient and unknown

origin, as a rule, but some of them were Roman; they were ill-shapen,

and seldom rounder than a moon that is a week past the full; they

were hammered, not minted, and they were so worn with use that

the devices upon them were as illegible as blisters, and looked

like them.  I judged that a sharp, bright new nickel, with a

first-rate likeness of the king on one side of it and Guenever

on the other, and a blooming pious motto, would take the tuck out

of scrofula as handy as a nobler coin and please the scrofulous

fancy more; and I was right.  This batch was the first it was

tried on, and it worked to a charm.  The saving in expense was

a notable economy.  You will see that by these figures:  We touched

a trifle over 700 of the 800 patients; at former rates, this would

have cost the government about $240; at the new rate we pulled

through for about $35, thus saving upward of $200 at one swoop.

To appreciate the full magnitude of this stroke, consider these

other figures:  the annual expenses of a national government amount

to the equivalent of a contribution of three days' average wages of

every individual of the population, counting every individual as

if he were a man.  If you take a nation of 60,000,000, where average

wages are $2 per day, three days' wages taken from each individual

will provide $360,000,000 and pay the government's expenses.  In my

day, in my own country, this money was collected from imposts,

and the citizen imagined that the foreign importer paid it, and it

made him comfortable to think so; whereas, in fact, it was paid

by the American people, and was so equally and exactly distributed

among them that the annual cost to the 100-millionaire and the

annual cost to the sucking child of the day-laborer was precisely

the same--each paid $6.  Nothing could be equaler than that,

I reckon.  Well, Scotland and Ireland were tributary to Arthur,

and the united populations of the British Islands amounted to

something less than 1,000,000.  A mechanic's average wage was

3 cents a day, when he paid his own keep.  By this rule the national

government's expenses were $90,000 a year, or about $250 a day.

Thus, by the substitution of nickels for gold on a king's-evil

day, I not only injured no one, dissatisfied no one, but pleased

all concerned and saved four-fifths of that day's national expense

into the bargain--a saving which would have been the equivalent

of $800,000 in my day in America.  In making this substitution

I had drawn upon the wisdom of a very remote source--the wisdom

of my boyhood--for the true statesman does not despise any wisdom,

howsoever lowly may be its origin:  in my boyhood I had always

saved my pennies and contributed buttons to the foreign missionary

cause.  The buttons would answer the ignorant savage as well as

the coin, the coin would answer me better than the buttons; all

hands were happy and nobody hurt.



Marinel took the patients as they came.  He examined the candidate;

if he couldn't qualify he was warned off; if he could he was passed

along to the king.  A priest pronounced the words, "They shall

lay their hands on the sick, and they shall recover."  Then the king

stroked the ulcers, while the reading continued; finally, the

patient graduated and got his nickel--the king hanging it around

his neck himself--and was dismissed.  Would you think that that

would cure?  It certainly did.  Any mummery will cure if the

patient's faith is strong in it.  Up by Astolat there was a chapel

where the Virgin had once appeared to a girl who used to herd

geese around there--the girl said so herself--and they built the

chapel upon that spot and hung a picture in it representing the

occurrence--a picture which you would think it dangerous for a sick

person to approach; whereas, on the contrary, thousands of the lame

and the sick came and prayed before it every year and went away

whole and sound; and even the well could look upon it and live.

Of course, when I was told these things I did not believe them;

but when I went there and saw them I had to succumb.  I saw the

cures effected myself; and they were real cures and not questionable.

I saw cripples whom I had seen around Camelot for years on crutches,

arrive and pray before that picture, and put down their crutches

and walk off without a limp.  There were piles of crutches there

which had been left by such people as a testimony.



In other places people operated on a patient's mind, without saying

a word to him, and cured him.  In others, experts assembled patients

in a room and prayed over them, and appealed to their faith, and

those patients went away cured.  Wherever you find a king who can't

cure the king's-evil you can be sure that the most valuable

superstition that supports his throne--the subject's belief in

the divine appointment of his sovereign--has passed away.  In my

youth the monarchs of England had ceased to touch for the evil,

but there was no occasion for this diffidence:  they could have

cured it forty-nine times in fifty.



Well, when the priest had been droning for three hours, and the

good king polishing the evidences, and the sick were still pressing

forward as plenty as ever, I got to feeling intolerably bored.

I was sitting by an open window not far from the canopy of state.

For the five hundredth time a patient stood forward to have his

repulsivenesses stroked; again those words were being droned out:

"they shall lay their hands on the sick"--when outside there rang

clear as a clarion a note that enchanted my soul and tumbled

thirteen worthless centuries about my ears:  "Camelot _Weekly

Hosannah and Literary Volcano!_--latest irruption--only two cents--

all about the big miracle in the Valley of Holiness!"  One greater

than kings had arrived--the newsboy.  But I was the only person

in all that throng who knew the meaning of this mighty birth, and

what this imperial magician was come into the world to do.



I dropped a nickel out of the window and got my paper; the

Adam-newsboy of the world went around the corner to get my change;

is around the corner yet.  It was delicious to see a newspaper

again, yet I was conscious of a secret shock when my eye fell upon

the first batch of display head-lines.  I had lived in a clammy

atmosphere of reverence, respect, deference, so long that they

sent a quivery little cold wave through me:





              HIGH TIMES IN THE VALLEY



                    OF HOLINESS!



                        ----



               THE WATER-WORKS CORKED!



                        ----



         BRER MERLIN WORKS HIS ARTS, BUT GETS

                        LEFT?



                        ----



      But the Boss scores on his first Innings!



                        ----



          The Miraculous Well Uncorked amid

                  awful outbursts of



              INFERNAL FIRE AND SMOKE

                     ATHUNDER!



                        ----



           THE BUZZARD-ROOST ASTONISHED!



                        ----



              UNPARALLELED REJOIBINGS!





--and so on, and so on.  Yes, it was too loud.  Once I could have

enjoyed it and seen nothing out of the way about it, but now its

note was discordant.  It was good Arkansas journalism, but this

was not Arkansas.  Moreover, the next to the last line was calculated

to give offense to the hermits, and perhaps lose us their advertising.

Indeed, there was too lightsome a tone of flippancy all through

the paper.  It was plain I had undergone a considerable change

without noticing it.  I found myself unpleasantly affected by

pert little irreverencies which would have seemed but proper and

airy graces of speech at an earlier period of my life.  There was an

abundance of the following breed of items, and they discomforted me:



   LOCAL SMOKE AND CINDERS.



   Sir Launcelot met up with old King

   Agrivance of Ireland unexpectedly last

   weok over on the moor south of Sir

   Balmoral le Merveilleuse's hog dasture.

   The widow has been notified.



   Expedition No. 3 will start adout the

   first of mext month on a search f8r Sir

   Sagramour le Desirous. It is in com-

   and of the renowned Knight of the Red

   Lawns, assissted by Sir Persant of Inde,

   who is compete9t. intelligent, courte-

   ous, and in every way a brick, and fur-

   tHer assisted by Sir Palamides the Sara-

   cen, who is no huckleberry hinself.

   This is no pic-nic, these boys mean

   busine&s.



   The readers of the Hosannah will re-

   gret to learn that the hadndsome and

   popular Sir Charolais of Gaul, who dur-

   ing his four weeks' stay at the Bull and

   Halibut, this city, has won every heart

   by his polished manners and elegant

   cPnversation, will pUll out to-day for

   home. Give us another call, Charley!



   The bdsiness end of the funeral of

   the late Sir Dalliance the duke's son of

   Cornwall, killed in an encounter with

   the Giant of the Knotted Bludgeon last

   Tuesday on the borders of the Plain of

   Enchantment was in the hands of the

   ever affable and efficient Mumble,

   prince of un3ertakers, then whom there

   exists none by whom it were a more

   satisfying pleasure to have the last sad

   offices performed. Give him a trial.



   The cordial thanks of the Hosannah

   office are due, from editor down to

   devil, to the ever courteous and thought-

   ful Lord High Stew d of the Palace's

   Third Assistant V  t for several sau-

   ceTs of ice crEam a quality calculated

   to make the ey of the recipients hu-

   mid with grt  ude; and it done it.

   When this  administration wants to

   chalk up a desirable name for early

   promotion, the Hosannah would like a

   chance to sudgest.



   The Demoiselle Irene Dewlap, of

   South Astolat, is visiting her uncle, the

   popular host of the Cattlemen's Board-

   ing Ho&se, Liver Lane, this city.



   Young Barker the bellows-mender is

   hoMe again, and looks much improved

   by his vacation round-up among the out-

   lying smithies. See his ad.



Of course it was good enough journalism for a beginning; I knew

that quite well, and yet it was somehow disappointing.  The

"Court Circular" pleased me better; indeed, its simple and dignified

respectfulness was a distinct refreshment to me after all those

disgraceful familiarities.  But even it could have been improved.

Do what one may, there is no getting an air of variety into a court

circular, I acknowledge that.  There is a profound monotonousness

about its facts that baffles and defeats one's sincerest efforts

to make them sparkle and enthuse.  The best way to manage--in fact,

the only sensible way--is to disguise repetitiousness of fact under

variety of form:  skin your fact each time and lay on a new cuticle

of words.  It deceives the eye; you think it is a new fact; it

gives you the idea that the court is carrying on like everything;

this excites you, and you drain the whole column, with a good

appetite, and perhaps never notice that it's a barrel of soup made

out of a single bean.  Clarence's way was good, it was simple,

it was dignified, it was direct and business-like; all I say is,

it was not the best way:



             COURT CIRCULAR.



   On Monday, the king rode in the park.

   "  Tuesday,      "      "        "

   "  Wendesday     "      "        "

   "  Thursday      "      "        "

   "  Friday,       "      "        "

   "  Saturday      "      "        "

   "  Sunday,       "      "        "





However, take the paper by and large, I was vastly pleased with it.

Little crudities of a mechanical sort were observable here and

there, but there were not enough of them to amount to anything,

and it was good enough Arkansas proof-reading, anyhow, and better

than was needed in Arthur's day and realm.  As a rule, the grammar

was leaky and the construction more or less lame; but I did not

much mind these things.  They are common defects of my own, and

one mustn't criticise other people on grounds where he can't stand

perpendicular himself.



I was hungry enough for literature to want to take down the whole

paper at this one meal, but I got only a few bites, and then had

to postpone, because the monks around me besieged me so with eager

questions:  What is this curious thing?  What is it for?  Is it a

handkerchief?--saddle blanket?--part of a shirt?  What is it made of?

How thin it is, and how dainty and frail; and how it rattles.

Will it wear, do you think, and won't the rain injure it?  Is it

writing that appears on it, or is it only ornamentation?  They

suspected it was writing, because those among them who knew how

to read Latin and had a smattering of Greek, recognized some of

the letters, but they could make nothing out of the result as a

whole.  I put my information in the simplest form I could:



"It is a public journal; I will explain what that is, another time.

It is not cloth, it is made of paper; some time I will explain

what paper is.  The lines on it are reading matter; and not written

by hand, but printed; by and by I will explain what printing is.

A thousand of these sheets have been made, all exactly like this,

in every minute detail--they can't be told apart."  Then they all

broke out with exclamations of surprise and admiration:



"A thousand!  Verily a mighty work--a year's work for many men."



"No--merely a day's work for a man and a boy."



They crossed themselves, and whiffed out a protective prayer or two.



"Ah-h--a miracle, a wonder!  Dark work of enchantment."



I let it go at that.  Then I read in a low voice, to as many as

could crowd their shaven heads within hearing distance, part of

the account of the miracle of the restoration of the well, and

was accompanied by astonished and reverent ejaculations all through:

"Ah-h-h!"  "How true!"  "Amazing, amazing!"  "These be the very

haps as they happened, in marvelous exactness!"  And might they

take this strange thing in their hands, and feel of it and examine

it?--they would be very careful.  Yes.  So they took it, handling

it as cautiously and devoutly as if it had been some holy thing

come from some supernatural region; and gently felt of its texture,

caressed its pleasant smooth surface with lingering touch, and

scanned the mysterious characters with fascinated eyes.  These

grouped bent heads, these charmed faces, these speaking eyes--

how beautiful to me!  For was not this my darling, and was not

all this mute wonder and interest and homage a most eloquent

tribute and unforced compliment to it?  I knew, then, how a mother

feels when women, whether strangers or friends, take her new baby,

and close themselves about it with one eager impulse, and bend

their heads over it in a tranced adoration that makes all the rest

of the universe vanish out of their consciousness and be as if it

were not, for that time.  I knew how she feels, and that there is

no other satisfied ambition, whether of king, conqueror, or poet,

that ever reaches half-way to that serene far summit or yields half

so divine a contentment.



During all the rest of the seance my paper traveled from group to

group all up and down and about that huge hall, and my happy eye

was upon it always, and I sat motionless, steeped in satisfaction,

drunk with enjoyment.  Yes, this was heaven; I was tasting it once,

if I might never taste it more.







CHAPTER XXVII



THE YANKEE AND THE KING TRAVEL INCOGNITO



About bedtime I took the king to my private quarters to cut his

hair and help him get the hang of the lowly raiment he was to wear.

The high classes wore their hair banged across the forehead but

hanging to the shoulders the rest of the way around, whereas the

lowest ranks of commoners were banged fore and aft both; the slaves

were bangless, and allowed their hair free growth.  So I inverted

a bowl over his head and cut away all the locks that hung below it.

I also trimmed his whiskers and mustache until they were only

about a half-inch long; and tried to do it inartistically, and

succeeded.  It was a villainous disfigurement.  When he got his

lubberly sandals on, and his long robe of coarse brown linen cloth,

which hung straight from his neck to his ankle-bones, he was no

longer the comeliest man in his kingdom, but one of the unhandsomest

and most commonplace and unattractive.  We were dressed and barbered

alike, and could pass for small farmers, or farm bailiffs, or

shepherds, or carters; yes, or for village artisans, if we chose,

our costume being in effect universal among the poor, because of

its strength and cheapness.  I don't mean that it was really cheap

to a very poor person, but I do mean that it was the cheapest

material there was for male attire--manufactured material, you

understand.



We slipped away an hour before dawn, and by broad sun-up had made

eight or ten miles, and were in the midst of a sparsely settled

country.  I had a pretty heavy knapsack; it was laden with

provisions--provisions for the king to taper down on, till he

could take to the coarse fare of the country without damage.



I found a comfortable seat for the king by the roadside, and then

gave him a morsel or two to stay his stomach with.  Then I said

I would find some water for him, and strolled away.  Part of my

project was to get out of sight and sit down and rest a little

myself.  It had always been my custom to stand when in his presence;

even at the council board, except upon those rare occasions when

the sitting was a very long one, extending over hours; then I had

a trifling little backless thing which was like a reversed culvert

and was as comfortable as the toothache.  I didn't want to break

him in suddenly, but do it by degrees.  We should have to sit

together now when in company, or people would notice; but it would

not be good politics for me to be playing equality with him when

there was no necessity for it.



I found the water some three hundred yards away, and had been

resting about twenty minutes, when I heard voices.  That is all

right, I thought--peasants going to work; nobody else likely to be

stirring this early.  But the next moment these comers jingled into

sight around a turn of the road--smartly clad people of quality,

with luggage-mules and servants in their train!  I was off like

a shot, through the bushes, by the shortest cut.  For a while it

did seem that these people would pass the king before I could

get to him; but desperation gives you wings, you know, and I canted

my body forward, inflated my breast, and held my breath and flew.

I arrived.  And in plenty good enough time, too.



"Pardon, my king, but it's no time for ceremony--jump!  Jump to

your feet--some quality are coming!"



"Is that a marvel?  Let them come."



"But my liege!  You must not be seen sitting.  Rise!--and stand in

humble posture while they pass.  You are a peasant, you know."



"True--I had forgot it, so lost was I in planning of a huge war

with Gaul"--he was up by this time, but a farm could have got up

quicker, if there was any kind of a boom in real estate--"and

right-so a thought came randoming overthwart this majestic dream

the which--"



"A humbler attitude, my lord the king--and quick!  Duck your head!

--more!--still more!--droop it!"



He did his honest best, but lord, it was no great things.  He looked

as humble as the leaning tower at Pisa.  It is the most you could

say of it.  Indeed, it was such a thundering poor success that

it raised wondering scowls all along the line, and a gorgeous

flunkey at the tail end of it raised his whip; but I jumped in

time and was under it when it fell; and under cover of the volley

of coarse laughter which followed, I spoke up sharply and warned

the king to take no notice.  He mastered himself for the moment,

but it was a sore tax; he wanted to eat up the procession.  I said:



"It would end our adventures at the very start; and we, being

without weapons, could do nothing with that armed gang.  If we

are going to succeed in our emprise, we must not only look the

peasant but act the peasant."



"It is wisdom; none can gainsay it.  Let us go on, Sir Boss.

I will take note and learn, and do the best I may."



He kept his word.  He did the best he could, but I've seen better.

If you have ever seen an active, heedless, enterprising child

going diligently out of one mischief and into another all day

long, and an anxious mother at its heels all the while, and just

saving it by a hair from drowning itself or breaking its neck with

each new experiment, you've seen the king and me.



If I could have foreseen what the thing was going to be like,

I should have said, No, if anybody wants to make his living

exhibiting a king as a peasant, let him take the layout; I can

do better with a menagerie, and last longer.  And yet, during

the first three days I never allowed him to enter a hut or other

dwelling.  If he could pass muster anywhere during his early

novitiate it would be in small inns and on the road; so to these

places we confined ourselves.  Yes, he certainly did the best he

could, but what of that?  He didn't improve a bit that I could see.



He was always frightening me, always breaking out with fresh

astonishers, in new and unexpected places.  Toward evening on

the second day, what does he do but blandly fetch out a dirk

from inside his robe!



"Great guns, my liege, where did you get that?"



"From a smuggler at the inn, yester eve."



"What in the world possessed you to buy it?"



"We have escaped divers dangers by wit--thy wit--but I have

bethought me that it were but prudence if I bore a weapon, too.

Thine might fail thee in some pinch."



"But people of our condition are not allowed to carry arms.  What

would a lord say--yes, or any other person of whatever condition--

if he caught an upstart peasant with a dagger on his person?"



It was a lucky thing for us that nobody came along just then.

I persuaded him to throw the dirk away; and it was as easy as

persuading a child to give up some bright fresh new way of killing

itself.  We walked along, silent and thinking.  Finally the king said:



"When ye know that I meditate a thing inconvenient, or that hath

a peril in it, why do you not warn me to cease from that project?"



It was a startling question, and a puzzler.  I didn't quite know

how to take hold of it, or what to say, and so, of course, I ended

by saying the natural thing:



"But, sire, how can I know what your thoughts are?"



The king stopped dead in his tracks, and stared at me.



"I believed thou wert greater than Merlin; and truly in magic

thou art.  But prophecy is greater than magic.  Merlin is a prophet."



I saw I had made a blunder.  I must get back my lost ground.

After a deep reflection and careful planning, I said:



"Sire, I have been misunderstood.  I will explain.  There are two

kinds of prophecy.  One is the gift to foretell things that are but

a little way off, the other is the gift to foretell things that

are whole ages and centuries away.  Which is the mightier gift,

do you think?"



"Oh, the last, most surely!"



"True.  Does Merlin possess it?"



"Partly, yes.  He foretold mysteries about my birth and future

kingship that were twenty years away."



"Has he ever gone beyond that?"



"He would not claim more, I think."



"It is probably his limit.  All prophets have their limit.  The limit

of some of the great prophets has been a hundred years."



"These are few, I ween."



"There have been two still greater ones, whose limit was four

hundred and six hundred years, and one whose limit compassed

even seven hundred and twenty."



"Gramercy, it is marvelous!"



"But what are these in comparison with me?  They are nothing."



"What?  Canst thou truly look beyond even so vast a stretch

of time as--"



"Seven hundred years?  My liege, as clear as the vision of an eagle

does my prophetic eye penetrate and lay bare the future of this

world for nearly thirteen centuries and a half!"



My land, you should have seen the king's eyes spread slowly open,

and lift the earth's entire atmosphere as much as an inch!  That

settled Brer Merlin.  One never had any occasion to prove his

facts, with these people; all he had to do was to state them.  It

never occurred to anybody to doubt the statement.



"Now, then," I continued, "I _could_ work both kinds of prophecy--

the long and the short--if I chose to take the trouble to keep

in practice; but I seldom exercise any but the long kind, because

the other is beneath my dignity.  It is properer to Merlin's sort--

stump-tail prophets, as we call them in the profession.  Of course,

I whet up now and then and flirt out a minor prophecy, but not

often--hardly ever, in fact.  You will remember that there was

great talk, when you reached the Valley of Holiness, about my

having prophesied your coming and the very hour of your arrival,

two or three days beforehand."



"Indeed, yes, I mind it now."



"Well, I could have done it as much as forty times easier, and

piled on a thousand times more detail into the bargain, if it had

been five hundred years away instead of two or three days."



"How amazing that it should be so!"



"Yes, a genuine expert can always foretell a thing that is five

hundred years away easier than he can a thing that's only five

hundred seconds off."



"And yet in reason it should clearly be the other way; it should

be five hundred times as easy to foretell the last as the first,

for, indeed, it is so close by that one uninspired might almost

see it.  In truth, the law of prophecy doth contradict the likelihoods,

most strangely making the difficult easy, and the easy difficult."



It was a wise head.  A peasant's cap was no safe disguise for it;

you could know it for a king's under a diving-bell, if you could

hear it work its intellect.



I had a new trade now, and plenty of business in it.  The king

was as hungry to find out everything that was going to happen

during the next thirteen centuries as if he were expecting to live

in them.  From that time out, I prophesied myself bald-headed

trying to supply the demand.  I have done some indiscreet things in

my day, but this thing of playing myself for a prophet was the

worst.  Still, it had its ameliorations.  A prophet doesn't have

to have any brains.  They are good to have, of course, for the

ordinary exigencies of life, but they are no use in professional

work.  It is the restfulest vocation there is.  When the spirit of

prophecy comes upon you, you merely cake your intellect and lay it

off in a cool place for a rest, and unship your jaw and leave it

alone; it will work itself:  the result is prophecy.



Every day a knight-errant or so came along, and the sight of them

fired the king's martial spirit every time.  He would have forgotten

himself, sure, and said something to them in a style a suspicious

shade or so above his ostensible degree, and so I always got him

well out of the road in time.  Then he would stand and look with

all his eyes; and a proud light would flash from them, and his

nostrils would inflate like a war-horse's, and I knew he was

longing for a brush with them.  But about noon of the third day

I had stopped in the road to take a precaution which had been

suggested by the whip-stroke that had fallen to my share two days

before; a precaution which I had afterward decided to leave untaken,

I was so loath to institute it; but now I had just had a fresh

reminder:  while striding heedlessly along, with jaw spread and

intellect at rest, for I was prophesying, I stubbed my toe and

fell sprawling.  I was so pale I couldn't think for a moment;

then I got softly and carefully up and unstrapped my knapsack.

I had that dynamite bomb in it, done up in wool in a box.  It was

a good thing to have along; the time would come when I could do

a valuable miracle with it, maybe, but it was a nervous thing

to have about me, and I didn't like to ask the king to carry it.

Yet I must either throw it away or think up some safe way to get

along with its society.  I got it out and slipped it into my scrip,

and just then here came a couple of knights.  The king stood,

stately as a statue, gazing toward them--had forgotten himself again,

of course--and before I could get a word of warning out, it was

time for him to skip, and well that he did it, too.  He supposed

they would turn aside.  Turn aside to avoid trampling peasant dirt

under foot?  When had he ever turned aside himself--or ever had

the chance to do it, if a peasant saw him or any other noble knight

in time to judiciously save him the trouble?  The knights paid

no attention to the king at all; it was his place to look out

himself, and if he hadn't skipped he would have been placidly

ridden down, and laughed at besides.



The king was in a flaming fury, and launched out his challenge

and epithets with a most royal vigor.  The knights were some little

distance by now.  They halted, greatly surprised, and turned in

their saddles and looked back, as if wondering if it might be worth

while to bother with such scum as we.  Then they wheeled and

started for us.  Not a moment must be lost.  I started for _them_.

I passed them at a rattling gait, and as I went by I flung out a

hair-lifting soul-scorching thirteen-jointed insult which made

the king's effort poor and cheap by comparison.  I got it out of

the nineteenth century where they know how.  They had such headway

that they were nearly to the king before they could check up;

then, frantic with rage, they stood up their horses on their hind

hoofs and whirled them around, and the next moment here they came,

breast to breast.  I was seventy yards off, then, and scrambling up

a great bowlder at the roadside.  When they were within thirty

yards of me they let their long lances droop to a level, depressed

their mailed heads, and so, with their horse-hair plumes streaming

straight out behind, most gallant to see, this lightning express

came tearing for me!  When they were within fifteen yards, I sent

that bomb with a sure aim, and it struck the ground just under

the horses' noses.



Yes, it was a neat thing, very neat and pretty to see.  It resembled

a steamboat explosion on the Mississippi; and during the next

fifteen minutes we stood under a steady drizzle of microscopic

fragments of knights and hardware and horse-flesh.  I say we,

for the king joined the audience, of course, as soon as he had got

his breath again.  There was a hole there which would afford steady

work for all the people in that region for some years to come--

in trying to explain it, I mean; as for filling it up, that service

would be comparatively prompt, and would fall to the lot of a

select few--peasants of that seignory; and they wouldn't get

anything for it, either.



But I explained it to the king myself. I said it was done with a

dynamite bomb.  This information did him no damage, because it

left him as intelligent as he was before.  However, it was a noble

miracle, in his eyes, and was another settler for Merlin.  I thought

it well enough to explain that this was a miracle of so rare a sort

that it couldn't be done except when the atmospheric conditions

were just right.  Otherwise he would be encoring it every time we

had a good subject, and that would be inconvenient, because I

hadn't any more bombs along.







CHAPTER XXVIII



DRILLING THE KING



On the morning of the fourth day, when it was just sunrise, and we

had been tramping an hour in the chill dawn, I came to a resolution:

the king _must_ be drilled; things could not go on so, he must be

taken in hand and deliberately and conscientiously drilled, or we

couldn't ever venture to enter a dwelling; the very cats would know

this masquerader for a humbug and no peasant.  So I called a halt

and said:



"Sire, as between clothes and countenance, you are all right, there

is no discrepancy; but as between your clothes and your bearing,

you are all wrong, there is a most noticeable discrepancy.  Your

soldierly stride, your lordly port--these will not do.  You stand

too straight, your looks are too high, too confident.  The cares

of a kingdom do not stoop the shoulders, they do not droop the chin,

they do not depress the high level of the eye-glance, they do not

put doubt and fear in the heart and hang out the signs of them

in slouching body and unsure step.  It is the sordid cares of

the lowly born that do these things.  You must learn the trick;

you must imitate the trademarks of poverty, misery, oppression,

insult, and the other several and common inhumanities that sap

the manliness out of a man and make him a loyal and proper and

approved subject and a satisfaction to his masters, or the very

infants will know you for better than your disguise, and we shall go

to pieces at the first hut we stop at.  Pray try to walk like this."



The king took careful note, and then tried an imitation.



"Pretty fair--pretty fair.  Chin a little lower, please--there, very

good.  Eyes too high; pray don't look at the horizon, look at the

ground, ten steps in front of you.  Ah--that is better, that is

very good.  Wait, please; you betray too much vigor, too much

decision; you want more of a shamble.  Look at me, please--this is

what I mean....  Now you are getting it; that is the idea--at least,

it sort of approaches it....  Yes, that is pretty fair.  _But!_

There is a great big something wanting, I don't quite know what

it is.  Please walk thirty yards, so that I can get a perspective

on the thing....  Now, then--your head's right, speed's right,

shoulders right, eyes right, chin right, gait, carriage, general

style right--everything's right!  And yet the fact remains, the

aggregate's wrong.  The account don't balance.  Do it again,

please....  _Now_ I think I begin to see what it is.  Yes, I've

struck it.  You see, the genuine spiritlessness is wanting; that's

what's the trouble.  It's all _amateur_--mechanical details all

right, almost to a hair; everything about the delusion perfect,

except that it don't delude."



"What, then, must one do, to prevail?"



"Let me think... I can't seem to quite get at it.  In fact, there

isn't anything that can right the matter but practice.  This is

a good place for it:  roots and stony ground to break up your

stately gait, a region not liable to interruption, only one field

and one hut in sight, and they so far away that nobody could

see us from there.  It will be well to move a little off the road

and put in the whole day drilling you, sire."



After the drill had gone on a little while, I said:



"Now, sire, imagine that we are at the door of the hut yonder,

and the family are before us.  Proceed, please--accost the head

of the house."



The king unconsciously straightened up like a monument, and said,

with frozen austerity:



"Varlet, bring a seat; and serve to me what cheer ye have."



"Ah, your grace, that is not well done."



"In what lacketh it?"



"These people do not call _each other_ varlets."



"Nay, is that true?"



"Yes; only those above them call them so."



"Then must I try again.  I will call him villein."



"No-no; for he may be a freeman."



"Ah--so.  Then peradventure I should call him goodman."



"That would answer, your grace, but it would be still better if

you said friend, or brother."



"Brother!--to dirt like that?"



"Ah, but _we_ are pretending to be dirt like that, too."



"It is even true.  I will say it.  Brother, bring a seat, and

thereto what cheer ye have, withal.  Now 'tis right."



"Not quite, not wholly right.  You have asked for one, not _us_--

for one, not both; food for one, a seat for one."



The king looked puzzled--he wasn't a very heavy weight, intellectually.

His head was an hour-glass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do

it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once.



"Would _you_ have a seat also--and sit?"



"If I did not sit, the man would perceive that we were only pretending

to be equals--and playing the deception pretty poorly, too."



"It is well and truly said!  How wonderful is truth, come it in

whatsoever unexpected form it may!  Yes, he must bring out seats

and food for both, and in serving us present not ewer and napkin

with more show of respect to the one than to the other."



"And there is even yet a detail that needs correcting.  He must

bring nothing outside; we will go in--in among the dirt, and

possibly other repulsive things,--and take the food with the

household, and after the fashion of the house, and all on equal

terms, except the man be of the serf class; and finally, there

will be no ewer and no napkin, whether he be serf or free.  Please

walk again, my liege.  There--it is better--it is the best yet;

but not perfect.  The shoulders have known no ignobler burden

than iron mail, and they will not stoop."



"Give me, then, the bag.  I will learn the spirit that goeth

with burdens that have not honor.  It is the spirit that stoopeth

the shoulders, I ween, and not the weight; for armor is heavy,

yet it is a proud burden, and a man standeth straight in it....

Nay, but me no buts, offer me no objections.  I will have the thing.

Strap it upon my back."



He was complete now with that knapsack on, and looked as little

like a king as any man I had ever seen.  But it was an obstinate

pair of shoulders; they could not seem to learn the trick of

stooping with any sort of deceptive naturalness.  The drill went on,

I prompting and correcting:



"Now, make believe you are in debt, and eaten up by relentless

creditors; you are out of work--which is horse-shoeing, let us

say--and can get none; and your wife is sick, your children are

crying because they are hungry--"



And so on, and so on.  I drilled him as representing in turn all

sorts of people out of luck and suffering dire privations and

misfortunes.  But lord, it was only just words, words--they meant

nothing in the world to him, I might just as well have whistled.

Words realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, unless you have

suffered in your own person the thing which the words try to

describe.  There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and

complacently about "the working classes," and satisfy themselves

that a day's hard intellectual work is very much harder than

a day's hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much

bigger pay.  Why, they really think that, you know, because they

know all about the one, but haven't tried the other.  But I know

all about both; and so far as I am concerned, there isn't money

enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days,

but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as

near nothing as you can cipher it down--and I will be satisfied, too.



Intellectual "work" is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation,

and is its own highest reward.  The poorest paid architect,

engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate,

legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven

when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow

in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the

ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him--why,

certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord,

it's a sarcasm just the same.  The law of work does seem utterly

unfair--but there it is, and nothing can change it:  the higher

the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall

be his pay in cash, also.  And it's also the very law of those

transparent swindles, transmissible nobility and kingship.







CHAPTER XXIX



THE SMALLPOX HUT



When we arrived at that hut at mid-afternoon, we saw no signs

of life about it.  The field near by had been denuded of its crop

some time before, and had a skinned look, so exhaustively had

it been harvested and gleaned.  Fences, sheds, everything had a

ruined look, and were eloquent of poverty.  No animal was around

anywhere, no living thing in sight.  The stillness was awful, it

was like the stillness of death.  The cabin was a one-story one,

whose thatch was black with age, and ragged from lack of repair.



The door stood a trifle ajar.  We approached it stealthily--on tiptoe

and at half-breath--for that is the way one's feeling makes him do,

at such a time.  The king knocked.  We waited.  No answer.  Knocked

again.  No answer.  I pushed the door softly open and looked in.

I made out some dim forms, and a woman started up from the ground

and stared at me, as one does who is wakened from sleep.  Presently

she found her voice:



"Have mercy!" she pleaded.  "All is taken, nothing is left."



"I have not come to take anything, poor woman."



"You are not a priest?"



"No."



"Nor come not from the lord of the manor?"



"No, I am a stranger."



"Oh, then, for the fear of God, who visits with misery and death

such as be harmless, tarry not here, but fly!  This place is under

his curse--and his Church's."



"Let me come in and help you--you are sick and in trouble."



I was better used to the dim light now.  I could see her hollow

eyes fixed upon me.  I could see how emaciated she was.



"I tell you the place is under the Church's ban.  Save yourself--

and go, before some straggler see thee here, and report it."



"Give yourself no trouble about me; I don't care anything for the

Church's curse.  Let me help you."



"Now all good spirits--if there be any such--bless thee for that

word.  Would God I had a sup of water!--but hold, hold, forget

I said it, and fly; for there is that here that even he that

feareth not the Church must fear:  this disease whereof we die.

Leave us, thou brave, good stranger, and take with thee such

whole and sincere blessing as them that be accursed can give."



But before this I had picked up a wooden bowl and was rushing

past the king on my way to the brook.  It was ten yards away.

When I got back and entered, the king was within, and was opening

the shutter that closed the window-hole, to let in air and light.

The place was full of a foul stench.  I put the bowl to the woman's

lips, and as she gripped it with her eager talons the shutter came

open and a strong light flooded her face.  Smallpox!



I sprang to the king, and said in his ear:



"Out of the door on the instant, sire! the woman is dying of that

disease that wasted the skirts of Camelot two years ago."



He did not budge.



"Of a truth I shall remain--and likewise help."



I whispered again:



"King, it must not be.  You must go."



"Ye mean well, and ye speak not unwisely.  But it were shame that

a king should know fear, and shame that belted knight should

withhold his hand where be such as need succor.  Peace, I will

not go.  It is you who must go.  The Church's ban is not upon me,

but it forbiddeth you to be here, and she will deal with you with

a heavy hand an word come to her of your trespass."



It was a desperate place for him to be in, and might cost him his

life, but it was no use to argue with him.  If he considered his

knightly honor at stake here, that was the end of argument; he

would stay, and nothing could prevent it; I was aware of that.

And so I dropped the subject.  The woman spoke:



"Fair sir, of your kindness will ye climb the ladder there,

and bring me news of what ye find?  Be not afraid to report,

for times can come when even a mother's heart is past breaking--

being already broke."



"Abide," said the king, "and give the woman to eat.  I will go."

And he put down the knapsack.



I turned to start, but the king had already started.  He halted,

and looked down upon a man who lay in a dim light, and had not

noticed us thus far, or spoken.



"Is it your husband?" the king asked.



"Yes."



"Is he asleep?"



"God be thanked for that one charity, yes--these three hours.

Where shall I pay to the full, my gratitude! for my heart is

bursting with it for that sleep he sleepeth now."



I said:



"We will be careful.  We will not wake him."



"Ah, no, that ye will not, for he is dead."



"Dead?"



"Yes, what triumph it is to know it!  None can harm him, none

insult him more.  He is in heaven now, and happy; or if not there,

he bides in hell and is content; for in that place he will find

neither abbot nor yet bishop.  We were boy and girl together; we

were man and wife these five and twenty years, and never separated

till this day.  Think how long that is to love and suffer together.

This morning was he out of his mind, and in his fancy we were

boy and girl again and wandering in the happy fields; and so in

that innocent glad converse wandered he far and farther, still

lightly gossiping, and entered into those other fields we know

not of, and was shut away from mortal sight.  And so there was

no parting, for in his fancy I went with him; he knew not but

I went with him, my hand in his--my young soft hand, not this

withered claw.  Ah, yes, to go, and know it not; to separate and

know it not; how could one go peace--fuller than that?  It was

his reward for a cruel life patiently borne."



There was a slight noise from the direction of the dim corner where

the ladder was.  It was the king descending.  I could see that he

was bearing something in one arm, and assisting himself with the

other.  He came forward into the light; upon his breast lay a

slender girl of fifteen.  She was but half conscious; she was dying

of smallpox.  Here was heroism at its last and loftiest possibility,

its utmost summit; this was challenging death in the open field

unarmed, with all the odds against the challenger, no reward set

upon the contest, and no admiring world in silks and cloth of gold

to gaze and applaud; and yet the king's bearing was as serenely

brave as it had always been in those cheaper contests where knight

meets knight in equal fight and clothed in protecting steel.  He

was great now; sublimely great.  The rude statues of his ancestors

in his palace should have an addition--I would see to that; and it

would not be a mailed king killing a giant or a dragon, like the

rest, it would be a king in commoner's garb bearing death in his

arms that a peasant mother might look her last upon her child and

be comforted.



He laid the girl down by her mother, who poured out endearments

and caresses from an overflowing heart, and one could detect a

flickering faint light of response in the child's eyes, but that

was all.  The mother hung over her, kissing her, petting her, and

imploring her to speak, but the lips only moved and no sound came.

I snatched my liquor flask from my knapsack, but the woman forbade

me, and said:



"No--she does not suffer; it is better so.  It might bring her back

to life.  None that be so good and kind as ye are would do her

that cruel hurt.  For look you--what is left to live for?  Her

brothers are gone, her father is gone, her mother goeth, the

Church's curse is upon her, and none may shelter or befriend her

even though she lay perishing in the road.  She is desolate.  I have

not asked you, good heart, if her sister be still on live, here

overhead; I had no need; ye had gone back, else, and not left

the poor thing forsaken--"



"She lieth at peace," interrupted the king, in a subdued voice.



"I would not change it.  How rich is this day in happiness!  Ah,

my Annis, thou shalt join thy sister soon--thou'rt on thy way,

and these be merciful friends that will not hinder."



And so she fell to murmuring and cooing over the girl again, and

softly stroking her face and hair, and kissing her and calling her

by endearing names; but there was scarcely sign of response now

in the glazing eyes.  I saw tears well from the king's eyes, and

trickle down his face.  The woman noticed them, too, and said:



"Ah, I know that sign:  thou'st a wife at home, poor soul, and

you and she have gone hungry to bed, many's the time, that the

little ones might have your crust; you know what poverty is, and

the daily insults of your betters, and the heavy hand of the Church

and the king."



The king winced under this accidental home-shot, but kept still;

he was learning his part; and he was playing it well, too, for

a pretty dull beginner.  I struck up a diversion.  I offered the

woman food and liquor, but she refused both.  She would allow

nothing to come between her and the release of death.  Then I slipped

away and brought the dead child from aloft, and laid it by her.

This broke her down again, and there was another scene that was

full of heartbreak.  By and by I made another diversion, and beguiled

her to sketch her story.



"Ye know it well yourselves, having suffered it--for truly none

of our condition in Britain escape it.  It is the old, weary tale.

We fought and struggled and succeeded; meaning by success, that

we lived and did not die; more than that is not to be claimed.  No

troubles came that we could not outlive, till this year brought

them; then came they all at once, as one might say, and overwhelmed

us.  Years ago the lord of the manor planted certain fruit trees on

our farm; in the best part of it, too--a grievous wrong and shame--"



"But it was his right," interrupted the king.



"None denieth that, indeed; an the law mean anything, what is

the lord's is his, and what is mine is his also.  Our farm was

ours by lease, therefore 'twas likewise his, to do with it as he

would.  Some little time ago, three of those trees were found hewn

down.  Our three grown sons ran frightened to report the crime.

Well, in his lordship's dungeon there they lie, who saith there

shall they lie and rot till they confess.  They have naught to

confess, being innocent, wherefore there will they remain until

they die.  Ye know that right well, I ween.  Think how this left us;

a man, a woman and two children, to gather a crop that was planted

by so much greater force, yes, and protect it night and day from

pigeons and prowling animals that be sacred and must not be hurt

by any of our sort.  When my lord's crop was nearly ready for

the harvest, so also was ours; when his bell rang to call us to

his fields to harvest his crop for nothing, he would not allow that

I and my two girls should count for our three captive sons, but

for only two of them; so, for the lacking one were we daily fined.

All this time our own crop was perishing through neglect; and so

both the priest and his lordship fined us because their shares

of it were suffering through damage.  In the end the fines ate up

our crop--and they took it all; they took it all and made us harvest

it for them, without pay or food, and we starving.  Then the worst

came when I, being out of my mind with hunger and loss of my boys,

and grief to see my husband and my little maids in rags and misery

and despair, uttered a deep blasphemy--oh! a thousand of them!--

against the Church and the Church's ways.  It was ten days ago.

I had fallen sick with this disease, and it was to the priest

I said the words, for he was come to chide me for lack of due

humility under the chastening hand of God.  He carried my trespass

to his betters; I was stubborn; wherefore, presently upon my head

and upon all heads that were dear to me, fell the curse of Rome.



"Since that day we are avoided, shunned with horror.  None has

come near this hut to know whether we live or not.  The rest of us

were taken down.  Then I roused me and got up, as wife and mother

will.  It was little they could have eaten in any case; it was

less than little they had to eat.  But there was water, and I gave

them that.  How they craved it! and how they blessed it!  But the

end came yesterday; my strength broke down.  Yesterday was the

last time I ever saw my husband and this youngest child alive.

I have lain here all these hours--these ages, ye may say--listening,

listening for any sound up there that--"



She gave a sharp quick glance at her eldest daughter, then cried

out, "Oh, my darling!" and feebly gathered the stiffening form

to her sheltering arms.  She had recognized the death-rattle.







CHAPTER XXX



THE TRAGEDY OF THE MANOR-HOUSE



At midnight all was over, and we sat in the presence of four

corpses.  We covered them with such rags as we could find, and

started away, fastening the door behind us.  Their home must be

these people's grave, for they could not have Christian burial,

or be admitted to consecrated ground.  They were as dogs, wild

beasts, lepers, and no soul that valued its hope of eternal life

would throw it away by meddling in any sort with these rebuked and

smitten outcasts.



We had not moved four steps when I caught a sound as of footsteps

upon gravel.  My heart flew to my throat.  We must not be seen

coming from that house.  I plucked at the king's robe and we drew

back and took shelter behind the corner of the cabin.



"Now we are safe," I said, "but it was a close call--so to speak.

If the night had been lighter he might have seen us, no doubt,

he seemed to be so near."



"Mayhap it is but a beast and not a man at all."



"True.  But man or beast, it will be wise to stay here a minute

and let it get by and out of the way."



"Hark!  It cometh hither."



True again.  The step was coming toward us--straight toward the hut.

It must be a beast, then, and we might as well have saved our

trepidation.  I was going to step out, but the king laid his hand

upon my arm.  There was a moment of silence, then we heard a soft

knock on the cabin door.  It made me shiver.  Presently the knock

was repeated, and then we heard these words in a guarded voice:



"Mother!  Father!  Open--we have got free, and we bring news to

pale your cheeks but glad your hearts; and we may not tarry, but

must fly!  And--but they answer not.  Mother! father!--"



I drew the king toward the other end of the hut and whispered:



"Come--now we can get to the road."



The king hesitated, was going to demur; but just then we heard

the door give way, and knew that those desolate men were in the

presence of their dead.



"Come, my liege! in a moment they will strike a light, and then

will follow that which it would break your heart to hear."



He did not hesitate this time.  The moment we were in the road

I ran; and after a moment he threw dignity aside and followed.

I did not want to think of what was happening in the hut--I couldn't

bear it; I wanted to drive it out of my mind; so I struck into the

first subject that lay under that one in my mind:



"I have had the disease those people died of, and so have nothing

to fear; but if you have not had it also--"



He broke in upon me to say he was in trouble, and it was his

conscience that was troubling him:



"These young men have got free, they say--but _how_?  It is not

likely that their lord hath set them free."



"Oh, no, I make no doubt they escaped."



"That is my trouble; I have a fear that this is so, and your

suspicion doth confirm it, you having the same fear."



"I should not call it by that name though.  I do suspect that they

escaped, but if they did, I am not sorry, certainly."



"I am not sorry, I _think_--but--"



"What is it?  What is there for one to be troubled about?"



"_If_ they did escape, then are we bound in duty to lay hands upon

them and deliver them again to their lord; for it is not seemly

that one of his quality should suffer a so insolent and high-handed

outrage from persons of their base degree."



There it was again.  He could see only one side of it.  He was

born so, educated so, his veins were full of ancestral blood that

was rotten with this sort of unconscious brutality, brought down

by inheritance from a long procession of hearts that had each done

its share toward poisoning the stream.  To imprison these men

without proof, and starve their kindred, was no harm, for they were

merely peasants and subject to the will and pleasure of their lord,

no matter what fearful form it might take; but for these men to

break out of unjust captivity was insult and outrage, and a thing

not to be countenanced by any conscientious person who knew his

duty to his sacred caste.



I worked more than half an hour before I got him to change the

subject--and even then an outside matter did it for me.  This was

a something which caught our eyes as we struck the summit of a

small hill--a red glow, a good way off.



"That's a fire," said I.



Fires interested me considerably, because I was getting a good

deal of an insurance business started, and was also training some

horses and building some steam fire-engines, with an eye to a paid

fire department by and by.  The priests opposed both my fire and

life insurance, on the ground that it was an insolent attempt to

hinder the decrees of God; and if you pointed out that they did not

hinder the decrees in the least, but only modified the hard

consequences of them if you took out policies and had luck, they

retorted that that was gambling against the decrees of God, and was

just as bad.  So they managed to damage those industries more

or less, but I got even on my Accident business.  As a rule, a knight

is a lummox, and some times even a labrick, and hence open to pretty

poor arguments when they come glibly from a superstition-monger,

but even _he_ could see the practical side of a thing once in a while;

and so of late you couldn't clean up a tournament and pile the

result without finding one of my accident-tickets in every helmet.



We stood there awhile, in the thick darkness and stillness, looking

toward the red blur in the distance, and trying to make out the

meaning of a far-away murmur that rose and fell fitfully on the

night.  Sometimes it swelled up and for a moment seemed less

remote; but when we were hopefully expecting it to betray its cause

and nature, it dulled and sank again, carrying its mystery with it.

We started down the hill in its direction, and the winding road

plunged us at once into almost solid darkness--darkness that was

packed and crammed in between two tall forest walls.  We groped

along down for half a mile, perhaps, that murmur growing more and

more distinct all the time.  The coming storm threatening more and

more, with now and then a little shiver of wind, a faint show of

lightning, and dull grumblings of distant thunder.  I was in the

lead.  I ran against something--a soft heavy something which gave,

slightly, to the impulse of my weight; at the same moment the

lightning glared out, and within a foot of my face was the writhing

face of a man who was hanging from the limb of a tree!  That is,

it seemed to be writhing, but it was not.  It was a grewsome sight.

Straightway there was an ear-splitting explosion of thunder, and

the bottom of heaven fell out; the rain poured down in a deluge.

No matter, we must try to cut this man down, on the chance that

there might be life in him yet, mustn't we?  The lightning came

quick and sharp now, and the place was alternately noonday and

midnight.  One moment the man would be hanging before me in an

intense light, and the next he was blotted out again in the darkness.

I told the king we must cut him down.  The king at once objected.



"If he hanged himself, he was willing to lose him property to

his lord; so let him be.  If others hanged him, belike they had

the right--let him hang."



"But--"



"But me no buts, but even leave him as he is.  And for yet another

reason.  When the lightning cometh again--there, look abroad."



Two others hanging, within fifty yards of us!



"It is not weather meet for doing useless courtesies unto dead folk.

They are past thanking you.  Come--it is unprofitable to tarry here."



There was reason in what he said, so we moved on.  Within the next

mile we counted six more hanging forms by the blaze of the lightning,

and altogether it was a grisly excursion.  That murmur was a murmur

no longer, it was a roar; a roar of men's voices.  A man came flying

by now, dimly through the darkness, and other men chasing him.

They disappeared.  Presently another case of the kind occurred,

and then another and another.  Then a sudden turn of the road

brought us in sight of that fire--it was a large manor-house, and

little or nothing was left of it--and everywhere men were flying

and other men raging after them in pursuit.



I warned the king that this was not a safe place for strangers.

We would better get away from the light, until matters should

improve.  We stepped back a little, and hid in the edge of the

wood.  From this hiding-place we saw both men and women hunted

by the mob.  The fearful work went on until nearly dawn.  Then,

the fire being out and the storm spent, the voices and flying

footsteps presently ceased, and darkness and stillness reigned again.



We ventured out, and hurried cautiously away; and although we were

worn out and sleepy, we kept on until we had put this place some

miles behind us.  Then we asked hospitality at the hut of a charcoal

burner, and got what was to be had.  A woman was up and about, but

the man was still asleep, on a straw shake-down, on the clay floor.

The woman seemed uneasy until I explained that we were travelers

and had lost our way and been wandering in the woods all night.

She became talkative, then, and asked if we had heard of the

terrible goings-on at the manor-house of Abblasoure.  Yes, we had

heard of them, but what we wanted now was rest and sleep.  The

king broke in:



"Sell us the house and take yourselves away, for we be perilous

company, being late come from people that died of the Spotted Death."



It was good of him, but unnecessary.  One of the commonest decorations

of the nation was the waffle-iron face.  I had early noticed that

the woman and her husband were both so decorated.  She made us

entirely welcome, and had no fears; and plainly she was immensely

impressed by the king's proposition; for, of course, it was a good

deal of an event in her life to run across a person of the king's

humble appearance who was ready to buy a man's house for the sake

of a night's lodging.  It gave her a large respect for us, and she

strained the lean possibilities of her hovel to the utmost to make

us comfortable.



We slept till far into the afternoon, and then got up hungry enough to

make cotter fare quite palatable to the king, the more particularly

as it was scant in quantity.  And also in variety; it consisted

solely of onions, salt, and the national black bread made out of

horse-feed.  The woman told us about the affair of the evening

before.  At ten or eleven at night, when everybody was in bed,

the manor-house burst into flames.  The country-side swarmed to

the rescue, and the family were saved, with one exception, the

master.  He did not appear.  Everybody was frantic over this loss,

and two brave yeomen sacrificed their lives in ransacking the

burning house seeking that valuable personage.  But after a while

he was found--what was left of him--which was his corpse.  It was

in a copse three hundred yards away, bound, gagged, stabbed in a

dozen places.



Who had done this?  Suspicion fell upon a humble family in the

neighborhood who had been lately treated with peculiar harshness

by the baron; and from these people the suspicion easily extended

itself to their relatives and familiars.  A suspicion was enough;

my lord's liveried retainers proclaimed an instant crusade against

these people, and were promptly joined by the community in general.

The woman's husband had been active with the mob, and had not

returned home until nearly dawn.  He was gone now to find out

what the general result had been.  While we were still talking he

came back from his quest.  His report was revolting enough.  Eighteen

persons hanged or butchered, and two yeomen and thirteen prisoners

lost in the fire.



"And how many prisoners were there altogether in the vaults?"



"Thirteen."



"Then every one of them was lost?"



"Yes, all."



"But the people arrived in time to save the family; how is it they

could save none of the prisoners?"



The man looked puzzled, and said:



"Would one unlock the vaults at such a time?  Marry, some would

have escaped."



"Then you mean that nobody _did_ unlock them?"



"None went near them, either to lock or unlock.  It standeth to

reason that the bolts were fast; wherefore it was only needful

to establish a watch, so that if any broke the bonds he might not

escape, but be taken. None were taken."



"Natheless, three did escape," said the king, "and ye will do well

to publish it and set justice upon their track, for these murthered

the baron and fired the house."



I was just expecting he would come out with that.  For a moment

the man and his wife showed an eager interest in this news and

an impatience to go out and spread it; then a sudden something

else betrayed itself in their faces, and they began to ask questions.

I answered the questions myself, and narrowly watched the effects

produced.  I was soon satisfied that the knowledge of who these

three prisoners were had somehow changed the atmosphere; that

our hosts' continued eagerness to go and spread the news was now

only pretended and not real.  The king did not notice the change,

and I was glad of that.  I worked the conversation around toward

other details of the night's proceedings, and noted that these

people were relieved to have it take that direction.



The painful thing observable about all this business was the

alacrity with which this oppressed community had turned their

cruel hands against their own class in the interest of the common

oppressor.  This man and woman seemed to feel that in a quarrel

between a person of their own class and his lord, it was the natural

and proper and rightful thing for that poor devil's whole caste

to side with the master and fight his battle for him, without ever

stopping to inquire into the rights or wrongs of the matter.  This

man had been out helping to hang his neighbors, and had done his

work with zeal, and yet was aware that there was nothing against

them but a mere suspicion, with nothing back of it describable

as evidence, still neither he nor his wife seemed to see anything

horrible about it.



This was depressing--to a man with the dream of a republic in his

head.  It reminded me of a time thirteen centuries away, when

the "poor whites" of our South who were always despised and

frequently insulted by the slave-lords around them, and who owed

their base condition simply to the presence of slavery in their

midst, were yet pusillanimously ready to side with the slave-lords

in all political moves for the upholding and perpetuating of

slavery, and did also finally shoulder their muskets and pour out

their lives in an effort to prevent the destruction of that very

institution which degraded them.  And there was only one redeeming

feature connected with that pitiful piece of history; and that was,

that secretly the "poor white" did detest the slave-lord, and did

feel his own shame.  That feeling was not brought to the surface,

but the fact that it was there and could have been brought out,

under favoring circumstances, was something--in fact, it was enough;

for it showed that a man is at bottom a man, after all, even if it

doesn't show on the outside.



Well, as it turned out, this charcoal burner was just the twin of

the Southern "poor white" of the far future.  The king presently

showed impatience, and said:



"An ye prattle here all the day, justice will miscarry.  Think ye

the criminals will abide in their father's house?  They are fleeing,

they are not waiting.  You should look to it that a party of horse

be set upon their track."



The woman paled slightly, but quite perceptibly, and the man looked

flustered and irresolute.  I said:



"Come, friend, I will walk a little way with you, and explain which

direction I think they would try to take.  If they were merely

resisters of the gabelle or some kindred absurdity I would try

to protect them from capture; but when men murder a person of

high degree and likewise burn his house, that is another matter."



The last remark was for the king--to quiet him.  On the road

the man pulled his resolution together, and began the march with

a steady gait, but there was no eagerness in it.  By and by I said:



"What relation were these men to you--cousins?"



He turned as white as his layer of charcoal would let him, and

stopped, trembling.



"Ah, my God, how know ye that?"



"I didn't know it; it was a chance guess."



"Poor lads, they are lost.  And good lads they were, too."



"Were you actually going yonder to tell on them?"



He didn't quite know how to take that; but he said, hesitatingly:



"Ye-s."



"Then I think you are a damned scoundrel!"



It made him as glad as if I had called him an angel.



"Say the good words again, brother! for surely ye mean that ye

would not betray me an I failed of my duty."



"Duty?  There is no duty in the matter, except the duty to keep

still and let those men get away.  They've done a righteous deed."



He looked pleased; pleased, and touched with apprehension at the

same time.  He looked up and down the road to see that no one

was coming, and then said in a cautious voice:



"From what land come you, brother, that you speak such perilous

words, and seem not to be afraid?"



"They are not perilous words when spoken to one of my own caste,

I take it.  You would not tell anybody I said them?"



"I?  I would be drawn asunder by wild horses first."



"Well, then, let me say my say.  I have no fears of your repeating

it.  I think devil's work has been done last night upon those

innocent poor people.  That old baron got only what he deserved.

If I had my way, all his kind should have the same luck."



Fear and depression vanished from the man's manner, and gratefulness

and a brave animation took their place:



"Even though you be a spy, and your words a trap for my undoing,

yet are they such refreshment that to hear them again and others

like to them, I would go to the gallows happy, as having had one

good feast at least in a starved life.  And I will say my say now,

and ye may report it if ye be so minded.  I helped to hang my

neighbors for that it were peril to my own life to show lack of

zeal in the master's cause; the others helped for none other reason.

All rejoice to-day that he is dead, but all do go about seemingly

sorrowing, and shedding the hypocrite's tear, for in that lies

safety.  I have said the words, I have said the words! the only

ones that have ever tasted good in my mouth, and the reward of

that taste is sufficient.  Lead on, an ye will, be it even to the

scaffold, for I am ready."



There it was, you see.  A man is a man, at bottom.  Whole ages

of abuse and oppression cannot crush the manhood clear out of him.

Whoever thinks it a mistake is himself mistaken.  Yes, there is

plenty good enough material for a republic in the most degraded

people that ever existed--even the Russians; plenty of manhood

in them--even in the Germans--if one could but force it out of

its timid and suspicious privacy, to overthrow and trample in the

mud any throne that ever was set up and any nobility that ever

supported it.  We should see certain things yet, let us hope and

believe.  First, a modified monarchy, till Arthur's days were done,

then the destruction of the throne, nobility abolished, every

member of it bound out to some useful trade, universal suffrage

instituted, and the whole government placed in the hands of the

men and women of the nation there to remain.  Yes, there was no

occasion to give up my dream yet a while.







CHAPTER XXXI



MARCO



We strolled along in a sufficiently indolent fashion now, and

talked.  We must dispose of about the amount of time it ought

to take to go to the little hamlet of Abblasoure and put justice

on the track of those murderers and get back home again.  And

meantime I had an auxiliary interest which had never paled yet,

never lost its novelty for me since I had been in Arthur's kingdom:

the behavior--born of nice and exact subdivisions of caste--of chance

passers-by toward each other.  Toward the shaven monk who trudged

along with his cowl tilted back and the sweat washing down his

fat jowls, the coal-burner was deeply reverent; to the gentleman

he was abject; with the small farmer and the free mechanic he was

cordial and gossipy; and when a slave passed by with a countenance

respectfully lowered, this chap's nose was in the air--he couldn't

even see him.  Well, there are times when one would like to hang

the whole human race and finish the farce.



Presently we struck an incident.  A small mob of half-naked boys

and girls came tearing out of the woods, scared and shrieking.

The eldest among them were not more than twelve or fourteen years

old.  They implored help, but they were so beside themselves that

we couldn't make out what the matter was.  However, we plunged

into the wood, they skurrying in the lead, and the trouble was

quickly revealed:  they had hanged a little fellow with a bark rope,

and he was kicking and struggling, in the process of choking to

death.  We rescued him, and fetched him around.  It was some more

human nature; the admiring little folk imitating their elders;

they were playing mob, and had achieved a success which promised

to be a good deal more serious than they had bargained for.



It was not a dull excursion for me.  I managed to put in the time

very well.  I made various acquaintanceships, and in my quality

of stranger was able to ask as many questions as I wanted to.

A thing which naturally interested me, as a statesman, was the

matter of wages.  I picked up what I could under that head during

the afternoon.  A man who hasn't had much experience, and doesn't

think, is apt to measure a nation's prosperity or lack of prosperity

by the mere size of the prevailing wages; if the wages be high, the

nation is prosperous; if low, it isn't.  Which is an error.  It

isn't what sum you get, it's how much you can buy with it, that's

the important thing; and it's that that tells whether your wages

are high in fact or only high in name.  I could remember how it

was in the time of our great civil war in the nineteenth century.

In the North a carpenter got three dollars a day, gold valuation;

in the South he got fifty--payable in Confederate shinplasters

worth a dollar a bushel.  In the North a suit of overalls cost

three dollars--a day's wages; in the South it cost seventy-five--

which was two days' wages.  Other things were in proportion.

Consequently, wages were twice as high in the North as they were

in the South, because the one wage had that much more purchasing

power than the other had.



Yes, I made various acquaintances in the hamlet and a thing that

gratified me a good deal was to find our new coins in circulation--

lots of milrays, lots of mills, lots of cents, a good many nickels,

and some silver; all this among the artisans and commonalty

generally; yes, and even some gold--but that was at the bank,

that is to say, the goldsmith's.  I dropped in there while Marco,

the son of Marco, was haggling with a shopkeeper over a quarter

of a pound of salt, and asked for change for a twenty-dollar gold

piece.  They furnished it--that is, after they had chewed the piece,

and rung it on the counter, and tried acid on it, and asked me

where I got it, and who I was, and where I was from, and where

I was going to, and when I expected to get there, and perhaps

a couple of hundred more questions; and when they got aground,

I went right on and furnished them a lot of information voluntarily;

told them I owned a dog, and his name was Watch, and my first wife

was a Free Will Baptist, and her grandfather was a Prohibitionist,

and I used to know a man who had two thumbs on each hand and a wart

on the inside of his upper lip, and died in the hope of a glorious

resurrection, and so on, and so on, and so on, till even that

hungry village questioner began to look satisfied, and also a shade

put out; but he had to respect a man of my financial strength,

and so he didn't give me any lip, but I noticed he took it out of

his underlings, which was a perfectly natural thing to do.  Yes,

they changed my twenty, but I judged it strained the bank a little,

which was a thing to be expected, for it was the same as walking

into a paltry village store in the nineteenth century and requiring

the boss of it to change a two thousand-dollar bill for you all

of a sudden.  He could do it, maybe; but at the same time he

would wonder how a small farmer happened to be carrying so much

money around in his pocket; which was probably this goldsmith's

thought, too; for he followed me to the door and stood there gazing

after me with reverent admiration.



Our new money was not only handsomely circulating, but its language

was already glibly in use; that is to say, people had dropped

the names of the former moneys, and spoke of things as being worth

so many dollars or cents or mills or milrays now.  It was very

gratifying.  We were progressing, that was sure.



I got to know several master mechanics, but about the most interesting

fellow among them was the blacksmith, Dowley.  He was a live man

and a brisk talker, and had two journeymen and three apprentices,

and was doing a raging business.  In fact, he was getting rich,

hand over fist, and was vastly respected.  Marco was very proud of

having such a man for a friend.  He had taken me there ostensibly

to let me see the big establishment which bought so much of his

charcoal, but really to let me see what easy and almost familiar

terms he was on with this great man.  Dowley and I fraternized

at once; I had had just such picked men, splendid fellows, under

me in the Colt Arms Factory.  I was bound to see more of him, so

I invited him to come out to Marco's Sunday, and dine with us.

Marco was appalled, and held his breath; and when the grandee

accepted, he was so grateful that he almost forgot to be astonished

at the condescension.



Marco's joy was exuberant--but only for a moment; then he grew

thoughtful, then sad; and when he heard me tell Dowley I should

have Dickon, the boss mason, and Smug, the boss wheelwright, out

there, too, the coal-dust on his face turned to chalk, and he lost

his grip.  But I knew what was the matter with him; it was the

expense.  He saw ruin before him; he judged that his financial

days were numbered.  However, on our way to invite the others,

I said:



"You must allow me to have these friends come; and you must also

allow me to pay the costs."



His face cleared, and he said with spirit:



"But not all of it, not all of it.  Ye cannot well bear a burden

like to this alone."



I stopped him, and said:



"Now let's understand each other on the spot, old friend.  I am

only a farm bailiff, it is true; but I am not poor, nevertheless.

I have been very fortunate this year--you would be astonished

to know how I have thriven.  I tell you the honest truth when I say

I could squander away as many as a dozen feasts like this and never

care _that_ for the expense!" and I snapped my fingers.  I could

see myself rise a foot at a time in Marco's estimation, and when

I fetched out those last words I was become a very tower for style

and altitude.  "So you see, you must let me have my way.  You

can't contribute a cent to this orgy, that's _settled_."



"It's grand and good of you--"



"No, it isn't.  You've opened your house to Jones and me in the

most generous way; Jones was remarking upon it to-day, just before

you came back from the village; for although he wouldn't be likely

to say such a thing to you--because Jones isn't a talker, and is

diffident in society--he has a good heart and a grateful, and

knows how to appreciate it when he is well treated; yes, you and

your wife have been very hospitable toward us--"



"Ah, brother, 'tis nothing--_such_ hospitality!"



"But it _is_ something; the best a man has, freely given, is always

something, and is as good as a prince can do, and ranks right

along beside it--for even a prince can but do his best.  And so

we'll shop around and get up this layout now, and don't you worry

about the expense.  I'm one of the worst spendthrifts that ever

was born.  Why, do you know, sometimes in a single week I spend--

but never mind about that--you'd never believe it anyway."



And so we went gadding along, dropping in here and there, pricing

things, and gossiping with the shopkeepers about the riot, and now

and then running across pathetic reminders of it, in the persons of

shunned and tearful and houseless remnants of families whose homes

had been taken from them and their parents butchered or hanged.

The raiment of Marco and his wife was of coarse tow-linen and

linsey-woolsey respectively, and resembled township maps, it being

made up pretty exclusively of patches which had been added, township

by township, in the course of five or six years, until hardly a

hand's-breadth of the original garments was surviving and present.

Now I wanted to fit these people out with new suits, on account of

that swell company, and I didn't know just how to get at it--

with delicacy, until at last it struck me that as I had already

been liberal in inventing wordy gratitude for the king, it would

be just the thing to back it up with evidence of a substantial

sort; so I said:



"And Marco, there's another thing which you must permit--out of

kindness for Jones--because you wouldn't want to offend him.

He was very anxious to testify his appreciation in some way, but

he is so diffident he couldn't venture it himself, and so he begged

me to buy some little things and give them to you and Dame Phyllis

and let him pay for them without your ever knowing they came from

him--you know how a delicate person feels about that sort of thing--

and so I said I would, and we would keep mum.  Well, his idea

was, a new outfit of clothes for you both--"



"Oh, it is wastefulness!  It may not be, brother, it may not be.

Consider the vastness of the sum--"



"Hang the vastness of the sum!  Try to keep quiet for a moment,

and see how it would seem; a body can't get in a word edgeways,

you talk so much.  You ought to cure that, Marco; it isn't good

form, you know, and it will grow on you if you don't check it.

Yes, we'll step in here now and price this man's stuff--and don't

forget to remember to not let on to Jones that you know he had

anything to do with it.  You can't think how curiously sensitive

and proud he is.  He's a farmer--pretty fairly well-to-do farmer--

an I'm his bailiff; _but_--the imagination of that man!  Why,

sometimes when he forgets himself and gets to blowing off, you'd

think he was one of the swells of the earth; and you might listen

to him a hundred years and never take him for a farmer--especially if

he talked agriculture.  He _thinks_ he's a Sheol of a farmer; thinks

he's old Grayback from Wayback; but between you and me privately

he don't know as much about farming as he does about running

a kingdom--still, whatever he talks about, you want to drop your

underjaw and listen, the same as if you had never heard such

incredible wisdom in all your life before, and were afraid you

might die before you got enough of it.  That will please Jones."



It tickled Marco to the marrow to hear about such an odd character;

but it also prepared him for accidents; and in my experience when

you travel with a king who is letting on to be something else and

can't remember it more than about half the time, you can't take

too many precautions.



This was the best store we had come across yet; it had everything

in it, in small quantities, from anvils and drygoods all the way

down to fish and pinchbeck jewelry.  I concluded I would bunch

my whole invoice right here, and not go pricing around any more.

So I got rid of Marco, by sending him off to invite the mason and

the wheelwright, which left the field free to me.  For I never care

to do a thing in a quiet way; it's got to be theatrical or I don't

take any interest in it.  I showed up money enough, in a careless

way, to corral the shopkeeper's respect, and then I wrote down

a list of the things I wanted, and handed it to him to see if he

could read it.  He could, and was proud to show that he could.

He said he had been educated by a priest, and could both read

and write.  He ran it through, and remarked with satisfaction that

it was a pretty heavy bill.  Well, and so it was, for a little

concern like that.  I was not only providing a swell dinner, but

some odds and ends of extras.  I ordered that the things be carted

out and delivered at the dwelling of Marco, the son of Marco,

by Saturday evening, and send me the bill at dinner-time Sunday.

He said I could depend upon his promptness and exactitude, it was

the rule of the house.  He also observed that he would throw in

a couple of miller-guns for the Marcos gratis--that everybody

was using them now.  He had a mighty opinion of that clever

device.  I said:



"And please fill them up to the middle mark, too; and add that

to the bill."



He would, with pleasure.  He filled them, and I took them with

me.  I couldn't venture to tell him that the miller-gun was a

little invention of my own, and that I had officially ordered that

every shopkeeper in the kingdom keep them on hand and sell them

at government price--which was the merest trifle, and the shopkeeper

got that, not the government.  We furnished them for nothing.



The king had hardly missed us when we got back at nightfall.  He

had early dropped again into his dream of a grand invasion of Gaul

with the whole strength of his kingdom at his back, and the afternoon

had slipped away without his ever coming to himself again.







CHAPTER XXXII



DOWLEY'S HUMILIATION



Well, when that cargo arrived toward sunset, Saturday afternoon,

I had my hands full to keep the Marcos from fainting.  They were

sure Jones and I were ruined past help, and they blamed themselves

as accessories to this bankruptcy.  You see, in addition to the

dinner-materials, which called for a sufficiently round sum,

I had bought a lot of extras for the future comfort of the family:

for instance, a big lot of wheat, a delicacy as rare to the tables

of their class as was ice-cream to a hermit's; also a sizeable

deal dinner-table; also two entire pounds of salt, which was

another piece of extravagance in those people's eyes; also crockery,

stools, the clothes, a small cask of beer, and so on.  I instructed

the Marcos to keep quiet about this sumptuousness, so as to give

me a chance to surprise the guests and show off a little.  Concerning

the new clothes, the simple couple were like children; they were up

and down, all night, to see if it wasn't nearly daylight, so that

they could put them on, and they were into them at last as much

as an hour before dawn was due.  Then their pleasure--not to say

delirium--was so fresh and novel and inspiring that the sight of it

paid me well for the interruptions which my sleep had suffered.

The king had slept just as usual--like the dead.  The Marcos could

not thank him for their clothes, that being forbidden; but they

tried every way they could think of to make him see how grateful

they were.  Which all went for nothing:  he didn't notice any change.



It turned out to be one of those rich and rare fall days which is

just a June day toned down to a degree where it is heaven to be

out of doors.  Toward noon the guests arrived, and we assembled

under a great tree and were soon as sociable as old acquaintances.

Even the king's reserve melted a little, though it was some little

trouble to him to adjust himself to the name of Jones along at

first.  I had asked him to try to not forget that he was a farmer;

but I had also considered it prudent to ask him to let the thing

stand at that, and not elaborate it any.  Because he was just the

kind of person you could depend on to spoil a little thing like

that if you didn't warn him, his tongue was so handy, and his

spirit so willing, and his information so uncertain.



Dowley was in fine feather, and I early got him started, and then

adroitly worked him around onto his own history for a text and

himself for a hero, and then it was good to sit there and hear him

hum.  Self-made man, you know.  They know how to talk.  They do

deserve more credit than any other breed of men, yes, that is true;

and they are among the very first to find it out, too.  He told how

he had begun life an orphan lad without money and without friends

able to help him; how he had lived as the slaves of the meanest

master lived; how his day's work was from sixteen to eighteen hours

long, and yielded him only enough black bread to keep him in a

half-fed condition; how his faithful endeavors finally attracted

the attention of a good blacksmith, who came near knocking him

dead with kindness by suddenly offering, when he was totally

unprepared, to take him as his bound apprentice for nine years

and give him board and clothes and teach him the trade--or "mystery"

as Dowley called it.  That was his first great rise, his first

gorgeous stroke of fortune; and you saw that he couldn't yet speak

of it without a sort of eloquent wonder and delight that such a

gilded promotion should have fallen to the lot of a common human

being.  He got no new clothing during his apprenticeship, but on

his graduation day his master tricked him out in spang-new tow-linens

and made him feel unspeakably rich and fine.



"I remember me of that day!" the wheelwright sang out, with

enthusiasm.



"And I likewise!" cried the mason.  "I would not believe they

were thine own; in faith I could not."



"Nor other!" shouted Dowley, with sparkling eyes.  "I was like

to lose my character, the neighbors wending I had mayhap been

stealing.  It was a great day, a great day; one forgetteth not

days like that."



Yes, and his master was a fine man, and prosperous, and always

had a great feast of meat twice in the year, and with it white

bread, true wheaten bread; in fact, lived like a lord, so to speak.

And in time Dowley succeeded to the business and married the daughter.



"And now consider what is come to pass," said he, impressively.

"Two times in every month there is fresh meat upon my table."

He made a pause here, to let that fact sink home, then added--

"and eight times salt meat."



"It is even true," said the wheelwright, with bated breath.



"I know it of mine own knowledge," said the mason, in the same

reverent fashion.



"On my table appeareth white bread every Sunday in the year,"

added the master smith, with solemnity.  "I leave it to your own

consciences, friends, if this is not also true?"



"By my head, yes," cried the mason.



"I can testify it--and I do," said the wheelwright.



"And as to furniture, ye shall say yourselves what mine equipment

is."  He waved his hand in fine gesture of granting frank and

unhampered freedom of speech, and added:  "Speak as ye are moved;

speak as ye would speak; an I were not here."



"Ye have five stools, and of the sweetest workmanship at that, albeit

your family is but three," said the wheelwright, with deep respect.



"And six wooden goblets, and six platters of wood and two of pewter

to eat and drink from withal," said the mason, impressively.  "And

I say it as knowing God is my judge, and we tarry not here alway,

but must answer at the last day for the things said in the body,

be they false or be they sooth."



"Now ye know what manner of man I am, brother Jones," said the

smith, with a fine and friendly condescension, "and doubtless ye

would look to find me a man jealous of his due of respect and

but sparing of outgo to strangers till their rating and quality be

assured, but trouble yourself not, as concerning that; wit ye well

ye shall find me a man that regardeth not these matters but is

willing to receive any he as his fellow and equal that carrieth

a right heart in his body, be his worldly estate howsoever modest.

And in token of it, here is my hand; and I say with my own mouth

we are equals--equals"--and he smiled around on the company with

the satisfaction of a god who is doing the handsome and gracious

thing and is quite well aware of it.



The king took the hand with a poorly disguised reluctance, and

let go of it as willingly as a lady lets go of a fish; all of which

had a good effect, for it was mistaken for an embarrassment natural

to one who was being called upon by greatness.



The dame brought out the table now, and set it under the tree.

It caused a visible stir of surprise, it being brand new and a

sumptuous article of deal.  But the surprise rose higher still

when the dame, with a body oozing easy indifference at every pore,

but eyes that gave it all away by absolutely flaming with vanity,

slowly unfolded an actual simon-pure tablecloth and spread it.

That was a notch above even the blacksmith's domestic grandeurs,

and it hit him hard; you could see it.  But Marco was in Paradise;

you could see that, too.  Then the dame brought two fine new

stools--whew! that was a sensation; it was visible in the eyes of

every guest.  Then she brought two more--as calmly as she could.

Sensation again--with awed murmurs.  Again she brought two--

walking on air, she was so proud.  The guests were petrified, and

the mason muttered:



"There is that about earthly pomps which doth ever move to reverence."



As the dame turned away, Marco couldn't help slapping on the climax

while the thing was hot; so he said with what was meant for a

languid composure but was a poor imitation of it:



"These suffice; leave the rest."



So there were more yet!  It was a fine effect.  I couldn't have

played the hand better myself.



From this out, the madam piled up the surprises with a rush that

fired the general astonishment up to a hundred and fifty in the

shade, and at the same time paralyzed expression of it down to

gasped "Oh's" and "Ah's," and mute upliftings of hands and eyes.

She fetched crockery--new, and plenty of it; new wooden goblets

and other table furniture; and beer, fish, chicken, a goose, eggs,

roast beef, roast mutton, a ham, a small roast pig, and a wealth

of genuine white wheaten bread.  Take it by and large, that spread

laid everything far and away in the shade that ever that crowd had

seen before.  And while they sat there just simply stupefied with

wonder and awe, I sort of waved my hand as if by accident, and

the storekeeper's son emerged from space and said he had come

to collect.



"That's all right," I said, indifferently.  "What is the amount?

give us the items."



Then he read off this bill, while those three amazed men listened,

and serene waves of satisfaction rolled over my soul and alternate

waves of terror and admiration surged over Marco's:



   2 pounds salt . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   200

   8 dozen pints beer, in the wood . . . . .   800

   3 bushels wheat . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2,700

   2 pounds fish . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   100

   3 hens  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   400

   1 goose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   400

   3 dozen eggs  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   150

   1 roast of beef . . . . . . . . . . . . .   450

   1 roast of mutton . . . . . . . . . . . .   400

   1 ham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   800

   1 sucking pig . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   500

   2 crockery dinner sets  . . . . . . . . . 6,000

   2 men's suits and underwear . . . . . . . 2,800

   1 stuff and 1 linsey-woolsey gown

     and underwear . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,600

   8 wooden goblets  . . . . . . . . . . . .   800

   Various table furniture . . . . . . . . .10,000

   1 deal table  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,000

   8 stools  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4,000

   2 miller guns, loaded . . . . . . . . . . 3,000



He ceased.  There was a pale and awful silence.  Not a limb stirred.

Not a nostril betrayed the passage of breath.



"Is that all?" I asked, in a voice of the most perfect calmness.



"All, fair sir, save that certain matters of light moment are

placed together under a head hight sundries.  If it would like

you, I will sepa--"



"It is of no consequence," I said, accompanying the words with

a gesture of the most utter indifference; "give me the grand

total, please."



The clerk leaned against the tree to stay himself, and said:



"Thirty-nine thousand one hundred and fifty milrays!"



The wheelwright fell off his stool, the others grabbed the table

to save themselves, and there was a deep and general ejaculation of:



"God be with us in the day of disaster!"



The clerk hastened to say:



"My father chargeth me to say he cannot honorably require you

to pay it all at this time, and therefore only prayeth you--"



I paid no more heed than if it were the idle breeze, but, with an

air of indifference amounting almost to weariness, got out my money

and tossed four dollars on to the table.  Ah, you should have seen

them stare!



The clerk was astonished and charmed.  He asked me to retain

one of the dollars as security, until he could go to town and--

I interrupted:



"What, and fetch back nine cents?  Nonsense!  Take the whole.

Keep the change."



There was an amazed murmur to this effect:



"Verily this being is _made_ of money!  He throweth it away even

as if it were dirt."



The blacksmith was a crushed man.



The clerk took his money and reeled away drunk with fortune.  I said

to Marco and his wife:



"Good folk, here is a little trifle for you"--handing the miller-guns

as if it were a matter of no consequence, though each of them

contained fifteen cents in solid cash; and while the poor creatures

went to pieces with astonishment and gratitude, I turned to the

others and said as calmly as one would ask the time of day:



"Well, if we are all ready, I judge the dinner is.  Come, fall to."



Ah, well, it was immense; yes, it was a daisy.  I don't know that

I ever put a situation together better, or got happier spectacular

effects out of the materials available.  The blacksmith--well, he

was simply mashed.  Land! I wouldn't have felt what that man was

feeling, for anything in the world.  Here he had been blowing and

bragging about his grand meat-feast twice a year, and his fresh

meat twice a month, and his salt meat twice a week, and his white

bread every Sunday the year round--all for a family of three; the

entire cost for the year not above 69.2.6 (sixty-nine cents, two

mills and six milrays), and all of a sudden here comes along a man

who slashes out nearly four dollars on a single blow-out; and not

only that, but acts as if it made him tired to handle such small

sums.  Yes, Dowley was a good deal wilted, and shrunk-up and

collapsed; he had the aspect of a bladder-balloon that's been

stepped on by a cow.







CHAPTER XXXIII



SIXTH CENTURY POLITICAL ECONOMY



However, I made a dead set at him, and before the first third

of the dinner was reached, I had him happy again.  It was easy

to do--in a country of ranks and castes.  You see, in a country

where they have ranks and castes, a man isn't ever a man, he is

only part of a man, he can't ever get his full growth.  You prove

your superiority over him in station, or rank, or fortune, and

that's the end of it--he knuckles down.  You can't insult him

after that.  No, I don't mean quite that; of course you _can_ insult

him, I only mean it's difficult; and so, unless you've got a lot

of useless time on your hands it doesn't pay to try.  I had the

smith's reverence now, because I was apparently immensely prosperous

and rich; I could have had his adoration if I had had some little

gimcrack title of nobility.  And not only his, but any commoner's

in the land, though he were the mightiest production of all the ages,

in intellect, worth, and character, and I bankrupt in all three.

This was to remain so, as long as England should exist in the

earth.  With the spirit of prophecy upon me, I could look into

the future and see her erect statues and monuments to her unspeakable

Georges and other royal and noble clothes-horses, and leave unhonored

the creators of this world--after God--Gutenburg, Watt, Arkwright,

Whitney, Morse, Stephenson, Bell.



The king got his cargo aboard, and then, the talk not turning upon

battle, conquest, or iron-clad duel, he dulled down to drowsiness

and went off to take a nap.  Mrs. Marco cleared the table, placed

the beer keg handy, and went away to eat her dinner of leavings

in humble privacy, and the rest of us soon drifted into matters

near and dear to the hearts of our sort--business and wages,

of course.  At a first glance, things appeared to be exceeding

prosperous in this little tributary kingdom--whose lord was

King Bagdemagus--as compared with the state of things in my own

region.  They had the "protection" system in full force here,

whereas we were working along down toward free-trade, by easy

stages, and were now about half way.  Before long, Dowley and I

were doing all the talking, the others hungrily listening.  Dowley

warmed to his work, snuffed an advantage in the air, and began

to put questions which he considered pretty awkward ones for me,

and they did have something of that look:



"In your country, brother, what is the wage of a master bailiff,

master hind, carter, shepherd, swineherd?"



"Twenty-five milrays a day; that is to say, a quarter of a cent."



The smith's face beamed with joy.  He said:



"With us they are allowed the double of it!  And what may a mechanic

get--carpenter, dauber, mason, painter, blacksmith, wheelwright,

and the like?"



"On the average, fifty milrays; half a cent a day."



"Ho-ho!  With us they are allowed a hundred!  With us any good

mechanic is allowed a cent a day!  I count out the tailor, but

not the others--they are all allowed a cent a day, and in driving

times they get more--yes, up to a hundred and ten and even fifteen

milrays a day.  I've paid a hundred and fifteen myself, within

the week.  'Rah for protection--to Sheol with free-trade!"



And his face shone upon the company like a sunburst.  But I didn't

scare at all.  I rigged up my pile-driver, and allowed myself

fifteen minutes to drive him into the earth--drive him _all_ in--

drive him in till not even the curve of his skull should show

above ground.  Here is the way I started in on him.  I asked:



"What do you pay a pound for salt?"



"A hundred milrays."



"We pay forty.  What do you pay for beef and mutton--when you

buy it?"  That was a neat hit; it made the color come.



"It varieth somewhat, but not much; one may say seventy-five milrays

the pound."



"_We_ pay thirty-three.  What do you pay for eggs?"



"Fifty milrays the dozen."



"We pay twenty.  What do you pay for beer?"



"It costeth us eight and one-half milrays the pint."



"We get it for four; twenty-five bottles for a cent.

What do you pay for wheat?"



"At the rate of nine hundred milrays the bushel."



"We pay four hundred.  What do you pay for a man's tow-linen suit?"



"Thirteen cents."



"We pay six.  What do you pay for a stuff gown for the wife of the

laborer or the mechanic?"



"We pay eight cents, four mills."



"Well, observe the difference:  you pay eight cents and four mills,

we pay only four cents."  I prepared now to sock it to him.  I said:

"Look here, dear friend, _what's become of your high wages you

were bragging so about a few minutes ago?_"--and I looked around

on the company with placid satisfaction, for I had slipped up

on him gradually and tied him hand and foot, you see, without his

ever noticing that he was being tied at all.  "What's become of

those noble high wages of yours?--I seem to have knocked the

stuffing all out of them, it appears to me."



But if you will believe me, he merely looked surprised, that

is all! he didn't grasp the situation at all, didn't know he had

walked into a trap, didn't discover that he was _in_ a trap.  I could

have shot him, from sheer vexation.  With cloudy eye and a struggling

intellect he fetched this out:



"Marry, I seem not to understand.  It is _proved_ that our wages

be double thine; how then may it be that thou'st knocked therefrom

the stuffing?--an miscall not the wonderly word, this being the

first time under grace and providence of God it hath been granted

me to hear it."



Well, I was stunned; partly with this unlooked-for stupidity on

his part, and partly because his fellows so manifestly sided with

him and were of his mind--if you might call it mind.  My position

was simple enough, plain enough; how could it ever be simplified

more?  However, I must try:



"Why, look here, brother Dowley, don't you see?  Your wages are

merely higher than ours in _name_, not in _fact_."



"Hear him!  They are the _double_--ye have confessed it yourself."



"Yes-yes, I don't deny that at all.  But that's got nothing to do

with it; the _amount_ of the wages in mere coins, with meaningless

names attached to them to know them by, has got nothing to do

with it.  The thing is, how much can you _buy_ with your wages?--

that's the idea.  While it is true that with you a good mechanic

is allowed about three dollars and a half a year, and with us only

about a dollar and seventy-five--"



"There--ye're confessing it again, ye're confessing it again!"



"Confound it, I've never denied it, I tell you!  What I say is

this.  With us _half_ a dollar buys more than a _dollar_ buys

with you--and THEREFORE it stands to reason and the commonest

kind of common-sense, that our wages are _higher_ than yours."



He looked dazed, and said, despairingly:



"Verily, I cannot make it out.  Ye've just said ours are the

higher, and with the same breath ye take it back."



"Oh, great Scott, isn't it possible to get such a simple thing

through your head?  Now look here--let me illustrate.  We pay

four cents for a woman's stuff gown, you pay 8.4.0, which is

four mills more than _double_.  What do you allow a laboring

woman who works on a farm?"



"Two mills a day."



"Very good; we allow but half as much; we pay her only a tenth

of a cent a day; and--"



"Again ye're conf--"



"Wait!  Now, you see, the thing is very simple; this time you'll

understand it.  For instance, it takes your woman 42 days to earn

her gown, at 2 mills a day--7 weeks' work; but ours earns hers

in forty days--two days _short_ of 7 weeks.  Your woman has a gown,

and her whole seven weeks wages are gone; ours has a gown, and

two days' wages left, to buy something else with.  There--_now_

you understand it!"



He looked--well, he merely looked dubious, it's the most I can say;

so did the others.  I waited--to let the thing work.  Dowley spoke

at last--and betrayed the fact that he actually hadn't gotten away

from his rooted and grounded superstitions yet.  He said, with

a trifle of hesitancy:



"But--but--ye cannot fail to grant that two mills a day is better

than one."



Shucks!  Well, of course, I hated to give it up.  So I chanced

another flyer:



"Let us suppose a case.  Suppose one of your journeymen goes out

and buys the following articles:



  "1 pound of salt;

   1 dozen eggs;

   1 dozen pints of beer;

   1 bushel of wheat;

   1 tow-linen suit;

   5 pounds of beef;

   5 pounds of mutton.



"The lot will cost him 32 cents.  It takes him 32 working days

to earn the money--5 weeks and 2 days.  Let him come to us and

work 32 days at _half_ the wages; he can buy all those things for

a shade under 14 1/2 cents; they will cost him a shade under 29

days' work, and he will have about half a week's wages over.  Carry

it through the year; he would save nearly a week's wages every

two months, _your_ man nothing; thus saving five or six weeks' wages

in a year, your man not a cent.  _Now_ I reckon you understand that

'high wages' and 'low wages' are phrases that don't mean anything

in the world until you find out which of them will _buy_ the most!"



It was a crusher.



But, alas! it didn't crush.  No, I had to give it up.  What those

people valued was _high wages_; it didn't seem to be a matter of

any consequence to them whether the high wages would buy anything

or not.  They stood for "protection," and swore by it, which was

reasonable enough, because interested parties had gulled them into

the notion that it was protection which had created their high

wages.  I proved to them that in a quarter of a century their wages

had advanced but 30 per cent., while the cost of living had gone

up 100; and that with us, in a shorter time, wages had advanced

40 per cent. while the cost of living had gone steadily down.  But

it didn't do any good.  Nothing could unseat their strange beliefs.



Well, I was smarting under a sense of defeat.  Undeserved defeat,

but what of that?  That didn't soften the smart any.  And to think

of the circumstances! the first statesman of the age, the capablest

man, the best-informed man in the entire world, the loftiest

uncrowned head that had moved through the clouds of any political

firmament for centuries, sitting here apparently defeated in

argument by an ignorant country blacksmith!  And I could see that

those others were sorry for me--which made me blush till I could

smell my whiskers scorching.  Put yourself in my place; feel as mean

as I did, as ashamed as I felt--wouldn't _you_ have struck below the

belt to get even?  Yes, you would; it is simply human nature.

Well, that is what I did.  I am not trying to justify it; I'm only

saying that I was mad, and _anybody_ would have done it.



Well, when I make up my mind to hit a man, I don't plan out

a love-tap; no, that isn't my way; as long as I'm going to hit him

at all, I'm going to hit him a lifter.  And I don't jump at him

all of a sudden, and risk making a blundering half-way business

of it; no, I get away off yonder to one side, and work up on him

gradually, so that he never suspects that I'm going to hit him

at all; and by and by, all in a flash, he's flat on his back, and

he can't tell for the life of him how it all happened.  That is

the way I went for brother Dowley.  I started to talking lazy and

comfortable, as if I was just talking to pass the time; and the

oldest man in the world couldn't have taken the bearings of my

starting place and guessed where I was going to fetch up:



"Boys, there's a good many curious things about law, and custom,

and usage, and all that sort of thing, when you come to look at it;

yes, and about the drift and progress of human opinion and movement,

too.  There are written laws--they perish; but there are also

unwritten laws--_they_ are eternal.  Take the unwritten law of wages:

it says they've got to advance, little by little, straight through

the centuries.  And notice how it works.  We know what wages are

now, here and there and yonder; we strike an average, and say that's

the wages of to-day.  We know what the wages were a hundred years

ago, and what they were two hundred years ago; that's as far back

as we can get, but it suffices to give us the law of progress,

the measure and rate of the periodical augmentation; and so, without

a document to help us, we can come pretty close to determining

what the wages were three and four and five hundred years ago.

Good, so far.  Do we stop there?  No.  We stop looking backward;

we face around and apply the law to the future.  My friends, I can

tell you what people's wages are going to be at any date in the

future you want to know, for hundreds and hundreds of years."



"What, goodman, what!"



"Yes.  In seven hundred years wages will have risen to six times

what they are now, here in your region, and farm hands will be

allowed 3 cents a day, and mechanics 6."



"I would't I might die now and live then!" interrupted Smug, the

wheelwright, with a fine avaricious glow in his eye.



"And that isn't all; they'll get their board besides--such as it is:

it won't bloat them.  Two hundred and fifty years later--pay attention

now--a mechanic's wages will be--mind you, this is law, not

guesswork; a mechanic's wages will then be _twenty_ cents a day!"



There was a general gasp of awed astonishment, Dickon the mason

murmured, with raised eyes and hands:



"More than three weeks' pay for one day's work!"



"Riches!--of a truth, yes, riches!" muttered Marco, his breath

coming quick and short, with excitement.



"Wages will keep on rising, little by little, little by little,

as steadily as a tree grows, and at the end of three hundred and

forty years more there'll be at least _one_ country where the

mechanic's average wage will be _two hundred_ cents a day!"



It knocked them absolutely dumb!  Not a man of them could get

his breath for upwards of two minutes.  Then the coal-burner

said prayerfully:



"Might I but live to see it!"



"It is the income of an earl!" said Smug.



"An earl, say ye?" said Dowley; "ye could say more than that and

speak no lie; there's no earl in the realm of Bagdemagus that hath

an income like to that.  Income of an earl--mf! it's the income

of an angel!"



"Now, then, that is what is going to happen as regards wages.

In that remote day, that man will earn, with _one_ week's work,

that bill of goods which it takes you upwards of _fifty_ weeks to

earn now.  Some other pretty surprising things are going to happen,

too.  Brother Dowley, who is it that determines, every spring,

what the particular wage of each kind of mechanic, laborer, and

servant shall be for that year?"



"Sometimes the courts, sometimes the town council; but most of all,

the magistrate.  Ye may say, in general terms, it is the magistrate

that fixes the wages."



"Doesn't ask any of those poor devils to _help_ him fix their wages

for them, does he?"



"Hm!  That _were_ an idea!  The master that's to pay him the money

is the one that's rightly concerned in that matter, ye will notice."



"Yes--but I thought the other man might have some little trifle

at stake in it, too; and even his wife and children, poor creatures.

The masters are these:  nobles, rich men, the prosperous generally.

These few, who do no work, determine what pay the vast hive shall

have who _do_ work.  You see?  They're a 'combine'--a trade union,

to coin a new phrase--who band themselves together to force their

lowly brother to take what they choose to give.  Thirteen hundred

years hence--so says the unwritten law--the 'combine' will be the

other way, and then how these fine people's posterity will fume

and fret and grit their teeth over the insolent tyranny of trade

unions!  Yes, indeed! the magistrate will tranquilly arrange the

wages from now clear away down into the nineteenth century; and

then all of a sudden the wage-earner will consider that a couple

of thousand years or so is enough of this one-sided sort of thing;

and he will rise up and take a hand in fixing his wages himself.

Ah, he will have a long and bitter account of wrong and humiliation

to settle."



"Do ye believe--"



"That he actually will help to fix his own wages?  Yes, indeed.

And he will be strong and able, then."



"Brave times, brave times, of a truth!" sneered the prosperous smith.



"Oh,--and there's another detail.  In that day, a master may hire

a man for only just one day, or one week, or one month at a time,

if he wants to."



"What?"



"It's true.  Moreover, a magistrate won't be able to force a man

to work for a master a whole year on a stretch whether the man

wants to or not."



"Will there be _no_ law or sense in that day?"



"Both of them, Dowley.  In that day a man will be his own property,

not the property of magistrate and master.  And he can leave town

whenever he wants to, if the wages don't suit him!--and they can't

put him in the pillory for it."



"Perdition catch such an age!" shouted Dowley, in strong indignation.

"An age of dogs, an age barren of reverence for superiors and

respect for authority!  The pillory--"



"Oh, wait, brother; say no good word for that institution.  I think

the pillory ought to be abolished."



"A most strange idea.  Why?"



"Well, I'll tell you why.  Is a man ever put in the pillory for

a capital crime?"



"No."



"Is it right to condemn a man to a slight punishment for a small

offense and then kill him?"



There was no answer.  I had scored my first point!  For the first

time, the smith wasn't up and ready.  The company noticed it.

Good effect.



"You don't answer, brother.  You were about to glorify the pillory

a while ago, and shed some pity on a future age that isn't going

to use it.  I think the pillory ought to be abolished.  What

usually happens when a poor fellow is put in the pillory for some

little offense that didn't amount to anything in the world?  The

mob try to have some fun with him, don't they?"



"Yes."



"They begin by clodding him; and they laugh themselves to pieces

to see him try to dodge one clod and get hit with another?"



"Yes."



"Then they throw dead cats at him, don't they?"



"Yes."



"Well, then, suppose he has a few personal enemies in that mob

and here and there a man or a woman with a secret grudge against

him--and suppose especially that he is unpopular in the community,

for his pride, or his prosperity, or one thing or another--stones

and bricks take the place of clods and cats presently, don't they?"



"There is no doubt of it."



"As a rule he is crippled for life, isn't he?--jaws broken, teeth

smashed out?--or legs mutilated, gangrened, presently cut off?--

or an eye knocked out, maybe both eyes?"



"It is true, God knoweth it."



"And if he is unpopular he can depend on _dying_, right there in

the stocks, can't he?"



"He surely can!  One may not deny it."



"I take it none of _you_ are unpopular--by reason of pride or

insolence, or conspicuous prosperity, or any of those things that

excite envy and malice among the base scum of a village?  _You_

wouldn't think it much of a risk to take a chance in the stocks?"



Dowley winced, visibly.  I judged he was hit.  But he didn't betray

it by any spoken word.  As for the others, they spoke out plainly,

and with strong feeling.  They said they had seen enough of the

stocks to know what a man's chance in them was, and they would

never consent to enter them if they could compromise on a quick

death by hanging.



"Well, to change the subject--for I think I've established my

point that the stocks ought to be abolished.  I think some of our

laws are pretty unfair.  For instance, if I do a thing which ought

to deliver me to the stocks, and you know I did it and yet keep

still and don't report me, _you_ will get the stocks if anybody

informs on you."



"Ah, but that would serve you but right," said Dowley, "for you

_must_ inform.  So saith the law."



The others coincided.



"Well, all right, let it go, since you vote me down.  But there's

one thing which certainly isn't fair.  The magistrate fixes a

mechanic's wage at one cent a day, for instance.  The law says that

if any master shall venture, even under utmost press of business,

to pay anything _over_ that cent a day, even for a single day, he

shall be both fined and pilloried for it; and whoever knows he did

it and doesn't inform, they also shall be fined and pilloried.  Now

it seems to me unfair, Dowley, and a deadly peril to all of us,

that because you thoughtlessly confessed, a while ago, that within

a week you have paid a cent and fifteen mil--"



Oh, I tell _you_ it was a smasher!  You ought to have seen them to

go to pieces, the whole gang.  I had just slipped up on poor

smiling and complacent Dowley so nice and easy and softly, that

he never suspected anything was going to happen till the blow

came crashing down and knocked him all to rags.



A fine effect.  In fact, as fine as any I ever produced, with so

little time to work it up in.



But I saw in a moment that I had overdone the thing a little.

I was expecting to scare them, but I wasn't expecting to scare

them to death.  They were mighty near it, though.  You see they

had been a whole lifetime learning to appreciate the pillory; and

to have that thing staring them in the face, and every one of them

distinctly at the mercy of me, a stranger, if I chose to go and

report--well, it was awful, and they couldn't seem to recover

from the shock, they couldn't seem to pull themselves together.

Pale, shaky, dumb, pitiful?  Why, they weren't any better than

so many dead men.  It was very uncomfortable.  Of course, I thought

they would appeal to me to keep mum, and then we would shake hands,

and take a drink all round, and laugh it off, and there an end.

But no; you see I was an unknown person, among a cruelly oppressed

and suspicious people, a people always accustomed to having advantage

taken of their helplessness, and never expecting just or kind

treatment from any but their own families and very closest intimates.

Appeal to _me_ to be gentle, to be fair, to be generous?  Of course,

they wanted to, but they couldn't dare.







CHAPTER XXXIV



THE YANKEE AND THE KING SOLD AS SLAVES



Well, what had I better do?  Nothing in a hurry, sure.  I must

get up a diversion; anything to employ me while I could think,

and while these poor fellows could have a chance to come to life

again.  There sat Marco, petrified in the act of trying to get

the hang of his miller-gun--turned to stone, just in the attitude

he was in when my pile-driver fell, the toy still gripped in his

unconscious fingers.  So I took it from him and proposed to explain

its mystery.  Mystery! a simple little thing like that; and yet it

was mysterious enough, for that race and that age.



I never saw such an awkward people, with machinery; you see, they

were totally unused to it.  The miller-gun was a little double-barreled

tube of toughened glass, with a neat little trick of a spring

to it, which upon pressure would let a shot escape.  But the shot

wouldn't hurt anybody, it would only drop into your hand.  In the

gun were two sizes--wee mustard-seed shot, and another sort that

were several times larger.  They were money.  The mustard-seed

shot represented milrays, the larger ones mills.  So the gun was

a purse; and very handy, too; you could pay out money in the dark

with it, with accuracy; and you could carry it in your mouth; or

in your vest pocket, if you had one.  I made them of several sizes--

one size so large that it would carry the equivalent of a dollar.

Using shot for money was a good thing for the government; the metal

cost nothing, and the money couldn't be counterfeited, for I was

the only person in the kingdom who knew how to manage a shot tower.

"Paying the shot" soon came to be a common phrase.  Yes, and I knew

it would still be passing men's lips, away down in the nineteenth

century, yet none would suspect how and when it originated.



The king joined us, about this time, mightily refreshed by his nap,

and feeling good.  Anything could make me nervous now, I was so

uneasy--for our lives were in danger; and so it worried me to

detect a complacent something in the king's eye which seemed to

indicate that he had been loading himself up for a performance

of some kind or other; confound it, why must he go and choose

such a time as this?



I was right.  He began, straight off, in the most innocently

artful, and transparent, and lubberly way, to lead up to the

subject of agriculture.  The cold sweat broke out all over me.

I wanted to whisper in his ear, "Man, we are in awful danger!

every moment is worth a principality till we get back these men's

confidence; _don't_ waste any of this golden time."  But of course

I couldn't do it.  Whisper to him?  It would look as if we were

conspiring.  So I had to sit there and look calm and pleasant while

the king stood over that dynamite mine and mooned along about his

damned onions and things.  At first the tumult of my own thoughts,

summoned by the danger-signal and swarming to the rescue from

every quarter of my skull, kept up such a hurrah and confusion

and fifing and drumming that I couldn't take in a word; but

presently when my mob of gathering plans began to crystallize

and fall into position and form line of battle, a sort of order and

quiet ensued and I caught the boom of the king's batteries, as if

out of remote distance:



"--were not the best way, methinks, albeit it is not to be denied

that authorities differ as concerning this point, some contending

that the onion is but an unwholesome berry when stricken early

from the tree--"



The audience showed signs of life, and sought each other's eyes

in a surprised and troubled way.



"--whileas others do yet maintain, with much show of reason, that

this is not of necessity the case, instancing that plums and other

like cereals do be always dug in the unripe state--"



The audience exhibited distinct distress; yes, and also fear.



"--yet are they clearly wholesome, the more especially when one

doth assuage the asperities of their nature by admixture of the

tranquilizing juice of the wayward cabbage--"



The wild light of terror began to glow in these men's eyes, and

one of them muttered, "These be errors, every one--God hath surely

smitten the mind of this farmer."  I was in miserable apprehension;

I sat upon thorns.



"--and further instancing the known truth that in the case of

animals, the young, which may be called the green fruit of the

creature, is the better, all confessing that when a goat is ripe,

his fur doth heat and sore engame his flesh, the which defect,

taken in connection with his several rancid habits, and fulsome

appetites, and godless attitudes of mind, and bilious quality

of morals--"



They rose and went for him!  With a fierce shout, "The one would

betray us, the other is mad!  Kill them!  Kill them!" they flung

themselves upon us.  What joy flamed up in the king's eye!  He

might be lame in agriculture, but this kind of thing was just in

his line.  He had been fasting long, he was hungry for a fight.

He hit the blacksmith a crack under the jaw that lifted him clear

off his feet and stretched him flat on his back.  "St. George for

Britain!" and he downed the wheelwright.  The mason was big, but

I laid him out like nothing.  The three gathered themselves up and

came again; went down again; came again; and kept on repeating

this, with native British pluck, until they were battered to jelly,

reeling with exhaustion, and so blind that they couldn't tell us

from each other; and yet they kept right on, hammering away with

what might was left in them.  Hammering each other--for we stepped

aside and looked on while they rolled, and struggled, and gouged,

and pounded, and bit, with the strict and wordless attention to

business of so many bulldogs.  We looked on without apprehension,

for they were fast getting past ability to go for help against us,

and the arena was far enough from the public road to be safe

from intrusion.



Well, while they were gradually playing out, it suddenly occurred

to me to wonder what had become of Marco.  I looked around; he

was nowhere to be seen.  Oh, but this was ominous!  I pulled the

king's sleeve, and we glided away and rushed for the hut.  No Marco

there, no Phyllis there!  They had gone to the road for help, sure.

I told the king to give his heels wings, and I would explain later.

We made good time across the open ground, and as we darted into

the shelter of the wood I glanced back and saw a mob of excited

peasants swarm into view, with Marco and his wife at their head.

They were making a world of noise, but that couldn't hurt anybody;

the wood was dense, and as soon as we were well into its depths

we would take to a tree and let them whistle.  Ah, but then came

another sound--dogs!  Yes, that was quite another matter.  It

magnified our contract--we must find running water.



We tore along at a good gait, and soon left the sounds far behind

and modified to a murmur.  We struck a stream and darted into it.

We waded swiftly down it, in the dim forest light, for as much

as three hundred yards, and then came across an oak with a great

bough sticking out over the water.  We climbed up on this bough,

and began to work our way along it to the body of the tree; now

we began to hear those sounds more plainly; so the mob had struck

our trail.  For a while the sounds approached pretty fast.  And

then for another while they didn't.  No doubt the dogs had found

the place where we had entered the stream, and were now waltzing

up and down the shores trying to pick up the trail again.



When we were snugly lodged in the tree and curtained with foliage,

the king was satisfied, but I was doubtful.  I believed we could

crawl along a branch and get into the next tree, and I judged it

worth while to try.  We tried it, and made a success of it, though

the king slipped, at the junction, and came near failing to connect.

We got comfortable lodgment and satisfactory concealment among

the foliage, and then we had nothing to do but listen to the hunt.



Presently we heard it coming--and coming on the jump, too; yes,

and down both sides of the stream.  Louder--louder--next minute

it swelled swiftly up into a roar of shoutings, barkings, tramplings,

and swept by like a cyclone.



"I was afraid that the overhanging branch would suggest something

to them," said I, "but I don't mind the disappointment.  Come,

my liege, it were well that we make good use of our time.  We've

flanked them.  Dark is coming on, presently.  If we can cross the

stream and get a good start, and borrow a couple of horses from

somebody's pasture to use for a few hours, we shall be safe enough."



We started down, and got nearly to the lowest limb, when we seemed

to hear the hunt returning.  We stopped to listen.



"Yes," said I, "they're baffled, they've given it up, they're on

their way home.  We will climb back to our roost again, and let

them go by."



So we climbed back.  The king listened a moment and said:



"They still search--I wit the sign.  We did best to abide."



He was right.  He knew more about hunting than I did.  The noise

approached steadily, but not with a rush.  The king said:



"They reason that we were advantaged by no parlous start of them,

and being on foot are as yet no mighty way from where we took

the water."



"Yes, sire, that is about it, I am afraid, though I was hoping

better things."



The noise drew nearer and nearer, and soon the van was drifting

under us, on both sides of the water.  A voice called a halt from

the other bank, and said:



"An they were so minded, they could get to yon tree by this branch

that overhangs, and yet not touch ground.  Ye will do well to send

a man up it."



"Marry, that we will do!"



I was obliged to admire my cuteness in foreseeing this very thing

and swapping trees to beat it.  But, don't you know, there are

some things that can beat smartness and foresight?  Awkwardness

and stupidity can.  The best swordsman in the world doesn't need

to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person

for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never

had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought

to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him; he does the thing

he ought not to do; and often it catches the expert out and ends

him on the spot.  Well, how could I, with all my gifts, make any

valuable preparation against a near-sighted, cross-eyed, pudding-headed

clown who would aim himself at the wrong tree and hit the right

one?  And that is what he did.  He went for the wrong tree, which

was, of course, the right one by mistake, and up he started.



Matters were serious now.  We remained still, and awaited developments.

The peasant toiled his difficult way up.  The king raised himself

up and stood; he made a leg ready, and when the comer's head

arrived in reach of it there was a dull thud, and down went the man

floundering to the ground.  There was a wild outbreak of anger

below, and the mob swarmed in from all around, and there we were

treed, and prisoners.  Another man started up; the bridging bough

was detected, and a volunteer started up the tree that furnished

the bridge.  The king ordered me to play Horatius and keep the

bridge.  For a while the enemy came thick and fast; but no matter,

the head man of each procession always got a buffet that dislodged

him as soon as he came in reach.  The king's spirits rose, his joy

was limitless.  He said that if nothing occurred to mar the prospect

we should have a beautiful night, for on this line of tactics we

could hold the tree against the whole country-side.



However, the mob soon came to that conclusion themselves; wherefore

they called off the assault and began to debate other plans.

They had no weapons, but there were plenty of stones, and stones

might answer.  We had no objections.  A stone might possibly

penetrate to us once in a while, but it wasn't very likely; we were

well protected by boughs and foliage, and were not visible from

any good aiming point.  If they would but waste half an hour in

stone-throwing, the dark would come to our help.  We were feeling

very well satisfied.  We could smile; almost laugh.



But we didn't; which was just as well, for we should have been

interrupted.  Before the stones had been raging through the leaves

and bouncing from the boughs fifteen minutes, we began to notice

a smell.  A couple of sniffs of it was enough of an explanation--

it was smoke!  Our game was up at last.  We recognized that.  When

smoke invites you, you have to come.  They raised their pile of

dry brush and damp weeds higher and higher, and when they saw

the thick cloud begin to roll up and smother the tree, they broke

out in a storm of joy-clamors.  I got enough breath to say:



"Proceed, my liege; after you is manners."



The king gasped:



"Follow me down, and then back thyself against one side of the

trunk, and leave me the other.  Then will we fight.  Let each pile

his dead according to his own fashion and taste."



Then he descended, barking and coughing, and I followed.  I struck

the ground an instant after him; we sprang to our appointed places,

and began to give and take with all our might.  The powwow and

racket were prodigious; it was a tempest of riot and confusion and

thick-falling blows.  Suddenly some horsemen tore into the midst

of the crowd, and a voice shouted:



"Hold--or ye are dead men!"



How good it sounded!  The owner of the voice bore all the marks of

a gentleman:  picturesque and costly raiment, the aspect of command,

a hard countenance, with complexion and features marred by dissipation.

The mob fell humbly back, like so many spaniels.  The gentleman

inspected us critically, then said sharply to the peasants:



"What are ye doing to these people?"



"They be madmen, worshipful sir, that have come wandering we know

not whence, and--"



"Ye know not whence?  Do ye pretend ye know them not?"



"Most honored sir, we speak but the truth.  They are strangers

and unknown to any in this region; and they be the most violent

and bloodthirsty madmen that ever--"



"Peace!  Ye know not what ye say.  They are not mad.  Who are ye?

And whence are ye?  Explain."



"We are but peaceful strangers, sir," I said, "and traveling upon

our own concerns.  We are from a far country, and unacquainted

here.  We have purposed no harm; and yet but for your brave

interference and protection these people would have killed us.

As you have divined, sir, we are not mad; neither are we violent

or bloodthirsty."



The gentleman turned to his retinue and said calmly:  "Lash me

these animals to their kennels!"



The mob vanished in an instant; and after them plunged the horsemen,

laying about them with their whips and pitilessly riding down such

as were witless enough to keep the road instead of taking to the

bush.  The shrieks and supplications presently died away in the

distance, and soon the horsemen began to straggle back.  Meantime

the gentleman had been questioning us more closely, but had dug

no particulars out of us.  We were lavish of recognition of the

service he was doing us, but we revealed nothing more than that we

were friendless strangers from a far country.  When the escort were

all returned, the gentleman said to one of his servants:



"Bring the led-horses and mount these people."



"Yes, my lord."



We were placed toward the rear, among the servants.  We traveled

pretty fast, and finally drew rein some time after dark at a

roadside inn some ten or twelve miles from the scene of our

troubles.  My lord went immediately to his room, after ordering

his supper, and we saw no more of him.  At dawn in the morning

we breakfasted and made ready to start.



My lord's chief attendant sauntered forward at that moment with

indolent grace, and said:



"Ye have said ye should continue upon this road, which is our

direction likewise; wherefore my lord, the earl Grip, hath given

commandment that ye retain the horses and ride, and that certain

of us ride with ye a twenty mile to a fair town that hight Cambenet,

whenso ye shall be out of peril."



We could do nothing less than express our thanks and accept the

offer.  We jogged along, six in the party, at a moderate and

comfortable gait, and in conversation learned that my lord Grip

was a very great personage in his own region, which lay a day's

journey beyond Cambenet.  We loitered to such a degree that it was

near the middle of the forenoon when we entered the market square

of the town.  We dismounted, and left our thanks once more for

my lord, and then approached a crowd assembled in the center of

the square, to see what might be the object of interest.  It was the

remnant of that old peregrinating band of slaves!  So they had

been dragging their chains about, all this weary time.  That poor

husband was gone, and also many others; and some few purchases

had been added to the gang.  The king was not interested, and

wanted to move along, but I was absorbed, and full of pity.  I could

not take my eyes away from these worn and wasted wrecks of humanity.

There they sat, grounded upon the ground, silent, uncomplaining,

with bowed heads, a pathetic sight.  And by hideous contrast, a

redundant orator was making a speech to another gathering not thirty

steps away, in fulsome laudation of "our glorious British liberties!"



I was boiling.  I had forgotten I was a plebeian, I was remembering

I was a man.  Cost what it might, I would mount that rostrum and--



Click! the king and I were handcuffed together!  Our companions,

those servants, had done it; my lord Grip stood looking on.  The

king burst out in a fury, and said:



"What meaneth this ill-mannered jest?"



My lord merely said to his head miscreant, coolly:



"Put up the slaves and sell them!"



_Slaves!_  The word had a new sound--and how unspeakably awful!  The

king lifted his manacles and brought them down with a deadly force;

but my lord was out of the way when they arrived.  A dozen of

the rascal's servants sprang forward, and in a moment we were

helpless, with our hands bound behind us.  We so loudly and so

earnestly proclaimed ourselves freemen, that we got the interested

attention of that liberty-mouthing orator and his patriotic crowd,

and they gathered about us and assumed a very determined attitude.

The orator said:



"If, indeed, ye are freemen, ye have nought to fear--the God-given

liberties of Britain are about ye for your shield and shelter!

(Applause.)  Ye shall soon see. Bring forth your proofs."



"What proofs?"



"Proof that ye are freemen."



Ah--I remembered!  I came to myself; I said nothing.  But the

king stormed out:



"Thou'rt insane, man.  It were better, and more in reason, that

this thief and scoundrel here prove that we are _not_ freemen."



You see, he knew his own laws just as other people so often know

the laws; by words, not by effects.  They take a _meaning_, and get

to be very vivid, when you come to apply them to yourself.



All hands shook their heads and looked disappointed; some turned

away, no longer interested.  The orator said--and this time in the

tones of business, not of sentiment:



"An ye do not know your country's laws, it were time ye learned

them.  Ye are strangers to us; ye will not deny that. Ye may be

freemen, we do not deny that; but also ye may be slaves.  The law

is clear:  it doth not require the claimant to prove ye are slaves,

it requireth you to prove ye are not."



I said:



"Dear sir, give us only time to send to Astolat; or give us only

time to send to the Valley of Holiness--"



"Peace, good man, these are extraordinary requests, and you may

not hope to have them granted.  It would cost much time, and would

unwarrantably inconvenience your master--"



"_Master_, idiot!" stormed the king.  "I have no master, I myself

am the m--"



"Silence, for God's sake!"



I got the words out in time to stop the king.  We were in trouble

enough already; it could not help us any to give these people

the notion that we were lunatics.



There is no use in stringing out the details.  The earl put us up

and sold us at auction.  This same infernal law had existed in

our own South in my own time, more than thirteen hundred years

later, and under it hundreds of freemen who could not prove that

they were freemen had been sold into lifelong slavery without

the circumstance making any particular impression upon me; but the

minute law and the auction block came into my personal experience,

a thing which had been merely improper before became suddenly

hellish.  Well, that's the way we are made.



Yes, we were sold at auction, like swine.  In a big town and an

active market we should have brought a good price; but this place

was utterly stagnant and so we sold at a figure which makes me

ashamed, every time I think of it.  The King of England brought

seven dollars, and his prime minister nine; whereas the king was

easily worth twelve dollars and I as easily worth fifteen.  But

that is the way things always go; if you force a sale on a dull

market, I don't care what the property is, you are going to make

a poor business of it, and you can make up your mind to it.  If

the earl had had wit enough to--



However, there is no occasion for my working my sympathies up

on his account.  Let him go, for the present; I took his number,

so to speak.



The slave-dealer bought us both, and hitched us onto that long

chain of his, and we constituted the rear of his procession.  We

took up our line of march and passed out of Cambenet at noon;

and it seemed to me unaccountably strange and odd that the King

of England and his chief minister, marching manacled and fettered

and yoked, in a slave convoy, could move by all manner of idle men

and women, and under windows where sat the sweet and the lovely,

and yet never attract a curious eye, never provoke a single remark.

Dear, dear, it only shows that there is nothing diviner about a king

than there is about a tramp, after all.  He is just a cheap and

hollow artificiality when you don't know he is a king.  But reveal

his quality, and dear me it takes your very breath away to look

at him.  I reckon we are all fools. Born so, no doubt.







CHAPTER XXXV



A PITIFUL INCIDENT



It's a world of surprises.  The king brooded; this was natural.

What would he brood about, should you say?  Why, about the prodigious

nature of his fall, of course--from the loftiest place in the world

to the lowest; from the most illustrious station in the world to

the obscurest; from the grandest vocation among men to the basest.

No, I take my oath that the thing that graveled him most, to start

with, was not this, but the price he had fetched!  He couldn't

seem to get over that seven dollars.  Well, it stunned me so, when

I first found it out, that I couldn't believe it; it didn't seem

natural.  But as soon as my mental sight cleared and I got a right

focus on it, I saw I was mistaken; it _was_ natural.  For this

reason:  a king is a mere artificiality, and so a king's feelings,

like the impulses of an automatic doll, are mere artificialities;

but as a man, he is a reality, and his feelings, as a man, are

real, not phantoms.  It shames the average man to be valued below

his own estimate of his worth, and the king certainly wasn't

anything more than an average man, if he was up that high.



Confound him, he wearied me with arguments to show that in anything

like a fair market he would have fetched twenty-five dollars,

sure--a thing which was plainly nonsense, and full or the baldest

conceit; I wasn't worth it myself.  But it was tender ground for

me to argue on.  In fact, I had to simply shirk argument and do

the diplomatic instead.  I had to throw conscience aside, and

brazenly concede that he ought to have brought twenty-five dollars;

whereas I was quite well aware that in all the ages, the world had

never seen a king that was worth half the money, and during the

next thirteen centuries wouldn't see one that was worth the fourth

of it.  Yes, he tired me.  If he began to talk about the crops;

or about the recent weather; or about the condition of politics;

or about dogs, or cats, or morals, or theology--no matter what--

I sighed, for I knew what was coming; he was going to get out of it

a palliation of that tiresome seven-dollar sale.  Wherever we

halted where there was a crowd, he would give me a look which

said plainly:  "if that thing could be tried over again now, with

this kind of folk, you would see a different result."  Well, when

he was first sold, it secretly tickled me to see him go for seven

dollars; but before he was done with his sweating and worrying

I wished he had fetched a hundred.  The thing never got a chance

to die, for every day, at one place or another, possible purchasers

looked us over, and, as often as any other way, their comment on

the king was something like this:



"Here's a two-dollar-and-a-half chump with a thirty-dollar style.

Pity but style was marketable."



At last this sort of remark produced an evil result.  Our owner

was a practical person and he perceived that this defect must be

mended if he hoped to find a purchaser for the king.  So he went

to work to take the style out of his sacred majesty.  I could have

given the man some valuable advice, but I didn't; you mustn't

volunteer advice to a slave-driver unless you want to damage

the cause you are arguing for.  I had found it a sufficiently

difficult job to reduce the king's style to a peasant's style,

even when he was a willing and anxious pupil; now then, to undertake

to reduce the king's style to a slave's style--and by force--go to!

it was a stately contract.  Never mind the details--it will save me

trouble to let you imagine them.  I will only remark that at the

end of a week there was plenty of evidence that lash and club

and fist had done their work well; the king's body was a sight

to see--and to weep over; but his spirit?--why, it wasn't even

phased.  Even that dull clod of a slave-driver was able to see

that there can be such a thing as a slave who will remain a man

till he dies; whose bones you can break, but whose manhood you

can't.  This man found that from his first effort down to his

latest, he couldn't ever come within reach of the king, but the

king was ready to plunge for him, and did it.  So he gave up

at last, and left the king in possession of his style unimpaired.

The fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was

a man; and when a man is a man, you can't knock it out of him.



We had a rough time for a month, tramping to and fro in the earth,

and suffering.  And what Englishman was the most interested in

the slavery question by that time?  His grace the king!  Yes; from

being the most indifferent, he was become the most interested.

He was become the bitterest hater of the institution I had ever

heard talk.  And so I ventured to ask once more a question which

I had asked years before and had gotten such a sharp answer that

I had not thought it prudent to meddle in the matter further.

Would he abolish slavery?



His answer was as sharp as before, but it was music this time;

I shouldn't ever wish to hear pleasanter, though the profanity

was not good, being awkwardly put together, and with the crash-word

almost in the middle instead of at the end, where, of course, it

ought to have been.



I was ready and willing to get free now; I hadn't wanted to get

free any sooner.  No, I cannot quite say that.  I had wanted to,

but I had not been willing to take desperate chances, and had

always dissuaded the king from them.  But now--ah, it was a new

atmosphere!  Liberty would be worth any cost that might be put

upon it now.  I set about a plan, and was straightway charmed

with it.  It would require time, yes, and patience, too, a great

deal of both.  One could invent quicker ways, and fully as sure

ones; but none that would be as picturesque as this; none that

could be made so dramatic.  And so I was not going to give this

one up.  It might delay us months, but no matter, I would carry

it out or break something.



Now and then we had an adventure.  One night we were overtaken

by a snow-storm while still a mile from the village we were making

for.  Almost instantly we were shut up as in a fog, the driving

snow was so thick.  You couldn't see a thing, and we were soon

lost.  The slave-driver lashed us desperately, for he saw ruin

before him, but his lashings only made matters worse, for they

drove us further from the road and from likelihood of succor.

So we had to stop at last and slump down in the snow where we

were.  The storm continued until toward midnight, then ceased.

By this time two of our feebler men and three of our women were

dead, and others past moving and threatened with death.  Our

master was nearly beside himself.  He stirred up the living, and

made us stand, jump, slap ourselves, to restore our circulation,

and he helped as well as he could with his whip.



Now came a diversion.  We heard shrieks and yells, and soon a

woman came running and crying; and seeing our group, she flung

herself into our midst and begged for protection.  A mob of people

came tearing after her, some with torches, and they said she was a

witch who had caused several cows to die by a strange disease,

and practiced her arts by help of a devil in the form of a black

cat.  This poor woman had been stoned until she hardly looked

human, she was so battered and bloody.  The mob wanted to burn her.



Well, now, what do you suppose our master did?  When we closed

around this poor creature to shelter her, he saw his chance.  He

said, burn her here, or they shouldn't have her at all.  Imagine

that!  They were willing.  They fastened her to a post; they

brought wood and piled it about her; they applied the torch while

she shrieked and pleaded and strained her two young daughters

to her breast; and our brute, with a heart solely for business,

lashed us into position about the stake and warmed us into life

and commercial value by the same fire which took away the innocent

life of that poor harmless mother.  That was the sort of master we

had.  I took _his_ number.  That snow-storm cost him nine of his

flock; and he was more brutal to us than ever, after that, for

many days together, he was so enraged over his loss.



We had adventures all along.  One day we ran into a procession.

And such a procession!  All the riffraff of the kingdom seemed

to be comprehended in it; and all drunk at that.  In the van was

a cart with a coffin in it, and on the coffin sat a comely young

girl of about eighteen suckling a baby, which she squeezed to her

breast in a passion of love every little while, and every little

while wiped from its face the tears which her eyes rained down

upon it; and always the foolish little thing smiled up at her,

happy and content, kneading her breast with its dimpled fat hand,

which she patted and fondled right over her breaking heart.



Men and women, boys and girls, trotted along beside or after

the cart, hooting, shouting profane and ribald remarks, singing

snatches of foul song, skipping, dancing--a very holiday of

hellions, a sickening sight.  We had struck a suburb of London,

outside the walls, and this was a sample of one sort of London

society.  Our master secured a good place for us near the gallows.

A priest was in attendance, and he helped the girl climb up, and

said comforting words to her, and made the under-sheriff provide

a stool for her.  Then he stood there by her on the gallows, and

for a moment looked down upon the mass of upturned faces at his

feet, then out over the solid pavement of heads that stretched away

on every side occupying the vacancies far and near, and then began

to tell the story of the case.  And there was pity in his voice--

how seldom a sound that was in that ignorant and savage land!

I remember every detail of what he said, except the words he said

it in; and so I change it into my own words:



"Law is intended to mete out justice.  Sometimes it fails. This

cannot be helped.  We can only grieve, and be resigned, and pray

for the soul of him who falls unfairly by the arm of the law, and

that his fellows may be few.  A law sends this poor young thing

to death--and it is right.  But another law had placed her where

she must commit her crime or starve with her child--and before God

that law is responsible for both her crime and her ignominious death!



"A little while ago this young thing, this child of eighteen years,

was as happy a wife and mother as any in England; and her lips

were blithe with song, which is the native speech of glad and

innocent hearts.  Her young husband was as happy as she; for he was

doing his whole duty, he worked early and late at his handicraft,

his bread was honest bread well and fairly earned, he was prospering,

he was furnishing shelter and sustenance to his family, he was

adding his mite to the wealth of the nation.  By consent of a

treacherous law, instant destruction fell upon this holy home and

swept it away!  That young husband was waylaid and impressed,

and sent to sea.  The wife knew nothing of it.  She sought him

everywhere, she moved the hardest hearts with the supplications

of her tears, the broken eloquence of her despair.  Weeks dragged

by, she watching, waiting, hoping, her mind going slowly to wreck

under the burden of her misery.  Little by little all her small

possessions went for food.  When she could no longer pay her rent,

they turned her out of doors.  She begged, while she had strength;

when she was starving at last, and her milk failing, she stole a

piece of linen cloth of the value of a fourth part of a cent,

thinking to sell it and save her child.  But she was seen by the

owner of the cloth.  She was put in jail and brought to trial.

The man testified to the facts.  A plea was made for her, and her

sorrowful story was told in her behalf.  She spoke, too, by

permission, and said she did steal the cloth, but that her mind

was so disordered of late by trouble that when she was overborne

with hunger all acts, criminal or other, swam meaningless through

her brain and she knew nothing rightly, except that she was so

hungry!  For a moment all were touched, and there was disposition

to deal mercifully with her, seeing that she was so young and

friendless, and her case so piteous, and the law that robbed her

of her support to blame as being the first and only cause of her

transgression; but the prosecuting officer replied that whereas

these things were all true, and most pitiful as well, still there

was much small theft in these days, and mistimed mercy here would

be a danger to property--oh, my God, is there no property in ruined

homes, and orphaned babes, and broken hearts that British law

holds precious!--and so he must require sentence.



"When the judge put on his black cap, the owner of the stolen

linen rose trembling up, his lip quivering, his face as gray as

ashes; and when the awful words came, he cried out, 'Oh, poor

child, poor child, I did not know it was death!' and fell as a

tree falls.  When they lifted him up his reason was gone; before

the sun was set, he had taken his own life.  A kindly man; a man

whose heart was right, at bottom; add his murder to this that

is to be now done here; and charge them both where they belong--

to the rulers and the bitter laws of Britain.  The time is come, my

child; let me pray over thee--not _for_ thee, dear abused poor heart

and innocent, but for them that be guilty of thy ruin and death,

who need it more."



After his prayer they put the noose around the young girl's neck,

and they had great trouble to adjust the knot under her ear,

because she was devouring the baby all the time, wildly kissing it,

and snatching it to her face and her breast, and drenching it

with tears, and half moaning, half shrieking all the while, and the

baby crowing, and laughing, and kicking its feet with delight over

what it took for romp and play.  Even the hangman couldn't stand it,

but turned away.  When all was ready the priest gently pulled and

tugged and forced the child out of the mother's arms, and stepped

quickly out of her reach; but she clasped her hands, and made a

wild spring toward him, with a shriek; but the rope--and the

under-sheriff--held her short.  Then she went on her knees and

stretched out her hands and cried:



"One more kiss--oh, my God, one more, one more,--it is the dying

that begs it!"



She got it; she almost smothered the little thing.  And when they

got it away again, she cried out:



"Oh, my child, my darling, it will die!  It has no home, it has

no father, no friend, no mother--"



"It has them all!" said that good priest.  "All these will I be

to it till I die."



You should have seen her face then!  Gratitude?  Lord, what do

you want with words to express that?  Words are only painted fire;

a look is the fire itself.  She gave that look, and carried it away

to the treasury of heaven, where all things that are divine belong.







CHAPTER XXXVI



AN ENCOUNTER IN THE DARK



London--to a slave--was a sufficiently interesting place.  It was

merely a great big village; and mainly mud and thatch.  The streets

were muddy, crooked, unpaved.  The populace was an ever flocking

and drifting swarm of rags, and splendors, of nodding plumes and

shining armor.  The king had a palace there; he saw the outside

of it.  It made him sigh; yes, and swear a little, in a poor

juvenile sixth century way.  We saw knights and grandees whom

we knew, but they didn't know us in our rags and dirt and raw

welts and bruises, and wouldn't have recognized us if we had hailed

them, nor stopped to answer, either, it being unlawful to speak

with slaves on a chain.  Sandy passed within ten yards of me on

a mule--hunting for me, I imagined.  But the thing which clean

broke my heart was something which happened in front of our old

barrack in a square, while we were enduring the spectacle of a man

being boiled to death in oil for counterfeiting pennies.  It was

the sight of a newsboy--and I couldn't get at him!  Still, I had

one comfort--here was proof that Clarence was still alive and

banging away.  I meant to be with him before long; the thought was

full of cheer.



I had one little glimpse of another thing, one day, which gave me

a great uplift.  It was a wire stretching from housetop to housetop.

Telegraph or telephone, sure.  I did very much wish I had a little

piece of it.  It was just what I needed, in order to carry out my

project of escape.  My idea was to get loose some night, along with

the king, then gag and bind our master, change clothes with him,

batter him into the aspect of a stranger, hitch him to the slave-chain,

assume possession of the property, march to Camelot, and--



But you get my idea; you see what a stunning dramatic surprise

I would wind up with at the palace.  It was all feasible, if

I could only get hold of a slender piece of iron which I could

shape into a lock-pick.  I could then undo the lumbering padlocks

with which our chains were fastened, whenever I might choose.

But I never had any luck; no such thing ever happened to fall

in my way.  However, my chance came at last.  A gentleman who

had come twice before to dicker for me, without result, or indeed

any approach to a result, came again.  I was far from expecting

ever to belong to him, for the price asked for me from the time

I was first enslaved was exorbitant, and always provoked either

anger or derision, yet my master stuck stubbornly to it--twenty-two

dollars.  He wouldn't bate a cent.  The king was greatly admired,

because of his grand physique, but his kingly style was against

him, and he wasn't salable; nobody wanted that kind of a slave.

I considered myself safe from parting from him because of my

extravagant price.  No, I was not expecting to ever belong to

this gentleman whom I have spoken of, but he had something which

I expected would belong to me eventually, if he would but visit

us often enough.  It was a steel thing with a long pin to it, with

which his long cloth outside garment was fastened together in

front.  There were three of them. He had disappointed me twice,

because he did not come quite close enough to me to make my project

entirely safe; but this time I succeeded; I captured the lower

clasp of the three, and when he missed it he thought he had lost

it on the way.



I had a chance to be glad about a minute, then straightway a chance

to be sad again.  For when the purchase was about to fail, as usual,

the master suddenly spoke up and said what would be worded thus--

in modern English:



"I'll tell you what I'll do.  I'm tired supporting these two for

no good.  Give me twenty-two dollars for this one, and I'll throw

the other one in."



The king couldn't get his breath, he was in such a fury.  He began

to choke and gag, and meantime the master and the gentleman moved

away discussing.



"An ye will keep the offer open--"



"'Tis open till the morrow at this hour."



"Then I will answer you at that time," said the gentleman, and

disappeared, the master following him.



I had a time of it to cool the king down, but I managed it.

I whispered in his ear, to this effect:



"Your grace _will_ go for nothing, but after another fashion.  And

so shall I.  To-night we shall both be free."



"Ah!  How is that?"



"With this thing which I have stolen, I will unlock these locks

and cast off these chains to-night.  When he comes about nine-thirty

to inspect us for the night, we will seize him, gag him, batter

him, and early in the morning we will march out of this town,

proprietors of this caravan of slaves."



That was as far as I went, but the king was charmed and satisfied.

That evening we waited patiently for our fellow-slaves to get

to sleep and signify it by the usual sign, for you must not take

many chances on those poor fellows if you can avoid it.  It is

best to keep your own secrets.  No doubt they fidgeted only about

as usual, but it didn't seem so to me.  It seemed to me that they

were going to be forever getting down to their regular snoring.

As the time dragged on I got nervously afraid we shouldn't have

enough of it left for our needs; so I made several premature

attempts, and merely delayed things by it; for I couldn't seem

to touch a padlock, there in the dark, without starting a rattle

out of it which interrupted somebody's sleep and made him turn

over and wake some more of the gang.



But finally I did get my last iron off, and was a free man once

more.  I took a good breath of relief, and reached for the king's

irons.  Too late! in comes the master, with a light in one hand

and his heavy walking-staff in the other.  I snuggled close among

the wallow of snorers, to conceal as nearly as possible that I was

naked of irons; and I kept a sharp lookout and prepared to spring

for my man the moment he should bend over me.



But he didn't approach.  He stopped, gazed absently toward our

dusky mass a minute, evidently thinking about something else;

then set down his light, moved musingly toward the door, and before

a body could imagine what he was going to do, he was out of the

door and had closed it behind him.



"Quick!" said the king.  "Fetch him back!"



Of course, it was the thing to do, and I was up and out in a

moment.  But, dear me, there were no lamps in those days, and

it was a dark night.  But I glimpsed a dim figure a few steps

away.  I darted for it, threw myself upon it, and then there was

a state of things and lively!  We fought and scuffled and struggled,

and drew a crowd in no time.  They took an immense interest in

the fight and encouraged us all they could, and, in fact, couldn't

have been pleasanter or more cordial if it had been their own

fight.  Then a tremendous row broke out behind us, and as much

as half of our audience left us, with a rush, to invest some

sympathy in that.  Lanterns began to swing in all directions;

it was the watch gathering from far and near.  Presently a halberd

fell across my back, as a reminder, and I knew what it meant.

I was in custody.  So was my adversary.  We were marched off toward

prison, one on each side of the watchman.  Here was disaster,

here was a fine scheme gone to sudden destruction!  I tried to

imagine what would happen when the master should discover that

it was I who had been fighting him; and what would happen if they

jailed us together in the general apartment for brawlers and petty

law-breakers, as was the custom; and what might--



Just then my antagonist turned his face around in my direction,

the freckled light from the watchman's tin lantern fell on it,

and, by George, he was the wrong man!







CHAPTER XXXVII



AN AWFUL PREDICAMENT



Sleep?  It was impossible.  It would naturally have been impossible

in that noisome cavern of a jail, with its mangy crowd of drunken,

quarrelsome, and song-singing rapscallions.  But the thing that

made sleep all the more a thing not to be dreamed of, was my

racking impatience to get out of this place and find out the whole

size of what might have happened yonder in the slave-quarters

in consequence of that intolerable miscarriage of mine.



It was a long night, but the morning got around at last.  I made

a full and frank explanation to the court.  I said I was a slave,

the property of the great Earl Grip, who had arrived just after

dark at the Tabard inn in the village on the other side of the

water, and had stopped there over night, by compulsion, he being

taken deadly sick with a strange and sudden disorder.  I had been

ordered to cross to the city in all haste and bring the best

physician; I was doing my best; naturally I was running with all

my might; the night was dark, I ran against this common person

here, who seized me by the throat and began to pummel me, although

I told him my errand, and implored him, for the sake of the great

earl my master's mortal peril--



The common person interrupted and said it was a lie; and was going

to explain how I rushed upon him and attacked him without a word--



"Silence, sirrah!" from the court.  "Take him hence and give him

a few stripes whereby to teach him how to treat the servant of

a nobleman after a different fashion another time.  Go!"



Then the court begged my pardon, and hoped I would not fail

to tell his lordship it was in no wise the court's fault that this

high-handed thing had happened.  I said I would make it all right,

and so took my leave.  Took it just in time, too; he was starting

to ask me why I didn't fetch out these facts the moment I was

arrested.  I said I would if I had thought of it--which was true--

but that I was so battered by that man that all my wit was knocked

out of me--and so forth and so on, and got myself away, still

mumbling.  I didn't wait for breakfast.  No grass grew under my

feet.  I was soon at the slave quarters.  Empty--everybody gone!

That is, everybody except one body--the slave-master's.  It lay

there all battered to pulp; and all about were the evidences of

a terrific fight.  There was a rude board coffin on a cart at

the door, and workmen, assisted by the police, were thinning a

road through the gaping crowd in order that they might bring it in.



I picked out a man humble enough in life to condescend to talk

with one so shabby as I, and got his account of the matter.



"There were sixteen slaves here.  They rose against their master

in the night, and thou seest how it ended."



"Yes.  How did it begin?"



"There was no witness but the slaves.  They said the slave that

was most valuable got free of his bonds and escaped in some strange

way--by magic arts 'twas thought, by reason that he had no key,

and the locks were neither broke nor in any wise injured.  When

the master discovered his loss, he was mad with despair, and threw

himself upon his people with his heavy stick, who resisted and

brake his back and in other and divers ways did give him hurts

that brought him swiftly to his end."



"This is dreadful.  It will go hard with the slaves, no doubt,

upon the trial."



"Marry, the trial is over."



"Over!"



"Would they be a week, think you--and the matter so simple?  They

were not the half of a quarter of an hour at it."



"Why, I don't see how they could determine which were the guilty

ones in so short a time."



"_Which_ ones?  Indeed, they considered not particulars like to that.

They condemned them in a body.  Wit ye not the law?--which men

say the Romans left behind them here when they went--that if one

slave killeth his master all the slaves of that man must die for it."



"True.  I had forgotten.  And when will these die?"



"Belike within a four and twenty hours; albeit some say they will

wait a pair of days more, if peradventure they may find the missing

one meantime."



The missing one!  It made me feel uncomfortable.



"Is it likely they will find him?"



"Before the day is spent--yes.  They seek him everywhere.  They

stand at the gates of the town, with certain of the slaves who

will discover him to them if he cometh, and none can pass out

but he will be first examined."



"Might one see the place where the rest are confined?"



"The outside of it--yes.  The inside of it--but ye will not want

to see that."



I took the address of that prison for future reference and then

sauntered off.  At the first second-hand clothing shop I came to,

up a back street, I got a rough rig suitable for a common seaman

who might be going on a cold voyage, and bound up my face with

a liberal bandage, saying I had a toothache.  This concealed my

worst bruises.  It was a transformation.  I no longer resembled my

former self.  Then I struck out for that wire, found it and

followed it to its den.  It was a little room over a butcher's

shop--which meant that business wasn't very brisk in the telegraphic

line.  The young chap in charge was drowsing at his table.  I locked

the door and put the vast key in my bosom.  This alarmed the young

fellow, and he was going to make a noise; but I said:



"Save your wind; if you open your mouth you are dead, sure.  Tackle

your instrument.  Lively, now!  Call Camelot."



"This doth amaze me!  How should such as you know aught of such

matters as--"



"Call Camelot!  I am a desperate man.  Call Camelot, or get away

from the instrument and I will do it myself."



"What--you?"



"Yes--certainly.  Stop gabbling.  Call the palace."



He made the call.



"Now, then, call Clarence."



"Clarence _who_?"



"Never mind Clarence who.  Say you want Clarence; you'll get

an answer."



He did so.  We waited five nerve-straining minutes--ten minutes--

how long it did seem!--and then came a click that was as familiar

to me as a human voice; for Clarence had been my own pupil.



"Now, my lad, vacate!  They would have known _my_ touch, maybe,

and so your call was surest; but I'm all right now."



He vacated the place and cocked his ear to listen--but it didn't

win.  I used a cipher.  I didn't waste any time in sociabilities

with Clarence, but squared away for business, straight-off--thus:



"The king is here and in danger.  We were captured and brought

here as slaves.  We should not be able to prove our identity--

and the fact is, I am not in a position to try.  Send a telegram

for the palace here which will carry conviction with it."



His answer came straight back:



"They don't know anything about the telegraph; they haven't had

any experience yet, the line to London is so new.  Better not

venture that.  They might hang you.  Think up something else."



Might hang us!  Little he knew how closely he was crowding the

facts.  I couldn't think up anything for the moment.  Then an idea

struck me, and I started it along:



"Send five hundred picked knights with Launcelot in the lead; and

send them on the jump.  Let them enter by the southwest gate, and

look out for the man with a white cloth around his right arm."



The answer was prompt:



"They shall start in half an hour."



"All right, Clarence; now tell this lad here that I'm a friend

of yours and a dead-head; and that he must be discreet and say

nothing about this visit of mine."



The instrument began to talk to the youth and I hurried away.

I fell to ciphering.  In half an hour it would be nine o'clock.

Knights and horses in heavy armor couldn't travel very fast.

These would make the best time they could, and now that the ground

was in good condition, and no snow or mud, they would probably

make a seven-mile gait; they would have to change horses a couple

of times; they would arrive about six, or a little after; it would

still be plenty light enough; they would see the white cloth which

I should tie around my right arm, and I would take command.  We

would surround that prison and have the king out in no time.

It would be showy and picturesque enough, all things considered,

though I would have preferred noonday, on account of the more

theatrical aspect the thing would have.



Now, then, in order to increase the strings to my bow, I thought

I would look up some of those people whom I had formerly recognized,

and make myself known.  That would help us out of our scrape,

without the knights.  But I must proceed cautiously, for it was

a risky business.  I must get into sumptuous raiment, and it

wouldn't do to run and jump into it.  No, I must work up to it

by degrees, buying suit after suit of clothes, in shops wide apart,

and getting a little finer article with each change, until I should

finally reach silk and velvet, and be ready for my project.  So

I started.



But the scheme fell through like scat!  The first corner I turned,

I came plump upon one of our slaves, snooping around with a watchman.

I coughed at the moment, and he gave me a sudden look that bit right

into my marrow.  I judge he thought he had heard that cough before.

I turned immediately into a shop and worked along down the counter,

pricing things and watching out of the corner of my eye.  Those

people had stopped, and were talking together and looking in at

the door.  I made up my mind to get out the back way, if there

was a back way, and I asked the shopwoman if I could step out

there and look for the escaped slave, who was believed to be in

hiding back there somewhere, and said I was an officer in disguise,

and my pard was yonder at the door with one of the murderers in

charge, and would she be good enough to step there and tell him

he needn't wait, but had better go at once to the further end of

the back alley and be ready to head him off when I rousted him out.



She was blazing with eagerness to see one of those already celebrated

murderers, and she started on the errand at once.  I slipped out

the back way, locked the door behind me, put the key in my pocket

and started off, chuckling to myself and comfortable.



Well, I had gone and spoiled it again, made another mistake.

A double one, in fact.  There were plenty of ways to get rid of

that officer by some simple and plausible device, but no, I must

pick out a picturesque one; it is the crying defect of my character.

And then, I had ordered my procedure upon what the officer, being

human, would _naturally_ do; whereas when you are least expecting it,

a man will now and then go and do the very thing which it's _not_

natural for him to do.  The natural thing for the officer to do,

in this case, was to follow straight on my heels; he would find

a stout oaken door, securely locked, between him and me; before

he could break it down, I should be far away and engaged in slipping

into a succession of baffling disguises which would soon get me

into a sort of raiment which was a surer protection from meddling

law-dogs in Britain than any amount of mere innocence and purity

of character.  But instead of doing the natural thing, the officer

took me at my word, and followed my instructions.  And so, as I

came trotting out of that cul de sac, full of satisfaction with my

own cleverness, he turned the corner and I walked right into his

handcuffs.  If I had known it was a cul de sac--however, there

isn't any excusing a blunder like that, let it go.  Charge it up

to profit and loss.



Of course, I was indignant, and swore I had just come ashore from

a long voyage, and all that sort of thing--just to see, you know,

if it would deceive that slave.  But it didn't.  He knew me.  Then

I reproached him for betraying me.  He was more surprised than

hurt.  He stretched his eyes wide, and said:



"What, wouldst have me let thee, of all men, escape and not hang

with us, when thou'rt the very _cause_ of our hanging?  Go to!"



"Go to" was their way of saying "I should smile!" or "I like that!"

Queer talkers, those people.



Well, there was a sort of bastard justice in his view of the case,

and so I dropped the matter.  When you can't cure a disaster by

argument, what is the use to argue?  It isn't my way.  So I only said:



"You're not going to be hanged.  None of us are."



Both men laughed, and the slave said:



"Ye have not ranked as a fool--before.  You might better keep

your reputation, seeing the strain would not be for long."



"It will stand it, I reckon.  Before to-morrow we shall be out

of prison, and free to go where we will, besides."



The witty officer lifted at his left ear with his thumb, made

a rasping noise in his throat, and said:



"Out of prison--yes--ye say true.  And free likewise to go where

ye will, so ye wander not out of his grace the Devil's sultry realm."



I kept my temper, and said, indifferently:



"Now I suppose you really think we are going to hang within

a day or two."



"I thought it not many minutes ago, for so the thing was decided

and proclaimed."



"Ah, then you've changed your mind, is that it?"



"Even that.  I only _thought_, then; I _know_, now."



I felt sarcastical, so I said:



"Oh, sapient servant of the law, condescend to tell us, then,

what you _know_."



"That ye will all be hanged _to-day_, at mid-afternoon!  Oho! that

shot hit home!  Lean upon me."



The fact is I did need to lean upon somebody.  My knights couldn't

arrive in time.  They would be as much as three hours too late.

Nothing in the world could save the King of England; nor me, which

was more important.  More important, not merely to me, but to

the nation--the only nation on earth standing ready to blossom

into civilization.  I was sick.  I said no more, there wasn't

anything to say.  I knew what the man meant; that if the missing

slave was found, the postponement would be revoked, the execution

take place to-day.  Well, the missing slave was found.







CHAPTER XXXVIII



SIR LAUNCELOT AND KNIGHTS TO THE RESCUE



Nearing four in the afternoon.  The scene was just outside the

walls of London.  A cool, comfortable, superb day, with a brilliant

sun; the kind of day to make one want to live, not die.  The

multitude was prodigious and far-reaching; and yet we fifteen

poor devils hadn't a friend in it.  There was something painful

in that thought, look at it how you might.  There we sat, on our

tall scaffold, the butt of the hate and mockery of all those

enemies.  We were being made a holiday spectacle.  They had built

a sort of grand stand for the nobility and gentry, and these were

there in full force, with their ladies.  We recognized a good

many of them.



The crowd got a brief and unexpected dash of diversion out of

the king.  The moment we were freed of our bonds he sprang up,

in his fantastic rags, with face bruised out of all recognition, and

proclaimed himself Arthur, King of Britain, and denounced the

awful penalties of treason upon every soul there present if hair

of his sacred head were touched.  It startled and surprised him

to hear them break into a vast roar of laughter.  It wounded his

dignity, and he locked himself up in silence.  Then, although

the crowd begged him to go on, and tried to provoke him to it

by catcalls, jeers, and shouts of



"Let him speak!  The king!  The king! his humble subjects hunger

and thirst for words of wisdom out of the mouth of their master

his Serene and Sacred Raggedness!"



But it went for nothing.  He put on all his majesty and sat under

this rain of contempt and insult unmoved.  He certainly was great

in his way.  Absently, I had taken off my white bandage and wound

it about my right arm.  When the crowd noticed this, they began

upon me.  They said:



"Doubtless this sailor-man is his minister--observe his costly

badge of office!"



I let them go on until they got tired, and then I said:



"Yes, I am his minister, The Boss; and to-morrow you will hear

that from Camelot which--"



I got no further.  They drowned me out with joyous derision.  But

presently there was silence; for the sheriffs of London, in their

official robes, with their subordinates, began to make a stir which

indicated that business was about to begin.  In the hush which

followed, our crime was recited, the death warrant read, then

everybody uncovered while a priest uttered a prayer.



Then a slave was blindfolded; the hangman unslung his rope.  There

lay the smooth road below us, we upon one side of it, the banked

multitude wailing its other side--a good clear road, and kept free

by the police--how good it would be to see my five hundred horsemen

come tearing down it!  But no, it was out of the possibilities.

I followed its receding thread out into the distance--not a horseman

on it, or sign of one.



There was a jerk, and the slave hung dangling; dangling and hideously

squirming, for his limbs were not tied.



A second rope was unslung, in a moment another slave was dangling.



In a minute a third slave was struggling in the air.  It was

dreadful.  I turned away my head a moment, and when I turned back

I missed the king!  They were blindfolding him!  I was paralyzed;

I couldn't move, I was choking, my tongue was petrified.  They

finished blindfolding him, they led him under the rope.  I couldn't

shake off that clinging impotence.  But when I saw them put the

noose around his neck, then everything let go in me and I made

a spring to the rescue--and as I made it I shot one more glance

abroad--by George! here they came, a-tilting!--five hundred mailed

and belted knights on bicycles!



The grandest sight that ever was seen.  Lord, how the plumes

streamed, how the sun flamed and flashed from the endless procession

of webby wheels!



I waved my right arm as Launcelot swept in--he recognized my rag--

I tore away noose and bandage, and shouted:



"On your knees, every rascal of you, and salute the king!  Who

fails shall sup in hell to-night!"



I always use that high style when I'm climaxing an effect.  Well,

it was noble to see Launcelot and the boys swarm up onto that

scaffold and heave sheriffs and such overboard.  And it was fine

to see that astonished multitude go down on their knees and beg

their lives of the king they had just been deriding and insulting.

And as he stood apart there, receiving this homage in rags,

I thought to myself, well, really there is something peculiarly

grand about the gait and bearing of a king, after all.



I was immensely satisfied.  Take the whole situation all around,

it was one of the gaudiest effects I ever instigated.



And presently up comes Clarence, his own self! and winks, and

says, very modernly:



"Good deal of a surprise, wasn't it?  I knew you'd like it.  I've

had the boys practicing this long time, privately; and just hungry

for a chance to show off."







CHAPTER XXXIX



THE YANKEE'S FIGHT WITH THE KNIGHTS



Home again, at Camelot.  A morning or two later I found the paper,

damp from the press, by my plate at the breakfast table.  I turned

to the advertising columns, knowing I should find something of

personal interest to me there.  It was this:



             DE PAR LE ROI.



   Know that the great lord and illus-

   trious Kni8ht, SIR SAGRAMOR LE

   DESIROUS naving condescended to

   meet the King's Minister, Hank Mor-

    gan, the which is surnamed The Boss,

   for satisfgction of offence anciently given,

   these wilL engage in the lists by

   Camelot about the fourth hour of the

   morning of the sixteenth day of this

   next succeeding month. The battle

   will be a l outrance, sith the said offence

   was of a deadly sort, admitting of no

   comPosition.



             DE PAR LE ROI





Clarence's editorial reference to this affair was to this effect:



   It will be observed, by a gl7nce at our

   advertising columns, that the commu-

   nity is to be favored with a treat of un-

   usual interest in the tournament line.

   The n ames of the artists are warrant of

   good enterTemment. The box-office

   will be open at noon of the 13th; ad-

   mission 3 cents, reserved seatsh 5; pro-

   ceeds to go to the hospital fund  The

   royal pair and all the Court will be pres-

   ent. With these exceptions, and the

   press and the clergy, the free list is strict-

   ly susPended. Parties are hereby warn-

   ed against buying tickets of speculators;

   they will not be good at the door.

   Everybody knows and likes The Boss,

   everybody knows and likes Sir Sag.;

   come, let us give the lads a good send-

   off. ReMember, the proceeds go to a

   great and free charity, and one whose

   broad begevolence stretches out its help-

   ing hand, warm with the blood of a lov-

   ing heart, to all that suffer, regardless of

   race, creed, condition or color--the

   only charity yet established in the earth

   which has no politico-religious stop-

   cock on its compassion, but says Here

   flows the stream, let ALL come and

   drink! Turn out, all hands! fetch along

   your dou3hnuts and your gum-drops

   and have a good time. Pie for sale on

   the grounds, and rocks to crack it with;

   and ciRcus-lemonade--three drops of

   lime juice to a barrel of water.

   N.B. This is the first tournament

   under the new law, whidh allow each

   combatant to use any weapon he may pre-

   fer. You may want to make a note of that.



Up to the day set, there was no talk in all Britain of anything

but this combat.  All other topics sank into insignificance and

passed out of men's thoughts and interest.  It was not because

a tournament was a great matter, it was not because Sir Sagramor

had found the Holy Grail, for he had not, but had failed; it was

not because the second (official) personage in the kingdom was

one of the duellists; no, all these features were commonplace.

Yet there was abundant reason for the extraordinary interest which

this coming fight was creating.  It was born of the fact that all

the nation knew that this was not to be a duel between mere men,

so to speak, but a duel between two mighty magicians; a duel not

of muscle but of mind, not of human skill but of superhuman art

and craft; a final struggle for supremacy between the two master

enchanters of the age.  It was realized that the most prodigious

achievements of the most renowned knights could not be worthy

of comparison with a spectacle like this; they could be but child's

play, contrasted with this mysterious and awful battle of the gods.

Yes, all the world knew it was going to be in reality a duel

between Merlin and me, a measuring of his magic powers against

mine.  It was known that Merlin had been busy whole days and nights

together, imbuing Sir Sagramor's arms and armor with supernal

powers of offense and defense, and that he had procured for him

from the spirits of the air a fleecy veil which would render the

wearer invisible to his antagonist while still visible to other

men.  Against Sir Sagramor, so weaponed and protected, a thousand

knights could accomplish nothing; against him no known enchantments

could prevail.  These facts were sure; regarding them there was

no doubt, no reason for doubt.  There was but one question:  might

there be still other enchantments, _unknown_ to Merlin, which could

render Sir Sagramor's veil transparent to me, and make his enchanted

mail vulnerable to my weapons?  This was the one thing to be

decided in the lists.  Until then the world must remain in suspense.



So the world thought there was a vast matter at stake here, and

the world was right, but it was not the one they had in their

minds.  No, a far vaster one was upon the cast of this die:

_the life of knight-errantry_.  I was a champion, it was true, but

not the champion of the frivolous black arts, I was the champion

of hard unsentimental common-sense and reason.  I was entering

the lists to either destroy knight-errantry or be its victim.



Vast as the show-grounds were, there were no vacant spaces in them

outside of the lists, at ten o'clock on the morning of the 16th.

The mammoth grand-stand was clothed in flags, streamers, and rich

tapestries, and packed with several acres of small-fry tributary

kings, their suites, and the British aristocracy; with our own

royal gang in the chief place, and each and every individual

a flashing prism of gaudy silks and velvets--well, I never saw

anything to begin with it but a fight between an Upper Mississippi

sunset and the aurora borealis.  The huge camp of beflagged and

gay-colored tents at one end of the lists, with a stiff-standing

sentinel at every door and a shining shield hanging by him for

challenge, was another fine sight.  You see, every knight was

there who had any ambition or any caste feeling; for my feeling

toward their order was not much of a secret, and so here was their

chance.  If I won my fight with Sir Sagramor, others would have

the right to call me out as long as I might be willing to respond.



Down at our end there were but two tents; one for me, and another

for my servants.  At the appointed hour the king made a sign, and

the heralds, in their tabards, appeared and made proclamation,

naming the combatants and stating the cause of quarrel.  There

was a pause, then a ringing bugle-blast, which was the signal for

us to come forth.  All the multitude caught their breath, and

an eager curiosity flashed into every face.



Out from his tent rode great Sir Sagramor, an imposing tower

of iron, stately and rigid, his huge spear standing upright in its

socket and grasped in his strong hand, his grand horse's face and

breast cased in steel, his body clothed in rich trappings that

almost dragged the ground--oh, a most noble picture.  A great

shout went up, of welcome and admiration.



And then out I came.  But I didn't get any shout.  There was

a wondering and eloquent silence for a moment, then a great wave

of laughter began to sweep along that human sea, but a warning

bugle-blast cut its career short.  I was in the simplest and

comfortablest of gymnast costumes--flesh-colored tights from neck

to heel, with blue silk puffings about my loins, and bareheaded.

My horse was not above medium size, but he was alert, slender-limbed,

muscled with watchsprings, and just a greyhound to go.  He was

a beauty, glossy as silk, and naked as he was when he was born,

except for bridle and ranger-saddle.



The iron tower and the gorgeous bedquilt came cumbrously but

gracefully pirouetting down the lists, and we tripped lightly up

to meet them.  We halted; the tower saluted, I responded; then

we wheeled and rode side by side to the grand-stand and faced

our king and queen, to whom we made obeisance.  The queen exclaimed:



"Alack, Sir Boss, wilt fight naked, and without lance or sword or--"



But the king checked her and made her understand, with a polite

phrase or two, that this was none of her business.  The bugles

rang again; and we separated and rode to the ends of the lists,

and took position.  Now old Merlin stepped into view and cast

a dainty web of gossamer threads over Sir Sagramor which turned

him into Hamlet's ghost; the king made a sign, the bugles blew,

Sir Sagramor laid his great lance in rest, and the next moment here

he came thundering down the course with his veil flying out behind,

and I went whistling through the air like an arrow to meet him--

cocking my ear the while, as if noting the invisible knight's

position and progress by hearing, not sight.  A chorus of encouraging

shouts burst out for him, and one brave voice flung out a heartening

word for me--said:



"Go it, slim Jim!"



It was an even bet that Clarence had procured that favor for me--

and furnished the language, too.  When that formidable lance-point

was within a yard and a half of my breast I twitched my horse aside

without an effort, and the big knight swept by, scoring a blank.

I got plenty of applause that time.  We turned, braced up, and

down we came again.  Another blank for the knight, a roar of

applause for me.  This same thing was repeated once more; and

it fetched such a whirlwind of applause that Sir Sagramor lost his

temper, and at once changed his tactics and set himself the task

of chasing me down.  Why, he hadn't any show in the world at that;

it was a game of tag, with all the advantage on my side; I whirled

out of his path with ease whenever I chose, and once I slapped him

on the back as I went to the rear.  Finally I took the chase into

my own hands; and after that, turn, or twist, or do what he would,

he was never able to get behind me again; he found himself always

in front at the end of his maneuver.  So he gave up that business

and retired to his end of the lists.  His temper was clear gone now,

and he forgot himself and flung an insult at me which disposed

of mine.  I slipped my lasso from the horn of my saddle, and

grasped the coil in my right hand.  This time you should have seen

him come!--it was a business trip, sure; by his gait there was

blood in his eye.  I was sitting my horse at ease, and swinging

the great loop of my lasso in wide circles about my head; the

moment he was under way, I started for him; when the space between

us had narrowed to forty feet, I sent the snaky spirals of the rope

a-cleaving through the air, then darted aside and faced about and

brought my trained animal to a halt with all his feet braced under

him for a surge.  The next moment the rope sprang taut and yanked

Sir Sagramor out of the saddle!  Great Scott, but there was

a sensation!



Unquestionably, the popular thing in this world is novelty.  These

people had never seen anything of that cowboy business before,

and it carried them clear off their feet with delight.  From all

around and everywhere, the shout went up:



"Encore! encore!"



I wondered where they got the word, but there was no time to cipher

on philological matters, because the whole knight-errantry hive

was just humming now, and my prospect for trade couldn't have

been better.  The moment my lasso was released and Sir Sagramor

had been assisted to his tent, I hauled in the slack, took my

station and began to swing my loop around my head again.  I was

sure to have use for it as soon as they could elect a successor

for Sir Sagramor, and that couldn't take long where there were

so many hungry candidates.  Indeed, they elected one straight off--

Sir Hervis de Revel.



_Bzz_!  Here he came, like a house afire; I dodged:  he passed like

a flash, with my horse-hair coils settling around his neck;

a second or so later, _fst_! his saddle was empty.



I got another encore; and another, and another, and still another.

When I had snaked five men out, things began to look serious to

the ironclads, and they stopped and consulted together.  As a

result, they decided that it was time to waive etiquette and send

their greatest and best against me.  To the astonishment of that

little world, I lassoed Sir Lamorak de Galis, and after him

Sir Galahad.  So you see there was simply nothing to be done now,

but play their right bower--bring out the superbest of the superb,

the mightiest of the mighty, the great Sir Launcelot himself!



A proud moment for me?  I should think so.  Yonder was Arthur,

King of Britain; yonder was Guenever; yes, and whole tribes of

little provincial kings and kinglets; and in the tented camp yonder,

renowned knights from many lands; and likewise the selectest body

known to chivalry, the Knights of the Table Round, the most

illustrious in Christendom; and biggest fact of all, the very sun

of their shining system was yonder couching his lance, the focal

point of forty thousand adoring eyes; and all by myself, here was

I laying for him.  Across my mind flitted the dear image of a

certain hello-girl of West Hartford, and I wished she could see

me now.  In that moment, down came the Invincible, with the rush

of a whirlwind--the courtly world rose to its feet and bent forward--

the fateful coils went circling through the air, and before you

could wink I was towing Sir Launcelot across the field on his

back, and kissing my hand to the storm of waving kerchiefs and

the thunder-crash of applause that greeted me!



Said I to myself, as I coiled my lariat and hung it on my saddle-horn,

and sat there drunk with glory, "The victory is perfect--no other

will venture against me--knight-errantry is dead."  Now imagine my

astonishment--and everybody else's, too--to hear the peculiar

bugle-call which announces that another competitor is about to

enter the lists!  There was a mystery here; I couldn't account for

this thing.  Next, I noticed Merlin gliding away from me; and then

I noticed that my lasso was gone!  The old sleight-of-hand expert

had stolen it, sure, and slipped it under his robe.



The bugle blew again.  I looked, and down came Sagramor riding

again, with his dust brushed off and his veil nicely re-arranged.

I trotted up to meet him, and pretended to find him by the sound

of his horse's hoofs.  He said:



"Thou'rt quick of ear, but it will not save thee from this!" and

he touched the hilt of his great sword.  "An ye are not able to see

it, because of the influence of the veil, know that it is no cumbrous

lance, but a sword--and I ween ye will not be able to avoid it."



His visor was up; there was death in his smile.  I should never

be able to dodge his sword, that was plain.  Somebody was going

to die this time.  If he got the drop on me, I could name the

corpse.  We rode forward together, and saluted the royalties.

This time the king was disturbed.  He said:



"Where is thy strange weapon?"



"It is stolen, sire."



"Hast another at hand?"



"No, sire, I brought only the one."



Then Merlin mixed in:



"He brought but the one because there was but the one to bring.

There exists none other but that one.  It belongeth to the king

of the Demons of the Sea.  This man is a pretender, and ignorant,

else he had known that that weapon can be used in but eight bouts

only, and then it vanisheth away to its home under the sea."



"Then is he weaponless," said the king.  "Sir Sagramore, ye will

grant him leave to borrow."



"And I will lend!" said Sir Launcelot, limping up.  "He is as

brave a knight of his hands as any that be on live, and he shall

have mine."



He put his hand on his sword to draw it, but Sir Sagramor said:



"Stay, it may not be.  He shall fight with his own weapons; it

was his privilege to choose them and bring them.  If he has erred,

on his head be it."



"Knight!" said the king.  "Thou'rt overwrought with passion; it

disorders thy mind.  Wouldst kill a naked man?"



"An he do it, he shall answer it to me," said Sir Launcelot.



"I will answer it to any he that desireth!" retorted Sir Sagramor hotly.



Merlin broke in, rubbing his hands and smiling his lowdownest

smile of malicious gratification:



"'Tis well said, right well said!  And 'tis enough of parleying,

let my lord the king deliver the battle signal."



The king had to yield.  The bugle made proclamation, and we turned

apart and rode to our stations.  There we stood, a hundred yards

apart, facing each other, rigid and motionless, like horsed statues.

And so we remained, in a soundless hush, as much as a full minute,

everybody gazing, nobody stirring.  It seemed as if the king could

not take heart to give the signal.  But at last he lifted his hand,

the clear note of the bugle followed, Sir Sagramor's long blade

described a flashing curve in the air, and it was superb to see him

come.  I sat still.  On he came.  I did not move.  People got so

excited that they shouted to me:



"Fly, fly!  Save thyself!  This is murther!"



I never budged so much as an inch till that thundering apparition

had got within fifteen paces of me; then I snatched a dragoon

revolver out of my holster, there was a flash and a roar, and

the revolver was back in the holster before anybody could tell

what had happened.



Here was a riderless horse plunging by, and yonder lay Sir Sagramor,

stone dead.



The people that ran to him were stricken dumb to find that the life

was actually gone out of the man and no reason for it visible,

no hurt upon his body, nothing like a wound.  There was a hole

through the breast of his chain-mail, but they attached no importance

to a little thing like that; and as a bullet wound there produces

but little blood, none came in sight because of the clothing and

swaddlings under the armor.  The body was dragged over to let

the king and the swells look down upon it.  They were stupefied

with astonishment naturally.  I was requested to come and explain

the miracle.  But I remained in my tracks, like a statue, and said:



"If it is a command, I will come, but my lord the king knows that

I am where the laws of combat require me to remain while any desire

to come against me."



I waited.  Nobody challenged.  Then I said:



"If there are any who doubt that this field is well and fairly won,

I do not wait for them to challenge me, I challenge them."



"It is a gallant offer," said the king, "and well beseems you.

Whom will you name first?"



"I name none, I challenge all!  Here I stand, and dare the chivalry

of England to come against me--not by individuals, but in mass!"



"What!" shouted a score of knights.



"You have heard the challenge.  Take it, or I proclaim you recreant

knights and vanquished, every one!"



It was a "bluff" you know.  At such a time it is sound judgment

to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what

it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to "call,"

and you rake in the chips.  But just this once--well, things looked

squally!  In just no time, five hundred knights were scrambling

into their saddles, and before you could wink a widely scattering

drove were under way and clattering down upon me.  I snatched

both revolvers from the holsters and began to measure distances

and calculate chances.



Bang!  One saddle empty.  Bang! another one.  Bang--bang, and

I bagged two.  Well, it was nip and tuck with us, and I knew it.

If I spent the eleventh shot without convincing these people,

the twelfth man would kill me, sure.  And so I never did feel

so happy as I did when my ninth downed its man and I detected

the wavering in the crowd which is premonitory of panic.  An instant

lost now could knock out my last chance.  But I didn't lose it.

I raised both revolvers and pointed them--the halted host stood

their ground just about one good square moment, then broke and fled.



The day was mine.  Knight-errantry was a doomed institution.  The

march of civilization was begun.  How did I feel?  Ah, you never

could imagine it.



And Brer Merlin?  His stock was flat again.  Somehow, every time

the magic of fol-de-rol tried conclusions with the magic of science,

the magic of fol-de-rol got left.







CHAPTER XL



THREE YEARS LATER



When I broke the back of knight-errantry that time, I no longer

felt obliged to work in secret.  So, the very next day I exposed

my hidden schools, my mines, and my vast system of clandestine

factories and workshops to an astonished world.  That is to say,

I exposed the nineteenth century to the inspection of the sixth.



Well, it is always a good plan to follow up an advantage promptly.

The knights were temporarily down, but if I would keep them so

I must just simply paralyze them--nothing short of that would

answer.  You see, I was "bluffing" that last time in the field;

it would be natural for them to work around to that conclusion,

if I gave them a chance.  So I must not give them time; and I didn't.



I renewed my challenge, engraved it on brass, posted it up where

any priest could read it to them, and also kept it standing in

the advertising columns of the paper.



I not only renewed it, but added to its proportions.  I said,

name the day, and I would take fifty assistants and stand up

_against the massed chivalry of the whole earth and destroy it_.



I was not bluffing this time.  I meant what I said; I could do

what I promised.  There wasn't any way to misunderstand the language

of that challenge.  Even the dullest of the chivalry perceived

that this was a plain case of "put up, or shut up."  They were

wise and did the latter.  In all the next three years they gave

me no trouble worth mentioning.



Consider the three years sped.  Now look around on England.  A happy

and prosperous country, and strangely altered.  Schools everywhere,

and several colleges; a number of pretty good newspapers.  Even

authorship was taking a start; Sir Dinadan the Humorist was first

in the field, with a volume of gray-headed jokes which I had been

familiar with during thirteen centuries.  If he had left out that

old rancid one about the lecturer I wouldn't have said anything;

but I couldn't stand that one.  I suppressed the book and hanged

the author.



Slavery was dead and gone; all men were equal before the law;

taxation had been equalized.  The telegraph, the telephone, the

phonograph, the typewriter, the sewing-machine, and all the thousand

willing and handy servants of steam and electricity were working

their way into favor.  We had a steamboat or two on the Thames,

we had steam warships, and the beginnings of a steam commercial

marine; I was getting ready to send out an expedition to discover

America.



We were building several lines of railway, and our line from

Camelot to London was already finished and in operation.  I was

shrewd enough to make all offices connected with the passenger

service places of high and distinguished honor.  My idea was

to attract the chivalry and nobility, and make them useful and keep

them out of mischief.  The plan worked very well, the competition

for the places was hot.  The conductor of the 4.33 express was

a duke; there wasn't a passenger conductor on the line below

the degree of earl.  They were good men, every one, but they had

two defects which I couldn't cure, and so had to wink at:  they

wouldn't lay aside their armor, and they would "knock down" fare--

I mean rob the company.



There was hardly a knight in all the land who wasn't in some useful

employment.  They were going from end to end of the country in all

manner of useful missionary capacities; their penchant for wandering,

and their experience in it, made them altogether the most effective

spreaders of civilization we had.  They went clothed in steel and

equipped with sword and lance and battle-axe, and if they couldn't

persuade a person to try a sewing-machine on the installment plan,

or a melodeon, or a barbed-wire fence, or a prohibition journal,

or any of the other thousand and one things they canvassed for,

they removed him and passed on.



I was very happy.  Things were working steadily toward a secretly

longed-for point.  You see, I had two schemes in my head which

were the vastest of all my projects.  The one was to overthrow the

Catholic Church and set up the Protestant faith on its ruins--

not as an Established Church, but a go-as-you-please one; and

the other project was to get a decree issued by and by, commanding

that upon Arthur's death unlimited suffrage should be introduced,

and given to men and women alike--at any rate to all men, wise

or unwise, and to all mothers who at middle age should be found

to know nearly as much as their sons at twenty-one.  Arthur was

good for thirty years yet, he being about my own age--that is

to say, forty--and I believed that in that time I could easily

have the active part of the population of that day ready and eager

for an event which should be the first of its kind in the history

of the world--a rounded and complete governmental revolution

without bloodshed.  The result to be a republic.  Well, I may

as well confess, though I do feel ashamed when I think of it:

I was beginning to have a base hankering to be its first president

myself.  Yes, there was more or less human nature in me; I found

that out.



Clarence was with me as concerned the revolution, but in a modified

way.  His idea was a republic, without privileged orders, but with

a hereditary royal family at the head of it instead of an elective

chief magistrate.  He believed that no nation that had ever known

the joy of worshiping a royal family could ever be robbed of it

and not fade away and die of melancholy.  I urged that kings were

dangerous.  He said, then have cats.  He was sure that a royal

family of cats would answer every purpose.  They would be as useful

as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would

have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition

to get up shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably

vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive;

finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other

royal house, and "Tom VII, or Tom XI, or Tom XIV by the grace

of God King," would sound as well as it would when applied to

the ordinary royal tomcat with tights on.  "And as a rule," said

he, in his neat modern English, "the character of these cats would

be considerably above the character of the average king, and this

would be an immense moral advantage to the nation, for the reason

that a nation always models its morals after its monarch's.  The

worship of royalty being founded in unreason, these graceful and

harmless cats would easily become as sacred as any other royalties,

and indeed more so, because it would presently be noticed that

they hanged nobody, beheaded nobody, imprisoned nobody, inflicted

no cruelties or injustices of any sort, and so must be worthy of

a deeper love and reverence than the customary human king, and

would certainly get it.  The eyes of the whole harried world would

soon be fixed upon this humane and gentle system, and royal butchers

would presently begin to disappear; their subjects would fill

the vacancies with catlings from our own royal house; we should

become a factory; we should supply the thrones of the world; within

forty years all Europe would be governed by cats, and we should

furnish the cats.  The reign of universal peace would begin then,

to end no more forever....  Me-e-e-yow-ow-ow-ow--fzt!--wow!"



Hang him, I supposed he was in earnest, and was beginning to be

persuaded by him, until he exploded that cat-howl and startled me

almost out of my clothes.  But he never could be in earnest.  He

didn't know what it was.  He had pictured a distinct and perfectly

rational and feasible improvement upon constitutional monarchy,

but he was too feather-headed to know it, or care anything about

it, either.  I was going to give him a scolding, but Sandy came

flying in at that moment, wild with terror, and so choked with sobs

that for a minute she could not get her voice.  I ran and took her

in my arms, and lavished caresses upon her and said, beseechingly:



"Speak, darling, speak!  What is it?"



Her head fell limp upon my bosom, and she gasped, almost inaudibly:



"HELLO-CENTRAL!"



"Quick!" I shouted to Clarence; "telephone the king's homeopath

to come!"



In two minutes I was kneeling by the child's crib, and Sandy was

dispatching servants here, there, and everywhere, all over the

palace.  I took in the situation almost at a glance--membranous

croup!  I bent down and whispered:



"Wake up, sweetheart!  Hello-Central."



She opened her soft eyes languidly, and made out to say:



"Papa."



That was a comfort.  She was far from dead yet.  I sent for

preparations of sulphur, I rousted out the croup-kettle myself;

for I don't sit down and wait for doctors when Sandy or the child

is sick.  I knew how to nurse both of them, and had had experience.

This little chap had lived in my arms a good part of its small life,

and often I could soothe away its troubles and get it to laugh

through the tear-dews on its eye-lashes when even its mother couldn't.



Sir Launcelot, in his richest armor, came striding along the great

hall now on his way to the stock-board; he was president of the

stock-board, and occupied the Siege Perilous, which he had bought

of Sir Galahad; for the stock-board consisted of the Knights of

the Round Table, and they used the Round Table for business purposes

now.  Seats at it were worth--well, you would never believe the

figure, so it is no use to state it.  Sir Launcelot was a bear, and

he had put up a corner in one of the new lines, and was just getting

ready to squeeze the shorts to-day; but what of that?  He was

the same old Launcelot, and when he glanced in as he was passing

the door and found out that his pet was sick, that was enough

for him; bulls and bears might fight it out their own way for all

him, he would come right in here and stand by little Hello-Central

for all he was worth.  And that was what he did.  He shied his

helmet into the corner, and in half a minute he had a new wick

in the alcohol lamp and was firing up on the croup-kettle.  By this

time Sandy had built a blanket canopy over the crib, and everything

was ready.



Sir Launcelot got up steam, he and I loaded up the kettle with

unslaked lime and carbolic acid, with a touch of lactic acid added

thereto, then filled the thing up with water and inserted the

steam-spout under the canopy.  Everything was ship-shape now,

and we sat down on either side of the crib to stand our watch.

Sandy was so grateful and so comforted that she charged a couple

of church-wardens with willow-bark and sumach-tobacco for us,

and told us to smoke as much as we pleased, it couldn't get under

the canopy, and she was used to smoke, being the first lady in the

land who had ever seen a cloud blown.  Well, there couldn't be

a more contented or comfortable sight than Sir Launcelot in his

noble armor sitting in gracious serenity at the end of a yard

of snowy church-warden.  He was a beautiful man, a lovely man,

and was just intended to make a wife and children happy.  But, of

course Guenever--however, it's no use to cry over what's done and

can't be helped.



Well, he stood watch-and-watch with me, right straight through,

for three days and nights, till the child was out of danger; then

he took her up in his great arms and kissed her, with his plumes

falling about her golden head, then laid her softly in Sandy's

lap again and took his stately way down the vast hall, between

the ranks of admiring men-at-arms and menials, and so disappeared.

And no instinct warned me that I should never look upon him again

in this world!  Lord, what a world of heart-break it is.



The doctors said we must take the child away, if we would coax

her back to health and strength again.  And she must have sea-air.

So we took a man-of-war, and a suite of two hundred and sixty

persons, and went cruising about, and after a fortnight of this we

stepped ashore on the French coast, and the doctors thought it

would be a good idea to make something of a stay there.  The little

king of that region offered us his hospitalities, and we were glad

to accept.  If he had had as many conveniences as he lacked, we

should have been plenty comfortable enough; even as it was, we

made out very well, in his queer old castle, by the help of comforts

and luxuries from the ship.



At the end of a month I sent the vessel home for fresh supplies,

and for news.  We expected her back in three or four days.  She

would bring me, along with other news, the result of a certain

experiment which I had been starting.  It was a project of mine

to replace the tournament with something which might furnish an

escape for the extra steam of the chivalry, keep those bucks

entertained and out of mischief, and at the same time preserve

the best thing in them, which was their hardy spirit of emulation.

I had had a choice band of them in private training for some time,

and the date was now arriving for their first public effort.



This experiment was baseball.  In order to give the thing vogue

from the start, and place it out of the reach of criticism, I chose

my nines by rank, not capacity.  There wasn't a knight in either

team who wasn't a sceptered sovereign.  As for material of this

sort, there was a glut of it always around Arthur.  You couldn't

throw a brick in any direction and not cripple a king.  Of course,

I couldn't get these people to leave off their armor; they wouldn't

do that when they bathed.  They consented to differentiate the

armor so that a body could tell one team from the other, but that

was the most they would do.  So, one of the teams wore chain-mail

ulsters, and the other wore plate-armor made of my new Bessemer

steel.  Their practice in the field was the most fantastic thing I

ever saw.  Being ball-proof, they never skipped out of the way,

but stood still and took the result; when a Bessemer was at the bat

and a ball hit him, it would bound a hundred and fifty yards

sometimes.  And when a man was running, and threw himself on his

stomach to slide to his base, it was like an iron-clad coming into

port.  At first I appointed men of no rank to act as umpires, but

I had to discontinue that.  These people were no easier to please

than other nines.  The umpire's first decision was usually his

last; they broke him in two with a bat, and his friends toted him

home on a shutter.  When it was noticed that no umpire ever survived

a game, umpiring got to be unpopular.  So I was obliged to appoint

somebody whose rank and lofty position under the government would

protect him.



Here are the names of the nines:



     BESSEMERS                   ULSTERS



   KING ARTHUR.                EMPEROR LUCIUS.

   KING LOT OF LOTHIAN.        KING LOGRIS.

   KING OF NORTHGALIS.         KING MARHALT OF IRELAND.

   KING MARSIL.                KING MORGANORE.

   KING OF LITTLE BRITAIN.     KING MARK OF CORNWALL.

   KING LABOR.                 KING NENTRES OF GARLOT.

   KING PELLAM OF LISTENGESE.  KING MELIODAS OF LIONES.

   KING BAGDEMAGUS.            KING OF THE LAKE.

   KING TOLLEME LA FEINTES.    THE SOWDAN OF SYRIA.



                  Umpire--CLARENCE.



The first public game would certainly draw fifty thousand people;

and for solid fun would be worth going around the world to see.

Everything would be favorable; it was balmy and beautiful spring

weather now, and Nature was all tailored out in her new clothes.







CHAPTER XLI



THE INTERDICT



However, my attention was suddenly snatched from such matters;

our child began to lose ground again, and we had to go to sitting

up with her, her case became so serious.  We couldn't bear to allow

anybody to help in this service, so we two stood watch-and-watch,

day in and day out.  Ah, Sandy, what a right heart she had, how

simple, and genuine, and good she was!  She was a flawless wife

and mother; and yet I had married her for no other particular

reasons, except that by the customs of chivalry she was my property

until some knight should win her from me in the field.  She had

hunted Britain over for me; had found me at the hanging-bout

outside of London, and had straightway resumed her old place at

my side in the placidest way and as of right.  I was a New Englander,

and in my opinion this sort of partnership would compromise her,

sooner or later.  She couldn't see how, but I cut argument short

and we had a wedding.



Now I didn't know I was drawing a prize, yet that was what I did

draw.  Within the twelvemonth I became her worshiper; and ours

was the dearest and perfectest comradeship that ever was.  People

talk about beautiful friendships between two persons of the same

sex.  What is the best of that sort, as compared with the friendship

of man and wife, where the best impulses and highest ideals of

both are the same?  There is no place for comparison between

the two friendships; the one is earthly, the other divine.



In my dreams, along at first, I still wandered thirteen centuries

away, and my unsatisfied spirit went calling and harking all up

and down the unreplying vacancies of a vanished world.  Many a

time Sandy heard that imploring cry come from my lips in my sleep.

With a grand magnanimity she saddled that cry of mine upon our

child, conceiving it to be the name of some lost darling of mine.

It touched me to tears, and it also nearly knocked me off my feet,

too, when she smiled up in my face for an earned reward, and played

her quaint and pretty surprise upon me:



"The name of one who was dear to thee is here preserved, here made

holy, and the music of it will abide alway in our ears.  Now

thou'lt kiss me, as knowing the name I have given the child."



But I didn't know it, all the same.  I hadn't an idea in the

world; but it would have been cruel to confess it and spoil her

pretty game; so I never let on, but said:



"Yes, I know, sweetheart--how dear and good it is of you, too!

But I want to hear these lips of yours, which are also mine, utter

it first--then its music will be perfect."



Pleased to the marrow, she murmured:



"HELLO-CENTRAL!"



I didn't laugh--I am always thankful for that--but the strain

ruptured every cartilage in me, and for weeks afterward I could

hear my bones clack when I walked.  She never found out her mistake.

The first time she heard that form of salute used at the telephone

she was surprised, and not pleased; but I told her I had given

order for it:  that henceforth and forever the telephone must

always be invoked with that reverent formality, in perpetual honor

and remembrance of my lost friend and her small namesake.  This

was not true.  But it answered.



Well, during two weeks and a half we watched by the crib, and in

our deep solicitude we were unconscious of any world outside of

that sick-room.  Then our reward came:  the center of the universe

turned the corner and began to mend.  Grateful?  It isn't the term.

There _isn't_ any term for it.  You know that yourself, if you've

watched your child through the Valley of the Shadow and seen it

come back to life and sweep night out of the earth with one

all-illuminating smile that you could cover with your hand.



Why, we were back in this world in one instant!  Then we looked

the same startled thought into each other's eyes at the same

moment; more than two weeks gone, and that ship not back yet!



In another minute I appeared in the presence of my train.  They

had been steeped in troubled bodings all this time--their faces

showed it.  I called an escort and we galloped five miles to a

hilltop overlooking the sea.  Where was my great commerce that

so lately had made these glistening expanses populous and beautiful

with its white-winged flocks?  Vanished, every one!  Not a sail,

from verge to verge, not a smoke-bank--just a dead and empty

solitude, in place of all that brisk and breezy life.



I went swiftly back, saying not a word to anybody.  I told Sandy

this ghastly news.  We could imagine no explanation that would

begin to explain.  Had there been an invasion? an earthquake?

a pestilence?  Had the nation been swept out of existence?  But

guessing was profitless.  I must go--at once.  I borrowed the king's

navy--a "ship" no bigger than a steam launch--and was soon ready.



The parting--ah, yes, that was hard.  As I was devouring the child

with last kisses, it brisked up and jabbered out its vocabulary!--

the first time in more than two weeks, and it made fools of us

for joy.  The darling mispronunciations of childhood!--dear me,

there's no music that can touch it; and how one grieves when it

wastes away and dissolves into correctness, knowing it will never

visit his bereaved ear again.  Well, how good it was to be able

to carry that gracious memory away with me!



I approached England the next morning, with the wide highway of

salt water all to myself.  There were ships in the harbor, at

Dover, but they were naked as to sails, and there was no sign

of life about them.  It was Sunday; yet at Canterbury the streets

were empty; strangest of all, there was not even a priest in sight,

and no stroke of a bell fell upon my ear.  The mournfulness of

death was everywhere.  I couldn't understand it.  At last, in

the further edge of that town I saw a small funeral procession--

just a family and a few friends following a coffin--no priest;

a funeral without bell, book, or candle; there was a church there

close at hand, but they passed it by weeping, and did not enter it;

I glanced up at the belfry, and there hung the bell, shrouded in

black, and its tongue tied back.  Now I knew!  Now I understood

the stupendous calamity that had overtaken England.  Invasion?

Invasion is a triviality to it.  It was the INTERDICT!



I asked no questions; I didn't need to ask any.  The Church had

struck; the thing for me to do was to get into a disguise, and

go warily.  One of my servants gave me a suit of clothes, and

when we were safe beyond the town I put them on, and from that time

I traveled alone; I could not risk the embarrassment of company.



A miserable journey.  A desolate silence everywhere.  Even in

London itself.  Traffic had ceased; men did not talk or laugh, or

go in groups, or even in couples; they moved aimlessly about, each

man by himself, with his head down, and woe and terror at his heart.

The Tower showed recent war-scars.  Verily, much had been happening.



Of course, I meant to take the train for Camelot.  Train!  Why,

the station was as vacant as a cavern.  I moved on.  The journey

to Camelot was a repetition of what I had already seen.  The Monday

and the Tuesday differed in no way from the Sunday.  I arrived

far in the night.  From being the best electric-lighted town in

the kingdom and the most like a recumbent sun of anything you ever

saw, it was become simply a blot--a blot upon darkness--that is

to say, it was darker and solider than the rest of the darkness,

and so you could see it a little better; it made me feel as if

maybe it was symbolical--a sort of sign that the Church was going to

_keep_ the upper hand now, and snuff out all my beautiful civilization

just like that.  I found no life stirring in the somber streets.

I groped my way with a heavy heart.  The vast castle loomed black

upon the hilltop, not a spark visible about it.  The drawbridge

was down, the great gate stood wide, I entered without challenge,

my own heels making the only sound I heard--and it was sepulchral

enough, in those huge vacant courts.







CHAPTER XLII



WAR!



I found Clarence alone in his quarters, drowned in melancholy;

and in place of the electric light, he had reinstituted the ancient

rag-lamp, and sat there in a grisly twilight with all curtains

drawn tight.  He sprang up and rushed for me eagerly, saying:



"Oh, it's worth a billion milrays to look upon a live person again!"



He knew me as easily as if I hadn't been disguised at all.  Which

frightened me; one may easily believe that.



"Quick, now, tell me the meaning of this fearful disaster," I said.

"How did it come about?"



"Well, if there hadn't been any Queen Guenever, it wouldn't have

come so early; but it would have come, anyway.  It would have

come on your own account by and by; by luck, it happened to come

on the queen's."



"_And_ Sir Launcelot's?"



"Just so."



"Give me the details."



"I reckon you will grant that during some years there has been

only one pair of eyes in these kingdoms that has not been looking

steadily askance at the queen and Sir Launcelot--"



"Yes, King Arthur's."



"--and only one heart that was without suspicion--"



"Yes--the king's; a heart that isn't capable of thinking evil

of a friend."



"Well, the king might have gone on, still happy and unsuspecting,

to the end of his days, but for one of your modern improvements--

the stock-board.  When you left, three miles of the London,

Canterbury and Dover were ready for the rails, and also ready and

ripe for manipulation in the stock-market.  It was wildcat, and

everybody knew it.  The stock was for sale at a give-away.  What

does Sir Launcelot do, but--"



"Yes, I know; he quietly picked up nearly all of it for a song;

then he bought about twice as much more, deliverable upon call;

and he was about to call when I left."



"Very well, he did call.  The boys couldn't deliver.  Oh, he had

them--and he just settled his grip and squeezed them.  They were

laughing in their sleeves over their smartness in selling stock

to him at 15 and 16 and along there that wasn't worth 10.  Well,

when they had laughed long enough on that side of their mouths,

they rested-up that side by shifting the laugh to the other side.

That was when they compromised with the Invincible at 283!"



"Good land!"



"He skinned them alive, and they deserved it--anyway, the whole

kingdom rejoiced.  Well, among the flayed were Sir Agravaine and

Sir Mordred, nephews to the king.  End of the first act.  Act

second, scene first, an apartment in Carlisle castle, where the

court had gone for a few days' hunting.  Persons present, the

whole tribe of the king's nephews.  Mordred and Agravaine propose

to call the guileless Arthur's attention to Guenever and Sir

Launcelot.  Sir Gawaine, Sir Gareth, and Sir Gaheris will have

nothing to do with it.  A dispute ensues, with loud talk; in the

midst of it enter the king.  Mordred and Agravaine spring their

devastating tale upon him.  _Tableau_.  A trap is laid for Launcelot,

by the king's command, and Sir Launcelot walks into it.  He made

it sufficiently uncomfortable for the ambushed witnesses--to wit,

Mordred, Agravaine, and twelve knights of lesser rank, for he

killed every one of them but Mordred; but of course that couldn't

straighten matters between Launcelot and the king, and didn't."



"Oh, dear, only one thing could result--I see that.  War, and

the knights of the realm divided into a king's party and a

Sir Launcelot's party."



"Yes--that was the way of it.  The king sent the queen to the

stake, proposing to purify her with fire.  Launcelot and his

knights rescued her, and in doing it slew certain good old friends

of yours and mine--in fact, some of the best we ever had; to wit,

Sir Belias le Orgulous, Sir Segwarides, Sir Griflet le Fils de Dieu,

Sir Brandiles, Sir Aglovale--"



"Oh, you tear out my heartstrings."



"--wait, I'm not done yet--Sir Tor, Sir Gauter, Sir Gillimer--"



"The very best man in my subordinate nine.  What a handy right-fielder

he was!"



"--Sir Reynold's three brothers, Sir Damus, Sir Priamus, Sir Kay

the Stranger--"



"My peerless short-stop!  I've seen him catch a daisy-cutter in

his teeth.  Come, I can't stand this!"



"--Sir Driant, Sir Lambegus, Sir Herminde, Sir Pertilope,

Sir Perimones, and--whom do you think?"



"Rush!  Go on."



"Sir Gaheris, and Sir Gareth--both!"



"Oh, incredible!  Their love for Launcelot was indestructible."



"Well, it was an accident.  They were simply onlookers; they were

unarmed, and were merely there to witness the queen's punishment.

Sir Launcelot smote down whoever came in the way of his blind fury,

and he killed these without noticing who they were.  Here is an

instantaneous photograph one of our boys got of the battle; it's

for sale on every news-stand.  There--the figures nearest the queen

are Sir Launcelot with his sword up, and Sir Gareth gasping his

latest breath.  You can catch the agony in the queen's face through

the curling smoke.  It's a rattling battle-picture."



"Indeed, it is.  We must take good care of it; its historical value

is incalculable.  Go on."



"Well, the rest of the tale is just war, pure and simple.  Launcelot

retreated to his town and castle of Joyous Gard, and gathered

there a great following of knights.  The king, with a great host,

went there, and there was desperate fighting during several days,

and, as a result, all the plain around was paved with corpses

and cast-iron.  Then the Church patched up a peace between Arthur

and Launcelot and the queen and everybody--everybody but Sir Gawaine.

He was bitter about the slaying of his brothers, Gareth and Gaheris,

and would not be appeased.  He notified Launcelot to get him

thence, and make swift preparation, and look to be soon attacked.

So Launcelot sailed to his Duchy of Guienne with his following, and

Gawaine soon followed with an army, and he beguiled Arthur to go

with him.  Arthur left the kingdom in Sir Mordred's hands until

you should return--"



"Ah--a king's customary wisdom!"



"Yes.  Sir Mordred set himself at once to work to make his kingship

permanent.  He was going to marry Guenever, as a first move; but

she fled and shut herself up in the Tower of London.  Mordred

attacked; the Bishop of Canterbury dropped down on him with the

Interdict.  The king returned; Mordred fought him at Dover, at

Canterbury, and again at Barham Down.  Then there was talk of peace

and a composition.  Terms, Mordred to have Cornwall and Kent during

Arthur's life, and the whole kingdom afterward."



"Well, upon my word!  My dream of a republic to _be_ a dream, and

so remain."



"Yes.  The two armies lay near Salisbury.  Gawaine--Gawaine's head

is at Dover Castle, he fell in the fight there--Gawaine appeared to

Arthur in a dream, at least his ghost did, and warned him to

refrain from conflict for a month, let the delay cost what it might.

But battle was precipitated by an accident.  Arthur had given

order that if a sword was raised during the consultation over

the proposed treaty with Mordred, sound the trumpet and fall on!

for he had no confidence in Mordred.  Mordred had given a similar

order to _his_ people.  Well, by and by an adder bit a knight's heel;

the knight forgot all about the order, and made a slash at the

adder with his sword.  Inside of half a minute those two prodigious

hosts came together with a crash!  They butchered away all day.

Then the king--however, we have started something fresh since

you left--our paper has."



"No?  What is that?"



"War correspondence!"



"Why, that's good."



"Yes, the paper was booming right along, for the Interdict made

no impression, got no grip, while the war lasted.  I had war

correspondents with both armies.  I will finish that battle by

reading you what one of the boys says:



   Then the king looked about him, and then was he

   ware of all his host and of all his good knights

   were left no more on live but two knights, that

   was Sir Lucan de Butlere, and his brother Sir

   Bedivere: and they were full sore wounded.  Jesu

   mercy, said the king, where are all my noble

   knights becomen?  Alas that ever I should see this

   doleful day.  For now, said Arthur, I am come to

   mine end.  But would to God that I wist where were

   that traitor Sir Mordred, that hath caused all

   this mischief.  Then was King Arthur ware where Sir

   Mordred leaned upon his sword among a great heap

   of dead men.  Now give me my spear, said Arthur

   unto Sir Lucan, for yonder I have espied the

   traitor that all this woe hath wrought.  Sir, let

   him be, said Sir Lucan, for he is unhappy; and if

   ye pass this unhappy day, ye shall be right well

   revenged upon him.  Good lord, remember ye of your

   night's dream, and what the spirit of Sir Gawaine

   told you this night, yet God of his great goodness

   hath preserved you hitherto.  Therefore, for God's

   sake, my lord, leave off by this. For blessed be

   God ye have won the field:  for here we be three

   on live, and with Sir Mordred is none on live.

   And if ye leave off now, this wicked day of

   destiny is past.  Tide me death, betide me life,

   saith the king, now I see him yonder alone, he

   shall never escape mine hands, for at a better

   avail shall I never have him.  God speed you well,

   said Sir Bedivere.  Then the king gat his spear

   in both his hands, and ran toward Sir Mordred

   crying, Traitor, now is thy death day come.  And

   when Sir Mordred heard Sir Arthur, he ran until

   him with his sword drawn in his hand.  And then

   King Arthur smote Sir Mordred under the shield,

   with a foin of his spear throughout the body more

   than a fathom.  And when Sir Mordred felt that he

   had his death's wound, he thrust himself, with

   the might that he had, up to the butt of King

   Arthur's spear.  And right so he smote his father

   Arthur with his sword holden in both his hands,

   on the side of the head, that the sword pierced

   the helmet and the brain-pan, and therewithal

   Sir Mordred fell stark dead to the earth.  And

   the noble Arthur fell in a swoon to the earth,

   and there he swooned oft-times



"That is a good piece of war correspondence, Clarence; you are

a first-rate newspaper man.  Well--is the king all right?  Did

he get well?"



"Poor soul, no.  He is dead."



I was utterly stunned; it had not seemed to me that any wound

could be mortal to him.



"And the queen, Clarence?"



"She is a nun, in Almesbury."



"What changes! and in such a short while.  It is inconceivable.

What next, I wonder?"



"I can tell you what next."



"Well?"



"Stake our lives and stand by them!"



"What do you mean by that?"



"The Church is master now.  The Interdict included you with Mordred;

it is not to be removed while you remain alive.  The clans are

gathering.  The Church has gathered all the knights that are left

alive, and as soon as you are discovered we shall have business

on our hands."



"Stuff!  With our deadly scientific war-material; with our hosts

of trained--"



"Save your breath--we haven't sixty faithful left!"



"What are you saying?  Our schools, our colleges, our vast

workshops, our--"



"When those knights come, those establishments will empty themselves

and go over to the enemy.  Did you think you had educated the

superstition out of those people?"



"I certainly did think it."



"Well, then, you may unthink it.  They stood every strain easily--

until the Interdict.  Since then, they merely put on a bold

outside--at heart they are quaking.  Make up your mind to it--

when the armies come, the mask will fall."



"It's hard news.  We are lost.  They will turn our own science

against us."



"No they won't."



"Why?"



"Because I and a handful of the faithful have blocked that game.

I'll tell you what I've done, and what moved me to it.  Smart as

you are, the Church was smarter.  It was the Church that sent

you cruising--through her servants, the doctors."



"Clarence!"



"It is the truth.  I know it.  Every officer of your ship was

the Church's picked servant, and so was every man of the crew."



"Oh, come!"



"It is just as I tell you.  I did not find out these things at once,

but I found them out finally.  Did you send me verbal information,

by the commander of the ship, to the effect that upon his return

to you, with supplies, you were going to leave Cadiz--"



"Cadiz!  I haven't been at Cadiz at all!"



"--going to leave Cadiz and cruise in distant seas indefinitely,

for the health of your family?  Did you send me that word?"



"Of course not.  I would have written, wouldn't I?"



"Naturally.  I was troubled and suspicious.  When the commander

sailed again I managed to ship a spy with him.  I have never

heard of vessel or spy since.  I gave myself two weeks to hear

from you in.  Then I resolved to send a ship to Cadiz.  There was

a reason why I didn't."



"What was that?"



"Our navy had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared!  Also, as

suddenly and as mysteriously, the railway and telegraph and

telephone service ceased, the men all deserted, poles were cut

down, the Church laid a ban upon the electric light!  I had to be

up and doing--and straight off.  Your life was safe--nobody in

these kingdoms but Merlin would venture to touch such a magician

as you without ten thousand men at his back--I had nothing to

think of but how to put preparations in the best trim against your

coming.  I felt safe myself--nobody would be anxious to touch

a pet of yours.  So this is what I did.  From our various works

I selected all the men--boys I mean--whose faithfulness under

whatsoever pressure I could swear to, and I called them together

secretly and gave them their instructions.  There are fifty-two of

them; none younger than fourteen, and none above seventeen years old."



"Why did you select boys?"



"Because all the others were born in an atmosphere of superstition

and reared in it.  It is in their blood and bones.  We imagined

we had educated it out of them; they thought so, too; the Interdict

woke them up like a thunderclap!  It revealed them to themselves,

and it revealed them to me, too.  With boys it was different.  Such

as have been under our training from seven to ten years have had

no acquaintance with the Church's terrors, and it was among these

that I found my fifty-two.  As a next move, I paid a private visit

to that old cave of Merlin's--not the small one--the big one--"



"Yes, the one where we secretly established our first great electric

plant when I was projecting a miracle."



"Just so.  And as that miracle hadn't become necessary then,

I thought it might be a good idea to utilize the plant now.  I've

provisioned the cave for a siege--"



"A good idea, a first-rate idea."



"I think so.  I placed four of my boys there as a guard--inside,

and out of sight.  Nobody was to be hurt--while outside; but any

attempt to enter--well, we said just let anybody try it!  Then

I went out into the hills and uncovered and cut the secret wires

which connected your bedroom with the wires that go to the dynamite

deposits under all our vast factories, mills, workshops, magazines,

etc., and about midnight I and my boys turned out and connected

that wire with the cave, and nobody but you and I suspects where

the other end of it goes to.  We laid it under ground, of course, and

it was all finished in a couple of hours or so.  We sha'n't have

to leave our fortress now when we want to blow up our civilization."



"It was the right move--and the natural one; military necessity,

in the changed condition of things.  Well, what changes _have_ come!

We expected to be besieged in the palace some time or other, but--

however, go on."



"Next, we built a wire fence."



"Wire fence?"



"Yes.  You dropped the hint of it yourself, two or three years ago."



"Oh, I remember--the time the Church tried her strength against

us the first time, and presently thought it wise to wait for a

hopefuler season.  Well, how have you arranged the fence?"



"I start twelve immensely strong wires--naked, not insulated--

from a big dynamo in the cave--dynamo with no brushes except

a positive and a negative one--"



"Yes, that's right."



"The wires go out from the cave and fence in a circle of level

ground a hundred yards in diameter; they make twelve independent

fences, ten feet apart--that is to say, twelve circles within

circles--and their ends come into the cave again."



"Right; go on."



"The fences are fastened to heavy oaken posts only three feet apart,

and these posts are sunk five feet in the ground."



"That is good and strong."



"Yes.  The wires have no ground-connection outside of the cave.

They go out from the positive brush of the dynamo; there is a

ground-connection through the negative brush; the other ends of

the wire return to the cave, and each is grounded independently."



"No, no, that won't do!"



"Why?"



"It's too expensive--uses up force for nothing.  You don't want

any ground-connection except the one through the negative brush.

The other end of every wire must be brought back into the cave

and fastened independently, and _without_ any ground-connection.

Now, then, observe the economy of it.  A cavalry charge hurls

itself against the fence; you are using no power, you are spending

no money, for there is only one ground-connection till those horses

come against the wire; the moment they touch it they form a

connection with the negative brush _through the ground_, and drop

dead.  Don't you see?--you are using no energy until it is needed;

your lightning is there, and ready, like the load in a gun; but

it isn't costing you a cent till you touch it off.  Oh, yes, the

single ground-connection--"



"Of course!  I don't know how I overlooked that.  It's not only

cheaper, but it's more effectual than the other way, for if wires

break or get tangled, no harm is done."



"No, especially if we have a tell-tale in the cave and disconnect

the broken wire.  Well, go on.  The gatlings?"



"Yes--that's arranged.  In the center of the inner circle, on a

spacious platform six feet high, I've grouped a battery of thirteen

gatling guns, and provided plenty of ammunition."



"That's it.  They command every approach, and when the Church's

knights arrive, there's going to be music.  The brow of the

precipice over the cave--"



"I've got a wire fence there, and a gatling.  They won't drop any

rocks down on us."



"Well, and the glass-cylinder dynamite torpedoes?"



"That's attended to.  It's the prettiest garden that was ever

planted.  It's a belt forty feet wide, and goes around the outer

fence--distance between it and the fence one hundred yards--kind of

neutral ground that space is.  There isn't a single square yard

of that whole belt but is equipped with a torpedo.  We laid them

on the surface of the ground, and sprinkled a layer of sand over

them.  It's an innocent looking garden, but you let a man start

in to hoe it once, and you'll see."



"You tested the torpedoes?"



"Well, I was going to, but--"



"But what?  Why, it's an immense oversight not to apply a--"



"Test?  Yes, I know; but they're all right; I laid a few in the

public road beyond our lines and they've been tested."



"Oh, that alters the case.  Who did it?"



"A Church committee."



"How kind!"



"Yes.  They came to command us to make submission.  You see they

didn't really come to test the torpedoes; that was merely an incident."



"Did the committee make a report?"



"Yes, they made one.  You could have heard it a mile."



"Unanimous?"



"That was the nature of it.  After that I put up some signs, for the

protection of future committees, and we have had no intruders since."



"Clarence, you've done a world of work, and done it perfectly."



"We had plenty of time for it; there wasn't any occasion for hurry."



We sat silent awhile, thinking.  Then my mind was made up, and

I said:



"Yes, everything is ready; everything is shipshape, no detail is

wanting.  I know what to do now."



"So do I; sit down and wait."



"No, _sir_! rise up and _strike_!"



"Do you mean it?"



"Yes, indeed!  The _de_fensive isn't in my line, and the _of_fensive

is.  That is, when I hold a fair hand--two-thirds as good a hand

as the enemy.  Oh, yes, we'll rise up and strike; that's our game."



"A hundred to one you are right.  When does the performance begin?"



"_Now!_  We'll proclaim the Republic."



"Well, that _will_ precipitate things, sure enough!"



"It will make them buzz, I tell you!  England will be a hornets'

nest before noon to-morrow, if the Church's hand hasn't lost its

cunning--and we know it hasn't.  Now you write and I'll dictate thus:



                      "PROCLAMATION



                           ---



   "BE IT KNOWN UNTO ALL.  Whereas the king having died

   and left no heir, it becomes my duty to continue the

   executive authority vested in me, until a government

   shall have been created and set in motion.  The

   monarchy has lapsed, it no longer exists.  By

   consequence, all political power has reverted to its

   original source, the people of the nation.  With the

   monarchy, its several adjuncts died also; wherefore

   there is no longer a nobility, no longer a privileged

   class, no longer an Established Church; all men are

   become exactly equal; they are upon one common

   level, and religion is free.  _A Republic is hereby

   proclaimed_, as being the natural estate of a nation

   when other authority has ceased.  It is the duty of

   the British people to meet together immediately,

   and by their votes elect representatives and deliver

   into their hands the government."



I signed it "The Boss," and dated it from Merlin's Cave.

Clarence said--



"Why, that tells where we are, and invites them to call right away."



"That is the idea.  We _strike_--by the Proclamation--then it's

their innings.  Now have the thing set up and printed and posted,

right off; that is, give the order; then, if you've got a couple

of bicycles handy at the foot of the hill, ho for Merlin's Cave!"



"I shall be ready in ten minutes.  What a cyclone there is going

to be to-morrow when this piece of paper gets to work!...  It's a

pleasant old palace, this is; I wonder if we shall ever again--

but never mind about that."







CHAPTER XLIII



THE BATTLE OF THE SAND BELT



In Merlin's Cave -- Clarence and I and fifty-two fresh, bright,

well-educated, clean-minded young British boys.  At dawn I sent

an order to the factories and to all our great works to stop

operations and remove all life to a safe distance, as everything

was going to be blown up by secret mines, "_and no telling at what

moment--therefore, vacate at once_."  These people knew me, and

had confidence in my word.  They would clear out without waiting

to part their hair, and I could take my own time about dating the

explosion.  You couldn't hire one of them to go back during the

century, if the explosion was still impending.



We had a week of waiting.  It was not dull for me, because I was

writing all the time.  During the first three days, I finished

turning my old diary into this narrative form; it only required

a chapter or so to bring it down to date.  The rest of the week

I took up in writing letters to my wife.  It was always my habit

to write to Sandy every day, whenever we were separate, and now

I kept up the habit for love of it, and of her, though I couldn't

do anything with the letters, of course, after I had written them.

But it put in the time, you see, and was almost like talking;

it was almost as if I was saying, "Sandy, if you and Hello-Central

were here in the cave, instead of only your photographs, what

good times we could have!"  And then, you know, I could imagine

the baby goo-gooing something out in reply, with its fists in its

mouth and itself stretched across its mother's lap on its back,

and she a-laughing and admiring and worshipping, and now and then

tickling under the baby's chin to set it cackling, and then maybe

throwing in a word of answer to me herself--and so on and so on--

well, don't you know, I could sit there in the cave with my pen,

and keep it up, that way, by the hour with them.  Why, it was

almost like having us all together again.



I had spies out every night, of course, to get news.  Every report

made things look more and more impressive.  The hosts were gathering,

gathering; down all the roads and paths of England the knights were

riding, and priests rode with them, to hearten these original

Crusaders, this being the Church's war.  All the nobilities, big

and little, were on their way, and all the gentry.  This was all

as was expected.  We should thin out this sort of folk to such

a degree that the people would have nothing to do but just step

to the front with their republic and--



Ah, what a donkey I was!  Toward the end of the week I began to get

this large and disenchanting fact through my head:  that the mass

of the nation had swung their caps and shouted for the republic for

about one day, and there an end!  The Church, the nobles, and

the gentry then turned one grand, all-disapproving frown upon them

and shriveled them into sheep!  From that moment the sheep had

begun to gather to the fold--that is to say, the camps--and offer

their valueless lives and their valuable wool to the "righteous

cause."  Why, even the very men who had lately been slaves were

in the "righteous cause," and glorifying it, praying for it,

sentimentally slabbering over it, just like all the other commoners.

Imagine such human muck as this; conceive of this folly!



Yes, it was now "Death to the Republic!" everywhere--not a dissenting

voice.  All England was marching against us!  Truly, this was more

than I had bargained for.



I watched my fifty-two boys narrowly; watched their faces, their

walk, their unconscious attitudes:  for all these are a language--

a language given us purposely that it may betray us in times of

emergency, when we have secrets which we want to keep.  I knew

that that thought would keep saying itself over and over again

in their minds and hearts, _All England is marching against us!_

and ever more strenuously imploring attention with each repetition,

ever more sharply realizing itself to their imaginations, until

even in their sleep they would find no rest from it, but hear

the vague and flitting creatures of the dreams say, _All England_--

ALL ENGLAND!--_is marching against you_!  I knew all this would

happen; I knew that ultimately the pressure would become so great

that it would compel utterance; therefore, I must be ready with an

answer at that time--an answer well chosen and tranquilizing.



I was right.  The time came.  They HAD to speak.  Poor lads, it

was pitiful to see, they were so pale, so worn, so troubled.  At

first their spokesman could hardly find voice or words; but he

presently got both.  This is what he said--and he put it in the

neat modern English taught him in my schools:



"We have tried to forget what we are--English boys!  We have tried

to put reason before sentiment, duty before love; our minds

approve, but our hearts reproach us.  While apparently it was

only the nobility, only the gentry, only the twenty-five or thirty

thousand knights left alive out of the late wars, we were of one

mind, and undisturbed by any troubling doubt; each and every one

of these fifty-two lads who stand here before you, said, 'They

have chosen--it is their affair.'  But think!--the matter is

altered--_All England is marching against us_!  Oh, sir, consider!--

reflect!--these people are our people, they are bone of our bone,

flesh of our flesh, we love them--do not ask us to destroy our nation!"



Well, it shows the value of looking ahead, and being ready for

a thing when it happens.  If I hadn't foreseen this thing and been

fixed, that boy would have had me!--I couldn't have said a word.

But I was fixed.  I said:



"My boys, your hearts are in the right place, you have thought the

worthy thought, you have done the worthy thing.  You are English

boys, you will remain English boys, and you will keep that name

unsmirched.  Give yourselves no further concern, let your minds be

at peace.  Consider this:  while all England is marching against

us, who is in the van?  Who, by the commonest rules of war, will

march in the front?  Answer me."



"The mounted host of mailed knights."



"True.  They are thirty thousand strong.  Acres deep they will march.

Now, observe:  none but _they_ will ever strike the sand-belt!  Then

there will be an episode!  Immediately after, the civilian multitude

in the rear will retire, to meet business engagements elsewhere.

None but nobles and gentry are knights, and _none but these_ will

remain to dance to our music after that episode.  It is absolutely

true that we shall have to fight nobody but these thirty thousand

knights.  Now speak, and it shall be as you decide.  Shall we

avoid the battle, retire from the field?"



"NO!!!"



The shout was unanimous and hearty.



"Are you--are you--well, afraid of these thirty thousand knights?"



That joke brought out a good laugh, the boys' troubles vanished

away, and they went gaily to their posts.  Ah, they were a darling

fifty-two!  As pretty as girls, too.



I was ready for the enemy now.  Let the approaching big day come

along--it would find us on deck.



The big day arrived on time.  At dawn the sentry on watch in the

corral came into the cave and reported a moving black mass under

the horizon, and a faint sound which he thought to be military

music.  Breakfast was just ready; we sat down and ate it.



This over, I made the boys a little speech, and then sent out

a detail to man the battery, with Clarence in command of it.



The sun rose presently and sent its unobstructed splendors over

the land, and we saw a prodigious host moving slowly toward us,

with the steady drift and aligned front of a wave of the sea.

Nearer and nearer it came, and more and more sublimely imposing

became its aspect; yes, all England was there, apparently.  Soon

we could see the innumerable banners fluttering, and then the sun

struck the sea of armor and set it all aflash.  Yes, it was a fine

sight; I hadn't ever seen anything to beat it.



At last we could make out details.  All the front ranks, no telling

how many acres deep, were horsemen--plumed knights in armor.

Suddenly we heard the blare of trumpets; the slow walk burst into

a gallop, and then--well, it was wonderful to see!  Down swept

that vast horse-shoe wave--it approached the sand-belt--my breath

stood still; nearer, nearer--the strip of green turf beyond the

yellow belt grew narrow--narrower still--became a mere ribbon in

front of the horses--then disappeared under their hoofs.  Great

Scott!  Why, the whole front of that host shot into the sky with

a thunder-crash, and became a whirling tempest of rags and fragments;

and along the ground lay a thick wall of smoke that hid what was

left of the multitude from our sight.



Time for the second step in the plan of campaign!  I touched

a button, and shook the bones of England loose from her spine!



In that explosion all our noble civilization-factories went up in

the air and disappeared from the earth.  It was a pity, but it

was necessary.  We could not afford to let the enemy turn our own

weapons against us.



Now ensued one of the dullest quarter-hours I had ever endured.

We waited in a silent solitude enclosed by our circles of wire,

and by a circle of heavy smoke outside of these.  We couldn't

see over the wall of smoke, and we couldn't see through it.  But

at last it began to shred away lazily, and by the end of another

quarter-hour the land was clear and our curiosity was enabled

to satisfy itself.  No living creature was in sight!  We now

perceived that additions had been made to our defenses.  The

dynamite had dug a ditch more than a hundred feet wide, all around

us, and cast up an embankment some twenty-five feet high on both

borders of it.  As to destruction of life, it was amazing.  Moreover,

it was beyond estimate.  Of course, we could not _count_ the dead,

because they did not exist as individuals, but merely as homogeneous

protoplasm, with alloys of iron and buttons.



No life was in sight, but necessarily there must have been some

wounded in the rear ranks, who were carried off the field under

cover of the wall of smoke; there would be sickness among the

others--there always is, after an episode like that.  But there

would be no reinforcements; this was the last stand of the chivalry

of England; it was all that was left of the order, after the recent

annihilating wars.  So I felt quite safe in believing that the

utmost force that could for the future be brought against us

would be but small; that is, of knights.  I therefore issued a

congratulatory proclamation to my army in these words:



   SOLDIERS, CHAMPIONS OF HUMAN LIBERTY AND EQUALITY:

   Your General congratulates you!  In the pride of his

   strength and the vanity of his renown, an arrogant

   enemy came against you.  You were ready.  The conflict

   was brief; on your side, glorious.  This mighty

   victory, having been achieved utterly without loss,

   stands without example in history.  So long as the

   planets shall continue to move in their orbits, the

   BATTLE OF THE SAND-BELT will not perish out of the

   memories of men.



                                THE BOSS.



I read it well, and the applause I got was very gratifying to me.

I then wound up with these remarks:



"The war with the English nation, as a nation, is at an end.

The nation has retired from the field and the war.  Before it can

be persuaded to return, war will have ceased.  This campaign is

the only one that is going to be fought.  It will be brief--

the briefest in history.  Also the most destructive to life,

considered from the standpoint of proportion of casualties to

numbers engaged.  We are done with the nation; henceforth we deal

only with the knights.  English knights can be killed, but they

cannot be conquered.  We know what is before us.  While one of

these men remains alive, our task is not finished, the war is not

ended.  We will kill them all."  [Loud and long continued applause.]



I picketed the great embankments thrown up around our lines by

the dynamite explosion--merely a lookout of a couple of boys

to announce the enemy when he should appear again.



Next, I sent an engineer and forty men to a point just beyond

our lines on the south, to turn a mountain brook that was there,

and bring it within our lines and under our command, arranging

it in such a way that I could make instant use of it in an emergency.

The forty men were divided into two shifts of twenty each, and

were to relieve each other every two hours.  In ten hours the

work was accomplished.



It was nightfall now, and I withdrew my pickets.  The one who

had had the northern outlook reported a camp in sight, but visible

with the glass only.  He also reported that a few knights had been

feeling their way toward us, and had driven some cattle across our

lines, but that the knights themselves had not come very near.

That was what I had been expecting.  They were feeling us, you

see; they wanted to know if we were going to play that red terror

on them again.  They would grow bolder in the night, perhaps.

I believed I knew what project they would attempt, because it was

plainly the thing I would attempt myself if I were in their places

and as ignorant as they were.  I mentioned it to Clarence.



"I think you are right," said he; "it is the obvious thing for

them to try."



"Well, then," I said, "if they do it they are doomed."



"Certainly."



"They won't have the slightest show in the world."



"Of course they won't."



"It's dreadful, Clarence.  It seems an awful pity."



The thing disturbed me so that I couldn't get any peace of mind

for thinking of it and worrying over it.  So, at last, to quiet

my conscience, I framed this message to the knights:



   TO THE HONORABLE THE COMMANDER OF THE INSURGENT

   CHIVALRY OF ENGLAND:  YOU fight in vain.  We know

   your strength--if one may call it by that name.

   We know that at the utmost you cannot bring

   against us above five and twenty thousand knights.

   Therefore, you have no chance--none whatever.

   Reflect:  we are well equipped, well fortified, we

   number 54.  Fifty-four what?  Men?  No, MINDS--the

   capablest in the world; a force against which

   mere animal might may no more hope to prevail than

   may the idle waves of the sea hope to prevail

   against the granite barriers of England.  Be advised.

   We offer you your lives; for the sake of your

   families, do not reject the gift.  We offer you

   this chance, and it is the last:  throw down your

   arms; surrender unconditionally to the Republic,

   and all will be forgiven.



                          (Signed) THE BOSS.



I read it to Clarence, and said I proposed to send it by a flag

of truce.  He laughed the sarcastic laugh he was born with, and said:



"Somehow it seems impossible for you to ever fully realize what

these nobilities are.  Now let us save a little time and trouble.

Consider me the commander of the knights yonder.  Now, then,

you are the flag of truce; approach and deliver me your message,

and I will give you your answer."



I humored the idea.  I came forward under an imaginary guard of

the enemy's soldiers, produced my paper, and read it through.

For answer, Clarence struck the paper out of my hand, pursed up

a scornful lip and said with lofty disdain:



"Dismember me this animal, and return him in a basket to the

base-born knave who sent him; other answer have I none!"



How empty is theory in presence of fact!  And this was just fact,

and nothing else.  It was the thing that would have happened,

there was no getting around that.  I tore up the paper and granted

my mistimed sentimentalities a permanent rest.



Then, to business.  I tested the electric signals from the gatling

platform to the cave, and made sure that they were all right;

I tested and retested those which commanded the fences--these

were signals whereby I could break and renew the electric current

in each fence independently of the others at will.  I placed the

brook-connection under the guard and authority of three of my

best boys, who would alternate in two-hour watches all night and

promptly obey my signal, if I should have occasion to give it--

three revolver-shots in quick succession.  Sentry-duty was discarded

for the night, and the corral left empty of life; I ordered that

quiet be maintained in the cave, and the electric lights turned

down to a glimmer.



As soon as it was good and dark, I shut off the current from all

the fences, and then groped my way out to the embankment bordering

our side of the great dynamite ditch.  I crept to the top of it

and lay there on the slant of the muck to watch.  But it was

too dark to see anything.  As for sounds, there were none.  The

stillness was deathlike.  True, there were the usual night-sounds

of the country--the whir of night-birds, the buzzing of insects,

the barking of distant dogs, the mellow lowing of far-off kine--

but these didn't seem to break the stillness, they only intensified

it, and added a grewsome melancholy to it into the bargain.



I presently gave up looking, the night shut down so black, but

I kept my ears strained to catch the least suspicious sound, for

I judged I had only to wait, and I shouldn't be disappointed.

However, I had to wait a long time.  At last I caught what you

may call in distinct glimpses of sound dulled metallic sound.

I pricked up my ears, then, and held my breath, for this was the

sort of thing I had been waiting for.  This sound thickened, and

approached--from toward the north.  Presently, I heard it at my

own level--the ridge-top of the opposite embankment, a hundred

feet or more away.  Then I seemed to see a row of black dots appear

along that ridge--human heads?  I couldn't tell; it mightn't be

anything at all; you can't depend on your eyes when your imagination

is out of focus.  However, the question was soon settled.  I heard

that metallic noise descending into the great ditch.  It augmented

fast, it spread all along, and it unmistakably furnished me this

fact:  an armed host was taking up its quarters in the ditch.  Yes,

these people were arranging a little surprise party for us.  We

could expect entertainment about dawn, possibly earlier.



I groped my way back to the corral now; I had seen enough.  I went

to the platform and signaled to turn the current on to the two

inner fences.  Then I went into the cave, and found everything

satisfactory there--nobody awake but the working-watch.  I woke

Clarence and told him the great ditch was filling up with men,

and that I believed all the knights were coming for us in a body.

It was my notion that as soon as dawn approached we could expect

the ditch's ambuscaded thousands to swarm up over the embankment

and make an assault, and be followed immediately by the rest

of their army.



Clarence said:



"They will be wanting to send a scout or two in the dark to make

preliminary observations.  Why not take the lightning off the

outer fences, and give them a chance?"



"I've already done it, Clarence.  Did you ever know me to be

inhospitable?"



"No, you are a good heart.  I want to go and--"



"Be a reception committee?  I will go, too."



We crossed the corral and lay down together between the two inside

fences.  Even the dim light of the cave had disordered our eyesight

somewhat, but the focus straightway began to regulate itself and

soon it was adjusted for present circumstances.  We had had to feel

our way before, but we could make out to see the fence posts now.

We started a whispered conversation, but suddenly Clarence broke

off and said:



"What is that?"



"What is what?"



"That thing yonder."



"What thing--where?"



"There beyond you a little piece--dark something--a dull shape

of some kind--against the second fence."



I gazed and he gazed.  I said:



"Could it be a man, Clarence?"



"No, I think not.  If you notice, it looks a lit--why, it _is_

a man!--leaning on the fence."



"I certainly believe it is; let us go and see."



We crept along on our hands and knees until we were pretty close,

and then looked up.  Yes, it was a man--a dim great figure in armor,

standing erect, with both hands on the upper wire--and, of course,

there was a smell of burning flesh.  Poor fellow, dead as a

door-nail, and never knew what hurt him.  He stood there like a

statue--no motion about him, except that his plumes swished about

a little in the night wind.  We rose up and looked in through

the bars of his visor, but couldn't make out whether we knew him

or not--features too dim and shadowed.



We heard muffled sounds approaching, and we sank down to the ground

where we were.  We made out another knight vaguely; he was coming

very stealthily, and feeling his way.  He was near enough now for

us to see him put out a hand, find an upper wire, then bend and

step under it and over the lower one.  Now he arrived at the

first knight--and started slightly when he discovered him.  He

stood a moment--no doubt wondering why the other one didn't move

on; then he said, in a low voice, "Why dreamest thou here, good

Sir Mar--" then he laid his hand on the corpse's shoulder--and just

uttered a little soft moan and sunk down dead.  Killed by a dead

man, you see--killed by a dead friend, in fact.  There was something

awful about it.



These early birds came scattering along after each other, about

one every five minutes in our vicinity, during half an hour.

They brought no armor of offense but their swords; as a rule,

they carried the sword ready in the hand, and put it forward and

found the wires with it.  We would now and then see a blue spark

when the knight that caused it was so far away as to be invisible

to us; but we knew what had happened, all the same; poor fellow,

he had touched a charged wire with his sword and been elected.

We had brief intervals of grim stillness, interrupted with piteous

regularity by the clash made by the falling of an iron-clad; and

this sort of thing was going on, right along, and was very creepy

there in the dark and lonesomeness.



We concluded to make a tour between the inner fences.  We elected

to walk upright, for convenience's sake; we argued that if discerned,

we should be taken for friends rather than enemies, and in any case

we should be out of reach of swords, and these gentry did not seem

to have any spears along.  Well, it was a curious trip.  Everywhere

dead men were lying outside the second fence--not plainly visible,

but still visible; and we counted fifteen of those pathetic

statues--dead knights standing with their hands on the upper wire.



One thing seemed to be sufficiently demonstrated:  our current

was so tremendous that it killed before the victim could cry out.

Pretty soon we detected a muffled and heavy sound, and next moment

we guessed what it was.  It was a surprise in force coming! whispered

Clarence to go and wake the army, and notify it to wait in silence

in the cave for further orders.  He was soon back, and we stood

by the inner fence and watched the silent lightning do its awful

work upon that swarming host.  One could make out but little of

detail; but he could note that a black mass was piling itself up

beyond the second fence.  That swelling bulk was dead men!  Our

camp was enclosed with a solid wall of the dead--a bulwark,

a breastwork, of corpses, you may say.  One terrible thing about

this thing was the absence of human voices; there were no cheers,

no war cries; being intent upon a surprise, these men moved as

noiselessly as they could; and always when the front rank was near

enough to their goal to make it proper for them to begin to get

a shout ready, of course they struck the fatal line and went down

without testifying.



I sent a current through the third fence now; and almost immediately

through the fourth and fifth, so quickly were the gaps filled up.

I believed the time was come now for my climax; I believed that

that whole army was in our trap.  Anyway, it was high time to find

out.  So I touched a button and set fifty electric suns aflame

on the top of our precipice.



Land, what a sight!  We were enclosed in three walls of dead men!

All the other fences were pretty nearly filled with the living,

who were stealthily working their way forward through the wires.

The sudden glare paralyzed this host, petrified them, you may say,

with astonishment; there was just one instant for me to utilize

their immobility in, and I didn't lose the chance.  You see, in

another instant they would have recovered their faculties, then

they'd have burst into a cheer and made a rush, and my wires

would have gone down before it; but that lost instant lost them

their opportunity forever; while even that slight fragment of time

was still unspent, I shot the current through all the fences and

struck the whole host dead in their tracks!  _There_ was a groan

you could _hear_!  It voiced the death-pang of eleven thousand men.

It swelled out on the night with awful pathos.



A glance showed that the rest of the enemy--perhaps ten thousand

strong--were between us and the encircling ditch, and pressing

forward to the assault.  Consequently we had them _all!_ and had

them past help.  Time for the last act of the tragedy.  I fired

the three appointed revolver shots--which meant:



"Turn on the water!"



There was a sudden rush and roar, and in a minute the mountain

brook was raging through the big ditch and creating a river a

hundred feet wide and twenty-five deep.



"Stand to your guns, men!  Open fire!"



The thirteen gatlings began to vomit death into the fated ten

thousand.  They halted, they stood their ground a moment against

that withering deluge of fire, then they broke, faced about and

swept toward the ditch like chaff before a gale.  A full fourth

part of their force never reached the top of the lofty embankment;

the three-fourths reached it and plunged over--to death by drowning.



Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance

was totally annihilated, the campaign was ended, we fifty-four were

masters of England.  Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us.



But how treacherous is fortune!  In a little while--say an hour--

happened a thing, by my own fault, which--but I have no heart

to write that.  Let the record end here.







CHAPTER XLIV



A POSTSCRIPT BY CLARENCE



I, Clarence, must write it for him.  He proposed that we two

go out and see if any help could be accorded the wounded.  I was

strenuous against the project.  I said that if there were many,

we could do but little for them; and it would not be wise for us to

trust ourselves among them, anyway.  But he could seldom be turned

from a purpose once formed; so we shut off the electric current

from the fences, took an escort along, climbed over the enclosing

ramparts of dead knights, and moved out upon the field.  The first

wounded mall who appealed for help was sitting with his back

against a dead comrade.  When The Boss bent over him and spoke

to him, the man recognized him and stabbed him.  That knight was

Sir Meliagraunce, as I found out by tearing off his helmet.  He

will not ask for help any more.



We carried The Boss to the cave and gave his wound, which was

not very serious, the best care we could.  In this service we had

the help of Merlin, though we did not know it.  He was disguised

as a woman, and appeared to be a simple old peasant goodwife.

In this disguise, with brown-stained face and smooth shaven, he

had appeared a few days after The Boss was hurt and offered to cook

for us, saying her people had gone off to join certain new camps

which the enemy were forming, and that she was starving.  The Boss

had been getting along very well, and had amused himself with

finishing up his record.



We were glad to have this woman, for we were short handed.  We

were in a trap, you see--a trap of our own making.  If we stayed

where we were, our dead would kill us; if we moved out of our

defenses, we should no longer be invincible.  We had conquered;

in turn we were conquered.  The Boss recognized this; we all

recognized it.  If we could go to one of those new camps and

patch up some kind of terms with the enemy--yes, but The Boss

could not go, and neither could I, for I was among the first that

were made sick by the poisonous air bred by those dead thousands.

Others were taken down, and still others.  To-morrow--



_To-morrow._  It is here.  And with it the end.  About midnight

I awoke, and saw that hag making curious passes in the air about

The Boss's head and face, and wondered what it meant.  Everybody

but the dynamo-watch lay steeped in sleep; there was no sound.

The woman ceased from her mysterious foolery, and started tip-toeing

toward the door.  I called out:



"Stop!  What have you been doing?"



She halted, and said with an accent of malicious satisfaction:



"Ye were conquerors; ye are conquered!  These others are perishing--

you also.  Ye shall all die in this place--every one--except _him_.

He sleepeth now--and shall sleep thirteen centuries.  I am Merlin!"



Then such a delirium of silly laughter overtook him that he reeled

about like a drunken man, and presently fetched up against one

of our wires.  His mouth is spread open yet; apparently he is still

laughing.  I suppose the face will retain that petrified laugh until

the corpse turns to dust.



The Boss has never stirred--sleeps like a stone.  If he does not

wake to-day we shall understand what kind of a sleep it is, and

his body will then be borne to a place in one of the remote recesses

of the cave where none will ever find it to desecrate it.  As for

the rest of us--well, it is agreed that if any one of us ever

escapes alive from this place, he will write the fact here, and

loyally hide this Manuscript with The Boss, our dear good chief,

whose property it is, be he alive or dead.







THE END OF THE MANUSCRIPT











FINAL P.S. BY M.T.



The dawn was come when I laid the Manuscript aside.  The rain

had almost ceased, the world was gray and sad, the exhausted storm

was sighing and sobbing itself to rest.  I went to the stranger's

room, and listened at his door, which was slightly ajar.  I could

hear his voice, and so I knocked.  There was no answer, but I still

heard the voice.  I peeped in.  The man lay on his back in bed,

talking brokenly but with spirit, and punctuating with his arms,

which he thrashed about, restlessly, as sick people do in delirium.

I slipped in softly and bent over him.  His mutterings and

ejaculations went on.  I spoke--merely a word, to call his attention.

His glassy eyes and his ashy face were alight in an instant with

pleasure, gratitude, gladness, welcome:



"Oh, Sandy, you are come at last--how I have longed for you!  Sit

by me--do not leave me--never leave me again, Sandy, never again.

Where is your hand?--give it me, dear, let me hold it--there--

now all is well, all is peace, and I am happy again--_we_ are happy

again, isn't it so, Sandy?  You are so dim, so vague, you are but

a mist, a cloud, but you are _here_, and that is blessedness sufficient;

and I have your hand; don't take it away--it is for only a little

while, I shall not require it long....  Was that the child?...

Hello-Central!... she doesn't answer.  Asleep, perhaps?  Bring her

when she wakes, and let me touch her hands, her face, her hair,

and tell her good-bye....  Sandy!  Yes, you are there.  I lost

myself a moment, and I thought you were gone....  Have I been

sick long?  It must be so; it seems months to me.  And such dreams!

such strange and awful dreams, Sandy!  Dreams that were as real

as reality--delirium, of course, but _so_ real!  Why, I thought

the king was dead, I thought you were in Gaul and couldn't get

home, I thought there was a revolution; in the fantastic frenzy

of these dreams, I thought that Clarence and I and a handful of

my cadets fought and exterminated the whole chivalry of England!

But even that was not the strangest.  I seemed to be a creature

out of a remote unborn age, centuries hence, and even _that_ was

as real as the rest!  Yes, I seemed to have flown back out of that

age into this of ours, and then forward to it again, and was set

down, a stranger and forlorn in that strange England, with an

abyss of thirteen centuries yawning between me and you! between

me and my home and my friends! between me and all that is dear

to me, all that could make life worth the living!  It was awful--

awfuler than you can ever imagine, Sandy.  Ah, watch by me, Sandy--

stay by me every moment--_don't_ let me go out of my mind again;

death is nothing, let it come, but not with those dreams, not with

the torture of those hideous dreams--I cannot endure _that_ again....

Sandy?..."



He lay muttering incoherently some little time; then for a time he

lay silent, and apparently sinking away toward death.  Presently

his fingers began to pick busily at the coverlet, and by that sign

I knew that his end was at hand with the first suggestion of the

death-rattle in his throat he started up slightly, and seemed

to listen:  then he said:



"A bugle?...  It is the king!  The drawbridge, there!  Man the

battlements!--turn out the--"



He was getting up his last "effect"; but he never finished it.









End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

by Mark Twain













THE AMERICAN CLAIMANT



by Mark Twain







1892





EXPLANATORY



The Colonel Mulberry Sellers here re-introduced to the public is the same

person who appeared as Eschol Sellers in the first edition of the tale

entitled "The Gilded Age," years ago, and as Beriah Sellers in the

subsequent editions of the same book, and finally as Mulberry Sellers in

the drama played afterward by John T. Raymond.



The name was changed from Eschol to Beriah to accommodate an Eschol

Sellers who rose up out of the vasty deeps of uncharted space and

preferred his request--backed by threat of a libel suit--then went his

way appeased, and came no more.  In the play Beriah had to be dropped to

satisfy another member of the race, and Mulberry was substituted in the

hope that the objectors would be tired by that time and let it pass

unchallenged.  So far it has occupied the field in peace; therefore we

chance it again, feeling reasonably safe, this time, under shelter of the

statute of limitations.



MARK TWAIN.

Hartford, 1891.













THE WEATHER IN THIS BOOK.



No weather will be found in this book.  This is an attempt to pull a book

through without weather.  It being the first attempt of the kind in

fictitious literature, it may prove a failure, but it seemed worth the

while of some dare-devil person to try it, and the author was in just the

mood.



Many a reader who wanted to read a tale through was not able to do it

because of delays on account of the weather.  Nothing breaks up an

author's progress like having to stop every few pages to fuss-up the

weather.  Thus it is plain that persistent intrusions of weather are bad

for both reader and author.



Of course weather is necessary to a narrative of human experience.

That is conceded.  But it ought to be put where it will not be in the

way; where it will not interrupt the flow of the narrative.  And it ought

to be the ablest weather that can be had, not ignorant, poor-quality,

amateur weather.  Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand

can turn out a good article of it.  The present author can do only a few

trifling ordinary kinds of weather, and he cannot do those very good.

So it has seemed wisest to borrow such weather as is necessary for the

book from qualified and recognized experts-giving credit, of course.

This weather will be found over in the back part of the book, out of the

way.  See Appendix.  The reader is requested to turn over and help

himself from time to time as he goes along.









CHAPTER I.



It is a matchless morning in rural England.  On a fair hill we see a

majestic pile, the ivied walls and towers of Cholmondeley Castle, huge

relic and witness of the baronial grandeurs of the Middle Ages.  This is

one of the seats of the Earl of Rossmore, K. G. G. C. B. K. C. M. G.,

etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., who possesses twenty-two thousand acres of

English land, owns a parish in London with two thousand houses on its

lease-roll, and struggles comfortably along on an income of two hundred

thousand pounds a year.  The father and founder of this proud old line

was William the Conqueror his very self; the mother of it was not

inventoried in history by name, she being merely a random episode and

inconsequential, like the tanner's daughter of Falaise.



In a breakfast room of the castle on this breezy fine morning there are

two persons and the cooling remains of a deserted meal.  One of these

persons is the old lord, tall, erect, square-shouldered, white-haired,

stern-browed, a man who shows character in every feature, attitude, and

movement, and carries his seventy years as easily as most men carry

fifty.  The other person is his only son and heir, a dreamy-eyed young

fellow, who looks about twenty-six but is nearer thirty.  Candor,

kindliness, honesty, sincerity, simplicity, modesty--it is easy to see

that these are cardinal traits of his character; and so when you have

clothed him in the formidable components of his name, you somehow seem

to be contemplating a lamb in armor: his name and style being the

Honourable Kirkcudbright Llanover Marjorihanks Sellers Viscount-Berkeley,

of Cholmondeley Castle, Warwickshire.  (Pronounced K'koobry Thlanover

Marshbanks Sellers Vycount Barkly, of Chumly Castle, Warrikshr.) He is

standing by a great window, in an attitude suggestive of respectful

attention to what his father is saying and equally respectful dissent

from the positions and arguments offered.  The father walks the floor as

he talks, and his talk shows that his temper is away up toward summer

heat.



"Soft-spirited as you are, Berkeley, I am quite aware that when you have

once made up your mind to do a thing which your ideas of honor and

justice require you to do, argument and reason are (for the time being,)

wasted upon you--yes, and ridicule; persuasion, supplication, and command

as well.  To my mind--"



"Father, if you will look at it without prejudice, without passion, you

must concede that I am not doing a rash thing, a thoughtless, wilful

thing, with nothing substantial behind it to justify it.  I did not

create the American claimant to the earldom of Rossmore; I did not hunt

for him, did not find him, did not obtrude him upon your notice.

He found himself, he injected himself into our lives--"



"And has made mine a purgatory for ten years with his tiresome letters,

his wordy reasonings, his acres of tedious evidence,--"



"Which you would never read, would never consent to read.  Yet in common

fairness he was entitled to a hearing.  That hearing would either prove

he was the rightful earl--in which case our course would be plain--or it

would prove that he wasn't--in which case our course would be equally

plain.  I have read his evidences, my lord.  I have conned them well,

studied them patiently and thoroughly.  The chain seems to be complete,

no important link wanting.  I believe he is the rightful earl."



"And I a usurper--a--nameless pauper, a tramp!  Consider what you are

saying, sir."



"Father, if he is the rightful earl, would you, could you--that fact

being established--consent to keep his titles and his properties from him

a day, an hour, a minute?"



"You are talking nonsense--nonsense--lurid idiotcy!  Now, listen to me.

I will make a confession--if you wish to call it by that name.  I did not

read those evidences because I had no occasion to--I was made familiar

with them in, the time of this claimant's father and of my own father

forty years ago.  This fellow's predecessors have kept mine more or less

familiar with them for close upon a hundred and fifty years.  The truth

is, the rightful heir did go to America, with the Fairfax heir or about

the same time--but disappeared--somewhere in the, wilds of Virginia, got

married, end began to breed savages for the Claimant market; wrote no

letters home; was supposed to be dead; his younger brother softly took

possession; presently the American did die, and straightway his eldest

product put in his claim--by letter--letter still in existence--and died

before the uncle in-possession found time--or maybe inclination--to--

answer.  The infant son of that eldest product grew up--long interval,

you see--and he took to writing letters and furnishing evidences.  Well,

successor after successor has done the same, down to the present idiot.

It was a succession of paupers; not one of them was ever able to pay his

passage to England or institute suit.  The Fairfaxes kept their lordship

alive, and so they have never lost it to this day, although they live in

Maryland; their friend lost his by his own neglect.  You perceive now,

that the facts in this case bring us to precisely this result: morally

the American tramp is rightful earl of Rossmore; legally he has no more

right than his dog.  There now--are you satisfied?"



There was a pause, then the son glanced at the crest carved in the great

oaken mantel and said, with a regretful note in his voice:



"Since the introduction of heraldic symbols,--the motto of this house has

been 'Suum cuique'--to every man his own.  By your own intrepidly frank

confession, my lord, it is become a sarcasm: If Simon Lathers--"



Keep that exasperating name to yourself!  For ten years it has pestered

my eye--and tortured my ear; till at last my very footfalls time

themselves to the brain-racking rhythm of Simon Lathers!--Simon Lathers!

--Simon Lathers!  And now, to make its presence in my soul eternal,

immortal, imperishable, you have resolved to--to--what is it you have

resolved to do?"



"To go to Simon Lathers, in America, and change places with him."



"What?  Deliver the reversion of the earldom into his hands?"



"That is my purpose."



"Make this tremendous surrender without even trying the fantastic case in

the Lords?"



"Ye--s--" with hesitation and some embarrassment.



"By all that is amazing, I believe you are insane, my son.  See here

--have you been training with that ass again--that radical, if you prefer

the term, though the words are synonymous--Lord Tanzy, of Tollmache?"



The son did not reply, and the old lord continued:



"Yes, you confess.  That puppy, that shame to his birth and caste, who

holds all hereditary lordships and privilege to be usurpation, all

nobility a tinsel sham, all aristocratic institutions a fraud, all

inequalities in rank a legalized crime and an infamy, and no bread honest

bread that a man doesn't earn by his own work--work, pah!"--and the old

patrician brushed imaginary labor-dirt from his white hands.  "You have

come to hold just those opinions yourself, suppose,"--he added with a

sneer.



A faint flush in the younger man's cheek told that the shot had hit and

hurt; but he answered with dignity:



"I have.  I say it without shame--I feel none.  And now my reason for

resolving to renounce my heirship without resistance is explained.

I wish to retire from what to me is a false existence, a false position,

and begin my life over again--begin it right--begin it on the level of

mere manhood, unassisted by factitious aids, and succeed or fail by pure

merit or the want of it.  I will go to America, where all men are equal

and all have an equal chance; I will live or die, sink or swim, win or

lose as just a man--that alone, and not a single helping gaud or fiction

back of it."



"Hear, hear!"  The two men looked each other steadily in the eye a moment

or two, then the elder one added, musingly, "Ab-so-lutely

cra-zy-ab-solutely!  "After another silence, he said, as one who, long

troubled by clouds, detects a ray of sunshine," Well, there will be one

satisfaction--Simon Lathets will come here to enter into his own, and I

will drown him in the horsepond.  That poor devil--always so humble in

his letters, so pitiful, so deferential; so steeped in reverence for our

great line and lofty-station; so anxious to placate us, so prayerful for

recognition as a relative, a bearer in his veins of our sacred blood--

and withal so poor, so needy, so threadbare and pauper-shod as to

raiment, so despised, so laughed at for his silly claimantship by the

lewd American scum around him--ah, the vulgar, crawling, insufferable

tramp!  To read one of his cringing, nauseating letters--well?"



This to a splendid flunkey, all in inflamed plush and buttons and

knee-breeches as to his trunk, and a glinting white frost-work of

ground-glass paste as to his head, who stood with his heels together and

the upper half of him bent forward, a salver in his hands:



"The letters, my lord."



My lord took them, and the servant disappeared.



"Among the rest, an American letter.  From the tramp, of course.  Jove,

but here's a change!  No brown paper envelope this time, filched from a

shop, and carrying the shop's advertisement in the corner.  Oh, no, a

proper enough envelope--with a most ostentatiously broad mourning

border--for his cat, perhaps, since he was a bachelor--and fastened with

red wax--a batch of it as big as a half-crown--and--and--our crest for a

seal!--motto and all.  And the ignorant, sprawling hand is gone; he

sports a secretary, evidently--a secretary with a most confident swing

and flourish to his pen.  Oh indeed, our fortunes are improving over

there--our meek tramp has undergone a metamorphosis."



"Read it, my lord, please."



"Yes, this time I will.  For the sake of the cat:



                                        14,042 SIXTEENTH.  STREET,

                                        WASHINGTON, May 2.



It is my painful duty to announce to you that the head of our illustrious

house is no more--The Right Honourable, The Most Noble, The Most Puissant

Simon Lathers Lord Rossmore having departed this life ("Gone at last--

this is unspeakably precious news, my son,") at his seat in the environs

of the hamlet of Duffy's Corners in the grand old State of Arkansas,--

and his twin brother with him, both being crushed by a log at a

smoke-house-raising, owing to carelessness on the part of all present,

referable to over-confidence and gaiety induced by overplus of

sour-mash--("Extolled be sour-mash, whatever that may be, eh Berkeley?")

five days ago, with no scion of our ancient race present to close his

eyes and inter him with the honors due his historic name and lofty

rank-in fact, he is on the ice yet, him and his brother--friends took a

collection for it.  But I shall take immediate occasion to have their

noble remains shipped to you ("Great heavens!") for interment, with due

ceremonies and solemnities, in the family vault or mausoleum of our

house.  Meantime I shall put up a pair of hatchments on my house-front,

and you will of course do the same at your several seats.



I have also to remind you that by this sad disaster I as sole heir,

inherit and become seized of all the titles, honors, lands, and goods of

our lamented relative, and must of necessity, painful as the duty is,

shortly require at the bar of the Lords restitution of these dignities

and properties, now illegally enjoyed by your titular lordship.



With assurance of my distinguished consideration and warm cousinly

regard, I remain

                         Your titular lordship's



                                   Most obedient servant,

                              Mulberry Sellers Earl Rossmore.



"Im-mense!  Come, this one's interesting.  Why, Berkeley, his breezy

impudence is--is--why, it's colossal, it's sublime."



"No, this one doesn't seem to cringe much."



"Cringe--why, he doesn't know the meaning of the word.  Hatchments!  To

commemorate that sniveling tramp and his, fraternal duplicate.  And he is

going to send me the remains.  The late Claimant was a fool, but plainly

this new one's a maniac.  What a name!  Mulberry Sellers--there's music

for you, Simon Lathers--Mulberry Sellers--Mulberry Sellers--Simon

Lathers.  Sounds like machinery working and churning.  Simon Lathers,

Mulberry Sel--Are you going?"



"If I have your leave, father."



The old gentleman stood musing some time, after his son was gone.  This

was his thought:



"He is a good boy, and lovable.  Let him take his own course--as it would

profit nothing to oppose him--make things worse, in fact.  My arguments

and his aunt's persuasions have failed; let us see what America can do

for us.  Let us see what equality and hard-times can effect for the

mental health of a brain-sick young British lord.  Going to renounce his

lordship and be a man!  Yas!"









CHAPTER II.



COLONEL MULBERRY SELLERS--this was some days before he wrote his letter

to Lord Rossmore--was seated in his "library," which was also his

"drawing-room" and was also his "picture gallery" and likewise his

"work-shop."  Sometimes he called it by one of these names, sometimes by

another, according to occasion and circumstance.  He was constructing

what seemed to be some kind of a frail mechanical toy; and was apparently

very much interested in his work.  He was a white-headed man, now, but

otherwise he was as young, alert, buoyant, visionary and enterprising as

ever.  His loving old wife sat near by, contentedly knitting and

thinking, with a cat asleep in her lap.  The room was large, light, and

had a comfortable look, in fact a home-like look, though the furniture

was of a humble sort and not over abundant, and the knickknacks and

things that go to adorn a living-room not plenty and not costly.  But

there were natural flowers, and there was an abstract and unclassifiable

something about the place which betrayed the presence in the house of

somebody with a happy taste and an effective touch.



Even the deadly chromos on the walls were somehow without offence;

in fact they seemed to belong there and to add an attraction to the room-

-a fascination, anyway; for whoever got his eye on one of them was like

to gaze and suffer till he died--you have seen that kind of pictures.

Some of these terrors were landscapes, some libeled the sea, some were

ostensible portraits, all were crimes.  All the portraits were

recognizable as dead Americans of distinction, and yet, through labeling

added, by a daring hand, they were all doing duty here as "Earls of

Rossmore."  The newest one had left the works as Andrew Jackson, but was

doing its best now, as "Simon Lathers Lord Rossmore, Present Earl."

On one wall was a cheap old railroad map of Warwickshire.  This had been

newly labeled "The Rossmore Estates."  On the opposite, wall was another

map, and this was the most imposing decoration of the establishment and

the first to catch a stranger's attention, because of its great size.

It had once borne simply the title SIBERIA; but now the word "FUTURE" had

been written in front of that word.  There were other additions, in red

ink--many cities, with great populations set down, scattered over the

vast-country at points where neither cities nor populations exist to-day.

One of these cities, with population placed at 1,500,000, bore the name

"Libertyorloffskoizalinski," and there was a still more populous one,

centrally located and marked "Capital," which bore the name

"Freedomolovnaivanovich."



The "mansion"--the Colonel's usual name for the house--was a rickety old

two-story frame of considerable size, which had been painted, some time

or other, but had nearly forgotten it.  It was away out in the ragged

edge of Washington and had once been somebody's country place.  It had a

neglected yard around it, with a paling fence that needed straightening

up, in places, and a gate that would stay shut.  By the door-post were

several modest tin signs.  "Col. Mulberry Sellers, Attorney at Law and

Claim Agent," was the principal one.  One learned from the others that

the Colonel was a Materializer, a Hypnotizer, a Mind-Cure dabbler; and so

on.  For he was a man who could always find things to do.



A white-headed negro man, with spectacles and damaged white cotton gloves

appeared in the presence, made a stately obeisance and announced:



"Marse Washington Hawkins, suh."



"Great Scott!  Show him in, Dan'l, show him in."



The Colonel and his wife were on their feet in a moment, and the next

moment were joyfully wringing the hands of a stoutish, discouraged-

looking man whose general aspect suggested that he was fifty years old,

but whose hair swore to a hundred.



"Well, well, well, Washington, my boy, it is good to look at you again.

Sit down, sit down, and make yourself at home.  There, now--why, you look

perfectly natural; aging a little, just a little, but you'd have known

him anywhere, wouldn't you, Polly?"



"Oh, yes, Berry, he's just like his pa would have looked if he'd lived.

Dear, dear, where have you dropped from?  Let me see, how long is it

since--"



I should say it's all of fifteen` years, Mrs.  Sellers."



"Well, well, how time does get away with us.  Yes, and oh, the changes

that--"



There was a sudden catch of her voice and a trembling of the lip, the men

waiting reverently for her to, get command of herself and go on; but

after a little struggle she turned away, with her apron to her eyes, and

softly disappeared..



"Seeing you made her think of the children, poor thing--dear, dear,

they're all dead but the youngest.



"But banish care, it's no time for it now--on with the dance, let joy be

unconfined is my motto, whether there's any dance to dance; or any joy to

unconfine--you'll be the healthier for it every time,--every time,

Washington--it's my experience, and I've seen a good deal of this world.

Come--where have you disappeared to all these years, and are you from

there, now, or where are you from?"



"I don't quite think you would ever guess, Colonel.  Cherokee Strip."



"My land!"



"Sure as you live."



"You can't mean it.  Actually living out there?"



"Well, yes, if a body may call it that; though it's a pretty strong term

for 'dobies and jackass rabbits, boiled beans and slap-jacks, depression,

withered hopes, poverty in all its varieties--"



"Louise out there?"



"Yes, and the children."



"Out there now?"



"Yes, I couldn't afford to bring them with me."



"Oh, I see,--you had to come--claim against the government.  Make

yourself perfectly easy--I'll take care of that."



"But it isn't a claim against the government."



"No?  Want to be postmaster?  That's all right.  Leave it to me.  I'll

fix it."



"But it isn't postmaster--you're all astray yet."



"Well, good gracious, Washington, why don't you come out and tell me what

it is?  What, do you want to be so reserved and distrustful with an old

friend like me, for?  Don't you reckon I can keep a se--'



"There's no secret about it--you merely don't give me a chance to--"



"Now look here, old friend, I know the human race; and I know that when a

man comes to Washington, I don't care if it's from heaven, let alone

Cherokee-Strip, it's because he wants something.  And I know that as a

rule he's not going to get it; that he'll stay and try--for another thing

and won't get that; the same luck with the next and the next and the

next; and keeps on till he strikes bottom, and is too poor and ashamed to

go back, even to Cherokee Strip; and at last his heart breaks--and they

take up a collection and bury him.  There--don't interrupt me, I know

what I'm talking about.  Happy and prosperous in the Far West wasn't I?

You know that.  Principal citizen of Hawkeye, looked up to by everybody,

kind of an autocrat, actually a kind of an autocrat, Washington.  Well,

nothing would do but I must go Minister to St. James, the Governor and

everybody insisting, you know, and so at last I consented--no getting out

of it, had to do it, so here I came.  A day too late, Washington.  Think

of that--what little things change the world's history--yes, sir, the

place had been filled.  Well, there I was, you see.  I offered to

compromise and go to Paris.  The President was very sorry and all that,

but that place, you see, didn't belong to the West, so there I was again.

There was no help for it, so I had to stoop a little--we all reach the

day some time or other when we've got to do that, Washington, and it's

not a bad thing for us, either, take it by and large and all around--

I had to stoop a little and offer to take Constantinople.  Washington,

consider this--for it's perfectly true--within a month I asked for China;

within another month I begged for Japan; one year later I was away down,

down, down, supplicating with tears and anguish for the bottom office in

the gift of the government of the United States--Flint-Picker in the

cellars of the War Department.  And by George I didn't get it."



"Flint-Picker?"



"Yes.  Office established in the time of the Revolution, last century.

The musket-flints for the military posts were supplied from the capitol.

They do it yet; for although the flint-arm has gone out and the forts

have tumbled down, the decree hasn't been repealed--been overlooked and

forgotten, you see--and so the vacancies where old Ticonderoga and others

used to stand, still get their six quarts of gun-flints a year just the

same."



Washington said musingly after a pause:



"How strange it seems--to start for Minister to England at twenty

thousand a year and fail for flintpicker at--"



"Three dollars a week.  It's human life, Washington--just an epitome of

human ambition, and struggle, and the outcome: you aim for the palace and

get drowned in the sewer."



There was another meditative silence.  Then Washington said, with earnest

compassion in his voice--



"And so, after coming here, against your inclination, to satisfy your

sense of patriotic duty and appease a selfish public clamor, you get

absolutely nothing for it."



"Nothing?"  The Colonel had to get up and stand, to get room for his

amazement to expand.  "Nothing, Washington?  I ask you this: to be a

perpetual Member and the only Perpetual Member of a Diplomatic Body

accredited to the greatest country on earth do you call that nothing?"



It was Washington's turn to be amazed.  He was stricken dumb; but the

wide-eyed wonder, the reverent admiration expressed in his face were more

eloquent than any words could have been.  The Colonel's wounded spirit

was healed and he resumed his seat pleased and content.  He leaned

forward and said impressively:



"What was due to a man who had become forever conspicuous by an

experience without precedent in the history of the world?--a man made

permanently and diplomatically sacred, so to speak, by having been

connected, temporarily, through solicitation, with every single

diplomatic post in the roster of this government, from Envoy

Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James all

the way down to Consul to a guano rock in the Straits of Sunda--salary

payable in guano--which disappeared by volcanic convulsion the day before

they got down to my name in the list of applicants.  Certainly something

august enough to be answerable to the size of this unique and memorable

experience was my due, and I got it.  By the common voice of this

community, by acclamation of the people, that mighty, utterance which

brushes aside laws and legislation, and from whose decrees there is no

appeal, I was named Perpetual Member of the Diplomatic Body representing

the multifarious sovereignties and civilizations of the globe near the

republican court of the United States of America.  And they brought me

home with a torchlight procession."



"It is wonderful, Colonel, simply wonderful."



"It's the loftiest official position in the whole earth."



"I should think so-and the most commanding."



"You have named the word.  Think of it.  I frown, and there is war; I

smile, and contending nations lay down their arms."



"It is awful.  The responsibility, I mean."



"It is nothing.  Responsibility is no burden to me; I am used to it; have

always been used to it."



"And the work--the work!  Do you have to attend all the sittings?"



"Who, I?  Does the Emperor of Russia attend the conclaves of the

governors of the provinces?  He sits at home, and indicates his

pleasure."



Washington was silent a moment, then a deep sigh escaped him.



"How proud I was an hour ago; how paltry seems my little promotion now!

Colonel, the reason I came to Washington is,--I am Congressional Delegate

from Cherokee Strip!"



The Colonel sprang to his feet and broke out with prodigious enthusiasm:



"Give me your hand, my boy--this is immense news!  I congratulate you

with all my heart.  My prophecies stand confirmed.  I always said it was

in you.  I always said you were born for high distinction and would

achieve it.  You ask Polly if I didn't."



Washington was dazed by this most unexpected demonstration.



"Why, Colonel, there's nothing to it.  That little narrow, desolate,

unpeopled, oblong streak of grass and gravel, lost in the remote wastes

of the vast continent--why, it's like representing a billiard table--a

discarded one."



"Tut-tut, it's a great, it's a staving preferment, and just opulent with

influence here."



"Shucks, Colonel, I haven't even a vote."



"That's nothing; you can make speeches."



"No, I can't.  The population's only two, hundred--"



"That's all right, that's all right--"



"And they hadn't any right to elect me; we're not even a territory,

there's no Organic Act, the government hasn't any official knowledge of

us whatever."



"Never mind about that; I'll fix that.  I'll rush the thing through, I'll

get you organized in no time."



"Will you, Colonel?--it's too good of you; but it's just your old

sterling self, the same old ever-faithful friend," and the grateful tears

welled up in Washington's eyes.



"It's just as good as done, my boy, just as good as done.  Shake hands.

We'll hitch teams together, you and I, and we'll make things hum!"







CHAPTER III.



Mrs. Sellers returned, now, with her composure restored, and began to ask

after Hawkins's wife, and about his children, and the number of them, and

so on, and her examination of the witness resulted in a circumstantial

history of the family's ups and downs and driftings to and fro in the far

West during the previous fifteen years.  There was a message, now, from

out back, and Colonel Sellers went out there in answer to it.  Hawkins

took this opportunity to ask how the world had been using the Colonel

during the past half-generation.



"Oh, it's been using him just the same; it couldn't change its way of

using him if it wanted to, for he wouldn't let it."



"I can easily believe that, Mrs.  Sellers."



"Yes, you see, he doesn't change, himself--not the least little bit in

the world--he's always Mulberry Sellers."



"I can see that plain enough."



"Just the same old scheming, generous, good-hearted, moonshiny, hopeful,

no-account failure he always was, and still everybody likes him just as

well as if he was the shiningest success."



"They always did: and it was natural, because he was so obliging and

accommodating, and had something about him that made it kind of easy to

ask help of him, or favors--you didn't feel shy, you know, or have that

wish--you--didn't--have--to--try feeling that you have with other

people."



"It's just so, yet; and a body wonders at it, too, because he's been

shamefully treated, many times, by people that had used him for a ladder

to climb up by, and then kicked him down when they didn't need him any

more.  For a time you can see he's hurt, his pride's wounded, because he

shrinks away from that thing and don't want to talk about it--and so I

used to think now he's learned something and he'll be more careful

hereafter--but laws! in a couple of weeks he's forgotten all about it,

and any selfish tramp out of nobody knows where can come and put up a

poor mouth and walk right into his heart with his boots on."



"It must try your patience pretty sharply sometimes."



"Oh, no, I'm used to it; and I'd rather have him so than the other way.

When I call him a failure, I mean to the world he's a failure; he isn't

to me.  I don't know as I want him different much different, anyway.

I have to scold him some, snarl at him, you might even call it, but I

reckon I'd do that just the same, if he was different--it's my make.

But I'm a good deal less snarly and more contented when he's a failure

than I am when he isn't."



"Then he isn't always a failure," said Hawking, brightening.



"Him?  Oh, bless you, no.  He makes a strike, as he calls it, from time

to time.  Then's my time to fret and fuss.  For the money just flies--

first come first served.  Straight off, he loads up the house with

cripples and idiots and stray cats and all the different kinds of poor

wrecks that other people don't want and he does, and then when the

poverty comes again I've got to clear the most of them out or we'd

starve; and that distresses him, and me the same, of course.



"Here's old Dan'l and old Jinny, that the sheriff sold south one of the

times that we got bankrupted before the war--they came wandering back

after the peace, worn out and used up on the cotton plantations,

helpless, and not another lick of work left in their old hides for the

rest of this earthly pilgrimage--and we so pinched, oh so pinched for the

very crumbs to keep life in us, and he just flung the door wide, and the

way he received them you'd have thought they had come straight down from

heaven in answer to prayer.  I took him one side and said, 'Mulberry we

can't have them--we've nothing for ourselves--we can't feed them.'

He looked at me kind of hurt, and said, 'Turn them out?--and they've come

to me just as confident and trusting as--as--why Polly, I must have

bought that confidence sometime or other a long time ago, and given my

note, so to speak--you don't get such things as a gift--and how am I

going to go back on a debt like that?  And you see, they're so poor,

and old, and friendless, and--But I was ashamed by that time, and shut

him off, and somehow felt a new courage in me, and so I said, softly,

'We'll keep them--the Lord will provide.'  He was glad, and started to

blurt out one of those over-confident speeches of his, but checked

himself in time, and said humbly, 'I will, anyway.'  It was years and

years and years ago.  Well, you see those old wrecks are here yet."



"But don't they do your housework?"



"Laws!  The idea.  They would if they could, poor old things, and perhaps

they think they do do some of it.  But it's a superstition.  Dan'l waits

on the front door, and sometimes goes on an errand; and sometimes you'll

see one or both of them letting on to dust around in here--but that's

because there's something they want to hear about and mix their gabble

into.  And they're always around at meals, for the same reason.  But the

fact is, we have to keep a young negro girl just to take care of them,

and a negro woman to do the housework and help take care of them."



"Well, they ought to be tolerably happy, I should think.



"It's no name for it.  They quarrel together pretty much all the time--

most always about religion, because Dan'l's a Dunker Baptist and Jinny's

a shouting Methodist, and Jinny believes in special Providences and Dan'l

don't, because he thinks he's a kind of a free-thinker--and they play and

sing plantation hymns together, and talk and chatter just eternally and

forever, and are sincerely fond of each other and think the world of

Mulberry, and he puts up patiently with all their spoiled ways and

foolishness, and so-ah, well, they're happy enough if it comes to that.

And I don't mind--I've got used to it.  I can get used to anything, with

Mulberry to help; and the fact is, I don't much care what happens, so

long as he's spared to me."



"Well, here's to him, and hoping he'll make another strike soon."



"And rake in the lame, the halt and the blind, and turn the house into a

hospital again?  It's what he would do.  I've seen aplenty of that and

more.  No, Washington, I want his strikes to be mighty moderate ones the

rest of the way down the vale."



"Well, then, big strike or little strike, or no strike at all, here's

hoping he'll never lack for friends--and I don't reckon he ever will

while there's people around who know enough to--"



"Him lack for friends!" and she tilted her head up with a frank pride--

"why, Washington, you can't name a man that's anybody that isn't fond of

him.  I'll tell you privately, that I've had Satan's own time to keep

them from appointing him to some office or other.  They knew he'd no

business with an office, just as well as I did, but he's the hardest man

to refuse anything to, a body ever saw.  Mulberry Sellers with an office!

laws goodness, you know what that would be like.  Why, they'd come from

the ends of the earth to see a circus like that.  I'd just as lieves be

married to Niagara Falls, and done with it."  After a reflective pause

she added--having wandered back, in the interval, to the remark that had

been her text: "Friends?--oh, indeed, no man ever had more; and such

friends: Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Johnston, Longstreet, Lee--many's the

time they've sat in that chair you're sitting in--" Hawkins was out of it

instantly, and contemplating it with a reverential surprise, and with the

awed sense of having trodden shod upon holy ground--



"They!" he said.



"Oh, indeed, yes, a many and a many a time."



He continued to gaze at the chair fascinated, magnetized; and for once in

his life that continental stretch of dry prairie which stood for his

imagination was afire, and across it was marching a slanting flamefront

that joined its wide horizons together and smothered the skies with

smoke.  He was experiencing what one or another drowsing, geographically

ignorant alien experiences every day in the year when he turns a dull and

indifferent eye out of the car window and it falls upon a certain

station-sign which reads "Stratford -on-Avon!" Mrs.  Sellers went

gossiping comfortably along:



"Oh, they like to hear him talk, especially if their load is getting

rather heavy on one shoulder and they want to shift it.  He's all air,

you know,--breeze, you may say--and he freshens them up; it's a trip to

the country, they say.  Many a time he's made General Grant laugh--and

that's a tidy job, I can tell you, and as for Sheridan, his eye lights up

and he listens to Mulberry Sellers the same as if he was artillery.

You see, the charm about Mulberry is, he is so catholic and unprejudiced

that he fits in anywhere and everywhere.  It makes him powerful good

company, and as popular as scandal.  You go to the White House when the

President's holding a general reception--sometime when Mulberry's there.

Why, dear me, you can't tell which of them it is that's holding that

reception."



"Well, he certainly is a remarkable man--and he always was.  Is he

religious?"



"Clear to his marrow--does more thinking and reading on that subject than

any other except Russia and Siberia: thrashes around over the whole

field, too; nothing bigoted about him."



"What is his religion?"



"He--" She stopped, and was lost for a moment or two in thinking, then

she said, with simplicity, "I think he was a Mohammedan or something last

week."



Washington started down town, now, to bring his trunk, for the hospitable

Sellerses would listen to no excuses; their house must be his home during

the session.  The Colonel returned presently and resumed work upon his

plaything.  It was finished when Washington got back.



"There it is," said the Colonel, "all finished."



"What is it for, Colonel?"



"Oh, it's just a trifle.  Toy to amuse the children."



Washington examined it.



"It seems to be a puzzle."



"Yes, that's what it is.  I call it Pigs in the Clover.  Put them in--see

if you can put them in the pen."



After many failures Washington succeeded, and was as pleased as a child.



"It's wonderfully ingenious, Colonel, it's ever so clever and

interesting--why, I could play with it all day.  What are you going to do

with it?"



"Oh, nothing.  Patent it and throw it aside."



"Don't you do anything of the kind.  There's money in that thing."



A compassionate look traveled over the Colonel's countenance, and he

said:



"Money--yes; pin money: a couple of hundred thousand, perhaps.  Not

more."



Washington's eyes blazed.



"A couple of hundred thousand dollars!  do you call that pin money?"



The colonel rose and tip-toed his way across the room, closed a door that

was slightly ajar, tip-toed his way to his seat again, and said, under

his breath:



"You can keep a secret?"



Washington nodded his affirmative, he was too awed to speak.



"You have heard of materialization-materialization of departed spirits?"



Washington had heard of it.



"And probably didn't believe in it; and quite right, too.  The thing as

practised by ignorant charlatans is unworthy of attention or respect-

where there's a dim light and a dark cabinet, and a parcel of sentimental

gulls gathered together, with their faith and their shudders and their

tears all ready, and one and the same fatty degeneration of protoplasm

and humbug comes out and materializes himself into anybody you want,

grandmother, grandchild, brother-in-law, Witch of Endor, John Milton,

Siamese twins, Peter the Great, and all such frantic nonsense--no, that

is all foolish and pitiful.  But when a man that is competent brings the

vast powers of science to bear, it's a different matter, a totally

different matter, you see.  The spectre that answers that call has come

to stay.  Do you note the commercial value of that detail?"



"Well, I--the--the truth is, that I don't quite know that I do.  Do you

mean that such, being permanent, not transitory, would give more general

satisfaction, and so enhance the price--of tickets to the show--"



"Show?  Folly--listen to me; and get a good grip on your breath, for you

are going to need it.  Within three days I shall have completed my

method, and then--let the world stand aghast, for it shall see marvels.

Washington, within three days--ten at the outside--you shall see me call

the dead of any century, and they will arise and walk.  Walk?--they shall

walk forever, and never die again.  Walk with all the muscle and spring

of their pristine vigor."



"Colonel!  Indeed it does take one's breath away."



"Now do you see the money that's in it?"



"I'm--well, I'm--not really sure that I do."



Great Scott, look here.  I shall have a monopoly; they'll all belong to

me, won't they?  Two thousand policemen in the city of New York.  Wages,

four dollars a day.  I'll replace them with dead ones at half the money.



"Oh, prodigious!  I never thought of that.  F-o-u-r thousand dollars a

day.  Now I do begin to see!  But will dead policemen answer?"



"Haven't they--up to this time?"



"Well, if you put it that way--"



"Put it any way you want to.  Modify it to suit yourself, and my lads

shall still be superior.  They won't eat, they won't drink--don't need

those things; they won't wink for cash at gambling dens and unlicensed

rum-holes, they won't spark the scullery maids; and moreover the bands of

toughs that ambuscade them on lonely beats, and cowardly shoot and knife

them will only damage the uniforms and not live long enough to get more

than a momentary satisfaction out of that."



"Why, Colonel, if you can furnish policemen, then of course--"



"Certainly--I can furnish any line of goods that's wanted.  Take the

army, for instance--now twenty-five thousand men; expense, twenty-two

millions a year.  I will dig up the Romans, I will resurrect the Greeks,

I will furnish the government, for ten millions a year, ten thousand

veterans drawn from the victorious legions of all the ages--soldiers that

will chase Indians year in and year out on materialized horses, and cost

never a cent for rations or repairs.  The armies of Europe cost two

billions a year now--I will replace them all for a billion.  I will dig

up the trained statesmen of all ages and all climes, and furnish this

country with a Congress that knows enough to come in out of the rain--

a thing that's never happened yet, since the Declaration of Independence,

and never will happen till these practically dead people are replaced

with the genuine article.  I will restock the thrones of Europe with the

best brains and the best morals that all the royal sepulchres of all the

centuries can furnish--which isn't promising very much--and I'll divide

the wages and the civil list, fair and square, merely taking my half

and--"



"Colonel, if the half of this is true, there's millions in it--millions."



"Billions in it--billions; that's what you mean.  Why, look here; the

thing is so close at hand, so imminent, so absolutely immediate, that if

a man were to come to me now and say, Colonel, I am a little short, and

if you could lend me a couple of billion dollars for--come in!"



This in answer to a knock.  An energetic looking man bustled in with a

big pocket-book in his hand, took a paper from it and presented it, with

the curt remark:



"Seventeenth and last call--you want to out with that three dollars and

forty cents this time without fail, Colonel Mulberry Sellers."



The Colonel began to slap this pocket and that one, and feel here and

there and everywhere, muttering:



"What have I done with that wallet?--let me see--um--not here, not there

--Oh, I must have left it in the kitchen; I'll just run and--"



"No you won't--you'll stay right where you are.  And you're going to

disgorge, too--this time."



Washington innocently offered to go and look.  When he was gone the

Colonel said:



"The fact is, I've got to throw myself on your indulgence just this once

more, Suggs; you see the remittances I was expecting--"



"Hang the remittances--it's too stale--it won't answer.  Come!"



The Colonel glanced about him in despair.  Then his face lighted; he ran

to the wall and began to dust off a peculiarly atrocious chromo with his

handkerchief.  Then he brought it reverently, offered it to the

collector, averted his face and said:



"Take it, but don't let me see it go.  It's the sole remaining Rembrandt

that--"



"Rembrandt be damned, it's a chromo."



"Oh, don't speak of it so, I beg you.  It's the only really great

original, the only supreme example of that mighty school of art which--"



"Art!  It's the sickest looking thing I--"



The colonel was already bringing another horror and tenderly dusting it.



"Take this one too--the gem of my collection--the only genuine Fra

Angelico that--"



"Illuminated liver--pad, that's what it is.  Give it here--good day--

people will think I've robbed a' nigger barber-shop."



As he slammed the door behind him the Colonel shouted with an anguished

accent--



"Do please cover them up--don't let the damp get at them.  The delicate

tints in the Angelico--"



But the man was gone.



Washington re-appeared and said he had looked everywhere, and so had Mrs.

Sellers and the servants, but in vain; and went on to say he wished he

could get his eye on a certain man about this time--no need to hunt up

that pocket-book then.  The Colonel's interest was awake at once.



"What man?"



"One-armed Pete they call him out there--out in the Cherokee country I

mean.  Robbed the bank in Tahlequah."



"Do they have banks in Tahlequah?"



"Yes--a bank, anyway.  He was suspected of robbing it.  Whoever did it

got away with more than twenty thousand dollars.  They offered a reward

of five thousand.  I believe I saw that very man, on my way east."



"No--is that so?



"I certainly saw a man on the train, the first day I struck the railroad,

that answered the description pretty exactly--at least as to clothes and

a lacking arm."



"Why don't you get him arrested and claim the reward?"



"I couldn't.  I had to get a requisition, of course.  But I meant to stay

by him till I got my chance."



"Well?"



"Well, he left the train during the night some time."



"Oh, hang it, that's too bad."



"Not so very bad, either."



"Why?"



"Because he came down to Baltimore in the very train I was in, though I

didn't know it in time.  As we moved out of the station I saw him going

toward the iron gate with a satchel in his hand."



"Good; we'll catch him.  Let's lay a plan."



"Send description to the Baltimore police?"



"Why, what are you talking about?  No.  Do you want them to get the

reward?"



"What shall we do, then?"



The Colonel reflected.



"I'll tell you.  Put a personal in the Baltimore Sun.  Word it like this:



     "A. DROP ME A LINE, PETE."



"Hold on.  Which arm has he lost?"



"The right."



"Good.  Now then--



"A. DROP ME A LINE, PETE, EVEN IF YOU HAVE to write with your left hand.

Address X. Y. Z., General Postoffice, Washington.  From YOU KNOW WHO."



"There--that'll fetch him."



"But he won't know who--will he?"



"No, but he'll want to know, won't he?"



"Why, certainly--I didn't think of that.  What made you think of it?"



"Knowledge of human curiosity.  Strong trait, very strong trait."



"Now I'll go to my room and write it out and enclose a dollar and tell

them to print it to the worth of that."









CHAPTER IV.



The day wore itself out.  After dinner the two friends put in a long and

harassing evening trying to decide what to do with the five thousand

dollars reward which they were going to get when they should find One-

Armed Pete, and catch him, and prove him to be the right person, and

extradite him, and ship him to Tahlequah in the Indian Territory.  But

there were so many dazzling openings for ready cash that they found it

impossible to make up their minds and keep them made up.  Finally, Mrs.

Sellers grew very weary of it all, and said:



"What is the sense in cooking a rabbit before it's caught?"



Then the matter was dropped, for the time being, and all went to bed.

Next morning, being persuaded by Hawkins, the colonel made drawings and

specifications and went down and applied for a patent for his toy puzzle,

and Hawkins took the toy itself and started out to see what chance there

might be to do something with it commercially.  He did not have to go

far.  In a small old wooden shanty which had once been occupied as a

dwelling by some humble negro family he found a keen-eyed Yankee engaged

in repairing cheap chairs and other second-hand furniture.  This man

examined the toy indifferently; attempted to do the puzzle; found it not

so easy as he had expected; grew more interested, and finally

emphatically so; achieved a success at last, and asked:



"Is it patented?"



"Patent applied for."



"That will answer.  What do you want for it?"



"What will it retail for?"



"Well, twenty-five cents, I should think."



"What will you give for the exclusive right?"



"I couldn't give twenty dollars, if I had to pay cash down; but I'll tell

you what I'll do. I'll make it and market it, and pay you five cents

royalty on each one."



Washington sighed.  Another dream disappeared; no money in the thing.

So he said:



"All right, take it at that.  Draw me a paper."  He went his way with the

paper, and dropped the matter out of his mind dropped it out to make room

for further attempts to think out the most promising way to invest his

half of the reward, in case a partnership investment satisfactory to both

beneficiaries could not be hit upon.



He had not been very long at home when Sellers arrived sodden with grief

and booming with glad excitement--working both these emotions

successfully, sometimes separately, sometimes together.  He fell on

Hawkins's neck sobbing, and said:



"Oh, mourn with me my friend, mourn for my desolate house: death has

smitten my last kinsman and I am Earl of Rossmore--congratulate me!"



He turned to his wife, who had entered while this was going on, put his

arms about her and said--"You will bear up, for my sake, my lady--it had

to happen, it was decreed."



She bore up very well, and said:



"It's no great loss.  Simon Lathers was a poor well-meaning useless thing

and no account, and his brother never was worth shucks."



The rightful earl continued:



"I am too much prostrated by these conflicting griefs and joys to be able

to concentrate my mind upon affairs; I will ask our good friend here to

break the news by wire or post to the Lady Gwendolen and instruct her

to--"



"What Lady Gwendolen?"



"Our poor daughter, who, alas!--"



"Sally Sellers?  Mulberry Sellers, are you losing your mind?"



"There-please do not forget who you are, and who I am; remember your own

dignity, be considerate also of mine.  It were best to cease from using

my family name, now, Lady Rossmore."



"Goodness gracious, well, I never!  What am I to call you then?"



"In private, the ordinary terms of endearment will still be admissible,

to some degree; but in public it will be more becoming if your ladyship

will speak to me as my lord, or your lordship, and of me as Rossmore, or

the Earl, or his Lordship, and--"



"Oh, scat!  I can't ever do it, Berry."



"But indeed you must, my love--we must live up to our altered position

and submit with what grace we may to its requirements."



"Well, all right, have it your own way; I've never set my wishes against

your commands yet, Mul--my lord, and it's late to begin now, though to my

mind it's the rottenest foolishness that ever was."



"Spoken like my own true wife!  There, kiss and be friends again."



"But-Gwendolen!  I don't know how I am ever going to stand that name.

Why, a body wouldn't know Sally Sellers in it.  It's too large for her;

kind of like a cherub in an ulster, and it's a most outlandish sort of a

name, anyway, to my mind."



"You'll not hear her find fault with it, my lady."



"That's a true word.  She takes to any kind of romantic rubbish like she

was born to it.  She never got it from me, that's sure.  And sending her

to that silly college hasn't helped the matter any--just the other way.



"Now hear her, Hawkins!  Rowena-Ivanhoe College is the selectest and most

aristocratic seat of learning for young ladies in our country.  Under no

circumstances can a girl get in there unless she is either very rich and

fashionable or can prove four generations of what may be called American

nobility.  Castellated college-buildings--towers and turrets and an

imitation moat--and everything about the place named out of Sir Walter

Scott's books and redolent of royalty and state and style; and all the

richest girls keep phaetons, and coachmen in livery, and riding-horses,

with English grooms in plug hats and tight-buttoned coats, and top-boots,

and a whip-handle without any whip to it, to ride sixty-three feet behind

them--"



"And they don't learn a blessed thing, Washington Hawkins, not a single

blessed thing but showy rubbish and un-american pretentiousness.  But

send for the Lady Gwendolen--do; for I reckon the peerage regulations

require that she must come home and let on to go into seclusion and mourn

for those Arkansas blatherskites she's lost."



"My darling!  Blatherskites?  Remember--noblesse oblige."



"There, there--talk to me in your own tongue, Ross--you don't know any

other, and you only botch it when you try.  Oh, don't stare--it was a

slip, and no crime; customs of a life-time can't be dropped in a second.

Rossmore--there, now, be appeased, and go along with you and attend to

Gwendolen.  Are you going to write, Washington?--or telegraph?"



"He will telegraph, dear."



"I thought as much," my lady muttered, as she left the room.  "Wants it

so the address will have to appear on the envelop.  It will just make a

fool of that child.  She'll get it, of course, for if there are any other

Sellerses there they'll not be able to claim it.  And just leave her

alone to show it around and make the most of it.  Well, maybe she's

forgivable for that.  She's so poor and they're so rich, of course she's

had her share of snubs from the livery-flunkey sort, and I reckon it's

only human to want to get even."



Uncle Dan'l was sent with the telegram; for although a conspicuous object

in a corner of the drawing-room was a telephone hanging on a transmitter,

Washington found all attempts to raise the central office vain.  The

Colonel grumbled something about its being "always out of order when

you've got particular and especial use for it,"  but he didn't explain

that one of the reasons for this was that the thing was only a dummy and

hadn't any wire attached to it.  And yet the Colonel often used it--when

visitors were present--and seemed to get messages through it.  Mourning

paper and a seal were ordered, then the friends took a rest.



Next afternoon, while Hawkins, by request, draped Andrew Jackson's

portrait with crape, the rightful earl, wrote off the family bereavement

to the usurper in England--a letter which we have already read.  He also,

by letter to the village authorities at Duffy's Corners, Arkansas, gave

order that the remains of the late twins be embalmed by some St. Louis

expert and shipped at once to the usurper--with bill.  Then he drafted

out the Rossmore arms and motto on a great sheet of brown paper, and he

and Hawkins took it to Hawkins's Yankee furniture-mender and at the end

of an hour came back with a couple of stunning hatchments, which they

nailed up on the front of the house--attractions calculated to draw, and

they did; for it was mainly an idle and shiftless negro neighborhood,

with plenty of ragged children and indolent dogs to spare for a point of

interest like that, and keep on sparing them for it, days and days

together.



The new earl found-without surprise--this society item in the evening

paper, and cut it out and scrapbooked it:



     By a recent bereavement our esteemed fellow citizen, Colonel

     Mulberry Sellers, Perpetual Member-at-large of the Diplomatic Body,

     succeeds, as rightful lord, to the great earldom of Rossmore, third

     by order of precedence in the earldoms of Great Britain, and will

     take early measures, by suit in the House of Lords, to wrest the

     title and estates from the present usurping holder of them.  Until

     the season of mourning is past, the usual Thursday evening

     receptions at Rossmore Towers will be discontinued.



Lady Rossmore's comment-to herself:



"Receptions!  People who don't rightly know him may think he is

commonplace, but to my mind he is one of the most unusual men I ever saw.

As for suddenness and capacity in imagining things, his beat don't exist,

I reckon.  As like as not it wouldn't have occurred to anybody else to

name this poor old rat-trap Rossmore Towers, but it just comes natural to

him.  Well, no doubt it's a blessed thing to have an imagination that can

always make you satisfied, no matter how you are fixed.  Uncle Dave

Hopkins used to always say, 'Turn me into John Calvin, and I want to know

which place I'm going to; turn me into Mulberry Sellers and I don't

care.'"



The rightful earl's comment-to himself:



"It's a beautiful name, beautiful.  Pity I didn't think of it before I

wrote the usurper.  But I'll be ready for him when he answers."









CHAPTER V.



No answer to that telegram; no arriving daughter.  Yet nobody showed any

uneasiness or seemed surprised; that is, nobody but Washington.  After

three days of waiting, he asked Lady Rossmore what she supposed the

trouble was.  She answered, tranquilly:



"Oh, it's some notion of hers, you never can tell.  She's a Sellers, all

through--at least in some of her ways; and a Sellers can't tell you

beforehand what he's going to do, because he don't know himself till he's

done it.  She's all right; no occasion to worry about her.  When she's

ready she'll come or she'll write, and you can't tell which, till it's

happened."



It turned out to be a letter.  It was handed in at that moment, and was

received by the mother without trembling hands or feverish eagerness,

or any other of the manifestations common in the case of long delayed

answers to imperative telegrams.  She polished her glasses with

tranquility and thoroughness, pleasantly gossiping along, the while,

then opened the letter and began to read aloud:



                         KENILWORTH KEEP, REDGAUNTLET HALL,

                         ROWENA-IVANHOE COLLEGE, THURSDAY.



     DEAR PRECIOUS MAMMA ROSSMORE:



     Oh, the joy of it!--you can't think.  They had always turned up

     their noses at our pretentions, you know; and I had fought back as

     well as I could by turning up mine at theirs.  They always said it

     might be something great and fine to be rightful Shadow of an

     earldom, but to merely be shadow of a shadow, and two or three times

     removed at that-pooh-pooh!  And I always retorted that not to be

     able to show four generations of American-Colonial-Dutch Peddler-

     and-Salt-Cod-McAllister-Nobility might be endurable, but to have to

     confess such an origin--pfew-few!  Well, the telegram, it was just a

     cyclone!  The messenger came right into the great Rob Roy Hall of

     Audience, as excited as he could be, singing out, "Dispatch for Lady

     Gwendolen Sellers!" and you ought to have seen that simpering

     chattering assemblage of pinchbeck aristocrats, turn to stone!

     I as off in the corner, of course, by myself--it's where Cinderella

     belongs.  I took the telegram and read it, and tried to faint--and I

     could have done it if I had had any preparation, but it was all so

     sudden, you know--but no matter, I did the next best thing: I put my

     handkerchief to my eyes and fled sobbing to my room, dropping the

     telegram as I started.  I released one corner of my eye a moment--

     just enough to see the herd swarm for the telegram--and then

     continued my broken-hearted flight just as happy as a bird.



     Then the visits of condolence began, and I had to accept the loan of

     Miss Augusta-Templeton-Ashmore Hamilton's quarters because the press

     was so great and there isn't room for three and a cat in mine.  And

     I've been holding a Lodge of Sorrow ever since and defending myself

     against people's attempts to claim kin.  And do you know, the very

     first girl to fetch her tears and sympathy to my market was that

     foolish Skimperton girl who has always snubbed me so shamefully and

     claimed lordship and precedence of the whole college because some

     ancestor of hers, some time or other, was a McAllister.  Why it was

     like the bottom bird in the menagerie putting on airs because its

     head ancestor was a pterodactyl.



     But the ger-reatest triumph of all was-guess.  But you'll never.

     This is it.  That little fool and two others have always been

     fussing and fretting over which was entitled to precedence--by rank,

     you know.  They've nearly starved themselves at it; for each claimed

     the right to take precedence of all the college in leaving the

     table, and so neither of them ever finished her dinner, but broke

     off in the middle and tried to get out ahead of the others.  Well,

     after my first day's grief and seclusion--I was fixing up a mourning

     dress you see--I appeared at the public table again, and then--what

     do you think?  Those three fluffy goslings sat there contentedly,

     and squared up the long famine--lapped and lapped, munched and

     munched, ate and ate, till the gravy appeared in their eyes--humbly

     waiting for the Lady Gwendolen to take precedence and move out

     first, you see!



     Oh, yes, I've been having a darling good time.  And do you know, not

     one of these collegians has had the cruelty to ask me how I came by

     my new name.  With some, this is due to charity, but with the others

     it isn't.  They refrain, not from native kindness but from educated

     discretion.  I educated them.



     Well, as soon as I shall have settled up what's left of the old

     scores and snuffed up a few more of those pleasantly intoxicating

     clouds of incense.  I shall pack and depart homeward.  Tell papa I

     am as fond of him as I am of my new name.  I couldn't put it

     stronger than that.  What an inspiration it was!  But inspirations

     come easy to him.



                    These, from your loving daughter,

                                        GWENDOLEN.





Hawkins reached for the letter and glanced over it.



"Good hand," he said, "and full of confidence and animation, and goes

racing right along.  She's bright--that's plain."



"Oh, they're all bright--the Sellerses.  Anyway, they would be, if there

were any.  Even those poor Latherses would have been bright if they had

been Sellerses; I mean full blood.  Of course they had a Sellers strain

in them--a big strain of it, too--but being a Bland dollar don't make it

a dollar just the same."



The seventh day after the date of the telegram Washington came dreaming

down to breakfast and was set wide awake by an electrical spasm of

pleasure.



Here was the most beautiful young creature he had ever seen in his life.

It was Sally Sellers Lady Gwendolen; she had come in the night.  And it

seemed to him that her clothes were the prettiest and the daintiest he

had ever looked upon, and the most exquisitely contrived and fashioned

and combined, as to decorative trimmings, and fixings, and melting

harmonies of color.  It was only a morning dress, and inexpensive, but he

confessed to himself, in the English common to Cherokee Strip, that it

was a "corker."  And now, as he perceived, the reason why the Sellers

household poverties and sterilities had been made to blossom like the

rose, and charm the eye and satisfy the spirit, stood explained; here was

the magician; here in the midst of her works, and furnishing in her own

person the proper accent and climaxing finish of the whole.



"My daughter, Major Hawkins--come home to mourn; flown home at the call

of affliction to help the authors of her being bear the burden of

bereavement.  She was very fond of the late earl--idolized him, sir,

idolized him--"



"Why, father, I've never seen him."



"True--she's right, I was thinking of another--er--of her mother--"



"I idolized that smoked haddock?--that sentimental, spiritless--"



"I was thinking of myself!  Poor noble fellow, we were inseparable com--"



"Hear the man!  Mulberry Sel--Mul--Rossmore--hang the troublesome name I

can never--if I've heard you say once, I've heard you say a thousand

times that if that poor sheep--"



"I was thinking of--of--I don't know who I was thinking of, and it

doesn't make any difference anyway; somebody idolized him, I recollect it

as if it were yesterday; and--"



"Father, I am going to shake hands with Major Hawkins, and let the

introduction work along and catch up at its leisure.  I remember you very

well in deed, Major Hawkins, although I was a little child when I saw you

last; and I am very, very glad indeed to see you again and have you in

our house as one of us;" and beaming in his face she finished her cordial

shake with the hope that he had not forgotten her.



He was prodigiously pleased by her outspoken heartiness, and wanted to

repay her by assuring her that he remembered her, and not only that but

better even than he remembered his own children, but the facts would not

quite warrant this; still, he stumbled through a tangled sentence which

answered just as well, since the purport of it was an awkward and

unintentional confession that her extraordinary beauty had so stupefied

him that he hadn't got back to his bearings, yet, and therefore couldn't

be certain as to whether he remembered her at all or not.  The speech

made him her friend; it couldn't well help it.



In truth the beauty of this fair creature was of a rare type, and may

well excuse a moment of our time spent in its consideration.  It did not

consist in the fact that she had eyes, nose, mouth, chin, hair, ears, it

consisted in their arrangement.  In true beauty, more depends upon right

location and judicious distribution of feature than upon multiplicity of

them.  So also as regards color.  The very combination of colors which in

a volcanic irruption would add beauty to a landscape might detach it from

a girl.  Such was Gwendolen Sellers.



The family circle being completed by Gwendolen's arrival, it was decreed

that the official mourning should now begin; that it should begin at six

o'clock every evening, (the dinner hour,) and end with the dinner.



"It's a grand old line, major, a sublime old line, and deserves to be

mourned for, almost royally; almost imperially, I may say.  Er--Lady

Gwendolen--but she's gone; never mind; I wanted my Peerage; I'll fetch it

myself, presently, and show you a thing or two that will give you a

realizing idea of what our house is.  I've been glancing through Burke,

and I find that of William the Conqueror's sixty-four natural ah--

my dear, would you mind getting me that book?  It's on the escritoire in

our boudoir.  Yes, as I was saying, there's only St. Albans, Buccleugh

and Grafton ahead of us on the list--all the rest of the British nobility

are in procession behind us.  Ah, thanks, my lady.  Now then, we turn to

William, and we find--letter for XYZ?  Oh, splendid--when'd you get it?"



"Last night; but I was asleep before you came, you were out so late; and

when I came to breakfast Miss Gwendolen--well, she knocked everything out

of me, you know--"



"Wonderful girl, wonderful; her great origin is detectable in her step,

her carriage, her features--but what does he say?  Come, this is

exciting."



"I haven't read it--er--Rossm--Mr. Rossm--er--"



"M'lord!  Just cut it short like that.  It's the English way.  I'll open

it.  Ah, now let's see."



A.  TO YOU KNOW WHO.  Think I know you.  Wait ten days.  Coming to

     Washington.



The excitement died out of both men's faces.  There was a brooding

silence for a while, then the younger one said with a sigh:



"Why, we can't wait ten days for the money."



"No--the man's unreasonable; we are down to the bed rock, financially

speaking."



"If we could explain to him in some way, that we are so situated that

time is of the utmost importance to us--"



"Yes--yes, that's it--and so if it would be as convenient for him to come

at once it would be a great accommodation to us, and one which we--which

we--which we--wh--well, which we should sincerely appreciate--"



"That's it--and most gladly reciprocate--"



"Certainly--that'll fetch him.  Worded right, if he's a man--got any of

the feelings of a man, sympathies and all that, he'll be here inside of

twenty-four hours.  Pen and paper--come, we'll get right at it."



Between them they framed twenty-two different advertisements, but none

was satisfactory.  A main fault in all of them was urgency.  That feature

was very troublesome: if made prominent, it was calculated to excite

Pete's suspicion; if modified below the suspicion-point it was flat and

meaningless.  Finally the Colonel resigned, and said:



"I have noticed, in such literary experiences as I have had, that one of

the most taking things to do is to conceal your meaning when you are

trying to conceal it.  Whereas, if you go at literature with a free

conscience and nothing to conceal, you can turn out a book, every time,

that the very elect can't understand.  They all do."



Then Hawkins resigned also, and the two agreed that they must manage to

wait the ten days some how or other.  Next, they caught a ray of cheer:

since they had something definite to go upon, now, they could probably

borrow money on the reward--enough, at any rate, to tide them over till

they got it; and meantime the materializing recipe would be perfected,

and then good bye to trouble for good and all.



The next day, May the tenth, a couple of things happened--among others.

The remains of the noble Arkansas twins left our shores for England,

consigned to Lord Rossmore, and Lord Rossmore's son, Kirkcudbright

Llanover Marjoribanks Sellers Viscount Berkeley, sailed from Liverpool

for America to place the reversion of the earldom in the hands of the

rightful peer, Mulberry Sellers, of Rossmore Towers in the District of

Columbia, U. S. A.



These two impressive shipments would meet and part in mid-Atlantic, five

days later, and give no sign.









CHAPTER VI.



In the course of time the twins arrived and were delivered to their great

kinsman.  To try to describe the rage of that old man would profit

nothing, the attempt would fall so far short of the purpose.  However

when he had worn himself out and got quiet again, he looked the matter

over and decided that the twins had some moral rights, although they had

no legal ones; they were of his blood, and it could not be decorous to

treat them as common clay.  So he laid them with their majestic kin in

the Cholmondeley church, with imposing state and ceremony, and added the

supreme touch by officiating as chief mourner himself.  But he drew the

line at hatchments.



Our friends in Washington watched the weary days go by, while they waited

for Pete and covered his name with reproaches because of his calamitous

procrastinations.  Meantime, Sally Sellers, who was as practical and

democratic as the Lady Gwendolen Sellers was romantic and aristocratic,

was leading a life of intense interest and activity and getting the most

she could out of her double personality.  All day long in the privacy of

her work-room, Sally Sellers earned bread for the Sellers family; and all

the evening Lady Gwendolen Sellers supported the Rossmore dignity.  All

day she was American, practically, and proud of the work of her head and

hands and its commercial result; all the evening she took holiday and

dwelt in a rich shadow-land peopled with titled and coroneted fictions.

By day, to her, the place was a plain, unaffected, ramshackle old trap

just that, and nothing more; by night it was Rossmore Towers.  At college

she had learned a trade without knowing it.  The girls had found out that

she was the designer of her own gowns.  She had no idle moments after

that, and wanted none; for the exercise of an extraordinary gift is the

supremest pleasure in life, and it was manifest that Sally Sellers

possessed a gift of that sort in the matter of costume-designing.  Within

three days after reaching home she had hunted up some work; before Pete

was yet due in Washington, and before the twins were fairly asleep in

English soil, she was already nearly swamped with work, and the

sacrificing of the family chromos for debt had got an effective check.



"She's a brick," said Rossmore to the Major; "just her father all over:

prompt to labor with head or hands, and not ashamed of it; capable,

always capable, let the enterprise be what it may; successful by nature--

don't know what defeat is; thus, intensely and practically American by

inhaled nationalism, and at the same time intensely and aristocratically

European by inherited nobility of blood.  Just me, exactly: Mulberry

Sellers in matter of finance and invention; after office hours, what do

you find?  The same clothes, yes, but what's in them?  Rossmore of the

peerage."



The two friends had haunted the general post-office daily.  At last they

had their reward.  Toward evening the 20th of May, they got a letter for

XYZ.  It bore the Washington postmark; the note itself was not dated.  It

said:



     "Ash barrel back of lamp post Black horse Alley.  If you are playing

     square go and set on it to-morrow morning 21st 10.22 not sooner not

     later wait till I come."



The friends cogitated over the note profoundly.  Presently the earl said:



"Don't you reckon he's afraid we are a sheriff with a requisition?"



"Why, m'lord?"



"Because that's no place for a seance.  Nothing friendly, nothing

sociable about it.  And at the same time, a body that wanted to know who

was roosting on that ash-barrel without exposing himself by going near

it, or seeming to be interested in it, could just stand on the street

corner and take a glance down the alley and satisfy himself, don't you

see?"



"Yes, his idea is plain, now.  He seems to be a man that can't be candid

and straightforward.  He acts as if he thought we--shucks, I wish he had

come out like a man and told us what hotel he--"



"Now you've struck it! you've struck it sure, Washington; he has told

us."



"Has he?"



"Yes, he has; but he didn't mean to.  That alley is a lonesome little

pocket that runs along one side of the New Gadsby.  That's his hotel."



"What makes' you think that?"



"Why, I just know it.  He's got a room that's just across from that lamp

post.  He's going to sit there perfectly comfortable behind his shutters

at 10.22 to-morrow, and when he sees us sitting on the ash-barrel, he'll

say to himself, 'I saw one of those fellows on the train'--and then he'll

pack his satchel in half a minute and ship for the ends of the earth."



Hawkins turned sick with disappointment:



"Oh, dear, it's all up, Colonel--it's exactly what he'll do."



"Indeed he won't!"



"Won't he?  Why?"



"Because you won't be holding the ash barrel down, it'll be me.  You'll

be coming in with an officer and a requisition in plain clothes--the

officer, I mean--the minute you see him arrive and open up a talk with

me."



"Well, what a head you have got, Colonel Sellers!  I never should have

thought of that in the world."



"Neither would any earl of Rossmore, betwixt William's contribution and

Mulberry--as earl; but it's office hours, now, you see, and the earl in

me sleeps.  Come--I'll show you his very room."



They reached the neighborhood of the New Gadsby about nine in the

evening, and passed down the alley to the lamp post.



"There you are," said the colonel, triumphantly, with a wave of his hand

which took in the whole side of the hotel.  "There it is--what did I tell

you?"



"Well, but--why, Colonel, it's six stories high.  I don't quite make out

which window you--"



"All the windows, all of them.  Let him have his.  choice-I'm

indifferent, now that I have located him.  You go and stand on the corner

and wait; I'll prospect tie hotel."



The earl drifted here and there through the swarming lobby, and finally

took a waiting position in the neighborhood of the elevator.  During an

hour crowds went up and crowds came down; and all complete as to limbs;

but at last the watcher got a glimpse of a figure that was satisfactory-

got a glimpse of the back of it, though he had missed his chance at the

face through waning alertness.  The glimpse revealed a cowboy hat, and

below it a plaided sack of rather loud pattern, and an empty sleeve

pinned up to the shoulder.  Then the elevator snatched the vision aloft

and the watcher fled away in joyful excitement, and rejoined the fellow-

conspirator.



"We've got him, Major--got him sure!  I've seen him--seen him good; and I

don't care where or when that man approaches me backwards, I'll recognize

him every time.  We're all right.  Now for the requisition."



They got it, after the delays usual in such cases.  By half past eleven

they were at home and happy, and went to bed full of dreams of the

morrow's great promise.



Among the elevator load which had the suspect for fellow-passenger was a

young kinsman of Mulberry Sellers, but Mulberry was not aware of it and

didn't see him.  It was Viscount Berkeley.









CHAPTER VII.



Arrived in his room Lord Berkeley made preparations for that first and

last and all-the-time duty of the visiting Englishman--the jotting down

in his diary of his "impressions" to date.  His preparations consisted in

ransacking his "box" for a pen.  There was a plenty of steel pens on his

table with the ink bottle, but he was English.  The English people

manufacture steel pens for nineteen-twentieths of the globe, but they

never use any themselves.  They use exclusively the pre-historic quill.

My lord not only found a quill pen, but the best one he had seen in

several years--and after writing diligently for some time, closed with

the following entry:



          BUT IN ONE THING I HAVE MADE AN IMMENSE MISTAKE, I OUGHT TO

          HAVE SHUCKED MY TITLE AND CHANGED MY NAME BEFORE I STARTED.



He sat admiring that pen a while, and then went on:



"All attempts to mingle with the common people and became permanently one

of them are going to fail, unless I can get rid of it, disappear from it,

and re-appear with the solid protection of a new name.  I am astonished

and pained to see how eager the most of these Americans are to get

acquainted with a lord, and how diligent they are in pushing attentions

upon him.  They lack English servility, it is true--but they could

acquire it, with practice.  My quality travels ahead of me in the most

mysterious way.  I write my family name without additions, on the

register of this hotel, and imagine that I am going to pass for an

obscure and unknown wanderer, but the clerk promptly calls out, 'Front!

show his lordship to four-eighty-two!' and before I can get to the lift

there is a reporter trying to interview me as they call it.  This sort of

thing shall cease at once.  I will hunt up the American Claimant the

first thing in the morning, accomplish my mission, then change my lodging

and vanish from scrutiny under a fictitious name."





He left his diary on the table, where it would be handy in case any new

"impressions" should wake him up in the night, then he went to bed and

presently fell asleep.  An hour or two passed, and then he came slowly to

consciousness with a confusion of mysterious and augmenting sounds

hammering at the gates of his brain for admission; the next moment he was

sharply awake, and those sounds burst with the rush and roar and boom of

an undammed freshet into his ears.  Banging and slamming of shutters;

smashing of windows and the ringing clash of falling glass; clatter of

flying feet along the halls; shrieks, supplications, dumb moanings of

despair, within, hoarse shouts of command outside; cracklings and

mappings, and the windy roar of victorious flames!



Bang, bang, bang!  on the door, and a cry:



"Turn out-the house is on fire!"



The cry passed on, and the banging.  Lord Berkeley sprang out of bed and

moved with all possible speed toward the clothes-press in the darkness

and the gathering smoke, but fell over a chair and lost his bearings.

He groped desperately about on his hands, and presently struck his head

against the table and was deeply grateful, for it gave him his bearings

again, since it stood close by the door.  He seized his most precious

possession; his journaled Impressions of America, and darted from the

room.



He ran down the deserted hall toward the red lamp which he knew indicated

the place of a fire-escape.  The door of the room beside it was open.

In the room the gas was burning full head; on a chair was a pile of

clothing.  He ran to the window, could not get it up, but smashed it with

a chair, and stepped out on the landing of the fire-escape; below him was

a crowd of men, with a sprinkling of women and youth, massed in a ruddy

light.  Must he go down in his spectral night dress?  No--this side of

the house was not yet on fire except at the further end; he would snatch

on those clothes.  Which he did.  They fitted well enough, though a

trifle loosely, and they were just a shade loud as to pattern.  Also as

to hat--which was of a new breed to him, Buffalo Bill not having been to

England yet.  One side of the coat went on, but the other side refused;

one of its sleeves was turned up and stitched to the shoulder.  He

started down without waiting to get it loose, made the trip successfully,

and was promptly hustled outside the limit-rope by the police.



The cowboy hat and the coat but half on made him too much of a centre of

attraction for comfort, although nothing could be more profoundly

respectful, not to say deferential, than was the manner of the crowd

toward him.  In his mind he framed a discouraged remark for early entry

in his diary: "It is of no use; they know a lord through any disguise,

and show awe of him--even something very like fear, indeed."



Presently one of the gaping and adoring half-circle of boys ventured a

timid question.  My lord answered it.  The boys glanced wonderingly at

each other and from somewhere fell the comment:



"English cowboy!  Well, if that ain't curious."



Another mental note to be preserved for the diary: "Cowboy.  Now what

might a cowboy be?  Perhaps--" But the viscount perceived that some more

questions were about to be asked; so he worked his way out of the crowd,

released the sleeve, put on the coat and wandered away to seek a humble

and obscure lodging.  He found it and went to bed and was soon asleep.



In the morning, he examined his clothes.  They were rather assertive, it

seemed to him, but they were new and clean, at any rate.  There was

considerable property in the pockets.  Item, five one-hundred dollar

bills.  Item, near fifty dollars in small bills and silver.  Plug of

tobacco.  Hymn-book, which refuses to open; found to contain whiskey.

Memorandum book bearing no name.  Scattering entries in it, recording in

a sprawling, ignorant hand, appointments, bets, horse-trades, and so on,

with people of strange, hyphenated name--Six-Fingered Jake, Young-Man-

afraid-of his-Shadow, and the like.  No letters, no documents.



The young man muses-maps out his course.  His letter of credit is burned;

he will borrow the small bills and the silver in these pockets, apply

part of it to advertising for the owner, and use the rest for sustenance

while he seeks work.  He sends out for the morning paper, next, and

proceeds to read about the fire.  The biggest line in the display-head

announces his own death!  The body of the account furnishes all the

particulars; and tells how, with the inherited heroism of his caste, he

went on saving women and children until escape for himself was

impossible; then with the eyes of weeping multitudes upon him, he stood

with folded arms and sternly awaited the approach of the devouring fiend;

"and so standing, amid a tossing sea of flame and on-rushing billows of

smoke, the noble young heir of the great house of Rossmore was caught up

in a whirlwind of fiery glory, and disappeared forever from the vision of

men."



The thing was so fine and generous and knightly that it brought the

moisture to his eyes.  Presently he said to himself: "What to do is as

plain as day, now.  My Lord Berkeley is dead--let him stay so.  Died

creditably, too; that will make the calamity the easier for my father.

And I don't have to report to the American Claimant, now.  Yes, nothing

could be better than the way matters have turned out.  I have only to

furnish myself with a new name, and take my new start in life totally

untrammeled.  Now I breathe my first breath of real freedom; and how

fresh and breezy and inspiring it is!  At last I am a man! a man on equal

terms with my neighbor; and by my manhood; and by it alone, I shall rise

and be seen of the world, or I shall sink from sight and deserve it.

This is the gladdest day, and the proudest, that ever poured it's sun

upon my head!"









CHAPTER VIII.



"GOD bless my soul, Hawkins!"



The morning paper dropped from the Colonel's nerveless-grasp.



"What is it?"



"He's gone!--the bright, the young, the gifted, the noblest of his

illustrious race--gone! gone up in flames and unimaginable glory!"



"Who?"



"My precious, precious young kinsman--Kirkcudbright Llanover Marjoribanks

Sellers Viscount Berkeley, son and heir of usurping Rossmore."



"No!"



"It's true--too true."



"When?"



"Last night."



"Where?"



"Right here in Washington; where he arrived from England last night, the

papers say."



"You don't say!"



"Hotel burned down."



"What hotel?"



"The New Gadsby!"



"Oh, my goodness!  And have we lost both of them?"



"Both who?"



"One-Arm Pete."



"Oh, great guns, I forgot all about him.  Oh, I hope not."



"Hope!  Well, I should say!  Oh, we can't spare him!  We can better

afford to lose a million viscounts than our only support and stay."



They searched the paper diligently, and were appalled to find that a one-

armed man had been seen flying along one of the halls of the hotel in his

underclothing and apparently out of his head with fright, and as he would

listen to no one and persisted in making for a stairway which would carry

him to certain death, his case was given over as a hopeless one.



"Poor fellow," sighed Hawkins; "and he had friends so near.  I wish we

hadn't come away from there-maybe we could have saved him."



The earl looked up and said calmly:



"His being dead doesn't matter.  He was uncertain before.  We've got him

sure, this time."



"Got him?  How?"



"I will materialize him."



"Rossmore, don't--don't trifle with me.  Do you mean that?  Can you do

it?"



"I can do it, just as sure as you are sitting there.  And I will."



"Give me your hand, and let me have the comfort of shaking it.  I was

perishing, and you have put new life into me.  Get at it, oh, get at it

right away."



"It will take a little time, Hawkins, but there's no hurry, none in the

world--in the circumstances.  And of course certain duties have devolved

upon me now, which necessarily claim my first attention.  This poor young

nobleman--"



"Why, yes, I am sorry for my heartlessness, and you smitten with this new

family affliction.  Of course you must materialize him first--I quite

understand that."



"I--I--well, I wasn't meaning just that, but,--why, what am I thinking

of!  Of course I must materialize him.  Oh, Hawkins, selfishness is the

bottom trait in human nature; I was only thinking that now, with the

usurper's heir out of the way But you'll forgive that momentary weakness,

and forget it.  Don't ever remember it against me that Mulberry Sellers

was once mean enough to think the thought that I was thinking.  I'll

materialise him--I will, on my honor--and I'd do it were he a thousand

heirs jammed into one and stretching in a solid rank from here to the

stolen estates of Rossmore, and barring the road forever to the rightful

earl!



"There spoke the real Sellers--the other had a false ring, old friend."



"Hawkins, my boy, it just occurs to me--a thing I keep forgetting to

mention-a matter that we've got to be mighty careful about."



"What is that?"



"We must keep absolutely still about these materializations.  Mind, not a

hint of them must escape--not a hint.  To say nothing of how my wife and

daughter--high-strung, sensitive organizations--might feel about them,

the negroes wouldn't stay on the place a minute."



"That's true, they wouldn't.  It's well you spoke, for I'm not naturally

discreet with my tongue when I'm not warned."



Sellers reached out and touched a bell-button in the wall; set his eye

upon the rear door and waited; touched it again and waited; and just as

Hawkins was remarking admiringly that the Colonel was the most

progressive and most alert man he had ever seen, in the matter of

impressing into his service every modern convenience the moment it was

invented, and always keeping breast to breast with the drum major in the

great work of material civilization, he forsook the button (which hadn't

any wire attached to it,) rang a vast dinner bell which stood on the

table, and remarked that he had tried that new-fangled dry battery, now,

to his entire satisfaction, and had got enough of it; and added:



"Nothing would do Graham Bell but I must try it; said the mere fact of my

trying it would secure public confidence, and get it a chance to show

what it could do.  I told him that in theory a dry battery was just a

curled darling and no mistake, but when it come to practice, sho!--and

here's the result.  Was I right?  What should you say, Washington

Hawkins?  You've seen me try that button twice.  Was I right?--that's the

idea.  Did I know what I was talking about, or didn't I?"



"Well, you know how I feel about you, Colonel Sellers, and always have

felt.  It seems to me that you always know everything about everything.

If that man had known you as I know you he would have taken your judgment

at the start, and dropped his dry battery where it was."



"Did you ring, Marse Sellers?"



"No, Marse Sellers didn't."



"Den it was you, Marse Washington.  I's heah, suh."



"No, it wasn't Marse Washington, either."



"De good lan'! who did ring her, den?"



"Lord Rossmore rang it!"



The old negro flung up his hands and exclaimed:



"Blame my skin if I hain't gone en forgit dat name agin!  Come heah,

Jinny--run heah, honey."



Jinny arrived.



"You take dish-yer order de lord gwine to give you I's gwine down suller

and study dat name tell I git it."



"I take de order!  Who's yo' nigger las' year?  De bell rung for you."



"Dat don't make no diffunce.  When a bell ring for anybody, en old

marster tell me to--"



"Clear out, and settle it in the kitchen!"



The noise of the quarreling presently sank to a murmur in the distance,

and the earl added: "That's a trouble with old house servants that were

your slaves once and have been your personal friends always."



"Yes, and members of the family."



"Members of the family is just what they become--THE members of the

family, in fact.  And sometimes master and mistress of the household.

These two are mighty good and loving and faithful and honest, but hang

it, they do just about as they please, they chip into a conversation

whenever they want to, and the plain fact is, they ought to be killed."



It was a random remark, but it gave him an idea--however, nothing could

happen without that result.



"What I wanted, Hawkins, was to send for the family and break the news to

them."



"O, never mind bothering with the servants, then.  I will go and bring

them down."



While he was gone, the earl worked his idea.



"Yes," he said to himself, "when I've got the materializing down to a

certainty, I will get Hawkins to kill them, and after that they will be

under better control.  Without doubt a materialized negro could easily be

hypnotized into a state resembling silence.  And this could be made

permanent--yes, and also modifiable, at will--sometimes very silent,

sometimes turn on more talk, more action, more emotion, according to what

you want.  It's a prime good idea.  Make it adjustable--with a screw or

something."



The two ladies entered, now, with Hawkins, and the two negroes followed,

uninvited, and fell to brushing and dusting around, for they perceived

that there was matter of interest to the fore, and were willing to find

out what it was.



Sellers broke the, news with stateliness and ceremony, first warning the

ladies, with gentle art, that a pang of peculiar sharpness was about to

be inflicted upon their hearts--hearts still sore from a like hurt, still

lamenting a like loss--then he took the paper, and with trembling lips

and with tears in his voice he gave them that heroic death-picture.



The result was a very genuine outbreak of sorrow and sympathy from all

the hearers.  The elder lady cried, thinking how proud that great-hearted

young hero's mother would be, if she were living, and how unappeasable

her grief; and the two old servants cried with her, and spoke out their

applauses and their pitying lamentations with the eloquent sincerity and

simplicity native to their race.  Gwendolen was touched, and the romantic

side of her nature was strongly wrought upon.  She said that such a

nature as that young man's was rarely and truly noble, and nearly

perfect; and that with nobility of birth added it was entirely perfect.

For such a man she could endure all things, suffer all things, even to

the sacrificing of her life.  She wished she could have seen him; the

slightest, the most momentary, contact with such a spirit would have

ennobled her own character and made ignoble thoughts and ignoble acts

thereafter impossible to her forever.



"Have they found the body, Rossmore?" asked the wife.



"Yes, that is, they've found several.  It must be one of them, but none

of them are recognizable."



"What are you going to do?"



"I am going down there and identify one of them and send it home to the

stricken father."



"But papa, did you ever see the young man?"



"No, Gwendolen-why?"



"How will you identify it?"



"I--well, you know it says none of them are recognizable.  I'll send his

father one of them--there's probably no choice."



Gwendolen knew it was not worth while to argue the matter further, since

her father's mind was made up and there was a chance for him to appear

upon that sad scene down yonder in an authentic and official way.  So she

said no more--till he asked for a basket.



"A basket, papa?  What for?"



"It might be ashes."









CHAPTER IX.



The earl and Washington started on the sorrowful errand, talking as they

walked.



"And as usual!"



"What, Colonel?"



"Seven of them in that hotel.  Actresses.  And all burnt out, of

course."



"Any of them burnt up?"



"Oh, no they escaped; they always do; but there's never a one of them

that knows enough to fetch out her jewelry with her."



"That's strange."



"Strange--it's the most unaccountable thing in the world.  Experience

teaches them nothing; they can't seem to learn anything except out of a

book.  In some uses there's manifestly a fatality about it.  For

instance, take What's-her-name, that plays those sensational thunder and

lightning parts.  She's got a perfectly immense reputation--draws like a

dog-fight--and it all came from getting burnt out in hotels."



"Why, how could that give her a reputation as an actress?"



"It didn't--it only made her name familiar.  People want to see her play

because her name is familiar, but they don't know what made it familiar,

because they don't remember.  First, she was at the bottom of the

ladder, and absolutely obscure wages thirteen dollars a week and find her

own pads."



"Pads?"



"Yes-things to fat up her spindles with so as to be plump and attractive.

Well, she got burnt out in a hotel and lost $30,000 worth of diamonds."



"She?  Where'd she get them?"



"Goodness knows--given to her, no doubt, by spoony young flats and sappy

old bald-heads in the front row.  All the papers were full of it.  She

struck for higher pay and got it.  Well, she got burnt out again and lost

all her diamonds, and it gave her such a lift that she went starring."



"Well, if hotel fires are all she's got to depend on to keep up her name,

it's a pretty precarious kind of a reputation I should think."



"Not with her.  No, anything but that.  Because she's so lucky; born

lucky, I reckon.  Every time there's a hotel fire she's in it.  She's

always there--and if she can't be there herself, her diamonds are.  Now

you can't make anything out of that but just sheer luck."



"I never heard of such a thing.  She must have lost quarts of diamonds."



"Quarts, she's lost bushels of them.  It's got so that the hotels are

superstitious about her.  They won't let her in.  They think there will

be a fire; and besides, if she's there it cancels the insurance.  She's

been waning a little lately, but this fire will set her up.  She lost

$60,000 worth last night."



"I think she's a fool.  If I had $60,000 worth of diamonds I wouldn't

trust them in a hotel."



"I wouldn't either; but you can't teach an actress that.  This one's been

burnt out thirty-five times.  And yet if there's a hotel fire in San

Francisco to-night she's got to bleed again, you mark my words.  Perfect

ass; they say she's got diamonds in every hotel in the country."



When they arrived at the scene of the fire the poor old earl took one

glimpse at the melancholy morgue and turned away his face overcome by the

spectacle.  He said:



"It is too true, Hawkins--recognition is impossible, not one of the five

could be identified by its nearest friend.  You make the selection, I

can't bear it."



"Which one had I better--"



"Oh, take any of them.  Pick out the best one."



However, the officers assured the earl--for they knew him, everybody in

Washington knew him--that the position in which these bodies were found

made it impossible that any one of them could be that of his noble young

kinsman.  They pointed out the spot where, if the newspaper account was

correct, he must have sunk down to destruction; and at a wide distance

from this spot they showed him where the young man must have gone down in

case he was suffocated in his room; and they showed him still a third

place, quite remote, where he might possibly have found his death if

perchance he tried to escape by the side exit toward the rear.  The old

Colonel brushed away a tear and said to Hawkins:



"As it turns out there was something prophetic in my fears.  Yes, it's a

matter of ashes.  Will you kindly step to a grocery and fetch a couple

more baskets?"



Reverently they got a basket of ashes from each of those now hallowed

spots, and carried them home to consult as to the best manner of

forwarding them to England, and also to give them an opportunity to "lie

in state,"--a mark of respect which the colonel deemed obligatory,

considering the high rank of the deceased.



They set the baskets on the table in what was formerly the library,

drawing-room and workshop--now the Hall of Audience--and went up stairs

to the lumber room to see if they could find a British flag to use as a

part of the outfit proper to the lying in state.  A moment later, Lady

Rossmore came in from the street and caught sight of the baskets just as

old Jinny crossed her field of vision.  She quite lost her patience and

said:



"Well, what will you do next?  What in the world possessed you to clutter

up the parlor table with these baskets of ashes?"



"Ashes?"  And she came to look.  She put up her hands in pathetic

astonishment.  "Well, I never see de like!"



"Didn't you do it?"



"Who, me?  Clah to goodness it's de fust time I've sot eyes on 'em, Miss

Polly.  Dat's Dan'l.  Dat ole moke is losin' his mine."



But it wasn't Dan'l, for he was called, and denied it.



"Dey ain't no way to 'splain dat.  Wen hit's one er dese-yer common

'currences, a body kin reckon maybe de cat--"



"Oh!" and a shudder shook Lady Rossmore to her foundations.  "I see it

all.  Keep away from them--they're his."



"His, m' lady?"



"Yes--your young Marse Sellers from England that's burnt up."



She was alone with the ashes--alone before she could take half a breath.

Then she went after Mulberry Sellers, purposing to make short work with

his program, whatever it might be; "for," said she, "when his

sentimentals are up, he's a numskull, and there's no knowing what

extravagance he'll contrive, if you let him alone."  She found him.

He had found the flag and was bringing it.  When she heard that his idea

was to have the remains "lie in state, and invite the government and the

public," she broke it up.  She said:



"Your intentions are all right--they always are--you want to do honour to

the remains, and surely nobody can find any fault with that, for he was

your kin; but you are going the wrong way about it, and you will see it

yourself if you stop and think.  You can't file around a basket of ashes

trying to look sorry for it and make a sight that is really solemn,

because the solemner it is, the more it isn't--anybody can see that.  It

would be so with one basket; it would be three times so with three.

Well, it stands to reason that if it wouldn't be solemn with one mourner,

it wouldn't be with a procession--and there would be five thousand people

here.  I don't know but it would be pretty near ridiculous; I think it

would.  No, Mulberry, they can't lie in state--it would be a mistake.

Give that up and think of something else."



So he gave it up; and not reluctantly, when he had thought it over and

realized how right her instinct was.  He concluded to merely sit up with

the remains just himself and Hawkins.  Even this seemed a doubtful

attention, to his wife, but she offered no objection, for it was plain

that he had a quite honest and simple-hearted desire to do the friendly

and honourable thing by these forlorn poor relics which could command no

hospitality in this far off land of strangers but his.  He draped the

flag about the baskets, put some crape on the door-knob, and said with

satisfaction:



"There--he is as comfortable, now, as we can make him in the

circumstances.  Except--yes, we must strain a point there--one must do as

one would wish to be done by--he must have it."



"Have what, dear?"



"Hatchment."



The wife felt that the house-front was standing about all it could well

stand, in that way; the prospect of another stunning decoration of that

nature distressed her, and she wished the thing had not occurred to him..

She said, hesitatingly:



"But I thought such an honour as that wasn't allowed to any but very very

near relations, who--"



"Right, you are quite right, my lady, perfectly right; but there aren't

any nearer relatives than relatives by usurpation.  We cannot avoid it;

we are slaves of aristocratic custom and must submit."



The hatchments were unnecessarily generous, each being as large as a

blanket, and they were unnecessarily volcanic, too, as to variety and

violence of color, but they pleased the earl's barbaric eye, and they

satisfied his taste for symmetry and completeness, too, for they left no

waste room to speak of on the house-front.



Lady Rossmore and her daughter assisted at the sitting-up till near

midnight, and helped the gentlemen to consider what ought to be done next

with the remains.  Rossmore thought they ought to be sent home with a

committee and resolutions,--at once.  But the wife was doubtful.  She

said:



"Would you send all of the baskets?"



"Oh, yes, all."



"All at once?"



"To his father?  Oh, no--by no means.  Think of the shock.  No--one at a

time; break it to him by degrees."



"Would that have that effect, father?"



"Yes, my daughter.  Remember, you are young and elastic, but he is old.

To send him the whole at once might well be more than he could bear.

But mitigated--one basket at a time, with restful intervals between,

he would be used to it by the time he got all of him.  And sending him

in three ships is safer anyway.  On account of wrecks and storms."



"I don't like the idea, father.  If I were his father it would be

dreadful to have him coming in that--in that--"



"On the installment plan," suggested Hawkins, gravely, and proud of being

able to help.



"Yes--dreadful to have him coming in that incoherent way.  There would be

the strain of suspense upon me all the time.  To have so depressing a

thing as a funeral impending, delayed, waiting, unaccomplished--"



"Oh, no, my child," said the earl reassuringly, "there would be nothing

of that kind; so old a gentleman could not endure a long-drawn suspense

like that.  There will be three funerals."



Lady Rossmore looked up surprised, and said:



"How is that going to make it easier for him?  It's a total mistake, to

my mind.  He ought to be buried all at once; I'm sure of it."



"I should think so, too," said Hawkins.



"And certainly I should," said the daughter.



"You are all wrong," said the earl.  "You will see it yourselves, if you

think.  Only one of these baskets has got him in it."



"Very well, then," said Lady Rossmore, "the thing is perfectly simple-

bury that one."



"Certainly," said Lady Gwendolen.



"But it is not simple," said the earl, "because we do not know which

basket he is in.  We know he is in one of them, but that is all we do

know.  You see now, I reckon, that I was right; it takes three funerals,

there is no other way."



"And three graves and three monuments and three inscriptions?" asked the

daughter.



"Well--yes--to do it right.  That is what I should do.



"It could not be done so, father.  Each of the inscriptions would give

the same name and the same facts and say he was under each and all of

these monuments, and that would not answer at all."



The earl nestled uncomfortably in his chair.



"No," he said, "that is an objection.  That is a serious objection.  I

see no way out."



There was a general silence for a while.  Then Hawkins said:



"It seems to me that if we mixed the three ramifications together--"



The earl grasped him by the hand and shook it gratefully.



"It solves the whole problem," he said.  "One ship, one funeral, one

grave, one monument--it is admirably conceived.  It does you honor, Major

Hawkins, it has relieved me of a most painful embarrassment and distress,

and it will save that poor stricken old father much suffering.  Yes, he

shall go over in one basket."



"When?" asked the wife.



"To-morrow-immediately, of course."



"I would wait, Mulberry."



"Wait?  Why?"



"You don't want to break that childless old man's heart."



"God knows I don't!"



"Then wait till he sends for his son's remains.  If you do that, you will

never have to give him the last and sharpest pain a parent can know--

I mean, the certainty that his son is dead.  For he will never send."



"Why won't he?"



"Because to send--and find out the truth--would rob him of the one

precious thing left him, the uncertainty, the dim hope that maybe, after

all, his boy escaped, and he will see him again some day."



"Why Polly, he'll know by the papers that he was burnt up."



"He won't let himself believe the papers; he'll argue against anything

and everything that proves his son is dead; and he will keep that up and

live on it, and on nothing else till he dies.  But if the remains should

actually come, and be put before that poor old dim-hoping soul--"



"Oh, my God, they never shall!  Polly, you've saved me from a crime, and

I'll bless you for it always.  Now we know what to do.  We'll place them

reverently away, and he shall never know."









CHAPTER X.



The young Lord Berkeley, with the fresh air of freedom in his nostrils,

was feeling invincibly strong for his new career; and yet--and yet--if

the fight should prove a very hard one at first, very discouraging, very

taxing on untoughened moral sinews, he might in some weak moment want to

retreat.  Not likely, of course, but possibly that might happen.  And so

on the whole it might be pardonable caution to burn his bridges behind

him.  Oh, without doubt.  He must not stop with advertising for the owner

of that money, but must put it where he could not borrow from it himself,

meantime, under stress of circumstances.  So he went down town, and put

in his advertisement, then went to a bank and handed in the $500 for

deposit.



"What name?"



He hesitated and colored a little; he had forgotten to make a selection.

He now brought out the first one that suggested itself:



"Howard Tracy."



When he was gone the clerks, marveling, said:



"The cowboy blushed."



The first step was accomplished.  The money was still under his command

and at his disposal, but the next step would dispose of that difficulty.

He went to another bank and drew upon the first bank for the 500 by

check.  The money was collected and deposited a second time to the credit

of Howard Tracy.  He was asked to leave a few samples of his signature,

which he did.  Then he went away, once more proud and of perfect courage,

saying:



"No help for me now, for henceforth I couldn't draw that money without

identification, and that is become legally impossible.  No resources to

fall back on.  It is work or starve from now to the end.  I am ready--and

not afraid!"



Then he sent this cablegram to his father:



"Escaped unhurt from burning hotel.  Have taken fictitious name.

Goodbye."



During the, evening, while he was wandering about in one of the outlying

districts of the city, he came across a small brick church, with a bill

posted there with these words printed on it: "MECHANICS' CLUB DEBATE.

ALL INVITED."  He saw people, apparently mainly of the working class,

entering the place, and he followed and took his seat.  It was a humble

little church, quite bare as to ornamentation.  It had painted pews

without cushions, and no pulpit, properly speaking, but it had a

platform.  On the platform sat the chairman, and by his side sat a man

who held a manuscript in his hand and had the waiting look of one who is

going to perform the principal part.  The church was soon filled with a

quiet and orderly congregation of decently dressed and modest people.

This is what the chairman said:



"The essayist for this evening is an old member of our club whom you all

know, Mr.  Parker, assistant editor of the Daily Democrat.  The subject

of his essay is the American Press, and he will use as his text a couple

of paragraphs taken from Mr. Matthew Arnold's new book.  He asks me to

read these texts for him.  The first is as follows:



"'Goethe says somewhere that "the thrill of awe," that is to say,

REVERENCE, is the best thing humanity has."



"Mr. Arnold's other paragraph is as follows:



"'I should say that if one were searching for the best means to efface

and kill in a whole nation the discipline of respect, one could not do

better than take the American newspapers."



Mr.  Parker rose and bowed, and was received with warm applause.  He then

began to read in a good round resonant voice, with clear enunciation and

careful attention to his pauses and emphases.  His points were received

with approval as he went on.



The essayist took the position that the most important function of a

public journal in any country was the propagating of national feeling and

pride in the national name--the keeping the people "in love with their

country and its institutions, and shielded from the allurements of alien

and inimical systems."  He sketched the manner in which the reverent

Turkish or Russian journalist fulfilled this function--the one assisted

by the prevalent "discipline of respect" for the bastinado, the other for

Siberia.  Continuing, he said:



The chief function of an English journal is that of all other journals

the world over: it must keep the public eye fixed admiringly upon certain

things, and keep it diligently diverted from certain others.  For

instance, it must keep the public eye fixed admiringly upon the glories

of England, a processional splendor stretching its receding line down the

hazy vistas of time, with the mellowed lights of a thousand years

glinting from its banners; and it must keep it diligently diverted from

the fact that all these glories were for the enrichment and

aggrandizement of the petted and privileged few, at cost of the blood and

sweat and poverty of the unconsidered masses who achieved them but might

not enter in and partake of them.  It must keep the public eye fixed in

loving and awful reverence upon the throne as a sacred thing, and

diligently divert it from the fact that no throne was ever set up by the

unhampered vote of a majority of any nation; and that hence no throne

exists that has a right to exist, and no symbol of it, flying from any

flagstaff, is righteously entitled to wear any device but the skull and

crossbones of that kindred industry which differs from royalty only

business-wise-merely as retail differs from wholesale.  It must keep the

citizen's eye fixed in reverent docility upon that curious invention of

machine politics, an Established Church, and upon that bald contradiction

of common justice, a hereditary nobility; and diligently divert it from

the fact that the one damns him if he doesn't wear its collar, and robs

him under the gentle name of taxation whether he wears it or not, and the

other gets all the honors while he does all the work.



The essayist thought that Mr.  Arnold, with his trained eye and

intelligent observation, ought to have perceived that the very quality

which he so regretfully missed from our press--respectfulness, reverence

--was exactly the thing which would make our press useless to us if it

had it--rob it of the very thing which differentiates it from all other

journalism in the world and makes it distinctively and preciously

American, its frank and cheerful irreverence being by all odds the most

valuable of all its qualities.  "For its mission--overlooked by Mr.

Arnold--is to stand guard over a nation's liberties, not its humbugs and

shams."  He thought that if during fifty years the institutions of the

old world could be exposed to the fire of a flouting and scoffing press

like ours, "monarchy and its attendant crimes would disappear from

Christendom."  Monarchists might doubt this; then "why not persuade the

Czar to give it a trial in Russia?"  Concluding, he said:



Well, the charge is, that our press has but little of that old world

quality, reverence.  Let us be candidly grateful that it is so.  With its

limited reverence it at least reveres the things which this nation

reveres, as a rule, and that is sufficient: what other people revere is

fairly and properly matter of light importance to us.  Our press does not

reverence kings, it does not reverence so called nobilities, it does not

reverence established ecclesiastical slaveries, it does not reverence

laws which rob a younger son to fatten an elder one, it does not

reverence any fraud or sham or infamy, howsoever old or rotten or holy,

which sets one citizen above his neighbor by accident of birth: it does

not reverence any law or custom, howsoever old or decayed or sacred,

which shuts against the best man in the land the best place in the land

and the divine right to prove property and go up and occupy it.  In the

sense of the poet Goethe--that meek idolater of provincial three carat

royalty and nobility--our press is certainly bankrupt in the "thrill of

awe"--otherwise reverence; reverence for nickel plate and brummagem.

Let us sincerely hope that this fact will remain a fact forever: for to

my mind a discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of

human liberty--even as the other thing is the creator, nurse, and

steadfast protector of all forms of human slavery, bodily and mental.



Tracy said to himself, almost shouted to himself, "I'm glad I came to

this country.  I was right.  I was right to seek out a land where such

healthy principles and theories are in men's hearty and minds.  Think of

the innumerable slaveries imposed by misplaced reverence!  How well he

brought that out, and how true it is.  There's manifestly prodigious

force in reverence.  If you can get a man to reverence your ideals, he's

your slave.  Oh, yes, in all the ages the peoples of Europe have been

diligently taught to avoid reasoning about the shams of monarchy and

nobility, been taught to avoid examining them, been taught to reverence

them; and now, as a natural result, to reverence them is second nature.

In order to shock them it is sufficient to inject a thought of the

opposite kind into their dull minds.  For ages, any expression of so-

called irreverence from their lips has been sin and crime.  The sham and

swindle of all this is apparent the moment one reflects that he is

himself the only legitimately qualified judge of what is entitled to

reverence and what is not.  Come, I hadn't thought of that before, but it

is true, absolutely true.  What right has Goethe, what right has Arnold,

what right has any dictionary, to define the word Irreverence for me?

What their ideals are is nothing to me.  So long as I reverence my own

ideals my whole duty is done, and I commit no profanation if I laugh at

theirs.  I may scoff at other people's ideals as much as I want to.  It

is my right and my privilege.  No man has any right to deny it."



Tracy was expecting to hear the essay debated, but this did not happen.

The chairman said, by way of explanation:



"I would say, for the information of the strangers present here, that in

accordance with our custom the subject of this meeting will be debated at

the next meeting of the club.  This is in order to enable our members to

prepare what they may wish to say upon the subject with pen and paper,

for we are mainly mechanics and unaccustomed to speaking.  We are obliged

to write down what we desire to say."



Many brief papers were now read, and several offhand speeches made in

discussion of the essay read at the last meeting of the club, which had

been a laudation, by some visiting professor, of college culture, and the

grand results flowing from it to the nation.  One of the papers was read

by a man approaching middle age, who said he hadn't had a college

education, that he had got his education in a printing office, and had

graduated from there into the patent office, where he had been a clerk

now for a great many years.  Then he continued to this effect:



The essayist contrasted the America of to-day with the America of bygone

times, and certainly the result is the exhibition of a mighty progress.

But I think he a little overrated the college-culture share in the

production of that result.  It can no doubt be easily shown that the

colleges have contributed the intellectual part of this progress,

and that that part is vast; but that the material progress has been

immeasurably vaster, I think you will concede.  Now I have been looking

over a list of inventors--the creators of this amazing material

development--and I find that they were not college-bred men.  Of course

there are exceptions--like Professor Henry of Princeton, the inventor of

Mr. Morse's system of telegraphy--but these exceptions are few.  It is

not overstatement to say that the imagination--stunning material

development of this century, the only century worth living in since time

itself was invented, is the creation of men not college-bred.  We think

we see what these inventors have done: no, we see only the visible vast

frontage of their work; behind it is their far vaster work, and it is

invisible to the careless glance.  They have reconstructed this nation--

made it over, that is--and metaphorically speaking, have multiplied its

numbers almost beyond the power of figures to express.  I will explain

what I mean.  What constitutes the population of a land?  Merely the

numberable packages of meat and bones in it called by courtesy men and

women?  Shall a million ounces of brass and a million ounces of gold be

held to be of the same value?  Take a truer standard: the measure of a

man's contributing capacity to his time and his people--the work he can

do--and then number the population of this country to-day, as multiplied

by what a man can now do, more than his grandfather could do.  By this

standard of measurement, this nation, two or three generations ago,

consisted of mere cripples, paralytics, dead men, as compared with the

men of to-day.  In 1840 our population was 17,000,000.  By way of rude

but striking illustration, let us consider, for argument's sake, that

four of these millions consisted of aged people, little children, and

other incapables, and that the remaining 13,000,000 were divided and

employed as follows:



2,000,000 as ginners of cotton.

6,000,000 (women) as stocking-knitters.

2,000,000 (women) as thread-spinners.

500,000 as screw makers.

400,000 as reapers, binders, etc.

1,000,000 as corn shellers.

40,000 as weavers.

1,000 as stitchers of shoe soles.



Now the deductions which I am going to append to these figures may sound

extravagant, but they are not.  I take them from Miscellaneous Documents

No. 50, second session 45th Congress, and they are official and

trustworthy.  To-day, the work of those 2,000,000 cotton-ginners is done

by 2,000 men; that of the 6,000,000 stocking-knitters is done by 3,000

boys; that of the 2,000,000 thread-spinners is done by 1,000 girls; that

of the 500,000 screw makers is done by 500 girls; that of the 400,000

reapers, binders, etc., is done by 4,000 boys; that of the 1,000,000 corn

shelters is done by 7,500 men; that of the 40,000 weavers is done by

1,200 men; and that of the 1,000 stitchers of shoe soles is done by

6 men.  To bunch the figures, 17,900 persons to-day do the above-work,

whereas fifty years ago it would have taken thirteen millions of persons

to do it.  Now then, how many of that ignorant race--our fathers and

grandfathers--with their ignorant methods, would it take to do our work

to-day?  It would take forty thousand millions--a hundred times the

swarming population of China-twenty times the present population of the

globe.  You look around you and you see a nation of sixty millions--

apparently; but secreted in their hands and brains, and invisible to your

eyes, is the true population of this Republic, and it numbers forty

billions!  It is the stupendous creation of those humble unlettered,

un-college-bred inventors--all honor to their name.



"How grand that is!" said Tracy, as he wended homeward.  "What a

civilization it is, and what prodigious results these are! and brought

about almost wholly by common men; not by Oxford-trained aristocrats,

but men who stand shoulder to shoulder in the humble ranks of life and

earn the bread that they eat.  Again, I'm glad I came.  I have found a

country at last where one may start fair, and breast to breast with his

fellow man, rise by his own efforts, and be something in the world and be

proud of that something; not be something created by an ancestor three

hundred years ago."









CHAPTER XI.



During the first few days he kept the fact diligently before his mind

that he was in a land where there was "work and bread for all."  In fact,

for convenience' sake he fitted it to a little tune and hummed it to

himself; but as time wore on the fact itself began to take on a doubtful

look, and next the tune got fatigued and presently ran down and stopped.

His first effort was to get an upper clerkship in one of the departments,

where his Oxford education could come into play and do him service.

But he stood no chance whatever.  There, competency was no

recommendation; political backing, without competency, was worth six of

it.  He was glaringly English, and that was necessarily against him in

the political centre of a nation where both parties prayed for the Irish

cause on the house-top and blasphemed it in the cellar.  By his dress he

was a cowboy; that won him respect--when his back was not turned--but it

couldn't get a clerkship for him.  But he had said, in a rash moment,

that he would wear those clothes till the owner or the owner's friends

caught sight of them and asked for that money, and his conscience would

not let him retire from that engagement now.



At the end of a week things were beginning to wear rather a startling

look.  He had hunted everywhere for work, descending gradually the scale

of quality, until apparently he had sued for all the various kinds of

work a man without a special calling might hope to be able to do, except

ditching and the other coarse manual sorts--and had got neither work nor

the promise of it.



He was mechanically turning over the leaves of his diary, meanwhile, and

now his eye fell upon the first record made after he was burnt out:



"I myself did not doubt my stamina before, nobody could doubt it now, if

they could see how I am housed, and realise that I feel absolutely no

disgust with these quarters, but am as serenely content with them as any

dog would be in a similar kennel.  Terms, twenty-five dollars a week.

I said I would start at the bottom.  I have kept my word."



A shudder went quaking through him, and he exclaimed:



"What have I been thinking of!  This the bottom!  Mooning along a whole

week, and these terrific expenses climbing and climbing all the time!

I must end this folly straightway."



He settled up at once and went forth to find less sumptuous lodgings.  He

had to wander far and seek with diligence, but he succeeded.  They made

him pay in advance--four dollars and a half; this secured both bed and

food for a week.  The good-natured, hardworked landlady took him up three

flights of narrow, uncarpeted stairs and delivered him into his room.

There were two double-bedsteads in it, and one single one.  He would be

allowed to sleep alone in one of the double beds until some new boarder

should come, but he wouldn't be charged extra.



So he would presently be required to sleep with some stranger!

The thought of it made him sick.  Mrs.  Marsh, the landlady, was very

friendly and hoped he would like her house-they all liked it, she said.



"And they're a very nice set of boys.  They carry on a good deal, but

that's their fun.  You see, this room opens right into this back one,

and sometimes they're all in one and sometimes in the other; and hot

nights they all sleep on the roof when it don't rain.  They get out there

the minute it's hot enough.  The season's so early that they've already

had a night or two up there.  If you'd like to go up and pick out a

place, you can.  You'll find chalk in the side of the chimney where

there's a brick wanting.  You just take the chalk and--but of course

you've done it before."



"Oh, no, I haven't."



"Why, of course you haven't-what am I thinking of?  Plenty of room on the

Plains without chalking, I'll be bound.  Well, you just chalk out a place

the size of a blanket anywhere on the tin that ain't already marked off,

you know, and that's your property.  You and your bed-mate take turn-

about carrying up the blanket and pillows and fetching them down again;

or one carries them up and the other fetches them down, you fix it the

way you like, you know.  You'll like the boys, they're everlasting

sociable--except the printer.  He's the one that sleeps in that single

bed-the strangest creature; why, I don't believe you could get that man

to sleep with another man, not if the house was afire.  Mind you, I'm not

just talking, I know.  The boys tried him, to see.  They took his bed out

one night, and so when he got home about three in the morning--he was on

a morning paper then, but he's on an evening one now--there wasn't any

place for him but with the iron-moulder; and if you'll believe me, he

just set up the rest of the night--he did, honest.  They say he's

cracked, but it ain't so, he's English--they're awful particular.

You won't mind my saying that.  You--you're English?"



"Yes."



"I thought so.  I could tell it by the way you mispronounce the words

that's got a's in them, you know; such as saying loff when you mean laff

--but you'll get over that.  He's a right down good fellow, and a little

sociable with the photographer's boy and the caulker and the blacksmith

that work in the navy yard, but not so much with the others.  The fact

is, though it's private, and the others don't know it, he's a kind of an

aristocrat, his father being a doctor, and you know what style that is--

in England, I mean, because in this country a doctor ain't so very much,

even if he's that.  But over there of course it's different.  So this

chap had a falling out with his father, and was pretty high strung, and

just cut for this country, and the first he knew he had to get to work or

starve.  Well, he'd been to college, you see, and so he judged he was all

right--did you say anything?"



"No--I only sighed."



"And there's where he was mistaken.  Why, he mighty near starved.  And I

reckon he would have starved sure enough, if some jour' printer or other

hadn't took pity on him and got him a place as apprentice.  So he learnt

the trade, and then he was all right--but it was a close call.  Once he

thought he had got to haul in his pride and holler for his father and--

why, you're sighing again.  Is anything the matter with you?--does my

clatter--"



"Oh, dear--no.  Pray go on--I like it."



"Yes, you see, he's been over here ten years; he's twenty-eight, now,

and he ain't pretty well satisfied in his mind, because he can't get

reconciled to being a mechanic and associating with mechanics, he being,

as he says to me, a gentleman, which is a pretty plain letting-on that

the boys ain't, but of course I know enough not to let that cat out of

the bag."



"Why-would there be any harm in it?"



"Harm in it?  They'd lick him, wouldn't they?  Wouldn't you?  Of course

you would.  Don't you ever let a man say you ain't a gentleman in this

country.  But laws, what am I thinking about?  I reckon a body would

think twice before he said a cowboy wasn't a gentleman."



A trim, active, slender and very pretty girl of about eighteen walked

into the room now, in the most satisfied and unembarrassed way.  She was

cheaply but smartly and gracefully dressed, and the mother's quick glance

at the stranger's face as he rose, was of the kind which inquires what

effect has been produced, and expects to find indications of surprise and

admiration.



"This is my daughter Hattie--we call her Puss.  It's the new boarder,

Puss."  This without rising.



The young Englishman made the awkward bow common to his nationality and

time of life in circumstances of delicacy and difficulty, and these were

of that sort; for, being taken by surprise, his natural, lifelong self

sprang to the front, and that self of course would not know just how to

act when introduced to a chambermaid, or to the heiress of a mechanics'

boarding house.  His other self--the self which recognized the equality

of all men--would have managed the thing better, if it hadn't been caught

off guard and robbed of its chance.  The young girl paid no attention to

the bow, but put out her hand frankly and gave the stranger a friendly

shake and said:



"How do you do?"



Then she marched to the one washstand in the room, tilted her head this

way and that before the wreck of a cheap mirror that hung above it,

dampened her fingers with her tongue, perfected the circle of a little

lock of hair that was pasted against her forehead, then began to busy

herself with the slops.



"Well, I must be going--it's getting towards supper time.  Make yourself

at home, Mr.  Tracy, you'll hear the bell when it's ready."



The landlady took her tranquil departure, without commanding either of

the young people to vacate the room.  The young man wondered a little

that a mother who seemed so honest and respectable should be so

thoughtless, and was reaching for his hat, intending to disembarrass the

girl of his presence; but she said:



"Where are you going?"



"Well--nowhere in particular, but as I am only in the way here--"



"Why, who said you were in the way?  Sit down--I'll move you when you are

in the way."



She was making the beds, now.  He sat down and watched her deft and

diligent performance.



"What gave you that notion?  Do you reckon I need a whole room just to

make up a bed or two in?"



"Well no, it wasn't that, exactly.  We are away up here in an empty

house, and your mother being gone--"



The girl interrupted him with an amused laugh, and said:



"Nobody to protect me?  Bless you, I don't need it.  I'm not afraid.

I might be if I was alone, because I do hate ghosts, and I don't deny it.

Not that I believe in them, for I don't.  I'm only just afraid of them."



"How can you be afraid of them if you don't believe in them?"



"Oh, I don't know the how of it--that's too many for me; I only know it's

so.  It's the same with Maggie Lee."



"Who is that?"



"One of the boarders; young lady that works in the factry."



"She works in a factory?"



"Yes.  Shoe factory."



"In a shoe factory; and you call her a young lady?"



"Why, she's only twenty-two; what should you call her?"



"I wasn't thinking of her age, I was thinking of the title.  The fact is,

I came away from England to get away from artificial forms--for

artificial forms suit artificial people only--and here you've got them

too.  I'm sorry.  I hoped you had only men and women; everybody equal;

no differences in rank."



The girl stopped with a pillow in her teeth and the case spread open

below it, contemplating him from under her brows with a slightly puzzled

expression.  She released the pillow and said:



"Why, they are all equal.  Where's any difference in rank?"



"If you call a factory girl a young lady, what do you call the

President's wife?"



"Call her an old one."



"Oh, you make age the only distinction?"



"There ain't any other to make as far as I can see."



"Then all women are ladies?"



"Certainly they are.  All the respectable ones."



"Well, that puts a better face on it.  Certainly there is no harm in a

title when it is given to everybody.  It is only an offense and a wrong

when it is restricted to a favored few.  But Miss--er--"



"Hattie."



"Miss Hattie, be frank; confess that that title isn't accorded by

everybody to everybody.  The rich American doesn't call her cook a lady--

isn't that so?"



"Yes, it's so.  What of it?"



He was surprised and a little disappointed, to see that his admirable

shot had produced no perceptible effect.



"What of it?" he said.  "Why this: equality is not conceded here, after

all, and the Americans are no better off than the English.  In fact

there's no difference."



"Now what an idea.  There's nothing in a title except what is put into

it--you've said that yourself.  Suppose the title is 'clean,' instead of

'lady.'  You get that?"



"I believe so.  Instead of speaking of a woman as a lady, you substitute

clean and say she's a clean person."



"That's it.  In England the swell folks don't speak of the working people

as gentlemen and ladies?"



"Oh, no."



"And the working people don't call themselves gentlemen and ladies?"



"Certainly not."



"So if you used the other word there wouldn't be any change.  The swell

people wouldn't call anybody but themselves 'clean,' and those others

would drop sort of meekly into their way of talking and they wouldn't

call themselves clean.  We don't do that way here.  Everybody calls

himself a lady or gentleman, and thinks he is, and don't care what

anybody else thinks him, so long as he don't say it out loud.  You think

there's no difference.  You knuckle down and we don't.  Ain't that a

difference?"



"It is a difference I hadn't thought of; I admit that.  Still--calling

one's self a lady doesn't--er--"



"I wouldn't go on if I were you."



Howard Tracy turned his head to see who it might be that had introduced

this remark.  It was a short man about forty years old, with sandy hair,

no beard, and a pleasant face badly freckled but alive and intelligent,

and he wore slop-shop clothing which was neat but showed wear.  He had

come from the front room beyond the hall, where he had left his hat, and

he had a chipped and cracked white wash-bowl in his hand.  The girl came

and took the bowl.



"I'll get it for you.  You go right ahead and give it to him, Mr.

Barrow.  He's the new boarder--Mr. Tracy--and I'd just got to where it

was getting too deep for me."



"Much obliged if you will, Hattie.  I was coming to borrow of the boys."

He sat down at his ease on an old trunk, and said, "I've been listening

and got interested; and as I was saying, I wouldn't go on, if I were you.

You see where you are coming to, don't you?  Calling, yourself a lady

doesn't elect you; that is what you were going to say; and you saw that

if you said it you were going to run right up against another difference

that you hadn't thought of: to-wit, Whose right is it to do the electing?

Over there, twenty thousand people in a million elect themselves

gentlemen and ladies, and the nine hundred and eighty thousand accept

that decree and swallow the affront which it puts upon them.  Why, if

they didn't accept it, it wouldn't be an election, it would be a dead

letter and have no force at all.  Over here the twenty thousand would-be

exclusives come up to the polls and vote themselves to be ladies and

gentlemen.  But the thing doesn't stop there.  The nine hundred and

eighty thousand come and vote themselves to be ladies and gentlemen too,

and that elects the whole nation.  Since the whole million vote

themselves ladies and gentlemen, there is no question about that

election.  It does make absolute equality, and there is no fiction about

it; while over yonder the inequality, (by decree of the infinitely

feeble, and consent of the infinitely strong,) is also absolute--as real

and absolute as our equality."



Tracy had shrunk promptly into his English shell when this speech began,

notwithstanding he had now been in severe training several weeks for

contact and intercourse with the common herd on the common herd's terms;

but he lost no time in pulling himself out again, and so by the time the

speech was finished his valves were open once more, and he was forcing

himself to accept without resentment the common herd's frank fashion of

dropping sociably into other people's conversations unembarrassed and

uninvited.  The process was, not very difficult this time, for the man's

smile and voice and manner were persuasive and winning.  Tracy would even

have liked him on the spot, but for the fact--fact which he was not

really aware of--that the equality of men was not yet a reality to him,

it was only a theory; the mind perceived, but the man failed to feel it.

It was Hattie's ghost over again, merely turned around.  Theoretically

Barrow was his equal, but it was distinctly distasteful to see him

exhibit it.  He presently said:



"I hope in all sincerity that what you have said is true, as regards the

Americans, for doubts have crept into my mind several times.  It seemed

that the equality must be ungenuine where the sign-names of castes were

still in vogue; but those sign-names have certainly lost their offence

and are wholly neutralized, nullified and harmless if they are the

undisputed property of every individual in the nation.  I think I realize

that caste does not exist and cannot exist except by common consent of

the masses outside of its limits.  I thought caste created itself and

perpetuated itself; but it seems quite true that it only creates itself,

and is perpetuated by the people whom it despises, and who can dissolve

it at any time by assuming its mere sign-names themselves."



"It's what I think.  There isn't any power on earth that can prevent

England's thirty millions from electing themselves dukes and duchesses

to-morrow and calling themselves so.  And within six months all the

former dukes and duchesses would have retired from the business.

I wish they'd try that.  Royalty itself couldn't survive such a process.

A handful of frowners against thirty million laughers in a state of

irruption:  Why, it's Herculaneum against Vesuvius; it would take another

eighteen centuries to find that Herculaneum after the cataclysm.  What's

a Colonel in our South?  He's a nobody; because they're all colonels down

there.  No, Tracy" (shudder from Tracy) "nobody in England would call you

a gentleman and you wouldn't call yourself one; and I tell you it's a

state of things that makes a man put himself into most unbecoming

attitudes sometimes--the broad and general recognition and acceptance of

caste as caste does, I mean.  Makes him do it unconsciously--being bred

in him, you see, and never thought over and reasoned out.  You couldn't

conceive of the Matterhorn being flattered by the notice of one of your

comely little English hills, could you?"



"Why, no."



"Well, then, let a man in his right mind try to conceive of Darwin

feeling flattered by the notice of a princess.  It's so grotesque that

it--well, it paralyzes the imagination.  Yet that Memnon was flattered by

the notice of that statuette; he says so-says so himself.  The system

that can make a god disown his godship and profane it--oh, well, it's all

wrong, it's all wrong and ought to be abolished, I should say."



The mention of Darwin brought on a literary discussion, and this topic

roused such enthusiasm in Barrow that he took off his coat and made

himself the more free and comfortable for it, and detained him so long

that he was still at it when the noisy proprietors of the room came

shouting and skylarking in and began to romp, scuffle, wash, and

otherwise entertain themselves.  He lingered yet a little longer to offer

the hospitalities of his room and his book shelf to Tracy and ask him a

personal question or two:



"What is your trade?"



"They--well, they call me a cowboy, but that is a fancy.  I'm not that.

I haven't any trade."



"What do you work at for your living?"



Oh, anything--I mean I would work at, anything I could get to do, but

thus far I haven't been able to find an occupation."



"Maybe I can help you; I'd like to try."



"I shall be very glad.  I've tried, myself, to weariness."



"Well, of course where a man hasn't a regular trade he's pretty bad off

in this world.  What you needed, I reckon, was less book learning and

more bread-and-butter learning.  I don't know what your father could have

been thinking of.  You ought to have had a trade, you ought to have had a

trade, by all means.  But never mind about that; we'll stir up something

to do, I guess.  And don't you get homesick; that's a bad business.

We'll talk the thing over and look around a little.  You'll come out all

right.  Wait for me--I'll go down to supper with you."



By this time Tracy had achieved a very friendly feeling for Barrow and

would have called him a friend, maybe, if not taken too suddenly on a

straight-out requirement to realize on his theories.  He was glad of his

society, anyway, and was feeling lighter hearted than before.  Also he

was pretty curious to know what vocation it might be which had furnished

Barrow such a large acquaintanceship with books and allowed him so much

time to read.









CHAPTER XII.



Presently the supper bell began to ring in the depths of the house, and

the sound proceeded steadily upward, growing in intensity all the way up

towards the upper floors.  The higher it came the more maddening was the

noise, until at last what it lacked of being absolutely deafening, was

made up of the sudden crash and clatter of an avalanche of boarders down

the uncarpeted stairway.  The peerage did not go to meals in this

fashion; Tracy's training had not fitted him to enjoy this hilarious

zoological clamor and enthusiasm.  He had to confess that there was

something about this extraordinary outpouring of animal spirits which he

would have to get inured to before he could accept it.  No doubt in time

he would prefer it; but he wished the process might be modified and made

just a little more gradual, and not quite so pronounced and violent.

Barrow and Tracy followed the avalanche down through an ever increasing

and ever more and more aggressive stench of bygone cabbage and kindred

smells; smells which are to be found nowhere but in a cheap private

boarding house; smells which once encountered can never be forgotten;

smells which encountered generations later are instantly recognizable,

but never recognizable with pleasure.  To Tracy these odors were

suffocating, horrible, almost unendurable; but he held his peace and said

nothing.  Arrived in the basement, they entered a large dining-room where

thirty-five or forty people sat at a long table.  They took their places.

The feast had already begun and the conversation was going on in the

liveliest way from one end of the table to the other.  The table cloth

was of very coarse material and was liberally spotted with coffee stains

and grease.  The knives and forks were iron, with bone handles, the

spoons appeared to be iron or sheet iron or something of the sort.

The tea and coffee cups were of the commonest and heaviest and most

durable stone ware.  All the furniture of the table was of the commonest

and cheapest sort.  There was a single large thick slice of bread by each

boarder's plate, and it was observable that he economized it as if he

were not expecting it to be duplicated.  Dishes of butter were

distributed along the table within reach of people's arms, if they had

long ones, but there were no private butter plates.  The butter was

perhaps good enough, and was quiet and well behaved; but it had more

bouquet than was necessary, though nobody commented upon that fact or

seemed in any way disturbed by it.  The main feature of the feast was a

piping hot Irish stew made of the potatoes and meat left over from a

procession of previous meals.  Everybody was liberally supplied with this

dish.  On the table were a couple of great dishes of sliced ham, and

there were some other eatables of minor importance--preserves and New

Orleans molasses and such things.  There was also plenty of tea and

coffee of an infernal sort, with brown sugar and condensed milk, but the

milk and sugar supply was not left at the discretion of the boarders, but

was rationed out at headquarters--one spoonful of sugar and one of

condensed milk to each cup and no more.  The table was waited upon by two

stalwart negro women who raced back and forth from the bases of supplies

with splendid dash and clatter and energy.  Their labors were

supplemented after a fashion by the young girl Puss.  She carried coffee

and tea back and forth among the boarders, but she made pleasure

excursions rather than business ones in this way, to speak strictly.

She made jokes with various people.  She chaffed the young men pleasantly

and wittily, as she supposed, and as the rest also supposed, apparently,

judging by the applause and laughter which she got by her efforts.

Manifestly she was a favorite with most of the young fellows and

sweetheart of the rest of them.  Where she conferred notice she conferred

happiness, as was seen by the face of the recipient; and; at the same

time she conferred unhappiness--one could see it fall and dim the faces

of the other young fellows like a shadow.  She never "Mistered" these

friends of hers, but called them "Billy," "Tom," "John," and they called

her "Puss" or "Hattie."



Mr. Marsh sat at the head of the table, his wife sat at the foot.  Marsh

was a man of sixty, and was an American; but if he had been born a month

earlier he would have been a Spaniard.  He was plenty good enough

Spaniard as it was; his face was very dark, his hair very black, and his

eyes were not only exceedingly black but were very intense, and there was

something about them that indicated that they could burn with passion

upon occasion.  He was stoop-shouldered and lean-faced, and the general

aspect of him was disagreeable; he was evidently not a very companionable

person.  If looks went for anything, he was the very opposite of his

wife, who was all motherliness and charity, good will and good nature.

All the young men and the women called her Aunt Rachael, which was

another sign.  Tracy's wandering and interested eye presently fell upon

one boarder who had been overlooked in the distribution of the stew.

He was very pale and looked as if he had but lately come out of a sick

bed, and also as if he ought to get back into it again as soon as

possible.  His face was very melancholy.  The waves of laughter and

conversation broke upon it without affecting it any more than if it had

been a rock in the sea and the words and the laughter veritable waters.

He held his head down and looked ashamed.  Some of the women cast glances

of pity toward him from time to time in a furtive and half afraid way,

and some of the youngest of the men plainly had compassion on the young

fellow--a compassion exhibited in their faces but not in any more active

or compromising way.  But the great majority of the people present showed

entire indifference to the youth and his sorrows.  Marsh sat with his

head down, but one could catch the malicious gleam of his eyes through

his shaggy brows.  He was watching that young fellow with evident relish.

He had not neglected him through carelessness, and apparently the table

understood that fact.  The spectacle was making Mrs. Marsh very

uncomfortable.  She had the look of one who hopes against hope that the

impossible may happen.  But as the impossible did not happen, she finally

ventured to speak up and remind her husband that Nat Brady hadn't been

helped to the Irish stew.



Marsh lifted his head and gasped out with mock courtliness, "Oh, he

hasn't, hasn't he?  What a pity that is.  I don't know how I came to

overlook him.  Ah, he must pardon me.  You must indeed Mr--er--Baxter--

Barker, you must pardon me.  I--er--my attention was directed to some

other matter, I don't know what.  The thing that grieves me mainly is,

that it happens every meal now.  But you must try to overlook these

little things, Mr. Bunker, these little neglects on my part.  They're

always likely to happen with me in any case, and they are especially

likely to happen where a person has--er--well, where a person is, say,

about three weeks in arrears for his board.  You get my meaning?--you get

my idea?  Here is your Irish stew, and--er--it gives me the greatest

pleasure to send it to you, and I hope that you will enjoy the charity as

much as I enjoy conferring it."



A blush rose in Brady's white cheeks and flowed slowly backward to his

ears and upward toward his forehead, but he said nothing and began to eat

his food under the embarrassment of a general silence and the sense that

all eyes were fastened upon him.  Barrow whispered to Tracy:



"The old man's been waiting for that.  He wouldn't have missed that

chance for anything."



"It's a brutal business," said Tracy.  Then he said to himself, purposing

to set the thought down in his diary later:



"Well, here in this very house is a republic where all are free and

equal, if men are free and equal anywhere in the earth, therefore I have

arrived at the place I started to find, and I am a man among men, and on

the strictest equality possible to men, no doubt.  Yet here on the

threshold I find an inequality.  There are people at this table who are

looked up to for some reason or another, and here is a poor devil of a

boy who is looked down upon, treated with indifference, and shamed by

humiliations, when he has committed no crime but that common one of being

poor.  Equality ought to make men noble-minded.  In fact I had supposed

it did do that."



After supper, Barrow proposed a walk, and they started.  Barrow had a

purpose.  He wanted Tracy to get rid of that cowboy hat.  He didn't see

his way to finding mechanical or manual employment for a person rigged in

that fashion.  Barrow presently said:



"As I understand it, you're not a cowboy."



"No, I'm not."



"Well, now if you will not think me too curious, how did you come to

mount that hat?  Where'd you get it?"



Tracy didn't know quite how to reply to this, but presently said,



"Well, without going into particulars; I exchanged clothes with a

stranger under stress of weather, and I would like to find him and re-

exchange."



"Well, why don't you find him?  Where is he?"



"I don't know.  I supposed the best way to find him would be to continue

to wear his clothes, which are conspicuous enough to attract his

attention if I should meet him on the street."



"Oh, very well," said Barrow, "the rest of the outfit, is well enough,

and while it's not too conspicuous, it isn't quite like the clothes that

anybody else wears.  Suppress the hat.  When you meet your man he'll

recognize the rest of his suit.  That's a mighty embarrassing hat, you

know, in a centre of civilization like this.  I don't believe an angel

could get employment in Washington in a halo like that."



Tracy agreed to replace the hat with something of a modester form, and

they stepped aboard a crowded car and stood with others on the rear

platform.  Presently, as the car moved swiftly along the rails, two men

crossing the street caught sight of the backs of Barrow and Tracy, and

both exclaimed at once, "There he is!"  It was Sellers and Hawkins.

Both were so paralyzed with joy that before they could pull themselves

together and make an effort to stop the car, it was gone too far,

and they decided to wait for the next one.  They waited a while; then it

occurred to Washington that there could be no use in chasing one horse-

car with another, and he wanted to hunt up a hack.  But the Colonel said:



"When you come to think of it, there's no occasion for that at all.

Now that I've got him materialized, I can command his motions.  I'll have

him at the house by the time we get there."



Then they hurried off home in a state of great and joyful excitement.



The hat exchange accomplished, the two new friends started to walk back

leisurely to the boarding house.  Barrow's mind was full of curiosity

about this young fellow.  He said,



"You've never been to the Rocky Mountains?"



"No."



"You've never been out on the plains?"



"No."



"How long have you been in this country?"



"Only a few days."



"You've never been in America before?"



Then Barrow communed with himself.  "Now what odd shapes the notions of

romantic people take.  Here's a young, fellow who's read in England about

cowboys and adventures on the plains.  He comes here and buys a cowboy's

suit.  Thinks he can play himself on folks for a cowboy,

all inexperienced as he is.  Now the minute he's caught in this poor

little game, he's ashamed of it and ready to retire from it.  It is that

exchange that he has put up as an explanation.  It's rather thin,

too thin altogether.  Well, he's young, never been anywhere, knows

nothing about the world, sentimental, no doubt.  Perhaps it was the

natural thing for him to do, but it was a most singular choice, curious

freak, altogether."



Both men were busy with their thoughts for a time, then Tracy heaved a

sigh and said,



"Mr. Barrow, the case of that young fellow troubles me."



"You mean Nat Brady?"



"Yes, Brady, or Baxter, or whatever it was.  The old landlord called him

by several different names."



"Oh, yes, he has been very liberal with names for Brady, since Brady fell

into arrears for his board.  Well, that's one of his sarcasms--the old

man thinks he's great on sarcasm."



"Well, what is Brady's difficulty?  What is Brady--who is he?"



"Brady is a tinner.  He's a young journeyman tinner who was getting along

all right till he fell sick and lost his job.  He was very popular before

he lost his job; everybody in the house liked Brady.  The old man was

rather especially fond of him, but you know that when a man loses his job

and loses his ability to support himself and to pay his way as he goes,

it makes a great difference in the way people look at him and feel about

him."



"Is that so!  Is it so?"



Barrow looked at Tracy in a puzzled way.  "Why of course it's so.

Wouldn't you know that, naturally.  Don't you know that the wounded deer

is always attacked and killed by its companions and friends?"



Tracy said to himself, while a chilly and boding discomfort spread itself

through his system, "In a republic of deer and men where all are free and

equal, misfortune is a crime, and the prosperous gore the unfortunate to

death."  Then he said aloud, "Here in the boarding house, if one would

have friends and be popular instead of having the cold shoulder turned

upon him, he must be prosperous."



"Yes," Barrow said, "that is so.  It's their human nature.  They do turn

against Brady, now that he's unfortunate, and they don't like him as well

as they did before; but it isn't because of any lack in Brady--he's just

as he was before, has the same nature and the same impulses, but they--

well, Brady is a thorn in their consciences, you see.  They know they

ought to help him and they're too stingy to do it, and they're ashamed of

themselves for that, and they ought also to hate themselves on that

account, but instead of that they hate Brady because he makes them

ashamed of themselves.  I say that's human nature; that occurs

everywhere; this boarding house is merely the world in little, it's the

case all over--they're all alike.  In prosperity we are popular;

popularity comes easy in that case, but when the other thing comes our

friends are pretty likely to turn against us."



Tracy's noble theories and high purposes were beginning to feel pretty

damp and clammy.  He wondered if by any possibility he had made a mistake

in throwing his own prosperity to the winds and taking up the cross

of other people's unprosperity.  But he wouldn't listen to that sort of

thing; he cast it out of his mind and resolved to go ahead resolutely

along the course he had mapped out for himself.



Extracts from his diary:



Have now spent several days in this singular hive.  I don't know quite

what to make out of these people.  They have merits and virtues, but they

have some other qualities, and some ways that are hard to get along with.

I can't enjoy them.  The moment I appeared in a hat of the period,

I noticed a change.  The respect which had been paid me before, passed

suddenly away, and the people became friendly--more than that--they

became familiar, and I'm not used to familiarity, and can't take to it

right off; I find that out.  These people's familiarity amounts to

impudence, sometimes.  I suppose it's all right; no doubt I can get used

to it, but it's not a satisfactory process at all.  I have accomplished

my dearest wish, I am a man among men, on an equal footing with Tom, Dick

and Harry, and yet it isn't just exactly what I thought it was going to

be.  I--I miss home.  Am obliged to say I am homesick.  Another thing--

and this is a confession--a reluctant one, but I will make it: The thing

I miss most and most severely, is the respect, the deference, with which

I was treated all my life in England, and which seems to be somehow

necessary to me.  I get along very well without the luxury and the wealth

and the sort of society I've been accustomed to, but I do miss the

respect and can't seem to get reconciled to the absence of it.  There is

respect, there is deference here, but it doesn't fall to my share.  It is

lavished on two men.  One of them is a portly man of middle age who is a

retired plumber.  Everybody is pleased to have that man's notice.

He's full of pomp and circumstance and self complacency and bad grammar,

and at table he is Sir Oracle and when he opens his mouth not any dog in

the kennel barks.  The other person is a policeman at the capitol-

building.  He represents the government.  The deference paid to these two

men is not so very far short of that which is paid to an earl in England,

though the method of it differs.  Not so much courtliness, but the

deference is all there.



Yes, and there is obsequiousness, too.



It does rather look as if in a republic where all are free and equal,

prosperity and position constitute rank.









CHAPTER XIII.



The days drifted by, and they grew ever more dreary.  For Barrow's

efforts to find work for Tracy were unavailing.  Always the first

question asked was, "What Union do you belong to?"



Tracy was obliged to reply that he didn't belong to any trade-union.



"Very well, then, it's impossible to employ you.  My men wouldn't stay

with me if I should employ a 'scab,' or 'rat,'" or whatever the phrase

was.



Finally, Tracy had a happy thought.  He said, "Why the thing for me to

do, of course, is to join a trade-union."



"Yes," Barrow said, "that is the thing for you to do--if you can."



"If I can?  Is it difficult?"



"Well, Yes," Barrow said, "it's sometimes difficult--in fact, very

difficult.  But you can try, and of course it will be best to try."



Therefore Tracy tried; but he did not succeed.  He was refused admission

with a good deal of promptness, and was advised to go back home, where he

belonged, not come here taking honest men's bread out of their mouths.

Tracy began to realize that the situation was desperate, and the thought

made him cold to the marrow.  He said to himself, "So there is an

aristocracy of position here, and an aristocracy of prosperity, and

apparently there is also an aristocracy of the ins as opposed to the

outs, and I am with the outs.  So the ranks grow daily, here.  Plainly

there are all kinds of castes here and only one that I belong to, the

outcasts."  But he couldn't even smile at his small joke, although he was

obliged to confess that he had a rather good opinion of it.  He was

feeling so defeated and miserable by this time that he could no longer

look with philosophical complacency on the horseplay of the young fellows

in the upper rooms at night.  At first it had been pleasant to see them

unbend and have a good time after having so well earned it by the labors

of the day, but now it all rasped upon his feelings and his dignity.

He lost patience with the spectacle.  When they were feeling good, they

shouted, they scuffled, they sang songs, they romped about the place like

cattle, and they generally wound up with a pillow fight, in which they

banged each other over the head, and threw the pillows in all directions,

and every now and then he got a buffet himself; and they were always

inviting him to join in.  They called him "Johnny Bull," and invited him

with excessive familiarity to take a hand.  At first he had endured all

this with good nature, but latterly he had shown by his manner that it

was distinctly distasteful to him, and very soon he saw a change in the

manner of these young people toward him.  They were souring on him as

they would have expressed it in their language.  He had never been what

might be called popular.  That was hardly the phrase for it; he had

merely been liked, but now dislike for him was growing.  His case was not

helped by the fact that he was out of luck, couldn't get work, didn't

belong to a union, and couldn't gain admission to one: He got a good many

slights of that small ill-defined sort that you can't quite put your

finger on, and it was manifest that there was only one thing which

protected him from open insult, and that was his muscle.  These young

people had seen him exercising, mornings, after his cold sponge bath,

and they had perceived by his performance and the build of his body,

that he was athletic, and also versed in boxing.  He felt pretty naked

now, recognizing that he was shorn of all respect except respect for his

fists.  One night when he entered his room he found about a dozen of the

young fellows there carrying on a very lively conversation punctuated

with horse-laughter.  The talking ceased instantly, and the frank affront

of a dead silence followed.  He said,



"Good evening gentlemen," and sat down.



There was no response.  He flushed to the temples but forced himself to

maintain silence.  He sat there in this uncomfortable stillness some

time, then got up and went out.



The moment he had disappeared he heard a prodigious shout of laughter

break forth.  He saw that their plain purpose had been to insult him.

He ascended to the flat roof, hoping to be able to cool down his spirit

there and get back his tranquility.  He found the young tinner up there,

alone and brooding, and entered into conversation with him.  They were

pretty fairly matched, now, in unpopularity and general ill-luck and

misery, and they had no trouble in meeting upon this common ground with

advantage and something of comfort to both.  But Tracy's movements had

been watched, and in a few minutes the tormentors came straggling one

after another to the roof, where they began to stroll up and down in an

apparently purposeless way.  But presently they fell to dropping remarks

that were evidently aimed at Tracy, and some of them at the tinner.

The ringleader of this little mob was a short-haired bully and amateur

prize-fighter named Allen, who was accustomed to lording it over the

upper floor, and had more than once shown a disposition to make trouble

with Tracy.  Now there was an occasional cat-call, and hootings, and

whistlings, and finally the diversion of an exchange of connected remarks

was introduced:



"How many does it take to make a pair?"



"Well, two generally makes a pair, but sometimes there ain't stuff enough

in them to make a whole pair."  General laugh.



"What were you saying about the English a while ago?"



"Oh, nothing, the English are all right, only--I--"  What was it you said

about them?"



"Oh, I only said they swallow well."



"Swallow better than other people?"



"Oh, yes, the English swallow a good deal better than other people."



"What is it they swallow best?"



"Oh, insults."  Another general laugh.



"Pretty hard to make 'em fight, ain't it?"



"No, taint hard to make 'em fight."



"Ain't it, really?"



"No, taint hard.  It's impossible."  Another laugh.



"This one's kind of spiritless, that's certain."



"Couldn't be the other way--in his case."



"Why?"



"Don't you know the secret of his birth?"



"No! has he got a secret of his birth?"



"You bet he has."



"What is it?"



"His father was a wax-figger."



Allen came strolling by where the pair were sitting; stopped, and said to

the tinner;



"How are you off for friends, these days?"



"Well enough off."



"Got a good many?"



"Well, as many as I need."



"A friend is valuable, sometimes-as a protector, you know.  What do you

reckon would happen if I was to snatch your cap off and slap you in the

face with it?"



"Please don't trouble me, Mr.  Allen, I ain't doing anything to you."



You answer me!  What do you reckon would happen?"



"Well, I don't know."



Tracy spoke up with a good deal of deliberation and said:



"Don't trouble the young fellow, I can tell you what would happen."



"Oh, you can, can you?  Boys, Johnny Bull can tell us what would happen

if I was to snatch this chump's cap off and slap him in the face with it.

Now you'll see."



He snatched the cap and struck the youth in the face, and before he could

inquire what was going to happen, it had already happened, and he was

warming the tin with the broad of his back.  Instantly there was a rush,

and shouts of:



"A ring, a ring, make a ring!  Fair play all round!  Johnny's grit; give

him a chance."



The ring was quickly chalked on the tin, and Tracy found himself as eager

to begin as he could have been if his antagonist had been a prince

instead of a mechanic.  At bottom he was a little surprised at this,

because although his theories had been all in that direction for some

time, he was not prepared to find himself actually eager to measure

strength with quite so common a man as this ruffian.  In a moment all the

windows in the neighborhood were filled with people, and the roofs also.

The men squared off, and the fight began.  But Allen stood no chance

whatever, against the young Englishman.  Neither in muscle nor in science

was he his equal.  He measured his length on the tin time and again;

in fact, as fast as he could get up he went down again, and the applause

was kept up in liberal fashion from all the neighborhood around.

Finally, Allen had to be helped up.  Then Tracy declined to punish him

further and the fight was at an end.  Allen was carried off by some of

his friends in a very much humbled condition, his face black and blue and

bleeding, and Tracy was at once surrounded by the young fellows, who

congratulated him, and told him that he had done the whole house a

service, and that from this out Mr. Allen would be a little more

particular about how he handled slights and insults and maltreatment

around amongst the boarders.



Tracy was a hero now, and exceedingly popular.  Perhaps nobody had ever

been quite so popular on that upper floor before.  But if being

discountenanced by these young fellows had been hard to bear, their

lavish commendations and approval and hero-worship was harder still to

endure.  He felt degraded, but he did not allow himself to analyze the

reasons why, too closely.  He was content to satisfy himself with the

suggestion that he looked upon himself as degraded by the public

spectacle which he had made of himself, fighting on a tin roof, for the

delectation of everybody a block or two around.  But he wasn't entirely

satisfied with that explanation of it.  Once he went a little too far and

wrote in his diary that his case was worse than that of the prodigal son.

He said the prodigal son merely fed swine, he didn't have to chum with

them.  But he struck that out, and said "All men are equal.  I will not

disown my principles.  These men are as good as I am."



Tracy was become popular on the lower floors also.  Everybody was

grateful for Allen's reduction to the ranks, and for his transformation

from a doer of outrages to a mere threatener of them.  The young girls,

of whom there were half a dozen, showed many attentions to Tracy,

particularly that boarding house pet Hattie, the landlady's daughter.

She said to him, very sweetly,



"I think you're ever so nice."



And when he said, "I'm glad you think' so, Miss Hattie," she said, still

more sweetly,



"Don't call me Miss Hattie-call me Puss."



Ah, here was promotion!  He had struck the summit.  There were no higher

heights to climb in that boarding house.  His popularity was complete.



In the presence of people, Tracy showed a tranquil outside, but his heart

was being eaten out of him by distress and despair.



In a little while he should be out of money, and then what should he do?

He wished, now, that he had borrowed a little more liberally from that

stranger's store.  He found it impossible to sleep.  A single torturing,

terrifying thought went racking round and round in his head, wearing a

groove in his brain: What should he do--What was to become of him?  And

along with it began to intrude a something presently which was very like

a wish that he had not joined the great and noble ranks of martyrdom, but

had stayed at home and been content to be merely an earl and nothing

better, with nothing more to do in this world of a useful sort than an

earl finds to do.  But he smothered that part of his thought as well as

he could; he made every effort to drive it away, and with fair keep it

from intruding a little  success, but he couldn't now and then, and when

it intruded it came suddenly and nipped him like a bite, a sting, a burn.

He recognized that thought by the peculiar sharpness of its pang.  The

others were painful enough, but that one cut to the quick when it calm.

Night after night he lay tossing to the music of the hideous snoring of

the honest bread-winners until two and three o'clock in the morning,

then got up and took refuge on the roof, where he sometimes got a nap and

sometimes failed entirely.  His appetite was leaving him and the zest of

life was going along with it.  Finally, owe day, being near the imminent

verge of total discouragement, he said to himself--and took occasion to

blush privately when he said it, "If my father knew what my American name

is,--he--well, my duty to my father rather requires that I furnish him my

name.  I have no right to make his days and nights unhappy, I can do

enough unhappiness for the family all by myself.  Really he ought to know

what my American name is."  He thought over it a while and framed a

cablegram in his mind to this effect:



"My American name is Howard Tracy."



That wouldn't be suggesting anything.  His father could understand that

as he chose, and doubtless he would understand it as it was meant, as a

dutiful and affectionate desire on the part of a son to make his old

father happy for a moment.  Continuing his train of thought, Tracy said

to himself, "Ah, but if he should cable me to come home!  I--I--couldn't

do that--I mustn't do that.  I've started out on a mission, and I mustn't

turn my back on it in cowardice.  No, no, I couldn't go home, at--at--

least I shouldn't want to go home."  After a reflective pause: "Well,

maybe--perhaps--it would be my duty to go in the circumstances; he's very

old and he does need me by him to stay his footsteps down the long hill

that inclines westward toward the sunset of his life.  Well, I'll think

about that.  Yes, of course it wouldn't be right to stay here.  If I--

well, perhaps I could just drop him a line and put it off a little while

and satisfy him in that way.  It would be--well, it would mar everything

to have him require me to come instantly."  Another reflective pause--

then: "And yet if he should do that I don't know but--oh, dear me--home!

how good it sounds! and a body is excusable for wanting to see his home

again, now and then, anyway."



He went to one of the telegraph offices in the avenue and got the first

end of what Barrow called the "usual Washington courtesy," where "they

treat you as a tramp until they find out you're a congressman, and then

they slobber all over you."  There was a boy of seventeen on duty there,

tying his shoe.  He had his foot on a chair and his back turned towards

the wicket.  He glanced over his shoulder, took Tracy's measure, turned

back, and went on tying his shoe.  Tracy finished writing his telegram

and waited, still waited, and still waited, for that performance to

finish, but there didn't seem to be any finish to it; so finally Tracy

said:



"Can't you take my telegram?"



The youth looked over his shoulder and said, by his manner, not his

words:



"Don't you think you could wait a minute, if you tried?"



However, he got the shoe tied at last, and came and took the telegram,

glanced over it, then looked up surprised, at Tracy.  There was something

in his look that bordered upon respect, almost reverence, it seemed to

Tracy, although he had been so long without anything of this kind he was

not sure that he knew the signs of it.



The boy read the address aloud, with pleased expression in face and

voice.



"The Earl of Rossmore!  Cracky!  Do you know him?"



"Yes."



"Is that so!  Does he know you?"



"Well--yes."



"Well, I swear!  Will he answer you?"



"I think he will."



"Will he though?  Where'll you have it sent?"



"Oh, nowhere.  I'll call here and get it.  When shall I call?"



"Oh, I don't know--I'll send it to you.  Where shall I send it?  Give me

your address; I'll send it to you soon's it comes."



But Tracy didn't propose to do this.  He had acquired the boy's

admiration and deferential respect, and he wasn't willing to throw these

precious things away, a result sure to follow if he should give the

address of that boarding house.  So he said again that he would call and

get the telegram, and went his way.



He idled along, reflecting.  He said to himself, "There is something

pleasant about being respected.  I have acquired the respect of Mr.

Allen and some of those others, and almost the deference of some of them

on pure merit, for having thrashed Allen.  While their respect and their

deference--if it is deference--is pleasant, a deference based upon a

sham, a shadow, does really seem pleasanter still.  It's no real merit to

be in correspondence with an earl, and yet after all, that boy makes me

feel as if there was."



The cablegram was actually gone home! the thought of it gave him an

immense uplift.  He walked with a lighter tread.  His heart was full of

happiness.  He threw aside all hesitances and confessed to himself that

he was glad through and through that he was going to give up this

experiment and go back to his home again.  His eagerness to get his

father's answer began to grow, now, and it grew with marvelous celerity,

after it began.  He waited an hour, walking about, putting in his time as

well as he could, but interested in nothing that came under his eye, and

at last he presented himself at the office again and asked if any answer

had come yet.  The boy said,



"No, no answer yet," then glanced at the clock and added, "I don't think

it's likely you'll get one to-day."



"Why not?"



"Well, you see it's getting pretty late.  You can't always tell where

'bouts a man is when he's on the other side, and you can't always find

him just the minute you want him, and you see it's getting about six

o'clock now, and over there it's pretty late at night."



"Why yes," said Tracy, "I hadn't thought of that."



"Yes, pretty late, now, half past ten or eleven.  Oh yes, you probably

won't get any answer to-night."









CHAPTER XIV.



So Tracy went home to supper.  The odors in that supper room seemed more

strenuous and more horrible than ever before, and he was happy in the

thought that he was so soon to be free from them again.  When the supper

was over he hardly knew whether he had eaten any of it or not, and he

certainly hadn't heard any of the conversation.  His heart had been

dancing all the time, his thoughts had been faraway from these things,

and in the visions of his mind the sumptuous appointments of his father's

castle had risen before him without rebuke.  Even the plushed flunkey,

that walking symbol of a sham inequality, had not been unpleasant to his

dreaming view.  After the meal Barrow said,



"Come with me.  I'll give you a jolly evening."



"Very good.  Where are you going?"



"To my club."



"What club is that?"



"Mechanics' Debating Club."



Tracy shuddered, slightly.  He didn't say anything about having visited

that place himself.  Somehow he didn't quite relish the memory of that

time.  The sentiments which had made his former visit there so enjoyable,

and filled him with such enthusiasm, had undergone a gradual change, and

they had rotted away to such a degree that he couldn't contemplate

another visit there with anything strongly resembling delight.  In fact

he was a little ashamed to go; he didn't want to go there and find out by

the rude impact of the thought of those people upon his reorganized

condition of mind, how sharp the change had been.  He would have

preferred to stay away.  He expected that now he should hear nothing

except sentiments which would be a reproach to him in his changed mental

attitude, and he rather wished he might be excused.  And yet he didn't

quite want to say that, he didn't want to show how he did feel, or show

any disinclination to go, and so he forced himself to go along with

Barrow, privately purposing to take an early opportunity to get away.



After the essayist of the evening had read his paper, the chairman

announced that the debate would now be upon the subject of the previous

meeting, "The American Press."  It saddened the backsliding disciple to

hear this announcement.  It brought up too many reminiscences.  He wished

he had happened upon some other subject.  But the debate began, and he

sat still and listened.



In the course of the discussion one of the speakers--a blacksmith named

Tompkins--arraigned all monarchs and all lords in the earth for their

cold selfishness in retaining their unearned dignities.  He said that no

monarch and no son of a monarch, no lord and no son of a lord ought to be

able to look his fellow man in the face without shame.  Shame for

consenting to keep his unearned titles, property, and privileges--at the

expense of other people; shame for consenting to remain, on any terms, in

dishonourable possession of these things, which represented bygone

robberies and wrongs inflicted upon the general people of the nation.

He said, "if there were a laid or the son of a lord here, I would like to

reason with him, and try to show him how unfair and how selfish his

position is.  I would try to persuade him to relinquish it, take his

place among men on equal terms, earn the bread he eats, and hold of

slight value all deference paid him because of artificial position, all

reverence not the just due of his own personal merits."



Tracy seemed to be listening to utterances of his own made in talks with

his radical friends in England.  It was as if some eavesdropping

phonograph had treasured up his words and brought them across the

Atlantic to accuse him with them in the hour of his defection and

retreat.  Every word spoken by this stranger seemed to leave a blister on

Tracy's conscience, and by the time the speech was finished he felt that

he was all conscience and one blister.  This man's deep compassion for

the enslaved and oppressed millions in Europe who had to bear with the

contempt of that small class above them, throned upon shining heights

whose paths were shut against them, was the very thing he had often

uttered himself.  The pity in this man's voice and words was the very

twin of the pity that used to reside in his own heart and come from his

own lips when he thought of these oppressed peoples.



The homeward tramp was accomplished in brooding silence.  It was a

silence most grateful to Tracy's feelings.  He wouldn't have broken it

for anything; for he was ashamed of himself all the way through to his

spine.  He kept saying to himself:



"How unanswerable it all is--how absolutely unanswerable!  It is basely,

degradingly selfish to keep those unearned honors, and--and--oh, hang

it, nobody but a cur--'



"What an idiotic damned speech that Tompkins made!"



This outburst was from Barrow.  It flooded Tracy's demoralized soul with

waters of refreshment.  These were the darlingest words the poor

vacillating young apostate had ever heard--for they whitewashed his shame

for him, and that is a good service to have when you can't get the best

of all verdicts, self-acquittal.



"Come up to my room and smoke a pipe, Tracy."



Tracy had been expecting this invitation, and had had his declination all

ready: but he was glad enough to accept, now.  Was it possible that a

reasonable argument could be made against that man's desolating speech?

He was burning to hear Barrow try it.  He knew how to start him, and keep

him going: it was to seem to combat his positions--a process effective

with most people.



"What is it you object to in Tompkins's speech, Barrow?"



"Oh, the leaving out of the factor of human nature; requiring another man

to do what you wouldn't do yourself."



"Do you mean--"



"Why here's what I mean; it's very simple.  Tompkins is a blacksmith; has

a family; works for wages; and hard, too--fooling around won't furnish

the bread.  Suppose it should turn out that by the death of somebody in

England he is suddenly an earl--income, half a million dollars a year.

What would he do?"



"Well, I--I suppose he would have to decline to--"



"Man, he would grab it in a second!"



"Do you really think he would?"



"Think?--I don't think anything about it, I know it."



"Why?"



"Because he's not a fool."



"So you think that if he were a fool, he--"



"No, I don't.  Fool or no fool, he would grab it.  Anybody would.

Anybody that's alive.  And I've seen dead people that would get up and go

for it.  I would myself."



"This was balm, this was healing, this was rest and peace and comfort."



"But I thought you were opposed to nobilities."



"Transmissible ones, yes.  But that's nothing.  I'm opposed to

millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position."



"You'd take it?"



"I would leave the funeral of my dearest enemy to go and assume its

burdens and responsibilities."



Tracy thought a while, then said:



"I don't know that I quite get the bearings of your position.  You say

you are opposed to hereditary nobilities, and yet if you had the chance

you would--"



"Take one?  In a minute I would.  And there isn't a mechanic in that

entire club that wouldn't.  There isn't a lawyer, doctor, editor, author,

tinker, loafer, railroad president, saint-land, there isn't a human being

in the United States that wouldn't jump at the chance!"



"Except me," said Tracy softly.



"Except you!"   Barrow could hardly get the words out, his scorn so

choked him.  And he couldn't get any further than that form of words;

it seemed to dam his flow, utterly.  He got up and came and glared upon

Tracy in a kind of outraged and unappeasable way, and said again, "Except

you!"  He walked around him--inspecting him from one point of view and

then another, and relieving his soul now and then by exploding that

formula at him; "Except you!"  Finally he slumped down into his chair

with the air of one who gives it up, and said:



"He's straining his viscera and he's breaking his heart trying to get

some low-down job that a good dog wouldn't have, and yet wants to let on

that if he had a chance to scoop an earldom he wouldn't do it.  Tracy,

don't put this kind of a strain on me.  Lately I'm not as strong as I

was."



"Well, I wasn't meaning to put--a strain on you, Barrow, I was only

meaning to intimate that if an earldom ever does fall in my way--"



"There--I wouldn't give myself any worry about that, if I was you.  And

besides, I can settle what you would do.  Are you any different from me?"



"Well--no."



"Are you any better than me?"



"O,--er--why, certainly not."



"Are you as good?  Come!"



"Indeed, I--the fact is you take me so suddenly--"



"Suddenly?  What is there sudden about it?  It isn't a difficult question

is it?  Or doubtful?  Just measure us on the only fair lines--the lines

of merit--and of course you'll admit that a journeyman chairmaker that

earns his twenty dollars a week, and has had the good and genuine culture

of contact with men, and care, and hardship, and failure, and success,

and downs and ups and ups and downs, is just a trifle the superior of a

young fellow like you, who doesn't know how to do anything that's

valuable, can't earn his living in any secure and steady way, hasn't had

any experience of life and its seriousness, hasn't any culture but the

artificial culture of books, which adorns but doesn't really educate-

come! if I wouldn't scorn an earldom, what the devil right have you to do

it!"



Tracy dissembled his joy, though he wanted to thank the chair-maker for

that last remark.  Presently a thought struck him, and he spoke up

briskly and said:



"But look here, I really can't quite get the hang of your notions--your,

principles, if they are principles.  You are inconsistent.  You are

opposed to aristocracies, yet you'd take an earldom if you could.  Am I

to understand that you don't blame an earl for being and remaining an

earl?"



"I certainly don't."



"And you wouldn't blame Tompkins, or yourself, or me, or anybody, for

accepting an earldom if it was offered?"



"Indeed I wouldn't."



"Well, then, who would you blame?"



"The whole nation--any bulk and mass of population anywhere, in any

country, that will put up with the infamy, the outrage, the insult of a

hereditary aristocracy which they can't enter--and on absolutely free and

equal terms."



"Come, aren't you beclouding yourself with distinctions that are not

differences?"



"Indeed I am not.  I am entirely clear-headed about this thing.  If I

could extirpate an aristocratic system by declining its honors, then I

should be a rascal to accept them.  And if enough of the mass would join

me to make the extirpation possible, then I should be a rascal to do

otherwise than help in the attempt."



"I believe I understand--yes, I think I get the idea.  You have no blame

for the lucky few who naturally decline to vacate the pleasant nest they

were born into, you only despise the all-powerful and stupid mass of the

nation for allowing the nest to exist."



"That's it, that's it!  You can get a simple thing through your head if

you work at it long enough."



"Thanks."



"Don't mention it.  And I'll give you some sound advice: when you go

back; if you find your nation up and ready to abolish that hoary affront,

lend a hand; but if that isn't the state of things and you get a chance

at an earldom, don't you be a fool--you take it."



Tracy responded with earnestness and enthusiasm:



"As I live, I'll do it!"



Barrow laughed.



"I never saw such a fellow.  I begin to think you've got a good deal of

imagination.  With you, the idlest-fancy freezes into a reality at a

breath.  Why, you looked, then, as if it wouldn't astonish you if you did

tumble into an earldom."



Tracy blushed.  Barrow added: "Earldom!  Oh, yes, take it, if it offers;

but meantime we'll go on looking around, in a modest way, and if you get

a chance to superintend a sausage-stuffer at six or eight dollars a week,

you just trade off the earldom for a last year's almanac and stick to the

sausage-stuffing,"









CHAPTER XV.



Tracy went to bed happy once more, at rest in his mind once more.  He had

started out on a high emprise--that was to his credit, he argued; he had

fought the best fight he could, considering the odds against him--that

was to his credit; he had been defeated--certainly there was nothing

discreditable in that.  Being defeated, he had a right to retire with the

honors of war and go back without prejudice to the position in the

world's society to which he had been born.  Why not? even the rabid

republican chair-maker would do that.  Yes, his conscience was

comfortable once more.



He woke refreshed, happy, and eager for his cablegram.  He had been born

an aristocrat, he had been a democrat for a time, he was now an

aristocrat again.  He marveled to find that this final change was not

merely intellectual, it had invaded his feeling; and he also marveled to

note that this feeling seemed a good deal less artificial than any he had

entertained in his system for a long time.  He could also have noted,

if he had thought of it, that his bearing had stiffened, over night,

and that his chin had lifted itself a shade.  Arrived in the basement,

he was about to enter the breakfast room when he saw old Marsh in the dim

light of a corner of the hall, beckoning him with his finger to approach.

The blood welled slowly up in Tracy's cheek, and he said with a grade of

injured dignity almost ducal:



"Is that for me?"



"Yes."



"What is the purpose of it?"



"I want to speak to you-in private."



"This spot is private enough for me."



Marsh was surprised; and not particularly pleased.  He approached and

said:



"Oh, in public, then, if you prefer.  Though it hasn't been my way."



The boarders gathered to the spot, interested.



"Speak out," said Tracy.  "What is it you want?"



"Well, haven't you--er--forgot something?"



"I?  I'm not aware of it."



"Oh, you're not?  Now you stop and think, a minute."



"I refuse to stop and think.  It doesn't interest me.  If it interests

you, speak out."



"Well, then," said Marsh, raising his voice to a slightly angry pitch,"

You forgot to pay your board yesterday--if you're bound to have it

public."



Oh, yes, this heir to an annual million or so had been dreaming and

soaring, and had forgotten that pitiful three or four dollars.  For

penalty he must have it coarsely flung in his face in the presence of

these people--people in whose countenances was already beginning to dawn

an uncharitable enjoyment of the situation.



"Is that all!  Take your money and give your terrors a rest."



Tracy's hand went down into his pocket with angry decision.  But-it

didn't come out.  The color began to ebb out of his face.  The

countenances about him showed a growing interest; and some of them a

heightened satisfaction.  There was an uncomfortable pause--then he

forced out, with difficulty, the words:



"I've--been robbed!"



Old Marsh's eyes flamed up with Spanish fire, and he exclaimed:



"Robbed, is it?  That's your tune?  It's too old--been played in this

house too often; everybody plays it that can't get work when he wants it,

and won't work when he can get it.  Trot out Mr. Allen, somebody, and let

him take a toot at it.  It's his turn next, he forgot, too, last night.

I'm laying for him."



One of the negro women came scrambling down stairs as pale as a sorrel

horse with consternation and excitement:



"Misto Marsh, Misto Allen's skipped out!"



"What!"



"Yes-sah, and cleaned out his room clean; tuck bofe towels en de soap!"



"You lie, you hussy!"



"It's jes' so, jes' as I tells you--en Misto Summer's socks is gone, en

Misto Naylor's yuther shirt."



Mr. Marsh was at boiling point by this time.  He turned upon Tracy:



"Answer up now-when are you going to settle?"



"To-day-since you seem to be in a hurry."



"To-day is it?  Sunday--and you out of work?  I like that.  Come--where

are you going to get the money?"



Tracy's spirit was rising again.  He proposed to impress these people:



"I am expecting a cablegram from home."



Old Marsh was caught out, with the surprise of it.  The idea was so

immense, so extravagant, that he couldn't get his breath at first.  When

he did get it, it came rancid with sarcasm.



"A cablegram--think of it, ladies and gents, he's expecting a cablegram!

He's expecting a cablegram--this duffer, this scrub, this bilk!  From his

father--eh?  Yes--without a doubt.  A dollar or two a word--oh, that's

nothing--they don't mind a little thing like that--this kind's fathers

don't.  Now his father is--er--well, I reckon his father--"



"My father is an English earl!"



The crowd fell back aghast-aghast at the sublimity of the young loafer's

"cheek."  Then they burst into a laugh that made the windows rattle.

Tracy was too angry to realize that he had done a foolish thing.  He

said:



"Stand aside, please.  I--"



"Wait a minute, your lordship," said Marsh, bowing low, "where is your

lordship going?"



"For the cablegram.  Let me pass."



"Excuse me, your lordship, you'll stay right where you are."



"What do you mean by that?"



"I mean that I didn't begin to keep boarding-house yesterday.  It means

that I am not the kind that can be taken in by every hack-driver's son

that comes loafing over here because he can't bum a living at home.  It

means that you can't skip out on any such--"



Tracy made a step toward the old man, but Mrs.  Marsh sprang between, and

said:



"Don't, Mr. Tracy, please."  She turned to her husband and said, "Do

bridle your tongue.  What has he done to be treated so?  Can't you see he

has lost his mind, with trouble and distress?  He's not responsible."



"Thank your kind heart, madam, but I've not lost my mind; and if I can

have the mere privilege of stepping to the telegraph office--"



"Well, you can't," cried Marsh.



"--or sending--"



"Sending!  That beats everything.  If there's anybody that's fool enough

to go on such a chuckle-headed errand--"



"Here comes Mr. Barrow--he will go for me.  Barrow--"



A brisk fire of exclamations broke out--



"Say, Barrow, he's expecting a cablegram!"



"Cablegram from his father, you know!"



"Yes--cablegram from the wax-figger!"



"And say, Barrow, this fellow's an earl--take off your hat, pull down

your vest!"



"Yes, he's come off and forgot his crown, that he wears Sundays.  He's

cabled over to his pappy to send it."



"You step out and get that cablegram, Barrow; his majesty's a little lame

to-day."



"Oh stop," cried Barrow; "give the man a chance."  He turned, and said

with some severity, "Tracy, what's the matter with you?  What kind of

foolishness is this you've been talking.  You ought to have more sense."



"I've not been talking foolishness; and if you'll go to the telegraph

office--"



"Oh; don't talk so.  I'm your friend in trouble and out of it, before

your face and behind your back, for anything in reason; but you've lost

your head, you see, and this moonshine about a cablegram--"



"I'll go there and ask for it!"



"Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Brady.  Here, I'll give you a

Written order for it.  Fly, now, and fetch it.  We'll soon see!"



Brady flew.  Immediately the sort of quiet began to steal over the crowd

which means dawning doubt, misgiving; and might be translated into the

words, "Maybe he is expecting a cablegram--maybe he has got a father

somewhere--maybe we've been just a little too fresh, just a shade too

'previous'!"



Loud talk ceased; then the mutterings and low murmurings and whisperings

died out.  The crowd began to crumble apart.  By ones and twos the

fragments drifted to the breakfast table.  Barrow tried to bring Tracy

in; but he said:



"Not yet, Barrow-presently."



Mrs. Marsh and Hattie tried, offering gentle and kindly persuasions; but

he said;



"I would rather wait-till he comes."



Even old Marsh began to have suspicions that maybe he had been a trifle

too "brash," as he called it in the privacy of his soul, and he pulled

himself together and started toward Tracy with invitation in his eyes;

but Tracy warned him off with a gesture which was quite positive and

eloquent.  Then followed the stillest quarter of an hour which had ever

been known in that house at that time of day.  It was so still, and so

solemn withal, that when somebody's cup slipped from his fingers and

landed in his plate the shock made people start, and the sharp sound

seemed as indecorous there and as out of place as if a coffin and

mourners were imminent and being waited for.  And at last when Brady's

feet came clattering down the stairs the sacrilege seemed unbearable.

Everybody rose softly and turned toward the door, where stood Tracy;

then with a common impulse, moved a step or two in that direction, and

stopped.  While they gazed, young Brady arrived, panting, and put into

Tracy's hand,--sure enough--an envelope.  Tracy fastened a bland

victorious eye upon the gazers, and kept it there till one by one they

dropped their eyes, vanquished and embarrassed.  Then he tore open the

telegram and glanced at its message.  The yellow paper fell from his

fingers and fluttered to the floor, and his face turned white.  There was

nothing there but one word--



"Thanks."



The humorist of the house, the tall, raw-boned Billy Nash, caulker from

the navy yard, was standing in the rear of the crowd.  In the midst of

the pathetic silence that was now brooding over the place and moving some

few hearts there toward compassion, he began to whimper, then he put his

handkerchief to his eyes and buried his face in the neck of the,

bashfulest young fellow in the company, a navy-yard blacksmith, shrieked

"Oh, pappy, how could you!" and began to bawl like a teething baby, if

one may imagine a baby with the energy and the devastating voice of a

jackass.



So perfect was that imitation of a child's cry, and so vast the scale of

it and so ridiculous the aspect of the performer, that all gravity was

swept from the place as if by a hurricane, and almost everybody there

joined in the crash of laughter provoked by the exhibition.  Then the

small mob began to take its revenge--revenge for the discomfort and

apprehension it had brought upon itself by its own too rash freshness of

a little while before.  It guyed its poor victim, baited him, worried

him, as dogs do with a cornered cat.  The victim answered back with

defiances and challenges which included everybody, and which only gave

the sport new spirit and variety; but when he changed his tactics and

began to single out individuals and invite them by name, the fun lost its

funniness and the interest of the show died out, along with the noise.



Finally Marsh was about to take an innings, but Barrow said:



"Never mind, now--leave him alone.  You've no account with him but a

money account.  I'll take care of that myself."



The distressed and worried landlady gave Barrow a fervently grateful look

for his championship of the abused stranger; and the pet of the house, a

very prism in her cheap but ravishing Sunday rig, blew him a kiss from

the tips of her fingers and said, with the darlingest smile and a sweet

little toss of her head:



"You're the only man here, and I'm going to set my cap for you, you dear

old thing!"



"For shame, Puss!  How you talk!  I never saw such a child!"



It took a good deal of argument and persuasion--that is to say, petting,

under these disguises--to get Tracy to entertain the idea of breakfast.

He at first said he would never eat again in that house; and added that

he had enough firmness of character, he trusted, to enable him to starve

like a man when the alternative was to eat insult with his bread.



When he had finished his breakfast, Barrow took him to his room,

furnished him a pipe, and said cheerily:



"Now, old fellow, take in your battle-flag out of the wet, you're not in

the hostile camp any more.  You're a little upset by your troubles,

and that's natural enough, but don't let your mind run on them anymore

than you can help; drag your thoughts away from your troubles by the

ears, by the heels, or any other way, so you manage it; it's the

healthiest thing a body can do; dwelling on troubles is deadly, just

deadly--and that's the softest name there is for it.  You must keep your

mind amused--you must, indeed."



"Oh, miserable me!"



"Don't!  There's just pure heart-break in that tone.  It's just as I say;

you've got to get right down to it and amuse your mind, as if it was

salvation."



"They're easy words to say, Barrow, but how am I going to amuse,

entertain, divert a mind that finds itself suddenly assaulted and

overwhelmed by disasters of a sort not dreamed of and not provided for?

No-no, the bare idea of amusement is repulsive to my feelings: Let us

talk of death and funerals."



"No-not yet.  That would be giving up the ship.  We'll not give up the

ship yet.  I'm going to amuse you; I sent Brady out for the wherewithal

before you finished breakfast."



"You did?  What is it?"



"Come, this is a good sign-curiosity.  Oh, there's' hope for you yet."









CHAPTER XVI.



Brady arrived with a box, and departed, after saying" They're finishing

one up, but they'll be along as soon as it's done."



Barrow took a frameless oil portrait a foot square from the box, set it

up in a good light, without comment, and reached for another, taking a

furtive glance at Tracy, meantime. The stony solemnity in Tracy's face

remained as it was, and gave out no sign of interest.  Barrow placed the

second portrait beside the first, and stole another glance while reaching

for a third.  The stone image softened, a shade.  No. 3 forced the ghost

of a smile, No. 4 swept indifference wholly away, and No. 5 started a

laugh which was still in good and hearty condition when No. 14 took its

place  in the row.



"Oh, you're all right, yet," said Barrow.  "You see you're not past

amusement."



The pictures were fearful, as to color, and atrocious as to drawing and

expression; but the feature which squelched animosity and made them funny

was a feature which could not achieve its full force in a single picture,

but required the wonder-working assistance of repetition.  One loudly

dressed mechanic in stately attitude, with his hand on a cannon, ashore,

and a ship riding at anchor in the offing,--this is merely odd; but when

one sees the same cannon and the same ship in fourteen pictures in a row,

and a different mechanic standing watch in each, the thing gets to be

funny.



"Explain--explain these aberrations," said Tracy.



"Well, they are not the achievement of a single intellect, a single

talent--it takes two to do these miracles.  They are collaborations;

the one artist does the figure, the other the accessories.  The figure-

artist is a German shoemaker with an untaught passion for art, the other

is a simple hearted old Yankee sailor-man whose possibilities are

strictly limited to his ship, his cannon and his patch of petrified sea.

They work these things up from twenty-five-cent tintypes; they get six

dollars apiece for them, and they can grind out a couple a day when they

strike what they call a boost--that is, an inspiration."



"People actually pay money for these calumnies?"



"They actually do--and quite willingly, too.  And these abortionists

could double their trade and work the women in, if Capt. Saltmarsh could

whirl a horse in, or a piano, or a guitar, in place of his cannon.  The

fact is, he fatigues the market with that cannon.  Even the male market,

I mean.  These fourteen in the procession are not all satisfied.  One is

an old "independent" fireman, and he wants an engine in place of the

cannon; another is a mate of a tug, and wants a tug in place of the ship

--and so on, and so on.  But the captain can't make a tug that is

deceptive, and a fire engine is many flights beyond his power."



"This is a most extraordinary form of robbery, I never have heard of

anything like it.  It's interesting."



"Yes, and so are the artists.  They are perfectly honest men, and

sincere.  And the old sailor-man is full of sound religion, and is as

devoted a student of the Bible and misquoter of it as you can find

anywhere.  I don't know a better man or kinder hearted old soul than

Saltmarsh, although he does swear a little, sometimes."



"He seems to be perfect.  I want to know him, Barrow."



"You'll have the chance.  I guess I hear them coming, now.  We'll draw

them out on their art, if you like."



The artists arrived and shook hands with great heartiness.  The German

was forty and a little fleshy, with a shiny bald head and a kindly face

and deferential manner.  Capt.  Saltmarsh was sixty, tall, erect,

powerfully built, with coal-black hair and whiskers, and he had a well

tanned complexion, and a gait and countenance that were full of command,

confidence and decision.  His horny hands and wrists were covered with

tattoo-marks, and when his lips parted, his teeth showed up white and

blemishless.  His voice was the effortless deep bass of a church organ,

and would disturb the tranquility of a gas flame fifty yards away.



"They're wonderful pictures," said Barrow.  "We've been examining them."



"It is very bleasant dot you like dem," said Handel, the German, greatly

pleased.  "Und you, Herr Tracy, you haf peen bleased mit dem too,

alretty?"



"I can honestly say I have never seen anything just like them before."



"Schon!" cried the German, delighted.  "You hear, Gaptain?  Here is a

chentleman, yes, vot abbreviate unser aart."



The captain was charmed, and said:



"Well, sir, we're thankful for a compliment yet, though they're not as

scarce now as they used to be before we made a reputation."



"Getting the reputation is the up-hill time in most things, captain."



"It's so.  It ain't enough to know how to reef a gasket, you got to make

the mate know you know it.  That's reputation.  The good word, said at

the right time, that's the word that makes us; and evil be to him that

evil thinks, as Isaiah says."



"It's very relevant, and hits the point exactly," said Tracy.



"Where did you study art, Captain?"



"I haven't studied; it's a natural gift."



"He is born mit dose cannon in him.  He tondt haf to do noding, his

chenius do all de vork.  Of he is asleep, and take a pencil in his hand,

out come a cannon.  Py crashus, of he could do a clavier, of he could do

a guitar, of he could do a vashtub, it is a fortune, heiliger Yohanniss

it is yoost a fortune!"



"Well, it is an immense pity that the business is hindered and limited in

this unfortunate way."



The captain grew a trifle excited, himself, now:



"You've said it, Mr. Tracy!--Hindered?  well, I should say so.  Why, look

here.  This fellow here, No. 11, he's a hackman,--a flourishing hackman,

I may say.  He wants his hack in this picture.  Wants it where the cannon

is.  I got around that difficulty, by telling him the cannon's our

trademark, so to speak-proves that the picture's our work, and I was

afraid if we left it out people wouldn't know for certain if it was a

Saltmarsh--Handel--now you wouldn't yourself--"



"What, Captain?  You wrong yourself, indeed you do.  Anyone who has once

seen a genuine Saltmarsh-Handel is safe from imposture forever.  Strip

it, flay it, skin it out of every detail but the bare color and

expression, and that man will still recognize it--still stop to

worship--"



"Oh, how it makes me feel to hear dose oxpressions!--"



--"still say to himself again as he had, said a hundred times before, the

art of the Saltmarsh-Handel is an art apart, there is nothing in the

heavens above or in the earth beneath that resembles it,--"



"Py chiminy, nur horen Sie einmal!  In my life day haf I never heard so

brecious worts."



"So I talked him out of the hack, Mr. Tracy, and he let up on that, and

said put in a hearse, then--because he's chief mate of a hearse but don't

own it--stands a watch for wages, you know.  But I can't do a hearse any

more than I can a hack; so here we are--becalmed, you see.  And it's the

same with women and such.  They come and they want a little johnry

picture--"



"It's the accessories that make it a 'genre?'"



"Yes--cannon, or cat, or any little thing like that, that you heave into

whoop up the effect.  We could do a prodigious trade with the women if we

could foreground the things they like, but they don't give a damn for

artillery.  Mine's the lack," continued the captain with a sigh, "Andy's

end of the business is all right I tell you he's an artist from way

back!"



"Yoost hear dot old man!  He always talk 'poud me like dot," purred the

pleased German.



"Look at his work yourself!  Fourteen portraits in a row.  And no two of

them alike."



"Now that you speak of it, it is true; I hadn't noticed it before.  It is

very remarkable.  Unique, I suppose."



"I should say so.  That's the very thing about Andy--he discriminates.

Discrimination's the thief of time--forty-ninth Psalm; but that ain't any

matter, it's the honest thing, and it pays in the end."



"Yes, he certainly is great in that feature, one is obliged to admit it;

but--now mind, I'm not really criticising--don't you think he is just a

trifle overstrong in technique?"



The captain's face was knocked expressionless by this remark.  It

remained quite vacant while he muttered to himself--" Technique--

technique--polytechnique--pyro-technique; that's it, likely-fireworks too

much color."  Then he spoke up with serenity and confidence, and said:



"Well, yes, he does pile it on pretty loud; but they all like it, you

know--fact is, it's the life of the business.  Take that No. 9, there,

Evans the butcher.  He drops into the stoodio as sober-colored as

anything you ever see: now look at him.  You can't tell him from scarlet

fever.  Well, it pleases that butcher to death.  I'm making a study of a

sausage-wreath to hang on the cannon, and I don't really reckon I can do

it right, but if I can, we can break the butcher."



"Unquestionably your confederate--I mean your--your fellow-craftsman--

is a great colorist--"



"Oh, danke schon!--"



--"in fact a quite extraordinary colorist; a colorist, I make bold to

say, without imitator here or abroad--and with a most bold and effective

touch, a touch like a battering ram; and a manner so peculiar and

romantic, and extraneous, and ad libitum, and heart-searching, that--

that--he--he is an impressionist, I presume?"



"No," said the captain simply, "he is a Presbyterian."



"It accounts for it all--all--there's something divine about his art,--

soulful, unsatisfactory, yearning, dim hearkening on the void horizon,

vague-murmuring to the spirit out of ultra-marine distances and far-

sounding cataclysms of uncreated space--oh, if he--if, he--has he ever

tried distemper?"



The captain answered up with energy:



"Not if he knows himself!  But his dog has, and--"



"Oh, no, it vas not my dog."



"Why, you said it was your dog."



"Oh, no, gaptain, I--"



"It was a white dog, wasn't it, with his tail docked, and one ear gone,

and--"



"Dot's him, dot's him!--der fery dog.  Wy, py Chorge, dot dog he would

eat baint yoost de same like--"



"Well, never mind that, now--'vast heaving--I never saw such a man.  You

start him on that dog and he'll dispute a year.  Blamed if I haven't seen

him keep it up a level two hours and a half."



"Why captain!" said Barrow.  "I guess that must be hearsay."



"No, sir, no hearsay about it--he disputed with me.



"I don't see how you stood it."



"Oh, you've got to--if you run with Andy.  But it's the only fault he's

got."



"Ain't you afraid of acquiring it?"



"Oh, no," said the captain, tranquilly, "no danger of that, I reckon."



The artists presently took their leave.  Then Barrow put his hands on

Tracy's shoulders and said:



"Look me in the eye, my boy.  Steady, steady.  There--it's just as I

thought--hoped, anyway; you're all right, thank goodness.  Nothing the

matter with your mind.  But don't do that again--even for fun.  It isn't

wise.  They wouldn't have believed you if you'd been an earl's son.

Why, they couldn't--don't you know that?  What ever possessed you to take

such a freak?  But never mind about that; let's not talk of it.  It was a

mistake; you see that yourself."



"Yes--it was a mistake."



"Well, just drop it out of your, mind; it's no harm; we all make them.

Pull your courage together, and don't brood, and don't give up.  I'm at

your back, and we'll pull through, don't you be afraid."



When he was gone, Barrow walked the floor a good while, uneasy in his

mind.  He said to himself, "I'm troubled about him.  He never would have

made a break like that if he hadn't been a little off his balance.

But I know what being out of work and no prospect ahead can do for a man.

First it knocks the pluck out of him and drags his pride in the dirt;

worry does the rest, and his mind gets shaky.  I must talk to these

people.  No--if there's any humanity in them--and there is, at bottom--

they'll be easier on him if they think his troubles have disturbed his

reason.  But I've got to find him some work; work's the only medicine for

his disease. Poor devil! away off here, and not a friend."









CHAPTER XVII



The moment Tracy was alone his spirits vanished away, and all the misery

of his situation was manifest to him.  To be moneyless and an object of

the chairmaker's charity--this was bad enough, but his folly in

proclaiming himself an earl's son to that scoffing and unbelieving crew,

and, on top of that, the humiliating result--the recollection of these

things was a sharper torture still.  He made up his mind that he would

never play earl's son again before a doubtful audience.



His father's answer was a blow he could not understand.  At times he

thought his father imagined he could get work to do in America without

any trouble, and was minded to let him try it and cure himself of his

radicalism by hard, cold, disenchanting experience.  That seemed the most

plausible theory, yet he could not content himself with it.  A theory

that pleased him better was, that this cablegram would be followed by

another, of a gentler sort, requiring him to come home.  Should he write

and strike his flag, and ask for a ticket home?  Oh, no, that he couldn't

ever do.  At least, not yet.  That cablegram would come, it certainly

would.  So he went from one telegraph office to another every day for

nearly a week, and asked if there was a cablegram for Howard Tracy.

No, there wasn't any.  So they answered him at first.  Later, they said

it before he had a chance to ask.  Later still they merely shook their

heads impatiently as soon as he came in sight.  After that he was ashamed

to go any more.



He was down in the lowest depths of despair, now; for the harder Barrow

tried to find work for him the more hopeless the possibilities seemed to

grow.  At last he said to Barrow:



"Look here.  I want to make a confession.  I have got down, now, to where

I am not only willing to acknowledge to myself that I am a shabby

creature and full of false pride, but am willing to acknowledge it to

you.  Well, I've been allowing you to wear yourself out hunting for work

for me when there's been a chance open to me all the time.  Forgive my

pride--what was left of it.  It is all gone, now, and I've come to

confess that if those ghastly artists want another confederate, I'm their

man--for at last I am dead to shame."



"No?  Really, can you paint?"



"Not as badly as they.  No, I don't claim that, for I am not a genius;

in fact, I am a very indifferent amateur, a slouchy dabster, a mere

artistic sarcasm; but drunk or asleep I can beat those buccaneers."



"Shake!  I want to shout!  Oh, I tell you, I am immensely delighted and

relieved.  Oh, just to work--that is life!  No matter what the work is--

that's of no consequence.  Just work itself is bliss when a man's been

starving for it.  I've been there!  Come right along; we'll hunt the old

boys up.  Don't you feel good?  I tell you I do."



The freebooters were not at home.  But their "works" were, displayed in

profusion all about the little ratty studio.  Cannon to the right of

them, cannon to the left of them, cannon in front--it was Balaclava come

again.



"Here's the uncontented hackman, Tracy.  Buckle to--deepen the sea-green

to turf, turn the ship into a hearse.  Let the boys have a taste of your

quality."



The artists arrived just as the last touch was put on.  They stood

transfixed with admiration.



"My souls but she's a stunner, that hearse!  The hackman will just go all

to pieces when he sees that won't he Andy?"



"Oh, it is sphlennid, sphlennid!  Herr Tracy, why haf you not said you

vas a so sublime aartist?  Lob' Gott, of you had lif'd in Paris you would

be a Pree de Rome, dot's votes de matter!"



The arrangements were soon made.  Tracy was taken into full and equal

partnership, and he went straight to work, with dash and energy, to

reconstructing gems of art whose accessories had failed to satisfy.

Under his hand, on that and succeeding days, artillery disappeared and

the emblems of peace and commerce took its place--cats, hacks, sausages,

tugs, fire engines, pianos, guitars, rocks, gardens, flower-pots,

landscapes--whatever was wanted, he flung it in; and the more out of

place and absurd the required object was, the more joy he got out of

fabricating it.  The pirates were delighted, the customers applauded, the

sex began to flock in, great was the prosperity of the firm.  Tracy was

obliged to confess to himself that there was something about work,--even

such grotesque and humble work as this--which most pleasantly satisfied a

something in his nature which had never been satisfied before, and also

gave him a strange new dignity in his own private view of himself.



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



The Unqualified Member from Cherokee Strip was in a state of deep

dejection.  For a good while, now, he had been leading a sort of life

which was calculated to kill; for it had consisted in regularly

alternating days of brilliant hope and black disappointment.  The

brilliant hopes were created by the magician Sellers, and they always

promised that now he had got the trick, sure, and would effectively

influence that materialized cowboy to call at the Towers before night.

The black disappointments consisted in the persistent and monotonous

failure of these prophecies.



At the date which this history has now reached, Sellers was appalled to

find that the usual remedy was inoperative, and that Hawkins's low

spirits refused absolutely to lift.  Something must be done, he

reflected; it was heart-breaking, this woe, this smileless misery,

this dull despair that looked out from his poor friend's face.  Yes, he

must be cheered up.  He mused a while, then he saw his way.  He said in

his most conspicuously casual vein:



"Er--uh--by the way, Hawkins, we are feeling disappointed about this

thing--the way the materializee is acting, I mean--we are disappointed;

you concede that?"



"Concede it?  Why, yes, if you like the term."



"Very well; so far, so good.  Now for the basis of the feeling.  It is

not that your heart, your affections are concerned; that is to say, it is

not that you want the materializee Itself.  You concede that?"



"Yes, I concede that, too--cordially."



"Very well, again; we are making progress.  To sum up: The feeling, it is

conceded, is not engendered by the mere conduct of the materializee; it

is conceded that it does not arise from any pang which the personality of

the materializee could assuage.  Now then, "said the earl, with the light

of triumph in his eye, "the inexorable logic of the situation narrows us

down to this: our feeling has its source in the money-loss involved.

Come--isn't that so?"



"Goodness knows I concede that, with all my heart."



"Very well.  When you've found out the source of a disease, you've also

found out what remedy is required--just as in this case.  In this case

money is required.  And only money."



The old, old seduction was in that airy, confident tone and those

significant words--usually called pregnant words in books.  The old

answering signs of faith and hope showed up in Hawkins's countenance,

and he said:



"Only money?  Do you mean that you know a way to--"



"Washington, have you the impression that I have no resources but those

I allow the public and my intimate friends to know about?"



"Well, I--er--"



"Is it likely, do you think, that a man moved by nature and taught by

experience to keep his affairs to himself and a cautious and reluctant

tongue in his head, wouldn't be thoughtful enough to keep a few resources

in reserve for a rainy day, when he's got as many as I have to select

from?"



"Oh, you make me feel so much better already, Colonel!"



"Have you ever been in my laboratory?"



"Why, no."



"That's it.  You see you didn't even know that I had one.  Come along.

I've got a little trick there that I want to show you.  I've kept it

perfectly quiet, not fifty people know anything about it.  But that's my

way, always been my way.  Wait till you're ready, that's the idea; and

when you're ready, zzip!--let her go!"



"Well, Colonel, I've never seen a man that I've had such unbounded

confidence in as you.  When you say a thing right out, I always feel as

if that ends it; as if that is evidence, and proof, and everything else."



The old earl was profoundly pleased and touched.



"I'm glad you believe in me, Washington; not everybody is so just."



"I always have believed in you; and I always shall as long as I live."



"Thank you, my boy.  You shan't repent it.  And you can't."  Arrived in

the "laboratory," the earl continued, "Now, cast your eye around this

room--what do you see?  Apparently a junk-shop; apparently a hospital

connected with a patent office--in reality, the mines of Golconda in

disguise!  Look at that thing there.  Now what would you take that thing

to be?"



"I don't believe I could ever imagine."



"Of course you couldn't.  It's my grand adaptation of the phonograph to

the marine service.  You store up profanity in it for use at sea.

You know that sailors don't fly around worth a cent unless you swear

at them--so the mate that can do the best job of swearing is the most

valuable man.  In great emergencies his talent saves the ship.  But a

ship is a large thing, and he can't be everywhere at once; so there have

been times when one mate has lost a ship which could have been saved if

they had had a hundred.  Prodigious storms, you know.  Well, a ship can't

afford a hundred mates; but she can afford a hundred Cursing Phonographs,

and distribute them all over the vessel--and there, you see, she's armed

at every point.  Imagine a big storm, and a hundred of my machines all

cursing away at once--splendid spectacle, splendid!--you couldn't hear

yourself think.  Ship goes through that storm perfectly serene--she's

just as safe as she'd be on shore."



"It's a wonderful idea.  How do you prepare the thing?"



"Load it-simply load it."



"How?"



"Why you just stand over it and swear into it."



"That loads it, does it?"



"Yes--because every word it collars, it keeps--keeps it forever.  Never

wears out.  Any time you turn the crank, out it'll come.  In times of

great peril, you can reverse it, and it'll swear backwards.  That makes a

sailor hump himself!"



"O, I see.  Who loads them?--the mate?"



"Yes, if he chooses.  Or I'll furnish them already loaded.  I can hire an

expert for $75 a month who will load a hundred and fifty phonographs in

150 hours, and do it easy.  And an expert can furnish a stronger article,

of course, than the mere average uncultivated mate could.  Then you see,

all the ships of the world will buy them ready loaded--for I shall have

them loaded in any language a customer wants.  Hawkins, it will work the

grandest moral reform of the 19th century.  Five years from now, all the

swearing will be done by machinery--you won't ever hear a profane word

come from human lips on a ship.  Millions of dollars have been spent by

the churches, in the effort to abolish profanity in the commercial

marine.  Think of it--my name will live forever in the affections of good

men as the man, who, solitary and alone, accomplished this noble and

elevating reform."



"O, it is grand and beneficent and beautiful.  How did you ever come to

think of it?  You have a wonderful mind.  How did you say you loaded the

machine?"



"O, it's no trouble-perfectly simple.  If you want to load it up loud and

strong, you stand right over it and shout.  But if you leave it open and

all set, it'll eavesdrop, so to speak--that is to say, it will load

itself up with any sounds that are made within six feet of it.  Now I'll

show you how it works.  I had an expert come and load this one up

yesterday.  Hello, it's been left open--it's too bad--still I reckon it

hasn't had much chance to collect irrelevant stuff.  All you do is to

press this button in the floor--so."



The phonograph began to sing in a plaintive voice:



          There is a boarding-house, far far away,

          Where they have ham and eggs, 3 times a day.



"Hang it, that ain't it.  Somebody's been singing around here."



The plaintive song began again, mingled with a low, gradually rising wail

of cats slowly warming up toward a fight;



          O, how the boarders yell,

          When they hear that dinner bell

          They give that landlord--



(momentary outburst of terrific catfight which drowns out one word.)



          Three times a day.



(Renewal of furious catfight for a moment.  The plaintive voice on a high

fierce key, "Scat, you devils"--and a racket as of flying missiles.)



"Well, never mind--let it go.  I've got some sailor-profanity down in

there somewhere, if I could get to it.  But it isn't any matter; you see

how the machine works."



Hawkins responded with enthusiasm:



"O, it works admirably!  I know there's a hundred fortunes in it."



"And mind, the Hawkins family get their share, Washington."



"O, thanks, thanks; you are just as generous as ever.  Ah, it's the

grandest invention of the age!"



"Ah, well; we live in wonderful times.  The elements are crowded full of

beneficent forces--always have been--and ours is the first generation to

turn them to account and make them work for us.  Why Hawkins, everything

is useful--nothing ought ever to be wasted.  Now look at sewer gas, for

instance.  Sewer gas has always been wasted, heretofore; nobody tried to

save up sewer-gas--you can't name me a man.  Ain't that so? you know

perfectly well it's so."



"Yes it is so--but I never--er--I don't quite see why a body--"



"Should want to save it up?  Well, I'll tell you.  Do you see this little

invention here?--it's a decomposer--I call it a decomposer.  I give you

my word of honor that if you show me a house that produces a given

quantity of sewer-gas in a day, I'll engage to set up my decomposer there

and make that house produce a hundred times that quantity of sewer-gas in

less than half an hour."



"Dear me, but why should you want to?"



"Want to?  Listen, and you'll see.  My boy, for illuminating purposes and

economy combined, there's nothing in the world that begins with sewer-

gas.  And really, it don't cost a cent.  You put in a good inferior

article of plumbing,--such as you find everywhere--and add my decomposer,

and there you are.  Just use the ordinary gas pipes--and there your

expense ends.  Think of it.  Why, Major, in five years from now you won't

see a house lighted with anything but sewer-gas.  Every physician I talk

to, recommends it; and every plumber."



"But isn't it dangerous?"



"O, yes, more or less, but everything is--coal gas, candles, electricity

--there isn't anything that ain't."



"It lights up well, does it?"



"O, magnificently."



"Have you given it a good trial?"



"Well, no, not a first rate one.  Polly's prejudiced, and she won't let

me put it in here; but I'm playing my cards to get it adopted in the

President's house, and then it'll go--don't you doubt it.  I shall not

need this one for the present, Washington; you may take it down to some

boarding-house and give it a trial if you like."









CHAPTER XVIII.



Washington shuddered slightly at the suggestion, then his face took on a

dreamy look and he dropped into a trance of thought.  After a little,

Sellers asked him what he was grinding in his mental mill.



"Well, this.  Have you got some secret project in your head which

requires a Bank of England back of it to make it succeed?"



The Colonel showed lively astonishment, and said:



"Why, Hawkins, are you a mind-reader?"



"I?  I never thought of such a thing."



"Well, then how did you happen to drop onto that idea in this curious

fashion?  It's just mind-reading, that's what it is, though you may not

know it.  Because I have got a private project that requires a Bank of

England at its back.  How could you divine that?  What was the process?

This is interesting."



"There wasn't any process.  A thought like this happened to slip through

my head by accident: How much would make you or me comfortable?

A hundred thousand.  Yet you are expecting two or three of--these

inventions of yours to turn out some billions of money--and you are

wanting them to do that.  If you wanted ten millions, I could understand

that--it's inside the human limits.  But billions!  That's clear outside

the limits.  There must be a definite project back of that somewhere."



The earl's interest and surprise augmented with every word, and when

Hawkins finished, he said with strong admiration:



"It's wonderfully reasoned out, Washington, it certainly is.  It shows

what I think is quite extraordinary penetration.  For you've hit it;

you've driven the centre, you've plugged the bulls-eye of my dream.  Now

I'll tell you the whole thing, and you'll understand it.  I don't need to

ask you to keep it to yourself, because you'll see that the project will

prosper all the better for being kept in the background till the right

time.  Have you noticed how many pamphlets and books I've got lying

around relating to Russia?"



"Yes, I think most anybody would notice that--anybody who wasn't dead."



"Well, I've been posting myself a good while.  That's a great and,

splendid nation, and deserves to be set free."  He paused, then added in

a quite matter-of-fact way, "When I get this money I'm going to set it

free."



"Great guns!"



"Why, what makes you jump like that?"



"Dear me, when you are going to drop a remark under a man's chair that is

likely to blow him out through the roof, why don't you put some

expression, some force, some noise unto it that will prepare him?  You

shouldn't flip out such a gigantic thing as this in that colorless kind

of a way.  You do jolt a person up, so.  Go on, now, I'm all right again.

Tell me all about it.  I'm all interest--yes, and sympathy, too."



"Well, I've looked the ground over, and concluded that the methods of the

Russian patriots, while good enough considering the way the boys are

hampered, are not the best; at least not the quickest.  They are trying

to revolutionize Russia from within; that's pretty slow, you know, and

liable to interruption all the time, and is full of perils for the

workers.  Do you know how Peter the Great started his army?  He didn't

start it on the family premises under the noses of the Strelitzes; no, he

started it away off yonder, privately,--only just one regiment, you know,

and he built to that.  The first thing the Strelitzes knew, the regiment

was an army, their position was turned, and they had to take a walk.

Just that little idea made the biggest and worst of all the despotisms

the world has seen.  The same idea can unmake it.  I'm going to prove it.

I'm going to get out to one side and work my scheme the way Peter did."



"This is mighty interesting, Rossmore.  What is it you are, going to do?"



"I am going to buy Siberia and start a republic."



"There,--bang you go again, without giving any notice!  Going to buy it?"



"Yes, as soon as I get the money.  I don't care what the price is, I

shall take it.  I can afford it, and I will.  Now then, consider this--

and you've never thought of it, I'll warrant.  Where is the place where

there is twenty-five times more manhood, pluck, true heroism,

unselfishness, devotion to high and noble ideals, adoration of liberty,

wide education, and brains, per thousand of population, than any other

domain in the whole world can show?"



"Siberia!"



"Right."



"It is true; it certainly is true, but I never thought of it before."



"Nobody ever thinks of it.  But it's so, just the same.  In those mines

and prisons are gathered together the very finest and noblest and

capablest multitude of human beings that God is able to create.  Now if

you had that kind of a population to sell, would you offer it to a

despotism?  No, the despotism has no use for it; you would lose money.

A despotism has no use for anything but human cattle.  But suppose you

want to start a republic?"



"Yes, I see.  It's just, the material for it."



"Well, I should say so!  There's Siberia with just the very finest and

choicest material on the globe for a republic, and more coming--more

coming all the time, don't you see!  It is being daily, weekly, monthly

recruited by the most perfectly devised system that has ever been

invented, perhaps.  By this system the whole of the hundred millions of

Russia are being constantly and patiently sifted, sifted, sifted, by

myriads of trained experts, spies appointed by the Emperor personally;

and whenever they catch a man, woman or child that has got any brains or

education or character, they ship that person straight to Siberia.  It is

admirable, it is wonderful.  It is so searching and so effective that it

keeps the general level of Russian intellect and education down to that

of the Czar."



"Come, that sounds like exaggeration."



"Well, it's what they say anyway.  But I think, myself, it's a lie.  And

it doesn't seem right to slander a whole nation that way, anyhow.  Now,

then, you see what the material is, there in Siberia, for a republic."

He paused, and his breast began to heave and his eye to burn, under the

impulse of strong emotion.  Then his words began to stream forth, with

constantly increasing energy and fire, and he rose to his feet as if to

give himself larger freedom.  "The minute I organize that republic, the

light of liberty, intelligence, justice, humanity, bursting from it,

flooding from it, flaming from it, will concentrate the gaze of the whole

astonished world as upon the miracle of a new sun; Russia's countless

multitudes of slaves will rise up and march, march!--eastward, with that

great light transfiguring their faces as they come, and far back of them

you will see-what will you see?--a vacant throne in an empty land!  It

can be done, and by God I will do it!"



He stood a moment bereft of earthy consciousness by his exaltation; then

consciousness returned, bringing him a slight shock, and he said with

grave earnestness:



"I must ask you to pardon me, Major Hawkins.  I have never used that

expression before, and I beg you will forgive it this time."



Hawkins was quite willing.



"You see, Washington, it is an error which I am by nature not liable to.

Only excitable people, impulsive people, are exposed to it.  But the

circumstances of the present case--I being a democrat by birth and

preference, and an aristocrat by inheritance and relish--"



The earl stopped suddenly, his frame stiffened, and he began to stare

speechless through the curtainless window.  Then he pointed, and gasped

out a single rapturous word:



"Look!"



"What is it, Colonel?"



"IT!"



"No!"



"Sure as you're born.  Keep perfectly still.  I'll apply the influence--

I'll turn on all my force.  I've brought It thus far--I'll fetch It right

into the house.  You'll see."



He was making all sorts of passes in the air with his hands.



"There!  Look at that.  I've made It smile!  See?"



Quite true.  Tracy, out for an afternoon stroll, had come unexpectantly

upon his family arms displayed upon this shabby house-front.  The

hatchments made him smile; which was nothing, they had made the

neighborhood cats do that.



"Look, Hawkins, look!  I'm drawing It over!"



"You're drawing it sure, Rossmore.  If I ever had any doubts about

materialization, they're gone, now, and gone for good.  Oh, this is a

joyful day!"



Tracy was sauntering over to read the door-plate.  Before he was half way

over he was saying to himself, "Why, manifestly these are the American

Claimant's quarters."



"It's coming-coming right along.  I'll slide, down and pull It in.  You

follow after me."



Sellers, pale and a good deal agitated, opened the door and confronted

Tracy.  The old man could not at once get his voice: then he pumped out a

scattering and hardly coherent salutation, and followed it with--



"Walk in, walk right in, Mr.--er--"



"Tracy--Howard Tracy."



"Tracy--thanks-walk right in, you're expected."



Tracy entered, considerably puzzled, and said:



"Expected?  I think there must be some mistake."



"Oh, I judge not," said Sellers, who--noticing that Hawkins had arrived,

gave him a sidewise glance intended to call his close attention to a

dramatic effect which he was proposing to produce by his next remark.

Then he said, slowly and impressively--"I am--YOU KNOW WHO."



To the astonishment of both conspirators the remark produced no dramatic

effect at all; for the new comer responded with a quite innocent and

unembarrassed air--



"No, pardon me.  I don't know who you are.  I only suppose--but no doubt

correctly--that you are the gentleman whose title is on the doorplate."



"Right, quite right--sit down, pray sit down."  The earl was rattled,

thrown off his bearings, his head was in a whirl.  Then he noticed

Hawkins standing apart and staring idiotically at what to him was the

apparition of a defunct man, and a new idea was born to him.  He said to

Tracy briskly:



"But a thousand pardons, dear sir, I am forgetting courtesies due to a

guest and stranger.  Let me introduce my friend General Hawkins--General

Hawkins, our new Senator-Senator from the latest and grandest addition to

the radiant galaxy of sovereign States, Cherokee Strip"--(to himself,

"that name will shrivel him up!"--but it didn't, in the least, and the

Colonel resumed the introduction piteously disheartened and amazed),--

"Senator Hawkins, Mr.  Howard Tracy, of--er--"



"England."



"England!--Why that's im--"



"England, yes, native of England."



"Recently from there?"



"Yes, quite recently."



Said the Colonel to himself, "This phantom lies like an expert.

Purifying this kind by fire don't work.  I'll sound him a little further,

give him another chance or two to work his gift."  Then aloud--with deep

irony--



"Visiting our great country for recreation and amusement, no doubt.

I suppose you find that traveling in the majestic expanses of our Far

West is--"



"I haven't been West, and haven't been devoting myself to amusement with

any sort of exclusiveness, I assure you.  In fact, to merely live, an

artist has got to work, not play."



"Artist!" said Hawkins to himself, thinking of the rifled bank; "that is

a name for it!"



"Are you an artist?" asked the colonel; and added to himself, "now I'm

going to catch him."



"In a humble way, yes."



"What line?" pursued the sly veteran.



"Oils."



"I've got him!" said Sellers to himself.  Then aloud, "This is fortunate.

Could I engage you to restore some of my paintings that need that

attention?"



"I shall be very glad.  Pray let me see them."



No shuffling, no evasion, no embarrassment, even under this crucial test.

The Colonel was nonplussed.  He led Tracy to a chromo which had suffered

damage in a former owner's hands through being used as a lamp mat, and

said, with a flourish of his hand toward the picture--



"This del Sarto--"



"Is that a del Sarto?"



The colonel bent a look of reproach upon Tracy, allowed it to sink home,

then resumed as if there had been no interruption--



"This del Sarto is perhaps the only original of that sublime master in

our country.  You see, yourself, that the work is of such exceeding

delicacy that the risk--could--er--would you mind giving me a little

example of what you can do before we--"



"Cheerfully, cheerfully.  I will copy one of these marvels."



Water-color materials--relics of Miss Sally's college life--were brought.

Tracy said he was better in oils, but would take a chance with these.

So he was left alone.  He began his work, but the attractions of the

place were too strong for him, and he got up and went drifting about,

fascinated; also amazed.









CHAPTER XIX.



Meantime the earl and Hawkins were holding a troubled and anxious private

consultation.  The earl said:



"The mystery that bothers me, is, where did It get its other arm?"



"Yes--it worries me, too.  And another thing troubles me--the apparition

is English.  How do you account for that, Colonel?"



"Honestly, I don't know, Hawkins, I don't really know.  It is very

confusing and awful."



"Don't you think maybe we've waked up the wrong one?"



"The wrong one?  How do you account for the clothes?"



"The clothes are right, there's no getting around it.  What are we going

to do?  We can't collect, as I see.  The reward is for a one-armed

American.  This is a two-armed Englishman."



"Well, it may be that that is not objectionable.  You see it isn't less

than is called for, it is more, and so,--"



But he saw that this argument was weak, and dropped it.  The friends sat

brooding over their perplexities some time in silence.  Finally the

earl's face began to glow with an inspiration, and he said, impressively:



"Hawkins, this materialization is a grander and nobler science than we

have dreamed of.  We have little imagined what a solemn and stupendous

thing we have done.  The whole secret is perfectly clear to me, now,

clear as day.  Every man is made up of heredities, long-descended atoms

and particles of his ancestors.  This present materialization is

incomplete.  We have only brought it down to perhaps the beginning of

this century."



"What do you mean, Colonel!" cried Hawkins, filled with vague alarms by

the old man's awe-compelling words and manner.



"This.  We've materialized this burglar's ancestor!"



"Oh, don't-don't say that.  It's hideous."



"But it's true, Hawkins, I know it.  Look at the facts.  This apparition

is distinctly English-note that.  It uses good grammar--note that.  It is

an Artist--note that.  It has the manners and carriage of a gentleman--

note that.  Where's your cow-boy?  Answer me that."



"Rossmore, this is dreadful-it's too dreadful to think of!"



"Never resurrected a rag of that burglar but the clothes, not a solitary

rag of him but the clothes."



"Colonel, do you really mean--"



The Colonel brought his fist down with emphasis and said:



"I mean exactly this.  The materialization was immature, the burglar has

evaded us, this is nothing but a damned ancestor!"



He rose and walked the floor in great excitement.



Hawkins said plaintively:



"It's a bitter disappointment-bitter."



"I know it.  I know it, Senator; I feel it as deeply as anybody could.

But we've got to submit--on moral grounds.  I need money, but God knows

I am not poor enough or shabby enough to be an accessory to the punishing

of a man's ancestor for crimes committed by that ancestor's posterity."



"But Colonel!" implored Hawkins; "stop and think; don't be rash; you know

it's the only chance we've got to get the money; and besides, the Bible

itself says posterity to the fourth generation shall be punished for the

sins and crimes committed by ancestors four generations back that hadn't

anything to do with them; and so it's only fair to turn the rule around

and make it work both ways."



The Colonel was struck with the strong logic of this position.  He strode

up and down, and thought it painfully over.  Finally he said:



"There's reason in it; yes, there's reason in it.  And so, although it

seems a piteous thing to sweat this poor ancient devil for a burglary he

hadn't the least hand in, still if duty commands I suppose we must give

him up to the authorities."



"I would," said Hawkins, cheered and relieved, "I'd give him up if he was

a thousand ancestors compacted into one."



"Lord bless me, that's just what he is," said Sellers, with something

like a groan, "it's exactly what he is; there's a contribution in him

from every ancestor he ever had.  In him there's atoms of priests,

soldiers, crusaders, poets, and sweet and gracious women--all kinds and

conditions of folk who trod this earth in old, old centuries, and

vanished out of it ages ago, and now by act of ours they are summoned

from their holy peace to answer for gutting a one-horse bank away out on

the borders of Cherokee Strip, and it's just a howling outrage!"



"Oh, don't talk like that, Colonel; it takes the heart all out of me, and

makes me ashamed of the part I am proposing to--"



"Wait-I've got it!"



"A saving hope?  Shout it out, I am perishing."



"It's perfectly simple; a child would have thought of it.  He is all

right, not a flaw in him, as far as I have carried the work.  If I've

been able to bring him as far as the beginning of this century, what's to

stop me now?  I'll go on and materialize him down to date."



"Land, I never thought of that!" said Hawkins all ablaze with joy again.

"It's the very thing.  What a brain you have got!  And will he shed the

superfluous arm?"



"He will."



"And lose his English accent?"



"It will wholly disappear.  He will speak Cherokee Strip--and other forms

of profanity."



"Colonel, maybe he'll confess!"



"Confess?  Merely that bank robbery?"



" Merely?  Yes, but why 'merely'?"



The Colonel said in his most impressive manner: "Hawkins, he will be

wholly under my command.  I will make him confess every crime he ever

committed.  There must be a thousand.  Do you get the idea?"



"Well--not quite."



"The rewards will come to us."



"Prodigious conception!  I never saw such ahead for seeing with a

lightning glance all the outlying ramifications and possibilities of a

central idea."



"It is nothing; it comes natural to me.  When his time is out in one jail

he goes to the next and the next, and we shall have nothing to do but

collect the rewards as he goes along.  It is a perfectly steady income as

long as we live, Hawkins.  And much better than other kinds of

investments, because he is indestructible."



"It looks--it really does look the way you say; it does indeed."



"Look?--why it is.  It will not be denied that I have had a pretty wide

and comprehensive financial experience, and I do not hesitate to say that

I consider this one of the most valuable properties I have ever

controlled."



"Do you really think so?"



"I do, indeed."



"O, Colonel, the wasting grind and grief of poverty!  If we could realize

immediately.  I don't mean sell it all, but sell part-enough, you know,

to--"



"See how you tremble with excitement.  That comes of lack of experience.

My boy, when you have been familiar with vast operations as long as I

have, you'll be different.  Look at me; is my eye dilated? do you notice

a quiver anywhere?  Feel my pulse: plunk-plunk-plunk--same as if I were

asleep.  And yet, what is passing through my calm cold mind?  A

procession of figures which would make a financial novice drunk just the

sight of them.  Now it is by keeping cool, and looking at a thing all

around, that a man sees what's really in it, and saves himself from the

novice's unfailing mistake--the one you've just suggested--eagerness to

realize.  Listen to me.  Your idea is to sell a part of him for ready

cash.  Now mine is--guess."



"I haven't an idea.  What is it?"



"Stock him--of course."



"Well, I should never have thought of that."



"Because you are not a financier.  Say he has committed a thousand

crimes.  Certainly that's a low estimate.  By the look of him, even in

his unfinished condition, he has committed all of a million.  But call it

only a thousand to be perfectly safe; five thousand reward, multiplied by

a thousand, gives us a dead sure cash basis of--what?  Five million

dollars!"



"Wait--let me get my breath."



"And the property indestructible.  Perpetually fruitful--perpetually; for

a property with his disposition will go on committing crimes and winning

rewards."



"You daze me, you make my head whirl!"



"Let it whirl, it won't do it any harm.  Now that matter is all fixed--

leave it alone.  I'll get up the company and issue the stock, all in good

time.  Just leave it in my hands.  I judge you don't doubt my ability to

work it up for all it is worth.".



"Indeed I don't.  I can say that with truth."



"All right, then.  That's disposed of.  Everything in its turn.  We old

operators, go by order and system--no helter-skelter business with us.

What's the next thing on the docket?  The carrying on of the

materialization--the bringing it down to date.  I will begin on that at

once.  I think--



"Look here, Rossmore.  You didn't lock It in.  A hundred to one it has

escaped!"



"Calm yourself, as to that; don't give yourself any uneasiness."



"But why shouldn't it escape?"



"Let it, if it wants to?  What of it?"



"Well, I should consider it a pretty serious calamity."



"Why, my dear boy, once in my power, always in my power.  It may go and

come freely.  I can produce it here whenever I want it, just by the

exercise of my will."



"Well, I am truly glad to hear that, I do assure you."



"Yes, I shall give it all the painting it wants to do, and we and the

family will make it as comfortable and contented as we can.  No occasion

to restrain its movements.  I hope to persuade it to remain pretty quiet,

though, because a materialization which is in a state of arrested

development must of necessity be pretty soft and flabby and

substanceless, and--er--by the way, I wonder where It comes from?"



"How?  What do you mean?"



The earl pointed significantly--and interrogatively toward the sky.

Hawkins started; then settled into deep reflection; finally shook his

head sorrowfully and pointed downwards.



"What makes you think so, Washington?"



"Well, I hardly know, but really you can see, yourself, that he doesn't

seem to be pining for his last place."



"It's well thought!  Soundly deduced.  We've done that Thing a favor.

But I believe I will pump it a little, in a quiet way, and find out if we

are right."



"How long is it going to take to finish him off and fetch him down to

date, Colonel?"



"I wish I knew, but I don't.  I am clear knocked out by this new detail--

this unforeseen necessity of working a subject down gradually from his

condition of ancestor to his ultimate result as posterity.  But I'll make

him hump himself, anyway."



"Rossmore!"



"Yes, dear.  We're in the laboratory.  Come--Hawkins is here.  Mind, now

Hawkins--he's a sound, living, human being to all the family--don't

forget that.  Here she comes."



"Keep your seats, I'm not coming in.  I just wanted to ask, who is it

that's painting down there?"



"That?  Oh, that's a young artist; young Englishman, named Tracy; very

promising--favorite pupil of Hans Christian Andersen or one of the other

old masters--Andersen I'm pretty sure it is; he's going to half-sole some

of our old Italian masterpieces.  Been talking to him?"



"Well, only a word.  I stumbled right in on him without expecting anybody

was there.  I tried to be polite to him; offered him a snack"--(Sellers

delivered a large wink to Hawkins from behind his hand), "but he

declined, and said he wasn't hungry" (another sarcastic wink); "so I

brought some apples" (doublewink), "and he ate a couple of--"



"What!" and the colonel sprang some yards toward the ceiling and came

down quaking with astonishment.



Lady Rossmore was smitten dumb with amazement.  She gazed at the sheepish

relic of Cherokee Strip, then at her husband, and then at the guest

again.  Finally she said:



"What is the matter with you, Mulberry?"



He did not answer immediately.  His back was turned; he was bending over

his chair, feeling the seat of it.  But he answered next moment, and

said:



"Ah, there it is; it was a tack."



The lady contemplated him doubtfully a moment, then said, pretty

snappishly:



"All that for a tack!  Praise goodness it wasn't a shingle nail, it would

have landed you in the Milky Way.  I do hate to have my nerves shook up

so."  And she turned on her heel and went her way.



As soon as she was safely out, the Colonel said, in a suppressed voice:



"Come--we must see for ourselves.  It must be a mistake."



They hurried softly down and peeped in.  Sellers whispered, in a sort of

despair--



It is eating!  What a grisly spectacle!  Hawkins it's horrible!  Take me

away--I can't stand--



They tottered back to the laboratory.









CHAPTER XX.



Tracy made slow progress with his work, for his mind wandered a good

deal.  Many things were puzzling him.  Finally a light burst upon him all

of a sudden--seemed to, at any rate--and he said to himself, "I've got

the clew at last--this man's mind is off its balance; I don't know how

much, but it's off a point or two, sure; off enough to explain this mess

of perplexities, anyway.  These dreadful chromos which he takes for old

masters; these villainous portraits--which to his frantic mind represent

Rossmores; the hatchments; the pompous name of this ramshackle old crib--

Rossmore Towers; and that odd assertion of his, that I was expected.  How

could I be expected? that is, Lord Berkeley.  He knows by the papers that

that person was burned up in the New Gadsby.  Why, hang it, he really

doesn't know who he was expecting; for his talk showed that he was not

expecting an Englishman, or yet an artist, yet I answer his requirements

notwithstanding.  He seems sufficiently satisfied with me.  Yes, he is a

little off; in fact I am afraid he is a good deal off, poor old

gentleman.  But he's interesting--all people in about his condition are,

I suppose.  I hope he'll like my work; I would like to come every day and

study him.  And when I write my father--ah, that hurts!  I mustn't get on

that subject; it isn't good for my spirits.  Somebody coming--I must get

to work.  It's the old gentleman again.  He looks bothered.  Maybe my

clothes are suspicious; and they are--for an artist.  If my conscience

would allow me to make a change, but that is out of the question.

I wonder what he's making those passes in the air for, with his hands.

I seem to be the object of them.  Can he be trying to mesmerize me?

I don't quite like it.  There's something uncanny about it."



The colonel muttered to himself, "It has an effect on him, I can see it

myself.  That's enough for one time, I reckon.  He's not very solid, yet,

I suppose, and I might disintegrate him.  I'll just put a sly question or

two at him, now, and see if I can find out what his condition is, and

where he's from."



He approached and said affably:



"Don't let me disturb you, Mr.  Tracy; I only want to take a little

glimpse of your work.  Ah, that's fine--that's very fine indeed.  You are

doing it elegantly.  My daughter will be charmed with this.  May I sit

down by you?"



"Oh, do; I shall be glad."



"It won't disturb you?  I mean, won't dissipate your inspirations?"



Tracy laughed and said they were not ethereal enough to be very easily

discommoded.



The colonel asked a number of cautious and well-considered questions--

questions which seemed pretty odd and flighty to Tracy--but the answers

conveyed the information desired, apparently, for the colonel said to

himself, with mixed pride and gratification:



"It's a good job as far as I've got, with it.  He's solid.  Solid and

going to last, solid as the real thing."



"It's wonderful--wonderful.  I believe I could--petrify him."  After a

little he asked, warily "Do you prefer being here, or--or there?"



"There?  Where?"



"Why--er--where you've been?"



Tracy's thought flew to his boarding-house, and he answered with decision.



"Oh, here, much!"



The colonel was startled, and said to himself, "There's no uncertain ring

about that.  It indicates where he's been to, poor fellow.  Well, I am

satisfied, now.  I'm glad I got him out."



He sat thinking, and thinking, and watching the brush go.  At length he

said to himself, "Yes, it certainly seems to account for the failure of

my endeavors in poor Berkeley's case.  He went in the other direction.

Well, it's all right.  He's better off."



Sally Sellers entered from the street, now, looking her divinest, and the

artist was introduced to her.  It was a violent case of mutual love at

first sight, though neither party was entirely aware of the fact,

perhaps.  The Englishman made this irrelevant remark to himself, "Perhaps

he is not insane, after all."  Sally sat down, and showed an interest in

Tracy's work which greatly pleased him, and a benevolent forgiveness of

it which convinced him that the girl's nature was cast in a large mould.

Sellers was anxious to report his discoveries to Hawkins; so he took his

leave, saying that if the two "young devotees of the colored Muse"

thought they could manage without him, he would go and look after his

affairs.  The artist said to himself, "I think he is a little eccentric,

perhaps, but that is all."  He reproached himself for having injuriously

judged a man without giving him any fair chance to show what he really

was.



Of course the stranger was very soon at his ease and chatting along

comfortably.  The average American girl possesses the valuable qualities

of naturalness, honesty, and inoffensive straightforwardness; she is

nearly barren of troublesome conventions and artificialities,

consequently her presence and her ways are unembarrassing, and one is

acquainted with her and on the pleasantest terms with her before he knows

how it came about.  This new acquaintanceship--friendship, indeed--

progressed swiftly; and the unusual swiftness of it, and the thoroughness

of it are sufficiently evidenced and established by one noteworthy fact--

that within the first half hour both parties had ceased to be conscious

of Tracy's clothes.  Later this consciousness was re-awakened; it was

then apparent to Gwendolen that she was almost reconciled to them, and it

was apparent to Tracy that he wasn't.  The re-awakening was brought about

by Gwendolen's inviting the artist to stay to dinner.  He had to decline,

because he wanted to live, now--that is, now that there was something to

live for--and he could not survive in those clothes at a gentleman's

table.  He thought he knew that.  But he went away happy, for he saw that

Gwendolen was disappointed.



And whither did he go?  He went straight to a slopshop and bought as neat

and reasonably well-fitting a suit of clothes as an Englishman could be

persuaded to wear.  He said--to himself, but at his conscience--"I know

it's wrong; but it would be wrong not to do it; and two wrongs do not

make a right."



This satisfied him, and made his heart light.  Perhaps it will also

satisfy the reader--if he can make out what it means.



The old people were troubled about Gwendolen at dinner, because she was

so distraught and silent.  If they had noticed, they would have found

that she was sufficiently alert and interested whenever the talk stumbled

upon the artist and his work; but they didn't notice, and so the chat

would swap around to some other subject, and then somebody would

presently be privately worrying about Gwendolen again, and wondering if

she were not well, or if something had gone wrong in the millinery line.

Her mother offered her various reputable patent medicines, and tonics

with iron and other hardware in them, and her father even proposed to

send out for wine, relentless prohibitionist and head of the order in the

District of Columbia as he was, but these kindnesses were all declined--

thankfully, but with decision.  At bedtime, when the family were breaking

up for the night, she privately looted one of the brushes, saying to

herself, "It's the one he has used, the most."



The next morning Tracy went forth wearing his new suit, and equipped with

a pink in his button-hole--a daily attention from Puss.  His whole soul

was full of Gwendolen Sellers, and this condition was an inspiration,

art-wise.  All the morning his brush pawed nimbly away at the canvases,

almost without his awarity--awarity, in this sense being the sense of

being aware, though disputed by some authorities--turning out marvel upon

marvel, in the way of decorative accessories to the portraits, with a

felicity and celerity which amazed the veterans of the firm and fetched

out of them continuous explosions of applause.



Meantime Gwendolen was losing her morning, and many dollars.  She

supposed Tracy was coming in the forenoon--a conclusion which she had

jumped to without outside help.  So she tripped down stairs every little

while from her work-parlor to arrange the brushes and things over again,

and see if he had arrived.  And when she was in her work-parlor it was

not profitable, but just the other way--as she found out to her sorrow.



She had put in her idle moments during the last little while back, in

designing a particularly rare and capable gown for herself, and this

morning she set about making it up; but she was absent minded, and made

an irremediable botch of it.  When she saw what she had done, she knew

the reason of it and the meaning of it; and she put her work away from

her and said she would accept the sign.  And from that time forth she

came no more away from the Audience Chamber, but remained there and

waited.  After luncheon she waited again.  A whole hour.  Then a great

joy welled up in her heart, for she saw him coming.  So she flew back up

stairs thankful, and could hardly wait for him to miss the principal

brush, which she had mislaid down there, but knew where she had mislaid

it.  However, all in good time the others were called in and couldn't

find the brush, and then she was sent for, and she couldn't find it

herself for some little time; but then she found it when the others had

gone away to hunt in the kitchen and down cellar and in the woodshed,

and all those other places where people look for things whose ways they

are not familiar with.  So she gave him the brush, and remarked that she

ought to have seen that everything was ready for him, but it hadn't

seemed necessary, because it was so early that she wasn't expecting--but

she stopped there, surprised at herself for what she was saying; and he

felt caught and ashamed, and said to himself, "I knew my impatience would

drag me here before I was expected, and betray me, and that is just what

it has done; she sees straight through me--and is laughing at me, inside,

of course."



Gwendolen was very much pleased, on one account, and a little the other

way in another; pleased with the new clothes and the improvement which

they had achieved; less pleased by the pink in the buttonhole.

Yesterday's pink had hardly interested her; this one was just like it,

but somehow it had got her immediate attention, and kept it.  She wished

she could think of some way of getting at its history in a properly

colorless and indifferent way.  Presently she made a venture.  She said:



"Whatever a man's age may be, he can reduce it several years by putting a

bright-colored flower in his button-hole.  I have often noticed that.

Is that your sex's reason for wearing a boutonniere?"



"I fancy not, but certainly that reason would be a sufficient one.  I've

never heard of the idea before."



"You seem to prefer pinks.  Is it on account of the color, or the form?"



"Oh no," he said, simply, "they are given to me.  I don't think I have

any preference."



"They are given to him," she said to herself, and she felt a coldness

toward that pink.  "I wonder who it is, and what she is like."  The

flower began to take up a good deal of room; it obtruded itself

everywhere, it intercepted all views, and marred them; it was becoming

exceedingly annoying and conspicuous for a little thing.  "I wonder if he

cares for her."  That thought gave her a quite definite pain.









CHAPTER XXI.



She had made everything comfortable for the artist; there was no further

pretext for staying.  So she said she would go, now, and asked him to

summon the servants in case he should need anything.  She went away

unhappy; and she left unhappiness behind her; for she carried away all

the sunshine.  The time dragged heavily for both, now.  He couldn't paint

for thinking of her; she couldn't design or millinerize with any heart,

for thinking of him.  Never before had painting seemed so empty to him,

never before had millinerizing seemed so void of interest to her.  She

had gone without repeating that dinner-invitation--an almost unendurable

disappointment to him.  On her part-well, she was suffering, too; for she

had found she couldn't invite him.  It was not hard yesterday, but it was

impossible to-day.  A thousand innocent privileges seemed to have been

filched from her unawares in the past twenty-four hours.  To-day she felt

strangely hampered, restrained of her liberty.  To-day she couldn't

propose to herself to do anything or say anything concerning this young

man without being instantly paralyzed into non-action by the fear that he

might "suspect."  Invite him to dinner to-day?  It made her shiver to

think of it.



And so her afternoon was one long fret.  Broken at intervals.  Three

times she had to go down stairs on errands--that is, she thought she had

to go down stairs on errands.  Thus, going and coming, she had six

glimpses of him, in the aggregate, without seeming to look in his

direction; and she tried to endure these electric ecstasies without

showing any sign, but they fluttered her up a good deal, and she felt

that the naturalness she was putting on was overdone and quite too

frantically sober and hysterically calm to deceive.



The painter had his share of the rapture; he had his six glimpses, and

they smote him with waves of pleasure that assaulted him, beat upon him,

washed over him deliciously, and drowned out all consciousness of what he

was doing with his brush.  So there were six places in his canvas which

had to be done over again.



At last Gwendolen got some peace of mind by sending word to the

Thompsons, in the neighborhood, that she was coming there to dinner.

She wouldn't be reminded, at that table, that there was an absentee who

ought to be a presentee--a word which she meant to look out in the

dictionary at a calmer time.



About this time the old earl dropped in for a chat with the artist, and

invited him to stay to dinner.  Tracy cramped down his joy and gratitude

by a sudden and powerful exercise of all his forces; and he felt that now

that he was going to be close to Gwendolen, and hear her voice and watch

her face during several precious hours, earth had nothing valuable to add

to his life for the present.



The earl said to himself, "This spectre can eat apples, apparently.

We shall find out, now, if that is a specialty.  I think, myself, it's a

specialty.  Apples, without doubt, constitute the spectral limit.  It was

the case with our first parents.  No, I am wrong--at least only partly

right.  The line was drawn at apples, just as in the present case, but it

was from the other direction."  The new clothes gave him a thrill of

pleasure and pride.  He said to himself, "I've got part of him down to

date, anyway."



Sellers said he was pleased with Tracy's work; and he went on and engaged

him to restore his old masters, and said he should also want him to paint

his portrait and his wife's and possibly his daughter's.  The tide of the

artist's happiness was at flood, now.  The chat flowed pleasantly along

while Tracy painted and Sellers carefully unpacked a picture which he had

brought with him.  It was a chromo; a new one, just out.  It was the

smirking, self-satisfied portrait of a man who was inundating the Union

with advertisements inviting everybody to buy his specialty, which was a

three-dollar shoe or a dress-suit or something of that kind.  The old

gentleman rested the chromo flat upon his lap and gazed down tenderly

upon it, and became silent and meditative.  Presently Tracy noticed that

he was dripping tears on it.  This touched the young fellow's sympathetic

nature, and at the same time gave him the painful sense of being an

intruder upon a sacred privacy, an observer of emotions which a stranger

ought not to witness.  But his pity rose superior to other

considerations, and compelled him to try to comfort the old mourner with

kindly words and a show of friendly interest.  He said:



"I am very sorry--is it a friend whom--"



"Ah, more than that, far more than that--a relative, the dearest I had on

earth, although I was never permitted to see him.  Yes, it is young Lord

Berkeley, who perished so heroically in the awful conflagration, what is

the matter?"



"Oh, nothing, nothing."



It was a little startling to be so suddenly brought face to face, so to

speak, with a person one has heard so much talk about.  Is it a good

likeness?"



"Without doubt, yes.  I never saw him, but you can easily see the

resemblance to his father," said Sellers, holding up the chromo and

glancing from it to the chromo misrepresenting the Usurping Earl and back

again with an approving eye.



"Well, no--I am not sure that I make out the likeness.  It is plain that

the Usurping Earl there has a great deal of character and a long face

like a horse's, whereas his heir here is smirky, moon-faced and

characterless."



"We are all that way in the beginning--all the line," said Sellers,

undisturbed.  "We all start as moonfaced fools, then later we tadpole

along into horse-faced marvels of intellect and character.  It is by that

sign and by that fact that I detect the resemblance here and know this

portrait to be genuine and perfect.  Yes, all our family are fools at

first."



"This young man seems to meet the hereditary requirement, certainly."



"Yes, yes, he was a fool, without any doubt.  Examine the face, the shape

of the head, the expression.  It's all fool, fool, fool, straight

through."



"Thanks,--" said Tracy, involuntarily.



"Thanks?"



"I mean for explaining it to me.  Go on, please."



"As I was saying, fool is printed all over the face.



"A body can even read the details."



"What do they say?"



"Well, added up, he is a wobbler."



"A which?"



"Wobbler.  A person that's always taking a firm stand about something or

other--kind of a Gibraltar stand, he thinks, for unshakable fidelity and

everlastingness--and then, inside of a little while, he begins to wobble;

no more Gibraltar there; no, sir, a mighty ordinary commonplace weakling

wobbling--around on stilts.  That's Lord Berkeley to a dot, you can see

it look at that sheep!  But,--why are you blushing like sunset!  Dear

sir, have I unwittingly offended in some way?"



"Oh, no indeed, no indeed.  Far from it.  But it always makes me blush to

hear a man revile his own blood."  He said to himself, "How strangely his

vagrant and unguided fancies have hit upon the truth.  By accident, he

has described me.  I am that contemptible thing.  When I left England I

thought I knew myself; I thought I was a very Frederick the Great for

resolution and staying capacity; whereas in truth I am just a Wobbler,

simply a Wobbler.  Well--after all, it is at least creditable to have

high ideals and give birth to lofty resolutions; I will allow myself that

comfort."  Then he said, aloud, "Could this sheep, as you call him, breed

a great and self-sacrificing idea in his head, do you think?  Could he

meditate such a thing, for instance, as the renunciation of the earldom

and its wealth and its glories, and voluntary retirement to the ranks of

the commonalty, there to rise by his own merit or remain forever poor and

obscure?"



"Could he?  Why, look at him--look at this simpering self-righteous mug!

There is your answer.  It's the very thing he would think of.  And he

would start in to do it, too."



"And then?"



"He'd wobble."



"And back down?"



"Every time."



"Is that to happen with all my--I mean would that happen to all his high

resolutions?"



"Oh certainly--certainly.  It's the Rossmore of it."



"Then this creature was fortunate to die!  Suppose, for argument's sake,

that I was a Rossmore, and--"



"It can't be done."



"Why?"



"Because it's not a supposable case.  To be a Rossmore at your age, you'd

have to be a fool, and you're not a fool.  And you'd have to be a

Wobbler, whereas anybody that is an expert in reading character can see

at a glance that when you set your foot down once, it's there to stay;

and earthquake can't wobble it."  He added to himself, "That's enough to

say to him, but it isn't half strong enough for the facts.  The more

I observe him, now, the more remarkable I find him.  It is the strongest

face I have ever examined.  There is almost superhuman firmness here,

immovable purpose, iron steadfastness of will.  A most extraordinary

young man."



He presently said, aloud:



"Some time I want to ask your advice about a little matter, Mr.  Tracy.

You see, I've got that young lord's remaims--my goodness, how you jump!"



"Oh, it's nothing, pray go on.  You've got his remains?"



"Yes."



"Are you sure they are his, and not somebody else's?"



"Oh, perfectly sure.  Samples, I mean.  Not all of him."



"Samples?"



"Yes-in baskets.  Some time you will be going home; and if you wouldn't

mind taking them along--"



"Who?  I?"



"Yes--certainly.  I don't mean now; but after a while; after--but look

here, would you like to see them?"



"No!  Most certainly not.  I don't want to see them."



"O, very well.  I only thought--hey, where are you going, dear?"



"Out to dinner, papa."



Tracy was aghast.  The colonel said, in a disappointed voice:



"Well, I'm sorry.  Sho, I didn't know she was going out, Mr.  Tracy."



Gwendolen's face began to take on a sort of apprehensive 'What-have-I-

done expression.'



"Three old people to one young one--well, it isn't a good team, that's a

fact."



Gwendolen's face betrayed a dawning hopefulness and she said--with a tone

of reluctance which hadn't the hall-mark on it:



"If you prefer, I will send word to the Thompsons that I--"



"Oh, is it the Thompsons?  That simplifies it--sets everything right.

We can fix it without spoiling your arrangements, my child.  You've got

your heart set on--"



"But papa, I'd just as soon go there some other--"



"No--I won't have it.  You are a good hard-working darling child, and

your father is not the man to disappoint you when you--"



"But papa, I--"



"Go along, I won't hear a word.  We'll get along, dear."



Gwendolen was ready to cry with venation.  But there was nothing to do

but start; which she was about to do when her father hit upon an idea

which filled him with delight because it so deftly covered all the

difficulties of the situation and made things smooth and satisfactory:



"I've got it, my love, so that you won't be robbed of your holiday and at

the same time we'll be pretty satisfactorily fixed for a good time here.

You send Belle Thompson here--perfectly beautiful creature, Tracy,

perfectly beautiful; I want you to see that girl; why, you'll just go

mad; you'll go mad inside of a minute; yes, you send her right along,

Gwendolen, and tell her--why, she's gone!"  He turned-she was already

passing out' at the gate.  He muttered, "I wonder what's the matter; I

don't know what her mouth's doing, but I think her shoulders are

swearing.  Well," said Sellers blithely to Tracy, "I shall miss her--

parents always miss the children as soon as they're out of sight, it's

only a natural and wisely ordained partiality--but you'll be all right,

because Miss Belle will supply the youthful element for you and to your

entire content; and we old people will do our best, too.  We shall have a

good enough time.  And you'll have a chance to get better acquainted with

Admiral Hawkins.  That's a rare character, Mr. Tracy--one of the rarest

and most engaging characters the world has produced.  You'll find him

worth studying.  I've studied him ever since he was a child and have

always found him developing.  I really consider that one of the main

things that has enabled me to master the difficult science of character--

reading was the livid interest I always felt in that boy and the baffling

inscrutabilities of his ways and inspirations."



Tracy was not hearing a word.  His spirits were gone, he was desolate.



"Yes, a most wonderful character.  Concealment--that's the basis of it.

Always the first thing you want to do is to find the keystone a man's

character is built on--then you've got it.  No misleading and apparently

inconsistent peculiarities can fool you then.  What do you read on the

Senator's surface?  Simplicity; a kind of rank and protuberant

simplicity; whereas, in fact, that's one of the deepest minds in the

world.  A perfectly honest man--an absolutely honest and honorable man--

and yet without doubt the profoundest master of dissimulation the world

has ever seen."



"O, it's devilish!"  This was wrung from the unlistening Tracy by the

anguished thought of what might have been if only the dinner arrangements

hadn't got mixed.



"No, I shouldn't call it that," said Sellers, who was now placidly

walking up and down the room with his hands under his coat-tails and

listening to himself talk.  "One could quite properly call it devilish

in another man, but not in the Senator.  Your term is right--perfectly

right--I grant that--but the application is wrong.  It makes a great

difference.  Yes, he is a marvelous character.  I do not suppose that any

other statesman ever had such a colossal sense of humor, combined with

the ability to totally conceal it.  I may except George Washington and

Cromwell, and perhaps Robespierre, but I draw the line there.  A person

not an expert might be in Judge Hawkins's company a lifetime and never

find out he had any more sense of humor than a cemetery."



A deep-drawn yard-long sigh from the distraught and dreaming artist,

followed by a murmured, "Miserable, oh, miserable!"



"Well, no, I shouldn't say that about it, quite.  On the contrary, I

admire his ability to conceal his humor even more if possible than I

admire the gift itself, stupendous as it is.  Another thing--General

Hawkins is a thinker; a keen, logical, exhaustive, analytical thinker--

perhaps the ablest of modern times.  That is, of course, upon themes

suited to his size, like the glacial period, and the correlation of

forces, and the evolution of the Christian from the caterpillar--any of

those things; give him a subject according to his size, and just stand

back and watch him think!  Why you can see the place rock!  Ah, yes, you

must know him; you must get on the inside of him.  Perhaps the most

extraordinary mind since Aristotle."



Dinner was kept waiting for a while for Miss Thompson, but as Gwendolen

had not delivered the invitation to her the waiting did no good, and the

household presently went to the meal without her.  Poor old Sellers tried

everything his hospitable soul could devise to make the occasion an

enjoyable one for the guest, and the guest tried his honest best to be

cheery and chatty and happy for the old gentleman's sake; in fact all

hands worked hard in the interest of a mutual good time, but the thing

was a failure from the start; Tracy's heart was lead in his bosom, there

seemed to be only one prominent feature in the landscape and that was a

vacant chair, he couldn't drag his mind away from Gwendolen and his hard

luck; consequently his distractions allowed deadly pauses to slip in

every now and then when it was his turn to say something, and of course

this disease spread to the rest of the conversation--wherefore, instead

of having a breezy sail in sunny waters, as anticipated, everybody was

bailing out and praying for land.  What could the matter be?  Tracy alone

could have told, the others couldn't even invent a theory.



Meanwhile they were having a similarly dismal time at the Thompson house;

in fact a twin experience.  Gwendolen was ashamed of herself for allowing

her disappointment to so depress her spirits and make her so strangely

and profoundly miserable; but feeling ashamed of herself didn't improve

the matter any; it only seemed to aggravate the suffering.  She explained

that she was not feeling very well, and everybody could see that this was

true; so she got sincere sympathy and commiseration; but that didn't help

the case.  Nothing helps that kind of a case.  It is best to just stand

off and let it fester.  The moment the dinner was over the girl excused

herself, and she hurried home feeling unspeakably grateful to get away

from that house and that intolerable captivity and suffering.



Will he be gone?  The thought arose in her brain, but took effect in her

heels.  She slipped into the house, threw off her things and made

straight for the dining room.  She stopped and listened.  Her father's

voice--with no life in it; presently her mother's--no life in that;

a considerable vacancy, then a sterile remark from Washington Hawkins.

Another silence; then, not Tracy's but her father's voice again.



"He's gone," she said to herself despairingly, and listlessly opened the

door and stepped within.



"Why, my child," cried the mother, "how white you are!  Are you--has

anything--"



"White?" exclaimed Sellers.  "It's gone like a flash; 'twasn't serious.

Already she's as red as the soul of a watermelon!  Sit down, dear, sit

down--goodness knows you're welcome.  Did you have a good time?  We've

had great times here--immense.  Why didn't Miss Belle come?  Mr. Tracy is

not feeling well, and she'd have made him forget it."



She was content now; and out from her happy eyes there went a light that

told a secret to another pair of eyes there and got a secret in return.

In just that infinitely small fraction of a second those two great

confessions were made, received, and perfectly, understood.  All anxiety,

apprehension, uncertainty, vanished out of these young people's hearts

and left them filled with a great peace.



Sellers had had the most confident faith that with the new reinforcement

victory would be at this last moment snatched from the jaws of defeat,

but it was an error.  The talk was as stubbornly disjointed as ever.

He was proud of Gwendolen, and liked to show her off, even against Miss

Belle Thompson, and here had been a great opportunity, and what had she

made of it?  He felt a good deal put out.  It vexed him to think that

this Englishman, with the traveling Briton's everlasting disposition to

generalize whole mountain ranges from single sample-grains of sand, would

jump to the conclusion that American girls were as dumb as himself--

generalizing the whole tribe from this single sample and she at her

poorest, there being nothing at that table to inspire her, give her a

start, keep her from going to sleep.  He made up his mind that for the

honor of the country he would bring these two together again over the

social board before long.  There would be a different result another

time, he judged.  He said to himself, with a deep sense of injury,

"He'll put in his diary--they all keep diaries--he'll put in his diary

that she was miraculously uninteresting--dear, dear, but wasn't she!

I never saw the like--and yet looking as beautiful as Satan, too--and

couldn't seem to do anything but paw bread crumbs, and pick flowers to

pieces, and look fidgety.  And it isn't any better here in the Hall of

Audience.  I've had enough; I'll haul down my flag the others may fight

it out if they want to."



He shook hands all around and went off to do some work which he said was

pressing.  The idolaters were the width of the room apart; and apparently

unconscious of each other's presence.  The distance got shortened a

little, now.  Very soon the mother withdrew.  The distance narrowed

again.  Tracy stood before a chromo of some Ohio politician which had

been retouched and chain-mailed for a crusading Rossmore, and Gwendolen

was sitting on the sofa not far from his elbow artificially absorbed in

examining a photograph album that hadn't any photographs in it.



The "Senator" still lingered.  He was sorry for the young people; it had

been a dull evening for them.  In the goodness of his heart he tried to

make it pleasant for them now; tried to remove the ill impression

necessarily left by the general defeat; tried to be chatty, even tried to

be gay.  But the responses were sickly, there was no starting any

enthusiasm; he would give it up and quit--it was a day specially picked

out and consecrated to failures.



But when Gwendolen rose up promptly and smiled a glad smile and said with

thankfulness and blessing, "Must you go?" it seemed cruel to desert, and

he sat down again.



He was about to begin a remark when--when he didn't.  We have all been

there.  He didn't know how he knew his concluding to stay longer had been

a mistake, he merely knew it; and knew it for dead certain, too.  And so

he bade goodnight, and went mooning out, wondering what he could have

done that changed the atmosphere that way.  As the door closed behind him

those two were standing side by side, looking at that door--looking at it

in a waiting, second-counting, but deeply grateful kind of way.  And the

instant it closed they flung their arms about each other's necks, and

there, heart to heart and lip to lip--



"Oh, my God, she's kissing it!"



Nobody heard this remark, because Hawkins, who bred it, only thought it,

he didn't utter it.  He had turned, the moment he had closed the door,

and had pushed it open a little, intending to re-enter and ask what ill-

advised thing he had done or said, and apologize for it.  But he didn't

re-enter; he staggered off stunned, terrified, distressed.









CHAPTER XXII.



Five minutes later he was sitting in his room, with his head bowed within

the circle of his arms, on the table-final attitude of grief and despair.

His tears were flowing fast, and now and then a sob broke upon the

stillness.  Presently he said:



"I knew her when she was a little child and used to climb about my knees;

I love her as I love my own, and now--oh, poor thing, poor thing, I

cannot bear it!--she's gone and lost her heart to this mangy

materializee!  Why didn't we see that that might happen?  But how could

we?  Nobody could; nobody could ever have dreamed of such a thing.  You

couldn't expect a person would fall in love with a wax-work.  And this

one doesn't even amount to that."



He went on grieving to himself, and now and then giving voice to his

lamentations.



"It's done, oh, it's done, and there's no help for it, no undoing the

miserable business.  If I had the nerve, I would kill it.  But that

wouldn't do any good.  She loves it; she thinks it's genuine and

authentic.  If she lost it she would grieve for it just as she would for

a real person.  And who's to break it to the family!  Not I--I'll die

first.  Sellers is the best human being I ever knew and I wouldn't any

more think of--oh, dear, why it'll break his heart when he finds it out.

And Polly's too.  This comes of meddling with such infernal matters!

But for this, the creature would still be roasting in Sheol where it

belongs.  How is it that these people don't smell the brimstone?

Sometimes I can't come into the same room with him without nearly

suffocating."



After a while he broke out again:



"Well, there's one thing, sure.  The materializing has got to stop right

where it is.  If she's got to marry a spectre, let her marry a decent one

out of the Middle Ages, like this one--not a cowboy and a thief such as

this protoplasmic tadpole's going to turn into if Sellers keeps on

fussing at it.  It costs five thousand dollars cash and shuts down on the

incorporated company to stop the works at this point, but Sally Sellers's

happiness is worth more than that."



He heard Sellers coming, and got himself to rights.  Sellers took a seat,

and said:



"Well, I've got to confess I'm a good deal puzzled.  It did certainly

eat, there's no getting around it.  Not eat, exactly, either, but it

nibbled; nibbled in an appetiteless way, but still it nibbled; and that's

just a marvel.  Now the question is, what does it do with those

nibblings?  That's it--what does it do with them?  My idea is that we

don't begin to know all there is to this stupendous discovery yet.

But time will show-time and science-give us a chance, and don't get

impatient."



But he couldn't get Hawkins interested; couldn't make him talk to amount

to anything; couldn't drag him out of his depression.  But at last he

took a turn that arrested Hawkins's attention.



"I'm coming to like him, Hawkins.  He is a person of stupendous

character--absolutely gigantic.  Under that placid exterior is concealed

the most dare-devil spirit that was ever put into a man--he's just a

Clive over again.  Yes, I'm all admiration for him, on account of his

character, and liking naturally follows admiration, you know.  I'm coming

to like him immensely.  Do you know, I haven't the heart to degrade such

a character as that down to the burglar estate for money or for anything

else; and I've come to ask if you are willing to let the reward go, and

leave this poor fellow--"Where he is?"



"Yes--not bring him down to date."



"Oh, there's my hand; and my heart's in it, too!"



"I'll never forget you for this, Hawkins," said the old gentleman in a

voice which he found it hard to control.  "You are making a great

sacrifice for me, and one which you can ill afford, but I'll never forget

your generosity, and if I live you shall not suffer for it, be sure of

that."



Sally Sellers immediately and vividly realized that she was become a new

being; a being of a far higher and worthier sort than she had been such a

little while before; an earnest being, in place of a dreamer; and

supplied with a reason for her presence in the world, where merely a

wistful and troubled curiosity about it had existed before.  So great and

so comprehensive was the change which had been wrought, that she seemed

to herself to be a real person who had lately been a shadow; a something

which had lately been a nothing; a purpose, which had lately been a

fancy; a finished temple, with the altar-fires lit and the voice of

worship ascending, where before had been but an architect's confusion of

arid working plans, unintelligible to the passing eye and prophesying

nothing.



"Lady" Gwendolen!  The pleasantness of that sound was all gone; it was an

offense to her ear now.  She said:



"There--that sham belongs to the past; I will not be called by it any

more."



"I may call you simply Gwendolen?  You will allow me to drop the

formalities straightway and name you by your dear first name without

additions?"



She was dethroning the pink and replacing it with a rosebud.



"There-that is better.  I hate pinks--some pinks.  Indeed yes, you are to

call me by my first name without additions--that is,--well, I don't mean

without additions entirely, but--"



It was as far as she could get.  There was a pause; his intellect was

struggling to comprehend; presently it did manage to catch the idea in

time to save embarrassment all around, and he said gratefully--



"Dear Gwendolen!  I may say that?"



"Yes--part of it.  But--don't kiss me when I am talking, it makes me

forget what I was going to say.  You can call me by part of that form,

but not the last part.  Gwendolen is not my name."



"Not your name?" This in a tone of wonder and surprise.



The girl's soul was suddenly invaded by a creepy apprehension, a quite

definite sense of suspicion and alarm.  She put his arms away from her,

looked him searchingly in the eye, and said:



"Answer me truly, on your honor.  You are not seeking to marry me on

account of my rank?"



The shot almost knocked him through the wall, he was so little prepared

for it.  There was something so finely grotesque about the question and

its parent suspicion, that he stopped to wonder and admire, and thus was

he saved from laughing.  Then, without wasting precious time, he set

about the task of convincing her that he had been lured by herself alone,

and had fallen in love with her only, not her title and position; that he

loved her with all his heart, and could not love her more if she were a

duchess, or less if she were without home, name or family.  She watched

his face wistfully, eagerly, hopefully, translating his words by its

expression; and when he had finished there was gladness in her heart--

a tumultuous gladness, indeed, though outwardly she was calm, tranquil,

even judicially austere.  She prepared a surprise for him, now,

calculated to put a heavy strain upon those disinterested protestations

of his; and thus she delivered it, burning it away word by word as the

fuse burns down to a bombshell, and watching to see how far the explosion

would lift him:



"Listen--and do not doubt me, for I shall speak the exact truth.  Howard

Tracy, I am no more an earl's child than you are!"



To her joy--and secret surprise, also--it never phased him.  He was

ready, this time, and saw his chance.  He cried out with enthusiasm,

"Thank heaven for that!" and gathered her to his arms.



To express her happiness was almost beyond her gift of speech.



"You make me the proudest girl in all the earth," she said, with her head

pillowed on his shoulder.  "I thought it only natural that you should be

dazzled by the title--maybe even unconsciously, you being English--and

that you might be deceiving yourself in thinking you loved only me, and

find you didn't love me when the deception was swept away; so it makes me

proud that the revelation stands for nothing and that you do love just

me, only me--oh, prouder than any words can tell!"



"It is only you, sweetheart, I never gave one envying glance toward your

father's earldom.  That is utterly true, dear Gwendolen."



"There-you mustn't call me that.  I hate that false name.  I told you it

wasn't mine.  My name is Sally Sellers--or Sarah, if you like.  From this

time I banish dreams, visions, imaginings, and will no more of them.

I am going to be myself--my genuine self, my honest self, my natural

self, clear and clean of sham and folly and fraud, and worthy of you.

There is no grain of social inequality between us; I, like you, am poor;

I, like you, am without position or distinction; you are a struggling

artist, I am that, too, in my humbler way.  Our bread is honest bread, we

work for our-living.  Hand in hand we will walk hence to the grave,

helping each other in all ways, living for each other, being and

remaining one in heart and purpose, one in hope and aspiration,

inseparable to the end.  And though our place is low, judged by the

world's eye, we will make it as high as the highest in the great

essentials of honest work for what we eat and wear, and conduct above

reproach.  We live in a land, let us be thankful, where this is all-

sufficient, and no man is better than his neighbor by the grace of God,

but only by his own merit."



Tracy tried to break in, but she stopped him and kept the floor herself.



"I am not through yet.  I am going to purge myself of the last vestiges

of artificiality and pretence, and then start fair on your own honest

level and be worthy mate to you thenceforth.  My father honestly thinks

he is an earl.  Well, leave him his dream, it pleases him and does no one

any harm: It was the dream of his ancestors before him.  It has made

fools of the house of Sellers for generations, and it made something of a

fool of me, but took no deep root.  I am done with it now, and for good.

Forty-eight hours ago I was privately proud of being the daughter of a

pinchbeck earl, and thought the proper mate for me must be a man of like

degree; but to-day--oh, how grateful I am for your love which has healed

my sick brain and restored my sanity!--I could make oath that no earl's

son in all the world--"



"Oh,--well, but--but--"



"Why, you look like a person in a panic.  What is it?  What is the

matter?"



"Matter?  Oh, nothing--nothing.  I was only going to say"--but in his

flurry nothing occurred to him to say, for a moment; then by a lucky

inspiration he thought of something entirely sufficient for the occasion,

and brought it out with eloquent force: "Oh, how beautiful you are!  You

take my breath away when you look like that."



It was well conceived, well timed, and cordially delivered--and it got

its reward.



"Let me see.  Where was I?  Yes, my father's earldom is pure moonshine.

Look at those dreadful things on the wall.  You have of course supposed

them to be portraits of his ancestors, earls of Rossmore.  Well, they are

not.  They are chromos of distinguished Americans--all moderns; but he

has carried them back a thousand years by re-labeling them.  Andrew

Jackson there, is doing what he can to be the late American earl; and the

newest treasure in the collection is supposed to be the young English

heir--I mean the idiot with the crape; but in truth it's a shoemaker, and

not Lord Berkeley at all."



"Are you sure?"



"Why of course I am.  He wouldn't look like that."



"Why?"



"Because his conduct in his last moments, when the fire was sweeping

around him shows that he was a man.  It shows that he was a fine, high-

souled young creature."



Tracy was strongly moved by these compliments, and it seemed to him that

the girl's lovely lips took on anew loveliness when they were delivering

them.  He said, softly:



"It is a pity he could not know what a gracious impression his behavior

was going to leave with the dearest and sweetest stranger in the

land of--"



"Oh, I almost loved him!  Why, I think of him every day.  He is always

floating about in my mind."



Tracy felt that this was a little more than was necessary.  He was

conscious of the sting of jealousy.  He said:



"It is quite right to think of him--at least now and then--that is, at

intervals--in perhaps an admiring way--but it seems to me that--"



"Howard Tracy, are you jealous of that dead man?"



He was ashamed--and at the same time not ashamed.  He was jealous--and at

the same time he was not jealous.  In a sense the dead man was himself;

in that case compliments and affection lavished upon that corpse went

into his own till and were clear profit.  But in another sense the dead

man was not himself; and in that case all compliments and affection

lavished there were wasted, and a sufficient basis for jealousy.  A tiff

was the result of the dispute between the two.  Then they made it up, and

were more loving than ever.  As an affectionate clincher of the

reconciliation, Sally declared that she had now banished Lord Berkeley

from her mind; and added, "And in order to make sure that he shall never

make trouble between us again, I will teach myself to detest that name

and all that have ever borne it or ever shall bear it."



This inflicted another pang, and Tracy was minded to ask her to modify

that a little just on general principles, and as practice in not

overdoing a good thing--perhaps he might better leave things as they were

and not risk bringing on another tiff.  He got away from that particular,

and sought less tender ground for conversation.



"I suppose you disapprove wholly of aristocracies and nobilities, now

that you have renounced your title and your father's earldom."



"Real ones?  Oh, dear no--but I've thrown aside our sham one for good."



This answer fell just at the right time and just in the right place, to

save the poor unstable young man from changing his political complexion

once more.  He had been on the point of beginning to totter again, but

this prop shored him up and kept him from floundering back into democracy

and re-renouncing aristocracy.  So he went home glad that he had asked

the fortunate question.  The girl would accept a little thing like a

genuine earldom, she was merely prejudiced against the brummagem article.

Yes, he could have his girl and have his earldom, too: that question was

a fortunate stroke.



Sally went to bed happy, too; and remained happy, deliriously happy, for

nearly two hours; but at last, just as she was sinking into a contented

and luxurious unconsciousness, the shady devil who lives and lurks and

hides and watches inside of human beings and is always waiting for a

chance to do the proprietor a malicious damage, whispered to her soul and

said, "That question had a harmless look, but what was back of it?--what

was the secret motive of it?--what suggested it?"



The shady devil had knifed her, and could retire, now, and take a rest;

the wound would attend to business for him.  And it did.



Why should Howard Tracy ask that question?  If he was not trying to marry

her for the sake of her rank, what should suggest that question to him?

Didn't he plainly look gratified when she said her objections to

aristocracy had their limitations?  Ah, he is after that earldom, that

gilded sham--it isn't poor me he wants.



So she argued, in anguish and tears.  Then she argued the opposite

theory, but made a weak, poor business of it, and lost the case.  She

kept the arguing up, one side and then the other, the rest of the night,

and at last fell asleep at dawn; fell in the fire at dawn, one may say;

for that kind of sleep resembles fire, and one comes out of it with his

brain baked and his physical forces fried out of him.









CHAPTER XXIII.



Tracy wrote his father before he sought his bed.  He wrote a letter which

he believed would get better treatment than his cablegram received, for

it contained what ought to be welcome news; namely, that he had tried

equality and working for a living; had made a fight which he could find

no reason to be ashamed of, and in the matter of earning a living had

proved that he was able to do it; but that on the whole he had arrived at

the conclusion that he could not reform the world single-handed, and was

willing to retire from the conflict with the fair degree of honor which

he had gained, and was also willing to return home and resume his

position and be content with it and thankful for it for the future,

leaving further experiment of a missionary sort to other young people

needing the chastening and quelling persuasions of experience, the only

logic sure to convince a diseased imagination and restore it to rugged

health.  Then he approached the subject of marriage with the daughter of

the American Claimant with a good deal of caution and much painstaking

art.  He said praiseful and appreciative things about the girl, but

didn't dwell upon that detail or make it prominent.  The thing which he

made prominent was the opportunity now so happily afforded, to reconcile

York and Lancaster, graft the warring roses upon one stem, and end

forever a crying injustice which had already lasted far too long.  One

could infer that he had thought this thing all out and chosen this way of

making all things fair and right because it was sufficiently fair and

considerably wiser than the renunciation-scheme which he had brought with

him from England.  One could infer that, but he didn't say it.  In fact

the more he read his letter over, the more he got to inferring it

himself.



When the old earl received that letter, the first part of it filled him

with a grim and snarly satisfaction; but the rest of it brought a snort

or two out of him that could be translated differently.  He wasted no ink

in this emergency, either in cablegrams or letters; he promptly took ship

for America to look into the matter himself.  He had staunchly held his

grip all this long time, and given no sign of the hunger at his heart to

see his son; hoping for the cure of his insane dream, and resolute that

the process should go through all the necessary stages without assuaging

telegrams q other nonsense from home, and here was victory at last.

Victory, but stupidly marred by this idiotic marriage project.  Yes, he

would step over and take a hand in this matter himself.



During the first ten days following the mailing of the letter Tracy's

spirits had no idle time; they were always climbing up into the clouds or

sliding down into the earth as deep as the law of gravitation reached.

He was intensely happy or intensely miserable by turns, according to Miss

Sally's moods.  He never could tell when the mood was going to change,

and when it changed he couldn't tell what it was that had changed it.

Sometimes she was so in love with him that her love was tropical, torrid,

and she could find no language fervent enough for its expression; then

suddenly, and without warning or any apparent reason, the weather would

change, and the victim would find himself adrift among the icebergs and

feeling as lonesome and friendless as the north pole.  It sometimes

seemed to him that a man might better be dead than exposed to these

devastating varieties of climate.



The case was simple.  Sally wanted to believe that Tracy's preference was

disinterested; so she was always applying little tests of one sort or

another, hoping and expecting that they would bring out evidence which

would confirm or fortify her belief.  Poor Tracy did not know that these

experiments were being made upon him, consequently he walked promptly

into all the traps the girl set for him.  These traps consisted in

apparently casual references to social distinction, aristocratic title

and privilege, and such things.  Often Tracy responded to these

references heedlessly and not much caring what he said provided it kept

the talk going and prolonged the seance.  He didn't suspect that the girl

was watching his face and listening for his words as one who watches the

judge's face and listens for the words which will restore him to home and

friends and freedom or shut him away from the sun and human companionship

forever.  He didn't suspect that his careless words were being weighed,

and so he often delivered sentence of death when it would have been just

as handy and all the same to him to pronounce acquittal.  Daily he broke

the girl's heart, nightly he sent her to the rack for sleep.  He couldn't

understand it.



Some people would have put this and that together and perceived that the

weather never changed until one particular subject was introduced,

and that then it always changed.  And they would have looked further,

and perceived that that subject was always introduced by the one party,

never the other.  They would have argued, then, that this was done for a

purpose.  If they could not find out what that purpose was in any simpler

or easier way, they would ask.



But Tracy was not deep enough or suspicious enough to think of these

things.  He noticed only one particular; that the weather was always

sunny when a visit began.  No matter how much it might cloud up later,

it always began with a clear sky.  He couldn't explain this curious fact

to himself, he merely knew it to be a fact.  The truth of the matter was,

that by the time Tracy had been out of Sally's sight six hours she was so

famishing for a sight of him that her doubts and suspicions were all

consumed away in the fire of that longing, and so always she came into

his presence as surprisingly radiant and joyous as she wasn't when she

went out of it.



In circumstances like these a growing portrait runs a good many risks.

The portrait of Sellers, by Tracy, was fighting along, day by day,

through this mixed weather, and daily adding to itself ineradicable signs

of the checkered life it was leading.  It was the happiest portrait, in

spots, that was ever seen; but in other spots a damned soul looked out

from it; a soul that was suffering all the different kinds of distress

there are, from stomach ache to rabies.  But Sellers liked it: He said it

was just himself all over--a portrait that sweated moods from every pore,

and no two moods alike.  He said he had as many different kinds of

emotions in him as a jug.



It was a kind of a deadly work of art, maybe, but it was a starchy

picture for show; for it was life size, full length, and represented the

American earl in a peer's scarlet robe, with the three ermine bars

indicative of an earl's rank, and on the gray head an earl's coronet,

tilted just a wee bit to one side in a most gallus and winsome way.  When

Sally's weather was sunny the portrait made Tracy chuckle, but when her

weather was overcast it disordered his mind and stopped the circulation

of his blood.



Late one night when the sweethearts had been having a flawless visit

together, Sally's interior devil began to work his specialty, and soon

the conversation was drifting toward the customary rock.  Presently, in

the midst of Tracy's serene flow of talk, he felt a shudder which he knew

was not his shudder, but exterior to his breast although immediately

against it.  After the shudder came sobs; Sally was crying.



"Oh, my darling, what have I done--what have I said?  It has happened

again!  What have I done to wound you?"



She disengaged herself from his arms and gave him a look of deep

reproach.



"What have you done?  I will tell you what you have done.  You have

unwittingly revealed--oh, for the twentieth time, though I could not

believe it, would not believe it!--that it is not me you love, but that

foolish sham my father's imitation earldom; and you have broken my

heart!"



"Oh, my child, what are you saying!  I never dreamed of such a thing."



"Oh, Howard, Howard, the things you have uttered when you were forgetting

to guard your tongue, have betrayed you."



"Things I have uttered when I was forgetting to guard my tongue?  These

are hard words.  When have I remembered to guard it?  Never in one

instance.  It has no office but to speak the truth.  It needs no guarding

for that."



"Howard, I have noted your words and weighed them, when you were not

thinking of their significance--and they have told me more than you meant

they should."



"Do you mean to say you have answered the trust I had in you by using it

as an ambuscade from which you could set snares for my unsuspecting

tongue and be safe from detection while you did it?  You have not done

this--surely you have not done this thing.  Oh, one's enemy could not do

it."



This was an aspect of the girl's conduct which she had not clearly

perceived before.  Was it treachery?  Had she abused a trust?  The

thought crimsoned her cheeks with shame and remorse.



"Oh, forgive me," she said, "I did not know what I was doing.  I have

been so tortured--you will forgive me, you must; I have suffered so much,

and I am so sorry and so humble; you do forgive me, don't you?--don't

turn away, don't refuse me; it is only my love that is at fault, and you

know I love you, love you with all my heart; I couldn't bear to--oh,

dear, dear, I am so miserable, and I sever meant any harm, and I didn't

see where this insanity was carrying me, and how it was wronging and

abusing the dearest heart in all the world to me--and--and--oh, take me

in your arms again, I have no other refuge, no other home and hope!"



There was reconciliation again-immediate, perfect, all-embracing--and

with it utter happiness.  This would have been a good time to adjourn.

But no, now that the cloud-breeder was revealed at last; now that it was

manifest that all the sour weather had come from this girl's dread that

Tracy was lured by her rank and not herself, he resolved to lay that

ghost immediately and permanently by furnishing the best possible proof

that he couldn't have had back of him at any time the suspected motive.

So he said:



"Let me whisper a little secret in your ear--a secret which I have kept

shut up in my breast all this time.  Your rank couldn't ever have been an

enticement.  I am son and heir to an English earl!"



The girl stared at him-one, two, three moments, maybe a dozen--then her

lips parted:



"You?" she said, and moved away from him, still gazing at him in a kind

of blank amazement.



"Why--why, certainly I am.  Why do you act like this?  What have I done

now?"



"What have you done?  You have certainly made a most strange statement.

You must see that yourself."



"Well," with a timid little laugh, "it may be a strange enough statement;

but of what consequence is that, if it is true?"



"If it is true.  You are already retiring from it."



"Oh, not for a moment!  You should not say that.  I have not deserved it.

I have spoken the truth; why do you doubt it?"



Her reply was prompt.



"Simply because you didn't speak it earlier!"



"Oh!" It wasn't a groan, exactly, but it was an intelligible enough

expression of the fact that he saw the point and recognized that there

was reason in it.



"You have seemed to conceal nothing from me that I ought to know

concerning yourself, and you were not privileged to keep back such a

thing as this from me a moment after--after--well, after you had

determined to pay your court to me."



"Its true, it's true, I know it!  But there were circumstances--in--

in the way--circumstances which--"



She waved the circumstances aside.



"Well, you see," he said, pleadingly, "you seemed so bent on our

traveling the proud path of honest labor and honorable poverty, that I

was terrified--that is, I was afraid--of--of--well, you know how you

talked."



"Yes, I know how I talked.  And I also know that before the talk was

finished you inquired how I stood as regards aristocracies, and my answer

was calculated to relieve your fears."



He was silent a while.  Then he said, in a discouraged way:



"I don't see any way out of it.  It was a mistake.  That is in truth all

it was, just a mistake.  No harm was meant, no harm in the world.

I didn't see how it might some time look.  It is my way.  I don't seem to

see far."



The girl was almost disarmed, for a moment.  Then she flared up again.



"An Earl's son!  Do earls' sons go about working in lowly callings for

their bread and butter?"



"God knows they don't!  I have wished they did."



"Do earls' sons sink their degree in a country like this, and come sober

and decent to sue for the hand of a born child of poverty when they can

go drunk, profane, and steeped in dishonorable debt and buy the pick and

choice of the millionaires' daughters of America?  You an earl's son!

Show me the signs."



"I thank God I am not able--if those are the signs.  But yet I am an

earl's son and heir.  It is all I can say.  I wish you would believe me,

but you will not.  I know no way to persuade you."



She was about to soften again, but his closing remark made her bring her

foot down with smart vexation, and she cried out:



"Oh, you drive all patience out of me!  Would you have one believe that

you haven't your proofs at hand, and yet are what you say you are?

You do not put your hand in your pocket now--for you have nothing there.

You make a claim like this, and then venture to travel without

credentials.  These are simply incredibilities.  Don't you see that,

yourself?"



He cast about in his mind for a defence of some kind or other--hesitated

a little, and then said, with difficulty and diffidence:



"I will tell you just the truth, foolish as it will seem to you--

to anybody, I suppose--but it is the truth.  I had an ideal--call it

a dream, a folly, if you will--but I wanted to renounce the privileges

and unfair advantages enjoyed by the nobility and wrung from the nation

by force and fraud, and purge myself of my share of those crimes against

right and reason, by thenceforth comrading with the poor and humble on

equal terms, earning with my own hands the bread I ate, and rising by my

own merit if I rose at all."



The young girl scanned his face narrowly while he spoke; and there was

something about his simplicity of manner and statement which touched her

--touched her almost to the danger point; but she set her grip on the

yielding spirit and choked it to quiescence; it could not be wise to

surrender to compassion or any kind of sentiment, yet; she must ask one

or two more questions.  Tracy was reading her face; and what he read

there lifted his drooping hopes a little.



"An earl's son to do that!  Why, he were a man!  A man to love!--oh,

more, a man to worship!"



"Why?"



"But he never lived!  He is not born, he will not be born.  The self-

abnegation that could do that--even in utter folly, and hopeless of

conveying benefit to any, beyond the mere example--could be mistaken for

greatness; why, it would be greatness in this cold age of sordid ideals!

A moment--wait--let me finish; I have one question more.  Your father is

earl of what?"



"Rossmore--and I am Viscount Berkeley!"



The fat was in the fire again.  The girl felt so outraged that it was

difficult for her to speak.



"How can you venture such a brazen thing!  You know that he is dead,

and you know that I know it.  Oh, to rob the living of name and honors

for a selfish and temporary advantage is crime enough, but to rob the

defenceless dead--why it is more than crime, it degrades crime!"



"Oh, listen to me--just a word--don't turn away like that.  Don't go--

don't leave me, so--stay one moment.  On my honor--"



"Oh, on your honor!"



"On my honor I am what I say!  And I will prove it, and you will believe,

I know you will.  I will bring you a message--a cablegram--"



"When?"



"To-morrow-next day--"



"Signed 'Rossmore'?"



"Yes--signed Rossmore."



"What will that prove?"



"What will it prove?  What should it prove?"



"If you force me to say it--possibly the presence of a confederate

somewhere."



This was a hard blow, and staggered him.  He said, dejectedly:



"It is true.  I did not think of it.  Oh, my God, I do not know any way

to do; I do everything wrong.  You are going?--and you won't say even

good-night--or good-bye?  Ah, we have not parted like this before."



"Oh, I want to run and--no, go, now."  A pause--then she said, "You may

bring the message when it comes."



"Oh, may I?  God bless you."



He was gone; and none too soon; her lips were already quivering, and now

she broke down.  Through her sobbings her words broke from time to time.



"Oh, he is gone.  I have lost him, I shall never see him any more.  And

he didn't kiss me good-bye; never even offered to force a kiss from me,

and he knowing it was the very, very last, and I expecting he would, and

never dreaming he would treat me so after all we have been to each other.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, what shall I do, what shall I do!  He is a dear, poor,

miserable, good-hearted, transparent liar and humbug, but oh, I do love

him so--!"  After a little she broke into speech again.  "How dear he is!

and I shall miss him so, I shall miss him so!  Why won't he ever think to

forge a message and fetch it?--but no, he never will, he never thinks of

anything; he's so honest and simple it wouldn't ever occur to him.

Oh, what did possess him to think he could succeed as a fraud--and he

hasn't the first requisite except duplicity that I can see.  Oh, dear,

I'll go to bed and give it all up.  Oh, I wish I had told him to come and

tell me whenever he didn't get any telegram--and now it's all my own

fault if I never see him again.  How my eyes must look!"









CHAPTER XXIV.



Next day, sure enough, the cablegram didn't come.  This was an immense

disaster; for Tracy couldn't go into the presence without that ticket,

although it wasn't going to possess any value as evidence.  But if the

failure of the cablegram on that first day may be called an immense

disaster, where is the dictionary that can turn out a phrase sizeable

enough to describe the tenth day's failure?  Of course every day that the

cablegram didn't come made Tracy all of twenty-four hours' more ashamed

of himself than he was the day before, and made Sally fully twenty-four

hours more certain than ever that he not only hadn't any father anywhere,

but hadn't even a confederate--and so it followed that he was a double-

dyed humbug and couldn't be otherwise.



These were hard days for Barrow and the art firm.  All these had their

hands full, trying to comfort Tracy.  Barrow's task was particularly

hard, because he was made a confidant in full, and therefore had to humor

Tracy's delusion that he had a father, and that the father was an earl,

and that he was going to send a cablegram.  Barrow early gave up the idea

of trying to convince Tracy that he hadn't any father, because this had

such a bad effect on the patient, and worked up his temper to such an

alarming degree.  He had tried, as an experiment, letting Tracy think he

had a father; the result was so good that he went further, with proper

caution, and tried letting him think his father was an earl; this wrought

so well, that he grew bold, and tried letting him think he had two

fathers, if he wanted to, but he didn't want to, so Barrow withdrew one

of them and substituted letting him think he was going to get a

cablegram--which Barrow judged he wouldn't, and was right; but Barrow

worked the cablegram daily for all it was worth, and it was the one thing

that kept Tracy alive; that was Barrow's opinion.



And these were bitter hard days for poor Sally, and mainly delivered up

to private crying.  She kept her furniture pretty damp, and so caught

cold, and the dampness and the cold and the sorrow together undermined

her appetite, and she was a pitiful enough object, poor thing.  Her state

was bad enough, as per statement of it above quoted; but all the forces

of nature and circumstance seemed conspiring to make it worse--and

succeeding.  For instance, the morning after her dismissal of Tracy,

Hawkins and Sellers read in the associated press dispatches that a toy

puzzle called Pigs in the Clover, had come into sudden favor within the

past few weeks, and that from the Atlantic to the Pacific all the

populations of all the States had knocked off work to play with it,

and that the business of the country had now come to a standstill by

consequence; that judges, lawyers, burglars, parsons, thieves, merchants,

mechanics, murderers, women, children, babies--everybody, indeed, could

be seen from morning till midnight, absorbed in one deep project and

purpose, and only one--to pen those pigs, work out that puzzle

successfully; that all gayety, all cheerfulness had departed from the

nation, and in its place care, preoccupation and anxiety sat upon every

countenance, and all faces were drawn, distressed, and furrowed with the

signs of age and trouble, and marked with the still sadder signs of

mental decay and incipient madness; that factories were at work night and

day in eight cities, and yet to supply the demand for the puzzle was thus

far impossible.  Hawkins was wild with joy, but Sellers was calm.  Small

matters could not disturb his serenity.  He said--



"That's just the way things go.  A man invents a thing which could

revolutionize the arts, produce mountains of money, and bless the earth,

and who will bother with it or show any interest in it?--and so you are

just as poor as you were before.  But you invent some worthless thing to

amuse yourself with, and would throw it away if let alone, and all of a

sudden the whole world makes a snatch for it and out crops a fortune.

Hunt up that Yankee and collect, Hawkins--half is yours, you know.

Leave me to potter at my lecture."



This was a temperance lecture.  Sellers was head chief in the Temperance

camp, and had lectured, now and then in that interest, but had been

dissatisfied with his efforts; wherefore he was now about to try a new

plan.  After much thought he had concluded that a main reason why his

lectures lacked fire or something, was, that they were too transparently

amateurish; that is to say, it was probably too plainly perceptible that

the lecturer was trying to tell people about the horrid effects of liquor

when he didn't really know anything about those effects except from

hearsay, since he had hardly ever tasted an intoxicant in his life.

His scheme, now, was to prepare himself to speak from bitter experience.

Hawkins was to stand by with the bottle, calculate the doses, watch the

effects, make notes of results, and otherwise assist in the preparation.

Time was short, for the ladies would be along about noon--that is to say,

the temperance organization called the Daughters of Siloam--and Sellers

must be ready to head the procession.



The time kept slipping along-Hawkins did not return--Sellers could not

venture to wait longer; so he attacked the bottle himself, and proceeded

to note the effects.  Hawkins got back at last; took one comprehensive

glance at the lecturer, and went down and headed off the procession.

The ladies were grieved to hear that the champion had been taken suddenly

ill and violently so, but glad to hear that it was hoped he would be out

again in a few days.



As it turned out, the old gentleman didn't turn over or show any signs of

life worth speaking of for twenty-four hours.  Then he asked after the

procession, and learned what had happened about it.  He was sorry; said

he had been "fixed" for it.  He remained abed several days, and his wife

and daughter took turns in sitting with him and ministering to his wants.

Often he patted Sally's head and tried to comfort her.



"Don't cry, my child, don't cry so; you know your old father did it by

mistake and didn't mean a bit of harm; you know he wouldn't intentionally

do anything to make you ashamed for the world; you know he was trying to

do good and only made the mistake through ignorance, not knowing the

right doses and Washington not there to help.  Don't cry so, dear, it

breaks my old heart to see you, and think I've brought this humiliation

on you and you so dear to me and so good.  I won't ever do it again,

indeed I won't; now be comforted, honey, that's a good child."



But when she wasn't on duty at the bedside the crying went on just the

same; then the mother would try to comfort her, and say:



"Don't cry, dear, he never meant any harm; it was all one of those

happens that you can't guard against when you are trying experiments,

that way.  You see I don't cry.  It's because I know him so well.

I could never look anybody in the face again if he had got into such an

amazing condition as that a-purpose; but bless you his intention was,

pure and high, and that makes the act pure, though it was higher than was

necessary.  We're not humiliated, dear, he did it under a noble impulse

and we don't need to be ashamed.  There, don't cry any more, honey."



Thus, the old gentleman was useful to Sally, during several days, as an

explanation of her tearfulness.  She felt thankful to him for the shelter

he was affording her, but often said to herself, "It's a shame to let him

see in my cryings a reproach--as if he could ever do anything that could

make me reproach him!  But I can't confess; I've got to go on using him

for a pretext, he's the only one I've got in the world, and I do need one

so much."



As soon as Sellers was out again, and found that stacks of money had been

placed in bank for him and Hawkins by the Yankee, he said, "Now we'll

soon see who's the Claimant and who's the Authentic.  I'll just go over

there and warm up that House of Lords."  During the next few days he and

his wife were so busy with preparations for the voyage that Sally had all

the privacy she needed, and all the chance to cry that was good for her.

Then the old pair left for New York--and England.



Sally had also had a chance to do another thing.  That was, to make up

her mind that life was not worth living upon the present terms.  If she

must give up her impostor and die; doubtless she must submit; but might

she not lay her whole case before some disinterested person, first, and

see if there wasn't perhaps some saving way out of the matter?  She

turned this idea over in her mind a good deal.  In her first visit with

Hawkins after her parents were gone, the talk fell upon Tracy, and she

was impelled to set her case before the statesman and take his counsel.

So she poured out her heart, and he listened with painful solicitude.

She concluded, pleadingly, with--



"Don't tell me he is an impostor.  I suppose he is, but doesn't it look

to you as if he isn't?  You are cool, you know, and outside; and so,

maybe it can look to you as if he isn't one, when it can't to me.

Doesn't it look to you as if he isn't?  Couldn't you--can't it look to

you that way--for--for my sake?"



The poor man was troubled, but he felt obliged to keep in the

neighborhood of the truth.  He fought around the present detail a little

while, then gave it up and said he couldn't really see his way to

clearing Tracy.



"No," he said, "the truth is, he's an impostor."



"That is, you--you feel a little certain, but not entirely--oh, not

entirely, Mr. Hawkins!"



"It's a pity to have to say it--I do hate to say it, but I don't think

anything about it, I know he's an impostor."



"Oh, now, Mr.  Hawkins, you can't go that far.  A body can't really know

it, you know.  It isn't proved that he's not what he says he is."



Should he come out and make a clean breast of the whole wretched

business?  Yes--at least the most of it--it ought to be done.  So he set

his teeth and went at the matter with determination, but purposing to

spare the girl one pain-that of knowing that Tracy was a criminal.



"Now I am going to tell you a plain tale; one not pleasant for me to tell

or for you to hear, but we've got to stand it.  I know all about that

fellow; and I know he is no earl's son."



The girl's eyes flashed, and she said:



"I don't care a snap for that-go on!"



This was so wholly unexpected that it at once obstructed the narrative;

Hawkins was not even sure that he had heard aright.  He said:



"I don't know that I quite understand.  Do you mean to say that if he was

all right and proper otherwise you'd be indifferent about the earl part

of the business?"



"Absolutely."



"You'd be entirely satisfied with him and wouldn't care for his not being

an earl's son,--that being an earl's son wouldn't add any value to him?"



"Not the least value that I would care for.  Why, Mr.  Hawkins, I've

gotten over all that day-dreaming about earldoms and aristocracies and

all such nonsense and am become just a plain ordinary nobody and content

with it; and it is to him I owe my cure.  And as to anything being able

to add a value to him, nothing can do that.  He is the whole world to me,

just as he is; he comprehends all the values there are--then how can you

add one?"



"She's pretty far gone."  He said that to himself.  He continued, still

to himself, "I must change my plan again; I can't seem to strike one that

will stand the requirements of this most variegated emergency five

minutes on a stretch.  Without making this fellow a criminal, I believe

I will invent a name and a character for him calculated to disenchant

her.  If it fails to do it, then I'll know that the next rightest thing

to do will be to help her to her fate, poor thing, not hinder her."

Then he said aloud:



"Well, Gwendolen--"



"I want to be called Sally."



"I'm glad of it; I like it better, myself.  Well, then, I'll tell you

about this man Snodgrass."



"Snodgrass!  Is that his name?"



"Yes--Snodgrass.  The other's his nom de plume."



"It's hideous!"



"I know it is, but we can't help our names."



"And that is truly his real name--and not Howard Tracy?"



Hawkins answered, regretfully:



"Yes, it seems a pity."



The girl sampled the name musingly, once or twice--



"Snodgrass.  Snodgrass.  No, I could not endure that.  I could not get

used to it.  No, I should call him by his first name.  What is his first

name?"



"His--er--his initials are S. M."



"His initials?  I don't care anything about his initials.  I can't call

him by his initials.  What do they stand for?"



"Well, you see, his father was a physician, and he--he--well he was an

idolater of his profession, and he--well, he was a very eccentric man,

and--"



"What do they stand for!  What are you shuffling about?"



"They-well they stand for Spinal Meningitis.  His father being a phy--"



"I never heard such an infamous name!  Nobody can ever call a person

that--a person they love.  I wouldn't call an enemy by such a name.

It sounds like an epithet."  After a moment, she added with a kind of

consternation, "Why, it would be my name!  Letters would come with it

on."



"Yes--Mrs. Spinal Meningitis Snodgrass."



"Don't repeat it--don't; I can't bear it.  Was the father a lunatic?"



"No, that is not charged."



"I am glad of that, because that is transmissible.  What do you think was

the matter with him, then?"



"Well, I don't really know.  The family used to run a good deal to

idiots, and so, maybe--"



"Oh, there isn't any maybe about it.  This one was an idiot."



"Well, yes--he could have been.  He was suspected."



"Suspected!" said Sally, with irritation.  "Would one suspect there was

going to be a dark time if he saw the constellations fall out of the sky?

But that is enough about the idiot, I don't take any interest in idiots;

tell me about the son."



Very well, then, this one was the eldest, but not the favorite.  His

brother, Zylobalsamum--"



"Wait--give me a chance to realize that.  It is perfectly stupefying.

Zylo--what did you call it?"



"Zylobalsamum."



"I never heard such a name: It sounds like a disease.  Is it a disease?"



"No, I don't think it's a disease.  It's either Scriptural or--"



"Well, it's not Scriptural."



"Then it's anatomical.  I knew it was one or the other.  Yes, I remember,

now, it is anatomical.  It's a ganglion--a nerve centre--it is what is

called the zylobalsamum process."



"Well, go on; and if you come to any more of them, omit the names; they

make one feel so uncomfortable."



"Very well, then.  As I said, this one was not a favorite in the family,

and so he was neglected in every way, never sent to school, always

allowed to associate with the worst and coarsest characters, and so of

course he has grown up a rude, vulgar, ignorant, dissipated ruffian,

and--"



"He?  It's no such thing!  You ought to be more generous than to make

such a statement as that about a poor young stranger who--who--why, he is

the very opposite of that!  He is considerate, courteous, obliging,

modest, gentle, refined, cultivated-oh, for shame!  how can you say such

things about him?"



"I don't blame you, Sally--indeed I haven't a word of blame for you for

being blinded by--your affection--blinded to these minor defects which

are so manifest to others who--"



"Minor defects?  Do you call these minor defects?  What are murder and

arson, pray?"



"It is a difficult question to answer straight off--and of course

estimates of such things vary with environment.  With us, out our way,

they would not necessarily attract as much attention as with you, yet

they are often regarded with disapproval--"



"Murder and arson are regarded with disapproval?"



"Oh, frequently."



"With disapproval.  Who are those Puritans you are talking about?

But wait-how did you come to know so much about this family?  Where did

you get all this hearsay evidence?"



"Sally, it isn't hearsay evidence.  That is the serious part of it.

I knew that family-personally."



This was a surprise.



"You?  You actually knew them?"



"Knew Zylo, as we used to call him, and knew his father, Dr. Snodgrass.

I didn't know your own Snodgrass, but have had glimpses of him from time

to time, and I heard about him all the time.  He was the common talk, you

see, on account of his--"



"On account of his not being a house-burner or an assassin, I suppose.

That would have made him commonplace.  Where did you know these people?"



"In Cherokee Strip."



"Oh, how preposterous!  There are not enough people in Cherokee Strip to

give anybody a reputation, good or bad.  There isn't a quorum.  Why the

whole population consists of a couple of wagon loads of horse thieves."



Hawkins answered placidly--



"Our friend was one of those wagon loads."



Sally's eyes burned and her breath came quick and fast, but she kept a

fairly good grip on her anger and did not let it get the advantage of her

tongue.  The statesman sat still and waited for developments.  He was

content with his work.  It was as handsome a piece of diplomatic art as

he had ever turned out, he thought; and now, let the girl make her own

choice.  He judged she would let her spectre go; he hadn't a doubt of it

in fact; but anyway, let the choice be made, and he was ready to ratify

it and offer no further hindrance.



Meantime Sally had thought her case out and made up her mind.  To the

major's disappointment the verdict was against him.  Sally said:



"He has no friend but me, and I will not desert him now.  I will not

marry him if his moral character is bad; but if he can prove that it

isn't, I will--and he shall have the chance.  To me he seems utterly good

and dear; I've never seen anything about him that looked otherwise-

except, of course, his calling himself an earl's son.  Maybe that is only

vanity, and no real harm, when you get to the bottom of it.  I do not

believe he is any such person as you have painted him.  I want to see

him.  I want you to find him and send him to me.  I will implore him to

be honest with me, and tell me the whole truth, and not be afraid."



"Very well; if that is your decision I will do it.  But Sally, you know,

he's poor, and--"



"Oh, I don't care anything about that.  That's neither here nor there.

Will you bring him to me?"



"I'll do it.  When?--"



"Oh, dear, it's getting toward dark, now, and so you'll have to put it

off till morning.  But you will find him in the morning, won't you?

Promise."



"I'll have him here by daylight."



"Oh, now you're your own old self again--and lovelier than ever!"



"I couldn't ask fairer than that.  Good-bye, dear."



Sally mused a moment alone, then said earnestly, "I love him in spite of

his name!" and went about her affairs with a light heart.









CHAPTER XXV.



Hawkins went straight to the telegraph office and disburdened his

conscience.  He said to himself, "She's not going to give this galvanized

cadaver up, that's plain.  Wild horses can't pull her away from him.

I've done my share; it's for Sellers to take an innings, now."  So he

sent this message to New York:



"Come back.  Hire special train.  She's going to marry the materializee."



Meantime a note came to Rossmore Towers to say that the Earl of Rossmore

had just arrived from England, and would do himself the pleasure of

calling in the evening.  Sally said to herself, "It is a pity he didn't

stop in New York; but it's no matter; he can go up to-morrow and see my

father.  He has come over here to tomahawk papa, very likely--or buy out

his claim.  This thing would have excited me, a while back; but it has

only one interest for me now, and only one value.  I can say to--to--

Spine, Spiny, Spinal--I don't like any form of that name!--I can say to

him to-morrow, 'Don't try to keep it up any more, or I shall have to tell

you whom I have been talking with last night, and then you will be

embarrassed.'"



Tracy couldn't know he was to be invited for the morrow, or he might have

waited.  As it was, he was too miserable to wait any longer; for his last

hope--a letter--had failed him.  It was fully due to-day; it had not

come.  Had his father really flung him away?  It looked so.  It was not

like his father, but it surely looked so.  His father was a rather tough

nut, in truth, but had never been so with his son--still, this implacable

silence had a calamitous look.  Anyway, Tracy would go to the Towers and

--then what?  He didn't know; his head was tired out with thinking--

he wouldn't think about what he must do or say--let it all take care of

itself.  So that he saw Sally once more, he would be satisfied, happen

what might; he wouldn't care.



He hardly knew how he got to the Towers, or when.  He knew and cared for

only one thing--he was alone with Sally.  She was kind, she was gentle,

there was moisture in her eyes, and a yearning something in her face and

manner which she could not wholly hide--but she kept her distance.  They

talked.  Bye and bye she said--watching his downcast countenance out of

the corner of her eye--



"It's so lonesome--with papa and mamma gone.  I try to read, but I can't

seem to get interested in any book.  I try the newspapers, but they do

put such rubbish in them.  You take up a paper and start to read

something you thinks interesting, and it goes on and on and on about how

somebody--well, Dr. Snodgrass, for instance--"



Not a movement from Tracy, not the quiver of a muscle.  Sally was amazed

--what command of himself he must have!  Being disconcerted, she paused

so long that Tracy presently looked up wearily and said:



"Well?"



"Oh, I thought you were not listening.  Yes, it goes on and on about this

Doctor Snodgrass, till you are so tired, and then about his younger son--

the favorite son--Zylobalsamum Snodgrass--"



Not a sign from Tracy, whose head was drooping again.  What supernatural

self-possession!  Sally fixed her eye on him and began again, resolved to

blast him out of his serenity this time if she knew how to apply the

dynamite that is concealed in certain forms of words when those words are

properly loaded with unexpected meanings.



"And next it goes on and on and on about the eldest son--not the

favorite, this one--and how lie is neglected in his poor barren boyhood,

and allowed to grow up unschooled, ignorant, coarse, vulgar, the comrade

of the community's scum, and become in his completed manhood a rude,

profane, dissipated ruffian--"



That head still drooped!  Sally rose, moved softly and solemnly a step or

two, and stood before Tracy--his head came slowly up, his meek eyes met

her intense ones--then she finished with deep impressiveness--



"--named Spinal Meningitis Snodgrass!"



Tracy merely exhibited signs of increased fatigue.  The girl was outraged

by this iron indifference and callousness, and cried out--



"What are you made of?"



"I?  Why?"



"Haven't you any sensitiveness?  Don't these things touch any poor

remnant of delicate feeling in you?"



"N--no," he said wonderingly, "they don't seem to.  Why should they?"



"O, dear me, how can you look so innocent, and foolish, and good, and

empty, and gentle, and all that, right in the hearing of such things as

those!  Look me in the eye-straight in the eye.  There, now then, answer

me without a flinch.  Isn't Doctor Snodgrass your father, and isn't

Zylobalsamum your brother," [here Hawkins was about to enter the room,

but changed his mind upon hearing these words, and elected for a walk

down town, and so glided swiftly away], "and isn't your name Spinal

Meningitis, and isn't your father a doctor and an idiot, like all the

family for generations, and doesn't he name all his children after

poisons and pestilences and, abnormal anatomical eccentricities of the

human body?  Answer me, some way or somehow--and quick.  Why do you sit

there looking like an envelope without any address on it and see me going

mad before your face with suspense!"



"Oh, I wish I could do--do--I wish I could do something, anything that

would give you peace again and make you happy; but I know of nothing--

I know of no way.  I have never heard of these awful people before."



"What?  Say it again!"



"I have never-never in my life till now."



"Oh, you do look so honest when you say that!  It must be true--surely

you couldn't look that way, you wouldn't look that way if it were not

true--would you?"



"I couldn't and wouldn't.  It is true.  Oh, let us end this suffering--

take me back into your heart and confidence--"



"Wait--one more thing.  Tell me you told that falsehood out of mere

vanity and are sorry for it; that you're not expecting to ever wear the

coronet of an earl--"



"Truly I am cured--cured this very day--I am not expecting it!"



"O, now you are mine!  I've got you back in the beauty and glory of your

unsmirched poverty and your honorable obscurity, and nobody shall ever

take you from me again but the grave!  And if--"



"De earl of Rossmore, fum Englan'!"



"My father!"  The, young man released the girl and hung his head.



The old gentleman stood surveying the couple--the one with a strongly

complimentary right eye, the other with a mixed expression done with the

left.  This is difficult, and not often resorted to.  Presently his face

relaxed into a kind of constructive gentleness, and he said to his son:



"Don't you think you could embrace me, too?"



The young man did it with alacrity.  "Then you are the son of an earl,

after all," said Sally, reproachfully.



"Yes, I--"



"Then I won't have you!"



"O, but you know--"



"No, I will not.  You've told me another fib."



"She's right.  Go away and leave us.  I want to talk with her."



Berkeley was obliged to go.  But he did not go far.  He remained on the

premises.  At midnight the conference between the old gentleman and the

young girl was still going blithely on, but it presently drew to a close,

and the former said:



"I came all the way over here to inspect you, my dear, with the general

idea of breaking off this match if there were two fools of you, but as

there's only one, you can have him if you'll take him."



"Indeed I will, then!  May I kiss you?"



"You may.  Thank you.  Now you shall have that privilege whenever you are

good."



Meantime Hawkins had long ago returned and slipped up into the

laboratory.  He was rather disconcerted to find his late invention,

Snodgrass, there.  The news was told him: that the English Rossmore was

come,



--"and I'm his son, Viscount Berkeley, not Howard Tracy any more."



Hawkins was aghast.  He said:



"Good gracious, then you're dead!"



"Dead?"



"Yes you are--we've got your ashes."



"Hang those ashes, I'm tired of them; I'll give them to my father."



Slowly and painfully the statesman worked the truth into his head that

this was really a flesh and blood young man, and not the insubstantial

resurrection he and Sellers had so long supposed him to be.  Then he said

with feeling--



"I'm so glad; so glad on Sally's account, poor thing.  We took you for a

departed materialized bank thief from Tahlequah.  This will be a heavy

blow to Sellers."  Then he explained the whole matter to Berkeley, who

said:



"Well, the Claimant must manage to stand the blow, severe as it is.

But he'll get over the disappointment."



"Who--the colonel?  He'll get over it the minute he invents a new miracle

to take its place.  And he's already at it by this time.  But look here--

what do you suppose became of the man you've been representing all this

time?"



"I don't know.  I saved his clothes--it was all I could do.  I am afraid

he lost his life."



"Well, you must have found twenty or thirty thousand dollars in those

clothes, in money or certificates of deposit."



"No, I found only five hundred and a trifle.  I borrowed the trifle and

banked the five hundred."



"What'll we do about it?"



"Return it to the owner."



"It's easy said, but not easy to manage.  Let's leave it alone till we

get Sellers's advice.  And that reminds me.  I've got to run and meet

Sellers and explain who you are not and who you are, or he'll come

thundering in here to stop his daughter from marrying a phantom.  But--

suppose your father came over here to break off the match?"



"Well, isn't he down stairs getting acquainted with Sally?  That's all

safe."



So Hawkins departed to meet and prepare the Sellerses.



Rossmore Towers saw great times and late hours during the succeeding

week.  The two earls were such opposites in nature that they fraternized

at once.  Sellers said privately that Rossmore was the most extraordinary

character he had ever met--a man just made out of the condensed milk of

human kindness, yet with the ability to totally hide the fact from any

but the most practised character-reader; a man whose whole being was

sweetness, patience and charity, yet with a cunning so profound, an

ability so marvelous in the acting of a double part, that many a person

of considerable intelligence might live with him for centuries and never

suspect the presence in him of these characteristics.





Finally there was a quiet wedding at the Towers, instead of a big one at

the British embassy, with the militia and the fire brigades and the

temperance organizations on hand in torchlight procession, as at first

proposed by one of the earls.  The art-firm and Barrow were present at

the wedding, and the tinner and Puss had been invited, but the tinner was

ill and Puss was nursing him--for they were engaged.



The Sellerses were to go to England with their new allies for a brief

visit, but when it was time to take the train from Washington,

the colonel was missing.



Hawkins was going as far as New York with the party, and said he would

explain the matter on the road.



The explanation was in a letter left by the colonel in Hawkins's hands.

In it he promised to join Mrs. Sellers later, in England, and then went

on to say:



The truth is, my dear Hawkins, a mighty idea has been born to me within

the hour, and I must not even stop to say goodbye to my dear ones.

A man's highest duty takes precedence of all minor ones, and must be

attended to with his best promptness and energy, at whatsoever cost to

his affections or his convenience.  And first of all a man's duties is

his duty to his own honor-he must keep that spotless.  Mine is

threatened.  When I was feeling sure of my imminent future solidity,

I forwarded to the Czar of Russia-perhaps prematurely--an offer for the

purchase of Siberia, naming a vast sum.  Since then an episode has warned

me that the method by which I was expecting to acquire this money--

materialization upon a scale of limitless magnitude-is marred by a taint

of temporary uncertainty.  His imperial majesty may accept my offer at

any moment.  If this should occur now, I should find myself painfully

embarrassed, in fact financially inadequate.  I could not take Siberia.

This would become known, and my credit would suffer.



Recently my private hours have been dark indeed, but the sun shines main,

now; I see my way; I shall be able to meet my obligation, and without

having to ask an extension of the stipulated time, I think.  This grand

new idea of mine--the sublimest I have ever conceived, will save me

whole, I am sure.  I am leaving for San Francisco this moment, to test

it, by the help of the great Lick telescope.  Like all of my more notable

discoveries and inventions, it is based upon hard, practical scientific

laws; all other bases are unsound and hence untrustworthy.  In brief,

then, I have conceived the stupendous idea of reorganizing the climates

of the earth according to the desire of the populations interested.

That is to say, I will furnish climates to order, for cash or negotiable

paper, taking the old climates in part payment, of course, at a fair

discount, where they are in condition to be repaired at small cost and

let out for hire to poor and remote communities not able to afford a good

climate and not caring for an expensive one for mere display.  My studies

have convinced me that the regulation of climates and the breeding of new

varieties at will from the old stock is a feasible thing.  Indeed I am

convinced that it has been done before; done in prehistoric times by now

forgotten and unrecorded civilizations.  Everywhere I find hoary

evidences of artificial manipulation of climates in bygone times.  Take

the glacial period.  Was that produced by accident?  Not at all; it was

done for money.  I have a thousand proofs of it, and will some day reveal

them.



I will confide to you an outline of my idea.  It is to utilize the spots

on the sun--get control of them, you understand, and apply the stupendous

energies which they wield to beneficent purposes in the reorganizing of

our climates.  At present they merely make trouble and do harm in the

evoking of cyclones and other kinds of electric storms; but once under

humane and intelligent control this will cease and they will become a

boon to man.



I have my plan all mapped out, whereby I hope and expect to acquire

complete and perfect control of the sun-spots, also details of the method

whereby I shall employ the same commercially; but I will not venture to

go into particulars before the patents shall have been issued.  I shall

hope and expect to sell shop-rights to the minor countries at a

reasonable figure and supply a good business article of climate to the

great empires at special rates, together with fancy brands for

coronations, battles and other great and particular occasions.  There are

billions of money in this enterprise, no expensive plant is required, and

I shall begin to realize in a few days-in a few weeks at furthest.

I shall stand ready to pay cash for Siberia the moment it is delivered,

and thus save my honor and my credit.  I am confident of this.



I would like you to provide a proper outfit and start north as soon as I

telegraph you, be it night or be it day.  I wish you to take up all the

country stretching away from the north pole on all sides for many degrees

south, and buy Greenland and Iceland at the best figure you can get now

while they are cheap.  It is my intention to move one of the tropics up

there and transfer the frigid zone to the equator.  I will have the

entire Arctic Circle in the market as a summer resort next year, and will

use the surplusage of the old climate, over and above what can be

utilized on the equator, to reduce the temperature of opposition resorts.

But I have said enough to give you an idea of the prodigious nature of my

scheme and the feasible and enormously profitable character of it.

I shall join all you happy people in England as soon as I shall have sold

out some of my principal climates and arranged with the Czar about

Siberia.



Meantime, watch for a sign from me.  Eight days from now, we shall be

wide asunder; for I shall be on the border of the Pacific, and you far

out on the Atlantic, approaching England.  That day, if I am alive and my

sublime discovery is proved and established, I will send you greeting,

and my messenger shall deliver it where you are, in the solitudes of the

sea; for I will waft a vast sun-spot across the disk like drifting smoke,

and you will know it for my love-sign, and will say "Mulberry Sellers

throws us a kiss across the universe."













APPENDIX.



WEATHER FOR USE IN THIS BOOK.



Selected from the Best Authorities.



A brief though violent thunderstorm which had raged over the city was

passing away; but still, though the rain had ceased more than an hour

before, wild piles of dark and coppery clouds, in which a fierce and

rayless glow was laboring, gigantically overhung the grotesque and

huddled vista of dwarf houses, while in the distance, sheeting high over

the low, misty confusion of gables and chimneys, spread a pall of dead,

leprous blue, suffused with blotches of dull, glistening yellow, and with

black plague-spots of vapor floating and faint lightnings crinkling on

its surface.  Thunder, still muttering in the close and sultry air, kept

the scared dwellers in the street within, behind their closed shutters;

and all deserted, cowed, dejected, squalid, like poor, stupid, top-heavy

things that had felt the wrath of the summer tempest, stood the drenched

structures on either side of the narrow and crooked way, ghastly and

picturesque, under the giant canopy.  Rain dripped wretchedly in slow

drops of melancholy sound from their projecting eaves upon the broken

flagging, lay there in pools or trickled into the swollen drains, where

the fallen torrent sullenly gurgled on its way to the river.

                              "The Brazen Android."-W.  D.  O'Connor.





          The fiery mid-March sun a moment hung

          Above the bleak Judean wilderness;

          Then darkness swept upon us, and 't was night.

                    "Easter-Eve at Kerak-Moab."--Clinton Scollard.





The quick-coming winter twilight was already at hand.  Snow was again

falling, sifting delicately down, incidentally as it were.

                    "Felicia."  Fanny N. D. Murfree.





Merciful heavens!  The whole west, from right to left, blazes up with a

fierce light, and next instant the earth reels and quivers with the awful

shock of ten thousand batteries of artillery.  It is the signal for the

Fury to spring--for a thousand demons to scream and shriek--for

innumerable serpents of fire to writhe and light up the blackness.



Now the rain falls-now the wind is let loose with a terrible shriek--now

the lightning is so constant that the eyes burn, and the thunder-claps

merge into an awful roar, as did the 800 cannon at Gettysburg.  Crash!

Crash!  Crash!  It is the cottonwood trees falling to earth.  Shriek!

Shriek!  Shriek!  It is the Demon racing along the plain and uprooting

even the blades of grass.  Shock!  Shock!  Shock!  It is the Fury

flinging his fiery bolts into the bosom of the earth.--

                    "The Demon and the Fury."  M. Quad.





Away up the gorge all diurnal fancies trooped into the wide liberties of

endless luminous vistas of azure sunlit mountains beneath the shining

azure heavens.  The sky, looking down in deep blue placidities, only here

and there smote the water to azure emulations of its tint.--

                    "In the Stranger's Country." Charles Egbert Craddock.





There was every indication of a dust-storm, though the sun still shone

brilliantly.  The hot wind had become wild and rampant.  It was whipping

up the sandy coating of the plain in every direction.  High in the air

were seen whirling spires and cones of sand--a curious effect against the

deep-blue sky.  Below, puffs of sand were breaking out of the plain in

every direction, as though the plain were alive with invisible horsemen.

These sandy cloudlets were instantly dissipated by the wind; it was the

larger clouds that were lifted whole into the air, and the larger clouds

of sand were becoming more and more the rule.



Alfred's eye, quickly scanning the horizon, descried the roof of the

boundary-rider's hut still gleaming in the sunlight.  He remembered the

hut well.  It could not be farther than four miles, if as much as that,

from this point of the track.  He also knew these dust-storms of old;

Bindarra was notorious for them: Without thinking twice, Alfred put,

spurs to his horse and headed for the hut.  Before he had ridden half the

distance the detached clouds of sand banded together in one dense

whirlwind, and it was only owing to his horse's instinct that he did not

ride wide of the hut altogether; for during the last half-mile he never

saw the hut, until its outline loomed suddenly over his horse's ears; and

by then the sun was invisible.--

                    "A Bride from the Bush."





It rained forty days and forty nights.--Genesis.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The American Claimant

by Mark Twain













EXTRACTS FROM ADAM'S DIARY



Translated from the original MS.



by Mark Twain









[NOTE.--I translated a portion of this diary some years ago, and

a friend of mine printed a few copies in an incomplete form, but

the public never got them.  Since then I have deciphered some more

of Adam's hieroglyphics, and think he has now become sufficiently

important as a public character to justify this publication.--M. T.]





Monday



This new creature with the long hair is a good deal in the way.

It is always hanging around and following me about.  I don't like

this; I am not used to company.  I wish it would stay with the

other animals.  Cloudy to-day, wind in the east; think we shall

have rain.  ...  Where did I get that word? ...  I remember now--

the new creature uses it.



Tuesday



Been examining the great waterfall.  It is the finest thing on the

estate, I think.  The new creature calls it Niagara Falls--why,

I am sure I do not know.  Says it looks like Niagara Falls.  That

is not a reason; it is mere waywardness and imbecility.  I get no

chance to name anything myself.  The new creature names everything

that comes along, before I can get in a protest.  And always that

same pretext is offered--it looks like the thing.  There is the

dodo, for instance.  Says the moment one looks at it one sees at

a glance that it "looks like a dodo."  It will have to keep that

name, no doubt.  It wearies me to fret about it, and it does no

good, anyway.  Dodo! It looks no more like a dodo than I do.



Wednesday



Built me a shelter against the rain, but could not have it to

myself in peace.  The new creature intruded.  When I tried to put

it out it shed water out of the holes it looks with, and wiped it

away with the back of its paws, and made a noise such as some of

the other animals make when they are in distress.  I wish it would

not talk; it is always talking.  That sounds like a cheap fling

at the poor creature, a slur; but I do not mean it so.  I have never

heard the human voice before, and any new and strange sound

intruding itself here upon the solemn hush of these dreaming

solitudes offends my ear and seems a false note.  And this new

sound is so close to me; it is right at my shoulder, right at my

ear, first on one side and then on the other, and I am used only

to sounds that are more or less distant from me.



Friday



The naming goes recklessly on, in spite of anything I can do.  I

had a very good name for the estate, and it was musical and pretty--

GARDEN-OF-EDEN.  Privately, I continue to call it that, but not

any longer publicly.  The new creature says it is all woods and

rocks and scenery, and therefore has no resemblance to a garden.

Says it looks like a park, and does not look like anything but a

park.  Consequently, without consulting me, it has been new-named--

NIAGARA FALLS PARK.  This is sufficiently high-handed, it seems to

me.  And already there is a sign up:



  KEEP OFF

  THE GRASS



My life is not as happy as it was.



Saturday



The new creature eats too much fruit.  We are going to run short,

most likely.  "We" again--that is its word; mine too, now, from

hearing it so much.  Good deal of fog this morning.  I do not go

out in the fog myself.  The new creature does.  It goes out in

all weathers, and stumps right in with its muddy feet.  And talks.

It used to be so pleasant and quiet here.



Sunday



Pulled through.  This day is getting to be more and more trying.

It was selected and set apart last November as a day of rest.  I

already had six of them per week, before.  This morning found the

new creature trying to clod apples out of that forbidden tree.



Monday



The new creature says its name is Eve.  That is all right, I have

no objections.  Says it is to call it by when I want it to come.

I said it was superfluous, then.  The word evidently raised me in

its respect; and indeed it is a large, good word, and will bear

repetition.  It says it is not an It, it is a She.  This is probably

doubtful; yet it is all one to me; what she is were nothing to me

if she would but go by herself and not talk.



Tuesday



She has littered the whole estate with execrable names and offensive

signs:



THIS WAY TO THE WHIRLPOOL.



THIS WAY TO GOAT ISLAND.



CAVE OF THE WINDS THIS WAY.



She says this park would make a tidy summer resort, if there was

any custom for it.  Summer resort--another invention of hers--just

words, without any meaning.  What is a summer resort? But it is

best not to ask her, she has such a rage for explaining.



Friday



She has taken to beseeching me to stop going over the Falls.  What

harm does it do? Says it makes her shudder.  I wonder why.  I have

always done it--always liked the plunge, and the excitement, and

the coolness.  I supposed it was what the Falls were for.  They

have no other use that I can see, and they must have been made for

something.  She says they were only made for scenery--like the

rhinoceros and the mastodon.



I went over the Falls in a barrel--not satisfactory to her.  Went

over in a tub--still not satisfactory.  Swam the Whirlpool and the

Rapids in a fig-leaf suit.  It got much damaged.  Hence, tedious

complaints about my extravagance.  I am too much hampered here.

What I need is change of scene.



Saturday



I escaped last Tuesday night, and travelled two days, and built

me another shelter, in a secluded place, and obliterated my tracks

as well as I could, but she hunted me out by means of a beast which

she has tamed and calls a wolf, and came making that pitiful noise

again, and shedding that water out of the places she looks with.

I was obliged to return with her, but will presently emigrate again,

when occasion offers.  She engages herself in many foolish things:

among others, trying to study out why the animals called lions and

tigers live on grass and flowers, when, as she says, the sort of

teeth they wear would indicate that they were intended to eat each

other.  This is foolish, because to do that would be to kill each

other, and that would introduce what, as I understand it, is called

"death;" and death, as I have been told, has not yet entered the

Park.  Which is a pity, on some accounts.



Sunday



Pulled through.



Monday



I believe I see what the week is for: it is to give time to rest

up from the weariness of Sunday.  It seems a good idea.  ...  She

has been climbing that tree again.  Clodded her out of it.  She

said nobody was looking.  Seems to consider that a sufficient

justification for chancing any dangerous thing.  Told her that.

The word justification moved her admiration--and envy too, I

thought.  It is a good word.



Thursday



She told me she was made out of a rib taken from my body.  This

is at least doubtful, if not more than that.  I have not missed

any rib.  ...  She is in much trouble about the buzzard; says

grass does not agree with it; is afraid she can't raise it; thinks

it was intended to live on decayed flesh.  The buzzard must get

along the best it can with what is provided.  We cannot overturn

the whole scheme to accommodate the buzzard.



Saturday



She fell in the pond yesterday, when she was looking at herself

in it, which she is always doing.  She nearly strangled, and said

it was most uncomfortable.  This made her sorry for the creatures

which live in there, which she calls fish, for she continues to

fasten names on to things that don't need them and don't come when

they are called by them, which is a matter of no consequence to

her, as she is such a numskull anyway; so she got a lot of them

out and brought them in last night and put them in my bed to keep

warm, but I have noticed them now and then all day, and I don't

see that they are any happier there than they were before, only

quieter.  When night comes I shall throw them out-doors.  I will

not sleep with them again, for I find them clammy and unpleasant

to lie among when a person hasn't anything on.



Sunday



Pulled through.



Tuesday



She has taken up with a snake now.  The other animals are glad,

for she was always experimenting with them and bothering them;

and I am glad, because the snake talks, and this enables me to

get a rest.



Friday



She says the snake advises her to try the fruit of that tree, and

says the result will be a great and fine and noble education.  I

told her there would be another result, too--it would introduce

death into the world.  That was a mistake--it had been better to

keep the remark to myself; it only gave her an idea--she could

save the sick buzzard, and furnish fresh meat to the despondent

lions and tigers.  I advised her to keep away from the tree.  She

said she wouldn't.  I foresee trouble.  Will emigrate.



Wednesday



I have had a variegated time.  I escaped that night, and rode a

horse all night as fast as he could go, hoping to get clear out of

the Park and hide in some other country before the trouble should

begin; but it was not to be.  About an hour after sunup, as I was

riding through a flowery plain where thousands of animals were

grazing, slumbering, or playing with each other, according to their

wont, all of a sudden they broke into a tempest of frightful noises,

and in one moment the plain was in a frantic commotion and every

beast was destroying its neighbor.  I knew what it meant--Eve had

eaten that fruit, and death was come into the world.  ...  The

tigers ate my horse, paying no attention when I ordered them to

desist,  and they would even have eaten me if I had stayed--which

I didn't, but went away in much haste.  ...  I found this place,

outside the Park, and was fairly comfortable for a few days, but

she has found me out.  Found me out, and has named the place

Tonawanda--says it looks like that.  In fact, I was not sorry she

came, for there are but meagre pickings here, and she brought some

of those apples.  I was obliged to eat them, I was so hungry.  It

was against my principles, but I find that principles have no real

force except when one is well fed.  ...  She came curtained in

boughs and bunches of leaves, and when I asked her what she meant

by such nonsense, and snatched them away and threw them down, she

tittered and blushed.  I had never seen a person titter and blush

before, and to me it seemed unbecoming and idiotic.  She said I

would soon know how it was myself.  This was correct.  Hungry as

I was, I laid down the apple half eaten--certainly the best one I

ever saw, considering the lateness of the season--and arrayed

myself in the discarded boughs and branches, and then spoke to her

with some severity and ordered her to go and get some more and not

make such a spectacle of herself.  She did it, and after this we

crept down to where the wild-beast battle had been, and collected

some skins, and I made her patch together a couple of suits proper

for public occasions.  They are uncomfortable, it is true, but

stylish, and that is the main point about clothes.  ...  I find

she is a good deal of a companion.  I see I should be lonesome and

depressed without her, now that I have lost my property.  Another

thing, she says it is ordered that we work for our living hereafter.

She will be useful.  I will superintend.



Ten Days Later



She accuses me of being the cause of our disaster! She says, with

apparent sincerity and truth, that the Serpent assured her that

the forbidden fruit was not apples, it was chestnuts.  I said I

was innocent, then, for I had not eaten any chestnuts.  She said

the Serpent informed her that "chestnut" was a figurative term

meaning an aged and mouldy joke.  I turned pale at that, for I

have made many jokes to pass the weary time, and some of them could

have been of that sort, though I had honestly supposed that they

were new when I made them.  She asked me if I had made one just

at the time of the catastrophe.  I was obliged to admit that I had

made one to myself, though not aloud.  It was this.  I was thinking

about the Falls, and I said to myself, "How wonderful it is to see

that vast body of water tumble down there!" Then in an instant a

bright thought flashed into my head, and I let it fly, saying, "It

would be a deal more wonderful to see it tumble up there!"--and I

was just about to kill myself with laughing at it when all nature

broke loose in war and death, and I had to flee for my life.

"There," she said, with triumph, "that is just it; the Serpent

mentioned that very jest, and called it the First Chestnut, and

said it was coeval with the creation."  Alas, I am indeed to blame.

Would that I were not witty; oh, would that I had never had that

radiant thought!



Next Year



We have named it Cain.  She caught it while I was up country

trapping on the North Shore of the Erie; caught it in the timber

a couple of miles from our dug-out--or it might have been four,

she isn't certain which.  It resembles us in some ways, and may

be a relation.  That is what she thinks, but this is an error,

in my judgment.  The difference in size warrants the conclusion

that it is a different and new kind of animal--a fish, perhaps,

though when I put it in the water to see, it sank, and she plunged

in and snatched it out before there was opportunity for the

experiment to determine the matter.  I still think it is a fish,

but she is indifferent about what it is, and will not let me have

it to try.  I do not understand this.  The coming of the creature

seems to have changed her whole nature and made her unreasonable

about experiments.  She thinks more of it than she does of any of

the other animals, but is not able to explain why.  Her mind is

disordered--everything shows it.  Sometimes she carries the fish

in her arms half the night when it complains and wants to get to

the water.  At such times the water comes out of the places in

her face that she looks out of, and she pats the fish on the back

and makes soft sounds with her mouth to soothe it, and betrays

sorrow and solicitude in a hundred ways.  I have never seen her

do like this with any other fish, and it troubles me greatly.  She

used to carry the young tigers around so, and play with them,

before we lost our property; but it was only play; she never took

on about them like this when their dinner disagreed with them.



Sunday



She doesn't work Sundays, but lies around all tired out, and likes

to have the fish wallow over her; and she makes fool noises to

amuse it, and pretends to chew its paws, and that makes it laugh.

I have not seen a fish before that could laugh.  This makes me

doubt.  ...  I have come to like Sunday myself.  Superintending

all the week tires a body so.  There ought to be more Sundays.

In the old days they were tough, but now they come handy.



Wednesday



It isn't a fish.  I cannot quite make out what it is.  It makes

curious, devilish noises when not satisfied, and says "goo-goo"

when it is.  It is not one of us, for it doesn't walk; it is not

a bird, for it doesn't fly; it is not a frog, for it doesn't hop;

it is not a snake, for it doesn't crawl; I feel sure it is not a

fish, though I cannot get a chance to find out whether it can swim

or not.  It merely lies around, and mostly on its back, with its

feet up.  I have not seen any other animal do that before.  I said

I believed it was an enigma, but she only admired the word without

understanding it.  In my judgment it is either an enigma or some

kind of a bug.  If it dies, I will take it apart and see what its

arrangements are.  I never had a thing perplex me so.



Three Months Later



The perplexity augments instead of diminishing.  I sleep but little.

It has ceased from lying around, and goes about on its four legs

now.  Yet it differs from the other four-legged animals in that

its front legs are unusually short, consequently this causes the

main part of its person to stick up uncomfortably high in the air,

and this is not attractive.  It is built much as we are, but its

method of travelling shows that it is not of our breed.  The short

front legs and long hind ones indicate that it is of the kangaroo

family, but it is a marked variation of the species, since the

true kangaroo hops, whereas this one never does.  Still, it is a

curious and interesting variety, and has not been catalogued before.

As I discovered it, I have felt justified in securing the credit

of the discovery by attaching my name to it, and hence have called

it Kangaroorum Adamiensis.  ...  It must have been a young one

when it came, for it has grown exceedingly since.  It must be five

times as big, now, as it was then, and when discontented is able

to make from twenty-two to thirty-eight times the noise it made

at first.  Coercion does not modify this, but has the contrary

effect.  For this reason I discontinued the system.  She reconciles

it by persuasion, and by giving it things which she had previously

told it she wouldn't give it.  As already observed, I was not at

home when it first came, and she told me she found it in the woods.

It seems odd that it should be the only one, yet it must be so,

for I have worn myself out these many weeks trying to find another

one to add to my collection, and for this one to play with; for

surely then it would be quieter, and we could tame it more easily.

But I find none, nor any vestige of any; and strangest of all, no

tracks.  It has to live on the ground, it cannot help itself;

therefore, how does it get about without leaving a track? I have

set a dozen traps, but they do no good.  I catch all small animals

except that one; animals that merely go into the trap out of

curiosity, I think, to see what the milk is there for.  They never

drink it.



Three Months Later



The kangaroo still continues to grow, which is very strange and

perplexing.  I never knew one to be so long getting its growth.

It has fur on its head now; not like kangaroo fur, but exactly

like our hair, except that it is much finer and softer, and instead

of being black is red.  I am like to lose my mind over the capricious

and harassing developments of this unclassifiable zoological freak.

If I could catch another one--but that is hopeless; it is a new

variety, and the only sample; this is plain.  But I caught a true

kangaroo and brought it in, thinking that this one, being lonesome,

would rather have that for company than have no kin at all, or any

animal it could feel a nearness to or get sympathy from in its

forlorn condition here among strangers who do not know its ways

or habits, or what to do to make it feel that it is among friends;

but it was a mistake--it went into such fits at the sight of the

kangaroo that I was convinced it had never seen one before.  I

pity the poor noisy little animal, but there is nothing I can do

to make it happy.  If I could tame it--but that is out of the

question; the more I try, the worse I seem to make it.  It grieves

me to the heart to see it in its little storms of sorrow and

passion.  I wanted to let it go, but she wouldn't hear of it.  That

seemed cruel and not like her; and yet she may be right.  It might

be lonelier than ever; for since I cannot find another one, how

could it?



Five Months Later



It is not a kangaroo.  No, for it supports itself by holding to

her finger, and thus goes a few steps on its hind legs, and then

falls down.  It is probably some kind of a bear; and yet it has

no tail--as yet--and no fur, except on its head.  It still keeps

on growing--that is a curious circumstance, for bears get their

growth earlier than this.  Bears are dangerous--since our

catastrophe--and I shall not be satisfied to have this one prowling

about the place much longer without a muzzle on.  I have offered

to get her a kangaroo if she would let this one go, but it did no

good--she is determined to run us into all sorts of foolish risks,

I think.  She was not like this before she lost her mind.



A Fortnight Later



I examined its mouth.  There is no danger yet; it has only one

tooth.  It has no tail yet.  It makes more noise now than it ever

did before--and mainly at night.  I have moved out.  But I shall

go over, mornings, to breakfast, and to see if it has more teeth.

If it gets a mouthful of teeth, it will be time for it to go, tail

or no tail, for a bear does not need a tail in order to be

dangerous.



Four Months Later



I have been off hunting and fishing a month, up in the region that

she calls Buffalo; I don't know why, unless it is because there

are not any buffaloes there.  Meantime the bear has learned to

paddle around all by itself on its hind legs, and says "poppa"

and "momma."  It is certainly a new species.  This resemblance to

words may be purely accidental, of course, and may have no purpose

or meaning; but even in that case it is still extraordinary, and

is a thing which no other bear can do.  This imitation of speech,

taken together with general absence of fur and entire absence of

tail, sufficiently indicates that this is a new kind of bear.  The

further study of it will be exceedingly interesting.  Meantime I

will go off on a far expedition among the forests of the North and

make an exhaustive search.  There must certainly be another one

somewhere, and this one will be less dangerous when it has company

of its own species.  I will go straightway; but I will muzzle this

one first.



Three Months Later



It has been a weary, weary hunt, yet I have had no success.  In

the mean time, without stirring from the home estate, she has

caught another one!  I never saw such luck.  I might have hunted

these woods a hundred years, I never should have run across that

thing.



Next Day



I have been comparing the new one with the old one, and it is

perfectly plain that they are the same breed.  I was going to stuff

one of them for my collection, but she is prejudiced against it

for some reason or other; so I have relinquished the idea, though

I think it is a mistake.  It would be an irreparable loss to science

if they should get away.  The old one is tamer than it was, and

can laugh and talk like the parrot, having learned this, no doubt,

from being with the parrot so much, and having the imitative faculty

in a highly developed degree.  I shall be astonished if it turns

out to be a new kind of parrot, and yet I ought not to be astonished,

for it has already been everything else it could think of, since

those first days when it was a fish.  The new one is as ugly now

as the old one was at first; has the same sulphur-and-raw-meat

complexion and the same singular head without any fur on it.  She

calls it Abel.



Ten Years Later



They are boys; we found it out long ago.  It was their coming in

that small, immature shape that puzzled us; we were not used to it.

There are some girls now.  Abel is a good boy, but if Cain had

stayed a bear it would have improved him.  After all these years,

I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better

to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.

At first I thought she talked too much; but now I should be sorry

to have that voice fall silent and pass out of my life.  Blessed

be the chestnut that brought us near together and taught me to

know the goodness of her heart and the sweetness of her spirit!











End of The Project Gutenberg Etext Extracts From Adam's Diary, by Twain













IN DEFENSE OF HARRIET SHELLEY



by Mark Twain







I



I have committed sins, of course; but I have not committed enough of them

to entitle me to the punishment of reduction to the bread and water of

ordinary literature during six years when I might have been living on the

fat diet spread for the righteous in Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley,

if I had been justly dealt with.



During these six years I have been living a life of peaceful ignorance.

I was not aware that Shelley's first wife was unfaithful to him, and that

that was why he deserted her and wiped the stain from his sensitive honor

by entering into soiled relations with Godwin's young daughter.  This was

all new to me when I heard it lately, and was told that the proofs of it

were in this book, and that this book's verdict is accepted in the girls'

colleges of America and its view taught in their literary classes.



In each of these six years multitudes of young people in our country have

arrived at the Shelley-reading age.  Are these six multitudes

unacquainted with this life of Shelley?  Perhaps they are; indeed, one

may feel pretty sure that the great bulk of them are.  To these, then, I

address myself, in the hope that some account of this romantic historical

fable and the fabulist's manner of constructing and adorning it may

interest them.



First, as to its literary style.  Our negroes in America have several

ways of entertaining themselves which are not found among the whites

anywhere.  Among these inventions of theirs is one which is particularly

popular with them.  It is a competition in elegant deportment.  They hire

a hall and bank the spectators' seats in rising tiers along the two

sides, leaving all the middle stretch of the floor free.  A cake is

provided as a prize for the winner in the competition, and a bench of

experts in deportment is appointed to award it.  Sometimes there are as

many as fifty contestants, male and female, and five hundred spectators.

One at a time the contestants enter, clothed regardless of expense in

what each considers the perfection of style and taste, and walk down the

vacant central space and back again with that multitude of critical eyes

on them.  All that the competitor knows of fine airs and graces he throws

into his carriage, all that he knows of seductive expression he throws

into his countenance.  He may use all the helps he can devise: watch-

chain to twirl with his fingers, cane to do graceful things with, snowy

handkerchief to flourish and get artful effects out of, shiny new

stovepipe hat to assist in his courtly bows; and the colored lady may

have a fan to work up her effects with, and smile over and blush behind,

and she may add other helps, according to her judgment.  When the review

by individual detail is over, a grand review of all the contestants in

procession follows, with all the airs and graces and all the bowings and

smirkings on exhibition at once, and this enables the bench of experts to

make the necessary comparisons and arrive at a verdict.  The successful

competitor gets the prize which I have before mentioned, and an abundance

of applause and envy along with it.  The negroes have a name for this

grave deportment-tournament; a name taken from the prize contended for.

They call it a Cakewalk.



This Shelley biography is a literary cake-walk.  The ordinary forms of

speech are absent from it.  All the pages, all the paragraphs, walk by

sedately, elegantly, not to say mincingly, in their Sunday-best, shiny

and sleek, perfumed, and with boutonnieres in their button-holes; it is

rare to find even a chance sentence that has forgotten to dress.  If the

book wishes to tell us that Mary Godwin, child of sixteen, had known

afflictions, the fact saunters forth in this nobby outfit: "Mary was

herself not unlearned in the lore of pain"--meaning by that that she had

not always traveled on asphalt; or, as some authorities would frame it,

that she had "been there herself," a form which, while preferable to the

book's form, is still not to be recommended.  If the book wishes to tell

us that Harriet Shelley hired a wet-nurse, that commonplace fact gets

turned into a dancing-master, who does his professional bow before us in

pumps and knee-breeches, with his fiddle under one arm and his crush-hat

under the other, thus: "The beauty of Harriet's motherly relation to her

babe was marred in Shelley's eyes by the introduction into his house of a

hireling nurse to whom was delegated the mother's tenderest office."



This is perhaps the strangest book that has seen the light since

Frankenstein.  Indeed, it is a Frankenstein itself; a Frankenstein with

the original infirmity supplemented by a new one; a Frankenstein with the

reasoning faculty wanting.  Yet it believes it can reason, and is always

trying.  It is not content to leave a mountain of fact standing in the

clear sunshine, where the simplest reader can perceive its form, its

details, and its relation to the rest of the landscape, but thinks it

must help him examine it and understand it; so its drifting mind settles

upon it with that intent, but always with one and the same result: there

is a change of temperature and the mountain is hid in a fog.  Every time

it sets up a premise and starts to reason from it, there is a surprise in

store for the reader.  It is strangely nearsighted, cross-eyed, and

purblind.  Sometimes when a mastodon walks across the field of its vision

it takes it for a rat; at other times it does not see it at all.



The materials of this biographical fable are facts, rumors, and poetry.

They are connected together and harmonized by the help of suggestion,

conjecture, innuendo, perversion, and semi-suppression.



The fable has a distinct object in view, but this object is not

acknowledged in set words.  Percy Bysshe Shelley has done something which

in the case of other men is called a grave crime; it must be shown that

in his case it is not that, because he does not think as other men do

about these things.



Ought not that to be enough, if the fabulist is serious?  Having proved

that a crime is not a crime, was it worth while to go on and fasten the

responsibility of a crime which was not a crime upon somebody else?  What

is the use of hunting down and holding to bitter account people who are

responsible for other people's innocent acts?



Still, the fabulist thinks it a good idea to do that.  In his view

Shelley's first wife, Harriet, free of all offense as far as we have

historical facts for guidance, must be held unforgivably responsible for

her husband's innocent act in deserting her and taking up with another

woman.



Any one will suspect that this task has its difficulties.  Any one will

divine that nice work is necessary here, cautious work, wily work, and

that there is entertainment to be had in watching the magician do it.

There is indeed entertainment in watching him.  He arranges his facts,

his rumors, and his poems on his table in full view of the house, and

shows you that everything is there--no deception, everything fair and

above board.  And this is apparently true, yet there is a defect, for

some of his best stock is hid in an appendix-basket behind the door, and

you do not come upon it until the exhibition is over and the enchantment

of your mind accomplished--as the magician thinks.



There is an insistent atmosphere of candor and fairness about this book

which is engaging at first, then a little burdensome, then a trifle

fatiguing, then progressively suspicious, annoying, irritating, and

oppressive.  It takes one some little time to find out that phrases which

seem intended to guide the reader aright are there to mislead him; that

phrases which seem intended to throw light are there to throw darkness;

that phrases which seem intended to interpret a fact are there to

misinterpret it; that phrases which seem intended to forestall prejudice

are there to create it; that phrases which seem antidotes are poisons in

disguise.  The naked facts arrayed in the book establish Shelley's guilt

in that one episode which disfigures his otherwise superlatively lofty

and beautiful life; but the historian's careful and methodical

misinterpretation of them transfers the responsibility to the wife's

shoulders as he persuades himself.  The few meagre facts of Harriet

Shelley's life, as furnished by the book, acquit her of offense; but by

calling in the forbidden helps of rumor, gossip, conjecture, insinuation,

and innuendo he destroys her character and rehabilitates Shelley's--as he

believes.  And in truth his unheroic work has not been barren of the

results he aimed at; as witness the assertion made to me that girls in

the colleges of America are taught that Harriet Shelley put a stain upon

her husband's honor, and that that was what stung him into repurifying

himself by deserting her and his child and entering into scandalous

relations with a school-girl acquaintance of his.



If that assertion is true, they probably use a reduction of this work in

those colleges, maybe only a sketch outlined from it.  Such a thing as

that could be harmful and misleading.  They ought to cast it out and put

the whole book in its place.  It would not deceive.  It would not deceive

the janitor.



All of this book is interesting on account of the sorcerer's methods and

the attractiveness of some of his characters and the repulsiveness of the

rest, but no part of it is so much so as are the chapters wherein he

tries to think he thinks he sets forth the causes which led to Shelley's

desertion of his wife in 1814.



Harriet Westbrook was a school-girl sixteen years old.  Shelley was

teeming with advanced thought.  He believed that Christianity was a

degrading and selfish superstition, and he had a deep and sincere desire

to rescue one of his sisters from it.  Harriet was impressed by his

various philosophies and looked upon him as an intellectual wonder--

which indeed he was.  He had an idea that she could give him valuable

help in his scheme regarding his sister; therefore he asked her to

correspond with him.  She was quite willing.  Shelley was not thinking of

love, for he was just getting over a passion for his cousin, Harriet

Grove, and just getting well steeped in one for Miss Hitchener, a school-

teacher.  What might happen to Harriet Westbrook before the letter-

writing was ended did not enter his mind.  Yet an older person could have

made a good guess at it, for in person Shelley was as beautiful as an

angel, he was frank, sweet, winning, unassuming, and so rich in

unselfishness, generosities, and magnanimities that he made his whole

generation seem poor in these great qualities by comparison.  Besides,

he was in distress.  His college had expelled him for writing an

atheistical pamphlet and afflicting the reverend heads of the university

with it, his rich father and grandfather had closed their purses against

him, his friends were cold.  Necessarily, Harriet fell in love with him;

and so deeply, indeed, that there was no way for Shelley to save her from

suicide but to marry her.  He believed himself to blame for this state of

things, so the marriage took place.  He was pretty fairly in love with

Harriet, although he loved Miss Hitchener better.  He wrote and explained

the case to Miss Hitchener after the wedding, and he could not have been

franker or more naive and less stirred up about the circumstance if the

matter in issue had been a commercial transaction involving thirty-five

dollars.



Shelley was nineteen.  He was not a youth, but a man.  He had never had

any youth.  He was an erratic and fantastic child during eighteen years,

then he stepped into manhood, as one steps over a door-sill.  He was

curiously mature at nineteen in his ability to do independent thinking

on the deep questions of life and to arrive at sharply definite decisions

regarding them, and stick to them--stick to them and stand by them at

cost of bread, friendships, esteem, respect, and approbation.



For the sake of his opinions he was willing to sacrifice all these

valuable things, and did sacrifice them; and went on doing it, too, when

he could at any moment have made himself rich and supplied himself with

friends and esteem by compromising with his father, at the moderate

expense of throwing overboard one or two indifferent details of his cargo

of principles.



He and Harriet eloped to Scotland and got married.  They took lodgings in

Edinburgh of a sort answerable to their purse, which was about empty, and

there their life was a happy, one and grew daily more so.  They had only

themselves for company, but they needed no additions to it.  They were as

cozy and contented as birds in a nest.  Harriet sang evenings or read

aloud; also she studied and tried to improve her mind, her husband

instructing her in Latin.  She was very beautiful, she was modest, quiet,

genuine, and, according to her husband's testimony, she had no fine lady

airs or aspirations about her.  In Matthew Arnold's judgment, she was

"a pleasing figure."



The pair remained five weeks in Edinburgh, and then took lodgings in

York, where Shelley's college mate, Hogg, lived.  Shelley presently ran

down to London, and Hogg took this opportunity to make love to the young

wife.  She repulsed him, and reported the fact to her husband when he got

back.  It seems a pity that Shelley did not copy this creditable conduct

of hers some time or other when under temptation, so that we might have

seen the author of his biography hang the miracle in the skies and squirt

rainbows at it.



At the end of the first year of marriage--the most trying year for any

young couple, for then the mutual failings are coming one by one to

light, and the necessary adjustments are being made in pain and

tribulation--Shelley was able to recognize that his marriage venture had

been a safe one.  As we have seen, his love for his wife had begun in a

rather shallow way and with not much force, but now it was become deep

and strong, which entitles his wife to a broad credit mark, one may

admit.  He addresses a long and loving poem to her, in which both passion

and worship appear:



Exhibit A



                                        "O thou

          Whose dear love gleamed upon the gloomy path

          Which this lone spirit travelled,

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

          . . .  wilt thou not turn

          Those spirit-beaming eyes and look on me.

          Until I be assured that Earth is Heaven

          And Heaven is Earth?

           . . . . . . . .

          Harriet! let death all mortal ties dissolve,

          But ours shall not be mortal."





Shelley also wrote a sonnet to her in August of this same year in

celebration of her birthday:



Exhibit B



         "Ever as now with hove and Virtue's glow

          May thy unwithering soul not cease to burn,

          Still may thine heart with those pure thoughts o'erflow

          Which force from mine such quick and warm return."





Was the girl of seventeen glad and proud and happy?  We may conjecture

that she was.



That was the year 1812.  Another year passed still happily, still

successfully--a child was born in June, 1813, and in September, three

months later, Shelley addresses a poem to this child, Ianthe, in which he

points out just when the little creature is most particularly dear to

him:



Exhibit C



          "Dearest when most thy tender traits express

          The image of thy mother's loveliness."





Up to this point the fabulist counsel for Shelley and prosecutor of his

young wife has had easy sailing, but now his trouble begins, for Shelley

is getting ready to make some unpleasant history for himself, and it will

be necessary to put the blame of it on the wife.



Shelley had made the acquaintance of a charming gray-haired, young-

hearted Mrs. Boinville, whose face "retained a certain youthful beauty";

she lived at Bracknell, and had a young daughter named Cornelia Turner,

who was equipped with many fascinations.  Apparently these people were

sufficiently sentimental.  Hogg says of Mrs. Boinville:



          "The greater part of her associates were odious.  I generally

          found there two or three sentimental young butchers, an

          eminently philosophical tinker, and several very

          unsophisticated medical practitioners or medical students, all

          of low origin and vulgar and offensive manners.  They sighed,

          turned up their eyes, retailed philosophy, such as it was,"

          etc.



Shelley moved to Bracknell, July 27th (this is still 1813) purposely to

be near this unwholesome prairie-dogs' nest.  The fabulist says: "It was

the entrance into a world more amiable and exquisite than he had yet

known."



"In this acquaintance the attraction was mutual"--and presently it grew

to be very mutual indeed, between Shelley and Cornelia Turner, when they

got to studying the Italian poets together.  Shelley, "responding like a

tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or of sentiment," had his

chance here.  It took only four days for Cornelia's attractions to begin

to dim Harriet's.  Shelley arrived on the 27th of July; on the 31st he

wrote a sonnet to Harriet in which "one detects already the little rift

in the lover's lute which had seemed to be healed or never to have gaped

at all when the later and happier sonnet to Ianthe was written"--in

September, we remember:



Exhibit D



          "EVENING.  TO HARRIET



          "O thou bright Sun!  Beneath the dark blue line

          Of western distance that sublime descendest,

          And, gleaming lovelier as thy beams decline,

          Thy million hues to every vapor lendest,

          And over cobweb, lawn, and grove, and stream

          Sheddest the liquid magic of thy light,

          Till calm Earth, with the parting splendor bright,

          Shows like the vision of a beauteous dream;

          What gazer now with astronomic eye

          Could coldly count the spots within thy sphere?

          Such were thy lover, Harriet, could he fly

          The thoughts of all that makes his passion dear,

          And turning senseless from thy warm caress

          Pick flaws in our close-woven happiness."





I cannot find the "rift"; still it may be there.  What the poem seems to

say is, that a person would be coldly ungrateful who could consent to

count and consider little spots and flaws in such a warm, great,

satisfying sun as Harriet is.  It is a "little rift which had seemed to

be healed, or never to have gaped at all."  That is, "one detects" a

little rift which perhaps had never existed.  How does one do that?

How does one see the invisible?  It is the fabulist's secret; he knows

how to detect what does not exist, he knows how to see what is not

seeable; it is his gift, and he works it many a time to poor dead Harriet

Shelley's deep damage.



"As yet, however, if there was a speck upon Shelley's happiness it was no

more than a speck"--meaning the one which one detects where "it may never

have gaped at all"--"nor had Harriet cause for discontent."



Shelley's Latin instructions to his wife had ceased.  "From a teacher he

had now become a pupil."  Mrs. Boinville and her young married daughter

Cornelia were teaching him Italian poetry; a fact which warns one to

receive with some caution that other statement that Harriet had no

"cause for discontent."



Shelley had stopped instructing Harriet in Latin, as before mentioned.

The biographer thinks that the busy life in London some time back, and

the intrusion of the baby, account for this.  These were hindrances, but

were there no others?  He is always overlooking a detail here and there

that might be valuable in helping us understand a situation.  For

instance, when a man has been hard at work at the Italian poets with a

pretty woman, hour after hour, and responding like a tremulous instrument

to every breath of passion or of sentiment in the meantime, that man is

dog-tired when he gets home, and he can't teach his wife Latin; it would

be unreasonable to expect it.



Up to this time we have submitted to having Mrs. Boinville pushed upon

us as ostensibly concerned in these Italian lessons, but the biographer

drops her now, of his own accord.  Cornelia "perhaps" is sole teacher.

Hogg says she was a prey to a kind of sweet melancholy, arising from

causes purely imaginary; she required consolation, and found it in

Petrarch.  He also says, "Bysshe entered at once fully into her views and

caught the soft infection, breathing the tenderest and sweetest

melancholy, as every true poet ought."



Then the author of the book interlards a most stately and fine compliment

to Cornelia, furnished by a man of approved judgment who knew her well

"in later years."  It is a very good compliment indeed, and she no doubt

deserved it in her "later years," when she had for generations ceased to

be sentimental and lackadaisical, and was no longer engaged in enchanting

young husbands and sowing sorrow for young wives.  But why is that

compliment to that old gentlewoman intruded there?  Is it to make the

reader believe she was well-chosen and safe society for a young,

sentimental husband?  The biographer's device was not well planned.  That

old person was not present--it was her other self that was there, her

young, sentimental, melancholy, warm-blooded self, in those early sweet

times before antiquity had cooled her off and mossed her back.



"In choosing for friends such women as Mrs. Newton, Mrs. Boinville, and

Cornelia Turner, Shelley gave good proof of his insight and

discrimination."  That is the fabulist's opinion--Harriet Shelley's is

not reported.



Early in August, Shelley was in London trying to raise money.  In

September he wrote the poem to the baby, already quoted from.  In

the first week of October Shelley and family went to Warwick, then

to Edinburgh, arriving there about the middle of the month.



"Harriet was happy."  Why?  The author furnishes a reason, but hides from

us whether it is history or conjecture; it is because "the babe had borne

the journey well."  It has all the aspect of one of his artful devices--

flung in in his favorite casual way--the way he has when he wants to draw

one's attention away from an obvious thing and amuse it with some trifle

that is less obvious but more useful--in a history like this.  The

obvious thing is, that Harriet was happy because there was much territory

between her husband and Cornelia Turner now; and because the perilous

Italian lessons were taking a rest; and because, if there chanced to be

any respondings like a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or

of sentiment in stock in these days, she might hope to get a share of

them herself; and because, with her husband liberated, now, from the

fetid fascinations of that sentimental retreat so pitilessly described by

Hogg, who also dubbed it "Shelley's paradise" later, she might hope to

persuade him to stay away from it permanently; and because she might also

hope that his brain would cool, now, and his heart become healthy, and

both brain and heart consider the situation and resolve that it would be

a right and manly thing to stand by this girl-wife and her child and see

that they were honorably dealt with, and cherished and protected and

loved by the man that had promised these things, and so be made happy and

kept so.  And because, also--may we conjecture this?--we may hope for

the privilege of taking up our cozy Latin lessons again, that used to be

so pleasant, and brought us so near together--so near, indeed, that often

our heads touched, just as heads do over Italian lessons; and our hands

met in casual and unintentional, but still most delicious and thrilling

little contacts and momentary clasps, just as they inevitably do over

Italian lessons.  Suppose one should say to any young wife: "I find that

your husband is poring over the Italian poets and being instructed in the

beautiful Italian language by the lovely Cornelia Robinson"--would that

cozy picture fail to rise before her mind? would its possibilities fail

to suggest themselves to her? would there be a pang in her heart and a

blush on her face? or, on the contrary, would the remark give her

pleasure, make her joyous and gay?  Why, one needs only to make the

experiment--the result will not be uncertain.



However, we learn--by authority of deeply reasoned and searching

conjecture--that the baby bore the journey well, and that that was why

the young wife was happy.  That accounts for two per cent. of the

happiness, but it was not right to imply that it accounted for the other

ninety-eight also.



Peacock, a scholar, poet, and friend of the Shelleys, was of their party

when they went away.  He used to laugh at the Boinville menagerie, and

"was not a favorite."  One of the Boinville group, writing to Hogg, said,

"The Shelleys have made an addition to their party in the person of a

cold scholar, who, I think, has neither taste nor feeling.  This, Shelley

will perceive sooner or later, for his warm nature craves sympathy."

True, and Shelley will fight his way back there to get it--there will be

no way to head him off.



Towards the end of November it was necessary for Shelley to pay a

business visit to London, and he conceived the project of leaving Harriet

and the baby in Edinburgh with Harriet's sister, Eliza Westbrook,

a sensible, practical maiden lady about thirty years old, who had spent

a great part of her time with the family since the marriage.  She was

an estimable woman, and Shelley had had reason to like her, and did like

her; but along about this time his feeling towards her changed.  Part of

Shelley's plan, as he wrote Hogg, was to spend his London evenings with

the Newtons--members of the Boinville Hysterical Society.  But, alas,

when he arrived early in December, that pleasant game was partially

blocked, for Eliza and the family arrived with him.  We are left

destitute of conjectures at this point by the biographer, and it is my

duty to supply one.  I chance the conjecture that it was Eliza who

interfered with that game.  I think she tried to do what she could

towards modifying the Boinville connection, in the interest of her young

sister's peace and honor.



If it was she who blocked that game, she was not strong enough to block

the next one.  Before the month and year were out--no date given, let us

call it Christmas--Shelley and family were nested in a furnished house in

Windsor, "at no great distance from the Boinvilles"--these decoys still

residing at Bracknell.



What we need, now, is a misleading conjecture.  We get it with

characteristic promptness and depravity:



          "But Prince Athanase found not the aged Zonoras, the friend of

          his boyhood, in any wanderings to Windsor.  Dr. Lind had died

          a year since, and with his death Windsor must have lost, for

          Shelley, its chief attraction."



Still, not to mention Shelley's wife, there was Bracknell, at any rate.

While Bracknell remains, all solace is not lost.  Shelley is represented

by this biographer as doing a great many careless things, but to my mind

this hiring a furnished house for three months in order to be with a man

who has been dead a year, is the carelessest of them all.  One feels for

him--that is but natural, and does us honor besides--yet one is vexed,

for all that.  He could have written and asked about the aged Zonoras

before taking the house.  He may not have had the address, but that is

nothing--any postman would know the aged Zonoras; a dead postman would

remember a name like that.



And yet, why throw a rag like this to us ravening wolves?  Is it

seriously supposable that we will stop to chew it and let our prey

escape?  No, we are getting to expect this kind of device, and to give it

merely a sniff for certainty's sake and then walk around it and leave it

lying.  Shelley was not after the aged Zonoras; he was pointed for

Cornelia and the Italian lessons, for his warm nature was craving

sympathy.





II



The year 1813 is just ended now, and we step into 1814.



To recapitulate, how much of Cornelia's society has Shelley had, thus

far?  Portions of August and September, and four days of July.  That is

to say, he has had opportunity to enjoy it, more or less, during that

brief period.  Did he want some more of it?  We must fall back upon

history, and then go to conjecturing.



          "In the early part of the year 1814, Shelley was a frequent

          visitor at Bracknell."



"Frequent" is a cautious word, in this author's mouth; the very

cautiousness of it, the vagueness of it, provokes suspicion; it makes one

suspect that this frequency was more frequent than the mere common

everyday kinds of frequency which one is in the habit of averaging up

with the unassuming term "frequent."  I think so because they fixed up a

bedroom for him in the Boinville house.  One doesn't need a bedroom if

one is only going to run over now and then in a disconnected way to

respond like a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or of

sentiment and rub up one's Italian poetry a little.



The young wife was not invited, perhaps.  If she was, she most certainly

did not come, or she would have straightened the room up; the most

ignorant of us knows that a wife would not endure a room in the condition

in which Hogg found this one when he occupied it one night.  Shelley was

away--why, nobody can divine.  Clothes were scattered about, there were

books on every side: "Wherever a book could be laid was an open book

turned down on its face to keep its place."  It seems plain that the wife

was not invited.  No, not that; I think she was invited, but said to

herself that she could not bear to go there and see another young woman

touching heads with her husband over an Italian book and making thrilling

hand-contacts with him accidentally.



As remarked, he was a frequent visitor there, "where he found an easeful

resting-place in the house of Mrs. Boinville--the white-haired Maimuna--

and of her daughter, Mrs. Turner."  The aged Zonoras was deceased, but

the white-haired Maimuna was still on deck, as we see.  "Three charming

ladies entertained the mocker (Hogg) with cups of tea, late hours,

Wieland's Agathon, sighs and smiles, and the celestial manna of refined

sentiment."



"Such," says Hogg, "were the delights of Shelley's paradise in

Bracknell."



The white-haired Maimuna presently writes to Hogg:



          "I will not have you despise home-spun pleasures.  Shelley is

          making a trial of them with us--"



A trial of them.  It may be called that.  It was March 11, and he had

been in the house a month.  She continues:



          Shelley "likes then so well that he is resolved to leave off

          rambling--"



But he has already left it off.  He has been there a month.



          "And begin a course of them himself."



But he has already begun it.  He has been at it a month.  He likes it so

well that he has forgotten all about his wife, as a letter of his

reveals.



          "Seriously, I think his mind and body want rest."



Yet he has been resting both for a month, with Italian, and tea, and

manna of sentiment, and late hours, and every restful thing a young

husband could need for the refreshment of weary limbs and a sore

conscience, and a nagging sense of shabbiness and treachery.



          "His journeys after what he has never found have racked his

          purse and his tranquillity.  He is resolved to take a little

          care of the former, in pity to the latter, which I applaud, and

          shall second with all, my might."



But she does not say whether the young wife, a stranger and lonely

yonder, wants another woman and her daughter Cornelia to be lavishing so

much inflamed interest on her husband or not.  That young wife is always

silent--we are never allowed to hear from her.  She must have opinions

about such things, she cannot be indifferent, she must be approving or

disapproving, surely she would speak if she were allowed--even to-day and

from her grave she would, if she could, I think--but we get only the

other side, they keep her silent always.



          "He has deeply interested us.  In the course of your intimacy

          he must have made you feel what we now feel for him.  He is

          seeking a house close to us--"



Ah! he is not close enough yet, it seems--



          "and if he succeeds we shall have an additional motive to

          induce you to come among us in the summer."



The reader would puzzle a long time and not guess the biographer's

comment upon the above letter.  It is this:



          "These sound like words of s considerate and judicious friend."



That is what he thinks.  That is, it is what he thinks he thinks.  No,

that is not quite it: it is what he thinks he can stupefy a particularly

and unspeakably dull reader into thinking it is what he thinks.  He makes

that comment with the knowledge that Shelley is in love with this woman's

daughter, and that it is because of the fascinations of these two that

Shelley has deserted his wife--for this month, considering all the

circumstances, and his new passion, and his employment of the time,

amounted to desertion; that is its rightful name.  We cannot know how the

wife regarded it and felt about it; but if she could have read the letter

which Shelley was writing to Hogg four or five days later, we could guess

her thought and how she felt.  Hear him:

          . . . . . . .

          "I have been staying with Mrs. Boinville for the last month;

          I have escaped, in the society of all that philosophy and

          friendship combine, from the dismaying solitude of myself."



It is fair to conjecture that he was feeling ashamed.



          "They have revived in my heart the expiring flame of life.

          I have felt myself translated to a paradise which has nothing

          of mortality but its transitoriness; my heart sickens at the

          view of that necessity which will quickly divide me from the

          delightful tranquillity of this happy home--for it has become

          my home.

          . . . . . . .

          "Eliza is still with us--not here!--but will be with me when

          the infinite malice of destiny forces me to depart."



Eliza is she who blocked that game--the game in London--the one where we

were purposing to dine every night with one of the "three charming

ladies" who fed tea and manna and late hours to Hogg at Bracknell.



Shelley could send Eliza away, of course; could have cleared her out long

ago if so minded, just as he had previously done with a predecessor of

hers whom he had first worshipped and then turned against; but perhaps

she was useful there as a thin excuse for staying away himself.



          "I am now but little inclined to contest this point.

          I certainly hate her with all my heart and soul .  .  .  .



          "It is a sight which awakens an inexpressible sensation of

          disgust and horror, to see her caress my poor little Ianthe,

          in whom I may hereafter find the consolation of sympathy.

          I sometimes feel faint with the fatigue of checking the

          overflowings of my unbounded abhorrence for this miserable

          wretch.  But she is no more than a blind and loathsome worm,

          that cannot see to sting.



          "I have begun to learn Italian again .  .  .  .  Cornelia

          assists me in this language.  Did I not once tell you that I

          thought her cold and reserved?  She is the reverse of this, as

          she is the reverse of everything bad.  She inherits all the

          divinity of her mother .  .  .  .  I have sometimes forgotten

          that I am not an inmate of this delightful home--that a time

          will come which will cast me again into the boundless ocean of

          abhorred society.



          "I have written nothing but one stanza, which has no meaning,

          and that I have only written in thought:



                    "Thy dewy looks sink in my breast;

                    Thy gentle words stir poison there;

                    Thou hast disturbed the only rest

                    That was the portion of despair.

                    Subdued to duty's hard control,

                    I could have borne my wayward lot:

                    The chains that bind this rained soul

                    Had cankered then, but crushed it not.



          "This is the vision of a delirious and distempered dream, which

          passes away at the cold clear light of morning.  Its surpassing

          excellence and exquisite perfections have no more reality than

          the color of an autumnal sunset."



Then it did not refer to his wife.  That is plain; otherwise he would

have said so.  It is well that he explained that it has no meaning, for

if he had not done that, the previous soft references to Cornelia and the

way he has come to feel about her now would make us think she was the

person who had inspired it while teaching him how to read the warm and

ruddy Italian poets during a month.



The biography observes that portions of this letter "read like the tired

moaning of a wounded creature."  Guesses at the nature of the wound are

permissible; we will hazard one.



Read by the light of Shelley's previous history, his letter seems to be

the cry of a tortured conscience.  Until this time it was a conscience

that had never felt a pang or known a smirch.  It was the conscience of

one who, until this time, had never done a dishonorable thing, or an

ungenerous, or cruel, or treacherous thing, but was now doing all of

these, and was keenly aware of it.  Up to this time Shelley had been

master of his nature, and it was a nature which was as beautiful and as

nearly perfect as any merely human nature may be.  But he was drunk now,

with a debasing passion, and was not himself.  There is nothing in his

previous history that is in character with the Shelley of this letter.

He had done boyish things, foolish things, even crazy things, but never

a thing to be ashamed of.  He had done things which one might laugh at,

but the privilege of laughing was limited always to the thing itself;

you could not laugh at the motive back of it--that was high, that was

noble.  His most fantastic and quixotic acts had a purpose back of them

which made them fine, often great, and made the rising laugh seem

profanation and quenched it; quenched it, and changed the impulse to

homage.



Up to this time he had been loyalty itself, where his obligations lay--

treachery was new to him; he had never done an ignoble thing--baseness

was new to him; he had never done an unkind thing that also was new to

him.



This was the author of that letter, this was the man who had deserted his

young wife and was lamenting, because he must leave another woman's house

which had become a "home" to him, and go away.  Is he lamenting mainly

because he must go back to his wife and child?  No, the lament is mainly

for what he is to leave behind him.  The physical comforts of the house?

No, in his life he had never attached importance to such things.  Then

the thing which he grieves to leave is narrowed down to a person--to the

person whose "dewy looks" had sunk into his breast, and whose seducing

words had "stirred poison there."



He was ashamed of himself, his conscience was upbraiding him.  He was the

slave of a degrading love; he was drunk with his passion, the real

Shelley was in temporary eclipse.  This is the verdict which his previous

history must certainly deliver upon this episode, I think.



One must be allowed to assist himself with conjectures like these when

trying to find his way through a literary swamp which has so many

misleading finger-boards up as this book is furnished with.



We have now arrived at a part of the swamp where the difficulties and

perplexities are going to be greater than any we have yet met with--

where, indeed, the finger-boards are multitudinous, and the most of them

pointing diligently in the wrong direction.  We are to be told by the

biography why Shelley deserted his wife and child and took up with

Cornelia Turner and Italian.  It was not on account of Cornelia's sighs

and sentimentalities and tea and manna and late hours and soft and sweet

and industrious enticements; no, it was because "his happiness in his

home had been wounded and bruised almost to death."



It had been wounded and bruised almost to death in this way:



1st.  Harriet persuaded him to set up a carriage.



2d.  After the intrusion of the baby, Harriet stopped reading aloud and

studying.



3d.  Harriet's walks with Hogg "commonly conducted us to some fashionable

bonnet-shop."



4th.  Harriet hired a wet-nurse.



5th.  When an operation was being performed upon the baby, "Harriet stood

by, narrowly observing all that was done, but, to the astonishment of the

operator, betraying not the smallest sign of emotion."



6th.  Eliza Westbrook, sister-in-law, was still of the household.



The evidence against Harriet Shelley is all in; there is no more.  Upon

these six counts she stands indicted of the crime of driving her husband

into that sty at Bracknell; and this crime, by these helps, the

biographical prosecuting attorney has set himself the task of proving

upon her.



Does the biographer call himself the attorney for the prosecution?

No, only to himself, privately; publicly he is the passionless,

disinterested, impartial judge on the bench.  He holds up his judicial

scales before the world, that all may see; and it all tries to look so

fair that a blind person would sometimes fail to see him slip the false

weights in.



Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to

death, first, because Harriet had persuaded him to set up a carriage.

I cannot discover that any evidence is offered that she asked him to set

up a carriage.  Still, if she did, was it a heavy offence?  Was it

unique?  Other young wives had committed it before, others have committed

it since.  Shelley had dearly loved her in those London days; possibly he

set up the carriage gladly to please her; affectionate young husbands do

such things.  When Shelley ran away with another girl, by-and-by, this

girl persuaded him to pour the price of many carriages and many horses

down the bottomless well of her father's debts, but this impartial judge

finds no fault with that.  Once she appeals to Shelley to raise money--

necessarily by borrowing, there was no other way--to pay her father's

debts with at a time when Shelley was in danger of being arrested and

imprisoned for his own debts; yet the good judge finds no fault with her

even for this.



First and last, Shelley emptied into that rapacious mendicant's lap a sum

which cost him--for he borrowed it at ruinous rates--from eighty to one

hundred thousand dollars.  But it was Mary Godwin's papa, the

supplications were often sent through Mary, the good judge is Mary's

strenuous friend, so Mary gets no censures.  On the Continent Mary rode

in her private carriage, built, as Shelley boasts, "by one of the best

makers in Bond Street, "yet the good judge makes not even a passing

comment on this iniquity.  Let us throw out Count No. 1 against Harriet

Shelley as being far-fetched, and frivolous.



Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to

death, secondly, because Harriet's studies "had dwindled away to nothing,

Bysshe had ceased to express any interest in them."  At what time was

this?  It was when Harriet "had fully recovered from the fatigue of her

first effort of maternity,.  .  .  and was now in full force, vigor, and

effect."  Very well, the baby was born two days before the close of June.

It took the mother a month to get back her full force, vigor, and effect;

this brings us to July 27th and the deadly Cornelia.  If a wife of

eighteen is studying with her husband and he gets smitten with another

woman, isn't he likely to lose interest in his wife's studies for that

reason, and is not his wife's interest in her studies likely to languish

for the same reason?  Would not the mere sight of those books of hers

sharpen the pain that is in her heart?  This sudden breaking down of a

mutual intellectual interest of two years' standing is coincident with

Shelley's re-encounter with Cornelia; and we are allowed to gather from

that time forth for nearly two months he did all his studying in that

person's society.  We feel at liberty to rule out Count No. 2 from the

indictment against Harriet.



Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to

death, thirdly, because Harriet's walks with Hogg commonly led to some

fashionable bonnet-shop.  I offer no palliation; I only ask why the

dispassionate, impartial judge did not offer one himself--merely, I mean,

to offset his leniency in a similar case or two where the girl who ran

away with Harriet's husband was the shopper.  There are several occasions

where she interested herself with shopping--among them being walks which

ended at the bonnet-shop--yet in none of these cases does she get a word

of blame from the good judge, while in one of them he covers the deed

with a justifying remark, she doing the shopping that time to find

easement for her mind, her child having died.



Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to

death, fourthly, by the introduction there of a wet-nurse.  The wet-nurse

was introduced at the time of the Edinburgh sojourn, immediately after

Shelley had been enjoying the two months of study with Cornelia which

broke up his wife's studies and destroyed his personal interest in them.

Why, by this time, nothing that Shelley's wife could do would have been

satisfactory to him, for he was in love with another woman, and was never

going to be contented again until he got back to her.  If he had been

still in love with his wife it is not easily conceivable that he would

care much who nursed the baby, provided the baby was well nursed.

Harriet's jealousy was assuredly voicing itself now, Shelley's conscience

was assuredly nagging him, pestering him, persecuting him.  Shelley

needed excuses for his altered attitude towards his wife; Providence

pitied him and sent the wet-nurse.  If Providence had sent him a cotton

doughnut it would have answered just as well; all he wanted was something

to find fault with.



Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to

death, fifthly, because Harriet narrowly watched a surgical operation

which was being performed upon her child, and, "to the astonishment of

the operator," who was watching Harriet instead of attending to his

operation, she betrayed "not the smallest sign of emotion."  The author

of this biography was not ashamed to set down that exultant slander.

He was apparently not aware that it was a small business to bring into

his court a witness whose name he does not know, and whose character and

veracity there is none to vouch for, and allow him to strike this blow at

the mother-heart of this friendless girl.  The biographer says, "We may

not infer from this that Harriet did not feel"--why put it in, then?--

"but we learn that those about her could believe her to be hard and

insensible."  Who were those who were about her?  Her husband?  He hated

her now, because he was in love elsewhere.  Her sister?  Of course that

is not charged.  Peacock?  Peacock does not testify.  The wet-nurse?  She

does not testify.  If any others were there we have no mention of them.

"Those about her" are reduced to one person--her husband.  Who reports

the circumstance?  It is Hogg.  Perhaps he was there--we do not know.

But if he was, he still got his information at second-hand, as it was the

operator who noticed Harriet's lack of emotion, not himself.  Hogg is not

given to saying kind things when Harriet is his subject.  He may have

said them the time that he tried to tempt her to soil her honor, but

after that he mentions her usually with a sneer.  "Among those who were

about her" was one witness well equipped to silence all tongues, abolish

all doubts, set our minds at rest; one witness, not called, and not

callable, whose evidence, if we could but get it, would outweigh the

oaths of whole battalions of hostile Hoggs and nameless surgeons--the

baby.  I wish we had the baby's testimony; and yet if we had it it would

not do us any good--a furtive conjecture, a sly insinuation, a pious

"if" or two, would be smuggled in, here and there, with a solemn air of

judicial investigation, and its positiveness would wilt into dubiety.



The biographer says of Harriet, "If words of tender affection and

motherly pride proved the reality of love, then undoubtedly she loved her

firstborn child."  That is, if mere empty words can prove it, it stands

proved--and in this way, without committing himself, he gives the reader

a chance to infer that there isn't any extant evidence but words, and

that he doesn't take much stock in them.  How seldom he shows his hand!

He is always lurking behind a non-committal "if" or something of that

kind; always gliding and dodging around, distributing colorless poison

here and there and everywhere, but always leaving himself in a position

to say that his language will be found innocuous if taken to pieces and

examined.  He clearly exhibits a steady and never-relaxing purpose to

make Harriet the scapegoat for her husband's first great sin--but it is

in the general view that this is revealed, not in the details.  His

insidious literature is like blue water; you know what it is that makes

it blue, but you cannot produce and verify any detail of the cloud of

microscopic dust in it that does it.  Your adversary can dip up a

glassful and show you that it is pure white and you cannot deny it; and

he can dip the lake dry, glass by glass, and show that every glassful is

white, and prove it to any one's eye--and yet that lake was blue and you

can swear it.  This book is blue--with slander in solution.



Let the reader examine, for example, the paragraph of comment which

immediately follows the letter containing Shelley's self-exposure which

we have been considering.  This is it.  One should inspect the individual

sentences as they go by, then pass them in procession and review the

cake-walk as a whole:



          "Shelley's happiness in his home, as is evident from this

          pathetic letter, had been fatally stricken; it is evident,

          also, that he knew where duty lay; he felt that his part was to

          take up his burden, silently and sorrowfully, and to bear it

          henceforth with the quietness of despair.  But we can perceive

          that he scarcely possessed the strength and fortitude needful

          for success in such an attempt.  And clearly Shelley himself

          was aware how perilous it was to accept that respite of

          blissful ease which he enjoyed in the Boinville household; for

          gentle voices and dewy looks and words of sympathy could not

          fail to remind him of an ideal of tranquillity or of joy which

          could never be his, and which he must henceforth sternly

          exclude from his imagination."



That paragraph commits the author in no way.  Taken sentence by sentence

it asserts nothing against anybody or in favor of anybody, pleads for

nobody, accuses nobody.  Taken detail by detail, it is as innocent as

moonshine.  And yet, taken as a whole, it is a design against the reader;

its intent is to remove the feeling which the letter must leave with him

if let alone, and put a different one in its place--to remove a feeling

justified by the letter and substitute one not justified by it.  The

letter itself gives you no uncertain picture--no lecturer is needed to

stand by with a stick and point out its details and let on to explain

what they mean.  The picture is the very clear and remorsefully faithful

picture of a fallen and fettered angel who is ashamed of himself; an

angel who beats his soiled wings and cries, who complains to the woman

who enticed him that he could have borne his wayward lot, he could have

stood by his duty if it had not been for her beguilements; an angel who

rails at the "boundless ocean of abhorred society," and rages at his poor

judicious sister-in-law.  If there is any dignity about this spectacle it

will escape most people.



Yet when the paragraph of comment is taken as a whole, the picture is

full of dignity and pathos; we have before us a blameless and noble

spirit stricken to the earth by malign powers, but not conquered;

tempted, but grandly putting the temptation away; enmeshed by subtle

coils, but sternly resolved to rend them and march forth victorious, at

any peril of life or limb.  Curtain--slow music.



Was it the purpose of the paragraph to take the bad taste of Shelley's

letter out of the reader's mouth?  If that was not it, good ink was

wasted; without that, it has no relevancy--the multiplication table would

have padded the space as rationally.



We have inspected the six reasons which we are asked to believe drove a

man of conspicuous patience, honor, justice, fairness, kindliness, and

iron firmness, resolution, and steadfastness, from the wife whom he loved

and who loved him, to a refuge in the mephitic paradise of Bracknell.

These are six infinitely little reasons; but there were six colossal

ones, and these the counsel for the destruction of Harriet Shelley

persists in not considering very important.



Moreover, the colossal six preceded the little six and had done the

mischief before they were born.  Let us double-column the twelve; then we

shall see at a glance that each little reason is in turn answered by a

retorting reason of a size to overshadow it and make it insignificant:



1.  Harriet sets up carriage.      1.  CORNELIA TURNER.

2.  Harriet stops studying.        2.  CORNELIA TURNER.

3.  Harriet goes to bonnet-shop.   3.  CORNELIA TURNER.

4.  Harriet takes a wet-nurse.     4.  CORNELIA TURNER.

5.  Harriet has too much nerve.    5.  CORNELIA TURNER.

6.  Detested sister-in-law         6.  CORNELIA TURNER.



As soon as we comprehend that Cornelia Turner and the Italian lessons

happened before the little six had been discovered to be grievances,

we understand why Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and

bruised almost to death, and no one can persuade us into laying it on

Harriet.  Shelley and Cornelia are the responsible persons, and we cannot

in honor and decency allow the cruelties which they practised upon the

unoffending wife to be pushed aside in order to give us a chance to waste

time and tears over six sentimental justifications of an offence which

the six can't justify, nor even respectably assist in justifying.



Six?  There were seven; but in charity to the biographer the seventh

ought not to be exposed.  Still, he hung it out himself, and not only

hung it out, but thought it was a good point in Shelley's favor.  For two

years Shelley found sympathy and intellectual food and all that at home;

there was enough for spiritual and mental support, but not enough for

luxury; and so, at the end of the contented two years, this latter detail

justifies him in going bag and baggage over to Cornelia Turner and

supplying the rest of his need in the way of surplus sympathy and

intellectual pie unlawfully.  By the same reasoning a man in merely

comfortable circumstances may rob a bank without sin.





III



It is 1814, it is the 16th of March, Shelley has, written his letter, he

has been in the Boinville paradise a month, his deserted wife is in her

husbandless home.  Mischief had been wrought.  It is the biographer who

concedes this.  We greatly need some light on Harriet's side of the case

now; we need to know how she enjoyed the month, but there is no way to

inform ourselves; there seems to be a strange absence of documents and

letters and diaries on that side.  Shelley kept a diary, the approaching

Mary Godwin kept a diary, her father kept one, her half-sister by

marriage, adoption, and the dispensation of God kept one, and the entire

tribe and all its friends wrote and received letters, and the letters

were kept and are producible when this biography needs them; but there

are only three or four scraps of Harriet's writing, and no diary.

Harriet wrote plenty of letters to her husband--nobody knows where they

are, I suppose; she wrote plenty of letters to other people--apparently

they have disappeared, too.  Peacock says she wrote good letters, but

apparently interested people had sagacity enough to mislay them in time.

After all her industry she went down into her grave and lies silent

there--silent, when she has so much need to speak.  We can only wonder at

this mystery, not account for it.



No, there is no way of finding out what Harriet's state of feeling was

during the month that Shelley was disporting himself in the Bracknell

paradise.  We have to fall back upon conjecture, as our fabulist does

when he has nothing more substantial to work with.  Then we easily

conjecture that as the days dragged by Harriet's heart grew heavier and

heavier under its two burdens--shame and resentment: the shame of being

pointed at and gossiped about as a deserted wife, and resentment against

the woman who had beguiled her husband from her and now kept him in a

disreputable captivity.  Deserted wives--deserted whether for cause or

without cause--find small charity among the virtuous and the discreet.

We conjecture that one after another the neighbors ceased to call; that

one after another they got to being "engaged" when Harriet called; that

finally they one after the other cut her dead on the street; that after

that she stayed in the house daytimes, and brooded over her sorrows, and

nighttimes did the same, there being nothing else to do with the heavy

hours and the silence and solitude and the dreary intervals which sleep

should have charitably bridged, but didn't.



Yes, mischief had been wrought.  The biographer arrives at this

conclusion, and it is a most just one.  Then, just as you begin to half

hope he is going to discover the cause of it and launch hot bolts of

wrath at the guilty manufacturers of it, you have to turn away

disappointed.  You are disappointed, and you sigh.  This is what he says

--the italics [''] are mine:



          "However the mischief may have been wrought--'and at this day

          no one can wish to heap blame an any buried head'--"



So it is poor Harriet, after all.  Stern justice must take its course--

justice tempered with delicacy, justice tempered with compassion, justice

that pities a forlorn dead girl and refuses to strike her.  Except in the

back.  Will not be ignoble and say the harsh thing, but only insinuate

it.  Stern justice knows about the carriage and the wet-nurse and the

bonnet-shop and the other dark things that caused this sad mischief, and

may not, must not blink them; so it delivers judgment where judgment

belongs, but softens the blow by not seeming to deliver judgment at all.

To resume--the italics are mine:



          "However the mischief may have been wrought--and at this day no

          one can wish to heap blame on any buried head--'it is certain

          that some cause or causes of deep division between Shelley and

          his wife were in operation during the early part of the year

          1814'."



This shows penetration.  No deduction could be more accurate than this.

There were indeed some causes of deep division.  But next comes another

disappointing sentence:



          "To guess at the precise nature of these cafes, in the absence

          of definite statement, were useless."



Why, he has already been guessing at them for several pages, and we have

been trying to outguess him, and now all of a sudden he is tired of it

and won't play any more.  It is not quite fair to us.  However, he will

get over this by-and-by, when Shelley commits his next indiscretion and

has to be guessed out of it at Harriet's expense.



"We may rest content with Shelley's own words"--in a Chancery paper drawn

up by him three years later.  They were these: "Delicacy forbids me to

say more than that we were disunited by incurable dissensions."



As for me, I do not quite see why we should rest content with anything of

the sort.  It is not a very definite statement.  It does not necessarily

mean anything more than that he did not wish to go into the tedious

details of those family quarrels.  Delicacy could quite properly excuse

him from saying, "I was in love with Cornelia all that time; my wife kept

crying and worrying about it and upbraiding me and begging me to cut

myself free from a connection which was wronging her and disgracing us

both; and I being stung by these reproaches retorted with fierce and

bitter speeches--for it is my nature to do that when I am stirred,

especially if the target of them is a person whom I had greatly loved and

respected before, as witness my various attitudes towards Miss Hitchener,

the Gisbornes, Harriet's sister, and others--and finally I did not

improve this state of things when I deserted my wife and spent a whole

month with the woman who had infatuated me."



No, he could not go into those details, and we excuse him; but,

nevertheless, we do not rest content with this bland proposition to puff

away that whole long disreputable episode with a single mean, meaningless

remark of Shelley's.



We do admit that "it is certain that some cause or causes of deep

division were in operation."  We would admit it just the same if the

grammar of the statement were as straight as a string, for we drift into

pretty indifferent grammar ourselves when we are absorbed in historical

work; but we have to decline to admit that we cannot guess those cause or

causes.



But guessing is not really necessary.  There is evidence attainable--

evidence from the batch discredited by the biographer and set out at the

back door in his appendix-basket; and yet a court of law would think

twice before throwing it out, whereas it would be a hardy person who

would venture to offer in such a place a good part of the material which

is placed before the readers of this book as "evidence," and so treated

by this daring biographer.  Among some letters (in the appendix-basket)

from Mrs. Godwin, detailing the Godwinian share in the Shelleyan events

of 1814, she tells how Harriet Shelley came to her and her husband,

agitated and weeping, to implore them to forbid Shelley the house, and

prevent his seeing Mary Godwin.



          "She related that last November he had fallen in love with Mrs.

          Turner and paid her such marked attentions Mr. Turner, the

          husband, had carried off his wife to Devonshire."



The biographer finds a technical fault in this; "the Shelleys were in

Edinburgh in November."  What of that?  The woman is recalling a

conversation which is more than two months old; besides, she was probably

more intent upon the central and important fact of it than upon its

unimportant date.  Harriet's quoted statement has some sense in it; for

that reason, if for no other, it ought to have been put in the body of

the book.  Still, that would not have answered; even the biographer's

enemy could not be cruel enough to ask him to let this real grievance,

this compact and substantial and picturesque figure, this rawhead-and-

bloody-bones, come striding in there among those pale shams, those

rickety spectres labeled WET-NURSE, BONNET-SHOP, and so on--no, the

father of all malice could not ask the biographer to expose his pathetic

goblins to a competition like that.



The fabulist finds fault with the statement because it has a technical

error in it; and he does this at the moment that he is furnishing us an

error himself, and of a graver sort.  He says:



          "If Turner carried off his wife to Devonshire he brought her

          back and Shelley was staying with her and her mother on terms

          of cordial intimacy in March, 1814."



We accept the "cordial intimacy"--it was the very thing Harriet was

complaining of--but there is nothing to show that it was Turner who

brought his wife back.  The statement is thrown in as if it were not only

true, but was proof that Turner was not uneasy.  Turner's movements are

proof of nothing.  Nothing but a statement from Turner's mouth would have

any value here, and he made none.



Six days after writing his letter Shelley and his wife were together

again for a moment--to get remarried according to the rites of the

English Church.



Within three weeks the new husband and wife were apart again, and the

former was back in his odorous paradise.  This time it is the wife who

does the deserting.  She finds Cornelia too strong for her, probably.

At any rate, she goes away with her baby and sister, and we have a

playful fling at her from good Mrs. Boinville, the "mysterious spinner

Maimuna"; she whose "face was as a damsel's face, and yet her hair was

gray"; she of whom the biographer has said, "Shelley was indeed caught in

an almost invisible thread spun around him, but unconsciously, by this

subtle and benignant enchantress."  The subtle and benignant enchantress

writes to Hogg, April 18: "Shelley is again a widower; his beauteous half

went to town on Thursday."



Then Shelley writes a poem--a chant of grief over the hard fate which

obliges him now to leave his paradise and take up with his wife again.

It seems to intimate that the paradise is cooling towards him; that he is

warned off by acclamation; that he must not even venture to tempt with

one last tear his friend Cornelia's ungentle mood, for her eye is glazed

and cold and dares not entreat her lover to stay:



Exhibit E



          "Pause not! the time is past! Every voice cries 'Away!'

          Tempt not with one last tear thy friend's ungentle mood;

          Thy lover's eye, so glazed and cold, dares not entreat thy

          stay:

          Duty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude."



Back to the solitude of his now empty home, that is!



          "Away! away! to thy sad and silent home;

          Pour bitter tears on its desolated hearth."

          . . . . . . . .



But he will have rest in the grave by-and-by.  Until that time comes,

the charms of Bracknell will remain in his memory, along with Mrs.

Boinville's voice and Cornelia Turner's smile:



     "Thou in the grave shalt rest--yet, till the phantoms flee

     Which that house and hearth and garden made dear to thee ere while,

     Thy remembrance and repentance and deep musings are not free

     From the music of two voices and the light of one sweet smile."



We cannot wonder that Harriet could not stand it.  Any of us would have

left.  We would not even stay with a cat that was in this condition.

Even the Boinvilles could not endure it; and so, as we have seen, they

gave this one notice.



          "Early in May, Shelley was in London.  He did not yet despair

          of reconciliation with Harriet, nor had he ceased to love her."



Shelley's poems are a good deal of trouble to his biographer.  They are

constantly inserted as "evidence," and they make much confusion.  As soon

as one of them has proved one thing, another one follows and proves quite

a different thing.  The poem just quoted shows that he was in love with

Cornelia, but a month later he is in love with Harriet again, and there

is a poem to prove it.



          "In this piteous appeal Shelley declares that he has now no

          grief but one--the grief of having known and lost his wife's

          love."



Exhibit F



               "Thy look of love has power to calm

               The stormiest passion of my soul."





But without doubt she had been reserving her looks of love a good part of

the time for ten months, now--ever since he began to lavish his own on

Cornelia Turner at the end of the previous July.  He does really seem to

have already forgotten Cornelia's merits in one brief month, for he

eulogizes Harriet in a way which rules all competition out:



               "Thou only virtuous, gentle, kind,

               Amid a world of hate."



He complains of her hardness, and begs her to make the concession of

a "slight endurance"--of his waywardness, perhaps--for the sake of

"a fellow-being's lasting weal."  But the main force of his appeal is

in his closing stanza, and is strongly worded:



               "O tract for once no erring guide!

               Bid the remorseless feeling flee;

               'Tis malice, 'tis revenge, 'tis pride,

               'Tis anything but thee;

               I deign a nobler pride to prove,

               And pity if thou canst not love."



This is in May--apparently towards the end of it.  Harriet and Shelley

were corresponding all the time.  Harriet got the poem--a copy exists in

her own handwriting; she being the only gentle and kind person amid a

world of hate, according to Shelley's own testimony in the poem, we are

permitted to think that the daily letters would presently have melted

that kind and gentle heart and brought about the reconciliation, if there

had been time but there wasn't; for in a very few days--in fact, before

the 8th of June--Shelley was in love with another woman.



And so--perhaps while Harriet was walking the floor nights, trying to get

her poem by heart--her husband was doing a fresh one--for the other girl

--Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin--with sentiments like these in it:



Exhibit G



               To spend years thus and be rewarded,

               As thou, sweet love, requited me

               When none were near.

               .  .  .  thy lips did meet

               Mine tremblingly; .  .  ,



               " Gentle and good and mild thou art,

               Nor can I live if thou appear

               Aught but thyself." .  .  .





And so on.  "Before the close of June it was known and felt by Mary and

Shelley that each was inexpressibly dear to the other."  Yes, Shelley had

found this child of sixteen to his liking, and had wooed and won her in

the graveyard.  But that is nothing; it was better than wooing her in her

nursery, at any rate, where it might have disturbed the other children.



However, she was a child in years only.  From the day that she set her

masculine grip on Shelley he was to frisk no more.  If she had occupied

the only kind and gentle Harriet's place in March it would have been a

thrilling spectacle to see her invade the Boinville rookery and read the

riot act.  That holiday of Shelley's would have been of short duration,

and Cornelia's hair would have been as gray as her mother's when the

services were over.



Hogg went to the Godwin residence in Skinner Street with Shelley on that

8th of June.  They passed through Godwin's little debt-factory of a book-

shop and went up-stairs hunting for the proprietor.  Nobody there.

Shelley strode about the room impatiently, making its crazy floor quake

under him.  Then a door "was partially and softly opened.  A thrilling

voice called 'Shelley!'  A thrilling voice answered, 'Mary!'  And he

darted out of the room like an arrow from the bow of the far-shooting

King.  A very young female, fair and fair-haired, pale, indeed, and with

a piercing look, wearing a frock of tartan, an unusual dress in London at

that time, had called him out of the room."



This is Mary Godwin, as described by Hogg.  The thrill of the voices

shows that the love of Shelley and Mary was already upward of a fortnight

old; therefore it had been born within the month of May--born while

Harriet was still trying to get her poem by heart, we think.  I must not

be asked how I know so much about that thrill; it is my secret.  The

biographer and I have private ways of finding out things when it is

necessary to find them out and the customary methods fail.



Shelley left London that day, and was gone ten days.  The biographer

conjectures that he spent this interval with Harriet in Bath.  It would

be just like him.  To the end of his days he liked to be in love with two

women at once.  He was more in love with Miss Hitchener when he married

Harriet than he was with Harriet, and told the lady so with simple and

unostentatious candor.  He was more in love with Cornelia than he was

with Harriet in the end of 1813 and the beginning of 1814, yet he

supplied both of them with love poems of an equal temperature meantime;

he loved Mary and Harriet in June, and while getting ready to run off

with the one, it is conjectured that he put in his odd time trying to get

reconciled to the other; by-and-by, while still in love with Mary, he

will make love to her half-sister by marriage, adoption, and the

visitation of God, through the medium of clandestine letters, and she

will answer with letters that are for no eye but his own.



When Shelley encountered Mary Godwin he was looking around for another

paradise.  He had, tastes of his own, and there were features about the

Godwin establishment that strongly recommended it.  Godwin was an

advanced thinker and an able writer.  One of his romances is still read,

but his philosophical works, once so esteemed, are out of vogue now;

their authority was already declining when Shelley made his acquaintance

--that is, it was declining with the public, but not with Shelley.  They

had been his moral and political Bible, and they were that yet.  Shelley

the infidel would himself have claimed to be less a work of God than a

work of Godwin.  Godwin's philosophies had formed his mind and interwoven

themselves into it and become a part of its texture; he regarded himself

as Godwin's spiritual son.  Godwin was not without self-appreciation;

indeed, it may be conjectured that from his point of view the last

syllable of his name was surplusage.  He lived serene in his lofty world

of philosophy, far above the mean interests that absorbed smaller men,

and only came down to the ground at intervals to pass the hat for alms to

pay his debts with, and insult the man that relieved him.  Several of his

principles were out of the ordinary.  For example, he was opposed to

marriage.  He was not aware that his preachings from this text were but

theory and wind; he supposed he was in earnest in imploring people to

live together without marrying, until Shelley furnished him a working

model of his scheme and a practical example to analyze, by applying the

principle in his own family; the matter took a different and surprising

aspect then.  The late Matthew Arnold said that the main defect in

Shelley's make-up was that he was destitute of the sense of humor.  This

episode must have escaped Mr. Arnold's attention.



But we have said enough about the head of the new paradise.  Mrs. Godwin

is described as being in several ways a terror; and even when her soul

was in repose she wore green spectacles.  But I suspect that her main

unattractiveness was born of the fact that she wrote the letters that are

out in the appendix-basket in the back yard--letters which are an outrage

and wholly untrustworthy, for they say some kind things about poor

Harriet and tell some disagreeable truths about her husband; and these

things make the fabulist grit his teeth a good deal.



Next we have Fanny Godwin--a Godwin by courtesy only; she was Mrs.

Godwin's natural daughter by a former friend.  She was a sweet and

winning girl, but she presently wearied of the Godwin paradise, and

poisoned herself.



Last in the list is Jane (or Claire, as she preferred to call herself)

Clairmont, daughter of Mrs. Godwin by a former marriage.  She was very

young and pretty and accommodating, and always ready to do what she could

to make things pleasant.  After Shelley ran off with her part-sister

Mary, she became the guest of the pair, and contributed a natural child

to their nursery--Allegra.  Lord Byron was the father.



We have named the several members and advantages of the new paradise in

Skinner Street, with its crazy book-shop underneath.  Shelley was all

right now, this was a better place than the other; more variety anyway,

and more different kinds of fragrance.  One could turn out poetry here

without any trouble at all.



The way the new love-match came about was this:



Shelley told Mary all his aggravations and sorrows and griefs, and about

the wet-nurse and the bonnetshop and the surgeon and the carriage, and

the sister-in-law that blocked the London game, and about Cornelia and

her mamma, and how they had turned him out of the house after making so

much of him; and how he had deserted Harriet and then Harriet had

deserted him, and how the reconciliation was working along and Harriet

getting her poem by heart; and still he was not happy, and Mary pitied

him, for she had had trouble herself.  But I am not satisfied with this.

It reads too much like statistics.  It lacks smoothness and grace, and is

too earthy and business-like.  It has the sordid look of a trades-union

procession out on strike.  That is not the right form for it.  The book

does it better; we will fall back on the book and have a cake-walk:



          "It was easy to divine that some restless grief possessed him;

          Mary herself was not unlearned in the lore of pain.  His

          generous zeal in her father's behalf, his spiritual sonship to

          Godwin, his reverence for her mother's memory, were guarantees

          with Mary of his excellence.--[What she was after was

          guarantees of his excellence.  That he stood ready to desert

          his wife and child was one of them, apparently.]--The new

          friends could not lack subjects of discourse, and underneath

          their words about Mary's mother, and 'Political Justice,' and

          'Rights of Woman,' were two young hearts, each feeling towards

          the other, each perhaps unaware, trembling in the direction of

          the other.  The desire to assuage the suffering of one whose

          happiness has grown precious to us may become a hunger of the

          spirit as keen as any other, and this hunger now possessed

          Mary's heart; when her eyes rested unseen on Shelley, it was

          with a look full of the ardor of a 'soothing pity.'"



Yes, that is better and has more composure.  That is just the way it

happened.  He told her about the wet-nurse, she told him about political

justice; he told her about the deadly sister-in-law, she told him about

her mother; he told her about the bonnet-shop, she murmured back about

the rights of woman; then he assuaged her, then she assuaged him; then he

assuaged her some more, next she assuaged him some more; then they both

assuaged one another simultaneously; and so they went on by the hour

assuaging and assuaging and assuaging, until at last what was the result?

They were in love.  It will happen so every time.



          "He had married a woman who, as he now persuaded himself, had

          never truly loved him, who loved only his fortune and his rank,

          and who proved her selfishness by deserting him in his misery."



I think that that is not quite fair to Harriet.  We have no certainty

that she knew Cornelia had turned him out of the house.  He went back to

Cornelia, and Harriet may have supposed that he was as happy with her as

ever.  Still, it was judicious to begin to lay on the whitewash, for

Shelley is going to need many a coat of it now, and the sooner the reader

becomes used to the intrusion of the brush the sooner he will get

reconciled to it and stop fretting about it.



After Shelley's (conjectured) visit to Harriet at Bath--8th of June to

18th--"it seems to have been arranged that Shelley should henceforth

join the Skinner Street household each day at dinner."



Nothing could be handier than this; things will swim along now.



          "Although now Shelley was coming to believe that his wedded

          union with Harriet was a thing of the past, he had not ceased

          to regard her with affectionate consideration; he wrote to her

          frequently, and kept her informed of his whereabouts."



We must not get impatient over these curious inharmoniousnesses and

irreconcilabilities in Shelley's character.  You can see by the

biographer's attitude towards them that there is nothing objectionable

about them.  Shelley was doing his best to make two adoring young

creatures happy: he was regarding the one with affectionate consideration

by mail, and he was assuaging the other one at home.



          "Unhappy Harriet, residing at Bath, had perhaps never desired

          that the breach between herself and her husband should be

          irreparable and complete."



I find no fault with that sentence except that the "perhaps" is not

strictly warranted.  It should have been left out.  In support--or shall

we say extenuation?--of this opinion I submit that there is not

sufficient evidence to warrant the uncertainty which it implies.  The

only "evidence" offered that Harriet was hard and proud and standing out

against a reconciliation is a poem--the poem in which Shelley beseeches

her to "bid the remorseless feeling flee" and "pity" if she "cannot

love."  We have just that as "evidence," and out of its meagre materials

the biographer builds a cobhouse of conjectures as big as the Coliseum;

conjectures which convince him, the prosecuting attorney, but ought to

fall far short of convincing any fair-minded jury.



Shelley's love-poems may be very good evidence, but we know well that

they are "good for this day and train only."  We are able to believe that

they spoke the truth for that one day, but we know by experience that

they could not be depended on to speak it the next.  The very

supplication for a rewarming of Harriet's chilled love was followed so

suddenly by the poet's plunge into an adoring passion for Mary Godwin

that if it had been a check it would have lost its value before a lazy

person could have gotten to the bank with it.



Hardness, stubbornness, pride, vindictiveness--these may sometimes reside

in a young wife and mother of nineteen, but they are not charged against

Harriet Shelley outside of that poem, and one has no right to insert them

into her character on such shadowy "evidence" as that.  Peacock knew

Harriet well, and she has a flexible and persuadable look, as painted by

him:



          "Her manners were good, and her whole aspect and demeanor such

          manifest emanations of pure and truthful nature that to be once

          in her company was to know her thoroughly.  She was fond of her

          husband, and accommodated herself in every way to his tastes.

          If they mixed in society, she adorned it; if they lived in

          retirement, she was satisfied; if they travelled, she enjoyed

          the change of scene."



"Perhaps" she had never desired that the breach should be irreparable and

complete.  The truth is, we do not even know that there was any breach at

all at this time.  We know that the husband and wife went before the

altar and took a new oath on the 24th of March to love and cherish each

other until death--and this may be regarded as a sort of reconciliation

itself, and a wiping out of the old grudges.  Then Harriet went away, and

the sister-in-law removed herself from her society.  That was in April.

Shelley wrote his "appeal" in May, but the corresponding went right along

afterwards.  We have a right to doubt that the subject of it was a

"reconciliation," or that Harriet had any suspicion that she needed to be

reconciled and that her husband was trying to persuade her to it--as the

biographer has sought to make us believe, with his Coliseum of

conjectures built out of a waste-basket of poetry.  For we have

"evidence" now--not poetry and conjecture.  When Shelley had been dining

daily in the Skinner Street paradise fifteen days and continuing the

love-match which was already a fortnight old twenty-five days earlier,

he forgot to write Harriet; forgot it the next day and the next.  During

four days Harriet got no letter from him.  Then her fright and anxiety

rose to expression-heat, and she wrote a letter to Shelley's publisher

which seems to reveal to us that Shelley's letters to her had been the

customary affectionate letters of husband to wife, and had carried no

appeals for reconciliation and had not needed to:



                                   "BATH (postmark July 7, 1814).

          "MY DEAR SIR,--You will greatly oblige me by giving the

          enclosed to Mr.  Shelley.  I would not trouble you, but it is

          now four days since I have heard from him, which to me is an

          age.  Will you write by return of post and tell me what has

          become of him? as I always fancy something dreadful has

          happened if I do not hear from him.  If you tell me that he is

          well I shall not come to London, but if I do not hear from you

          or him I shall certainly come, as I cannot endure this dreadful

          state of suspense.  You are his friend and you can feel for me.

                              "I remain yours truly,

                                                  "H. S."





Even without Peacock's testimony that "her whole aspect and demeanor were

manifest emanations of a pure and truthful nature," we should hold this

to be a truthful letter, a sincere letter, a loving letter; it bears

those marks; I think it is also the letter of a person accustomed to

receiving letters from her husband frequently, and that they have been of

a welcome and satisfactory sort, too, this long time back--ever since the

solemn remarriage and reconciliation at the altar most likely.



The biographer follows Harriet's letter with a conjecture.

He conjectures that she "would now gladly have retraced her steps."

Which means that it is proven that she had steps to retrace--proven by

the poem.  Well, if the poem is better evidence than the letter, we must

let it stand at that.



Then the biographer attacks Harriet Shelley's honor--by authority of

random and unverified gossip scavengered from a group of people whose

very names make a person shudder: Mary Godwin, mistress to Shelley; her

part-sister, discarded mistress of Lord Byron; Godwin, the philosophical

tramp, who gathers his share of it from a shadow--that is to say, from a

person whom he shirks out of naming.  Yet the biographer dignifies this

sorry rubbish with the name of "evidence."



Nothing remotely resembling a distinct charge from a named person

professing to know is offered among this precious "evidence."



1.  "Shelley believed" so and so.



2.  Byron's discarded mistress says that Shelley told Mary Godwin so and

so, and Mary told her.



3.  "Shelley said" so and so--and later "admitted over and over again

that he had been in error."



4.  The unspeakable Godwin "wrote to Mr. Baxter" that he knew so and so

"from unquestionable authority"--name not furnished.



How-any man in his right mind could bring himself to defile the grave of

a shamefully abused and defenceless girl with these baseless

fabrications, this manufactured filth, is inconceivable.  How any man, in

his right mind or out of it, could sit down and coldly try to persuade

anybody to believe it, or listen patiently to it, or, indeed, do anything

but scoff at it and deride it, is astonishing.



The charge insinuated by these odious slanders is one of the most

difficult of all offences to prove; it is also one which no man has a

right to mention even in a whisper about any woman, living or dead,

unless he knows it to be true, and not even then unless he can also prove

it to be true.  There is no justification for the abomination of putting

this stuff in the book.



Against Harriet Shelley's good name there is not one scrap of tarnishing

evidence, and not even a scrap of evil gossip, that comes from a source

that entitles it to a hearing.



On the credit side of the account we have strong opinions from the people

who knew her best.  Peacock says:



          "I feel it due to the memory of Harriet to state my most

          decided conviction that her conduct as a wife was as pure, as

          true, as absolutely faultless, as that of any who for such

          conduct are held most in honor."



Thornton Hunt, who had picked and published slight flaws in Harriet's

character, says, as regards this alleged large one:



          "There is not a trace of evidence or a whisper of scandal

          against her before her voluntary departure from Shelley."



Trelawney says:



          "I was assured by the evidence of the few friends who knew both

          Shelley and his wife--Hookham, Hogg, Peacock, and one of the

          Godwins--that Harriet was perfectly innocent of all offence."



What excuse was there for raking up a parcel of foul rumors from

malicious and discredited sources and flinging them at this dead girl's

head?  Her very defencelessness should have been her protection.  The

fact that all letters to her or about her, with almost every scrap of her

own writing, had been diligently mislaid, leaving her case destitute of a

voice, while every pen-stroke which could help her husband's side had

been as diligently preserved, should have excused her from being brought

to trial.  Her witnesses have all disappeared, yet we see her summoned in

her grave-clothes to plead for the life of her character, without the

help of an advocate, before a disqualified judge and a packed jury.



Harriet Shelley wrote her distressed letter on the 7th of July.  On the

28th her husband ran away with Mary Godwin and her part-sister Claire to

the Continent.  He deserted his wife when her confinement was

approaching.  She bore him a child at the end of November, his mistress

bore him another one something over two months later.  The truants were

back in London before either of these events occurred.



On one occasion, presently, Shelley was so pressed for money to support

his mistress with that he went to his wife and got some money of his that

was in her hands--twenty pounds.  Yet the mistress was not moved to

gratitude; for later, when the wife was troubled to meet her engagements,

the mistress makes this entry in her diary:



          "Harriet sends her creditors here; nasty woman.  Now we shall

          have to change our lodgings."



The deserted wife bore the bitterness and obloquy of her situation two

years and a quarter; then she gave up, and drowned herself.  A month

afterwards the body was found in the water.  Three weeks later Shelley

married his mistress.



I must here be allowed to italicize a remark of the biographer's

concerning Harriet Shelley:



          "That no act of Shelley's during the two years which

          immediately preceded her death tended to cause the rash act

          which brought her life to its close seems certain."



Yet her husband had deserted her and her children, and was living with a

concubine all that time!  Why should a person attempt to write biography

when the simplest facts have no meaning to him?  This book is littered

with as crass stupidities as that one--deductions by the page which bear

no discoverable kinship to their premises.



The biographer throws off that extraordinary remark without any

perceptible disturbance to his serenity; for he follows it with a

sentimental justification of Shelley's conduct which has not a pang of

conscience in it, but is silky and smooth and undulating and pious--

a cake-walk with all the colored brethren at their best.  There may be

people who can read that page and keep their temper, but it is doubtful.

Shelley's life has the one indelible blot upon it, but is otherwise

worshipfully noble and beautiful.  It even stands out indestructibly

gracious and lovely from the ruck of these disastrous pages, in spite of

the fact that they expose and establish his responsibility for his

forsaken wife's pitiful fate--a responsibility which he himself tacitly

admits in a letter to Eliza Westbrook, wherein he refers to his taking up

with Mary Godwin as an act which Eliza "might excusably regard as the

cause of her sister's ruin."









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Defense of Harriet Shelley

by Mark Twain













FENIMORE COOPER'S LITERARY OFFENCES



by Mark Twain







          The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer stand at the head of Cooper's

          novels as artistic creations.  There are others of his works

          which contain parts as perfect as are to be found in these, and

          scenes even more thrilling.  Not one can be compared with

          either of them as a finished whole.



          The defects in both of these tales are comparatively slight.

          They were pure works of art.--Prof. Lounsbury.





          The five tales reveal an extraordinary fulness of invention.

          .  .  .  One of the very greatest characters in fiction, Natty

          Bumppo .  .  .  .



          The craft of the woodsman, the tricks of the trapper, all the

          delicate art of the forest, were familiar to Cooper from his

          youth up.--Prof. Brander Matthews.



          Cooper is the greatest artist in the domain of romantic fiction

          yet produced by America.--Wilkie Collins.





It seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English

Literature in Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and

Wilkie Collies to deliver opinions on Cooper's literature without having

read some of it.  It would have been much more decorous to keep silent

and let persons talk who have read Cooper.



Cooper's art has some defects.  In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the

restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences

against literary art out of a possible 115.  It breaks the record.



There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic

fiction--some say twenty-two.  In Deerslayer Cooper violated eighteen of

them.  These eighteen require:



1.  That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.  But the

Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air.



2.  They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of

the tale, and shall help to develop it.  But as the Deerslayer tale is

not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes

have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to

develop.



3.  They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in

the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the

corpses from the others.  But this detail has often been overlooked in

the Deerslayer tale.



4.  They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive,

shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.  But this detail also

has been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.



5.  They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation,

the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings

would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a

discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of

relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be

interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the

people cannot think of anything more to say.  But this requirement has

been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it.



6.  They require that when the author describes the character of a

personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage

shall justify said description.  But this law gets little or no attention

in the Deerslayer tale, as Natty Bumppo's case will amply prove.



7.  They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-

edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the

beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the

end of it.  But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the Deerslayer

tale.



8.  They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the

reader as "the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest," by

either the author or the people in the tale.  But this rule is

persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale.



9.  They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves

to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle,

the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and

reasonable.  But these rules are not respected in the Deerslayer tale.



10.  They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep

interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he

shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad

ones.  But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in

it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned

together.



11.  They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly

defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given

emergency.  But in the Deerslayer tale this rule is vacated.



In addition to these large rules there are some little ones.  These

require that the author shall:



12.  Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.



13.  Use the right word, not its second cousin.



14.  Eschew surplusage.



15.  Not omit necessary details.



16.  Avoid slovenliness of form.



17.  Use good grammar.



18.  Employ a simple and straightforward style.



Even these seven are coldly and persistently violated in the Deerslayer

tale.



Cooper's gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such

as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and

indeed he did some quite sweet things with it.  In his little box of

stage properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices

for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with,

and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things

and seeing them go.  A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread

in the tracks of the moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail.

Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick.

Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently

was his broken twig.  He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his

effects, and worked it the hardest.  It is a restful chapter in any book

of his when somebody doesn't step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds

and whites for two hundred yards around.  Every time a Cooper person is

in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure

to step on a dry twig.  There may be a hundred handier things to step on,

but that wouldn't satisfy Cooper.  Cooper requires him to turn out and

find a dry twig; and if he can't do it, go and borrow one.  In fact, the

Leather Stocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series.



I am sorry there is not room to put in a few dozen instances of the

delicate art of the forest, as practised by Natty Bumppo and some of the

other Cooperian experts.  Perhaps we may venture two or three samples.

Cooper was a sailor--a naval officer; yet he gravely tells us how a

vessel, driving towards a lee shore in a gale, is steered for a

particular spot by her skipper because he knows of an undertow there

which will hold her back against the gale and save her.  For just pure

woodcraft, or sailorcraft, or whatever it is, isn't that neat?  For

several years Cooper was daily in the society of artillery, and he ought

to have noticed that when a cannon-ball strikes the ground it either

buries itself or skips a hundred feet or so; skips again a hundred feet

or so--and so on, till finally it gets tired and rolls.  Now in one place

he loses some "females"--as he always calls women--in the edge of a wood

near a plain at night in a fog, on purpose to give Bumppo a chance to

show off the delicate art of the forest before the reader.  These mislaid

people are hunting for a fort.  They hear a cannonblast, and a cannon-

ball presently comes rolling into the wood and stops at their feet.  To

the females this suggests nothing.  The case is very different with the

admirable Bumppo.  I wish I may never know peace again if he doesn't

strike out promptly and follow the track of that cannon-ball across the

plain through the dense fog and find the fort.  Isn't it a daisy?  If

Cooper had any real knowledge of Nature's ways of doing things, he had a

most delicate art in concealing the fact.  For instance: one of his acute

Indian experts, Chingachgook (pronounced Chicago, I think), has lost the

trail of a person he is tracking through the forest.  Apparently that

trail is hopelessly lost.  Neither you nor I could ever have guessed out

the way to find it.  It was very different with Chicago.  Chicago was not

stumped for long.  He turned a running stream out of its course, and

there, in the slush in its old bed, were that person's moccasin-tracks.

The current did not wash them away, as it would have done in all other

like cases--no, even the eternal laws of Nature have to vacate when

Cooper wants to put up a delicate job of woodcraft on the reader.



We must be a little wary when Brander Matthews tells us that Cooper's

books "reveal an extraordinary fulness of invention."  As a rule, I am

quite willing to accept Brander Matthews's literary judgments and applaud

his lucid and graceful phrasing of them; but that particular statement

needs to be taken with a few tons of salt.  Bless your heart, Cooper

hadn't any more invention than a horse; and I don't mean a high-class

horse, either; I mean a clothes-horse.  It would be very difficult to

find a really clever "situation" in Cooper's books, and still more

difficult to find one of any kind which he has failed to render absurd by

his handling of it.  Look at the episodes of "the caves"; and at the

celebrated scuffle between Maqua and those others on the table-land a few

days later; and at Hurry Harry's queer water-transit from the castle to

the ark; and at Deerslayer's half-hour with his first corpse; and at the

quarrel between Hurry Harry and Deerslayer later; and at--but choose for

yourself; you can't go amiss.



If Cooper had been an observer his inventive faculty would have worked

better; not more interestingly, but more rationally, more plausibly.

Cooper's proudest creations in the way of "situations" suffer noticeably

from the absence of the observer's protecting gift.  Cooper's eye was

splendidly inaccurate.  Cooper seldom saw anything correctly.  He saw

nearly all things as through a glass eye, darkly.  Of course a man who

cannot see the commonest little every-day matters accurately is working

at a disadvantage when he is constructing a "situation."  In the

Deerslayer tale Cooper has a stream which is fifty feet wide where it

flows out of a lake; it presently narrows to twenty as it meanders along

for no given reason; and yet when a stream acts like that it ought to be

required to explain itself.  Fourteen pages later the width of the

brook's outlet from the lake has suddenly shrunk thirty feet, and become

"the narrowest part of the stream." This shrinkage is not accounted for.

The stream has bends in it, a sure indication that it has alluvial banks

and cuts them; yet these bends are only thirty and fifty feet long.  If

Cooper had been a nice and punctilious observer he would have noticed

that the bends were oftener nine hundred feet long than short of it.



Cooper made the exit of that stream fifty feet wide, in the first place,

for no particular reason; in the second place, he narrowed it to less

than twenty to accommodate some Indians.  He bends a "sapling" to the

form of an arch over this narrow passage, and conceals six Indians in its

foliage.  They are "laying" for a settler's scow or ark which is coming

up the stream on its way to the lake; it is being hauled against the

stiff current by a rope whose stationary end is anchored in the lake; its

rate of progress cannot be more than a mile an hour.  Cooper describes

the ark, but pretty obscurely.  In the matter of dimensions "it was

little more than a modern canal-boat." Let us guess, then, that it was

about one hundred and forty feet long.  It was of "greater breadth than

common."  Let us guess, then, that it was about sixteen feet wide.  This

leviathan had been prowling down bends which were but a third as long as

itself, and scraping between banks where it had only two feet of space to

spare on each side.  We cannot too much admire this miracle.  A low-

roofed log dwelling occupies "two-thirds of the ark's length"--a dwelling

ninety feet long and sixteen feet wide, let us say a kind of vestibule

train.  The dwelling has two rooms--each forty-five feet long and sixteen

feet wide, let us guess.  One of them is the bedroom of the Hutter girls,

Judith and Hetty; the other is the parlor in the daytime, at night it is

papa's bedchamber.  The ark is arriving at the stream's exit now, whose

width has been reduced to less than twenty feet to accommodate the

Indians--say to eighteen.  There is a foot to spare on each side of the

boat.  Did the Indians notice that there was going to be a tight squeeze

there?  Did they notice that they could make money by climbing down out

of that arched sapling and just stepping aboard when the ark scraped by?

No, other Indians would have noticed these things, but Cooper's Indians

never notice anything.  Cooper thinks they are marvelous creatures for

noticing, but he was almost always in error about his Indians.  There was

seldom a sane one among them.



The ark is one hundred and forty feet long; the dwelling is ninety feet

long.  The idea of the Indians is to drop softly and secretly from the

arched sapling to the dwelling as the ark creeps along under it at the

rate of a mile an hour, and butcher the family.  It will take the ark a

minute and a half to pass under.  It will take the ninety foot dwelling a

minute to pass under.  Now, then, what did the six Indians do?  It would

take you thirty years to guess, and even then you would have to give it

up, I believe.  Therefore, I will tell you what the Indians did.  Their

chief, a person of quite extraordinary intellect for a Cooper Indian,

warily watched the canal-boat as it squeezed along under him, and when he

had got his calculations fined down to exactly the right shade, as he

judged, he let go and dropped.  And missed the house!  That is actually

what he did.  He missed the house, and landed in the stern of the scow.

It was not much of a fall, yet it knocked him silly.  He lay there

unconscious.  If the house had been ninety-seven feet long he would have

made the trip.  The fault was Cooper's, not his.  The error lay in the

construction of the house.  Cooper was no architect.



There still remained in the roost five Indians.



The boat has passed under and is now out of their reach.  Let me explain

what the five did--you would not be able to reason it out for yourself.

No. 1 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water astern of it.  Then No.

2 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water still farther astern of it.

Then No. 3 jumped for the boat, and fell a good way astern of it.  Then

No, 4.  jumped for the boat, and fell in the water away astern.  Then

even No. 5 made a jump for the boat--for he was a Cooper Indian.  In the

matter of intellect, the difference between a Cooper Indian and the

Indian that stands in front of the cigarshop is not spacious.  The scow

episode is really a sublime burst of invention; but it does not thrill,

because the inaccuracy of the details throws a sort of air of

fictitiousness and general improbability over it.  This comes of Cooper's

inadequacy as an observer.



The reader will find some examples of Cooper's high talent for inaccurate

observation in the account of the shooting-match in The Pathfinder.



          "A common wrought nail was driven lightly into the target, its

          head having been first touched with paint."



The color of the paint is not stated--an important omission, but Cooper

deals freely in important omissions.  No, after all, it was not an

important omission; for this nail-head is a hundred yards from the

marksmen, and could not be seen by them at that distance, no matter what

its color might be.



How far can the best eyes see a common house-fly?  A hundred yards?  It

is quite impossible.  Very well; eyes that cannot see a house-fly that is

a hundred yards away cannot see an ordinary nailhead at that distance,

for the size of the two objects is the same.  It takes a keen eye to see

a fly or a nailhead at fifty yards--one hundred and fifty feet.  Can the

reader do it?



The nail was lightly driven, its head painted, and game called.  Then the

Cooper miracles began.  The bullet of the first marksman chipped an edge

off the nail-head; the next man's bullet drove the nail a little way into

the target--and removed all the paint.  Haven't the miracles gone far

enough now?  Not to suit Cooper; for the purpose of this whole scheme is

to show off his prodigy, Deerslayer Hawkeye--Long-Rifle-Leather-Stocking-

Pathfinder-Bumppo before the ladies.



          "'Be all ready to clench it, boys I' cried out Pathfinder,

          stepping into his friend's tracks the instant they were vacant.

          'Never mind a new nail; I can see that, though the paint is

          gone, and what I can see I can hit at a hundred yards, though

          it were only a mosquito's eye.  Be ready to clench!'



"The rifle cracked, the bullet sped its way, and the head of the nail was

buried in the wood, covered by the piece of flattened lead."



There, you see, is a man who could hunt flies with a rifle, and command a

ducal salary in a Wild West show to-day if we had him back with us.



The recorded feat is certainly surprising just as it stands; but it is

not surprising enough for Cooper.  Cooper adds a touch.  He has made

Pathfinder do this miracle with another man's rifle; and not only that,

but Pathfinder did not have even the advantage of loading it himself.  He

had everything against him, and yet he made that impossible shot; and not

only made it, but did it with absolute confidence, saying, "Be ready to

clench."  Now a person like that would have undertaken that same feat

with a brickbat, and with Cooper to help he would have achieved it, too.



Pathfinder showed off handsomely that day before the ladies.  His very

first feat was a thing which no Wild West show can touch.  He was

standing with the group of marksmen, observing--a hundred yards from the

target, mind; one jasper raised his rifle and drove the centre of the

bull's-eye.  Then the Quartermaster fired.  The target exhibited no

result this time.  There was a laugh.  "It's a dead miss," said Major

Lundie.  Pathfinder waited an impressive moment or two; then said, in

that calm, indifferent, know-it-all way of his, "No, Major, he has

covered jasper's bullet, as will be seen if any one will take the trouble

to examine the target."



Wasn't it remarkable!  How could he see that little pellet fly through

the air and enter that distant bullet-hole?  Yet that is what he did; for

nothing is impossible to a Cooper person.  Did any of those people have

any deep-seated doubts about this thing?  No; for that would imply

sanity, and these were all Cooper people.



          "The respect for Pathfinder's skill and for his 'quickness and

          accuracy of sight'" (the italics [''] are mine) "was so

          profound and general, that the instant he made this declaration

          the spectators began to distrust their own opinions, and a

          dozen rushed to the target in order to ascertain the fact.

          There, sure enough, it was found that the Quartermaster's

          bullet had gone through the hole made by Jasper's, and that,

          too, so accurately as to require a minute examination to be

          certain of the circumstance, which, however, was soon clearly

          established by discovering one bullet over the other in the

          stump against which the target was placed."



They made a "minute" examination; but never mind, how could they know

that there were two bullets in that hole without digging the latest one

out?  for neither probe nor eyesight could prove the presence of any more

than one bullet.  Did they dig?  No; as we shall see.  It is the

Pathfinder's turn now; he steps out before the ladies, takes aim, and

fires.



But, alas! here is a disappointment; an incredible, an unimaginable

disappointment--for the target's aspect is unchanged; there is nothing

there but that same old bullet-hole!



          "'If one dared to hint at such a thing,' cried Major Duncan, 'I

          should say that the Pathfinder has also missed the target!'"



As nobody had missed it yet, the "also" was not necessary; but never mind

about that, for the Pathfinder is going to speak.



          "'No, no, Major,' said he, confidently, 'that would be a risky

          declaration.  I didn't load the piece, and can't say what was

          in it; but if it was lead, you will find the bullet driving

          down those of the Quartermaster and Jasper, else is not my name

          Pathfinder.'



          "A shout from the target announced the truth of this

          assertion."



Is the miracle sufficient as it stands?  Not for Cooper.  The Pathfinder

speaks again, as he "now slowly advances towards the stage occupied by

the females":



          "'That's not all, boys, that's not all; if you find the target

          touched at all, I'll own to a miss.  The Quartermaster cut the

          wood, but you'll find no wood cut by that last messenger."



The miracle is at last complete.  He knew--doubtless saw--at the distance

of a hundred yards--that his bullet had passed into the hole without

fraying the edges.  There were now three bullets in that one hole--three

bullets embedded processionally in the body of the stump back of the

target.  Everybody knew this--somehow or other--and yet nobody had dug

any of them out to make sure.  Cooper is not a close observer, but he is

interesting.  He is certainly always that, no matter what happens.  And

he is more interesting when he is not noticing what he is about than when

he is.  This is a considerable merit.



The conversations in the Cooper books have a curious sound in our modern

ears.  To believe that such talk really ever came out of people's mouths

would be to believe that there was a time when time was of no value to a

person who thought he had something to say; when it was the custom to

spread a two-minute remark out to ten; when a man's mouth was a rolling-

mill, and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot pigs of thought

into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by attenuation;

when subjects were seldom faithfully stuck to, but the talk wandered all

around and arrived nowhere; when conversations consisted mainly of

irrelevancies, with here and there a relevancy, a relevancy with an

embarrassed look, as not being able to explain how it got there.



Cooper was certainly not a master in the construction of dialogue.

Inaccurate observation defeated him here as it defeated him in so many

other enterprises of his.  He even failed to notice that the man who

talks corrupt English six days in the week must and will talk it on the

seventh, and can't help himself.  In the Deerslayer story he lets

Deerslayer talk the showiest kind of book-talk sometimes, and at other

times the basest of base dialects.  For instance, when some one asks him

if he has a sweetheart, and if so, where she abides, this is his majestic

answer:



          "'She's in the forest-hanging from the boughs of the trees, in

          a soft rain--in the dew on the open grass--the clouds that

          float about in the blue heavens--the birds that sing in the

          woods--the sweet springs where I slake my thirst--and in all

          the other glorious gifts that come from God's Providence!'"



And he preceded that, a little before, with this:



          "'It consarns me as all things that touches a fri'nd consarns a

          fri'nd.'"



And this is another of his remarks:



          "'If I was Injin born, now, I might tell of this, or carry in

          the scalp and boast of the expl'ite afore the whole tribe; or

          if my inimy had only been a bear'"--and so on.



We cannot imagine such a thing as a veteran Scotch Commander-in-Chief

comporting himself in the field like a windy melodramatic actor, but

Cooper could.  On one occasion Alice and Cora were being chased by the

French through a fog in the neighborhood of their father's fort:



          "'Point de quartier aux coquins!' cried an eager pursuer, who

          seemed to direct the operations of the enemy.



          "'Stand firm and be ready, my gallant Goths!' suddenly

          exclaimed a voice above them; wait to see the enemy; fire low,

          and sweep the glacis.'



          "'Father? father!' exclaimed a piercing cry from out the mist;

          it is I!  Alice! thy own Elsie! spare, O! save your daughters!'



          "'Hold!' shouted the former speaker, in the awful tones of

          parental agony, the sound reaching even to the woods, and

          rolling back in solemn echo.  ''Tis she! God has restored me my

          children! Throw open the sally-port; to the field, Goths, to

          the field! pull not a trigger, lest ye kill my lambs!  Drive

          off these dogs of France with your steel!'"



Cooper's word-sense was singularly dull.  When a person has a poor ear

for music he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it.  He

keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune.  When a person has a poor

ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you

perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he

doesn't say it.  This is Cooper.  He was not a word-musician.  His ear

was satisfied with the approximate word.  I will furnish some

circumstantial evidence in support of this charge.  My instances are

gathered from half a dozen pages of the tale called Deerslayer.  He uses

"verbal," for "oral"; "precision," for "facility"; "phenomena," for

"marvels"; "necessary," for "predetermined"; "unsophisticated," for

"primitive"; "preparation," for "expectancy"; "rebuked," for "subdued";

"dependent on," for "resulting from"; "fact," for "condition"; "fact,"

for "conjecture"; "precaution," for "caution"; "explain," for

"determine"; "mortified," for "disappointed"; "meretricious," for

"factitious"; "materially," for "considerably"; "decreasing," for

"deepening"; "increasing," for "disappearing"; "embedded," for

"enclosed"; "treacherous;" for "hostile"; "stood," for "stooped";

"softened," for "replaced"; "rejoined," for "remarked"; "situation," for

"condition"; "different," for "differing"; "insensible," for

"unsentient"; "brevity," for "celerity"; "distrusted," for "suspicious";

"mental imbecility," for "imbecility"; "eyes," for "sight";

"counteracting," for "opposing"; "funeral obsequies," for "obsequies."



There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could

write English, but they are all dead now--all dead but Lounsbury.

I don't remember that Lounsbury makes the claim in so many words, still

he makes it, for he says that Deerslayer is a "pure work of art."

Pure, in that connection, means faultless--faultless in all details and

language is a detail.  If Mr. Lounsbury had only compared Cooper's

English with the English which he writes himself--but it is plain that he

didn't; and so it is likely that he imagines until this day that Cooper's

is as clean and compact as his own.  Now I feel sure, deep down in my

heart, that Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our

language, and that the English of Deerslayer is the very worst that even

Cooper ever wrote.



I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that Deerslayer is not a work

of art in any sense; it does seem to me that it is destitute of every

detail that goes to the making of a work of art; in truth, it seems to me

that Deerslayer is just simply a literary delirium tremens.



A work of art?  It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence,

or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of

reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words

they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that

they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations

are--oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime

against the language.



Counting these out, what is left is Art.  I think we must all admit that.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Fennimore Cooper's Literary Offences

by Mark Twain













ESSAYS ON PAUL BOURGET



by Mark Twain







CONTENTS:

     WHAT PAUL BOURGET THINKS OF US

     A LITTLE NOTE TO M. PAUL BOURGET









WHAT PAUL BOURGET THINKS OF US



He reports the American joke correctly.  In Boston they ask, How much

does he know? in New York, How much is he worth? in Philadelphia, Who

were his parents?  And when an alien observer turns his telescope upon

us--advertisedly in our own special interest--a natural apprehension

moves us to ask, What is the diameter of his reflector?



I take a great interest in M. Bourget's chapters, for I know by the

newspapers that there are several Americans who are expecting to get a

whole education out of them; several who foresaw, and also foretold, that

our long night was over, and a light almost divine about to break upon

the land.



          "His utterances concerning us are bound to be weighty and well

          timed."



          "He gives us an object-lesson which should be thoughtfully and

          profitably studied."



These well-considered and important verdicts were of a nature to restore

public confidence, which had been disquieted by questionings as to

whether so young a teacher would be qualified to take so large a class as

70,000,000, distributed over so extensive a schoolhouse as America, and

pull it through without assistance.



I was even disquieted myself, although I am of a cold, calm temperament,

and not easily disturbed.  I feared for my country.  And I was not wholly

tranquilized by the verdicts rendered as above.  It seemed to me that

there was still room for doubt.  In fact, in looking the ground over I

became more disturbed than I was before.  Many worrying questions came up

in my mind.  Two were prominent.  Where had the teacher gotten his

equipment?  What was his method?



He had gotten his equipment in France.



Then as to his method!  I saw by his own intimations that he was an

Observer, and had a System that used by naturalists and other scientists.

The naturalist collects many bugs and reptiles and butterflies and

studies their ways a long time patiently.  By this means he is presently

able to group these creatures into families and subdivisions of families

by nice shadings of differences observable in their characters.  Then he

labels all those shaded bugs and things with nicely descriptive group

names, and is now happy, for his great work is completed, and as a result

he intimately knows every bug and shade of a bug there, inside and out.

It may be true, but a person who was not a naturalist would feel safer

about it if he had the opinion of the bug.  I think it is a pleasant

System, but subject to error.



The Observer of Peoples has to be a Classifier, a Grouper, a Deducer, a

Generalizer, a Psychologizer; and, first and last, a Thinker.  He has to

be all these, and when he is at home, observing his own folk, he is often

able to prove competency.  But history has shown that when he is abroad

observing unfamiliar peoples the chances are heavily against him.  He is

then a naturalist observing a bug, with no more than a naturalist's

chance of being able to tell the bug anything new about itself, and no

more than a naturalist's chance of being able to teach it any new ways

which it will prefer to its own.



To return to that first question.  M. Bourget, as teacher, would simply

be France teaching America.  It seemed to me that the outlook was dark--

almost Egyptian, in fact.  What would the new teacher, representing

France, teach us?  Railroading?  No.  France knows nothing valuable about

railroading.  Steamshipping?  No.  France has no superiorities over us in

that matter.  Steamboating?  No.  French steamboating is still of

Fulton's date--1809.  Postal service?  No.  France is a back number

there.  Telegraphy?  No, we taught her that ourselves.  Journalism?  No.

Magazining?  No, that is our own specialty.  Government?  No; Liberty,

Equality, Fraternity, Nobility, Democracy, Adultery the system is too

variegated for our climate.  Religion?  No, not variegated enough for our

climate.  Morals?  No, we cannot rob the poor to enrich ourselves.

Novel-writing?  No.  M. Bourget and the others know only one plan, and

when that is expurgated there is nothing left of the book.



I wish I could think what he is going to teach us.  Can it be Deportment?

But he experimented in that at Newport and failed to give satisfaction,

except to a few.  Those few are pleased.  They are enjoying their joy as

well as they can.  They confess their happiness to the interviewer.  They

feel pretty striped, but they remember with reverent recognition that

they had sugar between the cuts.  True, sugar with sand in it, but sugar.

And true, they had some trouble to tell which was sugar and which was

sand, because the sugar itself looked just like the sand, and also had a

gravelly taste; still, they knew that the sugar was there, and would have

been very good sugar indeed if it had been screened.  Yes, they are

pleased; not noisily so, but pleased; invaded, or streaked, as one may

say, with little recurrent shivers of joy--subdued joy, so to speak, not

the overdone kind.  And they commune together, these, and massage each

other with comforting sayings, in a sweet spirit of resignation and

thankfulness, mixing these elements in the same proportions as the sugar

and the sand, as a memorial, and saying, the one to the other, and to the

interviewer: "It was severe--yes, it was bitterly severe; but oh, how

true it was; and it will do us so much good!"



If it isn't Deportment, what is left?  It was at this point that I seemed

to get on the right track at last.  M. Bourget would teach us to know

ourselves; that was it: he would reveal us to ourselves.  That would be

an education.  He would explain us to ourselves.  Then we should

understand ourselves; and after that be able to go on more intelligently.



It seemed a doubtful scheme.  He could explain us to himself--that would

be easy.  That would be the same as the naturalist explaining the bug to

himself.  But to explain the bug to the bug--that is quite a different

matter.  The bug may not know himself perfectly, but he knows himself

better than the naturalist can know him, at any rate.



A foreigner can photograph the exteriors of a nation, but I think that

that is as far as he can get.  I think that no foreigner can report its

interior--its soul, its life, its speech, its thought.  I think that a

knowledge of these things is acquirable in only one way; not two or four

or six--absorption; years and years of unconscious absorption; years and

years of intercourse with the life concerned; of living it, indeed;

sharing personally in its shames and prides, its joys and griefs, its

loves and hates, its prosperities and reverses, its shows and

shabbinesses, its deep patriotisms, its whirlwinds of political passion,

its adorations--of flag, and heroic dead, and the glory of the national

name.  Observation?  Of what real value is it?  One learns peoples

through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect.



There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the

life of a people and make a valuable report--the native novelist.  This

expert is so rare that the most populous country can never have fifteen

conspicuously and confessedly competent ones in stock at one time.  This

native specialist is not qualified to begin work until he has been

absorbing during twenty-five years.  How much of his competency is

derived from conscious "observation"?  The amount is so slight that it

counts for next to nothing in the equipment.  Almost the whole capital of

the novelist is the slow accumulation of unconscious observation--

absorption.  The native expert's intentional observation of manners,

speech, character, and ways of life can have value, for the native knows

what they mean without having to cipher out the meaning.  But I should be

astonished to see a foreigner get at the right meanings, catch the

elusive shades of these subtle things.  Even the native novelist becomes

a foreigner, with a foreigner's limitations, when he steps from the State

whose life is familiar to him into a State whose life he has not lived.

Bret Harte got his California and his Californians by unconscious

absorption, and put both of them into his tales alive.  But when he came

from the Pacific to the Atlantic and tried to do Newport life from study-

conscious observation--his failure was absolutely monumental.  Newport is

a disastrous place for the unacclimated observer, evidently.



To return to novel-building.  Does the native novelist try to generalize

the nation?  No, he lays plainly before you the ways and speech and life

of a few people grouped in a certain place--his own place--and that is

one book.  In time he and his brethren will report to you the life and

the people of the whole nation--the life of a group in a New England

village; in a New York village; in a Texan village; in an Oregon village;

in villages in fifty States and Territories; then the farm-life in fifty

States and Territories; a hundred patches of life and groups of people in

a dozen widely separated cities.  And the Indians will be attended to;

and the cowboys; and the gold and silver miners; and the negroes; and the

Idiots and Congressmen; and the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, the

Swedes, the French, the Chinamen, the Greasers; and the Catholics, the

Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, the Baptists, the

Spiritualists, the Mormons, the Shakers, the Quakers, the Jews, the

Campbellites, the infidels, the Christian Scientists, the Mind-Curists,

the Faith-Curists, the train-robbers, the White Caps, the Moonshiners.

And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the

soul of the people, the life of the people, the speech of the people; and

not anywhere else can these be had.  And the shadings of character,

manners, feelings, ambitions, will be infinite.



          "'The nature of a people' is always of a similar shade in its

          vices and its virtues, in its frivolities and in its labor.

          'It is this physiognomy which it is necessary to discover',

          and every document is good, from the hall of a casino to the

          church, from the foibles of a fashionable woman to the

          suggestions of a revolutionary leader.  I am therefore quite

          sure that this 'American soul', the principal interest and the

          great object of my voyage, appears behind the records of

          Newport for those who choose to see it."--M. Paul Bourget.



[The italics ('') are mine.]  It is a large contract which he has

undertaken.  "Records" is a pretty poor word there, but I think the use

of it is due to hasty translation.  In the original the word is 'fastes'.

I think M. Bourget meant to suggest that he expected to find the great

"American soul" secreted behind the ostentatious of Newport; and that he

was going to get it out and examine it, and generalize it, and

psychologize it, and make it reveal to him its hidden vast mystery: "the

nature of the people" of the United States of America.  We have been

accused of being a nation addicted to inventing wild schemes.  I trust

that we shall be allowed to retire to second place now.



There isn't a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled

"American."  There isn't a single human ambition, or religious trend,

or drift of thought, or peculiarity of education, or code of principles,

or breed of folly, or style of conversation, or preference for a

particular subject for discussion, or form of legs or trunk or head or

face or expression or complexion, or gait, or dress, or manners, or

disposition, or any other human detail, inside or outside, that can

rationally be generalized as "American."



Whenever you have found what seems to be an "American" peculiarity, you

have only to cross a frontier or two, or go down or up in the social

scale, and you perceive that it has disappeared.  And you can cross the

Atlantic and find it again.  There may be a Newport religious drift, or

sporting drift, or conversational style or complexion, or cut of face,

but there are entire empires in America, north, south, east, and west,

where you could not find your duplicates.  It is the same with everything

else which one might propose to call "American."  M. Bourget thinks he

has found the American Coquette.  If he had really found her he would

also have found, I am sure, that she was not new, that she exists in

other lands in the same forms, and with the same frivolous heart and the

same ways and impulses.  I think this because I have seen our coquette;

I have seen her in life; better still, I have seen her in our novels,

and seen her twin in foreign novels.  I wish M. Bourget had seen ours.

He thought he saw her.  And so he applied his System to her.  She was a

Species.  So he gathered a number of samples of what seemed to be her,

and put them under his glass, and divided them into groups which he calls

"types," and labeled them in his usual scientific way with "formulas"--

brief sharp descriptive flashes that make a person blink, sometimes, they

are so sudden and vivid.  As a rule they are pretty far-fetched, but that

is not an important matter; they surprise, they compel admiration, and I

notice by some of the comments which his efforts have called forth that

they deceive the unwary.  Here are a few of the coquette variants which

he has grouped and labeled:



     THE COLLECTOR.

     THE EQUILIBREE.

     THE PROFESSIONAL BEAUTY.

     THE BLUFFER.

     THE GIRL-BOY.



If he had stopped with describing these characters we should have been

obliged to believe that they exist; that they exist, and that he has seen

them and spoken with them.  But he did not stop there; he went further

and furnished to us light-throwing samples of their behavior, and also

light-throwing samples of their speeches.  He entered those things in his

note-book without suspicion, he takes them out and delivers them to the

world with a candor and simplicity which show that he believed them

genuine.  They throw altogether too much light.  They reveal to the

native the origin of his find.  I suppose he knows how he came to make

that novel and captivating discovery, by this time.  If he does not, any

American can tell him--any American to whom he will show his anecdotes.

It was "put up" on him, as we say.  It was a jest--to be plain, it was a

series of frauds.  To my mind it was a poor sort of jest, witless and

contemptible.  The players of it have their reward, such as it is; they

have exhibited the fact that whatever they may be they are not ladies.

M. Bourget did not discover a type of coquette; he merely discovered a

type of practical joker.  One may say the type of practical joker, for

these people are exactly alike all over the world.  Their equipment is

always the same: a vulgar mind, a puerile wit, a cruel disposition as a

rule, and always the spirit of treachery.



In his Chapter IV.  M. Bourget has two or three columns gravely devoted

to the collating and examining and psychologizing of these sorry little

frauds.  One is not moved to laugh.  There is nothing funny in the

situation; it is only pathetic.  The stranger gave those people his

confidence, and they dishonorably treated him in return.



But one must be allowed to suspect that M. Bourget was a little to blame

himself.  Even a practical joker has some little judgment.  He has to

exercise some degree of sagacity in selecting his prey if he would save

himself from getting into trouble.  In my time I have seldom seen such

daring things marketed at any price as these conscienceless folk have

worked off at par on this confiding observer.  It compels the conviction

that there was something about him that bred in those speculators a quite

unusual sense of safety, and encouraged them to strain their powers in

his behalf.  They seem to have satisfied themselves that all he wanted

was "significant" facts, and that he was not accustomed to examine the

source whence they proceeded.  It is plain that there was a sort of

conspiracy against him almost from the start--a conspiracy to freight him

up with all the strange extravagances those people's decayed brains could

invent.



The lengths to which they went are next to incredible.  They told him

things which surely would have excited any one else's suspicion, but they

did not excite his.  Consider this:



          "There is not in all the United States an entirely nude

          statue."



If an angel should come down and say such a thing about heaven, a

reasonably cautious observer would take that angel's number and inquire a

little further before he added it to his catch.  What does the present

observer do?  Adds it.  Adds it at once.  Adds it, and labels it with

this innocent comment:



          "This small fact is strangely significant."



It does seem to me that this kind of observing is defective.



Here is another curiosity which some liberal person made him a present

of.  I should think it ought to have disturbed the deep slumber of his

suspicion a little, but it didn't.  It was a note from a fog-horn for

strenuousness, it seems to me, but the doomed voyager did not catch it.

If he had but caught it, it would have saved him from several disasters:



          "If the American knows that you are traveling to take notes, he

          is interested in it, and at the same time rejoices in it, as in

          a tribute."



Again, this is defective observation.  It is human to like to be praised;

one can even notice it in the French.  But it is not human to like to be

ridiculed, even when it comes in the form of a "tribute."  I think a

little psychologizing ought to have come in there.  Something like this:

A dog does not like to be ridiculed, a redskin does not like to be

ridiculed, a negro does not like to be ridiculed, a Chinaman does not

like to be ridiculed; let us deduce from these significant facts this

formula: the American's grade being higher than these, and the chain-of

argument stretching unbroken all the way up to him, there is room for

suspicion that the person who said the American likes to be ridiculed,

and regards it as a tribute, is not a capable observer.



I feel persuaded that in the matter of psychologizing, a professional is

too apt to yield to the fascinations of the loftier regions of that great

art, to the neglect of its lowlier walks.  Every now and then, at half-

hour intervals, M.  Bourget collects a hatful of airy inaccuracies and

dissolves them in a panful of assorted abstractions, and runs the charge

into a mould and turns you out a compact principle which will explain an

American girl, or an American woman, or why new people yearn for old

things, or any other impossible riddle which a person wants answered.



It seems to be conceded that there are a few human peculiarities that can

be generalized and located here and there in the world and named by the

name of the nation where they are found.  I wonder what they are.

Perhaps one of them is temperament.  One speaks of French vivacity and

German gravity and English stubbornness.  There is no American

temperament.  The nearest that one can come at it is to say there are two

--the composed Northern and the impetuous Southern; and both are found in

other countries.  Morals?  Purity of women may fairly be called universal

with us, but that is the case in some other countries.  We have no

monopoly of it; it cannot be named American.  I think that there is but a

single specialty with us, only one thing that can be called by the wide

name "American."  That is the national devotion to ice-water.  All

Germans drink beer, but the British nation drinks beer, too; so neither

of those peoples is the beer-drinking nation.  I suppose we do stand

alone in having a drink that nobody likes but ourselves.  When we have

been a month in Europe we lose our craving for it, and we finally tell

the hotel folk that they needn't provide it any more.  Yet we hardly

touch our native shore again, winter or summer, before we are eager for

it.  The reasons for this state of things have not been psychologized

yet.  I drop the hint and say no more.



It is my belief that there are some "national" traits and things

scattered about the world that are mere superstitions, frauds that have

lived so long that they have the solid look of facts.  One of them is the

dogma that the French are the only chaste people in the world.  Ever

since I arrived in France this last time I have been accumulating doubts

about that; and before I leave this sunny land again I will gather in a

few random statistics and psychologize the plausibilities out of it.  If

people are to come over to America and find fault with our girls and our

women, and psychologize every little thing they do, and try to teach them

how to behave, and how to cultivate themselves up to where one cannot

tell them from the French model, I intend to find out whether those

missionaries are qualified or not.  A nation ought always to examine into

this detail before engaging the teacher for good.  This last one has let

fall a remark which renewed those doubts of mine when I read it:



          "In our high Parisian existence, for instance, we find applied

          to arts and luxury, and to debauchery, all the powers and all

          the weaknesses of the French soul."



You see, it amounts to a trade with the French soul; a profession;

a science; the serious business of life, so to speak, in our high

Parisian existence.  I do not quite like the look of it.  I question if

it can be taught with profit in our country, except, of course, to those

pathetic, neglected minds that are waiting there so yearningly for the

education which M.  Bourget is going to furnish them from the serene

summits of our high Parisian life.



I spoke a moment ago of the existence of some superstitions that have

been parading the world as facts this long time.  For instance, consider

the Dollar.  The world seems to think that the love of money is

"American"; and that the mad desire to get suddenly rich is "American."

I believe that both of these things are merely and broadly human, not

American monopolies at all.  The love of money is natural to all nations,

for money is a good and strong friend.  I think that this love has

existed everywhere, ever since the Bible called it the root of all evil.



I think that the reason why we Americans seem to be so addicted to trying

to get rich suddenly is merely because the opportunity to make promising

efforts in that direction has offered itself to us with a frequency out

of all proportion to the European experience.  For eighty years this

opportunity has been offering itself in one new town or region after

another straight westward, step by step, all the way from the Atlantic

coast to the Pacific.  When a mechanic could buy ten town lots on

tolerably long credit for ten months' savings out of his wages, and

reasonably expect to sell them in a couple of years for ten times what he

gave for them, it was human for him to try the venture, and he did it no

matter what his nationality was.  He would have done it in Europe or

China if he had had the same chance.



In the flush times in the silver regions a cook or any other humble

worker stood a very good chance to get rich out of a trifle of money

risked in a stock deal; and that person promptly took that risk, no

matter what his or her nationality might be.  I was there, and saw it.



But these opportunities have not been plenty in our Southern States; so

there you have a prodigious region where the rush for sudden wealth is

almost an unknown thing--and has been, from the beginning.



Europe has offered few opportunities for poor Tom, Dick, and Harry; but

when she has offered one, there has been no noticeable difference between

European eagerness and American.  England saw this in the wild days of

the Railroad King; France saw it in 1720--time of Law and the Mississippi

Bubble.  I am sure I have never seen in the gold and silver mines any

madness, fury, frenzy to get suddenly rich which was even remotely

comparable to that which raged in France in the Bubble day.  If I had a

cyclopaedia here I could turn to that memorable case, and satisfy nearly

anybody that the hunger for the sudden dollar is no more "American" than

it is French.  And if I could furnish an American opportunity to staid

Germany, I think I could wake her up like a house afire.



But I must return to the Generalizations, Psychologizings, Deductions.

When M. Bourget is exploiting these arts, it is then that he is

peculiarly and particularly himself.  His ways are wholly original when

he encounters a trait or a custom which is new to him.  Another person

would merely examine the find, verify it, estimate its value, and let it

go; but that is not sufficient for M. Bourget: he always wants to know

why that thing exists, he wants to know how it came to happen; and he

will not let go of it until he has found out.  And in every instance he

will find that reason where no one but himself would have thought of

looking for it.  He does not seem to care for a reason that is not

picturesquely located; one might almost say picturesquely and impossibly

located.



He found out that in America men do not try to hunt down young married

women.  At once, as usual, he wanted to know why.  Any one could have

told him.  He could have divined it by the lights thrown by the novels of

the country.  But no, he preferred to find out for himself.  He has a

trustfulness as regards men and facts which is fine and unusual; he is

not particular about the source of a fact, he is not particular about the

character and standing of the fact itself; but when it comes to pounding

out the reason for the existence of the fact, he will trust no one but

himself.



In the present instance here was his fact: American young married women

are not pursued by the corruptor; and here was the question:  What is it

that protects her?



It seems quite unlikely that that problem could have offered difficulties

to any but a trained philosopher.  Nearly any person would have said to

M. Bourget: "Oh, that is very simple.  It is very seldom in America that

a marriage is made on a commercial basis; our marriages, from the

beginning, have been made for love; and where love is there is no room

for the corruptor."



Now, it is interesting to see the formidable way in which M. Bourget went

at that poor, humble little thing.  He moved upon it in column--three

columns--and with artillery.



"Two reasons of a very different kind explain"--that fact.



And now that I have got so far, I am almost afraid to say what his two

reasons are, lest I be charged with inventing them.  But I will not

retreat now; I will condense them and print them, giving my word that I

am honest and not trying to deceive any one.



1.  Young married women are protected from the approaches of the seducer

in New England and vicinity by the diluted remains of a prudence created

by a Puritan law of two hundred years ago, which for a while punished

adultery with death.



2.  And young married women of the other forty or fifty States are

protected by laws which afford extraordinary facilities for divorce.



If I have not lost my mind I have accurately conveyed those two Vesuvian

irruptions of philosophy.  But the reader can consult Chapter IV. of

'Outre-Mer', and decide for himself.  Let us examine this paralyzing

Deduction or Explanation by the light of a few sane facts.



1.  This universality of "protection" has existed in our country from the

beginning; before the death penalty existed in New England, and during

all the generations that have dragged by since it was annulled.



2.  Extraordinary facilities for divorce are of such recent creation that

any middle-aged American can remember a time when such things had not yet

been thought of.



Let us suppose that the first easy divorce law went into effect forty

years ago, and got noised around and fairly started in business thirty-

five years ago, when we had, say, 25,000,000 of white population.  Let us

suppose that among 5,000,000 of them the young married women were

"protected" by the surviving shudder of that ancient Puritan scare--what

is M. Bourget going to do about those who lived among the 20,000,000?

They were clean in their morals, they were pure, yet there was no easy

divorce law to protect them.



Awhile ago I said that M.  Bourget's method of truth-seeking--hunting for

it in out-of-the-way places--was new; but that was an error.  I remember

that when Leverrier discovered the Milky Way, he and the other

astronomers began to theorize about it in substantially the same fashion

which M. Bourget employs in his seasonings about American social facts

and their origin.  Leverrier advanced the hypothesis that the Milky Way

was caused by gaseous protoplasmic emanations from the field of Waterloo,

which, ascending to an altitude determinable by their own specific

gravity, became luminous through the development and exposure--by the

natural processes of animal decay--of the phosphorus contained in them.



This theory was warmly complimented by Ptolemy, who, however, after much

thought and research, decided that he could not accept it as final.  His

own theory was that the Milky Way was an emigration of lightning bugs;

and he supported and reinforced this theorem by the well-known fact that

the locusts do like that in Egypt.



Giordano Bruno also was outspoken in his praises of Leverrier's important

contribution to astronomical science, and was at first inclined to regard

it as conclusive; but later, conceiving it to be erroneous, he pronounced

against it, and advanced the hypothesis that the Milky Way was a

detachment or corps of stars which became arrested and held in 'suspenso

suspensorum' by refraction of gravitation while on the march to join

their several constellations; a proposition for which he was afterwards

burned at the stake in Jacksonville, Illinois.



These were all brilliant and picturesque theories, and each was received

with enthusiasm by the scientific world; but when a New England farmer,

who was not a thinker, but only a plain sort of person who tried to

account for large facts in simple ways, came out with the opinion that

the Milky Way was just common, ordinary stars, and was put where it was

because God "wanted to hev it so," the admirable idea fell perfectly

flat.



As a literary artist, M. Bourget is as fresh and striking as he is as a

scientific one.  He says, "Above all, I do not believe much in

anecdotes."



Why?  "In history they are all false"--a sufficiently broad statement--

"in literature all libelous"--also a sufficiently sweeping statement,

coming from a critic who notes that we are a people who are peculiarly

extravagant in our language--" and when it is a matter of social life,

almost all biased."  It seems to amount to stultification, almost.  He

has built two or three breeds of American coquettes out of anecdotes--

mainly "biased" ones, I suppose; and, as they occur "in literature,"

furnished by his pen, they must be "all libelous."  Or did he mean not in

literature or anecdotes about literature or literary people?  I am not

able to answer that.  Perhaps the original would be clearer, but I have

only the translation of this installment by me.  I think the remark had

an intention; also that this intention was booked for the trip; but that

either in the hurry of the remark's departure it got left, or in the

confusion of changing cars at the translator's frontier it got side-

tracked.



"But on the other hand I believe in statistics; and those on divorces

appear to me to be most conclusive."  And he sets himself the task of

explaining--in a couple of columns--the process by which Easy-Divorce

conceived, invented, originated, developed, and perfected an empire-

embracing condition of sexual purity in the States.  IN 40 YEARS.  No, he

doesn't state the interval.  With all his passion for statistics he

forgot to ask how long it took to produce this gigantic miracle.



I have followed his pleasant but devious trail through those columns,

but I was not able to get hold of his argument and find out what it was.

I was not even able to find out where it left off.  It seemed to

gradually dissolve and flow off into other matters.  I followed it with

interest, for I was anxious to learn how easy-divorce eradicated adultery

in America, but I was disappointed; I have no idea yet how it did it.

I only know it didn't.  But that is not valuable; I knew it before.



Well, humor is the great thing, the saving thing, after all.  The minute

it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and

resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.  And so,

when M. Bourget said that bright thing about our grandfathers, I broke

all up.  I remember exploding its American countermine once, under that

grand hero, Napoleon.  He was only First Consul then, and I was Consul-

General--for the United States, of course; but we were very intimate,

notwithstanding the difference in rank, for I waived that.  One day

something offered the opening, and he said:



"Well, General, I suppose life can never get entirely dull to an

American, because whenever he can't strike up any other way to put in his

time he can always get away with a few years trying to find out who his

grandfather was!"



I fairly shouted, for I had never heard it sound better; and then I was

back at him as quick as a flash--"Right, your Excellency!  But I reckon

a Frenchman's got his little stand-by for a dull time, too; because when

all other interests fail he can turn in and see if he can't find out who

his father was!"



Well, you should have heard him just whoop, and cackle, and carry on!

He reached up and hit me one on the shoulder, and says:



"Land, but it's good!  It's im-mensely good!  I'George, I never heard it

said so good in my life before!  Say it again."



So I said it again, and he said his again, and I said mine again, and

then he did, and then I did, and then he did, and we kept on doing it,

and doing it, and I never had such a good time, and he said the same.

In my opinion there isn't anything that is as killing as one of those

dear old ripe pensioners if you know how to snatch it out in a kind of

a fresh sort of original way.



But I wish M. Bourget had read more of our novels before he came.  It is

the only way to thoroughly understand a people.  When I found I was

coming to Paris, I read 'La Terre'.













A LITTLE NOTE TO M. PAUL BOURGET



          [The preceding squib was assailed in the North American Review

          in an article entitled "Mark Twain and Paul Bourget," by Max

          O'Rell.  The following little note is a Rejoinder to that

          article.  It is possible that the position assumed here--that

          M. Bourget dictated the O'Rell article himself--is untenable.]



You have every right, my dear M. Bourget, to retort upon me by dictation,

if you prefer that method to writing at me with your pen; but if I may

say it without hurt--and certainly I mean no offence--I believe you would

have acquitted yourself better with the pen.  With the pen you are at

home; it is your natural weapon; you use it with grace, eloquence, charm,

persuasiveness, when men are to be convinced, and with formidable effect

when they have earned a castigation.  But I am sure I see signs in the

above article that you are either unaccustomed to dictating or are out of

practice.  If you will re-read it you will notice, yourself, that it

lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that

it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it

wanders around; that it loses itself early and does not find itself any

more.  There are some other defects, as you will notice, but I think I

have named the main ones.  I feel sure that they are all due to your lack

of practice in dictating.



Inasmuch as you had not signed it I had the impression at first that you

had not dictated it.  But only for a moment.  Certain quite simple and

definite facts reminded me that the article had to come from you, for the

reason that it could not come from any one else without a specific

invitation from you or from me.  I mean, it could not except as an

intrusion, a transgression of the law which forbids strangers to mix into

a private dispute between friends, unasked.



Those simple and definite facts were these: I had published an article in

this magazine, with you for my subject; just you yourself; I stuck

strictly to that one subject, and did not interlard any other.  No one,

of course, could call me to account but you alone, or your authorized

representative.  I asked some questions--asked them of myself.

I answered them myself.  My article was thirteen pages long, and all

devoted to you; devoted to you, and divided up in this way: one page of

guesses as to what subjects you would instruct us in, as teacher; one

page of doubts as to the effectiveness of your method of examining us and

our ways; two or three pages of criticism of your method, and of certain

results which it furnished you; two or three pages of attempts to show

the justness of these same criticisms; half a dozen pages made up of

slight fault-findings with certain minor details of your literary

workmanship, of extracts from your 'Outre-Mer' and comments upon them;

then I closed with an anecdote.  I repeat--for certain reasons--that I

closed with an anecdote.



When I was asked by this magazine if I wished to "answer" a "reply" to

that article of mine, I said "yes," and waited in Paris for the proof-

sheets of the "reply" to come.  I already knew, by the cablegram, that

the "reply" would not be signed by you, but upon reflection I knew it

would be dictated by you, because no volunteer would feel himself at

liberty to assume your championship in a private dispute, unasked, in

view of the fact that you are quite well able to take care of your

matters of that sort yourself and are not in need of any one's help.

No, a volunteer could not make such a venture.  It would be too immodest.

Also too gratuitously generous.  And a shade too self-sufficient.  No,

he could not venture it.  It would look too much like anxiety to get in

at a feast where no plate had been provided for him.  In fact he could

not get in at all, except by the back way, and with a false key; that is

to say, a pretext--a pretext invented for the occasion by putting into my

mouth words which I did not use, and by wresting sayings of mine from

their plain and true meaning.  Would he resort to methods like those to

get in?  No; there are no people of that kind.  So then I knew for a

certainty that you dictated the Reply yourself.  I knew you did it to

save yourself manual labor.



And you had the right, as I have already said and I am content--perfectly

content.



Yet it would have been little trouble to you, and a great kindness to me,

if you had written your Reply all out with your own capable hand.



Because then it would have replied--and that is really what a Reply is

for.  Broadly speaking, its function is to refute--as you will easily

concede.  That leaves something for the other person to take hold of:

he has a chance to reply to the Reply, he has a chance to refute the

refutation.  This would have happened if you had written it out instead

of dictating.  Dictating is nearly sure to unconcentrate the dictator's

mind, when he is out of practice, confuse him, and betray him into using

one set of literary rules when he ought to use a quite different set.

Often it betrays him into employing the RULES FOR CONVERSATION BETWEEN A

SHOUTER AND A DEAF PERSON--as in the present case--when he ought to

employ the RULES FOR CONDUCTING DISCUSSION WITH A FAULT-FINDER.  The

great foundation-rule and basic principle of discussion with a fault-

finder is relevancy and concentration upon the subject; whereas the great

foundation-rule and basic principle governing conversation between a

shouter and a deaf person is irrelevancy and persistent desertion of the

topic in hand.  If I may be allowed to illustrate by quoting example IV.,

section from chapter ix. of "Revised Rules for Conducting Conversation

between a Shouter and a Deaf Person," it will assist us in getting a

clear idea of the difference between the two sets of rules:



Shouter.  Did you say his name is WETHERBY?



Deaf Person.  Change?  Yes, I think it will.  Though if it should clear

off I--



Shouter.  It's his NAME I want--his NAME.



Deaf Person.  Maybe so, maybe so; but it will only be a shower, I think.



Shouter.  No, no, no!--you have quite misunderSTOOD me.  If--



Deaf Person.  Ah!  GOOD morning; I am sorry you must go.  But call again,

and let me continue to be of assistance to you in every way I can.





You see it is a perfect kodak of the article you have dictated.  It is

really curious and interesting when you come to compare it with yours;

in detail, with my former article to which it is a Reply in your hand.

I talk twelve pages about your American instruction projects, and your

doubtful scientific system, and your painstaking classification of

nonexistent things, and your diligence and zeal and sincerity, and your

disloyal attitude towards anecdotes, and your undue reverence for unsafe

statistics and far facts that lack a pedigree; and you turn around and

come back at me with eight pages of weather.



I do not see how a person can act so.  It is good of you to repeat, with

change of language, in the bulk of your rejoinder, so much of my own

article, and adopt my sentiments, and make them over, and put new buttons

on; and I like the compliment, and am frank to say so; but agreeing with

a person cripples controversy and ought not to be allowed.  It is

weather; and of almost the worst sort.  It pleases me greatly to hear you

discourse with such approval and expansiveness upon my text:



"A foreigner can photograph the exteriors of a nation, but I think that

is as far as he can get.  I think that no foreigner can report its

interior;"--[And you say: "A man of average intelligence, who has passed

six months among a people, cannot express opinions that are worth jotting

down, but he can form impressions that are worth repeating.  For my part,

I think that foreigners' impressions are more interesting than native

opinions.  After all, such impressions merely mean 'how the country

struck the foreigner.'"]--which is a quite clear way of saying that a

foreigner's report is only valuable when it restricts itself to

impressions.  It pleases me to have you follow my lead in that glowing

way, but it leaves me nothing to combat.  You should give me something to

deny and refute; I would do as much for you.



It pleases me to have you playfully warn the public against taking one of

your books seriously.--[When I published Jonathan and his Continent, I

wrote in a preface addressed to Jonathan: "If ever you should insist in

seeing in this little volume a serious study of your country and of your

countrymen, I warn you that your world-wide fame for humor will be

exploded."]--Because I used to do that cunning thing myself in earlier

days.  I did it in a prefatory note to a book of mine called Tom Sawyer.





                                 NOTICE.



Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted;

persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons

attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

                              BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

                              PER G. G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.





The kernel is the same in both prefaces, you see--the public must not

take us too seriously.  If we remove that kernel we remove the life-

principle, and the preface is a corpse.  Yes, it pleases me to have you

use that idea, for it is a high compliment.  But is leaves me nothing to

combat; and that is damage to me.



Am I seeming to say that your Reply is not a reply at all, M. Bourget?

If so, I must modify that; it is too sweeping.  For you have furnished a

general answer to my inquiry as to what France through you--can teach us.

--["What could France teach America!" exclaims Mark Twain.  France can

teach America all the higher pursuits of life, and there is more artistic

feeling and refinement in a street of French workingmen than in many

avenues inhabited by American millionaires.  She can teach her, not

perhaps how to work, but how to rest, how to live, how to be happy.

She can teach her that the aim of life is not money-making, but that

money-making is only a means to obtain an end.  She can teach her that

wives are not expensive toys, but useful partners, friends, and

confidants, who should always keep men under their wholesome influence by

their diplomacy, their tact, their common-sense, without bumptiousness.

These qualities, added to the highest standard of morality (not angular

and morose, but cheerful morality), are conceded to Frenchwomen by

whoever knows something of French life outside of the Paris boulevards,

and Mark Twain's ill-natured sneer cannot even so much as stain them.



I might tell Mark Twain that in France a man who was seen tipsy in his

club would immediately see his name canceled from membership.  A man who

had settled his fortune on his wife to avoid meeting his creditors would

be refused admission into any decent society.  Many a Frenchman has blown

his brains out rather than declare himself a bankrupt.  Now would Mark

Twain remark to this: 'An American is not such a fool: when a creditor

stands in his way he closes his doors, and reopens them the following

day.  When he has been a bankrupt three times he can retire from

business?']--It is a good answer.



It relates to manners, customs, and morals--three things concerning which

we can never have exhaustive and determinate statistics, and so the

verdicts delivered upon them must always lack conclusiveness and be

subject to revision; but you have stated the truth, possibly, as nearly

as any one could do it, in the circumstances.  But why did you choose a

detail of my question which could be answered only with vague hearsay

evidence, and go right by one which could have been answered with deadly

facts?--facts in everybody's reach, facts which none can dispute.

I asked what France could teach us about government.  I laid myself

pretty wide open, there; and I thought I was handsomely generous, too,

when I did it.  France can teach us how to levy village and city taxes

which distribute the burden with a nearer approach to perfect fairness

than is the case in any other land; and she can teach us the wisest and

surest system of collecting them that exists.  She can teach us how to

elect a President in a sane way; and also how to do it without throwing

the country into earthquakes and convulsions that cripple and embarrass

business, stir up party hatred in the hearts of men, and make peaceful

people wish the term extended to thirty years.  France can teach us--but

enough of that part of the question.  And what else can France teach us?

She can teach us all the fine arts--and does.  She throws open her

hospitable art academies, and says to us, "Come"--and we come, troops and

troops of our young and gifted; and she sets over us the ablest masters

in the world and bearing the greatest names; and she, teaches us all that

we are capable of learning, and persuades us and encourages us with

prizes and honors, much as if we were somehow children of her own; and

when this noble education is finished and we are ready to carry it home

and spread its gracious ministries abroad over our nation, and we come

with homage and gratitude and ask France for the bill--there is nothing

to pay.  And in return for this imperial generosity, what does America

do?  She charges a duty on French works of art!



I wish I had your end of this dispute; I should have something worth

talking about.  If you would only furnish me something to argue,

something to refute--but you persistently won't.  You leave good chances

unutilized and spend your strength in proving and establishing

unimportant things.  For instance, you have proven and established these

eight facts here following--a good score as to number, but not worth

while:



Mark Twain is--



1.  "Insulting."



2.  (Sarcastically speaking) "This refined humor, 1st."



3.  Prefers the manure-pile to the violets.



4.  Has uttered "an ill-natured sneer."



5.  Is "nasty."



6.  Needs a "lesson in politeness and good manners."



7.  Has published a "nasty article."



8.  Has made remarks "unworthy of a gentleman."--["It is more funny than

his" (Mark Twain's) "anecdote, and would have been less insulting."



A quoted remark of mine "is a gross insult to a nation friendly to

America."



"He has read La Terre, this refined humorist."



"When Mark Twain visits a garden .  .  .  he goes in the far-away comer

where the soil is prepared."



"Mark Twain's ill-natured sneer cannot so much as stain them" (the

Frenchwomen).



"When he" (Mark Twain) "takes his revenge he is unkind, unfair, bitter,

nasty."



"But not even your nasty article on my country, Mark," etc.



"Mark might certainly have derived from it "(M. Bourget's book)" a lesson

in politeness and good manners."



A quoted remark of mine is "unworthy of a gentleman."]--



These are all true, but really they are not valuable; no one cares much

for such finds.  In our American magazines we recognize this and suppress

them.  We avoid naming them.  American writers never allow themselves to

name them.  It would look as if they were in a temper, and we hold that

exhibitions of temper in public are not good form except in the very

young and inexperienced.  And even if we had the disposition to name

them, in order to fill up a gap when we were short of ideas and

arguments, our magazines would not allow us to do it, because they think

that such words sully their pages.  This present magazine is particularly

strenuous about it.  Its note to me announcing the forwarding of your

proof-sheets to France closed thus--for your protection:



"It is needless to ask you to avoid anything that he might consider as

personal."



It was well enough, as a measure of precaution, but really it was not

needed.  You can trust me implicitly, M. Bourget; I shall never call you

any names in print which I should be ashamed to call you with your

unoffending and dearest ones present.



Indeed, we are reserved, and particular in America to a degree which you

would consider exaggerated.  For instance, we should not write notes like

that one of yours to a lady for a small fault--or a large one.--[When M.

Paul Bourget indulges in a little chaffing at the expense of the

Americans, "who can always get away with a few years' trying to find out

who their grandfathers were,"] he merely makes an allusion to an American

foible; but, forsooth, what a kind man, what a humorist Mark Twain is

when he retorts by calling France a nation of bastards!  How the

Americans of culture and refinement will admire him for thus speaking in

their name!



Snobbery .  .  .  .  I could give Mark Twain an example of the American

specimen.  It is a piquant story.  I never published it because I feared

my readers might think that I was giving them a typical illustration of

American character instead of a rare exception.



I was once booked by my manager to give a causerie in the drawing-room of

a New York millionaire.  I accepted with reluctance.  I do not like

private engagements.  At five o'clock on the day the causerie was to be

given, the lady sent to my manager to say that she would expect me to

arrive at nine o'clock and to speak for about an hour.  Then she wrote a

postscript.  Many women are unfortunate there.  Their minds are full of

after-thoughts, and the most important part of their letters is generally

to be found after their signature.  This lady's P. S. ran thus: "I

suppose be will not expect to be entertained after the lecture."



I fairly shorted, as Mark Twain would say, and then, indulging myself in

a bit of snobbishness, I was back at her as quick as a flash:



"Dear Madam: As a literary man of some reputation, I have many times had

the pleasure of being entertained by the members of the old aristocracy

of France.  I have also many times had the pleasure of being entertained

by the members of the old aristocracy of England.  If it may interest

you, I can even tell you that I have several times had the honor of being

entertained by royalty; but my ambition has never been so wild as to

expect that one day I might be entertained by the aristocracy of New

York.  No, I do not expect to be entertained by you, nor do I want you to

expect me to entertain you and your friends to-night, for I decline to

keep the engagement."



Now, I could fill a book on America with reminiscences of this sort,

adding a few chapters on bosses and boodlers, on New York 'chronique

scandaleuse', on the tenement houses of the large cities, on the

gambling-hells of Denver, and the dens of San Francisco, and what not!

But not even your nasty article on my country, Mark, will make me do

it.]--We should not think it kind.  No matter how much we might have

associated with kings and nobilities, we should not think it right to

crush her with it and make her ashamed of her lowlier walk in life; for

we have a saying, "Who humiliates my mother includes his own."



Do I seriously imagine you to be the author of that strange letter,

M. Bourget?  Indeed I do not.  I believe it to have been surreptitiously

inserted by your amanuensis when your back was turned.  I think he did it

with a good motive, expecting it to add force and piquancy to your

article, but it does not reflect your nature, and I know it will grieve

you when you see it.  I also think he interlarded many other things which

you will disapprove of when you see them.  I am certain that all the

harsh names discharged at me come from him, not you.  No doubt you could

have proved me entitled to them with as little trouble as it has cost him

to do it, but it would have been your disposition to hunt game of a

higher quality.



Why, I even doubt if it is you who furnish me all that excellent

information about Balzac and those others.--["Now the style of M.

Bourget and many other French writers is apparently a closed letter to

Mark Twain; but let us leave that alone.  Has he read Erckmann-Chatrian,

Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Edmond About, Cherbuliez, Renan?  Has he read

Gustave Droz's 'Monsieur, Madame, et Bebe', and those books which leave

for a long time a perfume about you?  Has he read the novels of Alexandre

Dumas, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and Balzac?  Has be read Victor Hugo's

'Les Miserables' and 'Notre Dame de Paris'?  Has he read or heard the

plays of Sandeau, Augier, Dumas, and Sardou, the works of those Titans of

modern literature, whose names will be household words all over the world

for hundreds of years to come?  He has read La Terre--this kind-hearted,

refined humorist!  When Mark Twain visits a garden does he smell the

violets, the roses, the jasmine, or the honeysuckle?  No, he goes in the

far-away comer where the soil is prepared.  Hear what he says: 'I wish M.

Paul Bourget had read more of our novels before he came.  It is the only

way to thoroughly understand a people.  When I found I was coming to

Paris I read La Terre.'"]--All this in simple justice to you--and to me;

for, to gravely accept those interlardings as yours would be to wrong

your head and heart, and at the same time convict myself of being

equipped with a vacancy where my penetration ought to be lodged.



And now finally I must uncover the secret pain, the wee sore from which

the Reply grew--the anecdote which closed my recent article--and consider

how it is that this pimple has spread to these cancerous dimensions.

If any but you had dictated the Reply, M. Bourget, I would know that that

anecdote was twisted around and its intention magnified some hundreds of

times, in order that it might be used as a pretext to creep in the back

way.  But I accuse you of nothing--nothing but error.  When you say that

I "retort by calling France a nation of bastards," it is an error.  And

not a small one, but a large one.  I made no such remark, nor anything

resembling it.  Moreover, the magazine would not have allowed me to use

so gross a word as that.



You told an anecdote.  A funny one--I admit that.  It hit a foible of our

American aristocracy, and it stung me--I admit that; it stung me sharply.

It was like this: You found some ancient portraits of French kings in the

gallery of one of our aristocracy, and you said:



"He has the Grand Monarch, but where is the portrait of his grandfather?"

That is, the American aristocrat's grandfather.



Now that hits only a few of us, I grant--just the upper crust only--but

it hits exceedingly hard.



I wondered if there was any way of getting back at you.  In one of your

chapters I found this chance:



"In our high Parisian existence, for instance, we find applied to arts

and luxury, and to debauchery, all the powers and all the weaknesses of

the French soul."



You see?  Your "higher Parisian" class--not everybody, not the nation,

but only the top crust of the Ovation--applies to debauchery all the

powers of its soul.



I argued to myself that that energy must produce results.  So I built an

anecdote out of your remark.  In it I make Napoleon Bonaparte say to me--

but see for yourself the anecdote (ingeniously clipped and curtailed) in

paragraph eleven of your Reply.--[So, I repeat, Mark Twain does not like

M. Paul Bourget's book.  So long as he makes light fun of the great

French writer he is at home, he is pleasant, he is the American humorist

we know.  When he takes his revenge (and where is the reason for taking a

revenge?) he is unkind, unfair, bitter, nasty.



For example:

See his answer to a Frenchman who jokingly remarks to him:



"I suppose life can never get entirely dull to an American, because

whenever he can't strike up any other way to put in his time, he can

always get away with a few years trying to find out who his grandfather

was."



Hear the answer:



"I reckon a Frenchman's got his little standby for a dull time, too;

because when all other interests fail, he can turn in and see if he can't

find out who his father was."



The first remark is a good-humored bit of chaffing on American snobbery.

I may be utterly destitute of humor, but I call the second remark a

gratuitous charge of immorality hurled at the French women--a remark

unworthy of a man who has the ear of the public, unworthy of a gentleman,

a gross insult to a nation friendly to America, a nation that helped Mark

Twain's ancestors in their struggle for liberty, a nation where to-day it

is enough to say that you are American to see every door open wide to

you.



If Mark Twain was hard up in search of, a French "chestnut," I might have

told him the following little anecdote.  It is more funny than his, and

would have been less insulting: Two little street boys are abusing each

other.  "Ah, hold your tongue," says one, "you ain't got no father."



"Ain't got no father!" replies the other; "I've got more fathers than

you."]



Now, then, your anecdote about the grandfathers hurt me.  Why?  Because

it had a point.  It wouldn't have hurt me if it hadn't had point.  You

wouldn't have wasted space on it if it hadn't had point.



My anecdote has hurt you.  Why?  Because it had point, I suppose.  It

wouldn't have hurt you if it hadn't had point.  I judged from your remark

about the diligence and industry of the high Parisian upper crust that it

would have some point, but really I had no idea what a gold-mine I had

struck.  I never suspected that the point was going to stick into the

entire nation; but of course you know your nation better than I do, and

if you think it punctures them all, I have to yield to your judgment.

But you are to blame, your own self.  Your remark misled me.  I supposed

the industry was confined to that little unnumerous upper layer.



Well, now that the unfortunate thing has been done, let us do what we can

to undo it.  There must be a way, M.  Bourget, and I am willing to do

anything that will help; for I am as sorry as you can be yourself.



I will tell you what I think will be the very thing.



We will swap anecdotes.  I will take your anecdote and you take mine.  I

will say to the dukes and counts and princes of the ancient nobility of

France:



"Ha, ha! You must have a pretty hard time trying to find out who your

grandfathers were?"



They will merely smile indifferently and not feel hurt, because they can

trace their lineage back through centuries.



And you will hurl mine at every individual in the American nation,

saying:



"And you must have a pretty hard time trying to find out who your fathers

were."  They will merely smile indifferently, and not feel hurt, because

they haven't any difficulty in finding their fathers.



Do you get the idea?  The whole harm in the anecdotes is in the point,

you see; and when we swap them around that way, they haven't any.



That settles it perfectly and beautifully, and I am glad I thought of it.

I am very glad indeed, M. Bourget; for it was just that little wee thing

that caused the whole difficulty and made you dictate the Reply, and your

amanuensis call me all those hard names which the magazines dislike so.

And I did it all in fun, too, trying to cap your funny anecdote with

another one--on the give-and-take principle, you know--which is American.

I didn't know that with the French it was all give and no take, and you

didn't tell me.  But now that I have made everything comfortable again,

and fixed both anecdotes so they can never have any point any more, I

know you will forgive me.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Essays on Paul Bourget

by Mark Twain













TOM SAWYER ABROAD



CHAPTER I.

TOM SEEKS NEW ADVENTURES



DO you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all

them adventures? I mean the adventures we had

down the river, and the time we set the darky Jim free

and Tom got shot in the leg. No, he wasn't. It only

just p'isoned him for more. That was all the effect it

had. You see, when we three came back up the river

in glory, as you may say, from that long travel, and

the village received us with a torchlight procession and

speeches, and everybody hurrah'd and shouted, it

made us heroes, and that was what Tom Sawyer had

always been hankering to be.



For a while he WAS satisfied. Everybody made

much of him, and he tilted up his nose and stepped

around the town as though he owned it. Some called

him Tom Sawyer the Traveler, and that just swelled

him up fit to bust. You see he laid over me and Jim

considerable, because we only went down the river on

a raft and came back by the steamboat, but Tom went

by the steamboat both ways. The boys envied me and

Jim a good deal, but land! they just knuckled to the

dirt before TOM.



Well, I don't know; maybe he might have been

satisfied if it hadn't been for old Nat Parsons, which

was postmaster, and powerful long and slim, and kind

o' good-hearted and silly, and bald-headed, on account

of his age, and about the talkiest old cretur I ever see.

For as much as thirty years he'd been the only man in

the village that had a reputation -- I mean a reputation

for being a traveler, and of course he was mortal proud

of it, and it was reckoned that in the course of that

thirty years he had told about that journey over a

million times and enjoyed it every time. And now

comes along a boy not quite fifteen, and sets everybody

admiring and gawking over HIS travels, and it just give

the poor old man the high strikes. It made him sick

to listen to Tom, and to hear the people say "My

land!" "Did you ever!" "My goodness sakes

alive!" and all such things; but he couldn't pull away

from it, any more than a fly that's got its hind leg fast

in the molasses. And always when Tom come to a

rest, the poor old cretur would chip in on HIS same old

travels and work them for all they were worth; but

they were pretty faded, and didn't go for much, and it

was pitiful to see. And then Tom would take another

innings, and then the old man again -- and so on, and

so on, for an hour and more, each trying to beat out

the other.



You see, Parsons' travels happened like this: When

he first got to be postmaster and was green in the busi-

ness, there come a letter for somebody he didn't know,

and there wasn't any such person in the village. Well,

he didn't know what to do, nor how to act, and there

the letter stayed and stayed, week in and week out, till

the bare sight of it gave him a conniption. The postage

wasn't paid on it, and that was another thing to worry

about. There wasn't any way to collect that ten cents,

and he reckon'd the gov'ment would hold him respon-

sible for it and maybe turn him out besides, when they

found he hadn't collected it. Well, at last he couldn't

stand it any longer. He couldn't sleep nights, he

couldn't eat, he was thinned down to a shadder, yet

he da'sn't ask anybody's advice, for the very person

he asked for advice might go back on him and let the

gov'ment know about the letter. He had the letter

buried under the floor, but that did no good; if he

happened to see a person standing over the place it'd

give him the cold shivers, and loaded him up with

suspicions, and he would sit up that night till the town

was still and dark, and then he would sneak there and

get it out and bury it in another place. Of course,

people got to avoiding him and shaking their heads

and whispering, because, the way he was looking and

acting, they judged he had killed somebody or done

something terrible, they didn't know what, and if he

had been a stranger they would've lynched him.



Well, as I was saying, it got so he couldn't stand it

any longer; so he made up his mind to pull out for

Washington, and just go to the President of the United

States and make a clean breast of the whole thing, not

keeping back an atom, and then fetch the letter out and

lay it before the whole gov'ment, and say, "Now,

there she is -- do with me what you're a mind to;

though as heaven is my judge I am an innocent man

and not deserving of the full penalties of the law and

leaving behind me a family that must starve and yet

hadn't had a thing to do with it, which is the whole

truth and I can swear to it."



So he did it. He had a little wee bit of steamboat-

ing, and some stage-coaching, but all the rest of the

way was horseback, and it took him three weeks to get

to Washington. He saw lots of land and lots of vil-

lages and four cities. He was gone 'most eight weeks,

and there never was such a proud man in the village as

he when he got back. His travels made him the greatest

man in all that region, and the most talked about; and

people come from as much as thirty miles back in the

country, and from over in the Illinois bottoms, too,

just to look at him -- and there they'd stand and gawk,

and he'd gabble. You never see anything like it.



Well, there wasn't any way now to settle which was

the greatest traveler; some said it was Nat, some said

it was Tom. Everybody allowed that Nat had seen

the most longitude, but they had to give in that what-

ever Tom was short in longitude he had made up in

latitude and climate. It was about a stand-off; so both

of them had to whoop up their dangerous adventures,

and try to get ahead THAT way. That bullet-wound in

Tom's leg was a tough thing for Nat Parsons to buck

against, but he bucked the best he could; and at a

disadvantage, too, for Tom didn't set still as he'd orter

done, to be fair, but always got up and sauntered

around and worked his limp while Nat was painting up

the adventure that HE had in Washington; for Tom

never let go that limp when his leg got well, but prac-

ticed it nights at home, and kept it good as new right

along.



Nat's adventure was like this; I don't know how

true it is; maybe he got it out of a paper, or some-

where, but I will say this for him, that he DID know

how to tell it. He could make anybody's flesh crawl,

and he'd turn pale and hold his breath when he told

it, and sometimes women and girls got so faint they

couldn't stick it out. Well, it was this way, as near as

I can remember:



He come a-loping into Washington, and put up his

horse and shoved out to the President's house with his

letter, and they told him the President was up to the

Capitol, and just going to start for Philadelphia -- not

a minute to lose if he wanted to catch him. Nat 'most

dropped, it made him so sick. His horse was put up,

and he didn't know what to do. But just then along

comes a darky driving an old ramshackly hack, and he

see his chance. He rushes out and shouts: "A half a

dollar if you git me to the Capitol in half an hour, and

a quarter extra if you do it in twenty minutes!"



"Done!" says the darky.



Nat he jumped in and slammed the door, and away

they went a-ripping and a-tearing over the roughest

road a body ever see, and the racket of it was some-

thing awful. Nat passed his arms through the loops

and hung on for life and death, but pretty soon the

hack hit a rock and flew up in the air, and the bottom

fell out, and when it come down Nat's feet was on the

ground, and he see he was in the most desperate danger

if he couldn't keep up with the hack. He was horrible

scared, but he laid into his work for all he was worth,

and hung tight to the arm-loops and made his legs

fairly fly. He yelled and shouted to the driver to

stop, and so did the crowds along the street, for they

could see his legs spinning along under the coach, and

his head and shoulders bobbing inside through the

windows, and he was in awful danger; but the more

they all shouted the more the nigger whooped and

yelled and lashed the horses and shouted, "Don't you

fret, I'se gwine to git you dah in time, boss; I's gwine

to do it, sho'!" for you see he thought they were all

hurrying him up, and, of course, he couldn't hear any-

thing for the racket he was making. And so they went

ripping along, and everybody just petrified to see it;

and when they got to the Capitol at last it was the

quickest trip that ever was made, and everybody said

so. The horses laid down, and Nat dropped, all tuck-

ered out, and he was all dust and rags and barefooted;

but he was in time and just in time, and caught the

President and give him the letter, and everything was

all right, and the President give him a free pardon on

the spot, and Nat give the nigger two extra quarters

instead of one, because he could see that if he hadn't

had the hack he wouldn't'a' got there in time, nor

anywhere near it.



It WAS a powerful good adventure, and Tom Sawyer

had to work his bullet-wound mighty lively to hold his

own against it.



Well, by and by Tom's glory got to paling down

gradu'ly, on account of other things turning up for the

people to talk about -- first a horse-race, and on top of

that a house afire, and on top of that the circus, and

on top of that the eclipse; and that started a revival,

same as it always does, and by that time there wasn't

any more talk about Tom, so to speak, and you never

see a person so sick and disgusted.



Pretty soon he got to worrying and fretting right

along day in and day out, and when I asked him what

WAS he in such a state about, he said it 'most broke his

heart to think how time was slipping away, and him

getting older and older, and no wars breaking out and

no way of making a name for himself that he could

see. Now that is the way boys is always thinking, but

he was the first one I ever heard come out and say it.



So then he set to work to get up a plan to make him

celebrated; and pretty soon he struck it, and offered to

take me and Jim in. Tom Sawyer was always free and

generous that way. There's a-plenty of boys that's

mighty good and friendly when YOU'VE got a good

thing, but when a good thing happens to come their

way they don't say a word to you, and try to hog it

all. That warn't ever Tom Sawyer's way, I can say

that for him. There's plenty of boys that will come

hankering and groveling around you when you've got

an apple and beg the core off of you; but when they've

got one, and you beg for the core and remind them

how you give them a core one time, they say thank

you 'most to death, but there ain't a-going to be no

core. But I notice they always git come up with; all

you got to do is to wait.



Well, we went out in the woods on the hill, and Tom

told us what it was. It was a crusade.



"What's a crusade?" I says.



He looked scornful, the way he's always done when

he was ashamed of a person, and says:



"Huck Finn, do you mean to tell me you don't

know what a crusade is?"



"No," says I, "I don't. And I don't care to,

nuther. I've lived till now and done without it, and

had my health, too. But as soon as you tell me, I'll

know, and that's soon enough. I don't see any use in

finding out things and clogging up my head with them

when I mayn't ever have any occasion to use 'em.

There was Lance Williams, he learned how to talk

Choctaw here till one come and dug his grave for him.

Now, then, what's a crusade? But I can tell you one

thing before you begin; if it's a patent-right, there's

no money in it. Bill Thompson he --"



"Patent-right!" says he. "I never see such an

idiot. Why, a crusade is a kind of war."



I thought he must be losing his mind. But no, he

was in real earnest, and went right on, perfectly

ca'm.



"A crusade is a war to recover the Holy Land from

the paynim."



"Which Holy Land?"



"Why, the Holy Land -- there ain't but one."



"What do we want of it?"



"Why, can't you understand? It's in the hands of

the paynim, and it's our duty to take it away from

them."



"How did we come to let them git hold of it?"



"We didn't come to let them git hold of it. They

always had it."



"Why, Tom, then it must belong to them, don't it?"



"Why of course it does. Who said it didn't?"



I studied over it, but couldn't seem to git at the

right of it, no way. I says:



"It's too many for me, Tom Sawyer. If I had a

farm and it was mine, and another person wanted it,

would it be right for him to --"



"Oh, shucks! you don't know enough to come in

when it rains, Huck Finn. It ain't a farm, it's entirely

different. You see, it's like this. They own the land,

just the mere land, and that's all they DO own; but it

was our folks, our Jews and Christians, that made it

holy, and so they haven't any business to be there

defiling it. It's a shame, and we ought not to stand it

a minute. We ought to march against them and take

it away from them."



"Why, it does seem to me it's the most mixed-up

thing I ever see! Now, if I had a farm and another

person --"



"Don't I tell you it hasn't got anything to do with

farming? Farming is business, just common low-down

business: that's all it is, it's all you can say for it; but

this is higher, this is religious, and totally different."



"Religious to go and take the land away from

people that owns it?"



"Certainly; it's always been considered so."



Jim he shook his head, and says:



"Mars Tom, I reckon dey's a mistake about it

somers -- dey mos' sholy is. I's religious myself, en

I knows plenty religious people, but I hain't run across

none dat acts like dat."



It made Tom hot, and he says:



"Well, it's enough to make a body sick, such

mullet-headed ignorance! If either of you'd read any-

thing about history, you'd know that Richard Cur de

Loon, and the Pope, and Godfrey de Bulleyn, and lots

more of the most noble-hearted and pious people in

the world, hacked and hammered at the paynims for

more than two hundred years trying to take their land

away from them, and swum neck-deep in blood the

whole time -- and yet here's a couple of sap-headed

country yahoos out in the backwoods of Missouri set-

ting themselves up to know more about the rights and

wrongs of it than they did! Talk about cheek!"



Well, of course, that put a more different light on it,

and me and Jim felt pretty cheap and ignorant, and

wished we hadn't been quite so chipper. I couldn't

say nothing, and Jim he couldn't for a while; then he

says:



"Well, den, I reckon it's all right; beca'se ef dey

didn't know, dey ain't no use for po' ignorant folks

like us to be trying to know; en so, ef it's our duty,

we got to go en tackle it en do de bes' we can. Same

time, I feel as sorry for dem paynims as Mars Tom.

De hard part gwine to be to kill folks dat a body hain't

been 'quainted wid and dat hain't done him no harm.

Dat's it, you see. Ef we wuz to go 'mongst 'em, jist

we three, en say we's hungry, en ast 'em for a bite to

eat, why, maybe dey's jist like yuther people. Don't

you reckon dey is? Why, DEY'D give it, I know dey

would, en den --"



"Then what?"



"Well, Mars Tom, my idea is like dis. It ain't no

use, we CAN'T kill dem po' strangers dat ain't doin' us

no harm, till we've had practice -- I knows it perfectly

well, Mars Tom -- 'deed I knows it perfectly well. But

ef we takes a' axe or two, jist you en me en Huck, en

slips acrost de river to-night arter de moon's gone

down, en kills dat sick fam'ly dat's over on the Sny,

en burns dey house down, en --"



"Oh, you make me tired!" says Tom. "I don't

want to argue any more with people like you and Huck

Finn, that's always wandering from the subject, and

ain't got any more sense than to try to reason out a

thing that's pure theology by the laws that protect real

estate!"



Now that's just where Tom Sawyer warn't fair. Jim

didn't mean no harm, and I didn't mean no harm.

We knowed well enough that he was right and we was

wrong, and all we was after was to get at the HOW of

it, and that was all; and the only reason he couldn't

explain it so we could understand it was because we

was ignorant -- yes, and pretty dull, too, I ain't deny-

ing that; but, land! that ain't no crime, I should think.



But he wouldn't hear no more about it -- just said if

we had tackled the thing in the proper spirit, he would

'a' raised a couple of thousand knights and put them

in steel armor from head to heel, and made me a lieu-

tenant and Jim a sutler, and took the command himself

and brushed the whole paynim outfit into the sea like

flies and come back across the world in a glory like

sunset. But he said we didn't know enough to take

the chance when we had it, and he wouldn't ever offer

it again. And he didn't. When he once got set, you

couldn't budge him.



But I didn't care much. I am peaceable, and don't

get up rows with people that ain't doing nothing to

me. I allowed if the paynim was satisfied I was, and

we would let it stand at that.



Now Tom he got all that notion out of Walter Scott's

book, which he was always reading. And it WAS a

wild notion, because in my opinion he never could've

raised the men, and if he did, as like as not he would've

got licked. I took the book and read all about it, and

as near as I could make it out, most of the folks that

shook farming to go crusading had a mighty rocky

time of it.





CHAPTER II.

THE BALLOON ASCENSION



WELL, Tom got up one thing after another, but

they all had tender spots about 'em somewheres,

and he had to shove 'em aside. So at last he was

about in despair. Then the St. Louis papers begun to

talk a good deal about the balloon that was going to

sail to Europe, and Tom sort of thought he wanted

to go down and see what it looked like, but couldn't

make up his mind. But the papers went on talking,

and so he allowed that maybe if he didn't go he

mightn't ever have another chance to see a balloon;

and next, he found out that Nat Parsons was going

down to see it, and that decided him, of course. He

wasn't going to have Nat Parsons coming back brag-

ging about seeing the balloon, and him having to listen

to it and keep quiet. So he wanted me and Jim to go

too, and we went.



It was a noble big balloon, and had wings and fans

and all sorts of things, and wasn't like any balloon you

see in pictures. It was away out toward the edge of

town, in a vacant lot, corner of Twelfth street; and

there was a big crowd around it, making fun of it, and

making fun of the man, -- a lean pale feller with that

soft kind of moonlight in his eyes, you know, -- and

they kept saying it wouldn't go. It made him hot to

hear them, and he would turn on them and shake his

fist and say they was animals and blind, but some day

they would find they had stood face to face with one

of the men that lifts up nations and makes civilizations,

and was too dull to know it; and right here on this

spot their own children and grandchildren would build

a monument to him that would outlast a thousand

years, but his name would outlast the monument.

And then the crowd would burst out in a laugh again,

and yell at him, and ask him what was his name before

he was married, and what he would take to not do it,

and what was his sister's cat's grandmother's name,

and all the things that a crowd says when they've got

hold of a feller that they see they can plague. Well,

some things they said WAS funny, -- yes, and mighty

witty too, I ain't denying that, -- but all the same it

warn't fair nor brave, all them people pitching on one,

and they so glib and sharp, and him without any gift

of talk to answer back with. But, good land! what

did he want to sass back for? You see, it couldn't do

him no good, and it was just nuts for them. They

HAD him, you know. But that was his way. I reckon

he couldn't help it; he was made so, I judge. He

was a good enough sort of cretur, and hadn't no harm

in him, and was just a genius, as the papers said, which

wasn't his fault. We can't all be sound: we've got to

be the way we're made. As near as I can make out,

geniuses think they know it all, and so they won't take

people's advice, but always go their own way, which

makes everybody forsake them and despise them, and

that is perfectly natural. If they was humbler, and

listened and tried to learn, it would be better for them.



The part the professor was in was like a boat, and

was big and roomy, and had water-tight lockers around

the inside to keep all sorts of things in, and a body

could sit on them, and make beds on them, too. We

went aboard, and there was twenty people there, snoop-

ing around and examining, and old Nat Parsons was

there, too. The professor kept fussing around getting

ready, and the people went ashore, drifting out one at

a time, and old Nat he was the last. Of course it

wouldn't do to let him go out behind US. We mustn't

budge till he was gone, so we could be last ourselves.



But he was gone now, so it was time for us to follow.

I heard a big shout, and turned around -- the city was

dropping from under us like a shot! It made me sick

all through, I was so scared. Jim turned gray and

couldn't say a word, and Tom didn't say nothing, but

looked excited. The city went on dropping down,

and down, and down; but we didn't seem to be doing

nothing but just hang in the air and stand still. The

houses got smaller and smaller, and the city pulled

itself together, closer and closer, and the men and

wagons got to looking like ants and bugs crawling

around, and the streets like threads and cracks; and

then it all kind of melted together, and there wasn't

any city any more it was only a big scar on the earth,

and it seemed to me a body could see up the river and

down the river about a thousand miles, though of

course it wasn't so much. By and by the earth was a

ball -- just a round ball, of a dull color, with shiny

stripes wriggling and winding around over it, which

was rivers. The Widder Douglas always told me the

earth was round like a ball, but I never took any stock

in a lot of them superstitions o' hers, and of course I

paid no attention to that one, because I could see my-

self that the world was the shape of a plate, and flat.

I used to go up on the hill, and take a look around

and prove it for myself, because I reckon the best way

to get a sure thing on a fact is to go and examine for

yourself, and not take anybody's say-so. But I had to

give in now that the widder was right. That is, she

was right as to the rest of the world, but she warn't

right about the part our village is in; that part is the

shape of a plate, and flat, I take my oath!



The professor had been quiet all this time, as if he

was asleep; but he broke loose now, and he was mighty

bitter. He says something like this:



"Idiots! They said it wouldn't go; and they

wanted to examine it, and spy around and get the

secret of it out of me. But I beat them. Nobody

knows the secret but me. Nobody knows what makes

it move but me; and it's a new power -- a new power,

and a thousand times the strongest in the earth!

Steam's foolishness to it! They said I couldn't go to

Europe. To Europe! Why, there's power aboard to

last five years, and feed for three months. They are

fools! What do they know about it? Yes, and they

said my air-ship was flimsy. Why, she's good for

fifty years! I can sail the skies all my life if I want

to, and steer where I please, though they laughed at

that, and said I couldn't. Couldn't steer! Come

here, boy; we'll see. You press these buttons as I

tell you."



He made Tom steer the ship all about and every

which way, and learnt him the whole thing in nearly

no time; and Tom said it was perfectly easy. He

made him fetch the ship down 'most to the earth, and

had him spin her along so close to the Illinois prairies

that a body could talk to the farmers, and hear every-

thing they said perfectly plain; and he flung out

printed bills to them that told about the balloon, and

said it was going to Europe. Tom got so he could

steer straight for a tree till he got nearly to it, and then

dart up and skin right along over the top of it. Yes,

and he showed Tom how to land her; and he done it

first-rate, too, and set her down in the prairies as soft

as wool. But the minute we started to skip out the

professor says, "No, you don't!" and shot her up in

the air again. It was awful. I begun to beg, and so

did Jim; but it only give his temper a rise, and he

begun to rage around and look wild out of his eyes,

and I was scared of him.



Well, then he got on to his troubles again, and

mourned and grumbled about the way he was treated,

and couldn't seem to git over it, and especially people's

saying his ship was flimsy. He scoffed at that, and at

their saying she warn't simple and would be always

getting out of order. Get out of order! That graveled

him; he said that she couldn't any more get out of

order than the solar sister.



He got worse and worse, and I never see a person

take on so. It give me the cold shivers to see him,

and so it did Jim. By and by he got to yelling and

screaming, and then he swore the world shouldn't ever

have his secret at all now, it had treated him so mean.

He said he would sail his balloon around the globe just

to show what he could do, and then he would sink it in

the sea, and sink us all along with it, too. Well, it was

the awfulest fix to be in, and here was night coming

on!



He give us something to eat, and made us go to the

other end of the boat, and he laid down on a locker,

where he could boss all the works, and put his old

pepper-box revolver under his head, and said if any-

body come fooling around there trying to land her, he

would kill him.



We set scrunched up together, and thought consider-

able, but didn't say much -- only just a word once in a

while when a body had to say something or bust, we

was so scared and worried. The night dragged along

slow and lonesome. We was pretty low down, and the

moonshine made everything soft and pretty, and the

farmhouses looked snug and homeful, and we could

hear the farm sounds, and wished we could be down

there; but, laws! we just slipped along over them like

a ghost, and never left a track.



Away in the night, when all the sounds was late

sounds, and the air had a late feel, and a late smell,

too -- about a two-o'clock feel, as near as I could make

out -- Tom said the professor was so quiet this time

he must be asleep, and we'd better --



"Better what?" I says in a whisper, and feeling sick

all over, because I knowed what he was thinking about.



"Better slip back there and tie him, and land the

ship," he says.



I says: "No, sir! Don' you budge, Tom Sawyer."



And Jim -- well, Jim was kind o' gasping, he was so

scared. He says:



"Oh, Mars Tom, DON'T! Ef you teches him, we's

gone -- we's gone sho'! I ain't gwine anear him, not

for nothin' in dis worl'. Mars Tom, he's plumb crazy."



Tom whispers and says -- "That's WHY we've got to

do something. If he wasn't crazy I wouldn't give

shucks to be anywhere but here; you couldn't hire me

to get out -- now that I've got used to this balloon and

over the scare of being cut loose from the solid ground

-- if he was in his right mind. But it's no good politics,

sailing around like this with a person that's out of his

head, and says he's going round the world and then

drown us all. We've GOT to do something, I tell you,

and do it before he wakes up, too, or we mayn't ever

get another chance. Come!"



But it made us turn cold and creepy just to think of

it, and we said we wouldn't budge. So Tom was for

slipping back there by himself to see if he couldn't get

at the steering-gear and land the ship. We begged and

begged him not to, but it warn't no use; so he got

down on his hands and knees, and begun to crawl an

inch at a time, we a-holding our breath and watching.

After he got to the middle of the boat he crept slower

than ever, and it did seem like years to me. But at

last we see him get to the professor's head, and sort

of raise up soft and look a good spell in his face and

listen. Then we see him begin to inch along again

toward the professor's feet where the steering-buttons

was. Well, he got there all safe, and was reaching

slow and steady toward the buttons, but he knocked

down something that made a noise, and we see him

slump down flat an' soft in the bottom, and lay still.

The professor stirred, and says, "What's that?" But

everybody kept dead still and quiet, and he begun to

mutter and mumble and nestle, like a person that's

going to wake up, and I thought I was going to die, I

was so worried and scared.



Then a cloud slid over the moon, and I 'most cried,

I was so glad. She buried herself deeper and deeper

into the cloud, and it got so dark we couldn't see Tom.

Then it began to sprinkle rain, and we could hear the

professor fussing at his ropes and things and abusing

the weather. We was afraid every minute he would

touch Tom, and then we would be goners, and no

help; but Tom was already on his way back, and when

we felt his hands on our knees my breath stopped

sudden, and my heart fell down 'mongst my other works,

because I couldn't tell in the dark but it might be the

professor! which I thought it WAS.



Dear! I was so glad to have him back that I was

just as near happy as a person could be that was up in

the air that way with a deranged man. You can't land

a balloon in the dark, and so I hoped it would keep on

raining, for I didn't want Tom to go meddling any

more and make us so awful uncomfortable. Well, I

got my wish. It drizzled and drizzled along the rest

of the night, which wasn't long, though it did seem so;

and at daybreak it cleared, and the world looked

mighty soft and gray and pretty, and the forests and

fields so good to see again, and the horses and cattle

standing sober and thinking. Next, the sun come a-

blazing up gay and splendid, and then we began to feel

rusty and stretchy, and first we knowed we was all

asleep.





CHAPTER III.

TOM EXPLAINS



WE went to sleep about four o'clock, and woke up

about eight. The professor was setting back

there at his end, looking glum. He pitched us some

breakfast, but he told us not to come abaft the midship

compass. That was about the middle of the boat.

Well, when you are sharp-set, and you eat and satisfy

yourself, everything looks pretty different from what it

done before. It makes a body feel pretty near com-

fortable, even when he is up in a balloon with a genius.

We got to talking together.



There was one thing that kept bothering me, and by

and by I says:



"Tom, didn't we start east?"



"Yes."



"How fast have we been going?"



"Well, you heard what the professor said when he

was raging round. Sometimes, he said, we was making

fifty miles an hour, sometimes ninety, sometimes a

hundred; said that with a gale to help he could make

three hundred any time, and said if he wanted the gale,

and wanted it blowing the right direction, he only had

to go up higher or down lower to find it."



"Well, then, it's just as I reckoned. The professor

lied."



"Why?"



"Because if we was going so fast we ought to be

past Illinois, oughtn't we?"



"Certainly."



"Well, we ain't."



"What's the reason we ain't?"



"I know by the color. We're right over Illinois

yet. And you can see for yourself that Indiana ain't

in sight."



"I wonder what's the matter with you, Huck. You

know by the COLOR?"



"Yes, of course I do."



"What's the color got to do with it?"



"It's got everything to do with it. Illinois is green,

Indiana is pink. You show me any pink down here,

if you can. No, sir; it's green."



"Indiana PINK? Why, what a lie!"



"It ain't no lie; I've seen it on the map, and it's

pink."



You never see a person so aggravated and disgusted.

He says:



"Well, if I was such a numbskull as you, Huck

Finn, I would jump over. Seen it on the map! Huck

Finn, did you reckon the States was the same color

out-of-doors as they are on the map?"



"Tom Sawyer, what's a map for? Ain't it to learn

you facts?"



"Of course."



"Well, then, how's it going to do that if it tells lies?

That's what I want to know."



"Shucks, you muggins! It don't tell lies."



"It don't, don't it?"



"No, it don't."



"All right, then; if it don't, there ain't no two

States the same color. You git around THAT if you

can, Tom Sawyer."



He see I had him, and Jim see it too; and I tell

you, I felt pretty good, for Tom Sawyer was always a

hard person to git ahead of. Jim slapped his leg and

says:



"I tell YOU! dat's smart, dat's right down smart.

Ain't no use, Mars Tom; he got you DIS time, sho'!"

He slapped his leg again, and says, "My LAN', but it

was smart one!"



I never felt so good in my life; and yet I didn't

know I was saying anything much till it was out. I

was just mooning along, perfectly careless, and not

expecting anything was going to happen, and never

THINKING of such a thing at all, when, all of a sudden,

out it came. Why, it was just as much a surprise to

me as it was to any of them. It was just the same way

it is when a person is munching along on a hunk of

corn-pone, and not thinking about anything, and all of

a sudden bites into a di'mond. Now all that HE knows

first off is that it's some kind of gravel he's bit into;

but he don't find out it's a di'mond till he gits it out

and brushes off the sand and crumbs and one thing or

another, and has a look at it, and then he's surprised

and glad -- yes, and proud too; though when you

come to look the thing straight in the eye, he ain't

entitled to as much credit as he would 'a' been if he'd

been HUNTING di'monds. You can see the difference

easy if you think it over. You see, an accident, that

way, ain't fairly as big a thing as a thing that's done

a-purpose. Anybody could find that di'mond in that

corn-pone; but mind you, it's got to be somebody

that's got THAT KIND OF A CORN-PONE. That's where that

feller's credit comes in, you see; and that's where

mine comes in. I don't claim no great things -- I

don't reckon I could 'a' done it again -- but I done it

that time; that's all I claim. And I hadn't no more

idea I could do such a thing, and warn't any more

thinking about it or trying to, than you be this minute.

Why, I was just as ca'm, a body couldn't be any

ca'mer, and yet, all of a sudden, out it come. I've

often thought of that time, and I can remember just

the way everything looked, same as if it was only last

week. I can see it all: beautiful rolling country with

woods and fields and lakes for hundreds and hundreds

of miles all around, and towns and villages scattered

everywheres under us, here and there and yonder; and

the professor mooning over a chart on his little table,

and Tom's cap flopping in the rigging where it was

hung up to dry. And one thing in particular was a

bird right alongside, not ten foot off, going our way

and trying to keep up, but losing ground all the time;

and a railroad train doing the same thing down there,

sliding among the trees and farms, and pouring out a

long cloud of black smoke and now and then a little

puff of white; and when the white was gone so long

you had almost forgot it, you would hear a little faint

toot, and that was the whistle. And we left the bird

and the train both behind, 'WAY behind, and done it

easy, too.



But Tom he was huffy, and said me and Jim was a

couple of ignorant blatherskites, and then he says:



"Suppose there's a brown calf and a big brown dog,

and an artist is making a picture of them. What is the

MAIN thing that that artist has got to do? He has got

to paint them so you can tell them apart the minute

you look at them, hain't he? Of course. Well, then,

do you want him to go and paint BOTH of them brown?

Certainly you don't. He paints one of them blue,

and then you can't make no mistake. It's just the

same with the maps. That's why they make every

State a different color; it ain't to deceive you, it's to

keep you from deceiving yourself."



But I couldn't see no argument about that, and

neither could Jim. Jim shook his head, and says:



"Why, Mars Tom, if you knowed what chuckle-

heads dem painters is, you'd wait a long time before

you'd fetch one er DEM in to back up a fac'. I's

gwine to tell you, den you kin see for you'self. I see

one of 'em a-paintin' away, one day, down in ole

Hank Wilson's back lot, en I went down to see, en he

was paintin' dat old brindle cow wid de near horn

gone -- you knows de one I means. En I ast him

what he's paintin' her for, en he say when he git her

painted, de picture's wuth a hundred dollars. Mars

Tom, he could a got de cow fer fifteen, en I tole him

so. Well, sah, if you'll b'lieve me, he jes' shuck his

head, dat painter did, en went on a-dobbin'. Bless

you, Mars Tom, DEY don't know nothin'."



Tom lost his temper. I notice a person 'most always

does that's got laid out in an argument. He told us to

shut up, and maybe we'd feel better. Then he see a

town clock away off down yonder, and he took up the

glass and looked at it, and then looked at his silver

turnip, and then at the clock, and then at the turnip

again, and says:



"That's funny! That clock's near about an hour

fast."



So he put up his turnip. Then he see another clock,

and took a look, and it was an hour fast too. That

puzzled him.



"That's a mighty curious thing," he says. "I

don't understand it."



Then he took the glass and hunted up another clock,

and sure enough it was an hour fast too. Then his

eyes began to spread and his breath to come out kinder

gaspy like, and he says:



"Ger-reat Scott, it's the LONGITUDE!"



I says, considerably scared:



"Well, what's been and gone and happened now?"



"Why, the thing that's happened is that this old

bladder has slid over Illinois and Indiana and Ohio like

nothing, and this is the east end of Pennsylvania or

New York, or somewheres around there."



"Tom Sawyer, you don't mean it!"



"Yes, I do, and it's dead sure. We've covered

about fifteen degrees of longitude since we left St.

Louis yesterday afternoon, and them clocks are right.

We've come close on to eight hundred miles."



I didn't believe it, but it made the cold streaks

trickle down my back just the same. In my experi-

ence I knowed it wouldn't take much short of two

weeks to do it down the Mississippi on a raft.

Jim was working his mind and studying. Pretty

soon he says:



"Mars Tom, did you say dem clocks uz right?"



"Yes, they're right."



"Ain't yo' watch right, too?"



"She's right for St. Louis, but she's an hour wrong

for here."



"Mars Tom, is you tryin' to let on dat de time ain't

de SAME everywheres?"



"No, it ain't the same everywheres, by a long

shot."



Jim looked distressed, and says:



"It grieves me to hear you talk like dat, Mars Tom;

I's right down ashamed to hear you talk like dat, arter

de way you's been raised. Yassir, it'd break yo' Aunt

Polly's heart to hear you."



Tom was astonished. He looked Jim over wonder-

ing, and didn't say nothing, and Jim went on:



"Mars Tom, who put de people out yonder in St.

Louis? De Lord done it. Who put de people here

whar we is? De Lord done it. Ain' dey bofe his

children? 'Cose dey is. WELL, den! is he gwine to

SCRIMINATE 'twixt 'em?"



"Scriminate! I never heard such ignorance. There

ain't no discriminating about it. When he makes you

and some more of his children black, and makes the

rest of us white, what do you call that?"



Jim see the p'int. He was stuck. He couldn't

answer. Tom says:



"He does discriminate, you see, when he wants to;

but this case HERE ain't no discrimination of his, it's

man's. The Lord made the day, and he made the

night; but he didn't invent the hours, and he didn't

distribute them around. Man did that."



"Mars Tom, is dat so? Man done it?"



"Certainly."



"Who tole him he could?"



"Nobody. He never asked."



Jim studied a minute, and says:



"Well, dat do beat me. I wouldn't 'a' tuck no

sich resk. But some people ain't scared o' nothin'.

Dey bangs right ahead; DEY don't care what happens.

So den dey's allays an hour's diff'unce everywhah,

Mars Tom?"



"An hour? No! It's four minutes difference for

every degree of longitude, you know. Fifteen of 'em's

an hour, thirty of 'em's two hours, and so on. When

it's one clock Tuesday morning in England, it's eight

o'clock the night before in New York."



Jim moved a little way along the locker, and you

could see he was insulted. He kept shaking his head

and muttering, and so I slid along to him and patted

him on the leg, and petted him up, and got him over

the worst of his feelings, and then he says:



"Mars Tom talkin' sich talk as dat! Choosday in

one place en Monday in t'other, bofe in the same day!

Huck, dis ain't no place to joke -- up here whah we is.

Two days in one day! How you gwine to get two

days inter one day? Can't git two hours inter one

hour, kin you? Can't git two niggers inter one nigger

skin, kin you? Can't git two gallons of whisky inter a

one-gallon jug, kin you? No, sir, 'twould strain de

jug. Yes, en even den you couldn't, I don't believe.

Why, looky here, Huck, s'posen de Choosday was

New Year's -- now den! is you gwine to tell me it's

dis year in one place en las' year in t'other, bofe in de

identical same minute? It's de beatenest rubbage! I

can't stan' it -- I can't stan' to hear tell 'bout it."

Then he begun to shiver and turn gray, and Tom

says:



"NOW what's the matter? What's the trouble?"



Jim could hardly speak, but he says:



"Mars Tom, you ain't jokin', en it's SO?"



"No, I'm not, and it is so."



Jim shivered again, and says:



"Den dat Monday could be de las' day, en dey

wouldn't be no las' day in England, en de dead

wouldn't be called. We mustn't go over dah, Mars

Tom. Please git him to turn back; I wants to be

whah --"



All of a sudden we see something, and all jumped

up, and forgot everything and begun to gaze. Tom

says:



"Ain't that the --" He catched his breath, then

says: "It IS, sure as you live! It's the ocean!"



That made me and Jim catch our breath, too. Then

we all stood petrified but happy, for none of us had

ever seen an ocean, or ever expected to. Tom kept

muttering:



"Atlantic Ocean -- Atlantic. Land, don't it sound

great! And that's IT -- and WE are looking at it -- we!

Why, it's just too splendid to believe!"



Then we see a big bank of black smoke; and when

we got nearer, it was a city -- and a monster she was,

too, with a thick fringe of ships around one edge; and

we wondered if it was New York, and begun to jaw

and dispute about it, and, first we knowed, it slid from

under us and went flying behind, and here we was, out

over the very ocean itself, and going like a cyclone.

Then we woke up, I tell you!



We made a break aft and raised a wail, and begun to

beg the professor to turn back and land us, but

he jerked out his pistol and motioned us back,

and we went, but nobody will ever know how bad we

felt.



The land was gone, all but a little streak, like a

snake, away off on the edge of the water, and down

under us was just ocean, ocean, ocean -- millions of

miles of it, heaving and pitching and squirming, and

white sprays blowing from the wave-tops, and only a

few ships in sight, wallowing around and laying over,

first on one side and then on t'other, and sticking their

bows under and then their sterns; and before long

there warn't no ships at all, and we had the sky and

the whole ocean all to ourselves, and the roomiest place

I ever see and the lonesomest.





CHAPTER IV.

STORM



AND it got lonesomer and lonesomer. There was

the big sky up there, empty and awful deep; and

the ocean down there without a thing on it but just the

waves. All around us was a ring, where the sky and

the water come together; yes, a monstrous big ring it

was, and we right in the dead center of it -- plumb in

the center. We was racing along like a prairie fire, but

it never made any difference, we couldn't seem to git

past that center no way. I couldn't see that we ever

gained an inch on that ring. It made a body feel

creepy, it was so curious and unaccountable.



Well, everything was so awful still that we got to

talking in a very low voice, and kept on getting creepier

and lonesomer and less and less talky, till at last the

talk ran dry altogether, and we just set there and

"thunk," as Jim calls it, and never said a word the

longest time.



The professor never stirred till the sun was overhead,

then he stood up and put a kind of triangle to his eye,

and Tom said it was a sextant and he was taking the

sun to see whereabouts the balloon was. Then he

ciphered a little and looked in a book, and then he

begun to carry on again. He said lots of wild things,

and, among others, he said he would keep up this

hundred-mile gait till the middle of to-morrow after-

noon, and then he'd land in London.



We said we would be humbly thankful.



He was turning away, but he whirled around when

we said that, and give us a long look of his blackest

kind -- one of the maliciousest and suspiciousest looks

I ever see. Then he says:



"You want to leave me. Don't try to deny it."



We didn't know what to say, so we held in and

didn't say nothing at all.



He went aft and set down, but he couldn't seem to

git that thing out of his mind. Every now and then he

would rip out something about it, and try to make us

answer him, but we dasn't.



It got lonesomer and lonesomer right along, and it

did seem to me I couldn't stand it. It was still worse

when night begun to come on. By and by Tom

pinched me and whispers:



"Look!"



I took a glance aft, and see the professor taking a

whet out of a bottle. I didn't like the looks of that.

By and by he took another drink, and pretty soon he

begun to sing. It was dark now, and getting black

and stormy. He went on singing, wilder and wilder,

and the thunder begun to mutter, and the wind to

wheeze and moan among the ropes, and altogether it

was awful. It got so black we couldn't see him any

more, and wished we couldn't hear him, but we could.

Then he got still; but he warn't still ten minutes till

we got suspicious, and wished he would start up his

noise again, so we could tell where he was. By and by

there was a flash of lightning, and we see him start to

get up, but he staggered and fell down. We heard

him scream out in the dark:



"They don't want to go to England. All right, I'll

change the course. They want to leave me. I know

they do. Well, they shall -- and NOW!"



I 'most died when he said that. Then he was still

again -- still so long I couldn't bear it, and it did seem

to me the lightning wouldn't EVER come again. But at

last there was a blessed flash, and there he was, on his

hands and knees crawling, and not four feet from us.

My, but his eyes was terrible! He made a lunge for

Tom, and says, "Overboard YOU go!" but it was

already pitch-dark again, and I couldn't see whether

he got him or not, and Tom didn't make a sound.



There was another long, horrible wait; then there

was a flash, and I see Tom's head sink down outside

the boat and disappear. He was on the rope-ladder

that dangled down in the air from the gunnel. The

professor let off a shout and jumped for him, and

straight off it was pitch-dark again, and Jim groaned

out, "Po' Mars Tom, he's a goner!" and made a

jump for the professor, but the professor warn't there.



Then we heard a couple of terrible screams, and then

another not so loud, and then another that was 'way

below, and you could only JUST hear it; and I heard

Jim say, "Po' Mars Tom!"



Then it was awful still, and I reckon a person could

'a' counted four thousand before the next flash come.

When it come I see Jim on his knees, with his arms

on the locker and his face buried in them, and he was

crying. Before I could look over the edge it was all

dark again, and I was glad, because I didn't want to

see. But when the next flash come, I was watching,

and down there I see somebody a-swinging in the wind

on the ladder, and it was Tom!



"Come up!" I shouts; "come up, Tom!"



His voice was so weak, and the wind roared so, I

couldn't make out what he said, but I thought he asked

was the professor up there. I shouts:



"No, he's down in the ocean! Come up! Can

we help you?"



Of course, all this in the dark.



"Huck, who is you hollerin' at?"



"I'm hollerin' at Tom."



"Oh, Huck, how kin you act so, when you know

po' Mars Tom --" Then he let off an awful scream,

and flung his head and his arms back and let off another

one, because there was a white glare just then, and he

had raised up his face just in time to see Tom's, as

white as snow, rise above the gunnel and look him right

in the eye. He thought it was Tom's ghost, you

see.



Tom clumb aboard, and when Jim found it WAS him,

and not his ghost, he hugged him, and called him all

sorts of loving names, and carried on like he was gone

crazy, he was so glad. Says I:



"What did you wait for, Tom? Why didn't you

come up at first?"



"I dasn't, Huck. I knowed somebody plunged

down past me, but I didn't know who it was in the

dark. It could 'a' been you, it could 'a' been Jim."



That was the way with Tom Sawyer -- always sound.

He warn't coming up till he knowed where the pro-

fessor was.



The storm let go about this time with all its might;

and it was dreadful the way the thunder boomed and

tore, and the lightning glared out, and the wind sung

and screamed in the rigging, and the rain come down.

One second you couldn't see your hand before you,

and the next you could count the threads in your coat-

sleeve, and see a whole wide desert of waves pitching

and tossing through a kind of veil of rain. A storm

like that is the loveliest thing there is, but it ain't at its

best when you are up in the sky and lost, and it's wet

and lonesome, and there's just been a death in the

family.



We set there huddled up in the bow, and talked low

about the poor professor; and everybody was sorry

for him, and sorry the world had made fun of him and

treated him so harsh, when he was doing the best he

could, and hadn't a friend nor nobody to encourage

him and keep him from brooding his mind away and

going deranged. There was plenty of clothes and

blankets and everything at the other end, but we

thought we'd ruther take the rain than go meddling

back there.





CHAPTER V.

LAND



WE tried to make some plans, but we couldn't come

to no agreement. Me and Jim was for turning

around and going back home, but Tom allowed that

by the time daylight come, so we could see our way,

we would be so far toward England that we might as

well go there, and come back in a ship, and have the

glory of saying we done it.



About midnight the storm quit and the moon come

out and lit up the ocean, and we begun to feel com-

fortable and drowsy; so we stretched out on the

lockers and went to sleep, and never woke up again

till sun-up. The sea was sparkling like di'monds, and

it was nice weather, and pretty soon our things was all

dry again.



We went aft to find some breakfast, and the first

thing we noticed was that there was a dim light burning

in a compass back there under a hood. Then Tom was

disturbed. He says:



"You know what that means, easy enough. It

means that somebody has got to stay on watch and

steer this thing the same as he would a ship, or she'll

wander around and go wherever the wind wants her

to."



"Well," I says, "what's she been doing since --

er -- since we had the accident?"



"Wandering," he says, kinder troubled --" wander-

ing, without any doubt. She's in a wind now that's

blowing her south of east. We don't know how long

that's been going on, either."



So then he p'inted her east, and said he would hold

her there till we rousted out the breakfast. The pro-

fessor had laid in everything a body could want; he

couldn't 'a' been better fixed. There wasn't no milk

for the coffee, but there was water, and everything

else you could want, and a charcoal stove and the

fixings for it, and pipes and cigars and matches; and

wine and liquor, which warn't in our line; and books,

and maps, and charts, and an accordion; and furs,

and blankets, and no end of rubbish, like brass beads

and brass jewelry, which Tom said was a sure sign that

he had an idea of visiting among savages. There was

money, too. Yes, the professor was well enough fixed.



After breakfast Tom learned me and Jim how to

steer, and divided us all up into four-hour watches,

turn and turn about; and when his watch was out I

took his place, and he got out the professor's papers

and pens and wrote a letter home to his aunt Polly, tell-

ing her everything that had happened to us, and dated

it "IN THE WELKIN, APPROACHING ENGLAND," and folded

it together and stuck it fast with a red wafer, and

directed it, and wrote above the direction, in big

writing, "FROM TOM SAWYER, THE ERRONORT," and said

it would stump old Nat Parsons, the postmaster, when

it come along in the mail. I says:



"Tom Sawyer, this ain't no welkin, it's a balloon."



"Well, now, who SAID it was a welkin, smarty?"



"You've wrote it on the letter, anyway."



"What of it? That don't mean that the balloon's

the welkin."



"Oh, I thought it did. Well, then, what is a

welkin?"



I see in a minute he was stuck. He raked and

scraped around in his mind, but he couldn't find noth-

ing, so he had to say:



"I don't know, and nobody don't know. It's just

a word, and it's a mighty good word, too. There

ain't many that lays over it. I don't believe there's

ANY that does."



"Shucks!" I says. "But what does it MEAN? --

that's the p'int. "



"I don't know what it means, I tell you. It's a

word that people uses for -- for -- well, it's orna-

mental. They don't put ruffles on a shirt to keep a

person warm, do they?"



"Course they don't."



"But they put them ON, don't they?"



"Yes."



"All right, then; that letter I wrote is a shirt, and

the welkin's the ruffle on it."



I judged that that would gravel Jim, and it did.



"Now, Mars Tom, it ain't no use to talk like dat;

en, moreover, it's sinful. You knows a letter ain't no

shirt, en dey ain't no ruffles on it, nuther. Dey ain't

no place to put 'em on; you can't put em on, and

dey wouldn't stay ef you did."



"Oh DO shut up, and wait till something's started

that you know something about."



"Why, Mars Tom, sholy you can't mean to say I

don't know about shirts, when, goodness knows, I's

toted home de washin' ever sence --"



"I tell you, this hasn't got anything to do with

shirts. I only --"



"Why, Mars Tom, you said yo'self dat a letter --"



"Do you want to drive me crazy? Keep still. I

only used it as a metaphor."



That word kinder bricked us up for a minute. Then

Jim says -- rather timid, because he see Tom was get-

ting pretty tetchy:



"Mars Tom, what is a metaphor?"



"A metaphor's a -- well, it's a -- a -- a metaphor's

an illustration." He see THAT didn't git home, so he

tried again. "When I say birds of a feather flocks

together, it's a metaphorical way of saying --"



"But dey DON'T, Mars Tom. No, sir, 'deed dey

don't. Dey ain't no feathers dat's more alike den a

bluebird en a jaybird, but ef you waits till you catches

dem birds together, you'll --"



"Oh, give us a rest! You can't get the simplest

little thing through your thick skull. Now don't bother

me any more."



Jim was satisfied to stop. He was dreadful pleased

with himself for catching Tom out. The minute Tom

begun to talk about birds I judged he was a goner,

because Jim knowed more about birds than both of us

put together. You see, he had killed hundreds and

hundreds of them, and that's the way to find out

about birds. That's the way people does that writes

books about birds, and loves them so that they'll

go hungry and tired and take any amount of trouble to

find a new bird and kill it. Their name is ornitholo-

gers, and I could have been an ornithologer myself,

because I always loved birds and creatures; and I

started out to learn how to be one, and I see a bird

setting on a limb of a high tree, singing with its head

tilted back and its mouth open, and before I thought I

fired, and his song stopped and he fell straight down

from the limb, all limp like a rag, and I run and picked

him up and he was dead, and his body was warm in my

hand, and his head rolled about this way and that, like

his neck was broke, and there was a little white skin

over his eyes, and one little drop of blood on the side

of his head; and, laws! I couldn't see nothing more

for the tears; and I hain't never murdered no creature

since that warn't doing me no harm, and I ain't going

to.



But I was aggravated about that welkin. I wanted

to know. I got the subject up again, and then Tom

explained, the best he could. He said when a person

made a big speech the newspapers said the shouts of

the people made the welkin ring. He said they always

said that, but none of them ever told what it was, so

he allowed it just meant outdoors and up high. Well,

that seemed sensible enough, so I was satisfied, and

said so. That pleased Tom and put him in a good

humor again, and he says:



"Well, it's all right, then; and we'll let bygones

be bygones. I don't know for certain what a welkin

is, but when we land in London we'll make it ring,

anyway, and don't you forget it."



He said an erronort was a person who sailed around

in balloons; and said it was a mighty sight finer to be

Tom Sawyer the Erronort than to be Tom Sawyer the

Traveler, and we would be heard of all round the

world, if we pulled through all right, and so he wouldn't

give shucks to be a traveler now.



Toward the middle of the afternoon we got every-

thing ready to land, and we felt pretty good, too, and

proud; and we kept watching with the glasses, like

Columbus discovering America. But we couldn't see

nothing but ocean. The afternoon wasted out and the

sun shut down, and still there warn't no land any-

wheres. We wondered what was the matter, but

reckoned it would come out all right, so we went on

steering east, but went up on a higher level so we

wouldn't hit any steeples or mountains in the dark.



It was my watch till midnight, and then it was Jim's;

but Tom stayed up, because he said ship captains done

that when they was making the land, and didn't stand

no regular watch.



Well, when daylight come, Jim give a shout, and we

jumped up and looked over, and there was the land

sure enough -- land all around, as far as you could see,

and perfectly level and yaller. We didn't know how

long we'd been over it. There warn't no trees, nor

hills, nor rocks, nor towns, and Tom and Jim had took

it for the sea. They took it for the sea in a dead

ca'm; but we was so high up, anyway, that if it had

been the sea and rough, it would 'a' looked smooth, all

the same, in the night, that way.



We was all in a powerful excitement now, and

grabbed the glasses and hunted everywheres for Lon-

don, but couldn't find hair nor hide of it, nor any

other settlement -- nor any sign of a lake or a river,

either. Tom was clean beat. He said it warn't his

notion of England; he thought England looked like

America, and always had that idea. So he said we

better have breakfast, and then drop down and inquire

the quickest way to London. We cut the breakfast

pretty short, we was so impatient. As we slanted

along down, the weather began to moderate, and

pretty soon we shed our furs. But it kept ON moder-

ating, and in a precious little while it was 'most too

moderate. We was close down now, and just blistering!



We settled down to within thirty foot of the land --

that is, it was land if sand is land; for this wasn't any-

thing but pure sand. Tom and me clumb down the

ladder and took a run to stretch our legs, and it felt

amazing good -- that is, the stretching did, but the

sand scorched our feet like hot embers. Next, we see

somebody coming, and started to meet him; but we

heard Jim shout, and looked around and he was fairly

dancing, and making signs, and yelling. We couldn't

make out what he said, but we was scared anyway, and

begun to heel it back to the balloon. When we got

close enough, we understood the words, and they

made me sick:



"Run! Run fo' yo' life! Hit's a lion; I kin see

him thoo de glass! Run, boys; do please heel it de

bes' you kin. He's bu'sted outen de menagerie, en

dey ain't nobody to stop him!"



It made Tom fly, but it took the stiffening all out of

my legs. I could only just gasp along the way you do

in a dream when there's a ghost gaining on you.



Tom got to the ladder and shinned up it a piece and

waited for me; and as soon as I got a foothold on it

he shouted to Jim to soar away. But Jim had clean

lost his head, and said he had forgot how. So Tom

shinned along up and told me to follow; but the lion

was arriving, fetching a most ghastly roar with every

lope, and my legs shook so I dasn't try to take one of

them out of the rounds for fear the other one would

give way under me.



But Tom was aboard by this time, and he started the

balloon up a little, and stopped it again as soon as the

end of the ladder was ten or twelve feet above ground.

And there was the lion, a-ripping around under me,

and roaring and springing up in the air at the ladder,

and only missing it about a quarter of an inch, it

seemed to me. It was delicious to be out of his reach,

perfectly delicious, and made me feel good and thank-

ful all up one side; but I was hanging there helpless

and couldn't climb, and that made me feel perfectly

wretched and miserable all down the other. It is most

seldom that a person feels so mixed like that; and it is

not to be recommended, either.



Tom asked me what he'd better do, but I didn't

know. He asked me if I could hold on whilst he sailed

away to a safe place and left the lion behind. I said I

could if he didn't go no higher than he was now; but

if he went higher I would lose my head and fall, sure.

So he said, "Take a good grip," and he started.



"Don't go so fast," I shouted. "It makes my

head swim."



He had started like a lightning express. He slowed

down, and we glided over the sand slower, but still in

a kind of sickening way; for it IS uncomfortable to see

things sliding and gliding under you like that, and not

a sound.



But pretty soon there was plenty of sound, for the

lion was catching up. His noise fetched others. You

could see them coming on the lope from every direc-

tion, and pretty soon there was a couple of dozen of

them under me, jumping up at the ladder and snarling

and snapping at each other; and so we went skimming

along over the sand, and these fellers doing what they

could to help us to not forgit the occasion; and then

some other beasts come, without an invite, and they

started a regular riot down there.



We see this plan was a mistake. We couldn't ever

git away from them at this gait, and I couldn't hold on

forever. So Tom took a think, and struck another

idea. That was, to kill a lion with the pepper-box

revolver, and then sail away while the others stopped

to fight over the carcass. So he stopped the balloon

still, and done it, and then we sailed off while the fuss

was going on, and come down a quarter of a mile off,

and they helped me aboard; but by the time we was

out of reach again, that gang was on hand once more.

And when they see we was really gone and they

couldn't get us, they sat down on their hams and

looked up at us so kind of disappointed that it was as

much as a person could do not to see THEIR side of the

matter.





CHAPTER VI.

IT'S A CARAVAN



I WAS so weak that the only thing I wanted was a

chance to lay down, so I made straight for my

locker-bunk, and stretched myself out there. But a

body couldn't get back his strength in no such oven as

that, so Tom give the command to soar, and Jim

started her aloft.



We had to go up a mile before we struck comfort-

able weather where it was breezy and pleasant and just

right, and pretty soon I was all straight again. Tom

had been setting quiet and thinking; but now he jumps

up and says:



"I bet you a thousand to one I know where we are.

We're in the Great Sahara, as sure as guns!"



He was so excited he couldn't hold still; but I

wasn't. I says:



"Well, then, where's the Great Sahara? In Eng-

land or in Scotland?"



"'Tain't in either; it's in Africa."



Jim's eyes bugged out, and he begun to stare down

with no end of interest, because that was where his

originals come from; but I didn't more than half be-

lieve it. I couldn't, you know; it seemed too awful

far away for us to have traveled.



But Tom was full of his discovery, as he called it,

and said the lions and the sand meant the Great Desert,

sure. He said he could 'a' found out, before we

sighted land, that we was crowding the land some-

wheres, if he had thought of one thing; and when we

asked him what, he said:



"These clocks. They're chronometers. You al-

ways read about them in sea voyages. One of them

is keeping Grinnage time, and the other is keeping St.

Louis time, like my watch. When we left St. Louis it

was four in the afternoon by my watch and this clock,

and it was ten at night by this Grinnage clock. Well,

at this time of the year the sun sets at about seven

o'clock. Now I noticed the time yesterday evening

when the sun went down, and it was half-past five

o'clock by the Grinnage clock, and half past 11 A.M.

by my watch and the other clock. You see, the sun

rose and set by my watch in St. Louis, and the Grin-

nage clock was six hours fast; but we've come so far

east that it comes within less than half an hour of set-

ting by the Grinnage clock now, and I'm away out --

more than four hours and a half out. You see, that

meant that we was closing up on the longitude of

Ireland, and would strike it before long if we was

p'inted right -- which we wasn't. No, sir, we've been

a-wandering -- wandering 'way down south of east, and

it's my opinion we are in Africa. Look at this map.

You see how the shoulder of Africa sticks out to the

west. Think how fast we've traveled; if we had gone

straight east we would be long past England by this

time. You watch for noon, all of you, and we'll stand

up, and when we can't cast a shadow we'll find that

this Grinnage clock is coming mighty close to marking

twelve. Yes, sir, I think we're in Africa; and it's just

bully."



Jim was gazing down with the glass. He shook his

head and says:



"Mars Tom, I reckon dey's a mistake som'er's.

hain't seen no niggers yit."



"That's nothing; they don't live in the desert.

What is that, 'way off yonder? Gimme a glass."



He took a long look, and said it was like a black

string stretched across the sand, but he couldn't guess

what it was.



"Well," I says, "I reckon maybe you've got a

chance now to find out whereabouts this balloon is,

because as like as not that is one of these lines here,

that's on the map, that you call meridians of longi-

tude, and we can drop down and look at its number,

and --"



"Oh, shucks, Huck Finn, I never see such a lunk-

head as you. Did you s'pose there's meridians of

longitude on the EARTH?"



"Tom Sawyer, they're set down on the map, and

you know it perfectly well, and here they are, and you

can see for yourself."



"Of course they're on the map, but that's nothing;

there ain't any on the GROUND."



"Tom, do you know that to be so?"



"Certainly I do."



"Well, then, that map's a liar again. I never see

such a liar as that map."



He fired up at that, and I was ready for him, and

Jim was warming his opinion, too, and next minute

we'd 'a' broke loose on another argument, if Tom

hadn't dropped the glass and begun to clap his hands

like a maniac and sing out:



"Camels! -- Camels!"



So I grabbed a glass and Jim, too, and took a look,

but I was disappointed, and says:



"Camels your granny; they're spiders."



"Spiders in a desert, you shad? Spiders walking

in a procession? You don't ever reflect, Huck Finn,

and I reckon you really haven't got anything to

reflect WITH. Don't you know we're as much as a

mile up in the air, and that that string of crawlers is

two or three miles away? Spiders, good land! Spiders

as big as a cow? Perhaps you'd like to go down

and milk one of 'em. But they're camels, just the

same. It's a caravan, that's what it is, and it's a mile

long."



"Well, then, let's go down and look at it. I

don't believe in it, and ain't going to till I see it and

know it."



"All right," he says, and give the command:



"Lower away."



As we come slanting down into the hot weather, we

could see that it was camels, sure enough, plodding

along, an everlasting string of them, with bales strapped

to them, and several hundred men in long white robes,

and a thing like a shawl bound over their heads and

hanging down with tassels and fringes; and some of

the men had long guns and some hadn't, and some

was riding and some was walking. And the weatherJ--

well, it was just roasting. And how slow they did

creep along! We swooped down now, all of a

sudden, and stopped about a hundred yards over their

heads.



The men all set up a yell, and some of them fell flat

on their stomachs, some begun to fire their guns at us,

and the rest broke and scampered every which way,

and so did the camels.



We see that we was making trouble, so we went up

again about a mile, to the cool weather, and watched

them from there. It took them an hour to get together

and form the procession again; then they started along,

but we could see by the glasses that they wasn't pay-

ing much attention to anything but us. We poked

along, looking down at them with the glasses, and by

and by we see a big sand mound, and something like

people the other side of it, and there was something

like a man laying on top of the mound that raised his

head up every now and then, and seemed to be watch-

ing the caravan or us, we didn't know which. As the

caravan got nearer, he sneaked down on the other side

and rushed to the other men and horses -- for that is

what they was -- and we see them mount in a hurry;

and next, here they come, like a house afire, some with

lances and some with long guns, and all of them yell-

ing the best they could.



They come a-tearing down on to the caravan, and the

next minute both sides crashed together and was all

mixed up, and there was such another popping of guns

as you never heard, and the air got so full of smoke

you could only catch glimpses of them struggling

together. There must 'a' been six hundred men in

that battle, and it was terrible to see. Then they

broke up into gangs and groups, fighting tooth and

nail, and scurrying and scampering around, and laying

into each other like everything; and whenever the

smoke cleared a little you could see dead and wounded

people and camels scattered far and wide and all about,

and camels racing off in every direction.



At last the robbers see they couldn't win, so their

chief sounded a signal, and all that was left of them

broke away and went scampering across the plain.

The last man to go snatched up a child and carried it

off in front of him on his horse, and a woman run

screaming and begging after him, and followed him

away off across the plain till she was separated a long

ways from her people; but it warn't no use, and she

had to give it up, and we see her sink down on the

sand and cover her face with her hands. Then Tom

took the hellum, and started for that yahoo, and we

come a-whizzing down and made a swoop, and knocked

him out of the saddle, child and all; and he was jarred

considerable, but the child wasn't hurt, but laid there

working its hands and legs in the air like a tumble-bug

that's on its back and can't turn over. The man went

staggering off to overtake his horse, and didn't know

what had hit him, for we was three or four hundred

yards up in the air by this time.



We judged the woman would go and get the child

now; but she didn't. We could see her, through the

glass, still setting there, with her head bowed down on

her knees; so of course she hadn't seen the perform-

ance, and thought her child was clean gone with the

man. She was nearly a half a mile from her people,

so we thought we might go down to the child, which

was about a quarter of a mile beyond her, and snake

it to her before the caravan people could git to us to

do us any harm; and besides, we reckoned they had

enough business on their hands for one while, anyway,

with the wounded. We thought we'd chance it, and

we did. We swooped down and stopped, and Jim

shinned down the ladder and fetched up the kid, which

was a nice fat little thing, and in a noble good humor,

too, considering it was just out of a battle and been

tumbled off of a horse; and then we started for the

mother, and stopped back of her and tolerable near

by, and Jim slipped down and crept up easy, and when

he was close back of her the child goo-goo'd, the way

a child does, and she heard it, and whirled and fetched

a shriek of joy, and made a jump for the kid and

snatched it and hugged it, and dropped it and hugged

Jim, and then snatched off a gold chain and hung it

around Jim's neck, and hugged him again, and jerked

up the child again, a-sobbing and glorifying all the

time; and Jim he shoved for the ladder and up it, and

in a minute we was back up in the sky and the woman

was staring up, with the back of her head between her

shoulders and the child with its arms locked around

her neck. And there she stood, as long as we was in

sight a-sailing away in the sky.





CHAPTER VII.

TOM RESPECTS THE FLEA



"NOON!" says Tom, and so it was. His shadder

was just a blot around his feet. We looked,

and the Grinnage clock was so close to twelve the

difference didn't amount to nothing. So Tom said

London was right north of us or right south of us, one

or t'other, and he reckoned by the weather and the

sand and the camels it was north; and a good many

miles north, too; as many as from New York to the

city of Mexico, he guessed.



Jim said he reckoned a balloon was a good deal the

fastest thing in the world, unless it might be some

kinds of birds -- a wild pigeon, maybe, or a railroad.



But Tom said he had read about railroads in England

going nearly a hundred miles an hour for a little ways,

and there never was a bird in the world that could do

that -- except one, and that was a flea.



"A flea? Why, Mars Tom, in de fust place he

ain't a bird, strickly speakin' --"



"He ain't a bird, eh? Well, then, what is he?"



"I don't rightly know, Mars Tom, but I speck he's

only jist a' animal. No, I reckon dat won't do, nuther,

he ain't big enough for a' animal. He mus' be a bug.

Yassir, dat's what he is, he's a bug."



"I bet he ain't, but let it go. What's your second

place?"



"Well, in de second place, birds is creturs dat goes

a long ways, but a flea don't."



"He don't, don't he? Come, now, what IS a long

distance, if you know?"



"Why, it's miles, and lots of 'em -- anybody knows

dat."



"Can't a man walk miles?"



"Yassir, he kin."



"As many as a railroad?"



"Yassir, if you give him time."



"Can't a flea?"



"Well -- I s'pose so -- ef you gives him heaps of

time."



"Now you begin to see, don't you, that DISTANCE

ain't the thing to judge by, at all; it's the time it takes

to go the distance IN that COUNTS, ain't it?"



"Well, hit do look sorter so, but I wouldn't 'a'

b'lieved it, Mars Tom."



"It's a matter of PROPORTION, that's what it is; and

when you come to gauge a thing's speed by its size,

where's your bird and your man and your railroad,

alongside of a flea? The fastest man can't run more

than about ten miles in an hour -- not much over ten

thousand times his own length. But all the books says

any common ordinary third-class flea can jump a hun-

dred and fifty times his own length; yes, and he can

make five jumps a second too -- seven hundred and

fifty times his own length, in one little second -- for he

don't fool away any time stopping and starting -- he

does them both at the same time; you'll see, if you

try to put your finger on him. Now that's a common,

ordinary, third-class flea's gait; but you take an Eye-

talian FIRST-class, that's been the pet of the nobility all

his life, and hasn't ever knowed what want or sickness

or exposure was, and he can jump more than three

hundred times his own length, and keep it up all day,

five such jumps every second, which is fifteen hundred

times his own length. Well, suppose a man could go

fifteen hundred times his own length in a second -- say,

a mile and a half. It's ninety miles a minute; it's

considerable more than five thousand miles an hour.

Where's your man NOW? -- yes, and your bird, and

your railroad, and your balloon? Laws, they don't

amount to shucks 'longside of a flea. A flea is just

a comet b'iled down small."



Jim was a good deal astonished, and so was I. Jim

said:



"Is dem figgers jist edjackly true, en no jokin' en

no lies, Mars Tom?"



"Yes, they are; they're perfectly true."



"Well, den, honey, a body's got to respec' a flea.

I ain't had no respec' for um befo', sca'sely, but dey

ain't no gittin' roun' it, dey do deserve it, dat's

certain."



"Well, I bet they do. They've got ever so much

more sense, and brains, and brightness, in proportion

to their size, than any other cretur in the world. A

person can learn them 'most anything; and they learn

it quicker than any other cretur, too. They've been

learnt to haul little carriages in harness, and go this

way and that way and t'other way according to their

orders; yes, and to march and drill like soldiers, doing

it as exact, according to orders, as soldiers does it.

They've been learnt to do all sorts of hard and

troublesome things. S'pose you could cultivate a flea

up to the size of a man, and keep his natural

smartness a-growing and a-growing right along up,

bigger and bigger, and keener and keener, in the same

proportion -- where'd the human race be, do you

reckon? That flea would be President of the United

States, and you couldn't any more prevent it than you

can prevent lightning."



"My lan', Mars Tom, I never knowed dey was so

much TO de beas'. No, sir, I never had no idea of it,

and dat's de fac'."



"There's more to him, by a long sight, than there

is to any other cretur, man or beast, in proportion to

size. He's the interestingest of them all. People have

so much to say about an ant's strength, and an ele-

phant's, and a locomotive's. Shucks, they don't begin

with a flea. He can lift two or three hundred times his

own weight. And none of them can come anywhere

near it. And, moreover, he has got notions of his

own, and is very particular, and you can't fool him;

his instinct, or his judgment, or whatever it is, is per-

fectly sound and clear, and don't ever make a mistake.

People think all humans are alike to a flea. It ain't

so. There's folks that he won't go near, hungry or

not hungry, and I'm one of them. I've never had one

of them on me in my life."



"Mars Tom!"



"It's so; I ain't joking."



"Well, sah, I hain't ever heard de likes o' dat befo'."

Jim couldn't believe it, and I couldn't; so we had to

drop down to the sand and git a supply and see. Tom

was right. They went for me and Jim by the thou-

sand, but not a one of them lit on Tom. There warn't

no explaining it, but there it was and there warn't no

getting around it. He said it had always been just so,

and he'd just as soon be where there was a million of

them as not; they'd never touch him nor bother

him.



We went up to the cold weather to freeze 'em out,

and stayed a little spell, and then come back to the

comfortable weather and went lazying along twenty or

twenty-five miles an hour, the way we'd been doing for

the last few hours. The reason was, that the longer

we was in that solemn, peaceful desert, the more the

hurry and fuss got kind of soothed down in us, and

the more happier and contented and satisfied we got to

feeling, and the more we got to liking the desert, and

then loving it. So we had cramped the speed down,

as I was saying, and was having a most noble good

lazy time, sometimes watching through the glasses,

sometimes stretched out on the lockers reading, some-

times taking a nap.



It didn't seem like we was the same lot that was in

such a state to find land and git ashore, but it was.

But we had got over that -- clean over it. We was

used to the balloon now and not afraid any more, and

didn't want to be anywheres else. Why, it seemed

just like home; it 'most seemed as if I had been born

and raised in it, and Jim and Tom said the same. And

always I had had hateful people around me, a-nagging

at me, and pestering of me, and scolding, and finding

fault, and fussing and bothering, and sticking to me,

and keeping after me, and making me do this, and

making me do that and t'other, and always selecting

out the things I didn't want to do, and then giving me

Sam Hill because I shirked and done something else,

and just aggravating the life out of a body all the time;

but up here in the sky it was so still and sunshiny and

lovely, and plenty to eat, and plenty of sleep, and

strange things to see, and no nagging and no pester-

ing, and no good people, and just holiday all the time.

Land, I warn't in no hurry to git out and buck at

civilization again. Now, one of the worst things about

civilization is, that anybody that gits a letter with

trouble in it comes and tells you all about it and makes

you feel bad, and the newspapers fetches you the

troubles of everybody all over the world, and keeps

you downhearted and dismal 'most all the time, and

it's such a heavy load for a person. I hate them

newspapers; and I hate letters; and if I had my way

I wouldn't allow nobody to load his troubles on to

other folks he ain't acquainted with, on t'other side of

the world, that way. Well, up in a balloon there ain't

any of that, and it's the darlingest place there is.



We had supper, and that night was one of the

prettiest nights I ever see. The moon made it just

like daylight, only a heap softer; and once we see a

lion standing all alone by himself, just all alone on the

earth, it seemed like, and his shadder laid on the sand

by him like a puddle of ink. That's the kind of moon-

light to have.



Mainly we laid on our backs and talked; we didn't

want to go to sleep. Tom said we was right in the

midst of the Arabian Nights now. He said it was right

along here that one of the cutest things in that book

happened; so we looked down and watched while he

told about it, because there ain't anything that is so

interesting to look at as a place that a book has talked

about. It was a tale about a camel-driver that had lost

his camel, and he come along in the desert and met a

man, and says:



"Have you run across a stray camel to-day?"



And the man says:



"Was he blind in his left eye?"



"Yes."



"Had he lost an upper front tooth?"



"Yes."



"Was his off hind leg lame?"



"Yes."



"Was he loaded with millet-seed on one side and

honey on the other?"



"Yes, but you needn't go into no more details --

that's the one, and I'm in a hurry. Where did you

see him?"



"I hain't seen him at all," the man says.



"Hain't seen him at all? How can you describe

him so close, then?"



"Because when a person knows how to use his eyes,

everything has got a meaning to it; but most people's

eyes ain't any good to them. I knowed a camel had

been along, because I seen his track. I knowed he

was lame in his off hind leg because he had favored

that foot and trod light on it, and his track showed it.

I knowed he was blind on his left side because he only

nibbled the grass on the right side of the trail. I

knowed he had lost an upper front tooth because where

he bit into the sod his teeth-print showed it. The

millet-seed sifted out on one side -- the ants told me

that; the honey leaked out on the other -- the flies

told me that. I know all about your camel, but I

hain't seen him."



Jim says:



"Go on, Mars Tom, hit's a mighty good tale, and

powerful interestin'."



"That's all," Tom says.



"ALL?" says Jim, astonished. "What 'come o'

de camel?"



"I don't know."



"Mars Tom, don't de tale say?"



"No."



Jim puzzled a minute, then he says:



"Well! Ef dat ain't de beatenes' tale ever I struck.

Jist gits to de place whah de intrust is gittin' red-hot,

en down she breaks. Why, Mars Tom, dey ain't no

SENSE in a tale dat acts like dat. Hain't you got no

IDEA whether de man got de camel back er not?"



"No, I haven't."



I see myself there warn't no sense in the tale, to

chop square off that way before it come to anything,

but I warn't going to say so, because I could see Tom

was souring up pretty fast over the way it flatted out

and the way Jim had popped on to the weak place in

it, and I don't think it's fair for everybody to pile on

to a feller when he's down. But Tom he whirls on

me and says:



"What do YOU think of the tale?"



Of course, then, I had to come out and make a clean

breast and say it did seem to me, too, same as it did

to Jim, that as long as the tale stopped square in the

middle and never got to no place, it really warn't

worth the trouble of telling.



Tom's chin dropped on his breast, and 'stead of

being mad, as I reckoned he'd be, to hear me scoff at

his tale that way, he seemed to be only sad; and he

says:



"Some people can see, and some can't -- just as

that man said. Let alone a camel, if a cyclone had

gone by, YOU duffers wouldn't 'a' noticed the

track."



I don't know what he meant by that, and he didn't

say; it was just one of his irrulevances, I reckon -- he

was full of them, sometimes, when he was in a close

place and couldn't see no other way out -- but I didn't

mind. We'd spotted the soft place in that tale sharp

enough, he couldn't git away from that little fact. It

graveled him like the nation, too, I reckon, much as

he tried not to let on.





CHAPTER VIII.

THE DISAPPEARING LAKE



WE had an early breakfast in the morning, and set

looking down on the desert, and the weather

was ever so bammy and lovely, although we warn't

high up. You have to come down lower and lower

after sundown in the desert, because it cools off so

fast; and so, by the time it is getting toward dawn,

you are skimming along only a little ways above the

sand.



We was watching the shadder of the balloon slide

along the ground, and now and then gazing off across

the desert to see if anything was stirring, and then

down on the shadder again, when all of a sudden

almost right under us we see a lot of men and camels

laying scattered about, perfectly quiet, like they was

asleep.



We shut off the power, and backed up and stood

over them, and then we see that they was all dead. It

give us the cold shivers. And it made us hush down,

too, and talk low, like people at a funeral. We

dropped down slow and stopped, and me and Tom

clumb down and went among them. There was men,

and women, and children. They was dried by the sun

and dark and shriveled and leathery, like the pictures

of mummies you see in books. And yet they looked

just as human, you wouldn't 'a' believed it; just like

they was asleep.



Some of the people and animals was partly covered

with sand, but most of them not, for the sand was

thin there, and the bed was gravel and hard. Most

of the clothes had rotted away; and when you took

hold of a rag, it tore with a touch, like spider-

web. Tom reckoned they had been laying there for

years.



Some of the men had rusty guns by them, some had

swords on and had shawl belts with long, silver-

mounted pistols stuck in them. All the camels had

their loads on yet, but the packs had busted or rotted

and spilt the freight out on the ground. We didn't

reckon the swords was any good to the dead people

any more, so we took one apiece, and some pistols.

We took a small box, too, because it was so handsome

and inlaid so fine; and then we wanted to bury the

people; but there warn't no way to do it that we could

think of, and nothing to do it with but sand, and that

would blow away again, of course.



Then we mounted high and sailed away, and pretty

soon that black spot on the sand was out of sight, and

we wouldn't ever see them poor people again in this

world. We wondered, and reasoned, and tried to

guess how they come to be there, and how it all hap-

pened to them, but we couldn't make it out. First we

thought maybe they got lost, and wandered around and

about till their food and water give out and they

starved to death; but Tom said no wild animals nor

vultures hadn't meddled with them, and so that guess

wouldn't do. So at last we give it up, and judged we

wouldn't think about it no more, because it made us

low-spirited.



Then we opened the box, and it had gems and jewels

in it, quite a pile, and some little veils of the kind the

dead women had on, with fringes made out of curious

gold money that we warn't acquainted with. We

wondered if we better go and try to find them again

and give it back; but Tom thought it over and said

no, it was a country that was full of robbers, and they

would come and steal it; and then the sin would be on

us for putting the temptation in their way. So we

went on; but I wished we had took all they had, so

there wouldn't 'a' been no temptation at all left.



We had had two hours of that blazing weather down

there, and was dreadful thirsty when we got aboard

again. We went straight for the water, but it was

spoiled and bitter, besides being pretty near hot enough

to scald your mouth. We couldn't drink it. It was

Mississippi river water, the best in the world, and we

stirred up the mud in it to see if that would help, but

no, the mud wasn't any better than the water.

Well, we hadn't been so very, very thirsty before,

while we was interested in the lost people, but we was

now, and as soon as we found we couldn't have a

drink, we was more than thirty-five times as thirsty as

we was a quarter of a minute before. Why, in a little

while we wanted to hold our mouths open and pant

like a dog.



Tom said to keep a sharp lookout, all around, every-

wheres, because we'd got to find an oasis or there

warn't no telling what would happen. So we done it.

We kept the glasses gliding around all the time, till our

arms got so tired we couldn't hold them any more.

Two hours -- three hours -- just gazing and gazing,

and nothing but sand, sand, SAND, and you could see

the quivering heat-shimmer playing over it. Dear,

dear, a body don't know what real misery is till he is

thirsty all the way through and is certain he ain't ever

going to come to any water any more. At last I

couldn't stand it to look around on them baking plains;

I laid down on the locker, and give it up.



But by and by Tom raised a whoop, and there she

was! A lake, wide and shiny, with pa'm-trees leaning

over it asleep, and their shadders in the water just as

soft and delicate as ever you see. I never see anything

look so good. It was a long ways off, but that

warn't anything to us; we just slapped on a hundred-

mile gait, and calculated to be there in seven minutes;

but she stayed the same old distance away, all the

time; we couldn't seem to gain on her; yes, sir, just as

far, and shiny, and like a dream; but we couldn't get

no nearer; and at last, all of a sudden, she was gone!



Tom's eyes took a spread, and he says:



"Boys, it was a MYridge!" Said it like he was

glad. I didn't see nothing to be glad about. I says:



"Maybe. I don't care nothing about its name, the

thing I want to know is, what's become of it?"



Jim was trembling all over, and so scared he couldn't

speak, but he wanted to ask that question himself if he

could 'a' done it. Tom says:



"What's BECOME of it? Why, you see yourself it's

gone."



"Yes, I know; but where's it gone TO?"



He looked me over and says:



"Well, now, Huck Finn, where WOULD it go to!

Don't you know what a myridge is?"



"No, I don't. What is it?"



"It ain't anything but imagination. There ain't

anything TO it. "



It warmed me up a little to hear him talk like that,

and I says:



"What's the use you talking that kind of stuff, Tom

Sawyer? Didn't I see the lake?"



"Yes -- you think you did."



"I don't think nothing about it, I DID see it."



"I tell you you DIDN'T see it either -- because it

warn't there to see."



It astonished Jim to hear him talk so, and he broke

in and says, kind of pleading and distressed:



"Mars Tom, PLEASE don't say sich things in sich an

awful time as dis. You ain't only reskin' yo' own

self, but you's reskin' us -- same way like Anna Nias

en Siffra. De lake WUZ dah -- I seen it jis' as plain

as I sees you en Huck dis minute."



I says:



"Why, he seen it himself! He was the very one

that seen it first. NOW, then!"



"Yes, Mars Tom, hit's so -- you can't deny it. We

all seen it, en dat PROVE it was dah."



"Proves it! How does it prove it?"



"Same way it does in de courts en everywheres,

Mars Tom. One pusson might be drunk, or dreamy

or suthin', en he could be mistaken; en two might,

maybe; but I tell you, sah, when three sees a thing,

drunk er sober, it's SO. Dey ain't no gittin' aroun'

dat, en you knows it, Mars Tom."



"I don't know nothing of the kind. There used to

be forty thousand million people that seen the sun

move from one side of the sky to the other every day.

Did that prove that the sun DONE it?"



"Course it did. En besides, dey warn't no 'casion

to prove it. A body 'at's got any sense ain't gwine to

doubt it. Dah she is now -- a sailin' thoo de sky,

like she allays done."



Tom turned on me, then, and says:



"What do YOU say -- is the sun standing still?"



"Tom Sawyer, what's the use to ask such a jackass

question? Anybody that ain't blind can see it don't

stand still."



"Well," he says, "I'm lost in the sky with no

company but a passel of low-down animals that don't

know no more than the head boss of a university did

three or four hundred years ago."



It warn't fair play, and I let him know it. I

says:



"Throwin' mud ain't arguin', Tom Sawyer."



"Oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness gracious,

dah's de lake agi'n!" yelled Jim, just then. "NOW,

Mars Tom, what you gwine to say?"



Yes, sir, there was the lake again, away yonder

across the desert, perfectly plain, trees and all, just

the same as it was before. I says:



"I reckon you're satisfied now, Tom Sawyer."



But he says, perfectly ca'm:



"Yes, satisfied there ain't no lake there."



Jim says:



"DON'T talk so, Mars Tom -- it sk'yers me to hear

you. It's so hot, en you's so thirsty, dat you ain't in

yo' right mine, Mars Tom. Oh, but don't she look

good! 'clah I doan' know how I's gwine to wait tell

we gits dah, I's SO thirsty."



"Well, you'll have to wait; and it won't do you no

good, either, because there ain't no lake there, I tell

you."



I says:



"Jim, don't you take your eye off of it, and I

won't, either."



"'Deed I won't; en bless you, honey, I couldn't ef

I wanted to."



We went a-tearing along toward it, piling the miles

behind us like nothing, but never gaining an inch on it

-- and all of a sudden it was gone again! Jim stag-

gered, and 'most fell down. When he got his breath

he says, gasping like a fish:



"Mars Tom, hit's a GHOS', dat's what it is, en I

hopes to goodness we ain't gwine to see it no mo'.

Dey's BEEN a lake, en suthin's happened, en de lake's

dead, en we's seen its ghos'; we's seen it twiste, en

dat's proof. De desert's ha'nted, it's ha'nted, sho;

oh, Mars Tom, le''s git outen it; I'd ruther die den

have de night ketch us in it ag'in en de ghos' er dat

lake come a-mournin' aroun' us en we asleep en doan'

know de danger we's in."



"Ghost, you gander! It ain't anything but air and

heat and thirstiness pasted together by a person's

imagination. If I -- gimme the glass!"



He grabbed it and begun to gaze off to the right.



"It's a flock of birds," he says. "It's getting

toward sundown, and they're making a bee-line across

our track for somewheres. They mean business --

maybe they're going for food or water, or both. Let

her go to starboard! -- Port your hellum! Hard down!

There -- ease up -- steady, as you go."



We shut down some of the power, so as not to out-

speed them, and took out after them. We went skim-

ming along a quarter of a mile behind them, and when

we had followed them an hour and a half and was get-

ting pretty discouraged, and was thirsty clean to

unendurableness, Tom says:



"Take the glass, one of you, and see what that is,

away ahead of the birds."



Jim got the first glimpse, and slumped down on the

locker sick. He was most crying, and says:



"She's dah ag'in, Mars Tom, she's dah ag'in, en I

knows I's gwine to die, 'case when a body sees a ghos'

de third time, dat's what it means. I wisht I'd never

come in dis balloon, dat I does."



He wouldn't look no more, and what he said made

me afraid, too, because I knowed it was true, for that

has always been the way with ghosts; so then I

wouldn't look any more, either. Both of us begged

Tom to turn off and go some other way, but he

wouldn't, and said we was ignorant superstitious

blatherskites. Yes, and he'll git come up with, one

of these days, I says to myself, insulting ghosts that

way. They'll stand it for a while, maybe, but they

won't stand it always, for anybody that knows about

ghosts knows how easy they are hurt, and how revenge-

ful they are.



So we was all quiet and still, Jim and me being

scared, and Tom busy. By and by Tom fetched the

balloon to a standstill, and says:



"NOW get up and look, you sapheads."



We done it, and there was the sure-enough water

right under us! -- clear, and blue, and cool, and deep,

and wavy with the breeze, the loveliest sight that ever

was. And all about it was grassy banks, and flowers,

and shady groves of big trees, looped together with

vines, and all looking so peaceful and comfortable --

enough to make a body cry, it was so beautiful.



Jim DID cry, and rip and dance and carry on, he was

so thankful and out of his mind for joy. It was my

watch, so I had to stay by the works, but Tom and

Jim clumb down and drunk a barrel apiece, and

fetched me up a lot, and I've tasted a many a good

thing in my life, but nothing that ever begun with that

water.



Then we went down and had a swim, and then Tom

came up and spelled me, and me and Jim had a swim,

and then Jim spelled Tom, and me and Tom had a

foot-race and a boxing-mill, and I don't reckon I ever

had such a good time in my life. It warn't so very

hot, because it was close on to evening, and we hadn't

any clothes on, anyway. Clothes is well enough in

school, and in towns, and at balls, too, but there ain't

no sense in them when there ain't no civilization nor

other kinds of bothers and fussiness around.



"Lions a-comin'! -- lions! Quick, Mars Tom!

Jump for yo' life, Huck!"



Oh, and didn't we! We never stopped for clothes,

but waltzed up the ladder just so. Jim lost his head

straight off -- he always done it whenever he got ex-

cited and scared; and so now, 'stead of just easing the

ladder up from the ground a little, so the animals

couldn't reach it, he turned on a raft of power, and we

went whizzing up and was dangling in the sky before

he got his wits together and seen what a foolish thing

he was doing. Then he stopped her, but he had clean

forgot what to do next; so there we was, so high that

the lions looked like pups, and we was drifting off on

the wind.



But Tom he shinned up and went for the works and

begun to slant her down, and back toward the lake,

where the animals was gathering like a camp-meeting,

and I judged he had lost HIS head, too; for he knowed

I was too scared to climb, and did he want to dump

me among the tigers and things?



But no, his head was level, he knowed what he was

about. He swooped down to within thirty or forty

feet of the lake, and stopped right over the center, and

sung out:



"Leggo, and drop!"



I done it, and shot down, feet first, and seemed to

go about a mile toward the bottom; and when I come

up, he says:



"Now lay on your back and float till you're rested

and got your pluck back, then I'll dip the ladder in

the water and you can climb aboard."



I done it. Now that was ever so smart in Tom, be-

cause if he had started off somewheres else to drop

down on the sand, the menagerie would 'a' come

along, too, and might 'a' kept us hunting a safe place

till I got tuckered out and fell.



And all this time the lions and tigers was sorting out

the clothes, and trying to divide them up so there

would be some for all, but there was a misunderstand-

ing about it somewheres, on account of some of them

trying to hog more than their share; so there was

another insurrection, and you never see anything like

it in the world. There must 'a' been fifty of them, all

mixed up together, snorting and roaring and snapping

and biting and tearing, legs and tails in the air, and

you couldn't tell which was which, and the sand and

fur a-flying. And when they got done, some was

dead. and some was limping off crippled, and the rest

was setting around on the battlefield, some of them

licking their sore places and the others looking up at

us and seemed to be kind of inviting us to come down

and have some fun, but which we didn't want any.



As for the clothes, they warn't any, any more.

Every last rag of them was inside of the animals; and

not agreeing with them very well, I don't reckon, for

there was considerable many brass buttons on them,

and there was knives in the pockets, too, and smoking

tobacco, and nails and chalk and marbles and fish-

hooks and things. But I wasn't caring. All that was

bothering me was, that all we had now was the pro-

fessor's clothes, a big enough assortment, but not suit-

able to go into company with, if we came across any,

because the britches was as long as tunnels, and the

coats and things according. Still, there was everything

a tailor needed, and Jim was a kind of jack legged

tailor, and he allowed he could soon trim a suit or two

down for us that would answer.





CHAPTER IX.

TOM DISCOURSES ON THE DESERT



STILL, we thought we would drop down there a

minute, but on another errand. Most of the pro-

fessor's cargo of food was put up in cans, in the new

way that somebody had just invented; the rest was

fresh. When you fetch Missouri beefsteak to the

Great Sahara, you want to be particular and stay up

in the coolish weather. So we reckoned we would

drop down into the lion market and see how we could

make out there.



We hauled in the ladder and dropped down till we

was just above the reach of the animals, then we let

down a rope with a slip-knot in it and hauled up a

dead lion, a small tender one, then yanked up a cub

tiger. We had to keep the congregation off with the

revolver, or they would 'a' took a hand in the proceed-

ings and helped.



We carved off a supply from both, and saved the

skins, and hove the rest overboard. Then we baited

some of the professor's hooks with the fresh meat and

went a-fishing. We stood over the lake just a con-

venient distance above the water, and catched a lot of

the nicest fish you ever see. It was a most amazing

good supper we had; lion steak, tiger steak, fried fish,

and hot corn-pone. I don't want nothing better than

that.



We had some fruit to finish off with. We got it out

of the top of a monstrous tall tree. It was a very slim

tree that hadn't a branch on it from the bottom plumb

to the top, and there it bursted out like a feather-

duster. It was a pa'm-tree, of course; anybody knows

a pa'm-tree the minute he see it, by the pictures. We

went for cocoanuts in this one, but there warn't none.

There was only big loose bunches of things like over-

sized grapes, and Tom allowed they was dates, because

he said they answered the description in the Arabian

Nights and the other books. Of course they mightn't

be, and they might be poison; so we had to wait a

spell, and watch and see if the birds et them. They

done it; so we done it, too, and they was most amaz-

ing good.



By this time monstrous big birds begun to come and

settle on the dead animals. They was plucky creturs;

they would tackle one end of a lion that was being

gnawed at the other end by another lion. If the lion

drove the bird away, it didn't do no good; he was

back again the minute the lion was busy.



The big birds come out of every part of the sky --

you could make them out with the glass while they was

still so far away you couldn't see them with your naked

eye. Tom said the birds didn't find out the meat was

there by the smell; they had to find it out by seeing

it. Oh, but ain't that an eye for you! Tom said at

the distance of five mile a patch of dead lions couldn't

look any bigger than a person's finger-nail, and he

couldn't imagine how the birds could notice such a

little thing so far off.



It was strange and unnatural to see lion eat lion,

and we thought maybe they warn't kin. But Jim said

that didn't make no difference. He said a hog was

fond of her own children, and so was a spider, and he

reckoned maybe a lion was pretty near as unprincipled

though maybe not quite. He thought likely a lion

wouldn't eat his own father, if he knowed which was

him, but reckoned he would eat his brother-in-law if

he was uncommon hungry, and eat his mother-in-law

any time. But RECKONING don't settle nothing. You

can reckon till the cows come home, but that don't

fetch you to no decision. So we give it up and let it

drop.



Generly it was very still in the Desert nights, but this

time there was music. A lot of other animals come to

dinner; sneaking yelpers that Tom allowed was jackals,

and roached-backed ones that he said was hyenas; and

all the whole biling of them kept up a racket all the

time. They made a picture in the moonlight that was

more different than any picture I ever see. We had a

line out and made fast to the top of a tree, and didn't

stand no watch, but all turned in and slept; but I was

up two or three times to look down at the animals and

hear the music. It was like having a front seat at a

menagerie for nothing, which I hadn't ever had before,

and so it seemed foolish to sleep and not make the

most of it; I mightn't ever have such a chance

again.



We went a-fishing again in the early dawn, and then

lazied around all day in the deep shade on an island,

taking turn about to watch and see that none of the

animals come a-snooping around there after erronorts

for dinner. We was going to leave the next day, but

couldn't, it was too lovely.



The day after, when we rose up toward the sky and

sailed off eastward, we looked back and watched that

place till it warn't nothing but just a speck in the

Desert, and I tell you it was like saying good-bye to a

friend that you ain't ever going to see any more.



Jim was thinking to himself, and at last he says:



"Mars Tom, we's mos' to de end er de Desert now,

I speck."



"Why?"



"Well, hit stan' to reason we is. You knows how

long we's been a-skimmin' over it. Mus' be mos' out

o' san'. Hit's a wonder to me dat it's hilt out as long

as it has."



"Shucks, there's plenty sand, you needn't worry."



"Oh, I ain't a-worryin', Mars Tom, only wonderin',

dat's all. De Lord's got plenty san', I ain't doubtin'

dat; but nemmine, He ain't gwyne to WAS'E it jist on

dat account; en I allows dat dis Desert's plenty big

enough now, jist de way she is, en you can't spread

her out no mo' 'dout was'in' san'."



"Oh, go 'long! we ain't much more than fairly

STARTED across this Desert yet. The United States is a

pretty big country, ain't it? Ain't it, Huck?"



"Yes," I says, "there ain't no bigger one, I don't

reckon."



"Well," he says, "this Desert is about the shape

of the United States, and if you was to lay it down on

top of the United States, it would cover the land of

the free out of sight like a blanket. There'd be a little

corner sticking out, up at Maine and away up north-

west, and Florida sticking out like a turtle's tail, and

that's all. We've took California away from the

Mexicans two or three years ago, so that part of the

Pacific coast is ours now, and if you laid the Great

Sahara down with her edge on the Pacific, she would

cover the United States and stick out past New York

six hundred miles into the Atlantic ocean."



I say:



"Good land! have you got the documents for that,

Tom Sawyer?"



"Yes, and they're right here, and I've been study-

ing them. You can look for yourself. From New

York to the Pacific is 2,600 miles. From one end of

the Great Desert to the other is 3,200. The United

States contains 3,600,000 square miles, the Desert

contains 4,162,000. With the Desert's bulk you could

cover up every last inch of the United States, and in

under where the edges projected out, you could tuck

England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Denmark, and all

Germany. Yes, sir, you could hide the home of the

brave and all of them countries clean out of sight under

the Great Sahara, and you would still have 2,000

square miles of sand left."



"Well," I says, "it clean beats me. Why, Tom,

it shows that the Lord took as much pains makin' this

Desert as makin' the United States and all them other

countries."



Jim says: "Huck, dat don' stan' to reason. I

reckon dis Desert wa'n't made at all. Now you take

en look at it like dis -- you look at it, and see ef I's

right. What's a desert good for? 'Taint good for

nuthin'. Dey ain't no way to make it pay. Hain't

dat so, Huck?"



"Yes, I reckon."



"Hain't it so, Mars Tom?"



"I guess so. Go on."



"Ef a thing ain't no good, it's made in vain, ain't it?"



"Yes."



"NOW, den! Do de Lord make anything in vain?

You answer me dat."



"Well -- no, He don't."



"Den how come He make a desert?"



"Well, go on. How DID He come to make it?"



"Mars Tom, I b'lieve it uz jes like when you's buildin'

a house; dey's allays a lot o' truck en rubbish lef' over.

What does you do wid it? Doan' you take en k'yart

it off en dump it into a ole vacant back lot? 'Course.

Now, den, it's my opinion hit was jes like dat -- dat

de Great Sahara warn't made at all, she jes HAPPEN'."



I said it was a real good argument, and I believed it

was the best one Jim ever made. Tom he said the same,

but said the trouble about arguments is, they ain't

nothing but THEORIES, after all, and theories don't prove

nothing, they only give you a place to rest on, a spell,

when you are tuckered out butting around and around

trying to find out something there ain't no way TO find

out. And he says:



"There's another trouble about theories: there's

always a hole in them somewheres, sure, if you look

close enough. It's just so with this one of Jim's.

Look what billions and billions of stars there is. How

does it come that there was just exactly enough star-

stuff, and none left over? How does it come there

ain't no sand-pile up there?"



But Jim was fixed for him and says:



"What's de Milky Way? -- dat's what I want to

know. What's de Milky Way? Answer me dat!"



In my opinion it was just a sockdologer. It's only

an opinion, it's only MY opinion and others may think

different; but I said it then and I stand to it now -- it

was a sockdologer. And moreover, besides, it landed

Tom Sawyer. He couldn't say a word. He had that

stunned look of a person that's been shot in the back

with a kag of nails. All he said was, as for people

like me and Jim, he'd just as soon have intellectual

intercourse with a catfish. But anybody can say that

-- and I notice they always do, when somebody has

fetched them a lifter. Tom Sawyer was tired of that

end of the subject.



  So we got back to talking about the size of the

Desert again, and the more we compared it with this

and that and t'other thing, the more nobler and bigger

and grander it got to look right along. And so, hunt-

ing among the figgers, Tom found, by and by, that it

was just the same size as the Empire of China. Then

he showed us the spread the Empire of China made on

the map, and the room she took up in the world.

Well, it was wonderful to think of, and I says:



"Why, I've heard talk about this Desert plenty of

times, but I never knowed before how important she

was."



Then Tom says:



"Important! Sahara important! That's just the

way with some people. If a thing's big, it's important.

That's all the sense they've got. All they can see is

SIZE. Why, look at England. It's the most important

country in the world; and yet you could put it in

China's vest-pocket; and not only that, but you'd

have the dickens's own time to find it again the next

time you wanted it. And look at Russia. It spreads

all around and everywhere, and yet ain't no more im-

portant in this world than Rhode Island is, and hasn't

got half as much in it that's worth saving."



Away off now we see a little hill, a-standing up just

on the edge of the world. Tom broke off his talk, and

reached for a glass very much excited, and took a look,

and says:



"That's it -- it's the one I've been looking for,

sure. If I'm right, it's the one the dervish took the

man into and showed him all the treasures."



So we begun to gaze, and he begun to tell about it

out of the Arabian Nights.





CHAPTER X.

THE TREASURE-HILL



TOM said it happened like this.



A dervish was stumping it along through the

Desert, on foot, one blazing hot day, and he had come

a thousand miles and was pretty poor, and hungry,

and ornery and tired, and along about where we are

now he run across a camel-driver with a hundred

camels, and asked him for some a'ms. But the camel-

driver he asked to be excused. The dervish said:



"Don't you own these camels?"



"Yes, they're mine."



"Are you in debt?"



"Who -- me? No."



"Well, a man that owns a hundred camels and ain't

in debt is rich -- and not only rich, but very rich.

Ain't it so?"



The camel-driver owned up that it was so. Then

the dervish says:



"God has made you rich, and He has made me

poor. He has His reasons, and they are wise, blessed

be His name. But He has willed that His rich shall

help His poor, and you have turned away from me,

your brother, in my need, and He will remember this,

and you will lose by it."



That made the camel-driver feel shaky, but all the

same he was born hoggish after money and didn't like

to let go a cent; so he begun to whine and explain,

and said times was hard, and although he had took a

full freight down to Balsora and got a fat rate for it,

he couldn't git no return freight, and so he warn't

making no great things out of his trip. So the dervish

starts along again, and says:



"All right, if you want to take the risk; but I

reckon you've made a mistake this time, and missed a

chance."



Of course the camel-driver wanted to know what

kind of a chance he had missed, because maybe there

was money in it; so he run after the dervish, and

begged him so hard and earnest to take pity on him

that at last the dervish gave in, and says:



"Do you see that hill yonder? Well, in that hill is

all the treasures of the earth, and I was looking around

for a man with a particular good kind heart and a

noble, generous disposition, because if I could find just

that man, I've got a kind of a salve I could put on

his eyes and he could see the treasures and get them

out."



So then the camel-driver was in a sweat; and he

cried, and begged, and took on, and went down on his

knees, and said he was just that kind of a man, and

said he could fetch a thousand people that would say

he wasn't ever described so exact before.



"Well, then," says the dervish, "all right. If we

load the hundred camels, can I have half of them?"



The driver was so glad he couldn't hardly hold in,

and says:



"Now you're shouting."



So they shook hands on the bargain, and the dervish

got out his box and rubbed the salve on the driver's

right eye, and the hill opened and he went in, and

there, sure enough, was piles and piles of gold and

jewels sparkling like all the stars in heaven had fell down.



So him and the dervish laid into it, and they loaded

every camel till he couldn't carry no more; then they

said good-bye, and each of them started off with his

fifty. But pretty soon the camel-driver come a-running

and overtook the dervish and says:



"You ain't in society, you know, and you don't

really need all you've got. Won't you be good, and

let me have ten of your camels?"



"Well," the dervish says, "I don't know but what

you say is reasonable enough."



So he done it, and they separated and the dervish

started off again with his forty. But pretty soon here

comes the camel-driver bawling after him again, and

whines and slobbers around and begs another ten off of

him, saying thirty camel loads of treasures was enough

to see a dervish through, because they live very simple,

you know, and don't keep house, but board around

and give their note.



But that warn't the end yet. That ornery hound

kept coming and coming till he had begged back all

the camels and had the whole hundred. Then he was

satisfied, and ever so grateful, and said he wouldn't

ever forgit the dervish as long as he lived, and nobody

hadn't been so good to him before, and liberal. So

they shook hands good-bye, and separated and started

off again.



But do you know, it warn't ten minutes till the

camel-driver was unsatisfied again -- he was the low-

downest reptyle in seven counties -- and he come a-

running again. And this time the thing he wanted was

to get the dervish to rub some of the salve on his other

eye.



"Why?" said the dervish.



"Oh, you know," says the driver.



"Know what?"



"Well, you can't fool me," says the driver.

"You're trying to keep back something from me,

you know it mighty well. You know, I reckon, that

if I had the salve on the other eye I could see a lot

more things that's valuable. Come -- please put it on."



The dervish says:



"I wasn't keeping anything back from you. I

don't mind telling you what would happen if I put it

on. You'd never see again. You'd be stone-blind the

rest of your days."



But do you know that beat wouldn't believe him.

No, he begged and begged, and whined and cried, till

at last the dervish opened his box and told him to put

it on, if he wanted to. So the man done it, and sure

enough he was as blind as a bat in a minute.



Then the dervish laughed at him and mocked at him

and made fun of him; and says:



"Good-bye -- a man that's blind hain't got no use

for jewelry."



And he cleared out with the hundred camels, and

left that man to wander around poor and miserable and

friendless the rest of his days in the Desert.



Jim said he'd bet it was a lesson to him.



"Yes," Tom says, "and like a considerable many

lessons a body gets. They ain't no account, because

the thing don't ever happen the same way again -- and

can't. The time Hen Scovil fell down the chimbly

and crippled his back for life, everybody said it would

be a lesson to him. What kind of a lesson? How

was he going to use it? He couldn't climb chimblies

no more, and he hadn't no more backs to break."



"All de same, Mars Tom, dey IS sich a thing as

learnin' by expe'ence. De Good Book say de burnt

chile shun de fire."



"Well, I ain't denying that a thing's a lesson if it's

a thing that can happen twice just the same way.

There's lots of such things, and THEY educate a person,

that's what Uncle Abner always said; but there's forty

MILLION lots of the other kind -- the kind that don't

happen the same way twice -- and they ain't no real

use, they ain't no more instructive than the small-pox.

When you've got it, it ain't no good to find out you

ought to been vaccinated, and it ain't no good to git

vaccinated afterward, because the small-pox don't

come but once. But, on the other hand, Uncle Abner

said that the person that had took a bull by the tail

once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a

person that hadn't, and said a person that started in to

carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that

was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever

going to grow dim or doubtful. But I can tell you,

Jim, Uncle Abner was down on them people that's all

the time trying to dig a lesson out of everything that

happens, no matter whether --"



But Jim was asleep. Tom looked kind of ashamed,

because you know a person always feels bad when he

is talking uncommon fine and thinks the other person

is admiring, and that other person goes to sleep that

way. Of course he oughtn't to go to sleep, because

it's shabby; but the finer a person talks the certainer

it is to make you sleep, and so when you come to look

at it it ain't nobody's fault in particular; both of

them's to blame.



Jim begun to snore -- soft and blubbery at first,

then a long rasp, then a stronger one, then a half a

dozen horrible ones like the last water sucking down

the plug-hole of a bath-tub, then the same with more

power to it, and some big coughs and snorts flung in,

the way a cow does that is choking to death; and

when the person has got to that point he is at his level

best, and can wake up a man that is in the next block

with a dipperful of loddanum in him, but can't wake

himself up although all that awful noise of his'n ain't

but three inches from his own ears. And that is the

curiosest thing in the world, seems to me. But you

rake a match to light the candle, and that little bit of a

noise will fetch him. I wish I knowed what was the

reason of that, but there don't seem to be no way to

find out. Now there was Jim alarming the whole

Desert, and yanking the animals out, for miles and

miles around, to see what in the nation was going on

up there; there warn't nobody nor nothing that was as

close to the noise as HE was, and yet he was the only

cretur that wasn't disturbed by it. We yelled at him

and whooped at him, it never done no good; but the

first time there come a little wee noise that wasn't of a

usual kind it woke him up. No, sir, I've thought it

all over, and so has Tom, and there ain't no way to

find out why a snorer can't hear himself snore.



Jim said he hadn't been asleep; he just shut his eyes

so he could listen better.



Tom said nobody warn't accusing him.



That made him look like he wished he hadn't said

anything. And he wanted to git away from the sub-

ject, I reckon, because he begun to abuse the camel-

driver, just the way a person does when he has got

catched in something and wants to take it out of some-

body else. He let into the camel-driver the hardest he

knowed how, and I had to agree with him; and he

praised up the dervish the highest he could, and I had

to agree with him there, too. But Tom says:



"I ain't so sure. You call that dervish so dreadful

liberal and good and unselfish, but I don't quite see it.

He didn't hunt up another poor dervish, did he? No,

he didn't. If he was so unselfish, why didn't he go in

there himself and take a pocketful of jewels and go

along and be satisfied? No, sir, the person he was

hunting for was a man with a hundred camels. He

wanted to get away with all the treasure he could."



"Why, Mars Tom, he was willin' to divide, fair and

square; he only struck for fifty camels."



"Because he knowed how he was going to get all of

them by and by."



"Mars Tom, he TOLE de man de truck would make

him bline."



"Yes, because he knowed the man's character. It

was just the kind of a man he was hunting for -- a

man that never believes in anybody's word or any-

body's honorableness, because he ain't got none of his

own. I reckon there's lots of people like that dervish.

They swindle, right and left, but they always make the

other person SEEM to swindle himself. They keep inside

of the letter of the law all the time, and there ain't no

way to git hold of them. THEY don't put the salve on

-- oh, no, that would be sin; but they know how to

fool YOU into putting it on, then it's you that blinds

yourself. I reckon the dervish and the camel-driver

was just a pair -- a fine, smart, brainy rascal, and a

dull, coarse, ignorant one, but both of them rascals,

just the same."



"Mars Tom, does you reckon dey's any o' dat kind

o' salve in de worl' now?"



"Yes, Uncle Abner says there is. He says they've

got it in New York, and they put it on country people's

eyes and show them all the railroads in the world, and

they go in and git them, and then when they rub the

salve on the other eye the other man bids them good-

bye and goes off with their railroads. Here's the

treasure-hill now. Lower away!"



We landed, but it warn't as interesting as I thought

it was going to be, because we couldn't find the place

where they went in to git the treasure. Still, it was

plenty interesting enough, just to see the mere hill

itself where such a wonderful thing happened. Jim

said he wou'dn't 'a' missed it for three dollars, and I

felt the same way.



And to me and Jim, as wonderful a thing as any was

the way Tom could come into a strange big country

like this and go straight and find a little hump like that

and tell it in a minute from a million other humps that

was almost just like it, and nothing to help him but

only his own learning and his own natural smartness.

We talked and talked it over together, but couldn't

make out how he done it. He had the best head on

him I ever see; and all he lacked was age, to make a

name for himself equal to Captain Kidd or George

Washington. I bet you it would 'a' crowded either of

THEM to find that hill, with all their gifts, but it warn't

nothing to Tom Sawyer; he went across Sahara and

put his finger on it as easy as you could pick a nigger

out of a bunch of angels.



We found a pond of salt water close by and scraped

up a raft of salt around the edges, and loaded up the

lion's skin and the tiger's so as they would keep till Jim

could tan them.





CHAPTER XI.

THE SAND-STORM



WE went a-fooling along for a day or two, and then

just as the full moon was touching the ground

on the other side of the desert, we see a string of little

black figgers moving across its big silver face. You

could see them as plain as if they was painted on the

moon with ink. It was another caravan. We cooled

down our speed and tagged along after it, just to have

company, though it warn't going our way. It was a

rattler, that caravan, and a most bully sight to look at

next morning when the sun come a-streaming across

the desert and flung the long shadders of the camels

on the gold sand like a thousand grand-daddy-long-

legses marching in procession. We never went very

near it, because we knowed better now than to act like

that and scare people's camels and break up their cara-

vans. It was the gayest outfit you ever see, for rich

clothes and nobby style. Some of the chiefs rode on

dromedaries, the first we ever see, and very tall, and

they go plunging along like they was on stilts, and

they rock the man that is on them pretty violent and

churn up his dinner considerable, I bet you, but they

make noble good time, and a camel ain't nowheres with

them for speed.



The caravan camped, during the middle part of the

day, and then started again about the middle of the

afternoon. Before long the sun begun to look very

curious. First it kind of turned to brass, and then to

copper, and after that it begun to look like a blood-

red ball, and the air got hot and close, and pretty soon

all the sky in the west darkened up and looked thick

and foggy, but fiery and dreadful -- like it looks

through a piece of red glass, you know. We looked

down and see a big confusion going on in the caravan,

and a rushing every which way like they was scared;

and then they all flopped down flat in the sand and

laid there perfectly still.



Pretty soon we see something coming that stood up

like an amazing wide wall, and reached from the Desert

up into the sky and hid the sun, and it was coming

like the nation, too. Then a little faint breeze struck

us, and then it come harder, and grains of sand begun

to sift against our faces and sting like fire, and Tom

sung out:



"It's a sand-storm -- turn your backs to it!"



We done it; and in another minute it was blowing a

gale, and the sand beat against us by the shovelful, and

the air was so thick with it we couldn't see a thing. In

five minutes the boat was level full, and we was setting

on the lockers buried up to the chin in sand, and only

our heads out and could hardly breathe.



Then the storm thinned, and we see that monstrous

wall go a-sailing off across the desert, awful to look at,

I tell you. We dug ourselves out and looked down,

and where the caravan was before there wasn't any-

thing but just the sand ocean now, and all still and

quiet. All them people and camels was smothered and

dead and buried -- buried under ten foot of sand, we

reckoned, and Tom allowed it might be years before

the wind uncovered them, and all that time their friends

wouldn't ever know what become of that caravan.

Tom said:



"NOW we know what it was that happened to the

people we got the swords and pistols from."



Yes, sir, that was just it. It was as plain as day

now. They got buried in a sand-storm, and the wild

animals couldn't get at them, and the wind never un-

covered them again until they was dried to leather and

warn't fit to eat. It seemed to me we had felt as sorry

for them poor people as a person could for anybody,

and as mournful, too, but we was mistaken; this last

caravan's death went harder with us, a good deal

harder. You see, the others was total strangers, and

we never got to feeling acquainted with them at all,

except, maybe, a little with the man that was watching

the girl, but it was different with this last caravan. We

was huvvering around them a whole night and 'most a

whole day, and had got to feeling real friendly with

them, and acquainted. I have found out that there

ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people

or hate them than to travel with them. Just so with

these. We kind of liked them from the start, and

traveling with them put on the finisher. The longer

we traveled with them, and the more we got used to

their ways, the better and better we liked them, and

the gladder and gladder we was that we run across

them. We had come to know some of them so well

that we called them by name when we was talking

about them, and soon got so familiar and sociable that

we even dropped the Miss and Mister and just used

their plain names without any handle, and it did not

seem unpolite, but just the right thing. Of course, it

wasn't their own names, but names we give them.

There was Mr. Elexander Robinson and Miss Adaline

Robinson, and Colonel Jacob McDougal and Miss

Harryet McDougal, and Judge Jeremiah Butler and

young Bushrod Butler, and these was big chiefs mostly

that wore splendid great turbans and simmeters, and

dressed like the Grand Mogul, and their families. But

as soon as we come to know them good, and like them

very much, it warn't Mister, nor Judge, nor nothing,

any more, but only Elleck, and Addy, and Jake, and

Hattie, and Jerry, and Buck, and so on.



And you know the more you join in with people in

their joys and their sorrows, the more nearer and

dearer they come to be to you. Now we warn't cold

and indifferent, the way most travelers is, we was right

down friendly and sociable, and took a chance in every-

thing that was going, and the caravan could depend on

us to be on hand every time, it didn't make no differ-

ence what it was.



When they camped, we camped right over them, ten

or twelve hundred feet up in the air. When they et a

meal, we et ourn, and it made it ever so much home-

liker to have their company. When they had a wed-

ding that night, and Buck and Addy got married, we

got ourselves up in the very starchiest of the professor's

duds for the blow-out, and when they danced we jined

in and shook a foot up there.



But it is sorrow and trouble that brings you the

nearest, and it was a funeral that done it with us. It

was next morning, just in the still dawn. We didn't

know the diseased, and he warn't in our set, but that

never made no difference; he belonged to the caravan,

and that was enough, and there warn't no more sincerer

tears shed over him than the ones we dripped on him

from up there eleven hundred foot on high.



Yes, parting with this caravan was much more

bitterer than it was to part with them others, which was

comparative strangers, and been dead so long, anyway.

We had knowed these in their lives, and was fond of

them, too, and now to have death snatch them from

right before our faces while we was looking, and leave

us so lonesome and friendless in the middle of that big

desert, it did hurt so, and we wished we mightn't ever

make any more friends on that voyage if we was

going to lose them again like that.



We couldn't keep from talking about them, and

they was all the time coming up in our memory, and

looking just the way they looked when we was all alive

and happy together. We could see the line marching,

and the shiny spearheads a-winking in the sun; we

could see the dromedaries lumbering along; we could

see the wedding and the funeral; and more oftener

than anything else we could see them praying, because

they don't allow nothing to prevent that; whenever

the call come, several times a day, they would stop

right there, and stand up and face to the east, and lift

back their heads, and spread out their arms and begin,

and four or five times they would go down on their

knees, and then fall forward and touch their forehead

to the ground.



Well, it warn't good to go on talking about them,

lovely as they was in their life, and dear to us in their

life and death both, because it didn't do no good, and

made us too down-hearted. Jim allowed he was going

to live as good a life as he could, so he could see them

again in a better world; and Tom kept still and didn't

tell him they was only Mohammedans; it warn't no

use to disappoint him, he was feeling bad enough just

as it was.



When we woke up next morning we was feeling a

little cheerfuller, and had had a most powerful good

sleep, because sand is the comfortablest bed there is,

and I don't see why people that can afford it don't

have it more. And it's terrible good ballast, too; I

never see the balloon so steady before.



Tom allowed we had twenty tons of it, and wondered

what we better do with it; it was good sand, and it

didn't seem good sense to throw it away. Jim says:



"Mars Tom, can't we tote it back home en sell it?

How long'll it take?"



"Depends on the way we go."



"Well, sah, she's wuth a quarter of a dollar a load

at home, en I reckon we's got as much as twenty

loads, hain't we? How much would dat be?"



"Five dollars."



"By jings, Mars Tom, le's shove for home right on

de spot! Hit's more'n a dollar en a half apiece, hain't

it?"



"Yes."



"Well, ef dat ain't makin' money de easiest ever I

struck! She jes' rained in -- never cos' us a lick o'

work. Le's mosey right along, Mars Tom."



But Tom was thinking and ciphering away so busy

and excited he never heard him. Pretty soon he says:



"Five dollars -- sho! Look here, this sand's worth

-- worth -- why, it's worth no end of money."



"How is dat, Mars Tom? Go on, honey, go on!"



"Well, the minute people knows it's genuwyne sand

from the genuwyne Desert of Sahara, they'll just be in

a perfect state of mind to git hold of some of it to

keep on the what-not in a vial with a label on it for a

curiosity. All we got to do is to put it up in vials and

float around all over the United States and peddle them

out at ten cents apiece. We've got all of ten thousand

dollars' worth of sand in this boat."



Me and Jim went all to pieces with joy, and begun

to shout whoopjamboreehoo, and Tom says:



"And we can keep on coming back and fetching

sand, and coming back and fetching more sand, and

just keep it a-going till we've carted this whole Desert

over there and sold it out; and there ain't ever going

to be any opposition, either, because we'll take out a

patent."



"My goodness," I says, "we'll be as rich as Creo-

sote, won't we, Tom?"



"Yes -- Creesus, you mean. Why, that dervish was

hunting in that little hill for the treasures of the earth,

and didn't know he was walking over the real ones for

a thousand miles. He was blinder than he made the

driver."



"Mars Tom, how much is we gwyne to be worth?"



"Well, I don't know yet. It's got to be ciphered,

and it ain't the easiest job to do, either, because it's

over four million square miles of sand at ten cents a

vial."



Jim was awful excited, but this faded it out consider-

able, and he shook his head and says:



"Mars Tom, we can't 'ford all dem vials -- a king

couldn't. We better not try to take de whole Desert,

Mars Tom, de vials gwyne to bust us, sho'."



Tom's excitement died out, too, now, and I reck-

oned it was on account of the vials, but it wasn't. He

set there thinking, and got bluer and bluer, and at last

he says:



"Boys, it won't work; we got to give it up."



"Why, Tom?"



"On account of the duties."



I couldn't make nothing out of that, neither could

Jim. I says:



"What IS our duty, Tom? Because if we can't git

around it, why can't we just DO it? People often has

to."



But he says:



"Oh, it ain't that kind of duty. The kind I mean

is a tax. Whenever you strike a frontier -- that's the

border of a country, you know -- you find a custom-

house there, and the gov'ment officers comes and rum-

mages among your things and charges a big tax, which

they call a duty because it's their duty to bust you if

they can, and if you don't pay the duty they'll hog

your sand. They call it confiscating, but that don't

deceive nobody, it's just hogging, and that's all it is.

Now if we try to carry this sand home the way we're

pointed now, we got to climb fences till we git tired --

just frontier after frontier -- Egypt, Arabia, Hindostan,

and so on, and they'll all whack on a duty, and so you

see, easy enough, we CAN'T go THAT road."



"Why, Tom," I says, "we can sail right over their

old frontiers; how are THEY going to stop us?"



He looked sorrowful at me, and says, very grave:



"Huck Finn, do you think that would be honest?"



I hate them kind of interruptions. I never said

nothing, and he went on:



"Well, we're shut off the other way, too. If we go

back the way we've come, there's the New York

custom-house, and that is worse than all of them others

put together, on account of the kind of cargo we've

got."



"Why?"



"Well, they can't raise Sahara sand in America, of

course, and when they can't raise a thing there, the

duty is fourteen hundred thousand per cent. on it if

you try to fetch it in from where they do raise it."



"There ain't no sense in that, Tom Sawyer."



"Who said there WAS? What do you talk to me

like that for, Huck Finn? You wait till I say a thing's

got sense in it before you go to accusing me of say-

ing it."



"All right, consider me crying about it, and sorry.

Go on."



Jim says:



"Mars Tom, do dey jam dat duty onto everything

we can't raise in America, en don't make no 'stinction

'twix' anything?"



"Yes, that's what they do."



"Mars Tom, ain't de blessin' o' de Lord de mos'

valuable thing dey is?"



"Yes, it is."



"Don't de preacher stan' up in de pulpit en call it

down on de people?"



"Yes."



"Whah do it come from?"



"From heaven."



"Yassir! you's jes' right, 'deed you is, honey -- it

come from heaven, en dat's a foreign country. NOW,

den! do dey put a tax on dat blessin'?"



"No, they don't."



"Course dey don't; en so it stan' to reason dat

you's mistaken, Mars Tom. Dey wouldn't put de tax

on po' truck like san', dat everybody ain't 'bleeged to

have, en leave it off'n de bes' thing dey is, which

nobody can't git along widout."



Tom Sawyer was stumped; he see Jim had got him

where he couldn't budge. He tried to wiggle out by

saying they had FORGOT to put on that tax, but they'd

be sure to remember about it, next session of Con-

gress, and then they'd put it on, but that was a poor

lame come-off, and he knowed it. He said there

warn't nothing foreign that warn't taxed but just that

one, and so they couldn't be consistent without taxing

it, and to be consistent was the first law of politics.

So he stuck to it that they'd left it out unintentional

and would be certain to do their best to fix it before

they got caught and laughed at.



But I didn't feel no more interest in such things, as

long as we couldn't git our sand through, and it made

me low-spirited, and Jim the same. Tom he tried to

cheer us up by saying he would think up another

speculation for us that would be just as good as this

one and better, but it didn't do no good, we didn't

believe there was any as big as this. It was mighty

hard; such a little while ago we was so rich, and could

'a' bought a country and started a kingdom and been

celebrated and happy, and now we was so poor and

ornery again, and had our sand left on our hands.

The sand was looking so lovely before, just like gold

and di'monds, and the feel of it was so soft and so

silky and nice, but now I couldn't bear the sight of it,

it made me sick to look at it, and I knowed I wouldn't

ever feel comfortable again till we got shut of it, and I

didn't have it there no more to remind us of what we

had been and what we had got degraded down to.

The others was feeling the same way about it that I

was. I knowed it, because they cheered up so, the

minute I says le's throw this truck overboard.



Well, it was going to be work, you know, and pretty

solid work, too; so Tom he divided it up according to

fairness and strength. He said me and him would

clear out a fifth apiece of the sand, and Jim three-

fifths. Jim he didn't quite like that arrangement. He

says:



"Course I's de stronges', en I's willin' to do a share

accordin', but by jings you's kinder pilin' it onto ole

Jim, Mars Tom, hain't you?"



"Well, I didn't think so, Jim, but you try your hand

at fixing it, and let's see."



So Jim reckoned it wouldn't be no more than fair if

me and Tom done a TENTH apiece. Tom he turned his

back to git room and be private, and then he smole a

smile that spread around and covered the whole Sahara

to the westward, back to the Atlantic edge of it where

we come from. Then he turned around again and

said it was a good enough arrangement, and we was

satisfied if Jim was. Jim said he was.



So then Tom measured off our two-tenths in the

bow and left the rest for Jim, and it surprised Jim a

good deal to see how much difference there was and

what a raging lot of sand his share come to, and said

he was powerful glad now that he had spoke up in time

and got the first arrangement altered, for he said that

even the way it was now, there was more sand than

enjoyment in his end of the contract, he believed.



Then we laid into it. It was mighty hot work, and

tough; so hot we had to move up into cooler weather

or we couldn't 'a' stood it. Me and Tom took turn

about, and one worked while t'other rested, but there

warn't nobody to spell poor old Jim, and he made all

that part of Africa damp, he sweated so. We couldn't

work good, we was so full of laugh, and Jim he kept

fretting and wanting to know what tickled us so, and

we had to keep making up things to account for it, and

they was pretty poor inventions, but they done well

enough, Jim didn't see through them. At last when

we got done we was 'most dead, but not with work

but with laughing. By and by Jim was 'most dead,

too, but: it was with work; then we took turns and

spelled him, and he was as thankfull as he could be,

and would set on the gunnel and swab the sweat, and

heave and pant, and say how good we was to a poor

old nigger, and he wouldn't ever forgit us. He was

always the gratefulest nigger I ever see, for any little

thing you done for him. He was only nigger outside;

inside he was as white as you be.





CHAPTER XII.

JIM STANDING SIEGE



THE next few meals was pretty sandy, but that

don't make no difference when you are hungry;

and when you ain't it ain't no satisfaction to eat, any-

way, and so a little grit in the meat ain't no particular

drawback, as far as I can see.



Then we struck the east end of the Desert at last,

sailing on a northeast course. Away off on the edge

of the sand, in a soft pinky light, we see three little

sharp roofs like tents, and Tom says:



"It's the pyramids of Egypt."



It made my heart fairly jump. You see, I had seen

a many and a many a picture of them, and heard tell

about them a hundred times, and yet to come on them

all of a sudden, that way, and find they was REAL, 'stead

of imaginations, 'most knocked the breath out of me

with surprise. It's a curious thing, that the more you

hear about a grand and big and bully thing or person,

the more it kind of dreamies out, as you may say, and

gets to be a big dim wavery figger made out of moon-

shine and nothing solid to it. It's just so with George

Washington, and the same with them pyramids.



And moreover, besides, the thing they always said

about them seemed to me to be stretchers. There was

a feller come to the Sunday-school once, and had a

picture of them, and made a speech, and said the big-

gest pyramid covered thirteen acres, and was most five

hundred foot high, just a steep mountain, all built out

of hunks of stone as big as a bureau, and laid up

in perfectly regular layers, like stair-steps. Thirteen

acres, you see, for just one building; it's a farm. If

it hadn't been in Sunday-school, I would 'a' judged it

was a lie; and outside I was certain of it. And he

said there was a hole in the pyramid, and you could go

in there with candles, and go ever so far up a long

slanting tunnel, and come to a large room in the

stomach of that stone mountain, and there you would

find a big stone chest with a king in it, four thousand

years old. I said to myself, then, if that ain't a lie I

will eat that king if they will fetch him, for even

Methusalem warn't that old, and nobody claims it.



As we come a little nearer we see the yaller sand

come to an end in a long straight edge like a blanket,

and on to it was joined, edge to edge, a wide country

of bright green, with a snaky stripe crooking through

it, and Tom said it was the Nile. It made my heart

jump again, for the Nile was another thing that wasn't

real to me. Now I can tell you one thing which is

dead certain: if you will fool along over three thou-

sand miles of yaller sand, all glimmering with heat so

that it makes your eyes water to look at it, and you've

been a considerable part of a week doing it, the green

country will look so like home and heaven to you that

it will make your eyes water AGAIN.



It was just so with me, and the same with Jim.



And when Jim got so he could believe it WAS the

land of Egypt he was looking at, he wouldn't enter it

standing up, but got down on his knees and took off

his hat, because he said it wasn't fitten' for a humble

poor nigger to come any other way where such men

had been as Moses and Joseph and Pharaoh and the

other prophets. He was a Presbyterian, and had a

most deep respect for Moses which was a Presbyterian,

too, he said. He was all stirred up, and says:



"Hit's de lan' of Egypt, de lan' of Egypt, en I's

'lowed to look at it wid my own eyes! En dah's de

river dat was turn' to blood, en I's looking at de very

same groun' whah de plagues was, en de lice, en de

frogs, en de locus', en de hail, en whah dey marked

de door-pos', en de angel o' de Lord come by in de

darkness o' de night en slew de fust-born in all de lan'

o' Egypt. Ole Jim ain't worthy to see dis day!"



And then he just broke down and cried, he was so

thankful. So between him and Tom there was talk

enough, Jim being excited because the land was so full

of history -- Joseph and his brethren, Moses in the

bulrushers, Jacob coming down into Egypt to buy

corn, the silver cup in the sack, and all them interesting

things; and Tom just as excited too, because the land

was so full of history that was in HIS line, about

Noureddin, and Bedreddin, and such like monstrous

giants, that made Jim's wool rise, and a raft of other

Arabian Nights folks, which the half of them never

done the things they let on they done, I don't believe.



Then we struck a disappointment, for one of them

early morning fogs started up, and it warn't no use to

sail over the top of it, because we would go by Egypt,

sure, so we judged it was best to set her by compass

straight for the place where the pyramids was gitting

blurred and blotted out, and then drop low and skin

along pretty close to the ground and keep a sharp

lookout. Tom took the hellum, I stood by to let go

the anchor, and Jim he straddled the bow to dig

through the fog with his eyes and watch out for danger

ahead. We went along a steady gait, but not very

fast, and the fog got solider and solider, so solid that

Jim looked dim and ragged and smoky through it. It

was awful still, and we talked low and was anxious.

Now and then Jim would say:



"Highst her a p'int, Mars Tom, highst her!" and

up she would skip, a foot or two, and we would slide

right over a flat-roofed mud cabin, with people that

had been asleep on it just beginning to turn out and

gap and stretch; and once when a feller was clear up

on his hind legs so he could gap and stretch better, we

took him a blip in the back and knocked him off. By

and by, after about an hour, and everything dead still

and we a-straining our ears for sounds and holding our

breath, the fog thinned a little, very sudden, and Jim

sung out in an awful scare:



"Oh, for de lan's sake, set her back, Mars Tom,

here's de biggest giant outen de 'Rabian Nights a-

comin' for us!" and he went over backwards in the

boat.



Tom slammed on the back-action, and as we slowed

to a standstill a man's face as big as our house at home

looked in over the gunnel, same as a house looks out

of its windows, and I laid down and died. I must 'a'

been clear dead and gone for as much as a minute or

more; then I come to, and Tom had hitched a boat-

hook on to the lower lip of the giant and was holding

the balloon steady with it whilst he canted his head

back and got a good long look up at that awful face.



Jim was on his knees with his hands clasped, gazing

up at the thing in a begging way, and working his lips,

but not getting anything out. I took only just a

glimpse, and was fading out again, but Tom says:



"He ain't alive, you fools; it's the Sphinx!"



I never see Tom look so little and like a fly;

but that was because the giant's head was so big and

awful. Awful, yes, so it was, but not dreadful any

more, because you could see it was a noble face,

and kind of sad, and not thinking about you, but about

other things and larger. It was stone, reddish stone,

and its nose and ears battered, and that give it an

abused look, and you felt sorrier for it for that.



We stood off a piece, and sailed around it and over

it, and it was just grand. It was a man's head, or

maybe a woman's, on a tiger's body a hundred and

twenty-five foot long, and there was a dear little temple

between its front paws. All but the head used to be

under the sand, for hundreds of years, maybe thou-

sands, but they had just lately dug the sand away and

found that little temple. It took a power of sand to

bury that cretur; most as much as it would to bury a

steamboat, I reckon.



We landed Jim on top of the head, with an American

flag to protect him, it being a foreign land; then we

sailed off to this and that and t'other distance, to git

what Tom called effects and perspectives and propor-

tions, and Jim he done the best he could, striking all

the different kinds of attitudes and positions he could

study up, but standing on his head and working his

legs the way a frog does was the best. The further we

got away, the littler Jim got, and the grander the

Sphinx got, till at last it was only a clothespin on a

dome, as you might say. That's the way perspective

brings out the correct proportions, Tom said; he said

Julus Cesar's niggers didn't know how big he was,

they was too close to him.



Then we sailed off further and further, till we

couldn't see Jim at all any more, and then that great

figger was at its noblest, a-gazing out over the Nile

Valley so still and solemn and lonesome, and all the

little shabby huts and things that was scattered about it

clean disappeared and gone, and nothing around it now

but a soft wide spread of yaller velvet, which was the

sand.



That was the right place to stop, and we done it.

We set there a-looking and a-thinking for a half an

hour, nobody a-saying anything, for it made us feel

quiet and kind of solemn to remember it had been

looking over that valley just that same way, and think-

ing its awful thoughts all to itself for thousands of

years. and nobody can't find out what they are to this

day.



At last I took up the glass and see some little black

things a-capering around on that velvet carpet, and

some more a-climbing up the cretur's back, and then I

see two or three wee puffs of white smoke, and told

Tom to look. He done it, and says:



"They're bugs. No -- hold on; they -- why, I be-

lieve they're men. Yes, it's men -- men and horses

both. They're hauling a long ladder up onto the

Sphinx's back -- now ain't that odd? And now they're

trying to lean it up a -- there's some more puffs of

smoke -- it's guns! Huck, they're after Jim."



We clapped on the power, and went for them a-

biling. We was there in no time, and come a-whizzing

down amongst them, and they broke and scattered every

which way, and some that was climbing the ladder after

Jim let go all holts and fell. We soared up and found

him laying on top of the head panting and most

tuckered out, partly from howling for help and partly

from scare. He had been standing a siege a long time

-- a week, HE said, but it warn't so, it only just seemed

so to him because they was crowding him so. They

had shot at him, and rained the bullets all around him,

but he warn't hit, and when they found he wouldn't

stand up and the bullets couldn't git at him when he

was laying down, they went for the ladder, and then

he knowed it was all up with him if we didn't come

pretty quick. Tom was very indignant, and asked him

why he didn't show the flag and command them to GIT,

in the name of the United States. Jim said he done

it, but they never paid no attention. Tom said he

would have this thing looked into at Washington, and

says:



"You'll see that they'll have to apologize for insult-

ing the flag, and pay an indemnity, too, on top of it

even if they git off THAT easy."



Jim says:



"What's an indemnity, Mars Tom?"



"It's cash, that's what it is."



"Who gits it, Mars Tom?"



"Why, WE do."



"En who gits de apology?"



"The United States. Or, we can take whichever

we please. We can take the apology, if we want to,

and let the gov'ment take the money."



"How much money will it be, Mars Tom?"



"Well, in an aggravated case like this one, it will

be at least three dollars apiece, and I don't know but

more."



"Well, den, we'll take de money, Mars Tom, blame

de 'pology. Hain't dat yo' notion, too? En hain't it

yourn, Huck?"



We talked it over a little and allowed that that was as

good a way as any, so we agreed to take the money.

It was a new business to me, and I asked Tom if

countries always apologized when they had done wrong,

and he says:



"Yes; the little ones does."



We was sailing around examining the pyramids, you

know, and now we soared up and roosted on the flat top

of the biggest one, and found it was just like what the

man said in the Sunday-school. It was like four pairs

of stairs that starts broad at the bottom and slants up

and comes together in a point at the top, only these

stair-steps couldn't be clumb the way you climb other

stairs; no, for each step was as high as your chin, and

you have to be boosted up from behind. The two

other pyramids warn't far away, and the people moving

about on the sand between looked like bugs crawling,

we was so high above them.



Tom he couldn't hold himself he was so worked up

with gladness and astonishment to be in such a cele-

brated place, and he just dripped history from every

pore, seemed to me. He said he couldn't scarcely

believe he was standing on the very identical spot the

prince flew from on the Bronze Horse. It was in the

Arabian Night times, he said. Somebody give the

prince a bronze horse with a peg in its shoulder, and

he could git on him and fly through the air like a bird,

and go all over the world, and steer it by turning the

peg, and fly high or low and land wherever he wanted

to.



When he got done telling it there was one of them

uncomfortable silences that comes, you know, when a

person has been telling a whopper and you feel sorry

for him and wish you could think of some way to

change the subject and let him down easy, but git stuck

and don't see no way, and before you can pull your

mind together and DO something, that silence has got in

and spread itself and done the business. I was embar-

rassed, Jim he was embarrassed, and neither of us

couldn't say a word. Well, Tom he glowered at me a

minute, and says:



"Come, out with it. What do you think?"



I says:



"Tom Sawyer, YOU don't believe that, yourself."



"What's the reason I don't? What's to hender

me?"



"There's one thing to hender you: it couldn't

happen, that's all."



"What's the reason it couldn't happen?"



"You tell me the reason it COULD happen."



"This balloon is a good enough reason it could

happen, I should reckon."



"WHY is it?"



"WHY is it? I never saw such an idiot. Ain't this

balloon and the bronze horse the same thing under

different names?"



"No, they're not. One is a balloon and the other's

a horse. It's very different. Next you'll be saying a

house and a cow is the same thing."



"By Jackson, Huck's got him ag'in! Dey ain't no

wigglin' outer dat!"



"Shut your head, Jim; you don't know what you're

talking about. And Huck don't. Look here, Huck,

I'll make it plain to you, so you can understand. You

see, it ain't the mere FORM that's got anything to do

with their being similar or unsimilar, it's the PRINCI-

PLE involved; and the principle is the same in both.

Don't you see, now?"



I turned it over in my mind, and says:



"Tom, it ain't no use. Principles is all very well,

but they don't git around that one big fact, that the

thing that a balloon can do ain't no sort of proof of

what a horse can do."



"Shucks, Huck, you don't get the idea at all. Now

look here a minute -- it's perfectly plain. Don't we

fly through the air?"



"Yes."



"Very well. Don't we fly high or fly low, just as

we please?"



"Yes."



"Don't we steer whichever way we want to?"



"Yes."



"And don't we land when and where we please?"



"Yes."



"How do we move the balloon and steer it?"



"By touching the buttons."



"NOW I reckon the thing is clear to you at last. In

the other case the moving and steering was done by

turning a peg. We touch a button, the prince turned

a peg. There ain't an atom of difference, you see. I

knowed I could git it through your head if I stuck to it

long enough."



He felt so happy he begun to whistle. But me and

Jim was silent, so he broke off surprised, and says:



"Looky here, Huck Finn, don't you see it YET?"



I says:



"Tom Sawyer, I want to ask you some questions."



"Go ahead," he says, and I see Jim chirk up to

listen.



"As I understand it, the whole thing is in the buttons

and the peg -- the rest ain't of no consequence. A

button is one shape, a peg is another shape, but that

ain't any matter?"



"No, that ain't any matter, as long as they've both

got the same power."



"All right, then. What is the power that's in a

candle and in a match?"



"It's the fire."



"It's the same in both, then?"



"Yes, just the same in both."



"All right. Suppose I set fire to a carpenter shop

with a match, what will happen to that carpenter

shop?"



"She'll burn up."



"And suppose I set fire to this pyramid with a

candle -- will she burn up?"



"Of course she won't."



"All right. Now the fire's the same, both times.

WHY does the shop burn, and the pyramid don't?"



"Because the pyramid CAN'T burn."



"Aha! and A HORSE CAN'T FLY!"



"My lan', ef Huck ain't got him ag'in! Huck's

landed him high en dry dis time, I tell you! Hit's

de smartes' trap I ever see a body walk inter -- en

ef I --"



But Jim was so full of laugh he got to strangling and

couldn't go on, and Tom was that mad to see how neat

I had floored him, and turned his own argument ag'in

him and knocked him all to rags and flinders with it,

that all he could manage to say was that whenever he

heard me and Jim try to argue it made him ashamed

of the human race. I never said nothing; I was feel-

ing pretty well satisfied. When I have got the best of

a person that way, it ain't my way to go around crow-

ing about it the way some people does, for I consider

that if I was in his place I wouldn't wish him to crow

over me. It's better to be generous, that's what I

think.





CHAPTER XIII.

GOING FOR TOM'S PIPE:



BY AND BY we left Jim to float around up there in

the neighborhood of the pyramids, and we clumb

down to the hole where you go into the tunnel, and

went in with some Arabs and candles, and away in

there in the middle of the pyramid we found a room and

a big stone box in it where they used to keep that king,

just as the man in the Sunday-school said; but he was

gone, now; somebody had got him. But I didn't take

no interest in the place, because there could be ghosts

there, of course; not fresh ones, but I don't like no

kind.



So then we come out and got some little donkeys and

rode a piece, and then went in a boat another piece,

and then more donkeys, and got to Cairo; and all the way

the road was as smooth and beautiful a road as ever I

see, and had tall date-pa'ms on both sides, and naked

children everywhere, and the men was as red as copper,

and fine and strong and handsome. And the city was

a curiosity. Such narrow streets -- why, they were

just lanes, and crowded with people with turbans, and

women with veils, and everybody rigged out in blazing

bright clothes and all sorts of colors, and you wondered

how the camels and the people got by each other in

such narrow little cracks, but they done it -- a perfect

jam, you see, and everybody noisy. The stores warn't

big enough to turn around in, but you didn't have to

go in; the storekeeper sat tailor fashion on his counter,

smoking his snaky long pipe, and had his things where

he could reach them to sell, and he was just as good as

in the street, for the camel-loads brushed him as they

went by.



Now and then a grand person flew by in a carriage

with fancy dressed men running and yelling in front of

it and whacking anybody with a long rod that didn't

get out of the way. And by and by along comes the

Sultan riding horseback at the head of a procession,

and fairly took your breath away his clothes was so

splendid; and everybody fell flat and laid on his

stomach while he went by. I forgot, but a feller

helped me to remember. He was one that had a rod

and run in front.



There was churches, but they don't know enough to

keep Sunday; they keep Friday and break the Sab-

bath. You have to take off your shoes when you go

in. There was crowds of men and boys in the church,

setting in groups on the stone floor and making no end

of noise -- getting their lessons by heart, Tom said, out

of the Koran, which they think is a Bible, and people

that knows better knows enough to not let on. I never

see such a big church in my life before, and most awful

high, it was; it made you dizzy to look up; our

village church at home ain't a circumstance to it; if

you was to put it in there, people would think it was a

drygoods box.



What I wanted to see was a dervish, because I was

interested in dervishes on accounts of the one that

played the trick on the camel-driver. So we found a

lot in a kind of a church, and they called themselves

Whirling Dervishes; and they did whirl, too. I never

see anything like it. They had tall sugar-loaf hats on,

and linen petticoats; and they spun and spun and

spun, round and round like tops, and the petticoats

stood out on a slant, and it was the prettiest thing I

ever see, and made me drunk to look at it. They was

all Moslems, Tom said, and when I asked him what a

Moslem was, he said it was a person that wasn't a

Presbyterian. So there is plenty of them in Missouri,

though I didn't know it before.



We didn't see half there was to see in Cairo, because

Tom was in such a sweat to hunt out places that was

celebrated in history. We had a most tiresome time to

find the granary where Joseph stored up the grain

before the famine, and when we found it it warn't

worth much to look at, being such an old tumble-down

wreck; but Tom was satisfied, and made more fuss over

it than I would make if I stuck a nail in my foot.

How he ever found that place was too many for me.

We passed as much as forty just like it before we come

to it, and any of them would 'a' done for me, but none

but just the right one would suit him; I never see any-

body so particular as Tom Sawyer. The minute he

struck the right one he reconnized it as easy as I would

reconnize my other shirt if I had one, but how he done

it he couldn't any more tell than he could fly; he said

so himself.



Then we hunted a long time for the house where the

boy lived that learned the cadi how to try the case of

the old olives and the new ones, and said it was out of

the Arabian Nights, and he would tell me and Jim

about it when he got time. Well, we hunted and

hunted till I was ready to drop, and I wanted Tom to

give it up and come next day and git somebody that

knowed the town and could talk Missourian and could

go straight to the place; but no, he wanted to find it

himself, and nothing else would answer. So on we

went. Then at last the remarkablest thing happened I

ever see. The house was gone -- gone hundreds of

years ago -- every last rag of it gone but just one mud

brick. Now a person wouldn't ever believe that a

backwoods Missouri boy that hadn't ever been in that

town before could go and hunt that place over and find

that brick, but Tom Sawyer done it. I know he done

it, because I see him do it. I was right by his very

side at the time, and see him see the brick and see him

reconnize it. Well, I says to myself, how DOES he do

it? Is it knowledge, or is it instink?



Now there's the facts, just as they happened: let

everybody explain it their own way. I've ciphered

over it a good deal, and it's my opinion that some of it

is knowledge but the main bulk of it is instink. The

reason is this: Tom put the brick in his pocket to give

to a museum with his name on it and the facts when he

went home, and I slipped it out and put another brick

considerable like it in its place, and he didn't know the

difference -- but there was a difference, you see. I

think that settles it -- it's mostly instink, not knowledge.

Instink tells him where the exact PLACE is for the brick to

be in, and so he reconnizes it by the place it's in, not

by the look of the brick. If it was knowledge, not

instink, he would know the brick again by the look of

it the next time he seen it -- which he didn't. So it

shows that for all the brag you hear about knowledge

being such a wonderful thing, instink is worth forty of

it for real unerringness. Jim says the same.



When we got back Jim dropped down and took us

in, and there was a young man there with a red skull-

cap and tassel on and a beautiful silk jacket and baggy

trousers with a shawl around his waist and pistols in it

that could talk English and wanted to hire to us as

guide and take us to Mecca and Medina and Central

Africa and everywheres for a half a dollar a day and his

keep, and we hired him and left, and piled on the

power, and by the time we was through dinner we was

over the place where the Israelites crossed the Red Sea

when Pharaoh tried to overtake them and was caught

by the waters. We stopped, then, and had a good

look at the place, and it done Jim good to see it. He

said he could see it all, now, just the way it happened;

he could see the Israelites walking along between the

walls of water, and the Egyptians coming, from away

off yonder, hurrying all they could, and see them start

in as the Israelites went out, and then when they was

all in, see the walls tumble together and drown the last

man of them. Then we piled on the power again and

rushed away and huvvered over Mount Sinai, and saw

the place where Moses broke the tables of stone, and

where the children of Israel camped in the plain and

worshiped the golden calf, and it was all just as

interesting as could be, and the guide knowed every

place as well as I knowed the village at home.



But we had an accident, now, and it fetched all the

plans to a standstill. Tom's old ornery corn-cob pipe

had got so old and swelled and warped that she couldn't

hold together any longer, notwithstanding the strings

and bandages, but caved in and went to pieces. Tom

he didn't know WHAT to do. The professor's pipe

wouldn't answer; it warn't anything but a mershum,

and a person that's got used to a cob pipe knows it

lays a long ways over all the other pipes in this world,

and you can't git him to smoke any other. He

wouldn't take mine, I couldn't persuade him. So

there he was.



He thought it over, and said we must scour around

and see if we could roust out one in Egypt or Arabia or

around in some of these countries, but the guide said no,

it warn't no use, they didn't have them. So Tom was

pretty glum for a little while, then he chirked up and said

he'd got the idea and knowed what to do. He says:



"I've got another corn-cob pipe, and it's a prime

one, too, and nearly new. It's laying on the rafter

that's right over the kitchen stove at home in the

village. Jim, you and the guide will go and get it,

and me and Huck will camp here on Mount Sinai till

you come back."



"But, Mars Tom, we couldn't ever find de village.

I could find de pipe, 'case I knows de kitchen, but my

lan', we can't ever find de village, nur Sent Louis, nur

none o' dem places. We don't know de way, Mars

Tom."



That was a fact, and it stumped Tom for a minute.

Then he said:



"Looky here, it can be done, sure; and I'll tell you

how. You set your compass and sail west as straight

as a dart, till you find the United States. It ain't any

trouble, because it's the first land you'll strike the other

side of the Atlantic. If it's daytime when you strike it,

bulge right on, straight west from the upper part of the

Florida coast, and in an hour and three quarters you'll

hit the mouth of the Mississippi -- at the speed that

I'm going to send you. You'll be so high up in the

air that the earth will be curved considerable -- sorter

like a washbowl turned upside down -- and you'll see a

raft of rivers crawling around every which way, long

before you get there, and you can pick out the Miss-

issippi without any trouble. Then you can follow the

river north nearly, an hour and three quarters, till you

see the Ohio come in; then you want to look sharp,

because you're getting near. Away up to your left

you'll see another thread coming in -- that's the

Missouri and is a little above St. Louis. You'll come

down low then, so as you can examine the villages as

you spin along. You'll pass about twenty-five in the

next fifteen minutes, and you'll recognize ours when

you see it -- and if you don't, you can yell down and

ask."



"Ef it's dat easy, Mars Tom, I reckon we kin do

it -- yassir, I knows we kin."



The guide was sure of it, too, and thought that he

could learn to stand his watch in a little while.



"Jim can learn you the whole thing in a half an

hour," Tom said. "This balloon's as easy to manage

as a canoe."



Tom got out the chart and marked out the course

and measured it, and says:



"To go back west is the shortest way, you see.

It's only about seven thousand miles. If you went

east, and so on around, it's over twice as far." Then

he says to the guide, "I want you both to watch the

tell-tale all through the watches, and whenever it don't

mark three hundred miles an hour, you go higher or

drop lower till you find a storm-current that's going

your way. There's a hundred miles an hour in this

old thing without any wind to help. There's two-

hundred-mile gales to be found, any time you want to

hunt for them."



"We'll hunt for them, sir."



"See that you do. Sometimes you may have to

go up a couple of miles, and it'll be p'ison cold, but

most of the time you'll find your storm a good deal

lower. If you can only strike a cyclone -- that's the

ticket for you! You'll see by the professor's books

that they travel west in these latitudes; and they travel

low, too."



Then he ciphered on the time, and says --



"Seven thousand miles, three hundred miles an

hour -- you can make the trip in a day -- twenty-four

hours. This is Thursday; you'll be back here Sat-

urday afternoon. Come, now, hustle out some blankets

and food and books and things for me and Huck, and

you can start right along. There ain't no occasion to

fool around -- I want a smoke, and the quicker you

fetch that pipe the better."



All hands jumped for the things, and in eight min-

utes our things was out and the balloon was ready for

America. So we shook hands good-bye, and Tom

gave his last orders:



"It's 1O minutes to 2 P.M. now, Mount Sinai time.

In 24 hours you'll be home, and it'll be 6 to-mor-

row morning, village time. When you strike the

village, land a little back of the top of the hill, in the

woods, out of sight; then you rush down, Jim, and

shove these letters in the post-office, and if you see

anybody stirring, pull your slouch down over your face

so they won't know you. Then you go and slip in the

back way to the kitchen and git the pipe, and lay this

piece of paper on the kitchen table, and put something

on it to hold it, and then slide out and git away, and

don't let Aunt Polly catch a sight of you, nor nobody

else. Then you jump for the balloon and shove for

Mount Sinai three hundred miles an hour. You won't

have lost more than an hour. You'll start back at 7 or

8 A.M., village time, and be here in 24 hours, arriving

at 2 or 3 P.M., Mount Sinai time."



Tom he read the piece of paper to us. He had

wrote on it:



  "THURSDAY AFTERNOON. Tom Sawyer the Erro-

  nort sends his love to Aunt Polly from Mount Sinai

  where the Ark was, and so does Huck Finn, and she

  will get it to-morrow morning half-past six." *



  [* This misplacing of the Ark is probably Huck's

  error, not Tom's. -- M.T.]



"That'll make her eyes bulge out and the tears

come," he says. Then he says:



"Stand by! One -- two -- three -- away you go!"



And away she DID go! Why, she seemed to whiz

out of sight in a second.



Then we found a most comfortable cave that looked

out over the whole big plain, and there we camped to

wait for the pipe.



The balloon come hack all right, and brung the pipe;

but Aunt Polly had catched Jim when he was getting

it, and anybody can guess what happened: she sent

for Tom. So Jim he says:



"Mars Tom, she's out on de porch wid her eye sot on

de sky a-layin' for you, en she say she ain't gwyne to

budge from dah tell she gits hold of you. Dey's gwyne

to be trouble, Mars Tom, 'deed dey is."



So then we shoved for home, and not feeling very

gay, neither.



END.













THE TRAGEDY OF PUDD'NHEAD WILSON



by Mark Twain





A WHISPER TO THE READER





There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it

can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless.

Observe the ass, for instance:  his character is about perfect,

he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals,

yet see what ridicule has brought him to.  Instead of feeling

complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt.



                                   --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





A person who is ignorant of legal matters is always liable to

make mistakes when he tries to photograph a court scene with his pen;

and so I was not willing to let the law chapters in this book

go to press without first subjecting them to rigid and exhausting

revision and correction by a trained barrister--if that is what

they are called.  These chapters are right, now, in every detail,

for they were rewritten under the immediate eye of William Hicks,

who studied law part of a while in southwest Missouri thirty-five

years ago and then came over here to Florence for his health and

is still helping for exercise and board in Macaroni Vermicelli's

horse-feed shed, which is up the back alley as you turn around the

corner out of the Piazza del Duomo just beyond the house where that

stone that Dante used to sit on six hundred years ago is let into

the wall when he let on to be watching them build Giotto's campanile

and yet always got tired looking as Beatrice passed along on her way

to get a chunk of chestnut cake to defend herself with in case of a

Ghibelline outbreak before she got to school, at the same old stand

where they sell the same old cake to this day and it is just as light

and good as it was then, too, and this is not flattery, far from it.

He was a little rusty on his law, but he rubbed up for this book,

and those two or three legal chapters are right and straight, now.

He told me so himself.



Given under my hand this second day of January, 1893, at the Villa Viviani,

village of Settignano, three miles back of Florence, on the hills--

the same certainly affording the most charming view to be found

on this planet, and with it the most dreamlike and enchanting sunsets

to be found in any planet or even in any solar system--and given, too,

in the swell room of the house, with the busts of Cerretani senators

and other grandees of this line looking approvingly down upon me,

as they used to look down upon Dante, and mutely asking me to adopt them

into my family, which I do with pleasure, for my remotest ancestors

are but spring chickens compared with these robed and stately antiques,

and it will be a great and satisfying lift for me, that six hundred years will.



Mark Twain.





-----------------------------------------------------------------





CHAPTER 1



Pudd'nhead Wins His Name





Tell the truth or trump--but get the trick.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





The scene of this chronicle is the town of Dawson's Landing,

on the Missouri side of the Mississippi, half a day's journey,

per steamboat, below St. Louis.



In 1830 it was a snug collection of modest one- and two- story

frame dwellings, whose whitewashed exteriors were almost concealed

from sight by climbing tangles of rose vines, honeysuckles,

and morning glories.  Each of these pretty homes had a garden in front

fenced with white palings and opulently stocked with hollyhocks, marigolds,

touch-me-nots, prince's-feathers, and other old-fashioned flowers;

while on the windowsills of the houses stood wooden boxes containing

moss rose plants and terra-cotta pots in which grew a breed of geranium

whose spread of intensely red blossoms accented the prevailing pink tint

of the rose-clad house-front like an explosion of flame.  When there was room

on the ledge outside of the pots and boxes for a cat, the cat was there--

in sunny weather--stretched at full length, asleep and blissful,

with her furry belly to the sun and a paw curved over her nose.

Then that house was complete, and its contentment and peace were made

manifest to the world by this symbol, whose testimony is infallible.

A home without a cat--and a well-fed, well-petted, and properly revered cat--

may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?



All along the streets, on both sides, at the outer edge

of the brick sidewalks, stood locust trees with trunks protected by

wooden boxing, and these furnished shade for summer and a sweet fragrancer

in spring, when the clusters of buds came forth.  The main street,

one block back from the river, and running parallel with it, was the

sole business street.  It was six blocks long, and in each block two

or three brick stores, three stories high, towered above interjected

bunches of little frame shops.  Swinging signs creaked in the wind the

street's whole length.  The candy-striped pole, which indicates nobility

proud and ancient along the palace-bordered canals of Venice, indicated

merely the humble barbershop along the main street of Dawson's Landing.

On a chief corner stood a lofty unpainted pole wreathed from top to

bottom with tin pots and pans and cups, the chief tinmonger's noisy

notice to the world (when the wind blew) that his shop was on hand

for business at that corner.



The hamlet's front was washed by the clear waters of the great river;

its body stretched itself rearward up a gentle incline;

its most rearward border fringed itself out and scattered its houses

about its base line of the hills; the hills rose high, enclosing the

town in a half-moon curve, clothed with forests from foot to summit.



Steamboats passed up and down every hour or so.  Those belonging to

the little Cairo line and the little Memphis line always stopped;

the big Orleans liners stopped for hails only, or to land passengers

or freight; and this was the case also with the great flotilla of

"transients."  These latter came out of a dozen rivers--

the Illinois, the Missouri, the Upper Mississippi, the Ohio,

the Monongahela, the Tennessee, the Red River, the White River,

and so on--and were bound every whither and stocked with every imaginable

comfort or necessity, which the Mississippi's communities could want,

from the frosty Falls of St. Anthony down through nine climates

to torrid New Orleans.



Dawson's Landing was a slaveholding town, with a rich, slave-worked

grain and pork country back of it.  The town was sleepy and comfortable

and contented.  It was fifty years old, and was growing slowly--

very slowly, in fact, but still it was growing.



The chief citizen was York Leicester Driscoll, about forty years old,

judge of the county court.  He was very proud of his old Virginian ancestry,

and in his hospitalities and his rather formal and stately manners,

he kept up its traditions.  He was fine and just and generous.

To be a gentleman--a gentleman without stain or blemish--was his

only religion, and to it he was always faithful.  He was respected,

esteemed, and beloved by all of the community.  He was well off,

and was gradually adding to his store.  He and his wife were very

nearly happy, but not quite, for they had no children.  The longing for

the treasure of a child had grown stronger and stronger as the years

slipped away, but the blessing never came--and was never to come.



With this pair lived the judge's widowed sister, Mrs. Rachel Pratt,

and she also was childless--childless, and sorrowful for that reason,

and not to be comforted.  The women were good and commonplace people,

and did their duty, and had their reward in clear consciences and the

community's approbation.  They were Presbyterians, the judge was a freethinker.



Pembroke Howard, lawyer and bachelor, aged almost forty, was another

old Virginian grandee with proved descent from the First Families.

He was a fine, majestic creature, a gentleman according to the nicest

requirements of the Virginia rule, a devoted Presbyterian, an authority

on the "code", and a man always courteously ready to stand up before you in

the field if any act or word of his had seemed doubtful or suspicious to you,

and explain it with any weapon you might prefer from bradawls to artillery.

He was very popular with the people, and was the judge's dearest friend.



Then there was Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex, another F.F.V.

of formidable caliber--however, with him we have no concern.



Percy Northumberland Driscoll, brother to the judge, and younger than

he by five years, was a married man, and had had children around

his hearthstone; but they were attacked in detail by measles, croup,

and scarlet fever, and this had given the doctor a chance with his

effective antediluvian methods; so the cradles were empty.  He was a

prosperous man, with a good head for speculations, and his fortune

was growing.  On the first of February, 1830, two boy babes were born

in his house; one to him, one to one of his slave girls, Roxana by name.

Roxana was twenty years old.  She was up and around the same day,

with her hands full, for she was tending both babes.



Mrs. Percy Driscoll died within the week.  Roxy remained in charge of

the children.  She had her own way, for Mr. Driscoll soon absorbed himself

in his speculations and left her to her own devices.



In that same month of February, Dawson's Landing gained a new citizen.

This was Mr. David Wilson, a young fellow of Scotch parentage.

He had wandered to this remote region from his birthplace in the interior

of the State of New York, to seek his fortune.  He was twenty-five years old,

college bred, and had finished a post-college course in an Eastern

law school a couple of years before.



He was a homely, freckled, sandy-haired young fellow, with an intelligent

blue eye that had frankness and comradeship in it and a covert twinkle

of a pleasant sort.  But for an unfortunate remark of his, he would no

doubt have entered at once upon a successful career at Dawson's Landing.

But he made his fatal remark the first day he spent in the village,

and it "gaged" him.  He had just made the acquaintance of a group of

citizens when an invisible dog began to yelp and snarl and howl and make

himself very comprehensively disagreeable, whereupon young Wilson said,

much as one who is thinking aloud:



"I wish I owned half of that dog."



"Why?" somebody asked.



"Because I would kill my half."



The group searched his face with curiosity, with anxiety even,

but found no light there, no expression that they could read.

They fell away from him as from something uncanny, and went into privacy

to discuss him.  One said:



"'Pears to be a fool."



"'Pears?" said another.  "_Is,_ I reckon you better say."



"Said he wished he owned _half_ of the dog, the idiot," said a third.

"What did he reckon would become of the other half if he killed his half?

Do you reckon he thought it would live?"



"Why, he must have thought it, unless he IS the downrightest fool

in the world; because if he hadn't thought it, he would have wanted to own

the whole dog, knowing that if he killed his half and the other half died,

he would be responsible for that half just the same as if he had killed

that half instead of his own.  Don't it look that way to you, gents?"



"Yes, it does.  If he owned one half of the general dog, it would be so;

if he owned one end of the dog and another person owned the other end,

it would be so, just the same; particularly in the first case,

because if you kill one half of a general dog, there ain't any man

that can tell whose half it was; but if he owned one end of the dog,

maybe he could kill his end of it and--"



"No, he couldn't either; he couldn't and not be responsible if the other

end died, which it would.  In my opinion that man ain't in his right mind."



"In my opinion he hain't _got_ any mind."



No. 3 said:  "Well, he's a lummox, anyway."



That's what he is;" said No. 4.  "He's a labrick--just a Simon-pure labrick,

if there was one."



"Yes, sir, he's a dam fool.  That's the way I put him up," said No. 5.

"Anybody can think different that wants to, but those are my sentiments."



"I'm with you, gentlemen," said No. 6.  "Perfect jackass--yes,

and it ain't going too far to say he is a pudd'nhead.

If he ain't a pudd'nhead, I ain't no judge, that's all."



Mr. Wilson stood elected.  The incident was told all over the town,

and gravely discussed by everybody.  Within a week he had lost his

first name;  Pudd'nhead took its place.  In time he came to be liked,

and well liked too; but by that time the nickname had got well stuck on,

and it stayed.  That first day's verdict made him a fool, and he was not

able to get it set aside, or even modified.  The nickname soon ceased to

carry any harsh or unfriendly feeling with it, but it held its place,

and was to continue to hold its place for twenty long years.







CHAPTER 2



Driscoll Spares His Slaves





Adam was but human--this explains it all.  He did not want the apple

for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden.

The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have

eaten the serpent.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





Pudd'nhead Wilson had a trifle of money when he arrived,

and he bought a small house on the extreme western verge of the town.

Between it and Judge Driscoll's house there was only a grassy yard,

with a paling fence dividing the properties in the middle.

He hired a small office down in the town and hung out a tin sign

with these words on it:





                     D A V I D   W I L S O N



                  ATTORNEY AND COUNSELOR-AT-LAW



                  SURVEYING, CONVEYANCING, ETC.





But his deadly remark had ruined his chance--at least in the law.

No clients came.  He took down his sign, after a while, and put it

up on his own house with the law features knocked out of it.

It offered his services now in the humble capacities of land surveyor

and expert accountant.  Now and then he got a job of surveying to do,

and now and then a merchant got him to straighten out his books.

With Scotch patience and pluck he resolved to live down his reputation

and work his way into the legal field yet.  Poor fellow, he could

foresee that it was going to take him such a weary long time to do it.



He had a rich abundance of idle time, but it never hung heavy on his hands,

for he interested himself in every new thing that was born into the

universe of ideas, and studied it, and experimented upon it at his house.

One of his pet fads was palmistry.  To another one he gave no name,

neither would he explain to anybody what its purpose was, but merely

said it was an amusement.  In fact, he had found that his fads added to his

reputation as a pudd'nhead; there, he was growing chary of being too

communicative about them.  The fad without a name was one which dealt

with people's finger marks.  He carried in his coat pocket a shallow box

with grooves in it, and in the grooves strips of glass five inches long

and three inches wide.  Along the lower edge of each strip was pasted a

slip of white paper.  He asked people to pass their hands through their

hair (thus collecting upon them a thin coating of the natural oil) and then

making a thumb-mark on a glass strip, following it with the mark of the ball

of each finger in succession.  Under this row of faint grease prints he

would write a record on the strip of white paper--thus:



                    JOHN SMITH, right hand--



and add the day of the month and the year, then take Smith's left hand

on another glass strip, and add name and date and the words "left hand."

The strips were now returned to the grooved box, and took their place

among what Wilson called his "records."



He often studied his records, examining and poring over them with

absorbing interest until far into the night; but what he found there--

if he found anything--he revealed to no one.  Sometimes he copied on

paper the involved and delicate pattern left by the ball of the finger,

and then vastly enlarged it with a pantograph so that he could examine

its web of curving lines with ease and convenience.



One sweltering afternoon--it was the first day of July, 1830--

he was at work over a set of tangled account books in his workroom,

which looked westward over a stretch of vacant lots, when a conversation

outside disturbed him.  It was carried on it yells, which showed that

the people engaged in it were not close together.



"Say, Roxy, how does yo' baby come on?"  This from the distant voice.



"Fust-rate.  How does _you_ come on, Jasper?"  This yell was from close by.



"Oh, I's middlin'; hain't got noth'n' to complain of, I's gwine to come

a-court'n you bimeby, Roxy."



"_You_ is, you black mud cat!  Yah--yah--yah!  I got somep'n' better to do

den 'sociat'n' wid niggers as black as you is.  Is ole Miss Cooper's Nancy

done give you de mitten?"  Roxy followed this sally with another discharge

of carefree laughter.



"You's jealous, Roxy, dat's what's de matter wid you, you

hussy--yah--yah--yah!  Dat's de time I got you!"



"Oh, yes, _you_ got me, hain't you.  'Clah to goodness if dat conceit

o' yo'n strikes in, Jasper, it gwine to kill you sho'.  If you b'longed

to me, I'd sell you down de river 'fo' you git too fur gone.

Fust time I runs acrost yo' marster, I's gwine to tell him so."



This idle and aimless jabber went on and on, both parties enjoying the

friendly duel and each well satisfied with his own share of

the wit exchanged--for wit they considered it.



Wilson stepped to the window to observe the combatants; he could not

work while their chatter continued.  Over in the vacant lots was Jasper,

young, coal black, and of magnificent build, sitting on a wheelbarrow

in the pelting sun--at work, supposably, whereas he was in fact only

preparing for it by taking an hour's rest before beginning.  In front of

Wilson's porch stood Roxy, with a local handmade baby wagon,

in which sat her two charges--one at each end and facing each other.

From Roxy's manner of speech, a stranger would have expected her to

be black, but she was not.  Only one sixteenth of her was black,

and that sixteenth did not show.  She was of majestic form and stature,

her attitudes were imposing and statuesque, and her gestures and movements

distinguished by a noble and stately grace.  Her complexion was very fair,

with the rosy glow of vigorous health in her cheeks, her face was full

of character and expression, her eyes were brown and liquid, and she

had a heavy suit of fine soft hair which was also brown, but the fact

was not apparent because her head was bound about with a checkered

handkerchief and the hair was concealed under it.  Her face was shapely,

intelligent, and comely--even beautiful.  She had an easy, independent

carriage--when she was among her own caste--and a high and "sassy" way,

withal; but of course she was meek and humble enough where white people were.



To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one

sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and

made her a Negro.  She was a slave, and salable as such.  Her child was

thirty-one parts white, and he, too, was a slave, and by a fiction of

law and custom a Negro.  He had blue eyes and flaxen curls like his

white comrade, but even the father of the white child was able to tell

the children apart--little as he had commerce with them--by their clothes;

for the white babe wore ruffled soft muslin and a coral necklace,

while the other wore merely a coarse tow-linen shirt which barely reached

to its knees, and no jewelry.



The white child's name was Thomas a Becket Driscoll, the other's name

was Valet de Chambre:  no surname--slaves hadn't the privilege.

Roxana had heard that phrase somewhere, the fine sound of it had pleased her

ear, and as she had supposed it was a name, she loaded it on to her darling.

It soon got shorted to "Chambers," of course.



Wilson knew Roxy by sight, and when the duel of wits begun to play out,

he stepped outside to gather in a record or two.  Jasper went to work

energetically, at once, perceiving that his leisure was observed.

Wilson inspected the children and asked:



"How old are they, Roxy?"



"Bofe de same age, sir--five months.  Bawn de fust o' Feb'uary."



"They're handsome little chaps.  One's just as handsome as the other, too."



A delighted smile exposed the girl's white teeth, and she said:



"Bless yo' soul, Misto Wilson, it's pow'ful nice o' you to say dat,

'ca'se one of 'em ain't on'y a nigger.  Mighty prime little nigger,

_I_ al'ays says, but dat's 'ca'se it's mine, o' course."



"How do you tell them apart, Roxy, when they haven't any clothes on?"



Roxy laughed a laugh proportioned to her size, and said:



"Oh, _I_ kin tell 'em 'part, Misto Wilson, but I bet Marse Percy

couldn't, not to save his life."



Wilson chatted along for awhile, and presently got Roxy's fingerprints

for his collection--right hand and left--on a couple of his glass strips;

then labeled and dated them, and took the "records" of both children,

and labeled and dated them also.



Two months later, on the third of September, he took this trio of finger

marks again.  He liked to have a "series," two or three "takings"

at intervals during the period of childhood, these to be followed at

intervals of several years.



The next day--that is to say, on the fourth of September--something

occurred which profoundly impressed Roxana.  Mr. Driscoll missed another

small sum of money--which is a way of saying that this was not a new thing,

but had happened before.  In truth, it had happened three times before.

Driscoll's patience was exhausted.  He was a fairly humane man toward

slaves and other animals; he was an exceedingly humane man toward the

erring of his own race.  Theft he could not abide, and plainly there was

a thief in his house.  Necessarily the thief must be one of his Negros.

Sharp measures must be taken.  He called his servants before him.

There were three of these, besides Roxy:  a man, a woman, and a boy

twelve years old.  They were not related.  Mr. Driscoll said:



"You have all been warned before.  It has done no good.  This time I

will teach you a lesson.  I will sell the thief.  Which of you is

the guilty one?"



They all shuddered at the threat, for here they had a good home,

and a new one was likely to be a change for the worse.  The denial

was general.  None had stolen anything--not money, anyway--a little sugar,

or cake, or honey, or something like that, that "Marse Percy wouldn't

mind or miss" but not money--never a cent of money.  They were eloquent

in their protestations, but Mr. Driscoll was not moved by them.

He answered each in turn with a stern "Name the thief!"



The truth was, all were guilty but Roxana; she suspected that the others

were guilty, but she did not know them to be so.  She was horrified

to think how near she had come to being guilty herself; she had been

saved in the nick of time by a revival in the colored Methodist Church,

a fortnight before, at which time and place she "got religion."

The very next day after that gracious experience, while her change of

style was fresh upon her and she was vain of her purified condition,

her master left a couple dollars unprotected on his desk, and she happened

upon that temptation when she was polishing around with a dustrag.

She looked at the money awhile with a steady rising resentment,

then she burst out with:



"Dad blame dat revival, I wisht it had 'a' be'n put off till tomorrow!"



Then she covered the tempter with a book, and another member of the

kitchen cabinet got it.  She made this sacrifice as a matter of

religious etiquette; as a thing necessary just now, but by no means to

be wrested into a precedent; no, a week or two would limber up her piety,

then she would be rational again, and the next two dollars that got left

out in the cold would find a comforter--and she could name the comforter.



Was she bad?  Was she worse than the general run of her race?  No.

They had an unfair show in the battle of life, and they held it no sin

to take military advantage of the enemy--in a small way; in a small way,

but not in a large one.  They would smouch provisions from the pantry

whenever they got a chance; or a brass thimble, or a cake of wax,

or an emery bag, or a paper of needles, or a silver spoon, or a dollar bill,

or small articles of clothing, or any other property of light value;

and so far were they from considering such reprisals sinful, that they

would go to church and shout and pray the loudest and sincerest with their

plunder in their pockets.  A farm smokehouse had to be kept heavily

padlocked, or even the colored deacon himself could not resist a ham

when Providence showed him in a dream, or otherwise, where such a thing

hung lonesome, and longed for someone to love.  But with a hundred hanging

before him, the deacon would not take two--that is, on the same night.

On frosty nights the humane Negro prowler would warm the end of the plank

and put it up under the cold claws of chickens roosting in a tree;

a drowsy hen would step on to the comfortable board, softly clucking

her gratitude, and the prowler would dump her into his bag, and later

into his stomach, perfectly sure that in taking this trifle from the man

who daily robbed him of an inestimable treasure--his liberty--he was

not committing any sin that God would remember against him in the

Last Great Day.



"Name the thief!"



For the fourth time Mr. Driscoll had said it, and always in the same

hard tone.  And now he added these words of awful import:



"I give you one minute."  He took out his watch.  "If at the end of

that time, you have not confessed, I will not only sell all four

of you, BUT--I will sell you DOWN THE RIVER!"



It was equivalent to condemning them to hell!  No Missouri Negro

doubted this.  Roxy reeled in her tracks, and the color vanished out

of her face; the others dropped to their knees as if they had been shot;

tears gushed from their eyes, their supplicating hands went up,

and three answers came in the one instant.



"I done it!"



"I done it!"



"I done it!--have mercy, marster--Lord have mercy on us po' niggers!"



"Very good," said the master, putting up his watch, "I will

sell you _here_ though you don't deserve it.  You ought to be sold

down the river."



The culprits flung themselves prone, in an ecstasy of gratitude,

and kissed his feet, declaring that they would never forget his

goodness and never cease to pray for him as long as they lived.

They were sincere, for like a god he had stretched forth his mighty

hand and closed the gates of hell against them.  He knew, himself,

that he had done a noble and gracious thing, and was privately well

pleased with his magnanimity; and that night he set the incident down

in his diary, so that his son might read it in after years, and be

thereby moved to deeds of gentleness and humanity himself.







CHAPTER 3



Roxy Plays a Shrewd Trick





Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is,

knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam,

the first great benefactor of our race.  He brought death into the world.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





Percy Driscoll slept well the night he saved his house minions from

going down the river, but no wink of sleep visited Roxy's eyes.

A profound terror had taken possession of her.  Her child could grow up

and be sold down the river!  The thought crazed her with horror.

If she dozed and lost herself for a moment, the next moment she was

on her feet flying to her child's cradle to see if it was still there.

Then she would gather it to her heart and pour out her love upon it in

a frenzy of kisses, moaning, crying, and saying, "Dey sha'n't, oh,

dey _sha'nt'!'_--yo' po' mammy will kill you fust!"



Once, when she was tucking him back in its cradle again, the other child

nestled in its sleep and attracted her attention.  She went and stood over

it a long time communing with herself.



"What has my po' baby done, dat he couldn't have yo' luck?

He hain't done nuth'n.  God was good to you; why warn't he good to him?

Dey can't sell _you_ down de river.  I hates yo' pappy; he hain't got

no heart--for niggers, he hain't, anyways.  I hates him, en I could

kill him!"  She paused awhile, thinking; then she burst into wild

sobbings again, and turned away, saying, "Oh, I got to kill my chile,

dey ain't no yuther way--killin' _him_ wouldn't save de chile fum goin'

down de river.  Oh, I got to do it, yo' po' mammy's got to kill you to

save you, honey."  She gathered her baby to her bosom now, and began to

smother it with caresses.  "Mammy's got to kill you--how _kin_ I do it!

But yo' mammy ain't gwine to desert you--no, no, _dah_, don't cry--

she gwine _wid_ you, she gwine to kill herself too.  Come along, honey,

come along wid mammy; we gwine to jump in de river, den troubles o' dis

worl' is all over--dey don't sell po' niggers down the river over _yonder_."



She stared toward the door, crooning to the child and hushing it;

midway she stopped, suddenly.  She had caught sight of her new Sunday gown--

a cheap curtain-calico thing, a conflagration of gaudy colors and

fantastic figures.  She surveyed it wistfully, longingly.



"Hain't ever wore it yet," she said, "en it's just lovely."

Then she nodded her head in response to a pleasant idea, and added,

"No, I ain't gwine to be fished out, wid everybody lookin' at me,

in dis mis'able ole linsey-woolsey."



She put down the child and made the change.  She looked in the glass and

was astonished at her beauty.  She resolved to make her death toilet perfect.

She took off her handkerchief turban and dressed her glossy wealth of

hair "like white folks"; she added some odds and ends of rather lurid

ribbon and a spray of atrocious artificial flowers; finally she threw

over her shoulders a fluffy thing called a "cloud" in that day,

which was of a blazing red complexion.  Then she was ready for the tomb.



She gathered up her baby once more; but when her eye fell upon its

miserably short little gray tow-linen shirt and noted the contrast

between its pauper shabbiness and her own volcanic eruption of infernal

splendors, her mother-heart was touched, and she was ashamed.



"No, dolling mammy ain't gwine to treat you so.  De angels is gwine

to 'mire you jist as much as dey does 'yo mammy.  Ain't gwine to have

'em putt'n dey han's up 'fo' dey eyes en sayin' to David and Goliah

en dem yuther prophets, 'Dat chile is dress' to indelicate fo' dis place.'"



By this time she had stripped off the shirt.  Now she clothed the naked

little creature in one of Thomas `a Becket's snowy, long baby gowns,

with its bright blue bows and dainty flummery of ruffles.



"Dah--now you's fixed."  She propped the child in a chair and stood

off to inspect it.  Straightway her eyes begun to widen with astonishment

and admiration, and she clapped her hands and cried out,

"Why, it do beat all!  I _never_ knowed you was so lovely.

Marse Tommy ain't a bit puttier--not a single bit."



She stepped over and glanced at the other infant;' she flung a glance

back at her own; then one more at the heir of the house.  Now a strange

light dawned in her eyes, and in a moment she was lost in thought.

She seemed in a trance; when she came out of it, she muttered,

"When I 'uz a-washin' 'em in de tub, yistiddy, he own pappy asked me

which of 'em was his'n."



She began to move around like one in a dream.  She undressed

Thomas `a Becket, stripping him of everything, and put the tow-linen

shirt on him.  She put his coral necklace on her own child's neck.

Then she placed the children side by side, and after earnest

inspection she muttered:



"Now who would b'lieve clo'es could do de like o' dat?  Dog my cats

if it ain't all _I_ kin do to tell t' other fum which, let alone his pappy."



She put her cub in Tommy's elegant cradle and said:



"You's young Marse _Tom_ fum dis out, en I got to practice and git used

to 'memberin' to call you dat, honey, or I's gwine to make a mistake

sometime en git us bofe into trouble.  Dah--now you lay still en

don't fret no mo', Marse Tom.  Oh, thank de lord in heaven, you's saved,

you's saved!  Dey ain't no man kin ever sell mammy's po' little

honey down de river now!"



She put the heir of the house in her own child's unpainted pine cradle,

and said, contemplating its slumbering form uneasily:



"I's sorry for you, honey; I's sorry, God knows I is--but what _kin_ I do,

what _could_ I do?  Yo' pappy would sell him to somebody, sometime,

en den he'd go down de river, sho', en I couldn't, couldn't,

_couldn't_ stan' it."



She flung herself on her bed and began to think and toss, toss and think.

By and by she sat suddenly upright, for a comforting thought had flown

through her worried mind--



"'T ain't no sin--_white_ folks has done it!  It ain't no sin,

glory to goodness it ain't no sin!  _Dey's_ done it--yes, en dey was

de biggest quality in de whole bilin', too--_kings!"_



She began to muse; she was trying to gather out of her memory the

dim particulars of some tale she had heard some time or other.

At last she said--



"Now I's got it; now I 'member.  It was dat ole nigger preacher dat

tole it, de time he come over here fum Illinois en preached in

de nigger church.  He said dey ain't nobody kin save his own self--

can't do it by faith, can't do it by works, can't do it no way at all.

Free grace is de _on'y_ way, en dat don't come fum nobody but jis' de Lord;

en _he_ kin give it to anybody He please, saint or sinner--_he_ don't kyer.

He do jis' as He's a mineter.  He s'lect out anybody dat suit Him,

en put another one in his place, and make de fust one happy forever

en leave t' other one to burn wid Satan.  De preacher said it was jist

like dey done in Englan' one time, long time ago.  De queen she lef'

her baby layin' aroun' one day, en went out callin'; an one 'o de

niggers roun'bout de place dat was 'mos' white, she come in en see de

chile layin' aroun', en tuck en put her own chile's clo's on

de queen's chile, en put de queen's chile's clo'es on her own chile,

en den lef' her own chile layin' aroun', en tuck en toted de queen's

chile home to de nigger quarter, en nobody ever foun' it out,

en her chile was de king bimeby, en sole de queen's chile down de

river one time when dey had to settle up de estate.  Dah, now--de preacher

said it his own self, en it ain't no sin, 'ca'se white folks done it.

DEY done it--yes, DEY done it; en not on'y jis' common white folks nuther,

but de biggest quality dey is in de whole bilin'.  _Oh_, I's _so_ glad I

'member 'bout dat!"



She got lighthearted and happy, and went to the cradles, and spent what

was left of the night "practicing."  She would give her own child a

light pat and say humbly, "Lay still, Marse Tom," then give the real

Tom a pat and say with severity, "Lay _still_, Chambers!  Does you want

me to take somep'n _to_ you?"



As she progressed with her practice, she was surprised to see how steadily

and surely the awe which had kept her tongue reverent and her manner

humble toward her young master was transferring itself to her speech

and manner toward the usurper, and how similarly handy she was becoming

in transferring her motherly curtness of speech and peremptoriness of

manner to the unlucky heir of the ancient house of Driscoll.



She took occasional rests from practicing, and absorbed herself in

calculating her chances.



"Dey'll sell dese niggers today fo' stealin' de money, den dey'll

buy some mo' dat don't now de chillen--so _dat's_ all right.  When I takes

de chillen out to git de air, de minute I's roun' de corner I's gwine

to gaum dey mouths all roun' wid jam, den dey can't _nobody_ notice

dey's changed.  Yes, I gwine ter do dat till I's safe, if it's a year.



"Dey ain't but one man dat I's afeard of, en dat's dat Pudd'nhead Wilson.

Dey calls him a pudd'nhead, en says he's a fool.  My lan, dat man

ain't no mo' fool den I is!  He's de smartes' man in dis town,

lessn' it's Jedge Driscoll or maybe Pem Howard.  Blame dat man,

he worries me wid dem ornery glasses o' his'n; _I_ b'lieve he's a witch.

But nemmine, I's gwine to happen aroun' dah one o' dese days en let

on dat I reckon he wants to print a chillen's fingers ag'in; en if HE

don't notice dey's changed, I bound dey ain't nobody gwine to notice it,

en den I's safe, sho'.  But I reckon I'll tote along a hoss-shoe to

keep off de witch work."



The new Negros gave Roxy no trouble, of course.  The master gave her none,

for one of his speculations was in jeopardy, and his mind was so

occupied that he hardly saw the children when he looked at them,

and all Roxy had to do was to get them both into a gale of laughter

when he came about;  then their faces were mainly cavities exposing gums,

and he was gone again before the spasm passed and the little creatures

resumed a human aspect.



Within a few days the fate of the speculation became so dubious that

Mr. Percy went away with his brother, the judge, to see what could be

done with it.  It was a land speculation as usual, and it had gotten

complicated with a lawsuit.  The men were gone seven weeks.  Before they

got back, Roxy had paid her visit to Wilson, and was satisfied.

Wilson took the fingerprints, labeled them with the names and with the date--

October the first--put them carefully away, and continued his chat

with Roxy, who seemed very anxious that he should admire the great

advance in flesh and beauty which the babes had made since he took

their fingerprints a month before.  He complimented their improvement

to her contentment; and as they were without any disguise of jam

or other stain, she trembled all the while and was miserably frightened

lest at any moment he--



But he didn't.  He discovered nothing; and she went home jubilant,

and dropped all concern about the matter permanently out of her mind.









CHAPTER 4



The Ways of the Changelings





Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was,

that they escaped teething.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





There is this trouble about special providences--namely, there is

so often a doubt as to which party was intended to be the beneficiary.

In the case of the children, the bears, and the prophet,

the bears got more real satisfaction out of the episode than

the prophet did, because they got the children.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar







This history must henceforth accommodate itself to the change which

Roxana has consummated, and call the real heir "Chambers" and the

usurping little slave, "Thomas `a Becket"--shortening this latter

name to "Tom," for daily use, as the people about him did.



"Tom" was a bad baby, from the very beginning of his usurpation.

He would cry for nothing; he would burst into storms of devilish

temper without notice, and let go scream after scream and squall

after squall, then climax the thing with "holding his breath"--

that frightful specialty of the teething nursling, in the throes of

which the creature exhausts its lungs, then is convulsed with noiseless

squirmings and twistings and kickings in the effort to get its breath,

while the lips turn blue and the mouth stands wide and rigid,

offering for inspection one wee tooth set in the lower rim of a hoop

of red gums; and when the appalling stillness has endured until one

is sure the lost breath will never return, a nurse comes flying,

and dashes water in the child's face, and--presto! the lungs fill,

and instantly discharge a shriek, or a yell, or a howl which bursts the

listening ear and surprises the owner of it into saying words which

would not go well with a halo if he had one.  The baby Tom would claw

anybody who came within reach of his nails, and pound anybody he could

reach with his rattle.  He would scream for water until he got it,

and then throw cup and all on the floor and scream for more.

He was indulged in all his caprices, howsoever troublesome and

exasperating they might be; he was allowed to eat anything he wanted,

particularly things that would give him the stomach-ache.



When he got to be old enough to begin to toddle about and say broken

words and get an idea of what his hands were for, he was a more

consummate pest than ever.  Roxy got no rest while he was awake.

He would call for anything and everything he saw, simply saying,

"Awnt it!" (want it), which was a command.  When it was brought,

he said in a frenzy, and motioning it away with his hands,

"Don't awnt it! don't awnt it!" and the moment it was gone he set up

frantic yells of "Awnt it! awnt it!" and Roxy had to give wings to

her heels to get that thing back to him again before he could get time

to carry out his intention of going into convulsions about it.



What he preferred above all other things was the tongs.

This was because his "father" had forbidden him to have them lest

he break windows and furniture with them.  The moment Roxy's back

was turned he would toddle to the presence of the tongs and say,

"Like it!" and cock his eye to one side or see if Roxy was observed;

then, "Awnt it!" and cock his eye again; then, "Hab it!" with another

furtive glace; and finally, "Take it!"--and the prize was his.

The next moment the heavy implement was raised aloft; the next,

there was a crash and a squall, and the cat was off on three legs to

meet an engagement; Roxy would arrive just as the lamp or a window

went to irremediable smash.



Tom got all the petting, Chambers got none.  Tom got all the delicacies,

Chambers got mush and milk, and clabber without sugar.  In consequence Tom

was a sickly child and Chambers wasn't.  Tom was "fractious," as Roxy

called it, and overbearing; Chambers was meek and docile.



With all her splendid common sense and practical everyday ability,

Roxy was a doting fool of a mother.  She was this toward her child--

and she was also more than this:  by the fiction created by herself,

he was become her master; the necessity of recognizing this relation

outwardly and of perfecting herself in the forms required to express

the recognition, had moved her to such diligence and faithfulness in

practicing these forms that this exercise soon concreted itself into habit;

it became automatic and unconscious; then a natural result followed:

deceptions intended solely for others gradually grew practically

into self-deceptions as well; the mock reverence became real reverence,

the mock homage real homage; the little counterfeit rift of separation

between imitation-slave and imitation-master widened and widened,

and became an abyss, and a very real one-- and on one side of it

stood Roxy, the dupe of her own deceptions, and on the other stood

her child, no longer a usurper to her, but her accepted and

recognized master.  He was her darling, her master, and her deity

all in one, and in her worship of him she forgot who she was and

what he had been.



In babyhood Tom cuffed and banged and scratched Chambers unrebuked,

and Chambers early learned that between meekly bearing it and

resenting it, the advantage all lay with the former policy.

The few times that his persecutions had moved him beyond control

and made him fight back had cost him very dear at headquarters;

not at the hands of Roxy, for if she ever went beyond scolding

him sharply for "forgett'n' who his young marster was," she at

least never extended her punishment beyond a box on the ear.

No, Percy Driscoll was the person.  He told Chambers that under no

provocation whatever was he privileged to lift his hand against his

little master.  Chambers overstepped the line three times, and got

three such convincing canings from the man who was his father and

didn't know it, that he took Tom's cruelties in all humility after that,

and made no more experiments.



Outside the house the two boys were together all through

their boyhood.  Chambers was strong beyond his years, and a good fighter;

strong because he was coarsely fed and hard worked about the house,

and a good fighter because Tom furnished him plenty of practice--

on white boys whom he hated and was afraid of.  Chambers was his

constant bodyguard, to and from school; he was present on the

playground at recess to protect his charge.  He fought himself into

such a formidable reputation, by and by, that Tom could have changed

clothes with him, and "ridden in peace," like Sir Kay in Launcelot's armor.



He was good at games of skill, too.  Tom staked him with marbles to

play "keeps" with, and then took all the winnings away from him.

In the winter season Chambers was on hand, in Tom's worn-out clothes,

with "holy" red mittens, and "holy" shoes, and pants "holy" at the

knees and seat, to drag a sled up the hill for Tom, warmly clad,

to ride down on; but he never got a ride himself.  He built snowmen

and snow fortifications under Tom's directions.  He was Tom's patient

target when Tom wanted to do some snowballing, but the target couldn't

fire back.  Chambers carried Tom's skates to the river and strapped

them on him, the trotted around after him on the ice, so as to be on

hand when he wanted; but he wasn't ever asked to try the skates himself.



In summer the pet pastime of the boys of Dawson's Landing was to

steal apples, peaches, and melons from the farmer's fruit wagons--

mainly on account of the risk they ran of getting their heads laid

open with the butt of the farmer's whip.  Tom was a distinguished adept

at these thefts--by proxy.  Chambers did his stealing, and got the

peach stones, apple cores, and melon rinds for his share.



Tom always made Chambers go in swimming with him, and stay by him as

a protection.  When Tom had had enough, he would slip out and tie knots

in Chamber's shirt, dip the knots in the water and make them hard to undo,

then dress himself and sit by and laugh while the naked shiverer tugged

at the stubborn knots with his teeth.



Tom did his humble comrade these various ill turns partly out of

native viciousness, and partly because he hated him for his

superiorities of physique and pluck, and for his manifold cleverness.

Tom couldn't dive, for it gave him splitting headaches.

Chambers could dive without inconvenience, and was fond of doing it.

He excited so much admiration, one day, among a crowd of white boys,

by throwing back somersaults from the stern of a canoe, that it wearies

Tom's spirit, and at last he shoved the canoe underneath Chambers while

he was in the air--so he came down on his head in the canoe bottom;

and while he lay unconscious, several of Tom's ancient adversaries saw

that their long-desired opportunity was come, and they gave the false heir

such a drubbing that with Chamber's best help he was hardly able to drag

himself home afterward.



When the boys was fifteen and upward, Tom was "showing off" in the river

one day, when he was taken with a cramp, and shouted for help.

It was a common trick with the boys--particularly if a stranger

was present--to pretend a cramp and howl for help; then when the

stranger came tearing hand over hand to the rescue, the howler would

go on struggling and howling till he was close at hand, then replace

the howl with a sarcastic smile and swim blandly away, while the

town boys assailed the dupe with a volley of jeers and laughter.

Tom had never tried this joke as yet, but was supposed to be trying

it now, so the boys held warily back; but Chambers believed his master

was in earnest; therefore, he swam out, and arrived in time,

unfortunately, and saved his life.



This was the last feather.  Tom had managed to endure everything else,

but to have to remain publicly and permanently under such an obligation

as this to a nigger, and to this nigger of all niggers--this was too much.

He heaped insults upon Chambers for "pretending" to think he was in

earnest in calling for help, and said that anybody but a blockheaded

nigger would have known he was funning and left him alone.



Tom's enemies were in strong force here, so they came out with their

opinions quite freely.  The laughed at him, and called him coward,

liar, sneak, and other sorts of pet names, and told him they meant

to call Chambers by a new name after this, and make it common

in the town--"Tom Driscoll's nigger pappy,"--to signify that he

had had a second birth into this life, and that Chambers was the author

of his new being.  Tom grew frantic under these taunts, and shouted:



"Knock their heads off, Chambers!  Knock their heads off!

What do you stand there with your hands in your pockets for?"



Chambers expostulated, and said, "But, Marse Tom, dey's too

many of 'em--dey's--"



"Do you hear me?"



"Please, Marse Tom, don't make me!  Dey's so many of 'em dat--"



Tom sprang at him and drove his pocketknife into him two or three

times before the boys could snatch him away and give the wounded lad

a chance to escape.  He was considerably hurt, but not seriously.

If the blade had been a little longer, his career would have ended there.



Tom had long ago taught Roxy "her place."  It had been many a day now

since she had ventured a caress or a fondling epithet in his quarter.

Such things, from a "nigger," were repulsive to him, and she had been

warned to keep her distance and remember who she was.  She saw her

darling gradually cease from being her son, she saw THAT detail

perish utterly; all that was left was master--master, pure and simple,

and it was not a gentle mastership, either.  She saw herself sink from the

sublime height of motherhood to the somber depths of unmodified slavery,

the abyss of separation between her and her boy was complete.

She was merely his chattel now, his convenience, his dog, his cringing

and helpless slave, the humble and unresisting victim of his capricious

temper and vicious nature.



Sometimes she could not go to sleep, even when worn out with fatigue,

because her rage boiled so high over the day's experiences with her boy.

She would mumble and mutter to herself:



"He struck me en I warn't no way to blame--struck me in de face,

right before folks.  En he's al'ays callin' me nigger wench, en hussy,

en all dem mean names, when I's doin' de very bes' I kin.

Oh, Lord, I done so much for him--I lif' him away up to what he is--

en dis is what I git for it."



Sometimes when some outrage of peculiar offensiveness stung her to

the heart, she would plan schemes of vengeance and revel in the fancied

spectacle of his exposure to the world as an imposter and a slave;

but in the midst of these joys fear would strike her; she had made him

too strong; she could prove nothing, and--heavens, she might get sold

down the river for her pains!  So her schemes always went for nothing,

and she laid them aside in impotent rage against the fates,

and against herself for playing the fool on that fatal September day

in not providing herself with a witness for use in the day when such a

thing might be needed for the appeasing of her vengeance-hungry heart.



And yet the moment Tom happened to be good to her, and kind--

and this occurred every now and then--all her sore places were healed,

and she was happy; happy and proud, for this was her son, her nigger son,

lording it among the whites and securely avenging their crimes

against her race.



There were two grand funerals in Dawson's Landing that fall--the fall

of 1845.  One was that of Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex,

the other that of Percy Driscoll.



On his deathbed Driscoll set Roxy free and delivered his idolized

ostensible son solemnly into the keeping of his brother, the judge,

and his wife.  Those childless people were glad to get him.

Childless people are not difficult to please.



Judge Driscoll had gone privately to his brother, a month before,

and bought Chambers.  He had heard that Tom had been trying to get

his father to sell the boy down the river, and he wanted to prevent

the scandal--for public sentiment did not approve of that way of treating

family servants for light cause or for no cause.



Percy Driscoll had worn himself out in trying to save his great

speculative landed estate, and had died without succeeding.

He was hardly in his grave before the boom collapsed and left his

envied young devil of an heir a pauper.  But that was nothing; his uncle

told him he should be his heir and have all his fortune when he died;

so Tom was comforted.



Roxy had no home now; so she resolved to go around and say good-by to

her friends and then clear out and see the world--that is to say,

she would go chambermaiding on a steamboat, the darling ambition of her

race and sex.



Her last call was on the black giant, Jasper.  She found him chopping

Pudd'nhead Wilson's winter provision of wood.



Wilson was chatting with him when Roxy arrived.  He asked her how she

could bear to go off chambermaiding and leave her boys; and chaffingly

offered to copy off a series of their fingerprints, reaching up to their

twelfth year, for her to remember them by; but she sobered in a moment,

wondering if he suspected anything; then she said she believed she

didn't want them.  Wilson said to himself, "The drop of black blood in

her is superstitious; she thinks there's some devilry, some witch business

about my glass mystery somewhere; she used to come here with an old

horseshoe in her hand; it could have been an accident, but I doubt it."









CHAPTER 5



The Twins Thrill Dawson's Landing





Training is everything.  The peach was once a bitter almond;

cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar



Remark of Dr. Baldwin's, concerning upstarts:  We don't care

to eat toadstools that think they are truffles.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





Mrs. York Driscoll enjoyed two years of bliss with that prize,

Tom--bliss that was troubled a little at times, it is true,

but bliss nevertheless; then she died, and her husband and his

childless sister, Mrs. Pratt, continued this bliss-business at the

old stand.  Tom was petted and indulged and spoiled to his entire

content--or nearly that.  This went on till he was nineteen,

then he was sent to Yale.  He went handsomely equipped with "conditions,"

but otherwise he was not an object of distinction there.

He remained at Yale two years, and then threw up the struggle.

He came home with his manners a good deal improved; he had lost his

surliness and brusqueness, and was rather pleasantly soft and smooth, now;

he was furtively, and sometimes openly, ironical of speech, and given

to gently touching people on the raw, but he did it with a good-natured

semiconscious air that carried it off safely, and kept him from getting

into trouble.  He was as indolent as ever and showed no very strenuous

desire to hunt up an occupation.  People argued from this that he

preferred to be supported by his uncle until his uncle's shoes should

become vacant.  He brought back one or two new habits with him,

one of which he rather openly practiced--tippling--but concealed another,

which was gambling.  It would not do to gamble where his uncle could

hear of it; he knew that quite well.



Tom's Eastern polish was not popular among the young people.

They could have endured it, perhaps, if Tom had stopped there;

but he wore gloves, and that they couldn't stand, and wouldn't;

so he was mainly without society.  He brought home with him a

suit of clothes of such exquisite style and cut in fashion--

Eastern fashion, city fashion--that it filled everybody with anguish

and was regarded as a peculiarly wanton affront.  He enjoyed the

feeling which he was exciting, and paraded the town serene and

happy all day; but the young fellows set a tailor to work that night,

and when Tom started out on his parade next morning, he found the old

deformed Negro bell ringer straddling along in his wake tricked out

in a flamboyant curtain-calico exaggeration of his finery,

and imitating his fancy Eastern graces as well as he could.



Tom surrendered, and after that clothed himself in the local fashion.

But the dull country town was tiresome to him, since his

acquaintanceship with livelier regions, and it grew daily more

and more so.  He began to make little trips to St. Louis for refreshment.

There he found companionship to suit him, and pleasures to his taste,

along with more freedom, in some particulars, than he could have at home.

So, during the next two years, his visits to the city grew in frequency

and his tarryings there grew steadily longer in duration.



He was getting into deep waters.  He was taking chances, privately,

which might get him into trouble some day--in fact, _did_.



Judge Driscoll had retired from the bench and from all business

activities in 1850, and had now been comfortably idle three years.

He was president of the Freethinkers' Society, and Pudd'nhead Wilson

was the other member.  The society's weekly discussions were now the

old lawyer's main interest in life.  Pudd'nhead was still toiling in

obscurity at the bottom of the ladder, under the blight of that unlucky

remark which he had let fall twenty-three years before about the dog.



Judge Driscoll was his friend, and claimed that he had a mind above

the average, but that was regarded as one of the judge's whims,

and it failed to modify the public opinion.  Or rather, that was one

of the reason why it failed, but there was another and better one.

If the judge had stopped with bare assertion, it would have had a good

deal of effect; but he made the mistake of trying to prove his position.

For some years Wilson had been privately at work on a whimsical almanac,

for his amusement--a calendar, with a little dab of ostensible philosophy,

usually in ironical form, appended to each date; and the judge thought

that these quips and fancies of Wilson's were neatly turned and cute;

so he carried a handful of them around one day, and read them to some

of the chief citizens.  But irony was not for those people;

their mental vision was not focused for it.  They read those playful

trifles in the solidest terms, and decided without hesitancy that if

there had ever been any doubt that Dave Wilson was a pudd'nhead--

which there hadn't--this revelation removed that doubt for good and all.

That is just the way in this world; an enemy can partly ruin a man,

but it takes a good-natured injudicious friend to complete the thing and

make it perfect.  After this the judge felt tenderer than ever toward

Wilson, and surer than ever that his calendar had merit.



Judge Driscoll could be a freethinker and still hold his place in

society because he was the person of most consequence to the community,

and therefore could venture to go his own way and follow out his

own notions.  The other member of his pet organization was allowed the

like liberty because he was a cipher in the estimation of the public,

and nobody attached any importance to what he thought or did.

He was liked, he was welcome enough all around, but he simply

didn't count for anything.



The Widow Cooper--affectionately called "Aunt Patsy" by everybody--

lived in a snug and comely cottage with her daughter Rowena,

who was nineteen, romantic, amiable, and very pretty, but otherwise

of no consequence.  Rowena had a couple of young brothers--

also of no consequence.



The widow had a large spare room, which she let to a lodger, with board,

when she could find one, but this room had been empty for a year now,

to her sorrow.  Her income was only sufficient for the family support,

and she needed the lodging money for trifling luxuries.  But now, at last,

on a flaming June day, she found herself happy; her tedious wait was ended;

her year-worn advertisement had been answered; and not by a village

applicant, no, no!--this letter was from away off yonder in the dim great

world to the North; it was from St. Louis.  She sat on her porch gazing

out with unseeing eyes upon the shining reaches of the mighty Mississippi,

her thoughts steeped in her good fortune.  Indeed it was specially

good fortune, for she was to have two lodgers instead of one.



She had read the letter to the family, and Rowena had danced away to see

to the cleaning and airing of the room by the slave woman, Nancy,

and the boys had rushed abroad in the town to spread the great news,

for it was a matter of public interest, and the public would wonder

and not be pleased if not informed.  Presently Rowena returned,

all ablush with joyous excitement, and begged for a rereading of the letter.

It was framed thus:



HONORED MADAM:  My brother and I have seen your advertisement, by chance,

and beg leave to take the room you offer.  We are twenty-four years

of age and twins.  We are Italians by birth, but have lived long in

the various countries of Europe, and several years in the United States.

Our names are Luigi and Angelo Capello.  You desire but one guest;

but, dear madam, if you will allow us to pay for two, we will not

incommode you.  We shall be down Thursday.



"Italians!  How romantic!  Just think, Ma--there's never been one

in this town, and everybody will be dying to see them, and they're

all OURS!  Think of that!"



"Yes, I reckon they'll make a grand stir."



"Oh, indeed they will.  The whole town will be on its head!

Think--they've been in Europe and everywhere!  There's never been a

traveler in this town before, Ma, I shouldn't wonder if they've seen kings!"



"Well, a body can't tell, but they'll make stir enough, without that."



"Yes, that's of course.  Luigi--Angelo.  They're lovely names;

and so grand and foreign--not like Jones and Robinson and such.

Thursday they are coming, and this is only Tuesday; it's a cruel

long time to wait.  Here comes Judge Driscoll in at the gate.

He's heard about it.  I'll go and open the door."



The judge was full of congratulations and curiosity.  The letter was

read and discussed.  Soon Justice Robinson arrived with more

congratulations, and there was a new reading and a new discussion.

This was the beginning.  Neighbor after neighbor, of both sexes,

followed, and the procession drifted in and out all day and evening

and all Wednesday and Thursday.  The letter was read and reread until

it was nearly worn out; everybody admired its courtly and gracious tone,

and smooth and practiced style, everybody was sympathetic and excited,

and the Coopers were steeped in happiness all the while.



The boats were very uncertain in low water in these primitive times.

This time the Thursday boat had not arrived at ten at night--

so the people had waited at the landing all day for nothing;

they were driven to their homes by a heavy storm without having had

a view of the illustrious foreigners.



Eleven o'clock came; and the Cooper house was the only one in the town

that still had lights burning.  The rain and thunder were booming yet,

and the anxious family were still waiting, still hoping.

At last there was a knock at the door, and the family jumped to open it.

Two Negro men entered, each carrying a trunk, and proceeded upstairs

toward the guest room.  Then entered the twins--the handsomest,

the best dressed, the most distinguished-looking pair of young fellows

the West had ever seen.  One was a little fairer than the other,

but otherwise they were exact duplicates.









CHAPTER 6



Swimming in Glory





Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the

undertaker will be sorry.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar



Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man,

but coaxed downstairs at step at a time.



                                   --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





At breakfast in the morning, the twins' charm of manner and easy and

polished bearing made speedy conquest of the family's good graces.

All constraint and formality quickly disappeared, and the friendliest

feeling succeeded.  Aunt Patsy called them by their Christian names

almost from the beginning.  She was full of the keenest curiosity

about them, and showed it; they responded by talking about themselves,

which pleased her greatly.  It presently appeared that in their early

youth they had known poverty and hardship.  As the talk wandered along,

the old lady watched for the right place to drop in a question or two

concerning that matter, and when she found it, she said to the blond twin,

who was now doing the biographies in his turn while the brunette one rested:



"If it ain't asking what I ought not to ask, Mr. Angelo, how did you

come to be so friendless and in such trouble when you were little?

Do you mind telling?  But don't, if you do."



"Oh, we don't mind it at all, madam; in our case it was merely misfortune,

and nobody's fault.  Our parents were well to do, there in Italy,

and we were their only child.  We were of the old Florentine nobility"--

Rowena's heart gave a great bound, her nostrils expanded,

and a fine light played in her eyes--"and when the war broke out,

my father was on the losing side and had to fly for his life.

His estates were confiscated, his personal property seized, and there

we were, in Germany, strangers, friendless, and in fact paupers.

My brother and I were ten years old, and well educated for that age,

very studious, very fond of our books, and well grounded in the German,

French, Spanish, and English languages.  Also, we were marvelous musical

prodigies--if you will allow me to say it, it being only the truth.



"Our father survived his misfortunes only a month, our mother soon

followed him, and we were alone in the world.  Our parents could have

made themselves comfortable by exhibiting us as a show, and they had

many and large offers; but the thought revolted their pride,

and they said they would starve and die first.  But what they

wouldn't consent to do, we had to do without the formality of consent.

We were seized for the debts occasioned by their illness and their funerals,

and placed among the attractions of a cheap museum in Berlin to earn the

liquidation money.  It took us two years to get out of that slavery.

We traveled all about Germany, receiving no wages, and not even our keep.

We had to be exhibited for nothing, and beg our bread.



"Well, madam, the rest is not of much consequence.  When we escaped from

that slavery at twelve years of age, we were in some respects men.

Experience had taught us some valuable things; among others,

how to take care of ourselves, how to avoid and defeat sharks

and sharpers, and how to conduct our own business for our own profit and

without other people's help.  We traveled everywhere--years and years--

picking up smatterings of strange tongues, familiarizing ourselves

with strange sights and strange customs, accumulating an education

of a wide and varied and curious sort.  It was a pleasant life.

We went to Venice--to London, Paris, Russia, India, China, Japan--"



At this point Nancy, the slave woman, thrust her head in at

the door and exclaimed:



"Ole Missus, de house of plum' jam full o' people, en dey's

jes a-spi'lin' to see de gen'lemen!"  She indicated the twins

with a nod of her head, and tucked it back out of sight again.



It was a proud occasion for the widow, and she promised

herself high satisfaction in showing off her fine foreign birds

before her neighbors and friends--simple folk who had hardly ever

seen a foreigner of any kind, and never one of any distinction or style.

Yet her feeling was moderate indeed when contrasted with Rowena's.

Rowena was in the clouds, she walked on air; this was to be the

greatest day, the most romantic episode in the colorless history of

that dull country town.  She was to be familiarly near the source of

its glory and feel the full flood of it pour over her and about her;

the other girls could only gaze and envy, not partake.



The widow was ready, Rowena was ready, so also were the foreigners.



The party moved along the hall, the twins in advance, and entered

the open parlor door, whence issued a low hum of conversation.

The twins took a position near the door, the widow stood at Luigi's side,

Rowena stood beside Angelo, and the march-past and the introductions began.

The widow was all smiles and contentment.  She received the procession

and passed it on to Rowena.



"Good mornin', Sister Cooper"--handshake.



"Good morning, Brother Higgins--Count Luigi Capello, Mr. Higgins"--

handshake, followed by a devouring stare and "I'm glad to see ye,"

on the part of Higgins, and a courteous inclination of the head

and a pleasant "Most happy!" on the part of Count Luigi.



"Good mornin', Roweny"--handshake.



"Good morning, Mr. Higgins--present you to Count Angelo Capello."

Handshake, admiring stare, "Glad to see ye"--courteous nod,

smily "Most happy!" and Higgins passes on.



None of these visitors was at ease, but, being honest people,

they didn't pretend to be.  None of them had ever seen a person

bearing a title of nobility before, and none had been expecting to

see one now, consequently the title came upon them as a kind of

pile-driving surprise and caught them unprepared.  A few tried to rise

to the emergency, and got out an awkward "My lord," or "Your lordship,"

or something of that sort, but the great majority were overwhelmed by

the unaccustomed word and its dim and awful associations with gilded

courts and stately ceremony and anointed kingship, so they only

fumbled through the handshake and passed on, speechless.  Now and then,

as happens at all receptions everywhere, a more than ordinary friendly soul

blocked the procession and kept it waiting while he inquired how the

brothers liked the village, and how long they were going to stay,

and if their family was well, and dragged in the weather, and hoped

it would get cooler soon, and all that sort of thing, so as to be

able to say, when he got home, "I had quite a long talk with them";

but nobody did or said anything of a regrettable kind, and so the great

affair went through to the end in a creditable and satisfactory fashion.



General conversation followed, and the twins drifted about

from group to group, talking easily and fluently and winning

approval, compelling admiration and achieving favor from all.

The widow followed their conquering march with a proud eye,

and every now and then Rowena said to herself with deep satisfaction,

"And to think they are ours--all ours!"



There were no idle moments for mother or daughter.  Eager inquiries

concerning the twins were pouring into their enchanted ears all

the time; each was the constant center of a group of breathless listeners;

each recognized that she knew now for the first time the real meaning

of that great word Glory, and perceived the stupendous value of it,

and understand why men in all ages had been willing to throw away

meaner happiness, treasure, life itself, to get a taste of its sublime

and supreme joy.  Napoleon and all his kind stood accounted for--

and justified.



When Rowena had at last done all her duty by the people in the parlor,

she went upstairs to satisfy the longings of an overflow meeting there,

for the parlor was not big enough to hold all the comers.

Again she was besieged by eager questioners, and again she swam in

sunset seas of glory.  When the forenoon was nearly gone, she recognized

with a pang that this most splendid episode of her life was almost over,

that nothing could prolong it, that nothing quite its equal could ever

fall to her fortune again.  But never mind, it was sufficient unto itself,

the grand occasion had moved on an ascending scale from the start,

and was a noble and memorable success.  If the twins could but do some

crowning act now to climax it, something usual, something startling,

something to concentrate upon themselves the company's loftiest admiration,

something in the nature of an electric surprise--



Here a prodigious slam-banging broke out below, and everybody rushed

down to see.  It was the twins, knocking out a classic four-handed

piece on the piano in great style.  Rowena was satisfied--satisfied

down to the bottom of her heart.



The young strangers were kept long at the piano.  The villagers were

astonished and enchanted with the magnificence of their performance,

and could not bear to have them stop.  All the music that they had ever

heard before seemed spiritless prentice-work and barren of grace and

charm when compared with these intoxicating floods of melodious sound.

They realized that for once in their lives they were hearing masters.









CHAPTER 7



The Unknown Nymph





One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie

is that a cat has only nine lives.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





The company broke up reluctantly, and drifted toward their several homes,

chatting with vivacity and all agreeing that it would be many a long

day before Dawson's Landing would see the equal of this one again.

The twins had accepted several invitations while the reception

was in progress, and had also volunteered to play some duets at

an amateur entertainment for the benefit of a local charity.

Society was eager to receive them to its bosom.  Judge Driscoll had

the good fortune to secure them for an immediate drive, and to be

the first to display them in public.  They entered his buggy with him

and were paraded down the main street, everybody flocking to the windows

and sidewalks to see.



The judge showed the strangers the new graveyard, and the jail,

and where the richest man lived, and the Freemasons' hall,

and the Methodist church, and the Presbyterian church, and where the

Baptist church was going to be when they got some money to build it with,

and showed them the town hall and the slaughterhouse, and got out

of the independent fire company in uniform and had them put out

an imaginary fire; then he let them inspect the muskets of the

militia company, and poured out an exhaustless stream of enthusiasm

over all these splendors, and seemed very well satisfied with the

responses he got, for the twins admired his admiration, and paid him

back the best they could, though they could have done better if

some fifteen or sixteen hundred thousand previous experiences of this

sort in various countries had not already rubbed off a considerable part

of the novelty in it.



The judge laid himself out hospitality to make them have a good time,

and if there was a defect anywhere, it was not his fault.

He told them a good many humorous anecdotes, and always forgot the nub,

but they were always able to furnish it, for these yarns were of a

pretty early vintage, and they had had many a rejuvenating pull

at them before.  And he told them all about his several dignities,

and how he had held this and that and the other place of honor or profit,

and had once been to the legislature, and was now president of the

Society of Freethinkers.  He said the society had been in existence

four years, and already had two members, and was firmly established.

He would call for the brothers in the evening, if they would like

to attend a meeting of it.



Accordingly he called for them, and on the way he told them all about

Pudd'nhead Wilson, in order that they might get a favorable impression

of him in advance and be prepared to like him.  This scheme succeeded--

the favorable impression was achieved.  Later it was confirmed and

solidified when Wilson proposed that out of courtesy to the strangers

the usual topics be put aside and the hour be devoted to conversation upon

ordinary subjects and the cultivation of friendly relations and

good-fellowship--a proposition which was put to vote and carried.



The hour passed quickly away in lively talk, and when it was ended,

the lonesome and neglected Wilson was richer by two friends than he

had been when it began.  He invited the twins to look in at his

lodgings presently, after disposing of an intervening engagement,

and they accepted with pleasure.



Toward the middle of the evening, they found themselves on the road

to his house.  Pudd'nhead was at home waiting for them and putting

in his time puzzling over a thing which had come under his notice

that morning.  The matter was this:  He happened to be up very early--

at dawn, in fact; and he crossed the hall, which divided his cottage

through the center, and entered a room to get something there.

The window of the room had no curtains, for that side of the house

had long been unoccupied, and through this window he caught sight of

something which surprised and interested him.  It was a young woman--

a young woman where properly no young woman belonged; for she was in

Judge Driscoll's house, and in the bedroom over the judge's private

study or sitting room.  This was young Tom Driscoll's bedroom.

He and the judge, the judge's widowed sister Mrs. Pratt, and three Negro

servants were the only people who belonged in the house.  Who, then,

might this young lady be?  The two houses were separated by an

ordinary yard, with a low fence running back through its middle

from the street in front to the lane in the rear.  The distance was

not great, and Wilson was able to see the girl very well,

the window shades of the room she was in being up, and the window also.

The girl had on a neat and trim summer dress, patterned in broad stripes

of pink and white, and her bonnet was equipped with a pink veil.

She was practicing steps, gaits and attitudes, apparently; she was

doing the thing gracefully, and was very much absorbed in her work.

Who could she be, and how came she to be in young Tom Driscoll's room?



Wilson had quickly chosen a position from which he could watch the girl

without running much risk of being seen by her, and he remained there

hoping she would raise her veil and betray her face.  But she

disappointed him.  After a matter of twenty minutes she disappeared

and although he stayed at his post half an hour longer, she came no more.



Toward noon he dropped in at the judge's and talked with Mrs. Pratt

about the great event of the day, the levee of the distinguished

foreigners at Aunt Patsy Cooper's.  He asked after her nephew Tom,

and she said he was on his way home and that she was expecting him

to arrive a little before night, and added that she and the judge

were gratified to gather from his letters that he was conducting himself

very nicely and creditably--at which Wilson winked to himself privately.

Wilson did not ask if there was a newcomer in the house, but he asked

questions that would have brought light-throwing answers as to that

matter if Mrs. Pratt had had any light to throw; so he went away

satisfied that he knew of things that were going on in her house

of which she herself was not aware.



He was now awaiting for the twins, and still puzzling over the problem

of who that girl might be, and how she happened to be in that

young fellow's room at daybreak in the morning.









CHAPTER 8



Marse Tom Tramples His Chance





The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal

and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime,

if not asked to lend money.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar



Consider well the proportions of things.  It is better to be

a young June bug than an old bird of paradise.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





It is necessary now to hunt up Roxy.



At the time she was set free and went away chambermaiding,

she was thirty-five.  She got a berth as second chambermaid on a

Cincinnati boat in the New Orleans trade, the _Grand Mogul_.

A couple of trips made her wonted and easygoing at the work,

and infatuated her with the stir and adventure and independence of

steamboat life.  Then she was promoted and become head chambermaid.

She was a favorite with the officers, and exceedingly proud of their

joking and friendly way with her.



During eight years she served three parts of the year on that boat,

and the winters on a Vicksburg packet.  But now for two months,

she had had rheumatism in her arms, and was obliged to let

the washtub alone.  So she resigned.  But she was well fixed--

rich, as she would have described it; for she had lived a steady life,

and had banked four dollars every month in New Orleans as a provision

for her old age.  She said in the start that she had "put shoes on

one bar'footed nigger to tromple on her with," and that one mistake

like that was enough; she would be independent of the human race

thenceforth forevermore if hard work and economy could accomplish it.

When the boat touched the levee at New Orleans she bade good-by to her

comrades on the _Grand Mogul_ and moved her kit ashore.



But she was back in a hour.  The bank had gone to smash and carried

her four hundred dollars with it.  She was a pauper and homeless.

Also disabled bodily, at least for the present.  The officers were

full of sympathy for her in her trouble, and made up a little purse

for her.  She resolved to go to her birthplace; she had friends there

among the Negros, and the unfortunate always help the unfortunate,

she was well aware of that; those lowly comrades of her youth would

not let her starve.



She took the little local packet at Cairo, and now she was on

the homestretch.  Time had worn away her bitterness against her son,

and she was able to think of him with serenity.  She put the vile side

of him out of her mind, and dwelt only on recollections of his occasional

acts of kindness to her.  She gilded and otherwise decorated these,

and made them very pleasant to contemplate.  She began to long to see him.

She would go and fawn upon him slavelike--for this would have to be her

attitude, of course--and maybe she would find that time had modified him,

and that he would be glad to see his long-forgotten old nurse and treat

her gently.  That would be lovely; that would make her forget her woes

and her poverty.



Her poverty!  That thought inspired her to add another castle to her dream:

maybe he would give her a trifle now and then--maybe a dollar,

once a month, say; any little thing like that would help, oh,

ever so much.



By the time she reached Dawson's Landing, she was her old self again;

her blues were gone, she was in high feather.  She would get along,

surely; there were many kitchens where the servants would share their

meals with her, and also steal sugar and apples and other dainties

for her to carry home--or give her a chance to pilfer them herself,

which would answer just as well.  And there was the church.

She was a more rabid and devoted Methodist than ever, and her piety

was no sham, but was strong and sincere.  Yes, with plenty of creature

comforts and her old place in the amen corner in her possession again,

she would be perfectly happy and at peace thenceforward to the end.



She went to Judge Driscoll's kitchen first of all.  She was received

there in great form and with vast enthusiasm.  Her wonderful travels,

and the strange countries she had seen, and the adventures she had had,

made her a marvel and a heroine of romance.  The Negros hung enchanted

upon a great story of her experiences, interrupting her all along with

eager questions, with laughter, exclamations of delight, and expressions

of applause; and she was obliged to confess to herself that if there

was anything better in this world than steamboating, it was the

glory to be got by telling about it.  The audience loaded her stomach

with their dinners, and then stole the pantry bare to load up her basket.



Tom was in St. Louis.  The servants said he had spent the best part

of his time there during the previous two years.  Roxy came every day,

and had many talks about the family and its affairs.  Once she asked

why Tom was away so much.  The ostensible "Chambers" said:



"De fac' is, ole marster kin git along better when young marster's

away den he kin when he's in de town; yes, en he love him better, too;

so he gives him fifty dollahs a month--"



"No, is dat so?  Chambers, you's a-jokin', ain't you?"



"'Clah to goodness I ain't, Mammy; Marse Tom tole me so his own self.

But nemmine, 'tain't enough."



"My lan', what de reason 'tain't enough?"



"Well, I's gwine to tell you, if you gimme a chanst, Mammy.

De reason it ain't enough is 'ca'se Marse Tom gambles."



Roxy threw up her hands in astonishment, and Chambers went on:



"Ole marster found it out, 'ca'se he had to pay two hundred

dollahs for Marse Tom's gamblin' debts, en dat's true, Mammy,

jes as dead certain as you's bawn."



"Two--hund'd dollahs!  Why, what is you talkin' 'bout?

Two --hund'd--dollahs.  Sakes alive, it's 'mos' enough to buy a

tol'able good secondhand nigger wid.  En you ain't lyin', honey?

You wouldn't lie to you' old Mammy?"



"It's God's own truth, jes as I tell you--two hund'd dollahs--

I wisht I may never stir outen my tracks if it ain't so.

En, oh, my lan', ole Marse was jes a-hoppin'!  He was b'ilin' mad,

I tell you!  He tuck 'n' dissenhurrit him."



"Disen_whiched_ him?"



"Dissenhurrit him."



"What's dat?  What do you mean?"



"Means he bu'sted de will."



"Bu's--ted de will!  He wouldn't _ever_ treat him so!  Take it back,

you mis'able imitation nigger dat I bore in sorrow en tribbilation."



Roxy's pet castle--an occasional dollar from Tom's pocket--

was tumbling to ruin before her eyes.  She could not abide such a

disaster as that; she couldn't endure the thought of it.

Her remark amused Chambers.



"Yah-yah-yah!  Jes listen to dat!  If I's imitation, what is you?

Bofe of us is imitation _white_--dat's what we is--en pow'ful

good imitation, too.  Yah-yah-yah!  We don't 'mount to noth'n as

imitation _niggers_; en as for--"



"Shet up yo' foolin', 'fo' I knock you side de head, en tell me 'bout

de will.  Tell me 'tain't bu'sted--do, honey, en I'll never forgit you."



"Well, _'tain't_--'ca'se dey's a new one made, en Marse Tom's

all right ag'in.  But what is you in sich a sweat 'bout it for,

Mammy?  'Tain't none o' your business I don't reckon."



"'Tain't none o' my business?  Whose business is it den, I'd like

to know?  Wuz I his mother tell he was fifteen years old, or wusn't I?--

you answer me dat.  En you speck I could see him turned out po' and

ornery on de worl' en never care noth'n' 'bout it?  I reckon if you'd

ever be'n a mother yo'self, Valet de Chambers, you wouldn't talk

sich foolishness as dat."



"Well, den, ole Marse forgive him en fixed up de will ag'in --do dat

satisfy you?"



Yes, she was satisfied now, and quite happy and sentimental over it.

She kept coming daily, and at last she was told that Tom had come home.

She began to tremble with emotion, and straightway sent to beg him

to let his "po' ole nigger Mammy have jes one sight of him en die for joy."



Tom was stretched at his lazy ease on a sofa when Chambers brought

the petition.  Time had not modified his ancient detestation of the

humble drudge and protector of his boyhood; it was still bitter

and uncompromising.  He sat up and bent a severe gaze upon the face

of the young fellow whose name he was unconsciously using and whose

family rights he was enjoying.  He maintained the gaze until the victim

of it had become satisfactorily pallid with terror, then he said:



"What does the old rip want with me?"



The petition was meekly repeated.



"Who gave you permission to come and disturb me with the social

attentions of niggers?"



Tom had risen.  The other young man was trembling now, visibly.

He saw what was coming, and bent his head sideways, and put up his

left arm to shield it.  Tom rained cuffs upon the head and its shield,

saying no word:  the victim received each blow with a beseeching,

"Please, Marse Tom!--oh, please, Marse Tom!"  Seven blows--then Tom said,

"Face the door--march!"  He followed behind with one, two,

three solid kicks.  The last one helped the pure-white slave over

the door-sill, and he limped away mopping his eyes with his old,

ragged sleeve.  Tom shouted after him, "Send her in!"



Then he flung himself panting on the sofa again, and rasped out

the remark, "He arrived just at the right moment; I was full to the

brim with bitter thinkings, and nobody to take it out of.  How refreshing it

was!  I feel better."



Tom's mother entered now, closing the door behind her, and approached

her son with all the wheedling and supplication servilities that fear

and interest can impart to the words and attitudes of the born slave.

She stopped a yard from her boy and made two or three admiring

exclamations over his manly stature and general handsomeness,

and Tom put an arm under his head and hoisted a leg over the

sofa back in order to look properly indifferent.



"My lan', how you is growed, honey!  'Clah to goodness, I wouldn't

a-knowed you, Marse Tom!  'Deed I wouldn't!  Look at me good;

does you 'member old Roxy?  Does you know yo' old nigger mammy, honey?

Well now, I kin lay down en die in peace, 'ca'se I'se seed--"



"Cut it short, Goddamn it, cut it short!  What is it you want?"



"You heah dat?  Jes the same old Marse Tom, al'ays so gay and funnin'

wid de ole mammy.  I'uz jes as shore--"



"Cut it short, I tell you, and get along!  What do you want?"



This was a bitter disappointment.  Roxy had for so many days nourished

and fondled and petted her notion that Tom would be glad to see his

old nurse, and would make her proud and happy to the marrow with a

cordial word or two, that it took two rebuffs to convince her that

he was not funning, and that her beautiful dream was a fond and

foolish variety, a shabby and pitiful mistake.  She was hurt to the heart,

and so ashamed that for a moment she did not quite know what to do or

how to act.  Then her breast began to heave, the tears came,

and in her forlornness she was moved to try that other dream of hers--

an appeal to her boy's charity; and so, upon the impulse,

and without reflection, she offered her supplication:



"Oh, Marse Tom, de po' ole mammy is in sich hard luck dese days;

en she's kinder crippled in de arms and can't work, en if you could

gimme a dollah--on'y jes one little dol--"



Tom was on his feet so suddenly that the supplicant was startled

into a jump herself.



"A dollar!--give you a dollar!  I've a notion to strangle you!

Is _that_ your errand here?  Clear out!  And be quick about it!"



Roxy backed slowly toward the door.  When she was halfway she stopped,

and said mournfully:



"Marse Tom, I nussed you when you was a little baby, en I raised you

all by myself tell you was 'most a young man; en now you is young

en rich, en I is po' en gitt'n ole, en I come heah b'leavin' dat you

would he'p de ole mammy 'long down de little road dat's lef' 'twix'

her en de grave, en--"



Tom relished this tune less than any that he preceded it,

for it began to wake up a sort of echo in his conscience;

so he interrupted and said with decision, though without asperity,

that he was not in a situation to help her, and wasn't going to do it.



"Ain't you ever gwine to he'p me, Marse Tom?"



"No!  Now go away and don't bother me any more."



Roxy's head was down, in an attitude of humility.  But now the fires

of her old wrongs flamed up in her breast and began to burn fiercely.

She raised her head slowly, till it was well up, and at the same time

her great frame unconsciously assumed an erect and masterful attitude,

with all the majesty and grace of her vanished youth in it.

She raised her finger and punctuated with it.



"You has said de word.  You has had yo' chance, en you has trompled

it under yo' foot.  When you git another one, you'll git down on yo'

knees en _beg_ for it!"



A cold chill went to Tom's heart, he didn't know why; for he did not

reflect that such words, from such an incongruous source,

and so solemnly delivered, could not easily fail of that effect.

However, he did the natural thing: he replied with bluster and mockery.



"_You'll_ give me a chance--_you_!  Perhaps I'd better get down

on my knees now!  But in case I don't--just for argument's sake--

what's going to happen, pray?"



"Dis is what is gwine to happen, I's gwine as straight to yo'

uncle as I kin walk, en tell him every las' thing I knows 'bout you."



Tom's cheek blenched, and she saw it.  Disturbing thoughts

began to chase each other through his head.  "How can she know?

And yet she must have found out--she looks it.  I've had the will

back only three months, and am already deep in debt again, and moving

heaven and earth to save myself from exposure and destruction,

with a reasonably fair show of getting the thing covered up if I'm

let alone, and now this fiend has gone and found me out somehow or other.

I wonder how much she knows?  Oh, oh, oh, it's enough to break

a body's heart!  But I've got to humor her--there's no other way."



Then he worked up a rather sickly sample of a gay laugh and a hollow

chipperness of manner, and said:



"Well, well, Roxy dear, old friends like you and me mustn't quarrel.

Here's your dollar--now tell me what you know."



He held out the wildcat bill; she stood as she was, and made

no movement.  It was her turn to scorn persuasive foolery now,

and she did not waste it.  She said, with a grim implacability in

voice and manner which made Tom almost realize that even a former

slave can remember for ten minutes insults and injuries returned

for compliments and flatteries received, and can also enjoy

taking revenge for them when the opportunity offers:



"What does I know?  I'll tell you what I knows, I knows enough to

bu'st dat will to flinders--en more, mind you, _more!_"



Tom was aghast.



"More?" he said, "What do you call more?  Where's there any room for more?"



Roxy laughed a mocking laugh, and said scoffingly, with a toss

of her head, and her hands on her hips:



"Yes!--oh, I reckon!  _co'se_ you'd like to know--wid yo' po' little

ole rag dollah.  What you reckon I's gwine to tell _you_ for?--

you ain't got no money.  I's gwine to tell yo' uncle--en I'll do it

dis minute, too--he'll gimme FIVE dollahs for de news, en mighty glad, too."



She swung herself around disdainfully, and started away.

Tom was in a panic.  He seized her skirts, and implored her to wait.

She turned and said, loftily:



"Look-a-heah, what 'uz it I tole you?"



"You--you--I don't remember anything.  What was it you told me?"



"I tole you dat de next time I give you a chance you'd git

down on yo' knees en beg for it."



Tom was stupefied for a moment.  He was panting with excitement.

Then he said:



"Oh, Roxy, you wouldn't require your young master to do such a

horrible thing.  You can't mean it."



"I'll let you know mighty quick whether I means it or not!

You call me names, en as good as spit on me when I comes here,

po' en ornery en 'umble, to praise you for bein' growed up so

fine and handsome, en tell you how I used to nuss you en tend you en

watch you when you 'uz sick en hadn't no mother but me in de whole worl',

en beg you to give de po' ole nigger a dollah for to get her som'n'

to eat, en you call me names--_names_, dad blame you!  Yassir,

I gives you jes one chance mo', and dat's _now_, en it las' on'y

half a second--you hear?"



Tom slumped to his knees and began to beg, saying:



"You see I'm begging, and it's honest begging, too!  Now tell me,

Roxy, tell me."



The heir of two centuries of unatoned insult and outrage looked down

on him and seemed to drink in deep draughts of satisfaction.

Then she said:



"Fine nice young white gen'l'man kneelin' down to a nigger wench!

I's wanted to see dat jes once befo' I's called.  Now, Gabr'el,

blow de hawn, I's ready . . .  Git up!"



Tom did it.  He said, humbly:



"Now, Roxy, don't punish me any more.  I deserved what I've got,

but be good and let me off with that.  Don't go to uncle.  Tell me--

I'll give you the five dollars."



"Yes, I bet you will; en you won't stop dah, nuther.  But I ain't

gwine to tell you heah--"



"Good gracious, no!"



"Is you 'feared o' de ha'nted house?"



"N-no."



"Well, den, you come to de ha'nted house 'bout ten or 'leven tonight,

en climb up de ladder, 'ca'se de sta'rsteps is broke down,

en you'll find me.  I's a-roostin' in de ha'nted house 'ca'se I can't

'ford to roos' nowher's else."  She started toward the door,

but stopped and said, "Gimme de dollah bill!"  He gave it to her.

She examined it and said, "H'm--like enough de bank's bu'sted."

She started again, but halted again.  "Has you got any whisky?"



"Yes, a little."



"Fetch it!"



He ran to his room overhead and brought down a bottle which

was two-thirds full.  She tilted it up and took a drink.

Her eyes sparkled with satisfaction, and she tucked the bottle under

her shawl, saying, "It's prime.  I'll take it along."



Tom humbly held the door for her, and she marched out as grim and

erect as a grenadier.









CHAPTER 9



Tom Practices Sycophancy





Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral?

It is because we are not the person involved.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar



It is easy to find fault, if one has that disposition.  There was once

a man who, not being able to find any other fault with his coal,

complained that there were too many prehistoric toads in it.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





Tom flung himself on the sofa, and put his throbbing head in his hands,

and rested his elbows on his knees.  He rocked himself back and

forth and moaned.



"I've knelt to a nigger wench!" he muttered.  "I thought I had

struck the deepest depths of degradation before, but oh, dear,

it was nothing to this. . . .   Well, there is one consolation,

such as it is--I've struck bottom this time; there's nothing lower."



But that was a hasty conclusion.



At ten that night he climbed the ladder in the haunted house, pale,

weak, and wretched.  Roxy was standing in the door of one of the rooms,

waiting, for she had heard him.



This was a two-story log house which had acquired the reputation a few

years ago of being haunted, and that was the end of its usefulness.

Nobody would live in it afterward, or go near it by night,

and most people even gave it a wide berth in the daytime.

As it had no competition, it was called _the_ haunted house.

It was getting crazy and ruinous now, from long neglect.

It stood three hundred yards beyond Pudd'nhead Wilson's house,

with nothing between but vacancy.  It was the last house in the

town at that end.



Tom followed Roxy into the room.  She had a pile of clean straw in

the corner for a bed, some cheap but well-kept clothing was hanging

on the wall, there was a tin lantern freckling the floor with little

spots of light, and there were various soap and candle boxes

scattered about, which served for chairs.  The two sat down.  Roxy said:



"Now den, I'll tell you straight off, en I'll begin to k'leck de

money later on; I ain't in no hurry.  What does you reckon

I's gwine to tell you?"



"Well, you--you--oh, Roxy, don't make it too hard for me!

Come right out and tell me you've found out somehow what a shape

I'm in on account of dissipation and foolishness."



"Disposition en foolishness!  NO sir, dat ain't it.  Dat jist ain't

nothin' at all, 'longside o' what _I_ knows."



Tom stared at her, and said:



"Why, Roxy, what do you mean?"



She rose, and gloomed above him like a Fate.



"I means dis--en it's de Lord's truth.  You ain't no more kin to

ole Marse Driscoll den I is!  _dat's_  what I means!" and her eyes

flamed with triumph.



"What?"



"Yassir, en _dat_ ain't all!  You's a _nigger!_--_bawn_ a nigger and

a _slave!_--en you's a nigger en a slave dis minute; en if I opens my

mouf ole Marse Driscoll'll sell you down de river befo' you is two days

older den what you is now!"



"It's a thundering lie, you miserable old blatherskite!"



"It ain't no lie, nuther.  It's just de truth, en nothin' _but_ de truth,

so he'p me.  Yassir--you's my _son_--"



"You devil!"



"En dat po' boy dat you's be'n a-kickin' en a-cuffin' today

is Percy Driscoll's son en yo' _marster_--"



"You beast!"



"En _his_ name is Tom Driscoll, en _yo's_ name's Valet de Chambers,

en you ain't GOT no fambly name, beca'se niggers don't _have_ em!"



Tom sprang up and seized a billet of wood and raised it, but his mother

only laughed at him, and said:



"Set down, you pup!  Does you think you kin skyer me?  It ain't in you,

nor de likes of you.  I reckon you'd shoot me in de back, maybe,

if you got a chance, for dat's jist yo' style--_I_ knows you,

throo en throo--but I don't mind gitt'n killed, beca'se all dis is

down in writin' and it's in safe hands, too, en de man dat's got it

knows whah to look for de right man when I gits killed.

Oh, bless yo' soul, if you puts yo' mother up for as big a fool as

_you_ is, you's pow'ful mistaken, I kin tell you!

Now den, you set still en behave yo'self; en don't you git up

ag'in till I tell you!"



Tom fretted and chafed awhile in a whirlwind of disorganizing

sensations and emotions, and finally said, with something like

settled conviction:



"The whole thing is moonshine; now then, go ahead and do

your worst; I'm done with you."



Roxy made no answer.  She took the lantern and started for the door.

Tom was in a cold panic in a moment.



"Come back, come back!" he wailed.  "I didn't mean it, Roxy;

I take it all back, and I'll never say it again!  Please come back, Roxy!"



The woman stood a moment, then she said gravely:



"Dat's one thing you's got to stop, Valet de Chambers.  You can't

call me _Roxy_, same as if you was my equal.  Chillen don't speak to

dey mammies like dat.  You'll call me ma or mammy, dat's what you'll

call me--leastways when de ain't nobody aroun'.  _Say_ it!"



It cost Tom a struggle, but he got it out.



"Dat's all right.  don't you ever forgit it ag'in, if you knows

what's good for you.  Now den, you had said you wouldn't ever call

it lies en moonshine ag'in.  I'll tell you dis, for a warnin':

if you ever does say it ag'in, it's de LAS' time you'll ever say

it to me; I'll tramp as straight to de judge as I kin walk,

en tell him who you is, en _prove_ it.  Does you b'lieve me when I says dat?"



"Oh," groaned Tom, "I more than believe it; I _know_ it."



Roxy knew her conquest was complete.  She could have proved nothing

to anybody, and her threat of writings was a lie; but she knew the

person she was dealing with, and had made both statements without any

doubt as to the effect they would produce.



She went and sat down on her candle box, and the pride and pomp of

her victorious attitude made it a throne.  She said:



"Now den, Chambers, we's gwine to talk business, en dey ain't gwine

to be no mo' foolishness.  In de fust place, you gits fifty dollahs

a month; you's gwine to han' over half of it to yo' ma.  Plank it out!"



But Tom had only six dollars in the world.  He gave her that,

and promised to start fair on next month's pension.



"Chambers, how much is you in debt?"



Tom shuddered, and said:



"Nearly three hundred dollars."



"How is you gwine to pay it?"



Tom groaned out:  "Oh, I don't know; don't ask me such awful questions."



But she stuck to her point until she wearied a confession out of him:

he had been prowling about in disguise, stealing small valuables from

private houses; in fact, he made a good deal of a raid on his fellow

villagers a fortnight before, when he was supposed to be in St. Louis;

but he doubted if he had sent away enough stuff to realize the

required amount, and was afraid to make a further venture in the

present excited state of the town.  His mother approved of his conduct,

and offered to help, but this frightened him.  He tremblingly ventured

to say that if she would retire from the town he should feel better

and safer, and could hold his head higher--and was going on to make

an argument, but she interrupted and surprised him pleasantly by saying

she was ready; it didn't make any difference to her where she stayed,

so that she got her share of the pension regularly.  She said she would

not go far, and would call at the haunted house once a month for her money.

Then she said:



"I don't hate you so much now, but I've hated you a many a year--

and anybody would.  Didn't I change you off, en give you a good fambly

en a good name, en made you a white gen'l'man en rich, wid store

clothes on--en what did I git for it?  You despised me all de time,

en was al'ays sayin' mean hard things to me befo' folks, en wouldn't

ever let me forgit I's a nigger--en--en--"



She fell to sobbing, and broke down.  Tom said:  "But you know I

didn't know you were my mother; and besides--"



"Well, nemmine 'bout dat, now; let it go.  I's gwine to fo'git it."

Then she added fiercely, "En don't ever make me remember it ag'in,

or you'll be sorry, _I_ tell you."



When they were parting, Tom said, in the most persuasive way

he could command:



"Ma, would you mind telling me who was my father?"



He had supposed he was asking an embarrassing question.  He was mistaken.

Roxy drew herself up with a proud toss of her head, and said:



"Does I mine tellin' you?  No, dat I don't!  You ain't got no 'casion

to be shame' o' yo' father, _I_ kin tell you.  He wuz de highest quality

in dis whole town--ole Virginny stock.  Fust famblies, he wuz.

Jes as good stock as de Driscolls en de Howards, de bes' day dey

ever seed."  She put on a little prouder air, if possible,

and added impressively:  "Does you 'member Cunnel Cecil Burleigh Essex,

dat died de same year yo' young Marse Tom Driscoll's pappy died,

en all de Masons en Odd Fellers en Churches turned out en give him de

bigges' funeral dis town ever seed?  Dat's de man."



Under the inspiration of her soaring complacency the departed graces of

her earlier days returned to her, and her bearing took to itself a

dignity and state that might have passed for queenly if her

surroundings had been a little more in keeping with it.



"Dey ain't another nigger in dis town dat's as highbawn as you is.

Now den, go 'long!  En jes you hold yo' head up as high as you want to--

you has de right, en dat I kin swah."









CHAPTER 10



The Nymph Revealed





All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"--a strange complaint

to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar



When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





Every now and then, after Tom went to bed, he had sudden wakings

out of his sleep, and his first thought was, "Oh, joy, it was

all a dream!"  Then he laid himself heavily down again, with a groan

and the muttered words, "A nigger!  I am a nigger!  Oh, I wish I was dead!"



He woke at dawn with one more repetition of this horror, and then he

resolved to meddle no more with that treacherous sleep.

He began to think.  Sufficiently bitter thinkings they were.

They wandered along something after this fashion:



Why were niggers _and_ whites made?  What crime did the uncreated

first nigger commit that the curse of birth was decreed for him?

And why is this awful difference made between white and black? . . .

How hard the nigger's fate seems, this morning!--yet until last night

such a thought never entered my head."



He sighed and groaned an hour or more away.  Then "Chambers" came humbly

in to say that breakfast was nearly ready.  "Tom" blushed scarlet to

see this aristocratic white youth cringe to him, a nigger,

and call him "Young Marster."  He said roughly:



"Get out of my sight!" and when the youth was gone, he muttered,

"He has done me no harm, poor wrench, but he is an eyesore to me now,

for he is Driscoll, the young gentleman, and I am a--oh, I wish I was dead!"



A gigantic eruption, like that of Krakatoa a few years ago,

with the accompanying earthquakes, tidal waves, and clouds of

volcanic dust, changes the face of the surrounding landscape

beyond recognition, bringing down the high lands, elevating the low,

making fair lakes where deserts had been, and deserts where green

prairies had smiled before.  The tremendous catastrophe which had

befallen Tom had changed his moral landscape in much the same way.

Some of his low places he found lifted to ideals, some of his ideas

had sunk to the valleys, and lay there with the sackcloth and ashes

of pumice stone and sulphur on their ruined heads.



For days he wandered in lonely places, thinking, thinking, thinking--

trying to get his bearings.  It was new work.  If he met a friend,

he found that the habit of a lifetime had in some mysterious way vanished--

his arm hung limp, instead of involuntarily extending the hand for a shake.

It was the "nigger" in him asserting its humility,  and he blushed

and was abashed.  And the "nigger" in him was surprised when the white

friend put out his hand for a shake with him.  He found the "nigger"

in him involuntarily giving the road, on the sidewalk,

to a white rowdy and loafer.  When Rowena, the dearest thing his heart knew,

the idol of his secret worship, invited him in, the "nigger" in him made

an embarrassed excuse and was afraid to enter and sit with the dread

white folks on equal terms.  The "nigger" in him went shrinking

and skulking here and there and yonder, and fancying it saw suspicion and

maybe detection in all faces, tones, and gestures.  So strange and

uncharacteristic was Tom's conduct that people noticed it,

and turned to look after him when he passed on; and when he

glanced back--as he could not help doing, in spite of his best

resistance--and caught that puzzled expression in a person's face,

it gave him a sick feeling, and he took himself out of view as quickly

as he could.  He presently came to have a hunted sense and a hunted look,

and then he fled away to the hilltops and the solitudes.

He said to himself that the curse of Ham was upon him.



He dreaded his meals; the "nigger" in him was ashamed to sit at the

white folk's table, and feared discovery all the time; and once when Judge

Driscoll said, "What's the matter with you?  You look as meek as

a nigger," he felt as secret murderers are said to feel when

the accuser says, "Thou art the man!"  Tom said he was not well,

and left the table.



His ostensible "aunt's" solicitudes and endearments were become

a terror to him, and he avoided them.



And all the time, hatred of his ostensible "uncle" was steadily growing

in his heart; for he said to himself, "He is white; and I am

his chattel, his property, his goods, and he can sell me, just as

he could his dog."



For as much as a week after this, Tom imagined that his character had

undergone a pretty radical change.  But that was because he did

not know himself.



In several ways his opinions were totally changed, and would never go

back to what they were before, but the main structure of his character

was not changed, and could not be changed.  One or two very important

features of it were altered, and in time effects would result from this,

if opportunity offered--effects of a quite serious nature, too.

Under the influence of a great mental and moral upheaval, his character

and his habits had taken on the appearance of complete change,

but after a while with the subsidence of the storm, both began to

settle toward their former places.  He dropped gradually back into his

old frivolous and easygoing ways and conditions of feeling and manner

of speech, and no familiar of his could have detected anything in him that

differentiated him from the weak and careless Tom of other days.



The theft raid which he had made upon the village turned out better than

he had ventured to hope.  It produced the sum necessary to pay

his gaming debts, and saved him from exposure to his uncle and

another smashing of the will.  He and his mother learned to like

each other fairly well.  She couldn't love him, as yet,

because there "warn't nothing _to_ him," as she expressed it,

but her nature needed something or somebody to rule over,

and he was better than nothing.  Her strong character and aggressive

and commanding ways compelled Tom's admiration in spite of the fact

that he got more illustrations of them than he needed for his comfort.

However, as a rule her conversation was made up of racy tale about the

privacies of the chief families of the town (for she went harvesting

among their kitchens every time she came to the village),

and Tom enjoyed this.  It was just in his line.  She always collected

her half of his pension punctually, and he was always at the haunted

house to have a chat with her on these occasions.  Every now and then,

she paid him a visit there on between-days also.



Occasions he would run up to St. Louis for a few weeks, and at last

temptation caught him again.  He won a lot of money, but lost it,

and with it a deal more besides, which he promised to raise as

soon as possible.



For this purpose he projected a new raid on his town.  He never meddled

with any other town, for he was afraid to venture into houses whose

ins and outs he did not know and the habits of whose households he

was not acquainted with.  He arrived at the haunted house in disguise

on the Wednesday before the advent of the twins--after writing his

Aunt Pratt that he would not arrive until two days after--and laying

in hiding there with his mother until toward daylight Friday morning,

when he went to his uncle's house and entered by the back way with his

own key, and slipped up to his room where he could have the use of the

mirror and toilet articles.  He had a suit of girl's clothes with him in a

bundle as a disguise for his raid, and was wearing a suit of his

mother's clothing, with black gloves and veil.  By dawn he was tricked out

for his raid, but he caught a glimpse of Pudd'nhead Wilson through the

window over the way, and knew that Pudd'nhead had caught a glimpse of him.

So he entertained Wilson with some airs and graces and attitudes

for a while, then stepped out of sight and resumed the other disguise,

and by and by went down and out the back way and started downtown

to reconnoiter the scene of his intended labors.



But he was ill at ease.  He had changed back to Roxy's dress,

with the stoop of age added to he disguise, so that Wilson

would not bother himself about a humble old women leaving a

neighbor's house by the back way in the early morning, in case he

was still spying.  But supposing Wilson had seen him leave,

and had thought it suspicious, and had also followed him?

The thought made Tom cold.  He gave up the raid for the day,

and hurried back to the haunted house by the obscurest route he knew.

His mother was gone; but she came back, by and by, with the news

of the grand reception at Patsy Cooper's, and soon persuaded him

that the opportunity was like a special Providence, it was so

inviting and perfect.  So he went raiding, after all, and made a

nice success of it while everybody was gone to Patsy Cooper's.

Success gave him nerve and even actual intrepidity; insomuch,

indeed, that after he had conveyed his harvest to his mother in a

back alley, he went to the reception himself, and added several

of the valuables of that house to his takings.



After this long digression we have now arrived once more at the point

where Pudd'nhead Wilson, while waiting for the arrival of the twins

on that same Friday evening, sat puzzling over the strange apparition

of that morning--a girl in young Tom Driscoll's bedroom; fretting,

and guessing, and puzzling over it, and wondering who the shameless

creature might be.









CHAPTER 11



Pudd'nhead's Thrilling Discovery





There are three infallible ways of pleasing an author, and the three

form a rising scale of compliment:  1--to tell him you have read one

of his books; 2--to tell him you have read all of his books;

3--to ask him to let you read the manuscript of his forthcoming book.

No. 1 admits you to his respect; No. 2 admits you to his admiration;

No. 3 carries you clear into his heart.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar



As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





The twins arrived presently, and talk began.  It flowed along

chattily and sociably, and under its influence the new friendship

gathered ease and strength.  Wilson got out his Calendar, by request,

and read a passage or two from it, which the twins praised quite cordially.

This pleased the author so much that he complied gladly when the asked

him to lend them a batch of the work to read at home.  In the course of

their wide travels, they had found out that there are three sure ways of

pleasing an author; they were now working the best of the three.



There was an interruption now.  Young Driscoll appeared, and joined

the party.  He pretended to be seeing the distinguished strangers for

the first time when they rose to shake hands; but this was only a blind,

as he had already had a glimpse of them, at the reception, while robbing

the house.  The twins made mental note that he was smooth-faced and

rather handsome, and smooth and undulatory in his movements--graceful,

in fact.  Angelo thought he had a good eye; Luigi thought there was

something veiled and sly about it.  Angelo thought he had a pleasant

free-and-easy way of talking; Luigi thought it was more so than was agreeable.

Angelo thought he was a sufficiently nice young man; Luigi reserved

his decision.  Tom's first contribution to the conversation was a

question which he had put to Wilson a hundred times before.

It was always cheerily and good-natured put, and always inflicted a

little pang, for it touched a secret sore; but this time the pang

was sharp, since strangers were present.



"Well, how does the law come on?  Had a case yet?"



Wilson bit his lip, but answered, "No--not yet," with as much

indifference as he could assume.  Judge Driscoll had generously left

the law feature out of Wilson's biography which he had furnished

to the twins.  Young Tom laughed pleasantly, and said:



"Wilson's a lawyer, gentlemen, but he doesn't practice now."



The sarcasm bit, but Wilson kept himself under control,

and said without passion:



"I don't practice, it is true.  It is true that I have never had a case,

and have had to earn a poor living for twenty years as an expert

accountant in a town where I can't get a hold of a set of books to

untangle as often as I should like.  But it is also true that I did

myself well for the practice of the law.  By the time I was your age,

Tom, I had chosen a profession, and was soon competent to enter upon it."

Tom winced.  "I never got a chance to try my hand at it, and I may

never get a chance; and yet if I ever do get it, I shall be found ready,

for I have kept up my law studies all these years."



"That's it; that's good grit!  I like to see it.  I've a notion to throw

all my business your way.  My business and your law practice ought to

make a pretty gay team, Dave," and the young fellow laughed again.



"If you will throw--"  Wilson had thought of the girl in Tom's bedroom,

and was going to say, "If you will throw the surreptitious and

disreputable part of your business my way, it may amount to something,"

but thought better of it and said,



"However, this matter doesn't fit well in a general conversation."



"All right, we'll change the subject; I guess you were about

to give me another dig, anyway, so I'm willing to change.

How's the Awful Mystery flourishing these days?  Wilson's got a scheme

for driving plain window glass panes out of the market by decorating it

with greasy finger marks, and getting rich by selling it at famine

prices to the crowned heads over in Europe to outfit their palaces with.

Fetch it out, Dave."



Wilson brought three of his glass strips, and said:



"I get the subject to pass the fingers of his right through his hair,

so as to get a little coating of the natural oil on them,

and then press the balls of them on the glass.  A fine an delicate

print of the lines in the skin results, and is permanent,

if it doesn't come in contact with something able to rub it off.

You begin, Tom."



"Why, I think you took my finger marks once or twice before."



"Yes, but you were a little boy the last time, only about

twelve years old."



"That's so.  Of course, I've changed entirely since then,

and variety is what the crowned heads want, I guess."



He passed his fingers through his crop of short hair, and pressed

them one at a time on the glass.  Angelo made a print of his fingers

on another glass, and Luigi followed with a third.  Wilson marked the

glasses with names and dates, and put them away.  Tom gave one of

his little laughs, and said:



"I thought I wouldn't say anything, but if variety is what you are after,

you have wasted a piece of glass.  The hand print of one twin is the

same as the hand print of the fellow twin."



"Well, it's done now, and I like to have them both, anyway,"

said Wilson, returned to his place.



"But look here, Dave," said Tom, you used to tell people's fortunes,

too, when you took their finger marks.  Dave's just an all-round genius--

a genius of the first water, gentlemen; a great scientist running to

seed here in this village, a prophet with the kind of honor that

prophets generally get at home--for here they don't give shucks for

his scientifics, and they call his skull a notion factory--hey, Dave,

ain't it so?  But never mind, he'll make his mark someday--finger mark,

you know, he-he!  But really, you want to let him take a shy at

your palms once; it's worth twice the price of admission or your

money's returned at the door.  Why, he'll read your wrinkles as easy

as a book, and not only tell you fifty or sixty things that's going to

happen to you, but fifty or sixty thousand that ain't.  Come, Dave,

show the gentlemen what an inspired jack-at-all-science we've got in

this town, and don't know it."



Wilson winced under this nagging and not very courteous chaff,

and the twins suffered with him and for him.  They rightly judged,

now, that the best way was to relieve him would be to take the thing

in earnest and treat it with respect, ignoring Tom's rather

overdone raillery; so Luigi said:



"We have seen something of palmistry in our wanderings, and know very

well what astonishing things it can do.  If it isn't a science,

and one of the greatest of them too, I don't know what its other

name ought to be.  In the Orient--"



Tom looked surprised and incredulous.  He said:



"That juggling a science?  But really, you ain't serious, are you?"



"Yes, entirely so.  Four years ago we had our hands read out to us as

if our plans had been covered with print."



"Well, do you mean to say there was actually anything in it?" asked Tom,

his incredulity beginning to weaken a little.



"There was this much in it," said Angelo:  "what was told us

of our characters was minutely exact--we could have not have

bettered it ourselves.  Next, two or three memorable things that

have happened to us were laid bare--things which no one present

but ourselves could have known about."



"Why, it's rank sorcery!" exclaimed Tom, who was now becoming very

much interested.  "And how did they make out with what was going to

happen to you in the future?"



"On the whole, quite fairly," said Luigi.  "Two or three of the most

striking things foretold have happened since; much the most striking

one of all happened within that same year.  Some of the minor prophesies

have come true; some of the minor and some of the major ones have not

been fulfilled yet, and of course may never be:  still, I should be

more surprised if they failed to arrive than if they didn't."



Tom was entirely sobered, and profoundly impressed.  He said, apologetically:



"Dave, I wasn't meaning to belittle that science; I was only chaffing--

chattering, I reckon I'd better say.  I wish you would look at their palms.

Come, won't you?"



"Why certainly, if you want me to; but you know I've had no chance to

become an expert, and don't claim to be one.  When a past event is

somewhat prominently recorded in the palm, I can generally detect that,

but minor ones often escape me--not always, of course, but often--

but I haven't much confidence in myself when it comes to

reading the future.  I am talking as if palmistry was a daily

study with me, but that is not so.  I haven't examined half a

dozen hands in the last half dozen years; you see, the people got to

joking about it, and I stopped to let the talk die down.  I'll tell you

what we'll do, Count Luigi:  I'll make a try at your past,

and if I have any success there--no, on the whole, I'll let

the future alone; that's really the affair of an expert."



He took Luigi's hand.  Tom said:



"Wait--don't look yet, Dave!  Count Luigi, here's paper and pencil.

Set down that thing that you said was the most striking one that was

foretold to you, and happened less than a year afterward, and give it

to me so I can see if Dave finds it in your hand."



Luigi wrote a line privately, and folded up the piece of paper,

and handed it to Tom, saying:



"I'll tell you when to look at it, if he finds it."



Wilson began to study Luigi's palm, tracing life lines, heart lines,

head lines, and so on, and noting carefully their relations with the

cobweb of finer and more delicate marks and lines that enmeshed them

on all sides; he felt of the fleshy cushion at the base of the thumb

and noted its shape; he felt of the fleshy side of the hand between

the wrist and the base of the little finger and noted its shape also;

he painstakingly examined the fingers, observing their form, proportions,

and natural manner of disposing themselves when in repose.

All this process was watched by the three spectators with

absorbing interest, their heads bent together over Luigi's palm, and nobody

disturbing the stillness with a word.  Wilson now entered upon a close

survey of the palm again, and his revelations began.



He mapped out Luigi's character and disposition, his tastes, aversions,

proclivities, ambitions, and eccentricities in a way which sometimes

made Luigi wince and the others laugh, but both twins declared that

the chart was artistically drawn and was correct.



Next, Wilson took up Luigi' history.  He proceeded cautiously and

with hesitation now, moving his finger slowly along the great lines

of the palm, and now and then halting it at a "star" or some

such landmark, and examining that neighborhood minutely.

He proclaimed one or two past events, Luigi confirmed his correctness,

and the search went on.  Presently Wilson glanced up suddenly with

a surprised expression.



"Here is a record of an incident which you would perhaps not wish me to--"



"Bring it out," said Luigi, good-naturedly.  "I promise you

sha'n't embarrass me."



But Wilson still hesitated, and did not seem quite to know what to do.

Then he said:



"I think it is too delicate a matter to--to--I believe I would rather

write it or whisper it to you, and let you decide for yourself whether

you want it talked out or not."



"That will answer," said Luigi.  "Write it."



Wilson wrote something on a slip of paper and handed it to Luigi,

who read it to himself and said to Tom:



"Unfold your slip and read it, Mr. Driscoll."



Tom said:



"'IT WAS PROPHESIED THAT I WOULD KILL A MAN.  IT CAME TRUE

BEFORE THE YEAR WAS OUT.'"



Tom added, "Great Scott!"



Luigi handed Wilson's paper to Tom, and said:



"Now read this one."



Tom read:



"'YOU HAVE KILLED SOMEONE, BUT WHETHER MAN, WOMAN, OR CHILD,

I DO NOT MAKE OUT.'"



"Caesar's ghost!" commented Tom, with astonishment.

"It beats anything that was ever heard of!  Why, a man's own hand is

his deadliest enemy!  Just think of that--a man's own hand keeps

a record of the deepest and fatalest secrets of his life, and is

treacherously ready to expose himself to any black-magic stranger

that comes along.  But what do you let a person look at your hand for,

with that awful thing printed on it?"



"Oh," said Luigi, reposefully, "I don't mind it.  I killed the man

for good reasons, and I don't regret it."



"What were the reasons?"



"Well, he needed killing."



"I'll tell you why he did it, since he won't say himself," said Angelo,

warmly.  "He did it to save my life, that's what he did it for.

So it was a noble act, and not a thing to be hid in the dark."



"So it was, so it was," said Wilson.  "To do such a thing to save a

brother's life is a great and fine action."



"Now come," said Luigi, "it is very pleasant to hear you say

these things, but for unselfishness, or heroism, or magnanimity,

the circumstances won't stand scrutiny.  You overlook one detail;

suppose I hadn't saved Angelo's life, what would have become of mine?

If I had let the man kill him, wouldn't he have killed me, too?

I saved my own life, you see."



"Yes, that is your way of talking," said Angelo, "but I know you--

I don't believe you thought of yourself at all.  I keep that weapon

yet that Luigi killed the man with, and I'll show it to you sometime.

That incident makes it interesting, and it had a history before it

came into Luigi's hands which adds to its interest.  It was given to

Luigi by a great Indian prince, the Gaikowar of Baroda, and it had been

in his family two or three centuries.  It killed a good many disagreeable

people who troubled the hearthstone at one time or another.  It isn't much

too look at, except it isn't shaped like other knives, or dirks,

or whatever it may be called--here, I'll draw it for you."  He took a

sheet of paper and made a rapid sketch.  "There it is--a broad and

murderous blade, with edges like a razor for sharpness.

The devices engraved on it are the ciphers or names of its long

line of possessors--I had Luigi's name added in Roman letters

myself with our coat of arms, as you see.  You notice what a

curious handle the thing has.  It is solid ivory, polished like a mirror,

and is four or five inches long--round, and as thick as a

large man's wrist, with the end squared off flat, for your thumb

to rest on; for you grasp it, with your thumb resting on the blunt end--

so--and lift it along and strike downward.  The Gaikowar showed us how

the thing was done when he gave it to Luigi, and before that

night was ended, Luigi had used the knife, and the Gaikowar was a man

short by reason of it.  The sheath is magnificently ornamented with

gems of great value.  You will find a sheath more worth looking at

than the knife itself, of course."



Tom said to himself:



"It's lucky I came here.  I would have sold that knife for a song;

I supposed the jewels were glass."



"But go on; don't stop," said Wilson.  "Our curiosity is up now,

to hear about the homicide.  Tell us about that."



"Well, briefly, the knife was to blame for that, all around.

A native servant slipped into our room in the palace in the night,

to kill us and steal the knife on account of the fortune encrusted

on its sheath, without a doubt.  Luigi had it under his pillow;

we were in bed together.  There was a dim night-light burning.

I was asleep, but Luigi was awake, and he thought he detected a

vague form nearing the bed.  He slipped the knife out of the sheath

and was ready and unembarrassed by hampering bedclothes,

for the weather was hot and we hadn't any.  Suddenly that native rose

at the bedside, and bent over me with his right hand lifted and a

dirk in it aimed at my throat; but Luigi grabbed his wrist,

pulled him downward, and drove his own knife into the man's neck.

That is the whole story."



Wilson and Tom drew deep breaths, and after some general chat

about the tragedy, Pudd'nhead said, taking Tom's hand:



"Now, Tom, I've never had a look at your palms, as it happens;

perhaps you've got some little questionable privacies that need--hel-lo!"



Tom had snatched away his hand, and was looking a good deal confused.



"Why, he's blushing!" said Luigi.



Tom darted an ugly look at him, and said sharply:



"Well, if I am, it ain't because I'm a murderer!"  Luigi's dark

face flushed, but before he could speak or move, Tom added with

anxious haste:  "Oh, I beg a thousand pardons.  I didn't mean that;

it was out before I thought, and I'm very, very sorry--you must forgive me!"



Wilson came to the rescue, and smoothed things down as well as he could;

and in fact was entirely successful as far as the twins were concerned,

for they felt sorrier for the affront put upon him by his guest's

outburst of ill manners than for the insult offered to Luigi.

But the success was not so pronounced with the offender.  Tom tried to

seem at his ease, and he went through the motions fairly well,

but at bottom he felt resentful toward all the three witnesses of

his exhibition; in fact, he felt so annoyed at them for having

witnessed it and noticed it that he almost forgot to feel annoyed

at himself for placing it before them.  However, something presently

happened which made him almost comfortable, and brought him nearly back

to a state of charity and friendliness.  This was a little spat between

the twins; not much of a spat, but still a spat; and before they got

far with it, they were in a decided condition of irritation while

pretending to be actuated by more respectable motives.  By his help

the fire got warmed up to the blazing point, and he might have had the

happiness of seeing the flames show up in another moment, but for the

interruption of a knock on the door--an interruption which fretted him

as much as it gratified Wilson.  Wilson opened the door.



The visitor was a good-natured, ignorant, energetic middle-aged

Irishman named John Buckstone, who was a great politician in a

small way, and always took a large share in public matters of

every sort.  One of the town's chief excitements, just now, was over

the matter of rum.  There was a strong rum party and a strong

anti-rum party.  Buckstone was training with the rum party, and he

had been sent to hunt up the twins and invite them to attend a

mass meeting of that faction.  He delivered his errand, and said

the clans were already gathering in the big hall over the market house.

Luigi accepted the invitation cordially.  Angelo less cordially,

since he disliked crowds, and did not drink the powerful intoxicants

of America.  In fact, he was even a teetotaler sometimes--

when it was judicious to be one.



The twins left with Buckstone, and Tom Driscoll joined the

company with them uninvited.



In the distance, one could see a long wavering line of

torches drifting down the main street, and could hear the

throbbing of the bass drum, the clash of cymbals, the squeaking

of a fife or two, and the faint roar of remote hurrahs.  The tail

end of this procession was climbing the market house stairs when

the twins arrived in its neighborhood; when they reached the hall,

it was full of people, torches, smoke, noise, and enthusiasm.

They were conducted to the platform by Buckstone--Tom Driscoll

still following--and were delivered to the chairman in the midst

of a prodigious explosion of welcome.  When the noise had moderated

a little, the chair proposed that "our illustrious guests be at

once elected, by complimentary acclamation, to membership in our

ever-glorious organization, the paradise of the free and the perdition

of the slave."



This eloquent discharge opened the floodgates of enthusiasm again,

and the election was carried with thundering unanimity.  Then arose

a storm of cries:



"Wet them down!  Wet them down!  Give them a drink!"



Glasses of whisky were handed to the twins.  Luigi waves his aloft,

then brought it to his lips; but Angelo set his down.

There was another storm of cries.



"What's the matter with the other one?"  "What is the blond one

going back on us for?"  "Explain!  Explain!"



The chairman inquired, and then reported:



"We have made an unfortunate mistake, gentlemen.  I find that the

Count Angelo Capello is opposed to our creed--is a teetotaler, in fact,

and was not intending to apply for membership with us.  He desires

that we reconsider the vote by which he was elected.  What is the

pleasure of the house?"



There was a general burst of laughter, plentifully accented with

whistlings and catcalls, but the energetic use of the gavel

presently restored something like order.  Then a man spoke from

the crowd, and said that while he was very sorry that the mistake

had been made, it would not be possible to rectify it at the

present meeting.  According to the bylaws, it must go over to the

next regular meeting for action.  He would not offer a motion, as

none was required.  He desired to apologize to the gentlemen in

the name of the house, and begged to assure him that as far as it

might lie in the power of the Sons of Liberty, his temporary

membership in the order would be made pleasant to him.



This speech was received with great applause, mixed with cries of:



"That's the talk!  "He's a good fellow, anyway, if he _is_ a teetotaler!"

"Drink his health!"  "Give him a rouser, and no heeltaps!"



Glasses were handed around, and everybody on the platform

drank Angelo's health, while the house bellowed forth in song:





          For he's a jolly good fel-low,

          For he's a jolly good fel-low,

          For he's a jolly good fe-el-low,

               Which nobody can deny.





Tom Driscoll drank.  It was his second glass, for he had drunk

Angelo's the moment that Angelo had set it down.  The two drinks

made him very merry--almost idiotically so, and he began to take a

most lively and prominent part in the proceedings, particularly in

the music and catcalls and side remarks.



The chairman was still standing at the front, the twins at his side.

The extraordinarily close resemblance of the brothers to each other

suggested a witticism to Tom Driscoll, and just as the chairman began

a speech he skipped forward and said, with an air of tipsy confidence,

to the audience:



"Boys, I move that he keeps still and lets this human philopena snip

you out a speech."



The descriptive aptness of the phrase caught the house, and a mighty

burst of laughter followed.



Luigi's southern blood leaped to the boiling point in a moment under

the sharp humiliation of this insult delivered in the presence of

four hundred strangers.  It was not in the young man's nature to

let the matter pass, or to delay the squaring of the account.

He took a couple of strides and halted behind the unsuspecting joker.

Then he drew back and delivered a kick of such titanic vigor that it

lifted Tom clear over the footlights and landed him on the heads of

the front row of the Sons of Liberty.



Even a sober person does not like to have a human being emptied on him

when he is not going any harm; a person who is not sober cannot endure

such an attention at all.  The nest of Sons of Liberty that Driscoll

landed in had not a sober bird in it; in fact there was probably not

an entirely sober one in the auditorium.  Driscoll was promptly and

indignantly flung on the heads of Sons in the next row, and these Sons

passed him on toward the rear, and then immediately began to pummel the

front row Sons who had passed him to them.  This course was strictly

followed by bench after bench as Driscoll traveled in his tumultuous

and airy flight toward the door; so he left behind him an ever-lengthening

wake of raging and plunging and fighting and swearing humanity.

Down went group after group of torches, and presently above the

deafening clatter of the gavel, roar of angry voices, and crash of

succumbing benches, rose the paralyzing cry of "_fire!_"



The fighting ceased instantly; the cursing ceased; for one distinctly

defined moment, there was a dead hush, a motionless calm, where the

tempest had been; then with one impulse the multitude awoke to life

and energy again, and went surging and struggling and swaying,

this way and that, its outer edges melting away through windows and

doors and gradually lessening the pressure and relieving the mass.



The fireboys were never on hand so suddenly before; for there was

no distance to go this time, their quarters being in the rear end

of the market house,  There was an engine company and a

hook-and-ladder company.  Half of each was composed of rummies and

the other half of anti-rummies, after the moral and political

share-and-share-alike fashion of the frontier town of the period.

Enough anti-rummies were loafing in quarters to man the engine

and the ladders.  In two minutes they had their red shirts and helmets on--

they never stirred officially in unofficial costume--and as the

mass meeting overhead smashed through the long row of windows and

poured out upon the roof of the arcade, the deliverers were ready

for them with a powerful stream of water, which washed some of them

off the roof and nearly drowned the rest.  But water was preferable

to fire, and still the stampede from the windows continued, and still the

pitiless drenching assailed it until the building was empty;

then the fireboys mounted to the hall and flooded it with water enough

to annihilate forty times as much fire as there was there;

for a village fire company does not often get a chance to show off,

and so when it does get a chance, it makes the most of it.

Such citizens of that village as were of a thoughtful and judicious

temperament did not insure against fire; they insured against the

fire company.









CHAPTER 12



The Shame of Judge Driscoll





Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear.

Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say

it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word.

Consider the flea!--incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God,

if ignorance of fear were courage.  Whether you are asleep or awake he

will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength

you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child;

he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap

of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more

afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was

threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before.  When we speak

of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who "didn't know what fear was,"

we ought always to add the flea--and put him at the head of the procession.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





Judge Driscoll was in bed and asleep by ten o'clock on Friday night,

and he was up and gone a-fishing before daylight in the morning with

his friend Pembroke Howard.  These two had been boys together in

Virginia when that state still ranked as the chief and most imposing

member of the Union, and they still coupled the proud and affectionate

adjective "old" with her name when they spoke of her.

In Missouri a recognized superiority attached to any person who

hailed from Old Virginia; and this superiority was exalted to

supremacy when a person of such nativity could also prove descent

from the First Families of that great commonwealth.  The Howards and

Driscolls were of this aristocracy.  In their eyes, it was a nobility.

It had its unwritten laws, and they were as clearly defined and as

strict as any that could be found among the printed statues of the land.

The F.F.V. was born a gentleman; his highest duty in life was to

watch over that great inheritance and keep it unsmirched.

He must keep his honor spotless.  Those laws were his chart;

his course was marked out on it; if he swerved from it by so much as

half a point of the compass, it meant shipwreck to his honor;

that is to say, degradation from his rank as a gentleman.

These laws required certain things of him which his religion might forbid:

then his religion must yield--the laws could not be relaxed to

accommodate religions or anything else.  Honor stood first;

and the laws defined what it was and wherein it differed in certain

details from honor as defined by church creeds and by the social laws

and customs of some of the minor divisions of the globe that had got

crowded out when the sacred boundaries of Virginia were staked out.



If Judge Driscoll was the recognized first citizen of Dawson's Landing,

Pembroke Howard was easily its recognized second citizen.

He was called "the great lawyer"--an earned title.  He and Driscoll

were of the same age--a year or two past sixty.



Although Driscoll was a freethinker and Howard a strong and

determined Presbyterian, their warm intimacy suffered no

impairment in consequence.  They were men whose opinions were

their own property and not subject to revision and amendment,

suggestion or criticism, by anybody, even their friends.



The day's fishing finished, they came floating downstream in their skiff,

talking national politics and other high matters, and presently met

a skiff coming up from town, with a man in it who said:



"I reckon you know one of the new twins gave your nephew a

kicking last night, Judge?"



"Did WHAT?"



"Gave him a kicking."



The old judge's lips paled, and his eyes began to flame.  He choked with

anger for a moment, then he got out what he was trying to say:



"Well--well--go on!  Give me the details!"



The man did it.  At the finish the judge was silent a minute,

turning over in his mind the shameful picture of Tom's flight over

the footlights; then he said, as if musing aloud,



"H'm--I don't understand it.  I was asleep at home.  He didn't wake me.

Thought he was competent to manage his affair without my help, I reckon."

His face lit up with pride and pleasure at that thought, and he said

with a cheery complacency, "I like that--it's the true old blood--

hey, Pembroke?"



Howard smiled an iron smile, and nodded his head approvingly.

Then the news-bringer spoke again.



"But Tom beat the twin on the trial."



The judge looked at the man wonderingly, and said:



"The trial?  What trial?"



"Why, Tom had him up before Judge Robinson for assault and battery."



The old man shrank suddenly together like one who has received a

death stroke.  Howard sprang for him as he sank forward in a swoon,

and took him in his arms, and bedded him on his back in the boat.

He sprinkled water in his face, and said to the startled visitor:



"Go, now--don't let him come to and find you here.  You see what an

effect your heedless speech has had; you ought to have been more

considerate than to blurt out such a cruel piece of slander as that."



"I'm right down sorry I did it now, Mr. Howard, and I wouldn't

have done it if I had thought; but it ain't slander;

it's perfectly true, just as I told him."



He rowed away.  Presently the old judge came out of his faint and

looked up piteously into the sympathetic face that was bent over him.



"Say it ain't true, Pembroke; tell me it ain't true!" he said in a weak voice.



There was nothing weak in the deep organ tones that responded:



"You know it's a lie as well as I do, old friend.  He is of

the best blood of the Old Dominion."



"God bless you for saying it!" said the old gentleman, fervently.

"Ah, Pembroke, it was such a blow!"



Howard stayed by his friend, and saw him home, and entered the house

with him.  It was dark, and past supper-time, but the judge was

not thinking of supper; he was eager to hear the slander refuted

from headquarters, and as eager to have Howard hear it, too.

Tom was sent for, and he came immediately.  He was bruised and lame,

and was not a happy-looking object.  His uncle made him sit down, and said:



"We have been hearing about your adventure, Tom, with a handsome lie

added for embellishment.  Now pulverize that lie to dust!

What measures have you taken?  How does the thing stand?"



Tom answered guilelessly:  "It don't stand at all; it's all over.

I had him up in court and beat him.  Pudd'nhead Wilson defended him--

first case he ever had, and lost it.  The judge fined the miserable

hound five dollars for the assault."



Howard and the judge sprang to their feet with the opening sentence--

why, neither knew; then they stood gazing vacantly at each other.

Howard stood a moment, then sat mournfully down without saying anything.

The judge's wrath began to kindle, and he burst out:



"You cur!  You scum!  You vermin!  Do you mean to tell me that blood

of my race has suffered a blow and crawled to a court of law about it?

Answer me!"



Tom's head drooped, and he answered with an eloquent silence.

His uncle stared at him with a mixed expression of amazement and

shame and incredulity that was sorrowful to see.  At last he said:



"Which of the twins was it?"



"Count Luigi."



"You have challenged him?"



"N--no," hesitated Tom, turning pale.



"You will challenge him tonight.  Howard will carry it."



Tom began to turn sick, and to show it.  He turned his hat round and

round in his hand, his uncle glowering blacker and blacker upon him

as the heavy seconds drifted by; then at last he began to stammer,

and said piteously:



"Oh, please, don't ask me to do it, uncle!  He is a murderous devil--

I never could--I--I'm afraid of him!"



Old Driscoll's mouth opened and closed three times before he

could get it to perform its office; then he stormed out:



"A coward in my family!  A Driscoll a coward!  Oh, what have I done

to deserve this infamy!"  He tottered to his secretary in the corner,

repeated that lament again and again in heartbreaking tones,

and got out of a drawer a paper, which he slowly tore to bits,

scattering the bits absently in his track as he walked up

and down the room, still grieving and lamenting.  At last he said:



"There it is, shreds and fragments once more--my will.  Once more you

have forced me to disinherit you, you base son of a most noble father!

Leave my sight!  Go--before I spit on you!"



The young man did not tarry.  Then the judge turned to Howard:



"You will be my second, old friend?"



"Of course."



"There is pen and paper.  Draft the cartel, and lose no time."



"The Count shall have it in his hands in fifteen minutes," said Howard.



Tom was very heavyhearted.  His appetite was gone with his property

and his self-respect.  He went out the back way and wandered down the

obscure lane grieving, and wondering if any course of future conduct,

however discreet and carefully perfected and watched over,

could win back his uncle's favor and persuade him to reconstruct once

more that generous will which had just gone to ruin before his eyes.

He finally concluded that it could.  He said to himself that he had

accomplished this sort of triumph once already, and that what had been

done once could be done again.  He would set about it.  He would bend

every energy to the task, and he would score that triumph once more,

cost what it might to his convenience, limit as it might his

frivolous and liberty-loving life.



"To begin," he says to himself, "I'll square up with the proceeds of

my raid, and then gambling has got to be stopped--and stopped short off.

It's the worst vice I've got--from my standpoint, anyway,

because it's the one he can most easily find out, through the impatience

of my creditors.  He thought it expensive to have to pay two hundred

dollars to them for me once.  Expensive--_that!_  Why, it cost me

the whole of his fortune--but, of course, he never thought of that;

some people can't think of any but their own side of a case.

If he had known how deep I am in now, the will would have gone to pot

without waiting for a duel to help.  Three hundred dollars!

It's a pile!  But he'll never hear of it, I'm thankful to say.

The minute I've cleared it off, I'm safe; and I'll never touch

a card again.  Anyway, I won't while he lives, I make oath to that.

I'm entering on my last reform--I know it--yes, and I'll win;

but after that, if I ever slip again I'm gone."









CHAPTER 13



Tom Stares at Ruin



When I reflect upon the number of disagreeable people who I know

have gone to a better world, I am moved to lead a different life.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar



October.  This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate

in stocks in.  The others are July, January, September, April,

November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





Thus mournfully communing with himself, Tom moped along the lane past

Pudd'nhead Wilson's house, and still on and on between fences enclosing

vacant country on each hand till he neared the haunted house,

then he came moping back again, with many sighs and heavy with trouble.

He sorely wanted cheerful company.  Rowena!  His heart gave a bound

at the thought, but the next thought quieted it--the detested twins

would be there.



He was on the inhabited side of Wilson's house, and now as

he approached it, he noticed that the sitting room was lighted.

This would do; others made him feel unwelcome sometimes, but Wilson

never failed in courtesy toward him, and a kindly courtesy does at least

save one's feelings, even if it is not professing to stand for a welcome.

Wilson heard footsteps at his threshold, then the clearing of a throat.



"It's that fickle-tempered, dissipated young goose--poor devil,

he find friends pretty scarce today, likely, after the disgrace of

carrying a personal assault case into a law-court."



A dejected knock.  "Come in!"



Tom entered, and dropped into a chair, without saying anything.

Wilson said kindly:



"Why, my boy, you look desolate.  Don't take it so hard.

Try and forget you have been kicked."



"Oh, dear," said Tom, wretchedly, "it's not that, Pudd'nhead--

it's not that..  It's a thousand times worse than that--oh, yes,

a million times worse."



"Why, Tom, what do you mean?  Has Rowena--"



"Flung me?  _No_, but the old man has."



Wilson said to himself, "Aha!" and thought of the mysterious girl

in the bedroom.  "The Driscolls have been making discoveries!"

Then he said aloud, gravely:



"Tom, there are some kinds of dissipation which--"



"Oh, shucks, this hasn't got anything to do with dissipation.

He wanted me to challenge that derned Italian savage,

and I wouldn't do it."



"Yes, of course he would do that," said Wilson in a meditative

matter-of-course way, "but the thing that puzzled me was,

why he didn't look to that last night, for one thing,

and why he let you carry such a matter into a court of law at all,

either before the duel or after it.  It's no place for it.

It was not like him.  I couldn't understand it.  How did it happen?"



"It happened because he didn't know anything about it.  He

was asleep when I got home last night."



"And you didn't wake him?  Tom, is that possible?"



Tom was not getting much comfort here.  He fidgeted a moment, then said:



"I didn't choose to tell him--that's all.  He was going a-fishing

before dawn, with Pembroke Howard, and if I got the twins into

the common calaboose--and I thought sure I could--I never dreamed

of their slipping out on a paltry fine for such an outrageous offense--

well, once in the calaboose they would be disgraced, and uncle wouldn't

want any duels with that sort of characters, and wouldn't allow any.



"Tom, I am ashamed of you!  I don't see how you could treat

your good old uncle so.  I am a better friend of his than you are;

for if I had known the circumstances I would have kept that case out

of court until I got word to him and let him have the gentleman's chance."



"You would?" exclaimed Tom, with lively surprise.  "And it your

first case!  And you know perfectly well there never would have _been_

any case if he had got that chance, don't you?  And you'd have finished

your days a pauper nobody, instead of being an actually launched and

recognized lawyer today.  And you would really have done that, would you?"



"Certainly."



Tom looked at him a moment or two, then shook his head sorrowfully and said:



"I believe you--upon my word I do.  I don't know why I do, but I do.

Pudd'nhead Wilson, I think you're the biggest fool I ever saw."



"Thank you."



"Don't mention it."



"Well, he has been requiring you to fight the Italian,

and you have refused.  You degenerate remnant of an honorable line!

I'm thoroughly ashamed of you, Tom!"



"Oh, that's nothing!  I don't care for anything, now that the will's

torn up again."



"Tom, tell me squarely--didn't he find any fault with you for anything

but those two things--carrying the case into court and refusing to fight?"



He watched the young fellow's face narrowly, but it was

entirely reposeful, and so also was the voice that answered:



"No, he didn't find any other fault with me.  If he had had any to find,

he would have begun yesterday, for he was just in the humor for it.

He drove that jack-pair around town and showed them the sights,

and when he came home he couldn't find his father's old silver watch

that don't keep time and he thinks so much of, and couldn't remember

what he did with it three or four days ago when he saw it last,

and when I suggested that it probably wasn't lost but stolen,

it put him in a regular passion, and he said I was a fool--

which convinced me, without any trouble, that that was just what he

was afraid _had_ happened, himself, but did not want to believe it,

because lost things stand a better chance of being found again

than stolen ones."



"Whe-ew!" whistled Wilson.  "Score another one the list."



"Another what?"



"Another theft!"



"Theft?"



"Yes, theft.  That watch isn't lost, it's stolen.  There's been another

raid on the town--and just the same old mysterious sort of thing

that has happened once before, as you remember."



"You don't mean it!"



"It's as sure as you are born!  Have you missed anything yourself?"



"No.  That is, I did miss a silver pencil case that Aunt Mary Pratt

gave me last birthday--"



"You'll find it stolen--that's what you'll find."



"No, I sha'n't; for when I suggested theft about the watch and got

such a rap, I went and examined my room, and the pencil case was missing,

but it was only mislaid, and I found it again."



"You are sure you missed nothing else?"



"Well, nothing of consequence.  I missed a small plain gold ring worth

two or three dollars, but that will turn up.  I'll look again."



"In my opinion you'll not find it.  There's been a raid, I tell you.

Come _in!_"



Mr. Justice Robinson entered, followed by Buckstone and

the town constable, Jim Blake.  They sat down, and after some

wandering and aimless weather-conversation Wilson said:



"By the way, We've just added another to the list of thefts, maybe two.

Judge Driscoll's old silver watch is gone, and Tom here

has missed a gold ring."



"Well, it is a bad business," said the justice, "and gets worse

the further it goes.  The Hankses, the Dobsons, the Pilligrews,

the Ortons, the Grangers, the Hales, the Fullers, the Holcombs,

in fact everybody that lives around about Patsy Cooper's had been

robbed of little things like trinkets and teaspoons and suchlike

small valuables that are easily carried off.  It's perfectly plain

that the thief took advantage of the reception at Patsy Cooper's when

all the neighbors were in her house and all their niggers hanging around

her fence for a look at the show, to raid the vacant houses undisturbed.

Patsy is miserable about it; miserable on account of the neighbors,

and particularly miserable on account of her foreigners, of course;

so miserable on their account that she hasn't any room to worry

about her own little losses."



"It's the same old raider," said Wilson.  "I suppose there isn't

any doubt about that."



"Constable Blake doesn't think so."



"No, you're wrong there," said Blake.  "The other times it was a man;

there was plenty of signs of that, as we know, in the profession,

thought we never got hands on him; but this time it's a woman."



Wilson thought of the mysterious girl straight off.  She was always

in his mind now.  But she failed him again.  Blake continued:



"She's a stoop-shouldered old woman with a covered basket on her arm,

in a black veil, dressed in mourning.  I saw her going aboard

the ferryboat yesterday.  Lives in Illinois, I reckon; but I don't care

where she lives, I'm going to get her--she can make herself sure of that."



"What makes you think she's the thief?"



"Well, there ain't any other, for one thing; and for another,

some nigger draymen that happened to be driving along saw her coming

out of or going into houses, and told me so--and it just happens that

they was _robbed_, every time."



It was granted that this was plenty good enough circumstantial evidence.

A pensive silence followed, which lasted some moments, then Wilson said:



"There's one good thing, anyway.  She can't either pawn or sell

Count Luigi's costly Indian dagger."



"My!" said Tom.  "Is _that_ gone?"



"Yes."



"Well, that was a haul!  But why can't she pawn it or sell it?"



"Because when the twins went home from the Sons of Liberty meeting

last night, news of the raid was sifting in from everywhere,

and Aunt Patsy was in distress to know if they had lost anything.

They found that the dagger was gone, and they notified the police

and pawnbrokers everywhere.  It was a great haul, yes, but

the old woman won't get anything out of it, because she'll get caught."



"Did they offer a reward?" asked Buckstone.



"Yes, five hundred dollars for the knife, and five hundred more

for the thief."



"What a leather-headed idea!" exclaimed the constable.

"The thief das'n't go near them, nor send anybody.

Whoever goes is going to get himself nabbed,

for their ain't any pawnbroker that's going to lose the chance to--"



If anybody had noticed Tom's face at that time, the gray-green color

of it might have provoked curiosity; but nobody did.

He said to himself:  "I'm gone!  I never can square up; the rest of

the plunder won't pawn or sell for half of the bill.  Oh, I know it--

I'm gone, I'm gone--and this time it's for good.  Oh, this is awful--

I don't know what to do, nor which way to turn!"



"Softly, softly," said Wilson to Blake.  "I planned their scheme

for them at midnight last night, and it was all finished up shipshape

by two this morning.  They'll get their dagger back,

and then I'll explain to you how the thing was done."



There were strong signs of a general curiosity, and Buckstone said:



"Well, you have whetted us up pretty sharp.  Wilson, and I'm free

to say that if you don't mind telling us in confidence--"



"Oh, I'd as soon tell as not, Buckstone, but as long as the

twins and I agreed to say nothing about it, we must let it stand so.

But you can take my word for it, you won't be kept waiting three days.

Somebody will apply for that reward pretty promptly,

and I'll show you the thief and the dagger both very soon afterward."



The constable was disappointed, and also perplexed.  He said:



"It may all be--yes, and I hope it will, but I'm blamed if I

can see my way through it.  It's too many for yours truly."



The subject seemed about talked out.  Nobody seemed to have

anything further to offer.  After a silence the justice of the

peace informed Wilson that he and Buckstone and the constable had

come as a committee, on the part of the Democratic party, to ask him

to run for mayor--for the little town was about to become a city and

the first charter election was approaching.  It was the first attention

which Wilson had ever received at the hands of any party;

it was a sufficiently humble one, but it was a recognition of his debut

into the town's life and activities at last; it was a step upward,

and he was deeply gratified. He accepted, and the committee departed,

followed by young Tom.









CHAPTER 14



Roxana Insists Upon Reform





The true Southern watermelon is a boon apart, and not to be mentioned

with commoner things.  It is chief of this world's luxuries,

king by the grace of God over all the fruits of the earth.

When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat.  It was not a

Southern watermelon that Eve took:  we know it because she repented.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





About the time that Wilson was bowing the committee out,

Pembroke Howard was entering the next house to report.

He found the old judge sitting grim and straight in his chair, waiting.



"Well, Howard--the news?"



"The best in the world."



"Accepts, does he?"  and the light of battle gleamed joyously

in the Judge's eye.



"Accepts?  Why he jumped at it."



"Did, did he?  Now that's fine--that's very fine.  I like that.

When is it to be?"



"Now!  Straight off!  Tonight!  An admirable fellow--admirable!"



"Admirable?  He's a darling!  Why, it's an honor as well as

a pleasure to stand up before such a man.  Come--off with you!

Go and arrange everything--and give him my heartiest compliments.

A rare fellow, indeed; an admirable fellow, as you have said!"



"I'll have him in the vacant stretch between Wilson's and

the haunted house within the hour, and I'll bring my own pistols."



Judge Driscoll began to walk the floor in a state of pleased excitement;

but presently he stopped, and began to think--began to think of Tom.

Twice he moved toward the secretary, and twice he turned away again;

but finally he said:



"This may be my last night in the world--I must not take the chance.

He is worthless and unworthy, but it is largely my fault.

He was entrusted to me by my brother on his dying bed,

and I have indulged him to his hurt, instead of training him up severely,

and making a man of him, I have violated my trust, and I must not add

the sin of desertion to that.  I have forgiven him once already,

and would subject him to a long and hard trial before forgiving

him again, if I could live; but I must not run that risk.

No, I must restore the will.  But if I survive the duel,

I will hide it away, and he will not know, and I will not tell him

until he reforms, and I see that his reformation is going to be permanent."



He redrew the will, and his ostensible nephew was heir to a

fortune again.  As he was finishing his task, Tom, wearied with

another brooding tramp, entered the house and went tiptoeing past

the sitting room door.  He glanced in, and hurried on, for the sight

of his uncle was nothing but terrors for him tonight.  But his uncle

was writing!  That was unusual at this late hour.  What could he

be writing?  A chill of anxiety settled down upon Tom's heart.

Did that writing concern him?  He was afraid so.  He reflected that

when ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers.

He said he would get a glimpse of that document or know the reason why.

He heard someone coming, and stepped out of sight and hearing.

It was Pembroke Howard.  What could be hatching?



Howard said, with great satisfaction:



"Everything's right and ready.  He's gone to the battleground with

his second and the surgeon--also with his brother.  I've arranged it

all with Wilson--Wilson's his second.  We are to have three shots apiece."



"Good!  How is the moon?"



"Bright as day, nearly.  Perfect, for the distance--fifteen yards.

No wind--not a breath; hot and still."



"All good; all first-rate.  Here, Pembroke, read this, and witness it."



Pembroke read and witnessed the will, then gave the old man's hand

a hearty shake and said:



"Now that's right, York--but I knew you would do it.  You couldn't

leave that poor chap to fight along without means or profession,

with certain defeat before him, and I knew you wouldn't, for his

father's sake if not for his own."



"For his dead father's sake, I couldn't, I know; for poor Percy--

but you know what Percy was to me.  But mind--Tom is not to know

of this unless I fall tonight."



"I understand.  I'll keep the secret."



The judge put the will away, and the two started for the battleground.

In another minute the will was in Tom's hands.

His misery vanished, his feelings underwent a tremendous revulsion.

He put the will carefully back in its place, and spread his mouth

and swung his hat once, twice, three times around his head,

in imitation of three rousing huzzahs, no sound issuing from his lips.

He fell to communing with himself excitedly and joyously,

but every now and then he let off another volley of dumb hurrahs.



He said to himself:  "I've got the fortune again, but I'll not let on

that I know about it.  And this time I'm gong to hang on to it.

I take no more risks.  I'll gamble no more, I'll drink no more,

because--well, because I'll not go where there is any of that sort of

thing going on, again.  It's the sure way, and the only sure way;

I might have thought of that sooner--well, yes, if I had wanted to.

But now--dear me, I've had a scare this time, and I'll take

no more chances.  Not a single chance more. Land!  I persuaded myself

this evening that I could fetch him around without any great amount

of effort, but I've been getting more and more heavyhearted and

doubtful straight along, ever since.  If he tells me about this thing,

all right; but if he doesn't, I sha'n't let on.  I--well, I'd like to tell

Pudd'nhead Wilson, but--no, I'll think about that; perhaps I won't."

He whirled off another dead huzzah, and said, "I'm reformed,

and this time I'll stay so, sure!"



He was about to close with a final grand silent demonstration,

when he suddenly recollected that Wilson had put it out of his power

to pawn or sell the Indian knife, and that he was once more in

awful peril of exposure by his creditors for that reason.

His joy collapsed utterly, and he turned away and moped toward

the door moaning and lamenting over the bitterness of his luck.

He dragged himself upstairs, and brooded in his room a long time,

disconsolate and forlorn, with Luigi's Indian knife for a text.

At last he sighed and said:



"When I supposed these stones were glass and this ivory bone,

the thing hadn't any interest for me because it hadn't any value,

and couldn't help me out of my trouble.  But now--why, now it is

full of interest; yes, and of a sort to break a body's heart.

It's a bag of gold that has turned to dirt and ashes in my hands.

It could save me, and save me so easily, and yet I've got to go to ruin.

It's like drowning with a life preserver in my reach.  All the hard luck

comes to me, and all the good luck goes to other people--

Pudd'nhead Wilson, for instance; even his career has got a sort of

a little start at last, and what has he done to deserve it,

I should like to know?  Yes, he has opened his own road,

but he isn't content with that, but must block mine.

It's a sordid, selfish world, and I wish I was out of it."

He allowed the light of the candle to play upon the jewels of the sheath,

but the flashings and sparklings had no charm for his eye;

they were only just so many pangs to his heart.  "I must not say

anything to Roxy about this thing," he said.  "She is too daring.

She would be for digging these stones out and selling them, and then--

why, she would be arrested and the stones traced, and then--"

The thought made him quake, and he hid the knife away, trembling

all over and glancing furtively about, like a criminal who fancies that

the accuser is already at hand.



Should he try to sleep?  Oh, no, sleep was not for him; his trouble

was too haunting, too afflicting for that.  He must have somebody

to mourn with.  He would carry his despair to Roxy.



He had heard several distant gunshots, but that sort of thing

was not uncommon, and they had made no impression upon him.

He went out at the back door, and turned westward.  He passed

Wilson's house and proceeded along the lane, and presently saw

several figures approaching Wilson's place through the vacant lots.

These were the duelists returning from the fight; he thought

he recognized them, but as he had no desire for white people's company,

he stooped down behind the fence until they were out of his way.



Roxy was feeling fine.  She said:



"Whah was you, child?  Warn't you in it?"



"In what?"



"In de duel."



"Duel?  Has there been a duel?"



"Co'se dey has.  De ole Jedge has be'n havin' a duel wid one o' dem twins."



"Great Scott!"  Then he added to himself:  "That's what made him remake

the will; he thought he might get killed, and it softened him toward me.

And that's what he and Howard were so busy about. . . .

Oh dear, if the twin had only killed him, I should be out of my--"



"What is you mumblin' 'bout, Chambers?  Whah was you?

Didn't you know dey was gwine to be a duel?"



"No, I didn't.  The old man tried to get me to fight one with Count Luigi,

but he didn't succeed, so I reckon he concluded to patch up

the family honor himself."



He laughed at the idea, and went rambling on with a detailed account

of his talk with the judge, and how shocked and ashamed the judge was

to find that he had a coward in his family.  He glanced up at last,

and got a shock himself.  Roxana's bosom was heaving with

suppressed passion, and she was glowering down upon

him with measureless contempt written in her face.



"En you refuse' to fight a man dat kicked you, 'stid o' jumpin'

at de chance!  En you ain't got no mo' feelin' den to come

en tell me, dat fetched sich a po' lowdown ornery rabbit into

de worl'!  Pah! it make me sick!  It's de nigger in you,

dat's what it is.  Thirty-one parts o' you is white, en on'y one

part nigger, en dat po' little one part is yo' _soul_.

'Tain't wuth savin'; tain't wuth totin' out on a shovel en throwin'

en de gutter.  You has disgraced yo' birth.  What would yo' pa

think o' you?  It's enough to make him turn in his grave.



The last three sentences stung Tom into a fury, and he said to

himself that if his father were only alive and in reach of assassination

his mother would soon find that he had a very clear notion of the

size of his indebtedness to that man, and was willing to pay it

up in full, and would do it too, even at risk of his life;

but he kept this thought to himself; that was safest in his

mother's present state.



"Whatever has come o' yo' Essex blood?  Dat's what I can't understan'.

En it ain't on'y jist Essex blood dat's in you, not by a long sight--

'deed it ain't!  My great-great-great-gran'father en yo'

great-great-great-great-gran'father was Ole Cap'n John Smith,

de highest blood dat Ole Virginny ever turned out, en _his_

great-great-gran'mother, or somers along back dah, was Pocahontas

de Injun queen, en her husbun' was a nigger king outen Africa--

en yit here you is, a slinkin' outen a duel en disgracin' our

whole line like a ornery lowdown hound!  Yes, it's de nigger in you!"



She sat down on her candle box and fell into a reverie.

Tom did not disturb her; he sometimes lacked prudence, but it was not

in circumstances of this kind, Roxana's storm went gradually down,

but it died hard, and even when it seemed to be quite gone,

it would now and then break out in a distant rumble, so to speak,

in the form of muttered ejaculations.  One of these was, "Ain't nigger

enough in him to show in his fingernails, en dat takes mighty little--

yit dey's enough to pain his soul."



Presently she muttered.  "Yassir, enough to paint a whole thimbleful

of 'em."  At last her ramblings ceased altogether, and her countenance

began to clear--a welcome sight to Tom, who had learned her moods,

and knew she was on the threshold of good humor now.

He noticed that from time to time she unconsciously carried her finger

to the end of her nose.  He looked closer and said:



"Why, Mammy, the end of your nose is skinned.  How did that come?"



She sent out the sort of wholehearted peal of laughter which God had

vouchsafed in its perfection to none but the happy angels in heaven

and the bruised and broken black slave on the earth, and said:



"Dad fetch dat duel, I be'n in it myself."



"Gracious! did a bullet to that?"



"Yassir, you bet it did!"



"Well, I declare!  Why, how did that happen?"



"Happened dis-away.  I 'uz a-sett'n' here kinder dozin' in de dark,

en _che-bang!_ goes a gun, right out dah.  I skips along out towards

t'other end o' de house to see what's gwine on, en stops by de ole winder

on de side towards Pudd'nhead Wilson's house dat ain't got no sash in it--

but dey ain't none of 'em got any sashes, for as dat's concerned--

en I stood dah in de dark en look out, en dar in the moonlight,

right down under me 'uz one o' de twins a-cussin'--not much,

but jist a-cussin' soft--it 'uz de brown one dat 'uz cussin,'

'ca'se he 'uz hit in de shoulder.  En Doctor Claypool he 'uz

a-workin' at him, en Pudd'nhead Wilson he 'uz a-he'pin', en ole

Jedge Driscoll en Pem Howard 'uz a-standin' out yonder a little piece

waitin' for 'em to get ready agin.  En treckly dey squared off en give

de word, en _bang-bang_ went de pistols, en de twin he say,

'Ouch!'--hit him on de han' dis time --en I hear dat same bullet

go _spat!_ ag'in de logs under de winder; en de nex' time dey shoot,

de twin say, 'Ouch!' ag'in, en I done it too, 'ca'se de bullet glance'

on his cheekbone en skip up here en glance' on de side o' de winder

en whiz right acrost my face en tuck de hide off'n my nose--

why, if I'd 'a'; be'n jist a inch or a inch en a half furder 't

would 'a' tuck de whole nose en disfiggered me.  Here's de bullet;

I hunted her up."



"Did you stand there all the time?"



"Dat's a question to ask, ain't it!  What else would I do?

Does I git a chance to see a duel every day?"



"Why, you were right in range!  Weren't you afraid?"



The woman gave a sniff of scorn.



"'Fraid!  De Smith-Pocahontases ain't 'fraid o' nothin', let alone bullets."



"They've got pluck enough, I suppose; what they lack is judgment.

_I_ wouldn't have stood there."



"Nobody's accusin' you!"



"Did anybody else get hurt?"



"Yes, we all got hit 'cep' de blon' twin en de doctor en de seconds.

De Jedge didn't git hurt, but I hear Pudd'nhead say de bullet snip

some o' his ha'r off."



"'George!" said Tom to himself, "to come so near being out

of my trouble, and miss it by an inch.  Oh dear, dear, he will

live to find me out and sell me to some nigger trader yet--yes,

and he would do it in a minute."  Then he said aloud, in a grave tone:



"Mother, we are in an awful fix."



Roxana caught her breath with a spasm, and said:



"Chile!  What you hit a body so sudden for, like dat?

What's be'n en gone en happen'?"



"Well, there's one thing I didn't tell you.  When I wouldn't fight,

he tore up the will again, and--"



Roxana's face turned a dead white, and she said:



"Now you's _done!_--done forever!  Dat's de end.  Bofe un us is gwine

to starve to--"



"Wait and hear me through, can't you!  I reckon that when he

resolved to fight, himself, he thought he might get killed and

not have a chance to forgive me any more in this life, so he made

the will again, and I've seen it, and it's all right.  But--"



"Oh, thank goodness, den we's safe ag'in!--safe! en so what

did you want to come here en talk sich dreadful--"



"Hold ON, I tell you, and let me finish.  The swag I gathered

won't half square me up, and the first thing we know, my creditors--

well, you know what'll happen."



Roxana dropped her chin, and told her son to leave her alone--

she must think this matter out.  Presently she said impressively:



"You got to go mighty keerful now, I tell you!  En here's what you

got to do.  He didn't git killed, en if you gives him de least reason,

he'll bust de will ag'in, en dat's de _las'_ time, now you hear me!

So--you's got to show him what you kin do in de nex' few days.

You got to be pison good, en let him see it; you got to do everything

dat'll make him b'lieve in you, en you got to sweeten aroun' ole Aunt Pratt,

too--she's pow'ful strong with de Jedge, en de bes' frien' you got.

Nex', you'll go 'long away to Sent Louis, en dat'll _keep_ him in yo' favor.

Den you go en make a bargain wid dem people.  You tell 'em he ain't gwine

to live long--en dat's de fac', too--en tell 'em you'll pay 'em intrust,

en big intrust, too--ten per--what you call it?"



"Ten percent a month?"



"Dat's it.  Den you take and sell yo' truck aroun', a little at a time,

en pay de intrust.  How long will it las'?"



"I think there's enough to pay the interest five or six months."

"Den you's all right.  If he don't die in six months, dat don't make

no diff'rence--Providence'll provide.  You's gwine to be safe--

if you behaves."  She bent an austere eye on him and added,

"En you IS gwine to behave--does you know dat?"



He laughed and said he was going to try, anyway.  She did not unbend.

She said gravely:



"Tryin' ain't de thing.  You's gwine to _do_ it.  You ain't gwine

to steal a pin--'ca'se it ain't safe no mo'; en you ain't gwine into

no bad comp'ny--not even once, you understand; en you ain't gwine

to drink a drop--nary a single drop; en you ain't gwine to gamble

one single gamble--not one!  Dis ain't what you's gwine to try to do,

it's what you's gwine to DO.  En I'll tell you how I knows it.

Dis is how.  I's gwine to foller along to Sent Louis my own self;

en you's gwine to come to me every day o' your life, en I'll look

you over; en if you fails in one single one o' dem things--jist _one_--

I take my oath I'll come straight down to dis town en tell de Jedge

you's a nigger en a slave--en _prove_ it!"  She paused to let her words

sink home.  Then she added, "Chambers, does you b'lieve me when I says dat?"



Tom was sober enough now.  There was no levity in his voice

when he answered:



"Yes, Mother, I know, now, that I am reformed--and permanently.

Permanently--and beyond the reach of any human temptation."



"Den g'long home en begin!"









CHAPTER 15



The Robber Robbed





Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar



Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket"--

which is but a manner of saying, "Scatter your money and

your attention"; but the wise man saith, "Put all your eggs in

the one basket and--_watch that basket!_"



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





What a time of it Dawson's Landing was having!  All its life

it had been asleep, but now it hardly got a chance for a nod,

so swiftly did big events and crashing surprises come along in one

another's wake:  Friday morning, first glimpse of Real Nobility,

also grand reception at Aunt Patsy Cooper's, also great robber raid;

Friday evening, dramatic kicking of the heir of the chief citizen in

presence of four hundred people; Saturday morning, emergence as

practicing lawyer of the long-submerged Pudd'nhead Wilson;

Saturday night, duel between chief citizen and titled stranger.



The people took more pride in the duel than in all the other

events put together, perhaps.  It was a glory to their town to have

such a thing happen there.  In their eyes the principals had reached

the summit of human honor.  Everybody paid homage to their names;

their praises were in all mouths.  Even the duelists' subordinates

came in for a handsome share of the public approbation:

wherefore Pudd'nhead Wilson was suddenly become a man of consequence.

When asked to run for the mayoralty Saturday night, he was risking defeat,

but Sunday morning found him a made man and his success assured.



The twins were prodigiously great now; the town took them to its bosom

with enthusiasm.  Day after day, and night after night,

they went dining and visiting from house to house, making friends,

enlarging and solidifying their popularity, and charming and surprising

all with their musical prodigies, and now and then heightening the

effects with samples of what they could do in other directions,

out of their stock of rare and curious accomplishments.  They were

so pleased that they gave the regulation thirty days' notice,

the required preparation for citizenship, and resolved to finish

their days in this pleasant place.  That was the climax.

The delighted community rose as one man and applauded; and when

the twins were asked to stand for seats in the forthcoming

aldermanic board, and consented, the public contentment was

rounded and complete.



Tom Driscoll was not happy over these things; they sunk deep,

and hurt all the way down.  He hated the one twin for kicking him,

and the other one for being the kicker's brother.



Now and then the people wondered why nothing was heard of the raider,

or of the stolen knife or the other plunder, but nobody was able

to throw any light on that matter.  Nearly a week had drifted by,

and still the thing remained a vexed mystery.



On Sunday Constable Blake and Pudd'nhead Wilson met on the street,

and Tom Driscoll joined them in time to open their conversation for them.

He said to Blake:  "You are not looking  well, Blake; you seem to be

annoyed about something.  Has anything gone wrong in the

detective business?  I believe you fairly and justifiably claim

to have a pretty good reputation in that line, isn't it so?"--

which made Blake feel good, and look it; but Tom added,

"for a country detective"--which made Blake feel the other way,

and not only look it, but betray it in his voice.



"Yes, sir, I _have_ got a reputation; and it's as good as

anybody's in the profession, too, country or no country."



"Oh, I beg pardon; I didn't mean any offense.  What I started out

to ask was only about the old woman that raided the town--

the stoop-shouldered old woman, you know, that you said you were going

to catch; and I knew you would, too, because you have the reputation

of never boasting, and--well, you--you've caught the old woman?"



"Damn the old woman!"



"Why, sho! you don't mean to say you haven't caught her?"



"No, I haven't caught her.  If anybody could have caught her,

I could; but nobody couldn't, I don't care who he is."



I am sorry, real sorry--for your sake; because, when it gets around

that a detective has expressed himself confidently, and then--"



"Don't you worry, that's all--don't you worry; and as for the town,

the town needn't worry either.  She's my meat--make yourself easy

about that.  I'm on her track; I've got clues that--"



"That's good!  Now if you could get an old veteran detective down from

St. Louis to help you find out what the clues mean, and where

they lead to, and then--"



"I'm plenty veteran enough myself, and I don't need anybody's help.

I'll have her inside of a we--inside of a month.  That I'll swear to!"



Tom said carelessly:



"I suppose that will answer--yes, that will answer.  But I reckon

she is pretty old, and old people don't often outlive the

cautious pace of the professional detective when he has got his

clues together and is out on his still-hunt."



Blake's dull face flushed under this gibe, but before he could set

his retort in order Tom had turned to Wilson, and was saying,

with placid indifference of manner and voice:



"Who got the reward, Pudd'nhead?"



Wilson winced slightly, and saw that his own turn was come.



"What reward?"



"Why, the reward for the thief, and the other one for the knife."



Wilson answered--and rather uncomfortably, to judge by his

hesitating fashion of delivering himself:



"Well, the--well, in face, nobody has claimed it yet."



Tom seemed surprised.



"Why, is that so?"



Wilson showed a trifle of irritation when he replied:



"Yes, it's so.  And what of it?"



"Oh, nothing.  Only I thought you had struck out a new idea,

and invented a scheme that was going to revolutionize the timeworn

and ineffectual methods of the--"  He stopped, and turned to Blake,

who was happy now that another had taken his place on the gridiron.

"Blake, didn't you understand him to intimate that it wouldn't be

necessary for you to hunt the old woman down?"



'B'George, he said he'd have thief and swag both inside of three days--

he did, by hokey! and that's just about a week ago.

Why, I said at the time that no thief and no thief's pal was

going to try to pawn or sell a thing where he knowed the pawnbroker

could get both rewards by taking HIM into camp _with_ the swag.

It was the blessedest idea that ever I struck!"



"You'd change your mind," said Wilson, with irritated bluntness,

"if you knew the entire scheme instead of only part of it."



"Well," said the constable, pensively, "I had the idea that

it wouldn't work, and up to now I'm right anyway."



"Very well, then, let it stand at that, and give it a further show.

It has worked at least as well as your own methods, you perceive."



The constable hadn't anything handy to hit back with,

so he discharged a discontented sniff, and said nothing.



After the night that Wilson had partly revealed his scheme

at his house, Tom had tried for several days to guess out the

secret of the rest of it, but had failed.  Then it occurred to

him to give Roxana's smarter head a chance at it.  He made up a

supposititious0z H case, and laid it before her.  She thought it over,

and delivered her verdict upon it.  Tom said to himself,

"She's hit it, sure!"  He thought he would test that verdict now,

and watch Wilson's face; so he said reflectively:



"Wilson, you're not a fool--a fact of recent discovery.

Whatever your scheme was, it had sense in it, Blake's opinion to

the contrary notwithstanding.  I don't ask you to reveal it,

but I will suppose a case--a case which you will answer as a starting

point for the real thing I am going to come at, and that's all I want.

You offered five hundred dollars for the knife, and five hundred

for the thief.  We will suppose, for argument's sake,

that the first reward is _advertised_ and the second offered by

_private letter_ to pawnbrokers and--"



Blake slapped his thigh, and cried out:



"By Jackson, he's got you, Pudd'nhead!  Now why couldn't I

or _any_ fool have thought of that?"



Wilson said to himself, "Anybody with a reasonably good head would

have thought of it.  I am not surprised that Blake didn't detect it;

I am only surprised that Tom did.  There is more to him

than I supposed."  He said nothing aloud, and Tom went on:



"Very well.  The thief would not suspect that there was a trap,

and he would bring or send the knife, and say he bought it for a song,

or found it in the road, or something like that, and try

to collect the reward, and be arrested--wouldn't he?"



"Yes," said Wilson.



"I think so," said Tom.  "There can't be any doubt of it.

Have you ever seen that knife?"



"No."



"Has any friend of yours?"



"Not that I know of."



"Well, I begin to think I understand why your scheme failed."



"What do you mean, Tom?  What are you driving at?" asked Wilson,

with a dawning sense of discomfort.



"Why, that there _isn't_ any such knife."



"Look here, Wilson," said Blake, "Tom Driscoll's right,

for a thousand dollars--if I had it."



Wilson's blood warmed a little, and he wondered if he had been played

upon by those strangers; it certainly had something of that look.

But what could they gain by it?  He threw out that suggestion.

Tom replied:



"Gain?  Oh, nothing that you would value, maybe.  But they are strangers

making their way in a new community.  Is it nothing to them to appear

as pets of an Oriental prince--at no expense?  It is nothing

to them to be able to dazzle this poor town with thousand-dollar

rewards--at no expense?  Wilson, there isn't any such knife,

or your scheme would have fetched it to light.  Or if there is

any such knife, they've got it yet.  I believe, myself,

that they've seen such a knife, for Angelo pictured it out with

his pencil too swiftly and handily for him to have been inventing it,

and of course I can't swear that they've never had it; but this I'll

go bail for--if they had it when they came to this town,

they've got it yet."



Blake said:



"It looks mighty reasonable, the way Tom puts it; it most certainly does."



Tom responded, turning to leave:



"You find the old woman, Blake, and if she can't furnish the knife,

go and search the twins!"



Tom sauntered away.  Wilson felt a good deal depressed.  He hardly

knew what to think.  He was loath to withdraw his faith from the twins,

and was resolved not to do it on the present indecisive evidence;

but--well, he would think, and then decide how to act.



"Blake, what do you think of this matter?"



"Well, Pudd'nhead, I'm bound to say I put it up the way Tom does.

They hadn't the knife; or if they had it, they've got it yet."



The men parted.  Wilson said to himself:



"I believe they had it; if it had been stolen, the scheme would have

restored it, that is certain.  And so I believe they've got it."



Tom had no purpose in his mind when he encountered those two men.

When he began his talk he hoped to be able to gall them a

little and get a trifle of malicious entertainment out of it.

But when he left, he left in great spirits, for he perceived that

just by pure luck and no troublesome labor he had accomplished

several delightful things:  he had touched both men on a raw spot

and seen them squirm; he had modified Wilson's sweetness for the

twins with one small bitter taste that he wouldn't be able to get

out of his mouth right away; and, best of all, he had taken the

hated twins down a peg with the community; for Blake would gossip

around freely, after the manner of detectives, and within a week

the town would be laughing at them in its sleeve for offering a

gaudy reward for a bauble which they either never possessed or

hadn't lost. Tom was very well satisfied with himself.



Tom's behavior at home had been perfect during the entire week.

His uncle and aunt had seen nothing like it before.  They could find

no fault with him anywhere.



Saturday evening he said to the Judge:



"I've had something preying on my mind, uncle, and as I am going away,

and might never see you again, I can't bear it any longer.

I made you believe I was afraid to fight that Italian adventurer.

I had to get out of it on some pretext or other, and maybe I

chose badly, being taken unawares, but no honorable person could

consent to meet him in the field, knowing what I knew about him."



"Indeed?  What was that?"



"Count Luigi is a confessed assassin."



"Incredible."



"It's perfectly true.  Wilson detected it in his hand, by palmistry,

and charged him with it, and cornered him up so close that he had

to confess; but both twins begged us on their knees to keep the secret,

and swore they would lead straight lives here; and it was all

so pitiful that we gave our word of honor never to expose them

while they kept the promise.  You would have done it yourself, uncle."



"You are right, my boy; I would.  A man's secret is still his

own property, and sacred, when it has been surprised out of him

like that.  You did well, and I am proud of you."

Then he added mournfully, "But I wish I could have been saved the

shame of meeting an assassin on the field on honor."



"It couldn't be helped, uncle.  If I had known you were going

to challenge him, I should have felt obliged to sacrifice

my pledged word in order to stop it, but Wilson couldn't be

expected to do otherwise than keep silent."



"Oh, no, Wilson did right, and is in no way to blame.  Tom, Tom,

you have lifted a heavy load from my heart; I was stung to the very

soul when I seemed to have discovered that I had a coward in my family."



"You may imagine what it cost ME to assume such a part, uncle."



"Oh, I know it, poor boy, I know it.  And I can understand how much

it has cost you to remain under that unjust stigma to this time.

But it is all right now, and no harm is done.  You have restored

my comfort of mind, and with it your own; and both of us

had suffered enough."



The old man sat awhile plunged in thought; then he looked up

with a satisfied light in his eye, and said:  "That this assassin

should have put the affront upon me of letting me meet him on the

field of honor as if he were a gentleman is a matter which I will

presently settle--but not now.  I will not shoot him until after election.

I see a way to ruin them both before; I will attend to that first.

Neither of them shall be elected, that I promise.

You are sure that the fact that he is an assassin has not got abroad?"



"Perfectly certain of it, sir."



"It will be a good card.  I will fling a hint at it from the stump

on the polling day.  It will sweep the ground from under both of them."



"There's not a doubt of it.  It will finish them."



"That and outside work among the voters will, to a certainty.

I want you to come down here by and by and work privately among

the rag-tag and bobtail.  You shall spend money among them;

I will furnish it."



Another point scored against the detested twins!  Really it was

a great day for Tom.  He was encouraged to chance a parting shot, now,

at the same target, and did it.



"You know that wonderful Indian knife that the twins have been making

such a to-do about?  Well, there's no track or trace of it yet;

so the town is beginning to sneer and gossip and laugh.

Half the people believe they never had any such knife,

the other half believe they had it and have got it still.

I've heard twenty people talking like that today."



Yes, Tom's blemishless week had restored him to the favor of

his aunt and uncle.



His mother was satisfied with him, too.  Privately, she believed she

was coming to love him, but she did not say so.  She told him to

go along to St. Louis now, and she would get ready and follow.

Then she smashed her whisky bottle and said:



"Dah now!  I's a-gwine to make you walk as straight as a string,

Chambers, en so I's bown, you ain't gwine to git no bad example

out o' yo' mammy.  I tole you you couldn't go into no bad comp'ny.

Well, you's gwine into my comp'ny, en I's gwine to fill de bill.

Now, den, trot along, trot along!"



Tom went aboard one of the big transient boats that night with

his heavy satchel of miscellaneous plunder, and slept the sleep

of the unjust, which is serener and sounder than the other kind,

as we know by the hanging-eve history of a million rascals.

But when he got up in the morning, luck was against him again:

a brother thief had robbed him while he slept, and gone ashore at

some intermediate landing.







CHAPTER 16



Sold Down the River





If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous,

he will not bite you.  This is the principal difference between a

dog and a man.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





We all know about the habits of the ant, we know all about

the habits of the bee, but we know nothing at all about the

habits of the oyster.  It seems almost certain that we have been

choosing the wrong time for studying the oyster.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





When Roxana arrived, she found her son in such despair and

misery that her heart was touched and her motherhood rose up

strong in her.  He was ruined past hope now; his destruction

would be immediate and sure, and he would be an outcast and friendless.

That was reason enough for a mother to love a child;

so she loved him, and told him so.  It made him wince, secretly--

for she was a "nigger."  That he was one himself was far from

reconciling him to that despised race.



Roxana poured out endearments upon him, to which he

responded uncomfortably, but as well as he could.

And she tried to comfort him, but that was not possible.

These intimacies quickly became horrible to him, and within the hour

began to try to get up courage enough to tell her so, and require

that they be discontinued or very considerably modified.

But he was afraid of her; and besides, there came a lull now,

for she had begun to think.  She was trying to invent a saving plan.

Finally she started up, and said she had found a way out.  Tom was almost

suffocated by the joy of this sudden good news.  Roxana said:



"Here is de plan, en she'll win, sure.  I's a nigger,

en nobody ain't gwine to doubt it dat hears me talk.

I's wuth six hund'd dollahs.  Take en sell me,

en pay off dese gamblers."



Tom was dazed.  He was not sure he had heard aright.

He was dumb for a moment; then he said:



"Do you mean that you would be sold into slavery to save me?"



"Ain't you my chile?  En does you know anything dat a mother

won't do for her chile?  Day ain't nothin' a white mother won't

do for her chile.  Who made 'em so?  De Lord done it.

En who made de niggers?  De Lord made 'em.  In de inside, mothers is all

de same.  De good lord he made 'em so.  I's gwine to be sole into

slavery, en in a year you's gwine to buy yo' ole mammy free ag'in.

I'll show you how.  Dat's de plan."



Tom's hopes began to rise, and his spirits along with them.  He said:



"It's lovely of you, Mammy--it's just--"



"Say it ag'in!  En keep on sayin' it!  It's all de pay a

body kin want in dis worl', en it's mo' den enough.

Laws bless you, honey, when I's slav' aroun', en dey 'buses me,

if I knows you's a-sayin' dat, 'way off yonder somers,

it'll heal up all de sore places, en I kin stan' 'em."



"I DO say it again, Mammy, and I'll keep on saying it, too.

But how am I going to sell you?  You're free, you know."



"Much diff'rence dat make!  White folks ain't partic'lar.

De law kin sell me now if dey tell me to leave de state in six

months en I don't go.  You draw up a paper--bill o' sale--

en put it 'way off yonder, down in de middle o' Kaintuck somers,

en sign some names to it, en say you'll sell me cheap 'ca'se you's

hard up; you'll find you ain't gwine to have no trouble.

You take me up de country a piece, en sell me on a farm;

dem people ain't gwine to ask no questions if I's a bargain."



Tom forged a bill of sale and sold him mother to an Arkansas

cotton planter for a trifle over six hundred dollars.

He did not want to commit this treachery, but luck threw the man in his way,

and this saved him the necessity of going up-country to hunt up a purchaser,

with the added risk of having to answer a lot of questions,

whereas this planter was so pleased with Roxy that he

asked next to none at all.  Besides, the planter insisted that

Roxy wouldn't know where she was, at first, and that by the time

she found out she would already have been contented.



So Tom argued with himself that it was an immense advantaged

for Roxy to have a master who was pleased with her, as this

planter manifestly was.  In almost no time his flowing reasonings

carried him to the point of even half believing he was doing Roxy

a splendid surreptitious service in selling her "down the river."

And then he kept diligently saying to himself all the time:

"It's for only a year.  In a year I buy her free again;

she'll keep that in mind, and it'll reconcile her."  Yes; the little

deception could do no harm, and everything would come out right

and pleasant in the end, anyway.  By agreement, the conversation

in Roxy's presence was all about the man's "up-country" farm,

and how pleasant a place it was, and how happy the slaves were there;

so poor Roxy was entirely deceived; and easily, for she was not

dreaming that her own son could be guilty of treason to a mother who,

in voluntarily going into slavery--slavery of any kind,

mild or severe, or of any duration, brief or long--was making a

sacrifice for him compared with which death would have been a

poor and commonplace one.  She lavished tears and loving caresses

upon him privately, and then went away with her owner--

went away brokenhearted, and yet proud to do it.



Tom scored his accounts, and resolved to keep to the very

letter of his reform, and never to put that will in jeopardy

again.  He had three hundred dollars left.  According to his

mother's plan, he was to put that safely away, and add her half

of his pension to it monthly.  In one year this fund would buy

her free again.



For a whole week he was not able to sleep well, so much the

villainy which he had played upon his trusting mother preyed upon

his rag of conscience; but after that he began to get comfortable again,

and was presently able to sleep like any other miscreant.



The boat bore Roxy away from St. Louis at four in the afternoon,

and she stood on the lower guard abaft the paddle box

and watched Tom through a blur of tears until he melted into the

throng of people and disappeared; then she looked no more,

but sat there on a coil of cable crying till far into the night.

When she went to her foul steerage bunk at last, between the

clashing engines, it was not to sleep, but only to wait for the

morning, and, waiting, grieve.



It had been imagined that she "would not know," and would

think she was traveling upstream.  She!  Why, she had been

steamboating for years.  At dawn she got up and went listlessly

and sat down on the cable coil again.  She passed many a snag

whose "break" could have told her a thing to break her heart,

for it showed a current moving in the same direction that the boat

was going; but her thoughts were elsewhere, and she did not notice.

But at last the roar of a bigger and nearer break than

usual brought her out of her torpor, and she looked up,

and her practiced eye fell upon that telltale rush of water.

For one moment her petrified gaze fixed itself there.

Then her head dropped upon her breast, and she said:



"Oh, de good Lord God have mercy on po' sinful me--

I'S SOLE DOWN DE RIVER!"







CHAPTER 17



The Judge Utters Dire Prophesy





Even popularity can be overdone.  In Rome, along at first,

you are full of regrets that Michelangelo died; but by and by,

you only regret that you didn't see him do it.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





JULY 4.  Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day

than in all the other days of the year put together.

This proves, by the number left in stock, that one Fourth of

July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





The summer weeks dragged by, and then the political campaign opened--

opened in pretty warm fashion, and waxed hotter and hotter daily.

The twins threw themselves into it with their whole heart,

for their self-love was engaged.  Their popularity,

so general at first, had suffered afterward; mainly because they

had been TOO popular, and so a natural reaction had followed.

Besides, it had been diligently whispered around that it was

curious--indeed, VERY curious--that that wonderful knife of

theirs did not turn up--IF it was so valuable, or IF it had ever existed.

And with the whisperings went chucklings and nudgings and winks,

and such things have an effect.  The twins considered

that success in the election would reinstate them, and that

defeat would work them irreparable damage.  Therefore they worked hard,

but not harder than Judge Driscoll and Tom worked against

them in the closing days of the canvass.  Tom's conduct had

remained so letter-perfect during two whole months now, that his

uncle not only trusted him with money with which to persuade voters,

but trusted him to go and get it himself out of the safe

in the private sitting room.



The closing speech of the campaign was made by Judge Driscoll,

and he made it against both of the foreigners.  It was

disastrously effective.  He poured out rivers of ridicule upon them,

and forced the big mass meeting to laugh and applaud.

He scoffed at them as adventures, mountebanks, sideshow riffraff,

dime museum freaks; he assailed their showy titles with

measureless derision; he said they were back-alley barbers

disguised as nobilities, peanut peddlers masquerading as

gentlemen, organ-grinders bereft of their brother monkey.

At last he stopped and stood still.  He waited until the place had

become absolutely silent and expectant, then he delivered his

deadliest shot; delivered it with ice-cold seriousness and

deliberation, with a significant emphasis upon the closing words:

he said he believed that the reward offered for the lost knife

was humbug and bunkum, and that its owner would know where to

find it whenever he should have occasion TO ASSASSINATE SOMEBODY.



Then he stepped from the stand, leaving a startled and

impressive hush behind him instead of the customary explosion of

cheers and party cries.



The strange remark flew far and wide over the town and made

an extraordinary sensation.  Everybody was asking, "What could he

mean by that?"  And everybody went on asking that question,

but in vain; for the judge only said he knew what he was talking about,

and stopped there; Tom said he hadn't any idea what his uncle meant,

and Wilson, whenever he was asked what he thought it meant,

parried the question by asking the questioner what HE thought it meant.



Wilson was elected, the twins were defeated--crushed,

in fact, and left forlorn and substantially friendless.

Tom went back to St. Louis happy.



Dawson's Landing had a week of repose now, and it needed it.

But it was in an expectant state, for the air was full of rumors

of a new duel.  Judge Driscoll's election labors had prostrated him,

but it was said that as soon as he was well enough to

entertain a challenge he would get one from Count Luigi.



The brothers withdrew entirely from society, and nursed

their humiliation in privacy.  They avoided the people, and wait

out for exercise only late at night, when the streets were deserted.







CHAPTER 18



Roxana Commands





Gratitude and treachery are merely the two extremities of

the same procession.  You have seen all of it that is worth

staying for when the band and the gaudy officials have gone by.

--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





THANKSGIVING DAY.  Let us all give humble, hearty, and

sincere thanks now, but the turkeys.  In the island of Fiji they

do not use turkeys; they use plumbers.  It does not become you

and me to sneer at Fiji.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





The Friday after the election was a rainy one in St. Louis.

It rained all day long, and rained hard, apparently trying its

best to wash that soot-blackened town white, but of course not

succeeding.  Toward midnight Tom Driscoll arrived at his lodgings

from the theater in the heavy downpour, and closed his umbrella

and let himself in; but when he would have shut the door,

he found that there was another person entering--doubtless another lodger;

this person closed the door and tramped upstairs behind Tom.

Tom found his door in the dark, and entered it, and turned

up the gas.  When he faced about, lightly whistling, he saw the

back of a man.  The man was closing and locking his door from him.

His whistle faded out and he felt uneasy.  The man turned around,

a wreck of shabby old clothes, sodden with rain and all a-drip,

and showed a black face under an old slouch hat.  Tom was frightened.

He tried to order the man out, but the words refused to come,

and the other man got the start.  He said, in a low voice:



"Keep still--I's yo' mother!"



Tom sunk in a heap on a chair, and gasped out:



"It was mean of me, and base--I know it; but I meant it for

the best, I did indeed--I can swear it."



Roxana stood awhile looking mutely down on him while he

writhed in shame and went on incoherently babbling self-accusations

mixed with pitiful attempts at explanation and

palliation of his crime; then she seated herself and took off her hat,

and her unkept masses of long brown hair tumbled down about her shoulders.



"It warn't no fault o' yo'n dat dat ain't gray," she said sadly,

noticing the hair.



"I know it, I know it!  I'm a scoundrel.  But I swear I

meant it for the best.  It was a mistake, of course,

but I thought it was for the best, I truly did."



Roxana began to cry softly, and presently words began to

find their way out between her sobs.  They were uttered

lamentingly, rather than angrily.



"Sell a pusson down de river--DOWN DE RIVER!--for de bes'!

I wouldn't treat a dog so!  I is all broke down and en wore out

now, en so I reckon it ain't in me to storm aroun' no mo',

like I used to when I 'uz trompled on en 'bused.  I don't know--

but maybe it's so.  Leastways, I's suffered so much dat mournin' seem

to come mo' handy to me now den stormin'."



These words should have touched Tom Driscoll, but if they did,

that effect was obliterated by a stronger one--one which

removed the heavy weight of fear which lay upon him, and gave his

crushed spirit a most grateful rebound, and filled all his small

soul with a deep sense of relief.  But he kept prudently still,

and ventured no comment.  There was a voiceless interval of some

duration now, in which no sounds were heard but the beating of

the rain upon the panes, the sighing and complaining of the

winds, and now and then a muffled sob from Roxana.

The sobs became more and more infrequent, and at least ceased.

Then the refugee began to talk again.



"Shet down dat light a little.  More.  More yit.  A pusson

dat is hunted don't like de light.  Dah--dat'll do.  I kin see

whah you is, en dat's enough.  I's gwine to tell you de tale,

en cut it jes as short as I kin, en den I'll tell you what you's got to do.

Dat man dat bought me ain't a bad man; he's good enough,

as planters goes; en if he could 'a' had his way I'd 'a' be'n a

house servant in his fambly en be'n comfortable:  but his wife

she was a Yank, en not right down good lookin', en she riz up

agin me straight off; so den dey sent me out to de quarter

'mongst de common fiel' han's.  Dat woman warn't satisfied even

wid dat, but she worked up de overseer ag'in' me, she 'uz dat

jealous en hateful; so de overseer he had me out befo' day in de

mawnin's en worked me de whole long day as long as dey'uz any

light to see by; en many's de lashin's I got 'ca'se I couldn't

come up to de work o' de stronges'.  Dat overseer wuz a Yank too,

outen New Englan', en anybody down South kin tell you what dat mean.

DEY knows how to work a nigger to death, en dey knows how

to whale 'em too--whale 'em till dey backs is welted like a washboard.

'Long at fust my marster say de good word for me to

de overseer, but dat 'uz bad for me; for de mistis she fine it

out, en arter dat I jist ketched it at every turn--dey warn't no

mercy for me no mo'."



Tom's heart was fired--with fury against the planter's wife;

and he said to himself, "But for that meddlesome fool,

everything would have gone all right."  He added a deep and bitter

curse against her.



The expression of this sentiment was fiercely written in his face,

and stood thus revealed to Roxana by a white glare of

lightning which turned the somber dusk of the room into dazzling

day at that moment.  She was pleased--pleased and grateful;

for did not that expression show that her child was capable of

grieving for his mother's wrongs and a feeling resentment toward

her persecutors?--a thing which she had been doubting.

But her flash of happiness was only a flash, and went out again and

left her spirit dark; for she said to herself, "He sole me down de river--

he can't feel for a body long; dis'll pass en go."

Then she took up her tale again.



"'Bout ten days ago I 'uz sayin' to myself dat I couldn't

las' many mo' weeks I 'uz so wore out wid de awful work en de

lashin's, en so downhearted en misable.  En I didn't care no mo',

nuther--life warn't wuth noth'n' to me, if I got to go on like

dat.  Well, when a body is in a frame o' mine like dat, what do a

body care what a body do?  Dey was a little sickly nigger wench

'bout ten year ole dat 'uz good to me, en hadn't no mammy,

po' thing, en I loved her en she loved me; en she come out whah I uz'

workin' en she had a roasted tater, en tried to slip it to me--

robbin' herself, you see, 'ca'se she knowed de overseer didn't

give me enough to eat--en he ketched her at it, en giver her a

lick acrost de back wid his stick, which 'uz as thick as a broom handle,

en she drop' screamin' on de groun', en squirmin' en

wallerin' aroun' in de dust like a spider dat's got crippled.

I couldn't stan' it.  All de hellfire dat 'uz ever in my heart

flame' up, en I snatch de stick outen his han' en laid him flat.

He laid dah moanin' en cussin', en all out of his head, you know,

en de niggers 'uz plumb sk'yred to death.  Dey gathered roun' him

to he'p him, en I jumped on his hoss en took out for de river as

tight as I could go.  I knowed what dey would do wid me.  Soon as

he got well he would start in en work me to death if marster let him;

en if dey didn't do dat, they'd sell me furder down de river,

en dat's de same thing.  so I 'lowed to drown myself en

git out o' my troubles.  It 'uz gitt'n' towards dark.  I 'uz at

de river in two minutes.  Den I see a canoe, en I says dey ain't

no use to drown myself tell I got to; so I ties de hoss in de

edge o' de timber en shove out down de river, keepin' in under de

shelter o' de bluff bank en prayin' for de dark to shet down quick.

I had a pow'ful good start, 'ca'se de big house 'uz three

mile back f'om de river en on'y de work mules to ride dah on, en

on'y niggers ride 'em, en DEY warn't gwine to hurry--dey'd gimme

all de chance dey could.  Befo' a body could go to de house en

back it would be long pas' dark, en dey couldn't track de hoss en

fine out which way I went tell mawnin', en de niggers would tell

'em all de lies dey could 'bout it.



"Well, de dark come, en I went on a-spinnin' down de river.

I paddled mo'n two hours, den I warn't worried no mo', so I quit

paddlin' en floated down de current, considerin' what I 'uz gwine

to do if I didn't have to drown myself.  I made up some plans,

en floated along, turnin' 'em over in my mine.  Well, when it 'uz a

little pas' midnight, as I reckoned, en I had come fifteen or

twenty mile, I see de lights o' a steamboat layin' at de bank,

whah dey warn't no town en no woodyard, en putty soon I ketched

de shape o' de chimbly tops ag'in' de stars, en den good gracious me,

I 'most jumped out o' my skin for joy!  It 'uz de GRAN' MOGUL--

I 'uz chambermaid on her for eight seasons in de Cincinnati en

Orleans trade. I slid 'long pas'--don't see nobody stirrin' nowhah--

hear 'em a-hammerin' away in de engine room, den I knowed

what de matter was--some o' de machinery's broke.  I got  asho'

below de boat and turn' de canoe loose, den I goes 'long up, en

dey 'uz jes one plank out, en I step' 'board de boat.  It 'uz

pow'ful hot, deckhan's en roustabouts 'uz sprawled aroun' asleep

on de fo'cas'l', de second mate, Jim Bangs, he sot dah on de

bitts wid his head down, asleep--'ca'se dat's de way de second

mate stan' de cap'n's watch!--en de ole watchman, Billy Hatch,

he 'uz a-noddin' on de companionway;--en I knowed 'em all; en, lan',

but dey did look good!  I says to myself, I wished old marster'd

come along NOW en try to take me--bless yo' heart, I's 'mong

frien's, I is.  So I tromped right along 'mongst 'em, en went up

on de b'iler deck en 'way back aft to de ladies' cabin guard,

en sot down dah in de same cheer dat I'd sot in 'mos' a hund'd

million times, I reckon; en it 'uz jist home ag'in, I tell you!



"In 'bout an hour I heard de ready bell jingle, en den de

racket begin.  Putty soon I hear de gong strike.  'Set her back

on de outside,' I says to myself.  'I reckon I knows dat music!'

I hear de gong ag'in.  'Come ahead on de inside,' I says.

Gong ag'in.  'Stop de outside.'  gong ag'in.  'Come ahead on de outside--

now we's pinted for Sent Louis, en I's outer de woods en

ain't got to drown myself at all.'  I knowed de MOGUL 'uz in de

Sent Louis trade now, you see.  It 'uz jes fair daylight when we

passed our plantation, en I seed a gang o' niggers en white folks

huntin' up en down de sho', en troublin' deyselves a good deal 'bout me;

but I warn't troublin' myself none 'bout dem.



"'Bout dat time Sally Jackson, dat used to be my second

chambermaid en 'uz head chambermaid now, she come out on de guard,

en 'uz pow'ful glad to see me, en so 'uz all de officers;

en I tole 'em I'd got kidnapped en sole down de river,

en dey made me up twenty dollahs en give it to me, en Sally she rigged

me out wid good clo'es, en when I got here I went straight to

whah you used to wuz, en den I come to dis house, en dey say

you's away but 'spected back every day; so I didn't dast to go

down de river to Dawson's, 'ca'se I might miss you.



"Well, las' Monday I 'uz pass'n by one o' dem places in

fourth street whah deh sticks up runaway nigger bills, en he'ps

to ketch 'em, en I seed my marster!  I 'mos' flopped down on de

groun', I felt so gone.  He had his back to me, en 'uz talkin' to

de man en givin' him some bills--nigger bills, I reckon, en I's

de nigger.  He's offerin' a reward--dat's it.  Ain't I right,

don't you reckon?"



Tom had been gradually sinking into a state of ghastly terror,

and he said to himself, now:  "I'm lost, no matter what

turn things take!  This man has said to me that he thinks there

was something suspicious about that sale.  he said he had a

letter from a passenger on the GRAND MOGUL saying that Roxy came

here on that boat and that everybody on board knew all about the case;

so he says that her coming here instead of flying to a free

state looks bad for me, and that if I don't find her for him,

and that pretty soon, he will make trouble for me.  I never believed

that story; I couldn't believe she would be so dead to all

motherly instincts as to come here, knowing the risk she would

run of getting me into irremediable trouble.  And after all,

here she is!  And I stupidly swore I would help find her,

thinking it was a perfectly safe thing to promise.  If I venture to

deliver her up, she--she--but how can I help myself?  I've got to do

that or pay the money, and where's the money to come from?  I--I--well,

I should think that if he would swear to treat her kindly hereafter--

and she says, herself, that he is a good man--and if he would

swear to never allow her to be overworked, or ill fed, or--"



A flash of lightning exposed Tom's pallid face, drawn and

rigid with these worrying thoughts.  Roxana spoke up sharply now,

and there was apprehension in her voice.



"Turn up dat light!  I want to see yo' face better.  Dah now

--lemme look at you.  Chambers, you's as white as yo' shirt!

Has you see dat man?  Has he be'n to see you?"



"Ye-s."



"When?"



"Monday noon."



"Monday noon!  Was he on my track?"



"He--well, he thought he was.  That is, he hoped he was.

This is the bill you saw."  He took it out of his pocket.



"Read it to me!"



She was panting with excitement, and there was a dusky glow

in her eyes that Tom could not translate with certainty,

but there seemed to be something threatening about it.

The handbill had the usual rude woodcut of a turbaned Negro woman running,

with the customary bundle on a stick over her shoulder, and the

heading in bold type, "$100 REWARD."  Tom read the bill aloud--

at least the part that described Roxana and named the master and his

St. Louis address and the address of the Fourth street agency;

but he left out the item that applicants for the reward might

also apply to Mr. Thomas Driscoll.



"Gimme de bill!"



Tom had folded it and was putting it in his pocket.

He felt a chilly streak creeping down his back,

but said as carelessly as he could:



"The bill?  Why, it isn't any use to you, you can't read it.

What do you want with it?"



"Gimme de bill!"  Tom gave it to her, but with a reluctance

which he could not entirely disguise.  "Did you read it ALL to me?"



"Certainly I did."



"Hole up yo' han' en swah to it."



Tom did it.  Roxana put the bill carefully away in her pocket,

with her eyes fixed upon Tom's face all the while; then she said:



"Yo's lyin'!"



"What would I want to lie about it for?"



"I don't know--but you is.  Dat's my opinion, anyways.

But nemmine 'bout dat.  When I seed dat man I 'uz dat sk'yerd dat I

could sca'cely wobble home.  Den I give a nigger man a dollar for

dese clo'es, en I ain't be'in in a house sence, night ner day, till now.

I blacked my face en laid hid in de cellar of a ole

house dat's burnt down, daytimes, en robbed de sugar hogsheads en

grain sacks on de wharf, nights, to git somethin' to eat,

en never dast to try to buy noth'n', en I's 'mos' starved.

En I never dast to come near dis place till dis rainy night,

when dey ain't no people roun' sca'cely.  But tonight I be'n a-stanin'

in de dark alley ever sence night come, waitin' for you to go by.

En here I is."



She fell to thinking.  Presently she said:



"You seed dat man at noon, las' Monday?"



"Yes."



"I seed him de middle o' dat arternoon.  He hunted you up, didn't he?"



"Yes."



"Did he give you de bill dat time?"



"No, he hadn't got it printed yet."



Roxana darted a suspicious glance at him.



"Did you he'p him fix up de bill?"



Tom cursed himself for making that stupid blunder, and tried

to rectify it by saying he remember now that it WAS at noon

Monday that the man gave him the bill.  Roxana said:



"You's lyin' ag'in, sho."  Then she straightened up and raised her finger:



"Now den!  I's gwine to ask you a question, en I wants to

know how you's gwine to git aroun' it.  You knowed he 'uz arter me;

en if you run off, 'stid o' stayin' here to he'p him,

he'd know dey 'uz somethin' wrong 'bout dis business, en den he would

inquire 'bout you, en dat would take him to yo' uncle, en yo'

uncle would read de bill en see dat you be'n sellin' a free

nigger down de river, en you know HIM, I reckon!  He'd t'ar up de

will en kick you outen de house.  Now, den, you answer me dis

question:  hain't you tole dat man dat I would be sho' to come here,

en den you would fix it so he could set a trap en ketch me?"



Tom recognized that neither lies nor arguments could help

him any longer--he was in a vise, with the screw turned on,

and out of it there was no budging.  His face began to take on an

ugly look, and presently he said, with a snarl:



"Well, what could I do?  You see, yourself, that I was in

his grip and couldn't get out."



Roxy scorched him with a scornful gaze awhile, then she said:



"What could you do?  You could be Judas to yo' own mother to

save yo' wuthless hide!  Would anybody b'lieve it?

No--a dog couldn't!  You is de lowdownest orneriest hound dat was ever

pup'd into dis worl'--en I's 'sponsible for it!"--and she spat on him.



He made no effort to resent this.  Roxy reflected a moment,

then she said:



"Now I'll tell you what you's gwine to do.  You's gwine to

give dat man de money dat you's got laid up, en make him wait

till you kin go to de judge en git de res' en buy me free agin."



"Thunder!  What are you thinking of?  Go and ask him for

three hundred dollars and odd?  What would I tell him I want it

for, pray?"



Roxy's answer was delivered in a serene and level voice.



"You'll tell him you's sole me to pay yo' gamblin' debts en

dat you lied to me en was a villain, en dat I 'quires you to git

dat money en buy me back ag'in."



"Why, you've gone stark mad!  He would tear the will to

shreads in a minute--don't you know that?"



"Yes, I does."



"Then you don't believe I'm idiot enough to go to him, do you?"



"I don't b'lieve nothin' 'bout it--I KNOWS you's a-goin'.

I knows it 'ca'se you knows dat if you don't raise dat money I'll

go to him myself, en den he'll sell YOU down de river, en you kin

see how you like it!"



Tom rose, trembling and excited, and there was an evil light in his eye.

He strode to the door and said he must get out of

this suffocating place for a moment and clear his brain in the

fresh air so that he could determine what to do.

The door wouldn't open.  Roxy smiled grimly, and said:



"I's got the key, honey--set down.  You needn't cle'r up yo'

brain none to fine out what you gwine to do--_I_ knows what you's

gwine to do."  Tom sat down and began to pass his hands through

his hair with a helpless and desperate air.

Roxy said, "Is dat man in dis house?"



Tom glanced up with a surprised expression, and asked:



"What gave you such an idea?"



"You done it.  Gwine out to cle'r yo' brain!  In de fust

place you ain't got none to cle'r, en in de second place yo'

ornery eye tole on you.  You's de lowdownest hound dat ever--

but I done told you dat befo'.  Now den, dis is Friday.

You kin fix it up wid dat man, en tell him you's gwine away to

git de res' o' de money, en dat you'll be back wid it nex' Tuesday,

or maybe Wednesday. You understan'?"



Tom answered sullenly:  "Yes."



"En when you gits de new bill o' sale dat sells me to my own self,

take en send it in de mail to Mr. Pudd'nhead Wilson,

en write on de back dat he's to keep it tell I come.  You understan'?"



"Yes."



"Dat's all den.  Take yo' umbreller, en put on yo' hat."



"Why?"



"Beca'se you's gwine to see me home to de wharf.  You see dis knife?

I's toted it aroun' sence de day I seed dat man en bought dese clo'es en it.

If he ketch me, I's gwine to kill myself wid it.  Now start along,

en go sof', en lead de way; en if you gives a sign in dis house,

or if anybody comes up to you in de street, I's gwine to jam it

right into you.  Chambers, does you b'lieve me when I says dat?"



"It's no use to bother me with that question.  I know your word's good."



"Yes, it's diff'rent from yo'n!  Shet de light out en move along--

here's de key."



They were not followed.  Tom trembled every time a late

straggler brushed by them on the street, and half expected to

feel the cold steel in his back.  Roxy was right at his heels and

always in reach.  After tramping a mile they reached a wide

vacancy on the deserted wharves, and in this dark and rainy

desert they parted.



As Tom trudged home his mind was full of dreary thoughts and

wild plans; but at last he said to himself, wearily:



"There is but the one way out.  I must follow her plan.

But with a variation--I will not ask for the money and ruin myself;

I will ROB the old skinflint."







CHAPTER 19



The Prophesy Realized





Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a

good example.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





It were not best that we should all think alike; it is

difference of opinion that makes horse races.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





Dawson's Landing was comfortably finishing its season of

dull repose and waiting patiently for the duel.

Count Luigi was waiting, too; but not patiently, rumor said.

Sunday came, and Luigi insisted on having his challenge conveyed.

Wilson carried it.  Judge Driscoll declined to fight with an assassin--

"that is," he added significantly, "in the field of honor."



Elsewhere, of course, he would be ready.  Wilson tried to

convince him that if he had been present himself when Angelo told

him about the homicide committed by Luigi, he would not have

considered the act discreditable to Luigi; but the obstinate old

man was not to be moved.



Wilson went back to his principal and reported the failure

of his mission.  Luigi was incensed, and asked how it could be

that the old gentleman, who was by no means dull-witted, held his

trifling nephew's evidence in inferences to be of more value than Wilson's.

But Wilson laughed, and said:



"That is quite simple; that is easily explicable.

I am not his doll--his baby--his infatuation:  his nature is.

The judge and his late wife never had any children.

The judge and his wife were past middle age when this treasure

fell into their lap.  One must make allowances for a parental instinct

that has been starving for twenty-five or thirty years.

It is famished, it is crazed wit hunger by that time, and will be

entirely satisfied with anything that comes handy; its taste is atrophied,

it can't tell mud cat from shad.  A devil born to a young couple is

measurably recognizable by them as a devil before long,

but a devil adopted by an old couple is an angel to them,

and remains so, through thick and thin.  Tom is this old man's angel;

he is infatuated with him.  Tom can persuade him into things which

other people can't--not all things; I don't mean that,

but a good many--particularly one class of things:  the things that

create or abolish personal partialities or prejudices in the old

man's mind.  The old man liked both of you.  Tom conceived a

hatred for you.  That was enough; it turned the old man around at once.

The oldest and strongest friendship must go to the ground

when one of these late-adopted darlings throws a brick at it."



"It's a curious philosophy," said Luigi.



"It ain't philosophy at all--it's a fact.  And there is

something pathetic and beautiful about it, too.  I think there is

nothing more pathetic than to see one of these poor old childless

couples taking a menagerie of yelping little worthless dogs to

their hearts; and then adding some cursing and squawking parrots

and a jackass-voiced macaw; and next a couple of hundred

screeching songbirds, and presently some fetid guinea pigs and

rabbits, and a howling colony of cats.  It is all a groping and

ignorant effort to construct out of base metal and brass filings,

so to speak, something to take the place of that golden treasure

denied them by Nature, a child.  But this is a digression.

The unwritten law of this region requires you to kill Judge Driscoll

on sight, and he and the community will expect that attention at

your hands--though of course your own death by his bullet will

answer every purpose.  Look out for him!  Are you healed--that is, fixed?"



"Yes, he shall have his opportunity.  If he attacks me, I will respond."



As Wilson was leaving, he said:



"The judge is still a little used up by his campaign work,

and will not get out for a day or so; but when he does get out,

you want to be on the alert."



About eleven at night the twins went out for exercise,

and started on a long stroll in the veiled moonlight.



Tom Driscoll had landed at Hackett's Store, two miles below Dawson's,

just about half an hour earlier, the only passenger for

that lonely spot, and had walked up the shore road and entered

Judge Driscoll's house without having encountered anyone either

on the road or under the roof.



He pulled down his window blinds and lighted his candle.

He laid off his coat and hat and began his preparations.

He unlocked his trunk and got his suit of girl's clothes out from

under the male attire in it, and laid it by.  Then he blacked his

face with burnt cork and put the cork in his pocket.

His plan was to slip down to his uncle's private sitting room below,

pass into the bedroom, steal the safe key from the old gentleman's

clothes, and then go back and rob the safe.  He took up his

candle to start.  His courage and confidence were high,

up to this point, but both began to waver a little now.

Suppose he should make a noise, by some accident, and get caught--

say, in the act of opening the safe?  Perhaps it would be well to go armed.

He took the Indian knife from its hiding place, and felt

a pleasant return of his wandering courage.  He slipped

stealthily down the narrow stair, his hair rising and his pulses

halting at the slightest creak.  When he was halfway down, he was

disturbed to perceive that the landing below was touched by a

faint glow of light.  What could that mean?  Was his uncle still up?

No, that was not likely; he must have left his night taper

there when he went to bed.  Tom crept on down, pausing at every

step to listen. He found the door standing open, and glanced it.

What he saw pleased him beyond measure.  His uncle was asleep on

the sofa; on a small table at the head of the sofa a lamp was

burning low, and by it stood the old man's small cashbox, closed.

Near the box was a pile of bank notes and a piece of paper

covered with figured in pencil.  The safe door was not open.

Evidently the sleeper had wearied himself with work upon his

finances, and was taking a rest.



Tom set his candle on the stairs, and began to make his way

toward the pile of notes, stooping low as he went.

When he was passing his uncle, the old man stirred in his sleep,

and Tom stopped instantly--stopped, and softly drew the knife from its

sheath, with his heart thumping, and his eyes fastened upon his

benefactor's face.  After a moment or two he ventured forward

again--one step--reached for his prize and seized it, dropping

the knife sheath.  Then he felt the old man's strong grip upon him,

and a wild cry of "Help! help!" rang in his ear.

Without hesitation he drove the knife home--and was free.

Some of the notes escaped from his left hand and fell in the blood on

the floor.  He dropped the knife and snatched them up and started to fly;

transferred them to his left hand, and seized the knife again,

in his fright and confusion, but remembered himself and flung it from him,

as being a dangerous witness to carry away with him.



He jumped for the stair-foot, and closed the door behind him;

and as he snatched his candle and fled upward,

the stillness of the night was broken by the sound of urgent footsteps

approaching the house. In another moment he was in his room,

and the twins were standing aghast over the body of the murdered man!



Tom put on his coat, buttoned his hat under it, threw on his

suit of girl's clothes, dropped the veil, blew out his light,

locked the room door by which he had just entered, taking the key,

passed through his other door into the black hall,

locked that door and kept the key, then worked his way along in the dark

and descended the black stairs.  He was not expecting to meet anybody,

for all interest was centered in the other part of the

house now; his calculation proved correct.  By the time he was

passing through the backyard, Mrs. Pratt, her servants,

and a dozen half-dressed neighbors had joined the twins and the dead,

and accessions were still arriving at the front door.



As Tom, quaking as with a palsy, passed out at the gate,

three women came flying from the house on the opposite side of the lane.

They rushed by him and in at the gate, asking him what

the trouble was there, but not waiting for an answer.

Tom said to himself, "Those old maids waited to dress--they did the same

thing the night Stevens's house burned down next door."

In a few minutes he was in the haunted house.  He lighted a candle and

took off his girl-clothes.  There was blood on him all down his

left side, and his right hand was red with the stains of the

blood-soaked notes which he has crushed in it; but otherwise he

was free from this sort of evidence.  He cleansed his hand on the straw,

and cleaned most of the smut from his face.  Then he burned the male and

female attire to ashes, scattered the ashes,

and put on a disguise proper for a tramp.  He blew out his light,

went below, and was soon loafing down the river road with the

intent to borrow and use one of Roxy's devices.  He found a canoe

and paddled down downstream, setting the canoe adrift as dawn

approached, and making his way by land to the next village,

where he kept out of sight till a transient steamer came along,

and then took deck passage for St. Louis.  He was ill at ease

Dawson's Landing was behind him; then he said to himself,

"All the detectives on earth couldn't trace me now; there's not a

vestige of a clue left in the world; that homicide will take its

place with the permanent mysteries, and people won't get done

trying to guess out the secret of it for fifty years."



In St. Louis, next morning, he read this brief telegram in

the papers--dated at Dawson's Landing:





Judge Driscoll, an old and respected citizen,

was assassinated here about midnight by a profligate Italian nobleman

or a barber on account of a quarrel growing out of the recent election.

The assassin will probably be lynched.





"One of the twins!" soliloquized Tom.  "How lucky!

It is the knife that has done him this grace.  We never know when

fortune is trying to favor us.  I actually cursed Pudd'nhead

Wilson in my heart for putting it out of my power to sell that knife.

I take it back now."



Tom was now rich and independent.  He arranged with the

planter, and mailed to Wilson the new bill of sale which sold

Roxana to herself; then he telegraphed his Aunt Pratt:





Have seen the awful news in the papers and am almost

prostrated with grief.  Shall start by packet today.

Try to bear up till I come.





When Wilson reached the house of mourning and had gathered

such details as Mrs. Pratt and the rest of the crowd could tell him,

he took command as mayor, and gave orders that nothing

should be touched, but everything left as it was until Justice

Robinson should arrive and take the proper measures as corner.

He cleared everybody out of the room but the twins and himself.

The sheriff soon arrived and took the twins away to jail.

Wilson told them to keep heart, and promised to do it best in their

defense when the case should come to trial.  Justice Robinson

came presently, and with him Constable Blake.  They examined the

room thoroughly.  They found the knife and the sheath.

Wilson noticed that there were fingerprints on the knife's handle.

That pleased him, for the twins had required the earliest comers to

make a scrutiny of their hands and clothes, and neither these

people nor Wilson himself had found any bloodstains upon them.

Could there be a possibility that the twins had spoken the truth

when they had said they found the man dead when they ran into the

house in answer to the cry for help?  He thought of that

mysterious girl at once.  But this was not the sort of work for a

girl to be engaged in.  No matter; Tom Driscoll's room must be examined.



After the coroner's jury had viewed the body and its surroundings,

Wilson suggested a search upstairs, and he went along.

The jury forced an entrance to Tom's room, but found nothing, of course.



The coroner's jury found that the homicide was committed by Luigi,

and that Angelo was accessory to it.



The town was bitter against he misfortunates, and for the

first few days after the murder they were in constant danger of

being lynched.  The grand jury presently indicted Luigi for

murder in the first degree, and Angelo as accessory before the fact.

The twins were transferred from the city jail to the

county prison to await trial.



Wilson examined the finger marks on the knife handle and

said to himself, "Neither of the twins made those marks."

Then manifestly there was another person concerned, either in his

own interest or as hired assassin."



But who could it be?  That, he must try to find out.

The safe was not opened, the cashbox was closed, and had three

thousand dollars in it.  Then robbery was not the motive,

and revenge was.  Where had the murdered man an enemy except Luigi?

There was but that one person in the world with a deep grudge against him.



The mysterious girl!  The girl was a great trial to Wilson.

If the motive had been robbery, the girl might answer; but there

wasn't any girl that would want to take this old man's life for revenge.

He had no quarrels with girls; he was a gentleman.



Wilson had perfect tracings of the finger marks of the knife handle;

and among his glass records he had a great array of

fingerprints of women and girls, collected during the last

fifteen or eighteen years, but he scanned them in vain,

they successfully withstood every test; among them were no duplicates

of the prints on the knife.



The presence of the knife on the stage of the murder was a

worrying circumstance for Wilson.  A week previously he had as

good as admitted to himself that he believed Luigi had possessed

such a knife, and that he still possessed it notwithstanding his

pretense that it had been stolen.  And now here was the knife,

and with it the twins.  Half the town had said the twins were

humbugging when the claimed they had lost their knife,

and now these people were joyful, and said, "I told you so!"



If their fingerprints had been on the handle--but useless to

bother any further about that; the fingerprints on the handle

were NOT theirs--that he knew perfectly.



Wilson refused to suspect Tom; for first, Tom couldn't

murder anybody--he hadn't character enough; secondly,

if he could murder a person he wouldn't select his doting benefactor

and nearest relative; thirdly, self-interest was in the way;

for while the uncle lived, Tom was sure of a free support and a

chance to get the destroyed will revived again, but with the

uncle gone, that chance was gone too.  It was true the will had

really been revived, as was now discovered, but Tom could not

have been aware of it, or he would have spoken of it, in his

native talky, unsecretive way.  Finally, Tom was in St. Louis

when the murder was done, and got the news out of the morning journals,

as was shown by his telegram to his aunt. These speculations were

umemphasized sensations rather than articulated thoughts,

for Wilson would have laughed at the idea of seriously

connecting Tom with the murder.



Wilson regarded the case of the twins as desperate--in fact,

about hopeless.  For he argued that if a confederate was not found,

an enlightened Missouri jury would hang them; sure;

if a confederate was found, that would not improve the matter,

but simply furnish one more person for the sheriff to hang.

Nothing could save the twins but the discovery of a person who did the

murder on his sole personal account--an undertaking which had all

the aspect of the impossible.  Still, the person who made the

fingerprints must be sought.  The twins might have no case WITH them,

but they certainly would have none without him.



So Wilson mooned around, thinking, thinking, guessing, guessing,

day and night, and arriving nowhere.  Whenever he ran

across a girl or a woman he was not acquainted with, he got her

fingerprints, on one pretext or another; and they always cost him

a sigh when he got home, for they never tallied with the finger

marks on the knife handle.



As to the mysterious girl, Tom swore he knew no such girl,

and did not remember ever seeing a girl wearing a dress like the

one described by Wilson.  He admitted that he did not always lock

his room, and that sometimes the servants forgot to lock the

house doors; still, in his opinion the girl must have made but

few visits or she would have been discovered.  When Wilson tried

to connect her with the stealing raid, and thought she might have

been the old woman' confederate, if not the very thief disguised

as an old woman, Tom seemed stuck, and also much interested,

and said he would keep a sharp eye out for this person or persons,

although he was afraid that she or they would be too smart to

venture again into a town where everybody would now be on the

watch for a good while to come.



Everybody was pitying Tom, he looked so quiet and sorrowful,

and seemed to feel his great loss so deeply.  He was playing a part,

but it was not all a part.  The picture of his alleged uncle,

as he had last seen him, was before him in the dark pretty

frequently, when he was away, and called again in his dreams,

when he was asleep.  He wouldn't go into the room where the

tragedy had happened.  This charmed the doting Mrs. Pratt, who

realized now, "as she had never done before," she said, what a

sensitive and delicate nature her darling had, and how he adored

his poor uncle.







CHAPTER 20



The Murderer Chuckles





Even the clearest and most perfect circumstantial evidence

is likely to be at fault, after all, and therefore ought to be

received with great caution.  Take the case of any pencil,

sharpened by any woman; if you have witnesses, you will find she

did it with a knife; but if you take simply the aspect of the

pencil, you will say she did it with her teeth.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





The weeks dragged along, no friend visiting the jailed twins

but their counsel and Aunt Patsy Cooper, and the day of trial

came at last--the heaviest day in Wilson's life; for with all his

tireless diligence he had discovered no sign or trace of the

missing confederate.  "Confederate" was the term he had long ago

privately accepted for that person--not as being unquestionably

the right term, but as being the least possibly the right one,

though he was never able to understand why the twins did not

vanish and escape, as the confederate had done, instead of

remaining by the murdered man and getting caught there.



The courthouse was crowded, of course, and would remain so

to the finish, for not only in the town itself, but in the

country for miles around, the trial was the one topic of

conversation among the people.  Mrs. Pratt, in deep mourning,

and Tom with a weed on his hat, had seats near Pembroke Howard,

the public prosecutor, and back of them sat a great array of friends

of the family.  The twins had but one friend present to keep

their counsel in countenance, their poor old sorrowing landlady.

She sat near Wilson, and looked her friendliest.  In the

"nigger corner" sat Chambers; also Roxy, with good clothes on,

and her bill of sale in her pocket.  It was her most precious possession,

and she never parted with it, day or night.  Tom had allowed her

thirty-five dollars a month ever since he came into his property,

and had said the he and she ought to be grateful to the twins for

making them rich; but had roused such a temper in her by this

speech that he did not repeat the argument afterward.  She said

the old judge had treated her child a thousand times better than

he deserved, and had never done her an unkindness in his life;

so she hated these outlandish devils for killing him, and shouldn't

ever sleep satisfied till she saw them hanged for it.

She was here to watch the trial now, and was going to lift up just one

"hooraw" over it if the county judge put her in jail a year for it.

She gave her turbaned head a toss and said, "When dat verdic' comes,

I's gwine to lif' dat ROOF, now, I TELL you."



Pembroke Howard briefly sketched the state's case.

He said he would show by a chain of circumstantial evidence without

break or fault in it anywhere, that the principal prisoner at the bar

committed the murder; that the motive was partly revenge,

and partly a desire to take his own life out of jeopardy, and that

his brother, by his presence, was a consenting accessory to the crime;

a crime which was the basest known to the calendar of

human misdeeds--assassination; that it was conceived by the

blackest of hearts and consummated by the cowardliest of hands;

a crime which had broken a loving sister's heart, blighted the

happiness of a young nephew who was as dear as a son, brought

inconsolable grief to many friends, and sorrow and loss to the

whole community.  The utmost penalty of the outraged law would be exacted,

and upon the accused, now present at the bar,

that penalty would unquestionably be executed.  He would reserve

further remark until his closing speech.



He was strongly moved, and so also was the whole house;

Mrs. Pratt and several other women were weeping when he sat down,

and many an eye that was full of hate was riveted upon the unhappy prisoners.



Witness after witness was called by the state,

and questioned at length; but the cross questioning was brief.

Wilson knew they could furnish nothing valuable for his side.

People were sorry for Pudd'nhead Wilson; his budding career would

get hurt by this trial.



Several witnesses swore they heard Judge Driscoll say in his

public speech that the twins would be able to find their lost

knife again when they needed it to assassinate somebody with.

This was not news, but now it was seen to have been sorrowfully

prophetic, and a profound sensation quivered through the hushed

courtroom when those dismal words were repeated.



The public prosecutor rose and said that it was within his

knowledge, through a conversation held with Judge Driscoll on the

last day of his life, that counsel for the defense had brought

him a challenge from the person charged at the bar with murder;

that he had refused to fight with a confessed assassin--

"that is, on the field of honor," but had added significantly,

that would would be ready for him elsewhere.  Presumably the person

here charged with murder was warned that he must kill or be killed the

first time he should meet Judge Driscoll.  If counsel for the

defense chose to let the statement stand so, he would not call

him to the witness stand.  Mr. Wilson said he would offer no denial.

[Murmurs in the house:  "It is getting worse and worse for Wilson's case."]



Mrs. Pratt testified that she heard no outcry, and did not

know what woke her up, unless it was the sound of rapid footsteps

approaching the front door.  She jumped up and ran out in the

hall just as she was, and heard the footsteps flying up the front

steps and then following behind her as she ran to the sitting room.

There she found the accused standing over her murdered brother.

[Here she broke down and sobbed.  Sensation in the court.]

Resuming, she said the persons entered behind her were

Mr. Rogers and Mr. Buckstone.



Cross-examined by Wilson, she said the twins proclaimed

their innocence; declared that they had been taking a walk,

and had hurried to the house in response to a cry for help which was

so loud and strong that they had heard it at a considerable

distance; that they begged her and the gentlemen just mentioned

to examine their hands and clothes--which was done, and no blood

stains found.



Confirmatory evidence followed from Rogers and Buckstone.



The finding of the knife was verified, the advertisement

minutely describing it and offering a reward for it was put in evidence,

and its exact correspondence with that description proved.

Then followed a few minor details, and the case for the state was closed.



Wilson said that he had three witnesses, the Misses Clarkson,

who would testify that they met a veiled young woman

leaving Judge Driscoll's premises by the back gate a few minutes

after the cries for help were heard, and that their evidence,

taken with certain circumstantial evidence which he would call to

the court's attention to, would in his opinion convince the court

that there was still one person concerned in this crime who had

not yet been found, and also that a stay of proceedings ought to

be granted, in justice to his clients, until that person should

be discovered.  As it was late, he would ask leave to defer the

examination of his three witnesses until the next morning.



The crowd poured out of the place and went flocking away in

excited groups and couples, taking the events of the session over

with vivacity and consuming interest, and everybody seemed to

have had a satisfactory and enjoyable day except the accused,

their counsel, and their old lady friend.  There was no cheer among these,

and no substantial hope.



In parting with the twins Aunt Patsy did attempt a good-night with

a gay pretense of hope and cheer in it, but broke down without finishing.



Absolutely secure as Tom considered himself to be,

the opening solemnities of the trial had nevertheless oppressed him

with a vague uneasiness, his being a nature sensitive to even the

smallest alarms; but from the moment that the poverty and

weakness of Wilson's case lay exposed to the court,

he was comfortable once more, even jubilant.  He left the courtroom

sarcastically sorry for Wilson.  "The Clarksons met an unknown

woman in the back lane," he said to himself, "THAT is his case!

I'll give him a century to find her in--a couple of them if he likes.

A woman who doesn't exist any longer, and the clothes

that gave her her sex burnt up and the ashes thrown away--

oh, certainly, he'll find HER easy enough!"  This reflection set him

to admiring, for the hundredth time, the shrewd ingenuities by

which he had insured himself against detection--more, against even suspicion.



"Nearly always in cases like this there is some little

detail or other overlooked, some wee little track or trace left behind,

and detection follows; but here there's not even the

faintest suggestion of a trace left.  No more than a bird leaves

when it flies through the air--yes, through the night, you may say.

The man that can track a bird through the air in the dark

and find that bird is the man to track me out and find the

judge's assassin--no other need apply.  And that is the job that

has been laid out for poor Pudd'nhead Wilson, of all people in the world!

Lord, it will be pathetically funny to see him

grubbing and groping after that woman that don't exist, and the

right person sitting under his very nose all the time!"

The more he thought the situation over, the more the humor of it

struck him.  Finally he said, "I'll never let him hear the last of

that woman.  Every time I catch him in company, to his dying day,

I'll ask him in the guileless affectionate way that used to gravel

him so when I inquired how his unborn law business was coming along,

'Got on her track yet--hey, Pudd'nhead?'"  He wanted to laugh,

but that would not have answered; there were people about, and he

was mourning for his uncle.  He made up his mind that it would be

good entertainment to look in on Wilson that night and watch him

worry over his barren law case and goad him with an exasperating

word or two of sympathy and commiseration now and then.



Wilson wanted no supper, he had no appetite.  He got out all

the fingerprints of girls and women in his collection of records

and pored gloomily over them an hour or more, trying to convince

himself that that troublesome girl's marks were there somewhere

and had been overlooked.  But it was not so.  He drew back his

chair, clasped his hands over his head, and gave himself up to

dull and arid musings.



Tom Driscoll dropped in, an hour after dark, and said with a

pleasant laugh as he took a seat:



"Hello, we've gone back to the amusements of our days of

neglect and obscurity for consolation, have we?" and he took up

one of the glass strips and held it against the light to inspect it.

"Come, cheer up, old man; there's no use in losing your grip

and going back to this child's play merely because this big

sunspot is drifting across your shiny new disk.  It'll pass,

and you'll be all right again"--and he laid the glass down.

"Did you think you could win always?"



"Oh, no," said Wilson, with a sigh, "I didn't expect that,

but I can't believe Luigi killed your uncle, and I feel very

sorry for him.  It makes me blue.  And you would feel as I do, Tom,

if you were not prejudiced against those young fellows."



"I don't know about that," and Tom's countenance darkened,

for his memory reverted to his kicking.  "I owe them no good will,

considering the brunet one's treatment of me that night.

Prejudice or no prejudice, Pudd'nhead, I don't like them,

and when they get their deserts you're not going to find me sitting

on the mourner's bench."



He took up another strip of glass, and exclaimed:



"Why, here's old Roxy's label!  Are you going to ornament

the royal palaces with nigger paw marks, too?  By the date here,

I was seven months old when this was done, and she was nursing me

and her little nigger cub.  There's a line straight across her thumbprint.

How comes that?" and Tom held out the piece of glass to Wilson.



"That is common," said the bored man, wearily.

"Scar of a cut or a scratch, usually"--and he took the strip

of glass indifferently, and raised it toward the lamp.



All the blood sank suddenly out of his face; his hand quaked,

and he gazed at the polished surface before him with the

glassy stare of a corpse.



"Great heavens, what's the matter with you, Wilson?

Are you going to faint?"



Tom sprang for a glass of water and offered it, but Wilson

shrank shuddering from him and said:



"No, no!--take it away!"  His breast was rising and falling,

and he moved his head about in a dull and wandering way, like a

person who had been stunned.  Presently he said, "I shall feel

better when I get to bed; I have been overwrought today;

yes, and overworked for many days."



"Then I'll leave you and let you get to your rest.

Good night, old man."  But as Tom went out he couldn't deny himself

a small parting gibe:  "Don't take it so hard; a body can't win

every time; you'll hang somebody yet."



Wilson muttered to himself, "It is no lie to say I am sorry

I have to begin with you, miserable dog though you are!"



He braced himself up with a glass of cold whisky, and went

to work again.  He did not compare the new finger marks

unintentionally left by Tom a few minutes before on Roxy's glass

with the tracings of the marks left on the knife handle, there

being no need for that (for his trained eye), but busied himself

with another matter, muttering from time to time, "Idiot that I was!--

Nothing but a GIRL would do me--a man in girl's clothes

never occurred to me."  First, he hunted out the plate containing

the fingerprints made by Tom when he was twelve years old, and

laid it by itself; then he brought forth the marks made by Tom's

baby fingers when he was a suckling of seven months, and placed

these two plates with the one containing this subject's newly

(and unconsciously) made record



"Now the series is complete," he said with satisfaction,

and sat down to inspect these things and enjoy them.



But his enjoyment was brief.  He stared a considerable time

at the three strips, and seemed stupefied with astonishment.

At last he put them down and said, "I can't make it out at all--

hang it, the baby's don't tally with the others!"



He walked the floor for half an hour puzzling over his enigma,

then he hunted out the other glass plates.



He sat down and puzzled over these things a good while,

but kept muttering, "It's no use; I can't understand it.

They don't tally right, and yet I'll swear the names and dates are right,

and so of course they OUGHT to tally.  I never labeled one of

these thing carelessly in my life.  There is a most extraordinary

mystery here."



He was tired out now, and his brains were beginning to clog.

He said he would sleep himself fresh, and then see what he could

do with this riddle.  He slept through a troubled and unrestful hour,

then unconsciousness began to shred away, and presently he

rose drowsily to a sitting posture.  "Now what was that dream?"

he said, trying to recall it.  "What was that dream?  It seemed

to unravel that puz--"



He landed in the middle of the floor at a bound, without

finishing the sentence, and ran and turned up his light and

seized his "records."  He took a single swift glance at them and

cried out:



"It's so!  Heavens, what a revelation!  And for twenty-three

years no man has ever suspected it!"







CHAPTER 21



Doom





He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it,

inspiring the cabbages.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





APRIL 1.  This is the day upon which we are reminded of what

we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





Wilson put on enough clothes for business purposes and went

to work under a high pressure of steam.  He was awake all over.

All sense of weariness had been swept away by the invigorating

refreshment of the great and hopeful discovery which he had made.

He made fine and accurate reproductions of a number of his

"records," and then enlarged them on a scale of ten to one with

his pantograph.  He did these pantograph enlargements on sheets

of white cardboard, and made each individual line of the

bewildering maze of whorls or curves or loops which consisted of

the "pattern" of a "record" stand out bold and black by

reinforcing it with ink.  To the untrained eye the collection of

delicate originals made by the human finger on the glass plates

looked about alike; but when enlarged ten times they resembled

the markings of a block of wood that has been sawed across the

grain, and the dullest eye could detect at a glance, and at a

distance of many feet, that no two of the patterns were alike.

When Wilson had at last finished his tedious and difficult work,

he arranged his results according to a plan in which a

progressive order and sequence was a principal feature; then he

added to the batch several pantograph enlargements which he had

made from time to time in bygone years.



The night was spent and the day well advanced now.  By the

time he had snatched a trifle of breakfast, it was nine o'clock,

and the court was ready to begin its sitting.  He was in his

place twelve minutes later with his "records."



Tom Driscoll caught a slight glimpse of the records,

and nudged his nearest friend and said, with a wink,

"Pudd'nhead's got a rare eye to business--thinks that as long as

he can't win his case it's at least a noble good chance to advertise

his window palace decorations without any expense."  Wilson was

informed that his witnesses had been delayed, but would arrive

presently; but he rose and said he should probably not have

occasion to make use of their testimony.  [An amused murmur ran

through the room:  "It's a clean backdown! he gives up without

hitting a lick!"]  Wilson continued:  "I have other testimony--

and better.  [This compelled interest, and evoked murmurs of

surprise that had a detectable ingredient of disappointment in them.]

If I seem to be springing this evidence upon the court,

I offer as my justification for this, that I did not discover its

existence until late last night, and have been engaged in

examining and classifying it ever since, until half an hour ago.

I shall offer it presently; but first I with to say a few

preliminary words.



"May it please the court, the claim given the front place,

the claim most persistently urged, the claim most strenuously and

I may even say aggressively and defiantly insisted upon by the

prosecution is this--that the person whose hand left the

bloodstained fingerprints upon the handle of the Indian knife is

the person who committed the murder."  Wilson paused, during

several moments, to give impressiveness to what he was about to say,

and then added tranquilly, "WE GRANT THAT CLAIM."



It was an electrical surprise.  No one was prepared for such

an admission.  A buzz of astonishment rose on all sides,

and people were heard to intimate that the overworked lawyer had

lost his mind.  Even the veteran judge, accustomed as he was to legal

ambushes and masked batteries in criminal procedure, was not sure

that his ears were not deceiving him, and asked counsel what it

was he had said.  Howard's impassive face betrayed no sign,

but his attitude and bearing lost something of their careless

confidence for a moment.  Wilson resumed:



"We not only grant that claim, but we welcome it and

strongly endorse it.  Leaving that matter for the present,

we will now proceed to consider other points in the case which we

propose to establish by evidence, and shall include that one in

the chain in its proper place."



He had made up his mind to try a few hardy guesses, in

mapping out his theory of the origin and motive of the murder--

guesses designed to fill up gaps in it--guesses which could help

if they hit, and would probably do no harm if they didn't.



"To my mind, certain circumstances of the case before the

court seem to suggest a motive for the homicide quite different

from the one insisted on by the state.  It is my conviction that

the motive was not revenge, but robbery.  It has been urged that

the presence of the accused brothers in that fatal room,

just after notification that one of them must take the life  of

Judge Driscoll or lose his own the moment the parties should meet,

clearly signifies that the natural of self-preservation moved my

clients to go there secretly and save Count Luigi by destroying

his adversary.



"Then why did they stay there, after the deed was done?

Mrs. Pratt had time, although she did not hear the cry for help,

but woke up some moments later, to run to that room--and there

she found these men standing and making no effort to escape.

If they were guilty, they ought to have been running out of the

house at the same time that she was running to that room.

If they had had such a strong instinct toward self-preservation as

to move them to kill that unarmed man, what had become of it now,

when it should have been more alert than ever.  Would any of us

have remained there?  Let us not slander our intelligence to that degree.



"Much stress has been laid upon the fact that the accused

offered a very large reward for the knife with which this murder

was done; that no thief came forward to claim that extraordinary

reward; that the latter fact was good circumstantial evidence

that the claim that the knife had been stolen was a vanity and a

fraud; that these details taken in connection with the memorable

and apparently prophetic speech of the deceased concerning that

knife, and the finally discovery of that very knife in the fatal

room where no living person was found present with the

slaughtered man but the owner of the knife and his brother, form

an indestructible chain of evidence which fixed the crime upon

those unfortunate strangers.



"But I shall presently ask to be sworn, and shall testify

that there was a large reward offered for the THIEF, also;

and it was offered secretly and not advertised; that this fact was

indiscreetly mentioned--or at least tacitly admitted--in what was

supposed to be safe circumstances, but may NOT have been.

The thief may have been present himself.  [Tom Driscoll had been

looking at the speaker, but dropped his eyes at this point.]

In that case he would retain the knife in his possession, not daring

to offer it for sale, or for pledge in a pawnshop.  [There was a

nodding of heads among the audience by way of admission that this

was not a bad stroke.]  I shall prove to the satisfaction of the

jury that there WAS a person in Judge Driscoll's room several

minutes before the accused entered it.  [This produced a strong

sensation; the last drowsy head in the courtroom roused up now,

and made preparation to listen.]  If it shall seem necessary,

I will prove by the Misses Clarkson that they met a veiled person--

ostensibly a woman--coming out of the back gate a few minutes

after the cry for help was heard.  This person was not a woman,

but a man dressed in woman's clothes."  Another sensation.

Wilson had his eye on Tom when he hazarded this guess, to see

what effect it would produce.  He was satisfied with the result,

and said to himself, "It was a success--he's hit!"



The object of that person in that house was robbery, not

murder.  It is true that the safe was not open, but there was an

ordinary cashbox on the table, with three thousand dollars in it.

It is easily supposable that the thief was concealed in the

house; that he knew of this box, and of its owner's habit of

counting its contents and arranging his accounts at night--if he

had that habit, which I do not assert, of course--that he tried

to take the box while its owner slept, but made a noise and was

seized, and had to use the knife to save himself from capture;

and that he fled without his booty because he heard help coming.



"I have now done with my theory, and will proceed to the

evidences by which I propose to try to prove its soundness."

Wilson took up several of his strips of glass.  When the audience

recognized these familiar mementos of Pudd'nhead's old time

childish "puttering" and folly, the tense and funereal interest

vanished out of their faces, and the house burst into volleys of

relieving and refreshing laughter, and Tom chirked up and joined

in the fun himself; but Wilson was apparently not disturbed.

He arranged his records on the table before him, and said:



"I beg the indulgence of the court while I make a few

remarks in explanation of some evidence which I am about to

introduce, and which I shall presently ask to be allowed to

verify under oath on the witness stand.  Every human being

carries with him from his cradle to his grave certain physical

marks which do not change their character, and by which he can

always be identified--and that without shade of doubt or question.

These marks are his signature, his physiological

autograph, so to speak, and this autograph can not be counterfeited,

nor can he disguise it or hide it away, nor can it

become illegible by the wear and mutations of time.

This signature is not his face--age can change that beyond

recognition; it is not his hair, for that can fall out; it is not

his height, for duplicates of that exist; it is not his form,

for duplicates of that exist also, whereas this signature is each

man's very own--there is no duplicate of it among the swarming

populations of the globe!  [The audience were interested once more.]



"This autograph consists of the delicate lines or

corrugations with which Nature marks the insides of the hands and

the soles of the feet.  If you will look at the balls of your fingers--

you that have very sharp eyesight--you will observe that

these dainty curving lines lie close together, like those that

indicate the borders of oceans in maps, and that they form

various clearly defined patterns, such as arches, circles,

long curves, whorls, etc., and that these patters differ on the

different fingers.  [Every man in the room had his hand up to the

light now, and his head canted to one side, and was minutely

scrutinizing the balls of his fingers; there were whispered

ejaculations of "Why, it's so--I never noticed that before!"]

The patterns on the right hand are not the same as those on the left.

[Ejaculations of "Why, that's so, too!"]  Taken finger for finger,

your patterns differ from your neighbor's.  [Comparisons

were made all over the house--even the judge and jury were

absorbed in this curious work.]  The patterns of a twin's right

hand are not the same as those on his left.  One twin's patters

are never the same as his fellow twin's patters--the jury will

find that the patterns upon the finger balls of the twins' hands

follow this rule.  [An examination of the twins' hands was begun at once.]

You have often heard of twins who were so exactly

alike that when dressed alike their own parents could not tell them apart.

Yet there was never a twin born in to this world

that did not carry from birth to death a sure identifier in this

mysterious and marvelous natal autograph.  That once known to you,

his fellow twin could never personate him and deceive you."



Wilson stopped and stood silent.  Inattention dies a quick

and sure death when a speaker does that.  The stillness gives

warning that something is coming.  All palms and finger balls

went down now, all slouching forms straightened, all heads came up,

all eyes were fastened upon Wilson's face.  He waited yet one, two,

three moments, to let his pause complete and perfect

its spell upon the house; then, when through the profound hush he

could hear the ticking of the clock on the wall, he put out his

hand and took the Indian knife by the blade and held it aloft

where all could see the sinister spots upon its ivory handle;

then he said, in a level and passionless voice:



"Upon this haft stands the assassin's natal autograph,

written in the blood of that helpless and unoffending old man who

loved you and whom you all loved.  There is but one man in the

whole earth whose hand can duplicate that crimson sign"--

he paused and raised his eyes to the pendulum swinging back and forth--

"and please God we will produce that man in this room

before the clock strikes noon!"



Stunned, distraught, unconscious of its own movement, the

house half rose, as if expecting to see the murderer appear at

the door, and a breeze of muttered ejaculations swept the place.

"Order in the court!--sit down!"  This from the sheriff.  He was obeyed,

and quiet reigned again.  Wilson stole a glance at Tom,

and said to himself, "He is flying signals of distress now; even

people who despise him are pitying him; they think this is a hard

ordeal for a young fellow who has lost his benefactor by so cruel

a stroke--and they are right."  He resumed his speech:



"For more than twenty years I have amused my compulsory

leisure with collecting these curious physical signatures in this town.

At my house I have hundreds upon hundreds of them.

Each and every one is labeled with name and date; not labeled the

next day or even the next hour, but in the very minute that the

impression was taken.  When I go upon the witness stand I will

repeat under oath the things which I am now saying.  I have the

fingerprints of the court, the sheriff, and every member of the jury.

There is hardly a person in this room, white or black,

whose natal signature I cannot produce, and not one of them can

so disguise himself that I cannot pick him out from a multitude

of his fellow creatures and unerringly identify him by his hands.

And if he and I should live to be a hundred I could still do it.

[The interest of the audience was steadily deepening now.]



"I have studied some of these signatures so much that I know

them as well as the bank cashier knows the autograph of his

oldest customer.  While I turn my back now, I beg that several

persons will be so good as to pass their fingers through their hair,

and then press them upon one of the panes of the window

near the jury, and that among them the accused may set THEIR

finger marks.  Also, I beg that these experimenters, or others,

will set their fingers upon another pane, and add again the marks

of the accused, but not placing them in the same order or

relation to the other signatures as before--for, by one chance in

a million, a person might happen upon the right marks by pure guesswork,

ONCE, therefore I wish to be tested twice."



He turned his back, and the two panes were quickly covered

with delicately lined oval spots, but visible only to such

persons as could get a dark background for them--the foliage of a tree,

outside, for instance.  Then upon call, Wilson went to the

window, made his examination, and said:



"This is Count Luigi's right hand; this one, three

signatures below, is his left.  Here is Count Angelo's right;

down here is his left.  How for the other pane:  here and here

are Count Luigi's, here and here are his brother's."  He faced about.

"Am I right?"



A deafening explosion of applause was the answer.

The bench said:



"This certainly approaches the miraculous!"



Wilson turned to the window again and remarked,

pointing with his finger:



"This is the signature of Mr. Justice Robinson.  [Applause.]

This, of Constable Blake.  [Applause.]  This of John Mason, juryman.

[Applause.]  This, of the sheriff.  [Applause.]

I cannot name the others, but I have them all at home, named and dated,

and could identify them all by my fingerprint records."



He moved to his place through a storm of applause--which the

sheriff stopped, and also made the people sit down, for they were

all standing and struggling to see, of course.  Court, jury,

sheriff, and everybody had been too absorbed in observing

Wilson's performance to attend to the audience earlier.



"Now then," said Wilson, "I have here the natal autographs

of the two children--thrown up to ten times the natural size by

the pantograph, so that anyone who can see at all can tell the

markings apart at a glance.  We will call the children A and B.

Here are A's finger marks, taken at the age of five months.

Here they are again taken at seven months.  [Tom started.]

They are alike, you see.  Here are B's at five months, and also at

seven months.  They, too, exactly copy each other, but the patterns

are quite different from A's, you observe.  I shall refer to these

again presently, but we will turn them face down now.



"Here, thrown up ten sizes, are the natal autographs of the

two persons who are here before you accused of murdering Judge Driscoll.

I made these pantograph copies last night, and will so

swear when I go upon the witness stand.  I ask the jury to

compare them with the finger marks of the accused upon the

windowpanes, and tell the court if they are the same."



He passed a powerful magnifying glass to the foreman.



One juryman after another took the cardboard and the glass

and made the comparison.  Then the foreman said to the judge:



"Your honor, we are all agreed that they are identical."



Wilson said to the foreman:



"Please turn that cardboard face down, and take this one,

and compare it searchingly, by the magnifier, with the fatal

signature upon the knife handle, and report your finding to the court."



Again the jury made minute examinations, and again reported:



"We find them to be exactly identical, your honor."



Wilson turned toward the counsel for the prosecution,

and there was a clearly recognizable note of warning in his voice

when he said:



"May it please the court, the state has claimed, strenuously

and persistently, that the bloodstained fingerprints upon that

knife handle were left there by the assassin of Judge Driscoll.

You have heard us grant that claim, and welcome it."  He turned

to the jury:  "Compare the fingerprints of the accused with the

fingerprints left by the assassin--and report."



The comparison began.  As it proceeded, all movement and all

sound ceased, and the deep silence of an absorbed and waiting

suspense settled upon the house; and when at last the words came,

"THEY DO NOT EVEN RESEMBLE," a thundercrash of applause followed

and the house sprang to its feet, but was quickly repressed by

official force and brought to order again.  Tom was altering his

position every few minutes now, but none of his changes brought

repose nor any small trifle of comfort.  When the house's

attention was become fixed once more, Wilson said gravely,

indicating the twins with a gesture:



"These men are innocent--I have no further concern with them.

[Another outbreak of applause began, but was promptly checked.]

We will now proceed to find the guilty.  [Tom's eyes

were starting from their sockets--yes, it was a cruel day for the

bereaved youth, everybody thought.]  We will return to the infant

autographs of A and B.  I will ask the jury to take these large

pantograph facsimilies of A's marked five months and seven months.

Do they tally?"



The foreman responded:  "Perfectly."



"Now examine this pantograph, taken at eight months,

and also marked A.  Does it tally with the other two?"



The surprised response was:



"NO--THEY DIFFER WIDELY!"



"You are quite right.  Now take these two pantographs of B's

autograph, marked five months and seven months.  Do they tally

with each other?"



"Yes--perfectly."



"Take this third pantograph marked B, eight months.

Does it tally with B's other two?"



"BY NO MEANS!"



"Do you know how to account for those strange discrepancies?

I will tell you.  For a purpose unknown to us, but probably a

selfish one, somebody changed those children in the cradle."



This produced a vast sensation, naturally; Roxana was

astonished at this admirable guess, but not disturbed by it.

To guess the exchange was one thing, to guess who did it quite another.

Pudd'nhead Wilson could do wonderful things, no doubt,

but he couldn't do impossible ones.  Safe?  She was perfectly safe.

She smiled privately.



"Between the ages of seven months and eight months those

children were changed in the cradle"--he made one of this effect-

collecting pauses, and added--"and the person who did it is in

this house!"



Roxy's pulses stood still!  The house was thrilled as with

an electric shock, and the people half rose as if to seek a

glimpse of the person who had made that exchange.  Tom was

growing limp; the life seemed oozing out of him.  Wilson resumed:



"A was put into B's cradle in the nursery; B was transferred

to the kitchen and became a Negro and a slave [Sensation--

confusion of angry ejaculations]--but within a quarter of an hour

he will stand before you white and free!  [Burst of applause,

checked by the officers.]  From seven months onward until now,

A has still been a usurper, and in my finger record he bears B's name.

Here is his pantograph at the age of twelve.

Compare it with the assassin's signature upon the knife handle.

Do they tally?"



The foreman answered:



"TO THE MINUTEST DETAIL!"



Wilson said, solemnly:



"The murderer of your friend and mine--York Driscoll of the

generous hand and the kindly spirit--sits in among you.

Valet de Chambre, Negro and slave--falsely called Thomas a Becket Driscoll

--make upon the window the fingerprints that will hang you!"



Tom turned his ashen face imploring toward the speaker, made

some impotent movements with his white lips, then slid limp and

lifeless to the floor.



Wilson broke the awed silence with the words:



"There is no need.  He has confessed."



Roxy flung herself upon her knees, covered her face with her

hands, and out through her sobs the words struggled:



"De Lord have mercy on me, po' misasble sinner dat I is!"



The clock struck twelve.



The court rose; the new prisoner, handcuffed, was removed.







CONCLUSION





It is often the case that the man who can't tell a lie

thinks he is the best judge of one.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





OCTOBER 12, THE DISCOVERY.  It was wonderful to find America,

but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.



--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar





The town sat up all night to discuss the amazing events of

the day and swap guesses as to when Tom's trial would begin.

Troop after troop of citizens came to serenade Wilson,

and require a speech, and shout themselves hoarse over every

sentence that fell from his lips--for all his sentences were golden,

now, all were marvelous.  His long fight against hard luck and

prejudice was ended; he was a made man for good.

And as each of these roaring gangs of enthusiasts marched away,

some remorseful member of it was quite sure to raise his

voice and say:



"And this is the man the likes of us have called a

pudd'nhead for more than twenty years.  He has resigned from that

position, friends."



"Yes, but it isn't vacant--we're elected."



The twins were heroes of romance, now, and with

rehabilitated reputations.  But they were weary of Western

adventure, and straightway retired to Europe.



Roxy's heart was broken.  The young fellow upon whom she had

inflicted twenty-three years of slavery continued the false

heir's pension of thirty-five dollars a month to her, but her

hurts were too deep for money to heal; the spirit in her eye was

quenched, her martial bearing departed with it, and the voice of

her laughter ceased in the land.  In her church and its affairs

she found her only solace.



The real heir suddenly found himself rich and free, but in a

most embarrassing situation.  He could neither read nor write,

and his speech was the basest dialect of the Negro quarter.

His gait, his attitudes, his gestures, his bearing, his laugh--

all were vulgar and uncouth; his manners were the manners of a slave.

Money and fine clothes could not mend these defects or cover them up;

they only made them more glaring and the more pathetic.

The poor fellow could not endure the terrors of the white man's parlor,

and felt at home and at peace nowhere but in the kitchen.

The family pew was a misery to him, yet he could nevermore enter

into the solacing refuge of the "nigger gallery"--that was closed

to him for good and all.  But we cannot follow his curious fate further--

that would be a long story.



The false heir made a full confession and was sentenced to

imprisonment for life.  But now a complication came up.

The Percy Driscoll estate was in such a crippled shape when its

owner died that it could pay only sixty percent of its great

indebtedness, and was settled at that rate.  But the creditors

came forward now, and complained that inasmuch as through an

error for which THEY were in no way to blame the false heir was

not inventoried at the time with the rest of the property, great

wrong and loss had thereby been inflicted upon them.

They rightly claimed that "Tom" was lawfully their property and had

been so for eight years; that they had already lost sufficiently

in being deprived of his services during that long period, and

ought not to be required to add anything to that loss; that if he

had been delivered up to them in the first place, they would have

sold him and he could not have murdered Judge Driscoll; therefore

it was not that he had really committed the murder, the guilt lay

with the erroneous inventory.  Everybody saw that there was

reason in this.  Everybody granted that if "Tom" were white and

free it would be unquestionably right to punish him--it would be

no loss to anybody; but to shut up a valuable slave for life--

that was quite another matter.



As soon as the Governor understood the case, he pardoned Tom at once,

and the creditors sold him down the river.





-----------------------------------------------------------------





Author's Note to THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS



A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a

troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel.

I know this from experience.  He has no clear idea of his story;

in fact he has no story.  He merely has some people in his mind,

and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge

those people into those incidents with interesting results.

So he goes to work.  To write a novel?  No--that is a thought which

comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a

little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale.  But as it is a

tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what

it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more

than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book.

I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.



And I have noticed another thing:  that as the short tale

grows into the long tale, the original intention (or motif)

is apt to get abolished and find itself superseded by a quite

different one.  It was so in the case of a magazine sketch which

I once started to write--a funny and fantastic sketch about a

prince an a pauper; it presently assumed a grave cast of its own accord,

and in that new shape spread itself out into a book.

Much the same thing happened with PUDD'NHEAD WILSON.  I had a

sufficiently hard time with that tale, because it changed itself

from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it--a most

embarrassing circumstance.  But what was a great deal worse was,

that it was not one story, but two stories tangled together; and

they obstructed and interrupted each other at every turn and

created no end of confusion and annoyance.  I could not offer the

book for publication, for I was afraid it would unseat the

reader's reason, I did not know what was the matter with it,

for I had not noticed, as yet, that it was two stories in one.

It took me months to make that discovery.  I carried the manuscript

back and forth across the Atlantic two or three times, and read

it and studied over it on shipboard; and at last I saw where the

difficulty lay.  I had no further trouble.  I pulled one of the

stories out by the roots, and left the other--a kind of literary

Caesarean operation.



Would the reader care to know something about the story

which I pulled out?  He has been told many a time how the born-

and-trained novelist works; won't he let me round and complete

his knowledge by telling him how the jackleg does it?



Originally the story was called THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS.

I meant to make it very short.  I had seen a picture of a

youthful Italian "freak"--or "freaks"--which was--or which were--

on exhibition in our cities--a combination consisting of two

heads and four arms joined to a single body and a single pair of legs--

and I thought I would write an extravagantly fantastic

little story with this freak of nature for hero--or heroes--

a silly young miss for heroine, and two old ladies and two boys for

the minor parts.  I lavishly elaborated these people and their

doings, of course.  But the take kept spreading along and

spreading along, and other people got to intruding themselves and

taking up more and more room with their talk and their affairs.

Among them came a stranger named Pudd'nhead Wilson, and woman

named Roxana; and presently the doings of these two pushed up

into prominence a young fellow named Tom Driscoll, whose proper

place was away in the obscure background.  Before the book was

half finished those three were taking things almost entirely into

their own hands and working the whole tale as a private venture

of their own--a tale which they had nothing at all to do with, by rights.



When the book was finished and I came to look around to see

what had become of the team I had originally started out with--

Aunt Patsy Cooper, Aunt Betsy Hale, and two boys, and Rowena the

lightweight heroine--they were nowhere to be seen; they had

disappeared from the story some time or other.  I hunted about

and found them--found them stranded, idle, forgotten, and

permanently useless.  It was very awkward.  It was awkward all

around, but more particularly in the case of Rowena, because

there was a love match on, between her and one of the twins that

constituted the freak, and I had worked it up to a blistering

heat and thrown in a quite dramatic love quarrel, wherein Rowena

scathingly denounced her betrothed for getting drunk, and scoffed

at his explanation of how it had happened, and wouldn't listen to it,

and had driven him from her in the usual "forever" way;

and now here she sat crying and brokenhearted; for she had found that

he had spoken only the truth; that is was not he, but the other

of the freak that had drunk the liquor that made him drunk;

that her half was a prohibitionist and had never drunk a drop in his

life, and altogether tight as a brick three days in the week, was

wholly innocent of blame; and indeed, when sober, was constantly

doing all he could to reform his brother, the other half, who

never got any satisfaction out of drinking, anyway, because

liquor never affected him.  Yes, here she was, stranded with that

deep injustice of hers torturing her poor torn heart.



I didn't know what to do with her.  I was as sorry for her

as anybody could be, but the campaign was over, the book was finished,

she was sidetracked, and there was no possible way of

crowding her in, anywhere.  I could not leave her there,

of course; it would not do.  After spreading her out so, and making

such a to-do over her affairs, it would be absolutely necessary

to account to the reader for her.  I thought and thought and

studied and studied; but I arrived at nothing.  I finally saw

plainly that there was really no way but one--I must simply give

her the grand bounce.  It grieved me to do it, for after

associating with her so much I had come to kind of like her after

a fashion, notwithstanding things and was so nauseatingly sentimental.

Still it had to be done.  So at the top of Chapter

XVII I put a "Calendar" remark concerning July the Fourth,

and began the chapter with this statistic:



"Rowena went out in the backyard after supper to see the

fireworks and fell down the well and got drowned."



It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader wouldn't notice it,

because I changed the subject right away to something else.

Anyway it loosened up Rowena from where she was stuck and

got her out of the way, and that was the main thing.  It seemed a

prompt good way of weeding out people that had got stalled, and a

plenty good enough way for those others; so I hunted up the two

boys and said, "They went out back one night to stone the cat and

fell down the well and got drowned."  Next I searched around and

found old Aunt Patsy and Aunt Betsy Hale where they were around,

and said, "They went out back one night to visit the sick and

fell down the well and got drowned."  I was going to drown some others,

but I gave up the idea, partly because I believed that if

I kept that up it would arose attention, and perhaps sympathy

with those people, and partly because it was not a large well and

would not hold any more anyway.



Still the story was unsatisfactory.  Here was a set of new

characters who were become inordinately prominent and who

persisted in remaining so to the end; and back yonder was an

older set who made a large noise and a great to-do for a little

while and then suddenly played out utterly and fell down the well.

There was a radical defect somewhere, and I must search it

out and cure it.



The defect turned out to be the one already spoken of--

two stories in one, a farce and a tragedy.  So I pulled out the farce

and left the tragedy.  This left the original team in, but only

as mere names, not as characters.  Their prominence was wholly gone;

they were not even worth drowning; so I removed that detail.

Also I took the twins apart and made two separate men of them.

They had no occasion to have foreign names now, but it was

too much trouble to remove them all through, so I left them

christened as they were and made no explanation.





End of the Project Gutenberg edition of The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson













THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS



by Mark Twain







A man who is born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of

it when he tries to build a novel.  I know this from experience.  He has

no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story.  He merely has some

people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality.  He knows

these people, he knows the selected locality, and he trusts that he can

plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.  So he

goes to work.  To write a novel?  No--that is a thought which comes

later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale; a

very little tale; a six-page tale.  But as it is a tale which he is not

acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes

along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it

spreads itself into a book.  I know about this, because it has happened

to me so many times.



And I have noticed another thing: that as the short tale grows into the

long tale, the original intention (or motif) is apt to get abolished and

find itself superseded by a quite different one.  It was so in the case

of a magazine sketch which I once started to write--a funny and fantastic

sketch about a prince and a pauper; it presently assumed a grave cast of

its own accord, and in that new shape spread itself out into a book.

Much the same thing happened with "Pudd'nhead Wilson."  I had a

sufficiently hard time with that tale, because it changed itself from a

farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it--a most embarrassing

circumstance.  But what was a great deal worse was, that it was not one

story, but two stories tangled together; and they obstructed and

interrupted each other at every turn and created no end of confusion and

annoyance.  I could not offer the book for publication, for I was afraid

it would unseat the reader's reason.  I did not know what was the matter

with it, for I had not noticed, as yet, that it was two stories in one.

It took me months to make that discovery.  I carried the manuscript back

and forth across the Atlantic two or three times, and read it and studied

over it on shipboard; and at last I saw where the difficulty lay.  I had

no further trouble.  I pulled one of the stories out by the roots, and

left the other one--a kind of literary Caesarean operation.



Would the reader care to know something about the story which I pulled

out?  He has been told many a time how the born-and-trained novelist

works.  Won't he let me round and complete his knowledge by telling him

how the jack-leg does it?



Originally the story was called "Those Extraordinary Twins."  I meant to

make it very short.  I had seen a picture of a youthful Italian "freak"

or "freaks" which was--or which were--on exhibition in our cities--a

combination consisting of two heads and four arms joined to a single body

and a single pair of legs--and I thought I would write an extravagantly

fantastic little story with this freak of nature for hero--or heroes--

a silly young miss for heroine, and two old ladies and two boys for the

minor parts.  I lavishly elaborated these people and their doings, of

course.  But the tale kept spreading along, and spreading along, and

other people got to intruding themselves and taking up more and more room

with their talk and their affairs.  Among them came a stranger named

Pudd'nhead Wilson, and a woman named Roxana; and presently the doings of

these two pushed up into prominence a young fellow named Tom Driscoll,

whose proper place was away in the obscure background.  Before the book

was half finished those three were taking things almost entirely into

their own hands and working the whole tale as a private venture of their

own--a tale which they had nothing at all to do with, by rights.



When the book was finished and I came to look around to see what had

become of the team I had originally started out with--Aunt Patsy Cooper,

Aunt Betsy Hale, the two boys, and Rowena the light-weight heroine--they

were nowhere to be seen; they had disappeared from the story some time or

other.  I hunted about and found them found them stranded, idle,

forgotten, and permanently useless.  It was very awkward.  It was awkward

all around; but more particularly in the case of Rowena, because there

was a love-match on, between her and one of the twins that constituted

the freak, and I had worked it up to a blistering heat and thrown in a

quite dramatic love-quarrel, wherein Rowena scathingly denounced her

betrothed for getting drunk, and scoffed at his explanation of how it had

happened, and wouldn't listen to it, and had driven him from her in the

usual "forever" way; and now here she sat crying and broken-hearted; for

she had found that he had spoken only the truth; that it was not he, but

the other half of the freak, that had drunk the liquor that made him

drunk; that her half was a prohibitionist and had never drunk a drop in

his life, and, although tight as a brick three days in the week, was

wholly innocent of blame; and indeed, when sober, was constantly doing

all he could to reform his brother, the other half, who never got any

satisfaction out of drinking, anyway, because liquor never affected him.

Yes, here she was, stranded with that deep injustice of hers torturing

her poor torn heart.



I didn't know what to do with her.  I was as sorry for her as anybody

could be, but the campaign was over, the book was finished, she was

sidetracked, and there was no possible way of crowding her in, anywhere.

I could not leave her there, of course; it would not do.  After spreading

her out so, and making such a to-do over her affairs, it would be

absolutely necessary to account to the reader for her.  I thought and

thought and studied and studied; but I arrived at nothing.  I finally saw

plainly that there was really no way but one--I must simply give her the

grand bounce.  It grieved me to do it, for after associating with her so

much I had come to kind of like her after a fashion, notwithstanding she

was such an ass and said such stupid irritating things and was so

nauseatingly sentimental.  Still it had to be done.  So, at the top of

Chapter XVII, I put in a "Calendar" remark concerning July Fourth, and

began the chapter with this statistic:



"Rowena went out in the back yard after supper to see the fireworks and

fell down the well and got drowned."



It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader wouldn't notice it,

because I changed the subject right away to something else.  Anyway it

loosened up Rowena from where she was stuck and got her out of the way,

and that was the main thing.  It seemed a prompt good way of weeding out

people that had got stalled, and a plenty good enough way for those

others; so I hunted up the two boys and said "they went out back one

night to stone the cat and fell down the well and got drowned."  Next I

searched around and found old Aunt Patsy Cooper and Aunt Betsy Hale where

they were aground, and said "they went out back one night to visit the

sick and fell down the well and got drowned."  I was going to drown some

of the others, but I gave up the idea, partly because I believed that if

I kept that up it would arouse attention, and perhaps sympathy with those

people, and partly because it was not a large well and would not hold any

more anyway.



Still the story was unsatisfactory.  Here was a set of new characters who

were become inordinately prominent and who persisted in remaining so to

the end; and back yonder was an older set who made a large noise and a

great to-do for a little while and then suddenly played out utterly and

fell down the well.  There was a radical defect somewhere, and I must

search it out and cure it.



The defect turned out to be the one already spoken of--two stories in

one, a farce and a tragedy.  So I pulled out the farce and left the

tragedy.  This left the original team in, but only as mere names, not as

characters.  Their prominence was wholly gone; they were not even worth

drowning; so I removed that detail.  Also I took those twins apart and

made two separate men of them.  They had no occasion to have foreign

names now, but it was too much trouble to remove them all through, so I

left them christened as they were and made no explanation.













CHAPTER I



THE TWINS AS THEY REALLY WERE



The conglomerate twins were brought on the the stage in Chapter I of the

original extravaganza.  Aunt Patsy Cooper has received their letter

applying for board and lodging, and Rowena, her daughter, insane with

joy, is begging for a hearing of it:



"Well, set down then, and be quiet a minute and don't fly around so; it

fairly makes me tired to see you.  It starts off so: 'HONORED MADAM'--"



"I like that, ma, don't you?  It shows they're high-bred."



"Yes, I noticed that when I first read it.  'My brother and I have seen

your advertisement, by chance, in a copy of your local journal--'



"It's so beautiful and smooth, ma-don't you think so?"



"Yes, seems so to me--'and beg leave to take the room you offer.  We are

twenty-four years of age, and twins--'"



"Twins!  How sweet!  I do hope they are handsome, and I just know they

are!  Don't you hope they are, ma?"



"Land, I ain't particular.  'We are Italians by birth--'"



"It's so romantic!  Just think there's never been one in this town, and

everybody will want to see them, and they're all ours!  Think of that!"



"--'but have lived long in the various countries of Europe, and several

years in the United States.'"



"Oh, just think what wonders they've seen, ma!  Won't it be good to hear

them talk?"



"I reckon so; yes, I reckon so.  'Our names are Luigi and Angelo Capello-

-'"



"Beautiful, perfectly beautiful!  Not like Jones and Robinson and those

horrible names."



"'You desire but one guest, but dear madam, if you will allow us to pay

for two we will not discommode you.  We will sleep together in the same

bed.  We have always been used to this, and prefer it.  And then he goes

on to say they will be down Thursday."



"And this is Tuesday--I don't know how I'm ever going to wait, ma!  The

time does drag along so, and I'm so dying to see them!  Which of them do

you reckon is the tallest, ma?"



"How do you s'pose I can tell, child?  Mostly they are the same

size-twins are."



"'Well then, which do you reckon is the best looking?"



"Goodness knows--I don't."



"I think Angelo is; it's the prettiest name, anyway.  Don't you think

it's a sweet name, ma?"



"Yes, it's well enough.  I'd like both of them better if I knew the way

to pronounce them--the Eyetalian way, I mean.  The Missouri way and the

Eyetalian way is different, I judge."



"Maybe--yes.  It's Luigi that writes the letter.  What do you reckon is

the reason Angelo didn't write it?"



"Why, how can I tell?  What's the difference who writes it, so long as

it's done?"



"Oh, I hope it wasn't because he is sick!  You don't think he is sick, do

you, ma?"



"Sick your granny; what's to make him sick?"



"Oh, there's never any telling.  These foreigners with that kind of names

are so delicate, and of course that kind of names are not suited to our

climate--you wouldn't expect it."





[And so-on and so-on, no end.  The time drags along; Thursday comes: the

boat arrives in a pouring storm toward midnight.]





At last there was a knock at the door and the anxious family jumped to

open it.  Two negro men entered, each carrying a trunk, and proceeded

upstairs toward the guest-room.  Then followed a stupefying apparition--

a double-headed human creature with four arms, one body, and a single

pair of legs!  It--or they, as you please--bowed with elaborate foreign

formality, but the Coopers could not respond immediately; they were

paralyzed.  At this moment there came from the rear of the group a

fervent ejaculation--"My lan'!"--followed by a crash of crockery, and the

slave-wench Nancy stood petrified and staring, with a tray of wrecked

tea-things at her feet.  The incident broke the spell, and brought the

family to consciousness.  The beautiful heads of the new-comer bowed

again, and one of them said with easy grace and dignity:



"I crave the honor, madam and miss, to introduce to you my brother, Count

Luigi Capello," (the other head bowed) "and myself--Count Angelo; and at

the same time offer sincere apologies for the lateness of our coming,

which was unavoidable," and both heads bowed again.



The poor old lady was in a whirl of amazement and confusion, but she

managed to stammer out:



"I'm sure I'm glad to make your acquaintance, sir--I mean, gentlemen.

As for the delay, it is nothing, don't mention it.  This is my daughter

Rowena, sir--gentlemen.  Please step into the parlor and sit down and

have a bite and sup; you are dreadful wet and must be uncomfortable--

both of you, I mean."



But to the old lady's relief they courteously excused themselves, saying

it would be wrong to keep the family out of their beds longer; then each

head bowed in turn and uttered a friendly good night, and the singular

figure moved away in the wake of Rowena's small brothers, who bore

candles, and disappeared up the stairs.



The widow tottered into the parlor and sank into a chair with a gasp,

and Rowena followed, tongue-tied and dazed.  The two sat silent in the

throbbing summer heat unconscious of the million-voiced music of the

mosquitoes, unconscious of the roaring gale, the lashing and thrashing of

the rain along the windows and the roof, the white glare of the

lightning, the tumultuous booming and bellowing of the thunder; conscious

of nothing but that prodigy, that uncanny apparition that had come and

gone so suddenly--that weird strange thing that was so soft-spoken and so

gentle of manner and yet had shaken them up like an earthquake with the

shock of its gruesome aspect.  At last a cold little shudder quivered

along down the widow's meager frame and she said in a weak voice:



"Ugh, it was awful just the mere look of that phillipene!"



Rowena did not answer.  Her faculties were still caked; she had not yet

found her voice.  Presently the widow said, a little resentfully:



"Always been used to sleeping together--in-fact, prefer it.  And I was

thinking it was to accommodate me.  I thought it was very good of them,

whereas a person situated as that young man is--"



"Ma, you oughtn't to begin by getting up a prejudice against him.

I'm sure he is good-hearted and means well.  Both of his faces show it."



"I'm not so certain about that.  The one on the left--I mean the one on

it's left--hasn't near as good a face, in my opinion, as its brother."



"That's Luigi."



"Yes, Luigi; anyway it's the dark-skinned one; the one that was west of

his brother when they stood in the door.  Up to all kinds of mischief and

disobedience when he was a boy, I'll be bound.  I lay his mother had

trouble to lay her hand on him when she wanted him.  But the one on the

right is as good as gold, I can see that."



"That's Angelo."



"Yes, Angelo, I reckon, though I can't tell t'other from which by their

names, yet awhile.  But it's the right-hand one--the blond one.  He has

such kind blue eyes, and curly copper hair and fresh complexion--"



"And such a noble face!--oh, it is a noble face, ma, just royal, you may

say!  And beautiful deary me, how beautiful!  But both are that; the dark

one's as beautiful as--a picture.  There's no such wonderful faces and

handsome heads in this town none that even begin.  And such hands,

especially Angelo's--so shapely and--"



"Stuff, how could you tell which they belonged to?--they had gloves on."



"Why, didn't I see them take off their hats?"



"That don't signify.  They might have taken off each other's hats.

Nobody could tell.  There was just a wormy squirming of arms in the air

--seemed to be a couple of dozen of them, all writhing at once, and it

just made me dizzy to see them go."



"Why, ma, I hadn't any difficulty.  There's two arms on each shoulder--"



"There, now.  One arm on each shoulder belongs to each of the creatures,

don't it?  For a person to have two arms on one shoulder wouldn't do him

any good, would it?  Of course not.  Each has an arm on each shoulder.

Now then, you tell me which of them belongs to which, if you can.  They

don't know, themselves--they just work whichever arm comes handy.  Of

course they do; especially if they are in a hurry and can't stop to think

which belongs to which."



The mother seemed to have the rights of the argument, so the daughter

abandoned the struggle.  Presently the widow rose with a yawn and said:



"Poor thing, I hope it won't catch cold; it was powerful wet, just

drenched, you may say.  I hope it has left its boots outside, so they can

be dried."



Then she gave a little start, and looked perplexed.



"Now I remember I heard one of them ask Joe to call him at half after

seven--I think it was the one on the left--no, it was the one to the east

of the other one--but I didn't hear the other one say any thing.  I

wonder if he wants to be called too.  Do you reckon it's too late to

ask?"



"Why, ma, it's not necessary.  Calling one is calling both.  If one gets

up, the other's got to."



"Sho, of course; I never thought of that.  Well, come along, maybe we can

get some sleep, but I don't know, I'm so shook up with what we've been

through."



The stranger had made an impression on the boys, too.  They had a word of

talk as they were getting to bed.  Henry, the gentle, the humane, said:



"I feel ever so sorry for it, don't you, Joe?"



But Joe was a boy of this world, active, enterprising, and had a

theatrical side to him:



"Sorry?  Why, how you talk!  It can't stir a step without attracting

attention.  It's just grand!"



Henry said, reproachfully:



"Instead of pitying it, Joe, you talk as if--"



"Talk as if what?  I know one thing mighty certain: if you can fix me so

I can eat for two and only have to stub toes for one, I ain't going to

fool away no such chance just for sentiment."



The twins were wet and tired, and they proceeded to undress without-any

preliminary remarks.  The abundance of sleeve made the partnership coat

hard to get off, for it was like skinning a tarantula; but it came at

last, after much tugging and perspiring.  The mutual vest followed.  Then

the brothers stood up before the glass, and each took off his own cravat

and collar.  The collars were of the standing kind, and came high up

under the ears, like the sides of a wheelbarrow, as required by the

fashion of the day.  The cravats were as broad as a bank-bill, with

fringed ends which stood far out to right and left like the wings of a

dragon-fly, and this also was strictly in accordance with the fashion of

the time.  Each cravat, as to color, was in perfect taste, so far as its

owner's complexion was concerned--a delicate pink, in the case of the

blond brother, a violent scarlet in the case of the brunette--but as a

combination they broke all the laws of taste known to civilization.

Nothing more fiendish and irreconcilable than those shrieking and

blaspheming colors could have been contrived, The wet boots gave no end

of trouble--to Luigi.  When they were off at last, Angelo said, with

bitterness:



"I wish you wouldn't wear such tight boots, they hurt my feet."



Luigi answered with indifference:



"My friend, when I am in command of our body, I choose my apparel

according to my own convenience, as I have remarked more than several

times already.  When you are in command, I beg you will do as you

please."



Angelo was hurt, and the tears came into his eyes.  There was gentle

reproach in his voice, but, not anger, when he replied:



"Luigi, I often consult your wishes, but you never consult mine.  When I

am in command I treat you as a guest; I try to make you feel at home;

when you are in command you treat me as an intruder, you make me feel

unwelcome.  It embarrasses me cruelly in company, for I can, see that

people notice it and comment on it."



"Oh, damn the people," responded the brother languidly, and with the air

of one who is tired of the subject.



A slight shudder shook the frame of Angelo, but he said nothing and the

conversation ceased.  Each buttoned his own share of the nightshirt in

silence; then Luigi, with Paine's Age of Reason in his hand, sat down in

one chair and put his feet in another and lit his pipe, while Angelo took

his Whole Duty of Man, and both began to read.  Angelo presently began to

cough; his coughing increased and became mixed with gaspings for breath,

and he was finally obliged to make an appeal to his brother's humanity:



"Luigi, if you would only smoke a little milder tobacco, I am sure I

could learn not to mind it in time, but this is so strong, and the pipe

is so rank that--"



"Angelo, I wouldn't be such a baby!  I have learned to smoke in a week,

and the trouble is already over with me; if you would try, you could

learn too, and then you would stop spoiling my comfort with your

everlasting complaints."



"Ah, brother, that is a strong word--everlasting--and isn't quite fair.

I only complain when I suffocate; you know I don't complain when we are

in the open air."



"Well, anyway, you could learn to smoke yourself."



"But my principles, Luigi, you forget my principles.  You would not have

me do a thing which I regard as a sin?"



"Oh, bosh!"



The conversation ceased again, for Angelo was sick and discouraged and

strangling; but after some time he closed his book and asked Luigi to

sing "From Greenland's Icy Mountains" with him, but he would not, and

when he tried to sing by himself Luigi did his best to drown his

plaintive tenor with a rude and rollicking song delivered in a thundering

bass.



After the singing there was silence, and neither brother was happy.

Before blowing the light out Luigi swallowed half a tumbler of whisky,

and Angelo, whose sensitive organization could not endure intoxicants of

any kind, took a pill to keep it from giving him the headache.









CHAPTER II



MA COOPER GETS ALL MIXED UP



The family sat in the breakfast-room waiting for the twins to come down.

The widow was quiet, the daughter was alive with happy excitement.  She

said:



"Ah, they're a boon, ma, just a boon!  don't you think so?"



"Laws, I hope so, I don't know."



"Why, ma, yes you do.  They're so fine and handsome, and high-bred and

polite, so every way superior to our gawks here in this village; why,

they'll make life different from what it was--so humdrum and commonplace,

you know--oh, you may be sure they're full of accomplishments, and

knowledge of the world, and all that, that will be an immense advantage

to society here.  Don't you think so, ma?"



"Mercy on me, how should I know, and I've hardly set eyes on them yet."

After a pause she added, "They made considerable noise after they went

up."



"Noise?  Why, ma, they were singing!  And it was beautiful, too."



"Oh, it was well enough, but too mixed-up, seemed to me."



"Now, ma, honor bright, did you ever hear 'Greenland's Icy Mountains'

sung sweeter--now did you?"



"If it had been sung by itself, it would have been uncommon sweet, I

don't deny it; but what they wanted to mix it up with 'Old Bob Ridley'

for, I can't make out.  Why, they don't go together, at all.  They are

not of the same nature.  'Bob Ridley' is a common rackety slam-bang

secular song, one of the rippingest and rantingest and noisiest there is.

I am no judge of music, and I don't claim it, but in my opinion nobody

can make those two songs go together right."



"Why, ma, I thought--"



"It don't make any difference what you thought, it can't be done.  They

tried it, and to my mind it was a failure.  I never heard such a crazy

uproar; seemed to me, sometimes, the roof would come off; and as for the

cats--well, I've lived a many a year, and seen cats aggravated in more

ways than one, but I've never seen cats take on the way they took on last

night."



"Well, I don't think that that goes for anything, ma, because it is the

nature of cats that any sound that is unusual--"



"Unusual!  You may well call it so.  Now if they are going to sing duets

every night, I do hope they will both sing the same tune at the same

time, for in my opinion a duet that is made up of two different tunes is

a mistake; especially when the tunes ain't any kin to one another, that

way."



"But, ma, I think it must be a foreign custom; and it must be right too;

and the best way, because they have had every opportunity to know what is

right, and it don't stand to reason that with their education they would

do anything but what the highest musical authorities have sanctioned.

You can't help but admit that, ma."



The argument was formidably strong; the old lady could not find any way

around it; so, after thinking it over awhile she gave in with a sigh of

discontent, and admitted that the daughter's position was probably

correct.  Being vanquished, she had no mind to continue the topic at that

disadvantage, and was about to seek a change when a change came of

itself.  A footstep was heard on the stairs, and she said:



"There-he's coming!"



"They, ma--you ought to say they--it's nearer right."



The new lodger, rather shoutingly dressed but looking superbly handsome,

stepped with courtly carnage into the trim little breakfast-room and put

out all his cordial arms at once, like one of those pocket-knives with a

multiplicity of blades, and shook hands with the whole family

simultaneously.  He was so easy and pleasant and hearty that all

embarrassment presently thawed away and disappeared, and a cheery feeling

of friendliness and comradeship took its place.  He--or preferably they

--were asked to occupy the seat of honor at the foot of the table.  They

consented with thanks, and carved the beefsteak with one set of their

hands while they distributed it at the same time with the other set.



"Will you have coffee, gentlemen, or tea?"



"Coffee for Luigi, if you please, madam, tea for me."



"Cream and sugar?"



"For me, yes, madam; Luigi takes his coffee, black.  Our natures differ a

good deal from each other, and our tastes also."



The first time the negro girl Nancy appeared in the door and saw the two

heads turned in opposite directions and both talking at once, then saw

the commingling arms feed potatoes into one mouth and coffee into the

other at the same time, she had to pause and pull herself out of a

faintness that came over her; but after that she held her grip and was

able to wait on the table with fair courage.



Conversation fell naturally into the customary grooves.  It was a little

jerky, at first, because none of the family could get smoothly through a

sentence without a wabble in it here and a break there, caused by some

new surprise in the way of attitude or gesture on the part of the twins.

The weather suffered the most.  The weather was all finished up and

disposed of, as a subject, before the simple Missourians had gotten

sufficiently wonted to the spectacle of one body feeding two heads to

feel composed and reconciled in the presence of so bizarre a miracle.

And even after everybody's mind became tranquilized there was still one

slight distraction left: the hand that picked up a biscuit carried it to

the wrong head, as often as any other way, and the wrong mouth devoured

it.  This was a puzzling thing, and marred the talk a little.  It

bothered the widow to such a degree that she presently dropped out of the

conversation without knowing it, and fell to watching and guessing and

talking to herself:



"Now that hand is going to take that coffee to no, it's gone to the other

mouth; I can't understand it; and how, here is the dark-complected hand

with a potato in its fork, I'll see what goes with it--there, the

light-complected head's got it, as sure as I live!"



Finally Rowena said:



"Ma, what is the matter with you?  Are you dreaming about something?"



The old lady came to herself and blushed; then she explained with the

first random thing that came into her mind: "I saw Mr. Angelo take up Mr.

Luigi's coffee, and I thought maybe he--sha'n't I give you a cup, Mr.

Angelo?"



"Oh no, madam, I am very much obliged, but I never drink coffee, much as

I would like to.  You did see me take up Luigi's cup, it is true, but if

you noticed, I didn't carry it to my mouth, but to his."



"Y-es, I thought you did: Did you mean to?"



"How?"



The widow was a little embarrassed again.  She said:



"I don't know but what I'm foolish, and you mustn't mind; but you see,

he got the coffee I was expecting to see you drink, and you got a potato

that I thought he was going to get.  So I thought it might be a mistake

all around, and everybody getting what wasn't intended for him."



Both twins laughed and Luigi said:



"Dear madam, there wasn't any mistake.  We are always helping each other

that way.  It is a great economy for us both; it saves time and labor.

We have a system of signs which nobody can notice or understand but

ourselves.  If I am using both my hands and want some coffee, I make the

sign and Angelo furnishes it to me; and you saw that when he needed a

potato I delivered it."



"How convenient!"



"Yes, and often of the extremest value.  Take the Mississippi boats, for

instance.  They are always overcrowded.  There is table-room for only

half of the passengers, therefore they have to set a second table for the

second half.  The stewards rush both parties, they give them no time to

eat a satisfying meal, both divisions leave the table hungry.  It isn't

so with us.  Angelo books himself for the one table, I book myself for

the other.  Neither of us eats anything at the other's table, but just

simply works--works.  Thus, you see there are four hands to feed Angelo,

and the same four to feed me.  Each of us eats two meals."



The old lady was dazed with admiration, and kept saying, "It is perfectly

wonderful, perfectly wonderful" and the boy Joe licked his chops

enviously, but said nothing--at least aloud.



"Yes," continued Luigi, "our construction may have its disadvantages--in

fact, has but it also has its compensations of one sort and another. Take

travel, for instance.  Travel is enormously expensive, in all countries;

we have been obliged to do a vast deal of it--come, Angelo, don't put any

more sugar in your tea, I'm just over one indigestion and don't want

another right away--been obliged to do a deal of it, as I was saying.

Well, we always travel as one person, since we occupy but one seat; so we

save half the fare."



"How romantic!" interjected Rowena, with effusion.



"Yes, my dear young lady, and how practical too, and economical.  In

Europe, beds in the hotels are not charged with the board, but

separately--another saving, for we stood to our rights and paid for the

one bed only.  The landlords often insisted that as both of us occupied

the bed we ought--"



"No, they didn't," said Angelo.  "They did it only twice, and in both

cases it was a double bed--a rare thing in Europe--and the double bed

gave them some excuse.  Be fair to the landlords; twice doesn't

constitute 'often.'"



"Well, that depends--that depends.  I knew a man who fell down a well

twice.  He said he didn't mind the first time, but he thought the second

time was once too often.  Have I misused that word, Mrs. Cooper?"



"To tell the truth, I was afraid you had, but it seems to look, now, like

you hadn't."  She stopped, and was evidently struggling with the

difficult problem a moment, then she added in the tone of one who is

convinced without being converted, "It seems so, but I can't somehow tell

why."



Rowena thought Luigi's retort was wonderfully quick and bright, and she

remarked to herself with satisfaction that there wasn't any young native

of Dawson's Landing that could have risen to the occasion like that.

Luigi detected the applause in her face, and expressed his pleasure and

his thanks with his eyes; and so eloquently withal, that the girl was

proud and pleased, and hung out the delicate sign of it on her cheeks.

Luigi went on, with animation:



"Both of us get a bath for one ticket, theater seat for one ticket,

pew-rent is on the same basis, but at peep-shows we pay double."



"We have much to' be thankful for," said Angelo, impressively, with a

reverent light in his eye and a reminiscent tone in his voice, "we have

been greatly blessed.  As a rule, what one of us has lacked, the other,

by the bounty of Providence, has been able to supply.  My brother is

hardy, I am not; he is very masculine, assertive, aggressive; I am much

less so.  I am subject to illness, he is never ill.  I cannot abide

medicines, and cannot take them, but he has no prejudice against them,

and--"



"Why, goodness gracious," interrupted the widow, "when you are sick, does

he take the medicine for you?"



"Always, madam."



"Why, I never heard such a thing in my life!  I think it's beautiful of

you."



"Oh, madam, it's nothing, don't mention it, it's really nothing at all."



"But I say it's beautiful, and I stick to it!" cried the widow, with a

speaking moisture in her eye.



"A well brother to take the medicine for his poor sick brother--I wish I

had such a son," and she glanced reproachfully at her boys.  "I declare

I'll never rest till I've shook you by the hand," and she scrambled out

of her chair in a fever of generous enthusiasm, and made for the twins,

blind with her tears, and began to shake.  The boy Joe corrected her:

"You're shaking the wrong one, ma."



This flurried her, but she made a swift change and went on shaking.



"Got the wrong one again, ma," said the boy.



"Oh, shut up, can't you!" said the widow, embarrassed and irritated.

"Give me all your hands, I want to shake them all; for I know you are

both just as good as you can be."



It was a victorious thought, a master-stroke of diplomacy, though that

never occurred to her and she cared nothing for diplomacy.  She shook the

four hands in turn cordially, and went back to her place in a state of

high and fine exultation that made her look young and handsome.



"Indeed I owe everything to Luigi," said Angelo, affectionately.

"But for him I could not have survived our boyhood days, when we were

friendless and poor--ah, so poor!  We lived from hand to mouth-lived on

the coarse fare of unwilling charity, and for weeks and weeks together

not a morsel of food passed my lips, for its character revolted me and I

could not eat it.  But for Luigi I should have died.  He ate for us

both."



"How noble!" sighed Rowena.



"Do you hear that?" said the widow, severely, to her boys.  "Let it be an

example to you--I mean you, Joe."



Joe gave his head a barely perceptible disparaging toss and said: "Et for

both.  It ain't anything I'd 'a' done it."



"Hush, if you haven't got any better manners than that.  You don't see

the point at all.  It wasn't good food."



"I don't care--it was food, and I'd 'a' et it if it was rotten."



"Shame!  Such language!  Can't you understand?  They were starving--

actually starving--and he ate for both, and--"



"Shucks!  you gimme a chance and I'll--"



"There, now--close your head!  and don't you open it again till you're

asked."



     [Angelo goes on and tells how his parents the Count and Countess had

     to fly from Florence for political reasons, and died poor in Berlin

     bereft of their great property by confiscation; and how he and Luigi

     had to travel with a freak-show during two years and suffer

     semi-starvation.]



"That hateful black-bread; but I seldom ate anything during that time;

that was poor Luigi's affair--"



"I'll never Mister him again!" cried the widow, with strong emotion,

"he's Luigi to me, from this out!"



"Thank you a thousand times, madam, a thousand times! though in truth I

don't deserve it."



"Ah, Luigi is always the fortunate one when honors are showering," said

Angelo, plaintively; "now what have I done, Mrs.  Cooper, that you leave

me out?  Come, you must strain a point in my favor."



"Call you Angelo?  Why, certainly I will; what are you thinking of!  In

the case of twins, why--"



"But, ma, you're breaking up the story--do let him go on."



"You keep still, Rowena Cooper, and he can go on all the better, I

reckon.  One interruption don't hurt, it's two that makes the trouble."



"But you've added one, now, and that is three."



"Rowena!  I will not allow you to talk back at me when you have got

nothing rational to say."









CHAPTER III



ANGELO IS BLUE



[After breakfast the whole village crowded in, and there was a grand

reception in honor of the twins; and at the close of it the gifted

"freak" captured everybody's admiration by sitting down at the piano and

knocking out a classic four-handed piece in great style.  Then the judge

took it--or them--driving in his buggy and showed off his village.]



All along the streets the people crowded the windows and stared at the

amazing twins.  Troops of small boys flocked after the buggy, excited and

yelling.  At first the dogs showed no interest.  They thought they merely

saw three men in a buggy--a matter of no consequence; but when they found

out the facts of the case, they altered their opinion pretty radically,

and joined the boys, expressing their minds as they came.  Other dogs got

interested; indeed, all the dogs.  It was a spirited sight to see them

come leaping fences, tearing around corners, swarming out of every

bystreet and alley.  The noise they made was something beyond belief--

or praise.  They did not seem to be moved by malice but only by

prejudice, the common human prejudice against lack of conformity.  If the

twins turned their heads, they broke and fled in every direction, but

stopped at a safe distance and faced about; and then formed and came on

again as soon as the strangers showed them their back.  Negroes and

farmers' wives took to the woods when the buggy came upon them suddenly,

and altogether the drive was pleasant and animated, and a refreshment all

around.



     [It was a long and lively drive.  Angelo was a Methodist, Luigi was

     a Free-thinker.  The judge was very proud of his Freethinkers'

     Society, which was flourishing along in a most prosperous way and

     already had two members--himself and the obscure and neglected

     Pudd'nhead Wilson.  It was to meet that evening, and he invited

     Luigi to join; a thing which Luigi was glad to do, partly because it

     would please himself, and partly because it would gravel Angelo.]



They had now arrived at the widow's gate, and the excursion was ended.

The twins politely expressed their obligations for the pleasant outing

which had been afforded them; to which the judge bowed his thanks,

and then said he would now go and arrange for the Free-thinkers' meeting,

and would call for Count Luigi in the evening.



"For you also, dear sir," he added hastily, turning to Angelo and bowing.

"In addressing myself particularly to your brother, I was not meaning to

leave you out.  It was an unintentional rudeness, I assure you, and due

wholly to accident--accident and preoccupation.  I beg you to forgive

me."



His quick eye had seen the sensitive blood mount into Angelo's face,

betraying the wound that had been inflicted.  The sting of the slight had

gone deep, but the apology was so prompt, and so evidently sincere, that

the hurt was almost immediately healed, and a forgiving smile testified

to the kindly judge that all was well again.



Concealed behind Angelo's modest and unassuming exterior, and unsuspected

by any but his intimates, was a lofty pride, a pride of almost abnormal

proportions, indeed, and this rendered him ever the prey of slights; and

although they were almost always imaginary ones, they hurt none the less

on that account.  By ill fortune judge Driscoll had happened to touch his

sorest point, i.e., his conviction that his brother's presence was

welcomer everywhere than his own; that he was often invited, out of mere

courtesy, where only his brother was wanted, and that in a majority of

cases he would not be included in an invitation if he could be left out

without offense.  A sensitive nature like this is necessarily subject to

moods; moods which traverse the whole gamut of feeling; moods which know

all the climes of emotion, from the sunny heights of joy to the black

abysses of despair.  At times, in his seasons of deepest depressions,

Angelo almost wished that he and his brother might become segregated from

each other and be separate individuals, like other men.  But of course as

soon as his mind cleared and these diseased imaginings passed away, he

shuddered at the repulsive thought, and earnestly prayed that it might

visit him no more.  To be separate, and as other men are!  How awkward it

would seem; how unendurable.  What would he do with his hands, his arms?

How would his legs feel?  How odd, and strange, and grotesque every

action, attitude, movement, gesture would be.  To sleep by himself, eat

by himself, walk by himself--how lonely, how unspeakably lonely!  No, no,

any fate but that.  In every way and from every point, the idea was

revolting.



This was of course natural; to have felt otherwise would have been

unnatural.  He had known no life but a combined one; he had been familiar

with it from his birth; he was not able to conceive of any other as being

agreeable, or even bearable.  To him, in the privacy of his secret

thoughts, all other men were monsters, deformities: and during

three-fourths of his life their aspect had filled him with what promised

to be an unconquerable aversion.  But at eighteen his eye began to take

note of female beauty; and little by little, undefined longings grew up

in his heart, under whose softening influences the old stubborn aversion

gradually diminished, and finally disappeared.  Men were still

monstrosities to him, still deformities, and in his sober moments he had

no desire to be like them, but their strange and unsocial and uncanny

construction was no longer offensive to him.



This had been a hard day for him, physically and mentally.  He had been

called in the morning before he had quite slept off the effects of the

liquor which Luigi had drunk; and so, for the first half-hour had had the

seedy feeling, and languor, the brooding depression, the cobwebby mouth

and druggy taste that come of dissipation and are so ill a preparation

for bodily or intellectual activities; the long violent strain of the

reception had followed; and this had been followed, in turn, by the

dreary sight-seeing, the judge's wearying explanations and laudations of

the sights, and the stupefying clamor of the dogs.  As a congruous

conclusion, a fitting end, his feelings had been hurt, a slight had been

put upon him.  He would have been glad to forego dinner and betake

himself to rest and sleep, but he held his peace and said no word, for he

knew his brother, Luigi, was fresh, unweary, full of life, spirit,

energy; he would have scoffed at the idea of wasting valuable time on a

bed or a sofa, and would have refused permission.









CHAPTER IV



SUPERNATURAL CHRONOMETRY



Rowena was dining out, Joe and Harry were belated at play, there were but

three chairs and four persons that noon at the home dinner-table--

the twins, the widow, and her chum, Aunt Betsy Hale.  The widow soon

perceived that Angelo's spirits were as low as Luigi's were high, and

also that he had a jaded look.  Her motherly solicitude was aroused, and

she tried to get him interested in the talk and win him to a happier

frame of mind, but the cloud of sadness remained on his countenance.

Luigi lent his help, too.  He used a form and a phrase which he was

always accustomed to employ in these circumstances.  He gave his brother

an affectionate slap on the shoulder and said, encouragingly:



"Cheer up, the worst is yet to come!"



But this did no good.  It never did.  If anything, it made the matter

worse, as a rule, because it irritated Angelo.  This made it a favorite

with Luigi.  By and by the widow said:



"Angelo, you are tired, you've overdone yourself; you go right to bed

after dinner, and get a good nap and a rest, then you'll be all right."



"Indeed, I would give anything if I could do that, madam."



"And what's to hender, I'd like to know?  Land, the room's yours to do

what you please with!  The idea that you can't do what you like with your

own!"



"But, you see, there's one prime essential--an essential of the very

first importance--which isn't my own."



"What is that?"



"My body."



The old ladies looked puzzled, and Aunt Betsy Hale said:



"Why bless your heart, how is that?"



"It's my brother's."



"Your brother's!  I don't quite understand.  I supposed it belonged to

both of you."



"So it does.  But not to both at the same time."



"That is mighty curious; I don't see how it can be.  I shouldn't think it

could be managed that way."



"Oh, it's a good enough arrangement, and goes very well; in fact, it

wouldn't do to have it otherwise.  I find that the teetotalers and the

anti-teetotalers hire the use of the same hall for their meetings.  Both

parties don't use it at the same time, do they?"



"You bet they don't!" said both old ladies in a breath.



"And, moreover," said Aunt Betsy, "the Freethinkers and the Baptist Bible

class use the same room over the Market house, but you can take my word

for it they don't mush up together and use it at the same time.'



"Very well," said Angelo, "you understand it now.  And it stands to

reason that the arrangement couldn't be improved.  I'll prove it to you.

If our legs tried to obey two wills, how could we ever get anywhere?

I would start one way, Luigi would start another, at the same moment--

the result would be a standstill, wouldn't it?"



"As sure as you are born!  Now ain't that wonderful!  A body would never

have thought of it."



"We should always be arguing and fussing and disputing over the merest

trifles.  We should lose worlds of time, for we couldn't go down-stairs

or up, couldn't go to bed, couldn't rise, couldn't wash, couldn't dress,

couldn't stand up, couldn't sit down, couldn't even cross our legs,

without calling a meeting first and explaining the case and passing

resolutions, and getting consent.  It wouldn't ever do--now would it?"



"Do?  Why, it would wear a person out in a week!  Did you ever hear

anything like it, Patsy Cooper?"



"Oh, you'll find there's more than one thing about them that ain't

commonplace," said the widow, with the complacent air of a person with a

property right in a novelty that is under admiring scrutiny.



"Well, now, how ever do you manage it?  I don't mind saying I'm suffering

to know."



"He who made us," said Angelo reverently, "and with us this difficulty,

also provided a way out of it.  By a mysterious law of our being, each of

us has utter and indisputable command of our body a week at a time, turn

and turn about."



"Well, I never!  Now ain't that beautiful!"



"Yes, it is beautiful and infinitely wise and just.  The week ends every

Saturday at midnight to the minute, to the second, to the last shade of

a fraction of a second, infallibly, unerringly, and in that instant the

one brother's power over the body vanishes and the other brother takes

possession, asleep or awake."



"How marvelous are His ways, and past finding out!"



Luigi said: "So exactly to the instant does the change come, that during

our stay in many of the great cities of the world, the public clocks were

regulated by it; and as hundreds of thousands of private clocks and

watches were set and corrected in accordance with the public clocks, we

really furnished the standard time for the entire city."



"Don't tell me that He don't do miracles any more!  Blowing down the

walls of Jericho with rams' horns wa'n't as difficult, in my opinion."



"And that is not all," said Angelo.  "A thing that is even more

marvelous, perhaps, is the fact that the change takes note of longitude

and fits itself to the meridian we are on.  Luigi is in command this

week.  Now, if on Saturday night at a moment before midnight we could fly

in an instant to a point fifteen degrees west of here, he would hold

possession of the power another hour, for the change observes local time

and no other."



Betsy Hale was deeply impressed, and said with solemnity:



"Patsy Cooper, for detail it lays over the Passage of the Red Sea."



"Now, I shouldn't go as far as that," said Aunt Patsy, "but if you've a

mind to say Sodom and Gomorrah, I am with you, Betsy Hale."



"I am agreeable, then, though I do think I was right, and I believe

Parson Maltby would say the same.  Well, now, there's another thing.

Suppose one of you wants to borrow the legs a minute from the one that's

got them, could he let him?"



"Yes, but we hardly ever do that.  There were disagreeable results,

several times, and so we very seldom ask or grant the privilege,

nowadays, and we never even think of such a thing unless the case is

extremely urgent.  Besides, a week's possession at a time seems so little

that we can't bear to spare a minute of it.  People who have the use of

their legs all the time never think of what a blessing it is, of course.

It never occurs to them; it's just their natural ordinary condition,

and so it does not excite them at all.  But when I wake up, on Sunday

morning, and it's my week and I feel the power all through me, oh, such a

wave of exultation and thanksgiving goes surging over me, and I want to

shout 'I can walk!  I can walk!'  Madam, do you ever, at your uprising,

want to shout 'I can walk!  I can walk!'?"



"No, you poor unfortunate cretur', but I'll never get out of my bed again

without doing it!  Laws, to think I've had this unspeakable blessing all

my long life and never had the grace to thank the good Lord that gave it

to me!"



Tears stood in the eyes of both the old ladies and the widow said,

softly:



"Betsy Hale, we have learned something, you and me."



The conversation now drifted wide, but by and by floated back once more

to that admired detail, the rigid and beautiful impartiality with which

the possession of power had been distributed, between the twins.  Aunt

Betsy saw in it a far finer justice than human law exhibits in related

cases.  She said:



"In my opinion it ain't right no, and never has been right, the way a

twin born a quarter of a minute sooner than the other one gets all the

land and grandeurs and nobilities in the old countries and his brother

has to go bare and be a nobody.  Which of you was born first?"



Angelo's head was resting against Luigi's; weariness had overcome him,

and for the past five minutes he had been peacefully sleeping.  The old

ladies had dropped their voices to a lulling drone, to help him to steal

the rest his brother wouldn't take him up-stairs to get.  Luigi listened

a moment to Angelo's regular breathing, then said in a voice barely

audible:



"We were both born at the same time, but I am six months older than he

is."



"For the land's sake!"



"'Sh!  don't wake him up; he wouldn't like my telling this.  It has

always been kept secret till now."



"But how in the world can it be?  If you were both born at the same time,

how can one of you be older than the other?"



"It is very simple, and I assure you it is true.  I was born with a full

crop of hair, he was as bald as an egg for six months.  I could walk six

months before he could make a step.  I finished teething six months ahead

of him.  I began to take solids six months before he left the breast.

I began to talk six months before he could say a word.  Last, and

absolutely unassailable proof, the sutures in my skull closed six months

ahead of his.  Always just that six months' difference to a day.  Was

that accident?  Nobody is going to claim that, I'm sure.  It was ordained

it was law it had its meaning, and we know what that meaning was.  Now

what does this overwhelming body of evidence establish?  It establishes

just one thing, and that thing it establishes beyond any peradventure

whatever.  Friends, we would not have it known for the world, and I must

beg you to keep it strictly to yourselves, but the truth is, we are no

more twins than you are."



The two old ladies were stunned, paralyzed-petrified, one may almost say

--and could only sit and gaze vacantly at each other for some moments;

then Aunt Betsy Hale said impressively:



"There's no getting around proof like that.  I do believe it's the most

amazing thing I ever heard of."  She sat silent a moment or two and

breathing hard with excitement, then she looked up and surveyed the

strangers steadfastly a little while, and added: "Well, it does beat me,

but I would have took you for twins anywhere."



"So would I, so would I," said Aunt Patsy with the emphasis of a

certainty that is not impaired by any shade of doubt.



"Anybody would-anybody in the world, I don't care who he is," said Aunt

Betsy with decision.



"You won't tell," said Luigi, appealingly.



"Oh, dear, no!" answered both ladies promptly, "you can trust us, don't

you be afraid."



"That is good of you, and kind.  Never let on; treat us always as if we

were twins."



"You can depend on us," said Aunt Betsy, "but it won't be easy, because

now that I know you ain't you don't seem so."



Luigi muttered to himself with satisfaction: "That swindle has gone

through without change of cars."



It was not very kind of him to load the poor things up with a secret like

that, which would be always flying to their tongues' ends every time they

heard any one speak of the strangers as twins, and would become harder

and harder to hang on to with every recurrence of the temptation to tell

it, while the torture of retaining it would increase with every new

strain that was applied; but he never thought of that, and probably would

not have worried much about it if he had.



A visitor was announced--some one to see the twins.  They withdrew to the

parlor, and the two old ladies began to discuss with interest the strange

things which they had been listening to.  When they had finished the

matter to their satisfaction, and Aunt Betsy rose to go, she stopped to

ask a question:



"How does things come on between Roweny and Tom Driscoll?"



"Well, about the same.  He writes tolerable often, and she answers

tolerable seldom."



"Where is he?"



"In St. Louis, I believe, though he's such a gadabout that a body can't

be very certain of him, I reckon."



"Don't Roweny know?"



"Oh, yes, like enough.  I haven't asked her lately."



"Do you know how him and the judge are getting along now?"



"First rate, I believe.  Mrs. Pratt says so; and being right in the

house, and sister to the one and aunt to t'other, of course she ought to

know.  She says the judge is real fond of him when he's away; but frets

when he's around and is vexed with his ways, and not sorry to have him go

again.  He has been gone three weeks this time--a pleasant thing for both

of them, I reckon."



"Tom's rather harum-scarum, but there ain't anything bad in him, I

guess."



"Oh, no, he's just young, that's all.  Still, twenty-three is old, in one

way.  A young man ought to be earning his living by that time.  If Tom

were doing that, or was even trying to do it, the judge would be a heap

better satisfied with him.  Tom's always going to begin, but somehow he

can't seem to find just the opening he likes."



"Well, now, it's partly the judge's own fault.  Promising the boy his

property wasn't the way to set him to earning a fortune of his own.  But

what do you think is Roweny beginning to lean any toward him, or ain't

she?"



Aunt Patsy had a secret in her bosom; she wanted to keep it there, but

nature was too strong for her.  She drew Aunt Betsy aside, and said in

her most confidential and mysterious manner:



"Don't you breathe a syllable to a soul--I'm going to tell you something.

In my opinion Tom Driscoll's chances were considerable better yesterday

than they are to-day."



"Patsy Cooper, what do you mean?"



"It's so, as sure as you're born.  I wish you could 'a' been at breakfast

and seen for yourself."



"You don't mean it!"



"Well, if I'm any judge, there's a leaning--there's a leaning, sure."



"My land!  Which one of 'em is it?"



"I can't say for certain, but I think it's the youngest one--Anjy."



Then there were hand-shakings, and congratulations, and hopes, and so on,

and the old ladies parted, perfectly happy--the one in knowing something

which the rest of the town didn't, and the other in having been the sole

person able to furnish that knowledge.



The visitor who had called to see the twins was the Rev. Mr. Hotchkiss,

pastor of the Baptist church.  At the reception Angelo had told him he

had lately experienced a change in his religious views, and was now

desirous of becoming a Baptist, and would immediately join Mr.

Hotchkiss's church.  There was no time to say more, and the brief talk

ended at that point.  The minister was much gratified, and had dropped in

for a moment now, to invite the twins to attend his Bible class at eight

that evening.  Angelo accepted, and was expecting Luigi to decline, but

he did not, because he knew that the Bible class and the Freethinkers met

in the same room, and he wanted to treat his brother to the embarrassment

of being caught in free-thinking company.









CHAPTER V



GUILT AND INNOCENCE FINELY BLENT



[A long and vigorous quarrel follows, between the twins.  And there is

plenty to quarrel about, for Angelo was always seeking truth, and this

obliged him to change and improve his religion with frequency, which

wearied Luigi, and annoyed him too; for he had to be present at each new

enlistment--which placed him in the false position of seeming to indorse

and approve his brother's fickleness; moreover, he had to go to Angelo's

prohibition meetings, and he hated them.  On the other hand, when it was

his week to command the legs he gave Angelo just cause of complaint, for

he took him to circuses and horse-races and fandangoes, exposing him to

all sorts of censure and criticism; and he drank, too; and whatever he

drank went to Angelo's head instead of his own and made him act

disgracefully.  When the evening was come, the two attended the Free-

thinkers' meeting, where Angelo was sad and silent; then came the Bible

class and looked upon him coldly, finding him in such company.  Then they

went to Wilson's house and Chapter XI of Pudd'nhead Wilson follows, which

tells of the girl seen in Tom Driscoll's room; and closes with the

kicking of Tom by Luigi at the anti-temperance mass-meeting of the Sons

of Liberty; with the addition of some account of Roxy's adventures as a

chamber-maid on a Mississippi boat.  Her exchange of the children had

been flippantly and farcically described in an earlier chapter.]



Next morning all the town was a-buzz with great news; Pudd'nhead Wilson

had a law case!  The, public astonishment was so great and the public

curiosity so intense, that when the justice of the peace opened his

court, the place was packed with people and even the windows were full.

Everybody was, flushed and perspiring; the summer heat was almost

unendurable.



Tom Driscoll had brought a charge of assault and battery against the

twins.  Robert Allen was retained by Driscoll, David Wilson by the

defense.  Tom, his native cheerfulness unannihilated by his back-breaking

and bone-bruising passage across the massed heads of the Sons of Liberty

the previous night, laughed his little customary laugh, and said to

Wilson:



"I've kept my promise, you see; I'm throwing my business your way.

Sooner than I was expecting, too."



"It's very good of you--particularly if you mean to keep it up."



"Well, I can't tell about that yet.  But we'll see.  If I find you

deserve it I'll take you under my protection and make your fame and

fortune for you."



"I'll try to deserve it, Tom."



A jury was sworn in; then Mr.  Allen said:



"We will detain your honor but a moment with this case.  It is not one

where any doubt of the fact of the assault can enter in.  These

gentlemen--the accused--kicked my client at the Market Hall last night;

they kicked him with violence; with extraordinary violence; with even

unprecedented violence, I may say; insomuch that he was lifted entirely

off his feet and discharged into the midst of the audience.  We can prove

this by four hundred witnesses--we shall call but three.  Mr. Harkness

will take the stand."



Mr. Harkness, being sworn, testified that he was chairman upon the

occasion mentioned; that he was close at hand and saw the defendants in

this action kick the plaintiff into the air and saw him descend among the

audience.



"Take the witness," said Allen.



"Mr. Harkness," said Wilson, "you say you saw these gentlemen, my

clients, kick the plaintiff.  Are you sure--and please remember that you

are on oath--are you perfectly sure that you saw both of them kick him,

or only one?  Now be careful."



A bewildered look began to spread itself over the witness's face.  He

hesitated, stammered, but got out nothing.  His eyes wandered to the

twins and fixed themselves there with a vacant gaze.



"Please answer, Mr.  Harkness, you are keeping the court waiting.  It is

a very simple question."



Counsel for the prosecution broke in with impatience:



"Your honor, the question is an irrelevant triviality.  Necessarily, they

both kicked him, for they have but the one pair of legs, and both are

responsible for them."



Wilson said, sarcastically:



"Will your honor permit this new witness to be sworn?  He seems to

possess knowledge which can be of the utmost value just at this moment--

knowledge which would at once dispose of what every one must see is a

very difficult question in this case.  Brother Allen, will you take the

stand?"



"Go on with your case!" said Allen, petulantly.  The audience laughed,

and got a warning from the court.



"Now, Mr. Harkness," said Wilson, insinuatingly, "we shall have to insist

upon an answer to that question."



"I--er--well, of course, I do not absolutely know, but in my opinion--"



"Never mind your opinion, sir--answer the question."



"I--why, I can't answer it."



"That will do, Mr.  Harkness.  Stand down."



The audience tittered, and the discomfited witness retired in a state of

great embarrassment.



Mr. Wakeman took the stand and swore that he saw the twins kick the

plaintiff off the platform.



The defense took the witness.



"Mr. Wakeman, you have sworn that you saw these gentlemen kick the

plaintiff.  Do I understand you to swear that you saw them both do it?"



"Yes, sir,"--with derision.



"How do you know that both did it?"



"Because I saw them do it."



The audience laughed, and got another warning from the court.



"But by what means do you know that both, and not one, did it?"



"Well, in the first place, the insult was given to both of them equally,

for they were called a pair of scissors.  Of course they would both want

to resent it, and so--"



"Wait!  You are theorizing now.  Stick to facts--counsel will attend to

the arguments.  Go on."



"Well, they both went over there--that I saw."



"Very good.  Go on."



"And they both kicked him--I swear to it."



"Mr. Wakeman, was Count Luigi, here, willing to join the Sons of Liberty

last night?"



"Yes, sir, he was.  He did join, too, and drank a glass or two of whisky,

like a man."



"Was his brother willing to join?"



"No, sir, he wasn't.  He is a teetotaler, and was elected through a

mistake."



"Was he given a glass of whisky?"



"Yes, sir, but of course that was another mistake, and not intentional.

He wouldn't drink it.  He set it down."  A slight pause, then he added,

casually and quite simply: "The plaintiff reached for it and hogged it."



There was a fine outburst of laughter, but as the justice was caught out

himself, his reprimand was not very vigorous.



Mr. Allen jumped up and exclaimed: "I protest against these foolish

irrelevancies.  What have they to do with the case?"



Wilson said: "Calm yourself, brother, it was only an experiment.  Now,

Mr. Wakeman, if one of these gentlemen chooses to join an association and

the other doesn't; and if one of them enjoys whisky and the other

doesn't, but sets it aside and leaves it unprotected" (titter from the

audience), "it seems to show that they have independent minds, and

tastes, and preferences, and that one of them is able to approve of a

thing at the very moment that the other is heartily disapproving of it.

Doesn't it seem so to you?"



"Certainly it does.  It's perfectly plain."



"Now, then, it might be--I only say it might be--that one of these

brothers wanted to kick the plaintiff last night, and that the other

didn't want that humiliating punishment inflicted upon him in that public

way and before all those people.  Isn't that possible?"



"Of course it is.  It's more than possible.  I don't believe the blond

one would kick anybody.  It was the other one that--"



"Silence!" shouted the plaintiff's counsel, and went on with an angry

sentence which was lost in the wave of laughter that swept the house.



"That will do, Mr.  Wakeman," said Wilson, "you may stand down."



The third witness was called.  He had seen the twins kick the plaintiff.

Mr. Wilson took the witness.



"Mr. Rogers, you say you saw these accused gentlemen kick the plaintiff?"



"Yes, sir."



"Both of them?"



"Yes, sir."



"Which of them kicked him first?"



"Why--they--they both kicked him at the same time.



"Are you perfectly sure of that?"



"Yes, sir."



"What makes you sure of it?"



"Why, I stood right behind them, and saw them do it."



"How many kicks were delivered?"



"Only one."



"If two men kick, the result should be two kicks, shouldn't it?"



"Why--why yes, as a rule."



"Then what do you think went with the other kick?"



"I--well--the fact is, I wasn't thinking of two being necessary, this

time."



"What do you think now?"



"Well, I--I'm sure I don't quite know what to think, but I reckon that

one of them did half of the kick and the other one did the other half."



Somebody in the crowd sung out: "It's the first sane thing that any of

them has said."



The audience applauded.  The judge said: "Silence! or I will clear the

court."



Mr. Allen looked pleased, but Wilson did not seem disturbed.  He said:



"Mr. Rogers, you have favored us with what you think and what you reckon,

but as thinking and reckoning are not evidence, I will now give you a

chance to come out with something positive, one way or the other, and

shall require you to produce it.  I will ask the accused to stand up and

repeat the phenomenal kick of last night."  The twins stood up.  "Now,

Mr. Rogers, please stand behind them."



A Voice: "No, stand in front!" (Laughter.  Silenced by the court.)

Another Voice:  "No, give Tommy another highst!"  (Laughter.  Sharply

rebuked by the court.)



"Now, then, Mr. Rogers, two kicks shall be delivered, one after the

other, and I give you my word that at least one of the two shall be

delivered by one of the twins alone, without the slightest assistance

from his brother.  Watch sharply, for you have of to render a decision

without any if's and ands it."  Rogers bent himself behind the twins with

palms just above his knees, in the modern attitude of the catcher at a

baseball match, and riveted eyes on the pair of legs in front of him.



"Are you ready, Mr.  Rogers?"



"Ready sir."



The kick, launched.



"Have you got that one classified, Mr.  Rogers?"



"Let me study a minute, sir."



"Take as much time as you please.  Let me know when you are ready."



For as much as a minute Rogers pondered, with all eyes and a breathless

interest fastened upon him.  Then he gave the word: "Ready, sir."



"Kick!"



The kick that followed was an exact duplicate of the first one.



"Now, then, Mr.  Rogers, one of those kicks was an individual kick, not a

mutual one.  You will now state positively which was the mutual one."



The witness said, with a crestfallen look:



"I've got to give it up.  There ain't any man in the world that could

tell t'other from which, sir."



"Do you still assert that last night's kick was a mutual kick?"



"Indeed, I don't, sir."



"That will do, Mr.  Rogers.  If my brother Allen desires to address the

court, your honor, very well; but as far as I am concerned I am ready to

let the case be at once delivered into the hands of this intelligent jury

without comment."



Mr.  Justice Robinson had been in office only two months, and in that

short time had not had many cases to try, of course.  He had no knowledge

of laws and courts except what he had picked up since he came into

office.  He was a sore trouble to the lawyers, for his rulings were

pretty eccentric sometimes, and he stood by them with Roman simplicity

and fortitude; but the people were well satisfied with him, for they saw

that his intentions were always right, that he was entirely impartial,

and that he usually made up in good sense what he lacked in technique,

so to speak.  He now perceived that there was likely to be a miscarriage

of justice here, and he rose to the occasion.



"Wait a moment, gentlemen," he said, "it is plain that an assault has

been committed it is plain to anybody; but the way things are going, the

guilty will certainly escape conviction.  I can not allow this.  Now---"



"But, your honor!" said Wilson, interrupting him, earnestly but

respectfully, "you are deciding the case yourself, whereas the jury--"



"Never mind the jury, Mr. Wilson; the jury will have a chance when there

is a reasonable doubt for them to take hold of--which there isn't,

so far.  There is no doubt whatever that an assault has been committed.

The attempt to show that both of the accused committed it has failed.

Are they both to escape justice on that account?  Not in this court,

if I can prevent it.  It appears to have been a mistake to bring the

charge against them as a corporation; each should have been charged in

his capacity as an individual, and--"



"But, your honor!" said Wilson, "in fairness to my clients I must insist

that inasmuch as the prosecution 'd not separate the--"



"No wrong will be done your clients, sir--they will be protected;

also the public and the offended laws.  Mr. Allen, you will amend your

pleadings, and put one of the accused on trial at a time."



Wilson broke in: "But, your honor! this is wholly unprecedented!

To imperil an accused person by arbitrarily altering and widening the

charge against him in order to compass his conviction when the charge as

originally brought promises to fail to convict, is a thing unheard of

before."



"Unheard of where?"



"In the courts of this or any other state."



The judge said with dignity: "I am not acquainted with the customs of

other courts, and am not concerned to know what they are.  I am

responsible for this court, and I cannot conscientiously allow my

judgment to be warped and my judicial liberty hampered by trying to

conform to the caprices of other courts, be they--"



"But, your honor, the oldest and highest courts in Europe--"



"This court is not run on the European plan, Mr. Wilson; it is not run on

any plan but its own.  It has a plan of its own; and that plan is,

to find justice for both State and accused, no matter what happens to be

practice and custom in Europe or anywhere else."  (Great applause.)

"Silence!  It has not been the custom of this court to imitate other

courts; it has not been the custom of this court to take shelter behind

the decisions of other courts, and we will not begin now.  We will do the

best we can by the light that God has given us, and while this 'court

continues to have His approval, it will remain indifferent to what other

organizations may think of it."  (Applause.) "Gentlemen, I must have

order!--quiet yourselves!  Mr. Allen, you will now proceed against the

prisoners one at a time.  Go on with the case."



Allen was not at his ease.  However, after whispering a moment with his

client and with one or two other people, he rose and said:



"Your honor, I find it to be reported and believed that the accused are

able to act independently in many ways, but that this independence does

not extend to their legs, authority over their legs being vested

exclusively in the one brother during a specific term of days, and then

passing to the other brother for a like term, and so on, by regular

alternation.  I could call witnesses who would prove that the accused had

revealed to them the existence of this extraordinary fact, and had also

made known which of them was in possession of the legs yesterday--and

this would, of course, indicate where the guilt of the assault belongs--

but as this would be mere hearsay evidence, these revelations not having

been made under oath"



"Never mind about that, Mr. Allen.  It may not all be hearsay.  We shall

see.  It may at least help to put us on the right track.  Call the

witnesses."



"Then I will call Mr. John Buckstone, who is now present, and I beg that

Mrs. Patsy Cooper may be sent for.  Take the stand, Mr. Buckstone."



Buckstone took the oath, and then testified that on the previous evening

the Count Angelo Capello had protested against going to the hall, and had

called all present to witness that he was going by compulsion and would

not go if he could help himself.  Also, that the Count Luigi had replied

sharply that he would go, just the same, and that he, Count Luigi, would

see to that himself.  Also, that upon Count Angelo's complaining about

being kept on his legs so long, Count Luigi retorted with apparent

surprise, "Your legs!--I like your impudence!"



"Now we are getting at the kernel of the thing," observed the judge, with

grave and earnest satisfaction.  "It looks as if the Count Luigi was in

possession of the battery at the time of the assault."



Nothing further was elicited from Mr. Buckstone on direct examination.

Mr. Wilson took the witness.



"Mr. Buckstone, about what time was it that that conversation took

place?"



"Toward nine yesterday evening, sir."



"Did you then proceed directly to the hall?"



"Yes, sir."



"How long did it take you to go there?"



"Well, we walked; and as it was from the extreme edge of the town, and

there was no hurry, I judge it took us about twenty minutes, maybe a

trifle more."



"About what hour was the kick delivered?"



"About thirteen minutes and a half to ten."



"Admirable!  You are a pattern witness, Mr. Buckstone.  How did you

happen to look at your watch at that particular moment?"



"I always do it when I see an assault.  It's likely I shall be called as

a witness, and it's a good point to have."



"It would be well if others were as thoughtful.  Was anything said,

between the conversation at my house and the assault, upon the detail

which we are now examining into?"



"No, sir."



"If power over the mutual legs was in the possession of one brother at

nine, and passed into the possession of the other one during the next

thirty or forty minutes, do you think you could have detected the

change?"



"By no means!"



"That is all, Mr.  Buckstone."



Mrs. Patsy Cooper was called.  The crowd made way for her, and she came

smiling and bowing through the narrow human lane, with Betsy Hale, as

escort and support, smiling and bowing in her wake, the audience breaking

into welcoming cheers as the old favorites filed along.  The judge did

not check this kindly demonstration of homage and affection, but let it

run its course unrebuked.



The old ladies stopped and shook hands with the twins with effusion, then

gave the judge a friendly nod, and bustled into the seats provided for

them.  They immediately began to deliver a volley of eager questions at

the friends around them: "What is this thing for?"  "What is that thing

for?"  "Who is that young man that's writing at the desk?  Why, I

declare, it's Jack Bunce!  I thought he was sick."  "Which is the jury?

Why, is that the jury?  Billy Price and Job Turner, and Jack Lounsbury,

and--well, I never!"  "Now who would ever 'a' thought--"



But they were gently called to order at this point, and asked not to talk

in court.  Their tongues fell silent, but the radiant interest in their

faces remained, and their gratitude for the blessing of a new sensation

and a novel experience still beamed undimmed from their eyes.  Aunt Patsy

stood up and took the oath, and Mr. Allen explained the point in issue,

and asked her to go on now, in her own way, and throw as much light upon

it as she could.  She toyed with her reticule a moment or two, as if

considering where to begin, then she said:



"Well, the way of it is this.  They are Luigi's legs a week at a time,

and then they are Angelo's, and he can do whatever he wants to with

them."



"You are making a mistake, Aunt Patsy Cooper," said the judge.  "You

shouldn't state that as a fact, because you don't know it to be a fact."



"What's the reason I don't?" said Aunt Patsy, bridling a little.



"What is the reason that you do know it?"



"The best in the world because they told me."



"That isn't a reason."



"Well, for the land's sake!  Betsy Hale, do you hear that?"



"Hear it?  I should think so," said Aunt Betsy, rising and facing the

court.  "Why, Judge, I was there and heard it myself.  Luigi says to

Angelo--no, it was Angelo said it to--"



"Come, come, Mrs.  Hale, pray sit down, and--"



"Certainly, it's all right, I'm going to sit down presently, but not

until I've--"



"But you must sit down!"



"Must!  Well, upon my word if things ain't getting to a pretty pass

when--"



The house broke into laughter, but was promptly brought to order, and

meantime Mr. Allen persuaded the old lady to take her seat.  Aunt Patsy

continued:



"Yes, they told me that, and I know it's true.  They're Luigi's legs this

week, but--"



"Ah, they told you that, did they?" said the Justice, with interest.



"Well, no, I don't know that they told me, but that's neither here nor

there.  I know, without that, that at dinner yesterday, Angelo was as

tired as a dog, and yet Luigi wouldn't lend him the legs to go up-stairs

and take a nap with."



"Did he ask for them?"



"Let me see--it seems to me, somehow, that--that--Aunt Betsy, do you

remember whether he--"



"Never mind about what Aunt Betsy remembers--she is not a witness; we

only want to know what you remember yourself," said the judge.



"Well, it does seem to, me that you are most cantankerously particular

about a little thing, Sim Robinson.  Why, when I can't remember a thing

myself, I always--"





"Ah, please go on!"



"Now how can she when you keep fussing at her all the time?" said Aunt

Betsy.  "Why, with a person pecking at me that way, I should get that

fuzzled and fuddled that--"



She was on her feet again, but Allen coaxed her into her seat once more,

while the court squelched the mirth of the house.  Then the judge said:



"Madam, do you know--do you absolutely know, independently of anything

these gentlemen have told you--that the power over their legs passes from

the one to the other regularly every week?"



"Regularly?  Bless your heart, regularly ain't any name for the exactness

of it!  All the big cities in Europe used to set the clocks by it."

(Laughter, suppressed by the court.)



"How do you know?  That is the question.  Please answer it plainly and

squarely."



"Don't you talk to me like that, Sim Robinson--I won't have it.  How do

I know, indeed!  How do you know what you know?  Because somebody told

you.  You didn't invent it out of your own head, did you?  Why, these

twins are the truthfulest people in the world; and I don't think it

becomes you to sit up there and throw slurs at them when they haven't

been doing anything to you.  And they are orphans besides--both of them.

All--"



But Aunt Betsy was up again now, and both old ladies were talking at once

and with all their might; but as the house was weltering in a storm of

laughter, and the judge was hammering his desk with an iron paper-weight,

one could only see them talk, not hear them.  At last, when quiet was

restored, the court said:



"Let the ladies retire."



"But, your honor, I have the right, in the interest of my clients,--to

cross-exam--"



"You'll not need to exercise it, Mr. Wilson--the evidence is thrown out."



"Thrown out!" said Aunt Patsy, ruffled; "and what's it thrown out for,

I'd like to know."



"And so would I, Patsy Cooper.  It seems to me that if we can save these

poor persecuted strangers, it is our bounden duty to stand up here and

talk for them till--"



"There, there, there, do sit down!"



It cost some trouble and a good deal of coaxing, but they were got into

their seats at last.  The trial was soon ended now.  The twins themselves

became witnesses in their own defense.  They established the fact, upon

oath, that the leg-power passed from one to the other every Saturday

night at twelve o'clock sharp.  But or cross-examination their counsel

would not allow them to tell whose week of power the current week was.

The judge insisted upon their answering, and proposed to compel them, but

even the prosecution took fright and came to the rescue then, and helped

stay the sturdy jurist's revolutionary hand.  So the case had to go to

the jury with that important point hanging in the air.  They were out an

hour and brought in this verdict:



"We the jury do find:  1, that an assault was committed, as charged;

2, that it was committed by one of the persons accused, he having been

seen to do it by several credible witnesses; 3, but that his identity is

so merged in his brother's that we have not been able to tell which was

him.  We cannot convict both, for only one is guilty.  We cannot acquit

both, for only one is innocent.  Our verdict is that justice has been

defeated by the dispensation of God, and ask to be discharged from

further duty."



This was read aloud in court and brought out a burst of hearty applause.

The old ladies made a spring at the twins, to shake and congratulate, but

were gently disengaged by Mr. Wilson and softly crowded back into their

places.



The judge rose in his little tribune, laid aside his silver-bowed

spectacles, roached his gray hair up with his fingers, and said, with

dignity and solemnity, and even with a certain pathos:



"In all my experience on the bench, I have not seen justice bow her head

in shame in this court until this day.  You little realize what far-

reaching harm has just been wrought here under the fickle forms of law.

Imitation is the bane of courts--I thank God that this one is free from

the contamination of that vice--and in no long time you will see the

fatal work of this hour seized upon by profligate so-called guardians of

justice in all the wide circumstance of this planet and perpetuated in

their pernicious decisions.  I wash my hands of this iniquity.  I would

have compelled these culprits to expose their guilt, but support failed

me where I had most right to expect aid and encouragement.  And I was

confronted by a law made in the interest of crime, which protects the

criminal from testifying against himself.  Yet I had precedents of my own

whereby I had set aside that law on two different occasions and thus

succeeded in convicting criminals to whose crimes there were no witnesses

but themselves.  What have you accomplished this day?  Do you realize it?

You have set adrift, unadmonished, in this community, two men endowed

with an awful and mysterious gift, a hidden and grisly power for evil--

a power by which each in his turn may commit crime after crime of the

most heinous character, and no man be able to tell which is the guilty or

which the innocent party in any case of them all.  Look to your homes

look to your property look to your lives for you have need!



"Prisoners at the bar, stand up.  Through suppression of evidence, a jury

of your--our--countrymen have been obliged to deliver a verdict

concerning your case which stinks to heaven with the rankness of its

injustice.  By its terms you, the guilty one, go free with the innocent.

Depart in peace, and come no more!  The costs devolve upon the outraged

plaintiff--another iniquity.  The court stands dissolved."



Almost everybody crowded forward to overwhelm the twins and their counsel

with congratulations; but presently the two old aunties dug the

duplicates out and bore them away in triumph through the hurrahing crowd,

while lots of new friends carried Pudd'nhead Wilson off tavernward to

feast him and "wet down" his great and victorious entry into the legal

arena.  To Wilson, so long familiar with neglect and depreciation, this

strange new incense of popularity and admiration was as a fragrance blown

from the fields of paradise.  A happy man was Wilson.









CHAPTER VI



THE AMAZING DUEL



     A deputation came in the evening and conferred upon Wilson the

     welcome honor of a nomination for mayor; for the village has just

     been converted into a city by charter.  Tom skulks out of

     challenging the twins.  Judge Driscoll thereupon challenges Angelo

     (accused by Tom of doing the kicking); he declines, but Luigi

     accepts in his place against Angelo's timid protest.



It was late Saturday night nearing eleven.



The judge and his second found the rest of the war party at the further

end of the vacant ground, near the haunted house.  Pudd'nhead Wilson

advanced to meet them, and said anxiously:



"I must say a word in behalf of my principal's proxy, Count Luigi, to

whom you have kindly granted the privilege of fighting my principal's

battle for him.  It is growing late, and Count Luigi is in great trouble

lest midnight shall strike before the finish."



"It is another testimony," said Howard, approvingly.  "That young man is

fine all through.  He wishes to save his brother the sorrow of fighting

on the Sabbath, and he is right; it is the right and manly feeling and

does him credit.  We will make all possible haste."



Wilson said: "There is also another reason--a consideration, in fact,

which deeply concerns Count Luigi himself.  These twins have command of

their mutual legs turn about.  Count Luigi is in command now; but at

midnight, possession will pass to my principal, Count Angelo, and--well,

you can foresee what will happen.  He will march straight off the field,

and carry Luigi with him."



"Why! sure enough!" cried the judge, "we have heard something about that

extraordinary law of their being, already--nothing very definite, it is

true, as regards dates and durations of power, but I see it is definite

enough as regards to-night.  Of course we must give Luigi every chance.

Omit all the ceremonial possible, gentlemen, and place us in position."



The seconds at once tossed up a coin; Howard won the choice.  He placed

the judge sixty feet from the haunted house and facing it; Wilson placed

the twins within fifteen feet of the house and facing the judge--

necessarily.  The pistol-case was opened and the long slim tubes taken

out; when the moonlight glinted from them a shiver went through Angelo.

The doctor was a fool, but a thoroughly well-meaning one, with a kind

heart and a sincere disposition to oblige, but along with it an absence

of tact which often hurt its effectiveness.  He brought his box of lint

and bandages, and asked Angelo to feel and see how soft and comfortable

they were.  Angelo's head fell over against Luigi's in a faint, and

precious time was lost in bringing him to; which provoked Luigi into

expressing his mind to the doctor with a good deal of vigor and

frankness.  After Angelo came to he was still so weak that Luigi was

obliged to drink a stiff horn of brandy to brace him up.



The seconds now stepped at once to their posts, halfway between the

combatants, one of them on each side of the line of fire.  Wilson was to

count, very deliberately, "One-two-three-fire!--stop!" and the duelists

could bang away at any time they chose during that recitation, but not

after the last word.  Angelo grew very nervous when he saw Wilson's hand

rising slowly into the air as a sign to make ready, and he leaned his

head against Luigi's and said:



"Oh, please take me away from here, I can't stay, I know I can't!"



"What in the world are you doing?  Straighten up!  What's the matter with

you?--you're in no danger--nobody's going to shoot at you.  Straighten

up, I tell you!"



Angelo obeyed, just in time to hear:



"One--!"



"Bang!"  Just one report, and a little tuft of white hair floated slowly

to the judge's feet in the moonlight.  The judge did not swerve; he still

stood erect and motionless, like a statue, with his pistol-arm hanging

straight down at his side.  He was reserving his fire.



"Two--!"



"Three--"!



"Fire--!"



Up came the pistol-arm instantly-Angelo dodged with the report.  He said

"Ouch!" and fainted again.



The doctor examined and bandaged the wound.



It was of no consequence, he said--bullet through fleshy part of arm--no

bones broken the gentleman was still able to fight let the duel proceed.



Next time Angelo jumped just as Luigi fired, which disordered his aim and

caused him to cut a chip off of Howard's ear.  The judge took his time

again, and when he fired Angelo jumped and got a knuckle skinned.  The

doctor inspected and dressed the wounds.  Angelo now spoke out and said

he was content with the satisfaction he had got, and if the judge--but

Luigi shut him roughly up, and asked him not to make an ass of himself;

adding:



"And I want you to stop dodging.  You take a great deal too prominent a

part in this thing for a person who has got nothing to do with it.  You

should remember that you are here only by courtesy, and are without

official recognition; officially you are not here at all; officially you

do not even exist.  To all intents and purposes you are absent from this

place, and you ought for your own modesty's sake to reflect that it

cannot become a person who is not present here to be taking this sort of

public and indecent prominence in a matter in which he is not in the

slightest degree concerned.  Now, don't dodge again; the bullets are not

for you, they are for me; if I want them dodged I will attend to it

myself.  I never saw a person act so."



Angelo saw the reasonableness of what his brother had said, and he did

try to reform, but it was of no use; both pistols went off at the same

instant, and he jumped once more; he got a sharp scrape along his cheek

from the judge's bullet, and so deflected Luigi's aim that his ball went

wide and chipped flake of skin from Pudd'nhead Wilson's chin.  The doctor

attended to the wounded.



By the terms, the duel was over.  But Luigi was entirely out of patience,

and begged for one exchange of shots, insisting that he had had no fair

chance, on account of his brother's indelicate behavior.  Howard was

opposed to granting so unusual a privilege, but the judge took Luigi's

part, and added that indeed he himself might fairly be considered

entitled to another trial, because although the proxy on the other side

was in no way to blame for his (the judge's) humiliatingly resultless

work, the gentleman with whom he was fighting this duel was to blame for

it, since if he had played no advantages and had held his head still, his

proxy would have been disposed of early.  He added:



"Count Luigi's request for another exchange is another proof that he is a

brave and chivalrous gentleman, and I beg that the courtesy he asks may

be accorded him."



"I thank you most sincerely for this generosity, Judge Driscoll," said

Luigi, with a polite bow, and moving to his place.  Then he added to

Angelo, "Now hold your grip, hold your grip, I tell you, and I'll land

him sure!"



The men stood erect, their pistol-arms at their sides, the two seconds

stood at their official posts, the doctor stood five paces in Wilson's

rear with his instruments and bandages in his hands.  The deep stillness,

the peaceful moonlight, the motionless figures, made an impressive

picture and the impending fatal possibilities augmented this

impressiveness solemnity.  Wilson's hand began to rise--slowly--still

higher--still higher--in another moment:



"Boom!" the first stroke of midnight swung up  out of the distance;

Angelo was off like a deer!



"Oh, you unspeakable traitor!" wailed his brother, as they went soaring

over the fence.



The others stood astonished and gazing; and so stood, watching that

strange spectacle until distance dissolved it and swept it from their

view.  Then they rubbed their eyes like people waking out of a dream,



"Well, I've never seen anything like that before!" said the judge.

"Wilson, I am going to confess now, that I wasn't quite able to believe

in that leg business, and had a suspicion that it was a put-up

convenience between those twins; and when Count Angelo fainted I thought

I saw the whole scheme--thought it was pretext No. 2, and would be

followed by others till twelve o'clock should arrive, and Luigi would get

off with all the credit of seeming to want to fight and yet not have to

fight, after all.  But I was mistaken.  His pluck proved it.  He's a

brave fellow and did want to fight."



"There isn't any doubt about that," said Howard, and added, in a grieved

tone, "but what an unworthy sort of Christian that Angelo is--I hope and

believe there are not many like him.  It is not right to engage in a duel

on the Sabbath--I could not approve of that myself; but to finish one

that has been begun--that is a duty, let the day be what it may."



They strolled along, still wondering, still talking.



"It is a curious circumstance, "remarked the surgeon, halting Wilson a

moment to paste so more court-plaster on his chin, which had gone to

leaking blood again, "that in this duel neither of the parties who

handled the pistols lost blood while nearly all the persons present in

the mere capacity of guests got hit.  I have not heard of such a thing

before.  Don't you think it unusual?"



"Yes," said the Judge, "it has struck me as peculiar.  Peculiar and

unfortunate.  I was annoyed at it, all the time.  In the case of Angelo

it made no great difference, because he was in a measure concerned,

though not officially; but it troubled me to see the seconds compromised,

and yet I knew no way to mend the matter.



"There was no way to mend it," said Howard, whose ear was being

readjusted now by the doctor; "the code fixes our place, and it would not

have been lawful to change it.  If we could have stood at your side, or

behind you, or in front of you, it--but it would not have been legitimate

and the other parties would have had a just right to complain of our

trying to protect ourselves from danger; infractions of the code are

certainly not permissible in any case whatever."



Wilson offered no remarks.  It seemed to him that there was very little

place here for so much solemnity, but he judged that if a duel where

nobody was in danger or got crippled but the seconds and the outsiders

had nothing ridiculous about it for these gentlemen, his pointing out

that feature would probably not help them to see it.



He invited them in to take a nightcap, and Howard and the judge accepted,

but the doctor said he would have to go and see how Angelo's principal

wound was getting on.



     [It was now Sunday, and in the afternoon Angelo was to be received

     into the Baptist communion by immersion--a doubtful prospect, the

     doctor feared.]









CHAPTER VII



LUIGI DEFIES GALEN



When the doctor arrived at Aunt Patsy Cooper's house, he found the lights

going and everybody up and dressed and in a great state of solicitude and

excitement.  The twins were stretched on a sofa in the sitting-room, Aunt

Patsy was fussing at Angelo's arm, Nancy was flying around under her

commands, the two young boys were trying to keep out of the way and

always getting in it, in order to see and wonder, Rowena stood apart,

helpless with apprehension and emotion, and Luigi was growling in

unappeasable fury over Angelo's shameful flight.



As has been reported before, the doctor was a fool--a kind-hearted and

well-meaning one, but with no tact; and as he was by long odds the most

learned physician in the town, and was quite well aware of it, and could

talk his learning with ease and precision, and liked to show off when he

had an audience, he was sometimes tempted into revealing more of a case

than was good for the patient.



He examined Angelo's wound, and was really minded to say nothing for

once; but Aunt Patsy was so anxious and so pressing that he allowed his

caution to be overcome, and proceeded to empty himself as follows, with

scientific relish:



"Without going too much into detail, madam--for you would probably not

understand it, anyway--I concede that great care is going to be necessary

here; otherwise exudation of the esophagus is nearly sure to ensue, and

this will be followed by ossification and extradition of the maxillaris

superioris, which must decompose the granular surfaces of the great

infusorial ganglionic system, thus obstructing the action of the

posterior varioloid arteries, and precipitating compound strangulated

sorosis of the valvular tissues, and ending unavoidably in the dispersion

and combustion of the marsupial fluxes and the consequent embrocation of

the bicuspid populo redax referendum rotulorum."



A miserable silence followed.  Aunt Patsy's heart sank, the pallor of

despair invaded her face, she was not able to speak; poor Rowena wrung

her hands in privacy and silence, and said to herself in the bitterness

of her young grief, "There is no hope--it is plain there is no hope"; the

good-hearted negro wench, Nancy, paled to chocolate, then to orange, then

to amber, and thought to herself with yearning sympathy and sorrow, "Po'

thing, he ain' gwyne to las' throo de half o' dat"; small Henry choked

up, and turned his head away to hide his rising tears, and his brother

Joe said to himself, with a sense of loss, "The baptizing's busted,

that's sure."  Luigi was the only person who had any heart to speak.  He

said, a little bit sharply, to the doctor:



"Well, well, there's nothing to be gained by wasting precious time; give

him a barrel of pills--I'll take them for him."



"You?" asked the doctor.



"Yes.  Did you suppose he was going to take them himself?"



"Why, of course."



"Well, it's a mistake.  He never took a dose of medicine in his life.  He

can't."



"Well, upon my word, it's the most extraordinary thing I ever heard of!"



"Oh," said Aunt Patsy, as pleased as a mother whose child is being

admired and wondered at; "you'll find that there's more about them that's

wonderful than their just being made in the image of God like the rest of

His creatures, now you can depend on that, I tell you," and she wagged

her complacent head like one who could reveal marvelous things if she

chose.



The boy Joe began:



"Why, ma, they ain't made in the im--"



"You shut up, and wait till you're asked, Joe.  I'll let you know when I

want help.  Are you looking for something, doctor?"



The doctor asked for a few sheets of paper and a pen, and said he would

write a prescription; which he did.  It was one of Galen's; in fact, it

was Galen's favorite, and had been slaying people for sixteen thousand

years.  Galen used it for everything, applied it to everything, said it

would remove everything, from warts all the way through to lungs and it

generally did.  Galen was still the only medical authority recognized in

Missouri; his practice was the only practice known to the Missouri

doctors, and his prescriptions were the only ammunition they carried when

they went out for game.



By and by Dr. Claypool laid down his pen and read the result of his

labors aloud, carefully and deliberately, for this battery must be

constructed on the premises by the family, and mistakes could occur;

for he wrote a doctor's hand the hand which from the beginning of time

has been so disastrous to the apothecary and so profitable to the

undertaker:



"Take of afarabocca, henbane, corpobalsamum, each two drams and a half:

of cloves, opium, myrrh, cyperus, each two drams; of opobalsamum, Indian

leaf, cinnamon, zedoary, ginger, coftus, coral, cassia, euphorbium, gum

tragacanth, frankincense, styrax calamita, Celtic, nard, spignel,

hartwort, mustard, saxifrage, dill, anise, each one dram; of xylaloes,

rheum ponticum, alipta, moschata, castor, spikenard, galangals, opoponax,

anacardium, mastich, brimstone, peony, eringo, pulp of dates, red and

white hermodactyls, roses, thyme, acorns, pennyroyal, gentian, the bark

of the root of mandrake, germander, valerian, bishop's-weed, bayberries,

long and white pepper, xylobalsamum, carnabadium, macedonian, parsley

seeds, lovage, the seeds of rue, and sinon, of each a dram and a half; of

pure gold, pure silver, pearls not perforated, the blatta byzantina, the

bone of the stag's heart, of each the quantity of fourteen grains of

wheat; of sapphire, emerald and jasper stones, each one dram; of hazel-

nuts, two drams; of pellitory of Spain, shavings of ivory, calamus

odoratus, each the quantity of twenty-nine grains of wheat; of honey or

sugar a sufficient quantity.  Boil down and skim off."



"There," he said, "that will fix the patient; give his brother a

dipperful every three-quarters of an hour--"



"--while he survives," muttered Luigi--



"--and see that the room is kept wholesomely hot, and the doors and

windows closed tight.  Keep Count Angelo nicely covered up with six or

seven blankets, and when he is thirsty--which will be frequently--moisten

a 'rag in the vapor of the tea kettle and let his brother suck it.  When

he is hungry--which will also be frequently he must not be humored

oftener than every seven or eight hours; then toast part of a cracker

until it begins to brown, and give it to his brother."



"That is all very well, as far as Angelo is concerned," said Luigi, "but

what am I to eat?"



"I do not see that there is anything the matter with you," the doctor

answered, "you may, of course, eat what you please."



"And also drink what I please, I suppose?"



"Oh, certainly--at present.  When the violent and continuous perspiring

has reduced your strength, I shall have to reduce your diet, of course,

and also bleed you, but there is no occasion for that yet awhile."  He

turned to Aunt Patsy and said: "He must be put to bed, and sat up with,

and tended with the greatest care, and not allowed to stir for several

days and nights."



"For one, I'm sacredly thankful for that," said Luigi, "it postpones the

funeral--I'm not to be drowned to-day, anyhow."



Angelo said quietly to the doctor:



"I will cheerfully submit to all your requirements, sir, up to two

o'clock this afternoon, and will resume them after three, but cannot be

confined to the house during that intermediate hour."



"Why, may I ask?"



"Because I have entered the Baptist communion, and by appointment am to

be baptised in the river at that hour."



"Oh, insanity!--it cannot be allowed!"



Angelo answered with placid firmness:



"Nothing shall prevent it, if I am alive."



"Why, consider, my dear sir, in your condition it might prove fatal."



A tender and ecstatic smile beamed from Angelo's eyes, and he broke forth

in a tone of joyous fervency:



"Ah, how blessed it would be to die for such a cause--it would be

martyrdom!"



"But your brother--consider your brother; you would be risking his life,

too."



"He risked mine an hour ago," responded Angelo, gloomily; "did he

consider me?"  A thought swept through his mind that made him shudder.

"If I had not run, I might have been killed in a duel on the Sabbath day,

and my soul would have been lost--lost."



"Oh, don't fret, it wasn't in any danger," said Luigi, irritably; "they

wouldn't waste it for a little thing like that; there's a glass case all

ready for it in the heavenly museum, and a pin to stick it up with."



Aunt Patsy was shocked, and said:



"Looy, Looy!--don't talk so, dear!"



Rowena's soft heart was pierced by Luigi's unfeeling words, and she

murmured to herself, "Oh, if I but had the dear privilege of protecting

and defending him with my weak voice!--but alas! this sweet boon is

denied me by the cruel conventions of social intercourse."



"Get their bed ready," said Aunt Patsy to Nancy, "and shut up the windows

and doors, and light their candles, and see that you drive all the

mosquitoes out of their bar, and make up a good fire in their stove, and

carry up some bags of hot ashes to lay to his feet--"



"--and a shovel of fire for his head, and a mustard plaster for his neck,

and some gum shoes for his ears," Luigi interrupted, with temper; and

added, to himself, "Damnation, I'm going to be roasted alive, I just know

it!"



"Why, Looy!  Do be quiet; I never saw such a fractious thing.  A body

would think you didn't care for your brother."



"I don't--to that extent, Aunt Patsy.  I was glad the drowning was

postponed a minute ago, but I'm not now.  No, that is all gone by; I want

to be drowned."



"You'll bring a judgment on yourself just as sure as you live, if you go

on like that.  Why, I never heard the beat of it.  Now, there--there!

you've said enough.  Not another word out of you--I won't have it!"



"But, Aunt Patsy--"



"Luigi!  Didn't you hear what I told you?"



"But, Aunt Patsy, I--why, I'm not going to set my heart and lungs afloat

in that pail of sewage which this criminal here has been prescri--"



"Yes, you are, too.  You are going to be good, and do everything I tell

you, like a dear," and she tapped his cheek affectionately with her

finger.  "Rowena, take the prescription and go in the kitchen and hunt up

the things and lay them out for me.  I'll sit up with my patient the rest

of the night, doctor; I can't trust Nancy, she couldn't make Luigi take

the medicine.  Of course, you'll drop in again during the day.  Have you

got any more directions?"



"No, I believe not, Aunt Patsy.  If I don't get in earlier, I'll be along

by early candle-light, anyway.  Meantime, don't allow him to get out of

his bed."



Angelo said, with calm determination:



"I shall be baptized at two o'clock.  Nothing but death shall prevent

me."



The doctor said nothing aloud, but to himself he said:



"Why, this chap's got a manly side, after all!  Physically he's a coward,

but morally he's a lion.  I'll go and tell the others about this; it will

raise him a good deal in their estimation--and the public will follow

their lead, of course."



Privately, Aunt Patsy applauded too, and was proud of Angelo's courage in

the moral field as she was of Luigi's in the field of honor.



The boy Henry was troubled, but the boy Joe said, inaudibly, and

gratefully, "We're all honky, after all; and no postponement on account

of the weather."









CHAPTER VIII



BAPTISM OF THE BETTER HALF



By nine o'clock the town was humming with the news of the midnight duel,

and there were but two opinions about it: one, that Luigi's pluck in the

field was most praiseworthy and Angela's flight most scandalous; the

other, that Angelo's courage in flying the field for conscience' sake was

as fine and creditable as was Luigi's in holding the field in the face of

the bullets.  The one opinion was held by half of the town, the other one

was maintained by the other half.  The division was clean and exact, and

it made two parties, an Angela party and a Luigi party.  The twins had

suddenly become popular idols along with Pudd'nhead Wilson, and haloed

with a glory as intense as his.  The children talked the duel all the way

to Sunday-school, their elders talked it all the way to church, the choir

discussed it behind their red curtain, it usurped the place of pious

thought in the "nigger gallery."



By noon the doctor had added the news, and spread it, that Count Angelo,

in spite of his wound and all warnings and supplications, was resolute in

his determination to be baptized at the hour appointed.  This swept the

town like wildfire, and mightily reinforced the enthusiasm of the Angelo

faction, who said, "If any doubted that it was moral courage that took

him from the field, what have they to say now!"



Still the excitement grew.  All the morning it was traveling countryward,

toward all points of the compass; so, whereas before only the farmers and

their wives were intending to come and witness the remarkable baptism,

a general holiday was now proclaimed and the children and negroes

admitted to the privileges of the occasion.  All the farms for ten miles

around were vacated, all the converging roads emptied long processions of

wagons, horses, and yeomanry into the town.  The pack and cram of people

vastly exceeded any that had ever been seen in that sleepy region before.

The only thing that had ever even approached it, was the time long gone

by, but never forgotten, nor even referred to without wonder and pride,

when two circuses and a Fourth of July fell together.  But the glory of

that occasion was extinguished now for good.  It was but a freshet to

this deluge.



The great invasion massed itself on the river-bank and waited hungrily

for the immense event.  Waited, and wondered if it would really happen,

or if the twin who was not a "professor" would stand out and prevent it.



But they were not to be disappointed.  Angela was as good as his word.

He came attended by an escort of honor composed of several hundred of the

best citizens, all of the Angelo party; and when the immersion was

finished they escorted him back home and would even have carried him on

their shoulders, but that people might think they were carrying Luigi.



Far into the night the citizens continued to discuss and wonder over the

strangely mated pair of incidents that had distinguished and exalted the

past twenty-four hours above any other twenty-four in the history of

their town for picturesqueness and splendid interest; and long before the

lights were out and burghers asleep it had been decided on all hands that

in capturing these twins Dawson's Landing had drawn a prize in the great

lottery of municipal fortune.



At midnight Angelo was sleeping peacefully.  His immersion had not harmed

him, it had merely made him wholesomely drowsy, and he had been dead

asleep many hours now.  It had made Luigi drowsy, too, but he had got

only brief naps, on account of his having to take the medicine every

three-quarters of an hour-and Aunt Betsy Hale was there to see that he

did it.  When he complained and resisted, she was quietly firm with him,

and said in a low voice:



"No-no, that won't do; you mustn't talk, and you mustn't retch and gag

that way, either--you'll wake up your poor brother."



"Well, what of it, Aunt Betsy, he--"



"'Sh-h!  Don't make a noise, dear.  You mustn't: forget that your poor

brother is sick and--"



"Sick, is he?  Well, I wish I--"



"'Sh-h-h!  Will you be quiet, Luigi!  Here, now, take the rest of it--

don't keep me holding the dipper all night.  I declare if you haven't

left a good fourth of it in the bottom!  Come-that's a good--



"Aunt Betsy, don't make me!  I feel like I've swallowed a cemetery; I do,

indeed.  Do let me rest a little--just a little; I can't take any more of

the devilish stuff now."



"Luigi!  Using such language here, and him just baptized!  Do you want

the roof to fall on you?"



"I wish to goodness it would!"



"Why, you dreadful thing!  I've a good notion to--let that blanket alone;

do you want your, brother to catch his death?"



"Aunt Betsy, I've got to have it off, I'm being roasted alive; nobody

could stand it--you couldn't yourself."



"Now, then, you're sneezing again--I just expected it."



"Because I've caught a cold in my head.  I always do, when I go in the

water with my clothes on.  And it takes me weeks to get over it, too.

I think it was a shame to serve me so."



"Luigi, you are unreasonable; you know very well they couldn't baptize

him dry.  I should think you would be willing to undergo a little

inconvenience for your brother's sake."



"Inconvenience!  Now how you talk, Aunt Betsy.  I came as near as

anything to getting drowned you saw that yourself; and do you call this

inconvenience?--the room shut up as tight as a drum, and so hot the

mosquitoes are trying to get out; and a cold in the head, and dying for

sleep and no chance to get any--on account of this infamous medicine that

that assassin prescri--"



"There, you're sneezing again.  I'm going down and mix some more of this

truck for you, dear."









CHAPTER IX



THE DRINKLESS DRUNK



During Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday the twins grew steadily worse; but

then the doctor was summoned South to attend his mother's funeral, and

they got well in forty-eight hours.  They appeared on the street on

Friday, and were welcomed with enthusiasm by the new-born parties, the

Luigi and Angelo factions.  The Luigi faction carried its strength into

the Democratic party, the Angelo faction entered into a combination with

the Whigs.  The Democrats nominated Luigi for alderman under the new city

government, and the Whigs put up Angelo against him.  The Democrats

nominated Pudd'nhead Wilson for mayor, and he was left alone in this

glory, for the Whigs had no man who was willing to enter the lists

against such a formidable opponent.  No politician had scored such a

compliment as this before in the history of the Mississippi Valley.



The political campaign in Dawson's Landing opened in a pretty warm

fashion, and waned hotter every week.  Luigi's whole heart was in it,

and even Angelo developed a surprising amount of interest-which was

natural, because he was not merely representing Whigism, a matter of no

consequence to him; but he was representing something immensely finer and

greater--to wit, Reform.  In him was centered the hopes of the whole

reform element of the town; he was the chosen and admired champion of

every clique that had a pet reform of any sort or kind at heart.  He was

president of the great Teetotalers' Union, its chiefest prophet and

mouthpiece.



But as the canvass went on, troubles began to spring up all around--

troubles for the twins, and through them for all the parties and segments

and factions of parties.  Whenever Luigi had possession of the legs, he

carried Angelo to balls, rum shops, Sons of Liberty parades, horse-

races, campaign riots, and everywhere else that could damage him with his

party and the church; and when it was Angelo's week he carried Luigi

diligently to all manner of moral and religious gatherings, doing his

best to regain the ground he had lost before.  As a result of these

double performances, there was a storm blowing all the time, an ever-

rising storm, too--a storm of frantic criticism of the twins, and rage

over their extravagant, incomprehensible conduct.



Luigi had the final chance.  The legs were his for the closing week of

the canvass.  He led his brother a fearful dance.



But he saved his best card for the very eve of the election.  There was

to be a grand turnout of the Teetotalers' Union that day, and Angelo was

to march at the head of the procession and deliver a great oration

afterward.  Luigi drank a couple of glasses of whisky--which steadied his

nerves and clarified his mind, but made Angelo drunk.  Everybody who saw

the march, saw that the Champion of the Teetotalers was half seas over,

and noted also that his brother, who made no hypocritical pretensions to

extra temperance virtues, was dignified and sober.  This eloquent fact

could not be unfruitful at the end of a hot political canvass.  At the

mass-meeting Angelo tried to make his great temperance oration, but was

so discommoded--by hiccoughs and thickness of tongue that he had to give

it up; then drowsiness overtook him and his head drooped against Luigi's

and he went to sleep.  Luigi apologized for him, and was going on to

improve his opportunity with an appeal for a moderation of what he called

"the prevailing teetotal madness," but persons in the audience began to

howl and throw things at him, and then the meeting rose in wrath and

chased him home.



This episode was a crusher for Angelo in another way.  It destroyed his

chances with Rowena.  Those chances had been growing, right along, for

two months.  Rowena had partly confessed that she loved him, but wanted

time to consider.  Now the tender dream was ended, and she told him so

the moment he was sober enough to understand.  She said she would never

marry a man who drank.



"But I don't drink," he pleaded.



"That is nothing to the point," she said, coldly, "you get drunk, and

that is worse."



[There was a long and sufficiently idiotic discussion here, which ended

as reported in a previous note.]









CHAPTER X



SO THEY HANGED LUIGI



Dawson's Landing had a week of repose, after the election, and it needed

it, for the frantic and variegated nightmare which had tormented it all

through the preceding week had left it limp, haggard, and exhausted at

the end.  It got the week of repose because Angelo had the legs, and was

in too subdued a condition to want to go out and mingle with an irritated

community that had come to disgust and detest him because there was such

a lack of harmony between his morals, which were confessedly excellent,

and his methods of illustrating them, which were distinctly damnable.

The new city officers were sworn in on the following Monday--at least all

but Luigi.  There was a complication in his case.  His election was

conceded, but he could not sit in the board of aldermen without his

brother, and his brother could not sit there because he was not a member.

There seemed to be no way out of the difficulty but to carry the matter

into the courts, so this was resolved upon.



The case was set for the Monday fortnight.  In due course the time

arrived.  In the mean time the city government had been at a standstill,

because with out Luigi there was a tie in the board of aldermen, whereas

with him the liquor interest--the richest in the political field--would

have one majority.  But the court decided that Angelo could not sit in

the board with him, either in public or executive sessions, and at the

same time forbade the board to deny admission to Luigi, a fairly and

legally chosen alderman.  The case was carried up and up from court to

court, yet still the same old original decision was confirmed every time.

As a result, the city government not only stood still, with its hands

tied, but everything it was created to protect and care for went a steady

gait toward rack and ruin.  There was no way to levy a tax, so the minor

officials had to resign or starve; therefore they resigned.  There being

no city money, the enormous legal expenses on both sides had to be

defrayed by private subscription.  But at last the people came to their

senses, and said:



"Pudd'nhead was right at the start--we ought to have hired the official

half of that human phillipene to resign; but it's too late now; some of

us haven't got anything left to hire him with."



"Yes, we have," said another citizen, "we've got this"--and he produced a

halter.



Many shouted: "That's the ticket."  But others said: "No--Count Angelo is

innocent; we mustn't hang him."



"Who said anything about hanging him?  We are only going to hang the

other one."



"Then that is all right--there is no objection to that."



So they hanged Luigi.  And so ends the history of "Those Extraordinary

Twins."









FINAL REMARKS



As you see, it was an extravagant sort of a tale, and had no purpose but

to exhibit that monstrous "freak" in all sorts of grotesque lights.  But

when Roxy wandered into the tale she had to be furnished with something

to do; so she changed the children in the cradle; this necessitated the

invention of a reason for it; this, in turn, resulted in making the

children prominent personages--nothing could prevent it of course.  Their

career began to take a tragic aspect, and some one had to be brought in

to help work the machinery; so Pudd'nhead Wilson was introduced and taken

on trial.  By this time the whole show was being run by the new people

and in their interest, and the original show was become side-tracked and

forgotten; the twin-monster, and the heroine, and the lads, and the old

ladies had dwindled to inconsequentialities and were merely in the way.

Their story was one story, the new people's story was another story, and

there was no connection between them, no interdependence, no kinship.

It is not practicable or rational to try to tell two stories at the same

time; so I dug out the farce and left the tragedy.



The reader already knew how the expert works; he knows now how the other

kind do it.



MARK TWAIN.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Those Extraordinary Twins

by Mark Twain













PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC VOL. 1



by Mark Twain









Consider this unique and imposing distinction. Since the writing of

human history began, Joan of Arc is the only person, of either sex,

who has ever held supreme command of the military forces of a

nation at the age of seventeen



LOUIS KOSSUTH.









Contents

Translator's Preface

A Peculiarity of Joan of Arc's History

The Sieur Louis de Conte





Book I -- IN DOMREMY



1 When Wolves Ran Free in Paris

2 The Fa‰ry Tree of Domremy

3 All Aflame with Love of France

4 Joan Tames the Mad Man

5 Domremy Pillaged and Burned

6 Joan and Archangel Michael

7 She Delivers the Divine Command

8 Why the Scorners Relented





Book II -- IN COURT AND CAMP



1 Joan Says Good-By

2 The Governor Speeds Joan

3 The Paladin Groans and Boasts

4 Joan Leads Us Through the Enemy

5 We Pierce the Last Ambuscades

6 Joan Convinces the King

7 Our Paladin in His Glory

8 Joan Persuades the Inquisitors

9 She Is Made General-in-Chief

10 The Maid's Sword and Banner

11 The War March Is Begun

12 Joan Puts Heart in Her Army

13 Checked by the Folly of the Wise

14 What the English Answered

15 My Exquisite Poem Goes to Smash

16 The Finding of the Dwarf

17 Sweet Fruit of Bitter Truth

18 Joan's First Battle-Field

19 We Burst In Upon Ghosts

20 Joan Makes Cowards Brave Victors

21 She Gently Reproves Her Dear Friend

22 The Fate of France Decided

23 Joan Inspires the Tawdry King

24 Tinsel Trappings of Nobility

25 At Last--Forward!

26 The Last Doubts Scattered

27 How Joan Took Jargeau



PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC

by THE SIEUR LOUIS DE CONTE

(her page and secretary)









In Two Volumes





Volume 1.





Freely translated out of the ancient French into modern English

from the original unpublished manuscript in the National Archives

of France



by JEAN FRAN€OIS ALDEN

Authorities examined in verification of the truthfulness of this

narrative:



J. E. J. QUICHERAT, Condamnation et R‚habilitation de Jeanne

d'Arc.

J. FABRE, ProcŠs de Condamnation de Jeanne d'Arc.

H. A. WALLON, Jeanne d'Arc.

M. SEPET, Jeanne d'Arc.

J. MICHELET, Jeanne d'Arc.

BERRIAT DE SAINT-PRIX, La Famille de Jeanne d'Arc.

La Comtesse A. DE CHABANNES, La Vierge Lorraine.

Monseigneur RICARD, Jeanne d'Arc la V‚n‚rable.

Lord RONALD GOWER, F.S.A., Joan of Arc. JOHN O'HAGAN,

Joan of Arc.

JANET TUCKEY, Joan of Arc the Maid.









TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE



TO ARRIVE at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one

must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours. Judged by the

standards of one century, the noblest characters of an earlier one

lose much of their luster; judged by the standards of to-day, there

is probably no illustrious man of four or five centuries ago whose

character could meet the test at all points. But the character of

Joan of Arc is unique. It can be measured by the standards of all

times without misgiving or apprehension as to the result. Judged

by any of them, it is still flawless, it is still ideally perfect; it still

occupies the loftiest place possible to human attainment, a loftier

one than has been reached by any other mere mortal.



When we reflect that her century was the brutalest, the wickedest,

the rottenest in history since the darkest ages, we are lost in

wonder at the miracle of such a product from such a soil. The

contrast between her and her century is the contrast between day

and night. She was truthful when lying was the common speech of

men; she was honest when honesty was become a lost virtue; she

was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was

expected of no one; she gave her great mind to great thoughts and

great purposes when other great minds wasted themselves upon

pretty fancies or upon poor ambitions; she was modest, and fine,

and delicate when to be loud and coarse might be said to be

universal; she was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the

rule; she was steadfast when stability was unknown, and honorable

in an age which had forgotten what honor was; she was a rock of

convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at

all things; she was unfailingly true to an age that was false to the

core; she maintained her personal dignity unimpaired in an age of

fawnings and servilities; she was of a dauntless courage when hope

and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation; she was

spotlessly pure in mind and body when society in the highest

places was foul in both--she was all these things in an age when

crime was the common business of lords and princes, and when

the highest personages in Christendom were able to astonish even

that infamous era and make it stand aghast at the spectacle of their

atrocious lives black with unimaginable treacheries, butcheries,

and beastialities.



She was perhaps the only entirely unselfish person whose name

has a place in profane history. No vestige or suggestion of

self-seeking can be found in any word or deed of hers. When she

had rescued her King from his vagabondage, and set his crown

upon hi8s head, she was offered rewards and honors, but she

refused them all, and would take nothing. All she would take for

herself--if the King would grant it--was leave to go back to her

village home, and tend her sheep again, and feel her mother's arms

about her, and be her housemaid and helper. The selfishness of this

unspoiled general of victorious armies, companion of princes, and

idol of an applauding and grateful nation, reached but that far and

no farther.



The work wrought by Joan of Arc may fairly be regarded as

ranking any recorded in history, when one considers the conditions

under which it was undertaken, the obstacles in the way, and the

means at her disposal. Caesar carried conquests far, but he did it

with the trained and confident veterans of Rome, and was a trained

soldier himself; and Napoleon swept away the disciplined armies

of Europe, but he also was a trained soldier, and the began his

work with patriot battalions inflamed and inspired by the

miracle-working new breath of Liberty breathed upon them by the

Revolution--eager young apprentices to the splendid trade of war,

not old and broken men-at-arms, despairing survivors of an

age-long accumulation of monotonous defeats; but Joan of Arc, a

mere child in years, ignorant, unlettered, a poor village girl

unknown and without influence, found a great nation lying in

chains, helpless and hopeless under an alien domination, its

treasury bankrupt, its soldiers disheartened and dispersed, all spirit

torpid, all courage dead in the hearts of the people through long

years of foreign and domestic outrage and oppression, their King

cowed, resigned to its fate, and preparing to fly the country; and

she laid her hand upon this nation, this corpse, and it rose and

followed her. She led it from victory to victory, she turned back

the tide of the Hundred Years' War, she fatally crippled the English

power, and died with the earned title of DELIVERER OF

FRANCE, which she bears to this day.



And for all reward, the French King, whom she had crowned,

stood supine and indifferent, while French priests took the noble

child, the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable the

ages have produced, and burned her alive at the stake.



A PECULIARITY OF JOAN OF ARC'S HISTORY



THE DETAILS of the life of Joan of Arc form a biography which

is unique among the world's biographies in one respect: It is the

only story of a human life which comes to us under oath, the only

one which comes to us from the witness-stand. The official records

of the Great Trial of 1431, and of the Process of Rehabilitation of

a quarter of a century later, are still preser4ved in the National

Archives of France, and they furnish with remarkable fullness the

facts of her life. The history of no other life of that remote time is

known with either the certainty or the comprehensiveness that

attaches to hers.



The Sieur Louis de Conte is faithful to her official history in his

Personal Recollections, and thus far his trustworthiness is

unimpeachable; but his mass of added particulars must depend for

credit upon his word alone.



THE TRANSLATOR.



THE SIEUR LOUIS DE CONTE



To his Great-Great-Grand Nephews and Nieces



THIS IS the year 1492. I am eighty-two years of age. The things I

am going to tell you are things which I saw myself as a child and

as a youth.



In all the tales and songs and histories of Joan of Arc, which you

and the rest of the world read and sing and study in the books

wrought in the late invented art of printing, mention is made of

me, the Sieur Louis de Conte--I was her page and secretary, I was

with her from the beginning until the end.



I was reared in the same village with her. I played with her every

day, when we were little children together, just as you play with

your mates. Now that we perceive how great she was, now that her

name fills the whole world, it seems strange that what I am saying

is true; for it is as if a perishable paltry candle should speak of the

eternal sun riding in the heavens and say, "He was gossip and

housemate to me when we were candles together." And yet it is

true, just as I say. I was her playmate, and I fought at her side in

the wars; to this day I carry in my mind, fine and clear, the picture

of that dear little figure, with breast bent to the flying horse's neck,

charging at the head of the armies of France, her hair streaming

back, her silver mail plowing steadily deeper and deeper into the

thick of the battle, sometimes nearly drowned from sight by

tossing heads of horses, uplifted sword-arms, wind-blow plumes,

and intercepting shields. I was with her to the end; and when that

black day came whose accusing shadow will lie always upon the

memory of the mitered French slaves of England who were her

assassins, and upon France who stood idle and essayed no rescue,

my hand was the last she touched in life.



As the years and the decades drifted by, and the spectacle of the

marvelous child's meteor flight across the war firmament of France

and its extinction in the smoke-clouds of the stake receded deeper

and deeper into the past and grew ever more strange, and

wonderful, and divine, and pathetic, I came to comprehend and

recognize her at last for what she was--the most noble life that was

ever born into this world save only One.



BOOK I IN DOMREMY



Chapter 1 When Wolves Ran Free in Paris



I, THE SIEUR LOUIS DE CONTE, was born in Neufchateau, on

the 6th of January, 1410; that is to say, exactly two years before

Joan of Arc was born in Domremy. My family had fled to those

distant regions from the neighborhood of Paris in the first years of

the century. In politics they were Armagnacs--patriots; they were

for our own French King, crazy and impotent as he was. The

Burgundian party, who were for the English, had stripped them,

and done it well. They took everything but my father's small

nobility, and when he reached Neufchateau he reached it in

poverty and with a broken spirit. But the political atmosphere there

was the sort he liked, and that was something. He came to a region

of comparative quiet; he left behind him a region peopled with

furies, madmen, devils, where slaughter was a daily pastime and

no man's life safe for a moment. In Paris, mobs roared through the

streets nightly, sacking, burning, killing, unmolested,

uninterrupted. The sun rose upon wrecked and smoking buildings,

and upon mutilated corpses lying here, there, and yonder about the

streets, just as they fell, and stripped naked by thieves, the unholy

gleaners after the mob. None had the courage to gather these dead

for burial; they were left there to rot and create plagues.



And plagues they did create. Epidemics swept away the people

like flies, and the burials were conducted secretly and by night, for

public funerals were not allowed, lest the revelation of the

magnitude of the plague's work unman the people and plunge them

into despair. Then came, finally, the bitterest winter which had

visited France in five hundred years. Famine, pestilence, slaughter,

ice, snow--Paris had all these at once. The dead lay in heaps about

the streets, and wolves entered the city in daylight and devoured

them.



Ah, France had fallen low--so low! For more than three quarters of

a century the English fangs had been bedded in her flesh, and so

cowed had her armies become by ceaseless rout and defeat that it

was said and accepted that the mere sight of an English army was

sufficient to put a French one to flight.



When I was five years old the prodigious disaster of Agincourt fell

upon France; and although the English King went home to enjoy

his glory, he left the country prostrate and a prey to roving bands

of Free Companions in the service of the Burgundian party, and

one of these bands came raiding through Neufchateau one night,

and by the light of our burning roof-thatch I saw all that were dear

to me in this world (save an elder brother, your ancestor, left

behind with the court) butchered while they begged for mercy, and

heard the butchers laugh at their prayers and mimic their

pleadings. I was overlooked, and escaped without hurt. When the

savages were gone I crept out and cried the night away watching

the burning houses; and I was all alone, except for the company of

the dead and the wounded, for the rest had taken flight and hidden

themselves.



I was sent to Domremy, to the priest, whose housekeeper became a

loving mother to me. The priest, in the course of time, taught me

to read and write, and he and I were the only persons in the village

who possessed this learning.



At the time that the house of this good priest, Guillaume Fronte,

became my home, I was six years old. We lived close by the

village church, and the small garden of Joan's parents was behind

the church. As to that family there were Jacques d'Arc the father,

his wife Isabel Romee; three sons--Jacques, ten years old, Pierre,

eight, and Jean, seven; Joan, four, and her baby sister Catherine,

about a year old. I had these children for playmates from the

beginning. I had some other playmates besides--particularly four

boys: Pierre Morel, Etienne Roze, No‰l Rainguesson, and Edmond

Aubrey, whose father was maire at that time; also two girls, about

Joan's age, who by and by became her favorites; one was named

Haumetter, the other was called Little Mengette. These girls were

common peasant children, like Joan herself. When they grew up,

both married common laborers. Their estate was lowly enough,

you see; yet a time came, many years after, when no passing

stranger, howsoever great he might be, failed to go and pay his

reverence to those to humble old women who had been honored in

their youth by the friendship of Joan of Arc.



These were all good children, just of the ordinary peasant type; not

bright, of course--you would not expect that--but good-hearted and

companionable, obedient to their parents and the priest; and as

they grew up they became properly stocked with narrowness and

prejudices got at second hand from their elders, and adopted

without reserve; and without examination also--which goes

without saying. Their religion was inherited, their politics the

same. John Huss and his sort might find fault with the Church, in

Domremy it disturbed nobody's faith; and when the split came,

when I was fourteen, and we had three Popes at once, nobody in

Domremy was worried about how to choose among them--the

Pope of Rome was the right one, a Pope outside of Rome was no

Pope at all. Every human creature in the village was an

Armagnac--a patriot--and if we children hotly hated nothing else in

the world, we did certainly hate the English and Burgundian name

and polity in that way.



Chapter 2 The Fa‰ry Tree of Domremy



OUR DOMREMY was like any other humble little hamlet of that

remote time and region. It was a maze of crooked, narrow lanes

and alleys shaded and sheltered by the overhanging thatch roofs of

the barnlike houses. The houses were dimly lighted by

wooden-shuttered windows--that is, holes in the walls which

served for windows. The floors were dirt, and there was very little

furniture. Sheep and cattle grazing was the main industry; all the

young folks tended flocks.



The situation was beautiful. From one edge of the village a flowery

plain extended in a wide sweep to the river--the Meuse; from the

rear edge of the village a grassy slope rose gradually, and at the top

was the great oak forest--a forest that was deep and gloomy and

dense, and full of interest for us children, for many murders had

been done in it by outlaws in old times, and in still earlier times

prodigious dragons that spouted fire and poisonous vapors from

their nostrils had their homes in there. In fact, one was still living

in there in our own time. It was as long as a tree, and had a body as

big around as a tierce, and scales like overlapping great tiles, and

deep ruby eyes as large as a cavalier's hat, and an anchor-fluke on

its tail as big as I don't know what, but very big, even unusually so

for a dragon, as everybody said who knew about dragons. It was

thought that this dragon was of a brilliant blue color, with gold

mottlings, but no one had ever seen it, therefore this was not

known to be so, it was only an opinion. It was not my opinion; I

think there is no sense in forming an opinion when there is no

evidence to form it on. If you build a person without any bones in

h8im he may look fair enough to the eye, but he will be limber and

cannot stand up; and I consider that evidence is the bones of an

opinion. But I will take up this matter more at large at another

time, and try to make the justness of my position appear. As to that

dragon, I always held the belief that its color was gold and without

blue, for that has always been the color of dragons. That this

dragon lay but a little way within the wood at one time is shown by

the fact that Pierre Morel was in there one day and smelt it, and

recognized it by the smell. It gives one a horrid idea of how near to

us the deadliest danger can be and we not suspect it.



In the earliest times a hundred knights from many remote places in

the earth would have gone in there one after another, to kill the

dragon and get the reward, but in our time that method had gone

out, and the priest had become the one that abolished dragons.

PŠre Guillaume Fronte did it in this case. He had a procession,

with candles and incense and banners, and marched around the

edge of the wood and exorcised the dragon, and it was never heard

of again, although it was the opinion of many that the smell never

wholly passed away. Not that any had ever smelt the smell again,

for none had; it was only an opinion, like that other--and lacked

bones, you see. I know that the creature was there before the

exorcism, but whether it was there afterward or not is a thing

which I cannot be so positive about.



In a noble open space carpeted with grass on the high ground

toward Vaucouleurs stood a most majestic beech tree with

wide-reaching arms and a grand spread of shade, and by it a limpid

spring of cold water; and on summer days the children went

there--oh, every summer for more than five hundred years--went

there and sang and danced around the tree for hours together,

refreshing themselves at the spring from time to time, and it was

most lovely and enjoyable. Also they made wreaths of flowers and

hung them upon the tree and about the spring to please the fairies

that lived there; for they liked that, being idle innocent little

creatures, as all fairies are, and fond of anything delicate and

pretty like wild flowers put together in that way. And in return for

this attention the fairies did any friendly thing they could for the

children, such as keeping the spring always full and clear and cold,

and driving away serpents and insects that sting; and so there was

never any unkindness between the fairies and the children during

more than five hundred years--tradition said a thousand--but only

the warmest affection and the most perfect trust and confidence;

and whenever a child died the fairies mourned just as that child's

playmates did, and the sign of it was there to see; for before the

dawn on the day of the funeral they hung a little immortelle over

the place where that child was used to sit under the tree. I know

this to be true by my own eyes; it is not hearsay. And the reason it

was known that the fairies did it was this--that it was made all of

black flowers of a sort not known in France anywhere.



Now from time immemorial all children reared in Domremy were

called the Children of the Tree; and they loved that name, for it

carried with it a mystic privilege not granted to any others of the

children of this world. Which was this: whenever one of these

came to die, then beyond the vague and formless images drifting

through his darkening mind rose soft and rich and fair a vision of

the Tree--if all was well with his soul. That was what some said.

Others said the vision came in two ways: once as a warning, one or

two years in advance of death, when the soul was the captive of

sin, and then the Tree appeared in its desolate winter aspect--then

that soul was smitten with an awful fear. If repentance came, and

purity of life, the vision came again, this time summer-clad and

beautiful; but if it were otherwise with that soul the vision was

withheld, and it passed from life knowing its doom. Still others

said that the vision came but once, and then only to the sinless

dying forlorn in distant lands and pitifully longing for some last

dear reminder of their home. And what reminder of it could go to

their hearts like the picture of the Tree that was the darling of their

love and the comrade of their joys and comforter of their small

griefs all through the divine days of their vanished youth?



Now the several traditions were as I have said, some believing one

and some another. One of them I knew to be the truth, and that was

the last one. I do not say anything against the others; I think they

were true, but I only know that the last one was; and it is my

thought that if one keep to the things he knows, and not trouble

about the things which he cannot be sure about, he will have the

st3eadier mind for it--and there is profit in that. I know that when

the Children of the Tree die in a far land, then--if they be at peace

with God--they turn their longing eyes toward home, and there,

far-shining, as through a rift in a cloud that curtains heaven, they

see the soft picture of the Fairy Tree, clothed in a dream of golden

light; and they see the bloomy mead sloping away to the river, and

to their perishing nostrils is blown faint and sweet the fragrance of

the flowers of home. And then the vision fades and passes--b they

know, they know! and by their transfigured faces you know also,

you who stand looking on; yes, you know the message that has

come, and that it has come from heaven.



Joan and I believed alike about this matter. But Pierre Morel and

Jacques d'Arc, and many others believed that the vision appeared

twice--to a sinner. In fact, they and many others said they knew it.

Probably because their fathers had known it and had told them; for

one gets most things at second hand in this world.



Now one thing that does make it quite likely that there were really

two apparitions of the Tree is this fact: From the most ancient

times if one saw a villager of ours with his face ash-white and rigid

with a ghastly fright, it was common for every one to whisper to

his neighbor, "Ah, he is in sin, and has got his warning." And the

neighbor would shudder at the thought and whisper back, "Yes,

poor soul, he has seen the Tree."



Such evidences as these have their weight; they are not to be put

aside with a wave of the hand. A thing that is backed by the

cumulative evidence of centuries naturally gets nearer and nearer

to being proof all the time; and if this continue and continue, it

will some day become authority--and authority is a bedded rock,

and will abide.



In my long life I have seen several cases where the tree appeared

announcing a death which was still far away; but in none of these

was the person in a state of sin. No; the apparition was in these

cases only a special grace; in place of deferring the tidings of that

soul's redemption till the day of death, the apparition brought them

long before, and with them peace--peace that might no more be

disturbed--the eternal peace of God. I myself, old and broken, wait

with serenity; for I have seen the vision of the Tree. I have seen it,

and am content.



Always, from the remotest times, when the children joined hands

and danced around the Fairy Tree they sang a song which was the

Tree's song, the song of L'Arbre fee de Bourlemont. They sang it to

a quaint sweet air--a solacing sweet air which has gone murmuring

through my dreaming spirit all my life when I was weary and

troubled, resting me and carrying me through night and distance

home again. No stranger can know or feel what that song has been,

through the drifting centuries, to exiled Children of the Tree,

homeless and heavy of heart in countries foreign to their speech

and ways. You will think it a simple thing, that song, and poor,

perchance; but if you will remember what it was to us, and what it

brought before our eyes when it floated through our memories,

then you will respect it. And you will understand how the water

wells up in our eyes and makes all things dim, and our voices

break and we cannot sing the last lines:



"And when, in Exile wand'ring, we

Shall fainting yearn for glimpse of thee,

Oh, rise upon our sight!"



And you will remember that Joan of Arc sang this song with us

around the Tree when she was a little child, and always loved it.

And that hallows it, yes, you will grant that:



L'ARBRE F�E DE BOURLEMONT



SONG OF THE CHILDREN



Now what has kept your leaves so green,

Arbre F‚e de Bourlemont?



The children's tears! They brought each grief,

And you did comfort them and cheer

Their bruised hearts, and steal a tear

That, healed, rose a leaf.



And what has built you up so strong,

Arbre F‚e de Bourlemont?



The children's love! They've loved you long

Ten hundred years, in sooth,

They've nourished you with praise and song,

And warmed your heart and kept it young--

A thousand years of youth!



Bide always green in our young hearts,

Arbre F‚e de Bourlemont!

And we shall always youthful be,

Not heeding Time his flight;

And when, in exile wand'ring, we

Shall fainting yearn for glimpse of thee,

Oh, rise upon our sight!



The fairies were still there when we were children, but we never

saw them; because, a hundred years before that, the priest of

Domremy had held a religious function under the tree and

denounced them as being blood-kin to the Fiend and barred them

from redemption; and then he warned them never to show

themselves again, nor hang any more immortelles, on pain of

perpetual banishment from that parish.



All the children pleaded for the fairies, and said they were their

good friends and dear to them and never did them any harm, but

the priest would not listen, and said it was sin and shame to have

such friends. The children mourned and could not be comforted;

and they made an agreement among themselves that they would

always continue to hang flower-wreaths on the tree as a perpetual

sign to the fairies that they were still loved and remembered,

though lost to sight.



But late one night a great misfortune befell. Edmond Aubrey's

mother passed by the Tree, and the fairies were stealing a dance,

not thinking anybody was by; and they were so busy, and so

intoxicated with the wild happiness of it, and with the bumpers of

dew sharpened up with honey which they had been drinking, that

they noticed nothing; so Dame Aubrey stood there astonished and

admiring, and saw the little fantastic atoms holding hands, as many

as three hundred of them, tearing around in a great ring half as big

as an ordinary bedroom, and leaning away back and spreading

their mouths with laughter and song, which she could hear quite

distinctly, and kicking their legs up as much as three inches from

the ground in perfect abandon and hilarity--oh, the very maddest

and witchingest dance the woman ever saw.



But in about a minute or two minutes the poor little ruined

creatures discovered her. They burst out in one heartbreaking

squeak of grief and terror and fled every which way, with their wee

hazel-nut fists in their eyes and crying; and so disappeared.



The heartless woman--no, the foolish woman; she was not

heartless, but only thoughtless--went straight home and told the

neighbors all about it, whilst we, the small friends of the fairies,

were asleep and not witting the calamity that was come upon us,

and all unconscious that we ought to be up and trying to stop these

fatal tongues. In the morning everybody knew, and the disaster was

complete, for where everybody knows a thing the priest knows it,

of course. We all flocked to PŠre Fronte, crying and begging--and

he had to cry, too, seeing our sorrow, for he had a most kind and

gentle nature; and he did not want to banish the fairies, and said

so; but said he had no choice, for it had been decreed that if they

ever revealed themselves to man again, they must go. This all

happened at the worst time possible, for Joan of Arc was ill of a

fever and out of her head, and what could we do who had not her

gifts of reasoning and persuasion? We flew in a swarm to her bed

and cried out, "Joan, wake! Wake, there is no moment to lose!

Come and plead for the fairies--come and save them; only you can

do it!"



But her mind was wandering, she did not know what we said nor

what we meant; so we went away knowing all was lost. Yes, all

was lost, forever lost; the faithful friends of the children for five

hundred years must go, and never come back any more.



It was a bitter day for us, that day that PŠre Fronte held the

function under the tree and banished the fairies. We could not

wear mourning that any could have noticed, it would not have

been allowed; so we had to be content with some poor small rag of

black tied upon our garments where it made no show; but in our

hearts we wore mourning, big and noble and occupying all the

room, for our hearts were ours; they could not get at them to

prevent that.



The great tree--l'Arbre F‚e do Bourlemont was its beautiful

name--was never afterward quite as much to us as it had been

before, but it was always dear; is dear to me yet when I got there

now, once a year in my old age, to sit under it and bring back the

lost playmates of my youth and group them about me and look

upon their faces through my tears and break my heart, oh, my God!

No, the place was not quite the same afterward. In one or two ways

it could not be; for, the fairies' protection being gone, the spring

lost much of its freshness and coldness, and more than two-thirds

of its volume, and the banished serpents and stinging insects

returned, and multiplied, and became a torment and have remained

so to this day.



When that wise little child, Joan, got well, we realized how much

her illness had cost us; for we found that we had been right in

believing she could save the fairies. She burst into a great storm of

anger, for so little a creature, and went straight to PŠre Fronte, and

stood up before him where he sat, and made reverence and said:



"The fairies were to go if they showed themselves to people again,

is it not so?"



"Yes, that was it, dear."



"If a man comes prying into a person's room at midnight when that

person is half-naked, will you be so unjust as to say that that

person is showing himself to that man?"



"Well--no." The good priest looked a little troubled and uneasy

when he said it.



"Is a sin a sin, anyway, even if one did not intend to commit it?"



PŠre Fronte threw up his hands and cried out:



"Oh, my poor little child, I see all my fault," and he drew here to

his side and put an arm around her and tried to make his peace

with her, but her temper was up so high that she could not get it

down right away, but buried her head against his breast and broke

out crying and said:



"Then the fairies committed no sin, for there was no intention to

commit one, they not knowing that any one was by; and because

they were little creatures and could not speak for themselves and

say the saw was against the intention, not against the innocent act,

because they had no friend to think that simple thing for them and

say it, they have been sent away from their home forever, and it

was wrong, wrong to do it!"



The good father hugged her yet closer to his side and said:



"Oh, out of the mouths of babes and sucklings the heedless and

unthinking are condemned; would God I could bring the little

creatures back, for your sake. And mine, yes, and mine; for I have

been unjust. There, there, don't cry--nobody could be sorrier than

your poor old friend--don't cry, dear."



"But I can't stop right away, I've got to. And it is no little matter,

this thing that you have done. Is being sorry penance enough for

such an act?"



PŠre Fronte turned away his face, for it would have hurt her to see

him laugh, and said:



"Oh, thou remorseless but most just accuser, no, it is not. I will put

on sackcloth and ashes; there--are you satisfied?"



Joan's sobs began to diminish, and she presently looked up at the

old man through her tears, and said, in her simple way:



"Yes, that will do--if it will clear you."



PŠre Fronte would have been moved to laugh again, perhaps, if he

had not remembered in time that he had made a contract, and not a

very agreeable one. It must be fulfilled. So he got up and went to

the fireplace, Joan watching him with deep interest, and took a

shovelful of cold ashes, and was going to empty them on his old

gray head when a better idea came to him, and he said:



"Would you mind helping me, dear?"



"How, father?"



He got down on his knees and bent his head low, and said:



"Take the ashes and put them on my head for me."



The matter ended there, of course. The victory was with the priest.

One can imagine how the idea of such a profanation would strike

Joan or any other child in the village. She ran and dropped upon

her knees by his side and said:



"Oh, it is dreadful. I didn't know that that was what one meant by

sackcloth and ashes--do please get up, father."



"But I can't until I am forgiven. Do you forgive me?"



"I? Oh, you have done nothing to me, father; it is yourself that

must forgive yourself for wronging those poor things. Please get

up, gather, won't you?"



"But I am worse off now than I was before. I thought I was earning

your forgiveness, but if it is my own, I can't be lenient; it would not

become me. Now what can I do? Find me some way out of this

with your wise little head."



The PŠre would not stir, for all Joan's pleadings. She was about to

cry again; then she had an idea, and seized the shovel and deluged

her own head with the ashes, stammering out through her chokings

and suffocations:



"There--now it is done. Oh, please get up, father."



The old man, both touched and amused, gathered her to his breast

and said:



"Oh, you incomparable child! It's a humble martyrdom, and not of

a sort presentable in a picture, but the right and true spirit is in it;

that I testify."



Then he brushed the ashes out of her hair, and helped her scour her

face and neck and properly tidy herself up. He was in fine spirits

now, and ready for further argument, so he took his seat and drew

Joan to his side again, and said:



"Joan, you were used to make wreaths there at the Fairy Tree with

the other children; is it not so?"



That was the way he always started out when he was going to

corner me up and catch me in something--just that gentle,

indifferent way that fools a person so, and leads him into the trap,

he never noticing which way he is traveling until he is in and the

door shut on him. He enjoyed that. I knew he was going to drop

corn along in front of Joan now. Joan answered:



"Yes, father."



"Did you hang them on the tree?"



"No, father."



"Didn't hang them there?"



"No."



"Why didn't you?"



"I--well, I didn't wish to."



"Didn't wish to?"



"No, father."



"What did you do with them?"



"I hung them in the church."



"Why didn't you want to hang them in the tree?"



"Because it was said that the fairies were of kin to the Fiend, and

that it was sinful to show them honor."



"Did you believe it was wrong to honor them so?"



"Yes. I thought it must be wrong."



"Then if it was wrong to honor them in that way, and if they were

of kin to the Fiend, they could be dangerous company for you and

the other children, couldn't they?"



"I suppose so--yes, I think so."



He studied a minute, and I judged he was going to spring his trap,

and he did. He said:



"Then the matter stands like this. They were banned creatures, of

fearful origin; they could be dangerous company for the children.

Now give me a rational reason, dear, if you can think of any, why

you call it a wrong to drive them into banishment, and why you

would have saved them from it. In a word, what loss have you

suffered by it?"



How stupid of him to go and throw his case away like that! I could

have boxed his ears for vexation if he had been a boy. He was

going along all right until he ruined everything by winding up in

that foolish and fatal way. What had she lost by it! Was he never

going to find out what kind of a child Joan of Arc was? Was he

never going to learn that things which merely concerned her own

gain or loss she cared nothing about? Could he never get the

simple fact into his head that the sure way and the only way to

rouse her up and set her on fire was to show her where some other

person was going to suffer wrong or hurt or loss? Why, he had

gone and set a trap for himself--that was all he had accomplished.



The minute those words were out of his mouth her temper was up,

the indignant tears rose in her eyes, and she burst out on him with

an energy and passion which astonished him, but didn't astonish

me, for I knew he had fired a mine when he touched off his

ill-chosen climax.



"Oh, father, how can you talk like that? Who owns France?"



"God and the King."



"Not Satan?"



"Satan, my child? This is the footstool of the Most High--Satan

owns no handful of its soil."



"Then who gave those poor creatures their home? God. Who

protected them in it all those centuries? God. Who allowed them to

dance and play there all those centuries and found no fault with it?

God. Who disapproved of God's approval and put a threat upon

them? A man. Who caught them again in harmless sports that God

allowed and a man forbade, and carried out that threat, and drove

the poor things away from the home the good God gave them in

His mercy and His pity, and sent down His rain and dew and

sunshine upon it five hundred years in token of His peace? It was

their home--theirs, by the grace of God and His good heart, and no

man had a right to rob them of it. And they were the gentlest,

truest friends that children ever had, and did them sweet and

loving service all these five long centuries, and never any hurt or

harm; and the children loved them, and now they mourn for them,

and there is no healing for their grief. And what had the children

done that they should suffer this cruel stroke? The poor fairies

could have been dangerous company for the children? Yes, but

never had been; and could is no argument. Kinsmen of the Fiend?

What of it? Kinsmen of the Fiend have rights, and these had; and

children have rights, and these had; and if I had been there I would

have spoken--I would have begged for the children and the fiends,

and stayed your hand and saved them all. But now--oh, now, all is

lost; everything is lost, and there is no help more!"



Then she finished with a blast at that idea that fairy kinsmen of the

Fiend ought to be shunned and denied human sympathy and

friendship because salvation was barred against them. She said

that for that very reason people ought to pity them, and do every

humane and loving thing they could to make them forget the hard

fate that had been put upon them by accident of birth and no fault

of their own. "Poor little creatures!" she said. "What can a person's

heart be made of that can pity a Christian's child and yet can't pity

a devil's child, that a thousand times more needs it!"



She had torn loose from PŠre Fronte, and was crying, with her

knuckles in her eyes, and stamping her small feet in a fury; and

now she burst out of the place and was gone before we could

gather our senses together out of this storm of words and this

whirlwind of passion.



The PŠre had got upon his feet, toward the last, and now he stood

there passing his hand back and forth across his forehead like a

person who is dazed and troubled; then he turned and wandered

toward the door of his little workroom, and as he passed through it

I heard him murmur sorrowfully:



"Ah, me, poor children, poor fiends, they have rights, and she said

true--I never thought of that. God forgive me, I am to blame."



When I heard that, I knew I was right in the thought that he had set

a trap for himself. It was so, and he had walked into it, you see. I

seemed to feel encouraged, and wondered if mayhap I might get

him into one; but upon reflection my heart went down, for this was

not my gift.



Chapter 3 All Aflame with Love of France



SPEAKING of this matter reminds me of many incidents, many

things that I could tell, but I think I will not try to do it now. It will

be more to my present humor to call back a little glimpse of the

simple and colorless good times we used to have in our village

homes in those peaceful days--especially in the winter. In the

summer we children were out on the breezy uplands with the

flocks from dawn till night, and then there was noisy frolicking

and all that; but winter was the cozy time, winter was the snug

time. Often we gathered in old Jacques d'Arc's big dirt-floored

apartment, with a great fire going, and played games, and sang

songs, and told fortunes, and listened to the old villagers tell tales

and histories and lies and one thing and another till twelve o'clock

at night.



One winter's night we were gathered there--it was the winter that

for years afterward they called the hard winter--and that particular

night was a sharp one. It blew a gale outside, and the screaming of

the wind was a stirring sound, and I think I may say it was

beautiful, for I think it is great and fine and beautiful to hear the

wind rage and storm and blow its clarions like that, when you are

inside and comfortable. And we were. We had a roaring fire, and

the pleasant spit-spit of the snow and sleet falling in it down the

chimney, and the yarning and laughing and singing went on at a

noble rate till about ten o'clock, and then we had a supper of hot

porridge and beans, and meal cakes with butter, and appetites to

match.



Little Joan sat on a box apart, and had her bowl and bread on

another one, and her pets around her helping. She had more than

was usual of them or economical, because all the outcast cats

came and took up with her, and homeless or unlovable animals of

other kinds heard about it and came, and these spread the matter to

the other creatures, and they came also; and as the birds and the

other timid wild things of the woods were not afraid of her, but

always had an idea she was a friend when they came across her,

and generally struck up an acquaintance with her to get invited to

the house, she always had samples of those breeds in stock. She

was hospitable to them all, for an animal was an animal to her, and

dear by mere reason of being an animal, no matter about its sort or

social station; and as she would allow of no cages, no collars, no

fetters, but left the creatures free to come and go as they liked, that

contented them, and they came; but they didn't go, to any extent,

and so they were a marvelous nuisance, and made Jacques d'Arc

swear a good deal; but his wife said God gave the child the

instinct, and knew what He was doing when He did it, therefore it

must have its course; it would be no sound prudence to meddle

with His affairs when no invitation had been extended. So the pets

were left in peace, and here they were, as I have said, rabbits,

birds, squirrels, cats, and other reptiles, all around the child, and

full of interest in her supper, and helping what they could. There

was a very small squirrel on her shoulder, sitting up, as those

creatures do, and turning a rocky fragment of prehistoric

chestnut-cake over and over in its knotty hands, and hunting for

the less indurated places, and giving its elevated bushy tail a flirt

and its pointed ears a toss when it found one--signifying

thankfulness and surprise--and then it filed that place off with

those two slender front teeth which a squirrel carries for that

purpose and not for ornament, for ornamental they never could be,

as any will admit that have noticed them.



Everything was going fine and breezy and hilarious, but then there

came an interruption, for somebody hammered on the door. It was

one of those ragged road-stragglers--the eternal wars kept the

country full of them. He came in, all over snow, and stamped his

feet, and shook, and brushed himself, and shut the door, and took

off his limp ruin of a hat, and slapped it once or twice against his

leg to knock off its fleece of snow, and then glanced around on the

company with a pleased look upon his thin face, and a most

yearning and famished one in his eye when it fell upon the

victuals, and then he gave us a humble and conciliatory salutation,

and said it was a blessed thing to have a fire like that on such a

night, and a roof overhead like this, and that rich food to eat, and

loving friends to talk with--ah, yes, this was true, and God help the

homeless, and such as must trudge the roads in this weather.



Nobody said anything. The embarrassed poor creature stood there

and appealed to one face after the other with his eyes, and found

no welcome in any, the smile on his own face flickering and fading

and perishing, meanwhile; then he dropped his gaze, the muscles

of his face began to twitch, and he put up his hand to cover this

womanish sign of weakness.



"Sit down!"



This thunder-blast was from old Jacques d'Arc, and Joan was the

object of it. The stranger was startled, and took his hand away, and

there was Joan standing before him offering him her bowl of

porridge. The man said:



"God Almighty bless you, my darling!" and then the tears came,

and ran down his cheeks, but he was afraid to take the bowl.



"Do you hear me? Sit down, I say!"



There could not be a child more easy to persuade than Joan, but

this was not the way. Her father had not the art; neither could he

learn it. Joan said:



"Father, he is hungry; I can see it."



"Let him work for food, then. We are being eaten out of house and

home by his like, and I have said I would endure it no more, and

will keep my word. He has the face of a rascal anyhow, and a

villain. Sit down, I tell you!"



"I know not if he is a rascal or no, but he is hungry, father, and

shall have my porridge--I do not need it."



"If you don't obey me I'll-- Rascals are not entitled to help from

honest people, and no bite nor sup shall they have in this house.

Joan!"



She set her bowl down on the box and came over and stood before

her scowling father, and said:



"Father, if you will not let me, then it must be as you say; but I

would that you would think--then you would see that it is not right

to punish one part of him for what the other part has done; for it is

that poor stranger's head that does the evil things, but it is not his

head that is hungry, it is his stomach, and it has done no harm to

anybody, but is without blame, and innocent, not having any way

to do a wrong, even if it was minded to it. Please let--"



"What an idea! It is the most idiotic speech I ever heard."



But Aubrey, the maire, broke in, he being fond of an argument,

and having a pretty gift in that regard, as all acknowledged. Rising

in his place and leaning his knuckles upon the table and looking

about him with easy dignity, after the manner of such as be orators,

he began, smooth and persuasive:



"I will differ with you there, gossip, and will undertake to show the

company"--here he looked around upon us and nodded his head in

a confident way--"that there is a grain of sense in what the child

has said; for look you, it is of a certainty most true and

demonstrable that it is a man's head that is master and supreme

ruler over his whole body. Is that granted? Will any deny it?" He

glanced around again; everybody indicated assent. "Very well,

then; that being the case, no part of the body is responsible for the

result when it carries out an order delivered to it by the head; ergo,

the head is alone responsible for crimes done by a man's hands or

feet or stomach--do you get the idea? am I right thus far?"

Everybody said yes, and said it with enthusiasm, and some said,

one to another, that the maire was in great form to-night and at his

very best--which pleased the maire exceedingly and made his eyes

sparkle with pleasure, for he overheard these things; so he went on

in the same fertile and brilliant way. "Now, then, we will consider

what the term responsibility means, and how it affects the case in

point. Responsibility makes a man responsible for only those

things for which he is properly responsible"--and he waved his

spoon around in a wide sweep to indicate the comprehensive

nature of that class of responsibilities which render people

responsible, and several exclaimed, admiringly, "He is right!--he

has put that whole tangled thing into a nutshell--it is wonderful!""

After a little pause to give the interest opportunity to gather and

grow, he went on: "Very good. Let us suppose the case of a pair of

tongs that falls upon a man's foot, causing a cruel hurt. Will you

claim that the tongs are punishable for that? The question is

answered; I see by your faces that you would call such a claim

absurd. Now, why is it absurd? It is absurd because, there being no

reasoning faculty--that is to say, no faculty of personal

command--in a pair of togs, personal responsibility for the acts of

the tongs is wholly absent from the tongs; and, therefore,

responsibility being absent, punishment cannot ensue. Am I right?"

A hearty burst of applause was his answer. "Now, then, we arrive

at a man's stomach. Consider how exactly, how marvelously,

indeed, its situation corresponds to that of a pair of tongs.

Listen--and take careful note, I beg you. Can a man's stomach plan

a murder? No. Can it plan a theft? No. Can it plan an incendiary

fire? No. Now answer me--can a pair of tongs?" (There were

admiring shouts of "No!" and "The cases are just exact!" and

"Don't he do it splendid!") "Now, then, friends and neighbors, a

stomach which cannot plan a crime cannot be a principal in the

commission of it--that is plain, as you see. The matter is narrowed

down by that much; we will narrow it further. Can a stomach, of

its own motion, assist at a crime? The answer is no, because

command is absent, the reasoning faculty is absent, volition is

absent--as in the case of the tongs. We perceive now, do we not,

that the stomach is totally irresponsible for crimes committed,

either in whole or in part, by it?" He got a rousing cheer for

response. "Then what do we arrive at as our verdict? Clearly this:

that there is no such thing in this world as a guilty stomach; that in

the body of the veriest rascal resides a pure and innocent stomach;

that, whatever it's owner may do, it at least should be sacred in our

eyes; and that while God gives us minds to think just and

charitable and honorable thoughts, it should be, and is, our

privilege, as well as our duty, not only to feed the hungry stomach

that resides in a rascal, having pity for its sorrow and its need, but

to do it gladly, gratefully, in recognition of its sturdy and loyal

maintenance of its purity and innocence in the midst of temptation

and in company so repugnant to its better feelings. I am done."



Well, you never saw such an effect! They rose--the whole house

rose--an clapped, and cheered, and praised him to the skies; and

one after another, still clapping and shouting, they crowded

forward, some with moisture in their eyes, and wrung his hands,

and said such glorious things to him that he was clear overcome

with pride and happiness, and couldn't say a word, for his voice

would have broken, sure. It was splendid to see; and everybody

said he had never come up to that speech in his life before, and

never could do it again. Eloquence is a power, there is no question

of that. Even old Jacques d'Arc was carried away, for once in his

life, and shouted out:



"It's all right, Joan--give him the porridge!"



She was embarrassed, and did not seem to know what to say, and

so didn't say anything. It was because she had given the man the

porridge long ago and he had already eaten it all up. When she was

asked why she had not waited until a decision was arrived at, she

said the man's stomach was very hungry, and it would not have

been wise to wait, since she could not tell what the decision would

be. Now that was a good and thoughtful idea for a child.



The man was not a rascal at all. He was a very good fellow, only

he was out of luck, and surely that was no crime at that time in

France. Now that his stomach was proved to be innocent, it was

allowed to make itself at home; and as soon as it was well filled

and needed nothing more, the man unwound his tongue and turned

it loose, and it was really a noble one to go. He had been in the

wars for years, and the things he told and the way he told them

fired everybody's patriotism away up high, and set all hearts to

thumping and all pulses to leaping; then, before anybody rightly

knew how the change was made, he was leading us a sublime

march through the ancient glories of France, and in fancy we saw

the titanic forms of the twelve paladins rise out of the mists of the

past and face their fate; we heard the tread of the innumerable

hosts sweeping down to shut them in; we saw this human tide flow

and ebb, ebb and flow, and waste away before that little band of

heroes; we saw each detail pass before us of that most stupendous,

most disastrous, yet most adored and glorious day in French

legendary history; here and there and yonder, across that vast field

of the dead and dying, we saw this and that and the other paladin

dealing his prodigious blows with weary arm and failing strength,

and one by one we saw them fall, till only one remained--he that

was without peer, he whose name gives name to the Song of

Songs, the song which no Frenchman can hear and keep his

feelings down and his pride of country cool; then, grandest and

pitifulest scene of all, we saw his own pathetic deat; and out

stillness, as we sat with parted lips and breathless, hanging upon

this man's words, gave us a sense of the awful stillness that reigned

in that field of slaughter when that last surviving soul had passed.



And now, in this solemn hush, the stranger gave Joan a pat or two

on the head and said:



"Little maid--whom God keep!--you have brought me from death

to life this night; now listen: here is your reward," and at that

supreme time for such a heart-melting, soul-rousing surprise,

without another word he lifted up the most noble and pathetic

voice that was ever heard, and began to pour out the great Song of

Roland!



Think of that, with a French audience all stirred up and ready. Oh,

where was your spoken eloquence now! what was it to this! How

fine he looked, how stately, how inspired, as he stood there with

that mighty chant welling from his lips and his heart, his whole

body transfigured, and his rags along with it.



Everybody rose and stood while he sang, and their faces glowed

and their eyes burned; and the tears came and flowed don their

cheeks and their forms began to sway unconsciously to the swing

of the song, and their bosoms to heave and pant; and moanings

broke out, and deep ejaculations; and when the last verse was

reached, and Roland lay dying, all alone, with his face to the field

and to his slain, lying there in heaps and winrows, and took off and

held up his gauntlet to God with his failing hand, and breathed his

beautiful prayer with his paling pips, all burst out in sobs and

wailings. But when the final great note died out and the song was

done, they all flung themselves in a body at the singer, stark mad

with love of him and love of France and pride in her great deeds

and old renown, and smothered him with their embracings; but

Joan was there first, hugged close to his breast, and covering his

face with idolatrous kisses.



The storm raged on outside, but that was no matter; this was the

stranger's home now, for as long as he might please.



Chapter 4 Joan Tames the Mad Man



ALL CHILDREN have nicknames, and we had ours. We got one

apiece early, and they stuck to us; but Joan was richer in this

matter, for, as time went on, she earned a second, and then a third,

and so on, and we gave them to her. First and last she had as many

as half a dozen. Several of these she never lost. Peasant-girls are

bashful naturally; but she surpassed the rule so far, and colored so

easily, and was so easily embarrassed in the presence of strangers,

that we nicknamed her the Bashful. We were all patriots, but she

was called the Patriot, because our warmest feeling for our country

was cold beside hers. Also she was called the Beautiful; and this

was not merely because of the extraordinary beauty of her face and

form, but because of the loveliness of her character. These names

she kept, and one other--the Brave.



We grew along up, in that plodding and peaceful region, and got to

be good-sized boys and girls--big enough, in fact, to begin to know

as much about the wars raging perpetually to the west and north of

us as our elders, and also to feel as stirred up over the occasional

news from these red fields as they did. I remember certain of these

days very clearly. One Tuesday a crowd of us were romping and

singing around the Fairy Tree, and hanging garlands on it in

memory of our lost little fairy friends, when Little Mengette cried

out:



"Look! What is that?"



When one exclaims like that in a way that shows astonishment and

apprehension, he gets attention. All the panting breasts and flushed

faces flocked together, and all the eager eyes were turned in one

direction--down the slope, toward the village.



"It's a black flag."



"A black flag! No--is it?"



"You can see for yourself that it is nothing else."



"It is a black flag, sure! Now, has any ever seen the like of that

before?"



"What can it mean?"



"Mean? It means something dreadful--what else?"



"That is nothing to the point; anybody knows that without the

telling. But what?--that is the question."



"It is a chance that he that bears it can answer as well as any that

are here, if you contain yourself till he comes."



"He runs well. Who is it?"



Some named one, some another; but presently all saw that it was

�tienne Roze, called the Sunflower, because he had yellow hair

and a round pock-marked face. His ancestors had been Germans

some centuries ago. He came straining up the slope, now and then

projecting his flag-stick aloft and giving his black symbol of woe a

wave in the air, whilst all eyes watched him, all tongues discussed

him, and every heart beat faster and faster with impatience to

know his news. At last he sprang among us, and struck his

flag-stick into the ground, saying:



"There! Stand there and represent France while I get my breath.

She needs no other flag now."



All the giddy chatter stopped. It was as if one had announced a

death. In that chilly hush there was no sound audible but the

panting of the breath-blown boy. When he was presently able to

speak, he said:



"Black news is come. A treaty has been made at Troyes between

France and the English and Burgundians. By it France is betrayed

and delivered over, tied hand and foot, to the enemy. It is the work

of the Duke of Burgundy and that she-devil, the Queen of France.

It marries Henry of England to Catharine of France--"



"Is not this a lie? Marries the daughter of France to the Butcher of

Agincourt? It is not to be believed. You have not heard aright."



"If you cannot believe that, Jacques d'Arc, then you have a difficult

task indeed before you, for worse is to come. Any child that is born

of that marriage--if even a girl--is to inherit the thrones of both

England and France, and this double ownership is to remain with

its posterity forever!"



"Now that is certainly a lie, for it runs counter to our Salic law, and

so is not legal and cannot have effect," said Edmond Aubrey,

called the Paladin, because of the armies he was always going to

eat up some day. He would have said more, but he was drowned

out by the clamors of the others, who all burst into a fury over this

feature of the treaty, all talking at once and nobody hearing

anybody, until presently Haumette persuaded them to be still,

saying:



"It is not fair to break him up so in his tale; pray let him go on.

You find fault with his history because it seems to be lies. That

were reason for satisfaction--that kind of lies--not discontent. Tell

the rest, �tienne."



"There is but this to tell: Our King, Charles VI., is to reign until he

dies, then Henry V. of England is to be Regent of France until a

child of his shall be old enough to--"



"That man is to reign over us--the Butcher? It is lies! all lies!" cried

the Paladin. "Besides, look you--what becomes of our Dauphin?

What says the treaty about him?"



"Nothing. It takes away his throne and makes him an outcast."



Then everybody shouted at once and said the news was a lie; and

all began to get cheerful again, saying, "Our King would have to

sign the treaty to make it good; and that he would not do, seeing

how it serves his own son."



But the Sunflower said: "I will ask you this: Would the Queen sign

a treaty disinheriting her son?"



"That viper? Certainly. Nobody is talking of her. Nobody expects

better of her. There is no villainy she will stick at, if it feed her

spite; and she hates her son. Her signing it is of no consequence.

The King must sign."



"I will ask you another thing. What is the King's condition? Mad,

isn't he?"



"Yes, and his people love him all the more for it. It brings him near

to them by his sufferings; and pitying him makes them love him."



"You say right, Jacques d'Arc. Well, what would you of one that is

mad? Does he know what he does? No. Does he do what others

make him do? Yes. Now, then, I tell you he has signed the treaty."



"Who made him do it?"



"You know, without my telling. The Queen."



Then there was another uproar--everybody talking at once, and all

heaping execrations upon the Queen's head. Finally Jacques d'Arc

said:



"But many reports come that are not true. Nothing so shameful as

this has ever come before, nothing that cuts so deep, nothing that

has dragged France so low; therefore there is hope that this tale is

but another idle rumor. Where did you get it?"



The color went out of his sister Joan's face. She dreaded the

answer; and her instinct was right.



"The cur‚ of Maxey brought it."



There was a general gasp. We knew him, you see, for a trusty man.



"Did he believe it?"



The hearts almost stopped beating. Then came the answer:



"He did. And that is not all. He said he knew it to be true."



Some of the girls began to sob; the boys were struck silent. The

distress in Joan's face was like that which one sees in the face of a

dumb animal that has received a mortal hurt. The animal bears it,

making no complaint; she bore it also, saying no word. Her brother

Jacques put his hand on her head and caressed her hair to indicate

his sympathy, and she gathered the hand to her lips and kissed it

for thanks, not saying anything. Presently the reaction came, and

the boys began to talk. No‰l Rainguesson said:



"Oh, are we never going to be men! We do grow along so slowly,

and France never needed soldiers as she needs them now, to wipe

out this black insult."



"I hate youth!" said Pierre Morel, called the Dragon-fly because his

eyes stuck out so. "You've always got to wait, and wait, and

wait--and here are the great wars wasting away for a hundred

years, and you never get a chance. If I could only be a soldier

now!"



"As for me, I'm not going to wait much longer," said the Paladin;

"and when I do start you'll hear from me, I promise you that. There

are some who, in storming a castle, prefer to be in the rear; but as

for me, give me the front or none; I will have none in front of me

but the officers."



Even the girls got the war spirit, and Marie Dupont said:



"I would I were a man; I would start this minute!" and looked very

proud of herself, and glanced about for applause.



"So would I," said C‚cile Letellier, sniffing the air like a war-horse

that smells the battle; "I warrant you I would not turn back from

the field though all England were in front of me."



"Pooh!" said the Paladin; "girls can brag, but that's all they are

good for. Let a thousand of them come face to face with a handful

of soldiers once, if you want to see what running is like. Here's

little Joan--next she'll be threatening to go for a soldier!"



The idea was so funny, and got such a good laugh, that the Paladin

gave it another trial, and said: "Why you can just see her!--see her

plunge into battle like any old veteran. Yes, indeed; and not a poor

shabby common soldier like us, but an officer--an officer, mind

you, with armor on, and the bars of a steel helmet to blush behind

and hide her embarrassment when she finds an army in front of her

that she hasn't been introduced to. An officer? Why, she'll be a

captain! A captain, I tell you, with a hundred men at her back--or

maybe girls. Oh, no common-soldier business for her! And, dear

me, when she starts for that other army, you'll think there's a

hurricane blowing it away!"



Well, he kept it up like that till he made their sides ache with

laughing; which was quite natural, for certainly it was a very funny

idea--at that time--I mean, the idea of that gentle little creature,

that wouldn't hurt a fly, and couldn't bear the sight of blood, and

was so girlish and shrinking in all ways, rushing into battle with a

gang of soldiers at her back. Poor thing, she sat there confused and

ashamed to be so laughed at; and yet at that very minute there was

something about to happen which would change the aspect of

things, and make those young people see that when it comes to

laughing, the person that laughs last has the best chance. For just

then a face which we all knew and all feared projected itself from

behind the Fairy Tree, and the thought that shot through us all was,

crazy Benoist has gotten loose from his cage, and we are as good

as dead! This ragged and hairy and horrible creature glided out

from behind the tree, and raised an ax as he came. We all broke

and fled, this way and that, the girls screaming and crying. No, not

all; all but Joan. She stood up and faced the man, and remained so.

As we reached the wood that borders the grassy clearing and

jumped into its shelter, two or three of us glanced back to see if

Benoist was gaining on us, and that is what we saw--Joan standing,

and the maniac gliding stealthily toward her with his ax lifted. The

sight was sickening. We stood where we were, trembling and not

able to move. I did not want to see the murder done, and yet I

could not take my eyes away. Now I saw Joan step forward to meet

the man, though I believed my eyes must be deceiving me. Then I

saw him stop. He threatened her with his ax, as if to warn her not

to come further, but she paid no heed, but went steadily on, until

she was right in front of him--right under his ax. Then she stopped,

and seemed to begin to talke with him. It made me sick, yes,

giddy, and everything swam around me, and I could not see

anything for a time--whether long or brief I do not know. When

this passed and I looked again, Joan was walking by the man's side

toward the village, holding him by his hand. The ax was in her

other hand.



One by one the boys and girls crept out, and we stood there gazing,

open-mouthed, till those two entered the village and were hid from

sight. It was then that we named her the Brave.



We left the black flag there to continue its mournful office, for we

had other matter to think of now. We started for the village on a

run, to give warning, and get Joan out of her peril; though for one,

after seeing what I had seen, it seemed to me that while Joan had

the ax the man's chance was not the best of the two. When we

arrived the danger was past, the madman was in custody. All the

people were flocking to the little square in front of the church to

talk and exclaim and wonder over the event, and it even made the

town forget the black news of the treaty for two or three hours.



All the women kept hugging and kissing Joan, and praising her,

and crying, and the men patted her on the head and said they

wished she was a man, they would send her to the wars and never

doubt but that she would strike some blows that would be heard of.

She had to tear herself away and go and hide, this glory was so

trying to her diffidence.



Of course the people began to ask us for the particulars. I was so

ashamed that I made an excuse to the first comer, and got privately

away and went back to the Fairy Tree, to get relief from the

embarrassment of those questionings. There I found Joan, but she

was there to get relief from the embarrassment of glory. One by

one the others shirked the inquirers and joined us in our refuge.

Then we gathered around Joan, and asked her how she had dared

to do that thing. She was very modest about it, and said:



"You make a great thing of it, but you mistake; it was not a great

matter. It was not as if I had been a stranger to the man. I know

him, and have known him long; and he knows me, and likes me. I

have fed him through the bars of his cage many times; and last

December, when they chopped off two of his fingers to remind

him to stop seizing and wounding people passing by, I dressed his

hand every day till it was well again."



"That is all well enough," said Little Mengette, "but he is a

madman, dear, and so his likings and his gratitude and friendliness

go for nothing when his rage is up. You did a perilous thing."



"Of course you did," said the Sunflower. "Didn't he threaten to kill

you with the ax?"



"Yes."



"Didn't he threaten you more than once?"



"Yes."



"Didn't you feel afraid?"



"No--at least not much--very little."



"Why didn't you?"



She thought a moment, then said, quite simply:



"I don't know."



It made everybody laugh. Then the Sunflower said it was like a

lamb trying to think out how it had come to eat a wolf, but had to

give it up.



C‚cile Letellier asked, "Why didn't you run when we did?"



"Because it was necessary to get him to his cage; else he would kill

some one. Then he would come to the like harm himself."



It is noticeable that this remark, which implies that Joan was

entirely forgetful of herself and h3er own danger, and had thought

and wrought for the preservation of other people alone, was not

challenged, or criticized, or commented upon by anybody there,

but was taken by all as matter of course and true. It shows how

clearly her character was defined, and how well it was known and

established.



There was silence for a time, and perhaps we were all thinking of

the same thing--namely, what a poor figure we had cut in that

adventure as contrasted with Joan's performance. I tried to think up

some good way of explaining why I had run away and left a little

girl at the mercy of a maniac armed with an ax, but all of the

explanations that offered themselves to me seemed so cheap and

shabby that I gave the matter up and remained still. But others

were less wise. No‰l Rainguesson fidgeted awhile, then broke out

with a remark which showed what his mind had been running on:



"The fact is, I was taken by surprise. That is the reason. If I had

had a moment to think, I would no more have thought of running

that I would think of running from a baby. For, after all, what is

Th‚ophile Benoist, that I should seem to be afraid of him? Pooh!

the idea of being afraid of that poor thing! I only wish he would

come along now--I'd show you!"



"So do I!" cried Pierre Morel. "If I wouldn't make him climb this

tree quicker than--well, you'd see what I would do! Taking a

person by surprise, that way--why, I never meant to run; not in

earnest, I mean. I never thought of running in earnest; I only

wanted to have some fun, and when I saw Joan standing there, and

him threatening her, it was all I could do to restrain myself from

going there and just tearing the livers and lights out of him. I

wanted to do it bad enough, and if it was to do over again, I would!

If ever he comes fooling around me again, I'll--"



"Oh, hush!" said the Paladin, breaking in with an air of disdain;

"the way you people talk, a person would think there's something

heroic about standing up and facing down that poor remnant of a

man. Why, it's nothing! There's small glory to be got in facing him

down, I should say. Why, I wouldn't want any better fun than to

face down a hundred like him. If he was to come along here now, I

would walk up to him just as I am now--I wouldn't care if he had a

thousand axes--and say--"



And so he went on and on, telling the brave things he would say

and the wonders he would do; and the others put in a word from

time to time, describing over again the gory marvels they would do

if ever that madman ventured to cross their path again, for next

time they would be ready for him, and would soon teach him that

if he thought he could surprise them twice because he had

surprised them once, he would find himself very seriously

mistaken, that's all.



And so, in the end, they all got back their self-respect; yes, and

even added somewhat to it; indeed when the sitting broke up they

had a finer opinion of themselves than they had ever had before.



Chapter 5 Domremy Pillaged and Burned



THEY WERE peaceful and pleasant, those young and smoothly

flowing days of ours; that is, that was the case as a rule, we being

remote from the seat of war; but at intervals roving bands

approached near enough for us to see the flush in the sky at night

which marked where they were burning some farmstead or village,

and we all knew, or at least felt, that some day they would come

yet nearer, and we should have our turn. This dull dread lay upon

our spirits like a physical weight. It was greatly augmented a

couple of years after the Treaty of Troyes.



It was truly a dismal year for France. One day we had been over to

have one of our occasional pitched battles with those hated

Burgundian boys of the village of Maxey, and had been whipped,

and were arriving on our side of the river after dark, bruised and

weary, when we heard the bell ringing the tocsin. We ran all the

way, and when we got to the square we found it crowded with the

excited villagers, and weirdly lighted by smoking and flaring

torches.



On the steps of the church stood a stranger, a Burgundian priest,

who was telling the people new which made them weep, and rave,

and rage, and curse, by turns. He said our old mad King was dead,

and that now we and France and the crown were the property of an

English baby lying in his cradle in London. And he urged us to

give that child our allegiance, and be its faithful servants and

well-wishers; and said we should now have a strong and stable

government at last, and that in a little time the English armies

would start on their last march, and it would be a brief one, for all

that it would need to do would be to conquer what odds and ends

of our country yet remained under that rare and almost forgotten

rag, the banner of France.



The people stormed and raged at him, and you could see dozens of

them stretch their fists above the sea of torch-lighted faces and

shake them at him; and it was all a wild picture, and stirring to

look at; and the priest was a first-rate part of it, too, for he stood

there in the strong glare and looked down on those angry people in

the blandest and most indifferent way, so that while you wanted to

burn him at the stake, you still admired the aggravating coolness of

him. And his winding-up was the coolest thing of all. For he told

them how, at the funeral of our old King, the French King-at-Arms

had broken his staff of office over the coffin of "Charles VI. and

his dynasty," at the same time saying, in a loud voice, "Good grant

long life to Henry, King of France and England, our sovereign

lord!" and then he asked them to join him in a hearty Amen to that!

The people were white with wrath, and it tied their tongues for the

moment, and they could not speak. But Joan was standing close

by, and she looked up in his face, and said in her sober, earnest

way:



"I would I might see thy head struck from thy body!"--then, after a

pause, and crossing herself--"if it were the will of God."



This is worth remembering, and I will tell you why: it is the only

harsh speech Joan ever uttered in her life. When I shall have

revealed to you the storms she went through, and the wrongs and

persecutions, then you will see that it was wonderful that she said

but one bitter thing while she lived.



From the day that that dreary news came we had one scare after

another, the marauders coming almost to our doors every now and

then; so that we lived in ever-increasing apprehension, and yet

were somehow mercifully spared from actual attack. But at last

our turn did really come. This was in the spring of '28. The

Burgundians swarmed in with a great noise, in the middle of a dark

night, and we had to jump up and fly for our lives. We took the

road to Neufchƒteau, and rushed along in the wildest disorder,

everybody trying to get ahead, and thus the movements of all were

impeded; but Joan had a cool head--the only cool head there--and

she took command and brought order out of that chaos. She did

her work quickly and with decision and despatch, and soon turned

the panic flight into a quite steady-going march. You will grant

that for so young a person, and a girl at that, this was a good piece

of work.



She was sixteen now, shapely and graceful, and of a beauty so

extraordinary that I might allow myself any extravagance of

language in describing it and yet have no fear of going beyond the

truth. There was in her face a sweetness and serenity and purity

that justly reflected her spiritual nature. She was deeply religious,

and this is a thing which sometimes gives a melancholy cast to a

person's countenance, but it was not so in her case. Her religion

made her inwardly content and joyous; and if she was troubled at

times, and showed the pain of it in her face and bearing, it came of

distress for her country; no part of it was chargeable to her

religion.



A considerable part of our village was destroyed, and when it

became safe for us to venture back there we realized what other

people had been suffering in all the various quarters of France for

many years--yes, decades of years. For the first time we saw

wrecked and smoke-blackened homes, and in the lanes and alleys

carcasses of dumb creatures that had been slaughtered in pure

wantonness--among them calves and lambs that had been pets of

the children; and it was pity to see the children lament over them.



And then, the taxes, the taxes! Everybody thought of that. That

burden would fall heavy now in the commune's crippled condition,

and all faces grew long with the thought of it. Joan said:



"Paying taxes with naught to pay them with is what the rest of

France has been doing these many years, but we never knew the

bitterness of that before. We shall know it now."



And so she went on talking about it and growing more and more

troubled about it, until one could see that it was filling all her

mind.



At last we came upon a dreadful object. It was the

madman--hacked and stabbed to death in his iron cage in the

corner of the square. It was a bloody and dreadful sight. Hardly

any of us young people had ever seen a man before who had lost

his life by violence; so this cadaver had an awful fascination for

us; we could not take our eyes from it. I mean, it had that sort of

fascination for all of us but one. That one was Joan. She turned

away in horror, and could not be persuaded to go near it again.

There--it is a striking reminder that we are but creatures of use and

custom; yes, and it is a reminder, too, of how harshly and unfairly

fate deals with us sometimes. For it was so ordered that the very

ones among us who were most fascinated with mutilated and

bloody death were to live their lives in peace, while that other,

who had a native and deep horror of it, must presently go forth and

have it as a familiar spectacle every day on the field of battle.



You may well believe that we had plenty of matter for talk now,

since the raiding of our village seemed by long odds the greatest

event that had really ever occurred in the world; for although these

dull peasants may have thought they recognized the bigness of

some of the previous occurrences that had filtered from the world's

history dimly into their minds, the truth is that they hadn't. One

biting little fact, visible to their eyes of flesh and felt in their own

personal vitals, became at once more prodigious to them than the

grandest remote episode in the world's history which they had got

at second hand and by hearsay. It amuses me now when I recall

how our elders talked then. The fumed and fretted in a fine

fashion.



"Ah, yes," said old Jacques d'Arc, "things are come to a pretty pass,

indeed! The King must be informed of this. It is time that he cease

from idleness and dreaming, and get at his proper business." He

meant our young disinherited King, the hunted refugee, Charles

VII.



"You way well," said the maire. "He should be informed, and that

at once. It is an outrage that such things whould be permitted.

Why, we are not safe in our beds, and he taking his case yonder. It

shall be made known, indeed it shall--all France shall hear of it!"



To hear them talk, one would have imagined that all the previous

ten thousand sackings and burnings in France had been but fables,

and this one the only fact. It is always the way; words will answer

as long as it is only a person's neighbor who is in trouble, but when

that person gets into trouble himself, it is time that the King rise up

and do something.



The big event filled us young people with talk, too. We let it flow

in a steady stream while we tended the flocks. We were beginning

to feel pretty important now, for I was eighteen and the other

youths were from one to four years older--young men, in fact. One

day the Paladin was arrogantly criticizing the patriot generals of

France and said:



"Look at Donois, Bastard of Orleans--call him a eneral! Just put

me in his place once--never mind what I would do, it is not for me

to say, I have no stomach for talk, my way is to act and let others

do the talking--but just put me in his place once, that's all! And

look at Saintrailles--pooh! and that blustering La Hire, now what a

general that is!"



It shocked everybody to hear these great names so flippantly

handled, for to us these renowned soldiers were almost gods. In

their far-off splendor they rose upon our imaginations dim and

huge, shadowy and awful, and it was a fearful thing to hear them

spoken of as if they were mere men, and their acts open to

comment and criticism. The olor rose in Joan's face, and she said:



"I know not how any can be so hardy as to use such words

regarding these sublime men, who are the very pillars of the

French state, supporting it with their strength and preserving it at

daily cost of their blood. As for me, I could count myself honored

past all deserving if I might be allowed but the privilege of looking

upon them once--at a distance, I mean, for it would not become

one of my degree to approach them too near."



The Paladin was disconcerted for a moment, seeing by the faces

around him that Joan had put into words what the others felt, then

he pulled his complacency together and fell to fault-finding again.

Joan's brother Jean said:



"If you don't like what our generals do, why don't you go to the

great wars yourself and better their work? You are always talking

about going to the wars, but you don't go."



"Look you," said the Paladin, "it is easy to say that. Now I will tell

you why I remain chafing here in a bloodless tranquillity which my

reputation teaches you is repulsive to my nature. I do not go

because I am not a gentleman. That is the whole reason. What can

one private soldier do in a contest like this? Nothing. He is not

permitted to rise from the ranks. If I were a gentleman would I

remain here? Not one moment. I can save France--ah, you may

laugh, but I know what is in me, I know what is hid under this

peasant cap. I can save France, and I stand ready to do it, but not

under these present conditions. If they want me, let them send for

me; otherwise, let them take the consequences; I shall not budge

but as an officer."



"Alas, poor France--France is lost!" said Pierre d'Arc.



"Since you sniff so at others, why don't you go to the wars yourself,

Pierre d'Arc?"



"Oh, I haven't been sent for, either. I am no more a gentleman than

you. Yet I will go; I promise to go. I promise to go as a private

under your orders--when you are sent for."



They all laughed, and the Dragon-fly said:



"So soon? Then you need to begin to get ready; you might be

called for in five years--who knows? Yes, in my opinion you'll

march for the wars in five years."



"He will go sooner," said Joan. She said it in a low voice and

musingly, but several heard it.



"How do you know that, Joan?" said the Dragon-fly, with a

surprised look. But Jean d'Arc broke in and said:



"I want to go myself, but as I am rather young yet, I also will wait,

and march when the Paladin is sent for."



"No," said Joan, "he will go with Pierre."



She said it as one who talks to himself aloud without knowing it,

and none heard it but me. I glanced at her and saw that her

knitting-needles were idle in her hands, and that her face had a

dreamy and absent look in it. There were fleeting movements of

her lips as if she might be occasionally saying parts of sentences to

herself. But there was no sound, for I was the nearest person to her

and I heard nothing. But I set my ears open, for those two speeches

had affected me uncannily, I being superstitious and easily

troubled by any little thing of a strange and unusual sort.



No‰l Rainguesson said:



"There is one way to let France have a chance for her salvation.

We've got one gentleman in the commune, at any rate. Why can't

the Scholar change name and condition with the Paladin? Then he

can be an officer. France will send for him then, and he will sweep

these English and Burgundian armies into the sea like flies."



I was the Scholar. That was my nickname, because I could read

and write. There was a chorus of approval, and the Sunflower said:



"That is the very thing--it settles every difficulty. The Sieur de

Conte will easily agree to that. Yes, he will march at the back of

Captain Paladin and die early, covered with common-soldier

glory."



"He will march with Jean and Pierre, and live till these wars are

forgotten," Joan muttered; "and at the eleventh hour No‰l and the

Paladin will join these, but not of their own desire." The voice was

so low that I was not perfectly sure that these were the words, but

they seemed to be. It makes one feel creepy to hear such things.



"Come, now," No‰l continued, "it's all arranged; there's nothing to

do but organize under the Paladin's banner and go forth and rescue

France. You'll all join?"



All said yes, except Jacques d'Arc, who said:



"I'll ask you to excuse me. It is pleasant to talk war, and I am with

you there, and I've always thought I should go soldiering about this

time, but the look of our wrecked village and that carved-up and

bloody madman have taught me that I am not made for such work

and such sights. I could never be at home in that trade. Face

swords and the big guns and death? It isn't in me. No, no; count me

out. And besides, I'm the eldest son, and deputy prop and protector

of the family. Since you are going to carry Jean and Pierre to the

wars, somebody must be left behind to take care of our Joan and

her sister. I shall stay at home, and grow old in peace and

tranquillity."



"He will stay at home, but not grow old," murmured Joan.



The talk rattled on in the gay and careless fashion privileged to

youth, and we got the Paladin to map out his campaigns and fight

his battles and win his victories and extinguish the English and put

our King upon his throne and set his crown upon his head. Then

we asked him what he was going to answer when the King should

require him to name his reward. The Paladin had it all arranged in

his head, and brought it out promptly:



"He shall give me a dukedom, name me premier peer, and make

me Hereditary Lord High Constable of France."



"And marry you to a princess--you're not going to leave that out,

are you?"



The Paladin colored a trifle, and said, brusquely:



"He may keep his princesses--I can marry more to my taste."



Meaning Joan, though nobody suspected it at that time. If any had,

the Paladin would have been finely ridiculed for his vanity. There

was no fit mate in that village for Joan of Arc. Every one would

have said that.



In turn, each person present was required to say what reward he

would demand of the King if he could change places with the

Paladin and do the wonders the Paladin was going to do. The

answers were given in fun, and each of us tried to outdo his

predecessors in the extravagance of the reward he would claim;

but when it came to Joan's turn, and they rallied her out of her

dreams and asked her to testify, they had to explain to her what the

question was, for her thought had been absent, and she had heard

none of this latter part of our talk. She supposed they wanted a

serious answer, and she gave it. She sat considering some

moments, then she said:



"If the Dauphin, out of his grace and nobleness, should say to me,

'Now that I am rich and am come to my own again, choose and

have,' I should kneel and ask him to give command that our village

should nevermore be taxed."



It was so simple and out of her heart that it touched us and we did

not laugh, but fell to thinking. We did not laugh; but there came a

day when we remembered that speech with a mournful pride, and

were glad that we had not laughed, perceiving then how honest her

words had been, and seeing how faithfully she made them good

when the time came, asking just that boon of the King and refusing

to take even any least thing for herself.



Chapter 6 Joan and Archangel Michael



ALL THROUGH her childhood and up to the middle of her

fourteenth year, Joan had been the most light-hearted creature and

the merriest in the village, with a hop-skip-and-jump gait and a

happy and catching laugh; and this disposition, supplemented by

her warm and sympathetic nature and frank and winning ways, had

made her everybody's pet. She had been a hot patriot all this time,

and sometimes the war news had sobered her spirits and wrung her

heart and made her acquainted with tears, but always when these

interruptions had run their course her spirits rose and she was her

old self again.



But now for a whole year and a half she had been mainly grave;

not melancholy, but given to thought, abstraction, dreams. She was

carrying France upon her heart, and she found the burden not light.

I knew that this was her trouble, but others attributed her

abstraction to religious ecstasy, for she did not share her thinkings

with the village at large, yet gave me glimpses of them, and so I

knew, better than the rest, what was absorbing her interest. Many a

time the idea crossed my mind that she had a secret--a secret

which she was keeping wholly to herself, as well from me as from

the others. This idea had come to me because several times she

had cut a sentence in two and changed the subject when apparently

she was on the verge of a revelation of some sort. I was to find this

secret out, but not just yet.



The day after the conversation which I have been reporting we

were together in the pastures and fell to talking about France, as

usual. For her sake I had always talked hopefully before, but that

was mere lying, for really there was not anything to hang a rag of

hope for France upon. Now it was such a pain to lie to her, and

cost me such shame to offer this treachery to one so snow-pure

from lying and treachery, and even from suspicion of such

baseness in others, as she was, that I was resolved to face about

now and begin over again, and never insult her more with

deception. I started on the new policy by sayingq1qstill opening up

with a small lie, of course, for habit is habit, and not to be flung

out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a

time:



"Joan, I have been thinking the thing all over last night, and have

concluded that we have been in the wrong all this time; that the

case of France is desperate; that it has been desperate ever since

Agincourt; and that to-day it is more than desperate, it is hopeless."



I did not look her in the face while I was saying it; it could not be

expected of a person. To break her heart, to crush her hope with a

so frankly brutal speech as that, without one charitable soft place

in it--it seemed a shameful thing, and it was. But when it was out,

the weight gone, and my conscience rising to the surface, I glanced

at her face to see the result.



There was none to see. At least none that I was expecting. There

was a barely perceptible suggestion of wonder in her serious eyes,

but that was all; and she said, in her simple and placid way:



"The case of France hopeless? Why should you think that? Tell

me."



It is a most pleasant thing to find that what you thought would

inflict a hurt upon one whom you honor, has not done it. I was

relieved now, and could say all my say without any furtivenesses

and without embarrassment. So I began:



"Let us put sentiment and patriotic illusions aside, and look at the

facts in the face. What do they say? They speak as plainly as the

figures in a merchant's account-book. One has only to add the two

columns up to see that the French house is bankrupt, that one-half

of its property is already in the English sheriff's hands and the

other half in nobody's--except those of irresponsible raiders and

robbers confessing allegiance to nobody. Our King is shut up with

his favorites and fools in inglorious idleness and poverty in a

narrow little patch of the kingdom--a sort of back lot, as one may

say--and has no authority there or anywhere else, hasn't a farthing

to his name, nor a regiment of soldiers; he is not fighting, he is not

intending to fight, he means to make no further resistance; in truth,

there is but one thing that he is intending to do--give the whole

thing up, pitch his crown into the sewer, and run away to Scotland.

There are the facts. Are they correct?"



"Yes, they are correct."



"Then it is as I have said: one needs but to add them together in

order to realize what they mean."



She asked, in an ordinary, level tone:



"What--that the case of France is hopeless?"



"Necessarily. In face of these facts, doubt of it is impossible."



"How can you say that? How can you feel like that?"



"How can I? How could I think or feel in any other way, in the

circumstances? Joan, with these fatal figures before, you, have you

really any hope for France--really and actually?"



"Hope--oh, more than that! France will win her freedom and keep

it. Do not doubt it."



It seemed to me that her clear intellect must surely be clouded

to-day. It must be so, or she would see that those figures could

mean only one thing. Perhaps if I marshaled them again she would

see. So I said:



"Joan, your heart, which worships France, is beguiling your head.

You are not perceiving the importance of these figures. Here--I

want to make a picture of them, her eon the ground with a stick.

Now, this rough outline is France. Through its middle, east and

west, I draw a river."



"Yes, the Loire."



"Now, then, this whole northern half of the country is in the tight

grip of the English."



"Yes."



"And this whole southern half is really in nobody's hands at all--as

our King confesses by meditating desertion and flight to a foreign

land. England has armies here; opposition is dead; she can assume

full possession whenever she may choose. In very truth, all France

is gone, France is already lost, France has ceased to exist. What

was France is now but a British province. Is this true?"



Her voice was low, and just touched with emotion, but distinct:



"Yes, it is true."



"Very well. Now add this clinching fact, and surely the sum is

complete: When have French soldiers won a victory? Scotch

soldiers, under the French flag, have won a barren fight or two a

few years back, but I am speaking of French ones. Since eight

thousand Englishmen nearly annihilated sixty thousand Frenchmen

a dozen years ago at Agincourt, French courage has been

paralyzed. And so it is a common saying to-day that if you

confront fifty French soldiers with five English ones, the French

will run."



"It is a pity, but even these things are true."



"Then certainly the day for hoping is past."



I believed the case would be clear to her now. I thought it could

not fail to be clear to her, and that she would say, herself, that

there was no longer any ground for hope. But I was mistaken; and

disappointed also. She said, without any doubt in her tone:



"France will rise again. You shall see."



"Rise?--with this burden of English armies on her back!"



"She will cast it off; she will trample it under foot!" This with

spirit.



"Without soldiers to fight with?"



"The drums will summon them. They will answer, and they will

march."



"March to the rear, as usual?"



"No; to the front--ever to the front--always to the front! You shall

see."



"And the pauper King?"



"He will mount his throne--he will wear his crown."



"Well, of a truth this makes one's head dizzy. Why, if I could

believe that in thirty years from now the English domination would

be broken and the French monarch's head find itself hooped with a

real crown of sovereignty--"



"Both will have happened before two years are sped."



"Indeed? and who is going to perform all these sublime

impossibilities?"



"God."



It was a reverent low note, but it rang clear.



What could have put those strange ideas in her head? This question

kept running in my mind during two or three days. It was

inevitable that I should think of madness. What other way was

there to account for such things? Grieving and brooding over the

woes of France had weakened that strong mind, and filled it with

fantastic phantoms--yes, that must be it.



But I watched her, and tested her, and it was not so. Her eye was

clear and sane, her ways were natural, her speech direct and to the

point. No, there was nothing the matter with her mind; it was still

the soundest in the village and the best. She went on thinking for

others, planning for others, sacrificing herself for others, just as

always before. She went on ministering to her sick and to her poor,

and still stood ready to give the wayfarer her bed and content

herself with the floor. There was a secret somewhere, but madness

was not the key to it. This was plain.



Now the key did presently come into my hands, and the way that it

happened was this. You have heard all the world talk of this matter

which I am about to speak of, but you have not heard an

eyewitness talk of it before.



I was coming from over the ridge, one day--it was the 15th of May,

'28--and when I got to the edge of the oak forest and was about to

step out of it upon the turfy open space in which the haunted beech

tree stood, I happened to cast a glance from cover, first--then I

took a step backward, and stood in the shelter and concealment of

the foliage. For I had caught sight of Joan, and thought I would

devise some sort of playful surprise for her. Think of it--that trivial

conceit was neighbor, with but a scarcely measurable interval of

time between, to an event destined to endure forever in histories

and songs.



The day was overcast, and all that grassy space wherein the Tree

stood lay in a soft rich shadow. Joan sat on a natural seat formed

by gnarled great roots of the Tree. Her hands lay loosely, one

reposing in the other, in her lap. Her head was bent a little toward

the ground, and her air was that of one who is lost to thought,

steeped in dreams, and not conscious of herself or of the world.

And now I saw a most strange thing, for I saw a white shadow

come slowly gliding along the grass toward the Tree. It was of

grand proportions--a robed form, with wings--and the whiteness of

this shadow was not like any other whiteness that we know of,

except it be the whiteness of lightnings, but even the lightnings are

not so intense as it was, for one cal look at them without hurt,

whereas this brilliancy was so blinding that in pained my eyes and

brought the water into them. I uncovered my head, perceiving that

I was in the presence of something not of this world. My breath

grew faint and difficult, because of the terror and the awe that

possessed me.



Another strange thing. The wood had been silent--smitten with that

deep stillness which comes when a storm-cloud darkens a forest,

and the wild creatures lose heart and are afraid; but now all the

birds burst forth into song, and the joy, the rapture, the ecstasy of it

was beyond belief; and was so eloquent and so moving, withal,

that it was plain it was an act of worship. With the first note of

those birds Joan cast herself upon her knees, and bent her head low

and crossed her hands upon her breast.



She had not seen the shadow yet. Had the song of the birds told her

it was coming? It had that look to me. Then the like of this must

have happened before. Yes, there might be no doubt of that.



The shadow approached Joan slowly; the extremity of it reached

her, flowed over her, clothed her in its awful splendor. In that

immortal light her face, only humanly beautiful before, became

divine; flooded with that transforming glory her mean peasant

habit was become like to the raiment of the sun-clothed children of

God as we see them thronging the terraces of the Throne in our

dreams and imaginings.



Presently she rose and stood, with her head still bowed a little, and

with her arms down and the ends of her fingers lightly laced

together in front of her; and standing so, all drenched with that

wonderful light, and yet apparently not knowing it, she seemed to

listen--but I heard nothing. After a little she raised her head, and

looked up as one might look up toward the face of a giant, and

then clasped her hands and lifted them high, imploringly, and

began to plead. I heard some of the words. I heard her say:



"But I am so young! oh, so young to leave my mother and my

home and go out into the strange world to undertake a thing so

great! Ah, how can I talke with men, be comrade with

men?--soldiers! It would give me over to insult, and rude usage,

and contempt. How can I go to the great wars, and lead armies?--I

a girl, and ignorant of such things, knowing nothing of arms, nor

how to mount a horse, nor ride it. . . . Yet--if it is commanded--"



Her voice sank a little, and was broken by sobs, and I made out no

more of her words. Then I came to myself. I reflected that I had

been intruding upon a mystery of God--and what might my

punishment be? I was afraid, and went deeper into the wood. Then

I carved a mark in the bark of a tree, saying to myself, it may be

that I am dreaming and have not seen this vision at all. I will come

again, when I know that I am awake and not dreaming, and see if

this mark is still here; then I shall know.



Chapter  7 She Delivers the Divine Command



I HEARD my name called. It was Joan's voice. It startled me, for

how could she know I was there? I said to myself, it is part of the

dream; it is all dream--voice, vision and all; the fairies have done

this. So I crossed myself and pronounced the name of God, to

break the enchantment. I knew I was awake now and free from the

spell, for no spell can withstand this exorcism. Then I heard my

name called again, and I stepped at once from under cover, and

there indeed was Joan, but not looking as she had looked in the

dream. For she was not crying now, but was looking as she had

used to look a year and a half before, when her heart was light and

her spirits high. Her old-time energy and fire were back, and a

something like exaltation showed itself in her face and bearing. It

was almost as if she had been in a trance all that time and had

come awake again. Really, it was just as if she had been away and

lost, and was come back to us at last; and I was so glad that I felt

like running to call everybody and have them flock around her and

give her welcome. I ran to her excited and said:



"Ah, Joan, I've got such a wonderful thing to tell you about! You

would never imagine it. I've had a dream, and in the dream I saw

you right here where you are standing now, and--"



But she put up her hand and said:



"It was not a dream."



It gave me a shock, and I began to feel afraid again.



"Not a dream?" I said, "how can you know about it, Joan?"



"Are you dreaming now?"



"I--I suppose not. I think I am not."



"Indeed you are not. I know you are not. And yow were not

dreaming when you cut the mark in the tree."



I felt myself turning cold with fright, for now I knew of a certainty

that I had not been dreaming, but had really been in the presence

of a dread something not of this world. Then I remembered that

my sinful feet were upon holy ground--the ground where that

celestial shadow had rested. I moved quickly away, smitten to the

bones with fear. Joan followed, and said:



"Do not be afraid; indeed there is no need. Come with me. We will

sit by the spring and I will tell you all my secret."



When she was ready to begin, I checked her and said:



"First tell me this. You could not see me in the wood; how did you

know I cut a mark in the tree?"



"Wait a little; I will soon come to that; then you will see."



"But tell me one thing now; what was that awful shadow that I

saw?"



"I will tell you, but do not be disturbed; you are not in danger. It

was the shadow of an archangel--Michael, the chief and lord of the

armies of heaven."



I could but cross myself and tremble for having polluted that

ground with my feet.



"You were not afraid, Joan? Did you see his face--did you see his

form?"



"Yes; I was not afraid, because this was not the first time. I was

afraid the first time."



"When was that, Joan?"



"It is nearly three years ago now."



"So long? Have you seen him many times?"



"Yes, many times."



"It is this, then, that has changed you; it was this that made you

thoughtful and not as you were before. I see it now. Why did you

not tell us about it?"



"It was not permitted. It is permitted now, and soon I shall tell all.

But only you, now. It must remain a secret for a few days still."



"Has none seen that white shadow before but me?"



"No one. It has fallen upon me before when you and others were

present, but none could see it. To-day it has been otherwise, and I

was told why; but it will not be visible again to any."



"It was a sign to me, then--and a sign with a meaning of some

kind?"



"Yes, but I may not speak of that."



"Strange--that that dazzling light could rest upon an object before

one's eyes and not be visible."



"With it comes speech, also. Several saints come, attended by

myriads of angels, and they speak to me; I hear their voices, but

others do not. They are very dear to me--my Voices; that is what I

call them to myself."



"Joan, what do they tell you?"



"All manner of things--about France, I mean."



"What things have they been used to tell you?"



She sighed, and said:



"Disasters--only disasters, and misfortunes, and humiliation. There

was naught else to foretell."



"They spoke of them to you beforehand? "Yes. So that I knew what

was going to happen before it happened. It made me grave--as you

saw. It could not be otherwise. But always there was a word of

hope, too. More than that: France was to be rescued, and made

great and free again. But how and by whom--that was not told. Not

until to-day." As she said those last words a sudden deep glow

shone in her eyes, which I was to see there many times in

after-days when the bugles sounded the charge and learn to call it

the battle-light. Her breast heaved, and the color rose in her face.

"But to-day I know. God has chosen the meanest of His creatures

for this work; and by His command, and in His protection, and by

His strength, not mine, I am to lead His armies, and win back

France, and set the crown upon the head of His servant that is

Dauphin and shall be King."



I was amazed, and said:



"You, Joan? You, a child, lead armies?"



"Yes. For one little moment or two the thought crushed me; for it

is as you say--I am only a child; a child and ignorant--ignorant of

everything that pertains to war, and not fitted for the rough life of

camps and the companionship of soldiers. But those weak

moments passed; they will not come again. I am enlisted, I will not

turn back, God helping me, till the English grip is loosed from the

throat of France. My Voices have never told me lies, they have not

lied to-day. They say I am to go to Robert de Baudricourt,

governor of Vaucouleurs, and he will give me men-at-arms for

escort and send me to the King. A year from now a blow will be

struck which will be the beginning of the end, and the end will

follow swiftly."



"Where will it be struck?"



"My Voices have not said; nor what will happen this present year,

before it is struck. It is appointed me to strike it, that is all I know;

and follow it with others, sharp and swift, undoing in ten weeks

England's long years of costly labor, and setting the crown upon

the Dauphin's head--for such is God's will; my Voices have said it,

and shall I doubt it? No; it will be as they have said, for they say

only that which is true."



These were tremendous sayings. They were impossibilities to my

reason, but to my heart they rang true; and so, while my reason

doubted, my heart believed--believed, and held fast to the belief

from that day. Presently I said:



"Joan, I believe the things which you have said, and now I am glad

that I am to march with you to the great wars--that is, if it is with

you I am to march when I go."



She looked surprised, and said:



"It is true that you will be with me when I go to the wars, but how

did you know?"



"I shall march with you, and so also will Jean and Pierre, but not

Jacques."



"All true--it is so ordered, as was revealed to me lately, but I did

not know until to-day that the marching would be with me, or that

I should march at all. How did you know these things?"



I told her when it was that she had said them. But she did not

remember about it. So then I knew that she had been asleep, or in a

trance or an ecstasy of some kind, at that time. She bade me keep

these and the other revelations to myself for the present, and I said

I would, and kept the faith I promised.



None who met Joan that day failed to notice the change that had

come over her. She moved and spoke with energy and decision;

there was a strange new fire in her eye, and also a something

wholly new and remarkable in her carriage and in the set of her

head. This new light in the eye and this new bearing were born of

the authority and leadership which had this day been vested in her

by the decree of God, and they asserted that authority as plainly as

speech could have done it, yet without ostentation or bravado. This

calm consciousness of command, and calm unconscious outward

expression of it, remained with her thenceforth until her mission

was accomplished.



Like the other villagers, she had always accorded me the deference

due my rank; but now, without word said on either side, she and I

changed places; she gave orders, not suggestions. I received them

with the deference due a superior, and obeyed them without

comment. In the evening she said to me:



"I leave before dawn. No one will know it but you. I go to speak

with the governor of Vaucouleurs as commanded, who will

despise me and treat me rudely, and perhaps refuse my prayer at

this time. I go first to Burey, to persuade my uncle Laxart to go

with me, it not being meet that I go alone. I may need you in

Vaucouleurs; for if the governor will not receive me I will dictate

a letter to him, and so must have some one by me who knows the

art of how to write and spell the words. You will go from here

to-morrow in the afternoon, and remain in Vaucouleurs until I

need you."



I said I would obey, and she went her way. You see how clear a

head she had, and what a just and level judgment. She did not

order me to go with her; no, she would not subject her good name

to gossiping remark. She knew that the governor, being a noble,

would grant me, another noble, audience; but no, you see, she

would not have that, either. A poor peasant-girl presenting a

petition through a young nobleman--how would that look? She

always protected her modesty from hurt; and so, for reward, she

carried her good name unsmirched to the end. I knew what I must

do now, if I would have her approval: go to Vaucouleurs, keep out

of her sight, and be ready when wanted.



I went the next afternoon, and took an obscure lodging; the next

day I called at the castle and paid my respects to the governor, who

invited me to dine with him at noon of the following day. He was

an ideal soldier of the time; tall, brawny, gray-headed, rough, full

of strange oaths acquired here and there and yonder in the wars

and treasured as if they were decorations. He had been used to the

camp all his life, and to his notion war was God's best gift to man.

He had his steel cuirass on, and wore boots that came above his

knees, and was equipped with a huge sword; and when I looked at

this martial figure, and heard the marvelous oaths, and guessed

how little of poetry and sentiment might be looked for in this

quarter, I hoped the little peasant-girl would not get the privilege

of confronting this battery, but would have to content herself with

the dictated letter.



I came again to the castle the next day at noon, and was conducted

to the great dining-hall and seated by the side of the governor at a

small table which was raised a couple of steps higher than the

general table. At the small table sat several other guests besides

myself, and at the general table sat the chief officers of the

garrison. At the entrance door stood a guard of halberdiers, in

morion and breastplate.



As for talk, there was but one topic, of course--the desperate

situation of France. There was a rumor, some one said, that

Salisbury was making preparations to march against Orleans. It

raised a turmoil of excited conversation, and opinions fell thick

and fast. Some believed he would march at once, others that he

could not accomplish the investment before fall, others that the

siege would be long, and bravely contested; but upon one thing all

voices agreed: that Orleans must eventually fall, and with it

France. With that, the prolonged discussion ended, and there was

silence. Every man seemed to sink himself in his own thoughts,

and to forget where he was. This sudden and profound stillness,

where before had been so much animation, was impressive and

solemn. Now came a servant and whispered something to the

governor, who said:



"Would talk with me?"



"Yes, your Excellency."



"H'm! A strange idea, certainly. Bring them in."



It was Joan and her uncle Laxart. At the spectacle of the great

people the courage oozed out of the poor old peasant and he

stopped midway and would come no further, but remained there

with his red nightcap crushed in his hands and bowing humbly

here, there, and everywhere, stupefied with embarrassment and

fear. But Joan came steadily forward, erect and self-possessed, and

stood before the governor. She recognized me, but in no way

indicated it. There was a buzz of admiration, even the governor

contributing to it, for I heard him mutter, "By God's grace, it is a

beautiful creature!" He inspected her critically a moment or two,

then said:



"Well, what is your errand, my child?"



"My message is to you, Robert de Baudricourt, governor of

Vaucouleurs, and it is this: that you will send and tell the Dauphin

to wait and not give battle to his enemies, for God will presently

send him help."



This strange speech amazed the company, and many murmured,

"The poor young thing is demented." The governor scowled, and

said:



"What nonsense is this? The King--or the Dauphin, as you call

him--needs no message of that sort. He will wait, give yourself no

uneasiness as to that. What further do you desire to say to me?"



"This. To beg that you will give me an escort of men-at-arms and

send me to the Dauphin."



"What for?"



"That he may make me his general, for it is appointed that I shall

drive the English out of France, and set the crown upon his head."



"What--you? Why, you are but a child!"



"Yet am I appointed to do it, nevertheless."



"Indeed! And when will all this happen?"



"Next year he will be crowned, and after that will remain master of

France."



There was a great and general burst of laughter, and when it had

subsided the governor said:



"Who has sent you with these extravagant messages?"



"My Lord."



"What Lord?"



"The King of Heaven."



Many murmured, "Ah, poor thing, poor thing!" and others, "Ah,

her mind is but a wreck!" The governor hailed Laxart, and said:



"Harkye!--take this mad child home and whip her soundly. That is

the best cure for her ailment."



As Joan was moving away she turned and said, with simplicity:



"You refuse me the soldiers, I know not why, for it is my Lord that

has commanded you. Yes, it is He that has made the command;

therefore I must come again, and yet again; then I shall have the

men-at-arms."



There was a great deal of wondering talk, after she was gone; and

the guards and servants passed the talk to the town, the town

passed it to the country; Domremy was already buzzing with it

when we got back.



Chapter  8 Why the Scorners Relented



HUMAN NATURE is the same everywhere: it defies success, it

has nothing but scorn for defeat. The village considered that Joan

had disgraced it with her grotesque performance and its ridiculous

failure; so all the tongues were busy with the matter, and as bilious

and bitter as they were busy; insomuch that if the tongues had been

teeth she would not have survived her persecutions. Those persons

who did not scold did what was worse and harder to bear; for they

ridiculed her, and mocked at her, and ceased neither day nor night

from their witticisms and jeerings and laughter. Haumette and

Little Mengette and I stood by her, but the storm was too strong for

her other friends, and they avoided her, being ashamed to be seen

with her because she was so unpopular, and because of the sting of

the taunts that assailed them on her account. She shed tears in

secret, but none in public. In public she carried herself with

serenity, and showed no distress, nor any resentment--conduct

which should have softened the feeling against her, but it did not.

Her father was so incensed that he could not talk in measured

terms about her wild project of going to the wars like a man. He

had dreamed of her doing such a thing, some time before, and now

he remembered that dream with apprehension and anger, and said

that rather than see her unsex herself and go away with the armies,

he would require her brothers to drown her; and that if they should

refuse, he would do it with his own hands.



But none of these things shook her purpose in the least. Her

parents kept a strict watch upon her to keep her from leaving the

village, but she said her time was not yet; that when the time to go

was come she should know it, and then the keepers would watch in

vain.



The summer wasted along; and when it was seen that her purpose

continued steadfast, the parents were glad of a chance which

finally offered itself for bringing her projects to an end through

marriage. The Paladin had the effrontery to pretend that she had

engaged herself to him several years before, and now he claimed a

ratification of the engagement.



She said his statement was not true, and refused to marry him. She

was cited to appear before the ecclesiastical court at Toul to

answer for her perversity; when she declined to have counsel, and

elected to conduct her case herself, her parents and all her

ill-wishers rejoiced, and looked upon her as already defeated. And

that was natural enough; for who would expect that an ignorant

peasant-girl of sixteen would be otherwise than frightened and

tongue-tied when standing for the first time in presence of the

practised doctors of the law, and surrounded by the cold

solemnities of a court? Yet all these people were mistaken. They

flocked to Toul to see and enjoy this fright and embarrassment and

defeat, and they had their trouble for their pains. She was modest,

tranquil, and quite at her ease. She called no witnesses, saying she

would content herself with examining the witnesses for the

prosecution. When they had testified, she rose and reviewed their

testimony in a few words, pronounced it vague, confused, and of

no force, then she placed the Paladin again on the stand and began

to search him. His previous testimony went rag by rag to ruin

under her ingenious hands, until at last he stood bare, so to speak,

he that had come so richly clothed in fraud and falsehood. His

counsel began an argument, but the court declined to hear it, and

threw out the case, adding a few words of grave compliment for

Joan, and referring to her as "this marvelous child."



After this victory, with this high praise from so imposing a source

added, the fickle village turned again, and gave Joan countenance,

compliment, and peace. Her mother took her back to her heart, and

even her father relented and said he was proud of her. But the time

hung heavy on her hands, nevertheless, for the siege of Orleans

was begun, the clouds lowered darker and darker over France, and

still her Voices said wait, and gave her no direct commands. The

winter set in, and wore tgediously along; but at last there was a

change.



BOOK II  IN COURT AND CAMP



Chapter 1 Joan Says Good-By



THE 5th of January, 1429, Joan came to me with her uncle Laxart,

and said:



"The time is come. My Voices are not vague now, but clear, and

they have told me what to do. In two months I shall be with the

Dauphin."



Her spirits were high, and her bearing martial. I caught the

infection and felt a great impulse stirring in me that was like what

one feels when he hears the roll of the drums and the tramp of

marching men.



"I believe it," I said.



"I also believe it," said Laxart. "If she had told me before, that she

was commanded of God to rescue France, I should not have

believed; I should have let her seek the governor by her own ways

and held myself clear of meddling in the matter, not doubting she

was mad. But I have seen her stand before those nobles and might

men unafraid, and say her say; and she had not been able to do that

but by the help of God. That I know. Therefore with all

humbleness I am at her command, to do with me as she will."



"My uncle is very good to me," Joan said. "I sent and asked him to

come and persuade my mother to let him take me home with him

to tend his wife, who is not well. It is arranged, and we go at dawn

to-morrow. From his house I shall go soon to Vaucouleurs, and

wait and strive until my prayer is granted. Who were the two

cavaliers who sat to your left at the governor's table that day?"



"One was the Sieur Jean de Novelonpont de Metz, the other the

Sieur Bertrand de Poulengy."



"Good metal--good metal, both. I marked them for men of mine. . .

. What is it I see in your face? Doubt?"



I was teaching myself to speak the truth to her, not trimming it or

polishing it; so I said:



"They considered you out of your head, and said so. It is true they

pitied you for being in such misfortune, but still they held you to

be mad."



This did not seem to trouble her in any way or wound her. She

only said:



"The wise change their minds when they perceive that they have

been in error. These will. They will march with me. I shall see

them presently. . . . You seem to doubt again? Do you doubt?"



"N-no. Not now. I was remembering that it was a year ago, and

that they did not belong here, but only chanced to stop a day on

their journey."



"They will come again. But as to matters now in hand; I came to

leave with you some instructions. You will follow me in a few

days. Order your affairs, for you will be absent long."



"Will Jean and Pierre go with me?"



"No; they would refuse now, but presently they will come, and

with them they will bring my parents' blessing, and likewise their

consent that I take up my mission. I shall be stronger,

then--stronger for that; for lack of it I am weak now." She paused a

little while, and the tears gathered in her eyes; then she went on: "I

would say good-by to Little Mengette. Bring her outside the village

at dawn; she must go with me a little of the way--"



"And Haumette?"



She broke down and began to cry, saying:



"No, oh, no--she is too dear to me, I could not bear it, knowing I

should never look upon her face again."



Next morning I brought Mengette, and we four walked along the

road in the cold dawn till the village was far behind; then the two

girls said their good-bys, clinging about each other's neck, and

pouring out their grief in loving words and tears, a pitiful sight to

see. And Joan took one long look back upon the distant village,

and the Fairy Tree, and the oak forest, and the flowery plain, and

the river, as if she was trying to print these scenes on her memory

so that they would abide there always and not fade, for she knew

she would not see them any more in this life; then she turned, and

went from us, sobbing bitterly. It was her birthday and mine. She

was seventeen years old.



Chapter 2 The Governor Speeds Joan



After a few days, Laxart took Joan to Vaucouleurs, and found

lodging and guardianship for her with Catherine Royer, a

wheelwright's wife, an honest and good woman. Joan went to mass

regularly, she helped do the housework, earning her keep in that

way, and if any wished to talke with her about her mission--and

many did--she talked freely, making no concealments regarding

the matter now. I was soon housed near by, and witnessed the

effects which followed. At once the tidings spread that a young girl

was come who was appointed of God to save France. The common

people flocked in crowds to look at her and speak with her, and

her fair young loveliness won the half of their belief, and her deep

earnestness and transparent sincerity won the other half. The

well-to-do remained away and scoffed, but that is their way.



Next, a prophecy of Merlin's, more than eight hundred years old,

was called to mind, which said that in a far future time France

would be lost by a woman and restored by a woman. France was

now, for the first time, lost--and by a woman, Isabel of Bavaria,

her base Queen; doubtless this fair and pure young girl was

commissioned of Heaven to complete the prophecy.



This gave the growing interest a new and powerful impulse; the

excitement rose higher and higher, and hope and faith along with

it; and so from Vaucouleurs wave after wave of this inspiring

enthusiasm flowed out over the land, far and wide, invading all the

villages and refreshing and revivifying the perishing children of

France; and from these villages came people who wanted to see for

themselves, hear for themselves; and they did see and hear, and

believe. They filled the town; they more than filled it; inns and

lodgings were packed, and yet half of the inflow had to go without

shelter. And still they came, winter as it was, for when a man's soul

is starving, what does he care for meat and roof so he can but get

that nobler hunger fed? Day after day, and still day after day the

great tide rose. Domremy was dazed, amazed, stupefied, and said

to itself, "Was this world-wonder in our familiar midst all these

years and we too dull to see it?" Jean and Pierre went out from the

village, stared at and envied like the great and fortunate of the

earth, and their progress to Vaucouleurs was like a triumph, all the

country-side flocking to see and salute the brothers of one with

whom angels had spoken face to face, and into whose hands by

command of God they had delivered the destinies of France.



The brothers brought the parents' blessing and godspeed to Joan,

and their promise to bring it to her in person later; and so, with this

culminating happiness in her heart and the high hope it inspired,

she went and confronted the governor again. But he was no more

tractable than he had been before. He refused to send her to the

King. She was disappointed, but in no degree discouraged. She

said:



"I must still come to you until I get the men-at-arms; for so it is

commanded, and I may not disobey. I must go to the Dauphin,

though I go on my knees."



I and the two brothers were with Joan daily, to see the people that

came and hear what they said; and one day, sure enough, the Sieur

Jean de Metz came. He talked with her in a petting and playful

way, as one talks with children, and said:



"What are you doing here, my little maid? Will they drive the King

out of France, and shall we all turn English?"



She answered him in her tranquil, serious way:



"I am come to bid Robert de Baudricourt take or send me to the

King, but he does not heed my words."



"Ah, you have an admirable persistence, truly; a whole year has

not turned you from your wish. I saw you when you came before."



Joan said, as tranquilly as before:



"It is not a wish, it is a purpose. He will grant it. I can wait."



"Ah, perhaps it will not be wise to make too sure of that, my child.

These governors are stubborn people to deal with. In case he shall

not grant your prayer--"



"He will grant it. He must. It is not a matter of choice."



The gentleman's playful mood began to disappear--one could see

that, by his face. Joan's earnestness was affecting him. It always

happened that people who began in jest with her ended by being in

earnest. They soon began to perceive depths in her that they had

not suspected; and then her manifest sincerity and the rocklike

steadfastness of her convictions were forces which cowed levity,

and it could not maintain its self-respect in their presence. The

Sieur de Metz was thoughtful for a moment or two, then he began,

quite soberly:



"Is it necessary that you go to the King soon?--that is, I mean--"



"Before Mid-Lent, even though I wear away my legs to the knees!"



She said it with that sort of repressed fieriness that means so much

when a person's heart is in a thing. You could see the response in

that nobleman's face; you could see his eye light up; there was

sympathy there. He said, most earnestly:



"God knows I think you should have the men-at-arms, and that

somewhat would come of it. What is it that you would do? What is

your hope and purpose?"



"To rescue France. And it is appointed that I shall do it. For no one

else in the world, neither kings, nor dukes, no any other, can

recover the kingdom of France, and there is no help but in me."



The words had a pleading and pathetic sound, and they touched

that good nobleman. I saw it plainly. Joan dropped her voice a

little, and said: "But indeed I would rather spin with my poor

mother, for this is not my calling; but I must go and do it, for it is

my Lord's will."



"Who is your Lord?"



"He is God."



Then the Sieur de Metz, following the impressive old feudal

fashion, knelt and laid his hands within Joan's in sign of fealty, and

made oath that by God's help he himself would take her to the

king.



The next day came the Sieur Bertrand de Poulengy, and he also

pledged his oath and knightly honor to abide with her and follower

witherosever she might lead.



This day, too, toward evening, a great rumor went flying abroad

through the town--namely, that the very governor himself was

going to visit the young girl in her humble lodgings. So in the

morning the streets and lanes were packed with people waiting to

see if this strange thing would indeed happen. And happen it did.

The governor rode in state, attended by his guards, and the news of

it went everywhere, and made a great sensation, and modified the

scoffings of the people of quality and raised Joan's credit higher

than ever.



The governor had made up his mind to one thing: Joan was either a

witch or a saint, and he meant to find out which it was. So he

brought a priest with him to exorcise the devil that was in her in

case there was one there. The priest performed his office, but

found no devil. He merely hurt Joan's feelings and offended her

piety without need, for he had already confessed her before this,

and should have known, if he knew anything, that devils cannot

abide the confessional, but utter cries of anguish and the most

profane and furious cursings whenever they are confronted with

that holy office.



The governor went away troubled and full of thought, and not

knowing what to do. And while he pondered and studied, several

days went by and the 14th of February was come. Then Joan went

to the castle and said:



"In God's name, Robert de Baudricourt, you are too slow about

sending me, and have caused damage thereby, for this day the

Dauphin's cause has lost a battle near Orleans, and will suffer yet

greater injury if you do not send me to him soon."



The governor was perplexed by this speech, and said:



"To-day, child, to-day? How can you know what has happened in

that region to-day? It would take eight or ten days for the word to

come."



"My Voices have brought the word to me, and it is true. A battle

was lost to-day, and you are in fault to delay me so."



The governor walked the floor awhile, talking within himself, but

letting a great oath fall outside now and then; and finally he said:



"Harkye! go in peace, and wait. If it shall turn out as you say, I will

give you the letter and send you to the King, and not otherwise."



Joan said with fervor:



"Now God be thanked, these waiting days are almost done. In nine

days you will fetch me the letter."



Already the people of Vaucouleurs had given her a horse and had

armed and equipped her as a soldier. She got no chance to try the

horse and see if she could ride it, for her great first duty was to

abide at her post and lift up the hopes and spirits of all who would

come to talk with her, and prepare them to help in the rescue and

regeneration of the kingdom. This occupied every waking moment

she had. But it was no matter. There was nothing she could not

learn--and in the briefest time, too. Her horse would find this out

in the first hour. Meantime the brothers and I took the horse in turn

and began to learn to ride. And we had teaching in the use of the

sword and other arms also.



On the 20th Joan called her small army together--the two knights

and her two brothers and me--for a private council of war. No, it

was not a council, that is not the right name, for she did not

consult with us, she merely gave us orders. She mapped out the

course she would travel toward the King, and did it like a person

perfectly versed in geography; and this itinerary of daily marches

was so arranged as to avoid here and there peculiarly dangerous

regions by flank movements--which showed that she knew her

political geography as intimately as she knew her physical

geography; yet she had never had a day's schooling, of course, and

was without education. I was astonished, butg thought her Voices

must have taught her. But upon reflection I saw that this was not

so. By her references to what this and that and the other per4son

had told her, I perceived that she had been diligently questioning

those crowds of visiting strangers, and that out of them she had

patiently dug all this mass of invaluable knowledge. The two

knights were filled with wonder at her good sense and sagacity.



She commanded us to make preparations to travel by night and

sleep by day in concealment, as almost the whole of our long

journey would be through the enemy's country.



Also, she commanded that we should keep the date of our

departure a secret, since she meant to get away unobserved.

Otherwise we should be sent off with a grand demonstration which

would advertise us to the enemy, and we should be ambushed and

captured somewhere. Finally she said:



"Nothing remains, now, but that I confide to you the date of our

departure, so that you may make all needful preparation in time,

leaving nothing to be done in haste and badly at the last moment.

We march the 23d, at eleven of the clock at night."



Then we were dismissed. The two knights were startled--yes, and

troubled; and the Sieur Bertrand said:



"Even if the governor shall really furnish the letter and the escort,

he still may not do it in time to meet the date she has chosen. Then

how can she venture to name that date? It is a great risk--a great

risk to select and decide upon the date, in this state of uncertainty.



I said:



"Since she has named the 23d, we may trust her. The Voices have

told her, I think. We shall do best to obey."



We did obey. Joan's parents were notified to come before the 23d,

but prudence forbade that they be told why this limit was named.



All day, the 23d, she glanced up wistfully whenever new bodies of

strangers entered the house, but her parents did not appear. Still

she was not discouraged, but hoped on. But when night fell at last,

her hopes perished, and the tears came; however, she dashed them

away, and said:



"It was to be so, no doubt; no doubt it was so ordered; I must bear

it, and will."



De Metz tried to comfort her by saying:



"The governor sends no word; it may be that they will come

to-morrow, and--"



He got no further, for she interrupted him, saying:



"To what good end? We start at eleven to-night."



And it was so. At ten the governor came, with his guard and arms,

with horses and equipment for me and for the brothers, and gave

Joan a letter to the King. Then he took off his sword, and belted it

about her waist with his own hands, and said:



"You said true, child. The battle was lost, on the day you said. So I

have kept my word. Now go--come of it what may."



Joan gave him thanks, and he went his way.



The lost battle was the famous disaster that is called in history the

Battle of the Herrings.



All the lights in the house were at once put out, and a little while

after, when the streets had become dark and still, we crept

stealthily through them and out at the western gate and rode away

under whip and spur.



Chapter 3 The Paladin Groans and Boasts



WE WERE twenty-five strong, and well equipped. We rode in

double file, Joan and her brothers in the center of the column, with

Jean de Metz at the head of it and the Sieur Bertrand at its extreme

rear. In two or three hours we should be in the enemy's country,

and then none would venture to desert. By and by we began to hear

groans and sobs and execrations from different points along the

line, and upon inquiry found that six of our men were peasants

who had never ridden a horse before, and were finding it very

difficult to stay in their saddles, and moreover were now beginning

to suffer considerable bodily torture. They had been seized by the

governor at the last moment and pressed into the service to make

up the tale, and he had placed a veteran alongside of each with

orders to help him stick to the saddle, and kill him if he tried to

desert.



These poor devils had kept quiet as long as they could, but their

physical miseries were become so sharp by this time that they were

obliged to give them vent. But we were within the enemy's country

now, so there was no help for them, they must continue the march,

though Joan said that if they chose to take the risk they might

depart. They preferred to stay with us. We modified our pace now,

and moved cautiously, and the new men were warned to keep their

sorrows to themselves and not get the command into danger with

their curses and lamentations.



Toward dawn we rode deep into a forest, and soon all but the

sentries were sound asleep in spite of the cold ground and the

frosty air.



I woke at noon out of such a solid and stupefying sleep that at first

my wits were all astray, and I did not know where I was nor what

had been happening. Then my senses cleared, and I remembered.

As I lay there thinking over the strange events of the past month or

two the thought came into my mind, greatly surprising me, that

one of Joan's prophecies had failed; for where were No‰l and the

Paladin, who were to join us at the eleventh hour? By this time,

you see, I had gotten used to expecting everything Joan said to

come true. So, being disturbed and troubled by these thoughts, I

opened my eyes. Well, there stood the Paladin leaning against a

tree and looking down on me! How often that happens; you think

of a person, or speak of a person, and there he stands before you,

and you not dreaming he is near. It looks as if his being near is

really the thing that makes you think of him, and not just an

accident, as people imagine. Well, be that as it may, there was the

Paladin, anyway, looking down in my face and waiting for me to

wake. I was ever so glad to see him, and jumped up and shook him

by the hand, and led him a little way from the camp--he limping

like a cripple--and told him to sit down, and said:



"Now, where have you dropped down from? And how did you

happen to light in this place? And what do the soldier-clothes

mean? Tell me all about it."



He answered:



"I marched with you last night."



"No!" (To myself I said, "The prophecy has not all failed--half of it

has come true.")

"Yes, I did. I hurried up from Domremy to join, and was within a

half a minute of being too late. In fact, I was too late, but I begged

so hard that the governor was touched by my brave devotion to my

country's cause--those are the words he used--and so he yielded,

and allowed me to come."



I thought to myself, this is a lie, he is one of those six the governor

recruited by force at the last moment; I know it, for Joan's

prophecy said he would join at the eleventh hour, but not by his

own desire. Then I said aloud:



"I am glad you came; it is a noble cause, and one should not sit at

home in times like these."



"Sit at home! I could no more do it than the thunderstone could

stay hid in the clouds when the storm calls it."



"That is the right talk. It sounds like you."



That pleased him.



"I'm glad you know me. Some don't. But they will, presently. They

will know me well enough before I get done with this war."



"That is what I think. I believe that wherever danger confronts you

you will make yourself conspicuous."



He was charmed with this speech, and it swelled him up like a

bladder. He said:



"If I know myself--and I think I do--my performances in this

campaign will give you occasion more than once to remember

those words."



"I were a fool to doubt it. That I know."



"I shall not be at my best, being but a common soldier; still, the

country will hear of me. If I were where I belong; if I were in the

place of La Hire, or Saintrailles, or the Bastard of Orleans--well, I

say nothing. I am not of the talking kind, like No‰l Rainguesson

and his sort, I thank God. But it will be something, I take it--a

novelty in this world, I should say--to raise the fame of a private

soldier above theirs, and extinguish the glory of their names with

its shadow."



"Why, look here, my friend," I said, "do you know that you have

hit out a most remarkable idea there? Do you realize the gigantic

proportions of it? For look you; to be a general of vast renown,

what is that? Nothing--history is clogged and confused with them;

one cannot keep their names in his memory, there are so many.

But a common soldier of supreme renown--why, he would stand

alone! He would the be one moon in a firmament of mustard-seed

stars; his name would outlast the human race! My friend, who gave

you that idea?"



He was ready to burst with happiness, but he suppressed betrayal

of it as well as he could. He simply waved the compliment aside

with his hand and said, with complacency:



"It is nothing. I have them often--ideas like that--and even greater

ones. I do not consider this one much."



"You astonish me; you do, indeed. So it is really your own?"



"Quite. And there is plenty more where it came from"--tapping his

head with his finger, and taking occasion at the same time to cant

his morion over his right ear, which gave him a very self-satisfied

air--"I do not need to borrow my ideas, like No‰l Rainguesson."



"Speaking of No‰l, when did you see him last?"



"Half an hour ago. He is sleeping yonder like a corpse. Rode with

us last night."



I felt a great upleap in my heart, and said to myself, now I am at

rest and glad; I will never doubt her prophecies again. Then I said

aloud:



"It gives me joy. It makes me proud of our village. There is not

keeping our lion-hearts at home in these great times, I see that."



"Lion-heart! Who--that baby? Why, he begged like a dog to be let

off. Cried, and said he wanted to go to his mother. Him a

lion-heart!--that tumble-bug!"



"Dear me, why I supposed he volunteered, of course. Didn't he?"



"Oh, yes, he volunteered the way people do to the headsman. Why,

when he found I was coming up from Domremy to volunteer, he

asked me to let him come along in my protection, and see the

crowds and the excitement. Well, we arrived and saw the torches

filing out at the Castle, and ran there, and the governor had him

seized, along with four more, and he begged to be let off, and I

begged for his place, and atg last the governor allowed me to join,

but wouldn't let No‰l off, because he was disgusted with him, he

was such a cry-baby. Yes, and much good he'll do the King's

service; he'll eat for six and run for sixteen. I hate a pygmy with

half a heart and nine stomachs!"



"Why, this is very surprising news to me, and I am sorry and

disappointed to hear it. I thought he was a very manly fellow."



The Paladin gave me an outraged look, and said:



"I don't see how you can talk like that, I'm sure I don't. I don't see

how you could have got such a notion. I don't dislike him, and I'm

not saying these things out of prejudice, for I don't allow myself to

have prejudices against people. I like him, and have always

comraded with him from the cradle, but he must allow me to speak

my mind about his faults, and I am willing he shall speak his about

mine, if I have any. And, true enough, maybe I have; but I reckon

they'll bear inspection--I have that idea, anyway. A manly fellow!

You should have heard him whine and wail and swear, last night,

because the saddle hurt him. Why didn't the saddle hurt me?

Pooh--I was as much at home in it as if I had been born there. And

yet it was the first time I was ever on a horse. All those old soldiers

admired my riding; they said they had never seen anything like it.

But him--why, they had to hold him on, all the time."



An odor as of breakfast came stealing through the wood; the

Paladin unconsciously inflated his nostrils in lustful response, and

got up and limped painfully away, saying he must go and look to

his horse.



At bottom he was all right and a good-hearted giant, without any

harm in him, for it is no harm to bark, if one stops there and does

not bite, and it is no harm to be an ass, if one is content to bray and

not kick. If this vast structure of brawn and muscle and vanity and

foolishness seemed to have a libelous tongue, what of it? There

was no malice behind it; and besides, the defect was not of his

own creation; it was the work of No‰l Rainguesson, who had

nurtured it, fostered it, built it up and perfected it, for the

entertainment he got out of it. His careless light heart had to have

somebody to nag and chaff and make fun of, the Paladin had only

needed development in order to meet its requirements,

consequently the development was taken in hand and diligently

attended to and looked after, gnat-and-bull fashion, for years, to

the neglect and damage of far more important concerns. The result

was an unqualified success. No‰l prized the society of the Paladin

above everybody else's; the Paladin preferred anybody's to No‰l's.

The big fellow was often seen with the little fellow, but it was for

the same reason that the bull is often seen with the gnat.



With the first opportunity, I had a talk with No‰l. I welcomed him

to our expedition, and said:



"It was fine and brave of you to volunteer, No‰l."



His eye twinkled, and he answered:



"Yes, it was rather fine, I think. Still, the credit doesn't all belong

to me; I had help."



"Who helped you?"



"The governor."



"How?"



"Well, I'll tell you the whole thing. I came up from Domremy to

see the crowds and the general show, for I hadn't ever had any

experience of such things, of course, and this was a great

opportunity; but I hadn't any mind to volunteer. I overtook the

Paladin on the road and let him have my company the rest of the

way, although he did not want it and said so; and while we were

gawking and blinking in the glare of the governor's torches they

seized us and four more and added us to the escort, and that is

really how I came to volunteer. But, after all, I wasn't sorry,

remembering how dull life would have been in the village without

the Paladin."



"How did he feel about it? Was he satisfied?"



"I think he was glad."



"Why?"



"Because he said he wasn't. He was taken by surprise, you see, and

it is not likely that he could tell the truth without preparation. Not

that he would have prepared, if he had had the chance, for I do not

think he would. I am not charging him with that. In the same space

of time that he could prepare to speak the truth, he could also

prepare to lie; besides, his judgment would be cool then, and

would warn him against fooling with new methods in an

emergency. No, I am sure he was glad, because he said he wasn't."



"Do you think he was very glad?"



"Yes, I know he was. He begged like a slave, and bawled for his

mother. He said his health was delicate, and he didn't know how to

ride a horse, and he knew he couldn't outlive the first march. But

really he wasn't looking as delicate as he was feeling. There was a

cask of wine there, a proper lift for four men. The governor's

temper got afire, and he delivered an oath at him that knocked up

the dust where it struck the ground, and told him to shoulder that

cask or he would carve him to cutlets and send him home in a

basket. The Paladin did it, and that secured his promotion to a

privacy in the escort without any further debate."



"Yes, you seem to make it quite plain that he was glad to join--that

is, if your premises are right that you start from. How did he stand

the march last night?"



"About as I did. If he made the more noise, it was the privilege of

his bulk. We stayed in our saddles because we had help. We are

equally lame to-day, and if he likes to sit down, let him; I prefer to

stand."



Chapter 4 Joan Leads Us Through the Enemy



WE WERE called to quarters and subjected to a searching

inspection by Joan. Then she made a short little talk in which she

said that even the rude business of war could be conducted better

without profanity and other brutalities of speech than with them,

and that she should strictly require us to remember and apply this

admonition. She ordered half an hour's horsemanship drill for the

novices then, and appointed one of the veterans to conduct it. It

was a ridiculous exhibition, but we learned something, and Joan

was satisfied and complimented us. She did not take any

instruction herself or go through the evolutions and

man&oelig;uvers, but merely sat her horse like a martial little

statue and looked on. That was sufficient for her, you see. She

would not miss or forget a detail of the lesson, she would take it all

in with her eye and her mind, and apply it afterward with as much

certainty and confidence as if she had already practised it.



We now made three night marches of twelve or thirteen leagues

each, riding in peace and undisturbed, being taken for a roving

band of Free Companions. Country-folk were glad to have that sort

of people go by without stopping. Still, they were very wearying

marches, and not comfortable, for the bridges were few and the

streams many, and as we had to ford them we found the water

dismally cold, and afterward had to bed ourselves, still wet, on the

frosty or snowy ground, and get warm as we might and sleep if we

could, for it would not have been prudent to build fires. Our

energies languished under these hardships and deadly fatigues, but

Joan's did not. Her step kept its srping and firmness and her eye its

fire. We could only wonder at this, we could not explain it.



But if we had had hard times before, I know not what to call the

five nights that now followed, for the marches were as fatiguing,

the baths as cold, and we were ambuscaded seven times in

addition, and lost two novices and three veterans in the resulting

fights. The news had leaked out and gone abroad that the inspired

Virgin of Vaucouleurs was making for the King with an escort,

and all the roads were being watched now.



These five nights disheartened the command a good deal. This was

aggravated by a discovery which No‰l made, and which he

promptly made known at headquarters. Some of the men had been

trying to understand why Joan continued to be alert, vigorous, and

confident while the strongest men in the company were fagged

with the heavy marches and exposure and were become morose

and irritable. There, it shows you how men can have eyes and yet

not see. All their lives those men had seen their own women-folks

hitched up with a cow and dragging the plow in the fields while

the men did the driving. They had also seen other evidences that

women have far more endurance and patience and fortitude than

men--but what good had their seeing these things been to them?

None. It had taught them nothing. They were still surprised to see a

girl of seventeen bear the fatigues of war better than trained

veterans of the army. Moreover, they did not reflect that a great

soul, with a great purpose, can make a weak body strong and keep

it so; and here was the greatest soul in the universe; but how could

they know that, those dumb creatures? No, they knew nothing, and

their reasonings were of a piece with their ignorance. They argued

and discussed among themselves, with No‰l listening, and arrived

at the decision that Joan was a witch, and had her strange pluck

and strength from Satan; so they made a plan to watch for a safe

opportunity to take her life.



To have secret plottings of this sort going on in our midst was a

very serious business, of course, and the knights asked Joan's

permission to hang the plotters, but she refused without hesitancy.

She said:



"Neither these men nor any others can take my life before my

mission is accomplished, therefore why should I have their blood

upon my hands? I will inform them of this, and also admonish

them. Call them before me."



When the came she made that statement to them in a plain

matter-of-fact way, and just as if the thought never entered her

mind that any one could doubt it after she had given her word that

it was true. The men were evidently amazed and impressed to hear

her say such a thing in such a sure and confident way, for

prophecies boldly uttered never fall barren on superstitious ears.

Yes, this speech certainly impressed them, but her closing remark

impressed them still more. It was for the ringleader, and Joan said

it sorrowfully:



"It is a pity that you should plot another's death when you own is

so close at hand."



That man's horse stumbled and fell on him in the first ford which

we crossed that night, and he was drowned before we could help

him. We had no more conspiracies.



This night was harassed with ambuscades, but we got through

without having any men killed. One more night would carry us

over the hostile frontier if we had good luck, and we saw the night

close down with a good deal of solicitude. Always before, we had

been more or less reluctant to start out into the gloom and the

silence to be frozen in the fords and persecuted by the enemy, but

this time we were impatient to get under way and have it over,

although there was promise of more and harder fighting than any

of the previous nights had furnished. Moreover, in front of us

about three leagues there was a deep stream with a frail wooden

bridge over it, and as a cold rain mixed with snow had been falling

steadily all day we were anxious to find out whether we were in a

trap or not. If the swollen stream had washed away the bridge, we

might properly consider ourselves trapped and cut off from escape.



As soon as it was dark we filed out from the depth of the forest

where we had been hidden and began the march. From the time

that we had begun to encounter ambushes Joan had ridden at the

head of the column, and she took this post now. By the time we

had gone a league the rain and snow had turned to sleet, and under

the impulse of the storm-wind it lashed my face like whips, and I

envied Joan and the knights, who could close their visors and shut

up their heads in their helmets as in a box. Now, out of the pitchy

darkness and close at hand, came the sharp command:



"Halt!"



We obeyed. I made out a dim mass in front of us which might be a

body of horsemen, but one could not be sure. A man rode up and

said to Joan in a tone of reproof:



"Well, you have taken your time, truly. And what have you found

out? Is she still behind us, or in front?"



Joan answered in a level voice:



"She is still behind."



This news softened the stranger's tone. He said:



"If you know that to be true, you have not lost your time, Captain.

But are you sure? How do you know?"



"Because I have seen her."



"Seen her! Seen the Virgin herself?"



"Yes, I have been in her camp."



"Is it possible! Captain Raymond, I ask you to pardon me for

speaking in that tone just now. You have performed a daring and

admirable service. Where was she camped?"



"In the forest, not more than a league from here."



"Good! I was afraid we might be still behind her, but now that we

know she is behind us, everything is safe. She is our game. We will

hang her. You shall hang her yourself. No one has so well earned

the privilege of abolishing this pestilent limb of Satan."



"I do not know how to thank you sufficiently. If we catch her, I--"



"If! I will take care of that; give yourself no uneasiness. All I want

is just a look at her, to see what the imp is like that has been able

to make all this noise, then you and the halter may have her. How

many men has she?"



"I counted but eighteen, but she may have had two or three pickets

out."



"Is that all? It won't be a mouthful for my force. Is it true that she

is only a girl?"



"Yes; she is not more than seventeen."



"It passes belief! Is she robust, or slender?"



"Slender."



The officer pondered a moment or two, then he said:



"Was she preparing to break camp?"



"Not when I had my last glimpse of her."



"What was she doing?"



"She was talking quietly with an officer."



"Quietly? Not giving orders?"



"No, talking as quietly as we are now."



"That is good. She is feeling a false security. She would have been

restless and fussy else--it is the way of her sex when danger is

about. As she was making no preparation to break camp--"



"She certainly was not when I saw her last."



"--and was chatting quietly and at her ease, it means that this

weather is not to her taste. Night-marching in sleet and wind is not

for chits of seventeen. No; she will stay where she is. She has my

thanks. We will camp, ourselves; here is as good a place as any.

Let us get about it."



"If you command it--certainly. But she has two knights with her.

They might force her to march, particularly if the weather should

improve."



I was scared, and impatient to be getting out of this peril, and it

distressed and worried me to have Joan apparently set herself to

work to make delay and increase the danger--still, I thought she

probably knew better than I what to do. The officer said:



"Well, in that case we are here to block the way."



"Yes, if they come this way. But if they should send out spies, and

find out enough to make them want to try for the bridge through

the woods? Is it best to allow the bridge to stand?"



It made me shiver to hear her.



The officer considered awhile, then said:



"It might be well enough to send a force to destroy the bridge. I

was intending to occupy it with the whole command, but that is

not necessary now."



Joan said, tranquilly:



"With your permission, I will go and destroy it myself."



Ah, now I saw her idea, and was glad she had had the cleverness to

invent it and the ability to keep her head cool and think of it in that

tight place. The officer replied:



"You have it, Captain, and my thanks. With you to do it, it will be

well done; I could send another in your place, but not a better."



They saluted, and we moved forward. I breathed freer. A dozen

times I had imagined I heard the hoofbeats of the real Captain

Raymond's troop arriving behind us, and had been sitting on pins

and needles all the while that that conversation was dragging

along. I breathed freer, but was still not comfortable, for Joan had

given only the simple command, "Forward!" Consequently we

moved in a walk. Moved in a dead walk past a dim and

lengthening column of enemies at our side. The suspense was

exhausting, yet it lasted but a short while, for when the enemy's

bugles sang the "Dismount!" Joan gave the word to trot, and that

was a great relief to me. She was always at herself, you see. Before

the command to dismount had been given, somebody might have

wanted the countersign somewhere along that line if we came

flying by at speed, but now wee seemed to be on our way to our

allotted camping position, so we were allowed to pass

unchallenged. The further we went the more formidable was the

strength revealed by the hostile force. Perhaps it was only a

hundred or two, but to me it seemed a thousand. When we passed

the last of these people I was thankful, and the deeper we plowed

into the darkness beyond them the better I felt. I came nearer and

nearer to feeling good, for an hour; then we found the bridge still

standing, and I felt entirely good. We crossed it and destroyed it,

and then I felt--but I cannot describe what I felt. One has to feel it

himself in order to know what it is like.



We had expected to hear the rush of a pursuing force behind us,

for we thought that the real Captain Raymond would arrive and

suggest that perhaps the troop that had been mistaken for his

belonged to the Virgin of Vaucouleurs; but he must have been

delayed seriously, for when we resumed our march beyond the

river there were no sounds behind us except those which the storm

was furnishing.



I said that Joan had harvested a good many compliments intended

for Captain Raymond, and that he would find nothing of a crop left

but a dry stubble of reprimands when he got back, and a

commander just in the humor to superintend the gathering of it in.



Joan said:



"It will be as you say, no doubt; for the commander took a troop

for granted, in the night and unchallenged, and would have

camped without sending a force to destroy the bridge if he had

been left unadvised, and none are so ready to find fault with others

as those who do things worthy of blame themselves."



The Sieur Bertrand was amused at Joan's na‹ve way of referring to

her advice as if it had been a valuable present to a hostile leader

who was saved by it from making a censurable blunder of

omission, and then he went on to admire how ingeniously she had

deceived that man and yet had not told him anything that was not

the truth. This troubled Joan, and she said:



"I thought he was deceiving himself. I forbore to tell him lies, for

that would have been wrong; but if my truths deceived him,

perhaps that made them lies, and I am to blame. I would God I

knew if I have done wrong."



She was assured that she had done right, and that in the perils and

necessities of war deceptions that help one's own cause and hurt

the enemy's were always permissible; but she was not quite

satisfied with that, and thought that even when a great cause was

in danger one ought to have the privilege of trying honorable ways

first. Jean said:



"Joan, you told us yourself that you were going to Uncle Laxart's to

nurse his wife, but you didn't say you were going further, yet you

did go on to Vaucouleurs. There!"



"I see now," said Joan, sorrowfully. "I told no lie, yet I deceived. I

had tried all other ways first, but I could not get away, and I had to

get away. My mission required it. I did wrong, I think, and am to

blame."



She was silent a moment, turning the matter over in her mind, then

she added, with quiet decision, "But the thing itself was right, and I

would do it again."



It seemed an over-nice distinction, but nobody said anything. I few

had known her as well as she knew herself, and as her later history

revealed her to us, we should have perceived that she had a clear

meaning there, and that her position was not identical with ours, as

we were supposing, but occupied a higher plane. She would

sacrifice herself--and her best self; that is, her truthfulness--to save

her cause; but only that; she would not buy her life at that cost;

whereas our war-ethics permitted the purchase of our lives, or any

mere military advantage, small or great, by deception. Her saying

seemed a commonplace at the time, the essence of its meaning

escaping us; but one sees now that it contained a principle which

lifted it above that and made it great and fine.



Presently the wind died down, the sleet stopped falling, and the

cold was less severe. The road was become a bog, and the horses

labored through it at a walk--they could do no better. As the heavy

time wore on, exhaustion overcame us, and we slept in our

saddles. Not even the dangers that threatened us could keep us

awake.



This tenth night seemed longer than any of the others, and of

course it was the hardest, because we had been accumulating

fatigue from the beginning, and had more of it on hand now than at

any previous time. But we were not molested again. When the dull

dawn came at last we saw a river before us and we knew it was the

Loire; we entered the town of Gien, and knew we were in a

friendly land, with the hostiles all behind us. That was a glad

morning for us.



We were a worn and bedraggled and shabby-looking troop; and

still, as always, Joan was the freshest of us all, in both body and

spirits. We had averaged above thirteen leagues a night, by

tortuous and wretched roads. It was a remarkable march, and

shows what men can do when they have a leader with a

determined purpose and a resolution that never flags.



Chapter 5 We Pierce the Last Ambuscades



WE RESTED and otherwise refreshed ourselves two or three

hours at Gien, but by that time the news was abroad that the young

girl commissioned of God to deliver France was come; wherefore,

such a press of people flocked to our quarters to get sight of her

that it seemed best to seek a quieter place; so we pushed on and

halted at a small village called Fierbois.



We were now within six leagues of the King, who was a the Castle

of Chinon. Joan dictated a letter to him at once, and I wrote it. In it

she said she had come a hundred and fifty leagues to bring him

good news, and begged the privilege of delivering it in person. She

added that although she had never seen him she would know him

in any disguise and would point him out.



The two knights rode away at once with the letter. The troop slept

all the afternoon, and after supper we felt pretty fresh and fine,

especially our little group of young Domremians. We had the

comfortable tap-room of the village inn to ourselves, and for the

first time in ten unspeakably long days were exempt from bodings

and terrors and hardships and fatiguing labors. The Paladin was

suddenly become his ancient self again, and was swaggering up

and down, a very monument of self-complacency. No‰l

Rainguesson said:



"I think it is wonderful, the way he has brought us through."



"Who?" asked Jean.



"Why, the Paladin."



The Paladin seemed not to hear.



"What had he to do with it?" asked Pierre d'Arc.



"Everything. It was nothing but Joan's confidence in his discretion

that enabled her to keep up her heart. She could depend on us and

on herself for valor, but discretion is the winning thing in war,

after all; discretion is the rarest and loftiest of qualities, and he has

got more of it than any other man in France--more of it, perhaps,

than any other sixty men in France."



"Now you are getting ready to make a fool of yourself, No‰l

Rainguesson," said the Paladin, "and you want to coil some of that

long tongue of yours around your neck and stick the end of it in

your ear, then you'll be the less likely to get into trouble."



"I didn't know he had more discretion than other people," said

Pierre, "for discretion argues brains, and he hasn't any more brains

than the rest of us, in my opinion."



"No, you are wrong there. Discretion hasn't anything to do with

brains; brains are an obstruction to it, for it does not reason, it

feels. Perfect discretion means absence of brains. Discretion is a

quality of the heart--solely a quality of the heart; it acts upon us

through feeling. We know this because if it were an intellectual

quality it would only perceive a danger, for instance, where a

danger exists; whereas--"



"Hear him twaddle--the damned idiot!" muttered the Paladin.



"--whereas, it being purely a quality of the heart, and proceeding

by feeling, not reason, its reach is correspondingly wider and

sublimer, enabling it to perceive and avoid dangers that haven't

any existence at all; as, for instance, that night in the fog, when the

Paladin took his horse's ears for hostile lances and got off and

climbed a tree--"



"It's a lie! a lie without shadow of foundation, and I call upon you

all to beware you you give credence to the malicious inventions of

this ramshackle slander-mill that has been doing its best to destroy

my character for years, and will grind up your own reputations for

you next. I got off to tighten my saddle-girth--I wish I may die in

my tracks if it isn't so--and whoever wants to believe it can, and

whoever don't can let it alone."



"There, that is the way with him, you see; he never can discuss a

theme temperately, but always flies off the handle and becomes

disagreeable. And you notice his defect of memory. He remembers

getting off his horse, but forgets all the rest, even the tree. But that

is natural; he would remember getting off the horse because he

was so used to doing it. He always did it when there was an alarm

and the clash of arms at the front."



"Why did he choose that time for it?" asked Jean.



"I don't know. To tighten up his girth, he thinks, to climb a tree, I

think; I saw him climb nine trees in a single night."



"You saw nothing of the kind! A person that can lie like that

deserves no one's respect. I ask you all to answer me. Do you

believe what this reptile has said?"



All seemed embarrassed, and only Pierre replied. He said,

hesitatingly:



"I--well, I hardly know what to say. It is a delicate situation. It

seems offensive to me to refuse to believe a person when he makes

so direct a statement, and yet I am obliged to say, rude as it may

appear, that I am not able to believe the whole of it--no, I am not

able to believe that you climbed nine trees."



"There!" cried the Paladin; "now what do you think of yoiurself,

No‰l Rainguesson? How many do you believe I climbed, Pierre?"



"Only eight."



The laughter that followed inflamed the Paladin's anger to white

heat, and he said:



"I bide my time--I bide my time. I will reckon with you all, I

promise you that!"



"Don't get him started," No‰l pleaded; "he is a perfect lion when he

gets started. I saw enough to teach me that, after the third skirmish.

After it was over I saw him come out of the bushes and attack a

dead man single-handed."



"It is another lie; and I give you fair warning that you are going too

far. You will see me attack a live one if you are not careful."



"Meaning me, of course. This wounds me more than any number

of injurious and unkind speeches could do. In gratitude to one's

benefactor--"



"Benefactor? What do I owe you, I should like to know?"



"You owe me your life. I stood between the trees and the foe, and

kept hundreds and thousands of the enemy at bay when they were

thirsting for your blood. And I did not do it to display my daring. I

did it because I loved you and could not live without you."



"There--you have said enough! I will not stay here to listen to these

infamies. I can endure your lies, but not your love. Keep that

corruption for somebody with a stronger stomach than mine. And I

want to say this, before I go. That you people's small performances

might appear the better and win you the more glory, I hid my own

deeds through all the march. I went always to the front, where the

fighting was thickest, to be remote from you in order that you

might not see and be discouraged by the things I did to the enemy.

It was my purpose to keep this a secret in my own breast, but you

force me to reveal it. If you ask for my witnesses, yonder they lie,

on the road we have come. I found that road mud, I paved it with

corpses. I found that country sterile, I fertilized it with blood. Time

and again I was urged to go to the rear because the command could

not proceed on account of my dead. And yet you, you miscreant,

accuse me of climbing trees! Pah!"



And he strode out, with a lofty air, for the recital of his imaginary

deeds had already set him up again and made him feel good.



Next day we mounted and faced toward Chinon. Orleans was at

our back now, and close by, lying in the strangling grip of the

English; soon, please God, we would face about and go to their

relief. From Gien the news had spread to Orleans that the peasant

Maid of Vaucouleurs was on her way, divinely commissioned to

raise the siege. The news made a great excitement and raised a

great hope--the first breath of hope those poor souls had breathed

in five months. They sent commissioners at once to the King to

beg him to consider this matter, and not throw this help lightly

away. These commissioners were already at Chinon by this time.



When we were half-way to Chinon we happened upon yet one

more squad of enemies. They burst suddenly out of the woods, and

in considerable force, too; but we were not the apprentices we

were ten or twelve days before; no, we were seasoned to this kind

of adventure now; our hearts did not jump into our throats and our

weapons tremble in our hands. We had learned to be always in

battle array, always alert, and always ready to deal with any

emergency that might turn up. We were no more dismayed by the

sight of those people than our commander was. Before they could

form, Joan had delivered the order, "Forward!" and we were down

upon them with a rush. They stood no chance; they turned tail and

scattered, we plowing through them as if they had been men of

straw. That was our last ambuscade, and it was probably laid for us

by that treacherous rascal, the King's own minister and favorite, De

la Tremouille.



We housed ourselves in an inn, and soon the town came flocking

to get a glimpse of the Maid.



Ah, the tedious King and his tedious people! Our two good knights

came presently, their patience well wearied, and reported. They

and we reverently stood--as becomes persons who are in the

presence of kings and the superiors of kings--until Joan, troubled

by this mark of homage and respect, and not content with it nor yet

used to it, although we had not permitted ourselves to do otherwise

since the day she prophesied that wretched traitor's death and he

was straightway drowned, thus confirming many previous signs

that she was indeed an ambassador commissioned of God,

commanded us to sit; then the Sieur de Metz said to Joan:



"The King has got the letter, but they will not let us have speech

with him."



"Who is it that forbids?"



"None forbids, but there be three or four that are nearest his

person--schemers and traitors every one--that put obstructions in

the way, and seek all ways, by lies and pretexts, to make delay.

Chiefest of these are Georges de la Tremouille and that plotting

fox, the Archbishop of Rheims. While they keep the King idle and

in bondage to his sports and follies, they are great and their

importance grows; whereas if ever he assert himself and rise and

strike for crown and country like a man, their reign is done. So

they but thrive, they care not if the crown go to destruction and the

King with it."



"You have spoken with others besides these?"



"Not of the Court, no--the Court are the meek slaves of those

reptiles, and watch their mouths and their actions, acting as they

act, thinking as they think, saying as they say; wherefore they are

cold to us, and turn aside and go another way when we appear. But

we have spoken with the commissioners from Orleans. They said

with heat: 'It is a marvel that any man in such desperate case as is

the King can moon around in this torpid way, and see his all go to

ruin without lifting a finger to stay the disaster. What a most

strange spectacle it is! Here he is, shut up in this wee corner of the

realm like a rat in a trap; his royal shelter this huge gloomy tomb

of a castle, with wormy rags for upholstery and crippled furniture

for use, a very house of desolation; in his treasure forty francs, and

not a farthing more, God be witness! no army, nor any shadow of

one; and by contrast with his hungry poverty you behold this

crownless pauper and his shoals of fools and favorites tricked out

in the gaudiest silks and velvets you shall find in any Court in

Christendom. And look you, he knows that when our city falls--as

fall it surely will except succor come swiftly--France falls; he

knows that when that day comes he will be an outlaw and a

fugitive, and that behind him the English flag will float

unchallenged over every acre of his great heritage; he knows these

things, he knows that our faithful city is fighting all solitary and

alone against disease, starvation, and the sword to stay this awful

calamity, yet he will not strike one blow to save her, he will not

hear our prayers, he will not even look upon our faces.' That is

what the commissioners said, and they are in despair."



Joan said, gently:



"It is pity, but they must not despair. The Dauphin will hear them

presently. Tell them so."



She almost always called the King the Dauphin. To her mind he

was not King yet, not being crowned.



"We will tell them so, and it will content them, for they believe

you come from God. The Archbishop and his confederate have for

backer that veteran soldier Raoul de Gaucourt, Grand Master of

the Palace, a worthy man, but simply a soldier, with no head for

any greater matter. He cannot make out to see how a country-girl,

ignorant of war, can take a sword in her small hand and win

victories where the trained generals of France have looked for

defeats only, for fifty years--and always found them. And so he

lifts his frosty mustache and scoffs."



"When God fights it is but small matter whether the hand that

bears His sword is big or little. He will perceive this in time. Is

there none in that Castle of Chinon who favors us?"



"Yes, the King's mother-in-law, Yolande, Queen of Sicily, who is

wise and good. She spoke with the Sieur Bertrand."



"She favors us, and she hates those others, the King's beguilers,"

said Bertrand. "She was full of interest, and asked a thousand

questions, all of which I answered according to my ability. Then

she sat thinking over these replies until I thought she was lost in a

dream and would wake no more. But it was not so. At last she said,

slowly, and as if she were talking to herself: 'A child of

seventeen--a girl--country-bred--untaught--ignorant of war, the use

of arms, and the conduct of battles--modest, gentle, shrinking--yet

throws away her shepherd's crook and clothes herself in steel, and

fights her way through a hundred and fifty leagues of fear, and

comes--she to whom a king must be a dread and awful

presence--and will stand up before such an one and say, Be not

afraid, God has sent me to save you! Ah, whence could come a

courage and conviction so sublime as this but from very God

Himself!' She was silent again awhile, thinking and making up her

mind; then she said, 'And whether she comes of God or no, there is

that in her heart that raises her above men--1high above all men

that breathe in France to-day--for in her is that mysterious

something that puts heart into soldiers, and turns mobs of cowards

into armies of fighters that forget what fear is when they are in that

presence--fighters who go into battle with joy in their eyes and

songs on their lips, and sweep over the field like a storm --that is

the spirit that can save France, and that alone, come it whence it

may! It is in her, I do truly believe, for what else could have borne

up that child on that great march, and made her despise its dangers

and fatigues? The King must see her face to face--and shall!' She

dismissed me with those good words, and I know her promise will

be kept. They will delay her all they can--those animals--bu she

will not fail in the end."



"Would she were King!" said the other knight, fervently. "For there

is little hope that the King himself can be stirred out of his

lethargy. He is wholly without hope, and is only thinking of

throwing away everything and flying to some foreign land. The

commissioners say there is a spell upon him that makes him

hopeless--yes, and that it is shut up in a mystery which they cannot

fathom."



"I know the mystery," said Joan, with quiet confidence; "I know it,

and he knows it, but no other but God. When I see him I will tell

him a secret that will drive away his trouble, then he will hold up

his head again."



I was miserable with curiosity to know what it was that she would

tell him, but she did not say, and I did not expect she would. She

was but a child, it is true; but she was not a chatterer to tell great

matters and make herself important to little people; no, she was

reserved, and kept things to herself, as the truly great always do.



The next day Queen Yolande got one victory over the King's

keepers, for, in spite of their protestations and obstructions, she

procured an audience for our two knights, and they made the most

they could out of their opportunity. They told the King what a

spotless and beautiful character Joan was, and how great and noble

a spirit animated her, and they implored him to trust in her, believe

in her, and have faith that she was sent to save France. They

begged him to consent to see her. He was strongly moved to do

this, and promised that he would not drop the matter out of his

mind, but would consult with his council about it. This began to

look encouraging. Two hours later there was a great stir below,

and the innkeeper came flying up to say a commission of

illustrious ecclesiastics was come from the King--from the King

his very self, understand!--think of this vast honor to his humble

little hostelry!--and he was so overcome with the glory of it that he

could hardly find breath enough in his excited body to put the facts

into words. They were come from the King to speak with the Maid

of Vaucouleurs. Then he flew downstairs, and presently appeared

again, backing into the room, and bowing to the ground with every

step, in front of four imposing and austere bishops and their train

of servants.



Joan rose, and we all stood. The bishops took seats, and for a while

no word was said, for it was their prerogative to speak first, and

they were so astonished to see what a child it was that was making

such a noise in the world and degrading personages of their dignity

to the base function of ambassadors to her in her plebeian tavern,

that they could not find any words to say at first. Then presently

their spokesman told Joan they were aware that she had a message

for the King, wherefore she was now commanded to put it into

words, briefly and without waste of time or embroideries of

speech.



As for me, I could hardly contain my joy--our message was to

reach the King at last! And there was the same joy and pride and

exultation in the faces of our knights, too, and in those of Joan's

brothers. And I knew that they were all praying--asI was--that the

awe which we felt in the presence of these great dignitaries, and

which would have tied our tongues and locked our jaws, would not

affect her in the like degree, but that she would be enabled to word

her message well, and with little stumbling, and so make a

favorable impression here, where it would be so valuable and so

important.



Ah, dear, how little we were expecting what happened then! We

were aghast to hear her say what she said. She was standing in a

reverent attitude, with her head down and her hands clasped in

front of her; for she was always reverent toward the consecrated

servants of God. When the spokesman had finished, she raised her

head and set her calm eye on those faces, not any more disturbed

by their state and grandeur than a princess would have been, and

said, with all her ordinary simplicity and modesty of voice and

manner:



"Ye will forgive me, reverend sirs, but I have no message save for

the King's ear alone."



Those surprised men were dumb for a moment, and their faces

flushed darkly; then the spokesman said:



"Hark ye, to you fling the King's command in his face and refuse to

deliver this message of yours to his servants appointed to receive

it?"



"God has appointed me to receive it, and another's commandment

may not take precedence of that. I pray you let me have speech for

his grace the Dauphin."



"Forbear this folly, and come at your message! Deliver it, and

waste no more time about it."



"You err indeed, most reverend fathers in God, and it is not well. I

am not come hither to talk, but to deliver Orleans, and lead the

Dauphin to his good city of Rheims, and set the crown upon his

head."



"Is that the message you send to the King?"



But Joan only said, in the simple fashion which was her wont:



"Ye will pardon me for reminding you again--but I have no

message to send to any one."



The King's messengers rose in deep anger and swept out of the

place without further words, we and Joan kneeling as they passed.



Our countenances were vacant, our hearts full of a sense of

disaster. Our precious opportunity was thrown away; we could not

understand Joan's conduct, she who had ben so wise until this fatal

hour. At last the Sieur Bertrand found courage to ask her why she

had let this great chance to get her message to the King go by.



"Who sent them here?" she asked.



"The King."



"Who moved the King to send them?" She waited for an answer;

none came, for we began to see what was in her mind--so she

answered herself: "The Dauphin's council moved him to it. Are

they enemies to me and to the Dauphin's weal, or are they

friends?"



"Enemies," answered the Sieur Bertrand.



"If one would have a message go sound and ungarbled, does one

choose traitors and tricksters to send it by?"



I saw that we had been fools, and she wise. They saw it too, so

none found anything to say. Then she went on:



"They had but small wit that contrived this trap. They thought to

get my message and seem to deliver it straight, yet deftly twist it

from its purpose. You know that one part of my message is but

this--to move the Dauphin by argument and reasonings to give me

men-at-arms and send me to the siege. If an enemy carried these in

the right words, the exact words, and no word missing, yet left out

the persuasions of gesture and supplicating tone and beseeching

looks that inform the words and make them live, where were the

value of that argument--whom could it convince? Be patient, the

Dauphin will hear me presently; have no fear."



The Sieur de Metz nodded his head several times, and muttered as

to himself:



"She was right and wise, and we are but dull fools, when all is

said."



It was just my thought; I could have said it myself; and indeed it

was the thought of all there present. A sort of awe crept over us, to

think how that untaught girl, taken suddenly and unprepared, was

yet able to penetrate the cunning devices of a King's trained

advisers and defeat them. Marveling over this, and astonished at it,

we fell silent and spoke no more. We had come to know that she

was great in courage, fortitude, endurance, patience, conviction,

fidelity to all duties--in all things, indeed, that make a good and

trusty soldier and perfect him for his post; now we were beginning

to feel that maybe there were greatnesses in her brain that were

even greater than these great qualities of the heart. It set us

thinking.



What Joan did that day bore fruit the very day after. The King was

obliged to respect the spirit of a young girl who could hold her

own and stand her ground like that, and he asserted himself

sufficiently to put his respect into an act instead of into polite and

empty words. He moved Joan out of that poor inn, and housed her,

with us her servants, in the Castle of Courdray, personally

confiding her to the care of Madame de Bellier, wife of old Raoul

de Gaucourt, Master of the Palace. Of course, this royal attention

had an immediate result: all the great lords and ladies of the Court

began to flock there to see and listen to the wonderful girl-soldier

that all the world was talking about, and who had answered the

King's mandate with a bland refusal to obey. Joan charmed them

every one with her sweetness and simplicity and unconscious

eloquence, and all the best and capablest among them recognized

that there was an indefinable something about her that testified

that she was not made of common clay, that she was built on a

grander plan than the mass of mankind, and moved on a loftier

plane. These spread her fame. She always made friends and

advocates that way; neither the high nor the low could come

within the sound of her voice and the sight of her face and go out

from her presence indifferent.



Chapter 6 Joan Convinces the King



WELL, anything to make delay. The King's council advised him

against arriving at a decision in our matter too precipitately. He

arrive at a decision too precipitately! So they sent a committee of

priests--always priests--into Lorraine to inquire into Joan's

character and history--a matter which would consume several

weeks, of course. You see how fastidious they were. It was as if

people should come to put out the fire when a man's house was

burning down, and they waited till they could send into another

country to find out if he had always kept the Sabbath or not, before

letting him try.



So the days poked along; dreary for us young people in some ways,

but not in all, for we had one great anticipation in front of us; we

had never seen a king, and now some day we should have that

prodigious spectacle to see and to treasure in our memories all our

lives; so we were on the lookout, and always eager and watching

for the chance. The others were doomed to wait longer than I, as it

turned out. One day great news came--the Orleans commissioners,

with Yolande and our knights, had at last turned the council's

position and persuaded the King to see Joan.



Joan received the immense news gratefully but without losing her

head, but with us others it was otherwise; we could not eat or sleep

or do any rational thing for the excitement and the glory of it.

During two days our pair of noble knights were in distress and

trepidation on Joan's account, for the audience was to be at night,

and they were afraid that Joan would be so paralyzed by the glare

of light from the long files of torches, the solemn pomps and

ceremonies, the great concourse of renowned personages, the

brilliant costumes, and the other splendors of the Court, that she, a

simple country-maid, and all unused to such things, would be

overcome by these terrors and make a piteous failure.



No doubt I could have comforted them, but I was not free to speak.

Would Joan be disturbed by this cheap spectacle, this tinsel show,

with its small King and his butterfly dukelets?--she who had

spoken face to face with the princes of heaven, the familiars of

God, and seen their retinue of angels stretching back into the

remoteness of the sky, myriads upon myriads, like a measureless

fan of light, a glory like the glory of the sun streaming from each

of those innumerable heads, the massed radiance filling the deeps

of space with a blinding splendor? I thought not.



Queen Yolande wanted Joan to make the best possible impression

upon the King and the Court, so she was strenuous to have her

clothed in the richest stuffs, wrought upon the princeliest pattern,

and set off with jewels; but in that she had to be disappointed, of

course, Joan not being persuadable to it, but begging to be simply

and sincerely dressed, as became a servant of God, and one sent

upon a mission of a serious sort and grave political import. So then

the gracious Queen imagined and contrived that simple and

witching costume which I have described to you so many times,

and which I cannot think of even now in my dull age without being

moved just as rhythmical and exquisite music moves one; for that

was music, that dress--that is what it was--music that one saw with

a the eyes and felt in the heart. Yes, she was a poem, she was a

dream, she was a spirit when she was clothed in that.



She kept that raiment always, and wore it several times upon

occasions of state, and it is preserved to this day in the Treasury of

Orleans, with two of her swords, and her banner, and other things

now sacred because they had belonged to her.



At the appointed time the Count of Vend“me, a great lord of the

court, came richly clothed, with his train of servants and assistants,

to conduct Joan to the King, and the two knights and I went with

her, being entitled to this privilege by reason of our official

positions near her person.



When we entered the great audience-hall, there it all was just as I

have already painted it. Here were ranks of guards in shining

armor and with polished halberds; two sides of the hall were like

flower-gardens for variety of color and the magnificence of the

costumes; light streamed upon these masses of color from two

hundred and fifty flambeaux. There was a wide free space down

the middle of the hall, and at the end of it was a throne royally

canopied, and upon it sat a crowned and sceptered figure nobly

clothed and blazing with jewels.



It is true that Joan had been hindered and put off a good while, but

now that she was admitted to an audience at last, she was received

with honors granted to only the greatest personages. At the

entrance door stood four heralds in a row, in splendid tabards, with

long slender silver trumpets at their mouths, with square silken

banners depending from them embroidered with the arms of

France. As Joan and the Count passed by, these trumpets gave

forth in unison one long rich note, and as we moved down the hall

under the pictured and gilded vaulting, this was repeated at every

fifty feet of our progress--six times in all. It made our good knights

proud and happy, and they held themselves erect, and stiffened

their stride, and looked fine and soldierly. They were not expecting

this beautiful and honorable tribute to our little country-maid.



Joan walked two yards behind the Count, we three walked two

yards behind Joan. Our solemn march ended when we were as yet

some eight or ten steps from the throne. The Count made a deep

obeisance, pronounced Joan's name, then bowed again and moved

to his place among a group of officials near the throne. I was

devouring the crowned personage with all my eyes, and my heart

almost stgood still with awe.



The eyes of all others were fixed upon Joan in a gaze of wonder

which was half worship, and which seemed to say, "How

sweet--how lovely--how divine!" All lips were parted and

motionless, which was a sure sign that those people, who seldom

forget themselves, had forgotten themselves now, and were not

conscious of anything but the one object they were gazing upon.

They had the look of people who are under the enchantment of a

vision.



Then they presently began to come to life again, rousing

themselves out of the spell and shaking it off as one drives away

little by little a clinging drowsiness or intoxication. Now they fixed

their attention upon Joan with a strong new interest of another

sort; they were full of curiosity to see what she would do--they

having a secret and particular reason for this curiosity. So they

watched. This is what they saw:



She made no obeisance, nor even any slight inclination of her

head, but stood looking toward the throne in silence. That was all

there was to see at present.



I glanced up at De Metz, and was shocked at the paleness of his

face. I whispered and said:



"What is it, man, what is it?"



His answering whisper was so weak I could hardly catch it:



"They have taken advantage of the hint in her letter to play a trick

upon her! She will err, and they will laugh at her. That is not the

King that sits there."



Then I glanced at Joan. She was still gazing steadfastly toward the

throne, and I had the curious fancy that even her shoulders and the

back of her head expressed bewilderment. Now she turned her

head slowly, and her eye wandered along the lines of standing

courtiers till it fell upon a young man who was very quietly

dressed; then her face lighted joyously, and she ran and threw

herself at his feet, and clasped his knees, exclaiming in that soft

melodious voice which was her birthright and was now charged

with deep and tender feeling:



"God of his grace give you long life, O dear and gentle Dauphin!"



In his astonishment and exultation De Metz cried out:



"By the shadow of God, it is an amazing thing!" Then he mashed

all the bones of my hand in his grateful grip, and added, with a

proud shake of his mane, "Now, what have these painted infidels

to say!"



Meantime the young person in the plain clothes was saying to

Joan:



"Ah, you mistake, my child, I am not the King. There he is," and

he pointed to the throne.



The knight's face clouded, and he muttered in grief and

indignation:



"Ah, it is a shame to use her so. But for this lie she had gone

through safe. I will go and proclaim to all the house what--"



"Stay where you are!" whispered I and the Sieur Bertrand in a

breath, and made him stop in his place.



Joan did not stir from her knees, but still lifted her happy face

toward the King, and said:



"No, gracious liege, you are he, and none other."



De Metz's troubles vanished away, and he said:



"Verily, she was not guessing, she knew. Now, how could she

know? It is a miracle. I am content, and will meddle no more, for I

perceive that she is equal to her occasions, having that in her head

that cannot profitably be helped by the vacancy that is in mine."



This interruption of his lost me a remark or two of the other talk;

however, I caught the King's next question:



"But tell me who you are, and what would you?"



"I am called Joan the Maid, and am sent to say that the King of

Heaven wills that you be crowned and consecrated in your good

city of Rheims, and be thereafter Lieutenant of the Lord of

Heaven, who is King of France. And He willeth also that you set

me at my appointed work and give me men-at-arms." After a slight

pause she added, her eye lighting at the sound of her words, "For

then will I raise the siege of Orleans and break the English power!"



The young monarch's amused face sobered a little when this

martial speech fell upon that sick air like a breath blown from

embattled camps and fields of war, and this trifling smile presently

faded wholly away and disappeared. He was grave now, and

thoughtful. After a little he waved his hand lightly, and all the

people fell away and left those two by themselves in a vacant

space. The knights and I moved to the opposite side of the hall and

stood there. We saw Joan rise at a sign, then she and the King

talked privately together.



All that host had been consumed with curiosity to see what Joan

would do. Well, they had seen, and now they were full of

astonishment to see that she had really performed that strange

miracle according to the promise in her letter; and they were fully

as much astonished to find that she was not overcome by the

pomps and splendors about her, but was even more tranquil and at

her ease in holding speech with a monarch than ever they

themselves had been, with all their practice and experience.



As for our two knights, they were inflated beyond measure with

pride in Joan, but nearly dumb, as to speech, they not being able to

think out any way to account for her managing to carry herself

through this imposing ordeal without ever a mistake or an

awkwardness of any kind to mar the grace and credit of her great

performance.



The talk between Joan and the King was long and earnest, and held

in low voices. We could not hear, but we had our eyes and could

note effects; and presently we and all the house noted one effect

which was memorable and striking, and has been set down in

memoirs and histories and in testimony at the Process of

Rehabilitation by some who witnessed it; for all knew it was big

with meaning, though none knew what that meaning was at that

time, of course. For suddenly we saw the King shake off his

indolent attitude and straighten up like a man, and at the same

time look immeasurably astonished. It was as if Joan had told him

something almost too wonderful for belief, and yet of a most

uplifting and welcome nature.



It was long before we found out the secret of this conversation, but

we know it now, and all the world knows it. That part of the talk

was like this--as one may read in all histories. The perplexed King

asked Joan for a sign. He wanted to believe in her and her mission,

and that her Voices were supernatural and endowed with

knowledge hidden from mortals, but how could he do this unless

these Voices could prove their claim in some absolutely

unassailable way? It was then that Joan said:



"I will give you a sign, and you shall no more doubt. There is a

secret trouble in your heart which you speak of to none--a doubt

which wastes away your courage, and makes you dream of

throwing all away and fleeing from your realm. Within this little

while you have been praying, in your own breast, that God of his

grace would resolve that doubt, even if the doing of it must show

you that no kingly right is lodged in you."



It was that that amazed the King, for it was as she had said: his

prayer was the secret of his own breast, and none but God could

know about it. So he said:



"The sign is sufficient. I know now that these Voices are of God.

They have said true in this matter; if they have said more, tell it

me--I will believe."



"They have resolved that doubt, and I bring their very words,

which are these: Thou art lawful heir to the King thy father, and

true heir of France. God has spoken it. Now lift up they head, and

doubt no more, but give me men-at-arms and let me get about my

work."



Telling him he was of lawful birth was what straightened him up

and made a man of him for a moment, removing his doubts upon

that head and convincing him of his royal right; and if any could

have hanged his hindering and pestiferous council and set him

free, he would have answered Joan's prayer and set her in the field.

But no, those creatures were only checked, not checkmated; they

could invent some more delays.



We had been made proud by the honors which had so

distinguished Joan's entrance into that place--honors restricted to

personages of very high rank and worth--but that pride was as

nothing compared with the pride we had in the honor done her

upon leaving it. For whereas those first honors were shown only to

the great, these last, up to this time, had been shown only to the

royal. The King himself led Joan by the hand down the great hall

to the door, the glittering multitude standing and making reverence

as they passed, and the silver trumpets sounding those rich notes of

theirs. Then he dismissed her with gracious words, bending low

over her hand and kissing it. Always--from all companies, high or

low--she went forth richer in honor and esteem than when she

came.



And the King did another handsome thing by Joan, for he sent us

back to Courdray Castle torch-lighted and in state, under escort of

his own troop--his guard of honor--the only soldiers he had; and

finely equipped and bedizened they were, too, though they hadn't

seen the color of their wages since they were children, as a body

might say. The wonders which Joan had been performing before

the King had been carried all around by this time, so the road was

so packed with people who wanted to get a sight of her that we

could hardly dig through; and as for talking together, we couldn't,

all attempts at talk being drowned in the storm of shoutings and

huzzas that broke out all along as we passed, and kept abreast of us

like a wave the whole way.



Chapter 7 Our Paladin in His Glory



WE WERE doomed to suffer tedious waits and delays, and we

settled ourselves down to our fate and bore it with a dreary

patience, counting the slow hours and the dull days and hoping for

a turn when God should please to send it. The Paladin was the only

exception--that is to say, he was the only one who was happy and

had no heavy times. This was partly owing to the satisfaction he

got out of his clothes. He bought them at second hand--a Spanish

cavalier's complete suit, wide-brimmed hat with flowing plumes,

lace collar and cuffs, faded velvet doublet and trunks, short cloak

hung from the shoulder, funnel-topped buskins, long rapier, and all

that--a graceful and picturesque costume, and the Paladin's great

frame was the right place to hang it for effect. He wore it when off

duty; and when he swaggered by with one hand resting on the hilt

of his rapier, and twirling his new mustache with the other,

everybody stopped to look and admire; and well they might, for he

was a fine and stately contrast to the small French gentlemen of

the day squeezed into the trivial French costume of the time.



He was king bee of the little village that snuggled under the shelter

of the frowning towers and bastions of Courdray Castle, and

acknowledged lord of the tap-room of the inn. When he opened his

mouth there, he got a hearing. Those simple artisans and peasants

listened with deep and wondering interest; for he was a traveler

and had seen the world--all of it that lay between Chinon and

Domremy, at any rate--and that was a wide stretch more of it than

they might ever hope to see; and he had been in battle, and knew

how to paint its shock and struggle, its perils and surprised, with

an art that was all his own. He was cock of that walk, hero of that

hostelry; he drew custom as honey draws flies; so he was the pet of

the innkeeper, and of his wife and daughter, and they were his

obliged and willing servants.



Most people who have the narrative gift--that great and rare

endowment--have with it the defect of telling their choice things

over the same way every time, and this injures them and causes

them to sound stale and wearisome after several repetitions; but it

was not so with the Paladin, whose art was of a finer sort; it was

more stirring and interesting to hear him tell about a battle the

tenth time than it was the first time, because he did not tell it twice

the same way, but always made a new battle of it and a better one,

with more casualties on the enemy's side each time, and more

general wreck and disaster all around, and more widows and

orphans and suffering in the neighborhood where it happened. He

could not tell his battles apart himself, except by their names; and

by the time he had told one of then ten times it had grown so that

there wasn't room enough in France for it any more, but was

lapping over the edges. But up to that point the audience would not

allow him to substitute a new battle, knowing that the old ones

were the best, and sure to imporve as long as France could hold

them; and so, instead of saying to him as they would have said to

another, "Give us something fresh, we are fatigued with that old

thing," they would say, with one voice and with a strong interest,

"Tell about the surprise at Beaulieu again--tell in three or four

times!" That is a compliment which few narrative experts have

heard in their lifetime.



At first when the Paladin heard us tell about the glories of the

Royal Audience he was broken-hearted because he was not taken

with us to it; next, his talk was full of what he would have done if

he had been there; and within two days he was telling what he did

do when he was there. His mill was fairly started, now, and could

be trusted to take care of its affair. Within three nights afterward

all his battles were taking a rest, for already his worshipers in the

tap-room were so infatuated with the great tale of the Royal

Audience that they would have nothing else, and so besotted with

it were they that they would have cried if they could not have

gotten it.



No‰l Rainguesson hid himself and heard it, and came and told me,

and after that we went together to listen, bribing the inn hostess to

let us have her little private parlor, where we could stand at the

wickets in the door and see and hear.



The tap-room was large, yet had a snug and cozy look, with its

inviting little tables and chairs scattered irregularly over its red

brick floor, and its great fire flaming and crackling in the wide

chimney. It was a comfortable place to be in on such chilly and

blustering March nights as these, and a goodly company had taken

shelter there, and were sipping their wine in contentment and

gossiping one with another in a neighborly way while they waited

for the historian. The host, the hostess, and their pretty daughter

were flying here and there and yonder among the tables and doing

their best to keep up with the orders. The room was about forty

feet square, and a space or aisle down the center of it had been

kept vacant and reserved for the Paladin's needs. At the end of it

was a platform ten or twelve feet wide, with a big chair and a

small table on it, and three steps leading up to it.



Among the wine-sippers were many familiar faces: the cobbler, the

farrier, the blacksmith, the wheelwright, the armorer, the maltster,

the weaver, the backer, the miller's man with his dusty coat, and so

on; and conscious and important, as a matter of course, was the

barber-surgeon, for he is that in all villages. As he has to pull

everybody's teeth and purge and bleed all the grown people once a

month to keep their health sound, he knows everybody, and by

constant contact with all sorts of folk becomes a master of

etiquette and manners and a conversationalist of large facility.

There were plenty of carriers, drovers, and their sort, and

journeymen artisans.



When the Paladin presently came sauntering indolently in, he was

received with a cheer, and the barber hustled forward and greeted

him with several low and most graceful and courtly bows, also

taking his hand an touching his lips to it. Then he called in a loud

voice for a stoup of wine for the Paladin, and when the host's

daughter brought it up on the platform and dropped her courtesy

and departed, the barber called after her, and told her to add the

wine to his score. This won him ejaculations of approval, which

pleased him very much and made his little rat-eyes shine; and such

applause is right and proper, for when we do a liberal and gallant

thing it is but natural that we should wish to see notice taken of it.



The barber called upon the people to rise and drink the Paladin's

health, and they did it with alacrity and affectionate heartiness,

clashing their metal flagons together with a simultaneous crash,

and heightening the effect with a resounding cheer. It was a fine

thing to see how that young swashbuckler had made himself so

popular in a strange land in so little a while, and without other

helps to his advancement than just his tongue and the talent to use

it given him by God--a talent which was but one talent in the

beginning, but was now become ten through husbandry and the

increment and usufruct that do naturally follow that and reward it

as by a law.



The people sat down and began to hammer on the tables with their

flagons and call for "the King's Audience!--the King's

Audience!--the King's Audience!" The Paladin stood there in one

of his best attitudes, with his plumed great hat tipped over to the

left, the folds of his short cloak drooping from his shoulder, and

the one hand resting upon the hilt of his rapier and the other lifting

his beaker. As the noise died down he made a stately sort of a bow,

which he had picked up somewhere, then fetched his beaker with a

sweep to his lips and tilted his head back and rained it to the

bottom. The barber jumped for it and set it upon the Paladin's

table. Then the Paladin began to walk up and down his platform

with a great deal of dignity and quite at his ease; and as he walked

he talked, and every little while stopped and stood facing his house

and so standing continued his talk.



We went three nights in succession. It was plain that there was a

charm about the performance that was apart from the mere interest

which attaches to lying. It was presently discoverable that this

charm lay in the Paladin's sincerity. He was not lying consciously;

he believed what he was saying. To him, his initial statements

were facts, and whenever he enlarged a statement, the enlargement

became a fact too. He put his heart into his extravagant narrative,

just as a poet puts his heart into a heroic fiction, and his

earnestness disarmed criticism--disarmed it as far as he himself

was concerned. Nobody believed his narrative, but all believed that

he believed it.



He made his enlargements without flourish, without emphasis, and

so casually that often one failed to notice that a change had been

made. He spoke of the governor of Vaucouleurs, the first night,

simply as the governor of Vaucouleurs; he spoke of him the

second night as his uncle the governor of Vaucouleurs; the third

night he was his father. He did not seem to know that he was

making these extraordinary changes; they dropped from his lips in

a quite natural and effortless way. By his first night's account the

governor merely attached him to the Maid's military escort in a

general and unofficial way; the second night his uncle the governor

sent him with the Maid as lieutenant of her rear guard; the third

night his father the governor put the whole command, Maid and

all, in his special charge. The first night the governor spoke of his

as a youth without name or ancestry, but "destined to achieve

both"; the second night his uncle the governor spoke of him as the

latest and worthiest lineal descendent of the chiefest and noblest of

the Twelve Paladins of Charlemagne; the third night he spoke of

his as the lineal descendent of the whole dozen. In three nights he

promoted the Count of Vend“me from a fresh acquaintance to a

schoolmate, and then brother-in-law.



At the King's Audience everything grew, in the same way. First the

four silver trumpets were twelve, then thirty-five, finally

ninety-six; and byk that time he had thrown in so many drums and

cymbals that he had to lengthen the hall from five hundred feet to

nine hundred to accommodate them. Under his hand the people

present multiplied in the same large way.



The first two nights he contented himself with merely describing

and exaggerating the chief dramatic incident of the Audience, but

the third night he added illustration to description. He throned the

barber in his own high chair to represent the sham King; then he

told how the Court watched the Maid with intense interest and

suppressed merriment, expecting to see her fooled by the

deception and get herself swept permanently out of credit by the

storm of scornful laughter which would follow. He worked this

scene up till he got his house in a burning fever of excitement and

anticipation, then came his climax. Turning to the barber, he said:



"But mark you what she did. She gazed steadfastly upon that

sham's villain face as I now gaze upon yourse--this being her noble

and simple attitude, just as I stand now--then turned she--thus--to

me, and stretching her arm out--so--and pointing with her finger,

she said, in that firm, calm tone which she was used to use in

directing the conduct of a battle, 'Pluck me this false knave from

the throne!' I, striding forward as I do now, took him by the collar

and lifted him out and held him aloft--thus--as it he had been but a

child." (The house rose, shouting, stamping, and banging with their

flagons, and went fairly mad over this magnificent exhibition of

strength--and there was not the shadow of a laugh anywhere,

though the spectacle of the limp but proud barber hanging there in

the air like a puppy held by the scruff of its neck was a thing that

had nothing of solemnity about it.) "Then I set him down upon his

feet--thus-- being minded to get him by a better hold and heave

him out of the window, but she bid me forbear, so by that error he

escaped with his life.



"Then she turned her about and viewed the throng with those eyes

of hers, which are the clear-shining windows whence her immortal

wisdom looketh out upon the world, resolving its falsities and

coming at the kernel of truth that is hid within them, and presently

they fell upon a young man modestly clothed, and him she

proclaimed for what he truly was, saying, 'I am thy servant--thou

art the King!' Then all were astonished, and a great shout went up,

the whole six thousand joining in it, so that the walls rocked with

the volume and the tumult of it."



He made a fine and picturesque thing of the march-out from the

Audience, augmenting the glories of it to the last limit of the

impossibilities; then he took from his finger and held up a brass

nut from a bolt-head which the head ostler at the castle had given

him that morning, and made his conclusion--thus:



"Then the King dismissed the Maid most graciously--as indeed

was her desert--and, turning to me, said, 'Take this signet-ring, son

of the Paladins, and command me with it in your day of need; and

look you,' said he, touching my temple, 'preserve this brain, France

has use for it; and look well to its casket also, for I foresee that it

will be hooped with a ducal coronet one day.' I took the ring, and

knelt and kissed his hand, saying, 'Sire, where glory calls, there

will I be found; where danger and death are thickest, that is my

native air; when France and the throne need help--well, I say

nothing, for I am not of the talking sort--let my deeds speak for

me, it is all I ask.'

"So ended the most fortunate and memorable episode, so big with

future weal for the crown and the nation, and unto God be the

thanks! Rise! Fill you flagons! Now--to France and the

King--drink!"



They emptied them to the bottom, then burst into cheers and

huzzas, and kept it up as much as two minutes, the Paladin

standing at stately ease the while and smiling benignantly from his

platform.



Chapter 8 Joan Persuades Her Inquisitors



WHEN JOAN told the King what that deep secret was that was

torturing his heart, his doubts were cleared away; he believed she

was sent of God, and if he had been let alone he would have set

her upon her great mission at once. But he was not let alone.

Tremouille and the holy fox of Rheims knew their man. All they

needed to say was this--and they said it:



"Your Highness says her Voices have revealed to you, by her

mouth, a secret known only to yourself and God. How can you

know that her Voices are not of Satan, and she his

mouthpiece?--for does not Satan know the secrets of men and use

his knowledge for the destruction of their souls? It is a dangerous

business, and your Highness will do well not to proceed in it

without probing the matter to the bottom."



That was enough. It shriveled up the King's little soul like a raisin,

with terrors and apprehensions, and straightway he privately

appointed a commission of bishops to visit and question Joan daily

until they should find out whether her supernatural helps hailed

from heaven or from hell.



The King's relative, the Duke of Alen‡on, three years prisoner of

war to the English, was in these days released from captivity

through promise of a great ransom; and the name and fame of the

Maid having reached him--for the same filled all mouths now, and

penetrated to all parts--he came to Chinon to see with his own eyes

what manner of creature she might be. The King sent for Joan and

introduced her to the Duke. She said, in her simple fashion:



"You are welcome; the more of the blood of France that is joined

to this cause, the better for the cause and it."



Then the two talked together, and there was just the usual result:

when they departed, the Duke was her friend and advocate.



Joan attended the King's mass the next day, and afterward dined

with the King and the Duke. The King was learning to prize her

company and value her conversation; and that might well be, for,

like other kings, he was used to getting nothing out of people's talk

but guarded phrases, colorless and non-committal, or carefully

tinted to tally with the color of what he said himself; and so this

kind of conversation only vexes and bores, and is wearisome; but

Joan's talk was fresh and free, sincere and honest, and unmarred by

timorous self-watching and constraint. She said the very thing that

was in her mind, and said it in a plain, straightforward way. One

can believe that to the King this must have been like fresh cold

water from the mountains to parched lips used to the water of the

sun-baked puddles of the plain.



After dinner Joan so charmed the Duke with her horsemanship and

lance practice in the meadows by the Castle of Chinon whither the

King also had come to look on, that he made her a present of a

great black war-steed.



Every day the commission of bishops came and questioned Joan

about her Voices and her mission, and then went to the King with

their report. These pryings accomplished but little. She told as

much as she considered advisable, and kept the rest to herself.

Both threats and trickeries were wasted upon her. She did not care

for the threats, and the traps caught nothing. She was perfectly

frank and childlike about these things. She knew the bishops were

sent by the King, that their questions were the King's questions,

and that by all law and custom a King's questions must be

answered; yet she told the King in her na‹ve way at his own table

one day that she answered only such of those questions as suited

her.



The bishops finally concluded that they couldn't tell whether Joan

was sent by God or not. They were cautious, you see. There were

two powerful parties at Court; therefore to make a decision either

way would infallibly embroil them with one of those parties; so it

seemed to them wisest to roost on the fence and shift the burden to

other shoulders. And that is what they did. They made final report

that Joan's case was beyond their powers, and recommended that it

be put into the hands of the learned and illustrious doctors of the

University of Poitiers. Then they retired from the field, leaving

behind them this little item of testimony, wrung from them by

Joan's wise reticence: they said she was a "gentle and simple little

shepherdess, very candid, but not given to talking."



It was quite true--in their case. But if they could have looked back

and seen her with us in the happy pastures of Domremy, they

would have perceived that she had a tongue that could go fast

enough when no harm could come of her words.



So we traveled to Poitiers, to endure there three weeks of tedious

delay while this poor child was being daily questioned and

badgered before a great bench of--what? Military experts?--since

what she had come to apply for was an army and the privilege of

leading it to battle against the enemies of France. Oh no; it was a

great bench of priests and monks--profoundly leaned and astute

casuists--renowned professors of theology! Instead of setting a

military commission to find out if this valorous little soldier could

win victories, they set a company of holy hair-splitters and

phrase-mongers to work to find out if the soldier was sound in her

piety and had no doctrinal leaks. The rats were devouring the

house, but instead of examining the cat's teeth and claws, they only

concerned themselves to find out if it was a holy cat. If it was a

pious cat, a moral cat, all right, never mind about the other

capacities, they were of no consequence.



Joan was as sweetly self-possessed and tranquil before this grim

tribunal, with its robed celebrities, its solemn state and imposing

ceremonials, as if she were but a spectator and not herself on trial.

She sat there, solitary on her bench, untroubled, and disconcerted

the science of the sages with her sublime ignorance--an ignorance

which was a fortress; arts, wiles, the learning drawn from books,

and all like missiles rebounded from its unconscious masonry and

fell to the ground harmless; they could not dislodge the garrison

which was within--Joan's serene great heart and spirit, the guards

and keepers of her mission.



She answered all questions frankly, and she told all the story of her

visions and of her experiences with the angels and what they said

to her; and the manner of the telling was so unaffected, and so

earnest and sincere, and made it all seem so lifelike and real, that

even that hard practical court forgot itself and sat motionless and

mute, listening with a charmed and wondering interest to the end.

And if you would have other testimony than mine, look in the

histories and you will find where an eyewitness, giving sworn

testimony in the Rehabilitation process, says that she told that tale

"with a noble dignity and simplicity," and as to its effect, says in

substance what I have said. Seventeen, she was--seventeen, and all

alone on her bench by herself; yet was not afraid, but faced that

great company of erudite doctor4s of law ant theology, and by the

help of no art learned in the schools, but using only the

enchantments which were hers by nature, of youth, sincerity, a

voice soft and musical, and an eloquence whose source was the

heart, not the head, she laid that spell upon them. Now was not

that a beautiful thing to see? If I could, I would put it before you

just as I saw it; then I know what you would say.



As I have told you, she could not read. "One day they harried and

pestered her with arguments, reasonings, objections, and other

windy and wordy trivialities, gathered out of the works of this and

that and the other great theological authority, until at last her

patience vanished, and she turned upon them sharply and said:



"I don't know A from B; but I know this: that I am come by

command of the Lord of Heaven to deliver Orleans from the

English power and crown the King of Rheims, and the matters ye

are puttering over are of no consequence!"



Necessarily those were trying days for her, and wearing for

everybody that took part; but her share was the hardest, for she had

no holidays, but must be always on hand and stay the long hours

through, whereas this, that, and the other inquisitor could absent

himself and rest up from his fatigues when he got worn out. And

yet she showed no wear, no weariness, and but seldom let fly her

temper. As a rule she put her day through calm, alert, patient,

fencing with those veteran masters of scholarly sword-play and

coming out always without a scratch.



One day a Dominican sprung upon her a question which made

everybody cock up his ears with interest; as for me, I trembled, and

said to myself she is done this time, poor Joan, for there is no way

of answering this. The sly Dominican began in this way--in a sort

of indolent fashion, as if the thing he was about was a matter of no

moment:



"You assert that God has willed to deliver France from this English

bondage?"



"Yes, He has willed it."



"You wish for men-at-arms, so that you may go to the relief of

Orleans, I believe?"



"Yes--and the sooner the better."



"God is all-powerful, and able to do whatsoever thing He wills to

do, is it not so?"



"Most surely. None doubts it."



The Dominican lifted his head suddenly, and sprung that question I

have spoken of, with exultation:



"Then answer me this. If He has willed to deliver France, and is

able to do whatsoever He wills, where is the need for

men-at-arms?"



There was a fine stir and commotion when he said that, and a

sudden thrusting forward of heads and putting up of hands to ears

to catch the answer; and the Dominican wagged his head with

satisfaction, and looked about him collecting his applause, for it

shone in every face. But Joan was not disturbed. There was no note

of disquiet in her voice when she answered:



"He helps who help themselves. The sons of France will fight the

battles, but He will give the victory!"



You could see a light of admiration sweep the house from face to

face like a ray from the sun. Even the Dominican himself looked

pleased, to see his master-stroke so neatly parried, and I heard a

venerable bishop mutter, in the phrasing common to priest and

people in that robust time, "By God, the child has said true. He

willed that Goliath should be slain, and He sent a child like this to

do it!"



Another day, when the inquisition had dragged along until

everybody looked drowsy and tired but Joan, Brother S‚guin,

professor of theology at the University of Poitiers, who was a sour

and sarcastic man, fell to plying Joan with all sorts of nagging

questions in his bastard Limousin French--for he was from

Limoges. Finally he said:



"How is it that you understand those angels? What language did

they speak?"



"French."



"In-deed! How pleasant to know that our language is so honored!

Good French?"



"Yes--perfect."



"Perfect, eh? Well, certainly you ought to know. It was even better

than your own, eh?"



"As to that, I--I believe I cannot say," said she, and was going on,

but stopped. Then she added, almost as if she were saying it to

herself, "Still, it was an improvement on yours!"



I knew there was a chuckle back of her eyes, for all their

innocence. Everybody shouted. Brother S‚guin was nettled, and

asked brusquely:



"Do you believe in God?"



Joan answered with an irritating nonchalance:



"Oh, well, yes--better than you, it is likely."



Brother S‚guin lost his patience, and heaped sarcasm after sarcasm

upon her, and finally burst out in angry earnest, exclaiming:



"Very well, I can tell you this, you whose believe in God is so

great: God has not willed that any shall believe in you without a

sign. Where is your sign?--show it!"



This roused Joan, and she was on her feet in a moment, and flung

out her retort with spirit:



"I have not come to Poitiers to show signs and do miracles. Send

me to Orleans and you shall have signs enough. Give me

men-at-arms--few or many--and let me go!"



The fire was leaping from her eyes--ah, the heroic little figure!

can't you see her? There was a great burst of acclamations, and she

sat down blushing, for it was not in her delicate nature to like

being conspicuous.



This speech and that episode about the French language scored

two points against Brother S‚guin, while he scored nothing against

Joan; yet, sour man as he was, he was a manly man, and honest, as

you can see by the histories; for at the Rehabilitation he could have

hidden those unlucky incidents if he had chosen, but he didn't do

it, but spoke them right out in his evidence.



On one of the lat3er days of that three-weeks session the gowned

scholars and professors made one grand assault all along the line,

fairly overwhelming Joan with objections and arguments culled

from the writings of every ancient and illustrious authority of the

Roman Church. She was well-nigh smothered; but at last she

shook herself free and struck back, crying out:



"Listen! The Book of God is worth more than all these ye cite, and

I stand upon it. And I tell ye there are things in that Book that not

one among ye can read, with all your learning!"



From the first she was the guest, by invitation, of the dame De

Rabateau, wife of a councilor of the Parliament of Poitiers; and to

that house the great ladies of the city came nightly to see Joan and

talk with her; and not these only, but the old lawyers, councilors

and scholars of the Parliament and the University. And these grave

men, accustomed to weigh every strange and questionable thing,

and cautiously consider it, and turn it about this way and that and

still doubt it, came night after night, and night after night, falling

ever deeper and deeper under the influence of that mysterious

something, that spell, that elusive and unwordable fascination,

which was the supremest endowment of Joan of Arc, that winning

and persuasive and convincing something which high and low

alike recognized and felt, but which neither high nor low could

explain or describe, and one by one they all surrendered, saying,

"This child is sent of God."



All day long Joan, in the great court and subject to its rigid rules of

procedure, was at a disadvantage; her judges had things their own

way; but at night she held court herself, and matters were reversed,

she presiding, with her tongue free and her same judges there

before her. There could not be but one result: all the objections and

hindrances they could build around her with their hard labors of

the day she would charm away at night. In the end, she carried her

judges with her in a mass, and got her great verdict without a

dissenting voice.



The court was a sight to see when the president of it read it from

his throne, for all the great people of the town were there who

could get admission and find room. First there were some solemn

ceremonies, proper and usual at such times; then, when there was

silence again, the reading followed, penetrating the deep hush so

that every word was heard in even the remotest parts of the house:



"It is found, and is hereby declared, that Joan of Arc, called the

Maid, is a good Christian and a good Catholic; that there is

nothing in her person or her words contrary to the faith; and that

the King may and ought to accept the succor she offers; for to

repel it would be to offend the Holy Spirit, and render him

unworthy of the air of God."



The court rose, and then the storm of plaudits burst forth

unrebuked, dying down and bursting forth again and again, and I

lost sight of Joan, for she was swallowed up in a great tide of

people who rushed to congratulate her and pour out benedictions

upon her and upon the cause of France, now solemnly and

irrevocably delivered into her little hands.



Chapter 9 She Is Made General-in-Chief



IT WAS indeed a great day, and a stirring thing to see.



She had won! It was a mistake of Tremouille and her other

ill-wishers to let her hold court those nights.



The commission of priests sent to Lorraine ostensibly to inquire

into Joan's character--in fact to weary her with delays and wear out

her purpose and make her give it up--arrived back and reported her

character perfect. Our affairs were in full career now, you see.



The verdict made a prodigious stir. Dead France woke suddenly to

life, wherever the great news traveled. Whereas before, the

spiritless and cowed people hung their heads and slunk away if one

mentioned war to them, now they came clamoring to be enlisted

under the banner of the Maid of Vaucouleurs, and the roaring of

war-songs and the thundering of the drums filled all the air. I

remembered now what she had said, that time there in our village

when I proved by facts and statistics that France's case was

hopeless, and nothing could ever rouse the people from their

lethargy:



"They will hear the drums--and they will answer, they will march!"



It has been said that misfortunes never come one at a time, but in a

body. In our case it was the same with good luck. Having got a

start, it came flooding in, tide after tide. Our next wave of it was of

this sort. There had been grave doubts among the priests as to

whether the Church ought to permit a female soldier to dress like a

man. But now came a verdict on that head. Two of the greatest

scholars and theologians of the time--one of whom had been

Chancellor of the University of Paris--rendered it. They decided

that since Joan "must do the work of a man and a soldier, it is just

and legitimate that her apparel should conform to the situation."



It was a great point gained, the Church's authority to dress as a

man. Oh, yes, wave on wave the good luck came sweeping in.

Never mind about the smaller waves, let us come to the largest one

of all, the wave that swept us small fry quite off our feet and

almost drowned us with joy. The day of the great verdict, couriers

had been despatched to the King with it, and the next morning

bright and early the clear notes of a bugle came floating to us on

the crisp air, and we pricked up our ears and began to count them.

One--two--three; pause; one--two; pause; one--two--three,

again--and out we skipped and went flying; for that formula was

used only when the King's herald-at-arms would deliver a

proclamation to the people. As we hurried along, people came

racing out of every street and house and alley, men, women, and

children, all flushed, excited, and throwing lacking articles of

clothing on as they ran; still those clear notes pealed out, and still

the rush of people increased till the whole town was abroad and

streaming along the principal street. At last we reached the square,

which was now packed with citizens, and there, high on the

pedestal of the great cross, we saw the herald in his brilliant

costume, with his servitors about him. The next moment he began

his delivery in the powerful voice proper to his office:



"Know all men, and take heed therefore, that the most high, the

most illustrious Charles, by the grace of God King of France, hath

been pleased to confer upon his well-beloved servant Joan of Arc,

called the Maid, the title, emoluments, authorities, and dignity of

General-in-Chief of the Armies of France--"



Here a thousand caps flew in the air, and the multitude burst into a

hurricane of cheers that raged and raged till it seemed as if it

would never come to an end; but at last it did; then the herald went

on and finished:



--"and hath appointed to be her lieutenant and chief of staff a

prince of his royal house, his grace the Duke of Alen‡on!"



That was the end, and the hurricane began again, and was split up

into innumerable strips by the blowers of it and wafted through all

the lanes and streets of the town.



General of the Armies of France, with a prince of the blood for

subordinate! Yesterday she was nothing--to-day she was this.

Yesterday she was not even a sergeant, not even a corporal, not

even a private--to-day, with one step, she was at the top. Yesterday

she was less than nobody to the newest recruit--to-day her

command was law to La Hire, Saintrailles, the Bastard of Orleans,

and all those others, veterans of old renown, illustrious masters of

the trade of war. These were the thoughts I was thinking; I was

trying to realize this strange and wonderful thing that had

happened, you see.



My mind went travelling back, and presently lighted upon a

picture--a picture which was still so new and fresh in my memory

that it seemed a matter of only yesterday--and indeed its date was

no further back than the first days of January. This is what it was.

A peasant-girl in a far-off village, her seventeenth year not yet

quite completed, and herself and her village as unknown as if they

had been on the other side of the globe. She had picked up a

friendless wanderer somewhere and brought it home--a small gray

kitten in a forlorn and starving condition--and had fed it and

comforted it and got its confidence and made it believe in her, and

now it was curled up in her lap asleep, and she was knitting a

coarse stocking and thinking--dreaming--about what, one may

never know. And now--the kitten had hardly had time to become a

cat, and yet already the girl is General of the Armies of France,

with a prince of the blood to give orders to, and out of her village

obscurity her name has climbed up like the sun and is visible from

all corners of the land! It made me dizzy to think of these things,

they were so out of the common order, and seemed so impossible.



Chapter 10 The Maid's Sword and Banner



JOAN'S first official act was to dictate a letter to the English

commanders at Orleans, summoning them to deliver up all

strongholds in their possession and depart out of France. She must

have been thinking it all out before and arranging it in her mind, it

flowed from her lips so smoothly, and framed itself into such

vivacious and forcible language. Still, it might not have been so;

she always had a quick mind and a capable tongue, and her

faculties were constantly developing in these latter weeks. This

letter was to be forwarded presently from Blois. Men, provisions,

and money were offering in plenty now, and Joan appointed Blois

as a recruiting-station and depot of supplies, and ordered up La

Hire from the front to take charge.



The Great Bastard--him of the ducal house, and governor of

Orleans--had been clamoring for weeks for Joan to be sent to him,

and now came another messenger, old D'Aulon, a veteran officer, a

trusty man and fine and honest. The King kept him, and gave him

to Joan to be chief of her household, and commanded her to

appoint the rest of her people herself, making their number and

dignity accord with the greatness of her office; and at the same

time he gave order that they should be properly equipped with

arms, clothing, and horses.



Meantime the King was having a complete suit of armor made for

her at Tours. It was of the finest steel, heavily plated with silver,

richly ornamented with engraved designs, and polished like a

mirror.



Joan's Voices had told her that there was an ancient sword hidden

somewhere behind the altar of St. Catherine's at Fierbois, and she

sent De Metz to get it. The priests knew of no such sword, but a

search was made, and sure enough it was found in that place,

buried a little way under the ground. It had no sheath and was very

rusty, but the priests polished it up and sent it to Tours, whither we

were now to come. They also had a sheath of crimson velvet made

for it, and the people of Tours equipped it with another, made of

cloth-of-gold. But Joan meant to carry this sword always in battle;

so she laid the showy sheaths away and got one made of leather. It

was generally believed that his sword had belonged to

Charlemagne, but that was only a matter of opinion. I wanted to

sharpen that old blade, but she said it was not necessary, as she

should never kill anybody, and should carry it only as a symbol of

authority.



At Tours she designed her Standard, and a Scotch painter named

James Power made it. It was of the most delicate white boucassin,

with fringes of silk. For device it bore the image of God the Father

throned in the clouds and holding the world in His hand; two

angels knelt at His feet, presenting lilies; inscription, JESUS,

MARIA; on the reverse the crown of France supported by two

angels.



She also caused a smaller standard or pennon to be made, whereon

was represented an angel offering a lily to the Holy Virgin.



Everything was humming there at Tours. Every now and then one

heard the bray and crash of military music, every little while one

heard the measured tramp of marching men--squads of recruits

leaving for Blois; songs and shoutings and huzzas filled the air

night and day, the town was full of strangers, the streets and inns

were thronged, the bustle of preparation was everywhere, and

everybody carried a glad and cheerful face. Around Joan's

headquarters a crowd of people was always massed, hoping for a

glimpse of the new General, and when they got it, they went wild;

but they seldom got it, for she was busy planning her campaign,

receiving reports, giving orders, despatching couriers, and giving

what odd moments she could spare to the companies of great folk

waiting in the drawing-rooms. As for us boys, we hardly saw her at

all, she was so occupied.



We were in a mixed state of mind--sometimes hopeful, sometimes

not; mostly not. She had not appointed her household yet--that was

our trouble. We knew she was being overrun with applications for

places in it, and that these applications were backed by great

names and weighty influence, whereas we had nothing of the sort

to recommend us. She could fill her humblest places with titled

folk--folk whose relationships would be a bulwark for her and a

valuable support at all times. In these circumstances would policy

allow her to consider us? We were not as cheerful as the rest of the

town, but were inclined to be depressed and worried. Sometimes

we discussed our slim chances and gave them as good an

appearance as we could. But the very mention of the subject was

anguish to the Paladin; for whereas we had some little hope, he

had none at all. As a rule No‰l Rainguesson was quite wiLa

Hireing to let the dismal matter alone; but not when the Paladin

was present. Once we were talking the thing over, when No‰l said:



"Cheer up, Paladin, I had a dream last night, and you were the only

one among us that got an appointment. It wasn't a high one, but it

was an appointment, anyway--some kind of a lackey or

body-servant, or something of that kind."



The Paladin roused up and looked almost cheerful; for he was a

believer in dreams, and in anything and everything of a

superstitious sort, in fact. He said, with a rising hopefulness:



"I wish it might come true. Do you think it will come true?"



"Certainly; I might almost say I know it will, for my dreams hardly

ever fail."



"No‰l, I could hug you if that dream could come true, I could,

indeed! To be servant of the first General of France and have all

the world hear of it, and the news go back to the village and make

those gawks stare that always said I wouldn't ever amount to

anything--wouldn't it be great! Do you think it will come true,

No‰l? Don't you believe it will?"



"I do. There's my hand on it."



"No‰l, if it comes true I'll never forget you--shake again! I should

be dressed in a noble livery, and the news would go to the village,

and those animals would say, 'Him, lackey to the General-in-Chief,

with the eyes of the whole world on him, admiring--well, he has

shot up into the sky now, hasn't he!"



He began to walk the floor and pile castles in the air so fast and so

high that we could hardly keep up with him. Then all of a sudden

all the joy went out of his face and misery took its place, and he

said:



"Oh, dear, it is all a mistake, it will never come true. I forgot that

foolish business at Toul. I have kept out of her sight as much as I

could, all these weeks, hoping she would forget that and forgive

it--but I know she never will. She can't, of course. And, after all, I

wasn't to blame. I did say she promised to marry me, but they put

me up to it and persuaded me. I swear they did!" The vast creature

was almost crying. Then he pulled himself together and said,

remorsefully, "It was the only lie I've ever told, and--"



He was drowned out with a chorus of groans and outraged

exclamations; and before he could begin again, one of D'Aulon's

liveried servants appeared and said we were required at

headquarters. We rose, and No‰l said:



"There--what did I tell you? I have a presentiment--the spirit of

prophecy is upon me. She is going to appoint him, and we are to

go there and do him homage. Come along!"



But the Paladin was afraid to go, so we left him.



When we presently stood in the presence, in front of a crowd of

glittering officers of the army, Joan greeted us with a winning

smile, and said she appointed all of us to places in her household,

for she wanted her old friends by her. It was a beautiful surprise to

have ourselves honored like this when she could have had people

of birth and consequence instead, but we couldn't find our tongues

to say so, she was become so great and so high above us now. One

at a time we stepped forward and each received his warrant from

the hand of our chief, D'Aulon. All of us had honorable places; the

two knights stood highest; then Joan's two brothers; I was first

page and secretary, a young gentleman named Raimond was

second page; No‰l was her messenger; she had two heralds, and

also a chaplain and almoner, whose name was Jean Pasquerel. She

had previously appointed a maŒtre d'h“tel and a number of

domestics. Now she looked around and said:



"But where is the Paladin?"



The Sieur Bertrand said:



"He thought he was not sent for, your Excellency."



"Now that is not well. Let him be called."



The Paladin entered humbly enough. He ventured no farther than

just within the door. He stopped there, looking embarrassed and

afraid. Then Joan spoke pleasantly, and said:



"I watched you on the road. You began badly, but improved. Of

old you were a fantastic talker, but there is a man in you, and I will

bring it out." It was fine to see the Paladin's face light up when she

said that. "Will you follow where I lead?"



"Into the fire!" he said; and I said to myself, "By the ring of that, I

think she has turned this braggart into a hero. It is another of her

miracles, I make no doubt of it."



"I believe you," said Joan. "Here--take my banner. You will ride

with me in every field, and when France is saved, you will give it

me back."



He took the banner, which is now the most precious of the

memorials that remain of Joan of Arc, and his voice was unsteady

with emotion when he said:



"If I ever disgrace this trust, my comrades here will know how to

do a friend's office upon my body, and this charge I lay upon them,

as knowing they will not fail me."



Chapter 11 The War March Is Begun



NO L and I went back together--silent at first, and impressed.



Finally No‰l came up out of his thinkings and said:



"The first shall be last and the last first--there's authority for this

surprise. But at the same time wasn't it a lofty hoist for our big

bull!"



"It truly was; I am not over being stunned yet. It was the greatest

place in her gift."



"Yes, it was. There are many generals, and she can create more;

but there is only one Standard-Bearer."



"True. It is the most conspicuous place in the army, after her own."



"And the most coveted and honorable. Sons of two dukes tried to

get it, as we know. And of all people in the world, this majestic

windmill carries it off. Well, isn't it a gigantic promotion, when

you come to look at it!"



"There's no doubt about it. It's a kind of copy of Joan's own in

miniature."



"I don't know how to account for it--do you?"



"Yes--without any trouble at all--that is, I think I do."



No‰l was surprised at that, and glanced up quickly, as if to see if I

was in earnest. He said:



"I thought you couldn't be in earnest, but I see you are. If you can

make me understand this puzzle, do it. Tell me what the

explanation is."



"I believe I can. You have noticed that our chief knight says a good

many wise things and has a thoughtful head on his shoulders. One

day, riding along, we were talking about Joan's great talents, and

he said, 'But, greatest of all her gifts, she has the seeing eye.' I said,

like an unthinking fool, 'The seeing eye?--I shouldn't count on that

for much--I suppose we all have it.' 'No,' he said; 'very few have it.'

Then he explained, and made his meaning clear. He said the

common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that,

but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul,

finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or

promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect. He said

the mightiest military genius must fail and come to nothing if it

have not the seeing eye--that is to say, if it cannot read men and

select its subordinates with an infallible judgment. It sees as by

intuition that this man is good for strategy, that one for dash and

daredevil assault, the other for patient bulldog persistence, and it

appoints each to his right place and wins, while the commander

without the seeing eye would give to each the other's place and

lose. He was right about Joan, and I saw it. When she was a child

and the tramp came one night, her father and all of us took him for

a rascal, but she saw the honest man through the rags. When I

dined with the governor of Vaucouleurs so long ago, I saw nothing

in our two knights, though I sat with them and talked with them

two hours; Joan was there five minutes, and neither spoke with

them nor heard them speak, yet she marked them for men of worth

and fidelity, and they have confirmed her judgment. Whom has she

sent for to take charge of this thundering rabble of new recruits at

Blois, made up of old disbanded Armagnac raiders, unspeakable

hellions, every one? Why, she has sent for Satan himself--that is to

say, La Hire--that military hurricane, that godless swashbuckler,

that lurid conflagration of blasphemy, that Vesuvius of profanity,

forever in eruption. Does he know how to deal with that mob of

roaring devils? Better than any man that lives; for he is the head

devil of this world his own self, he is the match of the whole of

them combined, and probably the father of most of them. She

places him in temporary command until she can get to Blois

herself--and then! Why, then she will certainly take them in hand

personally, or I don't know her as well as I ought to, after all these

years of intimacy. That will be a sight to see--that fair spirit in her

white armor, delivering her will to that muck-heap, that rag-pile,

that abandoned refuse of perdition."



"La Hire!" cried No‰l, "our hero of all these years--I do want to see

that man!"



"I too. His name stirs me just as it did when I was a little boy."



"I want to hear him swear."



"Of course, I would rather hear him swear than another man pray.

He is the frankest man there is, and the na‹vest. Once when he was

rebuked for pillaging on his raids, he said it was nothing. Said he,

'If God the Father were a soldier, He would rob.' I judge he is the

right man to take temporary charge there at Blois. Joan has cast the

seeing eye upon him, you see."



"Which brings us back to where we started. I have an honest

affection for the Paladin, and not merely because he is a good

fellow, but because he is my child--I made him what he is, the

windiest blusterer and most catholic liar in the kingdom. I'm glad

of his luck, but I hadn't the seeing eye. I shouldn't have chosen him

for the most dangerous post in the army. I should have placed him

in the rear to kill the wounded and violate the dead."



"Well, we shall see. Joan probably knows what is in him better

than we do. And I'll give you another idea. When a person in Joan

of Arc's position tells a man he is brave, he believes it; and

believing it is enough; in fact, to believe yourself brave is to be

brave; it is the one only essential thing."



"Now you've hit it!" cried No‰l. "She's got the creating mouth as

well as the seeing eye! Ah, yes, that is the thing. France was cowed

and a coward; Joan of Arc has spoken, and France is marching,

with her head up!"



I was summoned now to write a letter from Joan's dictation.

During the next day and night our several uniforms were made by

the tailors, and our new armor provided. We were beautiful to look

upon now, whether clothed for peace or war. Clothed for peace, in

costly stuffs and rich colors, the Paladin was a tower dyed with the

glories of the sunset; plumed and sashed and iron-clad for war, he

was a still statelier thing to look at.



Orders had been issued for the march toward Blois. It was a clear,

sharp, beautiful morning. As our showy great company trotted out

in column, riding two and two, Joan and the Duke of Alen‡on in

the lead, D'Aulon and the big standard-bearer next, and so on, we

made a handsome spectacle, as you may well imagine; and as we

plowed through the cheering crowds, with Joan bowing her

plumed head to left and right and the sun glinting from her silver

mail, the spectators realized that the curtain was rolling up before

their eyes upon the first act of a prodigious drama, and their rising

hopes were expressed in an enthusiasm that increased with each

moment, until at last one seemed to even physically feel the

concussion of the huzzas as well as hear them. Far down the street

we heard the softened strains of wind-blown music, and saw a

cloud of lancers moving, the sun glowing with a subdued light

upon the massed armor, but striking bright upon the soaring

lance-heads--a vaguely luminous nebula, so to speak, with a

constellation twinkling above it--and that was our guard of honor.

It joined us, the procession was complete, the first war-march of

Joan of Arc was begun, the curtain was up.



Chapter 12 Joan Puts Heart in Her Army



WE WERE at Blois three days. Oh, that camp, it is one of the

treasures of my memory! Order? There was no more order among

those brigands than there is among the wolves and the hyenas.

They went roaring and drinking about, whooping, shouting,

swearing, and entertaining themselves with all manner of rude and

riotous horse-play; and the place was full of loud and lewd

women, and they were no whit behind the men for romps and

noise and fantastics.



It was in the midst of this wild mob that No‰l and I had our first

glimpse of La Hire. He answered to our dearest dreams. He was of

great size and of martial bearing, he was cased in mail from head

to heel, with a bushel of swishing plumes on his helmet, and at his

side the vast sword of the time.



He was on his way to pay his respects in state to Joan, and as he

passed through the camp he was restoring order, and proclaiming

that the Maid had come, and he would have no such spectacle as

this exposed to the head of the army. His way of creating order

was his own, not borrowed. He did it with his great fists. As he

moved along swearing and admonishing, he let drive this way, that

way, and the other, and wherever his blow landed, a man went

down.



"Damn you!" he said, "staggering and cursing around like this, and

the Commander-in-Chief in the camp! Straighten up!" and he laid

the man flat. What his idea of straightening up was, was his own

secret.



We followed the veteran to headquarters, listening, observing,

admiring--yes, devouring, you may say, the pet hero of the boys of

France from our cradles up to that happy day, and their idol and

ours. I called to mind how Joan had once rebuked the Paladin,

there in the pastures of Domremy, for uttering lightly those mighty

names, La Hire and the Bastard of Orleans, and how she said that

if she could but be permitted to stand afar off and let her eyes rest

once upon those great men, she would hold it a privilege. They

were to her and the other girls just what they were to the boys.

Well, here was one of them at last--and what was his errand? It

was hard to realize it, and yet it was true; he was coming to

uncover his head before her and take her orders.



While he was quieting a considerable group of his brigands in his

soothing way, near headquarters, we stepped on ahead and got a

glimpse of Joan's military family, the great chiefs of the army, for

they had all arrived now. There they were, six officers of wide

renown, handsome men in beautiful armor, but the Lord High

Admiral of France was the handsomest of them all and had the

most gallant bearing.



When La Hire entered, one could see the surprise in his face at

Joan's beauty and extreme youth, and one could see, too, by Joan's

glad smile, that it made her happy to get sight of this hero of her

childhood at last. La Hire bowed low, with his helmet in his

gauntleted hand, and made a bluff but handsome little speech with

hardly an oath in it, and one could see that those two took to each

other on the spot.



The visit of ceremony was soon over, and the others went away;

but La Hire stayed, and he and Joan sat there, and he sipped her

wine, and they talked and laughed together like old friends. And

presently she gave him some instructions, in his quality as master

of the camp, which made his breath stand still. For, to begin with,

she said that all those loose women must pack out of the place at

once, she wouldn't allow one of them to remain. Next, the rough

carousing must stop, drinking must be brought within proper and

strictly defined limits, and discipline must take the place of

disorder. And finally she cloiimaxed the list of surprises with

this--which nearly lifted him out of his armor:



"Every man who joins my standard must confess before the priest

and absolve himself from sin; and all accepted recruits must be

present at divine service twice a day."



La Hire could not say a word for a good part of a minute, then he

said, in deep dejection:



"Oh, sweet child, they were littered in hell, these poor darlings of

mine! Attend mass? Why, dear heart, they'll see us both damned

first!"



And he went on, pouring out a most pathetic stream of arguments

and blasphemy, which broke Joan all up, and made her laugh as

she had not laughed since she played in the Domremy pastures. It

was good to hear.



But she stuck to her point; so the soldier yielded, and said all right,

if such were the orders he must obey, and would do the best that

was in him; then he refreshed himself with a lurid explosion of

oaths, and said that if any man in the camp refused to renounce sin

and lead a pious life, he would knock his head off. That started

Joan off again; she was really having a good time, you see. But she

would not consent to that form of conversions. She said they must

be voluntary.



La Hire said that that was all right, he wasn't going to kill the

voluntary ones, but only the others.



No matter, none of them must be killed--Joan couldn't have it. She

said that to give a man a chance to volunteer, on pain of death if he

didn't, left him more or less trammeled, and she wanted him to be

entirely free.



So the soldier sighed and said he would advertise the mass, but

said he doubted if there was a man in camp that was any more

likely to go to it than he was himself. Then there was another

surprise for him, for Joan said:



"But, dear man, you are going!"



"I? Impossible! Oh, this is lunacy!"



"Oh, no, it isn't. You are going to the service--twice a day."



"Oh, am I dreaming? Am I drunk--or is my hearing playing me

false? Why, I would rather go to--"



"Never mind where. In the morning you are going to begin, and

after that it will come easy. Now don't look downhearted like that.

Soon you won't mind it."



La Hire tried to cheer up, but he was not able to do it. He sighed

like a zephyr, and presently said:



"Well, I'll do it for you, but before I would do it for another, I

swear I--"



"But don't swear. Break it off."



"Break it off? It is impossible! I beg you to--to-- Why--oh, my

General, it is my native speech!"



He begged so hard for grace for his impediment, that Joan left him

one fragment of it; she said he might swear by his bƒton, the

symbol of his generalship.



He promised that he would swear only by his bƒton when in her

presence, and would try to modify himself elsewhere, but doubted

he could manage it, now that it was so old and stubborn a habit,

and such a solace and support to his declining years.



That tough old lion went away from there a good deal tamed and

civilized--not to say softened and sweetened, for perhaps those

expressions would hardly fit him. No‰l and I believed that when he

was away from Joan's influence his old aversions would come up

so strong in him that he could not master them, and so wouldn't go

to mass. But we got up early in the morning to see.



Satan was converted, you see. Well, the rest followed. Joan rode

up and down that camp, and wherever that fair young form

appeared in its shining armor, with that sweet face to grace the

vision and perfect it, the rude host seemed to think they saw the

god of war in person, descended out of the clouds; and first they

wondered, then they worshiped. After that, she could do with them

what she would.



In three days it was a clean camp and orderly, and those barbarians

were herding to divine service twice a day like good children. The

women were gone. La Hire was stunned by these marvels; he could

not understand them. He went outside the camp when he wanted to

swear. He was that sort of a man--sinful by nature and habit, but

full of superstitious respect for holy places.



The enthusiasm of the reformed army for Joan, its devotion to her,

and the hot desire had aroused in it to be led against the enemy,

exceeded any manifestations of this sort which La Hire had ever

seen before in his long career. His admiration of it all, and his

wonder over the mystery and miracle of it, were beyond his power

to put into words. He had held this army cheap before, but his

pride and confidence in it knew no limits now. He said:



"Two or three days ago it was afraid of a hen-roost; one could

storm the gates of hell with it now."



Joan and he were inseparable, and a quaint and pleasant contrast

they made. He was so big, she so little; he was so gray and so far

along in his pilgrimage of life, she so youthful; his face was so

bronzed and scarred, hers so fair and pink, so fresh and smooth;

she was so gracious, and he so stern; she was so pure, so innocent,

he such a cyclopedia of sin. In her eye was stored all charity and

compassion, in his lightnings; when her glance fell upon you it

seemed to bring benediction and the peace of God, but with his it

was different, generally.



They rode through the camp a dozen times a day, visiting every

corner of it, observing, inspecting, perfecting; and wherever they

appeared the enthusiasm broke forth. They rode side by side, he a

great figure of brawn and muscle, she a little masterwork of

roundness and grace; he a fortress of rusty iron, she a shining

statuette of silver; and when the reformed raiders and bandits

caught sight of them they spoke out, with affection and welcome

in their voices, and said:



"There they come--Satan and the Page of Christ!"



All the three days that we were in Blois, Joan worked earnestly

and tirelessly to bring La Hire to God--to rescue him from the

bondage of sin--to breathe into his stormy hear the serenity and

peace of religion. She urged, she begged, she implored him to

pray. He stood out, three days of our stay, begging about piteously

to be let off--to be let off from just that one thing, that impossible

thing; he would do anything else--anything--command, and he

would obey--he would go through the fire for her if she said the

word--but spare him this, only this, for he couldn't pray, had never

prayed, he was ignorant of how to frame a prayer, he had no words

to put it in.



And yet--can any believe it?--she carried even that point, she won

that incredible victory. She made La Hire pray. It shows, I think,

that nothing was impossible to Joan of Arc. Yes, he stood there

before her and put up his mailed hands and made a prayer. And it

was not borrowed, but was his very own; he had none to help him

frame it, he made it out of his own head--saying:



"Fair Sir God, I pray you to do by La Hire as he would do by you if

you were La Hire and he were God." [1]

Then he put on his helmet and marched out of Joan's tent as

satisfied with himself as any one might be who had arranged a

perplexed and difficult business to the content and admiration of

all the parties concerned in the matter.



If I had know that he had been praying, I could have understood

why he was feeling so superior, but of course I could not know

that.



I was coming to the tent at that moment, and saw him come out,

and saw him march away in that large fashion, and indeed it was

fine and beautiful to see. But when I got to the tent door I stopped

and stepped back, grieved and shocked, for I heard Joan crying, as

I mistakenly thought--crying as if she could not contain nor endure

the anguish of her soul, crying as if she would die. But it was not

so, she was laughing--laughing at La Hire's prayer.



It was not until six-and-thirty years afterward that I found that out,

and then--oh, then I only cried when that picture of young care-free

mirth rose before me out of the blur and mists of that

long-vanished time; for there had come a day between, when God's

good gift of laughter had gone out from me to come again no more

in this life.



[1] This prayer has been stolen many times and by many nations in

the past four hundred and sixty years, but it originated with La

Hire, and the fact is of official record in the National Archives of

France. We have the authority of Michelet for this. --

TRANSLATOR



Chapter 13 Checked by the Folly of the Wise



WE MARCHED out in great strength and splendor, and took the

road toward Orleans. The initial part of Joan's great dream was

realizing itself at last. It was the first time that any of us youngsters

had ever seen an army, and it was a most stately and imposing

spectacle to us. It was indeed an inspiring sight, that interminable

column, stretching away into the fading distances, and curving

itself in and out of the crookedness of the road like a mighty

serpent. Joan rode at the head of it with her personal staff; then

came a body of priests singing the Veni Creator, the banner of the

Cross rising out of their midst; after these the glinting forest of

spears. The several divisions were commanded by the great

Armagnac generals, La Hire, and Marshal de Boussac, the Sire de

Retz, Florent d'Illiers, and Poton de Saintrailles.



Each in his degree was tough, and there were three degrees--tough,

tougher, toughest--and La Hire was the last by a shade, but only a

shade. They were just illustrious official brigands, the whole party;

and by long habits of lawlessness they had lost all

acquaintanceship with obedience, if they had ever had any.



But what was the good of saying that? These independent birds

knew no law. They seldom obeyed the King; they never obeyed

him when it didn't suit them to do it. Would they obey the Maid?

In the first place they wouldn't know how to obey her or anybody

else, and in the second place it was of course not possible for them

to take her military character seriously--that country-girl of

seventeen who had been trained for the complex and terrible

business of war--how? By tending sheep.



They had no idea of obeying her except in cases where their

veteran military knowledge and experience showed them that the

thing she required was sound and right when gauged by the regular

military standards. Were they to blame for this attitude? I should

think not. Old war-worn captains are hard-headed, practical men.

They do not easily believe in the ability of ignorant children to

plan campaigns and command armies. No general that ever lived

could have taken Joan seriously (militarily) before she raised the

siege of Orleans and followed it with the great campaign of the

Loire.



Did they consider Joan valueless? Far from it. They valued her as

the fruitful earth values the sun--they fully believed she could

produce the crop, but that it was in their line of business, not hers,

to take it off. They had a deep and superstitious reverence for her

as being endowed with a mysterious supernatural something that

was able to do a mighty thing which they were powerless to

do--blow the breath of life and valor into the dead corpses of

cowed armies and turn them into heroes.



To their minds they were everything with her, but nothing without

her. She could inspire the soldiers and fit them for battle--but fight

the battle herself? Oh, nonsense--that was their function. They, the

generals, would fight the battles, Joan would give the victory. That

was their idea--an unconscious paraphrase of Joan's reply to the

Dominican.



So they began by playing a deception upon her. She had a clear

idea of how she meant to proceed. It was her purpose to march

boldly upon Orleans by the north bank of the Loire. She gave that

order to her generals. They said to themselves, "The idea is

insane--it is blunder No. 1; it is what might have been expected of

this child who is ignorant of war." They privately sent the word to

the Bastard of Orleans. He also recognized the insanity of it--at

least he though he did--and privately advised the generals to get

around the order in some way.



They did it by deceiving Joan. She trusted those people, she was

not expecting this sort of treatment, and was not on the lookout for

it. It was a lesson to her; she saw to it that the game was not played

a second time.



Why was Joan's idea insane, from the generals' point of view, but

not from hers? Because her plan was to raise the siege

immediately, by fighting, while theirs was to besiege the besiegers

and starve them out by closing their communications--a plan

which would require months in the consummation.



The English had built a fence of strong fortresses called bastilles

around Orleans--fortresses which closed all the gates of the city

but one. To the French generals the idea of trying to fight their way

past those fortresses and lead the army into Orleans was

preposterous; they believed that the result would be the army's

destruction. One may not doubt that their opinion was militarily

sound--no, would have been, but for one circumstance which they

overlooked. That was this: the English soldiers were in a

demoralized condition of superstitious terror; they had become

satisfied that the Maid was in league with Satan. By reason of this

a good deal of their courage had oozed out and vanished. On the

other hand, the Maid'' soldiers were full of courage, enthusiasm,

and zeal.



Joan could have marched by the English forts. However, it was not

to be. She had been cheated out of her first chance to strike a

heavy blow for her country.



In camp that night she slept in her armor on the ground. It was a

cold night, and she was nearly as stiff as her armor itself when we

resumed the march in the morning, for iron is not good material

for a blanket. However, her joy in being now so far on her way to

the theater of her mission was fire enough to warm her, and it soon

did it.



Her enthusiasm and impatience rose higher and higher with every

mile of progress; but at last we reached Olivet, and down it went,

and indignation took its place. For she saw the trick that had been

played upon her--the river lay between us and Orleans.



She was for attacking one of the three bastilles that were on our

side of the river and forcing access to the bridge which it guarded

(a project which, if successful, would raise the siege instantly), but

the long-ingrained fear of the English came upon her generals and

they implored her not to make the attempt. The soldiers wanted to

attack, but had to suffer disappointment. So we moved on and

came to a halt at a point opposite Ch‚cy, six miles above Orleans.



Dunois, Bastard of Orleans, with a body of knights and citizens,

came up from the city to welcome Joan. Joan was still burning

with resentment over the trick that had been put upon her, and was

not in the mood for soft speeches, even to reversed military idols

of her childhood. She said:



"Are you the bbb?"



"Yes, I am he, and am right glad of your coming."



"And did you advise that I be brought by this side of the river

instgead of straight to Talbot and the English?"



Her high manner abashed him, and he was not able to answer with

anything like a confident promptness, but with many hesitations

and partial excuses he managed to get out the confession that for

what he and the council had regarded as imperative military

reasons they so advised.



"In God's name," said Joan, "my Lord's counsel is safer and wiser

than yours. You thought to deceive me, but you have deceived

yourselves, for I bring you the bst help that ever knight or city had;

for it is God's help, not sent for love of me, but by God's pleasure.

At the prayer of St. Louis and St. Charlemagne He has had pity on

Orleans, and will not suffer the enemy to have both the Duke of

Orleans and his city. The provisions to save the starving people are

here, the boats are below the city, the wind is contrary, they cannot

come up hither. Now then, tell me, in God's name, you who are so

wise, what that council of yours was thinking about, to invent this

foolish difficulty."



Dunois and the rest fumbled around the matter a moment, then

gave in and conceded that a blunder had been made.



"Yes, a blunder has been made," said Joan, "and except God take

your proper work upon Himself and change the wind and correct

your blunder for you, there is none else that can devise a remedy."



Some of these people began to perceive that with all her technical

ignorance she had practical good sense, and that with all her native

sweetness and charm she was not the right kind of a person to play

with.



Presently God did take the blunder in hand, and by His grace the

wind did change. So the fleet of boats came up and went away

loaded with provisions and cattle, and conveyed that welcome

succor to the hungry city, managing the matter successfully under

protection of a sortie from the walls against the bastille of St.

Loup. Then Joan began on the Bastard again:



"You see here the army?"



"Yes."



"It is here on this side by advice of your council?"



"Yes."



"Now, in God's name, can that wise council explain why it is better

to have it here than it would be to have it in the bottom of the

sea?"



Dunois made some wandering attempts to explain the inexplicable

and excuse the inexcusable, but Joan cut him short and said:



"Answer me this, good sir--has the army any value on this side of

the river?"



The Bastard confessed that it hadn't--that is, in view of the plan of

campaign which she had devised and decreed.



"And yet, knowing this, you had the hardihood to disobey my

orders. Since the army's place is on the other side, will you explain

to me how it is to get there?"



The whole size of the needless muddle was apparent. Evasions

were of no use; therefore Dunois admitted that there was no way to

correct the blunder but to send the army all the way back to Blois,

and let it begin over again and come up on the other side this time,

according to Joan's original plan.



Any other girl, after winning such a triumph as this over a veteran

soldier of old renown, might have exulted a little and been

excusable for it, but Joan showed no disposition of this sort. She

dropped a word or two of grief over the precious time that must be

lost, then began at once to issue commands for the march back.

She sorrowed to see her army go; for she said its heart was great

and its enthusiasm high, and that with it at her back she did not

fear to face all the might of England.



All arrangements having been completed for the return of the main

body of the army, she took the Bastard and La Hire and a thousand

men and went down to Orleans, where all the town was in a fever

of impatience to have sight of her face. It was eight in the evening

when she and the troops rode in at the Burgundy gate, with the

Paladin preceding her with her standard. She was riding a white

horse, and she carried in her hand the sacred sword of Fierbois.

You should have seen Orleans then. What a picture it was! Such

black seas of people, such a starry firmament of torches, such

roaring whirlwinds of welcome, such booming of bells and

thundering of cannon! It was as if the world was come to an end.

Everywhere in the glare of the torches one saw rank upon rank of

upturned white faces, the mouths wide open, shouting, and the

unchecked tears running down; Joan forged her slow way through

the solid masses, her mailed form projecting above the pavement

of heads like a silver statue. The people about her struggled along,

gazing up at her through their tears with the rapt look of men and

women who believe they are seeing one who is divine; and always

her feet were being kissed by grateful folk, and such as failed of

that privilege touched her horse and then kissed their fingers.



Nothing that Joan did escaped notice; everything she did was

commented upon and applauded. You could hear the remarks

going all the time.



"There--she's smiling--see!"



"Now she's taking her little plumed cap off to somebody--ah, it's

fine and graceful!"



"She's patting that woman on the head with her gauntlet."



"Oh, she was born on a horse--see her turn in her saddle, and kiss

the hilt of her sword to the ladies in the window that threw the

flowers down."



"Now there's a poor woman lifting up a child--she's kissed it--oh,

she's divine!"



"What a dainty little figure it is, and what a lovely face--and such

color and animation!"



Joan's slender long banner streaming backward had an

accident--the fringe caught fire from a torch. She leaned forward

and crushed the flame in her hand.



"She's not afraid of fire nor anything!" they shouted, and delivered

a storm of admiring applause that made everything quake.



She rode to the cathedral and gave thanks to God, and the people

crammed the place and added their devotions to hers; then she

took up her march again and picked her slow way through the

crowds and the wilderness of torches to the house of Jacques

Boucher, treasurer of the Duke of Orleans, where she was to be the

guest of his wife as long as she stayed in the city, and have his

young daughter for comrade and room-mate. The delirium of the

people went on the rest of the night, and with it the clamor of the

joy-bells and the welcoming cannon.



Joan of Arc had stepped upon her stage at last, and was ready to

begin.



Chapter 14 What the English Answered



SHE WAS ready, but must sit down and wait until there was an

army to work with.



Next morning, Saturday, April 30, 1429, she set about inquiring

after the messenger who carried her proclamation to the English

from Blois--the one which she had dictated at Poitiers. Here is a

copy of it. It is a remarkable document, for several reasons: for its

matter-of-fact directness, for its high spirit and forcible diction,

and for its na‹ve confidence in her ability to achieve the prodigious

task which she had laid upon herself, or which had been laid upon

her--which you please. All through it you seem to see the pomps of

war and hear the rumbling of the drums. In it Joan's warrior soul is

revealed, and for the moment the soft little shepherdess has

disappeared from your view. This untaught country-damsel,

unused to dictating anything at all to anybody, much less

documents of state to kings and generals, poured out this

procession of vigorous sentences as fluently as if this sort of work

had been her trade from childhood:



JESUS MARIA

King of England and you Duke of Bedford who call yourself

Regent of France; William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk; and you

Thomas Lord Scales, who style yourselves lieutenants of the said

Bedford--do right to the King of Heaven. Render to the Maid who

is sent by God the keys of all the good towns you have taken and

violated in France. She is sent hither by God, to restore the blood

royal. She is very ready to make peace if you will do her right by

giving up France and paying for what you have held. And you

archers, companions of war, noble and otherwise, who are before

the good city of Orleans, begone into your own land in God's

name, or expect news from the Maid who will shortly go to see

you to your very great hurt. King of England, if you do not so, I am

chief of war, and whenever I shall find your people in France, I

will drive them out, willing or not willing; and if they do not obey

I will slay them all, but if they obey, I will have them to mercy. I

am come hither by God, the King of Heaven, body for body, to put

you our of France, in spite of those who would work treason and

mischief against the kingdom. Think not you shall ever hold the

kingdom from the King of Heaven, the Son of the Blessed Mary;

King Charles shall hold it, for God wills it so, and has revealed it

to him by the Maid. If you believe not the news sent by God

through the Maid, wherever we shall met you we will strike boldly

and make such a noise as has not been in France these thousand

years. Be sure that God can send more strength to the Maid than

you can bring to any assault against her and her good men-at-arms;

and then we shall see who has the better right, the King of Heaven,

or you. Duke of Bedford, the Maid prays you not to bring about

your own destruction. If you do her right, you may yet go in her

company where the French shall do the finest deed that has been

done in Christendom, and if you do not, you shall be reminded

shortly of your great wrongs.



In that closing sentence she invites them to go on crusade with her

to rescue the Holy Sepulcher. No answer had been returned to this

proclamation, and the messenger himself had not come back.



So now she sent her two heralds with a new letter warning the

English to raise the siege and requiring them to restore that

missing messenger. The heralds came back without him. All they

brought was notice from the English to Joan that they would

presently catch her and burn her if she did not clear out now while

she had a chance, and "go back to her proper trade of minding

cows."



She held her peace, only saying it was a pity that the English

would persist in inviting present disaster and eventual destruction

when she was "doing all she could to get them out of the country

with their lives still in their bodies."



Presently she thought of an arrangement that might be acceptable,

and said to the heralds, "Go back and say to Lord Talbot this, from

me: 'Come out of your bastilles with your host, and I will come

with mine; if I beat you, go in peace out of France; if you beat me,

burn me, according to your desire.'"



I did not hear this, but Dunois did, and spoke of it. The challenge

was refused.



Sunday morning her Voices or some instinct gave her a warning,

and she sent Dunois to Blois to take command of the army and

hurry it to Orleans. It was a wise move, for he found Regnault de

Chartres and some more of the King's pet rascals there trying their

best to disperse the army, and crippling all the efforts of Joan's

generals to head it for Orleans. They were a fine lot, those

miscreants. They turned their attention to Dunois now, but he had

balked Joan once, with unpleasant results to himself, and was not

minded to meddle in that way again. He soon had the army

moving.



Chapter 15 My Exquisite Poem Goes to Smash



WE OF the personal staff were in fairyland now, during the few

days that we waited for the return of the army. We went into

society. To our two knights this was not a novelty, but to us young

villagers it was a new and wonderful life. Any position of any sort

near the person of the Maid of Vaucouleurs conferred high

distinction upon the holder and caused his society to be courted;

and so the D'Arc brothers, and No‰l, and the Paladin, humble

peasants at home, were gentlemen here, personages of weight and

influence. It was fine to see how soon their country diffidences and

awkwardnesses melted away under this pleasant sun of deference

and disappeared, and how lightly and easily they took to their new

atmosphere. The Paladin was as happy as it was possible for any

one in this earth to be. His tongue went all the time, and daily he

got new delight out of hearing himself talk. He began to enlarge

his ancestry and spread it out all around, and ennoble it right and

left, and it was not long until it consisted almost entirely of dukes.

He worked up his old battles and tricked them out with fresh

splendors; also with new terrors, for he added artillery now. We

had seen cannon for the first time at Blois--a few pieces--here

there was plenty of it, and now and then we had the impressive

spectacle of a huge English bastille hidden from sight in a

mountain of smoke from its own guns, with lances of red flame

darting through it; and this grand picture, along with the quaking

thunders pounding away in the heart of it, inflamed the Paladin's

imagination and enabled him to dress out those

ambuscade-skirmishes of ours with a sublimity which made it

impossible for any to recognize them at all except people who had

not been there.



You may suspect that there was a special inspiration for these

great efforts of the Paladin's, and there was. It was the daughter of

the house, Catherine Boucher, who was eighteen, and gentle and

lovely in her ways, and very beautiful. I think she might have been

as beautiful as Joan herself, if she had had Joan's eyes. But that

could never be. There was never but that one pair, there will never

be another. Joan's eyes were deep and rich and wonderful beyond

anything merely earthly. They spoke all the languages--they had no

need of words. They produced all effects--and just by a glance, just

a single glance; a glance that could convict a liar of his lie and

make him confess it; that could bring down a proud man's pride

and make him humble; that could put courage into a coward and

strike dead the courage of the bravest; that could appease

resentments and real hatreds; that could make the doubter believe

and the hopeless hope again; that could purify the impure mind;

that could persuade--ah, there it is--persuasion! that is the word;

what or who is it that it couldn't persuade? The maniac of

Domremy--the fairy-banishing priest--the reverend tribunal of

Toul--the doubting and superstitious Laxart--the obstinate veteran

of Vaucouleurs--the characterless heir of France--the sages and

scholars of the Parliament and University of Poitiers--the darling

of Satan, La Hire--the masterless Bastard of Orleans, accustomed

to acknowledge no way as right and rational but his own--these

were the trophies of that great gift that made her the wonder and

mystery that she was.



We mingled companionably with the great folk who flocked to the

big house to make Joan's acquaintance, and they made much of us

and we lived in the clouds, so to speak. But what we preferred

even to this happiness was the quieter occasions, when the formal

guests were gone and the family and a few dozen of its familiar

friends were gathered together for a social good time. It was then

that we did our best, we five youngsters, with such fascinations as

we had, and the chief object of them was Catherine. None of us

had ever been in love been in love before, and now we had the

misfortune to all fall in love with the same person at the same

time--which was the first moment we saw her. She was a merry

heart, and full of life, and I still remember tenderly those few

evenings that I was permitted to have my share of her dear society

and of comradeship with that little company of charming people.



The Paladin made us all jealous the first night, for when he got

fairly started on those battles of his he had everything to himself,

and there was no use in anybody else's trying to get any attention.

Those people had been living in the midst of real war for seven

months; and to hear this windy giant lay out his imaginary

campaigns and fairly swim in blood and spatter it all around,

entertained them to the verge of the grave. Catherine was like to

die, for pure enjoyment. She didn't laugh loud--we, of course,

wished she would--but kept in the shelter of a fan, and shook until

there was danger that she would unhitch her ribs from her spine.

Then when the Paladin had got done with a battle and we began to

feel thankful and hope for a change, she would speak up in a way

that was so sweet and persuasive that it rankled in me, and ask him

about some detail or other in the early part of his battle which she

said had greatly interested her, and would he be so good as to

describe that part again and with a little more particularity?--which

of course precipitated the whole battle on us, again, with a hundred

lies added that had been overlooked before.



I do not know how to make you realize the pain I suffered. I had

never been jealous before, and it seemed intolerable that this

creature should have this good fortune which he was so ill entitled

to, and I have to sit and see myself neglected when I was so

longing for the least little attention out of the thousand that this

beloved girl was lavishing on him. I was near her, and tried two or

three times to get started on some of the things that I had done in

those battles--and I felt ashamed of myself, too, for stooping to

such a business--but she cared for nothing but his battles, and

could not be got to listen; and presently when one of my attempts

caused her to lose some precious rag or other of his mendacities

and she asked him to repeat, thus bringing on a new engagement,

of course, and increasing the havoc and carnage tenfold, I felt so

humiliated by this pitiful miscarriage of mine that I gave up and

tried no more.



The others were as outraged by the Paladin's selfish conduct as I

was--and by his grand luck, too, of course--perhaps, indeed, that

was the main hurt. We talked our trouble over together, which was

natural, for rivals become brothers when a common affliction

assails them and a common enemy bears off the victory.



Each of us could do things that would please and get notice if it

were not for this person, who occupied all the time and gave others

no chance. I had made a poem, taking a whole night to it--a poem

in which I most happily and delicately celebrated that sweet girl's

charms, without mentioning her name, but any one could see who

was meant; for the bare title--"The Rose of Orleans"--would reveal

that, as it seemed to me. It pictured this pure and dainty white rose

as growing up out of the rude soil of war and looking abroad out of

its tender eyes upon the horrid machinery of death, and then--note

this conceit--it blushes for the sinful nature of man, and turns red

in a single night. Becomes a red rose, you see--a rose that was

white before. The idea was my own, and quite new. Then it sent its

sweet perfume out over the embattled city, and when the

beleaguering forces smelt it they laid down their arms and wept.

This was also my own idea, and new. That closed that part of the

poem; then I put her into the similitude of the firmament--not the

whole of it, but only part. That is to say, she was the moon, and all

the constellations were following her about, their hearts in flames

for love of her, but she would not halt, she would not listen, for

'twas thought she loved another. 'Twas thought she loved a poor

unworthy suppliant who was upon the earth, facing danger, death,

and possible mutilation in the bloody field, waging relentless war

against a heartless foe to save her from an all too early grave, and

her city from destruction. And when the sad pursuing

constellations came to know and realize the bitter sorrow that was

come upon them--note this idea--their hearts broke and their tears

gushed forth, filling the vault of heaven with a fiery splendor, for

those tears were falling stars. It was a rash idea, but beautiful;

beautiful and pathetic; wonderfully pathetic, the way I had it, with

the rhyme and all to help. At the end of each verse there was a

two-line refrain pitying the poor earthly lover separated so far, and

perhaps forever, from her he loved so well, and growing always

paler and weaker and thinner in his agony as he neared the cruel

grave--the most touching thing--even the boys themselves could

hardly keep back their tears, the way No‰l said those lines. There

were eight four-line stanzas in the first end of the poem--the end

about the rose, the horticultural end, as you may say, if that is not

too large a name for such a little poem--and eight in the

astronomical end--sixteen stanzas altogether, and I could have

made it a hundred and fifty if I had wanted to, I was so inspired

and so all swelled up with beautiful thoughts and fancies; but that

would have been too many to sing or recite before a company that

way, whereas sixteen was just right, and could be done over again

if desired.



The boys were amazed that I could make such a poem as that out

of my own head, and so was I, of course, it being as much a

surprise to me as it could be to anybody, for I did not know that it

was in me. If any had asked me a single day before if it was in me,

I should have told them frankly no, it was not.



That is the way with us; we may go on half of our life not knowing

such a thing is in us, when in reality it was there all the time, and

all we needed was something to turn up that would call for it.

Indeed, it was always so without family. My grandfather had a

cancer, and they never knew what was the matter with him till he

died, and he didn't know himself. It is wonderful how gifts and

diseases can be concealed in that way. All that was necessary in

my case was for this lovely and inspiring girl to cross my path, and

out came the poem, and no more trouble to me to word it and

rhyme it and perfect it than it is to stone a dog. No, I should have

said it was not in me; but it was.



The boys couldn't say enough about it, they were so charmed and

astonished. The thing that pleased them the most was the way it

would do the Paladin's business for him. They forgot everything in

their anxiety to get him shelved and silenced. No‰l Rainguesson

was clear beside himself with admiration of the poem, and wished

he could do such a thing, but it was out of his line, and he couldn't,

of course. He had it by heart in half an hour, and there was never

anything so pathetic and beautiful as the way he recited it. For that

was just his gift--that and mimicry. He could recite anything better

than anybody in the world, and he could take of La Hire to the very

life--or anybody else, for that matter. Now I never could recite

worth a farthing; and when I tried with this poem the boys

wouldn't let me finish; they would nave nobody but No‰l. So then,

as I wanted the poem to make the best possible impression on

Catherine and the company, I told No‰l he might do the reciting.

Never was anybody so delighted. He could hardly believe that I

was in earnest, but I was. I said that to have them know that I was

the author of it would be enough for me. The boys were full of

exultation, and No‰l said if he could just get one chance at those

people it would be all he would ask; he would make them realize

that there was something higher and finer than war-lies to be had

here.



But how to get the opportunity--that was the difficulty. We

invented several schemes that promised fairly, and at last we hit

upon one that was sure. That was, to let the Paladin get a good

start in a manufactured battle, and then send in a false call for him,

and as soon as he was out of the room, have No‰l take his place

and finish the battle himself in the Paladin's own style, imitated to

a shade. That would get great applause, and win the house's favor

and put it in the right mood to hear the poem. The two triumphs

together with finish the Standard-Bearer--modify him, anyway, to

a certainty, and give the rest of us a chance for the future.



So the next night I kept out of the way until the Paladin had got his

start and was sweeping down upon the enemy like a whirlwind at

the head of his corps, then I stepped within the door in my official

uniform and announced that a messenger from General La Hire's

quarters desired speech with the Standard-Bearer. He left the

room, and No‰l took his place and said that the interruption was to

be deplored, but that fortunately he was personally acquainted with

the details of the battle himself, and if permitted would be glad to

state them to the company. Then without waiting for the

permission he turned himself to the Paladin--a dwarfed Paladin, of

course--with manner, tones, gestures, attitudes, everything exact,

and went right on with the battle, and it would be impossible to

imagine a more perfectly and minutely ridiculous imitation than he

furnished to those shrieking people. They went into spasms,

convulsions, frenzies of laughter, and the tears flowed down their

cheeks in rivulets. The more they laughed, the more inspires No‰l

grew with his theme and the greater marvels he worked, till really

the laughter was not properly laughing any more, but screaming.

Blessedest feature of all, Catherine Boucher was dying with

ecstasies, and presently there was little left of her but gasps and

suffocations. Victory? It was a perfect Agincourt.



The Paladin was gone only a couple of minutes; he found out at

once that a trick had been played on him, so he came back. When

he approached the door he heard No‰l ranting in there and

recognized the state of the case; so he remained near the door but

out of sight, and heard the performance through to the end. The

applause No‰l got when he finished was wonderful; and they kept

it up and kept it up, clapping their hands like mad, and shouting to

him to do it over again.



But No‰l was clever. He knew the very best background for a

poem of deep and refined sentiment and pathetic melancholy was

one where great and satisfying merriment had prepared the spirit

for the powerful contrast.



So he paused until all was quiet, then his face grew grave and

assumed an impressive aspect, and at once all faces sobered in

sympathy and took on a look of wondering and expectant interest.

Now he began in a low but distinct voice the opening verses of

The Rose. As he breathed the rhythmic measures forth, and one

gracious line after another fell upon those enchanted ears in that

deep hush, one could catch, on every hand, half-audible

ejaculations of "How lovely--how beautiful--how exquisite!"



By this time the Paladin, who had gone away for a moment with

the opening of the poem, was back again, and had stepped within

the door. He stood there now, resting his great frame against the

wall and gazing toward the reciter like one entranced. When No‰l

got to the second part, and that heart-breaking refrain began to

melt and move all listeners, the Paladin began to wipe away tears

with the back of first one hand and then the other. The next time

the refrain was repe3ated he got to snuffling, and sort of half

sobbing, and went to wiping his eyes with the sleeves of his

doublet. He was so conspicuous that he embarrassed No‰l a little,

and also had an ill effect upon the audience. With the next

repetition he broke quite down and began to cry like a calf, which

ruined all the effect and started many to the audience to laughing.

Then he went on from bad to worse, until I never saw such a

spectacle; for he fetched out a towel from under his doublet and

began to swab his eyes with it and let go the most infernal

bellowings mixed up with sobbings and groanings and retchings

and barkings and coughings and snortings and screamings and

howlings--and he tdwisted himself about on his heels and

squirmed this way and that, still pouring out that brutal clamor and

flourishing his towel in the air and swabbing again and wringing it

out. Hear? You couldn't hear yourself think. No‰l was wholly

drowned out and silenced, and those people were laughing the very

lungs out of themselves. It was the most degrading sight that ever

was. Now I heard the clankety-clank that plate-armor makes when

the man that is in it is running, and then alongside my head there

burst out the most inhuman explosion of laughter that ever rent the

drum of a person's ear, and I looked, and it was La Hire; and the

stood there with his gauntlets on his hips and his head tilted back

and his jaws spread to that degree to let out his hurricanes and his

thunders that it amounted to indecent exposure, for you could see

everything that was in him. Only one thing more and worse could

happen, and it happened: at the other door I saw the flurry and

bustle and bowings and scrapings of officials and flunkeys which

means that some great personage is coming--then Joan of Arc

stepped in, and the house rose! Yes, and tried to shut its

indecorous mouth and make itself grave and proper; but when it

saw the Maid herself go to laughing, it thanked God for this mercy

and the earthquake that followed.



Such things make a life of bitterness, and I do not wish to dwell

upon them. The effect of the poem was spoiled.



Chapter 16 The Finding of the Dwarf



THIS EPISODE disagreed with me and I was not able to leave my

bed the next day. The others were in the same condition. But for

this, one or another of us might have had the good luck that fell to

the Paladin's share that day; but it is observable that God in His

compassion sends the good luck to such as are ill equipped with

gifts, as compensation for their defect, but requires such as are

more fortunately endowed to get by labor and talent what those

others get by chance. It was No‰l who said this, and it seemed to

me to be well and justly thought.



The Paladin, going about the town all the day in order to be

followed and admired and overhear the people say in an awed

voice, "'Ssh!--look, it is the Standard-Bearer of Joan of Arc!" had

speech with all sorts and conditions of folk, and he learned from

some boatmen that there was a stir of some kind going on in the

bastilles on the other side of the river; and in the evening, seeking

further, he found a deserter from the fortress called the

"Augustins," who said that the English were going to send me over

to strengthen the garrisons on our side during the darkness of the

night, and were exulting greatly, for they meant to spring upon

Dunois and the army when it was passing the bastilles and destroy

it; a thing quite easy to do, since the "Witch" would not be there,

and without her presence the army would do like the French

armies of these many years past--drop their weapons and run when

they saw an English face.



It was ten at night when the Paladin brought this news and asked

leave to speak to Joan, and I was up and on duty then. It was a

bitter stroke to me to see what a chance I had lost. Joan made

searching inquiries, and satisfied herself that the word was true,

then she made this annoying remark:



"You have done well, and you have my thanks. It may be that you

have prevented a disaster. Your name and service shall receive

official mention."



Then he bowed low, and when he rose he was eleven feet high. As

he swelled out past me he covertly pulled down the corner of his

eye with his finger and muttered part of that defiled refrain, "Oh,

tears, ah, tears, oh, sad sweet tears!--name in General

Orders--personal mention to the King, you see!"



I wished Joan could have seen his conduct, but she was busy

thinking what she would do. Then she had me fetch the knight

Jean de Metz, and in a minute he was off for La Hire's quarters

with orders for him and the Lord de Villars and Florent d'Illiers to

report to her at five o'clock next morning with five hundred picked

men well mounted. The histories say half past four, but it is not

true, I heard the order given.



We were on our way at five to the minute, and encountered the

head of the arriving column between six and seven, a couple of

leagues from the city. Dunois was pleased, for the army had begun

to get restive and show uneasiness now that it was getting so near

to the dreaded bastilles. But that all disappeared now, as the word

ran down the line, with a huzza that swept along the length of it

like a wave, that the Maid was come. Dunois asked her to halt and

let the column pass in review, so that the men could be sure that

the reports of her presence was not a ruse to revive their courage.

So she took position at the side of the road with her staff, and the

battalions swung by with a martial stride, huzzaing. Joan was

armed, except her head. She was wearing the cunning little velvet

cap with the mass of curved white ostrich plumes tumbling over its

edges which the city of Orleans had given her the night she

arrived--the one that is in the picture that hangs in the H“tel de

Ville at Rouen. She was looking about fifteen. The sight of

soldiers always set her blood to leaping, and lit the fires in her eyes

and brought the warm rich color to her cheeks; it was then that you

saw that she was too beautiful to be of the earth, or at any rate that

there was s subtle something somewhere about her beauty that

differed it from the human types of your experience and exalted it

above them.



In the train of wains laden with supplies a man lay on top of the

goods. He was stretched out on his back, and his hands were tied

together with ropes, and also his ankles. Joan signed to the officer

in charge of that division of the train to come to her, and he rode

up and saluted.



"What is he that is bound there?" she asked.



"A prisoner, General."



"What is his offense?"



"He is a deserter."



"What is to be done with him?"



"He will be hanged, but it was not convenient on the march, and

there was no hurry."



"Tell me about him."



"He is a good soldier, but he asked leave to go and see his wife

who was dying, he said, but it could not be granted; so he went

without leave. Meanwhile the march began, and he only overtook

us yesterday evening."



"Overtook you? Did he come of his own will?"



"Yes, it was of his own will."



"He a deserter! Name of God! Bring him to me."



The officer rode forward and loosed the man's feet and brought

him back with his hands still tied. What a figure he was--a good

seven feet high, and built for business! He had a strong face; he

had an unkempt shock of black hair which showed up a striking

way when the officer removed his morion for him; for weapon he

had a big ax in his broad leathern belt. Standing by Joan's horse, he

made Joan look littler than ever, for his head was about on a level

with her own. His face was profoundly melancholy; all interest in

life seemed to be dead in the man. Joan said:



"Hold up your hands."



The man's head was down. He lifted it when he heard that soft

friendly voice, and there was a wistful something in his face which

made one think that there had been music in it for him and that he

would like to hear it again. When he raised his hands Joan laid her

sword to his bonds, but the officer said with apprehension:



"Ah, madam--my General!"



"What is it?" she said.



"He is under sentence!"



"Yes, I know. I am responsible for him"; and she cut the bonds.

They had lacerated his wrists, and they were bleeding. "Ah,

pitiful!" she said; "blood--I do not like it"; and she shrank from the

sight. But only for a moment. "Give me something, somebody, to

bandage his wrists with."



The officer said:



"Ah, my General! it is not fitting. Let me bring another to do it."



"Another? De par le Dieu! You would seek far to find one that can

do it better than I, for I learned it long ago among both men and

beasts. And I can tie better than those that did this; if I had tied

him the ropes had not cut his flesh."



The man looked on silent, while he was being bandaged, stealing a

furtive glance at Joan's face occasionally, such as an animal might

that is receiving a kindness form an unexpected quarter and is

gropingly trying to reconcile the act with its source. All the staff

had forgotten the huzzaing army drifting by in its rolling clouds of

dust, to crane their necks and watch the bandaging as if it was the

most interesting and absorbing novelty that ever was. I have often

seen people do like that--get entirely lost in the simplest trifle,

when it is something that is out of their line. Now there in Poitiers,

once, I saw two bishops and a dozen of those grave and famous

scholars grouped together watching a man paint a sign on a shop;

they didn't breathe, they were as good as dead; and when it began

to sprinkle they didn't know it at first; then they noticed it, and

each man hove a deep sigh, and glanced up with a surprised look

as wondering to see the others there, and how he came to be there

himself--but that is the way with people, as I have said. There is no

way of accounting for people. You have to take them as they are.



"There," said Joan at last, pleased with her success; "another could

have done it no better--not as well, I think. Tell me--what is it you

did? Tell me all."



The giant said:



"It was this way, my angel. My mother died, then my three little

children, one after the other, all in two years. It was the famine;

others fared so--it was God's will. I saw them die; I had that grace;

and I buried them. Then when my poor wife's fate was come, I

begged for leave to go to her--she who was so dear to me--she who

was all I had; I begged on my knees. But they would not let me.

Could I let her die, friendless and alone? Could I let her die

believing I would not come? Would she let me die and she not

come--with her feet free to do it if she would, and no cost upon it

but only her life? Ah, she would come--she would come through

the fire! So I went. I saw her. She died in my arms. I buried her.

Then the army was gone. I had trouble to overtake it, but my legs

are long and there are many hours in a day; I overtook it last

night."



Joan said, musingly, as as if she were thinking aloud:



"It sounds true. If true, it were no great harm to suspend the law

this one time--any would say that. It may not be true, but if it is

true--" She turned suddenly to the man and said, "I would see your

eyes--look up!" The eyes of the two met, and Joan said to the

officer, "This man is pardoned. Give you good day; you may go."

Then she said to the man, "Did you know it was death to come

back to the army?"



"Yes," he said, "I knew it."



"Then why did you do it?"



The man said, quite simply:



"Because it ws death. She was all I had. There was nothing left to

love."



"Ah, yes, there was--France! The children of France have always

their mother--they cannot be left with nothing to love. You shall

live--and you shall serve France--"



"I will serve you!"



--"you shall fight for France--"



"I will fight for you!"



"You shall be France's soldier--"



"I will be your soldier!"



--"you shall give all your heart to France--"



"I will give all my heart to you--and all my soul, if I have one--and

all my strength, which is great--for I was dead and am alive again;

I had nothing to live for, but now I have! You are France for me.

You are my France, and I will have no other."



Joan smiled, and was touched and pleased at the man's grave

enthusiasm--solemn enthusiasm, one may call it, for the manner of

it was deeper than mere gravity--and she said:



"Well, it shall be as you will. What are you called?"



The man answered with unsmiling simplicity:



"They call me the Dwarf, but I think it is more in jest than

otherwise."



It made Joan laugh, and she said:



"It has something of that look truly! What is the office of that vast

ax?"



The soldier replied with the same gravity--which must have been

born to him, it sat upon him so naturally:



"It is to persuade persons to respect France."



Joan laughed again, and said:



"Have you given many lessons?"



"Ah, indeed, yes--many."



"The pupils behaved to suit you, afterward?"



"Yes; it made them quiet--quite pleasant and quiet."



"I should think it would happen so. Would you like to be my

man-at-arms?--orderly, sentinel, or something like that?"



"If I may!"



"Then you shall. You shall have proper armor, and shall go on

teaching your art. Take one of those led horses there, and follow

the staff when we move."



That is how we came by the Dwarf; and a good fellow he was.

Joan picked him out on sight, but it wasn't a mistake; no one could

be faithfuler than he was, and he was a devil and the son of a devil

when he turned himself loose with his ax. He was so big that he

made the Paladin look like an ordinary man. He liked to like

people, therefore people liked him. He liked us boys from the start;

and he liked the knights, and liked pretty much everybody he came

across; but he thought more of a paring of Joan's finger-nail than

he did of all the rest of the world put together.



Yes, that is where we got him--stretched on the wain, going to his

death, poor chap, and nobody to say a good word for him. He was

a good find. Why, the knights treated him almost like an equal--it

is the honest truth; that is the sort of a man he was. They called

him the Bastille sometimes, and sometimes they called him

Hellfire, which was on account of his warm and sumptuous style in

battle, and you know they wouldn't have given him pet names if

they hadn't had a good deal of affection for him.



To the Dwarf, Joan was France, the spirit of France made flesh--he

never got away from that idea that he had started with; and God

knows it was the true one. That was a humble eye to see so great a

truth where some others failed. To me that seems quite

remarkable. And yet, after all, it was, in a way, just what nations

do. When they love a great and noble thing, they embody it--they

want it so that they can see it with their eyes; like liberty, for

instance. They are not content with the cloudy abstract idea, they

make a beautiful statue of it, and then their beloved idea is

substantial and they can look at it and worship it. And so it is as I

say; to the Dwarf, Joan was our country embodied, our country

made visible flesh cast in a gracious form. When she stood before

others, they saw Joan of Arc, but he saw France.



Sometimes he would speak of her by that name. It shows you how

the idea was embedded in his mind, and how real it was to him.

The world has called our kings by it, but I know of none of them

who has had so good a right as she to that sublime title.



When the march past was finished, Joan returned to the front and

rode at the head of the column. When we began to file past those

grim bastilles and could glimpse the men within, standing to their

guns and ready to empty death into our ranks, such a faintness

came over me and such a sickness that all things seemed to turn

dim and swim before my eyes; and the other boys looked droopy,

too, I thought--including the Paladin, although I do not know this

for certain, because he was ahead of me and I had to keep my eyes

out toward the bastille side, because I could wince better when I

saw what to wince at.



But Joan was at home--in Paradise, I might say. She sat up straight,

and I could see that she was feeling different from me. The

awfulest thing was the silence; there wasn't a sound but the

screaking of the saddles, the measured tramplings, and the

sneezing of the horses, afflicted by the smothering dust-clouds

which they kicked up. I wanted to sneeze myself, but it seemed to

me that I would rather go unsneezed, or suffer even a bitterer

torture, if there is one, than attract attention to myself.



I was not of a rank to make suggestions, or I would have suggested

that if we went faster we should get by sooner. It seemed to me

that it was an ill-judged time to be taking a walk. Just as we were

drifting in that suffocating stillness past a great cannon that stood

just within a raised portcullis, with nothing between me and it but

the moat, a most uncommon jackass in there split the world with

his bray, and I fell out of the saddle. Sir Bertrand grabbed me as I

went, which was well, for if I had gone to the ground in my armor

I could not have gotten up again by myself. The English warders

on the battlements laughed a coarse laugh, forgetting that every

one must begin, and that there had been a time when they

themselves would have fared no better when shot by a jackass.



The English never uttered a challenge nor fired a shot. It was said

afterward that when their men saw the Maid riding at the front and

saw how lovely she was, their eager courage cooled down in many

cases and vanished in the rest, they feeling certain that the creature

was not mortal, but the very child of Satan, and so the officers

were prudent and did not try to make them fight. It was said also

that some of the officers were affected by the same superstitious

fears. Well, in any case, they never offered to molest us, and we

poked by all the grisly fortresses in peace. During the march I

caught up on my devotions, which were in arrears; so it was not all

loss and no profit for me after all.



It was on this march that the histories say Dunois told Joan that the

English were expecting reinforcements under the command of Sir

John Fastolfe, and that she turned upon him and said:



"Bastard, Bastard, in God's name I warn you to let me know of his

coming as soon as you hear of it; for if he passes without my

knowledge you shall lose your head!"



It may be so; I don't deny it; but I didn't her it. If she really said it I

think she only meant she would take off his official head--degrade

him from his command. It was not like her to threaten a comrade's

life. She did have her doubts of her generals, and was entitled to

them, for she was all for storm and assault, and they were for

holding still and tiring the English out. Since they did not believe

in her way and were experienced old soldiers, it would be natural

for them to prefer their own and try to get around carrying hers

out.



But I did hear something that the histories didn't mention and don't

know about. I heard Joan say that now that the garrisons on the

other wide had been weakened to strengthen those on our side, the

most effective point of operations had shifted to the south shore;

so she meant to go over there and storm the forts which held the

bridge end, and that would open up communication with our own

dominions and raise the siege. The generals began to balk,

privately, right away, but they only baffled and delayed her, and

that for only four days.



All Orleans met the army at the gate and huzzaed it through the

bannered streets to its various quarters, but nobody had to rock it

to sleep; it slumped down dog-tired, for Dunois had rushed it

without mercy, and for the next twenty-four hours it would be

quiet, all but the snoring.



Chapter 17 Sweet Fruit of Bitter Truth



WHEN WE got home, breakfast for us minor fry was waiting in

our mess-room and the family honored us by coming in to eat it

with us. The nice old treasurer, and in fact all three were

flatteringly eager to hear about our adventures. Nobody asked the

Paladin to begin, but he did begin, because now that his specially

ordained and peculiar military rank set him above everybody on

the personal staff but old D'Aulon, who didn't eat with us, he didn't

care a farthing for the knights' nobility no mine, but took

precedence in the talk whenever it suited him, which was all the

time, because he was born that way. He said:



"God be thanked, we found the army in admirable condition I

think I have never seen a finer body of animals."



"Animals!" said Miss Catherine.



"I will explain to you what he means," said No‰l. "He--"



"I will trouble you not to trouble yourself to explain anything for

me," said the Paladin, loftily. "I have reason to think--"



"That is his way," said No‰l; "always when he thinks he has reason

to think, he thinks he does think, but this is an error. He didn't see

the army. I noticed him, and he didn't see it. He was troubled by

his old complaint."



"What s his old complaint?" Catherine asked.



"Prudence," I said, seeing my chance to help.



But it was not a fortunate remark, for the Paladin said:



"It probably isn't your turn to criticize people's prudence--you who

fall out of the saddle when a donkey brays."



They all laughed, and I was ashamed of myself for my hasty

smartness. I said:



"It isn't quite fair for you to say I fell out on account of the

donkey's braying. It was emotion, just ordinary emotion."



"Very well, if you want to call it that, I am not objecting. What

would you call it, Sir Bertrand?"



"Well, it--well, whatever it was, it was excusable, I think. All of

you have learned how to behave in hot hand-to-hand engagements,

and you don't need to be ashamed of your record in that matter; but

to walk along in front of death, with one's hands idle, and no noise,

no music, and nothing going on, is a very trying situation. If I were

you, De Conte, I would name the emotion; it's nothing to be

ashamed of."



It was as straight and sensible a speech as ever I heard, and I was

grateful for the opening it gave me; so I came out and said:



"It was fear--and thank you for the honest idea, too."



"It was the cleanest and best way out," said the old treasurer;

"you've done well, my lad."



That made me comfortable, and when Miss Catherine said, "It's

what I think, too," I was grateful to myself for getting into that

scrape.



Sir Jean de Metz said:



"We were all in a body together when the donkey brayed, and it

was dismally still at the time. I don't see how any young

campaigner could escape some little touch of that emotion."



He looked about him with a pleasant expression of inquiry on his

good face, and as each pair of eyes in turn met his head they were

in nodded a confession. Even the Paladin delivered his nod. That

surprised everybody, and saved the Standard-Bearer's credit. It was

clever of him; nobody believed he could tell the truth that way

without practice, or would tell that particular sort of a truth either

with or without practice. I suppose he judged it would favorably

impress the family. Then the old treasurer said:



"Passing the forts in that trying way required the same sort of

nerve that a person must have when ghosts are about him in the

dark, I should think. What does the Standard-Bearer think?"



"Well, I don't quite know about that, sir. I've often thought I would

like to see a ghost if I--"



"Would you?" exclaimed the young lady. "We've got one! Would

you try that one? Will you?"



She was so eager and pretty that the Paladin said straight out that

he would; and then as none of the rest had bravery enough to

expose the fear that was in him, one volunteered after the other

with a prompt mouth and a sick heart till all were shipped for the

voyage; then the girl clapped her hands in glee, and the parents

were gratified, too, saying that the ghosts of their house had been a

dread and a misery to them and their forebears for generations, and

nobody had ever been found yet who was willing to confront them

and find out what their trouble was, so that the family could heal it

and content the poor specters and beguile them to tranquillity and

peace.



Chapter 18 Joan's First Battle-Field



ABOUT NOON I was chatting with Madame Boucher; nothing

was going on, all was quiet, when Catherine Boucher suddenly

entered in great excitement, and said:



"Fly, sir, fly! The Maid was doing in her chair in my room, when

she sprang up and cried out, 'French blood is flowing!--my arms,

give me my arms!' Her giant was on guard at the door, and he

brought D'Aulon, who began to arm her, and I and the giant have

been warning the staff. Fly!--and stay by her; and if there really is a

battle, keep her out of it--don't let her risk herself--there is no

need--if the men know she is near and looking on, it is all that is

necessary. Keep her out of the fight--don't fail of this!"



I started on a run, saying, sarcastically--for I was always fond of

sarcasm, and it was said that I had a most neat gift that way:



"Oh, yes, nothing easier than that--I'll attend to it!"



At the furthest end of the house I met Joan, fully armed, hurrying

toward the door, and she said:



"Ah, French blood is being spilt, and you did not tell me."



"Indeed I did not know it," I said; "there are no sounds of war;

everything is quiet, your Excellency."



"You will hear war-sounds enough in a moment," she said, and

was gone.



It was true. Before one could count five there broke upon the

stillness the swelling rush and tramp of an approaching multitude

of men and horses, with hoarse cries of command; and then out of

the distance came the muffled deep boom!--boom-boom!--boom!

of cannon, and straightway that rushing multitude was roaring by

the house like a hurricane.



Our knights and all our staff came flying, armed, but with no

horses ready, and we burst out after Joan in a body, the Paladin in

the lead with the banner. The surging crowd was made up half of

citizens and half of soldiers, and had no recognizedleader. When

Joan was seen a huzza went up, and she shouted:



"A horse--a horse!"



A dozen saddles were at her disposal in a moment. She mounted, a

hundred people shouting:



"Way, there--way for the MAID OF ORLEANS!" The first time

that that immortal name was ever uttered--and I, praise God, was

there to hear it! The mass divided itself like the waters of the Red

Sea, and down this lane Joan went skimming like a bird, crying,

"Forward, French hearts--follow me!" and we came winging in her

wake on the rest of the borrowed horses, the holy standard

streaming above us, and the lane closing together in our rear.



This was a different thing from the ghastly march past the dismal

bastilles. No, we felt fine, now, and all awhirl with enthusiasm.

The explanation of this sudden uprising was this. The city and the

little garrison, so long hopeless and afraid, had gone wild over

Joan's coming, and could no longer restrain their desire to get at

the enemy; so, without orders from anybody, a few hundred

soldiers and citizens had plunged out at the Burgundy gate on a

sudden impulse and made a charge on one of Lord Talbot's most

formidable fortresses--St. Loup--and were getting the worst of it.

The news of this had swept through the city and started this new

crowd that we were with.



As we poured out at the gate we met a force bringing in the

wounded from the front. The sight moved Joan, and she said:



"Ah, French blood; it makes my hair rise to see it!"



We were soon on the field, soon in the midst of the turmoil. Joan

was seeing her first real battle, and so were we.



It was a battle in the open field; for the garrison of St. Loup had

sallied confidently out to meet the attack, being used to victories

when "witches" were not around. The sally had been reinforced by

troops from the "Paris" bastille, and when we approached the

French were getting whipped and were falling back. But when

Joan came charging through the disorder with her banner

displayed, crying "Forward, men--follow me!" there was a change;

the French turned about and surged forward like a solid wave of

the sea, and swept the English before them, hacking and slashing,

and being hacked and slashed, in a way that was terrible to see.



In the field the Dwarf had no assignment; that is to say, he was not

under orders to occupy any particular place, therefore he chose his

place for himself, and went ahead of Joan and made a road for her.

It was horrible to see the iron helmets fly into fragments under his

dreadful ax. He called it cracking nuts, and it looked like that. He

made a good road, and paved it well with flesh and iron. Joan and

the rest of us followed it so briskly that we outspeeded our forces

and had the English behind us as well as before. The knights

commanded us to face outward around Joan, which we did, and

then there was work done that was fine to see. One was obliged to

respect the Paladin, now. Being right under Joan's exalting and

transforming eye, he forgot his native prudence, he forgot his

diffidence in the presence of danger, he forgot what fear was, and

he never laid about him in his imaginary battles in a more

tremendous way that he did in this real one; and wherever he

struck there was an enemy the less.



We were in that close place only a few minutes; then our forces to

the rear broke through with a great shout and joined us, and then

the English fought a retreating fight, but in a fine and gallant way,

and we drove them to their fortress foot by foot, they facing us all

the time, and their reserves on the walls raining showers of arrows,

cross-bow bolts, and stone cannon-balls upon us.



The bulk of the enemy got safely within the works and left us

outside with piles of French and English dead and wounded for

company--a sickening sight, an awful sight to us youngsters, for

our little ambush fights in February had been in the night, and the

blood and the mutilations and the dead faces were mercifully dim,

whereas we saw these things now for the first time in all their

naked ghastliness.



Now arrived Dunois from the city, and plunged through the battle

on his foam-flecked horse and galloped up to Joan, saluting, and

uttering handsome compliments as he came. He waved his hand

toward the distant walls of the city, where a multitude of flags

were flaunting gaily in the wind, and said the populace were up

there observing her fortunate performance and rejoicing over it,

and added that she and the forces would have a great reception

now.



"Now? Hardly now, Bastard. Not yet!"



"Why not yet? Is there more to be done?"



"More, Bastard? We have but begun! We will take this fortress."



"Ah, you can't be serious! We can't take this place; let me urge you

not to make the attempt; it is too desperate. Let me order the forces

back."



Joan's heart was overflowing with the joys and enthusiasms of war,

and it made her impatient to hear such talk. She cried out:



"Bastard, Bastard, will ye play always with these English? Now

verily I tell you we will not budge until this place is ours. We will

carry it by storm. Sound the charge!"



"Ah, my General--"



"Waste no more time, man--let the bugles sound the assault!" and

we saw that strange deep light in her eye which we named the

battle-light, and learned to know so well in later fields.



The martial notes pealed out, the troops answered with a yell, and

down they came against that formidable work, whose outlines

were lost in its own cannon-smoke, and whose sides were spouting

flame and thunder.



We suffered repulse after repulse, but Joan was here and there and

everywhere encouraging the men, and she kept them to their work.

During three hours the tide ebbed and flowed, flowed and ebbed;

but at last La Hire, who was now come, made a final and resistless

charge, and the bastille St. Loup was ours. We gutted it, taking all

its stores and artillery, and then destroyed it.



When all our host was shouting itself hoarse with rejoicings, and

there went up a cry for the General, for they wanted to praise her

and glorify her and do her homage for her victory, we had trouble

to find her; and when we did find her, she was off by herself,

sitting among a ruck of corpses, with her face in her hands,

crying--for she was a young girl, you know, and her hero heart was

a young girl's heart too, with the pity and the tenderness that are

natural to it. She was thinking of the mothers of those dead friends

and enemies.



Among the prisoners were a number of priests, and Joan took these

under her protection and saved their lives. It was urged that they

were most probably combatants in disguise, but she said:



"As to that, how can any tell? They wear the livery of God, and if

even one of these wears it rightfully, surely it were better that all

the guilty should escape than that we have upon our hands the

blood of that innocent man. I will lodge them where I lodge, and

feed them, and sent them away in safety."



We marched back to the city with our crop of cannon and

prisoners on view and our banners displayed. Here was the first

substantial bit of war-work the imprisoned people had seen in the

seven months that the siege had endured, the first chance they had

had to rejoice over a French exploit. You may guess that they

made good use of it. They and the bells went mad. Joan was their

darling now, and the press of people struggling and shouldering

each other to get a glimpse of her was so great that we could

hardly push our way through the streets at all. Her new name had

gone all about, and was on everybody's lips. The Holy Maid of

Vaucouleurs was a forgotten title; the city had claimed her for its

own, and she was the MAID OF ORLEANS now. It is a happiness

to me to remember that I heard that name the first time it was ever

uttered. Between that first utterance and the last time it will be

uttered on this earth--ah, think how many moldering ages will lie

in that gap!



The Boucher family welcomed her back as if she had been a child

of the house, and saved frm death against all hope or probability.

They chided her for going into the battle and exposing herself to

danger during all those hours. They could not realize that she had

meant to carry her warriorship so far, and asked her if it had really

been her purpose to go right into the turmoil of the fight, or hadn't

she got swept into it by accident and the rush of the troops? They

begged her to be more careful another time. It was good advice,

maybe, but it fell upon pretty unfruitful soil.



Chapter 19 We Burst In Upon Ghosts



BEING WORN out with the long fight, we all slept the rest of the

afternoon away and two or three hours into the night. Then we got

up refreshed, and had supper. As for me, I could have been willing

to let the matter of the ghost drop; and the others were of a like

mind, no doubt, for they talked diligently of the battle and said

nothing of that other thing. And indeed it was fine and stirring to

hear the Paladin rehearse his deeds and see him pile his dead,

fifteen here, eighteen there, and thirty-five yonder; but this only

postponed the trouble; it could not do more. He could not go on

forever; when he had carried the bastille by assault and eaten up

the garrison there was nothing for it but to stop, unless Catherine

Boucher would give him a new start and have it all done over

again--as we hoped she would, this time--but she was otherwise

minded. As soon as there was a good opening and a fair chance,

she brought up her unwelcome subject, and we faced it the best we

could.



We followed her and her parents to the haunted room at eleven

o'clock, with candles, and also with torches to place in the sockets

on the walls. It was a big house, with very thick walls, and this

room was in a remote part of it which had been left unoccupied for

nobody knew how many years, because of its evil repute.



This was a large room, like a salon, and had a big table in it of

enduring oak and well preserved; but the chair were worm-eaten

and the tapestry on the walls was rotten and discolored by age. The

dusty cobwebs under the ceiling had the look of not having had

any business for a century.



Catherine said:



"Tradition says that these ghosts have never been seen--they have

merely been heard. It is plain that this room was once larger than it

is now, and that the wall at this end was built in some bygone time

to make and fence off a narrow room there. There is no

communication anywhere with that narrow room, and if it

exists--and of that there is no reasonable doubt--it has no light and

no air, but is an absolute dungeon. Wait where you are, and take

note of what happens."



That was all. Then she and her parents left us. When their footfalls

had died out in the distance down the empty stone corridors an

uncanny si8lence and solemnity ensued which was dismaler to me

than the mute march past the bastilles. We sat loking vacantly at

each other, and it was easy to see that no one there was

comfortable. The longer we sat so, the more deadly still that

stillness got to be; and when the wind began to moan around the

house presently, it made me sick and miserable, and I wished I had

been brave enough to be a coward this time, for indeed it is no

proper shame to be afraid of ghosts, seeing how helpless the living

are in their hands. And then these ghosts were invisible, which

made the matter the worse, as it seemed to me. They might be in

the room with us at that moment--we could not know. I felt airy

touches on my shoulders and my hair, and I shrank from them and

cringed, and was not ashamed to show this fear, for I saw the

others doing the like, and knew that they were feeling those faint

contacts too. As this went on--oh, eternities it seemed, the time

dragged so drearily--all those faces became as wax, and I seemed

sitting with a congress of the dead.



At last, faint and far and weird and slow, came a

"boom!--boom!--boom!"--a distant bell tolling midnight. When the

last stroke died, that depressing stillness followed again, and as

before I was staring at those waxen faces and feeling those airy

touches on my hair and my shoulders once more.



One minute--two minutes--three minutes of this, then we heard a

long deep groan, and everybody sprang up and stood, with his legs

quaking. It came from that little dungeon. There was a pause, then

we herd muffled sobbings, mixed with pitiful ejaculations. Then

there was a second voice, low and not distinct, and the one seemed

trying to comfort the other; and so the two voices went on, with

moanings, and soft sobbings, and, ah, the tones were so full of

compassion and sorry and despair! Indeed, it made one's heart sore

to hear it.



But those sounds were so real and so human and so moving that

the idea of ghosts passed straight out of our minds, and Sir Jean de

Metz spoke out and said:



"Come! we will smash that wall and set those poor captives free.

Here, with your ax!"



The Dwarf jumped forward, swinging his great ax with both hands,

and others sprang for torches and brought them.

Bang!--whang!--slam!--smash went the ancient bricks, and there

was a hole an ox could pass through. We plunged within and held

up the torches.



Nothing there but vacancy! On the floor lay a rusty sword and a

rotten fan.



Now you know all that I know. Take the pathetic relics, and weave

about them the romance of the dungeon's long-vanished inmates as

best you can.



Chapter 20 Joan Makes Cowards Brave Victors



THE NEXT day Joan wanted to go against the enemy again, but it

was the feast of the Ascension, and the holy council of bandit

generals were too pious to be willing to profane it with bloodshed.

But privately they profaned it with plottings, a sort of industry just

in their line. They decided to do the only thing proper to do now in

the new circumstances of the case--feign an attack on the most

important bastille on the Orleans side, and then, if the English

weakened the far more important fortresses on the other side of the

river to come to its help, cross in force and capture those works.

This would give them the bridge and free communication with the

Sologne, which was French territory. They decided to keep this

latter part of the program secret from Joan.



Joan intruded and took them by surprise. She asked them what

they were about and what they had resolved upon. They said they

had resolved to attack the most important of the English bastilles

on the Orleans side next morning--and there the spokesman

stopped. Joan said:



"Well, go on."



"There is nothing more. That is all."



"Am I to believe this? That is to say, am I to believe that you have

lost your wits?" She turned to Dunois, and said, "Bastard, you have

sense, answer me this: if this attack is made and the bastille taken,

how much better off would we be than we are now?"



The Bastard hesitated, and then began some rambling talk not

quite germane to the question. Joan interrupted him and said:



"That will not do, good Bastard, you have answered. Since the

Bastard is not able to mention any advantage to be gained by

taking that bastille and stopping there, it is not likely that any of

you could better the matter. You waste much time here in

inventing plans that lead to nothing, and making delays that are a

damage. Are you concealing something from me? Bastard, this

council has a general plan, I take it; without going into details,

what is it?"



"It is the same it was in the beginning, seven months ago--to get

provisions for a long siege, then sit down and tire the English out."



"In the name of God! As if seven months was not enough, you

want to provide for a year of it. Now ye shall drop these

pusillanimous dreams--the English shall go in three days!"



Several exclaimed:



"Ah, General, General, be prudent!"



"Be prudent and starve? Do ye call that war? I tell you this, if you

do not already know it: The new circumstances have changed the

face of matters. The true point of attack has shifted; it is on the

other side of the river now. One must take the fortifications that

command the bridge. The English know that if we are not fools

and cowards we will try to do that. They are grateful for your piety

in wasting this day. They will reinforce the bridge forts from this

side to-night, knowing what ought to happen to-morrow. You have

but lost a day and made our task harder, for we will cross and take

the bridge forts. Bastard, tell me the truth--does not this council

know that there is no other course for us than the one I am

speaking of?"



Dunois conceded that the council did know it to be the most

desirable, but considered it impracticable; and he excused the

council as well as he could by saying that inasmuch as nothing was

really and rationally to be hoped for but a long continuance of the

siege and wearying out of the English, they were naturally a little

afraid of Joan's impetuous notions. He said:



"You see, we are sure that the waiting game is the best, whereas

you would carry everything by storm."



"That I would!--and moreover that I will! You have my

orders--here and now. We will move upon the forts of the south

bank to-morrow at dawn."



"And carry them by storm?"



"Yes, carry them by storm!"



La Hire came clanking in, and heard the last remark. He cried out:



"By my baton, that is the music I love to hear! Yes, that is the right

time and the beautiful words, my General--we will carry them by

storm!"



He saluted in his large way and came up and shook Joan by the

hand.



Some member of the council was heard to say:



"It follows, then, that we must begin with the bastille St. John, and

that will give the English time to--"



Joan turned and said:



"Give yourselves no uneasiness about the bastille St. John. The

English will know enough to retire from it and fall back on the

bridge bastilles when they see us coming." She added, with a touch

of sarcasm, "Even a war-council would know enough to do that

itself."



Then she took her leave. La Hire made this general remark to the

council:



"She is a child, and that is all ye seem to see. Keep to that

superstition if you must, but you perceive that this child

understands this complex game of war as well as any of you; and if

you want my opinion without the trouble of asking for it, here you

have it without ruffles or embroidery--by God, I think she can

teach the best of you how to play it!"



Joan had spoken truly; the sagacious English saw that the policy of

the French had undergone a revolution; that the policy of paltering

and dawdling was ended; that in place of taking blows, blows were

ready to be struck now; therefore they made ready for the new

state of things by transferring heavy reinforcements to the bastilles

of the south bank from those of the north.



The city learned the great news that once more in French history,

after all these humiliating years, France was going to take the

offensive; that France, so used to retreating, was going to advance;

that France, so long accustomed to skulking, was going to face

about and strike. The joy of the people passed all bounds. The city

walls were black with them to see the army march out in the

morning in that strange new position--its front, not its tail, toward

an English camp. You shall imagine for yourselves what the

excitement was like and how it expressed itself, when Joan rode

out at the head of the host with her banner floating above her.



We crossed the five in strong force, and a tedious long job it was,

for the boats were small and not numerous. Our landing on the

island of St. Aignan was not disputed. We threw a bridge of a few

boats across the narrow channel thence to the south shore and took

up our march in good order and unmolested; for although there

was a fortress there--St. John--the English vacated and destroyed it

and fell back on the bridge forts below as soon as our first boats

were seen to leave the Orleans shore; which was what Joan had

said would happen, when she was disputing with the council.



We moved down the shore and Joan planted her standard before

the bastille of the Augustins, the first of the formidable works that

protected the end of the bridge. The trumpets sounded the assault,

and two charges followed in handsome style; but we were too

weak, as yet, for our main body was still lagging behind. Before

we could gather for a third assault the garrison of St. Prive were

seen coming up to reinforce the big bastille. They came on a run,

and the Augustins sallied out, and both forces came against us with

a rush, and sent our small army flying in a panic, and followed us,

slashing and slaying, and shouting jeers and insults at us.



Joan was doing her best to rally the men, but their wits were gone,

their hearts were dominated for the moment by the old-time dread

of the English. Joan's temper flamed up, and she halted and

commanded the trumpets to sound the advance. Then she wheeled

about and cried out:



"If there is but a dozen of you that are not cowards, it is

enough--follow me!"



Away she went, and after her a few dozen who had heard her

words and been inspired by them. The pursuing force was

astonished to see her sweeping down upon them with this handful

of men, and it was their turn now to experience a grisly

fright--surely this is a witch, this is a child of Satan! That was their

thought--and without stopping to analyze the matter they turned

and fled in a panic.



Our flying squadrons heard the bugle and turned to look; and when

they saw the Maid's banner speeding in the other direction and the

enemy scrambling ahead of it in disorder, their courage returned

and they came scouring after us.



La Hire heard it and hurried his force forward and caught up with

us just as we were planting our banner again before the ramparts of

the Augustins. We were strong enough now. We had a long and

tough piece of work before us, but we carried it through before

night, Joan keeping us hard at it, and she and La Hire saying we

were able to take that big bastille, and must. The English fought

like--well, they fought like the English; when that is said, there is

no more to say. We made assault after assault, through the smoke

and flame and the deafening cannon-blasts, and at last as the sun

was sinking we carried the place with a rush, and planted our

standard on its walls.



The Augustins was ours. The Tourelles must be ours, too, if we

would free the bridge and raise the siege. We had achieved one

great undertaking, Joan was determined to accomplish the other.

We must lie on our arms where we were, hold fast to what we had

got, and be ready for business in the morning. So Joan was not

minded to let the men be demoralized by pillage and riot and

carousings; she had the Augustins burned, with all its stores in it,

excepting the artillery and ammunition.



Everybody was tired out with this long day's har work, and of

course this was the case with Joan; still, she wanted to stay with

the army before the Tourelles, to be ready for the assault in the

morning. The chiefs argued with her, and at last persuaded her to

go home and prepare for the great work by taking proper rest, and

also by having a leech look to a wound which she had received in

her foot. So we crossed with them and went home.



Just as usual, we found the town in a fury of joy, all the bells

clanging, everybody shouting, and several people drunk. We never

went out or came in without furnishing good and sufficient reasons

for one of these pleasant tempests, and so the tempest was always

on hand. There had been a blank absence of reasons for this sort of

upheavals for the past seven months, therefore the people too to

the upheavals with all the more relish on that account.



Chapter 21 She Gently Reproves Her Dear Friend



TO GET away from the usual crowd of visitors and have a rest,

Joan went with Catherine straight to the apartment which the two

occupied together, and there they took their supper and there the

wound was dressed. But then, instead of going to bed, Joan, weary

as she was, sent the Dwarf for me, in spite of Catherine's protests

and persuasions. She said she had something on her mind, and

must send a courier to Domremy with a letter for our old PŠre

Fronte to read to her mother. I came, and she began to dictate.

After some loving words and greetings to her mother and family,

came this:



"But the thing which moves me to write now, is to say that when

you presently hear that I am wounded, you shall give yourself no

concern about it, and refuse faith to any that shall try to make you

believe it is serious."



She was going on, when Catherine spoke up and said:



"Ah, but it will fright her so to read these words. Strike them out,

Joan, strike them out, and wait only one day--two days at

most--then write and say your foot was wounded but is well

again--for it surely be well then, or very near it. Don't distress her,

Joan; do as I say."



A laugh like the laugh of the old days, the impulsive free laugh of

an untroubled spirit, a laugh like a chime of bells, was Joan's

answer; then she said:



"My foot? Why should I write about such a scratch as that? I was

not thinking of it, dear heart."



"Child, have you another wound and a worse, and have not spoken

of it? What have you been dreaming about, that you--"



She had jumped up, full of vague fears, to have the leech called

back at once, but Joan laid her hand upon her arm and made her sit

down again, saying:



"There, now, be tranquil, there is no other wound, as yet; I am

writing about one which I shall get when we storm that bastille

tomorrow."



Catherine had the look of one who is trying to understand a

puzzling proposition but cannot quite do it. She said, in a

distraught fashion:



"A wound which you are going to get? But--but why grieve your

mother when it--when it may not happen?"



"May not? Why, it will."



The puzzle was a puzzle still. Catherine said in that same

abstracted way as before:



"Will. It is a strong word. I cannot seem to--my mind is not able to

take hold of this. Oh, Joan, such a presentiment is a dreadful

thing--it takes one's peace and courage all away. Cast it from

you!--drive it out! It will make your whole night miserable, and to

no good; for we will hope--"



"But it isn't a presentiment--it is a fact. And it will not make me

miserable. It is uncertainties that do that, but this is not an

uncertainty."



"Joan, do you know it is going to happen?"



"Yes, I know it. My Voices told me."



"Ah," said Catherine, resignedly, "if they told you-- But are you

sure it was they?--quite sure?"



"Yes, quite. It will happen--there is no doubt."



"It is dreadful! Since when have you know it?"



"Since--I think it is several weeks." Joan turned to me. "Louis, you

will remember. How long is it?"



"Your Excellency spoke of it first to the King, in Chinon," I

answered; "that was as much as seven weeks ago. You spoke of it

again the 20th of April, and also the 22d, two weeks ago, as I see

by my record here."



These marvels disturbed Catherine profoundly, but I had long

ceased to be surprised at them. One can get used to anything in this

world. Catherine said:



"And it is to happen to-morrow?--always to-morrow? Is it the same

date always? There has been no mistake, and no confusion?"



"No," Joan said, "the 7th of May is the date--there is no other."



"Then you shall not go a step out of this house till that awful day is

gone by! You will not dream of it, Joan, will you?--promise that

you will stay with us."



But Joan was not persuaded. She said:



"It would not help the matter, dear good friend. The wound is to

come, and come to-morrow. If I do not seek it, it will seek me. My

duty calls me to that place to-morrow; I should have to go if my

death were waiting for me there; shall I stay away for only a

wound? Oh, no, we must try to do better than that."



"Then you are determined to go?"



"Of a certainty, yes. There is only one thing that I can do for

France--hearten her soldiers for battle and victory." She thought a

moment, then added, "However, one should not be unreasonable,

and I would do much to please you, who are so good to me. Do

you love France?"



I wondered what she might be contriving now, but I saw no clue.

Catherine said, reproachfully:



"Ah, what have I done to deserve this question?"



"Then you do love France. I had not doubted it, dear. Do not be

hurt, but answer me--have you ever told a lie?"



"In my life I have not wilfully told a lie--fibs, but no lies."



"That is sufficient. You love France and do not tell lies; therefore I

will trust you. I will go or I will stay, as you shall decide."



"Oh, I thank you from my heart, Joan! How good and dear it is of

you to do this for me! Oh, you shall stay, and not go!"



In her delight she flung her arms about Joan's neck and squandered

endearments upon her the least of which would have made me

rich, but, as it was, they only made me realize how poor I

was--how miserably poor in what I would most have prized in this

world. Joan said:



"Then you will send word to my headquarters that I am not going?"



"Oh, gladly. Leave that to me."



"It is good of you. And how will you word it?--for it must have

proper official form. Shall I word it for you?"



"Oh, do--for you know about these solemn procedures and stately

proprieties, and I have had no experience."



"Then word it like this: 'The chief of staff is commanded to make

known to the King's forces in garrison and in the field, that the

General-in-Chief of the Armies of France will not face the English

on the morrow, she being afraid she may get hurt. Signed, JOAN

OF ARC, by the hand of CATHERINE BOUCHER, who loves

France.'"



There was a pause--a silence of the sort that tortures one into

stealing a glance to see how the situation looks, and I did that.

There was a loving smile on Joan's face, but the color was

mounting in crimson waves into Catherine's, and her lips were

quivering and the tears gathering; then she said:



"Oh, I am so ashamed of myself!--and you are so noble and brave

and wise, and I am so paltry--so paltry and such a fool!" and she

broke down and began to cry, and I did so want to take her in my

arms and comfort her, but Joan did it, and of course I said nothing.

Joan did it well, and most sweetly and tenderly, but I could have

done it as well, though I knew it would be foolish and out of place

to suggest such a thing, and might make an awkwardness, too, and

be embarrassing to us all, so I did not offer, and I hope I did right

and for the best, though I could not know, and was many times

tortured with doubts afterward as having perhaps let a chance pass

which might have changed all my life and made it happier and

more beautiful than, alas, it turned out to be. For this reason I

grieve yet, when I think of that scene, and do not like to call it up

out of the deeps of my memory because of the pangs it brings.



Well, well, a good and wholesome thing is a little harmless fun in

this world; it tones a body up and keeps him human and prevents

him from souring. To set that little trap for Catherine was as good

and effective a way as any to show her what a grotesque thing she

was asking of Joan. It was a funny idea now, wasn't it, when you

look at it all around? Even Catherine dried up her tears and

laughed when she thought of the English getting hold of the French

Commander-in-Chief's reason for staying out of a battle. She

granted that they could have a good time over a thing like that.



We got to work on the letter again, and of course did not have to

strike out the passage about the wound. Joan was in fine spirits;

but when she got to sending messages to this, that, and the other

playmate and friend, it brought our village and the Fairy Tree and

the flowery plain and the browsing sheep and all the peaceful

beauty of our old humble home-place back, and the familiar names

began to tremble on her lips; and when she got to Haumette and

Little Mengette it was no use, her voice broke and she couldn't go

on. She waited a moment, then said:



"Give them my love--my warm love--my deep love--oh, out of my

heart of hearts! I shall never see our home any more."



Now came Pasquerel, Joan's confessor, and introduced a gallant

knight, the Sire de Rais, who had been sent with a message. He

said he was instructed to say that the council had decided that

enough had been done for the present; that it would be safest and

best to be content with what God had already done; that the city

was now well victualed and able to stand a long siege; that the

wise course must necessarily be to withdraw the troops from the

other side of the river and resume the defensive--therfore they had

decided accordingly.



"The incurable cowards!" exclaimed Joan. "So it was to get me

away from my men that they pretended so much solicitude about

my fatigue. Take this message back, not to the council--I have no

speeches for those disguised ladies' maids--but to the Bastard and

La Hire, who are men. Tell them the army is to remain where it is,

and I hold them responsible if this command miscarries. And say

the offensive will be resumed in the morning. You may go, good

sir."



Then she said to her priest:



"Rise early, and be by me all the day. There will be much work on

my hands, and I shall be hurt between my neck and my shoulder."



Chapter 22  The Fate of France Decided



WE WERE up at dawn, and after mass we started. In the hall we

met the master of the house, who was grieved, good man, to see

Joan going breakfastless to such a day's work, and begged her to

wait and eat, but she couldn't afford the time--that is to say, she

couldn't afford the patience, she being in such a blaze of anxiety to

get at that last remaining bastille which stood between her and the

completion of the first great step in the rescue and redemption of

France. Boucher put in another plea:



"But think--we poor beleaguered citizens who have hardly known

the flavor of fish for these many months, have spoil of that sort

again, and we owe it to you. There's a noble shad for breakfast;

wait--be persuaded."



Joan said:



"Oh, there's going to be fish in plenty; when this day's work is done

the whole river-front will be yours to do as you please with."



"Ah, your Excellency will do well, that I know; but we don't

require quite that much, even of you; you shall have a month for it

in place of a day. Now be beguiled--wait and eat. There's a saying

that he that would cross a river twice in the same day in a boat,

will do well to eat fish for luck, lest he have an accident."



"That doesn't fit my case, for to-day I cross but once in a boat."



"Oh, don't say that. Aren't you coming back to us?"



"Yes, but not in a boat."



"How, then?"



"By the bridge."



"Listen to that--by the bridge! Now stop this jesting, dear General,

and do as I would have done you. It's a noble fish."



"Be good then, and save me some for supper; and I will bring one

of those Englishmen with me and he shall have his share."



"Ah, well, have your way if you must. But he that fasts must

attempt but little and stop early. When shall you be back?"



"When we've raised the siege of Orleans. FORWARD!"



We were off. The streets were full of citizens and of groups and

squads of soldiers, but the spectacle was melancholy. There was

not a smile anywhere, but only universal gloom. It was as if some

vast calamity had smitten all hope and cheer dead. We were not

used to this, and were astonished. But when they saw the Maid,

there was an immediate stir, and the eager question flew from

mouth to mouth.



"Where is she going? Whither is she bound?"



Joan heard it, and called out:



"Whither would ye suppose? I am going to take the Tourelles."



It would not be possible for any to describe how those few words

turned that mourning into joy--into exaltation--into frenzy; and

how a storm of huzzas burst out and swept down the streets in

every direction and woke those corpselike multitudes to vivid life

and action and turmoil in a moment. The soldiers broke from the

crowd and came flocking to our standard, and many of the citizens

ran and got pikes and halberds and joined us. As we moved on, our

numbers increased steadily, and the hurrahing continued--yes, we

moved through a solid cloud of noise, as you may say, and all the

windows on both sides contributed to it, for they were filled with

excited people.



You see, the council had closed the Burgundy gate and placed a

strong force there, under that stout soldier Raoul de Gaucourt,

Bailly of Orleans, with orders to prevent Joan from getting out and

resuming the attack on the Tourelles, and this shameful thing had

plunged the city into sorrow and despair. But that feeling was gone

now. They believed the Maid was a match for the council, and they

were right.



When we reached the gate, Joan told Gaucourt to open it and let

her pass.



He said it would be impossible to do this, for his orders were from

the council and were strict. Joan said:



"There is no authority above mine but the King's. If you have an

order from the King, produce it."



"I cannot claim to have an order from him, General."



"Then make way, or take the consequences!"



He began to argue the case, for he was like the rest of the tribe,

always ready to fight with words, not acts; but in the midst of his

gabble Joan interrupted with the terse order:



"Charge!"



We came with a rush, and brief work we made of that small job. It

was good to see the Bailly's surprise. He was not used to this

unsentimental promptness. He said afterward that he was cut off in

the midst of what he was saying--in the midst of an argument by

which he could have proved that he could not let Joan pass--an

argument which Joan could not have answered.



"Still, it appears she did answer it," said the person he was talking

to.



We swung through the gate in great style, with a vast accession of

noise, the most of which was laughter, and soon our van was over

the river and moving down against the Tourelles.



First we must take a supporting work called a boulevard, and

which was otherwise nameless, before we could assault the great

bastille. Its rear communicated with the bastille by a drawbridge,

under which ran a swift and deep strip of the Loire. The boulevard

was strong, and Dunois doubted our ability to take it, but Joan had

no such doubt. She pounded it with artillery all the forenoon, then

about noon she ordered an assault and led it herself. We poured

into the fosse through the smoke and a tempest of missiles, and

Joan, shouting encouragements to her men, started to climb a

scaling-ladder, when that misfortune happened which we knew

was to happen--the iron bolt from an arbalest struck between her

neck and her shoulder, and tore its way down through her armor.

When she felt the sharp pain and saw her blood gushing over her

breast, she was frightened, poor girl, and as she sank to the ground

she began to cry bitterly.



The English sent up a glad shout and came surging down in strong

force to take her, and then for a few minutes the might of both

adversaries was concentrated upon that spot. Over her and above

her, English and French fought with desperation--for she stood for

France, indeed she was France to both sides--whichever won her

won France, and could keep it forever. Right there in that small

spot, and in ten minutes by the clock, the fate of France, for all

time, was to be decided, and was decided.



If the English had captured Joan then, Charles VII. would have

flown the country, the Treaty of Troyes would have held good, and

France, already English property, would have become, without

further dispute, an English province, to so remain until Judgment

Day. A nationality and a kingdom were at stake there, and no more

time to decide it in than it takes to hard-boil an egg. It was the

most momentous ten minutes that the clock has ever ticked in

France, or ever will. Whenever you read in histories about hours or

days or weeks in which the fate of one or another nation hung in

the balance, do not you fail to remember, nor your French hearts to

beat the quicker for the remembrance, the ten minutes that France,

called otherwise Joan of Arc, lay bleeding in the fosse that day,

with two nations struggling over her for her possession.



And you will not forget the Dwarf. For he stood over her, and did

the work of any six of the others. He swung his ax with both

hands; whenever it came down, he said those two words, "For

France!" and a splintered helmet flew like eggshells, and the skull

that carried it had learned its manners and would offend the French

no more. He piled a bulwark of iron-clad dead in front of him and

fought from behind it; and at last when the victory was ours we

closed about him, shielding him, and he ran up a ladder with Joan

as easily as another man would carry a child, and bore her out of

the battle, a great crowd following and anxious, for she was

drenched with blood to her feet, half of it her own and the other

half English, for bodies had fallen across her as she lay and had

poured their red life-streams over her. One couldn't see the white

armor now, with that awful dressing over it.



The iron bolt was still in the wound--some say it projected out

behind the shoulder. It may be--I did not wish to see, and did not

try to. It was pulled out, and the pain made Joan cry again, poor

thing. Some say she pulled it out herself because others refused,

saying they could not bear to hurt her. As to this I do not know; I

only know it was pulled out, and that the wound was treated with

oil and properly dressed.



Joan lay on the grass, weak and suffering, hour after hour, but still

insisting that the fight go on. Which it did, but not to much

purpose, for it was only under her eye that men were heroes and

not afraid. They were like the Paladin; I think he was afraid of his

shadow--I mean in the afternoon, when it was very big and long;

but when he was under Joan's eye and the inspiration of her great

spirit, what was he afraid of? Nothing in this world--and that is just

the truth.



Toward night Dunois gave it up. Joan heard the bugles.



"What!" she cried. "Sounding the retreat!"



Her wound was forgotten in a moment. She countermanded the

order, and sent another, to the officer in command of a battery, to

stand ready to fire five shots in quick successin. This was a signal

to the force on the Orleans side of the river under La Hire, who

was not, as some of the histories say, with us. It was to be given

whenever Joan should feel sure the boulevard was about to fall

into her hands--then that force must make a counter-attack on the

Tourelles by way of the bridge.



Joan mounted her horse now, with her staff about her, and when

our people saw us coming they raised a great shout, and were at

once eager for another assault on the boulevard. Joan rode straight

to the fosse where she had received her wound, and standing there

in the rain of bolts and arrows, she ordered the Paladin to let her

long standard blow free, and to note when its fringes should touch

the fortress. Presently he said:



"It touches."



"Now, then," said Joan to the waiting battalions, "the place is

yours--enter in! Bugles, sound the assault! Now, then--all

together--go!"



And go it was. You never saw anything like it. We swarmed up the

ladders and over the battlements like a wave--and the place was

our property. Why, one might live a thousand years and never see

so gorgeous a thing as that again. There, hand to hand, we fought

like wild beasts, for there was no give-up to those English--there

was no way to convince one of those people but to kill him, and

even then he doubted. At least so it was thought, in those days, and

maintained by many.



We were busy and never heard the five cannonshots fired, but they

were fired a moment after Joan had ordered the assault; and so,

while we were hammering and being hammerd in the smaller

fortress, the reserve on the Orleans side poured across the bridge

and attacked the Tourelles from that side. A fire-boat was brought

down and moored under the drawbridge which connected the

Tourelles with our boulevard; wherefore, when at last we drove

our English ahead of us and they tried to cross that drawbridge and

join their friends in the Tourelles, the burning timbers gave way

under them and emptied them in a mass into the river in their

heavy armor--and a pitiful sight it was to see brave men die such a

death as that.



"Ah, God pity them!" said Joan, and wept to see that sorrowful

spectacle. She said those gentle words and wept those

compassionate tears although one of those perishing men had

grossly insulted her with a coarse name three days before, when

she had sent him a message asking him to surrender. That was

their leader, Sir Williams Glasdale, a most valorous knight. He

was clothed all in steel; so he plunged under water like a lance,

and of course came up no more.



We soon patched a sort of bridge together and threw ourselves

against the last stronghold of the English power that barred

Orleans from friends and supplies. Before the sun was quite down,

Joan's forever memorable day's work was finished, her banner

floated from the fortress of the Tourelles, her promise was

fulfilled, she had raised the siege of Orleans!



The seven months' beleaguerment was ended, the thing which the

first generals of France had called impossible was accomplished;

in spite of all that the King's ministers and war-councils could do

to prevent it, this little country-maid at seventeen had carried her

immortal task through, and had done it in four days!



Good news travels fast, sometimes, as well as bad. By the time we

were ready to start homeward by the bridge the whole city of

Orleans was one red flame of bonfires, and the heavens blushed

with satisfaction to see it; and the booming and bellowing of

cannon and the banging of bells surpassed by great odds anything

that even Orleans had attempted before in the way of noise.



When we arrived--well, there is no describing that. Why, those

acres of people that we plowed through shed tears enough to raise

the river; there was not a face in the glare of those fires that hadn't

tears streaming down it; and if Joan's feet had not been protected

by iron they would have kissed them off of her. "Welcome!

welcome to the Maid of Orleans!" That was the cry; I heard it a

hundred thousand times. "Welcome to our Maid!" some of them

worded it.



No other girl in all history has ever reached such a summit of glory

as Joan of Arc reached that day. And do you think it turned her

head, and that she sat up to enjoy that delicious music of homage

and applause? No; another girl would have done that, but not this

one. That was the greatest heart and the simplest that ever beat.

She went straight to bed and to sleep, like any tired child; and

when the people found she was wounded and would rest, they shut

off all passage and traffic in that region and stood guard

themselves the whole night through, to see that he slumbers were

not disturbed. They said, "She has given us peace, she shall have

peace herself."



All knew that that region would be empty of English next day, and

all said that neither the present citizens nor their posterity would

ever cease to hold that day sacred to the memory of Joan of Arc.

That word has been true for more than sixty years; it will continue

so always. Orleans will never forget the 8th of May, nor ever fail

to celebrate it. It is Joan of Arc's day--and holy. [1]



[1] It is still celebrated every year with civic and military pomps

and solemnities. -- TRANSLATOR.



Chapter 23 Joan Inspires the Tawdry King



IN THE earliest dawn of morning, Talbot and his English forces

evacuated their bastilles and marched away, not stopping to burn,

destroy, or carry off anything, but leaving their fortresses just as

they were, provisioned, armed, and equipped for a long siege. It

was difficult for the people to believe that this great thing had

really happened; that they were actually free once more, and might

go and come through any gate they pleased, with none to molest or

forbid; that the terrible Talbot, that scourge of the French, that

man whose mere name had been able to annul the effectiveness of

French armies, was gone, vanished, retreating--driven away by a

girl.



The city emptied itself. Out of every gate the crowds poured. They

swarmed about the English bastilles like an invasion of ants, but

noisier than those creatures, and carried off the artillery and stores,

then turned all those dozen fortresses into monster bonfires,

imitation volcanoes whose lofty columns of thick smoke seemed

supporting the arch of the sky.



The delight of the children took another form. To some of the

younger ones seven months was a sort of lifetime. They had

forgotten what grass was like, and the velvety green meadows

seemed paradise to their surprised and happy eyes after the long

habit of seeing nothing but dirty lanes and streets. It was a wonder

to them--those spacious reaches of open country to run and dance

and tumble and frolic in, after their dull and joyless captivity; so

they scampered far and wide over the fair regions on both sides of

the river, and came back at eventide weary, but laden with flowers

and flushed with new health drawn from the fresh country air and

the vigorous exercise.



After the burnings, the grown folk followed Joan from church to

church and put in the day in thanksgivings for the city's

deliverance, and at night they fˆted her and her generals and

illuminated the town, and high and low gave themselves up to

festivities and rejoicings. By the time the populace were fairly in

bed, toward dawn, we wer ein the saddle and away toward Tours

to report to the King.



That was a march which would have turned any one's head but

Joan's. We moved between emotional ranks of grateful

country-people all the way. They crowded about Joan to touch her

feet, her horse, her armor, and they even knelt in the road and

kissed her horse's hoof-prints.



The land was full of her praises. The most illustrious cheifs of the

church wrote to the King extolling the Maid, comparing her to the

saints and heroes of the Bible, and warning him not to let

"unbelief, ingratitude, or other injustice" hinder or impair the

divine help sent through her. One might think there was a touch of

prophecy in that, and we will let it go at that; but to my mind it had

its inspiration in those great men's accurate knowledge of the

King's trivial and treacherous character.



The King had come to Tours to meet Joan. At the present day this

poor thing is called Charles the Victorious, on account of victories

which other people won for him, but in our time we had a private

name for him which described him better, and was sanctified to

him by personal deserving--Charles the Base. When we entered the

presence he sat throned, with his tinseled snobs and dandies

around him. He looked like a forked carrot, so tightly did his

clothing fit him from his waist down; he wore shoes with a

rope-like pliant toe a foot long that had to be hitched up to the

knee to keep it out of the way; he had on a crimson velvet cape

that came no lower than his elbows; on his head he had a tall felt

thing like a thimble, with a feather it its jeweled band that stuck up

like a pen from an inkhorn, and from under that thimble his bush

of stiff hair stuck down to his shoulders, curving outward at the

bottom, so that the cap and the hair together made the head like a

shuttlecock. All the materials of his dress were rich, and all the

colors brilliant. In his lap he cuddled a miniature greyhound that

snarled, lifting its lip and showing its white teeth whenever any

slight movement disturbed it. The King's dandies were dressed in

about the same fashion as himself, and when I remembered that

Joan had called the war-council of Orleans "disguised ladies'

maids," it reminded me of people who squander all their money on

a trifle and then haven't anything to invest when they come across

a better chance; that name ought to have been saved for these

creatures.



Joan fell on her knees before the majesty of France, and the other

frivolous animal in his lap--a sight which it pained me to see.

What had that man done for his country or for anybody in it, that

she or any other person should kneel to him? But she--she had just

done the only great deed that had been done for France in fifty

years, and had consecrated it with the libation of her blood. The

positions should have been reversed.



However, to be fair, one must grant that Charles acquitted himself

very well for the most part, on that occasion--very much better

than he was in the habit of doing. He passed his pup to a courtier,

and took off his cap to Joan as if she had been a queen. Then he

stepped from his throne and raised her, and showed quite a spirited

and manly joy and gratitude in welcoming her and thanking her for

her extraordinary achievement in his service. My prejudices are of

a later date than that. If he had continued as he was at that

moment, I should not have acquired them.



He acted handsomely. He said:



"You shall not kneel to me, my matchless General; you have

wrought royally, and royal courtesies are your due." Noticing that

she was pale, he said, "But you must not stand; you have lost blood

for France, and your wound is yet green--come." He led her to a

seat and sat down by her. "Now, then, speak out frankly, as to one

who owes you much and freely confesses it before all this courtly

assemblage. What shall be your reward? Name it."



I was ashamed of him. And yet that was not fair, for how could he

be expected to know this marvelous child in these few weeks,

when we who thought we had known her all her life were daily

seeing the clouds uncover some new altitudes of her character

whose existence was not suspected by us before? But we are all

that way: when we know a thing we have only scorn for other

people who don't happen to know it. And I was ashamed of these

courtiers, too, for the way they licked their chops, so to speak, as

envying Joan her great chance, they not knowing her any better

than the King did. A blush began to rise in Joan's cheeks at the

thought that she was working for her country for pay, and she

dropped her head and tried to hide her face, as girls always do

when they find themselves blushing; no one knows why they do,

but they do, and the more they blush the more they fail to get

reconciled to it, and the more they can't bear to have people look at

them when they are doing it. The King made it a great deal worse

by calling attention to it, which is the unkindest thing a person can

do when a girl is blushing; sometimes, when there is a big crowd

of strangers, it is even likely to make her cry if she is as young as

Joan was. God knows the reason for this, it is hidden from men. As

for me, I would as soon blush as sneeze; in fact, I would rather.

However, these meditations are not of consequence: I will go on

with what I was saying. The King rallied her for blushing, and this

brought up the rest of the blood and turned her face to fire. Then

he was sorry, seeing what he had done, and tried to make her

comfortable by saying the blush was exceeding becoming to her

and not to mind it--which caused even the dog to notice it now, so

of course the red in Joan's face turned to purple, and the tears

overflowed and ran down--I could have told anybody that that

would happen. The King was distressed, and saw that the best

thing to do would be to get away from this subject, so he began to

say the finest kind of things about Joan's capture of the Tourelles,

and presently when she was more composed he mentioned the

reward again and pressed her to name it. Everybody listened with

anxious interest to hear what her claim was going to be, but when

her answer came their faces showed that the thing she asked for

was not what they had been expecting.



"Oh, dear and gracious Dauphin, I have but one desire--only one.

If--"



"Do not be afraid, my child--name it."



"That you will not delay a day. My army is strong and valiant, and

eager to finish its work--march with me to Rheims and receive

your crown." You could see the indolent King shrink, in his

butterfly clothes.



"To Rheims--oh, impossible, my General! We march through the

heart of England's power?"



Could those be French faces there? Not one of them lighted in

response to the girl's brave proposition, but all promptly showed

satisfaction in the King's objection. Leave this silken idleness for

the rude contact of war? None of these butterflies desired that.

They passed their jeweled comfit-boxes one to another and

whispered their content in the head butterfly's practical prudence.

Joan pleaded with the King, saying:



"Ah, I pray you do not throw away this perfect opportunity.

Everything is favorable--everything. It is as if the circumstances

were specially made for it. The spirits of our army are exalted with

victory, those of the English forces depressed by defeat. Delay will

change this. Seeing us hesitate to follow up our advantage, our

men will wonder, doubt, lose confidence, and the English will

wonder, gather courage, and be bold again. Now is the

time--pritheee let us march!"



The King shook his head, and La Tremouille, being asked for an

opinion, eagerly furnished it:



"Sire, all prudence is against it. Think of the English strongholds

along the Loire; think of those that lie between us and Rheims!"



He was going on, but Joan cut him short, and said, turning to him:



"If we wait, they will all be strengthened, reinforced. Will that

advantage us?"



"Why--no."



"Then what is your suggestion?--what is it that you would propose

to do?"



"My judgment is to wait."



"Wait for what?"



The minister was obliged to hesitate, for he knew of no

explanation that would sound well. Moreover, he was not used to

being catechized in this fashion, with the eyes of a crowd of people

on him, so he was irritated, and said:



"Matters of state are not proper matters for public discussion."



Joan said placidly:



"I have to beg your pardon. My trespass came of ignorance. I did

not know that matters connected with your department of the

government were matters of state."



The minister lifted his brows in amused surprise, and said, with a

touch of sarcasm:



"I am the King's chief minister, and yet you had the impression that

matters connected with my department are not matters of state?

Pray, how is that?"



Joan replied, indifferently:



"Because there is no state."



"No state!"



"No, sir, there is no state, and no use for a minister. France is

shrunk to a couple of acres of ground; a sheriff's constable could

take care of it; its affairs are not matters of state. The term is too

large."



The King did not blush, but burst into a hearty, careless laugh, and

the court laughed too, but prudently turned its head and did it

silently. La Tremouille was angry, and opened his mouth to speak,

but the King put up his hand, and said:



"There--I take her under the royal protection. She has spoken the

truth, the ungilded truth--how seldom I hear it! With all this tinsel

on me and all this tinsel about me, I am but a sheriff after all--a

poor shabby two-acre sheriff--and you are but a constable," and he

laughed his cordial laugh again. "Joan, my frank, honest General,

will you name your reward? I would ennoble you. You shall

quarter the crown and the lilies of France for blazon, and with

them your victorious sword to defend them--speak the word."



It made an eager buzz of surprise and envy in the assemblage, but

Joan shook her head and said:



"Ah, I cannot, dear and noble Dauphin. To be allowed to work for

France, to spend one's self for France, is itself so supreme a reward

that nothing can add to it--nothing. Give me the one reward I ask,

the dearest of all rewards, the highest in your gift--march with me

to Rheims and receive your crown. I will beg it on my knees."



But the King put his hand on her arm, and there was a really brave

awakening in his voice and a manly fire in his eye when he said:



"No, sit. You have conquered me--it shall be as you--"



But a warning sign from his minister halted him, and he added, to

the relief of the court:



"Well, well, we will think of it, we will think it over and see. Does

that content you, impulsive little soldier?"



The first part of the speech sent a glow of delight to Joan's face,

but the end of it quenched it and she looked sad, and the tears

gathered in her eyes. After a moment she spoke out with what

seemed a sort of terrified impulse, and said:



"Oh, use me; I beseech you, use me--there is but little time!"



"But little time?"



"Only a year--I shall last only a year."



"Why, child, there are fifty good years in that compact little body

yet."



"Oh, you err, indeed you do. In one little year the end will come.

Ah, the time is so short, so short; the moments are flying, and so

much to be done. Oh, use me, and quickly--it is life or death for

France."



Even those insects were sobered by her impassioned words. The

King looked very grave--grave, and strongly impressed. His eyes lit

suddenly with an eloquent fire, and he rose and drew his sword

and raised it aloft; then he brought it slowly down upon Joan's

shoulder and said:



"Ah, thou art so simple, so true, so great, so noble--and by this

accolade I join thee to the nobility of France, thy fitting place! And

for thy sake I do hereby ennoble all thy family and all thy kin; and

all their descendants born in wedlock, not only in the male but also

in the female line. And more!--more! To distinguish thy house and

honor it above all others, we add a privilege never accorded to any

before in the history of these dominions: the females of thy line

shall have and hold the right to ennoble their husbands when these

shall be of inferior degree." [Astonishment and envy flared up in

every countenance when the words were uttered which conferred

this extraordinary grace. The King paused and looked around upon

these signs with quite evident satisfaction.] "Rise, Joan of Arc,

now and henceforth surnamed Du Lis, in grateful acknowledgment

of the good blow which you have struck for the lilies of France;

and they, and the royal crown, and your own victorious sword, fit

and fair company for each other, shall be grouped in you

escutcheon and be and remain the symbol of your high nobility

forever."



As my Lady Du Lis rose, the gilded children of privilege pressed

forward to welcome her to their sacred ranks and call her by her

new name; but she was troubled, and said these honors were not

meet for one of her lowly birth and station, and by their kind grace

she would remain simple Joan of Arc, nothing more--and so be

called.



Nothing more! As if there could be anything more, anything

higher, anything greater. My Lady Du Lis--why, it was tinsel, petty,

perishable. But, JOAN OF ARC! The mere sound of it sets one's

pulses leaping.



Chapter 24 Tinsel Trappings of Nobility



IT WAS vexatious to see what a to-do the whole town, and next

the whole country, made over the news. Joan of Arc ennobled by

the King! People went dizzy with wonder and delight over it. You

cannot imagine how she was gaped at, stared at, envied. Why, one

would have supposed that some great and fortunate thing had

happened to her. But we did not think any great things of it. To our

minds no mere human hand could add a glory to Joan of Arc. To

us she was the sun soaring in the heavens, and her new nobility a

candle atop of it; to us it was swallowed up and lost in her own

light. And she was as indifferent to it and as unconscious of it as

the other sun would have been.



But it was different with her brothers. They were proud and happy

in their new dignity, which was quite natural. And Joan was glad it

had been conferred, when she saw how pleased they were. It was a

clever thought in the King to outflank her scruples by marching on

them under shelter of her love for her family and her kin.



Jean and Pierre sported their coats-of-arms right away; and their

society was courted by everybody, the nobles and commons alike.

The Standard-Bearer said, with some touch of bitterness, that he

could see that they just felt good to be alive, they were so soaked

with the comfort of their glory; and didn't like to sleep at all,

because when they were asleep they didn't know they were noble,

and so sleep was a clean loss of time. And then he said:



"They can't take precedence of me in military functions and state

ceremonies, but when it comes to civil ones and society affairs I

judge they'll cuddle coolly in behind you and the knights, and No‰l

and I will have to walk behind them--hey?"



"Yes," I said, "I think you are right."



"I was just afraid of it--just afraid of it," said the Standard-Bearer,

with a sigh. "Afraid of it? I'm talking like a fool; of course I knew

it. Yes, I was talking like a fool."



No‰l Rainguesson said, musingly:



"Yes, I noticed something natural about the tone of it."



We others laughed.



"Oh, you did, did you? You think you are very clever, don't you?

I'll take and wring your neck for you one of these days, No‰l

Rainguesson."



The Sieur de Metz said:



"Paladin, your fears haven't reached the top notch. They are away

below the grand possibilities. Didn't it occur to you that in civil

and society functions they will take precedence of all the rest of

the personal staff--every one of us?"



"Oh, come!"



"You'll find it's so. Look at their escutcheon. Its chiefest feature is

the lilies of France. It's royal, man, royal--do you understand the

size of that? The lilies are there by authority of the King--do you

understand the size of that? Though not in detail and in entirety,

they do nevertheless substantially quarter the arms of France in

their coat. Imagine it! consider it! measure the magnitude of it! We

walk in front of those boys? Bless you, we've done that for the last

time. In my opinion there isn't a lay lord in this whole region that

can walk in front of them, except the Duke d'Alen‡on, prince of

the blood."



You could have knocked the Paladin down with a feather. He

seemed to actually turn pale. He worked his lips a moment without

getting anything out; then it came:



"I didn't know that, nor the half of it; how could I? I've been an

idiot. I see it now--I've been an idiot. I met them this morning, and

sung out hello to themjust as I would to anybody. I didn't mean to

be ill-mannered, but I didn't know the half of this that you've been

telling. I've been an ass. Yes, that is all there is to it--I've been an

ass."



No‰l Rainguesson said, in a kind of weary way:



"Yes, that is likely enough; but I don't see why you should seem

surprised at it."



"You don't, don't you? Well, why don't you?"



"Because I don't see any novelty about it. With some people it is a

condition which is present all the time. Now you take a condition

which is present all the time, and the results of that condition will

be uniform; this uniformity of result will in time become

monotonous; monotonousness, by the law of its being, is fatiguing.

If you had manifested fatigue upon noticing that you had been an

ass, that would have been logical, that would have been rational;

whereas it seems to me that to manifest surprise was to be again an

ass, because the condition of intellect that can enable a person to

be surprised and stirred by inert monotonousness is a--"



"Now that is enough, No‰l Rainguesson; stop where you are,

before you get yourself into trouble. And don't bother me any more

for some days or a week an it please you, for I cannot abide your

clack."



"Come, I like that! I didn't want to talk. I tried to get out of talking.

If you didn't want to hear my clack, what did you keep intruding

your conversation on me for?"



"I? I never dreamed of such a thing."



"Well, you did it, anyway. And I have a right to feel hurt, and I do

feel hurt, to have you treat me so. It seems to me that when a

person goads, and crowds, and in a manner forces another person

to talk, it is neither very fair nor very good-mannered to call what

he says clack."



"Oh, snuffle--do! and break your heart, you poor thing. Somebody

fetch this sick doll a sugar-rag. Look you, Sir Jean de Metz, do you

feel absolutely certain about that thing?"



"What thing?"



"Why, that Jean and Pierre are going to take precedence of all the

lay noblesse hereabouts except the Duke d'Alen‡on?"



"I think there is not a doubt of it."



The Standard-Bearer was deep in thoughts and dreams a few

moments, then the silk-and-velvet expanse of his vast breast rose

and fell with a sigh, and he said:



"Dear, dear, what a lift it is! It just shows what luck can do. Well, I

don't care. I shouldn't care to be a painted accident--I shouldn't

value it. I am prouder to have climbed up to where I am just by

sheer natural merit than I would be to ride the very sun in the

zenith and have to reflect that I was nothing but a poor little

accident, and got shot up there out of somebody else's catapult. To

me, merit is everything--in fact, the only thing. All else is dross."



Just then the bugles blew the assembly, and that cut our talk short.



Chapter 25 At Last--Forward!



THE DAYS began to waste away--and nothing decided,nothing

done. The army was full of zeal, but it was also hungry. It got no

pay, the treasury was getting empty, it was becoming impossible to

feed it; under pressure of privation it began to fall apart and

disperse--which pleased the trifling court exceedingly. Joan's

distress was pitiful to see. She was obliged to stand helpless while

her victorious army dissolved away until hardly the skeleton of it

was left.



At last one day she went to the Castle of Loches, where the King

was idling. She found him consulting with three of his councilors,

Robert le Ma‡on, a former Chancellor of France, Christophe

d'Harcourt, and Gerard Machet. The Bastard of Orleans was

present also, and it is through him that we know what happened.

Joan threw herself at the King's feet and embraced his knees,

saying:



"Noble Dauphin, prithee hold no more of these long and numerous

councils, but come, and come quickly, to Rheims and receive your

crown."



Christophe d'Harcourt asked:



"Is it your Voices that command you to say that to the King?"



"Yes, and urgently."



"Then will you not tell us in the King's presence in what way the

Voices communicate with you?"



It was another sly attempt to trap Joan into indiscreet admissions

and dangerous pretensions. But nothing came of it. Joan's answer

was simple and straightforward, and the smooth Bishop was not

able to find any fault with it. She said that when she met with

people who doubted the truth of her mission she went aside and

prayed, complaining of the distrust of these, and then the

comforting Voices were heard at her ear saying, soft and low, "Go

forward, Daughter of God, and I will help thee." Then she added,

"When I hear that, the joy in my heart, oh, it is insupportable!"



The Bastard said that when she said these words her face lit up as

with a flame, and she was like one in an ecstasy.



Joan pleaded, persuaded, reasoned; gaining ground little by little,

but opposed step by step by the council. She begged, she implored,

leave to march. When they could answer nothing further, they

granted that perhaps it had been a mistake to let the army waste

away, but how could we help it now? how could we march without

an army?



"Raise one!" said Joan.



"But it will take six weeks."



"No matter--begin! let us begin!"



"It is too late. Without doubt the Duke of Bedford has been

gathering troops to push to the succor of his strongholds on the

Loire."



"Yes, while we have been disbanding ours--and pity 'tis. But we

must throw away no more time; we must bestir ourselves."



The King objected that he could not venture toward Rheims with

those strong places on the Loire in his path. But Joan said:



"We will break them up. Then you can march."



With that plan the King was willing to venture assent. He could sit

around out of danger while the road was being cleared.



Joan came back in great spirits. Straightway everything was

stirring. Proclamations were issued calling for men, a

recruiting-camp was established at Selles in Berry, and the

commons and the nobles began to flock to it with enthusiasm.



A deal of the month of May had been wasted; and yet by the 6th of

June Joan had swept together a new army and was ready to march.

She had eight thousand men. Think of that. Think of gathering

together such a body as that in that little region. And these were

veteran soldiers, too. In fact, most of the men in France were

soldiers, when you came to that; for the wars had lasted

generations now. Yes, most Frenchmen were soldiers; and

admirable runners, too, both by practice and inheritance; they had

done next to nothing but run for near a century. But that was not

their fault. They had had no fair and proper leadership--at least

leaders with a fair and proper chance. Away back, King and Court

got the habit of being treacherous to the leaders; then the leaders

easily got the habit of disobeying the King and going their own

way, each for himself and nobody for the lot. Nobody could win

victories that way. Hence, running became the habit of the French

troops, and no wonder. Yet all that those troops needed in order to

be good fighters was a leader who would attend strictly to

business--a leader with all authority in his hands in place of a tenth

of it along with nine other generals equipped with an equal tenth

apiece. They had a leader rightly clothed with authority now, and

with a head and heart bent on war of the most intensely

businesslike and earnest sort--and there would be results. No doubt

of that. They had Joan of Arc; and under that leadership their legs

would lose the art and mystery of running.



Yes, Joan was in great spirits. She was here and there and

everywhere, all over the camp, by day and by night, pushing

things. And wherever she came charging down the lines, reviewing

the troops, it was good to hear them break out and cheer. And

nobody could help cheering, she was such a vision of young bloom

and beauty and grace, and such an incarnation of pluck and life

and go! she was growing more and more ideally beautiful every

day, as was plain to be seen--and these were days of development;

for she was well past seventeen now--in fact, she was getting close

upon seventeen and a half--indeed, just a little woman, as you may

say.



The two young Counts de Laval arrived one day--fine young

fellows allied to the greatest and most illustrious houses of France;

and they could not rest till they had seen Joan of Arc. So the King

sent for them and presented them to her, and you may believe she

filled the bill of their expectations. When they heard that rich

voice of hers they must have thought it was a flute; and when they

saw her deep eyes and her face, and the soul that looked out of that

face, you could see that the sight of her stirred them like a poem,

like lofty eloquence, like martial music. One of them wrote home

to his people, and in his letter he said, "It seemed something divine

to see her and hear her." Ah, yes, and it was a true word. Truer

word was never spoken.



He saw her when she was ready to begin her march and open the

campaign, and this is what he said about it:



"She was clothed all in white armor save her head, and in her hand

she carried a little battle-ax; and when she was ready to mount her

great black horse he reared and plunged and would not let her.

Then she said, 'Lead him to the cross.' This cross was in front of

the church close by. So they led him there. Then she mounted, and

he never budged, any more than if he had been tied. Then she

turned toward the door of the church and said, in her soft womanly

voice, 'You, priests and people of the Church, make processions

and pray to God for us!' Then she spurred away, under her

standard, with her little ax in her hand, crying 'Forward--march!'

One of her brothers, who came eight days ago, departed with her;

and he also was clad all in white armor."



I was there, and I saw it, too; saw it all, just as he pictures it. And I

see it yet--the little battle-ax, the dainty plumed cap, the white

armor--all in the soft June afternoon; I see it just as if it were

yesterday. And I rode with the staff--the personal stdaff--the staff

of Joan of Arc.



That young count was dying to go, too, but the King held him back

for the present. But Joan had made him a promise. In his letter he

said:



"She told me that when the King starts for Rheims I shall go with

him. But God grant I may not have to wait till then, but may have a

part in the battles!"



She made him that promise when she was taking leave of my lady

the Duchess d'Alen‡on. The duchess was exacting a promise, so it

seemed a proper ttime for others to do the like. The duchess was

troubled for her husband, for she foresaw desperate fighting; and

she held Joan to her breast, and stroked her hair lovingly, and said:



"You must watch over him, dear, and take care of him, and send

him back to me safe. I require it of you; I will not let you go till

you promise."



Joan said:



"I give you the promise with all my heart; and it is not just words,

it is a promise; you shall have him back without a hurt. Do you

believe? And are you satisfied with me now?"



The duchess could not speak, but she kissed Joan on the forehead;

and so they parted.



We left on the 6th and stopped over at Romorantin; then on the 9th

Joan entered Orleans in state, under triumphal arches, with the

welcoming cannon thundering and seas of welcoming flags

fluttering in the breeze. The Grand Staff rode with her, clothed in

shining splendors of costume and decorations: the Duke

d'Alen‡on; the Bastard of Orleans; the Sire de Boussac, Marshal of

France; the Lord de Graville, Master of the Crossbowmen; the Sire

de Culan, Admiral of France; Ambroise de Lor‚; �tienne de

Vignoles, called La Hire; Gautier de Brusac, and other illustrious

captains.



It was grand times; the usual shoutings and packed multitudes, the

usual crush to get sight of Joan; but at last we crowded through to

our old lodgings, and I saw old Boucher and the wife and that dear

Catherine gather Joan to their hearts and smother her with

kisses--and my heart ached tterso! for I could have kissed

Catherine better than anybody, and more and longer; yet was not

thought of for that office, and I so famished for it. Ah, she was so

beautiful, and oh, so sweet! I had loved her the first day I ever saw

her, and from that day forth she was sacred to me. I have carried

her image in my heart for sixty-three years--all lonely thee, yes,

solitary, for it never has had company--and I am grown so old, so

old; but it, oh, it is as fresh and young and merry and mischievous

and lovely and sweet and pure and witching and divine as it was

when it crept in there, bringing benediction and peace to its

habitation so long ago, so long ago--for it has not aged a day!



Chapter 26 The Last Doubts Scattered



THIS TIME, as before, the King's last command to the generals

was this: "See to it that you do nothing without the sanction of the

Maid." And this time the command was obeyed; and would

continue to be obeyed all through the coming great days of the

Loire campaign.



That was a change! That was new! It broke the traditions. It shows

you what sort of a reputation as a commander-in-chief the child

had made for herself in ten days in the field. It was a conquering of

men's doubts and suspicions and a capturing and solidifying of

men's belief and confidence such as the grayest veteran on the

Grand Staff had not been able to achieve in thirty years. Don't you

remember that when at sixteen Joan conducted her own case in a

grim court of law and won it, the old judge spoke of her as "this

marvelous child"? It was the right name, you see.



These veterans were not going to branch out and do things without

the sanction of the Maid--that is true; and it was a great gain. But

at the same time there were some among them who still trembled

at her new and dashing war tactics and earnestly desired to modify

them. And so, during the 10th, while Joan was slaving away at her

plans and issuing order after order with tireless industry, the

old-time consultations and arguings and speechifyings were going

on among certain of the generals.



In the afternoon of that day they came in a body to hold one of

these councils of war; and while they waited for Joan to join them

they discussed the situation. Now this discussion is not set down in

the histories; but I was there, and I will speak of it, as knowing you

will trust me, I not being given to beguiling you with lies.



Gautier de Brusac was spokesman for the timid ones; Joan's side

was resolutely upheld by d'Alen‡on, the Bastard, La Hire, the

Admiral of France, the Marshal de Boussac, and all the other really

important chiefs.



De Brusac argued that the situation was very grave; that Jargeau,

the first point of attack, was formidably strong; its imposing walls

bristling with artillery; with seven thousand picked English

veterans behind them, and at their head the great Earl of Suffolk

and his two redoubtable brothers, the De la Poles. It seemed to him

that the proposal of Joan of Arc to try to take such a place by storm

was a most rash and over-daring idea, and she ought to be

persuaded to relinquish it in favor of the soberer and safer

procedure of investment by regular siege. It seemed to him that

this fiery and furious new fashion of hurling masses of men against

impregnable walls of stone, in defiance of the established laws and

usages of war, was--

But he got no further. La Hire gave his plumed helm an impatient

toss and burst out with:



"By God, she knows her trade, and none can teach it her!"



And before he could get out anything more, D'Alen‡on was on his

feet, and the Bastard of Orleans, and a half a dozen others, all

thundering at once, and pouring out their indignant displeasure

upon any and all that mid hold, secretly or publicly, distrust of the

wisdom of the Commander-in-Chief. And when they had said their

say, La Hire took a chance again, and said:



"There are some that never know how to change. Circumstances

may change, but those people are never able to see that they have

got to change too, to meet those circumstances. All that they know

is the one beaten track that their fathers and grandfathers have

followed and that they themselves have followed in their turn. If

an earthquake come and rip the land to chaos, and that beaten

track now lead over precipices and into morasses, those people

can't learn that they must strike out a new road--no; they will

march stupidly along and follow the old one, to death and

perdition. Men, there's a new state of things; and a surpassing

military genius has perceived it with her clear eye. And a new road

is required, and that same clear eye has noted where it must go,

and has marked it out for us. The man does not live, never has

lived, never will live, that can improve upon it! The old state of

things was defeat, defeat, defeat--and by consequence we had

troops with no dash, no heart, no hope. Would you assault stone

walls with such? No--there was but one way with that kind: sit

down before a place and wait, wait--starve it out, if you could. The

new case is the very opposite; it is this: men all on fire with pluck

and dash and vim and fury and energy--a restrained conflagration!

What would you do with it? Hold it down and let it smolder and

perish and go out? What would Joan of Arc do with it? Turn it

loose, by the Lord God of heaven and earth, and let it swallow up

the foe in the whirlwind of its fires! Nothing shows the splendor

and wisdom of her military genius like her instant comprehension

of the size of the change which has come about, and her instant

perception of the right and only right way to take advantage of it.

With her is no sitting down and starving out; no dilly-dallying and

fooling around; no lazying, loafing, and going to sleep; no, it is

storm! storm! storm! and still storm! storm! storm! and forever

storm! storm! storm! hunt the enemy to his hole, then turn her

French hurricanes loose and carry him by storm! And that is my

sort! Jargeau? What of Jargeau, with its battlements and towers, its

devastating artillery, its seven thousand picked veterans? Joan of

Arc is to the fore, and by the splendor of God its fate is sealed!"



Oh, he carried them. There was not another word said about

persuading Joan to change her tactics. They sat talking

comfortably enough after that.



By and by Joan entered, and they rose and saluted with their

swords, and she asked what their pleasure might be. La Hire said:



"It is settled, my General. The matter concerned Jargeau. There

were some who thought we could not take the place."



Joan laughed her pleasant laugh, her merry, carefree laugh; the

laugh that rippled so buoyantly from her lips and made old people

feel young again to hear it; and she said to the company:



"Have no fears--indeed, there is no need nor any occasion for

them. We will strike the English boldly by assault, and you will

see." Then a faraway look came into her eyes, and I think that a

picture of her home drifted across the vision of her mind; for she

said very gently, and as one who muses, "But that I know God

guides us and will give us success, I had liefer keep sheep than

endure these perils."



We had a homelike farewell supper that evening--just the personal

staff and the family. Joan had to miss it; for the city had given a

banquet in her honor, and she had gone there in state with the

Grand Staff, through a riot of joy-bells and a sparkling Milky Way

of illuminations.



After supper some lively young folk whom we knew came in, and

we presently forgot that we were soldiers, and only remembered

that we were boys and girls and full of animal spirits and long-pent

fun; and so there was dancing, and games, and romps, and screams

of laughter--just as extravagant and innocent and noisy a good time

as ever I had in my life. Dear, dear, how long ago it was!--and I

was young then. And outside, all the while, was the measured

tramp of marching battalions, belated odds and ends of the French

power gathering for the morrow's tragedy on the grim stage of war.

Yes, in those days we had those contrasts side by side. And as I

passed along to bed there was another one: the big Dwarf, in brave

new armor, sat sentry at Joan's door--the stern Spirit of War made

flesh, as it were--and on his ample shoulder was curled a kitten

asleep.



Chapter 27 How Joan Took Jargeau



WE MADE a gallant show next day when we filed out through the

frowning gates of Orleans, with banners flying and Joan and the

Grand Staff in the van of the long column. Those two young De

Lavals were come now, and were joined to the Grand Staff. Which

was well; war being their proper trade, for they were grandsons of

that illustrious fighter Bertrand du Guesclin, Constable of France

in earlier days. Louis de Bourbon, the Marshal de Rais, and the

Vidame de Chartres were added also. We had a right to feel a little

uneasy, for we knew that a force of five thousand men was on its

way under Sir John Fastolfe to reinforce Jargeau, but I think we

were not uneasy, nevertheless. In truth, that force was not yet in

our neighborhood. Sir John was loitering; for some reason or other

he was not hurrying. He was losing precious time--four days at

�tampes, and four more at Janville.



We reached Jargeau and began business at once. Joan sent forward

a heavy force which hurled itself against the outworks in

handsome style, and gained a footing and fought hard to keep it;

but it presently began to fall back before a sortie from the city.

Seeing this, Joan raised her battle-cry and led a new assault herself

under a furious artillery fire. The Paladin was struck down at her

side wounded, but she snatched her standard from his failing hand

and plunged on through the ruck of flying missiles, cheering her

men with encouraging cries; and then for a good time one had

turmoil, and clash of steel, and collision and confusion of

struggling multitudes, and the hoarse bellowing of the guns; and

then the hiding of it all under a rolling firmament of smoke--a

firmament through which veiled vacancies appeared for a moment

now and then, giving fitful dim glimpses of the wild tragedy

enacting beyond; and always at these times one caught sight of that

slight figure in white mail which was the center and soul of our

hope and trust, and whenever we saw that, with its back to us and

its face to the fight, we knew that all was well. At last a great shout

went up--a joyous roar of shoutings, in fact--and that was sign

sufficient that the faubourgs were ours.



Yes, they were ours; the enemy had been driven back within the

walls. On the ground which Joan had won we camped; for night

was coming on.



Joan sent a summons to the English, promising that if they

surrendered she would allow them to go in peace and take their

horses with them. Nobody knew that she could take that strong

place, but she knew it--knew it well; yet she offered that

grace--offered it in a time when such a thing was unknown in war;

in a time when it was custom and usage to massacre the garrison

and the inhabitants of captured cities without pity or

compunctin--yes, even to the harmless women and children

sometimes. There are neighbors all about you who well remember

the unspeakable atrocities which Charles the Bold inflicted upon

the men and women and children of Dinant when he took that

place some years ago. It was a unique and kindly grace which Joan

offered that garrison; but that was her way, that was her loving and

merciful nature--she always did her best to save her enemy's life

and his soldierly pride when she had the mastery of him.



The English asked fifteen days' armistice to consider the proposal

in. And Fastolfe coming with five thousand men! Joan said no. But

she offered another grace: they might take both their horses and

their side-arms--but they must go within the hour.



Well, those bronzed English veterans were pretty hard-headed

folk. They declined again. Then Joan gave command that her army

be made ready to move to the assault at nine in the morning.

Considering the deal of marching and fighting which the men had

done that day, D'Alen‡on thought the hour rather early; but Joan

said it was best so, and so must be obeyed. Then she burst out with

one of those enthusiasms which were always burning in her when

battle was imminent, and said:



Work! work! and God will work with us!"



Yes, one might say that her motto was "Work! stick to it; keep on

working!" for in war she never knew what indolence was. And

whoever will take that motto and live by it will likely to succeed.

There's many a way to win in this world, but none of them is worth

much without good hard work back out of it.



I think we should have lost our big Standard-Bearer that day, if our

bigger Dwarf had not been at hand to bring him out of the mˆl‚e

when he was wounded. He was unconscious, and would have been

trampled to death by our own horse, if the Dwarf had not promptly

rescued him and haled him to the rear and safety. He recovered,

and was himself again after two or three hours; and then he was

happy and proud, and made the most of his wound, and went

swaggering around in his bandages showing off like an innocent

big-child--which was just what he was. He was prouder of being

wounded than a really modest person would be of being killed. But

there was no harm in his vanity, and nobody minded it. He said he

was hit by a stone from a catapult--a stone the size of a man's head.

But the stone grew, of course. Before he got through with it he was

claiming that the enemy had flung a building at him.



"Let him alone," said No‰l Rainguesson. "Don't interrupt his

processes. To-morrow it will be a cathedral."



He said that privately. And, sure enough, to-morrow it was a

cathedral. I never saw anybody with such an abandoned

imagination.



Joan was abroad at the crack of dawn, galloping here and there and

yonder, examining the situation minutely, and choosing what she

considered the most effective positions for her artillery; and with

such accurate judgment did she place her guns that her

Lieutenant-General's admiration of it still survived in his memory

when his testimony was taken at the Rehabilitation, a quarter of a

century later.



In this testimony the Duke d'Alen‡on said that at Jargeau that

morning of the 12th of June she made her dispositions not like a

novice, but "with the sure and clear judgment of a trained general

of twenty or thirty years' experience."



The veteran captains of the armies of France said she was great in

war in all ways, but greatest of all in her genius for posting and

handling artillery.



Who taught the shepherd-girl to do these marvels--she who could

not read, and had had no opportunity to study the complex arts of

war? I do not know any way to solve such a baffling riddle as that,

there being no precedent for it, nothing in history to compare it

with and examine it by. For in history there is no great general,

however gifted, who arrived at success otherwise than through able

teaching and hard study and some experience. It is a riddle which

will never be guessed. I think these vast powers and capacities

were born in her, and that she applied them by an intuition which

could not err.



At eight o'clock all movement ceased, and with it all sounds, all

noise. A mute expectancy reigned. The stillness was something

awful--because it meant so much. There was no air stirring. The

flags on the towers and ramparts hung straight down like tassels.

Wherever one saw a person, that person had stopped what he was

doing, and was in a waiting attitude, a listening attitude. We were

on a commanding spot, clustered around Joan. Not far from us, on

every hand, were the lanes and humble dwellings of these outlying

suburbs. Many people were visible--all were listening, not one was

moving. A man had placed a nail; he was about to fasten

something with it to the door-post of his shop--but he had stopped.

There was his hand reaching up holding the nail; and there was his

other hand n the act of striking with the hammer; but he had

forgotten everything--his head was turned aside listening. Even

children unconsciously stopped in their play; I saw a little boy with

his hoop-stick pointed slanting toward the ground in the act of

steering the hoop around the corner; and so he had stopped and

was listening--the hoop was rolling away, doing its own steering. I

saw a young girl prettily framed in an open window, a

watering-pot in her hand and window-boxes of red flowers under

its spout--but the water had ceased to flow; the girl was listening.

Everywhere were these impressive petrified forms; and

everywhere was suspended movement and that awful stillness.



Joan of Arc raised her sword in the air. At the signal, the silence

was torn to rags; cannon after cannon vomited flames and smoke

and delivered its quaking thunders; and we saw answering tongues

of fire dart from the towers and walls of the city, accompanied by

answering deep thunders, and in a minute the walls and the towers

disappeared, and in their place stood vast banks and pyramids of

snowy smoke, motionless in the dead air. The startled girl dropped

her watering-pot and clasped her hands together, and at that

moment a stone cannon-ball crashed through her fair body.



The great artillery duel went on, each side hammering away with

all its might; and it was splendid for smoke and noise, and most

exalting to one's spirits. The poor little town around about us

suffered cruelly. The cannon-balls tore through its slight buildings,

wrecking them as if they had been built of cards; and every

moment or two one would see a huge rock come curving through

the upper air above the smoke-clouds and go plunging down

through the roofs. Fire broke out, and columns of flame and smoke

rose toward the sky.



Presently the artillery concussions changed the weather. The sky

became overcast, and a strong wind rose and blew away the smoke

that hid the English fortresses.



Then the spectacle was fine; turreted gray walls and towers, and

streaming bright flags, and jets of red fire and gushes of white

smoke in long rows, all standing out with sharp vividness against

the deep leaden background of the sky; and then the whizzing

missiles began to knock up the dirt all around us, and I felt no

more interest in the scenery. There was one English gun that was

getting our position down finer and finer all the time. Presently

Joan pointed to it and said:



"Fair duke, step out of your tracks, or that machine will kill you."



The Duke d'Alen‡on did as he was bid; but Monsieur du Lude

rashly took his place, and that cannon tore his head off in a

moment.



Joan was watching all along for the right time to order the assault.

At last, about nine o'clock, she cried out:



"Now--to the assault!" and the buglers blew the charge.



Instantly we saw the body of men that had been appointed to this

service move forward toward a point where the concentrated fire

of our guns had crumbled the upper half of a broad stretch of wall

to ruins; we saw this force descend into the ditch and begin to

plant the scaling-ladders. We were soon with them. The

Lieutenant-General thought the assault premature. But Joan said:



"Ah, gentle duke, are you afraid? Do you not know that I have

promised to send you home safe?"



It was warm work in the ditches. The walls were crowded with

men, and they poured avalanches of stones down upon us. There

was one gigantic Englishman who did us more hurt than any dozen

of his brethren. He always dominated the places easiest of assault,

and flung down exceedingly troublesome big stones which

smashed men and ladders both--then he would near burst himself

with laughing over what he had done. But the duke settled

accounts with him. He went and found the famous cannoneer, Jean

le Lorrain, and said:



"Train your gun--kill me this demon."



He did it with the first shot. He hit the Englishman fair in the

breast and knocked him backward into the city.



The enemy's resistance was so effective and so stubborn that our

people began to show signs of doubt and dismay. Seeing this, Joan

raised her inspiring battle-cry and descended into the fosse herself,

the Dwarf helping her and the Paladin sticking bravely at her side

with the standard. She started up a scaling-ladder, but a great stone

flung from above came crashing down upon her helmet and

stretched her, wounded and stunned, upon the ground. But only for

a moment. The Dwarf stood her upon her feet, and straightway she

started up the ladder again, crying:



"To the assault, friends, to the assault--the English are ours! It is

the appointed hour!"



There was a grand rush, and a fierce roar of war-cries, and we

swarmed over the ramparts like ants. The garrison fled, we

pursued; Jargeau was ours!



The Earl of Suffolk was hemmed in and surrounded, and the Duke

d'Alen‡on and the Bastard of Orleans demanded that he surrender

himself. But he was a proud nobleman and came of a proud race.

He refused to yield his sword to subordinates, saying:



"I will die rather. I will surrender to the Maid of Orleans alone,

and to no other."



And so he did; and was courteously and honorably used by her.



His two brothers retreated, fighting step by step, toward the bridge,

we pressing their despairing forces and cutting them down by

scores. Arrived on the bridge, the slaughter still continued.

Alexander de la Pole was pushed overboard or fell over, and was

drowned. Eleven hundred men had fallen; John de la Pole decided

to give up the struggle. But he was nearly as proud and particular

as his brother of Suffolk as to whom he would surrender to. The

French officer nearest at hand was Guillaume Renault, who was

pressing him closely. Sir John said to him:



"Are you a gentleman?"



"Yes."



"And a knight?"



"No."



Then Sir John knighted him himself there on the bridge, giving

him the accolade with English coolness and tranquillity in the

midst of that storm of slaughter and mutilation; and then bowing

with high courtesy took the sword by the blade and laid the hilt of

it in the man's hand in token of surrender. Ah, yes, a proud tribe,

those De la Poles.



It was a grand day, a memorable day, a most splendid victory. We

had a crowd of prisoners, but Joan would not allow them to be

hurt. We took them with us and marched into Orleans next day

through the usual tempest of welcome and joy.



And this time there was a new tribute to our leader. From

everywhere in the packed streets the new recruits squeezed their

way to her side to touch the sword of Joan of Arc and draw from it

somewhat of that mysterious quality which made it invincible.











End of Project Gutenberg Etext Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc V 1













PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC, V2



by THE SIEUR LOUIS DE CONTE

(her page and secretary)







Volume 2.





Freely translated out of the ancient French into modern English

from the original unpublished manuscript in the National Archives

of France





Contents



Book II -- IN COURT AND CAMP Continued



28 Joan Foretells Her Doom

29 Fierce Talbot Reconsiders

30 The Red Field of Patay

31 France Begins to Live Again

32 The Joyous News Flies Fast

33 Joan's Five Great Deeds

34 The Jests of the Burgundians

35 The Heir of France is Crowned

36 Joan Hears News from Home

37 Again to Arms

38 The King Cries "Forward!"

39 We Win, but the King Balks

40 Treachery Conquers Joan

41 The Maid Will March No More



Book III -- TRIAL AND MARTYRDOM



1 The Maid in Chains

2 Joan Sold to the English

3 Weaving the Net About Her

4 All Ready to Condemn

5 Fifty Experts Against a Novice

6 The Maid Baffles Her Persecutors

7 Craft That Was in Vain

8 Joan Tells of Her Visions

9 Her Sure Deliverance Foretold

10 The Inquisitors at Their Wit's End

11 The Court Reorganized for Assassination

12 Joan's Master-Stroke Diverted

13 The Third Trial Fails

14 Joan Struggles with Her Twelve Lies

15 Undaunted by Threat of Burning

16 Joan Stands Defiant Before the Rack

17 Supreme in Direst Peril

18 Condemned Yet Unafraid

19 Our Last Hopes of Rescue Fail

20 The Betrayal

21 Respited Only for Torture

22 Joan Gives the Fatal Answer

23 The Time Is at Hand

24 Joan the Martyr

Conclusion







Chapter 28 Joan Foretells Her Doom



THE TROOPS must have a rest. Two days would be allowed for

this.



The morning of the 14th I was writing from Joan's dictation in a

small room which she sometimes used as a private office when she

wanted to get away from officials and their interruptions.

Catherine Boucher came in and sat down and said:



"Joan, dear, I want you to talk to me."



"Indeed, I am not sorry for that, but glad. What is in your mind?"



"This. I scarcely slept last night, for thinking of the dangers you

are running. The Paladin told me how you made the duke stand out

of the way when the cannon-balls were flying all about, and so

saved his life."



"Well, that was right, wasn't it?"



"Right? Yes; but you stayed there yourself. Why will you do like

that? It seems such a wanton risk."



"Oh, no, it was not so. I was not in any danger."



"How can you say that, Joan, with those deadly things flying all

about you?"



Joan laughed, and tried to turn the subject, but Catherine persisted.

She said:



"It was horribly dangerous, and it could not be necessary to stay in

such a place. And you led an assault again. Joan, it is tempting

Providence. I want you to make me a promise. I want you to

promise me that you will let others lead the assaults, if there must

be assaults, and that you will take better care of yourself in those

dreadful battles. Will you?"



But Joan fought away from the promise and did not give it.

Catherine sat troubled and discontented awhile, then she said:



"Joan, are you going to be a soldier always? These wars are so

long--so long. They last forever and ever and ever."



There was a glad flash in Joan's eye as she cried:



"This campaign will do all the really hard work that is in front of it

in the next four days. The rest of it will be gentler--oh, far less

bloody. Yes, in four days France will gather another trophy like the

redemption of Orleans and make her second long step toward

freedom!"



Catherine started (and do did I); then she gazed long at Joan like

one in a trance, murmuring "four days--four days," as if to herself

and unconsciously. Finally she asked, in a low voice that had

something of awe in it:



"Joan, tell me--how is it that you know that? For you do know it, I

think."



"Yes," said Joan, dreamily, "I know--I know. I shall strike--and

strike again. And before the fourth day is finished I shall strike yet

again." She became silent. We sat wondering and still. This was

for a whole minute, she looking at the floor and her lips moving

but uttering nothing. Then came these words, but hardly audible:

"And in a thousand years the English power in France will not rise

up from that blow."



It made my flesh creep. It was uncanny. She was in a trance

again--I could see it--just as she was that day in the pastures of

Domremy when she prophesied about us boys in the war and

afterward did not know that she had done it. She was not

conscious now; but Catherine did not know that, and so she said,

in a happy voice:



"Oh, I believe it, I believe it, and I am so glad! Then you will come

back and bide with us all your life long, and we will love you so,

and honor you!"



A scarcely perceptible spasm flitted across Joan's face, and the

dreamy voice muttered:



"Before two years are sped I shall die a cruel death!"



I sprang forward with a warning hand up. That is why Catherine

did not scream. She was going to do that--I saw it plainly. Then I

whispered her to slip out of the place, and say nothing of what had

happened. I said Joan was asleep--asleep and dreaming. Catherine

whispered back, and said:



"Oh, I am so grateful that it is only a dream! It sounded like

prophecy." And she was gone.



Like prophecy! I knew it was prophecy; and I sat down crying, as

knowing we should lose her. Soon she started, shivering slightly,

and came to herself, and looked around and saw me crying there,

and jumped out of her chair and ran to me all in a whirl of

sympathy and compassion, and put her hand on my head, and said:



"My poor boy! What is it? Look up and tell me."



I had to tell her a lie; I grieved to do it, but there was no other way.

I picked up an old letter from my table, written by Heaven knows

who, about some matter Heaven knows what, and told her I had

just gotten it from PŠre Fronte, and that in it it said the children's

Fairy Tree had been chopped down by some miscreant or other,

and-- I got no further. She snatched the letter from my hand and

searched it up and down and all over, turning it this way and that,

and sobbing great sobs, and the tears flowing down her cheeks,

and ejaculating all the time, "Oh, cruel, cruel! how could any be so

heartless? Ah, poor Arbre F‚e de Bourlemont gone--and we

children loved it so! Show me the place where it says it!"



And I, still lying, showed her the pretended fatal words on the

pretended fatal page, and she gazed at them through her tears, and

said she could see herself that they were hateful, ugly words--they

"had the very look of it."



Then we heard a strong voice down the corridor announcing:



"His majesty's messenger--with despatches for her Excellency the

Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of France!"



Chapter 29 Fierce Talbot Reconsiders



I KNEW she had seen the wisdom of the Tree. But when? I could

not know. Doubtless before she had lately told the King to use her,

for that she had but one year left to work in. It had not occurred to

me at the time, but the conviction came upon me now that at that

time she had already seen the Tree. It had brought her a welcome

message; that was plain, otherwise she could not have been so

joyous and light-hearted as she had been these latter days. The

death-warning had nothing dismal about it for her; no, it was

remission of exile, it was leave to come home.



Yes, she had seen the Tree. No one had taken the prophecy to heart

which she made to the King; and for a good reason, no doubt; no

one wanted to take it to heart; all wanted to banish it away and

forget it. And all had succeeded, and would go on to the end placid

and comfortable. All but me alone. I must carry my awful secret

without any to help me. A heavy load, a bitter burden; and would

cost me a daily heartbreak. She was to die; and so soon. I had

never dreamed of that. How could I, and she so strong and fresh

and young, and every day earning a new right to a peaceful and

honored old age? For at that time I though old age valuable. I do

not know why, but I thought so. All young people think it, I

believe, they being ignorant and full of superstitions. She had seen

the Tree. All that miserable night those ancient verses went

floating back and forth through my brain:



And when, in exile wand'ring, we Shall fainting yearn for glimpse

of thee, Oh, rise upon our sight!



But at dawn the bugles and the drums burst through the dreamy

hush of the morning, and it was turn out all! mount and ride. For

there was red work to be done.



We marched to Meung without halting. There we carried the

bridge by assault, and left a force to hold it, the rest of the army

marching away next morning toward Beaugency, where the lion

Talbot, the terror of the French, was in command. When we

arrived at that place, the English retired into the castle and we sat

down in the abandoned town.



Talbot was not at the moment present in person, for he had gone

away to watch for and welcome Fastolfe and his reinforcement of

five thousand men.



Joan placed her batteries and bombarded the castle till night. Then

some news came: Richemont, Constable of France, this long time

in disgrace with the King, largely because of the evil machinations

of La Tremouille and his party, was approaching with a large body

of men to offer his services to Joan--and very much she needed

them, now that Fastolfe was so close by. Richemont had wanted to

join us before, when we first marched on Orleans; but the foolish

King, slave of those paltry advisers of his, warned him to keep his

distance and refused all reconciliation with him.



I go into these details because they are important. Important

because they lead up to the exhibition of a new gift in Joan's

extraordinary mental make-up--statesmanship. It is a sufficiently

strange thing to find that great quality in an ignorant country-girl

of seventeen and a half, but she had it.



Joan was for receiving Richemont cordially, and so was La Hire

and the two young Lavals and other chiefs, but the

Lieutenant-General, d'Alen‡on, strenuously and stubbornly

opposed it. He said he had absolute orders from the King to deny

and defy Richemont, and that if they were overridden he would

leave the army. This would have been a heavy disaster, indeed. But

Joan set herself the task of persuading him that the salvation of

France took precedence of all minor things--even the commands of

a sceptered ass; and she accomplished it. She persuaded him to

disobey the King in the interest of the nation, and to be reconciled

to Count Richemont and welcome him. That was statesmanship;

and of the highest and soundest sort. Whatever thing men call

great, look for it in Joan of Arc, and there you will find it.



In the early morning, June 17th, the scouts reported the approach

of Talbot and Fastolfe with Fastolfe's succoring force. Then the

drums beat to arms; and we set forth to meet the English, leaving

Richemont and his troops behind to watch the castle of Beaugency

and keep its garrison at home. By and by we came in sight of the

enemy. Fastolfe had tried to convince Talbot that it would be

wisest to retreat and not risk a battle with Joan at this time, but

distribute the new levies among the English strongholds of the

Loire, thus securing them against capture; then be patient and

wait--wait for more levies from Paris; let Joan exhaust her army

with fruitless daily skirmishing; then at the right time fall upon her

in resistless mass and annihilate her. He was a wise old

experienced general, was Fastolfe. But that fierce Talbot would

hear of no delay. He was in a rage over the punishment which the

Maid had inflicted upon him at Orleans and since, and he swore by

God and Saint George that he would have it out with her if he had

to fight her all alone. So Fastolfe yielded, though he said they were

now risking the loss of everything which the English had gained by

so many years' work and so many hard knocks.



The enemy had taken up a strong position, and were waiting, in

order of battle, with their archers to the front and a stockade before

them.



Night was coming on. A messenger came from the English with a

rude defiance and an offer of battle. But Joan's dignity was not

ruffled, her bearing was not discomposed. She said to the herald:



"Go back and say it is too late to meet to-night; but to-morrow,

please God and our Lady, we will come to close quarters."



The night fell dark and rainy. It was that sort of light steady rain

which falls so softly and brings to one's spirit such serenity and

peace. About ten o'clock D'Alen‡on, the Bastard of Orleans, La

Hire, Pothon of Saintrailles, and two or three other generals came

to our headquarters tent, and sat down to discuss matters with

Joan. Some thought it was a pity that Joan had declined battle,

some thought not. Then Pothon asked her why she had declined it.

She said:



"There was more than one reason. These English are ours--they

cannot get away from us. Wherefore there is no need to take risks,

as at other times. The day was far spent. It is good to have much

time and the fair light of day when one's force is in a weakened

state--nine hundred of us yonder keeping the bridge of Meung

under the Marshal de Rais, fifteen hundred with the Constable of

France keeping the bridge and watching the castle of Beaugency."



Dunois said:



"I grieve for this decision, Excellency, but it cannot be helped. And

the case will be the same the morrow, as to that."



Joan was walking up and down just then. She laughed her

affectionate, comrady laugh, and stopping before that old war-tiger

she put her small hand above his head and touched one of his

plumes, saying:



"Now tell me, wise man, which feather is it that I touch?"



"In sooth, Excellency, that I cannot."



"Name of God, Bastard, Bastard! you cannot tell me this small

thing, yet are bold to name a large one--telling us what is in the

stomach of the unborn morrow: that we shall not have those men.

Now it is my thought that they will be with us."



That made a stir. All wanted to know why she thought that. But La

Hire took the word and said:



"Let be. If she thinks it, that is enough. It will happen."



Then Pothon of Santrailles said:



"There were other reasons for declining battle, according to the

saying of your Excellency?"



"Yes. One was that we being weak and the day far gone, the battle

might not be decisive. When it is fought it must be decisive. And it

shall be."



"God grant it, and amen. There were still other reasons?"



"One other--yes." She hesitated a moment, then said: "This was not

the day. To-morrow is the day. It is so written."



They were going to assail her with eager questionings, but she put

up her hand and prevented them. Then she said:



"It will be the most noble and beneficent victory that God has

vouchsafed for France at any time. I pray you question me not as to

whence or how I know this thing, but be content that it is so."



There was pleasure in every face, and conviction and high

confidence. A murmur of conversation broke out, but that was

interrupted by a messenger from the outposts who brought

news--namely, that for an hour there had been stir and movement

in the English camp of a sort unusual at such a time and with a

resting army, he said. Spies had been sent under cover of the rain

and darkness to inquire into it. They had just come back and

reported that large bodies of men had been dimly made out who

were slipping stealthily away in the direction of Meung.



The generals were very much surprised, as any might tell from

their faces.



"It is a retreat," said Joan.



"It has that look," said D'Alen‡on.



"It certainly has," observed the Bastard and La Hire.



"It was not to be expected," said Louis de Bourbon, "but one can

divine the purpose of it."



"Yes," responded Joan. "Talbot has reflected. His rash brain has

cooled. He thinks to take the bridge of Meung and escape to the

other side of the river. He knows that this leaves his garrison of

Beaugency at the mercy of fortune, to escape our hands if it can;

but there is no other course if he would avoid this battle, and that

he also knows. But he shall not get the bridge. We will see to that."



"Yes," said D'Alen&ccecil;on, "we must follow him, and take care

of that matter. What of Beaugency?"



"Leave Beaugency to me, gentle duke; I will have it in two hours,

and at no cost of blood."



"It is true, Excellency. You will but need to deliver this news there

and receive the surrender."



"Yes. And I will be with you at Meung with the dawn, fetching the

Constable and his fifteen hundred; and when Talbot knows that

Beaugency has fallen it will have an effect upon him."



"By the mass, yes!" cried La Hire. "He will join his Meung garrison

to his army and break for Paris. Then we shall have our bridge

force with us again, along with our Beaugency watchers, and be

stronger for our great day's work by four-and-twenty hundred able

soldiers, as was here promised within the hour. Verily this

Englishman is doing our errands for us and saving us much blood

and trouble. Orders, Excellency--give us orders!"



"They are simple. Let the men rest three hours longer. At one

o'clock the advance-guard will march, under our command, with

Pothon of Saintrailles as second; the second division will follow at

two under the Lieutenant-General. Keep well in the rear of the

enemy, and see to it that you avoid an engagement. I will ride

under guard to Beaugency and make so quick work there that Ii

and the Constable of France will join you before dawn with his

men."



She kept her word. Her guard mounted and we rode off through

the puttering rain, taking with us a captured English officer to

confirm Joan's news. We soon covered the journey and summoned

the castle. Richard Gu‚tin, Talbot's lieutenant, being convinced

that he and his five hundred men were left helpless, conceded that

it would be useless to try to hold out. He could not expect easy

terms, yet Joan granted them nevertheless. His garrison could keep

their horses and arms, and carry away property to the value of a

silver mark per man. They could go whither they pleased, but must

not take arms against France again under ten days.



Before dawn we were with our army again, and with us the

Constable and nearly all his men, for we left only a small garrison

in Beaugency castle. We heard the dull booming of cannon to the

front, and knew that Talbot was beginning his attack on the bridge.

But some time before it was yet light the sound ceased and we

heard it no more.



Gu‚tin had sent a messenger through our lines under a

safe-conduct given by Joan, to tell Talbot of the surrender. Of

course this poursuivant had arrived ahead of us. Talbot had held it

wisdom to turn now and retreat upon Paris. When daylight came

he had disappeared; and with him Lord Scales and the garrison of

Meung.



What a harvest of English strongholds we had reaped in those

three days!--strongholds which had defied France with quite cool

confidence and plenty of it until we came.



Chapter 30  The Red Field of Patay



WHEN THE morning broke at last on that forever memorable 18th

of June, thee was no enemy discoverable anywhere, as I have said.

But that did not trouble me. I knew we should find him, and that

we should strike him; strike him the promised blow--the one from

which the English power in France would not rise up in a thousand

years, as Joan had said in her trance.



The enemy had plunged into the wide plains of La Beauce--a

roadless waste covered with bushes, with here and there bodies of

forest trees--a region where an army would be hidden from view in

a very little while. We found the trail in the soft wet earth and

followed it. It indicated an orderly march; no confusion, no panic.



But we had to be cautious. In such a piece of country we could

walk into an ambush without any trouble. Therefore Joan sent

bodies of cavalry ahead under La Hire, Pothon, and other captains,

to feel the way. Some of the other officers began to show

uneasiness; this sort of hide-and-go-seek business troubled them

and made their confidence a little shaky. Joan divined their state of

mind and cried out impetuously:



"Name of God, what would you? We must smite these English,

and we will. They shall not escape us. Though they were hung to

the clouds we would get them!"



By and by we were nearing Patay; it was about a league away.

Now at this time our reconnaissance, feeling its way in the bush,

frightened a deer, and it went bounding away and was out of sight

in a moment. Then hardly a minute later a dull great shout went up

in the distance toward Patay. It was the English soldiery. They had

been shut up in a garrison so long on moldy food that they could

not keep their delight to themselves when this fine fresh meat

came springing into their midst. Poor creature, it had wrought

damage to a nation which loved it well. For the French knew

where the English were now, whereas the English had no suspicion

of where the French were.



La Hire halted where he was, and sent back the tidings. Joan was

radiant with joy. The Duke d'Alen‡on said to her:



"Very well, we have found them; shall we fight them?"



"Have you good spurs, prince?"



"Why? Will they make us run away?"



"Nenni, en nom de Dieu! These English are ours--they are lost.

They will fly. Who overtakes them will need good spurs.

Forward--close up!"



By the time we had come up with La Hire the English had

discovered our presence. Talbot's force was marching in three

bodies. First his advance-guard; then his artillery; then his

battle-corps a good way in the rear. He was now out of the bush

and in a fair open country. He at once posted his artillery, his

advance-guard, and five hundred picked archers along some

hedges where the French would be obliged to pass, and hoped to

hold this position till his battle-corps could come up. Sir John

Fastolfe urged the battle-corps into a gallop. Joan saw her

opportunity and ordered La Hire to advance--which La Hire

promptly did, launching his wild riders like a storm-wind, his

customary fashion.



The duke and the Bastard wanted to follow, but Joan said:



"Not yet--wait."



So they waited--impatiently, and fidgeting in their saddles. But she

was ready--gazing straight before her, measuring, weighing,

calculating--by shades, minutes, fractions of minutes,

seconds--with all her great soul present, in eye, and set of head,

and noble pose of body--but patient, steady, master of

herself--master of herself and of the situation.



And yonder, receding, receding, plumes lifting and falling, lifting

and falling, streamed the thundering charge of La Hire's godless

crew, La Hire's great figure dominating it and his sword stretched

aloft like a flagstaff.



"Oh, Satan andhis Hellions, see them go!" Somebody muttered it

in deep admiration.



And now he was closing up--closing up on Fastolfe's rushing corps.



And now he struck it--struck it hard, and broke its order. It lifted

the duke and the Bastard in their saddles to see it; and they turned,

trembling with excitement, to Joan, saying:



"Now!"



But she put up her hand, still gazing, weighing, calculating, and

said again:



"Wait--not yet."



Fastolfe's hard-driven battle-corps raged on like an avalanche

toward the waiting advance-guard. Suddenly these conceived the

idea that it was flying in panic before Joan; and so in that instant it

broke and swarmed away in a mad panic itself, with Talbot

storming and cursing after it.



Now was the golden time. Joan drove her spurs home and waved

the advance with her sword. "Follow me!" she cried, and bent her

head to her horse's neck and sped away like the wind!



We went down into the confusion of that flying rout, and for three

long hours we cut and hacked and stabbed. At last the bugles sang

"Halt!"



The Battle of Patay was won.



Joan of Arc dismounted, and stood surveying that awful field, lost

in thought. Presently she said:



"The praise is to God. He has smitten with a heavy hand this day."

After a little she lifted her face, and looking afar off, said, with the

manner of one who is thinking aloud, "In a thousand years--a

thousand years--the English power in France will not rise up from

this blow." She stood again a time thinking, then she turned toward

her grouped generals, and there was a glory in her face and a noble

light in her eye; and she said:



"Oh, friends, friends, do you know?--do you comprehend? France

is on the way to be free!"



"And had never been, but for Joan of Arc!" said La Hire, passing

before her and bowing low, the other following and doing

likewise; he muttering as he went, "I will say it though I be

damned for it." Then battalion after battalion of our victorious

army swung by, wildly cheering. And they shouted, "Live forever,

Maid of Orleans, live forever!" while Joan, smiling, stood at the

salute with her sword.



This was not the last time I saw the Maid of Orleans on the red

field of Patay. Toward the end of the day I came upon her where

the dead and dying lay stretched all about in heaps and winrows;

our men had mortally wounded an English prisoner who was too

poor to pay a ransom, and from a distance she had seen that cruel

thing done; and had galloped to the place and sent for a priest, and

now she was holding the head of her dying enemy in her lap, and

easing him to his death with comforting soft words, just as his

sister might have done; and the womanly tears running down her

face all the time. [1]



[1] Lord Ronald Gower (Joan of Arc, p. 82) says: "Michelet

discovered this story in the deposition of Joan of Arc's page, Louis

de Conte, who was probably an eye-witness of the scene." This is

true. It was a part of the testimony of the author of these "Personal

Recollections of Joan of Arc," given by him in the Rehabilitation

proceedings of 1456. -- TRANSLATOR.



Chapter 31 France Begins to Live Again



JOAN HAD said true: France was on the way to be free.



The war called the Hundred Years' War was very sick to-day. Sick

on its English side--for the very first time since its birth,

ninety-one years gone by.



Shall we judge battles by the numbers killed and the ruin wrought?

Or shall we not rather judge them by the results which flowed

from them? Any one will say that a battle is only truly great or

small according to its results. Yes, any one will grant that, for it is

the truth.



Judged by results, Patay's place is with the few supremely great

and imposing battles that have been fought since the peoples of the

world first resorted to arms for the settlement of their quarrels. So

judged, it is even possible that Patay has no peer among that few

just mentioned, but stand alone, as the supremest of historic

conflicts. For when it began France lay gasping out the remnant of

an exhausted life, her case wholly hopeless in the view of all

political physicians; when it ended, three hours later, she was

convalescent. Convalescent, and nothing requisite but time and

ordinary nursing to bring her back to perfect health. The dullest

physician of them all could see this, and there was none to deny it.



Many death-sick nations have reached convalescence through a

series of battles, a procession of battles, a weary tale of wasting

conflicts stretching over years, but only one has reached it in a

single day and by a single battle. That nation is France, and that

battle Patay.



Remember it and be proud of it; for you are French, and it is the

stateliest fact in the long annals of your country. There it stands,

with its head in the clouds! And when you grow up you will go on

pilgrimage to the field of Patay, and stand uncovered in the

presence of--what? A monument with its head in the clouds? Yes.

For all nations in all times have built monuments on their

battle-fields to keep green the memory of the perishable deed that

was wrought there and of the perishable name of him who wrought

it; and will France neglect Patay and Joan of Arc? Not for long.

And will she build a monument scaled to their rank as compared

with the world's other fields and heroes? Perhaps--if there be room

for it under the arch of the sky.



But let us look back a little, and consider certain strange and

impressive facts. The Hundred Years' War began in 1337. It raged

on and on, year after year and year after year; and at last England

stretched France prone with that fearful blow at Cr‚cy. But she

rose and struggled on, year after year, and at last again she went

down under another devastating blow--Poitiers. She gathered her

crippled strength once more, and the war raged on, and on, and

still on, year after year, decade after decade. Children were born,

grew up, married, died--the war raged on; their children in turn

grew up, married, died--the war raged on; their children, growing,

saw France struck down again; this time under the incredible

disaster of Agincourt--and still the war raged on, year after year,

and in time these chldren married in their turn.



France was a wreck, a ruin, a desolation. The half of it belonged to

England, with none to dispute or deny the truth; the other half

belonged to nobody--in three months would be flying the English

flag; the French King was making ready to throw away his crown

and flee beyond the seas.



Now came the ignorant country-maid out of her remote village and

confronted this hoary war, this all-consuming conflagration that

had swept the land for three generations. Then began the briefest

and most amazing campaign that is recorded in history. In seven

weeks it was finished. In seven weeks she hopelessly crippled that

gigantic war that was ninety-one years old. At Orleans she struck it

a staggering blow; on the field of Patay she broke its back.



Think of it. Yes, one can do that; but understand it? Ah, that is

another matter; none will ever be able to comprehend that

stupefying marvel.



Seven weeks--with her and there a little bloodshed. Perhaps the

most of it, in any single fight, at Patay, where the English began

six thousand strong and left two thousand dead upon the field. It is

said and believed that in three battles alone--Cr‚cy, Poitiers, and

Agincourt--near a hundred thousand Frenchmen fell, without

counting the thousand other fights of that long war. The dead of

that war make a mournful long list--an interminable list. Of men

slain in the field the count goes by tens of thousands; of innocent

women and children slain by bitter hardship and hunger it goes by

that appalling term, millions.



It was an ogre, that war; an ogre that went about for near a hundred

years, crunching men and dripping blood from its jaws. And with

her little hand that child of seventeen struck him down; and yonder

he lies stretched on the field of Patay, and will not get up any more

while this old world lasts.



Chapter 32 The Joyous News Flies Fast



THE GREAT news of Patay was carried over the whole of France

in twenty hours, people said. I do not know as to that; but one

thing is sure, anyway: the moment a man got it he flew shouting

and glorifying God and told his neighbor; and that neighbor flew

with it to the next homestead; and so on and so on without resting

the word traveled; and when a man got it in the night, at what hour

soever, he jumped out of his bed and bore the blessed message

along. And the joy that went with it was like the light that flows

across the land when an eclipse is receding from the face of the

sun; and, indeed, you may say that France had lain in an eclipse

this long time; yes, buried in a black gloom which these beneficent

tidings were sweeping away now before the onrush of their white

splendor.



The news beat the flying enemy to Yeuville, and the town rose

against its English masters and shut the gates against their

brethren. It flew to Mont Pipeau, to Saint Simon, and to this, that,

and the other English fortress; and straightway the garrison applied

the torch and took to the fields and the woods. A detachment of

our army occupied Meung and pillaged it.



When we reached Orleans that tow was as much as fifty times

insaner with joy than we had ever seen it before--which is saying

much. Night had just fallen, and the illuminations were on so

wonderful a scale that we seemed to plow through seas of fire; and

as to the noise--the hoarse cheering of the multitude, the

thundering of cannon, the clash of bells--indeed, there was never

anything like it. And everywhere rose a new cry that burst upon us

like a storm when the column entered the gates, and nevermore

ceased: "Welcome to Joan of Arc--way for the SAVIOR OF

FRANCE!" And there was another cry: "Cr‚cy is avenged! Poitiers

is avenged! Agincourt is avenged!--Patay shall live forever!"



Mad? Why, you never could imagine it in the world. The prisoners

were in the center of the column. When that came along and the

people caught sight of their masterful old enemy Talbot, that had

made them dance so long to his grim war-music, you may imagine

what the uproar was like if you can, for I can not describe it. They

were so glad to see him that presently they wanted to have him out

and hang him; so Joan had him brought up to the front to ride in

her protection. They made a striking pair.



Chapter 33 Joan's Five Great Deeds



YES, ORLEANS was in a delirium of felicity. She invited the

King, and made sumptuous preparations to receive him, but--he

didn't come. He was simply a serf at that time, and La Tremouille

was his master. Master and serf were visiting together at the

master's castle of Sully-sur-Loire.



At Beaugency Joan had engaged to bring about a reconciliation

between the Constable Richemont and the King. She took

Richemont to Sully-sur-Loire and made her promise good.



The great deeds of Joan of Arc are five:



1. The Raising of the Siege.



2. The Victory of Patay.



3. The Reconciliation at Sully-sur-Loire.



4. The Coronation of the King.



5. The Bloodless March.



We shall come to the Bloodless March presently (and the

Coronation). It was the victorious long march which Joan made

through the enemy's country from Gien to Rheims, and thence to

the gates of Paris, capturing every English town and fortress that

barred the road, from the beginning of the journey to the end of it;

and this by the mere force of her name, and without shedding a

drop of blood--perhaps the most extraordinary campaign in this

regard in history--this is the most glorious of her military exploits.



The Reconciliation was one of Joan's most important

achievements. No one else could have accomplished it; and, in

fact, no one else of high consequence had any disposition to try. In

brains, in scientific warfare, and in statesmanship the Constable

Richemont was the ablest man in France. His loyalty was sincere;

his probity was above suspicion--(and it made him sufficiently

conspicuous in that trivial and conscienceless Court).



In restoring Richemont to France, Joan made thoroughly secure the

successful completion of the great work which she had begun. She

had never seen Richemont until he came to her with his little army.

Was it not wonderful that at a glance she should know him for the

one man who could finish and perfect her work and establish it in

perpetuity? How was it that that child was able to do this? It was

because she had the "seeing eye," as one of our knights had once

said. Yes, she had that great gift--almost the highest and rarest that

has been granted to man. Nothing of an extraordinary sort was still

to be done, yet the remaining work could not safely be left to the

King's idiots; for it would require wise statesmanship and long and

patient though desultory hammering of the enemy. Now and then,

for a quarter of a century yet, there would be a little fighting to do,

and a handy man could carry that on with small disturbance to the

rest of the country; and little by little, and with progressive

certainty, the English would disappear from France.



And that happened. Under the influence of Richemont the King

became at a later time a man--a man, a king, a brave and capable

and determined soldier. Within six years after Patay he was

leading storming parties himself; fighting in fortress ditches up to

his waist in water, and climbing scaling-ladders under a furious

fire with a pluck that would have satisfied even Joan of Arc. In

time he and Richemont cleared away all the English; even from

regions where the people had been under their mastership for three

hundred years. In such regions wise and careful work was

necessary, for the English rule had been fair and kindly; and men

who have been ruled in that way are not always anxious for a

change.



Which of Joan's five chief deeds shall we call the chiefest? It is my

thought that each in its turn was that. This is saying that, taken as a

whole, they equalized each other, and neither was then greater than

its mate.



Do you perceive? Each was a stage in an ascent. To leave out one

of them would defeat the journey; to achieve one of them at the

wrong time and in the wrong place would have the same effect.



Consider the Coronation. As a masterpiece of diplomacy, where

can you find its superior in our history? Did the King suspect its

vast importance? No. Did his ministers? No. Did the astute

Bedford, representative of the English crown? No. An advantage

of incalculable importance was here under the eyes of the King

and of Bedford; the King could get it by a bold stroke, Bedford

could get it without an effort; but, being ignorant of its value,

neither of them put forth his hand. Of all the wise people in high

office in France, only one knew the priceless worth of this

neglected prize--the untaught child of seventeen, Joan of Arc--and

she had known it from the beginning as an essential detail of her

mission.



How did she know it? It was simple: she was a peasant. That tells

the whole story. She was of the people and knew the people; those

others moved in a loftier sphere and knew nothing much about

them. We make little account of that vague, formless, inert mass,

that mighty underlying force which we call "the people"--an

epithet which carries contempt with it. It is a strange attitude; for

at bottom we know that the throne which the people support

stands, and that when that support is removed nothing in this world

can save it.



Now, then, consider this fact, and observe its importance.

Whatever the parish priest believes his flock believes; they love

him, they revere him; he is their unfailing friend, their dauntless

protector, their comforter in sorrow, their helper in their day of

need; he has their whole confidence; what he tells them to do, that

they will do, with a blind and affectionate obedience, let it cost

what it may. Add these facts thoughtfully together, and what is the

sum? This: The parish priest governs the nation. What is the King,

then, if the parish priest withdraws his support and deny his

authority? Merely a shadow and no King; let him resign.



Do you get that idea? Then let us proceed. A priest is consecrated

to his office by the awful hand of God, laid upon him by his

appointed representative on earth. That consecration is final;

nothing can undo it, nothing can remove it. Neither the Pope nor

any other power can strip the priest of his office; God gave it, and

it is forever sacred and secure. The dull parish knows all this. To

priest and parish, whatsoever is anointed of God bears an office

whose authority can no longer be disputed or assailed. To the

parish priest, and to his subjects the nation, an uncrowned king is a

similitude of a person who has been named for holy orders but has

not been consecrated; he has no office, he has not been ordained,

another may be appointed to his place. In a word, an uncrowned

king is a doubtful king; but if God appoint him and His servant the

Bishop anoint him, the doubt is annihilated; the priest and the

parish are his loyal subjects straightway, and while he lives they

will recognize no king but him.



To Joan of Arc, the peasant-girl, Charles VII. was no King until he

was crowned; to her he was only the Dauphin; that is to say, the

heir. If I have ever made her call him King, it was a mistake; she

called him the Dauphin, and nothing else until after the

Coronation. It shows you as in a mirror--for Joan was a mirror in

which the lowly hosts of France were clearly reflected--that to all

that vast underlying force called "the people," he was no King but

only Dauphin before his crowning, and was indisputably and

irrevocably King after it.



Now you understand what a colossal move on the political

chess-board the Coronation was. Bedford realized this by and by,

and tried to patch up his mistake by crowning his King; but what

good could that do? None in the world.



Speaking of chess, Joan's great acts may be likened to that game.

Each move was made in its proper order, and it as great and

effective because it was made in its proper order and not out of it.

Each, at the time made, seemed the greatest move; but the final

result made them all recognizable as equally essential and equally

important. This is the game, as played:



1. Joan moves to Orleans and Patay--check.



2. Then moves the Reconciliation--but does not proclaim check, it

being a move for position, and to take effect later.



3. Next she moves the Coronation--check.



4. Next, the Bloodless March--check.



5. Final move (after her death), the reconciled Constable

Richemont to the French King's elbow--checkmate.



Chapter 34 The Jests of the Burgundians



THE CAMPAIGN of the Loire had as good as opened the road to

Rheims. There was no sufficient reason now why the Coronation

should not take place. The Coronation would complete the mission

which Joan had received from heaven, and then she would be

forever done with war, and would fly home to her mother and her

sheep, and never stir from the hearthstone and happiness any more.

That was her dream; and she could not rest, she was so impatient

to see it fulfilled. She became so possessed with this matter that I

began to lose faith in her two prophecies of her early death--and,

of course, when I found that faith wavering I encouraged it to

waver all the more.



The King was afraid to start to Rheims, because the road was

mile-posted with English fortresses, so to speak. Joan held them in

light esteem and not things to be afraid of in the existing modified

condition of English confidence.



And she was right. As it turned out, the march to Rheims was

nothing but a holiday excursion: Joan did not even take any

artillery along, she was so sure it would not be necessary. We

marched from Gien twelve thousand strong. This was the 29th of

June. The Maid rode by the side of the King; on his other side was

the Duke d'Alen‡on. After the duke followed three other princes of

the blood. After these followed the Bastard of Orleans, the

Marshal de Boussac, and the Admiral of France. After these came

La Hire, Saintrailles, Tremouille, and a long procession of knights

and nobles.



We rested three days before Auxerre. The city provisioned the

army, and a deputation waited upon the King, but we did not enter

the place.



Saint-Florentin opened its gates to the King.



On the 4th of July we reached Saint-Fal, and yonder lay Troyes

before us--a town which had a burning interest for us boys; for we

remembered how seven years before, in the pastures of Domremy,

the Sunflower came with his black flag and brought us the

shameful news of the Treaty of Troyes--that treaty which gave

France to England, and a daughter of our royal line in marriage to

the Butcher of Agincourt. That poor town was not to blame, of

course; yet we flushed hot with that old memory, and hoped there

would be a misunderstanding here, for we dealry wanted to storm

the place and burn it. It was powerfully garrisoned by English and

Burgundian soldiery, and was expecting reinforcements from

Paris. Before night we camped before its gates and made rough

work with a sortie which marched out against us.



Joan summoned Troyes to surrender. Its commandant, seeing that

she had no artillery, scoffed at the idea, and sent her a grossly

insulting reply. Five days we consulted and negotiated. No result.

The King was about to turn back now and give up. He was afraid

to go on, leaving this strong place in his rear. Then La Hire put in a

word, with a slap in it for some of his Majesty's advisers:



"The Maid of Orleans undertook this expedition of her own

motion; and it is my mind that it is her judgment that should be

followed here, and not that of any other, let him be of whatsoever

breed and standing he may."



There was wisdom and righteousness in that. So the King sent for

the Maid, and asked her how she thought the prospect looked. She

said, without any tone of doubt or question in her voice:



"In three days' time the place is ours."



The smug Chancellor put in a word now:



"If we were sure of it we would wait her six days."



"Six days, forsooth! Name of God, man, we will enter the gates

to-morrow!"



Then she mounted, and rode her lines, crying out:



"Make preparation--to your work, friends, to your work! We

assault at dawn!"



She worked hard that night, slaving away with her own hands like

a common soldier. She ordered fascines and fagots to be prepared

and thrown into the fosse, thereby to bridge it; and in this rough

labor she took a man's share.



At dawn she took her place at the head of the storming force and

the bugles blew the assault. At that moment a flag of truce was

flung to the breeze from the walls, and Troyes surrendered without

firing a shot.



The next day the King with Joan at his side and the Paladin

bearing her banner entered the town in state at the head of the

army. And a goodly army it was now, for it had been growing ever

bigger and bigger from the first.



And now a curious thing happened. By the terms of the treaty

made with the town the garrison of English and Burgundian

soldiery were to be allowed to carry away their "goods" with them.

This was well, for otherwise how would they buy the wherewithal

to live? Very well; these people were all to go out by the one gate,

and at the time set for them to depart we young fellows went to

that gate, along with the Dwarf, to see the march-out. Presently

here they came in an interminable file, the foot-soldiers in the

lead. As they approached one could see that each bore a burden of

a bulk and weight to sorely tax his strength; and we said among

ourselves, truly these folk are well off for poor common soldiers.

When they were come nearer, what do you think? Every rascal of

them had a French prisoner on his back! They were carrying away

their "goods," you see--their property--strictly according to the

permission granted by the treaty.



Now think how clever that was, how ingenious. What could a body

say? what could a body do? For certainly these people were within

their right. These prisoners were property; nobody could deny that.

My dears, if those had been English captives, conceive of the

richness of that booty! For English prisoners had been scarce and

precious for a hundred years; whereas it was a different matter

with French prisoners. They had been over-abundant for a century.

The possessor of a French prisoner did not hold him long for

ransom, as a rule, but presently killed him to save the cost of his

keep. This shows you how small was the value of such a

possession in those times. When we took Troyes a calf was worth

thirty francs, a sheep sixteen, a French prisoner eight. It was an

enormous price for those other animals--a price which naturally

seems incredible to you. It was the war, you see. It worked two

ways: it made meat dear and prisoners cheap.



Well, here were these poor Frenchmen being carried off. What

could we do? Very little of a permanent sort, but we did what we

could. We sent a messenger flying to Joan, and we and the French

guards halted the procession for a parley--to gain time, you see. A

big Burgundian lost his temper and swore a great oath that none

should stop him; he would go, and would take his prisoner with

him. But we blocked him off, and he saw that he was mistaken

about going--he couldn't do it. He exploded into the maddest

cursings and revilings, then, and, unlashing his prisoner from his

back, stood him up, all bound and helpless; then drew his knife,

and said to us with a light of sarcasting triumph in his eye:



"I may not carry him away, you say--yet he is mine, none will

dispute it. Since I may not convey him hence, this property of

mine, there is another way. Yes, I can kill him; not even the dullest

among you will question that right. Ah, you had not thought of

that--vermin!"



That poor starved fellow begged us with his piteous eyes to save

him; then spoke, and said he had a wife and little children at home.

Think how it wrung our heartstrings. But what could we do? The

Burgundian was within his right. We could only beg and plead for

the prisoner. Which we did. And the Burgundian enjoyed it. He

stayed his hand to hear more of it, and laugh at it. That stung. Then

the Dwarf said:



"Prithee, young sirs, let me beguile him; for when a matter

requiring permission is to the fore, I have indeed a gift in that sort,

as any will tell you that know me well. You smile; and that is

punishment for my vanity; and fairly earned, I grant you. Still, if I

may toy a little, just a little--" saying which he stepped to the

Burgundian and began a fair soft speech, all of goodly and gentle

tenor; and in the midst he mentioned the Maid; and was going on

to say how she out of her good heart would prize and praise this

compassionate deed which he was about to-- It was as far as he

got. The Burgundian burst into his smooth oration with an insult

leveled at Joan of Arc. We sprang forward, but the Dwarf, his face

all livid, brushed us aside and said, in a most grave and earnest

way:



"I crave your patience. Am not I her guard of honor? This is my

affair."



And saying this he suddenly shot his right hand out and gripped the

great Burgundian by the throat, and so held him upright on his feet.

"You have insulted the Maid," he said; "and the Maid is France.

The tongue that does that earns a long furlough."



One heard the muffled cracking of bones. The Burgundian's eyes

began to protrude from their sockets and stare with a leaden

dullness at vacancy. The color deepened in his face and became an

opaque purple. His hands hung down limp, his body collapsed with

a shiver, every muscle relaxed its tension and ceased from its

function. The Dwarf took away his hand and the column of inert

mortality sank mushily to the ground.



We struck the bonds from the prisoner and told him he was free.

His crawling humbleness changed to frantic joy in a moment, and

his ghastly fear to a childish rage. He flew at that dead corpse and

kicked it, spat in its face, danced upon it, crammed mud into its

mouth, laughing, jeering, cursing, and volleying forth indecencies

and bestialities like a drunken fiend. It was a thing to be expected;

soldiering makes few saints. Many of the onlookers laughed,

others were indifferent, none was surprised. But presently in his

mad caperings the freed man capered within reach of the waiting

file, and another Burgundian promptly slipped a knife through his

neck, and down he went with a death-shriek, his brilliant artery

blood spurting ten feet as straight and bright as a ray of light.

There was a great burst of jolly laughter all around from friend and

foe alike; and thus closed one of the pleasantest incidents of my

checkered military life.



And now came Joan hurrying, and deeply troubled. She considered

the claim of the garrison, then said:



"You have right upon your side. It is plain. It was a careless word

to put in the treaty, and covers too much. But ye may not take

these poor men away. They are French, and I will not have it. The

King shall ransom them, every one. Wait till I send you word from

him; and hurt no hair of their heads; for I tell you, I who speak,

that that would cost you very dear."



That settled it. The prisoners were safe for one while, anyway.

Then she rode back eagerly and required that thing of the King,

and would listen to no paltering and no excuses. So the King told

her to have her way, and she rode straight back and bought the

captives free in his name and let them go.



Chapter 35 The Heir of France is Crowned



IT WAS here hat we saw again the Grand Master of the King's

Household, in whose castle Joan was guest when she tarried at

Chinon in those first days of her coming out of her own country.

She made him Bailiff of Troyes now by the King's permission.



And now we marched again; Chƒlons surrendered to us; and there

by Chƒlons in a talk, Joan, being asked if she had no fears for the

future, said yes, one--treachery. Who would believe it? who could

dream it? And yet in a sense it was prophecy. Truly, man is a

pitiful animal.



We marched, marched, kept on marching; and at last, on the 16th

of July, we came in sight of our goal, and saw the great

cathedraled towers of Rheims rise out of the distance! Huzza after

huzza swept the army from van to rear; and as for Joan of Arc,

there where she sat her horse gazing, clothed all in white armor,

dreamy, beautiful, and in her face a deep, deep joy, a joy not of

earth, oh, she was not flesh, she was a spirit! Her sublime mission

was closing--closing in flawless triumph. To-morrow she could

say, "It is finished--let me go free."



We camped, and the hurry and rush and turmoil of the grand

preparations began. The Archbishop and a great deputation

arrived; and after these came flock after flock, crowd after crowd,

of citizens and country-folk, hurrahing, in, with banners and

music, and flowed over the camp, one rejoicing inundation after

another, everybody drunk with happiness. And all night long

Rheims was hard at work, hammering away, decorating the town,

building triumphal arches and clothing the ancient cathedral

within and without in a glory of opulent splendors.



We moved betimes in the morning; the coronation ceremonies

would begin at nine and last five hours. We were aware that the

garrison of English and Burgundian soldiers had given up all

thought of resisting the Maid, and that we should find the gates

standing hospitably open and the whole city ready to welcome us

with enthusiasm.



It was a delicious morning, brilliant with sunshine, but cool and

fresh and inspiring. The army was in great form, and fine to see, as

it uncoiled from its lair fold by fold, and stretched away on the

final march of the peaceful Coronation Campaign.



Joan, on her black horse, with the Lieutenant-General and the

personal staff grouped about her, took post for a final review and a

good-by; for she was not expecting to ever be a soldier again, or

ever serve with these or any other soldiers any more after this day.

The army knew this, and believed it was looking for the last time

upon the girlish face of its invincible little Chief, its pet, its pride,

its darling, whom it had ennobled in its private heart with

nobilities of its own creation, call her "Daughter of God," "Savior

of France," "Victory's Sweetheart," "The Page of Christ," together

with still softer titles which were simply na‹f and frank

endearments such as men are used to confer upon children whom

they love. And so one saw a new thing now; a thing bred of the

emotion that was present there on both sides. Always before, in the

march-past, the battalions had gone swinging by in a storm of

cheers, heads up and eyes flashing, the drums rolling, the bands

braying p‘ans of victory; but now there was nothing of that. But

for one impressive sound, one could have closed his eyes and

imagined himself in a world of the dead. That one sound was all

that visited the ear in the summer stillness--just that one sound--the

muffled tread of the marching host. As the serried masses drifted

by, the men put their right hands up to their temples, palms to the

front, in military salute, turning their eyes upon Joan's face in mute

God-bless-you and farewell, and keeping them there while they

could. They still kept their hands up in reverent salute many steps

after they had passed by. Every time Joan put her handkerchief to

her eyes you could see a little quiver of emotion crinkle along the

faces of the files.



The march-past after a victory is a thing to drive the heart mad

with jubilation; but this one was a thing to break it.



We rode now to the King's lodgins, which was the Archbishop's

country palace; and he was presently ready, and we galloped off

and took position at the head of the army. By this time the

country-people were arriving in multitudes from every direction

and massing themselves on both sides of the road to get sight of

Joan--just as had been done every day since our first day's march

began. Our march now lay through the grassy plain, and those

peasants made a dividing double border for that plain. They

stretched right down through it, a broad belt of bright colors on

each side of the road; for every peasant girl and woman in it had a

white jacket on her body and a crimson skirt on the rest of her.

Endless borders made of poppies and lilies stretching away in front

of us--that is what it looked like. And that is the kind of lane we

had been marching through all these days. Not a lane between

multitudinous flowers standing upright on their stems--no, these

flowers were always kneeling; kneeling, these human flowers, with

their hands and faces lifted toward Joan of Arc, and the grateful

tears streaming down. And all along, those closest to the road

hugged her feet and kissed them and laid their wet cheeks fondly

against them. I never, during all those days, saw any of either sex

stand while she passed, nor any man keep his head covered.

Afterward in the Great Trial these touching scenes were used as a

weapon against her. She had been made an object of adoration by

the people, and this was proof that she was a heretic--so claimed

that unjust court.



As we drew near the city the curving long sweep of ramparts and

towers was gay with fluttering flags and black with masses of

people; and all the air was vibrant with the crash of artillery and

gloomed with drifting clouds of smoke. We entered the gates in

state and moved in procession through the city, with all the guilds

and industries in holiday costume marching in our rear with their

banners; and all the route was hedged with a huzzaing crush of

people, and all the windows were full and all the roofs; and from

the balconies hung costly stuffs of rich colors; and the waving of

handkerchiefs, seen in perspective through a long vista, was like a

snowstorm.



Joan's name had been introduced into the prayers of the

Church--an honor theretofore restricted to royalty. But she had a

dearer honor and an honor more to be proud of, from a humbler

source: the common people had had leaden medals struck which

bore her effigy and her escutcheon, and these they wore as charms.

One saw them everywhere.



From the Archbishop's Palace, where we halted, and where the

King and Joan were to lodge, the King sent to the Abbey Church of

St. Remi, which was over toward the gate by which we had entered

the city, for the Sainte Ampoule, or flask of holy oil. This oil was

not earthly oil; it was made in heaven; the flask also. The flask,

with the oil in it, was brought down from heaven by a dove. It was

sent down to St. Remi just as he was going to baptize King Clovis,

who had become a Christian. I know this to be true. I had known it

long before; for PŠre Fronte told me in Domremy. I cannot tell you

how strange and awful it made me feel when I saw that flask and

knew I was looking with my own eyes upon a thing which had

actually been in heave, a thing which had been seen by angels,

perhaps; and by God Himself of a certainty, for He sent it. And I

was looking upon it--I. At one time I could have touched it. But I

was afraid; for I could not know but that God had touched it. It is

most probable that He had.



From this flask Clovis had been anointed; and from it all the kings

of France had been anointed since. Yes, ever since the time of

Clovis, and that was nine hundred years. And so, as I have said,

that flask of holy oil was sent for, while we waited. A coronation

without that would not have been a coronation at all, in my belief.



Now in order to get the flask, a most ancient ceremonial had to be

gone through with; otherwise the Abb‚ of St. Remi, hereditary

guardian in perpetuity of the oil, would not deliver it. So, in

accordance with custom, the King deputed five great nobles to ride

in solemn state and richly armed and accoutered, they and their

steeds, to the Abbey Church as a guard of honor to the Archbishop

of Rheims and his canons, who were to bear the King's demand for

the oil. When the five great lords were ready to start, they knelt in

a row and put up their mailed hands before their faces, palm joined

to palm, and swore upon their lives to conduct the sacred vessel

safely, and safely restore it again to the Church of St. Remi after

the anointing of the King. The Archbishop and his subordinates,

thus nobly escorted, took their way to St. Remi. The Archbishop

was in grand costume, with his miter on his head and his cross in

his hand. At the door of St. Remi they halted and formed, to

receive the holy vial. Soon one heard the deep tones of the organ

and of chanting men; then one saw a long file of lights

approaching through the dim church. And so came the Abbot, in

his sacerdotal panoply, bearing the vial, with his people following

after. He delivered it, with solemn ceremonies, to the Archbishop;

then the march back began, and it was most impressive; for it

moved, the whole way, between two multitudes of men and

women who lay flat upon their faces and prayed in dumb silence

and in dread while that awful thing went by that had been in

heaven.



This august company arrived at the great west door of the

cathedral; and as the Archbishop entered a noble anthem rose and

filled the vast building. The cathedral was packed with

people--people in thousands. Only a wide space down the center

had been kept free. Down this space walked the Archbishop and

his canons, and after them followed those five stately figures in

splendid harness, each bearing his feudal banner--and riding!



Oh, that was a magnificent thing to see. Riding down the

cavernous vastness of the building through the rich lights

streaming in long rays from the pictured windows--oh, there was

never anything so grand!



They rode clear to the choir--as much as four hundred feet from

the door, it was said. Then the Archbishop dismissed them, and

they made deep obeisance till their plumes touched their horses'

necks, then made those proud prancing and mincing and dancing

creatures go backward all the way to the door--which was pretty to

see, and graceful; then they stood them on their hind-feet and spun

them around and plunged away and disappeared.



For some minutes there was a deep hush, a waiting pause; a silence

so profound that it was as if all those packed thousands there were

steeped in dreamless slumber--why, you could even notice the

faintest sounds, like the drowsy buzzing of insects; then came a

mighty flood of rich strains from four hundred silver trumpets, and

then, framed in the pointed archway of the great west door,

appeared Joan and the King. They advanced slowly, side by side,

through a tempest of welcome--explosion after explosion of cheers

and cries, mingled with the deep thunders of the organ and rolling

tides of triumphant song from chanting choirs. Behind Joan and

the King came the Paladin and the Banner displayed; and a

majestic figure he was, and most proud and lofty in his bearing, for

he knew that the people were marking him and taking note of the

gorgeous state dress which covered his armor.



At his side was the Sire d'Albret, proxy for the Constable of

France, bearing the Sword of State.



After these, in order of rank, came a body royally attired

representing the lay peers of France; it consisted of three princes of

the blood, and La Tremouille and the young De Laval brothers.



These were followed by the representatives of the ecclesiastical

peers--the Archbishop of Rheims, and the Bishops of Laon,

Chƒlons, Orleans, and one other.



Behind these came the Grand Staff, all our great generals and

famous names, and everybody was eager to get a sight of them.

Through all the din one could hear shouts all along that told you

where two of them were: "Live the Bastard of Orleans!" "Satan La

Hire forever!"



The august procession reached its appointed place in time, and the

solemnities of the Coronation began. They were long and

imposing--with prayers, and anthems, and sermons, and everything

that is right for such occasions; and Joan was at the King's side all

these hours, with her Standard in her hand. But at last came the

grand act: the King took the oath, he was anointed with the sacred

oil; a splendid personage, followed by train-bearers and other

attendants, approached, bearing the Crown of France upon a

cushion, and kneeling offered it. The King seemed to hesitate--in

fact, did hesitate; for he put out his hand and then stopped with it

there in the air over the crown, the fingers in the attitude of taking

hold of it. But that was for only a moment--though a moment is a

notable something when it stops the heartbeat of twenty thousand

people and makes them catch their breath. Yes, only a moment;

then he caught Joan's eye, and she gave him a look with all the joy

of her thankful great soul in it; then he smiled, and took the Crown

of France in his hand, and right finely and right royally lifted it up

and set it upon his head.



Then what a crash there was! All about us cries and cheers, and the

chanting of the choirs and groaning of the organ; and outside the

clamoring of the bells and the booming of the cannon. The

fantastic dream, the incredible dream, the impossible dream of the

peasant-child stood fulfilled; the English power was broken, the

Heir of France was crowned.



She was like one transfigured, so divine was the joy that shone in

her face as she sank to her knees at the King's feet and looked up at

him through her tears. Her lips were quivering, and her words

came soft and low and broken:



"Now, O gentle King, is the pleasure of God accomplished

according to His command that you should come to Rheims and

receive the crown that belongeth of right to you, and unto none

other. My work which was given me to do is finished; give me

your peace, and let me go back to my mother, who is poor and old,

and has need of me."



The King raised her up, and there before all that host he praised

her great deeds in most noble terms; and there he confirmed her

nobility and titles, making her the equal of a count in rank, and

also appointed a household and officers for her according to her

dignity; and then he said:



"You have saved the crown. Speak--require--demand; and

whatsoever grace you ask it shall be granted, though it make the

kingdom poor to meet it."



Now that was fine, that was royal. Joan was on her knees again

straightway, and said:



"Then, O gentle King, if out of your compassion you will speak the

word, I pray you give commandment that my village, poor and

hard pressed by reason of war, may have its taxes remitted."



"It is so commanded. Say on."



"That is all."



"All? Nothing but that?"



"It is all. I have no other desire."



"But that is nothing--less than nothing. Ask--do not be afraid."



"Indeed, I cannot, gentle King. Do not press me. I will not have

aught else, but only this alone."



The King seemed nonplussed, and stood still a moment, as if

trying to comprehend and realize the full stature of this strange

unselfishness. Then he raised his head and said:



"Whe has one a kingdom and crowned its King; and all she asks

and all she will take is this poor grace--and even this is for others,

not for herself. And it is well; her act being proportioned to the

dignity of one who carries in her head and heart riches which

outvalue any that any King could add, though he gave his all. She

shall have her way. Now, therefore, it is decreed that from this day

forth Domremy, natal village of Joan of Arc, Deliverer of France,

called the Maid of Orleans, is freed from all taxation forever."

Whereat the silver horns blew a jubilant blast.



There, you see, she had had a vision of this very scene the time she

was in a trance in the pastures of Domremy and we asked her to

name to boon she would demand of the King if he should ever

chance to tell her she might claim one. But whether she had the

vision or not, this act showed that after all the dizzy grandeurs that

had come upon her, she was still the same simple, unselfish

creature that she was that day.



Yes, Charles VII. remitted those taxes "forever." Often the

gratitude of kings and nations fades and their promises are

forgotten or deliberately violated; but you, who are children of

France, should remember with pride that France has kept this one

faithfully. Sixty-three years have gone by since that day. The taxes

of the region wherein Domremy lies have been collected

sixty-three times since then, and all the villages of that region have

paid except that one--Domremy. The tax-gatherer never visits

Domremy. Domremy has long ago forgotten what that dread

sorrow-sowing apparition is like. Sixty-three tax-books have been

filed meantime, and they lie yonder with the other public records,

and any may see them that desire it. At the top of every page in the

sixty-three books stands the name of a village, and below that5

name its weary burden of taxation is figured out and displayed; in

the case of all save one. It is true, just as I tell you. In each of the

sixty-three books there is a page headed "Domremi," but under that

name not a figure appears. Where the figures should be, there are

three words written; and the same words have been written every

year for all these years; yes, it is a blank page, with always those

grateful words lettered across the face of it--a touching memorial.

Thus:



__________________________________ | | | DOMREMI | | | |

RIEN--LA FUCELLE | |__________________________________|

"NOTHING--THE MAID OF ORLEANS." How brief it is; yet how

much it says! It is the nation speaking. You have the spectacle of

that unsentimental thing, a Government, making reverence to that

name and saying to its agent, "Uncover, and pass on; it is France

that commands." Yes, the promise has been kept; it will be kept

always; "forever" was the King's word. [1] At two o'clock in the

afternoon the ceremonies of the Coronation came at last to an end;

then the procession formed once more, with Joan and the King at

its head, and took up its solemn march through the midst of the

church, all instruments and all people making such clamor of

rejoicing noises as was, indeed, a marvel to hear. An so ended the

third of the great days of Joan's life. And how close together they

stand--May 8th, June 18th, July 17th!



[1] IT was faithfully kept during three hundred and sixty years and

more; then the over-confident octogenarian's prophecy failed.

During the tumult of the French Revolution the promise was

forgotten and the grace withdrawn. It has remained in disuse ever

since. Joan never asked to be remembered, but France has

remembered her with an inextinguishable love and reverence; Joan

never asked for a statue, but France has lavished them upon her;

Joan never asked for a church for Domremy, but France is building

one; Joan never asked for saintship, but even that is impending.

Everything which Joan of Arc did not ask for has been given her,

and with a noble profusion; but the one humble little thing which

she did ask for and get has been taken away from her. There is

something infinitely pathetic about this. France owes Domremy a

hundred years of taxes, and could hardly find a citizen within her

borders who would vote against the payment of the debt. -- NOTE

BY THE TRANSLATOR.



Chapter 36 Joan Hears News from Home



WE MOUNTED and rode, a spectacle to remember, a most noble

display of rich vestments and nodding plumes, and as we moved

between the banked multitudes they sank down all along abreast of

us as we advanced, like grain before the reaper, and kneeling

hailed with a rousing welcome the consecrated King and his

companion the Deliverer of France. But by and by when we had

paraded about the chief parts of the city and were come near to the

end of our course, we being now approaching the Archbishop's

palace, one saw on the right, hard by the inn that is called the

Zebra, a strange t--two men not kneeling but standing! Standing in

the front rank of the kneelers; unconscious, transfixed, staring.

Yes, and clothed in the coarse garb of the peasantry, these two.

Two halberdiers sprang at them in a fury to teach them better

manners; but just as they seized them Joan cried out "Forbear!"

and slid from her saddle and flung her arms about one of those

peasants, calling him by all manner of endearing names, and

sobbing. For it was her father; and the other was her uncle, Laxart.



The news flew everywhere, and shouts of welcome were raised,

and in just one little moment those two despised and unknown

plebeians were become famous and popular and envied, and

everybody was in a fever to get sight of them and be able to say, all

their lives long, that they had seen the father of Joan of Arc and the

brother of her mother. How easy it was for her to do miracles like

to this! She was like the sun; on whatsoever dim and humble

object her rays fell, that thing was straightway drowned in glory.



All graciously the King said:



"Bring them to me."



And she brought them; she radiant with happiness and affection,

they trembling and scared, with their caps in their shaking hands;

and there before all the world the King gave them his hand to kiss,

while the people gazed in envy and admiration; and he said to old

D'Arc:



"Give God thanks for that you are father to this child, this

dispenser of immortalities. You who bear a name that will still live

in the mouths of men when all the race of kings has been

forgotten, it is not meet that you bare your head before the fleeting

fames and dignities of a day--cover yourself!" And truly he looked

right fine and princely when he said that. Then he gave order that

the Bailly of Rheims be brought; and when he was come, and

stood bent low and bare, the King said to him, "These two are

guests of France;" and bade him use them hospitably.



I may as well say now as later, that Papa D'Arc and Laxart were

stopping in that little Zebra inn, and that there they remained.

Finer quarters were offered them by the Bailly, also public

distinctions and brave entertainment; but they were frightened at

these projects, they being only humble and ignorant peasants; so

they begged off, and had peace. They could not have enjoyed such

things. Poor souls, they did not even know what to do with their

hands, and it took all their attention to keep from treading on

them. The Bailly did the best he could in the circumstances. He

made the innkeeper place a whole floor at their disposal, and told

him to provide everything they might desire, and charge all to the

city. Also the Bailly gave them a horse apiece and furnishings;

which so overwhelmed them with pride and delight and

astonishment that they couldn't speak a word; for in their lives they

had never dreamed of wealth like this, and could not believe, at

first, that the horses were real and would not dissolve to a mist and

blow away. They could not unglue their minds from those

grandeurs, and were always wrenching the conversation out of its

groove and dragging the matter of animals into it, so that they

could say "my horse" here, and "my horse" there and yonder and

all around, and taste the words and lick their chops over them, and

spread their legs and hitch their thumbs in their armpits, and feel

as the good God feels when He looks out on His fleets of

constellations plowing the awful deeps of space and reflects with

satisfaction that they are His--all His. Well, they were the happiest

old children one ever saw, and the simplest.



The city gave a grand banquet to the King and Joan in

mid-afternoon, and to the Court and the Grand Staff; and about the

middle of it PŠre D'Arc and Laxart were sent for, but would not

venture until it was promised that they might sit in a gallery and be

all by themselves and see all that was to be seen and yet be

unmolested. And so they sat there and looked down upon the

splendid spectacle, and were moved till the tears ran down their

cheeks to see the unbelievable honors that were paid to their small

darling, and how na‹vely serene and unafraid she sat there with

those consuming glories beating upon her.



But at last her serenity was broken up. Yes, it stood the strain of

the King's gracious speech; and of D'Alen‡on's praiseful words,

and the Bastard's; and even La Hire's thunder-blast, which took the

place by storm; but at last, as I have said, they brought a force to

bear which was too strong for her. For at the close the King put up

his hand to command silence, and so waited, with his hand up, till

every sound was dead and it was as if one could almost  the

stillness, so profound it was. Then out of some remote corner of

that vast place there rose a plaintive voice, and in tones most

tender and sweet and rich came floating through that enchanted

hush our poor old simple song "L'Arbre F‚e le Bourlemont!" and

then Joan broke down and put her face in her hands and cried. Yes,

you see, all in a moment the pomps and grandeurs dissolved away

and she was a little child again herding her sheep with the tranquil

pastures stretched about her, and war and wounds and blood and

death and the mad frenzy and turmoil of battle a dream. Ah, that

shows you the power of music, that magician of magicians, who

lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass

away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in

flesh.



That was the King's invention, that sweet and dear surprise.

Indeed, he had fine things hidden away in his nature, though one

seldom got a glimpse of them, with that scheming Tremouille and

those others always standing in the light, and he so indolently

content to save himself fuss and argument and let them have their

way.



At the fall of night we the Domremy contingent of the personal

staff were with the father and uncle at the inn, in their private

parlor, brewing generous drinks and breaking ground for a homely

talk about Domremy and the neighbors, when a large parcel

arrived from Joan to be kept till she came; and soon she came

herself and sent her guard away, saying she would take one of her

father's rooms and sleep under his roof, and so be at home again.

We of the staff rose and stood, as was meet, until she made us sit.

Then she turned and saw that the two old men had gotten up too,

and were standing in an embarrassed and unmilitary way; which

made her want to laugh, but she kept it in, as not wishing to hurt

them; and got them to their seats and snuggled down between

them, and took a hand of each of them upon her knees and nestled

her own hands in them, and said:



"Now we will nave no more ceremony, but be kin and playmates

as in other times; for I am done with the great wars now, and you

two will take me home with you, and I shall see--" She stopped,

and for a moment her happy face sobered, as if a doubt or a

presentiment had flitted through her mind; then it cleared again,

and she said, with a passionate yearning, "Oh, if the day were but

come and we could start!"



The old father was surprised, and said:



"Why, child, are you in earnest? Would you leave doing these

wonders that make you to be praised by everybody while there is

still so much glory to be won; and would you go out from this

grand comradeship with princes and generals to be a drudging

villager again and a nobody? It is not rational."



"No," said the uncle, Laxart, "it is amazing to hear, and indeed not

understandable. It is a stranger thing to hear her say she will stop

the soldiering that it was to hear her say she would begin it; and I

who speak to you can say in all truth that that was the strangest

word that ever I had heard till this day and hour. I would it could

be explained."



"It is not difficult," said Joan. "I was not ever fond of wounds and

suffering, nor fitted by my nature to inflict them; and quarrelings

did always distress me, and noise and tumult were against my

liking, my disposition being toward peace and quietness, and love

for all things that have life; and being made like this, how could I

bear to think of wars and blood, and the pain that goes with them,

and the sorrow and mourning that follow after? But by his angels

God laid His great commands upon me, and could I disobey? I did

as I was bid. Did He command me to do many things? No; only

two: to raise the siege of Orleans, and crown the King at Rheims.

The task is finished, and I am free. Has ever a poor soldier fallen

in my sight, whether friend or foe, and I not felt the pain in my

own body, and the grief of his home-mates in my own heart? No,

not one; and, oh, it is such bliss to know that my release is won,

and that I shall not any more see these cruel things or suffer these

tortures of the mind again! Then why should I not go to my village

and be as I was before? It is heaven! and ye wonder that I desire it.

Ah, ye are men--just men! My mother would understand."



They didn't quite know what to say; so they sat still awhile,

looking pretty vacant. Then old D'Arc said:



"Yes, your mother--that is true. I never saw such a woman. She

worries, and worries, and worries; and wakes nights, and lies so,

thinking--that is, worrying; worrying about you. And when the

night storms go raging along, she moans and says, 'Ah, God pity

her, she is out in this with her poor wet sodliers.' And when the

lightning glares and the thunder crashes she wrings her hands and

trembles, saying, 'It is like the awful cannon and the flash, and

yonder somewhere she is riding down upon the spouting guns and I

not there to protect her."



"Ah, poor mother, it is pity, it is pity!"



"Yes, a most strange woman, as I have noticed a many times.

When there is news of a victory and all the village goes mad with

pride and joy, she rushes here and there in a maniacal frenzy till

she finds out the one only thing she cares to know--that you are

safe; then down she goes on her knees in the dirt and praises God

as long as there is any breath left in her body; and all on your

account, for she never mentions the battle once. And always she

says, 'Now it is over--now France is saved--now she will come

home'--and always is disappointed and goes about mourning."



"Don't, father! it breaks my heart. I will be so good to her when I

get home. I will do her work for her, and be her comfort, and she

shall not suffer any more through me."



There was some more talk of this sort, then Uncle Laxart said:



"You have done the will of God, dear, and are quits; it is true, and

none may deny it; but what of the King? You are his best soldier;

what if he command you to stay?"



That was a crusher--and sudden! It took Joan a moment or two to

recover from the shock of it; then she said, quite simply and

resignedly:



"The King is my Lord; I am his servant." She was silent and

thoughtful a little while, then she brightened up and said, cheerily,

"But let us drive such thoughts away--this is no time for them. Tell

me about home."



So the two old gossips talked and talked; talked about everything

and everybody in the village; and it was good to hear. Joan out of

her kindness tried to get us into the conversation, but that failed, of

course. She was the Commander-in-Chief, we were nobodies; her

name was the mightiest in France, we were invisible atoms; she

was the comrade of princes and heroes, we of the humble and

obscure; she held rank above all Personages and all Puissances

whatsoever in the whole earth, by right of baring her commission

direct from God. To put it in one word, she was JOAN OF

ARC--and when that is said, all is said. To us she was divine.

Between her and us lay the bridgeless abyss which that word

implies. We could not be familiar with her. No, you can see

yourselves that that would have been impossible.



And yet she was so human, too, and so good and kind and dear and

loving and cheery and charming and unspoiled and unaffected!

Those are all the words I think of now, but they are not enough;

no, they are too few and colorless and meager to tell it all, or tell

the half. Those simple old men didn't realize her; they couldn't;

they had never known any people but human beings, and so they

had no other standard to measure her by. To them, after their first

little shyness had worn off, she was just a girl--that was all. It was

amazing. It made one shiver, sometimes, to see how calm and easy

and comfortable they were in her presence, and hear them talk to

her exactly as they would have talked to any other girl in France.



Why, that simple old Laxart sat up there and droned out the most

tedious and empty tale one ever heard, and neither he nor Papa

D'Arc ever gave a thought to the badness of the etiquette of it, or

ever suspected that that foolish tale was anything but dignified and

valuable history. There was not an atom of value in it; and whilst

they thought it distressing and pathetic, it was in fact not pathetic

at all, but actually ridiculous. At least it seemed so to me, and it

seems so yet. Indeed, I know it was, because it made Joan laugh;

and the more sorrowful it got the more it made her laugh; and the

Paladin said that he could have laughed himself if she had not

been there, and No‰l Rainguesson said the same. It was about old

Laxart going to a funeral there at Domremy two or three weeks

back. He had spots all over his face and hands, and he got Joan to

rub some healing ointment on them, and while she was doing it,

and comforting him, and trying to say pitying things to him, he told

her how it happened. And first he asked her if she remembered

that black bull calf that she left behind when she came away, and

she said indeed she did, and he was a dear, and she loved him so,

and was he well?--and just drowned him in questions about that

creature. And he said it was a young bull now, and very frisky; and

he was to bear a principal hand at a funeral; and she said, "The

bull?" and he said, "No, myself"; but said the bull did take a hand,

but not because of his being invited, for he wasn't; but anyway he

was away over beyond the Fairy Tree, and fell asleep on the grass

with his Sunday funeral clothes on, and a long black rag on his hat

and hanging down his back; and when he woke he saw by the sun

how late it was, and not a moment to lose; and jumped up terribly

worried, and saw the young bull grazing there, and thought maybe

he could ride part way on him and gain time; so he tied a rope

around the bull's body to hold on by, and put a halter on him to

steer with, and jumped on and started; but it was all new to the

bull, and he was discontented with it, and scurried around and

bellowed and reared and pranced, and Uncle Laxart was satisfied,

and wanted to get off and go by the next bull or some other way

that was quieter, but he didn't dare try; and it was getting very

warm for him, too, and disturbing and wearisome, and not proper

for Sunday; but by and by the bull lost all his temper, and went

tearing down the slope with his tail in the air and blowing in the

most awful way; and just in the edge of the village he knocked

down some beehives, and the bees turned out and joined the

excursion, and soared along in a black cloud that nearly hid those

other two from sight, and prodded them both, and jabbed them and

speared them and spiked them, and made them bellow and shriek,

and shriek and bellow; and here they came roaring through the

village like a hurricane, and took the funeral procession right in

the center, and sent that section of it sprawling, and galloped over

it, and the rest scattered apart and fled screeching in every

direction, every person with a layer of bees on him, and not a rag

of that funeral left but the corpse; and finally the bull broke for the

river and jumped in, and when they fished Uncle Laxart out he was

nearly drowned, and his face looked like a pudding with raisins in

it. And then he turned around, this old simpleton, and looked a

long time in a dazed way at Joan where she had her face in a

cushion, dying, apparently, and says:



"What do you reckon she is laughing at?"



And old D'Arc stood looking at her the same way, sort of absently

scratching his head; but had to give it up, and said he didn't

know--"must have been something that happened when we weren't

noticing."



Yes, both of those old people thought that that tale was pathetic;

whereas to my mind it was purely ridiculous, and not in any way

valuable to any one. It seemed so to me then, and it seems so to me

yet. And as for history, it does not resemble history; for the office

of history is to furnish serious and important facts that teach;

whereas this strange and useless event teaches nothing; nothing

that I can see, except not to ride a bull to a funeral; and surely no

reflecting person needs to be taught that.



Chapter 37 Again to Arms



NOW THESE were nobles, you know, by decree of the

King!--these precious old infants. But they did not realize it; they

could not be called conscious of it; it was an abstraction, a

phantom; to them it had no substance; their minds could not take

hold of it. No, they did not bother about their nobility; they lived in

their horses. The horses were solid; they were visible facts, and

would make a mighty stir in Domremy. Presently something was

said about the Coronation, and old D'Arc said it was going to be a

grand thing to be able to say, when they got home, that they were

present in the very town itself when it happened. Joan looked

troubled, and said:



"Ah, that reminds me. You were here and you didn't send me word.

In the town, indeed! Why, you could have sat with the other

nobles, and ben welcome; and could have looked upon the

crowning itself, and carried that home to tell. Ah, why did you use

me so, and send me no word?"



The old father was embarrassed, now, quite visibly embarrassed,

and had the air of one who does not quite know what to say. But

Joan was looking up in his face, her hands upon his

shoulders--waiting. He had to speak; so presently he drew her to

his breast, which was heaving with emotion; and he said, getting

out his words with difficulty:



"There, hide your face, child, and let your old father humble

himself and make his confession. I--I--don't you see, don't you

understand?--I could not know that these grandeurs would not turn

your young head--it would be only natural. I might shame you

before these great per--"



"Father!"



"And then I was afraid, as remembering that cruel thing I said once

in my sinful anger. Oh, appointed of God to be a soldier, and the

greatest in the land! and in my ignorant anger I said I would drown

you with my own hands if you unsexed yourself and brought

shame to your name and family. Ah, how could I ever have said it,

and you so good and dear and innocent! I was afraid; for I was

guilty. You understand it now, my child, and you forgive?"



Do you see? Even that poor groping old land-crab, with his skull

full of pulp, had pride. Isn't it wonderful? And more--he had

conscience; he had a sense of right and wrong, such as it was; he

was able to find remorse. It looks impossible, it looks incredible,

but it is not. I believe that some day it will be found out that

peasants are people. Yes, beings in a great many respects like

ourselves. And I believe that some day they will find this out,

too--and then! Well, then I think they will rise up and demand to

be regarded as part of the race, and that by consequence there will

be trouble. Whenever one sees in a book or in a king's

proclamation those words "the nation," they bring before us the

upper classes; only those; we know no other "nation"; for us and

the kings no other "nation" exists. But from the day that I saw old

D'Arc the peasant acting and feeling just as I should have acted

and felt myself, I have carried the conviction in my heart that our

peasants are not merely animals, beasts of burden put here by the

good God to produce food and comfort for the "nation," but

something more and better. You look incredulous. Well, that is

your training; it is the training of everybody; but as for me, I thank

that incident for giving me a better light, and I have never

forgotten it.



Let me see--where was I? One's mind wanders around here and

there and yonder, when one is old. I think I said Joan comforted

him. Certainly, that is what she would do--there was no need to say

that. She coaxed him and petted him and caressed him, and laid

the memory of that old hard speech of his to rest. Laid it to rest

until she should be dead. Then he would remember it again--yes,

yes! Lord, how those things sting, and burn, and gnaw--the things

which we did against the innocent dead! And we say in our

anguish, "If they could only come back!" Which is all very well to

say, but, as far as I can see, it doesn't profit anything. In my

opinion the best way is not to do the thing in the first place. And I

am not alone in this; I have heard our two knights say the same

thing; and a man there in Orleans--no, I believe it was at

Beaugency, or one of those places--it seems more as if it was at

Beaugency than the others--this man said the same thing exactly;

almost the same words; a dark man with a cast in his eye and one

leg shorter than the other. His name was--was--it is singular that I

can't call that man's name; I had it in my mind only a moment ago,

and I know it begins with--no, I don't remember what it begins

with; but never mind, let it go; I will think of it presently, and then

I will tell you.



Well, pretty soon the old father wanted to know how Joan felt

when she was in the thick of a battle, with the bright blades

hacking and flashing all around her, and the blows rapping and

slatting on her shield, and blood gushing on her from the cloven

ghastly face and broken teeth of the neighbor at her elbow, and the

perilous sudden back surge of massed horses upon a person when

the front ranks give way before a heavy rush of the enemy, and

men tumble limp and groaning out of saddles all around, and

battle-flags falling from dead hands wipe across one's face and

hide the tossing turmoil a moment, and in the reeling and swaying

and laboring jumble one's horse's hoofs sink into soft substances

and shrieks of pain respond, and presently--panic! rush! swarm!

flight! and death and hell following after! And the old fellow got

ever so much excited; and strode up and down, his tongue going

like a mill, asking question after question and never waiting for an

answer; and finally he stood Joan up in the middle of the room and

stepped off and scanned her critically, and said:



"No--I don't understand it. You are so little. So little and slender.

When you had your armor on, to-day, it gave one a sort of notion

of it; but in these pretty silks and velvets, you are only a dainty

page, not a league-striding war-colossus, moving in clouds and

darkness and breathing smoke and thunder. I would God I might

see you at it and go tell your mother! That would help her sleep,

poor thing! Here--teach me the arts of the soldier, that I may

explain them to her."



And she did it. She gave him a pike, and put him through the

manual of arms; and made him do the steps, too. His marching was

incredibly awkward and slovenly, and so was his drill with the

pike; but he didn't know it, and was wonderfully pleased with

himself, and mightily excited and charmed with the ringing, crisp

words of command. I am obliged to say that if looking proud and

happy when one is marching were sufficient, he would have been

the perfect soldier.



And he wanted a lesson in sword-play, and got it. But of course

that was beyond him; he was too old. It was beautiful to see Joan

handle the foils, but the old man was a bad failure. He was afraid

of the things, and skipped and dodged and scrambled around like a

woman who has lost her mind on account of the arrival of a bat.

He was of no good as an exhibition. But if La Hire had only come

in, that would have been another matter. Those two fenced often; I

saw them many times. True, Joan was easily his master, but it

made a good show for all that, for La Hire was a grand swordsman.

What a swift creature Joan was! You would see her standing erect

with her ankle-bones together and her foil arched over her head,

the hilt in one hand and the button in the other--the old general

opposite, bent forward, left hand reposing on his back, his foil

advanced, slightly wiggling and squirming, his watching eye

boring straight into hers--and all of a sudden she would give a

spring forward, and back again; and there she was, with the foil

arched over her head as before. La Hire had been hit, but all that

the spectator saw of it was a something like a thin flash of light in

the air, but nothing distinct, nothing definite.



We kept the drinkables moving, for that would please the Bailly

and the landlord; and old Laxart and D'Arc got to feeling quite

comfortable, but without being what you could call tipsy. They got

out the presents which they had been buying to carry

home--humble things and cheap, but they would be fine there, and

welcome. And they gave to Joan a present from PŠre Fronte and

one from her mother--the one a little leaden image of the Holy

Virgin, the other half a yard of blue silk ribbon; and she was as

pleased as a child; and touched, too, as one could see plainly

enough. Yes, she kissed those poor things over and over again, as

if they had been something costly and wonderful; and she pinned

the Virgin on her doublet, and sent for her helmet and tied the

ribbon on that; first one way, then another; then a new way, then

another new way; and with each effort perching the helmet on her

hand and holding it off this way and that, and canting her head to

one side and then the other, examining the effect, as a bird does

when it has got a new bug. And she said she could almost wish she

was going to the wars again; for then she would fight with the

better courage, as having always with her something which her

mother's touch had blessed.



Old Laxart said he hoped she would go to the wars again, but

home first, for that all the people there were cruel anxious to see

her--and so he went on:



"They are proud of you, dear. Yes, prouder than any village ever

was of anybody before. And indeed it is right and rational; for it is

the first time a village has ever had anybody like you to be proud

of and call its own. And it is strange and beautiful how they try to

give your name to every creature that has a sex that is convenient.

It is but half a year since you began to be spoken of and left us, and

so it is surprising to see how many babies there are already in that

region that are named for you. First it was just Joan; then it was

Joan-Orleans; then Joan-Orleans-Beaugency-Patay; and now the

next ones will have a lot of towns and the Coronation added, of

course. Yes, and the animals the same. They know how you love

animals, and so they try to do you honor and show their love for

you by naming all those creatures after you; insomuch that if a

body should step out and call ''Joan of Arc--come!' 'there would be

a landslide of cats and all such things, each supposing it was the

one wanted, and all willing to take the benefit of the doubt,

anyway, for the sake of the food that might be on delivery. The

kitten you left behind--the last estray you fetched home--bears you

name, now, and belongs to PŠre Fronte, and is the pet nad pride of

the village; and people have come miles to look at it and pet it and

stare at it and wonder over it because it was Joan of Arc's cat.

Everybody will tell you that; and one day when a stranger threw a

stone at it, not knowing it was your cat, the village rose against

him as one man and hanged him! And but for PŠre Fronte--"



There was an interruption. It was a messenger from the King,

bearing a note for Joan, which I read to her, saying he had

reflected, and had consulted his other generals, and was obliged to

ask her to remain at the head of the army and withdraw her

resignation. Also, would she come immediately and attend a

council of war? Straightway, at a little distance, military

commands and the rumble of drums broke on the still night, and

we knew that her guard was approaching.



Deep disappointment clouded her face for just one moment and no

more--it passed, and with it the homesick girl, and she was Joan of

Arc, Commander-in-Chief again, and ready for duty.



Chapter 38 The King Cries "Forward!"



IN MY double quality of page and secretary I followed Joan to the

council. She entered that presence with the bearing of a grieved

goddess. What was become of the volatile child that so lately was

enchanted with a ribbon and suffocated with laughter over the

distress of a foolish peasant who had stormed a funeral on the back

of a bee-stung bull? One may not guess. Simply it was gone, and

had left no sign. She moved straight to the council-table, and

stood. Her glance swept from face to face there, and where it fell,

these lit it as with a torch, those it scorched as with a brand. She

knew where to strike. She indicated the generals with a nod, and

said:



"My business is not with you. You have not craved a council of

war." Then she turned toward the King's privy council, and

continued: "No; it is with you. A council of war! It is amazing.

There is but one thing to do, and only one, and lo, ye call a council

of war! Councils of war have no value but to decide between two

or several doubtful courses. But a council of war when there is

only one course? Conceive of a man in a boat and his family in the

water, and he goes out among his friends to ask what he would

better do? A council of war, name of God! To determine what?"



She stopped, and turned till her eyes rested upon the face of La

Tremouille; and so she stood, silent, measuring him, the

excitement in all faces burning steadily higher and higher, and all

pulses beating faster and faster; then she said, with deliberation:



"Every sane man--whose loyalty is to his King and not a show and

a pretense--knows that there is but one rational thing before us--the

march upon Paris!"



Down came the fist of La Hire with an approving crash upon the

table. La Tremouille turned white with anger, but he pulled

himself firmly together and held his peace. The King's lazy blood

was stirred and his eye kindled finely, for the spirit of war was

away down in him somewhere, and a frank, bold speech always

found it and made it tingle gladsomely. Joan waited to see if the

chief minister might wish to defend his position; but he was

experienced and wise, and not a man to waste his forces where the

current was against him. He would wait; the King's private ear

would be at his disposal by and by.



That pious fox the Chancellor of France took the word now. He

washed his soft hands together, smiling persuasively, and said to

Joan:



"Would it be courteous, your Excellency, to move abruptly from

here without waiting for an answer from the Duke of Burgundy?

You may not know that we are negotiating with his Highness, and

that there is likely to be a fortnight's truce between us; and on his

part a pledge to deliver Paris into our hands without the cost of a

blow or the fatigue of a march thither."



Joan turned to him and said, gravely:



"This is not a confessional, my lord. You were not obliged to

expose that shame here."



The Chancellor's face reddened, and he retorted:



"Shame? What is there shameful about it?"



Joan answered in level, passionless tones:



"One may describe it without hunting far for words. I knew of this

poor comedy, my lord, although it was not intended that I should

know. It is to the credit of the devisers of it that they tried to

conceal it--this comedy whose text and impulse are describable in

two words."



The Chancellor spoke up with a fine irony in his manner:



"Indeed? And will your Excellency be good enough to utter them?"



"Cowardice and treachery!"



The fists of all the generals came down this time, and again the

King's eye sparkled with pleasure. The Chancellor sprang to his

feet and appealed to his Majesty:



"Sire, I claim your protection."



But the King waved him to his seat again, saying:



"Peace. She had a right to be consulted before that thing was

undertaken, since it concerned war as well as politics. It is but just

that she be heard upon it now."



The Chancellor sat down trembling with indignation, and

remarked to Joan:



"Out of charity I will consider that you did not know who devised

this measure which you condemn in so candid language."



"Save your charity for another occasion, my lord," said Joan, as

calmly as before. "Whenever anything is done to injure the

interests and degrade the honor of France, all but the dead know

how to name the two conspirators-in-chief--"



"Sir, sire! this insinuation--"



"It is not an insinuation, my lord," said Joan, placidly, "it is a

charge. I bring it against the King's chief minister and his

Chancellor."



Both men were on their feet now, insisting that the King modify

Joan's frankness; but he was not minded to do it. His ordinary

councils were stale water--his spirit was drinking wine, now, and

the taste of it was good. He said:



"Sit--and be patient. What is fair for one must in fairness be

allowed the other. Consider--and be just. When have you two

spared her? What dark charges and harsh names have you withheld

when you spoke of her?" Then he added, with a veiled twinkle in

his eyes, "If these are offenses I see no particular difference

between them, except that she says her hard things to your faces,

whereas you say yours behind her back."



He was pleased with that neat shot and the way it shriveled those

two people up, and made La Hire laugh out loud and the other

generals softly quake and chuckle. Joan tranquilly resumed:



"From the first, we have been hindered by this policy of

shilly-hally; this fashion of counseling and counseling and

counseling where no counseling is needed, but only fighting. We

took Orleans on the 8th of May, and could have cleared the region

round about in three days and saved the slaughter of Patay. We

could have been in Rheims six weeks ago, and in Paris now; and

would see the last Englishman pass out of France in half a year.

But we struck no blow after Orleans, but went off into the

country--what for? Ostensibly to hold councils; really to give

Bedford time to send reinforcements to Talbot--which he did; and

Patay had to be fought. After Patay, more counseling, more waste

of precious time. Oh, my King, I would that you would be

persuaded!" She began to warm up, now. "Once more we have our

opportunity. If we rise and strike, all is well. Bid me march upon

Paris. In twenty days it shall be yours, and in six months all

France! Here is half a year's work before us; if this chance be

wasted, I give you twenty years to do it in. Speak the word, O

gentle King--speak but the one--"



"I cry you mercy!" interrupted the Chancellor, who saw a

dangerous enthusiasm rising in the King's face. "March upon

Paris? Does your Excellency forget that the way bristles with

English strongholds?"



"That for your English strongholds!" and Joan snapped her fingers

scornfully. "Whence have we marched in these last days? From

Gien. And whither? To Rheims. What bristled between? English

strongholds. What are they now? French ones--and they never cost

a blow!" Here applause broke out from the group of generals, and

Joan had to pause a moment to let it subside. "Yes, English

strongholds bristled before us; now French ones bristle behind us.

What is the argument? A child can read it. The strongholds

between us and Paris are garrisoned by no new breed of English,

but by the same breed as those others--with the same fears, the

same questionings, the same weaknesses, the same disposition to

see the heavy hand of God descending upon them. We have but to

march!--on the instant--and they are ours, Paris is ours, France is

ours! Give the word, O my King, command your servant to--"



"Stay!" cried the Chancellor. "It would be madness to put our

affront upon his Highness the Duke of Burgundy. By the treaty

which we have every hope to make with him--"



"Oh, the treaty which we hope to make with him! He has scorned

you for years, and defied you. Is it your subtle persuasions that

have softened his manners and beguiled him to listen to proposals?

No; it was blows!--the blows which we gave him! That is the only

teaching that that sturdy rebel can understand. What does he care

for wind? The treaty which we hope to make with him--alack! He

deliver Paris! There is no pauper in the land that is less able to do

it. He deliver Paris! Ah, but that would make great Bedford smile!

Oh, the pitiful pretext! the blind can see that this thin pour-parler

with its fifteen-day truce has no purpose but to give Bedford time

to hurry forward his forces against us. More treachery--always

treachery! We call a council of war--with nothing to council about;

but Bedford calls no council to teach him what our course is. He

knows what he would do in our place. He would hang his traitors

and march upon Paris! O gentle King, rouse! The way is open,

Paris beckons, France implores, Speak and we--"



"Sire, it is madness, sheer madness! Your Excellency, we cannot,

we must not go back from what we have done; we have proposed

to treat, we must treat with the Duke of Burgundy."



"And we will!" said Joan.



"Ah? How?"



"At the point of the lance!"



The house rose, to a man--all that had French hearts--and let go a

crach of applause--and kept it up; and in the midst of it one heard

La Hire growl out: "At the point of the lance! By God, that is

music!" The King was up, too, and drew his sword, and took it by

the blade and strode to Joan and delivered the hilt of it into her

hand, saying:



"There, the King surrenders. Carry it to Paris."



And so the applause burst out again, and the historical co9uncil of

war that has bred so many legends was over.



Chapte 39 We Win, but the King Balks



IT WAS away past midnight, and had been a tremendous day in

the matter of excitement and fatigue, but that was no matter to

Joan when there was business on hand. She did not think of bed.

The generals followed her to her official quarters, and she

delivered her orders to them as fast as she could talk, and they sent

them off to their different commands as fast as delivered;

wherefore the messengers galloping hither and thither raised a

world of clatter and racket in the still streets; and soon were added

to this the music of distant bugles and the roll of drums--notes of

preparation; for the vanguard would break camp at dawn.



The generals were soon dismissed, but I wasn't; nor Joan; for it

was my turn to work, now. Joan walked the floor and dictated a

summons to the Duke of Burgundy to lay down his arms and make

peace and exchange pardons with the King; or, if he must fight, go

fight the Saracens. "Pardonnez-vous l'un … l'autre de bon

c&oelig;ur, entiŠrement, ainsi que doivent faire loyaux chr‚tiens,

et, s'il vous plait de guerroyer, allez contre les Sarrasins." It was

long, but it was good, and had the sterling ring to it. It is my

opinion that it was as fine and simple and straightforward and

eloquent a state paper as she ever uttered.



It was delivered into the hands of a courier, and he galloped away

with it. The Joan dismissed me, and told me to go to the inn and

stay, and in the morning give to her father the parcel which she

had left there. It contained presents for the Domremy relatives and

friends and a peasant dress which she had bought for herself. She

said she would say good-by to her father and uncle in the morning

if it should still be their purpose to go, instead of tarrying awhile to

see the city.



I didn't say anything, of course, but I could have said that wild

horses couldn't keep those men in that town half a day. They waste

the glory of being the first to carry the great news to

Domremy--the taxes remitted forever!--and hear the bells clang

and clatter, and the people cheer and shout? Oh, not they. Patay

and Orleans and the Coronation were events which in a vague way

these men understood to be colossal; but they were colossal mists,

films, abstractions; this was a gigantic reality!



When I got there, do you suppose they were abed! Quite the

reverse. They and the rest were as mellow as mellow could be; and

the Paladin was doing his battles in great style, and the old

peasants were endangering the building with their applause. He

was doing Patay now; and was bending his big frame forward and

laying out the positions and movements with a rake here and a

rake there of his formidable sword on the floor, and the peasants

were stooped over with their hands on their spread knees observing

with excited eyes and ripping out ejaculations of wonder and

admiration all along:



"Yes, here we were, waiting--waiting for the word; our horses

fidgeting and snorting and dancing to get away, we lying back on

the bridles till our bodies fairly slanted to the rear; the word rang

out at last--'Go!' and we went!



"Went? There was nothing like it ever seen! Where we swept by

squads of scampering English, the mere wind of our passage laid

them flat in piles and rows! Then we plunged into the ruck of

Fastolfe's frantic battle-corps and tore through it like a hurricane,

leaving a causeway of the dead stretching far behind; no tarrying,

no slacking rein, but on! on! on! far yonder in the distance lay our

prey--Talbot and his host looming vast and dark like a storm-cloud

brooding on the sea! Down we swooped upon them, glooming all

the air with a quivering pall of dead leaves flung up by the

whirlwind of our flight. In another moment we should have struck

them as world strikes world when disorbited constellations crash

into the Milky way, but by misfortune and the inscrutable

dispensation of God I was recognized! Talbot turned white, and

shouting, 'Save yourselves, it is the Standard-Bearer of Joan of

Arc!' drove his spurs home till they met in the middle of his horse's

entrails, and fled the field with his billowing multitudes at his

back! I could have cursed myself for not putting on a disguise. I

saw reproach in the eyes of her Excellency, and was bitterly

ashamed. I had caused what seemed an irreparable disaster.

Another might have gone aside to grieve, as not seeing any way to

mend it; but I thank God I am not of those. Great occasions only

summon as with a trumpet-call the slumbering reserves of my

intellect. I saw my opportunity in an instant--in the next I was

away! Through the woods I vanished--fst!--like an extinguished

light! Away around through the curtaining forest I sped, as if on

wings, none knowing what was become of me, none suspecting my

design. Minute after minute passed, on and on I flew; on, and still

on; and at last with a great cheer I flung my Banner to the breeze

and burst out in front of Talbot! Oh, it was a mighty thought! That

weltering chaos of distracted men whirled and surged backward

like a tidal wave which has struck a continent, and the day was

ours! Poor helpless creatures, they were in a trap; they were

surrounded; they could not escape to the rear, for there was our

army; they could not escape to the front, for there was I. Their

hearts shriveled in their bodies, their hands fell listless at their

sides. They stood still, and at our leisure we slaughtered them to a

man; all except Talbot and Fastolfe, whom I saved and brought

away, one under each arm."



Well, there is no denying it, the Paladin was in great form that

night. Such style! such noble grace of gesture, such grandeur of

attitude, such energy when he got going! such steady rise, on such

sure wing, such nicely graduated expenditures of voice according

to the weight of the matter, such skilfully calculated approaches to

his surprises and explosions, such belief-compelling sincerity of

tone and manner, such a climaxing peal from his brazen lungs, and

such a lightning-vivid picture of his mailed form and flaunting

banner when he burst out before that despairing army! And oh, the

gentle art of the last half of his last sentence--delivered in the

careless and indolent tone of one who has finished his real story,

and only adds a colorless and inconsequential detil because it has

happened to occur to him in a lazy way.



It was a marvel to see those innocent peasants. Why, they went all

to pieces with enthusiasm, and roared out applauses fit to raise the

roof and wake the dead. When they had cooled down at last and

there was silence but for the heaving and panting, old Laxart said,

admiringly:



"As it seems to me, you are an army in your single person."



"Yes, that is what he is," said No‰l Rainguesson, convincingly. "He

is a terror; and not just in this vicinity. His mere name carries a

shudder with it to distant lands--just he mere name; and when he

frowns, the shadow of it falls as far as Rome, and the chickens go

to roost an hour before schedule time. Yes; and some say--"



"No‰l Rainguesson, you are preparing yourself for trouble. I will

say just one word to you, and it will be to your advantage to--"



I saw that the usual thing had got a start. No man could prophesy

when it would end. So I delivered Joan's message and went off to

bed.



Joan made her good-byes to those old fellows in the morning, with

loving embraces and many tears, and with a packed multitude for

sympathizers, and they rode proudly away on their precious horses

to carry their great news home. I had seen better riders, some will

say that; for horsemanship was a new art to them.



The vanguard moved out at dawn and took the road, with bands

braying and banners flying; the second division followed at eight.

Then came the Burgundian ambassadors, and lost us the rest of

that day and the whole of the next. But Joan was on hand, and so

they had their journey for their pains. The rest of us took the road

at dawn, next morning, July 20th. And got how far? Six leagues.

Tremouille was getting in his sly work with the vacillating King,

you see. The King stopped at St. Marcoul and prayed three days.

Precious time lost--for us; precious time gained for Bedford. He

would know how to use it.



We could not go on without the King; that would be to leave him

in the conspirators' camp. Joan argued, reasoned, implored; and at

last we got under way again.



Joan's prediction was verified. It was not a campaign, it was only

another holiday excursion. English strongholds lined our route;

they surrendered without a blow; we garrisoned them with

Frenchmen and passed on. Bedford was on the march against us

with his new army by this time, and on the 25th of July the hostile

forces faced each other and made preparation for battle; but

Bedford's good judgment prevailed, and he turned and retreated

toward Paris. Now was our chance. Our men were in great spirits.



Will you believe it? Our poor stick of a King allowed his worthless

advisers to persuade him to start back for Gien, whence he had set

out when we first marched for Rheims and the Coronation! And

we actually did start back. The fifteen-day truce had just been

concluded with the Duke of Burgundy, and we would go and tarry

at Gien until he should deliver Paris to us without a fight.



We marched to Bray; then the King changed his mind once more,

and with it his face toward Paris. Joan dictated a letter to the

citizens of Rheims to encourage them to keep heart in spite of the

truce, and promising to stand by them. She furnished them the

news herself that the Kin had made this truce; and in speaking of it

she was her usual frank self. She said she was not satisfied with it,

and didn't know whether she would keep it or not; that if she kept

it, it would be solely out of tenderness for the King's honor. All

French children know those famous words. How na‹ve they are!

"De cette trŠve qui a ‚t‚ faite, je ne suis pas contente, et je ne sais

si je la tiendrai. Si je la tiens, ce sera seulement pour garder

l'honneur du roi." But in any case, she said, she would not allow

the blood royal to be abused, and would keep the army in good

order and ready for work at the end of the truce.



Poor child, to have to fight England, Burgundy, and a French

conspiracy all at the same time--it was too bad. She was a match

for the others, but a conspiracy--ah, nobody is a match for that,

when the victim that is to be injured is weak and willing. It grieved

her, these troubled days, to be so hindered and delayed and

baffled, and at times she was sad and the tears lay near the surface.

Once, talking with her good old faithful friend and servant, the

Bastard of Orleans, she said:



"Ah, if it might but please God to let me put off this steel raiment

and go back to my father and my mother, and tend my sheep again

with my sister and my brothers, who would be so glad to see me!"



By the 12th of August we were camped near Dampmartin. Later

we had a brush with Bedford's rear-guard, and had hopes of a big

battle on the morrow, but Bedford and all his force got away in the

night and went on toward Paris.



Charles sent heralds and received the submission of Beauvais. The

Bishop Pierre Cauchon, that faithful friend and slave of the

English, was not able to prevent it, though he did his best. He was

obscure then, but his name was to travel round the globe presently,

and live forever in the curses of France! Bear with me now, while I

spit in fancy upon his grave.



CompiŠgne surrendered, and hauled down the English flag. On the

14th we camped two leagues from Senlis. Bedford turned and

approached, and took up a strong position. We went against him,

but all our efforts to beguile him out from his intrenchments failed,

though he had promised us a duel in the open field. Night shut

down. Let him look our for the morning! But in the morning he

was gone again.



We enterd CompiŠgne the 18th of August, turning out the English

garrison and hoisting our own flag.



On the 23d Joan gave command to move upon Paris. The King and

the clique were not satisfied with this, and retired sulking to

Senlis, which had just surrendered. Within a few days many strong

places submitted--Creil, Pont-Saint-Maxence, Choisy,

Gournay-sur-Aronde, Remy, Le Neufville-en-Hez, Moguay,

Chantilly, Saintines. The English power was tumbling, crash after

crash! And still the King sulked and disapproved, and was afraid

of our movement against the capital.



On the 26th of August, 1429, Joan camped at St. Denis; in effect,

under the walls of Paris.



And still the King hung back and was afraid. If we could but have

had him there to back us with his authority! Bedford had lost heart

and decided to waive resistance and go an concentrate his strength

in the best and loyalest province remaining to him--Normandy. Ah,

if we could only have persuaded the King to come and

countenance us with his presence and approval at this supreme

moment!



Chapter 40 Treachery Conquers Joan



COURIER after courier was despatched to the King, and he

promised to come, but didn't. The Duke d'Alen‡on went to him and

got his promise again, which he broke again. Nine days were lost

thus; then he came, arriving at St. Denis September 7th.



Meantime the enemy had begun to take heart: the spiritless

conduct of the King could have no other result. Preparations had

now been made to defend the city. Joan's chances had been

diminished, but she and her generals considered them plenty good

enough yet. Joan ordered the attack for eight o'clock next morning,

and at that hour it began.



Joan placed her artillery and began to pound a strong work which

protected the gate St. Honor‚. When it was sufficiently crippled

the assault was sounded at noon, and it was carried by storm. Then

we moved forward to storm the gate itself, and hurled ourselves

against it again and again, Joan in the le3ad with her standard at

her side, the smoke enveloping us in choking clouds, and the

missiles flying over us and through us as thick as hail.



In the midst of our last assault, which would have carried the gate

sure and given us Paris and in effect France, Joan was struck down

by a crossbow bolt, and our men fell back instantly and almost in a

panic--for what were they without her? She was the army, herself.



Although disabled, she refused to retire, and begged that a new

assault be made, say8ing it must win; and adding, with the

battle-light rising in her eyes, "I will take Paris now or die!" She

had to be carried away by force, and this was done by Gaucourt

and the Duke d'Alen‡on.



But her spirits were at the very top notch, now. She was brimming

with enthusiasm. She said she would be carried before the gate in

the morning, and in half an hour Paris would be ours without any

question. She could have kept her word. About this there was no

doubt. But she forgot one factor--the King, shadow of that

substance named La Tremouille. The King forbade the attempt!



You see, a new Embassy had just come from the Duke of

Burgundy, and another sham private trade of some sort was on

foot.



You would know, without my telling you, that Joan's heart was

nearly broken. Because of the pain of her wound and the pain at

her heart she slept little that night. Several times the watchers

heard muffled sobs from the dark room where she lay at St. Denis,

and many times the grieving words, "It could have been taken!--it

could have been taken!" which were the only ones she said.



She dragged herself out of bed a day later with a new hope.

D'Alen‡on had thrown a bridge across the Seine near St. Denis.

Might she not cross by that and assault Paris at another point? But

the King got wind of it and broke the bridge down! And more--he

declared the campaign ended! And more still--he had made a new

truce and a long one, in which he had agreed to leave Paris

unthreatened and unmolested, and go back to the Loire whence he

had come!



Joan of Arc, who had never been defeated by the enemy, was

defeated by her own King. She had said once that all she feared for

her cause was treachery. It had struck its first blow now. She hung

up her white armor in the royal basilica of St. Denis, and went and

asked the King to relieve her of her functions and let her go home.

As usual, she was wise. Grand combinations, far-reaching great

military moves were at an end, now; for the future, when the truce

should end, the war would be merely a war of random and idle

skirmishes, apparently; work suitable for subalterns, and not

requiring the supervision of a sublime military genius. But the

King would not let her go. The truce did not embrace all France;

there were French strongholds to be watched and preserved; he

would need her. Really, you see, Tremouille wanted to keep her

where he could balk and hinder her.



Now came her Voices again. They said, "Remain at St. Denis."

There was no explanation. They did not say why. That was the

voice of God; it took precedence of the command of the King;

Joan resolved to stay. But that filled La Tremouille with dread. She

was too tremendous a force to be left to herself; she would surely

defeat all his plans. He beguiled the King to use compulsion. Joan

had to submit--because she was wounded and helpless. In the

Great Trial she said she was carried away against her will; and that

if she had not been wounded it could not have been accomplished.

Ah, she had a spirit, that slender girl! a spirit to brave all earthly

powers and defy them. We shall never know why the Voices

ordered her to stay. We only know this; that if she could have

obeyed, the history of France would not be as it now stands written

in the books. Yes, well we know that.



On the 13th of September the army, sad and spiritless, turned its

face toward the Loire, and marched--without music! Yes, one

noted that detail. It was a funeral march; that is what it was. A

long, dreary funeral march, with never a shout or a cheer; friends

looking on in tears, all the way, enemies laughing. We reached

Gien at last--that place whence we had set out on our splendid

march toward Rheims less than three months before, with flags

flying, bands playing, the victory-flush of Patay glowing in our

faces, and the massed multitudes shouting and praising and giving

us godspeed. There was a dull rain falling now, the day was dark,

the heavens mourned, the spectators were few, we had no welcome

but the welcome of silence, and pity, and tears.



Then the King disbanded that noble army of heroes; it furled its

flags, it stored its arms: the disgrace of France was complete. La

Tremouille wore the victor's crown; Joan of Arc, the

unconquerable, was conquered.



Chapter 41 The Maid Will March No More



YES, IT was as I have said: Joan had Paris and France in her

grip,and the Hundred Years' War under her heel, and the King

made her open her fist and take away her foot.



Now followed about eight months of drifting about with the King

and his council, and his gay and showy and dancing and flirting

and hawking and frolicking and serenading and dissipating

court--drifting from town to town and from castle to castle--a life

which was pleasant to us of the personal staff, but not to Joan.

However, she only saw it, she didn't live it. The King did his

sincerest best to make her happy, and showed a most kind and

constant anxiety in this matter.



All others had to go loaded with the chains of an exacting court

etiquette, but she was free, she was privileged. So that she paid her

duty to the King once a day and passed the pleasant word, nothing

further was required of her. Naturally, then, she made herself a

hermit, and grieved the weary days through in her own apartments,

with her thoughts and devotions for company, and the planning of

now forever unrealizable military combinations for entertainment.

In fancy she moved bodies of men from this and that and the other

point, so calculating the distances to be covered, the time required

for each body, and the nature of the country to be traversed, as to

have them appear in sight of each other on a given day or at a

given hour and concentrate for battle. It was her only game, her

only relief from her burden of sorrow and inaction. She played it

hour after hour, as others play chess; and lost herself in it, and so

got repose for her mind and healing for her heart.



She never complained, of course. It was not her way. She was the

sort that endure in silence.



But--she was a caged eagle just the same, and pined for the free air

and the alpine heights and the fierce joys of the storm.



France was full of rovers--disbanded soldiers ready for anything

that might turn up. Several times, at intervals, when Joan's dull

captivity grew too heavy to bear, she was allowed to gather a troop

of cavalry and make a health-restoring dash against the enemy.

These things were a bath to her spirits.



It was like old times, there at Saint-Pierre-le-Moutier, to see her

lead assault after assault, be driven back again and again, but

always rsally and charge anew, all in a blaze of eagerness and

delight; till at last the tempest of missiles rained so intolerably

thick that old D'Aulon, who was wounded, sounded the retreat (for

the King had charged him on his head to let no harm come to

Joan); and away everybody rushed after him--as he supposed; but

when he turned and looked, there were we of the staff still

hammering away; wherefore he rode back and urged her to come,

saying she was mad to stay there with only a dozen men. Her eye

danced merrily, and she turned upon him crying out:



"A dozen men! name of God, I have fifty thousand, and will never

budge till this place is taken!



Sound the charge!"



Which he did, and over the walls we went, and the fortress was

ours. Old D'Aulon thought her mind was wandering; but all she

meant was, that she felt the might of fifty thousand men surging in

her heart. It was a fanciful expression; but, to my thinking, truer

word was never said.



Then there was the affair near Lagny, where we charged the

intrenched Burgundians through the open field four times, the last

time victoriously; the best prize of it Franquet d'Arras, the

free-booter and pitiless scourge of the region roundabout.



Now and then other such affairs; and at last, away toward the end

of May, 1430, we were in the neighborhood of Compiegrave;gne,

and Joan resolved to go to the help of that place, which was being

besieged by the Duke of Burgundy.



I had been wounded lately, and was not able to ride without help;

but the good Dwarf took me on behind him, and I held on to him

and was safe enough. We started at midnight, in a sullen downpour

of warm rain, and went slowly and softly and in dead silence, for

we had to slip through the enemy's lines. We were challenged only

once; we made no answer, but held our breath and crept steadily

and stealthily along, and got through without any accident. About

three or half past we reached CompiŠgne, just as the gray dawn

was breaking in the east.



Joan set to work at once, and concerted a plan with Guillaume de

Flavy, captain of the city--a plan for a sortie toward evening

against the enemy, who was posted in three bodies on the other

side of the Oise, in the level plain. From our side one of the city

gates communicated with a bridge. The end of this bridge was

defended on the other side of the river by one of those fortresses

called a boulevard; and this boulevard also commanded a raised

road, which stretched from its front across the plain to the village

of Marguy. A force of Burgundians occupied Marguy; another was

camped at Clairoix, a couple of miles above the raised road; and a

body of English was holding Venette, a mile and a half below it. A

kind of bow-and-arrow arrangement, you see; the causeway the

arrow, the boulevard at the feather-end of it, Marguy at the barb,

Venette at one end of the bow, Clairoix at the other.



Joan's plan was to go straight per causeway against Marguy, carry

it by assault, then turn swiftly upon Clairoix, up to the right, and

capture that camp in the same way, then face to the rear and be

ready for heavy work, for the Duke of Burgundy lay behind

Clairoix with a reserve. Flavy's lieutenant, with archers and the

artillery of the boulevard, was to keep the English troops from

coming up from below and seizing the causeway and cutting off

Joan's retreat in case she should have to make one. Also, a fleet of

covered boats was to be stationed near the boulevard as an

additional help in case a retreat should become necessary.



It was the 24th of May. At four in the afternoon Joan moved out at

the head of six hundred cavalry--on her last march in this life!



It breaks my heart. I had got myself helped up onto the walls, and

from there I saw much that happened, the rest was told me long

afterward by our two knights and other eye-witnesses. Joan crossed

the bridge, and soon left the boulevard behind her and went

skimming away over the raised road with her horsemen clattering

at her heels. She had on a brilliant silver-gilt cape over her armor,

and I could see it flap and flare and rise and fall like a little patch

of white flame.



It was a bright day, and one could see far and wide over that plain.

Soon we saw the English force advancing, swiftly and in

handsome order, the sunlight flashing from its arms.



Joan crashed into the Burgundians at Marguy and was repulsed.

Then she saw the other Burgundians moving down from Clairoix.

Joan rallied her men and charged again, and was again rolled back.

Two assaults occupy a good deal of time--and time was precious

here. The English were approaching the road now from Venette,

but the boulevard opened fire on them and they were checked.

Joan heartened her men with inspiring words and led them to the

charge again in great style. This time she carried Marguy with a

hurrah. Then she turned at once to the right and plunged into the

plan and struck the Clairoix force, which was just arriving; then

there was heavy work, and plenty of it, the two armies hurling each

other backward turn about and about, and victory inclining first to

the one, then to the other. Now all of a sudden thee was a panic on

our side. Some say one thing caused it, some another. Some say

the cannonade made our front ranks think retreat was being cut off

by the English, some say the rear ranks got the idea that Joan was

killed. Anyway our men broke, and went flying in a wild rout for

the causeway. Joan tried to rally them and face them around,

crying to them that victory was sure, but it did no good, they

divided and swept by her like a wave. Old D'Aulon begged her to

retreat while there was yet a chance for safety, but she refused; so

he seized her horse's bridle and bore her along with the wreck and

ruin in spite of herself. And so along the causeway they came

swarming, that wild confusion of frenzied men and horses--and the

artillery had to stop firing, of course; consequently the English and

Burgundians closed in in safety, the former in front, the latter

behind their prey. Clear to the boulevard the French were washed

in this enveloping inundation; and there, cornered in an angle

formed by the flank of the boulevard and the slope of the

causeway, they bravely fought a hopeless fight, and sank down one

by one.



Flavy, watching from the city wall, ordered the gate to be closed

and the drawbridge raised. This shut Joan out.



The little personal guard around her thinned swiftly. Both of our

good knights went down disabled; Joan's two brothers fell

wounded; then No‰l Rainguesson--all wounded while loyally

sheltering Joan from blows aimed at her. When only the Dwarf

and the Paladin were left, they would not give up, but stood their

ground stoutly, a pair of steel towers streaked and splashed with

blood; and where the ax of one fell, and the sword of the other, an

enemy gasped and died.



And so fighting, and loyal to their duty to the last, good simple

souls, they came to their honorable end. Peace to their memories!

they were very dear to me.



Then there was a cheer and a rush, and Joan, still defiant, still

laying about her with her sword, was seized by her cape and

dragged from her horse. She was borne away a prisoner to the

Duke of Burgundy's camp, and after her followed the victorious

army roaring its joy.



The awful news started instantly on its round; from lip to lip it

flew; and wherever it came it struck the people as with a sort of

paralysis; and they murmured over and over again, as if they were

talking to themselves, or in their sleep, "The Maid of Orleans

taken! . . . Joan of Arc a prisoner! . . . the savior of France lost to

us!"--and would keep saying that over, as if they couldn't

understand how it could be, or how God could permit it, poor

creatures!



You know what a city is like when it is hung from eaves to

pavement with rustling black? Then you know what Rouse was

like, and some other cities. But can any man tell you what the

mourning in the hearts of the peasantry of France was like? No,

nobody can tell you that, and, poor dumb things, they could not

have told you themselves, but it was there--indeed, yes. Why, it

was the spirit of a whole nation hung with crape!



The 24th of May. We will draw down the curtain now upon the

most strange, and pathetic, and wonderful military drama that has

been played upon the stage of the world. Joan of Arc will march

no more.



BOOK III  TRIAL AND MARTYRDOM



Chapter 1 The Maid in Chains



I CANNOT bear to dwell at great length upon the shameful history

of the summer and winter following the capture. For a while I was

not much troubled, for I was expecting every day to hear that Joan

had been put to ransom, and that the King--no, not the King, but

grateful France--had come eagerly forward to pay it. By the laws of

war she could not be denied the privilege of ransom. She was not a

rebel; she was a legitimately constituted soldier, head of the

armies of France by her King's appointment, and guilty of no crime

known to military law; therefore she could not be detained upon

any pretext, if ransom were proffered.



But day after day dragged by and no ransom was offered! It seems

incredible, but it is true. Was that reptile Tremouille busy at the

King's ear? All we know is, that the King was silent, and made no

offer and no effort in behalf of this poor girl who had done so

much for him.



But, unhappily, there was alacrity enough in another quarter. The

news of the capture reached Paris the day after it happened, and

the glad English and Burgundians deafened the world all the day

and all the night with the clamor of their joy-bells and the thankful

thunder of their artillery, and the next day the Vicar-General of the

Inquisition sent a message to the Duke of Burgundy requiring the

delivery of the prisoner into the hands of the Church to be tried as

an idolater.



The English had seen their opportunity, and it was the English

power that was really acting, not the Church. The Church was

being used as a blind, a disguise; and for a forcible reason: the

Church was not only able to take the life of Joan of Arc, but to

blight her influence and the valor-breeding inspiration of her

name, whereas the English power could but kill her body; that

would not diminish or destroy the influence of her name; it would

magnify it and make it permanent. Joan of Arc was the only power

in France that the English did not despise, the only power in

France that they considered formidable. If the Church could be

brought to take her life, or to proclaim her an idolater, a heretic, a

witch, sent from Satan, not from heaven, it was believed that the

English supremacy could be at once reinstated.



The Duke of Burgundy listened--but waited. He could not doubt

that the French King or the French people would come forward

presently and pay a higher price than the English. He kept Joan a

close prisoner in a strong fortress, and continued to wait, week

after week. He was a French prince, and was at heart ashamed to

sell her to the English. Yet with all his waiting no offer came to

him from the French side.



One day Joan played a cunning truck on her jailer, and not only

slipped out of her prison, but locked him up in it. But as she fled

away she was seen by a sentinel, and was caught and brought back.



Then she was sent to Beaurevoir, a stronger castle. This was early

in August, and she had been in captivity more than two months

now. Here she was shut up in the top of a tower which was sixty

feet high. She ate her heart there for another long stretch--about

three months and a half. And she was aware, all these weary five

months of captivity, that the English, under cover of the Church,

were dickering for her as one would dicker for a horse or a slave,

and that France was silent, the King silent, all her friends the same.

Yes, it was pitiful.



And yet when she heard at last that CompiŠgne was being closely

besieged and likely to be captured, and that the enemy had

declared that no inhabitant of it should escape massacre, not even

children of seven years of age, she was in a fever at once to fly to

our rescue. So she tore her bedclothes to strips and tied them

together and descended this frail rope in the night, and it broke,

and she fell and was badly bruised, and remained three days

insensible, meantime neither eating nor drinking.



And now came relief to us, led by the Count of Vend“me, and

CompiŠgne was saved and the siege raised. This was a disaster to

the Duke of Burgundy. He had to save money now. It was a good

time for a new bid to be made for Joan of Arc. The English at once

sent a French bishop--that forever infamous Pierre Cauchon of

Beauvais. He was partly promised the Archbishopric of Rouen,

which was vacant, if he should succeed. He claimed the right to

preside over Joan's ecclesiastical trial because the battle-ground

where she was taken was within his diocese. By the military usage

of the time the ransom of a royal prince was 10,000 livres of gold,

which is 61,125 francs--a fixed sum, you see. It must be accepted

when offered; it could not be refused.



Cauchon brought the offer of this very sum from the English--a

royal prince's ransom for the poor little peasant-girl of Domremy.

It shows in a striking way the English idea of her formidable

importance. It was accepted. For that sum Joan of Arc, the Savior

of France, was sold; sold to her enemies; to the enemies of her

country; enemies who had lashed and thrashed and thumped and

trounced France for a century and made holiday sport of it;

enemies who had forgotten, years and years ago, what a

Frenchman's face was like, so used were they to seeing nothing but

his back; enemies whom she had whipped, whom she had cowed,

whom she had taught to respect French valor, new-born in her

nation by the breath of her spirit; enemies who hungered for her

life as being the only puissance able to stand between English

triumph and French degradation. Sold to a French priest by a

French prince, with the French King and the French nation

standing thankless by and saying nothing.



And she--what did she say? Nothing. Not a reproach passed her

lips. She was too great for that--she was Joan of Arc; and when

that is said, all is said.



As a soldier, her record was spotless. She could not be called to

account for anything under that head. A subterfuge must be found,

and, as we have seen, was found. She must be tried by priests for

crimes against religion. If none could be discovered, some must be

invented. Let the miscreant Cauchon alone to contrive those.



Rouen was chosen as the scene of the trial. It was in the heart of

the English power; its population had been under English

dominion so many generations that they were hardly French now,

save in language. The place was strongly garrisoned. Joan was

taken there near the end of December, 1430, and flung into a

dungeon. Yes, and clothed in chains, that free spirit!



Still France made no move. How do I account for this? I think

there is only one way. You will remember that whenever Joan was

not at the front, the French held back and ventured nothing; that

whenever she led, they swept everything before them, so long as

they could see her white armor or her banner; that every time she

fell wounded or was reported killed--as at CompiŠgne--they broke

in panic and fled like sheep. I argue from this that they had

undergone no real transformation as yet; that at bottom they were

still under the spell of a timorousness born of generations of

unsuccess, and a lack of confidence in each other and in their

leaders born of old and bitter experience in the way of treacheries

of all sorts--for their kings had been treacherous to their great

vassals and to their generals, and these in turn were treacherous to

the head of the state and to each other. The soldiery found that

they could depend utterly on Joan, and upon her alone. With her

gone, everything was gone. She was the sun that melted the frozen

torrents and set them boiling; with that sun removed, they froze

again, and the army and all France became what they had been

before, mere dead corpses--that and nothing more; incapable of

thought, hope, ambition, or motion.



Chapter 2 Joan Sold to the English



MY WOUND gave me a great deal of trouble clear into the first

part of October; then the fresher weather renewed my life and

strength. All this time there were reports drifting about that the

King was going to ransom Joan. I believed these, for I was young

and had not yet found out the littleness and meanness of our poor

human race, which brags about itself so much, and thinks it is

better and higher than the other animals.



In October I was well enough to go out with two sorties, and in the

second one, on the 23d, I was wounded again. My luck had turned,

you see. On the night of the 25th the besiegers decamped, and in

the disorder and confusion one of their prisoners escaped and got

safe into CompiŠgne, and hobble into my room as pallid and

pathetic an object as you would wish to see.



"What? Alive? No‰l Rainguesson!"



It was indeed he. It was a most joyful meeting, that you will easily

know; and also as sad as it was joyful. We could not speak Joan's

name. One's voice would have broken down. We knew who was

meant when she was mentioned; we could say "she" and "her," but

we could not speak the name.



We talked of the personal staff. Old D'Aulon, wounded and a

prisoner, was still with Joan and serving her, by permission of the

Duke of Burgundy. Joan was being treated with respect due to her

rank and to her character as a prisoner of war taken in honorable

conflict. And this was continued--as we learned later--until she fell

into the hands of that bastard of Satan, Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of

Beauvais.



No‰l was full of noble and affectionate praises and appreaciations

of our old boastful big Standard-Bearer, now gone silent forever,

his real and imaginary battles all fought, his work done, his life

honorably closed and completed.



"And think of his luck!" burst out No‰l, with his eyes full of tears.

"Always the pet child of luck!



See how it followed him and stayed by him, from his first step all

through, in the field or out of it; always a splendid figure in the

public eye, courted and envied everywhere; always having a

chance to do fine things and always doing them; in the beginning

called the Paladin in joke, and called it afterward in earnest

because he magnificently made the title good; and at

last--supremest luck of all--died in the field! died with his harness

on; died faithful to his charg, the Standard in his hand; died--oh,

think of it--with the approving eye of Joan of Arc upon him!



He drained the cup of glory to the last drop, and went jubilant to

his peace, blessedly spared all part in the disaster which was to

follow. What luck, what luck! And we? What was our sin that we

are still here, we who have also earned our place with the happy

dead?"



And presently he said:



"They tore the sacred Standard from his dead hand and carried it

away, their most precious prize after its captured owner. But they

haven't it now. A month ago we put our lives upon the risk--our

two good knights, my fellow-prisoners, and I--and stole it, and got

it smuggled by trusty hands to Orleans, and there it is now, safe for

all time in the Treasury."



I was glad and grateful to learn that. I have seen it often since,

when I have gone to Orleans on the 8th of May to be the petted old

guest of the city and hold the first place of honor at the banquets

and in the processions--I mean since Joan's brothers passed from

this life. It will still be there, sacredly guarded by French love, a

thousand years from now--yes, as long as any shred of it hangs

together. [1] Two or three weeks after this talk came tehe

tremendous news like a thunder-clap, and we were aghast--Joan of

Arc sold to the English!



Not for a moment had we ever dreamed of such a thing. We were

young, you see, and did not know the human race, as I have said

before. We had been so proud of our country, so sure of her

nobleness, her magnanimity, her gratitude. We had expected little

of the King, but of France we had expected everything. Everybody

knew that in various towns patriot priests had been marching in

procession urging the people to sacrifice money, property,

everything, and buy the freedom of their heaven-sent deliverer.

That the money would be raised we had not thought of doubting.



But it was all over now, all over. It was a bitter time for us. The

heavens seemed hung with black; all cheer went out from our

hearts. Was this comrade here at my bedside really No‰l

Rainguesson, that light-hearted creature whose whole life was but

one long joke, and who used up more breath in laughter than in

keeping his body alive? No, no; that No‰l I was to see no more.

This one's heart was broken. He moved grieving about, and

absently, like one in a dream; the stream of his laughter was dried

at its source.



Well, that was best. It was my own mood. We were company for

each other. He nursed me patiently through the dull long weeks,

and at last, in January, I was strong enough to go about again.

Then he said:



"Shall we go now?"



"Yes."



There was no need to explain. Our hearts were in Rouen; we

would carry our bodies there. All that we cared for in this life was

shut up in that fortress. We could not help her, but it would be

some solace to us to be near her, to breathe the air that she

breathed, and look daily upon the stone walls that hid her. What if

we should be made prisoners there? Well, we could but do our

best, and let luck and fate decide what should happen.



And so we started. We could not realize the change which had

come upon the country. We seemed able to choose our own route

and go whenever we pleased, unchallenged and unmolested. When

Joan of Arc was in the field there was a sort of panic of fear

everywhere; but now that she was out of the way, fear had

vanished. Nobody was troubled about you or afraid of you, nobody

was curious about you or your business, everybody was indifferent.



We presently saw that we could take to the Seine, and not weary

ourselves out with land travel.



So we did it, and were carried in a boat to within a league of

Rouen. Then we got ashore; not on the hilly side, but on the other,

where it is as level as a floor. Nobody could enter or leave the city

without explaining himself. It was because they feared attempts at

a rescue of Joan.



We had no trouble. We stopped in the plain with a family of

peasants and stayed a wekk, helping them with their work for

board and lodging, and making friends of them. We got clothes

like theirs, and wore them. When we had worked our way through

their reserves and gotten their confidence, we found that they

secretly harbored French hearts in their bodies. Then we came out

frankly and told them everythng, and found them ready to do

anything they could to help us.



Our plan was soon made, and was quite simple. It was to help

them drive a flock of sheep to the market of the city. One morning

early we made the venture in a melancholy drizzle of rain, and

passed through the frowning gates unmolested. Our friends had

friends living over a humble wine shop in a quaint tall building

situated in one of the narrow lanes that run down from the

cathedral to the river, and with these they bestowed us; and the

next day they smuggled our own proper clothing and other

belongings to us. The family that lodged us--the Pieroons--were

French in sympathy, and we needed to have no secrets from them.



[1] It remained there three hundred and sixty years, and then was

destroyed in a public bonfire, together with two swords, a plumed

cap, several suits of state apparel, and other relics of the Maid, by

a mob in the time of the Revolution. Nothing which the hand of

Joan of Arc is known to have touched now remains in existence

except a few preciously guarded military and state papers which

she signed, her pen being guided by a clek or her secretary, Louis

de Conte. A boulder exists from which she is known to have

mounted her horse when she was once setting out upon a

campaign. Up to a quarter of a century ago there was a single hair

from her head still in existence. It was drawn through the wax of a

seal attached to the parchment of a state document. It was

surreptitiously snipped out, seal and all, by some vandal

relic-hunter, and carried off. Doubtless it still exists, but only the

thief knows where. -- TRANSLATOR.



Chapter 3 Weaving the Net About Her



IT WAS necessary for me to have some way to gain bread for No‰l

and myself; and when the Pierrons found that I knew how to write,

the applied to their confessor in my behalf, and he got a place for

me with a good priest named Manchon, who was to be the chief

recorder in the Great Trial of Joan of Arc now approaching. It was

a strange position for me--clerk to the recorder--and dangerous if

my sympathies and the late employment should be found out. But

there was not much danger. Manchon was at bottom friendly to

Joan and would not betray me; and my name would not, for I had

discarded my surname and retained only my given one, like a

person of low degree.



I attended Manchon constantly straight along, out of January and

into February, and was often in the citadel with him--in the very

fortress where Joan was imprisoned, though not in the dungeon

where she was confined, and so did not see her, of course.



Manchon told me everything that had been happening before my

coming. Ever since the purchase of Joan, Cauchon had been busy

packing his jury for the destruction of the Maid--weeks and weeks

he had spent in this bad industry. The University of Paris had sent

him a number of learned and able and trusty ecclesiastics of the

stripe he wanted; and he had scraped together a clergyman of like

stripe and great fame here and there and yonder, until he was able

to construct a formidable court numbering half a hundred

distinguished names. French names they were, but their interests

and sympathies were English.



A great officer of the Inquisition was also sent from Paris for the

accused must be tried by the forms of the Inquisition; but this was

a brave and righteous man, and he said squarely that this court had

no power to try the case, wherefore he refused to act; and the same

honest talk was uttered by two or three others.



The Inquisitor was right. The case as here resurrected against Joan

had already been tried long ago at Poitiers, and decided in her

favor. Yes, and by a higher tribunal than this one, for at the head of

it was an Archbishop--he of Rheims--Cauchon's own metropolitan.

So here, you see, a lower court was impudently preparing to try

and redecide a cause which had already been decided by its

superior, a court of higher authority. Imagine it! No, the case could

not properly be tried again. Cauchon could not properly preside in

this new court, for more than one reason:



Rouen was not in his diocese; Joan had not been arrested in her

domicile, which was still Domremy; and finally this proposed

judge was the prisoner's outspoken enemy, and therefore he was

incompetent to try her. Yet all these large difficulties were gotten

rid of. The territorial Chapter of Rouen finally granted territorial

letters to Cauchon--though only after a struggle and under

compulsion. Force was also applied to the Inquisitor, and he was

obliged to submit.



So then, the little English King, by his representative, formally

delivered Joan into the hands of the court, but with this

reservation: if the court failed to condemn her, he was to have her

back again!  Ah, dear, what chance was there for that forsaken and

friendless child? Friendless, indeed--it is the right word. For she

was in a black dungeon, with half a dozen brutal common soldiers

keeping guard night and day in the room where her cage was--for

she was in a cage; an iron cage, and chained to her bed by neck

and hands and feet. Never a person near her whom she had ever

seen before; never a woman at all. Yes, this was, indeed,

friendlessness.



Now it was a vassal of Jean de Luxembourg who captured Joan

and CompiŠgne, and it was Jean who sold her to the Duke of

Burgundy. Yet this very De Luxembourg was shameless enough to

go and show his face to Joan in her cage. He came with two

English earls, Warwick and Stafford. He was a poor reptile. He

told her he would get her set free if she would promise not to fight

the English any more. She had been in that cage a long time now,

but not long enough to break her spirit. She retorted scornfully:



"Name of God, you but mock me. I know that you have neither the

power nor the will to do it."



He insisted. Then the pride and dignity of the soldier rose in Joan,

and she lifted her chained hands and let them fall with a clash,

saying:



"See these! They know more than you, an can prophesy better. I

know that the English are going to kill me, for they think that

when I am dead they can get the Kingdom of France. It is not so.



Though there were a hundred thousand of them they would never

get it."



This defiance infuriated Stafford, and he--now think of it--he a

free, strong man, she a chained and helpless girl--he drew his

dagger and flung himself at her to stab her. But Warwick seized

him and held him back. Warwick was wise. Take her life in that

way? Send her to Heaven stainless and undisgraced? It would

make her the idol of France, and the whole nation would rise and

march to victory and emancipation under the inspiration of her

spirit. No, she must be saved for another fate than that.



Well, the time was approaching for the Great Trial. For more than

two months Cauchon had been raking and scraping everywhere for

any odds and ends of evidence or suspicion or conjecture that

might be usable against Joan, and carefully suppressing all

evidence that came to hand in her favor. He had limitless ways and

means and powers at his disposal for preparing and strengthening

the case for the prosecution, and he used them all.



But Joan had no one to prepare her case for her, and she was shut

up in those stone walls and had no friend to appeal to for help.

And as for witnesses, she could not call a single one in her

defense; they were all far away, under the French flag, and this

was an English court; they would have been seized and hanged if

they had shown their faces at the gates of Rouen. No, the prisoner

must be the sole witness--witness for the prosecution, witness for

the defense; and with a verdict of death resolved upon before the

doors were opened for the court's first sitting.



When she learned that the court was made up of ecclesiastics in

the interest of the English, she begged that in fairness an equal

number of priests of the French party should be added to these.



Cauchon scoffed at her message, and would not even deign to

answer it.



By the law of the Church--she being a minor under twenty-one--it

was her right to have counsel to conduct her case, advise her how

to answer when questioned, and protect her from falling into traps

set by cunning devices of the prosecution. She probably did not

know that this was her right, and that she could demand it and

require it, for there was none to tell her that; but she begged for

this help, at any rate. Cauchon refused it. She urged and implored,

pleading her youth and her ignorance of the complexities and

intricacies of the law and of legal procedure. Cauchon refused

again, and said she must get along with her case as best she might

by herself. Ah, his heart was a stone.



Cauchon prepared the procŠs verbal. I will simplify that by calling

it the Bill of Particulars. It was a detailed list of the charges against

her, and formed the basis of the trial. Charges? It was a list of

suspicions and public rumors--those were the words used. It was

merely charged that she was suspected of having been guilty of

heresies, witchcraft, and other such offenses against religion.



Now by the law of the Church, a trial of that sort could not be

begun until a searching inquiry had been made into the history and

character of the accused, and it was essential that the result of this

inquiry be added to the procŠs verbal and form a part of it. You

remember that that was the first thing they did before the trial at

Poitiers. They did it again now. An ecclesiastic was sent to

Domremy. There and all about the neighborhood he made an

exhaustive search into Joan's history and character, and came back

with his verdict. It was very clear. The searcher reported that he

found Joan's character to be in every way what he "would like his

own sister's character to be." Just about the same report that was

brought back to Poitiers, you see. Joan's was a character which

could endure the minutest examination.



This verdict was a strong point for Joan, you will say. Yes, it

would have been if it could have seen the light; but Cauchon was

awake, and it disappeared from the procŠs verbal before the trial.

People were prudent enough not to inquire what became of it.



One would imagine that Cauchon was ready to begin the trial by

this time. But no, he devised one more scheme for poor Joan's

destruction, and it promised to be a deadly one.



One of the great personages picked out and sent down by the

University of Paris was an ecclesiastic named Nicolas Loyseleur.

He was tall, handsome, grave, of smooth, soft speech and

courteous and winning manners. There was no seeming of

treachery or hypocrisy about him, yet he was full of both. He was

admitted to Joan's prison by night, disguised as a cobbler; he

pretended to be from her own country; he professed to be secretly

a patriot; he revealed the fact that he was a priest. She was filled

with gladness to see one from the hills and plains that were so dear

to her; happier still to look upon a priest and disburden her heart in

confession, for the offices of the Church were the bread of life, the

breath of her nostrils to her, and she had been long forced to pine

for them in vain. She opened her whole innocent heart to this

creature, and in return he gave her advice concerning her trial

which could have destroyed her if her deep native wisdom had not

protected her against following it.



You will ask, what value could this scheme have, since the secrets

of the confessional are sacred and cannot be revealed? True--but

suppose another person should overhear them? That person is not

bound to keep the secret. Well, that is what happened. Cauchon

had previously caused a hole to be bored through the wall; and he

stood with his ear to that hole and heard all. It is pitiful to think of

these things. One wonders how they could treat that poor child so.

She had not done them any harm.



Chapter 4 All Ready to Condemn



ON TUESDAY, the 20th of February, while I sat at my master's

work in the evening, he came in, looking sad, and said it had been

decided to begin the trial at eight o'clock the next morning, and I

must get ready to assist him.



Of course I had been expecting such news every day for many

days; but no matter, the shock of it almost took my breath away

and set me trembling like a leaf. I suppose that without knowing it

I had been half imagining that at the last moment something would

happen, something that would stop this fatal trial; maybe that La

Hire would burst in at the gates with his hellions at his back;

maybe that God would have pity and stretch forth His mighty

hand. But now--now there was no hope.



The trial was to begin in the chapel of the fortress and would be

public. So I went sorrowing away and told No‰l, so that he might

be there early and secure a place. It would give him a chance to

look again upon the face which we so revered and which was so

precious to us. All the way, both going and coming, I plowed

through chattering and rejoicing multitudes of English soldiery and

English-hearted French citizens. There was no talk but of the

coming event. Many times I heard the remark, accompanied by a

pitiless laugh:



"The fat Bishop has got things as he wants them at last, and says he

will lead the vile witch a merry dance and a short one."



But here and there I glimpsed compassion and distress in a face,

and it was not always a French one. English soldiers feared Joan,

but they admired her for her great deeds and her unconquerable

spirit.



In the morning Manchon and I went early, yet as we approached

the vast fortress we found crowds of men already there and still

others gathering. The chapel was already full and the way barred

against further admissions of unofficial persons. We took our

appointed places. Throned on high sat the president, Cauchon,

Bishop of Beauvais, in his grand robes, and before him in rows sat

his robed court--fifty distinguished ecclesiastics, men of high

degree in the Church, of clear-cut intellectual faces, men of deep

learning, veteran adepts in strategy and casuistry, practised

settersof traps for ignorant minds and unwary feet. When I looked

around upon this army of masters of legal fence, gathered here to

find just one verdict and no other, and remembered that Joan must

fight for her good name and her life single-handed against them, I

asked myself what chance an ignorant poor country-girl of

nineteen could have in such an unequal conflict; and my heart sank

down low, very low. When I looked again at that obese president,

puffing and wheezing there, his great belly distending and receding

with each breath, and noted his three chins, fold above fold, and

his knobby and knotty face, and his purple and splotchy

complexion, and his repulsive cauliflower nose, and his cold and

malignant eyes--a brute, every detail of him--my heart sank lower

still. And when I noted that all were afraid of this man, and shrank

and fidgeted in their seats when his eye smote theirs, my last poor

ray of hope dissolved away and wholly disappeared.



There was one unoccupied seat in this place, and only one. It was

over against the wall, in view of every one. It was a little wooden

bench without a back, and it stood apart and solitary on a sort of

dais. Tall men-at-arms in morion, breastplate, and steel gauntlets

stood as stiff as their own halberds on each side of this dais, but no

other creature was near by it. A pathetic little bench to me it was,

for I knew whom it was for; and the sight of it carried my mind

back to the great court at Poitiers, where Joan sat upon one like it

and calmly fought her cunning fight with the astonished doctors of

the Church and Parliament, and rose from it victorious and

applauded by all, and went forth to fill the world with the glory of

her name.



What a dainty little figure she was, and how gentle and innocent,

how winning and beautiful in the fresh bloom of her seventeen

years! Those were grand days. And so recent--for she was just

nineteen now--and how much she had seen since, and what

wonders she had accomplished!



But now--oh, all was changed now. She had been languishing in

dungeons, away from light and air and the cheer of friendly faces,

for nearly three-quarters of a year--she, born child of the sun,

natural comrade of the birds and of all happy free creatures. She

would be weary now, and worn with this long captivity, her forces

impaired; despondent, perhaps, as knowing there was no hope.

Yes, all was changed.



All this time there had been a muffled hum of conversation, and

rustling of robes and scraping of feet on the floor, a combination

of dull noises which filled all the place. Suddenly:



"Produce the accused!"



It made me catch my breath. My heart began to thump like a

hammer. But there was silence now--silence absolute. All those

noises ceased, and it was as if they had never been. Not a sound;

the stillness grew oppressive; it was like a weight upon one. All

faces were turned toward the door; and one could properly expect

that, for most of the people there suddenly realized, no doubt, that

they were about to see, in actual flesh and blood, what had been to

them before only an embodied prodigy, a word, a phrase, a

world-girdling Name.



The stillness continued. Then, far down the stone-paved corridors,

one heard a vague slow sound approaching: clank . . . clink . . .

clank--Joan of Arc, Deliverer of France, in chains!



My head swam; all things whirled and spun about me. Ah, I was

realizing, too.



Chapter 5 Fifty Experts Against a Novice



I GIVE you my honor now that I am not going to distort or discolor

the facts of this miserable trial. No, I will give them to you

honestly, detail by detail, just as Manchon and I set them down

daily in the official record of the court, and just as one may read

them in the printed histories.



There will be only this difference: that in talking familiarly with

you shall use my right to comment upon the proceedings and

explain them as I go along, so that you can understand them better;

also, I shall throw in trifles which came under our eyes and have a

certain interest for you and me, but were not important enough to

go into the official record. [1] To take up my story now where I

left off. We heard the clanking of Joan's chains down the corridors;

she was approaching.



Presently she appeared; a thrill swept the house, and one heard

deep breaths drawn. Two guardsmen followed her at a short

distance to the rear. Her head was bowed a little, and she moved

slowly, she being weak and her irons heavy. She had on men's

attire--all black; a soft woolen stuff, intensely black, funereally

black, not a speck of relieving color in it from ther throat to the

floor. A wide collar of this same black stuff lay in radiating folds

upon her shoulders and breast; the sleeves of her doublet were full,

down to the elbows, and tight thence to her manacled wrists;

below the doublet, tight black hose down to the chains on her

ankles.



Half-way to her bench she stopped, just where a wide shaft of light

fell slanting from a window, and slowly lifted her face. Another

thrill!--it was totally colorless, white as snow; a face of gleaming

snow set in vivid contrast upon that slender statue of somber

unmitigated black. It was smooth and pure and girlish, beautiful

beyond belief, infinitely sad and sweet. But, dear, dear!



when the challenge of those untamed eyes fell upon that judge, and

the droop vanished from her form and it straightened up soldierly

and noble, my heart leaped for joy; and I said, all is well, all is

well--they have not broken her, they have not conquered her, she is

Joan of Arc still! Yes, it was plain to me now that there was one

spirit there which this dreaded judge could not quell nor make

afraid.



She moved to her place and mounted the dais and seated herself

upon her bench, gathering her chains into her lap and nestling her

little white hands there. Then she waited in tranquil dignity, the

only person there who seemed unmoved and unexcited. A bronzed

and brawny English soldier, standing at martial ease in the front

rank of the citizen spectators, did now most gallantly and

respectfully put up his great hand and give her the military salute;

and she, smiling friendly, put up hers and returned it; whereat

there was a sympathetic little break of applause, which the judge

sternly silence.



Now the memorable inquisition called in history the Great Trial

began. Fifty experts against a novice, and no one to help the

novice!



The judge summarized the circumstances of the case and the

public reports and suspicions upon which it was based; then he

required Joan to kneel and make oath that she would answer with

exact truthfulness to all questions asked her.



Joan's mind was not asleep. It suspected that dangerous

possibilities might lie hidden under this apparently fair and

reasonable demand. She answered with the simplicity which so

often spoiled the enemy's best-laid plans in the trial at Poitiers, and

said:



"No; for I do not know what you are going to ask me; you might

ask of me things which I would not tell you."



This incensed the Court, and brought out a brisk flurry of angry

exclamations. Joan was not disturbed. Cauchon raised his voice

and began to speak in the midst of this noise, but he was so angry

that he could hardly get his words out. He said:



"With the divine assistance of our Lord we require you to expedite

these proceedings for the welfare of your conscience. Swear, with

your hands upon the Gospels, that you will answer true to the

questions which shall be asked you!" and he brought down his fat

hand with a crash upon his official table.



Joan said, with composure:



"As concerning my father and mother, and the faith, and what

things I have done since my coming into France, I will gladly

answer; but as regards the revelations which I have received from

God, my Voices have forbidden me to confide them to any save

my King--"



Here there was another angry outburst of threats and expletives,

and much movement and confusion; so she had to stop, and wait

for the noise to subside; then her waxen face flushed a little and

she straightened up and fixed her eye on the judge, and finished

her sentence in a voice that had the old ring to it:



--"and I will never reveal these things though you cut my head

off!"



Well, maybe you know what a deliberative body of Frenchmen is

like. The judge and half the court were on their feet in a moment,

and all shaking their fists at the prisoner, and all storming and

vituperating at once, so that you could hardly hear yourself think.

They kept this up several minutes; and because Joan sat untroubled

and indifferent they grew madder and noisier all the time. Once

she said, with a fleeting trace of the old-time mischief in her eye

and manner:



"Prithee, speak one at a time, fair lords, then I will answer all of

you."



At the end of three whole hours of furious debating over the oath,

the situation had not changed a jot. The Bishop was still requiring

an unmodified oath, Joan was refusing for the twentieth time to

take any except the one which she had herself proposed. There was

a physical change apparent, but it was confined to the court and

judge; they were hoarse, droopy, exhausted by their long frenzy,

and had a sort of haggard look in their faces, poor men, whereas

Joan was still placid and reposeful and did not seem noticeably

tired.



The noise quieted down; there was a waiting pause of some

moments' duration. Then the judge surrendered to the prisoner, and

with bitterness in his voice told her to take the oath after her own

fashion. Joan sunk at once to her knees; and as she laid her hands

upon the Gospels, that big English soldier set free his mind:



"By God, if she were but English, she were not in this place

another half a second!"



It was the soldier in him responding to the soldier in her. But what

a stinging rebuke it was, what an arraignment of French character

and French royalty! Would that he could have uttered just that one

phrase in the hearing of Orleans! I know that that grateful city, that

adoring city, would have risen to the last man and the last woman,

and marched upon Rouen. Some speeches--speeches that shame a

man and humble him--burn themselves into the memory and

remain there. That one is burned into mine.



After Joan had made oath, Cauchon asked her her name, and

where she was born, and some questions about her family; also

what her age was. She answered these. Then he asked her how

much education she had.



"I have learned from my mother the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria,

and the Belief. All that I know was taught me by my mother."



Questions of this unessential sort dribbled on for a considerable

time. Everybody was tired out by now, except Joan. The tribunal

prepared to rise. At this point Cauchon forbade Joan to try to

escape from prison, upon pain of being held guilty of the crime of

heresy--singular logic! She answered simply:



"I am not bound by this proposition. If I could escape I would not

reproach myself, for I have given no promise, and I shall not."



Then she complained of the burden of her chains, and asked that

they might be removed, for she was strongly guarded in that

dungeon and there was no need of them. But the Bishop refused,

and reminded her that she had broken out of prison twice before.

Joan of Arc was too proud to insist. She only said, as she rose to go

with the guard:



"It is true, I have wanted to escape, and I do want to escape." Then

she added, in a way that would touch the pity of anybody, I think,

"It is the right of every prisoner."



And so she went from the place in the midst of an impressive

stillness, which made the sharper and more distressful to me the

clank of those pathetic chains.



What presence of mind she had! One could never surprise her out

of it. She saw No‰l and me there when she first took her seat on

the bench, and we flushed to the forehead with excitement and

emotion, but her face showed nothing, betrayed nothing. Her eyes

sought us fifty times that day, but they passed on and there was

never any ray of recognition in them. Another would have started

upon seeing us, and then--why, then there could have been trouble

for us, of course.



We walked slowly home together, each busy with his own grief

and saying not a word.



[1] He kept his word. His account of the Great Trial will be found

to be in strict and detailed accordance with the sworn facts of

history. Qq TRANSLATOR.



Chapter 6 The Maid Baffles Her Persecutors



THAT NIGHT Manchon told me that all through the day's

proceedings Cauchon had had some clerks concealed in the

embrasure of a window who were to make a special report

garbling Joan's answers and twisting them from their right

meaning. Ah, that was surely the cruelest man and the most

shameless that has lived in this world. But his scheme failed.

Those clerks had human hearts in them, and their base work

revolted them, and they turned to and boldly made a straight

report, whereupon Cauchon curse them and ordered them out of

his presence with a threat of drowning, which was his favorite and

most frequent menace. The matter had gotten abroad and was

making great and unpleasant talk, and Cauchon would not try to

repeat this shabby game right away. It comforted me to hear that.



When we arrived at the citadel next morning, we found that a

change had been made. The chapel had been found too small. The

court had now removed to a noble chamber situated at the end of

the great hall of the castle. The number of judges was increased to

sixty-two--one ignorant girl against such odds, and none to help

her.



The prisoner was brought in. She was as white as ever, but she was

looking no whit worse than she looked when she had first appeared

the day before. Isn't it a strange thing? Yesterday she had sat five

hours on that backless bench with her chains in her lap, baited,

badgered, persecuted by that unholy crew, without even the

refreshment of a cup of water--for she was never offered anything,

and if I have made you know her by this time you will know

without my telling you that she was not a person likely to ask

favors of those people. And she had spent the night caged in her

wintry dungeon with her chains upon her; yet here she was, as I

say, collected, unworn, and ready for the conflict; yes, and the only

person there who showed no signs of the wear and worry of

yesterday. And her eyes--ah, you should have seen them and

broken your hearts. Have you seen that veiled deep glow, that

pathetic hurt dignity, that unsubdued and unsubduable spirit that

burns and smolders in the eye of a caged eagle and makes you feel

mean and shabby under the burden of its mute reproach? Her eyes

were like that. How capable they were, and how wonderful! Yes,

at all times and in all circumstances they could express as by print

every shade of the wide range of her moods. In them were hidden

floods of gay sunshine, the softest and peacefulest twilights, and

devastating storms and lightnings. Not in this world have there

been others that were comparable to them. Such is my opinion,

and none that had the privilege to see them would say otherwise

than this which I have said concerning them.



The s‚ance began. And how did it begin, should you think?

Exactly as it began before--with that same tedious thing which had

been settled once, after so much wrangling. The Bishop opened

thus:



"You are required now, to take the oath pure and simple, to answer

truly all questions asked you."



Joan replied placidly:



"I have made oath yesterday, my lord; let that suffice."



The Bishop insisted and insisted, with rising temper; Joan but

shook her head and remained silent. At last she said:



"I made oath yesterday; it is sufficient." Then she sighed and said,

"Of a truth, you do burden me too much."



The Bishop still insisted, still commanded, but he could not move

her. At last he gave it up and turned her over for the day's inquest

to an old hand at tricks and traps and deceptive

plausibilities--Beaupere, a doctor of theology. Now notice the form

of this sleek strategist's first remark--flung out in an easy, offhand

way that would have thrown any unwatchful person off his guard:



"Now, Joan, the matter is very simple; just speak up and frankly

and truly answer the questions which I am going to ask you, as you

have sworn to do."



It was a failure. Joan was not asleep. She saw the artifice. She said:



"No. You could ask me things which I could not tell you--and

would not." Then, reflecting upon how profane and out of

character it was for these ministers of God to be prying into

matters which had proceeded from His hands under the awful seal

of His secrecy, she added, with a warning note in her tone, "If you

were well informed concerning me you would wish me out of your

hands. I have done nothing but by revelation."



Beaupere changed his attack, and began an approach from another

quarter. He would slip upon her, you see, under cover of innocent

and unimportant questions.



"Did you learn any trade at home?"



"Yes, to sew and to spin." Then the invincible soldier, victor of

Patay, conquerer of the lion Talbot, deliverer of Orleans, restorer

of a king's crown, commander-in-chief of a nation's armies,

straightened herself proudly up, gave her head a little toss, and said

with na‹ve complacency, "And when it comes to that, I am not

afraid to be matched against any woman in Rouen!"



The crowd of spectators broke out with applause--which pleased

Joan--and there was many a friendly and petting smile to be seen.

But Cauchon stormed at the people and warned them to keep still

and mind their manners.



Beaupere asked other questions. Then:



"Had you other occupations at home?"



"Yes. I helped my mother in the household work and went to the

pastures with the sheep and the cattle."



Her voice trembled a little, but one could hardly notice it. As for

me, it brought those old enchanted days flooding back to me, and I

could not see what I was writing for a little while.



Beaupere cautiously edged along up with other questions toward

the forbidden ground, and finally repeated a question which she

had refused to answer a little while back--as to whether she had

received the Eucharist in those days at other festivals than that of

Easter. Joan merely said:



"Passez outre." Or, as one might say, "Pass on to matters which

you are privileged to pry into."



I heard a member of the court say to a neighbor:



"As a rule, witnesses are but dull creatures, and an easy prey--yes,

and easily embarrassed, easily frightened--but truly one can neither

scare this child nor find her dozing."



Presently the house pricked up its ears and began to listen eagerly,

for Beaupere began to touch upon Joan's Voices, a matter of

consuming interest and curiosity to everybody. His purpose was to

trick her into heedless sayings that could indicate that the Voices

had sometimes given her evil advice--hence that they had come

from Satan, you see. To have dealing with the devil--well, that

would send her to the stake in brief order, and that was the

deliberate end and aim of this trial.



"When did you first hear these Voices?"



"I was thirteen when I first heard a Voice coming from God to help

me to live well. I was frightened. It came at midday, in my father's

garden in the summer."



"Had you been fasting?"



"Yes."



"The day before?"



"No."



"From what direction did it come?"



"From the right--from toward the church."



"Did it come with a bright light?"



"Oh, indeed yes. It was brilliant. When I came into France I often

heard the Voices very loud."



"What did the Voice sound like?"



"It was a noble Voice, and I thought it was sent to me from God.

The third time I heard it I recognized it as being an angel's."



"You could understand it?"



"Quite easily. It was always clear."



"What advice did it give you as to the salvation of your soul?"



"It told me to live rightly, and be regular in attendance upon the

services of the Church. And it told me that I must go to France."



"In what species of form did the Voice appear?"



Joan looked suspiciously at he priest a moment, then said,

tranquilly:



"As to that, I will not tell you."



"Did the Voice seek you often?"



"Yes. Twice or three times a week, saying, 'Leave your village and

go to France.'"



"Did you father know about your departure?"



"No. The Voice said, 'Go to France'; therefore I could not abide at

home any longer."



"What else did it say?"



"That I should raise the siege of Orleans."



"Was that all?"



"No, I was to go to Vaucouleurs, and Robert de Baudricourt would

give me soldiers to go with me to France; and I answered, saying

that I was a poor girl who did not know how to ride, neither how to

fight."



Then she told how she was balked and interrupted at Vaucouleurs,

but finally got her soldiers, and began her march.



"How were you dressed?"



The court of Poitiers had distinctly decided and decreed that as

God had appointed her to do a man's work, it was meet and no

scandal to religion that she should dress as a man; but no matter,

this court was ready to use any and all weapons against Joan, even

broken and discredited ones, and much was going to be made of

this one before this trial should end.



"I wore a man's dress, also a sword which Robert de Baudricourt

gave me, but no other weapon."



"Who was it that advised you to wear the dress of a man?"



Joan was suspicious again. She would not answer.



The question was repeated.



She refused again.



"Answer. It is a command!"



"Passez outre," was all she said.



So Beaupere gave up the matter for the present.



"What did Baudricourt say to you when you left?"



"He made them that were to go with me promise to take charge of

me, and to me he said, 'Go, and let happen what may!'" (Advienne

que pourra!) After a good deal of questioning upon other matters

she was asked again about her attire. She said it was necessary for

her to dress as a man.



"Did your Voice advise it?"



Joan merely answered placidly:



"I believe my Voice gave me good advice."



It was all that could be got out of her, so the questions wandered to

other matters, and finally to her first meeting with the King at

Chinon. She said she chose out the King, who was unknown to her,

by the revelation of her Voices. All that happened at that time was

gone over. Finally:



"Do you still hear those Voices?"



"They come to me every day."



"What do you ask of them?"



"I have never asked of them any recompense but the salvation of

my soul."



"Did the Voice always urge you to follow the army?"



He is creeping upon her again. She answered:



"It required me to remain behind at St. Denis. I would have obeyed

if I had been free, but I was helpless by my wound, and the knights

carried me away by force."



"When were you wounded?"



"I was wounded in the moat before Paris, in the assault."



The next question reveals what Beaupere had been leading up to:



"Was it a feast-day?"



You see? The suggestion that a voice coming from God would

hardly advise or permit the violation, by war and bloodshed, of a

sacred day.



Joan was troubled a moment, then she answered yes, it was a

feast-day.



"Now, then, tell the this: did you hold it right to make the attack on

such a day?"



This was a shot which might make the first breach in a wall which

had suffered no damage thus far. There was immediate silence in

the court and intense expectancy noticeable all about. But Joan

disappointed the house. She merely made a slight little motion

with her hand, as when one brushes away a fly, and said with

reposeful indifference:



"Passez outre."



Smiles danced for a moment in some of the sternest faces there,

and several men even laughed outright. The trap had been long and

laboriously prepared; it fell, and was empty.



The court rose. It had sat for hours, and was cruelly fatigued. Most

of the time had been taken up with apparently idle and purposeless

inquiries about the Chinon events, the exiled Duke of Orleans,

Joan's first proclamation, and so on, but all this seemingly random

stuff had really been sown thick with hidden traps. But Joan had

fortunately escaped them all, some by the protecting luck which

attends upon ignorance and innocence, some by happy accident,

the others by force of her best and surest helper, the clear vision

and lightning intuitions of her extraordinary mind.



Now, then, this daily baiting and badgering of this friendless girl, a

captive in chains, was to continue a long, long time--dignified

sport, a kennel of mastiffs and bloodhounds harassing a

kitten!--and I may as well tell you, upon sworn testimony, what it

was like from the first day to the last. When poor Joan had been in

her grave a quarter of a century, the Pope called together that great

court which was to re-examine her history, and whose just verdict

cleared her illustrious name from every spot and stain, and laid

upon the verdict and conduct of our Rouen tribunal the blight of its

everlasting execrations. Manchon and several of the judges who

had been members of our court were among the witnesses who

appeared before that Tribunal of Rehabilitation. Recalling these

miserable proceedings which I have been telling you about,

Manchon testified thus:--here you have it, all in fair print in the

unofficial history:



When Joan spoke of her apparitions she was interrupted at almost

every word. They wearied her with long and multiplied

interrogatories upon all sorts of things. Almost every day the

interrogatories of the morning lasted three or four hours; then from

these morning interrogatories they extracted the particularly

difficult and subtle points, and these served as material for the

afternoon interrogatories, which lasted two or three hours.

Moment by moment they skipped from one subject to another; yet

in spite of this she always responded with an astonishing wisdom

and memory. She often corrected the judges, saying, "But I have

already answered that once before--ask the recorder," referring

them to me.



And here is the testimony of one of Joan's judges. Remember,

these witnesses are not talking about two or three days, they are

talking about a tedious long procession of days:



They asked her profound questions, but she extricated herself quite

well. Sometimes the questioners changed suddenly and passed on

to another subject to see if she would not contradict herself. They

burdened her with long interrogatories of two or three hours, from

which the judges themselves went forth fatigued. From the snares

with which she was beset the expertest man in the world could not

have extricated himself but with difficulty. She gave her responses

with great prudence; indeed to such a degree that during three

weeks I believed she was inspired.



Ah, had she a mind such as I have described? You see what these

priests say under oath--picked men, men chosen for their places in

that terrible court on account of their learning, their experience,

their keen and practised intellects, and their strong bias against the

prisoner. They make that poor country-girl out the match, and

more than the match, of the sixty-two trained adepts. Isn't it so?

They from the University of Paris, she from the sheepfold and the

cow-stable!



Ah, yes, she was great, she was wonderful. It took six thousand

years to produce her; her like will not be seen in the earth again in

fifty thousand. Such is my opinion.



Chapter 7 Craft That Was in Vain



THE THIRD meeting of the court was in that same spacious

chamber, next day, 24th of February.



How did it begin? In just the same old way. When the preparations

were ended, the robed sixty-two massed in their chairs and the

guards and order-keepers distributed to their stations, Cauchon

spoke from his throne and commanded Joan to lay her hands upon

the Gospels and swear to tell the truth concerning everything asked

her!



Joan's eyes kindled, and she rose; rose and stood, fine and noble,

and faced toward the Bishop and said:



"Take care what you do, my lord, you who are my judge, for you

take a terrible responsibility on yourself and you presume too far."



It made a great stir, and Cauchon burst out upon her with an awful

threat--the threat of instant condemnation unless she obeyed. That

made the very bones of my body turn cold, and I saw cheeks about

me blanch--for it meant fire and the stake! But Joan, still standing,

answered him back, proud and undismayed:



"Not all the clergy in Paris and Rouen could condemn me, lacking

the right!"



This made a great tumult, and part of it was applause from the

spectators. Joan resumed her seat.



The Bishop still insisted. Joan said:



"I have already made oath. It is enough."



The Bishop shouted:



"In refusing to swear, you place yourself under suspicion!"



"Let be. I have sword already. It is enough."



The Bishop continued to insist. Joan answered that "she would tell

what she knew--but not all that she knew."



The Bishop plagued her straight along, till at last she said, in a

weary tone:



"I came from God; I have nothing more to do here. Return me to

God, from whom I came."



It was piteous to hear; it was the same as saying, "You only want

my life; take it and let me be at peace."



The Bishop stormed out again:



"Once more I command you to--"



Joan cut in with a nonchalant "Passez outre," and Cauchon retired

from the struggle; but he retired with some credit this time, for he

offered a compromise, and Joan, always clear-headed, saw

protection for herself in it and promptly and willingly accepted it.

She was to swear to tell the truth "as touching the matters et down

in the procŠs verbal." They could not sail her outside of definite

limits, now; her course was over a charted sea, henceforth. The

Bishop had granted more than he had intended, and more than he

would honestly try to abide by.



By command, Beaupere resumed his examination of the accused.

It being Lent, there might be a chance to catch her neglecting some

detail of her religious duties. I could have told him he would fail

there. Why, religion was her life!



"Since when have you eaten or drunk?"



If the least thing had passed her lips in the nature of sustenance,

neither her youth nor the fact that she was being half starved in her

prison could save her from dangerous suspicion of contempt for

the commandments of the Church.



"I have done neither since yesterday at noon."



The priest shifted to the Voices again.



"When have you heard your Voice?"



"Yesterday and to-day."



"At what time?"



"Yesterday it was in the morning."



"What were you doing then?"



"I was asleep and it woke me."



"By touching your arm?"



"No, without touching me."



"Did you thank it? Did you kneel?"



He had Satan in his mind, you see; and was hoping, perhaps, that

by and by it could be shown that she had rendered homage to the

arch enemy of God and man.



"Yes, I thanked it; and knelt in my bed where I was chained, and

joined my hands and begged it to implore God's help for me so that

I might have light and instruction as touching the answers I should

give here."



"Then what did the Voice say?"



"It told me to answer boldly, and God would help me." Then she

turned toward Cauchon and said, "You say that you are my judge;

now I tell you again, take care what you do, for in truth I am sent

of God and you are putting yourself in great danger."



Beaupere asked her if the Voice's counsels were not fickle and

variable.



"No. It never contradicts itself. This very day it has told me again

to answer boldly."



"Has it forbidden you to answer only part of what is asked you?"



"I will tell you nothing as to that. I have revelations touching the

King my master, and those I will not tell you." Then she was

stirred by a great emotion, and the tears sprang to her eyes and she

spoke out as with strong conviction, saying:



"I believe wholly--as wholly as I believe the Christian faith and

that God has redeemed us from the fires of hell, that God speaks to

me by that Voice!"



Being questioned further concerning the Voice, she said she was

not at liberty to tell all she knew.



"Do you think God would be displeased at your telling the whole

truth?"



"The Voice has commanded me to tell the King certain things, and

not you--and some very lately--even last night; things which I

would he knew. He would be more easy at his dinner."



"Why doesn't the Voice speak to the King itself, as it did when you

were with him? Would it not if you asked it?"



"I do not know if it be the wish of God." She was pensive a

moment or two, busy with her thoughts and far away, no doubt;

then she added a remark in which Beaupere, always watchful,

always alert, detected a possible opening--a chance to set a trap.

Do you think he jumped at it instantly, betraying the joy he had in

his mind, as a young hand at craft and artifice would do?



No, oh, no, you could not tell that he had noticed the remark at all.

He slid indifferently away from it at once, and began to ask idle

questions about other things, so as to slip around and spring on it

from behind, so to speak: tedious and empty questions as to

whether the Voice had told her she would escape from this prison;

and if it had furnished answers to be used by her in to-day's s‚ance;

if it was accompanied with a glory of light; if it had eyes, etc. That

risky remark of Joan's was this:



"Without the Grace of God I could do nothing."



The court saw the priest's game, and watched his play with a cruel

eagerness. Poor Joan was grown dreamy and absent; possibly she

was tired. Her life was in imminent danger, and she did not suspect

it. The time was ripe now, and Beaupere quietly and stealthily

sprang his trap:



"Are you in a state of Grace?"



Ah, we had two or three honorable brave men in that pack of

judges; and Jean Lefevre was one of them. He sprang to his feet

and cried out:



"It is a terrible question! The accused is not obliged to answer it!"



Cauchon's face flushed black with anger to see this plank flung to

the perishing child, and he shouted:



"Silence! and take your seat. The accused will answer the

question!"



There was no hope, no way out of the dilemma; for whether she

said yes or whether she said no, it would be all the same--a

disastrous answer, for the Scriptures had said one cannot know this

thing. Think what hard hearts they were to set this fatal snare for

that ignorant young girl and be proud of such work and happy in it.

It was a miserable moment for me while we waited; it seemed a

year. All the house showed excitement; and mainly it was glad

excitement. Joan looked out upon these hungering faces with

innocent, untroubled eyes, and then humbly and gently she brought

out that immortal answer which brushed the formidable snare

away as it had been but a cobweb:



"If I be not in a state of Grace, I pray God place me in it; if I be in

it, I pray God keep me so."



Ah, you will never see an effect like that; no, not while you live.

For a space there was the silence of the grave. Men looked

wondering into each other's faces, and some were awed and

crossed themselves; and I heard Lefevre mutter:



"It was beyond the wisdom of man to devise that answer. Whence

comes this child's amazing inspirations?"



Beaupere presently took up his work again, but the humiliation of

his defeat weighed upon him, and he made but a rambling and

dreary business of it, he not being able to put any heart in it.



He asked Joan a thousand questions about her childhood and about

the oak wood, and the fairies, and the children's games and romps

under our dear Arbre f‚e de Bourlemont, and this stirring up of old

memories broke her voice and made her cry a little, but she bore

up as well as she could, and answered everything.



Then the priest finished by touching again upon the matter of her

apparel--a matter which was never to be lost sight of in this

still-hunt for this innocent creature's life, but kept always hanging

over her, a menace charged with mournful possibilities:



"Would you like a woman's dress?"



"Indeed yes, if I may go out from this prison--but here, no."



Chapter 8 Joan Tells of Her Visions



THE COURT met next on Monday the 27th. Would you believe it?

The Bishop ignored the contract limiting the examination to

matters set down in the procŠs verbal and again commanded Joan

to take the oath without reservations. She said:



"You should be content I have sworn enough."



She stood her ground, and Cauchon had to yield.



The examination was resumed, concerning Joan's Voices.



"You have said that you recognized them as being the voices of

angels the third time that you heard them. What angels were they?"



"St. Catherine and St. Marguerite."



"How did you know that it was those two saints? How could you

tell the one from the other?"



"I know it was they; and I know how to distinguish them."



"By what sign?"



"By their manner of saluting me. I have been these seven years

under their direction, and I knew who they were because they told

me."



"Whose was the first Voice that came to you when you were

thirteen years old?"



"It was the Voice of St. Michael. I saw him before my eyes; and he

was not alone, but attended by a cloud of angels."



"Did you see the archangel and the attendant angels in the body, or

in the spirit?"



"I saw them with the eyes of my body, just as I see you; and when

they went away I cried because they did not take me with them."



It made me see that awful shadow again that fell dazzling white

upon her that day under l'Arbre F&eeacute;e de Bourlemont, and it

made me shiver again, though it was so long ago. It was really not

very long gone by, but it seemed so, because so much had

happened since.



"In what shape and form did St. Michael appear?"



"As to that, I have not received permission to speak."



"What did the archangel say to you that first time?"



"I cannot answer you to-day."



Meaning, I think, that she would have to get permission of her

Voices first.



Presently, after some more questions as to the revelations which

had been conveyed through her to the King, she complained of the

unnecessity of all this, and said:



"I will say again, as I have said before many times in these sittings,

that I answered all questions of this sort before the court at

Poitiers, and I would hat you wold bring here the record of that

court and read from that. Prithee, send for that book."



There was no answer. It was a subject that had to be got around

and put aside. That book had wisely been gotten out of the way, for

it contained things which would be very awkward here.



Among them was a decision that Joan's mission was from God,

whereas it was the intention of this inferior court to show that it

was from the devil; also a decision permitting Joan to wear male

attire, whereas it was the purpose of this court to make the male

attire do hurtful work against her.



"How was it that you were moved to come into France--by your

own desire?"



"Yes, and by command of God. But that it was His will I would

note have come. I would sooner have had my body torn in sunder

by horses than come, lacking that."



Beaupere shifted once more to the matter of the male attire, now,

and proceeded to make a solemn talk about it. That tried Joan's

patience; and presently she interrupted and said:



"It is a trifling thing and of no consequence. And I did not put it on

by counsel of any man, but by command of God."



"Robert de Baudricourt did not order you to wear it?"



"No."



"Did you think you did well in taking the dress of a man?"



"I did well to do whatsoever thing God commanded me to do."



"But in this particular case do you think you did well in taking the

dress of a man?"



"I have done nothing but by command of God."



Beaupere made various attempts to lead her into contradictions of

herself; also to put her words and acts in disaccord with the

Scriptures. But it was lost time. He did not succeed. He returned to

her visions, the light which shone about them, her relations with

the King, and so on.



"Was there an angel above the King's head the first time you saw

him?"



"By the Blessed Mary!--"



She forced her impatience down, and finished her sentence with

tranquillity: "If there was one I did not see it."



"Was there light?"



"There were more than three thousand soldiers there, and five

hundred torches, without taking account of spiritual light."



"What made the King believe in the revelations which you brought

him?"



"He had signs; also the counsel of the clergy."



"What revelations were made to the King?"



"You will not get that out of me this year."



Presently she added: "During three weeks I was questioned by the

clergy at Chinon and Poitiers.



The King had a sign before he would believe; and the clergy were

of opinion that my acts were good and not evil."



The subject was dropped now for a while, and Beaupere took up

the matter of the miraculous sword of Fierbois to see if he could

not find a chance there to fix the crime of sorcery upon Joan.



"How did you know that there was an ancient sword buried in the

ground under the rear of the altar of the church of St. Catherine of

Fierbois?"



Joan had no concealments to make as to this:



"I knew the sword was there because my Voices told me so; and I

sent to ask that it be given to me to carry in the wars. It seemed to

me that it was not very deep in the ground. The clergy of the

church caused it to be sought for and dug up; and they polished it,

and the rust fell easily off from it."



"Were you wearing it when you were taken in battle at

CompiŠgne?"



"No. But I wore it constantly until I left St. Denis after the attack

upon Paris."



This sword, so mysteriously discovered and so long and so

constantly victorious, was suspected of being under the protection

of enchantment.



"Was that sword blest? What blessing had been invoked upon it?"



"None. I loved it because it was found in the church of St.

Catherine, for I loved that church very dearly."



She loved it because it had been built in honor of one of her

angels.



"Didn't you lay it upon the altar, to the end that it might be lucky?"

(The altar of St. Denis.) "No."



"Didn't you pray that it might be made lucky?"



"Truly it were no harm to wish that my harness might be

fortunate."



"Then it was not that sword which you wore in the field of

CompiŠgne? What sword did you wear there?"



"The sword of the Burgundian Franquet d'Arras, whom I took

prisoner in the engagement at Lagny. I kept it because it was a

good war-sword--good to lay on stout thumps and blows with."



She said that quite simply; and the contrast between her delicate

little self and the grim soldier words which she dropped with such

easy familiarity from her lips made many spectators smile.



"What is become of the other sword? Where is it now?"



"Is that in the procŠs verbal?"



Beaupere did not answer.



"Which do you love best, your banner or your sword?"



Her eye lighted gladly at the mention of her banner, and she cried

out:



"I love my banner best--oh, forty times more than the sword!

Sometimes I carried it myself when I charged the enemy, to avoid

killing any one." Then she added, na‹vely, and with again that

curious contrast between her girlish little personality and her

subject, "I have never killed anyone."



It made a great many smile; and no wonder, when you consider

what a gentle and innocent little thing she looked. One could

hardly believe she had ever even seen men slaughtered, she look so

little fitted for such things.



"In the final assault at Orleans did you tell your soldiers that the

arrows shot by the enemy and the stones discharged from their

catapults would not strike any one but you?"



"No. And the proof its, that more than a hundred of my men were

struck. I told them to have no doubts and no fears; that they would

raise the siege. I was wounded in the neck by an arrow in the

assault upon the bastille that commanded the bridge, but St.

Catherine comforted me and I was cured in fifteen days without

having to quit the saddle and leave my work."



"Did you know that you were going to be wounded?"



"Yes; and I had told it to the King beforehand. I had it from my

Voices."



"When you took Jargeau, why did you not put its commandant to

ransom?"



"I offered him leave to go out unhurt from the place, with all his

garrison; and if he would not I would take it by storm."



"And you did, I believe."



"Yes."



"Had your Voices counseled you to take it by storm?"



"As to that, I do not remember."



Thus closed a weary long sitting, without result. Every device that

could be contrived to trap Joan into wrong thinking, wrong doing,

or disloyalty to the Church, or sinfulness as a little child at home

or later, had been tried, and none of them had succeeded. She had

come unscathed through the ordeal.



Was the court discouraged? No. Naturally it was very much

surprised, very much astonished, to find its work baffling and

difficult instead of simple and easy, but it had powerful allies in

the shape of hunger, cold, fatigue, persecution, deception, and

treachery; and opposed to this array nothing but a defenseless and

ignorant girl who must some time or other surrender to bodily and

mental exhaustion or get caught in one of the thousand traps set

for her.



And had the court made no progress during these seemingly

resultless sittings? Yes. It had been feeling its way, groping here,

groping there, and had found one or two vague trails which might

freshen by and by and lead to something. The male attire, for

instance, and the visions and Voices. Of course no one doubted

that she had seen supernatural beings and been spoken to and

advised by them. And of course no one doubted that by

supernatural help miracles had been done by Joan, such as

choosing out the King in a crowd when she had never seen him

before, and her discovery of the sword buried under the altar. It

would have been foolish to doubt these things, for we all know that

the air is full of devils and angels that are visible to traffickers in

magic on the one hand and to the stainlessly holy on the other; but

what many and perhaps most did doubt was, that Joan's visions,

Voices, and miracles came from God. It was hoped that in time

they could be proven to have been of satanic origin. Therefore, as

you see, the court's persistent fashion of coming back to that

subject every little while and spooking around it and prying into it

was not to pass the time--it had a strictly business end in view.



Chapter 9 Her Sure Deliverance Foretold



THE NEXT sitting opened on Thursday the first of March.

Fifty-eight judges present--the others resting.



As usual, Joan was required to take an oath without reservations.

She showed no temper this time. She considered herself well

buttressed by the procŠs verbal compromise which Cauchon was

so anxious to repudiate and creep out of; so she merely refused,

distinctly and decidedly; and added, in a spirit of fairness and

candor:



"But as to matters set down in the procŠs verbal, I will freely tell

the whole truth--yes, as freely and fully as if I were before the

Pope."



Here was a chance! We had two or three Popes, then; only one of

them could be the true Pope, of course. Everybody judiciously

shirked the question of which was the true Pope and refrained

from naming him, it being clearly dangerous to go into particulars

in this matter. Here was an opportunity to trick an unadvised girl

into bringing herself into peril, and the unfair judge lost no time in

taking advantage of it. He asked, in a plausibly indolent and absent

way:



"Which one do you consider to be the true Pope?"



The house took an attitude of deep attention, and so waited to hear

the answer and see the prey walk into the trap. But when the

answer came it covered the judge with confusion, and you could

see many people covertly chuckling. For Joan asked in a voice and

manner which almost deceived even me, so innocent it seemed:



"Are there two?"



One of the ablest priests in that body and one of the best swearers

there, spoke right out so that half the house heard him, and said:



"By God, it was a master stroke!"



As soon as the judge was better of his embarrassment he came

back to the charge, but was prudent and passed by Joan's question:



"Is it true that you received a letter from the Count of Armagnac

asking you which of the three Popes he ought to obey?"



"Yes, and answered it."



Copies of both letters were produced and read. Joan said that hers

had not been quite strictly copied. She said she had received the

Count's letter when she was just mounting her horse; and added:



"So, in dictating a word or two of reply I said I would try to answer

him from Paris or somewhere where I could be at rest."



She was asked again which Pope she had considered the right one.



"I was not able to instruct the Count of Armagnac as to which one

he ought to obey"; then she added, with a frank fearlessness which

sounded fresh and wholesome in that den of trimmers and

shufflers, "but as for me, I hold that we are bound to obey our Lord

the Pope who is at Rome."



The matter was dropped. They they produced and read a copy of

Joan's first effort at dictating--her proclamation summoning the

English to retire from the siege of Orleans and vacate France--truly

a great and fine production for an unpractised girl of seventeen.



"Do you acknowledge as your own the document which has just

been read?"



"Yes, except that there are errors in it--words which make me give

myself too much importance." I saw what was coming; I was

troubled and ashamed. "For instance, I did not say 'Deliver up to

the Maid' (rendez … la Pucelle</>); I said 'Deliver up to the King'

(rendez au Roi); and I did not call myself 'Commander-in-Chief'

(chef de guerre). All those are words which my secretary

substituted; or mayhap he misheard me or forgot what I said."



She did not look at me when she said it: she spared me that

embarrassment. I hadn't misheard her at all, and hadn't forgotten. I

changed her language purposely, for she was Commander-in-Chief

and entitled to call herself so, and it was becoming and proper,

too; and who was going to surrender anything to the King?--at that

time a stick, a cipher? If any surrendering was done, it would be to

the noble Maid of Vaucouleurs, already famed and formidable

though she had not yet struck a blow.



Ah, there would have been a fine and disagreeable episode (for

me) there, if that pitiless court had discovered that the very

scribbler of that piece of dictation, secretary to Joan of Arc, was

present--and not only present, but helping build the record; and not

only that, but destined at a far distant day to testify against lies and

perversions smuggled into it by Cauchon and deliver them over to

eternal infamy!



"Do you acknowledge that you dictated this proclamation?"



"I do."



"Have you repented of it? Do you retract it?"



Ah, then she was indignant!



"No! Not even these chains"--and she shook them--"not even these

chains can chill the hopes that I uttered there. And more!"--she

rose, and stood a moment with a divine strange light kindling in

her face, then her words burst forth as in a flood--"I warn you now

that before seven years a disaster will smite the English, oh, many

fold greater than the fall of Orleans! and--"



"Silence! Sit down!"



"--and then, soon after, they will lose all France!"



Now consider these things. The French armies no longer existed.

The French cause was standing still, our King was standing still,

there was no hint that by and by the Constable Richemont would

come forward and take up the great work of Joan of Arc and finish

it. In face of all this, Joan made that prophecy--made it with

perfect confidence--and it came true.  For within five years Paris

fell--1436--and our King marched into it flying the victor's flag. So

the first part of the prophecy was then fulfilled--in fact, almost the

entire prophecy; for, with Paris in our hands, the fulfilment of the

rest of it was assured.



Twenty years later all France was ours excepting a single

town--Calais.



Now that will remind you of an earlier prophecy of Joan's. At the

time that she wanted to take Paris and could have done it with ease

if our King had but consented, she said that that was the golden

time; that, with Paris ours, all France would be ours in six months.

But if this golden opportunity to recover France was wasted, said

she, "I give you twenty years to do it in."



She was right. After Paris fell, in 1436, the rest of the work had to

be done city by city, castle by castle, and it took twenty years to

finish it.



Yes, it was the first day of March, 1431, there in the court, that she

stood in the view of everybody and uttered that strange and

incredible prediction. Now and then, in this world, somebody's

prophecy turns up correct, but when you come to look into it there

is sure to be considerable room for suspicion that the prophecy was

made after the fact. But here the matter is different. There in that

court Joan's prophecy was set down in the official record at the

hour and moment of its utterance, years before the fulfilment, and

there you may read it to this day.



Twenty-five years after Joan's death the record was produced in

the great Court of the Rehabilitation and verified under oath by

Manchon and me, and surviving judges of our court confirmed the

exactness of the record in their testimony.



Joan' startling utterance on that now so celebrated first of March

stirred up a great turmoil, and it was some time before it quieted

down again. Naturally, everybody was troubled, for a prophecy is a

grisly and awful thing, whether one thinks it ascends from hell or

comes down from heaven.



All that these people felt sure of was, that the inspiration back of it

was genuine and puissant.



They would have given their right hands to know the source of it.



At last the questions began again.



"How do you know that those things are going to happen?"



"I know it by revelation. And I know it as surely as I know that you

sit here before me."



This sort of answer was not going to allay the spreading

uneasiness. Therefore, after some further dallying the judge got the

subject out of the way and took up one which he could enjoy more.



"What languages do your Voices speak?"



"French."



"St. Marguerite, too?"



"Verily; why not? She is on our side, not on the English!"



Saints and angels who did not condescend to speak English is a

grave affront. They could not be brought into court and punished

for contempt, but the tribunal could take silent note of Joan's

remark and remember it against her; which they did. It might be

useful by and by.



"Do your saints and angels wear jewelry?--crowns, rings,

earrings?"



To Joan, questions like these were profane frivolities and not

worthy of serious notice; she answered indifferently. But the

question brought to her mind another matter, and she turned upon

Cauchon and said:



"I had two rings. They have been taken away from me during my

captivity. You have one of them. It is the gift of my brother. Give

it back to me. If not to me, then I pray that it be given to the

Church."



The judges conceived the idea that maybe these rings were for the

working of enchantments.



Perhaps they could be made to do Joan a damage.



"Where is the other ring?"



"The Burgundians have it."



"Where did you get it?"



"My father and mother gave it to me."



"Describe it."



"It is plain and simple and has 'Jesus and Mary' engraved upon it."



Everybody could see that that was not a valuable equipment to do

devil's rok with. So that trail was not worth following. Still, to

make sure, one of the judges asked Joan if she had ever cured sick

people by touching them with the ring. She said no.



"Now as concerning the fairies, that were used to abide near by

Domremy whereof there are many reports and traditions. It is said

that your godmother surprised these creatures on a summer's night

dancing under the tree called l"Arbre F‚e de Bourlemont. Is it not

possible that your pretended saints and angles are but those

fairies?"



"Is that in your procŠs?"



She made no other answer.



"Have you not conversed with St. Marguerite and St. Catherine

under that tree?"



"I do not know."



"Or by the fountain near the tree?"



"Yes, sometimes."



"What promises did they make you?"



"None but such as they had God's warrant for."



"But what promises did they make?"



"That is not in your procŠs; yet I will say this much: they told me

that the King would become master of his kingdom in spite of his

enemies."



"And what else?"



There was a pause; then she said humbly:



"They promised to lead me to Paradise."



If faces do really betray what is passing in men's minds, a fear

came upon many in that house, at this time, that maybe, after all, a

chosen servant and herald of God was here being hunted to her

death. The interest deepened. Movements and whisperings ceased:

the stillness became almost painful.



Have you noticed that almost from the beginning the nature of the

questions asked Joan showed that in some way or other the

questioner very often already knew his fact before he asked his

question? Have you noticed that somehow or other the questioners

usually knew just how and were to search for Joan's secrets; that

they really knew the bulk of her privacies--a fact not suspected by

her--and that they had no task before them but to trick her into

exposing those secrets?



Do you rememberLoyseleur, the hypocrite, the treacherous priest,

tool of Cauchon? Do you remember that under the sacred seal of

the confessional joan freely and trustingly revealed ot him

everything concerning her history save only a few things regarding

her supernatural revelations which her Voices had forbidden her to

tell to any one--and that the unjust judge, Cauchon, was a hidden

listener all the time?



Now you understand how the inquisitors were able to devise that

long array of minutely prying questions; questions whose subtlety

and ingenuity and penetration are astonishing until we come to

remember Loyseleur's performance and recognize their source. Ah,

Bishop of Beauvais, you are now lamenting this cruel iniquity

these many years in hell! Yes verily, unless one has come to your

help. There is but one among the redeemed that would do it; and it

is futile to hope that that one has not already done it--Joan of Arc.



We will return to the questionings.



"Did they make you still another promise?"



"Yes, but that is not in your procŠs. I will not tell it now, but

before three months I will tell it you."



The judge seems to know the matter he is asking about, already;

one gets this idea from his next question.



"Did your Voices tell you that you would be liberated before three

months?"



Joan often showed a little flash of surprise at the good guessing of

the judges, and she showed one this time. I was frequently in terror

to find my mind (which Icould not control) criticizing the Voices

and saying, "They counsel her to speak boldly--a thing which she

would do without any suggestion from them or anybody else--but

when it comes to telling her any useful thing, such as how these

conspirators manage to guess their way so skilfully into her affairs,

they are always off attending to some other business."



I am reverent by nature; and when such thoughts swept through my

head they made me cold with fear, and if there was a storm and

thunder at the time, I was so ill that I could but with difficulty

abide at my post and do my work.



Joan answered:



"That is not in your procŠs. I do not know when I shall be set free,

but some who wish me out of this world will go from it before

me."



It made some of them shiver.



"Have your Voices told you that you will be delivered from this

prison?"



Without a doubt they had, and the judge knew it before he asked

the question.



"Ask me again in three months and I will tell you." She said it with

such a happy look, the tired prisoner! And I? And No‰l

Rainguesson, drooping yonder?--why, the floods of joy went

streaming through us from crown to sole! It was all that we could

do to hold still and keep from making fatal exposure of our

feelings.



She was to be set free in three months. That was what she meant;

we saw it. The Voices had told her so, and told her true--true to the

very day--May 30th. But we know now that they had mercifully

hidden from her how she was to be set free, but left her in

ignorance. Home again!



That day was our understanding of it--No‰l's and mine; that was

our dream; and now we would count the days, the hours, the

minutes. They would fly lightly along; they would soon be over.



Yes, we would carry our idol home; and there, far from the pomps

and tumults of the world, we would take up our happy life again

and live it out as we had begun it, in the free air and the sunshine,

with the friendly sheep and the friendly people for comrades, and

the grace and charm of the meadows, the woods, and the river

always before our eyes and their deep peace in our hearts. Yes,

that was our dream, the dream that carried us bravely through that

three months to an exact and awful fulfilment, the though of which

would have killed us, I think, if we had foreknown it and been

obliged to bear the burden of it upon our hearts the half of those

weary days.



Our reading of the prophecy was this: We believed the King's soul

was going to be smitten with remorse; and that he would privately

plan a rescue with Joan's old lieutenants, D'Alen‡on and the

Bastard and La Hire, and that this rescue woud take place at the

end of the three months. So we made up our minds to be ready and

take a hand in it.



In the present and also in later sittings Joan was urged to name the

exact day of her deliverance; but she could not do that. She had not

the permission of her Voices. Moreover, the Voices themselves

did not name the precise day. Ever since the fulfilment of the

prophecy, I have believed that Joan had the idea that her

deliverance was going to dome in the form of death. But not that

death! Divine as she was, dauntless as she was in battle, she was

human also. She was not solely a saint, an angel, she was a

clay-made girl also--as human a girl as any in the world, and full of

a human girl's sensitiveness and tenderness and elicacies. And so,

that death! No, she could not have lived the three months with that

one before her, I think. You remember that the first time she was

wounded she was frightened, and cried, just as any other girl of

seventeen would have done, although she had known for eighteen

days that she was going to be wounded on that very day. No, she

was not afraid of any ordinary death, and an ordinary death was

what she believed the prophecy of deliverance meant, I think, for

her face showed happiness, not horror, when she uttered it.



Now I will explain why I think as I do. Five weeks before she was

captured in the battle of CompiŠgne, her Voices told her what was

coming. They did not tell her the day or the place, but said she

would be taken prisoner and that it would be before the feast of St.

John. She begged that death, certain and swift, should be her fate,

and the captivity brief; for she was a free spirit, and dreaded the

confinement. The Voices made no promise, but only told her to

bear whatever came. Now as they did not refuse the swift death, a

hopeful young thing like Joan would naturally cherish that fact and

make the most of it, allowing it to grow and establish itself in her

mind. And so now that she was told she was to be "delivered" in

three onths, I think she believed it meant that she would die in her

bed in the prison, and that that was why she looked happy and

content--the gates of Paradise standing open for her, the time so

short, you see, her troubles so soon to be over, her reward so close

at hand. Yes, that would make her look happy, that would make

her patient and bold, and able to fight her fight out like a soldier.

Save herself if she could, of course, and try for the best, for that

was the way she was made; but die with her face to the front if die

she must.



Then later, when she charged Cauchon with trying to kill her with

a poisoned fish, her notion that she was to be "delivered" by death

in the prison--if she had it, and I believe she had--would naturally

be greatly strengthened, you see.



But I am wandering from the trial. Joan was asked to definitelyk

name the time that she would be delivered from prison.



"I have always said that I was not permitted to tell you everything.

I am to be set free, and I desire to ask leave of my Voices to tell

you the day. That is why I wish for delay."



"Do your Voices forbid you to tell the truth?"



"Is it that you wish to know matters concerning the King of

France? I tell you again that he will regain his kingdom, and that I

know it as well as I know that you sit here before me in this

tribunal." She sighed and, after a little pause, added: "I should be

dead but for this revelation, which comforts me always."



Some trivial questions were asked her about St. Michael's dress

and appearance. She answered them with dignity, but one saw that

they gave her pain. After a little she said:



"I have great joy in seeing him, for when I see him I have the

feeling that I am not in mortal sin."



She added, "Sometimes St. Marguerite and St. Catherine have

allowed me to confess myself to them."



Here was a possible chance to set a successful snare for her

innocence.



"When you confessed were you in mortal sin, do you think?"



But her reply did her no hurt. So the inquiry was shifted once more

to the revelations made to the King--secrets which the court had

tried again and again to force out of Joan, but without success.



"Now as to the sign given to the King--"



"I have already told you that I will tell you nothing about it."



"Do you know what the sign was?"



"As to that, you will not find out from me."



All this refers to Joan's secret interview with the King--held apart,

though two or three others were present. It was known--through

Loyseleur, of course--that this sign was a crown and was a pledge

of the verity of Joan's mission. But that is all a mystery until this

day--the nature of the crown, I mean--and will remain a mystery to

the end of time. We can never know whether a real crown

descended upon the King's head, or only a symbol, the mystic

fabric of a vision.



"Did you see a crown upon the King's head when he received the

revelation?"



"I cannot tell you as to that, without perjury."



"Did the King have that crown at Rheims?"



"I think the King put upon his head a crown which he found there;

but a much richer one was brought him afterward."



"Have you seen that one?"



"I cannot tell you, without perjury. But whether I have seen it or

not, I have heard say that it was rich and magnificent."



They went on and pestered her to weariness about that mysterious

crown, but they got nothing more out of her. The sitting closed. A

long, hard day for all of us.



Chapter 10 The Inquisitors at Their Wits' End



THE COURT rested a day, then took up work again on Saturday,

the third of March.



This was one of our stormiest sessions. The whole court was out of

patience; and with good reason. These threescore distinguished

churchmen, illustrious tacticians, veteran legal gladiators, had left

important posts where their supervision was needed, to journey

hither from various regions and accomplish a most simple and

easy matter--condemn and send to death a country-lass of nineteen

who could neither read nor write, knew nothing of the wiles and

perplexities of legal procedure, could not call a single witness in

her defense, was allowed no advocate or adviser, and must conduct

her case by herself against a hostile judge and a packed jury. In

two hours she would be hopelessly entangled, routed, defeated,

convicted. Nothing could be more certain that this--so they

thought. But it was a mistake. The two hours had strung out into

days; what promised to be a skirmish had expanded into a siege;

the thing which had looked so easy had proven to be surprisingly

difficult; the light victim who was to have been puffed away like a

feather remained planted like a rock; and on top of all this, if

anybody had a right to laugh it was the country-lass and not the

court.



She was not doing that, for that was not her spirit; but others were

doing it. The whole town was laughing in its sleeve, and the court

knew it, and its dignity was deeply hurt. The members could not

hide their annoyance.



And so, as I have said, the session was stormy. It was easy to see

that these men had made up their minds to force words from Joan

to-day which should shorten up her case and bring it to a prompt

conclusion. It shows that after all their experience with her they

did not know her yet.



They went into the battle with energy. They did not leave the

questioning to a particular member; no, everybody helped. They

volleyed questions at Joan from all over the house, and sometimes

so many were talking at once that she had to ask them to deliver

their fire one at a time and not by platoons. The beginning was as

usual:



"You are once more required to take the oath pure and simple."



"I will answer to what is in the procŠs verbal. When I do more, I

will choose the occasion for myself."



That old ground was debated and fought over inch by inch with

great bitterness and many threats. But Joan remained steadfast, and

the questionings had to shift to other matters. Half an hour was

spent over Joan's apparitions--their dress, hair, general appearance,

and so on--in the hope of fishing something of a damaging sort out

of the replies; but with no result.



Next, the male attire was reverted to, of course. After many

well-worn questions had been re-asked, one or two new ones were

put forward.



"Did not the King or the Queen sometimes ask you to quit the male

dress?"



"That is not in your procŠs."



"Do you think you would have sinned if you had taken the dress of

your sex?"



"I have done best to serve and obey my sovereign Lord and

Master."



After a while the matter of Joan's Standard was taken up, in the

hope of connecting magic and witchcraft with it.



"Did not your men copy your banner in their pennons?"



"The lancers of my guard did it. It was to distinguish them from

the rest of the forces. It was their own idea."



"Were they often renewed?"



"Yes. When the lances were broken they were renewed."



The purpose of the question unveils itself in the next one.



"Did you not say to your men that pennons made like your banner

would be lucky?"



The soldier-spirit in Joan was offended at this puerility. She drew

herself up, and said with dignity and fire: "What I said to them

was, 'Ride those English down!' and I did it myself."



Whenever she flung out a scornful speech like that at these French

menials in English livery it lashed them into a rage; and that is

what happened this time. There were ten, twenty, sometimes even

thirty of them on their feet at a time, storming at the prisoner

minute after minute, but Joan was not disturbed.



By and by there was peace, and the inquiry was resumed.



It was now sought to turn against Joan the thousand loving honors

which had been done her when she was raising France out of the

dirt and shame of a century of slavery and castigation.



"Did you not cause paintings and images of yourself to be made?"



"No. At Arras I saw a painting of myself kneeling in armor before

the King and delivering him a letter; but I caused no such things to

be made."



"Were not masses and prayers said in your honor?"



"If it was done it was not by my command. But if any prayed for

me I think it was no harm."



"Did the French people believe you were sent of God?"



"As to that, I know not; but whether they believed it or not, I was

not the less sent of God."



"If they thought you were sent of God, do you think it was well

thought?"



"If they believed it, their trust was not abused."



"What impulse was it, think you, that moved the people to kiss

your hands, your feet, and your vestments?"



"They were glad to see me, and so they did those things; and I

could not have prevented them if I had had the heart. Those poor

people came lovingly to me because I had not done them any hurt,

but had done the best I could for them according to my strength."



See what modest little words she uses to describe that touching

specatcle, her marches about France walled in on both sides by the

adoring multitudes: "They were glad to see me." Glad?



Why they were transported with joy to see her. When they could

not kiss her hands or her feet, they knelt in the mire and kissed the

hoof-prints of her horse. They worshiped her; and that is what

these priests were trying to prove. It was nothing to them that she

was not to blame for what other people did. No, if she was

worshiped, it was enough; she was guilty of mortal sin.



Curious logic, one must say.



"Did you not stand sponsor for some children baptized at Rheims?"



"At Troyes I did, and at St. Denis; and I named the boys Charles, in

honor of the King, and the girls I named Joan."



"Did not women touch their rings to those which you wore?"



"Yes, many did, but I did not know their reason for it."



"At Rheims was your Standard carried into the church? Did you

stand at the altar with it in your hand at the Coronation?"



"Yes."



"In passing through the country did you confess yourself in the

Churches and receive the sacrament?"



"Yes."



"In the dress of a man?"



"Yes. But I do not remember that I was in armor."



It was almost a concession! almost a half-surrender of the

permission granted her by the Church at Poitiers to dress as a man.

The wily court shifted to another matter: to pursue this one at this

time might call Joan's attention to her small mistake, and by her

native cleverness she might recover her lost ground. The

tempestuous session had worn her and drowsed her alertness.



"It is reported that you brought a dead child to life in the church at

Lagny. Was that in answer to your prayers?"



"As to that, I have no knowledge. Other young girls were praying

for the child, and I joined them and prayed also, doing no more

than they."



"Continue."



"While we prayed it came to life, and cried. It had been dead three

days, and was as black as my doublet. It was straight way baptized,

then it passed from life again and was buried in holy ground."



"Why did you jump from the tower of Beaurevoir by night and try

to escape?"



"I would go to the succor of CompiŠgne."



It was insinuated that this was an attempt to commit the deep

crime of suicide to avoid falling into the hands of the English.



"Did you not say that you would rather die than be delivered into

the power of the English?"



Joan answered frankly; without perceiving the trap:



"Yes; my words were, that I would rather that my soul be returned

unto God than that I should fall into the hands of the English."



It was now insinuated that when she came to, after jumping from

the tower, she was angry and blasphemed the name of God; and

that she did it again when she heard of the defection of the

Commandant of Soissons. She was hurt and indignant at this, and

said:



"It is not true. I have never cursed. It is not my custom to swear."



Chapter 11 The Court Reorganized for Assassination



A HALT was called. It was time. Cauchon was losing ground in

the fight, Joan was gaining it.



There were signs that here and there in the court a judge was being

softened toward Joan by her courage, her presence of mind, her

fortitude, her constancy, her piety, her simplicity and candor, her

manifest purity, the nobility of her character, her fine intelligence,

and the good brave fight she was making, all friendless and alone,

against unfair odds, and there was grave room for fear that this

softening process would spread further and presently bring

Cauchon's plans in danger.



Something must be done, and it was done. Cauchon was not

distinguished for compassion, but he now gave proof that he had it

in his character. He thought it pity to subject so many judges to the

prostrating fatigues of this trial when it could be conducted plenty

well enough by a handful of them. Oh, gentle judge! But he did not

remember to modify the fatigues for the little captive.



He would let all the judges but a handful go, but he would select

the handful himself, and he did.



He chose tigers. If a lamb or two got in, it was by oversight, not

intention; and he knew what to do with lambs when discovered.



He called a small council now, and during five days they sifted the

huge bulk of answers thus far gathered from Joan. They winnowed

it of all chaff, all useless matter--that is, all matter favorable to

Joan; they saved up all matter which could be twisted to her hurt,

and out of this they constructed a basis for a new trial which

should have the semblance of a continuation of the old one.

Another change. It was plain that the public trial had wrought

damage: its proceedings had been discussed all over the town and

had moved many to pity the abused prisoner. There should be no

more of that. The sittings should be secret hereafter, and no

spectators admitted. So No‰l could come no more. I sent this news

to him. I had not the heart to carry it myself. I would give the pain

a chance to modify before I should see him in the evening.



On the 10th of March the secret trial began. A week had passed

since I had seen Joan. Her appearance gave me a great shock. She

looked tired and weak. She was listless and far away, and her

answers showed that she was dazed and not able to keep perfect

run of all that was done and said. Another court would not have

taken advantage of her state, seeing that her life was at stake here,

but would have adjourned and spared her. Did this one? No; it

worried her for hours, and with a glad and eager ferocity, making

all it could out of this great chance, the first one it had had.



She was tortured into confusing herself concerning the "sign"

which had been given the King, and the next day this was

continued hour after hour. As a result, she made partial

revealments of particulars forbidden by her Voice3s; and seemed

to me to state as facts things which were but allegories and visions

mixed with facts.



The third day she was brighter, and looked less worn. She was

almost her normal self again, and did her work well. Many

attempts were made to beguile her into saying indiscreet things,

but she saw the purpose in view and answered with tact and

wisdom.



"Do you know if St. Catherine and St. Marguerite hate the

English?"



"They love whom Our Lord loves, and hate whom He hates."



"Does God hate the English?"



"Of the love or the hatred of God toward the English I know

nothing." Then she spoke up with the old martial ring in her voice

and the old audacity in her words, and added, "But I know

this--that God will send victory to the French, and that all the

English will be flung out of France but the dead ones!"



"Was God on the side of the English when they were prosperous in

France?"



"I do not know if God hates the French, but I think that He allowed

them to be chastised for their sins."



It was a sufficiently na‹ve way to account for a chastisement which

had now strung out for ninety-six years. But nobody found fault

with it. There was nobody there who would not punish a sinner

ninety-six years if he could, nor anybody there who would ever

dream of such a thing as the Lord's being any shade less stringent

than men.



"Have you ever embraced St. Marguerite and St. Catherine?"



"Yes, both of them."



The evil face of Cauchon betrayed satisfaction when she said that.



"When you hung garlands upon L'Arbre F‚e de Bourlemont, did

you do it in honor of your apparitions?"



"No."



Satisfaction again. No doubt Cauchon would take it for granted

that she hung them there out of sinful love for the fairies.



"When the saints appeared to you did you bow, did you make

reverence, did you kneel?"



"Yes; I did them the most honor and reverence that I could."



A good point for Cauchon if he could eventually make it appear

that these were no saints to whom she had done reverence, but

devils in disguise.



Now there was the matter of Joan's keeping her supernatural

commerce a secret from her parents. Much might be made of that.

In fact, particular emphasis had been given to it in a private remark

written in the margin of the procŠs: "She concealed her visions

from her parents and from every one." Possibly this disloyalty to

her parents might itself be the sign of the satanic source of her

mission.



"Do you think it was right to go away to the wars without getting

your parents' leave? It is written one must honor his father and his

mother."



"I have obeyed them in all things but that. And for that I have

begged their forgiveness in a letter and gotten it."



"Ah, you asked their pardon? So you knew you were guilty of sin

in going without their leave!"



Joan was stirred. Her eyes flashed, and she exclaimed:



"I was commanded of God, and it was right to go! If I had had a

hundred fathers and mothers and been a king's daughter to boot I

would have gone."



"Did you never ask your Voices if you might tell your parents?"



"They were willing that I should tell them, but I would not for

anything have given my parents that pain."



Tgo the minds of the questioners this headstrong conduct savored

of pride. That sort of pride would move one to see sacrilegious

adorations.



"Did not your Voices call you Daughter of God?"



Joan answered with simplicity, and unsuspiciously:



"Yes; before the siege of Orleans and since, they have several

times called me Daughter of God."



Further indications of pride and vanity were sought.



"What horse were you riding when you were captured? Who gave

it you?"



"The King."



"You had other things--riches--of the King?"



"For myself I had horses and arms, and money to pay the service in

my household."



"Had you not a treasury?"



"Yes. Ten or twelve thousand crowns." Then she said with na‹vet‚,

"It was not a great sum to carry on a war with."



"You have it yet?"



"No. It is the King's money. My brothers hold it for him."



"What were the arms which you left as an offering in the church of

St. Denis?"



"My suit of silver mail and a sword."



"Did you put them there in order that they might be adored?"



"No. It was but an act of devotion. And it is the custom of men of

war who have been wounded to make such offering there. I had

been wounded before Paris."



Nothing appealed to these stony hearts, those dull

imaginations--not even this pretty picture, so simply drawn, of the

wounded girl-soldier hanging her toy harness there in curious

companionship with the grim and dusty iron mail of the historic

defenders of France. No, there was nothing in it for them; nothing,

unless evil and injury for that innocent creature could be gotten out

of it somehow.



"Which aided most--you the Standard, or the Standard you?"



"Whether it was the Standard or whether it was I, is nothing--the

victories came from God."



"But did you base your hopes of victory in yourself or in your

Standard?"



"In neither. In God, and not otherwise."



"Was not your Standard waved around the King's head at the

Coronation?"



"No. It was not."



"Why was it that your Standard had place at the crowning of the

King in the Cathedral of Rheims, rather than those of the other

captains?"



Then, soft and low, came that touching speech which will live as

long as language lives, and pass into all tongues, and move all

gentle hearts wheresoever it shall come, down to the latest day:



"It had borne the burden, it had earned the honor." [1] How simple

it is, and how beautiful. And how it beggars the studies eloquence

of the masters of oratory. Eloquence was a native gift of Joan of

Arc; it came from her lips without effort and without preparation.

Her words were as sublime as her deeds, as sublime as her

character; they had their source in a great heart and were coined in

a great brain.



[1] What she said has been many times translated, but never with

success. There is a haunting pathos about the original which eludes

all efforts to convey it into our tongue. It is as subtle as an odor,

and escapes in the transmission. Her words were these:



"Il avait ‚t‚ a la peine, c'etait bien raison qu'il fut a l'honneur."



Monseigneur Ricard, Honorary Vicar-General to the Archbishop of

Aix, finely speaks of it (Jeanne d'Arc la V‚n‚rable, page 197) as

"that sublime reply, enduring in the history of celebrated sayings

like the cry of a French and Christian soul wounded unto death in

its patriotism and its faith." -- TRANSLATOR.



Chapter 12 Joan's Master-Stroke Diverted



NOW, as a next move, this small secret court of holy assassins did

a thing so base that even at this day, in my old age, it is hard to

speak of it with patience.



In the beginning of her commerce with her Voices there at

Domremy, the child Joan solemnly devoted her life to God,

vowing her pure body and her pure soul to His service. You will

remember that her parents tried to stop her from going to the wars

by haling her to the court at Toul to compel her to make a

marriage which she had never promised to make--a marriage with

our poor, good, windy, big, hard-fighting, and most dear and

lamented comrade, the Standard-Bearer, who fell in honorable

battle and sleeps with God these sixty years, peace to his ashes!

And you will remember how Joan, sixteen years old, stood up in

that venerable court and conducted her case all by herself, and tore

the poor Paladin's case to rags and blew it away with a breath; and

how the astonished old judge on the bench spoke of her as "this

marvelous child."



You remember all that. Then think what I felt, to see these false

priests, here in the tribunal wherein Joan had fought a fourth lone

fight in three years, deliberately twist that matter entirely around

and try to make out that Joan haled the Paladin into court and

pretended that he had promised to marry her, and was bent on

making him do it.



Certainly there was no baseness that those people were ashamed to

stoop to in their hunt for that friendless girl's life. What they

wanted to show was this--that she had committed the sin of

relapsing from her vow and trying to violate it.



Joan detailed the true history of the case, but lost her temper as she

went along, and finished with some words for Cauchon which he

remembers yet, whether he is fanning himself in the world he

belongs in or has swindled his way into the other.



The rest of this day and part of the next the court labored upon the

old theme--the male attire. It was shabby work for those grave men

to be engaged in; for they well knew one of Joan's reasons for

clinging to the male dress was, that soldiers of the guard were

always present in her room whether she was asleep or awake, and

that the male dress was a better parotection for her modesty than

the other.



The court knew that one of Joan's purposes had been the

deliverance of the exiled Duke of Orleans, and they were curious

to know how she had intended to manage it. Her plan was

characteristically businesslike, and her statement of it as

characteristically simple and straightforward:



"I would have taken English prisoners enough in France for his

ransom; and failing that, I would have invaded England and

brought him out by force."



That was just her way. If a thing was to be done, it was love first,

and hammer and tongs to follow; but no shilly-shallying between.

She added with a little sigh:



"If I had had my freedom three years, I would have delivered him."



"Have you the permission of your Voices to break out of prison

whenever you can?"



"I have asked their leave several times, but they have not given it."



I think it is as I have said, she expected the deliverance of death,

and within the prison walls, before the three months should expire.



"Would you escape if you saw the doors open?"



She spoke up frankly and said:



"Yes--for I should see in that the permission of Our Lord. God

helps who help themselves, the proverb says. But except I thought

I had permission, I would not go."



Now, then, at this point, something occurred which convinces me,

every time I think of it--and it struck me so at the time--that for a

moment, at least, her hopes wandered to the King, and put into her

mind the same notion about her deliverance which No‰l and I had

settled upon--a rescue by her old soldiers. I think the idea of the

rescue did occur to her, but only as a passing thought, and that it

quickly passed away.



Some remark of the Bishop of Beauvais moved her to remind him

once more that he was an unfair judge, and had no right to preside

there, and that he was putting himself in great danger.



"What danger?" he asked.



"I do not know. St. Catherine has promised me help, but I do not

know the form of it. I do not know whether I am to be delivered

from this prison or whether when you sent me to the scaffold there

will happen a trouble by which I shall be set free. Without much

thought as to this matter, I am of the opinion that it may be one or

the other." After a pause she added these words, memorable

forever--words whose meaning she may have miscaught,

misunderstood; as to that we can never know; words which she

may have rightly understood, as to that, also, we can never know;

but words whose mystery fell away from them many a year ago

and revealed their meaning to all the world:



"But what my Voices have said clearest is, that I shall be delivered

by a great victory." She paused, my heart was beating fast, for to

me that great victory meant the sudden bursting in of our old

soldiers with the war-cry and clash of steel at the last moment and

the carrying off of Joan of Arc in triumph. But, oh, that thought

had such a short life! For now she raised her head and finished,

with those solemn words which men still so often quote and dwell

upon--words which filled me with fear, they sounded so like a

prediction. "And always they say 'Submit to whatever comes; do

not grieve for your martyrdom; from it you will ascend into the

Kingdom of Paradise."



Was she thinking of fire and the stake? I think not. I thought of it

myself, but I believe she was only thinking of this slow and cruel

martyrdom of chains and captivity and insult. Surely, martyrdom

was the right name for it.



It was Jean de la Fontaine who was asking the questions. He was

silling to make the most he could out of what she had said:



"As the Voices have told you you are going to Paradise, you feel

certain that that will happen and that you will not be damned in

hell. Is that so?"



"I believe what they told me. I know that I shall be saved."



"It is a weighty answer."



"To me the knowledge that I shall be saved is a great treasure."



"Do you think that after that revelation you could be able to

commit mortal sin?"



"As to that, I do not know. My hope for salvation is in holding fast

to my oath to keep by body and my soul pure."



"Since you know you are to be saved, do you think it necessary to

go to confession?"



The snare was ingeniously devised, but Joan's simple and humble

answer left it empty:



"One cannot keep his conscience too clean."



We were now arriving at the last day of this new trial. Joan had

come through the ordeal well. It had been a long and wearisome

struggle for all concerned. All ways had been tried to convict the

accused, and all had failed, thus far. The inquisitors were

thoroughly vexed and dissatisfied.



However, they resolved to make one more effort, put in one more

day's work. This was done--March 17th. Early in the sitting a

notable trap was set for Joan:



"Will you submit to the determination of the Church all your

words and deeds, whether good or bad?"



That was well planned. Joan was in imminent peril now. If she

should heedlessly say yes, it would put her mission itself upon

trial, and one would know how to decide its source and character

promptly. If she should say no, she would render herself

chargeable with the crime of heresy.



But she was equal to the occasion. She drew a distinct line of

separation between the Church's authority over her as a subject

member, and the matter of her mission. She said she loved the

Church and was ready to support the Christian faith with all her

strength; but as to the works done under her mission, those must

be judged by God alone, who had commanded them to be done.



The judge still insisted that she submit them to the decision of the

Church. She said:



"I will submit them to Our Lord who sent me. It would seem to me

that He and His Church are one, and that there should be no

difficulty about this matter." Then she turned upon the judge and

said, "Why do you make a difficulty when there is no room for

any?"



Then Jean de la Fontaine corrected her notion that there was but

one Church. There were two--the Church Triumphant, which is

God, the saints, the angels, and the redeemed, and has its seat in

heave; and the Church Militant, which is our Holy Father the Pope,

Vicar of God, the prelates, the clergy and all good Christians and

Catholics, the which Church has its seat in the earth, is governed

by the Holy Spirit, and cannot err. "Will you not submit those

matters to the Church Militant?"



"I am come to the King of France from the Church Triumphant on

high by its commandant, and to that Church I will submit all those

things which I have done. For the Church Militant I have no other

answer now."



The court took note of this straitly worded refusal, and would hope

to get profit out of it; but the matter was dropped for the present,

and a long chase was then made over the old hunting-ground--the

fairies, the visions, the male attire, and all that.



In the afternoon the satanic Bishop himself took the chair and

presided over the closing scenes of the trial. Along toward the

finish, this question was asked by one of the judges:



"You have said to my lord the Bishop that you would answer him

as you would answer before our Holy Father the Pope, and yet

there are several questions which you continually refuse to answer.

Would you not answer the Pope more fully than you have

answered before my lord of Beauvais? Would you not feel obliged

to answer the Pope, who is the Vicar of God, more fully?"



Now a thunder-clap fell out of a clear sky:



"Take me to the Pope. I will answer to everything that I ought to."



It made the Bishop's purple face fairly blanch with consternation.

If Joan had only known, if she had only know! She had lodged a

mine under this black conspiracy able to blow the Bishop's

schemes to the four winds of heaven, and she didn't know it. She

had made that speech by mere instinct, not suspecting what

tremendous forces were hidden in it, and there was none to tell her

what she had done. I knew, and Manchon knew; and if she had

known how to read writing we could have hoped to get the

knowledge to her somehow; but speech was the only way, and

none was allowed to approach her near enough for that. So there

she sat, once more Joan of Arc the Victorious, but all unconscious

of it. She was miserably worn and tired, by the long day's struggle

and by illness, or she must have noticed the effect of that speech

and divined the reason of it.



She had made many master-strokes, but this was the master-stroke.

It was an appeal to Rome. It was her clear right; and if she had

persisted in it Cauchon's plot would have tumbled about his ears

like a house of cards, and he would have gone from that place the

worst-beaten man of the century. He was daring, but he was not

daring enough to stand up against that demand if Joan had urged it.

But no, she was ignorant, poor thing, and did not know what a

blow she had struck for life and liberty.



France was not the Church. Rome had no interest in the

destruction of this messenger of God.



Rome would have given her a fair trial, and that was all that her

cause needed. From that trial she would have gone forth free, and

honored, and blessed.



But it was not so fated. Cauchon at once diverted the questions to

other matters and hurried the trial quickly to an end.



As Joan moved feebly away, dragging her chains, I felt stunned

and dazed, and kept saying to myself, "Such a little while ago she

said the saving word and could have gone free; and now, there she

goes to her death; yes, it is to her death, I know it, I feel it. They

will double the guards; they will never let any come near her now

between this and her condemnation, lest she get a hint and speak

that word again. This is the bitterest day that has come to me in all

this miserable time."



Chapter 13 The Third Trial Fails



SO THE SECOND trial in the prison was over. Over, and no

definite result. The character of it I have described to you. It was

baser in one particular than the previous one; for this time the

charges had not been communicated to Joan, therefore she had

been obliged to fight in the dark.



There was no opportunity to do any thinking beforehand; there was

no foreseeing what traps might be set, and no way to prepare for

them. Truly it was a shabby advantage to take of a girl situated as

this one was. One day, during the course of it, an able lawyer of

Normandy, MaŒtre Lohier, happened to be in Rouen, and I will

give you his opinion of that trial, so that you may see that I have

been honest with you, and that my partisanship has not made me

deceive you as to its unfair and illegal character. Cauchon showed

Lohier the procŠs and asked his opinion about the trial. Now this

was the opinion which he gave to Cauchon. He said that the whole

thing was null and void; for these reasons: 1, because the trial was

secret, and full freedom of speech and action on the part of those

present not possible; 2, because the trial touched the honor of the

King of France, yet he was not summoned to defend himself, nor

any one appointed to represent him; 3, because the charges against

the prisoner were not communicated to her; 4, because the

accused, although young and simple, had been forced to defend

her cause without help of counsel, notwithstanding she had so

much at stake.



Did that please Bishop Cauchon? It did not. He burst out upon

Lohier with the most savage cursings, and swore he would have

him drowned. Lohier escaped from Rouen and got out of France

with all speed, and so saved his life.



Well, as I have said, the second trial was over, without definite

result. But Cauchon did not give up. He could trump up another.

And still another and another, if necessary. He had the

half-promise of an enormous prize--the Archbishopric of Rouen--if

he should succeed in burning the body and damning to hell the

soul of this young girl who had never done him any harm; and

such a prize as that, to a man like the Bishop of Beauvais, was

worth the burning and damning of fifty harmless girls, let alone

one.



So he set to work again straight off next day; and with high

confidence, too, intimating with brutal cheerfulness that he should

succeed this time. It took him and the other scavengers nine days

to dig matter enough out of Joan's testimony and their own

inventions to build up the new mass of charges. And it was a

formidable mass indeed, for it numbered sixty-six articles.



This huge document was carried to the castle the next day, March

27th; and there, before a dozen carefully selected judges, the new

trial was begun.



Opinions were taken, and the tribunal decided that Joan should

hear the articles read this time.



Maybe that was on account of Lohier's remark upon that head; or

maybe it was hoped that the reading would kill the prisoner with

fatigue--for, as it turned out, this reading occupied several days. It

was also decided that Joan should be required to answer squarely

to every article, and that if she refused she should be considered

convicted. You see, Cauchon was managing to narrow her chances

more and more all the time; he was drawing the toils closer and

closer.



Joan was brought in, and the Bishop of Beauvais opened with a

speech to her which ought to have made even himself blush, so

laden it was with hypocrisy and lies. He said that this court was

composed of holy and pious churchmen whose hearts were full of

benevolence and compassion toward her, and that they had no

wish to hurt her body, but only a desire to instruct her and lead her

into the way of truth and salvation.



Why, this man was born a devil; now think of his describing

himself and those hardened slaves of his in such language as that.



And yet, worse was to come. For now having in mind another of

Lohier's h8ints, he had the cold effrontery to make to Joan a

proposition which, I think, will surprise you when you hear it. He

said that this court, recognizing her untaught estate and her

inability to deal with the complex and difficult matters which were

about to be considered, had determined, out of their pity and their

mercifulness, to allow her to choose one or more persons out of

their own number to help her with counsel and advice!



Think of that--a court made up of Loyseleur and his breed of

reptiles. It was granting leave to a lamb to ask help of a wolf. Joan

looked up to see if he was serious, and perceiving that he was at

least pretending to be, she declined, of course.



The Bishop was not expecting any other reply. He had made a

show of fairness and could have it entered on the minutes,

therefore he was satisfied.



Then he commanded Joan to answer straitly to every accusation;

and threatened to cut her off from the Church if she failed to do

that or delayed her answers beyond a given length of time.



Yes, he was narrowing her chances down, step by step.



Thomas de Courcelles began the reading of that interminable

document, article by article. Joan answered to each article in its

turn; sometimes merely denying its truth, sometimes by saying her

answer would be found in the records of the previous trials.



What a strange document that was, and what an exhibition and

exposure of the heart of man, the one creature authorized to boast

that he is made in the image of God. To know Joan of Arc was to

know one who was wholly noble, pure, truthful, brave,

compassionate, generous, pious, unselfish, modest, blameless as

the very flowers in the fields--a nature fine and beautiful, a

character supremely great. To know her from that document would

be to know her as the exact reverse of all that. Nothing that she

was appears in it, everything that she was not appears there in

detail.



Consider some of the things it charges against her, and remember

who it is it is speaking of. It calls her a sorceress, a false prophet,

an invoker and companion of evil spirits, a dealer in magic, a

person ignorant of the Catholic faith, a schismatic; she is

sacrilegious, an idolater, an apostate, a blasphemer of God and His

saints, scandalous, seditious, a disturber of the peace; she incites

men to war, and to the spilling of human blood; she discards the

decencies and proprieties of her sex, irreverently assuming the

dress of a man and the vocation of a soldier; she beguiles both

princes and people; she usurps divine honors, and has caused

herself to be adored and venerated, offering her hands and her

vestments to be kissed.



There it is--every fact of her life distorted, perverted, reversed. As

a child she had loved the fairies, she had spoken a pitying word for

them when they were banished from their home, she had played

under their tree and around their fountain--hence she was a

comrade of evil spirits.



She had lifted France out of the mud and moved her to strike for

freedom, and led her to victory after victory--hence she was a

disturber of the peace--as indeed she was, and a provoker of

war--as indeed she was again! and France will be proud of it and

grateful for it for many a century to come. And she had been

adored--as if she could help that, poor thing, or was in any way to

blame for it. The cowed veteran and the wavering recruit had

drunk the spirit of war from her eyes and touched her sword with

theirs and moved forward invincible--hence she was a sorceress.



And so the document went on, detail by detail, turning these

waters of life to poison, this gold to dross, these proofs of a noble

and beautiful life to evidences of a foul and odious one.



Of course, the sixty-six articles were just a rehash of the things

which had come up in the course of the previous trials, so I will

touch upon this new trial but lightly. In fact, Joan went but little

into detail herself, usually merely saying, "That is not true--passez

outre"; or, "I have answered that before--let the clerk read it in his

record," or saying some other brief thing.



She refused to have her mission examined and tried by the earthly

Church. The refusal was taken note of.



She denied the accusation of idolatry and that she had sought

men's homage. She said:



"If any kissed my hands and my vestments it was not by my desire,

and I did what I could to prevent it."



She had the pluck to say to that deadly tribunal that she did not

know the fairies to be evil beings. She knew it was a perilous thing

to say, but it was not in her nature to speak anything but the truth

when she spoke at all. Danger had no weight with her in such

things. Note was taken of her remark.



She refused, as always before, when asked if she would put off the

male attire if she were given permission to commune. And she

added this:



"When one receives the sacrament, the manner of his dress is a

small thing and of no value in the eyes of Our Lord."



She was charge with being so stubborn in clinging to her male

dress that she would not lay it off even to get the blessed privilege

of hearing mass. She spoke out with spirit and said:



"I would rather die than be untrue to my oath to God."



She was reproached with doing man's work in the wars and thus

deserting the industries proper to her sex. She answered, with

some little touch of soldierly disdain:



"As to the matter of women's work, there's plenty to do it."



It was always a comfort to me to see the soldier spirit crop up in

her. While that remained in her she would be Joan of Arc, and able

to look trouble and fate in the face.



"It appears that this mission of yours which you claim you had

from God, was to make war and pour out human blood."



Joan replied quite simply, contenting herself with explaining that

war was not her first move, but her second:



"To begin with, I demanded that peace should be made. If it was

refused, then I would fight."



The judge mixed the Burgundians and English together in

speaking of the enemy which Joan had come to make war upon.

But she showed that she made a distinction between them by act

and word, the Burgundians being Frenchmen and therefore entitled

to less brusque treatment than the English. She said:



As to the Duke of Burgundy, I required of him, both by letters and

by his ambassadors, that he make peace with the King. As to the

English, the only peace for them was that they leave the country

and go home."



Then she said that even with the English she had shown a pacific

disposition, since she had warned them away by proclamation

before attacking them.



"If they had listened to me," said she, "they would have done

wisely." At this point she uttered her prophecy again, saying with

emphasis, "Before seven years they will see it themselves."



Then they presently began to pester her again about her male

costume, and tried to persuade her to voluntarily promise to

discard it. I was never deep, so I think it no wonder that I was

puzzled by their persistency in what seemed a thing of no

consequence, and could not make out what their reason could be.

But we all know now. We all know now that it was another of their

treacherous projects. Yes, if they could but succeed in getting her

to formally discard it they could play a game upon her which

would quickly destroy her. So they kept at their evil work until at

last she broke out and said:



"Peace! Without the permission of God I will not lay it off though

you cut off my head!"



At one point she corrected the procŠs verbal, saying:



"It makes me say that everything which I have done was done by

the counsel of Our Lord. I did not say that, I said 'all which I have

well done.'"



Doubt was cast upon the authenticity of her mission because of the

ignorance and simplicity of the messenger chosen. Joan smiled at

that. She could have reminded these people that Our Lord, who is

no respecter of persons, had chosen the lowly for his high purposes

even oftener than he had chosen bishops and cardinals; but she

phrased her rebuke in simpler terms:



"It is the prerogative of Our Lord to choose His instruments where

He will."



She was asked what form of prayer she used in invoking counsel

from on high. She said the form was brief and simple; then she

lifted her pallid face and repeated it, clasping her chained hands:



"Most dear God, in honor of your holy passion I beseech you, if

you love me, that you will reveal to me what I am to answer to

these churchmen. As concerns my dress, I know by what command

I have put it on, but I know not in what manner I am to lay it off. I

pray you tell me what to do."



She was charged with having dared, against the precepts of God

and His saints, to assume empire over men and make herself

Commander-in-Chief. That touched the soldier in her. She had a

deep reverence for priests, but the soldier in her had but small

reverence for a priest's opinions about war; so, in her answer to

this charge she did not condescend to go into any explanations or

excuses, but delivered herself with bland indifference and military

brevity.



"If I was Commander-in-Chief, it was to thrash the English."



Death was staring her in the face here all the time, but no matter;

she dearly loved to make these English-hearted Frenchmen squirm,

and whenever they gave her an opening she was prompt to jab her

sting into it. She got great refreshment out of these little episodes.

Her days were a desert; these were the oases in it.



Her being in the wars with men was charged against her as an

indelicacy. She said:



"I had a woman with me when I could--in towns and lodgings. In

the field I always slept in my armor."



That she and her family had been ennobled by the King was

charged against her as evidence that the source of her deeds were

sordid self-seeking. She answered that she had not asked this grace

of the King; it was his own act.



This third trial was ended at last. And once again there was no

definite result.



Possibly a fourth trial might succeed in defeating this apparently

unconquerable girl. So the malignant Bishop set himself to work to

plan it.



He appointed a commission to reduce the substance of the

sixty-six articles to twelve compact lies, as a basis for the new

attempt. This was done. It took several days.



Meantime Cauchon went to Joan's cell one day, with Manchon and

two of the judges, Isambard de la Pierre and Martin Ladvenue, to

see if he could not manage somehow to beguile Joan into

submitting her mission to the examination and decision of the

Church Militant--that is to say, to that part of the Church Militant

which was represented by himself and his creatures.



Joan once more positively refused. Isambard de la Pierre had a

heart in his body, and he so pitied this persecuted poor girl that he

ventured to do a very daring thing; for he asked her if she would be

willing to have her case go before the Council of Basel, and said it

contained as many priests of her party as of the English party.



Joan cried out that she would gladly go before so fairly constructed

a tribunal as that; but before Isambard could say another word

Cauchon turned savagely upon him and exclaimed:



"Shut up, in the devil's name!"



Then Manchon ventured to do a brave thing, too, though he did it

in great fear for his life. He asked Cauchon if he should enter

Joan's submission to the Council of Basel upon the minutes.



"No! It is not necessary."



"Ah," said poor Joan, reproachfully, "you set down everything that

is against me, but you will not set down what is for me."



It was piteous. It would have touched the heart of a brute. But

Cauchon was more than that.



Chapter 14 Joan Struggles with Her Twelve Lies



WE WERE now in the first days of April. Joan was ill. She had

fallen ill the 29th of March, the day after the close of the third

trial, and was growing worse when the scene which I have just

described occurred in her cell. It was just like Cauchon to go there

and try to get some advantage out of her weakened state.



Let us note some of the particulars in the new indictment--the

Twelve Lies.



Part of the first one says Joan asserts that she has found her

salvation. She never said anything of the kind. It also says she

refuses to submit herself to the Church. Not true. She was willing

to submit all her acts to this Rouen tribunal except those done by

the command of God in fulfilment of her mission. Those she

reserved for the judgment of God. She refused to recognize

Cauchon and his serfs as the Church, but was willing to go before

the Pope or the Council of Basel.



A clause of another of the Twelve says she admits having

threatened with death those who would not obey her. Distinctly

false. Another clause says she declares that all she has done has

been done by command of God. What she really said was, all that

she had done well--a correction made by herself as you have

already seen.



Another of the Twelve says she claims that she has never

committed any sin. She never made any such claim.



Another makes the wearing of the male dress a sin. If it was, she

had high Catholic authority for committing it--that of the

Archbishop of Rheims and the tribunal of Poitiers.



The Tenth Article was resentful against her for "pretending" that

St. Catherine and St.



Marguerite spoke French and not English, and were French in their

politics.



The Twelve were to be submitted first to the learned doctors of

theology of the University of Paris for approval. They were copied

out and ready by the night of April 4th. Then Manchon did another

bold thing: he wrote in the margin that many of the Twelve put

statements in Joan's mouth which were the exact opposite of what

she had said. That fact would not be considered important by the

University of Paris, and would not influence its decision or stir its

humanity, in case it had any--which it hadn't when acting in a

political capacity, as at present--but it was a brave thing for that

good Manchon to do, all the same.



The Twelve were sent to Paris next day, April 5th. That afternoon

there was a great tumult in Rouen, and excited crowds were

flocking through all the chief streets, chattering and seeking for

news; for a report had gone abroad that Joan of Arc was sick unti

death. In truth, these long s‚ances had worn her out, and she was

ill indeed. The heads of the English party were in a state of

consternation; for if Joan should die uncondemned by the Church

and go to the grave unsmirched, the pity and the love of the people

would turn her wrongs and sufferings and death into a holy

martyrdom, and she would be even a mightier power in France

dead than she had been when alive.



The Earl of Warwick and the English Cardinal (Winchester)

hurried to the castle and sent messengers flying for physicians.

Warwick was a hard man, a rude, coarse man, a man without

compassion. There lay the sick girl stretched in her chains in her

iron cage--not an object to move man to ungentle speech, one

would think; yet Warwick spoke right out in her hearing and said

to the physicians:



"Mind you take good care of her. The King of England has no

mind to have her die a natural death. She is dear to him, for he

bought her dear, and he does not want her to die, save at the stake.

Now then, mind you cure her."



The doctors asked Joan what had made her ill. She said the Bishop

of Beauvais had sent her a fish and she thought it was that.



Then Jean d'Estivet burst out on her, and called her names and

abused her. He understood Joan to be charging the Bishop with

poisoning her, you see; and that was not pleasing to him, for he

was one of Cauchon's most loving and conscienceless slaves, and

it outraged him to have Joan injure his master in the eyes of these

great English chiefs, these being men who could ruin Cauchon and

would promptly do it if they got the conviction that he was capable

of saving Joan from the stake by poisoning her and thus cheating

the English out of all the real value gainable by her purchase from

the Duke of Burgundy.



Joan had a high fever, and the doctors proposed to bleed her.

Warwick said:



"Be careful about that; she is smart and is capable of killing

herself."



He meant that to escape the stake she might undo the bandage and

let herself bleed to death.



But the doctors bled her anyway, and then she was better.



Not for long, though. Jean d'Estivet could not hold still, he was so

worried and angry about the suspicion of poisoning which Joan

had hinted at; so he came back in the evening and stormed at her

till he brought the fever all back again.



When Warwick heard of this he was in a fine temper, you may be

sure, for here was his prey threatening to escape again, and all

through the over-zeal of this meddling fool. Warwick gave

D'Estivet a quite admirable cursing--admirable as to strength, I

mean, for it was said by persons of culture that the art of it was not

good--and after that the meddler kept still.



Joan remained ill more than two weeks; then she grew better. She

was still very weak, but she could bear a little persecution now

without much danger to her life. It seemed to Cauchon a good time

to furnish it. So he called together some of his doctors of theology

and went to her dungeon. Manchon and I went along to keep the

record--that is, to set down what might be useful to Cauchon, and

leave out the rest.



The sight of Joan gave me a shock. Why, she was but a shadow! It

was difficult for me to realize that this frail little creature with the

sad face and drooping form was the same Joan of Arc that I had so

often seen, all fire and enthusiasm, charging through a hail of

death and the lightning and thunder of the guns at the head of her

battalions. It wrung my heart to see her looking like this.



But Cauchon was not touched. He made another of those

conscienceless speeches of his, all dripping with hypocrisy and

guile. He told Joan that among her answers had been some which

had seemed to endanger religion; and as she was ignorant and

without knowledge of the Scriptures, he had brought some good

and wise men to instruct her, if she desired it. Said he, "We are

churchmen, and disposed by our good will as well as by our

vocation to procure for you the salvation of your soul and your

body, in every way in our power, just as we would do the like for

our nearest kin or for ourselves. In this we but follow the example

of Holy Church, who never closes the refuge of her bosom against

any that are willing to return."



Joan thanked him for these sayings and said:



"I seem to be in danger of death from this malady; if it be the

pleasure of God that I die here, I beg that I may be heard in

confession and also receive my Saviour; and that I may be buried

in consecrated ground."



Cauchon thought he saw his opportunity at last; this weakened

body had the fear of an unblessed death before it and the pains of

hell to follow. This stubborn spirit would surrender now. So he

spoke out and said:



"Then if you want the Sacraments, you must do as all good

Catholics do, and submit to the Church."



He was eager for her answer; but when it came there was no

surrender in it, she still stood to her guns. She turned her head

away and said wearily:



"I have nothing more to say."



Cauchon's temper was stirred, and he raised his voice threateningly

and said that the more she was in danger of death the more she

ought to amend her life; and again he refused the things she

begged for unless she would submit to the Church. Joan said:



"If I die in this prison I beg you to have me buried in holdy ground;

if you will not, I cast myself upon my Saviour."



There was some more conversation of the like sort, then Cauchon

demanded again, and imperiously, that she submit herself and all

her deeds to the Church. His threatening and storming went for

nothing. That body was weak, but the spirit in it was the spirit of

Joan of Arc; and out of that came the steadfast answer which these

people were already so familiar with and detested so sincerely:



"Let come what may. I will neither do nor say any otherwise than I

have said already in your tribunals."



Then the good theologians took turn about and worried her with

reasonings and arguments and Scriptures; and always they held the

lure of the Sacraments before her famishing soul, and tried to bribe

her with them to surrender her mission to the Church's

judgment--that is to their judgment--as if they were the Church!

But it availed nothing. I could have told them that beforehand, if

they had asked me. But they never asked me anything; I was too

humble a creature for their notice.



Then the interview closed with a threat; a threat of fearful import;

a threat calculated to make a Catholic Christian feel as if the

ground were sinking from under him:



"The Church calls upon you to submit; disobey, and she will

abandon you as if you were a pagan!"



Think of being abandoned by the Church!--that august Power in

whose hands is lodged the fate of the human race; whose scepter

stretches beyond the furthest constellation that twinkles in the sky;

whose authority is over millions that live and over the billions that

wait trembling in purgatory for ransom or doom; whose smile

opens the gates of heaven to you, whose frown delivers you to the

fires of everlasting hell; a Power whose dominion overshadows

and belittles the pomps and shows of a village. To be abandoned

by one's King--yes, that is death, and death is much; but to be

agandoned by Rome, to be abandoned by the Church! Ah, death is

nothing to that, for that is consignment to endless life--and such a

life!



I could see the red waves tossing in that shoreless lake of fire, I

could see the black myriads of the damned rise out of them and

struggle and sink and rise again; and I knew that Joan was seeing

what I saw, while she paused musing; and I believed that she must

yield now, and in truth I hoped she would, for these men were able

to make the threat good and deliver her over to eternal suffering,

and I knew that it was in their natures to do it.



But I was foolish to think that thought and hope that hope. Joan of

Arc was not made as others are made. Fidelity to principle, fidelity

to truth, fidelity to her word, all these were in her bone and in her

flesh--they were parts of her. She could not change, she could not

cast them out. She was the very genius of Fidelity; she was

Steadfastness incarnated. Where she had taken her stand and

planted her foot, there she would abide; hell itself could not move

her from that place.



Her Voices had not given her permission to make the sort of

submission that was required, therefore she would stand fast. She

would wait, in perfect obedience, let come what might.



My heart was like lead in my body when I went out from that

dungeon; but she--she was serene, she was not troubled. She had

done what she believed to be her duty, and that was sufficient; the

consequences were not her affair. The last thing she said that time

was full of this serenity, full of contented repose:



"I am a good Christian born and baptized, and a good Christian I

will die."



Chapter 15 Undaunted by Threat of Burning



TWO WEEKS went by; the second of May was come, the chill

was departed out of the air, the wild flowers were springing in the

glades and glens, the birds were piping in the woods, all nature

was brilliant with sunshine, all spirits were renewed and refreshed,

all hearts glad, the world was alive with hope and cheer, the plain

beyond the Seine stretched away soft and rich and green, the river

was limpid and lovely, the leafy islands were dainty to see, and

flung still daintier reflections of themselves upon the shining

water; and from the tall bluffs above the bridge Rouen was

become again a delight to the eye, the most exquisite and

satisfying picture of a town that nestles under the arch of heaven

anywhere.



When I say that all hearts were glad and hopeful, I mean it in a

general sense. There were exceptions--we who were the friends of

Joan of Arc, also Joan of Arc herself, that poor girl shut up there in

that frowning stretch of mighty walls and towers: brooding in

darkness, so close to the flooding downpour of sunshine yet so

impossibly far away from it; so longing for any little glimpse of it,

yet so implacably denied it by those wolves in the black gowns

who were plotting her death and the blackening of her good name.



Cauchon was ready to go on with his miserable work. He had a

new scheme to try now. He would see what persuasion could

do--argument, eloquence, poured out upon the incorrigible captive

from the mouth of a trained expert. That was his plan. But the

reading of the Twelve Articles to her was not a part of it. No, even

Cauchon was ashamed to lay that monstrosity before her; even he

had a remnant of shame in him, away down deep, a million

fathoms deep, and that remnant asserted itself now and prevailed.



On this fair second of May, then, the black company gathered

itself together in the spacious chamber at the end of the great hall

of the castle--the Bishop of Beauvais on his throne, and sixty-two

minor judges massed before him, with the guards and recorders at

their stations and the orator at his desk.



Then we heard the far clank of chains, and presently Joan entered

with her keepers and took her seat upon her isolated bench. She

was looking well now, and most fair and beautiful after her

fortnight's rest from wordy persecution.



She glanced about and noted the orator. Doubtless she divined the

situation.



The orator had written his speech all out, and had it in his hand,

though he held it back of him out of sight. It was so thick that it

resembled a book. He began flowing, but in the midst of a flowery

period his memory failed him and he had to snatch a furtive glance

at his manuscript--which much injured the effect. Again this

happened, and then a third time. The poor man's face was red with

embarrassment, the whole great house was pitying him, which

made the matter worse; then Joan dropped in a remark which

completed the trouble. She said:



"Read your book--and then I will answer you!"



Why, it was almost cruel the way those moldy veterans laughed;

and as for the orator, he looked so flustered and helpless that

almost anybody would have pitied him, and I had difficulty to keep

from doing it myself. Yes, Joan was feeling very well after her

rest, and the native mischief that was in her lay near the surface. It

did not show when she made the remark, but I knew it was close in

there back of the words.



When the orator had gotten back his composure he did a wise

thing; for he followed Joan's advice: he made no more attempts at

sham impromptu oratory, but read his speech straight from his

"book." In the speech he compressed the Twelve Articles into six,

and made these his text.



Every now and then he stopped and asked questions, and Joan

replied. The nature of the Church Militant was explained, and once

more Joan was asked to submit herself to it.



She gave her usual answer.



Then she was asked:



"Do you believe the Church can err?"



"I believe it cannot err; but for those deeds and words of mine

which were done and uttered by command of God, I will answer to

Him alone."



"Will you say that you have no judge upon earth? Is not our Holy

Father the Pope your judge?"



"I will say nothing about it. I have a good Master who is our Lord,

and to Him I will submit all."



Then came these terrible words:



"If you do not submit to the Church you will be pronounced a

heretic by these judges here present and burned at the stake!"



Ah, that would have smitten you or me dead with fright, but it only

roused the lion heart of Joan of Arc, and in her answer rang that

martial note which had used to stir her soldiers like a bugle-call:



"I will not say otherwise than I have said already; and if I saw the

fire before me I would say it again!"



It was uplifting to hear her battle-voice once more and see the

battle-light burn in her eye. Many there were stirred; every man

that was a man was stirred, whether friend or foe; and Manchon

risked his life again, good soul, for he wrote in the margin of the

record in good plain letters these brave words: "Superba

responsio!" and there they have remained these sixty years, and

there you may read them to this day.



"Superba responsio!" Yes, it was just that. For this "superb answer"

came from the lips of a girl of nineteen with death and hell staring

her in the face.



Of course, the matter of the male attire was gone over again; and

as usual at wearisome length; also, as usual, the customary bribe

was offered: if she would discard that dress voluntarily they would

let her hear mass. But she answered as she had often answered

before:



"I will go in a woman's robe to all services of the Church if I may

be permitted, but I will resume the other dress when I return to my

cell."



They set several traps for her in a tentative form; that is to say,

they placed suppositious propositions before her and cunningly

tried to commit her to one end of the propositions without

committing themselves to the other. But she always saw the game

and spoiled it. The trap was in this form:



"Would you be willing to do so and so if we should give you

leave?"



Her answer was always in this form or to this effect:



"When you give me leave, then you will know."



Yes, Joan was at her best that second of May. She had all her wits

about her, and they could not catch her anywhere. It was a long,

long session, and all the old ground was fought over again, foot by

foot, and the orator-expert worked all his persuasions, all his

eloquence; but the result was the familiar one--a drawn battle, the

sixty-two retiring upon their base, the solitary enemy holding her

original position within her original lines.



Chapter 16 Joan Stands Defiant Before the Rack



THE BRILLIANT weather, the heavenly weather, the bewitching

weather made everybody's heart to sing, as I have told you; yes,

Rouen was feeling light-hearted and gay, and most willing and

ready to break out and laugh upon the least occasion; and so when

the news went around that the young girl in the tower had scored

another defeat against Bishop Cauchon there was abundant

laughter--abundant laughter among the citizens of both parties, for

they all hated the Bishop. It is true, the English-hearted majority of

the people wanted Joan burned, but that did not keep them from

laughing at the man they hated. It would have been perilous for

anybody to laugh at the English chiefs or at the majority of

Cauchon's assistant judges, but to laugh at Cauchon or D'Estivet

and Loyseleur was safe--nobody would report it.



The difference between Cauchon and cochon [1] was not

noticeable in speech, and so there was plenty of opportunity for

puns; the opportunities were not thrown away.



Some of the jokes got well worn in the course of two or three

months, from repeated use; for every time Cauchon started a new

trial the folk said "The sow has littered [2] again"; and every time

the trial failed they said it over again, with its other meaning, "The

hog has made a mess of it."



And so, on the third of May, No‰l and I, drifting about the town,

heard many a wide-mouthed lout let go his joke and his laugh, and

then move tot he next group, proud of his wit and happy, to work it

off again:



"'Od's blood, the sow has littered five times, and five times has

made a mess of it!"



And now and then one was bold enough to say--but he said it

softly:



"Sixty-three and the might of England against a girl, and she

camps on the field five times!"



Cauchon lived in the great palace of the Archbishop, and it was

guarded by English soldiery; but no matter, there was never a dark

night but the walls showed next morning that the rude joker had

been there with his paint and brush. Yes, he had been thee, and had

smeared the sacred walls with pictures of hogs in all attitudes

except flattering ones; hogs clothed in a Bishop's vestments and

wearing a Bishop's miter irreverently cocked on the side of their

heads.



Cauchon raged and cursed over his defeats and his impotence

during seven says; then he conceived a new scheme. You shall see

what it was; for you have not cruel hearts, and you would never

guess it.



On the ninth of May there was a summons, and Manchon and I got

out materials together and started. But this time we were to go to

one of the other towers--not the one which was Joan's prison. It

was round and grim and massive, and built of the plainest and

thickest and solidest masonry--a dismal and forbidding structure.

[3] We entered the circular room on the ground floor, and I saw

what turned me sick--the instruments of torture and the

executioners standing ready! Here you have the black heart of

Cauchon at the blackest, here you have the proof that in his nature

there was no such thing as pity. One wonders if he ever knew his

mother or ever had a sister.



Cauchon was there, and the Vice-Inquisitor and the Abbot of St.

Corneille; also six others, among them that false Loyseleur. The

guards were in their places, the rack was there, and by it stood the

executioner and his aids in their crimson hose and doublets, meet

color for their bloody trade. The picture of Joan rose before me

stretched upon the rack, her feet tied to one end of it, her wrists to

the other, and those red giants turning the windlass and pulling her

limbs out of their sockets. It seemed to me that I could hear the

bones snap and the flesh tear apart, and I did not see how that body

of anointed servants of the merciful Jesus could sit there and look

so placid and indifferent.



After a little, Joan arrived and was brought in. She saw the rack,

she saw the attendants, and the same picture which I had been

seeing must have risen in her mind; but do you think she quailed,

do you think she shuddered? No, there was no sign of that sort. She

straightened herself up, and there was a slight curl of scorn about

her lip; but as for fear, she showed not a vestige of it.



This was a memorable session, but it was the shortest one of all

the list. When Joan had taken her seat a r‚sum‚ of her "crimes"

was read to her. Then Cauchon made a solemn speech. It in he said

that in the course of her several trials Joan had refused to answer

some of the questions and had answered others with lies, but that

now he was going to have the truth out of her, and the whole of it.



Her manner was full of confidence this time; he was sure he had

found a way at last to break this child's stubborn spirit and make

her beg and cry. He would score a victory this time and stop the

mouths of the jokers of Rouen. You see, he was only just a man

after all, and couldn't stand ridicule any better than other people.

He talked high, and his splotchy face lighted itself up with all the

shifting tints and signs of evil pleasure and promised

triumph--purple, yellow, red, green--they were all there, with

sometimes the dull and spongy blue of a drowned man, the

uncanniest of them all. And finally he burst out in a great passion

and said:



"There is the rack, and there are its ministers! You will reveal all

now or be put to the torture.



Speak."



Then she made that great answer which will live forever; made it

without fuss or bravado, and yet how fine and noble was the sound

of it:



"I will tell you nothing more than I have told you; no, not even if

you tear the limbs from my body. And even if in my pain I did say

something otherwise, I would always say afterward that it was the

torture that spoke and not I."



There was no crushing that spirit. You should have seen Cauchon.

Defeated again, and he had not dreamed of such a thing. I heard it

said the next day, around the town, that he had a full confession all

written out, in his pocket and all ready for Joan to sign. I do not

know that that was true, but it probably was, for her mark signed at

the bottom of a confession would be the kind of evidence (for

effect with the public) which Cauchon and his people were

particularly value, you know.



No, there was no crushing that spirit, and no beclouding that clear

mind. Consider the depth, the wisdom of that answer, coming from

an ignorant girl. Why, there were not six men in the world who

had ever reflected that words forced out of a person by horrible

tortures were not necessarily words of verity and truth, yet this

unlettered peasant-girl put her finger upon that flaw with an

unerring instinct. I had always supposed that torture brought out

the truth--everybody supposed it; and when Joan came out with

those simple common-sense words they seemed to flood the place

with light. It was like a lightning-flash at midnight which suddenly

reveals a fair valley sprinkled over with silver streams and

gleaming villages and farmsteads where was only an impenetrable

world of darkness before. Manchon stole a sidewise look at me,

and his face was full of surprise; and there was the like to be seen

in other faces there. Consider--they were old, and deeply cultured,

yet here was a village maid able to teach them something which

they had not known before. I heard one of them mutter:



"Verily it is a wonderful creature. She has laid her hand upon an

accepted truth that is as old as the world, and it has crumbled to

dust and rubbish under her touch. Now whence got she that

marvelous insight?"



The judges laid their heads together and began to talk now. It was

plain, from chance words which one caught now and then, that

Cauchon and Loyseleur were insisting upon the application of the

torture, and that most of the others were urgently objecting.



Finally Cauchon broke out with a good deal of asperity in his voice

and ordered Joan back to her dungeon. That was a happy surprise

for me. I was not expecting that the Bishop would yield.



When Manchon came home that night he said he had found out

why the torture was not applied.



There were two reasons. One was, a fear that Joan might die under

the torture, which would not suit the English at all; the other was,

that the torture would effect nothing if Joan was going to take back

everything she said under its pains; and as to putting her mark to a

confession, it was believed that not even the rack would ever make

her do that.



So all Rouen laughed again, and kept it up for three days, saying:



"The sow has littered six times, and made six messes of it."



And the palace walls got a new decoration--a mitered hog

carryinga discarded rack home on its shoulder, and Loyseleur

weeping in its wake. Many rewards were offered for the capture of

these painters, but nobody applied. Even the English guard feigned

blindness and would not see the artists at work.



The Bishop's anger was very high now. He could not reconcile

himself to the idea of giving up the torture. It was the pleasantest

idea he had invented yet, and he would not cast it by. So he called

in some of his satellites on the twelfth, and urged the torture again.

But it was a failure.



With some, Joan's speech had wrought an effect; others feared she

might die under torture; others did not believe that any amount of

suffering could make her put her mark to a lying confession. There

were fourteen men present, including the Bishop. Eleven of them

voted dead against the torture, and stood their ground in spite of

Cauchon's abuse. Two voted with the Bishop and insisted upon the

torture. These two were Loyseleur and the orator--the man whom

Joan had bidden to "read his book"--Thomas de Courcelles, the

renowned pleader and master of eloquence.



Age has taught me charity of speech; but it fails me when I think

of those three names--Cauchon, Courcelles, Loyseleur.



[1] Hog, pig.



[2] Cochonner, to litter, to farrow; also, "to make a mess of"!



[3] The lower half of it remains to-day just as it was then; the

upper half is of a later date. -- TRANSLATOR.



Chapter 17 Supreme in Direst Peril



ANOTHER ten days' wait. The great theologians of that treasury of

all valuable knowledge and all wisdom, the University of Paris,

were still weighing and considering and discussing the Twelve

Lies.



I had had but little to do these ten days, so I spent them mainly in

walks about the town with No‰l. But there was no pleasure in

them, our spirits being so burdened with cares, and the outlook for

Joan growing steadily darker and darker all the time. And then we

naturally contrasted our circumstances with hers: this freedom and

sunshine, with her darkness and chains; our comradeship, with her

lonely estate; our alleviations of one sort and another, with her

destitution in all. She was used to liberty, but now she had none;

she was an out-of-door creature by nature and habit, but now she

was shut up day and night in a steel cage like an animal; she was

used to the light, but now she was always in a gloom where all

objects about her were dim and spectral; she was used to the

thousand various sounds which are the cheer and music of a busy

life, but now she heard only the monotonous footfall of the sentry

pacing his watch; she had been fond of talking with her mates, but

now there was no one to talk to; she had had an easy laugh, but it

was gone dumb now; she had been born for comradeship, and

blithe and busy work, and all manner of joyous activities, but here

were only dreariness, and leaden hours, and weary inaction, and

brooding stillness, and thoughts that travel by day and night and

night and day round and round in the same circle, and wear the

brain and break the heart with weariness. It was death in life; yes,

death in life, that is what it must have been. And there was another

hard thing about it all. A young girl in trouble needs the soothing

solace and support and sympathy of persons of her own sex, and

the delicate offices and gentle ministries which only these can

furnish; yet in all these months of gloomy captivity in her dungeon

Joan never saw the face of a girl or a woman. Think how her heart

would have leaped to see such a face.



Consider. If you would realize how great Joan of Arc was,

remember that it was out of such a place and such circumstances

that she came week after week and month after month and

confronted the master intellects of France single-handed, and

baffled their cunningest schemes, defeated their ablest plans,

detected and avoided their secretest traps and pitfalls, broke their

lines, repelled their assaults, and camped on the field after every

engagement; steadfast always, true to her faith and her ideals;

defying torture, defying the stake, and answering threats of eternal

death and the pains of hell with a simple "Let come what may,

here I take my stand and will abide."



Yes, if you would realize how great was the soul, how profound

the wisdom, and how luminous the intellect of Joan of Arc, you

must study her there, where she fought out that long fight all

alone--and not merely against the subtlest brains and deepest

learning of France, but against the ignoble deceits, the meanest

treacheries, and the hardest hearts to be found in any land, pagan

or Christian.



She was great in battle--we all know that; great in foresight; great

in loyalty and patriotism; great in persuading discontented chiefs

and reconciling conflicting interests and passions; great in the

ability to discover merit and genius wherever it lay hidden; great in

picturesque and eloquent speech; supremely great in the gift of

firing the hearts of hopeless men and noble enthusiasms, the gift of

turning hares into heroes, slaves and skulkers into battalions that

march to death with songs on their lips. But all these are exalting

activities; they keep hand and heart and brain keyed up to their

work; there is the joy of achievement, the inspiration of stir and

movement, the applause which hails success; the soul is

overflowing with life and energy, the faculties are at white heat;

weariness, despondency, inertia--these do not exist.



Yes, Joan of Arc was great always, great everywhere, but she was

greatest in the Rouen trials.



There she rose above the limitations and infirmities of our human

nature, and accomplished under blighting and unnerving and

hopeless conditions all that her splendid equipment of moral and

intellectual forces could have accomplished if they had been

supplemented by the mighty helps of hope and cheer and light, the

presence of friendly faces, and a fair and equal fight, with the great

world looking on and wondering.



Chapter 18 Condemned Yet Unafraid



TOWARD THE END of the ten-day interval the University of

Paris rendered its decision concerning the Twelve Articles. By this

finding, Joan was guilty upon all the counts: she must renounce her

errors and make satisfaction, or be abandoned to the secular arm

for punishment.



The University's mind was probably already made up before the

Articles were laid before it; yet it took it from the fifth to the

eighteenth to produce its verdict. I think the delay may have been

caused by temporary difficulties concerning two points:



1. As to who the fiends were who were represented in Joan's

Voices; 2. As to whether her saints spoke French only.



You understand, the University decided emphatically that it was

fiends who spoke in those Voices; it would need to prove that, and

it did. It found out who those fiends were, and named them in the

verdict: Belial, Satan, and Behemoth. This has always seemed a

doubtful thing to me, and not entitled to much credit. I think so for

this reason: if the University had actually known it was those three,

it would for very consistency's sake have told how it knew it, and

not stopped with the mere assertion, since it had made joan explain

how she knew they were not fiends. Does not that seem

reasonable? To my mind the University's position was weak, and I

will tell you why. It had claimed that Joan's angels were devils in

disguise, and we all know that devils do disguise themselves as

angels; up to that point the University's position was strong; but

you see yourself that it eats its own argument when it turns around

and pretends that it can tell who such apparitions are, while

denying the like ability to a person with as good a head on her

shoulders as the best one the University could produce.



The doctors of the University had to see those creatures in order to

know; and if Joan was deceived, it is argument that they in their

turn could also be deceived, for their insight and judgment were

surely not clearer than hers.



As to the other point which I have thought may have proved a

difficulty and cost the University delay, I will touch but a moment

upon that, and pass on. The University decided that it was

blasphemy for Joan to say that her saints spoke French and not

English, and were on the French side in political sympathies. I

think that the thing which troubled the doctors of theology was

this: they had decided that the three Voices were Satan and two

other devils; but they had also decided that these Voices were not

on the French side--thereby tacitly asserting that they were on the

English side; and if on the English side, then they must be angels

and not devils. Otherwise, the situation was embarrassing. You

see, the University being the wisest and deepest and most erudite

body in the world, it would like to be logical if it could, for the

sake of its reputation; therefore it would study and study, days and

days, trying to find some good common-sense reason for proving

the Voices to be devils in Article No. 1 and proving them to be

angels in Article No. 10. However, they had to give it up. They

found no way out; and so, to this day, the University's verdict

remains just so--devils in No. 1, angels in No. 10; and no way to

reconcile the discrepancy.



The envoys brought the verdict to Rouen, and with it a letter for

Cauchon which was full of fervid praise. The University

complimented him on his zeal in hunting down this woman

"whose venom had infected the faithful of the whole West," and as

recompense it as good as promised him "a crown of imperishable

glory in heaven." Only that!--a crown in heaven; a promissory note

and no indorser; always something away off yonder; not a word

about the Archbishopric of Rouen, which was the thing Cauchon

was destroying his soul for. A crown in heaven; it must have

sounded like a sarcasm to him, after all his hard work. What

should he do in heaven? he did not know anybody there.



On the nineteenth of May a court of fifty judges sat in the

archiepiscopal palace to discuss Joan's fate. A few wanted her

delivered over to the secular arm at once for punishment, but the

rest insisted that she be once more "charitably admonished" first.



So the same court met in the castle on the twenty-third, and Joan

was brought to the bar. Pierre Maurice, a canon of Rouen, made a

speech to Joan in which he admonished her to save her life and her

soul by renouncing her errors and surrendering to the Church. He

finished with a stern threat: if she remained obstinate the

damnation of her soul was certain, the destruction of her body

probable. But Joan was immovable. She said:



"If I were under sentence, and saw the fire before me, and the

executioner ready to light it--more, if I were in the fire itself, I

would say none but the things which I have said in these trials; and

I would abide by them till I died."



A deep silence followed now, which endured some moments. It lay

upon me like a weight. I knew it for an omen. Then Cauchon,

grave and solemn, turned to Pierre Maurice:



"Have you anything further to say?"



The priest bowed low, and said:



"Nothing, my lord."



"Prisoner at the bar, have you anything further to say?"



"Nothing."



"Then the debate is closed. To-morrow, sentence will be

pronounced. Remove the prisoner."



She seemed to go from the place erect and noble. But I do not

know; my sight was dim with tears.



To-morrow--twenty-fourth of May! Exactly a year since I saw her

go speeding across the plain at the head of her troops, her silver

helmet shining, her silvery cape fluttering in the wind, her white

plumes flowing, her sword held aloft; saw her charge the

Burgundian camp three times, and carry it; saw her wheel to the

right and spur for the duke's reserves; saws her fling herself against

it in the last assault she was ever to make. And now that fatal day

was come again--and see what it was bringing!



Chapter 19 Our Last Hopes of Rescue Fail



JOAN HAD been adjudged guilty of heresy, sorcery, and all the

other terrible crimes set forth in the Twelve Articles, and her life

was in Cauchon's hands at last. He could send her to the stake at

once. His work was finished now, you think? He was satisfied?

Not at all. What would his Archbishopric be worth if the people

should get the idea into their heads that this faction of interested

priests, slaving under the English lash, had wrongly condemned

and burned Joan of Arc, Deliverer of France? That would be to

make of her a holy martyr. Then her spirit would rise from her

body's ashes, a thousandfold reinforced, and sweep the English

domination into the sea, and Cauchon along with it. No, the

victory was not complete yet. Joan's guilt must be established by

evidence which would satisfy the people. Where was that evidence

to be found? There was only one person in the world who could

furnish it--Joan of Arc herself. She must condemn herself, and in

public--at least she must seem to do it.



But how was this to be managed? Weeks had been spent already in

trying to get her to surrender--time wholly wasted; what was to

persuade her now? Torture had been threatened, the fire had been

threatened; what was left? Illness, deadly fatigue, and the sight of

the fire, the presence of the fire! That was left.



Now that was a shrewd thought. She was but a girl after all, and,

under illness and exhaustion, subject to a girl's weaknesses.



Yes, it was shrewdly thought. She had tacitly said herself that

under the bitter pains of the rack they would be able to extort a

false confession from her. It was a hint worth remembering, and it

was remembered.



She had furnished another hint at the same time: that as soon as the

pains were gone, she would retract the confession. That hint was

also remembered.



She had herself taught them what to do, you see. First, they must

wear out her strength, then frighten her with the fire. Second,

while the fright was on her, she must be made to sign a paper.



But she would demand a reading of the paper. They could not

venture to refuse this, with the public there to hear. Suppose that

during the reading her courage should return?--she would refuse to

sign then. Very well, even that difficulty could be got over. They

could read a short paper of no importance, then slip a long and

deadly one into its place and trick her into signing that.



Yet there was still one other difficulty. If they made her seem to

abjure, that would free her from the death-penalty. They could

keep her in a prison of the Church, but they could not kill her.



That would not answer; for only her death would content the

English. Alive she was a terror, in a prison or out of it. She had

escaped from two prisons already.



But even that difficulty could be managed. Cauchon would make

promises to her; in return she would promise to leave off the male

dress. He would violate his promises, and that would so situate her

that she would not be able to keep hers. Her lapse would condemn

her to the stake, and the stake would be ready.



These were the several moves; there was nothing to do but to make

them, each in its order, and the game was won. One might almost

name the day that the betrayed girl, the most innocent creature in

France and the noblest, would go to her pitiful death.



The world knows now that Cauchon's plan was as I have sketched

it to you, but the world did not know it at that time. There are

sufficient indications that Warwick and all the other English chiefs

except the highest one--the Cardinal of Winchester--were not let

into the secret, also, that only Loyseleur and Beaupere, on the

French side, knew the scheme. Sometimes I have doubted if even

Loyseleur and Beaupere knew the whole of it at first. However, if

any did, it was these two.



It is usual to let the condemned pass their last night of life in

peace, but this grace was denied to poor Joan, if one may credit the

rumors of the time. Loyseleur was smuggled into her presence, and

in the character of priest, friend, and secret partisan of France and

hater of England, he spent some hours in beseeching her to do "the

only right an righteous thing"--submit to the Church, as a good

Christian should; and that then she would straightway get out of

the clutches of the dreaded English and be transferred to the

Church's prison, where she would be honorably used and have

women about her for jailers. He knew where to touch her. He knew

how odious to her was the presence of her rough and profane

English guards; he knew that her Voices had vaguely promised

something which she interpreted to be escape, rescue, release of

some sort, and the chance to burst upon France once more and

victoriously complete the great work which she had been

commissioned of Heaven to do. Also there was that other thing: if

her failing body could be further weakened by loss of rest and

sleep now, her tired mind would be dazed and drowsy on the

morrow, and in ill condition to stand out against persuasions,

threats, and the sight of the stake, and also be purblind to traps and

snares which it would be swift to detect when in its normal estate.



I do not need to tell you that there was no rest for me that night.

Nor for No‰l. We went to the main gate of the city before nightfall,

with a hope in our minds, based upon that vague prophecy of

Joan's Voices which seemed to promise a rescue by force at the

last moment. The immense news had flown swiftly far and wide

that at last Joan of Arc was condemned, and would be sentenced

and burned alive on the morrow; and so crowds of people were

flowing in at the gate, and other crowds were being refused

admission by the soldiery; these being people who brought

doubtful passes or none at all. We scanned these crowds eagerly,

but thee was nothing about them to indicate that they were our old

war-comrades in disguise, and certainly there were no familiar

faces among them. And so, when the gate was closed at last, we

turned away grieved, and more disappointed than we cared to

admit, either in speech or thought.



The streets were surging tides of excited men. It was difficult to

make one's way. Toward midnight our aimless tramp brought us to

the neighborhood of the beautiful church of St. Ouen, and there all

was bustle and work. The square was a wilderness of torches and

people; and through a guarded passage dividing the pack, laborers

were carrying planks and timbers and disappearing with them

through the gate of the churchyard. We asked what was going

forward; the answer was:



"Scaffolds and the stake. Don't you know that the French witch is

to be burned in the morning?"



Then we went away. We had no heart for that place.



At dawn we were at the city gate again; this time with a hope

which our wearied bodies and fevered minds magnified into a

large probability. We had heard a report that the Abbot of

JumiŠges with all his monks was coming to witness the burning.

Our desire, abetted by our imagination, turned those nine hundred

monks into Joan's old campaigners, and their Abbot into La Hire or

the Bastard or D'Alen‡on; and we watched them file in,

unchallenged, the multitude respectfully dividing and uncovering

while they passed, with our hearts in our throats and our eyes

swimming with tears of joy and pride and exultation; and we tried

to catch glimpses of the faces under the cowls, and were prepared

to give signal to any recognized face that we were Joan's men and

ready and eager to kill and be killed in the good cause. How

foolish we were!



But we were young, you know, and youth hopeth all things,

believeth all things.



Chapter 20 The Betrayal



IN THE MORNING I was at my official post. It was on a platform

raised the height of a man, in the churchyard, under the eaves of

St. Ouen. On this same platform was a crowd of priests and

important citizens, and several lawyers. Abreast it, with a small

space between, was another and larger platform, handsomely

canopied against sun and rain, and richly carpeted; also it was

furnished with comfortable chairs, and with two which were more

sumptuous than the others, and raised above the general level. One

of these two was occupied by a prince of the royal blood of

England, his Eminence the Cardinal of Winchester; the other by

Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais. In the rest of the chairs sat three

bishops, the Vice-Inquisitor, eight abbots, and the sixty-two friars

and lawyers who had sat as Joan's judges in her late trials.



Twenty steps in front of the platforms was another--a table-topped

pyramid of stone, built up in retreating courses, thus forming steps.

Out of this rose that grisly thing, the stake; about the stake bundles

of fagots and firewood were piled. On the ground at the base of the

pyramid stood three crimson figures, the executioner and his

assistants. At their feet lay what had been a goodly heap of brands,

but was now a smokeless nest of ruddy coals; a foot or two from

this was a supplemental supply of wood and fagots compacted into

a pile shoulder-high and containing as much as six packhorse

loads. Think of that. We seem so delicately made, so destructible,

so insubstantial; yet it is easier to reduce a granite statue to ashes

than it is to do that with a man's body.



The sight of the stake sent physical pains tingling down the nerves

of my body; and yet, turn as I would, my eyes would keep coming

back t it, such fascination has the gruesome and the terrible for us.



The space occupied by the platforms and the stake was kept open

by a wall of English soldiery, standing elbow to elbow, erect and

stalwart figures, fine and sightly in their polished steel; while from

behind them on every hand str4etched far away a level plain of

human heads; and there was no window and no housetop within

our view, howsoever distant, but was black with patches and

masses of people.



But there was no noise, no stir; it was as if the world was dead.

The impressiveness of this silence and solemnity was deepened by

a leaden twilight, for the sky was hidden by a pall of low-hanging

storm-clouds; and above the remote horizon faint winkings of

heat-lightning played, and now and then one caught the dull

mutterings and complainings of distant thunder.



At last the stillness was broken. From beyond the square rose an

indistinct sound, but familiar--court, crisp phrases of command;

next I saw the plain of heads dividing, and the steady swing of a

marching host was glimpsed between. My heart leaped for a

moment. Was it La Hire and his hellions? No--that was not their

gait. No, it was the prisoner and her escort; it was Joan of Arc,

under guard, that was coming; my spirits sank as low as they had

been before. Weak as she was they made her walk; they would

increase her weakness all they could. The distance was not

great--it was but a few hundred yards--but short as it was it was a

heavy tax upon one who had been lying chained in one spot for

months, and whose feet had lost their powers from inaction. Yes,

and for a year Joan had known only the cool damps of a dungeon,

and now she was dragging herself through this sultry summer heat,

this airless and suffocating void. As she entered the gate, drooping

with exhaustion, there was that creature Loyseleur at her side with

his head bent to her ear. We knew afterward that he had been with

her again this morning in the prison wearying her with his

persuasions and enticing her with false promises, and that he was

now still at the same work at the gate, imploring her to yield

everything that would be required of her, and assuring her that if

she would do this all would be well with her: she would be rid of

the dreaded English and find safety in the powerful shelter and

protection of the Church. A miserable man, a stony-hearted man!



The moment Joan was seated on the platform she closed her eyes

and allowed her chin to fall; and so sat, with her hands nestling in

her lap, indifferent to everything, caring for nothing but rest. And

she was so white again--white as alabaster.



How the faces of that packed mass of humanity lighted up with

interest, and with what intensity all eyes gazed upon this fragile

girl! And how natural it was; for these people realized that at last

they were looking upon that person whom they had so long

hungered to see; a person whose name and fame filled all Europe,

and made all other names and all other renowns insignificant by

comparions; Joan of Arc, the wonder of the time, and destined to

be the wonder of all times!



And I could read as by print, in their marveling countenances, the

words that were drifting through their minds: "Can it be true, is it

believable, that it is this little creature, this girl, this child with the

good face, the sweet face, the beautiful face, the dear and bonny

face, that has carried fortresses by storm, charged at the head of

victorious armies, blown the might of England out of her path with

a breath, and fought a long campaign, solitary and alone, against

the massed brains and learning of France--and had won it if the

fight had been fair!"



Evidently Cauchon had grown afraid of Manchon because of his

pretty apparent leanings toward Joan, for another recorder was in

the chief place here, which left my master and me nothing to do

but sit idle and look on.



Well, I suppose that everything had been done which could be

thought of to tire Joan's body and mind, but it was a mistake; one

more device had been invented. This was to preach a long sermon

to her in that oppressive heat.



When the preacher began, she cast up one distressed and

disappointed look, then dropped her head again. This preacher was

Guillaume Erard, an oratorical celebrity. He got his text from the

Twelve Lies. He emptied upon Joan al the calumnies in detail that

had been bottled up in that mass of venom, and called her all the

brutal names that the Twelve were labeled with, working himself

into a whirlwind of fury as he went on; but his labors were wasted,

she seemed lost in dreams, she made no sign, she did not seem to

hear. At last he launched this apostrophe:



"O France, how hast thou been abused! Thou hast always been the

home of Christianity; but now, Charles, who calls himself thy King

and governor, indorses, like the heretic and schismatic that he is,

the words and deeds of a worthless and infamous woman!" Joan

raised her head, and her eyes began to burn and flash. The

preacher turned to her: "It is to you, Joan, that I speak, and I tell

you that your King is schismatic and a heretic!"



Ah, he might abuse her to his heart's content; she could endure

that; but to her dying moment she could never hear in patience a

word against that ingrate, that treacherous dog our King, whose

proper place was here, at this moment, sword in hand, routing

these reptiles and saving this most noble servant that ever King

had in this world--and he would have been there if he had not been

what I have called him. Joan's loyal soul was outraged, and she

turned upon the preacher and flung out a few words with a spirit

which the crowd recognized as being in accordance with the Joan

of Arc traditions:



"By my faith, sir! I make bold to say and swear, on pain of death,

that he is the most noble Christian of all Christians, and the best

lover of the faith and the Church!"



There was an explosion of applause from the crowd--which

angered the preacher, for he had been aching long to hear an

expression like this, and now that it was come at last it had fallen

to the wrong person: he had done all the work; the other had

carried off all the spoil. He stamped his foot and shouted to the

sheriff:



"Make her shut up!"



That made the crowd laugh.



A mob has small respect for a grown man who has to call on a

sheriff to protect him from a sick girl.



Joan had damaged the preacher's cause more with one sentence

than he had helped it with a hundred; so he was much put out, and

had trouble to get a good start again. But he needn't have bothered;

thee was no occasion. It was mainly an English-feeling mob. It had

but obeyed a law of our nature--an irresistible law--to enjoy and

applaud a spirited and promptly delivered retort, no matter who

makes it. The mob was with the preacher; it had been beguiled for

a moment, but only that; it would soon return. It was there to see

this girl burnt; so that it got that satisfaction--without too much

delay--it would be content.



Presently the preacher formally summoned Joan to submit to the

Church. He made the demand with confidence, for he had gotten

the idea from Loyseleur and Beaupere that she was worn to the

bone, exhausted, and would not be able to put forth any more

resistance; and, indeed, to look at her it seemed that they must be

right. Nevertheless, she made one more effort to hold her ground,

and said, wearily:



"As to that matter, I have answered my judges before. I have told

them to report all that I have said and done to our Holy Father the

Pope--to whom, and to God first, I appeal."



Again, out of her native wisdom, she had brought those words of

tremendous import, but was ignorant of their value. But they could

have availed her nothing in any case, now, with the stake there and

these thousands of enemies about her. Yet they made every

churchman there blench, and the preacher changed the subject

with all haste. Well might those criminals blench, for Joan's appeal

of her case to the Pope stripped Cauchon at once of jurisdiction

over it, and annulled all that he and his judges had already done in

the matter and all that they should do in it henceforth.



Joan went on presently to reiterate, after some further talk, that she

had acted by command of God in her deeds and utterances; then,

when an attempt was made to implicate the King, and friends of

hers and his, she stopped that. She said:



"I charge my deeds and words upon no one, neither upon my King

nor any other. If there is any fault in them, I am responsible and no

other."



She was asked if she would not recant those of her words and

deeds which had been pronounced evil by her judges. Here answer

made confusion and damage again:



"I submit them to God and the Pope."



The Pope once more! It was very embarrassing. Here was a person

who was asked to submit her case to the Church, and who frankly

consents--offers to submit it to the very head of it. What more

could any one require? How was one to answer such a formidably

unanswerable answer as that?



The worried judges put their heads together and whispered and

planned and discussed. Then they brought forth this sufficiently

shambling conclusion--but it was the best they could do, in so

close a place: they said the Pope was so far away; and it was not

necessary to go to him anyway, because the present judges had

sufficient power and authority to deal with the present case, and

were in effect "the Church" to that extent. At another time they

could have smiled at this conceit, but not now; they were not

comfortable enough now.



The mob was getting impatient. It was beginning to put on a

threatening aspect; it was tired of standing, tired of the scorching

heat; and the thunder was coming nearer, the lightning was

flashing brighter. It was necessary to hurry this matter to a close.

Erard showed Joan a written form, which had been prepared and

made all ready beforehand, and asked her to abjure.



"Abjure? What is abjure?"



She did not know the word. It was explained to her by Massieu.

She tried to understand, but she was breaking, under exhaustion,

and she could not gather the meaning. It was all a jumble and

confusion of strange words. In her despair she sent out this

beseeching cry:



"I appeal to the Church universal whether I ought to abjure or not!"



Erard exclaimed:



"You shall abjure instantly, or instantly be burnt!"



She glanced up, at those awful words, and for the first time she

saw the stake and the mass of red coals--redder and angrier than

ever now under the constantly deepening storm-gloom. She gasped

and staggered up out of her seat muttering and mumbling

incoherently, and gazed vacantly upon the people and the scene

about her like one who is dazed, or thinks he dreams, and does not

know where he is.



The priests crowded about her imploring her to sign the paper,

there were many voices beseeching and urging her at once, there

was great turmoil and shouting and excitement among the

populace and everywhere.



"Sign! sign!" from the priests; "sign--sign and be saved!" And

Loyseleur was urging at her ear, "Do as I told you--do not destroy

yourself!"



Joan said plaintively to these people:



"Ah, you do not do well to seduce me."



The judges joined their voices to the others. Yes, even the iron in

their hearts melted, and they said:



"O Joan, we pity you so! Take back what you have said, or we

must deliver you up to punishment."



And now there was another voice--it was from the other

platform--pealing solemnly above the din: Cauchon's--reading the

sentence of death!



Joan's strength was all spent. She stood looking about her in a

bewildered way a moment, then slowly she sank to her knees, and

bowed her head and said:



"I submit."



They gave her no time to reconsider--they knew the peril of that.

The moment the words were out of her mouth Massieu was

reading to her the abjuration, and she was repeating the words after

him mechanically, unconsciously--and smiling; for her wandering

mind was far away in some happier world.



Then this short paper of six lines was slipped aside and a long one

of many pages was smuggled into its place, and she, noting

nothing, put her mark on it, saying, in pathetic apology, that she

did not know how to write. But a secretary of the King of England

was there to take care of that defect; he guided her hand with his

own, and wrote her name--Jehanne.



The great crime was accomplished. She had signed--what? She did

not know--but the others knew. She had signed a paper confessing

herself a sorceress, a dealer with devils, a liar, a blasphermer of

God and His angels, a lover of blood, a promoter of sedition, cruel,

wicked, commissioned of Satan; and this signature of hers bound

her to resume the dress of a woman.



There were other promises, but that one would answer, without the

others; and that one could be made to destroy her.



Loyseleur pressed forward and praised her for having done "such a

good day's work."



But she was still dreamy, she hardly heard.



Then Cauchon pronounced the words which dissolved the

excommunication and and restored her to her beloved Church,

with all the dear privileges of worship. Ah, she heard that! You

could see it in the deep gratitude that rose in her face and

transfigured it with joy.



But how transient was that happiness! For Cauchon, without a

tremor of pity in his voice, added these crushing words:



"And that she may repent of her crimes and repeat them no more,

she is sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, with the bread of

affliction and the water of anguish!"



Perpetual imprisonment! She had never dreamed of that--such a

thing had never been hinted to her by Loyseleur or by any other.

Loyseleur had distinctly said and promised that "all would be well

with her." And the very last words spoken to her by Erard, on that

very platform, when he was urging her to abjure, was a straight,

unqualified promised--that if she would do it she should go free

from captivity.



She stood stunned and speechless a moment; then she

remembered, with such solacement as the thought could furnish,

that by another clear promise made by Cauchon himself--she

would at least be the Church's captive, and have women about her

in place of a brutal foreign soldiery. So she turned to the body of

priests and said, with a sad resignation:



"Now, you men of the Church, take me to your prison, and leave

me no longer in the hands of the English"; and she gathered up her

chains and prepared to move.



But alas! now came these shameful words from Cauchon--and with

them a mocking laugh:



"Take her to the prison whence she came!"



Poor abused girl! She stood dumb, smitten, paralyzed. It was

pitiful to see. She had been beguiled, lied to, betrayed; she saw it

all now.



The rumbling of a drum broke upon the stillness, and for just one

moment she thought of the glorious deliverance promised by her

Voices--I read it in the rapture that lit her face; then she saw what

it was--her prison escort--and that light faded, never to revive

again. And now her head began a piteous rocking motion, swaying

slowly, this way and that, as is the way when one is suffering

unwordable pain, or when one's heart is broken; then drearily she

went from us, with her face in her hands, and sobbing bitterly.



Chapter 21 Respited Only for Torture



THERE IS no certainty that any one in all Rouen was in the secret

of the deep game which Cauchon was playing except the Cardinal

of Winchester. Then you can imagine the astonishment and

stupefaction of that vast mob gathered there and those crowds of

churchmen assembled on the two platforms, when they saw Joan

of Arc moving away, alive and whole--slipping out of their grip at

last, after all this tedious waiting, all this tantalizing expectancy.



Nobody was able to stir or speak for a while, so paralyzing was the

universal astonishment, so unbelievable the fact that the stake was

actually standing there unoccupied and its prey gone.



Then suddenly everybody broke into a fury of rage; maledictions

and charges of treachery began to fly freely; yes, and even stones:

a stone came near killing the Cardinal of Winchester--it just

missed his head. But the man who threw it was not to blame, for

he was excited, and a person who is excited never can throw

straight.



The tumult was very great, indeed, for a while. In the midst of it a

chaplain of the Cardinal even forgot the proprieties so far as to

oppobriously assail the august Bishop of Beauvais himself,

shaking his fist in his face and shouting:



"By God, you are a traitor!"



"You lie!" responded the Bishop.



He a traitor! Oh, far from it; he certainly was the last Frenchman

that any Briton had a right to bring that charge against.



The Early of Warwick lost his temper, too. He was a doughty

soldier, but when it came to the intellectuals--when it came to

delicate chicane, and scheming, and trickery--he couldn't see any

further through a millstone than another. So he burst out in his

frank warrior fashion, and swore that the King of England was

being treacherously used, and that Joan of Arc was going to be

allowed to cheat the stake. But they whispered comfort into his

ear:



"Give yourself no uneasiness, my lord; we shall soon have her

again."



Perhaps the like tidings found their way all around, for good news

travels fast as well as bad. At any rate, the ragings presently

quieted down, and the huge concourse crumbled apart and

disappeared. And thus we reached the noon of that fearful

Thursday.



We two youths were happy; happier than any words can tell--for

we were not in the secret any more than the rest. Joan's life was

saved. We knew that, and that was enough. France would hear of

this day's infamous work--and then! Why, then her gallant sons

would flock to her standard by thousands and thousands,

multitudes upon multitudes, and their wrath would be like the

wrath of the ocean when the storm-winds sweep it; and they would

hurl themselves against this doomed city and overwhelm it like the

resistless tides of that ocean, and Joan of Arc would march again!



In six days--seven days--one short week--noble France, grateful

France, indignant France, would be thundering at these gates--let

us count the hours, let us count the minutes, let us count the

seconds! O happy day, O day of ecstasy, how our hearts sang in

our bosoms!



For we were young then, yes, we were very young.



Do you think the exhausted prisoner was allowed to rest and sleep

after she had spent the small remnant of her strength in dragging

her tired body back to the dungeon?



No, there was no rest for her, with those sleuth-hounds on her

track. Cauchon and some of his people followed her to her lair

straightway; they found her dazed and dull, her mental and

physical forces in a state of prostration. They told her she had

abjured; that she had made certain promises--among them, to

resume the apparel of her sex; and that if she relapsed, the Church

would cast her out for good and all. She heard the words, but they

had no meaning to her. She was like a person who has taken a

narcotic and is dying for sleep, dying for rest from nagging, dying

to be let alone, and who mechanically does everything the

persecutor asks, taking but dull note of the things done, and but

dully recording them in the memory. And so Joan put on the gown

which Cauchon and his people had brought; and would come to

herself by and by, and have at first but a dim idea as to when and

how the change had come about.



Cauchon went away happy and content. Joan had resumed

woman's dress without protest; also she had been formally warned

against relapsing. He had witnesses to these facts. How could

matters be better?



But suppose she should not relapse?



Why, then she must be forced to do it.



Did Cauchon hint to the English guards that thenceforth if they

chose to make their prisoner's captivity crueler and bitterer than

ever, no official notice would be taken of it? Perhaps so; since the

guards did begin that policy at once, and no official notice was

taken of it. Yes, from that moment Joan's life in that dungeon was

made almost unendurable. Do not ask me to enlarge upon it. I will

not do it.



Chapter 22 Joan Gives the Fatal Answer



FRIDAY and Saturday were happy days for No‰l and me. Our

minds were full of our splendid dream of France aroused--France

shaking her mane--France on the march--France at the

gates--Rouen in ashes, and Joan free! Our imagination was on fire;

we were delirious with pride and joy. For we were very young, as I

have said.



We knew nothing about what had been happening in the dungeon

in the yester-afternoon. We supposed that as Joan had abjured and

been taken back into the forgiving bosom of the Church, she was

being gently used now, and her captivity made as pleasant and

comfortable for her as the circumstances would allow. So, in high

contentment, we planned out our share in the great rescue, and

fought our part of the fight over and over again during those two

happy days--as happy days as ever I have known.



Sunday morning came. I was awake, enjoying the balmy, lazy

weather, and thinking. Thinking of the rescue--what else? I had no

other thought now. I was absorbed in that, drunk with the

happiness of it.



I heard a voice shouting far down the street, and soon it came

nearer, and I caught the words:



"Joan of Arc has relapsed! The witch's time has come!"



It stopped my heart, it turned my blood to ice. That was more than

sixty years ago, but that triumphant note rings as clear in my

memory to-day as it rang in my ear that long-vanished summer

morning. We are so strangely made; the memories that could make

us happy pass away; it is the memories that break our hearts that

abide.



Soon other voices took up that cry--tens, scores, hundreds of

voices; all the world seemed filled with the brutal joy of it. And

there were other clamors--the clatter of rushing feet, merry

congratulations, bursts of coarse laughter, the rolling of drums, the

boom and crash of distant bands profaning the sacred day with the

music of victory and thanksgiving.



About the middle of the afternoon came a summons for Manchon

and me to go to Joan's dungeon--a summons from Cauchon. But by

that time distrust had already taken possession of the English and

their soldiery again, and all Rouen was in an angry and threatening

mood. We could see plenty of evidences of this from our own

windows--fist-shaking, black looks, tumultuous tides of furious

men billowing by along the street.



And we learned that up at the castle things were going very badly,

indeed; that there was a great mob gathered there who considered

the relapse a lie and a priestly trick, and among them many

half-drunk English soldiers. Moreover, these people had gone

beyond words. They had laid hands upon a number of churchmen

who were trying to enter the castle, and it had been difficult work

to rescue them and save their lives.



And so Manchon refused to go. He said he would not go a step

without a safeguard from Warwick. So next morning Warwick sent

an escort of soldiers, and then we went. Matters had not grown

peacefuler meantime, but worse. The soldiers protected us from

bodily damage, but as we passed through the great mob at the

castle we were assailed with insults and shameful epithets. I bore it

well enough, though, and said to myself, with secret satisfaction,

"In three or four short days, my lads, you will be employing your

tongues in a different sort from this--and I shall be there to hear."



To my mind these were as good as dead men. How many of them

would still be alive after the rescue that was coming? Not more

than enough to amuse the executioner a short half-hour, certainly.



It turned out that the report was true. Joan had relapsed. She was

sitting there in her chains, clothed again in her male attire.



She accused nobody. That was her way. It was not in her character

to hold a servant to account for what his master had made him do,

and her mind had cleared now, and she knew that the advantage

which had been taken of her the previous morning had its origin,

not in the subordinate but in the master--Cauchon.



Here is what had happened. While Joan slept, in the early morning

of Sunday, one of the guards stole her female apparel and put her

male attire in its place. When she woke she asked for the other

dress, but the guards refused to give it back. She protested, and

said she was forbidden to wear the male dress. But they continued

to refuse. She had to have clothing, for modesty's sake; moreover,

she saw that she could not save her life if she must fight for it

against treacheries like this; so she put on the forbidden garments,

knowing what the end would be. She was weary of the struggle,

poor thing.



We had followed in the wake of Cauchon, the Vice-Inquisitor, and

the others--six or eight--and when I saw Joan sitting there,

despondent, forlorn, and still in chains, when I was expecting to

find her situation so different, I did not know what to make of it.

The shock was very great. I had doubted the relapse perhaps;

possibly I had believed in it, but had not realized it.



Cauchon's victory was complete. He had had a harassed and

irritated and disgusted look for a long time, but that was all gone

now, and contentment and serenity had taken its place. His purple

face was full of tranquil and malicious happiness. He went trailing

his robes and stood grandly in front of Joan, with his legs apart,

and remained so more than a minute, gloating over her and

enjoying the sight of this poor ruined creature, who had won so

lofty a place for him in the service of the meek and merciful Jesus,

Saviour of the World, Lord of the Universe--in case England kept

her promise to him, who kept no promises himself.



Presently the judges began to question Joan. One of them, named

Marguerie, who was a man with more insight than prudence,

remarked upon Joan's change of clothing, and said:



"There is something suspicious about this. How could it have come

about without connivance on the part of others? Perhaps even

something worse?"



"Thousand devils!" screamed Cauchon, in a fury. "Will you shut

your mouth?"



"Armagnac! Traitor!" shouted the soldiers on guard, and made a

rush for Marguerie with their lances leveled. It was with the

greatest difficulty that he was saved from being run through the

body. He made no more attempts to help the inquiry, poor man.

The other judges proceeded with the questionings.



"Why have you resumed this male habit?"



I did not quite catch her answer, for just then a soldier's halberd

slipped from his fingers and fell on the stone floor with a crash;

but I thought I understood Joan to say that she had resumed it of

her own motion.



"But you have promised and sworn that you would not go back to

it."



I was full of anxiety to hear her answer to that question; and when

it came it was just what I was expecting. She said--quiet quietly:



"I have never intended and never understood myself to swear I

would not resume it."



There--I had been sure, all along, that she did not know what she

was doing and saying on the platform Thursday, and this answer of

hers was proof that I had not been mistaken. Then she went on to

add this:



"But I had a right to resume it, because the promises made to me

have not been kept--promises that I should be allowed to go to

mass and receive the communion, and that I should be freed from

the bondage of these chains--but they are still upon me, as you

see."



"Nevertheless, you have abjured, and have especially promised to

return no more to the dress of a man."



Then Joan held out her fettered hands sorrowfully toward these

unfeeling men and said:



"I would rather die than continue so. But if they may be taken off,

and if I may hear mass, and be removed to a penitential prison, and

have a woman about me, I will be good, and will do what shall

seem good to you that I do."



Cauchon sniffed scoffingly at that. Honor the compact which he

and his had made with her?



Fulfil its conditions? What need of that? Conditions had been a

good thing to concede, temporarily, and for advantage; but they

have served their turn--let something of a fresher sort and of more

consequence be considered. The resumption of the male dress was

sufficient for all practical purposes, but perhaps Joan could be led

to add something to that fatal crime. So Cauchon asked her if her

Voices had spoken to her since Thursday--and he reminded her of

her abjuration.



"Yes," she answered; and then it came out that the Voices had

talked with her about the abjuration--told her about it, I suppose.

She guilelessly reasserted the heavenly origin of her mission, and

did it with the untroubled mien of one who was not conscious that

she had ever knowingly repudiated it. So I was convinced once

more that she had had no notion of what she was doing that

Thursday morning on the platform. Finally she said, "My Voices

told me I did very wrong to confess that what I had done was not

well." Then she sighed, and said with simplicity, "But it was the

fear of the fire that made me do so."



That is, fear of the fire had made her sign a paper whose contents

she had not understood then, but understood now by revelation of

her Voices and by testimony of her persecutors.



She was sane now and not exhausted; her courage had come back,

and with it her inborn loyalty to the truth. She was bravely and

serenely speaking it again, knowing that it would deliver her body

up to that very fire which had such terrors for her.



That answer of hers was quite long, quite frank, wholly free from

concealments or palliations. It made me shudder; I knew she was

pronouncing sentence of death upon herself. So did poor Manchon.

And he wrote in the margin abreast of it:



"RESPONSIO MORTIFERA."



Fatal answer. Yes, all present knew that it was, indeed, a fatal

answer. Then there fell a silence such as falls in a sick-room when

the watchers of the dying draw a deep breath and say softly one to

another, "All is over."



Here, likewise, all was over; but after some moments Cauchon,

wishing to clinch this matter and make it final, put this question:



"Do you still believe that your Voices are St. Marguerite and St.

Catherine?"



"Yes--and that they come from God."



"Yet you denied them on the scaffold?"



Then she made direct and clear affirmation that she had never had

any intention to deny them; and that if--I noted the if--"if she had

made some retractions and revocations on the scaffold it was from

fear of the fire, and it was a violation of the truth."



There it is again, you see. She certainly never knew what it was

she had done on the scaffold until she was told of it afterward by

these people and by her Voices.



And now she closed this most painful scene with these words; and

there was a weary note in them that was pathetic:



"I would rather do my penance all at once; let me die. I cannot

endure captivity any longer."



The spirit born for sunshine and liberty so longed for release that it

would take it in any form, even that.



Several among the company of judges went from the place

troubled and sorrowful, the others in another mood. In the court of

the castle we found the Earl of Warwick and fifty English waiting,

impatient for news. As soon as Cauchon saw them he

shouted--laughing--think of a man destroying a friendless poor girl

and then having the heart to laugh at it:



"Make yourselves comfortable--it's all over with her!"



Chapter 23 The Time Is at Hand



THE YOUNG can sink into abysses of despondency, and it was so

with No‰l and me now; but the hopes of the young are quick to

rise again, and it was so with ours. We called back that vague

promise of the Voices, and said the one to the other that the

glorious release was to happen at "the last moment"--"that other

time was not the last moment, but this is; it will happen now; the

King will come, La Hire will come, and with them our veterans,

and behind them all France!" And so we were full of heart again,

and could already hear, in fancy, that stirring music the clash of

steel and the war-cries and the uproar of the onset, and in fancy see

our prisoner free, her chains gone, her sword in her hand.



But this dream was to pass also, and come to nothing. Late at

night, when Manchon came in, he said:



"I am come from the dungeon, and I have a message for you from

that poor child."



A message to me! If he had been noticing I think he would have

discovered me--discovered that my indifference concerning the

prisoner was a pretense; for I was caught off my guard, and was so

moved and so exalted to be so honored by her that I must have

shown my feeling in my face and manner.



"A message for me, your reverence?"



"Yes. It is something she wishes done. She said she had noticed the

young man who helps me, and that he had a good face; and did I

think he would do a kindness for her? I said I knew you would, and

asked her what it was, and she said a letter--would you write a

letter to her mother?



And I said you would. But I said I would do it myself, and gladly;

but she said no, that my labors were heavy, and she thought the

young man would not mind the doing of this service for one not

able to do it for herself, she not knowing how to write. Then I

would have sent for you, and at that the sadness vanished out of

her face. Why, it was as if she was going to see a friend, poor

friendless thing. But I was not permitted. I did my best, but the

orders remain as strict as ever, the doors are closed against all but

officials; as before, none but officials may speak to her. So I went

back and told her, and she sighed, and was sad again. Now this is

what she begs you to write to her mother. It is partly a strange

message, and to me means nothing, but she said her mother would

understand. You will 'convey her adoring love to her family and

her village friends, and say there will be no rescue, for that this

night--and it is the third time in the twelvemonth, and is final--she

has seen the Vision of the Tree.'"



"How strange!"



"Yes, it is strange, but that is what she said; and said her parents

would understand. And for a little time she was lost in dreams and

thinkings, and her lips moved, and I caught in her muttering these

lines, which she said over two or three times, and they seemed to

bring peace and contentment to her. I set them down, thinking they

might have some connection with her letter and be useful; but it

was not so; they were a mere memory, floating idly in a tired

mind, and they have no meaning, at least no relevancy."



I took the piece of paper, and found what I knew I should find:



And when in exile wand'ring, we Shall fainting yearn for glimpse

of thee, Oh, rise upon our sight!



There was no hope any more. I knew it now. I knew that Joan's

letter was a message to No‰l and me, as well as to her family, and

that its object was to banish vain hopes from our minds and tell us

from her own mouth of the blow that was going to fall upon us, so

that we, being her soldiers, would know it for a command to bear

it as became us and her, and so submit to the will of God; and in

thus obeying, find assuagement of our grief. It was like her, for she

was always thinking of others, not of herself. Yes, her heart was

sore for us; she could find time to think of us, the humblest of her

servants, and try to soften our pain, lighten the burden of our

troubles--she that was drinking of the bitter waters; she that was

walking in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.



I wrote the letter. You will know what it cost me, without my

telling you. I wrote it with the same wooden stylus which had put

upon parchment the first words ever dictated by Joan of Arc--that

high summons to the English to vacate France, two years past,

when she was a lass of seventeen; it had now set down the last

ones which she was ever to dictate. Then I broke it. For the pen

that had served Joan of Arc could not serve any that would come

after her in this earth without abasement.



The next day, May 29th, Cauchon summoned his serfs, and

forty-two responded. It is charitable to believe that the other

twenty were ashamed to come. The forty-two pronounced her a

relapsed heretic, and condemned her to be delivered over to the

secular arm. Cauchon thanked them.



Then he sent orders that Joan of Arc be conveyed the next morning

to the place known as the Old Market; and that she be then

delivered to the civil judge, and by the civil judge to the

executioner. That meant she would be burnt.



All the afternoon and evening of Tuesday, the 29th, the news was

flying, and the people of the country-side flocking to Rouen to see

the tragedy--all, at least, who could prove their English sympathies

and count upon admission. The press grew thicker and thicker in

the streets, the excitement grew higher and higher. And now a

thing was noticeable again which had been noticeable more than

once before--that there was pity for Joan in the hearts of many of

these people. Whenever she had been in great danger it had

manifested itself, and now it was apparent again--manifest in a

pathetic dumb sorrow which was visible in many faces.



Early the next morning, Wednesday, Martin Ladvenu and another

friat were sent to Joan to prepare her for death; and Manchon and I

went with them--a hard service for me. We tramped through the

dim corridors, winding this way and that, and piercing ever deeper

and deeper into that vast heart of stone, and at last we stood before

Joan. But she did not know it. She sat with her hands in her lap

and her head bowed, thinking, and her face was very sad. One

might not know what she was thinking of. Of her home, and the

peaceful pastures, and the friends she was no more to see? Of her

wrongs, and her forsaken estate, and the cruelties which had been

put upon her? Or was it of death--the death which she had longed

for, and which was now so close?



Or was it of the kind of death she must suffer? I hoped not; for she

feared only one kind, and that one had for her unspeakable terrors.

I believed she so feared that one that with her strong will she

would shut the thought of it wholly out of her mind, and hope and

believe that God would take pity on her and grant her an easier

one; and so it might chance that the awful news which we were

bringing might come as a surprise to her at last.



We stood silent awhile, but she was still unconscious of us, still

deep in her sad musings and far away. Then Martin Ladvenu said,

softly:



"Joan."



She looked up then, with a little start and a wan smile, and said:



"Speak. Have you a message for me?"



"Yes, my poor child. Try to bear it. Do you think you can bear it?"



"Yes"--very softly, and her head drooped again.



"I am come to prepare you for death."



A faint shiver trembled through her wasted body. There was a

pause. In the stillness we could hear our breathings. Then she said,

still in that low voice:



"When will it be?"



The muffled notes of a tolling bell floated to our ears out of the

distance.



"Now. The time is at hand."



That slight shiver passed again.



"It is so soon--ah, it is so soon!"



There was a long silence. The distant throbbings of the bell pulsed

through it, and we stood motionless and listening. But it was

broken at last:



"What death is it?"



"By fire!"



"oh, I knew it, I knew it!" She sprang wildly to her feet, and wound

her hands in her hair, and began to writhe and sob, oh, so

piteously, and mourn and grieve and lament, and turn to first one

and then another of us, and search our faces beseechingly, as

hoping she might find help and friendliness there, poor thing--she

that had never denied these to any creature, even her wounded

enemy on the battle-field.



"Oh, cruel, cruel, to treat me so! And must my body, that has never

been defiled, be consumed today and turned to ashes? Ah, sooner

would I that my head were cut off seven times than suffer this

woeful death. I had the promise of the Church's prison when I

submitted, and if I had but been there, and not left here in the

hands of my enemies, this miserable fate had not befallen me.



Oh, I appeal to God the Great Judge, against the injustice which

has been done me."



There was none there that could endure it. They turned away, with

the tears running down their faces. In a moment I was on my knees

at her feet. At once she thought only of my danger, and bent and

whispered in my hear: "Up!--do not peril yourself, good heart.

There--God bless you always!" and I felt the quick clasp of her

hand. Mine was the last hand she touched with hers in life. None

saw it; history does not know of it or tell of it, yet it is true, just as

I have told it. The next moment she saw Cauchon coming, and she

went and stood before him and reproached him, saying:



"Bishop, it is by you that I die!"



He was not shamed, not touched; but said, smoothly:



"Ah, be patient, Joan. You die because you have not kept your

promise, but have returned to your sins."



"Alas," she said, "if you had put me in the Church's prison, and

given me right and proper keepers, as you promised, this would not

have happened. And for this I summon you to answer before God!"



Then Cauchon winced, and looked less placidly content than

before, and he turned him about and went away.



Joan stood awhile musing. She grew calmer, but occasionally she

wiped her eyes, and now and then sobs shook her body; but their

violence was modifying now, and the intervals between them were

growing longer. Finally she looked up and saw Pierre Maurice,

who had come in with the Bishop, and she said to him:



"Master Peter, where shall I be this night?"



"Have you not good hope in God?"



"Yes--and by His grace I shall be in Paradise."



Now Martin Ladvenu heard her in confession; then she begged for

the sacrament. But how grant the communion to one who had been

publicly cut off from the Church, and was now no more entitled to

its privileges than an unbaptized pagan? The brother could not do

this, but he sent to Cauchon to inquire what he must do. All laws,

human and divine, were alike to that man--he respected none of

them. He sent back orders to grant Joan whatever she wished. Her

last speech to him had reached his fears, perhaps; it could not

reach his heart, for he had none.



The Eucharist was brought now to that poor soul that had yearned

for it with such unutterable longing all these desolate months. It

was a solemn moment. While we had been in the deeps of the

prison, the public courts of the castle had been filling up with

crowds of the humbler sort of men and women, who had learned

what was going on in Joan's cell, and had come with softened

hearts to do--they knew not what; to hear--they knew not what. We

knew nothing of this, for they were out of our view. And there

were other great crowds of the like caste gathered in masses

outside the castle gates. And when the lights and the other

accompaniments of the Sacrament passed by, coming to Joan in

the prison, all those multitudes kneeled down and began to pray

for her, and many wept; and when the solemn ceremony of the

communion began in Joan's cell, out of the distance a moving

sound was borne moaning to our ears--it was those invisible

multitudes chanting the litany for a departing soul.



The fear of the fiery death was gone from Joan of Arc now, to

come again no more, except for one fleeting instant--then it would

pass, and serenity and courage would take its place and abide till

the end.



Chapter 24 Joan the Martyr



AT NINE o'clock the Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France, went

forth in the grace of her innocence and her youth to lay down her

life for the country she loved with such devotion, and for the King

that had abandoned her. She sat in the cart that is used only for

felons. In one respect she was treated worse than a felon; for

whereas she was on her way to be sentenced by the civil arm, she

already bore her judgment inscribed in advance upon a

miter-shaped cap which she wore:



HERETIC, RELAPSED, APOSTATE, IDOLATER In the cart with

her sat the friar Martin Ladvenu and MaŒtre Jean Massieu. She

looked girlishly fair and sweet and saintly in her long white robe,

and when a gush of sunlight flooded her as she emerged from the

gloom of the prison and was yet for a moment still framed in the

arch of the somber gate, the massed multitudes of poor folk

murmured "A vision! a vision!" and sank to their knees praying,

and many of the women weeping; and the moving invocation for

the dying arose again, and was taken up and borne along, a

majestic wave of sound, which accompanied the doomed, solacing

and blessing her, all the sorrowful way to the place of death.

"Christ have pity! Saint Margaret have pity! Pray for her, all ye

saints, archangels, and blessed martyrs, pray for her! Saints and

angels intercede for her! From thy wrath, good Lord, deliver her! O

Lord God, save her! Have mercy on her, we beseech Thee, good

Lord!"



It is just and true what one of the histories has said: "The poor and

the helpless had nothing but their prayers to give Joan of Arc; but

these we may believe were not unavailing. There are few more

pathetic events recorded in history than this weeping, helpless,

praying crowd, holding their lighted candles and kneeling on the

pavement beneath the prison walls of the old fortress."



And it was so all the way: thousands upon thousands massed upon

their knees and stretching far down the distances, thick-sown with

the faint yellow candle-flames, like a field starred with golden

flowers.



But there were some that did not kneel; these were the English

soldiers. They stood elbow to elbow, on each side of Joan's road,

and walled it in all the way; and behind these living walls knelt the

multitudes.



By and by a frantic man in priest's garb came wailing and

lamenting, and tore through the crowd and the barriers of soldiers

and flung himself on his knees by Joan's cart and put up his hands

in supplication, crying out:



"O forgive, forgive!"



It was Loyseleur!



And Joan forgave him; forgave him out of a heart that knew

nothing but forgiveness, nothing but compassion, nothing but pity

for all that suffer, let their offense be what it might. And she had

no word of reproach for this poor wretch who had wrought day and

night with deceits and treacheries and hypocrisies to betray her to

her death.



The soldiers would have killed him, but the Earl of Warwick saved

his life. What became of him is not known. He hid himself from

the world somewhere, to endure his remorse as he might.



In the square of the Old Market stood the two platforms and the

stake that had stood before in the churchyard of St. Ouen. The

platforms were occupied as before, the one by Joan and her judges,

the other by great dignitaries, the principal being Cauchon and the

English Cardinal--Winchester. The square was packed with

people, the windows and roofs of the blocks of buildings

surrounding it were black with them.



When the preparations had been finished, all noise and movement

gradually ceased, and a waiting stillness followed which was

solemn and impressive.



And now, by order of Cauchon, an ecclesiastic named Nicholas

Midi preached a sermon, wherein he explained that when a branch

of the vine--which is the Church--becomes diseased and corrupt, it

must be cut away or it will corrupt and destroy the whole vine. He

made it appear that Joan, through her wicknedness, was a menace

and a peril to the Church's purity and holiness, and her death

therefore necessary. When he was come to the end of his discourse

he turned toward her and paused a moment, then he said:



"Joan, the Church can no longer protect you. Go in peace!"



Joan had been placed wholly apart and conspicuous, to signify the

Church's abandonment of her, and she sat there in her loneliness,

waiting in patience and resignation for the end. Cauchon addressed

her now. He had been advised to read the form of her abjuration to

her, and had brought it with him; but he changed his mind, fearing

that she would proclaim the truth--that she had never knowingly

abjured--and so bring shame upon him and eternal infamy. He

contented himself with admonishing her to keep in mind her

wickednesses, and repent of them, and think of her salvation. Then

he solemnly pronounced her excommunicate and cut off from the

body of the Church. With a final word he delivered her over to the

secular arm for judgment and sentence.



Joan, weeping, knelt and began to pray. For whom? Herself? Oh,

no--for the King of France. Her voice rose sweet and clear, and

penetrated all hearts with its passionate pathos. She never thought

of his treacheries to her, she never thought of his desertion of her,

she never remembered that it was because he was an ingrate that

she was here to die a miserable death; she remembered only that

he was her King, that she was his loyal and loving subject, and that

his enemies had undermined his cause with evil reports and false

charges, and he not by to defend himself. And so, in the very

presence of death, she forgot her own troubles to implore all in her

hearing to be just to him; to believe that he was good and noble

and sincere, and not in any way to blame for any acts of hers,

neither advising them nor urging them, but being wholly clear and

free of all responsibility for them. Then, closing, she begged in

humble and touching words that all here present would pray for

her and would pardon her, both her enemies and such as might

look friendly upon her and feel pity for her in their hearts.



There was hardly one heart there that was not touched--even the

English, even the judges showed it, and there was many a lip that

trembled and many an eye that was blurred with tears; yes, even

the English Cardinal's--that man with a political heart of stone but

a human heart of flesh.



The secular judge who should have delivered judgment and

pronounced sentence was himself so disturbed that he forgot his

duty, and Joan went to her death unsentenced--thus completing

with an illegality what had begun illegally and had so continued to

the end. He only said--to the guards:



"Take her"; and to the executioner, "Do your duty."



Joan asked for a cross. None was able to furnish one. But an

English soldier broke a stick in two and crossed the pieces and tied

them together, and this cross he gave her, moved to it by the good

heart that was in him; and she kissed it and put it in her bosom.

Then Isambard de la Pierre went to the church near by and brought

her a consecrated one; and this one also she kissed, and pressed it

to her bosom with rapture, and then kissed it again and again,

covering it with tears and pouring out her gratitude to God and the

saints.



And so, weeping, and with her cross to her lips, she climbed up the

cruel steps to the face of the stake, with the friar Isambard at her

side. Then she was helped up to the top of the pile of wood that

was built around the lower third of the stake and stood upon it with

her back against the stake, and the world gazing up at her

breathless. The executioner ascended to her side and wound chains

around her slender body, and so fastened her to the stake. Then he

descended to finish his dreadful office; and there she remained

alone--she that had had so many friends in the days when she was

free, and had been so loved and so dear.



All these things I saw, albeit dimly and blurred with tears; but I

could bear no more. I continued in my place, but what I shall

deliver to you now I got by others' eyes and others' mouths. Tragic

sounds there were that pierced my ears and wounded my heart as I

sat there, but it is as I tell you:



the latest image recorded by my eyes in that desolating hour was

Joan of Arc with the grace of her comely youth still unmarred; and

that image, untouched by time or decay, has remained with me all

my days. Now I will go on.



If any thought that now, in that solemn hour when all transgressors

repent and confess, she would revoke her revocation and say her

great deeds had been evil deeds and Satan and his fiends their

source, they erred. No such thought was in her blameless mind.

She was not thinking of herself and her troubles, but of others, and

of woes that might befall them. And so, turning her grieving eyes

about her, where rose the towers and spires of that fair city, she

said:



"Oh, Rouen, Rouen, must I die here, and must you be my tomb?

Ah, Rouen, Rouen, I have great fear that you will suffer for my

death."



A whiff of smoke swept upward past her face, and for one moment

terror seized her and she cried out, "Water! Give me holy water!"

but the next moment her fears were gone, and they came no more

to torture her.



She heard the flames crackling below her, and immediately

distress for a fellow-creature who was in danger took possession of

her. It was the friar Isambard. She had given him her cross and

begged him to raise it toward her face and let her eyes rest in hope

and consolation upon it till she was entered into the peace of God.

She made him go out from the danger of the fire. Then she was

satisfied, and said:



"Now keep it always in my sight until the end."



Not even yet could Cauchon, that man without shame, endure to

let her die in peace, but went toward her, all black with crimes and

sins as he was, and cried out:



"I am come, Joan, to exhort you for the last time to repent and seek

the pardon of God."



"I die through you," she said, and these were the last words she

spoke to any upon earth.



Then the pitchy smoke, shot through with red flashes of flame,

rolled up in a thick volume and hid her from sight; and from the

heart of this darkness her voice rose strong and eloquent in prayer,

and when by moments the wind shredded somewhat of the smoke

aside, there were veiled glimpses of an upturned face and moving

lips. At last a mercifully swift tide of flame burst upward, and

none saw that face any more nor that form, and the voice was still.



Yes, she was gone from us: JOAN OF ARC! What little words they

are, to tell of a rich world made empty and poor!



CONCLUSION



JOAN'S BROTHER Jacques died in Domremy during the Great

Trial at Rouen. This was sccording to the prophecy which Joan

made that day in the pastures the time that she said the rest of us

would go to the great wars.



When her poor old father heard of the martyrdom it broke his

heart, and he died.



The mother was granted a pension by the city of Orleans, and upon

this she lived out her days, which were many. Twenty-four years

after her illustrious child's death she traveled all the way to Paris in

the winter-time and was present at the opening of the discussion in

the Cathedral of Notre Dame which was the first step in the

Rehabilitation. Paris was crowded with people, from all about

France, who came to get sight of the venerable dame, and it was a

touching spectacle when she moved through these reverent

wet-eyed multitudes on her way to the grand honors awaiting her

at the cathedral. With her were Jean and Pierre, no longer the

light-hearted youths who marched with us from Vaucouleurs, but

war-torn veterans with hair beginning to show frost.



After the martyrdom No‰l and I went back to Domremy, but

presently when the Constable Richemont superseded La

Tremouille as the King's chief adviser and began the completion of

Joan's great work, we put on our harness and returned to the field

and fought for the King all through the wars and skirmishes until

France was freed of the English. It was what Joan would have

desired of us; and, dead or alive, her desire was law for us. All the

survivors of the personal staff were faithful to her memory and

fought for the King to the end. Mainly we were well scattered, but

when Paris fell we happened to be together. It was a great day and

a joyous; but it was a sad one at the same time, because Joan was

not there to march into the captured capital with us.



No‰l and I remained always together, and I was by his side when

death claimed him. It was in the last great battle of the war. In that

battle fell also Joan's sturdy old enemy Talbot. He was eighty-five

years old, and had spent his whole life in battle. A fine old lion he

was, with his flowing white mane and his tameless spirit; yes, and

his indestructible energy as well; for he fought as knighly and

vigorous a fight that day as the best man there.



La Hire survived the martyrdom thirteen years; and always

fighting, of course, for that was all he enjoyed in life. I did not see

him in all that time, for we were far apart, but one was always

hearing of him.



The Bastard of Orleans and D'Alen‡on and D'Aulon lived to see

France free, and to testify with Jean and Pierre d'Arc and Pasquerel

and me at the Rehabilitation. But they are all at rest now, these

many years. I alone am left of those who fought at the side of Joan

of Arc in the great wars.



She said I would live until those wars were forgotten--a prophecy

which failed. If I should live a thousand years it would still fail.

For whatsoever had touch with Joan of Arc, that thing is immortal.



Members of Joan's family married, and they have left descendants.

Their descendants are of the nobility, but their family name and

blood bring them honors which no other nobles receive or may

hope for. You have seen how everybody along the way uncovered

when those children came yesterday to pay their duty to me. It was

not because they are noble, it is because they are grandchildren of

the brothers of Joan of Arc.



Now as to the Rehabilitation. Joan crowned the King at Rheims.

For reward he allowed her to be hunted to her death without

making one effort to save her. During the next twenty-three years

he remained indifferent to her memory; indifferent to the fact that

her good name was under a damning blot put there by the priest

because of the deeds which she had done in saving him and his

scepter; indifferent to the fact that France was ashamed, and

longed to have the Deliverer's fair fame restored. Indifferent all

that time. Then he suddenly changed and was anxious to have

justice for poor Joan himself. Why? Had he become grateful at

last? Had remorse attacked his hard heart? No, he had a better

reason--a better one for his sort of man. This better reason was

that, now that the English had been finally expelled from the

country, they were beginning to call attention to the fact that this

King had gotten his crown by the hands of a person proven by the

priests to have been in league with Satan and burned for it by them

as a sorceress--therefore, of what value or authority was such a

Kingship as that? Of no value at all; no nation could afford to

allow such a king to remain on the throne.



It was high time to stir now, and the King did it. That is how

Charles VII. came to be smitten with anxiety to have justice done

the memory of his benefactress.



He appealed to the Pope, and the Pope appointed a great

commission of churchmen to examine into the facts of Joan's life

and award judgment. The Commission sat at Paris, at Domremy, at

Rouen, at Orleans, and at several other places, and continued its

work during several months. It examined the records of Joan's

trials, it examined the Bastard of Orleans, and the Duke d'Alen‡on,

and D'Aulon, and Pasquerel, and Courcelles, and Isambard de la

Pierre, and Manchon, and me, and many others whose names I

have made familiar to you; also they examined more than a

hundred witnesses whose names are less familiar to you--the

friends of Joan in Domremy, Vaucouleurs, Orleans, and other

places, and a number of judges and other people who had assisted

at the Rouen trials, the abjuration, and the martyrdom. And out of

this exhaustive examination Joan's character and history came

spotless and perfect, and this verdict was placed upon record, to

remain forever.



I was present upon most of these occasions, and saw again many

faces which I have not seen for a quarter of a century; among them

some well-beloved faces--those of our generals and that of

Catherine Boucher (married, alas!), and also among them certain

other faces that filled me with bitterness--those of Beaupere and

Courcelles and a number of their fellow-fiends. I saw Haumette

and Little Mengette--edging along toward fifty now, and mothers

of many children. I saw No‰l's father, and the parents of the

Paladin and the Sunflower.



It was beautiful to hear the Duke d'Alen‡on praise Joan's splendid

capacities as a general, and to hear the Bastard indorse these

praises with his eloquent tongue and then go on and tell how sweet

and good Joan was, and how full of pluck and fire and

impetuosity, and mischief, and mirthfulness, and tenderness, and

compassion, and everything that was pure and fine and noble and

lovely. He made her live again before me, and wrung my heart.



I have finished my story of Joan of Arc, that wonderful child, that

sublime personality, that spirit which in one regard has had no peer

and will have none--this: its purity from all alloy of self-seeking,

self-interest, personal ambition. In it no trace of these motives can

be found, search as you may, and this cannot be said of any other

person whose name appears in profane history.



With Joan of Arc love of country was more than a sentiment--it

was a passion. She was the Genius of Patriotism--she was

Patriotism embodied, concreted, made flesh, and palpable to the

touch and visible to the eye.



Love, Mercy, Charity, Fortitude, War, Peace, Poetry, Music--these

may be symbolized as any shall prefer: by figures of either sex and

of any age; but a slender girl in her first young bloom, with the

martyr's crown upon her head, and in her hand the sword that

severed her country's bonds--shall not this, and no other, stand for

PATRIOTISM through all the ages until time shall end?











Project Gutenberg Etext Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc V 2













TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE





CHAPTER I.  AN INVITATION FOR TOM AND HUCK



[Footnote: Strange as the incidents of this story are,

they are not inventions, but facts--even to the public

confession of the accused.  I take them from an old-time

Swedish criminal trial, change the actors, and transfer

the scenes to America.  I have added some details,

but only a couple of them are important ones. -- M. T.]



WELL, it was the next spring after me and Tom Sawyer

set our old nigger Jim free, the time he was chained up

for a runaway slave down there on Tom's uncle Silas's farm

in Arkansaw.  The frost was working out of the ground,

and out of the air, too, and it was getting closer and

closer onto barefoot time every day; and next it would be

marble time, and next mumbletypeg, and next tops and hoops,

and next kites, and then right away it would be summer

and going in a-swimming. It just makes a boy homesick

to look ahead like that and see how far off summer is.

Yes, and it sets him to sighing and saddening around,

and there's something the matter with him, he don't know what.

But anyway, he gets out by himself and mopes and thinks;

and mostly he hunts for a lonesome place high up on the

hill in the edge of the woods, and sets there and looks

away off on the big Mississippi down there a-reaching

miles and miles around the points where the timber looks

smoky and dim it's so far off and still, and everything's

so solemn it seems like everybody you've loved is dead

and gone, and you 'most wish you was dead and gone too,

and done with it all.



Don't you know what that is? It's spring fever.

That is what the name of it is.  And when you've got it,

you want--oh, you don't quite know what it is you DO want,

but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!

It seems to you that mainly what you want is to get away;

get away from the same old tedious things you're so used

to seeing and so tired of, and set something new.

That is the idea; you want to go and be a wanderer;

you want to go wandering far away to strange countries

where everything is mysterious and wonderful and romantic.

And if you can't do that, you'll put up with considerable less;

you'll go anywhere you CAN go, just so as to get away, and be

thankful of the chance, too.



Well, me and Tom Sawyer had the spring fever, and had

it bad, too; but it warn't any use to think about Tom

trying to get away, because, as he said, his Aunt Polly

wouldn't let him quit school and go traipsing off somers

wasting time; so we was pretty blue.  We was setting on

the front steps one day about sundown talking this way,

when out comes his aunt Polly with a letter in her hand

and says:



"Tom, I reckon you've got to pack up and go down

to Arkansaw--your aunt Sally wants you."



I 'most jumped out of my skin for joy.  I reckoned Tom

would fly at his aunt and hug her head off; but if you

believe me he set there like a rock, and never said a word.

It made me fit to cry to see him act so foolish, with such

a noble chance as this opening up.  Why, we might lose it

if he didn't speak up and show he was thankful and grateful.

But he set there and studied and studied till I was

that distressed I didn't know what to do; then he says,

very ca'm, and I could a shot him for it:



"Well," he says, "I'm right down sorry, Aunt Polly,

but I reckon I got to be excused--for the present."



His aunt Polly was knocked so stupid and so mad at the cold

impudence of it that she couldn't say a word for as much

as a half a minute, and this gave me a chance to nudge

Tom and whisper:



"Ain't you got any sense? Sp'iling such a noble chance

as this and throwing it away?"



But he warn't disturbed.  He mumbled back:



"Huck Finn, do you want me to let her SEE how bad I

want to go? Why, she'd begin to doubt, right away,

and imagine a lot of sicknesses and dangers and objections,

and first you know she'd take it all back.  You lemme alone;

I reckon I know how to work her."



Now I never would 'a' thought of that.  But he was right.

Tom Sawyer was always right--the levelest head I ever see,

and always AT himself and ready for anything you might spring

on him.  By this time his aunt Polly was all straight again,

and she let fly.  She says:



"You'll be excused! YOU will! Well, I never heard the

like of it in all my days! The idea of you talking like

that to ME! Now take yourself off and pack your traps;

and if I hear another word out of you about what you'll

be excused from and what you won't, I lay I'LL excuse

you--with a hickory!"



She hit his head a thump with her thimble as we dodged by,

and he let on to be whimpering as we struck for the stairs.

Up in his room he hugged me, he was so out of his head

for gladness because he was going traveling.  And he says:



"Before we get away she'll wish she hadn't let me go,

but she won't know any way to get around it now.

After what she's said, her pride won't let her take

it back."



Tom was packed in ten minutes, all except what his aunt

and Mary would finish up for him; then we waited ten more

for her to get cooled down and sweet and gentle again;

for Tom said it took her ten minutes to unruffle in times

when half of her feathers was up, but twenty when they

was all up, and this was one of the times when they

was all up.  Then we went down, being in a sweat to know

what the letter said.



She was setting there in a brown study, with it laying

in her lap.  We set down, and she says:



"They're in considerable trouble down there, and they think

you and Huck'll be a kind of diversion for them--'comfort,'

they say.  Much of that they'll get out of you and Huck Finn,

I reckon.  There's a neighbor named Brace Dunlap that's been

wanting to marry their Benny for three months, and at last

they told him point blank and once for all, he COULDN'T;

so he has soured on them, and they're worried about it.

I reckon he's somebody they think they better be on the

good side of, for they've tried to please him by hiring

his no-account brother to help on the farm when they can't

hardly afford it, and don't want him around anyhow.

Who are the Dunlaps?"



"They live about a mile from Uncle Silas's place,

Aunt Polly--all the farmers live about a mile apart

down there--and Brace Dunlap is a long sight richer than

any of the others, and owns a whole grist of niggers.

He's a widower, thirty-six years old, without any children,

and is proud of his money and overbearing, and everybody

is a little afraid of him.  I judge he thought he could

have any girl he wanted, just for the asking, and it must

have set him back a good deal when he found he couldn't

get Benny.  Why, Benny's only half as old as he is,

and just as sweet and lovely as--well, you've seen her.

Poor old Uncle Silas--why, it's pitiful, him trying

to curry favor that way--so hard pushed and poor,

and yet hiring that useless Jubiter Dunlap to please his

ornery brother."



"What a name--Jubiter! Where'd he get it?"



"It's only just a nickname.  I reckon they've forgot

his real name long before this.  He's twenty-seven, now,

and has had it ever since the first time he ever went

in swimming.  The school teacher seen a round brown

mole the size of a dime on his left leg above his knee,

and four little bits of moles around it, when he was naked,

and he said it minded him of Jubiter and his moons; and the

children thought it was funny, and so they got to calling

him Jubiter, and he's Jubiter yet.  He's tall, and lazy,

and sly, and sneaky, and ruther cowardly, too, but kind

of good-natured, and wears long brown hair and no beard,

and hasn't got a cent, and Brace boards him for nothing,

and gives him his old clothes to wear, and despises him.

Jubiter is a twin."



"What's t'other twin like?"



"Just exactly like Jubiter--so they say; used to was,

anyway, but he hain't been seen for seven years.

He got to robbing when he was nineteen or twenty,

and they jailed him; but he broke jail and got away--up

North here, somers.  They used to hear about him robbing

and burglaring now and then, but that was years ago.

He's dead, now.  At least that's what they say.

They don't hear about him any more."



"What was his name?"



"Jake."



There wasn't anything more said for a considerable while;

the old lady was thinking.  At last she says:



"The thing that is mostly worrying your aunt Sally is

the tempers that that man Jubiter gets your uncle into."



Tom was astonished, and so was I. Tom says:



"Tempers? Uncle Silas? Land, you must be joking! I didn't

know he HAD any temper."



"Works him up into perfect rages, your aunt Sally says;

says he acts as if he would really hit the man, sometimes."



"Aunt Polly, it beats anything I ever heard of.

Why, he's just as gentle as mush."



"Well, she's worried, anyway.  Says your uncle Silas is

like a changed man, on account of all this quarreling.

And the neighbors talk about it, and lay all the blame

on your uncle, of course, because he's a preacher and

hain't got any business to quarrel.  Your aunt Sally

says he hates to go into the pulpit he's so ashamed;

and the people have begun to cool toward him, and he ain't

as popular now as he used to was."



"Well, ain't it strange? Why, Aunt Polly,

he was always so good and kind and moony and

absent-minded and chuckle-headed and lovable--why,

he was just an angel! What CAN be the matter of him,

do you reckon?"





CHAPTER II.  JAKE DUNLAP



WE had powerful good luck; because we got a chance in a

stern-wheeler from away North which was bound for one of

them bayous or one-horse rivers away down Louisiana way,

and so we could go all the way down the Upper Mississippi

and all the way down the Lower Mississippi to that farm

in Arkansaw without having to change steamboats at St. Louis;

not so very much short of a thousand miles at one pull.



A pretty lonesome boat; there warn't but few passengers,

and all old folks, that set around, wide apart, dozing,

and was very quiet.  We was four days getting out of

the "upper river," because we got aground so much.

But it warn't dull--couldn't be for boys that was traveling,

of course.



From the very start me and Tom allowed that there

was somebody sick in the stateroom next to ourn,

because the meals was always toted in there by the waiters.

By and by we asked about it--Tom did and the waiter

said it was a man, but he didn't look sick.



"Well, but AIN'T he sick?"



"I don't know; maybe he is, but 'pears to me he's just

letting on."



"What makes you think that?"



"Because if he was sick he would pull his clothes off SOME

time or other--don't you reckon he would? Well, this one

don't. At least he don't ever pull off his boots, anyway."



"The mischief he don't! Not even when he goes to bed?"



"No."



It was always nuts for Tom Sawyer--a mystery was.  If you'd

lay out a mystery and a pie before me and him, you wouldn't

have to say take your choice; it was a thing that would

regulate itself.  Because in my nature I have always run

to pie, whilst in his nature he has always run to mystery.

People are made different.  And it is the best way.

Tom says to the waiter:



"What's the man's name?"



"Phillips."



"Where'd he come aboard?"



"I think he got aboard at Elexandria, up on the Iowa line."



"What do you reckon he's a-playing?"



"I hain't any notion--I never thought of it."



I says to myself, here's another one that runs to pie.



"Anything peculiar about him?--the way he acts or talks?"



"No--nothing, except he seems so scary, and keeps his

doors locked night and day both, and when you knock he

won't let you in till he opens the door a crack and sees

who it is."



"By jimminy, it's int'resting! I'd like to get a look

at him.  Say--the next time you're going in there,

don't you reckon you could spread the door and--"



"No, indeedy! He's always behind it.  He would block

that game."



Tom studied over it, and then he says:



"Looky here.  You lend me your apern and let me take him

his breakfast in the morning.  I'll give you a quarter."



The boy was plenty willing enough, if the head steward

wouldn't mind.  Tom says that's all right, he reckoned

he could fix it with the head steward; and he done it.

He fixed it so as we could both go in with aperns on and

toting vittles.



He didn't sleep much, he was in such a sweat to get

in there and find out the mystery about Phillips;

and moreover he done a lot of guessing about it all night,

which warn't no use, for if you are going to find out

the facts of a thing, what's the sense in guessing out

what ain't the facts and wasting ammunition? I didn't

lose no sleep.  I wouldn't give a dern to know what's

the matter of Phillips, I says to myself.



Well, in the morning we put on the aperns and got a couple

of trays of truck, and Tom he knocked on the door.

The man opened it a crack, and then he let us in and shut

it quick.  By Jackson, when we got a sight of him,

we 'most dropped the trays! and Tom says:



"Why, Jubiter Dunlap, where'd YOU come from?"



Well, the man was astonished, of course; and first off

he looked like he didn't know whether to be scared,

or glad, or both, or which, but finally he settled

down to being glad; and then his color come back,

though at first his face had turned pretty white.

So we got to talking together while he et his breakfast.

And he says:



"But I aint Jubiter Dunlap.  I'd just as soon tell you

who I am, though, if you'll swear to keep mum, for I

ain't no Phillips, either."



Tom says:



"We'll keep mum, but there ain't any need to tell who you

are if you ain't Jubiter Dunlap."



"Why?"



"Because if you ain't him you're t'other twin, Jake.

You're the spit'n image of Jubiter."



"Well, I'm Jake.  But looky here, how do you come to know

us Dunlaps?"



Tom told about the adventures we'd had down there at his

uncle Silas's last summer, and when he see that there warn't

anything about his folks--or him either, for that matter--that

we didn't know, he opened out and talked perfectly free

and candid.  He never made any bones about his own case;

said he'd been a hard lot, was a hard lot yet, and reckoned

he'd be a hard lot plumb to the end.  He said of course

it was a dangerous life, and--He give a kind of gasp,

and set his head like a person that's listening.  We didn't

say anything, and so it was very still for a second or so,

and there warn't no sounds but the screaking of the

woodwork and the chug-chugging of the machinery down below.



Then we got him comfortable again, telling him about

his people, and how Brace's wife had been dead three years,

and Brace wanted to marry Benny and she shook him,

and Jubiter was working for Uncle Silas, and him and Uncle

Silas quarreling all the time--and then he let go and laughed.



"Land!" he says, "it's like old times to hear all this

tittle-tattle, and does me good.  It's been seven years

and more since I heard any.  How do they talk about me

these days?"



"Who?"



"The farmers--and the family."



"Why, they don't talk about you at all--at least only

just a mention, once in a long time."



"The nation!" he says, surprised; "why is that?"



"Because they think you are dead long ago."



"No! Are you speaking true?--honor bright, now."

He jumped up, excited.



"Honor bright.  There ain't anybody thinks you are alive."



"Then I'm saved, I'm saved, sure! I'll go home.

They'll hide me and save my life.  You keep mum.

Swear you'll keep mum--swear you'll never, never tell

on me.  Oh, boys, be good to a poor devil that's being

hunted day and night, and dasn't show his face! I've

never done you any harm; I'll never do you any, as God

is in the heavens; swear you'll be good to me and help

me save my life."



We'd a swore it if he'd been a dog; and so we done it.

Well, he couldn't love us enough for it or be grateful enough,

poor cuss; it was all he could do to keep from hugging us.



We talked along, and he got out a little hand-bag and begun

to open it, and told us to turn our backs.  We done it,

and when he told us to turn again he was perfectly

different to what he was before.  He had on blue goggles

and the naturalest-looking long brown whiskers and mustashes

you ever see.  His own mother wouldn't 'a' knowed him.

He asked us if he looked like his brother Jubiter, now.



"No," Tom said; "there ain't anything left that's like him

except the long hair."



"All right, I'll get that cropped close to my head before

I get there; then him and Brace will keep my secret,

and I'll live with them as being a stranger, and the

neighbors won't ever guess me out.  What do you think?"



Tom he studied awhile, then he says:



"Well, of course me and Huck are going to keep mum there,

but if you don't keep mum yourself there's going to be a little

bit of a risk--it ain't much, maybe, but it's a little.

I mean, if you talk, won't people notice that your voice

is just like Jubiter's; and mightn't it make them think

of the twin they reckoned was dead, but maybe after all

was hid all this time under another name?"



"By George," he says, "you're a sharp one! You're

perfectly right.  I've got to play deef and dumb when there's

a neighbor around.  If I'd a struck for home and forgot

that little detail--However, I wasn't striking for home.

I was breaking for any place where I could get away

from these fellows that are after me; then I was going

to put on this disguise and get some different clothes, and--"



He jumped for the outside door and laid his ear against

it and listened, pale and kind of panting.  Presently he

whispers:



"Sounded like cocking a gun! Lord, what a life to lead!"



Then he sunk down in a chair all limp and sick like,

and wiped the sweat off of his face.





CHAPTER III.  A DIAMOND ROBBERY



FROM that time out, we was with him 'most all the time,

and one or t'other of us slept in his upper berth.  He said

he had been so lonesome, and it was such a comfort to him

to have company, and somebody to talk to in his troubles.

We was in a sweat to find out what his secret was,

but Tom said the best way was not to seem anxious,

then likely he would drop into it himself in one of

his talks, but if we got to asking questions he would get

suspicious and shet up his shell.  It turned out just so.

It warn't no trouble to see that he WANTED to talk about it,

but always along at first he would scare away from it

when he got on the very edge of it, and go to talking

about something else.  The way it come about was this:

He got to asking us, kind of indifferent like, about the

passengers down on deck.  We told him about them.

But he warn't satisfied; we warn't particular enough.

He told us to describe them better.  Tom done it.

At last, when Tom was describing one of the roughest

and raggedest ones, he gave a shiver and a gasp and says:



"Oh, lordy, that's one of them! They're aboard sure--

I just knowed it.  I sort of hoped I had got away,

but I never believed it.  Go on."



Presently when Tom was describing another mangy,

rough deck passenger, he give that shiver again and says:



"That's him!--that's the other one.  If it would only

come a good black stormy night and I could get ashore.

You see, they've got spies on me.  They've got a right

to come up and buy drinks at the bar yonder forrard,

and they take that chance to bribe somebody to keep watch

on me--porter or boots or somebody.  If I was to slip

ashore without anybody seeing me, they would know it inside

of an hour."



So then he got to wandering along, and pretty soon,

sure enough, he was telling! He was poking along through

his ups and downs, and when he come to that place he went

right along.  He says:



"It was a confidence game.  We played it on a julery-shop

in St. Louis.  What we was after was a couple of noble

big di'monds as big as hazel-nuts, which everybody was

running to see.  We was dressed up fine, and we played

it on them in broad daylight.  We ordered the di'monds

sent to the hotel for us to see if we wanted to buy,

and when we was examining them we had paste counterfeits

all ready, and THEM was the things that went back

to the shop when we said the water wasn't quite fine

enough for twelve thousand dollars."



"Twelve-thousand-dollars!" Tom says.  "Was they really

worth all that money, do you reckon?"



"Every cent of it."



"And you fellows got away with them?"



"As easy as nothing.  I don't reckon the julery people know

they've been robbed yet.  But it wouldn't be good sense

to stay around St. Louis, of course, so we considered where

we'd go.  One was for going one way, one another, so we

throwed up, heads or tails, and the Upper Mississippi won.

We done up the di'monds in a paper and put our names on

it and put it in the keep of the hotel clerk, and told

him not to ever let either of us have it again without

the others was on hand to see it done; then we went

down town, each by his own self--because I reckon maybe

we all had the same notion.  I don't know for certain,

but I reckon maybe we had."



"What notion?" Tom says.



"To rob the others."



"What--one take everything, after all of you had helped

to get it?"



"Cert'nly."



It disgusted Tom Sawyer, and he said it was the orneriest,

low-downest thing he ever heard of.  But Jake Dunlap said

it warn't unusual in the profession.  Said when a person

was in that line of business he'd got to look out for his

own intrust, there warn't nobody else going to do it for him.

And then he went on.  He says:



"You see, the trouble was, you couldn't divide up two di'monds

amongst three.  If there'd been three--But never mind

about that, there warn't three.  I loafed along the back

streets studying and studying.  And I says to myself,

I'll hog them di'monds the first chance I get, and I'll

have a disguise all ready, and I'll give the boys the slip,

and when I'm safe away I'll put it on, and then let

them find me if they can.  So I got the false whiskers

and the goggles and this countrified suit of clothes,

and fetched them along back in a hand-bag; and when I

was passing a shop where they sell all sorts of things,

I got a glimpse of one of my pals through the window.

It was Bud Dixon.  I was glad, you bet.  I says to myself,

I'll see what he buys.  So I kept shady, and watched.

Now what do you reckon it was he bought?"



"Whiskers?" said I.



"No."



"Goggles?"



"No."



"Oh, keep still, Huck Finn, can't you, you're only just

hendering all you can.  What WAS it he bought, Jake?"



"You'd never guess in the world.  It was only just

a screwdriver--just a wee little bit of a screwdriver."



"Well, I declare! What did he want with that?"



"That's what I thought.  It was curious.  It clean stumped me.

I says to myself, what can he want with that thing? Well,

when he come out I stood back out of sight, and then

tracked him to a second-hand slop-shop and see him buy

a red flannel shirt and some old ragged clothes--just

the ones he's got on now, as you've described.

Then I went down to the wharf and hid my things aboard

the up-river boat that we had picked out, and then

started back and had another streak of luck.  I seen our

other pal lay in HIS stock of old rusty second-handers.

We got the di'monds and went aboard the boat.



"But now we was up a stump, for we couldn't go to bed.

We had to set up and watch one another.  Pity, that was;

pity to put that kind of a strain on us, because there

was bad blood between us from a couple of weeks back,

and we was only friends in the way of business.

Bad anyway, seeing there was only two di'monds betwixt

three men.  First we had supper, and then tramped up

and down the deck together smoking till most midnight;

then we went and set down in my stateroom and locked

the doors and looked in the piece of paper to see if

the di'monds was all right, then laid it on the lower

berth right in full sight; and there we set, and set,

and by-and-by it got to be dreadful hard to keep awake.

At last Bud Dixon he dropped off.  As soon as he was

snoring a good regular gait that was likely to last,

and had his chin on his breast and looked permanent,

Hal Clayton nodded towards the di'monds and then towards

the outside door, and I understood.  I reached and got

the paper, and then we stood up and waited perfectly still;

Bud never stirred; I turned the key of the outside door

very soft and slow, then turned the knob the same way, and we

went tiptoeing out onto the guard, and shut the door very

soft and gentle.



"There warn't nobody stirring anywhere, and the boat

was slipping along, swift and steady, through the big

water in the smoky moonlight.  We never said a word,

but went straight up onto the hurricane-deck and plumb

back aft, and set down on the end of the sky-light. Both

of us knowed what that meant, without having to explain

to one another.  Bud Dixon would wake up and miss the swag,

and would come straight for us, for he ain't afeard

of anything or anybody, that man ain't. He would come,

and we would heave him overboard, or get killed trying.

It made me shiver, because I ain't as brave as some people,

but if I showed the white feather--well, I knowed better

than do that.  I kind of hoped the boat would land somers,

and we could skip ashore and not have to run the risk

of this row, I was so scared of Bud Dixon, but she

was an upper-river tub and there warn't no real chance

of that.



"Well, the time strung along and along, and that fellow

never come! Why, it strung along till dawn begun to break,

and still he never come.  'Thunder,' I says, 'what do you

make out of this?--ain't it suspicious?' 'Land!' Hal says,

'do you reckon he's playing us?--open the paper!' I done it,

and by gracious there warn't anything in it but a couple

of little pieces of loaf-sugar! THAT'S the reason he could

set there and snooze all night so comfortable.  Smart? Well,

I reckon! He had had them two papers all fixed and ready,

and he had put one of them in place of t'other right under

our noses.



"We felt pretty cheap.  But the thing to do, straight off,

was to make a plan; and we done it.  We would do up the

paper again, just as it was, and slip in, very elaborate

and soft, and lay it on the bunk again, and let on WE

didn't know about any trick, and hadn't any idea he was

a-laughing at us behind them bogus snores of his'n; and we

would stick by him, and the first night we was ashore we

would get him drunk and search him, and get the di'monds;

and DO for him, too, if it warn't too risky.  If we got

the swag, we'd GOT to do for him, or he would hunt us down

and do for us, sure.  But I didn't have no real hope.

I knowed we could get him drunk--he was always ready

for that--but what's the good of it? You might search him

a year and never find--"Well, right there I catched my

breath and broke off my thought! For an idea went ripping

through my head that tore my brains to rags--and land,

but I felt gay and good! You see, I had had my boots off,

to unswell my feet, and just then I took up one of them

to put it on, and I catched a glimpse of the heel-bottom,

and it just took my breath away.  You remember about that

puzzlesome little screwdriver?"



"You bet I do," says Tom, all excited.



"Well, when I catched that glimpse of that boot heel,

the idea that went smashing through my head was,

I know where he's hid the di'monds! You look at this

boot heel, now.  See, it's bottomed with a steel plate,

and the plate is fastened on with little screws.

Now there wasn't a screw about that feller anywhere

but in his boot heels; so, if he needed a screwdriver,

I reckoned I knowed why."



"Huck, ain't it bully!" says Tom.



"Well, I got my boots on, and we went down and slipped

in and laid the paper of sugar on the berth, and sat

down soft and sheepish and went to listening to Bud

Dixon snore.  Hal Clayton dropped off pretty soon,

but I didn't; I wasn't ever so wide awake in my life.

I was spying out from under the shade of my hat brim,

searching the floor for leather.  It took me a long time,

and I begun to think maybe my guess was wrong, but at

last I struck it.  It laid over by the bulkhead, and was

nearly the color of the carpet.  It was a little round

plug about as thick as the end of your little finger,

and I says to myself there's a di'mond in the nest

you've come from.  Before long I spied out the plug's mate.



"Think of the smartness and coolness of that blatherskite!

He put up that scheme on us and reasoned out what we

would do, and we went ahead and done it perfectly exact,

like a couple of pudd'nheads. He set there and took his

own time to unscrew his heelplates and cut out his plugs

and stick in the di'monds and screw on his plates again .

He allowed we would steal the bogus swag and wait all night

for him to come up and get drownded, and by George it's

just what we done! I think it was powerful smart."



"You bet your life it was!" says Tom, just full of admiration.





CHAPTER IV.  THE THREE SLEEPERS



WELL, all day we went through the humbug of watching

one another, and it was pretty sickly business

for two of us and hard to act out, I can tell you.

About night we landed at one of them little Missouri

towns high up toward Iowa, and had supper at the tavern,

and got a room upstairs with a cot and a double bed in it,

but I dumped my bag under a deal table in the dark hall

while we was moving along it to bed, single file, me last,

and the landlord in the lead with a tallow candle.

We had up a lot of whisky, and went to playing high-low-jack

for dimes, and as soon as the whisky begun to take hold

of Bud we stopped drinking, but we didn't let him stop.

We loaded him till he fell out of his chair and laid

there snoring.



"We was ready for business now.  I said we better pull

our boots off, and his'n too, and not make any noise,

then we could pull him and haul him around and ransack

him without any trouble.  So we done it.  I set my

boots and Bud's side by side, where they'd be handy.

Then we stripped him and searched his seams and his

pockets and his socks and the inside of his boots,

and everything, and searched his bundle.  Never found

any di'monds. We found the screwdriver, and Hal says,

'What do you reckon he wanted with that?' I said I

didn't know; but when he wasn't looking I hooked it.

At last Hal he looked beat and discouraged, and said we'd

got to give it up.  That was what I was waiting for.

I says:



"'There's one place we hain't searched.'



"'What place is that?' he says.



"'His stomach.'



"'By gracious, I never thought of that! NOW we're on

the homestretch, to a dead moral certainty.  How'll we manage?'



"'Well,' I says, 'just stay by him till I turn out and hunt

up a drug store, and I reckon I'll fetch something that'll

make them di'monds tired of the company they're keeping.'



"He said that's the ticket, and with him looking straight

at me I slid myself into Bud's boots instead of my own,

and he never noticed.  They was just a shade large for me,

but that was considerable better than being too small.

I got my bag as I went a-groping through the hall,

and in about a minute I was out the back way and stretching

up the river road at a five-mile gait.



"And not feeling so very bad, neither--walking on di'monds

don't have no such effect.  When I had gone fifteen

minutes I says to myself, there's more'n a mile behind me,

and everything quiet.  Another five minutes and I says

there's considerable more land behind me now, and there's

a man back there that's begun to wonder what's the trouble.

Another five and I says to myself he's getting real

uneasy--he's walking the floor now.  Another five,

and I says to myself, there's two mile and a half behind me,

and he's AWFUL uneasy--beginning to cuss, I reckon.

Pretty soon I says to myself, forty minutes gone--he

KNOWS there's something up! Fifty minutes--the truth's

a-busting on him now! he is reckoning I found the di'monds

whilst we was searching, and shoved them in my pocket and

never let on--yes, and he's starting out to hunt for me.

He'll hunt for new tracks in the dust, and they'll as likely

send him down the river as up.



"Just then I see a man coming down on a mule, and before I

thought I jumped into the bush.  It was stupid! When he got

abreast he stopped and waited a little for me to come out;

then he rode on again.  But I didn't feel gay any more.

I says to myself I've botched my chances by that;

I surely have, if he meets up with Hal Clayton.



"Well, about three in the morning I fetched Elexandria

and see this stern-wheeler laying there, and was very glad,

because I felt perfectly safe, now, you know.  It was

just daybreak.  I went aboard and got this stateroom and put

on these clothes and went up in the pilot-house--to watch,

though I didn't reckon there was any need of it.

I set there and played with my di'monds and waited and

waited for the boat to start, but she didn't. You see,

they was mending her machinery, but I didn't know anything

about it, not being very much used to steamboats.



"Well, to cut the tale short, we never left there till

plumb noon; and long before that I was hid in this stateroom;

for before breakfast I see a man coming, away off, that had

a gait like Hal Clayton's, and it made me just sick.

I says to myself, if he finds out I'm aboard this boat,

he's got me like a rat in a trap.  All he's got to do is

to have me watched, and wait--wait till I slip ashore,

thinking he is a thousand miles away, then slip after

me and dog me to a good place and make me give up

the di'monds, and then he'll--oh, I know what he'll

do! Ain't it awful--awful! And now to think the OTHER

one's aboard, too! Oh, ain't it hard luck, boys--ain't it

hard! But you'll help save me, WON'T you?--oh, boys,

be good to a poor devil that's being hunted to death,

and save me--I'll worship the very ground you walk on!"



We turned in and soothed him down and told him we would

plan for him and help him, and he needn't be so afeard;

and so by and by he got to feeling kind of comfortable again,

and unscrewed his heelplates and held up his di'monds

this way and that, admiring them and loving them;

and when the light struck into them they WAS beautiful,

sure; why, they seemed to kind of bust, and snap fire

out all around.  But all the same I judged he was a fool.

If I had been him I would a handed the di'monds to them

pals and got them to go ashore and leave me alone.

But he was made different.  He said it was a whole fortune

and he couldn't bear the idea.



Twice we stopped to fix the machinery and laid a good while,

once in the night; but it wasn't dark enough, and he was

afeard to skip.  But the third time we had to fix it there

was a better chance.  We laid up at a country woodyard

about forty mile above Uncle Silas's place a little after

one at night, and it was thickening up and going to storm.

So Jake he laid for a chance to slide.  We begun to take

in wood.  Pretty soon the rain come a-drenching down,

and the wind blowed hard.  Of course every boat-hand fixed

a gunny sack and put it on like a bonnet, the way they

do when they are toting wood, and we got one for Jake,

and he slipped down aft with his hand-bag and come

tramping forrard just like the rest, and walked ashore

with them, and when we see him pass out of the light

of the torch-basket and get swallowed up in the dark,

we got our breath again and just felt grateful and splendid.

But it wasn't for long.  Somebody told, I reckon;

for in about eight or ten minutes them two pals come

tearing forrard as tight as they could jump and darted

ashore and was gone.  We waited plumb till dawn for them

to come back, and kept hoping they would, but they never did.

We was awful sorry and low-spirited. All the hope we had

was that Jake had got such a start that they couldn't get

on his track, and he would get to his brother's and hide

there and be safe.



He was going to take the river road, and told us to find

out if Brace and Jubiter was to home and no strangers there,

and then slip out about sundown and tell him.  Said he

would wait for us in a little bunch of sycamores right back

of Tom's uncle Silas's tobacker field on the river road,

a lonesome place.



We set and talked a long time about his chances, and Tom

said he was all right if the pals struck up the river

instead of down, but it wasn't likely, because maybe

they knowed where he was from; more likely they would

go right, and dog him all day, him not suspecting,

and kill him when it come dark, and take the boots.

So we was pretty sorrowful.





CHAPTER V. A TRAGEDY IN THE WOODS



WE didn't get done tinkering the machinery till away

late in the afternoon, and so it was so close to sundown

when we got home that we never stopped on our road,

but made a break for the sycamores as tight as we could go,

to tell Jake what the delay was, and have him wait till we

could go to Brace's and find out how things was there.

It was getting pretty dim by the time we turned the corner

of the woods, sweating and panting with that long run,

and see the sycamores thirty yards ahead of us;

and just then we see a couple of men run into the bunch

and heard two or three terrible screams for help.

"Poor Jake is killed, sure," we says.  We was scared through

and through, and broke for the tobacker field and hid there,

trembling so our clothes would hardly stay on; and just

as we skipped in there, a couple of men went tearing by,

and into the bunch they went, and in a second out jumps four

men and took out up the road as tight as they could go,

two chasing two.



We laid down, kind of weak and sick, and listened for

more sounds, but didn't hear none for a good while but

just our hearts.  We was thinking of that awful thing

laying yonder in the sycamores, and it seemed like being

that close to a ghost, and it give me the cold shudders.

The moon come a-swelling up out of the ground, now,

powerful big and round and bright, behind a comb of trees,

like a face looking through prison bars, and the black

shadders and white places begun to creep around,

and it was miserable quiet and still and night-breezy

and graveyardy and scary.  All of a sudden Tom whispers:



"Look!--what's that?"



"Don't!" I says.  "Don't take a person by surprise that way.

I'm 'most ready to die, anyway, without you doing that."



"Look, I tell you.  It's something coming out of the sycamores."



"Don't, Tom!"



"It's terrible tall!"



"Oh, lordy-lordy! let's--"



"Keep still--it's a-coming this way."



He was so excited he could hardly get breath enough

to whisper.  I had to look.  I couldn't help it.

So now we was both on our knees with our chins on a fence

rail and gazing--yes, and gasping too.  It was coming

down the road--coming in the shadder of the trees, and you

couldn't see it good; not till it was pretty close to us;

then it stepped into a bright splotch of moonlight and we

sunk right down in our tracks--it was Jake Dunlap's

ghost! That was what we said to ourselves.



We couldn't stir for a minute or two; then it was gone

We talked about it in low voices.  Tom says:



"They're mostly dim and smoky, or like they're made

out of fog, but this one wasn't."



"No," I says; "I seen the goggles and the whiskers

perfectly plain."



"Yes, and the very colors in them loud countrified Sunday

clothes--plaid breeches, green and black--"



"Cotton velvet westcot, fire-red and yaller squares--"



"Leather straps to the bottoms of the breeches legs

and one of them hanging unbottoned--"



"Yes, and that hat--"



"What a hat for a ghost to wear!"



You see it was the first season anybody wore that kind--a

black sitff-brim stove-pipe, very high, and not smooth,

with a round top--just like a sugar-loaf.



"Did you notice if its hair was the same, Huck?"



"No--seems to me I did, then again it seems to me I didn't."



"I didn't either; but it had its bag along, I noticed that."



"So did I. How can there be a ghost-bag, Tom?"



"Sho! I wouldn't be as ignorant as that if I was you,

Huck Finn.  Whatever a ghost has, turns to ghost-stuff.

They've got to have their things, like anybody else.

You see, yourself, that its clothes was turned

to ghost-stuff. Well, then, what's to hender its bag

from turning, too? Of course it done it."



That was reasonable.  I couldn't find no fault with it.

Bill Withers and his brother Jack come along by, talking,

and Jack says:



"What do you reckon he was toting?"



"I dunno; but it was pretty heavy."



"Yes, all he could lug.  Nigger stealing corn from old

Parson Silas, I judged."



"So did I. And so I allowed I wouldn't let on to see him."



"That's me, too."



Then they both laughed, and went on out of hearing.

It showed how unpopular old Uncle Silas had got to be now.

They wouldn't 'a' let a nigger steal anybody else's corn

and never done anything to him.



We heard some more voices mumbling along towards us

and getting louder, and sometimes a cackle of a laugh.

It was Lem Beebe and Jim Lane.  Jim Lane says:



"Who?--Jubiter Dunlap?"



"Yes."



"Oh, I don't know.  I reckon so.  I seen him spading

up some ground along about an hour ago, just before

sundown--him and the parson.  Said he guessed he wouldn't

go to-night, but we could have his dog if we wanted him."



"Too tired, I reckon."



"Yes--works so hard!"



"Oh, you bet!"



They cackled at that, and went on by.  Tom said we

better jump out and tag along after them, because they

was going our way and it wouldn't be comfortable to run

across the ghost all by ourselves.  So we done it,

and got home all right.



That night was the second of September--a Saturday.

I sha'n't ever forget it.  You'll see why, pretty soon .





CHAPTER VI.  PLANS TO SECURE THE DIAMONDS



WE tramped along behind Jim and Lem till we come

to the back stile where old Jim's cabin was that

he was captivated in, the time we set him free,

and here come the dogs piling around us to say howdy,

and there was the lights of the house, too; so we warn't

afeard any more, and was going to climb over, but Tom says:



"Hold on; set down here a minute.  By George!"



"What's the matter?" says I.



"Matter enough!" he says.  "Wasn't you expecting we

would be the first to tell the family who it is that's

been killed yonder in the sycamores, and all about them

rapscallions that done it, and about the di'monds they've

smouched off of the corpse, and paint it up fine,

and have the glory of being the ones that knows a lot

more about it than anybody else?"



"Why, of course.  It wouldn't be you, Tom Sawyer,

if you was to let such a chance go by.  I reckon it

ain't going to suffer none for lack of paint," I says,

"when you start in to scollop the facts."



"Well, now," he says, perfectly ca'm, "what would you say

if I was to tell you I ain't going to start in at all?"



I was astonished to hear him talk so.  I says:



"I'd say it's a lie.  You ain't in earnest, Tom Sawyer?"



"You'll soon see.  Was the ghost barefooted?"



"No, it wasn't. What of it?"



"You wait--I'll show you what.  Did it have its boots on?"



"Yes. I seen them plain."



"Swear it?"



"Yes, I swear it."



"So do I. Now do you know what that means?"



"No. What does it mean?"



"Means that them thieves DIDN'T GET THE DI'MONDS."



"Jimminy! What makes you think that?"



"I don't only think it, I know it.  Didn't the breeches

and goggles and whiskers and hand-bag and every blessed

thing turn to ghost-stuff? Everything it had on turned,

didn't it? It shows that the reason its boots turned

too was because it still had them on after it started

to go ha'nting around, and if that ain't proof that them

blatherskites didn't get the boots, I'd like to know

what you'd CALL proof."



Think of that now.  I never see such a head as that

boy had.  Why, I had eyes and I could see things, but they

never meant nothing to me.  But Tom Sawyer was different.

When Tom Sawyer seen a thing it just got up on its hind

legs and TALKED to him--told him everything it knowed.

I never see such a head.



"Tom Sawyer," I says, "I'll say it again as I've said it

a many a time before: I ain't fitten to black your boots.

But that's all right--that's neither here nor there.

God Almighty made us all, and some He gives eyes

that's blind, and some He gives eyes that can see, and I

reckon it ain't none of our lookout what He done it for;

it's all right, or He'd 'a' fixed it some other way.

Go on--I see plenty plain enough, now, that them thieves

didn't get way with the di'monds. Why didn't they,

do you reckon?"



"Because they got chased away by them other two men

before they could pull the boots off of the corpse."



"That's so! I see it now.  But looky here, Tom, why ain't

we to go and tell about it?"



"Oh, shucks, Huck Finn, can't you see? Look at it.

What's a-going to happen? There's going to be an inquest

in the morning.  Them two men will tell how they heard

the yells and rushed there just in time to not save

the stranger.  Then the jury'll twaddle and twaddle

and twaddle, and finally they'll fetch in a verdict that he

got shot or stuck or busted over the head with something,

and come to his death by the inspiration of God.

And after they've buried him they'll auction off his

things for to pay the expenses, and then's OUR chance."

"How, Tom?"



"Buy the boots for two dollars!"



Well, it 'most took my breath.



"My land! Why, Tom, WE'LL get the di'monds!"



"You bet.  Some day there'll be a big reward offered

for them--a thousand dollars, sure.  That's our money!

Now we'll trot in and see the folks.  And mind you we

don't know anything about any murder, or any di'monds,

or any thieves--don't you forget that."



I had to sigh a little over the way he had got it fixed.

I'd 'a' SOLD them di'monds--yes, sir--for twelve

thousand dollars; but I didn't say anything.  It wouldn't

done any good.  I says:



"But what are we going to tell your aunt Sally has made

us so long getting down here from the village, Tom?"



"Oh, I'll leave that to you," he says.  "I reckon you

can explain it somehow."



He was always just that strict and delicate.  He never

would tell a lie himself.



We struck across the big yard, noticing this, that, and t'other

thing that was so familiar, and we so glad to see it again,

and when we got to the roofed big passageway betwixt

the double log house and the kitchen part, there was

everything hanging on the wall just as it used to was,

even to Uncle Silas's old faded green baize working-gown

with the hood to it, and raggedy white patch between the

shoulders that always looked like somebody had hit him with

a snowball; and then we lifted the latch and walked in.

Aunt Sally she was just a-ripping and a-tearing around,

and the children was huddled in one corner, and the old

man he was huddled in the other and praying for help

in time of need.  She jumped for us with joy and tears

running down her face and give us a whacking box on

the ear, and then hugged us and kissed us and boxed

us again, and just couldn't seem to get enough of it,

she was so glad to see us; and she says:



"Where HAVE you been a-loafing to, you good-for-nothing

trash! I've been that worried about you I didn't know what

to do.  Your traps has been here ever so long, and I've

had supper cooked fresh about four times so as to have it

hot and good when you come, till at last my patience is

just plumb wore out, and I declare I--I--why I could skin

you alive! You must be starving, poor things!--set down,

set down, everybody; don't lose no more time."



It was good to be there again behind all that noble

corn-pone and spareribs, and everything that you could

ever want in this world.  Old Uncle Silas he peeled off

one of his bulliest old-time blessings, with as many

layers to it as an onion, and whilst the angels was

hauling in the slack of it I was trying to study up

what to say about what kept us so long.  When our plates

was all loadened and we'd got a-going, she asked me, and I says:



"Well, you see,--er--Mizzes--"



"Huck Finn! Since when am I Mizzes to you? Have I ever

been stingy of cuffs or kisses for you since the day

you stood in this room and I took you for Tom Sawyer

and blessed God for sending you to me, though you told

me four thousand lies and I believed every one of them

like a simpleton? Call me Aunt Sally--like you always done."



So I done it.  And I says:



"Well, me and Tom allowed we would come along afoot

and take a smell of the woods, and we run across Lem

Beebe and Jim Lane, and they asked us to go with them

blackberrying to-night, and said they could borrow Jubiter

Dunlap's dog, because he had told them just that minute--"



"Where did they see him?" says the old man; and when I

looked up to see how HE come to take an intrust in a little

thing like that, his eyes was just burning into me,

he was that eager.  It surprised me so it kind of throwed

me off, but I pulled myself together again and says:



"It was when he was spading up some ground along with you,

towards sundown or along there."



He only said, "Um," in a kind of a disappointed way,

and didn't take no more intrust.  So I went on.

I says:



"Well, then, as I was a-saying--"



"That'll do, you needn't go no furder." It was Aunt Sally.

She was boring right into me with her eyes, and very indignant.

"Huck Finn," she says, "how'd them men come to talk about

going a-black-berrying in September--in THIS region?"



I see I had slipped up, and I couldn't say a word.

She waited, still a-gazing at me, then she says:



"And how'd they come to strike that idiot idea of going

a-blackberrying in the night?"



"Well, m'm, they--er--they told us they had a lantern, and--"



"Oh, SHET up--do! Looky here; what was they going to do

with a dog?--hunt blackberries with it?"



"I think, m'm, they--"



"Now, Tom Sawyer, what kind of a lie are you fixing YOUR

mouth to contribit to this mess of rubbage? Speak out--and

I warn you before you begin, that I don't believe a word

of it.  You and Huck's been up to something you no business

to--I know it perfectly well; I know you, BOTH of you.

Now you explain that dog, and them blackberries,

and the lantern, and the rest of that rot--and mind you

talk as straight as a string--do you hear?"



Tom he looked considerable hurt, and says, very dignified:



"It is a pity if Huck is to be talked to that way,

just for making a little bit of a mistake that anybody

could make."



"What mistake has he made?"



"Why, only the mistake of saying blackberries when

of course he meant strawberries."



"Tom Sawyer, I lay if you aggravate me a little more, I'll--"



"Aunt Sally, without knowing it--and of course without

intending it--you are in the wrong.  If you'd 'a' studied

natural history the way you ought, you would know that

all over the world except just here in Arkansaw they

ALWAYS hunt strawberries with a dog--and a lantern--"



But she busted in on him there and just piled into him

and snowed him under.  She was so mad she couldn't get

the words out fast enough, and she gushed them out

in one everlasting freshet.  That was what Tom Sawyer

was after.  He allowed to work her up and get her started

and then leave her alone and let her burn herself out.

Then she would be so aggravated with that subject

that she wouldn't say another word about it, nor let

anybody else.  Well, it happened just so.  When she

was tuckered out and had to hold up, he says, quite ca'm:



"And yet, all the same, Aunt Sally--"



"Shet up!" she says, "I don't want to hear another word

out of you."



So we was perfectly safe, then, and didn't have no more

trouble about that delay.  Tom done it elegant.





CHAPTER VII.  A NIGHT'S VIGIL



BENNY she was looking pretty sober, and she sighed some,

now and then; but pretty soon she got to asking about Mary,

and Sid, and Tom's aunt Polly, and then Aunt Sally's

clouds cleared off and she got in a good humor and joined

in on the questions and was her lovingest best self,

and so the rest of the supper went along gay and pleasant.

But the old man he didn't take any hand hardly, and was

absent-minded and restless, and done a considerable amount

of sighing; and it was kind of heart-breaking to see him

so sad and troubled and worried.



By and by, a spell after supper, come a nigger and knocked

on the door and put his head in with his old straw hat

in his hand bowing and scraping, and said his Marse

Brace was out at the stile and wanted his brother,

and was getting tired waiting supper for him, and would

Marse Silas please tell him where he was? I never see

Uncle Silas speak up so sharp and fractious before.

He says:



"Am I his brother's keeper?" And then he kind of

wilted together, and looked like he wished he hadn't

spoken so, and then he says, very gentle: "But you needn't

say that, Billy; I was took sudden and irritable, and I

ain't very well these days, and not hardly responsible.

Tell him he ain't here."



And when the nigger was gone he got up and walked the floor,

backwards and forwards, mumbling and muttering to himself

and plowing his hands through his hair.  It was real

pitiful to see him.  Aunt Sally she whispered to us and

told us not to take notice of him, it embarrassed him.

She said he was always thinking and thinking, since these

troubles come on, and she allowed he didn't more'n about

half know what he was about when the thinking spells was

on him; and she said he walked in his sleep considerable

more now than he used to, and sometimes wandered

around over the house and even outdoors in his sleep,

and if we catched him at it we must let him alone and not

disturb him.  She said she reckoned it didn't do him

no harm, and may be it done him good.  She said Benny

was the only one that was much help to him these days.

Said Benny appeared to know just when to try to soothe

him and when to leave him alone.



So he kept on tramping up and down the floor and muttering,

till by and by he begun to look pretty tired; then Benny

she went and snuggled up to his side and put one hand

in his and one arm around his waist and walked with him;

and he smiled down on her, and reached down and kissed her;

and so, little by little the trouble went out of his

face and she persuaded him off to his room.  They had

very petting ways together, and it was uncommon pretty

to see.



Aunt Sally she was busy getting the children ready for bed;

so by and by it got dull and tedious, and me and Tom

took a turn in the moonlight, and fetched up in the

watermelon-patch and et one, and had a good deal of talk.

And Tom said he'd bet the quarreling was all Jubiter's fault,

and he was going to be on hand the first time he got

a chance, and see; and if it was so, he was going to do

his level best to get Uncle Silas to turn him off.



And so we talked and smoked and stuffed watermelons much

as two hours, and then it was pretty late, and when we

got back the house was quiet and dark, and everybody

gone to bed.



Tom he always seen everything, and now he see that the

old green baize work-gown was gone, and said it wasn't

gone when he went out; so he allowed it was curious,

and then we went up to bed.



We could hear Benny stirring around in her room,

which was next to ourn, and judged she was worried

a good deal about her father and couldn't sleep.

We found we couldn't, neither.  So we set up a long time,

and smoked and talked in a low voice, and felt pretty

dull and down-hearted. We talked the murder and the ghost

over and over again, and got so creepy and crawly we

couldn't get sleepy nohow and noway.



By and by, when it was away late in the night and all

the sounds was late sounds and solemn, Tom nudged me

and whispers to me to look, and I done it, and there we

see a man poking around in the yard like he didn't know

just what he wanted to do, but it was pretty dim and we

couldn't see him good.  Then he started for the stile,

and as he went over it the moon came out strong, and he

had a long-handled shovel over his shoulder, and we see

the white patch on the old work-gown. So Tom says:



"He's a-walking in his sleep.  I wish we was allowed

to follow him and see where he's going to.  There, he's

turned down by the tobacker-field. Out of sight now.

It's a dreadful pity he can't rest no better."



We waited a long time, but he didn't come back any more,

or if he did he come around the other way; so at last we

was tuckered out and went to sleep and had nightmares,

a million of them.  But before dawn we was awake again,

because meantime a storm had come up and been raging,

and the thunder and lightning was awful, and the wind was

a-thrashing the trees around, and the rain was driving down

in slanting sheets, and the gullies was running rivers.

Tom says:



"Looky here, Huck, I'll tell you one thing that's

mighty curious.  Up to the time we went out last night

the family hadn't heard about Jake Dunlap being murdered.

Now the men that chased Hal Clayton and Bud Dixon away

would spread the thing around in a half an hour, and every

neighbor that heard it would shin out and fly around

from one farm to t'other and try to be the first to tell

the news.  Land, they don't have such a big thing as that

to tell twice in thirty year! Huck, it's mighty strange;

I don't understand it."



So then he was in a fidget for the rain to let up,

so we could turn out and run across some of the people

and see if they would say anything about it to us.

And he said if they did we must be horribly surprised

and shocked.



We was out and gone the minute the rain stopped.

It was just broad day then.  We loafed along up the road,

and now and then met a person and stopped and said howdy,

and told them when we come, and how we left the folks

at home, and how long we was going to stay, and all that,

but none of them said a word about that thing; which was

just astonishing, and no mistake.  Tom said he believed

if we went to the sycamores we would find that body laying

there solitary and alone, and not a soul around.  Said he

believed the men chased the thieves so far into the woods

that the thieves prob'ly seen a good chance and turned

on them at last, and maybe they all killed each other,

and so there wasn't anybody left to tell.



First we knowed, gabbling along that away, we was right at

the sycamores.  The cold chills trickled down my back and I

wouldn't budge another step, for all Tom's persuading.

But he couldn't hold in; he'd GOT to see if the boots was

safe on that body yet.  So he crope in--and the next minute

out he come again with his eyes bulging he was so excited,

and says:



"Huck, it's gone!"



I WAS astonished! I says:



"Tom, you don't mean it."



"It's gone, sure.  There ain't a sign of it.  The ground

is trampled some, but if there was any blood it's all

washed away by the storm, for it's all puddles and slush

in there."



At last I give in, and went and took a look myself; and it

was just as Tom said--there wasn't a sign of a corpse.



"Dern it," I says, "the di'monds is gone.  Don't you

reckon the thieves slunk back and lugged him off, Tom?"



"Looks like it.  It just does.  Now where'd they hide him,

do you reckon?"



"I don't know," I says, disgusted, "and what's more I

don't care.  They've got the boots, and that's all I

cared about.  He'll lay around these woods a long time

before I hunt him up."



Tom didn't feel no more intrust in him neither, only curiosity

to know what come of him; but he said we'd lay low and keep

dark and it wouldn't be long till the dogs or somebody rousted him out.



We went back home to breakfast ever so bothered and put

out and disappointed and swindled.  I warn't ever so down

on a corpse before.





CHAPTER VIII.  TALKING WITH THE GHOST



IT warn't very cheerful at breakfast.  Aunt Sally she

looked old and tired and let the children snarl and fuss

at one another and didn't seem to notice it was going on,

which wasn't her usual style; me and Tom had a plenty

to think about without talking; Benny she looked like she

hadn't had much sleep, and whenever she'd lift her head

a little and steal a look towards her father you could

see there was tears in her eyes; and as for the old man,

his things stayed on his plate and got cold without him

knowing they was there, I reckon, for he was thinking and

thinking all the time, and never said a word and never et

a bite.



By and by when it was stillest, that nigger's head

was poked in at the door again, and he said his Marse

Brace was getting powerful uneasy about Marse Jubiter,

which hadn't come home yet, and would Marse Silas please

--He was looking at Uncle Silas, and he stopped there,

like the rest of his words was froze; for Uncle Silas he

rose up shaky and steadied himself leaning his fingers

on the table, and he was panting, and his eyes was set

on the nigger, and he kept swallowing, and put his other

hand up to his throat a couple of times, and at last he

got his words started, and says:



"Does he--does he--think--WHAT does he think! Tell him--tell

him--" Then he sunk down in his chair limp and weak,

and says, so as you could hardly hear him: "Go away--go away!"



The nigger looked scared and cleared out, and we all

felt--well, I don't know how we felt, but it was awful,

with the old man panting there, and his eyes set and looking

like a person that was dying.  None of us could budge;

but Benny she slid around soft, with her tears running down,

and stood by his side, and nestled his old gray head

up against her and begun to stroke it and pet it with

her hands, and nodded to us to go away, and we done it,

going out very quiet, like the dead was there.



Me and Tom struck out for the woods mighty solemn,

and saying how different it was now to what it was last

summer when we was here and everything was so peaceful

and happy and everybody thought so much of Uncle Silas,

and he was so cheerful and simple-hearted and pudd'n-headed

and good--and now look at him.  If he hadn't lost his mind

he wasn't muck short of it.  That was what we allowed.



It was a most lovely day now, and bright and sun.  shiny;

and the further and further we went over the hills towards

the prairie the lovelier and lovelier the trees and flowers

got to be and the more it seemed strange and somehow wrong

that there had to be trouble in such a world as this.

And then all of a sudden I catched my breath and grabbed

Tom's arm, and all my livers and lungs and things fell down into my legs.



"There it is!" I says.  We jumped back behind a bush shivering,

and Tom says:



"'Sh!--don't make a noise."



It was setting on a log right in the edge of a little

prairie, thinking.  I tried to get Tom to come away,

but he wouldn't, and I dasn't budge by myself.  He said

we mightn't ever get another chance to see one, and he

was going to look his fill at this one if he died for it.

So I looked too, though it give me the fan-tods to do it.

Tom he HAD to talk, but he talked low.  He says:



"Poor Jakey, it's got all its things on, just as he said

he would.  NOW you see what we wasn't certain about--its hair.

It's not long now the way it was: it's got it cropped close

to its head, the way he said he would.  Huck, I never

see anything look any more naturaler than what It does."



"Nor I neither," I says; "I'd recognize it anywheres."



"So would I. It looks perfectly solid and genuwyne,

just the way it done before it died."



So we kept a-gazing. Pretty soon Tom says:



"Huck, there's something mighty curious about this one,

don't you know? IT oughtn't to be going around in the daytime."



"That's so, Tom--I never heard the like of it before."



"No, sir, they don't ever come out only at night--

and then not till after twelve.  There's something

wrong about this one, now you mark my words.  I don't

believe it's got any right to be around in the daytime.

But don't it look natural! Jake was going to play deef

and dumb here, so the neighbors wouldn't know his voice.

Do you reckon it would do that if we was to holler at it?"



"Lordy, Tom, don't talk so! If you was to holler at it

I'd die in my tracks."



"Don't you worry, I ain't going to holler at it.

Look, Huck, it's a-scratching its head--don't you see?"



"Well, what of it?"



"Why, this.  What's the sense of it scratching its head?

There ain't anything there to itch; its head is made

out of fog or something like that, and can't itch.

A fog can't itch; any fool knows that."



"Well, then, if it don't itch and can't itch, what in

the nation is it scratching it for? Ain't it just habit,

don't you reckon?"



"No, sir, I don't. I ain't a bit satisfied about the way this

one acts.  I've a blame good notion it's a bogus one--I have,

as sure as I'm a-sitting here.  Because, if it--Huck!"



"Well, what's the matter now?"



"YOU CAN'T SEE THE BUSHES THROUGH IT!"



"Why, Tom, it's so, sure! It's as solid as a cow.

I sort of begin to think--"



"Huck, it's biting off a chaw of tobacker! By George,

THEY don't chaw--they hain't got anything to chaw WITH.

Huck!"



"I'm a-listening."



"It ain't a ghost at all.  It's Jake Dunlap his own self!"



"Oh your granny!" I says.



"Huck Finn, did we find any corpse in the sycamores?"



"No."



"Or any sign of one?"



"No."



"Mighty good reason.  Hadn't ever been any corpse there."



"Why, Tom, you know we heard--"



"Yes, we did--heard a howl or two.  Does that prove anybody

was killed? Course it don't. And we seen four men run,

then this one come walking out and we took it for a ghost.

No more ghost than you are.  It was Jake Dunlap his

own self, and it's Jake Dunlap now.  He's been and got his

hair cropped, the way he said he would, and he's playing

himself for a stranger, just the same as he said he would.

Ghost? Hum!--he's as sound as a nut."



Then I see it all, and how we had took too much for granted.

I was powerful glad he didn't get killed, and so was Tom,

and we wondered which he would like the best--for us

to never let on to know him, or how? Tom reckoned the

best way would be to go and ask him.  So he started;

but I kept a little behind, because I didn't know but it

might be a ghost, after all.  When Tom got to where he was,

he says:



"Me and Huck's mighty glad to see you again, and you needn't

be afeared we'll tell.  And if you think it'll be safer for

you if we don't let on to know you when we run across you,

say the word and you'll see you can depend on us, and would

ruther cut our hands off than get you into the least little bit of danger."



First off he looked surprised to see us, and not

very glad, either; but as Tom went on he looked pleasanter,

and when he was done he smiled, and nodded his head

several times, and made signs with his hands, and says:



"Goo-goo--goo-goo," the way deef and dummies does.



Just then we see some of Steve Nickerson's people coming

that lived t'other side of the prairie, so Tom says:



"You do it elegant; I never see anybody do it better.

You're right; play it on us, too; play it on us same

as the others; it'll keep you in practice and prevent

you making blunders.  We'll keep away from you and let

on we don't know you, but any time we can be any help,

you just let us know."



Then we loafed along past the Nickersons, and of course

they asked if that was the new stranger yonder, and where'd

he come from, and what was his name, and which communion

was he, Babtis' or Methodis', and which politics,

Whig or Democrat, and how long is he staying, and all them

other questions that humans always asks when a stranger comes,

and animals does, too.  But Tom said he warn't able to make

anything out of deef and dumb signs, and the same with

goo-gooing. Then we watched them go and bullyrag Jake;

because we was pretty uneasy for him.  Tom said it would

take him days to get so he wouldn't forget he was a deef

and dummy sometimes, and speak out before he thought.

When we had watched long enough to see that Jake was

getting along all right and working his signs very good,

we loafed along again, allowing to strike the schoolhouse

about recess time, which was a three-mile tramp.



I was so disappointed not to hear Jake tell about the row

in the sycamores, and how near he come to getting killed,

that I couldn't seem to get over it, and Tom he felt

the same, but said if we was in Jake's fix we would want

to go careful and keep still and not take any chances.



The boys and girls was all glad to see us again, and we

had a real good time all through recess.  Coming to

school the Henderson boys had come across the new deef

and dummy and told the rest; so all the scholars was

chuck full of him and couldn't talk about anything else,

and was in a sweat to get a sight of him because they

hadn't ever seen a deef and dummy in their lives,

and it made a powerful excitement.



Tom said it was tough to have to keep mum now; said we would

be heroes if we could come out and tell all we knowed;

but after all, it was still more heroic to keep mum,

there warn't two boys in a million could do it.

That was Tom Sawyer's idea about it, and reckoned there

warn't anybody could better it.





CHAPTER IX.  FINDING OF JUBITER DUNLAP



IN the next two or three days Dummy he got to be powerful

popular.  He went associating around with the neighbors,

and they made much of him, and was proud to have such a

rattling curiosity among them.  They had him to breakfast,

they had him to dinner, they had him to supper; they kept

him loaded up with hog and hominy, and warn't ever tired

staring at him and wondering over him, and wishing they

knowed more about him, he was so uncommon and romantic.

His signs warn't no good; people couldn't understand them

and he prob'ly couldn't himself, but he done a sight of

goo-gooing, and so everybody was satisfied, and admired to hear

him go it.  He toted a piece of slate around, and a pencil;

and people wrote questions on it and he wrote answers;

but there warn't anybody could read his writing but

Brace Dunlap.  Brace said he couldn't read it very good,

but he could manage to dig out the meaning most of the time.

He said Dummy said he belonged away off somers and used to be

well off, but got busted by swindlers which he had trusted,

and was poor now, and hadn't any way to make a living.



Everybody praised Brace Dunlap for being so good to

that stranger.  He let him have a little log-cabin

all to himself, and had his niggers take care of it,

and fetch him all the vittles he wanted.



Dummy was at our house some, because old Uncle Silas was

so afflicted himself, these days, that anybody else that was

afflicted was a comfort to him.  Me and Tom didn't let on

that we had knowed him before, and he didn't let on that he

had knowed us before.  The family talked their troubles

out before him the same as if he wasn't there, but we

reckoned it wasn't any harm for him to hear what they said.

Generly he didn't seem to notice, but sometimes he did.



Well, two or three days went along, and everybody got to

getting uneasy about Jubiter Dunlap.  Everybody was asking

everybody if they had any idea what had become of him.

No, they hadn't, they said: and they shook their heads

and said there was something powerful strange about it.

Another and another day went by; then there was a report got

around that praps he was murdered.  You bet it made a big

stir! Everybody's tongue was clacking away after that.

Saturday two or three gangs turned out and hunted the

woods to see if they could run across his remainders.

Me and Tom helped, and it was noble good times and exciting.

Tom he was so brimful of it he couldn't eat nor rest.

He said if we could find that corpse we would be celebrated,

and more talked about than if we got drownded.



The others got tired and give it up; but not Tom

Sawyer--that warn't his style.  Saturday night he

didn't sleep any, hardly, trying to think up a plan;

and towards daylight in the morning he struck it.

He snaked me out of bed and was all excited, and says:



"Quick, Huck, snatch on your clothes--I've got it! Bloodhound!"



In two minutes we was tearing up the river road in the dark

towards the village.  Old Jeff Hooker had a bloodhound,

and Tom was going to borrow him.  I says:



"The trail's too old, Tom--and besides, it's rained,

you know."



"It don't make any difference, Huck.  If the body's hid

in the woods anywhere around the hound will find it.

If he's been murdered and buried, they wouldn't bury him deep,

it ain't likely, and if the dog goes over the spot he'll

scent him, sure.  Huck, we're going to be celebrated,

sure as you're born!"



He was just a-blazing; and whenever he got afire he was most

likely to get afire all over.  That was the way this time.

In two minutes he had got it all ciphered out, and wasn't

only just going to find the corpse--no, he was going to

get on the track of that murderer and hunt HIM down, too;

and not only that, but he was going to stick to him till--

"Well," I says, "you better find the corpse first;

I reckon that's a-plenty for to-day. For all we know,

there AIN'T any corpse and nobody hain't been murdered.

That cuss could 'a' gone off somers and not been killed

at all."



That graveled him, and he says:



"Huck Finn, I never see such a person as you to want

to spoil everything.  As long as YOU can't see anything

hopeful in a thing, you won't let anybody else.  What good

can it do you to throw cold water on that corpse and get

up that selfish theory that there ain't been any murder?

None in the world.  I don't see how you can act so.

I wouldn't treat you like that, and you know it.

Here we've got a noble good opportunity to make

a ruputation, and--"



"Oh, go ahead," I says.  "I'm sorry, and I take it all back.

I didn't mean nothing.  Fix it any way you want it.

HE ain't any consequence to me.  If he's killed, I'm as glad

of it as you are; and if he--"



"I never said anything about being glad; I only--"



"Well, then, I'm as SORRY as you are.  Any way you

druther have it, that is the way I druther have it.  He--"



"There ain't any druthers ABOUT it, Huck Finn; nobody said

anything about druthers.  And as for--"



He forgot he was talking, and went tramping along, studying.

He begun to get excited again, and pretty soon he says:



"Huck, it'll be the bulliest thing that ever happened

if we find the body after everybody else has quit looking,

and then go ahead and hunt up the murderer.  It won't only

be an honor to us, but it'll be an honor to Uncle Silas

because it was us that done it.  It'll set him up again,

you see if it don't."



But Old Jeff Hooker he throwed cold water on the whole

business when we got to his blacksmith shop and told him

what we come for.



"You can take the dog," he says, "but you ain't a-going

to find any corpse, because there ain't any corpse to find.

Everybody's quit looking, and they're right.  Soon as they

come to think, they knowed there warn't no corpse.

And I'll tell you for why.  What does a person kill another

person for, Tom Sawyer?--answer me that."



"Why, he--er--"



"Answer up! You ain't no fool.  What does he kill him FOR?"



"Well, sometimes it's for revenge, and--"



"Wait. One thing at a time.  Revenge, says you; and right

you are.  Now who ever had anything agin that poor trifling

no-account? Who do you reckon would want to kill HIM?--

that rabbit!"



Tom was stuck.  I reckon he hadn't thought of a person

having to have a REASON for killing a person before,

and now he sees it warn't likely anybody would have that

much of a grudge against a lamb like Jubiter Dunlap.

The blacksmith says, by and by:



"The revenge idea won't work, you see.  Well, then,

what's next? Robbery? B'gosh, that must 'a' been it,

Tom! Yes, sirree, I reckon we've struck it this time.

Some feller wanted his gallus-buckles, and so he--"



But it was so funny he busted out laughing, and just went

on laughing and laughing and laughing till he was 'most dead,

and Tom looked so put out and cheap that I knowed he

was ashamed he had come, and he wished he hadn't. But

old Hooker never let up on him.  He raked up everything

a person ever could want to kill another person about,

and any fool could see they didn't any of them fit

this case, and he just made no end of fun of the whole

business and of the people that had been hunting the body;

and he said:



"If they'd had any sense they'd 'a' knowed the lazy cuss slid

out because he wanted a loafing spell after all this work.

He'll come pottering back in a couple of weeks, and then

how'll you fellers feel? But, laws bless you, take the dog,

and go and hunt his remainders.  Do, Tom."



Then he busted out, and had another of them forty-rod laughs

of hisn.  Tom couldn't back down after all this, so he said,

"All right, unchain him;" and the blacksmith done it,

and we started home and left that old man laughing yet.



It was a lovely dog.  There ain't any dog that's got

a lovelier disposition than a bloodhound, and this one

knowed us and liked us.  He capered and raced around ever

so friendly, and powerful glad to be free and have a holiday;

but Tom was so cut up he couldn't take any intrust

in him, and said he wished he'd stopped and thought

a minute before he ever started on such a fool errand.

He said old Jeff Hooker would tell everybody, and we'd

never hear the last of it.



So we loafed along home down the back lanes, feeling pretty

glum and not talking.  When we was passing the far corner

of our tobacker field we heard the dog set up a long howl

in there, and we went to the place and he was scratching

the ground with all his might, and every now and then

canting up his head sideways and fetching another howl.



It was a long square, the shape of a grave; the rain had made

it sink down and show the shape.  The minute we come and

stood there we looked at one another and never said a word.

When the dog had dug down only a few inches he grabbed

something and pulled it up, and it was an arm and a sleeve.

Tom kind of gasped out, and says:



"Come away, Huck--it's found."



I just felt awful.  We struck for the road and fetched

the first men that come along.  They got a spade at

the crib and dug out the body, and you never see such

an excitement.  You couldn't make anything out of the face,

but you didn't need to.  Everybody said:



"Poor Jubiter; it's his clothes, to the last rag!"



Some rushed off to spread the news and tell the justice

of the peace and have an inquest, and me and Tom lit out

for the house.  Tom was all afire and 'most out of breath

when we come tearing in where Uncle Silas and Aunt Sally

and Benny was.  Tom sung out:



"Me and Huck's found Jubiter Dunlap's corpse all by ourselves

with a bloodhound, after everybody else had quit hunting

and given it up; and if it hadn't a been for us it never

WOULD 'a' been found; and he WAS murdered too--they done

it with a club or something like that; and I'm going

to start in and find the murderer, next, and I bet I'll do it!"



Aunt Sally and Benny sprung up pale and astonished,

but Uncle Silas fell right forward out of his chair on

to the floor and groans out:



"Oh, my God, you've found him NOW!"





CHAPTER X. THE ARREST OF UNCLE SILAS



THEM awful words froze us solid.  We couldn't move hand or

foot for as much as half a minute.  Then we kind of come to,

and lifted the old man up and got him into his chair,

and Benny petted him and kissed him and tried to comfort him,

and poor old Aunt Sally she done the same; but, poor things,

they was so broke up and scared and knocked out of their

right minds that they didn't hardly know what they

was about.  With Tom it was awful; it 'most petrified

him to think maybe he had got his uncle into a thousand

times more trouble than ever, and maybe it wouldn't ever

happened if he hadn't been so ambitious to get celebrated,

and let the corpse alone the way the others done.

But pretty soon he sort of come to himself again and says:



"Uncle Silas, don't you say another word like that.

It's dangerous, and there ain't a shadder of truth

in it."



Aunt Sally and Benny was thankful to hear him say that,

and they said the same; but the old man he wagged his head

sorrowful and hopeless, and the tears run down his face,

and he says;



"No--I done it; poor Jubiter, I done it!"



It was dreadful to hear him say it.  Then he went on and

told about it, and said it happened the day me and Tom

come--along about sundown.  He said Jubiter pestered him

and aggravated him till he was so mad he just sort of lost

his mind and grabbed up a stick and hit him over the head

with all his might, and Jubiter dropped in his tracks.

Then he was scared and sorry, and got down on his knees

and lifted his head up, and begged him to speak and say

he wasn't dead; and before long he come to, and when he

see who it was holding his head, he jumped like he was

'most scared to death, and cleared the fence and tore

into the woods, and was gone.  So he hoped he wasn't

hurt bad.



"But laws," he says, "it was only just fear that gave

him that last little spurt of strength, and of course it

soon played out and he laid down in the bush, and there

wasn't anybody to help him, and he died."



Then the old man cried and grieved, and said he was a murderer

and the mark of Cain was on him, and he had disgraced

his family and was going to be found out and hung.

But Tom said:



"No, you ain't going to be found out.  You DIDN'T kill him.

ONE lick wouldn't kill him.  Somebody else done it."



"Oh, yes," he says, "I done it--nobody else.  Who else

had anything against him? Who else COULD have anything

against him?"



He looked up kind of like he hoped some of us could mention

somebody that could have a grudge against that harmless

no-account, but of course it warn't no use--he HAD us;

we couldn't say a word.  He noticed that, and he saddened

down again, and I never see a face so miserable and so

pitiful to see.  Tom had a sudden idea, and says:



"But hold on!--somebody BURIED him.  Now who--"



He shut off sudden.  I knowed the reason.  It give me the

cold shudders when he said them words, because right away

I remembered about us seeing Uncle Silas prowling around

with a long-handled shovel away in the night that night.

And I knowed Benny seen him, too, because she was talking

about it one day.  The minute Tom shut off he changed

the subject and went to begging Uncle Silas to keep mum,

and the rest of us done the same, and said he MUST,

and said it wasn't his business to tell on himself, and if

he kept mum nobody would ever know; but if it was found

out and any harm come to him it would break the family's

hearts and kill them, and yet never do anybody any good.

So at last he promised.  We was all of us more comfortable,

then, and went to work to cheer up the old man.  We told

him all he'd got to do was to keep still, and it wouldn't

be long till the whole thing would blow over and be forgot.

We all said there wouldn't anybody ever suspect Uncle Silas,

nor ever dream of such a thing, he being so good and kind,

and having such a good character; and Tom says,

cordial and hearty, he says:



"Why, just look at it a minute; just consider.  Here is

Uncle Silas, all these years a preacher--at his own expense;

all these years doing good with all his might and every

way he can think of--at his own expense, all the time;

always been loved by everybody, and respected; always been

peaceable and minding his own business, the very last man

in this whole deestrict to touch a person, and everybody

knows it.  Suspect HIM? Why, it ain't any more possible than--"



"By authority of the State of Arkansaw, I arrest you

for the murder of Jubiter Dunlap!" shouts the sheriff

at the door.



It was awful.  Aunt Sally and Benny flung themselves at

Uncle Silas, screaming and crying, and hugged him and hung

to him, and Aunt Sally said go away, she wouldn't ever

give him up, they shouldn't have him, and the niggers

they come crowding and crying to the door and--well, I

couldn't stand it; it was enough to break a person's heart;

so I got out.



They took him up to the little one-horse jail in the village,

and we all went along to tell him good-bye; and Tom was

feeling elegant, and says to me, "We'll have a most noble

good time and heaps of danger some dark night getting him

out of there, Huck, and it'll be talked about everywheres

and we will be celebrated;" but the old man busted

that scheme up the minute he whispered to him about it.

He said no, it was his duty to stand whatever the law

done to him, and he would stick to the jail plumb

through to the end, even if there warn't no door to it.

It disappointed Tom and graveled him a good deal, but he

had to put up with it.



But he felt responsible and bound to get his uncle Silas free;

and he told Aunt Sally, the last thing, not to worry,

because he was going to turn in and work night and day

and beat this game and fetch Uncle Silas out innocent;

and she was very loving to him and thanked him and said she

knowed he would do his very best.  And she told us to help

Benny take care of the house and the children, and then we

had a good-bye cry all around and went back to the farm,

and left her there to live with the jailer's wife a month

till the trial in October.





CHAPTER XI.  TOM SAWYER DISCOVERS THE MURDERERS



WELL, that was a hard month on us all.  Poor Benny, she kept

up the best she could, and me and Tom tried to keep things

cheerful there at the house, but it kind of went for nothing,

as you may say.  It was the same up at the jail.  We went up

every day to see the old people, but it was awful dreary,

because the old man warn't sleeping much, and was walking

in his sleep considerable and so he got to looking fagged

and miserable, and his mind got shaky, and we all got

afraid his troubles would break him down and kill him.

And whenever we tried to persuade him to feel cheerfuler,

he only shook his head and said if we only knowed what it

was to carry around a murderer's load in your heart we

wouldn't talk that way.  Tom and all of us kept telling

him it WASN'T murder, but just accidental killing!

but it never made any difference--it was murder, and he

wouldn't have it any other way.  He actu'ly begun to come

out plain and square towards trial time and acknowledge

that he TRIED to kill the man.  Why, that was awful,

you know.  It made things seem fifty times as dreadful,

and there warn't no more comfort for Aunt Sally and Benny.

But he promised he wouldn't say a word about his murder

when others was around, and we was glad of that.



Tom Sawyer racked the head off of himself all that month

trying to plan some way out for Uncle Silas, and many's

the night he kept me up 'most all night with this kind

of tiresome work, but he couldn't seem to get on the right

track no way.  As for me, I reckoned a body might as well

give it up, it all looked so blue and I was so downhearted;

but he wouldn't. He stuck to the business right along,

and went on planning and thinking and ransacking his head.



So at last the trial come on, towards the middle of October,

and we was all in the court.  The place was jammed,

of course.  Poor old Uncle Silas, he looked more like a dead

person than a live one, his eyes was so hollow and he

looked so thin and so mournful.  Benny she set on one side

of him and Aunt Sally on the other, and they had veils on,

and was full of trouble.  But Tom he set by our lawyer,

and had his finger in everywheres, of course.  The lawyer

let him, and the judge let him.  He 'most took the business

out of the lawyer's hands sometimes; which was well enough,

because that was only a mud-turtle of a back-settlement

lawyer and didn't know enough to come in when it rains,

as the saying is.



They swore in the jury, and then the lawyer for the

prostitution got up and begun.  He made a terrible speech

against the old man, that made him moan and groan,

and made Benny and Aunt Sally cry.  The way HE told

about the murder kind of knocked us all stupid it was

so different from the old man's tale.  He said he was

going to prove that Uncle Silas was SEEN to kill Jubiter

Dunlap by two good witnesses, and done it deliberate,

and SAID he was going to kill him the very minute he

hit him with the club; and they seen him hide Jubiter

in the bushes, and they seen that Jubiter was stone-dead.

And said Uncle Silas come later and lugged Jubiter down

into the tobacker field, and two men seen him do it.

And said Uncle Silas turned out, away in the night,

and buried Jubiter, and a man seen him at it.



I says to myself, poor old Uncle Silas has been lying

about it because he reckoned nobody seen him and he

couldn't bear to break Aunt Sally's heart and Benny's;

and right he was: as for me, I would 'a' lied the same way,

and so would anybody that had any feeling, to save

them such misery and sorrow which THEY warn't no ways

responsible for.  Well, it made our lawyer look pretty sick;

and it knocked Tom silly, too, for a little spell,

but then he braced up and let on that he warn't worried--but

I knowed he WAS, all the same.  And the people--my,

but it made a stir amongst them!



And when that lawyer was done telling the jury what he was

going to prove, he set down and begun to work his witnesses.



First, he called a lot of them to show that there was bad

blood betwixt Uncle Silas and the diseased; and they told

how they had heard Uncle Silas threaten the diseased,

at one time and another, and how it got worse and worse

and everybody was talking about it, and how diseased got

afraid of his life, and told two or three of them he

was certain Uncle Silas would up and kill him some time

or another.



Tom and our lawyer asked them some questions; but it

warn't no use, they stuck to what they said.



Next, they called up Lem Beebe, and he took the stand.

It come into my mind, then, how Lem and Jim Lane had come

along talking, that time, about borrowing a dog or something

from Jubiter Dunlap; and that brought up the blackberries

and the lantern; and that brought up Bill and Jack Withers,

and how they passed by, talking about a nigger stealing

Uncle Silas's corn; and that fetched up our old ghost

that come along about the same time and scared us

so--and here HE was too, and a privileged character,

on accounts of his being deef and dumb and a stranger,

and they had fixed him a chair inside the railing, where he

could cross his legs and be comfortable, whilst the other

people was all in a jam so they couldn't hardly breathe.

So it all come back to me just the way it was that day;

and it made me mournful to think how pleasant it was up

to then, and how miserable ever since.



  LEM BEEBE, sworn, said--"I was a-coming along, that day,

  second of September, and Jim Lane was with me, and it was

  towards sundown, and we heard loud talk, like quarrelling,

  and we was very close, only the hazel bushes between

  (that's along the fence); and we heard a voice say,

  'I've told you more'n once I'd kill you,' and knowed

  it was this prisoner's voice; and then we see a club

  come up above the bushes and down out of sight again.

  and heard a smashing thump and then a groan or two: and

  then we crope soft to where we could see, and there laid

  Jupiter Dunlap dead, and this prisoner standing over him

  with the club; and the next he hauled the dead man into

  a clump of bushes and hid him, and then we stooped low,

  to be cut of sight, and got away."



Well, it was awful.  It kind of froze everybody's blood

to hear it, and the house was 'most as still whilst

he was telling it as if there warn't nobody in it.

And when he was done, you could hear them gasp and sigh,

all over the house, and look at one another the same as

to say, "Ain't it perfectly terrible--ain't it awful!"



Now happened a thing that astonished me.  All the time the

first witnesses was proving the bad blood and the threats

and all that, Tom Sawyer was alive and laying for them;

and the minute they was through, he went for them,

and done his level best to catch them in lies and spile

their testimony.  But now, how different.  When Lem first

begun to talk, and never said anything about speaking

to Jubiter or trying to borrow a dog off of him, he was

all alive and laying for Lem, and you could see he was

getting ready to cross-question him to death pretty soon,

and then I judged him and me would go on the stand

by and by and tell what we heard him and Jim Lane say.

But the next time I looked at Tom I got the cold shivers.

Why, he was in the brownest study you ever see--miles and

miles away.  He warn't hearing a word Lem Beebe was saying;

and when he got through he was still in that brown-study,

just the same.  Our lawyer joggled him, and then he looked

up startled, and says, "Take the witness if you want him.

Lemme alone--I want to think."



Well, that beat me.  I couldn't understand it.  And Benny

and her mother--oh, they looked sick, they was so troubled.

They shoved their veils to one side and tried to get his eye,

but it warn't any use, and I couldn't get his eye either.

So the mud-turtle he tackled the witness, but it didn't

amount to nothing; and he made a mess of it.



Then they called up Jim Lane, and he told the very same story

over again, exact.  Tom never listened to this one at all,

but set there thinking and thinking, miles and miles away.

So the mud-turtle went in alone again and come out just

as flat as he done before.  The lawyer for the prostitution

looked very comfortable, but the judge looked disgusted.

You see, Tom was just the same as a regular lawyer, nearly,

because it was Arkansaw law for a prisoner to choose

anybody he wanted to help his lawyer, and Tom had had Uncle

Silas shove him into the case, and now he was botching

it and you could see the judge didn't like it much.

All that the mud-turtle got out of Lem and Jim was this:

he asked them:



"Why didn't you go and tell what you saw?"



"We was afraid we would get mixed up in it ourselves.

And we was just starting down the river a-hunting for all

the week besides; but as soon as we come back we found

out they'd been searching for the body, so then we went

and told Brace Dunlap all about it."



"When was that?"



"Saturday night, September 9th."



The judge he spoke up and says:



"Mr. Sheriff, arrest these two witnesses on suspicions

of being accessionary after the fact to the murder."



The lawyer for the prostitution jumps up all excited,

and says:



"Your honor! I protest against this extraordi--"



"Set down!" says the judge, pulling his bowie and laying

it on his pulpit.  "I beg you to respect the Court."



So he done it.  Then he called Bill Withers.



  BILL WITHERS, sworn, said: "I was coming along about

  sundown, Saturday, September 2d, by the prisoner's field,

  and my brother Jack was with me and we seen a man toting

  off something heavy on his back and allowed it was a nigger

  stealing corn; we couldn't see distinct; next we made out

  that it was one man carrying another; and the way it hung,

  so kind of limp, we judged it was somebody that was drunk;

  and by the man's walk we said it was Parson Silas,

  and we judged he had found Sam Cooper drunk in the road,

  which he was always trying to reform him, and was toting

  him out of danger."



It made the people shiver to think of poor old Uncle

Silas toting off the diseased down to the place

in his tobacker field where the dog dug up the body,

but there warn't much sympathy around amongst the faces,

and I heard one cuss say "'Tis the coldest blooded work

I ever struck, lugging a murdered man around like that,

and going to bury him like a animal, and him a preacher

at that."



Tom he went on thinking, and never took no notice;

so our lawyer took the witness and done the best he could,

and it was plenty poor enough.



Then Jack Withers he come on the stand and told

the same tale, just like Bill done.



And after him comes Brace Dunlap, and he was looking

very mournful, and most crying; and there was a rustle

and a stir all around, and everybody got ready to listen,

and lost of the women folks said, "Poor cretur, poor cretur,"

and you could see a many of them wip-ing their eyes.



  BRACE DUNLAP, sworn, said: "I was in considerable trouble

  a long time about my poor brother, but I reckoned things

  warn't near so bad as he made out, and I couldn't make

  myself believe anybody would have the heart to hurt

  a poor harmless cretur like that"--[by jings, I was sure

  I seen Tom give a kind of a faint little start, and then

  look disappointed again]--"and you know I COULDN'T think

  a preacher would hurt him--it warn't natural to think

  such an onlikely thing--so I never paid much attention,

  and now I sha'n't ever, ever forgive myself; for if I had

  a done different, my poor brother would be with me this day,

  and not laying yonder murdered, and him so harmless."

  He kind of broke down there and choked up, and waited to get

  his voice; and people all around said the most pitiful things,

  and women cried; and it was very still in there, and solemn,

  and old Uncle Silas, poor thing, he give a groan right

  out so everybody heard him.  Then Brace he went on,

  "Saturday, September 2d, he didn't come home to supper.

  By-and-by I got a little uneasy, and one of my niggers

  went over to this prisoner's place, but come back and

  said he warn't there.  So I got uneasier and uneasier,

  and couldn't rest.  I went to bed, but I couldn't sleep;

  and turned out, away late in the night, and went wandering

  over to this prisoner's place and all around about there

  a good while, hoping I would run across my poor brother,

  and never knowing he was out of his troubles and gone

  to a better shore --" So he broke down and choked up again,

  and most all the women was crying now.  Pretty soon

  he got another start and says: "But it warn't no use;

  so at last I went home and tried to get some sleep,

  but couldn't. Well, in a day or two everybody was uneasy,

  and they got to talking about this prisoner's threats,

  and took to the idea, which I didn't take no stock in,

  that my brother was murdered so they hunted around and tried

  to find his body, but couldn't and give it up.  And so I

  reckoned he was gone off somers to have a little peace,

  and would come back to us when his troubles was kind

  of healed.  But late Saturday night, the 9th, Lem Beebe

  and Jim Lane come to my house and told me all--told me

  the whole awful 'sassination, and my heart was broke.

  And THEN I remembered something that hadn't took no hold

  of me at the time, because reports said this prisoner had

  took to walking in his sleep and doing all kind of things

  of no consequence, not knowing what he was about.  I will

  tell you what that thing was that come back into my memory.

  Away late that awful Saturday night when I was wandering

  around about this prisoner's place, grieving and troubled,

  I was down by the corner of the tobacker- field and I

  heard a sound like digging in a gritty soil; and I crope

  nearer and peeped through the vines that hung on the

  rail fence and seen this prisoner SHOVELING--shoveling

  with a long-handled shovel--heaving earth into a big

  hole that was most filled up; his back was to me, but it

  was bright moonlight and I knowed him by his old green

  baize work-gown with a splattery white patch in the middle

  of the back like somebody had hit him with a snowball.

  HE WAS BURYING THE MAN HE'D MURDERED!"



And he slumped down in his chair crying and sobbing,

and 'most everybody in the house busted out wailing,

and crying, and saying, "Oh, it's awful--awful--

horrible! and there was a most tremendous excitement,

and you couldn't hear yourself think; and right in the

midst of it up jumps old Uncle Silas, white as a sheet,

and sings out:



"IT'S TRUE, EVERY WORD--I MURDERED HIM IN COLD BLOOD!"



By Jackson, it petrified them! People rose up wild all

over the house, straining and staring for a better look

at him, and the judge was hammering with his mallet

and the sheriff yelling "Order--order in the court--order!"



And all the while the old man stood there a-quaking

and his eyes a-burning, and not looking at his wife

and daughter, which was clinging to him and begging him

to keep still, but pawing them off with his hands and

saying he WOULD clear his black soul from crime, he WOULD

heave off this load that was more than he could bear,

and he WOULDN'T bear it another hour! And then he raged

right along with his awful tale, everybody a-staring

and gasping, judge, jury, lawyers, and everybody, and Benny

and Aunt Sally crying their hearts out.  And by George,

Tom Sawyer never looked at him once! Never once--just

set there gazing with all his eyes at something else,

I couldn't tell what.  And so the old man raged right along,

pouring his words out like a stream of fire:



"I killed him! I am guilty! But I never had the notion

in my life to hurt him or harm him, spite of all them lies

about my threatening him, till the very minute I raised

the club--then my heart went cold!--then the pity all went

out of it, and I struck to kill! In that one moment all my

wrongs come into my mind; all the insults that that man

and the scoundrel his brother, there, had put upon me,

and how they laid in together to ruin me with the people,

and take away my good name, and DRIVE me to some deed

that would destroy me and my family that hadn't ever done

THEM no harm, so help me God! And they done it in a mean

revenge--for why? Because my innocent pure girl here at my

side wouldn't marry that rich, insolent, ignorant coward,

Brace Dunlap, who's been sniveling here over a brother

he never cared a brass farthing for--"[I see Tom give

a jump and look glad THIS time, to a dead certainty]"--

and in that moment I've told you about, I forgot my God

and remembered only my heart's bitterness, God forgive me,

and I struck to kill.  In one second I was miserably

sorry--oh, filled with remorse; but I thought of my

poor family, and I MUST hide what I'd done for their sakes;

and I did hide that corpse in the bushes; and presently I

carried it to the tobacker field; and in the deep night I

went with my shovel and buried it where--"



Up jumps Tom and shouts:



"NOW, I've got it!" and waves his hand, oh, ever so fine

and starchy, towards the old man, and says:



"Set down! A murder WAS done, but you never had no hand

in it!"



Well, sir, you could a heard a pin drop.  And the old man

he sunk down kind of bewildered in his seat and Aunt Sally

and Benny didn't know it, because they was so astonished

and staring at Tom with their mouths open and not knowing

what they was about.  And the whole house the same.

I never seen people look so helpless and tangled up,

and I hain't ever seen eyes bug out and gaze without a blink

the way theirn did.  Tom says, perfectly ca'm:



"Your honor, may I speak?"



"For God's sake, yes--go on!" says the judge, so astonished

and mixed up he didn't know what he was about hardly.



Then Tom he stood there and waited a second or two--

that was for to work up an "effect," as he calls it--

then he started in just as ca'm as ever, and says:



"For about two weeks now there's been a little bill sticking

on the front of this courthouse offering two thousand dollars

reward for a couple of big di'monds--stole at St. Louis.

Them di'monds is worth twelve thousand dollars.  But never

mind about that till I get to it.  Now about this murder.

I will tell you all about it--how it happened--who done

it--every DEtail."



You could see everybody nestle now, and begin to listen

for all they was worth.



"This man here, Brace Dunlap, that's been sniveling

so about his dead brother that YOU know he never cared

a straw for, wanted to marry that young girl there,

and she wouldn't have him.  So he told Uncle Silas he

would make him sorry.  Uncle Silas knowed how powerful

he was, and how little chance he had against such a man,

and he was scared and worried, and done everything he could

think of to smooth him over and get him to be good to him:

he even took his no-account brother Jubiter on the farm

and give him wages and stinted his own family to pay them;

and Jubiter done everything his brother could contrive

to insult Uncle Silas, and fret and worry him, and try

to drive Uncle Silas into doing him a hurt, so as to

injure Uncle Silas with the people.  And it done it.

Everybody turned against him and said the meanest kind

of things about him, and it graduly broke his heart--yes,

and he was so worried and distressed that often he warn't

hardly in his right mind.



"Well, on that Saturday that we've had so much trouble about,

two of these witnesses here, Lem Beebe and Jim Lane, come along

by where Uncle Silas and Jubiter Dunlap was at work--and

that much of what they've said is true, the rest is lies.

They didn't hear Uncle Silas say he would kill Jubiter;

they didn't hear no blow struck; they didn't see no dead man,

and they didn't see Uncle Silas hide anything in the bushes.

Look at them now--how they set there, wishing they hadn't

been so handy with their tongues; anyway, they'll wish

it before I get done.



"That same Saturday evening Bill and Jack Withers DID see

one man lugging off another one.  That much of what they

said is true, and the rest is lies.  First off they

thought it was a nigger stealing Uncle Silas's corn--you

notice it makes them look silly, now, to find out somebody

overheard them say that.  That's because they found

out by and by who it was that was doing the lugging,

and THEY know best why they swore here that they took it

for Uncle Silas by the gait--which it WASN'T, and they

knowed it when they swore to that lie.



"A man out in the moonlight DID see a murdered person

put under ground in the tobacker field--but it wasn't

Uncle Silas that done the burying.  He was in his bed

at that very time.



"Now, then, before I go on, I want to ask you if you've

ever noticed this: that people, when they're thinking deep,

or when they're worried, are most always doing something

with their hands, and they don't know it, and don't

notice what it is their hands are doing.  some stroke

their chins; some stroke their noses; some stroke up

UNDER their chin with their hand; some twirl a chain,

some fumble a button, then there's some that draws

a figure or a letter with their finger on their cheek,

or under their chin or on their under lip.  That's MY way.

When I'm restless, or worried, or thinking hard, I draw

capital V's on my cheek or on my under lip or under my chin,

and never anything BUT capital V's--and half the time I

don't notice it and don't know I'm doing it."



That was odd.  That is just what I do; only I make

an O. And I could see people nodding to one another,

same as they do when they mean "THAT's so."



"Now, then, I'll go on.  That same Saturday--no, it

was the night before--there was a steamboat laying

at Flagler's Landing, forty miles above here, and it

was raining and storming like the nation.  And there

was a thief aboard, and he had them two big di'monds

that's advertised out here on this courthouse door;

and he slipped ashore with his hand-bag and struck

out into the dark and the storm, and he was a-hoping

he could get to this town all right and be safe.

But he had two pals aboard the boat, hiding, and he

knowed they was going to kill him the first chance they

got and take the di'monds; because all three stole them,

and then this fellow he got hold of them and skipped.



"Well, he hadn't been gone more'n ten minutes before

his pals found it out, and they jumped ashore and lit

out after him.  Prob'ly they burnt matches and found

his tracks.  Anyway, they dogged along after him all

day Saturday and kept out of his sight; and towards

sundown he come to the bunch of sycamores down by Uncle

Silas's field, and he went in there to get a disguise

out of his hand-bag and put it on before he showed

himself here in the town--and mind you he done that just

a little after the time that Uncle Silas was hitting

Jubiter Dunlap over the head with a club--for he DID hit him.



"But the minute the pals see that thief slide into

the bunch of sycamores, they jumped out of the bushes

and slid in after him.



"They fell on him and clubbed him to death.



"Yes, for all he screamed and howled so, they never had

no mercy on him, but clubbed him to death.  And two men

that was running along the road heard him yelling that way,

and they made a rush into the syca- i more bunch--which was

where they was bound for, anyway--and when the pals saw them

they lit out and the two new men after them a-chasing them

as tight as they could go.  But only a minute or two--then

these two new men slipped back very quiet into the sycamores.



"THEN what did they do? I will tell you what they done.

They found where the thief had got his disguise out of his

carpet-sack to put on; so one of them strips and puts on

that disguise."



Tom waited a little here, for some more "effect"--then

he says, very deliberate:



"The man that put on that dead man's disguise was--

JUBITER DUNLAP!"



"Great Scott!" everybody shouted, all over the house,

and old Uncle Silas he looked perfectly astonished.



"Yes, it was Jubiter Dunlap.  Not dead, you see.  Then they

pulled off the dead man's boots and put Jubiter Dunlap's

old ragged shoes on the corpse and put the corpse's boots

on Jubiter Dunlap.  Then Jubiter Dunlap stayed where he was,

and the other man lugged the dead body off in the twilight;

and after midnight he went to Uncle Silas's house,

and took his old green work-robe off of the peg where it

always hangs in the passage betwixt the house and the

kitchen and put it on, and stole the long-handled shovel

and went off down into the tobacker field and buried

the murdered man."



He stopped, and stood half a minute.  Then--"And who do

you reckon the murdered man WAS? It was--JAKE Dunlap,

the long-lost burglar!"



"Great Scott!"



"And the man that buried him was--BRACE Dunlap, his brother!"



"Great Scott!"



"And who do you reckon is this mowing idiot here that's

letting on all these weeks to be a deef and dumb stranger?

It's--JUBITER Dunlap!"



My land, they all busted out in a howl, and you never see

the like of that excitement since the day you was born.

And Tom he made a jump for Jubiter and snaked off his goggles

and his false whiskers, and there was the murdered man,

sure enough, just as alive as anybody! And Aunt Sally

and Benny they went to hugging and crying and kissing

and smothering old Uncle Silas to that degree he was more

muddled and confused and mushed up in his mind than he ever

was before, and that is saying considerable.  And next,

people begun to yell:



"Tom Sawyer! Tom Sawyer! Shut up everybody, and let him

go on! Go on, Tom Sawyer!"



Which made him feel uncommon bully, for it was nuts for Tom

Sawyer to be a public character that-away, and a hero,

as he calls it.  So when it was all quiet, he says:



"There ain't much left, only this.  When that man there,

Bruce Dunlap, had most worried the life and sense out of

Uncle Silas till at last he plumb lost his mind and hit

this other blatherskite, his brother, with a club, I reckon

he seen his chance.  Jubiter broke for the woods to hide,

and I reckon the game was for him to slide out, in the night,

and leave the country.  Then Brace would make everybody

believe Uncle Silas killed him and hid his body somers;

and that would ruin Uncle Silas and drive HIM out of the

country--hang him, maybe; I dunno.  But when they found

their dead brother in the sycamores without knowing him,

because he was so battered up, they see they had a better thing;

disguise BOTH and bury Jake and dig him up presently

all dressed up in Jubiter's clothes, and hire Jim Lane

and Bill Withers and the others to swear to some handy

lies--which they done.  And there they set, now, and I

told them they would be looking sick before I got done,

and that is the way they're looking now.



"Well, me and Huck Finn here, we come down on the boat

with the thieves, and the dead one told us all about the

di'monds, and said the others would murder him if they got

the chance; and we was going to help him all we could.

We was bound for the sycamores when we heard them killing

him in there; but we was in there in the early morning

after the storm and allowed nobody hadn't been killed,

after all.  And when we see Jubiter Dunlap here spreading

around in the very same disguise Jake told us HE was

going to wear, we thought it was Jake his own self--and

he was goo-gooing deef and dumb, and THAT was according

to agreement.



"Well, me and Huck went on hunting for the corpse after

the others quit, and we found it.  And was proud, too;

but Uncle Silas he knocked us crazy by telling us HE

killed the man.  So we was mighty sorry we found the body,

and was bound to save Uncle Silas's neck if we could;

and it was going to be tough work, too, because he

wouldn't let us break him out of prison the way we done

with our old nigger Jim.



"I done everything I could the whole month to think up

some way to save Uncle Silas, but I couldn't strike

a thing.  So when we come into court to-day I come empty,

and couldn't see no chance anywheres.  But by and by I had

a glimpse of something that set me thinking--just a little

wee glimpse--only that, and not enough to make sure;

but it set me thinking hard--and WATCHING, when I was

only letting on to think; and by and by, sure enough,

when Uncle Silas was piling out that stuff about HIM

killing Jubiter Dunlap, I catched that glimpse again,

and this time I jumped up and shut down the proceedings,

because I KNOWED Jubiter Dunlap was a-setting here before me.

I knowed him by a thing which I seen him do--and I

remembered it.  I'd seen him do it when I was here a

year ago."



He stopped then, and studied a minute--laying for an

"effect"--I knowed it perfectly well.  Then he turned

off like he was going to leave the platform, and says,

kind of lazy and indifferent:



"Well, I believe that is all."



Why, you never heard such a howl!--and it come from

the whole house:



"What WAS it you seen him do? Stay where you are,

you little devil! You think you are going to work a body

up till his mouth's a-watering and stop there? What WAS

it he done?"



That was it, you see--he just done it to get an "effect";

you couldn't 'a' pulled him off of that platform

with a yoke of oxen.



"Oh, it wasn't anything much," he says.  "I seen him

looking a little excited when he found Uncle Silas was

actuly fixing to hang himself for a murder that warn't

ever done; and he got more and more nervous and worried,

I a-watching him sharp but not seeming to look at him--

and all of a sudden his hands begun to work and fidget,

and pretty soon his left crept up and HIS FINGER DRAWED

A CROSS ON HIS CHEEK, and then I HAD him!"



Well, then they ripped and howled and stomped and clapped

their hands till Tom Sawyer was that proud and happy he

didn't know what to do with himself.



And then the judge he looked down over his pulpit and says:



"My boy, did you SEE all the various details of this

strange conspiracy and tragedy that you've been describing?"



"No, your honor, I didn't see any of them."



"Didn't see any of them! Why, you've told the whole

history straight through, just the same as if you'd

seen it with your eyes.  How did you manage that?"



Tom says, kind of easy and comfortable:



"Oh, just noticing the evidence and piecing this

and that together, your honor; just an ordinary little

bit of detective work; anybody could 'a' done it."



"Nothing of the kind! Not two in a million could 'a' done it.

You are a very remarkable boy."



Then they let go and give Tom another smashing round,

and he--well, he wouldn't 'a' sold out for a silver mine.

Then the judge says:



"But are you certain you've got this curious history straight?"



"Perfectly, your honor.  Here is Brace Dunlap--let him deny

his share of it if he wants to take the chance; I'll engage

to make him wish he hadn't said anything...... Well,

you see HE'S pretty quiet.  And his brother's pretty quiet,

and them four witnesses that lied so and got paid for it,

they're pretty quiet.  And as for Uncle Silas, it ain't

any use for him to put in his oar, I wouldn't believe him

under oath!"



Well, sir, that fairly made them shout; and even the judge he

let go and laughed.  Tom he was just feeling like a rainbow.

When they was done laughing he looks up at the judge and says:



"Your honor, there's a thief in this house."



"A thief?"



"Yes, sir.  And he's got them twelve-thousand-dollar

di'monds on him."



By gracious, but it made a stir! Everybody went shouting:



"Which is him? which is him? p'int him out!"



And the judge says:



"Point him out, my lad.  Sheriff, you will arrest him.

Which one is it?"



Tom says:



"This late dead man here--Jubiter Dunlap."



Then there was another thundering let-go of astonishment

and excitement; but Jubiter, which was astonished enough before,

was just fairly putrified with astonishment this time.

And he spoke up, about half crying, and says:



"Now THAT'S a lie.  Your honor, it ain't fair;

I'm plenty bad enough without that.  I done the other

things--Brace he put me up to it, and persuaded me,

and promised he'd make me rich, some day, and I done it,

and I'm sorry I done it, and I wisht I hadn't; but I

hain't stole no di'monds, and I hain't GOT no di'monds;

I wisht I may never stir if it ain't so.  The sheriff can

search me and see."



Tom says:



"Your honor, it wasn't right to call him a thief, and I'll

let up on that a little.  He did steal the di'monds,

but he didn't know it.  He stole them from his brother

Jake when he was laying dead, after Jake had stole them

from the other thieves; but Jubiter didn't know he

was stealing them; and he's been swelling around here

with them a month; yes, sir, twelve thousand dollars'

worth of di'monds on him--all that riches, and going around

here every day just like a poor man.  Yes, your honor,

he's got them on him now."



The judge spoke up and says:



"Search him, sheriff."



Well, sir, the sheriff he ransacked him high and low,

and everywhere: searched his hat, socks, seams, boots,

everything--and Tom he stood there quiet, laying for another

of them effects of hisn.  Finally the sheriff he give

it up, and everybody looked disappointed, and Jubiter says:



"There, now! what'd I tell you?"



And the judge says:



"It appears you were mistaken this time, my boy."



Then Tom took an attitude and let on to be studying

with all his might, and scratching his head.  Then all

of a sudden he glanced up chipper, and says:



"Oh, now I've got it ! I'd forgot."



Which was a lie, and I knowed it.  Then he says:



"Will somebody be good enough to lend me a little small

screwdriver? There was one in your brother's hand-bag

that you smouched, Jubiter.  but I reckon you didn't

fetch it with you."



"No, I didn't. I didn't want it, and I give it away."



"That's because you didn't know what it was for."



Jubiter had his boots on again, by now, and when the thing

Tom wanted was passed over the people's heads till it

got to him, he says to Jubiter:



"Put up your foot on this chair." And he kneeled down

and begun to unscrew the heel-plate, everybody watching;

and when he got that big di'mond out of that boot-heel

and held it up and let it flash and blaze and squirt

sunlight everwhichaway, it just took everybody's breath;

and Jubiter he looked so sick and sorry you never see

the like of it.  And when Tom held up the other di'mond

he looked sorrier than ever.  Land! he was thinking how

he would 'a' skipped out and been rich and independent

in a foreign land if he'd only had the luck to guess

what the screwdriver was in the carpet-bag for.



Well, it was a most exciting time, take it all around,

and Tom got cords of glory.  The judge took the di'monds,

and stood up in his pulpit, and cleared his throat,

and shoved his spectacles back on his head, and says:



"I'll keep them and notify the owners; and when they

send for them it will be a real pleasure to me to hand

you the two thousand dollars, for you've earned the

money--yes, and you've earned the deepest and most

sincerest thanks of this community besides, for lifting

a wronged and innocent family out of ruin and shame,

and saving a good and honorable man from a felon's death,

and for exposing to infamy and the punishment of the law

a cruel and odious scoundrel and his miserable creatures!"



Well, sir, if there'd been a brass band to bust out

some music, then, it would 'a' been just the perfectest

thing I ever see, and Tom Sawyer he said the same.



Then the sheriff he nabbed Brace Dunlap and his crowd,

and by and by next month the judge had them up for

trial and jailed the whole lot.  And everybody crowded

back to Uncle Silas's little old church, and was ever

so loving and kind to him and the family and couldn't

do enough for them; and Uncle Silas he preached them

the blamedest jumbledest idiotic sermons you ever struck,

and would tangle you up so you couldn't find your way home

in daylight; but the people never let on but what they

thought it was the clearest and brightest and elegantest

sermons that ever was; and they would set there and cry,

for love and pity; but, by George, they give me the

jim-jams and the fan-tods and caked up what brains I had,

and turned them solid; but by and by they loved the old

man's intellects back into him again, and he was as sound

in his skull as ever he was, which ain't no flattery,

I reckon.  And so the whole family was as happy as birds,

and nobody could be gratefuler and lovinger than what they

was to Tom Sawyer; and the same to me, though I hadn't

done nothing.  And when the two thousand dollars come,

Tom give half of it to me, and never told anybody so,

which didn't surprise me, because I knowed him.



END OF "TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE".













                               FOLLOWING

                              THE EQUATOR

                       A JOURNEY AROUND THE WORLD

                                   BY

                               MARK TWAIN

                           SAMUEL L. CLEMENS

                         HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT







                               THIS BOOK

                     Is affectionately inscribed to

                            MY YOUNG FRIEND

                              HARRY ROGERS

                            WITH RECOGNITION

         OF WHAT HE IS, AND APPREHENSION OF WHAT HE MAY BECOME

              UNLESS HE FORM HIMSELF A LITTLE MORE CLOSELY

                           UPON THE MODEL OF

                              THE AUTHOR.











                         THE PUDD'NHEAD MAXIMS.

            THESE WISDOMS ARE FOR THE LURING OF YOUTH TOWARD

               HIGH MORAL ALTITUDES.  THE AUTHOR DID NOT

                  GATHER THEM FROM PRACTICE, BUT FROM

                   OBSERVATION.  TO BE GOOD IS NOBLE;

                         BUT TO SHOW OTHERS HOW

                          TO BE GOOD IS NOBLER

                            AND NO TROUBLE.









                                 CONTENTS



CHAPTER I.

The Party--Across America to Vancouver--On Board the Warrimo--Steamer

Chairs-The Captain-Going Home under a Cloud--A Gritty Purser--The

Brightest Passenger--Remedy for Bad Habits--The Doctor and the Lumbago

--A Moral Pauper--Limited Smoking--Remittance-men.





CHAPTER II.

Change of Costume--Fish, Snake, and Boomerang Stories--Tests of Memory

--A Brahmin Expert--General Grant's Memory--A Delicately Improper Tale





CHAPTER III.

Honolulu--Reminiscences of the Sandwich Islands--King Liholiho and His

Royal Equipment--The Tabu--The Population of the Island--A Kanaka Diver

--Cholera at Honolulu--Honolulu; Past and Present--The Leper Colony





CHAPTER IV.

Leaving Honolulu--Flying-fish--Approaching the Equator--Why the Ship Went

Slow--The Front Yard of the Ship--Crossing the Equator--Horse Billiards

or Shovel Board--The Waterbury Watch--Washing Decks--Ship Painters--The

Great Meridian--The Loss of a Day--A Babe without a Birthday





CHAPTER V.

A lesson in Pronunciation--Reverence for Robert Burns--The Southern

Cross--Troublesome Constellations--Victoria for a Name--Islands on the

Map--Alofa and Fortuna--Recruiting for the Queensland Plantations--

Captain Warren's NoteBook--Recruiting not thoroughly Popular





CHAPTER VI.

Missionaries Obstruct Business--The Sugar Planter and the Kanaka--The

Planter's View--Civilizing the Kanaka The Missionary's View--The Result--

Repentant Kanakas--Wrinkles--The Death Rate in Queensland





CHAPTER VII.

The  Fiji Islands--Suva--The Ship from Duluth--Going Ashore--Midwinter in

Fiji--Seeing the Governor--Why Fiji was Ceded to England--Old time

Fijians--Convicts among the Fijians--A Case Where Marriage was a Failure

Immortality with Limitations





CHAPTER VIII.

A Wilderness of Islands--Two Men without a Country--A Naturalist from New

Zealand--The Fauna of Australasia--Animals, Insects, and Birds--The

Ornithorhynchus--Poetry and Plagiarism





CHAPTER IX.



Close to Australia--Porpoises at Night--Entrance to Sydney Harbor--The

Loss of the Duncan Dunbar--The Harbor--The City of Sydney--Spring-time in

Australia--The Climate--Information for Travelers--The Size of Australia

--A Dust-Storm and Hot Wind





CHAPTER X.

The  Discovery of Australia--Transportation of Convicts--Discipline--

English Laws, Ancient and Modern--Flogging Prisoners to Death--Arrival of

Settlers--New South Wales Corps--Rum Currency--Intemperance Everywhere

$100,000 for One Gallon of Rum--Development of the Country--Immense

Resources





CHAPTER XI.

Hospitality of English-speaking People--Writers and their Gratitude--Mr.

Gane and the Panegyrics--Population of Sydney An English City with

American Trimming--"Squatters"--Palaces and Sheep Kingdoms--Wool and

Mutton--Australians and Americans--Costermonger Pronunciation--England is

"Home"--Table Talk--English and Colonial Audiences 124





CHAPTER XII.

Mr. X., a Missionary--Why Christianity Makes Slow Progress in India--A

Large Dream--Hindoo Miracles and Legends--Sampson and Hanuman--The

Sandstone Ridge--Where are the Gates?





CHAPTER XIII.

Public Works in Australasia--Botanical Garden of Sydney--Four Special

Socialties--The Government House--A Governor and His Functions--The

Admiralty House--The Tour of the Harbor--Shark Fishing--Cecil Rhodes'

Shark and his First Fortune--Free Board for Sharks.





CHAPTER XIV.

Bad Health--To Melbourne by Rail--Maps Defective--The Colony of Victoria

--A Round-trip Ticket from Sydney--Change Cars, from Wide to Narrow

Gauge, a Peculiarity at Albury--Customs-fences--"My Word"--The Blue

Mountains--Rabbit Piles--Government R. R. Restaurants--Duchesses for

Waiters--"Sheep-dip"--Railroad Coffee--Things Seen and Not Seen





CHAPTER XV.

Wagga-Wagga--The Tichborne Claimant--A Stock Mystery--The Plan of the

Romance--The Realization--The Henry Bascom Mystery--Bascom Hall--The

Author's Death and Funeral





CHAPTER XVI.

Melbourne and its Attractions--The Melbourne Cup Races--Cup Day--Great

Crowds--Clothes Regardless of Cost--The Australian Larrikin--Is He Dead?

Australian Hospitality--Melbourne Wool-brokers--The Museums--The Palaces

--The Origin of Melbourne





CHAPTER XVII.

The British Empire--Its Exports and Imports--The Trade of Australia--To

Adelaide--Broken Hill Silver Mine--A Roundabout road--The Scrub and its

Possibilities for the Novelist--The Aboriginal Tracker--A Test Case--How

Does One Cow-Track Differ from Another?





CHAPTER XVIII.

Gum Trees--Unsociable Trees--Gorse and Broom--A universal Defect--An

Adventurer--Wanted L200, got L20,000,000--A Vast Land Scheme--The Smash-

up--The Corpse Got Up and Danced--A Unique Business by One Man--

Buying the Kangaroo Skin--The Approach to Adelaide--Everything Comes to

Him who Waits--A Healthy Religious sphere--What is the Matter with the

Specter?





CHAPTER XIX.



The Botanical Gardens--Contributions from all Countries--The

Zoological Gardens of Adelaide--The Laughing Jackass--The Dingo--A

Misnamed Province--Telegraphing from Melbourne to San Francisco--A Mania

for Holidays--The Temperature--The Death Rate--Celebration of the

Reading of the Proclamation of 1836--Some old Settlers at the

Commemoration--Their Staying Powers--The Intelligence of the Aboriginal--

The Antiquity of the Boomerang





CHAPTER XX.

A Caller--A Talk about Old Times--The Fox Hunt--An Accurate Judgment of

an Idiot--How We Passed the Custom Officers in Italy





CHAPTER XXI.

The "Weet-Weet"--Keeping down the Population--Victoria--Killing the

Aboriginals--Pioneer Days in Queensland--Material for a Drama--The Bush--

Pudding with Arsenic Revenge--A Right Spirit but a Wrong Method--Death of

Donga Billy





CHAPTER XXII.

Continued Description of Aboriginals--Manly Qualities--Dodging Balls--

Feats of Spring--Jumping--Where the Kangaroo Learned its Art 'Well

Digging--Endurance--Surgery--Artistic Abilities--Fennimore Cooper's Last

Chance--Australian Slang





CHAPTER XXIII.

To Horsham (Colony of Victoria)--Description of Horsham--At the Hotel--

Pepper Tree-The Agricultural College, Forty Pupils--High Temperature--

Width of Road in Chains, Perches, etc.--The Bird with a Forgettable Name-

-The Magpie and the Lady--Fruit Trees--Soils--Sheep Shearing--To Stawell

--Gold Mining Country--$75,000 per Month Income and able to Keep House--

Fine Grapes and Wine--The Dryest Community on Earth--The Three Sisters--

Gum Trees and Water





CHAPTER XXIV.



Road to Ballarat--The City--Great Gold Strike, 1851--Rush for Australia--

"Great Nuggets"--Taxation--Revolt and Victory--Peter Lalor and the

Eureka Stockade--"Pencil Mark"--Fine Statuary at Ballarat--Population--

Ballarat English





CHAPTER XXV.

Bound for Bendigo--The Priest at Castlemaine--Time Saved by Walking--

Description of Bendigo--A Valuable Nugget--Perseverence and Success--

Mr. Blank and His Influence--Conveyance of an Idea--I Had to Like the

Irishman--Corrigan Castle, and the Mark Twain Club--My Bascom Mystery

Solved





CHAPTER XXVI.

Where New Zealand Is--But Few Know--Things People Think They Know--The

Yale Professor and His Visitor from N. Z.





CHAPTER XXVII.

The South Pole Swell--Tasmania--Extermination of the Natives--The Picture

Proclamation--The Conciliator--The Formidable Sixteen





CHAPTER XXVIII.

When the Moment Comes the Man Appears--Why Ed. Jackson called on

Commodore Vanderbilt--Their Interview--Welcome to the Child of His Friend

--A Big Time but under Inspection--Sent on Important Business--A Visit to

the Boys on the Boat





CHAPTER XXIX:

Tasmania, Early Days--Description of the Town of Hobart--An Englishman's

Love of Home Surroundings--Neatest City on Earth--The Museum--A Parrot

with an Acquired Taste--Glass Arrow Beads--Refuge for the Indigent too

healthy





CHAPTER XXX.

Arrival at Bluff, N. Z.--Where the Rabbit Plague Began--The Natural Enemy

of the Rabbit--Dunedin--A Lovely Town--Visit to Dr. Hockin--His Museum--

A Liquified Caterpillar--The Unperfected Tape Worm--The Public Museum and

Picture





CHAPTER XXXI.  The Express Train--"A Hell of a Hotel at Maryborough"--

Clocks and Bells--Railroad Service.





CHAPTER XXXII.

Description of the Town of Christ Church--A Fine Museum--Jade-stone

Trinkets--The Great Man--The First Maori in New Zealand--Women Voters--

"Person" in New Zealand Law Includes Woman--Taming an Ornithorhynchus--

A Voyage in the 'Flora' from Lyttelton--Cattle Stalls for Everybody--

A Wonderful Time.





CHAPTER XXXIII.

The Town of Nelson--"The Mongatapu Murders," the Great Event of the Town

--Burgess' Confession--Summit of Mount Eden--Rotorua and the Hot Lakes

and Geysers--Thermal Springs District--Kauri Gum--Tangariwa Mountains





CHAPTER XXXIV.

The Bay of Gisborne--Taking in Passengers by the Yard Arm--The Green

Ballarat Fly--False Teeth--From Napier to Hastings by the Ballarat Fly

Train--Kauri Trees--A Case of Mental Telegraphy





CHAPTER XXXV.

Fifty Miles in Four Hours--Comfortable Cars--Town of Wauganui--Plenty of

Maoris--On the Increase--Compliments to the Maoris--The Missionary Ways

all Wrong--The Tabu among the Maoris--A Mysterious Sign--Curious War-

monuments--Wellington





CHAPTER XXXVI.

The Poems of Mrs. Moore--The Sad Fate of William Upson--A Fellow Traveler

Imitating the Prince of Wales--A Would-be Dude--Arrival at Sydney--

Curious Town Names with Poem





CHAPTER XXXVII.

From Sydney for Ceylon--A Lascar Crew--A Fine Ship--Three Cats and a

Basket of Kittens--Dinner Conversations--Veuve Cliquot Wine--At Anchor in

King George's Sound Albany Harbor--More Cats--A Vulture on Board--Nearing

the Equator again--Dressing for Dinner--Ceylon, Hotel Bristol--Servant

Brampy--A Feminine Man--Japanese Jinriksha or Cart--Scenes in Ceylon--A

Missionary School--Insincerity of Clothes





CHAPTER XXXVIII.

Steamer Rosettes to Bombay--Limes 14 cents a Barrel--Bombay, a Bewitching

City--Descriptions of People and Dress--Woman as a Road Decoration--

India, the Land of Dreams and Romance--Fourteen Porters to Carry Baggage-

-Correcting a Servant--Killing a Slave--Arranging a Bedroom--Three Hours'

Work and a Terrible Racket--The Bird of Birds, the Indian Crow





CHAPTER XXXIX.

God Vishnu, 108 Names--Change of Titles or Hunting for an Heir--Bombay as

a Kaleidoscope--The Native's Man Servant--Servants' Recommendations--How

Manuel got his Name and his English--Satan--A Visit from God





CHAPTER XL.

The Government House at Malabar Point--Mansion of Kumar Shri Samatsin Hji

Bahadur--The Indian Princess--A Difficult Game--Wardrobe and Jewels--

Ceremonials--Decorations when Leaving--The Towers of Silence--A Funeral





CHAPTER XLI.

Jain Temple--Mr. Roychand's Bungalow--A Decorated Six-Gun Prince--Human

Fireworks--European Dress, Past and Present--Complexions--Advantages with

the Zulu--Festivities at the Bungalow-Nautch Dancers--Entrance of the

Prince--Address to the Prince





CHAPTER XLII.

A Hindoo Betrothal, midnight, Sleepers on the ground, Home of the Bride

of Twelve Years Dressed as a Boy--Illumination Nautch Girls--Imitating

Snakes--Later--Illuminated Porch Filled with Sleepers--The Plague





CHAPTER XLIII

Murder Trial in Bombay--Confidence Swindlers--Some Specialities of India-

-The Plague, Juggernaut, Suttee, etc.--Everything on Gigantic Scale--

India First in Everything--80 States, more Custom Houses than Cats--Rich

Ground for Thug Society





CHAPTER XLIV.

Thug Book--Supplies for Traveling, Bedding, and other Freight--Scene at

Railway Station--Making Way for White Man--Waiting Passengers, High and

Low Caste, Touch in the cars--Our Car--Beds made up--Dreaming of Thugs--

Baroda--Meet Friends--Indian Well--The Old Town--Narrow Streets--A Mad

Elephant



CHAPTER XLV.



Elephant Riding--Howdahs--The New Palace--The Prince's Excursion--Gold

and Silver Artillery--A Vice-royal Visit--Remarkable Dog--The Bench Show

--Augustin Daly's Back Door--Fakeer





CHAPTER XLVI.

The Thugs--Government Efforts to Exterminate them--Choking a Victim A

Fakeer Spared--Thief Strangled





CHAPTER XLVII.

Thugs, Continued--Record of Murders--A Joy of Hunting and Killing Men--

Gordon Gumming--Killing an Elephant--Family Affection among Thugs--

Burial Places





CHAPTER XLVIII.

Starting for Allahabad--Lower Berths in Sleepers--Elderly Ladies have

Preference of Berths--An American Lady Takes One Anyhow--How Smythe Lost

his Berth--How He Got Even--The Suttee





CHAPTER XLIX.

Pyjamas--Day Scene in India--Clothed in a Turban and a Pocket

Handkerchief--Land Parceled Out--Established Village Servants--Witches in

Families--Hereditary Midwifery--Destruction of Girl Babies--Wedding

Display--Tiger-Persuader--Hailstorm Discourages--The Tyranny of the

Sweeper--Elephant Driver--Water Carrier--Curious Rivers--Arrival at

Allahabad--English Quarter--Lecture Hall Like a Snowstorm--Private

Carriages--A Milliner--Early Morning--The Squatting Servant--A Religious

Fair





CHAPTER L.

On the Road to Benares--Dust and Waiting--The Bejeweled Crowd--A Native

Prince and his Guard--Zenana Lady--The Extremes of Fashion--The Hotel at

Benares--An Annex a Mile Away--Doors in India--The Peepul Tree--Warning

against Cold Baths--A Strange Fruit--Description of Benares--The

Beginning of Creation--Pilgrims to Benares--A Priest with a Good Business

Stand--Protestant Missionary--The Trinity Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu--

Religion the Business at Benares





CHAPTER LI.

Benares a Religious Temple--A Guide for Pilgrims to Save Time in Securing

Salvation





CHAPTER LII.

A Curious Way to Secure Salvation--The Banks of the Ganges--Architecture

Represents Piety--A Trip on the River--Bathers and their Costumes--

Drinking the Water--A Scientific Test of the Nasty Purifier--Hindoo Faith

in the Ganges--A Cremation--Remembrances of the Suttee--All Life Sacred

Except Human Life--The Goddess Bhowanee, and the Sacrificers--Sacred

Monkeys--Ugly Idols Everywhere--Two White Minarets--A Great View with a

Monkey in it--A Picture on the Water





CHAPTER LIII.

Still in Benares--Another Living God--Why Things are Wonderful--Sri 108

Utterly Perfect--How He Came so--Our Visit to Sri--A Friendly Deity

Exchanging Autographs and Books--Sri's Pupil--An Interesting Man--

Reverence and Irreverence--Dancing in a Sepulchre





CHAPTER LIV.

Rail to Calcutta--Population--The "City of Palaces"--A Fluted Candle-

stick--Ochterlony--Newspaper Correspondence--Average Knowledge of

Countries--A Wrong Idea of Chicago--Calcutta and the Black Hole--

Description of the Horrors--Those Who Lived--The Botanical Gardens--The

Afternoon Turnout--Grand Review--Military Tournament--Excursion on the

Hoogly--The Museum--What Winter Means Calcutta





CHAPTER LV

On the Road Again--Flannels in Order--Across Country--From Greenland's

Icy Mountain--Swapping Civilization--No Field women in India--How it is

in Other Countries--Canvas-covered Cars--The Tiger Country--My First Hunt

Some Elephants Get Away--The Plains of India--The Ghurkas--Women for

Pack-Horses--A Substitute for a Cab--Darjeeling--The Hotel--The Highest

Thing in the Himalayas--The Club--Kinchinjunga and Mt. Everest--

Thibetans--The Prayer Wheel--People Going to the Bazar





CHAPTER LVI.

On the Road Again--The Hand-Car--A Thirty-five-mile Slide--The Banyan

Tree--A Dramatic Performance--The Railroad--The Half-way House--The Brain

Fever Bird--The Coppersmith Bird--Nightingales and Cue Owls





CHAPTER LVII.

India the Most Extraordinary Country on Earth--Nothing Forgotten--The

Land of Wonders--Annual Statistics Everywhere about Violence--Tiger vs.

Man--A Handsome Fight--Annual Man Killing and Tiger Killing--Other

Animals--Snakes--Insurance and Snake Tables--The Cobra Bite--Muzaffurpore

--Dinapore--A Train that Stopped for Gossip--Six Hours for Thirty-five

Miles--A Rupee to the Engineer--Ninety Miles an Hour--Again to Benares,

the Piety Hive To Lucknow





CHAPTER LVIII.

The Great Mutiny--The Massacre in Cawnpore--Terrible Scenes in Lucknow--

The Residency--The Siege





CHAPTER LIX.

A Visit to the Residency--Cawnpore--The Adjutant Bird and the Hindoo

Corpse--The Tai Mahal--The True Conception--The Ice Storm--True Gems--

Syrian Fountains--An Exaggerated Niagara





CHAPTER LX.

To Lahore--The Governor's Elephant--Taking a Ride-No Danger from

Collision--Rawal Pindi--Back to Delhi--An Orientalized Englishman--

Monkeys and the Paint-pot--Monkey Crying over my Note-book--Arrival at

Jeypore--In Rajputana--Watching Servants--The Jeypore Hotel--Our Old and

New Satan--Satan as a Liar--The Museum--A Street Show--Blocks of Houses--

A Religious Procession





CHAPTER LXI.

Methods in American Deaf and Dumb Asylums--Methods in the Public Schools

--A Letter from a youth in Punjab--Highly Educated Service--A Damage to

the Country--A Little Book from Calcutta--Writing Poor English--

Embarrassed by a Beggar Girl--A Specimen Letter--An Application for

Employment--A Calcutta School Examination--Two Samples of

Literature





CHAPTER LXII.

Sail from Calcutta to Madras--Thence to Ceylon--Thence for  Mauritius--

The Indian Ocean--Our Captain's Peculiarity The Scot Has one too--The

Flying-fish that Went Hunting in the Field--Fined for Smuggling--Lots of

pets on Board--The Color of the Sea--The Most Important Member of

Nature's Family--The Captain's Story of Cold Weather--Omissions in the

Ship's Library--Washing Decks--Pyjamas on Deck--The Cat's Toilet--No

Interest in the Bulletin--Perfect Rest--The Milky Way and the Magellan

Clouds--Mauritius--Port Louis--A Hot Country--Under French Control--

A Variety of People and Complexions--Train to Curepipe--A Wonderful

Office-holder--The Wooden Peg Ornament--The Prominent Historical Event of

Mauritius--"Paul and Virginia"--One of Virginia's Wedding Gifts--Heaven

Copied after Mauritius--Early History of Mauritius--Quarantines--

Population of all Kinds--What the World Consists of--Where Russia and

Germany are--A Picture of Milan Cathedral--Newspapers--The Language--Best

Sugar in the World--Literature of Mauritius





CHAPTER LXIII.

Port Louis--Matches no Good--Good Roads--Death Notices--Why European

Nations Rob Each Other--What Immigrants to Mauritius Do--Population--

Labor Wages--The Camaron--The Palmiste and other Eatables--Monkeys--The

Cyclone of 1892--Mauritius a Sunday Landscape





CHAPTER LXIV.

The Steamer "Arundel Castle"--Poor Beds in Ships--The Beds in Noah's Ark-

-Getting a Rest in Europe--Ship in Sight--Mozambique Channel--The

Engineer and the Band--Thackeray's "Madagascar"--Africanders Going Home--

Singing on the After Deck--An Out-of-Place Story--Dynamite Explosion in

Johannesburg--Entering Delagoa Bay--Ashore--A Hot Winter--Small Town--No

Sights--No Carriages--Working Women--Barnum's Purchase of Shakespeare's

Birthplace, Jumbo, and the Nelson Monument--Arrival at Durban





CHAPTER LXV.

Royal Hotel Durban--Bells that Did not Ring--Early Inquiries for Comforts

--Change of Temperature after Sunset-Rickhaws--The Hotel Chameleon--

Natives not out after the Bell--Preponderance of Blacks in Natal--Hair

Fashions in Natal--Zulus for Police--A Drive round the Berea--The Cactus

and other Trees--Religion a Vital Matter--Peculiar Views about Babies--

Zulu Kings--A Trappist Monastery--Transvaal Politics--Reasons why the

Trouble came About





CHAPTER LXVI.

Jameson over the Border--His Defeat and Capture--Sent to England for

Trial--Arrest of Citizens by the Boers--Commuted sentences--Final Release

of all but Two--Interesting Days for a Stranger--Hard to Understand

Either Side--What the Reformers Expected to Accomplish--How They Proposed

to do it--Testimonies a Year Later--A "Woman's Part"--The Truth of the

South African Situation--"Jameson's Ride"--A Poem





CHAPTER LXVIL

Jameson's Raid--The Reform Committee's Difficult Task--Possible Plans--

Advice that Jameson Ought to Have--The War of 1881 and its Lessons--

Statistics of Losses of the Combatants--Jameson's Battles--Losses on Both

Sides--The Military Errors--How the Warfare Should Have Been Carried on

to Be Successful





CHAPTER LXVIII.

Judicious Mr. Rhodes--What South Africa Consists of--Johannesburg--The

Gold Mines--The Heaven of American Engineers--What the Author Knows about

Mining--Description of the Boer--What Should be Expected of Him--What Was

A Dizzy Jump for Rhodes--Taxes--Rhodesian Method of Reducing Native

Population--Journeying in Cape Colony--The Cars--The Country--The

Weather--Tamed Blacks--Familiar Figures in King William's Town--Boer

Dress--Boer Country Life--Sleeping Accommodations--The Reformers in Boer

Prison--Torturing a Black Prisoner





CHAPTER LXIX.

An Absorbing Novelty--The Kimberley Diamond Mines--Discovery of Diamonds

--The Wronged Stranger--Where the Gems Are--A Judicious Change of

Boundary--Modern Machinery and Appliances--Thrilling Excitement in

Finding a Diamond--Testing a Diamond--Fences--Deep Mining by Natives in

the Compound--Stealing--Reward for the Biggest Diamond--A Fortune in

Wine--The Great Diamond--Office of the De Beer Co.--Sorting the Gems--

Cape Town--The Most Imposing Man in British Provinces--Various Reasons

for his Supremacy--How He Makes Friends





CONCLUSION.

Table Rock--Table Bay--The Castle--Government and Parliament--The Club--

Dutch Mansions and their Hospitality--Dr. John Barry and his Doings--On

the Ship Norman--Madeira--Arrived in Southampton











                          FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR





CHAPTER I.



A man may have no bad habits and have worse.

                             --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



The starting point of this lecturing-trip around the world was Paris,

where we had been living a year or two.



We sailed for America, and there made certain preparations.  This took

but little time.  Two members of my family elected to go with me.  Also a

carbuncle.  The dictionary says a carbuncle is a kind of jewel.  Humor is

out of place in a dictionary.



We started westward from New York in midsummer, with Major Pond to manage

the platform-business as far as the Pacific.  It was warm work, all the

way, and the last fortnight of it was suffocatingly smoky, for in Oregon

and Columbia the forest fires were raging.  We had an added week of smoke

at the seaboard, where we were obliged awhile for our ship.  She had been

getting herself ashore in the smoke, and she had to be docked and

repaired.



We sailed at last; and so ended a snail-paced march across the continent,

which had lasted forty days.



We moved westward about mid-afternoon over a rippled and summer sea; an

enticing sea, a clean and cool sea, and apparently a welcome sea to all

on board; it certainly was to the distressful dustings and smokings and

swelterings of the past weeks.  The voyage would furnish a three-weeks

holiday, with hardly a break in it.  We had the whole Pacific Ocean in

front of us, with nothing to do but do nothing and be comfortable.  The

city of Victoria was twinkling dim in the deep heart of her smoke-cloud,

and getting ready to vanish and now we closed the field-glasses and sat

down on our steamer chairs contented and at peace.  But they went to

wreck and ruin under us and brought us to shame before all the

passengers.  They had been furnished by the largest furniture-dealing

house in Victoria, and were worth a couple of farthings a dozen, though

they had cost us the price of honest chairs.  In the Pacific and Indian

Oceans one must still bring his own deck-chair on board or go without,

just as in the old forgotten Atlantic times--those Dark Ages of sea

travel.



Ours was a reasonably comfortable ship, with the customary sea-going fare

--plenty of good food furnished by the Deity and cooked by the devil.

The discipline observable on board was perhaps as good as it is anywhere

in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.  The ship was not very well arranged

for tropical service; but that is nothing, for this is the rule for ships

which ply in the tropics.  She had an over-supply of cockroaches, but

this is also the rule with ships doing business in the summer seas--at

least such as have been long in service.  Our young captain was a very

handsome man, tall and perfectly formed, the very figure to show up a

smart uniform's best effects.  He was a man of the best intentions and

was polite and courteous even to courtliness.  There was a soft and

finish about his manners which made whatever place he happened to be in

seem for the moment a drawing room.  He avoided the smoking room.  He had

no vices.  He did not smoke or chew tobacco or take snuff; he did not

swear, or use slang or rude, or coarse, or indelicate language, or make

puns, or tell anecdotes, or laugh intemperately, or raise his voice above

the moderate pitch enjoined by the canons of good form. When he gave an

order, his manner modified it into a request.  After dinner he and his

officers joined the ladies and gentlemen in the ladies' saloon, and

shared in the singing and piano playing, and helped turn the music.  He

had a sweet and sympathetic tenor voice, and used it with taste and

effect the music he played whist there, always with the same partner and

opponents, until the ladies' bedtime.  The electric lights burned there

as late as the ladies and their friends might desire; but they were not

allowed to burn in the smoking-room after eleven.  There were many laws

on the ship's statute book of course; but so far as I could see, this and

one other were the only ones that were rigidly enforced.  The captain

explained that he enforced this one because his own cabin adjoined the

smoking-room, and the smell of tobacco smoke made him sick.  I did not

see how our smoke could reach him, for the smoking-room and his cabin

were on the upper deck, targets for all the winds that blew; and besides

there was no crack of communication between them, no opening of any sort

in the solid intervening bulkhead.  Still, to a delicate stomach even

imaginary smoke can convey damage.



The captain, with his gentle nature, his polish, his sweetness, his moral

and verbal purity, seemed pathetically out of place in his rude and

autocratic vocation.  It seemed another instance of the irony of fate.



He was going home under a cloud.  The passengers knew about his trouble,

and were sorry for him.  Approaching Vancouver through a narrow and

difficult passage densely befogged with smoke from the forest fires, he

had had the ill-luck to lose his bearings and get his ship on the rocks.

A matter like this would rank merely as an error with you and me; it

ranks as a crime with the directors of steamship companies.  The captain

had been tried by the Admiralty Court at Vancouver, and its verdict had

acquitted him of blame.  But that was insufficient comfort.  A sterner

court would examine the case in Sydney--the Court of Directors, the lords

of a company in whose ships the captain had served as mate a number of

years.  This was his first voyage as captain.



The officers of our ship were hearty and companionable young men, and

they entered into the general amusements and helped the passengers pass

the time.  Voyages in the Pacific and Indian Oceans are but pleasure

excursions for all hands.  Our purser was a young Scotchman who was

equipped with a grit that was remarkable.  He was an invalid, and looked

it, as far as his body was concerned, but illness could not subdue his

spirit.  He was full of life, and had a gay and capable tongue.  To all

appearances he was a sick man without being aware of it, for he did not

talk about his ailments, and his bearing and conduct were those of a

person in robust health; yet he was the prey, at intervals, of ghastly

sieges of pain in his heart.  These lasted many hours, and while the

attack continued he could neither sit nor lie.  In one instance he stood

on his feet twenty-four hours fighting for his life with these sharp

agonies, and yet was as full of life and cheer and activity

the next day as if nothing had happened.



The brightest passenger in the ship, and the most interesting and

felicitous talker, was a young Canadian who was not able to let the

whisky bottle alone. He was of a rich and powerful family, and could have

had a distinguished career and abundance of effective help toward it if

he could have conquered his appetite for drink; but he could not do it,

so his great equipment of talent was of no use to him. He had often taken

the pledge to drink no more, and was a good sample of what that sort of

unwisdom can do for a man--for a man with anything short of an iron will.

The system is wrong in two ways: it does not strike at the root of the

trouble, for one thing, and to make a pledge of any kind is to declare

war against nature; for a pledge is a chain that is always clanking and

reminding the wearer of it that he is not a free man.



I have said that the system does not strike at the root of the trouble,

and I venture to repeat that. The root is not the drinking, but the

desire to drink.  These are very different things.  The one merely

requires will--and a great deal of it, both as to bulk and staying

capacity--the other merely requires watchfulness--and for no long time.

The desire of course precedes the act, and should have one's first

attention; it can do but little good to refuse the act over and over

again, always leaving the desire unmolested, unconquered; the desire will

continue to assert itself, and will be almost sure to win in the long

run.  When the desire intrudes, it should be at once banished out of the

mind.  One should be on the watch for it all the time--otherwise it will

get in.  It must be taken in time and not allowed to get a lodgment.  A

desire constantly repulsed for a fortnight should die, then.  That should

cure the drinking habit.  The system of refusing the mere act of

drinking, and leaving the desire in full force, is unintelligent war

tactics, it seems to me.  I used to take pledges--and soon violate them.

My will was not strong, and I could not help it.  And then, to be tied in

any way naturally irks an otherwise free person and makes him chafe in

his bonds and want to get his liberty.  But when I finally ceased from

taking definite pledges, and merely resolved that I would kill an

injurious desire, but leave myself free to resume the desire and the

habit whenever I should choose to do so, I had no more trouble.  In five

days I drove out the desire to smoke and was not obliged to keep watch

after that; and I never experienced any strong desire to smoke again.  At

the end of a year and a quarter of idleness I began to write a book, and

presently found that the pen was strangely reluctant to go.  I tried a

smoke to see if that would help me out of the difficulty.  It did.  I

smoked eight or ten cigars and as many pipes a day for five months;

finished the book, and did not smoke again until a year had gone by and

another book had to be begun.



I can quit any of my nineteen injurious habits at any time, and without

discomfort or inconvenience.  I think that the Dr. Tanners and those

others who go forty days without eating do it by resolutely keeping out

the desire to eat, in the beginning, and that after a few hours the

desire is discouraged and comes no more.



Once I tried my scheme in a large medical way.  I had been confined to my

bed several days with lumbago.  My case refused to improve.  Finally the

doctor said,--



"My remedies have no fair chance.  Consider what they have to fight,

besides the lumbago.  You smoke extravagantly, don't you?"



"Yes."



"You take coffee immoderately?"



"Yes."



"And some tea?"



"Yes."



"You eat all kinds of things that are dissatisfied with each other's

company?"



"Yes."



"You drink two hot Scotches every night?"



"Yes."



"Very well, there you see what I have to contend against.  We can't make

progress the way the matter stands.  You must make a reduction in these

things; you must cut down your consumption of them considerably for some

days."



"I can't, doctor."



"Why can't you."



"I lack the will-power.  I can cut them off entirely, but I can't merely

moderate them."



He said that that would answer, and said he would come around in

twenty-four hours and begin work again.  He was taken ill himself and

could not come; but I did not need him.  I cut off all those things for

two days and nights; in fact, I cut off all kinds of food, too, and all

drinks except water, and at the end of the forty-eight hours the lumbago

was discouraged and left me.  I was a well man; so I gave thanks and took

to those delicacies again.



It seemed a valuable medical course, and I recommended it to a lady.  She

had run down and down and down, and had at last reached a point where

medicines no longer had any helpful effect upon her.  I said I knew I

could put her upon her feet in a week.  It brightened her up, it filled

her with hope, and she said she would do everything I told her to do.  So

I said she must stop swearing and drinking, and smoking and eating for

four days, and then she would be all right again.  And it would have

happened just so, I know it; but she said she could not stop swearing,

and smoking, and drinking, because she had never done those things.  So

there it was.  She had neglected her habits, and hadn't any.  Now that

they would have come good, there were none in stock.  She had nothing to

fall back on.  She was a sinking vessel, with no freight in her to throw

over lighten ship withal.  Why, even one or two little bad habits could

have saved her, but she was just a moral pauper. When she could have

acquired them she was dissuaded by her parents, who were ignorant people

though reared in the best society, and it was too late to begin now.  It

seemed such a pity; but there was no help for it.  These things ought to

be attended to while a person is young; otherwise, when age and disease

come, there is nothing effectual to fight them with.



When I was a youth I used to take all kinds of pledges, and do my best to

keep them, but I never could, because I didn't strike at the root of the

habit--the desire; I generally broke down within the month.  Once I tried

limiting a habit.  That worked tolerably well for a while.  I pledged

myself to smoke but one cigar a day.  I kept the cigar waiting until

bedtime, then I had a luxurious time with it.  But desire persecuted me

every day and all day long; so, within the week I found myself hunting

for larger cigars than I had been used to smoke; then larger ones still,

and still larger ones.  Within the fortnight I was getting cigars made

for me--on a yet larger pattern.  They still grew and grew in size.

Within the month my cigar had grown to such proportions that I could have

used it as a crutch.  It now seemed to me that a one-cigar limit was no

real protection to a person, so I knocked my pledge on the head and

resumed my liberty.



To go back to that young Canadian.  He was a "remittance man," the first

one I had ever seen or heard of.  Passengers explained the term to me.

They said that dissipated ne'er-do-wells belonging to important families

in England and Canada were not cast off by their people while there was

any hope of reforming them, but when that last hope perished at last, the

ne'er-do-well was sent abroad to get him out of the way.  He was shipped

off with just enough money in his pocket--no, in the purser's pocket--for

the needs of the voyage--and when he reached his destined port he would

find a remittance awaiting him there.  Not a large one, but just enough

to keep him a month.  A similar remittance would come monthly thereafter.

It was the remittance-man's custom to pay his month's board and lodging

straightway--a duty which his landlord did not allow him to forget--then

spree away the rest of his money in a single night, then brood and mope

and grieve in idleness till the next remittance came.  It is a pathetic

life.



We had other remittance-men on board, it was said.  At least they said

they were R. M.'s.  There were two.  But they did not resemble the

Canadian; they lacked his tidiness, and his brains, and his gentlemanly

ways, and his resolute spirit, and his humanities and generosities.  One

of them was a lad of nineteen or twenty, and he was a good deal of a

ruin, as to clothes, and morals, and general aspect.  He said he was a

scion of a ducal house in England, and had been shipped to Canada for the

house's relief, that he had fallen into trouble there, and was now being

shipped to Australia.  He said he had no title.  Beyond this remark he

was economical of the truth.  The first thing he did in Australia was to

get into the lockup, and the next thing he did was to proclaim himself an

earl in the police court in the morning and fail to prove it.









CHAPTER II.



When in doubt, tell the truth.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



About four days out from Victoria we plunged into hot weather, and all

the male passengers put on white linen clothes.  One or two days later we

crossed the 25th parallel of north latitude, and then, by order, the

officers of the ship laid away their blue uniforms and came out in white

linen ones.  All the ladies were in white by this time.  This prevalence

of snowy costumes gave the promenade deck an invitingly cool, and

cheerful and picnicky aspect.



From my diary:



There are several sorts of ills in the world from which a person can

never escape altogether, let him journey as far as he will.  One escapes

from one breed of an ill only to encounter another breed of it.  We have

come far from the snake liar and the fish liar, and there was rest and

peace in the thought; but now we have reached the realm of the boomerang

liar, and sorrow is with us once more.  The first officer has seen a man

try to escape from his enemy by getting behind a tree; but the enemy sent

his boomerang sailing into the sky far above and beyond the tree; then it

turned, descended, and killed the man.  The Australian passenger has seen

this thing done to two men, behind two trees--and by the one arrow.  This

being received with a large silence that suggested doubt, he buttressed

it with the statement that his brother once saw the boomerang kill a bird

away off a hundred yards and bring it to the thrower.  But these are ills

which must be borne.  There is no other way.



The talk passed from the boomerang to dreams--usually a fruitful subject,

afloat or ashore--but this time the output was poor.  Then it passed to

instances of extraordinary memory--with better results.  Blind Tom, the

negro pianist, was spoken of, and it was said that he could accurately

play any piece of music, howsoever long and difficult, after hearing it

once; and that six months later he could accurately play it again,

without having touched it in the interval.  One of the most striking of

the stories told was furnished by a gentleman who had served on the staff

of the Viceroy of India.  He read the details from his note-book, and

explained that he had written them down, right after the consummation of

the incident which they described, because he thought that if he did not

put them down in black and white he might presently come to think he had

dreamed them or invented them.



The Viceroy was making a progress, and among the shows offered by the

Maharajah of Mysore for his entertainment was a memory-exhibition.  The

Viceroy and thirty gentlemen of his suite sat in a row, and the memory-

expert, a high-caste Brahmin, was brought in and seated on the floor in

front of them.  He said he knew but two languages, the English and his

own, but would not exclude any foreign tongue from the tests to be

applied to his memory.  Then he laid before the assemblage his program--

a sufficiently extraordinary one.  He proposed that one gentleman should

give him one word of a foreign sentence, and tell him its place in the

sentence.  He was furnished with the French word 'est', and was told it

was second in a sentence of three words.  The next, gentleman gave him

the German word 'verloren' and said it was the third in a sentence of

four words.  He asked the next gentleman for one detail in a sum in

addition; another for one detail in a sum of subtraction; others for

single details in mathematical problems of various kinds; he got them.

Intermediates gave him single words from sentences in Greek, Latin,

Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages, and told him their

places in the sentences.  When at last everybody had furnished him a

single rag from a foreign sentence or a figure from a problem, he went

over the ground again, and got a second word and a second figure and was

told their places in the sentences and the sums; and so on and so on.  He

went over the ground again and again until he had collected all the parts

of the sums and all the parts of the sentences--and all in disorder, of

course, not in their proper rotation.  This had occupied two hours.



The Brahmin now sat silent and thinking, a while, then began and repeated

all the sentences, placing the words in their proper order, and untangled

the disordered arithmetical problems and gave accurate answers to them

all.



In the beginning he had asked the company to throw almonds at him during

the two hours, he to remember how many each gentleman had thrown; but

none were thrown, for the Viceroy said that the test would be a

sufficiently severe strain without adding that burden to it.



General Grant had a fine memory for all kinds of things, including even

names and faces, and I could have furnished an instance of it if I had

thought of it.  The first time I ever saw him was early in his first term

as President.  I had just arrived in Washington from the Pacific coast, a

stranger and wholly unknown to the public, and was passing the White

House one morning when I met a friend, a Senator from Nevada.  He asked

me if I would like to see the President.  I said I should be very glad;

so we entered.  I supposed that the President would be in the midst of a

crowd, and that I could look at him in peace and security from a

distance, as another stray cat might look at another king.  But it was in

the morning, and the Senator was using a privilege of his office which I

had not heard of--the privilege of intruding upon the Chief Magistrate's

working hours.  Before I knew it, the Senator and I were in the presence,

and there was none there but we three.  General Grant got slowly up from

his table, put his pen down, and stood before me with the iron expression

of a man who had not smiled for seven years, and was not intending to

smile for another seven.  He looked me steadily in the eyes--mine lost

confidence and fell.  I had never confronted a great man before, and was

in a miserable state of funk and inefficiency.  The Senator said:--



"Mr. President, may I have the privilege of introducing Mr. Clemens?"



The President gave my hand an unsympathetic wag and dropped it.  He did

not say a word but just stood.  In my trouble I could not think of

anything to say, I merely wanted to resign.  There was an awkward pause,

a dreary pause, a horrible pause.  Then I thought of something, and

looked up into that unyielding face, and said timidly:--



"Mr. President, I--I am embarrassed.  Are you?"



His face broke--just a little--a wee glimmer, the momentary flicker of a

summer-lightning smile, seven years ahead of time--and I was out and gone

as soon as it was.



Ten years passed away before I saw him the second time.  Meantime I was

become better known; and was one of the people appointed to respond to

toasts at the banquet given to General Grant in Chicago--by the Army of

the Tennessee when he came back from his tour around the world.  I

arrived late at night and got up late in the morning.  All the corridors

of the hotel were crowded with people waiting to get a glimpse of General

Grant when he should pass to the place whence he was to review the great

procession.  I worked my way by the suite of packed drawing-rooms, and at

the corner of the house I found a window open where there was a roomy

platform decorated with flags, and carpeted.  I stepped out on it, and

saw below me millions of people blocking all the streets, and other

millions caked together in all the windows and on all the house-tops

around.  These masses took me for General Grant, and broke into volcanic

explosions and cheers; but it was a good place to see the procession, and

I stayed.  Presently I heard the distant blare of military music, and far

up the street I saw the procession come in sight, cleaving its way

through the huzzaing multitudes, with Sheridan, the most martial figure

of the War, riding at its head in the dress uniform of a Lieutenant-

General.



And now General Grant, arm-in-arm with Major Carter Harrison, stepped out

on the platform, followed two and two by the badged and uniformed

reception committee.  General Grant was looking exactly as he had looked

upon that trying occasion of ten years before--all iron and bronze self-

possession.  Mr. Harrison came over and led me to the General and

formally introduced me.  Before I could put together the proper remark,

General Grant said--



"Mr. Clemens, I am not embarrassed.  Are you?"--and that little seven-

year smile twinkled across his face again.



Seventeen years have gone by since then, and to-day, in New York, the

streets are a crush of people who are there to honor the remains of the

great soldier as they pass to their final resting-place under the

monument; and the air is heavy with dirges and the boom of artillery, and

all the millions of America are thinking of the man who restored the

Union and the flag, and gave to democratic government a new lease of

life, and, as we may hope and do believe, a permanent place among the

beneficent institutions of men.



We had one game in the ship which was a good time-passer--at least it was

at night in the smoking-room when the men were getting freshened up from

the day's monotonies and dullnesses.  It was the completing of non-

complete stories.  That is to say, a man would tell all of a story except

the finish, then the others would try to supply the ending out of their

own invention.  When every one who wanted a chance had had it, the man

who had introduced the story would give it its original ending--then you

could take your choice.  Sometimes the new endings turned out to be

better than the old one.  But the story which called out the most

persistent and determined and ambitious effort was one which had no

ending, and so there was nothing to compare the new-made endings with.

The man who told it said he could furnish the particulars up to a certain

point only, because that was as much of the tale as he knew.  He had read

it in a volume of `sketches twenty-five years ago, and was interrupted

before the end was reached.  He would give any one fifty dollars who

would finish the story to the satisfaction of a jury to be appointed by

ourselves.  We appointed a jury and wrestled with the tale.  We invented

plenty of endings, but the jury voted them all down.  The jury was right.

It was a tale which the author of it may possibly have completed

satisfactorily, and if he really had that good fortune I would like to

know what the ending was.  Any ordinary man will find that the story's

strength is in its middle, and that there is apparently no way to

transfer it to the close, where of course it ought to be.  In substance

the storiette was as follows:



John Brown, aged thirty-one, good, gentle, bashful, timid, lived in a

quiet village in Missouri.  He was superintendent of the Presbyterian

Sunday-school.  It was but a humble distinction; still, it was his only

official one, and he was modestly proud of it and was devoted to its work

and its interests.  The extreme kindliness of his nature was recognized

by all; in fact, people said that he was made entirely out of good

impulses and bashfulness; that he could always be counted upon for help

when it was needed, and for bashfulness both when it was needed and when

it wasn't.



Mary Taylor, twenty-three, modest, sweet, winning, and in character and

person beautiful, was all in all to him.  And he was very nearly all in

all to her.  She was wavering, his hopes were high.  Her mother had been

in opposition from the first.  But she was wavering, too; he could see

it.  She was being touched by his warm interest in her two charity-

proteges and by his contributions toward their support.  These were two

forlorn and aged sisters who lived in a log hut in a lonely place up a

cross road four miles from Mrs. Taylor's farm.  One of the sisters was

crazy, and sometimes a little violent, but not often.



At last the time seemed ripe for a final advance, and Brown gathered his

courage together and resolved to make it.  He would take along a

contribution of double the usual size, and win the mother over; with her

opposition annulled, the rest of the conquest would be sure and prompt.



He took to the road in the middle of a placid Sunday afternoon in the

soft Missourian summer, and he was equipped properly for his mission.  He

was clothed all in white linen, with a blue ribbon for a necktie, and he

had on dressy tight boots.  His horse and buggy were the finest that the

livery stable could furnish.  The lap robe was of white linen, it was

new, and it had a hand-worked border that could not be rivaled in that

region for beauty and elaboration.



When he was four miles out on the lonely road and was walking his horse

over a wooden bridge, his straw hat blew off and fell in the creek, and

floated down and lodged against a bar.  He did not quite know what to do.

He must have the hat, that was manifest; but how was he to get it?



Then he had an idea.  The roads were empty, nobody was stirring.  Yes, he

would risk it.  He led the horse to the roadside and set it to cropping

the grass; then he undressed and put his clothes in the buggy, petted the

horse a moment to secure its compassion and its loyalty, then hurried to

the stream.  He swam out and soon had the hat.  When he got to the top of

the bank the horse was gone!



His legs almost gave way under him.  The horse was walking leisurely

along the road.  Brown trotted after it, saying, "Whoa, whoa, there's a

good fellow;" but whenever he got near enough to chance a jump for the

buggy, the horse quickened its pace a little and defeated him.  And so

this went on, the naked man perishing with anxiety, and expecting every

moment to see people come in sight.  He tagged on and on, imploring the

horse, beseeching the horse, till he had left a mile behind him, and was

closing up on the Taylor premises; then at last he was successful, and

got into the buggy.  He flung on his shirt, his necktie, and his coat;

then reached for--but he was too late; he sat suddenly down and pulled up

the lap-robe, for he saw some one coming out of the gate--a woman; he

thought.  He wheeled the horse to the left, and struck briskly up the

cross-road.  It was perfectly straight, and exposed on both sides; but

there were woods and a sharp turn three miles ahead, and he was very

grateful when he got there.  As he passed around the turn he slowed down

to a walk, and reached for his tr---- too late again.



He had come upon Mrs. Enderby, Mrs.  Glossop, Mrs. Taylor, and Mary.

They were on foot, and seemed tired and excited.  They came at once to

the buggy and shook hands, and all spoke at once, and said eagerly and

earnestly, how glad they were that he was come, and how fortunate it was.

And Mrs. Enderby said, impressively:



"It looks like an accident, his coming at such a time; but let no one

profane it with such a name; he was sent--sent from on high."



They were all moved, and Mrs. Glossop said in an awed voice:



"Sarah Enderby, you never said a truer word in your life.  This is no

accident, it is a special Providence.  He was sent.  He is an angel--an

angel as truly as ever angel was--an angel of deliverance.  I say angel,

Sarah Enderby, and will have no other word.  Don't let any one ever say

to me again, that there's no such thing as special Providences; for if

this isn't one, let them account for it that can."



"I know it's so," said Mrs. Taylor, fervently.  "John Brown, I could

worship you; I could go down on my knees to you.  Didn't something tell

you?--didn't you feel that you were sent?  I could kiss the hem of your

laprobe."



He was not able to speak; he was helpless with shame and fright.  Mrs.

Taylor went on:



"Why, just look at it all around, Julia Glossop.  Any person can see the

hand of Providence in it.  Here at noon what do we see?  We see the smoke

rising.  I speak up and say, 'That's the Old People's cabin afire.'

Didn't I, Julia Glossop?"



"The very words you said, Nancy Taylor.  I was as close to you as I am

now, and I heard them.  You may have said hut instead of cabin, but in

substance it's the same.  And you were looking pale, too."



"Pale?  I was that pale that if--why, you just compare it with this

laprobe.  Then the next thing I said was, 'Mary Taylor, tell the hired

man to rig up the team-we'll go to the rescue.'  And she said, 'Mother,

don't you know you told him he could drive to see his people, and stay

over Sunday?'  And it was just so.  I declare for it, I had forgotten it.

'Then,' said I, 'we'll go afoot.'  And go we did.  And found Sarah

Enderby on the road."



"And we all went together," said Mrs.  Enderby.  "And found the cabin set

fire to and burnt down by the crazy one, and the poor old things so old

and feeble that they couldn't go afoot.  And we got them to a shady place

and made them as comfortable as we could, and began to wonder which way

to turn to find some way to get them conveyed to Nancy Taylor's house.

And I spoke up and said--now what did I say?  Didn't I say, 'Providence

will provide'?"



"Why sure as you live, so you did!  I had forgotten it."



"So had I," said Mrs. Glossop and Mrs. Taylor; "but you certainly said

it.  Now wasn't that remarkable?"



"Yes, I said it.  And then we went to Mr. Moseley's, two miles, and all

of them were gone to the camp meeting over on Stony Fork; and then we

came all the way back, two miles, and then here, another mile--and

Providence has provided.  You see it yourselves"



They gazed at each other awe-struck, and lifted their hands and said in

unison:



"It's per-fectly wonderful."



"And then," said Mrs.  Glossop, "what do you think we had better do let

Mr. Brown drive the Old People to Nancy Taylor's one at a time, or put

both of them in the buggy, and him lead the horse?"



Brown gasped.



"Now, then, that's a question," said Mrs.  Enderby.  "You see, we are all

tired out, and any way we fix it it's going to be difficult.  For if Mr.

Brown takes both of them, at least one of us must, go back to help him,

for he can't load them into the buggy by himself, and they so helpless."



"That is so," said Mrs. Taylor.  "It doesn't look-oh, how would this do?

--one of us drive there with Mr. Brown, and the rest of you go along to

my house and get things ready.  I'll go with him.  He and I together can

lift one of the Old People into the buggy; then drive her to my house

and----



"But who will take care of the other one?" said Mrs.  Enderby.  "We

musn't leave her there in the woods alone, you know--especially the crazy

one.  There and back is eight miles, you see."



They had all been sitting on the grass beside the buggy for a while, now,

trying to rest their weary bodies.  They fell silent a moment or two, and

struggled in thought over the baffling situation; then Mrs. Enderby

brightened and said:



"I think I've got the idea, now.  You see, we can't walk any more.  Think

what we've done: four miles there, two to Moseley's, is six, then back to

here--nine miles since noon, and not a bite to eat; I declare I don't see

how we've done it; and as for me, I am just famishing.  Now, somebody's

got to go back, to help Mr. Brown--there's no getting mound that; but

whoever goes has got to ride, not walk.  So my idea is this: one of us to

ride back with Mr. Brown, then ride to Nancy Taylor's house with one of

the Old People, leaving Mr. Brown to keep the other old one company, you

all to go now to Nancy's and rest and wait; then one of you drive back

and get the other one and drive her to Nancy's, and Mr. Brown walk."



"Splendid!" they all cried.  "Oh, that will do--that will answer

perfectly."  And they all said that Mrs.  Enderby had the best head for

planning, in the company; and they said that they wondered that they

hadn't thought of this simple plan themselves.  They hadn't meant to take

back the compliment, good simple souls, and didn't know they had done it.

After a consultation it was decided that Mrs. Enderby should drive back

with Brown, she being entitled to the distinction because she had

invented the plan.  Everything now being satisfactorily arranged and

settled, the ladies rose, relieved and happy, and brushed down their

gowns, and three of them started homeward; Mrs. Enderby set her foot on

the buggy-step and was about to climb in, when Brown found a remnant of

his voice and gasped out--



"Please Mrs. Enderby, call them back--I am very weak; I can't walk, I

can't, indeed."



"Why, dear Mr. Brown!  You do look pale; I am ashamed of myself that I

didn't notice it sooner.  Come back-all of you!  Mr. Brown is not well.

Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Brown?--I'm real sorry.  Are you

in pain?"



"No, madam, only weak; I am not sick, but only just weak--lately; not

long, but just lately."



The others came back, and poured out their sympathies and commiserations,

and were full of self-reproaches for not having noticed how pale he was.



And they at once struck out a new plan, and soon agreed that it was by

far the best of all.  They would all go to Nancy Taylor's house and see

to Brown's needs first.  He could lie on the sofa in the parlor, and

while Mrs. Taylor and Mary took care of him the other two ladies would

take the buggy and go and get one of the Old People, and leave one of

themselves with the other one, and----



By this time, without any solicitation, they were at the horse's head and

were beginning to turn him around.  The danger was imminent, but Brown

found his voice again and saved himself.  He said--



"But ladies, you are overlooking something which makes the plan

impracticable.  You see, if you bring one of them home, and one remains

behind with the other, there will be three persons there when one of you

comes back for that other, for some one must drive the buggy back, and

three can't come home in it."



They all exclaimed, "Why, sure-ly, that is so!" and they were, all

perplexed again.



"Dear, dear, what can we do?" said Mrs.  Glossop;" it is the most mixed-

up thing that ever was.  The fox and the goose and the corn and things--

oh, dear, they are nothing to it."



They sat wearily down once more, to further torture their tormented heads

for a plan that would work.  Presently Mary offered a plan; it was her

first effort.  She said:



"I am young and strong, and am refreshed, now.  Take Mr. Brown to our

house, and give him help--you see how plainly he needs it.  I will go

back and take care of the Old People; I can be there in twenty minutes.

You can go on and do what you first started to do--wait on the main road

at our house until somebody comes along with a wagon; then send and bring

away the three of us.  You won't have to wait long; the farmers will soon

be coming back from town, now.  I will keep old Polly patient and cheered

up--the crazy one doesn't need it."



This plan was discussed and accepted; it seemed the best that could be

done, in the circumstances, and the Old People must be getting

discouraged by this time.



Brown felt relieved, and was deeply thankful.  Let him once get to the

main road and he would find a way to escape.



Then Mrs. Taylor said:



"The evening chill will be coming on, pretty soon, and those poor old

burnt-out things will need some kind of covering.  Take the lap-robe with

you, dear."



"Very well, Mother, I will."



She stepped to the buggy and put out her hand to take it----



That was the end of the tale.  The passenger who told it said that when

he read the story twenty-five years ago in a train he was interrupted at

that point--the train jumped off a bridge.



At first we thought we could finish the story quite easily, and we set to

work with confidence; but it soon began to appear that it was not a

simple thing, but difficult and baffling.  This was on account of Brown's

character--great generosity and kindliness, but complicated with unusual

shyness and diffidence, particularly in the presence of ladies.  There

was his love for Mary, in a hopeful state but not yet secure--just in a

condition, indeed, where its affair must be handled with great tact, and

no mistakes made, no offense given.  And there was the mother wavering,

half willing-by adroit and flawless diplomacy to be won over, now, or

perhaps never at all.  Also, there were the helpless Old People yonder in

the woods waiting-their fate and Brown's happiness to be determined by

what Brown should do within the next two seconds.  Mary was reaching for

the lap-robe; Brown must decide-there was no time to be lost.



Of course none but a happy ending of the story would be accepted by the

jury; the finish must find Brown in high credit with the ladies, his

behavior without blemish, his modesty unwounded, his character for self

sacrifice maintained, the Old People rescued through him, their

benefactor, all the party proud of him, happy in him, his praises on all

their tongues.



We tried to arrange this, but it was beset with persistent and

irreconcilable difficulties.  We saw that Brown's shyness would not allow

him to give up the lap-robe.  This would offend Mary and her mother; and

it would surprise the other ladies, partly because this stinginess toward

the suffering Old People would be out of character with Brown, and partly

because he was a special Providence and could not properly act so.  If

asked to explain his conduct, his shyness would not allow him to tell the

truth, and lack of invention and practice would find him incapable of

contriving a lie that would wash.  We worked at the troublesome problem

until three in the morning.



Meantime Mary was still reaching for the lap-robe.  We gave it up, and

decided to let her continue to reach.  It is the reader's privilege to

determine for himself how the thing came out.









CHAPTER III.



It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



On the seventh day out we saw a dim vast bulk standing up out of the

wastes of the Pacific and knew that that spectral promontory was Diamond

Head, a piece of this world which I had not seen before for twenty-nine

years.  So we were nearing Honolulu, the capital city of the Sandwich

Islands--those islands which to me were Paradise; a Paradise which I had

been longing all those years to see again.  Not any other thing in the

world could have stirred me as the sight of that great rock did.



In the night we anchored a mile from shore.  Through my port I could see

the twinkling lights of Honolulu and the dark bulk of the mountain-range

that stretched away right and left.  I could not make out the beautiful

Nuuana valley, but I knew where it lay, and remembered how it used to

look in the old times.  We used to ride up it on horseback in those days

--we young people--and branch off and gather bones in a sandy region

where one of the first Kamehameha's battles was fought.  He was a

remarkable man, for a king; and he was also a remarkable man for a

savage.  He was a mere kinglet and of little or no consequence at the

time of Captain Cook's arrival in 1788; but about four years afterward he

conceived the idea of enlarging his sphere of influence.  That is a

courteous modern phrase which means robbing your neighbor--for your

neighbor's benefit; and the great theater of its benevolences is Africa.

Kamehameha went to war, and in the course of ten years he whipped out all

the other kings and made himself master of every one of the nine or ten

islands that form the group.  But he did more than that.  He bought

ships, freighted them with sandal wood and other native products, and

sent them as far as South America and China; he sold to his savages the

foreign stuffs and tools and utensils which came back in these ships, and

started the march of civilization.  It is doubtful if the match to this

extraordinary thing is to be found in the history of any other savage.

Savages are eager to learn from the white man any new way to kill each

other, but it is not their habit to seize with avidity and apply with

energy the larger and nobler ideas which he offers them.  The details of

Kamehameha's history show that he was always hospitably ready to examine

the white man's ideas, and that he exercised a tidy discrimination in

making his selections from the samples placed on view.



A shrewder discrimination than was exhibited by his son and successor,

Liholiho, I think.  Liholiho could have qualified as a reformer, perhaps,

but as a king he was a mistake.  A mistake because he tried to be both

king and reformer.  This is mixing fire and gunpowder together.  A king

has no proper business with reforming.  His best policy is to keep things

as they are; and if he can't do that, he ought to try to make them worse

than they are.  This is not guesswork; I have thought over this matter a

good deal, so that if I should ever have a chance to become a king I

would know how to conduct the business in the best way.



When Liholiho succeeded his father he found himself possessed of an

equipment of royal tools and safeguards which a wiser king would have

known how to husband, and judiciously employ, and make profitable.  The

entire country was under the one scepter, and his was that scepter.

There was an Established Church, and he was the head of it.  There was a

Standing Army, and he was the head of that; an Army of 114 privates under

command of 27 Generals and a Field Marshal.  There was a proud and

ancient Hereditary Nobility.  There was still one other asset.  This was

the tabu--an agent endowed with a mysterious and stupendous power, an

agent not found among the properties of any European monarch, a tool of

inestimable value in the business.  Liholiho was headmaster of the tabu.

The tabu was the most ingenious and effective of all the inventions that

has ever been devised for keeping a people's privileges satisfactorily

restricted.



It required the sexes to live in separate houses.  It did not allow

people to eat in either house; they must eat in another place.  It did

not allow a man's woman-folk to enter his house.  It did not allow the

sexes to eat together; the men must eat first, and the women must wait on

them.  Then the women could eat what was left--if anything was left--and

wait on themselves.  I mean, if anything of a coarse or unpalatable sort

was left, the women could have it.  But not the good things, the fine

things, the choice things, such as pork, poultry, bananas, cocoanuts, the

choicer varieties of fish, and so on.  By the tabu, all these were sacred

to the men; the women spent their lives longing for them and wondering

what they might taste like; and they died without finding out.



These rules, as you see, were quite simple and clear.  It was easy to

remember them; and useful.  For the penalty for infringing any rule in

the whole list was death.  Those women easily learned to put up with

shark and taro and dog for a diet when the other things were so

expensive.



It was death for any one to walk upon tabu'd ground; or defile a tabu'd

thing with his touch; or fail in due servility to a chief; or step upon

the king's shadow.  The nobles and the King and the priests were always

suspending little rags here and there and yonder, to give notice to the

people that the decorated spot or thing was tabu, and death lurking near.

The struggle for life was difficult and chancy in the islands in those

days.



Thus advantageously was the new king situated.  Will it be believed that

the first thing he did was to destroy his Established Church, root and

branch?  He did indeed do that.  To state the case figuratively, he was a

prosperous sailor who burnt his ship and took to a raft.  This Church was

a horrid thing.  It heavily oppressed the people; it kept them always

trembling in the gloom of mysterious threatenings; it slaughtered them in

sacrifice before its grotesque idols of wood and stone; it cowed them, it

terrorized them, it made them slaves to its priests, and through the

priests to the king.  It was the best friend a king could have, and the

most dependable.  To a professional reformer who should annihilate so

frightful and so devastating a power as this Church, reverence and praise

would be due; but to a king who should do it, could properly be due

nothing but reproach; reproach softened by sorrow; sorrow for his

unfitness for his position.



He destroyed his Established Church, and his kingdom is a republic today,

in consequence of that act.



When he destroyed the Church and burned the idols he did a mighty thing

for civilization and for his people's weal--but it was not "business."

It was unkingly, it was inartistic.  It made trouble for his line.  The

American missionaries arrived while the burned idols were still smoking.

They found the nation without a religion, and they repaired the defect.

They offered their own religion and it was gladly received.  But it was

no support to arbitrary kingship, and so the kingly power began to weaken

from that day.  Forty-seven years later, when I was in the islands,

Kainehameha V.  was trying to repair Liholiho's blunder, and not

succeeding.  He had set up an Established Church and made himself the

head of it.  But it was only a pinchbeck thing, an imitation, a bauble,

an empty show.  It had no power, no value for a king.  It could not harry

or burn or slay, it in no way resembled the admirable machine which

Liholiho destroyed.  It was an Established Church without an

Establishment; all the people were Dissenters.



Long before that, the kingship had itself become but a name, a show.  At

an early day the missionaries had turned it into something very much like

a republic; and here lately the business whites have turned it into

something exactly like it.



In Captain Cook's time (1778), the native population of the islands was

estimated at 400,000; in 1836 at something short of 200,000, in 1866 at

50,000; it is to-day, per census, 25,000.  All intelligent people praise

Kamehameha I. and Liholiho for conferring upon their people the great

boon of civilization.  I would do it myself, but my intelligence is out

of repair, now, from over-work.



When I was in the islands nearly a generation ago, I was acquainted with

a young American couple who had among their belongings an attractive

little son of the age of seven--attractive but not practicably

companionable with me, because he knew no English.  He had played from

his birth with the little Kanakas on his father's plantation, and had

preferred their language and would learn no other.  The family removed to

America a month after I arrived in the islands, and straightway the boy

began to lose his Kanaka and pick up English.  By the time he was twelve

be hadn't a word of Kanaka left; the language had wholly departed from

his tongue and from his comprehension.  Nine years later, when he was

twenty-one, I came upon the family in one of the lake towns of New York,

and the mother told me about an adventure which her son had been having.

By trade he was now a professional diver.  A passenger boat had been

caught in a storm on the lake, and had gone down, carrying her people

with her.  A few days later the young diver descended, with his armor on,

and entered the berth-saloon of the boat, and stood at the foot of the

companionway, with his hand on the rail, peering through the dim water.

Presently something touched him on the shoulder, and he turned and found

a dead man swaying and bobbing about him and seemingly inspecting him

inquiringly.  He was paralyzed with fright.  His entry had disturbed the

water, and now he discerned a number of dim corpses making for him and

wagging their heads and swaying their bodies like sleepy people trying to

dance.  His senses forsook him, and in that condition he was drawn to the

surface.  He was put to bed at home, and was soon very ill.  During some

days he had seasons of delirium which lasted several hours at a time; and

while they lasted he talked Kanaka incessantly and glibly; and Kanaka

only.  He was still very ill, and he talked to me in that tongue; but I

did not understand it, of course.  The doctor-books tell us that cases

like this are not uncommon.  Then the doctors ought to study the cases

and find out how to multiply them.  Many languages and things get mislaid

in a person's head, and stay mislaid for lack of this remedy.



Many memories of my former visit to the islands came up in my mind while

we lay at anchor in front of Honolulu that night.  And pictures--pictures

pictures--an enchanting procession of them!  I was impatient for the

morning to come.



When it came it brought disappointment, of course.  Cholera had broken

out in the town, and we were not allowed to have any communication with

the shore.  Thus suddenly did my dream of twenty-nine years go to ruin.

Messages came from friends, but the friends themselves I was not to have

any sight of.  My lecture-hall was ready, but I was not to see that,

either.



Several of our passengers belonged in Honolulu, and these were sent

ashore; but nobody could go ashore and return.  There were people on

shore who were booked to go with us to Australia, but we could not

receive them; to do it would cost us a quarantine-term in Sydney.  They

could have escaped the day before, by ship to San Francisco; but the bars

had been put up, now, and they might have to wait weeks before any ship

could venture to give them a passage any whither.  And there were

hardships for others.  An elderly lady and her son, recreation-seekers

from Massachusetts, had wandered westward, further and further from home,

always intending to take the return track, but always concluding to go

still a little further; and now here they were at anchor before Honolulu

positively their last westward-bound indulgence--they had made up their

minds to that--but where is the use in making up your mind in this world?

It is usually a waste of time to do it.  These two would have to stay

with us as far as Australia.  Then they could go on around the world, or

go back the way they had come; the distance and the accommodations and

outlay of time would be just the same, whichever of the two routes they

might elect to take.  Think of it: a projected excursion of five hundred

miles gradually enlarged, without any elaborate degree of intention, to a

possible twenty-four thousand.  However, they were used to extensions by

this time, and did not mind this new one much.



And we had with us a lawyer from Victoria, who had been sent out by the

Government on an international matter, and he had brought his wife with

him and left the children at home with the servants and now what was to

be done?  Go ashore amongst the cholera and take the risks?  Most

certainly not.  They decided to go on, to the Fiji islands, wait there a

fortnight for the next ship, and then sail for home.  They couldn't

foresee that they wouldn't see a homeward-bound ship again for six weeks,

and that no word could come to them from the children, and no word go

from them to the children in all that time.  It is easy to make plans in

this world; even a cat can do it; and when one is out in those remote

oceans it is noticeable that a cat's plans and a man's are worth about

the same.  There is much the same shrinkage in both, in the matter of

values.



There was nothing for us to do but sit about the decks in the shade of

the awnings and look at the distant shore.  We lay in luminous blue

water; shoreward the water was green-green and brilliant; at the shore

itself it broke in a long white ruffle, and with no crash, no sound that

we could hear.  The town was buried under a mat of foliage that looked

like a cushion of moss.  The silky mountains were clothed in soft, rich

splendors of melting color, and some of the cliffs were veiled in

slanting mists.  I recognized it all.  It was just as I had seen it long

before, with nothing of its beauty lost, nothing of its charm wanting.



A change had come, but that was political, and not visible from the ship.

The monarchy of my day was gone, and a republic was sitting in its seat.

It was not a material change.  The old imitation pomps, the fuss and

feathers, have departed, and the royal trademark--that is about all that

one could miss, I suppose.  That imitation monarchy, was grotesque

enough, in my time; if it had held on another thirty years it would have

been a monarchy without subjects of the king's race.



We had a sunset of a very fine sort.  The vast plain of the sea was

marked off in bands of sharply-contrasted colors: great stretches of dark

blue, others of purple, others of polished bronze; the billowy mountains

showed all sorts of dainty browns and greens, blues and purples and

blacks, and the rounded velvety backs of certain of them made one want to

stroke them, as one would the sleek back of a cat.  The long, sloping

promontory projecting into the sea at the west turned dim and leaden and

spectral, then became suffused with pink--dissolved itself in a pink

dream, so to speak, it seemed so airy and unreal.  Presently the cloud-

rack was flooded with fiery splendors, and these were copied on the

surface of the sea, and it made one drunk with delight to look upon it.



From talks with certain of our passengers whose home was Honolulu, and

from a sketch by Mrs. Mary H. Krout, I was able to perceive what the

Honolulu of to-day is, as compared with the Honolulu of my time.  In my

time it was a beautiful little town, made up of snow-white wooden

cottages deliciously smothered in tropical vines and flowers and trees

and shrubs; and its coral roads and streets were hard and smooth, and as

white as the houses.  The outside aspects of the place suggested the

presence of a modest and comfortable prosperity--a general prosperity--

perhaps one might strengthen the term and say universal.  There were no

fine houses, no fine furniture.  There were no decorations.  Tallow

candles furnished the light for the bedrooms, a whale-oil lamp furnished

it for the parlor.  Native matting served as carpeting.  In the parlor

one would find two or three lithographs on the walls--portraits as a

rule: Kamehameha IV., Louis Kossuth, Jenny Lind; and may be an engraving

or two: Rebecca at the Well, Moses smiting the rock, Joseph's servants

finding the cup in Benjamin's sack.  There would be a center table, with

books of a tranquil sort on it: The Whole Duty of Man, Baxter's Saints'

Rest, Fox's Martyrs, Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy, bound copies of The

Missionary Herald and of Father Damon's Seaman's Friend.  A melodeon; a

music stand, with 'Willie, We have Missed You', 'Star of the Evening',

'Roll on Silver Moon', 'Are We Most There', 'I Would not Live Alway', and

other songs of love and sentiment, together with an assortment of hymns.

A what-not with semi-globular glass paperweights, enclosing miniature

pictures of ships, New England rural snowstorms, and the like; sea-shells

with Bible texts carved on them in cameo style; native curios; whale's

tooth with full-rigged ship carved on it.  There was nothing reminiscent

of foreign parts, for nobody had been abroad.  Trips were made to San

Francisco, but that could not be called going abroad.  Comprehensively

speaking, nobody traveled.



But Honolulu has grown wealthy since then, and of course wealth has

introduced changes; some of the old simplicities have disappeared.  Here

is a modern house, as pictured by Mrs.  Krout:



     "Almost every house is surrounded by extensive lawns and gardens

     enclosed by walls of volcanic stone or by thick hedges of the

     brilliant hibiscus.



     "The houses are most tastefully and comfortably furnished; the

     floors are either of hard wood covered with rugs or with fine Indian

     matting, while there is a preference, as in most warm countries, for

     rattan or bamboo furniture; there are the usual accessories of bric-

     a-brac, pictures, books, and curios from all parts of the world, for

     these island dwellers are indefatigable travelers.



     "Nearly every house has what is called a lanai.  It is a large

     apartment, roofed, floored, open on three sides, with a door or a

     draped archway opening into the drawing-room.  Frequently the roof

     is formed by the thick interlacing boughs of the hou tree,

     impervious to the sun and even to the rain, except in violent

     storms.  Vines are trained about the sides--the stephanotis or some

     one of the countless fragrant and blossoming trailers which abound

     in the islands.  There are also curtains of matting that may be

     drawn to exclude the sun or rain.  The floor is bare for coolness,

     or partially covered with rugs, and the lanai is prettily furnished

     with comfortable chairs, sofas, and tables loaded with flowers, or

     wonderful ferns in pots.



     "The lanai is the favorite reception room, and here at any social

     function the musical program is given and cakes and ices are served;

     here morning callers are received, or gay riding parties, the ladies

     in pretty divided skirts, worn for convenience in riding astride,--

     the universal mode adopted by Europeans and Americans, as well as by

     the natives.



     "The comfort and luxury of such an apartment, especially at a

     seashore villa, can hardly be imagined.  The soft breezes sweep

     across it, heavy with the fragrance of jasmine and gardenia, and

     through the swaying boughs of palm and mimosa there are glimpses of

     rugged mountains, their summits veiled in clouds, of purple sea with

     the white surf beating eternally against the reefs, whiter still in

     the yellow sunlight or the magical moonlight of the tropics."



There: rugs, ices, pictures, lanais, worldly books, sinful bric-a-brac

fetched from everywhere.  And the ladies riding astride.  These are

changes, indeed.  In my time the native women rode astride, but the white

ones lacked the courage to adopt their wise custom.  In my time ice was

seldom seen in Honolulu.  It sometimes came in sailing vessels from New

England as ballast; and then, if there happened to be a man-of-war in

port and balls and suppers raging by consequence, the ballast was worth

six hundred dollars a ton, as is evidenced by reputable tradition.  But

the ice-machine has traveled all over the world, now, and brought ice

within everybody's reach.  In Lapland and Spitzbergen no one uses native

ice in our day, except the bears and the walruses.



The bicycle is not mentioned.  It was not necessary.  We know that it is

there, without inquiring.  It is everywhere.  But for it, people could

never have had summer homes on the summit of Mont Blanc; before its day,

property up there had but a nominal value.  The ladies of the Hawaiian

capital learned too late the right way to occupy a horse--too late to get

much benefit from it.  The riding-horse is retiring from business

everywhere in the world.  In Honolulu a few years from now he will be

only a tradition.



We all know about Father Damien, the French priest who voluntarily

forsook the world and went to the leper island of Molokai to labor among

its population of sorrowful exiles who wait there, in slow-consuming

misery, for death to cone and release them from their troubles; and we

know that the thing which he knew beforehand would happen, did happen:

that he became a leper himself, and died of that horrible disease.  There

was still another case of self-sacrifice, it appears.  I asked after

"Billy" Ragsdale, interpreter to the Parliament in my time--a half-white.

He was a brilliant young fellow, and very popular.  As an interpreter he

would have been hard to match anywhere.  He used to stand up in the

Parliament and turn the English speeches into Hawaiian and the Hawaiian

speeches into English with a readiness and a volubility that were

astonishing.  I asked after him, and was told that his prosperous career

was cut short in a sudden and unexpected way, just as he was about to

marry a beautiful half-caste girl.  He discovered, by some nearly

invisible sign about his skin, that the poison of leprosy was in him.

The secret was his own, and might be kept concealed for years; but he

would not be treacherous to the girl that loved him; he would not marry

her to a doom like his.  And so he put his affairs in order, and went

around to all his friends and bade them good-bye, and sailed in the leper

ship to Molokai.  There he died the loathsome and lingering death that

all lepers die.



In this place let me insert a paragraph or two from 11 The Paradise of

the Pacific" (Rev. H. H. Gowen)--



     "Poor lepers!  It is easy for those who have no relatives or friends

     among them to enforce the decree of segregation to the letter, but

     who can write of the terrible, the heart-breaking scenes which that

     enforcement has brought about?



     "A man upon Hawaii was suddenly taken away after a summary arrest,

     leaving behind him a helpless wife about to give birth to a babe.

     The devoted wife with great pain and risk came the whole journey to

     Honolulu, and pleaded until the authorities were unable to resist

     her entreaty that she might go and live like a leper with her leper

     husband.



     "A woman in the prime of life and activity is condemned as an

     incipient leper, suddenly removed from her home, and her husband

     returns to find his two helpless babes moaning for their lost

     mother.



     "Imagine it!  The case of the babies is hard, but its bitterness is

     a trifle--less than a trifle--less than nothing--compared to what

     the mother must suffer; and suffer minute by minute, hour by hour,

     day by day, month by month, year by year, without respite, relief,

     or any abatement of her pain till she dies.



     "One woman, Luka Kaaukau, has been living with her leper husband in

     the settlement for twelve years.  The man has scarcely a joint left,

     his limbs are only distorted ulcerated stumps, for four years his

     wife has put every particle of food into his mouth.  He wanted his

     wife to abandon his wretched carcass long ago, as she herself was

     sound and well, but Luka said that she was content to remain and

     wait on the man she loved till the spirit should be freed from its

     burden.



     "I myself have known hard cases enough:--of a girl, apparently in

     full health, decorating the church with me at Easter, who before

     Christmas is taken away as a confirmed leper; of a mother hiding her

     child in the mountains for years so that not even her dearest

     friends knew that she had a child alive, that he might not be taken

     away; of a respectable white man taken away from his wife and

     family, and compelled to become a dweller in the Leper Settlement,

     where he is counted dead, even by the insurance companies."



And one great pity of it all is, that these poor sufferers are innocent.

The leprosy does not come of sins which they committed, but of sins

committed by their ancestors, who escaped the curse of leprosy!



Mr. Gowan has made record of a certain very striking circumstance.  Would

you expect to find in that awful Leper Settlement a custom worthy to be

transplanted to your own country?  They have one such, and it is

inexpressibly touching and beautiful.  When death sets open the prison-

door of life there, the band salutes the freed soul with a burst of glad

music!









CHAPTER IV.



A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic

compliment.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Sailed from Honolulu.--From diary:



Sept. 2.  Flocks of flying fish-slim, shapely, graceful, and intensely

white.  With the sun on them they look like a flight of silver fruit-

knives.  They are able to fly a hundred yards.



Sept. 3.  In 9 deg. 50' north latitude, at breakfast.  Approaching the

equator on a long slant.  Those of us who have never seen the equator are

a good deal excited.  I think I would rather see it than any other thing

in the world.  We entered the "doldrums" last night--variable winds,

bursts of rain, intervals of calm, with chopping seas and a wobbly and

drunken motion to the ship--a condition of things findable in other

regions sometimes, but present in the doldrums always.  The globe-

girdling belt called the doldrums is 20 degrees wide, and the thread

called the equator lies along the middle of it.



Sept. 4.  Total eclipse of the moon last night.  At 1.30 it began to go

off.  At total--or about that--it was like a rich rosy cloud with a

tumbled surface framed in the circle and projecting from it--a bulge of

strawberry-ice, so to speak.  At half-eclipse the moon was like a gilded

acorn in its cup.



Sept. 5.  Closing in on the equator this noon.  A sailor explained to a

young girl that the ship's speed is poor because we are climbing up the

bulge toward the center of the globe; but that when we should once get

over, at the equator, and start down-hill, we should fly.  When she asked

him the other day what the fore-yard was, he said it was the front yard,

the open area in the front end of the ship.  That man has a good deal of

learning stored up, and the girl is likely to get it all.



Afternoon.  Crossed the equator.  In the distance it looked like a blue

ribbon stretched across the ocean.  Several passengers kodak'd it.  We

had no fool ceremonies, no fantastics, no horse play.  All that sort of

thing has gone out.  In old times a sailor, dressed as Neptune, used to

come in over the bows, with his suite, and lather up and shave everybody

who was crossing the equator for the first time, and then cleanse these

unfortunates by swinging them from the yard-arm and ducking them three

times in the sea. This was considered funny.  Nobody knows why.  No, that

is not true.  We do know why.  Such a thing could never be funny on land;

no part of the old-time grotesque performances gotten up on shipboard to

celebrate the passage of the line would ever be funny on shore--they

would seem dreary and less to shore people.  But the shore people would

change their minds about it at sea, on a long voyage.  On such a voyage,

with its eternal monotonies, people's intellects deteriorate; the owners

of the intellects soon reach a point where they almost seem to prefer

childish things to things of a maturer degree.  One is often surprised at

the juvenilities which grown people indulge in at sea, and the interest

they take in them, and the consuming enjoyment they get out of them.

This is on long voyages only.  The mind gradually becomes inert, dull,

blunted; it loses its accustomed interest in intellectual things; nothing

but horse-play can rouse it, nothing but wild and foolish grotesqueries

can entertain it.  On short voyages it makes no such exposure of itself;

it hasn't time to slump down to this sorrowful level.



The short-voyage passenger gets his chief physical exercise out of

"horse-billiards"--shovel-board.  It is a good game.  We play it in this

ship.  A quartermaster chalks off a diagram like this-on the deck.



The player uses a cue that is like a broom-handle with a quarter-moon of

wood fastened to the end of it.  With this he shoves wooden disks the

size of a saucer--he gives the disk a vigorous shove and sends it fifteen

or twenty feet along the deck and lands it in one of the squares if he

can.  If it stays there till the inning is played out, it will count as

many points in the game as the figure in the square it has stopped in

represents.  The adversary plays to knock that disk out and leave his own

in its place--particularly if it rests upon the 9 or 10 or some other of

the high numbers; but if it rests in the "10off" he backs it up--lands

his disk behind it a foot or two, to make it difficult for its owner to

knock it out of that damaging place and improve his record.  When the

inning is played out it may be found that each adversary has placed his

four disks where they count; it may be found that some of them are

touching chalk lines and not counting; and very often it will be found

that there has been a general wreckage, and that not a disk has been left

within the diagram.  Anyway, the result is recorded, whatever it is, and

the game goes on.  The game is 100 points, and it takes from twenty

minutes to forty to play it, according to luck and the condition of the

sea.  It is an exciting game, and the crowd of spectators furnish

abundance of applause for fortunate shots and plenty of laughter for the

other kind.  It is a game of skill, but at the same time the uneasy

motion of the ship is constantly interfering with skill; this makes it a

chancy game, and the element of luck comes largely in.



We had a couple of grand tournaments, to determine who should be

"Champion of the Pacific"; they included among the participants nearly

all the passengers, of both sexes, and the officers of the ship, and they

afforded many days of stupendous interest and excitement, and murderous

exercise--for horse-billiards is a physically violent game.



The figures in the following record of some of the closing games in the

first tournament will show, better than any description, how very chancy

the game is.  The losers here represented had all been winners in the

previous games of the series, some of them by fine majorities:



Chase,102      Mrs.  D.,57    Mortimer, 105  The Surgeon, 92

Miss C.,105    Mrs.  T.,9     Clemens, 101   Taylor,92

Taylor,109     Davies,95      Miss C., 108   Mortimer,55

Thomas,102     Roper,76       Clemens, 111   Miss C.,89

Coomber, 106   Chase,98



And so on; until but three couples of winners were left.  Then I beat my

man, young Smith beat his man, and Thomas beat his.  This reduced the

combatants to three.  Smith and I took the deck, and I led off.  At the

close of the first inning I was 10 worse than nothing and Smith had

scored 7.  The luck continued against me.  When I was 57, Smith was 97--

within 3 of out.  The luck changed then.  He picked up a 10-off or so,

and couldn't recover.  I beat him.



The next game would end tournament No. 1.



Mr. Thomas and I were the contestants.  He won the lead and went to the

bat--so to speak.  And there he stood, with the crotch of his cue resting

against his disk while the ship rose slowly up, sank slowly down, rose

again, sank again.  She never seemed to rise to suit him exactly.  She

started up once more; and when she was nearly ready for the turn, he let

drive and landed his disk just within the left-hand end of the 10.

(Applause).  The umpire proclaimed "a good 10," and the game-keeper set

it down.  I played: my disk grazed the edge of Mr. Thomas's disk, and

went out of the diagram.  (No applause.)



Mr. Thomas played again--and landed his second disk alongside of the

first, and almost touching its right-hand side.  "Good 10." (Great

applause.)



I played, and missed both of them.  (No applause.)



Mr. Thomas delivered his third shot and landed his disk just at the right

of the other two.  " Good 10." (Immense applause.)



There they lay, side by side, the three in a row.  It did not seem

possible that anybody could miss them.  Still I did it.  (Immense

silence.)



Mr. Thomas played his last disk.  It seems incredible, but he actually

landed that disk alongside of the others, and just to the right of them-a

straight solid row of 4 disks.  (Tumultuous and long-continued applause.)



Then I played my last disk.  Again it did not seem possible that anybody

could miss that row--a row which would have been 14 inches long if the

disks had been clamped together; whereas, with the spaces separating them

they made a longer row than that.  But I did it.  It may be that I was

getting nervous.



I think it unlikely that that innings has ever had its parallel in the

history of horse-billiards.  To place the four disks side by side in the

10 was an extraordinary feat; indeed, it was a kind of miracle.  To miss

them was another miracle.  It will take a century to produce another man

who can place the four disks in the 10; and longer than that to find a

man who can't knock them out.  I was ashamed of my performance at the

time, but now that I reflect upon it I see that it was rather fine and

difficult.



Mr. Thomas kept his luck, and won the game, and later the championship.



In a minor tournament I won the prize, which was a Waterbury watch.  I

put it in my trunk.  In Pretoria, South Africa, nine months afterward, my

proper watch broke down and I took the Waterbury out, wound it, set it by

the great clock on the Parliament House (8.05), then went back to my room

and went to bed, tired from a long railway journey.  The parliamentary

clock had a peculiarity which I was not aware of at the time--

a peculiarity which exists in no other clock, and would not exist in that

one if it had been made by a sane person; on the half-hour it strikes the

succeeding hour, then strikes the hour again, at the proper time.  I lay

reading and smoking awhile; then, when I could hold my eyes open no

longer and was about to put out the light, the great clock began to boom,

and I counted ten.  I reached for the Waterbury to see how it was getting

along.  It was marking 9.30.  It seemed rather poor speed for a three-

dollar watch, but I supposed that the climate was affecting it.  I shoved

it half an hour ahead; and took to my book and waited to see what would

happen.  At 10 the great clock struck ten again.  I looked--the Waterbury

was marking half-past 10.  This was too much speed for the money, and it

troubled me.  I pushed the hands back a half hour, and waited once more;

I had to, for I was vexed and restless now, and my sleepiness was gone.

By and by the great clock struck 11.  The Waterbury was marking 10.30.  I

pushed it ahead half an hour, with some show of temper.  By and by the

great clock struck 11 again.  The Waterbury showed up 11.30, now, and I

beat her brains out against the bedstead.  I was sorry next day, when I

found out.



To return to the ship.



The average human being is a perverse creature; and when he isn't that,

he is a practical joker.  The result to the other person concerned is

about the same: that is, he is made to suffer.  The washing down of the

decks begins at a very early hour in all ships; in but few ships are any

measures taken to protect the passengers, either by waking or warning

them, or by sending a steward to close their ports.  And so the

deckwashers have their opportunity, and they use it.  They send a bucket

of water slashing along the side of the ship and into the ports,

drenching the passenger's clothes, and often the passenger himself.  This

good old custom prevailed in this ship, and under unusually favorable

circumstances, for in the blazing tropical regions a removable zinc thing

like a sugarshovel projects from the port to catch the wind and bring it

in; this thing catches the wash-water and brings it in, too--and in

flooding abundance.  Mrs. L, an invalid, had to sleep on the locker--sofa

under her port, and every time she over-slept and thus failed to take

care of herself, the deck-washers drowned her out.



And the painters, what a good time they had!  This ship would be going

into dock for a month in Sydney for repairs; but no matter, painting was

going on all the time somewhere or other.  The ladies' dresses were

constantly getting ruined, nevertheless protests and supplications went

for nothing.  Sometimes a lady, taking an afternoon nap on deck near a

ventilator or some other thing that didn't need painting, would wake up

by and by and find that the humorous painter had been noiselessly daubing

that thing and had splattered her white gown all over with little greasy

yellow spots.



The blame for this untimely painting did not lie with the ship's

officers, but with custom.  As far back as Noah's time it became law that

ships must be constantly painted and fussed at when at sea; custom grew

out of the law, and at sea custom knows no death; this custom will

continue until the sea goes dry.



Sept. 8.--Sunday.  We are moving so nearly south that we cross only about

two meridians of longitude a day.  This morning we were in longitude 178

west from Greenwich, and 57 degrees west from San Francisco.  To-morrow

we shall be close to the center of the globe--the 180th degree of west

longitude and 180th degree of east longitude.



And then we must drop out a day-lose a day out of our lives, a day never

to be found again.  We shall all die one day earlier than from the

beginning of time we were foreordained to die.  We shall be a day

behindhand all through eternity.  We shall always be saying to the other

angels, "Fine day today," and they will be always retorting, "But it

isn't to-day, it's tomorrow." We shall be in a state of confusion all the

time and shall never know what true happiness is.



Next Day.  Sure enough, it has happened.  Yesterday it was September 8,

Sunday; to-day, per the bulletin-board at the head of the companionway,

it is September 10, Tuesday.  There is something uncanny about it.  And

uncomfortable.  In fact, nearly unthinkable, and wholly unrealizable,

when one comes to consider it.  While we were crossing the 180th meridian

it was Sunday in the stern of the ship where my family were, and Tuesday

in the bow where I was.  They were there eating the half of a fresh apple

on the 8th, and I was at the same time eating the other half of it on the

10th--and I could notice how stale it was, already.  The family were the

same age that they were when I had left them five minutes before, but I

was a day older now than I was then.  The day they were living in

stretched behind them half way round the globe, across the Pacific Ocean

and America and Europe; the day I was living in stretched in front of me

around the other half to meet it.  They were stupendous days for bulk and

stretch; apparently much larger days than we had ever been in before.

All previous days had been but shrunk-up little things by comparison.

The difference in temperature between the two days was very marked, their

day being hotter than mine because it was closer to the equator.



Along about the moment that we were crossing the Great Meridian a child

was born in the steerage, and now there is no way to tell which day it

was born on.  The nurse thinks it was Sunday, the surgeon thinks it was

Tuesday.  The child will never know its own birthday.  It will always be

choosing first one and then the other, and will never be able to make up

its mind permanently.  This will breed vacillation and uncertainty in its

opinions about religion, and politics, and business, and sweethearts, and

everything, and will undermine its principles, and rot them away, and

make the poor thing characterless, and its success in life impossible.

Every one in the ship says so.  And this is not all--in fact, not the

worst.  For there is an enormously rich brewer in the ship who said as

much as ten days ago, that if the child was born on his birthday he would

give it ten thousand dollars to start its little life with.  His birthday

was Monday, the 9th of September.



If the ships all moved in the one direction--westward, I mean--the world

would suffer a prodigious loss--in the matter of valuable time, through

the dumping overboard on the Great Meridian of such multitudes of days by

ships crews and passengers.  But fortunately the ships do not all sail

west, half of them sail east.  So there is no real loss.  These latter

pick up all the discarded days and add them to the world's stock again;

and about as good as new, too; for of course the salt water preserves

them.









CHAPTER V.



Noise proves nothing.  Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as

if she had laid an asteroid.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



WEDNESDAY, Sept. 11.  In this world we often make mistakes of judgment.

We do not as a rule get out of them sound and whole, but sometimes we do.

At dinner yesterday evening-present, a mixture of Scotch, English,

American, Canadian, and Australasian folk--a discussion broke out about

the pronunciation of certain Scottish words.  This was private ground,

and the non-Scotch nationalities, with one exception, discreetly kept

still.  But I am not discreet, and I took a hand.  I didn't know anything

about the subject, but I took a hand just to have something to do.  At

that moment the word in dispute was the word three.  One Scotchman was

claiming that the peasantry of Scotland pronounced it three, his

adversaries claimed that they didn't--that they pronounced it 'thraw'.

The solitary Scot was having a sultry time of it, so I thought I would

enrich him with my help.  In my position I was necessarily quite

impartial, and was equally as well and as ill equipped to fight on the

one side as on the other.  So I spoke up and said the peasantry

pronounced the word three, not thraw.  It was an error of judgment.

There was a moment of astonished and ominous silence, then weather

ensued.  The storm rose and spread in a surprising way, and I was snowed

under in a very few minutes.  It was a bad defeat for me--a kind of

Waterloo.  It promised to remain so, and I wished I had had better sense

than to enter upon such a forlorn enterprise.  But just then I had a

saving thought--at least a thought that offered a chance.  While the

storm was still raging, I made up a Scotch couplet, and then spoke up and

said:



"Very well, don't say any more.  I confess defeat.  I thought I knew, but

I see my mistake.  I was deceived by one of your Scotch poets."



"A Scotch poet!  O come!  Name him."



"Robert Burns."



It is wonderful the power of that name.  These men looked doubtful--but

paralyzed, all the same.  They were quite silent for a moment; then one

of them said--with the reverence in his voice which is always present in

a Scotchman's tone when he utters the name.



"Does Robbie Burns say--what does he say?"



"This is what he says:



         'There were nae bairns but only three--

          Ane at the breast, twa at the knee.'"



It ended the discussion.  There was no man there profane enough, disloyal

enough, to say any word against a thing which Robert Burns had settled.

I shall always honor that great name for the salvation it brought me in

this time of my sore need.



It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with

confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.  There are people who think

that honesty is always the best policy.  This is a superstition; there

are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it.



We are moving steadily southward-getting further and further down under

the projecting paunch of the globe.  Yesterday evening we saw the Big

Dipper and the north star sink below the horizon and disappear from our

world.  No, not "we," but they.  They saw it--somebody saw it--and told

me about it.  But it is no matter, I was not caring for those things, I

am tired of them, any way.  I think they are well enough, but one doesn't

want them always hanging around.  My interest was all in the Southern

Cross.  I had never seen that.  I had heard about it all my life, and it

was but natural that I should be burning to see it.  No other

constellation makes so much talk.  I had nothing against the Big Dipper--

and naturally couldn't have anything against it, since it is a citizen of

our own sky, and the property of the United States--but I did want it to

move out of the way and give this foreigner a chance.  Judging by the

size of the talk which the Southern Cross had made, I supposed it would

need a sky all to itself.



But that was a mistake.  We saw the Cross to-night, and it is not large.

Not large, and not strikingly bright.  But it was low down toward the

horizon, and it may improve when it gets up higher in the sky.  It is

ingeniously named, for it looks just as a cross would look if it looked

like something else.  But that description does not describe; it is too

vague, too general, too indefinite.  It does after a fashion suggest a

cross across that is out of repair--or out of drawing; not correctly

shaped.  It is long, with a short cross-bar, and the cross-bar is canted

out of the straight line.



It consists of four large stars and one little one.  The little one is

out of line and further damages the shape.  It should have been placed at

the intersection of the stem and the cross-bar.  If you do not draw an

imaginary line from star to star it does not suggest a cross--nor

anything in particular.



One must ignore the little star, and leave it out of the combination--it

confuses everything.  If you leave it out, then you can make out of the

four stars a sort of cross--out of true; or a sort of kite--out of true;

or a sort of coffin-out of true.



Constellations have always been troublesome things to name.  If you give

one of them a fanciful name, it will always refuse to live up to it; it

will always persist in not resembling the thing it has been named for.

Ultimately, to satisfy the public, the fanciful name has to be discarded

for a common-sense one, a manifestly descriptive one.  The Great Bear

remained the Great Bear--and unrecognizable as such--for thousands of

years; and people complained about it all the time, and quite properly;

but as soon as it became the property of the United States, Congress

changed it to the Big Dipper, and now every body is satisfied, and there

is no more talk about riots.  I would not change the Southern Cross to

the Southern Coffin, I would change it to the Southern Kite; for up there

in the general emptiness is the proper home of a kite, but not for

coffins and crosses and dippers.  In a little while, now--I cannot tell

exactly how long it will be--the globe will belong to the English-

speaking race; and of course the skies also.  Then the constellations

will be re-organized, and polished up, and re-named--the most of them

"Victoria," I reckon, but this one will sail thereafter as the Southern

Kite, or go out of business.  Several towns and things, here and there,

have been named for Her Majesty already.



In these past few days we are plowing through a mighty Milky Way of

islands.  They are so thick on the map that one would hardly expect to

find room between them for a canoe; yet we seldom glimpse one.  Once we

saw the dim bulk of a couple of them, far away, spectral and dreamy

things; members of the Horne-Alofa and Fortuna.  On the larger one are

two rival native kings--and they have a time together.  They are

Catholics; so are their people.  The missionaries there are French

priests.



From the multitudinous islands in these regions the "recruits" for the

Queensland plantations were formerly drawn; are still drawn from them, I

believe.  Vessels fitted up like old-time slavers came here and carried

off the natives to serve as laborers in the great Australian province.

In the beginning it was plain, simple man-stealing, as per testimony of

the missionaries.  This has been denied, but not disproven.  Afterward it

was forbidden by law to "recruit" a native without his consent, and

governmental agents were sent in all recruiting vessels to see that the

law was obeyed--which they did, according to the recruiting people; and

which they sometimes didn't, according to the missionaries.  A man could

be lawfully recruited for a three-years term of service; he could

volunteer for another term if he so chose; when his time was up he could

return to his island.  And would also have the means to do it; for the

government required the employer to put money in its hands for this

purpose before the recruit was delivered to him.



Captain Wawn was a recruiting ship-master during many years.  From his

pleasant book one gets the idea that the recruiting business was quite

popular with the islanders, as a rule.  And yet that did not make the

business wholly dull and uninteresting; for one finds rather frequent

little breaks in the monotony of it--like this, for instance:



     "The afternoon of our arrival at Leper Island the schooner was lying

     almost becalmed under the lee of the lofty central portion of the

     island, about three-quarters of a mile from the shore.  The boats

     were in sight at some distance.  The recruiter-boat had run into a

     small nook on the rocky coast, under a high bank, above which stood

     a solitary hut backed by dense forest.  The government agent and

     mate in the second boat lay about 400 yards to the westward.



     "Suddenly we heard the sound of firing, followed by yells from the

     natives on shore, and then we saw the recruiter-boat push out with a

     seemingly diminished crew.  The mate's boat pulled quickly up, took

     her in tow, and presently brought her alongside, all her own crew

     being more or less hurt.  It seems the natives had called them into

     the place on pretence of friendship.  A crowd gathered about the

     stern of the boat, and several fellows even got into her.  All of a

     sudden our men were attacked with clubs and tomahawks.  The

     recruiter escaped the first blows aimed at him, making play with his

     fists until he had an opportunity to draw his revolver.  'Tom

     Sayers,' a Mare man, received a tomahawk blow on the head which laid

     the scalp open but did not penetrate his skull, fortunately.  'Bobby

     Towns,' another Mare boatman, had both his thumbs cut in warding off

     blows, one of them being so nearly severed from the hand that the

     doctors had to finish the operation.  Lihu, a Lifu boy, the

     recruiter's special attendant, was cut and pricked in various

     places, but nowhere seriously.  Jack, an unlucky Tanna recruit, who

     had been engaged to act as boatman, received an arrow through his

     forearm, the head of which--apiece of bone seven or eight inches

     long--was still in the limb, protruding from both sides, when the

     boats returned.  The recruiter himself would have got off scot-free

     had not an arrow pinned one of his fingers to the loom of the

     steering-oar just as they were getting off.  The fight had been

     short but sharp.  The enemy lost two men, both shot dead."



The truth is, Captain Wawn furnishes such a crowd of instances of fatal

encounters between natives and French and English recruiting-crews (for

the French are in the business for the plantations of New Caledonia),

that one is almost persuaded that recruiting is not thoroughly popular

among the islanders; else why this bristling string of attacks and

bloodcurdling slaughter?  The captain lays it all to "Exeter Hall

influence."  But for the meddling philanthropists, the native fathers and

mothers would be fond of seeing their children carted into exile and now

and then the grave, instead of weeping about it and trying to kill the

kind recruiters.









CHAPTER VI.



He was as shy as a newspaper is when referring to its own merits.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Captain Wawn is crystal-clear on one point: He does not approve of

missionaries.  They obstruct his business.  They make "Recruiting," as he

calls it ("Slave-Catching," as they call it in their frank way) a trouble

when it ought to be just a picnic and a pleasure excursion.  The

missionaries have their opinion about the manner in which the Labor

Traffic is conducted, and about the recruiter's evasions of the law of

the Traffic, and about the traffic itself--and it is distinctly

uncomplimentary to the Traffic and to everything connected with it,

including the law for its regulation.  Captain Wawn's book is of very

recent date; I have by me a pamphlet of still later date--hot from the

press, in fact--by Rev. Wm. Gray, a missionary; and the book and the

pamphlet taken together make exceedingly interesting reading, to my mind.



Interesting, and easy to understand--except in one detail, which I will

mention presently.  It is easy to understand why the Queensland sugar

planter should want the Kanaka recruit: he is cheap.  Very cheap, in

fact.  These are the figures paid by the planter: L20 to the recruiter

for getting the Kanaka or "catching" him, as the missionary phrase goes;

L3 to the Queensland government for "superintending" the importation; L5

deposited with the Government for the Kanaka's passage home when his

three years are up, in case he shall live that long; about L25 to the

Kanaka himself for three years' wages and clothing; total payment for the

use of a man three years, L53; or, including diet, L60.  Altogether, a

hundred dollars a year.  One can understand why the recruiter is fond of

the business; the recruit costs him a few cheap presents (given to the

recruit's relatives, not himself), and the recruit is worth L20 to the

recruiter when delivered in Queensland.  All this is clear enough; but

the thing that is not clear is, what there is about it all to persuade

the recruit.  He is young and brisk; life at home in his beautiful island

is one lazy, long holiday to him; or if he wants to work he can turn out

a couple of bags of copra per week and sell it for four or five shillings

a bag.  In Queensland he must get up at dawn and work from eight to

twelve hours a day in the canefields--in a much hotter climate than he is

used to--and get less than four shillings a week for it.



I cannot understand his willingness to go to Queensland.  It is a deep

puzzle to me.  Here is the explanation, from the planter's point of view;

at least I gather from the missionary's pamphlet that it is the

planter's:



     "When he comes from his home he is a savage, pure and simple.  He

     feels no shame at his nakedness and want of adornment.  When he

     returns home he does so well dressed, sporting a Waterbury watch,

     collars, cuffs, boots, and jewelry.  He takes with him one or more

     boxes--["Box" is English for trunk.]--well filled with clothing, a

     musical instrument or two, and perfumery and other articles of

     luxury he has learned to appreciate."



For just one moment we have a seeming flash of comprehension of, the

Kanaka's reason for exiling himself: he goes away to acquire

civilization.  Yes, he was naked and not ashamed, now he is clothed and

knows how to be ashamed; he was unenlightened; now he has a Waterbury

watch; he was unrefined, now he has jewelry, and something to make him

smell good; he was a nobody, a provincial, now he has been to far

countries and can show off.



It all looks plausible--for a moment.  Then the missionary takes hold of

this explanation and pulls it to pieces, and dances on it, and damages it

beyond recognition.



     "Admitting that the foregoing description is the average one, the

     average sequel is this: The cuffs and collars, if used at all, are

     carried off by youngsters, who fasten them round the leg, just below

     the knee, as ornaments.  The Waterbury, broken and dirty, finds its

     way to the trader, who gives a trifle for it; or the inside is taken

     out, the wheels strung on a thread and hung round the neck.  Knives,

     axes, calico, and handkerchiefs are divided among friends, and there

     is hardly one of these apiece.  The boxes, the keys often lost on

     the road home, can be bought for 2s. 6d.  They are to be seen

     rotting outside in almost any shore village on Tanna.  (I speak of

     what I have seen.) A returned Kanaka has been furiously angry with

     me because I would not buy his trousers, which he declared were just

     my fit.  He sold them afterwards to one of my Aniwan teachers for

     9d. worth of tobacco--a pair of trousers that probably cost him 8s.

     or 10s. in Queensland.  A coat or shirt is handy for cold weather.

     The white handkerchiefs, the 'senet' (perfumery), the umbrella, and

     perhaps the hat, are kept.  The boots have to take their chance, if

     they do not happen to fit the copra trader.  'Senet' on the hair,

     streaks of paint on the face, a dirty white handkerchief round the

     neck, strips of turtle shell in the ears, a belt, a sheath and

     knife, and an umbrella constitute the rig of returned Kanaka at home

     the day after landing."



A hat, an umbrella, a belt, a neckerchief.  Otherwise stark naked.  All

in a day the hard-earned "civilization" has melted away to this.  And

even these perishable things must presently go.  Indeed, there is but a

single detail of his civilization that can be depended on to stay by him:

according to the missionary, he has learned to swear.  This is art, and

art is long, as the poet says.



In all countries the laws throw light upon the past.  The Queensland law

for the regulation of the Labor Traffic is a confession.  It is a

confession that the evils charged by the missionaries upon the traffic

had existed in the past, and that they still existed when the law was

made.  The missionaries make a further charge: that the law is evaded by

the recruiters, and that the Government Agent sometimes helps them to do

it.  Regulation 31 reveals two things: that sometimes a young fool of a

recruit gets his senses back, after being persuaded to sign away his

liberty for three years, and dearly wants to get out of the engagement

and stay at home with his own people; and that threats, intimidation, and

force are used to keep him on board the recruiting-ship, and to hold him

to his contract.  Regulation 31 forbids these coercions.  The law

requires that he shall be allowed to go free; and another clause of it

requires the recruiter to set him ashore--per boat, because of the

prevalence of sharks.  Testimony from Rev. Mr. Gray:



     "There are 'wrinkles' for taking the penitent Kanaka.  My first

     experience of the Traffic was a case of this kind in 1884.  A vessel

     anchored just out of sight of our station, word was brought to me

     that some boys were stolen, and the relatives wished me to go and

     get them back.  The facts were, as I found, that six boys had

     recruited, had rushed into the boat, the Government Agent informed

     me.  They had all 'signed'; and, said the Government Agent, 'on

     board they shall remain.'  I was assured that the six boys were of

     age and willing to go.  Yet on getting ready to leave the ship I

     found four of the lads ready to come ashore in the boat!  This I

     forbade.  One of them jumped into the water and persisted in coming

     ashore in my boat.  When appealed to, the Government Agent suggested

     that we go and leave him to be picked up by the ship's boat, a

     quarter mile distant at the time!"



The law and the missionaries feel for the repentant recruit--and

properly, one may be permitted to think, for he is only a youth and

ignorant and persuadable to his hurt--but sympathy for him is not kept in

stock by the recruiter.  Rev. Mr. Gray says:



     "A captain many years in the traffic explained to me how a penitent

     could betaken.  'When a boy jumps overboard we just take a boat and

     pull ahead of him, then lie between him and the shore.  If he has

     not tired himself swimming, and passes the boat, keep on heading him

     in this way.  The dodge rarely fails.  The boy generally tires of

     swimming, gets into the boat of his own accord, and goes quietly on

     board."



Yes, exhaustion is likely to make a boy quiet.  If the distressed boy had

been the speaker's son, and the captors savages, the speaker would have

been surprised to see how differently the thing looked from the new point

of view; however, it is not our custom to put ourselves in the other

person's place.  Somehow there is something pathetic about that

disappointed young savage's resignation.  I must explain, here, that in

the traffic dialect, "boy" does not always mean boy; it means a youth

above sixteen years of age.  That is by Queensland law the age of

consent, though it is held that recruiters allow themselves some latitude

in guessing at ages.



Captain Wawn of the free spirit chafes under the annoyance of "cast-iron

regulations."  They and the missionaries have poisoned his life.  He

grieves for the good old days, vanished to come no more.  See him weep;

hear him cuss between the lines!



     "For a long time we were allowed to apprehend and detain all

     deserters who had signed the agreement on board ship, but the 'cast-

     iron' regulations of the Act of 1884 put a stop to that, allowing

     the Kanaka to sign the agreement for three years' service, travel

     about in the ship in receipt of the regular rations, cadge all he

     could, and leave when he thought fit, so long as he did not extend

     his pleasure trip to Queensland."



Rev. Mr. Gray calls this same restrictive cast-iron law a "farce." "There

is as much cruelty and injustice done to natives by acts that are legal

as by deeds unlawful.  The regulations that exist are unjust and

inadequate--unjust and inadequate they must ever be."  He furnishes his

reasons for his position, but they are too long for reproduction here.



However, if the most a Kanaka advantages himself by a three-years course

in civilization in Queensland, is a necklace and an umbrella and a showy

imperfection in the art of swearing, it must be that all the profit of

the traffic goes to the white man.  This could be twisted into a

plausible argument that the traffic ought to be squarely abolished.



However, there is reason for hope that that can be left alone to achieve

itself.  It is claimed that the traffic will depopulate its sources of

supply within the next twenty or thirty years.  Queensland is a very

healthy place for white people--death-rate 12 in 1,000 of the population-

but the Kanaka death-rate is away above that.  The vital statistics for

1893 place it at 52; for 1894 (Mackay district), 68.  The first six

months of the Kanaka's exile are peculiarly perilous for him because of

the rigors of the new climate.  The death-rate among the new men has

reached as high as 180 in the 1,000.  In the Kanaka's native home his

death-rate is 12 in time of peace, and 15 in time of war.  Thus exile to

Queensland--with the opportunity to acquire civilization, an umbrella,

and a pretty poor quality of profanity--is twelve times as deadly for him

as war.  Common Christian charity, common humanity, does seem to require,

not only that these people be returned to their homes, but that war,

pestilence, and famine be introduced among them for their preservation.



Concerning these Pacific isles and their peoples an eloquent prophet

spoke long years ago--five and fifty years ago.  In fact, he spoke a

little too early.  Prophecy is a good line of business, but it is full of

risks.  This prophet was the Right Rev. M. Russell, LL.D., D.C.L., of

Edinburgh:



     "Is the tide of civilization to roll only to the foot of the Rocky

     Mountains, and is the sun of knowledge to set at last in the waves

     of the Pacific?  No; the mighty day of four thousand years is

     drawing to its close; the sun of humanity has performed its destined

     course; but long ere its setting rays are extinguished in the west,

     its ascending beams have glittered on the isles of the eastern seas

     .  .  .  .  And now we see the race of Japhet setting forth to

     people the isles, and the seeds of another Europe and a second

     England sown in the regions of the sun.  But mark the words of the

     prophecy: 'He shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be

     his servant.'  It is not said Canaan shall be his slave.  To the

     Anglo-Saxon race is given the scepter of the globe, but there is not

     given either the lash of the slave-driver or the rack of the

     executioner.  The East will not be stained with the same atrocities

     as the West; the frightful gangrene of an enthralled race is not to

     mar the destinies of the family of Japhet in the Oriental world;

     humanizing, not destroying, as they advance; uniting with, not

     enslaving, the inhabitants with whom they dwell, the British race

     may,"  etc., etc.



And he closes his vision with an invocation from Thomson:



          "Come, bright Improvement!  on the car of Time,

          And rule the spacious world from clime to clime."



Very well, Bright Improvement has arrived, you see, with her

civilization, and her Waterbury, and her umbrella, and her third-quality

profanity, and her humanizing-not-destroying machinery, and her hundred-

and-eighty death-rate, and everything is going along just as handsome!



But the prophet that speaks last has an advantage over the pioneer in the

business.  Rev. Mr. Gray says:



     "What I am concerned about is that we as a Christian nation should

     wipe out these races to enrich ourselves."



And he closes his pamphlet with a grim Indictment which is as eloquent in

its flowerless straightforward English as is the hand-painted rhapsody of

the early prophet:



     "My indictment of the Queensland-Kanaka Labor Traffic is this



     "1. It generally demoralizes and always impoverishes the Kanaka,

     deprives him of his citizenship, and depopulates the islands fitted

     to his home.



     "2. It is felt to lower the dignity of the white agricultural

     laborer in Queensland, and beyond a doubt it lowers his wages there.



     "3. The whole system is fraught with danger to Australia and the

     islands on the score of health.



     "4. On social and political grounds the continuance of the

     Queensland Kanaka Labor Traffic must be a barrier to the true

     federation of the Australian colonies.



     "5. The Regulations under which the Traffic exists in Queensland are

     inadequate to prevent abuses, and in the nature of things they must

     remain so.



     "6. The whole system is contrary to the spirit and doctrine of the

     Gospel of Jesus Christ.  The Gospel requires us to help the weak,

     but the Kanaka is fleeced and trodden down.



     "7. The bed-rock of this Traffic is that the life and liberty of a

     black man are of less value than those of a white man.  And a

     Traffic that has grown out of 'slave-hunting' will certainly remain

     to the end not unlike its origin."









CHAPTER VII.



Truth is the most valuable thing we have.  Let us economize it.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



From Diary:--For a day or two we have been plowing among an invisible

vast wilderness of islands, catching now and then a shadowy glimpse of a

member of it.  There does seem to be a prodigious lot of islands this

year; the map of this region is freckled and fly-specked all over with

them.  Their number would seem to be uncountable.  We are moving among

the Fijis now--224 islands and islets in the group.  In front of us, to

the west, the wilderness stretches toward Australia, then curves upward

to New Guinea, and still up and up to Japan; behind us, to the east, the

wilderness stretches sixty degrees across the wastes of the Pacific;

south of us is New Zealand.  Somewhere or other among these myriads Samoa

is concealed, and not discoverable on the map.  Still, if you wish to go

there, you will have no trouble about finding it if you follow the

directions given by Robert Louis Stevenson to Dr. Conan Doyle and to Mr.

J. M. Barrie.  "You go to America, cross the continent to San Francisco,

and then it's the second turning to the left."  To get the full flavor of

the joke one must take a glance at the map.



Wednesday, September 11.--Yesterday we passed close to an island or so,

and recognized the published Fiji characteristics: a broad belt of clean

white coral sand around the island; back of it a graceful fringe of

leaning palms, with native huts nestling cosily among the shrubbery at

their bases; back of these a stretch of level land clothed in tropic

vegetation; back of that, rugged and picturesque mountains.  A detail of

the immediate foreground: a mouldering ship perched high up on a reef-

bench.  This completes the composition, and makes the picture

artistically perfect.



In the afternoon we sighted Suva, the capital of the group, and threaded

our way into the secluded little harbor--a placid basin of brilliant blue

and green water tucked snugly in among the sheltering hills.  A few ships

rode at anchor in it--one of them a sailing vessel flying the American

flag; and they said she came from Duluth!  There's a journey!  Duluth is

several thousand miles from the sea, and yet she is entitled to the proud

name of Mistress of the Commercial Marine of the United States of

America.  There is only one free, independent, unsubsidized American ship

sailing the foreign seas, and Duluth owns it.  All by itself that ship is

the American fleet.  All by itself it causes the American name and power

to be respected in the far regions of the globe.  All by itself it

certifies to the world that the most populous civilized nation, in the

earth has a just pride in her stupendous stretch of sea-front, and is

determined to assert and maintain her rightful place as one of the Great

Maritime Powers of the Planet.  All by itself it is making foreign eyes

familiar with a Flag which they have not seen before for forty years,

outside of the museum.  For what Duluth has done, in building, equipping,

and maintaining at her sole expense the American Foreign Commercial

Fleet, and in thus rescuing the American name from shame and lifting it

high for the homage of the nations, we owe her a debt of gratitude which

our hearts shall confess with quickened beats whenever her name is named

henceforth.  Many national toasts will die in the lapse of time, but

while the flag flies and the Republic survives, they who live under their

shelter will still drink this one, standing and uncovered: Health and

prosperity to Thee, O Duluth, American Queen of the Alien Seas!



Row-boats began to flock from the shore; their crews were the first

natives we had seen.  These men carried no overplus of clothing, and this

was wise, for the weather was hot.  Handsome, great dusky men they were,

muscular, clean-limbed, and with faces full of character and

intelligence.  It would be hard to find their superiors anywhere among

the dark races, I should think.



Everybody went ashore to look around, and spy out the land, and have that

luxury of luxuries to sea-voyagers--a land-dinner.  And there we saw more

natives: Wrinkled old women, with their flat mammals flung over their

shoulders, or hanging down in front like the cold-weather drip from the

molasses-faucet; plump and smily young girls, blithe and content, easy

and graceful, a pleasure to look at; young matrons, tall, straight,

comely, nobly built, sweeping by with chin up, and a gait incomparable

for unconscious stateliness and dignity; majestic young men athletes for

build and muscle clothed in a loose arrangement of dazzling white, with

bronze breast and bronze legs naked, and the head a cannon-swab of solid

hair combed straight out from the skull and dyed a rich brick-red.  Only

sixty years ago they were sunk in darkness; now they have the bicycle.

We strolled about the streets of the white folks' little town, and around

over the hills by paths and roads among European dwellings and gardens

and plantations, and past clumps of hibiscus that made a body blink, the

great blossoms were so intensely red; and by and by we stopped to ask an

elderly English colonist a question or two, and to sympathize with him

concerning the torrid weather; but he was surprised, and said:



"This?  This is not hot.  You ought to be here in the summer time once."



"We supposed that this was summer; it has the ear-marks of it.  You could

take it to almost any country and deceive people with it.  But if it

isn't summer, what does it lack?"



"It lacks half a year.  This is mid-winter."



I had been suffering from colds for several months, and a sudden change

of season, like this, could hardly fail to do me hurt.  It brought on

another cold.  It is odd, these sudden jumps from season to season.  A

fortnight ago we left America in mid-summer, now it is midwinter; about a

week hence we shall arrive in Australia in the spring.



After dinner I found in the billiard-room a resident whom I had known

somewhere else in the world, and presently made, some new friends and

drove with them out into the country to visit his Excellency the head of

the State, who was occupying his country residence, to escape the rigors

of the winter weather, I suppose, for it was on breezy high ground and

much more comfortable than the lower regions, where the town is, and

where the winter has full swing, and often sets a person's hair afire

when he takes off his hat to bow.  There is a noble and beautiful view of

ocean and islands and castellated peaks from the governor's high-placed

house, and its immediate surroundings lie drowsing in that dreamy repose

and serenity which are the charm of life in the Pacific Islands.



One of the new friends who went out there with me was a large man, and I

had been admiring his size all the way.  I was still admiring it as he

stood by the governor on the veranda, talking; then the Fijian butler

stepped out there to announce tea, and dwarfed him.  Maybe he did not

quite dwarf him, but at any rate the contrast was quite striking.

Perhaps that dark giant was a king in a condition of political

suspension.  I think that in the talk there on the veranda it was said

that in Fiji, as in the Sandwich Islands, native kings and chiefs are of

much grander size and build than the commoners.  This man was clothed in

flowing white vestments, and they were just the thing for him; they

comported well with his great stature and his kingly port and dignity.

European clothes would have degraded him and made him commonplace.  I

know that, because they do that with everybody that wears them.



It was said that the old-time devotion to chiefs and reverence for their

persons still survive in the native commoner, and in great force.  The

educated young gentleman who is chief of the tribe that live in the

region about the capital dresses in the fashion of high-class European

gentlemen, but even his clothes cannot damn him in the reverence of his

people.  Their pride in his lofty rank and ancient lineage lives on, in

spite of his lost authority and the evil magic of his tailor.  He has no

need to defile himself with work, or trouble his heart with the sordid

cares of life; the tribe will see to it that he shall not want, and that

he shall hold up his head and live like a gentleman.  I had a glimpse of

him down in the town.  Perhaps he is a descendant of the last king--the

king with the difficult name whose memory is preserved by a notable

monument of cut-stone which one sees in the enclosure in the middle of

the town.  Thakombau--I remember, now; that is the name.  It is easier to

preserve it on a granite block than in your head.



Fiji was ceded to England by this king in 1858.  One of the gentlemen

present at the governor's quoted a remark made by the king at the time of

the session--a neat retort, and with a touch of pathos in it, too.  The

English Commissioner had offered a crumb of comfort to Thakombau by

saying that the transfer of the kingdom to Great Britain was merely "a

sort of hermit-crab formality, you know."  "Yes," said poor Thakombau,

"but with this difference--the crab moves into an unoccupied shell, but

mine isn't."



However, as far as I can make out from the books, the King was between

the devil and the deep sea at the time, and hadn't much choice.  He owed

the United States a large debt--a debt which he could pay if allowed

time, but time was denied him.  He must pay up right away or the warships

would be upon him.  To protect his people from this disaster he ceded his

country to Britain, with a clause in the contract providing for the

ultimate payment of the American debt.



In old times the Fijians were fierce fighters; they were very religious,

and worshiped idols; the big chiefs were proud and haughty, and they were

men of great style in many ways; all chiefs had several wives, the

biggest chiefs sometimes had as many as fifty; when a chief was dead and

ready for burial, four or five of his wives were strangled and put into

the grave with him.  In 1804 twenty-seven British convicts escaped from

Australia to Fiji, and brought guns and ammunition with them.  Consider

what a power they were, armed like that, and what an opportunity they

had.  If they had been energetic men and sober, and had had brains and

known how to use them, they could have achieved the sovereignty of the

archipelago twenty-seven kings and each with eight or nine islands under

his scepter.  But nothing came of this chance.  They lived worthless

lives of sin and luxury, and died without honor--in most cases by

violence.  Only one of them had any ambition; he was an Irishman named

Connor.  He tried to raise a family of fifty children, and scored forty-

eight.  He died lamenting his failure.  It was a foolish sort of avarice.

Many a father would have been rich enough with forty.



It is a fine race, the Fijians, with brains in their heads, and an

inquiring turn of mind.  It appears that their savage ancestors had a

doctrine of immortality in their scheme of religion--with limitations.

That is to say, their dead friend would go to a happy hereafter if he

could be accumulated, but not otherwise.  They drew the line; they

thought that the missionary's doctrine was too sweeping, too

comprehensive.  They called his attention to certain facts.  For

instance, many of their friends had been devoured by sharks; the sharks,

in their turn, were caught and eaten by other men; later, these men were

captured in war, and eaten by the enemy.  The original persons had

entered into the composition of the sharks; next, they and the sharks had

become part of the flesh and blood and bone of the cannibals.  How, then,

could the particles of the original men be searched out from the final

conglomerate and put together again?  The inquirers were full of doubts,

and considered that the missionary had not examined the matter with--the

gravity and attention which so serious a thing deserved.



The missionary taught these exacting savages many valuable things, and

got from them one--a very dainty and poetical idea: Those wild and

ignorant poor children of Nature believed that the flowers, after they

perish, rise on the winds and float away to the fair fields of heaven,

and flourish there forever in immortal beauty!









CHAPTER VIII.



It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no

distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



When one glances at the map the members of the stupendous island

wilderness of the Pacific seem to crowd upon each other; but no, there is

no crowding, even in the center of a group; and between groups there are

lonely wide deserts of sea.  Not everything is known about the islands,

their peoples and their languages.  A startling reminder of this is

furnished by the fact that in Fiji, twenty years ago, were living two

strange and solitary beings who came from an unknown country and spoke an

unknown language.  "They were picked up by a passing vessel many hundreds

of miles from any known land, floating in the same tiny canoe in which

they had been blown out to sea.  When found they were but skin and bone.

No one could understand what they said, and they have never named their

country; or, if they have, the name does not correspond with that of any

island on any chart.  They are now fat and sleek, and as happy as the day

is long.  In the ship's log there is an entry of the latitude and

longitude in which they were found, and this is probably all the clue

they will ever have to their lost homes."--[Forbes's "Two Years in

Fiji."]



What a strange and romantic episode it is; and how one is tortured with

curiosity to know whence those mysterious creatures came, those Men

Without a Country, errant waifs who cannot name their lost home,

wandering Children of Nowhere.



Indeed, the Island Wilderness is the very home of romance and dreams and

mystery.  The loneliness, the solemnity, the beauty, and the deep repose

of this wilderness have a charm which is all their own for the bruised

spirit of men who have fought and failed in the struggle for life in the

great world; and for men who have been hunted out of the great world for

crime; and for other men who love an easy and indolent existence; and for

others who love a roving free life, and stir and change and adventure;

and for yet others who love an easy and comfortable career of trading and

money-getting, mixed with plenty of loose matrimony by purchase, divorce

without trial or expense, and limitless spreeing thrown in to make life

ideally perfect.



We sailed again, refreshed.



The most cultivated person in the ship was a young English, man whose

home was in New Zealand.  He was a naturalist.  His learning in his

specialty was deep and thorough, his interest in his subject amounted to

a passion, he had an easy gift of speech; and so, when he talked about

animals it was a pleasure to listen to him.  And profitable, too, though

he was sometimes difficult to understand because now and then he used

scientific technicalities which were above the reach of some of us.  They

were pretty sure to be above my reach, but as he was quite willing to

explain them I always made it a point to get him to do it.  I had a fair

knowledge of his subject--layman's knowledge--to begin with, but it was

his teachings which crystalized it into scientific form and clarity--in a

word, gave it value.



His special interest was the fauna of Australasia, and his knowledge of

the matter was as exhaustive as it was accurate.  I already knew a good

deal about the rabbits in Australasia and their marvelous fecundity, but

in my talks with him I found that my estimate of the great hindrance and

obstruction inflicted by the rabbit pest upon traffic and travel was far

short of the facts.  He told me that the first pair of rabbits imported

into Australasia bred so wonderfully that within six months rabbits were

so thick in the land that people had to dig trenches through them to get

from town to town.



He told me a great deal about worms, and the kangaroo, and other

coleoptera, and said he knew the history and ways of all such

pachydermata.  He said the kangaroo had pockets, and carried its young in

them when it couldn't get apples.  And he said that the emu was as big as

an ostrich, and looked like one, and had an amorphous appetite and would

eat bricks.  Also, that the dingo was not a dingo at all, but just a wild

dog; and that the only difference between a dingo and a dodo was that

neither of them barked; otherwise they were just the same.  He said that

the only game-bird in Australia was the wombat, and the only song-bird

the larrikin, and that both were protected by government.  The most

beautiful of the native birds was the bird of Paradise.  Next came the

two kinds of lyres; not spelt the same.  He said the one kind was dying

out, the other thickening up.  He explained that the "Sundowner" was not

a bird it was a man; sundowner was merely the Australian equivalent of

our word, tramp.  He is a loafer, a hard drinker, and a sponge.  He

tramps across the country in the sheep-shearing season, pretending to

look for work; but he always times himself to arrive at a sheep-run just

at sundown, when the day's labor ends; all he wants is whisky and supper

and bed and breakfast; he gets them and then disappears.  The naturalist

spoke of the bell bird, the creature that at short intervals all day

rings out its mellow and exquisite peal from the deeps of the forest.  It

is the favorite and best friend of the weary and thirsty sundowner; for

he knows that wherever the bell bird is, there is water; and he goes

somewhere else.  The naturalist said that the oddest bird in Australasia

was the, Laughing Jackass, and the biggest the now extinct Great Moa.



The Moa stood thirteen feet high, and could step over an ordinary man's

head or kick his hat off; and his head, too, for that matter.  He said it

was wingless, but a swift runner.  The natives used to ride it.  It could

make forty miles an hour, and keep it up for four hundred miles and come

out reasonably fresh.  It was still in existence when the railway was

introduced into New Zealand; still in existence, and carrying the mails.

The railroad began with the same schedule it has now: two expresses a

week-time, twenty miles an hour.  The company exterminated the moa to get

the mails.



Speaking of the indigenous coneys and bactrian camels, the naturalist

said that the coniferous and bacteriological output of Australasia was

remarkable for its many and curious departures from the accepted laws

governing these species of tubercles, but that in his opinion Nature's

fondness for dabbling in the erratic was most notably exhibited in that

curious combination of bird, fish, amphibian, burrower, crawler,

quadruped, and Christian called the Ornithorhynchus--grotesquest of

animals, king of the animalculae of the world for versatility of

character and make-up.  Said he:



     "You can call it anything you want to, and be right.  It is a fish,

     for it lives in the river half the time; it is a land animal, for it

     resides on the land half the time; it is an amphibian, since it

     likes both and does not know which it prefers; it is a hybernian,

     for when times are dull and nothing much going on it buries itself

     under the mud at the bottom of a puddle and hybernates there a

     couple of weeks at a time; it is a kind of duck, for it has a duck-

     bill and four webbed paddles; it is a fish and quadruped together,

     for in the water it swims with the paddles and on shore it paws

     itself across country with them; it is a kind of seal, for it has a

     seal's fur; it is carnivorous, herbivorous, insectivorous, and

     vermifuginous, for it eats fish and grass and butterflies, and in

     the season digs worms out of the mud and devours them; it is clearly

     a bird, for it lays eggs, and hatches them; it is clearly a mammal,

     for it nurses its young; and it is manifestly a kind of Christian,

     for it keeps the Sabbath when there is anybody around, and when

     there isn't, doesn't.  It has all the tastes there are except

     refined ones, it has all the habits there are except good ones.



     "It is a survival--a survival of the fittest.  Mr. Darwin invented

     the theory that goes by that name, but the Ornithorhynchus was the

     first to put it to actual experiment and prove that it could be

     done.  Hence it should have as much of the credit as Mr. Darwin.

     It was never in the Ark; you will find no mention of it there; it

     nobly stayed out and worked the theory.  Of all creatures in the

     world it was the only one properly equipped for the test.  The Ark

     was thirteen months afloat, and all the globe submerged; no land

     visible above the flood, no vegetation, no food for a mammal to eat,

     nor water for a mammal to drink; for all mammal food was destroyed,

     and when the pure floods from heaven and the salt oceans of the

     earth mingled their waters and rose above the mountain tops, the

     result was a drink which no bird or beast of ordinary construction

     could use and live.  But this combination was nuts for the

     Ornithorhynchus, if I may use a term like that without offense.

     Its river home had always been salted by the flood-tides of the sea.

     On the face of the Noachian deluge innumerable forest trees were

     floating.  Upon these the Ornithorhynchus voyaged in peace; voyaged

     from clime to clime, from hemisphere to hemisphere, in contentment

     and comfort, in virile interest in the constant change Of scene, in

     humble thankfulness for its privileges, in ever-increasing

     enthusiasm in the development of the great theory upon whose

     validity it had staked its life, its fortunes, and its sacred honor,

     if I may use such expressions without impropriety in connection with

     an episode of this nature.



     "It lived the tranquil and luxurious life of a creature of

     independent means.  Of things actually necessary to its existence

     and its happiness not a detail was wanting.  When it wished to walk,

     it scrambled along the tree-trunk; it mused in the shade of the

     leaves by day, it slept in their shelter by night; when it wanted

     the refreshment of a swim, it had it; it ate leaves when it wanted a

     vegetable diet, it dug under the bark for worms and grubs; when it

     wanted fish it caught them, when it wanted eggs it laid them.  If

     the grubs gave out in one tree it swam to another; and as for fish,

     the very opulence of the supply was an embarrassment.  And finally,

     when it was thirsty it smacked its chops in gratitude over a blend

     that would have slain a crocodile.



     "When at last, after thirteen months of travel and research in all

     the Zones it went aground on a mountain-summit, it strode ashore,

     saying in its heart, 'Let them that come after me invent theories

     and dream dreams about the Survival of the Fittest if they like, but

     I am the first that has done it!



     "This wonderful creature dates back like the kangaroo and many other

     Australian hydrocephalous invertebrates, to an age long anterior to

     the advent of man upon the earth; they date back, indeed, to a time

     when a causeway hundreds of miles wide, and thousands of miles long,

     joined Australia to Africa, and the animals of the two countries

     were alike, and all belonged to that remote geological epoch known

     to science as the Old Red Grindstone Post-Pleosaurian.  Later the

     causeway sank under the sea; subterranean convulsions lifted the

     African continent a thousand feet higher than it was before, but

     Australia kept her old level.  In Africa's new climate the animals

     necessarily began to develop and shade off into new forms and

     families and species, but the animals of Australia as necessarily

     remained stationary, and have so remained until this day.  In the

     course of some millions of years the African Ornithorhynchus

     developed and developed and developed, and sluffed off detail after

     detail of its make-up until at last the creature became wholly

     disintegrated and scattered.  Whenever you see a bird or a beast or

     a seal or an otter in Africa you know that he is merely a sorry

     surviving fragment of that sublime original of whom I have been

     speaking--that creature which was everything in general and nothing

     in particular--the opulently endowed 'e pluribus unum' of the animal

     world.



     "Such is the history of the most hoary, the most ancient, the most

     venerable creature that exists in the earth today--Ornithorhynchus

     Platypus Extraordinariensis--whom God preserve!"



When he was strongly moved he could rise and soar like that with ease.

And not only in the prose form, but in the poetical as well.  He had

written many pieces of poetry in his time, and these manuscripts he lent

around among the passengers, and was willing to let them be copied.  It

seemed to me that the least technical one in the series, and the one

which reached the loftiest note, perhaps, was his



               INVOCATION.



     "Come forth from thy oozy couch,

     O Ornithorhynchus dear!

     And greet with a cordial claw

     The stranger that longs to hear



     "From thy own own lips the tale

     Of thy origin all unknown:

     Thy misplaced bone where flesh should be

     And flesh where should be bone;



     "And fishy fin where should be paw,

     And beaver-trowel tail,

     And snout of beast equip'd with teeth

     Where gills ought to prevail.



     "Come, Kangaroo, the good and true

     Foreshortened as to legs,

     And body tapered like a churn,

     And sack marsupial, i' fegs,



     "And tells us why you linger here,

     Thou relic of a vanished time,

     When all your friends as fossils sleep,

     Immortalized in lime!"





Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist; but there seems to be warrant

for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an

unconscious one.  The above verses are indeed beautiful, and, in a way,

touching; but there is a haunting something about them which unavoidably

suggests the Sweet Singer of Michigan.  It can hardly be doubted that the

author had read the works of that poet and been impressed by them.  It is

not apparent that he has borrowed from them any word or yet any phrase,

but the style and swing and mastery and melody of the Sweet Singer all

are there.  Compare this Invocation with "Frank Dutton"--particularly

stanzas first and seventeenth--and I think the reader will feel convinced

that he who wrote the one had read the other:



     I.



    "Frank Dutton was as fine a lad

     As ever you wish to see,

     And he was drowned in Pine Island Lake

     On earth no more will he be,

     His age was near fifteen years,

     And he was a motherless boy,

     He was living with his grandmother

     When he was drowned, poor boy."





     XVII.



    "He was drowned on Tuesday afternoon,

     On Sunday he was found,

     And the tidings of that drowned boy

     Was heard for miles around.

     His form was laid by his mother's side,

     Beneath the cold, cold ground,

     His friends for him will drop a tear

     When they view his little mound."



     The Sentimental Song Book.  By Mrs. Julia Moore, p. 36.









CHAPTER IX.



It is your human environment that makes climate.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Sept. 15--Night.  Close to Australia now.  Sydney 50 miles distant.



That note recalls an experience.  The passengers were sent for, to come

up in the bow and see a fine sight.  It was very dark.  One could not

follow with the eye the surface of the sea more than fifty yards in any

direction it dimmed away and became lost to sight at about that distance

from us.  But if you patiently gazed into the darkness a little while,

there was a sure reward for you.  Presently, a quarter of a mile away you

would see a blinding splash or explosion of light on the water--a flash

so sudden and so astonishingly brilliant that it would make you catch

your breath; then that blotch of light would instantly extend itself and

take the corkscrew shape and imposing length of the fabled sea-serpent,

with every curve of its body and the "break" spreading away from its

head, and the wake following behind its tail clothed in a fierce splendor

of living fire.  And my, but it was coming at a lightning gait!  Almost

before you could think, this monster of light, fifty feet long, would go

flaming and storming by, and suddenly disappear.  And out in the distance

whence he came you would see another flash; and another and another and

another, and see them turn into sea-serpents on the instant; and once

sixteen flashed up at the same time and came tearing towards us, a swarm

of wiggling curves, a moving conflagration, a vision of bewildering

beauty, a spectacle of fire and energy whose equal the most of those

people will not see again until after they are dead.



It was porpoises--porpoises aglow with phosphorescent light.  They

presently collected in a wild and magnificent jumble under the bows, and

there they played for an hour, leaping and frollicking and carrying on,

turning summersaults in front of the stem or across it and never getting

hit, never making a miscalculation, though the stem missed them only

about an inch, as a rule.  They were porpoises of the ordinary length-

eight or ten feet--but every twist of their bodies sent a long procession

of united and glowing curves astern.  That fiery jumble was an enchanting

thing to look at, and we stayed out the performance; one cannot have such

a show as that twice in a lifetime.  The porpoise is the kitten of the

sea; he never has a serious thought, he cares for nothing but fun and

play.  But I think I never saw him at his winsomest until that night.

It was near a center of civilization, and he could have been drinking.



By and by, when we had approached to somewhere within thirty miles of

Sydney Heads the great electric light that is posted on one of those

lofty ramparts began to show, and in time the little spark grew to a

great sun and pierced the firmament of darkness with a far-reaching sword

of light.



Sydney Harbor is shut in behind a precipice that extends some miles like

a wall, and exhibits no break to the ignorant stranger.  It has a break

in the middle, but it makes so little show that even Captain Cook sailed

by it without seeing it.  Near by that break is a false break which

resembles it, and which used to make trouble for the mariner at night, in

the early days before the place was lighted.  It caused the memorable

disaster to the Duncan Dunbar, one of the most pathetic tragedies in the

history of that pitiless ruffian, the sea.  The ship was a sailing

vessel; a fine and favorite passenger packet, commanded by a popular

captain of high reputation.  She was due from England, and Sydney was

waiting, and counting the hours; counting the hours, and making ready to

give her a heart-stirring welcome; for she was bringing back a great

company of mothers and daughters, the long-missed light and bloom of life

of Sydney homes; daughters that had been years absent at school, and

mothers that had been with them all that time watching over them.  Of all

the world only India and Australasia have by custom freighted ships and

fleets with their hearts, and know the tremendous meaning of that phrase;

only they know what the waiting is like when this freightage is entrusted

to the fickle winds, not steam, and what the joy is like when the ship

that is returning this treasure comes safe to port and the long dread is

over.



On board the Duncan Dunbar, flying toward Sydney Heads in the waning

afternoon, the happy home-comers made busy preparation, for it was not

doubted that they would be in the arms of their friends before the day

was done; they put away their sea-going clothes and put on clothes meeter

for the meeting, their richest and their loveliest, these poor brides of

the grave.  But the wind lost force, or there was a miscalculation, and

before the Heads were sighted the darkness came on.  It was said that

ordinarily the captain would have made a safe offing and waited for the

morning; but this was no ordinary occasion; all about him were appealing

faces, faces pathetic with disappointment.  So his sympathy moved him to

try the dangerous passage in the dark.  He had entered the Heads

seventeen times, and believed he knew the ground.  So he steered straight

for the false opening, mistaking it for the true one.  He did not find

out that he was wrong until it was too late.  There was no saving the

ship.  The great seas swept her in and crushed her to splinters and

rubbish upon the rock tushes at the base of the precipice.  Not one of

all that fair and gracious company was ever seen again alive.  The tale

is told to every stranger that passes the spot, and it will continue to

be told to all that come, for generations; but it will never grow old,

custom cannot stale it, the heart-break that is in it can never perish

out of it.



There were two hundred persons in the ship, and but one survived the

disaster.  He was a sailor.  A huge sea flung him up the face of the

precipice and stretched him on a narrow shelf of rock midway between the

top and the bottom, and there he lay all night.  At any other time he

would have lain there for the rest of his life, without chance of

discovery; but the next morning the ghastly news swept through Sydney

that the Duncan Dunbar had gone down in sight of home, and straightway

the walls of the Heads were black with mourners; and one of these,

stretching himself out over the precipice to spy out what might be seen

below, discovered this miraculously preserved relic of the wreck.  Ropes

were brought and the nearly impossible feat of rescuing the man was

accomplished.  He was a person with a practical turn of mind, and he

hired a hall in Sydney and exhibited himself at sixpence a head till he

exhausted the output of the gold fields for that year.



We entered and cast anchor, and in the morning went oh-ing and ah-ing in

admiration up through the crooks and turns of the spacious and beautiful

harbor--a harbor which is the darling of Sydney and the wonder of the

world.  It is not surprising that the people are proud of it, nor that

they put their enthusiasm into eloquent words.  A returning citizen asked

me what I thought of it, and I testified with a cordiality which I judged

would be up to the market rate.  I said it was beautiful--superbly

beautiful.  Then by a natural impulse I gave God the praise.  The citizen

did not seem altogether satisfied.  He said:



"It is beautiful, of course it's beautiful--the Harbor; but that isn't

all of it, it's only half of it; Sydney's the other half, and it takes

both of them together to ring the supremacy-bell.  God made the Harbor,

and that's all right; but Satan made Sydney."



Of course I made an apology; and asked him to convey it to his friend.

He was right about Sydney being half of it.  It would be beautiful

without Sydney, but not above half as beautiful as it is now, with Sydney

added.  It is shaped somewhat like an oak-leaf-a roomy sheet of lovely

blue water, with narrow off-shoots of water running up into the country

on both sides between long fingers of land, high wooden ridges with sides

sloped like graves.  Handsome villas are perched here and there on these

ridges, snuggling amongst the foliage, and one catches alluring glimpses

of them as the ship swims by toward the city.  The city clothes a cluster

of hills and a ruffle of neighboring ridges with its undulating masses of

masonry, and out of these masses spring towers and spires and other

architectural dignities and grandeurs that break the flowing lines and

give picturesqueness to the general effect.



The narrow inlets which I have mentioned go wandering out into the land

everywhere and hiding themselves in it, and pleasure-launches are always

exploring them with picnic parties on board.  It is said by trustworthy

people that if you explore them all you will find that you have covered

700 miles of water passage.  But there are liars everywhere this year,

and they will double that when their works are in good going order.

October was close at hand, spring was come.  It was really spring--

everybody said so; but you could have sold it for summer in Canada, and

nobody would have suspected.  It was the very weather that makes our home

summers the perfection of climatic luxury; I mean, when you are out in

the wood or by the sea.  But these people said it was cool, now--a person

ought to see Sydney in the summer time if he wanted to know what warm

weather is; and he ought to go north ten or fifteen hundred miles if he

wanted to know what hot weather is.  They said that away up there toward

the equator the hens laid fried eggs.  Sydney is the place to go to get

information about other people's climates.  It seems to me that the

occupation of Unbiased Traveler Seeking Information is the pleasantest

and most irresponsible trade there is.  The traveler can always find out

anything he wants to, merely by asking.  He can get at all the facts, and

more.  Everybody helps him, nobody hinders him.  Anybody who has an old

fact in stock that is no longer negotiable in the domestic market will

let him have it at his own price.  An accumulation of such goods is

easily and quickly made.  They cost almost nothing and they bring par in

the foreign market.  Travelers who come to America always freight up with

the same old nursery tales that their predecessors selected, and they

carry them back and always work them off without any trouble in the home

market.



If the climates of the world were determined by parallels of latitude,

then we could know a place's climate by its position on the map; and so

we should know that the climate of Sydney was the counterpart of the

climate of Columbia, S. C., and of Little Rock, Arkansas, since Sydney is

about the same distance south of the equator that those other towns are

north of-it-thirty-four degrees.  But no, climate disregards the

parallels of latitude.  In Arkansas they have a winter; in Sydney they

have the name of it, but not the thing itself.  I have seen the ice in

the Mississippi floating past the mouth of the Arkansas river; and at

Memphis, but a little way above, the Mississippi has been frozen over,

from bank to bank.  But they have never had a cold spell in Sydney which

brought the mercury down to freezing point.  Once in a mid-winter day

there, in the month of July, the mercury went down to 36 deg., and that

remains the memorable "cold day" in the history of the town.  No doubt

Little Rock has seen it below zero.  Once, in Sydney, in mid-summer,

about New Year's Day, the mercury went up to 106 deg. in the shade, and

that is Sydney's memorable hot day.  That would about tally with Little

Rock's hottest day also, I imagine.  My Sydney figures are taken from a

government report, and are trustworthy.  In the matter of summer weather

Arkansas has no advantage over Sydney, perhaps, but when it comes to

winter weather, that is another affair.  You could cut up an Arkansas

winter into a hundred Sydney winters and have enough left for Arkansas

and the poor.



The whole narrow, hilly belt of the Pacific side of New South Wales has

the climate of its capital--a mean winter temperature of 54 deg. and a

mean summer one of 71 deg.  It is a climate which cannot be improved upon

for healthfulness.  But the experts say that 90 deg. in New South Wales

is harder to bear than 112 deg. in the neighboring colony of Victoria,

because the atmosphere of the former is humid, and of the latter dry.

The mean temperature of the southernmost point of New South Wales is the

same as that of Nice--60 deg.--yet Nice is further from the equator by

460 miles than is the former.



But Nature is always stingy of perfect climates; stingier in the case of

Australia than usual.  Apparently this vast continent has a really good

climate nowhere but around the edges.



If we look at a map of the world we are surprised to see how big

Australia is.  It is about two-thirds as large as the United States was

before we added Alaska.



But where as one finds a sufficiently good climate and fertile land

almost everywhere in the United States, it seems settled that inside of

the Australian border-belt one finds many deserts and in spots a climate

which nothing can stand except a few of the hardier kinds of rocks.  In

effect, Australia is as yet unoccupied.  If you take a map of the United

States and leave the Atlantic sea-board States in their places; also the

fringe of Southern States from Florida west to the Mouth of the

Mississippi; also a narrow, inhabited streak up the Mississippi half-way

to its head waters; also a narrow, inhabited border along the Pacific

coast: then take a brushful of paint and obliterate the whole remaining

mighty stretch of country that lies between the Atlantic States and the

Pacific-coast strip, your map will look like the latest map of Australia.



This stupendous blank is hot, not to say torrid; a part of it is fertile,

the rest is desert; it is not liberally watered; it has no towns.  One

has only to cross the mountains of New South Wales and descend into the

westward-lying regions to find that he has left the choice climate behind

him, and found a new one of a quite different character.  In fact, he

would not know by the thermometer that he was not in the blistering

Plains of India.  Captain Sturt, the great explorer, gives us a sample of

the heat.



     "The wind, which had been blowing all the morning from the N.E.,

     increased to a heavy gale, and I shall never forget its withering

     effect.  I sought shelter behind a large gum-tree, but the blasts of

     heat were so terrific that I wondered the very grass did not take

     fire.  This really was nothing ideal: everything both animate and

     inanimate gave way before it; the horses stood with their backs to

     the wind and their noses to the ground, without the muscular

     strength to raise their heads; the birds were mute, and the leaves

     of the trees under which we were sitting fell like a snow shower

     around us.  At noon I took a thermometer graded to 127 deg., out of

     my box, and observed that the mercury was up to 125.  Thinking that

     it had been unduly influenced, I put it in the fork of a tree close

     to me, sheltered alike from the wind and the sun.  I went to examine

     it about an hour afterwards, when I found the mercury had risen to

     the-top of the instrument and had burst the bulb, a circumstance

     that I believe no traveler has ever before had to record.  I cannot

     find language to convey to the reader's mind an idea of the intense

     and oppressive nature of the heat that prevailed."



That hot wind sweeps over Sydney sometimes, and brings with it what is

called a "dust-storm."  It is said that most Australian towns are

acquainted with the dust-storm.  I think I know what it is like, for the

following description by Mr. Gape tallies very well with the alkali

duststorm of Nevada, if you leave out the "shovel" part.  Still the

shovel part is a pretty important part, and seems to indicate that my

Nevada storm is but a poor thing, after all.



     "As we proceeded the altitude became less, and the heat

     proportionately greater until we reached Dubbo, which is only 600

     feet above sea-level.  It is a pretty town, built on an extensive

     plain .  .  .  .  After the effects of a shower of rain have passed

     away the surface of the ground crumbles into a thick layer of dust,

     and occasionally, when the wind is in a particular quarter, it is

     lifted bodily from the ground in one long opaque cloud.  In the

     midst of such a storm nothing can be seen a few yards ahead, and the

     unlucky person who happens to be out at the time is compelled to

     seek the nearest retreat at hand.  When the thrifty housewife sees

     in the distance the dark column advancing in a steady whirl towards

     her house, she closes the doors and windows with all expedition.  A

     drawing-room, the window of which has been carelessly left open

     during a dust-storm, is indeed an extraordinary sight.  A lady who

     has resided in Dubbo for some years says that the dust lies so thick

     on the carpet that it is necessary to use a shovel to remove it."



And probably a wagon.  I was mistaken; I have not seen a proper

duststorm.  To my mind the exterior aspects and character of Australia

are fascinating things to look at and think about, they are so strange,

so weird, so new, so uncommonplace, such a startling and interesting

contrast to the other sections of the planet, the sections that are known

to us all, familiar to us all.  In the matter of particulars--a detail

here, a detail there--we have had the choice climate of New South Wales'

seacoast; we have had the Australian heat as furnished by Captain Sturt;

we have had the wonderful dust-storm; and we have considered the

phenomenon of an almost empty hot wilderness half as big as the United

States, with a narrow belt of civilization, population, and good climate

around it.









CHAPTER X.



Everything human is pathetic.  The secret source of Humor itself is not

joy but sorrow.  There is no humor in heaven.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Captain Cook found Australia in 1770, and eighteen years later the

British Government began to transport convicts to it.  Altogether, New

South Wales received 83,000 in 53 years.  The convicts wore heavy chains;

they were ill-fed and badly treated by the officers set over them; they

were heavily punished for even slight infractions of the rules; "the

cruelest discipline ever known" is one historian's description of their

life.--[The Story of Australasia.  J. S. Laurie.]



English law was hard-hearted in those days.  For trifling offenses which

in our day would be punished by a small fine or a few days' confinement,

men, women, and boys were sent to this other end of the earth to serve

terms of seven and fourteen years; and for serious crimes they were

transported for life.  Children were sent to the penal colonies for seven

years for stealing a rabbit!



When I was in London twenty-three years ago there was a new penalty in

force for diminishing garroting and wife-beating--25 lashes on the bare

back with the cat-o'-nine-tails.  It was said that this terrible

punishment was able to bring the stubbornest ruffians to terms; and that

no man had been found with grit enough to keep his emotions to himself

beyond the ninth blow; as a rule the man shrieked earlier.  That penalty

had a great and wholesome effect upon the garroters and wife-beaters; but

humane modern London could not endure it; it got its law rescinded.  Many

a bruised and battered English wife has since had occasion to deplore

that cruel achievement of sentimental "humanity."



Twenty-five lashes!  In Australia and Tasmania they gave a convict fifty

for almost any little offense; and sometimes a brutal officer would add

fifty, and then another fifty, and so on, as long as the sufferer could

endure the torture and live.  In Tasmania I read the entry, in an old

manuscript official record, of a case where a convict was given three

hundred lashes--for stealing some silver spoons.  And men got more than

that, sometimes.  Who handled the cat?  Often it was another convict;

sometimes it was the culprit's dearest comrade; and he had to lay on with

all his might; otherwise he would get a flogging himself for his mercy-

for he was under watch--and yet not do his friend any good: the friend

would be attended to by another hand and suffer no lack in the matter of

full punishment.



The convict life in Tasmania was so unendurable, and suicide so difficult

to accomplish that once or twice despairing men got together and drew

straws to determine which of them should kill another of the group--this

murder to secure death to the perpetrator and to the witnesses of it by

the hand of the hangman!



The incidents quoted above are mere hints, mere suggestions of what

convict life was like--they are but a couple of details tossed into view

out of a shoreless sea of such; or, to change the figure, they are but a

pair of flaming steeples photographed from a point which hides from sight

the burning city which stretches away from their bases on every hand.



Some of the convicts--indeed, a good many of them--were very bad people,

even for that day; but the most of them were probably not noticeably

worse than the average of the people they left behind them at home.  We

must believe this; we cannot avoid it.  We are obliged to believe that a

nation that could look on, unmoved, and see starving or freezing women

hanged for stealing twenty-six cents' worth of bacon or rags, and boys

snatched from their mothers, and men from their families, and sent to the

other side of the world for long terms of years for similar trifling

offenses, was a nation to whom the term "civilized" could not in any

large way be applied.  And we must also believe that a nation that knew,

during more than forty years, what was happening to those exiles and was

still content with it, was not advancing in any showy way toward a higher

grade of civilization.



If we look into the characters and conduct of the officers and gentlemen

who had charge of the convicts and attended to their backs and stomachs,

we must grant again that as between the convict and his masters, and

between both and the nation at home, there was a quite noticeable

monotony of sameness.



Four years had gone by, and many convicts had come.  Respectable settlers

were beginning to arrive.  These two classes of colonists had to be

protected, in case of trouble among themselves or with the natives.  It

is proper to mention the natives, though they could hardly count they

were so scarce.  At a time when they had not as yet begun to be much

disturbed--not as yet being in the way--it was estimated that in New

South Wales there was but one native to 45,000 acres of territory.



People had to be protected.  Officers of the regular army did not want

this service--away off there where neither honor nor distinction was to

be gained.  So England recruited and officered a kind of militia force of

1,000 uniformed civilians called the "New South Wales Corps" and shipped

it.



This was the worst blow of all.  The colony fairly staggered under it.

The Corps was an object-lesson of the moral condition of England outside

of the jails.  The colonists trembled.  It was feared that next there

would be an importation of the nobility.



In those early days the colony was non-supporting.  All the necessaries

of life--food, clothing, and all--were sent out from England, and kept in

great government store-houses, and given to the convicts and sold to the

settlers--sold at a trifling advance upon cost.  The Corps saw its

opportunity.  Its officers went into commerce, and in a most lawless way.

They went to importing rum, and also to manufacturing it in private

stills, in defiance of the government's commands and protests.  They

leagued themselves together and ruled the market; they boycotted the

government and the other dealers; they established a close monopoly and

kept it strictly in their own hands.  When a vessel arrived with spirits,

they allowed nobody to buy but themselves, and they forced the owner to

sell to them at a price named by themselves--and it was always low

enough.  They bought rum at an average of two dollars a gallon and sold

it at an average of ten.  They made rum the currency of the country--for

there was little or no money--and they maintained their devastating hold

and kept the colony under their heel for eighteen or twenty years before

they were finally conquered and routed by the government.



Meantime, they had spread intemperance everywhere.  And they had squeezed

farm after farm out of the settlers hands for rum, and thus had

bountifully enriched themselves.  When a farmer was caught in the last

agonies of thirst they took advantage of him and sweated him for a drink.

In one instance they sold a man a gallon of rum worth two dollars for a

piece of property which was sold some years later for $100,000.

When the colony was about eighteen or twenty years old it was discovered

that the land was specially fitted for the wool-culture.  Prosperity

followed, commerce with the world began, by and by rich mines of the

noble metals were opened, immigrants flowed in, capital likewise.  The

result is the great and wealthy and enlightened commonwealth of New South

Wales.



It is a country that is rich in mines, wool ranches, trams, railways,

steamship lines, schools, newspapers, botanical gardens, art galleries,

libraries, museums, hospitals, learned societies; it is the hospitable

home of every species of culture and of every species of material

enterprise, and there is a, church at every man's door, and a race-track

over the way.









CHAPTER XI.



We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is

in it--and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot

stove-lid.  She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again--and that is

well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



All English-speaking colonies are made up of lavishly hospitable people,

and New South Wales and its capital are like the rest in this.  The

English-speaking colony of the United States of America is always called

lavishly hospitable by the English traveler.  As to the other English-

speaking colonies throughout the world from Canada all around, I know by

experience that the description fits them.  I will not go more

particularly into this matter, for I find that when writers try to

distribute their gratitude here and there and yonder by detail they run

across difficulties and do some ungraceful stumbling.



Mr. Gane ("New South Wales and Victoria in 1885 "), tried to distribute

his gratitude, and was not lucky:



     "The inhabitants of Sydney are renowned for their hospitality.  The

     treatment which we experienced at the hands of this generous-hearted

     people will help more than anything else to make us recollect with

     pleasure our stay amongst them.  In the character of hosts and

     hostesses they excel.  The 'new chum' needs only the

     acquaintanceship of one of their number, and he becomes at once the

     happy recipient of numerous complimentary invitations and thoughtful

     kindnesses.  Of the towns it has been our good fortune to visit,

     none have portrayed home so faithfully as Sydney."



Nobody could say it finer than that.  If he had put in his cork then, and

stayed away from Dubbo----but no; heedless man, he pulled it again.

Pulled it when he was away along in his book, and his memory of what he

had said about Sydney had grown dim:



     "We cannot quit the promising town of Dubbo without testifying, in

     warm praise, to the kind-hearted and hospitable usages of its

     inhabitants.  Sydney, though well deserving the character it bears

     of its kindly treatment of strangers, possesses a little formality

     and reserve.  In Dubbo, on the contrary, though the same congenial

     manners prevail, there is a pleasing degree of respectful

     familiarity which gives the town a homely comfort not often met with

     elsewhere.  In laying on one side our pen we feel contented in

     having been able, though so late in this work, to bestow a

     panegyric, however unpretentious, on a town which, though possessing

     no picturesque natural surroundings, nor interesting architectural

     productions, has yet a body of citizens whose hearts cannot but

     obtain for their town a reputation for benevolence and kind-

     heartedness."



I wonder what soured him on Sydney.  It seems strange that a pleasing

degree of three or four fingers of respectful familiarity should fill a

man up and give him the panegyrics so bad.  For he has them, the worst

way--any one can see that.  A man who is perfectly at himself does not

throw cold detraction at people's architectural productions and

picturesque surroundings, and let on that what he prefers is a Dubbonese

dust-storm and a pleasing degree of respectful familiarity, No, these are

old, old symptoms; and when they appear we know that the man has got the

panegyrics.



Sydney has a population of 400,000.  When a stranger from America steps

ashore there, the first thing that strikes him is that the place is eight

or nine times as large as he was expecting it to be; and the next thing

that strikes him is that it is an English city with American trimmings.

Later on, in Melbourne, he will find the American trimmings still more in

evidence; there, even the architecture will often suggest America; a

photograph of its stateliest business street might be passed upon him for

a picture of the finest street in a large American city.  I was told that

the most of the fine residences were the city residences of squatters.

The name seemed out of focus somehow.  When the explanation came, it

offered a new instance of the curious changes which words, as well as

animals, undergo through change of habitat and climate.  With us, when

you speak of a squatter you are always supposed to be speaking of a poor

man, but in Australia when you speak of a squatter you are supposed to be

speaking of a millionaire; in America the word indicates the possessor of

a few acres and a doubtful title, in Australia it indicates a man whose

landfront is as long as a railroad, and whose title has been perfected in

one way or another; in America the word indicates a man who owns a dozen

head of live stock, in Australia a man who owns anywhere from fifty

thousand up to half a million head; in America the word indicates a man

who is obscure and not important, in Australia a man who is prominent and

of the first importance; in America you take off your hat to no squatter,

in Australia you do; in America if your uncle is a squatter you keep it

dark, in Australia you advertise it; in America if your friend is a

squatter nothing comes of it, but with a squatter for your friend in

Australia you may sup with kings if there are any around.



In Australia it takes about two acres and a half of pastureland (some

people say twice as many), to support a sheep; and when the squatter has

half a million sheep his private domain is about as large as Rhode

Island, to speak in general terms.  His annual wool crop may be worth a

quarter or a half million dollars.



He will live in a palace in Melbourne or Sydney or some other of the

large cities, and make occasional trips to his sheep-kingdom several

hundred miles away in the great plains to look after his battalions of

riders and shepherds and other hands.  He has a commodious dwelling out

there, and if he approve of you he will invite you to spend a week in it,

and will make you at home and comfortable, and let you see the great

industry in all its details, and feed you and slake you and smoke you

with the best that money can buy.



On at least one of these vast estates there is a considerable town, with

all the various businesses and occupations that go to make an important

town; and the town and the land it stands upon are the property of the

squatters.  I have seen that town, and it is not unlikely that there are

other squatter-owned towns in Australia.



Australia supplies the world not only with fine wool, but with mutton

also.  The modern invention of cold storage and its application in ships

has created this great trade.  In Sydney I visited a huge establishment

where they kill and clean and solidly freeze a thousand sheep a day, for

shipment to England.



The Australians did not seem to me to differ noticeably from Americans,

either in dress, carriage, ways, pronunciation, inflections, or general

appearance.  There were fleeting and subtle suggestions of their English

origin, but these were not pronounced enough, as a rule, to catch one's

attention.  The people have easy and cordial manners from the beginning

--from the moment that the introduction is completed.  This is American.

To put it in another way, it is English friendliness with the English

shyness and self-consciousness left out.



Now and then--but this is rare--one hears such words as piper for paper,

lydy for lady, and tyble for table fall from lips whence one would not

expect such pronunciations to come.  There is a superstition prevalent in

Sydney that this pronunciation is an Australianism, but people who have

been "home"--as the native reverently and lovingly calls England--know

better.  It is "costermonger."  All over Australasia this pronunciation

is nearly as common among servants as it is in London among the

uneducated and the partially educated of all sorts and conditions of

people.  That mislaid 'y' is rather striking when a person gets enough of

it into a short sentence to enable it to show up.  In the hotel in Sydney

the chambermaid said, one morning:



"The tyble is set, and here is the piper; and if the lydy is ready I'll

tell the wyter to bring up the breakfast."



I have made passing mention, a moment ago, of the native Australasian's

custom of speaking of England as "home."  It was always pretty to hear

it, and often it was said in an unconsciously caressing way that made it

touching; in a way which transmuted a sentiment into an embodiment, and

made one seem to see Australasia as a young girl stroking mother

England's old gray head.



In the Australasian home the table-talk is vivacious and unembarrassed;

it is without stiffness or restraint.  This does not remind one of

England so much as it does of America.  But Australasia is strictly

democratic, and reserves and restraints are things that are bred by

differences of rank.



English and colonial audiences are phenomenally alert and responsive.

Where masses of people are gathered together in England, caste is

submerged, and with it the English reserve; equality exists for the

moment, and every individual is free; so free from any consciousness of

fetters, indeed, that the Englishman's habit of watching himself and

guarding himself against any injudicious exposure of his feelings is

forgotten, and falls into abeyance--and to such a degree indeed, that he

will bravely applaud all by himself if he wants to--an exhibition of

daring which is unusual elsewhere in the world.



But it is hard to move a new English acquaintance when he is by himself,

or when the company present is small and new to him.  He is on his guard

then, and his natural reserve is to the fore.  This has given him the

false reputation of being without humor and without the appreciation of

humor.



Americans are not Englishmen, and American humor is not English humor;

but both the American and his humor had their origin in England, and have

merely undergone changes brought about by changed conditions and a new

environment.  About the best humorous speeches I have yet heard were a

couple that were made in Australia at club suppers--one of them by an

Englishman, the other by an Australian.









CHAPTER XII.



There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and

shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said "Faith is believing what you

know ain't so."

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



In Sydney I had a large dream, and in the course of talk I told it to a

missionary from India who was on his way to visit some relatives in New

Zealand.  I dreamed that the visible universe is the physical person of

God; that the vast worlds that we see twinkling millions of miles apart

in the fields of space are the blood corpuscles in His veins; and that we

and the other creatures are the microbes that charge with multitudinous

life the corpuscles.



Mr. X., the missionary, considered the dream awhile, then said:



     "It is not surpassable for magnitude, since its metes and bounds are

     the metes and bounds of the universe itself; and it seems to me that

     it almost accounts for a thing which is otherwise nearly

     unaccountable--the origin of the sacred legends of the Hindoos.

     Perhaps they dream them, and then honestly believe them to be divine

     revelations of fact.  It looks like that, for the legends are built

     on so vast a scale that it does not seem reasonable that plodding

     priests would happen upon such colossal fancies when awake."



He told some of the legends, and said that they were implicitly believed

by all classes of Hindoos, including those of high social position and

intelligence; and he said that this universal credulity was a great

hindrance to the missionary in his work.  Then he said something like

this:



     "At home, people wonder why Christianity does not make faster

     progress in India.  They hear that the Indians believe easily, and

     that they have a natural trust in miracles and give them a

     hospitable reception.  Then they argue like this: since the Indian

     believes easily, place Christianity before them and they must

     believe; confirm its truths by the biblical miracles, and they will

     no longer doubt, The natural deduction is, that as Christianity

     makes but indifferent progress in India, the fault is with us: we

     are not fortunate in presenting the doctrines and the miracles.



     "But the truth is, we are not by any means so well equipped as they

     think.  We have not the easy task that they imagine.  To use a

     military figure, we are sent against the enemy with good powder in

     our guns, but only wads for bullets; that is to say, our miracles

     are not effective; the Hindoos do not care for them; they have more

     extraordinary ones of their own.  All the details of their own

     religion are proven and established by miracles; the details of ours

     must be proven in the same way.  When I first began my work in India

     I greatly underestimated the difficulties thus put upon my task.  A

     correction was not long in coming.  I thought as our friends think

     at home--that to prepare my childlike wonder-lovers to listen with

     favor to my grave message I only needed to charm the way to it with

     wonders, marvels, miracles.  With full confidence I told the wonders

     performed by Samson, the strongest man that had ever lived--for so I

     called him.



     "At first I saw lively anticipation and strong interest in the faces

     of my people, but as I moved along from incident to incident of the

     great story, I was distressed to see that I was steadily losing the

     sympathy of my audience.  I could not understand it.  It was a

     surprise to me, and a disappointment.  Before I was through, the

     fading sympathy had paled to indifference.  Thence to the end the

     indifference remained; I was not able to make any impression upon

     it.



     "A good old Hindoo gentleman told me where my trouble lay.  He said

     'We Hindoos recognize a god by the work of his hands--we accept no

     other testimony.  Apparently, this is also the rule with you

     Christians.  And we know when a man has his power from a god by the

     fact that he does things which he could not do, as a man, with the

     mere powers of a man.  Plainly, this is the Christian's way also, of

     knowing when a man is working by a god's power and not by his own.

     You saw that there was a supernatural property in the hair of

     Samson; for you perceived that when his hair was gone he was as

     other men.  It is our way, as I have said.  There are many nations

     in the world, and each group of nations has its own gods, and will

     pay no worship to the gods of the others.  Each group believes its

     own gods to be strongest, and it will not exchange them except for

     gods that shall be proven to be their superiors in power.  Man is

     but a weak creature, and needs the help of gods--he cannot do

     without it.  Shall he place his fate in the hands of weak gods when

     there may be stronger ones to be found?  That would be foolish.  No,

     if he hear of gods that are stronger than his own, he should not

     turn a deaf ear, for it is not a light matter that is at stake.  How

     then shall he determine which gods are the stronger, his own or

     those that preside over the concerns of other nations?  By comparing

     the known works of his own gods with the works of those others;

     there is no other way.  Now, when we make this comparison, we are

     not drawn towards the gods of any other nation.  Our gods are shown

     by their works to be the strongest, the most powerful.  The

     Christians have but few gods, and they are new--new, and not strong;

     as it seems to us.  They will increase in number, it is true, for

     this has happened with all gods, but that time is far away, many

     ages and decades of ages away, for gods multiply slowly, as is meet

     for beings to whom a thousand years is but a single moment.  Our own

     gods have been born millions of years apart.  The process is slow,

     the gathering of strength and power is similarly slow.  In the slow

     lapse of the ages the steadily accumulating power of our gods has at

     last become prodigious.  We have a thousand proofs of this in the

     colossal character of their personal acts and the acts of ordinary

     men to whom they have given supernatural qualities.  To your Samson

     was given supernatural power, and when he broke the withes, and slew

     the thousands with the jawbone of an ass, and carried away the

     gate's of the city upon his shoulders, you were amazed--and also

     awed, for you recognized the divine source of his strength.  But it

     could not profit to place these things before your Hindoo

     congregation and invite their wonder; for they would compare them

     with the deed done by Hanuman, when our gods infused their divine

     strength into his muscles; and they would be indifferent to them--as

     you saw.  In the old, old times, ages and ages gone by, when our god

     Rama was warring with the demon god of Ceylon, Rama bethought him to

     bridge the sea and connect Ceylon with India, so that his armies

     might pass easily over; and he sent his general, Hanuman, inspired

     like your own Samson with divine strength, to bring the materials

     for the bridge.  In two days Hanuman strode fifteen hundred miles,

     to the Himalayas, and took upon his shoulder a range of those lofty

     mountains two hundred miles long, and started with it toward Ceylon.

     It was in the night; and, as he passed along the plain, the people

     of Govardhun heard the thunder of his tread and felt the earth

     rocking under it, and they ran out, and there, with their snowy

     summits piled to heaven, they saw the Himalayas passing by.  And as

     this huge continent swept along overshadowing the earth, upon its

     slopes they discerned the twinkling lights of a thousand sleeping

     villages, and it was as if the constellations were filing in

     procession through the sky.  While they were looking, Hanuman

     stumbled, and a small ridge of red sandstone twenty miles long was

     jolted loose and fell.  Half of its length has wasted away in the

     course of the ages, but the other ten miles of it remain in the

     plain by Govardhun to this day as proof of the might of the

     inspiration of our gods.  You must know, yourself, that Hanuman

     could not have carried those mountains to Ceylon except by the

     strength of the gods.  You know that it was not done by his own

     strength, therefore, you know that it was done by the strength of

     the gods, just as you know that Samson carried the gates by the

     divine strength and not by his own.  I think you must concede two

     things:  First, That in carrying the gates of the city upon his

     shoulders, Samson did not establish the superiority of his gods over

     ours; secondly, That his feat is not supported by any but verbal

     evidence, while Hanuman's is not only supported by verbal evidence,

     but this evidence is confirmed, established, proven, by visible,

     tangible evidence, which is the strongest of all testimony.  We have

     the sandstone ridge, and while it remains we cannot doubt, and shall

     not.  Have you the gates?'"









CHAPTER XIII.



The timid man yearns for full value and asks a tenth.  The bold man

strikes for double value and compromises on par.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



One is sure to be struck by the liberal way in which Australasia spends

money upon public works--such as legislative buildings, town halls,

hospitals, asylums, parks, and botanical gardens.  I should say that

where minor towns in America spend a hundred dollars on the town hall and

on public parks and gardens, the like towns in Australasia spend a

thousand.  And I think that this ratio will hold good in the matter of

hospitals, also.  I have seen a costly and well-equipped, and

architecturally handsome hospital in an Australian village of fifteen

hundred inhabitants.  It was built by private funds furnished by the

villagers and the neighboring planters, and its running expenses were

drawn from the same sources.  I suppose it would be hard to match this in

any country.  This village was about to close a contract for lighting its

streets with the electric light, when I was there.  That is ahead of

London.  London is still obscured by gas--gas pretty widely scattered,

too, in some of the districts; so widely indeed, that except on moonlight

nights it is difficult to find the gas lamps.



The botanical garden of Sydney covers thirty-eight acres, beautifully

laid out and rich with the spoil of all the lands and all the climes of

the world.  The garden is on high ground in the middle of the town,

overlooking the great harbor, and it adjoins the spacious grounds of

Government House--fifty-six acres; and at hand also, is a recreation

ground containing eighty-two acres.  In addition, there are the

zoological gardens, the race-course, and the great cricket-grounds where

the international matches are played.  Therefore there is plenty of room

for reposeful lazying and lounging, and for exercise too, for such as

like that kind of work.



There are four specialties attainable in the way of social pleasure.  If

you enter your name on the Visitor's Book at Government House you will

receive an invitation to the next ball that takes place there, if nothing

can be proven against you.  And it will be very pleasant; for you will

see everybody except the Governor, and add a number of acquaintances and

several friends to your list.  The Governor will be in England.  He

always is.  The continent has four or five governors, and I do not know

how many it takes to govern the outlying archipelago; but anyway you will

not see them.  When they are appointed they come out from England and get

inaugurated, and give a ball, and help pray for rain, and get aboard ship

and go back home.  And so the Lieutenant-Governor has to do all the work.

I was in Australasia three months and a half, and saw only one Governor.

The others were at home.



The Australasian Governor would not be so restless, perhaps, if he had a

war, or a veto, or something like that to call for his reserve-energies,

but he hasn't.  There isn't any war, and there isn't any veto in his

hands.  And so there is really little or nothing doing in his line.  The

country governs itself, and prefers to do it; and is so strenuous about

it and so jealous of its independence that it grows restive if even the

Imperial Government at home proposes to help; and so the Imperial veto,

while a fact, is yet mainly a name.



Thus the Governor's functions are much more limited than are a Governor's

functions with us.  And therefore more fatiguing.  He is the apparent

head of the State, he is the real head of Society.  He represents

culture, refinement, elevated sentiment, polite life, religion; and by

his example he propagates these, and they spread and flourish and bear

good fruit.  He creates the fashion, and leads it.  His ball is the ball

of balls, and his countenance makes the horse-race thrive.



He is usually a lord, and this is well; for his position compels him to

lead an expensive life, and an English lord is generally well equipped

for that.



Another of Sydney's social pleasures is the visit to the Admiralty House;

which is nobly situated on high ground overlooking the water.  The trim

boats of the service convey the guests thither; and there, or on board

the flag-ship, they have the duplicate of the hospitalities of Government

House.  The Admiral commanding a station in British waters is a magnate

of the first degree, and he is sumptuously housed, as becomes the dignity

of his office.



Third in the list of special pleasures is the tour of the harbor in a

fine steam pleasure-launch.  Your richer friends own boats of this kind,

and they will invite you, and the joys of the trip will make a long day

seem short.



And finally comes the shark-fishing.  Sydney Harbor is populous with the

finest breeds of man-eating sharks in the world.  Some people make their

living catching them; for the Government pays a cash bounty on them.  The

larger the shark the larger the bounty, and some of the sharks are twenty

feet long.  You not only get the bounty, but everything that is in the

shark belongs to you.  Sometimes the contents are quite valuable.



The shark is the swiftest fish that swims.  The speed of the fastest

steamer afloat is poor compared to his.  And he is a great gad-about, and

roams far and wide in the oceans, and visits the shores of all of them,

ultimately, in the course of his restless excursions.  I have a tale to

tell now, which has not as yet been in print.  In 1870 a young stranger

arrived in Sydney, and set about finding something to do; but he knew no

one, and brought no recommendations, and the result was that he got no

employment.  He had aimed high, at first, but as time and his money

wasted away he grew less and less exacting, until at last he was willing

to serve in the humblest capacities if so he might get bread and shelter.

But luck was still against him; he could find no opening of any sort.

Finally his money was all gone.  He walked the streets all day, thinking;

he walked them all night, thinking, thinking, and growing hungrier and

hungrier.  At dawn he found himself well away from the town and drifting

aimlessly along the harbor shore.  As he was passing by a nodding shark-

fisher the man looked up and said----



"Say, young fellow, take my line a spell, and change my luck for me."



"How do you know I won't make it worse?"



"Because you can't.  It has been at its worst all night.



If you can't change it, no harm's done; if you do change it, it's for the

better, of course.  Come."



"All right, what will you give?"



"I'll give you the shark, if you catch one."



"And I will eat it, bones and all.  Give me the line."



"Here you are.  I will get away, now, for awhile, so that my luck won't

spoil yours; for many and many a time I've noticed that if----there, pull

in, pull in, man, you've got a bite!  I knew how it would be.  Why, I

knew you for a born son of luck the minute I saw you.  All right--he's

landed."



It was an unusually large shark--"a full nineteen-footer," the fisherman

said, as he laid the creature open with his knife.



"Now you rob him, young man, while I step to my hamper for a fresh bait.

There's generally something in them worth going for.  You've changed my

luck, you see.  But my goodness, I hope you haven't changed your own."



"Oh, it wouldn't matter; don't worry about that.  Get your bait.  I'll

rob him."



When the fisherman got back the young man had just finished washing his

hands in the bay, and was starting away.



"What, you are not going?"



"Yes.  Good-bye."



"But what about your shark?"



"The shark?  Why, what use is he to me?"



"What use is he?  I like that.  Don't you know that we can go and report

him to Government, and you'll get a clean solid eighty shillings bounty?

Hard cash, you know.  What do you think about it now?"



"Oh, well, you can collect it."



"And keep it?  Is that what you mean?"



"Yes."



"Well, this is odd.  You're one of those sort they call eccentrics, I

judge.  The saying is, you mustn't judge a man by his clothes, and I'm

believing it now.  Why yours are looking just ratty, don't you know; and

yet you must be rich."



"I am."



The young man walked slowly back to the town, deeply musing as he went.

He halted a moment in front of the best restaurant, then glanced at his

clothes and passed on, and got his breakfast at a "stand-up."  There was

a good deal of it, and it cost five shillings.  He tendered a sovereign,

got his change, glanced at his silver, muttered to himself, "There isn't

enough to buy clothes with," and went his way.



At half-past nine the richest wool-broker in Sydney was sitting in his

morning-room at home, settling his breakfast with the morning paper.  A

servant put his head in and said:



"There's a sundowner at the door wants to see you, sir."



"What do you bring that kind of a message here for?  Send him about his

business."



"He won't go, sir.  I've tried."



"He won't go?  That's--why, that's unusual.  He's one of two things,

then: he's a remarkable person, or he's crazy.  Is he crazy?"



"No, sir.  He don't look it."



"Then he's remarkable.  What does he say he wants?"



"He won't tell, sir; only says it's very important."



"And won't go.  Does he say he won't go?"



"Says he'll stand there till he sees you, sir, if it's all day."



"And yet isn't crazy.  Show him up."



The sundowner was shown in.  The broker said to himself, "No, he's not

crazy; that is easy to see; so he must be the other thing."



Then aloud, "Well, my good fellow, be quick about it; don't waste any

words; what is it you want?"



"I want to borrow a hundred thousand pounds."



"Scott!  (It's a mistake; he is crazy .  .  .  .  No--he can't be--not

with that eye.) Why, you take my breath away.  Come, who are you?"



"Nobody that you know."



"What is your name?"



"Cecil Rhodes."



"No, I don't remember hearing the name before.  Now then--just for

curiosity's sake--what has sent you to me on this extraordinary errand?"



"The intention to make a hundred thousand pounds for you and as much for

myself within the next sixty days."



"Well, well, well.  It is the most extraordinary idea that--sit down--you

interest me.  And somehow you--well, you fascinate me; I think that that

is about the word.  And it isn't your proposition--no, that doesn't

fascinate me; it's something else, I don't quite know what; something

that's born in you and oozes out of you, I suppose.  Now then just for

curiosity's sake again, nothing more: as I understand it, it is your

desire to bor----"



"I said intention."



"Pardon, so you did.  I thought it was an unheedful use of the word--an

unheedful valuing of its strength, you know."



"I knew its strength."



"Well, I must say--but look here, let me walk the floor a little, my mind

is getting into a sort of whirl, though you don't seem disturbed any.

(Plainly this young fellow isn't crazy; but as to his being remarkable--

well, really he amounts to that, and something over.)  Now then, I

believe I am beyond the reach of further astonishment.  Strike, and spare

not.  What is your scheme?"



"To buy the wool crop--deliverable in sixty days."



"What, the whole of it?"



"The whole of it."



"No, I was not quite out of the reach of surprises, after all.  Why, how

you talk!  Do you know what our crop is going to foot up?"



"Two and a half million sterling--maybe a little more."



"Well, you've got your statistics right, any way.  Now, then, do you know

what the margins would foot up, to buy it at sixty days?"



"The hundred thousand pounds I came here to get."



"Right, once more.  Well, dear me, just to see what would happen, I wish

you had the money.  And if you had it, what would you do with it?"



"I shall make two hundred thousand pounds out of it in sixty days."



"You mean, of course, that you might make it if----"



"I said 'shall'."



"Yes, by George, you did say 'shall'!  You are the most definite devil I

ever saw, in the matter of language.  Dear, dear, dear, look here!

Definite speech means clarity of mind.  Upon my word I believe you've got

what you believe to be a rational reason, for venturing into this house,

an entire stranger, on this wild scheme of buying the wool crop of an

entire colony on speculation.  Bring it out--I am prepared--acclimatized,

if I may use the word.  Why would you buy the crop, and why would you

make that sum out of it?  That is to say, what makes you think you----"



"I don't think--I know."



"Definite again.  How do you know?"



"Because France has declared war against Germany, and wool has gone up

fourteen per cent. in London and is still rising."



"Oh, in-deed?  Now then, I've got you!  Such a thunderbolt as you have

just let fly ought to have made me jump out of my chair, but it didn't

stir me the least little bit, you see.  And for a very simple reason: I

have read the morning paper.  You can look at it if you want to.  The

fastest ship in the service arrived at eleven o'clock last night, fifty

days out from London.  All her news is printed here.  There are no war-

clouds anywhere; and as for wool, why, it is the low-spiritedest

commodity in the English market.  It is your turn to jump, now .  .  .  .

Well, why, don't you jump?  Why do you sit there in that placid fashion,

when----"



"Because I have later news."



"Later news?  Oh, come--later news than fifty days, brought steaming hot

from London by the----"



"My news is only ten days old."



"Oh, Mun-chausen, hear the maniac talk!  Where did you get it?"



"Got it out of a shark."



"Oh, oh, oh, this is too much!  Front!  call the police bring the gun--

raise the town!  All the asylums in Christendom have broken loose in the

single person of----"



"Sit down!  And collect yourself.  Where is the use in getting excited?

Am I excited?  There is nothing to get excited about.  When I make a

statement which I cannot prove, it will be time enough for you to begin

to offer hospitality to damaging fancies about me and my sanity."



"Oh, a thousand, thousand pardons!  I ought to be ashamed of myself, and

I am ashamed of myself for thinking that a little bit of a circumstance

like sending a shark to England to fetch back a market report----"



"What does your middle initial stand for, sir?"



"Andrew.  What are you writing?"



"Wait a moment.  Proof about the shark--and another matter.  Only ten

lines.  There--now it is done.  Sign it."



"Many thanks--many.  Let me see; it says--it says oh, come, this is

interesting!  Why--why--look here!  prove what you say here, and I'll put

up the money, and double as much, if necessary, and divide the winnings

with you, half and half.  There, now--I've signed; make your promise good

if you can.  Show me a copy of the London Times only ten days old."



"Here it is--and with it these buttons and a memorandum book that

belonged to the man the shark swallowed.  Swallowed him in the Thames,

without a doubt; for you will notice that the last entry in the book is

dated 'London,' and is of the same date as the Times, and says, 'Ber

confequentz der Kreigeseflarun, reife ich heute nach Deutchland ab, aur

bak ich mein leben auf dem Ultar meines Landes legen mag'----, as clean

native German as anybody can put upon paper, and means that in

consequence of the declaration of war, this loyal soul is leaving for

home to-day, to fight.  And he did leave, too, but the shark had him

before the day was done, poor fellow."



"And a pity, too.  But there are times for mourning, and we will attend

to this case further on; other matters are pressing, now.  I will go down

and set the machinery in motion in a quiet way and buy the crop.  It will

cheer the drooping spirits of the boys, in a transitory way.  Everything

is transitory in this world.  Sixty days hence, when they are called to

deliver the goods, they will think they've been struck by lightning.  But

there is a time for mourning, and we will attend to that case along with

the other one.  Come along, I'll take you to my tailor.  What did you say

your name is?"



"Cecil Rhodes."



"It is hard to remember.  However, I think you will make it easier by and

by, if you live.  There are three kinds of people--Commonplace Men,

Remarkable Men, and Lunatics.  I'll classify you with the Remarkables,

and take the chances."



The deal went through, and secured to the young stranger the first

fortune he ever pocketed.



The people of Sydney ought to be afraid of the sharks, but for some

reason they do not seem to be.  On Saturdays the young men go out in

their boats, and sometimes the water is fairly covered with the little

sails.  A boat upsets now and then, by accident, a result of tumultuous

skylarking; sometimes the boys upset their boat for fun--such as it is

with sharks visibly waiting around for just such an occurrence.  The

young fellows scramble aboard whole--sometimes--not always.  Tragedies

have happened more than once.  While I was in Sydney it was reported that

a boy fell out of a boat in the mouth of the Paramatta river and screamed

for help and a boy jumped overboard from another boat to save him from

the assembling sharks; but the sharks made swift work with the lives of

both.



The government pays a bounty for the shark; to get the bounty the

fishermen bait the hook or the seine with agreeable mutton; the news

spreads and the sharks come from all over the Pacific Ocean to get the

free board.  In time the shark culture will be one of the most successful

things in the colony.









CHAPTER XIV.



We can secure other people's approval, if we do right and try hard; but

our own is worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found out of

securing that.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



My health had broken down in New York in May; it had remained in a

doubtful but fairish condition during a succeeding period of 82 days; it

broke again on the Pacific.  It broke again in Sydney, but not until

after I had had a good outing, and had also filled my lecture

engagements.  This latest break lost me the chance of seeing Queensland.

In the circumstances, to go north toward hotter weather was not

advisable.



So we moved south with a westward slant, 17 hours by rail to the capital

of the colony of Victoria, Melbourne--that juvenile city of sixty years,

and half a million inhabitants.  On the map the distance looked small;

but that is a trouble with all divisions of distance in such a vast

country as Australia.  The colony of Victoria itself looks small on the

map--looks like a county, in fact--yet it is about as large as England,

Scotland, and Wales combined.  Or, to get another focus upon it, it is

just 80 times as large as the state of Rhode Island, and one-third as

large as the State of Texas.



Outside of Melbourne, Victoria seems to be owned by a handful of

squatters, each with a Rhode Island for a sheep farm.  That is the

impression which one gathers from common talk, yet the wool industry of

Victoria is by no means so great as that of New South Wales.  The climate

of Victoria is favorable to other great industries--among others, wheat-

growing and the making of wine.



We took the train at Sydney at about four in the afternoon.  It was

American in one way, for we had a most rational sleeping car; also the

car was clean and fine and new--nothing about it to suggest the rolling

stock of the continent of Europe.  But our baggage was weighed, and extra

weight charged for.  That was continental.  Continental and troublesome.

Any detail of railroading that is not troublesome cannot honorably be

described as continental.



The tickets were round-trip ones--to Melbourne, and clear to Adelaide in

South Australia, and then all the way back to Sydney.  Twelve hundred

more miles than we really expected to make; but then as the round trip

wouldn't cost much more than the single trip, it seemed well enough to

buy as many miles as one could afford, even if one was not likely to need

them.  A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing

than he needs.



Now comes a singular thing: the oddest thing, the strangest thing, the

most baffling and unaccountable marvel that Australasia can show.  At the

frontier between New South Wales and Victoria our multitude of passengers

were routed out of their snug beds by lantern-light in the morning in the

biting-cold of a high altitude to change cars on a road that has no break

in it from Sydney to Melbourne!  Think of the paralysis of intellect that

gave that idea birth; imagine the boulder it emerged from on some

petrified legislator's shoulders.



It is a narrow-gage road to the frontier, and a broader gauge thence to

Melbourne.  The two governments were the builders of the road and are the

owners of it.  One or two reasons are given for this curious state of

things.  One is, that it represents the jealousy existing between the

colonies--the two most important colonies of Australasia.  What the other

one is, I have forgotten.  But it is of no consequence.  It could be but

another effort to explain the inexplicable.



All passengers fret at the double-gauge; all shippers of freight must of

course fret at it; unnecessary expense, delay, and annoyance are imposed

upon everybody concerned, and no one is benefitted.



Each Australian colony fences itself off from its neighbor with a custom-

house.  Personally, I have no objection, but it must be a good deal of

inconvenience to the people.  We have something resembling it here and

there in America, but it goes by another name.  The large empire of the

Pacific coast requires a world of iron machinery, and could manufacture

it economically on the spot if the imposts on foreign iron were removed.

But they are not.  Protection to Pennsylvania and Alabama forbids it.

The result to the Pacific coast is the same as if there were several rows

of custom-fences between the coast and the East.  Iron carted across the

American continent at luxurious railway rates would be valuable enough to

be coined when it arrived.



We changed cars.  This was at Albury.  And it was there, I think, that

the growing day and the early sun exposed the distant range called the

Blue Mountains.  Accurately named.  "My word!" as the Australians say,

but it was a stunning color, that blue.  Deep, strong, rich, exquisite;

towering and majestic masses of blue--a softly luminous blue, a

smouldering blue, as if vaguely lit by fires within.  It extinguished the

blue of the sky--made it pallid and unwholesome, whitey and washed-out.

A wonderful color--just divine.



A resident told me that those were not mountains; he said they were

rabbit-piles.  And explained that long exposure and the over-ripe

condition of the rabbits was what made them look so blue.  This man may

have been right, but much reading of books of travel has made me

distrustful of gratis information furnished by unofficial residents of a

country.  The facts which such people give to travelers are usually

erroneous, and often intemperately so.  The rabbit-plague has indeed been

very bad in Australia, and it could account for one mountain, but not for

a mountain range, it seems to me.  It is too large an order.



We breakfasted at the station.  A good breakfast, except the coffee; and

cheap.  The Government establishes the prices and placards them.  The

waiters were men, I think; but that is not usual in Australasia.  The

usual thing is to have girls.  No, not girls, young ladies--generally

duchesses.  Dress?  They would attract attention at any royal levee in

Europe.  Even empresses and queens do not dress as they do.  Not that

they could not afford it, perhaps, but they would not know how.



All the pleasant morning we slid smoothly along over the plains, through

thin--not thick--forests of great melancholy gum trees, with trunks

rugged with curled sheets of flaking bark--erysipelas convalescents, so

to speak, shedding their dead skins.  And all along were tiny cabins,

built sometimes of wood, sometimes of gray-blue corrugated iron; and the

doorsteps and fences were clogged with children--rugged little simply-

clad chaps that looked as if they had been imported from the banks of the

Mississippi without breaking bulk.



And there were little villages, with neat stations well placarded with

showy advertisements--mainly of almost too self-righteous brands of

"sheepdip."  If that is the name--and I think it is.  It is a stuff like

tar, and is dabbed on to places where the shearer clips a piece out of

the sheep.  It bars out the flies, and has healing properties, and a nip

to it which makes the sheep skip like the cattle on a thousand hills.  It

is not good to eat.  That is, it is not good to eat except when mixed

with railroad coffee.  It improves railroad coffee.  Without it railroad

coffee is too vague.  But with it, it is quite assertive and

enthusiastic.  By itself, railroad coffee is too passive; but sheep-dip

makes it wake up and get down to business.  I wonder where they get

railroad coffee?



We saw birds, but not a kangaroo, not an emu, not an ornithorhynchus, not

a lecturer, not a native.  Indeed, the land seemed quite destitute of

game.  But I have misused the word native.  In Australia it is applied to

Australian-born whites only.  I should have said that we saw no

Aboriginals--no "blackfellows."  And to this day I have never seen one.

In the great museums you will find all the other curiosities, but in the

curio of chiefest interest to the stranger all of them are lacking.  We

have at home an abundance of museums, and not an American Indian in them.

It is clearly an absurdity, but it never struck me before.









CHAPTER XV.



Truth is stranger than fiction--to some people, but I am measurably

familiar with it.

                             --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to

stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

                             --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



The air was balmy and delicious, the sunshine radiant; it was a charming

excursion.  In the course of it we came to a town whose odd name was

famous all over the world a quarter of a century ago--Wagga-Wagga.  This

was because the Tichborne Claimant had kept a butcher-shop there.  It was

out of the midst of his humble collection of sausages and tripe that he

soared up into the zenith of notoriety and hung there in the wastes of

space a time, with the telescopes of all nations leveled at him in

unappeasable curiosity--curiosity as to which of the two long-missing

persons he was:  Arthur Orton, the mislaid roustabout of Wapping, or Sir

Roger Tichborne, the lost heir of a name and estates as old as English

history.  We all know now, but not a dozen people knew then; and the

dozen kept the mystery to themselves and allowed the most intricate and

fascinating and marvelous real-life romance that has ever been played

upon the world's stage to unfold itself serenely, act by act, in a

British court by the long and laborious processes of judicial

development.



When we recall the details of that great romance we marvel to see what

daring chances truth may freely take in constructing a tale, as compared

with the poor little conservative risks permitted to fiction.  The

fiction-artist could achieve no success with the materials of this

splendid Tichborne romance.



He would have to drop out the chief characters; the public would say such

people are impossible.  He would have to drop out a number of the most

picturesque incidents; the public would say such things could never

happen.  And yet the chief characters did exist, and the incidents did

happen.



It cost the Tichborne estates $400,000 to unmask the Claimant and drive

him out; and even after the exposure multitudes of Englishmen still

believed in him.  It cost the British Government another $400,000 to

convict him of perjury; and after the conviction the same old multitudes

still believed in him; and among these believers were many educated and

intelligent men; and some of them had personally known the real Sir

Roger.  The Claimant was sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment.  When he

got out of prison he went to New York and kept a whisky saloon in the

Bowery for a time, then disappeared from view.



He always claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne until death called for him.

This was but a few months ago--not very much short of a generation since

he left Wagga-Wagga to go and possess himself of his estates.  On his

death-bed he yielded up his secret, and confessed in writing that he was

only Arthur Orton of Wapping, able seaman and butcher--that and nothing

more.  But it is scarcely to be doubted that there are people whom even

his dying confession will not convince.  The old habit of assimilating

incredibilities must have made strong food a necessity in their case; a

weaker article would probably disagree with them.



I was in London when the Claimant stood his trial for perjury.  I

attended one of his showy evenings in the sumptuous quarters provided for

him from the purses of his adherents and well-wishers.  He was in evening

dress, and I thought him a rather fine and stately creature.  There were

about twenty-five gentlemen present; educated men, men moving in good

society, none of them commonplace; some of them were men of distinction,

none of them were obscurities.  They were his cordial friends and

admirers.  It was "Sir Roger," always "Sir Roger," on all hands; no one

withheld the title, all turned it from the tongue with unction, and as if

it tasted good.



For many years I had had a mystery in stock.  Melbourne, and only

Melbourne, could unriddle it for me.  In 1873 I arrived in London with my

wife and young child, and presently received a note from Naples signed by

a name not familiar to me.  It was not Bascom, and it was not Henry; but

I will call it Henry Bascom for convenience's sake.  This note, of about

six lines, was written on a strip of white paper whose end-edges were

ragged.  I came to be familiar with those strips in later years.  Their

size and pattern were always the same.  Their contents were usually to

the same effect: would I and mine come to the writer's country-place in

England on such and such a date, by such and such a train, and stay

twelve days and depart by such and such a train at the end of the

specified time?  A carriage would meet us at the station.



These invitations were always for a long time ahead; if we were in

Europe, three months ahead; if we were in America, six to twelve months

ahead.  They always named the exact date and train for the beginning and

also for the end of the visit.



This first note invited us for a date three months in the future.  It

asked us to arrive by the 4.10 p.m. train from London, August 6th.  The

carriage would be waiting.  The carriage would take us away seven days

later-train specified.  And there were these words: "Speak to Tom

Hughes."



I showed the note to the author of "Tom Brown at Rugby," and be said:

"Accept, and be thankful."



He described Mr. Bascom as being a man of genius, a man of fine

attainments, a choice man in every way, a rare and beautiful character.

He said that Bascom Hall was a particularly fine example of the stately

manorial mansion of Elizabeth's days, and that it was a house worth going

a long way to see--like Knowle; that Mr. B. was of a social disposition;

liked the company of agreeable people, and always had samples of the sort

coming and going.



We paid the visit.  We paid others, in later years--the last one in 1879.

Soon after that Mr. Bascom started on a voyage around the world in a

steam yacht--a long and leisurely trip, for he was making collections, in

all lands, of birds, butterflies, and such things.



The day that President Garfield was shot by the assassin Guiteau, we were

at a little watering place on Long Island Sound; and in the mail matter

of that day came a letter with the Melbourne post-mark on it.  It was for

my wife, but I recognized Mr. Bascom's handwriting on the envelope, and

opened it.  It was the usual note--as to paucity of lines--and was

written on the customary strip of paper; but there was nothing usual

about the contents.  The note informed my wife that if it would be any

assuagement of her grief to know that her husband's lecture-tour in

Australia was a satisfactory venture from the beginning to the end, he,

the writer, could testify that such was the case; also, that her

husband's untimely death had been mourned by all classes, as she would

already know by the press telegrams, long before the reception of this

note; that the funeral was attended by the officials of the colonial and

city governments; and that while he, the writer, her friend and mine, had

not reached Melbourne in time to see the body, he had at least had the

sad privilege of acting as one of the pall-bearers.  Signed, "Henry

Bascom."



My first thought was, why didn't he have the coffin opened?  He would

have seen that the corpse was an imposter, and he could have gone right

ahead and dried up the most of those tears, and comforted those sorrowing

governments, and sold the remains and sent me the money.



I did nothing about the matter.  I had set the law after living lecture

doubles of mine a couple of times in America, and the law had not been

able to catch them; others in my trade had tried to catch their impostor-

doubles and had failed.  Then where was the use in harrying a ghost?

None--and so I did not disturb it.  I had a curiosity to know about that

man's lecture-tour and last moments, but that could wait.  When I should

see Mr. Bascom he would tell me all about it.  But he passed from life,

and I never saw him again..  My curiosity faded away.



However, when I found that I was going to Australia it revived.  And

naturally: for if the people should say that I was a dull, poor thing

compared to what I was before I died, it would have a bad effect on

business.  Well, to my surprise the Sydney journalists had never heard of

that impostor!  I pressed them, but they were firm--they had never heard

of him, and didn't believe in him.



I could not understand it; still, I thought it would all come right in

Melbourne.  The government would remember; and the other mourners.  At

the supper of the Institute of Journalists I should find out all about

the matter.  But no--it turned out that they had never heard of it.



So my mystery was a mystery still.  It was a great disappointment.  I

believed it would never be cleared up--in this life--so I dropped it out

of my mind.



But at last! just when I was least expecting it----



However, this is not the place for the rest of it; I shall come to the

matter again, in a far-distant chapter.









CHAPTER XVI.



There is a Moral sense, and there is an Immoral Sense.  History shows us

that the Moral Sense enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it,

and that the Immoral Sense enables us to perceive immorality and how to

enjoy it.

                              -Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Melbourne spreads around over an immense area of ground.  It is a stately

city architecturally as well as in magnitude.  It has an elaborate system

of cable-car service; it has museums, and colleges, and schools, and

public gardens, and electricity, and gas, and libraries, and theaters,

and mining centers, and wool centers, and centers of the arts and

sciences, and boards of trade, and ships, and railroads, and a harbor,

and social clubs, and journalistic clubs, and racing clubs, and a

squatter club sumptuously housed and appointed, and as many churches and

banks as can make a living.  In a word, it is equipped with everything

that goes to make the modern great city.  It is the largest city of

Australasia, and fills the post with honor and credit.  It has one

specialty; this must not be jumbled in with those other things.  It is

the mitred Metropolitan of the Horse-Racing Cult.  Its race-ground is the

Mecca of Australasia.  On the great annual day of sacrifice--the 5th of

November, Guy Fawkes's Day--business is suspended over a stretch of land

and sea as wide as from New York to San Francisco, and deeper than from

the northern lakes to the Gulf of Mexico; and every man and woman, of

high degree or low, who can afford the expense, put away their other

duties and come.  They begin to swarm in by ship and rail a fortnight

before the day, and they swarm thicker and thicker day after day, until

all the vehicles of transportation are taxed to their uttermost to meet

the demands of the occasion, and all hotels and lodgings are bulging

outward because of the pressure from within.  They come a hundred

thousand strong, as all the best authorities say, and they pack the

spacious grounds and grandstands and make a spectacle such as is never to

be seen in Australasia elsewhere.



It is the "Melbourne Cup" that brings this multitude together.  Their

clothes have been ordered long ago, at unlimited cost, and without bounds

as to beauty and magnificence, and have been kept in concealment until

now, for unto this day are they consecrate.  I am speaking of the ladies'

clothes; but one might know that.



And so the grand-stands make a brilliant and wonderful spectacle, a

delirium of color, a vision of beauty.  The champagne flows, everybody is

vivacious, excited, happy; everybody bets, and gloves and fortunes change

hands right along, all the time.  Day after day the races go on, and the

fun and the excitement are kept at white heat; and when each day is done,

the people dance all night so as to be fresh for the race in the morning.

And at the end of the great week the swarms secure lodgings and

transportation for next year, then flock away to their remote homes and

count their gains and losses, and order next year's Cup-clothes, and then

lie down and sleep two weeks, and get up sorry to reflect that a whole

year must be put in somehow or other before they can be wholly happy

again.



The Melbourne Cup is the Australasian National Day.  It would be

difficult to overstate its importance.  It overshadows all other holidays

and specialized days of whatever sort in that congeries of colonies.

Overshadows them?  I might almost say it blots them out.  Each of them

gets attention, but not everybody's; each of them evokes interest, but

not everybody's; each of them rouses enthusiasm, but not everybody's; in

each case a part of the attention, interest, and enthusiasm is a matter

of habit and custom, and another part of it is official and perfunctory.

Cup Day, and Cup Day only, commands an attention, an interest, and an

enthusiasm which are universal--and spontaneous, not perfunctory.  Cup

Day is supreme it has no rival.  I can call to mind no specialized annual

day, in any country, which can be named by that large name--Supreme.  I

can call to mind no specialized annual day, in any country, whose

approach fires the whole land with a conflagration of conversation and

preparation and anticipation and jubilation.  No day save this one; but

this one does it.



In America we have no annual supreme day; no day whose approach makes the

whole nation glad.  We have the Fourth of July, and Christmas, and

Thanksgiving.  Neither of them can claim the primacy; neither of them can

arouse an enthusiasm which comes near to being universal.  Eight grown

Americans out of ten dread the coming of the Fourth, with its pandemonium

and its perils, and they rejoice when it is gone--if still alive.  The

approach of Christmas brings harassment and dread to many excellent

people.  They have to buy a cart-load of presents, and they never know

what to buy to hit the various tastes; they put in three weeks of hard

and anxious work, and when Christmas morning comes they are so

dissatisfied with the result, and so disappointed that they want to sit

down and cry.  Then they give thanks that Christmas comes but once a

year.  The observance of Thanksgiving Day--as a function--has become

general of late years.  The Thankfulness is not so general.  This is

natural.  Two-thirds of the nation have always had hard luck and a hard

time during the year, and this has a calming effect upon their

enthusiasm.



We have a supreme day--a sweeping and tremendous and tumultuous day, a

day which commands an absolute universality of interest and excitement;

but it is not annual.  It comes but once in four years; therefore it

cannot count as a rival of the Melbourne Cup.



In Great Britain and Ireland they have two great days--Christmas and the

Queen's birthday.  But they are equally popular; there is no supremacy.



I think it must be conceded that the position of the Australasian Day is

unique, solitary, unfellowed; and likely to hold that high place a long

time.



The next things which interest us when we travel are, first, the people;

next, the novelties; and finally the history of the places and countries

visited.  Novelties are rare in cities which represent the most advanced

civilization of the modern day.  When one is familiar with such cities in

the other parts of the world he is in effect familiar with the cities of

Australasia.  The outside aspects will furnish little that is new.  There

will be new names, but the things which they represent will sometimes be

found to be less new than their names.  There may be shades of

difference, but these can easily be too fine for detection by the

incompetent eye of the passing stranger.  In the larrikin he will not be

able to discover a new species, but only an old one met elsewhere, and

variously called loafer, rough, tough, bummer, or blatherskite, according

to his geographical distribution.  The larrikin differs by a shade from

those others, in that he is more sociable toward the stranger than they,

more kindly disposed, more hospitable, more hearty, more friendly.  At

least it seemed so to me, and I had opportunity to observe.  In Sydney,

at least.  In Melbourne I had to drive to and from the lecture-theater,

but in Sydney I was able to walk both ways, and did it.  Every night, on

my way home at ten, or a quarter past, I found the larrikin grouped in

considerable force at several of the street corners, and he always gave

me this pleasant salutation:



"Hello, Mark!"



"Here's to you, old chap!



"Say--Mark!--is he dead?"--a reference to a passage in some book of mine,

though I did not detect, at that time, that that was its source.  And I

didn't detect it afterward in Melbourne, when I came on the stage for the

first time, and the same question was dropped down upon me from the dizzy

height of the gallery.  It is always difficult to answer a sudden inquiry

like that, when you have come unprepared and don't know what it means.

I will remark here--if it is not an indecorum--that the welcome which an

American lecturer gets from a British colonial audience is a thing which

will move him to his deepest deeps, and veil his sight and break his

voice.  And from Winnipeg to Africa, experience will teach him nothing;

he will never learn to expect it, it will catch him as a surprise each

time.  The war-cloud hanging black over England and America made no

trouble for me.  I was a prospective prisoner of war, but at dinners,

suppers, on the platform, and elsewhere, there was never anything to

remind me of it.  This was hospitality of the right metal, and would have

been prominently lacking in some countries, in the circumstances.



And speaking of the war-flurry, it seemed to me to bring to light the

unexpected, in a detail or two.  It seemed to relegate the war-talk to

the politicians on both sides of the water; whereas whenever a

prospective war between two nations had been in the air theretofore, the

public had done most of the talking and the bitterest.  The attitude of

the newspapers was new also.  I speak of those of Australasia and India,

for I had access to those only.  They treated the subject argumentatively

and with dignity, not with spite and anger.  That was a new spirit, too,

and not learned of the French and German press, either before Sedan or

since.  I heard many public speeches, and they reflected the moderation

of the journals.  The outlook is that the English-speaking race will

dominate the earth a hundred years from now, if its sections do not get

to fighting each other.  It would be a pity to spoil that prospect by

baffling and retarding wars when arbitration would settle their

differences so much better and also so much more definitely.



No, as I have suggested, novelties are rare in the great capitals of

modern times.  Even the wool exchange in Melbourne could not be told from

the familiar stock exchange of other countries.  Wool brokers are just

like stockbrokers; they all bounce from their seats and put up their

hands and yell in unison--no stranger can tell what--and the president

calmly says "Sold to Smith & Co., threpence farthing--next!"--when

probably nothing of the kind happened; for how should he know?



In the museums you will find acres of the most strange and fascinating

things; but all museums are fascinating, and they do so tire your eyes,

and break your back, and burn out your vitalities with their consuming

interest.  You always say you will never go again, but you do go.  The

palaces of the rich, in Melbourne, are much like the palaces of the rich

in America, and the life in them is the same; but there the resemblance

ends.  The grounds surrounding the American palace are not often large,

and not often beautiful, but in the Melbourne case the grounds are often

ducally spacious, and the climate and the gardeners together make them as

beautiful as a dream.  It is said that some of the country seats have

grounds--domains--about them which rival in charm and magnitude those

which surround the country mansion of an English lord; but I was not out

in the country; I had my hands full in town.



And what was the origin of this majestic city and its efflorescence of

palatial town houses and country seats?  Its first brick was laid and

its first house built by a passing convict.  Australian history is almost

always picturesque; indeed, it is so curious and strange, that it is

itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer, and so it pushes

the other novelties into second and third place.  It does not read like

history, but like the most beautiful lies.  And all of a fresh new sort,

no mouldy old stale ones.  It is full of surprises, and adventures, and

incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all

true, they all happened.









CHAPTER XVII.



The English are mentioned in the Bible: Blessed are the meek, for they

shall inherit the earth.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



When we consider the immensity of the British Empire in territory,

population, and trade, it requires a stern exercise of faith to believe

in the figures which represent Australasia's contribution to the Empire's

commercial grandeur.  As compared with the landed estate of the British

Empire, the landed estate dominated by any other Power except one--

Russia--is not very impressive for size.  My authorities make the British

Empire not much short of a fourth larger than the Russian Empire.

Roughly proportioned, if you will allow your entire hand to represent the

British Empire, you may then cut off the fingers a trifle above the

middle joint of the middle finger, and what is left of the hand will

represent Russia.  The populations ruled by Great Britain and China are

about the same--400,000,000 each.  No other Power approaches these

figures.  Even Russia is left far behind.



The population of Australasia--4,000,000--sinks into nothingness, and is

lost from sight in that British ocean of 400,000,000.  Yet the statistics

indicate that it rises again and shows up very conspicuously when its

share of the Empire's commerce is the matter under consideration.  The

value of England's annual exports and imports is stated at three billions

of dollars,--[New South Wales Blue Book.]--and it is claimed that more

than one-tenth of this great aggregate is represented by Australasia's

exports to England and imports from England.  In addition to this,

Australasia does a trade with countries other than England, amounting to

a hundred million dollars a year, and a domestic intercolonial trade

amounting to a hundred and fifty millions.



In round numbers the 4,000,000 buy and sell about $600,000,000 worth of

goods a year.  It is claimed that about half of this represents

commodities of Australasian production.  The products exported annually

by India are worth a trifle over $500,000,000.1 Now, here are some faith-

straining figures:



Indian production (300,000,000 population), $500,000,000.



Australasian production (4,000,000 population), $300,000,000.



That is to say, the product of the individual Indian, annually (for

export some whither), is worth $1.15; that of the individual

Australasian (for export some whither), $75! Or, to put it in another

way, the Indian family of man and wife and three children sends away an

annual result worth $8.75, while the Australasian family sends away $375

worth.



There are trustworthy statistics furnished by Sir Richard Temple and

others, which show that the individual Indian's whole annual product,

both for export and home use, is worth in gold only $7.50; or, $37.50

for the family-aggregate.  Ciphered out on a like ratio of

multiplication, the Australasian family's aggregate production would be

nearly $1,600.  Truly, nothing is so astonishing as figures, if they once

get started.



We left Melbourne by rail for Adelaide, the capital of the vast Province

of South Australia--a seventeen-hour excursion.  On the train we found

several Sydney friends; among them a Judge who was going out on circuit,

and was going to hold court at Broken Hill, where the celebrated silver

mine is.  It seemed a curious road to take to get to that region.  Broken

Hill is close to the western border of New South Wales, and Sydney is on

the eastern border.  A fairly straight line, 700 miles long, drawn

westward from Sydney, would strike Broken Hill, just as a somewhat

shorter one drawn west from Boston would strike Buffalo.  The way the

Judge was traveling would carry him over 2,000 miles by rail, he said;

southwest from Sydney down to Melbourne, then northward up to Adelaide,

then a cant back northeastward and over the border into New South Wales

once more--to Broken Hill.  It was like going from Boston southwest to

Richmond, Virginia, then northwest up to Erie, Pennsylvania, then a cant

back northeast and over the border--to Buffalo, New York.



But the explanation was simple.  Years ago the fabulously rich silver

discovery at Broken Hill burst suddenly upon an unexpectant world.  Its

stocks started at shillings, and went by leaps and bounds to the most

fanciful figures.  It was one of those cases where the cook puts a

month's wages into shares, and comes next mouth and buys your house at

your own price, and moves into it herself; where the coachman takes a few

shares, and next month sets up a bank; and where the common sailor

invests the price of a spree, and next month buys out the steamship

company and goes into business on his own hook.  In a word, it was one of

those excitements which bring multitudes of people to a common center

with a rush, and whose needs must be supplied, and at once.  Adelaide was

close by, Sydney was far away.  Adelaide threw a short railway across the

border before Sydney had time to arrange for a long one; it was not worth

while for Sydney to arrange at all.  The whole vast trade-profit of

Broken Hill fell into Adelaide's hands, irrevocably.  New South Wales

furnishes for Broken Hill and sends her Judges 2,000 miles--mainly

through alien countries--to administer it, but Adelaide takes the

dividends and makes no moan.



We started at 4.20 in the afternoon, and moved across level until night.

In the morning we had a stretch of "scrub" country--the kind of thing

which is so useful to the Australian novelist.  In the scrub the hostile

aboriginal lurks, and flits mysteriously about, slipping out from time to

time to surprise and slaughter the settler; then slipping back again, and

leaving no track that the white man can follow.  In the scrub the

novelist's heroine gets lost, search fails of result; she wanders here

and there, and finally sinks down exhausted and unconscious, and the

searchers pass within a yard or two of her, not suspecting that she is

near, and by and by some rambler finds her bones and the pathetic diary

which she had scribbled with her failing hand and left behind.  Nobody

can find a lost heroine in the scrub but the aboriginal "tracker," and he

will not lend himself to the scheme if it will interfere with the

novelist's plot.  The scrub stretches miles and miles in all directions,

and looks like a level roof of bush-tops without a break or a crack in it

--as seamless as a blanket, to all appearance.  One might as well walk

under water and hope to guess out a route and stick to it, I should

think.  Yet it is claimed that the aboriginal "tracker" was able to hunt

out people lost in the scrub.  Also in the "bush"; also in the desert;

and even follow them over patches of bare rocks and over alluvial ground

which had to all appearance been washed clear of footprints.



From reading Australian books and talking with the people, I became

convinced that the aboriginal tracker's performances evince a craft, a

penetration, a luminous sagacity, and a minuteness and accuracy of

observation in the matter of detective-work not found in nearly so

remarkable a degree in any other people, white or colored.  In an

official account of the blacks of Australia published by the government

of Victoria, one reads that the aboriginal not only notices the faint

marks left on the bark of a tree by the claws of a climbing opossum, but

knows in some way or other whether the marks were made to-day or

yesterday.



And there is the case, on records where A., a settler, makes a bet with

B., that B. may lose a cow as effectually as he can, and A. will produce

an aboriginal who will find her.  B. selects a cow and lets the tracker

see the cow's footprint, then be put under guard.  B. then drives the cow

a few miles over a course which drifts in all directions, and frequently

doubles back upon itself; and he selects difficult ground all the time,

and once or twice even drives the cow through herds of other cows, and

mingles her tracks in the wide confusion of theirs.  He finally brings

his cow home; the aboriginal is set at liberty, and at once moves around

in a great circle, examining all cow-tracks until he finds the one he is

after; then sets off and follows it throughout its erratic course, and

ultimately tracks it to the stable where B. has hidden the cow.  Now

wherein does one cow-track differ from another?  There must be a

difference, or the tracker could not have performed the feat; a

difference minute, shadowy, and not detectible by you or me, or by the

late Sherlock Holmes, and yet discernible by a member of a race charged

by some people with occupying the bottom place in the gradations of human

intelligence.









CHAPTER XVIII.



It is easier to stay out than get out.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



The train was now exploring a beautiful hill country, and went twisting

in and out through lovely little green valleys.  There were several

varieties of gum trees; among them many giants.  Some of them were bodied

and barked like the sycamore; some were of fantastic aspect, and reminded

one of the quaint apple trees in Japanese pictures.  And there was one

peculiarly beautiful tree whose name and breed I did not know.  The

foliage seemed to consist of big bunches of pine-spines, the lower half

of each bunch a rich brown or old-gold color, the upper half a most vivid

and strenuous and shouting green.  The effect was altogether bewitching.

The tree was apparently rare.  I should say that the first and last

samples of it seen by us were not more than half an hour apart.  There

was another tree of striking aspect, a kind of pine, we were told.  Its

foliage was as fine as hair, apparently, and its mass sphered itself

above the naked straight stem like an explosion of misty smoke.  It was

not a sociable sort; it did not gather in groups or couples, but each

individual stood far away from its nearest neighbor.  It scattered itself

in this spacious and exclusive fashion about the slopes of swelling

grassy great knolls, and stood in the full flood of the wonderful

sunshine; and as far as you could see the tree itself you could also see

the ink-black blot of its shadow on the shining green carpet at its feet.



On some part of this railway journey we saw gorse and broom--importations

from England--and a gentleman who came into our compartment on a visit

tried to tell me which--was which; but as he didn't know, he had

difficulty.  He said he was ashamed of his ignorance, but that he had

never been confronted with the question before during the fifty years and

more that he had spent in Australia, and so he had never happened to get

interested in the matter.  But there was no need to be ashamed.  The most

of us have his defect.  We take a natural interest in novelties, but it

is against nature to take an interest in familiar things.  The gorse and

the broom were a fine accent in the landscape.  Here and there they burst

out in sudden conflagrations of vivid yellow against a background of

sober or sombre color, with a so startling effect as to make a body catch

his breath with the happy surprise of it.  And then there was the wattle,

a native bush or tree, an inspiring cloud of sumptuous yellow bloom.  It

is a favorite with the Australians, and has a fine fragrance, a quality

usually wanting in Australian blossoms.



The gentleman who enriched me with the poverty of his formation about the

gorse and the broom told me that he came out from England a youth of

twenty and entered the Province of South Australia with thirty-six

shillings in his pocket--an adventurer without trade, profession, or

friends, but with a clearly-defined purpose in his head: he would stay

until he was worth L200, then go back home.  He would allow himself five

years for the accumulation of this fortune.



"That was more than fifty years ago," said he.  "And here I am, yet."



As he went out at the door he met a friend, and turned and introduced him

to me, and the friend and I had a talk and a smoke.  I spoke of the

previous conversation and said there something very pathetic about this

half century of exile, and that I wished the L200 scheme had succeeded.



"With him?  Oh, it did.  It's not so sad a case.  He is modest, and he

left out some of the particulars.  The lad reached South Australia just

in time to help discover the Burra-Burra copper mines.  They turned out

L700,000 in the first three years.  Up to now they have yielded

L120,000,000.  He has had his share.  Before that boy had been in the

country two years he could have gone home and bought a village; he could

go now and buy a city, I think.  No, there is nothing very pathetic about

his case.  He and his copper arrived at just a handy time to save South

Australia.  It had got mashed pretty flat under the collapse of a land

boom a while before."  There it is again; picturesque history--

Australia's specialty.  In 1829 South Australia hadn't a white man in it.

In 1836 the British Parliament erected it--still a solitude--into a

Province, and gave it a governor and other governmental machinery.

Speculators took hold, now, and inaugurated a vast land scheme, and

invited immigration, encouraging it with lurid promises of sudden wealth.

It was well worked in London; and bishops, statesmen, and all ports of

people made a rush for the land company's shares.  Immigrants soon began

to pour into the region of Adelaide and select town lots and farms in the

sand and the mangrove swamps by the sea.  The crowds continued to come,

prices of land rose high, then higher and still higher, everybody was

prosperous and happy, the boom swelled into gigantic proportions.  A

village of sheet iron huts and clapboard sheds sprang up in the sand, and

in these wigwams fashion made display; richly-dressed ladies played on

costly pianos, London swells in evening dress and patent-leather boots

were abundant, and this fine society drank champagne, and in other ways

conducted itself in this capital of humble sheds as it had been

accustomed to do in the aristocratic quarters of the metropolis of the

world.  The provincial government put up expensive buildings for its own

use, and a palace with gardens for the use of its governor.  The governor

had a guard, and maintained a court.  Roads, wharves, and hospitals were

built.  All this on credit, on paper, on wind, on inflated and fictitious

values--on the boom's moonshine, in fact.  This went on handsomely during

four or five years.  Then of a sudden came a smash.  Bills for a huge

amount drawn the governor upon the Treasury were dishonored, the land

company's credit went up in smoke, a panic followed, values fell with a

rush, the frightened immigrants seized their grips and fled to other

lands, leaving behind them a good imitation of a solitude, where lately

had been a buzzing and populous hive of men.



Adelaide was indeed almost empty; its population had fallen to 3,000.

During two years or more the death-trance continued.  Prospect of revival

there was none; hope of it ceased.  Then, as suddenly as the paralysis

had come, came the resurrection from it.  Those astonishingly rich copper

mines were discovered, and the corpse got up and danced.



The wool production began to grow; grain-raising followed--followed so

vigorously, too, that four or five years after the copper discovery, this

little colony, which had had to import its breadstuffs formerly, and pay

hard prices for them--once $50 a barrel for flour--had become an exporter

of grain.



The prosperities continued.  After many years Providence, desiring to

show especial regard for New South Wales and exhibit loving interest in

its welfare which should certify to all nations the recognition of that

colony's conspicuous righteousness and distinguished well-deserving,

conferred upon it that treasury of inconceivable riches, Broken Hill; and

South Australia went over the border and took it, giving thanks.



Among our passengers was an American with a unique vocation.  Unique is a

strong word, but I use it justifiably if I did not misconceive what the

American told me; for I understood him to say that in the world there was

not another man engaged in the business which he was following.  He was

buying the kangaroo-skin crop; buying all of it, both the Australian crop

and the Tasmanian; and buying it for an American house in New York.  The

prices were not high, as there was no competition, but the year's

aggregate of skins would cost him L30,000.  I had had the idea that the

kangaroo was about extinct in Tasmania and well thinned out on the

continent.  In America the skins are tanned and made into shoes.  After

the tanning, the leather takes a new name--which I have forgotten--I only

remember that the new name does not indicate that the kangaroo furnishes

the leather.  There was a German competition for a while, some years ago,

but that has ceased.  The Germans failed to arrive at the secret of

tanning the skins successfully, and they withdrew from the business.  Now

then, I suppose that I have seen a man whose occupation is really

entitled to bear that high epithet--unique.  And I suppose that there is

not another occupation in the world that is restricted to the hands of a

sole person.  I can think of no instance of it.  There is more than one

Pope, there is more than one Emperor, there is even more than one living

god, walking upon the earth and worshiped in all sincerity by large

populations of men.  I have seen and talked with two of these Beings

myself in India, and I have the autograph of one of them.  It can come

good, by and by, I reckon, if I attach it to a "permit."



Approaching Adelaide we dismounted from the train, as the French say, and

were driven in an open carriage over the hills and along their slopes to

the city.  It was an excursion of an hour or two, and the charm of it

could not be overstated, I think.  The road wound around gaps and gorges,

and offered all varieties of scenery and prospect--mountains, crags,

country homes, gardens, forests--color, color, color everywhere, and the

air fine and fresh, the skies blue, and not a shred of cloud to mar the

downpour of the brilliant sunshine.  And finally the mountain gateway

opened, and the immense plain lay spread out below and stretching away

into dim distances on every hand, soft and delicate and dainty and

beautiful.  On its near edge reposed the city.



We descended and entered.  There was nothing to remind one of the humble

capital, of buts and sheds of the long-vanished day of the land-boom.

No, this was a modern city, with wide streets, compactly built; with fine

homes everywhere, embowered in foliage and flowers, and with imposing

masses of public buildings nobly grouped and architecturally beautiful.



There was prosperity, in the air; for another boom was on.  Providence,

desiring to show especial regard for the neighboring colony on the west

called Western Australia--and exhibit a loving interest in its welfare

which should certify to all nations the recognition of that colony's

conspicuous righteousness and distinguished well-deserving, had recently

conferred upon it that majestic treasury of golden riches, Coolgardie;

and now South Australia had gone around the corner and taken it, giving

thanks.  Everything comes to him who is patient and good, and waits.



But South Australia deserves much, for apparently she is a hospitable

home for every alien who chooses to come; and for his religion, too.

She has a population, as per the latest census, of only 320,000-odd, and

yet her varieties of religion indicate the presence within her borders of

samples of people from pretty nearly every part of the globe you can

think of.  Tabulated, these varieties of religion make a remarkable show.

One would have to go far to find its match.  I copy here this

cosmopolitan curiosity, and it comes from the published census:



Church of England,........... 89,271

Roman Catholic,.............. 47,179

Wesleyan,.................... 49,159

Lutheran,.................... 23,328

Presbyterian,................ 18,206

Congregationalist,........... 11,882

Bible Christian,............. 15,762

Primitive Methodist,......... 11,654

Baptist,..................... 17,547

Christian Brethren,..........    465

Methodist New Connexion,.....     39

Unitarian,...................    688

Church of Christ,............  3,367

Society of Friends,..........    100

Salvation Army,..............  4,356

New Jerusalem Church,........    168

Jews,........................    840

Protestants (undefined),.....  6,532

Mohammedans,.................    299

Confucians, etc.,............  3,884

Other religions,.............  1,719

Object,......................  6,940

Not stated,..................  8,046



Total,.......................320,431





The item in the above list "Other religions" includes the following as

returned:



Agnostics,

Atheists,

Believers in Christ,

Buddhists,

Calvinists,

Christadelphians,

Christians,

Christ's Chapel,

Christian Israelites,

Christian Socialists,

Church of God,

Cosmopolitans,

Deists,

Evangelists,

Exclusive Brethren,

Free Church,

Free Methodists,

Freethinkers,

Followers of Christ,

Gospel Meetings,

Greek Church,

Infidels,

Maronites,

Memnonists,

Moravians,

Mormons,

Naturalists,

Orthodox,

Others (indefinite),

Pagans,

Pantheists,

Plymouth Brethren,

Rationalists,

Reformers,

Secularists,

Seventh-day Adventists,

Shaker,

Shintoists,

Spiritualists,

Theosophists,

Town (City) Mission,

Welsh Church,

Huguenot,

Hussite,

Zoroastrians,

Zwinglian,





About 64 roads to the other world.  You see how healthy the religious

atmosphere is.  Anything can live in it.  Agnostics, Atheists,

Freethinkers, Infidels, Mormons, Pagans, Indefinites they are all there.

And all the big sects of the world can do more than merely live in it:

they can spread, flourish, prosper.  All except the Spiritualists and the

Theosophists.  That is the most curious feature of this curious table.

What is the matter with the specter?  Why do they puff him away?  He is a

welcome toy everywhere else in the world.









CHAPTER XIX.



Pity is for the living, Envy is for the dead.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



The successor of the sheet-iron hamlet of the mangrove marshes has that

other Australian specialty, the Botanical Gardens.  We cannot have these

paradises.  The best we could do would be to cover a vast acreage under

glass and apply steam heat.  But it would be inadequate, the lacks would

still be so great: the confined sense, the sense of suffocation, the

atmospheric dimness, the sweaty heat--these would all be there, in place

of the Australian openness to the sky, the sunshine and the breeze.

Whatever will grow under glass with us will flourish rampantly out of

doors in Australia.--[The greatest heat in Victoria, that there is an

authoritative record of, was at Sandhurst, in January, 1862.  The

thermometer then registered 117 degrees in the shade.  In January, 1880,

the heat at Adelaide, South Australia, was 172 degrees in the sun.]



When the white man came the continent was nearly as poor, in variety of

vegetation, as the desert of Sahara; now it has everything that grows on

the earth.  In fact, not Australia only, but all Australasia has levied

tribute upon the flora of the rest of the world; and wherever one goes

the results appear, in gardens private and public, in the woodsy walls of

the highways, and in even the forests.  If you see a curious or beautiful

tree or bush or flower, and ask about it, the people, answering, usually

name a foreign country as the place of its origin--India, Africa, Japan,

China, England, America, Java, Sumatra, New Guinea, Polynesia, and so on.



In the Zoological Gardens of Adelaide I saw the only laughing jackass

that ever showed any disposition to be courteous to me.  This one opened

his head wide and laughed like a demon; or like a maniac who was consumed

with humorous scorn over a cheap and degraded pun.  It was a very human

laugh.  If he had been out of sight I could have believed that the

laughter came from a man.  It is an odd-looking bird, with a head and

beak that are much too large for its body.  In time man will exterminate

the rest of the wild creatures of Australia, but this one will probably

survive, for man is his friend and lets him alone.  Man always has a good

reason for his charities towards wild things, human or animal when he has

any.  In this case the bird is spared because he kills snakes.  If L. J.

he will not kill all of them.



In that garden I also saw the wild Australian dog--the dingo.  He was a

beautiful creature--shapely, graceful, a little wolfish in some of his

aspects, but with a most friendly eye and sociable disposition.  The

dingo is not an importation; he was present in great force when the

whites first came to the continent.  It may be that he is the oldest dog

in the universe; his origin, his descent, the place where his ancestors

first appeared, are as unknown and as untraceable as are the camel's.

He is the most precious dog in the world, for he does not bark.  But in

an evil hour he got to raiding the sheep-runs to appease his hunger, and

that sealed his doom.  He is hunted, now, just as if he were a wolf.

He has been sentenced to extermination, and the sentence will be carried

out.  This is all right, and not objectionable.  The world was made for

man--the white man.



South Australia is confusingly named.  All of the colonies have a

southern exposure except one--Queensland.  Properly speaking, South

Australia is middle Australia.  It extends straight up through the center

of the continent like the middle board in a center-table.  It is 2,000

miles high, from south to north, and about a third as wide.  A wee little

spot down in its southeastern corner contains eight or nine-tenths of its

population; the other one or two-tenths are elsewhere--as elsewhere as

they could be in the United States with all the country between Denver

and Chicago, and Canada and the Gulf of Mexico to scatter over.  There is

plenty of room.



A telegraph line stretches straight up north through that 2,000 miles of

wilderness and desert from Adelaide to Port Darwin on the edge of the

upper ocean.  South Australia built the line; and did it in 1871-2 when

her population numbered only 185,000.  It was a great work; for there

were no roads, no paths; 1,300 miles of the route had been traversed but

once before by white men; provisions, wire, and poles had to be carried

over immense stretches of desert; wells had to be dug along the route to

supply the men and cattle with water.



A cable had been previously laid from Port Darwin to Java and thence to

India, and there was telegraphic communication with England from India.

And so, if Adelaide could make connection with Port Darwin it meant

connection with the whole world.  The enterprise succeeded.  One could

watch the London markets daily, now; the profit to the wool-growers of

Australia was instant and enormous.



A telegram from Melbourne to San Francisco covers approximately 20,000

miles--the equivalent of five-sixths of the way around the globe.  It has

to halt along the way a good many times and be repeated; still, but

little time is lost.  These halts, and the distances between them, are

here tabulated.--[From "Round the Empire." (George R.  Parkin), all but

the last two.]



                              Miles.



Melbourne-Mount Gambier,.......300

Mount Gambier-Adelaide,........270

Adelaide-Port Augusta,.........200

Port Augusta-Alice Springs...1,036

Alice Springs-Port Darwin,.....898

Port Darwin-Banjoewangie,... 1,150

Banjoewangie-Batavia,..........480

Batavia-Singapore,.............553

Singapore-Penang,..............399

Penang-Madras,...............1,280

Madras-Bombay,.................650

Bombay-Aden,.................1,662

Aden-Suez,...................1,346

Suez-Alexandria,...............224

Alexandria-Malta,..............828

Malta-Gibraltar,.............1,008

Gibraltar-Falmouth,..........1,061

Falmouth-London,...............350

London-New York,.............2,500

New York-San Francisco,......3,500





I was in Adelaide again, some months later, and saw the multitudes gather

in the neighboring city of Glenelg to commemorate the Reading of the

Proclamation--in 1836--which founded the Province.  If I have at any time

called it a Colony, I withdraw the discourtesy.  It is not a Colony, it

is a Province; and officially so.  Moreover, it is the only one so named

in Australasia.  There was great enthusiasm; it was the Province's

national holiday, its Fourth of July, so to speak.  It is the pre-eminent

holiday; and that is saying much, in a country where they seem to have a

most un-English mania for holidays.  Mainly they are workingmen's

holidays; for in South Australia the workingman is sovereign; his vote is

the desire of the politician--indeed, it is the very breath of the

politician's being; the parliament exists to deliver the will of the

workingman, and the government exists to execute it.  The workingman is a

great power everywhere in Australia, but South Australia is his paradise.

He has had a hard time in this world, and has earned a paradise.  I am

glad he has found it.  The holidays there are frequent enough to be

bewildering to the stranger.  I tried to get the hang of the system, but

was not able to do it.



You have seen that the Province is tolerant, religious-wise.  It is so

politically, also.  One of the speakers at the Commemoration banquet--the

Minister of Public Works-was an American, born and reared in New England.

There is nothing narrow about the Province, politically, or in any other

way that I know of.  Sixty-four religions and a Yankee cabinet minister.

No amount of horse-racing can damn this community.



The mean temperature of the Province is 62 deg.  The death-rate is 13 in

the 1,000--about half what it is in the city of New York, I should think,

and New York is a healthy city.  Thirteen is the death-rate for the

average citizen of the Province, but there seems to be no death-rate for

the old people.  There were people at the Commemoration banquet who could

remember Cromwell.  There were six of them.  These Old Settlers had all

been present at the original Reading of the Proclamation, in 1536.  They

showed signs of the blightings and blastings of time, in their outward

aspect, but they were young within; young and cheerful, and ready to

talk; ready to talk, and talk all you wanted; in their turn, and out of

it.  They were down for six speeches, and they made 42.  The governor and

the cabinet and the mayor were down for 42 speeches, and they made 6.

They have splendid grit, the Old Settlers, splendid staying power.  But

they do not hear well, and when they see the mayor going through motions

which they recognize as the introducing of a speaker, they think they are

the one, and they all get up together, and begin to respond, in the most

animated way; and the more the mayor gesticulates, and shouts "Sit down!

Sit down!" the more they take it for applause, and the more excited and

reminiscent and enthusiastic they get; and next, when they see the whole

house laughing and crying, three of them think it is about the bitter

old-time hardships they are describing, and the other three think the

laughter is caused by the jokes they have been uncorking--jokes of the

vintage of 1836--and then the way they do go on!  And finally when ushers

come and plead, and beg, and gently and reverently crowd them down into

their seats, they say, "Oh, I'm not tired--I could bang along a week!"

and they sit there looking simple and childlike, and gentle, and proud of

their oratory, and wholly unconscious of what is going on at the other

end of the room.  And so one of the great dignitaries gets a chance, and

begins his carefully prepared speech, impressively and with solemnity--



     "when we, now great and prosperous and powerful, bow our heads in

     reverent wonder in the contemplation of those sublimities of energy,

     of wisdom, of forethought, of----"



Up come the immortal six again, in a body, with a joyous "Hey, I've

thought of another one!" and at it they go, with might and main, hearing

not a whisper of the pandemonium that salutes them, but taking all the

visible violences for applause, as before, and hammering joyously away

till the imploring ushers pray them into their seats again.  And a pity,

too; for those lovely old boys did so enjoy living their heroic youth

over, in these days of their honored antiquity; and certainly the things

they had to tell were usually worth the telling and the hearing.



It was a stirring spectacle; stirring in more ways than one, for it was

amazingly funny, and at the same time deeply pathetic; for they had seen

so much, these time-worn veterans, end had suffered so much; and had

built so strongly and well, and laid the foundations of their

commonwealth so deep, in liberty and tolerance; and had lived to see the

structure rise to such state and dignity and hear themselves so praised

for honorable work.



One of these old gentlemen told me some things of interest afterward;

things about the aboriginals, mainly.  He thought them intelligent--

remarkably so in some directions--and he said that along with their

unpleasant qualities they had some exceedingly good ones; and he

considered it a great pity that the race had died out.  He instanced

their invention of the boomerang and the "weet-weet" as evidences of

their brightness; and as another evidence of it he said he had never seen

a white man who had cleverness enough to learn to do the miracles with

those two toys that the aboriginals achieved.  He said that even the

smartest whites had been obliged to confess that they could not learn the

trick of the boomerang in perfection; that it had possibilities which

they could not master.  The white man could not control its motions,

could not make it obey him; but the aboriginal could.  He told me some

wonderful things--some almost incredible things--which he had seen the

blacks do with the boomerang and the weet-weet.  They have been confirmed

to me since by other early settlers and by trustworthy books.



It is contended--and may be said to be conceded--that the boomerang was

known to certain savage tribes in Europe in Roman times.  In support of

this, Virgil and two other Roman poets are quoted.  It is also contended

that it was known to the ancient Egyptians.



One of two things either some one with is then apparent: a boomerang

arrived in Australia in the days of antiquity before European knowledge

of the thing had been lost, or the Australian aboriginal reinvented it.

It will take some time to find out which of these two propositions is the

fact.  But there is no hurry.









CHAPTER XX.



It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three

unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience,

and the prudence never to practice either of them.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



From diary:



Mr. G.  called.  I had not seen him since Nauheim, Germany--several years

ago; the time that the cholera broke out at Hamburg.  We talked of the

people we had known there, or had casually met; and G. said:



"Do you remember my introducing you to an earl--the Earl of C.?"



"Yes.  That was the last time I saw you.  You and he were in a carriage,

just starting--belated--for the train.  I remember it."



"I remember it too, because of a thing which happened then which I was

not looking for.  He had told me a while before, about a remarkable and

interesting Californian whom he had met and who was a friend of yours,

and said that if he should ever meet you he would ask you for some

particulars about that Californian.  The subject was not mentioned that

day at Nauheim, for we were hurrying away, and there was no time; but the

thing that surprised me was this: when I induced you, you said, 'I am

glad to meet your lordship gain.'  The I again' was the surprise.  He is

a little hard of hearing, and didn't catch that word, and I thought you

hadn't intended that he should.  As we drove off I had only time to say,

'Why, what do you know about him?' and I understood you to say, 'Oh,

nothing, except that he is the quickest judge of----'  Then we were gone,

and I didn't get the rest.  I wondered what it was that he was such a

quick judge of.  I have thought of it many times since, and still

wondered what it could be.  He and I talked it over, but could not guess

it out.  He thought it must be fox-hounds or horses, for he is a good

judge of those--no one is a better.  But you couldn't know that, because

you didn't know him; you had mistaken him for some one else; it must be

that, he said, because he knew you had never met him before.  And of

course you hadn't had you?"



"Yes, I had."



"Is that so?  Where?"



"At a fox-hunt, in England."



"How curious that is.  Why, he hadn't the least recollection of it.  Had

you any conversation with him?"



"Some--yes."



"Well, it left not the least impression upon him.  What did you talk

about?"



"About the fox.  I think that was all."



"Why, that would interest him; that ought to have left an impression.

What did he talk about?"



"The fox."



It's very curious.  I don't understand it.  Did what he said leave an

impression upon you?"



"Yes.  It showed me that he was a quick judge of--however, I will tell

you all about it, then you will understand.  It was a quarter of a

century ago 1873 or '74.  I had an American friend in London named F.,

who was fond of hunting, and his friends the Blanks invited him and me to

come out to a hunt and be their guests at their country place.  In the

morning the mounts were provided, but when I saw the horses I changed my

mind and asked permission to walk.  I had never seen an English hunter

before, and it seemed to me that I could hunt a fox safer on the ground.

I had always been diffident about horses, anyway, even those of the

common altitudes, and I did not feel competent to hunt on a horse that

went on stilts.  So then Mrs. Blank came to my help and said I could go

with her in the dog-cart and we would drive to a place she knew of, and

there we should have a good glimpse of the hunt as it went by.



"When we got to that place I got out and went and leaned my elbows on a

low stone wall which enclosed a turfy and beautiful great field with

heavy wood on all its sides except ours.  Mrs. Blank sat in the dog-cart

fifty yards away, which was as near as she could get with the vehicle.

I was full of interest, for I had never seen a fox-hunt.  I waited,

dreaming and imagining, in the deep stillness and impressive tranquility

which reigned in that retired spot.  Presently, from away off in the

forest on the left, a mellow bugle-note came floating; then all of a

sudden a multitude of dogs burst out of that forest and went tearing by

and disappeared in the forest on the right; there was a pause, and then

a cloud of horsemen in black caps and crimson coats plunged out of the

left-hand forest and went flaming across the field like a prairie-fire,

a stirring sight to see.  There was one man ahead of the rest, and he

came spurring straight at me.  He was fiercely excited.  It was fine to

see him ride; he was a master horseman.  He came like, a storm till he

was within seven feet of me, where I was leaning on the wall, then he

stood his horse straight up in the air on his hind toe-nails, and shouted

like a demon:



"'Which way'd the fox go?'



"I didn't much like the tone, but I did not let on; for he was excited,

you know.  But I was calm; so I said softly, and without acrimony:



"'Which fox?'



"It seemed to anger him.  I don't know why; and he thundered out:



"'WHICH fox?  Why, THE fox?  Which way did the FOX go?'



"I said, with great gentleness--even argumentatively:



"'If you could be a little more definite--a little less vague--because I

am a stranger, and there are many foxes, as you will know even better

than I, and unless I know which one it is that you desire to identify,

and----'



"'You're certainly the damdest idiot that has escaped in a thousand

years!' and he snatched his great horse around as easily as I would

snatch a cat, and was away like a hurricane.  A very excitable man.



"I went back to Mrs. Blank, and she was excited, too--oh, all alive.  She

said:



"'He spoke to you!--didn't he?'



"'Yes, it is what happened.'



"'I knew it! I couldn't hear what he said, but I knew be spoke to you! Do

you know who it was?  It was Lord C., and he is Master of the Buckhounds!

Tell me--what do you think of him?'



"'Him?  Well, for sizing-up a stranger, he's got the most sudden and

accurate judgment of any man I ever saw.'



"It pleased her.  I thought it would."



G. got away from Nauheim just in time to escape being shut in by the

quarantine-bars on the frontiers; and so did we, for we left the next

day.  But G. had a great deal of trouble in getting by the Italian

custom-house, and we should have fared likewise but for the

thoughtfulness of our consul-general in Frankfort.  He introduced me to

the Italian consul-general, and I brought away from that consulate a

letter which made our way smooth.  It was a dozen lines merely commending

me in a general way to the courtesies of servants in his Italian

Majesty's service, but it was more powerful than it looked.  In addition

to a raft of ordinary baggage, we had six or eight trunks which were

filled exclusively with dutiable stuff--household goods purchased in

Frankfort for use in Florence, where we had taken a house.  I was going

to ship these through by express; but at the last moment an order went

throughout Germany forbidding the moving of any parcels by train unless

the owner went with them.  This was a bad outlook.  We must take these

things along, and the delay sure to be caused by the examination of them

in the custom-house might lose us our train.  I imagined all sorts of

terrors, and enlarged them steadily as we approached the Italian

frontier.  We were six in number, clogged with all that baggage, and I

was courier for the party the most incapable one they ever employed.



We arrived, and pressed with the crowd into the immense custom-house, and

the usual worries began; everybody crowding to the counter and begging to

have his baggage examined first, and all hands clattering and chattering

at once.  It seemed to me that I could do nothing; it would be better to

give it all up and go away and leave the baggage.  I couldn't speak the

language; I should never accomplish anything.  Just then a tall handsome

man in a fine uniform was passing by and I knew he must be the station-

master--and that reminded me of my letter.  I ran to him and put it into

his hands.  He took it out of the envelope, and the moment his eye caught

the royal coat of arms printed at its top, he took off his cap and made a

beautiful bow to me, and said in English:



"Which is your baggage?  Please show it to me."



I showed him the mountain.  Nobody was disturbing it; nobody was

interested in it; all the family's attempts to get attention to it had

failed--except in the case of one of the trunks containing the dutiable

goods.  It was just being opened.  My officer said:



"There, let that alone! Lock it.  Now chalk it.  Chalk all of the lot.

Now please come and show the hand-baggage."



He plowed through the waiting crowd, I following, to the counter, and he

gave orders again, in his emphatic military way:



"Chalk these.  Chalk all of them."



Then he took off his cap and made that beautiful bow again, and went his

way.  By this time these attentions had attracted the wonder of that acre

of passengers, and the whisper had gone around that the royal family were

present getting their baggage chalked; and as we passed down in review on

our way to the door, I was conscious of a pervading atmosphere of envy

which gave me deep satisfaction.



But soon there was an accident.  My overcoat pockets were stuffed with

German cigars and linen packages of American smoking tobacco, and a

porter was following us around with this overcoat on his arm, and

gradually getting it upside down.  Just as I, in the rear of my family,

moved by the sentinels at the door, about three hatfuls of the tobacco

tumbled out on the floor.  One of the soldiers pounced upon it, gathered

it up in his arms, pointed back whence I had come, and marched me ahead

of him past that long wall of passengers again--he chattering and

exulting like a devil, they smiling in peaceful joy, and I trying to look

as if my pride was not hurt, and as if I did not mind being brought to

shame before these pleased people who had so lately envied me.  But at

heart I was cruelly humbled.



When I had been marched two-thirds of the long distance and the misery of

it was at the worst, the stately station-master stepped out from

somewhere, and the soldier left me and darted after him and overtook him;

and I could see by the soldier's excited gestures that be was betraying

to him the whole shabby business.  The station-master was plainly very

angry.  He came striding down toward me, and when he was come near he

began to pour out a stream of indignant Italian; then suddenly took off

his hat and made that beautiful bow and said:



"Oh, it is you! I beg a thousands pardons!  This idiot here---" He turned

to the exulting soldier and burst out with a flood of white-hot Italian

lava, and the next moment he was bowing, and the soldier and I were

moving in procession again--he in the lead and ashamed, this time, I with

my chin up.  And so we marched by the crowd of fascinated passengers, and

I went forth to the train with the honors of war.  Tobacco and all.









CHAPTER XXI.



Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to

get himself envied.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Before I saw Australia I had never heard of the "weet-weet" at all.

I met but few men who had seen it thrown--at least I met but few who

mentioned having seen it thrown.  Roughly described, it is a fat wooden

cigar with its butt-end fastened to a flexible twig.  The whole thing is

only a couple of feet long, and weighs less than two ounces.  This

feather--so to call it--is not thrown through the air, but is flung with

an underhanded throw and made to strike the ground a little way in front

of the thrower; then it glances and makes a long skip; glances again,

skips again, and again and again, like the flat stone which a boy sends

skating over the water.  The water is smooth, and the stone has a good

chance; so a strong man may make it travel fifty or seventy-five yards;

but the weet-weet has no such good chance, for it strikes sand, grass,

and earth in its course.  Yet an expert aboriginal has sent it a measured

distance of two hundred and twenty yards.  It would have gone even

further but it encountered rank ferns and underwood on its passage and

they damaged its speed.  Two hundred and twenty yards; and so weightless

a toy--a mouse on the end of a bit of wire, in effect; and not sailing

through the accommodating air, but encountering grass and sand and stuff

at every jump.  It looks wholly impossible; but Mr. Brough Smyth saw the

feat and did the measuring, and set down the facts in his book about

aboriginal life, which he wrote by command of the Victorian Government.



What is the secret of the feat?  No one explains.  It cannot be physical

strength, for that could not drive such a feather-weight any distance.

It must be art.  But no one explains what the art of it is; nor how it

gets around that law of nature which says you shall not throw any two-

ounce thing 220 yards, either through the air or bumping along the

ground.  Rev. J. G. Woods says:



"The distance to which the weet-weet or kangaroo-rat can be thrown is

truly astonishing.  I have seen an Australian stand at one side of

Kennington Oval and throw the kangaroo rat completely across it." (Width

of Kensington Oval not stated.)  "It darts through the air with the sharp

and menacing hiss of a rifle-ball, its greatest height from the ground

being some seven or eight feet .  .  .  .  .  .  When properly thrown it

looks just like a living animal leaping along .  .  .  .  .  .  Its

movements have a wonderful resemblance to the long leaps of a kangaroo-

rat fleeing in alarm, with its long tail trailing behind it."



The Old Settler said that he had seen distances made by the weet-weet, in

the early days, which almost convinced him that it was as extraordinary

an instrument as the boomerang.



There must have been a large distribution of acuteness among those naked

skinny aboriginals, or they couldn't have been such unapproachable

trackers and boomerangers and weet-weeters.  It must have been race-

aversion that put upon them a good deal of the low-rate intellectual

reputation which they bear and have borne this long time in the world's

estimate of them.



They were lazy--always lazy.  Perhaps that was their trouble.  It is a

killing defect.  Surely they could have invented and built a competent

house, but they didn't.  And they could have invented and developed the

agricultural arts, but they didn't.  They went naked and houseless, and

lived on fish and grubs and worms and wild fruits, and were just plain

savages, for all their smartness.



With a country as big as the United States to live and multiply in, and

with no epidemic diseases among them till the white man came with those

and his other appliances of civilization, it is quite probable that there

was never a day in his history when he could muster 100,000 of his race

in all Australia.  He diligently and deliberately kept population down by

infanticide--largely; but mainly by certain other methods.  He did not

need to practise these artificialities any more after the white man came.

The white man knew ways of keeping down population which were worth

several of his.  The white man knew ways of reducing a native population

80 percent. in 20 years.  The native had never seen anything as fine as

that before.



For example, there is the case of the country now called Victoria--a

country eighty times as large as Rhode Island, as I have already said.

By the best official guess there were 4,500 aboriginals in it when the

whites came along in the middle of the 'Thirties.  Of these, 1,000 lived

in Gippsland, a patch of territory the size of fifteen or sixteen Rhode

Islands: they did not diminish as fast as some of the other communities;

indeed, at the end of forty years there were still 200 of them left.  The

Geelong tribe diminished more satisfactorily: from 173 persons it faded

to 34 in twenty years; at the end of another twenty the tribe numbered

one person altogether.  The two Melbourne tribes could muster almost 300

when the white man came; they could muster but twenty, thirty-seven years

later, in 1875.  In that year there were still odds and ends of tribes

scattered about the colony of Victoria, but I was told that natives of

full blood are very scarce now.  It is said that the aboriginals continue

in some force in the huge territory called Queensland.



The early whites were not used to savages.  They could not understand the

primary law of savage life: that if a man do you a wrong, his whole tribe

is responsible--each individual of it--and you may take your change out

of any individual of it, without bothering to seek out the guilty one.

When a white killed an aboriginal, the tribe applied the ancient law, and

killed the first white they came across.  To the whites this was a

monstrous thing.  Extermination seemed to be the proper medicine for such

creatures as this.  They did not kill all the blacks, but they promptly

killed enough of them to make their own persons safe.  From the dawn of

civilization down to this day the white man has always used that very

precaution.  Mrs. Campbell Praed lived in Queensland, as a child, in the

early days, and in her "Sketches of Australian life," we get informing

pictures of the early struggles of the white and the black to reform each

other.



Speaking of pioneer days in the mighty wilderness of Queensland, Mrs.

Praed says:



     "At first the natives retreated before the whites; and, except that

     they every now and then speared a beast in one of the herds, gave

     little cause for uneasiness.  But, as the number of squatters

     increased, each one taking up miles of country and bringing two or

     three men in his train, so that shepherds' huts and stockmen's camps

     lay far apart, and defenseless in the midst of hostile tribes, the

     Blacks' depredations became more frequent and murder was no unusual

     event.



     "The loneliness of the Australian bush can hardly be painted in

     words.  Here extends mile after mile of primeval forest where

     perhaps foot of white man has never trod--interminable vistas where

     the eucalyptus trees rear their lofty trunks and spread forth their

     lanky limbs, from which the red gum oozes and hangs in fantastic

     pendants like crimson stalactites; ravines along the sides of which

     the long-bladed grass grows rankly; level untimbered plains

     alternating with undulating tracts of pasture, here and there broken

     by a stony ridge, steep gully, or dried-up creek.  All wild, vast

     and desolate; all the same monotonous gray coloring, except where

     the wattle, when in blossom, shows patches of feathery gold, or a

     belt of scrub lies green, glossy, and impenetrable as Indian jungle.



     "The solitude seems intensified by the strange sounds of reptiles,

     birds, and insects, and by the absence of larger creatures; of which

     in the day-time, the only audible signs are the stampede of a herd

     of kangaroo, or the rustle of a wallabi, or a dingo stirring the

     grass as it creeps to its lair.  But there are the whirring of

     locusts, the demoniac chuckle of the laughing jack-ass, the

     screeching of cockatoos and parrots, the hissing of the frilled

     lizard, and the buzzing of innumerable insects hidden under the

     dense undergrowth. And then at night, the melancholy wailing of the

     curlews, the dismal howling of dingoes, the discordant croaking of

     tree-frogs, might well shake the nerves of the solitary watcher."



That is the theater for the drama.  When you comprehend one or two other

details, you will perceive how well suited for trouble it was, and how

loudly it invited it.  The cattlemen's stations were scattered over that

profound wilderness miles and miles apart--at each station half a dozen

persons.  There was a plenty of cattle, the black natives were always

ill-nourished and hungry.  The land belonged to them.  The whites had not

bought it, and couldn't buy it; for the tribes had no chiefs, nobody in

authority, nobody competent to sell and convey; and the tribes themselves

had no comprehension of the idea of transferable ownership of land.  The

ousted owners were despised by the white interlopers, and this opinion

was not hidden under a bushel.  More promising materials for a tragedy

could not have been collated.  Let Mrs. Praed speak:



     "At Nie station, one dark night, the unsuspecting hut-keeper,

     having, as he believed, secured himself against assault, was lying

     wrapped in his blankets sleeping profoundly.  The Blacks crept

     stealthily down the chimney and battered in his skull while he

     slept."



One could guess the whole drama from that little text.  The curtain was

up.  It would not fall until the mastership of one party or the other was

determined--and permanently:



     "There was treachery on both sides.  The Blacks killed the Whites

     when they found them defenseless, and the Whites slew the Blacks in

     a wholesale and promiscuous fashion which offended against my

     childish sense of justice.



     "They were regarded as little above the level of brutes, and in some

     cases were destroyed like vermin.



     "Here is an instance.  A squatter, whose station was surrounded by

     Blacks, whom he suspected to be hostile and from whom he feared an

     attack, parleyed with them from his house-door.  He told them it was

     Christmas-time--a time at which all men, black or white, feasted;

     that there were flour, sugar-plums, good things in plenty in the

     store, and that he would make for them such a pudding as they had

     never dreamed of--a great pudding of which all might eat and be

     filled.  The Blacks listened and were lost.  The pudding was made

     and distributed.  Next morning there was howling in the camp, for it

     had been sweetened with sugar and arsenic!"



The white man's spirit was right, but his method was wrong.  His spirit

was the spirit which the civilized white has always exhibited toward the

savage, but the use of poison was a departure from custom.  True, it was

merely a technical departure, not a real one; still, it was a departure,

and therefore a mistake, in my opinion.  It was better, kinder, swifter,

and much more humane than a number of the methods which have been

sanctified by custom, but that does not justify its employment.  That is,

it does not wholly justify it.  Its unusual nature makes it stand out and

attract an amount of attention which it is not entitled to.  It takes

hold upon morbid imaginations and they work it up into a sort of

exhibition of cruelty, and this smirches the good name of our

civilization, whereas one of the old harsher methods would have had no

such effect because usage has made those methods familiar to us and

innocent.  In many countries we have chained the savage and starved him

to death; and this we do not care for, because custom has inured us to

it; yet a quick death by poison is loving-kindness to it.  In many

countries we have burned the savage at the stake; and this we do not care

for, because custom has inured us to it; yet a quick death is loving-

kindness to it.  In more than one country we have hunted the savage and

his little children and their mother with dogs and guns through the woods

and swamps for an afternoon's sport, and filled the region with happy

laughter over their sprawling and stumbling flight, and their wild

supplications for mercy; but this method we do not mind, because custom

has inured us to it; yet a quick death by poison is loving-kindness to

it.  In many countries we have taken the savage's land from him, and made

him our slave, and lashed him every day, and broken his pride, and made

death his only friend, and overworked him till he dropped in his tracks;

and this we do not care for, because custom has inured us to it; yet a

quick death by poison is loving-kindness to it.  In the Matabeleland

today--why, there we are confining ourselves to sanctified custom, we

Rhodes-Beit millionaires in South Africa and Dukes in London; and nobody

cares, because we are used to the old holy customs, and all we ask is

that no notice-inviting new ones shall be intruded upon the attention of

our comfortable consciences.  Mrs. Praed says of the poisoner, "That

squatter deserves to have his name handed down to the contempt of

posterity."



I am sorry to hear her say that.  I myself blame him for one thing, and

severely, but I stop there.  I blame him for, the indiscretion of

introducing a novelty which was calculated to attract attention to our

civilization.  There was no occasion to do that.  It was his duty, and it

is every loyal man's duty to protect that heritage in every way he can;

and the best way to do that is to attract attention elsewhere.  The

squatter's judgment was bad--that is plain; but his heart was right.  He

is almost the only pioneering representative of civilization in history

who has risen above the prejudices of his caste and his heredity and

tried to introduce the element of mercy into the superior race's dealings

with the savage.  His name is lost, and it is a pity; for it deserves to

be handed down to posterity with homage and reverence.



This paragraph is from a London journal:



     "To learn what France is doing to spread the blessings of

     civilization in her distant dependencies we may turn with advantage

     to New Caledonia.  With a view to attracting free settlers to that

     penal colony, M. Feillet, the Governor, forcibly expropriated the

     Kanaka cultivators from the best of their plantations, with a

     derisory compensation, in spite of the protests of the Council

     General of the island.  Such immigrants as could be induced to cross

     the seas thus found themselves in possession of thousands of coffee,

     cocoa, banana, and bread-fruit trees, the raising of which had cost

     the wretched natives years of toil whilst the latter had a few five-

     franc pieces to spend in the liquor stores of Noumea."



You observe the combination?  It is robbery, humiliation, and slow, slow

murder, through poverty and the white man's whisky.  The savage's gentle

friend, the savage's noble friend, the only magnanimous and unselfish

friend the savage has ever had, was not there with the merciful swift

release of his poisoned pudding.



There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man's

notion that he is less savage than the other savages.--[See Chapter on

Tasmania, post.]









CHAPTER XXII.



Nothing is so ignorant as a man's left hand, except a lady's watch.



                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



You notice that Mrs. Praed knows her art.  She can place a thing before

you so that you can see it.  She is not alone in that.  Australia is

fertile in writers whose books are faithful mirrors of the life of the

country and of its history.  The materials were surprisingly rich, both

in quality and in mass, and Marcus Clarke, Ralph Boldrewood, Cordon,

Kendall, and the others, have built out of them a brilliant and vigorous

literature, and one which must endure.  Materials--there is no end to

them!  Why, a literature might be made out of the aboriginal all by

himself, his character and ways are so freckled with varieties--varieties

not staled by familiarity, but new to us.  You do not need to invent any

picturesquenesses; whatever you want in that line he can furnish you; and

they will not be fancies and doubtful, but realities and authentic.  In

his history, as preserved by the white man's official records, he is

everything--everything that a human creature can be.  He covers the

entire ground.  He is a coward--there are a thousand fact to prove it.

He is brave--there are a thousand facts to prove it.  He is treacherous--

oh, beyond imagination! he is faithful, loyal, true--the white man's

records supply you with a harvest of instances of it that are noble,

worshipful, and pathetically beautiful.  He kills the starving stranger

who comes begging for food and shelter there is proof of it.  He succors,

and feeds, and guides to safety, to-day, the lost stranger who fired on

him only yesterday--there is proof of it.  He takes his reluctant bride

by force, he courts her with a club, then loves her faithfully through a

long life--it is of record.  He gathers to himself another wife by the

same processes, beats and bangs her as a daily diversion, and by and by

lays down his life in defending her from some outside harm--it is of

record.  He will face a hundred hostiles to rescue one of his children,

and will kill another of his children because the family is large enough

without it.  His delicate stomach turns, at certain details of the white

man's food; but he likes over-ripe fish, and brazed dog, and cat, and

rat, and will eat his own uncle with relish.  He is a sociable animal,

yet he turns aside and hides behind his shield when his mother-in-law

goes by.  He is childishly afraid of ghosts and other trivialities that

menace his soul, but dread of physical pain is a weakness which he is not

acquainted with.  He knows all the great and many of the little

constellations, and has names for them; he has a symbol-writing by means

of which he can convey messages far and wide among the tribes; he has a

correct eye for form and expression, and draws a good picture; he can

track a fugitive by delicate traces which the white man's eye cannot

discern, and by methods which the finest white intelligence cannot

master; he makes a missile which science itself cannot duplicate without

the model--if with it; a missile whose secret baffled and defeated the

searchings and theorizings of the white mathematicians for seventy years;

and by an art all his own he performs miracles with it which the white

man cannot approach untaught, nor parallel after teaching.  Within

certain limits this savage's intellect is the alertest and the brightest

known to history or tradition; and yet the poor creature was never able

to invent a counting system that would reach above five, nor a vessel

that he could boil water in.  He is the prize-curiosity of all the races.

To all intents and purposes he is dead--in the body; but he has features

that will live in literature.



Mr. Philip Chauncy, an officer of the Victorian Government, contributed

to its archives a report of his personal observations of the aboriginals

which has in it some things which I wish to condense slightly and insert

here.  He speaks of the quickness of their eyes and the accuracy of their

judgment of the direction of approaching missiles as being quite

extraordinary, and of the answering suppleness and accuracy of limb and

muscle in avoiding the missile as being extraordinary also.  He has seen

an aboriginal stand as a target for cricket-balls thrown with great force

ten or fifteen yards, by professional bowlers, and successfully dodge

them or parry them with his shield during about half an hour.  One of

those balls, properly placed, could have killed him; "Yet he depended,

with the utmost self-possession, on the quickness of his eye and his

agility."



The shield was the customary war-shield of his race, and would not be a

protection to you or to me.  It is no broader than a stovepipe, and is

about as long as a man's arm.  The opposing surface is not flat, but

slopes away from the centerline like a boat's bow.  The difficulty about

a cricket-ball that has been thrown with a scientific "twist" is, that it

suddenly changes it course when it is close to its target and comes

straight for the mark when apparently it was going overhead or to one

side.  I should not be able to protect myself from such balls for half-

an-hour, or less.



Mr. Chauncy once saw "a little native man" throw a cricket-ball 119

yards.  This is said to beat the English professional record by thirteen

yards.



We have all seen the circus-man bound into the air from a spring-board

and make a somersault over eight horses standing side by side.  Mr.

Chauncy saw an aboriginal do it over eleven; and was assured that he had

sometimes done it over fourteen.  But what is that to this:



     "I saw the same man leap from the ground, and in going over he

     dipped his head, unaided by his hands, into a hat placed in an

     inverted position on the top of the head of another man sitting

     upright on horseback--both man and horse being of the average size.

     The native landed on the other side of the horse with the hat fairly

     on his head.  The prodigious height of the leap, and the precision

     with which it was taken so as to enable him to dip his head into the

     hat, exceeded any feat of the kind I have ever beheld."



I should think so!  On board a ship lately I saw a young Oxford athlete

run four steps and spring into the air and squirm his hips by a side-

twist over a bar that was five and one-half feet high; but he could not

have stood still and cleared a bar that was four feet high.  I know this,

because I tried it myself.



One can see now where the kangaroo learned its art.



Sir George Grey and Mr. Eyre testify that the natives dug wells fourteen

or fifteen feet deep and two feet in diameter at the bore--dug them in

the sand--wells that were "quite circular, carried straight down, and the

work beautifully executed."



Their tools were their hands and feet.  How did they throw sand out from

such a depth?  How could they stoop down and get it, with only two feet

of space to stoop in?  How did they keep that sand-pipe from caving in

on them?  I do not know.  Still, they did manage those seeming

impossibilities.  Swallowed the sand, may be.



Mr. Chauncy speaks highly of the patience and skill and alert

intelligence of the native huntsman when he is stalking the emu, the

kangaroo, and other game:



     "As he walks through the bush his step is light, elastic, and

     noiseless; every track on the earth catches his keen eye; a leaf, or

     fragment of a stick turned, or a blade of grass recently bent by the

     tread of one of the lower animals, instantly arrests his attention;

     in fact, nothing escapes his quick and powerful sight on the ground,

     in the trees, or in the distance, which may supply him with a meal

     or warn him of danger.  A little examination of the trunk of a tree

     which may be nearly covered with the scratches of opossums ascending

     and descending is sufficient to inform him whether one went up the

     night before without coming down again or not."



Fennimore Cooper lost his chance.  He would have known how to value these

people.  He wouldn't have traded the dullest of them for the brightest

Mohawk he ever invented.



All savages draw outline pictures upon bark; but the resemblances are not

close, and expression is usually lacking.  But the Australian

aboriginal's pictures of animals were nicely accurate in form, attitude,

carriage; and he put spirit into them, and expression.  And his pictures

of white people and natives were pretty nearly as good as his pictures of

the other animals.  He dressed his whites in the fashion of their day,

both the ladies and the gentlemen.  As an untaught wielder of the pencil

it is not likely that he has had his equal among savage people.



His place in art--as to drawing, not color-work--is well up, all things

considered.  His art is not to be classified with savage art at all, but

on a plane two degrees above it and one degree above the lowest plane of

civilized art.  To be exact, his place in art is between Botticelli and

De Maurier.  That is to say, he could not draw as well as De Maurier but

better than Boticelli.  In feeling, he resembles both; also in grouping

and in his preferences in the matter of subjects.  His "corrobboree" of

the Australian wilds reappears in De Maurier's Belgravian ballrooms, with

clothes and the smirk of civilization added; Botticelli's "Spring" is the

"corrobboree" further idealized, but with fewer clothes and more smirk.

And well enough as to intention, but--my word!



The aboriginal can make a fire by friction.  I have tried that.



All savages are able to stand a good deal of physical pain.  The

Australian aboriginal has this quality in a well-developed degree.  Do

not read the following instances if horrors are not pleasant to you.

They were recorded by the Rev. Henry N. Wolloston, of Melbourne, who had

been a surgeon before he became a clergyman:



     1.  "In the summer of 1852 I started on horseback from Albany, King

     George's Sound, to visit at Cape Riche, accompanied by a native on

     foot.  We traveled about forty miles the first day, then camped by a

     water-hole for the night.  After cooking and eating our supper, I

     observed the native, who had said nothing to me on the subject,

     collect the hot embers of the fire together, and deliberately place

     his right foot in the glowing mass for a moment, then suddenly

     withdraw it, stamping on the ground and uttering a long-drawn

     guttural sound of mingled pain and satisfaction.  This operation he

     repeated several times.  On my inquiring the meaning of his strange

     conduct, he only said, 'Me carpenter-make 'em' ('I am mending my

     foot'), and then showed me his charred great toe, the nail of which

     had been torn off by a tea-tree stump, in which it had been caught

     during the journey, and the pain of which he had borne with stoical

     composure until the evening, when he had an opportunity of

     cauterizing the wound in the primitive manner above described."



And he proceeded on the journey the next day, "as if nothing had

happened"--and walked thirty miles.  It was a strange idea, to keep a

surgeon and then do his own surgery.



     2.  "A native about twenty-five years of age once applied to me, as

     a doctor, to extract the wooden barb of a spear, which, during a

     fight in the bush some four months previously, had entered his

     chest, just missing the heart, and penetrated the viscera to a

     considerable depth.  The spear had been cut off, leaving the barb

     behind, which continued to force its way by muscular action

     gradually toward the back; and when I examined him I could feel a

     hard substance between the ribs below the left blade-bone.  I made a

     deep incision, and with a pair of forceps extracted the barb, which

     was made, as usual, of hard wood about four inches long and from

     half an inch to an inch thick.  It was very smooth, and partly

     digested, so to speak, by the maceration to which it had been

     exposed during its four months' journey through the body.  The wound

     made by the spear had long since healed, leaving only a small

     cicatrix; and after the operation, which the native bore without

     flinching, he appeared to suffer no pain.  Indeed, judging from his

     good state of health, the presence of the foreign matter did not

     materially annoy him.  He was perfectly well in a few days."



But No. 3 is my favorite.  Whenever I read it I seem to enjoy all that

the patient enjoyed--whatever it was:



     3.  "Once at King George's Sound a native presented himself to me

     with one leg only, and requested me to supply him with a wooden leg.

     He had traveled in this maimed state about ninety-six miles, for

     this purpose.  I examined the limb, which had been severed just

     below the knee, and found that it had been charred by fire, while

     about two inches of the partially calcined bone protruded through

     the flesh.  I at once removed this with the saw; and having made as

     presentable a stump of it as I could, covered the amputated end of

     the bone with a surrounding of muscle, and kept the patient a few

     days under my care to allow the wound to heal.  On inquiring, the

     native told me that in a fight with other black-fellows a spear had

     struck his leg and penetrated the bone below the knee.  Finding it

     was serious, he had recourse to the following crude and barbarous

     operation, which it appears is not uncommon among these people in

     their native state.  He made a fire, and dug a hole in the earth

     only sufficiently large to admit his leg, and deep enough to allow

     the wounded part to be on a level with the surface of the ground.

     He then surrounded the limb with the live coals or charcoal, which

     was replenished until the leg was literally burnt off.  The

     cauterization thus applied completely checked the hemorrhage, and he

     was able in a day or two to hobble down to the Sound, with the aid

     of a long stout stick, although he was more than a week on the

     road."



But he was a fastidious native.  He soon discarded the wooden leg made

for him by the doctor, because "it had no feeling in it."  It must have

had as much as the one he burnt off, I should think.



So much for the Aboriginals.  It is difficult for me to let them alone.

They are marvelously interesting creatures.  For a quarter of a century,

now, the several colonial governments have housed their remnants in

comfortable stations, and fed them well and taken good care of them in

every way.  If I had found this out while I was in Australia I could have

seen some of those people--but I didn't.  I would walk thirty miles to

see a stuffed one.



Australia has a slang of its own.  This is a matter of course.  The vast

cattle and sheep industries, the strange aspects of the country, and the

strange native animals, brute and human, are matters which would

naturally breed a local slang.  I have notes of this slang somewhere, but

at the moment I can call to mind only a few of the words and phrases.

They are expressive ones.  The wide, sterile, unpeopled deserts have

created eloquent phrases like "No Man's Land" and the "Never-never

Country."  Also this felicitous form: "She lives in the Never-never

Country"--that is, she is an old maid.  And this one is not without

merit: "heifer-paddock"--young ladies' seminary.  "Bail up" and "stick

up" equivalent of our highwayman-term to "hold up" a stage-coach or a

train.  "New-chum" is the equivalent of our "tenderfoot"--new arrival.



And then there is the immortal "My word!  "We must import it.  "M-y word!

"In cold print it is the equivalent of our "Ger-rreat Caesar!" but spoken

with the proper Australian unction and fervency, it is worth six of it

for grace and charm and expressiveness.  Our form is rude and explosive;

it is not suited to the drawing-room or the heifer-paddock; but "M-y

word!" is, and is music to the ear, too, when the utterer knows how to

say it.  I saw it in print several times on the Pacific Ocean, but it

struck me coldly, it aroused no sympathy.  That was because it was the

dead corpse of the thing, the 'soul was not there--the tones were

lacking--the informing spirit--the deep feeling--the eloquence.  But the

first time I heard an Australian say it, it was positively thrilling.









CHAPTER XXIII.



Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



We left Adelaide in due course, and went to Horsham, in the colony of

Victoria; a good deal of a journey, if I remember rightly, but pleasant.

Horsham sits in a plain which is as level as a floor--one of those famous

dead levels which Australian books describe so often; gray, bare, sombre,

melancholy, baked, cracked, in the tedious long drouths, but a

horizonless ocean of vivid green grass the day after a rain.  A country

town, peaceful, reposeful, inviting, full of snug homes, with garden

plots, and plenty of shrubbery and flowers.



"Horsham, October 17.

At the hotel.  The weather divine.  Across the way, in front of the

London Bank of Australia, is a very handsome cottonwood.  It is in

opulent leaf, and every leaf perfect.  The full power of the on-rushing

spring is upon it, and I imagine I can see it grow.  Alongside the bank

and a little way back in the garden there is a row of soaring fountain-

sprays of delicate feathery foliage quivering in the breeze, and mottled

with flashes of light that shift and play through the mass like flash-

lights through an opal--a most beautiful tree, and a striking contrast to

the cottonwood.  Every leaf of the cottonwood is distinctly defined--it

is a kodak for faithful, hard, unsentimental detail; the other an

impressionist picture, delicious to look upon, full of a subtle and

exquisite charm, but all details fused in a swoon of vague and soft

loveliness."



It turned out, upon inquiry, to be a pepper tree--an importation from

China.  It has a silky sheen, soft and rich.  I saw some that had long

red bunches of currant-like berries ambushed among the foliage.  At a

distance, in certain lights, they give the tree a pinkish tint and a new

charm.



There is an agricultural college eight miles from Horsham.  We were

driven out to it by its chief.  The conveyance was an open wagon; the

time, noonday; no wind; the sky without a cloud, the sunshine brilliant--

and the mercury at 92 deg. in the shade.  In some countries an indolent

unsheltered drive of an hour and a half under such conditions would have

been a sweltering and prostrating experience; but there was nothing of

that in this case.  It is a climate that is perfect.  There was no sense

of heat; indeed, there was no heat; the air was fine and pure and

exhilarating; if the drive had lasted half a day I think we should not

have felt any discomfort, or grown silent or droopy or tired.  Of course,

the secret of it was the exceeding dryness of the atmosphere.  In that

plain 112 deg. in the shade is without doubt no harder upon a man than is

88 or 90 deg. in New York.



The road lay through the middle of an empty space which seemed to me to

be a hundred yards wide between the fences.  I was not given the width in

yards, but only in chains and perches--and furlongs, I think.  I would

have given a good deal to know what the width was, but I did not pursue

the matter.  I think it is best to put up with information the way you

get it; and seem satisfied with it, and surprised at it, and grateful for

it, and say, "My word!" and never let on.  It was a wide space; I could

tell you how wide, in chains and perches and furlongs and things, but

that would not help you any.  Those things sound well, but they are

shadowy and indefinite, like troy weight and avoirdupois; nobody knows

what they mean.  When you buy a pound of a drug and the man asks you

which you want, troy or avoirdupois, it is best to say "Yes," and shift

the subject.



They said that the wide space dates from the earliest sheep and cattle-

raising days.  People had to drive their stock long distances--immense

journeys--from worn-out places to new ones where were water and fresh

pasturage; and this wide space had to be left in grass and unfenced, or

the stock would have starved to death in the transit.



On the way we saw the usual birds--the beautiful little green parrots,

the magpie, and some others; and also the slender native bird of modest

plumage and the eternally-forgettable name--the bird that is the smartest

among birds, and can give a parrot 30 to 1 in the game and then talk him

to death.  I cannot recall that bird's name.  I think it begins with M.

I wish it began with G. or something that a person can remember.



The magpie was out in great force, in the fields and on the fences.  He

is a handsome large creature, with snowy white decorations, and is a

singer; he has a murmurous rich note that is lovely.  He was once modest,

even diffident; but he lost all that when he found out that he was

Australia's sole musical bird.  He has talent, and cuteness, and

impudence; and in his tame state he is a most satisfactory pet--never

coming when he is called, always coming when he isn't, and studying

disobedience as an accomplishment.  He is not confined, but loafs all

over the house and grounds, like the laughing jackass.  I think he learns

to talk, I know he learns to sing tunes, and his friends say that he

knows how to steal without learning.  I was acquainted with a tame magpie

in Melbourne.  He had lived in a lady's house several years, and believed

he owned it.  The lady had tamed him, and in return he had tamed the

lady.  He was always on deck when not wanted, always having his own way,

always tyrannizing over the dog, and always making the cat's life a slow

sorrow and a martyrdom.  He knew a number of tunes and could sing them in

perfect time and tune; and would do it, too, at any time that silence was

wanted; and then encore himself and do it again; but if he was asked to

sing he would go out and take a walk.



It was long believed that fruit trees would not grow in that baked and

waterless plain around Horsham, but the agricultural college has

dissipated that idea.  Its ample nurseries were producing oranges,

apricots, lemons, almonds, peaches, cherries, 48 varieties of apples--in

fact, all manner of fruits, and in abundance.  The trees did not seem to

miss the water; they were in vigorous and flourishing condition.



Experiments are made with different soils, to see what things thrive best

in them and what climates are best for them.  A man who is ignorantly

trying to produce upon his farm things not suited to its soil and its

other conditions can make a journey to the college from anywhere in

Australia, and go back with a change of scheme which will make his farm

productive and profitable.



There were forty pupils there--a few of them farmers, relearning their

trade, the rest young men mainly from the cities--novices.  It seemed a

strange thing that an agricultural college should have an attraction for

city-bred youths, but such is the fact.  They are good stuff, too; they

are above the agricultural average of intelligence, and they come without

any inherited prejudices in favor of hoary ignorances made sacred by long

descent.



The students work all day in the fields, the nurseries, and the shearing-

sheds, learning and doing all the practical work of the business--three

days in a week.  On the other three they study and hear lectures.  They

are taught the beginnings of such sciences as bear upon agriculture--like

chemistry, for instance.  We saw the sophomore class in sheep-shearing

shear a dozen sheep.  They did it by hand, not with the machine.  The

sheep was seized and flung down on his side and held there; and the

students took off his coat with great celerity and adroitness.  Sometimes

they clipped off a sample of the sheep, but that is customary with

shearers, and they don't mind it; they don't even mind it as much as the

sheep.  They dab a splotch of sheep-dip on the place and go right ahead.



The coat of wool was unbelievably thick.  Before the shearing the sheep

looked like the fat woman in the circus; after it he looked like a bench.

He was clipped to the skin; and smoothly and uniformly.  The fleece comes

from him all in one piece and has the spread of a blanket.



The college was flying the Australian flag--the gridiron of England

smuggled up in the northwest corner of a big red field that had the

random stars of the Southern Cross wandering around over it.



From Horsham we went to Stawell.  By rail.  Still in the colony of

Victoria.  Stawell is in the gold-mining country.  In the bank-safe was

half a peck of surface-gold--gold dust, grain gold; rich; pure in fact,

and pleasant to sift through one's fingers; and would be pleasanter if it

would stick.  And there were a couple of gold bricks, very heavy to

handle, and worth $7,500 a piece.  They were from a very valuable quartz

mine; a lady owns two-thirds of it; she has an income of $75,000 a month

from it, and is able to keep house.



The Stawell region is not productive of gold only; it has great

vineyards, and produces exceptionally fine wines.  One of these

vineyards--the Great Western, owned by Mr. Irving--is regarded as a

model.  Its product has reputation abroad.  It yields a choice champagne

and a fine claret, and its hock took a prize in France two or three years

ago.  The champagne is kept in a maze of passages under ground, cut in

the rock, to secure it an even temperature during the three-year term

required to perfect it.  In those vaults I saw 120,000 bottles of

champagne.  The colony of Victoria has a population of 1,000,000, and

those people are said to drink 25,000,000 bottles of champagne per year.

The dryest community on the earth.  The government has lately reduced the

duty upon foreign wines.  That is one of the unkindnesses of Protection.

A man invests years of work and a vast sum of money in a worthy

enterprise, upon the faith of existing laws; then the law is changed, and

the man is robbed by his own government.



On the way back to Stawell we had a chance to see a group of boulders

called the Three Sisters--a curiosity oddly located; for it was upon high

ground, with the land sloping away from it, and no height above it from

whence the boulders could have rolled down.  Relics of an early ice-

drift, perhaps.  They are noble boulders.  One of them has the size and

smoothness and plump sphericity of a balloon of the biggest pattern.



The road led through a forest of great gum-trees, lean and scraggy and

sorrowful.  The road was cream-white--a clayey kind of earth, apparently.

Along it toiled occasional freight wagons, drawn by long double files of

oxen.  Those wagons were going a journey of two hundred miles, I was

told, and were running a successful opposition to the railway!  The

railways are owned and run by the government.



Those sad gums stood up out of the dry white clay, pictures of patience

and resignation.  It is a tree that can get along without water; still it

is fond of it--ravenously so.  It is a very intelligent tree and will

detect the presence of hidden water at a distance of fifty feet, and send

out slender long root-fibres to prospect it.  They will find it; and will

also get at it even through a cement wall six inches thick.  Once a

cement water-pipe under ground at Stawell began to gradually reduce its

output, and finally ceased altogether to deliver water.  Upon examining

into the matter it was found stopped up, wadded compactly with a mass of

root-fibres, delicate and hair-like.  How this stuff had gotten into the

pipe was a puzzle for some little time; finally it was found that it had

crept in through a crack that was almost invisible to the eye.  A gum

tree forty feet away had tapped the pipe and was drinking the water.









CHAPTER XXIV.



There is no such thing as "the Queen's English." The property has gone

into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the

shares!

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Frequently, in Australia, one has cloud-effects of an unfamiliar sort.

We had this kind of scenery, finely staged, all the way to Ballarat.

Consequently we saw more sky than country on that journey.  At one time a

great stretch of the vault was densely flecked with wee ragged-edged

flakes of painfully white cloud-stuff, all of one shape and size, and

equidistant apart, with narrow cracks of adorable blue showing between.

The whole was suggestive of a hurricane of snow-flakes drifting across

the skies.  By and by these flakes fused themselves together in

interminable lines, with shady faint hollows between the lines, the long

satin-surfaced rollers following each other in simulated movement, and

enchantingly counterfeiting the majestic march of a flowing sea.  Later,

the sea solidified itself; then gradually broke up its mass into

innumerable lofty white pillars of about one size, and ranged these

across the firmament, in receding and fading perspective, in the

similitude of a stupendous colonnade--a mirage without a doubt flung from

the far Gates of the Hereafter.



The approaches to Ballarat were beautiful.  The features, great green

expanses of rolling pasture-land, bisected by eye contenting hedges of

commingled new-gold and old-gold gorse--and a lovely lake.  One must put

in the pause, there, to fetch the reader up with a slight jolt, and keep

him from gliding by without noticing the lake.  One must notice it; for a

lovely lake is not as common a thing along the railways of Australia as

are the dry places.  Ninety-two in the shade again, but balmy and

comfortable, fresh and bracing.  A perfect climate.



Forty-five years ago the site now occupied by the City of Ballarat was a

sylvan solitude as quiet as Eden and as lovely.  Nobody had ever heard of

it.  On the 25th of August, 1851, the first great gold-strike made in

Australia was made here.  The wandering prospectors who made it scraped

up two pounds and a half of gold the first day-worth $600.  A few days

later the place was a hive--a town.  The news of the strike spread

everywhere in a sort of instantaneous way--spread like a flash to the

very ends of the earth.  A celebrity so prompt and so universal has

hardly been paralleled in history, perhaps.  It was as if the name

BALLARAT had suddenly been written on the sky, where all the world could

read it at once.



The smaller discoveries made in the colony of New South Wales three

months before had already started emigrants toward Australia; they had

been coming as a stream, but they came as a flood, now.  A hundred

thousand people poured into Melbourne from England and other countries in

a single month, and flocked away to the mines.  The crews of the ships

that brought them flocked with them; the clerks in the government offices

followed; so did the cooks, the maids, the coachmen, the butlers, and the

other domestic servants; so did the carpenters, the smiths, the plumbers,

the painters, the reporters, the editors, the lawyers, the clients, the

barkeepers, the bummers, the blacklegs, the thieves, the loose women, the

grocers, the butchers, the bakers, the doctors, the druggists, the

nurses; so did the police; even officials of high and hitherto envied

place threw up their positions and joined the procession.  This roaring

avalanche swept out of Melbourne and left it desolate, Sunday-like,

paralyzed, everything at a stand-still, the ships lying idle at anchor,

all signs of life departed, all sounds stilled save the rasping of the

cloud-shadows as they scraped across the vacant streets.



That grassy and leafy paradise at Ballarat was soon ripped open, and

lacerated and scarified and gutted, in the feverish search for its hidden

riches.  There is nothing like surface-mining to snatch the graces and

beauties and benignities out of a paradise, and make an odious and

repulsive spectacle of it.



What fortunes were made!  Immigrants got rich while the ship unloaded and

reloaded--and went back home for good in the same cabin they had come out

in!  Not all of them.  Only some.  I saw the others in Ballarat myself,

forty-five years later--what were left of them by time and death and the

disposition to rove.  They were young and gay, then; they are patriarchal

and grave, now; and they do not get excited any more.  They talk of the

Past.  They live in it.  Their life is a dream, a retrospection.



Ballarat was a great region for "nuggets." No such nuggets were found in

California as Ballarat produced.  In fact, the Ballarat region has

yielded the largest ones known to history.  Two of them weighed about 180

pounds each, and together were worth $90,000.  They were offered to any

poor person who would shoulder them and carry them away.  Gold was so

plentiful that it made people liberal like that.



Ballarat was a swarming city of tents in the early days.  Everybody was

happy, for a time, and apparently prosperous.  Then came trouble.  The

government swooped down with a mining tax.  And in its worst form, too;

for it was not a tax upon what the miner had taken out, but upon what he

was going to take out--if he could find it.  It was a license-tax license

to work his claim--and it had to be paid before he could begin digging.



Consider the situation.  No business is so uncertain as surface-mining.

Your claim may be good, and it may be worthless.  It may make you well

off in a month; and then again you may have to dig and slave for half a

year, at heavy expense, only to find out at last that the gold is not

there in cost-paying quantity, and that your time and your hard work have

been thrown away.  It might be wise policy to advance the miner a monthly

sum to encourage him to develop the country's riches; but to tax him

monthly in advance instead--why, such a thing was never dreamed of in

America.  There, neither the claim itself nor its products, howsoever

rich or poor, were taxed.



The Ballarat miners protested, petitioned, complained--it was of no use;

the government held its ground, and went on collecting the tax.  And not

by pleasant methods, but by ways which must have been very galling to

free people.  The rumblings of a coming storm began to be audible.



By and by there was a result; and I think it may be called the finest

thing in Australasian history.  It was a revolution--small in size; but

great politically; it was a strike for liberty, a struggle for a

principle, a stand against injustice and oppression.  It was the Barons

and John, over again; it was Hampden and Ship-Money; it was Concord and

Lexington; small beginnings, all of them, but all of them great in

political results, all of them epoch-making.  It is another instance of a

victory won by a lost battle.  It adds an honorable page to history; the

people know it and are proud of it.  They keep green the memory of the

men who fell at the Eureka Stockade, and Peter Lalor has his monument.



The surface-soil of Ballarat was full of gold.  This soil the miners

ripped and tore and trenched and harried and disembowled, and made it

yield up its immense treasure.  Then they went down into the earth with

deep shafts, seeking the gravelly beds of ancient rivers and brooks--and

found them.  They followed the courses of these streams, and gutted them,

sending the gravel up in buckets to the upper world, and washing out of

it its enormous deposits of gold.  The next biggest of the two monster

nuggets mentioned above came from an old river-channel 180 feet under

ground.



Finally the quartz lodes were attacked.  That is not poor-man's mining.

Quartz-mining and milling require capital, and staying-power, and

patience.  Big companies were formed, and for several decades, now, the

lodes have been successfully worked, and have yielded great wealth.

Since the gold discovery in 1853 the Ballarat mines--taking the three

kinds of mining together--have contributed to the world's pocket

something over three hundred millions of dollars, which is to say that

this nearly invisible little spot on the earth's surface has yielded

about one-fourth as much gold in forty-four years as all California has

yielded in forty-seven.  The Californian aggregate, from 1848 to 1895,

inclusive, as reported by the Statistician of the United States Mint, is

$1,265,215,217.



A citizen told me a curious thing about those mines.  With all my

experience of mining I had never heard of anything of the sort before.

The main gold reef runs about north and south--of course for that is the

custom of a rich gold reef.  At Ballarat its course is between walls of

slate.  Now the citizen told me that throughout a stretch of twelve miles

along the reef, the reef is crossed at intervals by a straight black

streak of a carbonaceous nature--a streak in the slate; a streak no

thicker than a pencil--and that wherever it crosses the reef you will

certainly find gold at the junction.  It is called the Indicator.  Thirty

feet on each side of the Indicator (and down in the slate, of course) is

a still finer streak--a streak as fine as a pencil mark; and indeed, that

is its name Pencil Mark.  Whenever you find the Pencil Mark you know that

thirty feet from it is the Indicator; you measure the distance, excavate,

find the Indicator, trace it straight to the reef, and sink your shaft;

your fortune is made, for certain.  If that is true, it is curious.  And

it is curious anyway.



Ballarat is a town of only 40,000 population; and yet, since it is in

Australia, it has every essential of an advanced and enlightened big

city.  This is pure matter of course.  I must stop dwelling upon these

things.  It is hard to keep from dwelling upon them, though; for it is

difficult to get away from the surprise of it.  I will let the other

details go, this time, but I must allow myself to mention that this

little town has a park of 326 acres; a flower garden of 83 acres, with an

elaborate and expensive fernery in it and some costly and unusually fine

statuary; and an artificial lake covering 600 acres, equipped with a

fleet of 200 shells, small sail boats, and little steam yachts.



At this point I strike out some other praiseful things which I was

tempted to add.  I do not strike them out because they were not true or

not well said, but because I find them better said by another man--and a

man more competent to testify, too, because he belongs on the ground, and

knows.  I clip them from a chatty speech delivered some years ago by Mr.

William Little, who was at that time mayor of Ballarat:



     "The language of our citizens, in this as in other parts of

     Australasia, is mostly healthy Anglo-Saxon, free from Americanisms,

     vulgarisms, and the conflicting dialects of our Fatherland, and is

     pure enough to suit a Trench or a Latham.  Our youth, aided by

     climatic influence, are in point of physique and comeliness

     unsurpassed in the Sunny South.  Our young men are well ordered; and

     our maidens, 'not stepping over the bounds of modesty,' are as fair

     as Psyches, dispensing smiles as charming as November flowers."



The closing clause has the seeming of a rather frosty compliment, but

that is apparent only, not real.  November is summer-time there.



His compliment to the local purity of the language is warranted.  It is

quite free from impurities; this is acknowledged far and wide.  As in the

German Empire all cultivated people claim to speak Hanovarian German, so

in Australasia all cultivated people claim to speak Ballarat English.

Even in England this cult has made considerable progress, and now that it

is favored by the two great Universities, the time is not far away when

Ballarat English will come into general use among the educated classes of

Great Britain at large.  Its great merit is, that it is shorter than

ordinary English--that is, it is more compressed.  At first you have some

difficulty in understanding it when it is spoken as rapidly as the orator

whom I have quoted speaks it.  An illustration will show what I mean.

When he called and I handed him a chair, he bowed and said:



"Q."



Presently, when we were lighting our cigars, he held a match to mine and

I said:



"Thank you," and he said:



"Km."



Then I saw.  'Q' is the end of the phrase "I thank you" 'Km'  is the end

of the phrase "You are welcome."  Mr. Little puts no emphasis upon either

of them, but delivers them so reduced that they hardly have a sound.  All

Ballarat English is like that, and the effect is very soft and pleasant;

it takes all the hardness and harshness out of our tongue and gives to it

a delicate whispery and vanishing cadence which charms the ear like the

faint rustling of the forest leaves.









CHAPTER XXV.



"Classic."  A book which people praise and don't read.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



On the rail again--bound for Bendigo.  From diary:



October 23.  Got up at 6, left at 7.30; soon reached Castlemaine, one of

the rich gold-fields of the early days; waited several hours for a train;

left at 3.40 and reached Bendigo in an hour.  For comrade, a Catholic

priest who was better than I was, but didn't seem to know it--a man full

of graces of the heart, the mind, and the spirit; a lovable man.  He will

rise.  He will be a bishop some day.  Later an Archbishop.  Later a

Cardinal.  Finally an Archangel, I hope.  And then he will recall me when

I say, "Do you remember that trip we made from Ballarat to Bendigo, when

you were nothing but Father C., and I was nothing to what I am now?"

It has actually taken nine hours to come from Ballarat to Bendigo.  We

could have saved seven by walking.  However, there was no hurry.



Bendigo was another of the rich strikes of the early days.  It does a

great quartz-mining business, now--that business which, more than any

other that I know of, teaches patience, and requires grit and a steady

nerve.  The town is full of towering chimney-stacks, and hoisting-works,

and looks like a petroleum-city.  Speaking of patience; for example, one

of the local companies went steadily on with its deep borings and

searchings without show of gold or a penny of reward for eleven years--

then struck it, and became suddenly rich.  The eleven years' work had

cost $55,000, and the first gold found was a grain the size of a pin's

head.  It is kept under locks and bars, as a precious thing, and is

reverently shown to the visitor, "hats off."  When I saw it I had not

heard its history.



"It is gold.  Examine it--take the glass.  Now how much should you say it

is worth?"



I said:



"I should say about two cents; or in your English dialect, four

farthings."



"Well, it cost L11,000."



"Oh, come!"



"Yes, it did.  Ballarat and Bendigo have produced the three monumental

nuggets of the world, and this one is the monumentalest one of the three.

The other two represent 19,000 a piece; this one a couple of thousand

more.  It is small, and not much to look at, but it is entitled to (its)

name--Adam.  It is the Adam-nugget of this mine, and its children run up

into the millions."



Speaking of patience again, another of the mines was worked, under heavy

expenses, during 17 years before pay was struck, and still another one

compelled a wait of 21 years before pay was struck; then, in both

instances, the outlay was all back in a year or two, with compound

interest.



Bendigo has turned out even more gold than Ballarat.  The two together

have produced $650,000,000 worth--which is half as much as California has

produced.



It was through Mr. Blank--not to go into particulars about his name--it

was mainly through Mr. Blank that my stay in Bendigo was made memorably

pleasant and interesting.  He explained this to me himself.  He told me

that it was through his influence that the city government invited me to

the town-hall to hear complimentary speeches and respond to them; that it

was through his influence that I had been taken on a long pleasure-drive

through the city and shown its notable features; that it was through his

influence that I was invited to visit the great mines; that it was

through his influence that I was taken to the hospital and allowed to see

the convalescent Chinaman who had been attacked at midnight in his lonely

hut eight weeks before by robbers, and stabbed forty-six times and

scalped besides; that it was through his influence that when I arrived

this awful spectacle of piecings and patchings and bandagings was sitting

up in his cot letting on to read one of my books; that it was through his

influence that efforts had been made to get the Catholic Archbishop of

Bendigo to invite me to dinner; that it was through his influence that

efforts had been made to get the Anglican Bishop of Bendigo to ask me to

supper; that it was through his influence that the dean of the editorial

fraternity had driven me through the woodsy outlying country and shown

me, from the summit of Lone Tree Hill, the mightiest and loveliest

expanse of forest-clad mountain and valley that I had seen in all

Australia.  And when he asked me what had most impressed me in Bendigo

and I answered and said it was the taste and the public spirit which had

adorned the streets with 105 miles of shade trees, he said that it was

through his influence that it had been done.



But I am not representing him quite correctly.  He did not say it was

through his influence that all these things had happened--for that would

have been coarse; be merely conveyed that idea; conveyed it so subtly

that I only caught it fleetingly, as one catches vagrant faint breaths of

perfume when one traverses the meadows in summer; conveyed it without

offense and without any suggestion of egoism or ostentation--but conveyed

it, nevertheless.



He was an Irishman; an educated gentleman; grave, and kindly, and

courteous; a bachelor, and about forty-five or possibly fifty years old,

apparently.  He called upon me at the hotel, and it was there that we had

this talk.  He made me like him, and did it without trouble.  This was

partly through his winning and gentle ways, but mainly through the

amazing familiarity with my books which his conversation showed.  He was

down to date with them, too; and if he had made them the study of his

life he could hardly have been better posted as to their contents than he

was.  He made me better satisfied with myself than I had ever been

before.  It was plain that he had a deep fondness for humor, yet he never

laughed; he never even chuckled; in fact, humor could not win to outward

expression on his face at all.  No, he was always grave--tenderly,

pensively grave; but he made me laugh, all along; and this was very

trying--and very pleasant at the same time--for it was at quotations from

my own books.



When he was going, he turned and said:



"You don't remember me?"



"I?  Why, no.  Have we met before?"



"No, it was a matter of correspondence."



"Correspondence?"



"Yes, many years ago.  Twelve or fifteen.  Oh, longer than that.  But of

course you----"  A musing pause.  Then he said:



"Do you remember Corrigan Castle?"



"N-no, I believe I don't.  I don't seem to recall the name."



He waited a moment, pondering, with the door-knob in his hand, then

started out; but turned back and said that I had once been interested in

Corrigan Castle, and asked me if I would go with him to his quarters in

the evening and take a hot Scotch and talk it over.  I was a teetotaler

and liked relaxation, so I said I would.



We drove from the lecture-hall together about half-past ten.  He had a

most comfortably and tastefully furnished parlor, with good pictures on

the walls, Indian and Japanese ornaments on the mantel, and here and

there, and books everywhere-largely mine; which made me proud.  The light

was brilliant, the easy chairs were deep-cushioned, the arrangements for

brewing and smoking were all there.  We brewed and lit up; then he passed

a sheet of note-paper to me and said--



"Do you remember that?"



"Oh, yes, indeed!"



The paper was of a sumptuous quality.  At the top was a twisted and

interlaced monogram printed from steel dies in gold and blue and red, in

the ornate English fashion of long years ago; and under it, in neat

gothic capitals was this--printed in blue:



                          THE MARK TWAIN CLUB

                            CORRIGAN CASTLE

                           ............187..



"My!" said I, "how did you come by this?"



"I was President of it."



"No!--you don't mean it."



"It is true.  I was its first President.  I was re-elected annually as

long as its meetings were held in my castle--Corrigan--which was five

years."



Then he showed me an album with twenty-three photographs of me in it.

Five of them were of old dates, the others of various later crops; the

list closed with a picture taken by Falk in Sydney a month before.



"You sent us the first five; the rest were bought."



This was paradise!  We ran late, and talked, talked, talked--subject, the

Mark Twain Club of Corrigan Castle, Ireland.



My first knowledge of that Club dates away back; all of twenty years, I

should say.  It came to me in the form of a courteous letter, written on

the note-paper which I have described, and signed "By order of the

President; C. PEMBROKE, Secretary."  It conveyed the fact that the Club

had been created in my honor, and added the hope that this token of

appreciation of my work would meet with my approval.



I answered, with thanks; and did what I could to keep my gratification

from over-exposure.



It was then that the long correspondence began.  A letter came back, by

order of the President, furnishing me the names of the members-thirty-two

in number.  With it came a copy of the Constitution and By-Laws, in

pamphlet form, and artistically printed.  The initiation fee and dues

were in their proper place; also, schedule of meetings--monthly--for

essays upon works of mine, followed by discussions; quarterly for

business and a supper, without essays, but with after-supper speeches

also, there was a list of the officers: President, Vice-President,

Secretary, Treasurer, etc.  The letter was brief, but it was pleasant

reading, for it told me about the strong interest which the membership

took in their new venture, etc., etc.  It also asked me for a photograph

--a special one.  I went down and sat for it and sent it--with a letter,

of course.



Presently came the badge of the Club, and very dainty and pretty it was;

and very artistic.  It was a frog peeping out from a graceful tangle of

grass-sprays and rushes, and was done in enamels on a gold basis, and had

a gold pin back of it.  After I had petted it, and played with it, and

caressed it, and enjoyed it a couple of hours, the light happened to fall

upon it at a new angle, and revealed to me a cunning new detail; with the

light just right, certain delicate shadings of the grass-blades and rush-

stems wove themselves into a monogram--mine!  You can see that that jewel

was a work of art.  And when you come to consider the intrinsic value of

it, you must concede that it is not every literary club that could afford

a badge like that.  It was easily worth $75, in the opinion of Messrs.

Marcus and Ward of New York.  They said they could not duplicate it for

that and make a profit.  By this time the Club was well under way; and

from that time forth its secretary kept my off-hours well supplied with

business.  He reported the Club's discussions of my books with laborious

fullness, and did his work with great spirit and ability.  As a, rule, he

synopsized; but when a speech was especially brilliant, he short-handed

it and gave me the best passages from it, written out.  There were five

speakers whom he particularly favored in that way: Palmer, Forbes,

Naylor, Norris, and Calder.  Palmer and Forbes could never get through a

speech without attacking each other, and each in his own way was

formidably effective--Palmer in virile and eloquent abuse, Forbes in

courtly and elegant but scalding satire.  I could always tell which of

them was talking without looking for his name.  Naylor had a polished

style and a happy knack at felicitous metaphor; Norris's style was wholly

without ornament, but enviably compact, lucid, and strong.  But after

all, Calder was the gem.  He never spoke when sober, he spoke

continuously when he wasn't.  And certainly they were the drunkest

speeches that a man ever uttered.  They were full of good things, but so

incredibly mixed up and wandering that it made one's head swim to follow

him.  They were not intended to be funny, but they were,--funny for the

very gravity which the speaker put into his flowing miracles of

incongruity.  In the course of five years I came to know the styles of

the five orators as well as I knew the style of any speaker in my own

club at home.



These reports came every month.  They were written on foolscap, 600 words

to the page, and usually about twenty-five pages in a report--a good

15,000 words, I should say,--a solid week's work.  The reports were

absorbingly entertaining, long as they were; but, unfortunately for me,

they did not come alone.  They were always accompanied by a lot of

questions about passages and purposes in my books, which the Club wanted

answered; and additionally accompanied every quarter by the Treasurer's

report, and the Auditor's report, and the Committee's report, and the

President's review, and my opinion of these was always desired; also

suggestions for the good of the Club, if any occurred to me.



By and by I came to dread those things; and this dread grew and grew and

grew; grew until I got to anticipating them with a cold horror.  For I

was an indolent man, and not fond of letter-writing, and whenever these

things came I had to put everything by and sit down--for my own peace of

mind--and dig and dig until I got something out of my head which would

answer for a reply.  I got along fairly well the first year; but for the

succeeding four years the Mark Twain Club of Corrigan Castle was my

curse, my nightmare, the grief and misery of my life.  And I got so, so

sick of sitting for photographs.  I sat every year for five years, trying

to satisfy that insatiable organization.  Then at last I rose in revolt.

I could endure my oppressions no longer.  I pulled my fortitude together

and tore off my chains, and was a free man again, and happy.  From that

day I burned the secretary's fat envelopes the moment they arrived, and

by and by they ceased to come.



Well, in the sociable frankness of that night in Bendigo I brought this

all out in full confession.  Then Mr. Blank came out in the same frank

way, and with a preliminary word of gentle apology said that he was the

Mark Twain Club, and the only member it had ever had!



Why, it was matter for anger, but I didn't feel any.  He said he never

had to work for a living, and that by the time he was thirty life had

become a bore and a weariness to him.  He had no interests left; they had

paled and perished, one by one, and left him desolate.  He had begun to

think of suicide.  Then all of a sudden he thought of that happy idea of

starting an imaginary club, and went straightway to work at it, with

enthusiasm and love.  He was charmed with it; it gave him something to

do.  It elaborated itself on his hands;--it became twenty times more

complex and formidable than was his first rude draft of it.  Every new

addition to his original plan which cropped up in his mind gave him a

fresh interest and a new pleasure.  He designed the Club badge himself,

and worked over it, altering and improving it, a number of days and

nights; then sent to London and had it made.  It was the only one that

was made.  It was made for me; the "rest of the Club" went without.



He invented the thirty-two members and their names.  He invented the five

favorite speakers and their five separate styles.  He invented their

speeches, and reported them himself.  He would have kept that Club going

until now, if I hadn't deserted, he said.  He said he worked like a slave

over those reports; each of them cost him from a week to a fortnight's

work, and the work gave him pleasure and kept him alive and willing to be

alive.  It was a bitter blow to him when the Club died.



Finally, there wasn't any Corrigan Castle.  He had invented that, too.



It was wonderful--the whole thing; and altogether the most ingenious and

laborious and cheerful and painstaking practical joke I have ever heard

of.  And I liked it; liked to bear him tell about it; yet I have been a

hater of practical jokes from as long back as I can remember.  Finally he

said--



"Do you remember a note from Melbourne fourteen or fifteen years ago,

telling about your lecture tour in Australia, and your death and burial

in Melbourne?--a note from Henry Bascomb, of Bascomb Hall, Upper

Holywell Hants."



"Yes."



"I wrote it."



"M-y-word!"



"Yes, I did it.  I don't know why.  I just took the notion, and carried

it out without stopping to think.  It was wrong.  It could have done

harm.  I was always sorry about it afterward.  You must forgive me.  I

was Mr. Bascom's guest on his yacht, on his voyage around the world.  He

often spoke of you, and of the pleasant times you had had together in his

home; and the notion took me, there in Melbourne, and I imitated his

hand, and wrote the letter."



So the mystery was cleared up, after so many, many years.









CHAPTER XXVI.



There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one!  keep

from telling their happinesses to the unhappy.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



After visits to Maryborough and some other Australian towns, we presently

took passage for New Zealand.  If it would not look too much like showing

off, I would tell the reader where New Zealand is; for he is as I was; he

thinks he knows.  And he thinks he knows where Hertzegovina is; and how

to pronounce pariah; and how to use the word unique without exposing

himself to the derision of the dictionary.  But in truth, he knows none

of these things.  There are but four or five people in the world who

possess this knowledge, and these make their living out of it.  They

travel from place to place, visiting literary assemblages, geographical

societies, and seats of learning, and springing sudden bets that these

people do not know these things.  Since all people think they know them,

they are an easy prey to these adventurers.  Or rather they were an easy

prey until the law interfered, three months ago, and a New York court

decided that this kind of gambling is illegal, "because it traverses

Article IV, Section 9, of the Constitution of the United States, which

forbids betting on a sure thing."  This decision was rendered by the full

Bench of the New York Supreme Court, after a test sprung upon the court

by counsel for the prosecution, which showed that none of the nine Judges

was able to answer any of the four questions.



All people think that New Zealand is close to Australia or Asia, or

somewhere, and that you cross to it on a bridge.  But that is not so.  It

is not close to anything, but lies by itself, out in the water.  It is

nearest to Australia, but still not near.  The gap between is very wide.

It will be a surprise to the reader, as it was to me, to learn that the

distance from Australia to New Zealand is really twelve or thirteen

hundred miles, and that there is no bridge.  I learned this from

Professor X., of Yale University, whom I met in the steamer on the great

lakes when I was crossing the continent to sail across the Pacific.  I

asked him about New Zealand, in order to make conversation.  I supposed

he would generalize a little without compromising himself, and then turn

the subject to something he was acquainted with, and my object would then

be attained; the ice would be broken, and we could go smoothly on, and

get acquainted, and have a pleasant time.  But, to my surprise, he was

not only not embarrassed by my question, but seemed to welcome it, and to

take a distinct interest in it.  He began to talk--fluently, confidently,

comfortably; and as he talked, my admiration grew and grew; for as the

subject developed under his hands, I saw that he not only knew where New

Zealand was, but that he was minutely familiar with every detail of its

history, politics, religions, and commerce, its fauna, flora, geology,

products, and climatic peculiarities.  When he was done, I was lost in

wonder and admiration, and said to myself, he knows everything; in the

domain of human knowledge he is king.



I wanted to see him do more miracles; and so, just for the pleasure of

hearing him answer, I asked him about Hertzegovina, and pariah, and

unique.  But he began to generalize then, and show distress.  I saw that

with New Zealand gone, he was a Samson shorn of his locks; he was as

other men.  This was a curious and interesting mystery, and I was frank

with him, and asked him to explain it.



He tried to avoid it at first; but then laughed and said that after all,

the matter was not worth concealment, so he would let me into the secret.

In substance, this is his story:



"Last autumn I was at work one morning at home, when a card came up--the

card of a stranger.  Under the name was printed a line which showed that

this visitor was Professor of Theological Engineering in Wellington

University, New Zealand.  I was troubled--troubled, I mean, by the

shortness of the notice.  College etiquette required that he be at once

invited to dinner by some member of the Faculty--invited to dine on that

day--not, put off till a subsequent day.  I did not quite know what to

do.  College etiquette requires, in the case of a foreign guest, that the

dinner-talk shall begin with complimentary references to his country, its

great men, its services to civilization, its seats of learning, and

things like that; and of course the host is responsible, and must either

begin this talk himself or see that it is done by some one else.  I was

in great difficulty; and the more I searched my memory, the more my

trouble grew.  I found that I knew nothing about New Zealand.  I thought

I knew where it was, and that was all.  I had an impression that it was

close to Australia, or Asia, or somewhere, and that one went over to it

on a bridge.  This might turn out to be incorrect; and even if correct,

it would not furnish matter enough for the purpose at the dinner, and I

should expose my College to shame before my guest; he would see that I, a

member of the Faculty of the first University in America, was wholly

ignorant of his country, and he would go away and tell this, and laugh at

it.  The thought of it made my face burn.



"I sent for my wife and told her how I was situated, and asked for her

help, and she thought of a thing which I might have thought of myself, if

I had not been excited and worried.  She said she would go and tell the

visitor that I was out but would be in in a few minutes; and she would

talk, and keep him busy while I got out the back way and hurried over and

make Professor Lawson give the dinner.  For Lawson knew everything, and

could meet the guest in a creditable way and save the reputation of the

University.  I ran to Lawson, but was disappointed.  He did not know

anything about New Zealand.  He said that, as far as his recollection

went it was close to Australia, or Asia, or somewhere, and you go over to

it on a bridge; but that was all he knew.  It was too bad.  Lawson was a

perfect encyclopedia of abstruse learning; but now in this hour of our

need, it turned out that he did not know any useful thing.



"We consulted.  He saw that the reputation of the University was in very

real peril, and he walked the floor in anxiety, talking, and trying to

think out some way to meet the difficulty.  Presently he decided that we

must try the rest of the Faculty--some of them might know about New

Zealand.  So we went to the telephone and called up the professor of

astronomy and asked him, and he said that all he knew was, that it was

close to Australia, or Asia, or somewhere, and you went over to it on----



"We shut him off and called up the professor of biology, and he said that

all he knew was that it was close to Aus----.



"We shut him off, and sat down, worried and disheartened, to see if we

could think up some other scheme.  We shortly hit upon one which promised

well, and this one we adopted, and set its machinery going at once.  It

was this.  Lawson must give the dinner.  The Faculty must be notified by

telephone to prepare.  We must all get to work diligently, and at the end

of eight hours and a half we must come to dinner acquainted with New

Zealand; at least well enough informed to appear without discredit before

this native.  To seem properly intelligent we should have to know about

New Zealand's population, and politics, and form of government, and

commerce, and taxes, and products, and ancient history, and modern

history, and varieties of religion, and nature of the laws, and their

codification, and amount of revenue, and whence drawn, and methods of

collection, and percentage of loss, and character of climate, and--well,

a lot of things like that; we must suck the maps and cyclopedias dry.

And while we posted up in this way, the Faculty's wives must flock over,

one after the other, in a studiedly casual way, and help my wife keep the

New Zealander quiet, and not let him get out and come interfering with

our studies.  The scheme worked admirably; but it stopped business,

stopped it entirely.



"It is in the official log-book of Yale, to be read and wondered at by

future generations--the account of the Great Blank Day--the memorable

Blank Day--the day wherein the wheels of culture were stopped, a Sunday

silence prevailed all about, and the whole University stood still while

the Faculty read-up and qualified itself to sit at meat, "without shame,

in the presence of the Professor of Theological Engineering from New

Zealand:



"When we assembled at the dinner we were miserably tired and worn--but we

were posted.  Yes, it is fair to claim that.  In fact, erudition is a

pale name for it.  New Zealand was the only subject; and it was just

beautiful to hear us ripple it out.  And with such an air of

unembarrassed ease, and unostentatious familiarity with detail, and

trained and seasoned mastery of the subject-and oh, the grace and fluency

of it!



"Well, finally somebody happened to notice that the guest was looking

dazed, and wasn't saying anything.  So they stirred him up, of course.

Then that man came out with a good, honest, eloquent compliment that made

the Faculty blush.  He said be was not worthy to sit in the company of

men like these; that he had been silent from admiration; that he had been

silent from another cause also--silent from shame--silent from ignorance!

'For,' said he, 'I, who have lived eighteen years in New Zealand and have

served five in a professorship, and ought to know much about that

country, perceive, now, that I know almost nothing about it.  I say it

with shame, that I have learned fifty times, yes, a hundred times more

about New Zealand in these two hours at this table than I ever knew

before in all the eighteen years put together.  I was silent because I

could not help myself.  What I knew about taxes, and policies, and laws,

and revenue, and products, and history, and all that multitude of things,

was but general, and ordinary, and vague-unscientific, in a word--and it

would have been insanity to expose it here to the searching glare of your

amazingly accurate and all-comprehensive knowledge of those matters,

gentlemen.  I beg you to let me sit silent--as becomes me.  But do not

change the subject; I can at least follow you, in this one; whereas if

you change to one which shall call out the full strength of your mighty

erudition, I shall be as one lost.  If you know all this about a remote

little inconsequent patch like New Zealand, ah, what wouldn't you know

about any other Subject!'"









CHAPTER XXVIL



Man is the Only Animal that Blushes.  Or needs to.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession, what

there is of it.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



FROM DIARY:



November 1--noon.   A fine day, a brilliant sun.  Warm in the sun, cold

in the shade--an icy breeze blowing out of the south.  A solemn long

swell rolling up northward.  It comes from the South Pole, with nothing

in the way to obstruct its march and tone its energy down.  I have read

somewhere that an acute observer among the early explorers--Cook?  or

Tasman?--accepted this majestic swell as trustworthy circumstantial

evidence that no important land lay to the southward, and so did not

waste time on a useless quest in that direction, but changed his course

and went searching elsewhere.



Afternoon.   Passing between Tasmania (formerly Van Diemen's Land) and

neighboring islands--islands whence the poor exiled Tasmanian savages

used to gaze at their lost homeland and cry; and die of broken hearts.

How glad I am that all these native races are dead and gone, or nearly

so.  The work was mercifully swift and horrible in some portions of

Australia.  As far as Tasmania is concerned, the extermination was

complete: not a native is left.  It was a strife of years, and decades of

years.  The Whites and the Blacks hunted each other, ambushed each other,

butchered each other.  The Blacks were not numerous.  But they were wary,

alert, cunning, and they knew their country well.  They lasted a long

time, few as they were, and inflicted much slaughter upon the Whites.



The Government wanted to save the Blacks from ultimate extermination, if

possible.  One of its schemes was to capture them and coop them up, on a

neighboring island, under guard.  Bodies of Whites volunteered for the

hunt, for the pay was good--L5 for each Black captured and delivered, but

the success achieved was not very satisfactory.  The Black was naked, and

his body was greased.  It was hard to get a grip on him that would hold.

The Whites moved about in armed bodies, and surprised little families of

natives, and did make captures; but it was suspected that in these

surprises half a dozen natives were killed to one caught--and that was

not what the Government desired.



Another scheme was to drive the natives into a corner of the island and

fence them in by a cordon of men placed in line across the country; but

the natives managed to slip through, constantly, and continue their

murders and arsons.



The governor warned these unlettered savages by printed proclamation that

they must stay in the desolate region officially appointed for them!  The

proclamation was a dead letter; the savages could not read it.  Afterward

a picture-proclamation was issued.  It was painted up on boards, and

these were nailed to trees in the forest.  Herewith is a photographic

reproduction of this fashion-plate.  Substantially it means:



1.  The Governor wishes the Whites and the Blacks to love each other;



2.  He loves his black subjects;



3.  Blacks who kill Whites will be hanged;



4.  Whites who kill Blacks will be hanged.



Upon its several schemes the Government spent L30,000 and employed the

labors and ingenuities of several thousand Whites for a long time with

failure as a result.  Then, at last, a quarter of a century after the

beginning of the troubles between the two races, the right man was found.

No, he found himself.  This was George Augustus Robinson, called in

history "The Conciliator."  He was not educated, and not conspicuous in

any way.  He was a working bricklayer, in Hobart Town.  But he must have

been an amazing personality; a man worth traveling far to see.  It may be

his counterpart appears in history, but I do not know where to look for

it.



He set himself this incredible task: to go out into the wilderness, the

jungle, and the mountain-retreats where the hunted and implacable savages

were hidden, and appear among them unarmed, speak the language of love

and of kindness to them, and persuade them to forsake their homes and the

wild free life that was so dear to them, and go with him and surrender to

the hated Whites and live under their watch and ward, and upon their

charity the rest of their lives!  On its face it was the dream of a

madman.



In the beginning, his moral-suasion project was sarcastically dubbed the

sugar plum speculation.  If the scheme was striking, and new to the

world's experience, the situation was not less so.  It was this.  The

White population numbered 40,000 in 1831; the Black population numbered

three hundred.  Not 300 warriors, but 300 men, women, and children.  The

Whites were armed with guns, the Blacks with clubs and spears.  The

Whites had fought the Blacks for a quarter of a century, and had tried

every thinkable way to capture, kill, or subdue them; and could not do

it.  If white men of any race could have done it, these would have

accomplished it.  But every scheme had failed, the splendid 300, the

matchless 300 were unconquered, and manifestly unconquerable.  They would

not yield, they would listen to no terms, they would fight to the bitter

end.  Yet they had no poet to keep up their heart, and sing the marvel of

their magnificent patriotism.



At the end of five-and-twenty years of hard fighting, the surviving 300

naked patriots were still defiant, still persistent, still efficacious

with their rude weapons, and the Governor and the 40,000 knew not which

way to turn, nor what to do.



Then the Bricklayer--that wonderful man--proposed to go out into the

wilderness, with no weapon but his tongue, and no protection but his

honest eye and his humane heart; and track those embittered savages to

their lairs in the gloomy forests and among the mountain snows.

Naturally, he was considered a crank.  But he was not quite that.  In

fact, he was a good way short of that.  He was building upon his long and

intimate knowledge of the native character.  The deriders of his project

were right--from their standpoint--for they believed the natives to be

mere wild beasts; and Robinson was right, from his standpoint--for he

believed the natives to be human beings.  The truth did really lie

between the two.  The event proved that Robinson's judgment was soundest;

but about once a month for four years the event came near to giving the

verdict to the deriders, for about that frequently Robinson barely

escaped falling under the native spears.



But history shows that he had a thinking head, and was not a mere wild

sentimentalist.  For instance, he wanted the war parties (called) in

before he started unarmed upon his mission of peace.  He wanted the best

chance of success--not a half-chance.  And he was very willing to have

help; and so, high rewards were advertised, for any who would go unarmed

with him.  This opportunity was declined.  Robinson persuaded some tamed

natives of both sexes to go with him--a strong evidence of his persuasive

powers, for those natives well knew that their destruction would be

almost certain.  As it turned out, they had to face death over and over

again.



Robinson and his little party had a difficult undertaking upon their

hands.  They could not ride off, horseback, comfortably into the woods

and call Leonidas and his 300 together for a talk and a treaty the

following day; for the wild men were not in a body; they were scattered,

immense distances apart, over regions so desolate that even the birds

could not make a living with the chances offered--scattered in groups of

twenty, a dozen, half a dozen, even in groups of three.  And the mission

must go on foot.  Mr. Bonwick furnishes a description of those horrible

regions, whereby it will be seen that even fugitive gangs of the hardiest

and choicest human devils the world has seen--the convicts set apart to

people the "Hell of Macquarrie Harbor Station"--were never able, but

once, to survive the horrors of a march through them, but starving and

struggling, and fainting and failing, ate each other, and died:



"Onward, still onward, was the order of the indomitable Robinson.  No one

ignorant of the western country of Tasmania can form a correct idea of

the traveling difficulties.  While I was resident in Hobart Town, the

Governor, Sir John Franklin, and his lady, undertook the western journey

to Macquarrie Harbor, and suffered terribly.  One man who assisted to

carry her ladyship through the swamps, gave me his bitter experience of

its miseries.  Several were disabled for life.  No wonder that but one

party, escaping from Macquarrie Harbor convict settlement, arrived at the

civilized region in safety.  Men perished in the scrub, were lost in

snow, or were devoured by their companions.  This was the territory

traversed by Mr. Robinson and his Black guides.  All honor to his

intrepidity, and their wonderful fidelity!  When they had, in the depth

of winter, to cross deep and rapid rivers, pass among mountains six

thousand feet high, pierce dangerous thickets, and find food in a country

forsaken even by birds, we can realize their hardships.



"After a frightful journey by Cradle Mountain, and over the lofty plateau

of Middlesex Plains, the travelers experienced unwonted misery, and the

circumstances called forth the best qualities of the noble little band.

Mr. Robinson wrote afterwards to Mr. Secretary Burnett some details of

this passage of horrors.  In that letter, of Oct 2, 1834, he states that

his Natives were very reluctant to go over the dreadful mountain passes;

that 'for seven successive days we continued traveling over one solid

body of snow;'  that 'the snows were of incredible depth;'  that 'the

Natives were frequently up to their middle in snow.'  But still the ill-

clad, ill-fed, diseased, and way-worn men and women were sustained by the

cheerful voice of their unconquerable friend, and responded most nobly to

his call."



Mr. Bonwick says that Robinson's friendly capture of the Big River tribe

remember, it was a whole tribe--"was by far the grandest feature of the

war, and the crowning glory of his efforts." The word "war" was not well

chosen, and is misleading.  There was war still, but only the Blacks were

conducting it--the Whites were holding off until Robinson could give his

scheme a fair trial.  I think that we are to understand that the friendly

capture of that tribe was by far the most important thing, the highest in

value, that happened during the whole thirty years of truceless

hostilities; that it was a decisive thing, a peaceful Waterloo, the

surrender of the native Napoleon and his dreaded forces, the happy ending

of the long strife.  For "that tribe was the terror of the colony," its

chief "the Black Douglas of Bush households."



Robinson knew that these formidable people were lurking somewhere, in

some remote corner of the hideous regions just described, and he and his

unarmed little party started on a tedious and perilous hunt for them.  At

last, "there, under the shadows of the Frenchman's Cap, whose grim cone

rose five thousand feet in the uninhabited westward interior," they were

found.  It was a serious moment.  Robinson himself believed, for once,

that his mission, successful until now, was to end here in failure, and

that his own death-hour had struck.



The redoubtable chief stood in menacing attitude, with his eighteen-foot

spear poised; his warriors stood massed at his back, armed for battle,

their faces eloquent with their long-cherished loathing for white men.

"They rattled their spears and shouted their war-cry."  Their women were

back of them, laden with supplies of weapons, and keeping their 150 eager

dogs quiet until the chief should give the signal to fall on.



"I think we shall soon be in the resurrection," whispered a member of

Robinson's little party.



"I think we shall," answered Robinson; then plucked up heart and began

his persuasions--in the tribe's own dialect, which surprised and pleased

the chief.  Presently there was an interruption by the chief:



"Who are you?"



"We are gentlemen."



"Where are your guns?"



"We have none."



The warrior was astonished.



"Where your little guns?" (pistols).



"We have none."



A few minutes passed--in by-play--suspense--discussion among the

tribesmen--Robinson's tamed squaws ventured to cross the line and begin

persuasions upon the wild squaws.  Then the chief stepped back "to confer

with the old women--the real arbiters of savage war."  Mr. Bonwick

continues:



     "As the fallen gladiator in the arena looks for the signal of life

     or death from the president of the amphitheatre, so waited our

     friends in anxious suspense while the conference continued.  In a

     few minutes, before a word was uttered, the women of the tribe threw

     up their arms three times.  This was the inviolable sign of peace!

     Down fell the spears.  Forward, with a heavy sigh of relief, and

     upward glance of gratitude, came the friends of peace.  The

     impulsive natives rushed forth with tears and cries, as each saw in

     the other's rank a loved one of the past.



     "It was a jubilee of joy.  A festival followed.  And, while tears

     flowed at the recital of woe, a corrobory of pleasant laughter

     closed the eventful day."



In four years, without the spilling of a drop of blood, Robinson brought

them all in, willing captives, and delivered them to the white governor,

and ended the war which powder and bullets, and thousands of men to use

them, had prosecuted without result since 1804.



Marsyas charming the wild beasts with his music--that is fable; but the

miracle wrought by Robinson is fact.  It is history--and authentic; and

surely, there is nothing greater, nothing more reverence-compelling in

the history of any country, ancient or modern.



And in memory of the greatest man Australasia ever developed or ever will

develop, there is a stately monument to George Augustus Robinson, the

Conciliator in--no, it is to another man, I forget his name.



However, Robertson's own generation honored him, and in manifesting it

honored themselves.  The Government gave him a money-reward and a

thousand acres of land; and the people held mass-meetings and praised him

and emphasized their praise with a large subscription of money.



A good dramatic situation; but the curtain fell on another:



     "When this desperate tribe was thus captured, there was much

     surprise to find that the L30,000 of a little earlier day had been

     spent, and the whole population of the colony placed under arms, in

     contention with an opposing force of sixteen men with wooden spears!

     Yet such was the fact.  The celebrated Big River tribe, that had

     been raised by European fears to a host, consisted of sixteen men,

     nine women, and one child.  With a knowledge of the mischief done by

     these few, their wonderful marches and their widespread aggressions,

     their enemies cannot deny to them the attributes of courage and

     military tact.  A Wallace might harass a large army with a small and

     determined band; but the contending parties were at least equal in

     arms and civilization.  The Zulus who fought us in Africa, the

     Maories in New Zealand, the Arabs in the Soudan, were far better

     provided with weapons, more advanced in the science of war, and

     considerably more numerous, than the naked Tasmanians.  Governor

     Arthur rightly termed them a noble race."



These were indeed wonderful people, the natives.  They ought not to have

been wasted.  They should have been crossed with the Whites.  It would

have improved the Whites and done the Natives no harm.



But the Natives were wasted, poor heroic wild creatures.  They were

gathered together in little settlements on neighboring islands, and

paternally cared for by the Government, and instructed in religion, and

deprived of tobacco, because the superintendent of the Sunday-school was

not a smoker, and so considered smoking immoral.



The Natives were not used to clothes, and houses, and regular hours, and

church, and school, and Sunday-school, and work, and the other misplaced

persecutions of civilization, and they pined for their lost home and

their wild free life.  Too late they repented that they had traded that

heaven for this hell.  They sat homesick on their alien crags, and day by

day gazed out through their tears over the sea with unappeasable longing

toward the hazy bulk which was the specter of what had been their

paradise; one by one their hearts broke and they died.



In a very few years nothing but a scant remnant remained alive.  A

handful lingered along into age.  In 1864 the last man died, in 1876 the

last woman died, and the Spartans of Australasia were extinct.



The Whites always mean well when they take human fish out of the ocean

and try to make them dry and warm and happy and comfortable in a chicken

coop; but the kindest-hearted white man can always be depended on to

prove himself inadequate when he deals with savages.  He cannot turn the

situation around and imagine how he would like it to have a well-meaning

savage transfer him from his house and his church and his clothes and his

books and his choice food to a hideous wilderness of sand and rocks and

snow, and ice and sleet and storm and blistering sun, with no shelter, no

bed, no covering for his and his family's naked bodies, and nothing to

eat but snakes and grubs and 'offal.  This would be a hell to him; and if

he had any wisdom he would know that his own civilization is a hell to

the savage--but he hasn't any, and has never had any; and for lack of it

he shut up those poor natives in the unimaginable perdition of his

civilization, committing his crime with the very best intentions, and saw

those poor creatures waste away under his tortures; and gazed at it,

vaguely troubled and sorrowful, and wondered what could be the matter

with them.  One is almost betrayed into respecting those criminals, they

were so sincerely kind, and tender, and humane; and well-meaning.



They didn't know why those exiled savages faded away, and they did their

honest best to reason it out.  And one man, in a like case in New South

Wales, did reason it out and arrive at a solution:



     "It is from the wrath of God, which is revealed from heaven against

     cold ungodliness and unrighteousness of men."



That settles it.









CHAPTER XXVIII.



Let us be thankful for the fools.  But for them the rest of us could not

succeed.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



The aphorism does really seem true: "Given the Circumstances, the Man

will appear."  But the man musn't appear ahead of time, or it will spoil

everything.  In Robinson's case the Moment had been approaching for a

quarter of a century--and meantime the future Conciliator was tranquilly

laying bricks in Hobart.  When all other means had failed, the Moment had

arrived, and the Bricklayer put down his trowel and came forward.

Earlier he would have been jeered back to his trowel again.  It reminds

me of a tale that was told me by a Kentuckian on the train when we were

crossing Montana.  He said the tale was current in Louisville years ago.

He thought it had been in print, but could not remember.  At any rate, in

substance it was this, as nearly as I can call it back to mind.



A few years before the outbreak of the Civil War it began to appear that

Memphis, Tennessee, was going to be a great tobacco entrepot--the wise

could see the signs of it.  At that time Memphis had a wharf boat, of

course.  There was a paved sloping wharf, for the accommodation of

freight, but the steamers landed on the outside of the wharfboat, and all

loading and unloading was done across it, between steamer and shore.  A

number of wharfboat clerks were needed, and part of the time, every day,

they were very busy, and part of the time tediously idle.  They were

boiling over with youth and spirits, and they had to make the intervals

of idleness endurable in some way; and as a rule, they did it by

contriving practical jokes and playing them upon each other.



The favorite butt for the jokes was Ed Jackson, because he played none

himself, and was easy game for other people's--for he always believed

whatever was told him.



One day he told the others his scheme for his holiday.  He was not going

fishing or hunting this time--no, he had thought out a better plan.  Out

of his $40 a month he had saved enough for his purpose, in an economical

way, and he was going to have a look at New York.



It was a great and surprising idea.  It meant travel immense travel--in

those days it meant seeing the world; it was the equivalent of a voyage

around it in ours.  At first the other youths thought his mind was

affected, but when they found that he was in earnest, the next thing to

be thought of was, what sort of opportunity this venture might afford for

a practical joke.



The young men studied over the matter, then held a secret consultation

and made a plan.  The idea was, that one of the conspirators should offer

Ed a letter of introduction to Commodore Vanderbilt, and trick him into

delivering it.  It would be easy to do this.  But what would Ed do when

he got back to Memphis?  That was a serious matter.  He was good-hearted,

and had always taken the jokes patiently; but they had been jokes which

did not humiliate him, did not bring him to shame; whereas, this would be

a cruel one in that way, and to play it was to meddle with fire; for with

all his good nature, Ed was a Southerner--and the English of that was,

that when he came back he would kill as many of the conspirators as he

could before falling himself.  However, the chances must be taken--it

wouldn't do to waste such a joke as that.



So the letter was prepared with great care and elaboration.  It was

signed Alfred Fairchild, and was written in an easy and friendly spirit.

It stated that the bearer was the bosom friend of the writer's son, and

was of good parts and sterling character, and it begged the Commodore to

be kind to the young stranger for the writer's sake.  It went on to say,

"You may have forgotten me, in this long stretch of time, but you will

easily call me back out of your boyhood memories when I remind you of how

we robbed old Stevenson's orchard that night; and how, while he was

chasing down the road after us, we cut across the field and doubled back

and sold his own apples to his own cook for a hat-full of doughnuts; and

the time that we----" and so forth and so on, bringing in names of

imaginary comrades, and detailing all sorts of wild and absurd and, of

course, wholly imaginary schoolboy pranks and adventures, but putting

them into lively and telling shape.



With all gravity Ed was asked if he would like to have a letter to

Commodore Vanderbilt, the great millionaire.  It was expected that the

question would astonish Ed, and it did.



"What?  Do you know that extraordinary man?"



"No; but my father does.  They were schoolboys together.  And if you

like, I'll write and ask father.  I know he'll be glad to give it to you

for my sake."



Ed could not find words capable of expressing his gratitude and delight.

The three days passed, and the letter was put into his bands.  He started

on his trip, still pouring out his thanks while he shook good-bye all

around.  And when he was out of sight his comrades let fly their laughter

in a storm of happy satisfaction--and then quieted down, and were less

happy, less satisfied.  For the old doubts as to the wisdom of this

deception began to intrude again.



Arrived in New York, Ed found his way to Commodore Vanderbilt's business

quarters, and was ushered into a large anteroom, where a score of people

were patiently awaiting their turn for a two-minute interview with the

millionaire in his private office.  A servant asked for Ed's card, and

got the letter instead.  Ed was sent for a moment later, and found Mr.

Vanderbilt alone, with the letter--open--in his hand.



"Pray sit down, Mr. --er--"



"Jackson."



" Ah--sit down, Mr. Jackson.  By the opening sentences it seems to be a

letter from an old friend.  Allow me--I will run my eye through it.  He

says he says--why, who is it?" He turned the sheet and found the

signature.  "Alfred Fairchild--hm--Fairchild--I don't recall the name.

But that is nothing--a thousand names have gone from me.  He says--he

says-hm-hmoh, dear, but it's good!  Oh, it's rare!  I don't quite

remember it, but I seem to it'll all come back to me presently.  He says

--he says--hm--hm-oh, but that was a game!  Oh, spl-endid!  How it

carries me back!  It's all dim, of course it's a long time ago--and the

names--some of the names are wavery and indistinct--but sho', I know it

happened--I can feel it!  and lord, how it warms my heart, and brings

back my lost youth!  Well, well, well, I've got to come back into this

work-a-day world now--business presses and people are waiting--I'll keep

the rest for bed to-night, and live my youth over again.  And you'll

thank Fairchild for me when you see him--I used to call him Alf, I think

--and you'll give him my gratitude for--what this letter has done for the

tired spirit of a hard-worked man; and tell him there isn't anything that

I can do for him or any friend of his that I won't do.  And as for you,

my lad, you are my guest; you can't stop at any hotel in New York.  Sit.

where you are a little while, till I get through with these people, then

we'll go home.  I'll take care of you, my boy--make yourself easy as to

that."



Ed stayed a week, and had an immense time--and never suspected that the

Commodore's shrewd eye was on him, and that he was daily being weighed

and measured and analyzed and tried and tested.



Yes, he had an immense time; and never wrote home, but saved it all up to

tell when he should get back.  Twice, with proper modesty and decency, he

proposed to end his visit, but the Commodore said, "No--wait; leave it to

me; I'll tell you when to go."



In those days the Commodore was making some of those vast combinations of

his--consolidations of warring odds and ends of railroads into harmonious

systems, and concentrations of floating and rudderless commerce in

effective centers--and among other things his farseeing eye had detected

the convergence of that huge tobacco-commerce, already spoken of, toward

Memphis, and he had resolved to set his grasp upon it and make it his

own.



The week came to an end.  Then the Commodore said:



"Now you can start home.  But first we will have some more talk about

that tobacco matter.  I know you now.  I know your abilities as well as

you know them yourself--perhaps better.  You understand that tobacco

matter; you understand that I am going to take possession of it, and you

also understand the plans which I have matured for doing it.  What I want

is a man who knows my mind, and is qualified to represent me in Memphis,

and be in supreme command of that important business--and I appoint you."



"Me!"



"Yes.  Your salary will be high--of course-for you are representing me.

Later you will earn increases of it, and will get them.  You will need a

small army of assistants; choose them yourself--and carefully.  Take no

man for friendship's sake; but, all things being equal, take the man you

know, take your friend, in preference to the stranger."  After some

further talk under this head, the Commodore said:



"Good-bye, my boy, and thank Alf for me, for sending you to me."



When Ed reached Memphis he rushed down to the wharf in a fever to tell

his great news and thank the boys over and over again for thinking to

give him the letter to Mr. Vanderbilt.  It happened to be one of those

idle times.  Blazing hot noonday, and no sign of life on the wharf.  But

as Ed threaded his way among the freight piles, he saw a white linen

figure stretched in slumber upon a pile of grain-sacks under an awning,

and said to himself, "That's one of them," and hastened his step; next,

he said, "It's Charley--it's Fairchild good"; and the next moment laid an

affectionate hand on the sleeper's shoulder.  The eyes opened lazily,

took one glance, the face blanched, the form whirled itself from the

sack-pile, and in an instant Ed was alone and Fairchild was flying for

the wharf-boat like the wind!



Ed was dazed, stupefied.  Was Fairchild crazy?  What could be the meaning

of this?  He started slow and dreamily down toward the wharf-boat; turned

the corner of a freight-pile and came suddenly upon two of the boys.

They were lightly laughing over some pleasant matter; they heard his

step, and glanced up just as he discovered them; the laugh died abruptly;

and before Ed could speak they were off, and sailing over barrels and

bales like hunted deer.  Again Ed was paralyzed.  Had the boys all gone

mad?  What could be the explanation of this extraordinary conduct?  And

so, dreaming along, he reached the wharf-boat, and stepped aboard nothing

but silence there, and vacancy.  He crossed the deck, turned the corner

to go down the outer guard, heard a fervent--



"O lord!" and saw a white linen form plunge overboard.



The youth came up coughing and strangling, and cried out--



"Go 'way from here!  You let me alone.  I didn't do it, I swear I

didn't!"



"Didn't do what?"



"Give you the----"



"Never mind what you didn't do--come out of that!  What makes you all act

so?  What have I done?"



"You?  Why you haven't done anything.  But----"



"Well, then, what have you got against me?  What do you all treat me so

for?"



"I--er--but haven't you got anything against us?"



"Of course not.  What put such a thing into your head?"



"Honor bright--you haven't?



"Honor bright."



"Swear it!"



"I don't know what in the world you mean, but I swear it, anyway."



"And you'll shake hands with me?"



"Goodness knows I'll be glad to!  Why, I'm just starving to shake hands

with somebody!"



The swimmer muttered, "Hang him, he smelt a rat and never delivered the

letter!--but it's all right, I'm not going to fetch up the subject."  And

he crawled out and came dripping and draining to shake hands.  First one

and then another of the conspirators showed up cautiously--armed to the

teeth--took in the amicable situation, then ventured warily forward and

joined the love-feast.



And to Ed's eager inquiry as to what made them act as they had been

acting, they answered evasively, and pretended that they had put it up as

a joke, to see what he would do.  It was the best explanation they could

invent at such short notice.  And each said to himself, "He never

delivered that letter, and the joke is on us, if he only knew it or we

were dull enough to come out and tell."



Then, of course, they wanted to know all about the trip; and he said--



"Come right up on the boiler deck and order the drinks it's my treat.

I'm going to tell you all about it.  And to-night it's my treat again--

and we'll have oysters and a time!"



When the drinks were brought and cigars lighted, Ed said:



"Well, when, I delivered the letter to Mr. Vanderbilt----"



"Great Scott!"



"Gracious, how you scared me.  What's the matter?"



"Oh--er--nothing.  Nothing--it was a tack in the chair-seat," said one.



"But you all said it.  However, no matter.  When I delivered the

letter----"



"Did you deliver it?"  And they looked at each other as people might who

thought that maybe they were dreaming.



Then they settled to listening; and as the story deepened and its marvels

grew, the amazement of it made them dumb, and the interest of it took

their breath.  They hardly uttered a whisper during two hours, but sat

like petrifactions and drank in the immortal romance.  At last the tale

was ended, and Ed said--



"And it's all owing to you, boys, and you'll never find me ungrateful--

bless your hearts, the best friends a fellow ever had!  You'll all have

places; I want every one of you.  I know you--I know you 'by the back,'

as the gamblers say.  You're jokers, and all that, but you're sterling,

with the hallmark on.  And Charley Fairchild, you shall be my first

assistant and right hand, because of your first-class ability, and

because you got me the letter, and for your father's sake who wrote it

for me, and to please Mr. Vanderbilt, who said it would!  And here's to

that great man--drink hearty!"



Yes, when the Moment comes, the Man appears--even if he is a thousand

miles away, and has to be discovered by a practical joke.









CHAPTER XXIX.



When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in

his private heart no man much respects himself.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Necessarily, the human interest is the first interest in the log-book of

any country.  The annals of Tasmania, in whose shadow we were sailing,

are lurid with that feature.  Tasmania was a convict-dump, in old times;

this has been indicated in the account of the Conciliator, where

reference is made to vain attempts of desperate convicts to win to

permanent freedom, after escaping from Macquarrie Harbor and the "Gates

of Hell." In the early days Tasmania had a great population of convicts,

of both sexes and all ages, and a bitter hard life they had.  In one spot

there was a settlement of juvenile convicts--children--who had been sent

thither from their home and their friends on the other side of the globe

to expiate their "crimes."



In due course our ship entered the estuary called the Derwent, at whose

head stands Hobart, the capital of Tasmania.  The Derwent's shores

furnish scenery of an interesting sort.  The historian Laurie, whose

book, "The Story of Australasia," is just out, invoices its features with

considerable truth and intemperance: "The marvelous picturesqueness of

every point of view, combined with the clear balmy atmosphere and the

transparency of the ocean depths, must have delighted and deeply

impressed" the early explorers.  "If the rock-bound coasts, sullen,

defiant, and lowering, seemed uninviting, these were occasionally broken

into charmingly alluring coves floored with golden sand, clad with

evergreen shrubbery, and adorned with every variety of indigenous wattle,

she-oak, wild flower, and fern, from the delicately graceful 'maiden-

hair' to the palm-like 'old man'; while the majestic gum-tree, clean and

smooth as the mast of 'some tall admiral' pierces the clear air to the

height of 230 feet or more."



It looked so to me.  "Coasting along Tasman's Peninsula, what a shock of

pleasant wonder must have struck the early mariner on suddenly sighting

Cape Pillar, with its cluster of black-ribbed basaltic columns rising to

a height of 900 feet, the hydra head wreathed in a turban of fleecy

cloud, the base lashed by jealous waves spouting angry fountains of

foam."



That is well enough, but I did not suppose those snags were 900 feet

high.  Still they were a very fine show.  They stood boldly out by

themselves, and made a fascinatingly odd spectacle.  But there was

nothing about their appearance to suggest the heads of a hydra.  They

looked like a row of lofty slabs with their upper ends tapered to the

shape of a carving-knife point; in fact, the early voyager, ignorant of

their great height, might have mistaken them for a rusty old rank of

piles that had sagged this way and that out of the perpendicular.



The Peninsula is lofty, rocky, and densely clothed with scrub, or brush,

or both.  It is joined to the main by a low neck.  At this junction was

formerly a convict station called Port Arthur--a place hard to escape

from.  Behind it was the wilderness of scrub, in which a fugitive would

soon starve; in front was the narrow neck, with a cordon of chained dogs

across it, and a line of lanterns, and a fence of living guards, armed.

We saw the place as we swept by--that is, we had a glimpse of what we

were told was the entrance to Port Arthur.  The glimpse was worth

something, as a remembrancer, but that was all.



The voyage thence up the Derwent Frith displays a grand succession of

fairy visions, in its entire length elsewhere unequaled.  In gliding over

the deep blue sea studded with lovely islets luxuriant to the water's

edge, one is at a loss which scene to choose for contemplation and to

admire most.  When the Huon and Bruni have been passed, there seems no

possible chance of a rival; but suddenly Mount Wellington, massive and

noble like his brother Etna, literally heaves in sight, sternly guarded

on either hand by Mounts Nelson and Rumney; presently we arrive at

Sullivan's Cove--Hobart!



It is an attractive town.  It sits on low hills that slope to the harbor

--a harbor that looks like a river, and is as smooth as one.  Its still

surface is pictured with dainty reflections of boats and grassy banks and

luxuriant foliage.  Back of the town rise highlands that are clothed in

woodland loveliness, and over the way is that noble mountain, Wellington,

a stately bulk, a most majestic pile.  How beautiful is the whole region,

for form, and grouping, and opulence, and freshness of foliage, and

variety of color, and grace and shapeliness of the hills, the capes, the,

promontories; and then, the splendor of the sunlight, the dim rich

distances, the charm of the water-glimpses!  And it was in this paradise

that the yellow-liveried convicts were landed, and the Corps-bandits

quartered, and the wanton slaughter of the kangaroo-chasing black

innocents consummated on that autumn day in May, in the brutish old time.

It was all out of keeping with the place, a sort of bringing of heaven

and hell together.



The remembrance of this paradise reminds me that it was at Hobart that we

struck the head of the procession of Junior Englands.  We were to

encounter other sections of it in New Zealand, presently, and others

later in Natal.  Wherever the exiled Englishman can find in his new home

resemblances to his old one, he is touched to the marrow of his being;

the love that is in his heart inspires his imagination, and these allied

forces transfigure those resemblances into authentic duplicates of the

revered originals.  It is beautiful, the feeling which works this

enchantment, and it compels one's homage; compels it, and also compels

one's assent--compels it always--even when, as happens sometimes, one

does not see the resemblances as clearly as does the exile who is

pointing them out.



The resemblances do exist, it is quite true; and often they cunningly

approximate the originals--but after all, in the matter of certain

physical patent rights there is only one England.  Now that I have

sampled the globe, I am not in doubt.  There is a beauty of Switzerland,

and it is repeated in the glaciers and snowy ranges of many parts of the

earth; there is a beauty of the fiord, and it is repeated in New Zealand

and Alaska; there is a beauty of Hawaii, and it is repeated in ten

thousand islands of the Southern seas; there is a beauty of the prairie

and the plain, and it is repeated here and there in the earth; each of

these is worshipful, each is perfect in its way, yet holds no monopoly of

its beauty; but that beauty which is England is alone--it has no

duplicate.



It is made up of very simple details--just grass, and trees, and shrubs,

and roads, and hedges, and gardens, and houses, and vines, and churches,

and castles, and here and there a ruin--and over it all a mellow dream-

haze of history.  But its beauty is incomparable, and all its own.



Hobart has a peculiarity--it is the neatest town that the sun shines on;

and I incline to believe that it is also the cleanest.  However that may

be, its supremacy in neatness is not to be questioned.  There cannot be

another town in the world that has no shabby exteriors; no rickety gates

and fences, no neglected houses crumbling to ruin, no crazy and unsightly

sheds, no weed-grown front-yards of the poor, no back-yards littered with

tin cans and old boots and empty bottles, no rubbish in the gutters, no

clutter on the sidewalks, no outer-borders fraying out into dirty lanes

and tin-patched huts.  No, in Hobart all the aspects are tidy, and all a

comfort to the eye; the modestest cottage looks combed and brushed, and

has its vines, its flowers, its neat fence, its neat gate, its comely cat

asleep on the window ledge.



We had a glimpse of the museum, by courtesy of the American gentleman who

is curator of it.  It has samples of half-a-dozen different kinds of

marsupials--[A marsupial is a plantigrade vertebrate whose specialty is

its pocket.  In some countries it is extinct, in the others it is rare.

The first American marsupials were Stephen Girard, Mr. Aston and the

opossum; the principal marsupials of the Southern Hemisphere are Mr.

Rhodes, and the kangaroo.  I, myself, am the latest marsupial.  Also, I

might boast that I have the largest pocket of them all.  But there is

nothing in that.]--one, the "Tasmanian devil;" that is, I think he was

one of them.  And there was a fish with lungs.  When the water dries up

it can live in the mud.  Most curious of all was a parrot that kills

sheep.  On one great sheep-run this bird killed a thousand sheep in a

whole year.  He doesn't want the whole sheep, but only the kidney-fat.

This restricted taste makes him an expensive bird to support.  To get the

fat he drives his beak in and rips it out; the wound is mortal.  This

parrot furnishes a notable example of evolution brought about by changed

conditions.  When the sheep culture was introduced, it presently brought

famine to the parrot by exterminating a kind of grub which had always

thitherto been the parrot's diet.  The miseries of hunger made the bird

willing to eat raw flesh, since it could get no other food, and it began

to pick remnants of meat from sheep skins hung out on the fences to dry.

It soon came to prefer sheep meat to any other food, and by and by it

came to prefer the kidney-fat to any other detail of the sheep.  The

parrot's bill was not well shaped for digging out the fat, but Nature

fixed that matter; she altered the bill's shape, and now the parrot can

dig out kidney-fat better than the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, or

anybody else, for that matter--even an Admiral.



And there was another curiosity--quite a stunning one, I thought: Arrow-

heads and knives just like those which Primeval Man made out of flint,

and thought he had done such a wonderful thing--yes, and has been humored

and coddled in that superstition by this age of admiring scientists until

there is probably no living with him in the other world by now.  Yet here

is his finest and nicest work exactly duplicated in our day; and by

people who have never heard of him or his works: by aborigines who lived

in the islands of these seas, within our time.  And they not only

duplicated those works of art but did it in the brittlest and most

treacherous of substances--glass: made them out of old brandy bottles

flung out of the British camps; millions of tons of them.  It is time for

Primeval Man to make a little less noise, now.  He has had his day.  He

is not what he used to be.  We had a drive through a bloomy and odorous

fairy-land, to the Refuge for the Indigent--a spacious and comfortable

home, with hospitals, etc., for both sexes.  There was a crowd in there,

of the oldest people I have ever seen.  It was like being suddenly set

down in a new world--a weird world where Youth has never been, a world

sacred to Age, and bowed forms, and wrinkles.  Out of the 359 persons

present, 223, were ex-convicts, and could have told stirring tales, no

doubt, if they had been minded to talk; 42 of the 359 were past 80, and

several were close upon 90; the average age at death there is 76 years.

As for me, I have no use for that place; it is too healthy.  Seventy is

old enough--after that, there is too much risk.  Youth and gaiety might

vanish, any day--and then, what is left?  Death in life; death without

its privileges, death without its benefits.  There were 185 women in that

Refuge, and 81 of them were ex-convicts.



The steamer disappointed us.  Instead of making a long visit at Hobart,

as usual, she made a short one.  So we got but a glimpse of Tasmania, and

then moved on.









CHAPTER XXX.



Nature makes the locust with an appetite for crops; man would have made

him with an appetite for sand.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



We spent part of an afternoon and a night at sea, and reached Bluff, in

New Zealand, early in the morning.  Bluff is at the bottom of the middle

island, and is away down south, nearly forty-seven degrees below the

equator.  It lies as far south of the line as Quebec lies north of it,

and the climates of the two should be alike; but for some reason or other

it has not been so arranged.  Quebec is hot in the summer and cold in the

winter, but Bluff's climate is less intense; the cold weather is not very

cold, the hot weather is not very hot; and the difference between the

hottest month and the coldest is but 17 degrees Fahrenheit.



In New Zealand the rabbit plague began at Bluff.  The man who introduced

the rabbit there was banqueted and lauded; but they would hang him, now,

if they could get him. In England the natural enemy of the rabbit is

detested and persecuted; in the Bluff region the natural enemy of the

rabbit is honored, and his person is sacred.  The rabbit's natural enemy

in England is the poacher, in Bluff its natural enemy is the stoat, the

weasel, the ferret, the cat, and the mongoose.  In England any person

below the Heir who is caught with a rabbit in his possession must

satisfactorily explain how it got there, or he will suffer fine and

imprisonment, together with extinction of his peerage; in Bluff, the cat

found with a rabbit in its possession does not have to explain--everybody

looks the other way; the person caught noticing would suffer fine and

imprisonment, with extinction of peerage.  This is a sure way to

undermine the moral fabric of a cat.  Thirty years from now there will

not be a moral cat in New Zealand.  Some think there is none there now.

In England the poacher is watched, tracked, hunted--he dare not show his

face; in Bluff the cat, the weasel, the stoat, and the mongoose go up and

down, whither they will, unmolested.  By a law of the legislature, posted

where all may read, it is decreed that any person found in possession of

one of these creatures (dead) must satisfactorily explain the

circumstances or pay a fine of not less than L5, nor more than L20.  The

revenue from this source is not large.  Persons who want to pay a hundred

dollars for a dead cat are getting rarer and rarer every day.  This is

bad, for the revenue was to go to the endowment of a University.  All

governments are more or less short-sighted: in England they fine the

poacher, whereas he ought to be banished to New Zealand.  New Zealand

would pay his way, and give him wages.



It was from Bluff that we ought to have cut across to the west coast and

visited the New Zealand Switzerland, a land of superb scenery, made up of

snowy grandeurs, anal mighty glaciers, and beautiful lakes; and over

there, also, are the wonderful rivals of the Norwegian and Alaskan

fiords; and for neighbor, a waterfall of 1,900 feet; but we were obliged

to postpone the trip to some later and indefinite time.



November 6.  A lovely summer morning; brilliant blue sky.  A few miles

out from Invercargill, passed through vast level green expanses snowed

over with sheep.  Fine to see.  The green, deep and very vivid sometimes;

at other times less so, but delicate and lovely.  A passenger reminds me

that I am in "the England of the Far South."



Dunedin, same date.  The town justifies Michael Davitt's praises.  The

people are Scotch.  They stopped here on their way from home to heaven-

thinking they had arrived.  The population is stated at 40,000, by

Malcolm Ross, journalist; stated by an M. P. at 60,000.  A journalist

cannot lie.



To the residence of Dr. Hockin.  He has a fine collection of books

relating to New Zealand; and his house is a museum of Maori art and

antiquities.  He has pictures and prints in color of many native chiefs

of the past--some of them of note in history.  There is nothing of the

savage in the faces; nothing could be finer than these men's features,

nothing more intellectual than these faces, nothing more masculine,

nothing nobler than their aspect.  The aboriginals of Australia and

Tasmania looked the savage, but these chiefs looked like Roman

patricians.  The tattooing in these portraits ought to suggest the

savage, of course, but it does not.  The designs are so flowing and

graceful and beautiful that they are a most satisfactory decoration.  It

takes but fifteen minutes to get reconciled to the tattooing, and but

fifteen more to perceive that it is just the thing.  After that, the

undecorated European face is unpleasant and ignoble.



Dr. Hockiu gave us a ghastly curiosity--a lignified caterpillar with a

plant growing out of the back of its neck--a plant with a slender stem 4

inches high.  It happened not by accident, but by design--Nature's

design.  This caterpillar was in the act of loyally carrying out a law

inflicted upon him by Nature--a law purposely inflicted upon him to get

him into trouble--a law which was a trap; in pursuance of this law he

made the proper preparations for turning himself into a night-moth; that

is to say, he dug a little trench, a little grave, and then stretched

himself out in it on his stomach and partially buried himself--then

Nature was ready for him.  She blew the spores of a peculiar fungus

through the air with a purpose.  Some of them fell into a crease in the

back of the caterpillar's neck, and began to sprout and grow--for there

was soil there--he had not washed his neck.  The roots forced themselves

down into the worm's person, and rearward along through its body, sucking

up the creature's juices for sap; the worm slowly died, and turned to

wood.  And here he was now, a wooden caterpillar, with every detail of

his former physique delicately and exactly preserved and perpetuated, and

with that stem standing up out of him for his monument--monument

commemorative of his own loyalty and of Nature's unfair return for it.



Nature is always acting like that.  Mrs. X. said (of course) that the

caterpillar was not conscious and didn't suffer.  She should have known

better.  No caterpillar can deceive Nature.  If this one couldn't suffer,

Nature would have known it and would have hunted up another caterpillar.

Not that she would have let this one go, merely because it was defective.

No.  She would have waited and let him turn into a night-moth; and then

fried him in the candle.



Nature cakes a fish's eyes over with parasites, so that it shan't be able

to avoid its enemies or find its food.  She sends parasites into a star-

fish's system, which clog up its prongs and swell them and make them so

uncomfortable that the poor creature delivers itself from the prong to

ease its misery; and presently it has to part with another prong for the

sake of comfort, and finally with a third.  If it re-grows the prongs,

the parasite returns and the same thing is repeated.  And finally, when

the ability to reproduce prongs is lost through age, that poor old star-

fish can't get around any more, and so it dies of starvation.



In Australia is prevalent a horrible disease due to an "unperfected

tapeworm."  Unperfected--that is what they call it, I do not know why,

for it transacts business just as well as if it were finished and

frescoed and gilded, and all that.



November 9.  To the museum and public picture gallery with the president

of the Society of Artists.  Some fine pictures there, lent by the S. of

A. several of them they bought, the others came to them by gift.  Next,

to the gallery of the S. of A.--annual exhibition--just opened.  Fine.

Think of a town like this having two such collections as this, and a

Society of Artists.  It is so all over Australasia.  If it were a

monarchy one might understand it.  I mean an absolute monarchy, where it

isn't necessary to vote money, but take it.  Then art flourishes.  But

these colonies are republics--republics with a wide suffrage; voters of

both sexes, this one of New Zealand.  In republics, neither the

government nor the rich private citizen is much given to propagating art.

All over Australasia pictures by famous European artists are bought for

the public galleries by the State and by societies of citizens.  Living

citizens--not dead ones.  They rob themselves to give, not their heirs.

This S. of A. here owns its buildings built it by subscription.









CHAPTER XXXI.



The spirit of wrath--not the words--is the sin; and the spirit of wrath

is cursing.  We begin to swear before we can talk.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



November 11.  On the road.  This train-express goes twenty and one-half

miles an hour, schedule time; but it is fast enough, the outlook upon sea

and land is so interesting, and the cars so comfortable.  They are not

English, and not American; they are the Swiss combination of the two.  A

narrow and railed porch along the side, where a person can walk up and

down.  A lavatory in each car.  This is progress; this is nineteenth-

century spirit. In New Zealand, these fast expresses run twice a week.

It is well to know this if you want to be a bird and fly through the

country at a 20-mile gait; otherwise you may start on one of the five

wrong days, and then you will get a train that can't overtake its own

shadow.



By contrast, these pleasant cars call to mind the branch-road cars at

Maryborough, Australia, and the passengers' talk about the branch-road

and the hotel.



Somewhere on the road to Maryborough I changed for a while to a smoking-

carriage.  There were two gentlemen there; both riding backward, one at

each end of the compartment.  They were acquaintances of each other.  I

sat down facing the one that sat at the starboard window.  He had a good

face, and a friendly look, and I judged from his dress that he was a

dissenting minister.  He was along toward fifty.  Of his own motion he

struck a match, and shaded it with his hand for me to light my cigar.  I

take the rest from my diary:



In order to start conversation I asked him something about Maryborough.

He said, in a most pleasant--even musical voice, but with quiet and

cultured decision:



"It's a charming town, with a hell of a hotel."



I was astonished.  It seemed so odd to hear a minister swear out loud.

He went placidly on:



"It's the worst hotel in Australia.  Well, one may go further, and say in

Australasia."



"Bad beds?"



"No--none at all.  Just sand-bags."



"The pillows, too?"



"Yes, the pillows, too.  Just sand.  And not a good quality of sand.  It

packs too hard, and has never been screened.  There is too much gravel in

it.  It is like sleeping on nuts."



"Isn't there any good sand?"



"Plenty of it.  There is as good bed-sand in this region as the world can

furnish.  Aerated sand--and loose; but they won't buy it.  They want

something that will pack solid, and petrify."



"How are the rooms?"



"Eight feet square; and a sheet of iced oil-cloth to step on in the

morning when you get out of the sand-quarry."



"As to lights?"



"Coal-oil lamp."



"A good one?"



"No.  It's the kind that sheds a gloom."



"I like a lamp that burns all night."



"This one won't.  You must blow it out early."



"That is bad.  One might want it again in the night.  Can't find it in

the dark."



"There's no trouble; you can find it by the stench."



"Wardrobe?"



"Two nails on the door to hang seven suits of clothes on if you've got

them."



"Bells?"



"There aren't any."



"What do you do when you want service?"



"Shout.  But it won't fetch anybody."



"Suppose you want the chambermaid to empty the slopjar?"



"There isn't any slop-jar.  The hotels don't keep them.  That is, outside

of Sydney and Melbourne."



"Yes, I knew that.  I was only talking.  It's the oddest thing in

Australia.  Another thing: I've got to get up in the dark, in the

morning, to take the 5 o'clock train.  Now if the boots----"



"There isn't any."



"Well, the porter."



"There isn't any."



"But who will call me?"



"Nobody.  You'll call yourself.  And you'll light yourself, too.

There'll not be a light burning in the halls or anywhere.  And if you

don't carry a light, you'll break your neck."



"But who will help me down with my baggage?"



"Nobody.  However, I will tell you what to do.  In Maryborough there's an

American who has lived there half a lifetime; a fine man, and prosperous

and popular.  He will be on the lookout for you; you won't have any

trouble.  Sleep in peace; he will rout you out, and you will make your

train.  Where is your manager?"



"I left him at Ballarat, studying the language.  And besides, he had to

go to Melbourne and get us ready for New Zealand.  I've not tried to

pilot myself before, and it doesn't look easy."



"Easy!  You've selected the very most difficult piece of railroad in

Australia for your experiment.  There are twelve miles of this road which

no man without good executive ability can ever hope--tell me, have you

good executive ability?  first-rate executive ability?"



"I--well, I think so, but----"



"That settles it.  The tone of----oh, you wouldn't ever make it in the

world.  However, that American will point you right, and you'll go.

You've got tickets?"



"Yes--round trip; all the way to Sydney."



"Ah, there it is, you see!  You are going in the 5 o'clock by

Castlemaine--twelve miles--instead of the 7.15 by Ballarat--in order to

save two hours of fooling along the road.  Now then, don't interrupt--let

me have the floor.  You're going to save the government a deal of

hauling, but that's nothing; your ticket is by Ballarat, and it isn't

good over that twelve miles, and so----"



"But why should the government care which way I go?"



"Goodness knows!  Ask of the winds that far away with fragments strewed

the sea, as the boy that stood on the burning deck used to say.  The

government chooses to do its railway business in its own way, and it

doesn't know as much about it as the French.  In the beginning they tried

idiots; then they imported the French--which was going backwards, you

see; now it runs the roads itself--which is going backwards again, you

see.  Why, do you know, in order to curry favor with the voters, the

government puts down a road wherever anybody wants it--anybody that owns

two sheep and a dog; and by consequence we've got, in the colony of

Victoria, 800 railway stations, and the business done at eighty of them

doesn't foot up twenty shillings a week."



"Five dollars?  Oh, come!"



"It's true.  It's the absolute truth."



"Why, there are three or four men on wages at every station."



"I know it.  And the station-business doesn't pay for the sheep-dip to

sanctify their coffee with.  It's just as I say.  And accommodating?

Why, if you shake a rag the train will stop in the midst of the

wilderness to pick you up.  All that kind of politics costs, you see.

And then, besides, any town that has a good many votes and wants a fine

station, gets it.  Don't you overlook that Maryborough station, if you

take an interest in governmental curiosities.  Why, you can put the whole

population of Maryborough into it, and give them a sofa apiece, and have

room for more.  You haven't fifteen stations in America that are as big,

and you probably haven't five that are half as fine.  Why, it's per-

fectly elegant.  And the clock!  Everybody will show yon the clock.

There isn't a station in Europe that's got such a clock.  It doesn't

strike--and that's one mercy.  It hasn't any bell; and as you'll have

cause to remember, if you keep your reason, all Australia is simply

bedamned with bells.  On every quarter-hour, night and day, they jingle a

tiresome chime of half a dozen notes--all the clocks in town at once, all

the clocks in Australasia at once, and all the very same notes; first,

downward scale: mi, re, do, sol--then upward scale: sol, si, re, do--down

again: mi, re, do, sol--up again: sol, si, re, do--then the clock--say at

midnight clang--clang--clang--clang--clang-clang--clang--clang--clang--

clang----and, by that time you're--hello, what's all this excitement

about? a runaway--scared by the train; why, you think this train could

scare anything.  Well, when they build eighty stations at a loss and a

lot of palace-stations and clocks like Maryborough's at another loss, the

government has got to economize somewhere hasn't it?  Very well look at

the rolling stock.  That's where they save the money.  Why, that train

from Maryborough will consist of eighteen freight-cars and two passenger-

kennels; cheap, poor, shabby, slovenly; no drinking water, no sanitary

arrangements, every imaginable inconvenience; and slow?--oh, the gait of

cold molasses; no air-brake, no springs, and they'll jolt your head off

every time they start or stop.  That's where they make their little

economies, you see.  They spend tons of money to house you palatially

while you wait fifteen minutes for a train, then degrade you to six

hours' convict-transportation to get the foolish outlay back.  What a

rational man really needs is discomfort while he's waiting, then his

journey in a nice train would be a grateful change.  But no, that would

be common sense--and out of place in a government.  And then, besides,

they save in that other little detail, you know--repudiate their own

tickets, and collect a poor little illegitimate extra shilling out of you

for that twelve miles, and----"



"Well, in any case----"



"Wait--there's more.  Leave that American out of the account and see what

would happen.  There's nobody on hand to examine your ticket when you

arrive.  But the conductor will come and examine it when the train is

ready to start.  It is too late to buy your extra ticket now; the train

can't wait, and won't.  You must climb out."



"But can't I pay the conductor?"



"No, he is not authorized to receive the money, and he won't.  You must

climb out.  There's no other way.  I tell you, the railway management is

about the only thoroughly European thing here--continentally European I

mean, not English.  It's the continental business in perfection; down

fine.  Oh, yes, even to the peanut-commerce of weighing baggage."



The train slowed up at his place.  As he stepped out he said:



"Yes, you'll like Maryborough.  Plenty of intelligence there.  It's a

charming place--with a hell of a hotel."



Then he was gone.  I turned to the other gentleman:



"Is your friend in the ministry?"



"No--studying for it."









CHAPTER XXXII.



The man with a new idea is a Crank until the idea succeeds.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



It was Junior England all the way to Christchurch--in fact, just a

garden.  And Christchurch is an English town, with an English-park annex,

and a winding English brook just like the Avon--and named the Avon; but

from a man, not from Shakespeare's river.  Its grassy banks are bordered

by the stateliest and most impressive weeping willows to be found in the

world, I suppose.  They continue the line of a great ancestor; they were

grown from sprouts of the willow that sheltered Napoleon's grave in St.

Helena.  It is a settled old community, with all the serenities, the

graces, the conveniences, and the comforts of the ideal home-life.  If it

had an established Church and social inequality it would be England over

again with hardly a lack.



In the museum we saw many curious and interesting things; among others a

fine native house of the olden time, with all the details true to the

facts, and the showy colors right and in their proper places.  All the

details: the fine mats and rugs and things; the elaborate and wonderful

wood carvings--wonderful, surely, considering who did them wonderful in

design and particularly in execution, for they were done with admirable

sharpness and exactness, and yet with no better tools than flint and jade

and shell could furnish; and the totem-posts were there, ancestor above

ancestor, with tongues protruded and hands clasped comfortably over

bellies containing other people's ancestors--grotesque and ugly devils,

every one, but lovingly carved, and ably; and the stuffed natives were

present, in their proper places, and looking as natural as life; and the

housekeeping utensils were there, too, and close at hand the carved and

finely ornamented war canoe.



And we saw little jade gods, to hang around the neck--not everybody's,

but sacred to the necks of natives of rank.  Also jade weapons, and many

kinds of jade trinkets--all made out of that excessively hard stone

without the help of any tool of iron.  And some of these things had small

round holes bored through them--nobody knows how it was done; a mystery,

a lost art.  I think it was said that if you want such a hole bored in a

piece of jade now, you must send it to London or Amsterdam where the

lapidaries are.



Also we saw a complete skeleton of the giant Moa.  It stood ten feet

high, and must have been a sight to look at when it was a living  bird.

It was a kicker, like the ostrich; in fight it did not use its beak, but

its foot.  It must have been a convincing kind of kick.  If a person had

his back to the bird and did not see who it was that did it, he would

think he had been kicked by a wind-mill.



There must have been a sufficiency of moas in the old forgotten days when

his breed walked the earth.  His bones are found in vast masses, all

crammed together in huge graves.  They are not in caves, but in the

ground.  Nobody knows how they happened to get concentrated there.  Mind,

they are bones, not fossils.  This means that the moa has not been

extinct very long.  Still, this is the only New Zealand creature which

has no mention in that otherwise comprehensive literature, the native

legends.  This is a significant detail, and is good circumstantial

evidence that the moa has been extinct 500 years, since the Maori has

himself--by tradition--been in New Zealand since the end of the fifteenth

century.  He came from an unknown land--the first Maori did--then sailed

back in his canoe and brought his tribe, and they removed the aboriginal

peoples into the sea and into the ground and took the land.  That is the

tradition.  That that first Maori could come, is understandable, for

anybody can come to a place when he isn't trying to; but how that

discoverer found his way back home again without a compass is his secret,

and he died with it in him.  His language indicates that he came from

Polynesia.  He told where he came from, but he couldn't spell well, so

one can't find the place on the map, because people who could spell

better than he could, spelt the resemblance all out of it when they made

the map.  However, it is better to have a map that is spelt right than

one that has information in it.



In New Zealand women have the right to vote for members of the

legislature, but they cannot be members themselves.  The law extending

the suffrage to them event into effect in 1893.  The population of

Christchurch (census of 1891) was 31,454.  The first election under the

law was held in November of that year.  Number of men who voted, 6,313;

number of women who voted, 5,989.  These figures ought to convince us

that women are not as indifferent about politics as some people would

have us believe.  In New Zealand as a whole, the estimated adult female

population was 139,915; of these 109,461 qualified and registered their

names on the rolls 78.23 per cent. of the whole.  Of these, 90,290 went

to the polls and voted--85.18 per cent.  Do men ever turn out better than

that--in America or elsewhere?  Here is a remark to the other sex's

credit, too--I take it from the official report:



"A feature of the election was the orderliness and sobriety of the

people.  Women were in no way molested."



At home, a standing argument against woman suffrage has always been that

women could not go to the polls without being insulted.  The arguments

against woman suffrage have always taken the easy form of prophecy.  The

prophets have been prophesying ever since the woman's rights movement

began in 1848--and in forty-seven years they have never scored a hit.



Men ought to begin to feel a sort of respect for their mothers and wives

and sisters by this time.  The women deserve a change of attitude like

that, for they have wrought well.  In forty-seven years they have swept

an imposingly large number of unfair laws from the statute books of

America.  In that brief time these serfs have set themselves free

essentially.  Men could not have done so much for themselves in that time

without bloodshed--at least they never have; and that is argument that

they didn't know how.  The women have accomplished a peaceful revolution,

and a very beneficent one; and yet that has not convinced the average man

that they are intelligent, and have courage and energy and perseverance

and fortitude.  It takes much to convince the average man of anything;

and perhaps nothing can ever make him realize that he is the average

woman's inferior--yet in several important details the evidences seems to

show that that is what he is.  Man has ruled the human race from the

beginning--but he should remember that up to the middle of the present

century it was a dull world, and ignorant and stupid; but it is not such

a dull world now, and is growing less and less dull all the time.  This

is woman's opportunity--she has had none before.  I wonder where man will

be in another forty-seven years?



In the New Zealand law occurs this: "The word person wherever it occurs

throughout the Act includes woman."



That is promotion, you see.  By that enlargement of the word, the matron

with the garnered wisdom and experience of fifty years becomes at one

jump the political equal of her callow kid of twenty-one.  The white

population of the colony is 626,000, the Maori population is 42,000.  The

whites elect seventy members of the House of Representatives, the Maoris

four.  The Maori women vote for their four members.



November 16.   After four pleasant days in Christchurch, we are to leave

at midnight to-night.  Mr. Kinsey gave me an ornithorhynchus, and I am

taming it.



Sunday, 17th.  Sailed last night in the Flora, from Lyttelton.



So we did.  I remember it yet.  The people who sailed in the Flora that

night may forget some other things if they live a good while, but they

will not live long, enough to forget that.  The Flora is about the

equivalent of a cattle-scow; but when the Union Company find it

inconvenient to keep a contract and lucrative to break it, they smuggle

her into passenger service, and "keep the change."



They give no notice of their projected depredation; you innocently buy

tickets for the advertised passenger boat, and when you get down to

Lyttelton at midnight, you find that they have substituted the scow.

They have plenty of good boats, but no competition--and that is the

trouble.  It is too late now to make other arrangements if you have

engagements ahead.



It is a powerful company, it has a monopoly, and everybody is afraid of

it--including the government's representative, who stands at the end of

the stage-plank to tally the passengers and see that no boat receives a

greater number than the law allows her to carry.  This conveniently-blind

representative saw the scow receive a number which was far in excess of

its privilege, and winked a politic wink and said nothing.  The

passengers bore with meekness the cheat which had been put upon them, and

made no complaint.



It was like being at home in America, where abused passengers act in just

the same way.  A few days before, the Union Company had discharged a

captain for getting a boat into danger, and had advertised this act as

evidence of its vigilance in looking after the safety of the passengers--

for thugging a captain costs the company nothing, but when opportunity

offered to send this dangerously overcrowded tub to sea and save a little

trouble and a tidy penny by it, it forgot to worry about the passenger's

safety.



The first officer told me that the Flora was privileged to carry 125

passengers.  She must have had all of 200 on board.  All the cabins were

full, all the cattle-stalls in the main stable were full, the spaces at

the heads of companionways were full, every inch of floor and table in

the swill-room was packed with sleeping men and remained so until the

place was required for breakfast, all the chairs and benches on the

hurricane deck were occupied, and still there were people who had to walk

about all night!



If the Flora had gone down that night, half of the people on board would

have been wholly without means of escape.



The owners of that boat were not technically guilty of conspiracy to

commit murder, but they were morally guilty of it.



I had a cattle-stall in the main stable--a cavern fitted up with a long

double file of two-storied bunks, the files separated by a calico

partition--twenty men and boys on one side of it, twenty women and girls

on the other.  The place was as dark as the soul of the Union Company,

and smelt like a kennel.  When the vessel got out into the heavy seas and

began to pitch and wallow, the cavern prisoners became immediately

seasick, and then the peculiar results that ensued laid all my previous

experiences of the kind well away in the shade.  And the wails, the

groans, the cries, the shrieks, the strange ejaculations--it was

wonderful.



The women and children and some of the men and boys spent the night in

that place, for they were too ill to leave it; but the rest of us got up,

by and by, and finished the night on the hurricane-deck.



That boat was the foulest I was ever in; and the smell of the breakfast

saloon when we threaded our way among the layers of steaming passengers

stretched upon its floor and its tables was incomparable for efficiency.



A good many of us got ashore at the first way-port to seek another ship.

After a wait of three hours we got good rooms in the Mahinapua, a wee

little bridal-parlor of a boat--only 205 tons burthen; clean and

comfortable; good service; good beds; good table, and no crowding.  The

seas danced her about like a duck, but she was safe and capable.



Next morning early she went through the French Pass--a narrow gateway of

rock, between bold headlands--so narrow, in fact, that it seemed no wider

than a street.  The current tore through there like a mill-race, and the

boat darted through like a telegram.  The passage was made in half a

minute; then we were in a wide place where noble vast eddies swept

grandly round and round in shoal water, and I wondered what they would do

with the little boat.  They did as they pleased with her.  They picked

her up and flung her around like nothing and landed her gently on the

solid, smooth bottom of sand--so gently, indeed, that we barely felt her

touch it, barely felt her quiver when she came to a standstill.  The

water was as clear as glass, the sand on the bottom was vividly distinct,

and the fishes seemed to be swimming about in nothing.  Fishing lines

were brought out, but before we could bait the hooks the boat was off and

away again.









CHAPTER XXXIII.



Let us be grateful to Adam our benefactor.  He cut us out of the

"blessing of idleness," and won for us the "curse of labor."

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



We soon reached the town of Nelson, and spent the most of the day there,

visiting acquaintances and driving with them about the garden--the whole

region is a garden, excepting the scene of the "Maungatapu Murders," of

thirty years ago.  That is a wild place--wild and lonely; an ideal place

for a murder.  It is at the base of a vast, rugged, densely timbered

mountain.  In the deep twilight of that forest solitude four desperate

rascals--Burgess, Sullivan, Levy, and Kelley--ambushed themselves beside

the mountain-trail to murder and rob four travelers--Kempthorne, Mathieu,

Dudley, and De Pontius, the latter a New Yorker. A harmless old laboring

man came wandering along, and as his presence was an embarrassment, they

choked him, hid him, and then resumed their watch for the four.  They had

to wait a while, but eventually everything turned out as they desired.



That dark episode is the one large event in the history of Nelson.  The

fame of it traveled far.  Burgess made a confession.  It is a remarkable

paper.  For brevity, succinctness, and concentration, it is perhaps

without its peer in the literature of murder.  There are no waste words

in it; there is no obtrusion of matter not pertinent to the occasion, nor

any departure from the dispassionate tone proper to a formal business

statement--for that is what it is: a business statement of a murder, by

the chief engineer of it, or superintendent, or foreman, or whatever one

may prefer to call him.



     "We were getting impatient, when we saw four men and a pack-horse

     coming.  I left my cover and had a look at the men, for Levy had

     told me that Mathieu was a small man and wore a large beard, and

     that it was a chestnut horse.  I said, 'Here they come.'  They were

     then a good distance away; I took the caps off my gun, and put fresh

     ones on.  I said, 'You keep where you are, I'll put them up, and you

     give me your gun while you tie them.'  It was arranged as I have

     described.  The men came; they arrived within about fifteen yards

     when I stepped up and said, 'Stand!  bail up!'  That means all of

     them to get together.  I made them fall back on the upper side of

     the road with their faces up the range, and Sullivan brought me his

     gun, and then tied their hands behind them.  The horse was very

     quiet all the time, he did not move.  When they were all tied,

     Sullivan took the horse up the hill, and put him in the bush; he cut

     the rope and let the swags'--[A "swag" is a kit, a pack, small

     baggage.]--fall on the ground, and then came to me.  We then marched

     the men down the incline to the creek; the water at this time barely

     running.  Up this creek we took the men; we went, I daresay, five or

     six hundred yards up it, which took us nearly half-an-hour to

     accomplish.  Then we turned to the right up the range; we went, I

     daresay, one hundred and fifty yards from the creek, and there we

     sat down with the men.  I said to Sullivan, 'Put down your gun and

     search these men,' which he did.  I asked them their several names;

     they told me.  I asked them if they were expected at Nelson.  They

     said, 'No.'  If such their lives would have been spared.  In money

     we took L60 odd.  I said, 'Is this all you have?  You had better

     tell me.' Sullivan said, 'Here is a bag of gold.' I said, 'What's on

     that pack-horse?  Is there any gold ?' when Kempthorne said, 'Yes,

     my gold is in the portmanteau, and I trust you will not take it

     all.' 'Well,' I said, 'we must take you away one at a time, because

     the range is steep just here, and then we will let you go.' They

     said, 'All right,' most cheerfully.  We tied their feet, and took

     Dudley with us; we went about sixty yards with him.  This was

     through a scrub.  It was arranged the night previously that it would

     be best to choke them, in case the report of the arms might be heard

     from the road, and if they were missed they never would be found.

     So we tied a handkerchief over his eyes, when Sullivan took the sash

     off his waist, put it round his neck, and so strangled him.

     Sullivan, after I had killed the old laboring man, found fault with

     the way he was choked.  He said, 'The next we do I'll show you my

     way.'  I said, 'I have never done such a thing before.  I have shot

     a man, but never choked one.'  We returned to the others, when

     Kempthorne said, 'What noise was that?'  I said it was caused by

     breaking through the scrub.  This was taking too much time, so it

     was agreed to shoot them.  With that I said, 'We'll take you no

     further, but separate you, and then loose one of you, and he can

     relieve the others.'  So with that, Sullivan took De Pontius to the

     left of where Kempthorne was sitting.  I took Mathieu to the right.

     I tied a strap round his legs, and shot him with a revolver.  He

     yelled, I ran from him with my gun in my hand, I sighted Kempthorne,

     who had risen to his feet.  I presented the gun, and shot him behind

     the right ear; his life's blood welled from him, and he died

     instantaneously.  Sullivan had shot.  De Pontius in the meantime,

     and then came to me.  I said, 'Look to Mathieu,' indicating the spot

     where he lay.  He shortly returned and said, 'I had to "chiv" that

     fellow, he was not dead,' a cant word, meaning that he had to stab

     him.  Returning to the road we passed where De Pontius lay and was

     dead.  Sullivan said, 'This is the digger, the others were all

     storekeepers; this is the digger, let's cover him up, for should the

     others be found, they'll think he done it and sloped,' meaning he

     had gone.  So with that we threw all the stones on him, and then

     left him.  This bloody work took nearly an hour and a half from the

     time we stopped the men."



Anyone who reads that confession will think that the man who wrote it was

destitute of emotions, destitute of feeling.  That is partly true.  As

regarded others he was plainly without feeling--utterly cold and

pitiless; but as regarded himself the case was different.  While he cared

nothing for the future of the murdered men, he cared a great deal for his

own.  It makes one's flesh creep to read the introduction to his

confession.  The judge on the bench characterized it as "scandalously

blasphemous," and it certainly reads so, but Burgess meant no blasphemy.

He was merely a brute, and whatever he said or wrote was sure to expose

the fact.  His redemption was a very real thing to him, and he was as

jubilantly happy on the gallows as ever was Christian martyr at the

stake.  We dwellers in this world are strangely made, and mysteriously

circumstanced.  We have to suppose that the murdered men are lost, and

that Burgess is saved; but we cannot suppress our natural regrets.



     "Written in my dungeon drear this 7th of August, in the year of

     Grace, 1866.  To God be ascribed all power and glory in subduing the

     rebellious spirit of a most guilty wretch, who has been brought,

     through the instrumentality of a faithful follower of Christ, to see

     his wretched and guilty state, inasmuch as hitherto he has led an

     awful and wretched life, and through the assurance of this faithful

     soldier of Christ, he has been led and also believes that Christ

     will yet receive and cleanse him from all his deep-dyed and bloody

     sins.  I lie under the imputation which says, 'Come now and let us

     reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet,

     they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson,

     they shall be as wool.' On this promise I rely."



We sailed in the afternoon late, spent a few hours at New Plymouth, then

sailed again and reached Auckland the next day, November 20th, and

remained in that fine city several days.  Its situation is commanding,

and the sea-view is superb.  There are charming drives all about, and by

courtesy of friends we had opportunity to enjoy them.  From the grassy

crater-summit of Mount Eden one's eye ranges over a grand sweep and

variety of scenery--forests clothed in luxuriant foliage, rolling green

fields, conflagrations of flowers, receding and dimming stretches of

green plain, broken by lofty and symmetrical old craters--then the blue

bays twinkling and sparkling away into the dreamy distances where the

mountains loom spiritual in their veils of haze.



It is from Auckland that one goes to Rotorua, the region of the renowned

hot lakes and geysers--one of the chief wonders of New Zealand; but I was

not well enough to make the trip.  The government has a sanitorium there,

and everything is comfortable for the tourist and the invalid.  The

government's official physician is almost over-cautious in his estimates

of the efficacy of the baths, when he is talking about rheumatism, gout,

paralysis, and such things; but when he is talking about the

effectiveness of the waters in eradicating the whisky-habit, he seems to

have no reserves.  The baths will cure the drinking-habit no matter how

chronic it is--and cure it so effectually that even the desire to drink

intoxicants will come no more.  There should be a rush from Europe and

America to that place; and when the victims of alcoholism find out what

they can get by going there, the rush will begin.



The Thermal-springs District of New Zealand comprises an area of upwards

of 600,000 acres, or close on 1,000 square miles.  Rotorua is the

favorite place.  It is the center of a rich field of lake and mountain

scenery; from Rotorua as a base the pleasure-seeker makes excursions.

The crowd of sick people is great, and growing.  Rotorua is the Carlsbad

of Australasia.



It is from Auckland that the Kauri gum is shipped.  For a long time now

about 8,000 tons of it have been brought into the town per year.  It is

worth about $300 per ton, unassorted; assorted, the finest grades are

worth about $1,000.  It goes to America, chiefly.  It is in lumps, and is

hard and smooth, and looks like amber--the light-colored like new amber,

and the dark brown like rich old amber.  And it has the pleasant feel of

amber, too.  Some of the light-colored samples were a tolerably fair

counterfeit of uncut South African diamonds, they were so perfectly

smooth and polished and transparent.  It is manufactured into varnish; a

varnish which answers for copal varnish and is cheaper.



The gum is dug up out of the ground; it has been there for ages.  It is

the sap of the Kauri tree.  Dr. Campbell of Auckland told me he sent a

cargo of it to England fifty years ago, but nothing came of the venture.

Nobody knew what to do with it; so it was sold at 15 a ton, to light

fires with.



November 26--3 P.M., sailed.  Vast and beautiful harbor.  Land all about

for hours.  Tangariwa, the mountain that "has the same shape from every

point of view."  That is the common belief in Auckland.  And so it has--

from every point of view except thirteen.  Perfect summer weather.  Large

school of whales in the distance.  Nothing could be daintier than the

puffs of vapor they spout up, when seen against the pink glory of the

sinking sun, or against the dark mass of an island reposing in the deep

blue shadow of a storm cloud .  .  .  .  Great Barrier rock standing up

out of the sea away to the left.  Sometime ago a ship hit it full speed

in a fog--20 miles out of her course--140 lives lost; the captain

committed suicide without waiting a moment.  He knew that, whether he was

to blame or not, the company owning the vessel would discharge him and

make a devotion--to--passengers' safety advertisement out of it, and his

chance to make a livelihood would be permanently gone.









CHAPTER XXXIV.



Let us not be too particular.  It is better to have old second-hand

diamonds than none at all.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



November 27.   To-day we reached Gisborne, and anchored in a big bay;

there was a heavy sea on, so we remained on board.



We were a mile from shore; a little steam-tug put out from the land; she

was an object of thrilling interest; she would climb to the summit of a

billow, reel drunkenly there a moment, dim and gray in the driving storm

of spindrift, then make a plunge like a diver and remain out of sight

until one had given her up, then up she would dart again, on a steep

slant toward the sky, shedding Niagaras of water from her forecastle--and

this she kept up, all the way out to us.  She brought twenty-five

passengers in her stomach--men and women mainly a traveling dramatic

company.  In sight on deck were the crew, in sou'westers, yellow

waterproof canvas suits, and boots to the thigh.  The deck was never

quiet for a moment, and seldom nearer level than a ladder, and noble were

the seas which leapt aboard and went flooding aft.  We rove a long line

to the yard-arm, hung a most primitive basketchair to it and swung it out

into the spacious air of heaven, and there it swayed, pendulum-fashion,

waiting for its chance--then down it shot, skillfully aimed, and was

grabbed by the two men on the forecastle.  A young fellow belonging to

our crew was in the chair, to be a protection to the lady-comers.  At

once a couple of ladies appeared from below, took seats in his lap, we

hoisted them into the sky, waited a moment till the roll of the ship

brought them in overhead, then we lowered suddenly away, and seized the

chair as it struck the deck.  We took the twenty-five aboard, and

delivered twenty-five into the tug--among them several aged ladies, and

one blind one--and all without accident.  It was a fine piece of work.



Ours is a nice ship, roomy, comfortable, well-ordered, and satisfactory.

Now and then we step on a rat in a hotel, but we have had no rats on

shipboard lately; unless, perhaps in the Flora; we had more serious

things to think of there, and did not notice.  I have noticed that it is

only in ships and hotels which still employ the odious Chinese gong, that

you find rats.  The reason would seem to be, that as a rat cannot tell

the time of day by a clock, he won't stay where he cannot find out when

dinner is ready.



November 29.  The doctor tells me of several old drunkards, one

spiritless loafer, and several far-gone moral wrecks who have been

reclaimed by the Salvation Army and have remained staunch people and hard

workers these two years.  Wherever one goes, these testimonials to the

Army's efficiency are forthcoming .  .  .  .  This morning we had one of

those whizzing green Ballarat flies in the room, with his stunning buzz-

saw noise--the swiftest creature in the world except the lightning-flash.

It is a stupendous force that is stored up in that little body.  If we

had it in a ship in the same proportion, we could spin from Liverpool to

New York in the space of an hour--the time it takes to eat luncheon.  The

New Zealand express train is called the Ballarat Fly .  .  .  .  Bad

teeth in the colonies.  A citizen told me they don't have teeth filled,

but pull them out and put in false ones, and that now and then one sees a

young lady with a full set.  She is fortunate.  I wish I had been born

with false teeth and a false liver and false carbuncles.  I should get

along better.



December 2.  Monday.  Left Napier in the Ballarat Fly the one that goes

twice a week.  From Napier to Hastings, twelve miles; time, fifty-five

minutes--not so far short of thirteen miles an hour .  .  .  .  A perfect

summer day; cool breeze, brilliant sky, rich vegetation.  Two or three

times during the afternoon we saw wonderfully dense and beautiful

forests, tumultuously piled skyward on the broken highlands--not the

customary roof-like slant of a hillside, where the trees are all the same

height.  The noblest of these trees were of the Kauri breed, we were told

the timber that is now furnishing the wood-paving for Europe, and is the

best of all wood for that purpose.  Sometimes these towering upheavals of

forestry were festooned and garlanded with vine-cables, and sometimes the

masses of undergrowth were cocooned in another sort of vine of a delicate

cobwebby texture--they call it the "supplejack," I think.  Tree ferns

everywhere--a stem fifteen feet high, with a graceful chalice of fern-

fronds sprouting from its top--a lovely forest ornament.  And there was a

ten-foot reed with a flowing suit of what looked like yellow hair hanging

from its upper end.  I do not know its name, but if there is such a thing

as a scalp-plant, this is it.  A romantic gorge, with a brook flowing in

its bottom, approaching Palmerston North.



Waitukurau.   Twenty minutes for luncheon.  With me sat my wife and

daughter, and my manager, Mr. Carlyle Smythe.  I sat at the head of the

table, and could see the right-hand wall; the others had their backs to

it.  On that wall, at a good distance away, were a couple of framed

pictures.  I could not see them clearly, but from the groupings of the

figures I fancied that they represented the killing of Napoleon III's son

by the Zulus in South Africa.  I broke into the conversation, which was

about poetry and cabbage and art, and said to my wife--



"Do you remember when the news came to Paris----"



"Of the killing of the Prince?"



(Those were the very words I had in my mind.) "Yes, but what Prince?"



"Napoleon.  Lulu."



"What made you think of that?"



"I don't know."



There was no collusion.  She had not seen the pictures, and they had not

been mentioned.  She ought to have thought of some recent news that came

to Paris, for we were but seven months from there and had been living

there a couple of years when we started on this trip; but instead of that

she thought of an incident of our brief sojourn in Paris of sixteen years

before.



Here was a clear case of mental telegraphy; of mind-transference; of my

mind telegraphing a thought into hers.  How do I know?  Because I

telegraphed an error.  For it turned out that the pictures did not

represent the killing of Lulu at all, nor anything connected with Lulu.

She had to get the error from my head--it existed nowhere else.









CHAPTER XXXV.



The Autocrat of Russia possesses more power than any other man in the

earth; but he cannot stop a sneeze.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



WAUGANIUI, December 3.  A pleasant trip, yesterday, per Ballarat Fly.

Four hours.  I do not know the distance, but it must have been well along

toward fifty miles.  The Fly could have spun it out to eight hours and

not discommoded me; for where there is comfort, and no need for hurry,

speed is of no value--at least to me; and nothing that goes on wheels can

be more comfortable, more satisfactory, than the New Zealand trains.

Outside of America there are no cars that are so rationally devised.

When you add the constant presence of charming scenery and the nearly

constant absence of dust--well, if one is not content then, he ought to

get out and walk.  That would change his spirit, perhaps?  I think so.

At the end of an hour you would find him waiting humbly beside the track,

and glad to be taken aboard again.



Much horseback riding, in and around this town; many comely girls in cool

and pretty summer gowns; much Salvation Army; lots of Maoris; the faces

and bodies of some of the old ones very tastefully frescoed.  Maori

Council House over the river-large, strong, carpeted from end to end with

matting, and decorated with elaborate wood carvings, artistically

executed.  The Maoris were very polite.



I was assured by a member of the House of Representatives that the native

race is not decreasing, but actually increasing slightly.  It is another

evidence that they are a superior breed of savages.  I do not call to

mind any savage race that built such good houses, or such strong and

ingenious and scientific fortresses, or gave so much attention to

agriculture, or had military arts and devices which so nearly approached

the white man's.  These, taken together with their high abilities in

boat-building, and their tastes and capacities in the ornamental arts

modify their savagery to a semi-civilization--or at least to, a quarter-

civilization.



It is a compliment to them that the British did not exterminate them, as

they did the Australians and the Tasmanians, but were content with

subduing them, and showed no desire to go further.  And it is another

compliment to them that the British did not take the whole of their

choicest lands, but left them a considerable part, and then went further

and protected them from the rapacities of landsharks--a protection which

the New Zealand Government still extends to them.  And it is still

another compliment to the Maoris that the Government allows native

representation--in both the legislature and the cabinet, and gives both

sexes the vote.  And in doing these things the Government also

compliments itself; it has not been the custom of the world for

conquerors to act in this large spirit toward the conquered.



The highest class white men Who lived among the Maoris in the earliest

time had a high opinion of them and a strong affection for them.  Among

the whites of this sort was the author of "Old New Zealand;" and Dr.

Campbell of Auckland was another.  Dr. Campbell was a close friend of

several chiefs, and has many pleasant things to say of their fidelity,

their magnanimity, and their generosity.  Also of their quaint notions

about the white man's queer civilization, and their equally quaint

comments upon it.  One of them thought the missionary had got everything

wrong end first and upside down.  "Why, he wants us to stop worshiping

and supplicating the evil gods, and go to worshiping and supplicating the

Good One!  There is no sense in that. A good god is not going to do us

any harm."



The Maoris had the tabu; and had it on a Polynesian scale of

comprehensiveness and elaboration.  Some of its features could have been

importations from India and Judea.  Neither the Maori nor the Hindoo of

common degree could cook by a fire that a person of higher caste had

used, nor could the high Maori or high Hindoo employ fire that had served

a man of low grade; if a low-grade Maori or Hindoo drank from a vessel

belonging to a high-grade man, the vessel was defiled, and had to be

destroyed.  There were other resemblances between Maori tabu and Hindoo

caste-custom.



Yesterday a lunatic burst into my quarters and warned me that the Jesuits

were going to "cook" (poison) me in my food, or kill me on the stage at

night.  He said a mysterious sign was visible upon my posters and meant

my death.  He said he saved Rev. Mr. Haweis's life by warning him that

there were three men on his platform who would kill him if he took his

eyes off them for a moment during his lecture.  The same men were in my

audience last night, but they saw that he was there.  "Will they be there

again to-night?"  He hesitated; then said no, he thought they would

rather take a rest and chance the poison.  This lunatic has no delicacy.

But he was not uninteresting.  He told me a lot of things.  He said he

had "saved so many lecturers in twenty years, that they put him in the

asylum."  I think he has less refinement than any lunatic I have met.



December 8.  A couple of curious war-monuments here at Wanganui.  One is

in honor of white men "who fell in defence of law and order against

fanaticism and barbarism."  Fanaticism.  We Americans are English in

blood, English in speech, English in religion, English in the essentials

of our governmental system, English in the essentials of our

civilization; and so, let us hope, for the honor of the blend, for the

honor of the blood, for the honor of the race, that that word got there

through lack of heedfulness, and will not be suffered to remain.  If you

carve it at Thermopylae, or where Winkelried died, or upon Bunker Hill

monument, and read it again "who fell in defence of law and order against

fanaticism" you will perceive what the word means, and how mischosen it

is.  Patriotism is Patriotism.  Calling it Fanaticism cannot degrade it;

nothing can degrade it.  Even though it be a political mistake, and a

thousand times a political mistake, that does not affect it; it is

honorable always honorable, always noble--and privileged to hold its head

up and look the nations in the face.  It is right to praise these brave

white men who fell in the Maori war--they deserve it; but the presence of

that word detracts from the dignity of their cause and their deeds, and

makes them appear to have spilt their blood in a conflict with ignoble

men, men not worthy of that costly sacrifice.  But the men were worthy.

It was no shame to fight them.  They fought for their homes, they fought

for their country; they bravely fought and bravely fell; and it would

take nothing from the honor of the brave Englishmen who lie under the

monument, but add to it, to say that they died in defense of English laws

and English homes against men worthy of the sacrifice--the Maori

patriots.



The other monument cannot be rectified.  Except with dynamite.  It is a

mistake all through, and a strangely thoughtless one.  It is a monument

erected by white men to Maoris who fell fighting with the whites and

against their own people, in the Maori war.  "Sacred to the memory of the

brave men who fell on the 14th of May, 1864," etc.  On one side are the

names of about twenty Maoris.  It is not a fancy of mine; the monument

exists.  I saw it.  It is an object-lesson to the rising generation.  It

invites to treachery, disloyalty, unpatriotism.  Its lesson, in frank

terms is, "Desert your flag, slay your people, burn their homes, shame

your nationality--we honor such."



December 9.  Wellington.  Ten hours from Wanganui by the Fly.

December 12.  It is a fine city and nobly situated.  A busy place, and

full of life and movement.  Have spent the three days partly in walking

about, partly in enjoying social privileges, and largely in idling around

the magnificent garden at Hutt, a little distance away, around the shore.

I suppose we shall not see such another one soon.



We are packing to-night for the return-voyage to Australia.  Our stay in

New Zealand has been too brief; still, we are not unthankful for the

glimpse which we have had of it.



The sturdy Maoris made the settlement of the country by the whites rather

difficult.  Not at first--but later.  At first they welcomed the whites,

and were eager to trade with them--particularly for muskets; for their

pastime was internecine war, and they greatly preferred the white man's

weapons to their own.  War was their pastime--I use the word advisedly.

They often met and slaughtered each other just for a lark, and when there

was no quarrel.  The author of "Old New Zealand" mentions a case where a

victorious army could have followed up its advantage and exterminated the

opposing army, but declined to do it; explaining naively that "if we did

that, there couldn't be any more fighting."  In another battle one army

sent word that it was out of ammunition, and would be obliged to stop

unless the opposing army would send some.  It was sent, and the fight

went on.



In the early days things went well enough.  The natives sold land without

clearly understanding the terms of exchange, and the whites bought it

without being much disturbed about the native's confusion of mind.  But

by and by the Maori began to comprehend that he was being wronged; then

there was trouble, for he was not the man to swallow a wrong and go aside

and cry about it.  He had the Tasmanian's spirit and endurance, and a

notable share of military science besides; and so he rose against the

oppressor, did this gallant "fanatic," and started a war that was not

brought to a definite end until more than a generation had sped.









CHAPTER XXXVI.



There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is

cowardice.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Names are not always what they seem.  The common Welsh name Bzjxxllwep is

pronounced Jackson.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Friday, December 13.   Sailed, at 3 p.m., in the 'Mararoa'.  Summer seas

and a good ship-life has nothing better.



Monday.  Three days of paradise.  Warm and sunny and smooth; the sea a

luminous Mediterranean blue .  .  .  .  One lolls in a long chair all day

under deck-awnings, and reads and smokes, in measureless content.  One

does not read prose at such a time, but poetry.  I have been reading the

poems of Mrs. Julia A.  Moore, again, and I find in them the same grace

and melody that attracted me when they were first published, twenty years

ago, and have held me in happy bonds ever since.



"The Sentimental Song Book" has long been out of print, and has been

forgotten by the world in general, but not by me.  I carry it with me

always--it and Goldsmith's deathless story.



Indeed, it has the same deep charm for me that the Vicar of Wakefield

has, and I find in it the same subtle touch--the touch that makes an

intentionally humorous episode pathetic and an intentionally pathetic one

funny.  In her time Mrs. Moore was called "the Sweet Singer of Michigan,"

and was best known by that name.  I have read her book through twice

today, with the purpose of determining which of her pieces has most

merit, and I am persuaded that for wide grasp and sustained power,

"William Upson" may claim first place





WILLIAM UPSON.



Air--"The Major's Only Son."

Come all good people far and near,

Oh, come and see what you can hear,

It's of a young man true and brave,

That is now sleeping in his grave.



Now, William Upson was his name

If it's not that, it's all the same

He did enlist in a cruel strife,

And it caused him to lose his life.



He was Perry Upson's eldest son,

His father loved his noble son,

This son was nineteen years of age

When first in the rebellion he engaged.



His father said that he might go,

But his dear mother she said no,

"Oh! stay at home, dear Billy," she said,

But she could not turn his head.



He went to Nashville, in Tennessee,

There his kind friends he could not see;

He died among strangers, so far away,

They did not know where his body lay.



He was taken sick and lived four weeks,

And Oh! how his parents weep,

But now they must in sorrow mourn,

For Billy has gone to his heavenly home.



Oh! if his mother could have seen her son,

For she loved him, her darling son;

If she could heard his dying prayer,

It would ease her heart till she met him there



How it would relieve his mother's heart

To see her son from this world depart,

And hear his noble words of love,

As he left this world for that above.



Now it will relieve his mother's heart,

For her son is laid in our graveyard;

For now she knows that his grave is near,

She will not shed so many tears.



Although she knows not that it was her son,

For his coffin could not be opened

It might be someone in his place,

For she could not see his noble face.





December, 17.  Reached Sydney.



December, 19.  In the train.  Fellow of 30 with four valises; a slim

creature, with teeth which made his mouth look like a neglected

churchyard.  He had solidified hair--solidified with pomatum; it was all

one shell.  He smoked the most extraordinary cigarettes--made of some

kind of manure, apparently.  These and his hair made him smell like the

very nation.  He had a low-cut vest on, which exposed a deal of frayed

and broken and unclean shirtfront.  Showy studs, of imitation gold--they

had made black disks on the linen.  Oversized sleeve buttons of imitation

gold, the copper base showing through.  Ponderous watch-chain of

imitation gold.  I judge that he couldn't tell the time by it, for he

asked Smythe what time it was, once.  He wore a coat which had been gay

when it was young; 5-o'clock-tea-trousers of a light tint, and

marvelously soiled; yellow mustache with a dashing upward whirl at the

ends; foxy shoes, imitation patent leather.  He was a novelty--an

imitation dude.  He would have been a real one if he could have afforded

it.  But he was satisfied with himself.  You could see it in his

expression, and in all his attitudes and movements.  He was living in a

dude dreamland where all his squalid shams were genuine, and himself a

sincerity.  It disarmed criticism, it mollified spite, to see him so

enjoy his imitation languors, and arts, and airs, and his studied

daintinesses of gesture and misbegotten refinements.  It was plain to me

that be was imagining himself the Prince of Wales, and was doing

everything the way he thought the Prince would do it.  For bringing his

four valises aboard and stowing them in the nettings, he gave his porter

four cents, and lightly apologized for the smallness of the gratuity--

just with the condescendingest little royal air in the world.  He

stretched himself out on the front seat and rested his pomatum-cake on

the middle arm, and stuck his feet out of the window, and began to pose

as the Prince and work his dreams and languors for exhibition; and he

would indolently watch the blue films curling up from his cigarette, and

inhale the stench, and look so grateful; and would flip the ash away with

the daintiest gesture, unintentionally displaying his brass ring in the

most intentional way; why, it was as good as being in Marlborough House

itself to see him do it so like.



There was other scenery in the trip.  That of the Hawksbury river, in the

National Park region, fine--extraordinarily fine, with spacious views of

stream and lake imposingly framed in woody hills; and every now and then

the noblest groupings of mountains, and the most enchanting

rearrangements of the water effects.  Further along, green flats, thinly

covered with gum forests, with here and there the huts and cabins of

small farmers engaged in raising children.  Still further along, arid

stretches, lifeless and melancholy.  Then Newcastle, a rushing town,

capital of the rich coal regions.  Approaching Scone, wide farming and

grazing levels, with pretty frequent glimpses of a troublesome plant--a

particularly devilish little prickly pear, daily damned in the orisons of

the agriculturist; imported by a lady of sentiment, and contributed

gratis to the colony. Blazing hot, all day.



December 20.  Back to Sydney.  Blazing hot again.  From the newspaper,

and from the map, I have made a collection of curious names of

Australasian towns, with the idea of making a poem out of them:



Tumut

Takee

Murriwillumba

Bowral

Ballarat

Mullengudgery

Murrurundi

Wagga-Wagga

Wyalong

Murrumbidgee

Goomeroo

Wolloway

Wangary

Wanilla

Worrow

Koppio

Yankalilla

Yaranyacka

Yackamoorundie

Kaiwaka

Coomooroo

Tauranga

Geelong

Tongariro

Kaikoura

Wakatipu

Oohipara

Waitpinga

Goelwa

Munno Para

Nangkita

Myponga

Kapunda

Kooringa

Penola

Nangwarry

Kongorong

Comaum

Koolywurtie

Killanoola

Naracoorte

Muloowurtie

Binnum

Wallaroo

Wirrega

Mundoora

Hauraki

Rangiriri

Teawamute

Taranaki

Toowoomba

Goondiwindi

Jerrilderie

Whangaroa

Wollongong

Woolloomooloo

Bombola

Coolgardie

Bendigo

Coonamble

Cootamundra

Woolgoolga



Mittagong

Jamberoo

Kondoparinga

Kuitpo

Tungkillo

Oukaparinga

Talunga

Yatala

Parawirra

Moorooroo

Whangarei

Woolundunga

Booleroo

Pernatty

Parramatta

Taroom

Narrandera

Deniliquin

Kawakawa.





It may be best to build the poem now, and make the weather help



                    A SWELTERING DAY IN AUSTRALIA.



          (To be read soft and low, with the lights turned down.)



               The Bombola faints in the hot Bowral tree,

               Where fierce Mullengudgery's smothering fires

               Far from the breezes of Coolgardie

               Burn ghastly and blue as the day expires;



               And Murriwillumba complaineth in song

               For the garlanded bowers of Woolloomooloo,

               And the Ballarat Fly and the lone Wollongong

               They dream of the gardens of Jamberoo;



               The wallabi sighs for the Murrubidgee,

               For the velvety sod of the Munno Parah,

               Where the waters of healing from Muloowurtie

               Flow dim in the gloaming by Yaranyackah;



               The Koppio sorrows for lost Wolloway,

               And sigheth in secret for Murrurundi,

               The Whangeroo wombat lamenteth the day

               That made him an exile from Jerrilderie;



               The Teawamute Tumut from Wirrega's glade,

               The Nangkita swallow, the Wallaroo swan,

               They long for the peace of the Timaru shade

               And thy balmy soft airs, O sweet Mittagong!



               The Kooringa buffalo pants in the sun,

               The Kondoparinga lies gaping for breath,

               The Kongorong Camaum to the shadow has won,

               But the Goomeroo sinks in the slumber of death;



               In the weltering hell of the Moorooroo plain

               The Yatala Wangary withers and dies,

               And the Worrow Wanilla, demented with pain,

               To the Woolgoolga woodlands despairingly flies;



               Sweet Nangwarry's desolate, Coonamble wails,

               And Tungkillo Kuito in sables is drest,

               For the Whangerei winds fall asleep in the sails

               And the Booleroo life-breeze is dead in the west.



               Mypongo, Kapunda, O slumber no more

               Yankalilla, Parawirra, be warned

               There's death in the air!

               Killanoola, wherefore

               Shall the prayer of Penola be scorned?



               Cootamundra, and Takee, and Wakatipu,

               Toowoomba, Kaikoura are lost

               From Onkaparinga to far Oamaru

               All burn in this hell's holocaust!



               Paramatta and Binnum are gone to their rest

               In the vale of Tapanni Taroom,

               Kawakawa, Deniliquin--all that was best

               In the earth are but graves and a tomb!



               Narrandera mourns, Cameron answers not

               When the roll of the scathless we cry

               Tongariro, Goondiwindi, Woolundunga, the spot

               Is mute and forlorn where ye lie.



Those are good words for poetry.  Among the best I have ever seen.

There are 81 in the list.  I did not need them all, but I have knocked

down 66 of them; which is a good bag, it seems to me, for a person not in

the business.  Perhaps a poet laureate could do better, but a poet

laureate gets wages, and that is different.  When I write poetry I do not

get any wages; often I lose money by it.  The best word in that list, and

the most musical and gurgly, is Woolloomoolloo.  It is a place near

Sydney, and is a favorite pleasure-resort.  It has eight O's in it.









CHAPTER XXXVII.



To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law,

concealment of it will do.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



MONDAY,--December 23, 1895.  Sailed from Sydney for Ceylon in the P. & O.

steamer 'Oceana'.  A Lascar crew mans this ship--the first I have seen.

White cotton petticoat and pants; barefoot; red shawl for belt; straw

cap, brimless, on head, with red scarf wound around it; complexion a rich

dark brown; short straight black hair; whiskers fine and silky; lustrous

and intensely black.  Mild, good faces; willing and obedient people;

capable, too; but are said to go into hopeless panics when there is

danger.  They are from Bombay and the coast thereabouts.  Left some of

the trunks in Sydney, to be shipped to South Africa by a vessel

advertised to sail three months hence.  The proverb says: "Separate not

yourself from your baggage."



This 'Oceana' is a stately big ship, luxuriously appointed.  She has

spacious promenade decks.  Large rooms; a surpassingly comfortable ship.

The officers' library is well selected; a ship's library is not usually

that .  .  .  .  For meals, the bugle call, man-of-war fashion; a

pleasant change from the terrible gong .  .  .  .  Three big cats--very

friendly loafers; they wander all over the ship; the white one follows

the chief steward around like a dog.  There is also a basket of kittens.

One of these cats goes ashore, in port, in England, Australia, and India,

to see how his various families are getting along, and is seen no more

till the ship is ready to sail.  No one knows how he finds out the

sailing date, but no doubt he comes down to the dock every day and takes

a look, and when he sees baggage and passengers flocking in, recognizes

that it is time to get aboard.  This is what the sailors believe.  The

Chief Engineer has been in the China and India trade thirty three years,

and has had but three Christmases at home in that time .  .  .  .

Conversational items at dinner, "Mocha!  sold all over the world!  It is

not true.  In fact, very few foreigners except the Emperor of Russia have

ever seen a grain of it, or ever will, while they live."  Another man

said: "There is no sale in Australia for Australian wine.  But it goes to

France and comes back with a French label on it, and then they buy it."

I have heard that the most of the French-labeled claret in New York is

made in California.  And I remember what Professor S. told me once about

Veuve Cliquot--if that was the wine, and I think it was.  He was the

guest of a great wine merchant whose town was quite near that vineyard,

and this merchant asked him if very much V. C. was drunk in America.



"Oh, yes," said S., "a great abundance of it."



"Is it easy to be had?"



"Oh, yes--easy as water.  All first and second-class hotels have it."



"What do you pay for it?"



"It depends on the style of the hotel--from fifteen to twenty-five francs

a bottle."



"Oh, fortunate country!  Why, it's worth 100 francs right here on the

ground."



"No!"



"Yes!"



"Do you mean that we are drinking a bogus Veuve-Cliquot over there?"



"Yes--and there was never a bottle of the genuine in America since

Columbus's time.  That wine all comes from a little bit of a patch of

ground which isn't big enough to raise many bottles; and all of it that

is produced goes every year to one person--the Emperor of Russia.  He

takes the whole crop in advance, be it big or little."



January 4, 1898.   Christmas in Melbourne, New Year's Day in Adelaide,

and saw most of the friends again in both places .  .  .  .  Lying here

at anchor all day--Albany (King George's Sound), Western Australia.  It

is a perfectly landlocked harbor, or roadstead--spacious to look at, but

not deep water.  Desolate-looking rocks and scarred hills.  Plenty of

ships arriving now, rushing to the new gold-fields.  The papers are full

of wonderful tales of the sort always to be heard in connection with new

gold diggings.  A sample: a youth staked out a claim and tried to sell

half for L5; no takers; he stuck to it fourteen days, starving, then

struck it rich and sold out for L10,000.  .  .  About sunset, strong

breeze blowing, got up the anchor.  We were in a small deep puddle, with

a narrow channel leading out of it, minutely buoyed, to the sea.



I stayed on deck to see how we were going to manage it with such a big

ship and such a strong wind.  On the bridge our giant captain, in

uniform; at his side a little pilot in elaborately gold-laced uniform; on

the forecastle a white mate and quartermaster or two, and a brilliant

crowd of lascars standing by for business.  Our stern was pointing

straight at the head of the channel; so we must turn entirely around in

the puddle--and the wind blowing as described.  It was done, and

beautifully.  It was done by help of a jib.  We stirred up much mud, but

did not touch the bottom.  We turned right around in our tracks--a

seeming impossibility.  We had several casts of quarter-less 5, and one

cast of half 4--27 feet; we were drawing 26 astern.  By the time we were

entirely around and pointed, the first buoy was not more than a hundred

yards in front of us.  It was a fine piece of work, and I was the only

passenger that saw it.  However, the others got their dinner; the P. & O.

Company got mine .  .  .  .  More cats developed.  Smythe says it is a

British law that they must be carried; and he instanced a case of a ship

not allowed to sail till she sent for a couple.  The bill came, too:

"Debtor, to 2 cats, 20 shillings." .  .  .  News comes that within this

week Siam has acknowledged herself to be, in effect, a French province.

It seems plain that all savage and semi-civilized countries are going to

be grabbed .  .  .  .  A vulture on board; bald, red, queer-shaped head,

featherless red places here and there on his body, intense great black

eyes set in featherless rims of inflamed flesh; dissipated look; a

businesslike style, a selfish, conscienceless, murderous aspect--the very

look of a professional assassin, and yet a bird which does no murder.

What was the use of getting him up in that tragic style for so innocent a

trade as his?  For this one isn't the sort that wars upon the living, his

diet is offal--and the more out of date it is the better he likes it.

Nature should give him a suit of rusty black; then he would be all right,

for he would look like an undertaker and would harmonize with his

business; whereas the way he is now he is horribly out of true.



January 5.   At 9 this morning we passed Cape Leeuwin (lioness) and

ceased from our long due-west course along the southern shore of

Australia.  Turning this extreme southwestern corner, we now take a long

straight slant nearly N. W., without a break, for Ceylon.  As we speed

northward it will grow hotter very fast--but it isn't chilly, now. . . .

The vulture is from the public menagerie at Adelaide--a great and

interesting collection.  It was there that we saw the baby tiger solemnly

spreading its mouth and trying to roar like its majestic mother.  It

swaggered, scowling, back and forth on its short legs just as it had seen

her do on her long ones, and now and then snarling viciously, exposing

its teeth, with a threatening lift of its upper lip and bristling

moustache; and when it thought it was impressing the visitors, it would

spread its mouth wide and do that screechy cry which it meant for a roar,

but which did not deceive.  It took itself quite seriously, and was

lovably comical.  And there was a hyena--an ugly creature; as ugly as the

tiger-kitty was pretty.  It repeatedly arched its back and delivered

itself of such a human cry; a startling resemblance; a cry which was just

that of a grown person badly hurt.  In the dark one would assuredly go to

its assistance--and be disappointed .  .  .  .  Many friends of

Australasian Federation on board.  They feel sure that the good day is

not far off, now.  But there seems to be a party that would go further--

have Australasia cut loose from the British Empire and set up

housekeeping on her own hook.  It seems an unwise idea.  They point to

the United States, but it seems to me that the cases lack a good deal of

being alike.  Australasia governs herself wholly--there is no

interference; and her commerce and manufactures are not oppressed in any

way.  If our case had been the same we should not have gone out when we

did.





January 13.   Unspeakably hot.  The equator is arriving again.  We are

within eight degrees of it.  Ceylon present.  Dear me, it is beautiful!

And most sumptuously tropical, as to character of foliage and opulence of

it.  "What though the spicy breezes blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle"--an

eloquent line, an incomparable line; it says little, but conveys whole

libraries of sentiment, and Oriental charm and mystery, and tropic

deliciousness--a line that quivers and tingles with a thousand

unexpressed and inexpressible things, things that haunt one and find no

articulate voice .  .  .  .  Colombo, the capital.  An Oriental town,

most manifestly; and fascinating.



In this palatial ship the passengers dress for dinner.  The ladies'

toilettes make a fine display of color, and this is in keeping with the

elegance of the vessel's furnishings and the flooding brilliancies of the

electric light.  On the stormy Atlantic one never sees a man in evening

dress, except at the rarest intervals; and then there is only one, not

two; and he shows up but once on the voyage--the night before the ship

makes port--the night when they have the "concert" and do the amateur

wailings and recitations.  He is the tenor, as a rule .  .  .  .  There

has been a deal of cricket-playing on board; it seems a queer game for a

ship, but they enclose the promenade deck with nettings and keep the ball

from flying overboard, and the sport goes very well, and is properly

violent and exciting .  .  .  .  We must part from this vessel here.



January 14.   Hotel Bristol.  Servant Brompy.  Alert, gentle, smiling,

winning young brown creature as ever was.  Beautiful shining black hair

combed back like a woman's, and knotted at the back of his head--

tortoise-shell comb in it, sign that he is a Singhalese; slender, shapely

form; jacket; under it is a beltless and flowing white cotton gown--from

neck straight to heel; he and his outfit quite unmasculine.  It was an

embarassment to undress before him.



We drove to the market, using the Japanese jinriksha--our first

acquaintanceship with it.  It is a light cart, with a native to draw it.

He makes good speed for half-an-hour, but it is hard work for him; he is

too slight for it.  After the half-hour there is no more pleasure for

you; your attention is all on the man, just as it would be on a tired

horse, and necessarily your sympathy is there too.  There's a plenty of

these 'rickshas, and the tariff is incredibly cheap.



I was in Cairo years ago.  That was Oriental, but there was a lack.  When

you are in Florida or New Orleans you are in the South--that is granted;

but you are not in the South; you are in a modified South, a tempered

South.  Cairo was a tempered Orient--an Orient with an indefinite

something wanting.  That feeling was not present in Ceylon.  Ceylon was

Oriental in the last measure of completeness--utterly Oriental; also

utterly tropical; and indeed to one's unreasoning spiritual sense the two

things belong together.  All the requisites were present.  The costumes

were right; the black and brown exposures, unconscious of immodesty, were

right; the juggler was there, with his basket, his snakes, his mongoose,

and his arrangements for growing a tree from seed to foliage and ripe

fruitage before one's eves; in sight were plants and flowers familiar to

one on books but in no other way celebrated, desirable, strange, but in

production restricted to the hot belt of the equator; and out a little

way in the country were the proper deadly snakes, and fierce beasts of

prey, and the wild elephant and the monkey.  And there was that swoon in

the air which one associates with the tropics, and that smother of heat,

heavy with odors of unknown flowers, and that sudden invasion of purple

gloom fissured with lightnings,--then the tumult of crashing thunder and

the downpour and presently all sunny and smiling again; all these things

were there; the conditions were complete, nothing was lacking.  And away

off in the deeps of the jungle and in the remotenesses of the mountains

were the ruined cities and mouldering temples, mysterious relics of the

pomps of a forgotten time and a vanished race--and this was as it should

be, also, for nothing is quite satisfyingly Oriental that lacks the

somber and impressive qualities of mystery and antiquity.



The drive through the town and out to the Galle Face by the seashore,

what a dream it was of tropical splendors of bloom and blossom, and

Oriental conflagrations of costume!  The walking groups of men, women,

boys, girls, babies--each individual was a flame, each group a house

afire for color.  And such stunning colors, such intensely vivid colors,

such rich and exquisite minglings and fusings of rainbows and lightnings!

And all harmonious, all in perfect taste; never a discordant note; never

a color on any person swearing at another color on him or failing to

harmonize faultlessly with the colors of any group the wearer might join.

The stuffs were silk-thin, soft, delicate, clinging; and, as a rule, each

piece a solid color: a splendid green, a splendid blue, a splendid

yellow, a splendid purple, a splendid ruby, deep, and rich with

smouldering fires they swept continuously by in crowds and legions and

multitudes, glowing, flashing, burning, radiant; and every five seconds

came a burst of blinding red that made a body catch his breath, and

filled his heart with joy.  And then, the unimaginable grace of those

costumes!  Sometimes a woman's whole dress was but a scarf wound about

her person and her head, sometimes a man's was but a turban and a

careless rag or two--in both cases generous areas of polished dark skin

showing--but always the arrangement compelled the homage of the eye and

made the heart sing for gladness.



I can see it to this day, that radiant panorama, that wilderness of rich

color, that incomparable dissolving-view of harmonious tints, and lithe

half-covered forms, and beautiful brown faces, and gracious and graceful

gestures and attitudes and movements, free, unstudied, barren of

stiffness and restraint, and--



Just then, into this dream of fairyland and paradise a grating dissonance

was injected.



Out of a missionary school came marching, two and two, sixteen prim and

pious little Christian black girls, Europeanly clothed--dressed, to the

last detail, as they would have been dressed on a summer Sunday in an

English or American village.  Those clothes--oh, they were unspeakably

ugly!  Ugly, barbarous, destitute of taste, destitute of grace, repulsive

as a shroud.  I looked at my womenfolk's clothes--just full-grown

duplicates of the outrages disguising those poor little abused creatures

--and was ashamed to be seen in the street with them.  Then I looked at

my own clothes, and was ashamed to be seen in the street with myself.



However, we must put up with our clothes as they are--they have their

reason for existing.  They are on us to expose us--to advertise what we

wear them to conceal.  They are a sign; a sign of insincerity; a sign of

suppressed vanity; a pretense that we despise gorgeous colors and the

graces of harmony and form; and we put them on to propagate that lie and

back it up.  But we do not deceive our neighbor; and when we step into

Ceylon we realize that we have not even deceived ourselves.  We do love

brilliant colors and graceful costumes; and at home we will turn out in a

storm to see them when the procession goes by--and envy the wearers.  We

go to the theater to look at them and grieve that we can't be clothed

like that.  We go to the King's ball, when we get a chance, and are glad

of a sight of the splendid uniforms and the glittering orders.  When we

are granted permission to attend an imperial drawing-room we shut

ourselves up in private and parade around in the theatrical court-dress

by the hour, and admire ourselves in the glass, and are utterly happy;

and every member of every governor's staff in democratic America does the

same with his grand new uniform--and if he is not watched he will get

himself photographed in it, too.  When I see the Lord Mayor's footman I

am dissatisfied with my lot.  Yes, our clothes are a lie, and have been

nothing short of that these hundred years.  They are insincere, they are

the ugly and appropriate outward exposure of an inward sham and a moral

decay.



The last little brown boy I chanced to notice in the crowds and swarms of

Colombo had nothing on but a twine string around his waist, but in my

memory the frank honesty of his costume still stands out in pleasant

contrast with the odious flummery in which the little Sunday-school

dowdies were masquerading.









CHAPTER XXXVIII.



Prosperity is the best protector of principle.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



EVENING--11th.   Sailed in the Rosetta.  This is a poor old ship, and

ought to be insured and sunk.  As in the 'Oceana', just so here:

everybody dresses for dinner; they make it a sort of pious duty.  These

fine and formal costumes are a rather conspicuous contrast to the poverty

and shabbiness of the surroundings .  .  .  .  If you want a slice of a

lime at four o'clock tea, you must sign an order on the bar.  Limes cost

14 cents a barrel.



January 18th.   We have been running up the Arabian Sea, latterly.

Closing up on Bombay now, and due to arrive this evening.



January 20th.   Bombay!  A bewitching place, a bewildering place, an

enchanting place--the Arabian Nights come again?  It is a vast city;

contains about a million inhabitants.  Natives, they are, with a slight

sprinkling of white people--not enough to have the slightest modifying

effect upon the massed dark complexion of the public.  It is winter here,

yet the weather is the divine weather of June, and the foliage is the

fresh and heavenly foliage of June.  There is a rank of noble great shade

trees across the way from the hotel, and under them sit groups of

picturesque natives of both sexes; and the juggler in his turban is there

with his snakes and his magic; and all day long the cabs and the

multitudinous varieties of costumes flock by.  It does not seem as if one

could ever get tired of watching this moving show, this shining and

shifting spectacle .  .  .  .  In the great bazar the pack and jam of

natives was marvelous, the sea of rich-colored turbans and draperies an

inspiring sight, and the quaint and showy Indian architecture was just

the right setting for it.  Toward sunset another show; this is the drive

around the sea-shore to Malabar Point, where Lord Sandhurst, the Governor

of the Bombay Presidency, lives.  Parsee palaces all along the first part

of the drive; and past them all the world is driving; the private

carriages of wealthy Englishmen and natives of rank are manned by a

driver and three footmen in stunning oriental liveries--two of these

turbaned statues standing up behind, as fine as monuments.  Sometimes

even the public carriages have this superabundant crew, slightly

modified--one to drive, one to sit by and see it done, and one to stand

up behind and yell--yell when there is anybody in the way, and for

practice when there isn't.  It all helps to keep up the liveliness and

augment the general sense of swiftness and energy and confusion and pow-

wow.



In the region of Scandal Point--felicitous name--where there are handy

rocks to sit on and a noble view of the sea on the one hand, and on the

other the passing and reprising whirl and tumult of gay carriages, are

great groups of comfortably-off Parsee women--perfect flower-beds of

brilliant color, a fascinating spectacle.  Tramp, tramp, tramping along

the road, in singles, couples, groups, and gangs, you have the working-

man and the working-woman--but not clothed like ours.  Usually the man is

a nobly-built great athlete, with not a rag on but his loin-handkerchief;

his color a deep dark brown, his skin satin, his rounded muscles knobbing

it as if it had eggs under it.  Usually the woman is a slender and

shapely creature, as erect as a lightning-rod, and she has but one thing

on--a bright-colored piece of stuff which is wound about her head and her

body down nearly half-way to her knees, and which clings like her own

skin.  Her legs and feet are bare, and so are her arms, except for her

fanciful bunches of loose silver rings on her ankles and on her arms.

She has jewelry bunched on the side of her nose also, and showy

clusterrings on her toes.  When she undresses for bed she takes off her

jewelry, I suppose.  If she took off anything more she would catch cold.

As a rule she has a large shiney brass water jar of graceful shape on her

head, and one of her naked arms curves up and the hand holds it there.

She is so straight, so erect, and she steps with such style, and such

easy grace and dignity; and her curved arm and her brazen jar are such a

help to the picture indeed, our working-women cannot begin with her as a

road-decoration.



It is all color, bewitching color, enchanting color--everywhere all

around--all the way around the curving great opaline bay clear to

Government House, where the turbaned big native 'chuprassies' stand

grouped in state at the door in their robes of fiery red, and do most

properly and stunningly finish up the splendid show and make it

theatrically complete.  I wish I were a 'chuprassy'.



This is indeed India!  the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth

and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of

famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers

and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations

and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods,

cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history,

grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays

bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations--the

one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable

interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant,

wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men

desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give

that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.

Even now, after the lapse of a year, the delirium of those days in Bombay

has not left me, and I hope never will.  It was all new, no detail of it

hackneyed.  And India did not wait for morning, it began at the hotel--

straight away.  The lobbies and halls were full of turbaned, and fez'd

and embroidered, cap'd, and barefooted, and cotton-clad dark natives,

some of them rushing about, others at rest squatting, or sitting on the

ground; some of them chattering with energy, others still and dreamy; in

the dining-room every man's own private native servant standing behind

his chair, and dressed for a part in the Arabian Nights.



Our rooms were high up, on the front.  A white man he was a burly German

--went up with us, and brought three natives along to see to arranging

things.  About fourteen others followed in procession, with the hand-

baggage; each carried an article--and only one; a bag, in some cases, in

other cases less.  One strong native carried my overcoat, another a

parasol, another a box of cigars, another a novel, and the last man in

the procession had no load but a fan.  It was all done with earnestness

and sincerity, there was not a smile in the procession from the head of

it to the tail of it.  Each man waited patiently, tranquilly, in no sort

of hurry, till one of us found time to give him a copper, then he bent

his head reverently, touched his forehead with his fingers, and went his

way.  They seemed a soft and gentle race, and there was something both

winning and touching about their demeanor.



There was a vast glazed door which opened upon the balcony.  It needed

closing, or cleaning, or something, and a native got down on his knees

and went to work at it.  He seemed to be doing it well enough, but

perhaps he wasn't, for the burly German put on a look that betrayed

dissatisfaction, then without explaining what was wrong, gave the native

a brisk cuff on the jaw and then told him where the defect was.  It

seemed such a shame to do that before us all.  The native took it with

meekness, saying nothing, and not showing in his face or manner any

resentment.  I had not seen the like of this for fifty years.  It carried

me back to my boyhood, and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this

was the usual way of explaining one's desires to a slave.  I was able to

remember that the method seemed right and natural to me in those days, I

being born to it and unaware that elsewhere there were other methods; but

I was also able to remember that those unresented cuffings made me sorry

for the victim and ashamed for the punisher.  My father was a refined and

kindly gentleman, very grave, rather austere, of rigid probity, a sternly

just and upright man, albeit he attended no church and never spoke of

religious matters, and had no part nor lot in the pious joys of his

Presbyterian family, nor ever seemed to suffer from this deprivation.  He

laid his hand upon me in punishment only twice in his life, and then not

heavily; once for telling him a lie--which surprised me, and showed me

how unsuspicious he was, for that was not my maiden effort.  He punished

me those two times only, and never any other member of the family at all;

yet every now and then he cuffed our harmless slave boy, Lewis, for

trifling little blunders and awkardnesses.  My father had passed his life

among the slaves from his cradle up, and his cuffings proceeded from the

custom of the time, not from his nature.  When I was ten years old I saw

a man fling a lump of iron-ore at a slaveman in anger, for merely doing

something awkwardly--as if that were a crime.  It bounded from the man's

skull, and the man fell and never spoke again.  He was dead in an hour.

I knew the man had a right to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet it

seemed a pitiful thing and somehow wrong, though why wrong I was not deep

enough to explain if I had been asked to do it.  Nobody in the village

approved of that murder, but of course no one said much about it.



It is curious--the space-annihilating power of thought.  For just one

second, all that goes to make the me in me was in a Missourian village,

on the other side of the globe, vividly seeing again these forgotten

pictures of fifty years ago, and wholly unconscious of all things but

just those; and in the next second I was back in Bombay, and that

kneeling native's smitten cheek was not done tingling yet!  Back to

boyhood--fifty years; back to age again, another fifty; and a flight

equal to the circumference of the globe-all in two seconds by the watch!



Some natives--I don't remember how many--went into my bedroom, now, and

put things to rights and arranged the mosquito-bar, and I went to bed to

nurse my cough.  It was about nine in the evening.  What a state of

things!  For three hours the yelling and shouting of natives in the hall

continued, along with the velvety patter of their swift bare feet--what a

racket it was!  They were yelling orders and messages down three flights.

Why, in the matter of noise it amounted to a riot, an insurrection, a

revolution.  And then there were other noises mixed up with these and at

intervals tremendously accenting them--roofs falling in, I judged,

windows smashing, persons being murdered, crows squawking, and deriding,

and cursing, canaries screeching, monkeys jabbering, macaws blaspheming,

and every now and then fiendish bursts of laughter and explosions of

dynamite.  By midnight I had suffered all the different kinds of shocks

there are, and knew that I could never more be disturbed by them, either

isolated or in combination.  Then came peace--stillness deep and solemn

and lasted till five.



Then it all broke loose again.  And who re-started it?  The Bird of Birds

the Indian crow.  I came to know him well, by and by, and be infatuated

with him.  I suppose he is the hardest lot that wears feathers.  Yes, and

the cheerfulest, and the best satisfied with himself.  He never arrived

at what he is by any careless process, or any sudden one; he is a work of

art, and "art is long"; he is the product of immemorial ages, and of deep

calculation; one can't make a bird like that in a day.  He has been

reincarnated more times than Shiva; and he has kept a sample of each

incarnation, and fused it into his constitution.  In the course of his

evolutionary promotions, his sublime march toward ultimate perfection, he

has been a gambler, a low comedian, a dissolute priest, a fussy woman, a

blackguard, a scoffer, a liar, a thief, a spy, an informer, a trading

politician, a swindler, a professional hypocrite, a patriot for cash, a

reformer, a lecturer, a lawyer, a conspirator, a rebel, a royalist, a

democrat, a practicer and propagator of irreverence, a meddler, an

intruder, a busybody, an infidel, and a wallower in sin for the mere love

of it.  The strange result, the incredible result, of this patient

accumulation of all damnable traits is, that be does not know what care

is, he does not know what sorrow is, he does not know what remorse is,

his life is one long thundering ecstasy of happiness, and he will go to

his death untroubled, knowing that he will soon turn up again as an

author or something, and be even more intolerably capable and comfortable

than ever he was before.



In his straddling wide forward-step, and his springy side-wise series of

hops, and his impudent air, and his cunning way of canting his head to

one side upon occasion, he reminds one of the American blackbird.  But

the sharp resemblances stop there.  He is much bigger than the blackbird;

and he lacks the blackbird's trim and slender and beautiful build and

shapely beak; and of course his sober garb of gray and rusty black is a

poor and humble thing compared with the splendid lustre of the

blackbird's metallic sables and shifting and flashing bronze glories.

The blackbird is a perfect gentleman, in deportment and attire, and is

not noisy, I believe, except when holding religious services and

political conventions in a tree; but this Indian sham Quaker is just a

rowdy, and is always noisy when awake--always chaffing, scolding,

scoffing, laughing, ripping, and cursing, and carrying on about something

or other.  I never saw such a bird for delivering opinions.  Nothing

escapes him; he notices everything that happens, and brings out his

opinion about it, particularly if it is a matter that is none of his

business.  And it is never a mild opinion, but always violent--violent

and profane--the presence of ladies does not affect him.  His opinions

are not the outcome of reflection, for he never thinks about anything,

but heaves out the opinion that is on top in his mind, and which is often

an opinion about some quite different thing and does not fit the case.

But that is his way; his main idea is to get out an opinion, and if he

stopped to think he would lose chances.



I suppose he has no enemies among men.  The whites and Mohammedans never

seemed to molest him; and the Hindoos, because of their religion, never

take the life of any creature, but spare even the snakes and tigers and

fleas and rats.  If I sat on one end of the balcony, the crows would

gather on the railing at the other end and talk about me; and edge

closer, little by little, till I could almost reach them; and they would

sit there, in the most unabashed way, and talk about my clothes, and my

hair, and my complexion, and probable character and vocation and

politics, and how I came to be in India, and what I  had been doing, and

how many days I had got for it, and how I had happened to go unhanged

so long, and when would it probably come off, and might there be more of

my sort where I came from, and when would they be hanged,--and so on, and

so on, until I could not longer endure the embarrassment of it; then I

would shoo them away, and they would circle around in the air a little

while, laughing and deriding and mocking, and presently settle on the

rail and do it all over again.



They were very sociable when there was anything to eat--oppressively so.

With a little encouragement they would come in and light on the table and

help me eat my breakfast; and once when I was in the other room and they

found themselves alone, they carried off everything they could lift; and

they were particular to choose things which they could make no use of

after they got them.  In India their number is beyond estimate, and their

noise is in proportion.  I suppose they cost the country more than the

government does; yet that is not a light matter.  Still, they pay; their

company pays; it would sadden the land to take their cheerful voice out

of it.









CHAPTER XXXIX.



By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity.  Another man's,

I mean.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



You soon find your long-ago dreams of India rising in a sort of vague and

luscious moonlight above the horizon-rim of your opaque consciousness,

and softly lighting up a thousand forgotten details which were parts of a

vision that had once been vivid to you when you were a boy, and steeped

your spirit in tales of the East.  The barbaric gorgeousnesses, for

instance; and the princely titles, the sumptuous titles, the sounding

titles,--how good they taste in the mouth!  The Nizam of Hyderabad; the

Maharajah of Travancore; the Nabob of Jubbelpore; the Begum of Bhopal;

the Nawab of Mysore; the Rance of Gulnare; the Ahkoond of Swat's; the Rao

of Rohilkund; the Gaikwar of Baroda.  Indeed, it is a country that runs

richly to name.  The great god Vishnu has 108--108 special ones--108

peculiarly holy ones--names just for Sunday use only.  I learned the

whole of Vishnu's 108 by heart once, but they wouldn't stay; I don't

remember any of them now but John W.



And the romances connected with, those princely native houses--to this

day they are always turning up, just as in the old, old times.  They were

sweating out a romance in an English court in Bombay a while before we

were there.  In this case a native prince, 16 1/2 years old, who has been

enjoying his titles and dignities and estates unmolested for fourteen

years, is suddenly haled into court on the charge that he is rightfully

no prince at all, but a pauper peasant; that the real prince died when

two and one-half years old; that the death was concealed, and a peasant

child smuggled into the royal cradle, and that this present incumbent was

that smuggled substitute.  This is the very material that so many

oriental tales have been made of.



The case of that great prince, the Gaikwar of Baroda, is a reversal of

the theme.  When that throne fell vacant, no heir could be found for some

time, but at last one was found in the person of a peasant child who was

making mud pies in a village street, and having an innocent good time.

But his pedigree was straight; he was the true prince, and he has reigned

ever since, with none to dispute his right.



Lately there was another hunt for an heir to another princely house, and

one was found who was circumstanced about as the Gaikwar had been.  His

fathers were traced back, in humble life, along a branch of the ancestral

tree to the point where it joined the stem fourteen generations ago, and

his heirship was thereby squarely established.  The tracing was done by

means of the records of one of the great Hindoo shrines, where princes on

pilgrimage record their names and the date of their visit.  This is to

keep the prince's religious account straight, and his spiritual person

safe; but the record has the added value of keeping the pedigree

authentic, too.



When I think of Bombay now, at this distance of time, I seem to have a

kaleidoscope at my eye; and I hear the clash of the glass bits as the

splendid figures change, and fall apart, and flash into new forms, figure

after figure, and with the birth of each new form I feel my skin crinkle

and my nerve-web tingle with a new thrill of wonder and delight.  These

remembered pictures float past me in a sequence of contracts; following

the same order always, and always whirling by and disappearing with the

swiftness of a dream, leaving me with the sense that the actuality was

the experience of an hour, at most, whereas it really covered days, I

think.



The series begins with the hiring of a "bearer"--native man-servant--a

person who should be selected with some care, because as long as he is in

your employ he will be about as near to you as your clothes.



In India your day may be said to begin with the "bearer's" knock on the

bedroom door, accompanied by a formula of, words--a formula which is

intended to mean that the bath is ready.  It doesn't really seem to mean

anything at all.  But that is because you are not used to "bearer"

English.  You will presently understand.



Where he gets his English is his own secret.  There is nothing like it

elsewhere in the earth; or even in paradise, perhaps, but the other place

is probably full of it.  You hire him as soon as you touch Indian soil;

for no matter what your sex is, you cannot do without him.  He is

messenger, valet, chambermaid, table-waiter, lady's maid, courier--he is

everything.  He carries a coarse linen clothes-bag and a quilt; he sleeps

on the stone floor outside your chamber door, and gets his meals you do

not know where nor when; you only know that he is not fed on the

premises, either when you are in a hotel or when you are a guest in a,

private house.  His wages are large--from an Indian point of view--and he

feeds and clothes himself out of them.  We had three of him in two and a

half months.  The first one's rate was thirty rupees a month that is to

say, twenty-seven cents a day; the rate of the others, Rs. 40 (40 rupees)

a month.  A princely sum; for the native switchman on a railway and the

native servant in a private family get only Rs. 7 per month, and the

farm-hand only 4.  The two former feed and clothe themselves and their

families on their $1.90 per month; but I cannot believe that the farmhand

has to feed himself on his $1.08.  I think the farm probably feeds him,

and that the whole of his wages, except a trifle for the priest, go to

the support of his family.  That is, to the feeding of his family; for

they live in a mud hut, hand-made, and, doubtless, rent-free, and they

wear no clothes; at least, nothing more than a rag.  And not much of a

rag at that, in the case of the males.  However, these are handsome times

for the farm-hand; he was not always the child of luxury that he is now.

The Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces, in a recent official

utterance wherein he was rebuking a native deputation for complaining of

hard times, reminded them that they could easily remember when a farm-

hand's wages were only half a rupee (former value) a month--that is to

say, less than a cent a day; nearly $2.90 a year.  If such a wage-earner

had a good deal of a family--and they all have that, for God is very good

to these poor natives in some ways--he would save a profit of fifteen

cents, clean and clear, out of his year's toil; I mean a frugal, thrifty

person would, not one given to display and ostentation.  And if he owed

$13.50 and took good care of his health, he could pay it off in ninety

years.  Then he could hold up his head, and look his creditors in the

face again.



Think of these facts and what they mean.  India does not consist of

cities.  There are no cities in India--to speak of.  Its stupendous

population consists of farm-laborers.  India is one vast farm--one almost

interminable stretch of fields with mud fences between. . .  Think of the

above facts; and consider what an incredible aggregate of poverty they

place before you.



The first Bearer that applied, waited below and sent up his

recommendations.  That was the first morning in Bombay.  We read them

over; carefully, cautiously, thoughtfully.  There was not a fault to find

with them--except one; they were all from Americans.  Is that a slur?

If it is, it is a deserved one.  In my experience, an American's

recommendation of a servant is not usually valuable.  We are too good-

natured a race; we hate to say the unpleasant thing; we shrink from

speaking the unkind truth about a poor fellow whose bread depends upon

our verdict; so we speak of his good points only, thus not scrupling to

tell a lie--a silent lie--for in not mentioning his bad ones we as good

as say he hasn't any.  The only difference that I know of between a

silent lie and a spoken one is, that the silent lie is a less respectable

one than the other.  And it can deceive, whereas the other can't--as a

rule.  We not only tell the silent lie as to a servant's faults, but we

sin in another way: we overpraise his merits; for when it comes to

writing recommendations of servants we are a nation of gushers.  And we

have not the Frenchman's excuse.  In France you must give the departing

servant a good recommendation; and you must conceal his faults; you have

no choice.  If you mention his faults for the protection of the next

candidate for his services, he can sue you for damages; and the court

will award them, too; and, moreover, the judge will give you a sharp

dressing-down from the bench for trying to destroy a poor man's

character, and rob him of his bread.  I do not state this on my own

authority, I got it from a French physician of fame and repute--a man who

was born in Paris, and had practiced there all his life.  And he said

that he spoke not merely from common knowledge, but from exasperating

personal experience.



As I was saying, the Bearer's recommendations were all from American

tourists; and St. Peter would have admitted him to the fields of the

blest on them--I mean if he is as unfamiliar with our people and our ways

as I suppose he is.  According to these recommendations, Manuel X. was

supreme in all the arts connected with his complex trade; and these

manifold arts were mentioned--and praised-in detail.  His English was

spoken of in terms of warm admiration--admiration verging upon rapture.

I took pleased note of that, and hoped that some of it might be true.



We had to have some one right away; so the family went down stairs and

took him a week on trial; then sent him up to me and departed on their

affairs.  I was shut up in my quarters with a bronchial cough, and glad

to have something fresh to look at, something new to play with.  Manuel

filled the bill; Manuel was very welcome.  He was toward fifty years old,

tall, slender, with a slight stoop--an artificial stoop, a deferential

stoop, a stoop rigidified by long habit--with face of European mould;

short hair intensely black; gentle black eyes, timid black eyes, indeed;

complexion very dark, nearly black in fact; face smooth-shaven.  He was

bareheaded and barefooted, and was never otherwise while his week with us

lasted; his clothing was European, cheap, flimsy, and showed much wear.



He stood before me and inclined his head (and body) in the pathetic

Indian way, touching his forehead with the finger--ends of his right

hand, in salute.  I said:



"Manuel, you are evidently Indian, but you seem to have a Spanish name

when you put it all together.  How is that?"



A perplexed look gathered in his face; it was plain that he had not

understood--but he didn't let on.  He spoke back placidly.



"Name, Manuel.  Yes, master."



"I know; but how did you get the name?"



"Oh, yes, I suppose.  Think happen so.  Father same name, not mother."



I saw that I must simplify my language and spread my words apart, if I

would be understood by this English scholar.



"Well--then--how--did--your--father--get--his name?"



"Oh, he,"--brightening a little--"he Christian--Portygee; live in Goa; I

born Goa; mother not Portygee, mother native-high-caste Brahmin--Coolin

Brahmin; highest caste; no other so high caste.  I high-caste Brahmin,

too.  Christian, too, same like father; high-caste Christian Brahmin,

master--Salvation Army."



All this haltingly, and with difficulty.  Then he had an inspiration, and

began to pour out a flood of words that I could make nothing of; so I

said:



"There--don't do that.  I can't understand Hindostani."



"Not Hindostani, master--English.  Always I speaking English sometimes

when I talking every day all the time at you."



"Very well, stick to that; that is intelligible.  It is not up to my

hopes, it is not up to the promise of the recommendations, still it is

English, and I understand it.  Don't elaborate it; I don't like

elaborations when they are crippled by uncertainty of touch."



"Master?"



"Oh, never mind; it was only a random thought; I didn't expect you to

understand it.  How did you get your English; is it an acquirement, or

just a gift of God?"



After some hesitation--piously:



"Yes, he very good.  Christian god very good, Hindoo god very good, too.

Two million Hindoo god, one Christian god--make two million and one.  All

mine; two million and one god.  I got a plenty.  Sometime I pray all time

at those, keep it up, go all time every day; give something at shrine,

all good for me, make me better man; good for me, good for my family, dam

good."



Then he had another inspiration, and went rambling off into fervent

confusions and incoherencies, and I had to stop him again.  I thought we

had talked enough, so I told him to go to the bathroom and clean it up

and remove the slops--this to get rid of him.  He went away, seeming to

understand, and got out some of my clothes and began to brush them.  I

repeated my desire several times, simplifying and re-simplifying it, and

at last he got the idea.  Then he went away and put a coolie at the work,

and explained that he would lose caste if he did it himself; it would be

pollution, by the law of his caste, and it would cost him a deal of fuss

and trouble to purify himself and accomplish his rehabilitation.  He said

that that kind of work was strictly forbidden to persons of caste, and as

strictly restricted to the very bottom layer of Hindoo society--the

despised 'Sudra' (the toiler, the laborer).  He was right; and apparently

the poor Sudra has been content with his strange lot, his insulting

distinction, for ages and ages--clear back to the beginning of things, so

to speak.  Buckle says that his name--laborer--is a term of contempt;

that it is ordained by the Institutes of Menu (900 B.C.) that if a Sudra

sit on a level with his superior he shall be exiled or branded--[Without

going into particulars I will remark that as a rule they wear no clothing

that would conceal the brand.--M. T.].  .  . ; if he speak

contemptuously of his superior or insult him he shall suffer death; if he

listen to the reading of the sacred books he shall have burning oil

poured in his ears; if he memorize passages from them he shall be killed;

if he marry his daughter to a Brahmin the husband shall go to hell for

defiling himself by contact with a woman so infinitely his inferior; and

that it is forbidden to a Sudra to acquire wealth.  "The bulk of the

population of India," says Bucklet--[Population to-day, 300,000,000.]--

"is the Sudras--the workers, the farmers, the creators of wealth."



Manuel was a failure, poor old fellow.  His age was against him.  He was

desperately slow and phenomenally forgetful.  When he went three blocks

on an errand he would be gone two hours, and then forget what it was he

went for.  When he packed a trunk it took him forever, and the trunk's

contents were an unimaginable chaos when he got done.  He couldn't wait

satisfactorily at table--a prime defect, for if you haven't your own

servant in an Indian hotel you are likely to have a slow time of it and

go away hungry.  We couldn't understand his English; he couldn't

understand ours; and when we found that he couldn't understand his own,

it seemed time for us to part.  I had to discharge him; there was no help

for it.  But I did it as kindly as I could, and as gently.  We must part,

said I, but I hoped we should meet again in a better world.  It was not

true, but it was only a little thing to say, and saved his feelings and

cost me nothing.



But now that he was gone, and was off my mind and heart, my spirits began

to rise at once, and I was soon feeling brisk and ready to go out and

have adventures.  Then his newly-hired successor flitted in, touched his

forehead, and began to fly around here, there, and everywhere, on his

velvet feet, and in five minutes he had everything in the room "ship-

shape and Bristol fashion," as the sailors say, and was standing at the

salute, waiting for orders.  Dear me, what a rustler he was after the

slumbrous way of Manuel, poor old slug!  All my heart, all my affection,

all my admiration, went out spontaneously to this frisky little forked

black thing, this compact and compressed incarnation of energy and force

and promptness and celerity and confidence, this smart, smily, engaging,

shiney-eyed little devil, feruled on his upper end by a gleaming fire-

coal of a fez with a red-hot tassel dangling from it.  I said, with deep

satisfaction--



"You'll suit.  What is your name?"



He reeled it mellowly off.



"Let me see if I can make a selection out of it--for business uses, I

mean; we will keep the rest for Sundays.  Give it to me in installments."



He did it.  But there did not seem to be any short ones, except

Mousawhich suggested mouse.  It was out of character; it was too soft,

too quiet, too conservative; it didn't fit his splendid style.  I

considered, and said--



"Mousa is short enough, but I don't quite like it.  It seems colorless--

inharmonious--inadequate; and I am sensitive to such things.  How do you

think Satan would do?"



"Yes, master.  Satan do wair good."



It was his way of saying "very good."



There was a rap at the door.  Satan covered the ground with a single

skip; there was a word or two of Hindostani, then he disappeared.  Three

minutes later he was before me again, militarily erect, and waiting for

me to speak first.



"What is it, Satan?"



"God want to see you."



"Who?"



"God.  I show him up, master?"



"Why, this is so unusual, that--that--well, you see indeed I am so

unprepared--I don't quite know what I do mean.  Dear me, can't you

explain?  Don't you see that this is a most ex----"



"Here his card, master."



Wasn't it curious--and amazing, and tremendous, and all that?  Such a

personage going around calling on such as I, and sending up his card,

like a mortal--sending it up by Satan.  It was a bewildering collision of

the impossibles.  But this was the land of the Arabian Nights, this was

India! and what is it that cannot happen in India?



We had the interview.  Satan was right--the Visitor was indeed a God in

the conviction of his multitudinous followers, and was worshiped by them

in sincerity and humble adoration.  They are troubled by no doubts as to

his divine origin and office.  They believe in him, they pray to him,

they make offerings to him, they beg of him remission of sins; to them

his person, together with everything connected with it, is sacred; from

his barber they buy the parings of his nails and set them in gold, and

wear them as precious amulets.



I tried to seem tranquilly conversational and at rest, but I was not.

Would you have been?  I was in a suppressed frenzy of excitement and

curiosity and glad wonder.  I could not keep my eyes off him.  I was

looking upon a god, an actual god, a recognized and accepted god; and

every detail of his person and his dress had a consuming interest for me.

And the thought went floating through my head, "He is worshiped--think of

it--he is not a recipient of the pale homage called compliment, wherewith

the highest human clay must make shift to be satisfied, but of an

infinitely richer spiritual food: adoration, worship!--men and women lay

their cares and their griefs and their broken hearts at his feet; and he

gives them his peace; and they go away healed."



And just then the Awful Visitor said, in the simplest way--"There is a

feature of the philosophy of Huck Finn which"--and went luminously on

with the construction of a compact and nicely-discriminated literary

verdict.



It is a land of surprises--India!  I had had my ambitions--I had hoped,

and almost expected, to be read by kings and presidents and emperors--but

I had never looked so high as That.  It would be false modesty to pretend

that I was not inordinately pleased.  I was.  I was much more pleased

than I should have been with a compliment from a man.



He remained half an hour, and I found him a most courteous and charming

gentleman.  The godship has been in his family a good while, but I do not

know how long.  He is a Mohammedan deity; by earthly rank he is a prince;

not an Indian but a Persian prince.  He is a direct descendant of the

Prophet's line.  He is comely; also young--for a god; not forty, perhaps

not above thirty-five years old.  He wears his immense honors with

tranquil brace, and with a dignity proper to his awful calling.  He

speaks English with the ease and purity of a person born to it.  I think

I am not overstating this.  He was the only god I had ever seen, and I

was very favorably impressed.  When he rose to say good-bye, the door

swung open and I caught the flash of a red fez, and heard these words,

reverently said--



"Satan see God out?"



"Yes." And these mis-mated Beings passed from view Satan in the lead and

The Other following after.









CHAPTER XL.



Few of us can stand prosperity.  Another man's, I mean.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



The next picture in my mind is Government House, on Malabar Point, with

the wide sea-view from the windows and broad balconies; abode of His

Excellency the Governor of the Bombay Presidency--a residence which is

European in everything but the native guards and servants, and is a home

and a palace of state harmoniously combined.



That was England, the English power, the English civilization, the modern

civilization--with the quiet elegancies and quiet colors and quiet tastes

and quiet dignity that are the outcome of the modern cultivation.  And

following it came a picture of the ancient civilization of India--an hour

in the mansion of a native prince: Kumar Schri Samatsinhji Bahadur of the

Palitana State.



The young lad, his heir, was with the prince; also, the lad's sister, a

wee brown sprite, very pretty, very serious, very winning, delicately

moulded, costumed like the daintiest butterfly, a dear little fairyland

princess, gravely willing to be friendly with the strangers, but in the

beginning preferring to hold her father's hand until she could take stock

of them and determine how far they were to be trusted.  She must have

been eight years old; so in the natural (Indian) order of things she

would be a bride in three or four years from now, and then this free

contact with the sun and the air and the other belongings of out-door

nature and comradeship with visiting male folk would end, and she would

shut herself up in the zenana for life, like her mother, and by inherited

habit of mind would be happy in that seclusion and not look upon it as an

irksome restraint and a weary captivity.



The game which the prince amuses his leisure with--however, never mind

it, I should never be able to describe it intelligibly.  I tried to get

an idea of it while my wife and daughter visited the princess in the

zenana, a lady of charming graces and a fluent speaker of English, but I

did not make it out.  It is a complicated game, and I believe it is said

that nobody can learn to play it well--but an Indian.  And I was not able

to learn how to wind a turban.  It seemed a simple art and easy; but that

was a deception.  It is a piece of thin, delicate stuff a foot wide or

more, and forty or fifty feet long; and the exhibitor of the art takes

one end of it in his hands, and winds it in and out intricately about his

head,  twisting it as he goes, and in a minute or two the thing is

finished, and is neat and symmetrical and fits as snugly as a mould.



We were interested in the wardrobe and the jewels, and in the silverware,

and its grace of shape and beauty and delicacy of ornamentation.  The

silverware is kept locked up, except at meal-times, and none but the

chief butler and the prince have keys to the safe.  I did not clearly

understand why, but it was not for the protection of the silver.  It was

either to protect the prince from the contamination which his caste would

suffer if the vessels were touched by low-caste hands, or it was to

protect his highness from poison.  Possibly it was both.  I believe a

salaried taster has to taste everything before the prince ventures it--an

ancient and judicious custom in the East, and has thinned out the tasters

a good deal, for of course it is the cook that puts the poison in.  If I

were an Indian prince I would not go to the expense of a taster, I would

eat with the cook.



Ceremonials are always interesting; and I noted that the Indian good-

morning is a ceremonial, whereas ours doesn't amount to that.  In

salutation the son reverently touches the father's forehead with a small

silver implement tipped with vermillion paste which leaves a red spot

there, and in return the son receives the father's blessing.  Our good

morning is well enough for the rowdy West, perhaps, but would be too

brusque for the soft and ceremonious East.



After being properly necklaced, according to custom, with great garlands

made of yellow flowers, and provided with betel-nut to chew, this

pleasant visit closed, and we passed thence to a scene of a different

sort: from this glow of color and this sunny life to those grim

receptacles of the Parsee dead, the Towers of Silence.  There is

something stately about that name, and an impressiveness which sinks

deep; the hush of death is in it.  We have the Grave, the Tomb, the

Mausoleum, God's Acre, the Cemetery; and association has made them

eloquent with solemn meaning; but we have no name that is so majestic as

that one, or lingers upon the ear with such deep and haunting pathos.



On lofty ground, in the midst of a paradise of tropical foliage and

flowers, remote from the world and its turmoil and noise, they stood--the

Towers of Silence; and away below was spread the wide groves of cocoa

palms, then the city, mile on mile, then the ocean with its fleets of

creeping ships all steeped in a stillness as deep as the hush that

hallowed this high place of the dead.  The vultures were there.  They

stood close together in a great circle all around the rim of a massive

low tower--waiting; stood as motionless as sculptured ornaments, and

indeed almost deceived one into the belief that that was what they were.

Presently there was a slight stir among the score of persons present, and

all moved reverently out of the path and ceased from talking.  A funeral

procession entered the great gate, marching two and two, and moved

silently by, toward the Tower.  The corpse lay in a shallow shell, and

was under cover of a white cloth, but was otherwise naked.  The bearers

of the body were separated by an interval of thirty feet from the

mourners.  They, and also the mourners, were draped all in pure white,

and each couple of mourners was figuratively bound together by a piece of

white rope or a handkerchief--though they merely held the ends of it in

their hands.  Behind the procession followed a dog, which was led in a

leash.  When the mourners had reached the neighborhood of the Tower--

neither they nor any other human being but the bearers of the dead must

approach within thirty feet of it--they turned and went back to one of

the prayer-houses within the gates, to pray for the spirit of their dead.

The bearers unlocked the Tower's sole door and disappeared from view

within.  In a little while they came out bringing the bier and the white

covering-cloth, and locked the door again.  Then the ring of vultures

rose, flapping their wings, and swooped down into the Tower to devour the

body.  Nothing was left of it but a clean-picked skeleton when they

flocked-out again a few minutes afterward.



The principle which underlies and orders everything connected with a

Parsee funeral is Purity.  By the tenets of the Zoroastrian religion, the

elements, Earth, Fire, and Water, are sacred, and must not be

contaminated by contact with a dead body.  Hence corpses must not be

burned, neither must they be buried.  None may touch the dead or enter

the Towers where they repose except certain men who are officially

appointed for that purpose.  They receive high pay, but theirs is a

dismal life, for they must live apart from their species, because their

commerce with the dead defiles them, and any who should associate with

them would share their defilement.  When they come out of the Tower the

clothes they are wearing are exchanged for others, in a building within

the grounds, and the ones which they have taken off are left behind, for

they are contaminated, and must never be used again or suffered to go

outside the grounds.  These bearers come to every funeral in new

garments.  So far as is known, no human being, other than an official

corpse-bearer--save one--has ever entered a Tower of Silence after its

consecration.  Just a hundred years ago a European rushed in behind the

bearers and fed his brutal curiosity with a glimpse of the forbidden

mysteries of the place.  This shabby savage's name is not given; his

quality is also concealed.  These two details, taken in connection with

the fact that for his extraordinary offense the only punishment he got

from the East India Company's Government was a solemn official

"reprimand"--suggest the suspicion that he was a European of consequence.

The same public document which contained the reprimand gave warning that

future offenders of his sort, if in the Company's service, would be

dismissed; and if merchants, suffer revocation of license and exile to

England.



The Towers are not tall, but are low in proportion to their

circumference, like a gasometer.  If you should fill a gasometer half way

up with solid granite masonry, then drive a wide and deep well down

through the center of this mass of masonry, you would have the idea of a

Tower of Silence.  On the masonry surrounding the well the bodies lie, in

shallow trenches which radiate like wheel-spokes from the well.  The

trenches slant toward the well and carry into it the rainfall.

Underground drains, with charcoal filters in them, carry off this water

from the bottom of the well.



When a skeleton has lain in the Tower exposed to the rain and the flaming

sun a month it is perfectly dry and clean.  Then the same bearers that

brought it there come gloved and take it up with tongs and throw it into

the well.  There it turns to dust.  It is never seen again, never touched

again, in the world.  Other peoples separate their dead, and preserve and

continue social distinctions in the grave--the skeletons of kings and

statesmen and generals in temples and pantheons proper to skeletons of

their degree, and the skeletons of the commonplace and the poor in places

suited to their meaner estate; but the Parsees hold that all men rank

alike in death--all are humble, all poor, all destitute.  In sign of

their poverty they are sent to their grave naked, in sign of their

equality the bones of the rich, the poor, the illustrious and the obscure

are flung into the common well together.  At a Parsee funeral there are

no vehicles; all concerned must walk, both rich and poor, howsoever great

the distance to be traversed may be.  In the wells of the Five Towers of

Silence is mingled the dust of all the Parsee men and women and children

who have died in Bombay and its vicinity during the two centuries which

have elapsed since the Mohammedan conquerors drove the Parsees out of

Persia, and into that region of India.  The earliest of the five towers

was built by the Modi family something more than 200 years ago, and it is

now reserved to the heirs of that house; none but the dead of that blood

are carried thither.



The origin of at least one of the details of a Parsee funeral is not now

known--the presence of the dog.  Before a corpse is borne from the house

of mourning it must be uncovered and exposed to the gaze of a dog; a dog

must also be led in the rear of the funeral.  Mr. Nusserwanjee Byranijee,

Secretary to the Parsee Punchayet, said that these formalities had once

had a meaning and a reason for their institution, but that they were

survivals whose origin none could now account for.  Custom and tradition

continue them in force, antiquity hallows them.  It is thought that in

ancient times in Persia the dog was a sacred animal and could guide souls

to heaven; also that his eye had the power of purifying objects which had

been contaminated by the touch of the dead; and that hence his presence

with the funeral cortege provides an ever-applicable remedy in case of

need.



The Parsees claim that their method of disposing of the dead is an

effective protection of the living; that it disseminates no corruption,

no impurities of any sort, no disease-germs; that no wrap, no garment

which has touched the dead is allowed to touch the living afterward; that

from the Towers of Silence nothing proceeds which can carry harm to the

outside world.  These are just claims, I think.  As a sanitary measure,

their system seems to be about the equivalent of cremation, and as sure.

We are drifting slowly--but hopefully--toward cremation in these days.

It could not be expected that this progress should be swift, but if it be

steady and continuous, even if slow, that will suffice.  When cremation

becomes the rule we shall cease to shudder at it; we should shudder at

burial if we allowed ourselves to think what goes on in the grave.



The dog was an impressive figure to me, representing as he did a mystery

whose key is lost.  He was humble, and apparently depressed; and he let

his head droop pensively, and looked as if he might be trying to call

back to his mind what it was that he had used to symbolize ages ago when

he began his function.  There was another impressive thing close at hand,

but I was not privileged to see it.  That was the sacred fire--a fire

which is supposed to have been burning without interruption for more than

two centuries; and so, living by the same heat that was imparted to it so

long ago.



The Parsees are a remarkable community.  There are only about 60,000 in

Bombay, and only about half as many as that in the rest of India; but

they make up in importance what they lack in numbers.  They are highly

educated, energetic, enterprising, progressive, rich, and the Jew himself

is not more lavish or catholic in his charities and benevolences.  The

Parsees build and endow hospitals, for both men and animals; and they and

their womenkind keep an open purse for all great and good objects.  They

are a political force, and a valued support to the government.  They have

a pure and lofty religion, and they preserve it in its integrity and

order their lives by it.



We took a final sweep of the wonderful view of plain and city and ocean,

and so ended our visit to the garden and the Towers of Silence; and the

last thing I noticed was another symbol--a voluntary symbol this one; it

was a vulture standing on the sawed-off top of a tall and slender and

branchless palm in an open space in the ground; he was perfectly

motionless, and looked like a piece of sculpture on a pillar.  And he had

a mortuary look, too, which was in keeping with the place.









CHAPTER XLI.



There is an old-time toast which is golden for its beauty.

"When you ascend the hill of prosperity may you not meet a friend."

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



The next picture that drifts across the field of my memory is one which

is connected with religious things.  We were taken by friends to see a

Jain temple.  It was small, and had many flags or streamers flying from

poles standing above its roof; and its little battlements supported a

great many small idols or images.  Upstairs, inside, a solitary Jain was

praying or reciting aloud in the middle of the room.  Our presence did

not interrupt him, nor even incommode him or modify his fervor.  Ten or

twelve feet in front of him was the idol, a small figure in a sitting

posture.  It had the pinkish look of a wax doll, but lacked the doll's

roundness of limb and approximation to correctness of form and justness

of proportion.  Mr. Gandhi explained every thing to us.  He was delegate

to the Chicago Fair Congress of Religions.  It was lucidly done, in

masterly English, but in time it faded from me, and now I have nothing

left of that episode but an impression: a dim idea of a religious belief

clothed in subtle intellectual forms, lofty and clean, barren of fleshly

grossnesses; and with this another dim impression which connects that

intellectual system somehow with that crude image, that inadequate idol--

how, I do not know. Properly they do not seem to belong together.

Apparently the idol symbolized a person who had become a saint or a god

through accessions of steadily augmenting holiness acquired through a

series of reincarnations and promotions extending over many ages; and was

now at last a saint and qualified to vicariously receive worship and

transmit it to heaven's chancellery.  Was that it?



And thence we went to Mr. Premchand Roychand's bungalow, in Lovelane,

Byculla, where an Indian prince was to receive a deputation of the Jain

community who desired to congratulate him upon a high honor lately

conferred upon him by his sovereign, Victoria, Empress of India.  She had

made him a knight of the order of the Star of India.  It would seem that

even the grandest Indian prince is glad to add the modest title "Sir" to

his ancient native grandeurs, and is willing to do valuable service to

win it.  He will remit taxes liberally, and will spend money freely upon

the betterment of the condition of his subjects, if there is a knighthood

to be gotten by it.  And he will also do good work and a deal of it to

get a gun added to the salute allowed him by the British Government.

Every year the Empress distributes knighthoods and adds guns for public

services done by native princes.  The salute of a small prince is three

or four guns; princes of greater consequence have salutes that run higher

and higher, gun by gun,--oh, clear away up to eleven; possibly more, but

I did not hear of any above eleven-gun princes.  I was told that when a

four-gun prince gets a gun added, he is pretty troublesome for a while,

till the novelty wears off, for he likes the music, and keeps hunting up

pretexts to get himself saluted.  It may be that supremely grand folk,

like the Nyzam of Hyderabad and the Gaikwar of Baroda, have more than

eleven guns, but I don't know.



When we arrived at the bungalow, the large hall on the ground floor was

already about full, and carriages were still flowing into the grounds.

The company present made a fine show, an exhibition of human fireworks,

so to speak, in the matters of costume and comminglings of brilliant

color.  The variety of form noticeable in the display of turbans was

remarkable.  We were told that the explanation of this was, that this

Jain delegation was drawn from many parts of India, and that each man

wore the turban that was in vogue in his own region.  This diversity of

turbans made a beautiful effect.



I could have wished to start a rival exhibition there, of Christian hats

and clothes.  I would have cleared one side of the room of its Indian

splendors and repacked the space with Christians drawn from America,

England, and the Colonies, dressed in the hats and habits of now, and of

twenty and forty and fifty years ago.  It would have been a hideous

exhibition, a thoroughly devilish spectacle.  Then there would have been

the added disadvantage of the white complexion.  It is not an unbearably

unpleasant complexion when it keeps to itself, but when it comes into

competition with masses of brown and black the fact is betrayed that it

is endurable only because we are used to it.  Nearly all black and brown

skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare.  How rare, one

may learn by walking down a street in Paris, New York, or London on a

week-day particularly an unfashionable street--and keeping count of the

satisfactory complexions encountered in the course of a mile.  Where dark

complexions are massed, they make the whites look bleached-out,

unwholesome, and sometimes frankly ghastly.  I could notice this as a

boy, down South in the slavery days before the war.  The splendid black

satin skin of the South African Zulus of Durban seemed to me to come very

close to perfection.  I can see those Zulus yet--'ricksha athletes

waiting in front of the hotel for custom; handsome and intensely black

creatures, moderately clothed in loose summer stuffs whose snowy

whiteness made the black all the blacker by contrast.  Keeping that group

in my mind, I can compare those complexions with the white ones which are

streaming past this London window now:



     A lady.  Complexion, new parchment.  Another lady.  Complexion, old

     parchment.



     Another.  Pink and white, very fine.



     Man.  Grayish skin, with purple areas.



     Man.  Unwholesome fish-belly skin.



     Girl.  Sallow face, sprinkled with freckles.



     Old woman.  Face whitey-gray.



     Young butcher.  Face a general red flush.



     Jaundiced man--mustard yellow.



     Elderly lady.  Colorless skin, with two conspicuous moles.



     Elderly man--a drinker.  Boiled-cauliflower nose in a flabby face

     veined with purple crinklings.



     Healthy young gentleman.  Fine fresh complexion.



     Sick young man.  His face a ghastly white.



No end of people whose skins are dull and characterless modifications of

the tint which we miscall white.  Some of these faces are pimply; some

exhibit other signs of diseased blood; some show scars of a tint out of a

harmony with the surrounding shades of color.  The white man's complexion

makes no concealments.  It can't.  It seemed to have been designed as a

catch-all for everything that can damage it.  Ladies have to paint it,

and powder it, and cosmetic it, and diet it with arsenic, and enamel it,

and be always enticing it, and persuading it, and pestering it, and

fussing at it, to make it beautiful; and they do not succeed.  But these

efforts show what they think of the natural complexion, as distributed.

As distributed it needs these helps.  The complexion which they try to

counterfeit is one which nature restricts to the few--to the very few.

To ninety-nine persons she gives a bad complexion, to the hundredth a

good one.  The hundredth can keep it--how long?  Ten years, perhaps.



The advantage is with the Zulu, I think.  He starts with a beautiful

complexion, and it will last him through.  And as for the Indian brown--

firm, smooth, blemishless, pleasant and restful to the eye, afraid of no

color, harmonizing with all colors and adding a grace to them all--I

think there is no sort of chance for the average white complexion against

that rich and perfect tint.



To return to the bungalow.  The most gorgeous costume present were worn

by some children.  They seemed to blaze, so bright were the colors, and

so brilliant the jewels strum over the rich materials.  These children

were professional nautch-dancers, and looked like girls, but they were

boys, They got up by ones and twos and fours, and danced and sang to an

accompaniment of weird music.  Their posturings and gesturings were

elaborate and graceful, but their voices were stringently raspy and

unpleasant, and there was a good deal of monotony about the tune.



By and by there was a burst of shouts and cheers outside and the prince

with his train entered in fine dramatic style.  He was a stately man, he

was ideally costumed, and fairly festooned with ropes of gems; some of

the ropes were of pearls, some were of uncut great emeralds--emeralds

renowned in Bombay for their quality and value.  Their size was

marvelous, and enticing to the eye, those rocks.  A boy--a princeling--

was with the prince, and he also was a radiant exhibition.



The ceremonies were not tedious.  The prince strode to his throne with

the port and majesty--and the sternness--of a Julius Caesar coming to

receive and receipt for a back-country kingdom and have it over and get

out, and no fooling.  There was a throne for the young prince, too, and

the two sat there, side by side, with their officers grouped at either

hand and most accurately and creditably reproducing the pictures which

one sees in the books--pictures which people in the prince's line of

business have been furnishing ever since Solomon received the Queen of

Sheba and showed her his things.  The chief of the Jain delegation read

his paper of congratulations, then pushed it into a beautifully engraved

silver cylinder, which was delivered with ceremony into the prince's

hands and at once delivered by him without ceremony into the hands of an

officer.  I will copy the address here.  It is interesting, as showing

what an Indian prince's subject may have opportunity to thank him for in

these days of modern English rule, as contrasted with what his ancestor

would have given them opportunity to thank him for a century and a half

ago--the days of freedom unhampered by English interference.  A century

and a half ago an address of thanks could have been put into small space.

It would have thanked the prince--



     1.  For not slaughtering too many of his people upon mere caprice;



     2.  For not stripping them bare by sudden and arbitrary tax levies,

     and bringing famine upon them;



     3.  For not upon empty pretext destroying the rich and seizing their

     property;



     4.  For not killing, blinding, imprisoning, or banishing the

     relatives of the royal house to protect the throne from possible

     plots;



     5.  For not betraying the subject secretly, for a bribe, into the

     hands of bands of professional Thugs, to be murdered and robbed in

     the prince's back lot.



Those were rather common princely industries in the old times, but they

and some others of a harsh sort ceased long ago under English rule.

Better industries have taken their place, as this Address from the Jain

community will show:



     "Your Highness,--We the undersigned members of the Jain community of

     Bombay have the pleasure to approach your Highness with the

     expression of our heartfelt congratulations on the recent conference

     on your Highness of the Knighthood of the Most Exalted Order of the

     Star of India.  Ten years ago we had the pleasure and privilege of

     welcoming your Highness to this city under circumstances which have

     made a memorable epoch in the history of your State, for had it not

     been for a generous and reasonable spirit that your Highness

     displayed in the negotiations between the Palitana Durbar and the

     Jain community, the conciliatory spirit that animated our people

     could not have borne fruit.  That was the first step in your

     Highness's administration, and it fitly elicited the praise of the

     Jain community, and of the Bombay Government.  A decade of your

     Highness's administration, combined with the abilities, training,

     and acquirements that your Highness brought to bear upon it, has

     justly earned for your Highness the unique and honourable

     distinction--the Knighthood of the Most Exalted Order of the Star of

     India, which we understand your Highness is the first to enjoy among

     Chiefs of your, Highness's rank and standing.  And we assure your

     Highness that for this mark of honour that has been conferred on you

     by Her Most Gracious Majesty, the Queen-Empress, we feel no less

     proud than your Highness.  Establishment of commercial factories,

     schools, hospitals, etc., by your Highness in your State has marked

     your Highness's career during these ten years, and we trust that

     your Highness will be spared to rule over your people with wisdom

     and foresight, and foster the many reforms that your Highness has

     been pleased to introduce in your State.  We again offer your

     Highness our warmest felicitations for the honour that has been

     conferred on you.  We beg to remain your Highness's obedient

     servants."



Factories, schools, hospitals, reforms.  The prince propagates that kind

of things in the modern times, and gets knighthood and guns for it.



After the address the prince responded with snap and brevity; spoke a

moment with half a dozen guests in English, and with an official or two

in a native tongue; then the garlands were distributed as usual, and the

function ended.









CHAPTER XLII.



Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others--his

last breath.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Toward midnight, that night, there was another function.  This was a

Hindoo wedding--no, I think it was a betrothal ceremony.  Always before,

we had driven through streets that were multitudinous and tumultuous with

picturesque native life, but now there was nothing of that.  We seemed to

move through a city of the dead.  There was hardly a suggestion of life

in those still and vacant streets.  Even the crows were silent.  But

everywhere on the ground lay sleeping natives-hundreds and hundreds.

They lay stretched at full length and tightly wrapped in blankets, beads

and all.  Their attitude and their rigidity counterfeited death.  The

plague was not in Bombay then, but it is devastating the city now.  The

shops are deserted, now, half of the people have fled, and of the

remainder the smitten perish by shoals every day.  No doubt the city

looks now in the daytime as it looked then at night.  When we had pierced

deep into the native quarter and were threading its narrow dim lanes, we

had to go carefully, for men were stretched asleep all about and there

was hardly room to drive between them.  And every now and then a swarm of

rats would scamper across past the horses' feet in the vague light--the

forbears of the rats that are carrying the plague from house to house in

Bombay now. The shops were but sheds, little booths open to the street;

and the goods had been removed, and on the counters families were

sleeping, usually with an oil lamp present.  Recurrent dead  watches, it

looked like.



But at last we turned a corner and saw a great glare of light ahead.  It

was the home of the bride, wrapped in a perfect conflagration of

illuminations,--mainly gas-work designs, gotten up specially for the

occasion.  Within was abundance of brilliancy--flames, costumes, colors,

decorations, mirrors--it was another Aladdin show.



The bride was a trim and comely little thing of twelve years, dressed as

we would dress a boy, though more expensively than we should do it, of

course.  She moved about very much at her ease, and stopped and talked

with the guests and allowed her wedding jewelry to be examined.  It was

very fine.  Particularly a rope of great diamonds, a lovely thing to look

at and handle.  It had a great emerald hanging to it.



The bridegroom was not present.  He was having betrothal festivities of

his own at his father's house.  As I understood it, he and the bride were

to entertain company every night and nearly all night for a week or more,

then get married, if alive.  Both of the children were a little elderly,

as brides and grooms go, in India--twelve; they ought to have been

married a year or two sooner; still to a, stranger twelve seems quite

young enough.



A while after midnight a couple of celebrated and high-priced nautch-

girls appeared in the gorgeous place, and danced and sang.  With them

were men who played upon strange instruments which made uncanny noises of

a sort to make one's flesh creep.  One of these instruments was a pipe,

and to its music the girls went through a performance which represented

snake charming.  It seemed a doubtful sort of music to charm anything

with, but a native gentleman assured me that snakes like it and will come

out of their holes and listen to it with every evidence of refreshment

And gratitude.  He said that at an entertainment in his grounds once, the

pipe brought out half a dozen snakes, and the music had to be stopped

before they would be persuaded to go.  Nobody wanted their company, for

they were bold, familiar, and dangerous; but no one would kill them, of

course, for it is sinful for a Hindoo to kill any kind of a creature.



We withdrew from the festivities at two in the morning.  Another picture,

then--but it has lodged itself in my memory rather as a stage-scene than

as a reality.  It is of a porch and short flight of steps crowded with

dark faces and ghostly-white draperies flooded with the strong glare from

the dazzling concentration of illuminations; and midway of the steps one

conspicuous figure for accent--a turbaned giant, with a name according to

his size: Rao Bahadur Baskirao Balinkanje Pitale, Vakeel to his Highness

the Gaikwar of Baroda.  Without him the picture would not have been

complete; and if his name had been merely Smith, he wouldn't have

answered.  Close at hand on house-fronts on both sides of the narrow

street were illuminations of a kind commonly employed by the natives--

scores of glass tumblers (containing tapers) fastened a few in inches

apart all over great latticed frames, forming starry constellations which

showed out vividly against their black back grounds.  As we  drew away

into the distance down the dim lanes the illuminations gathered together

into a single mass, and glowed out of the enveloping darkness like a sun.



Then again the deep silence, the skurrying rats, the dim forms stretched

every-where on the ground; and on either hand those open booths

counterfeiting sepulchres, with counterfeit corpses sleeping motionless

in the flicker of the counterfeit death lamps.  And now, a year later,

when I read the cablegrams I seem to be reading of what I myself partly

saw--saw before it happened--in a prophetic dream, as it were.  One

cablegram says, "Business in the native town is about suspended.  Except

the wailing and the tramp of the funerals.  There is but little life or

movement.  The closed shops exceed in number those that remain open."

Another says that 325,000 of the people have fled the city and are

carrying the plague to the country.  Three days later comes the news,

"The population is reduced by half."  The refugees have carried the

disease to Karachi; "220 cases, 214 deaths."  A day or two later, "52

fresh cases, all of which proved fatal."



The plague carries with it a terror which no other disease can excite;

for of all diseases known to men it is the deadliest--by far the

deadliest.  "Fifty-two fresh cases--all fatal."  It is the Black Death

alone that slays like that.  We can all imagine, after a fashion, the

desolation of a plague-stricken city, and the stupor of stillness broken

at intervals by distant bursts of wailing, marking the passing of

funerals, here and there and yonder, but I suppose it is not possible for

us to realize to ourselves the nightmare of dread and fear that possesses

the living who are present in such a place and cannot get away.  That

half million fled from Bombay in a wild panic suggests to us something of

what they were feeling, but perhaps not even they could realize what the

half million were feeling whom they left stranded behind to face the

stalking horror without chance of escape.  Kinglake was in Cairo many

years ago during an epidemic of the Black Death, and he has imagined the

terrors that creep into a man's heart at such a time and follow him until

they themselves breed the fatal sign in the armpit, and then the delirium

with confused images, and home-dreams, and reeling billiard-tables, and

then the sudden blank of death:



     "To the contagionist, filled as he is with the dread of final

     causes, having no faith in destiny, nor in the fixed will of God,

     and with none of the devil-may-care indifference which might stand

     him instead of creeds--to such one, every rag that shivers in the

     breeze of a plague-stricken city has this sort of sublimity.  If by

     any terrible ordinance he be forced to venture forth, be sees death

     dangling from every sleeve; and, as he creeps forward, he poises his

     shuddering limbs between the imminent jacket that is stabbing at his

     right elbow and the murderous pelisse that threatens to mow him

     clean down as it sweeps along on his left.  But most of all he

     dreads that which most of all he should love--the touch of a woman's

     dress; for mothers and wives, hurrying forth on kindly errands from

     the bedsides of the dying, go slouching along through the streets

     more willfully and less courteously than the men.  For a while it

     may be that the caution of the poor Levantine may enable him to

     avoid contact, but sooner or later, perhaps, the dreaded chance

     arrives; that bundle of linen, with the dark tearful eyes at the top

     of it, that labors along with the voluptuous clumsiness of Grisi--

     she has touched the poor Levantine with the hem of her sleeve!  From

     that dread moment his peace is gone; his mind for ever hanging upon

     the fatal touch invites the blow which he fears; he watches for the

     symptoms of plague so carefully, that sooner or later they come in

     truth.  The parched mouth is a sign--his mouth is parched; the

     throbbing brain--his brain does throb; the rapid pulse--he touches

     his own wrist (for he dares not ask counsel of any man lest he be

     deserted), he touches his wrist, and feels how his frighted blood

     goes galloping out of his heart.  There is nothing but the fatal

     swelling that is wanting to make his sad conviction complete;

     immediately, he has an odd feel under the arm--no pain, but a little

     straining of the skin; he would to God it were his fancy that were

     strong enough to give him that sensation; this is the worst of all.

     It now seems to him that he could be happy and contented with his

     parched mouth, and his throbbing brain, and his rapid pulse, if only

     he could know that there were no swelling under the left arm; but

     dares he try?--in a moment of calmness and deliberation he dares

     not; but when for a while he has writhed under the torture of

     suspense, a sudden strength of will drives him to seek and know his

     fate; he touches the gland, and finds the skin sane and sound but

     under the cuticle there lies a small lump like a pistol-bullet, that

     moves as he pushes it.  Oh! but is this for all certainty, is this

     the sentence of death?  Feel the gland of the other arm.  There is

     not the same lump exactly, yet something a little like it.  Have not

     some people glands naturally enlarged?--would to heaven he were one!

     So he does for himself the work of the plague, and when the Angel of

     Death thus courted does indeed and in truth come, he has only to

     finish that which has been so well begun; he passes his fiery hand

     over the brain of the victim, and lets him rave for a season, but

     all chance-wise, of people and things once dear, or of people and

     things indifferent.  Once more the poor fellow is back at his home

     in fair Provence, and sees the sundial that stood in his childhood's

     garden--sees his mother, and the long-since forgotten face of that

     little dear sister--(he sees her, he says, on a Sunday morning, for

     all the church bells are ringing); he looks up and down through the

     universe, and owns it well piled with bales upon bales of cotton,

     and cotton eternal--so much so that he feels--he knows--he swears he

     could make that winning hazard, if the billiard-table would not

     slant upwards, and if the cue were a cue worth playing with; but it

     is not--it's a cue that won't move--his own arm won't move--in

     short, there's the devil to pay in the brain of the poor Levantine;

     and perhaps, the next night but one he becomes the "life and the

     soul" of some squalling jackal family, who fish him out by the foot

     from his shallow and sandy grave."









CHAPTER XLIII.



Hunger is the handmaid of genius

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



One day during our stay in Bombay there was a criminal trial of a most

interesting sort, a terribly realistic chapter out of the "Arabian

Nights," a strange mixture of simplicities and pieties and murderous

practicalities, which brought back the forgotten days of Thuggee and made

them live again; in fact, even made them believable.  It was a case where

a young girl had been assassinated for the sake of her trifling

ornaments, things not worth a laborer's day's wages in America.  This

thing could have been done in many other countries, but hardly with the

cold business-like depravity, absence of fear, absence of caution,

destitution of the sense of horror, repentance, remorse, exhibited in

this case.  Elsewhere the murderer would have done his crime secretly, by

night, and without witnesses; his fears would have allowed him no peace

while the dead body was in his neighborhood; he would not have rested

until he had gotten it safe out of the way and hidden as effectually as

he could hide it.  But this Indian murderer does his deed in the full

light of day, cares nothing for the society of witnesses, is in no way

incommoded by the presence of the corpse, takes his own time about

disposing of it, and the whole party are so indifferent, so phlegmatic,

that they take their regular sleep as if nothing was happening and no

halters hanging over them; and these five bland people close the episode

with a religious service. The thing reads like a Meadows-Taylor Thug-tale

of half a century ago, as may be seen by the official report of the

trial:



     "At the Mazagon Police Court yesterday, Superintendent Nolan again

     charged Tookaram Suntoo Savat Baya, woman, her daughter Krishni, and

     Gopal Yithoo Bhanayker, before Mr. Phiroze Hoshang Dastur, Fourth

     Presidency Magistrate, under sections 302 and 109 of the Code, with

     having on the night of the 30th of December last murdered a Hindoo

     girl named Cassi, aged 12, by strangulation, in the room of a chawl

     at Jakaria Bunder, on the Sewriroad, and also with aiding and

     abetting each other in the commission of the offense.



     "Mr. F. A. Little, Public Prosecutor, conducted the case on behalf

     of the Crown, the accused being undefended.



     "Mr. Little applied under the provisions of the Criminal Procedure

     Code to tender pardon to one of the accused, Krishni, woman, aged

     22, on her undertaking to make a true and full statement of facts

     under which the deceased girl Cassi was murdered.



     "The Magistrate having granted the Public Prosecutor's application,

     the accused Krishni went into the witness-box, and, on being

     examined by Mr. Little, made the following confession:--I am a mill-

     hand employed at the Jubilee Mill.  I recollect the day (Tuesday); on

     which the body of the deceased Cassi was found.  Previous to that I

     attended the mill for half a day, and then returned home at 3 in the

     afternoon, when I saw five persons in the house, viz.: the first

     accused Tookaram, who is my paramour, my mother, the second accused

     Baya, the accused Gopal, and two guests named Ramji Daji and Annaji

     Gungaram.  Tookaram rented the room of the chawl situated at Jakaria

     Bunder-road from its owner, Girdharilal Radhakishan, and in that

     room I, my paramour, Tookaram, and his younger brother, Yesso

     Mahadhoo, live.  Since his arrival in Bombay from his native country

     Yesso came and lived with us.  When I returned from the mill on the

     afternoon of that day, I saw the two guests seated on a cot in the

     veranda, and a few minutes after the accused Gopal came and took his

     seat by their side, while I and my mother were seated inside the

     room.  Tookaram, who had gone out to fetch some 'pan' and betelnuts,

     on his return home had brought the two guests with him.  After

     returning home he gave them 'pan supari'.  While they were eating it

     my mother came out of the room and inquired of one of the guests,

     Ramji, what had happened to his foot, when he replied that he had

     tried many remedies, but they had done him no good.  My mother then

     took some rice in her hand and prophesied that the disease which

     Ramji was suffering from would not be cured until he returned to his

     native country.  In the meantime the deceased Casi came from the

     direction of an out-house, and stood in front on the threshhold of

     our room with a 'lota' in her hand.  Tookaram then told his two

     guests to leave the room, and they then went up the steps towards

     the quarry.  After the guests had gone away, Tookaram seized the

     deceased, who had come into the room, and he afterwards put a

     waistband around her, and tied her to a post which supports a loft.

     After doing this, he pressed the girl's throat, and, having tied her

     mouth with the 'dhotur' (now shown in Court), fastened it to the

     post.  Having killed the girl, Tookaram removed her gold head

     ornament and a gold 'putlee', and also took charge of her 'lota'.

     Besides these two ornaments Cassi had on her person ear-studs a

     nose-ring, some silver toe-rings, two necklaces, a pair of silver

     anklets and bracelets.  Tookaram afterwards tried to remove the

     silver amulets, the ear-studs, and the nose-ring; but he failed in

     his attempt.  While he was doing so, I, my mother, and Gopal were

     present.  After removing the two gold ornaments, he handed them over

     to Gopal, who was at the time standing near me.  When he killed

     Cassi, Tookaram threatened to strangle me also if I informed any one

     of this.  Gopal and myself were then standing at the door of our

     room, and we both were threatened by Tookaram.  My mother, Baya, had

     seized the legs of the deceased at the time she was killed, and

     whilst she was being tied to the post.  Cassi then made a noise.

     Tookaram and my mother took part in killing the girl.  After the

     murder her body was wrapped up in a mattress and kept on the loft

     over the door of our room.  When Cassi was strangled, the door of

     the room was fastened from the inside by Tookaram.  This deed was

     committed shortly after my return home from work in the mill.

     Tookaram put the body of the deceased in the mattress, and, after it

     was left on the loft, he went to have his head shaved by a barber

     named Sambhoo Raghoo, who lives only one door away from me.  My

     mother and myself then remained in the possession of the

     information.  I was slapped and threatened by my paramour, Tookaram,

     and that was the only reason why I did not inform any one at that

     time.  When I told Tookaram that I would give information of the

     occurrence, he slapped me.  The accused Gopal was asked by Tookaram

     to go back to his room, and he did so, taking away with him the two

     gold ornaments and the 'lota'.  Yesso Mahadhoo, a brother-in-law of

     Tookaram, came to the house and asked Taokaram why he was washing,

     the water-pipe being just opposite.  Tookaram replied that he was

     washing his dhotur, as a fowl had polluted it.  About 6 o'clock of

     the evening of that day my mother gave me three pice and asked me to

     buy a cocoanut, and I gave the money to Yessoo, who went and fetched

     a cocoanut and some betel leaves.  When Yessoo and others were in

     the room I was bathing, and, after I finished my bath, my mother

     took the cocoanut and the betel leaves from Yessoo, and we five went

     to the sea.  The party consisted of Tookaram, my mother, Yessoo,

     Tookaram's younger brother, and myself.  On reaching the seashore,

     my mother made the offering to the sea, and prayed to be pardoned

     for what we had done.  Before we went to the sea, some one came to

     inquire after the girl Cassi.  The police and other people came to

     make these inquiries both before and after we left the house for the

     seashore.  The police questioned my mother about the girl, and she

     replied that Cassi had come to her door, but had left.  The next day

     the police questioned Tookaram, and he, too, gave a similar reply.

     This was said the same night when the search was made for the girl.

     After the offering was made to the sea, we partook of the cocoanut

     and returned home, when my mother gave me some food; but Tookaram

     did not partake of any food that night.  After dinner I and my

     mother slept inside the room, and Tookaram slept on a cot near his

     brother-in-law, Yessoo Mahadhoo, just outside the door.  That was

     not the usual place where Tookaram slept.  He usually slept inside

     the room.  The body of the deceased remained on the loft when I went

     to sleep.  The room in which we slept was locked, and I heard that

     my paramour, Tookaram, was restless outside.  About 3 o'clock the

     following morning Tookaram knocked at the door, when both myself and

     my mother opened it.  He then told me to go to the steps leading to

     the quarry, and see if any one was about.  Those steps lead to a

     stable, through which we go to the quarry at the back of the

     compound.  When I got to the steps I saw no one there.  Tookaram

     asked me if any one was there, and I replied that I could see no one

     about.  He then took the body of the deceased from the loft, and

     having wrapped it up in his saree, asked me to accompany him to the

     steps of the quarry, and I did so.  The 'saree' now produced here

     was the same.  Besides the 'saree', there was also a 'cholee' on the

     body.  He then carried the body in his arms, and went up the steps,

     through the stable, and then to the right hand towards a Sahib's

     bungalow, where Tookaram placed the body near a wall.  All the time

     I and my mother were with him.  When the body was taken down, Yessoo

     was lying on the cot.  After depositing the body under the wall, we

     all returned home, and soon after 5 a.m.  the police again came and

     took Tookaram away.  About an hour after they returned and took me

     and my mother away.  We were questioned about it, when I made a

     statement.  Two hours later I was taken to the room, and I pointed

     out this waistband, the 'dhotur', the mattress, and the wooden post

     to Superintendent Nolan and Inspectors Roberts and Rashanali, in the

     presence of my mother and Tookaram.  Tookaram killed the girl Cassi

     for her ornaments, which he wanted for the girl to whom he was

     shortly going to be married.  The body was found in the same place

     where it was deposited by Tookaram."



The criminal side of the native has always been picturesque, always

readable.  The Thuggee and one or two other particularly outrageous

features of it have been suppressed by the English, but there is enough

of it left to keep it darkly interesting.  One finds evidence of these

survivals in the newspapers.  Macaulay has a light-throwing passage upon

this matter in his great historical sketch of Warren Hastings, where he

is describing some effects which followed the temporary paralysis of

Hastings' powerful government brought about by Sir Philip Francis and his

party:



     "The natives considered Hastings as a fallen man; and they acted

     after their kind.  Some of our readers may have seen, in India, a

     cloud of crows pecking a sick vulture to death--no bad type of what

     happens in that country as often as fortune deserts one who has been

     great and dreaded.  In an instant all the sycophants, who had lately

     been ready to lie for him, to forge for him, to pander for him, to

     poison for him, hasten to purchase the favor of his victorious

     enemies by accusing him.  An Indian government has only to let it be

     understood that it wishes a particular man to be ruined, and in

     twenty-four hours it will be furnished with grave charges, supported

     by depositions so full and circumstantial that any person

     unaccustomed to Asiatic mendacity would regard them as decisive.  It

     is well if the signature of the destined victim is not counterfeited

     at the foot of some illegal compact, and if some treasonable paper

     is not slipped into a hiding-place in his house."



That was nearly a century and a quarter ago.  An article in one of the

chief journals of India (the Pioneer) shows that in some respects the

native of to-day is just what his ancestor was then.  Here are niceties

of so subtle and delicate a sort that they lift their breed of rascality

to a place among the fine arts, and almost entitle it to respect:



     "The records of the Indian courts might certainly be relied upon to

     prove that swindlers as a class in the East come very close to, if

     they do not surpass, in brilliancy of execution and originality of

     design the most expert of their fraternity in Europe and America.

     India in especial is the home of forgery.  There are some particular

     districts which are noted as marts for the finest specimens of the

     forger's handiwork.  The business is carried on by firms who possess

     stores of stamped papers to suit every emergency.  They habitually

     lay in a store of fresh stamped papers every year, and some of the

     older and more thriving houses can supply documents for the past

     forty years, bearing the proper water-mark and possessing the

     genuine appearance of age.  Other districts have earned notoriety

     for skilled perjury, a pre-eminence that excites a respectful

     admiration when one thinks of the universal prevalence of the art,

     and persons desirous of succeeding in false suits are ready to pay

     handsomely to avail themselves of the services of these local

     experts as witnesses."



Various instances illustrative of the methods of these swindlers are

given.  They exhibit deep cunning and total depravity on the part of the

swindler and his pals, and more obtuseness on the part of the victim than

one would expect to find in a country where suspicion of your neighbor

must surely be one of the earliest things learned.  The favorite subject

is the young fool who has just come into a fortune and is trying to see

how poor a use he can put it to.  I will quote one example:



     "Sometimes another form of confidence trick is adopted, which is

     invariably successful.  The particular pigeon is spotted, and, his

     acquaintance having been made, he is encouraged in every form of

     vice.  When the friendship is thoroughly established, the swindler

     remarks to the young man that he has a brother who has asked him to

     lend him Rs.10,000.  The swindler says he has the money and would

     lend it; but, as the borrower is his brother, he cannot charge

     interest.  So he proposes that he should hand the dupe the money,

     and the latter should lend it to the swindler's brother, exacting a

     heavy pre-payment of interest which, it is pointed out, they may

     equally enjoy in dissipation.  The dupe sees no objection, and on

     the appointed day receives Rs.7,000 from the swindler, which he

     hands over to the confederate.  The latter is profuse in his thanks,

     and executes a promissory note for Rs.10,000, payable to bearer.

     The swindler allows the scheme to remain quiescent for a time, and

     then suggests that, as the money has not been repaid and as it would

     be unpleasant to sue his brother, it would be better to sell the

     note in the bazaar.  The dupe hands the note over, for the money he

     advanced was not his, and, on being informed that it would be

     necessary to have his signature on the back so as to render the

     security negotiable, he signs without any hesitation.  The swindler

     passes it on to confederates, and the latter employ a respectable

     firm of solicitors to ask the dupe if his signature is genuine.  He

     admits it at once, and his fate is sealed.  A suit is filed by a

     confederate against the dupe, two accomplices being made co-

     defendants.  They admit their Signatures as indorsers, and the one

     swears he bought the note for value from the dupe The latter has no

     defense, for no court would believe the apparently idle explanation

     of the manner in which he came to endorse the note."



There is only one India!  It is the only country that has a monopoly of

grand and imposing specialties.  When another country has a remarkable

thing, it cannot have it all to itself--some other country has a

duplicate.  But India--that is different.  Its marvels are its own; the

patents cannot be infringed; imitations are not possible.  And think of

the size of them, the majesty of them, the weird and outlandish character

of the most of them!



There is the Plague, the Black Death: India invented it; India is the

cradle of that mighty birth.



The Car of Juggernaut was India's invention.



So was the Suttee; and within the time of men still living eight hundred

widows willingly, and, in fact, rejoicingly, burned themselves to death

on the bodies of their dead husbands in a single year.  Eight hundred

would do it this year if the British government would let them.



Famine is India's specialty.  Elsewhere famines are inconsequential

incidents--in India they are devastating cataclysms; in one case they

annihilate hundreds; in the other, millions.



India had 2,000,000 gods, and worships them all.  In religion all other

countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.



With her everything is on a giant scale--even her poverty; no other

country can show anything to compare with it.  And she has been used to

wealth on so vast a scale that she has to shorten to single words the

expressions describing great sums.  She describes 100,000 with one word--

a 'lahk'; she describes ten millions with one word--a 'crore'.



In the bowels of the granite mountains she has patiently carved out

dozens of vast temples, and made them glorious with sculptured colonnades

and stately groups of statuary, and has adorned the eternal walls with

noble paintings.  She has built fortresses of such magnitude that the

show-strongholds of the rest of the world are but modest little things by

comparison; palaces that are wonders for rarity of materials, delicacy

and beauty of workmanship, and for cost; and one tomb which men go around

the globe to see.  It takes eighty nations, speaking eighty languages, to

people her, and they number three hundred millions.



On top of all this she is the mother and home of that wonder of wonders

caste--and of that mystery of mysteries, the satanic brotherhood of the

Thugs.



India had the start of the whole world in the beginning of things.  She

had the first civilization; she had the first accumulation of material

wealth; she was populous with deep thinkers and subtle intellects; she

had mines, and woods, and a fruitful soil.  It would seem as if she

should have kept the lead, and should be to-day not the meek dependent of

an alien master, but mistress of the world, and delivering law and

command to every tribe and nation in it.  But, in truth, there was never

any possibility of such supremacy for her.  If there had been but one

India and one language--but there were eighty of them!  Where there are

eighty nations and several hundred governments, fighting and quarreling

must be the common business of life; unity of purpose and policy are

impossible; out of such elements supremacy in the world cannot come.

Even caste itself could have had the defeating effect of a multiplicity

of tongues, no doubt; for it separates a people into layers, and layers,

and still other layers, that have no community of feeling with each

other; and in such a condition of things as that, patriotism can have no

healthy growth.



It was the division of the country into so many States and nations that

made Thuggee possible and prosperous.  It is difficult to realize the

situation.  But perhaps one may approximate it by imagining the States of

our Union peopled by separate nations, speaking separate languages, with

guards and custom-houses strung along all frontiers, plenty of

interruptions for travelers and traders, interpreters able to handle all

the languages very rare or non-existent, and a few wars always going on

here and there and yonder as a further embarrassment to commerce and

excursioning.  It would make intercommunication in a measure ungeneral.

India had eighty languages, and more custom-houses than cats.  No clever

man with the instinct of a highway robber could fail to notice what a

chance for business was here offered.  India was full of clever men with

the highwayman instinct, and so, quite naturally, the brotherhood of the

Thugs came into being to meet the long-felt want.



How long ago that was nobody knows-centuries, it is supposed.  One of the

chiefest wonders connected with it was the success with which it kept its

secret.  The English trader did business in India two hundred years and

more before he ever heard of it; and yet it was assassinating its

thousands all around him every year, the whole time.









CHAPTER XLIV.



The old saw says, "Let a sleeping dog lie."  Right....  Still, when there

is much at stake it is better to get a newspaper to do it.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



FROM DIARY:



January 28.   I learned of an official Thug-book the other day.  I was

not aware before that there was such a thing.  I am allowed the temporary

use of it.  We are making preparations for travel.  Mainly the

preparations are purchases of bedding.  This is to be used in sleeping

berths in the trains; in private houses sometimes; and in nine-tenths of

the hotels.  It is not realizable; and yet it is true.  It is a survival;

an apparently unnecessary thing which in some strange way has outlived

the conditions which once made it necessary.  It comes down from a time

when the railway and the hotel did not exist; when the occasional white

traveler went horseback or by bullock-cart, and stopped over night in the

small dak-bungalow provided at easy distances by the government--a

shelter, merely, and nothing more.  He had to carry bedding along, or do

without.  The dwellings of the English residents are spacious and

comfortable and commodiously furnished, and surely it must be an odd

sight to see half a dozen guests come filing into such a place and

dumping blankets and pillows here and there and everywhere.  But custom

makes incongruous things congruous.



One buys the bedding, with waterproof hold-all for it at almost any shop

--there is no difficulty about it.



January 30.  What a spectacle the railway station was, at train-time!  It

was a very large station, yet when we arrived it seemed as if the whole

world was present--half of it inside, the other half outside, and both

halves, bearing mountainous head-loads of bedding and other freight,

trying simultaneously to pass each other, in opposing floods, in one

narrow door.  These opposing floods were patient, gentle, long-suffering

natives, with whites scattered among them at rare intervals; and wherever

a white man's native servant appeared, that native seemed to have put

aside his natural gentleness for the time and invested himself with the

white man's privilege of making a way for himself by promptly shoving all

intervening black things out of it.  In these exhibitions of authority

Satan was scandalous.  He was probably a Thug in one of his former

incarnations.



Inside the great station, tides upon tides of rainbow-costumed natives

swept along, this way and that, in massed and bewildering confusion,

eager, anxious, belated, distressed; and washed up to the long trains and

flowed into them with their packs and bundles, and disappeared, followed

at once by the next wash, the next wave.  And here and there, in the

midst of this hurly-burly, and seemingly undisturbed by it, sat great

groups of natives on the bare stone floor,--young, slender brown women,

old, gray wrinkled women, little soft brown babies, old men, young men,

boys; all poor people, but all the females among them, both big and

little, bejeweled with cheap and showy nose-rings, toe-rings, leglets,

and armlets, these things constituting all their wealth, no doubt.  These

silent crowds sat there with their humble bundles and baskets and small

household gear about them, and patiently waited--for what?  A train that

was to start at some time or other during the day or night!  They hadn't

timed themselves well, but that was no matter--the thing had been so

ordered from on high, therefore why worry?  There was plenty of time,

hours and hours of it, and the thing that was to happen would happen--

there was no hurrying it.



The natives traveled third class, and at marvelously cheap rates.  They

were packed and crammed into cars that held each about fifty; and it was

said that often a Brahmin of the highest caste was thus brought into

personal touch, and consequent defilement, with persons of the lowest

castes--no doubt a very shocking thing if a body could understand it and

properly appreciate it.  Yes, a Brahmin who didn't own a rupee and

couldn't borrow one, might have to touch elbows with a rich hereditary

lord of inferior caste, inheritor of an ancient title a couple of yards

long, and he would just have to stand it; for if either of the two was

allowed to go in the cars where the sacred white people were, it probably

wouldn't be the august poor Brahmin.  There was an immense string of

those third-class cars, for the natives travel by hordes; and a weary

hard night of it the occupants would have, no doubt.



When we reached our car, Satan and Barney had already arrived there with

their train of porters carrying bedding and parasols and cigar boxes, and

were at work.  We named him Barney for short; we couldn't use his real

name, there wasn't time.



It was a car that promised comfort; indeed, luxury.  Yet the cost of it--

well, economy could no further go; even in France; not even in Italy.  It

was built of the plainest and cheapest partially-smoothed boards, with a

coating of dull paint on them, and there was nowhere a thought of

decoration.  The floor was bare, but would not long remain so when the

dust should begin to fly.  Across one end of the compartment ran a

netting for the accommodation of hand-baggage; at the other end was a

door which would shut, upon compulsion, but wouldn't stay shut; it opened

into a narrow little closet which had a wash-bowl in one end of it, and a

place to put a towel, in case you had one with you--and you would be sure

to have towels, because you buy them with the bedding, knowing that the

railway doesn't furnish them.  On each side of the car, and running fore

and aft, was a broad leather-covered sofa to sit on in the day and sleep

on at night.  Over each sofa hung, by straps, a wide, flat, leather-

covered shelf--to sleep on.  In the daytime you can hitch it up against

the wall, out of the way--and then you have a big unencumbered and most

comfortable room to spread out in.  No car in any country is quite its

equal for comfort (and privacy) I think.  For usually there are but two

persons in it; and even when there are four there is but little sense of

impaired privacy.  Our own cars at home can surpass the railway world in

all details but that one: they have no cosiness; there are too many

people together.



At the foot of each sofa was a side-door, for entrance and exit.

Along the whole length of the sofa on each side of the car ran a row of

large single-plate windows, of a blue tint-blue to soften the bitter

glare of the sun and protect one's eyes from torture.  These could be let

down out of the way when one wanted the breeze.  In the roof were two oil

lamps which gave a light strong enough to read by; each had a green-cloth

attachment by which it could be covered when the light should be no

longer needed.



While we talked outside with friends, Barney and Satan placed the hand-

baggage, books, fruits, and soda-bottles in the racks, and the hold-alls

and heavy baggage in the closet, hung the overcoats and sun-helmets and

towels on the hooks, hoisted the two bed-shelves up out of the way, then

shouldered their bedding and retired to the third class.



Now then, you see what a handsome, spacious, light, airy, homelike place

it was, wherein to walk up and down, or sit and write, or stretch out and

read and smoke.  A central door in the forward end of the compartment

opened into a similar compartment.  It was occupied by my wife and

daughter.  About nine in the evening, while we halted a while at a

station, Barney and Satan came and undid the clumsy big hold-alls, and

spread the bedding on the sofas in both compartments--mattresses, sheets,

gay coverlets, pillows, all complete; there are no chambermaids in India

--apparently it was an office that was never heard of.  Then they closed

the communicating door, nimbly tidied up our place, put the night-

clothing on the beds and the slippers under them, then returned to their

own quarters.



January 31.  It was novel and pleasant, and I stayed awake as long as I

could, to enjoy it, and to read about those strange people the Thugs.  In

my sleep they remained with me, and tried to strangle me.  The leader of

the gang was that giant Hindoo who was such a picture in the strong light

when we were leaving those Hindoo betrothal festivities at two o'clock in

the morning--Rao Bahadur Baskirao Balinkanje Pitale, Vakeel to the

Gaikwar of Baroda.  It was he that brought me the invitation from his

master to go to Baroda and lecture to that prince--and now he was

misbehaving in my dreams.  But all things can happen in dreams.  It is

indeed as the Sweet Singer of Michigan says--irrelevantly, of course, for

the one and unfailing great quality which distinguishes her poetry from

Shakespeare's and makes it precious to us is its stern and simple

irrelevancy:



               My heart was gay and happy,

               This was ever in my mind,

               There is better times a coming,

               And I hope some day to find

               Myself capable of composing,

               It was my heart's delight

               To compose on a sentimental subject

               If it came in my mind just right.



--["The Sentimental Song Book," p. 49; theme, "The Author's Early Life,"

19th stanza.]





Barroda.   Arrived at 7 this morning.  The dawn was just beginning to

show.  It was forlorn to have to turn out in a strange place at such a

time, and the blinking lights in the station made it seem night still.

But the gentlemen who had come to receive us were there with their

servants, and they make quick work; there was no lost time.  We were soon

outside and moving swiftly through the soft gray light, and presently

were comfortably housed--with more servants to help than we were used to,

and with rather embarassingly important officials to direct them.  But it

was custom; they spoke Ballarat English, their bearing was charming and

hospitable, and so all went well.



Breakfast was a satisfaction.  Across the lawns was visible in the

distance through the open window an Indian well, with two oxen tramping

leisurely up and down long inclines, drawing water; and out of the

stillness came the suffering screech of the machinery--not quite musical,

and yet soothingly melancholy and dreamy and reposeful--a wail of lost

spirits, one might imagine.  And commemorative and reminiscent, perhaps;

for of course the Thugs used to throw people down that well when they

were done with them.



After breakfast the day began, a sufficiently busy one.  We were driven

by winding roads through a vast park, with noble forests of great trees,

and with tangles and jungles of lovely growths of a humbler sort; and at

one place three large gray apes came out and pranced across the road--a

good deal of a surprise and an unpleasant one, for such creatures belong

in the menagerie, and they look artificial and out of place in a

wilderness.



We came to the city, by and by, and drove all through it.  Intensely

Indian, it was, and crumbly, and mouldering, and immemorially old, to all

appearance.  And the houses--oh, indescribably quaint and curious they

were, with their fronts an elaborate lace-work of intricate and beautiful

wood-carving, and now and then further adorned with rude pictures of

elephants and princes and gods done in shouting colors; and all the

ground floors along these cramped and narrow lanes occupied as shops--

shops unbelievably small and impossibly packed with merchantable rubbish,

and with nine-tenths-naked natives squatting at their work of hammering,

pounding, brazing, soldering, sewing, designing, cooking, measuring out

grain, grinding it, repairing idols--and then the swarm of ragged and

noisy humanity under the horses' feet and everywhere, and the pervading

reek and fume and smell!  It was all wonderful and delightful.



Imagine a file of elephants marching through such a crevice of a street

and scraping the paint off both sides of it with their hides.  How big

they must look, and how little they must make the houses look; and when

the elephants are in their glittering court costume, what a contrast they

must make with the humble and sordid surroundings.  And when a mad

elephant goes raging through, belting right and left with his trunk, how

do these swarms of people get out of the way?  I suppose it is a thing

which happens now and then in the mad season (for elephants have a mad

season).



I wonder how old the town is.  There are patches of building--massive

structures, monuments, apparently--that are so battered and worn, and

seemingly so tired and so burdened with the weight of age, and so dulled

and stupefied with trying to remember things they forgot before history

began, that they give one the feeling that they must have been a part of

original Creation.  This is indeed one of the oldest of the princedoms of

India, and has always been celebrated for its barbaric pomps and

splendors, and for the wealth of its princes.









CHAPTER XLV.



It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the

heart; the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Out of the town again; a long drive through open country, by winding

roads among secluded villages nestling in the inviting shade of tropic

vegetation, a Sabbath stillness everywhere, sometimes a pervading sense

of solitude, but always barefoot natives gliding by like spirits, without

sound of footfall, and others in the distance dissolving away and

vanishing like the creatures of dreams.  Now and then a string of stately

camels passed by--always interesting things to look at--and they were

velvet-shod by nature, and made no noise.  Indeed, there were no noises

of any sort in this paradise.  Yes, once there was one, for a moment: a

file of native convicts passed along in charge of an officer, and we

caught the soft clink of their chains.  In a retired spot, resting

himself under a tree, was a holy person--a naked black fakeer, thin and

skinny, and whitey-gray all over with ashes.



By and by to the elephant stables, and I took a ride; but it was by

request--I did not ask for it, and didn't want it; but I took it, because

otherwise they would have thought I was afraid, which I was.  The

elephant kneels down, by command--one end of him at a time--and you climb

the ladder and get into the howdah, and then he gets up, one end at a

time, just as a ship gets up over a wave; and after that, as he strides

monstrously about, his motion is much like a ship's motion.  The mahout

bores into the back of his head with a great iron prod and you wonder at

his temerity and at the elephant's patience, and you think that perhaps

the patience will not last; but it does, and nothing happens.  The mahout

talks to the elephant in a low voice all the time, and the elephant seems

to understand it all and to be pleased with it; and he obeys every order

in the most contented and docile way.  Among these twenty-five elephants

were two which were larger than any I had ever seen before, and if I had

thought I could learn to not be afraid, I would have taken one of them

while the police were not looking.



In the howdah-house there were many howdahs that were made of silver, one

of gold, and one of old ivory, and equipped with cushions and canopies of

rich and costly stuffs.  The wardrobe of the elephants was there, too;

vast velvet covers stiff and heavy with gold embroidery; and bells of

silver and gold; and ropes of these metals for fastening the things on

harness, so to speak; and monster hoops of massive gold for the elephant

to wear on his ankles when he is out in procession on business of state.



But we did not see the treasury of crown jewels, and that was a

disappointment, for in mass and richness it ranks only second in India.

By mistake we were taken to see the new palace instead, and we used up

the last remnant of our spare time there.  It was a pity, too; for the

new palace is mixed modern American-European, and has not a merit except

costliness.  It is wholly foreign to India, and impudent and out of

place.  The architect has escaped.  This comes of overdoing the

suppression of the Thugs; they had their merits.  The old palace is

oriental and charming, and in consonance with the country.  The old

palace would still be great if there were nothing of it but the spacious

and lofty hall where the durbars are held.  It is not a good place to

lecture in, on account of the echoes, but it is a good place to hold

durbars in and regulate the affairs of a kingdom, and that is what it is

for.  If I had it I would have a durbar every day, instead of once or

twice a year.



The prince is an educated gentleman.  His culture is European.  He has

been in Europe five times.  People say that this is costly amusement for

him, since in crossing the sea he must sometimes be obliged to drink

water from vessels that are more or less public, and thus damage his

caste.  To get it purified again he must make pilgrimage to some renowned

Hindoo temples and contribute a fortune or two to them.  His people are

like the other Hindoos, profoundly religious; and they could not be

content with a master who was impure.



We failed to see the jewels, but we saw the gold cannon and the silver

one--they seemed to be six-pounders.  They were not designed for

business, but for salutes upon rare and particularly important state

occasions.  An ancestor of the present Gaikwar had the silver one made,

and a subsequent ancestor had the gold one made, in order to outdo him.



This sort of artillery is in keeping with the traditions of Baroda, which

was of old famous for style and show.  It used to entertain visiting

rajahs and viceroys with tiger-fights, elephant-fights, illuminations,

and elephant-processions of the most glittering and gorgeous character.



It makes the circus a pale, poor thing.



In the train, during a part of the return journey from Baroda, we had the

company of a gentleman who had with him a remarkable looking dog.  I had

not seen one of its kind before, as far as I could remember; though of

course I might have seen one and not noticed it, for I am not acquainted

with dogs, but only with cats.  This dog's coat was smooth and shiny and

black, and I think it had tan trimmings around the edges of the dog, and

perhaps underneath.  It was a long, low dog, with very short, strange

legs--legs that curved inboard, something like parentheses wrong way (.

Indeed, it was made on the plan of a bench for length and lowness.  It

seemed to be satisfied, but I thought the plan poor, and structurally

weak, on account of the distance between the forward supports and those

abaft.  With age the dog's back was likely to sag; and it seemed to me

that it would have been a stronger and more practicable dog if it had had

some more legs.  It had not begun to sag yet, but the shape of the legs

showed that the undue weight imposed upon them was beginning to tell.

It had a long nose, and floppy ears that hung down, and a resigned

expression of countenance.  I did not like to ask what kind of a dog it

was, or how it came to be deformed, for it was plain that the gentleman

was very fond of it, and naturally he could be sensitive about it.  From

delicacy I thought it best not to seem to notice it too much.  No doubt a

man with a dog like that feels just as a person does who has a child that

is out of true.  The gentleman was not merely fond of the dog, he was

also proud of it--just the same again, as a mother feels about her child

when it is an idiot.  I could see that he was proud of it, not-

withstanding it was such a long dog and looked so resigned and pious.  It

had been all over the world with him, and had been pilgriming like that

for years and years.  It had traveled 50,000 miles by sea and rail, and

had ridden in front of him on his horse 8,000.  It had a silver medal

from the Geographical Society of Great Britain for its travels, and I saw

it.  It had won prizes in dog shows, both in India and in England--I saw

them.  He said its pedigree was on record in the Kennel Club, and that it

was a well-known dog.  He said a great many people in London could

recognize it the moment they saw it.  I did not say anything, but I did

not think it anything strange; I should know that dog again, myself, yet

I am not careful about noticing dogs.  He said that when he walked along

in London, people often stopped and looked at the dog.  Of course I did

not say anything, for I did not want to hurt his feelings, but I could

have explained to him that if you take a great long low dog like that and

waddle it along the street anywhere in the world and not charge anything,

people will stop and look.  He was gratified because the dog took prizes.

But that was nothing; if I were built like that I could take prizes

myself.  I wished I knew what kind of a dog it was, and what it was for,

but I could not very well ask, for that would show that I did not know.

Not that I want a dog like that, but only to know the secret of its

birth.



I think he was going to hunt elephants with it, because I know, from

remarks dropped by him, that he has hunted large game in India and

Africa, and likes it.  But I think that if he tries to hunt elephants

with it, he is going to be disappointed.



I do not believe that it is suited for elephants.  It lacks energy, it

lacks force of character, it lacks bitterness.  These things all show in

the meekness and resignation of its expression.  It would not attack an

elephant, I am sure of it.  It might not run if it saw one coming, but it

looked to me like a dog that would sit down and pray.



I wish he had told me what breed it was, if there are others; but I shall

know the dog next time, and then if I can bring myself to it I will put

delicacy aside and ask.  If I seem strangely interested in dogs, I have a

reason for it; for a dog saved me from an embarrassing position once, and

that has made me grateful to these animals; and if by study I could learn

to tell some of the kinds from the others, I should be greatly pleased.

I only know one kind apart, yet, and that is the kind that saved me that

time.  I always know that kind when I meet it, and if it is hungry or

lost I take care of it.  The matter happened in this way



It was years and years ago.  I had received a note from Mr. Augustin Daly

of the Fifth Avenue Theatre, asking me to call the next time I should be

in New York.  I was writing plays, in those days, and he was admiring

them and trying to get me a chance to get them played in Siberia.  I took

the first train--the early one--the one that leaves Hartford at 8.29 in

the morning.  At New Haven I bought a paper, and found it filled with

glaring display-lines about a "bench-show" there.  I had often heard of

bench-shows, but had never felt any interest in them, because I supposed

they were lectures that were not well attended.  It turned out, now, that

it was not that, but a dog-show.  There was a double-leaded column about

the king-feature of this one, which was called a Saint Bernard, and was

worth $10,000, and was known to be the largest and finest of his species

in the world.  I read all this with interest, because out of my school-

boy readings I dimly remembered how the priests and pilgrims of St.

Bernard used to go out in the storms and dig these dogs out of the

snowdrifts when lost and exhausted, and give them brandy and save their

lives, and drag them to the monastery and restore them with gruel.



Also, there was a picture of this prize-dog in the paper, a noble great

creature with a benignant countenance, standing by a table.  He was

placed in that way so that one could get a right idea of his great

dimensions.  You could see that he was just a shade higher than the

table--indeed, a huge fellow for a dog.  Then there was a description

which event into the details.  It gave his enormous weight--150 1/2

pounds, and his length 4 feet 2 inches, from stem to stern-post; and his

height--3 feet 1 inch, to the top of his back.  The pictures and the

figures so impressed me, that I could see the beautiful colossus before

me, and I kept on thinking about him for the next two hours; then I

reached New York, and he dropped out of my mind.



In the swirl and tumult of the hotel lobby I ran across Mr. Daly's

comedian, the late James Lewis, of beloved memory, and I casually

mentioned that I was going to call upon Mr. Daly in the evening at 8.

He looked surprised, and said he reckoned not.  For answer I handed him

Mr. Daly's note.  Its substance was: "Come to my private den, over the

theater, where we cannot be interrupted.  And come by the back way, not

the front.  No. 642 Sixth Avenue is a cigar shop; pass through it and you

are in a paved court, with high buildings all around; enter the second

door on the left, and come up stairs."



"Is this all?"



"Yes," I said.



"Well, you'll never get in"



"Why?"



"Because you won't.  Or if you do you can draw on me for a hundred

dollars; for you will be the first man that has accomplished it in

twenty-five years.  I can't think what Mr. Daly can have been absorbed

in.  He has forgotten a most important detail, and he will feel

humiliated in the morning when he finds that you tried to get in and

couldn't."



"Why, what is the trouble?"



"I'll tell you.  You see----"



At that point we were swept apart by the crowd, somebody detained me with

a moment's talk, and we did not get together again.  But it did not

matter; I believed he was joking, anyway.



At eight in the evening I passed through the cigar shop and into the

court and knocked at the second door.



"Come in!"



I entered.  It was a small room, carpetless, dusty, with a naked deal

table, and two cheap wooden chairs for furniture.  A giant Irishman was

standing there, with shirt collar and vest unbuttoned, and no coat on.  I

put my hat on the table, and was about to say something, when the

Irishman took the innings himself.  And not with marked courtesy of tone:



"Well, sor, what will you have?"



I was a little disconcerted, and my easy confidence suffered a shrinkage.

The man stood as motionless as Gibraltar, and kept his unblinking eye

upon me.  It was very embarrassing, very humiliating.  I stammered at a

false start or two; then----



"I have just run down from----"



"Av ye plaze, ye'll not smoke here, ye understand."



I laid my cigar on the window-ledge; chased my flighty thoughts a moment,

then said in a placating manner:



"I--I have come to see Mr. Daly."



"Oh, ye have, have ye?"



"Yes"



"Well, ye'll not see him."



"But he asked me to come."



"Oh, he did, did he?"



"Yes, he sent me this note, and----"



"Lemme see it."



For a moment I fancied there would be a change in the atmosphere, now;

but this idea was premature.  The big man was examining the note

searchingly under the gas-jet.  A glance showed me that he had it upside

down--disheartening evidence that he could not read.



"Is ut his own handwrite?"



"Yes--he wrote it himself."



"He did, did he?"



"Yes."



"H'm.  Well, then, why ud he write it like that?"



"How do you mean?"



"I mane, why wudn't he put his naime to ut?"



"His name is to it.  That's not it--you are looking at my name."



I thought that that was a home shot, but he did not betray that he had

been hit.  He said:



"It's not an aisy one to spell; how do you pronounce ut?"



"Mark Twain."



"H'm.  H'm.  Mike Train.  H'm.  I don't remember ut.  What is it ye want

to see him about?"



"It isn't I that want to see him, he wants to see me."



"Oh, he does, does he?"



"Yes."



"What does he want to see ye about?"



"I don't know."



"Ye don't know!  And ye confess it, becod!  Well, I can tell ye wan

thing--ye'll not see him.  Are ye in the business?"



"What business?"



"The show business."



A fatal question.  I recognized that I was defeated.  If I answered no,

he would cut the matter short and wave me to the door without the grace

of a word--I saw it in his uncompromising eye; if I said I was a

lecturer, he would despise me, and dismiss me with opprobrious words; if

I said I was a dramatist, he would throw me out of the window.  I saw

that my case was hopeless, so I chose the course which seemed least

humiliating: I would pocket my shame and glide out without answering.

The silence was growing lengthy.



"I'll ask ye again.  Are ye in the show business yerself?"



"Yes!"



I said it with splendid confidence; for in that moment the very twin of

that grand New Haven dog loafed into the room, and I saw that Irishman's

eye light eloquently with pride and affection.



"Ye are?  And what is it?"



"I've got a bench-show in New Haven."



The weather did change then.



"You don't say, sir!  And that's your show, sir!  Oh, it's a grand show,

it's a wonderful show, sir, and a proud man I am to see your honor this

day.  And ye'll be an expert, sir, and ye'll know all about dogs--more

than ever they know theirselves, I'll take me oath to ut."



I said, with modesty:



"I believe I have some reputation that way.  In fact, my business

requires it."



"Ye have some reputation, your honor!  Bedad I believe you!  There's not

a jintleman in the worrld that can lay over ye in the judgmint of a dog,

sir.  Now I'll vinture that your honor'll know that dog's dimensions

there better than he knows them his own self, and just by the casting of

your educated eye upon him.  Would you mind giving a guess, if ye'll be

so good?"



I knew that upon my answer would depend my fate.  If I made this dog

bigger than the prize-dog, it would be bad diplomacy, and suspicious; if

I fell too far short of the prizedog, that would be equally damaging.

The dog was standing by the table, and I believed I knew the difference

between him and the one whose picture I had seen in the newspaper to a

shade.  I spoke promptly up and said:



"It's no trouble to guess this noble creature's figures height, three

feet; length, four feet and three-quarters of an inch; weight, a hundred

and forty-eight and a quarter."



The man snatched his hat from its peg and danced on it with joy,

shouting:



"Ye've hardly missed it the hair's breadth, hardly the shade of a shade,

your honor!  Oh, it's the miraculous eye ye've got, for the judgmint of a

dog!"



And still pouring out his admiration of my capacities, he snatched off

his vest and scoured off one of the wooden chairs with it, and scrubbed

it and polished it, and said:



"There, sit down, your honor, I'm ashamed of meself that I forgot ye were

standing all this time; and do put on your hat, ye mustn't take cold,

it's a drafty place; and here is your cigar, sir, a getting cold, I'll

give ye a light.  There.  The place is all yours, sir, and if ye'll just

put your feet on the table and make yourself at home, I'll stir around

and get a candle and light ye up the ould crazy stairs and see that ye

don't come to anny harm, for be this time Mr. Daly'll be that impatient

to see your honor that he'll be taking the roof off."



He conducted me cautiously and tenderly up the stairs, lighting the way

and protecting me with friendly warnings, then pushed the door open and

bowed me in and went his way, mumbling hearty things about my wonderful

eye for points of a dog.  Mr. Daly was writing and had his back to me.

He glanced over his shoulder presently, then jumped up and said--



"Oh, dear me, I forgot all about giving instructions.  I was just writing

you to beg a thousand pardons.  But how is it you are here?  How did you

get by that Irishman?  You are the first man that's done it in five and

twenty years.  You didn't bribe him, I know that; there's not money

enough in New York to do it.  And you didn't persuade him; he is all ice

and iron: there isn't a soft place nor a warm one in him anywhere.  That

is your secret?  Look here; you owe me a hundred dollars for

unintentionally giving you a chance to perform a miracle--for it is a

miracle that you've done."



"That is all right," I said, "collect it of Jimmy Lewis."



That good dog not only did me that good turn in the time of my need, but

he won for me the envious reputation among all the theatrical people from

the Atlantic to the Pacific of being the only man in history who had ever

run the blockade of Augustin Daly's back door.









CHAPTER XLVI.



If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together,

who would escape hanging.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



On the Train.  Fifty years ago, when I was a boy in the then remote and

sparsely peopled Mississippi valley, vague tales and rumors of a

mysterious body of professional murderers came wandering in from a

country which was constructively as far from us as the constellations

blinking in space--India; vague tales and rumors of a sect called Thugs,

who waylaid travelers in lonely places and killed them for the

contentment of a god whom they worshiped; tales which everybody liked to

listen to and nobody believed, except with reservations.  It was

considered that the stories had gathered bulk on their travels.  The

matter died down and a lull followed.  Then Eugene Sue's "Wandering Jew"

appeared, and made great talk for a while.  One character in it was a

chief of Thugs--"Feringhea"--a mysterious and terrible Indian who was as

slippery and sly as a serpent, and as deadly; and he stirred up the Thug

interest once more.  But it did not last.  It presently died again this

time to stay dead.



At first glance it seems strange that this should have happened; but

really it was not strange--on the contrary,.  it was natural; I mean on

our side of the water.  For the source whence the Thug tales mainly came

was a Government Report, and without doubt was not republished in

America; it was probably never even seen there.  Government Reports have

no general circulation.  They are distributed to the few, and are not

always read by those few.  I heard of this Report for the first time a

day or two ago, and borrowed it.  It is full of fascinations; and it

turns those dim, dark fairy tales of my boyhood days into realities.



The Report was made in 1889 by Major Sleeman, of the Indian Service, and

was printed in Calcutta in 1840.  It is a clumsy, great, fat, poor sample

of the printer's art, but good enough for a government printing-office in

that old day and in that remote region, perhaps.  To Major Sleeman was

given the general superintendence of the giant task of ridding India of

Thuggee, and he and his seventeen assistants accomplished it.  It was the

Augean Stables over again.  Captain Vallancey, writing in a Madras

journal in those old times, makes this remark:



     "The day that sees this far-spread evil eradicated from India and

     known only in name, will greatly tend to immortalize British rule in

     the East."



He did not overestimate the magnitude and difficulty of the work, nor the

immensity of the credit which would justly be due to British rule in case

it was accomplished.



Thuggee became known to the British authorities in India about 1810, but

its wide prevalence was not suspected; it was not regarded as a serious

matter, and no systematic measures were taken for its suppression until

about 1830.  About that time Major Sleeman captured Eugene Sue's Thug-

chief, "Feringhea," and got him to turn King's evidence.  The revelations

were so stupefying that Sleeman was not able to believe them.  Sleeman

thought he knew every criminal within his jurisdiction, and that the

worst of them were merely thieves; but Feringhea told him that he was in

reality living in the midst of a swarm of professional murderers; that

they had been all about him for many years, and that they buried their

dead close by.  These seemed insane tales; but Feringhea said come and

see--and he took him to a grave and dug up a hundred bodies, and told him

all the circumstances of the killings, and named the Thugs who had done

the work.  It was a staggering business.  Sleeman captured some of these

Thugs and proceeded to examine them separately, and with proper

precautions against collusion; for he would not believe any Indian's

unsupported word.  The evidence gathered proved the truth of what

Feringhea had said, and also revealed the fact that gangs of Thugs were

plying their trade all over India.  The astonished government now took

hold of Thuggee, and for ten years made systematic and relentless war

upon it, and finally destroyed it.  Gang after gang was captured, tried,

and punished.  The Thugs were harried and hunted from one end of India to

the other.  The government got all their secrets out of them; and also

got the names of the members of the bands, and recorded them in a book,

together with their birthplaces and places of residence.



The Thugs were worshipers of Bhowanee; and to this god they sacrificed

anybody that came handy; but they kept the dead man's things themselves,

for the god cared for nothing but the corpse.  Men were initiated into

the sect with solemn ceremonies.  Then they were taught how to strangle a

person with the sacred choke-cloth, but were not allowed to perform

officially with it until after long practice.  No half-educated strangler

could choke a man to death quickly enough to keep him from uttering a

sound--a muffled scream, gurgle, gasp, moan, or something of the sort;

but the expert's work was instantaneous: the cloth was whipped around the

victim's neck, there was a sudden twist, and the head fell silently

forward, the eyes starting from the sockets; and all was over.  The Thug

carefully guarded against resistance.  It was usual to to get the victims

to sit down, for that was the handiest position for business.



If the Thug had planned India itself it could not have been more

conveniently arranged for the needs of his occupation.



There were no public conveyances.  There were no conveyances for hire.

The traveler went on foot or in a bullock cart or on a horse which he

bought for the purpose.  As soon as he was out of his own little State or

principality he was among strangers; nobody knew him, nobody took note of

him, and from that time his movements could no longer be traced.  He did

not stop in towns or villages, but camped outside of them and sent his

servants in to buy provisions.  There were no habitations between

villages.  Whenever he was between villages he was an easy prey,

particularly as he usually traveled by night, to avoid the heat.  He was

always being overtaken by strangers who offered him the protection of

their company, or asked for the protection of his--and these strangers

were often Thugs, as he presently found out to his cost.  The

landholders, the native police, the petty princes, the village officials,

the customs officers were in many cases protectors and harborers of the

Thugs, and betrayed travelers to them for a share of the spoil.  At first

this condition of things made it next to impossible for the government to

catch the marauders; they were spirited away by these watchful friends.

All through a vast continent, thus infested, helpless people of every

caste and kind moved along the paths and trails in couples and groups

silently by night, carrying the commerce of the country--treasure,

jewels, money, and petty batches of silks, spices, and all manner of

wares.  It was a paradise for the Thug.



When the autumn opened, the Thugs began to gather together by pre-

concert.  Other people had to have interpreters at every turn, but not

the Thugs; they could talk together, no matter how far apart they were

born, for they had a language of their own, and they had secret signs by

which they knew each other for Thugs; and they were always friends.  Even

their diversities of religion and caste were sunk in devotion to their

calling, and the Moslem and the high-caste and low-caste Hindoo were

staunch and affectionate brothers in Thuggery.



When a gang had been assembled, they had religious worship, and waited

for an omen.  They had definite notions about the omens.  The cries of

certain animals were good omens, the cries of certain other creatures

were bad omens.  A bad omen would stop proceedings and send the men home.



The sword and the strangling-cloth were sacred emblems.  The Thugs

worshiped the sword at home before going out to the assembling-place; the

strangling-cloth was worshiped at the place of assembly.  The chiefs of

most of the bands performed the religious ceremonies themselves; but the

Kaets delegated them to certain official stranglers (Chaurs).  The rites

of the Kaets were so holy that no one but the Chaur was allowed to touch

the vessels and other things used in them.



Thug methods exhibit a curious mixture of caution and the absence of it;

cold business calculation and sudden, unreflecting impulse; but there

were two details which were constant, and not subject to caprice: patient

persistence in following up the prey, and pitilessness when the time came

to act.



Caution was exhibited in the strength of the bands.  They never felt

comfortable and confident unless their strength exceeded that of any

party of travelers they were likely to meet by four or fivefold.  Yet it

was never their purpose to attack openly, but only when the victims were

off their guard.  When they got hold of a party of travelers they often

moved along in their company several days, using all manner of arts to

win their friendship and get their confidence.  At last, when this was

accomplished to their satisfaction, the real business began.  A few Thugs

were privately detached and sent forward in the dark to select a good

killing-place and dig the graves.  When the rest reached the spot a halt

was called, for a rest or a smoke.  The travelers were invited to sit.

By signs, the chief appointed certain Thugs to sit down in front of the

travelers as if to wait upon them, others to sit down beside them and

engage them in conversation, and certain expert stranglers to stand

behind the travelers and be ready when the signal was given.  The signal

was usually some commonplace remark, like "Bring the tobacco."  Sometimes

a considerable wait ensued after all the actors were in their places--the

chief was biding his time, in order to make everything sure.  Meantime,

the talk droned on, dim figures moved about in the dull light, peace and

tranquility reigned, the travelers resigned themselves to the pleasant

reposefulness and comfort of the situation, unconscious of the death-

angels standing motionless at their backs.  The time was ripe, now, and

the signal came: "Bring the tobacco."  There was a mute swift movement,

all in the same instant the men at each victim's sides seized his hands,

the man in front seized his feet, and pulled, the man at his back whipped

the cloth around his neck and gave it a twist the head sunk forward, the

tragedy was over.  The bodies were stripped and covered up in the graves,

the spoil packed for transportation, then the Thugs gave pious thanks to

Bhowanee, and departed on further holy service.



The Report shows that the travelers moved in exceedingly small groups--

twos, threes, fours, as a rule; a party with a dozen in it was rare.  The

Thugs themselves seem to have been the only people who moved in force.

They went about in gangs of 10, 15, 25, 40, 60, 100, 150, 200, 250, and

one gang of 310 is mentioned.  Considering their numbers, their catch was

not extraordinary--particularly when you consider that they were not in

the least fastidious, but took anybody they could get, whether rich or

poor, and sometimes even killed children.  Now and then they killed

women, but it was considered sinful to do it, and unlucky.  The "season"

was six or eight months long.  One season the half dozen Bundelkand and

Gwalior gangs aggregated 712 men, and they murdered 210 people.  One

season the Malwa and Kandeish gangs aggregated 702 men, and they murdered

232.  One season the Kandeish and Berar gangs aggregated 963 men, and

they murdered 385 people.



Here is the tally-sheet of a gang of sixty Thugs for a whole season--gang

under two noted chiefs, "Chotee and Sheik Nungoo from Gwalior":



     "Left Poora, in Jhansee, and on arrival at Sarora murdered a

     traveler.



     "On nearly reaching Bhopal, met 3 Brahmins, and murdered them.



     "Cross the Nerbudda; at a village called Hutteea, murdered a Hindoo.



     "Went through Aurungabad to Walagow; there met a Havildar of the

     barber caste and 5 sepoys (native soldiers); in the evening came to

     Jokur, and in the morning killed them near the place where the

     treasure-bearers were killed the year before.



     "Between Jokur and Dholeea met a sepoy of the shepherd caste; killed

     him in the jungle.



     "Passed through Dholeea and lodged in a village; two miles beyond,

     on the road to Indore, met a Byragee (beggar-holy mendicant);

     murdered him at the Thapa.



     "In the morning, beyond the Thapa, fell in with 3 Marwarie

     travelers; murdered them.



     "Near a village on the banks of the Taptee met 4 travelers and

     killed them.



     "Between Choupra and Dhoreea met a Marwarie; murdered him.



     "At Dhoreea met 3 Marwaries; took them two miles and murdered them.



     "Two miles further on, overtaken by three treasure-bearers; took

     them two miles and murdered them in the jungle.



     "Came on to Khurgore Bateesa in Indore, divided spoil, and

     dispersed.



     "A total of 27 men murdered on one expedition."



Chotee (to save his neck) was informer, and furnished these facts.

Several things are noticeable about his resume.  1. Business brevity;

2, absence of emotion; 3, smallness of the parties encountered by the 60;

4, variety in character and quality of the game captured; 5, Hindoo and

Mohammedan chiefs in business together for Bhowanee; 6, the sacred caste

of the Brahmins not respected by either; 7, nor yet the character of that

mendicant, that Byragee.



A beggar is a holy creature, and some of the gangs spared him on that

account, no matter how slack business might be; but other gangs

slaughtered not only him, but even that sacredest of sacred creatures,

the fakeer--that repulsive skin-and-bone thing that goes around naked and

mats his bushy hair with dust and dirt, and so beflours his lean body

with ashes that he looks like a specter.  Sometimes a fakeer trusted a

shade too far in the protection of his sacredness.  In the middle of a

tally-sheet of Feringhea's, who had been out with forty Thugs, I find a

case of the kind.  After the killing of thirty-nine men and one woman,

the fakeer appears on the scene:



     "Approaching Doregow, met 3 pundits; also a fakeer, mounted on a

     pony; he was plastered over with sugar to collect flies, and was

     covered with them.  Drove off the fakeer, and killed the other

     three.



     "Leaving Doregow, the fakeer joined again, and went on in company to

     Raojana; met 6 Khutries on their way from Bombay to Nagpore.  Drove

     off the fakeer with stones, and killed the 6 men in camp, and buried

     them in the grove.



     "Next day the fakeer joined again; made him leave at Mana.  Beyond

     there, fell in with two Kahars and a sepoy, and came on towards the

     place selected for the murder.  When near it, the fakeer came again.

     Losing all patience with him, gave Mithoo, one of the gang, 5 rupees

     ($2.50) to murder him, and take the sin upon himself.  All four were

     strangled, including the fakeer.  Surprised to find among the

     fakeer's effects 30 pounds of coral, 350 strings of small pearls, 15

     strings of large pearls, and a gilt necklace."



It it curious, the little effect that time has upon a really interesting

circumstance.  This one, so old, so long ago gone down into oblivion,

reads with the same freshness and charm that attach to the news in the

morning paper; one's spirits go up, then down, then up again, following

the chances which the fakeer is running; now you hope, now you despair,

now you hope again; and at last everything comes out right, and you feel

a great wave of personal satisfaction go weltering through you, and

without thinking, you put out your hand to pat Mithoo on the back, when--

puff!  the whole thing has vanished away, there is nothing there; Mithoo

and all the crowd have been dust and ashes and forgotten, oh, so many,

many, many lagging years!  And then comes a sense of injury: you don't

know whether Mithoo got the swag, along with the sin, or had to divide up

the swag and keep all the sin himself.  There is no literary art about a

government report.  It stops a story right in the most interesting place.



These reports of Thug expeditions run along interminably in one

monotonous tune: "Met a sepoy--killed him; met 5 pundits--killed them;

met 4 Rajpoots and a woman--killed them"--and so on, till the statistics

get to be pretty dry.  But this small trip of Feringhea's Forty had some

little variety about it.  Once they came across a man hiding in a grave--

a thief; he had stolen 1,100 rupees from Dhunroj Seith of Parowtee.  They

strangled him and took the money.  They had no patience with thieves.

They killed two treasure-bearers, and got 4,000 rupees.  They came across

two bullocks "laden with copper pice," and killed the four drivers and

took the money.  There must have been half a ton of it.  I think it takes

a double handful of pice to make an anna, and 16 annas to make a rupee;

and even in those days the rupee was worth only half a dollar.  Coming

back over their tracks from Baroda, they had another picturesque stroke

of luck:  "'The Lohars of Oodeypore' put a traveler in their charge for

safety."  Dear, dear, across this abyssmal gulf of time we still see

Feringhea's lips uncover his teeth, and through the dim haze we catch the

incandescent glimmer of his smile.  He accepted that trust, good man; and

so we know what went with the traveler.



Even Rajahs had no terrors for Feringhea; he came across an elephant-

driver belonging to the Rajah of Oodeypore and promptly strangled him.



"A total of 100 men and 5 women murdered on this expedition."



Among the reports of expeditions we find mention of victims of almost

every quality and estate.



Also a prince's cook; and even the water-carrier of that sublime lord of

lords and king of kings, the Governor-General of India!  How broad they

were in their tastes!  They also murdered actors--poor wandering

barnstormers.  There are two instances recorded; the first one by a gang

of Thugs under a chief who soils a great name borne by a better man--

Kipling's deathless "Gungadin":



     "After murdering 4 sepoys, going on toward Indore, met 4 strolling

     players, and persuaded them to come with us, on the pretense that we

     would see their performance at the next stage.  Murdered them at a

     temple near Bhopal."



Second instance:



     "At Deohuttee, joined by comedians.  Murdered them eastward of that

     place."



But this gang was a particularly bad crew.  On that expedition they

murdered a fakeer and twelve beggars.  And yet Bhowanee protected them;

for once when they were strangling a man in a wood when a crowd was going

by close at hand and the noose slipped and the man screamed, Bhowanee

made a camel burst out at the same moment with a roar that drowned the

scream; and before the man could repeat it the breath was choked out of

his body.



The cow is so sacred in India that to kill her keeper is an awful

sacrilege, and even the Thugs recognized this; yet now and then the lust

for blood was too strong, and so they did kill a few cow-keepers.  In one

of these instances the witness who killed the cowherd said, "In Thuggee

this is strictly forbidden, and is an act from which no good can come.  I

was ill of a fever for ten days afterward.  I do believe that evil will

follow the murder of a man with a cow.  If there be no cow it does not

signify."  Another Thug said he held the cowherd's feet while this

witness did the strangling.  He felt no concern, "because the bad fortune

of such a deed is upon the strangler and not upon the assistants; even if

there should be a hundred of them."



There were thousands of Thugs roving over India constantly, during many

generations.  They made Thug gee a hereditary vocation and taught it to

their sons and to their son's sons.  Boys were in full membership as

early as 16 years of age; veterans were still at work at 70.  What was

the fascination, what was the impulse?  Apparently, it was partly piety,

largely gain, and there is reason to suspect that the sport afforded was

the chiefest fascination of all.  Meadows Taylor makes a Thug in one of

his books claim that the pleasure of killing men was the white man's

beast-hunting instinct enlarged, refined, ennobled.  I will quote the

passage:









CHAPTER XLVII.



Simple rules for saving money: To save half, when you are fired by an

eager impulse to contribute to a charity, wait, and count forty.  To save

three-quarters, count sixty.  To save it all, count sixty-five.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



The Thug said:



"How many of you English are passionately devoted to sporting!  Your days

and months are passed in its excitement.  A tiger, a panther, a buffalo

or a hog rouses your utmost energies for its destruction--you even risk

your lives in its pursuit.  How much higher game is a Thug's!"



That must really be the secret of the rise and development of Thuggee.

The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done--these are traits of

the human race at large.  We white people are merely modified Thugs;

Thugs fretting under the restraints of a not very thick skin of

civilization; Thugs who long ago enjoyed the slaughter of the Roman

arena, and later the burning of doubtful Christians by authentic

Christians in the public squares, and who now, with the Thugs of Spain

and Nimes, flock to enjoy the blood and misery of the bullring.  We have

no tourists of either sex or any religion who are able to resist the

delights of the bull-ring when opportunity offers; and we are gentle

Thugs in the hunting-season, and love to chase a tame rabbit and kill it.

Still, we have made some progress-microscopic, and in truth scarcely

worth mentioning, and certainly nothing to be proud of--still, it is

progress: we no longer take pleasure in slaughtering or burning helpless

men.  We have reached a little altitude where we may look down upon the

Indian Thugs with a complacent shudder; and we may even hope for a day,

many centuries hence, when our posterity will look down upon us in the

same way.



There are many indications that the Thug often hunted men for the mere

sport of it; that the fright and pain of the quarry were no more to him

than are the fright and pain of the rabbit or the stag to us; and that he

was no more ashamed of beguiling his game with deceits and abusing its

trust than are we when we have imitated a wild animal's call and shot it

when it honored us with its confidence and came to see what we wanted:



     "Madara, son of Nihal, and I, Ramzam, set out from Kotdee in the

     cold weather and followed the high road for about twenty days in

     search of travelers, until we came to Selempore, where we met a very

     old man going to the east.  We won his confidence in this manner: he

     carried a load which was too heavy for his old age; I said to him,

     'You are an old man, I will aid you in carrying your load, as you

     are from my part of the country.'  He said, 'Very well, take me with

     you.'  So we took him with us to Selempore, where we slept that

     night.  We woke him next morning before dawn and set out, and at the

     distance of three miles we seated him to rest while it was still

     very dark.  Madara was ready behind him, and strangled him.  He

     never spoke a word.  He was about 60 or 70 years of age."



Another gang fell in with a couple of barbers and persuaded them to come

along in their company by promising them the job of shaving the whole

crew--30 Thugs.  At the place appointed for the murder 15 got shaved, and

actually paid the barbers for their work.  Then killed them and took back

the money.



A gang of forty-two Thugs came across two Brahmins and a shopkeeper on

the road, beguiled them into a grove and got up a concert for their

entertainment.  While these poor fellows were listening to the music the

stranglers were standing behind them; and at the proper moment for

dramatic effect they applied the noose.



The most devoted fisherman must have a bite at least as often as once a

week or his passion will cool and he will put up his tackle.  The tiger-

sportsman must find a tiger at least once a fortnight or he will get

tired and quit.  The elephant-hunter's enthusiasm will waste away little

by little, and his zeal will perish at last if he plod around a month

without finding a member of that noble family to assassinate.



But when the lust in the hunter's heart is for the noblest of all

quarries, man, how different is the case!  and how watery and poor is the

zeal and how childish the endurance of those other hunters by comparison.

Then, neither hunger, nor thirst, nor fatigue, nor deferred hope, nor

monotonous disappointment, nor leaden-footed lapse of time can conquer

the hunter's patience or weaken the joy of his quest or cool the splendid

rage of his desire.  Of all the hunting-passions that burn in the breast

of man, there is none that can lift him superior to discouragements like

these but the one--the royal sport, the supreme sport, whose quarry is

his brother.  By comparison, tiger-hunting is a colorless poor thing, for

all it has been so bragged about.



Why, the Thug was content to tramp patiently along, afoot, in the wasting

heat of India, week after week, at an average of nine or ten miles a day,

if he might but hope to find game some time or other and refresh his

longing soul with blood.  Here is an instance:



     "I (Ramzam) and Hyder set out, for the purpose of strangling

     travelers, from Guddapore, and proceeded via the Fort of Julalabad,

     Newulgunge, Bangermow, on the banks of the Ganges (upwards of 100

     miles), from whence we returned by another route.  Still no

     travelers! till we reached Bowaneegunge, where we fell in with a

     traveler, a boatman; we inveigled him and about two miles east of

     there Hyder strangled him as he stood--for he was troubled and

     afraid, and would not sit.  We then made a long journey (about 130

     miles) and reached Hussunpore Bundwa, where at the tank we fell in

     with a traveler--he slept there that night; next morning we followed

     him and tried to win his confidence; at the distance of two miles we

     endeavored to induce him to sit down--but he would not, having

     become aware of us.  I attempted to strangle him as he walked along,

     but did not succeed; both of us then fell upon him, he made a great

     outcry, 'They are murdering me!' at length we strangled him and

     flung his body into a well.  After this we returned to our homes,

     having been out a month and traveled about 260 miles.  A total of

     two men murdered on the expedition."



And here is another case-related by the terrible Futty Khan, a man with a

tremendous record, to be re-mentioned by and by:



     "I, with three others, traveled for about 45 days a distance of

     about 200 miles in search of victims along the highway to Bundwa and

     returned by Davodpore (another 200 miles) during which journey we

     had only one murder, which happened in this manner.  Four miles to

     the east of Noubustaghat we fell in with a traveler, an old man.  I,

     with Koshal and Hyder, inveigled him and accompanied him that day

     within 3 miles of Rampoor, where, after dark, in a lonely place, we

     got him to sit down and rest; and while I kept him in talk, seated

     before him, Hyder behind strangled him: he made no resistance.

     Koshal stabbed him under the arms and in the throat, and we flung

     the body into a running stream.  We got about 4 or 5 rupees each ($2

     or $2.50).  We then proceeded homewards.  A total of one man

     murdered on this expedition."



There.  They tramped 400 miles, were gone about three months, and

harvested two dollars and a half apiece.  But the mere pleasure of the

hunt was sufficient.  That was pay enough.  They did no grumbling.



Every now and then in this big book one comes across that pathetic

remark: "we tried to get him to sit down but he would not."  It tells the

whole story.  Some accident had awakened the suspicion in him that these

smooth friends who had been petting and coddling him and making him feel

so safe and so fortunate after his forlorn and lonely wanderings were the

dreaded Thugs; and now their ghastly invitation to "sit and rest" had

confirmed its truth.  He knew there was no help for him, and that he was

looking his last upon earthly things, but "he would not sit."  No, not

that--it was too awful to think of!



There are a number of instances which indicate that when a man had once

tasted the regal joys of man-hunting he could not be content with the

dull monotony of a crimeless life after ward.  Example, from a Thug's

testimony:



     "We passed through to Kurnaul, where we found a former Thug named

     Junooa, an old comrade of ours, who had turned religious mendicant

     and become a disciple and holy.  He came to us in the serai and

     weeping with joy returned to his old trade."



Neither wealth nor honors nor dignities could satisfy a reformed Thug for

long.  He would throw them all away, someday, and go back to the lurid

pleasures of hunting men, and being hunted himself by the British.



Ramzam was taken into a great native grandee's service and given

authority over five villages.  "My authority extended over these people

to summons them to my presence, to make them stand or sit.  I dressed

well, rode my pony, and had two sepoys, a scribe and a village guard to

attend me.  During three years I used to pay each village a monthly

visit, and no one suspected that I was a Thug!  The chief man used to

wait on me to transact business, and as I passed along, old and young

made their salaam to me."



And yet during that very three years he got leave of absence "to attend a

wedding," and instead went off on a Thugging lark with six other Thugs

and hunted the highway for fifteen days!--with satisfactory results.



Afterwards he held a great office under a Rajah.  There he had ten miles

of country under his command and a military guard of fifteen men, with

authority to call out 2,000 more upon occasion.  But the British got on

his track, and they crowded him so that he had to give himself up.  See

what a figure he was when he was gotten up for style and had all his

things on: "I was fully armed--a sword, shield, pistols, a matchlock

musket and a flint gun, for I was fond of being thus arrayed, and when so

armed feared not though forty men stood before me."



He gave himself up and proudly proclaimed himself a Thug.  Then by

request he agreed to betray his friend and pal, Buhram, a Thug with the

most tremendous record in India.  "I went to the house where Buhram slept

(often has he led our gangs!) I woke him, he knew me well, and came

outside to me.  It was a cold night, so under pretence of warming myself,

but in reality to have light for his seizure by the guards, I lighted

some straw and made a blaze.  We were warming our hands.  The guards drew

around us.  I said to them, 'This is Buhram,' and he was seized just as a

cat seizes a mouse.  Then Buhram said, 'I am a Thug! my father was a

Thug, my grandfather was a Thug, and I have thugged with many!'"



So spoke the mighty hunter, the mightiest of the mighty, the Gordon

Cumming of his day.  Not much regret noticeable in it.--["Having planted

a bullet in the shoulder-bone of an elephant, and caused the agonized

creature to lean for support against a tree, I proceeded to brew some

coffee.  Having refreshed myself, taking observations of the elephant's

spasms and writhings between the sips, I resolved to make experiments on

vulnerable points, and, approaching very near, I fired several bullets at

different parts of his enormous skull.  He only acknowledged the shots by

a salaam-like movement of his trunk, with the point of which he gently

touched the wounds with a striking and peculiar action.  Surprised and

shocked to find that I was only prolonging the suffering of the noble

beast, which bore its trials with such dignified composure, I resolved to

finish the proceeding with all possible despatch, and accordingly opened

fire upon him from the left side.  Aiming at the shoulder, I fired six

shots with the two-grooved rifle, which must have eventually proved

mortal, after which I fired six shots at the same part with the Dutch

six-founder.  Large tears now trickled down from his eyes, which he

slowly shut and opened, his colossal frame shivered convulsively, and

falling on his side he expired."--Gordon Cumming.]



So many many times this Official Report leaves one's curiosity

unsatisfied.  For instance, here is a little paragraph out of the record

of a certain band of 193 Thugs, which has that defect:



     "Fell in with Lall Sing Subahdar and his family, consisting of nine

     persons.  Traveled with them two days, and the third put them all to

     death except the two children, little boys of one and a half years

     old."



There it stops.  What did they do with those poor little fellows?  What

was their subsequent history?  Did they purpose training them up as

Thugs?  How could they take care of such little creatures on a march

which stretched over several months?  No one seems to have cared to ask

any questions about the babies.  But I do wish I knew.



One would be apt to imagine that the Thugs were utterly callous, utterly

destitute of human feelings, heartless toward their own families as well

as toward other people's; but this was not so.  Like all other Indians,

they had a passionate love for their kin.  A shrewd British officer who

knew the Indian character, took that characteristic into account in

laying his plans for the capture of Eugene Sue's famous Feringhea.  He

found out Feringhea's hiding-place, and sent a guard by night to seize

him, but the squad was awkward and he got away.  However, they got the

rest of the family--the mother, wife, child, and brother--and brought

them to the officer, at Jubbulpore; the officer did not fret, but bided

his time: "I knew Feringhea would not go far while links so dear to him

were in my hands."  He was right.  Feringhea knew all the danger he was

running by staying in the neighborhood, still he could not tear himself

away.  The officer found that he divided his time between five villages

where be had relatives and friends who could get news for him from his

family in Jubbulpore jail; and that he never slept two consecutive nights

in the same village.  The officer traced out his several haunts, then

pounced upon all the five villages on the one night and at the same hour,

and got his man.



Another example of family affection.  A little while previously to the

capture of Feringhea's family, the British officer had captured

Feringhea's foster-brother, leader of a gang of ten, and had tried the

eleven and condemned them to be hanged.  Feringhea's captured family

arrived at the jail the day before the execution was to take place.  The

foster-brother, Jhurhoo, entreated to be allowed to see the aged mother

and the others.  The prayer was granted, and this is what took place--it

is the British officer who speaks:



     "In the morning, just before going to the scaffold, the interview

     took place before me.  He fell at the old woman's feet and begged

     that she would relieve him from the obligations of the milk with

     which she had nourished him from infancy, as he was about to die

     before he could fulfill any of them.  She placed her hands on his

     head, and he knelt, and she said she forgave him all, and bid him

     die like a man."



If a capable artist should make a picture of it, it would be full of

dignity and solemnity and pathos; and it could touch you.  You would

imagine it to be anything but what it was.  There is reverence there, and

tenderness, and gratefulness, and compassion, and resignation, and

fortitude, and self-respect--and no sense of disgrace, no thought of

dishonor.  Everything is there that goes to make a noble parting, and

give it a moving grace and beauty and dignity.  And yet one of these

people is a Thug and the other a mother of Thugs!  The incongruities of

our human nature seem to reach their limit here.



I wish to make note of one curious thing while I think of it.  One of the

very commonest remarks to be found in this bewildering array of Thug

confessions is this:



"Strangled him and threw him an a well!"  In one case they threw sixteen

into a well--and they had thrown others in the same well before.  It

makes a body thirsty to read about it.



And there is another very curious thing.  The bands of Thugs had private

graveyards.  They did not like to kill and bury at random, here and there

and everywhere.  They preferred to wait, and toll the victims along, and

get to one of their regular burying-places ('bheels') if they could.  In

the little kingdom of Oude, which was about half as big as Ireland and

about as big as the State of Maine, they had two hundred and seventy-four

'bheels'.  They were scattered along fourteen hundred miles of road, at

an average of only five miles apart, and the British government traced

out and located each and every one of them and set them down on the map.



The Oude bands seldom went out of their own country, but they did a

thriving business within its borders.  So did outside bands who came in

and helped.  Some of the Thug leaders of Oude were noted for their

successful careers.  Each of four of them confessed to above 300 murders;

another to nearly 400; our friend Ramzam to 604--he is the one who got

leave of absence to attend a wedding and went thugging instead; and he is

also the one who betrayed Buhram to the British.



But the biggest records of all were the murder-lists of Futty Khan and

Buhram.  Futty Khan's number is smaller than Ramzam's, but he is placed

at the head because his average is the best in Oude-Thug history per year

of service.  His slaughter was 508 men in twenty years, and he was still

a young man when the British stopped his industry.  Buhram's list was 931

murders, but it took him forty years.  His average was one man and nearly

all of another man per month for forty years, but Futty Khan's average

was two men and a little of another man per month during his twenty years

of usefulness.



There is one very striking thing which I wish to call attention to.  You

have surmised from the listed callings followed by the victims of the

Thugs that nobody could travel the Indian roads unprotected and live to

get through; that the Thugs respected no quality, no vocation, no

religion, nobody; that they killed every unarmed man that came in their

way.  That is wholly true--with one reservation.  In all the long file of

Thug confessions an English traveler is mentioned but once--and this is

what the Thug says of the circumstance:



     "He was on his way from Mhow to Bombay.  We studiously avoided him.

     He proceeded next morning with a number of travelers who had sought

     his protection, and they took the road to Baroda."



We do not know who he was; he flits across the page of this rusty old

book and disappears in the obscurity beyond; but he is an impressive

figure, moving through that valley of death serene and unafraid, clothed

in the might of the English name.



We have now followed the big official book through, and we understand

what Thuggee was, what a bloody terror it was, what a desolating scourge

it was.  In 1830 the English found this cancerous organization imbedded

in the vitals of the empire, doing its devastating work in secrecy, and

assisted, protected, sheltered, and hidden by innumerable confederates--

big and little native chiefs, customs officers, village officials, and

native police, all ready to lie for it, and the mass of the people,

through fear, persistently pretending to know nothing about its doings;

and this condition of things had existed for generations, and was

formidable with the sanctions of age and old custom.  If ever there was

an unpromising task, if ever there was a hopeless task in the world,

surely it was offered here--the task of conquering Thuggee.  But that

little handful of English officials in India set their sturdy and

confident grip upon it, and ripped it out, root and branch!  How modest

do Captain Vallancey's words sound now, when we read them again, knowing

what we know:



     "The day that sees this far-spread evil completely eradicated from

     India, and known only in name, will greatly tend to immortalize

     British rule in the East."



It would be hard to word a claim more modestly than that for this most

noble work.









CHAPTER XLVIII.



Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you

must have somebody to divide it with.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



We left Bombay for Allahabad by a night train.  It is the custom of the

country to avoid day travel when it can conveniently be done.  But there

is one trouble: while you can seemingly "secure" the two lower berths by

making early application, there is no ticket as witness of it, and no

other producible evidence in case your proprietorship shall chance to be

challenged.  The word "engaged" appears on the window, but it doesn't

state who the compartment is engaged, for.  If your Satan and your Barney

arrive before somebody else's servants, and spread the bedding on the two

sofas and then stand guard till you come, all will be well; but if they

step aside on an errand, they may find the beds promoted to the two

shelves, and somebody else's demons standing guard over their master's

beds, which in the meantime have been spread upon your sofas.



You do not pay anything extra for your sleeping place; that is where the

trouble lies.  If you buy a fare-ticket and fail to use it, there is room

thus made available for someone else; but if the place were secured to

you it would remain vacant, and yet your ticket would secure you another

place when you were presently ready to travel.



However, no explanation of such a system can make it seem quite rational

to a person who has been used to a more rational system.  If our people

had the arranging of it, we should charge extra for securing the place,

and then the road would suffer no loss if the purchaser did not occupy

it.



The present system encourages good manners--and also discourages them.

If a young girl has a lower berth and an elderly lady comes in, it is

usual for the girl to offer her place to this late comer; and it is usual

for the late comer to thank her courteously and take it.  But the thing

happens differently sometimes.  When we were ready to leave Bombay my

daughter's satchels were holding possession of her berth--a lower one.

At the last moment, a middle-aged American lady swarmed into the

compartment, followed by native porters laden with her baggage.  She was

growling and snarling and scolding, and trying to make herself

phenomenally disagreeable; and succeeding.  Without a word, she hoisted

the satchels into the hanging shelf, and took possession of that lower

berth.



On one of our trips Mr. Smythe and I got out at a station to walk up and

down, and when we came back Smythe's bed was in the hanging shelf and an

English cavalry officer was in bed on the sofa which he had lately been

occupying.  It was mean to be glad about it, but it is the way we are

made; I could not have been gladder if it had been my enemy that had

suffered this misfortune.  We all like to see people in trouble, if it

doesn't cost us anything.  I was so happy over Mr. Smythe's chagrin that

I couldn't go to sleep for thinking of it and enjoying it.  I knew he

supposed the officer had committed the robbery himself, whereas without a

doubt the officer's servant had done it without his knowledge.  Mr.

Smythe kept this incident warm in his heart, and longed for a chance to

get even with somebody for it.  Sometime afterward the opportunity came,

in Calcutta.  We were leaving on a 24-hour journey to Darjeeling.  Mr.

Barclay, the general superintendent, has made special provision for our

accommodation, Mr. Smythe said; so there was no need to hurry about

getting to the train; consequently, we were a little late.



When we arrived, the usual immense turmoil and confusion of a great

Indian station were in full blast.  It was an immoderately long train,

for all the natives of India were going by it somewhither, and the native

officials were being pestered to frenzy by belated and anxious people.

They didn't know where our car was, and couldn't remember having received

any orders about it.  It was a deep disappointment; moreover, it looked

as if our half of our party would be left behind altogether.  Then Satan

came running and said he had found a compartment with one shelf and one

sofa unoccupied, and had made our beds and had stowed our baggage.  We

rushed to the place, and just as the train was ready to pull out and the

porters were slamming the doors to, all down the line, an officer of the

Indian Civil Service, a good friend of ours, put his head in and said:--



"I have been hunting for you everywhere.  What are you doing here?  Don't

you know----"



The train started before he could finish.  Mr. Smythe's opportunity was

come.  His bedding, on the shelf, at once changed places with the

bedding--a stranger's--that was occupying the sofa that was opposite to

mine.  About ten o'clock we stopped somewhere, and a large Englishman of

official military bearing stepped in.  We pretended to be asleep.  The

lamps were covered, but there was light enough for us to note his look of

surprise.  He stood there, grand and fine, peering down at Smythe, and

wondering in silence at the situation.  After a bit be said:--



"Well!" And that was all.



But that was enough.  It was easy to understand.  It meant: "This is

extraordinary.  This is high-handed.  I haven't had an experience like

this before."



He sat down on his baggage, and for twenty minutes we watched him through

our eyelashes, rocking and swaying there to the motion of the train.

Then we came to a station, and he got up and went out, muttering: "I must

find a lower berth, or wait over." His servant came presently and carried

away his things.



Mr. Smythe's sore place was healed, his hunger for revenge was satisfied.

But he couldn't sleep, and neither could I; for this was a venerable old.

car, and nothing about it was taut.  The closet door slammed all night,

and defied every fastening we could invent.  We got up very much jaded,

at dawn, and stepped out at a way station; and, while we were taking a

cup of coffee, that Englishman ranged up alongside, and somebody said to

him:



"So you didn't stop off, after all?"



"No.  The guard found a place for me that had been, engaged and not

occupied.  I had a whole saloon car all to myself--oh, quite palatial!

I never had such luck in my life."



That was our car, you see.  We moved into it, straight off, the family

and all.  But I asked the English gentleman to remain, and he did.  A

pleasant man, an infantry colonel; and doesn't know, yet, that Smythe

robbed him of his berth, but thinks it was done by Smythe's servant

without Smythe's knowledge.  He was assisted in gathering this

impression.



The Indian trains are manned by natives exclusively.  The Indian stations

except very large and important ones--are manned entirely by natives, and

so are the posts and telegraphs.  The rank and file of the police are

natives.  All these people are pleasant and accommodating.  One day I

left an express train to lounge about in that perennially ravishing show,

the ebb and flow and whirl of gaudy natives, that is always surging up

and down the spacious platform of a great Indian station; and I lost

myself in the ecstasy of it, and when I turned, the train was moving

swiftly away.  I was going to sit down and wait for another train, as I

would have done at home; I had no thought of any other course.  But a

native official, who had a green flag in his hand, saw me, and said

politely:



"Don't you belong in the train, sir?"



"Yes." I said.



He waved his flag, and the train came back!  And he put me aboard with as

much ceremony as if I had been the General Superintendent.  They are

kindly people, the natives.  The face and the bearing that indicate a

surly spirit and a bad heart seemed to me to be so rare among Indians--so

nearly non-existent, in fact--that I sometimes wondered if Thuggee wasn't

a dream, and not a reality.  The bad hearts are there, but I believe that

they are in a small, poor minority.  One thing is sure: They are much the

most interesting people in the world--and the nearest to being

incomprehensible.  At any rate, the hardest to account for.  Their

character and their history, their customs and their religion, confront

you with riddles at every turn-riddles which are a trifle more perplexing

after they are explained than they were before.  You can get the facts of

a custom--like caste, and Suttee, and Thuggee, and so on--and with the

facts a theory which tries to explain, but never quite does it to your

satisfaction.  You can never quite understand how so strange a thing

could have been born, nor why.



For instance--the Suttee.  This is the explanation of it:



A woman who throws away her life when her husband dies is instantly

joined to him again, and is forever afterward happy with him in heaven;

her family will build a little monument to her, or a temple, and will

hold her in honor, and, indeed, worship her memory always; they will

themselves be held in honor by the public; the woman's self-sacrifice has

conferred a noble and lasting distinction upon her posterity.  And,

besides, see what she has escaped: If she had elected to live, she would

be a disgraced person; she could not remarry; her family would despise

her and disown her; she would be a friendless outcast, and miserable all

her days.



Very well, you say, but the explanation is not complete yet.  How did

people come to drift into such a strange custom?  What was the origin of

the idea?  "Well, nobody knows; it was probably a revelation sent down by

the gods."  One more thing: Why was such a cruel death chosen--why

wouldn't a gentle one have answered?  "Nobody knows; maybe that was a

revelation, too."



No--you can never understand it.  It all seems impossible.  You resolve

to believe that a widow never burnt herself willingly, but went to her

death because she was afraid to defy public opinion.  But you are not

able to keep that position.  History drives you from it.  Major Sleeman

has a convincing case in one of his books.  In his government on the

Nerbudda he made a brave attempt on the 28th of March, 1828, to put down

Suttee on his own hook and without warrant from the Supreme Government of

India.  He could not foresee that the Government would put it down itself

eight months later.  The only backing he had was a bold nature and a

compassionate heart.  He issued his proclamation abolishing the Suttee in

his district.  On the morning of Tuesday--note the day of the week--the

24th of the following November, Ummed Singh Upadhya, head of the most

respectable and most extensive Brahmin family in the district, died, and

presently came a deputation of his sons and grandsons to beg that his old

widow might be allowed to burn herself upon his pyre.  Sleeman threatened

to enforce his order, and punish severely any man who assisted; and he

placed a police guard to see that no one did so.  From the early morning

the old widow of sixty-five had been sitting on the bank of the sacred

river by her dead, waiting through the long hours for the permission; and

at last the refusal came instead.  In one little sentence Sleeman gives

you a pathetic picture of this lonely old gray figure: all day and all

night "she remained sitting by the edge of the water without eating or

drinking."  The next morning the body of the husband was burned to ashes

in a pit eight feet square and three or four feet deep, in the view of

several thousand spectators.  Then the widow waded out to a bare rock in

the river, and everybody went away but her sons and other relations.  All

day she sat there on her rock in the blazing sun without food or drink,

and with no clothing but a sheet over her shoulders.



The relatives remained with her and all tried to persuade her to desist

from her purpose, for they deeply loved her.  She steadily refused.  Then

a part of the family went to Sleeman's house, ten miles away, and tried

again to get him to let her burn herself.  He refused, hoping to save her

yet.



All that day she scorched in her sheet on the rock, and all that night

she kept her vigil there in the bitter cold.  Thursday morning, in the

sight of her relatives, she went through a ceremonial which said more to

them than any words could have done; she put on the dhaja (a coarse red

turban) and broke her bracelets in pieces.  By these acts she became a

dead person in the eye of the law, and excluded from her caste forever.

By the iron rule of ancient custom, if she should now choose to live she

could never return to her family.  Sleeman was in deep trouble.  If she

starved herself to death her family would be disgraced; and, moreover,

starving would be a more lingering misery than the death by fire.  He

went back in the evening thoroughly worried.  The old woman remained on

her rock, and there in the morning he found her with her dhaja still on

her head.  "She talked very collectedly, telling me that she had

determined to mix her ashes with those of her departed husband, and

should patiently wait my permission to do so, assured that God would

enable her to sustain life till that was given, though she dared not eat

or drink.  Looking at the sun, then rising before her over a long and

beautiful reach of the river, she said calmly, 'My soul has been for five

days with my husband's near that sun; nothing but my earthly frame is

left; and this, I know, you will in time suffer to be mixed with his

ashes in yonder pit, because it is not in your nature or usage wantonly

to prolong the miseries of a poor old woman.'"



He assured her that it was his desire and duty to save her, and to urge

her to live, and to keep her family from the disgrace of being thought

her murderers.  But she said she "was not afraid of their being thought

so; that they had all, like good children, done everything in their power

to induce her to live, and to abide with them;  and if I should consent I

know they would love and honor me, but my duties to them have now ended.

I commit them all to your care, and I go to attend my husband, Ummed

Singh Upadhya, with whose ashes on the funeral pile mine have been

already three times mixed."



She believed that she and he had been upon the earth three several times

as wife and husband, and that she had burned herself to death three times

upon his pyre.  That is why she said that strange thing.  Since she had

broken her bracelets and put on the red turban she regarded herself as a

corpse; otherwise she would not have allowed herself to do her husband

the irreverence of pronouncing his name.  "This was the first time in her

long life that she had ever uttered her husband's name, for in India no

woman, high or low, ever pronounces the name of her husband."



Major Sleeman still tried to shake her purpose.  He promised to build her

a fine house among the temples of her ancestors upon the bank of the

river and make handsome provision for her out of rent-free lands if she

would consent to live; and if she wouldn't he would allow no stone or

brick to ever mark the place where she died.  But she only smiled and

said, "My pulse has long ceased to beat, my spirit has departed; I shall

suffer nothing in the burning; and if you wish proof, order some fire and

you shall see this arm consumed without giving me any pain."



Sleeman was now satisfied that he could not alter her purpose.  He sent

for all the chief members of the family and said he would suffer her to

burn herself if they would enter into a written engagement to abandon the

suttee in their family thenceforth.  They agreed; the papers were drawn

out and signed, and at noon, Saturday, word was sent to the poor old

woman.  She seemed greatly pleased.  The ceremonies of bathing were gone

through with, and by three o'clock she was ready and the fire was briskly

burning in the pit.  She had now gone without food or drink during more

than four days and a half.  She came ashore from her rock, first wetting

her sheet in the waters of the sacred river, for without that safeguard

any shadow which might fall upon her would convey impurity to her; then

she walked to the pit, leaning upon one of her sons and a nephew--the

distance was a hundred and fifty yards.



"I had sentries placed all around, and no other person was allowed to

approach within five paces.  She came on with a calm and cheerful

countenance, stopped once, and casting her eyes upwards, said, 'Why have

they kept me five days from thee, my husband?'  On coming to the sentries

her supporters stopped and remained standing; she moved on, and walked

once around the pit, paused a moment, and while muttering a prayer, threw

some flowers into the fire.  She then walked up deliberately and steadily

to the brink, stepped into the centre of the flame, sat down, and leaning

back in the midst as if reposing upon a couch, was consumed without

uttering a shriek or betraying one sign of agony."



It is fine and beautiful.  It compels one's reverence and respect--no,

has it freely, and without compulsion.  We see how the custom, once

started, could continue, for the soul of it is that stupendous power,

Faith; faith brought to the pitch of effectiveness by the cumulative

force of example and long use and custom; but we cannot understand how

the first widows came to take to it.  That is a perplexing detail.



Sleeman says that it was usual to play music at the suttee, but that the

white man's notion that this was to drown the screams of the martyr is

not correct; that it had a quite different purpose.  It was believed that

the martyr died prophecying; that the prophecies sometimes foretold

disaster, and it was considered a kindness to those upon whom it was to

fall to drown the voice and keep them in ignorance of the misfortune that

was to come.









CHAPTER XLIX.



He had had much experience of physicians, and said "the only way to keep

your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what; you don't like,

and do what you'd druther not."

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



It was a long journey--two nights, one day, and part of another day, from

Bombay eastward to Allahabad; but it was always interesting, and it was

not fatiguing.  At first the, night travel promised to be fatiguing, but

that was on account of pyjamas.  This foolish night-dress consists of

jacket and drawers.  Sometimes they are made of silk, sometimes of a

raspy, scratchy, slazy woolen material with a sandpaper surface.  The

drawers are loose elephant-legged and elephant-waisted things, and

instead of buttoning around the body there is a drawstring to produce the

required shrinkage.  The jacket is roomy, and one buttons it in front.

Pyjamas are hot on a hot night and cold on a cold night--defects which a

nightshirt is free from.  I tried the pyjamas in order to be in the

fashion; but I was obliged to give them up, I couldn't stand them.  There

was no sufficient change from day-gear to night-gear.  I missed the

refreshing and luxurious sense, induced by the night-gown, of being

undressed, emancipated, set free from restraints and trammels.  In place

of that, I had the worried, confined, oppressed, suffocated sense of

being abed with my clothes on.  All through the warm half of the night

the coarse surfaces irritated my skin and made it feel baked and

feverish, and the dreams which came in the fitful flurries of slumber

were such as distress the sleep of the damned, or ought to; and all

through the cold other half of the night I could get no time for sleep

because I had to employ it all in stealing blankets.  But blankets are of

no value at such a time; the higher they are piled the more effectively

they cork the cold in and keep it from getting out.  The result is that

your legs are ice, and you know how you will feel by and by when you are

buried.  In a sane interval I discarded the pyjamas, and led a rational

and comfortable life thenceforth.



Out in the country in India, the day begins early.  One sees a plain,

perfectly flat, dust-colored and brick-yardy, stretching limitlessly away

on every side in the dim gray light, striped everywhere with hard-beaten

narrow paths, the vast flatness broken at wide intervals by bunches of

spectral trees that mark where villages are; and along all the paths are

slender women and the black forms of lanky naked men moving, to their

work, the women with brass water-jars on their heads, the men carrying

hoes.  The man is not entirely naked; always there is a bit of white rag,

a loin-cloth; it amounts to a bandage, and is a white accent on his black

person, like the silver band around the middle of a pipe-stem.  Sometimes

he also wears a fluffy and voluminous white turban, and this adds a

second accent.  He then answers properly to Miss Gordon Cumming's flash-

light picture of him--as a person who is dressed in "a turban and a

pocket handkerchief."



All day long one has this monotony of dust-colored dead levels and

scattering bunches of trees and mud villages.  You soon realize that

India is not beautiful; still there is an enchantment about it that is

beguiling, and which does not pall.  You cannot tell just what it is that

makes the spell, perhaps, but you feel it and confess it, nevertheless.

Of course, at bottom, you know in a vague way that it is history; it is

that that affects you, a haunting sense of the myriads of human lives

that have blossomed, and withered, and perished here, repeating and

repeating and repeating, century after century, and age after age, the

barren and meaningless process; it is this sense that gives to this

forlorn, uncomely land power to speak to the spirit and make friends with

it; to, speak to it with a voice bitter with satire, but eloquent with

melancholy.  The deserts of Australia and the ice-barrens of Greenland

have no speech, for they have no venerable history; with nothing to tell

of man and his vanities, his fleeting glories and his miseries, they have

nothing wherewith to spiritualize their ugliness and veil it with a

charm.



There is nothing pretty about an Indian village--a mud one--and I do not

remember that we saw any but mud ones on that long flight to Allahabad.

It is a little bunch of dirt-colored mud hovels jammed together within a

mud wall.  As a rule, the rains had beaten down parts of some of the

houses, and this gave the village the aspect of a mouldering and hoary

ruin.  I believe the cattle and the vermin live inside the wall; for I

saw cattle coming out and cattle going in; and whenever I saw a villager,

he was scratching.  This last is only circumstantial evidence, but I

think it has value.  The village has a battered little temple or two, big

enough to hold an idol, and with custom enough to fat-up a priest and

keep him comfortable.  Where there are Mohammedans there are generally a

few sorry tombs outside the village that have a decayed and neglected

look.  The villages interested me because of things which Major Sleeman

says about them in his books--particularly what he says about the

division of labor in them.  He says that the whole face of India is

parceled out into estates of villages; that nine-tenths of the vast

population of the land consist of cultivators of the soil; that it is

these cultivators who inhabit the villages; that there are certain

"established" village servants--mechanics and others who are apparently

paid a wage by the village at large, and whose callings remain in certain

families and are handed down from father to son, like an estate.  He

gives a list of these established servants: Priest, blacksmith,

carpenter, accountant, washerman, basketmaker, potter, watchman, barber,

shoemaker, brazier, confectioner, weaver, dyer, etc.  In his day witches

abounded, and it was not thought good business wisdom for a man to marry

his daughter into a family that hadn't a witch in it, for she would need

a witch on the premises to protect her children from the evil spells

which would certainly be cast upon them by the witches connected with the

neighboring families.



The office of midwife was hereditary in the family of the basket-maker.

It belonged to his wife.  She might not be competent, but the office was

hers, anyway.  Her pay was not high--25 cents for a boy, and half as much

for a girl.  The girl was not desired, because she would be a disastrous

expense by and by.  As soon as she should be old enough to begin to wear

clothes for propriety's sake, it would be a disgrace to the family if she

were not married; and to marry her meant financial ruin; for by custom

the father must spend upon feasting and wedding-display everything he had

and all he could borrow--in fact, reduce himself to a condition of

poverty which he might never more recover from.



It was the dread of this prospective ruin which made the killing of girl-

babies so prevalent in India in the old days before England laid the iron

hand of her prohibitions upon the piteous slaughter.  One may judge of

how prevalent the custom was, by one of Sleeman's casual electrical

remarks, when he speaks of children at play in villages--where girl-

voices were never heard!



The wedding-display folly is still in full force in India, and by

consequence the destruction of girl-babies is still furtively practiced;

but not largely, because of the vigilance of the government and the

sternness of the penalties it levies.



In some parts of India the village keeps in its pay three other servants:

an astrologer to tell the villager when he may plant his crop, or make a

journey, or marry a wife, or strangle a child, or borrow a dog, or climb

a tree, or catch a rat, or swindle a neighbor, without offending the

alert and solicitous heavens; and what his dream means, if he has had one

and was not bright enough to interpret it himself by the details of his

dinner; the two other established servants were the tiger-persuader and

the hailstorm discourager.  The one kept away the tigers if he could, and

collected the wages anyway, and the other kept off the hailstorms, or

explained why he failed.  He charged the same for explaining a failure

that he did for scoring a success.  A man is an idiot who can't earn a

living in India.



Major Sleeman reveals the fact that the trade union and the boycott are

antiquities in India.  India seems to have originated everything.  The

"sweeper" belongs to the bottom caste; he is the lowest of the low--all

other castes despise him and scorn his office.  But that does not trouble

him.  His caste is a caste, and that is sufficient for him, and so he is

proud of it, not ashamed.  Sleeman says:



     "It is perhaps not known to many of my countrymen, even in India,

     that in every town and city in the country the right of sweeping the

     houses and streets is a monopoly, and is supported entirely by the

     pride of castes among the scavengers, who are all of the lowest

     class.  The right of sweeping within a certain range is recognized

     by the caste to belong to a certain member; and if any other member

     presumes to sweep within that range, he is excommunicated--no other

     member will smoke out of his pipe or drink out of his jug; and he

     can get restored to caste only by a feast to the whole body of

     sweepers.  If any housekeeper within a particular circle happens to

     offend the sweeper of that range, none of his filth will be removed

     till he pacifies him, because no other sweeper will dare to touch

     it; and the people of a town are often more tyrannized over by these

     people than by any other."



A footnote by Major Sleeman's editor, Mr. Vincent Arthur Smith, says that

in our day this tyranny of the sweepers' guild is one of the many

difficulties which bar the progress of Indian sanitary reform.  Think of

this:



     "The sweepers cannot be readily coerced, because no Hindoo or

     Mussulman would do their work to save his life, nor will he pollute

     himself by beating the refractory scavenger."



They certainly do seem to have the whip-hand; it would be difficult to

imagine a more impregnable position.  "The vested rights described in the

text are so fully recognized in practice that they are frequently the

subject of sale or mortgage."



Just like a milk-route; or like a London crossing-sweepership.  It is

said that the London crossing-sweeper's right to his crossing is

recognized by the rest of the guild; that they protect him in its

possession; that certain choice crossings are valuable property, and are

saleable at high figures.  I have noticed that the man who sweeps in

front of the Army and Navy Stores has a wealthy South African

aristocratic style about him; and when he is off his guard, he has

exactly that look on his face which you always see in the face of a man

who has is saving up his daughter to marry her to a duke.



It appears from Sleeman that in India the occupation of elephant-driver

is confined to Mohammedans.  I wonder why that is.  The water-carrier

('bheestie') is a Mohammedan, but it is said that the reason of that is,

that the Hindoo's religion does not allow him to touch the skin of dead

kine, and that is what the water-sack is made of; it would defile him.

And it doesn't allow him to eat meat; the animal that furnished the meat

was murdered, and to take any creature's life is a sin.  It is a good and

gentle religion, but inconvenient.



A great Indian river, at low water, suggests the familiar anatomical

picture of a skinned human body, the intricate mesh of interwoven muscles

and tendons to stand for water-channels, and the archipelagoes of fat and

flesh inclosed by them to stand for the sandbars.  Somewhere on this

journey we passed such a river, and on a later journey we saw in the

Sutlej the duplicate of that river.  Curious rivers they are; low shores

a dizzy distance apart, with nothing between but an enormous acreage of

sand-flats with sluggish little veins of water dribbling around amongst

them; Saharas of sand, smallpox-pitted with footprints punctured in belts

as straight as the equator clear from the one shore to the other (barring

the channel-interruptions)--a dry-shod ferry, you see.  Long railway

bridges are required for this sort of rivers, and India has them.  You

approach Allahabad by a very long one.  It was now carrying us across the

bed of the Jumna, a bed which did not seem to have been slept in for one

while or more.  It wasn't all river-bed--most of it was overflow ground.



Allahabad means "City of God." I get this from the books.  From a printed

curiosity--a letter written by one of those brave and confident Hindoo

strugglers with the English tongue, called a "babu"--I got a more

compressed translation: "Godville." It is perfectly correct, but that is

the most that can be said for it.



We arrived in the forenoon, and short-handed; for Satan got left behind

somewhere that morning, and did not overtake us until after nightfall.

It seemed very peaceful without him.  The world seemed asleep and

dreaming.



I did not see the native town, I think.  I do not remember why; for an

incident connects it with the Great Mutiny, and that is enough to make

any place interesting.  But I saw the English part of the city.  It is a

town of wide avenues and noble distances, and is comely and alluring, and

full of suggestions of comfort and leisure, and of the serenity which a

good conscience buttressed by a sufficient bank account gives.  The

bungalows (dwellings) stand well back in the seclusion and privacy of

large enclosed compounds (private grounds, as we should say) and in the

shade and shelter of trees.  Even the photographer and the prosperous

merchant ply their industries in the elegant reserve of big compounds,

and the citizens drive in thereupon their business occasions.  And not in

cabs--no; in the Indian cities cabs are for the drifting stranger; all

the white citizens have private carriages; and each carriage has a flock

of white-turbaned black footmen and drivers all over it.  The vicinity of

a lecture-hall looks like a snowstorm,--and makes the lecturer feel like

an opera.  India has many names, and they are correctly descriptive.  It

is the Land of Contradictions, the Land of Subtlety and Superstition, the

Land of Wealth and Poverty, the Land of Splendor and Desolation, the Land

of Plague and Famine, the Land of the Thug and the Poisoner, and of the

Meek and the Patient, the Land of the Suttee, the Land of the

Unreinstatable Widow, the Land where All Life is Holy, the Land of

Cremation, the Land where the Vulture is a Grave and a Monument, the Land

of the Multitudinous Gods; and if signs go for anything, it is the Land

of the Private Carriage.



In Bombay the forewoman of a millinery shop came to the hotel in her

private carriage to take the measure for a gown--not for me, but for

another.  She had come out to India to make a temporary stay, but was

extending it indefinitely; indeed, she was purposing to end her days

there.  In London, she said, her work had been hard, her hours long; for

economy's sake she had had to live in shabby rooms and far away from the

shop, watch the pennies, deny herself many of the common comforts of

life, restrict herself in effect to its bare necessities, eschew cabs,

travel third-class by underground train to and from her work, swallowing

coal-smoke and cinders all the way, and sometimes troubled with the

society of men and women who were less desirable than the smoke and the

cinders.  But in Bombay, on almost any kind of wages, she could live in

comfort, and keep her carriage, and have six servants in place of the

woman-of-all-work she had had in her English home.  Later, in Calcutta, I

found that the Standard Oil clerks had small one-horse vehicles, and did

no walking; and I was told that the clerks of the other large concerns

there had the like equipment.  But to return to Allahabad.



I was up at dawn, the next morning.  In India the tourist's servant does

not sleep in a room in the hotel, but rolls himself up head and ears in

his blanket and stretches himself on the veranda, across the front of his

master's door, and spends the night there.  I don't believe anybody's

servant occupies a room.  Apparently, the bungalow servants sleep on the

veranda; it is roomy, and goes all around the house.  I speak of

menservants; I saw none of the other sex.  I think there are none, except

child-nurses.  I was up at dawn, and walked around the veranda, past the

rows of sleepers.  In front of one door a Hindoo servant was squatting,

waiting for his master to call him.  He had polished the yellow shoes and

placed them by the door, and now he had nothing to do but wait.  It was

freezing cold, but there he was, as motionless as a sculptured image, and

as patient.  It troubled me.  I wanted to say to him, "Don't crouch there

like that and freeze; nobody requires it of you; stir around and get

warm."  But I hadn't the words.  I thought of saying 'jeldy jow', but I

couldn't remember what it meant, so I didn't say it.  I knew another

phrase, but it wouldn't come to my mind.  I moved on, purposing to

dismiss him from my thoughts, but his bare legs and bare feet kept him

there.  They kept drawing me back from the sunny side to a point whence I

could see him.  At the end of an hour he had not changed his attitude in

the least degree.  It was a curious and impressive exhibition of meekness

and patience, or fortitude or indifference, I did not know which.  But it

worried me, and it was spoiling my morning.  In fact, it spoiled two

hours of it quite thoroughly.  I quitted this vicinity, then, and left

him to punish himself as much as he might want to.  But up to that time

the man had not changed his attitude a hair.  He will always remain with

me, I suppose; his figure never grows vague in my memory.  Whenever I

read of Indian resignation, Indian patience under wrongs, hardships, and

misfortunes, he comes before me.  He becomes a personification, and

stands for India in trouble.  And for untold ages India in trouble has

been pursued with the very remark which I was going to utter but didn't,

because its meaning had slipped me: "Jeddy jow!"  ("Come, shove along!")



Why, it was the very thing.



In the early brightness we made a long drive out to the Fort.  Part of

the way was beautiful.  It led under stately trees and through groups of

native houses and by the usual village well, where the picturesque gangs

are always flocking to and fro and laughing and chattering; and this time

brawny men were deluging their bronze bodies with the limpid water, and

making a refreshing and enticing show of it; enticing, for the sun was

already transacting business, firing India up for the day.  There was

plenty of this early bathing going on, for it was getting toward

breakfast time, and with an unpurified body the Hindoo must not eat.



Then we struck into the hot plain, and found the roads crowded with

pilgrims of both sexes, for one of the great religious fairs of India was

being held, just beyond the Fort, at the junction of the sacred rivers,

the Ganges and the Jumna.  Three sacred rivers, I should have said, for

there is a subterranean one.  Nobody has seen it, but that doesn't

signify.  The fact that it is there is enough.  These pilgrims had come

from all over India; some of them had been months on the way, plodding

patiently along in the heat and dust, worn, poor, hungry, but supported

and sustained by an unwavering faith and belief; they were supremely

happy and content, now; their full and sufficient reward was at hand;

they were going to be cleansed from every vestige of sin and corruption

by these holy waters which make utterly pure whatsoever thing they touch,

even the dead and rotten.  It is wonderful, the power of a faith like

that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and

the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such

incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining.

It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know which it is.

No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination

marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites.  There are choice great

natures among us that could exhibit the equivalent of this prodigious

self-sacrifice, but the rest of us know that we should not be equal to

anything approaching it.  Still, we all talk self-sacrifice, and this

makes me hope that we are large enough to honor it in the Hindoo.



Two millions of natives arrive at this fair every year.  How many start,

and die on the road, from age and fatigue and disease and scanty

nourishment, and how many die on the return, from the same causes, no one

knows; but the tale is great, one may say enormous.  Every twelfth year

is held to be a year of peculiar grace; a greatly augmented volume of

pilgrims results then.  The twelfth year has held this distinction since

the remotest times, it is said.  It is said also that there is to be but

one more twelfth year--for the Ganges.  After that, that holiest of all

sacred rivers will cease to be holy, and will be abandoned by the pilgrim

for many centuries; how many, the wise men have not stated.  At the end

of that interval it will become holy again.  Meantime, the data will be

arranged by those people who have charge of all such matters, the great

chief Brahmins.  It will be like shutting down a mint.  At a first glance

it looks most unbrahminically uncommercial, but I am not disturbed, being

soothed and tranquilized by their reputation.  "Brer fox he lay low," as

Uncle Remus says; and at the judicious time he will spring something on

the Indian public which will show that he was not financially asleep when

he took the Ganges out of the market.



Great numbers of the natives along the roads were bringing away holy

water from the rivers.  They would carry it far and wide in India and

sell it.  Tavernier, the French traveler (17th century), notes that

Ganges water is often given at weddings, "each guest receiving a cup or

two, according to the liberality of the host; sometimes 2,000 or 3,000

rupees' worth of it is consumed at a wedding."



The Fort is a huge old structure, and has had a large experience in

religions.  In its great court stands a monolith which was placed there

more than 2,000 years ago to preach (Budhism) by its pious inscription;

the Fort was built three centuries ago by a Mohammedan Emperor--a

resanctification of the place in the interest of that religion.  There is

a Hindoo temple, too, with subterranean ramifications stocked with

shrines and idols; and now the Fort belongs to the English, it contains a

Christian Church.  Insured in all the companies.



From the lofty ramparts one has a fine view of the sacred rivers.  They

join at that point--the pale blue Jumna, apparently clean and clear, and

the muddy Ganges, dull yellow and not clean.  On a long curved spit

between the rivers, towns of tents were visible, with a multitude of

fluttering pennons, and a mighty swarm of pilgrims.  It was a troublesome

place to get down to, and not a quiet place when you arrived; but it was

interesting.  There was a world of activity and turmoil and noise, partly

religious, partly commercial; for the Mohammedans were there to curse and

sell, and the Hindoos to buy and pray.  It is a fair as well as a

religious festival.  Crowds were bathing, praying, and drinking the

purifying waters, and many sick pilgrims had come long journeys in

palanquins to be healed of their maladies by a bath; or if that might not

be, then to die on the blessed banks and so make sure of heaven.  There

were fakeers in plenty, with their bodies dusted over with ashes and

their long hair caked together with cow-dung; for the cow is holy and so

is the rest of it; so holy that the good Hindoo peasant frescoes the

walls of his hut with this refuse, and also constructs ornamental figures

out of it for the gracing of his dirt floor.  There were seated families,

fearfully and wonderfully painted, who by attitude and grouping

represented the families of certain great gods.  There was a holy man who

sat naked by the day and by the week on a cluster of iron spikes, and did

not seem to mind it; and another holy man, who stood all day holding his

withered arms motionless aloft, and was said to have been doing it for

years.  All of these performers have a cloth on the ground beside them

for the reception of contributions, and even the poorest of the people

give a trifle and hope that the sacrifice will be blessed to him.  At

last came a procession of naked holy people marching by and chanting, and

I wrenched myself away.









CHAPTER L.



The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that

wears a fig-leaf.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



The journey to Benares was all in daylight, and occupied but a few hours.

It was admirably dusty.  The dust settled upon you in a thick ashy layer

and turned you into a fakeer, with nothing lacking to the role but the

cow manure and the sense of holiness.  There was a change of cars about

mid-afternoon at Moghul-serai--if that was the name--and a wait of two

hours there for the Benares train.  We could have found a carriage and

driven to the sacred city, but we should have lost the wait.  In other

countries a long wait at a station is a dull thing and tedious, but one

has no right to have that feeling in India.  You have the monster crowd

of bejeweled natives, the stir, the bustle, the confusion, the shifting

splendors of the costumes--dear me, the delight of it, the charm of it

are beyond speech.  The two-hour wait was over too soon.  Among other

satisfying things to look at was a minor native prince from the backwoods

somewhere, with his guard of honor, a ragged but wonderfully gaudy gang

of fifty dark barbarians armed with rusty flint-lock muskets.  The

general show came so near to exhausting variety that one would have said

that no addition to it could be conspicuous, but when this Falstaff and

his motleys marched through it one saw that that seeming impossibility

had happened.



We got away by and by, and soon reached the outer edge of Benares; then

there was another wait; but, as usual, with something to look at.  This

was a cluster of little canvasboxes-palanquins.  A canvas-box is not much

of a sight--when empty; but when there is a lady in it, it is an object

of interest.  These boxes were grouped apart, in the full blaze of the

terrible sun during the three-quarters of an hour that we tarried there.

They contained zenana ladies.  They had to sit up; there was not room

enough to stretch out.  They probably did not mind it.  They are used to

the close captivity of the dwellings all their lives; when they go a

journey they are carried to the train in these boxes; in the train they

have to be secluded from inspection.  Many people pity them, and I always

did it myself and never charged anything; but it is doubtful if this

compassion is valued.  While we were in India some good-hearted Europeans

in one of the cities proposed to restrict a large park to the use of

zenana ladies, so that they could go there and in assured privacy go

about unveiled and enjoy the sunshine and air as they had never enjoyed

them before.  The good intentions back of the proposition were

recognized, and sincere thanks returned for it, but the proposition

itself met with a prompt declination at the hands of those who were

authorized to speak for the zenana ladies.  Apparently, the idea was

shocking to the ladies--indeed, it was quite manifestly shocking.  Was

that proposition the equivalent of inviting European ladies to assemble

scantily and scandalously clothed in the seclusion of a private park?  It

seemed to be about that.



Without doubt modesty is nothing less than a holy feeling; and without

doubt the person whose rule of modesty has been trangressed feels the

same sort of wound that he would feel if something made holy to him by

his religion had suffered a desecration.  I say "rule of modesty" because

there are about a million rules in the world, and this makes a million

standards to be looked out for.  Major Sleeman mentions the case of some

high-caste veiled ladies who were profoundly scandalized when some

English young ladies passed by with faces bare to the world; so

scandalized that they spoke out with strong indignation and wondered that

people could be so shameless as to expose their persons like that.  And

yet "the legs of the objectors were naked to mid-thigh."  Both parties

were clean-minded and irreproachably modest, while abiding by their

separate rules, but they couldn't have traded rules for a change without

suffering considerable discomfort.  All human rules are more or less

idiotic, I suppose.  It is best so, no doubt.  The way it is now, the

asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane

we should run out of building materials.



You have a long drive through the outskirts of Benares before you get to

the hotel.  And all the aspects are melancholy.  It is a vision of dusty

sterility, decaying temples, crumbling tombs, broken mud walls, shabby

huts.  The whole region seems to ache with age and penury.  It must take

ten thousand years of want to produce such an aspect.  We were still

outside of the great native city when we reached the hotel.  It was a

quiet and homelike house, inviting, and manifestly comfortable.  But we

liked its annex better, and went thither.  It was a mile away, perhaps,

and stood in the midst of a large compound, and was built bungalow

fashion, everything on the ground floor, and a veranda all around.  They

have doors in India, but I don't know why.  They don't fasten, and they

stand open, as a rule, with a curtain hanging in the doorspace to keep

out the glare of the sun.  Still, there is plenty of privacy, for no

white person will come in without notice, of course.  The native men

servants will, but they don't seem to count.  They glide in, barefoot and

noiseless, and are in the midst before one knows it.  At first this is a

shock, and sometimes it is an embarrassment; but one has to get used to

it, and does.



There was one tree in the compound, and a monkey lived in it.  At first I

was strongly interested in the tree, for I was told that it was the

renowned peepul--the tree in whose shadow you cannot tell a lie.  This

one failed to stand the test, and I went away from it disappointed.

There was a softly creaking well close by, and a couple of oxen drew

water from it by the hour, superintended by two natives dressed in the

usual "turban and pocket-handkerchief."  The tree and the well were the

only scenery, and so the compound was a soothing and lonesome and

satisfying place; and very restful after so many activities.  There was

nobody in our bungalow but ourselves; the other guests were in the next

one, where the table d'hote was furnished.  A body could not be more

pleasantly situated.  Each room had the customary bath attached--a room

ten or twelve feet square, with a roomy stone-paved pit in it and

abundance of water.  One could not easily improve upon this arrangement,

except by furnishing it with cold water and excluding the hot, in

deference to the fervency of the climate; but that is forbidden.  It

would damage the bather's health.  The stranger is warned against taking

cold baths in India, but even the most intelligent strangers are fools,

and they do not obey, and so they presently get laid up.  I was the most

intelligent fool that passed through, that year.  But I am still more

intelligent now.  Now that it is too late.



I wonder if the 'dorian', if that is the name of it, is another

superstition, like the peepul tree.  There was a great abundance and

variety of tropical fruits, but the dorian was never in evidence.  It was

never the season for the dorian.  It was always going to arrive from

Burma sometime or other, but it never did.  By all accounts it was a most

strange fruit, and incomparably delicious to the taste, but not to the

smell.  Its rind was said to exude a stench of so atrocious a nature that

when a dorian was in the room even the presence of a polecat was a

refreshment.  We found many who had eaten the dorian, and they all spoke

of it with a sort of rapture.  They said that if you could hold your nose

until the fruit was in your mouth a sacred joy would suffuse you from

head to foot that would make you oblivious to the smell of the rind, but

that if your grip slipped and you caught the smell of the rind before the

fruit was in your mouth, you would faint.  There is a fortune in that

rind.  Some day somebody will import it into Europe and sell it for

cheese.



Benares was not a disappointment.  It justified its reputation as a

curiosity.  It is on high ground, and overhangs a grand curve of the

Ganges.  It is a vast mass of building, compactly crusting a hill, and is

cloven in all directions by an intricate confusion of cracks which stand

for streets.  Tall, slim minarets and beflagged temple-spires rise out of

it and give it picturesqueness, viewed from the river.  The city is as

busy as an ant-hill, and the hurly-burly of human life swarming along the

web of narrow streets reminds one of the ants.  The sacred cow swarms

along, too, and goes whither she pleases, and takes toll of the grain-

shops, and is very much in the way, and is a good deal of a nuisance,

since she must not be molested.



Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than

legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.  From a

Hindoo statement quoted in Rev. Mr. Parker's compact and lucid Guide to

Benares, I find that the site of the town was the beginning-place of the

Creation.  It was merely an upright "lingam," at first, no larger than a

stove-pipe, and stood in the midst of a shoreless ocean.  This was the

work of the God Vishnu.  Later he spread the lingam out till its surface

was ten miles across.  Still it was not large enough for the business;

therefore he presently built the globe around it.  Benares is thus the

center of the earth.  This is considered an advantage.



It has had a tumultuous history, both materially and spiritually.  It

started Brahminically, many ages ago; then by and by Buddha came in

recent times 2,500 years ago, and after that it was Buddhist during many

centuries--twelve, perhaps--but the Brahmins got the upper hand again,

then, and have held it ever since.  It is unspeakably sacred in Hindoo

eyes, and is as unsanitary as it is sacred, and smells like the rind of

the dorian.  It is the headquarters of the Brahmin faith, and one-eighth

of the population are priests of that church.  But it is not an

overstock, for they have all India as a prey.  All India flocks thither

on pilgrimage, and pours its savings into the pockets of the priests in a

generous stream, which never fails.  A priest with a good stand on the

shore of the Ganges is much better off than the sweeper of the best

crossing in London.  A good stand is worth a world of money.  The holy

proprietor of it sits under his grand spectacular umbrella and blesses

people all his life, and collects his commission, and grows fat and rich;

and the stand passes from father to son, down and down and down through

the ages, and remains a permanent and lucrative estate in the family.  As

Mr. Parker suggests, it can become a subject of dispute, at one time or

another, and then the matter will be settled, not by prayer and fasting

and consultations with Vishnu, but by the intervention of a much more

puissant power--an English court.  In Bombay I was told by an American

missionary that in India there are 640 Protestant missionaries at work.

At first it seemed an immense force, but of course that was a thoughtless

idea.  One missionary to 500,000 natives--no, that is not a force; it is

the reverse of it; 640 marching against an intrenched camp of

300,000,000--the odds are too great.  A force of 640 in Benares alone

would have its hands over-full with 8,000 Brahmin priests for adversary.

Missionaries need to be well equipped with hope and confidence, and this

equipment they seem to have always had in all parts of the world.  Mr.

Parker has it.  It enables him to get a favorable outlook out of

statistics which might add up differently with other mathematicians.  For

instance:



"During the past few years competent observers declare that the number of

pilgrims to Benares has increased."



And then he adds up this fact and gets this conclusion:



"But the revival, if so it may be called, has in it the marks of death.

It is a spasmodic struggle before dissolution."



In this world we have seen the Roman Catholic power dying, upon these

same terms, for many centuries.  Many a time we have gotten all ready for

the funeral and found it postponed again, on account of the weather or

something.  Taught by experience, we ought not to put on our things for

this Brahminical one till we see the procession move.  Apparently one of

the most uncertain things in the world is the funeral of a religion.



I should have been glad to acquire some sort of idea of Hindoo theology,

but the difficulties were too great, the matter was too intricate.  Even

the mere A, B, C of it is baffling.



There is a trinity--Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu--independent powers,

apparently, though one cannot feel quite sure of that, because in one of

the temples there is an image where an attempt has been made to

concentrate the three in one person.  The three have other names and

plenty of them, and this makes confusion in one's mind.  The three have

wives and the wives have several names, and this increases the confusion.

There are children, the children have many names, and thus the confusion

goes on and on.  It is not worth while to try to get any grip upon the

cloud of minor gods, there are too many of them.



It is even a justifiable economy to leave Brahma, the chiefest god of

all, out of your studies, for he seems to cut no great figure in India.

The vast bulk of the national worship is lavished upon Shiva and Vishnu

and their families.  Shiva's symbol--the "lingam" with which Vishnu began

the Creation--is worshiped by everybody, apparently.  It is the commonest

object in Benares.  It is on view everywhere, it is garlanded with

flowers, offerings are made to it, it suffers no neglect.  Commonly it is

an upright stone, shaped like a thimble-sometimes like an elongated

thimble.  This priapus-worship, then, is older than history.  Mr. Parker

says that the lingams in Benares "outnumber the inhabitants."



In Benares there are many Mohammedan mosques.  There are Hindoo temples

without number--these quaintly shaped and elaborately sculptured little

stone jugs crowd all the lanes.  The Ganges itself and every individual

drop of water in it are temples.  Religion, then, is the business of

Benares, just as gold-production is the business of Johannesburg.  Other

industries count for nothing as compared with the vast and all-absorbing

rush and drive and boom of the town's specialty.  Benares is the

sacredest of sacred cities.  The moment you step across the sharply-

defined line which separates it from the rest of the globe, you stand

upon ineffably and unspeakably holy ground.  Mr. Parker says: "It is

impossible to convey any adequate idea of the intense feelings of

veneration and affection with which the pious Hindoo regards 'Holy Kashi'

(Benares)." And then he gives you this vivid and moving picture:



     "Let a Hindoo regiment be marched through the district, and as soon

     as they cross the line and enter the limits of the holy place they

     rend the air with cries of 'Kashi ji ki jai--jai--jai!  (Holy

     Kashi!  Hail to thee!  Hail!  Hail!  Hail)'.  The weary pilgrim

     scarcely able to stand, with age and weakness, blinded by the dust

     and heat, and almost dead with fatigue, crawls out of the oven-like

     railway carriage and as soon as his feet touch the ground he lifts

     up his withered hands and utters the same pious exclamation.  Let a

     European in some distant city in casual talk in the bazar mention

     the fact that he has lived at Benares, and at once voices will be

     raised to call down blessings on his head, for a dweller in Benares

     is of all men most blessed."



It makes our own religious enthusiasm seem pale and cold.  Inasmuch as

the life of religion is in the heart, not the head, Mr. Parker's touching

picture seems to promise a sort of indefinite postponement of that

funeral.









CHAPTER LI.



Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its

laws or its songs either.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Yes, the city of Benares is in effect just a big church, a religious

hive, whose every cell is a temple, a shrine or a mosque, and whose every

conceivable earthly and heavenly good is procurable under one roof, so to

speak--a sort of Army and Navy Stores, theologically stocked.



I will make out a little itinerary for the pilgrim; then you will see how

handy the system is, how convenient, how comprehensive.  If you go to

Benares with a serious desire to spiritually benefit yourself, you will

find it valuable.  I got some of the facts from conversations with the

Rev. Mr. Parker and the others from his Guide to Benares; they are

therefore trustworthy.



1. Purification.  At sunrise you must go down to the Ganges and bathe,

pray, and drink some of the water.  This is for your general

purification.



2. Protection against Hunger.  Next, you must fortify yourself against

the sorrowful earthly ill just named.  This you will do by worshiping for

a moment in the Cow Temple.  By the door of it you will find an image of

Ganesh, son of Shiva; it has the head of an elephant on a human body; its

face and hands are of silver.  You will worship it a little, and pass on,

into a covered veranda, where you will find devotees reciting from the

sacred books, with the help of instructors.  In this place are groups of

rude and dismal idols.  You may contribute something for their support;

then pass into the temple, a grim and stenchy place, for it is populous

with sacred cows and with beggars.  You will give something to the

beggars, and "reverently kiss the tails" of such cows as pass along, for

these cows are peculiarly holy, and this act of worship will secure you

from hunger for the day.



3. "The Poor Man's Friend."  You will next worship this god.  He is at

the bottom of a stone cistern in the temple of Dalbhyeswar, under the

shade of a noble peepul tree on the bluff overlooking the Ganges, so you

must go back to the river.  The Poor Man's Friend is the god of material

prosperity in general, and the god of the rain in particular.  You will

secure material prosperity, or both, by worshiping him.  He is Shiva,

under a new alias, and he abides in the bottom of that cistern, in the

form of a stone lingam.  You pour Ganges water over him, and in return

for this homage you get the promised benefits.  If there is any delay

about the rain, you must pour water in until the cistern is full; the

rain will then be sure to come.



4. Fever.  At the Kedar Ghat you will find a long flight of stone steps

leading down to the river.  Half way down is a tank filled with sewage.

Drink as much of it as you want.  It is for fever.



5. Smallpox.  Go straight from there to the central Ghat.  At its

upstream end you will find a small whitewashed building, which is a

temple sacred to Sitala, goddess of smallpox.  Her under-study is there--

a rude human figure behind a brass screen.  You will worship this for

reasons to be furnished presently.



6. The Well of Fate.  For certain reasons you will next go and do homage

at this well.  You will find it in the Dandpan Temple, in the city.  The

sunlight falls into it from a square hole in the masonry above.  You will

approach it with awe, for your life is now at stake.  You will bend over

and look.  If the fates are propitious, you will see your face pictured

in the water far down in the well.  If matters have been otherwise

ordered, a sudden cloud will mask the sun and you will see nothing.  This

means that you have not six months to live.  If you are already at the

point of death, your circumstances are now serious.  There is no time to

lose.  Let this world go, arrange for the next one.  Handily situated, at

your very elbow, is opportunity for this.  You turn and worship the image

of Maha Kal, the Great Fate, and happiness in the life to come is

secured.  If there is breath in your body yet, you should now make an

effort to get a further lease of the present life.  You have a chance.

There is a chance for everything in this admirably stocked and

wonderfully systemized Spiritual and Temporal Army and Navy Store.  You

must get yourself carried to the



7. Well of Long Life.  This is within the precincts of the mouldering and

venerable Briddhkal Temple, which is one of the oldest in Benares.  You

pass in by a stone image of the monkey god, Hanuman, and there, among the

ruined courtyards, you will find a shallow pool of stagnant sewage.  It

smells like the best limburger cheese, and is filthy with the washings of

rotting lepers, but that is nothing, bathe in it; bathe in it gratefully

and worshipfully, for this is the Fountain of Youth; these are the Waters

of Long Life.  Your gray hairs will disappear, and with them your

wrinkles and your rheumatism, the burdens of care and the weariness of

age, and you will come out young, fresh, elastic, and full of eagerness

for the new race of life.  Now will come flooding upon you the manifold

desires that haunt the dear dreams of the morning of life.  You will go

whither you will find



8. Fulfillment of Desire.  To wit, to the Kameshwar Temple, sacred to

Shiva as the Lord of Desires.  Arrange for yours there.  And if you like

to look at idols among the pack and jam of temples, there you will find

enough to stock a museum.  You will begin to commit sins now with a

fresh, new vivacity; therefore, it will be well to go frequently to a

place where you can get



9. Temporary Cleansing from Sin.  To wit, to the Well of the Earring.

You must approach this with the profoundest reverence, for it is

unutterably sacred.  It is, indeed, the most sacred place in Benares, the

very Holy of Holies, in the estimation of the people.  It is a railed

tank, with stone stairways leading down to the water.  The water is not

clean.  Of course it could not be, for people are always bathing in it.

As long as you choose to stand and look, you will see the files of

sinners descending and ascending--descending soiled with sin, ascending

purged from it.  "The liar, the thief, the murderer, and the adulterer

may here wash and be clean," says the Rev. Mr. Parker, in his book.  Very

well.  I know Mr. Parker, and I believe it; but if anybody else had said

it, I should consider him a person who had better go down in the tank and

take another wash.  The god Vishnu dug this tank.  He had nothing to dig

with but his "discus." I do not know what a discus is, but I know it is a

poor thing to dig tanks with, because, by the time this one was finished,

it was full of sweat--Vishnu's sweat.  He constructed the site that

Benares stands on, and afterward built the globe around it, and thought

nothing of it, yet sweated like that over a little thing like this tank.

One of these statements is doubtful.  I do not know which one it is, but

I think it difficult not to believe that a god who could build a world

around Benares would not be intelligent enough to build it around the

tank too, and not have to dig it.  Youth, long life, temporary

purification from sin, salvation through propitiation of the Great Fate--

these are all good.  But you must do something more.  You must



10. Make Salvation Sure.  There are several ways.  To get drowned in

the Ganges is one, but that is not pleasant.  To die within the limits of

Benares is another; but that is a risky one, because you might be out of

town when your time came.  The best one of all is the Pilgrimage Around

the City.  You must walk; also, you must go barefoot.  The tramp is

forty-four miles, for the road winds out into the country a piece, and

you will be marching five or six days.  But you will have plenty of

company.  You will move with throngs and hosts of happy pilgrims whose

radiant costumes will make the spectacle beautiful and whose glad songs

and holy pans of triumph will banish your fatigues and cheer your spirit;

and at intervals there will be temples where you may sleep and be

refreshed with food.  The pilgrimage completed, you have purchased

salvation, and paid for it.  But you may not get it unless you



11. Get Your Redemption Recorded.  You can get this done at the Sakhi

Binayak Temple, and it is best to do it, for otherwise you might not be

able to prove that you had made the pilgrimage in case the matter should

some day come to be disputed.  That temple is in a lane back of the Cow

Temple.  Over the door is a red image of Ganesh of the elephant head, son

and heir of Shiva, and Prince of Wales to the Theological Monarchy, so to

speak.  Within is a god whose office it is to record your pilgrimage and

be responsible for you.  You will not see him, but you will see a Brahmin

who will attend to the matter and take the money.  If he should forget to

collect the money, you can remind him.  He knows that your salvation is

now secure, but of course you would like to know it yourself.  You have

nothing to do but go and pray, and pay at the



12.  Well of the Knowledge of Salvation.  It is close to the Golden

Temple.  There you will see, sculptured out of a single piece of black

marble, a bull which is much larger than any living bull you have ever

seen, and yet is not a good likeness after all.  And there also you will

see a very uncommon thing--an image of Shiva.  You have seen his lingam

fifty thousand times already, but this is Shiva himself, and said to be a

good likeness.  It has three eyes.  He is the only god in the firm that

has three.  "The well is covered by a fine canopy of stone supported by

forty pillars," and around it you will find what you have already seen at

almost every shrine you have visited in Benares, a mob of devout and

eager pilgrims.  The sacred water is being ladled out to them; with it

comes to them the knowledge, clear, thrilling, absolute, that they are

saved; and you can see by their faces that there is one happiness in this

world which is supreme, and to which no other joy is comparable.  You

receive your water, you make your deposit, and now what more would you

have?  Gold, diamonds, power, fame?  All in a single moment these things

have withered to dirt, dust, ashes.  The world has nothing to give you

now.  For you it is bankrupt.



I do not claim that the pilgrims do their acts of worship in the order

and sequence above charted out in this Itinerary of mine, but I think

logic suggests that they ought to do so.  Instead of a helter-skelter

worship, we then have a definite starting-place, and a march which

carries the pilgrim steadily forward by reasoned and logical progression

to a definite goal.  Thus, his Ganges bath in the early morning gives him

an appetite; he kisses the cow-tails, and that removes it.  It is now

business hours, and longings for material prosperity rise in his mind,

and be goes and pours water over Shiva's symbol; this insures the

prosperity, but also brings on a rain, which gives him a fever.  Then he

drinks the sewage at the Kedar Ghat to cure the fever; it cures the fever

but gives him the smallpox.  He wishes to know how it is going to turn

out; he goes to the Dandpan Temple and looks down the well.  A clouded

sun shows him that death is near.  Logically his best course for the

present, since he cannot tell at what moment he may die, is to secure a

happy hereafter; this he does, through the agency of the Great Fate.  He

is safe, now, for heaven; his next move will naturally be to keep out of

it as long as he can.  Therefore he goes to the Briddhkal Temple and

secures Youth and long life by bathing in a puddle of leper-pus which

would kill a microbe.  Logically, Youth has re-equipped him for sin and

with the disposition to commit it; he will naturally go to the fane which

is consecrated to the Fulfillment of Desires, and make arrangements.

Logically, he will now go to the Well of the Earring from time to time to

unload and freshen up for further banned enjoyments.  But first and last

and all the time he is human, and therefore in his reflective intervals

he will always be speculating in "futures."  He will make the Great

Pilgrimage around the city and so make his salvation absolutely sure; he

will also have record made of it, so that it may remain absolutely sure

and not be forgotten or repudiated in the confusion of the Final

Settlement.  Logically, also, he will wish to have satisfying and

tranquilizing personal knowledge that that salvation is secure; therefore

he goes to the Well of the Knowledge of Salvation, adds that completing

detail, and then goes about his affairs serene and content; serene and

content, for he is now royally endowed with an advantage which no

religion in this world could give him but his own; for henceforth he may

commit as many million sins as he wants to and nothing can come of it.



Thus the system, properly and logically ordered, is neat, compact,

clearly defined, and covers the whole ground.  I desire to recommend it

to such as find the other systems too difficult, exacting, and irksome

for the uses of this fretful brief life of ours.



However, let me not deceive any one.  My Itinerary lacks a detail.  I

must put it in.  The truth is, that after the pilgrim has faithfully

followed the requirements of the Itinerary through to the end and has

secured his salvation and also the personal knowledge of that fact, there

is still an accident possible to him which can annul the whole thing.  If

he should ever cross to the other side of the Ganges and get caught out

and die there he would at once come to life again in the form of an ass.

Think of that, after all this trouble and expense.  You see how

capricious and uncertain salvation is there.  The Hindoo has a childish

and unreasoning aversion to being turned into an ass.  It is hard to tell

why.  One could properly expect an ass to have an aversion to being

turned into a Hindoo.  One could understand that he could lose dignity by

it; also self-respect, and nine-tenths of his intelligence.  But the

Hindoo changed into an ass wouldn't lose anything, unless you count his

religion.  And he would gain much--release from his slavery to two

million gods and twenty million priests, fakeers, holy mendicants, and

other sacred bacilli; he would escape the Hindoo hell; he would also

escape the Hindoo heaven.  These are advantages which the Hindoo ought to

consider; then he would go over and die on the other side.



Benares is a religious Vesuvius.  In its bowels the theological forces

have been heaving and tossing, rumbling, thundering and quaking, boiling,

and weltering and flaming and smoking for ages.  But a little group of

missionaries have taken post at its base, and they have hopes.  There are

the Baptist Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, the London

Missionary Society, the Wesleyan Missionary Society, and the Zenana Bible

and Medical Mission.  They have schools, and the principal work seems to

be among the children.  And no doubt that part of the work prospers best,

for grown people everywhere are always likely to cling to the religion

they were brought up in.









CHAPTER LII.



Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



In one of those Benares temples we saw a devotee working for salvation in

a curious way.  He had a huge wad of clay beside him and was making it up

into little wee gods no bigger than carpet tacks.  He stuck a grain of

rice into each--to represent the lingam, I think.  He turned them out

nimbly, for he had had long practice and had acquired great facility.

Every day he made 2,000 gods, then threw them into the holy Ganges.  This

act of homage brought him the profound homage of the pious--also their

coppers.  He had a sure living here, and was earning a high place in the

hereafter.



The Ganges front is the supreme show-place of Benares.  Its tall bluffs

are solidly caked from water to summit, along a stretch of three miles,

with a splendid jumble of massive and picturesque masonry, a bewildering

and beautiful confusion of stone platforms, temples, stair-flights, rich

and stately palaces--nowhere a break, nowhere a glimpse of the bluff

itself; all the long face of it is compactly walled from sight by this

crammed perspective of platforms, soaring stairways, sculptured temples,

majestic palaces, softening away into the distances; and there is

movement, motion, human life everywhere, and brilliantly costumed--

streaming in rainbows up and down the lofty stairways, and massed in

metaphorical flower-gardens on the miles of great platforms at the

river's edge.



All this masonry, all this architecture represents piety.  The palaces

were built by native princes whose homes, as a rule, are far from

Benares, but who go there from time to time to refresh their souls with

the sight and touch of the Ganges, the river of their idolatry.  The

stairways are records of acts of piety; the crowd of costly little

temples are tokens of money spent by rich men for present credit and hope

of future reward.  Apparently, the rich Christian who spends large sums

upon his religion is conspicuous with us, by his rarity, but the rich

Hindoo who doesn't spend large sums upon his religion is seemingly non-

existent.  With us the poor spend money on their religion, but they keep

back some to live on.  Apparently, in India, the poor bankrupt themselves

daily for their religion.  The rich Hindoo can afford his pious outlays;

he gets much glory for his spendings, yet keeps back a sufficiency of his

income for temporal purposes; but the poor Hindoo is entitled to

compassion, for his spendings keep him poor, yet get him no glory.



We made the usual trip up and down the river, seated in chairs under an

awning on the deck of the usual commodious hand-propelled ark; made it

two or three times, and could have made it with increasing interest and

enjoyment many times more; for, of course, the palaces and temples would

grow more and more beautiful every time one saw them, for that happens

with all such things; also, I think one would not get tired of the

bathers, nor their costumes, nor of their ingenuities in getting out of

them and into them again without exposing too much bronze, nor of their

devotional gesticulations and absorbed bead-tellings.



But I should get tired of seeing them wash their mouths with that

dreadful water and drink it.  In fact, I did get tired of it, and very

early, too.  At one place where we halted for a while, the foul gush from

a sewer was making the water turbid and murky all around, and there was a

random corpse slopping around in it that had floated down from up

country.  Ten steps below that place stood a crowd of men, women, and

comely young maidens waist deep in the water-and they were scooping it up

in their hands and drinking it.  Faith can certainly do wonders, and this

is an instance of it.  Those people were not drinking that fearful stuff

to assuage thirst, but in order to purify their souls and the interior of

their bodies.  According to their creed, the Ganges water makes

everything pure that it touches--instantly and utterly pure.  The sewer

water was not an offence to them, the corpse did not revolt them; the

sacred water had touched both, and both were now snow-pure, and could

defile no one.  The memory of that sight will always stay by me; but not

by request.



A word further concerning the nasty but all-purifying Ganges water.  When

we went to Agra, by and by, we happened there just in time to be in at

the birth of a marvel--a memorable scientific discovery--the discovery

that in certain ways the foul and derided Ganges water is the most

puissant purifier in the world!  This curious fact, as I have said, had

just been added to the treasury of modern science.  It had long been

noted as a strange thing that while Benares is often afflicted with the

cholera she does not spread it beyond her borders.  This could not be

accounted for.  Mr. Henkin, the scientist in the employ of the government

of Agra, concluded to examine the water.  He went to Benares and made his

tests.  He got water at the mouths of the sewers where they empty into

the river at the bathing ghats; a cubic centimetre of it contained

millions of germs; at the end of six hours they were all dead.  He caught

a floating corpse, towed it to the shore, and from beside it he dipped up

water that was swarming with cholera germs; at the end of six hours they

were all dead.  He added swarm after swarm of cholera germs to this

water; within the six hours they always died, to the last sample.

Repeatedly, he took pure well water which was bare of animal life, and

put into it a few cholera germs; they always began to propagate at once,

and always within six hours they swarmed--and were numberable by millions

upon millions.



For ages and ages the Hindoos have had absolute faith that the water of

the Ganges was absolutely pure, could not be defiled by any contact

whatsoever, and infallibly made pure and clean whatsoever thing touched

it.  They still believe it, and that is why they bathe in it and drink

it, caring nothing for its seeming filthiness and the floating corpses.

The Hindoos have been laughed at, these many generations, but the

laughter will need to modify itself a little from now on.  How did they

find out the water's secret in those ancient ages?  Had they germ-

scientists then?  We do not know.  We only know that they had a

civilization long before we emerged from savagery.  But to return to

where I was before; I was about to speak of the burning-ghat.



They do not burn fakeers--those revered mendicants.  They are so holy

that they can get to their place without that sacrament, provided they be

consigned to the consecrating river.  We saw one carried to mid-stream

and thrown overboard.  He was sandwiched between two great slabs of

stone.



We lay off the cremation-ghat half an hour and saw nine corpses burned.

I should not wish to see any more of it, unless I might select the

parties.  The mourners follow the bier through the town and down to the

ghat; then the bier-bearers deliver the body to some low-caste natives--

Doms--and the mourners turn about and go back home.  I heard no crying

and saw no tears, there was no ceremony of parting.  Apparently, these

expressions of grief and affection are reserved for the privacy of the

home.  The dead women came draped in red, the men in white.  They are

laid in the water at the river's edge while the pyre is being prepared.



The first subject was a man.  When the Doms unswathed him to wash him, he

proved to be a sturdily built, well-nourished and handsome old gentleman,

with not a sign about him to suggest that he had ever been ill.  Dry wood

was brought and built up into a loose pile; the corpse was laid upon it

and covered over with fuel.  Then a naked holy man who was sitting on

high ground a little distance away began to talk and shout with great

energy, and he kept up this noise right along.  It may have been the

funeral sermon, and probably was.  I forgot to say that one of the

mourners remained behind when the others went away.  This was the dead

man's son, a boy of ten or twelve, brown and handsome, grave and self-

possessed, and clothed in flowing white.  He was there to burn his

father.  He was given a torch, and while he slowly walked seven times

around the pyre the naked black man on the high ground poured out his

sermon more clamorously than ever.  The seventh circuit completed, the

boy applied the torch at his father's head, then at his feet; the flames

sprang briskly up with a sharp crackling noise, and the lad went away.

Hindoos do not want daughters, because their weddings make such a ruinous

expense; but they want sons, so that at death they may have honorable

exit from the world; and there is no honor equal to the honor of having

one's pyre lighted by one's son.  The father who dies sonless is in a

grievous situation indeed, and is pitied.  Life being uncertain, the

Hindoo marries while he is still a boy, in the hope that he will have a

son ready when the day of his need shall come.  But if he have no son, he

will adopt one.  This answers every purpose.



Meantime the corpse is burning, also several others.  It is a dismal

business.  The stokers did not sit down in idleness, but moved briskly

about, punching up the fires with long poles, and now and then adding

fuel.  Sometimes they hoisted the half of a skeleton into the air, then

slammed it down and beat it with the pole, breaking it up so that it

would burn better.  They hoisted skulls up in the same way and banged and

battered them.  The sight was hard to bear; it would have been harder if

the mourners had stayed to witness it.  I had but a moderate desire to

see a cremation, so it was soon satisfied.  For sanitary reasons it would

be well if cremation were universal; but this form is revolting, and not

to be recommended.



The fire used is sacred, of course--for there is money in it.  Ordinary

fire is forbidden; there is no money in it.  I was told that this sacred

fire is all furnished by one person, and that he has a monopoly of it and

charges a good price for it.  Sometimes a rich mourner pays a thousand

rupees for it.  To get to paradise from India is an expensive thing.

Every detail connected with the matter costs something, and helps to

fatten a priest.  I suppose it is quite safe to conclude that that fire-

bug is in holy orders.



Close to the cremation-ground stand a few time-worn stones which are

remembrances of the suttee.  Each has a rough carving upon it,

representing a man and a woman standing or walking hand in hand, and

marks the spot where a widow went to her death by fire in the days when

the suttee flourished.  Mr. Parker said that widows would burn themselves

now if the government would allow it.  The family that can point to one

of these little memorials and say: "She who burned herself there was an

ancestress of ours," is envied.



It is a curious people.  With them, all life seems to be sacred except

human life.  Even the life of vermin is sacred, and must not be taken.

The good Jain wipes off a seat before using it, lest he cause the death

of-some valueless insect by sitting down on it.  It grieves him to have

to drink water, because the provisions in his stomach may not agree with

the microbes.  Yet India invented Thuggery and the Suttee.  India is a

hard country to understand.  We went to the temple of the Thug goddess,

Bhowanee, or Kali, or Durga.  She has these names and others.  She is the

only god to whom living sacrifices are made.  Goats are sacrificed to

her.  Monkeys would be cheaper.  There are plenty of them about the

place.  Being sacred, they make themselves very free, and scramble around

wherever they please.  The temple and its porch are beautifully carved,

but this is not the case with the idol.  Bhowanee is not pleasant to look

at.  She has a silver face, and a projecting swollen  tongue painted a

deep red.  She wears a necklace of skulls.



In fact, none of the idols in Benares are handsome or attractive.  And

what a swarm of them there is!  The town is a vast museum of idols--and

all of them crude, misshapen, and ugly.  They flock through one's dreams

at night, a wild mob of nightmares.  When you get tired of them in the

temples and take a trip on the river, you find idol giants, flashily

painted, stretched out side by side on the shore.  And apparently

wherever there is room for one more lingam, a lingam is there.  If Vishnu

had foreseen what his town was going to be, he would have called it

Idolville or Lingamburg.



The most conspicuous feature of Benares is the pair of slender white

minarets which tower like masts from the great Mosque of Aurangzeb.  They

seem to be always in sight, from everywhere, those airy, graceful,

inspiring things.  But masts is not the right word, for masts have a

perceptible taper, while these minarets have not.  They are 142 feet

high, and only 8 1/2 feet in diameter at the base, and 7 1/2 at the

summit--scarcely any taper at all.  These are the proportions of a

candle; and fair and fairylike candles these are.  Will be, anyway, some

day, when the Christians inherit them and top them with the electric

light.  There is a great view from up there--a wonderful view.  A large

gray monkey was part of it, and damaged it.  A monkey has no judgment.

This one was skipping about the upper great heights of the mosque--

skipping across empty yawning intervals which were almost too wide for

him, and which he only just barely cleared, each time, by the skin of his

teeth.  He got me so nervous that I couldn't look at the view.  I

couldn't look at anything but him.  Every time he went sailing over one

of those abysses my breath stood still, and when he grabbed for the perch

he was going for, I grabbed too, in sympathy.  And he was perfectly

indifferent, perfectly unconcerned, and I did all the panting myself.

He came within an ace of losing his life a dozen times, and I was so

troubled about him that I would have shot him if I had had anything to do

it with.  But I strongly recommend the view.  There is more monkey than

view, and there is always going to be more monkey while that idiot

survives, but what view you get is superb.  All Benares, the river, and

the region round about are spread before you.  Take a gun, and look at

the view.



The next thing I saw was more reposeful.  It was a new kind of art.  It

was a picture painted on water.  It was done by a native.  He sprinkled

fine dust of various colors on the still surface of a basin of water, and

out of these sprinklings a dainty and pretty picture gradually grew, a

picture which a breath could destroy.  Somehow it was impressive, after

so much browsing among massive and battered and decaying fanes that rest

upon ruins, and those ruins upon still other ruins, and those upon still

others again.  It was a sermon, an allegory, a symbol of Instability.

Those creations in stone were only a kind of water pictures, after all.



A prominent episode in the Indian career of Warren Hastings had Benares

for its theater.  Wherever that extraordinary man set his foot, he left

his mark.  He came to Benares in 1781 to collect a fine of L500,000 which

he had levied upon its Rajah, Cheit Singly on behalf of the East India

Company.  Hastings was a long way from home and help.  There were,

probably, not a dozen Englishmen within reach; the Rajah was in his fort

with his myriads around him.  But no matter.  From his little camp in a

neighboring garden, Hastings sent a party to arrest the sovereign.  He

sent on this daring mission a couple of hundred native soldiers sepoys--

under command of three young English lieutenants.  The Rajah submitted

without a word.  The incident lights up the Indian situation

electrically, and gives one a vivid sense of the strides which the

English had made and the mastership they had acquired in the land since

the date of Clive's great victory.  In a quarter of a century, from being

nobodies, and feared by none, they were become confessed lords and

masters, feared by all, sovereigns included, and served by all,

sovereigns included.  It makes the fairy tales sound true.  The English

had not been afraid to enlist native soldiers to fight against their own

people and keep them obedient.  And now Hastings was not afraid to come

away out to this remote place with a handful of such soldiers and send

them to arrest a native sovereign.



The lieutenants imprisoned the Rajah in his own fort.  It was beautiful,

the pluckiness of it, the impudence of it.  The arrest enraged the

Rajah's people, and all Benares came storming about the place and

threatening vengeance.  And yet, but for an accident, nothing important

would have resulted, perhaps.  The mob found out a most strange thing, an

almost incredible thing--that this handful of soldiers had come on this

hardy errand with empty guns and no ammunition.  This has been attributed

to thoughtlessness, but it could hardly have been that, for in such large

emergencies as this, intelligent people do think.  It must have been

indifference, an over-confidence born of the proved submissiveness of the

native character, when confronted by even one or two stern Britons in

their war paint.  But, however that may be, it was a fatal discovery that

the mob had made.  They were full of courage, now, and they broke into

the fort and massacred the helpless soldiers and their officers.

Hastings escaped from Benares by night and got safely away, leaving the

principality in a state of wild insurrection; but he was back again

within the month, and quieted it down in his prompt and virile way, and

took the Rajah's throne away from him and gave it to another man.  He was

a capable kind of person was Warren Hastings.  This was the only time he

was ever out of ammunition.  Some of his acts have left stains upon his

name which can never be washed away, but he saved to England the Indian

Empire, and that was the best service that was ever done to the Indians

themselves, those wretched heirs of a hundred centuries of pitiless

oppression and abuse.









CHAPTER LIII.



True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



It was in Benares that I saw another living god.  That makes two.

I believe I have seen most of the greater and lesser wonders of the

world, but I do not remember that any of them interested me so

overwhelmingly as did that pair of gods.



When I try to account for this effect I find no difficulty about it.

I find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us it is not because

of what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it.  We get

almost all our wonders at second hand.  We are eager to see any

celebrated thing--and we never fail of our reward; just the deep

privilege of gazing upon an object which has stirred the enthusiasm or

evoked the reverence or affection or admiration of multitudes of our race

is a thing which we value; we are profoundly glad that we have seen it,

we are permanently enriched from having seen it, we would not part with

the memory of that experience for a great price.  And yet that very

spectacle may be the Taj.  You cannot keep your enthusiasms down, you

cannot keep your emotions within bounds when that soaring bubble of

marble breaks upon your view.  But these are not your enthusiasms and

emotions--they are the accumulated emotions and enthusiasms of a thousand

fervid writers, who have been slowly and steadily storing them up in your

heart day by day and year by year all your life; and now they burst out

in a flood and overwhelm you; and you could not be a whit happier if they

were your very own.  By and by you sober down, and then you perceive that

you have been drunk on the smell of somebody else's cork.  For ever and

ever the memory of my distant first glimpse of the Taj will compensate me

for creeping around the globe to have that great privilege.



But the Taj--with all your inflation of delusive emotions, acquired at

second-hand from people to whom in the majority of cases they were also

delusions acquired at second-hand--a thing which you fortunately did not

think of or it might have made you doubtful of what you imagined were

your own what is the Taj as a marvel, a spectacle and an uplifting and

overpowering wonder, compared with a living, breathing, speaking

personage whom several millions of human beings devoutly and sincerely

and unquestioningly believe to be a God, and humbly and gratefully

worship as a God?



He was sixty years old when I saw him.  He is called Sri 108 Swami

Bhaskarananda Saraswati.  That is one form of it.  I think that that is

what you would call him in speaking to him--because it is short.  But you

would use more of his name in addressing a letter to him; courtesy would

require this.  Even then you would not have to use all of it, but only

this much:



Sri 108 Matparamahansrzpairivrajakacharyaswamibhaskaranandasaraswati.



You do not put "Esq." after it, for that is not necessary.  The word

which opens the volley is itself a title of honor "Sri."  The "108"

stands for the rest of his names, I believe.  Vishnu has 108 names which

he does not use in business, and no doubt it is a custom of gods and a

privilege sacred to their order to keep 108 extra ones in stock.  Just

the restricted name set down above is a handsome property, without the

108.  By my count it has 58 letters in it.  This removes the long German

words from competition; they are permanently out of the race.



Sri 108 S. B. Saraswati has attained to what among the Hindoos is called

the "state of perfection."  It is a state which other Hindoos reach by

being born again and again, and over and over again into this world,

through one re-incarnation after another--a tiresome long job covering

centuries and decades of centuries, and one that is full of risks, too,

like the accident of dying on the wrong side of the Ganges some time or

other and waking up in the form of an ass, with a fresh start necessary

and the numerous trips to be made all over again.  But in reaching

perfection, Sri 108 S. B. S.  has escaped all that.  He is no longer a

part or a feature of this world; his substance has changed, all

earthiness has departed out of it; he is utterly holy, utterly pure;

nothing can desecrate this holiness or stain this purity; he is no longer

of the earth, its concerns are matters foreign to him, its pains and

griefs and troubles cannot reach him.  When he dies, Nirvana is his; he

will be absorbed into the substance of the Supreme Deity and be at peace

forever.



The Hindoo Scriptures point out how this state is to be reached, but it

is only once in a thousand years, perhaps, that candidate accomplishes

it.  This one has traversed the course required, stage by stage, from the

beginning to the end, and now has nothing left to do but wait for the

call which shall release him from a world in which he has now no part nor

lot.  First, he passed through the student stage, and became learned in

the holy books.  Next he became citizen, householder, husband, and

father.  That was the required second stage.  Then--like John Bunyan's

Christian he bade perpetual good-bye to his family, as required, and went

wandering away.  He went far into the desert and served a term as hermit.

Next, he became a beggar, "in accordance with the rites laid down in the

Scriptures," and wandered about India eating the bread of mendicancy.  A

quarter of a century ago he reached the stage of purity.  This needs no

garment; its symbol is nudity; he discarded the waist-cloth which he had

previously worn.  He could resume it now if he chose, for neither that

nor any other contact can defile him; but he does not choose.



There are several other stages, I believe, but I do not remember what

they are.  But he has been through them.  Throughout the long course he

was perfecting himself in holy learning, and writing commentaries upon

the sacred books.  He was also meditating upon Brahma, and he does that

now.



White marble relief-portraits of him are sold all about India.  He lives

in a good house in a noble great garden in Benares, all meet and proper

to his stupendous rank.  Necessarily he does not go abroad in the

streets.  Deities would never be able to move about handily in any

country.  If one whom we recognized and adored as a god should go abroad

in our streets, and the day it was to happen were known, all traffic

would be blocked and business would come to a standstill.



This god is comfortably housed, and yet modestly, all things considered,

for if he wanted to live in a palace he would only need to speak and his

worshipers would gladly build it.  Sometimes he sees devotees for a

moment, and comforts them and blesses them, and they kiss his feet and go

away happy.  Rank is nothing to him, he being a god.  To him all men are

alike.  He sees whom he pleases and denies himself to whom he pleases.

Sometimes he sees a prince and denies himself to a pauper; at other times

he receives the pauper and turns the prince away.  However, he does not

receive many of either class.  He has to husband his time for his

meditations.  I think he would receive Rev. Mr. Parker at any time.  I

think he is sorry for Mr. Parker, and I think Mr. Parker is sorry for

him; and no doubt this compassion is good for both of them.



When we arrived we had to stand around in the garden a little while and

wait, and the outlook was not good, for he had been turning away

Maharajas that day and receiving only the riff-raff, and we belonged in

between, somewhere.  But presently, a servant came out saying it was all

right, he was coming.



And sure enough, he came, and I saw him--that object of the worship of

millions.  It was a strange sensation, and thrilling.  I wish I could

feel it stream through my veins again.  And yet, to me he was not a god,

he was only a Taj.  The thrill was not my thrill, but had come to me

secondhand from those invisible millions of believers.  By a hand-shake

with their god I had ground-circuited their wire and got their monster

battery's whole charge.



He was tall and slender, indeed emaciated.  He had a clean cut and

conspicuously intellectual face, and a deep and kindly eye.  He looked

many years older than he really was, but much study and meditation and

fasting and prayer, with the arid life he had led as hermit and beggar,

could account for that.  He is wholly nude when he receives natives, of

whatever rank they may be, but he had white cloth around his loins now, a

concession to Mr. Parker's Europe prejudices, no doubt.



As soon as I had sobered down a little we got along very well together,

and I found him a most pleasant and friendly deity.  He had heard a deal

about Chicago, and showed a quite remarkable interest in it, for a god.

It all came of the World's Fair and the Congress of Religions.  If India

knows about nothing else American, she knows about those, and will keep

them in mind one while.



He proposed an exchange of autographs, a delicate attention which made me

believe in him, but I had been having my doubts before.  He wrote his in

his book, and I have a reverent regard for that book, though the words

run from right to left, and so I can't read it.  It was a mistake to

print in that way.  It contains his voluminous comments on the Hindoo

holy writings, and if I could make them out I would try for perfection

myself.  I gave him a copy of Huckleberry Finn.  I thought it might rest

him up a little to mix it in along with his meditations on Brahma, for he

looked tired, and I knew that if it didn't do him any good it wouldn't do

him any harm.



He has a scholar meditating under him--Mina Bahadur Rana--but we did not

see him.  He wears clothes and is very imperfect.  He has written a

little pamphlet about his master, and I have that.  It contains a wood-

cut of the master and himself seated on a rug in the garden.  The

portrait of the master is very good indeed.  The posture is exactly that

which Brahma himself affects, and it requires long arms and limber legs,

and can be accumulated only by gods and the india-rubber man.  There is a

life-size marble relief of Shri 108, S.B.S.  in the garden.  It

represents him in this same posture.



Dear me!  It is a strange world.  Particularly the Indian division of it.

This pupil, Mina Bahadur Rana, is not a commonplace person, but a man of

distinguished capacities and attainments, and, apparently, he had a fine

worldly career in front of him.  He was serving the Nepal Government in a

high capacity at the Court of the Viceroy of India, twenty years ago.  He

was an able man, educated, a thinker, a man of property.  But the longing

to devote himself to a religious life came upon him, and he resigned his

place, turned his back upon the vanities and comforts of the world, and

went away into the solitudes to live in a hut and study the sacred

writings and meditate upon virtue and holiness and seek to attain them.

This sort of religion resembles ours.  Christ recommended the rich to

give away all their property and follow Him in poverty, not in worldly

comfort.  American and English millionaires do it every day, and thus

verify and confirm to the world the tremendous forces that lie in

religion.  Yet many people scoff at them for this loyalty to duty, and

many will scoff at Mina Bahadur Rana and call him a crank.  Like many

Christians of great character and intellect, he has made the study of his

Scriptures and the writing of books of commentaries upon them the loving

labor of his life.  Like them, he has believed that his was not an idle

and foolish waste of his life, but a most worthy and honorable employment

of it.  Yet, there are many people who will see in those others, men

worthy of homage and deep reverence, but in him merely a crank.  But I

shall not.  He has my reverence.  And I don't offer it as a common thing

and poor, but as an unusual thing and of value.  The ordinary reverence,

the reverence defined and explained by the dictionary costs nothing.

Reverence for one's own sacred things--parents, religion, flag, laws, and

respect for one's own beliefs--these are feelings which we cannot even

help.  They come natural to us; they are involuntary, like breathing.

There is no personal merit in breathing.  But the reverence which is

difficult, and which has personal merit in it, is the respect which you

pay, without compulsion, to the political or religious attitude of a man

whose beliefs are not yours.  You can't revere his gods or his politics,

and no one expects you to do that, but you could respect his belief in

them if you tried hard enough; and you could respect him, too, if you

tried hard enough.  But it is very, very difficult; it is next to

impossible, and so we hardly ever try.  If the man doesn't believe as we

do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it.  I mean it does nowadays,

because now we can't burn him.



We are always canting about people's "irreverence," always charging this

offense upon somebody or other, and thereby intimating that we are better

than that person and do not commit that offense ourselves.  Whenever we

do this we are in a lying attitude, and our speech is cant; for none of

us are reverent--in a meritorious way; deep down in our hearts we are all

irreverent.  There is probably not a single exception to this rule in the

earth.  There is probably not one person whose reverence rises higher

than respect for his own sacred things; and therefore, it is not a thing

to boast about and be proud of, since the most degraded savage has that--

and, like the best of us, has nothing higher.  To speak plainly, we

despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the

pale of our own list of sacred things.  And yet, with strange

inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the

things which are holy to us.  Suppose we should meet with a paragraph

like the following, in the newspapers:



"Yesterday a visiting party of the British nobility had a picnic at Mount

Vernon, and in the tomb of Washington they ate their luncheon, sang

popular songs, played games, and danced waltzes and polkas."



Should we be shocked?  Should we feel outraged?  Should we be amazed?

Should we call the performance a desecration?  Yes, that would all

happen.  We should denounce those people in round terms, and call them

hard names.



And suppose we found this paragraph in the newspapers:



"Yesterday a visiting party of American pork-millionaires had a picnic in

Westminster Abbey, and in that sacred place they ate their luncheon, sang

popular songs, played games, and danced waltzes and polkas."



Would the English be shocked?  Would they feel outraged?  Would they be

amazed?  Would they call the performance a desecration?  That would all

happen.  The pork-millionaires would be denounced in round terms; they

would be called hard names.



In the tomb at Mount Vernon lie the ashes of America's most honored son;

in the Abbey, the ashes of England's greatest dead; the tomb of tombs,

the costliest in the earth, the wonder of the world, the Taj, was built

by a great Emperor to honor the memory of a perfect wife and perfect

mother, one in whom there was no spot or blemish, whose love was his stay

and support, whose life was the light of the world to him; in it her

ashes lie, and to the Mohammedan millions of India it is a holy place; to

them it is what Mount Vernon is to Americans, it is what the Abbey is to

the English.



Major Sleeman wrote forty or fifty years ago (the italics are mine):



     "I would here enter my humble protest against the quadrille and

     lunch parties which are sometimes given to European ladies and

     gentlemen of the station at this imperial tomb; drinking and dancing

     are no doubt very good things in their season, but they are sadly

     out of place in a sepulchre."



Were there any Americans among those lunch parties?  If they were

invited, there were.



If my imagined lunch-parties in Westminster and the tomb of Washington

should take place, the incident would cause a vast outbreak of bitter

eloquence about Barbarism and Irreverence; and it would come from two

sets of people who would go next day and dance in the Taj if they had a

chance.



As we took our leave of the Benares god and started away we noticed a

group of natives waiting respectfully just within the gate--a Rajah from

somewhere in India, and some people of lesser consequence.  The god

beckoned them to come, and as we passed out the Rajah was kneeling and

reverently kissing his sacred feet.



If Barnum--but Barnum's ambitions are at rest.  This god will remain in

the holy peace and seclusion of his garden, undisturbed.  Barnum could

not have gotten him, anyway.  Still, he would have found a substitute

that would answer.









CHAPTER LIV.



Do not undervalue the headache.  While it is at its sharpest it seems a

bad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth

$4 a minute.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



A comfortable railway journey of seventeen and a half hours brought us to

the capital of India, which is likewise the capital of Bengal--Calcutta.

Like Bombay, it has a population of nearly a million natives and a small

gathering of white people.  It is a huge city and fine, and is called the

City of Palaces.  It is rich in historical memories; rich in British

achievement--military, political, commercial; rich in the results of the

miracles done by that brace of mighty magicians, Clive and Hastings.  And

has a cloud kissing monument to one Ochterlony.



It is a fluted candlestick 250 feet high.  This lingam is the only large

monument in Calcutta, I believe.  It is a fine ornament, and will keep

Ochterlony in mind.



Wherever you are, in Calcutta, and for miles around, you can see it; and

always when you see it you think of Ochterlony.  And so there is not an

hour in the day that you do not think of Ochterlony and wonder who he

was.  It is good that Clive cannot come back, for he would think it was

for Plassey; and then that great spirit would be wounded when the

revelation came that it was not.  Clive would find out that it was for

Ochterlony; and he would think Ochterlony was a battle.  And he would

think it was a great one, too, and he would say, "With three thousand I

whipped sixty thousand and founded the Empire--and there is no monument;

this other soldier must have whipped a billion with a dozen and saved the

world."



But he would be mistaken.  Ochterlony was a man, not a battle.  And he

did good and honorable service, too; as good and honorable service as has

been done in India by seventy-five or a hundred other Englishmen of

courage, rectitude, and distinguished capacity.  For India has been a

fertile breeding-ground of such men, and remains so; great men, both in

war and in the civil service, and as modest as great.  But they have no

monuments, and were not expecting any.  Ochterlony could not have been

expecting one, and it is not at all likely that he desired one--certainly

not until Clive and Hastings should be supplied.  Every day Clive and

Hastings lean on the battlements of heaven and look down and wonder which

of the two the monument is for; and they fret and worry because they

cannot find out, and so the peace of heaven is spoiled for them and lost.

But not for Ochterlony.  Ochterlony is not troubled.  He doesn't suspect

that it is his monument.  Heaven is sweet and peaceful to him.  There is

a sort of unfairness about it all.



Indeed, if monuments were always given in India for high achievements,

duty straitly performed, and smirchless records, the landscape would be

monotonous with them.  The handful of English in India govern the Indian

myriads with apparent ease, and without noticeable friction, through

tact, training, and distinguished administrative ability, reinforced by

just and liberal laws--and by keeping their word to the native whenever

they give it.



England is far from India and knows little about the eminent services

performed by her servants there, for it is the newspaper correspondent

who makes fame, and he is not sent to India but to the continent, to

report the doings of the princelets and the dukelets, and where they are

visiting and whom they are marrying.  Often a British official spends

thirty or forty years in India, climbing from grade to grade by services

which would make him celebrated anywhere else, and finishes as a vice-

sovereign, governing a great realm and millions of subjects; then he goes

home to England substantially unknown and unheard of, and settles down in

some modest corner, and is as one extinguished.  Ten years later there is

a twenty-line obituary in the London papers, and the reader is paralyzed

by the splendors of a career which he is not sure that he had ever heard

of before.  But meanwhile he has learned all about the continental

princelets and dukelets.



The average man is profoundly ignorant of countries that lie remote from

his own.  When they are mentioned in his presence one or two facts and

maybe a couple of names rise like torches in his mind, lighting up an

inch or two of it and leaving the rest all dark.  The mention of Egypt

suggests some Biblical facts and the Pyramids-nothing more.  The mention

of South Africa suggests Kimberly and the diamonds and there an end.

Formerly the mention, to a Hindoo, of America suggested a name--George

Washington--with that his familiarity with our country was exhausted.

Latterly his familiarity with it has doubled in bulk; so that when

America is mentioned now, two torches flare up in the dark caverns of his

mind and he says, "Ah, the country of the great man Washington; and of

the Holy City--Chicago."  For he knows about the Congress of Religion, and

this has enabled him to get an erroneous impression of Chicago.



When India is mentioned to the citizen of a far country it suggests

Clive, Hastings, the Mutiny, Kipling, and a number of other great events;

and the mention of Calcutta infallibly brings up the Black Hole.  And so,

when that citizen finds himself in the capital of India he goes first of

all to see the Black Hole of Calcutta--and is disappointed.



The Black Hole was not preserved; it is gone, long, long ago.  It is

strange.  Just as it stood, it was itself a monument; a ready-made one.

It was finished, it was complete, its materials were strong and lasting,

it needed no furbishing up, no repairs; it merely needed to be let alone.

It was the first brick, the Foundation Stone, upon which was reared a

mighty Empire--the Indian Empire of Great Britain.  It was the ghastly

episode of the Black Hole that maddened the British and brought Clive,

that young military marvel, raging up from Madras; it was the seed from

which sprung Plassey; and it was that extraordinary battle, whose like

had not been seen in the earth since Agincourt, that laid deep and strong

the foundations of England's colossal Indian sovereignty.



And yet within the time of men who still live, the Black Hole was torn

down and thrown away as carelessly as if its bricks were common clay, not

ingots of historic gold.  There is no accounting for human beings.



The supposed site of the Black Hole is marked by an engraved plate.  I

saw that; and better that than nothing.  The Black Hole was a prison--a

cell is nearer the right word--eighteen feet square, the dimensions of an

ordinary bedchamber; and into this place the victorious Nabob of Bengal

packed 146 of his English prisoners.  There was hardly standing room for

them; scarcely a breath of air was to be got; the time was night, the

weather sweltering hot.  Before the dawn came, the captives were all dead

but twenty-three.  Mr. Holwell's long account of the awful episode was

familiar to the world a hundred years ago, but one seldom sees in print

even an extract from it in our day.  Among the striking things in it is

this.  Mr. Holwell, perishing with thirst, kept himself alive by sucking

the perspiration from his sleeves.  It gives one a vivid idea of the

situation.  He presently found that while he was busy drawing life from

one of his sleeves a young English gentleman was stealing supplies from

the other one.  Holwell was an unselfish man, a man of the most generous

impulses; he lived and died famous for these fine and rare qualities; yet

when he found out what was happening to that unwatched sleeve, he took

the precaution to suck that one dry first.  The miseries of the Black

Hole were able to change even a nature like his.  But that young

gentleman was one of the twenty-three survivors, and he said it was the

stolen perspiration that saved his life.  From the middle of Mr.

Holwell's narrative I will make a brief excerpt:



     "Then a general prayer to Heaven, to hasten the approach of the

     flames to the right and left of us, and put a period to our misery.

     But these failing, they whose strength and spirits were quite

     exhausted laid themselves down and expired quietly upon their

     fellows: others who had yet some strength and vigor left made a last

     effort at the windows, and several succeeded by leaping and

     scrambling over the backs and heads of those in the first rank, and

     got hold of the bars, from which there was no removing them.  Many

     to the right and left sunk with the violent pressure, and were soon

     suffocated; for now a steam arose from the living and the dead,

     which affected us in all its circumstances as if we were forcibly

     held with our heads over a bowl full of strong volatile spirit of

     hartshorn, until suffocated; nor could the effluvia of the one be

     distinguished from the other, and frequently, when I was forced by

     the load upon my head and shoulders to hold my face down, I was

     obliged, near as I was to the window, instantly to raise it again to

     avoid suffocation.  I need not, my dear friend, ask your

     commiseration, when I tell you, that in this plight, from half an

     hour past eleven till near two in the morning, I sustained the

     weight of a heavy man, with his knees in my back, and the pressure

     of his whole body on my head.  A Dutch surgeon who had taken his

     seat upon my left shoulder, and a Topaz (a black Christian soldier)

     bearing on my right; all which nothing could have enabled me to

     support but the props and pressure equally sustaining me all around.

     The two latter I frequently dislodged by shifting my hold on the

     bars and driving my knuckles into their ribs; but my friend above

     stuck fast, held immovable by two bars.



     "I exerted anew my strength and fortitude; but the repeated trials

     and efforts I made to dislodge the insufferable incumbrances upon me

     at last quite exhausted me; and towards two o'clock, finding I must

     quit the window or sink where I was, I resolved on the former,

     having bore, truly for the sake of others, infinitely more for life

     than the best of it is worth.  In the rank close behind me was an

     officer of one of the ships, whose name was Cary, and who had

     behaved with much bravery during the siege (his wife, a fine woman,

     though country born, would not quit him, but accompanied him into

     the prison, and was one who survived).  This poor wretch had been

     long raving for water and air; I told him I was determined to give

     up life, and recommended his gaining my station.  On my quitting it

     he made a fruitless attempt to get my place; but the Dutch surgeon,

     who sat on my shoulder, supplanted him.  Poor Cary expressed his

     thankfulness, and said he would give up life too; but it was with

     the utmost labor we forced our way from the window (several in the

     inner ranks appearing to me dead standing, unable to fall by the

     throng and equal pressure around).  He laid himself down to die; and

     his death, I believe, was very sudden; for he was a short, full,

     sanguine man.  His strength was great; and, I imagine, had he not

     retired with me, I should never have been able to force my way.  I

     was at this time sensible of no pain, and little uneasiness; I can

     give you no better idea of my situation than by repeating my simile

     of the bowl of spirit of hartshorn.  I found a stupor coming on

     apace, and laid myself down by that gallant old man, the Rev. Mr.

     Jervas Bellamy, who laid dead with his son, the lieutenant, hand in

     hand, near the southernmost wall of the prison.  When I had lain

     there some little time, I still had reflection enough to suffer some

     uneasiness in the thought that I should be trampled upon, when dead,

     as I myself had done to others.  With some difficulty I raised

     myself, and gained the platform a second time, where I presently

     lost all sensation; the last trace of sensibility that I have been

     able to recollect after my laying down, was my sash being uneasy

     about my waist, which I untied, and threw from me.  Of what passed

     in this interval, to the time of my resurrection from this hole of

     horrors, I can give you no account."



There was plenty to see in Calcutta, but there was not plenty of time for

it.  I saw the fort that Clive built; and the place where Warren Hastings

and the author of the Junius Letters fought their duel; and the great

botanical gardens; and the fashionable afternoon turnout in the Maidan;

and a grand review of the garrison in a great plain at sunrise; and a

military tournament in which great bodies of native soldiery exhibited

the perfection of their drill at all arms, a spectacular and beautiful

show occupying several nights and closing with the mimic storming of a

native fort which was as good as the reality for thrilling and accurate

detail, and better than the reality for security and comfort; we had a

pleasure excursion on the 'Hoogly' by courtesy of friends, and devoted

the rest of the time to social life and the Indian museum.  One should

spend a month in the museum, an enchanted palace of Indian antiquities.

Indeed, a person might spend half a year among the beautiful and

wonderful things without exhausting their interest.



It was winter.  We were of Kipling's "hosts of tourists who travel up and

down India in the cold weather showing how things ought to be managed."

It is a common expression there, "the cold weather," and the people think

there is such a thing.  It is because they have lived there half a

lifetime, and their perceptions have become blunted.  When a person is

accustomed to 138 in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are not

valuable.  I had read, in the histories, that the June marches made

between Lucknow and Cawnpore by the British forces in the time of the

Mutiny were made weather--138 in the shade and had taken it for

historical embroidery.  I had read it again in Serjeant-Major Forbes-

Mitchell's account of his military experiences in the Mutiny--at least I

thought I had--and in Calcutta I asked him if it was true, and he said it

was.  An officer of high rank who had been in the thick of the Mutiny

said the same.  As long as those men were talking about what they knew,

they were trustworthy, and I believed them; but when they said it was now

"cold weather," I saw that they had traveled outside of their sphere of

knowledge and were floundering.  I believe that in India "cold weather"

is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the

necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will

melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.  It was

observable that brass ones were in use while I was in Calcutta, showing

that it was not yet time to change to porcelain; I was told the change to

porcelain was not usually made until May.  But this cold weather was too

warm for us; so we started to Darjeeling, in the Himalayas--a twenty-four

hour journey.









CHAPTER LV.



There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been

squarely forbidden.  Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy

neighbor.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.





FROM DIARY:



February 14.  We left at 4:30 P.M.  Until dark we moved through rich

vegetation, then changed to a boat and crossed the Ganges.



February 15.  Up with the sun.  A brilliant morning, and frosty.  A

double suit of flannels is found necessary.  The plain is perfectly

level, and seems to stretch away and away and away, dimming and

softening, to the uttermost bounds of nowhere.  What a soaring,

strenuous, gushing fountain spray of delicate greenery a bunch of bamboo

is!  As far as the eye can reach, these grand vegetable geysers grace the

view, their spoutings refined to steam by distance.  And there are fields

of bananas, with the sunshine glancing from the varnished surface of

their drooping vast leaves.  And there are frequent groves of palm; and

an effective accent is given to the landscape by isolated individuals of

this picturesque family, towering, clean-stemmed, their plumes broken and

hanging ragged, Nature's imitation of an umbrella that has been out to

see what a cyclone is like and is trying not to look disappointed.  And

everywhere through the soft morning vistas we glimpse the villages, the

countless villages, the myriad villages, thatched, built of clean new

matting, snuggling among grouped palms and sheaves of bamboo; villages,

villages, no end of villages, not three hundred yards apart, and dozens

and dozens of them in sight all the time; a mighty City, hundreds of

miles long, hundreds of miles broad, made all of villages, the biggest

city in the earth, and as populous as a European kingdom.  I have seen no

such city as this before.  And there is a continuously repeated and

replenished multitude of naked men in view on both sides and ahead.  We

fly through it mile after mile, but still it is always there, on both

sides and ahead--brown-bodied, naked men and boys, plowing in the fields.

But not woman.  In these two hours I have not seen a woman or a girl

working in the fields.



              "From Greenland's icy mountains,

               From India's coral strand,

               Where Afric's sunny fountains

               Roll down their golden sand.

               From many an ancient river,

               From many a palmy plain,

               They call us to deliver

               Their land from error's chain."



Those are beautiful verses, and they have remained in my memory all my

life.  But if the closing lines are true, let us hope that when we come

to answer the call and deliver the land from its errors, we shall secrete

from it some of our high-civilization ways, and at the same time borrow

some of its pagan ways to enrich our high system with.  We have a right

to do this.  If we lift those people up, we have a right to lift

ourselves up nine or ten grades or so, at their expense.  A few years ago

I spent several weeks at Tolz, in Bavaria.  It is a Roman Catholic

region, and not even Benares is more deeply or pervasively or

intelligently devout.  In my diary of those days I find this:



     "We took a long drive yesterday around about the lovely country

     roads.  But it was a drive whose pleasure was damaged in a couple of

     ways: by the dreadful shrines and by the shameful spectacle of gray

     and venerable old grandmothers toiling in the fields.  The shrines

     were frequent along the roads--figures of the Saviour nailed to the

     cross and streaming with blood from the wounds of the nails and the

     thorns.



     "When missionaries go from here do they find fault with the pagan

     idols?  I saw many women seventy and even eighty years old mowing

     and binding in the fields, and pitchforking the loads into the

     wagons."



I was in Austria later, and in Munich.  In Munich I saw gray old women

pushing trucks up hill and down, long distances, trucks laden with

barrels of beer, incredible loads.  In my Austrian diary I find this:



     "In the fields I often see a woman and a cow harnessed to the plow,

     and a man driving.



     "In the public street of Marienbad to-day, I saw an old, bent, gray-

     headed woman, in harness with a dog, drawing a laden sled over bare

     dirt roads and bare pavements; and at his ease walked the driver,

     smoking his pipe, a hale fellow not thirty years old."



Five or six years ago I bought an open boat, made a kind of a canvas

wagon-roof over the stern of it to shelter me from sun and rain; hired a

courier and a boatman, and made a twelve-day floating voyage down the

Rhone from Lake Bourget to Marseilles.  In my diary of that trip I find

this entry.  I was far down the Rhone then:



     "Passing St. Etienne, 2:15 P.M.  On a distant ridge inland, a tall

     openwork structure commandingly situated, with a statue of the

     Virgin standing on it.  A devout country.  All down this river,

     wherever there is a crag there is a statue of the Virgin on it.  I

     believe I have seen a hundred of them.  And yet, in many respects,

     the peasantry seem to be mere pagans, and destitute of any

     considerable degree of civilization.



     " .  .  .  .  We reached a not very promising looking village about

     4 o'clock, and I concluded to tie up for the day; munching fruit and

     fogging the hood with pipe-smoke had grown monotonous; I could not

     have the hood furled, because the floods of rain fell unceasingly.

     The tavern was on the river bank, as is the custom.  It was dull

     there, and melancholy--nothing to do but look out of the window into

     the drenching rain, and shiver; one could do that, for it was bleak

     and cold and windy, and country France furnishes no fire.  Winter

     overcoats did not help me much; they had to be supplemented with

     rugs.  The raindrops were so large and struck the river with such

     force that they knocked up the water like pebble-splashes.



     "With the exception of a very occasional woodenshod peasant, nobody

     was abroad in this bitter weather--I mean nobody of our sex.  But

     all weathers are alike to the women in these continental countries.

     To them and the other animals, life is serious; nothing interrupts

     their slavery.  Three of them were washing clothes in the river

     under the window when I arrived, and they continued at it as long as

     there was light to work by.  One was apparently thirty; another--the

     mother!--above fifty; the third--grandmother!--so old and worn and

     gray she could have passed for eighty; I took her to be that old.

     They had no waterproofs nor rubbers, of course; over their shoulders

     they wore gunnysacks--simply conductors for rivers of water; some of

     the volume reached the ground; the rest soaked in on the way.



     "At last a vigorous fellow of thirty-five arrived, dry and

     comfortable, smoking his pipe under his big umbrella in an open

     donkey-cart-husband, son, and grandson of those women!  He stood up

     in the cart, sheltering himself, and began to superintend, issuing

     his orders in a masterly tone of command, and showing temper when

     they were not obeyed swiftly enough.



     "Without complaint or murmur the drowned women patiently carried out

     the orders, lifting the immense baskets of soggy, wrung-out clothing

     into the cart and stowing them to the man's satisfaction.  There

     were six of the great baskets, and a man of mere ordinary strength

     could not have lifted any one of them.  The cart being full now, the

     Frenchman descended, still sheltered by his umbrella, entered the

     tavern, and the women went drooping homeward, trudging in the wake

     of the cart, and soon were blended with the deluge and lost to

     sight.



     "When I went down into the public room, the Frenchman had his bottle

     of wine and plate of food on a bare table black with grease, and was

     "chomping" like a horse.  He had the little religious paper which is

     in everybody's hands on the Rhone borders, and was enlightening

     himself with the histories of French saints who used to flee to the

     desert in the Middle Ages to escape the contamination of woman.  For

     two hundred years France has been sending missionaries to other

     savage lands.  To spare to the needy from poverty like hers is fine

     and true generosity."



But to get back to India--where, as my favorite poem says--



              "Every prospect pleases,

               And only man is vile."



It is because Bavaria and Austria and France have not introduced their

civilization to him yet.  But Bavaria and Austria and France are on their

way.  They are coming.  They will rescue him; they will refine the

vileness out of him.



Some time during the forenoon, approaching the mountains, we changed from

the regular train to one composed of little canvas-sheltered cars that

skimmed along within a foot of the ground and seemed to be going fifty

miles an hour when they were really making about twenty.  Each car had

seating capacity for half-a-dozen persons; and when the curtains were up

one was substantially out of doors, and could see everywhere, and get all

the breeze, and be luxuriously comfortable.  It was not a pleasure

excursion in name only, but in fact.



After a while the stopped at a little wooden coop of a station just

within the curtain of the sombre jungle, a place with a deep and dense

forest of great trees and scrub and vines all about it.  The royal Bengal

tiger is in great force there, and is very bold and unconventional.  From

this lonely little station a message once went to the railway manager in

Calcutta: "Tiger eating station-master on front porch; telegraph

instructions."



It was there that I had my first tiger hunt.  I killed thirteen.  We were

presently away again, and the train began to climb the mountains.  In one

place seven wild elephants crossed the track, but two of them got away

before I could overtake them.  The railway journey up the mountain is

forty miles, and it takes eight hours to make it.  It is so wild and

interesting and exciting and enchanting that it ought to take a week.  As

for the vegetation, it is a museum.  The jungle seemed to contain samples

of every rare and curious tree and bush that we had ever seen or heard

of.  It is from that museum, I think, that the globe must have been

supplied with the trees and vines and shrubs that it holds precious.



The road is infinitely and charmingly crooked.  It goes winding in and

out under lofty cliffs that are smothered in vines and foliage, and

around the edges of bottomless chasms; and all the way one glides by

files of picturesque natives, some carrying burdens up, others going down

from their work in the tea-gardens; and once there was a gaudy wedding

procession, all bright tinsel and color, and a bride, comely and girlish,

who peeped out from the curtains of her palanquin, exposing her face with

that pure delight which the young and happy take in sin for sin's own

sake.



By and by we were well up in the region of the clouds, and from that

breezy height we looked down and afar over a wonderful picture--the

Plains of India, stretching to the horizon, soft and fair, level as a

floor, shimmering with heat, mottled with cloud-shadows, and cloven with

shining rivers.  Immediately below us, and receding down, down, down,

toward the valley, was a shaven confusion of hilltops, with ribbony roads

and paths squirming and snaking cream-yellow all over them and about

them, every curve and twist sharply distinct.



At an elevation of 6,000 feet we entered a thick cloud, and it shut out

the world and kept it shut out.  We climbed 1,000 feet higher, then began

to descend, and presently got down to Darjeeling, which is 6,000 feet

above the level of the Plains.



We had passed many a mountain village on the way up, and seen some new

kinds of natives, among them many samples of the fighting Ghurkas.  They

are not large men, but they are strong and resolute.  There are no better

soldiers among Britain's native troops.  And we had passed shoals of

their women climbing the forty miles of steep road from the valley to

their mountain homes, with tall baskets on their backs hitched to their

foreheads by a band, and containing a freightage weighing--I will not say

how many hundreds of pounds, for the sum is unbelievable.  These were

young women, and they strode smartly along under these astonishing

burdens with the air of people out for a holiday.  I was told that a

woman will carry a piano on her back all the way up the mountain; and

that more than once a woman had done it.  If these were old women I

should regard the Ghurkas as no more civilized than the Europeans.

At the railway station at Darjeeling you find plenty of cab-substitutes--

open coffins, in which you sit, and are then borne on men's shoulders up

the steep roads into the town.



Up there we found a fairly comfortable hotel, the property of an

indiscriminate and incoherent landlord, who looks after nothing, but

leaves everything to his army of Indian servants.  No, he does look after

the bill--to be just to him--and the tourist cannot do better than follow

his example.  I was told by a resident that the summit of Kinchinjunga is

often hidden in the clouds, and that sometimes a tourist has waited

twenty-two days and then been obliged to go away without a sight of it.

And yet went not disappointed; for when he got his hotel bill he

recognized that he was now seeing the highest thing in the Himalayas.

But this is probably a lie.



After lecturing I went to the Club that night, and that was a comfortable

place.  It is loftily situated, and looks out over a vast spread of

scenery; from it you can see where the boundaries of three countries come

together, some thirty miles away; Thibet is one of them, Nepaul another,

and I think Herzegovina was the other.  Apparently, in every town and

city in India the gentlemen of the British civil and military service

have a club; sometimes it is a palatial one, always it is pleasant and

homelike.  The hotels are not always as good as they might be, and the

stranger who has access to the Club is grateful for his privilege and

knows how to value it.



Next day was Sunday.  Friends came in the gray dawn with horses, and my

party rode away to a distant point where Kinchinjunga and Mount Everest

show up best, but I stayed at home for a private view; for it was very

old, and I was not acquainted with the horses, any way.  I got a pipe and

a few blankets and sat for two hours at the window, and saw the sun drive

away the veiling gray and touch up the snow-peaks one after another with

pale pink splashes and delicate washes of gold, and finally flood the

whole mighty convulsion of snow-mountains with a deluge of rich

splendors.



Kinchinjunga's peak was but fitfully visible, but in the between times it

was vividly clear against the sky--away up there in the blue dome more

than 28,000 feet above sea level--the loftiest land I had ever seen, by

12,000 feet or more.  It was 45 miles away.  Mount Everest is a thousand

feet higher, but it was not a part of that sea of mountains piled up

there before me, so I did not see it; but I did not care, because I think

that mountains that are as high as that are disagreeable.



I changed from the back to the front of the house and spent the rest of

the morning there, watching the swarthy strange tribes flock by from

their far homes in the Himalayas.  All ages and both sexes were

represented, and the breeds were quite new to me, though the costumes of

the Thibetans made them look a good deal like Chinamen.  The prayer-wheel

was a frequent feature.  It brought me near to these people, and made

them seem kinfolk of mine.  Through our preacher we do much of our

praying by proxy.  We do not whirl him around a stick, as they do, but

that is merely a detail.  The swarm swung briskly by, hour after hour, a

strange and striking pageant.  It was wasted there, and it seemed a pity.

It should have been sent streaming through the cities of Europe or

America, to refresh eyes weary of the pale monotonies of the circus-

pageant.  These people were bound for the bazar, with things to sell.  We

went down there, later, and saw that novel congress of the wild peoples,

and plowed here and there through it, and concluded that it would be

worth coming from Calcutta to see, even if there were no Kinchinjunga and

Everest.









CHAPTER LVI.



There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he

can't afford it, and when he can.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



On Monday and Tuesday at sunrise we again had fair-to-middling views of

the stupendous mountains; then, being well cooled off and refreshed, we

were ready to chance the weather of the lower world once more.



We traveled up hill by the regular train five miles to the summit, then

changed to a little canvas-canopied hand-car for the 35-mile descent.  It

was the size of a sleigh, it had six seats and was so low that it seemed

to rest on the ground.  It had no engine or other propelling power, and

needed none to help it fly down those steep inclines.  It only needed a

strong brake, to modify its flight, and it had that.  There was a story

of a disastrous trip made down the mountain once in this little car by

the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, when the car jumped the track and

threw its passengers over a precipice.  It was not true, but the story

had value for me, for it made me nervous, and nervousness wakes a person

up and makes him alive and alert, and heightens the thrill of a new and

doubtful experience.  The car could really jump the track, of course; a

pebble on the track, placed there by either accident or malice, at a

sharp curve where one might strike it before the eye could discover it,

could derail the car and fling it down into India; and the fact that the

lieutenant-governor had escaped was no proof that I would have the same

luck.  And standing there, looking down upon the Indian Empire from the

airy altitude of 7,000 feet, it seemed unpleasantly far, dangerously far,

to be flung from a handcar.



But after all, there was but small danger-for me.  What there was, was

for Mr. Pugh, inspector of a division of the Indian police, in whose

company and protection we had come from Calcutta.  He had seen long

service as an artillery officer, was less nervous than I was, and so he

was to go ahead of us in a pilot hand-car, with a Ghurka and another

native; and the plan was that when we should see his car jump over a

precipice we must put on our (break) and send for another pilot.  It was

a good arrangement.  Also Mr. Barnard, chief engineer of the mountain-

division of the road, was to take personal charge of our car, and he had

been down the mountain in it many a time.



Everything looked safe.  Indeed, there was but one questionable detail

left: the regular train was to follow us as soon as we should start, and

it might run over us.  Privately, I thought it would.



The road fell sharply down in front of us and went corkscrewing in and

out around the crags and precipices, down, down, forever down, suggesting

nothing so exactly or so uncomfortably as a croaked toboggan slide with

no end to it.  Mr. Pugh waved his flag and started, like an arrow from a

bow, and before I could get out of the car we were gone too.  I had

previously had but one sensation like the shock of that departure, and

that was the gaspy shock that took my breath away the first time that I

was discharged from the summit of a toboggan slide.  But in both

instances the sensation was pleasurable--intensely so; it was a sudden

and immense exaltation, a mixed ecstasy of deadly fright and unimaginable

joy.  I believe that this combination makes the perfection of human

delight.



The pilot car's flight down the mountain suggested the swoop of a swallow

that is skimming the ground, so swiftly and smoothly and gracefully it

swept down the long straight reaches and soared in and out of the bends

and around the corners.  We raced after it, and seemed to flash by the

capes and crags with the speed of light; and now and then we almost

overtook it--and had hopes; but it was only playing with us; when we got

near, it released its brake, make a spring around a corner, and the next

time it spun into view, a few seconds later, it looked as small as a

wheelbarrow, it was so far away.  We played with the train in the same

way.  We often got out to gather flowers or sit on a precipice and look

at the scenery, then presently we would hear a dull and growing roar, and

the long coils of the train would come into sight behind and above us;

but we did not need to start till the locomotive was close down upon us--

then we soon left it far behind.  It had to stop at every station,

therefore it was not an embarrassment to us.  Our brake was a good piece

of machinery; it could bring the car to a standstill on a slope as steep

as a house-roof.



The scenery was grand and varied and beautiful, and there was no hurry;

we could always stop and examine it.  There was abundance of time.  We

did not need to hamper the train; if it wanted the road, we could switch

off and let it go by, then overtake it and pass it later.  We stopped at

one place to see the Gladstone Cliff, a great crag which the ages and the

weather have sculptured into a recognizable portrait of the venerable

statesman.  Mr. Gladstone is a stockholder in the road, and Nature began

this portrait ten thousand years ago, with the idea of having the

compliment ready in time for the event.



We saw a banyan tree which sent down supporting stems from branches which

were sixty feet above the ground.  That is, I suppose it was a banyan;

its bark resembled that of the great banyan in the botanical gardens at

Calcutta, that spider-legged thing with its wilderness of vegetable

columns.  And there were frequent glimpses of a totally leafless tree

upon whose innumerable twigs and branches a cloud of crimson butterflies

had lighted--apparently.  In fact these brilliant red butterflies were

flowers, but the illusion was good.  Afterward in South Africa, I saw

another splendid effect made by red flowers.  This flower was probably

called the torch-plant--should have been so named, anyway.  It had a

slender stem several feet high, and from its top stood up a single tongue

of flame, an intensely red flower of the size and shape of a small corn-

cob.  The stems stood three or four feet apart all over a great hill-

slope that was a mile long, and make one think of what the Place de la

Concorde would be if its myriad lights were red instead of white and

yellow.



A few miles down the mountain we stopped half an hour to see a Thibetan

dramatic performance.  It was in the open air on the hillside.  The

audience was composed of Thibetans, Ghurkas, and other unusual people.

The costumes of the actors were in the last degree outlandish, and the

performance was in keeping with the clothes.  To an accompaniment of

barbarous noises the actors stepped out one after another and began to

spin around with immense swiftness and vigor and violence, chanting the

while, and soon the whole troupe would be spinning and chanting and

raising the dust.  They were performing an ancient and celebrated

historical play, and a Chinaman explained it to me in pidjin English as

it went along.  The play was obscure enough without the explanation; with

the explanation added, it was (opake).  As a drama this ancient

historical work of art was defective, I thought, but as a wild and

barbarous spectacle the representation was beyond criticism.

Far down the mountain we got out to look at a piece of remarkable loop-

engineering--a spiral where the road curves upon itself with such

abruptness that when the regular train came down and entered the loop, we

stood over it and saw the locomotive disappear under our bridge, then in

a few moments appear again, chasing its own tail; and we saw it gain on

it, overtake it, draw ahead past the rear cars, and run a race with that

end of the train.  It was like a snake swallowing itself.



Half-way down the mountain we stopped about an hour at Mr. Barnard's

house for refreshments, and while we were sitting on the veranda looking

at the distant panorama of hills through a gap in the forest, we came

very near seeing a leopard kill a calf.--[It killed it the day before.]

--It is a wild place and lovely.  From the woods all about came the songs

of birds,--among them the contributions of a couple of birds which I was

not then acquainted with: the brain-fever bird and the coppersmith.  The

song of the brain-fever demon starts on a low but steadily rising key,

and is a spiral twist which augments in intensity and severity with each

added spiral, growing sharper and sharper, and more and more painful,

more and more agonizing, more and more maddening, intolerable,

unendurable, as it bores deeper and deeper and deeper into the listener's

brain, until at last the brain fever comes as a relief and the man dies.

I am bringing some of these birds home to America.  They will be a great

curiosity there, and it is believed that in our climate they will

multiply like rabbits.



The coppersmith bird's note at a certain distance away has the ring of a

sledge on granite; at a certain other distance the hammering has a more

metallic ring, and you might think that the bird was mending a copper

kettle; at another distance it has a more woodeny thump, but it is a

thump that is full of energy, and sounds just like starting a bung.  So

he is a hard bird to name with a single name; he is a stone-breaker,

coppersmith, and bung-starter, and even then he is not completely named,

for when he is close by you find that there is a soft, deep, melodious

quality in his thump, and for that no satisfying name occurs to you.  You

will not mind his other notes, but when he camps near enough for you to

hear that one, you presently find that his measured and monotonous

repetition of it is beginning to disturb you; next it will weary you,

soon it will distress you, and before long each thump will hurt your

head; if this goes on, you will lose your mind with the pain and misery

of it, and go crazy.  I am bringing some of these birds home to America.

There is nothing like them there.  They will be a great surprise, and it

is said that in a climate like ours they will surpass expectation for

fecundity.



I am bringing some nightingales, too, and some cue-owls.  I got them in

Italy.  The song of the nightingale is the deadliest known to

ornithology.  That demoniacal shriek can kill at thirty yards.  The note

of the cue-owl is infinitely soft and sweet--soft and sweet as the

whisper of a flute.  But penetrating--oh, beyond belief; it can bore

through boiler-iron.  It is a lingering note, and comes in triplets, on

the one unchanging key: hoo-o-o, hoo-o-o, hoo-o-o; then a silence of

fifteen seconds, then the triplet again; and so on, all night.  At first

it is divine; then less so; then trying; then distressing; then

excruciating; then agonizing, and at the end of two hours the listener is

a maniac.



And so, presently we took to the hand-car and went flying down the

mountain again; flying and stopping, flying and stopping, till at last we

were in the plain once more and stowed for Calcutta in the regular train.

That was the most enjoyable day I have spent in the earth.  For rousing,

tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday trip that approaches the

bird-flight down the Himalayas in a hand-car.  It has no fault, no

blemish, no lack, except that there are only thirty-five miles of it

instead of five hundred.









CHAPTER LVII.



She was not quite what you would call refined.  She was not quite what

you would call unrefined.  She was the kind of person that keeps a

parrot.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man

or Nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun

visits on his round.  Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing over

looked.  Always, when you think you have come to the end of her

tremendous specialties and have finished banging tags upon her as the

Land of the Thug, the Land of the Plague, the Land of Famine, the Land of

Giant Illusions, the Land of Stupendous Mountains, and so forth, another

specialty crops up and another tag is required.  I have been overlooking

the fact that India is by an unapproachable supremacy--the Land of

Murderous Wild Creatures.  Perhaps it will be simplest to throw away the

tags and generalize her with one all-comprehensive name, as the Land of

Wonders.



For many years the British Indian Government has been trying to destroy

the murderous wild creatures, and has spent a great deal of money in the

effort.  The annual official returns show that the undertaking is a

difficult one.



These returns exhibit a curious annual uniformity in results; the sort of

uniformity which you find in the annual output of suicides in the world's

capitals, and the proportions of deaths by this, that, and the other

disease.  You can always come close to foretelling how many suicides will

occur in Paris, London, and New York, next year, and also how many deaths

will result from cancer, consumption, dog-bite, falling out of the

window, getting run over by cabs, etc., if you know the statistics of

those matters for the present year.  In the same way, with one year's

Indian statistics before you, you can guess closely at how many people

were killed in that Empire by tigers during the previous year, and the

year before that, and the year before that, and at how many were killed

in each of those years by bears, how many by wolves, and how many by

snakes; and you can also guess closely at how many people are going to be

killed each year for the coming five years by each of those agencies.

You can also guess closely at how many of each agency the government is

going to kill each year for the next five years.



I have before me statistics covering a period of six consecutive years.

By these, I know that in India the tiger kills something over 800 persons

every year, and that the government responds by killing about double as

many tigers every year.  In four of the six years referred to, the tiger

got 800 odd; in one of the remaining two years he got only 700, but in

the other remaining year he made his average good by scoring 917.  He is

always sure of his average.  Anyone who bets that the tiger will kill

2,400 people in India in any three consecutive years has invested his

money in a certainty; anyone who bets that he will kill 2,600 in any

three consecutive years, is absolutely sure to lose.



As strikingly uniform as are the statistics of suicide, they are not any

more so than are those of the tiger's annual output of slaughtered human

beings in India.  The government's work is quite uniform, too; it about

doubles the tiger's average.  In six years the tiger killed 5,000

persons, minus 50; in the same six years 10,000 tigers were killed, minus

400.



The wolf kills nearly as many people as the tiger--700 a year to the

tiger's 800 odd--but while he is doing it, more than 5,000 of his tribe

fall.



The leopard kills an average of 230 people per year, but loses 3,300 of

his own mess while he is doing it.



The bear kills 100 people per year at a cost of 1,250 of his own tribe.



The tiger, as the figures show, makes a very handsome fight against man.

But it is nothing to the elephant's fight.  The king of beasts, the lord

of the jungle, loses four of his mess per year, but he kills forty--five

persons to make up for it.



But when it comes to killing cattle, the lord of the jungle is not

interested.  He kills but 100 in six years--horses of hunters, no doubt--

but in the same six the tiger kills more than 84,000, the leopard

100,000, the bear 4,000, the wolf 70,000, the hyena more than 13,000,

other wild beasts 27,000, and the snakes 19,000, a grand total of more

than 300,000; an average of 50,000 head per year.



In response, the government kills, in the six years, a total of 3,201,232

wild beasts and snakes.  Ten for one.



It will be perceived that the snakes are not much interested in cattle;

they kill only 3,000 odd per year.  The snakes are much more interested

in man.  India swarms with deadly snakes.  At the head of the list is the

cobra, the deadliest known to the world, a snake whose bite kills where

the rattlesnake's bite merely entertains.



In India, the annual man-killings by snakes are as uniform, as regular,

and as forecastable as are the tiger-average and the suicide-average.

Anyone who bets that in India, in any three consecutive years the snakes

will kill 49,500 persons, will win his bet; and anyone who bets that in

India in any three consecutive years, the snakes will kill 53,500

persons, will lose his bet.  In India the snakes kill 17,000 people a

year; they hardly ever fall short of it; they as seldom exceed it.  An

insurance actuary could take the Indian census tables and the

government's snake tables and tell you within sixpence how much it would

be worth to insure a man against death by snake-bite there.  If I had a

dollar for every person killed per year in India, I would rather have it

than any other property, as it is the only property in the world not

subject to shrinkage.



I should like to have a royalty on the government-end of the snake

business, too, and am in London now trying to get it; but when I get it

it is not going to be as regular an income as the other will be if I get

that; I have applied for it.  The snakes transact their end of the

business in a more orderly and systematic way than the government

transacts its end of it, because the snakes have had a long experience

and know all about the traffic.  You can make sure that the government

will never kill fewer than 110,000 snakes in a year, and that it will

newer quite reach 300,000 too much room for oscillation; good speculative

stock, to bear or bull, and buy and sell long and short, and all that

kind of thing, but not eligible for investment like the other.  The man

that speculates in the government's snake crop wants to go carefully.  I

would not advise a man to buy a single crop at all--I mean a crop of

futures for the possible wobble is something quite extraordinary.  If he

can buy six future crops in a bunch, seller to deliver 1,500,000

altogether, that is another matter.  I do not know what snakes are worth

now, but I know what they would be worth then, for the statistics show

that the seller could not come within 427,000 of carrying out his

contract.  However, I think that a person who speculates in snakes is a

fool, anyway.  He always regrets it afterwards.



To finish the statistics.  In six years the wild beasts kill 20,000

persons, and the snakes kill 103,000.  In the same six the government

kills 1,073,546 snakes.  Plenty left.



There are narrow escapes in India.  In the very jungle where I killed

sixteen tigers and all those elephants, a cobra bit me but it got well;

everyone was surprised.  This could not happen twice in ten years,

perhaps.  Usually death would result in fifteen minutes.



We struck out westward or northwestward from Calcutta on an itinerary of

a zig-zag sort, which would in the course of time carry us across India

to its northwestern corner and the border of Afghanistan.  The first part

of the trip carried us through a great region which was an endless

garden--miles and miles of the beautiful flower from whose juices comes

the opium, and at Muzaffurpore we were in the midst of the indigo

culture; thence by a branch road to the Ganges at a point near Dinapore,

and by a train which would have missed the connection by a week but for

the thoughtfulness of some British officers who were along, and who knew

the ways of trains that are run by natives without white supervision.

This train stopped at every village; for no purpose connected with

business, apparently.  We put out nothing, we took nothing aboard.  The

train bands stepped ashore and gossiped with friends a quarter of an

hour, then pulled out and repeated this at the succeeding villages.  We

had thirty-five miles to go and six hours to do it in, but it was plain

that we were not going to make it.  It was then that the English officers

said it was now necessary to turn this gravel train into an express.  So

they gave the engine-driver a rupee and told him to fly.  It was a simple

remedy.  After that we made ninety miles an hour.  We crossed the Ganges

just at dawn, made our connection, and went to Benares, where we stayed

twenty-four hours and inspected that strange and fascinating piety-hive

again; then left for Lucknow, a city which is perhaps the most

conspicuous of the many monuments of British fortitude and valor that are

scattered about the earth.



The heat was pitiless, the flat plains were destitute of grass, and baked

dry by the sun they were the color of pale dust, which was flying in

clouds.  But it was much hotter than this when the relieving forces

marched to Lucknow in the time of the Mutiny.  Those were the days of 138

deg. in the shade.









CHAPTER, LVIII.



Make it a point to do something every day that you don't want to do.

This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty

without pain.

                             --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



It seems to be settled, now, that among the many causes from which the

Great Mutiny sprang, the main one was the annexation of the kingdom of

Oudh by the East India Company--characterized by Sir Henry Lawrence as

"the most unrighteous act that was ever committed."  In the spring of

1857, a mutinous spirit was observable in many of the native garrisons,

and it grew day by day and spread wider and wider.  The younger military

men saw something very serious in it, and would have liked to take hold

of it vigorously and stamp it out promptly; but they were not in

authority. Old-men were in the high places of the army--men who should

have been retired long before, because of their great age--and they

regarded the matter as a thing of no consequence.  They loved their

native soldiers, and would not believe that anything could move them to

revolt.  Everywhere these obstinate veterans listened serenely to the

rumbling of the volcanoes under them, and said it was nothing.



And so the propagators of mutiny had everything their own way.  They

moved from camp to camp undisturbed, and painted to the native soldier

the wrongs his people were suffering at the hands of the English, and

made his heart burn for revenge.  They were able to point to two facts of

formidable value as backers of their persuasions: In Clive's day, native

armies were incoherent mobs, and without effective arms; therefore, they

were weak against Clive's organized handful of well-armed men, but the

thing was the other way, now.  The British forces were native; they had

been trained by the British, organized by the British, armed by the

British, all the power was in their hands--they were a club made by

British hands to beat out British brains with.  There was nothing to

oppose their mass, nothing but a few weak battalions of British soldiers

scattered about India, a force not worth speaking of.  This argument,

taken alone, might not have succeeded, for the bravest and best Indian

troops had a wholesome dread of the white soldier, whether he was weak or

strong; but the agitators backed it with their second and best point

prophecy--a prophecy a hundred years old.  The Indian is open to prophecy

at all times; argument may fail to convince him, but not prophecy.  There

was a prophecy that a hundred years from the year of that battle of

Clive's which founded the British Indian Empire, the British power would

be overthrown and swept away by the natives.



The Mutiny broke out at Meerut on the 10th of May, 1857, and fired a

train of tremendous historical explosions.  Nana Sahib's massacre of the

surrendered garrison of Cawnpore occurred in June, and the long siege of

Lucknow began.  The military history of England is old and great, but I

think it must be granted that the crushing of the Mutiny is the greatest

chapter in it.  The British were caught asleep and unprepared.  They were

a few thousands, swallowed up in an ocean of hostile populations.  It

would take months to inform England and get help, but they did not falter

or stop to count the odds, but with English resolution and English

devotion they took up their task, and went stubbornly on with it, through

good fortune and bad, and fought the most unpromising fight that one may

read of in fiction or out of it, and won it thoroughly.



The Mutiny broke out so suddenly, and spread with such rapidity that

there was but little time for occupants of weak outlying stations to

escape to places of safety.  Attempts were made, of course, but they were

attended by hardships as bitter as death in the few cases which were

successful; for the heat ranged between 120 and 138 in the shade; the way

led through hostile peoples, and food and water were hardly to be had.

For ladies and children accustomed to ease and comfort and plenty, such a

journey must have been a cruel experience.  Sir G. O.  Trevelyan quotes

an example:



     "This is what befell Mrs. M----, the wife of the surgeon at a

     certain station on the southern confines of the insurrection.  'I

     heard,' she says, 'a number of shots fired, and, looking out, I saw

     my husband driving furiously from the mess-house, waving his whip.

     I ran to him, and, seeing a bearer with my child in his arms, I

     caught her up, and got into the buggy.  At the mess-house we found

     all the officers assembled, together with sixty sepoys, who had

     remained faithful.  We went off in one large party, amidst a general

     conflagration of our late homes.  We reached the caravanserai at

     Chattapore the next morning, and thence started for Callinger.  At

     this point our sepoy escort deserted us.  We were fired upon by

     match-lockmen, and one officer was shot dead.  We heard, likewise,

     that the people had risen at Callinger, so we returned and walked

     back ten miles that day.  M---- and I carried the child alternately.

     Presently Mrs. Smalley died of sunstroke.  We had no food amongst

     us.  An officer kindly lent us a horse.  We were very faint.  The

     Major died, and was buried; also the Sergeant-major and some women.

     The bandsmen left us on the nineteenth of June.  We were fired at

     again by match-lockmen, and changed direction for Allahabad.  Our

     party consisted of nine gentlemen, two children, the sergeant and

     his wife.  On the morning of the twentieth, Captain Scott took

     Lottie on to his horse.  I was riding behind my husband, and she was

     so crushed between us.  She was two years old on the first of the

     month.  We were both weak through want of food and the effect of the

     sun.  Lottie and I had no head covering.  M---- had a sepoy's cap I

     found on the ground.  Soon after sunrise we were followed by

     villagers armed with clubs and spears.  One of them struck Captain

     Scott's horse on the leg.  He galloped off with Lottie, and my poor

     husband never saw his child again.  We rode on several miles,

     keeping away from villages, and then crossed the river.  Our thirst

     was extreme.  M---- had dreadful cramps, so that I had to hold him

     on the horse.  I was very uneasy about him.  The day before I saw

     the drummer's wife eating chupatties, and asked her to give a piece

     to the child, which she did.  I now saw water in a ravine.  The

     descent was steep, and our only drinkingvessel was M----'s cap.  Our

     horse got water, and I bathed my neck.  I had no stockings, and my

     feet were torn and blistered.  Two peasants came in sight, and we

     were frightened and rode off.  The sergeant held our horse, and M----

     put me up and mounted.  I think he must have got suddenly faint,

     for I fell and he over me, on the road, when the horse started off.

     Some time before he said, and Barber, too, that he could not live

     many hours.  I felt he was dying before we came to the ravine.  He

     told me his wishes about his children and myself, and took leave.

     My brain seemed burnt up.  No tears came.  As soon as we fell, the

     sergeant let go the horse, and it went off; so that escape was cut

     off.  We sat down on the ground waiting for death.  Poor fellow! he

     was very weak; his thirst was frightful, and I went to get him

     water.  Some villagers came, and took my rupees and watch.  I took

     off my wedding-ring, and twisted it in my hair, and replaced the

     guard.  I tore off the skirt of my dress to bring water in, but was

     no use, for when I returned my beloved's eyes were fixed, and,

     though I called and tried to restore him, and poured water into his

     mouth, it only rattled in his throat.  He never spoke to me again.

     I held him in my arms till he sank gradually down.  I felt frantic,

     but could not cry.  I was alone.  I bound his head and face in my

     dress, for there was no earth to buy him.  The pain in my hands and

     feet was dreadful.  I went down to the ravine, and sat in the water

     on a stone, hoping to get off at night and look for Lottie.  When I

     came back from the water, I saw that they had not taken her little

     watch, chain, and seals, so I tied them under my petticoat.  In an

     hour, about thirty villagers came, they dragged me out of the

     ravine, and took off my jacket, and found the little chain.  They

     then dragged me to a village, mocking me all the way, and disputing

     as to whom I was to belong to.  The whole population came to look at

     me.  I asked for a bedstead, and lay down outside the door of a hut.

     They had a dozen of cows, and yet refused me milk.  When night came,

     and the village was quiet, some old woman brought me a leafful of

     rice.  I was too parched to eat, and they gave me water.  The

     morning after a neighboring Rajah sent a palanquin and a horseman to

     fetch me, who told me that a little child and three Sahibs had come

     to his master's house.  And so the poor mother found her lost one,

     'greatly blistered,' poor little creature.  It is not for Europeans

     in India to pray that their flight be not in the winter."



In the first days of June the aged general, Sir Hugh Wheeler commanding

the forces at Cawnpore, was deserted by his native troops; then he moved

out of the fort and into an exposed patch of open flat ground and built a

four-foot mud wall around it.  He had with him a few hundred white

soldiers and officers, and apparently more women and children than

soldiers.  He was short of provisions, short of arms, short of

ammunition, short of military wisdom, short of everything but courage and

devotion to duty.  The defense of that open lot through twenty-one days

and nights of hunger, thirst, Indian heat, and a never-ceasing storm of

bullets, bombs, and cannon-balls--a defense conducted, not by the aged

and infirm general, but by a young officer named Moore--is one of the

most heroic episodes in history.  When at last the Nana found it

impossible to conquer these starving men and women with powder and ball,

he resorted to treachery, and that succeeded.  He agreed to supply them

with food and send them to Allahabad in boats.  Their mud wall and their

barracks were in ruins, their provisions were at the point of exhaustion,

they had done all that the brave could do, they had conquered an

honorable compromise,--their forces had been fearfully reduced by

casualties and by disease, they were not able to continue the contest

longer.  They came forth helpless but suspecting no treachery, the Nana's

host closed around them, and at a signal from a trumpet the massacre

began.  About two hundred women and children were spared--for the

present--but all the men except three or four were killed.  Among the

incidents of the massacre quoted by Sir G. O. Trevelyan, is this:



     "When, after the lapse of some twenty minutes, the dead began to

     outnumber the living;--when the fire slackened, as the marks grew

     few and far between; then the troopers who had been drawn up to the

     right of the temple plunged into the river, sabre between teeth, and

     pistol in hand.  Thereupon two half-caste Christian women, the wives

     of musicians in the band of the Fifty-sixth, witnessed a scene which

     should not be related at second-hand.  'In the boat where I was to

     have gone,' says Mrs. Bradshaw, confirmed throughout by Mrs. Betts,

     'was the school-mistress and twenty-two misses.  General Wheeler

     came last in a palkee.  They carried him into the water near the

     boat.  I stood close by.  He said, 'Carry me a little further

     towards the boat.' But a trooper said, 'No, get out here.'  As the

     General got out of the palkee, head-foremost, the trooper gave him a

     cut with his sword into the neck, and he fell into the water.  My

     son was killed near him.  I saw it; alas!  alas!  Some were stabbed

     with bayonets; others cut down.  Little infants were torn in pieces.

     We saw it; we did; and tell you only what we saw.  Other children

     were stabbed and thrown into the river.  The schoolgirls were burnt

     to death.  I saw their clothes and hair catch fire.  In the water, a

     few paces off, by the next boat, we saw the youngest daughter of

     Colonel Williams.  A sepoy was going to kill her with his bayonet.

     She said, 'My father was always kind to sepoys.'  He turned away,

     and just then a villager struck her on the head with a club, and she

     fell into the water.  These people likewise saw good Mr. Moncrieff,

     the clergyman, take a book from his pocket that he never had leisure

     to open, and heard him commence a prayer for mercy which he was not

     permitted to conclude.  Another deponent observed an European making

     for a drain like a scared water-rat, when some boatmen, armed with

     cudgels, cut off his retreat, and beat him down dead into the mud."



The women and children who had been reserved from the massacre were

imprisoned during a fortnight in a small building, one story high--a

cramped place, a slightly modified Black Hole of Calcutta.  They were

waiting in suspense; there was none who could foretaste their fate.

Meantime the news of the massacre had traveled far and an army of

rescuers with Havelock at its head was on its way--at least an army which

hoped to be rescuers.  It was crossing the country by forced marches, and

strewing its way with its own dead men struck down by cholera, and by a

heat which reached 135 deg.  It was in a vengeful fury, and it stopped

for nothing neither heat, nor fatigue, nor disease, nor human opposition.

It tore its impetuous way through hostile forces, winning victory after

victory, but still striding on and on, not halting to count results.  And

at last, after this extraordinary march, it arrived before the walls of

Cawnpore, met the Nana's massed strength, delivered a crushing defeat,

and entered.



But too late--only a few hours too late.  For at the last moment the Nana

had decided upon the massacre of the captive women and children, and had

commissioned three Mohammedans and two Hindoos to do the work.  Sir G.

O. Trevelyan says:



     "Thereupon the five men entered.  It was the short gloaming of

     Hindostan--the hour when ladies take their evening drive.  She who

     had accosted the officer was standing in the doorway.  With her were

     the native doctor and two Hindoo menials.  That much of the business

     might be seen from the veranda, but all else was concealed amidst

     the interior gloom.  Shrieks and scuffing acquainted those without

     that the journeymen were earning their hire.  Survur Khan soon

     emerged with his sword broken off at the hilt.  He procured another

     from the Nana's house, and a few minutes after appeared again on the

     same errand.  The third blade was of better temper; or perhaps the

     thick of the work was already over.  By the time darkness had closed

     in, the men came forth and locked up the house for the night.  Then

     the screams ceased, but the groans lasted till morning.



     "The sun rose as usual.  When he had been up nearly three hours the

     five repaired to the scene of their labors over night.  They were

     attended by a few sweepers, who proceeded to transfer the contents

     of the house to a dry well situated behind some trees which grew

     hard by.  'The bodies,' says one who was present throughout, 'were

     dragged out, most of them by the hair of the head.  Those who had

     clothing worth taking were stripped.  Some of the women were alive.

     I cannot say how many; but three could speak.  They prayed for the

     sake of God that an end might be put to their sufferings.  I

     remarked one very stout woman, a half-caste, who was severely

     wounded in both arms, who entreated to be killed.  She and two or

     three others were placed against the bank of the cut by which

     bullocks go down in drawing water.  The dead were first thrown in.

     Yes: there was a great crowd looking on; they were standing along

     the walls of the compound.  They were principally city people and

     villagers.  Yes: there were also sepoys.  Three boys were alive.

     They were fair children.  The eldest, I think, must have been six or

     seven, and the youngest five years.  They were running around the

     well (where else could they go to?), and there was none to save

     them.  No one said a word or tried to save them.'



     "At length the smallest of them made an infantile attempt to get

     away.  The little thing had been frightened past bearing by the

     murder of one of the surviving ladies.  He thus attracted the

     observation of a native who flung him and his companions down the

     well."



The soldiers had made a march of eighteen days, almost without rest, to

save the women and the children, and now they were too late--all were

dead and the assassin had flown.  What happened then, Trevelyan hesitated

to put into words.  "Of what took place, the less said is the better."



Then he continues:



     "But there was a spectacle to witness which might excuse much.

     Those who, straight from the contested field, wandered sobbing

     through the rooms of the ladies' house, saw what it were well could

     the outraged earth have straightway hidden.  The inner apartment was

     ankle-deep in blood.  The plaster was scored with sword-cuts; not

     high up as where men have fought, but low down, and about the

     corners, as if a creature had crouched to avoid the blow.  Strips of

     dresses, vainly tied around the handles of the doors, signified the

     contrivance to which feminine despair had resorted as a means of

     keeping out the murderers.  Broken combs were there, and the frills

     of children's trousers, and torn cuffs and pinafores, and little

     round hats, and one or two shoes with burst latchets, and one or two

     daguerreotype cases with cracked glasses.  An officer picked up a

     few curls, preserved in a bit of cardboard, and marked 'Ned's hair,

     with love'; but around were strewn locks, some near a yard in

     length, dissevered, not as a keepsake, by quite other scissors."



The battle of Waterloo was fought on the 18th of June, 1815.  I do not

state this fact as a reminder to the reader, but as news to him.  For a

forgotten fact is news when it comes again.  Writers of books have the

fashion of whizzing by vast and renowned historical events with the

remark, "The details of this tremendous episode are too familiar to the

reader to need repeating here."  They know that that is not true.  It is

a low kind of flattery.  They know that the reader has forgotten every

detail of it, and that nothing of the tremendous event is left in his

mind but a vague and formless luminous smudge.  Aside from the desire to

flatter the reader, they have another reason for making the remark-two

reasons, indeed.  They do not remember the details themselves, and do not

want the trouble of hunting them up and copying them out; also, they are

afraid that if they search them out and print them they will be scoffed

at by the book-reviewers for retelling those worn old things which are

familiar to everybody.  They should not mind the reviewer's jeer; he

doesn't remember any of the worn old things until the book which he is

reviewing has retold them to him.



I have made the quoted remark myself, at one time and another, but I was

not doing it to flatter the reader; I was merely doing it to save work.

If I had known the details without brushing up, I would have put them in;

but I didn't, and I did not want the labor of posting myself; so I said,

"The details of this tremendous episode are too familiar to the reader to

need repeating here."  I do not like that kind of a lie; still, it does

save work.



I am not trying to get out of repeating the details of the Siege of

Lucknow in fear of the reviewer; I am not leaving them out in fear that

they would not interest the reader; I am leaving them out partly to save

work; mainly for lack of room.  It is a pity, too; for there is not a

dull place anywhere in the great story.



Ten days before the outbreak (May 10th) of the Mutiny, all was serene at

Lucknow, the huge capital of Oudh, the kingdom which had recently been

seized by the India Company.  There was a great garrison, composed of

about 7,000 native troops and between 700 and 800 whites.  These white

soldiers and their families were probably the only people of their race

there; at their elbow was that swarming population of warlike natives, a

race of born soldiers, brave, daring, and fond of fighting.  On high

ground just outside the city stood the palace of that great personage,

the Resident, the representative of British power and authority.  It

stood in the midst of spacious grounds, with its due complement of

outbuildings, and the grounds were enclosed by a wall--a wall not for

defense, but for privacy.  The mutinous spirit was in the air, but the

whites were not afraid, and did not feel much troubled.



Then came the outbreak at Meerut, then the capture of Delhi by the

mutineers; in June came the three-weeks leaguer of Sir Hugh Wheeler in

his open lot at Cawnpore--40 miles distant from Lucknow--then the

treacherous massacre of that gallant little garrison; and now the great

revolt was in full flower, and the comfortable condition of things at

Lucknow was instantly changed.



There was an outbreak there, and Sir Henry Lawrence marched out of the

Residency on the 30th of June to put it down, but was defeated with heavy

loss, and had difficulty in getting back again.  That night the memorable

siege of the Residency--called the siege of Lucknow--began.  Sir Henry

was killed three days later, and Brigadier Inglis succeeded him in

command.



Outside of the Residency fence was an immense host of hostile and

confident native besiegers; inside it were 480 loyal native soldiers, 730

white ones, and 500 women and children.



In those days the English garrisons always managed to hamper themselves

sufficiently with women and children.



The natives established themselves in houses close at hand and began to

rain bullets and cannon-balls into the Residency; and this they kept up,

night and day, during four months and a half, the little garrison

industriously replying all the time.  The women and children soon became

so used to the roar of the guns that it ceased to disturb their sleep.

The children imitated siege and defense in their play.  The women--with

any pretext, or with none--would sally out into the storm-swept grounds.

The defense was kept up week after week, with stubborn fortitude, in the

midst of death, which came in many forms--by bullet, small-pox, cholera,

and by various diseases induced by unpalatable and insufficient food, by

the long hours of wearying and exhausting overwork in the daily and

nightly battle in the oppressive Indian heat, and by the broken rest

caused by the intolerable pest of mosquitoes, flies, mice, rats, and

fleas.



Six weeks after the beginning of the siege more than one-half of the

original force of white soldiers was dead, and close upon three-fifths of

the original native force.



But the fighting went on just the same.  The enemy mined, the English

counter-mined, and, turn about, they blew up each other's posts.  The

Residency grounds were honey-combed with the enemy's tunnels.  Deadly

courtesies were constantly exchanged--sorties by the English in the

night; rushes by the enemy in the night--rushes whose purpose was to

breach the walls or scale them; rushes which cost heavily, and always

failed.



The ladies got used to all the horrors of war--the shrieks of mutilated

men, the sight of blood and death.  Lady Inglis makes this mention in her

diary:



     "Mrs. Bruere's nurse was carried past our door to-day, wounded in

     the eye.  To extract the bullet it was found necessary to take out

     the eye--a fearful operation.  Her mistress held her while it was

     performed."



The first relieving force failed to relieve.  It was under Havelock and

Outram; and arrived when the siege had been going on for three months.

It fought its desperate way to Lucknow, then fought its way through the

city against odds of a hundred to one, and entered the Residency; but

there was not enough left of it, then, to do any good.  It lost more men

in its last fight than it found in the Residency when it got in.  It

became captive itself.



The fighting and starving and dying by bullets and disease went steadily

on.  Both sides fought with energy and industry.  Captain Birch puts this

striking incident in evidence.  He is speaking of the third month of the

siege:



     "As an instance of the heavy firing brought to bear on our position

     this month may be mentioned the cutting down of the upper story of a

     brick building simply by musketry firring.  This building was in a

     most exposed position.  All the shots which just missed the top of

     the rampart cut into the dead wall pretty much in a straight line,

     and at length cut right through and brought the upper story tumbling

     down.  The upper structure on the top of the brigade-mess also fell

     in.  The Residency house was a wreck.  Captain Anderson's post had

     long ago been knocked down, and Innes' post also fell in.  These two

     were riddled with round shot.  As many as 200 were picked up by

     Colonel Masters."



The exhausted garrison fought doggedly on all through the next month

October.  Then, November 2d, news came Sir Colin Campbell's relieving

force would soon be on its way from Cawnpore.



On the 12th the boom of his guns was heard.



On the 13th the sounds came nearer--he was slowly, but steadily, cutting

his way through, storming one stronghold after another.



On the 14th he captured the Martiniere College, and ran up the British

flag there.  It was seen from the Residency.



Next he took the Dilkoosha.



On the 17th he took the former mess-house of the 32d regiment--a

fortified building, and very strong.  "A most exciting, anxious day,"

writes Lady Inglis in her diary.  "About 4 P.M., two strange officers

walked through our yard, leading their horses"--and by that sign she knew

that communication was established between the forces, that the relief

was real, this time, and that the long siege of Lucknow was ended.



The last eight or ten miles of Sir Colin Campbell's march was through

seas of, blood.  The weapon mainly used was the bayonet, the fighting was

desperate.  The way was mile-stoned with detached strong buildings of

stone, fortified, and heavily garrisoned, and these had to be taken by

assault.  Neither side asked for quarter, and neither gave it.  At the

Secundrabagh, where nearly two thousand of the enemy occupied a great

stone house in a garden, the work of slaughter was continued until every

man was killed.  That is a sample of the character of that devastating

march.



There were but few trees in the plain at that time, and from the

Residency the progress of the march, step by step, victory by victory,

could be noted; the ascending clouds of battle-smoke marked the way to

the eye, and the thunder of the guns marked it to the ear.



Sir Colin Campbell had not come to Lucknow to hold it, but to save the

occupants of the Residency, and bring them away.  Four or five days after

his arrival the secret evacuation by the troops took place, in the middle

of a dark night, by the principal gate, (the Bailie Guard).  The two

hundred women and two hundred and fifty children had been previously

removed.  Captain Birch says:



     "And now commenced a movement of the most perfect arrangement and

     successful generalship--the withdrawal of the whole of the various

     forces, a combined movement requiring the greatest care and skill.

     First, the garrison in immediate contact with the enemy at the

     furthest extremity of the Residency position was marched out.  Every

     other garrison in turn fell in behind it, and so passed out through

     the Bailie Guard gate, till the whole of our position was evacuated.

     Then Havelock's force was similarly withdrawn, post by post,

     marching in rear of our garrison.  After them in turn came the

     forces of the Commander-in-Chief, which joined on in the rear of

     Havelock's force.  Regiment by regiment was withdrawn with--the

     utmost order and regularity.  The whole operation resembled the

     movement of a telescope.  Stern silence was kept, and the enemy took

     no alarm."



Lady Inglis, referring to her husband and to General Sir James Outram,

sets down the closing detail of this impressive midnight retreat, in

darkness and by stealth, of this shadowy host through the gate which it

had defended so long and so well:



     "At twelve precisely they marched out, John and Sir James Outram

     remaining till all had passed, and then they took off their hats to

     the Bailie Guard, the scene of as noble a defense as I think history

     will ever have to relate."









CHAPTER LIX.



Don't part with your illusions.  When they are gone you may still exist

but you have ceased to live.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict

truth.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



We were driven over Sir Colin Campbell's route by a British officer, and

when I arrived at the Residency I was so familiar with the road that I

could have led a retreat over it myself; but the compass in my head has

been out of order from my birth, and so, as soon as I was within the

battered Bailie Guard and turned about to review the march and imagine

the relieving forces storming their way along it, everything was upside

down and wrong end first in a moment, and I was never able to get

straightened out again.  And now, when I look at the battle-plan, the

confusion remains.  In me the east was born west, the battle-plans which

have the east on the right-hand side are of no use to me.



The Residency ruins are draped with flowering vines, and are impressive

and beautiful.  They and the grounds are sacred now, and will suffer no

neglect nor be profaned by any sordid or commercial use while the British

remain masters of India.  Within the grounds are buried the dead who gave

up their lives there in the long siege.



After a fashion, I was able to imagine the fiery storm that raged night

and day over the place during so many months, and after a fashion I could

imagine the men moving through it, but I could not satisfactorily place

the 200 women, and I could do nothing at all with the 250 children.  I

knew by Lady Inglis' diary that the children carried on their small

affairs very much as if blood and carnage and the crash and thunder of a

siege were natural and proper features of nursery life, and I tried to

realize it; but when her little Johnny came rushing, all excitement,

through the din and smoke, shouting, "Oh, mamma, the white hen has laid

an egg!"  I saw that I could not do it.  Johnny's place was under the

bed.  I could imagine him there, because I could imagine myself there;

and I think I should not have been interested in a hen that was laying an

egg; my interest would have been with the parties that were laying the

bombshells.  I sat at dinner with one of those children in the Club's

Indian palace, and I knew that all through the siege he was perfecting

his teething and learning to talk; and while to me he was the most

impressive object in Lucknow after the Residency ruins, I was not able to

imagine what his life had been during that tempestuous infancy of his,

nor what sort of a curious surprise it must have been to him to be

marched suddenly out into a strange dumb world where there wasn't any

noise, and nothing going on.  He was only forty-one when I saw him, a

strangely youthful link to connect the present with so ancient an episode

as the Great Mutiny.



By and by we saw Cawnpore, and the open lot which was the scene of

Moore's memorable defense, and the spot on the shore of the Ganges where

the massacre of the betrayed garrison occurred, and the small Indian

temple whence the bugle-signal notified the assassins to fall on.  This

latter was a lonely spot, and silent.  The sluggish river drifted by,

almost currentless.  It was dead low water, narrow channels with vast

sandbars between, all the way across the wide bed; and the only living

thing in sight was that grotesque and solemn bald-headed bird, the

Adjutant, standing on his six-foot stilts, solitary on a distant bar,

with his head sunk between his shoulders, thinking; thinking of his

prize, I suppose--the dead Hindoo that lay awash at his feet, and whether

to eat him alone or invite friends.  He and his prey were a proper accent

to that mournful place.  They were in keeping with it, they emphasized

its loneliness and its solemnity.



And we saw the scene of the slaughter of the helpless women and children,

and also the costly memorial that is built over the well which contains

their remains.  The Black Hole of Calcutta is gone, but a more reverent

age is come, and whatever remembrancer still exists of the moving and

heroic sufferings and achievements of the garrisons of Lucknow and

Cawnpore will be guarded and preserved.



In Agra and its neighborhood, and afterwards at Delhi, we saw forts,

mosques, and tombs, which were built in the great days of the Mohammedan

emperors, and which are marvels of cost, magnitude, and richness of

materials and ornamentation, creations of surpassing grandeur, wonders

which do indeed make the like things in the rest of the world seem tame

and inconsequential by comparison.  I am not purposing to describe them.

By good fortune I had not read too much about them, and therefore was

able to get a natural and rational focus upon them, with the result that

they thrilled, blessed, and exalted me.  But if I had previously

overheated my imagination by drinking too much pestilential literary hot

Scotch, I should have suffered disappointment and sorrow.



I mean to speak of only one of these many world-renowned buildings, the

Taj Mahal, the most celebrated construction in the earth.  I had read a

great deal too much about it.  I saw it in the daytime, I saw it in the

moonlight, I saw it near at hand, I saw it from a distance; and I knew

all the time, that of its kind it was the wonder of the world, with no

competitor now and no possible future competitor; and yet, it was not my

Taj.  My Taj had been built by excitable literary people; it was solidly

lodged in my head, and I could not blast it out.



I wish to place before the reader some of the usual descriptions of the

Taj, and ask him to take note of the impressions left in his mind.  These

descriptions do really state the truth--as nearly as the limitations of

language will allow.  But language is a treacherous thing, a most unsure

vehicle, and it can seldom arrange descriptive words in such a way that

they will not inflate the facts--by help of the reader's imagination,

which is always ready to take a hand, and work for nothing, and do the

bulk of it at that.



I will begin with a few sentences from the excellent little local guide-

book of Mr. Satya Chandra Mukerji.  I take them from here and there in

his description:



     "The inlaid work of the Taj and the flowers and petals that are to

     be found on all sides on the surface of the marble evince a most

     delicate touch."



That is true.



     "The inlaid work, the marble, the flowers, the buds, the leaves, the

     petals, and the lotus stems are almost without a rival in the whole

     of the civilized world."



     "The work of inlaying with stones and gems is found in the highest

     perfection in the Taj."



Gems, inlaid flowers, buds, and leaves to be found on all sides.  What do

you see before you?  Is the fairy structure growing?  Is it becoming a

jewel casket?



     "The whole of the Taj produces a wonderful effect that is equally

     sublime and beautiful."



Then Sir William Wilson Hunter:



     "The Taj Mahal with its beautiful domes, 'a dream of marble,' rises

     on the river bank."



     "The materials are white marble and red sandstone."



     "The complexity of its design and the delicate intricacy of the

     workmanship baffle description."



Sir William continues.  I will italicize some of his words:



     "The mausoleum stands on a raised marble platform at each of whose

     corners rises a tall and slender minaret of graceful proportions and

     of exquisite beauty.  Beyond the platform stretch the two wings, one

     of which is itself a mosque of great architectural merit.  In the

     center of the whole design the mausoleum occupies a square of 186

     feet, with the angles deeply truncated so also form an unequal

     octagon.  The main feature in this central pile is the great dome,

     which swells upward to nearly two-thirds of a sphere and tapers at

     its extremity into a pointed spire crowned by a crescent.  Beneath

     it an enclosure of marble trellis-work surrounds the tomb of the

     princess and of her husband, the Emperor.  Each corner of the

     mausoleum is covered by a similar though much smaller dome erected

     on a pediment pierced with graceful Saracenic arches.  Light is

     admitted into the interior through a double screen of pierced

     marble, which tempers the glare of an Indian sky while its whiteness

     prevents the mellow effect from degenerating into gloom.  The

     internal decorations consist of inlaid work in precious stones, such

     as agate, jasper, etc., with which every squandril or salient point

     in the architecture is richly fretted.  Brown and violet marble is

     also freely employed in wreaths, scrolls, and lintels to relieve the

     monotony of white wall.  In regard to color and design, the interior

     of the Taj may rank first in the world for purely decorative

     workmanship; while the perfect symmetry of its exterior, once seen

     can never be forgotten, nor the aerial grace of its domes, rising

     like marble bubbles into the clear sky.  The Taj represents the most

     highly elaborated stage of ornamentation reached by the Indo-

     Mohammedan builders, the stage in which the architect ends and the

     jeweler begins.  In its magnificent gateway the diagonal

     ornamentation at the corners, which satisfied the designers of the

     gateways of Itimad-ud-doulah and Sikandra mausoleums is superseded

     by fine marble cables, in bold twists, strong and handsome.  The

     triangular insertions of white marble and large flowers have in like

     manner given place to fine inlaid work.  Firm perpendicular lines in

     black marble with well proportioned panels of the same material are

     effectively used in the interior of the gateway.  On its top the

     Hindu brackets and monolithic architraves of Sikandra are replaced

     by Moorish carped arches, usually single blocks of red sandstone, in

     the Kiosks and pavilions which adorn the roof.  From the pillared

     pavilions a magnificent view is obtained of the Taj gardens below,

     with the noble Jumna river at their farther end, and the city and

     fort of Agra in the distance.  From this beautiful and splendid

     gateway one passes up a straight alley shaded by evergreen trees

     cooled by a broad shallow piece of water running along the middle of

     the path to the Taj itself.  The Taj is entirely of marble and gems.

     The red sandstone of the other Mohammedan buildings has entirely

     disappeared, or rather the red sandstone which used to form the

     thickness of the walls, is in the Taj itself overlaid completely

     with white marble, and the white marble is itself inlaid with

     precious stones arranged in lovely patterns of flowers.  A feeling

     of purity impresses itself on the eye and the mind from the absence

     of the coarser material which forms so invariable a material in Agra

     architecture.  The lower wall and panels are covered with tulips,

     oleanders, and fullblown lilies, in flat carving on the white

     marble; and although the inlaid work of flowers done in gems is very

     brilliant when looked at closely, there is on the whole but little

     color, and the all-prevailing sentiment is one of whiteness,

     silence, and calm.  The whiteness is broken only by the fine color

     of the inlaid gems, by lines in black marble, and by delicately

     written inscriptions, also in black, from the Koran.  Under the dome

     of the vast mausoleum a high and beautiful screen of open tracery in

     white marble rises around the two tombs, or rather cenotaphs of the

     emperor and his princess; and in this marvel of marble the carving

     has advanced from the old geometrical patterns to a trellis-work of

     flowers and foliage, handled with great freedom and spirit.  The two

     cenotaphs in the center of the exquisite enclosure have no carving

     except the plain Kalamdan or oblong pen-box on the tomb of Emperor

     Shah Jehan.  But both cenotaphs are inlaid with flowers made of

     costly gems, and with the ever graceful oleander scroll."



Bayard Taylor, after describing the details of the Taj, goes on to say:



     "On both sides the palm, the banyan, and the feathery bamboo mingle

     their foliage; the song of birds meets your ears, and the odor of

     roses and lemon flowers sweetens the air.  Down such a vista and

     over such a foreground rises the Taj.  There is no mystery, no sense

     of partial failure about the Taj.  A thing of perfect beauty and of

     absolute finish in every detail, it might pass for the work of genii

     who knew naught of the weaknesses and ills with which mankind are

     beset."



All of these details are true.  But, taken together, they state a

falsehood--to you.  You cannot add them up correctly.  Those writers know

the values of their words and phrases, but to you the words and phrases

convey other and uncertain values.  To those writers their phrases have

values which I think I am now acquainted with; and for the help of the

reader I will here repeat certain of those words and phrases, and follow

them with numerals which shall represent those values--then we shall see

the difference between a writer's ciphering and a mistaken reader's



Precious stones, such as agate, jasper, etc.--5.



With which every salient point is richly fretted--5.



First in the world for purely decorative workmanship--9.



The Taj represents the stage where the architect ends and the jeweler

begins--5.



The Taj is entirely of marble and gems--7.



Inlaid with precious stones in lovely patterns of flowers--5.



The inlaid work of flowers done in gems is very brilliant

(followed by a most important modification which the reader is sure to

read too carelessly)--2.



The vast mausoleum--5.



This marvel of marble--5.



The exquisite enclosure--5.



Inlaid with flowers made of costly gems--5.



A thing of perfect beauty and absolute finish--5.





Those details are correct; the figures which I have placed after them

represent quite fairly their individual, values.  Then why, as a whole,

do they convey a false impression to the reader?  It is because the

reader--beguiled by, his heated imagination--masses them in the wrong

way.  The writer would mass the first three figures in the following way,

and they would speak the truth



Total--19



But the reader masses them thus--and then they tell a lie--559.



The writer would add all of his twelve numerals together, and then the

sum would express the whole truth about the Taj, and the truth only--63.



But the reader--always helped by his imagination--would put the figures

in a row one after the other, and get this sum, which would tell him a

noble big lie:



559575255555.



You must put in the commas yourself; I have to go on with my work.



The reader will always be sure to put the figures together in that wrong

way, and then as surely before him will stand, sparkling in the sun, a

gem-crusted Taj tall as the Matterhorn.



I had to visit Niagara fifteen times before I succeeded in getting my

imaginary Falls gauged to the actuality and could begin to sanely and

wholesomely wonder at them for what they were, not what I had expected

them to be.  When I first approached them it was with my face lifted

toward the sky, for I thought I was going to see an Atlantic ocean

pouring down thence over cloud-vexed Himalayan heights, a sea-green wall

of water sixty miles front and six miles high, and so, when the toy

reality came suddenly into view--that beruiled little wet apron hanging

out to dry--the shock was too much for me, and I fell with a dull thud.



Yet slowly, surely, steadily, in the course of my fifteen visits, the

proportions adjusted themselves to the facts, and I came at last to

realize that a waterfall a hundred and sixty-five feet high and a quarter

of a mile wide was an impressive thing.  It was not a dipperful to my

vanished great vision, but it would answer.



I know that I ought to do with the Taj as I was obliged to do with

Niagara--see it fifteen times, and let my mind gradually get rid of the

Taj built in it by its describers, by help of my imagination, and

substitute for it the Taj of fact.  It would be noble and fine, then, and

a marvel; not the marvel which it replaced, but still a marvel, and fine

enough.  I am a careless reader, I suppose--an impressionist reader; an

impressionist reader of what is not an impressionist picture; a reader

who overlooks the informing details or masses their sum improperly, and

gets only a large splashy, general effect--an effect which is not

correct, and which is not warranted by the particulars placed before me

particulars which I did not examine, and whose meanings I did not

cautiously and carefully estimate.  It is an effect which is some thirty-

five or forty times finer than the reality, and is therefore a great deal

better and more valuable than the reality; and so, I ought never to hunt

up the reality, but stay miles away from it, and thus preserve undamaged

my own private mighty Niagara tumbling out of the vault of heaven, and my

own ineffable Taj, built of tinted mists upon jeweled arches of rainbows

supported by colonnades of moonlight.  It is a mistake for a person with

an unregulated imagination to go and look at an illustrious world's

wonder.



I suppose that many, many years ago I gathered the idea that the Taj's

place in the achievements of man was exactly the place of the ice-storm

in the achievements of Nature; that the Taj represented man's supremest

possibility in the creation of grace and beauty and exquisiteness and

splendor, just as the ice-storm represents Nature's supremest possibility

in the combination of those same qualities.  I do not know how long ago

that idea was bred in me, but I know that I cannot remember back to a

time when the thought of either of these symbols of gracious and

unapproachable perfection did not at once suggest the other.  If I

thought of the ice-storm, the Taj rose before me divinely beautiful; if I

thought of the Taj, with its encrustings and inlayings of jewels, the

vision of the ice-storm rose.  And so, to me, all these years, the Taj

has had no rival among the temples and palaces of men, none that even

remotely approached it it was man's architectural ice-storm.



Here in London the other night I was talking with some Scotch and English

friends, and I mentioned the ice-storm, using it as a figure--a figure

which failed, for none of them had heard of the ice-storm.  One

gentleman, who was very familiar with American literature, said he had

never seen it mentioned in any book.  That is strange.  And I, myself,

was not able to say that I had seen it mentioned in a book; and yet the

autumn foliage, with all other American scenery, has received full and

competent attention.



The oversight is strange, for in America the ice-storm is an event.  And

it is not an event which one is careless about.  When it comes, the news

flies from room to room in the house, there are bangings on the doors,

and shoutings, "The ice-storm!  the ice-storm!" and even the laziest

sleepers throw off the covers and join the rush for the windows.  The

ice-storm occurs in midwinter, and usually its enchantments are wrought

in the silence and the darkness of the night.  A fine drizzling rain

falls hour after hour upon the naked twigs and branches of the trees, and

as it falls it freezes.  In time the trunk and every branch and twig are

incased in hard pure ice; so that the tree looks like a skeleton tree

made all of glass--glass that is crystal-clear.  All along the underside

of every branch and twig is a comb of little icicles--the frozen drip.

Sometimes these pendants do not quite amount to icicles, but are round

beads--frozen tears.



The weather clears, toward dawn, and leaves a brisk pure atmosphere and a

sky without a shred of cloud in it--and everything is still, there is not

a breath of wind.  The dawn breaks and spreads, the news of the storm

goes about the house, and the little and the big, in wraps and blankets,

flock to the window and press together there, and gaze intently out upon

the great white ghost in the grounds, and nobody says a word, nobody

stirs.  All are waiting; they know what is coming, and they are waiting

waiting for the miracle.  The minutes drift on and on and on, with not a

sound but the ticking of the clock; at last the sun fires a sudden sheaf

of rays into the ghostly tree and turns it into a white splendor of

glittering diamonds.  Everybody catches his breath, and feels a swelling

in his throat and a moisture in his eyes-but waits again; for he knows

what is coming; there is more yet.  The sun climbs higher, and still

higher, flooding the tree from its loftiest spread of branches to its

lowest, turning it to a glory of white fire; then in a moment, without

warning, comes the great miracle, the supreme miracle, the miracle

without its fellow in the earth; a gust of wind sets every branch and

twig to swaying, and in an instant turns the whole white tree into a

spouting and spraying explosion of flashing gems of every conceivable

color; and there it stands and sways this way and that, flash!  flash!

flash!  a dancing and glancing world of rubies, emeralds, diamonds,

sapphires, the most radiant spectacle, the most blinding spectacle, the

divinest, the most exquisite, the most intoxicating vision of fire and

color and intolerable and unimaginable splendor that ever any eye has

rested upon in this world, or will ever rest upon outside of the gates of

heaven.



By, all my senses, all my faculties, I know that the icestorm is Nature's

supremest achievement in the domain of the superb and the beautiful; and

by my reason, at least, I know that the Taj is man's ice-storm.



In the ice-storm every one of the myriad ice-beads pendant from twig and

branch is an individual gem, and changes color with every motion caused

by the wind; each tree carries a million, and a forest-front exhibits the

splendors of the single tree multiplied by a thousand.



It occurs to me now that I have never seen the ice-storm put upon canvas,

and have not heard that any painter has tried to do it.  I wonder why

that is.  Is it that paint cannot counterfeit the intense blaze of a sun-

flooded jewel?  There should be, and must be, a reason, and a good one,

why the most enchanting sight that Nature has created has been neglected

by the brush.



Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict

truth.  The describers of the Taj have used the word gem in its strictest

sense--its scientific sense.  In that sense it is a mild word, and

promises but little to the eye-nothing bright, nothing brilliant, nothing

sparkling, nothing splendid in the way of color.  It accurately describes

the sober and unobtrusive gem-work of the Taj; that is, to the very

highly-educated one person in a thousand; but it most falsely describes

it to the 999.  But the 999 are the people who ought to be especially

taken care of, and to them it does not mean quiet-colored designs wrought

in carnelians, or agates, or such things; they know the word in its wide

and ordinary sense only, and so to them it means diamonds and rubies and

opals and their kindred, and the moment their eyes fall upon it in print

they see a vision of glorious colors clothed in fire.



These describers are writing for the "general," and so, in order to make

sure of being understood, they ought to use words in their ordinary

sense, or else explain.  The word fountain means one thing in Syria,

where there is but a handful of people; it means quite another thing in

North America, where there are 75,000,000.  If I were describing some

Syrian scenery, and should exclaim, "Within the narrow space of a quarter

of a mile square I saw, in the glory of the flooding moonlight, two

hundred noble fountains--imagine the spectacle!" the North American would

have a vision of clustering columns of water soaring aloft, bending over

in graceful arches, bursting in beaded spray and raining white fire in

the moonlight-and he would be deceived.  But the Syrian would not be

deceived; he would merely see two hundred fresh-water springs--two

hundred drowsing puddles, as level and unpretentious and unexcited as so

many door-mats, and even with the help of the moonlight he would not lose

his grip in the presence of the exhibition.  My word "fountain" would be

correct; it would speak the strict truth; and it would convey the strict

truth to the handful of Syrians, and the strictest misinformation to the

North American millions.  With their gems--and gems--and more gems--and

gems again--and still other gems--the describers of the Taj are within

their legal but not their moral rights; they are dealing in the strictest

scientific truth; and in doing it they succeed to admiration in telling

"what ain't so."









CHAPTER LX.



SATAN (impatiently) to NEW-COMER.  The trouble with you Chicago people

is, that you think you are the best people down here; whereas you are

merely the most numerous.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



We wandered contentedly around here and there in India; to Lahore, among

other places, where the Lieutenant-Governor lent me an elephant.  This

hospitality stands out in my experiences in a stately isolation.  It was

a fine elephant, affable, gentlemanly, educated, and I was not afraid of

it.  I even rode it with confidence through the crowded lanes of the

native city, where it scared all the horses out of their senses, and

where children were always just escaping its feet.  It took the middle of

the road in a fine independent way, and left it to the world to get out

of the way or take the consequences.  I am used to being afraid of

collisions when I ride or drive, but when one is on top of an elephant

that feeling is absent.  I could have ridden in comfort through a

regiment of runaway teams.  I could easily learn to prefer an elephant to

any other vehicle, partly because of that immunity from collisions, and

partly because of the fine view one has from up there, and partly because

of the dignity one feels in that high place, and partly because one can

look in at the windows and see what is going on privately among the

family.  The Lahore horses were used to elephants, but they were

rapturously afraid of them just the same.  It seemed curious.  Perhaps

the better they know the elephant the more they respect him in that

peculiar way.  In our own case--we are not afraid of dynamite till we get

acquainted with it.



We drifted as far as Rawal Pindi, away up on the Afghan frontier--I think

it was the Afghan frontier, but it may have been Hertzegovina--it was

around there somewhere--and down again to Delhi, to see the ancient

architectural wonders there and in Old Delhi and not describe them, and

also to see the scene of the illustrious assault, in the Mutiny days,

when the British carried Delhi by storm, one of the marvels of history

for impudent daring and immortal valor.



We had a refreshing rest, there in Delhi, in a great old mansion which

possessed historical interest.  It was built by a rich Englishman who had

become orientalized--so much so that he had a zenana.  But he was a

broadminded man, and remained so.  To please his harem he built a mosque;

to please himself he built an English church.  That kind of a man will

arrive, somewhere.  In the Mutiny days the mansion was the British

general's headquarters.  It stands in a great garden--oriental fashion--

and about it are many noble trees.  The trees harbor monkeys; and they

are monkeys of a watchful and enterprising sort, and not much troubled

with fear.  They invade the house whenever they get a chance, and carry

off everything they don't want.  One morning the master of the house was

in his bath, and the window was open.  Near it stood a pot of yellow

paint and a brush.  Some monkeys appeared in the window; to scare them

away, the gentleman threw his sponge at them.  They did not scare at all;

they jumped into the room and threw yellow paint all over him from the

brush, and drove him out; then they painted the walls and the floor and

the tank and the windows and the furniture yellow, and were in the

dressing-room painting that when help arrived and routed them.



Two of these creatures came into my room in the early morning, through a

window whose shutters I had left open, and when I woke one of them was

before the glass brushing his hair, and the other one had my note-book,

and was reading a page of humorous notes and crying.  I did not mind the

one with the hair-brush, but the conduct of the other one hurt me; it

hurts me yet.  I threw something at him, and that was wrong, for my host

had told me that the monkeys were best left alone.  They threw everything

at me that they could lift, and then went into the bathroom to get some

more things, and I shut the door on them.



At Jeypore, in Rajputana, we made a considerable stay.  We were not in

the native city, but several miles from it, in the small European

official suburb.  There were but few Europeans--only fourteen but they

were all kind and hospitable, and it amounted to being at home.  In

Jeypore we found again what we had found all about India--that while the

Indian servant is in his way a very real treasure, he will sometimes bear

watching, and the Englishman watches him.  If he sends him on an errand,

he wants more than the man's word for it that he did the errand.  When

fruit and vegetables were sent to us, a "chit" came with them--a receipt

for us to sign; otherwise the things might not arrive.  If a gentleman

sent up his carriage, the chit stated "from" such-and-such an hour "to"

such-and-such an hour--which made it unhandy for the coachman and his two

or three subordinates to put us off with a part of the allotted time and

devote the rest of it to a lark of their own.



We were pleasantly situated in a small two-storied inn, in an empty large

compound which was surrounded by a mud wall as high as a man's head.  The

inn was kept by nine Hindoo brothers, its owners.  They lived, with their

families, in a one-storied building within the compound, but off to one

side, and there was always a long pile of their little comely brown

children loosely stacked in its veranda, and a detachment of the parents

wedged among them, smoking the hookah or the howdah, or whatever they

call it.  By the veranda stood a palm, and a monkey lived in it, and led

a lonesome life, and always looked sad and weary, and the crows bothered

him a good deal.



The inn cow poked about the compound and emphasized the secluded and

country air of the place, and there was a dog of no particular breed, who

was always present in the compound, and always asleep, always stretched

out baking in the sun and adding to the deep tranquility and

reposefulness of the place, when the crows were away on business.  White-

draperied servants were coming and going all the time, but they seemed

only spirits, for their feet were bare and made no sound.  Down the lane

a piece lived an elephant in the shade of a noble tree, and rocked and

rocked, and reached about with his trunk, begging of his brown mistress

or fumbling the children playing at his feet.  And there were camels

about, but they go on velvet feet, and were proper to the silence and

serenity of the surroundings.



The Satan mentioned at the head of this chapter was not our Satan, but

the other one.  Our Satan was lost to us.  In these later days he had

passed out of our life--lamented by me, and sincerely.  I was missing

him; I am missing him yet, after all these months.  He was an astonishing

creature to fly around and do things.  He didn't always do them quite

right, but he did them, and did them suddenly.  There was no time wasted.

You would say:



"Pack the trunks and bags, Satan."



"Wair good" (very good).



Then there would be a brief sound of thrashing and slashing and humming

and buzzing, and a spectacle as of a whirlwind spinning gowns and jackets

and coats and boots and things through the air, and then with bow and

touch--



"Awready, master."



It was wonderful.  It made one dizzy.  He crumpled dresses a good deal,

and he had no particular plan about the work--at first--except to put

each article into the trunk it didn't belong in.  But he soon reformed,

in this matter.  Not entirely; for, to the last, he would cram into the

satchel sacred to literature any odds and ends of rubbish that he

couldn't find a handy place for elsewhere.  When threatened with death

for this, it did not trouble him; he only looked pleasant, saluted with

soldierly grace, said "Wair good," and did it again next day.



He was always busy; kept the rooms tidied up, the boots polished, the

clothes brushed, the wash-basin full of clean water, my dress clothes

laid out and ready for the lecture-hall an hour ahead of time; and he

dressed me from head to heel in spite of my determination to do it

myself, according to my lifelong custom.



He was a born boss, and loved to command, and to jaw and dispute with

inferiors and harry them and bullyrag them.  He was fine at the railway

station--yes, he was at his finest there.  He would shoulder and plunge

and paw his violent way through the packed multitude of natives with

nineteen coolies at his tail, each bearing a trifle of luggage--one a

trunk, another a parasol, another a shawl, another a fan, and so on; one

article to each, and the longer the procession, the better he was suited

--and he was sure to make for some engaged sleeper and begin to hurl the

owner's things out of it, swearing that it was ours and that there had

been a mistake.  Arrived at our own sleeper, he would undo the bedding-

bundles and make the beds and put everything to rights and shipshape in

two minutes; then put his head out at, a window and have a restful good

time abusing his gang of coolies and disputing their bill until we

arrived and made him pay them and stop his noise.



Speaking of noise, he certainly was the noisest little devil in India--

and that is saying much, very much, indeed.  I loved him for his noise,

but the family detested him for it.  They could not abide it; they could

not get reconciled to it.  It humiliated them.  As a rule, when we got

within six hundred yards of one of those big railway stations, a mighty

racket of screaming and shrieking and shouting and storming would break

upon us, and I would be happy to myself, and the family would say, with

shame:



"There--that's Satan.  Why do you keep him?"



And, sure enough, there in the whirling midst of fifteen hundred

wondering people we would find that little scrap of a creature

gesticulating like a spider with the colic, his black eyes snapping, his

fez-tassel dancing, his jaws pouring out floods of billingsgate upon his

gang of beseeching and astonished coolies.



I loved him; I couldn't help it; but the family--why, they could hardly

speak of him with patience.  To this day I regret his loss, and wish I

had him back; but they--it is different with them.  He was a native, and

came from Surat.  Twenty degrees of latitude lay between his birthplace

and Manuel's, and fifteen hundred between their ways and characters and

dispositions.  I only liked Manuel, but I loved Satan.  This latter's

real name was intensely Indian.  I could not quite get the hang of it,

but it sounded like Bunder Rao Ram Chunder Clam Chowder.  It was too long

for handy use, anyway; so I reduced it.



When he had been with us two or three weeks, he began to make mistakes

which I had difficulty in patching up for him.  Approaching Benares one

day, he got out of the train to see if he could get up a misunderstanding

with somebody, for it had been a weary, long journey and he wanted to

freshen up.  He found what he was after, but kept up his pow-wow a shade

too long and got left.  So there we were in a strange city and no

chambermaid.  It was awkward for us, and we told him he must not do so

any more.  He saluted and said in his dear, pleasant way, "Wair good."

Then at Lucknow he got drunk.  I said it was a fever, and got the

family's compassion, and solicitude aroused; so they gave him a

teaspoonful of liquid quinine and it set his vitals on fire.  He made

several grimaces which gave me a better idea of the Lisbon earthquake

than any I have ever got of it from paintings and descriptions.  His

drunk was still portentously solid next morning, but I could have pulled

him through with the family if he would only have taken another spoonful

of that remedy; but no, although he was stupefied, his memory still had

flickerings of life; so he smiled a divinely dull smile and said,

fumblingly saluting:



"Scoose me, mem Saheb, scoose me, Missy Saheb; Satan not prefer it,

please."



Then some instinct revealed to them that he was drunk.  They gave him

prompt notice that next time this happened he must go.  He got out a

maudlin and most gentle "Wair good," and saluted indefinitely.



Only one short week later he fell again.  And oh, sorrow! not in a hotel

this time, but in an English gentleman's private house.  And in Agra, of

all places.  So he had to go.  When I told him, he said patiently, "Wair

good," and made his parting salute, and went out from us to return no

more forever.  Dear me!  I would rather have lost a hundred angels than

that one poor lovely devil.  What style he used to put on, in a swell

hotel or in a private house--snow-white muslin from his chin to his bare

feet, a crimson sash embroidered with gold thread around his waist, and

on his head a great sea-green turban like to the turban of the Grand

Turk.



He was not a liar; but he will become one if he keeps on.  He told me

once that he used to crack cocoanuts with his teeth when he was a boy;

and when I asked how he got them into his mouth, he said he was upward of

six feet high at that time, and had an unusual mouth.  And when I

followed him up and asked him what had become of that other foot, he said

a house fell on him and he was never able to get his stature back again.

Swervings like these from the strict line of fact often beguile a

truthful man on and on until he eventually becomes a liar.



His successor was a Mohammedan, Sahadat Mohammed Khan; very dark, very

tall, very grave.  He went always in flowing masses of white, from the

top of his big turban down to his bare feet.  His voice was low.  He

glided about in a noiseless way, and looked like a ghost.  He was

competent and satisfactory.  But where he was, it seemed always Sunday.

It was not so in Satan's time.



Jeypore is intensely Indian, but it has two or three features which

indicate the presence of European science and European interest in the

weal of the common public, such as the liberal water-supply furnished by

great works built at the State's expense; good sanitation, resulting in a

degree of healthfulness unusually high for India; a noble pleasure

garden, with privileged days for women; schools for the instruction of

native youth in advanced art, both ornamental and utilitarian; and a new

and beautiful palace stocked with a museum of extraordinary interest and

value.  Without the Maharaja's sympathy and purse these beneficences

could not have been created; but he is a man of wide views and large

generosities, and all such matters find hospitality with him.



We drove often to the city from the hotel Kaiser-i-Hind, a journey which

was always full of interest, both night and day, for that country road

was never quiet, never empty, but was always India in motion, always a

streaming flood of brown people clothed in smouchings from the rainbow, a

tossing and moiling flood, happy, noisy, a charming and satisfying

confusion of strange human and strange animal life and equally strange

and outlandish vehicles.



And the city itself is a curiosity.  Any Indian city is that, but this

one is not like any other that we saw.  It is shut up in a lofty turreted

wall; the main body of it is divided into six parts by perfectly straight

streets that are more than a hundred feet wide; the blocks of houses

exhibit a long frontage of the most taking architectural quaintnesses,

the straight lines being broken everywhere by pretty little balconies,

pillared and highly ornamented, and other cunning and cozy and inviting

perches and projections, and many of the fronts are curiously pictured by

the brush, and the whole of them have the soft rich tint of strawberry

ice-cream.  One cannot look down the far stretch of the chief street and

persuade himself that these are real houses, and that it is all out of

doors--the impression that it is an unreality, a picture, a scene in a

theater, is the only one that will take hold.



Then there came a great day when this illusion was more pronounced than

ever.  A rich Hindoo had been spending a fortune upon the manufacture of

a crowd of idols and accompanying paraphernalia whose purpose was to

illustrate scenes in the life of his especial god or saint, and this fine

show 'vas to be brought through the town in processional state at ten in

the morning.  As we passed through the great public pleasure garden on

our way to the city we found it crowded with natives.  That was one

sight.  Then there was another.  In the midst of the spacious lawns

stands the palace which contains the museum--a beautiful construction of

stone which shows arched colonnades, one above another, and receding,

terrace-fashion, toward the sky.  Every one of these terraces, all the

way to the top one, was packed and jammed with natives.  One must try to

imagine those solid masses of splendid color, one above another, up and

up, against the blue sky, and the Indian sun turning them all to beds of

fire and flame.



Later, when we reached the city, and glanced down the chief avenue,

smouldering in its crushed-strawberry tint, those splendid effects were

repeated; for every balcony, and every fanciful bird-cage of a snuggery

countersunk in the house-fronts, and all the long lines of roofs were

crowded with people, and each crowd was an explosion of brilliant color.



Then the wide street itself, away down and down and down into the

distance, was alive with gorgeously-clothed people not still, but moving,

swaying, drifting, eddying, a delirious display of all colors and all

shades of color, delicate, lovely, pale, soft, strong, stunning, vivid,

brilliant, a sort of storm of sweetpea blossoms passing on the wings of a

hurricane; and presently, through this storm of color, came swaying and

swinging the majestic elephants, clothed in their Sunday best of

gaudinesses, and the long procession of fanciful trucks freighted with

their groups of curious and costly images, and then the long rearguard of

stately camels, with their picturesque riders.



For color, and picturesqueness, and novelty, and outlandishness, and

sustained interest and fascination, it was the most satisfying show I had

ever seen, and I suppose I shall not have the privilege of looking upon

its like again.









CHAPTER LXI.



In the first place God made idiots.  This was for practice.  Then He made

School Boards.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Suppose we applied no more ingenuity to the instruction of deaf and dumb

and blind children than we sometimes apply in our American public schools

to the instruction of children who are in possession of all their

faculties?  The result would be that the deaf and dumb and blind would

acquire nothing.  They would live and die as ignorant as bricks and

stones.  The methods used in the asylums are rational.  The teacher

exactly measures the child's capacity, to begin with; and from thence

onwards the tasks imposed are nicely gauged to the gradual development of

that capacity, the tasks keep pace with the steps of the child's

progress, they don't jump miles and leagues ahead of it by irrational

caprice and land in vacancy--according to the average public-school plan.

In the public school, apparently, they teach the child to spell cat, then

ask it to calculate an eclipse; when it can read words of two syllables,

they require it to explain the circulation of the blood; when it reaches

the head of the infant class they bully it with conundrums that cover the

domain of universal knowledge.  This sounds extravagant--and is; yet it

goes no great way beyond the facts.



I received a curious letter one day, from the Punjab (you must pronounce

it Punjawb).  The handwriting was excellent, and the wording was English

--English, and yet not exactly English.  The style was easy and smooth

and flowing, yet there was something subtly foreign about it--A something

tropically ornate and sentimental and rhetorical.  It turned out to be

the work of a Hindoo youth, the holder of a humble clerical billet in a

railway office.  He had been educated in one of the numerous colleges of

India.  Upon inquiry I was told that the country was full of young

fellows of his like.  They had been educated away up to the snow-summits

of learning--and the market for all this elaborate cultivation was

minutely out of proportion to the vastness of the product.  This market

consisted of some thousands of small clerical posts under the government-

the supply of material for it was multitudinous.  If this youth with the

flowing style and the blossoming English was occupying a small railway

clerkship, it meant that there were hundreds and hundreds as capable as

he, or he would be in a high place; and it certainly meant that there

were thousands whose education and capacity had fallen a little short,

and that they would have to go without places.  Apparently, then, the

colleges of India were doing what our high schools have long been doing--

richly over-supplying the market for highly-educated service; and thereby

doing a damage to the scholar, and through him to the country.



At home I once made a speech deploring the injuries inflicted by the high

school in making handicrafts distasteful to boys who would have been

willing to make a living at trades and agriculture if they had but had

the good luck to stop with the common school.  But I made no converts.

Not one, in a community overrun with educated idlers who were above

following their fathers' mechanical trades, yet could find no market for

their book-knowledge.  The same rail that brought me the letter from the

Punjab, brought also a little book published by Messrs. Thacker, Spink &

Co., of Calcutta, which interested me, for both its preface and its

contents treated of this matter of over-education.  In the preface occurs

this paragraph from the Calcutta Review.  For "Government office" read

"drygoods clerkship" and it will fit more than one region of America:



     "The education that we give makes the boys a little less clownish in

     their manners, and more intelligent when spoken to by strangers.  On

     the other hand, it has made them less contented with their lot in

     life, and less willing to work with their hands.  The form which

     discontent takes in this country is not of a healthy kind; for, the

     Natives of India consider that the only occupation worthy of an

     educated man is that of a writership in some office, and especially

     in a Government office.  The village schoolboy goes back to the plow

     with the greatest reluctance; and the town schoolboy carries the

     same discontent and inefficiency into his father's workshop.

     Sometimes these ex-students positively refuse at first to work; and

     more than once parents have openly expressed their regret that they

     ever allowed their sons to be inveigled to school."



The little book which I am quoting from is called "Indo-Anglian

Literature," and is well stocked with "baboo" English--clerkly English,

hooky English, acquired in the schools.  Some of it is very funny,--

almost as funny, perhaps, as what you and I produce when we try to write

in a language not our own; but much of it is surprisingly correct and

free.  If I were going to quote good English--but I am not.  India is

well stocked with natives who speak it and write it as well as the best

of us.  I merely wish to show some of the quaint imperfect attempts at

the use of our tongue.  There are many letters in the book; poverty

imploring help--bread, money, kindness, office generally an office, a

clerkship, some way to get food and a rag out of the applicant's

unmarketable education; and food not for himself alone, but sometimes for

a dozen helpless relations in addition to his own family; for those

people are astonishingly unselfish, and admirably faithful to their ties

of kinship.  Among us I think there is nothing approaching it.  Strange

as some of these wailing and supplicating letters are, humble and even

groveling as some of them are, and quaintly funny and confused as a

goodly number of them are, there is still a pathos about them, as a rule,

that checks the rising laugh and reproaches it.  In the following letter

"father" is not to be read literally.  In Ceylon a little native beggar-

girl embarrassed me by calling me father, although I knew she was

mistaken.  I was so new that I did not know that she was merely following

the custom of the dependent and the supplicant.



     "SIR,



     "I pray please to give me some action (work) for I am very poor boy

     I have no one to help me even so father for it so it seemed in thy

     good sight, you give the Telegraph Office, and another work what is

     your wish I am very poor boy, this understand what is your wish you

     my father I am your son this understand what is your wish.



     "Your Sirvent, P. C. B."



Through ages of debasing oppression suffered by these people at the hands

of their native rulers, they come legitimately by the attitude and

language of fawning and flattery, and one must remember this in

mitigation when passing judgment upon the native character.  It is common

in these letters to find the petitioner furtively trying to get at the

white man's soft religious side; even this poor boy baits his hook with a

macerated Bible-text in the hope that it may catch something if all else

fail.



Here is an application for the post of instructor in English to some

children:



     "My Dear Sir or Gentleman, that your Petitioner has much

     qualification in the Language of English to instruct the young boys;

     I was given to understand that your of suitable children has to

     acquire the knowledge of English language."



As a sample of the flowery Eastern style, I will take a sentence or two

from along letter written by a young native to the Lieutenant-Governor of

Bengal--an application for employment:



     "HONORED AND MUCH RESPECTED SIR,



     "I hope your honor will condescend to hear the tale of this poor

     creature.  I shall overflow with gratitude at this mark of your

     royal condescension.  The bird-like happiness has flown away from my

     nest-like heart and has not hitherto returned from the period whence

     the rose of my father's life suffered the autumnal breath of death,

     in plain English he passed through the gates of Grave, and from that

     hour the phantom of delight has never danced before me."



It is all school-English, book-English, you see; and good enough, too,

all things considered.  If the native boy had but that one study he would

shine, he would dazzle, no doubt.  But that is not the case.  He is

situated as are our public-school children--loaded down with an over-

freightage of other studies; and frequently they are as far beyond the

actual point of progress reached by him and suited to the stage of

development attained, as could be imagined by the insanest fancy.

Apparently--like our public-school boy--he must work, work, work, in

school and out, and play but little.  Apparently--like our public-school

boy--his "education" consists in learning things, not the meaning of

them; he is fed upon the husks, not the corn.  From several essays

written by native schoolboys in answer to the question of how they spend

their day, I select one--the one which goes most into detail:



     "66.  At the break of day I rises from my own bed and finish my

     daily duty, then I employ myself till 8 o'clock, after which I

     employ myself to bathe, then take for my body some sweet meat, and

     just at 9 1/2 I came to school to attend my class duty, then at

     2 1/2 P. M.  I return from school and engage myself to do my natural

     duty, then, I engage for a quarter to take my tithn, then I study

     till 5 P. M., after which I began to play anything which comes in

     my head.  After 8 1/2, half pass to eight we are began to sleep,

     before sleeping I told a constable just 11 o' he came and rose us

     from half pass eleven we began to read still morning."



It is not perfectly clear, now that I come to cipher upon it.  He gets up

at about 5 in the morning, or along there somewhere, and goes to bed

about fifteen or sixteen hours afterward--that much of it seems straight;

but why he should rise again three hours later and resume his studies

till morning is puzzling.



I think it is because he is studying history.  History requires a world

of time and bitter hard work when your "education" is no further advanced

than the cat's; when you are merely stuffing yourself with a mixed-up

mess of empty names and random incidents and elusive dates, which no one

teaches you how to interpret, and which, uninterpreted, pay you not a

farthing's value for your waste of time.  Yes, I think he had to get up

at halfpast 11 P.M.  in order to be sure to be perfect with his history

lesson by noon.  With results as follows--from a Calcutta school

examination:



"Q.  Who was Cardinal Wolsey?

"Cardinal Wolsey was an Editor of a paper named North Briton.  No. 45 of

his publication he charged the King of uttering a lie from the throne.

He was arrested and cast into prison; and after releasing went to France.



"3.  As Bishop of York but died in disentry in a church on his way to be

blockheaded.



"8.  Cardinal Wolsey was the son of Edward IV, after his father's death

he himself ascended the throne at the age of (10) ten only, but when he

surpassed or when he was fallen in his twenty years of age at that time

he wished to make a journey in his countries under him, but he was

opposed by his mother to do journey, and according to his mother's

example he remained in the home, and then became King.  After many times

obstacles and many confusion he become King and afterwards his brother."



There is probably not a word of truth in that.



"Q.  What is the meaning of 'Ich Dien'?



"10.  An honor conferred on the first or eldest sons of English

Sovereigns.  It is nothing more than some feathers.



"11.  Ich Dien was the word which was written on the feathers of the

blind King who came to fight, being interlaced with the bridles of the

horse.



"13.  Ich Dien is a title given to Henry VII by the Pope of Rome, when he

forwarded the Reformation of Cardinal Wolsy to Rome, and for this reason

he was called Commander of the faith."



A dozen or so of this kind of insane answers are quoted in the book from

that examination.  Each answer is sweeping proof, all by itself, that the

person uttering it was pushed ahead of where he belonged when he was put

into history; proof that he had been put to the task of acquiring history

before he had had a single lesson in the art of acquiring it, which is

the equivalent of dumping a pupil into geometry before he has learned the

progressive steps which lead up to it and make its acquirement possible.

Those Calcutta novices had no business with history.  There was no excuse

for examining them in it, no excuse for exposing them and their teachers.

They were totally empty; there was nothing to "examine."



Helen Keller has been dumb, stone deaf, and stone blind, ever since she

was a little baby a year-and-a-half old; and now at sixteen years of age

this miraculous creature, this wonder of all the ages, passes the Harvard

University examination in Latin, German, French history, belles lettres,

and such things, and does it brilliantly, too, not in a commonplace

fashion.  She doesn't know merely things, she is splendidly familiar with

the meanings of them.  When she writes an essay on a Shakespearean

character, her English is fine and strong, her grasp of the subject is

the grasp of one who knows, and her page is electric with light.  Has

Miss Sullivan taught her by the methods of India and the American public

school?  No, oh, no; for then she would be deafer and dumber and blinder

than she was before.  It is a pity that we can't educate all the children

in the asylums.



To continue the Calcutta exposure:



"What is the meaning of a Sheriff?"



"25.  Sheriff is a post opened in the time of John.  The duty of Sheriff

here in Calcutta, to look out and catch those carriages which is rashly

driven out by the coachman; but it is a high post in England.



"26.  Sheriff was the English bill of common prayer.



"27.  The man with whom the accusative persons are placed is called

Sheriff.



"28.  Sheriff--Latin term for 'shrub,' we called broom, worn by the first

earl of Enjue, as an emblem of humility when they went to the pilgrimage,

and from this their hairs took their crest and surname.



"29.  Sheriff is a kind of titlous sect of people, as Barons, Nobles,

etc.



"30.  Sheriff; a tittle given on those persons who were respective and

pious in England."



The students were examined in the following bulky matters: Geometry, the

Solar Spectrum, the Habeas Corpus Act, the British Parliament, and in

Metaphysics they were asked to trace the progress of skepticism from

Descartes to Hume.  It is within bounds to say that some of the results

were astonishing.  Without doubt, there were students present who

justified their teacher's wisdom in introducing them to these studies;

but the fact is also evident that others had been pushed into these

studies to waste their time over them when they could have been

profitably employed in hunting smaller game.  Under the head of Geometry,

one of the answers is this:



"49.  The whole BD = the whole CA, and so-so-so-so-so-so-so."



To me this is cloudy, but I was never well up in geometry.  That was the

only effort made among the five students who appeared for examination in

geometry; the other four wailed and surrendered without a fight.  They

are piteous wails, too, wails of despair; and one of them is an eloquent

reproach; it comes from a poor fellow who has been laden beyond his

strength by a stupid teacher, and is eloquent in spite of the poverty of

its English.  The poor chap finds himself required to explain riddles

which even Sir Isaac Newton was not able to understand:



"50.  Oh my dear father examiner you my father and you kindly give a

number of pass you my great father.



"51.  I am a poor boy and have no means to support my mother and two

brothers who are suffering much for want of food.  I get four rupees

monthly from charity fund of this place, from which I send two rupees for

their support, and keep two for my own support.  Father, if I relate the

unlucky circumstance under which we are placed, then, I think, you will

not be able to suppress the tender tear.



"52.  Sir which Sir Isaac Newton and other experienced mathematicians

cannot understand I being third of Entrance Class can understand these

which is too impossible to imagine.  And my examiner also has put very

tiresome and very heavy propositions to prove."



We must remember that these pupils had to do their thinking in one

language, and express themselves in another and alien one.  It was a

heavy handicap.  I have by me "English as She is Taught"--a collection of

American examinations made in the public schools of Brooklyn by one of

the teachers, Miss Caroline B. Le Row.  An extract or two from its pages

will show that when the American pupil is using but one language, and

that one his own, his performance is no whit better than his Indian

brother's:



"ON HISTORY.



"Christopher Columbus was called the father of his Country.  Queen

Isabella of Spain sold her watch and chain and other millinery so that

Columbus could discover America.



"The Indian wars were very desecrating to the country.



"The Indians pursued their warfare by hiding in the bushes and then

scalping them.



"Captain John Smith has been styled the father of his country.  His life

was saved by his daughter Pochahantas.



"The Puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds of America.



"The Stamp Act was to make everybody stamp all materials so they should

be null and void.



"Washington died in Spain almost broken-hearted.  His remains were taken

to the cathedral in Havana.



"Gorilla warfare was where men rode on gorillas."





In Brooklyn, as in India, they examine a pupil, and when they find out he

doesn't know anything, they put him into literature, or geometry, or

astronomy, or government, or something like that, so that he can properly

display the assification of the whole system



"ON LITERATURE.



"'Bracebridge Hall' was written by Henry Irving.



"Edgar A. Poe was a very curdling writer.



"Beowulf wrote the Scriptures.



"Ben Johnson survived Shakespeare in some respects.



"In the 'Canterbury Tale' it gives account of King Alfred on his way to

the shrine of Thomas Bucket.



"Chaucer was the father of English pottery.



"Chaucer was succeeded by H. Wads. Longfellow."





We will finish with a couple of samples of "literature," one from

America, the other from India.  The first is a Brooklyn public-school

boy's attempt to turn a few verses of the "Lady of the Lake" into prose.

You will have to concede that he did it:



"The man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an instrument made

of steel alone with strong ardor not diminishing, for, being tired from

the time passed with hard labor overworked with anger and ignorant with

weariness, while every breath for labor lie drew with cries full of

sorrow, the young deer made imperfect who worked hard filtered in sight."





The following paragraph is from a little book which is famous in India-

the biography of a distinguished Hindoo judge, Onoocool Chunder

Mookerjee; it was written by his nephew, and is unintentionally funny-in

fact, exceedingly so.  I offer here the closing scene.  If you would like

to sample the rest of the book, it can be had by applying to the

publishers, Messrs.  Thacker, Spink & Co., Calcutta



     "And having said these words he hermetically sealed his lips not to

     open them again.  All the well-known doctors of Calcutta that could

     be procured for a man of his position and wealth were brought,--

     Doctors Payne, Fayrer, and Nilmadhub Mookerjee and others; they did

     what they could do, with their puissance and knack of medical

     knowledge, but it proved after all as if to milk the ram!  His wife

     and children had not the mournful consolation to hear his last

     words; he remained sotto voce for a few hours, and then was taken

     from us at 6.12 P.m.  according to the caprice of God which passeth

     understanding."









CHAPTER LXII.



There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined ones.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



We sailed from Calcutta toward the end of March; stopped a day at Madras;

two or three days in Ceylon; then sailed westward on a long flight for

Mauritius.  From my diary:



April 7.  We are far abroad upon the smooth waters of the Indian Ocean,

now; it is shady and pleasant and peaceful under the vast spread of the

awnings, and life is perfect again--ideal.



The difference between a river and the sea is, that the river looks

fluid, the sea solid--usually looks as if you could step out and walk on

it.



The captain has this peculiarity--he cannot tell the truth in a plausible

way.  In this he is the very opposite of the austere Scot who sits midway

of the table; he cannot tell a lie in an unplausible way.  When the

captain finishes a statement the passengers glance at each other

privately, as who should say, "Do you believe that?"  When the Scot

finishes one, the look says, "How strange and interesting."  The whole

secret is in the manner and method of the two men.  The captain is a

little shy and diffident, and he states the simplest fact as if he were a

little afraid of it, while the Scot delivers himself of the most

abandoned lie with such an air of stern veracity that one is forced to

believe it although one knows it isn't so.  For instance, the Scot told

about a pet flying-fish he once owned, that lived in a little fountain in

his conservatory, and supported itself by catching birds and frogs and

rats in the neighboring fields.  It was plain that no one at the table

doubted this statement.



By and by, in the course of some talk about custom-house annoyances, the

captain brought out the following simple everyday incident, but through

his infirmity of style managed to tell it in such a way that it got no

credence.  He said:



     "I went ashore at Naples one voyage when I was in that trade, and

     stood around helping my passengers, for I could speak a little

     Italian.  Two or three times, at intervals, the officer asked me if

     I had anything dutiable about me, and seemed more and more put out

     and disappointed every time I told him no.  Finally a passenger whom

     I had helped through asked me to come out and take something.  I

     thanked him, but excused myself, saying I had taken a whisky just

     before I came ashore.



     "It was a fatal admission.  The officer at once made me pay sixpence

     import-duty on the whisky-just from ship to shore, you see; and he

     fined me L5 for not declaring the goods, another L5 for falsely

     denying that I had anything dutiable about me, also L5 for

     concealing the goods, and L50 for smuggling, which is the maximum

     penalty for unlawfully bringing in goods under the value of

     sevenpence ha'penny.  Altogether, sixty-five pounds sixpence for a

     little thing like that."



The Scot is always believed, yet he never tells anything but lies;

whereas the captain is never believed, although he never tells a lie, so

far as I can judge.  If he should say his uncle was a male person, he

would probably say it in such a way that nobody would believe it; at the

same time the Scot could claim that he had a female uncle and not stir a

doubt in anybody's mind.  My own luck has been curious all my literary

life; I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that

anybody would believe.



Lots of pets on board--birds and things.  In these far countries the

white people do seem to run remarkably to pets.  Our host in Cawnpore had

a fine collection of birds--the finest we saw in a private house in

India.  And in Colombo, Dr. Murray's great compound and commodious

bungalow were well populated with domesticated company from the woods:

frisky little squirrels; a Ceylon mina walking sociably about the house;

a small green parrot that whistled a single urgent note of call without

motion of its beak; also chuckled; a monkey in a cage on the back

veranda, and some more out in the trees; also a number of beautiful

macaws in the trees; and various and sundry birds and animals of breeds

not known to me.  But no cat.  Yet a cat would have liked that place.



April 9.  Tea-planting is the great business in Ceylon, now.  A passenger

says it often pays 40 per cent. on the investment.  Says there is a boom.



April 10.  The sea is a Mediterranean blue; and I believe that that is

about the divinest color known to nature.



It is strange and fine--Nature's lavish generosities to her creatures.

At least to all of them except man.  For those that fly she has provided

a home that is nobly spacious--a home which is forty miles deep and

envelops the whole globe, and has not an obstruction in it.  For those

that swim she has provided a more than imperial domain--a domain which is

miles deep and covers four-fifths of the globe.  But as for man, she has

cut him off with the mere odds and ends of the creation.  She has given

him the thin skin, the meagre skin which is stretched over the remaining

one-fifth--the naked bones stick up through it in most places.  On the

one-half of this domain he can raise snow, ice, sand, rocks, and nothing

else.  So the valuable part of his inheritance really consists of but a

single fifth of the family estate; and out of it he has to grub hard to

get enough to keep him alive and provide kings and soldiers and powder to

extend the blessings of civilization with.  Yet man, in his simplicity

and complacency and inability to cipher, thinks Nature regards him as the

important member of the family--in fact, her favorite.  Surely, it must

occur to even his dull head, sometimes, that she has a curious way of

showing it.



Afternoon.  The captain has been telling how, in one of his Arctic

voyages, it was so cold that the mate's shadow froze fast to the deck and

had to be ripped loose by main strength.  And even then he got only about

two-thirds of it back.  Nobody said anything, and the captain went away.

I think he is becoming disheartened .  .  .  .  Also, to be fair, there

is another word of praise due to this ship's library: it contains no copy

of the Vicar of Wakefield, that strange menagerie of complacent

hypocrites and idiots, of theatrical cheap-john heroes and heroines, who

are always showing off, of bad people who are not interesting, and good

people who are fatiguing.  A singular book.  Not a sincere line in it,

and not a character that invites respect; a book which is one long waste-

pipe discharge of goody-goody puerilities and dreary moralities; a book

which is full of pathos which revolts, and humor which grieves the heart.

There are few things in literature that are more piteous, more pathetic,

than the celebrated "humorous" incident of Moses and the spectacles.

Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library.  Just that one

omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that

hadn't a book in it.



Customs in tropic seas.  At 5 in the morning they pipe to wash down the

decks, and at once the ladies who are sleeping there turn out and they

and their beds go below.  Then one after another the men come up from the

bath in their pyjamas, and walk the decks an hour or two with bare legs

and bare feet.  Coffee and fruit served.  The ship cat and her kitten now

appear and get about their toilets; next the barber comes and flays us on

the breezy deck.  Breakfast at 9.30, and the day begins.  I do not know

how a day could be more reposeful: no motion; a level blue sea; nothing

in sight from horizon to horizon; the speed of the ship furnishes a

cooling breeze; there is no mail to read and answer; no newspapers to

excite you; no telegrams to fret you or fright you--the world is far, far

away; it has ceased to exist for you--seemed a fading dream, along in the

first days; has dissolved to an unreality now; it is gone from your mind

with all its businesses and ambitions, its prosperities and disasters,

its exultations and despairs, its joys and griefs and cares and worries.

They are no concern of yours any more; they have gone out of your life;

they are a storm which has passed and left a deep calm behind.  The

people group themselves about the decks in their snowy white linen, and

read, smoke, sew, play cards, talk, nap, and so on.  In other ships the

passengers are always ciphering about when they are going to arrive; out

in these seas it is rare, very rare, to hear that subject broached.  In

other ships there is always an eager rush to the bulletin board at noon

to find out what the "run" has been; in these seas the bulletin seems to

attract no interest; I have seen no one visit it; in thirteen days I have

visited it only once.  Then I happened to notice the figures of the day's

run.  On that day there happened to be talk, at dinner, about the speed

of modern ships.  I was the only passenger present who knew this ship's

gait.  Necessarily, the Atlantic custom of betting on the ship's run is

not a custom here--nobody ever mentions it.



I myself am wholly indifferent as to when we are going to "get in"; if

any one else feels interested in the matter he has not indicated it in my

hearing.  If I had my way we should never get in at all.  This sort of

sea life is charged with an indestructible charm.  There is no weariness,

no fatigue, no worry, no responsibility, no work, no depression of

spirits.  There is nothing like this serenity, this comfort, this peace,

this deep contentment, to be found anywhere on land.  If I had my way I

would sail on for ever and never go to live on the solid ground again.



One of Kipling's ballads has delivered the aspect and sentiment of this

bewitching sea correctly:



               "The Injian Ocean sets an' smiles

               So sof', so bright, so bloomin' blue;

               There aren't a wave for miles an' miles

               Excep' the jiggle from the screw."



April 14.  It turns out that the astronomical apprentice worked off a

section of the Milky Way on me for the Magellan Clouds.  A man of more

experience in the business showed one of them to me last night.  It was

small and faint and delicate, and looked like the ghost of a bunch of

white smoke left floating in the sky by an exploded bombshell.



Wednesday, April 15.  Mauritius.  Arrived and anchored off Port Louis

2 A. M.  Rugged clusters of crags and peaks, green to their summits; from

their bases to the sea a green plain with just tilt enough to it to make

the water drain off.  I believe it is in 56 E.  and 22 S.--a hot tropical

country.  The green plain has an inviting look; has scattering dwellings

nestling among the greenery.  Scene of the sentimental adventure of Paul

and Virginia.



Island under French control--which means a community which depends upon

quarantines, not sanitation, for its health.



Thursday, April 16.  Went ashore in the forenoon at Port Louis, a little

town, but with the largest variety of nationalities and complexions we

have encountered yet.  French, English, Chinese, Arabs, Africans with

wool, blacks with straight hair, East Indians, half-whites, quadroons--

and great varieties in costumes and colors.



Took the train for Curepipe at 1.30--two hours' run, gradually uphill.

What a contrast, this frantic luxuriance of vegetation, with the arid

plains of India; these architecturally picturesque crags and knobs and

miniature mountains, with the monotony of the Indian dead-levels.



A native pointed out a handsome swarthy man of grave and dignified

bearing, and said in an awed tone, "That is so-and-so; has held office of

one sort or another under this government for 37 years--he is known all

over this whole island and in the other countries of the world perhaps--

who knows?  One thing is certain; you can speak his name anywhere in this

whole island, and you will find not one grown person that has not heard

it.  It is a wonderful thing to be so celebrated; yet look at him; it

makes no change in him; he does not even seem to know it."



Curepipe (means Pincushion or Pegtown, probably).  Sixteen miles (two

hours) by rail from Port Louis.  At each end of every roof and on the

apex of every dormer window a wooden peg two feet high stands up; in some

cases its top is blunt, in others the peg is sharp and looks like a

toothpick.  The passion for this humble ornament is universal.



Apparently, there has been only one prominent event in the history of

Mauritius, and that one didn't happen.  I refer to the romantic sojourn

of Paul and Virginia here.  It was that story that made Mauritius known

to the world, made the name familiar to everybody, the geographical

position of it to nobody.



A clergyman was asked to guess what was in a box on a table.  It was a

vellum fan painted with the shipwreck, and was "one of Virginia's wedding

gifts."



April 18.  This is the only country in the world where the stranger is

not asked "How do you like this place?"  This is indeed a large

distinction.  Here the citizen does the talking about the country

himself; the stranger is not asked to help.  You get all sorts of

information.  From one citizen you gather the idea that Mauritius was

made first, and then heaven; and that heaven was copied after Mauritius.

Another one tells you that this is an exaggeration; that the two chief

villages, Port Louis and Curepipe, fall short of heavenly perfection;

that nobody lives in Port Louis except upon compulsion, and that Curepipe

is the wettest and rainiest place in the world.  An English citizen said:



     "In the early part of this century Mauritius was used by the French

     as a basis from which to operate against England's Indian

     merchantmen; so England captured the island and also the neighbor,

     Bourbon, to stop that annoyance.  England gave Bourbon back; the

     government in London did not want any more possessions in the West

     Indies.  If the government had had a better quality of geography in

     stock it would not have wasted Bourbon in that foolish way.  A big

     war will temporarily shut up the Suez Canal some day and the English

     ships will have to go to India around the Cape of Good Hope again;

     then England will have to have Bourbon and will take it.



     "Mauritius was a crown colony until 20 years ago, with a governor

     appointed by the Crown and assisted by a Council appointed by

     himself; but Pope Hennessey came out as Governor then, and he worked

     hard to get a part of the council made elective, and succeeded.  So

     now the whole council is French, and in all ordinary matters of

     legislation they vote together and in the French interest, not the

     English. The English population is very slender; it has not votes

     enough to elect a legislator.  Half a dozen rich French families

     elect the legislature.  Pope Hennessey was an Irishman, a Catholic,

     a Home Ruler, M.P., a hater of England and the English, a very

     troublesome person and a serious incumbrance at Westminster; so it

     was decided to send him out to govern unhealthy countries, in hope

     that something would happen to him.  But nothing did.  The first

     experiment was not merely a failure, it was more than a failure.  He

     proved to be more of a disease himself than any he was sent to

     encounter.  The next experiment was here.  The dark scheme failed

     again.  It was an off-season and there was nothing but measles here

     at the time.  Pope Hennessey's health was not affected.  He worked

     with the French and for the French and against the English, and he

     made the English very tired and the French very happy, and lived to

     have the joy of seeing the flag he served publicly hissed.  His

     memory is held in worshipful reverence and affection by the French.



     "It is a land of extraordinary quarantines.  They quarantine a ship

     for anything or for nothing; quarantine her for 20 and even 30 days.

     They once quarantined a ship because her captain had had the

     smallpox when he was a boy.  That and because he was English.



     "The population is very small; small to insignificance.  The

     majority is East Indian; then mongrels; then negroes (descendants of

     the slaves of the French times); then French; then English.  There

     was an American, but he is dead or mislaid.  The mongrels are the

     result of all kinds of mixtures; black and white, mulatto and white,

     quadroon and white, octoroon and white.  And so there is every shade

     of complexion; ebony, old mahogany, horsechestnut, sorrel, molasses-

     candy, clouded amber, clear amber, old-ivory white, new-ivory white,

     fish-belly white--this latter the leprous complexion frequent with

     the Anglo-Saxon long resident in tropical climates.



     "You wouldn't expect a person to be proud of being a Mauritian, now

     would you?  But it is so.  The most of them have never been out of

     the island, and haven't read much or studied much, and they think

     the world consists of three principal countries--Judaea, France, and

     Mauritius; so they are very proud of belonging to one of the three

     grand divisions of the globe.  They think that Russia and Germany

     are in England, and that England does not amount to much.  They have

     heard vaguely about the United States and the equator, but they

     think both of them are monarchies.  They think Mount Peter Botte is

     the highest mountain in the world, and if you show one of them a

     picture of Milan Cathedral he will swell up with satisfaction and

     say that the idea of that jungle of spires was stolen from the

     forest of peg-tops and toothpicks that makes the roofs of Curepipe

     look so fine and prickly.



     "There is not much trade in books.  The newspapers educate and

     entertain the people.  Mainly the latter.  They have two pages of

     large-print reading-matter-one of them English, the other French.

     The English page is a translation of the French one.  The typography

     is super-extra primitive--in this quality it has not its equal

     anywhere.  There is no proof-reader now; he is dead.



     "Where do they get matter to fill up a page in this little island

     lost in the wastes of the Indian Ocean?  Oh, Madagascar.  They

     discuss Madagascar and France.  That is the bulk.  Then they chock

     up the rest with advice to the Government.  Also, slurs upon the

     English administration.  The papers are all owned and edited by

     creoles--French.



     "The language of the country is French.  Everybody speaks it--has

     to.  You have to know French particularly mongrel French, the patois

     spoken by Tom, Dick, and Harry of the multiform complexions--or you

     can't get along.



"This was a flourishing country in former days, for it made then and

still makes the best sugar in the world; but first the Suez Canal severed

it from the world and left it out in the cold and next the beetroot sugar

helped by bounties, captured the European markets.  Sugar is the life of

Mauritius, and it is losing its grip. Its downward course was checked by

the depreciation of the rupee--for the planter pays wages in rupees but

sells his crop for gold--and the insurrection in Cuba and paralyzation of

the sugar industry there have given our prices here a life-saving lift;

but the outlook has nothing permanently favorable about it.  It takes a

year to mature the canes--on the high ground three and six months longer

--and there is always a chance that the annual cyclone will rip the

profit out of the crop.  In recent times a cyclone took the whole crop,

as you may say; and the island never saw a finer one.  Some of the

noblest sugar estates in the island are in deep difficulties.  A dozen of

them are investments of English capital; and the companies that own them

are at work now, trying to settle up and get out with a saving of half

the money they put in.  You know, in these days, when a country begins to

introduce the tea culture, it means that its own specialty has gone back

on it.  Look at Bengal; look at Ceylon.  Well, they've begun to introduce

the tea culture, here.



"Many copies of Paul and Virginia are sold every year in Mauritius.  No

other book is so popular here except the Bible.  By many it is supposed

to be a part of the Bible.  All the missionaries work up their French on

it when they come here to pervert the Catholic mongrel.  It is the

greatest story that was ever written about Mauritius, and the only one."









CHAPTER LXIII.



The principal difference between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only

nine lives.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



April 20.--The cyclone of 1892 killed and crippled hundreds of people;

it was accompanied by a deluge of rain, which drowned Port Louis and

produced a water famine.  Quite true; for it burst the reservoir and the

water-pipes; and for a time after the flood had disappeared there was

much distress from want of water.



This is the only place in the world where no breed of matches can stand

the damp.  Only one match in 16 will light.



The roads are hard and smooth; some of the compounds are spacious, some

of the bungalows commodious, and the roadways are walled by tall bamboo

hedges, trim and green and beautiful; and there are azalea hedges, too,

both the white and the red; I never saw that before.



As to healthiness: I translate from to-day's (April 20) Merchants' and

Planters' Gazette, from the article of a regular contributor, "Carminge,"

concerning the death of the nephew of a prominent citizen:



     "Sad and lugubrious existence, this which we lead in Mauritius; I

     believe there is no other country in the world where one dies more

     easily than among us.  The least indisposition becomes a mortal

     malady; a simple headache develops into meningitis; a cold into

     pneumonia, and presently, when we are least expecting it, death is a

     guest in our home."



This daily paper has a meteorological report which tells you what the

weather was day before yesterday.



One is clever pestered by a beggar or a peddler in this town, so far as I

can see.  This is pleasantly different from India.



April 22.  To such as believe that the quaint product called French

civilization would be an improvement upon the civilization of New Guinea

and the like, the snatching of Madagascar and the laying on of French

civilization there will be fully justified.  But why did the English

allow the French to have Madagascar?  Did she respect a theft of a couple

of centuries ago?  Dear me, robbery by European nations of each other's

territories has never been a sin, is not a sin to-day.  To the several

cabinets the several political establishments of the world are

clotheslines; and a large part of the official duty of these cabinets is

to keep an eye on each other's wash and grab what they can of it as

opportunity offers.  All the territorial possessions of all the political

establishments in the earth--including America, of course--consist of

pilferings from other people's wash.  No tribe, howsoever insignificant,

and no nation, howsoever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not

stolen.  When the English, the French, and the Spaniards reached America,

the Indian tribes had been raiding each other's territorial clothes-lines

for ages, and every acre of ground in the continent had been stolen and

re-stolen 500 times.  The English, the French, and the Spaniards went to

work and stole it all over again; and when that was satisfactorily

accomplished they went diligently to work and stole it from each other.

In Europe and Asia and Africa every acre of ground has been stolen

several millions of times.  A crime persevered in a thousand centuries

ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue.  This is the law of custom,

and custom supersedes all other forms of law.  Christian governments are

as frank to-day, as open and above-board, in discussing projects for

raiding each other's clothes-lines as ever they were before the Golden

Rule came smiling into this inhospitable world and couldn't get a night's

lodging anywhere.  In 150 years England has beneficently retired garment

after garment from the Indian lines, until there is hardly a rag of the

original wash left dangling anywhere.  In 800 years an obscure tribe of

Muscovite savages has risen to the dazzling position of Land-Robber-in-

Chief; she found a quarter of the world hanging out to dry on a hundred

parallels of latitude, and she scooped in the whole wash.  She keeps a

sharp eye on a multitude of little lines that stretch along the northern

boundaries of India, and every now and then she snatches a hip-rag or a

pair of pyjamas.  It is England's prospective property, and Russia knows

it; but Russia cares nothing for that.  In fact, in our day land-robbery,

claim-jumping, is become a European governmental frenzy.  Some have been

hard at it in the borders of China, in Burma, in Siam, and the islands of

the sea; and all have been at it in Africa.  Africa has been as coolly

divided up and portioned out among the gang as if they had bought it and

paid for it.  And now straightway they are beginning the old game again--

to steal each other's grabbings.  Germany found a vast slice of Central

Africa with the English flag and the English missionary and the English

trader scattered all over it, but with certain formalities neglected--no

signs up, "Keep off the grass," "Trespassers-forbidden," etc.--and she

stepped in with a cold calm smile and put up the signs herself, and swept

those English pioneers promptly out of the country.



There is a tremendous point there.  It can be put into the form of a

maxim: Get your formalities right--never mind about the moralities.



It was an impudent thing; but England had to put up with it.  Now, in the

case of Madagascar, the formalities had originally been observed, but by

neglect they had fallen into desuetude ages ago.  England should have

snatched Madagascar from the French clothes-line.  Without an effort she

could have saved those harmless natives from the calamity of French

civilization, and she did not do it.  Now it is too late.



The signs of the times show plainly enough what is going to happen.  All

the savage lands in the world are going to be brought under subjection to

the Christian governments of Europe.  I am not sorry, but glad.  This

coming fate might have been a calamity to those savage peoples two

hundred years ago; but now it will in some cases be a benefaction.  The

sooner the seizure is consummated, the better for the savages.



The dreary and dragging ages of bloodshed and disorder and oppression

will give place to peace and order and the reign of law.  When one

considers what India was under her Hindoo and Mohammedan rulers, and what

she is now; when he remembers the miseries of her millions then and the

protections and humanities which they enjoy now, he must concede that the

most fortunate thing that has ever befallen that empire was the

establishment of British supremacy there.  The savage lands of the world

are to pass to alien possession, their peoples to the mercies of alien

rulers.  Let us hope and believe that they will all benefit by the

change.



April 23.  "The first year they gather shells; the second year they

gather shells and drink; the third year they do not gather shells." (Said

of immigrants to Mauritius.)



Population 375,000.  120 sugar factories.



Population 1851, 185,000.  The increase is due mainly to the introduction

of Indian coolies.  They now apparently form the great majority of the

population.  They are admirable breeders; their homes are always hazy

with children.  Great savers of money.  A British officer told me that in

India he paid his servant 10 rupees a month, and he had 11 cousins,

uncles, parents, etc., dependent upon him, and he supported them on his

wages.  These thrifty coolies are said to be acquiring land a trifle at a

time, and cultivating it; and may own the island by and by.



The Indian women do very hard labor [for wages of (1/2 rupee)for twelve

hours' work.]  They carry mats of sugar on their heads (70 pounds) all

day lading ships, for half a rupee, and work at gardening all day for

less.



The camaron is a fresh water creature like a cray-fish.  It is regarded

here as the world's chiefest delicacy--and certainly it is good.  Guards

patrol the streams to prevent poaching it.  A fine of Rs.200 or 300

(they say) for poaching.  Bait is thrown in the water; the camaron goes

for it; the fisher drops his loop in and works it around and about the

camaron he has selected, till he gets it over its tail; then there's a

jerk or something to certify the camaron that it is his turn now; he

suddenly backs away, which moves the loop still further up his person and

draws it taut, and his days are ended.



Another dish, called palmiste, is like raw turnip-shavings and tastes

like green almonds; is very delicate and good.  Costs the life of a palm

tree 12 to 20 years old--for it is the pith.



Another dish--looks like greens or a tangle of fine seaweed--is a

preparation of the deadly nightshade.  Good enough.



The monkeys live in the dense forests on the flanks of the toy mountains,

and they flock down nights and raid the sugar-fields.  Also on other

estates they come down and destroy a sort of bean-crop--just for fun,

apparently--tear off the pods and throw them down.



The cyclone of 1892 tore down two great blocks of stone buildings in the

center of Port Louis--the chief architectural feature-and left the

uncomely and apparently frail blocks standing.  Everywhere in its track

it annihilated houses, tore off roofs, destroyed trees and crops.  The

men were in the towns, the women and children at home in the country

getting crippled, killed, frightened to insanity; and the rain deluging

them, the wind howling, the thunder crashing, the lightning glaring.

This for an hour or so.  Then a lull and sunshine; many ventured out of

safe shelter; then suddenly here it came again from the opposite point

and renewed and completed the devastation.  It is said the Chinese fed

the sufferers for days on free rice.



Whole streets in Port Louis were laid flat--wrecked.  During a minute and

a half the wind blew 123 miles an hour; no official record made after

that, when it may have reached 150.  It cut down an obelisk.  It carried

an American ship into the woods after breaking the chains of two anchors.

They now use four-two forward, two astern.  Common report says it killed

1,200 in Port Louis alone, in half an hour.  Then came the lull of the

central calm--people did not know the barometer was still going down--

then suddenly all perdition broke loose again while people were rushing

around seeking friends and rescuing the wounded.  The noise was

comparable to nothing; there is nothing resembling it but thunder and

cannon, and these are feeble in comparison.



What there is of Mauritius is beautiful.  You have undulating wide

expanses of sugar-cane--a fine, fresh green and very pleasant to the eye;

and everywhere else you have a ragged luxuriance of tropic vegetation of

vivid greens of varying shades, a wild tangle of underbrush, with

graceful tall palms lifting their crippled plumes high above it; and you

have stretches of shady dense forest with limpid streams frolicking

through them, continually glimpsed and lost and glimpsed again in the

pleasantest hide-and-seek fashion; and you have some tiny mountains, some

quaint and picturesque groups of toy peaks, and a dainty little vest-

pocket Matterhorn; and here and there and now and then a strip of sea

with a white ruffle of surf breaks into the view.



That is Mauritius; and pretty enough.  The details are few, the massed

result is charming, but not imposing; not riotous, not exciting; it is a

Sunday landscape.  Perspective, and the enchantments wrought by distance,

are wanting.  There are no distances; there is no perspective, so to

speak.  Fifteen miles as the crow flies is the usual limit of vision.

Mauritius is a garden and a park combined.  It affects one's emotions as

parks and gardens affect them.  The surfaces of one's spiritual deeps are

pleasantly played upon, the deeps themselves are not reached, not

stirred.  Spaciousness, remote altitudes, the sense of mystery which

haunts apparently inaccessible mountain domes and summits reposing in the

sky--these are the things which exalt the spirit and move it to see

visions and dream dreams.



The Sandwich Islands remain my ideal of the perfect thing in the matter

of tropical islands.  I would add another story to Mauna Loa's 16,000

feet if I could, and make it particularly bold and steep and craggy and

forbidding and snowy; and I would make the volcano spout its lava-floods

out of its summit instead of its sides; but aside from these non-

essentials I have no corrections to suggest.  I hope these will be

attended to; I do not wish to have to speak of it again.









CHAPTER LXIV.



When your watch gets out of order you have choice of two things to do:

throw it in the fire or take it to the watch-tinker.  The former is the

quickest.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



The Arundel Castle is the finest boat I have seen in these seas.  She is

thoroughly modern, and that statement covers a great deal of ground.  She

has the usual defect, the common defect, the universal defect, the defect

that has never been missing from any ship that ever sailed--she has

imperfect beds.  Many ships have good beds, but no ship has very good

ones.  In the matter of beds all ships have been badly edited, ignorantly

edited, from the beginning.  The selection of the beds is given to some

hearty, strong-backed, self-made man, when it ought to be given to a

frail woman accustomed from girlhood to backaches and insomnia.  Nothing

is so rare, on either side of the ocean, as a perfect bed; nothing is so

difficult to make.  Some of the hotels on both sides provide it, but no

ship ever does or ever did.  In Noah's Ark the beds were simply

scandalous.  Noah set the fashion, and it will endure in one degree of

modification or another till the next flood.



8 A.M.  Passing Isle de Bourbon.  Broken-up sky-line of volcanic

mountains in the middle.  Surely it would not cost much to repair them,

and it seems inexcusable neglect to leave them as they are.



It seems stupid to send tired men to Europe to rest.  It is no proper

rest for the mind to clatter from town to town in the dust and cinders,

and examine galleries and architecture, and be always meeting people and

lunching and teaing and dining, and receiving worrying cables and

letters.  And a sea voyage on the Atlantic is of no use--voyage too

short, sea too rough.  The peaceful Indian and Pacific Oceans and the

long stretches of time are the healing thing.



May 2, AM.  A fair, great ship in sight, almost the first we have seen in

these weeks of lonely voyaging.  We are now in the Mozambique Channel,

between Madagascar and South Africa, sailing straight west for Delagoa

Bay.



Last night, the burly chief engineer, middle-aged, was standing telling a

spirited seafaring tale, and had reached the most exciting place, where a

man overboard was washing swiftly astern on the great seas, and uplifting

despairing cries, everybody racing aft in a frenzy of excitement and

fading hope, when the band, which had been silent a moment, began

impressively its closing piece, the English national anthem.  As simply

as if he was unconscious of what he was doing, he stopped his story,

uncovered, laid his laced cap against his breast, and slightly bent his

grizzled head.  The few bars finished, he put on his cap and took up his

tale again, as naturally as if that interjection of music had been a part

of it.  There was something touching and fine about it, and it was moving

to reflect that he was one of a myriad, scattered over every part of the

globe, who by turn was doing as he was doing every hour of the twenty-

four--those awake doing it while the others slept--those impressive bars

forever floating up out of the various climes, never silent and never

lacking reverent listeners.



All that I remember about Madagascar is that Thackeray's little Billie

went up to the top of the mast and there knelt him upon his knee, saying,

"I see



               "Jerusalem and Madagascar,

               And North and South Amerikee."



May 3.  Sunday.  Fifteen or twenty Africanders who will end their voyage

to-day and strike for their several homes from Delagoa Bay to-morrow, sat

up singing on the afterdeck in the moonlight till 3 A.M.  Good fun and

wholesome.  And the songs were clean songs, and some of them were

hallowed by tender associations.  Finally, in a pause, a man asked, "Have

you heard about the fellow that kept a diary crossing the Atlantic?"

It was a discord, a wet blanket.  The men were not in the mood for

humorous dirt.  The songs had carried them to their homes, and in spirit

they sat by those far hearthstones, and saw faces and heard voices other

than those that were about them.  And so this disposition to drag in an

old indecent anecdote got no welcome; nobody answered.  The poor man

hadn't wit enough to see that he had blundered, but asked his question

again.  Again there was no response.  It was embarrassing for him.  In

his confusion he chose the wrong course, did the wrong thing--began the

anecdote.  Began it in a deep and hostile stillness, where had been such

life and stir and warm comradeship before.  He delivered himself of the

brief details of the diary's first day, and did it with some confidence

and a fair degree of eagerness.  It fell flat.  There was an awkward

pause.  The two rows of men sat like statues.  There was no movement, no

sound.  He had to go on; there was no other way, at least none that an

animal of his calibre could think of.  At the close of each day's diary,

the same dismal silence followed.  When at last he finished his tale and

sprung the indelicate surprise which is wont to fetch a crash of

laughter, not a ripple of sound resulted.  It was as if the tale had been

told to dead men.  After what seemed a long, long time, somebody sighed,

somebody else stirred in his seat; presently, the men dropped into a low

murmur of confidential talk, each with his neighbor, and the incident was

closed.  There were indications that that man was fond of his anecdote;

that it was his pet, his standby, his shot that never missed, his

reputation-maker.  But he will never tell it again.  No doubt he will

think of it sometimes, for that cannot well be helped; and then he will

see a picture, and always the same picture--the double rank of dead men;

the vacant deck stretching away in dimming perspective beyond them, the

wide desert of smooth sea all abroad; the rim of the moon spying from

behind a rag of black cloud; the remote top of the mizzenmast shearing a

zigzag path through the fields of stars in the deeps of space; and this

soft picture will remind him of the time that he sat in the midst of it

and told his poor little tale and felt so lonesome when he got through.



Fifty Indians and Chinamen asleep in a big tent in the waist of the ship

forward; they lie side by side with no space between; the former wrapped

up, head and all, as in the Indian streets, the Chinamen uncovered; the

lamp and things for opium smoking in the center.



A passenger said it was ten 2-ton truck loads of dynamite that lately

exploded at Johannesburg.  Hundreds killed; he doesn't know how many;

limbs picked up for miles around.  Glass shattered, and roofs swept away

or collapsed 200 yards off; fragment of iron flung three and a half

miles.



It occurred at 3 p.m.; at 6, L65,000 had been subscribed.  When this

passenger left, L35,000 had been voted by city and state governments and

L100,000 by citizens and business corporations.  When news of the

disaster was telephoned to the Exchange L35,000 were subscribed in the

first five minutes.  Subscribing was still going on when he left; the

papers had ceased the names, only the amounts--too many names; not enough

room.  L100,000 subscribed by companies and citizens; if this is true, it

must be what they call in Australia "a record"--the biggest instance of a

spontaneous outpour for charity in history, considering the size of the

population it was drawn from, $8 or $10 for each white resident, babies

at the breast included.



Monday, May 4.  Steaming slowly in the stupendous Delagoa Bay, its dim

arms stretching far away and disappearing on both sides.  It could

furnish plenty of room for all the ships in the world, but it is shoal.

The lead has given us 3 1/2 fathoms several times and we are drawing

that, lacking 6 inches.



A bold headland--precipitous wall, 150 feet high, very strong, red color,

stretching a mile or so.  A man said it was Portuguese blood--battle

fought here with the natives last year.  I think this doubtful.  Pretty

cluster of houses on the tableland above the red-and rolling stretches of

grass and groups of trees, like England.



The Portuguese have the railroad (one passenger train a day) to the

border--70 miles--then the Netherlands Company have it.  Thousands of

tons of freight on the shore--no cover.  This is Portuguese allover--

indolence, piousness, poverty, impotence.



Crews of small boats and tugs, all jet black woolly heads and very

muscular.



Winter.  The South African winter is just beginning now, but nobody but

an expert can tell it from summer.  However, I am tired of summer; we

have had it unbroken for eleven months.  We spent the afternoon on shore,

Delagoa Bay.  A small town--no sights.  No carriages.  Three 'rickshas,

but we couldn't get them--apparently private.  These Portuguese are a

rich brown, like some of the Indians.  Some of the blacks have the long

horse beads and very long chins of the negroes of the picture books; but

most of them are exactly like the negroes of our Southern States round

faces, flat noses, good-natured, and easy laughers.



Flocks of black women passed along, carrying outrageously heavy bags of

freight on their heads. The quiver of their leg as the foot was planted

and the strain exhibited by their bodies showed what a tax upon their

strength the load was.  They were stevedores and doing full stevedores

work.  They were very erect when unladden--from carrying heavy loads on

their heads--just like the Indian women. It gives them a proud fine

carriage.



Sometimes one saw a woman carrying on her head a laden and top-heavy

basket the shape of an inverted pyramid-its top the size of a soup-plate,

its base the diameter of a teacup.  It required nice balancing--and got

it.



No bright colors; yet there were a good many Hindoos.



The Second Class Passenger came over as usual at "lights out" (11) and we

lounged along the spacious vague solitudes of the deck and smoked the

peaceful pipe and talked.  He told me an incident in Mr. Barnum's life

which was evidently characteristic of that great showman in several ways:



This was Barnum's purchase of Shakespeare's birthplace, a quarter of a

century ago.  The Second Class Passenger was in Jamrach's employ at the

time and knew Barnum well.  He said the thing began in this way.  One

morning Barnum and Jamrach were in Jamrach's little private snuggery back

of the wilderness of caged monkeys and snakes and other commonplaces of

Jamrach's stock in trade, refreshing themselves after an arduous stroke

of business, Jamrach with something orthodox, Barnum with something

heterodox--for Barnum was a teetotaler.  The stroke of business was in

the elephant line.  Jamrach had contracted to deliver to Barnum in New

York 18 elephants for $360,000 in time for the next season's opening.

Then it occurred to Mr. Barnum that he needed a "card" He suggested

Jumbo.  Jamrach said he would have to think of something else--Jumbo

couldn't be had; the Zoo wouldn't part with that elephant.  Barnum said

he was willing to pay a fortune for Jumbo if he could get him.  Jamrach

said it was no use to think about it; that Jumbo was as popular as the

Prince of Wales and the Zoo wouldn't dare to sell him; all England would

be outraged at the idea; Jumbo was an English institution; he was part of

the national glory; one might as well think of buying the Nelson

monument.  Barnum spoke up with vivacity and said:



"It's a first-rate idea.  I'll buy the Monument."



Jamrach was speechless for a second.  Then he said, like one ashamed

"You caught me.  I was napping.  For a moment I thought you were in

earnest."



Barnum said pleasantly--



"I was in earnest.  I know they won't sell it, but no matter, I will not

throw away a good idea for all that.  All I want is a big advertisement.

I will keep the thing in mind, and if nothing better turns up I will

offer to buy it.  That will answer every purpose.  It will furnish me a

couple of columns of gratis advertising in every English and American

paper for a couple of months, and give my show the biggest boom a show

ever had in this world."



Jamrach started to deliver a burst of admiration, but was interrupted by

Barnum, who said:



"Here is a state of things!  England ought to blush."



His eye had fallen upon something in the newspaper.  He read it through

to himself, then read it aloud.  It said that the house that Shakespeare

was born in at Stratford-on-Avon was falling gradually to ruin through

neglect; that the room where the poet first saw the light was now serving

as a butcher's shop; that all appeals to England to contribute money (the

requisite sum stated) to buy and repair the house and place it in the

care of salaried and trustworthy keepers had fallen resultless.  Then

Barnum said:



"There's my chance.  Let Jumbo and the Monument alone for the present-

they'll keep.  I'll buy Shakespeare's house.  I'll set it up in my Museum

in New York and put a glass case around it and make a sacred thing of it;

and you'll see all America flock there to worship; yes, and pilgrims from

the whole earth; and I'll make them take their hats off, too.  In America

we know how to value anything that Shakespeare's touch has made holy.

You'll see."



In conclusion the S. C. P.  said:



"That is the way the thing came about.  Barnum did buy Shakespeare's

house.  He paid the price asked, and received the properly attested

documents of sale.  Then there was an explosion, I can tell you.  England

rose!  That, the birthplace of the master-genius of all the ages and all

the climes--that priceless possession of Britain--to be carted out of the

country like so much old lumber and set up for sixpenny desecration in a

Yankee show-shop--the idea was not to be tolerated for a moment.  England

rose in her indignation; and Barnum was glad to relinquish his prize and

offer apologies.  However, he stood out for a compromise; he claimed a

concession--England must let him have Jumbo.  And England consented, but

not cheerfully."



It shows how, by help of time, a story can grow--even after Barnum has

had the first innings in the telling of it.  Mr. Barnum told me the story

himself, years ago.  He said that the permission to buy Jumbo was not a

concession; the purchase was made and the animal delivered before the

public knew anything about it.  Also, that the securing of Jumbo was all

the advertisement he needed.  It produced many columns of newspaper talk,

free of cost, and he was satisfied.  He said that if he had failed to get

Jumbo he would have caused his notion of buying the Nelson Monument to be

treacherously smuggled into print by some trusty friend, and after he had

gotten a few hundred pages of gratuitous advertising out of it, he would

have come out with a blundering, obtuse, but warm-hearted letter of

apology, and in a postscript to it would have naively proposed to let the

Monument go, and take Stonehenge in place of it at the same price.



It was his opinion that such a letter, written with well-simulated

asinine innocence and gush would have gotten his ignorance and stupidity

an amount of newspaper abuse worth six fortunes to him, and not

purchasable for twice the money.



I knew Mr. Barnum well, and I placed every confidence in the account

which he gave me of the Shakespeare birthplace episode.  He said he found

the house neglected and going-to decay, and he inquired into the matter

and was told that many times earnest efforts had been made to raise money

for its proper repair and preservation, but without success.  He then

proposed to buy it.  The proposition was entertained, and a price named--

$50,000, I think; but whatever it was, Barnum paid the money down,

without remark, and the papers were drawn up and executed.  He said that

it had been his purpose to set up the house in his Museum, keep it in

repair, protect it from name-scribblers and other desecrators, and leave

it by bequest to the safe and perpetual guardianship of the Smithsonian

Institute at Washington.



But as soon as it was found that Shakespeare's house had passed into

foreign hands and was going to be carried across the ocean, England was

stirred as no appeal from the custodians of the relic had ever stirred

England before, and protests came flowing in--and money, too, to stop the

outrage.  Offers of repurchase were made--offers of double the money that

Mr. Barnum had paid for the house.  He handed the house back, but took

only the sum which it had cost him--but on the condition that an

endowment sufficient for the future safeguarding and maintenance of the

sacred relic should be raised.  This condition was fulfilled.



That was Barnum's account of the episode; and to the end of his days he

claimed with pride and satisfaction that not England, but America--

represented by him--saved the birthplace of Shakespeare from destruction.



At 3 P.M., May 6th, the ship slowed down, off the land, and thoughtfully

and cautiously picked her way into the snug harbor of Durban, South

Africa.









CHAPTER LXV.



In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind about the

moralities.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



FROM DIARY:



Royal Hotel.  Comfortable, good table, good service of natives and

Madrasis.  Curious jumble of modern and ancient city and village,

primitiveness and the other thing.  Electric bells, but they don't ring.

Asked why they didn't, the watchman in the office said he thought they

must be out of order; he thought so because some of them rang, but most

of them didn't.  Wouldn't it be a good idea to put them in order?  He

hesitated--like one who isn't quite sure--then conceded the point.



May 7.  A bang on the door at 6.  Did I want my boots cleaned?  Fifteen

minutes later another bang.  Did we want coffee?  Fifteen later, bang

again, my wife's bath ready; 15 later, my bath ready.  Two other bangs;

I forget what they were about.  Then lots of shouting back and forth,

among the servants just as in an Indian hotel.



Evening.  At 4 P.M.  it was unpleasantly warm.  Half-hour after sunset

one needed a spring overcoat; by 8 a winter one.



Durban is a neat and clean town.  One notices that without having his

attention called to it.



Rickshaws drawn by splendidly built black Zulus, so overflowing with

strength, seemingly, that it is a pleasure, not a pain, to see them

snatch a rickshaw along.  They smile and laugh and show their teeth--a

good-natured lot.  Not allowed to drink; 2s per hour for one person; 3s

for two; 3d for a course--one person.



The chameleon in the hotel court.  He is fat and indolent and

contemplative; but is business-like and capable when a fly comes about-

reaches out a tongue like a teaspoon and takes him in.  He gums his

tongue first.  He is always pious, in his looks.  And pious and thankful

both, when Providence or one of us sends him a fly.  He has a froggy

head, and a back like a new grave--for shape; and hands like a bird's

toes that have been frostbitten.  But his eyes are his exhibition

feature.  A couple of skinny cones project from the sides of his head,

with a wee shiny bead of an eye set in the apex of each; and these cones

turn bodily like pivot-guns and point every-which-way, and they are

independent of each other; each has its own exclusive machinery.  When I

am behind him and C. in front of him, he whirls one eye rearwards and the

other forwards--which gives him a most Congressional expression (one eye

on the constituency and one on the swag); and then if something happens

above and below him he shoots out one eye upward like a telescope and the

other downward--and this changes his expression, but does not improve it.



Natives must not be out after the curfew bell without a pass.  In Natal

there are ten blacks to one white.



Sturdy plump creatures are the women.  They comb their wool up to a peak

and keep it in position by stiffening it with brown-red clay--half of

this tower colored, denotes engagement; the whole of it colored denotes

marriage.



None but heathen Zulus on the police; Christian ones not allowed.



May 9.  A drive yesterday with friends over the Berea.  Very fine roads

and lofty, overlooking the whole town, the harbor, and the sea-beautiful

views.  Residences all along, set in the midst of green lawns with shrubs

and generally one or two intensely red outbursts of poinsettia--the

flaming splotch of blinding red a stunning contrast with the world of

surrounding green.  The cactus tree--candelabrum-like; and one twisted

like gray writhing serpents.  The "flat-crown" (should be flat-roof)--

half a dozen naked branches full of elbows, slant upward like artificial

supports, and fling a roof of delicate foliage out in a horizontal

platform as flat as a floor; and you look up through this thin floor as

through a green cobweb or veil.  The branches are japanesich.  All about

you is a bewildering variety of unfamiliar and beautiful trees; one sort

wonderfully dense foliage and very dark green--so dark that you notice it

at once, notwithstanding there are so many orange trees.  The

"flamboyant"--not in flower, now, but when in flower lives up to its

name, we are told.  Another tree with a lovely upright tassel scattered

among its rich greenery, red and glowing as a firecoal.  Here and there a

gum-tree; half a dozen lofty Norfolk Island pines lifting their fronded

arms skyward.  Groups of tall bamboo.



Saw one bird.  Not many birds here, and they have no music--and the

flowers not much smell, they grow so fast.



Everything neat and trim and clean like the town.  The loveliest trees

and the greatest variety I have ever seen anywhere, except approaching

Darjeeling.  Have not heard anyone call Natal the garden of South Africa,

but that is what it probably is.



It was when Bishop of Natal that Colenso raised such a storm in the

religious world.  The concerns of religion are a vital matter here yet.

A vigilant eye is kept upon Sunday.  Museums and other dangerous resorts

are not allowed to be open.  You may sail on the Bay, but it is wicked to

play cricket.  For a while a Sunday concert was tolerated, upon condition

that it must be admission free and the money taken by collection.  But

the collection was alarmingly large and that stopped the matter.  They

are particular about babies.  A clergyman would not bury a child

according to the sacred rites because it had not been baptized.  The

Hindoo is more liberal.  He burns no child under three, holding that it

does not need purifying.



The King of the Zulus, a fine fellow of 30, was banished six years ago

for a term of seven years.  He is occupying Napoleon's old stand--St.

Helena.  The people are a little nervous about having him come back, and

they may well be, for Zulu kings have been terrible people sometimes--

like Tchaka, Dingaan, and Cetewayo.



There is a large Trappist monastery two hours from Durban, over the

country roads, and in company with Mr. Milligan and Mr. Hunter, general

manager of the Natal government railways, who knew the heads of it, we

went out to see it.



There it all was, just as one reads about it in books and cannot believe

that it is so--I mean the rough, hard work, the impossible hours, the

scanty food, the coarse raiment, the Maryborough beds, the tabu of human

speech, of social intercourse, of relaxation, of amusement, of

entertainment, of the presence of woman in the men's establishment.

There it all was.  It was not a dream, it was not a lie.  And yet with

the fact before one's face it was still incredible.  It is such a

sweeping suppression of human instincts, such an extinction of the man as

an individual.



La Trappe must have known the human race well.  The scheme which he

invented hunts out everything that a man wants and values--and withholds

it from him.  Apparently there is no detail that can help make life worth

living that has not been carefully ascertained and placed out of the

Trappist's reach.  La Trappe must have known that there were men who

would enjoy this kind of misery, but how did he find it out?



If he had consulted you or me he would have been told that his scheme

lacked too many attractions; that it was impossible; that it could never

be floated.  But there in the monastery was proof that he knew the human

race better than it knew itself.  He set his foot upon every desire that

a man has--yet he floated his project, and it has prospered for two

hundred years, and will go on prospering forever, no doubt.



Man likes personal distinction--there in the monastery it is obliterated.

He likes delicious food--there he gets beans and bread and tea, and not

enough of it.  He likes to lie softly--there he lies on a sand mattress,

and has a pillow and a blanket, but no sheet.  When he is dining, in a

great company of friends, he likes to laugh and chat--there a monk reads

a holy book aloud during meals, and nobody speaks or laughs.  When a man

has a hundred friends about him, evenings, be likes to have a good time

and run late--there he and the rest go silently to bed at 8; and in the

dark, too; there is but a loose brown robe to discard, there are no

night-clothes to put on, a light is not needed.  Man likes to lie abed

late there he gets up once or twice in the night to perform some

religious office, and gets up finally for the day at two in the morning.

Man likes light work or none at all--there he labors all day in the

field, or in the blacksmith shop or the other shops devoted to the

mechanical trades, such as shoemaking, saddlery, carpentry, and so on.

Man likes the society of girls and women--there he never has it.  He

likes to have his children about him, and pet them and play with them--

there he has none.  He likes billiards--there is no table there.  He

likes outdoor sports and indoor dramatic and musical and social

entertainments--there are none there.  He likes to bet on things--I was

told that betting is forbidden there.  When a man's temper is up he likes

to pour it out upon somebody there this is not allowed.  A man likes

animals--pets; there are none there.  He likes to smoke--there he cannot

do it.  He likes to read the news--no papers or magazines come there.  A

man likes to know how his parents and brothers and sisters are getting

along when he is away, and if they miss him--there he cannot know.  A man

likes a pretty house, and pretty furniture, and pretty things, and pretty

colors--there he has nothing but naked aridity and sombre colors.  A man

likes--name it yourself: whatever it is, it is absent from that place.



From what I could learn, all that a man gets for this is merely the

saving of his soul.



It all seems strange, incredible, impossible.  But La Trappe knew the

race.  He knew the powerful attraction of unattractiveness; he knew that

no life could be imagined, howsoever comfortless and forbidding, but

somebody would want to try it.



This parent establishment of Germans began its work fifteen years ago,

strangers, poor, and unencouraged; it owns 15,000 acres of land now, and

raises grain and fruit, and makes wines, and manufactures all manner of

things, and has native apprentices in its shops, and sends them forth

able to read and write, and also well equipped to earn their living by

their trades.  And this young establishment has set up eleven branches in

South Africa, and in them they are christianizing and educating and

teaching wage-yielding mechanical trades to 1,200 boys and girls.

Protestant Missionary work is coldly regarded by the commercial white

colonist all over the heathen world, as a rule, and its product is

nicknamed "rice-Christians" (occupationless incapables who join the

church for revenue only), but I think it would be difficult to pick a

flaw in the work of these Catholic monks, and I believe that the

disposition to attempt it has not shown itself.



Tuesday, May 12.  Transvaal politics in a confused condition.  First the

sentencing of the Johannesburg Reformers startled England by its

severity; on the top of this came Kruger's exposure of the cipher

correspondence, which showed that the invasion of the Transvaal, with the

design of seizing that country and adding it to the British Empire, was

planned by Cecil Rhodes and Beit--which made a revulsion in English

feeling, and brought out a storm against Rhodes and the Chartered Company

for degrading British honor.  For a good while I couldn't seem to get at

a clear comprehension of it, it was so tangled.  But at last by patient

study I have managed it, I believe.  As I understand it, the Uitlanders

and other Dutchmen were dissatisfied because the English would not allow

them to take any part in the government except to pay taxes.  Next, as I

understand it, Dr. Kruger and Dr. Jameson, not having been able to make

the medical business pay, made a raid into Matabeleland with the

intention of capturing the capital, Johannesburg, and holding the women

and children to ransom until the Uitlanders and the other Boers should

grant to them and the Chartered Company the political rights which had

been withheld from them.  They would have succeeded in this great scheme,

as I understand it, but for the interference of Cecil Rhodes and Mr.

Beit, and other Chiefs of the Matabele, who persuaded their countrymen to

revolt and throw off their allegiance to Germany.  This, in turn, as I

understand it, provoked the King of Abyssinia to destroy the Italian army

and fall back upon Johannesburg; this at the instigation of Rhodes, to

bull the stock market.









CHAPTER LXVI.



Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



When I scribbled in my note-book a year ago the paragraph which ends the

preceding chapter, it was meant to indicate, in an extravagant form, two

things: the conflicting nature of the information conveyed by the citizen

to the stranger concerning South African politics, and the resulting

confusion created in the stranger's mind thereby.



But it does not seem so very extravagant now.  Nothing could in that

disturbed and excited time make South African politics clear or quite

rational to the citizen of the country because his personal interest and

his political prejudices were in his way; and nothing could make those

politics clear or rational to the stranger, the sources of his

information being such as they were.



I was in South Africa some little time.  When I arrived there the

political pot was boiling fiercely.  Four months previously, Jameson had

plunged over the Transvaal border with about 600 armed horsemen at his

back, to go to the "relief of the women and children" of Johannesburg; on

the fourth day of his march the Boers had defeated him in battle, and

carried him and his men to Pretoria, the capital, as prisoners; the Boer

government had turned Jameson and his officers over to the British

government for trial, and shipped them to England; next, it had arrested

64 important citizens of Johannesburg as raid-conspirators, condemned

their four leaders to death, then commuted the sentences, and now the 64

were waiting, in jail, for further results.  Before midsummer they were

all out excepting two, who refused to sign the petitions for release; 58

had been fined $10,000 each and enlarged, and the four leaders had gotten

off with fines of $125,000 each with permanent exile added, in one case.



Those were wonderfully interesting days for a stranger, and I was glad.

to be in the thick of the excitement.  Everybody was talking, and I

expected to understand the whole of one side of it in a very little

while.



I was disappointed.  There were singularities, perplexities,

unaccountabilities about it which I was not able to master.  I had no

personal access to Boers--their side was a secret to me, aside from what

I was able to gather of it from published statements.  My sympathies were

soon with the Reformers in the Pretoria jail, with their friends, and

with their cause.  By diligent inquiry in Johannesburg I found out--

apparently--all the details of their side of the quarrel except one--what

they expected to accomplish by an armed rising.



Nobody seemed to know.



The reason why the Reformers were discontented and wanted some changes

made, seemed quite clear.  In Johannesburg it was claimed that the

Uitlanders (strangers, foreigners) paid thirteen-fifteenths of the

Transvaal taxes, yet got little or nothing for it.  Their city had no

charter; it had no municipal government; it could levy no taxes for

drainage, water-supply, paving, cleaning, sanitation, policing.  There

was a police force, but it was composed of Boers, it was furnished by the

State Government, and the city had no control over it.  Mining was very

costly; the government enormously increased the cost by putting

burdensome taxes upon the mines, the output, the machinery, the

buildings; by burdensome imposts upon incoming materials; by burdensome

railway-freight-charges.  Hardest of all to bear, the government reserved

to itself a monopoly in that essential thing, dynamite, and burdened it

with an extravagant price.  The detested Hollander from over the water

held all the public offices.  The government was rank with corruption.

The Uitlander had no vote, and must live in the State ten or twelve years

before he could get one.  He was not represented in the Raad

(legislature) that oppressed him and fleeced him.  Religion was not free.

There were no schools where the teaching was in English, yet the great

majority of the white population of the State knew no tongue but that.

The State would not pass a liquor law; but allowed a great trade in cheap

vile brandy among the blacks, with the result that 25 per cent. of the

50,000 blacks employed in the mines were usually drunk and incapable of

working.



There--it was plain enough that the reasons for wanting some changes made

were abundant and reasonable, if this statement of the existing

grievances was correct.



What the Uitlanders wanted was reform--under the existing Republic.



What they proposed to do was to secure these reforms by, prayer,

petition, and persuasion.



They did petition.  Also, they issued a Manifesto, whose very first note

is a bugle-blast of loyalty: "We want the establishment of this Republic

as a true Republic."



Could anything be clearer than the Uitlander's statement of the

grievances and oppressions under which they were suffering?  Could

anything be more legal and citizen-like and law-respecting than their

attitude as expressed by their Manifesto?  No.  Those things were

perfectly clear, perfectly comprehensible.



But at this point the puzzles and riddles and confusions begin to flock

in.  You have arrived at a place which you cannot quite understand.



For you find that as a preparation for this loyal, lawful, and in every

way unexceptionable attempt to persuade the government to right their

grievances, the Uitlanders had smuggled a Maxim gun or two and 1,500

muskets into the town, concealed in oil tanks and coal cars, and had

begun to form and drill military companies composed of clerks, merchants,

and citizens generally.



What was their idea?  Did they suppose that the Boers would attack them

for petitioning, for redress?  That could not be.



Did they suppose that the Boers would attack them even for issuing a

Manifesto demanding relief under the existing government?



Yes, they apparently believed so, because the air was full of talk of

forcing the government to grant redress if it were not granted

peacefully.



The Reformers were men of high intelligence.  If they were in earnest,

they were taking extraordinary risks.  They had enormously valuable

properties to defend; their town was full of women and children; their

mines and compounds were packed with thousands upon thousands of sturdy

blacks.  If the Boers attacked, the mines would close, the blacks would

swarm out and get drunk; riot and conflagration and the Boers together

might lose the Reformers more in a day, in money, blood, and suffering,

than the desired political relief could compensate in ten years if they

won the fight and secured the reforms.



It is May, 1897, now; a year has gone by, and the confusions of that day

have been to a considerable degree cleared away.  Mr. Cecil Rhodes, Dr.

Jameson, and others responsible for the Raid, have testified before the

Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry in London, and so have Mr. Lionel

Phillips and other Johannesburg Reformers, monthly-nurses of the

Revolution which was born dead.  These testimonies have thrown light.

Three books have added much to this light:



"South Africa As It Is," by Mr. Statham, an able writer partial to the

Boers; "The Story of an African Crisis," by Mr. Garrett, a brilliant

writer partial to Rhodes; and "A Woman's Part in a Revolution," by Mrs.

John Hays Hammond, a vigorous and vivid diarist, partial to the

Reformers.  By liquifying the evidence of the prejudiced books and of the

prejudiced parliamentary witnesses and stirring the whole together and

pouring it into my own (prejudiced) moulds, I have got at the truth of

that puzzling South African situation, which is this:



1.  The capitalists and other chief men of Johannesburg were fretting

under various political and financial burdens imposed by the State (the

South African Republic, sometimes called "the Transvaal") and desired to

procure by peaceful means a modification of the laws.



2.  Mr. Cecil Rhodes, Premier of the British Cape Colony, millionaire,

creator and managing director of the territorially-immense and

financially unproductive South Africa Company; projector of vast schemes

for the unification and consolidation of all the South African States,

one imposing commonwealth or empire under the shadow and general

protection of the British flag, thought he saw an opportunity to make

profitable use of the Uitlander discontent above mentioned--make the

Johannesburg cat help pull out one of his consolidation chestnuts for

him.  With this view he set himself the task of warming the lawful and

legitimate petitions and supplications of the Uitlanders into seditious

talk, and their frettings into threatenings--the final outcome to be

revolt and armed rebellion.  If he could bring about a bloody collision

between those people and the Boer government, Great Britain would have to

interfere; her interference would be resisted by the Boers; she would

chastise them and add the Transvaal to her South African possessions.  It

was not a foolish idea, but a rational and practical one.



After a couple of years of judicious plotting, Mr. Rhodes had his reward;

the revolutionary kettle was briskly boiling in Johannesburg, and the

Uitlander leaders were backing their appeals to the government--now

hardened into demands--by threats of force and bloodshed.  By the middle

of December, 1895, the explosion seemed imminent.  Mr. Rhodes was

diligently helping, from his distant post in Cape Town.  He was helping

to procure arms for Johannesburg; he was also arranging to have Jameson

break over the border and come to Johannesburg with 600 mounted men at

his back.  Jameson--as per instructions from Rhodes, perhaps--wanted a

letter from the Reformers requesting him to come to their aid.  It was a

good idea.  It would throw a considerable share of the responsibility of

his invasion upon the Reformers.  He got the letter--that famous one

urging him to fly to the rescue of the women and children.  He got it two

months before he flew.  The Reformers seem to have thought it over and

concluded that they had not done wisely; for the next day after giving

Jameson the implicating document they wanted to withdraw it and leave the

women and children in danger; but they were told that it was too late.

The original had gone to Mr. Rhodes at the Cape.  Jameson had kept a

copy, though.



From that time until the 29th of December, a good deal of the Reformers'

time was taken up with energetic efforts to keep Jameson from coming to

their assistance.  Jameson's invasion had been set for the 26th.  The

Reformers were not ready.  The town was not united.  Some wanted a fight,

some wanted peace; some wanted a new government, some wanted the existing

one reformed; apparently very few wanted the revolution to take place in

the interest and under the ultimate shelter of the Imperial flag--

British; yet a report began to spread that Mr. Rhodes's embarrassing

assistance had for its end this latter object.



Jameson was away up on the frontier tugging at his leash, fretting to

burst over the border.  By hard work the Reformers got his starting-date

postponed a little, and wanted to get it postponed eleven days.

Apparently, Rhodes's agents were seconding their efforts--in fact wearing

out the telegraph wires trying to hold him back.  Rhodes was himself the

only man who could have effectively postponed Jameson, but that would

have been a disadvantage to his scheme; indeed, it could spoil his whole

two years' work.



Jameson endured postponement three days, then resolved to wait no longer.

Without any orders--excepting Mr. Rhodes's significant silence--he cut

the telegraph wires on the 29th, and made his plunge that night, to go to

the rescue of the women and children, by urgent request of a letter now

nine days old--as per date,--a couple of months old, in fact.  He read

the letter to his men, and it affected them.  It did not affect all of

them alike.  Some saw in it a piece of piracy of doubtful wisdom, and

were sorry to find that they had been assembled to violate friendly

territory instead of to raid native kraals, as they had supposed.



Jameson would have to ride 150 miles.  He knew that there were suspicions

abroad in the Transvaal concerning him, but he expected to get through to

Johannesburg before they should become general and obstructive. But a

telegraph wire had been overlooked and not cut.  It spread the news of

his invasion far and wide, and a few hours after his start the Boer

farmers were riding hard from every direction to intercept him.



As soon as it was known in Johannesburg that he was on his way to rescue

the women and children, the grateful people put the women and children in

a train and rushed them for Australia.  In fact, the approach of

Johannesburg's saviour created panic and consternation; there, and a

multitude of males of peaceable disposition swept to the trains like a

sand-storm.  The early ones fared best; they secured seats--by sitting in

them--eight hours before the first train was timed to leave.



Mr. Rhodes lost no time.  He cabled the renowned Johannesburg letter of

invitation to the London press--the gray-headedest piece of ancient

history that ever went over a cable.



The new poet laureate lost no time.  He came out with a rousing poem

lauding Jameson's prompt and splendid heroism in flying to the rescue of

the women and children; for the poet could not know that he did not fly

until two months after the invitation.  He was deceived by the false date

of the letter, which was December 20th.



Jameson was intercepted by the Boers on New Year's Day, and on the next

day he surrendered.  He had carried his copy of the letter along, and if

his instructions required him--in case of emergency--to see that it fell

into the hands of the Boers, he loyally carried them out.  Mrs. Hammond

gives him a sharp rap for his supposed carelessness, and emphasizes her

feeling about it with burning italics: "It was picked up on the battle-

field in a leathern pouch, supposed to be Dr. Jameson's saddle-bag.  Why,

in the name of all that is discreet and honorable, didn't he eat it!"



She requires too much.  He was not in the service of the Reformers--

excepting ostensibly; he was in the service of Mr. Rhodes.  It was the

only plain English document, undarkened by ciphers and mysteries, and

responsibly signed and authenticated, which squarely implicated the

Reformers in the raid, and it was not to Mr. Rhodes's interest that it

should be eaten.  Besides, that letter was not the original, it was only

a copy.  Mr. Rhodes had the original--and didn't eat it.  He cabled it to

the London press.  It had already been read in England and America and

all over Europe before, Jameson dropped it on the battlefield.  If the

subordinate's knuckles deserved a rap, the principal's deserved as many

as a couple of them.



That letter is a juicily dramatic incident and is entitled to all its

celebrity, because of the odd and variegated effects which it produced.

All within the space of a single week it had made Jameson an illustrious

hero in England, a pirate in Pretoria, and an ass without discretion or

honor in Johannesburg; also it had produced a poet-laureatic explosion of

colored fireworks which filled the world's sky with giddy splendors, and,

the knowledge that Jameson was coming with it to rescue the women and

children emptied Johannesburg of that detail of the population.  For an

old letter, this was much.  For a letter two months old, it did marvels;

if it had been a year old it would have done miracles.









CHAPTER LXVII.



First catch your Boer, then kick him.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Those latter days were days of bitter worry and trouble for the harassed

Reformers.



From Mrs. Hammond we learn that on the 31st (the day after Johannesburg

heard of the invasion), "The Reform Committee repudiates Dr. Jameson's

inroad."



It also publishes its intention to adhere to the Manifesto.



It also earnestly desires that the inhabitants shall refrain from overt

acts against the Boer government.



It also "distributes arms" at the Court House, and furnishes horses "to

the newly-enrolled volunteers."



It also brings a Transvaal flag into the committee-room, and the entire

body swear allegiance to it "with uncovered heads and upraised arms."



Also "one thousand Lee-Metford rifles have been given out"--to rebels.



Also, in a speech, Reformer Lionel Phillips informs the public that the

Reform Committee Delegation has "been received with courtesy by the

Government Commission," and "been assured that their proposals shall be

earnestly considered."  That "while the Reform Committee regretted

Jameson's precipitate action, they would stand by him."



Also the populace are in a state of "wild enthusiasm," and "46 can

scarcely be restrained; they want to go out to meet Jameson and bring him

in with triumphal outcry."



Also the British High Commissioner has issued a damnifying proclamation

against Jameson and all British abettors of his game.  It arrives January

1st.



It is a difficult position for the Reformers, and full of hindrances and

perplexities.  Their duty is hard, but plain:



1.  They have to repudiate the inroad, and stand by the inroader.



2.  They have to swear allegiance to the Boer government, and distribute

cavalry horses to the rebels.



3.  They have to forbid overt acts against the Boer government, and

distribute arms to its enemies.



4.  They have to avoid collision with the British government, but still

stand by Jameson and their new oath of allegiance to the Boer government,

taken, uncovered, in presence of its flag.



They did such of these things as they could; they tried to do them all;

in fact, did do them all, but only in turn, not simultaneously.  In the

nature of things they could not be made to simultane.



In preparing for armed revolution and in talking revolution, were the

Reformers "bluffing," or were they in earnest?  If they were in earnest,

they were taking great risks--as has been already pointed out.  A

gentleman of high position told me in Johannesburg that he had in his

possession a printed document proclaiming a new government and naming its

president--one of the Reform leaders.  He said that this proclamation had

been ready for issue, but was suppressed when the raid collapsed.

Perhaps I misunderstood him.  Indeed, I must have misunderstood him, for

I have not seen mention of this large incident in print anywhere.



Besides, I hope I am mistaken; for, if I am, then there is argument that

the Reformers were privately not serious, but were only trying to scare

the Boer government into granting the desired reforms.



The Boer government was scared, and it had a right to be.  For if Mr.

Rhodes's plan was to provoke a collision that would compel the

interference of England, that was a serious matter.  If it could be shown

that that was also the Reformers' plan and purpose, it would prove that

they had marked out a feasible project, at any rate, although it was one

which could hardly fail to cost them ruinously before England should

arrive.  But it seems clear that they had no such plan nor desire.  If,

when the worst should come to the worst, they meant to overthrow the

government, they also meant to inherit the assets themselves, no doubt.



This scheme could hardly have succeeded.  With an army of Boers at their

gates and 50,000 riotous blacks in their midst, the odds against success

would have been too heavy--even if the whole town had been armed.  With

only 2,500 rifles in the place, they stood really no chance.



To me, the military problems of the situation are of more interest than

the political ones, because by disposition I have always been especially

fond of war.  No, I mean fond of discussing war; and fond of giving

military advice.  If I had been with Jameson the morning after he

started, I should have advised him to turn back.  That was Monday; it was

then that he received his first warning from a Boer source not to violate

the friendly soil of the Transvaal.  It showed that his invasion was

known.  If I had been with him on Tuesday morning and afternoon, when he

received further warnings, I should have repeated my advice.  If I had

been with him the next morning--New Year's--when he received notice that

"a few hundred" Boers were waiting for him a few miles ahead, I should

not have advised, but commanded him to go back.  And if I had been with

him two or three hours later--a thing not conceivable to me--I should

have retired him by force; for at that time he learned that the few

hundred had now grown to 800; and that meant that the growing would go on

growing.



For,--by authority of Mr. Garrett, one knows that Jameson's 600 were only

530 at most, when you count out his native drivers, etc.; and that the

530 consisted largely of "green" youths, "raw young fellows," not trained

and war-worn British soldiers; and I would have told.  Jameson that those

lads would not be able to shoot effectively from horseback in the scamper

and racket of battle, and that there would not be anything for them to

shoot at, anyway, but rocks; for the Boers would be behind the rocks, not

out in the open.  I would have told him that 300 Boer sharpshooters

behind rocks would be an overmatch for his 500 raw young fellows on

horseback.



If pluck were the only thing essential to battle-winning, the English

would lose no battles.  But discretion, as well as pluck, is required

when one fights Boers and Red Indians.  In South Africa the Briton has

always insisted upon standing bravely up, unsheltered, before the hidden

Boer, and taking the results: Jameson's men would follow the custom.

Jameson would not have listened to me--he would have been intent upon

repeating history, according to precedent.  Americans are not acquainted

with the British-Boer war of 1881; but its history is interesting, and

could have been instructive to Jameson if he had been receptive.  I will

cull some details of it from trustworthy sources mainly from "Russell's

Natal."  Mr. Russell is not a Boer, but a Briton.  He is inspector of

schools, and his history is a text-book whose purpose is the instruction

of the Natal English youth.



After the seizure of the Transvaal and the suppression of the Boer

government by England in 1877, the Boers fretted for three years, and

made several appeals to England for a restoration of their liberties, but

without result.  Then they gathered themselves together in a great mass-

meeting at Krugersdorp, talked their troubles over, and resolved to fight

for their deliverance from the British yoke.  (Krugersdorp--the place

where the Boers interrupted the Jameson raid.)  The little handful of

farmers rose against the strongest empire in the world.  They proclaimed

martial law and the re-establishment of their Republic.  They organized

their forces and sent them forward to intercept the British battalions.

This, although Sir Garnet Wolseley had but lately made proclamation that

"so long as the sun shone in the heavens," the Transvaal would be and

remain English territory.  And also in spite of the fact that the

commander of the 94th regiment--already on the march to suppress this

rebellion--had been heard to say that "the Boers would turn tail at the

first beat of the big drum."--["South Africa As It Is," by F.  Reginald

Statham, page 82.  London: T.  Fisher Unwin, 1897.]



Four days after the flag-raising, the Boer force which had been sent

forward to forbid the invasion of the English troops met them at

Bronkhorst Spruit--246 men of the 94th regiment, in command of a colonel,

the big drum beating, the band playing--and the first battle was fought.

It lasted ten minutes.  Result:



     British loss, more than 150 officers and men, out of the 246.

     Surrender of the remnant.



     Boer loss--if any--not stated.



They are fine marksmen, the Boers.  From the cradle up, they live on

horseback and hunt wild animals with the rifle.  They have a passion for

liberty and the Bible, and care for nothing else.



"General Sir George Colley, Lieutenant-Governor and Commander-in-Chief in

Natal, felt it his duty to proceed at once to the relief of the loyalists

and soldiers beleaguered in the different towns of the Transvaal."  He

moved out with 1,000 men and some artillery.  He found the Boers encamped

in a strong and sheltered position on high ground at Laing's Nek--every

Boer behind a rock.  Early in the morning of the 28th January, 1881, he

moved to the attack "with the 58th regiment, commanded by Colonel Deane,

a mounted squadron of 70 men, the 60th Rifles, the Naval Brigade with

three rocket tubes, and the Artillery with six guns."  He shelled the

Boers for twenty minutes, then the assault was delivered, the 58th

marching up the slope in solid column.  The battle was soon finished,

with this result, according to Russell--



     British loss in killed and wounded, 174.



     Boer loss, "trifling."



Colonel Deane was killed, and apparently every officer above the grade of

lieutenant was killed or wounded, for the 58th retreated to its camp in

command of a lieutenant.  ("Africa as It Is.")



That ended the second battle.



On the 7th of February General Colley discovered that the Boers were

flanking his position.  The next morning he left his camp at Mount

Pleasant and marched out and crossed the Ingogo river with 270 men,

started up the Ingogo heights, and there fought a battle which lasted

from noon till nightfall.  He then retreated, leaving his wounded with

his military chaplain, and in recrossing the now swollen river lost some

of his men by drowning.  That was the third Boer victory.  Result,

according to Mr. Russell--



     British loss 150 out of 270 engaged.



     Boer loss, 8 killed, 9 wounded--17.



There was a season of quiet, now, but at the end of about three weeks Sir

George Colley conceived the idea of climbing, with an infantry and

artillery force, the steep and rugged mountain of Amajuba in the night--a

bitter hard task, but he accomplished it.  On the way he left about 200

men to guard a strategic point, and took about 400 up the mountain with

him.  When the sun rose in the morning, there was an unpleasant surprise

for the Boers; yonder were the English troops visible on top of the

mountain two or three miles away, and now their own position was at the

mercy of the English artillery.  The Boer chief resolved to retreat--up

that mountain.  He asked for volunteers, and got them.



The storming party crossed the swale and began to creep up the steeps,

"and from behind rocks and bushes they shot at the soldiers on the

skyline as if they were stalking deer," says Mr. Russell.  There was

"continuous musketry fire, steady and fatal on the one side, wild and

ineffectual on the other." The Boers reached the top, and began to put in

their ruinous work.  Presently the British "broke and fled for their

lives down the rugged steep." The Boers had won the battle.  Result in

killed and wounded, including among the killed the British General:



     British loss, 226, out of 400 engaged.



     Boer loss, 1 killed, 5 wounded.



That ended the war.  England listened to reason, and recognized the Boer

Republic--a government which has never been in any really awful danger

since, until Jameson started after it with his 500 "raw young fellows."

To recapitulate:



The Boer farmers and British soldiers fought 4 battles, and the Boers won

them all.  Result of the 4, in killed and wounded:



     British loss, 700 men.



     Boer loss, so far as known, 23 men.



It is interesting, now, to note how loyally Jameson and his several

trained British military officers tried to make their battles conform to

precedent.  Mr. Garrett's account of the Raid is much the best one I have

met with, and my impressions of the Raid are drawn from that.



When Jameson learned that near Krugersdorp he would find 800 Boers

waiting to dispute his passage, he was not in the least disturbed.  He

was feeling as he had felt two or three days before, when he had opened

his campaign with a historic remark to the same purport as the one with

which the commander of the 94th had opened the Boer-British war of

fourteen years before.  That Commander's remark was, that the Boers

"would turn tail at the first beat of the big drum."  Jameson's was, that

with his "raw young fellows" he could kick the (persons) of the Boers

"all round the Transvaal."  He was keeping close to historic precedent.



Jameson arrived in the presence of the Boers.  They--according to

precedent--were not visible.  It was a country of ridges, depressions,

rocks, ditches, moraines of mining-tailings--not even as favorable for

cavalry work as Laing's Nek had been in the former disastrous days.

Jameson shot at the ridges and rocks with his artillery, just as General

Colley had done at the Nek; and did them no damage and persuaded no Boer

to show himself.  Then about a hundred of his men formed up to charge the

ridge-according to the 58th's precedent at the Nek; but as they dashed

forward they opened out in a long line, which was a considerable

improvement on the 58th's tactics; when they had gotten to within 200

yards of the ridge the concealed Boers opened out on them and emptied 20

saddles.  The unwounded dismounted and fired at the rocks over the backs

of their horses; but the return-fire was too hot, and they mounted again,

"and galloped back or crawled away into a clump of reeds for cover, where

they were shortly afterward taken prisoners as they lay among the reeds.

Some thirty prisoners were so taken, and during the night which followed

the Boers carried away another thirty killed and wounded--the wounded to

Krugersdorp hospital.  "Sixty per cent. of the assaulted force disposed

of--according to Mr. Garrett's estimate.



It was according to Amajuba precedent, where the British loss was 226 out

of about 400 engaged.



Also, in Jameson's camp, that night, "there lay about 30 wounded or

otherwise disabled" men.  Also during the night "some 30 or 40 young

fellows got separated from the command and straggled through into

Johannesburg."  Altogether a possible 150 men gone, out of his 530.  His

lads had fought valorously, but had not been able to get near enough to a

Boer to kick him around the Transvaal.



At dawn the next morning the column of something short of 400 whites

resumed its march.  Jameson's grit was stubbornly good; indeed, it was

always that.  He still had hopes.  There was a long and tedious

zigzagging march through broken ground, with constant harassment from the

Boers; and at last the column "walked into a sort of trap," and the Boers

"closed in upon it."  "Men and horses dropped on all sides.  In the

column the feeling grew that unless it could burst through the Boer lines

at this point it was done for.  The Maxims were fired until they grew too

hot, and, water failing for the cool jacket, five of them jammed and went

out of action.  The 7-pounder was fired until only half an hour's

ammunition was left to fire with.  One last rush was made, and failed,

and then the Staats Artillery came up on the left flank, and the game was

up."



Jameson hoisted a white flag and surrendered.



There is a story, which may not be true, about an ignorant Boer farmer

there who thought that this white flag was the national flag of England.

He had been at Bronkhorst, and Laing's Nek, and Ingogo and Amajuba, and

supposed that the English did not run up their flag excepting at the end

of a fight.



The following is (as I understand it) Mr. Garrett's estimate of Jameson's

total loss in killed and wounded for the two days:



"When they gave in they were minus some 20 per cent. of combatants.

There were 76 casualties.  There were 30 men hurt or sick in the wagons.

There were 27 killed on the spot or mortally wounded."



Total, 133, out of the original 530.  It is just 25 per cent.--[However,

I judge that the total was really 150; for the number of wounded carried

to Krugersdorp hospital was 53; not 30, as Mr. Garrett reports it.  The

lady whose guest I was in Krugerdorp gave me the figures.  She was head

nurse from the beginning of hostilities (Jan. 1) until the professional

nurses arrived, Jan. 8th.  Of the 53, "Three or four were Boers"; I quote

her words.]--This is a large improvement upon the precedents established

at Bronkhorst, Laing's Nek, Ingogo, and Amajuba, and seems to indicate

that Boer marksmanship is not so good now as it was in those days.  But

there is one detail in which the Raid-episode exactly repeats history.

By surrender at Bronkhorst, the whole British force disappeared from the

theater of war; this was the case with Jameson's force.



In the Boer loss, also, historical precedent is followed with sufficient

fidelity.  In the 4 battles named above, the Boer loss, so far as known,

was an average of 6 men per battle, to the British average loss of 175.

In Jameson's battles, as per Boer official report, the Boer loss in

killed was 4.  Two of these were killed by the Boers themselves, by

accident, the other by Jameson's army--one of them intentionally, the

other by a pathetic mischance.  "A young Boer named Jacobz was moving

forward to give a drink to one of the wounded troopers (Jameson's) after

the first charge, when another wounded man, mistaking his intention; shot

him."  There were three or four wounded Boers in the Krugersdorp

hospital, and apparently no others have been reported.  Mr. Garrett, "on

a balance of probabilities, fully accepts the official version, and

thanks Heaven the killed was not larger."



As a military man, I wish to point out what seems to me to be military

errors in the conduct of the campaign which we have just been

considering.  I have seen active service in the field, and it was in the

actualities of war that I acquired my training and my right to speak.

I served two weeks in the beginning of our Civil War, and during all that

tune commanded a battery of infantry composed of twelve men.  General

Grant knew the history of my campaign, for I told it him.  I also told

him the principle upon which I had conducted it; which was, to tire the

enemy.  I tired out and disqualified many battalions, yet never had a

casualty myself nor lost a man.  General Grant was not given to paying

compliments, yet he said frankly that if I had conducted the whole war

much bloodshed would have been spared, and that what the army might have

lost through the inspiriting results of collision in the field would have

been amply made up by the liberalizing influences of travel.  Further

endorsement does not seem to me to be necessary.



Let us now examine history, and see what it teaches.  In the 4 battles

fought in 1881 and the two fought by Jameson, the British loss in killed,

wounded, and prisoners, was substantially 1,300 men; the Boer loss, as

far as is ascertainable, eras about 30 men.  These figures show that

there was a defect somewhere.  It was not in the absence of courage.  I

think it lay in the absence of discretion.  The Briton should have done

one thing or the other: discarded British methods and fought the Boer

with Boer methods, or augmented his own force until--using British

methods--it should be large enough to equalize results with the Boer.



To retain the British method requires certain things, determinable by

arithmetic.  If, for argument's sake, we allow that the aggregate of

1,716 British soldiers engaged in the 4 early battles was opposed by the

same aggregate of Boers, we have this result: the British loss of 700 and

the Boer loss of 23 argues that in order to equalize results in future

battles you must make the British force thirty times as strong as the

Boer force.  Mr. Garrett shows that the Boer force immediately opposed to

Jameson was 2,000, and that there were 6,000 more on hand by the evening

of the second day.  Arithmetic shows that in order to make himself the

equal of the 8,000 Boers, Jameson should have had 240,000 men, whereas he

merely had 530 boys.  From a military point of view, backed by the facts

of history, I conceive that Jameson's military judgment was at fault.



Another thing.--Jameson was encumbered by artillery, ammunition, and

rifles.  The facts of the battle show that he should have had none of

those things along.  They were heavy, they were in his way, they impeded

his march.  There was nothing to shoot at but rocks--he knew quite well

that there would be nothing to shoot at but rocks--and he knew that

artillery and rifles have no effect upon rocks.  He was badly overloaded

with unessentials.  He had 8 Maxims--a Maxim is a kind of Gatling, I

believe, and shoots about 500 bullets per minute; he had one 12 1/2-

pounder cannon and two 7-pounders; also, 145,000 rounds of ammunition.

He worked the Maxims so hard upon the rocks that five of them became

disabled--five of the Maxims, not the rocks.  It is believed that upwards

of 100,000 rounds of ammunition of the various kinds were fired during

the 21 hours that the battles lasted.  One man killed.  He must have been

much mutilated.  It was a pity to bring those futile Maxims along.

Jameson should have furnished himself with a battery of Pudd'nhead Wilson

maxims instead, They are much more deadly than those others, and they are

easily carried, because they have no weight.



Mr. Garrett--not very carefully concealing a smile--excuses the presence

of the Maxims by saying that they were of very substantial use because

their sputtering disordered the aim of the Boers, and in that way saved

lives.



Three cannon, eight Maxims, and five hundred rifles yielded a result

which emphasized a fact which had already been established--that the

British system of standing out in the open to fight Boers who are behind

rocks is not wise, not excusable, and ought to be abandoned for something

more efficacious.  For the purpose of war is to kill, not merely to waste

ammunition.



If I could get the management of one of those campaigns, I would know

what to do, for I have studied the Boer.  He values the Bible above every

other thing.  The most delicious edible in South Africa is "biltong."

You will have seen it mentioned in Olive Schreiner's books.  It is what

our plainsmen call "jerked beef."  It is the Boer's main standby.  He has

a passion for it, and he is right.



If I had the command of the campaign I would go with rifles only, no

cumbersome Maxims and cannon to spoil good rocks with.  I would move

surreptitiously by night to a point about a quarter of a mile from the

Boer camp, and there I would build up a pyramid of biltong and Bibles

fifty feet high, and then conceal my men all about.  In the morning the

Boers would send out spies, and then the rest would come with a rush.

I would surround them, and they would have to fight my men on equal

terms, in the open.  There wouldn't be any Amajuba results.



--[Just as I am finishing this book an unfortunate dispute has sprung up

between Dr. Jameson and his officers, on the one hand, and Colonel Rhodes

on the other, concerning the wording of a note which Colonel Rhodes sent

from Johannesburg by a cyclist to Jameson just before hostilities began

on the memorable New Year's Day.  Some of the fragments of this note were

found on the battlefield after the fight, and these have been pieced

together; the dispute is as to what words the lacking fragments

contained.  Jameson says the note promised him a reinforcement of 300 men

from Johannesburg.  Colonel Rhodes denies this, and says he merely

promised to send out "some" men "to meet you."]



It seems a pity that these friends should fall out over so little a

thing.  If the 300 had been sent, what good would it have done?  In 21

hours of industrious fighting, Jameson's 530 men, with 8 Maxims, 3

cannon, and 145,000 rounds of ammunition, killed an aggregate of 1.

Boer.  These statistics show that a reinforcement of 300 Johannesburgers,

armed merely with muskets, would have killed, at the outside, only a

little over a half of another Boer.  This would not have saved the day.

It would not even have seriously affected the general result.  The

figures show clearly, and with mathematical violence, that the only way

to save Jameson, or even give him a fair and equal chance with the enemy,

was for Johannesburg to send him 240 Maxims, 90 cannon, 600 carloads of

ammunition, and 240,000 men.  Johannesburg was not in a position to do

this.  Johannesburg has been called very hard names for not reinforcing

Jameson.  But in every instance this has been done by two classes of

persons--people who do not read history, and people, like Jameson, who do

not understand what it means, after they have read it.]









CHAPTER LXVIII.



None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its

cussedness; but we can try.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



The Duke of Fife has borne testimony that Mr. Rhodes deceived him.  That

is also what Mr. Rhodes did with the Reformers.  He got them into

trouble, and then stayed out himself.  A judicious man.  He has always

been that.  As to this there was a moment of doubt, once.  It was when he

was out on his last pirating expedition in the Matabele country.  The

cable shouted out that he had gone unarmed, to visit a party of hostile

chiefs.  It was true, too; and this dare-devil thing came near fetching

another indiscretion out of the poet laureate.  It would have been too

bad, for when the facts were all in, it turned out that there was a lady

along, too, and she also was unarmed.



In the opinion of many people Mr. Rhodes is South Africa; others think he

is only a large part of it.  These latter consider that South Africa

consists of Table Mountain, the diamond mines, the Johannesburg gold

fields, and Cecil Rhodes.  The gold fields are wonderful in every way.

In seven or eight years they built up, in a desert, a city of a hundred

thousand inhabitants, counting white and black together; and not the

ordinary mining city of wooden shanties, but a city made out of lasting

material.  Nowhere in the world is there such a concentration of rich

mines as at Johannesburg.  Mr. Bonamici, my manager there, gave me a

small gold brick with some statistics engraved upon it which record the

output of gold from the early days to July, 1895, and exhibit the strides

which have been made in the development of the industry; in 1888 the

output was $4,162,440; the output of the next five and a half years was

(total: $17,585,894); for the single year ending with June, 1895, it was

$45,553,700.



The capital which has developed the mines came from England, the mining

engineers from America.  This is the case with the diamond mines also.

South Africa seems to be the heaven of the American scientific mining

engineer.  He gets the choicest places, and keeps them.  His salary is

not based upon what he would get in America, but apparently upon what a

whole family of him would get there.



The successful mines pay great dividends, yet the rock is not rich, from

a Californian point of view.  Rock which yields ten or twelve dollars a

ton is considered plenty rich enough.  It is troubled with base metals to

such a degree that twenty years ago it would have been only about half as

valuable as it is now; for at that time there was no paying way of

getting anything out of such rock but the coarser-grained "free" gold; but

the new cyanide process has changed all that, and the gold fields of the

world now deliver up fifty million dollars' worth of gold per year which

would have gone into the tailing-pile under the former conditions.



The cyanide process was new to me, and full of interest; and among the

costly and elaborate mining machinery there were fine things which were

new to me, but I was already familiar with the rest of the details of the

gold-mining industry.  I had been a gold miner myself, in my day, and

knew substantially everything that those people knew about it, except how

to make money at it.  But I learned a good deal about the Boers there,

and that was a fresh subject.  What I heard there was afterwards repeated

to me in other parts of South Africa.  Summed up--according to the

information thus gained--this is the Boer:



He is deeply religious, profoundly ignorant, dull, obstinate, bigoted,

uncleanly in his habits, hospitable, honest in his dealings with the

whites, a hard master to his black servant, lazy, a good shot, good

horseman, addicted to the chase, a lover of political independence, a

good husband and father, not fond of herding together in towns, but

liking the seclusion and remoteness and solitude and empty vastness and

silence of the veldt; a man of a mighty appetite, and not delicate about

what he appeases it with--well-satisfied with pork and Indian corn and

biltong, requiring only that the quantity shall not be stinted; willing

to ride a long journey to take a hand in a rude all-night dance

interspersed with vigorous feeding and boisterous jollity, but ready to

ride twice as far for a prayer-meeting; proud of his Dutch and Huguenot

origin and its religious and military history; proud of his race's

achievements in South Africa, its bold plunges into hostile and uncharted

deserts in search of free solitudes unvexed by the pestering and detested

English, also its victories over the natives and the British; proudest of

all, of the direct and effusive personal interest which the Deity has

always taken in its affairs.  He cannot read, he cannot write; he has one

or two newspapers, but he is, apparently, not aware of it; until latterly

he had no schools, and taught his children nothing, news is a term which

has no meaning to him, and the thing itself he cares nothing about.  He

hates to be taxed and resents it.  He has stood stock still in South

Africa for two centuries and a half, and would like to stand still till

the end of time, for he has no sympathy with Uitlander notions of

progress.  He is hungry to be rich, for he is human; but his preference

has been for riches in cattle, not in fine clothes and fine houses and

gold and diamonds.  The gold and the diamonds have brought the godless

stranger within his gates, also contamination and broken repose, and he

wishes that they had never been discovered.



I think that the bulk of those details can be found in Olive Schreiner's

books, and she would not be accused of sketching the Boer's portrait with

an unfair hand.



Now what would you expect from that unpromising material?  What ought you

to expect from it?  Laws inimical to religious liberty? Yes.  Laws

denying, representation and suffrage to the intruder? Yes.  Laws

unfriendly to educational institutions? Yes.  Laws obstructive of gold

production? Yes.  Discouragement of railway expansion? Yes.  Laws heavily

taxing the intruder and overlooking the Boer? Yes.



The Uitlander seems to have expected something very different from all

that.  I do not know why.  Nothing different from it was rationally to be

expected.  A round man cannot be expected to fit a square hole right

away.  He must have time to modify his shape.  The modification had begun

in a detail or two, before the Raid, and was making some progress.  It

has made further progress since.  There are wise men in the Boer

government, and that accounts for the modification; the modification of

the Boer mass has probably not begun yet.  If the heads of the Boer

government had not been wise men they would have hanged Jameson, and thus

turned a very commonplace pirate into a holy martyr.  But even their

wisdom has its limits, and they will hang Mr. Rhodes if they ever catch

him.  That will round him and complete him and make him a saint.  He has

already been called by all other titles that symbolize human grandeur,

and he ought to rise to this one, the grandest of all.  It will be a

dizzy jump from where he is now, but that is nothing, it will land him in

good company and be a pleasant change for him.



Some of the things demanded by the Johannesburgers' Manifesto have been

conceded since the days of the Raid, and the others will follow in time,

no doubt.  It was most fortunate for the miners of Johannesburg that the

taxes which distressed them so much were levied by the Boer government,

instead of by their friend Rhodes and his Chartered Company of

highwaymen, for these latter take half of whatever their mining victims

find, they do not stop at a mere percentage.  If the Johannesburg miners

were under their jurisdiction they would be in the poorhouse in twelve

months.



I have been under the impression all along that I had an unpleasant

paragraph about the Boers somewhere in my notebook, and also a pleasant

one.  I have found them now.  The unpleasant one is dated at an interior

village, and says--



"Mr. Z. called.  He is an English Afrikander; is an old resident, and has

a Boer wife.  He speaks the language, and his professional business is

with the Boers exclusively.  He told me that the ancient Boer families in

the great region of which this village is the commercial center are

falling victims to their inherited indolence and dullness in the

materialistic latter-day race and struggle, and are dropping one by one

into the grip of the usurer--getting hopelessly in debt--and are losing

their high place and retiring to second and lower.  The Boer's farm does

not go to another Boer when he loses it, but to a foreigner.  Some have

fallen so low that they sell their daughters to the blacks."



Under date of another South African town I find the note which is

creditable to the Boers:



"Dr. X. told me that in the Kafir war 1,500 Kafirs took refuge in a great

cave in the mountains about 90 miles north of Johannesburg, and the Boers

blocked up the entrance and smoked them to death.  Dr. X. has been in

there and seen the great array of bleached skeletons--one a woman with

the skeleton of a child hugged to her breast."



The great bulk of the savages must go.  The white man wants their lands,

and all must go excepting such percentage of them as he will need to do

his work for him upon terms to be determined by himself.  Since history

has removed the element of guesswork from this matter and made it

certainty, the humanest way of diminishing the black population should be

adopted, not the old cruel ways of the past.  Mr. Rhodes and his gang

have been following the old ways.--They are chartered to rob and slay,

and they lawfully do it, but not in a compassionate and Christian spirit.

They rob the Mashonas and the Matabeles of a portion of their territories

in the hallowed old style of "purchase!" for a song, and then they force

a quarrel and take the rest by the strong hand.  They rob the natives of

their cattle under the pretext that all the cattle in the country

belonged to the king whom they have tricked and assassinated.  They issue

"regulations" requiring the incensed and harassed natives to work for the

white settlers, and neglect their own affairs to do it.  This is slavery,

and is several times worse than was the American slavery which used to

pain England so much; for when this Rhodesian slave is sick, super-

annuated, or otherwise disabled, he must support himself or starve--his

master is under no obligation to support him.



The reduction of the population by Rhodesian methods to the desired limit

is a return to the old-time slow-misery and lingering-death system of a

discredited time and a crude "civilization."  We humanely reduce an

overplus of dogs by swift chloroform; the Boer humanely reduced an

overplus of blacks by swift suffocation; the nameless but right-hearted

Australian pioneer humanely reduced his overplus of aboriginal neighbors

by a sweetened swift death concealed in a poisoned pudding.  All these

are admirable, and worthy of praise; you and I would rather suffer either

of these deaths thirty times over in thirty successive days than linger

out one of the Rhodesian twenty-year deaths, with its daily burden of

insult, humiliation, and forced labor for a man whose entire race the

victim hates.  Rhodesia is a happy name for that land of piracy and

pillage, and puts the right stain upon it.



Several long journeys--gave us experience of the Cape Colony railways;

easy-riding, fine cars; all the conveniences; thorough cleanliness;

comfortable beds furnished for the night trains.  It was in the first

days of June, and winter; the daytime was pleasant, the nighttime nice

and cold.  Spinning along all day in the cars it was ecstasy to breathe

the bracing air and gaze out over the vast brown solitudes of the velvet

plains, soft and lovely near by, still softer and lovelier further away,

softest and loveliest of all in the remote distances, where dim island-

hills seemed afloat, as in a sea--a sea made of dream-stuff and flushed

with colors faint and rich; and dear me, the depth of the sky, and the

beauty of the strange new cloud-forms, and the glory of the sunshine, the

lavishness, the wastefulness of it!  The vigor and freshness and

inspiration of the air and the sunwell, it was all just as Olive

Schreiner had made it in her books.



To me the veldt, in its sober winter garb, was surpassingly beautiful.

There were unlevel stretches where it was rolling and swelling, and

rising and subsiding, and sweeping superbly on and on, and still on and

on like an ocean, toward the faraway horizon, its pale brown deepening by

delicately graduated shades to rich orange, and finally to purple and

crimson where it washed against the wooded hills and naked red crags at

the base of the sky.



Everywhere, from Cape Town to Kimberley and from Kimberley to Port

Elizabeth and East London, the towns were well populated with tamed

blacks; tamed and Christianized too, I suppose, for they wore the dowdy

clothes of our Christian civilization.  But for that, many of them would

have been remarkably handsome.  These fiendish clothes, together with the

proper lounging gait, good-natured face, happy air, and easy laugh, made

them precise counterparts of our American blacks; often where all the

other aspects were strikingly and harmoniously and thrillingly African, a

flock of these natives would intrude, looking wholly out of place, and

spoil it all, making the thing a grating discord, half African and half

American.



One Sunday in King William's Town a score of colored women came mincing

across the great barren square dressed--oh, in the last perfection of

fashion, and newness, and expensiveness, and showy mixture of unrelated

colors,--all just as I had seen it so often at home; and in their faces

and their gait was that languishing, aristocratic, divine delight in

their finery which was so familiar to me, and had always been such a

satisfaction to my eye and my heart.  I seemed among old, old friends;

friends of fifty years, and I stopped and cordially greeted them.  They

broke into a good-fellowship laugh, flashing their white teeth upon me,

and all answered at once.  I did not understand a word they said.  I was

astonished; I was not dreaming that they would answer in anything but

American.



The voices, too, of the African women, were familiar to me sweet and

musical, just like those of the slave women of my early days.  I followed

a couple of them all over the Orange Free State--no, over its capital--

Bloemfontein, to hear their liquid voices and the happy ripple of their

laughter.  Their language was a large improvement upon American.  Also

upon the Zulu.  It had no Zulu clicks in it; and it seemed to have no

angles or corners, no roughness, no vile s's or other hissing sounds, but

was very, very mellow and rounded and flowing.



In moving about the country in the trains, I had opportunity to see a

good many Boers of the veldt.  One day at a village station a hundred of

them got out of the third-class cars to feed.



Their clothes were very interesting.  For ugliness of shapes, and for

miracles of ugly colors inharmoniously associated, they were a record.

The effect was nearly as exciting and interesting as that produced by the

brilliant and beautiful clothes and perfect taste always on view at the

Indian railway stations.  One man had corduroy trousers of a faded

chewing gum tint.  And they were new--showing that this tint did not come

by calamity, but was intentional; the very ugliest color I have ever

seen.  A gaunt, shackly country lout six feet high, in battered gray

slouched hat with wide brim, and old resin-colored breeches, had on a

hideous brand-new woolen coat which was imitation tiger skin wavy broad

stripes of dazzling yellow and deep brown.  I thought he ought to be

hanged, and asked the station-master if it could be arranged.  He said

no; and not only that, but said it rudely; said it with a quite

unnecessary show of feeling.  Then he muttered something about my being a

jackass, and walked away and pointed me out to people, and did everything

he could to turn public sentiment against me.  It is what one gets for

trying to do good.



In the train that day a passenger told me some more about Boer life out

in the lonely veldt.  He said the Boer gets up early and sets his

"niggers" at their tasks (pasturing the cattle, and watching them); eats,

smokes, drowses, sleeps; toward evening superintends the milking, etc.;

eats, smokes, drowses; goes to bed at early candlelight in the fragrant

clothes he (and she) have worn all day and every week-day for years.  I

remember that last detail, in Olive Schreiner's "Story of an African

Farm."  And the passenger told me that the Boers were justly noted for

their hospitality.  He told me a story about it.  He said that his grace

the Bishop of a certain See was once making a business-progress through

the tavernless veldt, and one night he stopped with a Boer; after supper

was shown to bed; he undressed, weary and worn out, and was soon sound

asleep; in the night he woke up feeling crowded and suffocated, and found

the old Boer and his fat wife in bed with him, one on each side, with all

their clothes on, and snoring.  He had to stay there and stand it--awake

and suffering--until toward dawn, when sleep again fell upon him for an

hour.  Then he woke again.  The Boer was gone, but the wife was still at

his side.



Those Reformers detested that Boer prison; they were not used to cramped

quarters and tedious hours, and weary idleness, and early to bed, and

limited movement, and arbitrary and irritating rules, and the absence of

the luxuries which wealth comforts the day and the night with.  The

confinement told upon their bodies and their spirits; still, they were

superior men, and they made the best that was to be made of the

circumstances.  Their wives smuggled delicacies to them, which helped to

smooth the way down for the prison fare.



In the train Mr. B. told me that the Boer jail-guards treated the black

prisoners--even political ones--mercilessly.  An African chief and his

following had been kept there nine months without trial, and during all

that time they had been without shelter from rain and sun.  He said that

one day the guards put a big black in the stocks for dashing his soup on

the ground; they stretched his legs painfully wide apart, and set him

with his back down hill; he could not endure it, and put back his hands

upon the slope for a support.  The guard ordered him to withdraw the

support and kicked him in the back.  "Then," said Mr. B., "'the powerful

black wrenched the stocks asunder and went for the guard; a Reform

prisoner pulled him off, and thrashed the guard himself."









CHAPTER LXIX.



The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilsons's New Calendar.



There isn't a Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the

Equator if it had had its rights.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



Next to Mr. Rhodes, to me the most interesting convulsion of nature in

South Africa was the diamond-crater.  The Rand gold fields are a

stupendous marvel, and they make all other gold fields small, but I was

not a stranger to gold-mining; the veldt was a noble thing to see, but it

was only another and lovelier variety of our Great Plains; the natives

were very far from being uninteresting, but they were not new; and as for

the towns, I could find my way without a guide through the most of them

because I had learned the streets, under other names, in towns just like

them in other lands; but the diamond mine was a wholly fresh thing, a

splendid and absorbing novelty.  Very few people in the world have seen

the diamond in its home.  It has but three or four homes in the world,

whereas gold has a million.  It is worth while to journey around the

globe to see anything which can truthfully be called a novelty, and the

diamond mine is the greatest and most select and restricted novelty which

the globe has in stock.



The Kimberley diamond deposits were discovered about 1869, I think.  When

everything is taken into consideration, the wonder is that they were not

discovered five thousand years ago and made familiar to the African world

for the rest of time.  For this reason the first diamonds were found on

the surface of the ground.  They were smooth and limpid, and in the

sunlight they vomited fire.  They were the very things which an African

savage of any era would value above every other thing in the world

excepting a glass bead.  For two or three centuries we have been buying

his lands, his cattle, his neighbor, and any other thing he had for sale,

for glass beads and so it is strange that he was indifferent to the

diamonds--for he must have pickets them up many and many a time.  It

would not occur to him to try to sell them to whites, of course, since

the whites already had plenty of glass beads, and more fashionably

shaped, too, than these; but one would think that the poorer sort of

black, who could not afford real glass, would have been humbly content to

decorate himself with the imitation, and that presently the white trader

would notice the things, and dimly suspect, and carry some of them home,

and find out what they were, and at once empty a multitude of fortune-

hunters into Africa.  There are many strange things in human history; one

of the strangest is that the sparkling diamonds laid there so long

without exciting any one's interest.



The revelation came at last by accident.  In a Boer's hut out in the wide

solitude of the plains, a traveling stranger noticed a child playing with

a bright object, and was told it was a piece of glass which had been

found in the veldt.  The stranger bought it for a trifle and carried it

away; and being without honor, made another stranger believe it was a

diamond, and so got $125 out of him for it, and was as pleased with

himself as if he had done a righteous thing.  In Paris the wronged

stranger sold it to a pawnshop for $10,000, who sold it to a countess for

$90,000, who sold it to a brewer for $800;000, who traded it to a king

for a dukedom and a pedigree, and the king "put it up the spout."--

[handwritten note: "From the Greek meaning 'pawned it.'" M.T.]--I know

these particulars to be correct.



The news flew around, and the South African diamond-boom began.  The

original traveler--the dishonest one--now remembered that he had once

seen a Boer teamster chocking his wagon-wheel on a steep grade with a

diamond as large as a football, and he laid aside his occupations and

started out to hunt for it, but not with the intention of cheating

anybody out of $125 with it, for he had reformed.



We now come to matters more didactic.  Diamonds are not imbedded in rock

ledges fifty miles long, like the Johannesburg gold, but are distributed

through the rubbish of a filled-up well, so to speak.  The well is rich,

its walls are sharply defined; outside of the walls are no diamonds.  The

well is a crater, and a large one.  Before it had been meddled with, its

surface was even with the level plain, and there was no sign to suggest

that it was there.  The pasturage covering the surface of the Kimberley

crater was sufficient for the support of a cow, and the pasturage

underneath was sufficient for the support of a kingdom; but the cow did

not know it, and lost her chance.



The Kimberley crater is roomy enough to admit the Roman Coliseum; the

bottom of the crater has not been reached, and no one can tell how far

down in the bowels of the earth it goes.  Originally, it was a

perpendicular hole packed solidly full of blue rock or cement, and

scattered through that blue mass, like raisins in a pudding, were the

diamonds.  As deep down in the earth as the blue stuff extends, so deep

will the diamonds be found.



There are three or four other celebrated craters near by a circle three

miles in diameter would enclose them all.  They are owned by the De Beers

Company, a consolidation of diamond properties arranged by Mr. Rhodes

twelve or fourteen years ago.  The De Beers owns other craters; they are

under the grass, but the De Beers knows where they are, and will open

them some day, if the market should require it.



Originally, the diamond deposits were the property of the Orange Free

State; but a judicious "rectification" of the boundary line shifted them

over into the British territory of Cape Colony.  A high official of the

Free State told me that the sum of $4,00,000 was handed to his

commonwealth as a compromise, or indemnity, or something of the sort, and

that he thought his commonwealth did wisely to take the money and keep

out of a dispute, since the power was all on the one side and the

weakness all on the other.  The De Beers Company dig out $400,000 worth

of diamonds per week, now.  The Cape got the territory, but no profit;

for Mr. Rhodes and the Rothschilds and the other De Beers people own the

mines, and they pay no taxes.



In our day the mines are worked upon scientific principles, under the

guidance of the ablest mining-engineering talent procurable in America.

There are elaborate works for reducing the blue rock and passing it

through one process after another until every diamond it contains has

been hunted down and secured.  I watched the "concentrators" at work big

tanks containing mud and water and invisible diamonds--and was told that

each could stir and churn and properly treat 300 car-loads of mud per day

1,600 pounds to the car-load--and reduce it to 3 car-loads of slush.  I

saw the 3 carloads of slush taken to the "pulsators" and there reduced to

quarter of a load of nice clean dark-colored sand.  Then I followed it to

the sorting tables and saw the men deftly and swiftly spread it out and

brush it about and seize the diamonds as they showed up.  I assisted, and

once I found a diamond half as large as an almond.  It is an exciting

kind of fishing, and you feel a fine thrill of pleasure every time you

detect the glow of one of those limpid pebbles through the veil of dark

sand.  I would like to spend my Saturday holidays in that charming sport

every now and then.  Of course there are disappointments.  Sometimes you

find a diamond which is not a diamond; it is only a quartz crystal or

some such worthless thing.  The expert can generally distinguish it from

the precious stone which it is counterfeiting; but if he is in doubt he

lays it on a flatiron and hits it with a sledgehammer.  If it is a

diamond it holds its own; if it is anything else, it is reduced to

powder.  I liked that experiment very much, and did not tire of

repetitions of it.  It was full of enjoyable apprehensions, unmarred by

any personal sense of risk.  The De Beers concern treats 8;000 carloads--

about 6,000 tons--of blue rock per day, and the result is three pounds of

diamonds.  Value, uncut, $50,000 to $70,000.  After cutting, they will

weigh considerably less than a pound, but will be worth four or five

times as much as they were before.



All the plain around that region is spread over, a foot deep, with blue

rock, placed there by the Company, and looks like a plowed field.

Exposure for a length of time make the rock easier to work than it is

when it comes out of the mine.  If mining should cease now, the supply of

rock spread over those fields would furnish the usual 8,000 car-loads per

day to the separating works during three years.  The fields are fenced

and watched; and at night they are under the constant inspection of lofty

electric searchlight.  They contain fifty or sixty million dollars'

worth' of diamonds, and there is an abundance of enterprising thieves

around.



In the dirt of the Kimberley streets there is much hidden wealth.  Some

time ago the people were granted the privilege of a free wash-up.  There

was a general rush, the work was done with thoroughness, and a good

harvest of diamonds was gathered.



The deep mining is done by natives.  There are many hundreds of them.

They live in quarters built around the inside of a great compound.  They

are a jolly and good-natured lot, and accommodating.  They performed a

war-dance for us, which was the wildest exhibition I have ever seen.

They are not allowed outside of the compound during their term of service

three months, I think it, is, as a rule.  They go down the shaft, stand

their watch, come up again, are searched, and go to bed or to their

amusements in the compound; and this routine they repeat, day in and day

out.



It is thought that they do not now steal many diamonds successfully.

They used to swallow them, and find other ways of concealing them, but

the white man found ways of beating their various games.  One man cut his

leg and shoved a diamond into the wound, but even that project did not

succeed.  When they find a fine large diamond they are more likely to

report it than to steal it, for in the former case they get a reward, and

in the latter they are quite apt to merely get into trouble.  Some years

ago, in a mine not owned by the De Beers, a black found what has been

claimed to be the largest diamond known to the world's history; and, as a

reward he was released from service and given a blanket, a horse, and

five hundred dollars.  It made him a Vanderbilt.  He could buy four

wives, and have money left.  Four wives are an ample support for a

native.  With four wives he is wholly independent, and need never do a

stroke of work again.



That great diamond weighs 97l carats.  Some say it is as big as a piece

of alum, others say it is as large as a bite of rock candy, but the best

authorities agree that it is almost exactly the size of a chunk of ice.

But those details are not important; and in my opinion not trustworthy.

It has a flaw in it, otherwise it would be of incredible value.  As it

is, it is held to be worth $2,000,000.  After cutting it ought to be

worth from $5,000,000 to $8,000,000, therefore persons desiring to save

money should buy it now.  It is owned by a syndicate, and apparently

there is no satisfactory market for it.  It is earning nothing; it is

eating its head off.  Up to this time it has made nobody rich but the

native who found it.



He found it in a mine which was being worked by contract.  That is to

say, a company had bought the privilege of taking from the mine 5,000,000

carloads of blue-rock, for a sum down and a royalty.  Their speculation

had not paid; but on the very day that their privilege ran out that

native found the $2,000,000-diamond and handed it over to them.  Even the

diamond culture is not without its romantic episodes.



The Koh-i-Noor is a large diamond, and valuable; but it cannot compete in

these matters with three which--according to legend--are among the crown

trinkets of Portugal and Russia.  One of these is held to be worth

$20,000,000; another, $25,000,000, and the third something over

$28,000,000.



Those are truly wonderful diamonds, whether they exist or not; and yet

they are of but little importance by comparison with the one wherewith

the Boer wagoner chocked his wheel on that steep grade as heretofore

referred to.  In Kimberley I had some conversation with the man who saw

the Boer do that--an incident which had occurred twenty-seven or twenty-

eight years before I had my talk with him.  He assured me that that

diamond's value could have been over a billion dollars, but not under it.

I believed him, because he had devoted twenty-seven years to hunting for

it, and was, in a position to know.



A fitting and interesting finish to an examination of the tedious and

laborious and costly processes whereby the diamonds are gotten out of the

deeps of the earth and freed from the base stuffs which imprison them is

the visit to the De Beers offices in the town of Kimberley, where the

result of each day's mining is brought every day, and, weighed, assorted,

valued, and deposited in safes against shipping-day.  An unknown and

unaccredited person cannot, get into that place; and it seemed apparent

from the generous supply of warning and protective and prohibitory signs

that were posted all about, that not even the known and accredited can

steal diamonds there without inconvenience.



We saw the day's output--shining little nests of diamonds, distributed a

foot apart, along a counter, each nest reposing upon a sheet of white

paper.  That day's catch was about $70,000 worth.  In the course of a

year half a ton of diamonds pass under the scales there and sleep on that

counter; the resulting money is $18,000,000 or $20,000,000.  Profit,

about $12,000,000.



Young girls were doing the sorting--a nice, clean, dainty, and probably

distressing employment.  Every day ducal incomes sift and sparkle through

the fingers of those young girls; yet they go to bed at night as poor as

they were when they got up in the morning.  The same thing next day, and

all the days.



They are beautiful things, those diamonds, in their native state.  They

are of various shapes; they have flat surfaces, rounded borders, and

never a sharp edge.  They are of all colors and shades of color, from

dewdrop white to actual black; and their smooth and rounded surfaces and

contours, variety of color, and transparent limpidity make them look like

piles of assorted candies.  A very light straw color is their commonest

tint.  It seemed to me that these uncut gems must be more beautiful than

any cut ones could be; but when a collection of cut ones was brought out,

I saw my mistake.  Nothing is so beautiful as a rose diamond with the

light playing through it, except that uncostly thing which is just like

it--wavy sea-water with the sunlight playing through it and striking a

white-sand bottom.



Before the middle of July we reached Cape Town, and the end of our

African journeyings.  And well satisfied; for, towering above us was

Table Mountain--a reminder that we had now seen each and all of the great

features of South Africa except Mr. Cecil Rhodes.  I realize that that is

a large exception.  I know quite well that whether Mr. Rhodes is the

lofty and worshipful patriot and statesman that multitudes believe him to

be, or Satan come again, as the rest of the world account him, he is

still the most imposing figure in the British empire outside of England.

When he stands on the Cape of Good Hope, his shadow falls to the Zambesi.

He is the only colonial in the British dominions whose goings and comings

are chronicled and discussed under all the globe's meridians, and whose

speeches, unclipped, are cabled from the ends of the earth; and he is the

only unroyal outsider whose arrival in London can compete for attention

with an eclipse.



That he is an extraordinary man, and not an accident of fortune, not even

his dearest South African enemies were willing to deny, so far as I heard

them testify.  The whole South African world seemed to stand in a kind of

shuddering awe of him, friend and enemy alike.  It was as if he were

deputy-God on the one side, deputy-Satan on the other, proprietor of the

people, able to make them or ruin them by his breath, worshiped by many,

hated by many, but blasphemed by none among the judicious, and even by

the indiscreet in guarded whispers only.



What is the secret of his formidable supremacy?  One says it is his

prodigious wealth--a wealth whose drippings in salaries and in other ways

support multitudes and make them his interested and loyal vassals;

another says it is his personal magnetism and his persuasive tongue, and

that these hypnotize and make happy slaves of all that drift within the

circle of their influence; another says it is his majestic ideas, his

vast schemes for the territorial aggrandizement of England, his patriotic

and unselfish ambition to spread her beneficent protection and her just

rule over the pagan wastes of Africa and make luminous the African

darkness with the glory of her name; and another says he wants the earth

and wants it for his own, and that the belief that he will get it and let

his friends in on the ground floor is the secret that rivets so many eyes

upon him and keeps him in the zenith where the view is unobstructed.



One may take his choice.  They are all the same price.  One fact is sure:

he keeps his prominence and a vast following, no matter what he does.  He

"deceives" the Duke of Fife--it is the Duke's word--but that does not

destroy the Duke's loyalty to him.  He tricks the Reformers into immense

trouble with his Raid, but the most of them believe he meant well.  He

weeps over the harshly--taxed Johannesburgers and makes them his friends;

at the same time he taxes his Charter-settlers 50 per cent., and so wins

their affection and their confidence that they are squelched with despair

at every rumor that the Charter is to be annulled.  He raids and robs and

slays and enslaves the Matabele and gets worlds of Charter-Christian

applause for it.  He has beguiled England into buying Charter waste paper

for Bank of England notes, ton for ton, and the ravished still burn

incense to him as the Eventual God of Plenty.  He has done everything he

could think of to pull himself down to the ground; he has done more than

enough to pull sixteen common-run great men down; yet there he stands, to

this day, upon his dizzy summit under the dome of the sky, an apparent

permanency, the marvel of the time, the mystery of the age, an Archangel

with wings to half the world, Satan with a tail to the other half.



I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a

piece of the rope for a keepsake.









CONCLUSION.



I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the

angels speak English with an accent.

                                  --Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.



I saw Table Rock, anyway--a majestic pile.  It is 3,000 feet high.  It is

also 17,000 feet high.  These figures may be relied upon.  I got them in

Cape Town from the two best-informed citizens, men who had made Table

Rock the study of their lives.  And I saw Table Bay, so named for its

levelness.  I saw the Castle--built by the Dutch East India Company three

hundred years ago--where the Commanding General lives; I saw St. Simon's

Bay, where the Admiral lives.  I saw the Government, also the Parliament,

where they quarreled in two languages when I was there, and agreed in

none.  I saw the club.  I saw and explored the beautiful sea-girt drives

that wind about the mountains and through the paradise where the villas

are: Also I saw some of the fine old Dutch mansions, pleasant homes of

the early times, pleasant homes to-day, and enjoyed the privilege of

their hospitalities.



And just before I sailed I saw in one of them a quaint old picture which

was a link in a curious romance--a picture of a pale, intellectual young

man in a pink coat with a high black collar.  It was a portrait of Dr.

James Barry, a military surgeon who came out to the Cape fifty years ago

with his regiment.  He was a wild young fellow, and was guilty of various

kinds of misbehavior.  He was several times reported to headquarters in

England, and it was in each case expected that orders would come out to

deal with him promptly and severely, but for some mysterious reason no

orders of any kind ever came back--nothing came but just an impressive

silence.  This made him an imposing and uncanny wonder to the town.



Next, he was promoted-away up.  He was made Medical Superintendent

General, and transferred to India.  Presently he was back at the Cape

again and at his escapades once more.  There were plenty of pretty girls,

but none of them caught him, none of them could get hold of his heart;

evidently he was not a marrying man.  And that was another marvel,

another puzzle, and made no end of perplexed talk.  Once he was called in

the night, an obstetric service, to do what he could for a woman who was

believed to be dying.  He was prompt and scientific, and saved both

mother and child.  There are other instances of record which testify to

his mastership of his profession; and many which testify to his love of

it and his devotion to it.  Among other adventures of his was a duel of a

desperate sort, fought with swords, at the Castle.  He killed his man.



The child heretofore mentioned as having been saved by Dr. Barry so long

ago, was named for him, and still lives in Cape Town.  He had Dr.

Barry's portrait painted, and gave it to the gentleman in whose old Dutch

house I saw it--the quaint figure in pink coat and high black collar.



The story seems to be arriving nowhere.  But that is because I have not

finished.  Dr. Barry died in Cape Town 30 years ago.  It was then

discovered that he was a woman.



The legend goes that enquiries--soon silenced--developed the fact that

she was a daughter of a great English house, and that that was why her

Cape wildnesses brought no punishment and got no notice when reported to

the government at home.  Her name was an alias.  She had disgraced

herself with her people; so she chose to change her name and her sex and

take a new start in the world.



We sailed on the 15th of July in the Norman, a beautiful ship, perfectly

appointed.  The voyage to England occupied a short fortnight, without a

stop except at Madeira.  A good and restful voyage for tired people, and

there were several of us.  I seemed to have been lecturing a thousand

years, though it was only a twelvemonth, and a considerable number of the

others were Reformers who were fagged out with their five months of

seclusion in the Pretoria prison.



Our trip around the earth ended at the Southampton pier, where we

embarked thirteen months before.  It seemed a fine and large thing to

have accomplished--the circumnavigation of this great globe in that

little time, and I was privately proud of it.  For a moment.  Then came

one of those vanity-snubbing astronomical reports from the Observatory-

people, whereby it appeared that another great body of light had lately

flamed up in the remotenesses of space which was traveling at a gait

which would enable it to do all that I had done in a minute and a half.

Human pride is not worth while; there is always something lying in wait

to take the wind out of it.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Following the Equator,

by Mark Twain













THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG AND OTHER STORIES



By Mark Twain





CONTENTS:

     THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG

     MY FIRST LIE, AND HOW I GOT OUT OF IT

     THE ESQUIMAUX MAIDEN'S ROMANCE

     CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND THE BOOK OF MRS. EDDY

     IS HE LIVING OR IS HE DEAD?

     MY DEBUT AS A LITERARY PERSON

     AT THE APPETITE-CURE

     CONCERNING THE JEWS

     FROM THE 'LONDON TIMES' OF 1904

     ABOUT PLAY-ACTING

     TRAVELLING WITH A REFORMER

     DIPLOMATIC PAY AND CLOTHES

     LUCK

     THE CAPTAIN'S STORY

     STIRRING TIMES IN AUSTRIA

     MEISTERSCHAFT

     MY BOYHOOD DREAMS

          TO THE ABOVE OLD PEOPLE

     IN MEMORIAM--OLIVIA SUSAN CLEMENS









THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG



It was many years ago.  Hadleyburg was the most honest and upright

town in all the region round about.  It had kept that reputation

unsmirched during three generations, and was prouder of it than of

any other of its possessions.  It was so proud of it, and so anxious

to insure its perpetuation, that it began to teach the principles of

honest dealing to its babies in the cradle, and made the like

teachings the staple of their culture thenceforward through all the

years devoted to their education.  Also, throughout the formative

years temptations were kept out of the way of the young people, so

that their honesty could have every chance to harden and solidify,

and become a part of their very bone.  The neighbouring towns were

jealous of this honourable supremacy, and affected to sneer at

Hadleyburg's pride in it and call it vanity; but all the same they

were obliged to acknowledge that Hadleyburg was in reality an

incorruptible town; and if pressed they would also acknowledge that

the mere fact that a young man hailed from Hadleyburg was all the

recommendation he needed when he went forth from his natal town to

seek for responsible employment.



But at last, in the drift of time, Hadleyburg had the ill luck to

offend a passing stranger--possibly without knowing it, certainly

without caring, for Hadleyburg was sufficient unto itself, and cared

not a rap for strangers or their opinions.  Still, it would have

been well to make an exception in this one's case, for he was a

bitter man, and revengeful.  All through his wanderings during a

whole year he kept his injury in mind, and gave all his leisure

moments to trying to invent a compensating satisfaction for it.  He

contrived many plans, and all of them were good, but none of them

was quite sweeping enough:  the poorest of them would hurt a great

many individuals, but what he wanted was a plan which would

comprehend the entire town, and not let so much as one person escape

unhurt.  At last he had a fortunate idea, and when it fell into his

brain it lit up his whole head with an evil joy.  He began to form a

plan at once, saying to himself "That is the thing to do--I will

corrupt the town."



Six months later he went to Hadleyburg, and arrived in a buggy at

the house of the old cashier of the bank about ten at night.  He got

a sack out of the buggy, shouldered it, and staggered with it

through the cottage yard, and knocked at the door.  A woman's voice

said "Come in," and he entered, and set his sack behind the stove in

the parlour, saying politely to the old lady who sat reading the

"Missionary Herald" by the lamp:



"Pray keep your seat, madam, I will not disturb you.  There--now it

is pretty well concealed; one would hardly know it was there.  Can I

see your husband a moment, madam?"



No, he was gone to Brixton, and might not return before morning.



"Very well, madam, it is no matter.  I merely wanted to leave that

sack in his care, to be delivered to the rightful owner when he

shall be found.  I am a stranger; he does not know me; I am merely

passing through the town to-night to discharge a matter which has

been long in my mind.  My errand is now completed, and I go pleased

and a little proud, and you will never see me again.  There is a

paper attached to the sack which will explain everything.  Good-

night, madam."



The old lady was afraid of the mysterious big stranger, and was glad

to see him go.  But her curiosity was roused, and she went straight

to the sack and brought away the paper.  It began as follows:





"TO BE PUBLISHED, or, the right man sought out by private inquiry--

either will answer.  This sack contains gold coin weighing a hundred

and sixty pounds four ounces--"





"Mercy on us, and the door not locked!"



Mrs. Richards flew to it all in a tremble and locked it, then pulled

down the window-shades and stood frightened, worried, and wondering

if there was anything else she could do toward making herself and

the money more safe.  She listened awhile for burglars, then

surrendered to curiosity, and went back to the lamp and finished

reading the paper:





"I am a foreigner, and am presently going back to my own country, to

remain there permanently.  I am grateful to America for what I have

received at her hands during my long stay under her flag; and to one

of her citizens--a citizen of Hadleyburg--I am especially grateful

for a great kindness done me a year or two ago.  Two great

kindnesses in fact.  I will explain.  I was a gambler.  I say I WAS.

I was a ruined gambler.  I arrived in this village at night, hungry

and without a penny.  I asked for help--in the dark; I was ashamed

to beg in the light.  I begged of the right man.  He gave me twenty

dollars--that is to say, he gave me life, as I considered it.  He

also gave me fortune; for out of that money I have made myself rich

at the gaming-table.  And finally, a remark which he made to me has

remained with me to this day, and has at last conquered me; and in

conquering has saved the remnant of my morals:  I shall gamble no

more.  Now I have no idea who that man was, but I want him found,

and I want him to have this money, to give away, throw away, or

keep, as he pleases.  It is merely my way of testifying my gratitude

to him.  If I could stay, I would find him myself; but no matter, he

will be found.  This is an honest town, an incorruptible town, and I

know I can trust it without fear.  This man can be identified by the

remark which he made to me; I feel persuaded that he will remember

it.



"And now my plan is this:  If you prefer to conduct the inquiry

privately, do so.  Tell the contents of this present writing to any

one who is likely to be the right man.  If he shall answer, 'I am

the man; the remark I made was so-and-so,' apply the test--to wit:

open the sack, and in it you will find a sealed envelope containing

that remark.  If the remark mentioned by the candidate tallies with

it, give him the money, and ask no further questions, for he is

certainly the right man.



"But if you shall prefer a public inquiry, then publish this present

writing in the local paper--with these instructions added, to wit:

Thirty days from now, let the candidate appear at the town-hall at

eight in the evening (Friday), and hand his remark, in a sealed

envelope, to the Rev. Mr. Burgess (if he will be kind enough to

act); and let Mr. Burgess there and then destroy the seals of the

sack, open it, and see if the remark is correct:  if correct, let

the money be delivered, with my sincere gratitude, to my benefactor

thus identified."





Mrs. Richards sat down, gently quivering with excitement, and was

soon lost in thinkings--after this pattern:  "What a strange thing

it is! . . . And what a fortune for that kind man who set his bread

afloat upon the waters! . . . If it had only been my husband that

did it!--for we are so poor, so old and poor! . . ."  Then, with a

sigh--"But it was not my Edward; no, it was not he that gave a

stranger twenty dollars.  It is a pity too; I see it now. . . "

Then, with a shudder--"But it is GAMBLERS' money! the wages of sin;

we couldn't take it; we couldn't touch it.  I don't like to be near

it; it seems a defilement."  She moved to a farther chair. . . "I

wish Edward would come, and take it to the bank; a burglar might

come at any moment; it is dreadful to be here all alone with it."



At eleven Mr. Richards arrived, and while his wife was saying "I am

SO glad you've come!" he was saying, "I am so tired--tired clear

out; it is dreadful to be poor, and have to make these dismal

journeys at my time of life.  Always at the grind, grind, grind, on

a salary--another man's slave, and he sitting at home in his

slippers, rich and comfortable."



"I am so sorry for you, Edward, you know that; but be comforted; we

have our livelihood; we have our good name--"



"Yes, Mary, and that is everything.  Don't mind my talk--it's just a

moment's irritation and doesn't mean anything.  Kiss me--there, it's

all gone now, and I am not complaining any more.  What have you been

getting?  What's in the sack?"



Then his wife told him the great secret.  It dazed him for a moment;

then he said:



"It weighs a hundred and sixty pounds?  Why, Mary, it's for-ty thou-

sand dollars--think of it--a whole fortune!  Not ten men in this

village are worth that much.  Give me the paper."



He skimmed through it and said:



"Isn't it an adventure!  Why, it's a romance; it's like the

impossible things one reads about in books, and never sees in life."

He was well stirred up now; cheerful, even gleeful.  He tapped his

old wife on the cheek, and said humorously, "Why, we're rich, Mary,

rich; all we've got to do is to bury the money and burn the papers.

If the gambler ever comes to inquire, we'll merely look coldly upon

him and say:  'What is this nonsense you are talking?  We have never

heard of you and your sack of gold before;' and then he would look

foolish, and--"



"And in the meantime, while you are running on with your jokes, the

money is still here, and it is fast getting along toward burglar-

time."



"True.  Very well, what shall we do--make the inquiry private?  No,

not that; it would spoil the romance.  The public method is better.

Think what a noise it will make!  And it will make all the other

towns jealous; for no stranger would trust such a thing to any town

but Hadleyburg, and they know it.  It's a great card for us.  I must

get to the printing-office now, or I shall be too late."



"But stop--stop--don't leave me here alone with it, Edward!"



But he was gone.  For only a little while, however.  Not far from

his own house he met the editor--proprietor of the paper, and gave

him the document, and said "Here is a good thing for you, Cox--put

it in."



"It may be too late, Mr. Richards, but I'll see."



At home again, he and his wife sat down to talk the charming mystery

over; they were in no condition for sleep.  The first question was,

Who could the citizen have been who gave the stranger the twenty

dollars?  It seemed a simple one; both answered it in the same

breath--



"Barclay Goodson."



"Yes," said Richards, "he could have done it, and it would have been

like him, but there's not another in the town."



"Everybody will grant that, Edward--grant it privately, anyway.  For

six months, now, the village has been its own proper self once more-

-honest, narrow, self-righteous, and stingy."



"It is what he always called it, to the day of his death--said it

right out publicly, too."



"Yes, and he was hated for it."



"Oh, of course; but he didn't care.  I reckon he was the best-hated

man among us, except the Reverend Burgess."



"Well, Burgess deserves it--he will never get another congregation

here.  Mean as the town is, it knows how to estimate HIM.  Edward,

doesn't it seem odd that the stranger should appoint Burgess to

deliver the money?"



"Well, yes--it does.  That is--that is--"



"Why so much that-IS-ing?  Would YOU select him?"



"Mary, maybe the stranger knows him better than this village does."



"Much THAT would help Burgess!"



The husband seemed perplexed for an answer; the wife kept a steady

eye upon him, and waited.  Finally Richards said, with the hesitancy

of one who is making a statement which is likely to encounter doubt,



"Mary, Burgess is not a bad man."



His wife was certainly surprised.



"Nonsense!" she exclaimed.



"He is not a bad man.  I know.  The whole of his unpopularity had

its foundation in that one thing--the thing that made so much

noise."



"That 'one thing,' indeed!  As if that 'one thing' wasn't enough,

all by itself."



"Plenty.  Plenty.  Only he wasn't guilty of it."



"How you talk!  Not guilty of it!  Everybody knows he WAS guilty."



"Mary, I give you my word--he was innocent."



"I can't believe it and I don't.  How do you know?"



"It is a confession.  I am ashamed, but I will make it.  I was the

only man who knew he was innocent.  I could have saved him, and--

and--well, you know how the town was wrought up--I hadn't the pluck

to do it.  It would have turned everybody against me.  I felt mean,

ever so mean; ut I didn't dare; I hadn't the manliness to face

that."



Mary looked troubled, and for a while was silent.  Then she said

stammeringly:



"I--I don't think it would have done for you to--to--One mustn't--

er--public opinion--one has to be so careful--so--"  It was a

difficult road, and she got mired; but after a little she got

started again.  "It was a great pity, but--Why, we couldn't afford

it, Edward--we couldn't indeed.  Oh, I wouldn't have had you do it

for anything!"



"It would have lost us the good-will of so many people, Mary; and

then--and then--"



"What troubles me now is, what HE thinks of us, Edward."



"He?  HE doesn't suspect that I could have saved him."



"Oh," exclaimed the wife, in a tone of relief, "I am glad of that.

As long as he doesn't know that you could have saved him, he--he--

well that makes it a great deal better.  Why, I might have known he

didn't know, because he is always trying to be friendly with us, as

little encouragement as we give him.  More than once people have

twitted me with it.  There's the Wilsons, and the Wilcoxes, and the

Harknesses, they take a mean pleasure in saying 'YOUR FRIEND

Burgess,' because they know it pesters me.  I wish he wouldn't

persist in liking us so; I can't think why he keeps it up."



"I can explain it.  It's another confession.  When the thing was new

and hot, and the town made a plan to ride him on a rail, my

conscience hurt me so that I couldn't stand it, and I went privately

and gave him notice, and he got out of the town and stayed out till

it was safe to come back."



"Edward!  If the town had found it out--"



"DON'T!  It scares me yet, to think of it.  I repented of it the

minute it was done; and I was even afraid to tell you lest your face

might betray it to somebody.  I didn't sleep any that night, for

worrying.  But after a few days I saw that no one was going to

suspect me, and after that I got to feeling glad I did it.  And I

feel glad yet, Mary--glad through and through."



"So do I, now, for it would have been a dreadful way to treat him.

Yes, I'm glad; for really you did owe him that, you know.  But,

Edward, suppose it should come out yet, some day!"



"It won't."



"Why?"



"Because everybody thinks it was Goodson."



"Of course they would!"



"Certainly.  And of course HE didn't care.  They persuaded poor old

Sawlsberry to go and charge it on him, and he went blustering over

there and did it.  Goodson looked him over, like as if he was

hunting for a place on him that he could despise the most; then he

says, 'So you are the Committee of Inquiry, are you?'  Sawlsberry

said that was about what he was.  'H'm.  Do they require

particulars, or do you reckon a kind of a GENERAL answer will do?'

'If they require particulars, I will come back, Mr. Goodson; I will

take the general answer first.'  'Very well, then, tell them to go

to hell--I reckon that's general enough.  And I'll give you some

advice, Sawlsberry; when you come back for the particulars, fetch a

basket to carry what is left of yourself home in.'"



"Just like Goodson; it's got all the marks.  He had only one vanity;

he thought he could give advice better than any other person."



"It settled the business, and saved us, Mary.  The subject was

dropped."



"Bless you, I'm not doubting THAT."



Then they took up the gold-sack mystery again, with strong interest.

Soon the conversation began to suffer breaks--interruptions caused

by absorbed thinkings.  The breaks grew more and more frequent.  At

last Richards lost himself wholly in thought.  He sat long, gazing

vacantly at the floor, and by-and-by he began to punctuate his

thoughts with little nervous movements of his hands that seemed to

indicate vexation.  Meantime his wife too had relapsed into a

thoughtful silence, and her movements were beginning to show a

troubled discomfort.  Finally Richards got up and strode aimlessly

about the room, ploughing his hands through his hair, much as a

somnambulist might do who was having a bad dream.  Then he seemed to

arrive at a definite purpose; and without a word he put on his hat

and passed quickly out of the house.  His wife sat brooding, with a

drawn face, and did not seem to be aware that she was alone.  Now

and then she murmured, "Lead us not into t . . . but--but--we are so

poor, so poor! . . . Lead us not into . . . Ah, who would be hurt by

it?--and no one would ever know . . . Lead us . . . "  The voice

died out in mumblings.  After a little she glanced up and muttered

in a half-frightened, half-glad way--



"He is gone!  But, oh dear, he may be too late--too late . . . Maybe

not--maybe there is still time."  She rose and stood thinking,

nervously clasping and unclasping her hands.  A slight shudder shook

her frame, and she said, out of a dry throat, "God forgive me--it's

awful to think such things--but . . . Lord, how we are made--how

strangely we are made!"



She turned the light low, and slipped stealthily over and knelt down

by the sack and felt of its ridgy sides with her hands, and fondled

them lovingly; and there was a gloating light in her poor old eyes.

She fell into fits of absence; and came half out of them at times to

mutter "If we had only waited!--oh, if we had only waited a little,

and not been in such a hurry!"



Meantime Cox had gone home from his office and told his wife all

about the strange thing that had happened, and they had talked it

over eagerly, and guessed that the late Goodson was the only man in

the town who could have helped a suffering stranger with so noble a

sum as twenty dollars.  Then there was a pause, and the two became

thoughtful and silent.  And by-and-by nervous and fidgety.  At last

the wife said, as if to herself,



"Nobody knows this secret but the Richardses . . . and us . . .

nobody."



The husband came out of his thinkings with a slight start, and gazed

wistfully at his wife, whose face was become very pale; then he

hesitatingly rose, and glanced furtively at his hat, then at his

wife--a sort of mute inquiry.  Mrs. Cox swallowed once or twice,

with her hand at her throat, then in place of speech she nodded her

head.  In a moment she was alone, and mumbling to herself.



And now Richards and Cox were hurrying through the deserted streets,

from opposite directions.  They met, panting, at the foot of the

printing-office stairs; by the night-light there they read each

other's face.  Cox whispered:



"Nobody knows about this but us?"



The whispered answer was:



"Not a soul--on honour, not a soul!"



"If it isn't too late to--"



The men were starting up-stairs; at this moment they were overtaken

by a boy, and Cox asked,



"Is that you, Johnny?"



"Yes, sir."



"You needn't ship the early mail--nor ANY mail; wait till I tell

you."



"It's already gone, sir."



"GONE?"  It had the sound of an unspeakable disappointment in it.



"Yes, sir.  Time-table for Brixton and all the towns beyond changed

to-day, sir--had to get the papers in twenty minutes earlier than

common.  I had to rush; if I had been two minutes later--"



The men turned and walked slowly away, not waiting to hear the rest.

Neither of them spoke during ten minutes; then Cox said, in a vexed

tone,



"What possessed you to be in such a hurry, I can't make out."



The answer was humble enough:



"I see it now, but somehow I never thought, you know, until it was

too late.  But the next time--"



"Next time be hanged!  It won't come in a thousand years."



Then the friends separated without a good-night, and dragged

themselves home with the gait of mortally stricken men.  At their

homes their wives sprang up with an eager "Well?"--then saw the

answer with their eyes and sank down sorrowing, without waiting for

it to come in words.  In both houses a discussion followed of a

heated sort--a new thing; there had been discussions before, but not

heated ones, not ungentle ones.  The discussions to-night were a

sort of seeming plagiarisms of each other.  Mrs. Richards said:



"If you had only waited, Edward--if you had only stopped to think;

but no, you must run straight to the printing-office and spread it

all over the world."



"It SAID publish it."



"That is nothing; it also said do it privately, if you liked.

There, now--is that true, or not?"



"Why, yes--yes, it is true; but when I thought what a stir it would

make, and what a compliment it was to Hadleyburg that a stranger

should trust it so--"



"Oh, certainly, I know all that; but if you had only stopped to

think, you would have seen that you COULDN'T find the right man,

because he is in his grave, and hasn't left chick nor child nor

relation behind him; and as long as the money went to somebody that

awfully needed it, and nobody would be hurt by it, and--and--"



She broke down, crying.  Her husband tried to think of some

comforting thing to say, and presently came out with this:



"But after all, Mary, it must be for the best--it must be; we know

that.  And we must remember that it was so ordered--"



"Ordered!  Oh, everything's ORDERED, when a person has to find some

way out when he has been stupid. Just the same, it was ORDERED that

the money should come to us in this special way, and it was you that

must take it on yourself to go meddling with the designs of

Providence--and who gave you the right?  It was wicked, that is what

it was--just blasphemous presumption, and no more becoming to a meek

and humble professor of--"



"But, Mary, you know how we have been trained all our lives long,

like the whole village, till it is absolutely second nature to us to

stop not a single moment to think when there's an honest thing to be

done--"



"Oh, I know it, I know it--it's been one everlasting training and

training and training in honesty--honesty shielded, from the very

cradle, against every possible temptation, and so it's ARTIFICIAL

honesty, and weak as water when temptation comes, as we have seen

this night.  God knows I never had shade nor shadow of a doubt of my

petrified and indestructible honesty until now--and now, under the

very first big and real temptation, I--Edward, it is my belief that

this town's honesty is as rotten as mine is; as rotten as yours.  It

is a mean town, a hard, stingy town, and hasn't a virtue in the

world but this honesty it is so celebrated for and so conceited

about; and so help me, I do believe that if ever the day comes that

its honesty falls under great temptation, its grand reputation will

go to ruin like a house of cards.  There, now, I've made confession,

and I feel better; I am a humbug, and I've been one all my life,

without knowing it.  Let no man call me honest again--I will not

have it."



"I--Well, Mary, I feel a good deal as you do:  I certainly do.  It

seems strange, too, so strange.  I never could have believed it--

never."



A long silence followed; both were sunk in thought.  At last the

wife looked up and said:



"I know what you are thinking, Edward."



Richards had the embarrassed look of a person who is caught.



"I am ashamed to confess it, Mary, but--"



"It's no matter, Edward, I was thinking the same question myself."



"I hope so.  State it."



"You were thinking, if a body could only guess out WHAT THE REMARK

WAS that Goodson made to the stranger."



"It's perfectly true.  I feel guilty and ashamed.  And you?"



"I'm past it.  Let us make a pallet here; we've got to stand watch

till the bank vault opens in the morning and admits the sack. . . Oh

dear, oh dear--if we hadn't made the mistake!"



The pallet was made, and Mary said:



"The open sesame--what could it have been?  I do wonder what that

remark could have been.  But come; we will get to bed now."



"And sleep?"



"No; think."



"Yes; think."



By this time the Coxes too had completed their spat and their

reconciliation, and were turning in--to think, to think, and toss,

and fret, and worry over what the remark could possibly have been

which Goodson made to the stranded derelict; that golden remark;

that remark worth forty thousand dollars, cash.



The reason that the village telegraph-office was open later than

usual that night was this:  The foreman of Cox's paper was the local

representative of the Associated Press.  One might say its honorary

representative, for it wasn't four times a year that he could

furnish thirty words that would be accepted.  But this time it was

different.  His despatch stating what he had caught got an instant

answer:





"Send the whole thing--all the details--twelve hundred words."





A colossal order!  The foreman filled the bill; and he was the

proudest man in the State.  By breakfast-time the next morning the

name of Hadleyburg the Incorruptible was on every lip in America,

from Montreal to the Gulf, from the glaciers of Alaska to the

orange-groves of Florida; and millions and millions of people were

discussing the stranger and his money-sack, and wondering if the

right man would be found, and hoping some more news about the matter

would come soon--right away.









II





Hadleyburg village woke up world-celebrated--astonished--happy--

vain.  Vain beyond imagination.  Its nineteen principal citizens and

their wives went about shaking hands with each other, and beaming,

and smiling, and congratulating, and saying THIS thing adds a new

word to the dictionary--HADLEYBURG, synonym for INCORRUPTIBLE--

destined to live in dictionaries for ever!  And the minor and

unimportant citizens and their wives went around acting in much the

same way.  Everybody ran to the bank to see the gold-sack; and

before noon grieved and envious crowds began to flock in from

Brixton and all neighbouring towns; and that afternoon and next day

reporters began to arrive from everywhere to verify the sack and its

history and write the whole thing up anew, and make dashing free-

hand pictures of the sack, and of Richards's house, and the bank,

and the Presbyterian church, and the Baptist church, and the public

square, and the town-hall where the test would be applied and the

money delivered; and damnable portraits of the Richardses, and

Pinkerton the banker, and Cox, and the foreman, and Reverend

Burgess, and the postmaster--and even of Jack Halliday, who was the

loafing, good-natured, no-account, irreverent fisherman, hunter,

boys' friend, stray-dogs' friend, typical "Sam Lawson" of the town.

The little mean, smirking, oily Pinkerton showed the sack to all

comers, and rubbed his sleek palms together pleasantly, and enlarged

upon the town's fine old reputation for honesty and upon this

wonderful endorsement of it, and hoped and believed that the example

would now spread far and wide over the American world, and be epoch-

making in the matter of moral regeneration.  And so on, and so on.



By the end of a week things had quieted down again; the wild

intoxication of pride and joy had sobered to a soft, sweet, silent

delight--a sort of deep, nameless, unutterable content.  All faces

bore a look of peaceful, holy happiness.



Then a change came.  It was a gradual change; so gradual that its

beginnings were hardly noticed; maybe were not noticed at all,

except by Jack Halliday, who always noticed everything; and always

made fun of it, too, no matter what it was.  He began to throw out

chaffing remarks about people not looking quite so happy as they did

a day or two ago; and next he claimed that the new aspect was

deepening to positive sadness; next, that it was taking on a sick

look; and finally he said that everybody was become so moody,

thoughtful, and absent-minded that he could rob the meanest man in

town of a cent out of the bottom of his breeches pocket and not

disturb his reverie.



At this stage--or at about this stage--a saying like this was

dropped at bedtime--with a sigh, usually--by the head of each of the

nineteen principal households:



"Ah, what COULD have been the remark that Goodson made?"



And straightway--with a shudder--came this, from the man's wife:



"Oh, DON'T!  What horrible thing are you mulling in your mind?  Put

it away from you, for God's sake!"



But that question was wrung from those men again the next night--and

got the same retort.  But weaker.



And the third night the men uttered the question yet again--with

anguish, and absently.  This time--and the following night--the

wives fidgeted feebly, and tried to say something.  But didn't.



And the night after that they found their tongues and responded--

longingly:



"Oh, if we COULD only guess!"



Halliday's comments grew daily more and more sparklingly

disagreeable and disparaging.  He went diligently about, laughing at

the town, individually and in mass.  But his laugh was the only one

left in the village:  it fell upon a hollow and mournful vacancy and

emptiness.  Not even a smile was findable anywhere.  Halliday

carried a cigar-box around on a tripod, playing that it was a

camera, and halted all passers and aimed the thing and said "Ready!

--now look pleasant, please," but not even this capital joke could

surprise the dreary faces into any softening.



So three weeks passed--one week was left.  It was Saturday evening

after supper.  Instead of the aforetime Saturday-evening flutter and

bustle and shopping and larking, the streets were empty and

desolate.  Richards and his old wife sat apart in their little

parlour--miserable and thinking.  This was become their evening

habit now:  the life-long habit which had preceded it, of reading,

knitting, and contented chat, or receiving or paying neighbourly

calls, was dead and gone and forgotten, ages ago--two or three weeks

ago; nobody talked now, nobody read, nobody visited--the whole

village sat at home, sighing, worrying, silent.  Trying to guess out

that remark.



The postman left a letter.  Richards glanced listlessly at the

superscription and the post-mark--unfamiliar, both--and tossed the

letter on the table and resumed his might-have-beens and his

hopeless dull miseries where he had left them off.  Two or three

hours later his wife got wearily up and was going away to bed

without a good-night--custom now--but she stopped near the letter

and eyed it awhile with a dead interest, then broke it open, and

began to skim it over.  Richards, sitting there with his chair

tilted back against the wall and his chin between his knees, heard

something fall.  It was his wife.  He sprang to her side, but she

cried out:



"Leave me alone, I am too happy.  Read the letter--read it!"



He did.  He devoured it, his brain reeling.  The letter was from a

distant State, and it said:





"I am a stranger to you, but no matter:  I have something to tell.

I have just arrived home from Mexico, and learned about that

episode.  Of course you do not know who made that remark, but I

know, and I am the only person living who does know.  It was

GOODSON.  I knew him well, many years ago.  I passed through your

village that very night, and was his guest till the midnight train

came along.  I overheard him make that remark to the stranger in the

dark--it was in Hale Alley.  He and I talked of it the rest of the

way home, and while smoking in his house.  He mentioned many of your

villagers in the course of his talk--most of them in a very

uncomplimentary way, but two or three favourably:  among these

latter yourself.  I say 'favourably'--nothing stronger.  I remember

his saying he did not actually LIKE any person in the town--not one;

but that you--I THINK he said you--am almost sure--had done him a

very great service once, possibly without knowing the full value of

it, and he wished he had a fortune, he would leave it to you when he

died, and a curse apiece for the rest of the citizens.  Now, then,

if it was you that did him that service, you are his legitimate

heir, and entitled to the sack of gold.  I know that I can trust to

your honour and honesty, for in a citizen of Hadleyburg these

virtues are an unfailing inheritance, and so I am going to reveal to

you the remark, well satisfied that if you are not the right man you

will seek and find the right one and see that poor Goodson's debt of

gratitude for the service referred to is paid.  This is the remark

'YOU ARE FAR FROM BEING A BAD MAN:  GO, AND REFORM.'



"HOWARD L. STEPHENSON."





"Oh, Edward, the money is ours, and I am so grateful, OH, so

grateful,--kiss me, dear, it's for ever since we kissed--and we

needed it so--the money--and now you are free of Pinkerton and his

bank, and nobody's slave any more; it seems to me I could fly for

joy."



It was a happy half-hour that the couple spent there on the settee

caressing each other; it was the old days come again--days that had

begun with their courtship and lasted without a break till the

stranger brought the deadly money.  By-and-by the wife said:



"Oh, Edward, how lucky it was you did him that grand service, poor

Goodson!  I never liked him, but I love him now.  And it was fine

and beautiful of you never to mention it or brag about it."  Then,

with a touch of reproach, "But you ought to have told ME, Edward,

you ought to have told your wife, you know."



"Well, I--er--well, Mary, you see--"



"Now stop hemming and hawing, and tell me about it, Edward.  I

always loved you, and now I'm proud of you.  Everybody believes

there was only one good generous soul in this village, and now it

turns out that you--Edward, why don't you tell me?"



"Well--er--er--Why, Mary, I can't!"



"You CAN'T?  WHY can't you?"



"You see, he--well, he--he made me promise I wouldn't."



The wife looked him over, and said, very slowly:



"Made--you--promise?  Edward, what do you tell me that for?"



"Mary, do you think I would lie?"



She was troubled and silent for a moment, then she laid her hand

within his and said:



"No . . . no.  We have wandered far enough from our bearings--God

spare us that!  In all your life you have never uttered a lie.  But

now--now that the foundations of things seem to be crumbling from

under us, we--we--"  She lost her voice for a moment, then said,

brokenly, "Lead us not into temptation. . . I think you made the

promise, Edward.  Let it rest so.  Let us keep away from that

ground.  Now--that is all gone by; let us he happy again; it is no

time for clouds."



Edward found it something of an effort to comply, for his mind kept

wandering--trying to remember what the service was that he had done

Goodson.



The couple lay awake the most of the night, Mary happy and busy,

Edward busy, but not so happy.  Mary was planning what she would do

with the money.  Edward was trying to recall that service.  At first

his conscience was sore on account of the lie he had told Mary--if

it was a lie.  After much reflection--suppose it WAS a lie?  What

then?  Was it such a great matter?  Aren't we always ACTING lies?

Then why not tell them?  Look at Mary--look what she had done.

While he was hurrying off on his honest errand, what was she doing?

Lamenting because the papers hadn't been destroyed and the money

kept.  Is theft better than lying?



THAT point lost its sting--the lie dropped into the background and

left comfort behind it.  The next point came to the front:  HAD he

rendered that service?  Well, here was Goodson's own evidence as

reported in Stephenson's letter; there could be no better evidence

than that--it was even PROOF that he had rendered it.  Of course.

So that point was settled. . . No, not quite.  He recalled with a

wince that this unknown Mr. Stephenson was just a trifle unsure as

to whether the performer of it was Richards or some other--and, oh

dear, he had put Richards on his honour!  He must himself decide

whither that money must go--and Mr. Stephenson was not doubting that

if he was the wrong man he would go honourably and find the right

one.  Oh, it was odious to put a man in such a situation--ah, why

couldn't Stephenson have left out that doubt?  What did he want to

intrude that for?



Further reflection.  How did it happen that RICHARDS'S name remained

in Stephenson's mind as indicating the right man, and not some other

man's name?  That looked good.  Yes, that looked very good.  In fact

it went on looking better and better, straight along--until by-and-

by it grew into positive PROOF.  And then Richards put the matter at

once out of his mind, for he had a private instinct that a proof

once established is better left so.



He was feeling reasonably comfortable now, but there was still one

other detail that kept pushing itself on his notice:  of course he

had done that service--that was settled; but what WAS that service?

He must recall it--he would not go to sleep till he had recalled it;

it would make his peace of mind perfect.  And so he thought and

thought.  He thought of a dozen things--possible services, even

probable services--but none of them seemed adequate, none of them

seemed large enough, none of them seemed worth the money--worth the

fortune Goodson had wished he could leave in his will.  And besides,

he couldn't remember having done them, anyway.  Now, then--now,

then--what KIND of a service would it be that would make a man so

inordinately grateful?  Ah--the saving of his soul!  That must be

it.  Yes, he could remember, now, how he once set himself the task

of converting Goodson, and laboured at it as much as--he was going

to say three months; but upon closer examination it shrunk to a

month, then to a week, then to a day, then to nothing.  Yes, he

remembered now, and with unwelcome vividness, that Goodson had told

him to go to thunder and mind his own business--HE wasn't hankering

to follow Hadleyburg to heaven!



So that solution was a failure--he hadn't saved Goodson's soul.

Richards was discouraged.  Then after a little came another idea:

had he saved Goodson's property?  No, that wouldn't do--he hadn't

any.  His life?  That is it!  Of course.  Why, he might have thought

of it before.  This time he was on the right track, sure.  His

imagination-mill was hard at work in a minute, now.



Thereafter, during a stretch of two exhausting hours, he was busy

saving Goodson's life.  He saved it in all kinds of difficult and

perilous ways.  In every case he got it saved satisfactorily up to a

certain point; then, just as he was beginning to get well persuaded

that it had really happened, a troublesome detail would turn up

which made the whole thing impossible.  As in the matter of

drowning, for instance.  In that case he had swum out and tugged

Goodson ashore in an unconscious state with a great crowd looking on

and applauding, but when he had got it all thought out and was just

beginning to remember all about it, a whole swarm of disqualifying

details arrived on the ground:  the town would have known of the

circumstance, Mary would have known of it, it would glare like a

limelight in his own memory instead of being an inconspicuous

service which he had possibly rendered "without knowing its full

value."  And at this point he remembered that he couldn't swim

anyway.



Ah--THERE was a point which he had been overlooking from the start:

it had to be a service which he had rendered "possibly without

knowing the full value of it."  Why, really, that ought to be an

easy hunt--much easier than those others.  And sure enough, by-and-

by he found it.  Goodson, years and years ago, came near marrying a

very sweet and pretty girl, named Nancy Hewitt, but in some way or

other the match had been broken off; the girl died, Goodson remained

a bachelor, and by-and-by became a soured one and a frank despiser

of the human species.  Soon after the girl's death the village found

out, or thought it had found out, that she carried a spoonful of

negro blood in her veins.  Richards worked at these details a good

while, and in the end he thought he remembered things concerning

them which must have gotten mislaid in his memory through long

neglect.  He seemed to dimly remember that it was HE that found out

about the negro blood; that it was he that told the village; that

the village told Goodson where they got it; that he thus saved

Goodson from marrying the tainted girl; that he had done him this

great service "without knowing the full value of it," in fact

without knowing that he WAS doing it; but that Goodson knew the

value of it, and what a narrow escape he had had, and so went to his

grave grateful to his benefactor and wishing he had a fortune to

leave him.  It was all clear and simple, now, and the more he went

over it the more luminous and certain it grew; and at last, when he

nestled to sleep, satisfied and happy, he remembered the whole thing

just as if it had been yesterday.  In fact, he dimly remembered

Goodson's TELLING him his gratitude once.  Meantime Mary had spent

six thousand dollars on a new house for herself and a pair of

slippers for her pastor, and then had fallen peacefully to rest.



That same Saturday evening the postman had delivered a letter to

each of the other principal citizens--nineteen letters in all.  No

two of the envelopes were alike, and no two of the superscriptions

were in the same hand, but the letters inside were just like each

other in every detail but one.  They were exact copies of the letter

received by Richards--handwriting and all--and were all signed by

Stephenson, but in place of Richards's name each receiver's own name

appeared.



All night long eighteen principal citizens did what their caste-

brother Richards was doing at the same time--they put in their

energies trying to remember what notable service it was that they

had unconsciously done Barclay Goodson.  In no case was it a holiday

job; still they succeeded.



And while they were at this work, which was difficult, their wives

put in the night spending the money, which was easy.  During that

one night the nineteen wives spent an average of seven thousand

dollars each out of the forty thousand in the sack--a hundred and

thirty-three thousand altogether.



Next day there was a surprise for Jack Halliday.  He noticed that

the faces of the nineteen chief citizens and their wives bore that

expression of peaceful and holy happiness again.  He could not

understand it, neither was he able to invent any remarks about it

that could damage it or disturb it.  And so it was his turn to be

dissatisfied with life.  His private guesses at the reasons for the

happiness failed in all instances, upon examination.  When he met

Mrs. Wilcox and noticed the placid ecstasy in her face, he said to

himself, "Her cat has had kittens"--and went and asked the cook; it

was not so, the cook had detected the happiness, but did not know

the cause.  When Halliday found the duplicate ecstasy in the face of

"Shadbelly" Billson (village nickname), he was sure some neighbour

of Billson's had broken his leg, but inquiry showed that this had

not happened.  The subdued ecstasy in Gregory Yates's face could

mean but one thing--he was a mother-in-law short; it was another

mistake.  "And Pinkerton--Pinkerton--he has collected ten cents that

he thought he was going to lose."  And so on, and so on.  In some

cases the guesses had to remain in doubt, in the others they proved

distinct errors.  In the end Halliday said to himself, "Anyway it

roots up that there's nineteen Hadleyburg families temporarily in

heaven:  I don't know how it happened; I only know Providence is off

duty to-day."



An architect and builder from the next State had lately ventured to

set up a small business in this unpromising village, and his sign

had now been hanging out a week.  Not a customer yet; he was a

discouraged man, and sorry he had come.  But his weather changed

suddenly now.  First one and then another chief citizen's wife said

to him privately:



"Come to my house Monday week--but say nothing about it for the

present.  We think of building."



He got eleven invitations that day.  That night he wrote his

daughter and broke off her match with her student.  He said she

could marry a mile higher than that.



Pinkerton the banker and two or three other well-to-do men planned

country-seats--but waited.  That kind don't count their chickens

until they are hatched.



The Wilsons devised a grand new thing--a fancy-dress ball.  They

made no actual promises, but told all their acquaintanceship in

confidence that they were thinking the matter over and thought they

should give it--"and if we do, you will be invited, of course."

People were surprised, and said, one to another, "Why, they are

crazy, those poor Wilsons, they can't afford it."  Several among the

nineteen said privately to their husbands, "It is a good idea, we

will keep still till their cheap thing is over, then WE will give

one that will make it sick."



The days drifted along, and the bill of future squanderings rose

higher and higher, wilder and wilder, more and more foolish and

reckless.  It began to look as if every member of the nineteen would

not only spend his whole forty thousand dollars before receiving-

day, but be actually in debt by the time he got the money.  In some

cases light-headed people did not stop with planning to spend, they

really spent--on credit.  They bought land, mortgages, farms,

speculative stocks, fine clothes, horses, and various other things,

paid down the bonus, and made themselves liable for the rest--at ten

days.  Presently the sober second thought came, and Halliday noticed

that a ghastly anxiety was beginning to show up in a good many

faces.  Again he was puzzled, and didn't know what to make of it.

"The Wilcox kittens aren't dead, for they weren't born; nobody's

broken a leg; there's no shrinkage in mother-in-laws; NOTHING has

happened--it is an insolvable mystery."



There was another puzzled man, too--the Rev. Mr. Burgess.  For days,

wherever he went, people seemed to follow him or to be watching out

for him; and if he ever found himself in a retired spot, a member of

the nineteen would be sure to appear, thrust an envelope privately

into his hand, whisper "To be opened at the town-hall Friday

evening," then vanish away like a guilty thing.  He was expecting

that there might be one claimant for the sack--doubtful, however,

Goodson being dead--but it never occurred to him that all this crowd

might be claimants.  When the great Friday came at last, he found

that he had nineteen envelopes.









III





The town-hall had never looked finer.  The platform at the end of it

was backed by a showy draping of flags; at intervals along the walls

were festoons of flags; the gallery fronts were clothed in flags;

the supporting columns were swathed in flags; all this was to

impress the stranger, for he would be there in considerable force,

and in a large degree he would be connected with the press.  The

house was full.  The 412 fixed seats were occupied; also the 68

extra chairs which had been packed into the aisles; the steps of the

platform were occupied; some distinguished strangers were given

seats on the platform; at the horseshoe of tables which fenced the

front and sides of the platform sat a strong force of special

correspondents who had come from everywhere.  It was the best-

dressed house the town had ever produced.  There were some tolerably

expensive toilets there, and in several cases the ladies who wore

them had the look of being unfamiliar with that kind of clothes.  At

least the town thought they had that look, but the notion could have

arisen from the town's knowledge of the fact that these ladies had

never inhabited such clothes before.



The gold-sack stood on a little table at the front of the platform

where all the house could see it.  The bulk of the house gazed at it

with a burning interest, a mouth-watering interest, a wistful and

pathetic interest; a minority of nineteen couples gazed at it

tenderly, lovingly, proprietarily, and the male half of this

minority kept saying over to themselves the moving little impromptu

speeches of thankfulness for the audience's applause and

congratulations which they were presently going to get up and

deliver.  Every now and then one of these got a piece of paper out

of his vest pocket and privately glanced at it to refresh his

memory.



Of course there was a buzz of conversation going on--there always

is; but at last, when the Rev. Mr. Burgess rose and laid his hand on

the sack, he could hear his microbes gnaw, the place was so still.

He related the curious history of the sack, then went on to speak in

warm terms of Hadleyburg's old and well-earned reputation for

spotless honesty, and of the town's just pride in this reputation.

He said that this reputation was a treasure of priceless value; that

under Providence its value had now become inestimably enhanced, for

the recent episode had spread this fame far and wide, and thus had

focussed the eyes of the American world upon this village, and made

its name for all time, as he hoped and believed, a synonym for

commercial incorruptibility.  [Applause.]  "And who is to be the

guardian of this noble fame--the community as a whole?  No!  The

responsibility is individual, not communal.  From this day forth

each and every one of you is in his own person its special guardian,

and individually responsible that no harm shall come to it.  Do you

--does each of you--accept this great trust?  [Tumultuous assent.]

Then all is well.  Transmit it to your children and to your

children's children.  To-day your purity is beyond reproach--see to

it that it shall remain so.  To-day there is not a person in your

community who could be beguiled to touch a penny not his own--see to

it that you abide in this grace.  ["We will! we will!"]  This is not

the place to make comparisons between ourselves and other

communities--some of them ungracious towards us; they have their

ways, we have ours; let us be content.  [Applause.]  I am done.

Under my hand, my friends, rests a stranger's eloquent recognition

of what we are; through him the world will always henceforth know

what we are.  We do not know who he is, but in your name I utter

your gratitude, and ask you to raise your voices in indorsement."



The house rose in a body and made the walls quake with the thunders

of its thankfulness for the space of a long minute.  Then it sat

down, and Mr. Burgess took an envelope out of his pocket.  The house

held its breath while he slit the envelope open and took from it a

slip of paper.  He read its contents--slowly and impressively--the

audience listening with tranced attention to this magic document,

each of whose words stood for an ingot of gold:



"'The remark which I made to the distressed stranger was this:  "You

are very far from being a bad man; go, and reform."'"  Then he

continued:- "We shall know in a moment now whether the remark here

quoted corresponds with the one concealed in the sack; and if that

shall prove to be so--and it undoubtedly will--this sack of gold

belongs to a fellow-citizen who will henceforth stand before the

nation as the symbol of the special virtue which has made our town

famous throughout the land--Mr. Billson!"



The house had gotten itself all ready to burst into the proper

tornado of applause; but instead of doing it, it seemed stricken

with a paralysis; there was a deep hush for a moment or two, then a

wave of whispered murmurs swept the place--of about this tenor:

"BILLSON! oh, come, this is TOO thin!  Twenty dollars to a stranger

--or ANYBODY--BILLSON!  Tell it to the marines!"  And now at this

point the house caught its breath all of a sudden in a new access of

astonishment, for it discovered that whereas in one part of the hall

Deacon Billson was standing up with his head weekly bowed, in

another part of it Lawyer Wilson was doing the same.  There was a

wondering silence now for a while.  Everybody was puzzled, and

nineteen couples were surprised and indignant.



Billson and Wilson turned and stared at each other.  Billson asked,

bitingly:



"Why do YOU rise, Mr. Wilson?"



"Because I have a right to.  Perhaps you will be good enough to

explain to the house why YOU rise."



"With great pleasure.  Because I wrote that paper."



"It is an impudent falsity!  I wrote it myself."



It was Burgess's turn to be paralysed.  He stood looking vacantly at

first one of the men and then the other, and did not seem to know

what to do.  The house was stupefied.  Lawyer Wilson spoke up now,

and said:



"I ask the Chair to read the name signed to that paper."



That brought the Chair to itself, and it read out the name:



"John Wharton BILLSON."



"There!" shouted Billson, "what have you got to say for yourself

now?  And what kind of apology are you going to make to me and to

this insulted house for the imposture which you have attempted to

play here?"



"No apologies are due, sir; and as for the rest of it, I publicly

charge you with pilfering my note from Mr. Burgess and substituting

a copy of it signed with your own name.  There is no other way by

which you could have gotten hold of the test-remark; I alone, of

living men, possessed the secret of its wording."



There was likely to be a scandalous state of things if this went on;

everybody noticed with distress that the shorthand scribes were

scribbling like mad; many people were crying "Chair, chair!  Order!

order!"  Burgess rapped with his gavel, and said:



"Let us not forget the proprieties due.  There has evidently been a

mistake somewhere, but surely that is all.  If Mr. Wilson gave me an

envelope--and I remember now that he did--I still have it."



He took one out of his pocket, opened it, glanced at it, looked

surprised and worried, and stood silent a few moments.  Then he

waved his hand in a wandering and mechanical way, and made an effort

or two to say something, then gave it up, despondently.  Several

voices cried out:



"Read it! read it!  What is it?"



So he began, in a dazed and sleep-walker fashion:



"'The remark which I made to the unhappy stranger was this:  "You

are far from being a bad man.  [The house gazed at him marvelling.]

Go, and reform."'  [Murmurs:  "Amazing! what can this mean?"]  This

one," said the Chair, "is signed Thurlow G. Wilson."



"There!" cried Wilson, "I reckon that settles it!  I knew perfectly

well my note was purloined."



"Purloined!" retorted Billson.  "I'll let you know that neither you

nor any man of your kidney must venture to--"



The Chair:  "Order, gentlemen, order!  Take your seats, both of you,

please."



They obeyed, shaking their heads and grumbling angrily.  The house

was profoundly puzzled; it did not know what to do with this curious

emergency.  Presently Thompson got up.  Thompson was the hatter.  He

would have liked to be a Nineteener; but such was not for him; his

stock of hats was not considerable enough for the position.  He

said:



"Mr. Chairman, if I may be permitted to make a suggestion, can both

of these gentlemen be right?  I put it to you, sir, can both have

happened to say the very same words to the stranger?  It seems to

me--"



The tanner got up and interrupted him.  The tanner was a disgruntled

man; he believed himself entitled to be a Nineteener, but he

couldn't get recognition.  It made him a little unpleasant in his

ways and speech.  Said he:



"Sho, THAT'S not the point!  THAT could happen--twice in a hundred

years--but not the other thing.  NEITHER of them gave the twenty

dollars!"  [A ripple of applause.]



Billson.  "I did!"



Wilson.  "I did!"



Then each accused the other of pilfering.



The Chair.  "Order!  Sit down, if you please--both of you.  Neither

of the notes has been out of my possession at any moment."



A Voice.  "Good--that settles THAT!"



The Tanner.  "Mr. Chairman, one thing is now plain:  one of these

men has been eavesdropping under the other one's bed, and filching

family secrets.  If it is not unparliamentary to suggest it, I will

remark that both are equal to it.  [The Chair.  "Order! order!"]  I

withdraw the remark, sir, and will confine myself to suggesting that

IF one of them has overheard the other reveal the test-remark to his

wife, we shall catch him now."



A Voice.  "How?"



The Tanner.  "Easily.  The two have not quoted the remark in exactly

the same words.  You would have noticed that, if there hadn't been a

considerable stretch of time and an exciting quarrel inserted

between the two readings."



A Voice.  "Name the difference."



The Tanner.  "The word VERY is in Billson's note, and not in the

other."



Many Voices.  "That's so--he's right!"



The Tanner.  "And so, if the Chair will examine the test-remark in

the sack, we shall know which of these two frauds--[The Chair.

"Order!"]--which of these two adventurers--[The Chair.  "Order!

order!"]--which of these two gentlemen--[laughter and applause]--is

entitled to wear the belt as being the first dishonest blatherskite

ever bred in this town--which he has dishonoured, and which will be

a sultry place for him from now out!"  [Vigorous applause.]



Many Voices.  "Open it!--open the sack!"



Mr. Burgess made a slit in the sack, slid his hand in, and brought

out an envelope.  In it were a couple of folded notes.  He said:



"One of these is marked, 'Not to be examined until all written

communications which have been addressed to the Chair--if any--shall

have been read.'  The other is marked 'THE TEST.'  Allow me.  It is

worded--to wit:



"'I do not require that the first half of the remark which was made

to me by my benefactor shall be quoted with exactness, for it was

not striking, and could be forgotten; but its closing fifteen words

are quite striking, and I think easily rememberable; unless THESE

shall be accurately reproduced, let the applicant be regarded as an

impostor.  My benefactor began by saying he seldom gave advice to

anyone, but that it always bore the hallmark of high value when he

did give it.  Then he said this--and it has never faded from my

memory:  'YOU ARE FAR FROM BEING A BAD MAN--'"



Fifty Voices.  "That settles it--the money's Wilson's!  Wilson!

Wilson!  Speech!  Speech!"



People jumped up and crowded around Wilson, wringing his hand and

congratulating fervently--meantime the Chair was hammering with the

gavel and shouting:



"Order, gentlemen!  Order!  Order!  Let me finish reading, please."

When quiet was restored, the reading was resumed--as follows:



"'GO, AND REFORM--OR, MARK MY WORDS--SOME DAY, FOR YOUR SINS YOU

WILL DIE AND GO TO HELL OR HADLEYBURG--TRY AND MAKE IT THE FORMER.'"



A ghastly silence followed.  First an angry cloud began to settle

darkly upon the faces of the citizenship; after a pause the cloud

began to rise, and a tickled expression tried to take its place;

tried so hard that it was only kept under with great and painful

difficulty; the reporters, the Brixtonites, and other strangers bent

their heads down and shielded their faces with their hands, and

managed to hold in by main strength and heroic courtesy.  At this

most inopportune time burst upon the stillness the roar of a

solitary voice--Jack Halliday's:



"THAT'S got the hall-mark on it!"



Then the house let go, strangers and all.  Even Mr. Burgess's

gravity broke down presently, then the audience considered itself

officially absolved from all restraint, and it made the most of its

privilege.  It was a good long laugh, and a tempestuously

wholehearted one, but it ceased at last--long enough for Mr. Burgess

to try to resume, and for the people to get their eyes partially

wiped; then it broke out again, and afterward yet again; then at

last Burgess was able to get out these serious words:



"It is useless to try to disguise the fact--we find ourselves in the

presence of a matter of grave import.  It involves the honour of

your town--it strikes at the town's good name.  The difference of a

single word between the test-remarks offered by Mr. Wilson and Mr.

Billson was itself a serious thing, since it indicated that one or

the other of these gentlemen had committed a theft--"



The two men were sitting limp, nerveless, crushed; but at these

words both were electrified into movement, and started to get up.



"Sit down!" said the Chair, sharply, and they obeyed.  "That, as I

have said, was a serious thing.  And it was--but for only one of

them.  But the matter has become graver; for the honour of BOTH is

now in formidable peril.  Shall I go even further, and say in

inextricable peril?  BOTH left out the crucial fifteen words."  He

paused.  During several moments he allowed the pervading stillness

to gather and deepen its impressive effects, then added:  "There

would seem to be but one way whereby this could happen.  I ask these

gentlemen--Was there COLLUSION?--AGREEMENT?"



A low murmur sifted through the house; its import was, "He's got

them both."



Billson was not used to emergencies; he sat in a helpless collapse.

But Wilson was a lawyer.  He struggled to his feet, pale and

worried, and said:



"I ask the indulgence of the house while I explain this most painful

matter.  I am sorry to say what I am about to say, since it must

inflict irreparable injury upon Mr. Billson, whom I have always

esteemed and respected until now, and in whose invulnerability to

temptation I entirely believed--as did you all.  But for the

preservation of my own honour I must speak--and with frankness.  I

confess with shame--and I now beseech your pardon for it--that I

said to the ruined stranger all of the words contained in the test-

remark, including the disparaging fifteen.  [Sensation.]  When the

late publication was made I recalled them, and I resolved to claim

the sack of coin, for by every right I was entitled to it.  Now I

will ask you to consider this point, and weigh it well; that

stranger's gratitude to me that night knew no bounds; he said

himself that he could find no words for it that were adequate, and

that if he should ever be able he would repay me a thousandfold.

Now, then, I ask you this; could I expect--could I believe--could I

even remotely imagine--that, feeling as he did, he would do so

ungrateful a thing as to add those quite unnecessary fifteen words

to his test?--set a trap for me?--expose me as a slanderer of my own

town before my own people assembled in a public hall?  It was

preposterous; it was impossible.  His test would contain only the

kindly opening clause of my remark.  Of that I had no shadow of

doubt.  You would have thought as I did.  You would not have

expected a base betrayal from one whom you had befriended and

against whom you had committed no offence.  And so with perfect

confidence, perfect trust, I wrote on a piece of paper the opening

words--ending with "Go, and reform,"--and signed it.  When I was

about to put it in an envelope I was called into my back office, and

without thinking I left the paper lying open on my desk."  He

stopped, turned his head slowly toward Billson, waited a moment,

then added:  "I ask you to note this; when I returned, a little

latter, Mr. Billson was retiring by my street door."  [Sensation.]



In a moment Billson was on his feet and shouting:



"It's a lie!  It's an infamous lie!"



The Chair.  "Be seated, sir!  Mr. Wilson has the floor."



Billson's friends pulled him into his seat and quieted him, and

Wilson went on:



"Those are the simple facts.  My note was now lying in a different

place on the table from where I had left it.  I noticed that, but

attached no importance to it, thinking a draught had blown it there.

That Mr. Billson would read a private paper was a thing which could

not occur to me; he was an honourable man, and he would be above

that.  If you will allow me to say it, I think his extra word 'VERY'

stands explained:  it is attributable to a defect of memory.  I was

the only man in the world who could furnish here any detail of the

test-mark--by HONOURABLE means.  I have finished."



There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the

mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions

of an audience not practised in the tricks and delusions of oratory.

Wilson sat down victorious.  The house submerged him in tides of

approving applause; friends swarmed to him and shook him by the hand

and congratulated him, and Billson was shouted down and not allowed

to say a word.  The Chair hammered and hammered with its gavel, and

kept shouting:



"But let us proceed, gentlemen, let us proceed!"



At last there was a measurable degree of quiet, and the hatter said:



"But what is there to proceed with, sir, but to deliver the money?"



Voices.  "That's it!  That's it!  Come forward, Wilson!"



The Hatter.  "I move three cheers for Mr. Wilson, Symbol of the

special virtue which--"



The cheers burst forth before he could finish; and in the midst of

them--and in the midst of the clamour of the gavel also--some

enthusiasts mounted Wilson on a big friend's shoulder and were going

to fetch him in triumph to the platform.  The Chair's voice now rose

above the noise:



"Order!  To your places!  You forget that there is still a document

to be read."  When quiet had been restored he took up the document,

and was going to read it, but laid it down again saying "I forgot;

this is not to be read until all written communications received by

me have first been read."  He took an envelope out of his pocket,

removed its enclosure, glanced at it--seemed astonished--held it out

and gazed at it--stared at it.



Twenty or thirty voices cried out:



"What is it?  Read it! read it!"



And he did--slowly, and wondering:



"'The remark which I made to the stranger--[Voices.  "Hello! how's

this?"]--was this:  'You are far from being a bad man.  [Voices.

"Great Scott!"]  Go, and reform.'  [Voice.  "Oh, saw my leg off!"]

Signed by Mr. Pinkerton the banker."



The pandemonium of delight which turned itself loose now was of a

sort to make the judicious weep.  Those whose withers were unwrung

laughed till the tears ran down; the reporters, in throes of

laughter, set down disordered pot-hooks which would never in the

world be decipherable; and a sleeping dog jumped up scared out of

its wits, and barked itself crazy at the turmoil.  All manner of

cries were scattered through the din:  "We're getting rich--TWO

Symbols of Incorruptibility!--without counting Billson!"  "THREE!--

count Shadbelly in--we can't have too many!"  "All right--Billson's

elected!"  "Alas, poor Wilson! victim of TWO thieves!"



A Powerful Voice.  "Silence!  The Chair's fished up something more

out of its pocket."



Voices.  "Hurrah!  Is it something fresh?  Read it! read! read!"



The Chair [reading].  "'The remark which I made,' etc.  'You are far

from being a bad man.  Go,' etc.  Signed, 'Gregory Yates.'"



Tornado of Voices.  "Four Symbols!"  "'Rah for Yates!"  "Fish

again!"



The house was in a roaring humour now, and ready to get all the fun

out of the occasion that might be in it.  Several Nineteeners,

looking pale and distressed, got up and began to work their way

towards the aisles, but a score of shouts went up:



"The doors, the doors--close the doors; no Incorruptible shall leave

this place!  Sit down, everybody!"  The mandate was obeyed.



"Fish again!  Read! read!"



The Chair fished again, and once more the familiar words began to

fall from its lips--"'You are far from being a bad man--'"



"Name! name!  What's his name?"



"'L. Ingoldsby Sargent.'"



"Five elected!  Pile up the Symbols!  Go on, go on!"



"'You are far from being a bad--'"



"Name! name!"



"'Nicholas Whitworth.'"



"Hooray! hooray! it's a symbolical day!"



Somebody wailed in, and began to sing this rhyme (leaving out

"it's") to the lovely "Mikado" tune of "When a man's afraid of a

beautiful maid;" the audience joined in, with joy; then, just in

time, somebody contributed another line--





"And don't you this forget--"





The house roared it out.  A third line was at once furnished--





"Corruptibles far from Hadleyburg are--"





The house roared that one too.  As the last note died, Jack

Halliday's voice rose high and clear, freighted with a final line--





"But the Symbols are here, you bet!"





That was sung, with booming enthusiasm.  Then the happy house

started in at the beginning and sang the four lines through twice,

with immense swing and dash, and finished up with a crashing three-

times-three and a tiger for "Hadleyburg the Incorruptible and all

Symbols of it which we shall find worthy to receive the hall-mark

to-night."



Then the shoutings at the Chair began again, all over the place:



"Go on! go on!  Read! read some more!  Read all you've got!"



"That's it--go on!  We are winning eternal celebrity!"



A dozen men got up now and began to protest.  They said that this

farce was the work of some abandoned joker, and was an insult to the

whole community.  Without a doubt these signatures were all

forgeries--



"Sit down! sit down!  Shut up!  You are confessing.  We'll find your

names in the lot."



"Mr. Chairman, how many of those envelopes have you got?"



The Chair counted.



"Together with those that have been already examined, there are

nineteen."



A storm of derisive applause broke out.



"Perhaps they all contain the secret.  I move that you open them all

and read every signature that is attached to a note of that sort--

and read also the first eight words of the note."



"Second the motion!"



It was put and carried--uproariously.  Then poor old Richards got

up, and his wife rose and stood at his side.  Her head was bent

down, so that none might see that she was crying.  Her husband gave

her his arm, and so supporting her, he began to speak in a quavering

voice:



"My friends, you have known us two--Mary and me--all our lives, and

I think you have liked us and respected us--"



The Chair interrupted him:



"Allow me.  It is quite true--that which you are saying, Mr.

Richards; this town DOES know you two; it DOES like you; it DOES

respect you; more--it honours you and LOVES you--"



Halliday's voice rang out:



"That's the hall-marked truth, too!  If the Chair is right, let the

house speak up and say it.  Rise!  Now, then--hip! hip! hip!--all

together!"



The house rose in mass, faced toward the old couple eagerly, filled

the air with a snow-storm of waving handkerchiefs, and delivered the

cheers with all its affectionate heart.



The Chair then continued:



"What I was going to say is this:  We know your good heart, Mr.

Richards, but this is not a time for the exercise of charity toward

offenders.  [Shouts of "Right! right!"]  I see your generous purpose

in your face, but I cannot allow you to plead for these men--"



"But I was going to--"



"Please take your seat, Mr. Richards.  We must examine the rest of

these notes--simple fairness to the men who have already been

exposed requires this.  As soon as that has been done--I give you my

word for this--you shall he heard."



Many voices.  "Right!--the Chair is right--no interruption can be

permitted at this stage!  Go on!--the names! the names!--according

to the terms of the motion!"



The old couple sat reluctantly down, and the husband whispered to

the wife, "It is pitifully hard to have to wait; the shame will be

greater than ever when they find we were only going to plead for

OURSELVES."



Straightway the jollity broke loose again with the reading of the

names.



"'You are far from being a bad man--' Signature, 'Robert J.

Titmarsh.'"



'"You are far from being a bad man--' Signature, 'Eliphalet Weeks.'"



"'You are far from being a bad man--' Signature, 'Oscar B. Wilder.'"



At this point the house lit upon the idea of taking the eight words

out of the Chairman's hands.  He was not unthankful for that.

Thenceforward he held up each note in its turn and waited.  The

house droned out the eight words in a massed and measured and

musical deep volume of sound (with a daringly close resemblance to a

well-known church chant)--"You are f-a-r from being a b-a-a-a-d

man."  Then the Chair said, "Signature, 'Archibald Wilcox.'"  And so

on, and so on, name after name, and everybody had an increasingly

and gloriously good time except the wretched Nineteen.  Now and

then, when a particularly shining name was called, the house made

the Chair wait while it chanted the whole of the test-remark from

the beginning to the closing words, "And go to hell or Hadleyburg--

try and make it the for-or-m-e-r!" and in these special cases they

added a grand and agonised and imposing "A-a-a-a-MEN!"



The list dwindled, dwindled, dwindled, poor old Richards keeping

tally of the count, wincing when a name resembling his own was

pronounced, and waiting in miserable suspense for the time to come

when it would be his humiliating privilege to rise with Mary and

finish his plea, which he was intending to word thus:  ". . . for

until now we have never done any wrong thing, but have gone our

humble way unreproached.  We are very poor, we are old, and, have no

chick nor child to help us; we were sorely tempted, and we fell.  It

was my purpose when I got up before to make confession and beg that

my name might not be read out in this public place, for it seemed to

us that we could not bear it; but I was prevented.  It was just; it

was our place to suffer with the rest.  It has been hard for us.  It

is the first time we have ever heard our name fall from any one's

lips--sullied.  Be merciful--for the sake or the better days; make

our shame as light to bear as in your charity you can."  At this

point in his reverie Mary nudged him, perceiving that his mind was

absent.  The house was chanting, "You are f-a-r," etc.



"Be ready," Mary whispered.  "Your name comes now; he has read

eighteen."



The chant ended.



"Next! next! next!" came volleying from all over the house.



Burgess put his hand into his pocket.  The old couple, trembling,

began to rise.  Burgess fumbled a moment, then said:



"I find I have read them all."



Faint with joy and surprise, the couple sank into their seats, and

Mary whispered:



"Oh, bless God, we are saved!--he has lost ours--I wouldn't give

this for a hundred of those sacks!"



The house burst out with its "Mikado" travesty, and sang it three

times with ever-increasing enthusiasm, rising to its feet when it

reached for the third time the closing line--



"But the Symbols are here, you bet!"



and finishing up with cheers and a tiger for "Hadleyburg purity and

our eighteen immortal representatives of it."



Then Wingate, the saddler, got up and proposed cheers "for the

cleanest man in town, the one solitary important citizen in it who

didn't try to steal that money--Edward Richards."



They were given with great and moving heartiness; then somebody

proposed that "Richards be elected sole Guardian and Symbol of the

now Sacred Hadleyburg Tradition, with power and right to stand up

and look the whole sarcastic world in the face."



Passed, by acclamation; then they sang the "Mikado" again, and ended

it with--



"And there's ONE Symbol left, you bet!"



There was a pause; then--



A Voice.  "Now, then, who's to get the sack?"



The Tanner (with bitter sarcasm).  "That's easy.  The money has to

be divided among the eighteen Incorruptibles.  They gave the

suffering stranger twenty dollars apiece--and that remark--each in

his turn--it took twenty-two minutes for the procession to move

past.  Staked the stranger--total contribution, $360.  All they want

is just the loan back--and interest--forty thousand dollars

altogether."



Many Voices [derisively.]  "That's it!  Divvy! divvy!  Be kind to

the poor--don't keep them waiting!"



The Chair.  "Order!  I now offer the stranger's remaining document.

It says:  'If no claimant shall appear [grand chorus of groans], I

desire that you open the sack and count out the money to the

principal citizens of your town, they to take it in trust [Cries of

"Oh! Oh! Oh!"], and use it in such ways as to them shall seem best

for the propagation and preservation of your community's noble

reputation for incorruptible honesty [more cries]--a reputation to

which their names and their efforts will add a new and far-reaching

lustre."  [Enthusiastic outburst of sarcastic applause.]  That seems

to be all.  No--here is a postscript:



"'P.S.--CITIZENS OF HADLEYBURG:  There IS no test-remark--nobody

made one.  [Great sensation.]  There wasn't any pauper stranger, nor

any twenty-dollar contribution, nor any accompanying benediction and

compliment--these are all inventions.  [General buzz and hum of

astonishment and delight.]  Allow me to tell my story--it will take

but a word or two.  I passed through your town at a certain time,

and received a deep offence which I had not earned.  Any other man

would have been content to kill one or two of you and call it

square, but to me that would have been a trivial revenge, and

inadequate; for the dead do not SUFFER. Besides I could not kill you

all--and, anyway, made as I am, even that would not have satisfied

me.  I wanted to damage every man in the place, and every woman--and

not in their bodies or in their estate, but in their vanity--the

place where feeble and foolish people are most vulnerable.  So I

disguised myself and came back and studied you.  You were easy game.

You had an old and lofty reputation for honesty, and naturally you

were proud of it--it was your treasure of treasures, the very apple

of your eye.  As soon as I found out that you carefully and

vigilantly kept yourselves and your children OUT OF TEMPTATION, I

knew how to proceed.  Why, you simple creatures, the weakest of all

weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire.  I

laid a plan, and gathered a list of names.  My project was to

corrupt Hadleyburg the Incorruptible.  My idea was to make liars and

thieves of nearly half a hundred smirchless men and women who had

never in their lives uttered a lie or stolen a penny.  I was afraid

of Goodson.  He was neither born nor reared in Hadleyburg.  I was

afraid that if I started to operate my scheme by getting my letter

laid before you, you would say to yourselves, 'Goodson is the only

man among us who would give away twenty dollars to a poor devil'--

and then you might not bite at my bait.  But heaven took Goodson;

then I knew I was safe, and I set my trap and baited it.  It may be

that I shall not catch all the men to whom I mailed the pretended

test-secret, but I shall catch the most of them, if I know

Hadleyburg nature.  [Voices.  "Right--he got every last one of

them."]  I believe they will even steal ostensible GAMBLE-money,

rather than miss, poor, tempted, and mistrained fellows.  I am

hoping to eternally and everlastingly squelch your vanity and give

Hadleyburg a new renown--one that will STICK--and spread far.  If I

have succeeded, open the sack and summon the Committee on

Propagation and Preservation of the Hadleyburg Reputation.'"



A Cyclone of Voices.  "Open it!  Open it!  The Eighteen to the

front!  Committee on Propagation of the Tradition!  Forward--the

Incorruptibles!"



The Chair ripped the sack wide, and gathered up a handful of bright,

broad, yellow coins, shook them together, then examined them.



"Friends, they are only gilded disks of lead!"



There was a crashing outbreak of delight over this news, and when

the noise had subsided, the tanner called out:



"By right of apparent seniority in this business, Mr. Wilson is

Chairman of the Committee on Propagation of the Tradition.  I

suggest that he step forward on behalf of his pals, and receive in

trust the money."



A Hundred Voices.  "Wilson!  Wilson!  Wilson!  Speech!  Speech!"



Wilson [in a voice trembling with anger].  "You will allow me to

say, and without apologies for my language, DAMN the money!"



A Voice.  "Oh, and him a Baptist!"



A Voice.  "Seventeen Symbols left!  Step up, gentlemen, and assume

your trust!"



There was a pause--no response.



The Saddler.  "Mr. Chairman, we've got ONE clean man left, anyway,

out of the late aristocracy; and he needs money, and deserves it.  I

move that you appoint Jack Halliday to get up there and auction off

that sack of gilt twenty-dollar pieces, and give the result to the

right man--the man whom Hadleyburg delights to honour--Edward

Richards."



This was received with great enthusiasm, the dog taking a hand

again; the saddler started the bids at a dollar, the Brixton folk

and Barnum's representative fought hard for it, the people cheered

every jump that the bids made, the excitement climbed moment by

moment higher and higher, the bidders got on their mettle and grew

steadily more and more daring, more and more determined, the jumps

went from a dollar up to five, then to ten, then to twenty, then

fifty, then to a hundred, then--



At the beginning of the auction Richards whispered in distress to

his wife:  "Oh, Mary, can we allow it?  It--it--you see, it is an

honour--reward, a testimonial to purity of character, and--and--can

we allow it?  Hadn't I better get up and--Oh, Mary, what ought we to

do?--what do you think we--" [Halliday's voice.  "Fifteen I'm bid!--

fifteen for the sack!--twenty!--ah, thanks!--thirty--thanks again!

Thirty, thirty, thirty!--do I hear forty?--forty it is!  Keep the

ball rolling, gentlemen, keep it rolling!--fifty!--thanks, noble

Roman!--going at fifty, fifty, fifty!--seventy!--ninety!--

splendid!--a hundred!--pile it up, pile it up!--hundred and twenty--

forty!--just in time!--hundred and fifty!--Two hundred!--superb!  Do

I hear two h--thanks!--two hundred and fifty!--"]



"It is another temptation, Edward--I'm all in a tremble--but, oh,

we've escaped one temptation, and that ought to warn us, to--["Six

did I hear?--thanks!--six fifty, six f--SEVEN hundred!"]  And yet,

Edward, when you think--nobody susp--["Eight hundred dollars!--

hurrah!--make it nine!--Mr. Parsons, did I hear you say--thanks!--

nine!--this noble sack of virgin lead going at only nine hundred

dollars, gilding and all--come! do I hear--a thousand!--gratefully

yours!--did some one say eleven?--a sack which is going to be the

most celebrated in the whole Uni--"]  Oh, Edward (beginning to

sob), we are so poor!--but--but--do as you think best--do as you

think best."



Edward fell--that is, he sat still; sat with a conscience which was

not satisfied, but which was overpowered by circumstances.



Meantime a stranger, who looked like an amateur detective gotten up

as an impossible English earl, had been watching the evening's

proceedings with manifest interest, and with a contented expression

in his face; and he had been privately commenting to himself.  He

was now soliloquising somewhat like this:  'None of the Eighteen are

bidding; that is not satisfactory; I must change that--the dramatic

unities require it; they must buy the sack they tried to steal; they

must pay a heavy price, too--some of them are rich.  And another

thing, when I make a mistake in Hadleyburg nature the man that puts

that error upon me is entitled to a high honorarium, and some one

must pay.  This poor old Richards has brought my judgment to shame;

he is an honest man:--I don't understand it, but I acknowledge it.

Yes, he saw my deuces--AND with a straight flush, and by rights the

pot is his.  And it shall be a jack-pot, too, if I can manage it.

He disappointed me, but let that pass.'



He was watching the bidding.  At a thousand, the market broke:  the

prices tumbled swiftly.  He waited--and still watched.  One

competitor dropped out; then another, and another.  He put in a bid

or two now.  When the bids had sunk to ten dollars, he added a five;

some one raised him a three; he waited a moment, then flung in a

fifty-dollar jump, and the sack was his--at $1,282.  The house broke

out in cheers--then stopped; for he was on his feet, and had lifted

his hand.  He began to speak.



"I desire to say a word, and ask a favour.  I am a speculator in

rarities, and I have dealings with persons interested in numismatics

all over the world.  I can make a profit on this purchase, just as

it stands; but there is a way, if I can get your approval, whereby I

can make every one of these leaden twenty-dollar pieces worth its

face in gold, and perhaps more.  Grant me that approval, and I will

give part of my gains to your Mr. Richards, whose invulnerable

probity you have so justly and so cordially recognised tonight; his

share shall be ten thousand dollars, and I will hand him the money

to-morrow.  [Great applause from the house.  But the "invulnerable

probity" made the Richardses blush prettily; however, it went for

modesty, and did no harm.]  If you will pass my proposition by a

good majority--I would like a two-thirds vote--I will regard that as

the town's consent, and that is all I ask.  Rarities are always

helped by any device which will rouse curiosity and compel remark.

Now if I may have your permission to stamp upon the faces of each of

these ostensible coins the names of the eighteen gentlemen who--"



Nine-tenths of the audience were on their feet in a moment--dog and

all--and the proposition was carried with a whirlwind of approving

applause and laughter.



They sat down, and all the Symbols except "Dr." Clay Harkness got

up, violently protesting against the proposed outrage, and

threatening to--



"I beg you not to threaten me," said the stranger calmly.  "I know

my legal rights, and am not accustomed to being frightened at

bluster."  [Applause.]  He sat down.  "Dr." Harkness saw an

opportunity here.  He was one of the two very rich men of the place,

and Pinkerton was the other.  Harkness was proprietor of a mint;

that is to say, a popular patent medicine.  He was running for the

Legislature on one ticket, and Pinkerton on the other.  It was a

close race and a hot one, and getting hotter every day.  Both had

strong appetites for money; each had bought a great tract of land,

with a purpose; there was going to be a new railway, and each wanted

to be in the Legislature and help locate the route to his own

advantage; a single vote might make the decision, and with it two or

three fortunes.  The stake was large, and Harkness was a daring

speculator.  He was sitting close to the stranger.  He leaned over

while one or another of the other Symbols was entertaining the house

with protests and appeals, and asked, in a whisper,



"What is your price for the sack?"



"Forty thousand dollars."



"I'll give you twenty."



"No."



"Twenty-five."



"No."



"Say thirty."



"The price is forty thousand dollars; not a penny less."



"All right, I'll give it.  I will come to the hotel at ten in the

morning.  I don't want it known; will see you privately."



"Very good."  Then the stranger got up and said to the house:



"I find it late.  The speeches of these gentlemen are not without

merit, not without interest, not without grace; yet if I may he

excused I will take my leave.  I thank you for the great favour

which you have shown me in granting my petition.  I ask the Chair to

keep the sack for me until to-morrow, and to hand these three five-

hundred-dollar notes to Mr. Richards."  They were passed up to the

Chair.



"At nine I will call for the sack, and at eleven will deliver the

rest of the ten thousand to Mr. Richards in person at his home.

Good-night."



Then he slipped out, and left the audience making a vast noise,

which was composed of a mixture of cheers, the "Mikado" song, dog-

disapproval, and the chant, "You are f-a-r from being a b-a-a-d man-

-a-a-a a-men!"









IV





At home the Richardses had to endure congratulations and compliments

until midnight.  Then they were left to themselves.  They looked a

little sad, and they sat silent and thinking.  Finally Mary sighed

and said:



"Do you think we are to blame, Edward--MUCH to blame?" and her eyes

wandered to the accusing triplet of big bank-notes lying on the

table, where the congratulators had been gloating over them and

reverently fingering them.  Edward did not answer at once; then he

brought out a sigh and said, hesitatingly:



"We--we couldn't help it, Mary.  It--well it was ordered.  ALL

things are."



Mary glanced up and looked at him steadily, but he didn't return the

look.  Presently she said:



"I thought congratulations and praises always tasted good.  But--it

seems to me, now--Edward?"



"Well?"



"Are you going to stay in the bank?"



"N--no."



"Resign?"



"In the morning--by note."



"It does seem best."



Richards bowed his head in his hands and muttered:



"Before I was not afraid to let oceans of people's money pour

through my hands, but--Mary, I am so tired, so tired--"



"We will go to bed."



At nine in the morning the stranger called for the sack and took it

to the hotel in a cab.  At ten Harkness had a talk with him

privately.  The stranger asked for and got five cheques on a

metropolitan bank--drawn to "Bearer,"--four for $1,500 each, and one

for $34,000.  He put one of the former in his pocket-book, and the

remainder, representing $38,500, he put in an envelope, and with

these he added a note which he wrote after Harkness was gone.  At

eleven he called at the Richards' house and knocked.  Mrs. Richards

peeped through the shutters, then went and received the envelope,

and the stranger disappeared without a word.  She came back flushed

and a little unsteady on her legs, and gasped out:



"I am sure I recognised him!  Last night it seemed to me that maybe

I had seen him somewhere before."



"He is the man that brought the sack here?"



"I am almost sure of it."



"Then he is the ostensible Stephenson too, and sold every important

citizen in this town with his bogus secret.  Now if he has sent

cheques instead of money, we are sold too, after we thought we had

escaped.  I was beginning to feel fairly comfortable once more,

after my night's rest, but the look of that envelope makes me sick.

It isn't fat enough; $8,500 in even the largest bank-notes makes

more bulk than that."



"Edward, why do you object to cheques?"



"Cheques signed by Stephenson!  I am resigned to take the $8,500 if

it could come in bank-notes--for it does seem that it was so

ordered, Mary--but I have never had much courage, and I have not the

pluck to try to market a cheque signed with that disastrous name.

It would be a trap.  That man tried to catch me; we escaped somehow

or other; and now he is trying a new way.  If it is cheques--"



"Oh, Edward, it is TOO bad!"  And she held up the cheques and began

to cry.



"Put them in the fire! quick! we mustn't be tempted.  It is a trick

to make the world laugh at US, along with the rest, and--Give them

to ME, since you can't do it!"  He snatched them and tried to hold

his grip till he could get to the stove; but he was human, he was a

cashier, and he stopped a moment to make sure of the signature.

Then he came near to fainting.



"Fan me, Mary, fan me!  They are the same as gold!"



"Oh, how lovely, Edward!  Why?"



"Signed by Harkness.  What can the mystery of that be, Mary?"



"Edward, do you think--"



"Look here--look at this!  Fifteen--fifteen--fifteen--thirty-four.

Thirty-eight thousand five hundred!  Mary, the sack isn't worth

twelve dollars, and Harkness--apparently--has paid about par for

it."



"And does it all come to us, do you think--instead of the ten

thousand?"



"Why, it looks like it.  And the cheques are made to 'Bearer,' too."



"Is that good, Edward?  What is it for?"



"A hint to collect them at some distant bank, I reckon.  Perhaps

Harkness doesn't want the matter known.  What is that--a note?"



"Yes.  It was with the cheques."



It was in the "Stephenson" handwriting, but there was no signature.

It said:





"I am a disappointed man.  Your honesty is beyond the reach of

temptation.  I had a different idea about it, but I wronged you in

that, and I beg pardon, and do it sincerely.  I honour you--and that

is sincere too.  This town is not worthy to kiss the hem of your

garment.  Dear sir, I made a square bet with myself that there were

nineteen debauchable men in your self-righteous community.  I have

lost.  Take the whole pot, you are entitled to it."





Richards drew a deep sigh, and said:



"It seems written with fire--it burns so.  Mary--I am miserable

again."



"I, too.  Ah, dear, I wish--"



"To think, Mary--he BELIEVES in me."



"Oh, don't, Edward--I can't bear it."



"If those beautiful words were deserved, Mary--and God knows I

believed I deserved them once--I think I could give the forty

thousand dollars for them.  And I would put that paper away, as

representing more than gold and jewels, and keep it always.  But

now--We could not live in the shadow of its accusing presence,

Mary."



He put it in the fire.



A messenger arrived and delivered an envelope.  Richards took from

it a note and read it; it was from Burgess:





"You saved me, in a difficult time.  I saved you last night.  It was

at cost of a lie, but I made the sacrifice freely, and out of a

grateful heart.  None in this village knows so well as I know how

brave and good and noble you are.  At bottom you cannot respect me,

knowing as you do of that matter of which I am accused, and by the

general voice condemned; but I beg that you will at least believe

that I am a grateful man; it will help me to bear my burden.

[Signed]  'BURGESS.'"





"Saved, once more.  And on such terms!"  He put the note in the

lire.  "I--I wish I were dead, Mary, I wish I were out of it all!"



"Oh, these are bitter, bitter days, Edward.  The stabs, through

their very generosity, are so deep--and they come so fast!"



Three days before the election each of two thousand voters suddenly

found himself in possession of a prized memento--one of the renowned

bogus double-eagles.  Around one of its faces was stamped these

words:  "THE REMARK I MADE TO THE POOR STRANGER WAS--"  Around the

other face was stamped these:  "GO, AND REFORM.  [SIGNED]

PINKERTON."  Thus the entire remaining refuse of the renowned joke

was emptied upon a single head, and with calamitous effect.  It

revived the recent vast laugh and concentrated it upon Pinkerton;

and Harkness's election was a walk-over.



Within twenty-four hours after the Richardses had received their

cheques their consciences were quieting down, discouraged; the old

couple were learning to reconcile themselves to the sin which they

had committed.  But they were to learn, now, that a sin takes on new

and real terrors when there seems a chance that it is going to be

found out.  This gives it a fresh and most substantial and important

aspect.  At church the morning sermon was of the usual pattern; it

was the same old things said in the same old way; they had heard

them a thousand times and found them innocuous, next to meaningless,

and easy to sleep under; but now it was different:  the sermon

seemed to bristle with accusations; it seemed aimed straight and

specially at people who were concealing deadly sins.  After church

they got away from the mob of congratulators as soon as they could,

and hurried homeward, chilled to the bone at they did not know what-

-vague, shadowy, indefinite fears.  And by chance they caught a

glimpse of Mr. Burgess as he turned a corner.  He paid no attention

to their nod of recognition!  He hadn't seen it; but they did not

know that.  What could his conduct mean?  It might mean--it might--

mean--oh, a dozen dreadful things.  Was it possible that he knew

that Richards could have cleared him of guilt in that bygone time,

and had been silently waiting for a chance to even up accounts?  At

home, in their distress they got to imagining that their servant

might have been in the next room listening when Richards revealed

the secret to his wife that he knew of Burgess's innocence; next

Richards began to imagine that he had heard the swish of a gown in

there at that time; next, he was sure he HAD heard it.  They would

call Sarah in, on a pretext, and watch her face; if she had been

betraying them to Mr. Burgess, it would show in her manner.  They

asked her some questions--questions which were so random and

incoherent and seemingly purposeless that the girl felt sure that

the old people's minds had been affected by their sudden good

fortune; the sharp and watchful gaze which they bent upon her

frightened her, and that completed the business.  She blushed, she

became nervous and confused, and to the old people these were plain

signs of guilt--guilt of some fearful sort or other--without doubt

she was a spy and a traitor.  When they were alone again they began

to piece many unrelated things together and get horrible results out

of the combination.  When things had got about to the worst Richards

was delivered of a sudden gasp and his wife asked:



"Oh, what is it?--what is it?"



"The note--Burgess's note!  Its language was sarcastic, I see it

now."  He quoted:  "'At bottom you cannot respect me, KNOWING, as

you do, of THAT MATTER OF which I am accused'--oh, it is perfectly

plain, now, God help me!  He knows that I know!  You see the

ingenuity of the phrasing.  It was a trap--and like a fool, I walked

into it.  And Mary--!"



"Oh, it is dreadful--I know what you are going to say--he didn't

return your transcript of the pretended test-remark."



"No--kept it to destroy us with.  Mary, he has exposed us to some

already.  I know it--I know it well.  I saw it in a dozen faces

after church.  Ah, he wouldn't answer our nod of recognition--he

knew what he had been doing!"



In the night the doctor was called.  The news went around in the

morning that the old couple were rather seriously ill--prostrated by

the exhausting excitement growing out of their great windfall, the

congratulations, and the late hours, the doctor said.  The town was

sincerely distressed; for these old people were about all it had

left to be proud of, now.



Two days later the news was worse.  The old couple were delirious,

and were doing strange things.  By witness of the nurses, Richards

had exhibited cheques--for $8,500?  No--for an amazing sum--$38,500!

What could be the explanation of this gigantic piece of luck?



The following day the nurses had more news--and wonderful.  They had

concluded to hide the cheques, lest harm come to them; but when they

searched they were gone from under the patient's pillow--vanished

away.  The patient said:



"Let the pillow alone; what do you want?"



"We thought it best that the cheques--"



"You will never see them again--they are destroyed.  They came from

Satan.  I saw the hell-brand on them, and I knew they were sent to

betray me to sin."  Then he fell to gabbling strange and dreadful

things which were not clearly understandable, and which the doctor

admonished them to keep to themselves.



Richards was right; the cheques were never seen again.



A nurse must have talked in her sleep, for within two days the

forbidden gabblings were the property of the town; and they were of

a surprising sort.  They seemed to indicate that Richards had been a

claimant for the sack himself, and that Burgess had concealed that

fact and then maliciously betrayed it.



Burgess was taxed with this and stoutly denied it.  And he said it

was not fair to attach weight to the chatter of a sick old man who

was out of his mind.  Still, suspicion was in the air, and there was

much talk.



After a day or two it was reported that Mrs. Richards's delirious

deliveries were getting to be duplicates of her husband's.

Suspicion flamed up into conviction, now, and the town's pride in

the purity of its one undiscredited important citizen began to dim

down and flicker toward extinction.



Six days passed, then came more news.  The old couple were dying.

Richards's mind cleared in his latest hour, and he sent for Burgess.

Burgess said:



"Let the room be cleared.  I think he wishes to say something in

privacy."



"No!" said Richards; "I want witnesses.  I want you all to hear my

confession, so that I may die a man, and not a dog.  I was clean--

artificially--like the rest; and like the rest I fell when

temptation came.  I signed a lie, and claimed the miserable sack.

Mr. Burgess remembered that I had done him a service, and in

gratitude (and ignorance) he suppressed my claim and saved me.  You

know the thing that was charged against Burgess years ago.  My

testimony, and mine alone, could have cleared him, and I was a

coward and left him to suffer disgrace--"



"No--no--Mr.  Richards, you--"



"My servant betrayed my secret to him--"



"No one has betrayed anything to me--"



- "And then he did a natural and justifiable thing; he repented of

the saving kindness which he had done me, and he EXPOSED me--as I

deserved--"



"Never!--I make oath--"



"Out of my heart I forgive him."



Burgess's impassioned protestations fell upon deaf ears; the dying

man passed away without knowing that once more he had done poor

Burgess a wrong.  The old wife died that night.



The last of the sacred Nineteen had fallen a prey to the fiendish

sack; the town was stripped of the last rag of its ancient glory.

Its mourning was not showy, but it was deep.



By act of the Legislature--upon prayer and petition--Hadleyburg was

allowed to change its name to (never mind what--I will not give it

away), and leave one word out of the motto that for many generations

had graced the town's official seal.



It is an honest town once more, and the man will have to rise early

that catches it napping again.













MY FIRST LIE, AND HOW I GOT OUT OF IT



As I understand it, what you desire is information about 'my first lie,

and how I got out of it.'  I was born in 1835; I am well along, and my

memory is not as good as it was.  If you had asked about my first truth

it would have been easier for me and kinder of you, for I remember that

fairly well.  I remember it as if it were last week.  The family think it

was week before, but that is flattery and probably has a selfish project

back of it.  When a person has become seasoned by experience and has

reached the age of sixty-four, which is the age of discretion, he likes a

family compliment as well as ever, but he does not lose his head over it

as in the old innocent days.



I do not remember my first lie, it is too far back; but I remember my

second one very well.  I was nine days old at the time, and had noticed

that if a pin was sticking in me and I advertised it in the usual

fashion, I was lovingly petted and coddled and pitied in a most agreeable

way and got a ration between meals besides.



It was human nature to want to get these riches, and I fell.  I lied

about the pin--advertising one when there wasn't any.  You would have

done it; George Washington did it, anybody would have done it.  During

the first half of my life I never knew a child that was able to rise

about that temptation and keep from telling that lie.  Up to 1867 all the

civilised children that were ever born into the world were liars--

including George.  Then the safety-pin came in and blocked the game.  But

is that reform worth anything?  No; for it is reform by force and has no

virtue in it; it merely stops that form of lying, it doesn't impair the

disposition to lie, by a shade.  It is the cradle application of

conversion by fire and sword, or of the temperance principle through

prohibition.



To return to that early lie.  They found no pin and they realised that

another liar had been added to the world's supply.  For by grace of a

rare inspiration a quite commonplace but seldom noticed fact was borne in

upon their understandings--that almost all lies are acts, and speech has

no part in them.  Then, if they examined a little further they recognised

that all people are liars from the cradle onwards, without exception, and

that they begin to lie as soon as they wake in the morning, and keep it

up without rest or refreshment until they go to sleep at night.  If they

arrived at that truth it probably grieved them--did, if they had been

heedlessly and ignorantly educated by their books and teachers; for why

should a person grieve over a thing which by the eternal law of his make

he cannot help?  He didn't invent the law; it is merely his business to

obey it and keep still; join the universal conspiracy and keep so still

that he shall deceive his fellow-conspirators into imagining that he

doesn't know that the law exists.  It is what we all do--we that know.  I

am speaking of the lie of silent assertion; we can tell it without saying

a word, and we all do it--we that know.  In the magnitude of its

territorial spread it is one of the most majestic lies that the

civilisations make it their sacred and anxious care to guard and watch

and propagate.



For instance.  It would not be possible for a humane and intelligent

person to invent a rational excuse for slavery; yet you will remember

that in the early days of the emancipation agitation in the North the

agitators got but small help or countenance from any one.  Argue and

plead and pray as they might, they could not break the universal

stillness that reigned, from pulpit and press all the way down to the

bottom of society--the clammy stillness created and maintained by the lie

of silent assertion--the silent assertion that there wasn't anything

going on in which humane and intelligent people were interested.



From the beginning of the Dreyfus case to the end of it all France,

except a couple of dozen moral paladins, lay under the smother of the

silent-assertion lie that no wrong was being done to a persecuted and

unoffending man.  The like smother was over England lately, a good half

of the population silently letting on that they were not aware that Mr.

Chamberlain was trying to manufacture a war in South Africa and was

willing to pay fancy prices for the materials.



Now there we have instances of three prominent ostensible civilisations

working the silent-assertion lie.  Could one find other instances in the

three countries?  I think so.  Not so very many perhaps, but say a

billion--just so as to keep within bounds.  Are those countries working

that kind of lie, day in and day out, in thousands and thousands of

varieties, without ever resting?  Yes, we know that to be true.  The

universal conspiracy of the silent-assertion lie is hard at work always

and everywhere, and always in the interest of a stupidity or a sham,

never in the interest of a thing fine or respectable.  Is it the most

timid and shabby of all lies?  It seems to have the look of it.  For ages

and ages it has mutely laboured in the interest of despotisms and

aristocracies and chattel slaveries, and military slaveries, and

religious slaveries, and has kept them alive; keeps them alive yet, here

and there and yonder, all about the globe; and will go on keeping them

alive until the silent-assertion lie retires from business--the silent

assertion that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men are

aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop.



What I am arriving at is this: When whole races and peoples conspire to

propagate gigantic mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and shams, why

should we care anything about the trifling lies told by individuals?  Why

should we try to make it appear that abstention from lying is a virtue?

Why should we want to beguile ourselves in that way?  Why should we

without shame help the nation lie, and then be ashamed to do a little

lying on our own account?  Why shouldn't we be honest and honourable, and

lie every time we get a chance?  That is to say, why shouldn't we be

consistent, and either lie all the time or not at all?  Why should we

help the nation lie the whole day long and then object to telling one

little individual private lie in our own interest to go to bed on?  Just

for the refreshment of it, I mean, and to take the rancid taste out of

our mouth.



Here in England they have the oddest ways.  They won't tell a spoken lie

--nothing can persuade them.  Except in a large moral interest, like

politics or religion, I mean.  To tell a spoken lie to get even the

poorest little personal advantage out of it is a thing which is

impossible to them.  They make me ashamed of myself sometimes, they are

so bigoted.  They will not even tell a lie for the fun of it; they will

not tell it when it hasn't eve a suggestion of damage or advantage in it

for any one.  This has a restraining influence upon me in spite of

reason, and I am always getting out of practice.



Of course, they tell all sorts of little unspoken lies, just like

anybody; but they don't notice it until their attention is called to it.

They have got me so that sometimes I never tell a verbal lie now except

in a modified form; and even in the modified form they don't approve of

it.  Still, that is as far as I can go in the interest of the growing

friendly relations between the two countries; I must keep some of my

self-respect--and my health.  I can live on a pretty low diet, but I

can't get along on no sustenance at all.



Of course, there are times when these people have to come out with a

spoken lie, for that is a thing which happens to everybody once in a

while, and would happen to the angels if they came down here much.

Particularly to the angels, in fact, for the lies I speak of are self-

sacrificing ones told for a generous object, not a mean one; but even

when these people tell a lie of that sort it seems to scare them and

unsettle their minds.  It is a wonderful thing to see, and shows that

they are all insane.  In fact, it is a country which is full of the most

interesting superstitions.



I have an English friend of twenty-five years' standing, and yesterday

when we were coming down-town on top of the 'bus I happened to tell him a

lie--a modified one, of course; a half-breed, a mulatto; I can't seem to

tell any other kind now, the market is so flat.  I was explaining to him

how I got out of an embarrassment in Austria last year.  I do not know

what might have become of me if I hadn't happened to remember to tell the

police that I belonged to the same family as the Prince of Wales.  That

made everything pleasant and they let me go; and apologised, too, and

were ever so kind and obliging and polite, and couldn't do too much for

me, and explained how the mistake came to be made, and promised to hang

the officer that did it, and hoped I would let bygones be bygones and not

say anything about it; and I said they could depend on me.  My friend

said, austerely:



'You call it a modified lie?  Where is the modification?'



I explained that it lay in the form of my statement to the police.

'I didn't say I belonged to the Royal Family; I only said I belonged to

the same family as the Prince--meaning the human family, of course; and

if those people had had any penetration they would have known it.  I

can't go around furnishing brains to the police; it is not to be

expected.'



'How did you feel after that performance?'



'Well, of course I was distressed to find that the police had

misunderstood me, but as long as I had not told any lie I knew there was

no occasion to sit up nights and worry about it.'



My friend struggled with the case several minutes, turning it over and

examining it in his mind, then he said that so far as he could see the

modification was itself a lie, it being a misleading reservation of an

explanatory fact, and so I had told two lies instead of only one.



'I wouldn't have done it,' said he; 'I have never told a lie, and I

should be very sorry to do such a thing.'



Just then he lifted his hat and smiled a basketful of surprised and

delighted smiles down at a gentleman who was passing in a hansom.



'Who was that, G---?'



'I don't know.'



'Then why did you do that?'



'Because I saw he thought he knew me and was expecting it of me.  If I

hadn't done it he would have been hurt.  I didn't want to embarrass him

before the whole street.'



'Well, your heart was right, G---, and your act was right.  What you did

was kindly and courteous and beautiful; I would have done it myself; but

it was a lie.'



'A lie?  I didn't say a word.  How do you make it out?'



'I know you didn't speak, still you said to him very plainly and

enthusiastically in dumb show, "Hello! you in town?  Awful glad to see

you, old fellow; when did you get back?" Concealed in your actions was

what you have called "a misleading reservation of an explanatory fact"--

the act that you had never seen him before.  You expressed joy in

encountering him--a lie; and you made that reservation--another lie.  It

was my pair over again.  But don't be troubled--we all do it.'



Two hours later, at dinner, when quite other matters were being

discussed, he told how he happened along once just in the nick of time to

do a great service for a family who were old friends of his.  The head of

it had suddenly died in circumstances and surroundings of a ruinously

disgraceful character.  If know the facts would break the hearts of the

innocent family and put upon them a load of unendurable shame.  There was

no help but in a giant lie, and he girded up his loins and told it.



'The family never found out, G---?'



'Never.  In all these years they have never suspected.  They were proud

of him and had always reason to be; they are proud of him yet, and to

them his memory is sacred and stainless and beautiful.'



'They had a narrow escape, G---.'



'Indeed they had.'



'For the very next man that came along might have been one of these

heartless and shameless truth-mongers.  You have told the truth a million

times in your life, G---, but that one golden lie atones for it all.

Persevere.'



Some may think me not strict enough in my morals, but that position is

hardly tenable.  There are many kinds of lying which I do not approve.  I

do not like an injurious lie, except when it injures somebody else; and I

do not like the lie of bravado, nor the lie of virtuous ecstasy; the

latter was affected by Bryant, the former by Carlyle.



Mr. Bryant said, 'Truth crushed to earth will rise again.'  I have taken

medals at thirteen world's fairs, and may claim to be not without

capacity, but I never told as big a one as that.  Mr. Bryant was playing

to the gallery; we all do it.  Carlyle said, in substance, this--I do not

remember the exact words: 'This gospel is eternal--that a lie shall not

live.'  I have a reverent affection for Carlyle's books, and have read

his 'Revelation' eight times; and so I prefer to think he was not

entirely at himself when he told that one.  To me it is plain that he

said it in a moment of excitement, when chasing Americans out of his

back-yard with brickbats.  They used to go there and worship.  At bottom

he was probably fond of it, but he was always able to conceal it.  He

kept bricks for them, but he was not a good shot, and it is matter of

history that when he fired they dodged, and carried off the brick; for as

a nation we like relics, and so long as we get them we do not much care

what the reliquary thinks about it.  I am quite sure that when he told

that large one about a lie not being able to live he had just missed an

American and was over excited.  He told it above thirty years ago, but it

is alive yet; alive, and very healthy and hearty, and likely to outlive

any fact in history.  Carlyle was truthful when calm, but give him

Americans enough and bricks enough and he could have taken medals

himself.



As regards that time that George Washington told the truth, a word must

be said, of course.  It is the principal jewel in the crown of America,

and it is but natural that we should work it for all it is worth, as

Milton says in his 'Lay of the Last Minstrel.'  It was a timely and

judicious truth, and I should have told it myself in the circumstances.

But I should have stopped there.  It was a stately truth, a lofty truth--

a Tower; and I think it was a mistake to go on and distract attention

from its sublimity by building another Tower alongside of it fourteen

times as high.  I refer to his remark that he 'could not lie.'  I should

have fed that to the marines; or left it to Carlyle; it is just in his

style.  It would have taken a medal at any European fair, and would have

got an honourable mention even at Chicago if it had been saved up.  But

let it pass; the Father of his Country was excited.  I have been in those

circumstances, and I recollect.



With the truth he told I have no objection to offer, as already

indicated.  I think it was not premeditated but an inspiration.  With his

fine military mind, he had probably arranged to let his brother Edward in

for the cherry tree results, but by an inspiration he saw his opportunity

in time and took advantage of it.  By telling the truth he could astonish

his father; his father would tell the neighbours; the neighbours would

spread it; it would travel to all firesides; in the end it would make him

President, and not only that, but First President.  He was a far-seeing

boy and would be likely to think of these things.  Therefore, to my mind,

he stands justified for what he did.  But not for the other Tower; it was

a mistake.  Still, I don't know about that; upon reflection I think

perhaps it wasn't.  For indeed it is that Tower that makes the other one

live.  If he hadn't said 'I cannot tell a lie' there would have been no

convulsion.  That was the earthquake that rocked the planet.  That is the

kind of statement that lives for ever, and a fact barnacled to it has a

good chance to share its immortality.



To sum up, on the whole I am satisfied with things the way they are.

There is a prejudice against the spoken lie, but none against any other,

and by examination and mathematical computation I find that the

proportion of the spoken lie to the other varieties is as 1 to 22,894.

Therefore the spoken lie is of no consequence, and it is not worth while

to go around fussing about it and trying to make believe that it is an

important matter.  The silent colossal National Lie that is the support

and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and

unfairnesses that afflict the peoples--that is the one to throw bricks

and sermons at.  But let us be judicious and let somebody else begin.



And then--But I have wandered from my text.  How did I get out of my

second lie?  I think I got out with honour, but I cannot be sure, for it

was a long time ago and some of the details have faded out of my memory.

I recollect that I was reversed and stretched across some one's knee, and

that something happened, but I cannot now remember what it was.  I think

there was music; but it is all dim now and blurred by the lapse of time,

and this may be only a senile fancy.













THE ESQUIMAUX MAIDEN'S ROMANCE



'Yes, I will tell you anything about my life that you would like to know,

Mr. Twain,' she said, in her soft voice, and letting her honest eyes rest

placidly upon my face, 'for it is kind and good of you to like me and

care to know about me.'



She had been absently scraping blubber-grease from her cheeks with a

small bone-knife and transferring it to her fur sleeve, while she watched

the Aurora Borealis swing its flaming streamers out of the sky and wash

the lonely snow plain and the templed icebergs with the rich hues of the

prism, a spectacle of almost intolerable splendour and beauty; but now

she shook off her reverie and prepared to give me the humble little

history I had asked for.  She settled herself comfortably on the block of

ice which we were using as a sofa, and I made ready to listen.



She was a beautiful creature.  I speak from the Esquimaux point of view.

Others would have thought her a trifle over-plump.  She was just twenty

years old, and was held to be by far the most bewitching girl in her

tribe.  Even now, in the open air, with her cumbersome and shapeless fur

coat and trousers and boots and vast hood, the beauty of her face was at

least apparent; but her figure had to be taken on trust.  Among all the

guests who came and went, I had seen no girl at her father's hospitable

trough who could be called her equal.  Yet she was not spoiled.  She was

sweet and natural and sincere, and if she was aware that she was a belle,

there was nothing about her ways to show that she possessed that

knowledge.



She had been my daily comrade for a week now, and the better I knew her

the better I liked her.  She had been tenderly and carefully brought up,

in an atmosphere of singularly rare refinement for the polar regions, for

her father was the most important man of his tribe and ranked at the top

of Esquimaux civilisation.  I made long dog-sledge trips across the

mighty ice floes with Lasca--that was her name--and found her company

always pleasant and her conversation agreeable.  I went fishing with her,

but not in her perilous boat: I merely followed along on the ice and

watched her strike her game with her fatally accurate spear.  We went

sealing together; several times I stood by while she and the family dug

blubber from a stranded whale, and once I went part of the way when she

was hunting a bear, but turned back before the finish, because at bottom

I am afraid of bears.



However, she was ready to begin her story, now, and this is what she

said:



'Our tribe had always been used to wander about from place to place over

the frozen seas, like the other tribes, but my father got tired of that,

two years ago, and built this great mansion of frozen snow-blocks--look

at it; it is seven feet high and three or four times as long as any of

the others--and here we have stayed ever since.  He was very proud of his

house, and that was reasonable, for if you have examined it with care you

must have noticed how much finer and completer it is than houses usually

are.  But if you have not, you must, for you will find it has luxurious

appointments that are quite beyond the common.  For instance, in that end

of it which you have called the "parlour," the raised platform for the

accommodation of guests and the family at meals is the largest you have

ever seen in any house--is it not so?'



'Yes, you are quite right, Lasca; it is the largest; we have nothing

resembling it in even the finest houses in the United States.'  This

admission made her eyes sparkle with pride and pleasure.  I noted that,

and took my cue.



'I thought it must have surprised you,' she said.  'And another thing; it

is bedded far deeper in furs than is usual; all kinds of furs--seal,

sea-otter, silver-grey fox, bear, marten, sable--every kind of fur in

profusion; and the same with the ice-block sleeping-benches along the

walls which you call "beds." Are your platforms and sleeping-benches

better provided at home?'



'Indeed, they are not, Lasca--they do not begin to be.'  That pleased her

again.  All she was thinking of was the number of furs her aesthetic

father took the trouble to keep on hand, not their value.  I could have

told her that those masses of rich furs constituted wealth--or would in

my country--but she would not have understood that; those were not the

kind of things that ranked as riches with her people.  I could have told

her that the clothes she had on, or the every-day clothes of the

commonest person about her, were worth twelve or fifteen hundred dollars,

and that I was not acquainted with anybody at home who wore

twelve-hundred dollar toilets to go fishing in; but she would not have

understood it, so I said nothing.  She resumed:



'And then the slop-tubs.  We have two in the parlour, and two in the rest

of the house.  It is very seldom that one has two in the parlour.  Have

you two in the parlour at home?'



The memory of those tubs made me gasp, but I recovered myself before she

noticed, and said with effusion:



'Why, Lasca, it is a shame of me to expose my country, and you must not

let it go further, for I am speaking to you in confidence; but I give you

my word of honour that not even the richest man in the city of New York

has two slop-tubs in his drawing-room.'



She clapped her fur-clad hands in innocent delight, and exclaimed:



'Oh, but you cannot mean it, you cannot mean it!'



'Indeed, I am in earnest, dear.  There is Vanderbilt.  Vanderbilt is

almost the richest man in the whole world.  Now, if I were on my dying

bed, I could say to you that not even he has two in his drawing-room.

Why, he hasn't even one--I wish I may die in my tracks if it isn't true.'



Her lovely eyes stood wide with amazement, and she said, slowly, and with

a sort of awe in her voice:



'How strange--how incredible--one is not able to realise it.  Is he

penurious?'



'No--it isn't that.  It isn't the expense he minds, but--er--well, you

know, it would look like showing off.  Yes, that is it, that is the idea;

he is a plain man in his way, and shrinks from display.'



'Why, that humility is right enough,' said Lasca, 'if one does not carry

it too far--but what does the place look like?'



'Well, necessarily it looks pretty barren and unfinished, but--'



'I should think so! I never heard anything like it.  Is it a fine house--

that is, otherwise?'



'Pretty fine, yes.  It is very well thought of.'



The girl was silent awhile, and sat dreamily gnawing a candle-end,

apparently trying to think the thing out.  At last she gave her head a

little toss and spoke out her opinion with decision:



'Well, to my mind there's a breed of humility which is itself a species

of showing off when you get down to the marrow of it; and when a man is

able to afford two slop-tubs in his parlour, and doesn't do it, it may be

that he is truly humble-minded, but it's a hundred times more likely that

he is just trying to strike the public eye.  In my judgment, your Mr.

Vanderbilt knows what he is about.'



I tried to modify this verdict, feeling that a double slop-tub standard

was not a fair one to try everybody by, although a sound enough one in

its own habitat; but the girl's head was set, and she was not to be

persuaded.  Presently she said:



'Do the rich people, with you, have as good sleeping-benches as ours, and

made out of as nice broad ice-blocks?'



'Well, they are pretty good--good enough--but they are not made of

ice-blocks.'



'I want to know! Why aren't they made of ice-blocks?'



I explained the difficulties in the way, and the expensiveness of ice in

a country where you have to keep a sharp eye on your ice-man or your

ice-bill will weigh more than your ice.  Then she cried out:



'Dear me, do you buy your ice?'



'We most surely do, dear.'



She burst into a gale of guileless laughter, and said:



'Oh, I never heard of anything so silly! My! there's plenty of it--it

isn't worth anything.  Why, there is a hundred miles of it in sight,

right now.  I wouldn't give a fish-bladder for the whole of it.'



'Well, it's because you don't know how to value it, you little provincial

muggings.  If you had it in New York in midsummer, you could buy all the

whales in the market with it.'



She looked at me doubtfully, and said:



'Are you speaking true?'



'Absolutely.  I take my oath to it.'



This made her thoughtful.  Presently she said, with a little sigh:



'I wish I could live there.'



I had merely meant to furnish her a standard of values which she could

understand; but my purpose had miscarried.  I had only given her the

impression that whales were cheap and plenty in New York, and set her

mouth to watering for them.  It seemed best to try to mitigate the evil

which I had done, so I said:



'But you wouldn't care for whale-meat if you lived there.  Nobody does.'



'What!'



'Indeed they don't.'



'Why don't they?'



'Wel-l-l, I hardly know.  It's prejudice, I think.  Yes, that is it--just

prejudice.  I reckon somebody that hadn't anything better to do started a

prejudice against it, some time or other, and once you get a caprice like

that fairly going, you know it will last no end of time.'



'That is true--perfectly true,' said the girl, reflectively.  'Like our

prejudice against soap, here--our tribes had a prejudice against soap at

first, you know.'



I glanced at her to see if she was in earnest.  Evidently she was.  I

hesitated, then said, cautiously:



'But pardon me.  They had a prejudice against soap?  Had?'--with falling

inflection.



'Yes--but that was only at first; nobody would eat it.'



'Oh--I understand.  I didn't get your idea before.'



She resumed:



'It was just a prejudice.  The first time soap came here from the

foreigners, nobody liked it; but as soon as it got to be fashionable,

everybody liked it, and now everybody has it that can afford it.  Are you

fond of it?'



'Yes, indeed; I should die if I couldn't have it--especially here.  Do

you like it?'



'I just adore it! Do you like candles?'



'I regard them as an absolute necessity.  Are you fond of them?'



Her eyes fairly danced, and she exclaimed:



'Oh! Don't mention it! Candles!--and soap!--'



'And fish-interiors!--'



'And train-oil--'



'And slush!--'



'And whale-blubber!--'



'And carrion! and sour-krout! and beeswax! and tar! and turpentine! and

molasses! and--'



'Don't--oh, don't--I shall expire with ecstasy!--'



'And then serve it all up in a slush-bucket, and invite the neighbours

and sail in!'



But this vision of an ideal feast was too much for her, and she swooned

away, poor thing.  I rubbed snow in her face and brought her to, and

after a while got her excitement cooled down.  By-and-by she drifted into

her story again:



'So we began to live here in the fine house.  But I was not happy.  The

reason was this: I was born for love: for me there could be no true

happiness without it.  I wanted to be loved for myself alone.  I wanted

an idol, and I wanted to be my idol's idol; nothing less than mutual

idolatry would satisfy my fervent nature.  I had suitors in plenty--in

over-plenty, indeed--but in each and every case they had a fatal defect:

sooner or later I discovered that defect--not one of them failed to

betray it--it was not me they wanted, but my wealth.'



'Your wealth?'



'Yes; for my father is much the richest man in this tribe--or in any

tribe in these regions.'



I wondered what her father's wealth consisted of.  It couldn't be the

house--anybody could build its mate.  It couldn't be the furs--they were

not valued.  It couldn't be the sledge, the dogs, the harpoons, the boat,

the bone fish-hooks and needles, and such things--no, these were not

wealth.  Then what could it be that made this man so rich and brought

this swarm of sordid suitors to his house?  It seemed to me, finally,

that the best way to find out would be to ask.  So I did it.  The girl

was so manifestly gratified by the question that I saw she had been

aching to have me ask it.  She was suffering fully as much to tell as I

was to know.  She snuggled confidentially up to me and said:



'Guess how much he is worth--you never can!'



I pretended to consider the matter deeply, she watching my anxious and

labouring countenance with a devouring and delighted interest; and when,

at last, I gave it up and begged her to appease my longing by telling me

herself how much this polar Vanderbilt was worth, she put her mouth close

to my ear and whispered, impressively:



'Twenty-two fish-hooks--not bone, but foreign--made out of real iron!'



Then she sprang back dramatically, to observe the effect.  I did my level

best not to disappoint her.  I turned pale and murmured:



'Great Scott!'



'It's as true as you live, Mr. Twain!'



'Lasca, you are deceiving me--you cannot mean it.'



She was frightened and troubled.  She exclaimed:



'Mr. Twain, every word of it is true--every word.  You believe me--you do

believe me, now don't you?  Say you believe me--do say you believe me!'



'I--well, yes, I do--I am trying to.  But it was all so sudden.  So

sudden and prostrating.  You shouldn't do such a thing in that sudden

way.  It--'



'Oh, I'm so sorry! If I had only thought--'



'Well, it's all right, and I don't blame you any more, for you are young

and thoughtless, and of course you couldn't foresee what an effect--'



'But oh, dear, I ought certainly to have known better.  Why--'



'You see, Lasca, if you had said five or six hooks, to start with, and

then gradually--'



'Oh, I see, I see--then gradually added one, and then two, and then--ah,

why couldn't I have thought of that!'



'Never mind, child, it's all right--I am better now--I shall be over it

in a little while.  But--to spring the whole twenty-two on a person

unprepared and not very strong anyway--'



'Oh, it was a crime! But you forgive me--say you forgive me.  Do!'



After harvesting a good deal of very pleasant coaxing and petting and

persuading, I forgave her and she was happy again, and by-and-by she got

under way with her narrative once more.  I presently discovered that the

family treasury contained still another feature--a jewel of some sort,

apparently--and that she was trying to get around speaking squarely about

it, lest I get paralysed again.  But I wanted to known about that thing,

too, and urged her to tell me what it was.  She was afraid.  But I

insisted, and said I would brace myself this time and be prepared, then

the shock would not hurt me.  She was full of misgivings, but the

temptation to reveal that marvel to me and enjoy my astonishment and

admiration was too strong for her, and she confessed that she had it on

her person, and said that if I was sure I was prepared--and so on and so

on--and with that she reached into her bosom and brought out a battered

square of brass, watching my eye anxiously the while.  I fell over

against her in a quite well-acted faint, which delighted her heart and

nearly frightened it out of her, too, at the same time.  When I came to

and got calm, she was eager to know what I thought of her jewel.



'What do I think of it?  I think it is the most exquisite thing I ever

saw.'



'Do you really?  How nice of you to say that! But it is a love, now isn't

it?'



'Well, I should say so! I'd rather own it than the equator.'



'I thought you would admire it,' she said.  'I think it is so lovely.

And there isn't another one in all these latitudes.  People have come all

the way from the open Polar Sea to look at it.  Did you ever see one

before?'



I said no, this was the first one I had ever seen.  It cost me a pang to

tell that generous lie, for I had seen a million of them in my time, this

humble jewel of hers being nothing but a battered old New York Central

baggage check.



'Land!' said I, 'you don't go about with it on your person this way,

alone and with no protection, not even a dog?'



'Ssh! not so loud,' she said.  'Nobody knows I carry it with me.  They

think it is in papa's treasury.  That is where it generally is.'



'Where is the treasury?'



It was a blunt question, and for a moment she looked startled and a

little suspicious, but I said:



'Oh, come, don't you be afraid about me.  At home we have seventy

millions of people, and although I say it myself that shouldn't, there is

not one person among them all but would trust me with untold fish-hooks.'



This reassured her, and she told me where the hooks were hidden in the

house.  Then she wandered from her course to brag a little about the size

of the sheets of transparent ice that formed the windows of the mansion,

and asked me if I had ever seen their like at home, and I came right out

frankly and confessed that I hadn't, which pleased her more than she

could find words to dress her gratification in.  It was so easy to please

her, and such a pleasure to do it, that I went on and said--



'Ah, Lasca, you are a fortune girl!--this beautiful house, this dainty

jewel, that rich treasure, all this elegant snow, and sumptuous icebergs

and limitless sterility, and public bears and walruses, and noble freedom

and largeness and everybody's admiring eyes upon you, and everybody's

homage and respect at your command without the asking; young, rich,

beautiful, sought, courted, envied, not a requirement unsatisfied, not a

desire ungratified, nothing to wish for that you cannot have--it is

immeasurable good-fortune! I have seen myriads of girls, but none of whom

these extraordinary things could be truthfully said but you alone.  And

you are worthy--worthy of it all, Lasca--I believe it in my heart.'



It made her infinitely proud and happy to hear me say this, and she

thanked me over and over again for that closing remark, and her voice and

eyes showed that she was touched.  Presently she said:



'Still, it is not all sunshine--there is a cloudy side.  The burden of

wealth is a heavy one to bear.  Sometimes I have doubted if it were not

better to be poor--at least not inordinately rich.  It pains me to see

neighbouring tribesmen stare as they pass by, and overhear them say,

reverently, one to another, "There--that is she--the millionaire's

daughter!"  And sometimes they say sorrowfully, "She is rolling in

fish-hooks, and I--I have nothing."  It breaks my heart.  When I was a

child and we were poor, we slept with the door open, if we chose, but

now--now we have to have a night-watchman.  In those days my father was

gentle and courteous to all; but now he is austere and haughty and cannot

abide familiarity.  Once his family were his sole thought, but now he

goes about thinking of his fish-hooks all the time.  And his wealth makes

everybody cringing and obsequious to him.  Formerly nobody laughed at his

jokes, they being always stale and far-fetched and poor, and destitute of

the one element that can really justify a joke--the element of humour;

but now everybody laughs and cackles at these dismal things, and if any

fails to do it my father is deeply displeased, and shows it.  Formerly

his opinion was not sought upon any matter and was not valuable when he

volunteered it; it has that infirmity yet, but, nevertheless, it is

sought by all and applauded by all--and he helps do the applauding

himself, having no true delicacy and a plentiful want of tact.  He has

lowered the tone of all our tribe.  Once they were a frank and manly

race, now they are measly hypocrites, and sodden with servility.  In my

heart of hearts I hate all the ways of millionaires! Our tribe was once

plain, simple folk, and content with the bone fish-hooks of their

fathers; now they are eaten up with avarice and would sacrifice every

sentiment of honour and honesty to possess themselves of the debasing

iron fish-hooks of the foreigner.  However, I must not dwell on these sad

things.  As I have said, it was my dream to be loved for myself alone.



'At last, this dream seemed about to be fulfilled.  A stranger came by,

one day, who said his name was Kalula.  I told him my name, and he said

he loved me.  My heart gave a great bound of gratitude and pleasure, for

I had loved him at sight, and now I said so.  He took me to his breast

and said he would not wish to be happier than he was now.  We went

strolling together far over the ice-floes, telling all about each other,

and planning, oh, the loveliest future! When we were tired at last we sat

down and ate, for he had soap and candles and I had brought along some

blubber.  We were hungry and nothing was ever so good.



'He belonged to a tribe whose haunts were far to the north, and I found

that he had never heard of my father, which rejoiced me exceedingly.  I

mean he had heard of the millionaire, but had never heard his name--so,

you see, he could not know that I was the heiress.  You may be sure that

I did not tell him.  I was loved for myself at last, and was satisfied.

I was so happy--oh, happier than you can think!



'By-and-by it was towards supper time, and I led him home.  As we

approached our house he was amazed, and cried out:



'"How splendid! Is that your father's?"



'It gave me a pang to hear that tone and see that admiring light in his

eye, but the feeling quickly passed away, for I loved him so, and he

looked so handsome and noble.  All my family of aunts and uncles and

cousins were pleased with him, and many guests were called in, and the

house was shut up tight and the rag lamps lighted, and when everything

was hot and comfortable and suffocating, we began a joyous feast in

celebration of my betrothal.



'When the feast was over my father's vanity overcame him, and he could

not resist the temptation to show off his riches and let Kalula see what

grand good-fortune he had stumbled into--and mainly, of course, he wanted

to enjoy the poor man's amazement.  I could have cried--but it would have

done no good to try to dissuade my father, so I said nothing, but merely

sat there and suffered.



'My father went straight to the hiding-place in full sight of everybody,

and got out the fish-hooks and brought them and flung them scatteringly

over my head, so that they fell in glittering confusion on the platform

at my lover's knee.



'Of course, the astounding spectacle took the poor lad's breath away.  He

could only stare in stupid astonishment, and wonder how a single

individual could possess such incredible riches.  Then presently he

glanced brilliantly up and exclaimed:



'"Ah, it is you who are the renowned millionaire!"



'My father and all the rest burst into shouts of happy laughter, and when

my father gathered the treasure carelessly up as if it might be mere

rubbish and of no consequence, and carried it back to its place, poor

Kulala's surprise was a study.  He said:



'"Is it possible that you put such things away without counting them?"



'My father delivered a vain-glorious horse-laugh, and said:



'"Well, truly, a body may know you have never been rich, since a mere

matter of a fish-hook or two is such a mighty matter in your eyes."



'Kalula was confused, and hung his head, but said:



'"Ah, indeed, sir, I was never worth the value of the barb of one of

those precious things, and I have never seen any man before who was so

rich in them as to render the counting of his hoard worth while, since

the wealthiest man I have ever known, till now, was possessed of but

three."



'My foolish father roared again with jejune delight, and allowed the

impression to remain that he was not accustomed to count his hooks and

keep sharp watch over them.  He was showing off, you see.  Count them?

Why, he counted them every day!



'I had met and got acquainted with my darling just at dawn; I had brought

him home just at dark, three hours afterwards--for the days were

shortening toward the six-months' night at that time.  We kept up the

festivities many hours; then, at last, the guests departed and the rest

of us distributed ourselves along the walls on sleeping-benches, and soon

all were steeped in dreams but me.  I was too happy, too excited, to

sleep.  After I had lain quiet a long, long time, a dim form passed by me

and was swallowed up in the gloom that pervaded the farther end of the

house.  I could not make out who it was, or whether it was man or woman.

Presently that figure or another one passed me going the other way.  I

wondered what it all meant, but wondering did no good; and while I was

still wondering I fell asleep.



'I do not know how long I slept, but at last I came suddenly broad awake

and heard my father say in a terrible voice, "By the great Snow God,

there's a fish-hook gone!"  Something told me that that meant sorrow for

me, and the blood in my veins turned cold.  The presentiment was

confirmed in the same instant: my father shouted, "Up, everybody, and

seize the stranger!"  Then there was an outburst of cries and curses from

all sides, and a wild rush of dim forms through the obscurity.  I flew to

my beloved's help, but what could I do but wait and wring my hands?--he

was already fenced away from me by a living wall, he was being bound hand

and foot.  Not until he was secured would they let me get to him.  I

flung myself upon his poor insulted form and cried my grief out upon his

breast while my father and all my family scoffed at me and heaped threats

and shameful epithets upon him.  He bore his ill usage with a tranquil

dignity which endeared him to me more than ever, and made me proud and

happy to suffer with him and for him.  I heard my father order that the

elders of the tribe be called together to try my Kalula for his life.



'"What!"  I said, "before any search has been made for the lost hook?"



'"Lost hook!"  they all shouted, in derision; and my father added,

mockingly, "Stand back, everybody, and be properly serious--she is going

to hunt up that lost hook: oh, without doubt she will find it!"--whereat

they all laughed again.



'I was not disturbed--I had no fears, no doubts.  I said:



'"It is for you to laugh now; it is your turn.  But ours is coming; wait

and see."



'I got a rag lamp.  I thought I should find that miserable thing in one

little moment; and I set about that matter with such confidence that

those people grew grace, beginning to suspect that perhaps they had been

too hasty.  But alas and alas!--oh, the bitterness of that search! There

was deep silence while one might count his fingers ten or twelve times,

then my heart began to sink, and around me the mockings began again, and

grew steadily louder and more assured, until at last, when I gave up,

they burst into volley after volley of cruel laughter.



'None will ever know what I suffered then.  But my love was my support

and my strength, and I took my rightful place at my Kalula's side, and

put my arm about his neck, and whispered in his ear, saying:



'"You are innocent, my own--that I know; but say it to me yourself, for

my comfort, then I can bear whatever is in store for us."



'He answered:



'"As surely as I stand upon the brink of death at this moment, I am

innocent.  Be comforted, then, O bruised heart; be at peace, O thou

breath of my nostrils, life of my life!"



'"Now, then, let the elders come!"--and as I said the words there was a

gathering sound of crunching snow outside, and then a vision of stooping

forms filing in at the door--the elders.



'My father formally accused the prisoner, and detailed the happenings of

the night.  He said that the watchman was outside the door, and that in

the house were none but the family and the stranger.  "Would the family

steal their own property?" He paused.  The elders sat silent many

minutes; at last, one after another said to his neighbour, "This looks

bad for the stranger"--sorrowful words for me to hear.  Then my father

sat down.  O miserable, miserable me! At that very moment I could have

proved my darling innocent, but I did not know it!



'The chief of the court asked:



'"Is there any here to defend the prisoner?"



'I rose and said:



'"Why should he steal that hook, or any or all of them?  In another day

he would have been heir to the whole!"



I stood waiting.  There was a long silence, the steam from the many

breaths rising about me like a fog.  At last one elder after another

nodded his head slowly several times, and muttered, "There is force in

what the child has said."  Oh, the heart-lift that was in those words!--

so transient, but, oh, so precious! I sat down.



'"If any would say further, let him speak now, or after hold his peace,"

said the chief of the court.



'My father rose and said:



'"In the night a form passed by me in the gloom, going toward the

treasury and presently returned.  I think, now, it was the stranger."



'Oh, I was like to swoon! I had supposed that that was my secret; not the

grip of the great Ice God himself could have dragged it out of my heart.

The chief of the court said sternly to my poor Kalula:



'"Speak!"



'Kalula hesitated, then answered:



'"It was I.  I could not sleep for thinking of the beautiful hooks.  I

went there and kissed them and fondled them, to appease my spirit and

drown it in a harmless joy, then I put them back.  I may have dropped

one, but I stole none."



'Oh, a fatal admission to make in such a place! There was an awful hush.

I knew he had pronounced his own doom, and that all was over.  On every

face you could see the words hieroglyphed: "It is a confession!--and

paltry, lame, and thin."



'I sat drawing in my breath in faint gasps--and waiting.  Presently, I

heard the solemn words I knew were coming; and each word, as it came, was

a knife in my heart:



'"It is the command of the court that the accused be subjected to the

trial by water."



'Oh, curses be upon the head of him who brought "trial by water" to our

land! It came, generations ago, from some far country that lies none

knows where.  Before that our fathers used augury and other unsure

methods of trial, and doubtless some poor guilty creatures escaped with

their lives sometimes; but it is not so with trial by water, which is an

invention by wiser men than we poor ignorant savages are.  By it the

innocent are proved innocent, without doubt or question, for they drown;

and the guilty are proven guilty with the same certainty, for they do not

drown.  My heart was breaking in my bosom, for I said, "He is innocent,

and he will go down under the waves and I shall never see him more."



'I never left his side after that.  I mourned in his arms all the

precious hours, and he poured out the deep stream of his love upon me,

and oh, I was so miserable and so happy! At last, they tore him from me,

and I followed sobbing after them, and saw them fling him into the sea--

then I covered my face with my hands.  Agony?  Oh, I know the deepest

deeps of that word!



'The next moment the people burst into a shout of malicious joy, and I

took away my hands, startled.  Oh, bitter sight--he was swimming! My

heart turned instantly to stone, to ice.  I said, "He was guilty, and he

lied to me!"  I turned my back in scorn and went my way homeward.



'They took him far out to sea and set him on an iceberg that was drifting

southward in the great waters.  Then my family came home, and my father

said to me:



'"Your thief sent his dying message to you, saying, 'Tell her I am

innocent, and that all the days and all the hours and all the minutes

while I starve and perish I shall love her and think of her and bless the

day that gave me sight of her sweet face.'" Quite pretty, even poetical!



'I said, "He is dirt--let me never hear mention of him again."  And oh,

to think--he was innocent all the time!



'Nine months--nine dull, sad months--went by, and at last came the day of

the Great Annual Sacrifice, when all the maidens of the tribe wash their

faces and comb their hair.  With the first sweep of my comb out came the

fatal fish-hook from where it had been all those months nestling, and I

fell fainting into the arms of my remorseful father! Groaning, he said,

"We murdered him, and I shall never smile again!"  He has kept his word.

Listen; from that day to this not a month goes by that I do not comb my

hair.  But oh, where is the good of it all now!'



So ended the poor maid's humble little tale--whereby we learn that since

a hundred million dollars in New York and twenty-two fish-hooks on the

border of the Arctic Circle represent the same financial supremacy, a man

in straitened circumstances is a fool to stay in New York when he can buy

ten cents' worth of fish-hooks and emigrate.













CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND THE BOOK OF MRS. EDDY



     'It is the first time since the dawn-days of Creation that a Voice

     has gone crashing through space with such placid and complacent

     confidence and command.'



I



This last summer, when I was on my way back to Vienna from the

Appetite-Cure in the mountains, I fell over a cliff in the twilight and

broke some arms and legs and one thing or another, and by good luck was

found by some peasants who had lost an ass, and they carried me to the

nearest habitation, which was one of those large, low, thatch-roofed

farm-houses, with apartments in the garret for the family, and a cunning

little porch under the deep gable decorated with boxes of bright-coloured

flowers and cats; on the ground floor a large and light sitting-room,

separated from the milch-cattle apartment by a partition; and in the

front yard rose stately and fine the wealth and pride of the house, the

manure-pile.  That sentence is Germanic, and shows that I am acquiring

that sort of mastery of the art and spirit of the language which enables

a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.



There was a village a mile away, and a horse-doctor lived there, but

there was no surgeon.  It seemed a bad outlook; mine was distinctly a

surgery case.  Then it was remembered that a lady from Boston was

summering in that village, and she was a Christian Science doctor and

could cure anything.  So she was sent for.  It was night by this time,

and she could not conveniently come, but sent word that it was no matter,

there was no hurry, she would give me 'absent treatment' now, and come in

the morning; meantime she begged me to make myself tranquil and

comfortable and remember that there was nothing the matter with me.  I

thought there must be some mistake.



'Did you tell her I walked off a cliff seventy-five feet high?'



'Yes.'



'And struck a boulder at the bottom and bounced?'



'Yes.'



'And struck another one and bounced again?'



'Yes.'



'And struck another one and bounced yet again?'



'Yes.'



'And broke the boulders?'



'Yes.'



'That accounts for it; she is thinking of the boulders.  Why didn't you

tell her I got hurt, too?'



'I did.  I told her what you told me to tell her: that you were now but

an incoherent series of compound fractures extending from your scalp-lock

to your heels, and that the comminuted projections caused you to look

like a hat-rack.'



'And it was after this that she wished me to remember that there was

nothing the matter with me?'



'Those were her words.'



'I do not understand it.  I believe she has not diagnosed the case with

sufficient care.  Did she look like a person who was theorising, or did

she look like one who has fallen off precipices herself and brings to the

aid of abstract science the confirmation of personal experience?'



'Bitte?'



It was too large a contract for the Stubenmadchen's vocabulary; she

couldn't call the hand.  I allowed the subject to rest there, and asked

for something to eat and smoke, and something hot to drink, and a basket

to pile my legs in, and another capable person to come and help me curse

the time away; but I could not have any of these things.



'Why?'



'She said you would need nothing at all.'



'But I am hungry and thirsty, and in desperate pain.'



'She said you would have these delusions, but must pay no attention to

them.  She wants you to particularly remember that there are no such

things as hunger and thirst and pain.'



'She does, does she?'



'It is what she said.'



'Does she seem o be in full and functional possession of her intellectual

plant, such as it is?'



'Bitte?'



'Do they let her run at large, or do they tie her up?'



'Tie her up?'



'There, good-night, run along; you are a good girl, but your mental

Geschirr is not arranged for light and airy conversation.  Leave me to my

delusions.'





II



It was a night of anguish, of course--at least I supposed it was, for it

had all the symptoms of it--but it passed at last, and the Christian

Scientist came, and I was glad.  She was middle-aged, and large and bony

and erect, and had an austere face and a resolute jaw and a Roman beak

and was a widow in the third degree, and her name was Fuller.  I was

eager to get to business and find relief, but she was distressingly

deliberate.  She unpinned and unhooked and uncoupled her upholsteries one

by one, abolished the wrinkles with a flirt of her hand and hung the

articles up; peeled off her gloves and disposed of them, got a book out

of her hand-bag, then drew a chair to the bedside, descended into it

without hurry, and I hung out my tongue.  She said, with pity but without

passion:



'Return it to its receptacle.  We deal with the mind only, not with its

dumb servants.'



I could not offer my pulse, because the connection was broken; but she

detected the apology before I could word it, and indicated by a negative

tilt of her head that the pulse was another dumb servant that she had no

use for.  Then I thought I would tell her my symptoms and how I felt, so

that she would understand the case; but that was another inconsequence,

she did not need to know those things; moreover, my remark about how I

felt was an abuse of language, a misapplication of terms--



'One does not feel,' she explained; 'there is no such thing as feeling:

therefore, to speak of a non-existent thing as existent as a

contradiction.  Matter has no existence; nothing exists but mind; the

mind cannot feel pain, it can only imagine it.'



'But if it hurts, just the same--'



'It doesn't.  A thing which is unreal cannot exercise the functions of

reality.  Pain is unreal; hence pain cannot hurt.'



In making a sweeping gesture to indicate the act of shooing the illusion

of pain out of the mind, she raked her hand on a pin in her dress, said

'Ouch!' and went tranquilly on with her talk.  'You should never allow

yourself to speak of how you feel, nor permit others to ask you how you

are feeling: you should never concede that you are ill, nor permit others

to talk about disease or pain or death or similar non-existences in your

preserve.  Such talk only encourages the mind to continue its empty

imaginings.'  Just at that point the Stubenmadchen trod on the cat's

tail, and the cat let fly a frenzy of cat-profanity.  I asked with

caution:



'Is a cat's opinion about pain valuable?'



'A cat has no opinion; opinions proceed from the mind only; the lower

animals, being eternally perishable, have not been granted mind; without

mind opinion is impossible.'



'She merely imagined she felt a pain--the cat?'



'She cannot imagine a pain, for imagination is an effect of mind; without

mind, there is no imagination.  A cat has no imagination.'



'Then she had a real pain?'



'I have already told you there is no such thing as real pain.'



'It is strange and interesting.  I do wonder what was the matter with the

cat.  Because, there being no such thing as real pain, and she not being

able to imagine an imaginary thing, it would seem that God in his Pity

has compensated the cat with some kind of a mysterious emotion useable

when her tail is trodden on which for the moment joins cat and Christian

in one common brotherhood of--'



She broke in with an irritated--



'Peace! The cat feels nothing, the Christian feels nothing.  Your empty

and foolish imaginings are profanation and blasphemy, and can do you an

injury.  It is wiser and better and holier to recognise and confess that

there is no such thing as disease or pain or death.'



'I am full of imaginary tortures,' I said, 'but I do not think I could be

any more uncomfortable if they were real ones.  What must I do to get rid

of them?'



'There is no occasion to get rid of them, since they do not exist.  They

are illusions propagated by matter, and matter has no existence; there is

no such thing as matter.'



'It sounds right and clear, but yet it seems in a degree elusive; it

seems to slip through, just when you think you are getting a grip on it.'



'Explain.'



'Well, for instance: if there is no such thing as matter, how can matter

propagate things?'



In her compassion she almost smiled.  She would have smiled if there were

any such thing as a smile.



'It is quite simple,' she said; 'the fundamental propositions of

Christian Science explain it, and they are summarised in the four

following self-evident propositions: 1.  God is All in all.  2.  God is

good.  Good is Mind.  3.  God, Spirit, being all, nothing is matter.

4.  Life, God, omnipotent Good, deny death, evil sin, disease.  There--

now you see.'



It seemed nebulous: it did not seem to say anything about the difficulty

in hand--how non-existent matter can propagate illusions.  I said, with

some hesitancy:



'Does--does it explain?'



'Doesn't it?  Even if read backward it will do it.'



With a budding hope, I asked her to do it backward.



'Very well.  Disease sin evil death deny Good omnipotent God life matter

is nothing all being Spirit God Mind is Good good is God all in All is

God.  There--do you understand now?



'It--it--well, it is plainer than it was before; still--'



'Well?'



'Could you try it some more ways?'



'As many as you like: it always means the same.  Interchanged in any way

you please it cannot be made to mean anything different from what it

means when put in any other way.  Because it is perfect.  You can jumble

it all up, and it makes no difference: it always comes out the way it was

before.  It was a marvellous mind that produced it.  As a mental tour de

force it is without a mate, it defies alike the simple, the concrete, and

the occult.'



'It seems to be a corker.'



I blushed for the word, but it was out before I could stop it.



'A what?'



'A--wonderful structure--combination, so to speak, or profound thoughts--

unthinkable ones--un--'



'It is true.  Read backwards, or forwards, or perpendicularly, or at any

given angle, these four propositions will always be found to agree in

statement and proof.'



'Ah--proof.  Now we are coming at it.  The statements agree; they agree

with--with--anyway, they agree; I noticed that; but what is it they

prove--I mean, in particular?'



'Why, nothing could be clearer.  They prove: 1.  GOD--Principle, Life,

Truth, Love, Soul, Spirit, Mind.  Do you get that?'



'I--well, I seem to.  Go on, please.



'2.  MAN--God's universal idea, individual, perfect, eternal.  Is it

clear?'



'It--I think so.  Continue.'



'3.  IDEA--An image in Mind; the immediate object of understanding.

There it is--the whole sublime Arcana of Christian Science in a nutshell.

Do you find a weak place in it anywhere?'



'Well--no; it seems strong.'



'Very well.  There is more.  Those three constitute the Scientific

Definition of Immortal Mind.  Next, we have the Scientific Definition of

Mortal Mind.  Thus.  FIRST DEGREE: Depravity.  1.  Physical--Passions and

appetites, fear, depraved will, pride, envy, deceit, hatred, revenge,

sin, disease, death.'



'Phantasms, madam--unrealities, as I understand it.'



'Every one.  SECOND DEGREE: Evil Disappearing.  1.  Moral--Honesty,

affection, compassion, hope, faith, meekness, temperance.  Is it clear?'



'Crystal.'



'THIRD DEGREE: Spiritual Salvation.  1.  Spiritual--Faith, wisdom, power,

purity, understanding, health, love.  You see how searchingly and

co-ordinately interdependent and anthropomorphous it all is.  In this

Third Degree, as we know by the revelations of Christian Science, mortal

mind disappears.'



'Not earlier?'



'No, not until the teaching and preparation for the Third Degree are

completed.'



'It is not until then that one is enabled to take hold of Christian

Science effectively, and with the right sense of sympathy and kinship, as

I understand you.  That is to say, it could not succeed during the

process of the Second Degree, because there would still be remains of

mind left; and therefore--but I interrupted you.  You were about to

further explain the good results proceeding from the erosions and

disintegrations effected by the Third Degree.  It is very interesting: go

on, please.'



'Yes, as I was saying, in this Third Degree mortal mind disappears.

Science so reverses the evidence before the corporeal human senses as to

make this scriptural testimony true in our hearts, "the last shall be

first and the first shall be last," that God and His idea may be to us--

what divinity really is, and must of necessity be--all-inclusive.'



'It is beautiful.  And with that exhaustive exactness your choice and

arrangement of words confirms and establishes what you have claimed for

the powers and functions of the Third Degree.  The Second could probably

produce only temporary absence of mind, it is reserved to the Third to

make it permanent.  A sentence framed under the auspices of the Second

could have a kind of meaning--a sort of deceptive semblance of it--

whereas it is only under the magic of the Third that that defect would

disappear.  Also, without doubt, it is the Third Degree that contributes

another remarkable specialty to Christian Science: viz., ease and flow

and lavishness of words, and rhythm and swing and smoothness.  There must

be a special reason for this?'



'Yes--God-all, all-God, good Good, non-Matter, Matteration, Spirit,

Bones, Truth.'



'That explains it.'



'There is nothing in Christian Science that is not explicable; for God is

one, Time is one, Individuality is one, and may be one of a series, one

of many, as an individual man, individual horse; whereas God is one, not

one of a series, but one alone and without an equal.'



'These are noble thoughts.  They make one burn to know more.  How does

Christian Science explain the spiritual relation of systematic duality to

incidental reflection?'



'Christian Science reverses the seeming relation of Soul and body--as

astronomy reverses the human perception of the movement of the solar

system--and makes body tributary to Mind.  As it is the earth which is in

motion, while the sun is at rest, though in viewing the sun rise one

finds it impossible to believe the sun not to be really rising, so the

body is but the humble servant of the restful Mind, though it seems

otherwise to finite sense; but we shall never understand this while we

admit that soul is in body, or mind in matter, and that man is included

in non-intelligence.  Soul is God, unchangeable and eternal; and man

coexists with and reflects Soul, for the All-in-all is the Altogether,

and the Altogether embraces the All-one, Soul-Mind, Mind-Soul, Love,

Spirit, Bones, Liver, one of a series, alone and without an equal.'



(It is very curious, the effect which Christian Science has upon the

verbal bowels.  Particularly the Third Degree; it makes one think of a

dictionary with the cholera.  But I only thought this; I did not say it.)



'What is the origin of Christian Science?  Is it a gift of God, or did it

just happen?'



'In a sense, it is a gift of God.  That is to say, its powers are from

Him, but the credit of the discovery of the powers and what they are for

is due to an American lady.'



'Indeed?  When did this occur?'



'In 1866.  That is the immortal date when pain and disease and death

disappeared from the earth to return no more for ever.  That is, the

fancies for which those terms stand, disappeared.  The things themselves

had never existed; therefore as soon as it was perceived that there were

no such things, they were easily banished.  The history and nature of the

great discovery are set down in the book here, and--'



'Did the lady write the book?'



'Yes, she wrote it all, herself.  The title is "Science and Health, with

Key to the Scriptures"--for she explains the Scriptures; they were not

understood before.  Not even by the twelve Disciples.  She begins thus--I

will read it to you.'



But she had forgotten to bring her glasses.



'Well, it is no matter,' she said, 'I remember the words--indeed, all

Christian Scientists know the book by heart; it is necessary in our

practice.  We should otherwise make mistakes and do harm.  She begins

thus: "In the year 1866 I discovered the Science of Metaphysical Healing,

and named it Christian Science."  And she says--quite beautifully, I

think--"Through Christian Science, religion and medicine are inspired

with a diviner nature and essence, fresh pinions are given to faith and

understanding, and thoughts acquaint themselves intelligently with God."

Her very words.'



'It is elegant.  And it is a fine thought, too--marrying religion to

medicine, instead of medicine to the undertaker in the old way; for

religion and medicine properly belong together, they being the basis of

all spiritual and physical health.  What kind of medicine do you give for

the ordinary diseases, such as--'



'We never give medicine in any circumstances whatever! We--'



'But, madam, it says--'



'I don't care what it says, and I don't wish to talk about it.'



'I am sorry if I have offended, but you see the mention seemed in some

way inconsistent, and--'



'There are no inconsistencies in Christian Science.  The thing is

impossible, for the Science is absolute.  It cannot be otherwise, since

it proceeds directly from the All-in-all and the Everything-in-Which,

also Soul, Bones, Truth, one of a series, alone and without equal.  It is

Mathematics purified from material dross and made spiritual.'



'I can see that, but--'



'It rests upon the immovable basis of an Apodictical Principle.'



The word flattened itself against my mind trying to get in, and

disordered me a little, and before I could inquire into its pertinency,

she was already throwing the needed light:



'This Apodictical Principle is the absolute Principle of Scientific

Mind-healing, the sovereign Omnipotence which delivers the children of

men from pain, disease, decay, and every ill that flesh is heir to.'



'Surely not every ill, every decay?'



'Every one; there are no exceptions; there is no such thing as decay--it

is an unreality, it has no existence.'



'But without your glasses your failing eyesight does not permit you to--'



'My eyesight cannot fail; nothing can fail; the Mind is master, and the

Mind permits no retrogression.'



She was under the inspiration of the Third Degree, therefore there could

be no profit in continuing this part of the subject.  I shifted to other

ground and inquired further concerning the Discoverer of the Science.



'Did the discovery come suddenly, like Klondike, or after long study and

calculation, like America?'



'The comparisons are not respectful, since they refer to trivialities--

but let it pass.  I will answer in the Discoverer's own words: "God had

been graciously fitting me, during many years, for the reception of a

final revelation of the absolute Principle of Scientific Mind-healing."'



'Many years?  How many?'



'Eighteen centuries!'



'All God, God-good, good-God, Truth, Bones, Liver, one of a series alone

and without equal--it is amazing!'



'You may well say it, sir.  Yet it is but the truth.  This American lady,

our revered and sacred founder, is distinctly referred to and her coming

prophesied, in the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse; she could not have

been more plainly indicated by St.  John without actually mentioning her

name.'



'How strange, how wonderful!'



'I will quote her own words, for her "Key to the Scriptures:" "The

twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse has a special suggestiveness in

connection with this nineteenth century."  There--do you note that?

Think--note it well.'



'But--what does it mean?'



'Listen, and you will know.  I quote her inspired words again: "In the

opening of the Sixth Seal, typical of six thousand years since Adam,

there is one distinctive feature which has special reference to the

present age.  Thus:



'"Revelation xii.  1.  And there appeared a great wonder in heaven--a

woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her

head a crown of twelve stars."



'That is our Head, our Chief, our Discoverer of Christian Science--

nothing can be plainer, nothing surer.  And note this:



'"Revelation xii.  6.  And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she

had a place prepared of God."



'That is Boston.'



'I recognise it, madam.  These are sublime things and impressive; I never

understood these passages before; please go on with the--with the--

proofs.'



'Very well.  Listen:



'"And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a

cloud; and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the

sun, and his feet as pillars of fire.  And he had in his hand a little

book."



'A little book, merely a little book--could words be modester?  Yet how

stupendous its importance! Do you know what book that was?'



'Was it--'



'I hold it in my hand--"Christian Science"!'



'Love, Livers, Lights, Bones, Truth, Kidneys, one of a series, alone and

without equal--it is beyond imagination and wonder!'



'Hear our Founder's eloquent words: "Then will a voice from harmony cry,

'Go and take the little book; take it and eat it up, and it shall make

thy belly bitter; but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.'  Mortal,

obey the heavenly evangel.  Take up Divine Science.  Read it from

beginning to end.  Study it, ponder it.  It will be indeed sweet at its

first taste, when it heals you; but murmur not over Truth, if you find

its digestion bitter."  You now know the history of our dear and holy

Science, sir, and that its origin is not of this earth, but only its

discovery.  I will leave the book with you and will go, now, but give

yourself no uneasiness--I will give you absent treatment from now till I

go to bed.'





III



Under the powerful influence of the near treatment and the absent

treatment together, my bones were gradually retreating inward and

disappearing from view.  The good word took a brisk start, now, and went

on quite swiftly.  My body was diligently straining and stretching, this

way and that, to accommodate the processes of restoration, and every

minute or two I heard a dull click inside and knew that the two ends of a

fracture had been successfully joined.  This muffled clicking and

gritting and grinding and rasping continued during the next three hours,

and then stopped--the connections had all been made.  All except

dislocations; there were only seven of these: hips, shoulders, knees,

neck; so that was soon over; one after another they slipped into their

sockets with a sound like pulling a distant cork, and I jumped up as good

as new, as to framework, and sent for the horse-doctor.



I was obliged to do this because I had a stomach-ache and a cold in the

head, and I was not willing to trust these things any longer in the hands

of a woman whom I did not know, and in whose ability to successfully

treat mere disease I had lost all confidence.  My position was justified

by the fact that the cold and the ache had been in her charge from the

first, along with the fractures, but had experienced not a shade of

relief; and indeed the ache was even growing worse and worse, and more

and more bitter, now, probably on account of the protracted abstention

from food and drink.



The horse-doctor came, a pleasant man and full of hope and professional

interest in the case.  In the matter of smell he was pretty aromatic, in

fact quite horsey, and I tried to arrange with him for absent treatment,

but it was not in his line, so out of delicacy I did not press it.  He

looked at my teeth and examined my hock, and said my age and general

condition were favourable to energetic measures; therefore he would give

me something to turn the stomach-ache into the botts and the cold in the

head into the blind staggers; then he should be on his own beat and would

know what to do.  He made up a bucket of bran-mash, and said a dipperful

of it every two hours, alternated with a drench with turpentine and

axle-grease in it, would either knock my ailments out of me in

twenty-four hours or so interest me in other ways as to make me forget

they were on the premises.  He administered my first dose himself, then

took his leave, saying I was free to eat and drink anything I pleased and

in any quantity I liked.  But I was not hungry any more, and did not care

for food.



I took up the 'Christian Scientist' book and read half of it, then took a

dipperful of drench and read the other half.  The resulting experiences

were full of interest and adventure.  All through the rumblings and

grindings and quakings and effervescings accompanying the evolution of

the ache into the botts and the cold into the blind staggers I could note

the generous struggle for mastery going on between the mash and the

drench and the literature; and often I could tell which was ahead, and

could easily distinguish the literature from the others when the others

were separate, though not when they were mixed; for when a bran-mash and

an eclectic drench are mixed together they look just like the Apodictical

Principle out on a lark, and no one can tell it from that.  The finish

was reached at last, the evolutions were complete and a fine success; but

I think that this result could have been achieved with fewer materials.

I believe the mash was necessary to the conversion of the stomach-ache

into the boots, but I think one could develop the blind staggers out of

the literature by itself; also, that blind staggers produced in this way

would be of a better quality and more lasting than any produced by the

artificial processes of a horse-doctor.



For of all the strange, and frantic, and incomprehensible, and

uninterpretable books which the imagination of man has created, surely

this one is the prize sample.  It is written with a limitless confidence

and complacency, and with a dash and stir and earnestness which often

compel the effects of eloquence, even when the words do not seem to have

any traceable meaning.  There are plenty of people who imagine they

understand the book; I know this, for I have talked with them; but in all

cases they were people who also imagined that there were no such things

as pain, sickness, and death, and no realities in the world; nothing

actually existent but Mind.  It seems to me to modify the value of their

testimony.  When these people talk about Christian Science they do as

Mrs. Fuller did; they do not use their own language, but the book's; they

pour out the book's showy incoherences, and leave you to find out later

that they were not originating, but merely quoting; they seem to know the

volume by heart, and to revere it as they would a Bible--another Bible,

perhaps I ought to say.  Plainly the book was written under the mental

desolations of the Third Degree, and I feel sure that none but the

membership of that Degree can discover meanings in it.  When you read it

you seem to be listening to a lively and aggressive and oracular speech

delivered in an unknown tongue, a speech whose spirit you get but not the

particulars; or, to change the figure, you seem to be listening to a

vigorous instrument which is making a noise it thinks is a tune, but

which to persons not members of the band is only the martial tooting of a

trombone, and merely stirs the soul through the noise but does not convey

a meaning.



The book's serenities of self-satisfaction do almost seem to smack of a

heavenly origin--they have no blood-kin in the earth.  It is more than

human to be so placidly certain about things, and so finely superior, and

so airily content with one's performance.  Without ever presenting

anything which may rightfully be called by the strong name of Evidence,

and sometimes without even mentioning a reason for a deduction at all, it

thunders out the startling words, 'I have Proved' so and so! It takes the

Pope and all the great guns of his church in battery assembled to

authoritatively settle and establish the meaning of a sole and single

unclarified passage of Scripture, and this at vast cost of time and study

and reflection, but the author of this work is superior to all that: she

finds the whole Bible in an unclarified condition, and at small expense

of time and no expense of mental effort she clarifies it from lid to lid,

reorganises and improves the meanings, then authoritatively settles and

establishes them with formulae which you cannot tell from 'Let there be

light!' and 'Here you have it!' It is the first time since the dawn-days

of Creation that a Voice has gone crashing through space with such placid

and complacent confidence and command.





IV



A word upon a question of authorship.  Not that quite; but, rather, a

question of emendation and revision.  We know that the Bible-Annex was

not written by Mrs. Eddy, but was handed down to her eighteen hundred

years ago by the Angel of the Apocalypse; but did she translate it alone,

or did she have help?  There seems to be evidence that she had help.  For

there are four several copyrights on it--1875, 1885, 1890, 1894.  It did

not come down in English, for in that language it could not have acquired

copyright--there were no copyright laws eighteen centuries ago, and in my

opinion no English language--at least up there.  This makes it

substantially certain that the Annex is a translation.  Then, was not the

first translation complete?  If it was, on what grounds were the later

copyrights granted?



I surmise that the first translation was poor; and that a friend or

friends of Mrs. Eddy mended its English three times, and finally got it

into its present shape, where the grammar is plenty good enough, and the

sentences are smooth and plausible though they do not mean anything.  I

think I am right in this surmise, for Mrs. Eddy cannot write English

to-day, and this is argument that she never could.  I am not able to

guess who did the mending, but I think it was not done by any member of

the Eddy Trust, nor by the editors of the 'Christian Science Journal,'

for their English is not much better than Mrs. Eddy's.



However, as to the main point: it is certain that Mrs. Eddy did not

doctor the Annex's English herself.  Her original, spontaneous,

undoctored English furnishes ample proof of this.  Here are samples from

recent articles from her unappeasable pen; double columned with them are

a couple of passages from the Annex.  It will be seen that they throw

light.  The italics are mine:



1. 'What plague spot,          'Therefore the efficient

or bacilli were (sic) gnawing  remedy is to destroy the

(sic) at the heart of this     patient's unfortunate belief,

metropolis... and bringing     by both silently and audibly

it on bended knee?             arguing the opposite facts in

Why, it was an institute that  regard to harmonious being

had entered its vitals (sic)   representing man as

that, among other things,      healthful instead of diseased,

taught games,' et cetera. (P.  and showing that it is

670, 'C.S.Journal,' article    impossible for matter to suffer,

entitled 'A Narrative--by      to feel pain or heat, to be

Mary Baker G. Eddy.')          thirsty or sick.' (P. 375, Annex.)

2. 'Parks sprang up (sic)...

electric street cars run       'Man is never sick; for

(sic) merrily through several  Mind is not sick, and matter

streets, concrete sidewalks    cannot be. A false belief

and macadamised roads dotted   is both the tempter and the

(sic) the place,' et cetera.   tempted, the sin and the

(Ibid.)                        sinner, the disease and its

3. 'Shorn (sic) of its         cause. It is well to be calm

suburbs it had indeed little   in sickness; to be hopeful is

left to admire, save to (sic)  still better; but to

such as fancy a skeleton       understand that sickness is not

above ground breathing (sic)   real, and that Truth can

slowly through a barren (sic)  destroy it, is best of all, for

breast.' (Ibid.)               it is the universal and perfect

                               remedy.' (Chapter xii.,

                               Annex.)





You notice the contrast between the smooth, plausible, elegant, addled

English of the doctored Annex and the lumbering, ragged, ignorant output

of the translator's natural, spontaneous, and unmedicated penwork.  The

English of the Annex has been slicked up by a very industrious and

painstaking hand--but it was not Mrs. Eddy's.



If Mrs. Eddy really wrote or translated the Annex, her original draft was

exactly in harmony with the English of her plague-spot or bacilli which

were gnawing at the insides of the metropolis and bringing its heart on

bended knee, thus exposing to the eye the rest of the skeleton breathing

slowly through a barren breast.  And it bore little or no resemblance to

the book as we have it now--now that the salaried polisher has holystoned

all of the genuine Eddyties out of it.



Will the plague-spot article go into a volume just as it stands?  I think

not.  I think the polisher will take off his coat and vest and cravat and

'demonstrate over' it a couple of weeks and sweat it into a shape

something like the following--and then Mrs. Eddy will publish it and

leave people to believe that she did the polishing herself:



1.  What injurious influence was it that was affecting the city's morals?

It was a social club which propagated an interest in idle amusements,

disseminated a knowledge of games, et cetera.



2.  By the magic of the new and nobler influences the sterile spaces were

transformed into wooded parks, the merry electric car replaced the

melancholy 'bus, smooth concrete the tempestuous plank sidewalk, the

macadamised road the primitive corduroy, et cetera.



3.  Its pleasant suburbs gone, there was little left to admire save the

wrecked graveyard with its uncanny exposures.



The Annex contains one sole and solitary humorous remark.  There is a

most elaborate and voluminous Index, and it is preceded by this note:



'This Index will enable the student to find any thought or idea contained

in the book.'





V



No one doubts--certainly not I--that the mind exercises a powerful

influence over the body.  From the beginning of time, the sorcerer, the

interpreter of dreams, the fortune-teller, the charlatan, the quack, the

wild medicine-man, the educated physician, the mesmerist, and the

hypnotist have made use of the client's imagination to help them in their

work.  They have all recognised the potency and availability of that

force.  Physicians cure many patients with a bread pill; they know that

where the disease is only a fancy, the patient's confidence in the doctor

will make the bread pill effective.



Faith in the doctor.  Perhaps that is the entire thing.  It seems to look

like it.  In old times the King cured the king's evil by the touch of the

royal hand.  He frequently made extraordinary cures.  Could his footman

have done it?  No--not in his own clothes.  Disguised as the King, could

he have done it?  I think we may not doubt it.  I think we may feel sure

that it was not the King's touch that made the cure in any instance, but

the patient's faith in the efficacy of a King's touch.  Genuine and

remarkable cures have been achieved through contact with the relics of a

saint.  Is it not likely that any other bones would have done as well if

the substitution had been concealed from the patient?  When I was a boy,

a farmer's wife who lived five miles from our village, had great fame as

a faith-doctor--that was what she called herself.  Sufferers came to her

from all around, and she laid her hand upon them and said, 'Have faith--

it is all that is necessary,' and they went away well of their ailments.

She was not a religious woman, and pretended to no occult powers.  She

said that the patient's faith in her did the work.  Several times I saw

her make immediate cures of severe toothaches.  My mother was the

patient.  In Austria there is a peasant who drives a great trade in this

sort of industry and has both the high and the low for patients.  He gets

into prison every now and then for practising without a diploma, but his

business is as brisk as ever when he gets out, for his work is

unquestionably successful and keeps his reputation high.  In Bavaria

there is a man who performed so many great cures that he had to retire

from his profession of stage-carpentering in order to meet the demand of

his constantly increasing body of customers.  He goes on from year to

year doing his miracles, and has become very rich.  He pretends to no

religious helps, no supernatural aids, but thinks there is something in

his make-up which inspires the confidence of his patients, and that it is

this confidence which does the work and not some mysterious power issuing

from himself.



Within the last quarter of a century, in America, several sects of curers

have appeared under various names and have done notable things in the way

of healing ailments without the use of medicines.  There are the Mind

Cure, the Faith Cure, the Prayer Cure, the Mental-Science Cure, and the

Christian-Science Cure; and apparently they all do their miracles with

the same old powerful instrument--the patient's imagination.  Differing

names, but no difference in the process.  But they do not give that

instrument the credit; each sect claims that its way differs from the

ways of the others.



They all achieve some cures, there is no question about it; and the Faith

Cure and the Prayer Cure probably do no harm when they do no good, since

they do not forbid the patient to help out the cure with medicines if he

wants to; but the others bar medicines, and claim ability to cure every

conceivable human ailment through the application of their mental forces

alone.  They claim ability to cure malignant cancer, and other affections

which have never been cured in the history of the race.  There would seem

to be an element of danger here.  It has the look of claiming too much, I

think.  Public confidence would probably be increased if less were

claimed.



I believe it might be shown that all the 'mind' sects except Christian

Science have lucid intervals; intervals in which they betray some

diffidence, and in effect confess that they are not the equals of the

Deity; but if the Christian Scientist even stops with being merely the

equal of the Deity, it is not clearly provable by his Christian-Science

Amended Bible.  In the usual Bible the Deity recognises pain, disease,

and death as facts, but the Christian Scientist knows better.  Knows

better, and is not diffident about saying so.



The Christian Scientist was not able to cure my stomach-ache and my cold;

but the horse-doctor did it.  This convinces me that Christian Science

claims too much.  In my opinion it ought to let diseases alone and

confine itself to surgery.  There it would have everything its own way.



The horse-doctor charged me thirty kreutzers, and I paid him; in fact I

doubled it and gave him a shilling.  Mrs. Fuller brought in an itemised

bill for a crate of broken bones mended in two hundred and thirty-four

places--one dollar per fracture.



'Nothing exists but Mind?'



'Nothing,' she answered.  'All else is substanceless, all else is

imaginary.'



I gave her an imaginary cheque, and now she is suing me for substantial

dollars.  It looks inconsistent.





VI



Let us consider that we are all partially insane.  It will explain us to

each other, it will unriddle many riddles, it will make clear and simple

many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and

obscurities now.



Those of us who are not in the asylum, and not demonstrably due there,

are nevertheless no doubt insane in one or two particulars--I think we

must admit this; but I think that we are otherwise healthy-minded.  I

think that when we all see one thing alike, it is evidence that as

regards that one thing, our minds are perfectly sound.  Now there are

really several things which we do all see alike; things which we all

accept, and about which we do not dispute.  For instance, we who are

outside of the asylum all agree that water seeks its level; that the sun

gives light and heat; that fire consumes; that fog is damp; that 6 times

6 are thirty-six; that 2 from 10 leave eight; that 8 and 7 are fifteen.

These are perhaps the only things we are agreed about; but although they

are so few, they are of inestimable value, because they make an

infallible standard of sanity.  Whosoever accepts them we know to be

substantially sane; sufficiently sane; in the working essentials, sane.

Whoever disputes a single one of them we know to be wholly insane, and

qualified for the asylum.



Very well, the man who disputes none of them we concede to be entitled to

go at large--but that is concession enough; we cannot go any further than

that; for we know that in all matters of mere opinion that same man is

insane--just as insane as we are; just as insane as Shakespeare was, just

as insane as the Pope is.  We know exactly where to put our finger upon

his insanity; it is where his opinion differs from ours.



That is a simple rule, and easy to remember.  When I, a thoughtful and

unbiased Presbyterian, examine the Koran, I know that beyond any question

every Mohammedan is insane; not in all things, but in religious matters.

When a thoughtful and unbiased Mohammedan examines the Westminster

Catechism, he knows that beyond any question I am spiritually insane.  I

cannot prove to him that he is insane, because you never can prove

anything to a lunatic--for that is a part of his insanity and the

evidence of it.  He cannot prove to me that I am insane, for my mind has

the same defect that afflicts his.  All democrats are insane, but not one

of them knows it; none but the republicans and mugwumps know it.  All the

republicans are insane, but only the democrats and mugwumps can perceive

it.  The rule is perfect; in all matters of opinion our adversaries are

insane.  When I look around me I am often troubled to see how many people

are mad.  To mention only a few:



The Atheist,                      The Shakers,

The Infidel,                      The Millerites,

The Agnostic,                     The Mormons,

The Baptist,                      The Laurence Oliphant

The Methodist,                      Harrisites,

The Catholic, and the other       The Grand Lama's people,

  115 Christian sects, the        The Monarchists,

  Presbyterian excepted,          The Imperialists,

The 72 Mohammedan sects,          The Democrats,

The Buddhist,                     The Republicans (but not

The Blavatsky-Buddhist,             the Mugwumps),

The Nationalist,                  The Mind-Curists,

The Confucian,                    The Faith-Curists,

The Spiritualist,                 The Mental Scientists,

The 2,000 East Indian             The Allopaths,

  sects,                          The Homeopaths,

The Peculiar People,              The Electropaths,

The Swedenborgians,





The--but there's no end to the list; there are millions of them! And all

insane; each in his own way; insane as to his pet fad or opinion, but

otherwise sane and rational.



This should move us to be charitable toward one another's lunacies.  I

recognise that in his special belief the Christian Scientist is insane,

because he does not believe as I do; but I hail him as my mate and fellow

because I am as insane as he--insane from his point of view, and his

point of view is as authoritative as mine and worth as much.  That is to

say, worth a brass farthing.  Upon a great religious or political

question the opinion of the dullest head in the world is worth the same

as the opinion of the brightest head in the world--a brass farthing.  How

do we arrive at this?  It is simple: The affirmative opinion of a stupid

man is neutralised by the negative opinion of his stupid neighbour--no

decision is reached; the affirmative opinion of the intellectual giant

Gladstone is neutralised by the negative opinion of the intellectual

giant Cardinal Newman--no decision is reached.  Opinions that prove

nothing are, of course, without value--any but a dead person knows that

much.  This obliges us to admit the truth of the unpalatable proposition

just mentioned above--that in disputed matters political and religious

one man's opinion is worth no more than his peer's, and hence it follows

that no man's opinion possesses any real value.  It is a humbling

thought, but there is no way to get around it: all opinions upon these

great subjects are brass-farthing opinions.



It is a mere plain simple fact--as clear and as certain as that 8 and 7

make fifteen.  And by it we recognise that we are all insane, as concerns

those matters.  If we were sane we should all see a political or

religious doctrine alike, there would be no dispute: it would be a case

of 8 and 7--just as it is in heaven, where all are sane and none insane.

There there is but one religion, one belief, the harmony is perfect,

there is never a discordant note.



Under protection of these preliminaries I suppose I may now repeat

without offence that the Christian Scientist is insane.  I mean him no

discourtesy, and I am not charging--nor even imagining--that he is

insaner than the rest of the human race.  I think he is more

picturesquely insane that some of us.  At the same time, I am quite sure

that in one important and splendid particular he is saner than is the

vast bulk of the race.



Why is he insane?  I told you before: it is because his opinions are not

ours.  I know of no other reason, and I do not need any other; it is the

only way we have of discovering insanity when it is not violent.  It is

merely the picturesqueness of his insanity that makes it more interesting

than my kind or yours.  For instance, consider his 'little book'--the one

described in the previous article; the 'little book' exposed in the sky

eighteen centuries ago by the flaming angel of the Apocalypse and handed

down in our day to Mrs. Mary Baker G.  Eddy of New Hampshire and

translated by her, word for word, into English (with help of a polisher),

and now published and distributed in hundreds of editions by her at a

clear profit per volume, above cost, of 700 per cent.!--a profit which

distinctly belongs to the angel of the Apocalypse, and let him collect it

if he can; a 'little book' which the C.S.  very frequently calls by just

that name, and always inclosed in quotation-marks to keep its high origin

exultantly in mind; a 'little book' which 'explains' and reconstructs and

new-paints and decorates the Bible and puts a mansard roof on it and a

lightning-rod and all the other modern improvements; a little book which

for the present affects to travel in yoke with the Bible and be friendly

to it, and within half a century will hitch it in the rear, and

thenceforth travel tandem, itself in the lead, in the coming great march

of Christian Scientism through the Protestant dominions of the planet.



Perhaps I am putting the tandem arrangement too far away; perhaps five

years might be nearer the mark than fifty; for a Viennese lady told me

last night that in the Christian Science Mosque in Boston she noticed

some things which seem to me to promise a shortening of the interval; on

one side there was a display of texts from the New Testament, signed with

the Saviour's initials, 'J.C.;' and on the opposite side a display of

texts from the 'little book' signed--with the author's mere initials?

No--signed with Mrs. Mary Baker G.  Eddy's name in full.  Perhaps the

Angel of the Apocalypse likes this kind of piracy.  I made this remark

lightly to a Christian Scientist this morning, but he did not receive it

lightly, but said it was jesting upon holy things; he said there was no

piracy, for the angel did not compose the book, he only brought it--'God

composed it.'  I could have retorted that it was a case of piracy just

the same; that the displayed texts should be signed with the Author's

initials, and that to sign them with the translator's train of names was

another case of 'jesting upon holy things.'  However, I did not say these

things, for this Scientist was a large person, and although by his own

doctrine we have no substance, but are fictions and unrealities, I knew

he could hit me an imaginary blow which would furnish me an imaginary

pain which could last me a week.  The lady said that in that Mosque there

were two pulpits; in one of them was a man with the Former Bible, in the

other a woman with Mrs. Eddy's apocalyptic Annex; and from these books

the man and the woman were reading verse and verse about:



     'Hungry ones throng to hear the Bible read in connection with the

     text-book of Christian Science, "Science and Health, with Key to the

     Scriptures," by Mary Baker G.  Eddy.  These are our only preachers.

     They are the word of God.'--Christian Science Journal, October

     1898.



Are these things picturesque?  The Viennese lady told me that in a chapel

of the Mosque there was a picture or image of Mrs. Eddy, and that before

it burns a never-extinguished light.  Is that picturesque?  How long do

you think it will be before the Christian Scientist will be worshipping

that image and praying to it?  How long do you think it will be before it

is claimed that Mrs. Eddy is a Redeemer, a Christ, or Christ's equal?

Already her army of disciples speak of her reverently as 'Our Mother.'

How long will it be before they place her on the steps of the Throne

beside the Virgin--and later a step higher?  First, Mary the Virgin and

Mary the Matron; later, with a change of Precedence, Mary the Matron and

Mary the Virgin.  Let the artist get ready with his canvas and his

brushes; the new Renaissance is on its way, and there will be money in

altar-canvases--a thousand times as much as the Popes and their Church

ever spent on the Old Masters; for their riches were as poverty as

compared with what is going to pour into the treasure-chest of the

Christian-Scientist Papacy by-and-by, let us not doubt it.  We will

examine the financial outlook presently and see what it promises.  A

favourite subject of the new Old Master will be the first verse of the

twelfth chapter of Revelation--a verse which Mrs. Eddy says (in her Annex

to the Scriptures) has 'one distinctive feature which has special

reference to the present age'--and to her, as is rather pointedly

indicated:



     'And there appeared a great wonder in heaven--a woman clothed with

     the sun and the moon under her feet,' etc.



The woman clothed with the sun will be a portrait of Mrs. Eddy.



Is it insanity to believe that Christian Scientism is destined to make

the most formidable show that any new religion has made in the world

since the birth and spread of Mohammedanism, and that within a century

from now it may stand second to Rome only, in numbers and power in

Christendom?



If this is a wild dream it will not be easy to prove it is so just yet, I

think.  There seems argument that it may come true.  The

Christian-Science 'boom' is not yet five years old; yet already it has

500 churches and 1,000,000 members in America.



It has its start, you see, and it is a phenomenally good one.  Moreover,

it is latterly spreading with a constantly accelerating swiftness.  It

has a better chance to grow and prosper and achieve permanency than any

other existing 'ism;' for it has more to offer than any other.  The past

teaches us that, in order to succeed, a movement like this must not be a

mere philosophy, it must be a religion; also, that it must not claim

entire originality, but content itself with passing for an improvement on

an existing religion, and show its hand later, when strong and

prosperous--like Mohammedanism.



Next, there must be money--and plenty of it.



Next, the power and authority and capital must be concentrated in the

grip of a small and irresponsible clique, with nobody outside privileged

to ask questions or find fault.



Next, as before remarked, it must bait its hook with some new and

attractive advantages over the baits offered by the other religions.



A new movement equipped with some of these endowments--like spiritualism,

for instance--may count upon a considerable success; a new movement

equipped with the bulk of them--like Mohammedanism, for instance--may

count upon a widely extended conquest.  Mormonism had all the requisites

but one--it had nothing new and nothing valuable to bait with; and,

besides, it appealed to the stupid and the ignorant only.  Spiritualism

lacked the important detail of concentration of money and authority in

the hands of an irresponsible clique.



The above equipment is excellent, admirable, powerful, but not perfect.

There is yet another detail which is worth the whole of it put together--

and more; a detail which has never been joined (in the beginning of a

religious movement) to a supremely good working equipment since the world

began, until now: a new personage to worship.  Christianity had the

Saviour, but at first and for generations it lacked money and

concentrated power.  In Mrs. Eddy, Christian Science possesses the new

personage for worship, and in addition--here in the very beginning--a

working equipment that has not a flaw in it.  In the beginning,

Mohammedanism had no money; and it has never had anything to offer its

client but heaven--nothing here below that was valuable.  In addition to

heaven hereafter, Christian Science has present health and a cheerful

spirit to offer--for cash--and in comparison with this bribe all other

this-world bribes are poor and cheap.  You recognise that this estimate

is admissible, do you not?



To whom does Bellamy's 'Nationalism' appeal?  Necessarily to the few:

people who read and dream, and are compassionate, and troubled for the

poor and the hard-driven.  To whom does Spiritualism appeal?  Necessarily

to the few; its 'boom' has lasted for half a century and I believe it

claims short of four millions of adherents in America.  Who are attracted

by Swedenborgianism and some of the other fine and delicate 'isms?' The

few again: Educated people, sensitively organised, with superior mental

endowments, who seek lofty planes of thought and find their contentment

there.  And who are attracted by Christian Science?  There is no limit;

its field is horizonless; its appeal is as universal as is the appeal of

Christianity itself.  It appeals to the rich, the poor, the high, the

low, the cultured, the ignorant, the gifted, the stupid, the modest, the

vain, the wise, the silly, the soldier, the civilian, the hero, the

coward, the idler, the worker, the godly, the godless, the freeman, the

slave, the adult, the child; they who are ailing, they who have friends

that are ailing.  To mass it in a phrase, its clientele is the Human

Race?  Will it march?  I think so.





VII



Remember its principal great offer: to rid the Race of pain and disease.

Can it do it?  In large measure, yes.  How much of the pain and disease

in the world is created by the imaginations of the sufferers, and then

kept alive by those same imaginations?  Four-fifths?  Not anything short

of that I should think.  Can Christian Science banish that four-fifths?

I think so.  Can any other (organised) force do it?  None that I know of.

Would this be a new world when that was accomplished?  And a pleasanter

one--for us well people, as well as for those fussy and fretting sick

ones?  Would it seem as if there was not as much gloomy weather as there

used to be?  I think so.



In the meantime would the Scientist kill off a good many patients?  I

think so.  More than get killed off now by the legalised methods?  I will

take up that question presently.



At present I wish to ask you to examine some of the Scientist's

performances, as registered in his magazine, 'The Christian Science

Journal'--October number, 1898.  First, a Baptist clergyman gives us this

true picture of 'the average orthodox Christian'--and he could have added

that it is a true picture of the average (civilised) human being:



'He is a worried and fretted and fearful man; afraid of himself and his

propensities, afraid of colds and fevers, afraid of treading on serpents

or drinking deadly things.'



Then he gives us this contrast:



'The average Christian Scientist has put all anxiety and fretting under

his feet.  He does have a victory over fear and care that is not achieved

by the average orthodox Christian.'



He has put all anxiety and fretting under his feet.  What proportion of

your earnings or income would you be willing to pay for that frame of

mind, year in year out?  It really outvalues any price that can be put

upon it.  Where can you purchase it, at any outlay of any sort, in any

Church or out of it, except the Scientist's?



Well, it is the anxiety and fretting about colds, and fevers, and

draughts, and getting our feet wet, and about forbidden food eaten in

terror of indigestion, that brings on the cold and the fever and the

indigestion and the most of our other ailments; and so, if the Science

can banish that anxiety from the world I think it can reduce the world's

disease and pain about four-fifths.



In this October number many of the redeemed testify and give thanks; and

not coldly but with passionate gratitude.  As a rule they seem drunk with

health, and with the surprise of it, the wonder of it, the unspeakable

glory and splendour of it, after a long sober spell spent in inventing

imaginary diseases and concreting them with doctor-stuff.  The first

witness testifies that when 'this most beautiful Truth first dawned on

him' he had 'nearly all the ills that flesh is heir to;' that those he

did not have he thought he had--and thus made the tale about complete.

What was the natural result?  Why, he was a dump-pit 'for all the

doctors, druggists, and patent medicines of the country.'  Christian

Science came to his help, and 'the old sick conditions passed away,' and

along with them the 'dismal forebodings' which he had been accustomed to

employ in conjuring up ailments.  And so he was a healthy and cheerful

man, now, and astonished.



But I am not astonished, for from other sources I know what must have

been his method of applying Christian Science.  If I am in the right, he

watchfully and diligently diverted his mind from unhealthy channels and

compelled it to travel in healthy ones.  Nothing contrivable by human

invention could be more formidably effective than that, in banishing

imaginary ailments and in closing the entrances against subsequent

applicants of their breed.  I think his method was to keep saying, 'I am

well! I am sound!--sound and well! well and sound! Perfectly sound,

perfectly well! I have no pain; there's no such thing as pain! I have no

disease; there's no such thing as disease! Nothing is real but Mind; all

is Mind, All-Good, Good-Good, Life, Soul, Liver, Bones, one of a series,

ante and pass the buck!'



I do not mean that that was exactly the formula used, but that it

doubtless contains the spirit of it.  The Scientist would attach value to

the exact formula, no doubt, and to the religious spirit in which it was

used.  I should think that any formula that would divert the mind from

unwholesome channels and force it into healthy ones would answer every

purpose with some people, though not with all.  I think it most likely

that a very religious man would find the addition of the religious spirit

a powerful reinforcement in his case.



The second witness testifies that the Science banished 'an old organic

trouble' which the doctor and the surgeon had been nursing with drugs and

the knife for seven years.



He calls it his 'claim.'  A surface-miner would think it was not his

claim at all, but the property of the doctor and his pal the surgeon--for

he would be misled by that word, which is Christian-Science slang for

'ailment.'  The Christian Scientist has no ailment; to him there is no

such thing, and he will not use the lying word.  All that happens to him

is, that upon his attention an imaginary disturbance sometimes obtrudes

itself which claims to be an ailment, but isn't.



This witness offers testimony for a clergyman seventy years old who had

preached forty years in a Christian church, and has not gone over to the

new sect.  He was 'almost blind and deaf.'  He was treated by the C.S.

method, and 'when he heard the voice of Truth he saw spiritually.'  Saw

spiritually.  It is a little indefinite; they had better treat him again.

Indefinite testimonies might properly be waste-basketed, since there is

evidently no lack of definite ones procurable, but this C.S.  magazine is

poorly edited, and so mistakes of this kind must be expected.



The next witness is a soldier of the Civil War.  When Christian Science

found him, he had in stock the following claims:



Indigestion,

Rheumatism,

Catarrh,

Chalky deposits in

  Shoulder joints,

  Arm joints,

  Hand joints,

Atrophy of the muscles of

  Arms,

  Shoulders,

Stiffness of all those joints,

Insomnia,

Excruciating pains most of the time.





These claims have a very substantial sound.  They came of exposure in the

campaigns.  The doctors did all they could, but it was little.  Prayers

were tried, but 'I never realised any physical relief from that source.'

After thirty years of torture he went to a Christian Scientist and took

an hour's treatment and went home painless.  Two days later he 'began to

eat like a well man.'  Then 'the claims vanished--some at once, others

more gradually;' finally, 'they have almost entirely disappeared.'  And--

a thing which is of still greater value--he is now 'contented and happy.'

That is a detail which, as earlier remarked, is a Scientist-Church

specialty.  With thirty-one years' effort the Methodist Church had not

succeeded in furnishing it to this harassed soldier.



And so the tale goes on.  Witness after witness bulletins his claims,

declares their prompt abolishment, and gives Mrs. Eddy's Discovery the

praise.  Milk-leg is cured; nervous prostration is cured; consumption is

cured; and St.  Vitus's dance made a pastime.  And now and then an

interesting new addition to the Science slang appears on the page.  We

have 'demonstrations over' chilblains and such things.  It seems to be a

curtailed way of saying 'demonstrations of the power of Christian-Science

Truth over the fiction which masquerades under the name of Chilblains.'

The children as well as the adults, share in the blessings of the

Science.  'Through the study of the "little book" they are learning how

to be healthful, peaceful, and wise.'  Sometimes they are cured of their

little claims by the professional healer, and sometimes more advanced

children say over the formula and cure themselves.



A little Far-Western girl of nine, equipped with an adult vocabulary,

states her age and says, 'I thought I would write a demonstration to

you.'  She had a claim derived from getting flung over a pony's head and

landed on a rock-pile.  She saved herself from disaster by remember to

say 'God is All' while she was in the air.  I couldn't have done it.  I

shouldn't have even thought of it.  I should have been too excited.

Nothing but Christian Science could have enabled that child to do that

calm and thoughtful and judicious thing in those circumstances.  She came

down on her head, and by all the rules she should have broken it; but the

intervention of the formula prevented that, so the only claim resulting

was a blackened eye.  Monday morning it was still swollen and shut.  At

school 'it hurt pretty bad--that is, it seemed to.'  So 'I was excused,

and went down in the basement and said, "Now I am depending on mamma

instead of God, and I will depend on God instead of mamma."'  No doubt

this would have answered; but, to make sure, she added Mrs. Eddy to the

team and recited 'the Scientific Statement of Being,' which is one of the

principal incantations, I judge.  Then 'I felt my eye opening.'  Why, it

would have opened an oyster.  I think it is one of the touchingest things

in child-history, that pious little rat down cellar pumping away at the

Scientific Statement of Being.



There is a page about another good child--little Gordon.  Little Gordon

'came into the world without the assistance of surgery or anaesthetics.'

He was a 'demonstration.'  A painless one; therefore his coming evoked

'joy and thankfulness to God and the Discoverer of Christian Science.'

It is a noticeable feature of this literature--the so frequent linking

together of the Two Beings in an equal bond; also of Their Two Bibles.

When little Gordon was two years old, 'he was playing horse on the bed,

where I had left my "little book."  I noticed him stop in his play, take

the book carefully in his little hands, kiss it softly, then look about

for the highest place of safety his arms could reach, and put it there.'

This pious act filled the mother 'with such a train of thought as I had

never experienced before.  I thought of the sweet mother of long ago who

kept things in her heart,' etc.  It is a bold comparison; however,

unconscious profanations are about as common in the mouths of the lay

membership of the new Church as are frank and open ones in the mouths of

its consecrated chiefs.



Some days later, the family library--Christian Science books--was lying

in a deep-seated window.  It was another chance for the holy child to

show off.  He left his play and went there and pushed all the books to

one side except the Annex.  'It he took in both hands, slowly raised it

to his lips, then removed it carefully, and seated himself in the

window.'  It had seemed to the mother too wonderful to be true, that

first time; but now she was convinced that 'neither imagination nor

accident had anything to do with it.'  Later, little Gordon let the

author of his being see him do it.  After that he did it frequently;

probably every time anybody was looking.  I would rather have that child

than a chromo.  If this tale has any object, it is to intimate that the

inspired book was supernaturally able to convey a sense of its sacred and

awful character to this innocent little creature without the intervention

of outside aids.  The magazine is not edited with high-priced discretion.

The editor has a claim, and he ought to get it treated.



Among other witnesses, there is one who had a 'jumping toothache,' which

several times tempted her to 'believe that there was sensation in matter,

but each time it was overcome by the power of Truth.'  She would not

allow the dentist to use cocaine, but sat there and let him punch and

drill and split and crush the tool, and tear and slash its ulcerations,

and pull out the nerve, and dig out fragments of bone; and she wouldn't

once confess that it hurt.  And to this day she thinks it didn't, and I

have not a doubt that she is nine-tenths right, and that her Christian

Science faith did her better service than she could have gotten out of

cocaine.



There is an account of a boy who got broken all up into small bits by an

accident, but said over the Scientific Statement of Being, or some of the

other incantations, and got well and sound without having suffered any

real pain and without the intrusion of a surgeon.  I can believe this,

because my own case was somewhat similar, as per my former article.



Also there is an account of the restoration to perfect health, in a

single night, of a fatally injured horse, by the application of Christian

Science.  I can stand a good deal, but I recognise that the ice is

getting thin here.  That horse had as many as fifty claims: how could he

demonstrate over them?  Could he do the All-Good, Good-Good,

Good-Gracious, Liver, Bones, Truth, All down but Nine, Set them up on the

Other Alley?  Could he intone the Scientific Statement of Being?  Now,

could he?  Wouldn't it give him a relapse?  Let us draw the line at

horses.  Horses and furniture.



There is a plenty of other testimonies in the magazine, but these quoted

samples will answer.  They show the kind of trade the Science is driving.

Now we come back to the question; Does it kill a patient here and there

and now and then?  We must concede it.  Does it compensate for this?  I

am persuaded that it can make a plausible showing in that direction.  For

instance: when it lays its hands upon a soldier who has suffered thirty

years of helpless torture and makes him whole in body and mind, what is

the actual sum of that achievement?  This, I think: that it has restored

to life a subject who had essentially died ten deaths a year for thirty

years, and each of them a long and painful one.  But for its interference

that man would have essentially died thirty times more, in the three

years which have since elapsed.  There are thousand of young people in

the land who are now ready to enter upon a life-long death similar to

that man's.  Every time the Science captures one of these and secures to

him life-long immunity from imagination-manufactured disease, it may

plausibly claim that in his person it has saved 300 lives.  Meantime it

will kill a man every now and then; but no matter, it will still be ahead

on the credit side.





VIII



     'We consciously declare that "Science and Health with Key to the

     Scriptures," was foretold as well as its author, Mary Baker Eddy, in

     Revelation x.  She is the "mighty angel," or God's highest thought

     to this age (verse 1), giving us the spiritual interpretation of the

     Bible in the "little book open" (verse 2).  Thus we prove that

     Christian Science is the second coming of Christ--Truth--Spirit.'--

     Lecture by Dr.  George Tomkins, D.D., C.S.



There you have it in plain speech.  She is the mighty angel; she is the

divinely and officially sent bearer of God's highest thought.  For the

present, she brings the Second Advent.  We must expect that before she

has been in her grave fifty years she will be regarded by her following

as having been herself the Second Advent.  She is already worshipped, and

we must expect this feeling to spread territorially, and also to deepen

in intensity [1].



Particularly after her death; for then, as anyone can foresee,

Eddy-worship will be taught in the Sunday-schools and pulpits of the

cult.  Already whatever she puts her trade-mark on, thought it be only a

memorial spoon, is holy and is eagerly and passionately and gratefully

bought by the disciple, and becomes a fetish in his house.  I say bought,

for the Boston Christian-Science Trust gives nothing away; everything it

has for sale.  And the terms are cash; and not cash only but cash in

advance.  Its god is Mrs. Eddy first, then the Dollar.  Not a spiritual

Dollar, but a real one.  From end to end of the Christian-Science

literature not a single (material) thing in the world is conceded to be

real, except the Dollar.  But all through and through its advertisements

that reality is eagerly and persistently recognised.  The hunger of the

Trust for the Dollar, its adoration of the Dollar, its lust after the

Dollar, its ecstasy in the mere thought of the Dollar--there has been

nothing like it in the world in any age or country, nothing so coarse,

nothing so lubricous, nothing so bestial, except a French novel's

attitude towards adultery.



The Dollar is hunted down in all sorts of ways; the Christian-Science

Mother-Church and Bargain-Counter in Boston peddles all kinds of

spiritual wares to the faithful, always at extravagant prices, and always

on the one condition--cash, cash in advance.  The Angel of the Apocalypse

could not go there and get a copy of his own pirated book on credit.

Many, many precious Christian-Science things are to be had there--for

cash: Bible Lessons; Church Manual; C.S.  Hymnal; History of the building

of the Mother-Church; lot of Sermons; Communion Hymn, 'Saw Ye My

Saviour,' by Mrs. Eddy, half a dollar a copy, 'words used by special

permission of Mrs. Eddy.'  Also we have Mrs. Eddy's and the Angel's

little Bible-Annex in eight styles of binding at eight kinds of war-

prices: among these a sweet thing in 'levant, divinity circuit, leather

lined to edge, round corners, gold edge, silk sewed, each, prepaid, $6,'

and if you take a million you get them a shilling cheaper--that is to

say, 'prepaid, $5.75.'  Also we have Mrs. Eddy's 'Miscellaneous

Writings,' at noble big prices, the divinity-circuit style heading the

extortions, shilling discount where you take an edition.  Next comes

'Christ and Christmas,' by the fertile Mrs. eddy--a poem--I would God I

could see it--price $3, cash in advance.  Then follow five more books by

Mrs. Eddy at highwaymen's rates, as usual, some of them in 'leatherette

covers,' some of them in 'pebbled cloth,' with divinity circuit,

compensation balance, twin screw, and the other modern improvements: and

at the same bargain counter can be had the 'Christian Science Journal.'

I wish it were in refined taste to apply a rudely and ruggedly

descriptive epithet to that literary slush-bucket, so as to give one an

accurate idea of what it is like.  I am moved to do it, but I must not:

it is better to be refined than accurate when one is talking about a

production like that.



Christian-Science literary oleomargarine is a monopoly of the Mother

Church Headquarters Factory in Boston; none genuine without the

trade-mark of the Trust.  You must apply there, and not elsewhere; and

you pay your money before you get your soap-fat.



The Trust has still other sources of income.  Mrs. Eddy is president (and

perhaps proprietor?) of the Trust's Metaphysical College in Boston, where

the student who has practised C.S.  healing during three years the best

he knew how perfects himself in the game by a two weeks' course, and pays

one hundred dollars for it!  And I have a case among my statistics where

the student had a three weeks' course and paid three hundred for it.



The Trust does love the Dollar when it isn't a spiritual one.



In order to force the sale of Mrs. Eddy's Bible-Annex, no healer,

Metaphysical College-bred or other, is allowed to practise the game

unless he possess a copy of that holy nightmare.  That means a large and

constantly augmenting income for the Trust.  No C.S.  family would

consider itself loyal or pious or pain-proof without an Annex or two in

the house.  That means an income for the Trust--in the near future--of

millions: not thousands--millions a year.



No member, young or old, of a Christian-Scientist church can retain that

membership unless he pay 'capitation tax' to the Boston Trust every year.

That means an income for the Trust--in the near future--of millions more

per year.



It is a reasonably safe guess that in America in 1910 there will be

10,000,000 Christian Scientists, and 3,000,000 in Great Britain; that

these figures will be trebled by 1920; that in America in 1910 the

Christian Scientists will be a political force, in 1920 politically

formidable--to remain that, permanently.  And I think it a reasonable

guess that the Trust (which is already in our day pretty brusque in its

ways) will then be the most insolent and unscrupulous and tyrannical

politico-religious master that has dominated a people since the palmy

days of the Inquisition.  And a stronger master than the strongest of

bygone times, because this one will have a financial strength not dreamed

of by any predecessor; as effective a concentration of irresponsible

power as any predecessor had; in the railway, the telegraph, and the

subsidised newspaper, better facilities for watching and managing his

empire than any predecessor has had; and after a generation or two he

will probably divide Christendom with the Catholic Church.



The Roman Church has a perfect organisation, and it has an effective

centralisation of power--but not of its cash.  Its multitude of Bishops

are rich, but their riches remain in large measure in their own hands.

They collect from 200,000,000 of people, but they keep the bulk of the

result at home.  The Boston Pope of by-and-by will draw his dollar-a-head

capitation-tax from 300,000,000 of the human race, and the Annex and the

rest of his book-shop will fetch in double as much more; and his

Metaphysical Colleges, the annual pilgrimage to Mrs. Eddy's tomb, from

all over the world--admission, the Christian-Science Dollar (payable in

advance)--purchases of consecrated glass beads, candles, memorial spoons,

aureoled chromo-portraits and bogus autographs of Mrs. Eddy, cash

offerings at her shrine--no crutches of cured cripples received, and no

imitations of miraculously restored broken legs and necks allowed to be

hung up except when made out of the Holy Metal and proved by fire-assay;

cash for miracles worked at the tomb: these money-sources, with a

thousand to be yet invented and ambushed upon the devotee, will bring the

annual increment well up above a billion.  And nobody but the Trust will

have the handling of it.  No Bishops appointed unless they agree to hand

in 90 per cent. of the catch.  In that day the Trust will monopolise the

manufacture and sale of the Old and New Testaments as well as the Annex,

and raise their price to Annex rates, and compel the devotee to buy (for

even to-day a healer has to have the Annex and the Scriptures or he is

not allowed to work the game), and that will bring several hundred

million dollars more.  In those days the Trust will have an income

approaching $5,000,000 a day, and no expenses to be taken out of it; no

taxes to pay, and no charities to support.  That last detail should not

be lightly passed over by the read; it is well entitled to attention.



No charities to support.  No, nor even to contribute to.  One searches in

vain the Trust's advertisements and the utterances of its pulpit for any

suggestion that it spends a penny on orphans, widows, discharged

prisoners, hospitals, ragged schools, night missions, city missions,

foreign missions, libraries, old people's homes, or any other object that

appeals to a human being's purse through his heart.[2]



I have hunted, hunted, and hunted, by correspondence and otherwise, and

have not yet got upon the track of a farthing that the Trust has spent

upon any worthy object.  Nothing makes a Scientist so uncomfortable as to

ask him if he knows of a case where Christian Science has spent money on

a benevolence, either among its own adherents or elsewhere.  He is

obliged to say no.  And then one discovers that the person questioned has

been asked the question many times before, and that it is getting to be a

sore subject with him.  Why a sore subject?  Because he has written his

chiefs and asked with high confidence for an answer that will confound

these questioners--and the chiefs did not reply.  He has written again--

and then again--not with confidence, but humbly, now, and has begged for

defensive ammunition in the voice of supplication.  A reply does at last

come--to this effect: 'We must have faith in Our Mother, and rest content

in the conviction that whatever She[3] does with the money it is in

accordance with orders from Heaven, for She does no act of any kind

without first "demonstrating over" it.'



That settles it--as far as the disciple is concerned.  His Mind is

entirely satisfied with that answer; he gets down his Annex and does an

incantation or two, and that mesmerises his spirit and puts that to

sleep--brings it peace.  Peace and comfort and joy, until some inquirer

punctures the old sore again.



Through friends in America I asked some questions, and in some cases got

definite and informing answers; in other cases the answers were not

definite and not valuable.  From the definite answers I gather than the

'capitation-tax' is compulsory, and that the sum is one dollar.  To the

question, 'Does any of the money go to charities?' the answer from an

authoritative source was: 'No, *not in the sense usually conveyed by this

word*.'  (The italics are mine.) That answer is cautious.  But definite,

I think--utterly and unassailably definite--although quite

Christian-scientifically foggy in its phrasing.  Christian Science is

generally foggy, generally diffuse, generally garrulous.  The writer was

aware that the first word in his phrase answered the question which I was

asking, but he could not help adding nine dark words.  Meaningless ones,

unless explained by him.  It is quite likely--as intimated by him--that

Christian Science has invented a new class of objects to apply the word

charity to, but without an explanation we cannot know what they are.  We

quite easily and naturally and confidently guess that they are in all

cases objects which will return five hundred per cent.  on the Trust's

investment in them, but guessing is not knowledge; it is merely, in this

case, a sort of nine-tenths certainty deducible from what we think we

know of the Trust's trade principles and its sly and furtive and shifty

ways.



Sly?  Deep?  Judicious?  The Trust understands business.  The Trust does

not give itself away.  It defeats all the attempts of us impertinents to

get at its trade secrets.  To this day, after all our diligence, we have

not been able to get it to confess what it does with the money.  It does

not even let its own disciples find out.  All it says is, that the matter

has been 'demonstrated over.'  Now and then a lay Scientist says, with a

grateful exultation, that Mrs. Eddy is enormously rich, but he stops

there; as to whether any of the money goes to other charities or not, he

is obliged to admit that he does not know.  However, the Trust is

composed of human beings; and this justifies the conjecture that if it

had a charity on its list which it did not need to blush for, we should

soon hear of it.



'Without money and without price.'  Those used to be the terms.  Mrs.

Eddy's Annex cancels them.  The motto of Christian Science is 'The

labourer is worthy of his hire.'  And now that it has been 'demonstrated

over,' we find its spiritual meaning to be, 'Do anything and everything

your hand may find to do; and charge cash for it, and collect the money

in advance.'  The Scientist has on his tongue's end a cut-and-dried,

Boston-supplied set of rather lean arguments whose function is to show

that it is a Heaven-commanded duty to do this, and that the croupiers of

the game have no choice by to obey.



The Trust seems to be a reincarnation.  Exodus xxxii.4.



I have no reverence for Mrs. Eddy and the rest of the Trust--if there is

a rest--but I am not lacking in reverence for the sincerities of the lay

membership of the new Church.  There is every evidence that the lay

members are entirely sincere in their faith, and I think sincerity is

always entitled to honour and respect, let the inspiration of the

sincerity be what it may.  Zeal and sincerity can carry a new religion

further than any other missionary except fire and sword, and I believe

that the new religion will conquer the half of Christendom in a hundred

years.  I am not intending this as a compliment to the human race, I am

merely stating an opinion.  And yet I think that perhaps it is a

compliment to the race.  I keep in mind that saying of an orthodox

preacher--quoted further back.  He conceded that this new Christianity

frees its possessor's life from frets, fears, vexations, bitterness, and

all sorts of imagination-propagated maladies and pains, and fills his

world with sunshine and his heart with gladness.  If Christian Science,

with this stupendous equipment--and final salvation added--cannot win

half the Christian globe, I must be badly mistaken in the make-up of the

human race.



I think the Trust will be handed down like the other papacy, and will

always know how to handle its limitless cash.  It will press the button;

the zeal, the energy, the sincerity, the enthusiasm of its countless

vassals will do the rest.





IX



The power which a man's imagination has over his body to heal it or make

it sick is a force which none of us is born without.  The first man had

it, the last one will possess it.  If left to himself a man is most

likely to use only the mischievous half of the force--the half which

invents imaginary ailments for him and cultivates them: and if he is one

of these very wise people he is quite likely to scoff at the beneficent

half of the force and deny its existence.  And so, to heal or help that

man, two imaginations are required: his own and some outsider's.  The

outsider, B, must imagine that his incantations are the healing power

that is curing A, and A must imagine that this is so.  It is not so, at

all; but no matter, the cure is effected, and that is the main thing.

The outsider's work is unquestionably valuable; so valuable that it may

fairly be likened to the essential work performed by the engineer when he

handles the throttle and turns on the steam: the actual power is lodged

exclusively in the engine, but if the engine were left alone it would

never start of itself.  Whether the engineer be named Jim, or Bob, or

Tom, it is all one--his services are necessary, and he is entitled to

such wage as he can get you to pay.  Whether he be named Christian

Scientist, or Mental Scientist, or Mind Curist, or Lourdes Miracle-

Worker, or King's-Evil Expert, it is all one,--he is merely the Engineer,

he simply turns on the same old steam and the engine does the whole work.



In the case of the cure-engine it is a distinct advantage to clothe the

engineer in religious overalls and give him a pious name.  It greatly

enlarges the business, and does no one any harm.



The Christian-Scientist engineer drives exactly the same trade as the

other engineers, yet he out-prospers the whole of them put together.  Is

it because he has captured the takingest name?  I think that that is only

a small part of it.  I think that the secret of his high prosperity lies

elsewhere:



The Christian Scientist has organised the business.  Now that was

certainly a gigantic idea.  There is more intellect in it than would be

needed in the invention of a couple of millions of Eddy Science-and-

Health Bible Annexes.  Electricity, in limitless volume, has existed in

the air and the rocks and the earth and everywhere since time began--and

was going to waste all the while.  In our time we have organised that

scattered and wandering force and set it to work, and backed the business

with capital, and concentrated it in few and competent hands, and the

results are as we see.



The Christian Scientist has taken a force which has been lying idle in

every member of the human race since time began, and has organised it,

and backed the business with capital, and concentrated it at Boston

headquarters in the hands of a small and very competent Trust, and there

are results.



Therein lies the promise that this monopoly is going to extend its

commerce wide in the earth.  I think that if the business were conducted

in the loose and disconnected fashion customary with such things, it

would achieve but little more than the modest prosperity usually secured

by unorganised great moral and commercial ventures; but I believe that so

long as this one remains compactly organised and closely concentrated in

a Trust, the spread of its dominion will continue.



VIENNA: May 1, 1899.



[1] After raising a dead child to life, the disciple who did it writes an

account of her performance, to Mrs. Eddy, and closes it thus: 'My prayer

daily is to be more spiritual, that I may do more as you would have me

do...  and may we all love you more and so live it that the world may

know that the Christ is come.'--Printed in the Concord, N.H.,

Independent Statesman, March 9, 1899.  If this is no worship, it is a

good imitation of it.



[2] In the past two years the membership of the Established Church of

England have given voluntary contributions amounting to $73,000,000 to

the Church's benevolent enterprises.  Churches that give have nothing to

hide.



[3] I may be introducing the capital S a little early--still it is on its

way.













IS HE LIVING OR IS HE DEAD?



I was spending the month of March 1892 at Mentone, in the Riviera.  At

this retired spot one has all the advantages, privately, which are to be

had publicly at Monte Carlo and Nice, a few miles farther along.  That is

to say, one has the flooding sunshine, the balmy air and the brilliant

blue sea, without the marring additions of human pow-wow and fuss and

feathers and display.  Mentone is quiet, simple, restful, unpretentious;

the rich and the gaudy do not come there.  As a rule, I mean, the rich do

not come there.  Now and then a rich man comes, and I presently got

acquainted with one of these.  Partially to disguise him I will call him

Smith.  One day, in the Hotel des Anglais, at the second breakfast, he

exclaimed:



'Quick! Cast your eye on the man going out at the door.  Take in every

detail of him.'



'Why?'



'Do you know who he is?'



'Yes.  He spent several days here before you came.  He is an old,

retired, and very rich silk manufacturer from Lyons, they say, and I

guess he is alone in the world, for he always looks sad and dreamy, and

doesn't talk with anybody.  His name is Theophile Magnan.'



I supposed that Smith would now proceed to justify the large interest

which he had shown in Monsieur Magnan, but, instead, he dropped into a

brown study, and was apparently lost to me and to the rest of the world

during some minutes.  Now and then he passed his fingers through his

flossy white hair, to assist his thinking, and meantime he allowed his

breakfast to go on cooling.  At last he said:



'No, it's gone; I can't call it back.'



'Can't call what back?'



'It's one of Hans Andersen's beautiful little stories.  But it's gone fro

me.  Part of it is like this: A child has a caged bird, which it loves

but thoughtlessly neglects.  The bird pours out its song unheard and

unheeded; but, in time, hunger and thirst assail the creature, and its

song grows plaintive and feeble and finally ceases--the bird dies.  The

child comes, and is smitten to the heart with remorse: then, with bitter

tears and lamentations, it calls its mates, and they bury the bird with

elaborate pomp and the tenderest grief, without knowing, poor things,

that it isn't children only who starve poets to death and then spend

enough on their funerals and monuments to have kept them alive and made

them easy and comfortable.  Now--'



But here we were interrupted.  About ten that evening I ran across Smith,

and he asked me up to his parlour to help him smoke and drink hot Scotch.

It was a cosy place, with its comfortable chairs, its cheerful lamps, and

its friendly open fire of seasoned olive-wood.  To make everything

perfect, there was a muffled booming of the surf outside.  After the

second Scotch and much lazy and contented chat, Smith said:



'Now we are properly primed--I to tell a curious history and you to

listen to it.  It has been a secret for many years--a secret between me

and three others; but I am going to break the seal now.  Are you

comfortable?'



'Perfectly.  Go on.'



Here follows what he told me:



'A long time ago I was a young artist--a very young artist, in fact--and

I wandered about the country parts of France, sketching here and

sketching there, and was presently joined by a couple of darling young

Frenchmen who were at the same kind of thing that I was doing.  We were

as happy as we were poor, or as poor as we were happy--phrase it to suit

yourself.  Claude Frere and Carl Boulanger--these are the names of those

boys; dear, dear fellows, and the sunniest spirits that ever laughed at

poverty and had a noble good time in all weathers.



'At last we ran hard aground in a Breton village, and an artist as poor

as ourselves took us in and literally saved us from starving--Francois

Millet--'



'What! the great Francois Millet?'



'Great?  He wasn't any greater than we were, then.  He hadn't any fame,

even in his own village; and he was so poor that he hadn't anything to

feed us on but turnips, and even the turnips failed us sometimes.  We

four became fast friends, doting friends, inseparables.  We painted away

together with all our might, piling up stock, piling up stock, but very

seldom getting rid of any of it.  We had lovely times together; but, O my

soul! how we were pinched now and then!



'For a little over two years this went on.  At last, one day, Claude

said:



'"Boys, we've come to the end.  Do you understand that?--absolutely to

the end.  Everybody has struck--there's a league formed against us.  I've

been all around the village and it's just as I tell you.  They refuse to

credit us for another centime until all the odds and ends are paid up."



'This struck us as cold.  Every face was blank with dismay.  We realised

that our circumstances were desperate, now.  There was a long silence.

Finally, Millet said with a sigh:



'"Nothing occurs to me--nothing.  Suggest something, lads."



'There was no response, unless a mournful silence may be called a

response.  Carl got up, and walked nervously up and down a while, then

said:



'"It's a shame! Look at these canvases: stacks and stacks of as good

pictures as anybody in Europe paints--I don't care who he is.  Yes, and

plenty of lounging strangers have said the same--or nearly that, anyway."



'"But didn't buy," Millet said.



'"No matter, they said it; and it's true, too.  Look at your 'Angelus'

there! Will anybody tell me--"



'"Pah, Carl--My 'Angelus!' I was offered five francs for it."



'"When?"



'"Who offered it?"



'"Where is he?"



'"Why didn't you take it?"



'"Come--don't all speak at once.  I thought he would give more--I was

sure of it--he looked it--so I asked him eight."



'"Well--and then?"



'"He said he would call again."



'"Thunder and lightning! Why, Francois--"



'"Oh, I know--I know! It was a mistake, and I was a fool.  Boys, I meant

for the best; you'll grant me that, and I--"



'"Why, certainly, we know that, bless your dear heart; but don't you be a

fool again."



'"I?  I wish somebody would come along and offer us a cabbage for it--

you'd see!"



'"A cabbage! Oh, don't name it--it makes my mouth water.  Talk of things

less trying."



'"Boys," said Carl, "do these pictures lack merit?  Answer me that."



'"No!"



'"Aren't they of very great and high merit?  Answer me that."



'"Yes."



'"Of such great and high merit that, if an illustrious name were attached

to them they would sell at splendid prices.  Isn't it so?"



'"Certainly it is.  Nobody doubts that."



'"But--I'm not joking--isn't it so?"



'"Why, of course it's so--and we are not joking.  But what of it.  What

of it?  How does that concern us?"



'"In this way, comrades--we'll attach an illustrious name to them!"



'The lively conversation stopped.  The faces were turned inquiringly upon

Carl.  What sort of riddle might this be?  Where was an illustrious name

to be borrowed?  And who was to borrow it?



'Carl sat down, and said:



'"Now, I have a perfectly serious thing to propose.  I think it is the

only way to keep us out of the almshouse, and I believe it to be a

perfectly sure way.  I base this opinion upon certain multitudinous and

long-established facts in human history.  I believe my project will make

us all rich."



'"Rich! You've lost your mind."



'"No, I haven't."



'"Yes, you have--you've lost your mind.  What do you call rich?"



'"A hundred thousand francs apiece."



'"He has lost his mind.  I knew it."



'"Yes, he has.  Carl, privation has been too much for you, and--"



'"Carl, you want to take a pill and get right to bed."



'"Bandage him first--bandage his head, and then--"



'"No, bandage his heels; his brains have been settling for weeks--I've

noticed it."



'"Shut up!"  said Millet, with ostensible severity, "and let the boy have

his say.  Now, then--come out with your project, Carl.  What is it?"



'"Well, then, by way of preamble I will ask you to note this fact in

human history: that the merit of many a great artist has never been

acknowledged until after he was starved and dead.  This has happened so

often that I make bold to found a law upon it.  This law: that the merit

of every great unknown and neglected artist must and will be recognised

and his pictures climb to high prices after his death.  My project is

this: we must cast lots--one of us must die."



'The remark fell so calmly and so unexpectedly that we almost forgot to

jump.  Then there was a wild chorus of advice again--medical advice--for

the help of Carl's brain; but he waited patiently for the hilarity to

calm down, and then went on again with his project:



'"Yes, one of us must die, to save the others--and himself.  We will cast

lots.  The one chosen shall be illustrious, all of us shall be rich.

Hold still, now--hold still; don't interrupt--I tell you I know what I am

talking about.  Here is the idea.  During the next three months the one

who is to die shall paint with all his might, enlarge his stock all he

can--not pictures, no! skeleton sketches, studies, parts of studies,

fragments of studies, a dozen dabs of the brush on each--meaningless, of

course, but his, with his cipher on them; turn out fifty a day, each to

contain some peculiarity or mannerism easily detectable as his--they're

the things that sell, you know, and are collected at fabulous prices for

the world's museums, after the great man is gone; we'll have a ton of

them ready--a ton! And all that time the rest of us will be busy

supporting the moribund, and working Paris and the dealers--preparations

for the coming event, you know; and when everything is hot and just

right, we'll spring the death on them and have the notorious funeral.

You get the idea?"



'"N-o; at least, not qu--"



'"Not quite?  Don't you see?  The man doesn't really die; he changes his

name and vanishes; we bury a dummy, and cry over it, with all the world

to help.  And I--"



'But he wasn't allowed to finish.  Everybody broke out into a rousing

hurrah of applause; and all jumped up and capered about the room and fell

on each other's necks in transports of gratitude and joy.  For hours we

talked over the great plan, without ever feeling hungry; and at last,

when all the details had been arranged satisfactorily, we cast lots and

Millet was elected--elected to die, as we called it.  Then we scraped

together those things which one never parts with until he is betting them

against future wealth--keepsake trinkets and suchlike--and these we

pawned for enough to furnish us a frugal farewell supper and breakfast,

and leave us a few francs over for travel, and a stake of turnips and

such for Millet to live on for a few days.



'Next morning, early, the three of us cleared out, straightway after

breakfast--on foot, of course.  Each of us carried a dozen of Millet's

small pictures, purposing to market them.  Carl struck for Paris, where

he would start the work of building up Millet's name against the coming

great day.  Claude and I were to separate, and scatter abroad over

France.



'Now, it will surprise you to know what an easy and comfortable thing we

had.  I walked two days before I began business.  Then I began to sketch

a villa in the outskirts of a big town--because I saw the proprietor

standing on an upper veranda.  He came down to look on--I thought he

would.  I worked swiftly, intending to keep him interested.  Occasionally

he fired off a little ejaculation of approbation, and by-and-by he spoke

up with enthusiasm, and said I was a master!



'I put down my brush, reached into my satchel, fetched out a Millet, and

pointed to the cipher in the corner.  I said, proudly:



'"I suppose you recognise that?  Well, he taught me! I should think I

ought to know my trade!"



'The man looked guiltily embarrassed, and was silent.  I said

sorrowfully:



'"You don't mean to intimate that you don't know the cipher of Francois

Millet!"



'Of course he didn't know that cipher; but he was the gratefullest man

you ever saw, just the same, for being let out of an uncomfortable place

on such easy terms.  He said:



'"No! Why, it is Millet's, sure enough! I don't know what I could have

been thinking of.  Of course I recognise it now."



'Next, he wanted to buy it; but I said that although I wasn't rich I

wasn't that poor.  However, at last, I let him have it for eight hundred

francs.'



'Eight hundred!'



'Yes.  Millet would have sold it for a pork chop.  Yes, I got eight

hundred francs for that little thing.  I wish I could get it back for

eighty thousand.  But that time's gone by.  I made a very nice picture of

that man's house and I wanted to offer it to him for ten francs, but that

wouldn't answer, seeing I was the pupil of such a master, so I sold it to

him for a hundred.  I sent the eight hundred francs straight to Millet

from that town and struck out again next day.



'But I didn't walk--no.  I rode.  I have ridden ever since.  I sold one

picture every day, and never tried to sell two.  I always said to my

customer:



'"I am a fool to sell a picture of Francois Millet's at all, for that man

is not going to live three months, and when he dies his pictures can't be

had for love or money."



'I took care to spread that little fact as far as I could, and prepare

the world for the event.



'I take credit to myself for our plan of selling the pictures--it was

mine.  I suggested it that last evening when we were laying out our

campaign, and all three of us agreed to give it a good fair trial before

giving it up for some other.  It succeeded with all of us.  I walked only

two days, Claude walked two--both of afraid to make Millet celebrated too

close to home--but Carl walked only half a day, the bright,

conscienceless rascal, and after that he travelled like a duke.



'Every now and then we got in with a country editor and started an item

around through the press; not an item announcing that a new painter had

been discovered, but an item which let on that everybody knew Francois

Millet; not an item praising him in any way, but merely a word concerning

the present condition of the "master"--sometimes hopeful, sometimes

despondent, but always tinged with fears for the worst.  We always marked

these paragraphs, and sent the papers to all the people who had bought

pictures of us.



'Carl was soon in Paris and he worked things with a high hand.  He made

friends with the correspondents, and got Millet's condition reported to

England and all over the continent, and America, and everywhere.



'At the end of six weeks from the start, we three met in Paris and called

a halt, and stopped sending back to Millet for additional pictures.  The

boom was so high, and everything so ripe, that we saw that it would be a

mistake not to strike now, right away, without waiting any longer.  So we

wrote Millet to go to bed and begin to waste away pretty fast, for we

should like him to die in ten days if he could get ready.



'Then we figured up and found that among us we had sold eighty-five small

pictures and studies, and had sixty-nine thousand francs to show for it.

Carl had made the last sale and the most brilliant one of all.  He sold

the "Angelus" for twenty-two hundred francs.  How we did glorify him!--

not foreseeing that a day was coming by-and-by when France would struggle

to own it and a stranger would capture it for five hundred and fifty

thousand, cash.



'We had a wind-up champagne supper that night, and next day Claude and I

packed up and went off to nurse Millet through his last days and keep

busybodies out of the house and send daily bulletins to Carl in Paris for

publication in the papers of several continents for the information of a

waiting world.  The sad end came at last, and Carl was there in time to

help in the final mournful rites.



'You remember that great funeral, and what a stir it made all over the

globe, and how the illustrious of two worlds came to attend it and

testify their sorrow.  We four--still inseparable--carried the coffin,

and would allow none to help.  And we were right about that, because it

hadn't anything in it but a wax figure, and any other coffin-bearers

would have found fault with the weight.  Yes, we same old four, who had

lovingly shared privation together in the old hard times now gone for

ever, carried the cof--'



'Which four?'



'We four--for Millet helped to carry his own coffin.  In disguise, you

know.  Disguised as a relative--distant relative.'



'Astonishing!'



'But true just the same.  Well, you remember how the pictures went up.

Money?  We didn't know what to do with it.  there's a man in Paris to-day

who owns seventy Millet pictures.  He paid us two million francs for

them.  And as for the bushels of sketches and studies which Millet

shovelled out during the six weeks that we were on the road, well, it

would astonish you to know the figure we sell them at nowadays--that is,

when we consent to let one go!'



'It is a wonderful history, perfectly wonderful!'



'Yes--it amounts to that.'



'Whatever became of Millet?'



'Can you keep a secret?'



'I can.'



'Do you remember the man I called your attention to in the dining room

to-day?  That was Francois Millet.'



'Great--'



'Scott!  Yes.  For once they didn't starve a genius to death and then put

into other pockets the rewards he should have had himself.  This

song-bird was not allowed to pipe out its heart unheard and then be paid

with the cold pomp of a big funeral.  We looked out for that.'













MY DEBUT AS A LITERARY PERSON



In those early days I had already published one little thing ('The

Jumping Frog') in an Eastern paper, but I did not consider that that

counted.  In my view, a person who published things in a mere newspaper

could not properly claim recognition as a Literary Person: he must rise

away above that; he must appear in a magazine.  He would then be a

Literary Person; also, he would be famous--right away.  These two

ambitions were strong upon me.  This was in 1866.  I prepared my

contribution, and then looked around for the best magazine to go up to

glory in.  I selected the most important one in New York.  The

contribution was accepted.  I signed it 'MARK TWAIN;' for that name had

some currency on the Pacific coast, and it was my idea to spread it all

over the world, now, at this one jump.  The article appeared in the

December number, and I sat up a month waiting for the January number; for

that one would contain the year's list of contributors, my name would be

in it, and I should be famous and could give the banquet I was

meditating.



I did not give the banquet.  I had not written the 'MARK TWAIN'

distinctly; it was a fresh name to Eastern printers, and they put it

'Mike Swain' or 'MacSwain,' I do not remember which.  At any rate, I was

not celebrated and I did not give the banquet.  I was a Literary Person,

but that was all--a buried one; buried alive.



My article was about the burning of the clipper-ship 'Hornet' on the

line, May 3, 1866.  There were thirty-one men on board at the time, and I

was in Honolulu when the fifteen lean and ghostly survivors arrived there

after a voyage of forty-three days in an open boat, through the blazing

tropics, on ten days' rations of food.  A very remarkable trip; but it

was conducted by a captain who was a remarkable man, otherwise there

would have been no survivors.  He was a New Englander of the best

sea-going stock of the old capable times--Captain Josiah Mitchell.



I was in the islands to write letters for the weekly edition of the

Sacramento 'Union,' a rich and influential daily journal which hadn't any

use for them, but could afford to spend twenty dollars a week for

nothing.  The proprietors were lovable and well-beloved men: long ago

dead, no doubt, but in me there is at least one person who still holds

them in grateful remembrance; for I dearly wanted to see the islands, and

they listened to me and gave me the opportunity when there was but

slender likelihood that it could profit them in any way.



I had been in the islands several months when the survivors arrived.  I

was laid up in my room at the time, and unable to walk.  Here was a great

occasion to serve my journal, and I not able to take advantage of it.

Necessarily I was in deep trouble.  But by good luck his Excellency Anson

Burlingame was there at the time, on his way to take up his post in

China, where he did such good work for the United States.  He came and

put me on a stretcher and had me carried to the hospital where the

shipwrecked men were, and I never needed to ask a question.  He attended

to all of that himself, and I had nothing to do but make the notes.  It

was like him to take that trouble.  He was a great man and a great

American, and it was in his fine nature to come down from his high office

and do a friendly turn whenever he could.



We got through with this work at six in the evening.  I took no dinner,

for there was no time to spare if I would beat the other correspondents.

I spent four hours arranging the notes in their proper order, then wrote

all night and beyond it; with this result: that I had a very long and

detailed account of the 'Hornet' episode ready at nine in the morning,

while the other correspondents of the San Francisco journals had nothing

but a brief outline report--for they didn't sit up.  The now-and-then

schooner was to sail for San Francisco about nine; when I reached the

dock she was free forward and was just casting off her stern-line.  My

fat envelope was thrown by a strong hand, and fell on board all right,

and my victory was a safe thing.  All in due time the ship reached San

Francisco, but it was my complete report which made the stir and was

telegraphed to the New York papers, by Mr. Cash; he was in charge of the

Pacific bureau of the 'New York Herald' at the time.



When I returned to California by-and-by, I went up to Sacramento and

presented a bill for general correspondence at twenty dollars a week.  It

was paid.  Then I presented a bill for 'special' service on the 'Hornet'

matter of three columns of solid nonpareil at a hundred dollars a column.

The cashier didn't faint, but he came rather near it.  He sent for the

proprietors, and they came and never uttered a protest.  They only

laughed in their jolly fashion, and said it was robbery, but no matter;

it was a grand 'scoop' (the bill or my 'Hornet' report, I didn't know

which): 'Pay it.  It's all right.'  The best men that ever owned a

newspaper.



The 'Hornet' survivors reached the Sandwich Islands the 15th of June.

They were mere skinny skeletons; their clothes hung limp about them and

fitted them no better than a flag fits the flag-staff in a calm.  But

they were well nursed in the hospital; the people of Honolulu kept them

supplied with all the dainties they could need; they gathered strength

fast, and were presently nearly as good as new.  Within a fortnight the

most of them took ship for San Francisco; that is, if my dates have not

gone astray in my memory.  I went in the same ship, a sailing-vessel.

Captain Mitchell of the 'Hornet' was along; also the only passengers the

'Hornet' had carried.  These were two young men from Stamford,

Connecticut--brothers: Samuel and Henry Ferguson.  The 'Hornet' was a

clipper of the first class and a fast sailer; the young men's quarters

were roomy and comfortable, and were well stocked with books, and also

with canned meats and fruits to help out the ship-fare with; and when the

ship cleared from New York harbour in the first week of January there was

promise that she would make quick and pleasant work of the fourteen or

fifteen thousand miles in front of her.  As soon as the cold latitudes

were left behind and the vessel entered summer weather, the voyage became

a holiday picnic.  The ship flew southward under a cloud of sail which

needed no attention, no modifying or change of any kind, for days

together.  The young men read, strolled the ample deck, rested and

drowsed in the shade of the canvas, took their meals with the captain;

and when the day was done they played dummy whist with him till bed-time.

After the snow and ice and tempests of the Horn, the ship bowled

northward into summer weather again, and the trip was a picnic once more.



Until the early morning of the 3rd of May.  Computed position of the ship

112 degrees 10 minutes longitude, latitude 2 degrees above the equator;

no wind, no sea--dead calm; temperature of the atmosphere, tropical,

blistering, unimaginable by one who has not been roasted in it.  There

was a cry of fire.  An unfaithful sailor had disobeyed the rules and gone

into the booby-hatch with an open light to draw some varnish from a cask.

The proper result followed, and the vessel's hours were numbered.



There was not much time to spare, but the captain made the most of it.

The three boats were launched--long-boat and two quarter-boats.  That the

time was very short and the hurry and excitement considerable is

indicated by the fact that in launching the boats a hole was stove in the

side of one of them by some sort of collision, and an oar driven through

the side of another.  The captain's first care was to have four sick

sailors brought up and placed on deck out of harm's way--among them a

'Portyghee.'  This man had not done a day's work on the voyage, but had

lain in his hammock four months nursing an abscess.  When we were taking

notes in the Honolulu hospital and a sailor told this to Mr. Burlingame,

the third mate, who was lying near, raised his head with an effort, and

in a weak voice made this correction--with solemnity and feeling:



'Raising abscesses!  He had a family of them.  He done it to keep from

standing his watch.'



Any provisions that lay handy were gathered up by the men and two

passengers and brought and dumped on the deck where the 'Portyghee' lay;

then they ran for more.  The sailor who was telling this to Mr.

Burlingame added:



'We pulled together thirty-two days' rations for the thirty-one men that

way.'



The third mate lifted his head again and made another correction--with

bitterness:



'The "Portyghee" et twenty-two of them while he was soldiering there and

nobody noticing.  A damned hound.'



The fire spread with great rapidity.  The smoke and flame drove the men

back, and they had to stop their incomplete work of fetching provisions,

and take to the boats with only ten days' rations secured.



Each boat had a compass, a quadrant, a copy of Bowditch's 'Navigator,'

and a Nautical Almanac, and the captain's and chief mate's boats had

chronometers.  There were thirty-one men all told.  The captain took an

account of stock, with the following result: four hams, nearly thirty

pounds of salt pork, half-box of raisins, one hundred pounds of bread,

twelve two-pound cans of oysters, clams, and assorted meats, a keg

containing four pounds of butter, twelve gallons of water in a forty-

gallon 'scuttle-butt', four one-gallon demijohns full of water, three

bottles of brandy (the property of passengers), some pipes, matches, and

a hundred pounds of tobacco.  No medicines.  Of course the whole party

had to go on short rations at once.



The captain and the two passengers kept diaries.  On our voyage to San

Francisco we ran into a calm in the middle of the Pacific, and did not

move a rod during fourteen days; this gave me a chance to copy the

diaries.  Samuel Ferguson's is the fullest; I will draw upon it now.

When the following paragraph was written the doomed ship was about one

hundred and twenty days out from port, and all hands were putting in the

lazy time about as usual, as no one was forecasting disaster.



     [Diary entry] May 2.  Latitude 1 degree 28 minutes N., longitude 111

     degrees 38 minutes W.  Another hot and sluggish day; at one time,

     however, the clouds promised wind, and there came a slight breeze--

     just enough to keep us going.  The only thing to chronicle to-day is

     the quantities of fish about; nine bonitos were caught this

     forenoon, and some large albacores seen.  After dinner the first

     mate hooked a fellow which he could not hold, so he let the line go

     to the captain, who was on the bow.  He, holding on, brought the

     fish to with a jerk, and snap went the line, hook and all.  We also

     saw astern, swimming lazily after us, an enormous shark, which must

     have been nine or ten feet long.  We tried him with all sorts of

     lines and a piece of pork, but he declined to take hold.  I suppose

     he had appeased his appetite on the heads and other remains of the

     bonitos we had thrown overboard.



Next day's entry records the disaster.  The three boats got away, retired

to a short distance, and stopped.  The two injured ones were leaking

badly; some of the men were kept busy baling, others patched the holes as

well as they could.  The captain, the two passengers, and eleven men were

in the long-boat, with a share of the provisions and water, and with no

room to spare, for the boat was only twenty-one feet long, six wide, and

three deep.  The chief mate and eight men were in one of the small boats,

the second mate and seven men in the other.  The passengers had saved no

clothing but what they had on, excepting their overcoats.  The ship,

clothed in flame and sending up a vast column of black smoke into the

sky, made a grand picture in the solitudes of the sea, and hour after

hour the outcasts sat and watched it.  Meantime the captain ciphered on

the immensity of the distance that stretched between him and the nearest

available land, and then scaled the rations down to meet the emergency;

half a biscuit for dinner; one biscuit and some canned meat for dinner;

half a biscuit for tea; a few swallows of water for each meal.  And so

hunger began to gnaw while the ship was still burning.



     [Diary entry] May 4.  The ship burned all night very brightly, and

     hopes are that some ship has seen the light and is bearing down upon

     us.  None seen, however, this forenoon, so we have determined to go

     together north and a little west to some islands in 18 degrees or 19

     degrees north latitude and 114 degrees to 115 degrees west

     longitude, hoping in the meantime to be picked up by some ship.  The

     ship sank suddenly at about 5 A.M.  We find the sun very hot and

     scorching, but all try to keep out of it as much as we can.



They did a quite natural thing now: waited several hours for that

possible ship that might have seen the light to work her slow way to them

through the nearly dead calm.  Then they gave it up and set about their

plans.  If you will look at the map you will say that their course could

be easily decided.  Albemarle Island (Galapagos group) lies straight

eastward nearly a thousand miles; the islands referred to in the diary as

'some islands' (Revillagigedo Islands) lie, as they think, in some widely

uncertain region northward about one thousand miles and westward one

hundred or one hundred and fifty miles.  Acapulco, on the Mexican coast,

lies about north-east something short of one thousand miles.  You will

say random rocks in the ocean are not what is wanted; let them strike for

Acapulco and the solid continent.  That does look like the rational

course, but one presently guesses from the diaries that the thing would

have been wholly irrational--indeed, suicidal.  If the boats struck for

Albemarle they would be in the doldrums all the way; and that means a

watery perdition, with winds which are wholly crazy, and blow from all

points of the compass at once and also perpendicularly.  If the boats

tried for Acapulco they would get out of the doldrums when half-way

there--in case they ever got half-way--and then they would be in

lamentable case, for there they would meet the north-east trades coming

down in their teeth, and these boats were so rigged that they could not

sail within eight points of the wind.  So they wisely started northward,

with a slight slant to the west.  They had but ten days' short allowance

of food; the long-boat was towing the others; they could not depend on

making any sort of definite progress in the doldrums, and they had four

or five hundred miles of doldrums in front of them yet.  They are the

real equator, a tossing, roaring, rainy belt, ten or twelve hundred miles

broad, which girdles the globe.



It rained hard the first night and all got drenched, but they filled up

their water-butt.  The brothers were in the stern with the captain, who

steered.  The quarters were cramped; no one got much sleep.  'Kept on our

course till squalls headed us off.'



Stormy and squally the next morning, with drenching rains.  A heavy and

dangerous 'cobbling' sea.  One marvels how such boats could live in it.

Is it called a feat of desperate daring when one man and a dog cross the

Atlantic in a boat the size of a long-boat, and indeed it is; but this

long-boat was overloaded with men and other plunder, and was only three

feet deep.  'We naturally thought often of all at home, and were glad to

remember that it was Sacrament Sunday, and that prayers would go up from

our friends for us, although they know not our peril.'



The captain got not even a cat-nap during the first three days and

nights, but he got a few winks of sleep the fourth night.  'The worst sea

yet.'  About ten at night the captain changed his course and headed

east-north-east, hoping to make Clipperton Rock.  If he failed, no

matter; he would be in a better position to make those other islands.  I

will mention here that he did not find that rock.



On May 8 no wind all day; sun blistering hot; they take to the oars.

Plenty of dolphins, but they couldn't catch any.  'I think we are all

beginning to realise more and more the awful situation we are in.'  'It

often takes a ship a week to get through the doldrums; how much longer,

then, such a craft as ours?'  'We are so crowded that we cannot stretch

ourselves out for a good sleep, but have to take it any way we can get

it.'



Of course this feature will grow more and more trying, but it will be

human nature to cease to set it down; there will be five weeks of it yet

--we must try to remember that for the diarist; it will make our beds the

softer.



May 9 the sun gives him a warning: 'Looking with both eyes, the horizon

crossed thus +.'  'Henry keeps well, but broods over our troubles more

than I wish he did.'  They caught two dolphins; they tasted well.  'The

captain believed the compass out of the way, but the long-invisible north

star came out--a welcome sight--and endorsed the compass.'



May 10, 'latitude 7 degrees 0 minutes 3 seconds N., longitude 111 degrees

32 minutes W.'  So they have made about three hundred miles of northing

in the six days since they left the region of the lost ship.  'Drifting

in calms all day.'  And baking hot, of course; I have been down there,

and I remember that detail.  'Even as the captain says, all romance has

long since vanished, and I think the most of us are beginning to look the

fact of our awful situation full in the face.'  'We are making but little

headway on our course.'  Bad news from the rearmost boat: the men are

improvident; 'they have eaten up all of the canned meats brought from the

ship, and are now growing discontented.'  Not so with the chief mate's

people--they are evidently under the eye of a man.



Under date of May 11: 'Standing still! or worse; we lost more last night

than we made yesterday.'  In fact, they have lost three miles of the

three hundred of northing they had so laboriously made.  'The cock that

was rescued and pitched into the boat while the ship was on fire still

lives, and crows with the breaking of dawn, cheering us a good deal.'

What has he been living on for a week?  Did the starving men feed him

from their dire poverty?  'The second mate's boat out of water again,

showing that they over-drink their allowance.  The captain spoke pretty

sharply to them.'  It is true: I have the remark in my old note-book; I

got it of the third mate in the hospital at Honolulu.  But there is not

room for it here, and it is too combustible, anyway.  Besides, the third

mate admired it, and what he admired he was likely to enhance.



They were still watching hopefully for ships.  The captain was a

thoughtful man, and probably did not disclose on them that that was

substantially a waste of time.  'In this latitude the horizon is filled

with little upright clouds that look very much like ships.'  Mr. Ferguson

saved three bottles of brandy from his private stores when he left the

ship, and the liquor came good in these days.  'The captain serves out

two tablespoonfuls of brandy and water--half and half--to our crew.'  He

means the watch that is on duty; they stood regular watches--four hours

on and four off.  The chief mate was an excellent officer--a self-

possessed, resolute, fine, all-round man.  The diarist makes the

following note--there is character in it: 'I offered one bottle of brandy

to the chief mate, but he declined, saying he could keep the after-boat

quiet, and we had not enough for all.'







HENRY FERGUSON'S DIARY TO DATE, GIVEN IN FULL:



     May 4, 5, 6, doldrums.  May 7, 8, 9, doldrums.  May 10, 11, 12,

     doldrums.  Tells it all.  Never saw, never felt, never heard, never

     experienced such heat, such darkness, such lightning and thunder,

     and wind and rain, in my life before.



That boy's diary is of the economical sort that a person might properly

be expected to keep in such circumstances--and be forgiven for the

economy, too.  His brother, perishing of consumption, hunger, thirst,

blazing heat, drowning rains, loss of sleep, lack of exercise, was

persistently faithful and circumstantial with his diary from the first

day to the last--an instance of noteworthy fidelity and resolution.  In

spite of the tossing and plunging boat he wrote it close and fine, in a

hand as easy to read as print.  They can't seem to get north of 7 degrees

N.; they are still there the next day:



     [Diary entry] May 12.  A good rain last night, and we caught a good

     deal, though not enough to fill up our tank, pails, &c.  Our object

     is to get out of these doldrums, but it seems as if we cannot do it.

     To-day we have had it very variable, and hope we are on the northern

     edge, thought we are not much above 7 degrees.  This morning we all

     thought we had made out a sail; but it was one of those deceiving

     clouds.  Rained a good deal to-day, making all hands wet and

     uncomfortable; we filled up pretty nearly all our water-pots,

     however.  I hope we may have a fine night, for the captain certainly

     wants rest, and while there is any danger of squalls, or danger of

     any kind, he is always on hand.  I never would have believed that

     open boats such as ours, with their loads, could live in some of the

     seas we have had.



During the night, 12th-13th, 'the cry of A SHIP! brought us to our feet.'

It seemed to be the glimmer of a vessel's signal-lantern rising out of

the curve of the sea.  There was a season of breathless hope while they

stood watching, with their hands shading their eyes, and their hearts in

their throats; then the promise failed: the light was a rising star.  It

is a long time ago--thirty-two years--and it doesn't matter now, yet one

is sorry for their disappointment.  'Thought often of those at home

to-day, and of the disappointment they will feel next Sunday at not

hearing from us by telegraph from San Francisco.'  It will be many weeks

yet before the telegram is received, and it will come as a thunderclap of

joy then, and with the seeming of a miracle, for it will raise from the

grave men mourned as dead.  'To-day our rations were reduced to a quarter

of a biscuit a meal, with about half a pint of water.'  This is on May

13, with more than a month of voyaging in front of them yet! However, as

they do not know that, 'we are all feeling pretty cheerful.'



In the afternoon of the 14th there was a thunderstorm, 'which toward

night seemed to close in around us on every side, making it very dark and

squally.'  'Our situation is becoming more and more desperate,' for they

were making very little northing 'and every day diminishes our small

stock of provisions.'  They realise that the boats must soon separate,

and each fight for its own life.  Towing the quarter-boats is a hindering

business.



That night and next day, light and baffling winds and but little

progress.  Hard to bear, that persistent standing still, and the food

wasting away.  'Everything in a perfect sop; and all so cramped, and no

change of clothes.'  Soon the sun comes out and roasts them.  'Joe caught

another dolphin to-day; in his maw we found a flying-fish and two

skipjacks.'  There is an event, now, which rouses an enthusiasm of hope:

a land-bird arrives! It rests on the yard for awhile, and they can look

at it all they like, and envy it, and thank it for its message.  As a

subject of talk it is beyond price--a fresh new topic for tongues tired

to death of talking upon a single theme: Shall we ever see the land

again; and when?  Is the bird from Clipperton Rock?  They hope so; and

they take heart of grace to believe so.  As it turned out the bird had no

message; it merely came to mock.



May 16, 'the cock still lives, and daily carols forth his praise.'  It

will be a rainy night, 'but I do not care if we can fill up our

water-butts.'



On the 17th one of those majestic spectres of the deep, a water-spout,

stalked by them, and they trembled for their lives.  Young Henry set it

down in his scanty journal with the judicious comment that 'it might have

been a fine sight from a ship.'



From Captain Mitchell's log for this day: 'Only half a bushel of

bread-crumbs left.'  (And a month to wander the seas yet.')



It rained all night and all day; everybody uncomfortable.  Now came a

sword-fish chasing a bonito; and the poor thing, seeking help and

friends, took refuge under the rudder.  The big sword-fish kept hovering

around, scaring everybody badly.  The men's mouths watered for him, for

he would have made a whole banquet; but no one dared to touch him, of

course, for he would sink a boat promptly if molested.  Providence

protected the poor bonito from the cruel sword-fish.  This was just and

right.  Providence next befriended the shipwrecked sailors: they got the

bonito.  This was also just and right.  But in the distribution of

mercies the sword-fish himself got overlooked.  He now went away; to muse

over these subtleties, probably.  The men in all the boats seem pretty

well; the feeblest of the sick ones (not able for a long time to stand

his watch on board the ship) 'is wonderfully recovered.'  This is the

third mate's detected 'Portyghee' that raised the family of abscesses.



     Passed a most awful night.  Rained hard nearly all the time, and

     blew in squalls, accompanied by terrific thunder and lightning from

     all points of the compass.--Henry's Log.



     Most awful night I ever witnessed.--Captain's Log.



Latitude, May 18, 11 degrees 11 minutes.  So they have averaged but forty

miles of northing a day during the fortnight.  Further talk of

separating.  'Too bad, but it must be done for the safety of the whole.'

'At first I never dreamed, but now hardly shut my eyes for a cat-nap

without conjuring up something or other--to be accounted for by weakness,

I suppose.'  But for their disaster they think they would be arriving in

San Francisco about this time.  'I should have liked to send B---the

telegram for her birthday.'  This was a young sister.



On the 19th the captain called up the quarter-boats and said one would

have to go off on its own hook.  The long-boat could no longer tow both

of them.  The second mate refused to go, but the chief mate was ready; in

fact, he was always ready when there was a man's work to the fore.  He

took the second mate's boat; six of its crew elected to remain, and two

of his own crew came with him (nine in the boat, now, including himself).

He sailed away, and toward sunset passed out of sight.  The diarist was

sorry to see him go.  It was natural; one could have better spared the

'Portyghee.'  After thirty-two years I find my prejudice against this

'Portyghee' reviving.  His very looks have long passed out of my memory;

but no matter, I am coming to hate him as religiously as ever.  'Water

will now be a scarce article, for as we get out of the doldrums we shall

get showers only now and then in the trades.  This life is telling

severely on my strength.  Henry holds out first-rate.'  Henry did not

start well, but under hardships he improved straight along.



Latitude, Sunday, May 20, 12 degrees 0 minutes 9 seconds.  They ought to

be well out of the doldrums now, but they are not.  No breeze--the

longed-for trades still missing.  They are still anxiously watching for a

sail, but they have only 'visions of ships that come to naught--the

shadow without the substance.'  The second mate catches a booby this

afternoon, a bird which consists mainly of feathers; 'but as they have no

other meat, it will go well.'



May 21, they strike the trades at last! The second mate catches three

more boobies, and gives the long-boat one.  Dinner 'half a can of

mincemeat divided up and served around, which strengthened us somewhat.'

They have to keep a man bailing all the time; the hole knocked in the

boat when she was launched from the burning ship was never efficiently

mended.  'Heading about north-west now.'  They hope they have easting

enough to make some of these indefinite isles.  Failing that, they think

they will be in a better position to be picked up.  It was an infinitely

slender chance, but the captain probably refrained from mentioning that.



The next day is to be an eventful one.



     [Diary entry] May 22.  Last night wind headed us off, so that part

     of the time we had to steer east-south-east and then west-north-

     west, and so on.  This morning we were all startled by a cry of

     'SAIL HO!' Sure enough, we could see it!  And for a time we cut

     adrift from the second mate's boat, and steered so as to attract its

     attention.  This was about half-past five A.M.  After sailing in a

     state of high excitement for almost twenty minutes we made it out to

     be the chief mate's boat.  Of course we were glad to see them and

     have them report all well; but still it was a bitter disappointment

     to us all.  Now that we are in the trades it seems impossible to

     make northing enough to strike the isles.  We have determined to do

     the best we can, and get in the route of vessels.  Such being the

     determination, it became necessary to cast off the other boat,

     which, after a good deal of unpleasantness, was done, we again

     dividing water and stores, and taking Cox into our boat.  This makes

     our number fifteen.  The second mate's crew wanted to all get in

     with us, and cast the other boat adrift.  It was a very painful

     separation.



So these isles that they have struggled for so long and so hopefully have

to be given up.  What with lying birds that come to mock, and isles that

are but a dream, and 'visions of ships that come to naught,' it is a

pathetic time they are having, with much heartbreak in it.  It was odd

that the vanished boat, three days lost to sight in that vast solitude,

should appear again.  But it brought Cox--we can't be certain why.  But

if it hadn't, the diarist would never have seen the land again.



     [Diary entry] Our chances as we go west increase in regard to being

     picked up, but each day our scanty fare is so much reduced.  Without

     the fish, turtle, and birds sent us, I do not know how we should

     have got along.  The other day I offered to read prayers morning and

     evening for the captain, and last night commenced.  The men,

     although of various nationalities and religions, are very attentive,

     and always uncovered.  May God grant my weak endeavour its issue!



     Latitude, May 24, 14 degrees 18 minutes N.  Five oysters apiece for

     dinner and three spoonfuls of juice, a gill of water, and a piece of

     biscuit the size of a silver dollar.  'We are plainly getting

     weaker--God have mercy upon us all!' That night heavy seas break

     over the weather side and make everybody wet and uncomfortable

     besides requiring constant baling.



Next day 'nothing particular happened.'  Perhaps some of us would have

regarded it differently.  'Passed a spar, but not near enough to see what

it was.'  They saw some whales blow; there were flying-fish skimming the

seas, but none came aboard.  Misty weather, with fine rain, very

penetrating.



Latitude, May 26, 15 degrees 50 minutes.  They caught a flying-fish and a

booby, but had to eat them raw.  'The men grow weaker, and, I think,

despondent; they say very little, though.'  And so, to all the other

imaginable and unimaginable horrors, silence is added--the muteness and

brooding of coming despair.  'It seems our best chance to get in the

track of ships with the hope that some one will run near enough to our

speck to see it.'  He hopes the other boards stood west and have been

picked up.  (They will never be heard of again in this world.)



     [Diary entry] Sunday, May 27, Latitude 16 degrees 0 minutes 5

     seconds; longitude, by chronometer, 117 degrees 22 minutes.  Our

     fourth Sunday!  When we left the ship we reckoned on having about

     ten days' supplies, and now we hope to be able, by rigid economy, to

     make them last another week if possible.[1]  Last night the sea was

     comparatively quiet, but the wind headed us off to about west-north-

     west, which has been about our course all day to-day.  Another

     flying-fish came aboard last night, and one more to-day--both small

     ones.  No birds.  A booby is a great catch, and a good large one

     makes a small dinner for the fifteen of us--that is, of course, as

     dinners go in the 'Hornet's' long-boat.  Tried this morning to read

     the full service to myself, with the Communion, but found it too

     much; am too weak, and get sleepy, and cannot give strict attention;

     so I put off half till this afternoon.  I trust God will hear the

     prayers gone up for us at home to-day, and graciously answer them by

     sending us succour and help in this our season of deep distress.



The next day was 'a good day for seeing a ship.'  But none was seen.  The

diarist 'still feels pretty well,' though very weak; his brother Henry

'bears up and keeps his strength the best of any on board.'  'I do not

feel despondent at all, for I fully trust that the Almighty will hear our

and the home prayers, and He who suffers not a sparrow to fall sees and

cares for us, His creatures.'



Considering the situation and circumstances, the record for next day,

May 29, is one which has a surprise in it for those dull people who think

that nothing but medicines and doctors can cure the sick.  A little

starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best

medicines and the best doctors.  I do not mean a restricted diet; I mean

total abstention from food for one or two days.  I speak from experience;

starvation has been my cold and fever doctor for fifteen years, and has

accomplished a cure in all instances.  The third mate told me in Honolulu

that the 'Portyghee' had lain in his hammock for months, raising his

family of abscesses and feeding like a cannibal.  We have seen that in

spite of dreadful weather, deprivation of sleep, scorching, drenching,

and all manner of miseries, thirteen days of starvation 'wonderfully

recovered' him.  There were four sailors down sick when the ship was

burned.  Twenty-five days of pitiless starvation have followed, and now

we have this curious record: 'All the men are hearty and strong; even the

ones that were down sick are well, except poor Peter.'  When I wrote an

article some months ago urging temporary abstention from food as a remedy

for an inactive appetite and for disease, I was accused of jesting, but I

was in earnest.  'We are all wonderfully well and strong, comparatively

speaking.'  On this day the starvation regime drew its belt a couple of

buckle-holes tighter: the bread ration was reduced from the usual piece

of cracker the size of a silver dollar to the half of that, and one meal

was abolished from the daily three.  This will weaken the men physically,

but if there are any diseases of an ordinary sort left in them they will

disappear.



     Two quarts bread-crumbs left, one-third of a ham, three small cans

     of oysters, and twenty gallons of water.--Captain's Log.



The hopeful tone of the diaries is persistent.  It is remarkable.  Look

at the map and see where the boat is: latitude 16 degrees 44 minutes,

longitude 119 degrees 20 minutes.  It is more than two hundred miles west

of the Revillagigedo Islands, so they are quite out of the question

against the trades, rigged as this boat is.  The nearest land available

for such a boat is the American group, six hundred and fifty miles away,

westward; still, there is no note of surrender, none even of

discouragement!  Yet, May 30, 'we have now left: one can of oysters;

three pounds of raisins; one can of soup; one-third of a ham; three pints

of biscuit-crumbs.'



And fifteen starved men to live on it while they creep and crawl six

hundred and fifty miles.  'Somehow I feel much encouraged by this change

of course (west by north) which we have made to-day.'  Six hundred and

fifty miles on a hatful of provisions.  Let us be thankful, even after

thirty-two years, that they are mercifully ignorant of the fact that it

isn't six hundred and fifty that they must creep on the hatful, but

twenty-two hundred!



Isn't the situation romantic enough just as it stands?  No.  Providence

added a startling detail: pulling an oar in that boat, for common

seaman's wages, was a banished duke--Danish.  We hear no more of him;

just that mention, that is all, with the simple remark added that 'he is

one of our best men'--a high enough compliment for a duke or any other

man in those manhood-testing circumstances.  With that little glimpse of

him at his oar, and that fine word of praise, he vanishes out of our

knowledge for all time.  For all time, unless he should chance upon this

note and reveal himself.



The last day of May is come.  And now there is a disaster to report:

think of it, reflect upon it, and try to understand how much it means,

when you sit down with your family and pass your eye over your breakfast-

table.  Yesterday there were three pints of bread-crumbs; this morning

the little bag is found open and some of the crumbs are missing.  'We

dislike to suspect any one of such a rascally act, but there is no

question that this grave crime has been committed.  Two days will

certainly finish the remaining morsels.  God grant us strength to reach

the American group!'  The third mate told me in Honolulu that in these

days the men remembered with bitterness that the 'Portyghee' had devoured

twenty-two days' rations while he lay waiting to be transferred from the

burning ship, and that now they cursed him and swore an oath that if it

came to cannibalism he should be the first to suffer for the rest.



     [Diary entry] The captain has lost his glasses, and therefore he

     cannot read our pocket prayer-books as much as I think he would

     like, though he is not familiar with them.



Further of the captain: 'He is a good man, and has been most kind to us--

almost fatherly.  He says that if he had been offered the command of the

ship sooner he should have brought his two daughters with him.'  It makes

one shudder yet to think how narrow an escape it was.



     The two meals (rations) a day are as follows: fourteen raisins and a

     piece of cracker the size of a penny for tea; a gill of water, and a

     piece of ham and a piece of bread, each the size of a penny, for

     breakfast.--Captain's Log.



He means a penny in thickness as well as in circumference.  Samuel

Ferguson's diary says the ham was shaved 'about as thin as it could be

cut.'



     [Diary entry] June 1.  Last night and to-day sea very high and

     cobbling, breaking over and making us all wet and cold.  Weather

     squally, and there is no doubt that only careful management--with

     God's protecting care--preserved us through both the night and the

     day; and really it is most marvellous how every morsel that passes

     our lips is blessed to us.  It makes me think daily of the miracle

     of the loaves and fishes.  Henry keeps up wonderfully, which is a

     great consolation to me.  I somehow have great confidence, and hope

     that our afflictions will soon be ended, though we are running

     rapidly across the track of both outward and inward bound vessels,

     and away from them; our chief hope is a whaler, man-of-war, or some

     Australian ship.  The isles we are steering for are put down in

     Bowditch, but on my map are said to be doubtful.  God grant they may

     be there!



     Hardest day yet.--Captain's Log.



Doubtful!  It was worse than that.  A week later they sailed straight

over them.



     [Diary entry] June 2.  Latitude 18 degrees 9 minutes.  Squally,

     cloudy, a heavy sea....  I cannot help thinking of the cheerful and

     comfortable time we had aboard the 'Hornet.'



     Two days' scanty supplies left--ten rations of water apiece and a

     little morsel of bread.  BUT THE SUN SHINES AND GOD IS MERCIFUL.--

     Captain's Log.



     [Diary entry] Sunday, June 3.  Latitude 17 degrees 54 minutes.

     Heavy sea all night, and from 4 A.M.  very wet, the sea breaking

     over us in frequent sluices, and soaking everything aft,

     particularly.  All day the sea has been very high, and it is a

     wonder that we are not swamped.  Heaven grant that it may go down

     this evening!  Our suspense and condition are getting terrible.  I

     managed this morning to crawl, more than step, to the forward end of

     the boat, and was surprised to find that I was so weak, especially

     in the legs and knees.  The sun has been out again, and I have dried

     some things, and hope for a better night.



     June 4.  Latitude 17 degrees 6 minutes, longitude 131 degrees 30

     minutes.  Shipped hardly any seas last night, and to-day the sea has

     gone down somewhat, although it is still too high for comfort, as we

     have an occasional reminder that water is wet.  The sun has been out

     all day, and so we have had a good drying.  I have been trying for

     the last ten or twelve days to get a pair of drawers dry enough to

     put on, and to-day at last succeeded.  I mention this to show the

     state in which we have lived.  If our chronometer is anywhere near

     right, we ought to see the American Isles to-morrow or next day.  If

     there are not there, we have only the chance, for a few days, of a

     stray ship, for we cannot eke out the provisions more than five or

     six days longer, and our strength is failing very fast.  I was much

     surprised to-day to note how my legs have wasted away above my

     knees: they are hardly thicker than my upper arm used to be.  Still,

     I trust in God's infinite mercy, and feel sure he will do what is

     best for us.  To survive, as we have done, thirty-two days in an

     open boat, with only about ten days' fair provisions for thirty-one

     men in the first place, and these divided twice subsequently, is

     more than mere unassisted HUMAN art and strength could have

     accomplished and endured.



     Bread and raisins all gone.--Captain's Log.



     Men growing dreadfully discontented, and awful grumbling and

     unpleasant talk is arising.  God save us from all strife of men; and

     if we must die now, take us himself, and not embitter our bitter

     death still more.--Henry's Log.



     [Diary entry] June 5.  Quiet night and pretty comfortable day,

     though our sail and block show signs of failing, and need taking

     down--which latter is something of a job, as it requires the

     climbing of the mast.  We also had news from forward, there being

     discontent and some threatening complaints of unfair allowances,

     etc., all as unreasonable as foolish; still, these things bid us be

     on our guard.  I am getting miserably weak, but try to keep up the

     best I can.  If we cannot find those isles we can only try to make

     north-west and get in the track of Sandwich Island-bound vessels,

     living as best we can in the meantime.  To-day we changed to one

     meal, and that at about noon, with a small ration or water at 8 or 9

     A.M., another at 12 A.M., and a third at 5 or 6 P.M.



     Nothing left but a little piece of ham and a gill of water, all

     around.--Captain's Log.



They are down to one meal a day now--such as it is--and fifteen hundred

miles to crawl yet!  And now the horrors deepen, and, though they escaped

actual mutiny, the attitude of the men became alarming.  Now we seem to

see why that curious incident happened, so long ago; I mean Cox's return,

after he had been far away and out of sight several days in the chief

mate's boat.  If he had not come back the captain and the two young

passengers might have been slain, now, by these sailors, who were

becoming crazed through their sufferings.





     NOTE SECRETLY PASSED BY HENRY TO HIS BROTHER:



     Cox told me last night that there is getting to be a good deal of

     ugly talk among the men against the captain and us aft.  They say

     that the captain is the cause of all; that he did not try to save

     the ship at all, nor to get provisions, and that even would not let

     the men put in some they had; and that partiality is shown us in

     apportioning our rations aft.  ....asked Cox the other day if he

     would starve first or eat human flesh.  Cox answered he would

     starve.  ....then told him he would only be killing himself.  If we

     do not find those islands we would do well to prepare for anything.

     ....is the loudest of all.





     REPLY:



     We can depend on ...., I think, and ...., and Cox, can we not?





     SECOND NOTE:



     I guess so, and very likely on....; but there is no telling.... and

     Cox are certain.  There is nothing definite said or hinted as yet,

     as I understand Cox; but starving men are the same as maniacs.  It

     would be well to keep a watch on your pistol, so as to have it and

     the cartridges safe from theft.



     Henry's Log, June 5.  Dreadful forebodings.  God spare us from all

     such horrors!  Some of the men getting to talk a good deal.  Nothing

     to write down.  Heart very sad.



     Henry's Log, June 6.  Passed some sea-weed and something that looked

     like the trunk of an old tree, but no birds; beginning to be afraid

     islands not there.  To-day it was said to the captain, in the

     hearing of all, that some of the men would not shrink, when a man

     was dead, from using the flesh, though they would not kill.

     Horrible!  God give us all full use of our reason, and spare us from

     such things!  'From plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and

     murder, and from sudden death, good Lord, deliver us!'



     [Diary entry] June 6.  Latitude 16 degrees 30 minutes, longitude

     (chron.) 134 degrees.  Dry night and wind steady enough to require

     no change in sail; but this A.M.  an attempt to lower it proved

     abortive.  First the third mate tried and got up to the block, and

     fastened a temporary arrangement to reeve the halyards through, but

     had to come down, weak and almost fainting, before finishing; then

     Joe tried, and after twice ascending, fixed it and brought down the

     block; but it was very exhausting work, and afterward he was good

     for nothing all day.  The clue-iron which we are trying to make

     serve for the broken block works, however, very indifferently, and

     will, I am afraid, soon cut the rope.  It is very necessary to get

     everything connected with the sail in good easy running order before

     we get too weak to do anything with it.



     Only three meals left.--Captain's Log.



     [Diary entry] June 7.  Latitude 16 degrees 35 minutes N., longitude

     136 degrees 30 minutes W.  Night wet and uncomfortable.  To-day

     shows us pretty conclusively that the American Isles are not there,

     though we have had some signs that looked like them.  At noon we

     decided to abandon looking any farther for them, and to-night haul a

     little more northerly, so as to get in the way of Sandwich Island

     vessels, which fortunately come down pretty well this way--say to

     latitude 19 degrees to 20 degrees to get the benefit of the trade-

     winds.  Of course all the westing we have made is gain, and I hope

     the chronometer is wrong in our favour, for I do not see how any

     such delicate instrument can keep good time with the constant

     jarring and thumping we get from the sea.  With the strong trade we

     have, I hope that a week from Sunday will put us in sight of the

     Sandwich Islands, if we are not safe by that time by being picked

     up.



It is twelve hundred miles to the Sandwich Islands; the provisions are

virtually exhausted, but not the perishing diarist's pluck.



     [Diary entry] My cough troubled me a good deal last night, and

     therefore I got hardly any sleep at all.  Still, I make out pretty

     well, and should not complain.  Yesterday the third mate mended the

     block, and this P.M.  the sail, after some difficulty, was got down,

     and Harry got to the top of the mast and rove the halyards through

     after some hardship, so that it now works easy and well.  This

     getting up the mast is no easy matter at any time with the sea we

     have, and is very exhausting in our present state.  We could only

     reward Harry by an extra ration of water.  We have made good time

     and course to-day.  Heading her up, however, makes the boat ship

     seas and keeps us all wet; however, it cannot be helped.  Writing is

     a rather precarious thing these times.  Our meal to-day for the

     fifteen consists of half a can of 'soup and boullie'; the other half

     is reserved for to-morrow.  Henry still keeps up grandly, and is a

     great favourite.  God grant he may be spared.



     A better feeling prevails among the men.--Captain's Log.



     [Diary entry] June 9.  Latitude 17 degrees 53 minutes.  Finished to-

     day, I may say, our whole stack of provisions.[2]  We have only left

     a lower end of a ham-bone, with some of the outer rind and skin on.

     In regard to the water, however, I think we have got ten days'

     supply at our present rate of allowance.  This, with what

     nourishment we can get from boot-legs and such chewable matter, we

     hope will enable us to weather it out till we get to the Sandwich

     Islands, or, sailing in the meantime in the track of vessels thither

     bound, be picked up.  My hope is in the latter, for in all human

     probability I cannot stand the other.  Still, we have been

     marvellously protected, and God, I hope, will preserve us all in His

     own good time and way.  The men are getting weaker, but are still

     quiet and orderly.



     [Diary entry] Sunday, June 10.  Latitude 18 degrees 40 minutes,

     longitude 142 degrees 34 minutes.  A pretty good night last night,

     with some wettings, and again another beautiful Sunday.  I cannot

     but think how we should all enjoy it at home, and what a contrast is

     here!  How terrible their suspense must begin to be!  God grant that

     it may be relieved before very long, and He certainly seems to be

     with us in everything we do, and has preserved this boat

     miraculously; for since we left the ship we have sailed considerably

     over three thousand miles, which, taking into consideration our

     meagre stock of provisions, is almost unprecedented.  As yet I do

     not feel the stint of food so much as I do that of water.  Even

     Henry, who is naturally a good water-drinker, can save half of his

     allowance from time to time, when I cannot.  My diseased throat may

     have something to do with that, however.



Nothing is now left which by any flattery can be called food.  But they

must manage somehow for five days more, for at noon they have still eight

hundred miles to go.  It is a race for life now.



This is no time for comments or other interruptions from me--every moment

is valuable.  I will take up the boy brother's diary at this point, and

clear the seas before it and let it fly.



     HENRY FERGUSON'S LOG:



     Sunday, June 10.  Our ham-bone has given us a taste of food to-day,

     and we have got left a little meat and the remainder of the bone for

     tomorrow.  Certainly, never was there such a sweet knuckle-one, or

     one that was so thoroughly appreciated....  I do not know that I

     feel any worse than I did last Sunday, notwithstanding the reduction

     of diet; and I trust that we may all have strength given us to

     sustain the sufferings and hardships of the coming week.  We

     estimate that we are within seven hundred miles of the Sandwich

     Islands, and that our average, daily, is somewhat over a hundred

     miles, so that our hopes have some foundation in reason.  Heaven

     send we may all live to see land!



     June 11.  Ate the meat and rind of our ham-bone, and have the bone

     and the greasy cloth from around the ham left to eat to-morrow.  God

     send us birds or fish, and let us not perish of hunger, or be

     brought to the dreadful alternative of feeding on human flesh!  As I

     feel now, I do not think anything could persuade me; but you cannot

     tell what you will do when you are reduced by hunger and your mind

     wandering.  I hope and pray we can make out to reach the islands

     before we get to this strait; but we have one or two desperate men

     aboard, though they are quiet enough now.  IT IS MY FIRM TRUST AND

     BELIEF THAT WE ARE GOING TO BE SAVED.



     All food gone.--Captain's Log.[3]



[Ferguson's log continues]



     June 12.  Stiff breeze, and we are fairly flying--dead ahead of it--

     and toward the islands.  Good hope, but the prospects of hunger are

     awful.  Ate ham-bone to-day.  It is the captain's birthday; he is

     fifty-four years old.



     June 13.  The ham-rags are not quite all gone yet, and the boot-

     legs, we find, are very palatable after we get the salt out of them.

     A little smoke, I think, does some little good; but I don't know.



     June 14.  Hunger does not pain us much, but we are dreadfully weak.

     Our water is getting frightfully low.  God grant we may see land

     soon!  NOTHING TO EAT, but feel better than I did yesterday.  Toward

     evening saw a magnificent rainbow--THE FIRST WE HAD SEEN.  Captain

     said, 'Cheer up, boys; it's a prophecy--IT'S THE BOW OF PROMISE!'



     June 15.  God be for ever praised for His infinite mercy!  LAND IN

     SIGHT!  rapidly neared it and soon were SURE of it...  Two noble

     Kanakas swam out and took the boat ashore.  We were joyfully

     received by two white men--Mr. Jones and his steward Charley--and a

     crowd of native men, women, and children.  They treated us

     splendidly--aided us, and carried us up the bank, and brought us

     water, poi, bananas, and green coconuts; but the white men took care

     of us and prevented those who would have eaten too much from doing

     so.  Everybody overjoyed to see us, and all sympathy expressed in

     faces, deeds, and words.  We were then helped up to the house; and

     help we needed.  Mr. Jones and Charley are the only white men here.

     Treated us splendidly.  Gave us first about a teaspoonful of spirits

     in water, and then to each a cup of warm tea, with a little bread.

     Takes EVERY care of us.  Gave us later another cup of tea, and bread

     the same, and then let us go to rest.  IT IS THE HAPPIEST DAY OF MY

     LIFE...  God in His mercy has heard our prayer....  Everybody is so

     kind.  Words cannot tell.



     June 16.  Mr. Jones gave us a delightful bed, and we surely had a

     good night's rest; but not sleep--we were too happy to sleep; would

     keep the reality and not let it turn to a delusion--dreaded that we

     might wake up and find ourselves in the boat again.





It is an amazing adventure.  There is nothing of its sort in history that

surpasses it in impossibilities made possible.  In one extraordinary

detail--the survival of every person in the boat--it probably stands

alone in the history of adventures of its kinds.  Usually merely a part

of a boat's company survive--officers, mainly, and other educated and

tenderly-reared men, unused to hardship and heavy labour; the untrained,

roughly-reared hard workers succumb.  But in this case even the rudest

and roughest stood the privations and miseries of the voyage almost as

well as did the college-bred young brothers and the captain.  I mean,

physically.  The minds of most of the sailors broke down in the fourth

week and went to temporary ruin, but physically the endurance exhibited

was astonishing.  Those men did not survive by any merit of their own, of

course, but by merit of the character and intelligence of the captain;

they lived by the mastery of his spirit.  Without him they would have

been children without a nurse; they would have exhausted their provisions

in a week, and their pluck would not have lasted even as long as the

provisions.



The boat came near to being wrecked at the last.  As it approached the

shore the sail was let go, and came down with a run; then the captain saw

that he was drifting swiftly toward an ugly reef, and an effort was made

to hoist the sail again; but it could not be done; the men's strength was

wholly exhausted; they could not even pull an oar.  They were helpless,

and death imminent.  It was then that they were discovered by the two

Kanakas who achieved the rescue.  They swam out and manned the boat, and

piloted her through a narrow and hardly noticeable break in the reef--the

only break in it in a stretch of thirty-five miles!  The spot where the

landing was made was the only one in that stretch where footing could

have been found on the shore; everywhere else precipices came sheer down

into forty fathoms of water.  Also, in all that stretch this was the only

spot where anybody lived.



Within ten days after the landing all the men but one were up and

creeping about.  Properly, they ought to have killed themselves with the

'food' of the last few days--some of them, at any rate--men who had

freighted their stomachs with strips of leather from old boots and with

chips from the butter cask; a freightage which they did not get rid of by

digestion, but by other means.  The captain and the two passengers did

not eat strips and chips, as the sailors did, but scraped the boot-

leather and the wood, and made a pulp of the scrapings by moistening them

with water.  The third mate told me that the boots were old and full of

holes; then added thoughtfully, 'but the holes digested the best.'

Speaking of digestion, here is a remarkable thing, and worth nothing:

during this strange voyage, and for a while afterward on shore, the

bowels of some of the men virtually ceased from their functions; in some

cases there was no action for twenty and thirty days, and in one case for

forty-four!  Sleeping also came to be rare.  Yet the men did very well

without it.  During many days the captain did not sleep at all--twenty-

one, I think, on one stretch.



When the landing was made, all the men were successfully protected from

over-eating except the 'Portyghee;' he escaped the watch and ate an

incredible number of bananas: a hundred and fifty-two, the third mate

said, but this was undoubtedly an exaggeration; I think it was a hundred

and fifty-one.  He was already nearly half full of leather; it was

hanging out of his ears.  (I do not state this on the third mate's

authority, for we have seen what sort of a person he was; I state it on

my own.)  The 'Portyghee' ought to have died, of course, and even now it

seems a pity that he didn't; but he got well, and as early as any of

them; and all full of leather, too, the way he was, and butter-timber and

handkerchiefs and bananas.  Some of the men did eat handkerchiefs in

those last days, also socks; and he was one of them.



It is to the credit of the men that they did not kill the rooster that

crowed so gallantly mornings.  He lived eighteen days, and then stood up

and stretched his neck and made a brave, weak effort to do his duty once

more, and died in the act.  It is a picturesque detail; and so is that

rainbow, too--the only one seen in the forty-three days,--raising its

triumphal arch in the skies for the sturdy fighters to sail under to

victory and rescue.



With ten days' provisions Captain Josiah Mitchell performed this

memorable voyage of forty-three days and eight hours in an open boat,

sailing four thousand miles in reality and thirty-three hundred and sixty

by direct courses, and brought every man safe to land.  A bright, simple-

hearted, unassuming, plucky, and most companionable man.  I walked the

deck with him twenty-eight days--when I was not copying diaries,--and I

remember him with reverent honour.  If he is alive he is eighty-six years

old now.



If I remember rightly, Samuel Ferguson died soon after we reached San

Francisco.  I do not think he lived to see his home again; his disease

had been seriously aggravated by his hardships.



For a time it was hoped that the two quarter-boats would presently be

heard of, but this hope suffered disappointment.  They went down with all

on board, no doubt, not even sparing that knightly chief mate.



The authors of the diaries allowed me to copy them exactly as they were

written, and the extracts that I have given are without any smoothing

over or revision.  These diaries are finely modest and unaffected, and

with unconscious and unintentional art they rise toward the climax with

graduated and gathering force and swing and dramatic intensity; they

sweep you along with a cumulative rush, and when the cry rings out at

last, 'Land in sight!' your heart is in your mouth, and for a moment you

think it is you that have been saved.  The last two paragraphs are not

improvable by anybody's art; they are literary gold; and their very

pauses and uncompleted sentences have in them an eloquence not reachable

by any words.



The interest of this story is unquenchable; it is of the sort that time

cannot decay.  I have not looked at the diaries for thirty-two years, but

I find that they have lost nothing in that time.  Lost?  They have

gained; for by some subtle law all tragic human experiences gain in

pathos by the perspective of time.  We realize this when in Naples we

stand musing over the poor Pompeian mother, lost in the historic storm of

volcanic ashes eighteen centuries ago, who lies with her child gripped

close to her breast, trying to save it, and whose despair and grief have

been preserved for us by the fiery envelope which took her life but

eternalized her form and features.  She moves us, she haunts us, she

stays in our thoughts for many days, we do not know why, for she is

nothing to us, she has been nothing to anyone for eighteen centuries;

whereas of the like case to-day we should say, 'Poor thing!  it is

pitiful,' and forget it in an hour.



[1] There are nineteen days of voyaging ahead yet.--M.T.



[2] Six days to sail yet, nevertheless.--M.T.



[3] It was at this time discovered that the crazed sailors had gotten the

delusion that the captain had a million dollars in gold concealed aft,

and they were conspiring to kill him and the two passengers and seize it.

--M.T.













AT THE APPETITE-CURE



This establishment's name is Hochberghaus.  It is in Bohemia, a short

day's journey from Vienna, and being in the Austrian Empire is of course

a health resort.  The empire is made up of health resorts; it distributes

health to the whole world.  Its waters are all medicinal.  They are

bottled and sent throughout the earth; the natives themselves drink beer.

This is self-sacrifice apparently--but outlanders who have drunk Vienna

beer have another idea about it.  Particularly the Pilsner which one gets

in a small cellar up an obscure back lane in the First Bezirk--the name

has escaped me, but the place is easily found: You inquire for the Greek

church; and when you get to it, go right along by--the next house is that

little beer-mill.  It is remote from all traffic and all noise; it is

always Sunday there.  There are two small rooms, with low ceilings

supported by massive arches; the arches and ceilings are whitewashed,

otherwise the rooms would pass for cells in the dungeons of a bastile.

The furniture is plain and cheap, there is no ornamentation anywhere; yet

it is a heaven for the self-sacrificers, for the beer there is

incomparable; there is nothing like it elsewhere in the world.  In the

first room you will find twelve or fifteen ladies and gentlemen of

civilian quality; in the other one a dozen generals and ambassadors.  One

may live in Vienna many months and not hear of this place; but having

once heard of it and sampled it, the sampler will afterward infest it.



However, this is all incidental--a mere passing note of gratitude for

blessings received--it has nothing to do with my subject.  My subject is

health resorts.  All unhealthy people ought to domicile themselves in

Vienna, and use that as a base, making flights from time to time to the

outlying resorts, according to need.  A flight to Marienbad to get rid of

fat; a flight to Carlsbad to get rid of rheumatism; a flight to

Kalteneutgeben to take the water cure and get rid of the rest of the

diseases.  It is all so handy.  You can stand in Vienna and toss a

biscuit into Kaltenleutgeben, with a twelve-inch gun.  You can run out

thither at any time of the day; you go by phenomenally slow trains, and

yet inside of an hour you have exchanged the glare and swelter of the

city for wooded hills, and shady forest paths, and soft cool airs, and

the music of birds, and the repose and the peace of paradise.



And there are plenty of other health resorts at your service and

convenient to get at from Vienna; charming places, all of them; Vienna

sits in the centre of a beautiful world of mountains with now and then a

lake and forests; in fact, no other city is so fortunately situated.



There is an abundance of health resorts, as I have said.  Among them this

place--Hochberghaus.  It stands solitary on the top of a densely wooded

mountain, and is a building of great size.  It is called the Appetite

Anstallt, and people who have lost their appetites come here to get them

restored.  When I arrived I was taken by Professor Haimberger to his

consulting-room and questioned:



'It is six o'clock.  When did you eat last?'



'At noon.'



'What did you eat?'



'Next to nothing.'



'What was on the table?'



'The usual things.'



'Chops, chickens, vegetables, and so on?'



'Yes; but don't mention them--I can't bear it.'



'Are you tired of them?'



'Oh, utterly.  I wish I might never hear of them again.'



'The mere sight of food offends you, does it?'



'More, it revolts me.'



The doctor considered awhile, then got out a long menu and ran his eye

slowly down it.



'I think,' said he, 'that what you need to eat is--but here, choose for

yourself.'



I glanced at the list, and my stomach threw a hand-spring.  Of all the

barbarous lay-outs that were ever contrived, this was the most atrocious.

At the top stood 'tough, underdone, overdue tripe, garnished with

garlic;' half-way down the bill stood 'young cat; old cat; scrambled

cat;' at the bottom stood 'sailor-boots, softened with tallow--served

raw.'  The wide intervals of the bill were packed with dishes calculated

to gag a cannibal.  I said:



'Doctor, it is not fair to joke over so serious a case as mine.  I came

here to get an appetite, not to throw away the remnant that's left.'



He said gravely: 'I am not joking; why should I joke?'



'But I can't eat these horrors.'



'Why not?'



He said it with a naivete that was admirable, whether it was real or

assumed.



'Why not?  Because--why, doctor, for months I have seldom been able to

endure anything more substantial than omelettes and custards.  These

unspeakable dishes of yours--'



'Oh, you will come to like them.  They are very good.  And you must eat

them.  It is a rule of the place, and is strict.  I cannot permit any

departure from it.'



I said smiling: 'Well, then, doctor, you will have to permit the

departure of the patient.  I am going.'



He looked hurt, and said in a way which changed the aspect of things:



'I am sure you would not do me that injustice.  I accepted you in good

faith--you will not shame that confidence.  This appetite-cure is my

whole living.  If you should go forth from it with the sort of appetite

which you now have, it could become known, and you can see, yourself,

that people would say my cure failed in your case and hence can fail in

other cases.  You will not go; you will not do me this hurt.'



I apologised and said I would stay.



'That is right.  I was sure you would not go; it would take the food from

my family's mouths.'



'Would they mind that?  Do they eat these fiendish things?'



'They?  My family?' His eyes were full of gentle wonder.  'Of course

not.'



'Oh, they don't!  Do you?'



'Certainly not.'



'I see.  It's another case of a physician who doesn't take his own

medicine.'



'I don't need it.  It is six hours since you lunched.  Will you have

supper now--or later?'



'I am not hungry, but now is as good a time as any, and I would like to

be done with it and have it off my mind.  It is about my usual time, and

regularity is commanded by all the authorities.  Yes, I will try to

nibble a little now--I wish a light horsewhipping would answer instead.'



The professor handed me that odious menu.



'Choose--or will you have it later?'



'Oh, dear me, show me to my room; I forgot your hard rule.'



'Wait just a moment before you finally decide.  There is another rule.

If you choose now, the order will be filled at once; but if you wait, you

will have to await my pleasure.  You cannot get a dish from that entire

bill until I consent.'



'All right.  Show me to my room, and send the cook to bed; there is not

going to be any hurry.'



The professor took me up one flight of stairs and showed me into a most

inviting and comfortable apartment consisting of parlour, bedchamber, and

bathroom.



The front windows looked out over a far-reaching spread of green glades

and valleys, and tumbled hills clothed with forests--a noble solitude

unvexed by the fussy world.  In the parlour were many shelves filled with

books.  The professor said he would now leave me to myself; and added:



'Smoke and read as much as you please, drink all the water you like.

When you get hungry, ring and give your order, and I will decide whether

it shall be filled or not.  Yours is a stubborn, bad case, and I think

the first fourteen dishes in the bill are each and all too delicate for

its needs.  I ask you as a favour to restrain yourself and not call for

them.'



'Restrain myself, is it?  Give yourself no uneasiness.  You are going to

save money by me.  The idea of coaxing a sick man's appetite back with

this buzzard-fare is clear insanity.'



I said it with bitterness, for I felt outraged by this calm, cold talk

over these heartless new engines of assassination.  The doctor looked

grieved, but not offended.  He laid the bill of fare of the commode at my

bed's head, 'so that it would be handy,' and said:



'Yours is not the worst case I have encountered, by any means; still it

is a bad one and requires robust treatment; therefore I shall be

gratified if you will restrain yourself and skip down to No. 15 and begin

with that.'



Then he left me and I began to undress, for I was dog-tired and very

sleepy.  I slept fifteen hours and woke up finely refreshed at ten the

next morning.  Vienna coffee!  It was the first thing I thought of--that

unapproachable luxury--that sumptuous coffee-house coffee, compared with

which all other European coffee and all American hotel coffee is mere

fluid poverty.  I rang, and ordered it; also Vienna bread, that delicious

invention.  The servant spoke through the wicket in the door and said--

but you know what he said.  He referred me to the bill of fare.

I allowed him to go--I had no further use for him.



After the bath I dressed and started for a walk, and got as far as the

door.  It was locked on the outside.  I rang, and the servant came and

explained that it was another rule.  The seclusion of the patient was

required until after the first meal.  I had not been particularly anxious

to get out before; but it was different now.  Being locked in makes a

person wishful to get out.  I soon began to find it difficult to put in

the time.  At two o'clock I had been twenty-six hours without food.  I

had been growing hungry for some time; I recognised that I was not only

hungry now, but hungry with a strong adjective in front of it.  Yet I was

not hungry enough to face the bill of fare.



I must put in the time somehow.  I would read and smoke.  I did it; hour

by hour.  The books were all of one breed--shipwrecks; people lost in

deserts; people shut up in caved-in mines; people starving in besieged

cities.  I read about all the revolting dishes that ever famishing men

had stayed their hunger with.  During the first hours these things

nauseated me: hours followed in which they did not so affect me; still

other hours followed in which I found myself smacking my lips over some

tolerably infernal messes.  When I had been without food forty-five hours

I ran eagerly to the bell and ordered the second dish in the bill, which

was a sort of dumplings containing a compost made of caviar and tar.



It was refused me.  During the next fifteen hours I visited the bell

every now and then and ordered a dish that was further down the list.

Always a refusal.  But I was conquering prejudice after prejudice, right

along; I was making sure progress; I was creeping up on No. 15 with

deadly certainty, and my heart beat faster and faster, my hopes rose

higher and higher.



At last when food had not passed my lips for sixty hours, victory was

mine, and I ordered No. 15:



'Soft-boiled spring chicken--in the egg; six dozen, hot and fragrant!'



In fifteen minutes it was there; and the doctor along with it, rubbing

his hands with joy.  He said with great excitement:



'It's a cure, it's a cure!  I knew I could do it.  Dear sir, my grand

system never failed--never.  You've got your appetite back--you know you

have; say it and make me happy.'



'Bring on your carrion--I can eat anything in the bill!'



'Oh, this is noble, this is splendid--but I knew I could do it, the

system never fails.  How are the birds?'



'Never was anything so delicious in the world; and yet as a rule I don't

care for game.  But don't interrupt me, don't--I can't spare my mouth, I

really can't.'



Then the doctor said:



'The cure is perfect.  There is no more doubt nor danger.  Let the

poultry alone; I can trust you with a beefsteak, now.'



The beefsteak came--as much as a basketful of it--with potatoes, and

Vienna bread and coffee; and I ate a meal then that was worth all the

costly preparation I had made for it.  And dripped tears of gratitude

into the gravy all the time--gratitude to the doctor for putting a little

plain common-sense into me when I had been empty of it so many, many

years.





II



Thirty years ago Haimberger went off on a long voyage in a sailing-ship.

There were fifteen passengers on board.  The table-fare was of the

regulation pattern of the day: At 7 in the morning, a cup of bad coffee

in bed; at 9, breakfast: bad coffee, with condensed milk; soggy rolls,

crackers, salt fish; at 1 P.M., luncheon: cold tongue, cold ham, cold

corned beef, soggy cold rolls, crackers; 5 P.M., dinner: thick pea soup,

salt fish, hot corned beef and sour kraut, boiled pork and beans,

pudding; 9 till 11 P.M., supper: tea, with condensed milk, cold tongue,

cold ham, pickles, sea-biscuit, pickled oysters, pickled pigs' feet,

grilled bones, golden buck.



At the end of the first week eating had ceased, nibbling had taken its

place.  The passengers came to the table, but it was partly to put in the

time, and partly because the wisdom of the ages commanded them to be

regular in their meals.  They were tired of the coarse and monotonous

fare, and took no interest in it, had no appetite for it.  All day and

every day they roamed the ship half hungry, plagued by their gnawing

stomachs, moody, untalkative, miserable.  Among them were three confirmed

dyspeptics.  These became shadows in the course of three weeks.  There

was also a bed-ridden invalid; he lived on boiled rice; he could not look

at the regular dishes.



Now came shipwrecks and life in open boats, with the usual paucity of

food.  Provisions ran lower and lower.  The appetites improved, then.

When nothing was left but raw ham and the ration of that was down to two

ounces a day per person, the appetites were perfect.  At the end of

fifteen days the dyspeptics, the invalid, and the most delicate ladies in

the party were chewing sailor-boots in ecstasy, and only complaining

because the supply of them was limited.  Yet these were the same people

who couldn't endure the ship's tedious corned beef and sour kraut and

other crudities.  They were rescued by an English vessel.  Within ten

days the whole fifteen were in as good condition as they had been when

the shipwreck occurred.



'They had suffered no damage by their adventure,' said the professor.



'Do you note that?'



'Yes.'



'Do you note it well?'



'Yes--I think I do.'



'But you don't.  You hesitate.  You don't rise to the importance of it.

I will say it again--with emphasis--not one of them suffered any damage.'



'Now I begin to see.  Yes, it was indeed remarkable.'



'Nothing of the kind.  It was perfectly natural.  There was no reason why

they should suffer damage.  They were undergoing Nature's Appetite-Cure,

the best and wisest in the world.'



'Is that where you got your idea?'



'That is where I got it.'



'It taught those people a valuable lesson.'



'What makes you think that?'



'Why shouldn't I?  You seem to think it taught you one.'



'That is nothing to the point.  I am not a fool.'



'I see.  Were they fools?'



'They were human beings.'



'Is it the same thing?'



'Why do you ask?  You know it yourself.  As regards his health--and the

rest of the things--the average man is what his environment and his

superstitions have made him; and their function is to make him an ass.

He can't add up three or four new circumstances together and perceive

what they mean; it is beyond him.  He is not capable of observing for

himself; he has to get everything at second-hand.  If what are miscalled

the lower animals were as silly as man is, they would all perish from the

earth in a year.'



'Those passengers learned no lesson, then?'



'Not a sign of it.  They went to their regular meals in the English ship,

and pretty soon they were nibbling again--nibbling, appetiteless,

disgusted with the food, moody, miserable, half hungry, their outraged

stomachs cursing and swearing and whining and supplicating all day long.

And in vain, for they were the stomachs of fools.'



'Then, as I understand it, your scheme is--'



'Quite simple.  Don't eat until you are hungry.  If the food fails to

taste good, fails to satisfy you, rejoice you, comfort you, don't eat

again until you are very hungry.  Then it will rejoice you--and do you

good, too.'



'And I am to observe no regularity, as to hours?'



'When you are conquering a bad appetite--no.  After it is conquered,

regularity is no harm, so long as the appetite remains good.  As soon as

the appetite wavers, apply the corrective again--which is starvation,

long or short according to the needs of the case.'



'The best diet, I suppose--I mean the wholesomest--'



'All diets are wholesome.  Some are wholesomer than others, but all the

ordinary diets are wholesome enough for the people who use them.  Whether

the food be fine or coarse it will taste good and it will nourish if a

watch be kept upon the appetite and a little starvation introduced every

time it weakens.  Nansen was used to fine fare, but when his meals were

restricted to bear-meat months at a time he suffered no damage and no

discomfort, because his appetite was kept at par through the difficulty

of getting his bear-meat regularly.'



'But doctors arrange carefully considered and delicate diets for

invalids.'



'They can't help it.  The invalid is full of inherited superstitions and

won't starve himself.  He believes it would certainly kill him.'



'It would weaken him, wouldn't it?'



'Nothing to hurt.  Look at the invalids in our shipwreck.  They lived

fifteen days on pinches of raw ham, a suck at sailor-boots, and general

starvation.  It weakened them, but it didn't hurt them.  It put them in

fine shape to eat heartily of hearty food and build themselves up to a

condition of robust health.  But they did not know enough to profit by

that; they lost their opportunity; they remained invalids; it served them

right.  Do you know the trick that the health-resort doctors play?'



'What is it?'



'My system disguised--covert starvation.  Grape-cure, bath-cure, mud-

cure--it is all the same.  The grape and the bath and the mud make a show

and do a trifle of the work--the real work is done by the surreptitious

starvation.  The patient accustomed to four meals and late hours--at both

ends of the day--now consider what he has to do at a health resort.  He

gets up at 6 in the morning.  Eats one egg.  Tramps up and down a

promenade two hours with the other fools.  Eats a butterfly.  Slowly

drinks a glass of filtered sewage that smells like a buzzard's breath.

Promenades another two hours, but alone; if you speak to him he says

anxiously, "My water!--I am walking off my water!--please don't

interrupt," and goes stumping along again.  Eats a candied roseleaf.

Lies at rest in the silence and solitude of his room for hours; mustn't

read, mustn't smoke.  The doctor comes and feels of his heart, now, and

his pulse, and thumps his breast and his back and his stomach, and

listens for results through a penny flageolet; then orders the man's

bath--half a degree, Reaumur, cooler than yesterday.  After the bath

another egg.  A glass of sewage at three or four in the afternoon, and

promenade solemnly with the other freaks.  Dinner at 6--half a doughnut

and a cup of tea.  Walk again.  Half-past 8, supper--more butterfly; at

9, to bed.  Six weeks of this regime--think of it.  It starves a man out

and puts him in splendid condition.  It would have the same effect in

London, New York, Jericho--anywhere.'



'How long does it take to put a person in condition here?'



'It ought to take but a day or two; but in fact it takes from one to six

weeks, according to the character and mentality of the patient.'



'How is that?'



'Do you see that crowd of women playing football, and boxing, and jumping

fences yonder?  They have been here six or seven weeks.  They were

spectral poor weaklings when they came.  They were accustomed to nibbling

at dainties and delicacies at set hours four times a day, and they had no

appetite for anything.  I questioned them, and then locked them into

their rooms--the frailest ones to starve nine or ten hours, the others

twelve or fifteen.  Before long they began to beg; and indeed they

suffered a good deal.  They complained of nausea, headache, and so on.

It was good to see them eat when the time was up.  They could not

remember when the devouring of a meal had afforded them such rapture--

that was their word.  Now, then, that ought to have ended their cure, but

it didn't.  They were free to go to any meals in the house, and they

chose their accustomed four.  Within a day or two I had to interfere.

Their appetites were weakening.  I made them knock out a meal.  That set

them up again.  Then they resumed the four.  I begged them to learn to

knock out a meal themselves, without waiting for me.  Up to a fortnight

ago they couldn't; they really hadn't manhood enough; but they were

gaining it, and now I think they are safe.  They drop out a meal every

now and then of their own accord.  They are in fine condition now, and

they might safely go home, I think, but their confidence is not quite

perfect yet, so they are waiting awhile.'



'Other cases are different?'



'Oh yes.  Sometimes a man learns the whole trick in a week.  Learns to

regulate his appetite and keep it in perfect order.  Learns to drop out a

meal with frequency and not mind it.'



'But why drop the entire meal out?  Why not a part of it?'



'It's a poor device, and inadequate.  If the stomach doesn't call

vigorously--with a shout, as you may say--it is better not to pester it

but just give it a real rest.  Some people can eat more meals than

others, and still thrive.  There are all sorts of people, and all sorts

of appetites.  I will show you a man presently who was accustomed to

nibble at eight meals a day.  It was beyond the proper gait of his

appetite by two.  I have got him down to six a day, now, and he is all

right, and enjoys life.  How many meals to you affect per day?'



'Formerly--for twenty-two years--a meal and a half; during the past two

years, two and a half: coffee and a roll at 9, luncheon at 1, dinner at

7.30 or 8.'



'Formerly a meal and a half--that is, coffee and a roll at 9, dinner in

the evening, nothing between--is that it?



'Yes.'



'Why did you add a meal?'



'It was the family's idea.  They were uneasy.  They thought I was killing

myself.'



'You found a meal and a half per day enough, all through the twenty-two

years?'



'Plenty.'



'Your present poor condition is due to the extra meal.  Drop it out.  You

are trying to eat oftener than your stomach demands.  You don't gain, you

lose.  You eat less food now, in a day, on two and a half meals, than you

formerly ate on one and a half.'



'True--a good deal less; for in those olds days my dinner was a very

sizeable thing.'



'Put yourself on a single meal a day, now--dinner--for a few days, till

you secure a good, sound, regular, trustworthy appetite, then take to

your one and a half permanently, and don't listen to the family any more.

When you have any ordinary ailment, particularly of a feverish sort, eat

nothing at all during twenty-four hours.  That will cure it.  It will

cure the stubbornest cold in the head, too.  No cold in the head can

survive twenty-four hours' unmodified starvation.'



I know it.  I have proved it many a time.













CONCERNING THE JEWS



Some months ago I published a magazine article[1] descriptive of a

remarkable scene in the Imperial Parliament in Vienna.  Since then I have

received from Jews in America several letters of inquiry.  They were

difficult letters to answer, for they were not very definite.  But at

last I have received a definite one.  It is from a lawyer, and he really

asks the questions which the other writers probably believed they were

asking.  By help of this text I will do the best I can to publicly answer

this correspondent, and also the others--at the same time apologising for

having failed to reply privately.  The lawyer's letter reads as follows:



     'I have read "Stirring Times in Austria."  One point in particular

     is of vital import to not a few thousand people, including myself,

     being a point about which I have often wanted to address a question

     to some disinterested person.  The show of military force in the

     Austrian Parliament, which precipitated the riots, was not

     introduced by any Jew.  No Jew was a member of that body.  No Jewish

     question was involved in the Ausgleich or in the language

     proposition.  No Jew was insulting anybody.  In short, no Jew was

     doing any mischief toward anybody whatsoever.  In fact, the Jews

     were the only ones of the nineteen different races in Austria which

     did not have a party--they are absolute non-participants.  Yet in

     your article you say that in the rioting which followed, all classes

     of people were unanimous only on one thing, viz., in being against

     the Jews.  Now, will you kindly tell me why, in your judgment, the

     Jews have thus ever been, and are even now, in these days of

     supposed intelligence, the butt of baseless, vicious animosities?

     I dare say that for centuries there has been no more quiet,

     undisturbing, and well-behaving citizen, as a class, than that same

     Jew.  It seems to me that ignorance and fanaticism cannot alone

     account for these horrible and unjust persecutions.



     'Tell me, therefore, from your vantage point of cold view, what in

     your mind is the cause.  Can American Jews do anything to correct it

     either in America or abroad?  Will it ever come to an end?  Will a

     Jew be permitted to live honestly, decently, and peaceably like the

     rest of mankind?  What has become of the Golden Rule?'



I will begin by saying that if I thought myself prejudiced against the

Jew, I should hold it fairest to leave this subject to a person not

crippled in that way.  But I think I have no such prejudice.  A few years

ago a Jew observed to me that there was no uncourteous reference to his

people in my books, and asked how it happened.  It happened because the

disposition was lacking.  I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race

prejudices, and I think I have no colour prejudices nor caste prejudices

nor creed prejudices.  Indeed, I know it.  I can stand any society.  All

that I care to know is that a man is a human being--that is enough for

me; he can't be any worse.  I have no special regard for Satan; but I can

at least claim that I have no prejudice against him.  It may even be that

I lean a little his way, on account of his not having a fair show.  All

religions issue Bibles against him, and say the most injurious things

about him, but we never hear his side.  We have none but the evidence for

the prosecution, and yet we have rendered the verdict.  To my mind, this

is irregular.  It is un-English; it is un-American; it is French.

Without this precedent Dreyfus could not have been condemned.  Of course

Satan has some kind of a case, it goes without saying.  It may be a poor

one, but that is nothing; that can be said about any of us.  As soon as I

can get at the facts I will undertake his rehabilitation myself, if I can

find an unpolitic publisher.  It is a thing which we ought to be willing

to do for any one who is under a cloud.  We may not pay Satan reverence,

for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents.

A person who has during all time maintained the imposing position of

spiritual head of four-fifths of the human race, and political head of

the whole of it, must be granted the possession of executive abilities of

the loftiest order.  In his large presence the other popes and

politicians shrink to midges for the microscope.  I would like to see

him.  I would rather see him and shake him by the tail than any other

member of the European Concert.  In the present paper I shall allow

myself to use the word Jew as if it stood for both religion and race.  It

is handy; and, besides, that is what the term means to the general world.



In the above letter one notes these points:



1.  The Jew is a well-behaved citizen.



2.  Can ignorance and fanaticism alone account for his unjust treatment?



3.  Can Jews do anything to improve the situation?



4.  The Jews have no party; they are non-participants.



5.  Will the persecution ever come to an end?



6.  What has become of the Golden Rule?



Point No. 1.--We must grant proposition No. 1, for several sufficient

reasons.  The Jew is not a disturber of the peace of any country.  Even

his enemies will concede that.  He is not a loafer, he is not a sot, he

is not noisy, he is not a brawler nor a rioter, he is not quarrelsome.

In the statistics of crime his presence is conspicuously rare--in all

countries.  With murder and other crimes of violence he has but little to

do: he is a stranger to the hangman.  In the police court's daily long

roll of 'assaults' and 'drunk and disorderlies' his name seldom appears.

That the Jewish home is a home in the truest sense is a fact which no one

will dispute.  The family is knitted together by the strongest

affections; its members show each other every due respect; and reverence

for the elders is an inviolate law of the house.  The Jew is not a burden

on the charities of the state nor of the city; these could cease from

their functions without affecting him.  When he is well enough, he works;

when he is incapacitated, his own people take care of him.  And not in a

poor and stingy way, but with a fine and large benevolence.  His race is

entitled to be called the most benevolent of all the races of men.  A

Jewish beggar is not impossible, perhaps; such a thing may exist, but

there are few men that can say they have seen that spectacle.  The Jew

has been staged in many uncomplimentary forms, but, so far as I know, no

dramatist has done him the injustice to stage him as a beggar.  Whenever

a Jew has real need to beg, his people save him from the necessity of

doing it.  The charitable institutions of the Jews are supported by

Jewish money, and amply.  The Jews make no noise about it; it is done

quietly; they do not nag and pester and harass us for contributions; they

give us peace, and set us an example--an example which he have not found

ourselves able to follow; for by nature we are not free givers, and have

to be patiently and persistently hunted down in the interest of the

unfortunate.



These facts are all on the credit side of the proposition that the Jew is

a good and orderly citizen.  Summed up, they certify that he is quiet,

peaceable, industrious, unaddicted to high crimes and brutal

dispositions; that his family life is commendable; that he is not a

burden upon public charities; that he is not a beggar; that in

benevolence he is above the reach of competition.  These are the very

quintessentials of good citizenship.  If you can add that he is as honest

as the average of his neighbours--But I think that question is

affirmatively answered by the fact that he is a successful business man.

The basis of successful business is honesty; a business cannot thrive

where the parties to it cannot trust each other.  In the matter of

numbers the Jew counts for little in the overwhelming population of New

York; but that his honest counts for much is guaranteed by the fact that

the immense wholesale business of Broadway, from the Battery to Union

Square, is substantially in his hands.



I suppose that the most picturesque example in history of a trader's

trust in his fellow-trader was one where it was not Christian trusting

Christian, but Christian trusting Jew.  That Hessian Duke who used to

sell his subjects to George III. to fight George Washington with got rich

at it; and by-and-by, when the wars engendered by the French Revolution

made his throne too warm for him, he was obliged to fly the country.  He

was in a hurry, and had to leave his earnings behind--$9,000,000.  He had

to risk the money with some one without security.  He did not select a

Christian, but a Jew--a Jew of only modest means, but of high character;

a character so high that it left him lonesome--Rothschild of Frankfort.

Thirty years later, when Europe had become quiet and safe again, the Duke

came back from overseas, and the Jew returned the loan, with interest

added.[2]



The Jew has his other side.  He has some discreditable ways, though he

has not a monopoly of them, because he cannot get entirely rid of

vexatious Christian competition.  We have seen that he seldom

transgresses the laws against crimes of violence.  Indeed, his dealings

with courts are almost restricted to matters connected with commerce.  He

has a reputation for various small forms of cheating, and for practising

oppressive usury, and for burning himself out to get the insurance, and

for arranging cunning contracts which leave him an exit but lock the

other man in, and for smart evasions which find him safe and comfortable

just within the strict letter of the law, when court and jury know very

well that he has violated the spirit of it.  He is a frequent and

faithful and capable officer in the civil service, but he is charged with

an unpatriotic disinclination to stand by the flag as a soldier--like the

Christian Quaker.



Now if you offset these discreditable features by the creditable ones

summarised in a preceding paragraph beginning with the words, 'These

facts are all on the credit side,' and strike a balance, what must the

verdict be?  This, I think: that, the merits and demerits being fairly

weighed and measured on both sides, the Christian can claim no

superiority over the Jew in the matter of good citizenship.



Yet in all countries, from the dawn of history, the Jew has been

persistently and implacably hated, and with frequency persecuted.





Point No. 2.--'Can fanaticism alone account for this?'



Years ago I used to think that it was responsible for nearly all of it,

but latterly I have come to think that this was an error.  Indeed, it is

now my conviction that it is responsible for hardly any of it.



In this connection I call to mind Genesis, chapter xlvii.



We have all thoughtfully--or unthoughtfully--read the pathetic story of

the years of plenty and the years of famine in Egypt, and how Joseph,

with that opportunity, made a corner in broken hearts, and the crusts of

the poor, and human liberty--a corner whereby he took a nation's money

all away, to the last penny; took a nation's live stock all away, to the

last hoof; took a nation's land away, to the last acre; then took the

nation itself, buying it for bread, man by man, woman by woman, child by

child, till all were slaves; a corner which took everything, left

nothing; a corner so stupendous that, by comparison with it, the most

gigantic corners in subsequent history are but baby things, for it dealt

in hundreds of millions of bushels, and its profits were reckonable by

hundreds of millions of dollars, and it was a disaster so crushing that

its effects have not wholly disappeared from Egypt to-day, more than

three thousand years after the event.



Is it presumably that the eye of Egypt was upon Joseph the foreign Jew

all this time?  I think it likely.  Was it friendly?  We must doubt it.

Was Joseph establishing a character for his race which would survive long

in Egypt? and in time would his name come to be familiarly used to

express that character--like Shylock's?  It is hardly to be doubted.  Let

us remember that this was centuries before the Crucifixion?



I wish to come down eighteen hundred years later and refer to a remark

made by one of the Latin historians.  I read it in a translation many

years ago, and it comes back to me now with force.  It was alluding to a

time when people were still living who could have seen the Saviour in the

flesh.  Christianity was so new that the people of Rome had hardly heard

of it, and had but confused notions of what it was.  The substance of the

remark was this: Some Christians were persecuted in Rome through error,

they being 'mistaken for Jews.'



The meaning seems plain.  These pagans had nothing against Christians,

but they were quite ready to persecute Jews.  For some reason or other

they hated a Jew before they even knew what a Christian was.  May I not

assume, then, that the persecution of Jews is a thing which antedates

Christianity and was not born of Christianity?  I think so.  What was the

origin of the feeling?



When I was a boy, in the back settlements of the Mississippi Valley,

where a gracious and beautiful Sunday school simplicity and practicality

prevailed, the 'Yankee' (citizen of the New England States) was hated

with a splendid energy.  But religion had nothing to do with it.  In a

trade, the Yankee was held to be about five times the match of the

Westerner.  His shrewdness, his insight, his judgment, his knowledge, his

enterprise, and his formidable cleverness in applying these forces were

frankly confessed, and most competently cursed.



In the cotton States, after the war, the simple and ignorant Negroes made

the crops for the white planter on shares.  The Jew came down in force,

set up shop on the plantation, supplied all the negro's wants on credit,

and at the end of the season was proprietor of the negro's share of the

present crop and of part of his share of the next one.  Before long, the

whites detested the Jew, and it is doubtful if the negro loved him.



The Jew is begin legislated out of Russia.  The reason is not concealed.

The movement was instituted because the Christian peasant and villager

stood no chance against his commercial abilities.  He was always ready to

lend money on a crop, and sell vodka and other necessities of life on

credit while the crop was growing.  When settlement day came he owned the

crop; and next year or year after he owned the farm, like Joseph.



In the dull and ignorant English of John's time everybody got into debt

to the Jew.  He gathered all lucrative enterprises into his hands; he was

the king of commerce; he was ready to be helpful in all profitable ways;

he even financed crusades for the rescue of the Sepulchre.  To wipe out

his account with the nation and restore business to its natural and

incompetent channels he had to be banished the realm.



For the like reasons Spain had to banish him four hundred years ago, and

Austria about a couple of centuries later.



In all the ages Christian Europe has been oblige to curtail his

activities.  If he entered upon a mechanical trade, the Christian had to

retire from it.  If he set up as a doctor, he was the best one, and he

took the business.  If he exploited agriculture, the other farmers had to

get at something else.  Since there was no way to successfully compete

with him in any vocation, the law had to step in and save the Christian

from the poor-house.  Trade after trade was taken away from the Jew by

statute till practically none was left.  He was forbidden to engage in

agriculture; he was forbidden to practise law; he was forbidden to

practise medicine, except among Jews; he was forbidden the handicrafts.

Even the seats of learning and the schools of science had to be closed

against this tremendous antagonist.  Still, almost bereft of employments,

he found ways to make money, even ways to get rich.  Also ways to invest

his takings well, for usury was not denied him.  In the hard conditions

suggested, the Jew without brains could not survive, and the Jew with

brains had to keep them in good training and well sharpened up, or

starve.  Ages of restriction to the one tool which the law was not able

to take from him--his brain--have made that tool singularly competent;

ages of compulsory disuse of his hands have atrophied them, and he never

uses them now.  This history has a very, very commercial look, a most

sordid and practical commercial look, the business aspect of a Chinese

cheap-labour crusade.  Religious prejudices may account for one part of

it, but not for the other nine.



Protestants have persecuted Catholics, but they did not take their

livelihoods away from them.  The Catholics have persecuted the

Protestants with bloody and awful bitterness, but they never closed

agriculture and the handicrafts against them.  Why was that?  That has

the candid look of genuine religious persecution, not a trade-union

boycott in a religious dispute.



The Jews are harried and obstructed in Austria and Germany, and lately in

France; but England and America give them an open field and yet survive.

Scotland offers them an unembarrassed field too, but there are not many

takers.  There are a few Jews in Glasgow, and one in Aberdeen; but that

is because they can't earn enough to get away.  The Scotch pay themselves

that compliment, but it is authentic.



I feel convinced that the Crucifixion has not much to do with the world's

attitude toward the Jew; that the reasons for it are older than that

event, as suggested by Egypt's experience and by Rome's regret for having

persecuted an unknown quantity called a Christian, under the mistaken

impression that she was merely persecuting a Jew.  Merely a Jew--a

skinned eel who was used to it, presumably.  I am persuaded that in

Russia, Austria, and Germany nine-tenths of the hostility to the Jew

comes from the average Christian's inability to compete successfully with

the average Jew in business--in either straight business or the

questionable sort.



In Berlin, a few years ago, I read a speech which frankly urged the

expulsion of the Jews from Germany; and the agitator's reason was as

frank as his proposition.  It was this: that eighty-five percent of the

successful lawyers of Berlin were Jews, and that about the same

percentage of the great and lucrative businesses of all sorts in Germany

were in the hands of the Jewish race!  Isn't it an amazing confession?

It was but another way of saying that in a population of 48,000,000, of

whom only 500,000 were registered as Jews, eighty-five per cent of the

brains and honesty of the whole was lodged in the Jews.  I must insist

upon the honesty--it is an essential of successful business, taken by and

large.  Of course it does not rule out rascals entirely, even among

Christians, but it is a good working rule, nevertheless.  The speaker's

figures may have been inexact, but the motive of persecution stands out

as clear as day.



The man claimed that in Berlin the banks, the newspapers, the theatres,

the great mercantile, shipping, mining, and manufacturing interests, the

big army and city contracts, the tramways, and pretty much all other

properties of high value, and also the small businesses, were in the

hands of the Jews.  He said the Jew was pushing the Christian to the wall

all along the line; that it was all a Christian could do to scrape

together a living; and that the Jew must be banished, and soon--there was

no other way of saving the Christian.  Here in Vienna, last autumn, an

agitator said that all these disastrous details were true of Austria-

Hungary also; and in fierce language he demanded the expulsion of the

Jews.  When politicians come out without a blush and read the baby act in

this frank way, unrebuked, it is a very good indication that they have a

market back of them, and know where to fish for votes.



You note the crucial point of the mentioned agitation; the argument is

that the Christian cannot compete with the Jew, and that hence his very

bread is in peril.  To human beings this is a much more hate-inspiring

thing than is any detail connected with religion.  With most people, of a

necessity, bread and meat take first rank, religion second.  I am

convinced that the persecution of the Jew is not due in any large degree

to religious prejudice.



No, the Jew is a money-getter; and in getting his money he is a very

serious obstruction to less capable neighbours who are on the same quest.

I think that that is the trouble.  In estimating worldly values the Jew

is not shallow, but deep.  With precocious wisdom he found out in the

morning of time that some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some

worship power, some worship God, and that over these ideals they dispute

and cannot unite--but that they all worship money; so he made it the end

and aim of his life to get it.  He was at it in Egypt thirty-six

centuries ago; he was at it in Rome when that Christian got persecuted by

mistake for him; he has been at it ever since.  The cost to him has been

heavy; his success has made the whole human race his enemy--but it has

paid, for it has brought him envy, and that is the only thing which men

will sell both soul and body to get.  He long ago observed that a

millionaire commands respect, a two-millionaire homage, a multi-

millionaire the deepest deeps of adoration.  We all know that feeling;

we have seen it express itself.  We have noticed that when the average

man mentions the name of a multi-millionaire he does it with that mixture

in his voice of awe and reverence and lust which burns in a Frenchman's

eye when it falls on another man's centime.





Point No.  4--'The Jews have no party; they are non-participants.'



Perhaps you have let the secret out and given yourself away.  It seems

hardly a credit to the race that it is able to say that; or to you, sir,

that you can say it without remorse; more, that you should offer it as a

plea against maltreatment, injustice, and oppression.  Who gives the Jew

the right, who gives any race the right, to sit still in a free country,

and let somebody else look after its safety?  The oppressed Jew was

entitled to all pity in the former times under brutal autocracies, for he

was weak and friendless, and had no way to help his case.  But he has

ways now, and he has had them for a century, but I do not see that he has

tried to make serious use of then.  When the Revolution set him free in

France it was an act of grace--the grace of other people; he does not

appear in it as a helper.  I do not know that he helped when England set

him free.  Among the Twelve Sane Men of France who have stepped forward

with great Zola at their head to fight (and win, I hope and believe[3])

the battle for the most infamously misused Jew of modern times, do you

find a great or rich or illustrious Jew helping?  In the United States he

was created free in the beginning--he did not need to help, of course.

In Austria and Germany and France he has a vote, but of what considerable

use is it to him?  He doesn't seem to know how to apply it to the best

effect.  With all his splendid capacities and all his fat wealth he is

to-day not politically important in any country.  In America, as early as

1854, the ignorant Irish hod-carrier, who had a spirit of his own and a

way of exposing it to the weather, made it apparent to all that he must

be politically reckoned with; yet fifteen years before that we hardly

knew what an Irishman looked like.  As an intelligent force and

numerically, he has always been away down, but he has governed the

country just the same.  It was because he was organised.  It made his

vote valuable--in fact, essential.



You will say the Jew is everywhere numerically feeble.  That is nothing

to the point--with the Irishman's history for an object-lesson.  But I am

coming to your numerical feebleness presently.  In all parliamentary

countries you could no doubt elect Jews to the legislatures--and even one

member in such a body is sometimes a force which counts.  How deeply have

you concerned yourselves about this in Austria, France, and Germany?  Or

even in America, for that matter?  You remark that the Jews were not to

blame for the riots in this Reichsrath here, and you add with

satisfaction that there wasn't one in that body.  That is not strictly

correct; if it were, would it not be in order for you to explain it and

apologise for it, not try to make a merit of it?  But I think that the

Jew was by no means in as large force there as he ought to have been,

with his chances.  Austria opens the suffrage to him on fairly liberal

terms, and it must surely be his own fault that he is so much in the

background politically.



As to your numerical weakness.  I mentioned some figures awhile ago--

500,00--as the Jewish population of Germany.  I will add some more--

6,000,000 in Russia, 5,000,000 in Austria, 250,000 in the United States.

I take them from memory; I read them in the 'Encyclopaedia Brittannica'

ten or twelve years ago.  Still, I am entirely sure of them.  If those

statistics are correct, my argument is not as strong as it ought to be as

concerns America, but it still has strength.  It is plenty strong enough

as concerns Austria, for ten years ago 5,000,000 was nine per cent of the

empire's population.  The Irish would govern the Kingdom of Heaven if

they had a strength there like that.



I have some suspicions; I got them at second-hand, but they have remained

with me these ten or twelve years.  When I read in the 'E.B.'  that the

Jewish population of the United States was 250,000 I wrote the editor,

and explained to him that I was personally acquainted with more Jews than

that in my country, and that his figures were without a doubt a misprint

for 25,000,000.  I also added that I was personally acquainted with that

many there; but that was only to raise his confidence in me, for it was

not true.  His answer miscarried, and I never got it; but I went around

talking about the matter, and people told me they had reason to suspect

that for business reasons many Jews whose dealings were mainly with the

Christians did not report themselves as Jews in the census.  It looked

plausible; it looks plausible yet.  Look at the city of New York; and

look at Boston, and Philadelphia, and New Orleans, and Chicago, and

Cincinnati, and San Francisco--how your race swarms in those places!--and

everywhere else in America, down to the least little village.  Read the

signs on the marts of commerce and on the shops; Goldstein (gold stone),

Edelstein (precious stone), Blumenthal (flower-vale), Rosenthal (rose-

vale), Veilchenduft (violent odour), Singvogel (song-bird), Rosenzweig

(rose branch), and all the amazing list of beautiful and enviable names

which Prussia and Austria glorified you with so long ago.  It is another

instance of Europe's coarse and cruel persecution of your race; not that

it was coarse and cruel to outfit it with pretty and poetical names like

those, but it was coarse and cruel to make it pay for them or else take

such hideous and often indecent names that to-day their owners never use

them; or, if they do, only on official papers.  And it was the many, not

the few, who got the odious names, they being too poor to bribe the

officials to grant them better ones.



Now why was the race renamed?  I have been told that in Prussia it was

given to using fictitious names, and often changing them, so as to beat

the tax-gatherer, escape military service, and so on; and that finally

the idea was hit upon of furnishing all the inmates of a house with one

and the same surname, and then holding the house responsible right along

for those inmates, and accountable for any disappearances that might

occur; it made the Jews keep track of each other, for self-interest's

sake, and saved the Government the trouble[4].



If that explanation of how the Jews of Prussia came to be renamed is

correct, if it is true that they fictitiously registered themselves to

gain certain advantages, it may possible be true that in America they

refrain from registered themselves as Jews to fend off the damaging

prejudices of the Christian customer.  I have no way of knowing whether

this notion is well founded or not.  There may be other and better ways

of explaining why only that poor little 250,000 of our Jews got into the

'Encyclopaedia'.  I may, of course, be mistaken, but I am strongly of the

opinion that we have an immense Jewish population in America.





Point No.  3--'Can Jews do anything to improve the situation?'



I think so.  If I may make a suggestion without seeming to be trying to

teach my grandmother to suck eggs, I will offer it.  In our days we have

learned the value of combination.  We apply it everywhere--in railway

systems, in trusts, in trade unions, in Salvation Armies, in minor

politics, in major politics, in European Concerts.  Whatever our strength

may be, big or little, we organise it.  We have found out that that is

the only way to get the most out of it that is in it.  We know the

weakness of individual sticks, and the strength of the concentrated

faggot.  Suppose you try a scheme like this, for instance.  In England

and America put every Jew on the census-book as a Jew (in case you have

not been doing that).  Get up volunteer regiments composed of Jews

solely, and when the drum beats, fall in and go to the front, so as to

remove the reproach that you have few Massenas among you, and that you

feed on a country but don't like to fight for it.  Next, in politics,

organise your strength, band together, and deliver the casting-vote where

you can, and, where you can't, compel as good terms as possible.  You

huddle to yourselves already in all countries, but you huddle to no

sufficient purpose, politically speaking.  You do not seem to be

organised, except for your charities.  There you are omnipotent; there

you compel your due of recognition--you do not have to beg for it.  It

shows what you can do when you band together for a definite purpose.



And then from America and England you can encourage your race in Austria,

France, and Germany, and materially help it.  It was a pathetic tale that

was told by a poor Jew a fortnight ago during the riots, after he had

been raided by the Christian peasantry and despoiled of everything he

had.  He said his vote was of no value to him, and he wished he could be

excused from casting it, for indeed, casting it was a sure damage to him,

since, no matter which party he voted for, the other party would come

straight and take its revenge out of him.  Nine per cent of the

population, these Jews, and apparently they cannot put a plank into any

candidate's platform!  If you will send our Irish lads over here I think

they will organise your race and change the aspect of the Reichsrath.



You seem to think that the Jews take no hand in politics here, that they

are 'absolutely non-participants.'  I am assured by men competent to

speak that this is a very large error, that the Jews are exceedingly

active in politics all over the empire, but that they scatter their work

and their votes among the numerous parties, and thus lose the advantages

to be had by concentration.  I think that in America they scatter too,

but you know more about that than I do.



Speaking of concentration, Dr. Herzl has a clear insight into the value

of that.  Have you heard of his plan?  He wishes to gather the Jews of

the world together in Palestine, with a government of their own--under

the suzerainty of the Sultan, I suppose.  At the Convention of Berne,

last year, there were delegates from everywhere, and the proposal was

received with decided favour.  I am not the Sultan, and I am not

objecting; but if that concentration of the cunningest brains in the

world were going to be made in a free country (bar Scotland), I think it

would be politic to stop it.  It will not be well to let that race find

out its strength.  If the horses knew theirs, we should not ride any

more.





Point No. 5.--'Will the persecution of the Jews ever come to an end?'



On the score of religion, I think it has already come to an end.  On the

score of race prejudice and trade, I have the idea that it will continue.

That is, here and there in spots about the world, where a barbarous

ignorance and a sort of mere animal civilisation prevail; but I do not

think that elsewhere the Jew need now stand in any fear of being robbed

and raided.  Among the high civilisations he seems to be very comfortably

situated indeed, and to have more than his proportionate share of the

prosperities going.  It has that look in Vienna.  I suppose the race

prejudice cannot be removed; but he can stand that; it is no particular

matter.  By his make and ways he is substantially a foreigner wherever he

may be, and even the angels dislike a foreigner.  I am using this world

foreigner in the German sense--stranger.  Nearly all of us have an

antipathy to a stranger, even of our own nationality.  We pile grip-sacks

in a vacant seat to keep him from getting it; and a dog goes further, and

does as a savage would--challenges him on the spot.  The German

dictionary seems to make no distinction between a stranger and a

foreigner; in its view a stranger is a foreigner--a sound position,

I think.  You will always be by ways and habits and predilections

substantially strangers--foreigners--wherever you are, and that will

probably keep the race prejudice against you alive.



But you were the favourites of Heaven originally, and your manifold and

unfair prosperities convince me that you have crowded back into that snug

place again.  Here is an incident that is significant.  Last week in

Vienna a hailstorm struck the prodigious Central Cemetery and made

wasteful destruction there.  In the Christian part of it, according to

the official figures, 621 window-panes were broken; more than 900

singing-birds were killed; five great trees and many small ones were torn

to shreds and the shreds scattered far and wide by the wind; the

ornamental plants and other decorations of the graces were ruined, and

more than a hundred tomb-lanterns shattered; and it took the cemetery's

whole force of 300 labourers more than three days to clear away the

storm's wreckage.  In the report occurs this remark--and in its italics

you can hear it grit its Christian teeth: '...lediglich die israelitische

Abtheilung des Friedhofes vom Hagelwetter ganzlich verschont worden war.'

Not a hailstone hit the Jewish reservation!  Such nepotism makes me

tired.





Point No. 6.--'What has become of the Golden Rule?'



It exists, it continues to sparkle, and is well taken care of.  It is

Exhibit A in the Church's assets, and we pull it out every Sunday and

give it an airing.  But you are not permitted to try to smuggle it into

this discussion, where it is irrelevant and would not feel at home.

It is strictly religious furniture, like an acolyte, or a contribution-

plate, or any of those things.  It has never intruded into business; and

Jewish persecution is not a religious passion, it is a business passion.





To conclude.--If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one

per cent of the human race.  It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star-dust

lost in the blaze of the Milky Way.  Properly the Jew ought hardly to be

heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of.  He is as

prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial

importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his

bulk.  His contributions to the world's list of great names in

literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning

are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.  He has

made a marvellous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it

with his hands tied behind him.  He could be vain of himself, and be

excused for it.  The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose,

filled the planet with sound and splendour, then faded to dream-stuff and

passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and

they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for

a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have

vanished.  The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always

was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his

parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive

mind.  All things are mortal to the Jew; all other forces pass, but he

remains.  What is the secret of his immortality?





Postscript--THE JEW AS SOLDIER



When I published the above article in 'Harper's Monthly,' I was ignorant

--like the rest of the Christian world--of the fact that the Jew had a

record as a soldier.  I have since seen the official statistics, and I

find that he furnished soldiers and high officers to the Revolution, the

War of 1812, and the Mexican War.  In the Civil War he was represented in

the armies and navies of both the North and the South by 10 per cent of

his numerical strength--the same percentage that was furnished by the

Christian populations of the two sections.  This large fact means more

than it seems to mean; for it means that the Jew's patriotism was not

merely level with the Christian's, but overpassed it.  When the Christian

volunteer arrived in camp he got a welcome and applause, but as a rule

the Jew got a snub.  His company was not desired, and he was made to feel

it.  That he nevertheless conquered his wounded pride and sacrificed both

that and his blood for his flag raises the average and quality of his

patriotism above the Christian's.  His record for capacity, for fidelity,

and for gallant soldiership in the field is as good as any one's.  This

is true of the Jewish private soldiers and of the Jewish generals alike.

Major-General O. O. Howard speaks of one of his Jewish staff officers as

being 'of the bravest and best;' of another--killed at Chancellorsville--

as being 'a true friend and a brave officer;' he highly praises two of

his Jewish brigadier-generals; finally, he uses these strong words:

'Intrinsically there are no more patriotic men to be found in the country

than those who claim to be of Hebrew descent, and who served with me in

parallel commands or more directly under my instructions.'



Fourteen Jewish Confederate and Union families contributed, between them,

fifty-one soldiers to the war.  Among these, a father and three sons; and

another, a father and four sons.



In the above article I was neither able to endorse nor repel the common

approach that the Jew is willing to feed upon a country but not to fight

for it, because I did not know whether it was true or false.  I supposed

it to be true, but it is not allowable to endorse wandering maxims upon

supposition--except when one is trying to make out a case.  That slur

upon the Jew cannot hold up its head in presence of the figures of the

War Department.  It has done its work, and done it long and faithfully,

and with high approval: it ought to be pensioned off now, and retired

from active service.



[1] See 'Stirring Times in Austria,' in this volume.



[2] Here is another piece of picturesque history; and it reminds us that

shabbiness and dishonesty are not the monopoly of any race or creed, but

are merely human:



'Congress has passed a bill to pay $379.56 to Moses Pendergrass, of

Libertyville, Missouri.  The story of the reason of this liberality is

pathetically interesting, and shows the sort of pickle that an honest man

may get into who undertakes to do an honest job of work for Uncle Sam.

In 1886 Moses Pendergrass put in a bid for the contract to carry the mail

on the route from Knob Lick to Libertyville and Coffman, thirty miles a

day, from July 1, 1887, for one years.  He got the postmaster at Knob

Lick to write the letter for him, and while Moses intended that his bid

should be $400, his scribe carelessly made it $4.  Moses got the

contract, and did not find out about the mistake until the end of the

first quarter, when he got his first pay.  When he found at what rate he

was working he was sorely cast down, and opened communication with the

Post Office Department.  The department informed his that he must either

carry out his contract or throw it up, and that if he threw it up his

bondsman would have the pay the Government $1,459.85 damages.  So Moses

carried out his contract, walked thirty miles every week-day for a year,

and carried the mail, and received for his labour $4, or, to be accurate,

$6.84; for, the route being extended after his bid was accepted, his pay

was proportionately increased.  Now, after ten years, a bill was finally

passed to pay to Moses the difference between what he earned in that

unlucky year and what he received.'



The 'Sun,' which tells the above story, says that bills were introduced

in three or four Congresses for Moses' relief, and that committees

repeatedly investigated his claim.



It took six Congresses, containing in their persons the compressed

virtues of 70,000,000 of people, and cautiously and carefully giving

expression to those virtues in the fear of God and the next election,

eleven years to find out some way to cheat a fellow Christian out of

about $13 on his honestly executed contract, and out of nearly $300 due

him on its enlarged terms.  And they succeeded.  During the same time

they paid out $1,000,000,000 in pensions--a third of it unearned and

undeserved.  This indicates a splendid all-round competency in theft, for

it starts with farthings, and works its industries all the way up to

ship-loads.  It may be possible that the Jews can beat this, but the man

that bets on it is taking chances.



[3] The article was written in the summer of 1898.



[4] In Austria the renaming was merely done because the Jews in some

newly-acquired regions had no surnames, but were mostly named Abraham and

Moses, and therefore the tax-gatherer could tell t'other from which, and

was likely to lose his reason over the matter.  The renaming was put into

the hands of the War Department, and a charming mess the graceless young

lieutenants made of it.  To them a Jew was of no sort of consequence, and

they labelled the race in a way to make the angels weep.  As an example,

take these two: Abraham Bellyache and Schmul Godbedamned--Culled from

'Namens Studien,' by Karl Emil Fransos.













FROM THE 'LONDON TIMES' OF 1904



Correspondence of the 'London Times'

Chicago, April 1, 1904



I resume by cable-telephone where I left off yesterday.  For many hours

now, this vast city--along with the rest of the globe, of course--has

talked of nothing but the extraordinary episode mentioned in my last

report.  In accordance with your instructions, I will now trace the

romance from its beginnings down to the culmination of yesterday--or

today; call it which you like.  By an odd chance, I was a personal actor

in a part of this drama myself.  The opening scene plays in Vienna.

Date, one o'clock in the morning, March 31, 1898.  I had spent the

evening at a social entertainment.  About midnight I went away, in

company with the military attaches of the British, Italian, and American

embassies, to finish with a late smoke.  This function had been appointed

to take place in the house of Lieutenant Hillyer, the third attache

mentioned in the above list.  When we arrived there we found several

visitors in the room; young Szczepanik;[1] Mr. K., his financial backer;

Mr. W., the latter's secretary; and Lieutenant Clayton, of the United

States Army.  War was at that time threatening between Spain and our

country, and Lieutenant Clayton had been sent to Europe on military

business.  I was well acquainted with young Szczepanik and his two

friends, and I knew Mr. Clayton slightly.  I had met him at West Point

years before, when he was a cadet.  It was when General Merritt was

superintendent.  He had the reputation of being an able officer, and also

of being quick-tempered and plain-spoken.



This smoking-party had been gathered together partly for business.  This

business was to consider the availability of the telelectroscope for

military service.  It sounds oddly enough now, but it is nevertheless

true that at that time the invention was not taken seriously by any one

except its inventor.  Even his financial support regarded it merely as a

curious and interesting toy.  Indeed, he was so convinced of this that he

had actually postponed its use by the general world to the end of the

dying century by granting a two years' exclusive lease of it to a

syndicate, whose intent was to exploit it at the Paris World's Fair.

When we entered the smoking-room we found Lieutenant Clayton and

Szczepanik engaged in a warm talk over the telelectroscope in the German

tongue.  Clayton was saying:



'Well, you know my opinion of it, anyway!' and he brought his fist down

with emphasis upon the table.



'And I do not value it,' retorted the young inventor, with provoking

calmness of tone and manner.



Clayton turned to Mr. K., and said:



'I cannot see why you are wasting money on this toy.  In my opinion, the

day will never come when it will do a farthing's worth of real service

for any human being.'



'That may be; yes, that may be; still, I have put the money in it, and am

content.  I think, myself, that it is only a toy; but Szczepanik claims

more for it, and I know him well enough to believe that he can see father

than I can--either with his telelectroscope or without it.'



The soft answer did not cool Clayton down; it seemed only to irritate him

the more; and he repeated and emphasised his conviction that the

invention would never do any man a farthing's worth of real service.  He

even made it a 'brass' farthing, this time.  Then he laid an English

farthing on the table, and added:



'Take that, Mr. K., and put it away; and if ever the telelectroscope does

any man an actual service--mind, a real service--please mail it to me as

a reminder, and I will take back what I have been saying.  Will you?'



'I will,' and Mr. K. put the coin in his pocket.



Mr. Clayton now turned toward Szczepanik, and began with a taunt--a taunt

which did not reach a finish; Szczepanik interrupted it with a hardy

retort, and followed this with a blow.  There was a brisk fight for a

moment or two; then the attaches separated the men.



The scene now changes to Chicago.  Time, the autumn of 1901.  As soon as

the Paris contract released the telelectroscope, it was delivered to

public use, and was soon connected with the telephonic systems of the

whole world.  The improved 'limitless-distance' telephone was presently

introduced, and the daily doings of the globe made visible to everybody,

and audibly discussible, too, by witnesses separated by any number of

leagues.



By-and-by Szczepanik arrived in Chicago.  Clayton (now captain) was

serving in that military department at the time.  The two men resumed the

Viennese quarrel of 1898.  On three different occasions they quarrelled,

and were separated by witnesses.  Then came an interval of two months,

during which time Szczepanik was not seen by any of his friends, and it

was at first supposed that he had gone off on a sight seeing tour and

would soon be heard from.  But no; no word came from him.  Then it was

supposed that he had returned to Europe.  Still, time drifted on, and he

was not heard from.  Nobody was troubled, for he was like most inventors

and other kinds of poets, and went and came in a capricious way, and

often without notice.



Now comes the tragedy.  On December 29, in a dark and unused compartment

of the cellar under Captain Clayton's house, a corpse was discovered by

one of Clayton's maid-servants.  Friends of deceased identified it as

Szczepanik's.  The man had died by violence.  Clayton was arrested,

indicted, and brought to trial, charged with this murder.  The evidence

against him was perfect in every detail, and absolutely unassailable.

Clayton admitted this himself.  He said that a reasonable man could not

examine this testimony with a dispassionate mind and not be convinced by

it; yet the man would be in error, nevertheless.  Clayton swore that he

did not commit the murder, and that he had had nothing to do with it.



As your readers will remember, he was condemned to death.  He had

numerous and powerful friends, and they worked hard to save him, for none

of them doubted the truth of his assertion.  I did what little I could to

help, for I had long since become a close friend of his, and thought I

knew that it was not in his character to inveigle an enemy into a corner

and assassinate him.  During 1902 and 1903 he was several times reprieved

by the governor; he was reprieved once more in the beginning of the

present year, and the execution day postponed to March 31.



The governor's situation has been embarrassing, from the day of the

condemnation, because of the fact that Clayton's wife is the governor's

niece.  The marriage took place in 1899, when Clayton was thirty-four and

the girl twenty-three, and has been a happy one.  There is one child, a

little girl three years old.  Pity for the poor mother and child kept the

mouths of grumblers closed at first; but this could not last for ever--

for in America politics has a hand in everything--and by-and-by the

governor's political opponents began to call attention to his delay in

allowing the law to take its course.  These hints have grown more and

more frequent of late, and more and more pronounced.  As a natural

result, his own part grew nervous.  Its leaders began to visit

Springfield and hold long private conferences with him.  He was now

between two fires.  On the one hand, his niece was imploring him to

pardon her husband; on the other were the leaders, insisting that he

stand to his plain duty as chief magistrate of the State, and place no

further bar to Clayton's execution.  Duty won in the struggle, and the

Governor gave his word that he would not again respite the condemned man.

This was two weeks ago.  Mrs. Clayton now said:



'Now that you have given your word, my last hope is gone, for I know you

will never go back from it.  But you have done the best you could for

John, and I have no reproaches for you.  You love him, and you love me,

and we know that if you could honourable save him, you would do it.  I

will go to him now, and be what help I can to him, and get what comfort I

may out of the few days that are left to us before the night comes which

will have no end for me in life.  You will be with me that day?  You will

not let me bear it alone?'



'I will take you to him myself, poor child, and I will be near you to the

last.'



By the governor's command, Clayton was now allowed every indulgence he

might ask for which could interest his mind and soften the hardships of

his imprisonment.  His wife and child spent the days with him; I was his

companion by night.  He was removed from the narrow cell which he had

occupied during such a dreary stretch of time, and given the chief

warden's roomy and comfortable quarters.  His mind was always busy with

the catastrophe of his life, and with the slaughtered inventor, and he

now took the fancy that he would like to have the telelectroscope and

divert his mind with it.  He had his wish.  The connection was made with

the international telephone-station, and day by day, and night by night,

he called up one corner of the globe after another, and looked upon its

life, and studied its strange sights, and spoke with its people, and

realised that by grace of this marvellous instrument he was almost as

free as the birds of the air, although a prisoner under locks and bars.

He seldom spoke, and I never interrupted him when he was absorbed in this

amusement.  I sat in his parlour and read, and smoked, and the nights

were very quiet and reposefully sociable, and I found them pleasant.  Now

and then I would her him say 'Give me Yedo;' next, 'Give me Hong-Kong;'

next, 'Give me Melbourne.'  And I smoked on, and read in comfort, while

he wandered about the remote underworld, where the sun was shining in the

sky, and the people were at their daily work.  Sometimes the talk that

came from those far regions through the microphone attachment interested

me, and I listened.



Yesterday--I keep calling it yesterday, which is quite natural, for

certain reasons--the instrument remained unused, and that also was

natural, for it was the eve of the execution day.  It was spent in tears

and lamentations and farewells.  The governor and the wife and child

remained until a quarter-past eleven at night, and the scenes I witnessed

were pitiful to see.  The execution was to take place at four in the

morning.  A little after eleven a sound of hammering broke out upon the

still night, and there was a glare of light, and the child cried out,

'What is that, papa?' and ran to the window before she could be stopped

and clapped her small hands and said, 'Oh, come and see, mamma--such a

pretty thing they are making!' The mother knew--and fainted.  It was the

gallows!



She was carried away to her lodging, poor woman, and Clayton and I were

alone--alone, and thinking, brooding, dreaming.  We might have been

statues, we sat so motionless and still.  It was a wild night, for winter

was come again for a moment, after the habit of this region in the early

spring.  The sky was starless and black, and a strong wind was blowing

from the lake.  The silence in the room was so deep that all outside

sounds seemed exaggerated by contrast with it.  These sounds were fitting

ones: they harmonised with the situation and the conditions: the boom and

thunder of sudden storm-gusts among the roofs and chimneys, then the

dying down into moanings and wailings about the eaves and angles; now and

then a gnashing and lashing rush of sleet along the window-panes; and

always the muffled and uncanny hammering of the gallows-builders in the

court-yard.  After an age of this, another sound--far off, and coming

smothered and faint through the riot of the tempest--a bell tolling

twelve!  Another age, and it was tolled again.  By-and-by, again.  A

dreary long interval after this, then the spectral sound floated to us

once more--one, two three; and this time we caught our breath; sixty

minutes of life left!



Clayton rose, and stood by the window, and looked up into the black sky,

and listened to the thrashing sleet and the piping wind; then he said:

'That a dying man's last of earth should be--this!'  After a little he

said: 'I must see the sun again--the sun!' and the next moment he was

feverishly calling: 'China!  Give me China--Peking!'



I was strangely stirred, and said to myself: 'To think that it is a mere

human being who does this unimaginable miracle--turns winter into summer,

night into day, storm into calm, gives the freedom of the great globe to

a prisoner in his cell, and the sun in his naked splendour to a man dying

in Egyptian darkness.'



I was listening.



'What light!  what brilliancy!  what radiance!....  This is Peking?'



'Yes.'



'The time?'



'Mid-afternoon.'



'What is the great crowd for, and in such gorgeous costumes?  What masses

and masses of rich colour and barbaric magnificence!  And how they flash

and glow and burn in the flooding sunlight!  What is the occasion of it

all?'



'The coronation of our new emperor--the Czar.'



'But I thought that that was to take place yesterday.'



'This is yesterday--to you.'



'Certainly it is.  But my mind is confused, these days: there are reasons

for it....  Is this the beginning of the procession?'



'Oh, no; it began to move an hour ago.'



'Is there much more of it still to come?'



'Two hours of it.  Why do you sigh?'



'Because I should like to see it all.'



'And why can't you?'



'I have to go--presently.'



'You have an engagement?'



After a pause, softly: 'Yes.'  After another pause: 'Who are these in the

splendid pavilion?'



'The imperial family, and visiting royalties from here and there and

yonder in the earth.'



'And who are those in the adjoining pavilions to the right and left?'



'Ambassadors and their families and suites to the right; unofficial

foreigners to the left.'



'If you will be so good, I--'



Boom!  That distant bell again, tolling the half-hour faintly through the

tempest of wind and sleet.  The door opened, and the governor and the

mother and child entered--the woman in widow's weeds!  She fell upon her

husband's breast in a passion of sobs, and I--I could not stay; I could

not bear it.  I went into the bedchamber, and closed the door.  I sat

there waiting--waiting--waiting, and listening to the rattling sashes and

the blustering of the storm.  After what seemed a long, long time, I

heard a rustle and movement in the parlour, and knew that the clergyman

and the sheriff and the guard were come.  There was some low-voiced

talking; then a hush; then a prayer, with a sound of sobbing; presently,

footfalls--the departure for the gallows; then the child's happy voice:

'Don't cry now, mamma, when we've got papa again, and taking him home.'



The door closed; they were gone.  I was ashamed: I was the only friend of

the dying man that had no spirit, no courage.  I stepped into the room,

and said I would be a man and would follow.  But we are made as we are

made, and we cannot help it.  I did not go.



I fidgeted about the room nervously, and presently went to the window and

softly raised it--drawn by that dread fascination which the terrible and

the awful exert--and looked down upon the court-yard.  By the garish

light of the electric lamps I saw the little group of privileged

witnesses, the wife crying on her uncle's breast, the condemned man

standing on the scaffold with the halter around his neck, his arms

strapped to his body, the black cap on his head, the sheriff at his side

with his hand on the drop, the clergyman in front of him with bare head

and his book in his hand.



'I am the resurrection and the life--'



I turned away.  I could not listen; I could not look.  I did not know

whither to go or what to do.  Mechanically and without knowing it, I put

my eye to that strange instrument, and there was Peking and the Czar's

procession!  The next moment I was leaning out of the window, gasping,

suffocating, trying to speak, but dumb from the very imminence of the

necessity of speaking.  The preacher could speak, but I, who had such

need of words--'And may God have mercy upon your soul.  Amen.'



The sheriff drew down the black cap, and laid his hand upon the lever.  I

got my voice.



'Stop, for God's sake!  The man is innocent.  Come here and see

Szczepanik face to face!'



Hardly three minutes later the governor had my place at the window, and

was saying:



'Strike off his bonds and set him free!'



Three minutes later all were in the parlour again.  The reader will

imagine the scene; I have no need to describe it.  It was a sort of mad

orgy of joy.



A messenger carried word to Szczepanik in the pavilion, and one could see

the distressed amazement in his face as he listened to the tale.  Then he

came to his end of the line, and talked with Clayton and the governor and

the others; and the wife poured out her gratitude upon him for saving her

husband's life, and in her deep thankfulness she kissed him at twelve

thousand miles' range.



The telelectroscopes of the world were put to service now, and for many

hours the kinds and queens of many realms (with here and there a

reporter) talked with Szczepanik, and praised him; and the few scientific

societies which had not already made him an honorary member conferred

that grace upon him.



How had he come to disappear from among us?  It was easily explained.

HE had not grown used to being a world-famous person, and had been forced

to break away from the lionising that was robbing him of all privacy and

repose.  So he grew a beard, put on coloured glasses, disguised himself a

little in other ways, then took a fictitious name, and went off to wander

about the earth in peace.



Such is the tale of the drama which began with an inconsequential quarrel

in Vienna in the spring of 1898, and came near ending as a tragedy in the

spring of 1904.





II



Correspondence of the 'London Times'

Chicago, April 5, 1904



To-day, by a clipper of the Electric Line, and the latter's Electric

Railway connections, arrived an envelope from Vienna, for Captain

Clayton, containing an English farthing.  The receiver of it was a good

deal moved.  He called up Vienna, and stood face to face with Mr. K., and

said:



'I do not need to say anything: you can see it all in my face.  My wife

has the farthing.  Do not be afraid--she will not throw it away.'





III



Correspondence of the 'London Times'

Chicago, April 23, 1904



Now that the after developments of the Clayton case have run their course

and reached a finish, I will sum them up.  Clayton's romantic escape from

a shameful death stepped all this region in an enchantment of wonder and

joy--during the proverbial nine days.  Then the sobering process

followed, and men began to take thought, and to say: 'But a man was

killed, and Clayton killed him.'  Others replied: 'That is true: we have

been overlooking that important detail; we have been led away by

excitement.'



The telling soon became general that Clayton ought to be tried again.

Measures were taken accordingly, and the proper representations conveyed

to Washington; for in America under the new paragraph added to the

Constitution in 1889, second trials are not State affairs, but national,

and must be tried by the most august body in the land--the Supreme Court

of the United States.  The justices were therefore summoned to sit in

Chicago.  The session was held day before yesterday, and was opened with

the usual impressive formalities, the nine judges appearing in their

black robes, and the new chief justice (Lemaitre) presiding.  In opening

the case the chief justice said:



'It is my opinion that this matter is quite simple.  The prisoner at the

bar was charged with murdering the man Szczepanik; he was tried for

murdering the man Szczepanik; he was fairly tried and justly condemned

and sentenced to death for murdering the man Szczepanik.  It turns out

that the man Szczepanik was not murdered at all.  By the decision of the

French courts in the Dreyfus matter, it is established beyond cavil or

question that the decisions of courts and permanent and cannot be

revised.  We are obliged to respect and adopt this precedent.  It is upon

precedents that the enduring edifice of jurisprudence is reared.  The

prisoner at the bar has been fairly and righteously condemned to death

for the murder of the man Szczepanik, and, in my opinion, there is but

one course to pursue in the matter: he must be hanged.'



Mr. Justice Crawford said:



'But, your Excellency, he was pardoned on the scaffold for that.'



'The pardon is not valid, and cannot stand, because he was pardoned for

killing Szczepanik, a man whom he had not killed.  A man cannot be

pardoned for a crime which he has not committed; it would be an

absurdity.'



'But, your Excellency, he did kill a man.'



'That is an extraneous detail; we have nothing to do with it.  The court

cannot take up this crime until the prisoner has expiated the other one.'



Mr. Justice Halleck said:



'If we order his execution, your Excellency, we shall bring about a

miscarriage of justice, for the governor will pardon him again.'



'He will not have the power.  He cannot pardon a man for a crime which he

has not committed.  As I observed before, it would be an absurdity.'



After a consultation, Mr. Justice Wadsworth said:



'Several of us have arrived at the conclusion, your Excellency, that it

would be an error to hang the prisoner for killing Szczepanik, instead of

for killing the other man, since it is proven that he did not kill

Szczepanik.'



'On the contrary, it is proven that he did kill Szczepanik.  By the

French precedent, it is plain that we must abide by the finding of the

court.'



'But Szczepanik is still alive.'



'So is Dreyfus.'



In the end it was found impossible to ignore or get around the French

precedent.  There could be but one result: Clayton was delivered over for

the execution.  It made an immense excitement; the State rose as one man

and clamored for Clayton's pardon and retrial.  The governor issued the

pardon, but the Supreme Court was in duty bound to annul it, and did so,

and poor Clayton was hanged yesterday.  The city is draped in black, and,

indeed, the like may be said of the State.  All America is vocal with

scorn of 'French justice,' and of the malignant little soldiers who

invented it and inflicted it upon the other Christian lands.



[1] Pronounced (approximately) Shepannik.

















ABOUT PLAY-ACTING





I



I have a project to suggest.  But first I will write a chapter of

introduction.



I have just been witnessing a remarkable play, here at the Burg Theatre

in Vienna.  I do not know of any play that much resembles it.  In fact,

it is such a departure from the common laws of the drama that the name

'play' doesn't seem to fit it quite snugly.  However, whatever else it

may be, it is in any case a great and stately metaphysical poem, and

deeply fascinating.  'Deeply fascinating' is the right term: for the

audience sat four hours and five minutes without thrice breaking into

applause, except at the close of each act; sat rapt and silent--

fascinated.  This piece is 'The Master of Palmyra.'  It is twenty years

old; yet I doubt if you have ever heard of it.  It is by Wilbrandt, and

is his masterpiece and the work which is to make his name permanent in

German literature.  It has never been played anywhere except in Berlin

and in the great Burg Theatre in Vienna.  Yet whenever it is put on the

stage it packs the house, and the free list is suspended.  I know people

who have seem it ten times; they know the most of it by heart; they do

not tire of it; and they say they shall still be quite willing to go and

sit under its spell whenever they get the opportunity.



There is a dash of metempsychosis in it--and it is the strength of the

piece.  The play gave me the sense of the passage of a dimly connected

procession of dream-pictures.  The scene of it is Palmyra in Roman times.

It covers a wide stretch of time--I don't know how many years--and in the

course of it the chief actress is reincarnated several times: four times

she is a more or less young woman, and once she is a lad.  In the first

act she is Zoe--a Christian girl who has wandered across the desert from

Damascus to try to Christianise the Zeus-worshipping pagans of Palmyra.

In this character she is wholly spiritual, a religious enthusiast, a

devotee who covets martyrdom--and gets it.



After many years she appears in the second act as Phoebe, a graceful and

beautiful young light-o'-love from Rome, whose soul is all for the shows

and luxuries and delights of this life--a dainty and capricious feather-

head, a creature of shower and sunshine, a spoiled child, but a charming

one.  In the third act, after an interval of many years, she reappears as

Persida, mother of a daughter who is in the fresh bloom of youth.  She is

now a sort of combination of her two earlier selves: in religious loyalty

and subjection she is Zoe: in triviality of character and shallowness of

judgement--together with a touch of vanity in dress--she is Phoebe.



After a lapse of years she appears in the fourth act as Nymphas, a

beautiful boy, in whose character the previous incarnations are

engagingly mixed.



And after another stretch of years all these heredities are joined in the

Zenobia of the fifth act--a person of gravity, dignity, sweetness, with a

heart filled with compassion for all who suffer, and a hand prompt to put

into practical form the heart's benignant impulses.



There are a number of curious and interesting features in this piece.

For instance, its hero, Appelles, young, handsome, vigorous, in the first

act, remains so all through the long flight of years covered by the five

acts.  Other men, young in the firs act, are touched with gray in the

second, are old and racked with infirmities in the third; in the fourth,

all but one are gone to their long home, and this one is a blind and

helpless hulk of ninety or a hundred years.  It indicates that the

stretch of time covered by the piece is seventy years or more.  The

scenery undergoes decay, too--the decay of age assisted and perfected by

a conflagration.  The fine new temples and palaces of the second act are

by-and-by a wreck of crumbled walls and prostrate columns, mouldy, grass-

grown, and desolate; but their former selves are still recognisable in

their ruins.  The ageing men and the ageing scenery together convey a

profound illusion of that long lapse of time: they make you live it

yourself!  You leave the theatre with the weight of a century upon you.



Another strong effect:  Death, in person, walks about the stage in every

act.  So far as I could make out, he was supposably not visible to any

excepting two persons--the one he came for and Appelles.  He used various

costumes: but there was always more black about them than any other tint;

and so they were always sombre.  Also they were always deeply impressive

and, indeed, awe-inspiring.  The face was not subjected to changes, but

remained the same first and last--a ghastly white.  To me he was always

welcome, he seemed so real--the actual Death, not a play-acting

artificiality.  He was of a solemn and stately carriage; and he had a

deep voice, and used it with a noble dignity.  Wherever there was a

turmoil of merry-making or fighting or feasting or chaffing or

quarreling, or a gilded pageant, or other manifestation of our trivial

and fleeting life, into it drifted that black figure with the corpse-

face, and looked its fateful look and passed on; leaving its victim

shuddering and smitten.  And always its coming made the fussy human pack

seem infinitely pitiful and shabby, and hardly worth the attention of

either saving or damning.



In the beginning of the first act the young girl Zoe appears by some

great rocks in the desert, and sits down exhausted, to rest.  Presently

arrive a pauper couple stricken with age and infirmities; and they begin

to mumble and pray to the Spirit of Life, who is said to inhabit that

spot.  The Spirit of Life appears; also Death--uninvited.  They are

(supposably) invisible.  Death, tall, black-robed, corpse-faced, stands

motionless and waits.  The aged couple pray to the Spirit of Life for a

means to prop up their existence and continue it.  Their prayer fails.

The Spirit of Life prophesies Zoe's martyrdom; it will take place before

night.  Soon Appelles arrives, young and vigorous and full of enthusiasm:

he has led a host against the Persians and won the battle; he is the pet

of fortune, rich, honoured, believed, 'Master of Palmyra'.  He has heard

that whoever stretches himself out on one of those rocks there and asks

for a deathless life can have his wish.  He laughs at the tradition, but

wants to make the trial anyway.  The invisible Spirit of Life warns him!

'Life without end can be regret without end.'  But he persists: let him

keep his youth, his strength, and his mental faculties unimpaired, and he

will take all the risks.  He has his desire.



From this time forth, act after act, the troubles and sorrows and

misfortunes and humiliations of life beat upon him without pity or

respite; but he will not give up, he will not confess his mistake.

Whenever he meets Death he still furiously defies him--but Death

patiently waits.  He, the healer of sorrows, is man's best friend: the

recognition of this will come.  As the years drag on, and on, and on, the

friends of the Master's youth grow old; and one by one they totter to the

grave: he goes on with his proud fight, and will not yield.  At length he

is wholly alone in the world; all his friends are dead; last of all, his

darling of darlings, his son, the lad Nymphas, who dies in his arms.  His

pride is broken now; and he would welcome Death, if Death would come, if

Death would hear his prayers and give him peace.  The closing act is fine

and pathetic.  Appelles meets Zenobia, the helper of all who suffer, and

tells her his story, which moves her pity.  By common report she is

endowed with more than earthly powers; and since he cannot have the boon

of death, he appeals to her to drown his memory in forgetfulness of his

griefs--forgetfulness 'which is death's equivalent'.  She says (roughly

translated), in an exaltation of compassion:



'Come to me!



     Kneel; and may the power be granted me

     To cool the fires of this poor tortured brain,

     And bring it peace and healing.'



He kneels.  From her hand, which she lays upon his head, a mysterious

influence steals through him; and he sinks into a dreamy tranquility.



     'Oh, if I could but so drift

     Through this soft twilight into the night of peace,

     Never to wake again!



(Raising his hand, as if in benediction.)



     O mother earth, farewell!

     Gracious thou were to me.  Farewell!

     Appelles goes to rest.'



Death appears behind him and encloses the uplifted hand in his.  Appelles

shudders, wearily and slowly turns, and recognises his life-long

adversary.  He smiles and puts all his gratitude into one simple and

touching sentence, 'Ich danke dir,' and dies.



Nothing, I think, could be more moving, more beautiful, than this close.

This piece is just one long, soulful, sardonic laugh at human life.  Its

title might properly be 'Is Life a Failure?' and leave the five acts to

play with the answer.  I am not at all sure that the author meant to

laugh at life.  I only notice that he has done it.  Without putting into

words any ungracious or discourteous things about life, the episodes in

the piece seem to be saying all the time, inarticulately: 'Note what a

silly poor thing human life is; how childish its ambitions, how

ridiculous its pomps, how trivial its dignities, how cheap its heroisms,

how capricious its course, how brief its flight, how stingy in

happinesses, how opulent in miseries, how few its prides, how

multitudinous its humiliations, how comic its tragedies, how tragic its

comedies, how wearisome and monotonous its repetition of its stupid

history through the ages, with never the introduction of a new detail;

how hard it has tried, from the Creation down, to play itself upon its

possessor as a boon and has never proved its case in a single instance!'



Take note of some of the details of the piece.  Each of the five acts

contains an independent tragedy of its own.  In each act someone's

edifice of hope, or of ambition, or of happiness, goes down in ruins.

Even Appelles' perennial youth is only a long tragedy, and his life a

failure.  There are two martyrdoms in the piece; and they are curiously

and sarcastically contrasted.  In the first act the pagans persecute Zoe,

the Christian girl, and a pagan mob slaughters her.  In the fourth act

those same pagans--now very old and zealous--are become Christians, and

they persecute the pagans; a mob of them slaughters the pagan youth,

Nymphas, who is standing up for the old gods of his fathers.  No remark

is made about this picturesque failure of civilisation; but there it

stands, as an unworded suggestion that civilisation, even when

Christianised, was not able wholly to subdue the natural man in that old

day--just as in our day the spectacle of a shipwrecked French crew

clubbing women and children who tried to climb into the lifeboats

suggests that civilisation has not succeeded in entirely obliterating the

natural man even yet.  Common sailors a year ago, in Paris, at a fire,

the aristocracy of the same nation clubbed girls and women out of the way

to save themselves.  Civilisation tested at top and bottom both, you see.

And in still another panic of fright we have this same tough civilisation

saving its honour by condemning an innocent man to multiform death, and

hugging and whitewashing the guilty one.



In the second act a grand Roman official is not above trying to blast

Appelles' reputation by falsely charging him with misappropriating public

moneys.  Appelles, who is too proud to endure even the suspicion of

irregularity, strips himself to naked poverty to square the unfair

account, and his troubles begin: the blight which is to continue and

spread strikes his life; for the frivolous, pretty creature whom he

brought from Rome has no taste for poverty and agrees to elope with a

more competent candidate.  Her presence in the house has previously

brought down the pride and broken the heart of Appelles' poor old mother;

and her life is a failure.  Death comes for her, but is willing to trade

her for the Roman girl; so the bargain is struck with Appelles, and the

mother is spared for the present.



No one's life escapes the blight.  Timoleus, the gay satirist of the

first two acts, who scoffed at the pious hypocrisies and money-grubbing

ways of the great Roman lords, is grown old and fat and blear-eyed and

racked with disease in the third, has lost his stately purities, and

watered the acid of his wit.  His life has suffered defeat.  Unthinkingly

he swears by Zeus--from ancient habit--and then quakes with fright; for a

fellow-communicant is passing by.  Reproached by a pagan friend of his

youth for his apostasy, he confesses that principle, when unsupported by

an assenting stomach, has to climb down.  One must have bread; and 'the

bread is Christian now.'  Then the poor old wreck, once so proud of his

iron rectitude, hobbles away, coughing and barking.



In that same act Appelles give his sweet young Christian daughter and her

fine young pagan lover his consent and blessing, and makes them utterly

happy--for five minutes.  Then the priest and the mob come, to tear them

apart and put the girl in a nunnery; for marriage between the sects is

forbidden.  Appelles' wife could dissolve the rule; and she wants to do

it; but under priestly pressure she wavers; then, fearing that in

providing happiness for her child she would be committing a sin dangerous

to her own, she goes over to the opposition, and throws the casting vote

for the nunnery.  The blight has fallen upon the young couple, and their

life is a failure.



In the fourth act, Longinus, who made such a prosperous and enviable

start in the first act, is left alone in the desert, sick, blind,

helpless, incredibly old, to die: not a friend left in the world--another

ruined life.  And in that act, also, Appelles' worshipped boy, Nymphas,

done to death by the mob, breathes out his last sigh in his father's

arms--one more failure.  In the fifth act, Appelles himself dies, and is

glad to do it; he who so ignorantly rejoiced, only four acts before, over

the splendid present of an earthly immortality--the very worst failure of

the lot!





II



Now I approach my project.  Here is the theatre list for Saturday, May 7,

1898, cut from the advertising columns of a New York paper:



[graphic here]



Now I arrive at my project, and make my suggestion.  From the look of

this lightsome feast, I conclude that what you need is a tonic.  Send for

'The Master of Palmyra.'  You are trying to make yourself believe that

life is a comedy, that its sole business is fun, that there is nothing

serious in it.  You are ignoring the skeleton in your closet.  Send for

'The Master of Palmyra.'  You are neglecting a valuable side of your

life; presently it will be atrophied.  You are eating too much mental

sugar; you will bring on Bright's disease of the intellect.  You need a

tonic; you need it very much.  Send for 'The Master of Palmyra.'  You

will not need to translate it; its story is as plain as a procession of

pictures.



I have made my suggestion.  Now I wish to put an annex to it.  And that

is this: It is right and wholesome to have those light comedies and

entertaining shows; and I shouldn't wish to see them diminished.  But

none of us is always in the comedy spirit; we have our graver moods; they

come to us all; the lightest of us cannot escape them.  These moods have

their appetites--healthy and legitimate appetites--and there ought to be

some way of satisfying them.  It seems to me that New York ought to have

one theatre devoted to tragedy.  With her three millions of population,

and seventy outside millions to draw upon, she can afford it, she can

support it.  America devotes more time, labour, money and attention to

distributing literary and musical culture among the general public than

does any other nation, perhaps; yet here you find her neglecting what is

possibly the most effective of all the breeders and nurses and

disseminators of high literary taste and lofty emotion--the tragic stage.

To leave that powerful agency out is to haul the culture-wagon with a

crippled team.  Nowadays, when a mood comes which only Shakespeare can

set to music, what must we do?  Read Shakespeare ourselves!  Isn't it

pitiful?  It is playing an organ solo on a jew's-harp.  We can't read.

None but the Booths can do it.



Thirty years ago Edwin Booth played 'Hamlet' a hundred nights in New

York.  With three times the population, how often is 'Hamlet' played now

in a year?  If Booth were back now in his prime, how often could he play

it in New York?  Some will say twenty-five nights.  I will say three

hundred, and say it with confidence.  The tragedians are dead; but I

think that the taste and intelligence which made their market are not.



What has come over us English-speaking people?  During the first half of

this century tragedies and great tragedians were as common with us as

farce and comedy; and it was the same in England.  Now we have not a

tragedian, I believe, and London, with her fifty shows and theatres, has

but three, I think.  It is an astonishing thing, when you come to

consider it.  Vienna remains upon the ancient basis: there has been no

change.  She sticks to the former proportions: a number of rollicking

comedies, admirably played, every night; and also every night at the Burg

Theatre--that wonder of the world for grace and beauty and richness and

splendour and costliness--a majestic drama of depth and seriousness, or a

standard old tragedy.  It is only within the last dozen years that men

have learned to do miracles on the stage in the way of grand and

enchanting scenic effects; and it is at such a time as this that we have

reduced our scenery mainly to different breeds of parlours and varying

aspects of furniture and rugs.  I think we must have a Burg in New York,

and Burg scenery, and a great company like the Burg company.  Then, with

a tragedy-tonic once or twice a month, we shall enjoy the comedies all

the better.  Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is

wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional climb

among the solemn pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built by

Shakespeare and those others.  Do I seem to be preaching?  It is out of

my life: I only do it because the rest of the clergy seem to be on

vacation.













TRAVELLING WITH A REFORMER



Last spring I went out to Chicago to see the Fair, and although I did not

see it my trip was not wholly lost--there were compensations.  In New

York I was introduced to a Major in the regular army who said he was

going to the Fair, and we agreed to go together.  I had to go to Boston

first, but that did not interfere; he said he would go along and put in

the time.  He was a handsome man and built like a gladiator.  But his

ways were gentle, and his speech was soft and persuasive.  He was

companionable, but exceedingly reposeful.  Yes, and wholly destitute of

the sense of humour.  He was full of interest in everything that went on

around him, but his serenity was indestructible; nothing disturbed him,

nothing excited him.



But before the day was done I found that deep down in him somewhere he

had a passion, quiet as he was--a passion for reforming petty public

abuses.  He stood for citizenship--it was his hobby.  His idea was that

every citizen of the republic ought to consider himself an unofficial

policeman, and keep unsalaried watch and ward over the laws and their

execution.  He thought that the only effective way of preserving and

protecting public rights was for each citizen to do his share in

preventing or punishing such infringements of them as came under his

personal notice.



It was a good scheme, but I thought it would keep a body in trouble all

the time; it seemed to me that one would be always trying to get

offending little officials discharged, and perhaps getting laughed at for

all reward.  But he said no, I had the wrong idea: that there was no

occasion to get anybody discharged; that in fact you mustn't get anybody

discharged; that that would itself be a failure; no, one must reform the

man--reform him and make him useful where he was.



'Must one report the offender and then beg his superior not to discharge

him, but reprimand him and keep him?'



'No, that is not the idea; you don't report him at all, for then you risk

his bread and butter.  You can act as if you are going to report him--

when nothing else will answer.  But that's an extreme case.  That is a

sort of force, and force is bad.  Diplomacy is the effective thing.  Now

if a man has tact--if a man will exercise diplomacy--'



For two minutes we had been standing at a telegraph wicket, and during

all this time the Major had been trying to get the attention of one of

the young operators, but they were all busy skylarking.  The Major spoke

now, and asked one of them to take his telegram.  He got for reply:



'I reckon you can wait a minute, can't you?' And the skylarking went on.



The Major said yes, he was not in a hurry.  Then he wrote another

telegram:



     'President Western Union Tel. Co.:



     'Come and dine with me this evening.  I can tell you how business is

     conducted in one of your branches.'



Presently the young fellow who had spoken so pertly a little before

reached out and took the telegram, and when he read it he lost colour and

began to apologise and explain.  He said he would lose his place if this

deadly telegram was sent, and he might never get another.  If he could be

let off this time he would give no cause of complaint again.  The

compromise was accepted.



As we walked away, the Major said:



'Now, you see, that was diplomacy--and you see how it worked.  It

wouldn't do any good to bluster, the way people are always doing.  That

boy can always give you as good as you send, and you'll come out defeated

and ashamed of yourself pretty nearly always.  But you see he stands no

chance against diplomacy.  Gentle words and diplomacy--those are the

tools to work with.'



'Yes, I see: but everybody wouldn't have had your opportunity.  It isn't

everybody that is on those familiar terms with the President of the

Western Union.'



'Oh, you misunderstand.  I don't know the President--I only use him

diplomatically.  It is for his good and for the public good.  There's no

harm in it.'



I said with hesitation and diffidence:



'But is it ever right or noble to tell a lie?'



He took no note of the delicate self-righteousness of the question, but

answered with undisturbed gravity and simplicity:



'Yes, sometimes.  Lies told to injure a person and lies told to profit

yourself are not justifiable, but lies told to help another person, and

lies told in the public interest--oh, well, that is quite another matter.

Anybody knows that.  But never mind about the methods: you see the

result.  That youth is going to be useful now, and well-behaved.  He had

a good face.  He was worth saving.  Why, he was worth saving on his

mother's account if not his own.  Of course, he has a mother--sisters,

too.  Damn these people who are always forgetting that!  Do you know,

I've never fought a duel in my life--never once--and yet have been

challenged, like other people.  I could always see the other man's

unoffending women folks or his little children standing between him and

me.  They hadn't done anything--I couldn't break their hearts, you know.'



He corrected a good many little abuses in the course of the day, and

always without friction--always with a fine and dainty 'diplomacy' which

left no sting behind; and he got such happiness and such contentment out

of these performances that I was obliged to envy him his trade--and

perhaps would have adopted it if I could have managed the necessary

deflections from fact as confidently with my mouth as I believe I could

with a pen, behind the shelter of print, after a little practice.



Away late that night we were coming up-town in a horse-car when three

boisterous roughs got aboard, and began to fling hilarious obscenities

and profanities right and left among the timid passengers, some of whom

were women and children.  Nobody resisted or retorted; the conductor

tried soothing words and moral suasion, but the toughs only called him

names and laughed at him.  Very soon I saw that the Major realised that

this was a matter which was in his line; evidently he was turning over

his stock of diplomacy in his mind and getting ready.  I felt that the

first diplomatic remark he made in this place would bring down a

landslide of ridicule upon him, and maybe something worse; but before I

could whisper to him and check him he had begun, and it was too late.  He

said, in a level and dispassionate tone:



'Conductor, you must put these swine out.  I will help you.'



I was not looking for that.  In a flash the three roughs plunged at him.

But none of them arrived.  He delivered three such blows as one could not

expect to encounter outside the prize-ring, and neither of the men had

life enough left in him to get up from where he fell.  The Major dragged

them out and threw them off the car, and we got under way again.



I was astonished: astonished to see a lamb act so; astonished at the

strength displayed, and the clean and comprehensive result; astonished at

the brisk and business-like style of the whole thing.  The situation had

a humorous side to it, considering how much I had been hearing about mild

persuasion and gentle diplomacy all day from this pile-driver, and I

would have liked to call his attention to that feature and do some

sarcasms about it; but when I looked at him I saw that it would be of no

use--his placid and contented face had no ray of humour in it; he would

not have understood.  When we left the car, I said:



'That was a good stroke of diplomacy--three good strokes of diplomacy, in

fact.'



'That?  That wasn't diplomacy.  You are quite in the wrong.  Diplomacy is

a wholly different thing.  One cannot apply it to that sort; they would

not understand it.  No, that was not diplomacy; it was force.'



'Now that you mention it, I--yes, I think perhaps you are right.'



'Right?  Of course I am right.  It was just force.'



'I think, myself, it had the outside aspect of it.  Do you often have to

reform people in that way?'



'Far from it.  It hardly ever happens.  Not oftener than once in half a

year, at the outside.'



'Those men will get well?'



'Get well?  Why, certainly they will.  They are not in any danger.  I

know how to hit and where to hit.  You noticed that I did not hit them

under the jaw.  That would have killed them.'



I believed that.  I remarked--rather wittily, as I thought--that he had

been a lamb all day, but now had all of a sudden developed into a ram--

battering-ram; but with dulcet frankness and simplicity he said no, a

battering-ram was quite a different thing, and not in use now.  This was

maddening, and I came near bursting out and saying he had no more

appreciation of wit than a jackass--in fact, I had it right on my tongue,

but did not say it, knowing there was no hurry and I could say it just as

well some other time over the telephone.



We started to Boston the next afternoon.  The smoking compartment in the

parlour-car was full, and he went into the regular smoker.  Across the

aisle in the front seat sat a meek, farmer-looking old man with a sickly

pallor in his face, and he was holding the door open with his foot to get

the air.  Presently a big brakeman came rushing through, and when he got

to the door he stopped, gave the farmer an ugly scowl, then wrenched the

door to with such energy as to almost snatch the old man's boot off.

Then on he plunged about his business.  Several passengers laughed, and

the old gentleman looked pathetically shamed and grieved.



After a little the conductor passed along, and the Major stopped him and

asked him a question in his habitually courteous way:



'Conductor, where does one report the misconduct of a brakeman?  Does one

report to you?'



'You can report him at New Haven if you want to.  What has he been

doing?'



The Major told the story.  The conductor seemed amused.  He said, with

just a touch of sarcasm in his bland tones:



'As I understand you, the brakeman didn't say anything?'



'No, he didn't say anything.'



'But he scowled, you say?'



'Yes.'



'And snatched the door loose in a rough way?'



'Yes.'



'That's the whole business, is it?'



'Yes, that is the whole of it.'



The conductor smiled pleasantly, and said:



'Well, if you want to report him, all right, but I don't quite make out

what it's going to amount to.  You'll say--as I understand you--that the

brakeman insulted this old gentleman.  They'll ask you what he said.

You'll say he didn't say anything at all.  I reckon they'll say, How are

you going to make out an insult when you acknowledge yourself that he

didn't say a word?'



There was a murmur of applause at the conductor's compact reasoning, and

it gave him pleasure--you could see it in his face.  But the Major was

not disturbed.  He said:



'There--now you have touched upon a crying defect in the complaint

system.  The railway officials--as the public think and as you also seem

to think--are not aware that there are any insults except spoken ones.

So nobody goes to headquarters and reports insults of manner, insults of

gesture, look, and so forth; and yet these are sometimes harder to bear

than any words.  They are bitter hard to bear because there is nothing

tangible to take hold of; and the insulter can always say, if called

before the railway officials, that he never dreamed of intending any

offence.  It seems to me that the officials ought to specially and

urgently request the public to report unworded affronts and

incivilities.'



The conductor laughed, and said:



'Well, that would be trimming it pretty fine, sure!'



'But not too fine, I think.  I will report this matter at New Haven, and

I have an idea that I'll be thanked for it.'



The conductor's face lost something of its complacency; in fact, it

settled to a quite sober cast as the owner of it moved away.  I said:



'You are not really going to bother with that trifle, are you?'



'It isn't a trifle.  Such things ought always to be reported.  It is a

public duty and no citizen has a right to shirk it.  But I sha'n't' have

to report this case.'



'Why?'



'It won't be necessary.  Diplomacy will do the business.  You'll see.'



Presently the conductor came on his rounds again, and when he reached the

Major he leaned over and said:



'That's all right.  You needn't report him.  He's responsible to me, and

if he does it again I'll give him a talking to.'



The Major's response was cordial:



'Now that is what I like!  You mustn't think that I was moved by any

vengeful spirit, for that wasn't the case.  It was duty--just a sense of

duty, that was all.  My brother-in-law is one of the directors of the

road, and when he learns that you are going to reason with your brakeman

the very next time he brutally insults an unoffending old man it will

please him, you may be sure of that.'



The conductor did not look as joyous as one might have thought he would,

but on the contrary looked sickly and uncomfortable.  He stood around a

little; then said:



'I think something ought to be done to him now.  I'll discharge him.'



'Discharge him!  What good would that do?  Don't you think it would be

better wisdom to teach him better ways and keep him?'



'Well, there's something in that.  What would you suggest?'



'He insulted the old gentleman in presence of all these people.  How

would it do to have him come and apologise in their presence?'



'I'll have him here right off.  And I want to say this: If people would

do as you've done, and report such things to me instead of keeping mum

and going off and blackguarding the road, you'd see a different state of

things pretty soon.  I'm much obliged to you.'



The brakeman came and apologised.  After he was gone the Major said:



'Now you see how simple and easy that was.  The ordinary citizen would

have accomplished nothing--the brother-in-law of a directory can

accomplish anything he wants to.'



'But are you really the brother-in-law of a director?'



'Always.  Always when the public interests require it.  I have a brother-

in-law on all the boards--everywhere.  It saves me a world of trouble.'



'It is a good wide relationship.'



'Yes.  I have over three hundred of them.'



'Is the relationship never doubted by a conductor?'



'I have never met with a case.  It is the honest truth--I never have.'



'Why didn't you let him go ahead and discharge the brakeman, in spite of

your favourite policy.  You know he deserved it.'



The Major answered with something which really had a sort of distant

resemblance to impatience:



'If you would stop and think a moment you wouldn't ask such a question as

that.  Is a brakeman a dog, that nothing but dogs' methods will do for

him?  He is a man and has a man's fight for life.  And he always has a

sister, or a mother, or wife and children to support.  Always--there are

no exceptions.  When you take his living away from him you take theirs

away too--and what have they done to you?  Nothing.  And where is the

profit in discharging an uncourteous brakeman and hiring another just

like him?  It's unwisdom.  Don't you see that the rational thing to do is

to reform the brakeman and keep him?  Of course it is.'



Then he quoted with admiration the conduct of a certain division

superintendent of the Consolidated road, in a case where a switchman of

two years' experience was negligent once and threw a train off the track

and killed several people.  Citizens came in a passion to urge the man's

dismissal, but the superintendent said:



'No, you are wrong.  He has learned his lesson, he will throw no more

trains off the track.  He is twice as valuable as he was before.  I shall

keep him.'



We had only one more adventure on the train.  Between Hartford and

Springfield the train-boy came shouting with an armful of literature, and

dropped a sample into a slumbering gentleman's lap, and the man woke up

with a start.  He was very angry, and he and a couple of friends

discussed the outrage with much heat.  They sent for the parlour-car

conductor and described the matter, and were determined to have the boy

expelled from his situation.  The three complainants were wealthy Holyoke

merchants, and it was evident that the conductor stood in some awe of

them.  He tried to pacify them, and explained that the boy was not under

his authority, but under that of one of the news companies; but he

accomplished nothing.



Then the Major volunteered some testimony for the defence.  He said:



'I saw it all.  You gentlemen have not meant to exaggerate the

circumstances, but still that is what you have done.  The boy has done

nothing more than all train-boys do.  If you want to get his ways

softened down and his manners reformed, I am with you and ready to help,

but it isn't fair to get him discharged without giving him a chance.'



But they were angry, and would hear of no compromise.  They were well

acquainted with the President of the Boston and Albany, they said, and

would put everything aside next day and go up to Boston and fix that boy.



The Major said he would be on hand too, and would do what he could to

save the boy.  One of the gentlemen looked him over and said:



'Apparently it is going to be a matter of who can wield the most

influence with the President.  Do you know Mr. Bliss personally?'



The Major said, with composure:



'Yes; he is my uncle.'



The effect was satisfactory.  There was an awkward silence for a minute

or more; then the hedging and the half-confessions of over-haste and

exaggerated resentment began, and soon everything was smooth and friendly

and sociable, and it was resolved to drop the matter and leave the boy's

bread and butter unmolested.



It turned out as I had expected: the President of the road was not the

Major's uncle at all--except by adoption, and for this day and train

only.



We got into no episodes on the return journey.  Probably it was because

we took a night train and slept all the way.



We left New York Saturday night by the Pennsylvania road.  After

breakfast the next morning we went into the parlour-car, but found it a

dull place and dreary.  There were but few people in it and nothing going

on.  Then we went into the little smoking compartment of the same car and

found three gentlemen in there.  Two of them were grumbling over one of

the rules of the road--a rule which forbade card-playing on the trains on

Sunday.  They had started an innocent game of high-low-jack and had been

stopped.  The Major was interested.  He said to the third gentleman:



'Did you object to the game?'



'Not at all.  I am a Yale professor and a religious man, but my

prejudices are not extensive.'



Then the Major said to the others:



'You are at perfect liberty to resume your game, gentlemen; no one here

objects.'



One of them declined the risk, but the other one said he would like to

begin again if the Major would join him.  So they spread an overcoat over

their knees and the game proceeded.  Pretty soon the parlour-car

conductor arrived, and said, brusquely:



'There, there, gentlemen, that won't do.  Put up the cards--it's not

allowed.'



The Major was shuffling.  He continued to shuffle, and said:



'By whose order is it forbidden?'



'It's my order.  I forbid it.'



The dealing began.  The Major asked:



'Did you invent the idea?'



'What idea?'



'The idea of forbidding card-playing on Sunday.'



'No--of course not.'



'Who did?'



'The company.'



'Then it isn't your order, after all, but the company's.  Is that it?'



'Yes.  But you don't stop playing!  I have to require you to stop playing

immediately.'



'Nothing is gained by hurry, and often much is lost.  Who authorised the

company to issue such an order?'



'My dear sir, that is a matter of no consequence to me, and--'



'But you forget that you are not the only person concerned.  It may be a

matter of consequence to me.  It is, indeed, a matter of very great

importance to me.  I cannot violate a legal requirement of my country

without dishonouring myself; I cannot allow any man or corporation to

hamper my liberties with illegal rules--a thing which railway companies

are always trying to do--without dishonouring my citizenship.  So I come

back to that question: By whose authority has the company issued this

order?'



'I don't know.  That's their affair.'



'Mine, too.  I doubt if the company has any right to issue such a rule.

This road runs through several States.  Do you know what State we are in

now, and what its laws are in matters of this kind?'



'Its laws do not concern me, but the company's orders do.  It is my duty

to stop this game, gentlemen, and it must be stopped.'



'Possibly; but still there is no hurry.  In hotels they post certain

rules in the rooms, but they always quote passages from the State law as

authority for these requirements.  I see nothing posted here of this

sort.  Please produce your authority and let us arrive at a decision, for

you see yourself that you are marring the game.'



'I have nothing of the kind, but I have my orders, and that is

sufficient.  They must be obeyed.'



'Let us not jump to conclusions.  It will be better all around to examine

into the matter without heat or haste, and see just where we stand before

either of us makes a mistake--for the curtailing of the liberties of a

citizen of the United States is a much more serious matter than you and

the railroads seem to think, and it cannot be done in my person until the

curtailer proves his right to do so.  Now--'



'My dear sir, will you put down those cards?'



'All in good time, perhaps.  It depends.  You say this order must be

obeyed.  Must.  It is a strong word.  You see yourself how strong it is.

A wise company would not arm you with so drastic an order as this, of

course, without appointing a penalty for its infringement.  Otherwise it

runs the risk of being a dead letter and a thing to laugh at.  What is

the appointed penalty for an infringement of this law?'



'Penalty?  I never heard of any.'



'Unquestionably you must be mistaken.  Your company orders you to come

here and rudely break up an innocent amusement, and furnishes you no way

to enforce the order!  Don't you see that that is nonsense?  What do you

do when people refuse to obey this order?  Do you take the cards away

from them?'



'No.'



'Do you put the offender off at the next station?'



'Well, no--of course we couldn't if he had a ticket.'



'Do you have him up before a court?'



The conductor was silent and apparently troubled.  The Major started a

new deal, and said:



'You see that you are helpless, and that the company has placed you in a

foolish position.  You are furnished with an arrogant order, and you

deliver it in a blustering way, and when you come to look into the matter

you find you haven't any way of enforcing obedience.'



The conductor said, with chill dignity:



'Gentlemen, you have heard the order, and my duty is ended.  As to

obeying it or not, you will do as you think fit.'  And he turned to

leave.



'But wait.  The matter is not yet finished.  I think you are mistaken

about your duty being ended; but if it really is, I myself have a duty to

perform yet.'



'How do you mean?'



'Are you going to report my disobedience at headquarters in Pittsburg?'



'No.  What good would that do?'



'You must report me, or I will report you.'



'Report me for what?'



'For disobeying the company's orders in not stopping this game.  As a

citizen it is my duty to help the railway companies keep their servants

to their work.'



'Are you in earnest?'



'Yes, I am in earnest.  I have nothing against you as a man, but I have

this against you as an officer--that you have not carried out that order,

and if you do not report me I must report you.  And I will.'



The conductor looked puzzled, and was thoughtful a moment; then he burst

out with:



'I seem to be getting myself into a scrape!  It's all a muddle; I can't

make head or tail of it; it never happened before; they always knocked

under and never said a word, and so I never saw how ridiculous that

stupid order with no penalty is.  I don't want to report anybody, and I

don't want to be reported--why, it might do me no end of harm!  No do go

on with the game--play the whole day if you want to--and don't let's have

any more trouble about it!'



'No, I only sat down here to establish this gentleman's rights--he can

have his place now.  But before won't you tell me what you think the

company made this rule for?  Can you imagine an excuse for it?  I mean a

rational one--an excuse that is not on its face silly, and the invention

of an idiot.?'



'Why, surely I can.  The reason it was made is plain enough.  It is to

save the feelings of the other passengers--the religious ones among them,

I mean.  They would not like it to have the Sabbath desecrated by card-

playing on the train.'



'I just thought as much.  They are willing to desecrate it themselves by

travelling on Sunday, but they are not willing that other people--'



'By gracious, you've hit it!  I never thought of that before.  The fact

is, it is a silly rule when you come to look into it.'



At this point the train conductor arrived, and was going to shut down the

game in a very high-handed fashion, but the parlour-car conductor stopped

him, and took him aside to explain.  Nothing more was heard of the

matter.



I was ill in bed eleven days in Chicago and got no glimpse of the Fair,

for I was obliged to return East as soon as I was able to travel.  The

Major secured and paid for a state-room in a sleeper the day before we

left, so that I could have plenty of room and be comfortable; but when we

arrived at the station a mistake had been made and our car had not been

put on.  The conductor had reserved a section for us--it was the best he

could do, he said.  But Major said we were not in a hurry, and would wait

for the car to be put on.  The conductor responded, with pleasant irony:



'It may be that you are not in a hurry, just as you say, but we are.

Come, get aboard, gentlemen, get aboard--don't keep us waiting.'



But the Major would not get aboard himself nor allow me to do it.  He

wanted his car, and said he must have it.  This made the hurried and

perspiring conductor impatient, and he said:



'It's the best we can do--we can't do impossibilities.  You will take the

section or go without.  A mistake has been made and can't be rectified at

this late hour.  It's a thing that happens now and then, and there is

nothing for it but to put up with it and make the best of it.  Other

people do.'



'Ah, that is just it, you see.  If they had stuck to their rights and

enforced them you wouldn't be trying to trample mine underfoot in this

bland way now.  I haven't any disposition to give you unnecessary

trouble, but it is my duty to protect the next man from this kind of

imposition.  So I must have my car.  Otherwise I will wait in Chicago and

sue the company for violating its contract.'



'Sue the company?--for a thing like that!'



'Certainly.'



'Do you really mean that?'



'Indeed, I do.'



The conductor looked the Major over wonderingly, and then said:



'It beats me--it's bran-new--I've never struck the mate to it before.

But I swear I think you'd do it.  Look here, I'll send for the station-

master.'



When the station-master came he was a good deal annoyed--at the Major,

not at the person who had made the mistake.  He was rather brusque, and

took the same position which the conductor had taken in the beginning;

but he failed to move the soft-spoken artilleryman, who still insisted

that he must have his car.  However, it was plain that there was only one

strong side in this case, and that that side was the Major's.  The

station-master banished his annoyed manner, and became pleasant and even

half-apologetic.  This made a good opening for a compromise, and the

Major made a concession.  He said he would give up the engaged state-

room, but he must have a state-room.  After a deal of ransacking, one was

found whose owner was persuadable; he exchanged it for our section, and

we got away at last.  The conductor called on us in the evening, and was

kind and courteous and obliging, and we had a long talk and got to be

good friends.  He said he wished the public would make trouble oftener--

it would have a good effect.  He said that the railroads could not be

expected to do their whole duty by the traveller unless the traveller

would take some interest in the matter himself.



I hoped that we were done reforming for the trip now, but it was not so.

In the hotel car, in the morning, the Major called for broiled chicken.

The waiter said:



'It's not in the bill of fare, sir; we do not serve anything but what is

in the bill.'



'That gentleman yonder is eating a broiled chicken.'



'Yes, but that is different.  He is one of the superintendents of the

road.'



'Then all the more must I have broiled chicken.  I do not like these

discriminations.  Please hurry--bring me a broiled chicken.'



The waiter brought the steward, who explained in a low and polite voice

that the thing was impossible--it was against the rule, and the rule was

rigid.



'Very well, then, you must either apply it impartially or break it

impartially.  You must take that gentleman's chicken away from him or

bring me one.'



The steward was puzzled, and did not quite know what to do.  He began an

incoherent argument, but the conductor came along just then, and asked

what the difficulty was.  The steward explained that here was a gentleman

who was insisting on having a chicken when it was dead against the rule

and not in the bill.  The conductor said:



'Stick by your rules--you haven't any option.  Wait a moment--is this the

gentleman?' Then he laughed and said: 'Never mind your rules--it's my

advice, and sound: give him anything he wants--don't get him started on

his rights.  Give him whatever he asks for; and it you haven't got it,

stop the train and get it.'



The Major ate the chicken, but said he did it from a sense of duty and to

establish a principle, for he did not like chicken.



I missed the Fair it is true, but I picked up some diplomatic tricks

which I and the reader may find handy and useful as we go along.













DIPLOMATIC PAY AND CLOTHES



VIENNA, January 5--I find in this morning's papers the statement that the

Government of the United States has paid to the two members of the Peace

Commission entitled to receive money for their services 100,000 dollars

each for their six weeks' work in Paris.



I hope that this is true.  I will allow myself the satisfaction of

considering that it is true, and of treating it as a thing finished and

settled.



It is a precedent; and ought to be a welcome one to our country.  A

precedent always has a chance to be valuable (as well as the other way);

and its best chance to be valuable (or the other way) is when it takes

such a striking form as to fix a whole nation's attention upon it.  If it

come justified out of the discussion which will follow, it will find a

career ready and waiting for it.



We realise that the edifice of public justice is built of precedents,

from the ground upward; but we do not always realise that all the other

details of our civilisation are likewise built of precedents.  The

changes also which they undergo are due to the intrusion of new

precedents, which hold their ground against opposition, and keep their

place.  A precedent may die at birth, or it may live--it is mainly a

matter of luck.  If it be imitated once, it has a chance; if twice a

better chance; if three times it is reaching a point where account must

be taken of it; if four, five, or six times, it has probably come to

stay--for a whole century, possibly.  If a town start a new bow, or a new

dance, or a new temperance project, or a new kind of hat, and can get the

precedent adopted in the next town, the career of that precedent is

begun; and it will be unsafe to bet as to where the end of its journey is

going to be.  It may not get this start at all, and may have no career;

but, if a crown prince introduce the precedent, it will attract vast

attention, and its chances for a career are so great as to amount almost

to a certainty.



For a long time we have been reaping damage from a couple of disastrous

precedents.  One is the precedent of shabby pay to public servants

standing for the power and dignity of the Republic in foreign lands; the

other is a precedent condemning them to exhibit themselves officially in

clothes which are not only without grace or dignity, but are a pretty

loud and pious rebuke to the vain and frivolous costumes worn by the

other officials.  To our day an American ambassador's official costume

remains under the reproach of these defects.  At a public function in a

European court all foreign representatives except ours wear clothes which

in some way distinguish them from the unofficial throng, and mark them as

standing for their countries.  But our representative appears in a plain

black swallow-tail, which stands for neither country, nor people.  It has

no nationality.  It is found in all countries; it is as international as

a night-shirt.  It has no particular meaning; but our Government tries to

give it one; it tries to make it stand for Republican Simplicity, modesty

and unpretentiousness.  Tries, and without doubt fails, for it is not

conceivable that this loud ostentation of simplicity deceives any one.

The statue that advertises its modesty with a fig-leaf really brings its

modesty under suspicion.  Worn officially, our nonconforming swallow-tail

is a declaration of ungracious independence in the matter of manners, and

is uncourteous.  It says to all around: 'In Rome we do not choose to do

as Rome does; we refuse to respect your tastes and your traditions; we

make no sacrifices to anyone's customs and prejudices; we yield no jot to

the courtesies of life; we prefer our manners, and intrude them here.'



That is not the true American spirit, and those clothes misrepresent us.

When a foreigner comes among us and trespasses against our customs and

our code of manners, we are offended, and justly so; but our Government

commands our ambassadors to wear abroad an official dress which is an

offence against foreign manners and customers; and the discredit of it

falls upon the nation.



We did not dress our public functionaries in undistinguished raiment

before Franklin's time; and the change would not have come if he had been

an obscurity.  But he was such a colossal figure in the world that

whatever he did of an unusual nature attracted the world's attention,

and became a precedent.  In the case of clothes, the next representative

after him, and the next, had to imitate it.  After that, the thing was

custom; and custom is a petrifaction: nothing but dynamite can dislodge

it for a century.  We imagine that our queer official costumery was

deliberately devised to symbolise our Republican Simplicity--a quality

which we have never possessed, and are too old to acquire now, if we had

any use for it or any leaning toward it.  But it is not so; there was

nothing deliberate about it; it grew naturally and heedlessly out of the

precedent set by Franklin.



If it had been an intentional thing, and based upon a principle, it would

not have stopped where it did: we should have applied it further.

Instead of clothing our admirals and generals, for courts-martial and

other public functions, in superb dress uniforms blazing with colour and

gold, the Government would put them in swallow-tails and white cravats,

and make them look like ambassadors and lackeys.  If I am wrong in making

Franklin the father of our curious official clothes, it is no matter--he

will be able to stand it.



It is my opinion--and I make no charge for the suggestion--that, whenever

we appoint an ambassador or a minister, we ought to confer upon him the

temporary rank of admiral or general, and allow him to wear the

corresponding uniform at public functions in foreign countries.  I would

recommend this for the reason that it is not consonant with the dignity

of the United States of America that her representative should appear

upon occasions of state in a dress which makes him glaringly conspicuous;

and that is what his present undertaker-outfit does when it appears, with

its dismal smudge, in the midst of the butterfly splendours of a

Continental court.  It is a most trying position for a shy man, a modest

man, a man accustomed to being like other people.  He is the most

striking figure present; there is no hiding from the multitudinous eyes.

It would be funny, if it were not such a cruel spectacle, to see the

hunted creature in his solemn sables scuffling around in that sea of

vivid colour, like a mislaid Presbyterian in perdition.  We are all aware

that our representative's dress should not compel too much attention; for

anybody but an Indian chief knows that that is a vulgarity.  I am saying

these things in the interest of our national pride and dignity.  Our

representative is the flag.  He is the Republic.  He is the United States

of America.  And when these embodiments pass by, we do not want them

scoffed at; we desire that people shall be obliged to concede that they

are worthily clothed, and politely.



Our Government is oddly inconsistent in this matter of official dress.

When its representative is a civilian who has not been a solider, it

restricts him to the black swallow-tail and white tie; but if he is a

civilian who has been a solider, it allows him to wear the uniform of his

former rank as an official dress.  When General Sickles was minister to

Spain, he always wore, when on official duty, the dress uniform of a

major-general.  When General Grant visited foreign courts, he went

handsomely and properly ablaze in the uniform of a full general, and was

introduced by diplomatic survivals of his own Presidential

Administration.  The latter, by official necessity, went in the meek and

lowly swallow-tail--a deliciously sarcastic contrast: the one dress

representing the honest and honourable dignity of the nation; the other,

the cheap hypocrisy of the Republican Simplicity tradition.  In Paris our

present representative can perform his official functions reputably

clothed; for he was an officer in the Civil War.  In London our late

ambassador was similarly situated; for he, also, was an officer in the

Civil War.  But Mr. Choate must represent the Great Republic--even at

official breakfasts at seven in the morning--in that same old funny

swallow-tail.



Our Government's notions about proprieties of costume are indeed very,

very odd--as suggested by that last fact.  The swallow-tail is recognised

the world over as not wearable in the daytime; it is a night-dress, and a

night-dress only--a night-shirt is not more so.  Yet, when our

representative makes an official visit in the morning, he is obliged by

his Government to go in that night-dress.  It makes the very cab-horses

laugh.



The truth is, that for awhile during the present century, and up to

something short of forty years ago, we had a lucid interval, and dropped

the Republican Simplicity sham, and dressed our foreign representatives

in a handsome and becoming official costume.  This was discarded by-and-

by, and the swallow-tail substituted.  I believe it is not now known

which statesman brought about this change; but we all know that, stupid

as he was as to diplomatic proprieties in dress, he would not have sent

his daughter to a state ball in a corn-shucking costume, nor to a corn-

shucking in a state-ball costume, to be harshly criticised as an ill-

mannered offender against the proprieties of custom in both places.  And

we know another thing, viz.  that he himself would not have wounded the

tastes and feelings of a family of mourners by attending a funeral in

their house in a costume which was an offence against the dignities and

decorum prescribed by tradition and sanctified by custom.  Yet that man

was so heedless as not to reflect that all the social customs of

civilised peoples are entitled to respectful observance, and that no man

with a right spirit of courtesy in him ever has any disposition to

transgress these customs.



There is still another argument for a rational diplomatic dress--a

business argument.  We are a trading nation; and our representative is a

business agent.  If he is respected, esteemed, and liked where he is

stationed, he can exercise an influence which can extend our trade and

forward our prosperity.  A considerable number of his business activities

have their field in his social relations; and clothes which do not offend

against local manners and customers and prejudices are a valuable part of

his equipment in this matter--would be, if Franklin had died earlier.



I have not done with gratis suggestions yet.  We made a great deal of

valuable advance when we instituted the office of ambassador.  That lofty

rank endows its possessor with several times as much influence,

consideration, and effectiveness as the rank of minister bestows.  For

the sake of the country's dignity and for the sake of her advantage

commercially, we should have ambassadors, not ministers, at the great

courts of the world.



But not at present salaries!  No; if we are to maintain present salaries,

let us make no more ambassadors; and let us unmake those we have already

made.  The great position, without the means of respectably maintaining

it--there could be no wisdom in that.  A foreign representative, to be

valuable to his country, must be on good terms with the officials of the

capital and with the rest of the influential folk.  He must mingle with

this society; he cannot sit at home--it is not business, it butters no

commercial parsnips.  He must attend the dinners, banquets, suppers,

balls, receptions, and must return these hospitalities.  He should return

as good as he gets, too, for the sake of the dignity of his country, and

for the sake of Business.  Have we ever had a minister or an ambassador

who could do this on his salary?  No--not once, from Franklin's time to

ours.  Other countries understand the commercial value of properly lining

the pockets of their representatives; but apparently our Government has

not learned it.  England is the most successful trader of the several

trading nations; and she takes good care of the watchmen who keep guard

in her commercial towers.  It has been a long time, now, since we needed

to blush for our representatives abroad.  It has become custom to send

our fittest.  We send men of distinction, cultivation, character--our

ablest, our choicest, our best.  Then we cripple their efficiency through

the meagreness of their pay.  Here is a list of salaries for English and

American ministers and ambassadors:







City                               Salaries



                             American       English



Paris                         $17,500       $45,000

Berlin                         17,500        40,000

Vienna                         12,000        40,000

Constantinople                 10,000        40,000

St.  Petersburg                17,500        39,000

Rome                           12,000        35,000

Washington                        --         32,500







Sir Julian Pauncefote, the English ambassador at Washington, has a very

fine house besides--at no damage to his salary.



English ambassadors pay no house rent; they live in palaces owned by

England.  Our representatives pay house-rent out of their salaries.  You

can judge by the above figures what kind of houses the United States of

America has been used to living in abroad, and what sort of return-

entertaining she has done.  There is not a salary in our list which would

properly house the representative receiving it, and, in addition, pay

$3,000 toward his family's bacon and doughnuts--the strange but

economical and customary fare of the American ambassador's household,

except on Sundays, when petrified Boston crackers are added.



The ambassadors and ministers of foreign nations not only have generous

salaries, but their Governments provide them with money wherewith to pay

a considerable part of their hospitality bills.  I believe our Government

pays no hospitality bills except those incurred by the navy.  Through

this concession to the navy, that arm is able to do us credit in foreign

parts; and certainly that is well and politic.  But why the Government

does not think it well and politic that our diplomats should be able to

do us like credit abroad is one of those mysterious inconsistencies which

have been puzzling me ever since I stopped trying to understand baseball

and took up statesmanship as a pastime.



To return to the matter of house-rent.  Good houses, properly furnished,

in European capitals, are not to be had at small figures.  Consequently,

our foreign representatives have been accustomed to live in garrets--

sometimes on the roof.  Being poor men, it has been the best they could

do on the salary which the Government has paid them.  How could they

adequately return the hospitalities shown them?  It was impossible.  It

would have exhausted the salary in three months.  Still, it was their

official duty to entertain their influentials after some sort of fashion;

and they did the best they could with their limited purse.  In return for

champagne they furnished lemonade; in return for game they furnished ham;

in return for whale they furnished sardines; in return for liquors they

furnished condensed milk; in return for the battalion of liveried and

powdered flunkeys they furnished the hired girl; in return for the fairy

wilderness of sumptuous decorations they draped the stove with the

American flag; in return for the orchestra they furnished zither and

ballads by the family; in return for the ball--but they didn't return the

ball, except in cases where the United States lived on the roof and had

room.



Is this an exaggeration?  It can hardly be called that.  I saw nearly the

equivalent of it, a good many years ago.  A minister was trying to create

influential friends for a project which might be worth ten millions a

year to the agriculturists of the Republic; and our Government had

furnished him ham and lemonade to persuade the opposition with.  The

minister did not succeed.  He might not have succeeded if his salary had

been what it ought to have been--$50,000 or $60,00 a year--but his

chances would have been very greatly improved.  And in any case, he and

his dinners and his country would not have been joked about by the hard-

hearted and pitied by the compassionate.



Any experienced 'drummer' will testify that, when you want to do

business, there is no economy in ham and lemonade.  The drummer takes his

country customer to the theatre, the opera, the circus; dines him, wines

him, entertains him all the day and all the night in luxurious style; and

plays upon his human nature in all seductive ways.  For he knows, by old

experience, that this is the best way to get a profitable order out of

him.  He has this reward.  All Governments except our own play the same

policy, with the same end in view; and they, also, have their reward.

But ours refuses to do business by business ways, and sticks to ham and

lemonade.  This is the most expensive diet known to the diplomatic

service of the world.



Ours is the only country of first importance that pays its foreign

representatives trifling salaries.  If we were poor, we could not find

great fault with these economies, perhaps--at least one could find a sort

of plausible excuse for them.  But we are not poor; and the excuse fails.

As shown above, some of our important diplomatic representatives receive

$12,000; others, $17,500.  These salaries are all ham and lemonade, and

unworthy of the flag.  When we have a rich ambassador in London or Paris,

he lives as the ambassador of a country like ours ought to live, and it

costs him $100,000 a year to do it.  But why should we allow him to pay

that out of his private pocket?  There is nothing fair about it; and the

Republic is no proper subject for any one's charity.  In several cases

our salaries of $12,000 should be $50,000; and all of the salaries of

$17,500 ought to be $75,000 or $100,000, since we pay no representative's

house-rent.  Our State Department realises the mistake which we are

making, and would like to rectify it, but it has not the power.



When a young girl reaches eighteen she is recognised as being a woman.

She adds six inches to her skirt, she unplaits her dangling braids and

balls her hair on top of her head, she stops sleeping with her little

sister and has a room to herself, and becomes in many ways a thundering

expense.  But she is in society now; and papa has to stand it.  There is

no avoiding it.  Very well.  The Great Republic lengthened her skirts

last year, balled up her hair, and entered the world's society.  This

means that, if she would prosper and stand fair with society, she must

put aside some of her dearest and darlingest young ways and

superstitions, and do as society does.  Of course, she can decline if she

wants to; but this would be unwise.  She ought to realise, now that she

has 'come out,' that this is a right and proper time to change a part of

her style.  She is in Rome; and it has long been granted that when one is

in Rome it is good policy to do as Rome does.  To advantage Rome?  No--to

advantage herself.



If our Government has really paid representatives of ours on the Paris

Commission $100,000 apiece for six weeks' work, I feel sure that it is

the best cash investment the nation has made in many years.  For it seems

quite impossible that, with that precedent on the books, the Government

will be able to find excuses for continuing its diplomatic salaries at

the present mean figure.



P.S.--VIENNA, January 10.--I see, by this morning's telegraphic news,

that I am not to be the new ambassador here, after all.  This--well, I

hardly know what to say.  I--well, of course, I do not care anything

about it; but it is at least a surprise.  I have for many months been

using my influence at Washington to get this diplomatic see expanded into

an ambassadorship, with the idea, of course th--But never mind.  Let it

go.  It is of no consequence.  I say it calmly; for I am calm.  But at

the same time--However, the subject has no interest for me, and never

had.  I never really intended to take the place, anyway--I made up my

mind to it months and months ago, nearly a year.  But now, while I am

calm, I would like to say this--that so long as I shall continue to

possess an American's proper pride in the honour and dignity of his

country, I will not take any ambassadorship in the gift of the flag at a

salary short of $75,000 a year.  If I shall be charged with wanting to

live beyond my country's means, I cannot help it.  A country which cannot

afford ambassador's wages should be ashamed to have ambassadors.



Think of a Seventeen-thousand-five-hundred-dollar ambassador!

Particularly for America.  Why it is the most ludicrous spectacle, the

most inconsistent and incongruous spectable, contrivable by even the most

diseased imagination.  It is a billionaire in a paper collar, a king in a

breechclout, an archangel in a tin halo.  And, for pure sham and

hypocrisy, the salary is just the match of the ambassador's official

clothes--that boastful advertisement of a Republican Simplicity which

manifests itself at home in Fifty-thousand-dollar salaries to insurance

presidents and railway lawyers, and in domestic palaces whose fittings

and furnishings often transcend in costly display and splendour and

richness the fittings and furnishings of the palaces of the sceptred

masters of Europe; and which has invented and exported to the Old World

the palace-car, the sleeping-car, the tram-car, the electric trolley, the

best bicycles, the best motor-cars, the steam-heater, the best and

smartest systems of electric calls and telephonic aids to laziness and

comfort, the elevator, the private bath-room (hot and cold water on tap),

the palace-hotel, with its multifarious conveniences, comforts, shows,

and luxuries, the--oh, the list is interminable!  In a word, Republican

Simplicity found Europe with one shirt on her back, so to speak, as far

as real luxuries, conveniences, and the comforts of life go, and has

clothed her to the chin with the latter.  We are the lavishest and

showiest and most luxury-loving people on the earth; and at our masthead

we fly one true and honest symbol, the gaudiest flag the world has ever

seen.  Oh, Republican Simplicity, there are many, many humbugs in the

world, but none to which you need take off your hat!













LUCK



[NOTE.--This is not a fancy sketch.  I got it from a clergyman who was

an instructor at Woolwich forty years ago, and who vouched for its truth.

--M.T.]



It was at a banquet in London in honour of one of the two or three

conspicuously illustrious English military names of this generation.

For reasons which will presently appear, I will withhold his real name

and titles, and call him Lieutenant-General Lord Arthur Scoresby, V.C.,

K.C.B., etc., etc., etc.  What a fascination there is in a renowned name!

There say the man, in actual flesh, whom I had heard of so many thousands

of times since that day, thirty years before, when his name shot suddenly

to the zenith from a Crimean battle-field, to remain for ever celebrated.

It was food and drink to me to look, and look, and look at that demigod;

scanning, searching, noting: the quietness, the reserve, the noble

gravity of his countenance; the simple honesty that expressed itself all

over him; the sweet unconsciousness of his greatness--unconsciousness of

the hundreds of admiring eyes fastened upon him, unconsciousness of the

deep, loving, sincere worship welling out of the breasts of those people

and flowing toward him.



The clergyman at my left was an old acquaintance of mine--clergyman now,

but had spent the first half of his life in the camp and field, and as an

instructor in the military school at Woolwich.  Just at the moment I have

been talking about, a veiled and singular light glimmered in his eyes,

and he leaned down and muttered confidentially to me--indicating the hero

of the banquet with a gesture,--'Privately--his glory is an accident--

just a product of incredible luck.'



This verdict was a great surprise to me.  If its subject had been

Napoleon, or Socrates, or Solomon, my astonishment could not have been

greater.



Some days later came the explanation of this strange remark, and this is

what the Reverend told me.



About forty years ago I was an instructor in the military academy at

Woolwich.  I was present in one of the sections when young Scoresby

underwent his preliminary examination.  I was touched to the quick with

pity; for the rest of the class answered up brightly and handsomely,

while he--why, dear me, he didn't know anything, so to speak.  He was

evidently good, and sweet, and lovable, and guileless; and so it was

exceedingly painful to see him stand there, as serene as a graven image,

and deliver himself of answers which were veritably miraculous for

stupidity and ignorance.  All the compassion in me was aroused in his

behalf.  I said to myself, when he comes to be examined again, he will be

flung over, of course; so it will be simple a harmless act of charity to

ease his fall as much as I can.



I took him aside, and found that he knew a little of Caesar's history;

and as he didn't know anything else, I went to work and drilled him like

a galley-slave on a certain line of stock questions concerning Caesar

which I knew would be used.  If you'll believe me, he went through with

flying colours on examination day!  He went through on that purely

superficial 'cram', and got compliments, too, while others, who knew a

thousand times more than he, got plucked.  By some strangely lucky

accident--an accident not likely to happen twice in a century--he was

asked no question outside of the narrow limits of his drill.



It was stupefying.  Well, although through his course I stood by him,

with something of the sentiment which a mother feels for a crippled

child; and he always saved himself--just by miracle, apparently.



Now of course the thing that would expose him and kill him at last was

mathematics.  I resolved to make his death as easy as I could; so I

drilled him and crammed him, and crammed him and drilled him, just on the

line of questions which the examiner would be most likely to use, and

then launched him on his fate.  Well, sir, try to conceive of the result:

to my consternation, he took the first prize!  And with it he got a

perfect ovation in the way of compliments.



Sleep!  There was no more sleep for me for a week.  My conscience

tortured me day and night.  What I had done I had done purely through

charity, and only to ease the poor youth's fall--I never had dreamed of

any such preposterous result as the thing that had happened.  I felt as

guilty and miserable as the creator of Frankenstein.  Here was a wooden-

head whom I had put in the way of glittering promotions and prodigious

responsibilities, and but one thing could happen: he and his

responsibilities would all go to ruin together at the first opportunity.



The Crimean war had just broken out.  Of course there had to be a war, I

said to myself: we couldn't have peace and give this donkey a chance to

die before he is found out.  I waited for the earthquake.  It came.  And

it made me reel when it did come.  He was actually gazetted to a

captaincy in a marching regiment!  Better men grow old and gray in the

service before they climb to a sublimity like that.  And who could ever

have foreseen that they would go and put such a load of responsibility on

such green and inadequate shoulders?  I could just barely have stood it

if they had made him a cornet; but a captain--think of it!  I thought my

hair would turn white.



Consider what I did--I who so loved repose and inaction.  I said to

myself, I am responsible to the country for this, and I must go along

with him and protect the country against him as far as I can.  So I took

my poor little capital that I had saved up through years of work and

grinding economy, and went with a sigh and bought a cornetcy in his

regiment, and away we went to the field.



And there--oh dear, it was awful.  Blunders?  why, he never did anything

but blunder.  But, you see, nobody was in the fellow's secret--everybody

had him focused wrong, and necessarily misinterpreted his performance

every time--consequently they took his idiotic blunders for inspirations

of genius; they did honestly!  His mildest blunders were enough to make a

man in his right mind cry; and they did make me cry--and rage and rave

too, privately.  And the thing that kept me always in a sweat of

apprehension was the fact that every fresh blunder he made increased the

lustre of his reputation!  I kept saying to myself, he'll get so high

that when discovery does finally come it will be like the sun falling out

of the sky.



He went right along up, from grade to grade, over the dead bodies of his

superiors, until at last, in the hottest moment of the battle of....

down went our colonel, and my heart jumped into my mouth, for Scoresby

was next in rank!  Now for it, said I; we'll all land in Sheol in ten

minutes, sure.



The battle was awfully hot; the allies were steadily giving way all over

the field.  Our regiment occupied a position that was vital; a blunder

now must be destruction.  At this critical moment, what does this

immortal fool do but detach the regiment from its place and order a

charge over a neighbouring hill where there wasn't a suggestion of an

enemy!  'There you go!' I said to myself; 'this is the end at last.'



And away we did go, and were over the shoulder of the hill before the

insane movement could be discovered and stopped.  And what did we find?

An entire and unsuspected Russian army in reserve!  And what happened?

We were eaten up?  That is necessarily what would have happened in

ninety-nine cases out of a hundred.  But no; those Russians argued that

no single regiment would come browsing around there at such a time.  It

must be the entire English army, and that the sly Russian game was

detected and blocked; so they turned tail, and away they went, pell-mell,

over the hill and down into the field, in wild confusion, and we after

them; they themselves broke the solid Russia centre in the field, and

tore through, and in no time there was the most tremendous rout you ever

saw, and the defeat of the allies was turned into a sweeping and splendid

victory!  Marshal Canrobert looked on, dizzy with astonishment,

admiration, and delight; and sent right off for Scoresby, and hugged him,

and decorated him on the field in presence of all the armies!



And what was Scoresby's blunder that time?  Merely the mistaking his

right hand for his left--that was all.  An order had come to him to fall

back and support our right; and instead he fell forward and went over the

hill to the left.  But the name he won that day as a marvellous military

genius filled the world with his glory, and that glory will never fade

while history books last.



He is just as good and sweet and lovable and unpretending as a man can

be, but he doesn't know enough to come in when it rains.  He has been

pursued, day by day and year by year, by a most phenomenal and

astonishing luckiness.  He has been a shining soldier in all our wars for

half a generation; he has littered his military life with blunders, and

yet has never committed one that didn't make him a knight or a baronet or

a lord or something.  Look at his breast; why, he is just clothed in

domestic and foreign decorations.  Well, sir, every one of them is a

record of some shouting stupidity or other; and, taken together, they are

proof that the very best thing in all this world that can befall a man is

to be born lucky.















THE CAPTAIN'S STORY



There was a good deal of pleasant gossip about old Captain 'Hurricane'

Jones, of the Pacific Ocean--peace to his ashes!  Two or three of us

present had known him; I, particularly well, for I had made four sea-

voyages with him.  He was a very remarkable man.  He was born on a ship;

he picked up what little education he had among his ship-mates; he began

life in the forecastle, and climbed grade by grade to the captaincy.

More than fifty years of his sixty-five were spent at sea.  He had sailed

all oceans, seen all lands, and borrowed a tint from all climates.  When

a man has been fifty years at sea, he necessarily knows nothing of men,

nothing of the world but its surface, nothing of the world's thought,

nothing of the world's learning but it's a B C, and that blurred and

distorted by the unfocussed lenses of an untrained mind.  Such a man is

only a gray and bearded child.  That is what old Hurricane Jones was--

simply an innocent, lovable old infant.  When his spirit was in repose he

was as sweet and gentle as a girl; when his wrath was up he was a

hurricane that made his nickname seem tamely descriptive.  He was

formidable in a fight, for he was of powerful build and dauntless

courage.  He was frescoed from head to heel with pictures and mottoes

tattooed in red and blue India ink.  I was with him one voyage when he

got his last vacant space tattooed; this vacant space was around his left

ankle.  During three days he stumped about the ship with his ankle bare

and swollen, and this legend gleaming red and angry out from a clouding

of India ink: 'Virtue is its own R'd.'  (There was a lack of room.) He

was deeply and sincerely pious, and swore like a fish-woman.  He

considered swearing blameless, because sailors would not understand an

order unillumined by it.  He was a profound Biblical scholar--that is, he

thought he was.  He believed everything in the Bible, but he had his own

methods of arriving at his beliefs.  He was of the 'advanced' school of

thinkers, and applied natural laws to the interpretation of all miracles,

somewhat on the plan of the people who make the six days of creation six

geological epochs, and so forth.  Without being aware of it, he was a

rather severe satirist on modern scientific religionists.  Such a man as

I have been describing is rabidly fond of disquisition and argument; one

knows that without being told it.



One trip the captain had a clergyman on board, but did not know he was a

clergyman, since the passenger list did not betray the fact.  He took a

great liking to this Rev. Mr. Peters, and talked with him a great deal:

told him yarns, gave him toothsome scraps of personal history, and wove a

glittering streak of profanity through his garrulous fabric that was

refreshing to a spirit weary of the dull neutralities of undecorated

speech.  One day the captain said, 'Peters, do you ever read the Bible?'



'Well--yes.'



'I judge it ain't often, by the way you say it.  Now, you tackle it in

dead earnest once, and you'll find it'll pay.  Don't you get discouraged,

but hang right on.  First you won't understand it; but by-and-by things

will begin to clear up, and then you wouldn't lay it down to ^^^ear.'



'Yes, I have heard that said.'



'And it's so too.  There ain't a book that begins with it.  It lays over

'em all, Peters.  There's some pretty tough things in it--there ain't any

getting around that--but you stick to them and think them out, and when

once you get on the inside everything's plain as day.'



'The miracles, too, captain?'



'Yes, sir!  the miracles, too.  Every one of them.  Now, there's that

business with the prophets of Baal; like enough that stumped you?'



'Well, I don't know but--'



'Own up, now; it stumped you.  Well, I don't wonder.  You hadn't any

experience in ravelling such things out, and naturally it was too many

for you.  Would you like to have me explain that thing to you, and show

you how to get at the meat of these matters?'



'Indeed, I would, captain, if you don't mind.'



Then the captain proceeded as follows: 'I'll do it with pleasure.  First,

you see, I read and read, and thought and thought, till I got to

understand what sort of people they were in the old Bible times, and then

after that it was clear and easy.  Now, this was the way I put it up,

concerning Isaac[1] and the prophets of Baal.  There was some mighty

sharp men amongst the public characters of that old ancient day, and

Isaac was one of them.  Isaac had his failings--plenty of them, too; it

ain't for me to apologise for Isaac; he played a cold deck on the

prophets of Baal, and like enough he was justifiable, considering the

odds that was against him.  No, all I say it, 't' wa'n't any miracle, and

that I'll show you so's 't you can see it yourself.



'Well, times had been getting rougher and rougher for prophets--that is,

prophets of Isaac's denomination.  There were four hundred and fifty

prophets of Baal in the community, and only one Presbyterian; that is, if

Isaac was a Presbyterian, which I reckon he was, but it don't say.

Naturally, the prophets of Baal took all the trade.  Isaac was pretty low

spirited, I reckon, but he was a good deal of a man, and no doubt he went

a-prophesying around, letting on to be doing a land-office business, but

't' wa'n't any use; he couldn't run any opposition to amount to anything.

By-and-by things got desperate with him; he sets his head to work and

thinks it all out, and then what does he do?  Why he begins to throw out

hints that the other parties are this and that and t'other,--nothing very

definite, may be, but just kind of undermining their reputation in a

quiet way.  This made talk, of course, and finally got to the King.  The

King asked Isaac what he meant by his talk.  Says Isaac, "Oh, nothing

particular; only, can they pray down fire from heaven on an altar?  It

ain't much, maybe, your majesty, only can they do it?  That's the idea."

So the King was a good deal disturbed, and he went to the prophets of

Baal, and they said, pretty airy, that if he had an altar ready, they

were ready; and they intimated he better get it insured, too.



'So next morning all the Children of Israel and their parents and the

other people gathered themselves together.  Well, here was that great

crowd of prophets of Baal packed together on one side, and Isaac walking

up and down all alone on the other, putting up his job.  When time was

called, Isaac let on to be comfortable and indifferent; told the other

team to take the first innings.  So they went at it, the whole four

hundred and fifty, praying around the altar, very hopefully, and doing

their level best.  They prayed an hour--two hours--three hours--and so

on, plumb till noon.  It wa'n't any use; they hadn't took a trick.  Of

course they felt kind of ashamed before all those people, and well they

might.  Now, what would a magnanimous man do?  Keep still, wouldn't he?

Of course.  What did Isaac do?  He graveled the prophets of Baal every

way he could think of.  Says he, "You don't speak up loud enough; your

god's asleep, like enough, or may be he's taking a walk; you want to

holler, you know," or words to that effect; I don't recollect the exact

language.  Mind I don't apologise for Isaac; he had his faults.



'Well, the prophets of Baal prayed along the best they knew how all the

afternoon, and never raised a spark.  At last, about sundown, they were

all tuckered out, and they owned up and quit.



'What does Isaac do, now?  He steps up and says to some friends of his,

there, "Pour four barrels of water on the altar!"  Everybody was

astonished; for the other side had prayed at it dry, you know, and got

whitewashed.  They poured it on.  Says he, "Heave on four more barrels."

Then he says, "Heave on four more."  Twelve barrels, you see, altogether.

The water ran all over the altar, and all down the sides, and filled up a

trench around it that would hold a couple of hogsheads--"measures," it

says: I reckon it means about a hogshead.  Some of the people were going

to put on their things and go, for they allowed he was crazy.  They

didn't know Isaac.  Isaac knelt down and began to pray: he strung along,

and strung along, about the heathen in distant lands, and about the

sister churches, and about the state and the country at large, and about

those that's in authority in the government, and all the usual programme,

you know, till everybody had got tired and gone to thinking about

something else, and then, all of a sudden, when nobody was noticing, he

outs with a match and rakes it on the under side of his leg, and pff! up

the whole thing blazes like a house afire!  Twelve barrels of water?

Petroleum, sir, PETROLEUM!  that's what it was!'



'Petroleum, captain?'



'Yes, sir; the country was full of it.  Isaac knew all about that.  You

read the Bible.  Don't you worry about the tough places.  They ain't

tough when you come to think them out and throw light on them.  There

ain't a thing in the Bible but what is true; all you want is to go

prayerfully to work and cipher out how 'twas done.'



[1] This is the captain's own mistake.













STIRRING TIMES IN AUSTRIA





I.  THE GOVERNMENT IN THE FRYING-PAN.



Here in Vienna in these closing days of 1897 one's blood gets no chance

to stagnate.  The atmosphere is brimful of political electricity.  All

conversation is political; every man is a battery, with brushes overworn,

and gives out blue sparks when you set him going on the common topic.

Everybody has an opinion, and lets you have it frank and hot, and out of

this multitude of counsel you get merely confusion and despair.  For no

one really understands this political situation, or can tell you what is

going to be the outcome of it.



Things have happened here recently which would set any country but

Austria on fire from end to end, and upset the Government to a certainty;

but no one feels confident that such results will follow here.  Here,

apparently, one must wait and see what will happen, then he will know,

and not before; guessing is idle; guessing cannot help the matter.  This

is what the wise tell you; they all say it; they say it every day, and it

is the sole detail upon which they all agree.



There is some approach to agreement upon another point: that there will

be no revolution.  Men say: 'Look at our history, revolutions have not

been in our line; and look at our political map, its construction is

unfavourable to an organised uprising, and without unity what could a

revolt accomplish?  It is disunion which has held our empire together for

centuries, and what it has done in the past it may continue to do now and

in the future.'



The most intelligible sketch I have encountered of this unintelligible

arrangement of things was contributed to the 'Traveller's Record' by Mr.

Forrest Morgan, of Hartford, three years ago.  He says:



     'The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy is the patchwork-quilt, the Midway

     Plaisance, the national chain-gang of Europe; a state that is not a

     nation, but a collection of nations, some with national memories and

     aspirations and others without, some occupying distinct provinces

     almost purely their own, and others mixed with alien races, but each

     with a different language, and each mostly holding the others

     foreigners as much as if the link of a common government did not

     exist.  Only one of its races even now comprises so much as one-

     fourth of the whole, and not another so much as one-sixth; and each

     has remained for ages as unchanged in isolation, however mingled

     together in locality, as globules of oil in water.  There is nothing

     else in the modern world that is nearly like it, though there have

     been plenty in past ages; it seems unreal and impossible even though

     we know it is true; it violates all our feeling as to what a country

     should be in order to have a right to exist; and it seems as though

     it was too ramshackle to go on holding together any length of time.

     Yet it has survived, much in its present shape, two centuries of

     storms that have swept perfectly unified countries from existence

     and others that have brought it to the verge of ruin, has survived

     formidable European coalitions to dismember it, and has steadily

     gained force after each; forever changing in its exact make-up,

     losing in the West but gaining in the East, the changes leave the

     structure as firm as ever, like the dropping off and adding on of

     logs in a raft, its mechanical union of pieces showing all the

     vitality of genuine national life.'



That seems to confirm and justify the prevalent Austrian faith that in

this confusion of unrelated and irreconcilable elements, this condition

of incurable disunion, there is strength--for the Government.  Nearly

every day some one explains to me that a revolution would not succeed

here.  'It couldn't, you know.  Broadly speaking, all the nations in the

empire hate the Government--but they all hate each other too, and with

devoted and enthusiastic bitterness; no two of them can combine; the

nation that rises must rise alone; then the others would joyfully join

the Government against her, and she would have just a fly's chance

against a combination of spiders.  This Government is entirely

independent.  It can go its own road, and do as it pleases; it has

nothing to fear.  In countries like England and America, where there is

one tongue and the public interests are common, the Government must take

account of public opinion; but in Austria-Hungary there are nineteen

public opinions--one for each state.  No--two or three for each state,

since there are two or three nationalities in each.  A Government cannot

satisfy all these public opinions; it can only go through the motions of

trying.  This Government does that.  It goes through the motions, and

they do not succeed; but that does not worry the Government much.'



The next man will give you some further information.  'The Government has

a policy--a wise one--and sticks to it.  This policy is--tranquillity:

keep this hive of excitable nations as quiet as possible; encourage them

to amuse themselves with things less inflammatory that politics.  To this

end it furnishes them an abundance of Catholic priests to teach them to

be docile and obedient, and to be diligent in acquiring ignorance about

things here below, and knowledge about the kingdom of heaven, to whose

historic delights they are going to add the charm of their society by-

and-by; and further--to this same end--it cools off the newspapers every

morning at five o'clock, whenever warm events are happening.'  There is a

censor of the press, and apparently he is always on duty and hard at

work.  A copy of each morning paper is brought to him at five o'clock.

His official wagons wait at the doors of the newspaper offices and scud

to him with the first copies that come from the press.  His company of

assistants read every line in these papers, and mark everything which

seems to have a dangerous look; then he passes final judgment upon these

markings.  Two things conspire to give to the results a capricious and

unbalanced look: his assistants have diversified notions as to what is

dangerous and what isn't; he can't get time to examine their criticisms

in much detail; and so sometimes the very same matter which is suppressed

in one paper fails to be damned in another one, and gets published in

full feather and unmodified.  Then the paper in which it was suppressed

blandly copies the forbidden matter into its evening edition--provokingly

giving credit and detailing all the circumstances in courteous and

inoffensive language--and of course the censor cannot say a word.



Sometimes the censor sucks all the blood out of a newspaper and leaves it

colourless and inane; sometimes he leaves it undisturbed, and lets it

talk out its opinions with a frankness and vigour hardly to be surpassed,

I think, in the journals of any country.  Apparently the censor sometimes

revises his verdicts upon second thought, for several times lately he has

suppressed journals after their issue and partial distribution.  The

distributed copies are then sent for by the censor and destroyed.  I have

two of these, but at the time they were sent for I could not remember

what I had done with them.



If the censor did his work before the morning edition was printed, he

would be less of an inconvenience than he is; but, of course, the papers

cannot wait many minutes after five o'clock to get his verdict; they

might as well go out of business as do that; so they print and take their

chances.  Then, if they get caught by a suppression, they must strike out

the condemned matter and print the edition over again.  That delays the

issue several hours, and is expensive besides.  The Government gets the

suppressed edition for nothing.  If it bought it, that would be joyful,

and would give great satisfaction.  Also, the edition would be larger.

Some of the papers do not replace the condemned paragraphs with other

matter; they merely snatch they out and leave blanks behind--mourning

blanks, marked 'Confiscated'.



The Government discourages the dissemination of newspaper information in

other ways.  For instance, it does not allow newspapers to be sold on the

streets: therefore the newsboy is unknown in Vienna.  And there is a

stamp duty of nearly a cent upon each copy of a newspaper's issue.  Every

American paper that reaches me has a stamp upon it, which has been pasted

there in the post-office or downstairs in the hotel office; but no matter

who put it there, I have to pay for it, and that is the main thing.

Sometimes friends send me so many papers that it takes all I can earn

that week to keep this Government going.



I must take passing notice of another point in the Government's measures

for maintaining tranquillity.  Everybody says it does not like to see any

individual attain to commanding influence in the country, since such a

man can become a disturber and an inconvenience.  'We have as much talent

as the other nations,' says the citizen, resignedly, and without

bitterness, 'but for the sake of the general good of the country, we are

discouraged from making it over-conspicuous; and not only discouraged,

but tactfully and skillfully prevented from doing it, if we show too much

persistence.  Consequently we have no renowned men; in centuries we have

seldom produced one--that is, seldom allowed one to produce himself.  We

can say to-day what no other nation of first importance in the family of

Christian civilisations can say--that there exists no Austrian who has

made an enduring name for himself which is familiar all around the globe.



Another helper toward tranquillity is the army.  It is as pervasive as

the atmosphere.  It is everywhere.  All the mentioned creators,

promoters, and preservers of the public tranquillity do their several

shares in the quieting work.  They make a restful and comfortable

serenity and reposefulness.  This is disturbed sometimes for a little

while: a mob assembles to protest against something; it gets noisy--

noisier--still noisier--finally too noisy; then the persuasive soldiery

comes charging down upon it, and in a few minutes all is quiet again, and

there is no mob.



There is a Constitution and there is a Parliament.  The House draws its

membership of 425 deputies from the nineteen or twenty states heretofore

mentioned.  These men represent peoples who speak eleven different

languages.  That means eleven distinct varieties of jealousies,

hostilities, and warring interests.  This could be expected to furnish

forth a parliament of a pretty inharmonious sort, and make legislation

difficult at times--and it does that.  The Parliament is split up into

many parties--the Clericals, the Progressists, the German Nationalists,

the Young Czechs, the Social Democrats, the Christian Socialists, and

some others--and it is difficult to get up working combinations among

them.  They prefer to fight apart sometimes.



The recent troubles have grown out of Count Badeni's necessities.  He

could not carry on his Government without a majority vote in the House at

his back, and in order to secure it he had to make a trade of some sort.

He made it with the Czechs--the Bohemians.  The terms were not easy for

him: he must issue an ordinance making the Czech tongue the official

language in Bohemia in place of the German.  This created a storm.  All

the Germans in Austria were incensed.  In numbers they form but a fourth

part of the empire's population, but they urge that the country's public

business should be conducted in one common tongue, and that tongue a

world language--which German is.



However, Badeni secured his majority.  The German element in Parliament

was apparently become helpless.  The Czech deputies were exultant.



Then the music began.  Badeni's voyage, instead of being smooth, was

disappointingly rough from the start.  The Government must get the

Ausgleich through.  It must not fail.  Badeni's majority was ready to

carry it through; but the minority was determined to obstruct it and

delay it until the obnoxious Czech-language measure should be shelved.



The Ausgleich is an Adjustment, Arrangement, Settlement, which holds

Austria and Hungary together.  It dates from 1867, and has to be renewed

every ten years.  It establishes the share which Hungary must pay toward

the expenses of the imperial Government.  Hungary is a kingdom (the

Emperor of Austria is its King), and has its own Parliament and

governmental machinery.  But it has no foreign office, and it has no

army--at least its army is a part of the imperial army, is paid out of

the imperial treasury, and is under the control of the imperial war

office.



The ten-year arrangement was due a year ago, but failed to connect.  At

least completely.  A year's compromise was arranged.  A new arrangement

must be effected before the last day of this year.  Otherwise the two

countries become separate entities.  The Emperor would still be King of

Hungary--that is, King of an independent foreign country.  There would be

Hungarian custom-houses on the Austrian border, and there would be a

Hungarian army and a Hungarian foreign office.  Both countries would be

weakened by this, both would suffer damage.



The Opposition in the House, although in the minority, had a good weapon

to fight with in the pending Ausgleich.  If it could delay the Ausgleich

a few weeks, the Government would doubtless have to withdraw the hated

language ordinance or lose Hungary.



The Opposition began its fight.  Its arms were the Rules of the House.

It was soon manifest that by applying these Rules ingeniously it could

make the majority helpless, and keep it so as long as it pleased.  It

could shut off business every now and then with a motion to adjourn.  It

could require the ayes and noes on the motion, and use up thirty minutes

on that detail.  It could call for the reading and verification of the

minutes of the preceding meeting, and use up half a day in that way.  It

could require that several of its members be entered upon the list of

permitted speakers previously to the opening of a sitting; and as there

is no time-limit, further delays could thus be accomplished.



These were all lawful weapons, and the men of the Opposition (technically

called the Left) were within their rights in using them.  They used them

to such dire purpose that all parliamentary business was paralysed.  The

Right (the Government side) could accomplish nothing.  Then it had a

saving idea.  This idea was a curious one.  It was to have the President

and the Vice-Presidents of the Parliament trample the Rules under foot

upon occasion!



This, for a profoundly embittered minority constructed out of fire and

gun-cotton!  It was time for idle strangers to go and ask leave to look

down out of a gallery and see what would be the result of it.





II.  A MEMORABLE SITTING.



And now took place that memorable sitting of the House which broke two

records.  It lasted the best part of two days and a night, surpassing by

half an hour the longest sitting known to the world's previous

parliamentary history, and breaking the long-speech record with Dr.

Lecher's twelve-hour effort, the longest flow of unbroken talk that ever

came out of one mouth since the world began.



At 8.45 on the evening of the 28th of October, when the House had been

sitting a few minutes short of ten hours, Dr. Lecher was granted the

floor.  It was a good place for theatrical effects.  I think that no

other Senate House is so shapely as this one, or so richly and showily

decorated.  Its plan is that of an opera-house.  Up toward the straight

side of it--the stage side--rise a couple of terraces of desks for the

ministry, and the official clerks or secretaries--terraces thirty feet

long, and each supporting about half a dozen desks with spaces between

them.  Above these is the President's terrace, against the wall.  Along

it are distributed the proper accommodations for the presiding officer

and his assistants.  The wall is of richly coloured marble highly

polished, its paneled sweep relieved by fluted columns and pilasters of

distinguished grace and dignity, which glow softly and frostily in the

electric light.  Around the spacious half-circle of the floor bends the

great two-storied curve of the boxes, its frontage elaborately ornamented

and sumptuously gilded.  On the floor of the House the 425 desks radiate

fanwise from the President's tribune.



The galleries are crowded on this particular evening, for word has gone

about that the Ausgleich is before the House; that the President, Ritter

von Abrahamowicz, has been throttling the Rules; that the Opposition are

in an inflammable state in consequence, and that the night session is

likely to be of an exciting sort.



The gallery guests are fashionably dressed, and the finery of the women

makes a bright and pretty show under the strong electric light.  But down

on the floor there is no costumery.



The deputies are dressed in day clothes; some of the clothes neat and

trim, others not; there may be three members in evening dress, but not

more.  There are several Catholic priests in their long black gowns, and

with crucifixes hanging from their necks.  No member wears his hat.  One

may see by these details that the aspects are not those of an evening

sitting of an English House of Commons, but rather those of a sitting of

our House of Representatives.



In his high place sits the President, Abrahamowicz, object of the

Opposition's limitless hatred.  He is sunk back in the depths of his arm-

chair, and has his chin down.  He brings the ends of his spread fingers

together, in front of his breast, and reflectively taps them together,

with the air of one who would like to begin business, but must wait, and

be as patient as he can.  It makes you think of Richelieu.  Now and then

he swings his head up to the left or to the right and answers something

which some one has bent down to say to him.  Then he taps his fingers

again.  He looks tired, and maybe a trifle harassed.  He is a gray-

haired, long, slender man, with a colourless long face, which, in repose,

suggests a death-mask; but when not in repose is tossed and rippled by a

turbulent smile which washes this way and that, and is not easy to keep

up with--a pious smile, a holy smile, a saintly smile, a deprecating

smile, a beseeching and supplicating smile; and when it is at work the

large mouth opens, and the flexible lips crumple, and unfold, and crumple

again, and move around in a genial and persuasive and angelic way, and

expose large glimpses of the teeth; and that interrupts the sacredness of

the smile and gives it momentarily a mixed worldly and political and

satanic cast.  It is a most interesting face to watch.  And then the long

hands and the body--they furnish great and frequent help to the face in

the business of adding to the force of the statesman's words.



To change the tense.  At the time of which I have just been speaking the

crowds in the galleries were gazing at the stage and the pit with rapt

interest and expectancy.  One half of the great fan of desks was in

effect empty, vacant; in the other half several hundred members were

bunched and jammed together as solidly as the bristles in a brush; and

they also were waiting and expecting.  Presently the Chair delivered this

utterance:



'Dr. Lecher has the floor.'



Then burst out such another wild and frantic and deafening clamour as has

not been heard on this planet since the last time the Comanches surprised

a white settlement at night.  Yells from the Left, counter-yells from the

Right, explosions of yells from all sides at once, and all the air sawed

and pawed and clawed and cloven by a writhing confusion of gesturing arms

and hands.  Out of the midst of this thunder and turmoil and tempest rose

Dr. Lecher, serene and collected, and the providential length of his

enabled his head to show out of it.  He began his twelve-hour speech.  At

any rate, his lips could be seen to move, and that was evidence.  On high

sat the President, imploring order, with his long hands put together as

in prayer, and his lips visibly but not hearably speaking.  At intervals

he grasped his bell and swung it up and down with vigour, adding its keen

clamour to the storm weltering there below.



Dr. Lecher went on with his pantomime speech, contented, untroubled.

Here and there and now and then powerful voices burst above the din, and

delivered an ejaculation that was heard.  Then the din ceased for a

moment or two, and gave opportunity to hear what the Chair might answer;

then the noise broke out again.  Apparently the President was being

charged with all sorts of illegal exercises of power in the interest of

the Right (the Government side): among these, with arbitrarily closing an

Order of Business before it was finished; with an unfair distribution of

the right to the floor; with refusal of the floor, upon quibble and

protest, to members entitled to it; with stopping a speaker's speech upon

quibble and protest; and with other transgressions of the Rules of the

House.  One of the interrupters who made himself heard was a young fellow

of slight build and neat dress, who stood a little apart from the solid

crowd and leaned negligently, with folded arms and feet crossed, against

a desk.  Trim and handsome; strong face and thin features; black hair

roughed up; parsimonious moustache; resonant great voice, of good tone

and pitch.  It is Wolf, capable and hospitable with sword and pistol;

fighter of the recent duel with Count Badeni, the head of the Government.

He shot Badeni through the arm and then walked over in the politest way

and inspected his game, shook hands, expressed regret, and all that.  Out

of him came early this thundering peal, audible above the storm:



'I demand the floor.  I wish to offer a motion.'



In the sudden lull which followed, the President answered, 'Dr. Lecher

has the floor.'



Wolf.  'I move the close of the sitting!'



P.  'Representative Lecher has the floor.'  [Stormy outburst from the

Left--that is, the Opposition.]



Wolf.  'I demand the floor for the introduction of a formal notion.

[Pause].  Mr. President, are you going to grant it, or not?  [Crash of

approval from the Left.] I will keep on demanding the floor till I get

it.'



P.  'I call Representative Wolf to order.  Dr. Lecher has the floor.'



Wolf.  'Mr. President, are you going to observe the Rules of this House?'

[Tempest of applause and confused ejaculations from the Left--a boom and

roar which long endured, and stopped all business for the time being.]



Dr. von Pessler.  'By the Rules motions are in order, and the Chair must

put them to vote.'



For answer the President (who is a Pole--I make this remark in passing)

began to jangle his bell with energy at the moment that that wild

pandemonium of voices broke out again.



Wolf (hearable above the storm).  'Mr. President, I demand the floor.  We

intend to find out, here and now, which is the hardest, a Pole's skull or

a German's!'



This brought out a perfect cyclone of satisfaction from the Left.  In the

midst of it someone again moved an Adjournment.  The President blandly

answered that Dr. Lecher had the floor.  Which was true; and he was

speaking, too, calmly, earnestly, and argumentatively; and the official

stenographers had left their places and were at his elbows taking down

his words, he leaning and orating into their ears--a most curious and

interesting scene.



Dr. von Pessler (to the Chair).  'Do not drive us to extremities!'



The tempest burst out again: yells of approval from the Left, catcalls

and ironical laughter from the Right.  At this point a new and most

effective noise-maker was pressed into service.  Each desk has an

extension, consisting of a removable board eighteen inches long, six

wide, and a half-inch thick.  A member pulled one of these out and began

to belabour the top of his desk with it.  Instantly other members

followed suit, and perhaps you can imagine the result.  Of all

conceivable rackets it is the most ear-splitting, intolerable, and

altogether fiendish.



The persecuted President leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes,

clasped his hands in his lap, and a look of pathetic resignation crept

over his long face.  It is the way a country schoolmaster used to look in

days long past when he had refused his school a holiday and it had risen

against him in ill-mannered riot and violence and insurrection.  Twice a

motion to adjourn had been offered--a motion always in order in other

Houses, and doubtless so in this one also.  The President had refused to

put these motions.  By consequence, he was not in a pleasant place now,

and was having a right hard time.  Votes upon motions, whether carried or

defeated, could make endless delay, and postpone the Ausgleich to next

century.



In the midst of these sorrowful circumstances and this hurricane of yells

and screams and satanic clatter of desk-boards, Representative Dr.

Kronawetter unfeelingly reminds the Chair that a motion has been offered,

and adds: 'Say yes, or no!  What do you sit there for, and give no

answer?'



P.  'After I have given a speaker the floor, I cannot give it to another.

After Dr. Lecher is through, I will put your motion.'  [Storm of

indignation from the Left.]



Wolf (to the Chair).  'Thunder and lightning! look at the Rule governing

the case!'



Kronawetter.  'I move the close of the sitting!  And I demand the ayes

and noes!'



Dr. Lecher.  'Mr. President, have I the floor?'



P.  'You have the floor.'



Wolf (to the Chair, in a stentorian voice which cleaves its way through

the storm).  'It is by such brutalities as these that you drive us to

extremities!  Are you waiting till someone shall throw into your face the

word that shall describe what you are bringing about?[1]  [Tempest of

insulted fury from the Right.]  Is that what you are waiting for, old

Grayhead?' [Long-continued clatter of desk-boards from the Left, with

shouts of 'The vote! the vote!' An ironical shout from the Right, 'Wolf

is boss!']



Wolf keeps on demanding the floor for his motion.  At length--



P.  'I call Representative Wolf to order!  Your conduct is unheard of,

sir!  You forget that you are in a parliament; you must remember where

you are, sir.'  [Applause from the Right.  Dr. Lecher is still peacefully

speaking, the stenographers listening at his lips.]



Wolf (banging on his desk with his desk-board).  'I demand the floor for

my motion!  I won't stand this trampling of the Rules under foot--no, not

if I die for it!  I will never yield.  You have got to stop me by force.

Have I the floor?'



P.  'Representative Wolf, what kind of behaviour is this?  I call you to

order again.  You should have some regard for your dignity.'



Dr. Lecher speaks on.  Wolf turns upon him with an offensive innuendo.



Dr. Lecher.  'Mr. Wolf, I beg you to refrain from that sort of

suggestions.'  [Storm of hand-clapping from the Right.]



This was applause from the enemy, for Lecher himself, like Wolf, was an

Obstructionist.



Wolf growls to Lecher, 'You can scribble that applause in your album!'



P.  'Once more I call Representative Wolf to order!  Do not forget that

you are a Representative, sir!'



Wolf (slam-banging with his desk-board).  'I will force this matter!  Are

you going to grant me the floor, or not?'



And still the sergeant-at-arms did not appear.  It was because there

wasn't any.  It is a curious thing, but the Chair has no effectual means

of compelling order.



After some more interruptions:



Wolf (banging with his board).  'I demand the floor.  I will not yield!'



P.  'I have no recourse against Representative Wolf.  In the presence of

behaviour like this it is to be regretted that such is the case.'  [A

shout from the Right, 'Throw him out!']



It is true he had no effective recourse.  He had an official called an

'Ordner,' whose help he could invoke in desperate cases, but apparently

the Ordner is only a persuader, not a compeller.  Apparently he is a

sergeant-at-arms who is not loaded; a good enough gun to look at, but not

valuable for business.



For another twenty or thirty minutes Wolf went on banging with his board

and demanding his rights; then at last the weary President threatened to

summon the dread order-maker.  But both his manner and his words were

reluctant.  Evidently it grieved him to have to resort to this dire

extremity.  He said to Wolf, 'If this goes on, I shall feel obliged to

summon the Ordner, and beg him to restore order in the House.'



Wolf.  'I'd like to see you do it!  Suppose you fetch in a few policemen

too!  [Great tumult.] Are you going to put my motion to adjourn, or not?'



Dr. Lecher continues his speech.  Wolf accompanies him with his board-

clatter.



The President despatches the Ordner, Dr. Lang (himself a deputy), on his

order-restoring mission.  Wolf, with his board uplifted for defence,

confronts the Ordner with a remark which Boss Tweed might have translated

into 'Now let's see what you are going to do about it!' [Noise and tumult

all over the House.]



Wolf stands upon his rights, and says he will maintain them until he is

killed in his tracks.  Then he resumes his banging, the President jangles

his bell and begs for order, and the rest of the House augments the

racket the best it can.



Wolf.  'I require an adjournment, because I find myself personally

threatened.  [Laughter from the Right.]  Not that I fear for myself;

I am only anxious about what will happen to the man who touches me.'



The Ordner.  'I am not going to fight with you.'



Nothing came of the efforts of the angel of peace, and he presently

melted out of the scene and disappeared.  Wolf went on with his noise

and with his demands that he be granted the floor, resting his board at

intervals to discharge criticisms and epithets at the Chair.  Once he

reminded the Chairman of his violated promise to grant him (Wolf) the

floor, and said, 'Whence I came, we call promise-breakers rascals!'

And he advised the Chairman to take his conscience to bed with him and

use it as a pillow.  Another time he said that the Chair was making

itself ridiculous before all Europe.  In fact, some of Wolf's language

was almost unparliamentary.  By-and-by he struck the idea of beating out

a tune with his board.  Later he decided to stop asking for the floor,

and to confer it upon himself.  And so he and Dr. Lecher now spoke at the

same time, and mingled their speeches with the other noises, and nobody

heard either of them.  Wolf rested himself now and then from speech-

making by reading, in his clarion voice, from a pamphlet.



I will explain that Dr. Lecher was not making a twelve-hour speech for

pastime, but for an important purpose.  It was the Government's intention

to push the Ausgleich through its preliminary stages in this one sitting

(for which it was the Order of the Day), and then by vote refer it to a

select committee.  It was the Majority's scheme--as charged by the

Opposition--to drown debate upon the bill by pure noise--drown it out and

stop it.  The debate being thus ended, the vote upon the reference would

follow--with victory for the Government.  But into the Government's

calculations had not entered the possibility of a single-barrelled speech

which should occupy the entire time-limit of the setting, and also get

itself delivered in spite of all the noise.  Goliath was not expecting

David.  But David was there; and during twelve hours he tranquilly pulled

statistical, historical, and argumentative pebbles out of his scrip and

slung them at the giant; and when he was done he was victor, and the day

was saved.



In the English House an obstructionist has held the floor with Bible-

readings and other outside matters; but Dr. Lecher could not have that

restful and recuperative privilege--he must confine himself strictly to

the subject before the House.  More than once, when the President could

not hear him because of the general tumult, he sent persons to listen and

report as to whether the orator was speaking to the subject or not.



The subject was a peculiarly difficult one, and it would have troubled

any other deputy to stick to it three hours without exhausting his

ammunition, because it required a vast and intimate knowledge--detailed

and particularised knowledge--of the commercial, railroading, financial,

and international banking relations existing between two great

sovereignties, Hungary and the Empire.  But Dr. Lecher is President of

the Board of Trade of his city of Brunn, and was master of the situation.

His speech was not formally prepared.  He had a few notes jotted down for

his guidance; he had his facts in his head; his heard was in his work;

and for twelve hours he stood there, undisturbed by the clamour around

him, and with grace and ease and confidence poured out the riches of his

mind, in closely reasoned arguments, clothed in eloquent and faultless

phrasing.



He is a young man of thirty-seven.  He is tall and well-proportioned, and

has cultivated and fortified his muscle by mountain-climbing.  If he were

a little handsomer he would sufficiently reproduce for me the Chauncey

Depew of the great New England dinner nights of some years ago; he has

Depew's charm of manner and graces of language and delivery.



There was but one way for Dr. Lecher to hold the floor--he must stay on

his legs.  If he should sit down to rest a moment, the floor would be

taken from him by the enemy in the Chair.  When he had been talking three

or four hours he himself proposed an adjournment, in order that he might

get some rest from his wearing labours; but he limited his motion with

the condition that if it was lost he should be allowed to continue his

speech, and if it was carried he should have the floor at the next

sitting.  Wolf was now appeased, and withdrew his own thousand-times-

offered motion, and Dr. Lecher's was voted upon--and lost.  So he went on

speaking.



By one o'clock in the morning, excitement and noise-making had tired out

nearly everybody but the orator.  Gradually the seats of the Right

underwent depopulation; the occupants had slipped out to the refreshment-

rooms to eat and drink, or to the corridors to chat.  Some one remarked

that there was no longer a quorum present, and moved a call of the House.

The Chair (Vice-President Dr. Kramarz) refused to put it to vote.  There

was a small dispute over the legality of this ruling, but the Chair held

its ground.



The Left remained on the battle-field to support their champion.  He went

steadily on with his speech; and always it was strong, virile,

felicitous, and to the point.  He was earning applause, and this enabled

his party to turn that fact to account.  Now and then they applauded him

a couple of minutes on a stretch, and during that time he could stop

speaking and rest his voice without having the floor taken from him.



At a quarter to two a member of the Left demanded that Dr. Lecher be

allowed a recess for rest, and said that the Chairman was 'heartless.'

Dr. Lecher himself asked for ten minutes.  The Chair allowed him five.

Before the time had run out Dr. Lecher was on his feet again.



Wolf burst out again with a motion to adjourn.  Refused by the Chair.

Wolf said the whole Parliament wasn't worth a pinch of powder.  The Chair

retorted that that was true in a case where a single member was able to

make all parliamentary business impossible.  Dr. Lecher continued his

speech.



The members of the Majority went out by detachments from time to time and

took naps upon sofas in the reception-rooms; and also refreshed

themselves with food and drink--in quantities nearly unbelievable--but

the Minority stayed loyally by their champion.  Some distinguished

deputies of the Majority stayed by him too, compelled thereto by

admiration of his great performance.  When a man has been speaking eight

hours, is it conceivable that he can still be interesting, still

fascinating?  When Dr. Lecher had been speaking eight hours he was still

compactly surrounded by friends who would not leave him, and by foes (of

all parties) who could not; and all hung enchanted and wondering upon his

words, and all testified their admiration with constant and cordial

outbursts of applause.  Surely this was a triumph without precedent in

history.



During the twelve-hour effort friends brought to the orator three glasses

of wine, four cups of coffee, and one glass of beer--a most stingy re-

enforcement of his wasting tissues, but the hostile Chair would permit no

addition to it.  But, no matter, the Chair could not beat that man.  He

was a garrison holding a fort, and was not to be starved out.



When he had been speaking eight hours his pulse was 72; when he had

spoken twelve, it was 100.



He finished his long speech in these terms, as nearly as a permissibly

free translation can convey them:



'I will now hasten to close my examination of the subject.  I conceive

that we of the Left have made it clear to the honourable gentlemen of the

other side of the House that we are stirred by no intemperate enthusiasm

for this measure in its present shape...



'What we require, and shall fight for with all lawful weapons, is a

formal, comprehensive, and definitive solution and settlement of these

vexed matters.  We desire the restoration of the earlier condition of

things; the cancellation of all this incapable Government's pernicious

trades with Hungary; and then--release from the sorry burden of the

Badeni ministry!



'I voice the hope--I know not if it will be fulfilled--I voice the deep

and sincere and patriotic hope that the committee into whose hands this

bill will eventually be committed will take its stand upon high ground,

and will return the Ausgleich-Provisorium to this House in a form which

shall make it the protector and promoter alike of the great interests

involved and of the honour of our fatherland.'  After a pause, turning

towards the Government benches: 'But in any case, gentlemen of the

Majority, make sure of this: henceforth, as before, you find us at our

post.  The Germans of Austria will neither surrender nor die!'



Then burst a storm of applause which rose and fell, rose and fell, burst

out again and again and again, explosion after explosion, hurricane after

hurricane, with no apparent promise of ever coming to an end; and

meantime the whole Left was surging and weltering about the champion, all

bent upon wringing his hand and congratulating him and glorifying him.



Finally he got away, and went home and ate five loaves and twelve baskets

of fish, read the morning papers, slept three hours, took a short drive,

then returned to the House, and sat out the rest of the thirty-three-hour

session.



To merely stand up in one spot twelve hours on a stretch is a feat which

very few men could achieve; to add to the task the utterance of a hundred

thousand words would be beyond the possibilities of the most of those

few; to superimpose the requirement that the words should be put into the

form of a compact, coherent, and symmetrical oration would probably rule

out the rest of the few, bar Dr. Lecher.





III.--CURIOUS PARLIAMENTARY ETIQUETTE.



In consequence of Dr. Lecher's twelve-hour speech and the other

obstructions furnished by the Minority, the famous thirty-three-hour

sitting of the House accomplished nothing.  The Government side had made

a supreme effort, assisting itself with all the helps at hand, both

lawful and unlawful, yet had failed to get the Ausgleich into the hands

of a committee.  This was a severe defeat.  The Right was mortified, the

Left jubilant.



Parliament was adjourned for a week--to let the members cool off,

perhaps--a sacrifice of precious time; for but two months remained in

which to carry the all-important Ausgleich to a consummation.



If I have reported the behaviour of the House intelligibly, the reader

has been surprised by it, and has wondered whence these law-makers come

and what they are made of; and he has probably supposed that the conduct

exhibited at the Long Sitting was far out of the common, and due to

special excitement and irritation.  As to the make-up of the House, it is

this: the deputies come from all the walks of life and from all the

grades of society.  There are princes, counts, barons, priests, peasants,

mechanics, labourers, lawyers, judges, physicians, professors, merchants,

bankers, shopkeepers.  They are religious men, they are earnest, sincere,

devoted, and they hate the Jews.  The title of Doctor is so common in the

House that one may almost say that the deputy who does not bear it is by

that reason conspicuous.  I am assured that it is not a self-granted

title, and not an honorary one, but an earned one; that in Austria it is

very seldom conferred as a mere compliment; that in Austria the degrees

of Doctor of Music, Doctor of Philosophy, and so on, are not conferred by

the seats of learning; and so, when an Austrian is called Doctor, it

means that he is either a lawyer or a physician, and that he is not a

self-educated man, but is college-bred, and has been diplomaed for merit.



That answers the question of the constitution of the House.  Now as to

the House's curious manners.  The manners exhibited by this convention of

Doctors were not at that time being tried as a wholly new experiment.  I

will go back to a previous sitting in order to show that the deputies had

already had some practice.



There had been an incident.  The dignity of the House had been wounded by

improprieties indulged in in its presence by a couple of the members.

This matter was placed in the hands of a committee to determine where the

guilt lay and the degree of it, and also to suggest the punishment.  The

chairman of the committee brought in his report.  By this it appeared

that in the course of a speech, Deputy Schrammel said that religion had

no proper place in the public schools--it was a private matter.

Whereupon Deputy Gregorig shouted, 'How about free love!'



To this, Deputy Iro flung out this retort: 'Soda-water at the Wimberger!'



This appeared to deeply offend Deputy Gregorig, who shouted back at Iro,

'You cowardly blatherskite, say that again!'



The committee had sat three hours.  Gregorig had apologised.  Iro

explained that he didn't say anything about soda-water at the Wimberger.

He explained in writing, and was very explicit: 'I declare upon my word

of honour that I did not say the words attributed to me.'



Unhappily for his word of honour, it was proved by the official

stenographers and by the testimony of several deputies that he did say

them.



The committee did not officially know why the apparently inconsequential

reference to soda-water at the Wimberger should move Deputy Gregorig to

call the utterer of it a cowardly blatherskite; still, after proper

deliberation, it was of the opinion that the House ought to formally

censure the whole business.  This verdict seems to have been regarded as

sharply severe.  I think so because Deupty Dr. Lueger, Burgermeister of

Vienna, felt it a duty to soften the blow to his friend Gregorig by

showing that the soda-water remark was not so innocuous as it might look;

that, indeed, Gregorig's tough retory was justifiable--and he proceeded

to explain why.  He read a number of scandalous post-cards which he

intimated had proceeded from Iro, as indicated by the handwriting, though

they were anonymous.  Some of them were posted to Gregorig at his place

of business and could have been read by all his subordinates; the others

were posted to Gregorig's wife.  Lueger did not say--but everybody knew--

that the cards referred to a matter of town gossip which made Mr.

Gregorig a chief actor in a tavern scene where siphon-squirting played a

prominent and humorous part, and wherein women had a share.



There were several of the cards; more than several, in fact; no fewer

than five were sent in one day.  Dr. Lueger read some of them, and

described others.  Some of them had pictures on them; one a picture of a

hog with a monstrous snout, and beside it a squirting soda-siphon; below

it some sarcastic doggerel.



Gregorig dealt in shirts, cravats, etc.  One of the cards bore these

words: 'Much-respected Deputy and collar-sewer--or stealer.'



Another: 'Hurrah for the Christian-Social work among the women-

assemblages!  Hurrah for the soda-squirter!' Comment by Dr. Lueger: 'I

cannot venture to read the rest of that one, nor the signature, either.'



Another: 'Would you mind telling me if....'  Comment by Dr. Lueger: 'The

rest of it is not properly readable.'



To Deputy Gregorig's wife: 'Much-respected Madam Gregorig,--The

undersigned desires an invitation to the next soda-squirt.'  Comment by

Dr. Lueger: 'Neither the rest of the card nor the signature can I venture

to read to the House, so vulgar are they.'



The purpose of this card--to expose Gregorig to his family--was repeated

in others of these anonymous missives.



The House, by vote, censured the two improper deputies.



This may have had a modifying effect upon the phraseology of the

membership for a while, and upon its general exuberance also, but it was

not for long.  As has been seen, it had become lively once more on the

night of the Long Sitting.  At the next sitting after the long one there

was certainly no lack of liveliness.  The President was persistently

ignoring the Rules of the House in the interest of the government side,

and the Minority were in an unappeasable fury about it.  The ceaseless

din and uproar, the shouting and stamping and desk-banging, were

deafening, but through it all burst voices now and then that made

themselves heard.  Some of the remarks were of a very candid sort, and I

believe that if they had been uttered in our House of Representatives

they would have attracted attention.  I will insert some samples here.

Not in their order, but selected on their merits:



Mr. Mayreder (to the President).  'You have lied!  You conceded the floor

to me; make it good, or you have lied!'



Mr. Glockner (to the President).  'Leave!  Get out!'



Wolf (indicating the President).  'There sits a man to whom a certain

title belongs!'



Unto Wolf, who is continuously reading, in a powerful voice, from a

newspaper, arrive these personal remarks from the Majority: 'Oh, shut

your mouth!' 'Put him out!' 'Out with him!' Wolf stops reading a moment

to shout at Dr. Lueger, who has the floor but cannot get a hearing,

'Please, Betrayer of the People, begin!'



Dr. Lueger, 'Meine Herren--' ['Oho!' and groans.]



Wolf.  'That's the holy light of the Christian Socialists!'



Mr. Kletzenbauer (Christian Socialist).  'Dam--nation!  Are you ever

going to quiet down?'



Wolf discharges a galling remark at Mr. Wohlmeyer.



Wohlmeyer (responding).  'You Jew, you!'



There is a moment's lull, and Dr. Lueger begins his speech.  Graceful,

handsome man, with winning manners and attractive bearing, a bright and

easy speaker, and is said to know how to trim his political sails to

catch any favouring wind that blows.  He manages to say a few words, then

the tempest overwhelms him again.



Wolf stops reading his paper a moment to say a drastic thing about Lueger

and his Christian-Social pieties, which sets the C.S.S. in a sort of

frenzy.



Mr. Vielohlawek.  'You leave the Christian Socialists alone, you word-of-

honour-breaker!  Obstruct all you want to, but you leave them alone!

You've no business in this House; you belong in a gin-mill!'



Mr. Prochazka.  'In a lunatic-asylum, you mean!'



Vielohlawek.  'It's a pity that such man should be leader of the Germans;

he disgraces the German name!'



Dr. Scheicher.  'It's a shame that the like of him should insult us.'



Strohbach (to Wolf).  'Contemptible cub--we will bounce thee out of

this!' [It is inferable that the 'thee' is not intended to indicate

affection this time, but to re-enforce and emphasise Mr. Storhbach's

scorn.]



Dr. Scheicher.  'His insults are of no consequence.  He wants his ears

boxed.'



Dr. Lueger (to Wolf).  'You'd better worry a trifle over your Iro's word

of honour.  You are behaving like a street arab.'



Dr. Scheicher.  'It is infamous!'



Dr. Lueger.  'And these shameless creatures are the leaders of the German

People's Party!'



Meantime Wolf goes whooping along with his newspaper readings in great

contentment.



Dr. Pattai.  'Shut up!  Shut up!  Shut up!  You haven't the floor!'



Strohbach.  'The miserable cub!'



Dr. Lueger (to Wolf, raising his voice strenuously above the storm).

'You are a wholly honourless street brat!' [A voice, 'Fire the

rapscallion out!'  But Wolf's soul goes marching noisily on, just the

same.]



Schonerer (vast and muscular, and endowed with the most powerful voice in

the Reichsrath; comes ploughing down through the standing crowds, red,

and choking with anger; halts before Deputy Wohlmeyer, grabs a rule and

smashes it with a blow upon a desk, threatens Wohlmeyer's face with his

fist, and bellows out some personalities, and a promise).  'Only you

wait--we'll teach you!' [A whirlwind of offensive retorts assails him

from the band of meek and humble Christian Socialists compacted around

their leader, that distinguished religious expert, Dr. Lueger,

Burgermeister of Vienna.  Our breath comes in excited gasps now, and we

are full of hope.  We imagine that we are back fifty years ago in the

Arkansas Legislature, and we think we know what is going to happen, and

are glad we came, and glad we are up in the gallery, out of the way,

where we can see the whole thing and yet not have to supply any of the

material for the inquest.  However, as it turns out, our confidence is

abused, our hopes are misplaced.]



Dr. Pattai (wildly excited).  'You quiet down, or we shall turn ourselves

loose!  There will be cuffing of ears!'



Prochazka (in a fury).  'No--not ear boxing, but genuine blows!'



Vieholawek.  'I would rather take my hat off to a Jew than to Wolf!'



Strohbach (to Wolf).  'Jew flunky!  Here we have been fighting the Jews

for ten years, and now you are helping them to power again.  How much do

you get for it?'



Holansky.  'What he wants is a strait-jacket!'



Wolf continues his reading.  It is a market report now.



Remark flung across the House to Schonerer: 'Die Grossmutter auf dem

Misthaufen erzeugt worden!'



It will be judicious not to translate that.  Its flavour is pretty high,

in any case, but it becomes particularly gamy when you remember that the

first gallery was well stocked with ladies.



Apparently it was a great hit.  It fetched thunders of joyous enthusiasm

out of the Christian Socialists, and in their rapture they flung biting

epithets with wasteful liberality at specially detested members of the

Opposition; among others, this one at Schonerer, 'Bordell in der

Krugerstrasse!' Then they added these words, which they whooped, howled,

and also even sand, in a deep-voiced chorus: 'Schmul Leeb Kohn!  Schmul

Leeb Kohn!  Schmul Leeb Kohn!' and made it splendidly audible above the

banging of desk-boards and the rest of the roaring cyclone of fiendish

noises.  [A gallery witticism comes flitting by from mouth to mouth

around the great curve: 'The swan-song of Austrian representative

government!' You can note its progress by the applausive smiles and nods

it gets as it skims along.]



Kletzenbauer.  'Holofernes, where is Judith?' [Storm of laughter.]



Gregorig (the shirt-merchant).  'This Wolf-Theatre is costing 6,000

florins!'



Wolf (with sweetness).  'Notice him, gentlemen; it is Mr. Gregorig.'

[Laughter.]



Vieholawek (to Wolf).  'You Judas!'



Schneider.  'Brothel-knight!'



Chorus of Voices.  'East-German offal tub!'



And so the war of epithets crashes along, with never-diminishing energy,

for a couple of hours.



The ladies in the gallery were learning.  That was well; for by-and-by

ladies will form a part of the membership of all the legislatures in the

world; as soon as they can prove competency they will be admitted.  At

present, men only are competent to legislate; therefore they look down

upon women, and would feel degraded if they had to have them for

colleagues in their high calling.



Wolf is yelling another market report now.



Gessman.  'Shut up, infamous louse-brat!'



During a momentary lull Dr. Lueger gets a hearing for three sentences of

his speech.  The demand and require that the President shall suppress the

four noisiest members of the Opposition.



Wolf (with a that-settles-it toss of the head).  'The shifty trickster of

Vienna has spoken!'



Iro belonged to Schonerer's party.  The word-of-honour incident has given

it a new name.  Gregorig is a Christian Socialist, and hero of the post-

cards and the Wimberger soda-squirting incident.  He stands vast and

conspicuous, and conceited and self-satisfied, and roosterish and

inconsequential, at Lueger's elbow, and is proud and cocky to be in such

a great company.  He looks very well indeed; really majestic, and aware

of it.  He crows out his little empty remark, now and then, and looks as

pleased as if he had been delivered of the Ausgleich.  Indeed, he does

look notably fine.  He wears almost the only dress vest on the floor; it

exposes a continental spread of white shirt-front; his hands are posed at

ease in the lips of his trousers pockets; his head is tilted back

complacently; he is attitudinising; he is playing to the gallery.

However, they are all doing that.  It is curious to see.  Men who only

vote, and can't make speeches, and don't know how to invent witty

ejaculations, wander about the vacated parts of the floor, and stop in a

good place and strike attitudes--attitudes suggestive of weighty thought,

mostly--and glance furtively up at the galleries to see how it works; or

a couple will come together and shake hands in an artificial way, and

laugh a gay manufactured laugh, and do some constrained and self-

conscious attitudinising; and they steal glances at the galleries to see

if they are getting notice.  It is like a scene on the stage--by-play by

minor actors at the back while the stars do the great work at the front.

Even Count Badeni attitudinises for a moment; strikes a reflective

Napoleonic attitude of fine picturesqueness--but soon thinks better of it

and desists.  There are two who do not attitudinise--poor harried and

insulted President Abrahamowicz, who seems wholly miserable, and can find

no way to put in the dreary time but by swinging his bell and discharging

occasional remarks which nobody can hear; and a resigned and patient

priest, who sits lonely in a great vacancy on Majority territory and

munches an apple.



Schonerer uplifts his fog-horn of a voice and shakes the roof with an

insult discharged at the Majority.



Dr. Lueger.  'The Honourless Party would better keep still here!'



Gregorig (the echo, swelling out his shirt-front).  'Yes, keep quiet,

pimp!'



Schonerer (to Lueger).  'Political mountebank!'



Prochazka (to Schonerer).  'Drunken clown!'



During the final hour of the sitting many happy phrases were distributed

through the proceedings.  Among them were these--and they are strikingly

good ones:



'Blatherskite!'



'Blackguard!'



'Scoundrel!'



'Brothel-daddy!'



This last was the contribution of Dr. Gessman, and gave great

satisfaction.  And deservedly.  It seems to me that it was one of the

most sparkling things that was said during the whole evening.



At half-past two in the morning the House adjourned.  The victory was

with the Opposition.  No; not quite that.  The effective part of it was

snatched away from them by an unlawful exercise of Presidential force--

another contribution toward driving the mistreated Minority out of their

minds.



At other sittings of the parliament, gentlemen of the Opposition, shaking

their fists toward the President, addressed him as 'Polish Dog'.  At one

sitting an angry deputy turned upon a colleague and shouted,

'----------!'



You must try to imagine what it was.  If I should offer it even in the

original it would probably not get by the editor's blue pencil; to offer

a translation would be to waste my ink, of course.  This remark was

frankly printed in its entirety by one of the Vienna dailies, but the

others disguised the toughest half of it with stars.



If the reader will go back over this chapter and gather its array of

extraordinary epithets into a bunch and examine them, he will marvel at

two things: how this convention of gentlemen could consent to use such

gross terms; and why the users were allowed to get out the place alive.

There is no way to understand this strange situation.  If every man in

the House were a professional blackguard, and had his home in a sailor

boarding-house, one could still not understand it; for, although that

sort do use such terms, they never take them.  These men are not

professional blackguards; they are mainly gentlemen, and educated; yet

they use the terms, and take them too.  They really seem to attach no

consequence to them.  One cannot say that they act like schoolboys; for

that is only almost true, not entirely.  Schoolboys blackguard each other

fiercely, and by the hour, and one would think that nothing would ever

come of it but noise; but that would be a mistake.  Up to a certain limit

the result would be noise only, but, that limit overstepped, trouble

would follow right away.  There are certain phrases--phrases of a

peculiar character--phrases of the nature of that reference to

Schonerer's grandmother, for instance--which not even the most spiritless

schoolboy in the English-speaking world would allow to pass unavenged.

One difference between schoolboys and the law-makers of the Reichsrath

seems to be that the law-makers have no limit, no danger-line.

Apparently they may call each other what they please, and go home

unmutilated.



Now, in fact, they did have a scuffle on two occasions, but it was not on

account of names called.  There has been no scuffle where that was the

cause.



It is not to be inferred that the House lacks a sense of honour because

it lacks delicacy.  That would be an error.  Iro was caught in a lie, and

it profoundly disgraced him.  The House cut him, turned its back upon

him.  He resigned his seat; otherwise he would have been expelled.  But

it was lenient with Gregorig, who had called Iro a cowardly blatherskite

in debate.  It merely went through the form of mildly censuring him.

That did not trouble Gregorig.



The Viennese say of themselves that they are an easy-going, pleasure-

loving community, making the best of life, and not taking it very

seriously.  Nevertheless, they are grieved about the ways of their

Parliament, and say quite frankly that they are ashamed.  They claim that

the low condition of the parliament's manners is new, not old.  A

gentleman who was at the head of the government twenty years ago confirms

this, and says that in his time the parliament was orderly and well-

behaved.  An English gentleman of long residence here endorses this, and

says that a low order of politicians originated the present forms of

questionable speech on the stump some years ago, and imported them into

the parliament.[2] However, some day there will be a Minister of

Etiquette and a sergeant-at-arms, and then things will go better.  I mean

if parliament and the Constitution survive the present storm.





IV.--THE HISTORIC CLIMAX



During the whole of November things went from bad to worse.  The all-

important Ausgleich remained hard aground, and could not be sparred off.

Badeni's government could not withdraw the Language Ordinance and keep

its majority, and the Opposition could not be placated on easier terms.

One night, while the customary pandemonium was crashing and thundering

along at its best, a fight broke out.  It was a surging, struggling,

shoulder-to-shoulder scramble.  A great many blows were struck.  Twice

Schonerer lifted one of the heavy ministerial fauteuils--some say with

one hand--and threatened members of the Majority with it, but it was

wrenched away from him; a member hammered Wolf over the head with the

President's bell, and another member choked him; a professor was flung

down and belaboured with fists and choked; he held up an open penknife as

a defence against the blows; it was snatched from him and flung to a

distance; it hit a peaceful Christian Socialist who wasn't doing

anything, and brought blood from his hand.  This was the only blood

drawn.  The men who got hammered and choked looked sound and well next

day.  The fists and the bell were not properly handled, or better results

would have been apparent.  I am quite sure that the fighters were not in

earnest.



On Thanksgiving Day the sitting was a history-making one.  On that day

the harried, bedevilled, and despairing government went insane.  In order

to free itself from the thraldom of the Opposition it committed this

curiously juvenile crime; it moved an important change of the Rules of

the House, forbade debate upon the motion, put it to a stand-up vote

instead of ayes and noes, and then gravely claimed that it had been

adopted; whereas, to even the dullest witness--if I without immodesty may

pretend to that place--it was plain that nothing legitimately to be

called a vote had been taken at all.



I think that Saltpeter never uttered a truer thing than when he said,

'Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.'  Evidently the

government's mind was tottering when this bald insults to the House was

the best way it could contrive for getting out of the frying-pan.



The episode would have been funny if the matter at stake had been a

trifle; but in the circumstances it was pathetic.  The usual storm was

raging in the House.  As usual, many of the Majority and the most of the

Minority were standing up--to have a better chance to exchange epithets

and make other noises.  Into this storm Count Falkenhayn entered, with

his paper in his hand; and at once there was a rush to get near him and

hear him read his motion.  In a moment he was walled in by listeners.

The several clauses of his motion were loudly applauded by these allies,

and as loudly disapplauded--if I may invent a word--by such of the

Opposition as could hear his voice.  When he took his seat the President

promptly put the motion--persons desiring to vote in the affirmative,

stand up!  The House was already standing up; had been standing for an

hour; and before a third of it had found out what the President had been

saying, he had proclaimed the adoption of the motion!  And only a few

heard that.  In fact, when that House is legislating you can't tell it

from artillery practice.



You will realise what a happy idea it was to side-track the lawful ayes

and noes and substitute a stand-up vote by this fact: that a little

later, when a deputation of deputies waited upon the President and asked

him if he was actually willing to claim that that measure had been

passed, he answered, 'Yes--and unanimously.'  It shows that in effect the

whole House was on its feet when that trick was sprung.



The 'Lex Falkenhayn,' thus strangely born, gave the President power to

suspend for three days any deputy who should continue to be disorderly

after being called to order twice, and it also placed at his disposal

such force as might be necessary to make the suspension effective.  So

the House had a sergeant-at-arms at last, and a more formidable one, as

to power, than any other legislature in Christendom had ever possessed.

The Lex Falkenhayn also gave the House itself authority to suspend

members for thirty days.



On these terms the Ausgleich could be put through in an hour--apparently.

The Opposition would have to sit meek and quiet, and stop obstructing, or

be turned into the street, deputy after deputy, leaving the Majority an

unvexed field for its work.



Certainly the thing looked well.  The government was out of the frying-

pan at last.  It congratulated itself, and was almost girlishly happy.

Its stock rose suddenly from less than nothing to a premium.  It

confessed to itself, with pride, that its Lex Falkenhayn was a master-

stroke--a work of genius.



However, there were doubters--men who were troubled, and believed that a

grave mistake had been made.  It might be that the Opposition was

crushed, and profitably for the country, too; but the manner of it--the

manner of it!  That was the serious part.  It could have far-reaching

results; results whose gravity might transcend all guessing.  It might be

the initial step toward a return to government by force, a restoration of

the irresponsible methods of obsolete times.



There were no vacant seats in the galleries next day.  In fact, standing-

room outside the building was at a premium.  There were crowds there, and

a glittering array of helmeted and brass-buttoned police, on foot and on

horseback, to keep them from getting too much excited.  No one could

guess what was going to happen, but every one felt that something was

going to happen, and hoped he might have a chance to see it, or at least

get the news of it while it was fresh.



At noon the House was empty--for I do not count myself.  Half an hour

later the two galleries were solidly packed, the floor still empty.

Another half-hour later Wolf entered and passed to his place; then other

deputies began to stream in, among them many forms and faces grown

familiar of late.  By one o'clock the membership was present in full

force.  A band of Socialists stood grouped against the ministerial desks,

in the shadow of the Presidential tribune.  It was observable that these

official strongholds were now protected against rushes by bolted gates,

and that these were in ward of servants wearing the House's livery.  Also

the removable desk-boards had been taken away, and nothing left for

disorderly members to slat with.



There was a pervading, anxious hush--at least what stood very well for a

hush in that House.  It was believed by many that the Opposition was

cowed, and that there would be no more obstruction, no more noise.  That

was an error.



Presently the President entered by the distant door to the right,

followed by Vice-President Fuchs, and the two took their way down past

the Polish benches toward the tribune.  Instantly the customary storm of

noises burst out, and rose higher and higher, and wilder and wilder, and

really seemed to surpass anything that had gone before it in that place.

The President took his seat and begged for order, but no one could hear

him.  His lips moved--one could see that; be bowed his body forward

appealingly, and spread his great hand eloquently over his breast--one

could see that; but as concerned his uttered words, he probably could not

hear them himself.  Below him was that crowd of two dozen Socialists

glaring up at him, shaking their fists at him, roaring imprecations and

insulting epithets at him.  This went on for some time.  Suddenly the

Socialists burst through the gates and stormed up through the ministerial

benches, and a man in a red cravat reached up and snatched the documents

that lay on the President's desk and flung them abroad.  The next moment

he and his allies were struggling and fighting with the half-dozen

uniformed servants who were there to protect the new gates.  Meantime a

detail of Socialists had swarmed up the side steps and overflowed the

President and the Vice, and were crowding and shouldering and shoving

them out of the place.  They crowded them out, and down the steps and

across the House, past the Polish benches; and all about them swarmed

hostile Poles and Czechs, who resisted them.  One could see fists go up

and come down, with other signs and shows of a heady fight; then the

President and the Vice disappeared through the door of entrance, and the

victorious Socialists turned and marched back, mounted the tribune, flung

the President's bell and his remaining papers abroad, and then stood

there in a compact little crowd, eleven strong, and held the place as if

it were a fortress.  Their friends on the floor were in a frenzy of

triumph, and manifested it in their deafening way.  The whole House was

on its feet, amazed and wondering.



It was an astonishing situation, and imposingly dramatic.  Nobody had

looked for this.  The unexpected had happened.  What next?  But there can

be no next; the play is over; the grand climax is reached; the

possibilities are exhausted; ring down the curtain.



Not yet.  That distant door opens again.  And now we see what history

will be talking of five centuries hence: a uniformed and helmeted

battalion of bronzed and stalwart men marching in double file down the

floor of the House--a free parliament profaned by an invasion of brute

force!



It was an odious spectacle--odious and awful.  For one moment it was an

unbelievable thing--a thing beyond all credibility; it must be a

delusion, a dream, a nightmare.  But no, it was real--pitifully real,

shamefully real, hideously real.  These sixty policemen had been

soldiers, and they went at their work with the cold unsentimentality of

their trade.  They ascended the steps of the tribune, laid their hands

upon the inviolable persons of the representatives of a nation, and

dragged and tugged and hauled them down the steps and out at the door;

then ranged themselves in stately military array in front of the

ministerial estrade, and so stood.



It was a tremendous episode.  The memory of it will outlast all the

thrones that exist to-day.  In the whole history of free parliaments the

like of it had been seen but three times before.  It takes its imposing

place among the world's unforgettable things.  It think that in my

lifetime I have not twice seen abiding history made before my eyes, but I

know that I have seen it once.



Some of the results of this wild freak followed instantly.  The Badeni

government came down with a crash; there was a popular outbreak or two in

Vienna; there were three or four days of furious rioting in Prague,

followed by the establishing there of martial law; the Jews and Germans

were harried and plundered, and their houses destroyed; in other Bohemian

towns there was rioting--in some cases the Germans being the rioters, in

others the Czechs--and in all cases the Jew had to roast, no matter which

side he was on.  We are well along in December now;[3] the next new

Minister-President has not been able to patch up a peace among the

warring factions of the parliament, therefore there is no use in calling

it together again for the present; public opinion believes that

parliamentary government and the Constitution are actually threatened

with extinction, and that the permanency of the monarchy itself is a not

absolutely certain thing!



Yes, the Lex Falkenhayn was a great invention, and did what was claimed

for it--it got the government out of the frying-pan.



[1] That is, revolution.



[2] 'In that gracious bygone time when a mild and good-tempered spirit

was the atmosphere of our House, when the manner of our speakers was

studiously formal and academic, and the storms and explosions of to-day

were wholly unknown,' etc.--Translation of the opening remark of a

leading article in this morning's 'Neue Freie Presse,' December 11.



[3] It is the 9th.--M.T.













PRIVATE HISTORY OF THE 'JUMPING FROG' STORY



Five or six years ago a lady from Finland asked me to tell her a story in

our Negro dialect, so that she could get an idea of what that variety of

speech was like.  I told her one of Hopkinson Smith's Negro stories, and

gave her a copy of 'Harper's Monthly' containing it.  She translated it

for a Swedish newspaper, but by an oversight named me as the author of it

instead of Smith.  I was very sorry for that, because I got a good

lashing in the Swedish press, which would have fallen to his share but

for that mistake; for it was shown that Boccaccio had told that very

story, in his curt and meagre fashion, five hundred years before Smith

took hold of it and made a good and tellable thing out of it.



I have always been sorry for Smith.  But my own turn has come now.  A few

weeks ago Professor Van Dyke, of Princeton, asked this question:



'Do you know how old your "Jumping Frog" story is?'



And I answered:



'Yes--forty-five years.  The thing happened in Calaveras County, in the

spring of 1849.'



'No; it happened earlier--a couple of thousand years earlier; it is a

Greek story.'



I was astonished--and hurt.  I said:



'I am willing to be a literary thief if it has been so ordained; I am

even willing to be caught robbing the ancient dead alongside of Hopkinson

Smith, for he is my friend and a good fellow, and I think would be as

honest as any one if he could do it without occasioning remark; but I am

not willing to antedate his crimes by fifteen hundred years.  I must ask

you to knock off part of that.'



But the professor was not chaffing: he was in earnest, and could not

abate a century.  He offered to get the book and send it to me and the

Cambridge text-book containing the English translation also.  I thought I

would like the translation best, because Greek makes me tired.  January

30th he sent me the English version, and I will presently insert it in

this article.  It is my 'Jumping Frog' tale in every essential.  It is

not strung out as I have strung it out, but it is all there.



To me this is very curious and interesting.  Curious for several reasons.

For instance:



I heard the story told by a man who was not telling it to his hearers as

a thing new to them, but as a thing which they had witnessed and would

remember.  He was a dull person, and ignorant; he had no gift as a story-

teller, and no invention; in his mouth this episode was merely history--

history and statistics; and the gravest sort of history, too; he was

entirely serious, for he was dealing with what to him were austere facts,

and they interested him solely because they were facts; he was drawing on

his memory, not his mind; he saw no humour in his tale, neither did his

listeners; neither he nor they ever smiled or laughed; in my time I have

not attended a more solemn conference.  To him and to his fellow gold-

miners there were just two things in the story that were worth

considering.  One was the smartness of its hero, Jim Smiley, in taking

the stranger in with a loaded frog; and the other was Smiley's deep

knowledge of a frog's nature--for he knew (as the narrator asserted and

the listeners conceded) that a frog likes shot and is already ready to

eat it.  Those men discussed those two points, and those only.  They were

hearty in their admiration of them, and none of the party was aware that

a first-rate story had been told in a first-rate way, and that it brimful

of a quality whose presence they never suspected--humour.



Now, then, the interesting question is, did the frog episode happen in

Angel's Camp in the spring of '49, as told in my hearing that day in the

fall of 1865?  I am perfectly sure that it did.  I am also sure that its

duplicate happened in Boeotia a couple of thousand years ago.  I think it

must be a case of history actually repeating itself, and not a case of a

good story floating down the ages and surviving because too good to be

allowed to perish.



I would now like to have the reader examine the Greek story and the story

told by the dull and solemn Californian, and observe how exactly alike

they are in essentials.









[Translation.]





THE ATHENIAN AND THE FROG.[1]



An Athenian once fell in with a Boeotian who was sitting by the road-side

looking at a frog.  Seeing the other approach, the Boeotian said his was

a remarkable frog, and asked if he would agree to start a contest of

frogs, on condition that he whose frog jumped farthest should receive a

large sum of money.  The Athenian replied that he would if the other

would fetch him a frog, for the lake was near.  To this he agreed, and

when he was gone the Athenian took the frog, and, opening its mouth,

poured some stones into its stomach, so that it did not indeed seem

larger than before, but could not jump.  The Boeotian soon returned with

the other frog, and the contest began.  The second frog first was

pinched, and jumped moderately; then they pinched the Boeotian frog.  And

he gathered himself for a leap, and used the utmost effort, but he could

not move his body the least.  So the Athenian departed with the money.

When he was gone the Boeotian, wondering what was the matter with the

frog, lifted him up and examined him.  And being turned upside down, he

opened his mouth and vomited out the stones.





And here is the way it happened in California:



FROM 'THE CELEBRATED JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY'



Well, thish-yer Smiley had rat-tarriers and chicken cocks, and tom-cats,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

that ever they see.



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

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

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



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



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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

resk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras County.'



And the feller studies a minute, and then says, kinder sad like, 'Well,

I'm only a stranger here, and I ain't got no frog, but if I had a frog

I'd bet you.'



And then Smiley says: 'That's all right--that's all right; if you'll hold

my box a minute, I'll go and get you a frog.'  And so the feller took the

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

wait.



So he set there a good while thinking and thinking to hisself, and then

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

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

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

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

and give him to this feller, and says:



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

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

two--three--git!' and him and the feller touched up the frogs from

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

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

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

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

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

was, of course.



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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

nape of the neck, and hefted him, and says, 'Why, blame my cats if he

don't weigh five pound!' and turned him upside down, and he belched out a

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

maddest man--he set the frog down and took out after that feeler, but he

never ketched him.





The resemblances are deliciously exact.  There you have the wily Boeotain

and the wily Jim Smiley waiting--two thousand years apart--and waiting,

each equipped with his frog and 'laying' for the stranger.  A contest is

proposed--for money.  The Athenian would take a chance 'if the other

would fetch him a frog'; the Yankee says: 'I'm only a stranger here, and

I ain't got a frog; but if I had a frog I'd bet you.'  The wily Boeotian

and the wily Californian, with that vast gulf of two thousand years

between, retire eagerly and go frogging in the marsh; the Athenian and

the Yankee remain behind and work a best advantage, the one with pebbles,

the other with shot.  Presently the contest began.  In the one case 'they

pinched the Boeotian frog'; in the other, 'him and the feller touched up

the frogs from behind.'  The Boeotian frog 'gathered himself for a leap'

(you can just see him!), but 'could not move his body in the least'; the

Californian frog 'give a heave, but it warn't no use--he couldn't budge.'

In both the ancient and the modern cases the strangers departed with the

money.  The Boeotian and the Californian wonder what is the matter with

their frogs; they lift them and examine; they turn them upside down and

out spills the informing ballast.



Yes, the resemblances are curiously exact.  I used to tell the story of

the 'Jumping Frog' in San Francisco, and presently Artemus Ward came

along and wanted it to help fill out a little book which he was about to

publish; so I wrote it out and sent it to his publisher, Carleton; but

Carleton thought the book had enough matter in it, so he gave the story

to Henry Clapp as a present, and Clapp put it in his 'Saturday Press,'

and it killed that paper with a suddenness that was beyond praise.  At

least the paper died with that issue, and none but envious people have

ever tried to rob me of the honour and credit of killing it.  The

'Jumping Frog' was the first piece of writing of mine that spread itself

through the newspapers and brought me into public notice.  Consequently,

the 'Saturday Press' was a cocoon and I the worm in it; also, I was the

gay-coloured literary moth which its death set free.  This simile has

been used before.



Early in '66 the 'Jumping Frog' was issued in book form, with other

sketches of mine.  A year or two later Madame Blanc translated it into

French and published it in the 'Revue des Deux Mondes,' but the result

was not what should have been expected, for the 'Revue' struggled along

and pulled through, and is alive yet.  I think the fault must have been

in the translation.  I ought to have translated it myself.  I think so

because I examined into the matter and finally retranslated the sketch

from the French back into English, to see what the trouble was; that is,

to see just what sort of a focus the French people got upon it.  Then the

mystery was explained.  In French the story is too confused and chaotic

and unreposeful and ungrammatical and insane; consequently it could only

cause grief and sickness--it could not kill.  A glance at my

retranslation will show the reader that this must be true.









[My Retranslation.]



THE FROG JUMPING OF THE COUNTY OF CALAVERAS



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

fly lost.  Smiley had custom to say that all which lacked to a frog it

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

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

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

flies, Daniel, some flies!'--in a fash of the eye Daniel had bounded and

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

he rested truly to himself scratch the head with his behind-foot, as if

he no had not the least idea of his superiority.  Never you not have seen

frog as modest, as natural, sweet as she was.  And when he himself

agitated to jump purely and simply upon plain earth, she does more ground

in one jump than any beast of his species than you can know.



To jump plain--this was his strong.  When he himself agitated for that

Smiley multiplied the bests upon her as long as there to him remained a

red.  It must to know, Smiley was monstrously proud of his frog, and he

of it was right, for some men who were travelled, who had all seen, said

that they to him would be injurious to him compare to another frog.

Smiley guarded Daniel in a little box latticed which he carried bytimes

to the village for some bet.



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

him said:



'What is this that you have then shut up there within?'



Smiley said, with an air indifferent:



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

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



The individual it took, it regarded with care, it turned from one side

and from the other, then he said:



'Tiens!  in effect!--At what is she good?'



'My God!' responded Smiley, always with an air disengaged, 'she is good

for one thing, to my notice (a mon avis), she can better in jumping (elle

peut batter en sautant) all frogs of the county of Calaveras.'



The individual retook the box, it examined of new longly, and it rendered

to Smiley in saying with an air deliberate:



'Eh bien!  I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each

frog.'  (Je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait rien de mieux qu'aucune

grenouille.) [If that isn't grammar gone to seed, then I count myself no

judge.--M.T.]



'Possible that you not it saw not,' said Smiley; 'possible that you--you

comprehend frogs; possible that you not you there comprehend nothing;

possible that you had of the experience, and possible that you not be but

an amateur.  Of all manner (de toute maniere) I bet forty dollars that

she batter in jumping no matter which frog of the country of Calaveras.'



The individual reflected a second, and said like sad:



'I not am but a stranger here, I no have not a frog; but if I of it had

one, I would embrace the bet.'



'Strong, well!' respond Smiley; 'nothing of more facility.  If you will

hold my box a minute, I go you to search a frog (j'irai vous chercher.)'



Behold, then, the individual who guards the box, who puts his forty

dollars upon those of Smiley, and who attends (et qui attendre).  He

attended enough longtimes, reflecting all solely.  And figure you that he

takes Daniel, him opens the mouth by force and with a teaspoon him fills

with shot of the hunt, even him fills just to the chin, then he him puts

by the earth.  Smiley during these times was at slopping in a swamp.

Finally he trapped (attrape) a frog, him carried to that individual, and

said:



'Now if you be ready, put him all against Daniel, with their before-feet

upon the same line, and I give the signal'--then he added: 'One, two

three--advance!'



Him and the individual touched their frogs by behind, and the frog new

put to jump smartly, but Daniel himself lifted ponderously, exhalted the

shoulders thus, like a Frenchman--to what good?  He could not budge, he

is planted solid like a church, he not advance no more than if one him

had put at the anchor.



Smiley was surprised and disgusted, but he not himself doubted not of the

turn being intended (mais il ne se doutait pas du tour bien entendre).

The indidivual empocketed the silver, himself with it went, and of it

himself in going is that he no gives not a jerk of thumb over the

shoulder--like that--at the poor Daniel, in saying with his air

deliberate--(L'individu empoche l'argent, s'en va et en s'en allant est-

ce qu'il ne donne pas un coup de pouce pas-dessus l'epaule, comme ca, au

pauvre Daniel, en disant de son air delibere).



'Eh bien!  I no see not that that frog has nothing of better than

another.'



Smiley himself scratched longtimes the head, the eyes fixed upon Daniel,

until that which at last he said:



'I me demand how the devil it makes itself that this beast has refused.

Is it that she had something?  One would believe that she is stuffed.'



He grasped Daniel by the skin of the neck, him lifted and said:



'The wolf me bite if he no weigh not five pounds.'



He him reversed and the unhappy belched two handfuls of shot (et le

malheureux, etc.).  When Smiley recognised how it was, he was like mad.

He deposited his frog by the earth and ran after that individual, but he

not him caught never.





It may be that there are people who can translate better than I can, but

I am not acquainted with them.



So ends the private and public history of the Jumping Frog of Calaveras

County, an incident which has this unique feature about it--that it is

both old and new, a 'chestnut' and not a 'chestnut;' for it was original

when it happened two thousand years ago, and was again original when it

happened in California in our own time.



P.S.



London, July, 1900.--Twice, recently, I have been asked this question:



'Have you seen the Greek version of the "Jumping Frog"?'



And twice I have answered -'No.'



'Has Professor Van Dyke seen it?'



'I suppose so.'



'Then you supposition is at fault.'



'Why?'



'Because there isn't any such version.'



'Do you mean to intimate that the tale is modern, and not borrowed from

some ancient Greek book.'



'Yes.  It is not permissible for any but the very young and innocent to

be so easily beguiled as you and Van Dyke have been.'



'Do you mean that we have fallen a prey to our ignorance and simplicity?'



'Yes.  Is Van Dyke a Greek scholar?'



'I believe so.'



'Then he knew where to find the ancient Greek version if one existed.

Why didn't he look?  Why did he jump to conclusions?'



'I don't know.  And was it worth the trouble, anyway?'



As it turns out, now, it was not claimed that the story had been

translated from the Greek.  It had its place among other uncredited

stories, and was there to be turned into Greek by students of that

language.  'Greek Prose Composition'--that title is what made the

confusion.  It seemed to mean that the originals were Greek.  It was not

well chosen, for it was pretty sure to mislead.



Thus vanishes the Greek Frog, and I am sorry: for he loomed fine and

grand across the sweep of the ages, and I took a great pride in him.



M.T.



[1] Sidgwick, Greek Prose Composition, page 116















MY MILITARY CAMPAIGN



You have heard from a great many people who did something in the war; is

it not fair and right that you listen a little moment to one who started

out to do something in it, but didn't?  Thousands entered the war, got

just a taste of it, and then stepped out again, permanently.  These, by

their very numbers, are respectable, and are therefore entitled to a sort

of voice--not a loud one, but a modest one; not a boastful one, but an

apologetic one.  They ought not to be allowed much space among better

people--people who did something--I grant that; but they ought at least

to be allowed to state why they didn't do anything, and also to explain

the process by which they didn't do anything.  Surely this kind of light

must have a sort of value.



Out West there was a good deal of confusion in men's minds during the

first months of the great trouble--a good deal of unsettledness, of

leaning first this way, then that, then the other way.  It was hard for

us to get our bearings.  I call to mind an instance of this.  I was

piloting on the Mississippi when the news came that South Carolina had

gone out of the Union on December 20, 1860.  My pilot-mate was a New

Yorker.  He was strong for the Union; so was I.  But he would not listen

to me with any patience; my loyalty was smirched, to his eye, because my

father had owned slaves.  I said, in palliation of this dark fact, that I

had heard my father say, some years before he died, that slavery was a

great wrong, and that he would free the solitary Negro he then owned if

he could think it right to give away the property of the family when he

was so straitened in means.  My mate retorted that a mere impulse was

nothing--anybody could pretend to a good impulse; and went on decrying my

Unionism and libelling my ancestry.  A month later the secession

atmosphere had considerably thickened on the Lower Mississippi, and I

became a rebel; so did he.  We were together in New Orleans, January 26,

when Louisiana went out of the Union.  He did his full share of the rebel

shouting, but was bitterly opposed to letting me do mine.  He said that I

came of bad stock--of a father who had been willing to set slaves free.

In the following summer he was piloting a Federal gun-boat and shouting

for the Union again, and I was in the Confederate army.  I held his note

for some borrowed money.  He was one of the most upright men I ever knew;

but he repudiated that note without hesitation, because I was a rebel,

and the son of a man who had owned slaves.



In that summer--of 1861--the first wash of the wave of war broke upon the

shores of Missouri.  Our State was invaded by the Union forces.  They

took possession of St.  Louis, Jefferson Barracks, and some other points.

The Governor, Claib Jackson, issued his proclamation calling out fifty

thousand militia to repel the invader.



I was visiting in the small town where my boyhood had been spent--

Hannibal, Marion County.  Several of us got together in a secret place by

night and formed ourselves into a military company.  One Tom Lyman, a

young fellow of a good deal of spirit but of no military experience, was

made captain; I was made second lieutenant.  We had no first lieutenant;

I do not know why; it was long ago.  There were fifteen of us.  By the

advice of an innocent connected with the organisation, we called

ourselves the Marion Rangers.  I do not remember that any one found fault

with the name.  I did not; I thought it sounded quite well.  The young

fellow who proposed this title was perhaps a fair sample of the kind of

stuff we were made of.  He was young, ignorant, good-natured, well-

meaning, trivial, full of romance, and given to reading chivalric novels

and singing forlorn love-ditties.  He had some pathetic little nickel-

plated aristocratic instincts, and detested his name, which was Dunlap;

detested it, partly because it was nearly as common in that region as

Smith, but mainly because it had a plebeian sound to his ear.  So he

tried to ennoble it by writing it in this way: d'Unlap.  That contented

his eye, but left his ear unsatisfied, for people gave the new name the

same old pronunciation--emphasis on the front end of it.  He then did the

bravest thing that can be imagined--a thing to make one shiver when one

remembers how the world is given to resenting shams and affectations; he

began to write his name so: d'Un Lap.  And he waited patiently through

the long storm of mud that was flung at this work of art, and he had his

reward at last; for he lived to see that name accepted, and the emphasis

put where he wanted it, by people who had known him all his life, and to

whom the tribe of Dunlaps had been as familiar as the rain and the

sunshine for forty years.  So sure of victory at last is the courage that

can wait.  He said he had found, by consulting some ancient French

chronicles, that the name was rightly and originally written d'Un Lap;

and said that if it were translated into English it would mean Peterson:

Lap, Latin or Greek, he said, for stone or rock, same as the French

Pierre, that is to say, Peter; d', of or from; un, a or one; hence d'Un

Lap, of or from a stone or a Peter; that is to say, one who is the son of

a stone, the son of a Peter--Peterson.  Our militia company were not

learned, and the explanation confused them; so they called him Peterson

Dunlap.  He proved useful to us in his way; he named our camps for us,

and he generally struck a name that was 'no slouch,' as the boys said.



That is one sample of us.  Another was Ed Stevens, son of the town

jeweller,--trim-built, handsome, graceful, neat as a cat; bright,

educated, but given over entirely to fun.  There was nothing serious in

life to him.  As far as he was concerned, this military expedition of

ours was simply a holiday.  I should say that about half of us looked

upon it in the same way; not consciously, perhaps, but unconsciously.

We did not think; we were not capable of it.  As for myself, I was full

of unreasoning joy to be done with turning out of bed at midnight and

four in the morning, for a while; grateful to have a change, new scenes,

new occupations, a new interest.  In my thoughts that was as far as I

went; I did not go into the details; as a rule one doesn't at twenty-

five.



Another sample was Smith, the blacksmith's apprentice.  This vast donkey

had some pluck, of a slow and sluggish nature, but a soft heart; at one

time he would knock a horse down for some impropriety, and at another he

would get homesick and cry.  However, he had one ultimate credit to his

account which some of us hadn't: he stuck to the war, and was killed in

battle at last.



Jo Bowers, another sample, was a huge, good-natured, flax-headed lubber;

lazy, sentimental, full of harmless brag, a grumbler by nature; an

experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite picturesque liar,

and yet not a successful one, for he had had no intelligent training, but

was allowed to come up just any way.  This life was serious enough to

him, and seldom satisfactory.  But he was a good fellow, anyway, and the

boys all liked him.  He was made orderly sergeant; Stevens was made

corporal.



These samples will answer--and they are quite fair ones.  Well, this herd

of cattle started for the war.  What could you expect of them?  They did

as well as they knew how, but really what was justly to be expected of

them?  Nothing, I should say.  That is what they did.



We waited for a dark night, for caution and secrecy were necessary; then,

toward midnight, we stole in couples and from various directions to the

Griffith place, beyond the town; from that point we set out together on

foot.  Hannibal lies at the extreme south-eastern corner of Marion

County, on the Mississippi River; our objective point was the hamlet of

New London, ten miles away, in Ralls County.



The first hour was all fun, all idle nonsense and laughter.  But that

could not be kept up.  The steady trudging came to be like work; the play

had somehow oozed out of it; the stillness of the woods and the

sombreness of the night began to throw a depressing influence over the

spirits of the boys, and presently the talking died out and each person

shut himself up in his own thoughts.  During the last half of the second

hour nobody said a word.



Now we approached a log farm-house where, according to report, there was

a guard of five Union soldiers.  Lyman called a halt; and there, in the

deep gloom of the overhanging branches, he began to whisper a plan of

assault upon that house, which made the gloom more depressing than it was

before.  It was a crucial moment; we realised, with a cold suddenness,

that here was no jest--we were standing face to face with actual war.  We

were equal to the occasion.  In our response there was no hesitation, no

indecision: we said that if Lyman wanted to meddle with those soldiers,

he could go ahead and do it; but if he waited for us to follow him, he

would wait a long time.



Lyman urged, pleaded, tried to shame us, but it had no effect.  Our

course was plain, our minds were made up: we would flank the farmhouse--

go out around.  And that is what we did.  We turned the position.



We struck into the woods and entered upon a rough time, stumbling over

roots, getting tangled in vines, and torn by briers.  At last we reached

an open place in a safe region, and sat down, blown and hot, to cool off

and nurse our scratches and bruises.  Lyman was annoyed, but the rest of

us were cheerful; we had flanked the farm-house, we had made our first

military movement, and it was a success; we had nothing to fret about, we

were feeling just the other way.  Horse-play and laughing began again;

the expedition was become a holiday frolic once more.



Then we had two more hours of dull trudging and ultimate silence and

depression; then, about dawn, we straggled into New London, soiled, heel-

blistered, fagged with our little march, and all of us except Stevens in

a sour and raspy humour and privately down on the war.  We stacked our

shabby old shot-guns in Colonel Ralls's barn, and then went in a body and

breakfasted with that veteran of the Mexican War.  Afterwards he took us

to a distant meadow, and there in the shade of a tree we listened to an

old-fashioned speech from him, full of gunpowder and glory, full of that

adjective-piling, mixed metaphor, and windy declamation which was

regarded as eloquence in that ancient time and that remote region; and

then he swore us on the Bible to be faithful to the State of Missouri and

drive all invaders from her soil, no matter whence they might come or

under what flag they might march.  This mixed us considerably, and we

could not make out just what service we were embarked in; but Colonel

Ralls, the practised politician and phrase-juggler, was not similarly in

doubt; he knew quite clearly that he had invested us in the cause of the

Southern Confederacy.  He closed the solemnities by belting around me the

sword which his neighbour, colonel Brown, had worn at Buena Vista and

Molino del Rey; and he accompanied this act with another impressive

blast.



Then we formed in line of battle and marched four miles to a shady and

pleasant piece of woods on the border of the far-reached expanses of a

flowery prairie.  It was an enchanting region for war--our kind of war.



We pierced the forest about half a mile, and took up a strong position,

with some low, rocky, and wooded hills behind us, and a purling, limpid

creek in front.  Straightway half the command were in swimming, and the

other half fishing.  The ass with the French name gave this position a

romantic title, but it was too long, so the boys shortened and simplified

it to Camp Ralls.



We occupied an old maple-sugar camp, whose half-rotted troughs were still

propped against the trees.  A long corn-crib served for sleeping quarters

for the battalion.  On our left, half a mile away, was Mason's farm and

house; and he was a friend to the cause.  Shortly after noon the farmers

began to arrive from several directions, with mules and horses for our

use, and these they lent us for as long as the war might last, which they

judged would be about three months.  The animals were of all sizes, all

colours, and all breeds.  They were mainly young and frisky, and nobody

in the command could stay on them long at a time; for we were town boys,

and ignorant of horsemanship.  The creature that fell to my share was a

very small mule, and yet so quick and active that it could throw me

without difficulty; and it did this whenever I got on it.  Then it would

bray--stretching its neck out, laying its ears back, and spreading its

jaws till you could see down to its works.  It was a disagreeable animal,

in every way.  If I took it by the bridle and tried to lead it off the

grounds, it would sit down and brace back, and no one could budge it.

However, I was not entirely destitute of military resources, and I did

presently manage to spoil this game; for I had seen many a steam-boat

aground in my time, and knew a trick or two which even a grounded mule

would be obliged to respect.  There was a well by the corn-crib; so I

substituted thirty fathom of rope for the bridle, and fetched him home

with the windlass.



I will anticipate here sufficiently to say that we did learn to ride,

after some days' practice, but never well.  We could not learn to like

our animals; they were not choice ones, and most of them had annoying

peculiarities of one kind or another.  Stevens's horse would carry him,

when he was not noticing, under the huge excrescences which form on the

trunks of oak-trees, and wipe him out of the saddle; in this way Stevens

got several bad hurts.  Sergeant Bowers's horse was very large and tall,

with slim, long legs, and looked like a railroad bridge.  His size

enabled him to reach all about, and as far as he wanted to, with his

head; so he was always biting Bowers's legs.  On the march, in the sun,

Bowers slept a good deal; and as soon as the horse recognised that he was

asleep he would reach around and bite him on the leg.  His legs were

black and blue with bites.  This was the only thing that could ever make

him swear, but this always did; whenever the horse bit him he always

swore, and of course Stevens, who laughed at everything, laughed at this,

and would even get into such convulsions over it as to lose his balance

and fall off his horse; and then Bowers, already irritated by the pain of

the horse-bite, would resent the laughter with hard language, and there

would be a quarrel; so that horse made no end of trouble and bad blood in

the command.



However, I will get back to where I was--our first afternoon in the

sugar-camp.  The sugar-troughs came very handy as horse-troughs, and we

had plenty of corn to fill them with.  I ordered Sergeant Bowers to feed

my mule; but he said that if I reckoned he went to war to be dry-nurse to

a mule, it wouldn't take me very long to find out my mistake.  I believed

that this was insubordination, but I was full of uncertainties about

everything military, and so I let the thing pass, and went and ordered

Smith, the blacksmith's apprentice, to feed the mule; but he merely gave

me a large, cold, sarcastic grin, such as an ostensibly seven-year-old

horse gives you when you lift his lip and find he is fourteen, and turned

his back on me.  I then went to the captain, and asked if it was not

right and proper and military for me to have an orderly.  He said it was,

but as there was only one orderly in the corps, it was but right that he

himself should have Bowers on his staff.  Bowers said he wouldn't serve

on anybody's staff; and if anybody thought he could make him, let him try

it.  So, of course, the thing had to be dropped; there was no other way.



Next, nobody would cook; it was considered a degradation; so we had no

dinner.  We lazied the rest of the pleasant afternoon away, some dozing

under the trees, some smoking cob-pipes and talking sweethearts and war,

some playing games.  By late supper-time all hands were famished; and to

meet the difficulty all hands turned to, on an equal footing, and

gathered wood, built fires, and cooked the meal.  Afterward everything

was smooth for a while; then trouble broke out between the corporal and

the sergeant, each claiming to rank the other.  Nobody knew which was the

higher office; so Lyman had to settle the matter by making the rank of

both officers equal.  The commander of an ignorant crew like that has

many troubles and vexations which probably do not occur in the regular

army at all.  However, with the song-singing and yarn-spinning around the

camp-fire, everything presently became serene again; and by-and-by we

raked the corn down level in one end of the crib, and all went to bed on

it, tying a horse to the door, so that he would neigh if any one tried to

get in.[1]



We had some horsemanship drill every forenoon; then, afternoons, we rode

off here and there in squads a few miles, and visited the farmers' girls,

and had a youthful good time, and got an honest good dinner or supper,

and then home again to camp, happy and content.



For a time, life was idly delicious, it was perfect; there was nothing to

mar it.  Then came some farmers with an alarm one day.  They said it was

rumoured that the enemy were advancing in our direction, from over Hyde's

prairie.  The result was a sharp stir among us, and general

consternation.  It was a rude awakening from our pleasant trance.  The

rumour was but a rumour--nothing definite about it; so, in the confusion,

we did not know which way to retreat.  Lyman was for not retreating at

all, in these uncertain circumstances; but he found that if he tried to

maintain that attitude he would fare badly, for the command were in no

humour to put up with insubordination.  So he yielded the point and

called a council of war--to consist of himself and the three other

officers; but the privates made such a fuss about being left out, that we

had to allow them to remain, for they were already present, and doing the

most of the talking too.  The question was, which way to retreat; but all

were so flurried that nobody seemed to have even a guess to offer.

Except Lyman.  He explained in a few calm words, that inasmuch as the

enemy were approaching from over Hyde's prairie, our course was simple:

all we had to do was not to retreat toward him; any other direction would

answer our needs perfectly.  Everybody saw in a moment how true this was,

and how wise; so Lyman got a great many compliments.  It was now decided

that we should fall back upon Mason's farm.



It was after dark by this time, and as we could not know how soon the

enemy might arrive, it did not seem best to try to take the horses and

things with us; so we only took the guns and ammunition, and started at

once.  The route was very rough and hilly and rocky, and presently the

night grew very black and rain began to fall; so we had a troublesome

time of it, struggling and stumbling along in the dark; and soon some

person slipped and fell, and then the next person behind stumbled over

him and fell, and so did the rest, one after the other; and then Bowers

came with the keg of powder in his arms, whilst the command were all

mixed together, arms and legs, on the muddy slope; and so he fell, of

course, with the keg, and this started the whole detachment down the hill

in a body, and they landed in the brook at the bottom in a pile, and each

that was undermost pulling the hair and scratching and biting those that

were on top of him; and those that were being scratched and bitten,

scratching and biting the rest in their turn, and all saying they would

die before they would ever go to war again if they ever got out of this

brook this time, and the invader might rot for all they cared, and the

country along with them--and all such talk as that, which was dismal to

hear and take part in, in such smothered, low voices, and such a grisly

dark place and so wet, and the enemy maybe coming any moment.



The keg of powder was lost, and the guns too; so the growling and

complaining continued straight along whilst the brigade pawed around the

pasty hillside and slopped around in the brook hunting for these things;

consequently we lost considerable time at this; and then we heard a

sound, and held our breath and listened, and it seemed to be the enemy

coming, though it could have been a cow, for it had a cough like a cow;

but we did not wait, but left a couple of guns behind and struck out for

Mason's again as briskly as we could scramble along in the dark.  But we

got lost presently among the rugged little ravines, and wasted a deal of

time finding the way again, so it was after nine when we reached Mason's

stile at last; and then before we could open our mouths to give the

countersign, several dogs came bounding over the fence, with great riot

and noise, and each of them took a soldier by the slack of his trousers

and began to back away with him.  We could not shoot the dogs without

endangering the persons they were attached to; so we had to look on,

helpless, at what was perhaps the most mortifying spectacle of the civil

war.  There was light enough, and to spare, for the Masons had now run

out on the porch with candles in their hands.  The old man and his son

came and undid the dogs without difficulty, all but Bowers's; but they

couldn't undo his dog, they didn't know his combination; he was of the

bull kind, and seemed to be set with a Yale time-lock; but they got him

loose at last with some scalding water, of which Bowers got his share and

returned thanks.  Peterson Dunlap afterwards made up a fine name for this

engagement, and also for the night march which preceded it, but both have

long ago faded out of my memory.



We now went into the house, and they began to ask us a world of

questions, whereby it presently came out that we did not know anything

concerning who or what we were running from; so the old gentleman made

himself very frank, and said we were a curious breed of soldiers, and

guessed we could be depended on to end up the war in time, because no

Government could stand the expense of the shoe-leather we should cost it

trying to follow us around.  'Marion Rangers!  good name, b'gosh!' said

he.  And wanted to know why we hadn't had a picket-guard at the place

where the road entered the prairie, and why we hadn't sent out a scouting

party to spy out the enemy and bring us an account of his strength, and

so on, before jumping up and stampeding out of a strong position upon a

mere vague rumour--and so on, and so forth, till he made us all fell

shabbier than the dogs had done, and not half so enthusiastically

welcome.  So we went to bed shamed and low-spirited; except Stevens.

Soon Stevens began to devise a garment for Bowers which could be made to

automatically display his battle-scars to the grateful, or conceal them

from the envious, according to his occasions; but Bowers was in no humour

for this, so there was a fight, and when it was over Stevens had some

battle-scars of his own to think about.



Then we got a little sleep.  But after all we had gone through, our

activities were not over for the night; for about two o'clock in the

morning we heard a shout of warning from down the lane, accompanied by a

chorus from all the dogs, and in a moment everybody was up and flying

around to find out what the alarm was about.  The alarmist was a horseman

who gave notice that a detachment of Union soldiers was on its way from

Hannibal with orders to capture and hang any bands like ours which it

could find, and said we had no time to lose.  Farmer Mason was in a

flurry this time, himself.  He hurried us out of the house with all

haste, and sent one of his negroes with us to show us where to hide

ourselves and our tell-tale guns among the ravines half a mile away.  It

was raining heavily.



We struck down the lane, then across some rocky pasture-land which

offered good advantages for stumbling; consequently we were down in the

mud most of the time, and every time a man went down he blackguarded the

war, and the people who started it, and everybody connected with it, and

gave himself the master dose of all for being so foolish as to go into

it.  At last we reached the wooded mouth of a ravine, and there we

huddled ourselves under the streaming trees, and sent the negro back

home.  It was a dismal and heart-breaking time.  We were like to be

drowned with the rain, deafened with the howling wind and the booming

thunder, and blinded by the lightning.  It was indeed a wild night.  The

drenching we were getting was misery enough, but a deeper misery still

was the reflection that the halter might end us before we were a day

older.  A death of this shameful sort had not occurred to us as being

among the possibilities of war.  It took the romance all out of the

campaign, and turned our dreams of glory into a repulsive nightmare.  As

for doubting that so barbarous an order had been given, not one of us did

that.



The long night wore itself out at last, and then the negro came to us

with the news that the alarm had manifestly been a false one, and that

breakfast would soon be ready.  Straightway we were light-hearted again,

and the world was bright, and life as full of hope and promise as ever--

for we were young then.  How long ago that was!  Twenty-four years.



The mongrel child of philology named the night's refuse Camp Devastation,

and no soul objected.  The Masons gave us a Missouri country breakfast,

in Missourian abundance, and we needed it: hot biscuits; hot 'wheat

bread' prettily criss-crossed in a lattice pattern on top; hot corn pone;

fried chicken; bacon, coffee, eggs, milk, buttermilk, etc.;--and the

world may be confidently challenged to furnish the equal to such a

breakfast, as it is cooked in the South.



We stayed several days at Mason's; and after all these years the memory

of the dullness, the stillness and lifelessness of that slumberous farm-

house still oppresses my spirit as with a sense of the presence of death

and mourning.  There was nothing to do, nothing to think about; there was

no interest in life.  The male part of the household were away in the

fields all day, the women were busy and out of our sight; there was no

sound but the plaintive wailing of a spinning-wheel, forever moaning out

from some distant room--the most lonesome sound in nature, a sound

steeped and sodden with homesickness and the emptiness of life.  The

family went to bed about dark every night, and as we were not invited to

intrude any new customs, we naturally followed theirs.  Those nights were

a hundred years long to youths accustomed to being up till twelve.  We

lay awake and miserable till that hour every time, and grew old and

decrepit waiting through the still eternities for the clock-strikes.

This was no place for town boys.  So at last it was with something very

like joy that we received news that the enemy were on our track again.

With a new birth of the old warrior spirit, we sprang to our places in

line of battle and fell back on Camp Ralls.



Captain Lyman had taken a hint from Mason's talk, and he now gave ordered

that our camp should be guarded against surprise by the posting of

pickets.  I was ordered to place a picket at the forks of the road in

Hyde's prairie.  Night shut down black and threatening.  I told Sergeant

Bowers to go out to that place and stay till midnight; and, just as I was

expecting, he said he wouldn't do it.  I tried to get others to go, but

all refused.  Some excused themselves on account of the weather; but the

rest were frank enough to say they wouldn't go in any kind of weather.

This kind of thing sounds odd now, and impossible, but it seemed a

perfectly natural thing to do.  There were scores of little camps

scattered over Missouri where the same thing was happening.  These camps

were composed of young men who had been born and reared to a sturdy

independence, and who did not know what it meant to be ordered around by

Tom, Dick, and Harry, whom they had known familiarly all their lives, in

the village or on the farm.  It is quite within the probabilities that

this same thing was happening all over the South.  James Redpath

recognised the justice of this assumption, and furnished the following

instance in support of it.  During a short stay in East Tennessee he was

in a citizen colonel's tent one day, talking, when a big private appeared

at the door, and without salute or other circumlocution said to the

colonel:



'Say, Jim, I'm a-goin' home for a few days.'



'What for?'



'Well, I hain't b'en there for a right smart while, and I'd like to see

how things is comin' on.'



'How long are you going to be gone?'



''Bout two weeks.'



'Well don't be gone longer than that; and get back sooner if you can.'



That was all, and the citizen officer resumed his conversation where the

private had broken  it off.  This was in the first months of the war, of

course.  The camps in our part of Missouri were under Brigadier-General

Thomas H.  Harris.  He was a townsman of ours, a first-rate fellow, and

well liked; but we had all familiarly known him as the sole and modest-

salaried operator in our telegraph office, where he had to send about one

dispatch a week in ordinary times, and two when there was a rush of

business; consequently, when he appeared in our midst one day, on the

wing, and delivered a military command of some sort, in a large military

fashion, nobody was surprised at the response which he got from the

assembled soldiery:



'Oh, now, what'll you take to don't, Tom Harris!'



It was quite the natural thing.  One might justly imagine that we were

hopeless material for war.  And so we seemed, in our ignorant state; but

there were those among us who afterward learned the grim trade; learned

to obey like machines; became valuable soldiers; fought all through the

war, and came out at the end with excellent records.  One of the very

boys who refused to go out on picket duty that night, and called me an

ass for thinking he would expose himself to danger in such a foolhardy

way, had become distinguished for intrepidity before he was a year older.



I did secure my picket that night--not by authority, but by diplomacy.  I

got Bowers to go, by agreeing to exchange ranks with him for the time

being, and go along and stand the watch with him as his subordinate.  We

stayed out there a couple of dreary hours in the pitchy darkness and the

rain, with nothing to modify the dreariness but Bowers's monotonous

growlings at the war and the weather; then we began to nod, and presently

found it next to impossible to stay in the saddle; so we gave up the

tedious job, and went back to the camp without waiting for the relief

guard.  We rode into camp without interruption or objection from anybody,

and the enemy could have done the same, for there were no sentries.

Everybody was asleep; at midnight there was nobody to send out another

picket, so none was sent.  We never tried to establish a watch at night

again, as far as I remember, but we generally kept a picket out in the

daytime.



In that camp the whole command slept on the corn in the big corn-crib;

and there was usually a general row before morning, for the place was

full of rats, and they would scramble over the boys' bodies and faces,

annoying and irritating everybody; and now and then they would bite some

one's toe, and the person who owned the toe would start up and magnify

his English and begin to throw corn in the dark.  The ears were half as

heavy as bricks, and when they struck they hurt.  The persons struck

would respond, and inside of five minutes every man would be locked in a

death-grip with his neighbour.  There was a grievous deal of blood shed

in the corn-crib, but this was all that was spilt while I was in the war.

No, that is not quite true.  But for one circumstance it would have been

all.  I will come to that now.



Our scares were frequent.  Every few days rumours would come that the

enemy were approaching.  In these cases we always fell back on some other

camp of ours; we never stayed where we were.  But the rumours always

turned out to be false; so at last even we began to grow indifferent to

them.  One night a negro was sent to our corn-crib with the same old

warning: the enemy was hovering in our neighbourhood.  We all said let

him hover.  We resolved to stay still and be comfortable.  It was a fine

warlike resolution, and no doubt we all felt the stir of it in our veins

--for a moment.  We had been having a very jolly time, that was full of

horse-play and school-boy hilarity; but that cooled down now, and

presently the fast-waning fire of forced jokes and forced laughs died out

altogether, and the company became silent.  Silent and nervous.  And soon

uneasy--worried--apprehensive.  We had said we would stay, and we were

committed.  We could have been persuaded to go, but there was nobody

brave enough to suggest it.  An almost noiseless movement presently began

in the dark, by a general and unvoiced impulse.  When the movement was

completed, each man knew that he was not the only person who had crept to

the front wall and had his eye at a crack between the logs.  No, we were

all there; all there with our hearts in our throats, and staring out

toward the sugar-troughs where the forest foot-path came through.  It was

late, and there was a deep woodsy stillness everywhere.  There was a

veiled moonlight, which was only just strong enough to enable us to mark

the general shape of objects.  Presently a muffled sound caught our ears,

and we recognised it as the hoof-beats of a horse or horses.  And right

away a figure appeared in the forest path; it could have been made of

smoke, its mass had so little sharpness of outline.  It was a man on

horseback; and it seemed to me that there were others behind him.  I got

hold of a gun in the dark, and pushed it through a crack between the

logs, hardly knowing what I was doing, I was so dazed with fright.

Somebody said 'Fire!' I pulled the trigger.  I seemed to see a hundred

flashes and hear a hundred reports, then I saw the man fall down out of

the saddle.  My first feeling was of surprised gratification; my first

impulse was an apprentice-sportsman's impulse to run and pick up his

game.  Somebody said, hardly audibly, 'Good--we've got him!--wait for the

rest.'  But the rest did not come.  There was not a sound, not the

whisper of a leaf; just perfect stillness; an uncanny kind of stillness,

which was all the more uncanny on account of the damp, earthy, late-night

smells now rising and pervading it.  Then, wondering, we crept stealthily

out, and approached the man.  When we got to him the moon revealed him

distinctly.  He was lying on his back, with his arms abroad; his mouth

was open and his chest heaving with long gasps, and his white shirt-front

was all splashed with blood.  The thought shot through me that I was a

murderer; that I had killed a man--a man who had never done me any harm.

That was the coldest sensation that ever went through my marrow.  I was

down by him in a moment, helplessly stroking his forehead; and I would

have given anything then--my own life freely--to make him again what he

had been five minutes before.  And all the boys seemed to be feeling in

the same way; they hung over him, full of pitying interest, and tried all

they could to help him, and said all sorts of regretful things.  They had

forgotten all about the enemy; they thought only of this one forlorn unit

of the foe.  Once my imagination persuaded me that the dying man gave me

a reproachful look out of his shadowy eyes, and it seemed to me that I

would rather he had stabbed me than done that.  He muttered and mumbled

like a dreamer in his sleep, about his wife and child; and I thought with

a new despair, 'This thing that I have done does not end with him; it

falls upon them too, and they never did me any harm, any more than he.'



In a little while the man was dead.  He was killed in war; killed in fair

and legitimate war; killed in battle, as you might say; and yet he was as

sincerely mourned by the opposing force as if he had been their brother.

The boys stood there a half hour sorrowing over him, and recalling the

details of the tragedy, and wondering who he might be, and if he were a

spy, and saying that if it were to do over again they would not hurt him

unless he attacked them first.  It soon came out that mine was not the

only shot fired; there were five others--a division of the guilt which

was a grateful relief to me, since it in some degree lightened and

diminished the burden I was carrying.  There were six shots fired at

once; but I was not in my right mind at the time, and my heated

imagination had magnified my one shot into a volley.



The man was not in uniform, and was not armed.  He was a stranger in the

country; that was all we ever found out about him.  The thought of him

got to preying upon me every night; I could not get rid of it.  I could

not drive it away, the taking of that unoffending life seemed such a

wanton thing.  And it seemed an epitome of war; that all war must be just

that--the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal

animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you

found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it.  My

campaign was spoiled.  It seemed to me that I was not rightly equipped

for this awful business; that war was intended for men, and I for a

child's nurse.  I resolved to retire from this avocation of sham

soldiership while I could save some remnant of my self-respect.  These

morbid thoughts clung to me against reason; for at bottom I did not

believe I had touched that man.  The law of probabilities decreed me

guiltless of his blood; for in all my small experience with guns I had

never hit anything I had tried to hit, and I knew I had done my best to

hit him.  Yet there was no solace in the thought.  Against a diseased

imagination, demonstration goes for nothing.



The rest of my war experience was of a piece with what I have already

told of it.  We kept monotonously falling back upon one camp or another,

and eating up the country--I marvel now at the patience of the farmers

and their families.  They ought to have shot us; on the contrary, they

were as hospitably kind and courteous to us as if we had deserved it.

In one of these camps we found Ab Grimes, an Upper Mississippi pilot, who

afterwards became famous as a dare-devil rebel spy, whose career bristled

with desperate adventures.  The look and style of his comrades suggested

that they had not come into the war to play, and their deeds made good

the conjecture later.  They were fine horsemen and good revolver-shots;

but their favourite arm was the lasso.  Each had one at his pommel, and

could snatch a man out of the saddle with it every time, on a full

gallop, at any reasonable distance.



In another camp the chief was a fierce and profane old blacksmith of

sixty, and he had furnished his twenty recruits with gigantic home-made

bowie-knives, to be swung with the two hands, like the machetes of the

Isthmus.  It was a grisly spectacle to see that earnest band practising

their murderous cuts and slashes under the eye of that remorseless old

fanatic.



The last camp which we fell back upon was in a hollow near the village of

Florida, where I was born--in Monroe County.  Here we were warned, one

day, that a Union colonel was sweeping down on us with a whole regiment

at his heels.  This looked decidedly serious.  Our boys went apart and

consulted; then we went back and told the other companies present that

the war was a disappointment to us and we were going to disband.  They

were getting ready, themselves, to fall back on some place or other, and

were only waiting for General Tom Harris, who was expected to arrive at

any moment; so they tried to persuade us to wait a little while, but the

majority of us said no, we were accustomed to falling back, and didn't

need any of Tom Harris's help; we could get along perfectly well without

him and save time too.  So about half of our fifteen, including myself,

mounted and left on the instant; the others yielded to persuasion and

stayed--stayed through the war.



An hour later we met General Harris on the road, with two or three people

in his company--his staff, probably, but we could not tell; none of them

was in uniform; uniforms had not come into vogue among us yet.  Harris

ordered us back; but we told him there was a Union colonel coming with a

whole regiment in his wake, and it looked as if there was going to be a

disturbance; so we had concluded to go home.  He raged a little, but it

was of no use; our minds were made up.  We had done our share; had killed

one man, exterminated one army, such as it was; let him go and kill the

rest, and that would end the war.  I did not see that brisk young general

again until last year; then he was wearing white hair and whiskers.



In time I came to know that Union colonel whose coming frightened me out

of the war and crippled the Southern cause to that extent--General Grant.

I came within a few hours of seeing him when he was as unknown as I was

myself; at a time when anybody could have said, 'Grant?--Ulysses S.

Grant?  I do not remember hearing the name before.'  It seems difficult

to realise that there was once a time when such a remark could be

rationally made; but there was, and I was within a few miles of the place

and the occasion too, though proceeding in the other direction.



The thoughtful will not throw this war-paper of mine lightly aside as

being valueless.  It has this value: it is a not unfair picture of what

went on in many and many a militia camp in the first months of the

rebellion, when the green recruits were without discipline, without the

steadying and heartening influence or trained leaders; when all their

circumstances were new and strange, and charged with exaggerated terrors,

and before the invaluable experience of actual collision in the field had

turned them from rabbits into soldiers.  If this side of the picture of

that early day has not before been put into history, then history has

been to that degree incomplete, for it had and has its rightful place

there.  There was more Bull Run material scattered through the early

camps of this country than exhibited itself at Bull Run.  And yet it

learned its trade presently, and helped to fight the great battles later.

I could have become a soldier myself, if I had waited.  I had got part of

it learned; I knew more about retreating than the man that invented

retreating.



[1] It was always my impression that that was what the horse was there

for, and I know that it was also the impression of at least one other of

the command, for we talked about it at the time, and admired the military

ingenuity of the device; but when I was out West three years ago I was

told by Mr. A. G. Fuqua, a member of our company, that the horse was his,

that the leaving him tied at the door was a matter of mere forgetfulness,

and that to attribute it to intelligent invention was to give him quite

too much credit.  In support of his position, he called my attention to

the suggestive fact that the artifice was not employed again.  I had not

thought of that before.













MEISTERSCHAFT



IN THREE ACTS [1]







DRAMATIS PERSONAE:



MR. STEPHENSON.         MARGARET STEPHENSON.

GEORGE FRANKLIN.        ANNIE STEPHENSON.

WILLIAM JACKSON.        MRS. BLUMENTHAL, the Wirthin.

GRETCHEN, Kellnerin







ACT I. SCENE I.



Scene of the play, the parlour of a small private dwelling in a village.

(MARGARET discovered crocheting--has a pamphlet.)



MARGARET.  (Solus.) Dear, dear!  it's dreary enough, to have to study

this impossible German tongue: to be exiled from home and all human

society except a body's sister in order to do it, is just simply

abscheulich.  Here's only three weeks of the three months gone, and it

seems like three years.  I don't believe I can live through it, and I'm

sure Annie can't.  (Refers to her book, and rattles through, several

times, like one memorising:)  Entschuldigen Sie, mein Herr, konnen Sie

mir vielleicht sagen, um wie viel Uhr der erste Zug nach Dresden abgeht?

(Makes mistakes and corrects them.) I just hate Meisterschaft!  We may

see people; we can have society; yes, on condition that the conversation

shall be in German, and in German only--every single word of it!  Very

kind--oh, very! when neither Annie nor I can put two words together,

except as they are put together for us in Meisterschaft or that idiotic

Ollendorff!  (Refers to book, and memorises: Mein Bruder hat Ihren Herrn

Vater nicht gesehen, als er gestern in dem Laden des deutschen Kaufmannes

war.)  Yes, we can have society, provided we talk German.  What would

conversation be like!  If you should stick to Meisterschaft, it would

change the subject every two minutes; and if you stuck to Ollendorff, it

would be all about your sister's mother's good stocking of thread, or

your grandfather's aunt's good hammer of the carpenter, and who's got it,

and there an end.  You couldn't keep up your interest in such topics.

(Memorising: Wenn irgend moglich--mochte ich noch heute Vormittag

Geschaftsfreunde zu treffen.) My mind is made up to one thing: I will be

an exile, in spirit and in truth: I will see no one during these three

months.  Father is very ingenious--oh, very! thinks he is, anyway.

Thinks he has invented a way to force us to learn to speak German.  He is

a dear good soul, and all that; but invention isn't his fach'.  He will

see.  (With eloquent energy.)  Why, nothing in the world shall--Bitte,

konnen Sie mir vielleicht sagen, ob Herr Schmidt mit diesem Zuge

angekommen ist?  Oh, dear, dear George--three weeks!  It seems a whole

century since I saw him.  I wonder if he suspects that I--that I--care

for him--j-just a wee, wee bit?  I believe he does.  And I believe Will

suspects that Annie cares for him a little, that I do.  And I know

perfectly well that they care for us.  They agree with all our opinions,

no matter what they are; and if they have a prejudice, they change it, as

soon as they see how foolish it is.  Dear George! at first he just

couldn't abide cats; but now, why now he's just all for cats; he fairly

welters in cats.  I never saw such a reform.  And it's just so with all

his principles: he hasn't got one that he had before.  Ah, if all men

were like him, this world would--(Memorising: Im Gegentheil, mein Herr,

dieser Stoff ist sehr billig.  Bitte, sehen Sie sich nur die Qualitat

an.) Yes, and what did they go to studying German for, if it wasn't an

inspiration of the highest and purest sympathy?  Any other explanation is

nonsense--why, they'd as soon have thought of studying American history.



[Turns her back, buries herself in her pamphlet, first memorising aloud,

until Annie enters, then to herself, rocking to and fro, and rapidly

moving her lips, without uttering a sound.]



Enter ANNIE, absorbed in her pamphlet--does not at first see MARGARET.



ANNIE.  (Memorising: Er liess mich gestern fruh rufen, und sagte mir dass

er einen sehr unangenehmen Brief von Ihrem Lehrer erhalten hatte.

Repeats twice aloud, then to herself, briskly moving her lips.)



M. (Still not seeing her sister.) Wie geht es Ihrem Herrn Schwiegervater?

Es freut mich sehr dass Ihre Frau Mutter wieder wohl ist.  (Repeats.

Then mouths in silence.)



A.  (Repeats her sentence a couple of times aloud; then looks up, working

her lips, and discovers Margaret.) Oh, you here?  (Running to her.) O

lovey-dovey, dovey-lovey, I've got the gr-reatest news!  Guess, guess,

guess!  You'll never guess in a hundred thousand million years--and more!



M.  Oh, tell me, tell me, dearie; don't keep me in agony.



A.  Well I will.  What--do--you--think?  They're here!



M.  Wh-a-t!  Who?  When?  Which?  Speak!



A.  Will and George!



M.  Annie Alexandra Victoria Stephenson, what do you mean?



A.  As sure as guns!



M. (Spasmodically embracing and kissing her.) 'Sh!  don't use such

language.  O darling, say it again!



A.  As sure as guns!



M.  I don't mean that!  Tell me again, that--



A.  (Springing up and waltzing about the room.) They're here--in this

very village--to learn German--for three months!  Es sollte mich sehr

freuen wenn Sie--



M.  (Joining in the dance.) Oh, it's just too lovely for anything!

(Unconsciously memorising:) Es ware mir lieb wenn Sie morgen mit mir in

die Kirche gehen konnten, aber ich kann selbst nicht gehen, weil ich

Sonntags gewohnlich krank bin.  Juckhe!



A.  (Finishing some unconscious memorising.)--morgen Mittag bei mir

speisen konnten.  Juckhe!  Sit down and I'll tell you all I've heard.

(They sit.) They're here, and under that same odious law that fetters us

--our tongues, I mean; the metaphor's faulty, but no matter.  They can go

out, and see people, only on condition that they hear and speak German,

and German only.



M. Isn't--that--too lovely!



A.  And they're coming to see us!



M.  Darling!  (Kissing her.) But are you sure?



A.  Sure as guns--Gatling guns!



M. 'Sh!  don't, child, it's schrecklich!  Darling--you aren't mistaken?



A.  As sure as g--batteries!  [They jump up and dance a moment--then--]



M. (With distress.)  But, Annie dear!--we can't talk German--and neither

can they!



A.  (Sorrowfully.) I didn't think of that.



M.  How cruel it is!  What can we do?



A.  (After a reflective pause, resolutely.) Margaret--we've got to.



M.  Got to what?



A.  Speak German.



M.  Why, how, child?



A.  (Contemplating her pamphlet with earnestness.)  I can tell you one

thing.  Just give me the blessed privilege: just hinsetzen Will Jackson

here in front of me, and I'll talk German to him as long as this

Meisterschaft holds out to burn.



M.  (Joyously.) Oh, what an elegant idea!  You certainly have got a mind

that's a mine of resources, if ever anybody had one.



A.  I'll skin this Meisterschaft to the last sentence in it!



M.  (With a happy idea.) Why Annie, it's the greatest thing in the world.

I've been all this time struggling and despairing over these few little

Meisterschaft primers: but as sure as you live, I'll have the whole

fifteen by heart before this time day after to-morrow.  See if I don't.



A.  And so will I; and I'll trowel in a layer of Ollendorff mush between

every couple of courses of Meisterschaft bricks.  Juckhe!



M.  Hoch!  hoch!  hoch!



A.  Stoss an!



M.  Juckhe!  Wir werden gleich gute deutsche Schulerinnen werden!  Juck--



A. --he!



M.  Annie, when are they coming to see us?  To-night?



A.  No.



M.  No?  Why not?  When are they coming?  What are they waiting for?  The

idea!  I never heard of such a thing!  What do you--



A.  (Breaking in.) Wait, wait, wait!  give a body a chance.  They have

their reasons.



M.  Reasons?--what reasons?



A.  Well, now, when you stop and think, they're royal good ones.  They've

got to talk German when they come, haven't they?  Of course.  Well, they

don't know any German but Wie befinden Sie sich, and Haben Sie gut

geschlafen, and Vater unser, and Ich trinke lieber Bier als Wasser, and a

few little parlour things like that; but when it comes to talking, why,

they don't know a hundred and fifteen German words, put them all

together.



M.  Oh, I see.



A.  So they're going to neither eat, sleep, smoke, nor speak the truth

till they've crammed home the whole fifteen Meisterschafts auswendig!



M.  Noble hearts!



A.  They've given themselves till day after to-morrow, half-past 7 P.M.,

and then they'll arrive here loaded.



M.  Oh, how lovely, how gorgeous, how beautiful!  Some think this world

is made of mud; I think it's made of rainbows.  (Memorising.) Wenn irgend

moglich, so mochte ich noch heute Vormittag dort ankommen, da es mir sehr

daran gelegen ist--Annie, I can learn it just like nothing!



A.  So can I.  Meisterschaft's mere fun--I don't see how it ever could

have seemed difficult.  Come!  We can't be disturbed here; let's give

orders that we don't want anything to eat for two days; and are absent to

friends, dead to strangers, and not at home even to nougat peddlers--



M.  Schon! and we'll lock ourselves into our rooms, and at the end of two

days, whosoever may ask us a Meisterschaft question shall get a

Meisterschaft answer--and hot from the bat!



BOTH.  (Reciting in unison.) Ich habe einen Hut fur meinen Sohn, ein Paar

Handschuhe fur meinen Bruder, und einen Kamm fur mich selbst gekauft.

[Exeunt.]



Enter Mrs. BLUMENTHAL, the Wirthin.



WIRTHIN.  (Solus.) Ach, die armen Madchen, sie hassen die deutsche

Sprache, drum ist es ganz und gar unmoglich dass sie sie je lernen

konnen.  Es bricht mir ja mein Herz ihre Kummer uber die Studien

anzusehen...  Warum haben sie den Entchluss gefasst in ihren Zimmern ein

Paar Tagezu bleiben?...  Ja--gewiss--das versteht sich; sie sind

entmuthigt--arme Kinder!(A knock at the door.) Herein!



Enter GRETCHEN with card.



GR.  Er ist schon wieder da, und sagt dass er nur Sie sehen will.  (Hands

the card.) Auch-WIRTHIN.  Gott im Himmel--der Vater der Madchen?  (Puts

the card in her pocket.) Er wunscht die Tochter nicht zu treffen?  Ganz

recht; also, Du schweigst.



GR.  Zu Befehl.  WIRTHIN.  Lass ihn hereinkommen.



GR.  Ja, Frau Wirthin!  [Exit GRETCHEN.]



WIRTHIN.  (Solus.) Ah--jetzt muss ich ihm die Wahrheit offenbaren.



Enter Mr. STEPHENSON.



STEPHENSON.  Good-morning, Mrs. Blumenthal--keep your seat, keep your

seat, please.  I'm only here for a moment--merely to get your report, you

know.  (Seating himself.) Don't want to see the girls--poor things,

they'd want to go home with me.  I'm afraid I couldn't have the heart to

say no.  How's the German getting along?



WIRTHIN.  N-not very well; I was afraid you would ask me that.  You see,

they hate it, they don't take the least interest in it, and there isn't

anything to incite them to an interest, you see.  And so they can't talk

at all.



S.  M-m.  That's bad.  I had an idea that they'd get lonesome, and have

to seek society; and then, of course, my plan would work, considering the

cast-iron conditions of it.



WIRTHIN.  But it hasn't, so far.  I've thrown nice company in their way--

I've done my very best, in every way I could think of--but it's no use;

they won't go out, and they won't receive anybody.  And a body can't

blame them; they'd be tongue-tied--couldn't do anything with a German

conversation.  Now, when I started to learn German--such poor German as I

know--the case was very different: my intended was a German.  I was to

live among Germans the rest of my life; and so I had to learn.  Why,

bless my heart!  I nearly lost the man the first time he asked me--I

thought he was talking about the measles.  They were very prevalent at

the time.  Told him I didn't want any in mine.  But I found out the

mistake, and I was fixed for him next time...  Oh yes, Mr. Stephenson, a

sweetheart's a prime incentive.



S.  (Aside.) Good soul!  she doesn't suspect that my plan is a double

scheme--includes a speaking knowledge of German, which I am bound they

shall have, and the keeping them away from those two young fellows--

though if I had known that those boys were going off for a year's foreign

travel, I--however, the girls would never learn that language at home;

they're here, and I won't relent--they've got to stick the three months

out.  (Aloud.) So they are making poor progress?  Now tell me--will they

learn it--after a sort of fashion, I mean--in three months?



WIRTHIN.  Well, now, I'll tell you the only chance I see.  Do what I

will, they won't answer my German with anything but English; if that goes

on, they'll stand stock-still.  Now I'm willing to do this: I'll

straighten everything up, get matters in smooth running order, and day

after to-morrow I'll go to bed sick, and stay sick three weeks.



S.  Good!  You are an angel?  I see your idea.  The servant girl--



WIRTHIN.  That's it; that's my project.  She doesn't know a word of

English.  And Gretchen's a real good soul, and can talk the slates off a

roof.  Her tongue's just a flutter-mill.  I'll keep my room--just ailing

a little--and they'll never see my face except when they pay their little

duty-visits to me, and then I'll say English disorders my mind.  They'll

be shut up with Gretchen's windmill, and she'll just grind them to

powder.  Oh, they'll get a start in the language--sort of a one, sure's

you live.  You come back in three weeks.



S.  Bless you, my Retterin!  I'll be here to the day!  Get ye to your

sick-room--you shall have treble pay.  (Looking at watch.) Good!  I can

just catch my train.  Leben Sie wohl!  [Exit.]



WIRTHIN.  Leben Sie wohl!  mein Herr!











ACT II.  SCENE I.



Time, a couple of days later.  The girls discovered with their work and

primers.



ANNIE.  Was fehlt der Wirthin?



MARGARET.  Das weiss ich nicht.  Sie ist schon vor zwei Tagen ins Bett

gegangen--



A.  My! how fliessend you speak!



M.  Danke schon--und sagte dass sie nicht wohl sei.



A.  Good?  Oh no, I don't mean that!  no--only lucky for us--glucklich,

you know I mean because it'll be so much nicer to have them all to

ourselves.



M.  Oh, naturlich!  Ja!  Dass ziehe ich durchaus vor.  Do you believe

your Meisterschaft will stay with you, Annie?



A.  Well, I know it is with me--every last sentence of it; and a couple

of hods of Ollendorff, too, for emergencies.  Maybe they'll refuse to

deliver--right off--at first, you know--der Verlegenheit wegen--aber ich

will sie spater herausholen--when I get my hand in--und vergisst Du das

nicht!



M.  Sei nicht grob, Liebste.  What shall we talk about first--when they

come?



A.  Well--let me see.  There's shopping--and--all that about the trains,

you know--and going to church--and--buying tickets to London, and Berlin,

and all around--and all that subjunctive stuff about the battle in

Afghanistan, and where the American was said to be born, and so on--and--

and ah--oh, there's so many things--I don't think a body can choose

beforehand, because you know the circumstances and the atmosphere always

have so much to do in directing a conversation, especially a German

conversation, which is only a kind of an insurrection, anyway.  I believe

it's best to just depend on Prov--(Glancing at watch, and gasping.)--

half-past--seven!



M.  Oh, dear, I'm all of a tremble!  Let's get something ready, Annie!

(Both fall nervously to reciting): Entschuldigen Sie, mein Herr, konnen

Sie mir vielleicht sagen wie ich nach dem norddeutschen Bahnhof gehe?

(They repeat it several times, losing their grip and mixing it all up.)



BOTH.  Herein!  Oh, dear!  O der heilige--



Enter GRETCHEN.



GRETCHEN (Ruffled and indignant.) Entschuldigen Sie, meine gnadigsten

Fraulein, es sind zwei junge rasende Herren draussen, die herein wollen,

aber ich habe ihnen geschworen dass--(Handing the cards.)



M. Due liebe Zeit, they're here!  And of course down goes my back hair!

Stay and receive them, dear, while I--(Leaving.)



A.  I--alone?  I won't!  I'll go with you!  (To GR.) Lassen Sie die

Herren naher treten; und sagen Sie ihnen dass wir gleich zuruckkommen

werden.  [Exit.]



GR.  (Solus.) Was!  Sie freuen sich daruber?  Und ich sollte wirklich

diese Blodsinnigen, dies grobe Rindvieh hereinlassen?  In den hulflosen

Umstanden meiner gnadigen jungen Damen?--Unsinn!  (Pause--thinking.)

Wohlan!  Ich werde sie mal beschutzen!  Sollte man nicht glauben, dass

sie einen Sparren zu viel hatten?  (Tapping her skull significantly.) Was

sie mir doch Alles gesagt haben!  Der Eine: Guten Morgen!  wie geht es

Ihrem Herrn Schwiegervater?  Du liebe Zeit!  Wie sollte ich einen

Schwiegervater haben konnen!  Und der Andere: 'Es thut mir sehr leid dass

Ihrer Herr Vater meinen Bruder nicht gesehen hat, als er doch gestern in

dem Laden des deutschen Kaufmannes war!' Potztausendhimmelsdonnerwetter!

Oh, ich war ganz rasend!  Wie ich aber rief: 'Meine Herren, ich kenne Sie

nicht, und Sie kennen meinen Vater nicht, wissen Sie, denn er ist schon

lange durchgebrannt, und geht nicht beim Tage in einen Laden hinein,

wissen Sie--und ich habe keinen Schwiegervater, Gott sei Dank, werde auch

nie einen kriegen, werde uberhaupt, wissen Sie, ein solches Ding nie

haben, nie dulden, nie ausstehen: warum greifen Sie ein Madchen an, das

nur Unschuld kennt, das Ihnen nie Etwas zu Leide gethan hat?' Dann haben

sie sich beide die Finger in die Ohren gesteckt und gebetet:

'Allmachtiger Gott!  Erbarme Dich unser?' (Pauses.) Nun, ich werde schon

diesen Schurken Einlass gonnen, aber ich werde ein Auge mit ihnen haben,

damit sie sich nicht wie reine Teufel geberden sollen.  [Exit, grumbling

and shaking her head.]



Enter WILLIAM and GEORGE.



W.  My land, what a girl!  and what an incredible gift of gabble!--kind

of patent climate-proof compensation-balance self-acting automatic

Meisterschaft--touch her button, and br-r-r! away she goes!



GEO.  Never heard anything like it; tongue journalled on ball-bearings!

I wonder what she said; seemed to be swearing, mainly.



W.  (After mumbling Meisterschaft a while.)  Look here, George, this is

awful--come to think--this project: we can't talk this frantic language.



GEO.  I know it, Will, and it is awful; but I can't live without seeing

Margaret--I've endured it as long as I can.  I should die if I tried to

hold out longer--and even German is preferable to death.



W.  (Hesitatingly.) Well, I don't know; it's a matter of opinion.



GEO.  (Irritably.) It isn't a matter of opinion either.  German is

preferable to death.



W.  (Reflectively.) Well, I don't know--the problem is so sudden--but I

think you may be right: some kinds of death.  It is more than likely that

a slow, lingering--well, now, there in Canada in the early times a couple

of centuries ago, the Indians would take a missionary and skin him, and

get some hot ashes and boiling water and one thing and another, and by-

and-by that missionary--well, yes, I can see that, by-and-by, talking

German could be a pleasant change for him.



GEO.  Why, of course.  Das versteht sich; but you have to always think a

thing out, or you're not satisfied.  But let's not go to bothering about

thinking out this present business; we're here, we're in for it; you are

as moribund to see Annie as I am to see Margaret; you know the terms:

we've got to speak German.  Now stop your mooning and get at your

Meisterschaft; we've got nothing else in the world.



W.  Do you think that'll see us through?



GEO.  Why it's got to.  Suppose we wandered out of it and took a chance

at the language on our own responsibility, where the nation would we be!

Up a stump, that's where.  Our only safety is in sticking like wax to the

text.



W.  But what can we talk about?



GEO.  Why, anything that Meisterschaft talks about.  It ain't our affair.



W.  I know; but Meisterschaft talks about everything.



GEO.  And yet don't talk about anything long enough for it to get

embarrassing.  Meisterschaft is just splendid for general conversation.



W.  Yes, that's so; but it's so blamed general!  Won't it sound foolish?



GEO.  Foolish!  Why, of course; all German sounds foolish.



W.  Well, that is true; I didn't think of that.



GEO.  Now, don't fool around any more.  Load up; load up; get ready.  Fix

up some sentences; you'll need them in two minutes new.  [They walk up

and down, moving their lips in dumb-show memorising.]



W.  Look here--when we've said all that's in the book on a topic, and

want to change the subject, how can we say so?--how would a German say

it?



GEO.  Well, I don't know.  But you know when they mean 'Change cars,'

they say Umsteigen.  Don't you reckon that will answer?



W.  Tip-top!  It's short and goes right to the point; and it's got a

business whang to it that's almost American.  Umsteigen!--change subject!

--why, it's the very thing!



GEO.  All right, then, you umsteigen--for I hear them coming.



Enter the girls.



A. to W.  (With solemnity.) Guten Morgen, mein Herr, es freut mich sehr,

Sie zu sehen.



W.  Guten Morgen, mein Fraulein, es freut mich sehr Sie zu sehen.



[MARGARET and GEORGE repeat the same sentences.  Then, after an

embarrassing silence, MARGARET refers to her book and says:]



M.  Bitte, meine Herren, setzen Sie sich.



THE GENTLEMEN.  Danke schon.[The four seat themselves in couples, the

width of the stage apart, and the two conversations begin.  The talk is

not flowing--at any rate at first; there are painful silences all along.

Each couple worry out a remark and a reply: there is a pause of silent

thinking, and then the other couple deliver themselves.]



W.  Haben Sie meinen Vater in dem Laden meines Bruders nicht gesehen?



A.  Nein, mein Herr, ich habe Ihren Herrn Vater in dem Laden Ihres Herrn

Bruders nicht gesehen.



GEO.  Waren Sie gestern Abend im Koncert, oder im Theater?



M. Nein, ich war gestern Abend nicht im Koncert, noch im Theater, ich war

gestern Abend zu Hause.[General break-down--long pause.]



W.  Ich store doch nicht etwa?



A.  Sie storen mich durchaus nicht.



GEO.  Bitte, lassen Sie sich nicht von mir storen.



M.  Aber ich bitte Sie, Sie storen mich durchaus nicht.



W.  (To both girls.) Wenn wir Sie storen so gehen wir gleich wieder.



A.  O, nein!  Gewiss, nein!



M.  Im Gegentheil, es freut uns sehr, Sie zu sehen, alle beide.



W.  Schon!



GEO.  Gott sei dank!



M.  (Aside.) It's just lovely!



A.  (Aside.) It's like a poem.  [Pause.]



W.  Umsteigen!



M.  Um--welches?



W.  Umsteigen.



GEO.  Auf English, change cars--oder subject.



BOTH GIRLS.  Wie schon!



W.  Wir haben uns die Freiheit genommen, bei Ihnen vorzusprechen.



A.  Sie sind sehr gutig.



GEO.  Wir wollten uns erkundigen, wie Sie sich befanden.



M.  Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden--meine Schwester auch.



W.  Meine Frau lasst sich Ihnen bestens empfehlen.



A.  Ihre Frau?



W.  (Examining his book.) Vielleicht habe ich mich geirrt.  (Shows the

place.)  Nein, gerade so sagt das Buch.



A.  (Satisfied.) Ganz recht.  Aber--



W.  Bitte empfehlen Sie mich Ihrem Herrn Bruder.



A.  Ah, das ist viel besser--viel besser.  (Aside.) Wenigstens es ware

viel besser wenn ich einen Bruder hatte.



GEO.  Wie ist es Ihnen gegangen, seitdem ich das Vergnugen hatte, Sie

anderswo zu sehen?



M.  Danke bestens, ich befinde mich gewohnlich ziemlich wohl.



[GRETCHEN slips in with a gun, and listens.]



GEO.  (Still to Margaret.)  Befindet sich Ihre Frau Gemahlin wohl?



GR.  (Raising hands and eyes.)  Frau Gemahlin--heiliger Gott! [Is like to

betray herself with her smothered laughter, and glides out.]



M.  Danke sehr, meine Frau ist ganz wohl.  [Pause.]



W.  Durfen wir vielleicht--umsteigen?



THE OTHERS.  Gut!



GEO.  (Aside.) I feel better, now.  I'm beginning to catch on.  (Aloud.)

Ich mochte gern morgen fruh einige Einkaufe machen und wurde Ihnen seht

verbunden sein, wenn Sie mir den Gefallen thaten, mir die Namen der

besten hiesigen Firmen aufzuschreiben.



M. (Aside.) How sweet!



W.  (Aside.) Hang it, I was going to say that!  That's one of the noblest

things in the book.



A.  Ich mochte Ihnen gern begleiten, aber es ist mir wirklich heute

Morgen ganz unmoglich auszugehen.  (Aside.) It's getting as easy as 9

times 7 is 46.



M.  Sagen Sie dem Brieftrager, wenn's gefallig ist, er, mochte Ihnen den

eingeschriebenen Brief geben lassen.



W.  Ich wurde Ihnen sehr verbunden sein, wenn Sie diese Schachtel fur

mich nach der Post tragen wurden, da mir sehr daran liegt einen meiner

Geschaftsfreunde in dem Laden des deutschen Kaufmanns heute Abend treffen

zu konnen.  (Aside.)  All down but nine; set'm up on the other alley!



A.  Aber, Herr Jackson!  Sie haven die Satze gemischt.  Es ist

unbegreiflich wie Sie das haben thun konnen.  Zwischen Ihrem ersten Theil

und Ihrem letzten Theil haben Sie ganz funfzig Seiten ubergeschlagen!

Jetzt bin ich ganz verloren.  Wie kann man reden, wenn man seinen Platz

durchaus nicht wieder finden kann?



W.  Oh, bitte, verzeihen Sie; ich habe das wirklich nicht beabsichtigt.



A.  (Mollified.) Sehr wohl, lassen Sie gut sein.  Aber thun Sie es nicht

wieder.  Sie mussen ja doch einraumen, das solche Dinge unertragliche

Verwirrung mit sich fuhren.



[GRETCHEN slips in again with her gun.]



W.  Unzweifelhaft haben Sic Recht, meine holdselige Landsmannin...

Umsteigen!



[As GEORGE gets fairly into the following, GRETCHEN draws a bead on him,

and lets drive at the close, but the gun snaps.]



GEO.  Glauben Sie dass ich ein hubsches Wohnzimmer fur mich selbst und

ein kleines Schlafzimmer fur meinen Sohn in diesem Hotel fur funfzehn

Mark die Woche bekommen kann, oder, wurden Sie mir rathen, in einer

Privatwohnung Logis zu nehmen?  (Aside.) That's a daisy!



GR.  (Aside.) Schade!  [She draws her charge and reloads.]



M.  Glauben Sie nicht Sie werden besser thun bei diesem Wetter zu Hause

zu bleiben?



A.  Freilich glaube ich, Herr Franklin, Sie werden sich erkalten, wenn

Sie bei diesem unbestandigen Wetter ohne Ueberrock ausgehen.



GR.  (Relieved--aside.)  So?  Man redet von Ausgehen.  Das klingt schon

besser.  [Sits.]



W.  (To A.)  Wie theuer haben Sie das gekauft?  [Indicating a part of her

dress.]



A.  Das hat achtzehn Mark gekostet.



W.  Das ist sehr theuer.



GEO.  Ja, obgleich dieser Stoff wunderschon ist und das Muster sehr

geschmackvoll und auch das Vorzuglichste dass es in dieser Art gibt, so

ist es doch furchtbat theuer fur einen solcehn Artikel.



M. (Aside.)  How sweet is this communion of soul with soul!



A.  Im Gegentheil, mein Herr, das ist sehr billig.  Sehen Sie sich nur

die Qualitat an.



[They all examine it.]



GEO.  Moglicherweise ist es das allerneuste das man in diesem Stoff hat;

aber das Muster gefallt mir nicht.



[Pause.]



W.  Umsteigen!



A.  Welchen Hund haben Sie?  Haben Sie den hubschen Hund des Kaufmanns,

oder den hasslichen Hund der Urgrossmutter des Lehrlings des

bogenbeinigen Zimmermanns?



W.  (Aside.)  Oh, come, she's ringing in a cold deck on us: that's

Ollendorff.



GEO.  Ich habe nicht den Hund des--des--(Aside.) Stuck!  That's no

Meisterschaft; they don't play fair.  (Aloud.)  Ich habe nicht den Hund

des--des--In unserem Buche leider, gibt es keinen Hund; daher, ob ich

auch gern von solchen Thieren sprechen mochte, ist es mir doch unmoglich,

weil ich nicht vorbereitet bin.  Entschuldigen Sie, meine Damen.



GR.  (Aside) Beim Teufel, sie sind alle blodsinnig geworden.  In meinem

Leben habe ich nie ein so narrisches, verfluchtes, verdammtes Gesprach

gehort.



W.  Bitte, umsteigen.



[Run the following rapidly through.]



M. (Aside.) Oh, I've flushed an easy batch!  (Aloud.)  Wurden Sie mir

erlauben meine Reisetasche heir hinzustellen?



GR.  (Aside.) Wo ist seine Reisetasche?  Ich sehe keine.



W.  Bitte sehr.



GEO.  Ist meine Reisetasche Ihnen im Wege?



GR.  (Aside.) Und wo ist seine Reisetasche?



A.  Erlauben Sie mir Sie von meiner Reisetasche zu bereien.



GR.  (Aside.) Du Esel!



W.  Ganz und gar nicht.  (To Geo.) Es ist sehr schwul in diesem Coupe.



GR.  (Aside.)  Coupe.



GEO.  Sie haben Recht.  Erlauben Sie mir, gefalligst, das Fenster zu

offnen.  Ein wenig Luft wurde uns gut thun.



M. Wir fahren sehr rasch.



A.  Haben Sie den Namen jener Station gehort?



W.  Wie lange halten wir auf dieser Station an?



GEO.  Ich reise nach Dresden, Schaffner.  Wo muss ich umsteigen?



GR.  (Aside.) Sie sind ja alle ganz und gar verruckt.  Man denke sich sie

glauben dass sie auf der Eisenbahn reisen.



GEO.  (Aside, to William.)  Now brace up; pull all your confidence

together, my boy, and we'll try that lovely goodbye business a flutter.

I think it's about the gaudiest thing in the book, if you boom it right

along and don't get left on a base.  It'll impress the girls.  (Aloud.)

Lassen Sie uns gehen: es ist schon sehr spat, und ich muss morgen ganz

fruh aufstehen.



GR.  (Aside--grateful.) Gott sei Dank dass sie endlich gehen.



[Sets her gun aside.]



W.  (To Geo.)  Ich danke Ihnen hoflichst fur die Ehre die Sie mir

erweisen, aber ich kann nicht langer bleiben.



GEO.  (To W.) Entschuldigen Sie mich gutigst, aber ich kann wirklich

nicht langer bleiben.



[GRETCHEN looks on stupefied.]



W.  (To Geo.) Ich habe schon eine Einladung angenommen; ich kann wirklich

nicht langer bleiben.



[GRETCHEN fingers her gun again.]



GEO.  (To W.)  Ich muss gehen.



W.  (To GEO.)  Wie!  Sie wollen schon wieder gehen?  Sie sind ja eben

erst gekommen.



M.  (Aside.) It's just music!



A.  (Aside.) Oh, how lovely they do it!



GEO.  (To W.)  Also denken Sie doch noch nicht an's Gehen.



W.  (To Geo.) Es thut mir unendlich leid, aber ich muss nach Hause.

Meine Frau wird sich wundern, was aus mir geworden ist.



GEO.  (To W.)  Meine Frau hat keine Ahnung wo ich bin: ich muss wirklich

jetzt fort.



W.  (To Geo.)  Dann will ich Sie nicht langer aufhalten; ich bedaure sehr

dass Sie uns einen so kurzen Besuch gemacht haben.



GEO.  (To W.)  Adieu--auf recht baldiges Wiedersehen.



W.  UMSTEIGNEN!



[Great hand-clapping from the girls.]



M.  (Aside.) Oh, how perfect! how elegant!



A.  (Aside.) Per-fectly enchanting!



JOYOUS CHORUS.  (All)  Ich habe gehabt, du hast gehabt, er hat gehabt,

wir haben gehabt, ihr habet gehabt, sie haben gehabt.



[GRETCHEN faints, and tumbles from her chair, and the gun goes off with a

crash.  Each girl, frightened, seizes the protecting hand of her

sweetheart.  GRETCHEN scrambles up.  Tableau.]



W.  (Takes out some money--beckons Gretchen to him.  George adds money to

the pile.) Hubsches Madchen (giving her some of the coins), hast Du etwas

gesehen?



GR.  (Courtesy--aside.) Der Engel!  (Aloud--impressively.) Ich habe

nichts gesehen.



W.  (More money.)  Hast Du etwas gehort?



GR.  Ich habe nichts gehort.



W.  (More money.)  Und morgen?



GR.  Morgen--ware es nothig--bin ich taub und blind.



W.  Unvergleichbares Madchen!  Und (giving the rest of the money)

darnach?



GR.  (Deep courtesy--aside.)  Erzengel!  (Aloud.)  Darnach, mein

gnadgister, betrachten Sie mich also taub--blind--todt!



ALL.  (In chorus--with reverent joy.) Ich habe gehabt, du hast gehabt, er

hat gehabt, wir haben gehabt, ihr habet gehabt, sie haben gehabt!









ACT III.



Three weeks later.



SCENE I.



Enter GRETCHEN, and puts her shawl on a chair.  Brushing around with the

traditional feather-duster of the drama.  Smartly dressed, for she is

prosperous.





GR.  Wie hatte man sich das vorstellen konnen!  In nur drei Wochen bin

ich schon reich geworden!  (Gets out of her pocket handful after handful

of silver, which she piles on the table, and proceeds to repile and

count, occasionally ringing or biting a piece to try its quality.)  Oh,

dass (with a sigh) die Frau Wirthin nur ewig krank bliebe!...  Diese

edlen jungen Manner--sie sind ja so liebenswurdig!  Und so fleissig!--

und so treu!  Jeden Morgen kommen sie gerade um drei Viertel auf neun;

und plaudern und schwatzen, und plappern, und schnattern, die jungen

Damen auch; um Schlage zwolf nehmen sie Abschied; um Sclage eins kommen

sie schon wieder, und plauden und schwatzen und plappern und schnattern;

gerade um sechs Uhr nehmen sie wiederum Abschied; um halb acht kehren sie

noche'mal zuruck, und plaudern und schwatzen und plappern und schnattern

bis zehn Uhr, oder vielleicht ein Viertel nach, falls ihre Uhren nach

gehen (und stets gehen sie nach am Ende des Besuchs, aber stets vor

Beginn desselben), und zuweilen unterhalten sich die jungen Leute beim

Spazierengehen; und jeden Sonntag gehen sie dreimal in die Kirche; und

immer plaudern sie, und schwatzen und plappern und schnattern bis ihnen

die Zahne aus dem Munde fallen.  Und ich?  Durch Mangel an Uebung, ist

mir die Zunge mit Moos belegt worden!  Freilich ist's mir eine dumme Zei

gewesen.  Aber--um Gotteswillen, was geht das mir an?  Was soll ich

daraus machen?  Taglich sagt die Frau Wirthin, 'Gretchen' (dumb-show of

paying a piece of money into her hand), 'du bist eine der besten Sprach-

Lehrerinnen der Welt!' Act, Gott!  Und taglich sagen die edlen jungen

Manner, 'Gretchen, liebes Kind' (money-paying again in dumb-show--three

coins), 'bleib' taub--blind--todt!' und so bleibe ich...  Jetzt wird es

ungefahr neun Uhr sein; bald kommen sie vom Spaziergehen zuruck.  Also,

es ware gut dass ich meinem eigenen Schatz einen Besuch abstatte und

spazieren gehe.



[Dons her shawl.  Exit.  L.]



Enter WIRTHIN.  R.



WIRTHIN.  That was Mr. Stephenson's train that just came in.  Evidently

the girls are out walking with Gretchen;--can't find them, and she

doesn't seem to be around.  (A ring at the door.)  That's him.  I'll go

see.  [Exit.  R.]



Enter STEPHENSON and WIRTHIN.  R.



S.  Well, how does sickness seem to agree with you?



WIRTHIN.  So well that I've never been out of my room since, till I heard

your train come in.



S.  Thou miracle of fidelity!  Now I argue from that, that the new plan

is working.



WIRTHIN.  Working?  Mr. Stephenson, you never saw anything like it in the

whole course of your life!  It's absolutely wonderful the way it works.



S.  Succeeds?  No--you don't mean it.



WIRTHIN.  Indeed I do mean it.  I tell you, Mr. Stephenson, that plan was

just an inspiration--that's what it was.  You could teach a cat German by

it.



S.  Dear me, this is noble news!  Tell me about it.



WIRTHIN.  Well, it's all Gretchen--ev-ery bit of it.  I told you she was

a jewel.  And then the sagacity of that child--why, I never dreamed it

was in her.  Sh-she, 'Never you ask the young ladies a question--never

let on--just keep mum--leave the whole thing to me,' sh-she.



S.  Good!  And she justified, did she?



WIRTHIN.  Well, sir, the amount of German gabble that that child crammed

into those two girls inside the next forty-eight hours--well, I was

satisfied!  So I've never asked a question--never wanted to ask any.

I've just lain curled up there, happy.  The little dears! they've flitted

in to see me a moment, every morning and noon and supper-time; and as

sure as I'm sitting here, inside of six days they were clattering German

to me like a house afire!



S.  Sp-lendid, splendid!



WIRTHIN.  Of course it ain't grammatical--the inventor of the language

can't talk grammatical; if the dative didn't fetch him the accusative

would; but it's German all the same, and don't you forget it!



S.  Go on--go on--this is delicious news--



WIRTHIN.  Gretchen, she says to me at the start, 'Never you mind about

company for 'em,' sh-she--'I'm company enough.'  And I says, 'All right--

fix it your own way, child;' and that she was right is shown by the fact

that to this day they don't care a straw for any company but hers.



S.  Dear me; why, it's admirable!



WIRTHIN.  Well, I should think so!  They just dote on that hussy--can't

seem to get enough of her.  Gretchen tells me so herself.  And the care

she takes of them!  She tells me that every time there's a moonlight

night she coaxes them out for a walk; and if a body can believe her, she

actually bullies them off to church three times every Sunday!



S.  Why, the little dev--missionary!  Really, she's a genius!



WIRTHIN.  She's a bud, I tell you!  Dear me, how she's brought those

girls' health up!  Cheeks?--just roses.  Gait?--they walk on watch-

springs!  And happy?--by the bliss in their eyes, you'd think they're in

Paradise!  Ah, that Gretchen!  Just you imagine our trying to achieve

these marvels!



S.  You're right--every time.  Those girls--why, all they'd have wanted

to know was what we wanted done, and then they wouldn't have done it--the

mischievous young rascals!



WIRTHIN.  Don't tell me?  Bless you, I found that out early--when I was

bossing.



S.  Well, I'm im-mensely pleased.  Now fetch them down.  I'm not afraid

now.  They won't want to go home.



WIRTHIN.  Home!  I don't believe you could drag them away from Gretchen

with nine span of horses.  But if you want to see them, put on your hat

and come along; they're out somewhere trapseing along with Gretchen.

[Going.]



S.  I'm with you--lead on.



WIRTHIN.  We'll go out the side door.  It's towards the Anlage.  [Exit

both.  L.]



Enter GEORGE and MARGARET.  R.  Her head lies upon his shoulder, his arm

is about her waist; they are steeped in sentiment.



M. (Turning a fond face up at him.)  Du Engel!



GEO.  Liebste!



M.  Oh, das Liedchen dass Du mir gewidmet hast--es ist so schon, so

wunderschon.  Wie hatte ich je geahnt dass Du ein Poet warest!



GEO.  Mein Schatzchen!--es ist mir lieb wenn Dir die Kleinigkeit

gefallt.



M.  Ah, es ist mit der zartlichsten Musik gefullt--klingt ja so suss und

selig--wie das Flustern des Sommerwindes die Abenddammerung hindurch.

Wieder--Theuerste!--sag'es wieder.



GEO.  Du bist wie eine Blume!  -So schon und hold und rein--Ich schau'

Dich an, und WehmuthSchleicht mir ins Herz hinein.  Mir ist als ob ich

die HandeAufs Haupt Dir legen sollt', Betend, dass Gott Dich erhalte, So

rein und schon und hold.



M.  A-ch!  (Dumb-show sentimentalisms.)  Georgie--



GEO.  Kindchen!



M.  Warum kommen sie nicht?



GEO.  Das weiss ich gar night.  Sie waren--



M.  Es wird spat.  Wir mussen sie antreiben.  Komm!



GEO.  Ich glaube sie werden recht bald ankommen, aber--[Exit both.  L.]



Enter GRETCHEN, R., in a state of mind.  Slumps into a chair limp with

despair.



GR.  Ach!  was wird jetzt aus mir werden!  Zufallig habe ich in der Ferne

den verdammten Papa gesehen!--und die Frau Wirthin auch!  Oh, diese

Erscheinung--die hat mir beinahe das Leben genommen.  Sie suchen die

jungen Damen--das weiss ich wenn sie diese und die jungen Herren zusammen

fanden--du heileger Gott!  Wenn das gescheiht, waren wir Alle ganz und

gar verloren!  Ich muss sie gleich finden, und ihr eine Warnung geben!

[Exit.  L.]



Enter ANNIE and WILL, R., posed like the former couple and sentimental.



A.  Ich liebe Dich schon so sehr--Deiner edlen Natur wegen.  Dass du dazu

auch ein Dichter bist!--ach, mein Leben ist ubermassig reich geworden!

Wer hatte sich doch einbilden konnen dass ich einen Mann zu einem so

wunderschonen Gedicht hatte begeistern konnen?



W.  Liebste!  Es ist nur eine Kleinigkeit.



A.  Nein, nein, es ist ein echtes Wunder!  Sage es noch einmal--ich flehe

Dich an.



W.  Du bist wie eine Blume!--So schon und hold und rein--Ich schau' Dich

an, und WehmuthSchleicht mir ins Herz hinein.  Mir ist als ob ich die

HandeAufs Haupt Dir legen sollt', Betend, dass Gott Dich erhalt, So rein

und schon und hold.



A.  Ach, es ist himmlisch--einfach himmlisch.  [Kiss.] Schreibt auch

George Gedicht?



W.  Oh, ja--zuweilen.



A.  Wie schon!



W.  (Aside.) Smouches 'em, same as I do!  It was a noble good idea to

play that little thing on her.  George wouldn't ever think of that--

somehow he never had any invention.



A.  (Arranging chairs.)  Jetzt will ich bei Dir sitzen bleiben, und Du--



W.  (They sit.) Ja--und ich--



A.  Du wirst mir die alte Geschichte, die immer neu bleibt, noch wieder

erzahlen.



W.  Zum Beispiel, dass ich Dich liebe!



A.  Wieder!



W.  Ich--sie kommen!



Enter GEORGE and MARGARET.



A.  Das macht nichts.  Fortan!  [GEORGE unties M.'s bonnet.  She reties

his cravat--interspersings of love-pats, etc., and dumb show of love-

quarrellings.]



W.  Ich liebe Dich.



A.  Ach!  Noch einmal!



W.  Ich habe Dich vom Herzen lieb.



A.  Ach!  Abermals!



W.  Bist Du denn noch nicht satt?



A.  Nein!  (The other couple sit down, and MARGARET begins a retying of

the cravat.  Enter the WIRTHIN and STEPHENSON, he imposing silence with a

sign.)  Mich hungert sehr, ich verhungre!



W.  Oh, Du armes Kind!  (Lays her head on his shoulder.  Dumb-show

between STEPHENSON and WIRTHIN.) Und hungert es nicht mich?  Du hast mir

nicht einmal gesagt--



A.  Dass ich Dich liebe?  Mein Eigener!  (Frau WIRTHIN threatens to

faint--is supported by STEPHENSON.)  Hore mich nur an: Ich liebe Dich,

ich liebe Dich--



Enter GRETCHEN.



GR.  (Tears her hair.)  Oh, dass ich in der Holle ware!



M. Ich liebe Dich, ich liebe Dich!  Ah, ich bin so glucklich dass ich

nicht schlafen kann, nicht lesen kann, nicht reden kann, nicht--



A.  Und ich!  Ich bin auch so glucklich dass ich nicht speisen kann,

nicht studieren, arbeiten, denken, schreiben--



S.  (To Wirthin--aside.)  Oh, there isn't any mistake about it--

Gretchen's just a rattling teacher!



WIRTHIN.  (To Stephenson--aside.)  I'll skin her alive when I get my

hands on her!



M.  Komm, alle Verliebte! [They jump up, join hands, and sing in chorus--]

Du, Du, wie ich Dich liebe, Du, Du, liebest auch mich!  Die, die

zartlichsten Triebe--



S.  (Stepping forward.) Well!  [The girls throw themselves upon his neck

with enthusiasm.]



THE GIRLS.  Why, father!



S.  My darlings! [The young men hesitate a moment, they they add their

embrace, flinging themselves on Stephenson's neck, along with the girls.]



THE YOUNG MEN.  Why, father!



S.  (Struggling.) Oh, come, this is too thin!--too quick, I mean.  Let

go, you rascals!



GEO.  We'll never let go till you put us on the family list.



M.  Right! hold to him!



A.  Cling to him, Will!  [GRETCHEN rushes in and joins the general

embrace, but is snatched away by the WIRTHIN, crushed up against the

wall, and threatened with destruction.]



S.  (Suffocating.) All right, all right--have it your own way, you

quartette of swindlers!



W.  He's a darling!  Three cheers for papa!



EVERYBODY.  (Except Stephenson, who bows with hand on heart) Hip--hip--

hip: hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!



GR.  Der Tiger--ah-h-h!



WIRTHIN.  Sei ruhig, you hussy!



S.  Well, I've lost a couple of precious daughters, but I've gained a

couple of precious scamps to fill up the gap with; so it's all right.

I'm satisfied, and everybody's forgiven--[With mock threats at Gretchen.]



W.  Oh, wir werden fur Dich sorgen--dur herrliches Gretchen!



GR.  Danke schon!



M. (To Wirthin.) Und fur Sie auch; denn wenn Sie nicht so freundlich

gewesen waren, krank zu werden, wie waren wir je so glucklich geworden

wie jetzt?



WIRTHIN.  Well, dear, I was kind, but I didn't mean it.  But I ain't

sorry--not one bit--that I ain't.  [Tableau.]



S.  Come, now, the situation is full of hope, and grace, and tender

sentiment.  If I had in the least poetic gift, I know I could improvise

under such an inspiration (each girl nudges her sweetheart) something

worthy to--to--Is there no poet among us?  [Each youth turns solemnly his

back upon the other, and raises his hands in benediction over his

sweetheart's bowed head.]



BOTH YOUTHS AT ONCE.  Mir ist als ob ich die HandeAufs Haupt Dir legen

sollt'--[They turn and look reproachfully at each other--the girls

contemplate them with injured surprise.



S.  (Reflectively.) I think I've heard that before somewhere.



WIRTHIN.  (Aside.) Why, the very cats in Germany know it!



(Curtain.)





[1] [EXPLANATORY.]  I regard the idea of this play as a valuable

invention.  I call it the Patent Universally-Applicable Automatically-

Adjustable Language Drama.  This indicates that it is adjustable to any

tongue, and performable in any tongue.  The English portions of the play

are to remain just as they are, permanently; but you change the foreign

portions to any language you please, at will.  Do you see?  You at once

have the same old play in a new tongue.  And you can keep changing it

from language to language, until your private theatrical pupils have

become glib and at home in the speech of all nations.  Zum Beispiel,

suppose we wish to adjust the play to the French tongue.  First, we give

Mrs. Blumenthal and Gretchen French names.  Next, we knock the German

Meisterschaft sentences out of the first scene, and replace them with

sentences from the French Meisterschaft--like this, for instance: 'Je

voudrais faire des emplettes ce matin; voulez-vous avoir l'obligeance de

venir avec moi chez le tailleur francais?'  And so on.  Wherever you find

German, replace it with French, leaving the English parts undisturbed.

When you come to the long conversation in the second act, turn to any

pamphlet of your French Meisterschaft, and shovel in as much French talk

on any subject as will fill up the gaps left by the expunged German.

Example--page 423, French Meisterschaft: On dirait qu'il va faire chaud.

J'ai chaud.  J'ai extremement chaud.  Ah!  qu'il fait chaud!  Il fait une

chaleur etouffante!  L'air est brulant. Je meurs de chaleur.  Il est

presque impossible de supporter la chaleur.  Cela vous fait transpirer.

Mettons-nous a l'ombre.  Il fait du vent.  Il fait un vent froid.  Il

fait un tres agreable pour se promener aujourd'hui.  And so on, all the

way through.  It is very easy to adjust the play to any desired language.

Anybody can do it.













MY BOYHOOD DREAMS



The dreams of my boyhood?  No, they have not been realised.  For all who

are old, there is something infinitely pathetic about the subject which

you have chosen, for in no greyhead's case can it suggest any but one

thing--disappointment.  Disappointment is its own reason for its pain:

the quality or dignity of the hope that failed is a matter aside.  The

dreamer's valuation of the thing lost--not another man's--is the only

standard to measure it by, and his grief for it makes it large and great

and fine, and is worthy of our reverence in all cases.  We should

carefully remember that.  There are sixteen hundred million people in the

world.  Of these there is but a trifling number--in fact, only thirty-

eight millions--who can understand why a person should have an ambition

to belong to the French army; and why, belonging to it, he should be

proud of that; and why, having got down that far, he should want to go on

down, down, down till he struck the bottom and got on the General Staff;

and why, being stripped of this livery, or set free and reinvested with

his self-respect by any other quick and thorough process, let it be what

it might, he should wish to return to his strange serfage.  But no

matter: the estimate put upon these things by the fifteen hundred and

sixty millions is no proper measure of their value: the proper measure,

the just measure, is that which is put upon them by Dreyfus, and is

cipherable merely upon the littleness or the vastness of the

disappointment which their loss cost him.  There you have it: the measure

of the magnitude of a dream-failure is the measure of the disappointment

the failure cost the dreamer; the value, in others' eyes, of the thing

lost, has nothing to do with the matter.  With this straightening out and

classification of the dreamer's position to help us, perhaps we can put

ourselves in his place and respect his dream--Dreyfus's, and the dreams

our friends have cherished and reveal to us.  Some that I call to mind,

some that have been revealed to me, are curious enough; but we may not

smile at them, for they were precious to the dreamers, and their failure

has left scars which give them dignity and pathos.  With this theme in my

mind, dear heads that were brown when they and mine were young together

rise old and white before me now, beseeching me to speak for them, and

most lovingly will I do it.  Howells, Hay, Aldrich, Matthews, Stockton,

Cable, Remus--how their young hopes and ambitions come flooding back to

my memory now, out of the vague far past, the beautiful past, the

lamented past!  I remember it so well--that night we met together--it was

in Boston, and Mr. Fiends was there, and Mr. Osgood, Ralph Keeler, and

Boyle O'Reilly, lost to us now these many years--and under the seal of

confidence revealed to each other what our boyhood dreams had been: reams

which had not as yet been blighted, but over which was stealing the grey

of the night that was to come--a night which we prophetically felt, and

this feeling oppressed us and made us sad.  I remember that Howells's

voice broke twice, and it was only with great difficulty that he was able

to go on; in the end he wept.  For he had hoped to be an auctioneer.

He told of his early struggles to climb to his goal, and how at last he

attained to within a single step of the coveted summit.  But there

misfortune after misfortune assailed him, and he went down, and down, and

down, until now at last, weary and disheartened, he had for the present

given up the struggle and become the editor of the Atlantic Monthly.

This was in 1830.  Seventy years are gone since, and where now is his

dream?  It will never be fulfilled.  And it is best so; he is no longer

fitted for the position; no one would take him now; even if he got it,

he would not be able to do himself credit in it, on account of his

deliberateness of speech and lack of trained professional vivacity;

he would be put on real estate, and would have the pain of seeing younger

and abler men intrusted with the furniture and other such goods--goods

which draw a mixed and intellectually low order of customers, who must be

beguiled of their bids by a vulgar and specialised humour and sparkle,

accompanied with antics.  But it is not the thing lost that counts, but

only the disappointment the loss brings to the dreamer that had coveted

that thing and had set his heart of hearts upon it, and when we remember

this, a great wave of sorrow for Howells rises in our breasts, and we

wish for his sake that his fate could have been different.  At that time

Hay's boyhood dream was not yet past hope of realisation, but it was

fading, dimming, wasting away, and the wind of a growing apprehension was

blowing cold over the perishing summer of his life.  In the pride of his

young ambition he had aspired to be a steamboat mate; and in fancy saw

himself dominating a forecastle some day on the Mississippi and dictating

terms to roustabouts in high and wounding terms.  I look back now, from

this far distance of seventy years, and note with sorrow the stages of

that dream's destruction.  Hay's history is but Howells's, with

differences of detail.  Hay climbed high toward his ideal; when success

seemed almost sure, his foot upon the very gang-plank, his eye upon the

capstan, misfortune came and his fall began.  Down--down--down--ever

down: Private Secretary to the President; Colonel in the field; Charge

d'Affaires in Paris; Charge d'Affaires in Vienna; Poet; Editor of the

Tribune; Biographer of Lincoln; Ambassador to England; and now at last

there he lies--Secretary of State, Head of Foreign Affairs.  And he has

fallen like Lucifer, never to rise again.  And his dream--where now is

his dream?  Gone down in blood and tears with the dream of the

auctioneer.  And the young dream of Aldrich--where is that?  I remember

yet how he sat there that night fondling it, petting it; seeing it recede

and ever recede; trying to be reconciled and give it up, but not able yet

to bear the thought; for it had been his hope to be a horse-doctor.  He

also climbed high, but, like the others, fell; then fell again, and yet

again, and again and again.  And now at last he can fall no further.  He

is old now, he has ceased to struggle, and is only a poet.  No one would

risk a horse with him now.  His dream is over. Has any boyhood dream ever

been fulfilled?  I must doubt it.  Look at Brander Matthews.  He wanted

to be a cowboy.  What is he to-day?  Nothing but a professor in a

university.  Will he ever be a cowboy?  It is hardly conceivable.  Look

at Stockton.  What was Stockton's young dream?  He hoped to be a

barkeeper.  See where he has landed.  Is it better with Cable?  What was

Cable's young dream?  To be ring-master in the circus, and swell around

and crack the whip.  What is he to-day?  Nothing but a theologian and

novelist.  And Uncle Remus--what was his young dream?  To be a buccaneer.

Look at him now.  Ah, the dreams of our youth, how beautiful they are,

and how perishable!  The ruins of these might-have-beens, how pathetic!

The heart-secrets that were revealed that night now so long vanished, how

they touch me as I give them voice!  Those sweet privacies, how they

endeared us to each other!  We were under oath never to tell any of these

things, and I have always kept that oath inviolate when speaking with

persons whom I thought not worthy to hear them.  Oh, our lost Youth--God

keep its memory green in our hearts! for Age is upon us, with the

indignity of its infirmities, and Death beckons!













TO THE ABOVE OLD PEOPLE





Sleep! for the Sun that scores another Day

Against the Tale allotted You to stay,

Reminding You, is Risen, and now

Serves Notice--ah, ignore it while You stay!



The chill Wind blew, and those who stood before

The Tavern murmured, 'Having drunk his Score,

Why tarries He with empty Cup? Behold,

The Wine of Youth once poured, is poured no more



'Come, leave the Cup, and on the Winter's Snow

Your Summer Garment of Enjoyment throw:

Your Tide of Life is ebbing fast, and it,

Exhausted once, for You no more shall flow.'



While yet the Phantom of false Youth was mine,

I heard a Voice from out the Darkness whine,

'O Youth, O whither gone? Return,

And bathe my Age in thy reviving Wine.'



In this subduing Draught of tender green

And kindly Absinth, with its wimpling Sheen

Of dusky half-lights, let me drown

The haunting Pathos of the Might-Have-Been.



For every nickeled Joy, marred and brief,

We pay some day its Weight in golden Grief

Mined from our Hearts. Ah, murmur not--

From this one-sided Bargain dream of no Relief!



The Joy of Life, that streaming through their Veins

Tumultuous swept, falls slack--and wanes

The Glory in the Eye--and one by one

Life's Pleasures perish and make place for Pains.



Whether one hide in some secluded Nook--

Whether at Liverpool or Sandy Hook--

'Tis one. Old Age will search him out--and He--

He--He--when ready will know where to look.



From Cradle unto Grave I keep a House

OF Entertainment where may drowse

Bacilli and kindred Germs--or feed--or breed

Their festering Species in a deep Carouse.



Think--in this battered Caravanserai,

Whose Portals open stand all Night and Day,

How Microbe after Microbe with his Pomp

Arrives unasked, and comes to stay.



Our ivory Teeth, confessing to the Lust

Of masticating, once, now own Disgust

Of Clay-Plug'd Cavities--full soon our Snags

Are emptied, and our Mouths are filled with Dust.



Our Gums forsake the Teeth and tender grow,

And fat, like over-riped Figs--we know

The Sign--the Riggs' Disease is ours, and we

Must list this Sorrow, add another Woe;



Our Lungs begin to fail and soon we Cough,

And chilly Streaks play up our Backs, and off

Our fever'd Foreheads drips an icy Sweat--

We scoffered before, but now we may not scoff.



Some for the Bunions that afflict us prate

Of Plasters unsurpassable, and hate

To Cut a corn--ah cut, and let the Plaster go,

Nor murmur if the Solace come too late.



Some for the Honours of Old Age, and some

Long for its Respite from the Hum

And Clash of sordid Strife--O Fools,

The Past should teach them what's to Come:



Lo, for the Honours, cold Neglect instead!

For Respite, disputatious Heirs a Bed

Of Thorns for them will furnish. Go,

Seek not Here for Peace--but Yonder--with the Dead.



For whether Zal and Rustam heed this Sign,

And even smitten thus, will not repine,

Let Zal and Rustam shuffle as they may,

The Fine once levied they must Cash the Fine.



O Voices of the Long Ago that were so dear!

Fall'n Silent, now, for many a Mould'ring Year,

O whither are ye flown? Come back,

And break my heart, but bless my grieving ear.



Some happy Day my Voice will Silent fall,

And answer not when some that love it call:

Be glad for Me when this you note--and think

I've found the Voices lost, beyond the Pall.



So let me grateful drain the Magic Bowl

That medicines hurt Minds and on the Soul

The Healing of its Peace doth lay--if then

Death claim me--Welcome be his Dole!



SANNA, SWEDEN, September 15th.





Private.--If you don't know what Riggs's Disease of the Teeth is, the

dentist will tell you.  I've had it--and it is more than interesting.

                                             M.T.





EDITORIAL NOTE



Fearing that there might be some mistake, we submitted a proof of this

article to the (American) gentlemen named in it, and asked them to

correct any errors of detail that might have crept in among the facts.

They reply with some asperity that errors cannot creep in among facts

where there are no facts for them to creep in among; and that none are

discoverable in this article, but only baseless aberrations of a

disordered mind.  They have no recollection of any such night in Boston,

nor elsewhere; and in their opinion there was never any such night.  They

have met Mr. Twain, but have had the prudence not to intrust any

privacies to him--particularly under oath; and they think they now see

that this prudence was justified, since he has been untrustworthy enough

to even betray privacies which had no existence.  Further, they think it

a strange thing that Mr. Twain, who was never invited to meddle with

anybody's boyhood dreams but his own, has been so gratuitously anxious to

see that other people's are placed before the world that he has quite

lost his head in his zeal and forgotten to make any mention of his own at

all.  Provided we insert this explanation, they are willing to let his

article pass; otherwise they must require its suppression in the interest

of truth.



P.S.--These replies having left us in some perplexity, and also in some

fear lest they distress Mr. Twain if published without his privity, we

judged it but fair to submit them to him and give him an opportunity to

defend himself.  But he does not seem to be troubled, or even aware that

he is in a delicate situation.  He merely says: 'Do not worry about those

former young people.  They can write good literature, but when it comes

to speaking the truth, they have not had my training.--MARK TWAIN.'

The last sentence seems obscure, and liable to an unfortunate

construction.  It plainly needs refashioning, but we cannot take the

responsibility of doing it.--EDITOR.













IN MEMORIAM



OLIVIA SUSAN CLEMENS



DIED AUGUST 18, 1896; AGED 24



In a fair valley--oh, how long ago, how long ago!--

Where all the broad expanse was clothed in vines,

And fruitful fields and meadows starred with flowers,

And clear streams wandered at their idle will;

And still lakes slept, their burnished surfaces

A dream of painted clouds, and soft airs

Went whispering with odorous breath,

And all was peace--in that fair vale,

Shut from the troubled world, a nameless hamlet drowsed.



Hard by, apart, a temple stood;

And strangers from the outer world

Passing, noted it with tired eyes,

And seeing, saw it not:

A glimpse of its fair form--an answering momentary thrill--

And they passed on, careless and unaware.



They could not know the cunning of its make;

They could not know the secret shut up in its heart;

Only the dwellers of the hamlet knew;

They knew that what seemed brass was gold;

What marble seemed, was ivory;

The glories that enriched the milky surfaces--

The trailing vines, and interwoven flowers,

And tropic birds a-wing, clothed all in tinted fires--

They knew for what they were, not what they seemed:

Encrustings all of gems, not perishable splendours of the brush.

They knew the secret spot where one must stand--

They knew the surest hour, the proper slant of sun--

To gather in, unmarred, undimmed,

The vision of the fane in all its fairy grace,

A fainting dream against the opal sky.



And more than this. They knew

That in the temple's inmost place a spirit dwelt,

Made all of light!

For glimpses of it they had caught

Beyond the curtains when the priests

That served the altar came and went.



All loved that light and held it dear

That had this partial grace;

But the adoring priests alone who lived

By day and night submerged in its immortal glow

Knew all its power and depth, and could appraise the loss

If it should fade and fail and come no more.



All this was long ago--so long ago!



The light burned on; and they that worshipped it,

And they that caught its flash at intervals and held it dear,

Contented lived in its secure possession. Ah,

How long ago it was!



And then when they

Were nothing fearing, and God's peace was in the air,

And none was prophesying harm,

The vast disaster fell:

Where stood the temple when the sun went down

Was vacant desert when it rose again!



Ah yes! 'Tis ages since it chanced!

So long ago it was,

That from the memory of the hamlet-folk the Light has passed--

They scarce believing, now, that once it was,

Or if believing, yet not missing it,

And reconciled to have it gone.



Not so the priests! Oh, not so

The stricken ones that served it day and night,

Adoring it, abiding in the healing of its peace:

They stand, yet, where erst they stood

Speechless in that dim morning long ago;

And still they gaze, as then they gazed,

And murmur, 'It will come again;

It knows our pain--it knows--it knows--

Ah surely it will come again.



S.L.C.



LAKE LUCERNE, August 18, 1897.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Hadleyburg Other Stories,

by Mark Twain













WHAT IS MAN?  AND OTHER ESSAYS OF MARK TWAIN



    (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910)







CONTENTS





What Is Man?



The Death of Jean



The Turning-Point of My Life



How to Make History Dates Stick



The Memorable Assassination



A Scrap of Curious History



Switzerland, the Cradle of Liberty



At the Shrine of St. Wagner



William Dean Howells



English as She is Taught



A Simplified Alphabet



As Concerns Interpreting the Deity



Concerning Tobacco



Taming the Bicycle



Is Shakespeare Dead?



-----------------------------------------------------------------







 WHAT IS MAN?





I



a. Man the Machine.  b.  Personal Merit





[The Old Man and the Young Man had been conversing.  The Old

Man had asserted that the human being is merely a machine, and

nothing more.  The Young Man objected, and asked him to go into

particulars and furnish his reasons for his position.]



Old Man.  What are the materials of which a steam-engine is made?



Young Man.  Iron, steel, brass, white-metal, and so on.



O.M.  Where are these found?



Y.M.  In the rocks.



O.M.  In a pure state?



Y.M.  No--in ores.



O.M.  Are the metals suddenly deposited in the ores?



Y.M.  No--it is the patient work of countless ages.



O.M.  You could make the engine out of the rocks themselves?



Y.M.  Yes, a brittle one and not valuable.



O.M.  You would not require much, of such an engine as that?



Y.M.  No--substantially nothing.



O.M.  To make a fine and capable engine, how would you

proceed?



Y.M.  Drive tunnels and shafts into the hills; blast out the

iron ore; crush it, smelt it, reduce it to pig-iron; put some of

it through the Bessemer process and make steel of it.  Mine and

treat and combine several metals of which brass is made.



O.M.  Then?



Y.M.  Out of the perfected result, build the fine engine.



O.M.  You would require much of this one?



Y.M.  Oh, indeed yes.



O.M.  It could drive lathes, drills, planers, punches,

polishers, in a word all the cunning machines of a great factory?



Y.M.  It could.



O.M.  What could the stone engine do?



Y.M.  Drive a sewing-machine, possibly--nothing more,

perhaps.



O.M.  Men would admire the other engine and rapturously

praise it?



Y.M.  Yes.



O.M.  But not the stone one?



Y.M.  No.



O.M.  The merits of the metal machine would be far above

those of the stone one?



Y.M.  Of course.



O.M.  Personal merits?



Y.M.  PERSONAL merits?  How do you mean?



O.M.  It would be personally entitled to the credit of its

own performance?



Y.M.  The engine?  Certainly not.



O.M.  Why not?



Y.M.  Because its performance is not personal.  It is the

result of the law of construction.  It is not a MERIT that it

does the things which it is set to do--it can't HELP doing them.



O.M.  And it is not a personal demerit in the stone machine

that it does so little?



Y.M.  Certainly not.  It does no more and no less than the

law of its make permits and compels it to do.  There is nothing

PERSONAL about it; it cannot choose.  In this process of "working

up to the matter" is it your idea to work up to the proposition

that man and a machine are about the same thing, and that there

is no personal merit in the performance of either?



O.M.  Yes--but do not be offended; I am meaning no offense.

What makes the grand difference between the stone engine and the

steel one?  Shall we call it training, education?  Shall we call

the stone engine a savage and the steel one a civilized man?  The

original rock contained the stuff of which the steel one was

built--but along with a lot of sulphur and stone and other

obstructing inborn heredities, brought down from the old geologic

ages--prejudices, let us call them.  Prejudices which nothing

within the rock itself had either POWER to remove or any DESIRE

to remove.  Will you take note of that phrase?



Y.M.  Yes.  I have written it down; "Prejudices which

nothing within the rock itself had either power to remove or any

desire to remove."  Go on.



O.M.  Prejudices must be removed by OUTSIDE INFLUENCES or

not at all.  Put that down.



Y.M.  Very well; "Must be removed by outside influences or

not at all."  Go on.



O.M.  The iron's prejudice against ridding itself of the

cumbering rock.  To make it more exact, the iron's absolute

INDIFFERENCE as to whether the rock be removed or not.  Then

comes the OUTSIDE INFLUENCE and grinds the rock to powder and

sets the ore free.  The IRON in the ore is still captive.  An

OUTSIDE INFLUENCE smelts it free of the clogging ore.  The iron

is emancipated iron, now, but indifferent to further progress.

An OUTSIDE INFLUENCE beguiles it into the Bessemer furnace and

refines it into steel of the first quality.  It is educated, now

--its training is complete.  And it has reached its limit.  By no

possible process can it be educated into GOLD.  Will you set that

down?



Y.M.  Yes.  "Everything has its limit--iron ore cannot be

educated into gold."



O.M.  There are gold men, and tin men, and copper men, and

leaden mean, and steel men, and so on--and each has the

limitations of his nature, his heredities, his training, and his

environment.  You can build engines out of each of these metals,

and they will all perform, but you must not require the weak ones

to do equal work with the strong ones.  In each case, to get the

best results, you must free the metal from its obstructing

prejudicial ones by education--smelting, refining, and so forth.



Y.M.  You have arrived at man, now?



O.M.  Yes.  Man the machine--man the impersonal engine.

Whatsoever a man is, is due to his MAKE, and to the INFLUENCES

brought to bear upon it by his heredities, his habitat, his

associations.  He is moved, directed, COMMANDED, by EXTERIOR

influences--SOLELY.  He ORIGINATES nothing, not even a thought.



Y.M.  Oh, come!  Where did I get my opinion that this which

you are talking is all foolishness?



O.M.  It is a quite natural opinion--indeed an inevitable

opinion--but YOU did not create the materials out of which it is

formed.  They are odds and ends of thoughts, impressions,

feelings, gathered unconsciously from a thousand books, a

thousand conversations, and from streams of thought and feeling

which have flowed down into your heart and brain out of the

hearts and brains of centuries of ancestors.  PERSONALLY you did

not create even the smallest microscopic fragment of the

materials out of which your opinion is made; and personally you

cannot claim even the slender merit of PUTTING THE BORROWED

MATERIALS TOGETHER.  That was done AUTOMATICALLY--by your mental

machinery, in strict accordance with the law of that machinery's

construction.  And you not only did not make that machinery

yourself, but you have NOT EVEN ANY COMMAND OVER IT.



Y.M.  This is too much.  You think I could have formed no

opinion but that one?



O.M.  Spontaneously?  No.  And YOU DID NOT FORM THAT ONE;

your machinery did it for you--automatically and instantly,

without reflection or the need of it.



Y.M.  Suppose I had reflected?  How then?



O.M.  Suppose you try?



Y.M.  (AFTER A QUARTER OF AN HOUR.)  I have reflected.



O.M.  You mean you have tried to change your opinion--as an

experiment?



Y.M.  Yes.



O.M.  With success?



Y.M.  No.  It remains the same; it is impossible to change

it.



O.M.  I am sorry, but you see, yourself, that your mind is

merely a machine, nothing more.  You have no command over it, it

has no command over itself--it is worked SOLELY FROM THE OUTSIDE.

That is the law of its make; it is the law of all machines.



Y.M.  Can't I EVER change one of these automatic opinions?



O.M.  No.  You can't yourself, but EXTERIOR INFLUENCES can

do it.



Y.M.  And exterior ones ONLY?



O.M.  Yes--exterior ones only.



Y.M.  That position is untenable--I may say ludicrously

untenable.



O.M.  What makes you think so?



Y.M.  I don't merely think it, I know it.  Suppose I resolve

to enter upon a course of thought, and study, and reading, with

the deliberate purpose of changing that opinion; and suppose I

succeed.  THAT is not the work of an exterior impulse, the whole

of it is mine and personal; for I originated the project.



O.M.  Not a shred of it.  IT GREW OUT OF THIS TALK WITH ME.

But for that it would not have occurred to you.  No man ever

originates anything.  All his thoughts, all his impulses, come

FROM THE OUTSIDE.



Y.M.  It's an exasperating subject.  The FIRST man had

original thoughts, anyway; there was nobody to draw from.



O.M.  It is a mistake.  Adam's thoughts came to him from the

outside.  YOU have a fear of death.  You did not invent that--you

got it from outside, from talking and teaching.  Adam had no fear

of death--none in the world.



Y.M.  Yes, he had.



O.M.  When he was created?



Y.M.  No.



O.M.  When, then?



Y.M.  When he was threatened with it.



O.M.  Then it came from OUTSIDE.  Adam is quite big enough;

let us not try to make a god of him.  NONE BUT GODS HAVE EVER HAD

A THOUGHT WHICH DID NOT COME FROM THE OUTSIDE.  Adam probably had

a good head, but it was of no sort of use to him until it was

filled up FROM THE OUTSIDE.  He was not able to invent the

triflingest little thing with it.  He had not a shadow of a

notion of the difference between good and evil--he had to get the

idea FROM THE OUTSIDE.  Neither he nor Eve was able to originate

the idea that it was immodest to go naked; the knowledge came in

with the apple FROM THE OUTSIDE.  A man's brain is so constructed

that IT CAN ORIGINATE NOTHING WHATSOEVER.  It can only use

material obtained OUTSIDE.  It is merely a machine; and it works

automatically, not by will-power.  IT HAS NO COMMAND OVER ITSELF,

ITS OWNER HAS NO COMMAND OVER IT.



Y.M.  Well, never mind Adam:  but certainly Shakespeare's

creations--



O.M.  No, you mean Shakespeare's IMITATIONS.  Shakespeare

created nothing.  He correctly observed, and he marvelously

painted.  He exactly portrayed people whom GOD had created; but

he created none himself.  Let us spare him the slander of

charging him with trying.  Shakespeare could not create.  HE WAS

A MACHINE, AND MACHINES DO NOT CREATE.



Y.M.  Where WAS his excellence, then?



O.M.  In this.  He was not a sewing-machine, like you and

me; he was a Gobelin loom.  The threads and the colors came into

him FROM THE OUTSIDE; outside influences, suggestions,

EXPERIENCES (reading, seeing plays, playing plays, borrowing

ideas, and so on), framed the patterns in his mind and started up

his complex and admirable machinery, and IT AUTOMATICALLY turned

out that pictured and gorgeous fabric which still compels the

astonishment of the world.  If Shakespeare had been born and bred

on a barren and unvisited rock in the ocean his mighty intellect

would have had no OUTSIDE MATERIAL to work with, and could have

invented none; and NO OUTSIDE INFLUENCES, teachings, moldings,

persuasions, inspirations, of a valuable sort, and could have

invented none; and so Shakespeare would have produced nothing.

In Turkey he would have produced something--something up to the

highest limit of Turkish influences, associations, and training.

In France he would have produced something better--something up

to the highest limit of the French influences and training.  In

England he rose to the highest limit attainable through the

OUTSIDE HELPS AFFORDED BY THAT LAND'S IDEALS, INFLUENCES, AND

TRAINING.  You and I are but sewing-machines.  We must turn out

what we can; we must do our endeavor and care nothing at all when

the unthinking reproach us for not turning out Gobelins.



Y.M.  And so we are mere machines!  And machines may not

boast, nor feel proud of their performance, nor claim personal

merit for it, nor applause and praise.  It is an infamous

doctrine.



O.M.  It isn't a doctrine, it is merely a fact.



Y.M.  I suppose, then, there is no more merit in being brave

than in being a coward?



O.M.  PERSONAL merit?  No.  A brave man does not CREATE his

bravery.  He is entitled to no personal credit for possessing it.

It is born to him.  A baby born with a billion dollars--where is

the personal merit in that?  A baby born with nothing--where is

the personal demerit in that?  The one is fawned upon, admired,

worshiped, by sycophants, the other is neglected and despised--

where is the sense in it?



Y.M.  Sometimes a timid man sets himself the task of

conquering his cowardice and becoming brave--and succeeds.  What

do you say to that?



O.M.  That it shows the value of TRAINING IN RIGHT

DIRECTIONS OVER TRAINING IN WRONG ONES.  Inestimably valuable is

training, influence, education, in right directions--TRAINING

ONE'S SELF-APPROBATION TO ELEVATE ITS IDEALS.



Y.M.  But as to merit--the personal merit of the victorious

coward's project and achievement?



O.M.  There isn't any.  In the world's view he is a worthier

man than he was before, but HE didn't achieve the change--the

merit of it is not his.



Y.M.  Whose, then?



O.M.  His MAKE, and the influences which wrought upon it

from the outside.



Y.M.  His make?



O.M.  To start with, he was NOT utterly and completely a

coward, or the influences would have had nothing to work upon.

He was not afraid of a cow, though perhaps of a bull:  not afraid

of a woman, but afraid of a man.  There was something to build

upon.  There was a SEED.  No seed, no plant.  Did he make that

seed himself, or was it born in him?  It was no merit of HIS that

the seed was there.



Y.M.  Well, anyway, the idea of CULTIVATING it, the

resolution to cultivate it, was meritorious, and he originated

that.



O.M.  He did nothing of the kind.  It came whence ALL

impulses, good or bad, come--from OUTSIDE.  If that timid man had

lived all his life in a community of human rabbits, had never

read of brave deeds, had never heard speak of them, had never

heard any one praise them nor express envy of the heroes that had

done them, he would have had no more idea of bravery than Adam

had of modesty, and it could never by any possibility have

occurred to him to RESOLVE to become brave.  He COULD NOT

ORIGINATE THE IDEA--it had to come to him from the OUTSIDE.  And

so, when he heard bravery extolled and cowardice derided, it woke

him up.  He was ashamed.  Perhaps his sweetheart turned up her

nose and said, "I am told that you are a coward!"  It was not HE

that turned over the new leaf--she did it for him.  HE must not

strut around in the merit of it--it is not his.



Y.M.  But, anyway, he reared the plant after she watered the

seed.



O.M.  No.  OUTSIDE INFLUENCES reared it.  At the command--

and trembling--he marched out into the field--with other soldiers

and in the daytime, not alone and in the dark.  He had the

INFLUENCE OF EXAMPLE, he drew courage from his comrades' courage;

he was afraid, and wanted to run, but he did not dare; he was

AFRAID to run, with all those soldiers looking on.  He was

progressing, you see--the moral fear of shame had risen superior

to the physical fear of harm.  By the end of the campaign

experience will have taught him that not ALL who go into battle

get hurt--an outside influence which will be helpful to him; and

he will also have learned how sweet it is to be praised for

courage and be huzza'd at with tear-choked voices as the war-worn

regiment marches past the worshiping multitude with flags flying

and the drums beating.  After that he will be as securely brave

as any veteran in the army--and there will not be a shade nor

suggestion of PERSONAL MERIT in it anywhere; it will all have

come from the OUTSIDE.  The Victoria Cross breeds more heroes

than--



Y.M.  Hang it, where is the sense in his becoming brave if

he is to get no credit for it?



O.M.  Your question will answer itself presently.  It

involves an important detail of man's make which we have not yet

touched upon.



Y.M.  What detail is that?



O.M.  The impulse which moves a person to do things--the

only impulse that ever moves a person to do a thing.



Y.M.  The ONLY one!  Is there but one?



O.M.  That is all.  There is only one.



Y.M.  Well, certainly that is a strange enough doctrine.

What is the sole impulse that ever moves a person to do a thing?



O.M.  The impulse to CONTENT HIS OWN SPIRIT--the NECESSITY

of contenting his own spirit and WINNING ITS APPROVAL.



Y.M.  Oh, come, that won't do!



O.M.  Why won't it?



Y.M.  Because it puts him in the attitude of always looking

out for his own comfort and advantage; whereas an unselfish man

often does a thing solely for another person's good when it is a

positive disadvantage to himself.



O.M.  It is a mistake.  The act must do HIM good, FIRST;

otherwise he will not do it.  He may THINK he is doing it solely

for the other person's sake, but it is not so; he is contenting

his own spirit first--the other's person's benefit has to always

take SECOND place.



Y.M.  What a fantastic idea!  What becomes of self-

sacrifice?  Please answer me that.



O.M.  What is self-sacrifice?



Y.M.  The doing good to another person where no shadow nor

suggestion of benefit to one's self can result from it.







II



Man's Sole Impulse--the Securing of His Own Approval





Old Man.  There have been instances of it--you think?



Young Man.  INSTANCES?  Millions of them!



O.M.  You have not jumped to conclusions?  You have examined

them--critically?



Y.M.  They don't need it:  the acts themselves reveal the

golden impulse back of them.



O.M.  For instance?



Y.M.  Well, then, for instance.  Take the case in the book

here.  The man lives three miles up-town.  It is bitter cold,

snowing hard, midnight.  He is about to enter the horse-car when

a gray and ragged old woman, a touching picture of misery, puts

out her lean hand and begs for rescue from hunger and death.  The

man finds that he has a quarter in his pocket, but he does not

hesitate:  he gives it her and trudges home through the storm.

There--it is noble, it is beautiful; its grace is marred by no

fleck or blemish or suggestion of self-interest.



O.M.  What makes you think that?



Y.M.  Pray what else could I think?  Do you imagine that

there is some other way of looking at it?



O.M.  Can you put yourself in the man's place and tell me

what he felt and what he thought?



Y.M.  Easily.  The sight of that suffering old face pierced

his generous heart with a sharp pain.  He could not bear it.  He

could endure the three-mile walk in the storm, but he could not

endure the tortures his conscience would suffer if he turned his

back and left that poor old creature to perish.  He would not

have been able to sleep, for thinking of it.



O.M.  What was his state of mind on his way home?



Y.M.  It was a state of joy which only the self-sacrificer

knows.  His heart sang, he was unconscious of the storm.



O.M.  He felt well?



Y.M.  One cannot doubt it.



O.M.  Very well.  Now let us add up the details and see how

much he got for his twenty-five cents.  Let us try to find out

the REAL why of his making the investment.  In the first place HE

couldn't bear the pain which the old suffering face gave him.  So

he was thinking of HIS pain--this good man.  He must buy a salve

for it.  If he did not succor the old woman HIS conscience would

torture him all the way home.  Thinking of HIS pain again.  He

must buy relief for that.  If he didn't relieve the old woman HE

would not get any sleep.  He must buy some sleep--still thinking

of HIMSELF, you see.  Thus, to sum up, he bought himself free of

a sharp pain in his heart, he bought himself free of the tortures

of a waiting conscience, he bought a whole night's sleep--all for

twenty-five cents!  It should make Wall Street ashamed of itself.

On his way home his heart was joyful, and it sang--profit on top

of profit!  The impulse which moved the man to succor the old

woman was--FIRST--to CONTENT HIS OWN SPIRIT; secondly to relieve

HER sufferings.  Is it your opinion that men's acts proceed from

one central and unchanging and inalterable impulse, or from a

variety of impulses?



Y.M.  From a variety, of course--some high and fine and

noble, others not.  What is your opinion?



O.M.  Then there is but ONE law, one source.



Y.M.  That both the noblest impulses and the basest proceed

from that one source?



O.M.  Yes.



Y.M.  Will you put that law into words?



O.M.  Yes.  This is the law, keep it in your mind.  FROM HIS

CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE A MAN NEVER DOES A SINGLE THING WHICH HAS ANY

FIRST AND FOREMOST OBJECT BUT ONE--TO SECURE PEACE OF MIND,

SPIRITUAL COMFORT, FOR HIMSELF.



Y.M.  Come!  He never does anything for any one else's

comfort, spiritual or physical?



O.M.  No.  EXCEPT ON THOSE DISTINCT TERMS--that it shall

FIRST secure HIS OWN spiritual comfort.  Otherwise he will not do

it.



Y.M.  It will be easy to expose the falsity of that

proposition.



O.M.  For instance?



Y.M.  Take that noble passion, love of country, patriotism.

A man who loves peace and dreads pain, leaves his pleasant home

and his weeping family and marches out to manfully expose himself

to hunger, cold, wounds, and death.  Is that seeking spiritual

comfort?



O.M.  He loves peace and dreads pain?



Y.M.  Yes.



O.M.  Then perhaps there is something that he loves MORE

than he loves peace--THE APPROVAL OF HIS NEIGHBORS AND THE

PUBLIC.  And perhaps there is something which he dreads more than

he dreads pain--the DISAPPROVAL of his neighbors and the public.

If he is sensitive to shame he will go to the field--not because

his spirit will be ENTIRELY comfortable there, but because it

will be more comfortable there than it would be if he remained at

home.  He will always do the thing which will bring him the MOST

mental comfort--for that is THE SOLE LAW OF HIS LIFE.  He leaves

the weeping family behind; he is sorry to make them

uncomfortable, but not sorry enough to sacrifice his OWN comfort

to secure theirs.



Y.M.  Do you really believe that mere public opinion could

force a timid and peaceful man to--



O.M.  Go to war?  Yes--public opinion can force some men to

do ANYTHING.



Y.M.  ANYTHING?



O.M.  Yes--anything.



Y.M.  I don't believe that.  Can it force a right-principled

man to do a wrong thing?



O.M.  Yes.



Y.M.  Can it force a kind man to do a cruel thing?



O.M.  Yes.



Y.M.  Give an instance.



O.M.  Alexander Hamilton was a conspicuously high-principled

man.  He regarded dueling as wrong, and as opposed to the

teachings of religion--but in deference to PUBLIC OPINION he

fought a duel.  He deeply loved his family, but to buy public

approval he treacherously deserted them and threw his life away,

ungenerously leaving them to lifelong sorrow in order that he

might stand well with a foolish world.  In the then condition of

the public standards of honor he could not have been comfortable

with the stigma upon him of having refused to fight.  The

teachings of religion, his devotion to his family, his kindness

of heart, his high principles, all went for nothing when they

stood in the way of his spiritual comfort.  A man will do

ANYTHING, no matter what it is, TO SECURE HIS SPIRITUAL COMFORT;

and he can neither be forced nor persuaded to any act which has

not that goal for its object.  Hamilton's act was compelled by

the inborn necessity of contenting his own spirit; in this it was

like all the other acts of his life, and like all the acts of all

men's lives.  Do you see where the kernel of the matter lies?  A

man cannot be comfortable without HIS OWN approval.  He will

secure the largest share possible of that, at all costs, all

sacrifices.



Y.M.  A minute ago you said Hamilton fought that duel to get

PUBLIC approval.



O.M.  I did.  By refusing to fight the duel he would have

secured his family's approval and a large share of his own; but

the public approval was more valuable in his eyes than all other

approvals put together--in the earth or above it; to secure that

would furnish him the MOST comfort of mind, the most SELF-

approval; so he sacrificed all other values to get it.



Y.M.  Some noble souls have refused to fight duels, and have

manfully braved the public contempt.



O.M.  They acted ACCORDING TO THEIR MAKE.  They valued their

principles and the approval of their families ABOVE the public

approval.  They took the thing they valued MOST and let the rest

go.  They took what would give them the LARGEST share of PERSONAL

CONTENTMENT AND APPROVAL--a man ALWAYS does.  Public opinion

cannot force that kind of men to go to the wars.  When they go it

is for other reasons.  Other spirit-contenting reasons.



Y.M.  Always spirit-contenting reasons?



O.M.  There are no others.



Y.M.  When a man sacrifices his life to save a little child

from a burning building, what do you call that?



O.M.  When he does it, it is the law of HIS make.  HE can't

bear to see the child in that peril (a man of a different make

COULD), and so he tries to save the child, and loses his life.

But he has got what he was after--HIS OWN APPROVAL.



Y.M.  What do you call Love, Hate, Charity, Revenge,

Humanity, Magnanimity, Forgiveness?



O.M.  Different results of the one Master Impulse:  the

necessity of securing one's self approval.  They wear diverse

clothes and are subject to diverse moods, but in whatsoever ways

they masquerade they are the SAME PERSON all the time.  To change

the figure, the COMPULSION that moves a man--and there is but the

one--is the necessity of securing the contentment of his own

spirit.  When it stops, the man is dead.



Y.M.  That is foolishness.  Love--



O.M.  Why, love is that impulse, that law, in its most

uncompromising form.  It will squander life and everything else

on its object.  Not PRIMARILY for the object's sake, but for ITS

OWN.  When its object is happy IT is happy--and that is what it

is unconsciously after.



Y.M.  You do not even except the lofty and gracious passion

of mother-love?



O.M.  No, IT is the absolute slave of that law.  The mother

will go naked to clothe her child; she will starve that it may

have food; suffer torture to save it from pain; die that it may

live.  She takes a living PLEASURE in making these sacrifices.

SHE DOES IT FOR THAT REWARD--that self-approval, that

contentment, that peace, that comfort.  SHE WOULD DO IT FOR YOUR

CHILD IF SHE COULD GET THE SAME PAY.



Y.M.  This is an infernal philosophy of yours.



O.M.  It isn't a philosophy, it is a fact.



Y.M.  Of course you must admit that there are some acts which--



O.M.  No.  There is NO act, large or small, fine or mean,

which springs from any motive but the one--the necessity of

appeasing and contenting one's own spirit.



Y.M.  The world's philanthropists--



O.M.  I honor them, I uncover my head to them--from habit

and training; and THEY could not know comfort or happiness or

self-approval if they did not work and spend for the unfortunate.

It makes THEM happy to see others happy; and so with money and

labor they buy what they are after--HAPPINESS, SELF-APPROVAL.

Why don't miners do the same thing?  Because they can get a

thousandfold more happiness by NOT doing it.  There is no

other reason.  They follow the law of their make.



Y.M.  What do you say of duty for duty's sake?



O.M.  That IS DOES NOT EXIST.  Duties are not performed for

duty's SAKE, but because their NEGLECT would make the man

UNCOMFORTABLE.  A man performs but ONE duty--the duty of

contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to

himself.  If he can most satisfyingly perform this sole and only

duty by HELPING his neighbor, he will do it; if he can most

satisfyingly perform it by SWINDLING his neighbor, he will do it.

But he always looks out for Number One--FIRST; the effects upon

others are a SECONDARY matter.  Men pretend to self-sacrifices,

but this is a thing which, in the ordinary value of the phrase,

DOES NOT EXIST AND HAS NOT EXISTED.  A man often honestly THINKS

he is sacrificing himself merely and solely for some one else,

but he is deceived; his bottom impulse is to content a

requirement of his nature and training, and thus acquire peace

for his soul.



Y.M.  Apparently, then, all men, both good and bad ones,

devote their lives to contenting their consciences.



O.M.  Yes.  That is a good enough name for it:  Conscience--

that independent Sovereign, that insolent absolute Monarch inside

of a man who is the man's Master.  There are all kinds of

consciences, because there are all kinds of men.  You satisfy an

assassin's conscience in one way, a philanthropist's in another,

a miser's in another, a burglar's in still another.  As a GUIDE

or INCENTIVE to any authoritatively prescribed line of morals or

conduct (leaving TRAINING out of the account), a man's conscience

is totally valueless.  I know a kind-hearted Kentuckian whose

self-approval was lacking--whose conscience was troubling him, to

phrase it with exactness--BECAUSE HE HAD NEGLECTED TO KILL A

CERTAIN MAN--a man whom he had never seen.  The stranger had

killed this man's friend in a fight, this man's Kentucky training

made it a duty to kill the stranger for it.  He neglected his

duty--kept dodging it, shirking it, putting it off, and his

unrelenting conscience kept persecuting him for this conduct.  At

last, to get ease of mind, comfort, self-approval, he hunted up

the stranger and took his life.  It was an immense act of SELF-

SACRIFICE (as per the usual definition), for he did not want to

do it, and he never would have done it if he could have bought a

contented spirit and an unworried mind at smaller cost.  But we

are so made that we will pay ANYTHING for that contentment--even

another man's life.



Y.M.  You spoke a moment ago of TRAINED consciences.  You mean

that we are not BORN with consciences competent to guide us aright?



O.M.  If we were, children and savages would know right from wrong,

and not have to be taught it.



Y.M.  But consciences can be TRAINED?



O.M.  Yes.



Y.M.  Of course by parents, teachers, the pulpit, and books.



O.M.  Yes--they do their share; they do what they can.



Y.M.  And the rest is done by--



O.M.  Oh, a million unnoticed influences--for good or bad:

influences which work without rest during every waking moment of

a man's life, from cradle to grave.



Y.M.  You have tabulated these?



O.M.  Many of them--yes.



Y.M.  Will you read me the result?



O.M.  Another time, yes.  It would take an hour.



Y.M.  A conscience can be trained to shun evil and prefer good?



O.M.  Yes.



Y.M.  But will it for spirit-contenting reasons only?



O.M.  It CAN'T be trained to do a thing for any OTHER reason.

The thing is impossible.



Y.M.  There MUST be a genuinely and utterly self-sacrificing

act recorded in human history somewhere.



O.M.  You are young.  You have many years before you.

Search one out.



Y.M.  It does seem to me that when a man sees a fellow-being

struggling in the water and jumps in at the risk of his life to

save him--



O.M.  Wait.  Describe the MAN.  Describe the FELLOW-BEING.

State if there is an AUDIENCE present; or if they are ALONE.



Y.M.  What have these things to do with the splendid act?



O.M.  Very much.  Shall we suppose, as a beginning, that the

two are alone, in a solitary place, at midnight?



Y.M.  If you choose.



O.M.  And that the fellow-being is the man's daughter?



Y.M.  Well, n-no--make it someone else.



O.M.  A filthy, drunken ruffian, then?



Y.M.  I see.  Circumstances alter cases.  I suppose that if there

was no audience to observe the act, the man wouldn't perform it.



O.M.  But there is here and there a man who WOULD.  People,

for instance, like the man who lost his life trying to save the

child from the fire; and the man who gave the needy old woman his

twenty-five cents and walked home in the storm--there are here

and there men like that who would do it.  And why?  Because they

couldn't BEAR to see a fellow-being struggling in the water and

not jump in and help.  It would give THEM pain.  They would save

the fellow-being on that account.  THEY WOULDN'T DO IT OTHERWISE.

They strictly obey the law which I have been insisting upon.  You

must remember and always distinguish the people who CAN'T BEAR

things from people who CAN.  It will throw light upon a number of

apparently "self-sacrificing" cases.



Y.M.  Oh, dear, it's all so disgusting.



O.M.  Yes.  And so true.



Y.M.  Come--take the good boy who does things he doesn't

want to do, in order to gratify his mother.



O.M.  He does seven-tenths of the act because it gratifies

HIM to gratify his mother.  Throw the bulk of advantage the other

way and the good boy would not do the act.  He MUST obey the iron

law.  None can escape it.



Y.M.  Well, take the case of a bad boy who--



O.M.  You needn't mention it, it is a waste of time.  It is

no matter about the bad boy's act.  Whatever it was, he had a

spirit-contenting reason for it.  Otherwise you have been

misinformed, and he didn't do it.



Y.M.  It is very exasperating.  A while ago you said that man's

conscience is not a born judge of morals and conduct, but has to

be taught and trained.  Now I think a conscience can get drowsy

and lazy, but I don't think it can go wrong; if you wake it up--







A Little Story





O.M.  I will tell you a little story:



Once upon a time an Infidel was guest in the house of a

Christian widow whose little boy was ill and near to death.  The

Infidel often watched by the bedside and entertained the boy with

talk, and he used these opportunities to satisfy a strong longing

in his nature--that desire which is in us all to better other

people's condition by having them think as we think.  He was

successful.  But the dying boy, in his last moments, reproached

him and said:



"I BELIEVED, AND WAS HAPPY IN IT; YOU HAVE TAKEN MY BELIEF

AWAY, AND MY COMFORT.  NOW I HAVE NOTHING LEFT, AND I DIE

MISERABLE; FOR THE THINGS WHICH YOU HAVE TOLD ME DO NOT TAKE THE

PLACE OF THAT WHICH I HAVE LOST."



And the mother, also, reproached the Infidel, and said:



"MY CHILD IS FOREVER LOST, AND MY HEART IS BROKEN.  HOW

COULD YOU DO THIS CRUEL THING?  WE HAVE DONE YOU NO HARM, BUT

ONLY KINDNESS; WE MADE OUR HOUSE YOUR HOME, YOU WERE WELCOME TO

ALL WE HAD, AND THIS IS OUR REWARD."



The heart of the Infidel was filled with remorse for what he

had done, and he said:



"IT WAS WRONG--I SEE IT NOW; BUT I WAS ONLY TRYING TO DO HIM

GOOD.  IN MY VIEW HE WAS IN ERROR; IT SEEMED MY DUTY TO TEACH HIM

THE TRUTH."



Then the mother said:



"I HAD TAUGHT HIM, ALL HIS LITTLE LIFE, WHAT I BELIEVED TO

BE THE TRUTH, AND IN HIS BELIEVING FAITH BOTH OF US WERE HAPPY.

NOW HE IS DEAD,--AND LOST; AND I AM MISERABLE.  OUR FAITH CAME

DOWN TO US THROUGH CENTURIES OF BELIEVING ANCESTORS; WHAT RIGHT

HAD YOU, OR ANY ONE, TO DISTURB IT?  WHERE WAS YOUR HONOR, WHERE

WAS YOUR SHAME?"



Y.M.  He was a miscreant, and deserved death!



O.M.  He thought so himself, and said so.



Y.M.  Ah--you see, HIS CONSCIENCE WAS AWAKENED1!



O.M.  Yes, his Self-Disapproval was.  It PAINED him to see

the mother suffer.  He was sorry he had done a thing which

brought HIM pain.  It did not occur to him to think of the mother

when he was misteaching the boy, for he was absorbed in providing

PLEASURE for himself, then.  Providing it by satisfying what he

believed to be a call of duty.



Y.M.  Call it what you please, it is to me a case of

AWAKENED CONSCIENCE.  That awakened conscience could never get

itself into that species of trouble again.  A cure like that is a

PERMANENT cure.



O.M.  Pardon--I had not finished the story.  We are

creatures of OUTSIDE INFLUENCES--we originate NOTHING within.

Whenever we take a new line of thought and drift into a new line

of belief and action, the impulse is ALWAYS suggested from the

OUTSIDE.  Remorse so preyed upon the Infidel that it dissolved

his harshness toward the boy's religion and made him come to

regard it with tolerance, next with kindness, for the boy's sake

and the mother's.  Finally he found himself examining it.  From

that moment his progress in his new trend was steady and rapid.

He became a believing Christian.  And now his remorse for having

robbed the dying boy of his faith and his salvation was bitterer

than ever.  It gave him no rest, no peace.  He MUST have rest and

peace--it is the law of nature.  There seemed but one way to get

it; he must devote himself to saving imperiled souls.  He became

a missionary.  He landed in a pagan country ill and helpless.  A

native widow took him into her humble home and nursed him back to

convalescence.  Then her young boy was taken hopelessly ill, and

the grateful missionary helped her tend him.  Here was his first

opportunity to repair a part of the wrong done to the other boy

by doing a precious service for this one by undermining his

foolish faith in his false gods.  He was successful.  But the

dying boy in his last moments reproached him and said:



"I BELIEVED, AND WAS HAPPY IN IT; YOU HAVE TAKEN MY BELIEF

AWAY, AND MY COMFORT.  NOW I HAVE NOTHING LEFT, AND I DIE

MISERABLE; FOR THE THINGS WHICH YOU HAVE TOLD ME DO NOT TAKE THE

PLACE OF THAT WHICH I HAVE LOST."



And the mother, also, reproached the missionary, and said:



"MY CHILD IS FOREVER LOST, AND MY HEART IS BROKEN.  HOW

COULD YOU DO THIS CRUEL THING?  WE HAD DONE YOU NO HARM, BUT ONLY

KINDNESS; WE MADE OUR HOUSE YOUR HOME, YOU WERE WELCOME TO ALL WE

HAD, AND THIS IS OUR REWARD."



The heart of the missionary was filled with remorse for what

he had done, and he said:



"IT WAS WRONG--I SEE IT NOW; BUT I WAS ONLY TRYING TO DO HIM

GOOD.  IN MY VIEW HE WAS IN ERROR; IT SEEMED MY DUTY TO TEACH HIM

THE TRUTH."



Then the mother said:



"I HAD TAUGHT HIM, ALL HIS LITTLE LIFE, WHAT I BELIEVED TO

BE THE TRUTH, AND IN HIS BELIEVING FAITH BOTH OF US WERE HAPPY.

NOW HE IS DEAD--AND LOST; AND I AM MISERABLE.  OUR FAITH CAME

DOWN TO US THROUGH CENTURIES OF BELIEVING ANCESTORS; WHAT RIGHT

HAD YOU, OR ANY ONE, TO DISTURB IT?  WHERE WAS YOUR HONOR, WHERE

WAS YOUR SHAME?"



The missionary's anguish of remorse and sense of treachery

were as bitter and persecuting and unappeasable, now, as they had

been in the former case.  The story is finished.  What is your

comment?



Y.M.  The man's conscience is a fool!  It was morbid.  It

didn't know right from wrong.



O.M.  I am not sorry to hear you say that.  If you grant

that ONE man's conscience doesn't know right from wrong, it is an

admission that there are others like it.  This single admission

pulls down the whole doctrine of infallibility of judgment in

consciences.  Meantime there is one thing which I ask you to

notice.



Y.M.  What is that?



O.M.  That in both cases the man's ACT gave him no spiritual

discomfort, and that he was quite satisfied with it and got

pleasure out of it.  But afterward when it resulted in PAIN to

HIM, he was sorry.  Sorry it had inflicted pain upon the others,

BUT FOR NO REASON UNDER THE SUN EXCEPT THAT THEIR PAIN GAVE HIM

PAIN.  Our consciences take NO notice of pain inflicted upon

others until it reaches a point where it gives pain to US.  In

ALL cases without exception we are absolutely indifferent to

another person's pain until his sufferings make us uncomfortable.

Many an infidel would not have been troubled by that Christian

mother's distress.  Don't you believe that?



Y.M.  Yes.  You might almost say it of the AVERAGE infidel,

I think.



O.M.  And many a missionary,  sternly fortified by his sense

of duty, would not have been troubled by the pagan mother's

distress--Jesuit missionaries in Canada in the early French

times, for instance; see episodes quoted by Parkman.



Y.M.  Well, let us adjourn.  Where have we arrived?



O.M.  At this.  That we (mankind) have ticketed ourselves

with a number of qualities to which we have given misleading

names.  Love, Hate, Charity, Compassion, Avarice, Benevolence,

and so on.  I mean we attach misleading MEANINGS to the names.

They are all forms of self-contentment, self-gratification, but

the names so disguise them that they distract our attention from

the fact.  Also we have smuggled a word into the dictionary which

ought not to be there at all--Self-Sacrifice.  It describes a

thing which does not exist.  But worst of all, we ignore and

never mention the Sole Impulse which dictates and compels a man's

every act:  the imperious necessity of securing his own approval,

in every emergency and at all costs.  To it we owe all that we

are.  It is our breath, our heart, our blood.  It is our only

spur, our whip, our goad, our only impelling power; we have no

other.  Without it we should be mere inert images, corpses; no

one would do anything, there would be no progress, the world

would stand still.  We ought to stand reverently uncovered when

the name of that stupendous power is uttered.



Y.M.  I am not convinced.



O.M.  You will be when you think.







III



Instances in Point





Old Man.  Have you given thought to the Gospel of Self-

Approval since we talked?



Young Man.  I have.



O.M.  It was I that moved you to it.  That is to say an

OUTSIDE INFLUENCE moved you to it--not one that originated in

your head.  Will you try to keep that in mind and not forget it?



Y.M.  Yes.  Why?



O.M.  Because by and by in one of our talks, I wish to

further impress upon you that neither you, nor I, nor any man

ever originates a thought in his own head.  THE UTTERER OF A

THOUGHT ALWAYS UTTERS A SECOND-HAND ONE.



Y.M.  Oh, now--



O.M.  Wait.  Reserve your remark till we get to that part of

our discussion--tomorrow or next day, say.  Now, then, have you

been considering the proposition that no act is ever born of any

but a self-contenting impulse--(primarily).  You have sought.

What have you found?



Y.M.  I have not been very fortunate.  I have examined many

fine and apparently self-sacrificing deeds in romances and

biographies, but--



O.M.  Under searching analysis the ostensible self-sacrifice

disappeared?  It naturally would.



Y.M.  But here in this novel is one which seems to promise.

In the Adirondack woods is a wage-earner and lay preacher in the

lumber-camps who is of noble character and deeply religious.  An

earnest and practical laborer in the New York slums comes up

there on vacation--he is leader of a section of the University

Settlement.  Holme, the lumberman, is fired with a desire to

throw away his excellent worldly prospects and go down and save

souls on the East Side.  He counts it happiness to make this

sacrifice for the glory of God and for the cause of Christ.  He

resigns his place, makes the sacrifice cheerfully, and goes to

the East Side and preaches Christ and Him crucified every day and

every night to little groups of half-civilized foreign paupers

who scoff at him.  But he rejoices in the scoffings, since he is

suffering them in the great cause of Christ.  You have so filled

my mind with suspicions that I was constantly expecting to find a

hidden questionable impulse back of all this, but I am thankful

to say I have failed.  This man saw his duty, and for DUTY'S SAKE

he sacrificed self and assumed the burden it imposed.



O.M.  Is that as far as you have read?



Y.M.  Yes.



O.M.  Let us read further, presently.  Meantime, in

sacrificing himself--NOT for the glory of God, PRIMARILY, as HE

imagined, but FIRST to content that exacting and inflexible

master within him--DID HE SACRIFICE ANYBODY ELSE?



Y.M.  How do you mean?



O.M.  He relinquished a lucrative post and got mere food and

lodging in place of it.  Had he dependents?



Y.M.  Well--yes.



O.M.  In what way and to what extend did his self-sacrifice

affect THEM?



Y.M.  He was the support of a superannuated father.  He had

a young sister with a remarkable voice--he was giving her a

musical education, so that her longing to be self-supporting

might be gratified.  He was furnishing the money to put a young

brother through a polytechnic school and satisfy his desire to

become a civil engineer.



O.M.  The old father's comforts were now curtailed?



Y.M.  Quite seriously.  Yes.



O.M.  The sister's music-lessens had to stop?



Y.M.  Yes.



O.M.  The young brother's education--well, an extinguishing

blight fell upon that happy dream, and he had to go to sawing

wood to support the old father, or something like that?



Y.M.  It is about what happened.  Yes.



O.M.  What a handsome job of self-sacrificing he did do!  It

seems to me that he sacrificed everybody EXCEPT himself.  Haven't

I told you that no man EVER sacrifices himself; that there is no

instance of it upon record anywhere; and that when a man's

Interior Monarch requires a thing of its slave for either its

MOMENTARY or its PERMANENT contentment, that thing must and will

be furnished and that command obeyed, no matter who may stand in

the way and suffer disaster by it?  That man RUINED HIS FAMILY to

please and content his Interior Monarch--



Y.M.  And help Christ's cause.



O.M.  Yes--SECONDLY.  Not firstly.  HE thought it was firstly.



Y.M.  Very well, have it so, if you will.  But it could be

that he argued that if he saved a hundred souls in New York--



O.M.  The sacrifice of the FAMILY would be justified by that

great profit upon the--the--what shall we call it?



Y.M.  Investment?



O.M.  Hardly.  How would SPECULATION do?  How would GAMBLE

do?  Not a solitary soul-capture was sure.  He played for a

possible thirty-three-hundred-per-cent profit.  It was GAMBLING--

with his family for "chips."  However let us see how the game

came out.  Maybe we can get on the track of the secret original

impulse, the REAL impulse, that moved him to so nobly self-

sacrifice his family in the Savior's cause under the superstition

that he was sacrificing himself.  I will read a chapter or so. .

. .  Here we have it!  It was bound to expose itself sooner or

later.  He preached to the East-Side rabble a season, then went

back to his old dull, obscure life in the lumber-camps "HURT TO

THE HEART, HIS PRIDE HUMBLED."  Why?  Were not his efforts

acceptable to the Savior, for Whom alone they were made?  Dear

me, that detail is LOST SIGHT OF, is not even referred to, the

fact that it started out as a motive is entirely forgotten!  Then

what is the trouble?  The authoress quite innocently and

unconsciously gives the whole business away.  The trouble was

this:  this man merely PREACHED to the poor; that is not the

University Settlement's way; it deals in larger and better things

than that, and it did not enthuse over that crude Salvation-Army

eloquence.  It was courteous to Holme--but cool.  It did not pet

him, did not take him to its bosom.  "PERISHED WERE ALL HIS

DREAMS OF DISTINCTION, THE PRAISE AND GRATEFUL APPROVAL--"  Of

whom?  The Savior?  No; the Savior is not mentioned.  Of whom,

then?  Of "His FELLOW-WORKERS."  Why did he want that?  Because

the Master inside of him wanted it, and would not be content

without it.  That emphasized sentence quoted above, reveals the

secret we have been seeking, the original impulse, the REAL

impulse, which moved the obscure and unappreciated Adirondack

lumberman to sacrifice his family and go on that crusade to the

East Side--which said original impulse was this, to wit:  without

knowing it HE WENT THERE TO SHOW A NEGLECTED WORLD THE LARGE

TALENT THAT WAS IN HIM, AND RISE TO DISTINCTION.  As I have

warned you before, NO act springs from any but the one law, the

one motive.  But I pray you, do not accept this law upon my say-

so; but diligently examine for yourself.  Whenever you read of a

self-sacrificing act or hear of one, or of a duty done for DUTY'S

SAKE, take it to pieces and look for the REAL motive.  It is

always there.



Y.M.  I do it every day.  I cannot help it, now that I have

gotten started upon the degrading and exasperating quest.  For it

is hatefully interesting!--in fact, fascinating is the word.  As

soon as I come across a golden deed in a book I have to stop and

take it apart and examine it, I cannot help myself.



O.M.  Have you ever found one that defeated the rule?



Y.M.  No--at least, not yet.  But take the case of servant-

tipping in Europe.  You pay the HOTEL for service; you owe the

servants NOTHING, yet you pay them besides.  Doesn't that defeat it?



O.M.  In what way?



Y.M.  You are not OBLIGED to do it, therefore its source is

compassion for their ill-paid condition, and--



O.M.  Has that custom ever vexed you, annoyed you, irritated you?



Y.M.  Well, yes.



O.M.  Still you succumbed to it?



Y.M.  Of course.



O.M.  Why of course?



Y.M.  Well, custom is law, in a way, and laws must be

submitted to--everybody recognizes it as a DUTY.



O.M.  Then you pay for the irritating tax for DUTY'S sake?



Y.M.  I suppose it amounts to that.



O.M.  Then the impulse which moves you to submit to the tax

is not ALL compassion, charity, benevolence?



Y.M.  Well--perhaps not.



O.M.  Is ANY of it?



Y.M.  I--perhaps I was too hasty in locating its source.



O.M.  Perhaps so.  In case you ignored the custom would you

get prompt and effective service from the servants?



Y.M.  Oh, hear yourself talk!  Those European servants?

Why, you wouldn't get any of all, to speak of.



O.M.  Couldn't THAT work as an impulse to move you to pay

the tax?



Y.M.  I am not denying it.



O.M.  Apparently, then, it is a case of for-duty's-sake with

a little self-interest added?



Y.M.  Yes, it has the look of it.  But here is a point:

we pay that tax knowing it to be unjust and an extortion; yet we

go away with a pain at the heart if we think we have been stingy

with the poor fellows; and we heartily wish we were back again,

so that we could do the right thing, and MORE than the right

thing, the GENEROUS thing.  I think it will be difficult for you

to find any thought of self in that impulse.



O.M.  I wonder why you should think so.  When you find

service charged in the HOTEL bill does it annoy you?



Y.M.  No.



O.M.  Do you ever complain of the amount of it?



Y.M.  No, it would not occur to me.



O.M.  The EXPENSE, then, is not the annoying detail.  It is

a fixed charge, and you pay it cheerfully, you pay it without a

murmur.  When you came to pay the servants, how would you like it

if each of the men and maids had a fixed charge?



Y.M.  Like it?  I should rejoice!



O.M.  Even if the fixed tax were a shade MORE than you had

been in the habit of paying in the form of tips?



Y.M.  Indeed, yes!



O.M.  Very well, then.  As I understand it, it isn't really

compassion nor yet duty that moves you to pay the tax, and it

isn't the AMOUNT of the tax that annoys you.  Yet SOMETHING

annoys you.  What is it?



Y.M.  Well, the trouble is, you never know WHAT to pay, the

tax varies so, all over Europe.



O.M.  So you have to guess?



Y.M.  There is no other way.  So you go on thinking and

thinking, and calculating and guessing, and consulting with other

people and getting their views; and it spoils your sleep nights,

and makes you distraught in the daytime, and while you are

pretending to look at the sights you are only guessing and

guessing and guessing all the time, and being worried and

miserable.



O.M.  And all about a debt which you don't owe and don't

have to pay unless you want to!  Strange.  What is the purpose of

the guessing?



Y.M.  To guess out what is right to give them, and not be

unfair to any of them.



O.M.  It has quite a noble look--taking so much pains and using up

so much valuable time in order to be just and fair to a poor servant

to whom you owe nothing, but who needs money and is ill paid.



Y.M.  I think, myself, that if there is any ungracious

motive back of it it will be hard to find.



O.M.  How do you know when you have not paid a servant fairly?



Y.M.  Why, he is silent; does not thank you.  Sometimes he

gives you a look that makes you ashamed.  You are too proud to

rectify your mistake there, with people looking, but afterward

you keep on wishing and wishing you HAD done it.  My, the shame

and the pain of it!  Sometimes you see, by the signs, that you

have it JUST RIGHT, and you go away mightily satisfied.

Sometimes the man is so effusively thankful that you know you

have given him a good deal MORE than was necessary.



O.M.  NECESSARY?  Necessary for what?



Y.M.  To content him.



O.M.  How do you feel THEN?



Y.M.  Repentant.



O.M.  It is my belief that you have NOT been concerning

yourself in guessing out his just dues, but only in ciphering out

what would CONTENT him.  And I think you have a self-deluding

reason for that.



Y.M.  What was it?



O.M.  If you fell short of what he was expecting and

wanting, you would get a look which would SHAME YOU BEFORE FOLK.

That would give you PAIN.  YOU--for you are only working for

yourself, not HIM.  If you gave him too much you would be ASHAMED

OF YOURSELF for it, and that would give YOU pain--another case of

thinking of YOURSELF, protecting yourself, SAVING YOURSELF FROM

DISCOMFORT.  You never think of the servant once--except to guess

out how to get HIS APPROVAL.  If you get that, you get your OWN

approval, and that is the sole and only thing you are after.  The

Master inside of you is then satisfied, contented, comfortable;

there was NO OTHER thing at stake, as a matter of FIRST interest,

anywhere in the transaction.







Further Instances



Y.M.  Well, to think of it; Self-Sacrifice for others, the

grandest thing in man, ruled out! non-existent!



O.M.  Are you accusing me of saying that?



Y.M.  Why, certainly.



O.M.  I haven't said it.



Y.M.  What did you say, then?



O.M.  That no man has ever sacrificed himself in the common

meaning of that phrase--which is, self-sacrifice for another

ALONE.  Men make daily sacrifices for others, but it is for their

own sake FIRST.  The act must content their own spirit FIRST.

The other beneficiaries come second.



Y.M.  And the same with duty for duty's sake?



O.M.  Yes.  No man performs a duty for mere duty's sake; the act

must content his spirit FIRST.  He must feel better for DOING the

duty than he would for shirking it.  Otherwise he will not do it.



Y.M.  Take the case of the BERKELEY CASTLE.



O.M.  It was a noble duty, greatly performed.  Take it to

pieces and examine it, if you like.



Y.M.  A British troop-ship crowded with soldiers and their

wives and children.  She struck a rock and began to sink.  There

was room in the boats for the women and children only.  The

colonel lined up his regiment on the deck and said "it is our

duty to die, that they may be saved."  There was no murmur, no

protest.  The boats carried away the women and children.  When

the death-moment was come, the colonel and his officers took

their several posts, the men stood at shoulder-arms, and so, as

on dress-parade, with their flag flying and the drums beating,

they went down, a sacrifice to duty for duty's sake.  Can you

view it as other than that?



O.M.  It was something as fine as that, as exalted as that.

Could you have remained in those ranks and gone down to your

death in that unflinching way?



Y.M.  Could I?  No, I could not.



O.M.  Think.  Imagine yourself there, with that watery doom

creeping higher and higher around you.



Y.M.  I can imagine it.  I feel all the horror of it.  I could

not have endured it, I could not have remained in my place.

I know it.



O.M.  Why?



Y.M.  There is no why about it:  I know myself, and I know I

couldn't DO it.



O.M.  But it would be your DUTY to do it.



Y.M.  Yes, I know--but I couldn't.



O.M.  It was more than thousand men, yet not one of them

flinched.  Some of them must have been born with your

temperament; if they could do that great duty for duty's SAKE,

why not you?  Don't you know that you could go out and gather

together a thousand clerks and mechanics and put them on that

deck and ask them to die for duty's sake, and not two dozen of

them would stay in the ranks to the end?



Y.M.  Yes, I know that.



O.M.  But your TRAIN them, and put them through a campaign

or two; then they would be soldiers; soldiers, with a soldier's

pride, a soldier's self-respect, a soldier's ideals.  They would

have to content a SOLDIER'S spirit then, not a clerk's, not a

mechanic's.  They could not content that spirit by shirking a

soldier's duty, could they?



Y.M.  I suppose not.



O.M.  Then they would do the duty not for the DUTY'S sake,

but for their OWN sake--primarily.  The DUTY was JUST THE SAME,

and just as imperative, when they were clerks, mechanics, raw

recruits, but they wouldn't perform it for that.  As clerks and

mechanics they had other ideals, another spirit to satisfy, and

they satisfied it.  They HAD to; it is the law.  TRAINING is

potent.  Training toward higher and higher, and ever higher

ideals is worth any man's thought and labor and diligence.



Y.M.  Consider the man who stands by his duty and goes to

the stake rather than be recreant to it.



O.M.  It is his make and his training.  He has to content

the spirit that is in him, though it cost him his life.  Another

man, just as sincerely religious, but of different temperament,

will fail of that duty, though recognizing it as a duty, and

grieving to be unequal to it:  but he must content the spirit

that is in him--he cannot help it.  He could not perform that

duty for duty's SAKE, for that would not content his spirit, and

the contenting of his spirit must be looked to FIRST.  It takes

precedence of all other duties.



Y.M.  Take the case of a clergyman of stainless private

morals who votes for a thief for public office, on his own

party's ticket, and against an honest man on the other ticket.



O.M.  He has to content his spirit.  He has no public

morals; he has no private ones, where his party's prosperity is

at stake.  He will always be true to his make and training.







IV



Training



Young Man.  You keep using that word--training.  By it do

you particularly mean--



Old Man.  Study, instruction, lectures, sermons?  That is a

part of it--but not a large part.  I mean ALL the outside

influences.  There are a million of them.  From the cradle to the

grave, during all his waking hours, the human being is under

training.  In the very first rank of his trainers stands

ASSOCIATION.  It is his human environment which influences his

mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets him on

his road and keeps him in it.  If he leave that road he will find

himself shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and

whose approval he most values.  He is a chameleon; by the law of

his nature he takes the color of his place of resort.  The

influences about him create his preferences, his aversions, his

politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion.  He creates none

of these things for himself.  He THINKS he does, but that is

because he has not examined into the matter.  You have seen

Presbyterians?



Y.M.  Many.



O.M.  How did they happen to be Presbyterians and not

Congregationalists?  And why were the Congregationalists not

Baptists, and the Baptists Roman Catholics, and the Roman

Catholics Buddhists, and the Buddhists Quakers, and the Quakers

Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians Millerites and the

Millerites Hindus, and the Hindus Atheists, and the Atheists

Spiritualists, and the Spiritualists Agnostics, and the Agnostics

Methodists, and the Methodists Confucians, and the Confucians

Unitarians, and the Unitarians Mohammedans, and the Mohammedans

Salvation Warriors, and the Salvation Warriors Zoroastrians, and

the Zoroastrians Christian Scientists, and the Christian

Scientists Mormons--and so on?



Y.M.  You may answer your question yourself.



O.M.  That list of sects is not a record of STUDIES,

searchings, seekings after light; it mainly (and sarcastically)

indicates what ASSOCIATION can do.  If you know a man's

nationality you can come within a split hair of guessing the

complexion of his religion:  English--Protestant; American--

ditto; Spaniard, Frenchman, Irishman, Italian, South American--

Roman Catholic; Russian--Greek Catholic; Turk--Mohammedan; and so

on.  And when you know the man's religious complexion, you know

what sort of religious books he reads when he wants some more

light, and what sort of books he avoids, lest by accident he get

more light than he wants.  In America if you know which party-

collar a voter wears, you know what his associations are, and how

he came by his politics, and which breed of newspaper he reads to

get light, and which breed he diligently avoids, and which breed

of mass-meetings he attends in order to broaden his political

knowledge, and which breed of mass-meetings he doesn't attend,

except to refute its doctrines with brickbats.  We are always

hearing of people who are around SEEKING AFTER TRUTH.  I have

never seen a (permanent) specimen.  I think he had never lived.

But I have seen several entirely sincere people who THOUGHT they

were (permanent) Seekers after Truth.  They sought diligently,

persistently, carefully, cautiously, profoundly, with perfect

honesty and nicely adjusted judgment--until they believed that

without doubt or question they had found the Truth.  THAT WAS THE

END OF THE SEARCH.  The man spent the rest of his life hunting up

shingles wherewith to protect his Truth from the weather.  If he

was seeking after political Truth he found it in one or another

of the hundred political gospels which govern men in the earth;

if he was seeking after the Only True Religion he found it in one

or another of the three thousand that are on the market.  In any

case, when he found the Truth HE SOUGHT NO FURTHER; but from that

day forth, with his soldering-iron in one hand and his bludgeon

in the other he tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors.

There have been innumerable Temporary Seekers of Truth--have you

ever heard of a permanent one?  In the very nature of man such a

person is impossible.  However, to drop back to the text--

training:  all training is one from or another of OUTSIDE

INFLUENCE, and ASSOCIATION is the largest part of it.  A man is

never anything but what his outside influences have made him.

They train him downward or they train him upward--but they TRAIN

him; they are at work upon him all the time.



Y.M.  Then if he happen by the accidents of life to be

evilly placed there is no help for him, according to your

notions--he must train downward.



O.M.  No help for him?  No help for this chameleon?  It is a

mistake.  It is in his chameleonship that his greatest good

fortune lies.  He has only to change his habitat--his

ASSOCIATIONS.  But the impulse to do it must come from the

OUTSIDE--he cannot originate it himself, with that purpose in

view.  Sometimes a very small and accidental thing can furnish

him the initiatory impulse and start him on a new road, with a

new idea.  The chance remark of a sweetheart, "I hear that you

are a coward," may water a seed that shall sprout and bloom and

flourish, and ended in producing a surprising fruitage--in the

fields of war.  The history of man is full of such accidents.

The accident of a broken leg brought a profane and ribald soldier

under religious influences and furnished him a new ideal.  From

that accident sprang the Order of the Jesuits, and it has been

shaking thrones, changing policies, and doing other tremendous

work for two hundred years--and will go on.  The chance reading

of a book or of a paragraph in a newspaper can start a man on a

new track and make him renounce his old associations and seek new

ones that are IN SYMPATHY WITH HIS NEW IDEAL:  and the result,

for that man, can be an entire change of his way of life.



Y.M.  Are you hinting at a scheme of procedure?



O.M.  Not a new one--an old one.  One as mankind.



Y.M.  What is it?



O.M.  Merely the laying of traps for people.  Traps baited

with INITIATORY IMPULSES TOWARD HIGH IDEALS.  It is what the

tract-distributor does.  It is what the missionary does.  It is

what governments ought to do.



Y.M.  Don't they?



O.M.  In one way they do, in another they don't.  They

separate the smallpox patients from the healthy people, but in

dealing with crime they put the healthy into the pest-house along

with the sick.  That is to say, they put the beginners in with

the confirmed criminals.  This would be well if man were

naturally inclined to good, but he isn't, and so ASSOCIATION

makes the beginners worse than they were when they went into

captivity.  It is putting a very severe punishment upon the

comparatively innocent at times.  They hang a man--which is a

trifling punishment; this breaks the hearts of his family--which

is a heavy one.  They comfortably jail and feed a wife-beater,

and leave his innocent wife and family to starve.



Y.M.  Do you believe in the doctrine that man is equipped

with an intuitive perception of good and evil?



O.M.  Adam hadn't it.



Y.M.  But has man acquired it since?



O.M.  No.  I think he has no intuitions of any kind.  He

gets ALL his ideas, all his impressions, from the outside.  I

keep repeating this, in the hope that I may impress it upon you

that you will be interested to observe and examine for yourself

and see whether it is true or false.



Y.M.  Where did you get your own aggravating notions?



O.M.  From the OUTSIDE.  I did not invent them.  They are

gathered from a thousand unknown sources.  Mainly UNCONSCIOUSLY

gathered.



Y.M.  Don't you believe that God could make an inherently

honest man?



O.M.  Yes, I know He could.  I also know that He never did

make one.



Y.M.  A wiser observer than you has recorded the fact that

"an honest man's the noblest work of God."



O.M.  He didn't record a fact, he recorded a falsity.  It is windy,

and sounds well, but it is not true.  God makes a man with honest

and dishonest POSSIBILITIES in him and stops there.  The man's

ASSOCIATIONS develop the possibilities--the one set or the other.

The result is accordingly an honest man or a dishonest one.



Y.M.  And the honest one is not entitled to--



O.M.  Praise?  No.  How often must I tell you that?  HE is

not the architect of his honesty.



Y.M.  Now then, I will ask you where there is any sense in

training people to lead virtuous lives.  What is gained by it?



O.M.  The man himself gets large advantages out of it, and

that is the main thing--to HIM.  He is not a peril to his

neighbors, he is not a damage to them--and so THEY get an

advantage out of his virtues.  That is the main thing to THEM.

It can make this life comparatively comfortable to the parties

concerned; the NEGLECT of this training can make this life a

constant peril and distress to the parties concerned.



Y.M.  You have said that training is everything; that

training is the man HIMSELF, for it makes him what he is.



O.M.  I said training and ANOTHER thing.  Let that other

thing pass, for the moment.  What were you going to say?



Y.M.  We have an old servant.  She has been with us twenty-

two years.  Her service used to be faultless, but now she has

become very forgetful.  We are all fond of her; we all recognize

that she cannot help the infirmity which age has brought her; the

rest of the family do not scold her for her remissnesses, but at

times I do--I can't seem to control myself.  Don't I try?  I do

try.  Now, then, when I was ready to dress, this morning, no

clean clothes had been put out.  I lost my temper; I lose it

easiest and quickest in the early morning.  I rang; and

immediately began to warn myself not to show temper, and to be

careful and speak gently.  I safe-guarded myself most carefully.

I even chose the very word I would use:  "You've forgotten the

clean clothes, Jane."  When she appeared in the door I opened my

mouth to say that phrase--and out of it, moved by an instant

surge of passion which I was not expecting and hadn't time to put

under control, came the hot rebuke, "You've forgotten them

again!"  You say a man always does the thing which will best

please his Interior Master.  Whence came the impulse to make

careful preparation to save the girl the humiliation of a rebuke?

Did that come from the Master, who is always primarily concerned

about HIMSELF?



O.M.  Unquestionably.  There is no other source for any

impulse.  SECONDARILY you made preparation to save the girl, but

PRIMARILY its object was to save yourself, by contenting the

Master.



Y.M.  How do you mean?



O.M.  Has any member of the family ever implored you to

watch your temper and not fly out at the girl?



Y.M.  Yes.  My mother.



O.M.  You love her?



Y.M.  Oh, more than that!



O.M.  You would always do anything in your power to please her?



Y.M.  It is a delight to me to do anything to please her!



O.M.  Why?  YOU WOULD DO IT FOR PAY, SOLELY--for PROFIT.

What profit would you expect and certainly receive from

the investment?



Y.M.  Personally?  None.  To please HER is enough.



O.M.  It appears, then, that your object, primarily, WASN'T

to save the girl a humiliation, but to PLEASE YOUR MOTHER.  It

also appears that to please your mother gives YOU a strong

pleasure.  Is not that the profit which you get out of the

investment?  Isn't that the REAL profits and FIRST profit?



Y.M.  Oh, well?  Go on.



O.M.  In ALL transactions, the Interior Master looks to it

that YOU GET THE FIRST PROFIT.  Otherwise there is no

transaction.



Y.M.  Well, then, if I was so anxious to get that profit and

so intent upon it, why did I threw it away by losing my temper?



O.M.  In order to get ANOTHER profit which suddenly

superseded it in value.



Y.M.  Where was it?



O.M.  Ambushed behind your born temperament, and waiting for

a chance.  Your native warm temper suddenly jumped to the front,

and FOR THE MOMENT its influence was more powerful than your

mother's, and abolished it.  In that instance you were eager to

flash out a hot rebuke and enjoy it.  You did enjoy it, didn't you?



Y.M.  For--for a quarter of a second.  Yes--I did.



O.M.  Very well, it is as I have said:  the thing which will

give you the MOST pleasure, the most satisfaction, in any moment

or FRACTION of a moment, is the thing you will always do.  You

must content the Master's LATEST whim, whatever it may be.



Y.M.  But when the tears came into the old servant's eyes I

could have cut my hand off for what I had done.



O.M.  Right.  You had humiliated YOURSELF, you see, you had

given yourself PAIN.  Nothing is of FIRST importance to a man

except results which damage HIM or profit him--all the rest is

SECONDARY.  Your Master was displeased with you, although you had

obeyed him.  He required a prompt REPENTANCE; you obeyed again;

you HAD to--there is never any escape from his commands.  He is a

hard master and fickle; he changes his mind in the fraction of a

second, but you must be ready to obey, and you will obey, ALWAYS.

If he requires repentance, you content him, you will always

furnish it.  He must be nursed, petted, coddled, and kept

contented, let the terms be what they may.



Y.M.  Training!  Oh, what's the use of it?  Didn't I, and

didn't my mother try to train me up to where I would no longer

fly out at that girl?



O.M.  Have you never managed to keep back a scolding?



Y.M.  Oh, certainly--many times.



O.M.  More times this year than last?



Y.M.  Yes, a good many more.



O.M.  More times last year than the year before?



Y.M.  Yes.



O.M.  There is a large improvement, then, in the two years?



Y.M.  Yes, undoubtedly.



O.M.  Then your question is answered.  You see there IS use in

training.  Keep on.  Keeping faithfully on.  You are doing well.



Y.M.  Will my reform reach perfection?



O.M.  It will.  UP to YOUR limit.



Y.M.  My limit?  What do you mean by that?



O.M.  You remember that you said that I said training was

EVERYTHING.  I corrected you, and said "training and ANOTHER

thing."  That other thing is TEMPERAMENT--that is, the

disposition you were born with.  YOU CAN'T ERADICATE YOUR

DISPOSITION NOR ANY RAG OF IT--you can only put a pressure on it

and keep it down and quiet.  You have a warm temper?



Y.M.  Yes.



O.M.  You will never get rid of it; but by watching it you

can keep it down nearly all the time.  ITS PRESENCE IS YOUR

LIMIT.  Your reform will never quite reach perfection, for your

temper will beat you now and then, but you come near enough.  You

have made valuable progress and can make more.  There IS use in

training.  Immense use.  Presently you will reach a new stage of

development, then your progress will be easier; will proceed on a

simpler basis, anyway.



Y.M.  Explain.



O.M.  You keep back your scoldings now, to please YOURSELF

by pleasing your MOTHER; presently the mere triumphing over your

temper will delight your vanity and confer a more delicious

pleasure and satisfaction upon you than even the approbation of

your MOTHER confers upon you now.  You will then labor for

yourself directly and at FIRST HAND, not by the roundabout way

through your mother.  It simplifies the matter, and it also

strengthens the impulse.



Y.M.  Ah, dear!  But I sha'n't ever reach the point where I

will spare the girl for HER sake PRIMARILY, not mine?



O.M.  Why--yes.  In heaven.



Y.M.  (AFTER A REFLECTIVE PAUSE)  Temperament.  Well, I see

one must allow for temperament.  It is a large factor, sure

enough.  My mother is thoughtful, and not hot-tempered.  When I

was dressed I went to her room; she was not there; I called, she

answered from the bathroom.  I heard the water running.  I

inquired.  She answered, without temper, that Jane had forgotten

her bath, and she was preparing it herself.  I offered to ring,

but she said, "No, don't do that; it would only distress her to

be confronted with her lapse, and would be a rebuke; she doesn't

deserve that--she is not to blame for the tricks her memory

serves her."  I say--has my mother an Interior Master?--and where

was he?



O.M.  He was there.  There, and looking out for his own

peace and pleasure and contentment.  The girl's distress would

have pained YOUR MOTHER.  Otherwise the girl would have been rung

up, distress and all.  I know women who would have gotten a No. 1

PLEASURE out of ringing Jane up--and so they would infallibly

have pushed the button and obeyed the law of their make and

training, which are the servants of their Interior Masters.  It

is quite likely that a part of your mother's forbearance came

from training.  The GOOD kind of training--whose best and highest

function is to see to it that every time it confers a

satisfaction upon its pupil a benefit shall fall at second hand

upon others.



Y.M.  If you were going to condense into an admonition your

plan for the general betterment of the race's condition, how

would you word it?







Admonition



O.M.  Diligently train your ideals UPWARD and STILL UPWARD

toward a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure in

conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer

benefits upon your neighbor and the community.



Y.M.  Is that a new gospel?



O.M.  No.



Y.M.  It has been taught before?



O.M.  For ten thousand years.



Y.M.  By whom?



O.M.  All the great religions--all the great gospels.



Y.M.  Then there is nothing new about it?



O.M.  Oh yes, there is.  It is candidly stated, this time.

That has not been done before.



Y.M.  How do you mean?



O.M.  Haven't I put YOU FIRST, and your neighbor and the

community AFTERWARD?



Y.M.  Well, yes, that is a difference, it is true.



O.M.  The difference between straight speaking and crooked;

the difference between frankness and shuffling.



Y.M.  Explain.



O.M.  The others offer your a hundred bribes to be good,

thus conceding that the Master inside of you must be conciliated

and contented first, and that you will do nothing at FIRST HAND

but for his sake; then they turn square around and require you to

do good for OTHER'S sake CHIEFLY; and to do your duty for duty's

SAKE, chiefly; and to do acts of SELF-SACRIFICE.  Thus at the

outset we all stand upon the same ground--recognition of the

supreme and absolute Monarch that resides in man, and we all

grovel before him and appeal to him; then those others dodge and

shuffle, and face around and unfrankly and inconsistently and

illogically change the form of their appeal and direct its

persuasions to man's SECOND-PLACE powers and to powers which have

NO EXISTENCE in him, thus advancing them to FIRST place; whereas

in my Admonition I stick logically and consistently to the

original position:  I place the Interior Master's requirements

FIRST, and keep them there.



Y.M.  If we grant, for the sake of argument, that your

scheme and the other schemes aim at and produce the same result--

RIGHT LIVING--has yours an advantage over the others?



O.M.  One, yes--a large one.  It has no concealments, no

deceptions.  When a man leads a right and valuable life under it

he is not deceived as to the REAL chief motive which impels him

to it--in those other cases he is.



Y.M.  Is that an advantage?  Is it an advantage to live a

lofty life for a mean reason?  In the other cases he lives the

lofty life under the IMPRESSION that he is living for a lofty

reason.  Is not that an advantage?



O.M.  Perhaps so.  The same advantage he might get out of

thinking himself a duke, and living a duke's life and parading in

ducal fuss and feathers, when he wasn't a duke at all, and could

find it out if he would only examine the herald's records.



Y.M.  But anyway, he is obliged to do a duke's part; he puts

his hand in his pocket and does his benevolences on as big a

scale as he can stand, and that benefits the community.



O.M.  He could do that without being a duke.



Y.M.  But would he?



O.M.  Don't you see where you are arriving?



Y.M.  Where?



O.M.  At the standpoint of the other schemes:  That it is

good morals to let an ignorant duke do showy benevolences for his

pride's sake, a pretty low motive, and go on doing them unwarned,

lest if he were made acquainted with the actual motive which

prompted them he might shut up his purse and cease to be good?



Y.M.  But isn't it best to leave him in ignorance, as long

as he THINKS he is doing good for others' sake?



O.M.  Perhaps so.  It is the position of the other schemes.

They think humbug is good enough morals when the dividend on it

is good deeds and handsome conduct.



Y.M.  It is my opinion that under your scheme of a man's

doing a good deed for his OWN sake first-off, instead of first

for the GOOD DEED'S sake, no man would ever do one.



O.M.  Have you committed a benevolence lately?



Y.M.  Yes.  This morning.



O.M.  Give the particulars.



Y.M.  The cabin of the old negro woman who used to nurse me

when I was a child and who saved my life once at the risk of her

own, was burned last night, and she came mourning this morning,

and pleading for money to build another one.



O.M.  You furnished it?



Y.M.  Certainly.



O.M.  You were glad you had the money?



Y.M.  Money?  I hadn't.  I sold my horse.



O.M.  You were glad you had the horse?



Y.M.  Of course I was; for if I hadn't had the horse I

should have been incapable, and my MOTHER would have captured the

chance to set old Sally up.



O.M.  You were cordially glad you were not caught out and

incapable?



Y.M.  Oh, I just was!



O.M.  Now, then--



Y.M.  Stop where you are!  I know your whole catalog of

questions, and I could answer every one of them without your

wasting the time to ask them; but I will summarize the whole

thing in a single remark:  I did the charity knowing it was

because the act would give ME a splendid pleasure, and because

old Sally's moving gratitude and delight would give ME another

one; and because the reflection that she would be happy now and

out of her trouble would fill ME full of happiness.  I did the

whole thing with my eyes open and recognizing and realizing that

I was looking out for MY share of the profits FIRST.  Now then, I

have confessed.  Go on.



O.M.  I haven't anything to offer; you have covered the

whole ground.  Can you have been any MORE strongly moved to help

Sally out of her trouble--could you have done the deed any more

eagerly--if you had been under the delusion that you were doing

it for HER sake and profit only?



Y.M.  No!  Nothing in the world could have made the impulse

which moved me more powerful, more masterful, more thoroughly

irresistible.  I played the limit!



O.M.  Very well.  You begin to suspect--and I claim to KNOW

--that when a man is a shade MORE STRONGLY MOVED to do ONE of two

things or of two dozen things than he is to do any one of the

OTHERS, he will infallibly do that ONE thing, be it good or be it

evil; and if it be good, not all the beguilements of all the

casuistries can increase the strength of the impulse by a single

shade or add a shade to the comfort and contentment he will get

out of the act.



Y.M.  Then you believe that such tendency toward doing good

as is in men's hearts would not be diminished by the removal of

the delusion that good deeds are done primarily for the sake of

No. 2 instead of for the sake of No. 1?



O.M.  That is what I fully believe.



Y.M.  Doesn't it somehow seem to take from the dignity of the deed?



O.M.  If there is dignity in falsity, it does.  It removes that.



Y.M.  What is left for the moralists to do?



O.M.  Teach unreservedly what he already teaches with one

side of his mouth and takes back with the other:  Do right FOR

YOUR OWN SAKE, and be happy in knowing that your NEIGHBOR will

certainly share in the benefits resulting.



Y.M.  Repeat your Admonition.



O.M.  DILIGENTLY TRAIN YOUR IDEALS UPWARD AND STILL UPWARD

TOWARD A SUMMIT WHERE YOU WILL FIND YOUR CHIEFEST PLEASURE IN

CONDUCT WHICH, WHILE CONTENTING YOU, WILL BE SURE TO CONFER

BENEFITS UPON YOUR NEIGHBOR AND THE COMMUNITY.



Y.M.  One's EVERY act proceeds from EXTERIOR INFLUENCES, you think?



O.M.  Yes.



Y.M.  If I conclude to rob a person, I am not the ORIGINATOR

of the idea, but it comes in from the OUTSIDE?  I see him

handling money--for instance--and THAT moves me to the crime?



O.M.  That, by itself?  Oh, certainly not.  It is merely the

LATEST outside influence of a procession of preparatory

influences stretching back over a period of years.  No SINGLE

outside influence can make a man do a thing which is at war with

his training.  The most it can do is to start his mind on a new

tract and open it to the reception of NEW influences--as in the

case of Ignatius Loyola.  In time these influences can train him

to a point where it will be consonant with his new character to

yield to the FINAL influence and do that thing.  I will put the

case in a form which will make my theory clear to you, I think.

Here are two ingots of virgin gold.  They shall represent a

couple of characters which have been refined and perfected in the

virtues by years of diligent right training.  Suppose you wanted

to break down these strong and well-compacted characters--what

influence would you bring to bear upon the ingots?



Y.M.  Work it out yourself.  Proceed.



O.M.  Suppose I turn upon one of them a steam-jet during a

long succession of hours.  Will there be a result?



Y.M.  None that I know of.



O.M.  Why?



Y.M.  A steam-jet cannot break down such a substance.



O.M.  Very well.  The steam is an OUTSIDE INFLUENCE, but it

is ineffective because the gold TAKES NO INTEREST IN IT.  The

ingot remains as it was.  Suppose we add to the steam some

quicksilver in a vaporized condition, and turn the jet upon the

ingot, will there be an instantaneous result?



Y.M.  No.



O.M.  The QUICKSILVER is an outside influence which gold (by

its peculiar nature--say TEMPERAMENT, DISPOSITION) CANNOT BE

INDIFFERENT TO.  It stirs up the interest of the gold, although

we do not perceive it; but a SINGLE application of the influence

works no damage.  Let us continue the application in a steady

stream, and call each minute a year.  By the end of ten or twenty

minutes--ten or twenty years--the little ingot is sodden with

quicksilver, its virtues are gone, its character is degraded.  At

last it is ready to yield to a temptation which it would have

taken no notice of, ten or twenty years ago.  We will apply that

temptation in the form of a pressure of my finger.  You note the

result?



Y.M.  Yes; the ingot has crumbled to sand.  I understand,

now.  It is not the SINGLE outside influence that does the work,

but only the LAST one of a long and disintegrating accumulation

of them.  I see, now, how my SINGLE impulse to rob the man is not

the one that makes me do it, but only the LAST one of a

preparatory series.  You might illustrate with a parable.







A Parable



O.M.  I will.  There was once a pair of New England boys--

twins.  They were alike in good dispositions, feckless morals,

and personal appearance.  They were the models of the Sunday-

school.  At fifteen George had the opportunity to go as cabin-boy

in a whale-ship, and sailed away for the Pacific.  Henry remained

at home in the village.  At eighteen George was a sailor before

the mast, and Henry was teacher of the advanced Bible class.  At

twenty-two George, through fighting-habits and drinking-habits

acquired at sea and in the sailor boarding-houses of the European

and Oriental ports, was a common rough in Hong-Kong, and out of a

job; and Henry was superintendent of the Sunday-school.  At

twenty-six George was a wanderer, a tramp, and Henry was pastor

of the village church.  Then George came home, and was Henry's

guest.  One evening a man passed by and turned down the lane, and

Henry said, with a pathetic smile, "Without intending me a

discomfort, that man is always keeping me reminded of my pinching

poverty, for he carries heaps of money about him, and goes by

here every evening of his life."  That OUTSIDE INFLUENCE--that

remark--was enough for George, but IT was not the one that made

him ambush the man and rob him, it merely represented the eleven

years' accumulation of such influences, and gave birth to the act

for which their long gestation had made preparation.  It had

never entered the head of Henry to rob the man--his ingot had

been subjected to clean steam only; but George's had been

subjected to vaporized quicksilver.







V



More About the Machine



Note.--When Mrs. W. asks how can a millionaire give a single

dollar to colleges and museums while one human being is destitute

of bread, she has answered her question herself.  Her feeling for

the poor shows that she has a standard of benevolence; there she

has conceded the millionaire's privilege of having a standard;

since she evidently requires him to adopt her standard, she is by

that act requiring herself to adopt his.  The human being always

looks down when he is examining another person's standard; he

never find one that he has to examine by looking up.









The Man-Machine Again





Young Man.  You really think man is a mere machine?



Old Man.  I do.



Y.M.  And that his mind works automatically and is

independent of his control--carries on thought on its own hook?



O.M.  Yes.  It is diligently at work, unceasingly at work,

during every waking moment.  Have you never tossed about all

night, imploring, beseeching, commanding your mind to stop work

and let you go to sleep?--you who perhaps imagine that your mind

is your servant and must obey your orders, think what you tell it

to think, and stop when you tell it to stop.  When it chooses to

work, there is no way to keep it still for an instant.  The

brightest man would not be able to supply it with subjects if he

had to hunt them up.  If it needed the man's help it would wait

for him to give it work when he wakes in the morning.



Y.M.  Maybe it does.



O.M.  No, it begins right away, before the man gets wide

enough awake to give it a suggestion.  He may go to sleep saying,

"The moment I wake I will think upon such and such a subject,"

but he will fail.  His mind will be too quick for him; by the

time he has become nearly enough awake to be half conscious, he

will find that it is already at work upon another subject.  Make

the experiment and see.



Y.M.  At any rate, he can make it stick to a subject if he

wants to.



O.M.  Not if it find another that suits it better.  As a

rule it will listen to neither a dull speaker nor a bright one.

It refuses all persuasion.  The dull speaker wearies it and sends

it far away in idle dreams; the bright speaker throws out

stimulating ideas which it goes chasing after and is at once

unconscious of him and his talk.  You cannot keep your mind from

wandering, if it wants to; it is master, not you.







After an Interval of Days





O.M.  Now, dreams--but we will examine that later.

Meantime, did you try commanding your mind to wait for orders

from you, and not do any thinking on its own hook?



Y.M.  Yes, I commanded it to stand ready to take orders when

I should wake in the morning.



O.M.  Did it obey?



Y.M.  No.  It went to thinking of something of its own

initiation, without waiting for me.  Also--as you suggested--at

night I appointed a theme for it to begin on in the morning, and

commanded it to begin on that one and no other.



O.M.  Did it obey?



Y.M.  No.



O.M.  How many times did you try the experiment?



Y.M.  Ten.



O.M.  How many successes did you score?



Y.M.  Not one.



O.M.  It is as I have said:  the mind is independent of the

man.  He has no control over it; it does as it pleases.  It will

take up a subject in spite of him; it will stick to it in spite

of him; it will throw it aside in spite of him.  It is entirely

independent of him.



Y.M.  Go on.  Illustrate.



O.M.  Do you know chess?



Y.M.  I learned it a week ago.



O.M.  Did your mind go on playing the game all night that

first night?



Y.M.  Don't mention it!



O.M.  It was eagerly, unsatisfiably interested; it rioted in

the combinations; you implored it to drop the game and let you

get some sleep?



Y.M.  Yes.  It wouldn't listen; it played right along.  It

wore me out and I got up haggard and wretched in the morning.



O.M.  At some time or other you have been captivated by a

ridiculous rhyme-jingle?



Y.M.  Indeed, yes!



"I saw Esau kissing Kate,

And she saw I saw Esau;

I saw Esau, he saw Kate,

And she saw--"



And so on.  My mind went mad with joy over it.  It repeated it

all day and all night for a week in spite of all I could do to

stop it, and it seemed to me that I must surely go crazy.



O.M.  And the new popular song?



Y.M.  Oh yes!  "In the Swee-eet By and By"; etc.  Yes, the

new popular song with the taking melody sings through one's head

day and night, asleep and awake, till one is a wreck.  There is

no getting the mind to let it alone.



O.M.  Yes, asleep as well as awake.  The mind is quite

independent.  It is master.  You have nothing to do with it.  It

is so apart from you that it can conduct its affairs, sing its

songs, play its chess, weave its complex and ingeniously

constructed dreams, while you sleep.  It has no use for your

help, no use for your guidance, and never uses either, whether

you be asleep or awake.  You have imagined that you could

originate a thought in your mind, and you have sincerely believed

you could do it.



Y.M.  Yes, I have had that idea.



O.M.  Yet you can't originate a dream-thought for it to work

out, and get it accepted?



Y.M.  No.



O.M.  And you can't dictate its procedure after it has

originated a dream-thought for itself?



Y.M.  No.  No one can do it.  Do you think the waking mind

and the dream mind are the same machine?



O.M.  There is argument for it.  We have wild and fantastic

day-thoughts?  Things that are dream-like?



Y.M.  Yes--like Mr. Wells's man who invented a drug that made

him invisible; and like the Arabian tales of the Thousand Nights.



O.M.  And there are dreams that are rational, simple,

consistent, and unfantastic?



Y.M.  Yes.  I have dreams that are like that.  Dreams that

are just like real life; dreams in which there are several

persons with distinctly differentiated characters--inventions of

my mind and yet strangers to me:  a vulgar person; a refined one;

a wise person; a fool; a cruel person; a kind and compassionate

one; a quarrelsome person; a peacemaker; old persons and young;

beautiful girls and homely ones.  They talk in character, each

preserves his own characteristics.  There are vivid fights, vivid

and biting insults, vivid love-passages; there are tragedies and

comedies, there are griefs that go to one's heart, there are

sayings and doings that make you laugh:  indeed, the whole thing

is exactly like real life.



O.M.  Your dreaming mind originates the scheme, consistently

and artistically develops it, and carries the little drama

creditably through--all without help or suggestion from you?



Y.M.  Yes.



O.M.  It is argument that it could do the like awake without help

or suggestion from you--and I think it does.  It is argument that

it is the same old mind in both cases, and never needs your help.

I think the mind is purely a machine, a thoroughly independent

machine, an automatic machine.  Have you tried the other

experiment which I suggested to you?



Y.M.  Which one?



O.M.  The one which was to determine how much influence you

have over your mind--if any.



Y.M.  Yes, and got more or less entertainment out of it.  I

did as you ordered:  I placed two texts before my eyes--one a

dull one and barren of interest, the other one full of interest,

inflamed with it, white-hot with it.  I commanded my mind to busy

itself solely with the dull one.



O.M.  Did it obey?



Y.M.  Well, no, it didn't.  It busied itself with the other one.



O.M.  Did you try hard to make it obey?



Y.M.  Yes, I did my honest best.



O.M.  What was the text which it refused to be interested in

or think about?



Y.M.  It was this question:  If A owes B a dollar and a

half, and B owes C two and three-quarter, and C owes A thirty-

five cents, and D and A together owe E and B three-sixteenths of

--of--I don't remember the rest, now, but anyway it was wholly

uninteresting, and I could not force my mind to stick to it even

half a minute at a time; it kept flying off to the other text.



O.M.  What was the other text?



Y.M.  It is no matter about that.



O.M.  But what was it?



Y.M.  A photograph.



O.M.  Your own?



Y.M.  No.  It was hers.



O.M.  You really made an honest good test.  Did you make a

second trial?



Y.M.  Yes.  I commanded my mind to interest itself in the

morning paper's report of the pork-market, and at the same time I

reminded it of an experience of mine of sixteen years ago.  It

refused to consider the pork and gave its whole blazing interest

to that ancient incident.



O.M.  What was the incident?



Y.M.  An armed desperado slapped my face in the presence of

twenty spectators.  It makes me wild and murderous every time I

think of it.



O.M.  Good tests, both; very good tests.  Did you try my

other suggestion?



Y.M.  The one which was to prove to me that if I would leave

my mind to its own devices it would find things to think about

without any of my help, and thus convince me that it was a

machine, an automatic machine, set in motion by exterior

influences, and as independent of me as it could be if it were in

some one else's skull.  Is that the one?



O.M.  Yes.



Y.M.  I tried it.  I was shaving.  I had slept well, and my

mind was very lively, even gay and frisky.  It was reveling in a

fantastic and joyful episode of my remote boyhood which had

suddenly flashed up in my memory--moved to this by the spectacle

of a yellow cat picking its way carefully along the top of the

garden wall.  The color of this cat brought the bygone cat before

me, and I saw her walking along the side-step of the pulpit; saw

her walk on to a large sheet of sticky fly-paper and get all her

feet involved; saw her struggle and fall down, helpless and

dissatisfied, more and more urgent, more and more unreconciled,

more and more mutely profane; saw the silent congregation

quivering like jelly, and the tears running down their faces.  I

saw it all.  The sight of the tears whisked my mind to a far

distant and a sadder scene--in Terra del Fuego--and with Darwin's

eyes I saw a naked great savage hurl his little boy against the

rocks for a trifling fault; saw the poor mother gather up her

dying child and hug it to her breast and weep, uttering no word.

Did my mind stop to mourn with that nude black sister of mine?

No--it was far away from that scene in an instant, and was

busying itself with an ever-recurring and disagreeable dream of

mine.  In this dream I always find myself, stripped to my shirt,

cringing and dodging about in the midst of a great drawing-room

throng of finely dressed ladies and gentlemen, and wondering how

I got there.  And so on and so on, picture after picture,

incident after incident, a drifting panorama of ever-changing,

ever-dissolving views manufactured by my mind without any help

from me--why, it would take me two hours to merely name the

multitude of things my mind tallied off and photographed in

fifteen minutes, let alone describe them to you.



O.M.  A man's mind, left free, has no use for his help.  But

there is one way whereby he can get its help when he desires it.



Y.M.  What is that way?



O.M.  When your mind is racing along from subject to subject

and strikes an inspiring one, open your mouth and begin talking

upon that matter--or--take your pen and use that.  It will

interest your mind and concentrate it, and it will pursue the

subject with satisfaction.  It will take full charge, and furnish

the words itself.



Y.M.  But don't I tell it what to say?



O.M.  There are certainly occasions when you haven't time.

The words leap out before you know what is coming.



Y.M.  For instance?



O.M.  Well, take a "flash of wit"--repartee.  Flash is the

right word.  It is out instantly.  There is no time to arrange

the words.  There is no thinking, no reflecting.  Where there is

a wit-mechanism it is automatic in its action and needs no help.

Where the whit-mechanism is lacking, no amount of study and

reflection can manufacture the product.



Y.M.  You really think a man originates nothing, creates nothing.







The Thinking-Process



O.M.  I do.  Men perceive, and their brain-machines

automatically combine the things perceived.  That is all.



Y.M.  The steam-engine?



O.M.  It takes fifty men a hundred years to invent it.  One

meaning of invent is discover.  I use the word in that sense.

Little by little they discover and apply the multitude of details

that go to make the perfect engine.  Watt noticed that confined

steam was strong enough to lift the lid of the teapot.  He didn't

create the idea, he merely discovered the fact; the cat had

noticed it a hundred times.  From the teapot he evolved the

cylinder--from the displaced lid he evolved the piston-rod.  To

attach something to the piston-rod to be moved by it, was a

simple matter--crank and wheel.  And so there was a working

engine. [1]



One by one, improvements were discovered by men who used

their eyes, not their creating powers--for they hadn't any--and

now, after a hundred years the patient contributions of fifty or

a hundred observers stand compacted in the wonderful machine

which drives the ocean liner.



Y.M.  A Shakespearean play?



O.M.  The process is the same.  The first actor was a

savage.  He reproduced in his theatrical war-dances, scalp-

dances, and so on, incidents which he had seen in real life.  A

more advanced civilization produced more incidents, more

episodes; the actor and the story-teller borrowed them.  And so

the drama grew, little by little, stage by stage.  It is made up

of the facts of life, not creations.  It took centuries to

develop the Greek drama.  It borrowed from preceding ages; it

lent to the ages that came after.  Men observe and combine, that

is all.  So does a rat.



Y.M.  How?



O.M.  He observes a smell, he infers a cheese, he seeks and

finds.  The astronomer observes this and that; adds his this and

that to the this-and-thats of a hundred predecessors, infers an

invisible planet, seeks it and finds it.  The rat gets into a

trap; gets out with trouble; infers that cheese in traps lacks

value, and meddles with that trap no more.  The astronomer is

very proud of his achievement, the rat is proud of his.  Yet both

are machines; they have done machine work, they have originated

nothing, they have no right to be vain; the whole credit belongs

to their Maker.  They are entitled to no honors, no praises, no

monuments when they die, no remembrance.  One is a complex and

elaborate machine, the other a simple and limited machine, but

they are alike in principle, function, and process, and neither

of them works otherwise than automatically, and neither of them

may righteously claim a PERSONAL superiority or a personal

dignity above the other.



Y.M.  In earned personal dignity, then, and in personal merit

for what he does, it follows of necessity that he is on the

same level as a rat?



O.M.  His brother the rat; yes, that is how it seems to me.

Neither of them being entitled to any personal merit for what he

does, it follows of necessity that neither of them has a right to

arrogate to himself (personally created) superiorities over his

brother.



Y.M.  Are you determined to go on believing in these

insanities?  Would you go on believing in them in the face of

able arguments backed by collated facts and instances?



O.M.  I have been a humble, earnest, and sincere Truth-Seeker.



Y.M.  Very well?



O.M.  The humble, earnest, and sincere Truth-Seeker is

always convertible by such means.



Y.M.  I am thankful to God to hear you say this, for now I

know that your conversion--



O.M.  Wait.  You misunderstand.  I said I have BEEN a Truth-Seeker.



Y.M.  Well?



O.M.  I am not that now.  Have your forgotten?  I told you

that there are none but temporary Truth-Seekers; that a permanent

one is a human impossibility; that as soon as the Seeker finds

what he is thoroughly convinced is the Truth, he seeks no

further, but gives the rest of his days to hunting junk to patch

it and caulk it and prop it with, and make it weather-proof and

keep it from caving in on him.  Hence the Presbyterian remains a

Presbyterian, the Mohammedan a Mohammedan, the Spiritualist a

Spiritualist, the Democrat a Democrat, the Republican a

Republican, the Monarchist a Monarchist; and if a humble,

earnest, and sincere Seeker after Truth should find it in the

proposition that the moon is made of green cheese nothing could

ever budge him from that position; for he is nothing but an

automatic machine, and must obey the laws of his construction.



Y.M.  After so--



O.M.  Having found the Truth; perceiving that beyond question

man has but one moving impulse--the contenting of his own spirit--

and is merely a machine and entitled to no personal merit for

anything he does, it is not humanly possible for me to seek further.

The rest of my days will be spent in patching and painting and

puttying and caulking my priceless possession and in looking the

other way when an imploring argument or a damaging fact approaches.



-----

1.  The Marquess of Worcester had done all of this more than a

century earlier.







VI





Instinct and Thought



Young Man.  It is odious.  Those drunken theories of yours,

advanced a while ago--concerning the rat and all that--strip Man

bare of all his dignities, grandeurs, sublimities.



Old Man.  He hasn't any to strip--they are shams, stolen

clothes.  He claims credits which belong solely to his Maker.



Y.M.  But you have no right to put him on a level with a rat.



O.M.  I don't--morally.  That would not be fair to the rat.

The rat is well above him, there.



Y.M.  Are you joking?



O.M.  No, I am not.



Y.M.  Then what do you mean?



O.M.  That comes under the head of the Moral Sense.  It is a

large question.  Let us finish with what we are about now, before

we take it up.



Y.M.  Very well.  You have seemed to concede that you place

Man and the rat on A level.  What is it?  The intellectual?



O.M.  In form--not a degree.



Y.M.  Explain.



O.M.  I think that the rat's mind and the man's mind are the

same machine, but of unequal capacities--like yours and Edison's;

like the African pygmy's and Homer's; like the Bushman's and Bismarck's.



Y.M.  How are you going to make that out, when the lower animals

have no mental quality but instinct, while man possesses reason?



O.M.  What is instinct?



Y.M.  It is merely unthinking and mechanical exercise of

inherited habit.



O.M.  What originated the habit?



Y.M.  The first animal started it, its descendants have

inherited it.



O.M.  How did the first one come to start it?



Y.M.  I don't know; but it didn't THINK it out.



O.M.  How do you know it didn't?



Y.M.  Well--I have a right to suppose it didn't, anyway.



O.M.  I don't believe you have.  What is thought?



Y.M.  I know what you call it:  the mechanical and automatic

putting together of impressions received from outside, and

drawing an inference from them.



O.M.  Very good.  Now my idea of the meaningless term "instinct" is,

that it is merely PETRIFIED THOUGHT; solidified and made inanimate

by habit; thought which was once alive and awake, but it become

unconscious--walks in its sleep, so to speak.



Y.M.  Illustrate it.



O.M.  Take a herd of cows, feeding in a pasture.  Their

heads are all turned in one direction.  They do that

instinctively; they gain nothing by it, they have no reason for

it, they don't know why they do it.  It is an inherited habit

which was originally thought--that is to say, observation of an

exterior fact, and a valuable inference drawn from that

observation and confirmed by experience.  The original wild ox

noticed that with the wind in his favor he could smell his enemy

in time to escape; then he inferred that it was worth while to

keep his nose to the wind.  That is the process which man calls

reasoning.  Man's thought-machine works just like the other

animals', but it is a better one and more Edisonian.  Man, in the

ox's place, would go further, reason wider:  he would face part

of the herd the other way and protect both front and rear.



Y.M.  Did you stay the term instinct is meaningless?



O.M.  I think it is a bastard word.  I think it confuses us;

for as a rule it applies itself to habits and impulses which had

a far-off origin in thought, and now and then breaks the rule and

applies itself to habits which can hardly claim a thought-origin.



Y.M.  Give an instance.



O.M.  Well, in putting on trousers a man always inserts the same old

leg first--never the other one.  There is no advantage in that,

and no sense in it.  All men do it, yet no man thought it out

and adopted it of set purpose, I imagine.  But it is a habit which

is transmitted, no doubt, and will continue to be transmitted.



Y.M.  Can you prove that the habit exists?



O.M.  You can prove it, if you doubt.  If you will take a

man to a clothing-store and watch him try on a dozen pairs of

trousers, you will see.



Y.M.  The cow illustration is not--



O.M.  Sufficient to show that a dumb animal's mental machine

is just the same as a man's and its reasoning processes the same?

I will illustrate further.  If you should hand Mr. Edison a box

which you caused to fly open by some concealed device he would

infer a spring, and would hunt for it and find it.  Now an uncle

of mine had an old horse who used to get into the closed lot

where the corn-crib was and dishonestly take the corn.  I got the

punishment myself, as it was supposed that I had heedlessly

failed to insert the wooden pin which kept the gate closed.

These persistent punishments fatigued me; they also caused me to

infer the existence of a culprit, somewhere; so I hid myself and

watched the gate.  Presently the horse came and pulled the pin

out with his teeth and went in.  Nobody taught him that; he had

observed--then thought it out for himself.  His process did not

differ from Edison's; he put this and that together and drew an

inference--and the peg, too; but I made him sweat for it.



Y.M.  It has something of the seeming of thought about it.

Still it is not very elaborate.  Enlarge.



O.M.  Suppose Mr. Edison has been enjoying some one's

hospitalities.  He comes again by and by, and the house is

vacant.  He infers that his host has moved.  A while afterward,

in another town, he sees the man enter a house; he infers that

that is the new home, and follows to inquire.  Here, now, is the

experience of a gull, as related by a naturalist.  The scene is a

Scotch fishing village where the gulls were kindly treated.  This

particular gull visited a cottage; was fed; came next day and was

fed again; came into the house, next time, and ate with the

family; kept on doing this almost daily, thereafter.  But, once

the gull was away on a journey for a few days, and when it

returned the house was vacant.  Its friends had removed to a

village three miles distant.  Several months later it saw the

head of the family on the street there, followed him home,

entered the house without excuse or apology, and became a daily

guest again.  Gulls do not rank high mentally, but this one had

memory and the reasoning faculty, you see, and applied them

Edisonially.



Y.M.  Yet it was not an Edison and couldn't be developed into one.



O.M.  Perhaps not.  Could you?



Y.M.  That is neither here nor there.  Go on.



O.M.  If Edison were in trouble and a stranger helped him

out of it and next day he got into the same difficulty again, he

would infer the wise thing to do in case he knew the stranger's

address.  Here is a case of a bird and a stranger as related by a

naturalist.  An Englishman saw a bird flying around about his

dog's head, down in the grounds, and uttering cries of distress.

He went there to see about it.  The dog had a young bird in his

mouth--unhurt.  The gentleman rescued it and put it on a bush and

brought the dog away.  Early the next morning the mother bird

came for the gentleman, who was sitting on his veranda, and by

its maneuvers persuaded him to follow it to a distant part of the

grounds--flying a little way in front of him and waiting for him

to catch up, and so on; and keeping to the winding path, too,

instead of flying the near way across lots.  The distance covered

was four hundred yards.  The same dog was the culprit; he had the

young bird again, and once more he had to give it up.  Now the

mother bird had reasoned it all out:  since the stranger had

helped her once, she inferred that he would do it again; she knew

where to find him, and she went upon her errand with confidence.

Her mental processes were what Edison's would have been.  She put

this and that together--and that is all that thought IS--and out

of them built her logical arrangement of inferences.  Edison

couldn't have done it any better himself.



Y.M.  Do you believe that many of the dumb animals can think?



O.M.  Yes--the elephant, the monkey, the horse, the dog, the

parrot, the macaw, the mocking-bird, and many others.  The

elephant whose mate fell into a pit, and who dumped dirt and

rubbish into the pit till bottom was raised high enough to enable

the captive to step out, was equipped with the reasoning quality.

I conceive that all animals that can learn things through

teaching and drilling have to know how to observe, and put this

and that together and draw an inference--the process of thinking.

Could you teach an idiot of manuals of arms, and to advance,

retreat, and go through complex field maneuvers at the word of

command?



Y.M.  Not if he were a thorough idiot.



O.M.  Well, canary-birds can learn all that; dogs and elephants

learn all sorts of wonderful things.  They must surely be able

to notice, and to put things together, and say to themselves,

"I get the idea, now:  when I do so and so, as per order,

I am praised and fed; when I do differently I am punished."

Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can.



Y.M.  Granting, then, that dumb animals are able to think

upon a low plane, is there any that can think upon a high one?

Is there one that is well up toward man?



O.M.  Yes.  As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of

any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several

arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or

two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man,

savage or civilized!



Y.M.  Oh, come! you are abolishing the intellectual frontier

which separates man and beast.



O.M.  I beg your pardon.  One cannot abolish what does not exist.



Y.M.  You are not in earnest, I hope.  You cannot mean to

seriously say there is no such frontier.



O.M.  I do say it seriously. The instances of the horse, the

gull, the mother bird, and the elephant show that those creatures

put their this's and thats together just as Edison would have

done it and drew the same inferences that he would have drawn.

Their mental machinery was just like his, also its manner of

working.  Their equipment was as inferior to the Strasburg clock,

but that is the only difference--there is no frontier.



Y.M.  It looks exasperatingly true; and is distinctly

offensive.  It elevates the dumb beasts to--to--



O.M.  Let us drop that lying phrase, and call them the

Unrevealed Creatures; so far as we can know, there is no such

thing as a dumb beast.



Y.M.  On what grounds do you make that assertion?



O.M.  On quite simple ones.  "Dumb" beast suggests an animal

that has no thought-machinery, no understanding, no speech, no

way of communicating what is in its mind.  We know that a hen HAS

speech.  We cannot understand everything she says, but we easily

learn two or three of her phrases.  We know when she is saying,

"I have laid an egg"; we know when she is saying to the chicks,

"Run here, dears, I've found a worm"; we know what she is saying

when she voices a warning:  "Quick! hurry! gather yourselves

under mamma, there's a hawk coming!"  We understand the cat when

she stretches herself out, purring with affection and contentment

and lifts up a soft voice and says, "Come, kitties, supper's

ready"; we understand her when she goes mourning about and says,

"Where can they be?  They are lost.  Won't you help me hunt for

them?" and we understand the disreputable Tom when he challenges

at midnight from his shed, "You come over here, you product of

immoral commerce, and I'll make your fur fly!"  We understand a

few of a dog's phrases and we learn to understand a few of the

remarks and gestures of any bird or other animal that we

domesticate and observe.  The clearness and exactness of the few

of the hen's speeches which we understand is argument that she

can communicate to her kind a hundred things which we cannot

comprehend--in a word, that she can converse.  And this argument

is also applicable in the case of others of the great army of the

Unrevealed.  It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to

call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.

Now as to the ant--



Y.M.  Yes, go back to the ant, the creature that--as you

seem to think--sweeps away the last vestige of an intellectual

frontier between man and the Unrevealed.



O.M.  That is what she surely does.  In all his history the

aboriginal Australian never thought out a house for himself and

built it.  The ant is an amazing architect.  She is a wee little

creature, but she builds a strong and enduring house eight feet

high--a house which is as large in proportion to her size as is

the largest capitol or cathedral in the world compared to man's

size.  No savage race has produced architects who could approach

the air in genius or culture.  No civilized race has produced

architects who could plan a house better for the uses proposed

than can hers.  Her house contains a throne-room; nurseries for

her young; granaries; apartments for her soldiers, her workers,

etc.; and they and the multifarious halls and corridors which

communicate with them are arranged and distributed with an

educated and experienced eye for convenience and adaptability.



Y.M.  That could be mere instinct.



O.M.  It would elevate the savage if he had it.  But let us

look further before we decide.  The ant has soldiers--battalions,

regiments, armies; and they have their appointed captains and

generals, who lead them to battle.



Y.M.  That could be instinct, too.



O.M.  We will look still further.  The ant has a system of

government; it is well planned, elaborate, and is well carried on.



Y.M.  Instinct again.



O.M.  She has crowds of slaves, and is a hard and unjust

employer of forced labor.



Y.M.  Instinct.



O.M.  She has cows, and milks them.



Y.M.  Instinct, of course.



O.M.  In Texas she lays out a farm twelve feet square, plants it,

weeds it, cultivates it, gathers the crop and stores it away.



Y.M.  Instinct, all the same.



O.M.  The ant discriminates between friend and stranger.

Sir John Lubbock took ants from two different nests, made them

drunk with whiskey and laid them, unconscious, by one of the

nests, near some water.  Ants from the nest came and examined and

discussed these disgraced creatures, then carried their friends

home and threw the strangers overboard.  Sir John repeated the

experiment a number of times.  For a time the sober ants did as

they had done at first--carried their friends home and threw the

strangers overboard.  But finally they lost patience, seeing that

their reformatory efforts went for nothing, and threw both

friends and strangers overboard.  Come--is this instinct, or is

it thoughtful and intelligent discussion of a thing new--

absolutely new--to their experience; with a verdict arrived at,

sentence passed, and judgment executed?  Is it instinct?--thought

petrified by ages of habit--or isn't it brand-new thought,

inspired by the new occasion, the new circumstances?



Y.M.  I have to concede it.  It was not a result of habit;

it has all the look of reflection, thought, putting this and that

together, as you phrase it.  I believe it was thought.



O.M.  I will give you another instance of thought.  Franklin

had a cup of sugar on a table in his room.  The ants got at it.

He tried several preventives; and ants rose superior to them.

Finally he contrived one which shut off access--probably set the

table's legs in pans of water, or drew a circle of tar around the

cup, I don't remember.  At any rate, he watched to see what they

would do.  They tried various schemes--failures, every one.  The

ants were badly puzzled.  Finally they held a consultation,

discussed the problem, arrived at a decision--and this time they

beat that great philosopher.  They formed in procession, cross

the floor, climbed the wall, marched across the ceiling to a

point just over the cup, then one by one they let go and fell

down into it!  Was that instinct--thought petrified by ages of

inherited habit?



Y.M.  No, I don't believe it was.  I believe it was a newly

reasoned scheme to meet a new emergency.



O.M.  Very well.  You have conceded the reasoning power in

two instances.  I come now to a mental detail wherein the ant is

a long way the superior of any human being.  Sir John Lubbock

proved by many experiments that an ant knows a stranger ant of

her own species in a moment, even when the stranger is disguised

--with paint.  Also he proved that an ant knows every individual

in her hive of five hundred thousand souls.  Also, after a year's

absence one of the five hundred thousand she will straightway

recognize the returned absentee and grace the recognition with a

affectionate welcome.  How are these recognitions made?  Not by

color, for painted ants were recognized.  Not by smell, for ants

that had been dipped in chloroform were recognized.  Not by

speech and not by antennae signs nor contacts, for the drunken

and motionless ants were recognized and the friend discriminated

from the stranger.  The ants were all of the same species,

therefore the friends had to be recognized by form and feature--

friends who formed part of a hive of five hundred thousand!  Has

any man a memory for form and feature approaching that?



Y.M.  Certainly not.



O.M.  Franklin's ants and Lubbuck's ants show fine

capacities of putting this and that together in new and untried

emergencies and deducting smart conclusions from the

combinations--a man's mental process exactly.  With memory to

help, man preserves his observations and reasonings, reflects

upon them, adds to them, recombines, and so proceeds, stage by

stage, to far results--from the teakettle to the ocean

greyhound's complex engine; from personal labor to slave labor;

from wigwam to palace; from the capricious chase to agriculture

and stored food; from nomadic life to stable government and

concentrated authority; from incoherent hordes to massed armies.

The ant has observation, the reasoning faculty, and the

preserving adjunct of a prodigious memory; she has duplicated

man's development and the essential features of his civilization,

and you call it all instinct!



Y.M.  Perhaps I lacked the reasoning faculty myself.



O.M.  Well, don't tell anybody, and don't do it again.



Y.M.  We have come a good way.  As a result--as I understand it--

I am required to concede that there is absolutely no intellectual

frontier separating Man and the Unrevealed Creatures?



O.M.  That is what you are required to concede.  There is no

such frontier--there is no way to get around that.  Man has a

finer and more capable machine in him than those others, but it

is the same machine and works in the same way.  And neither he

nor those others can command the machine--it is strictly

automatic, independent of control, works when it pleases, and

when it doesn't please, it can't be forced.



Y.M.  Then man and the other animals are all alike, as to mental

machinery, and there isn't any difference of any stupendous

magnitude between them, except in quality, not in kind.



O.M.  That is about the state of it--intellectuality.  There

are pronounced limitations on both sides.  We can't learn to

understand much of their language, but the dog, the elephant,

etc., learn to understand a very great deal of ours.  To that

extent they are our superiors.  On the other hand, they can't

learn reading, writing, etc., nor any of our fine and high

things, and there we have a large advantage over them.



Y.M.  Very well, let them have what they've got, and welcome;

there is still a wall, and a lofty one.  They haven't got the

Moral Sense; we have it, and it lifts us immeasurably above them.



O.M.  What makes you think that?



Y.M.  Now look here--let's call a halt.  I have stood the

other infamies and insanities and that is enough; I am not going

to have man and the other animals put on the same level morally.



O.M.  I wasn't going to hoist man up to that.



Y.M.  This is too much!  I think it is not right to jest

about such things.



O.M.  I am not jesting, I am merely reflecting a plain and

simple truth--and without uncharitableness.  The fact that man

knows right from wrong proves his INTELLECTUAL superiority to the

other creatures; but the fact that he can DO wrong proves his

MORAL inferiority to any creature that CANNOT.  It is my belief

that this position is not assailable.







Free Will



Y.M.  What is your opinion regarding Free Will?



O.M.  That there is no such thing.  Did the man possess it

who gave the old woman his last shilling and trudged home in the

storm?



Y.M.  He had the choice between succoring the old woman and

leaving her to suffer.  Isn't it so?



O.M.  Yes, there was a choice to be made, between bodily

comfort on the one hand and the comfort of the spirit on the

other.  The body made a strong appeal, of course--the body would

be quite sure to do that; the spirit made a counter appeal.  A

choice had to be made between the two appeals, and was made.  Who

or what determined that choice?



Y.M.  Any one but you would say that the man determined it,

and that in doing it he exercised Free Will.



O.M.  We are constantly assured that every man is endowed

with Free Will, and that he can and must exercise it where he is

offered a choice between good conduct and less-good conduct.  Yet

we clearly saw that in that man's case he really had no Free

Will:  his temperament, his training, and the daily influences

which had molded him and made him what he was, COMPELLED him to

rescue the old woman and thus save HIMSELF--save himself from

spiritual pain, from unendurable wretchedness.  He did not make

the choice, it was made FOR him by forces which he could not

control.  Free Will has always existed in WORDS, but it stops

there, I think--stops short of FACT.  I would not use those

words--Free Will--but others.



Y.M.  What others?



O.M.  Free Choice.



Y.M.  What is the difference?



O.M.  The one implies untrammeled power to ACT as you please,

the other implies nothing beyond a mere MENTAL PROCESS:

the critical ability to determine which of two things

is nearest right and just.



Y.M.  Make the difference clear, please.



O.M.  The mind can freely SELECT, CHOOSE, POINT OUT the

right and just one--its function stops there.  It can go no

further in the matter.  It has no authority to say that the right

one shall be acted upon and the wrong one discarded.

That authority is in other hands.



Y.M.  The man's?



O.M.  In the machine which stands for him.  In his born

disposition and the character which has been built around it by

training and environment.



Y.M.  It will act upon the right one of the two?



O.M.  It will do as it pleases in the matter.  George Washington's

machine would act upon the right one; Pizarro would act upon the wrong one.



Y.M.  Then as I understand it a bad man's mental machinery calmly

and judicially points out which of two things is right and just--



O.M.  Yes, and his MORAL machinery will freely act upon

the other or the other, according to its make, and be quite

indifferent to the MIND'S feeling concerning the matter--that is,

WOULD be, if the mind had any feelings; which it hasn't.

It is merely a thermometer:  it registers the heat and the cold,

and cares not a farthing about either.



Y.M.  Then we must not claim that if a man KNOWS which of

two things is right he is absolutely BOUND to do that thing?



O.M.  His temperament and training will decide what he shall

do, and he will do it; he cannot help himself, he has no

authority over the mater.  Wasn't it right for David to go out

and slay Goliath?



Y.M.  Yes.



O.M.  Then it would have been equally RIGHT for any one else to do it?



Y.M.  Certainly.



O.M.  Then it would have been RIGHT for a born coward to attempt it?



Y.M.  It would--yes.



O.M.  You know that no born coward ever would have attempted it, don't you?



Y.M.  Yes.



O.M.  You know that a born coward's make and temperament

would be an absolute and insurmountable bar to his ever essaying

such a thing, don't you?



Y.M.  Yes, I know it.



O.M.  He clearly perceives that it would be RIGHT to try it?



Y.M.  Yes.



O.M.  His mind has Free Choice in determining that it would

be RIGHT to try it?



Y.M.  Yes.



O.M.  Then if by reason of his inborn cowardice he simply

can NOT essay it, what becomes of his Free Will?  Where is his

Free Will?  Why claim that he has Free Will when the plain facts

show that he hasn't?  Why content that because he and David SEE

the right alike, both must ACT alike?  Why impose the same laws

upon goat and lion?



Y.M.  There is really no such thing as Free Will?



O.M.  It is what I think.  There is WILL.  But it has

nothing to do with INTELLECTUAL PERCEPTIONS OF RIGHT AND WRONG,

and is not under their command.  David's temperament and training

had Will, and it was a compulsory force; David had to obey its

decrees, he had no choice.  The coward's temperament and training

possess Will, and IT is compulsory; it commands him to avoid

danger, and he obeys, he has no choice.  But neither the Davids

nor the cowards possess Free Will--will that may do the right or

do the wrong, as their MENTAL verdict shall decide.







Not Two Values, But Only One



Y.M.  There is one thing which bothers me:  I can't tell

where you draw the line between MATERIAL covetousness and

SPIRITUAL covetousness.



O.M.  I don't draw any.



Y.M.  How do you mean?



O.M.  There is no such thing as MATERIAL covetousness.

All covetousness is spiritual



Y.M.  ALL longings, desires, ambitions SPIRITUAL, never material?



O.M.  Yes.  The Master in you requires that in ALL cases you

shall content his SPIRIT--that alone.  He never requires anything

else, he never interests himself in any other matter.



Y.M.  Ah, come!  When he covets somebody's money--isn't that

rather distinctly material and gross?



O.M.  No.  The money is merely a symbol--it represents in

visible and concrete form a SPIRITUAL DESIRE.  Any so-called

material thing that you want is merely a symbol:  you want it not

for ITSELF, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.



Y.M.  Please particularize.



O.M.  Very well.  Maybe the thing longed for is a new hat.

You get it and your vanity is pleased, your spirit contented.

Suppose your friends deride the hat, make fun of it:  at once it

loses its value; you are ashamed of it, you put it out of your

sight, you never want to see it again.



Y.M.  I think I see.  Go on.



O.M.  It is the same hat, isn't it?  It is in no way

altered.  But it wasn't the HAT you wanted, but only what it

stood for--a something to please and content your SPIRIT.  When

it failed of that, the whole of its value was gone.  There are no

MATERIAL values; there are only spiritual ones.  You will hunt in

vain for a material value that is ACTUAL, REAL--there is no such

thing.  The only value it possesses, for even a moment, is the

spiritual value back of it:  remove that end and it is at once

worthless--like the hat.



Y.M.  Can you extend that to money?



O.M.  Yes.  It is merely a symbol, it has no MATERIAL value;

you think you desire it for its own sake, but it is not so.  You

desire it for the spiritual content it will bring; if it fail of

that, you discover that its value is gone.  There is that

pathetic tale of the man who labored like a slave, unresting,

unsatisfied, until he had accumulated a fortune, and was happy

over it, jubilant about it; then in a single week a pestilence

swept away all whom he held dear and left him desolate.  His

money's value was gone.  He realized that his joy in it came not

from the money itself, but from the spiritual contentment he got

out of his family's enjoyment of the pleasures and delights it

lavished upon them.  Money has no MATERIAL value; if you remove

its spiritual value nothing is left but dross.  It is so with all

things, little or big, majestic or trivial--there are no

exceptions.  Crowns, scepters, pennies, paste jewels, village

notoriety, world-wide fame--they are all the same, they have no

MATERIAL value:  while they content the SPIRIT they are precious,

when this fails they are worthless.







A Difficult Question



Y.M.  You keep me confused and perplexed all the time by

your elusive terminology.  Sometimes you divide a man up into two

or three separate personalities, each with authorities,

jurisdictions, and responsibilities of its own, and when he is in

that condition I can't grasp it.  Now when _I_ speak of a man, he

is THE WHOLE THING IN ONE, and easy to hold and contemplate.



O.M.  That is pleasant and convenient, if true.  When you

speak of "my body" who is the "my"?



Y.M.  It is the "me."



O.M.  The body is a property then, and the Me owns it.

Who is the Me?



Y.M.  The Me is THE WHOLE THING; it is a common property; an

undivided ownership, vested in the whole entity.



O.M.  If the Me admires a rainbow, is it the whole Me that

admires it, including the hair, hands, heels, and all?



Y.M.  Certainly not.  It is my MIND that admires it.



O.M.  So YOU divide the Me yourself.  Everybody does;

everybody must.  What, then, definitely, is the Me?



Y.M.  I think it must consist of just those two parts--

the body and the mind.



O.M.  You think so?  If you say "I believe the world is round,"

who is the "I" that is speaking?



Y.M.  The mind.



O.M.  If you say "I grieve for the loss of my father,"

who is the "I"?



Y.M.  The mind.



O.M.  Is the mind exercising an intellectual function when

it examines and accepts the evidence that the world is round?



Y.M.  Yes.



O.M.  Is it exercising an intellectual function when it

grieves for the loss of your father?



Y.M.  That is not cerebration, brain-work, it is a matter of FEELING.



O.M.  Then its source is not in your mind, but in your MORAL territory?



Y.M.  I have to grant it.



O.M.  Is your mind a part of your PHYSICAL equipment?



Y.M.  No.  It is independent of it; it is spiritual.



O.M.  Being spiritual, it cannot be affected by physical influences?



Y.M.  No.



O.M.  Does the mind remain sober with the body is drunk?



Y.M.  Well--no.



O.M.  There IS a physical effect present, then?



Y.M.  It looks like it.



O.M.  A cracked skull has resulted in a crazy mind.  Why

should it happen if the mind is spiritual, and INDEPENDENT of

physical influences?



Y.M.  Well--I don't know.



O.M.  When you have a pain in your foot, how do you know it?



Y.M.  I feel it.



O.M.  But you do not feel it until a nerve reports the hurt

to the brain.  Yet the brain is the seat of the mind, is it not?



Y.M.  I think so.



O.M.  But isn't spiritual enough to learn what is happening

in the outskirts without the help of the PHYSICAL messenger?  You

perceive that the question of who or what the Me is, is not a

simple one at all.  You say "I admire the rainbow," and "I

believe the world is round," and in these cases we find that the

Me is not speaking, but only the MENTAL part.  You say, "I

grieve," and again the Me is not all speaking, but only the MORAL

part.  You say the mind is wholly spiritual; then you say "I have

a pain" and find that this time the Me is mental AND spiritual

combined.  We all use the "I" in this indeterminate fashion,

there is no help for it.  We imagine a Master and King over what

you call The Whole Thing, and we speak of him as "I," but when we

try to define him we find we cannot do it.  The intellect and the

feelings can act quite INDEPENDENTLY of each other; we recognize

that, and we look around for a Ruler who is master over both, and

can serve as a DEFINITE AND INDISPUTABLE "I," and enable us to

know what we mean and who or what we are talking about when we

use that pronoun, but we have to give it up and confess that we

cannot find him.  To me, Man is a machine, made up of many

mechanisms, the moral and mental ones acting automatically in

accordance with the impulses of an interior Master who is built

out of born-temperament and an accumulation of multitudinous

outside influences and trainings; a machine whose ONE function is

to secure the spiritual contentment of the Master, be his desires

good or be they evil; a machine whose Will is absolute and must

be obeyed, and always IS obeyed.



Y.M.  Maybe the Me is the Soul?



O.M.  Maybe it is.  What is the Soul?



Y.M.  I don't know.



O.M.  Neither does any one else.







The Master Passion





Y.M.  What is the Master?--or, in common speech, the

Conscience?  Explain it.



O.M.  It is that mysterious autocrat, lodged in a man, which

compels the man to content its desires.  It may be called the

Master Passion--the hunger for Self-Approval.



Y.M.  Where is its seat?



O.M.  In man's moral constitution.



Y.M.  Are its commands for the man's good?



O.M.  It is indifferent to the man's good; it never concerns

itself about anything but the satisfying of its own desires.  It

can be TRAINED to prefer things which will be for the man's good,

but it will prefer them only because they will content IT better

than other things would.



Y.M.  Then even when it is trained to high ideals it is still

looking out for its own contentment, and not for the man's good.



O.M.  True.  Trained or untrained, it cares nothing for the man's good,

and never concerns itself about it.



Y.M.  It seems to be an IMMORAL force seated in the man's

moral constitution.



O.M.  It is a COLORLESS force seated in the man's moral constitution.

Let us call it an instinct--a blind, unreasoning instinct, which cannot

and does not distinguish between good morals and bad ones, and cares

nothing for results to the man provided its own contentment be secured;

and it will ALWAYS secure that.



Y.M.  It seeks money, and it probably considers that that is

an advantage for the man?



O.M.  It is not always seeking money, it is not always

seeking power, nor office, nor any other MATERIAL advantage.  In

ALL cases it seeks a SPIRITUAL contentment, let the MEANS be what

they may.  Its desires are determined by the man's temperament--

and it is lord over that.  Temperament, Conscience,

Susceptibility, Spiritual Appetite, are, in fact, the same thing.

Have you ever heard of a person who cared nothing for money?



Y.M.  Yes.  A scholar who would not leave his garret and his

books to take a place in a business house at a large salary.



O.M.  He had to satisfy his master--that is to say, his temperament,

his Spiritual Appetite--and it preferred books to money.  Are there

other cases?



Y.M.  Yes, the hermit.



O.M.  It is a good instance.  The hermit endures solitude,

hunger, cold, and manifold perils, to content his autocrat, who

prefers these things, and prayer and contemplation, to money or

to any show or luxury that money can buy.  Are there others?



Y.M.  Yes.  The artist, the poet, the scientist.



O.M.  Their autocrat prefers the deep pleasures of these

occupations, either well paid or ill paid, to any others in the

market, at any price.  You REALIZE that the Master Passion--the

contentment of the spirit--concerns itself with many things

besides so-called material advantage, material prosperity, cash,

and all that?



Y.M.  I think I must concede it.



O.M.  I believe you must.  There are perhaps as many

Temperaments that would refuse the burdens and vexations and

distinctions of public office as there are that hunger after

them.  The one set of Temperaments seek the contentment of the

spirit, and that alone; and this is exactly the case with the

other set.  Neither set seeks anything BUT the contentment of the

spirit.  If the one is sordid, both are sordid; and equally so,

since the end in view is precisely the same in both cases.  And

in both cases Temperament decides the preference--and Temperament

is BORN, not made.







Conclusion



O.M.  You have been taking a holiday?



Y.M.  Yes; a mountain tramp covering a week.  Are you ready to talk?



O.M.  Quite ready.  What shall we begin with?



Y.M.  Well, lying abed resting up, two days and nights, I

have thought over all these talks, and passed them carefully in

review.  With this result:  that . . . that . . . are you

intending to publish your notions about Man some day?



O.M.  Now and then, in these past twenty years, the Master

inside of me has half-intended to order me to set them to paper

and publish them.  Do I have to tell you why the order has

remained unissued, or can you explain so simply a thing without

my help?



Y.M.  By your doctrine, it is simplicity itself:  outside

influences moved your interior Master to give the order; stronger

outside influences deterred him.  Without the outside influences,

neither of these impulses could ever have been born, since a

person's brain is incapable or originating an idea within itself.



O.M.  Correct.  Go on.



Y.M.  The matter of publishing or withholding is still in your

Master's hands.  If some day an outside influence shall determine

him to publish, he will give the order, and it will be obeyed.



O.M.  That is correct.  Well?



Y.M.  Upon reflection I have arrived at the conviction

that the publication of your doctrines would be harmful.

Do you pardon me?



O.M.  Pardon YOU?  You have done nothing.  You are an

instrument--a speaking-trumpet.  Speaking-trumpets are not

responsible for what is said through them.  Outside influences--

in the form of lifelong teachings, trainings, notions,

prejudices, and other second-hand importations--have persuaded

the Master within you that the publication of these doctrines

would be harmful.  Very well, this is quite natural, and was to

be expected; in fact, was inevitable.  Go on; for the sake of

ease and convenience, stick to habit:  speak in the first person,

and tell me what your Master thinks about it.



Y.M.  Well, to begin:  it is a desolating doctrine; it is

not inspiring, enthusing, uplifting.  It takes the glory out of

man, it takes the pride out of him, it takes the heroism out of

him, it denies him all personal credit, all applause; it not only

degrades him to a machine, but allows him no control over the

machine; makes a mere coffee-mill of him, and neither permits him

to supply the coffee nor turn the crank, his sole and piteously

humble function being to grind coarse or fine, according to his

make, outside impulses doing the rest.



O.M.  It is correctly stated.  Tell me--what do men admire

most in each other?



Y.M.  Intellect, courage, majesty of build, beauty of

countenance, charity, benevolence, magnanimity, kindliness,

heroism, and--and--



O.M.  I would not go any further.  These are ELEMENTALS.

Virtue, fortitude, holiness, truthfulness, loyalty, high ideals--

these, and all the related qualities that are named in the

dictionary, are MADE OF THE ELEMENTALS, by blendings,

combinations, and shadings of the elementals, just as one makes

green by blending blue and yellow, and makes several shades and

tints of red by modifying the elemental red.  There are several

elemental colors; they are all in the rainbow; out of them we

manufacture and name fifty shades of them.  You have named the

elementals of the human rainbow, and also one BLEND--heroism,

which is made out of courage and magnanimity.  Very well, then;

which of these elements does the possessor of it manufacture for

himself?  Is it intellect?



Y.M.  No.



O.M.  Why?



Y.M.  He is born with it.



O.M.  Is it courage?



Y.M.  No.  He is born with it.



O.M.  Is it majesty of build, beauty of countenance?



Y.M.  No.  They are birthrights.



O.M.  Take those others--the elemental moral qualities--

charity, benevolence, magnanimity, kindliness; fruitful seeds,

out of which spring, through cultivation by outside influences,

all the manifold blends and combinations of virtues named in the

dictionaries:  does man manufacture any of those seeds, or are

they all born in him?



Y.M.  Born in him.



O.M.  Who manufactures them, then?



Y.M.  God.



O.M.  Where does the credit of it belong?



Y.M.  To God.



O.M.  And the glory of which you spoke, and the applause?



Y.M.  To God.



O.M.  Then it is YOU who degrade man.  You make him claim

glory, praise, flattery, for every valuable thing he possesses--

BORROWED finery, the whole of it; no rag of it earned by himself,

not a detail of it produced by his own labor.  YOU make man a

humbug; have I done worse by him?



Y.M.  You have made a machine of him.



O.M.  Who devised that cunning and beautiful mechanism, a

man's hand?



Y.M.  God.



O.M.  Who devised the law by which it automatically hammers

out of a piano an elaborate piece of music, without error, while

the man is thinking about something else, or talking to a friend?



Y.M.  God.



O.M.  Who devised the blood?  Who devised the wonderful

machinery which automatically drives its renewing and refreshing

streams through the body, day and night, without assistance or

advice from the man?  Who devised the man's mind, whose machinery

works automatically, interests itself in what it pleases,

regardless of its will or desire, labors all night when it likes,

deaf to his appeals for mercy?  God devised all these things.

_I_ have not made man a machine, God made him a machine.  I am

merely calling attention to the fact, nothing more.  Is it wrong

to call attention to the fact?  Is it a crime?



Y.M.  I think it is wrong to EXPOSE a fact when harm can

come of it.



O.M.  Go on.



Y.M.  Look at the matter as it stands now.  Man has been

taught that he is the supreme marvel of the Creation; he believes

it; in all the ages he has never doubted it, whether he was a

naked savage, or clothed in purple and fine linen, and civilized.

This has made his heart buoyant, his life cheery.  His pride in

himself, his sincere admiration of himself, his joy in what he

supposed were his own and unassisted achievements, and his

exultation over the praise and applause which they evoked--these

have exalted him, enthused him, ambitioned him to higher and

higher flights; in a word, made his life worth the living.  But

by your scheme, all this is abolished; he is degraded to a

machine, he is a nobody, his noble prides wither to mere

vanities; let him strive as he may, he can never be any better

than his humblest and stupidest neighbor; he would never be

cheerful again, his life would not be worth the living.



O.M.  You really think that?



Y.M.  I certainly do.



O.M.  Have you ever seen me uncheerful, unhappy.



Y.M.  No.



O.M.  Well, _I_ believe these things.  Why have they not

made me unhappy?



Y.M.  Oh, well--temperament, of course!  You never let THAT

escape from your scheme.



O.M.  That is correct.  If a man is born with an unhappy

temperament, nothing can make him happy; if he is born with a

happy temperament, nothing can make him unhappy.



Y.M.  What--not even a degrading and heart-chilling system

of beliefs?



O.M.  Beliefs?  Mere beliefs?  Mere convictions?  They are

powerless.  They strive in vain against inborn temperament.



Y.M.  I can't believe that, and I don't.



O.M.  Now you are speaking hastily.  It shows that you have

not studiously examined the facts.  Of all your intimates, which

one is the happiest?  Isn't it Burgess?



Y.M.  Easily.



O.M.  And which one is the unhappiest?  Henry Adams?



Y.M.  Without a question!



O.M.  I know them well.  They are extremes, abnormals; their

temperaments are as opposite as the poles.  Their life-histories

are about alike--but look at the results!  Their ages are about

the same--about around fifty.  Burgess had always been buoyant,

hopeful, happy; Adams has always been cheerless, hopeless,

despondent.  As young fellows both tried country journalism--and

failed.  Burgess didn't seem to mind it; Adams couldn't smile, he

could only mourn and groan over what had happened and torture

himself with vain regrets for not having done so and so instead

of so and so--THEN he would have succeeded.  They tried the law--

and failed.  Burgess remained happy--because he couldn't help it.

Adams was wretched--because he couldn't help it.  From that day

to this, those two men have gone on trying things and failing:

Burgess has come out happy and cheerful every time; Adams the

reverse.  And we do absolutely know that these men's inborn

temperaments have remained unchanged through all the vicissitudes

of their material affairs.  Let us see how it is with their

immaterials.  Both have been zealous Democrats; both have been

zealous Republicans; both have been zealous Mugwumps.  Burgess

has always found happiness and Adams unhappiness in these several

political beliefs and in their migrations out of them.  Both of

these men have been Presbyterians, Universalists, Methodists,

Catholics--then Presbyterians again, then Methodists again.

Burgess has always found rest in these excursions, and Adams

unrest.  They are trying Christian Science, now, with the

customary result, the inevitable result.  No political or

religious belief can make Burgess unhappy or the other man happy.

I assure you it is purely a matter of temperament.  Beliefs are

ACQUIREMENTS, temperaments are BORN; beliefs are subject to

change, nothing whatever can change temperament.



Y.M.  You have instanced extreme temperaments.



O.M.  Yes, the half-dozen others are modifications of the

extremes.  But the law is the same.  Where the temperament is

two-thirds happy, or two-thirds unhappy, no political or

religious beliefs can change the proportions.  The vast majority

of temperaments are pretty equally balanced; the intensities are

absent, and this enables a nation to learn to accommodate itself

to its political and religious circumstances and like them, be

satisfied with them, at last prefer them.  Nations do not THINK,

they only FEEL. They get their feelings at second hand through

their temperaments, not their brains.  A nation can be brought--

by force of circumstances, not argument--to reconcile itself to

ANY KIND OF GOVERNMENT OR RELIGION THAT CAN BE DEVISED; in time

it will fit itself to the required conditions; later, it will

prefer them and will fiercely fight for them.  As instances, you

have all history:  the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the

Egyptians, the Russians, the Germans, the French, the English,

the Spaniards, the Americans, the South Americans, the Japanese,

the Chinese, the Hindus, the Turks--a thousand wild and tame

religions, every kind of government that can be thought of, from

tiger to house-cat, each nation KNOWING it has the only true

religion and the only sane system of government, each despising

all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it, each proud of

its fancied supremacy, each perfectly sure it is the pet of God,

each without undoubting confidence summoning Him to take command

in time of war, each surprised when He goes over to the enemy,

but by habit able to excuse it and resume compliments--in a word,

the whole human race content, always content, persistently

content, indestructibly content, happy, thankful, proud, NO

MATTER WHAT ITS RELIGION IS, NOR WHETHER ITS MASTER BE TIGER OR

HOUSE-CAT.  Am I stating facts?  You know I am.  Is the human

race cheerful?  You know it is.  Considering what it can stand,

and be happy, you do me too much honor when you think that _I_

can place before it a system of plain cold facts that can take

the cheerfulness out of it.  Nothing can do that.  Everything has

been tried.  Without success.  I beg you not to be troubled.



-----------------------------------------------------------------







    THE DEATH OF JEAN







The death of Jean Clemens occurred early in the morning of

December 24, 1909.  Mr. Clemens was in great stress of mind when

I first saw him, but a few hours later I found him writing

steadily.



"I am setting it down," he said, "everything.  It is a

relief to me to write it.  It furnishes me an excuse for

thinking."  At intervals during that day and the next I looked

in, and usually found him writing.  Then on the evening of the

26th, when he knew that Jean had been laid to rest in Elmira, he

came to my room with the manuscript in his hand.



"I have finished it," he said; "read it.  I can form no

opinion of it myself.  If you think it worthy, some day--at the

proper time--it can end my autobiography.  It is the final

chapter."



Four months later--almost to the day--(April 21st) he was

with Jean.





Albert Bigelow Paine.







Stormfield, Christmas Eve, 11 A.M., 1909.





JEAN IS DEAD!



Has any one ever tried to put upon paper all the little

happenings connected with a dear one--happenings of the twenty-

four hours preceding the sudden and unexpected death of that dear

one?  Would a book contain them?  Would two books contain them?

I think not.  They pour into the mind in a flood.  They are

little things that have been always happening every day, and were

always so unimportant and easily forgettable before--but now!

Now, how different! how precious they are, now dear, how

unforgettable, how pathetic, how sacred, how clothed with dignity!



Last night Jean, all flushed with splendid health, and I the

same, from the wholesome effects of my Bermuda holiday, strolled

hand in hand from the dinner-table and sat down in the library

and chatted, and planned, and discussed, cheerily and happily

(and how unsuspectingly!)--until nine--which is late for us--then

went upstairs, Jean's friendly German dog following.  At my door

Jean said, "I can't kiss you good night, father:  I have a cold,

and you could catch it."  I bent and kissed her hand.  She was

moved--I saw it in her eyes--and she impulsively kissed my hand

in return.  Then with the usual gay "Sleep well, dear!" from

both, we parted.



At half past seven this morning I woke, and heard voices

outside my door.  I said to myself, "Jean is starting on her

usual horseback flight to the station for the mail."  Then Katy

[1] entered, stood quaking and gasping at my bedside a moment,

then found her tongue:



"MISS JEAN IS DEAD!"



Possibly I know now what the soldier feels when a bullet

crashes through his heart.



In her bathroom there she lay, the fair young creature,

stretched upon the floor and covered with a sheet.  And looking

so placid, so natural, and as if asleep.  We knew what had

happened.  She was an epileptic:  she had been seized with a

convulsion and heart failure in her bath.  The doctor had to come

several miles.  His efforts, like our previous ones, failed to

bring her back to life.



It is noon, now.  How lovable she looks, how sweet and how

tranquil!  It is a noble face, and full of dignity; and that was

a good heart that lies there so still.



In England, thirteen years ago, my wife and I were stabbed

to the heart with a cablegram which said, "Susy was mercifully

released today."  I had to send a like shot to Clara, in Berlin,

this morning.  With the peremptory addition, "You must not come

home."  Clara and her husband sailed from here on the 11th of

this month.  How will Clara bear it?  Jean, from her babyhood,

was a worshiper of Clara.



Four days ago I came back from a month's holiday in Bermuda

in perfected health; but by some accident the reporters failed to

perceive this.  Day before yesterday, letters and telegrams began

to arrive from friends and strangers which indicated that I was

supposed to be dangerously ill.  Yesterday Jean begged me to

explain my case through the Associated Press.  I said it was not

important enough; but she was distressed and said I must think of

Clara.  Clara would see the report in the German papers, and as

she had been nursing her husband day and night for four months

[2] and was worn out and feeble, the shock might be disastrous.

There was reason in that; so I sent a humorous paragraph by

telephone to the Associated Press denying the "charge" that I was

"dying," and saying "I would not do such a thing at my time of

life."



Jean was a little troubled, and did not like to see me treat

the matter so lightly; but I said it was best to treat it so, for

there was nothing serious about it.  This morning I sent the

sorrowful facts of this day's irremediable disaster to the

Associated Press.  Will both appear in this evening's papers?--

the one so blithe, the other so tragic?





I lost Susy thirteen years ago; I lost her mother--her

incomparable mother!--five and a half years ago; Clara has gone

away to live in Europe; and now I have lost Jean.  How poor I am,

who was once so rich!  Seven months ago Mr. Roger died--one of

the best friends I ever had, and the nearest perfect, as man and

gentleman, I have yet met among my race; within the last six

weeks Gilder has passed away, and Laffan--old, old friends of

mine.  Jean lies yonder, I sit here; we are strangers under our

own roof; we kissed hands good-by at this door last night--and it

was forever, we never suspecting it.  She lies there, and I sit

here--writing, busying myself, to keep my heart from breaking.

How dazzlingly the sunshine is flooding the hills around!  It is

like a mockery.



Seventy-four years ago twenty-four days ago.  Seventy-four

years old yesterday.  Who can estimate my age today?



I have looked upon her again.  I wonder I can bear it.  She

looks just as her mother looked when she lay dead in that

Florentine villa so long ago.  The sweet placidity of death! it

is more beautiful than sleep.



I saw her mother buried.  I said I would never endure that

horror again; that I would never again look into the grave of any

one dear to me.  I have kept to that.  They will take Jean from

this house tomorrow, and bear her to Elmira, New York, where lie

those of us that have been released, but I shall not follow.



Jean was on the dock when the ship came in, only four days

ago.  She was at the door, beaming a welcome, when I reached this

house the next evening.  We played cards, and she tried to teach

me a new game called "Mark Twain."  We sat chatting cheerily in

the library last night, and she wouldn't let me look into the

loggia, where she was making Christmas preparations.  She said

she would finish them in the morning, and then her little French

friend would arrive from New York--the surprise would follow; the

surprise she had been working over for days.  While she was out

for a moment I disloyally stole a look.  The loggia floor was

clothed with rugs and furnished with chairs and sofas; and the

uncompleted surprise was there:  in the form of a Christmas tree

that was drenched with silver film in a most wonderful way; and

on a table was prodigal profusion of bright things which she was

going to hang upon it today.  What desecrating hand will ever

banish that eloquent unfinished surprise from that place?  Not

mine, surely.  All these little matters have happened in the last

four days.  "Little."  Yes--THEN.  But not now.  Nothing she said

or thought or did is little now.  And all the lavish humor!--what

is become of it?  It is pathos, now.  Pathos, and the thought of

it brings tears.



All these little things happened such a few hours ago--and

now she lies yonder.  Lies yonder, and cares for nothing any

more.  Strange--marvelous--incredible!  I have had this

experience before; but it would still be incredible if I had had

it a thousand times.





"MISS JEAN IS DEAD!"



That is what Katy said.  When I heard the door open behind

the bed's head without a preliminary knock, I supposed it was

Jean coming to kiss me good morning, she being the only person

who was used to entering without formalities.



And so--



I have been to Jean's parlor.  Such a turmoil of Christmas

presents for servants and friends!  They are everywhere; tables,

chairs, sofas, the floor--everything is occupied, and over-

occupied.  It is many and many a year since I have seen the like.

In that ancient day Mrs. Clemens and I used to slip softly into

the nursery at midnight on Christmas Eve and look the array of

presents over.  The children were little then.  And now here is

Jean's parlor looking just as that nursery used to look.  The

presents are not labeled--the hands are forever idle that would

have labeled them today.  Jean's mother always worked herself

down with her Christmas preparations.  Jean did the same

yesterday and the preceding days, and the fatigue has cost her

her life.  The fatigue caused the convulsion that attacked her

this morning.  She had had no attack for months.





Jean was so full of life and energy that she was constantly

is danger of overtaxing her strength.  Every morning she was in

the saddle by half past seven, and off to the station for her

mail.  She examined the letters and I distributed them:  some to

her, some to Mr. Paine, the others to the stenographer and

myself.  She dispatched her share and then mounted her horse

again and went around superintending her farm and her poultry the

rest of the day.  Sometimes she played billiards with me after

dinner, but she was usually too tired to play, and went early to

bed.



Yesterday afternoon I told her about some plans I had been

devising while absent in Bermuda, to lighten her burdens.  We

would get a housekeeper; also we would put her share of the

secretary-work into Mr. Paine's hands.



No--she wasn't willing.  She had been making plans herself.

The matter ended in a compromise, I submitted.  I always did.

She wouldn't audit the bills and let Paine fill out the checks--

she would continue to attend to that herself.  Also, she would

continue to be housekeeper, and let Katy assist.  Also, she would

continue to answer the letters of personal friends for me.  Such

was the compromise.  Both of us called it by that name, though I

was not able to see where my formidable change had been made.



However, Jean was pleased, and that was sufficient for me.

She was proud of being my secretary, and I was never able to persuade

her to give up any part of her share in that unlovely work.



In the talk last night I said I found everything going so

smoothly that if she were willing I would go back to Bermuda in

February and get blessedly out of the clash and turmoil again for

another month.  She was urgent that I should do it, and said that

if I would put off the trip until March she would take Katy and

go with me.  We struck hands upon that, and said it was settled.

I had a mind to write to Bermuda by tomorrow's ship and secure a

furnished house and servants.  I meant to write the letter this

morning.  But it will never be written, now.



For she lies yonder, and before her is another journey than that.



Night is closing down; the rim of the sun barely shows above the

sky-line of the hills.



I have been looking at that face again that was growing dearer

and dearer to me every day.  I was getting acquainted with

Jean in these last nine months.  She had been long an exile from

home when she came to us three-quarters of a year ago.  She had

been shut up in sanitariums, many miles from us.  How eloquent

glad and grateful she was to cross her father's threshold again!



Would I bring her back to life if I could do it?  I would not.

If a word would do it, I would beg for strength to withhold

the word.  And I would have the strength; I am sure of it.  In

her loss I am almost bankrupt, and my life is a bitterness, but I

am content:  for she has been enriched with the most precious of

all gifts--that gift which makes all other gifts mean and poor--

death.  I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored

to life since I reached manhood.  I felt in this way when Susy

passed away; and later my wife, and later Mr. Rogers.  When Clara

met me at the station in New York and told me Mr. Rogers had died

suddenly that morning, my thought was, Oh, favorite of fortune--

fortunate all his long and lovely life--fortunate to his latest

moment!  The reporters said there were tears of sorrow in my

eyes.  True--but they were for ME, not for him.  He had suffered

no loss.  All the fortunes he had ever made before were poverty

compared with this one.





Why did I build this house, two years ago?  To shelter this

vast emptiness?  How foolish I was!  But I shall stay in it.  The

spirits of the dead hallow a house, for me.  It was not so with

other members of the family.  Susy died in the house we built in

Hartford.  Mrs. Clemens would never enter it again.  But it made

the house dearer to me.  I have entered it once since, when it

was tenantless and silent and forlorn, but to me it was a holy

place and beautiful.  It seemed to me that the spirits of the

dead were all about me, and would speak to me and welcome me if

they could:  Livy, and Susy, and George, and Henry Robinson, and

Charles Dudley Warner.  How good and kind they were, and how

lovable their lives!  In fancy I could see them all again, I

could call the children back and hear them romp again with

George--that peerless black ex-slave and children's idol who came

one day--a flitting stranger--to wash windows, and stayed

eighteen years.  Until he died.  Clara and Jean would never enter

again the New York hotel which their mother had frequented in

earlier days.  They could not bear it.  But I shall stay in this

house.  It is dearer to me tonight than ever it was before.

Jean's spirit will make it beautiful for me always.  Her lonely

and tragic death--but I will not think of that now.





Jean's mother always devoted two or three weeks to Christmas

shopping, and was always physically exhausted when Christmas Eve

came.  Jean was her very own child--she wore herself out present-

hunting in New York these latter days.  Paine has just found on

her desk a long list of names--fifty, he thinks--people to whom

she sent presents last night.  Apparently she forgot no one.  And

Katy found there a roll of bank-notes, for the servants.



Her dog has been wandering about the grounds today,

comradeless and forlorn.  I have seen him from the windows.  She

got him from Germany.  He has tall ears and looks exactly like a

wolf.  He was educated in Germany, and knows no language but the

German.  Jean gave him no orders save in that tongue.  And so

when the burglar-alarm made a fierce clamor at midnight a

fortnight ago, the butler, who is French and knows no German,

tried in vain to interest the dog in the supposed burglar.  Jean

wrote me, to Bermuda, about the incident.  It was the last letter

I was ever to receive from her bright head and her competent hand.

The dog will not be neglected.





There was never a kinder heart than Jean's.  From her

childhood up she always spent the most of her allowance on

charities of one kind or another.  After she became secretary and

had her income doubled she spent her money upon these things with

a free hand.  Mine too, I am glad and grateful to say.



She was a loyal friend to all animals, and she loved them

all, birds, beasts, and everything--even snakes--an inheritance

from me.  She knew all the birds; she was high up in that lore.

She became a member of various humane societies when she was

still a little girl--both here and abroad--and she remained an

active member to the last.  She founded two or three societies

for the protection of animals, here and in Europe.



She was an embarrassing secretary, for she fished my

correspondence out of the waste-basket and answered the letters.

She thought all letters deserved the courtesy of an answer.

Her mother brought her up in that kindly error.



She could write a good letter, and was swift with her pen.

She had but an indifferent ear music, but her tongue took to

languages with an easy facility.  She never allowed her Italian,

French, and German to get rusty through neglect.



The telegrams of sympathy are flowing in, from far and wide,

now, just as they did in Italy five years and a half ago, when

this child's mother laid down her blameless life.  They cannot

heal the hurt, but they take away some of the pain.  When Jean

and I kissed hands and parted at my door last, how little did we

imagine that in twenty-two hours the telegraph would be bringing

words like these:



"From the bottom of our hearts we send out sympathy,

dearest of friends."





For many and many a day to come, wherever I go in this house,

remembrancers of Jean will mutely speak to me of her.  Who can

count the number of them?



She was in exile two years with the hope of healing her

malady--epilepsy.  There are no words to express how grateful I

am that she did not meet her fate in the hands of strangers, but

in the loving shelter of her own home.





"MISS JEAN IS DEAD!"



It is true.  Jean is dead.



A month ago I was writing bubbling and hilarious articles

for magazines yet to appear, and now I am writing--this.





CHRISTMAS DAY.  NOON.--Last night I went to Jean's room at

intervals, and turned back the sheet and looked at the peaceful

face, and kissed the cold brow, and remembered that heartbreaking

night in Florence so long ago, in that cavernous and silent vast

villa, when I crept downstairs so many times, and turned back a

sheet and looked at a face just like this one--Jean's mother's

face--and kissed a brow that was just like this one.  And last

night I saw again what I had seen then--that strange and lovely

miracle--the sweet, soft contours of early maidenhood restored by

the gracious hand of death!  When Jean's mother lay dead, all

trace of care, and trouble, and suffering, and the corroding

years had vanished out of the face, and I was looking again upon

it as I had known and worshipped it in its young bloom and beauty

a whole generation before.



About three in the morning, while wandering about the house

in the deep silences, as one dies in times like these, when there

is a dumb sense that something has been lost that will never be

found again, yet must be sought, if only for the employment the

useless seeking gives, I came upon Jean's dog in the hall

downstairs, and noted that he did not spring to greet me,

according to his hospitable habit, but came slow and sorrowfully;

also I remembered that he had not visited Jean's apartment since

the tragedy.  Poor fellow, did he know?  I think so.  Always when

Jean was abroad in the open he was with her; always when she was

in the house he was with her, in the night as well as in the day.

Her parlor was his bedroom.  Whenever I happened upon him on the

ground floor he always followed me about, and when I went

upstairs he went too--in a tumultuous gallop.  But now it was

different:  after patting him a little I went to the library--he

remained behind; when I went upstairs he did not follow me, save

with his wistful eyes.  He has wonderful eyes--big, and kind, and

eloquent.  He can talk with them.  He is a beautiful creature,

and is of the breed of the New York police-dogs.  I do not like

dogs, because they bark when there is no occasion for it; but I

have liked this one from the beginning, because he belonged to

Jean, and because he never barks except when there is occasion--

which is not oftener than twice a week.



In my wanderings I visited Jean's parlor.  On a shelf I

found a pile of my books, and I knew what it meant.  She was

waiting for me to come home from Bermuda and autograph them, then

she would send them away.  If I only knew whom she intended them

for!  But I shall never know.  I will keep them.  Her hand has

touched them--it is an accolade--they are noble, now.



And in a closet she had hidden a surprise for me--a thing I

have often wished I owned:  a noble big globe.  I couldn't see it

for the tears.  She will never know the pride I take in it, and

the pleasure.  Today the mails are full of loving remembrances

for her:  full of those old, old kind words she loved so well,

"Merry Christmas to Jean!"  If she could only have lived one day

longer!



At last she ran out of money, and would not use mine.  So

she sent to one of those New York homes for poor girls all the

clothes she could spare--and more, most likely.





CHRISTMAS NIGHT.--This afternoon they took her away from her

room.  As soon as I might, I went down to the library, and there

she lay, in her coffin, dressed in exactly the same clothes she

wore when she stood at the other end of the same room on the 6th

of October last, as Clara's chief bridesmaid.  Her face was

radiant with happy excitement then; it was the same face now,

with the dignity of death and the peace of God upon it.



They told me the first mourner to come was the dog.  He came

uninvited, and stood up on his hind legs and rested his fore paws

upon the trestle, and took a last long look at the face that was

so dear to him, then went his way as silently as he had come.

HE KNOWS.



At mid-afternoon it began to snow.  The pity of it--that

Jean could not see it!  She so loved the snow.



The snow continued to fall.  At six o'clock the hearse drew

up to the door to bear away its pathetic burden.  As they lifted

the casket, Paine began playing on the orchestrelle Schubert's

"Impromptu," which was Jean's favorite.  Then he played the

Intermezzo; that was for Susy; then he played the Largo; that was

for their mother.  He did this at my request.  Elsewhere in my

Autobiography I have told how the Intermezzo and the Largo came

to be associated in my heart with Susy and Livy in their last

hours in this life.



From my windows I saw the hearse and the carriages wind

along the road and gradually grow vague and spectral in the

falling snow, and presently disappear.  Jean was gone out of my

life, and would not come back any more.  Jervis, the cousin she

had played with when they were babies together--he and her

beloved old Katy--were conducting her to her distant childhood

home, where she will lie by her mother's side once more, in the

company of Susy and Langdon.





DECEMBER 26TH.  The dog came to see me at eight o'clock this

morning.  He was very affectionate, poor orphan!  My room will be

his quarters hereafter.



The storm raged all night.  It has raged all the morning.

The snow drives across the landscape in vast clouds, superb,

sublime--and Jean not here to see.





2:30 P.M.--It is the time appointed.  The funeral has begun.

Four hundred miles away, but I can see it all, just as if I were

there.  The scene is the library in the Langdon homestead.

Jean's coffin stands where her mother and I stood, forty years

ago, and were married; and where Susy's coffin stood thirteen

years ago; where her mother's stood five years and a half ago;

and where mine will stand after a little time.





FIVE O'CLOCK.--It is all over.





When Clara went away two weeks ago to live in Europe, it was

hard, but I could bear it, for I had Jean left.  I said WE would

be a family.  We said we would be close comrades and happy--just

we two.  That fair dream was in my mind when Jean met me at the

steamer last Monday; it was in my mind when she received me at

the door last Tuesday evening.  We were together; WE WERE A

FAMILY! the dream had come true--oh, precisely true, contentedly,

true, satisfyingly true! and remained true two whole days.



And now?  Now Jean is in her grave!



In the grave--if I can believe it.  God rest her sweet

spirit!



-----



1.  Katy Leary, who had been in the service of the Clemens family

for twenty-nine years.



2.  Mr. Gabrilowitsch had been operated on for appendicitis.



-----------------------------------------------------------------









THE TURNING-POINT OF MY LIFE





I



If I understand the idea, the BAZAR invites several of us to

write upon the above text.  It means the change in my life's

course which introduced what must be regarded by me as the most

IMPORTANT condition of my career.  But it also implies--without

intention, perhaps--that that turning-point ITSELF was the

creator of the new condition.  This gives it too much

distinction, too much prominence, too much credit.  It is only

the LAST link in a very long chain of turning-points commissioned

to produce the cardinal result; it is not any more important than

the humblest of its ten thousand predecessors.  Each of the ten

thousand did its appointed share, on its appointed date, in

forwarding the scheme, and they were all necessary; to have left

out any one of them would have defeated the scheme and brought

about SOME OTHER result.  It know we have a fashion of saying

"such and such an event was the turning-point in my life," but we

shouldn't say it.  We should merely grant that its place as LAST

link in the chain makes it the most CONSPICUOUS link; in real

importance it has no advantage over any one of its predecessors.



Perhaps the most celebrated turning-point recorded in

history was the crossing of the Rubicon.  Suetonius says:





Coming up with his troops on the banks of the Rubicon, he

halted for a while, and, revolving in his mind the importance of

the step he was on the point of taking, he turned to those about

him and said, "We may still retreat; but if we pass this little

bridge, nothing is left for us but to fight it out in arms."





This was a stupendously important moment.  And all the

incidents, big and little, of Caesar's previous life had been

leading up to it, stage by stage, link by link.  This was the

LAST link--merely the last one, and no bigger than the others;

but as we gaze back at it through the inflating mists of our

imagination, it looks as big as the orbit of Neptune.



You, the reader, have a PERSONAL interest in that link, and

so have I; so has the rest of the human race.  It was one of the

links in your life-chain, and it was one of the links in mine.

We may wait, now, with baited breath, while Caesar reflects.

Your fate and mine are involved in his decision.



While he was thus hesitating, the following incident

occurred.  A person remarked for his noble mien and graceful

aspect appeared close at hand, sitting and playing upon a pipe.

When not only the shepherds, but a number of soldiers also,

flocked to listen to him, and some trumpeters among them, he

snatched a trumpet from one of them, ran to the river with it,

and, sounding the advance with a piercing blast, crossed to the

other side.  Upon this, Caesar exclaimed:  "Let us go whither the

omens of the gods and the iniquity of our enemies call up.

THE DIE IS CAST."



So he crossed--and changed the future of the whole human

race, for all time.  But that stranger was a link in Caesar's

life-chain, too; and a necessary one.  We don't know his name, we

never hear of him again; he was very casual; he acts like an

accident; but he was no accident, he was there by compulsion of

HIS life-chain, to blow the electrifying blast that was to make

up Caesar's mind for him, and thence go piping down the aisles of

history forever.



If the stranger hadn't been there!  But he WAS.  And Caesar

crossed.  With such results!  Such vast events--each a link in

the HUMAN RACE'S life-chain; each event producing the next one,

and that one the next one, and so on:  the destruction of the

republic; the founding of the empire; the breaking up of the

empire; the rise of Christianity upon its ruins; the spread of

the religion to other lands--and so on; link by link took its

appointed place at its appointed time, the discovery of America

being one of them; our Revolution another; the inflow of English

and other immigrants another; their drift westward (my ancestors

among them) another; the settlement of certain of them in

Missouri, which resulted in ME.  For I was one of the unavoidable

results of the crossing of the Rubicon.  If the stranger, with

his trumpet blast, had stayed away (which he COULDN'T, for he was

the appointed link) Caesar would not have crossed.  What would

have happened, in that case, we can never guess.  We only know

that the things that did happen would not have happened.  They

might have been replaced by equally prodigious things, of course,

but their nature and results are beyond our guessing.  But the

matter that interests me personally is that I would not be HERE

now, but somewhere else; and probably black--there is no telling.

Very well, I am glad he crossed.  And very really and thankfully

glad, too, though I never cared anything about it before.







II



To me, the most important feature of my life is its literary

feature.  I have been professionally literary something more than

forty years.  There have been many turning-points in my life, but

the one that was the link in the chain appointed to conduct me to

the literary guild is the most CONSPICUOUS link in that chain.

BECAUSE it was the last one.  It was not any more important than

its predecessors.  All the other links have an inconspicuous

look, except the crossing of the Rubicon; but as factors in

making me literary they are all of the one size, the crossing of

the Rubicon included.



I know how I came to be literary, and I will tell the steps

that lead up to it and brought it about.



The crossing of the Rubicon was not the first one, it was

hardly even a recent one; I should have to go back ages before

Caesar's day to find the first one.  To save space I will go back

only a couple of generations and start with an incident of my

boyhood.  When I was twelve and a half years old, my father died.

It was in the spring.  The summer came, and brought with it an

epidemic of measles.  For a time a child died almost every day.

The village was paralyzed with fright, distress, despair.

Children that were not smitten with the disease were imprisoned

in their homes to save them from the infection.  In the homes

there were no cheerful faces, there was no music, there was no

singing but of solemn hymns, no voice but of prayer, no romping

was allowed, no noise, no laughter, the family moved spectrally

about on tiptoe, in a ghostly hush.  I was a prisoner.  My soul

was steeped in this awful dreariness--and in fear.  At some time

or other every day and every night a sudden shiver shook me to

the marrow, and I said to myself, "There, I've got it! and I

shall die."  Life on these miserable terms was not worth living,

and at last I made up my mind to get the disease and have it

over, one way or the other.  I escaped from the house and went to

the house of a neighbor where a playmate of mine was very ill

with the malady.  When the chance offered I crept into his room

and got into bed with him.  I was discovered by his mother and

sent back into captivity.  But I had the disease; they could not

take that from me.  I came near to dying.  The whole village was

interested, and anxious, and sent for news of me every day; and

not only once a day, but several times.  Everybody believed I

would die; but on the fourteenth day a change came for the worse

and they were disappointed.



This was a turning-point of my life.  (Link number one.)

For when I got well my mother closed my school career and

apprenticed me to a printer.  She was tired of trying to keep me

out of mischief, and the adventure of the measles decided her to

put me into more masterful hands than hers.



I became a printer, and began to add one link after another

to the chain which was to lead me into the literary profession.

A long road, but I could not know that; and as I did not know

what its goal was, or even that it had one, I was indifferent.

Also contented.



A young printer wanders around a good deal, seeking and

finding work; and seeking again, when necessity commands.  N. B.

Necessity is a CIRCUMSTANCE; Circumstance is man's master--and

when Circumstance commands, he must obey; he may argue the

matter--that is his privilege, just as it is the honorable

privilege of a falling body to argue with the attraction of

gravitation--but it won't do any good, he must OBEY.  I wandered

for ten years, under the guidance and dictatorship of

Circumstance, and finally arrived in a city of Iowa, where I

worked several months.  Among the books that interested me in

those days was one about the Amazon.  The traveler told an

alluring tale of his long voyage up the great river from Para to

the sources of the Madeira, through the heart of an enchanted

land, a land wastefully rich in tropical wonders, a romantic land

where all the birds and flowers and animals were of the museum

varieties, and where the alligator and the crocodile and the

monkey seemed as much at home as if they were in the Zoo.  Also,

he told an astonishing tale about COCA, a vegetable product of

miraculous powers, asserting that it was so nourishing and so

strength-giving that the native of the mountains of the Madeira

region would tramp up hill and down all day on a pinch of

powdered coca and require no other sustenance.



I was fired with a longing to ascend the Amazon.  Also with

a longing to open up a trade in coca with all the world.  During

months I dreamed that dream, and tried to contrive ways to get to

Para and spring that splendid enterprise upon an unsuspecting

planet.  But all in vain.  A person may PLAN as much as he wants

to, but nothing of consequence is likely to come of it until the

magician CIRCUMSTANCE steps in and takes the matter off his

hands.  At last Circumstance came to my help.  It was in this

way.  Circumstance, to help or hurt another man, made him lose a

fifty-dollar bill in the street; and to help or hurt me, made me

find it.  I advertised the find, and left for the Amazon the same

day.  This was another turning-point, another link.



Could Circumstance have ordered another dweller in that town

to go to the Amazon and open up a world-trade in coca on a fifty-

dollar basis and been obeyed?  No, I was the only one.  There

were other fools there--shoals and shoals of them--but they were

not of my kind.  I was the only one of my kind.



Circumstance is powerful, but it cannot work alone; it has

to have a partner.  Its partner is man's TEMPERAMENT--his natural

disposition.  His temperament is not his invention, it is BORN in

him, and he has no authority over it, neither is he responsible

for its acts.  He cannot change it, nothing can change it,

nothing can modify it--except temporarily.  But it won't stay

modified.  It is permanent, like the color of the man's eyes and

the shape of his ears.  Blue eyes are gray in certain unusual lights;

but they resume their natural color when that stress is removed.



A Circumstance that will coerce one man will have no effect

upon a man of a different temperament.  If Circumstance had

thrown the bank-note in Caesar's way, his temperament would not

have made him start for the Amazon.  His temperament would have

compelled him to do something with the money, but not that.  It

might have made him advertise the note--and WAIT.  We can't tell.

Also, it might have made him go to New York and buy into the

Government, with results that would leave Tweed nothing to learn

when it came his turn.



Very well, Circumstance furnished the capital, and my

temperament told me what to do with it.  Sometimes a temperament

is an ass.  When that is the case of the owner of it is an ass,

too, and is going to remain one.  Training, experience,

association, can temporarily so polish him, improve him, exalt

him that people will think he is a mule, but they will be

mistaken.  Artificially he IS a mule, for the time being, but at

bottom he is an ass yet, and will remain one.



By temperament I was the kind of person that DOES things.

Does them, and reflects afterward.  So I started for the Amazon

without reflecting and without asking any questions.  That was

more than fifty years ago.  In all that time my temperament has

not changed, by even a shade.  I have been punished many and many

a time, and bitterly, for doing things and reflecting afterward,

but these tortures have been of no value to me; I still do the

thing commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and reflect

afterward.  Always violently.  When I am reflecting, on these

occasions, even deaf persons can hear me think.



I went by the way of Cincinnati, and down the Ohio and

Mississippi.  My idea was to take ship, at New Orleans, for Para.

In New Orleans I inquired, and found there was no ship leaving

for Para.  Also, that there never had BEEN one leaving for Para.

I reflected.  A policeman came and asked me what I was doing, and

I told him.  He made me move on, and said if he caught me

reflecting in the public street again he would run me in.



After a few days I was out of money.  Then Circumstance

arrived, with another turning-point of my life--a new link.  On

my way down, I had made the acquaintance of a pilot.  I begged

him to teach me the river, and he consented.  I became a pilot.



By and by Circumstance came again--introducing the Civil

War, this time, in order to push me ahead another stage or two

toward the literary profession.  The boats stopped running, my

livelihood was gone.



Circumstance came to the rescue with a new turning-point and

a fresh link.  My brother was appointed secretary to the new

Territory of Nevada, and he invited me to go with him and help

him in his office.  I accepted.



In Nevada, Circumstance furnished me the silver fever and I

went into the mines to make a fortune, as I supposed; but that

was not the idea.  The idea was to advance me another step toward

literature.  For amusement I scribbled things for the Virginia

City ENTERPRISE.  One isn't a printer ten years without setting

up acres of good and bad literature, and learning--unconsciously

at first, consciously later--to discriminate between the two,

within his mental limitations; and meantime he is unconsciously

acquiring what is called a "style."  One of my efforts attracted

attention, and the ENTERPRISE sent for me and put me on its staff.



And so I became a journalist--another link.  By and by Circumstance

and the Sacramento UNION sent me to the Sandwich Islands for five

or six months, to write up sugar.  I did it; and threw in a good

deal of extraneous matter that hadn't anything to do with sugar.

But it was this extraneous matter that helped me to another link.



It made me notorious, and San Francisco invited me to lecture.

Which I did.  And profitably.  I had long had a desire to travel

and see the world, and now Circumstance had most kindly and

unexpectedly hurled me upon the platform and furnished me the means.

So I joined the "Quaker City Excursion."



When I returned to America, Circumstance was waiting on the pier--

with the LAST link--the conspicuous, the consummating, the

victorious link:  I was asked to WRITE A BOOK, and I did it, and

called it THE INNOCENTS ABROAD.  Thus I became at last a member

of the literary guild.  That was forty-two years ago, and I have

been a member ever since.  Leaving the Rubicon incident away back

where it belongs, I can say with truth that the reason I am in

the literary profession is because I had the measles when I was

twelve years old.





III



Now what interests me, as regards these details, is not the

details themselves, but the fact that none of them was foreseen

by me, none of them was planned by me, I was the author of none

of them.  Circumstance, working in harness with my temperament,

created them all and compelled them all.  I often offered help,

and with the best intentions, but it was rejected--as a rule,

uncourteously.  I could never plan a thing and get it to come out

the way I planned it.  It came out some other way--some way I had

not counted upon.



And so I do not admire the human being--as an intellectual

marvel--as much as I did when I was young, and got him out of

books, and did not know him personally.  When I used to read that

such and such a general did a certain brilliant thing, I believed

it.  Whereas it was not so.  Circumstance did it by help of his

temperament.  The circumstances would have failed of effect with

a general of another temperament:  he might see the chance, but

lose the advantage by being by nature too slow or too quick or

too doubtful.  Once General Grant was asked a question about a

matter which had been much debated by the public and the

newspapers; he answered the question without any hesitancy.

"General, who planned the the march through Georgia?"  "The

enemy!"  He added that the enemy usually makes your plans for

you.  He meant that the enemy by neglect or through force of

circumstances leaves an opening for you, and you see your chance

and take advantage of it.



Circumstances do the planning for us all, no doubt, by help

of our temperaments.  I see no great difference between a man and

a watch, except that the man is conscious and the watch isn't,

and the man TRIES to plan things and the watch doesn't.  The

watch doesn't wind itself and doesn't regulate itself--these

things are done exteriorly.  Outside influences, outside

circumstances, wind the MAN and regulate him.  Left to himself,

he wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would

keep would not be valuable.  Some rare men are wonderful watches,

with gold case, compensation balance, and all those things, and

some men are only simple and sweet and humble Waterburys.  I am a

Waterbury.  A Waterbury of that kind, some say.



A nation is only an individual multiplied.  It makes plans

and Circumstances comes and upsets them--or enlarges them.  Some

patriots throw the tea overboard; some other patriots destroy a

Bastille.  The PLANS stop there; then Circumstance comes in,

quite unexpectedly, and turns these modest riots into a revolution.



And there was poor Columbus.  He elaborated a deep plan to

find a new route to an old country.  Circumstance revised his

plan for him, and he found a new WORLD.  And HE gets the credit

of it to this day.  He hadn't anything to do with it.



Necessarily the scene of the real turning-point of my life

(and of yours) was the Garden of Eden.  It was there that the

first link was forged of the chain that was ultimately to lead to

the emptying of me into the literary guild.  Adam's TEMPERAMENT

was the first command the Deity ever issued to a human being on

this planet.  And it was the only command Adam would NEVER be

able to disobey.  It said, "Be weak, be water, be characterless,

be cheaply persuadable."  The latter command, to let the fruit

alone, was certain to be disobeyed.  Not by Adam himself, but by

his TEMPERAMENT--which he did not create and had no authority

over.  For the TEMPERAMENT is the man; the thing tricked out with

clothes and named Man is merely its Shadow, nothing more.  The

law of the tiger's temperament is, Thou shalt kill; the law of

the sheep's temperament is Thou shalt not kill.  To issue later

commands requiring the tiger to let the fat stranger alone, and

requiring the sheep to imbue its hands in the blood of the lion

is not worth while, for those commands CAN'T be obeyed.  They

would invite to violations of the law of TEMPERAMENT, which is

supreme, and take precedence of all other authorities.  I cannot

help feeling disappointed in Adam and Eve.  That is, in their

temperaments.  Not in THEM, poor helpless young creatures--

afflicted with temperaments made out of butter; which butter was

commanded to get into contact with fire and BE MELTED.  What I

cannot help wishing is, that Adam had been postponed, and Martin

Luther and Joan of Arc put in their place--that splendid pair

equipped with temperaments not made of butter, but of asbestos.

By neither sugary persuasions nor by hell fire could Satan have

beguiled THEM to eat the apple.    There would have been results!

Indeed, yes.  The apple would be intact today; there would be no

human race; there would be no YOU; there would be no ME.  And the

old, old creation-dawn scheme of ultimately launching me into the

literary guild would have been defeated.



------------------------------------------------------------------





HOW TO MAKE HISTORY DATES STICK



These chapters are for children, and I shall try to make the

words large enough to command respect.  In the hope that you are

listening, and that you have confidence in me, I will proceed.

Dates are difficult things to acquire; and after they are

acquired it is difficult to keep them in the head.  But they are

very valuable.  They are like the cattle-pens of a ranch--they

shut in the several brands of historical cattle, each within its

own fence, and keep them from getting mixed together.  Dates are

hard to remember because they consist of figures; figures are

monotonously unstriking in appearance, and they don't take hold,

they form no pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to

help.  Pictures are the thing.  Pictures can make dates stick.

They can make nearly anything stick--particularly IF YOU MAKE THE

PICTURES YOURSELF.  Indeed, that is the great point--make the

pictures YOURSELF.  I know about this from experience.  Thirty

years ago I was delivering a memorized lecture every night, and

every night I had to help myself with a page of notes to keep

from getting myself mixed.  The notes consisted of beginnings of

sentences, and were eleven in number, and they ran something like

this:



"IN THAT REGION THE WEATHER--"



"AT THAT TIME IT WAS A CUSTOM--"



"BUT IN CALIFORNIA ONE NEVER HEARD--"



Eleven of them.  They initialed the brief divisions of the

lecture and protected me against skipping.  But they all looked

about alike on the page; they formed no picture; I had them by

heart, but I could never with certainty remember the order of

their succession; therefore I always had to keep those notes by

me and look at them every little while.  Once I mislaid them; you

will not be able to imagine the terrors of that evening.  I now

saw that I must invent some other protection.  So I got ten of

the initial letters by heart in their proper order--I, A, B, and

so on--and I went on the platform the next night with these

marked in ink on my ten finger-nails.  But it didn't answer.  I

kept track of the figures for a while; then I lost it, and after

that I was never quite sure which finger I had used last.  I

couldn't lick off a letter after using it, for while that would

have made success certain it also would have provoked too much

curiosity.  There was curiosity enough without that.  To the

audience I seemed more interested in my fingernails than I was in

my subject; one or two persons asked me afterward what was the

matter with my hands.



It was now that the idea of pictures occurred to me; then my

troubles passed away.  In two minutes I made six pictures with a

pen, and they did the work of the eleven catch-sentences, and did

it perfectly.  I threw the pictures away as soon as they were

made, for I was sure I could shut my eyes and see them any time.

That was a quarter of a century ago; the lecture vanished out of

my head more than twenty years ago, but I would rewrite it from

the pictures--for they remain.  Here are three of them: (Fig. 1).



The first one is a haystack--below it a rattlesnake--and it

told me where to begin to talk ranch-life in Carson Valley.  The

second one told me where to begin the talk about a strange and

violent wind that used to burst upon Carson City from the Sierra

Nevadas every afternoon at two o'clock and try to blow the town

away.  The third picture, as you easily perceive, is lightning;

its duty was to remind me when it was time to begin to talk about

San Francisco weather, where there IS no lightning--nor thunder,

either--and it never failed me.



I will give you a valuable hint.  When a man is making a

speech and you are to follow him don't jot down notes to speak

from, jot down PICTURES.  It is awkward and embarrassing to have

to keep referring to notes; and besides it breaks up your speech

and makes it ragged and non-coherent; but you can tear up your

pictures as soon as you have made them--they will stay fresh and

strong in your memory in the order and sequence in which you

scratched them down.  And many will admire to see what a good

memory you are furnished with, when perhaps your memory is not

any better than mine.



Sixteen years ago when my children were little creatures the

governess was trying to hammer some primer histories into their

heads.  Part of this fun--if you like to call it that--consisted

in the memorizing of the accession dates of the thirty-seven

personages who had ruled England from the Conqueror down.  These

little people found it a bitter, hard contract.  It was all

dates, and all looked alike, and they wouldn't stick.  Day after

day of the summer vacation dribbled by, and still the kings held

the fort; the children couldn't conquer any six of them.



With my lecture experience in mind I was aware that I could

invent some way out of the trouble with pictures, but I hoped a

way could be found which would let them romp in the open air

while they learned the kings.  I found it, and they mastered

all the monarchs in a day or two.



The idea was to make them SEE the reigns with their eyes;

that would be a large help.  We were at the farm then.  From the

house-porch the grounds sloped gradually down to the lower fence

and rose on the right to the high ground where my small work-den

stood.  A carriage-road wound through the grounds and up the

hill.  I staked it out with the English monarchs, beginning with

the Conqueror, and you could stand on the porch and clearly see

every reign and its length, from the Conquest down to Victoria,

then in the forty-sixth year of her reign--EIGHT HUNDRED AND

SEVENTEEN YEARS OF English history under your eye at once!



English history was an unusually live topic in America just

then.  The world had suddenly realized that while it was not

noticing the Queen had passed Henry VIII., passed Henry VI. and

Elizabeth, and gaining in length every day.  Her reign had

entered the list of the long ones; everybody was interested now--

it was watching a race.  Would she pass the long Edward?  There

was a possibility of it.  Would she pass the long Henry?

Doubtful, most people said.  The long George?  Impossible!

Everybody said it.  But we have lived to see her leave him two

years behind.



I measured off 817 feet of the roadway, a foot representing

a year, and at the beginning and end of each reign I drove a

three-foot white-pine stake in the turf by the roadside and wrote

the name and dates on it.  Abreast the middle of the porch-front

stood a great granite flower-vase overflowing with a cataract of

bright-yellow flowers--I can't think of their name.  The vase of

William the Conqueror.  We put his name on it and his accession

date, 1066.  We started from that and measured off twenty-one

feet of the road, and drove William Rufus's state; then thirteen

feet and drove the first Henry's stake; then thirty-five feet and

drove Stephen's; then nineteen feet, which brought us just past

the summer-house on the left; then we staked out thirty-five,

ten, and seventeen for the second Henry and Richard and John;

turned the curve and entered upon just what was needed for Henry

III.--a level, straight stretch of fifty-six feet of road without

a crinkle in it.  And it lay exactly in front of the house, in

the middle of the grounds.  There couldn't have been a better

place for that long reign; you could stand on the porch and see

those two wide-apart stakes almost with your eyes shut. (Fig. 2.)



That isn't the shape of the road--I have bunched it up like

that to save room.  The road had some great curves in it, but

their gradual sweep was such that they were no mar to history.

No, in our road one could tell at a glance who was who by the size

of the vacancy between stakes--with LOCALITY to help, of course.



Although I am away off here in a Swedish village [1] and

those stakes did not stand till the snow came, I can see them

today as plainly as ever; and whenever I think of an English

monarch his stakes rise before me of their own accord and I

notice the large or small space which he takes up on our road.

Are your kings spaced off in your mind?  When you think of

Richard III. and of James II. do the durations of their reigns

seem about alike to you?  It isn't so to me; I always notice that

there's a foot's difference.  When you think of Henry III. do you

see a great long stretch of straight road?  I do; and just at the

end where it joins on to Edward I. I always see a small pear-bush

with its green fruit hanging down.  When I think of the

Commonwealth I see a shady little group of these small saplings

which we called the oak parlor; when I think of George III. I see

him stretching up the hill, part of him occupied by a flight of

stone steps; and I can locate Stephen to an inch when he comes

into my mind, for he just filled the stretch which went by the

summer-house.  Victoria's reign reached almost to my study door

on the first little summit; there's sixteen feet to be added now;

I believe that that would carry it to a big pine-tree that was

shattered by some lightning one summer when it was trying to hit me.



We got a good deal of fun out of the history road; and

exercise, too.  We trotted the course from the conqueror to the

study, the children calling out the names, dates, and length of

reigns as we passed the stakes, going a good gait along the long

reigns, but slowing down when we came upon people like Mary and

Edward VI., and the short Stuart and Plantagenet, to give time to

get in the statistics.  I offered prizes, too--apples.  I threw

one as far as I could send it, and the child that first shouted

the reign it fell in got the apple.



The children were encouraged to stop locating things as

being "over by the arbor," or "in the oak parlor," or "up at the

stone steps," and say instead that the things were in Stephen, or

in the Commonwealth, or in George III.  They got the habit

without trouble.  To have the long road mapped out with such

exactness was a great boon for me, for I had the habit of leaving

books and other articles lying around everywhere, and had not

previously been able to definitely name the place, and so had

often been obliged to go to fetch them myself, to save time and

failure; but now I could name the reign I left them in, and send

the children.



Next I thought I would measure off the French reigns, and

peg them alongside the English ones, so that we could always have

contemporaneous French history under our eyes as we went our

English rounds.  We pegged them down to the Hundred Years' War,

then threw the idea aside, I do not now remember why.  After that

we made the English pegs fence in European and American history

as well as English, and that answered very well.  English and

alien poets, statesmen, artists, heroes, battles, plagues,

cataclysms, revolutions--we shoveled them all into the English

fences according to their dates.  Do you understand?  We gave

Washington's birth to George II.'s pegs and his death to George

III.'s; George II. got the Lisbon earthquake and George III. the

Declaration of Independence.  Goethe, Shakespeare, Napoleon,

Savonarola, Joan of Arc, the French Revolution, the Edict of

Nantes, Clive, Wellington, Waterloo, Plassey, Patay, Cowpens,

Saratoga, the Battle of the Boyne, the invention of the

logarithms, the microscope, the steam-engine, the telegraph--

anything and everything all over the world--we dumped it all

in among the English pegs according to it date and regardless

of its nationality.



If the road-pegging scheme had not succeeded I should have

lodged the kings in the children's heads by means of pictures--

that is, I should have tried.  It might have failed, for the

pictures could only be effective WHEN MADE BY THE PUPIL; not the

master, for it is the work put upon the drawing that makes the

drawing stay in the memory, and my children were too little to make

drawings at that time.  And, besides, they had no talent for art,

which is strange, for in other ways they are like me.



But I will develop the picture plan now, hoping that you will

be able to use it.  It will come good for indoors when the

weather is bad and one cannot go outside and peg a road.  Let us

imagine that the kings are a procession, and that they have come

out of the Ark and down Ararat for exercise and are now starting

back again up the zigzag road.  This will bring several of them

into view at once, and each zigzag will represent the length of

a king's reign.



And so on.  You will have plenty of space, for by my project

you will use the parlor wall.  You do not mark on the wall; that

would cause trouble.  You only attach bits of paper to it with

pins or thumb-tacks.  These will leave no mark.



Take your pen now, and twenty-one pieces of white paper,

each two inches square, and we will do the twenty-one years of

the Conqueror's reign.  On each square draw a picture of a whale

and write the dates and term of service.  We choose the whale for

several reasons:  its name and William's begin with the same

letter; it is the biggest fish that swims, and William is the

most conspicuous figure in English history in the way of a

landmark; finally, a whale is about the easiest thing to draw.

By the time you have drawn twenty-one wales and written "William

I.--1066-1087--twenty-one years" twenty-one times, those details

will be your property; you cannot dislodge them from your memory

with anything but dynamite.  I will make a sample for you to copy:

(Fig. 3).



I have got his chin up too high, but that is no matter; he

is looking for Harold.  It may be that a whale hasn't that fin up

there on his back, but I do not remember; and so, since there is

a doubt, it is best to err on the safe side.  He looks better,

anyway, than he would without it.



Be very careful and ATTENTIVE while you are drawing your

first whale from my sample and writing the word and figures under

it, so that you will not need to copy the sample any more.

Compare your copy with the sample; examine closely; if you find

you have got everything right and can shut your eyes and see the

picture and call the words and figures, then turn the sample and

copy upside down and make the next copy from memory; and also the

next and next, and so on, always drawing and writing from memory

until you have finished the whole twenty-one.  This will take you

twenty minutes, or thirty, and by that time you will find that

you can make a whale in less time than an unpracticed person can

make a sardine; also, up to the time you die you will always be

able to furnish William's dates to any ignorant person that

inquires after them.



You will now take thirteen pieces of BLUE paper, each two

inches square, and do William II. (Fig. 4.)



Make him spout his water forward instead of backward; also

make him small, and stick a harpoon in him and give him that sick

look in the eye.  Otherwise you might seem to be continuing the

other William, and that would be confusing and a damage.  It is

quite right to make him small; he was only about a No. 11 whale,

or along there somewhere; there wasn't room in him for his

father's great spirit.  The barb of that harpoon ought not to

show like that, because it is down inside the whale and ought to

be out of sight, but it cannot be helped; if the barb were

removed people would think some one had stuck a whip-stock into

the whale.  It is best to leave the barb the way it is, then

every one will know it is a harpoon and attending to business.

Remember--draw from the copy only once; make your other twelve

and the inscription from memory.



Now the truth is that whenever you have copied a picture and

its inscription once from my sample and two or three times from

memory the details will stay with you and be hard to forget.

After that, if you like, you may make merely the whale's HEAD and

WATER-SPOUT for the Conqueror till you end his reign, each time

SAYING the inscription in place of writing it; and in the case of

William II. make the HARPOON alone, and say over the inscription

each time you do it.  You see, it will take nearly twice as long

to do the first set as it will to do the second, and that will

give you a marked sense of the difference in length of the two reigns.



Next do Henry I. on thirty-five squares of RED paper.

(Fig. 5.)



That is a hen, and suggests Henry by furnishing the first syllable.

When you have repeated the hen and the inscription until you are

perfectly sure of them, draw merely the hen's head the rest of the

thirty-five times, saying over the inscription each time.  Thus:

(Fig. 6).



You begin to understand how how this procession is going to

look when it is on the wall.  First there will be the Conqueror's

twenty-one whales and water-spouts, the twenty-one white squares

joined to one another and making a white stripe three and one-

half feet long; the thirteen blue squares of William II. will be

joined to that--a blue stripe two feet, two inches long, followed

by Henry's red stripe five feet, ten inches long, and so on.  The

colored divisions will smartly show to the eye the difference in

the length of the reigns and impress the proportions on the

memory and the understanding. (Fig. 7.)



Stephen of Blois comes next.  He requires nineteen two-inch

squares of YELLOW paper. (Fig. 8.)



That is a steer.  The sound suggests the beginning of

Stephen's name.  I choose it for that reason.  I can make a

better steer than that when I am not excited.  But this one will

do.  It is a good-enough steer for history.  The tail is

defective, but it only wants straightening out.



Next comes Henry II.  Give him thirty-five squares of RED paper.

These hens must face west, like the former ones. (Fig. 9.)



This hen differs from the other one.  He is on his way to

inquire what has been happening in Canterbury.



How we arrive at Richard I., called Richard of the Lion-

heart because he was a brave fighter and was never so contented

as when he was leading crusades in Palestine and neglecting his

affairs at home.  Give him ten squares of WHITE paper. (Fig. 10).



That is a lion.  His office is to remind you of the lion-

hearted Richard.  There is something the matter with his legs,

but I do not quite know what it is, they do not seem right.

I think the hind ones are the most unsatisfactory; the front

ones are well enough, though it would be better if they were

rights and lefts.



Next comes King John, and he was a poor circumstance.

He was called Lackland.  He gave his realm to the Pope.

Let him have seventeen squares of YELLOW paper. (Fig. 11.)



That creature is a jamboree.  It looks like a trademark, but

that is only an accident and not intentional.  It is prehistoric

and extinct.  It used to roam the earth in the Old Silurian

times, and lay eggs and catch fish and climb trees and live on

fossils; for it was of a mixed breed, which was the fashion then.

It was very fierce, and the Old Silurians were afraid of it, but

this is a tame one.  Physically it has no representative now, but

its mind has been transmitted.  First I drew it sitting down, but

have turned it the other way now because I think it looks more

attractive and spirited when one end of it is galloping.  I love

to think that in this attitude it gives us a pleasant idea of

John coming all in a happy excitement to see what the barons have

been arranging for him at Runnymede, while the other one gives us

an idea of him sitting down to wring his hands and grieve over it.



We now come to Henry III.; RED squares again, of course--

fifty-six of them.  We must make all the Henrys the same color;

it will make their long reigns show up handsomely on the wall.

Among all the eight Henrys there were but two short ones.  A

lucky name, as far as longevity goes.  The reigns of six of the

Henrys cover 227 years.  It might have been well to name all the

royal princes Henry, but this was overlooked until it was too late.

(Fig. 12.)



This is the best one yet.  He is on his way (1265) to have a

look at the first House of Commons in English history.  It was a

monumental event, the situation in the House, and was the second

great liberty landmark which the century had set up.  I have made

Henry looking glad, but this was not intentional.



Edward I. comes next; LIGHT-BROWN paper, thirty-five squares.

(Fig. 13.)



That is an editor.  He is trying to think of a word.  He

props his feet on a chair, which is the editor's way; then he can

think better.  I do not care much for this one; his ears are not

alike; still, editor suggests the sound of Edward, and he will

do.  I could make him better if I had a model, but I made this

one from memory.  But is no particular matter; they all look

alike, anyway.  They are conceited and troublesome, and don't pay

enough.  Edward was the first really English king that had yet

occupied the throne.  The editor in the picture probably looks

just as Edward looked when it was first borne in upon him that

this was so.  His whole attitude expressed gratification and

pride mixed with stupefaction and astonishment.



Edward II. now; twenty BLUE squares. (Fig. 14.)



Another editor. That thing behind his ear is his pencil.

Whenever he finds a bright thing in your manuscript he strikes it

out with that.  That does him good, and makes him smile and show

his teeth, the way he is doing in the picture.  This one has just

been striking out a smart thing, and now he is sitting there with

his thumbs in his vest-holes, gloating.  They are full of envy

and malice, editors are.  This picture will serve to remind you

that Edward II. was the first English king who was DEPOSED.  Upon

demand, he signed his deposition himself.  He had found kingship

a most aggravating and disagreeable occupation, and you can see

by the look of him that he is glad he resigned.  He has put his

blue pencil up for good now.  He had struck out many a good thing

with it in his time.



Edward III. next; fifty RED squares. (Fig. 15.)



This editor is a critic.  He has pulled out his carving-

knife and his tomahawk and is starting after a book which he is

going to have for breakfast.  This one's arms are put on wrong.

I did not notice it at first, but I see it now.  Somehow he has

got his right arm on his left shoulder, and his left arm on his

right shoulder, and this shows us the back of his hands in both

instances.  It makes him left-handed all around, which is a thing

which has never happened before, except perhaps in a museum.

That is the way with art, when it is not acquired but born to

you:  you start in to make some simple little thing, not

suspecting that your genius is beginning to work and swell and

strain in secret, and all of a sudden there is a convulsion and

you fetch out something astonishing.  This is called inspiration.

It is an accident; you never know when it is coming.  I might

have tried as much as a year to think of such a strange thing as

an all-around left-handed man and I could not have done it, for

the more you try to think of an unthinkable thing the more it

eludes you; but it can't elude inspiration; you have only to bait

with inspiration and you will get it every time.  Look at

Botticelli's "Spring."  Those snaky women were unthinkable, but

inspiration secured them for us, thanks to goodness.  It is too

late to reorganize this editor-critic now; we will leave him as

he is.  He will serve to remind us.



Richard II. next; twenty-two WHITE squares.  (Fig. 16.)



We use the lion again because this is another Richard.  Like

Edward II., he was DEPOSED.  He is taking a last sad look at his

crown before they take it away.  There was not room enough and I

have made it too small; but it never fitted him, anyway.



Now we turn the corner of the century with a new line of

monarchs--the Lancastrian kings.



Henry IV.; fourteen squares of YELLOW paper. (Fig. 17.)



This hen has laid the egg of a new dynasty and realizes the

magnitude of the event.  She is giving notice in the usual way.

You notice I am improving in the construction of hens.  At first

I made them too much like other animals, but this one is

orthodox.  I mention this to encourage you.  You will find that

the more you practice the more accurate you will become.  I could

always draw animals, but before I was educated I could not tell

what kind they were when I got them done, but now I can.  Keep up

your courage; it will be the same with you, although you may not

think it.  This Henry died the year after Joan of Arc was born.



Henry V.; nine BLUE squares. (Fig. 18)



There you see him lost in meditation over the monument which

records the amazing figures of the battle of Agincourt.  French

history says 20,000 Englishmen routed 80,000 Frenchmen there; and

English historians say that the French loss, in killed and

wounded, was 60,000.



Henry VI.; thirty-nine RED squares. (Fig. 19)



This is poor Henry VI., who reigned long and scored many

misfortunes and humiliations.  Also two great disasters:  he lost

France to Joan of Arc and he lost the throne and ended the

dynasty which Henry IV. had started in business with such good

prospects.  In the picture we see him sad and weary and downcast,

with the scepter falling from his nerveless grasp.  It is a

pathetic quenching of a sun which had risen in such splendor.



Edward IV.; twenty-two LIGHT-BROWN squares. (Fig. 20.)



That is a society editor, sitting there elegantly dressed,

with his legs crossed in that indolent way, observing the clothes

the ladies wear, so that he can describe them for his paper and

make them out finer than they are and get bribes for it and

become wealthy.  That flower which he is wearing in his

buttonhole is a rose--a white rose, a York rose--and will serve

to remind us of the War of the Roses, and that the white one was

the winning color when Edward got the throne and dispossessed the

Lancastrian dynasty.



Edward V.; one-third of a BLACK square. (Fig. 21.)



His uncle Richard had him murdered in the tower.  When you

get the reigns displayed upon the wall this one will be

conspicuous and easily remembered.  It is the shortest one in

English history except Lady Jane Grey's, which was only nine

days.  She is never officially recognized as a monarch of

England, but if you or I should ever occupy a throne we should

like to have proper notice taken of it; and it would be only fair

and right, too, particularly if we gained nothing by it and lost

our lives besides.



Richard III.; two WHITE squares. (Fig. 22.)



That is not a very good lion, but Richard was not a very

good king.  You would think that this lion has two heads, but

that is not so; one is only a shadow.  There would be shadows for

the rest of him, but there was not light enough to go round, it

being a dull day, with only fleeting sun-glimpses now and then.

Richard had a humped back and a hard heart, and fell at the

battle of Bosworth.  I do not know the name of that flower in the

pot, but we will use it as Richard's trade-mark, for it is said

that it grows in only one place in the world--Bosworth Field--and

tradition says it never grew there until Richard's royal blood

warmed its hidden seed to life and made it grow.



Henry VII.; twenty-four BLUE squares. (Fig. 23.)



Henry VII. had no liking for wars and turbulence; he

preferred peace and quiet and the general prosperity which such

conditions create.  He liked to sit on that kind of eggs on his

own private account as well as the nation's, and hatch them out

and count up their result.  When he died he left his heir

2,000,000 pounds, which was a most unusual fortune for a king to

possess in those days.  Columbus's great achievement gave him the

discovery-fever, and he sent Sebastian Cabot to the New World to

search out some foreign territory for England.  That is Cabot's

ship up there in the corner.  This was the first time that

England went far abroad to enlarge her estate--but not the last.



Henry VIII.; thirty-eight RED squares. (Fig. 24.)



That is Henry VIII. suppressing a monastery in his arrogant fashion.



Edward VI.; six squares of YELLOW paper. (Fig. 25.)



He is the last Edward to date.  It is indicated by that

thing over his head, which is a LAST--shoemaker's last.



Mary; five squares of BLACK paper. (Fig. 26.)



The picture represents a burning martyr.  He is in back of

the smoke.  The first three letters of Mary's name and the first

three of the word martyr are the same.  Martyrdom was going out

in her day and martyrs were becoming scarcer, but she made

several.  For this reason she is sometimes called Bloody Mary.



This brings us to the reign of Elizabeth, after passing

through a period of nearly five hundred years of England's

history--492 to be exact.  I think you may now be trusted to go

the rest of the way without further lessons in art or

inspirations in the matter of ideas.  You have the scheme now,

and something in the ruler's name or career will suggest the

pictorial symbol.  The effort of inventing such things will not

only help your memory, but will develop originality in art.  See

what it has done for me.  If you do not find the parlor wall big

enough for all of England's history, continue it into the dining-

room and into other rooms.  This will make the walls interesting

and instructive and really worth something instead of being just

flat things to hold the house together.



-----

1.  Summer of 1899.



-----------------------------------------------------------------





THE MEMORABLE ASSASSINATION



Note.--The assassination of the Empress of Austria at

Geneva, September 10, 1898, occurred during Mark Twain's Austrian

residence.  The news came to him at Kaltenleutgeben, a summer

resort a little way out of Vienna.  To his friend, the Rev. Jos.

H. Twichell, he wrote:



"That good and unoffending lady, the Empress, is killed by a

madman, and I am living in the midst of world-history again.  The

Queen's Jubilee last year, the invasion of the Reichsrath by the

police, and now this murder, which will still be talked of and

described and painted a thousand a thousand years from now.  To

have a personal friend of the wearer of two crowns burst in at

the gate in the deep dusk of the evening and say, in a voice

broken with tears, 'My God! the Empress is murdered,' and fly

toward her home before we can utter a question--why, it brings

the giant event home to you, makes you a part of it and

personally interested; it is as if your neighbor, Antony, should

come flying and say, 'Caesar is butchered--the head of the world

is fallen!'



"Of course there is no talk but of this.  The mourning is

universal and genuine, the consternation is stupefying.  The

Austrian Empire is being draped with black.  Vienna will be a

spectacle to see by next Saturday, when the funeral cort`ege

marches."



He was strongly moved by the tragedy, impelled to write

concerning it.  He prepared the article which follows, but did

not offer it for publication, perhaps feeling that his own close

association with the court circles at the moment prohibited this

personal utterance.  There appears no such reason for withholding

its publication now.



A. B. P.





The more one thinks of the assassination, the more imposing

and tremendous the event becomes.  The destruction of a city is a

large event, but it is one which repeats itself several times in

a thousand years; the destruction of a third part of a nation by

plague and famine is a large event, but it has happened several

times in history; the murder of a king is a large event, but it

has been frequent.



The murder of an empress is the largest of all events.  One

must go back about two thousand years to find an instance to put

with this one.  The oldest family of unchallenged descent in

Christendom lives in Rome and traces its line back seventeen

hundred years, but no member of it has been present in the earth

when an empress was murdered, until now.  Many a time during

these seventeen centuries members of that family have been

startled with the news of extraordinary events--the destruction

of cities, the fall of thrones, the murder of kings, the wreck of

dynasties, the extinction of religions, the birth of new systems

of government; and their descendants have been by to hear of it

and talk about it when all these things were repeated once,

twice, or a dozen times--but to even that family has come news at

last which is not staled by use, has no duplicates in the long

reach of its memory.



It is an event which confers a curious distinction upon

every individual now living in the world:  he has stood alive and

breathing in the presence of an event such as has not fallen

within the experience of any traceable or untraceable ancestor of

his for twenty centuries, and it is not likely to fall within the

experience of any descendant of his for twenty more.



Time has made some great changes since the Roman days.  The

murder of an empress then--even the assassination of Caesar

himself--could not electrify the world as this murder has

electrified it.  For one reason, there was then not much of a

world to electrify; it was a small world, as to known bulk, and

it had rather a thin population, besides; and for another reason,

the news traveled so slowly that its tremendous initial thrill

wasted away, week by week and month by month, on the journey, and

by the time it reached the remoter regions there was but little

of it left.  It was no longer a fresh event, it was a thing of

the far past; it was not properly news, it was history.  But the

world is enormous now, and prodigiously populated--that is one

change; and another is the lightning swiftness of the flight of

tidings, good and bad.  "The Empress is murdered!"  When those

amazing words struck upon my ear in this Austrian village last

Saturday, three hours after the disaster, I knew that it was

already old news in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, San

Francisco, Japan, China, Melbourne, Cape Town, Bombay, Madras,

Calcutta, and that the entire globe with a single voice, was

cursing the perpetrator of it.  Since the telegraph first began

to stretch itself wider and wider about the earth, larger and

increasingly larger areas of the world have, as time went on,

received simultaneously the shock of a great calamity; but this

is the first time in history that the entire surface of the globe

has been swept in a single instant with the thrill of so gigantic

an event.



And who is the miracle-worker who has furnished to the world

this spectacle?  All the ironies are compacted in the answer.  He

is at the bottom of the human ladder, as the accepted estimates

of degree and value go:  a soiled and patched young loafer,

without gifts, without talents, without education, without

morals, without character, without any born charm or any acquired

one that wins or beguiles or attracts; without a single grace of

mind or heart or hand that any tramp or prostitute could envy

him; an unfaithful private in the ranks, an incompetent stone-

cutter, an inefficient lackey; in a word, a mangy, offensive,

empty, unwashed, vulgar, gross, mephitic, timid, sneaking, human

polecat.  And it was within the privileges and powers of this

sarcasm upon the human race to reach up--up--up--and strike from

its far summit in the social skies the world's accepted ideal of

Glory and Might and Splendor and Sacredness!  It realizes to us

what sorry shows and shadows we are.  Without our clothes and our

pedestals we are poor things and much of a size; our dignities

are not real, our pomps are shams.  At our best and stateliest we

are not suns, as we pretended, and teach, and believe, but only

candles; and any bummer can blow us out.



And now we get realized to us once more another thing which

we often forget--or try to:  that no man has a wholly undiseased

mind; that in one way or another all men are mad.  Many are mad

for money.  When this madness is in a mild form it is harmless

and the man passes for sane; but when it develops powerfully and

takes possession of the man, it can make him cheat, rob, and

kill; and when he has got his fortune and lost it again it can

land him in the asylum or the suicide's coffin.  Love is a

madness; if thwarted it develops fast; it can grow to a frenzy of

despair and make an otherwise sane and highly gifted prince, like

Rudolph, throw away the crown of an empire and snuff out his own

life.  All the whole list of desires, predilections, aversions,

ambitions, passions, cares, griefs, regrets, remorses, are

incipient madness, and ready to grow, spread, and consume, when

the occasion comes.  There are no healthy minds, and nothing

saves any man but accident--the accident of not having his malady

put to the supreme test.



One of the commonest forms of madness is the desire to be

noticed, the pleasure derived from being noticed.  Perhaps it is

not merely common, but universal.  In its mildest form it

doubtless is universal.  Every child is pleased at being noticed;

many intolerable children put in their whole time in distressing

and idiotic effort to attract the attention of visitors; boys are

always "showing off"; apparently all men and women are glad and

grateful when they find that they have done a thing which has

lifted them for a moment out of obscurity and caused wondering

talk.  This common madness can develop, by nurture, into a hunger

for notoriety in one, for fame in another.  It is this madness

for being noticed and talked about which has invented kingship

and the thousand other dignities, and tricked them out with

pretty and showy fineries; it has made kings pick one another's

pockets, scramble for one another's crowns and estates, slaughter

one another's subjects; it has raised up prize-fighters, and

poets, and villages mayors, and little and big politicians, and

big and little charity-founders, and bicycle champions, and

banditti chiefs, and frontier desperadoes, and Napoleons.

Anything to get notoriety; anything to set the village, or the

township, or the city, or the State, or the nation, or the planet

shouting, "Look--there he goes--that is the man!"  And in five

minutes' time, at no cost of brain, or labor, or genius this

mangy Italian tramp has beaten them all, transcended them all,

outstripped them all, for in time their names will perish; but by

the friendly help of the insane newspapers and courts and kings

and historians, his is safe and live and thunder in the world all

down the ages as long as human speech shall endure!  Oh, if it

were not so tragic how ludicrous it would be!



She was so blameless, the Empress; and so beautiful, in mind

and heart, in person and spirit; and whether with a crown upon

her head or without it and nameless, a grace to the human race,

and almost a justification of its creation; WOULD be, indeed, but

that the animal that struck her down re-establishes the doubt.



In her character was every quality that in woman invites and

engages respect, esteem, affection, and homage.  Her tastes, her

instincts, and her aspirations were all high and fine and all her

life her heart and brain were busy with activities of a noble

sort.  She had had bitter griefs, but they did not sour her

spirit, and she had had the highest honors in the world's gift,

but she went her simple way unspoiled.  She knew all ranks, and

won them all, and made them her friends.  An English fisherman's

wife said, "When a body was in trouble she didn't send her help,

she brought it herself."  Crowns have adorned others, but she

adorned her crowns.



It was a swift celebrity the assassin achieved.  And it is

marked by some curious contrasts.  At noon last, Saturday there

was no one in the world who would have considered

acquaintanceship with him a thing worth claiming or mentioning;

no one would have been vain of such an acquaintanceship; the

humblest honest boot-black would not have valued the fact that he

had met him or seen him at some time or other; he was sunk in

abysmal obscurity, he was away beneath the notice of the bottom

grades of officialdom.  Three hours later he was the one subject

of conversation in the world, the gilded generals and admirals

and governors were discussing him, all the kings and queens and

emperors had put aside their other interests to talk about him.

And wherever there was a man, at the summit of the world or the

bottom of it, who by chance had at some time or other come across

that creature, he remembered it with a secret satisfaction, and

MENTIONED it--for it was a distinction, now!  It brings human

dignity pretty low, and for a moment the thing is not quite

realizable--but it is perfectly true.  If there is a king who can

remember, now, that he once saw that creature in a time past, he

has let that fact out, in a more or less studiedly casual and

indifferent way, some dozens of times during the past week.  For

a king is merely human; the inside of him is exactly like the

inside of any other person; and it is human to find satisfaction

in being in a kind of personal way connected with amazing events.

We are all privately vain of such a thing; we are all alike; a

king is a king by accident; the reason the rest of us are not

kings is merely due to another accident; we are all made out of

the same clay, and it is a sufficient poor quality.



Below the kings, these remarks are in the air these days; I

know it well as if I were hearing them:



THE COMMANDER:  "He was in my army."



THE GENERAL:  "He was in my corps."



THE COLONEL:  "He was in my regiment.  A brute.  I remember

him well."



THE CAPTAIN:  "He was in my company.  A troublesome

scoundrel.  I remember him well."



THE SERGEANT:  "Did I know him?  As well as I know you.

Why, every morning I used to--" etc., etc.; a glad, long story,

told to devouring ears.



THE LANDLADY:  "Many's the time he boarded with me.  I can

show you his very room, and the very bed he slept in.  And the

charcoal mark there on the wall--he made that.  My little Johnny

saw him do it with his own eyes.  Didn't you, Johnny?"



It is easy to see, by the papers, that the magistrate and

the constables and the jailer treasure up the assassin's daily

remarks and doings as precious things, and as wallowing this week

in seas of blissful distinction.  The interviewer, too; he tried

to let on that he is not vain of his privilege of contact with

this man whom few others are allowed to gaze upon, but he is

human, like the rest, and can no more keep his vanity corked in

than could you or I.



Some think that this murder is a frenzied revolt against the

criminal militarism which is impoverishing Europe and driving the

starving poor mad.  That has many crimes to answer for, but not

this one, I think.  One may not attribute to this man a generous

indignation against the wrongs done the poor; one may not dignify

him with a generous impulse of any kind.  When he saw his

photograph and said, "I shall be celebrated," he laid bare the

impulse that prompted him.  It was a mere hunger for notoriety.

There is another confessed case of the kind which is as old as

history--the burning of the temple of Ephesus.



Among the inadequate attempts to account for the

assassination we must concede high rank to the many which have

described it as a "peculiarly brutal crime" and then added that

it was "ordained from above."  I think this verdict will not be

popular "above."  If the deed was ordained from above, there is

no rational way of making this prisoner even partially

responsible for it, and the Genevan court cannot condemn him

without manifestly committing a crime.  Logic is logic, and by

disregarding its laws even the most pious and showy theologian

may be beguiled into preferring charges which should not be

ventured upon except in the shelter of plenty of lightning-rods.



I witnessed the funeral procession, in company with friends,

from the windows of the Krantz, Vienna's sumptuous new hotel.  We

came into town in the middle of the forenoon, and I went on foot

from the station.  Black flags hung down from all the houses; the

aspects were Sunday-like; the crowds on the sidewalks were quiet

and moved slowly; very few people were smoking; many ladies wore

deep mourning, gentlemen were in black as a rule; carriages were

speeding in all directions, with footmen and coachmen in black

clothes and wearing black cocked hats; the shops were closed; in

many windows were pictures of the Empress:  as a beautiful young

bride of seventeen; as a serene and majestic lady with added

years; and finally in deep black and without ornaments--the

costume she always wore after the tragic death of her son nine

years ago, for her heart broke then, and life lost almost all its

value for her.  The people stood grouped before these pictures,

and now and then one saw women and girls turn away wiping the

tears from their eyes.



In front of the Krantz is an open square; over the way was

the church where the funeral services would be held.  It is small

and old and severely plain, plastered outside and whitewashed or

painted, and with no ornament but a statue of a monk in a niche

over the door, and above that a small black flag.  But in its

crypt lie several of the great dead of the House of Habsburg,

among them Maria Theresa and Napoleon's son, the Duke of Reichstadt.

Hereabouts was a Roman camp, once, and in it the Emperor Marcus

Aurelius died a thousand years before the first Habsburg ruled

in Vienna, which was six hundred years ago and more.



The little church is packed in among great modern stores and

houses, and the windows of them were full of people.  Behind the

vast plate-glass windows of the upper floors of the house on the

corner one glimpsed terraced masses of fine-clothed men and

women, dim and shimmery, like people under water.  Under us the

square was noiseless, but it was full of citizens; officials in

fine uniforms were flitting about on errands, and in a doorstep

sat a figure in the uttermost raggedness of poverty, the feet

bare, the head bent humbly down; a youth of eighteen or twenty,

he was, and through the field-glass one could see that he was

tearing apart and munching riffraff that he had gathered

somewhere.  Blazing uniforms flashed by him, making a sparkling

contrast with his drooping ruin of moldy rags, but he took not

notice; he was not there to grieve for a nation's disaster; he

had his own cares, and deeper.  From two directions two long

files of infantry came plowing through the pack and press in

silence; there was a low, crisp order and the crowd vanished, the

square save the sidewalks was empty, the private mourner was

gone.  Another order, the soldiers fell apart and enclosed the

square in a double-ranked human fence.  It was all so swift,

noiseless, exact--like a beautifully ordered machine.



It was noon, now.  Two hours of stillness and waiting

followed.  Then carriages began to flow past and deliver the two

and three hundred court personages and high nobilities privileged

to enter the church.  Then the square filled up; not with

civilians, but with army and navy officers in showy and beautiful

uniforms.  They filled it compactly, leaving only a narrow

carriage path in front of the church, but there was no civilian

among them.  And it was better so; dull clothes would have marred

the radiant spectacle.  In the jam in front of the church, on its

steps, and on the sidewalk was a bunch of uniforms which made a

blazing splotch of color--intense red, gold, and white--which

dimmed the brilliancies around them; and opposite them on the

other side of the path was a bunch of cascaded bright-green

plumes above pale-blue shoulders which made another splotch of

splendor emphatic and conspicuous in its glowing surroundings.

It was a sea of flashing color all about, but these two groups

were the high notes.  The green plumes were worn by forty or

fifty Austrian generals, the group opposite them were chiefly

Knights of Malta and knights of a German order.  The mass of

heads in the square were covered by gilt helmets and by military

caps roofed with a mirror-like gaze, and the movements of the

wearers caused these things to catch the sun-rays, and the effect

was fine to see--the square was like a garden of richly colored

flowers with a multitude of blinding and flashing little suns

distributed over it.



Think of it--it was by command of that Italian loafer yonder

on his imperial throne in the Geneva prison that this splendid

multitude was assembled there; and the kings and emperors that

were entering the church from a side street were there by his will.

It is so strange, so unrealizable.



At three o'clock the carriages were still streaming by in

single file.  At three-five a cardinal arrives with his

attendants; later some bishops; then a number of archdeacons--all

in striking colors that add to the show.  At three-ten a

procession of priests passed along, with crucifix.  Another one,

presently; after an interval, two more; at three-fifty another

one--very long, with many crosses, gold-embroidered robes, and

much white lace; also great pictured banners, at intervals,

receding into the distance.



A hum of tolling bells makes itself heard, but not sharply.

At three-fifty-eight a waiting interval.  Presently a long

procession of gentlemen in evening dress comes in sight and

approaches until it is near to the square, then falls back

against the wall of soldiers at the sidewalk, and the white

shirt-fronts show like snowflakes and are very conspicuous where

so much warm color is all about.



A waiting pause.  At four-twelve the head of the funeral

procession comes into view at last.  First, a body of cavalry,

four abreast, to widen the path.  Next, a great body of lancers,

in blue, with gilt helmets.  Next, three six-horse mourning-

coaches; outriders and coachmen in black, with cocked hats and

white wigs.  Next, troops in splendid uniforms, red, gold, and

white, exceedingly showy.



Now the multitude uncover.  The soldiers present arms; there

is a low rumble of drums; the sumptuous great hearse approaches,

drawn at a walk by eight black horses plumed with black bunches

of nodding ostrich feathers; the coffin is borne into the church,

the doors are closed.



The multitude cover their heads, and the rest of the

procession moves by; first the Hungarian Guard in their

indescribably brilliant and picturesque and beautiful uniform,

inherited from the ages of barbaric splendor, and after them

other mounted forces, a long and showy array.



Then the shining crown in the square crumbled apart, a

wrecked rainbow, and melted away in radiant streams, and in the

turn of a wrist the three dirtiest and raggedest and cheerfulest

little slum-girls in Austria were capering about in the spacious

vacancy.  It was a day of contrasts.



Twice the Empress entered Vienna in state.  The first time

was in 1854, when she was a bride of seventeen, and then she rode

in measureless pomp and with blare of music through a fluttering

world of gay flags and decorations, down streets walled on both

hands with a press of shouting and welcoming subjects; and the

second time was last Wednesday, when she entered the city in her

coffin and moved down the same streets in the dead of the night

under swaying black flags, between packed human walls again; but

everywhere was a deep stillness, now--a stillness emphasized,

rather than broken, by the muffled hoofbeats of the long

cavalcade over pavements cushioned with sand, and the low sobbing

of gray-headed women who had witnessed the first entry forty-four

years before, when she and they were young--and unaware!



A character in Baron von Berger's recent fairy drama

"Habsburg" tells about the first coming of the girlish Empress-

Queen, and in his history draws a fine picture:  I cannot make a

close translation of it, but will try to convey the spirit of the

verses:





I saw the stately pageant pass:

In her high place I saw the Empress-Queen:

I could not take my eyes away

From that fair vision, spirit-like and pure,

That rose serene, sublime, and figured to my sense

A noble Alp far lighted in the blue,

That in the flood of morning rends its veil of cloud

And stands a dream of glory to the gaze

Of them that in the Valley toil and plod.

------------------------------------------------------------------









A SCRAP OF CURIOUS HISTORY



Marion City, on the Mississippi River, in the State of

Missouri--a village; time, 1845.  La Bourboule-les-Bains, France

--a village; time, the end of June, 1894.  I was in the one

village in that early time; I am in the other now.  These times

and places are sufficiently wide apart, yet today I have the

strange sense of being thrust back into that Missourian village

and of reliving certain stirring days that I lived there so long

ago.



Last Saturday night the life of the President of the French

Republic was taken by an Italian assassin.  Last night a mob

surrounded our hotel, shouting, howling, singing the

"Marseillaise," and pelting our windows with sticks and stones;

for we have Italian waiters, and the mob demanded that they be

turned out of the house instantly--to be drubbed, and then driven

out of the village.  Everybody in the hotel remained up until far

into the night, and experienced the several kinds of terror which

one reads about in books which tell of nigh attacks by Italians

and by French mobs:  the growing roar of the oncoming crowd; the

arrival, with rain of stones and a crash of glass; the withdrawal

to rearrange plans--followed by a silence ominous, threatening,

and harder to bear than even the active siege and the noise.  The

landlord and the two village policemen stood their ground, and at

last the mob was persuaded to go away and leave our Italians in

peace.  Today four of the ringleaders have been sentenced to

heavy punishment of a public sort--and are become local heroes,

by consequence.



That is the very mistake which was at first made in the

Missourian village half a century ago.  The mistake was repeated

and repeated--just as France is doing in these later months.



In our village we had our Ravochals, our Henrys, our

Vaillants; and in a humble way our Cesario--I hope I have spelled

this name wrong.  Fifty years ago we passed through, in all

essentials, what France has been passing through during the past

two or three years, in the matter of periodical frights, horrors,

and shudderings.



In several details the parallels are quaintly exact.  In

that day, for a man to speak out openly and proclaim himself an

enemy of negro slavery was simply to proclaim himself a madman.

For he was blaspheming against the holiest thing known to a

Missourian, and could NOT be in his right mind.  For a man to

proclaim himself an anarchist in France, three years ago, was to

proclaim himself a madman--he could not be in his right mind.



Now the original first blasphemer against any institution

profoundly venerated by a community is quite sure to be in

earnest; his followers and imitators may be humbugs and self-

seekers, but he himself is sincere--his heart is in his protest.



Robert Hardy was our first ABOLITIONIST--awful name!  He was

a journeyman cooper, and worked in the big cooper-shop belonging

to the great pork-packing establishment which was Marion City's

chief pride and sole source of prosperity.  He was a New-

Englander, a stranger.  And, being a stranger, he was of course

regarded as an inferior person--for that has been human nature

from Adam down--and of course, also, he was made to feel

unwelcome, for this is the ancient law with man and the other

animals.  Hardy was thirty years old, and a bachelor; pale, given

to reverie and reading.  He was reserved, and seemed to prefer

the isolation which had fallen to his lot.  He was treated to

many side remarks by his fellows, but as he did not resent them

it was decided that he was a coward.



All of a sudden he proclaimed himself an abolitionist--

straight out and publicly!  He said that negro slavery was a

crime, an infamy.  For a moment the town was paralyzed with

astonishment; then it broke into a fury of rage and swarmed

toward the cooper-shop to lynch Hardy.  But the Methodist

minister made a powerful speech to them and stayed their hands.

He proved to them that Hardy was insane and not responsible for

his words; that no man COULD be sane and utter such words.



So Hardy was saved.  Being insane, he was allowed to go on

talking.  He was found to be good entertainment.  Several nights

running he made abolition speeches in the open air, and all the

town flocked to hear and laugh.  He implored them to believe him

sane and sincere, and have pity on the poor slaves, and take

measurements for the restoration of their stolen rights, or in no

long time blood would flow--blood, blood, rivers of blood!



It was great fun.  But all of a sudden the aspect of things

changed.  A slave came flying from Palmyra, the county-seat, a

few miles back, and was about to escape in a canoe to Illinois

and freedom in the dull twilight of the approaching dawn, when

the town constable seized him.  Hardy happened along and tried to

rescue the negro; there was a struggle, and the constable did not

come out of it alive.  Hardly crossed the river with the negro,

and then came back to give himself up.  All this took time, for

the Mississippi is not a French brook, like the Seine, the Loire,

and those other rivulets, but is a real river nearly a mile wide.

The town was on hand in force by now, but the Methodist preacher

and the sheriff had already made arrangements in the interest of

order; so Hardy was surrounded by a strong guard and safely

conveyed to the village calaboose in spite of all the effort of

the mob to get hold of him.  The reader will have begun to

perceive that this Methodist minister was a prompt man; a prompt

man, with active hands and a good headpiece.  Williams was his

name--Damon Williams; Damon Williams in public, Damnation Williams

in private, because he was so powerful on that theme and so frequent.



The excitement was prodigious.  The constable was the first

man who had ever been killed in the town.  The event was by long

odds the most imposing in the town's history.  It lifted the

humble village into sudden importance; its name was in

everybody's mouth for twenty miles around.  And so was the name

of Robert Hardy--Robert Hardy, the stranger, the despised.  In a

day he was become the person of most consequence in the region,

the only person talked about.  As to those other coopers, they

found their position curiously changed--they were important

people, or unimportant, now, in proportion as to how large or how

small had been their intercourse with the new celebrity.  The two

or three who had really been on a sort of familiar footing with

him found themselves objects of admiring interest with the public

and of envy with their shopmates.



The village weekly journal had lately gone into new hands.

The new man was an enterprising fellow, and he made the most of

the tragedy.  He issued an extra.  Then he put up posters

promising to devote his whole paper to matters connected with the

great event--there would be a full and intensely interesting

biography of the murderer, and even a portrait of him.  He was as

good as his word.  He carved the portrait himself, on the back of

a wooden type--and a terror it was to look at.  It made a great

commotion, for this was the first time the village paper had ever

contained a picture.  The village was very proud.  The output of

the paper was ten times as great as it had ever been before, yet

every copy was sold.



When the trial came on, people came from all the farms

around, and from Hannibal, and Quincy, and even from Keokuk; and

the court-house could hold only a fraction of the crowd that

applied for admission.  The trial was published in the village

paper, with fresh and still more trying pictures of the accused.



Hardy was convicted, and hanged--a mistake.  People came

from miles around to see the hanging; they brought cakes and

cider, also the women and children, and made a picnic of the

matter.  It was the largest crowd the village had ever seen.  The

rope that hanged Hardy was eagerly bought up, in inch samples,

for everybody wanted a memento of the memorable event.





Martyrdom gilded with notoriety has its fascinations.

Within one week afterward four young lightweights in the village

proclaimed themselves abolitionists!  In life Hardy had not been

able to make a convert; everybody laughed at him; but nobody

could laugh at his legacy.  The four swaggered around with their

slouch-hats pulled down over their faces, and hinted darkly at

awful possibilities.  The people were troubled and afraid, and

showed it.  And they were stunned, too; they could not understand

it.  "Abolitionist" had always been a term of shame and horror;

yet here were four young men who were not only not ashamed to

bear that name, but were grimly proud of it.  Respectable young

men they were, too--of good families, and brought up in the

church.  Ed Smith, the printer's apprentice, nineteen, had been

the head Sunday-school boy, and had once recited three thousand

Bible verses without making a break.  Dick Savage, twenty, the

baker's apprentice; Will Joyce, twenty-two, journeyman

blacksmith; and Henry Taylor, twenty-four, tobacco-stemmer--were

the other three.  They were all of a sentimental cast; they were

all romance-readers; they all wrote poetry, such as it was; they

were all vain and foolish; but they had never before been

suspected of having anything bad in them.



They withdrew from society, and grew more and more

mysterious and dreadful.  They presently achieved the distinction

of being denounced by names from the pulpit--which made an

immense stir!  This was grandeur, this was fame.  They were

envied by all the other young fellows now.  This was natural.

Their company grew--grew alarmingly.  They took a name.  It was a

secret name, and was divulged to no outsider; publicly they were

simply the abolitionists.  They had pass-words, grips, and signs;

they had secret meetings; their initiations were conducted with

gloomy pomps and ceremonies, at midnight.



They always spoke of Hardy as "the Martyr," and every little

while they moved through the principal street in procession--at

midnight, black-robed, masked, to the measured tap of the solemn

drum--on pilgrimage to the Martyr's grave, where they went

through with some majestic fooleries and swore vengeance upon his

murderers.  They gave previous notice of the pilgrimage by small

posters, and warned everybody to keep indoors and darken all

houses along the route, and leave the road empty.  These warnings

were obeyed, for there was a skull and crossbones at the top of

the poster.



When this kind of thing had been going on about eight weeks,

a quite natural thing happened.  A few men of character and grit

woke up out of the nightmare of fear which had been stupefying

their faculties, and began to discharge scorn and scoffings at

themselves and the community for enduring this child's-play; and

at the same time they proposed to end it straightway.  Everybody

felt an uplift; life was breathed into their dead spirits; their

courage rose and they began to feel like men again.  This was on

a Saturday.  All day the new feeling grew and strengthened; it

grew with a rush; it brought inspiration and cheer with it.

Midnight saw a united community, full of zeal and pluck, and with

a clearly defined and welcome piece of work in front of it.  The

best organizer and strongest and bitterest talker on that great

Saturday was the Presbyterian clergyman who had denounced the

original four from his pulpit--Rev. Hiram Fletcher--and he

promised to use his pulpit in the public interest again now.  On

the morrow he had revelations to make, he said--secrets of the

dreadful society.



But the revelations were never made.  At half past two in

the morning the dead silence of the village was broken by a

crashing explosion, and the town patrol saw the preacher's house

spring in a wreck of whirling fragments into the sky.  The

preacher was killed, together with a negro woman, his only slave

and servant.



The town was paralyzed again, and with reason.  To struggle

against a visible enemy is a thing worth while, and there is a

plenty of men who stand always ready to undertake it; but to

struggle against an invisible one--an invisible one who sneaks in

and does his awful work in the dark and leaves no trace--that is

another matter.  That is a thing to make the bravest tremble and

hold back.



The cowed populace were afraid to go to the funeral.  The

man who was to have had a packed church to hear him expose and

denounce the common enemy had but a handful to see him buried.

The coroner's jury had brought in a verdict of "death by the

visitation of God," for no witness came forward; if any existed

they prudently kept out of the way.  Nobody seemed sorry.  Nobody

wanted to see the terrible secret society provoked into the

commission of further outrages.  Everybody wanted the tragedy

hushed up, ignored, forgotten, if possible.



And so there was a bitter surprise and an unwelcome one when

Will Joyce, the blacksmith's journeyman, came out and proclaimed

himself the assassin!  Plainly he was not minded to be robbed of

his glory.  He made his proclamation, and stuck to it.  Stuck to

it, and insisted upon a trial.  Here was an ominous thing; here

was a new and peculiarly formidable terror, for a motive was

revealed here which society could not hope to deal with

successfully--VANITY, thirst for notoriety.  If men were going to

kill for notoriety's sake, and to win the glory of newspaper

renown, a big trial, and a showy execution, what possible

invention of man could discourage or deter them?  The town was in

a sort of panic; it did not know what to do.



However, the grand jury had to take hold of the matter--it

had no choice.  It brought in a true bill, and presently the case

went to the county court.  The trial was a fine sensation.  The

prisoner was the principal witness for the prosecution.  He gave

a full account of the assassination; he furnished even the

minutest particulars:  how he deposited his keg of powder and

laid his train--from the house to such-and-such a spot; how

George Ronalds and Henry Hart came along just then, smoking, and

he borrowed Hart's cigar and fired the train with it, shouting,

"Down with all slave-tyrants!" and how Hart and Ronalds made no

effort to capture him, but ran away, and had never come forward

to testify yet.



But they had to testify now, and they did--and pitiful it

was to see how reluctant they were, and how scared.  The crowded

house listened to Joyce's fearful tale with a profound and

breathless interest, and in a deep hush which was not broken till

he broke it himself, in concluding, with a roaring repetition of his

"Death to all slave-tyrants!"--which came so unexpectedly and so

startlingly that it made everyone present catch his breath and gasp.



The trial was put in the paper, with biography and large portrait,

with other slanderous and insane pictures, and the edition sold

beyond imagination.



The execution of Joyce was a fine and picturesque thing.  It

drew a vast crowd.  Good places in trees and seats on rail fences

sold for half a dollar apiece; lemonade and gingerbread-stands

had great prosperity.  Joyce recited a furious and fantastic and

denunciatory speech on the scaffold which had imposing passages

of school-boy eloquence in it, and gave him a reputation on the

spot as an orator, and his name, later, in the society's records,

of the "Martyr Orator."  He went to his death breathing slaughter and

charging his society to "avenge his murder."  If he knew anything of

human nature he knew that to plenty of young fellows present in that

great crowd he was a grand hero--and enviably situated.



He was hanged.  It was a mistake.  Within a month from his

death the society which he had honored had twenty new members,

some of them earnest, determined men.  They did not court

distinction in the same way, but they celebrated his martyrdom.

The crime which had been obscure and despised had become lofty

and glorified.



Such things were happening all over the country.  Wild-

brained martyrdom was succeeded by uprising and organization.

Then, in natural order, followed riot, insurrection, and the

wrack and restitutions of war.  It was bound to come, and it

would naturally come in that way.  It has been the manner of

reform since the beginning of the world.



------------------------------------------------------------------







SWITZERLAND, THE CRADLE OF LIBERTY





Interlaken, Switzerland, 1891.



It is a good many years since I was in Switzerland last.  In

that remote time there was only one ladder railway in the

country.  That state of things is all changed.  There isn't a

mountain in Switzerland now that hasn't a ladder railroad or two

up its back like suspenders; indeed, some mountains are latticed

with them, and two years hence all will be.  In that day the

peasant of the high altitudes will have to carry a lantern when

he goes visiting in the night to keep from stumbling over

railroads that have been built since his last round.  And also in

that day, if there shall remain a high-altitude peasant whose

potato-patch hasn't a railroad through it, it would make him as

conspicuous as William Tell.



However, there are only two best ways to travel through

Switzerland.  The first best is afloat.  The second best is by

open two-horse carriage.  One can come from Lucerne to Interlaken

over the Brunig by ladder railroad in an hour or so now, but you

can glide smoothly in a carriage in ten, and have two hours for

luncheon at noon--for luncheon, not for rest.  There is no

fatigue connected with the trip.  One arrives fresh in spirit and

in person in the evening--no fret in his heart, no grime on his

face, no grit in his hair, not a cinder in his eye.  This is the

right condition of mind and body, the right and due preparation

for the solemn event which closed the day--stepping with

metaphorically uncovered head into the presence of the most

impressive mountain mass that the globe can show--the Jungfrau.

The stranger's first feeling, when suddenly confronted by that

towering and awful apparition wrapped in its shroud of snow, is

breath-taking astonishment.  It is as if heaven's gates had swung

open and exposed the throne.



It is peaceful here and pleasant at Interlaken.  Nothing

going on--at least nothing but brilliant life-giving sunshine.

There are floods and floods of that.  One may properly speak of

it as "going on," for it is full of the suggestion of activity;

the light pours down with energy, with visible enthusiasm.  This

is a good atmosphere to be in, morally as well as physically.

After trying the political atmosphere of the neighboring

monarchies, it is healing and refreshing to breathe air that has

known no taint of slavery for six hundred years, and to come

among a people whose political history is great and fine, and

worthy to be taught in all schools and studied by all races and

peoples.  For the struggle here throughout the centuries has not

been in the interest of any private family, or any church, but in

the interest of the whole body of the nation, and for shelter and

protection of all forms of belief.  This fact is colossal.  If

one would realize how colossal it is, and of what dignity and

majesty, let him contrast it with the purposes and objects of the

Crusades, the siege of York, the War of the Roses, and other

historic comedies of that sort and size.



Last week I was beating around the Lake of Four Cantons, and

I saw Rutli and Altorf.  Rutli is a remote little patch of

meadow, but I do not know how any piece of ground could be holier

or better worth crossing oceans and continents to see, since it

was there that the great trinity of Switzerland joined hands six

centuries ago and swore the oath which set their enslaved and

insulted country forever free; and Altorf is also honorable

ground and worshipful, since it was there that William, surnamed

Tell (which interpreted means "The foolish talker"--that is to

say, the too-daring talker), refused to bow to Gessler's hat.  Of

late years the prying student of history has been delighting

himself beyond measure over a wonderful find which he has made--

to wit, that Tell did not shoot the apple from his son's head.

To hear the students jubilate, one would suppose that the

question of whether Tell shot the apple or didn't was an

important matter; whereas it ranks in importance exactly with the

question of whether Washington chopped down the cherry-tree or

didn't.  The deeds of Washington, the patriot, are the essential

thing; the cherry-tree incident is of no consequence.  To prove

that Tell did shoot the apple from his son's head would merely

prove that he had better nerve than most men and was skillful

with a bow as a million others who preceded and followed him, but

not one whit more so.  But Tell was more and better than a mere

marksman, more and better than a mere cool head; he was a type;

he stands for Swiss patriotism; in his person was represented a

whole people; his spirit was their spirit--the spirit which would

bow to none but God, the spirit which said this in words and

confirmed it with deeds.  There have always been Tells in

Switzerland--people who would not bow.  There was a sufficiency

of them at Rutli; there were plenty of them at Murten; plenty at

Grandson; there are plenty today.  And the first of them all--the

very first, earliest banner-bearer of human freedom in this

world--was not a man, but a woman--Stauffacher's wife.  There she

looms dim and great, through the haze of the centuries,

delivering into her husband's ear that gospel of revolt which was

to bear fruit in the conspiracy of Rutli and the birth of the

first free government the world had ever seen.



From this Victoria Hotel one looks straight across a flat of

trifling width to a lofty mountain barrier, which has a gateway

in it shaped like an inverted pyramid.  Beyond this gateway

arises the vast bulk of the Jungfrau, a spotless mass of gleaming

snow, into the sky.  The gateway, in the dark-colored barrier,

makes a strong frame for the great picture.  The somber frame and

the glowing snow-pile are startlingly contrasted.  It is this

frame which concentrates and emphasizes the glory of the Jungfrau

and makes it the most engaging and beguiling and fascinating

spectacle that exists on the earth.  There are many mountains of

snow that are as lofty as the Jungfrau and as nobly proportioned,

but they lack the fame.  They stand at large; they are intruded

upon and elbowed by neighboring domes and summits, and their

grandeur is diminished and fails of effect.



It is a good name, Jungfrau--Virgin.  Nothing could be

whiter; nothing could be purer; nothing could be saintlier of

aspect.  At six yesterday evening the great intervening barrier

seen through a faint bluish haze seemed made of air and

substanceless, so soft and rich it was, so shimmering where the

wandering lights touched it and so dim where the shadows lay.

Apparently it was a dream stuff, a work of the imagination,

nothing real about it.  The tint was green, slightly varying

shades of it, but mainly very dark.  The sun was down--as far as

that barrier was concerned, but not for the Jungfrau, towering

into the heavens beyond the gateway.  She was a roaring

conflagration of blinding white.





It is said the Fridolin (the old Fridolin), a new saint, but

formerly a missionary, gave the mountain its gracious name.  He

was an Irishman, son of an Irish king--there were thirty thousand

kings reigning in County Cork alone in his time, fifteen hundred

years ago.  It got so that they could not make a living, there

was so much competition and wages got cut so.  Some of them were

out of work months at a time, with wife and little children to

feed, and not a crust in the place.  At last a particularly

severe winter fell upon the country, and hundreds of them were

reduced to mendicancy and were to be seen day after day in the

bitterest weather, standing barefoot in the snow, holding out

their crowns for alms.  Indeed, they would have been obliged to

emigrate or starve but for a fortunate idea of Prince Fridolin's,

who started a labor-union, the first one in history, and got the

great bulk of them to join it.  He thus won the general

gratitude, and they wanted to make him emperor--emperor over them

all--emperor of County Cork, but he said, No, walking delegate

was good enough for him.  For behold! he was modest beyond his

years, and keen as a whip.  To this day in Germany and

Switzerland, where St. Fridolin is revered and honored, the

peasantry speak of him affectionately as the first walking

delegate.



The first walk he took was into France and Germany,

missionarying--for missionarying was a better thing in those days

than it is in ours.  All you had to do was to cure the savage's

sick daughter by a "miracle"--a miracle like the miracle of

Lourdes in our day, for instance--and immediately that head

savage was your convert, and filled to the eyes with a new

convert's enthusiasm.  You could sit down and make yourself easy,

now.  He would take an ax and convert the rest of the nation

himself.  Charlemagne was that kind of a walking delegate.



Yes, there were great missionaries in those days, for the

methods were sure and the rewards great.  We have no such

missionaries now, and no such methods.



But to continue the history of the first walking delegate,

if you are interested.  I am interested myself because I have

seen his relics in Sackingen, and also the very spot where he

worked his great miracle--the one which won him his sainthood in

the papal court a few centuries later.  To have seen these things

makes me feel very near to him, almost like a member of the

family, in fact.  While wandering about the Continent he arrived

at the spot on the Rhine which is now occupied by Sackingen, and

proposed to settle there, but the people warned him off.  He

appealed to the king of the Franks, who made him a present of the

whole region, people and all.  He built a great cloister there

for women and proceeded to teach in it and accumulate more land.

There were two wealthy brothers in the neighborhood, Urso and

Landulph.  Urso died and Fridolin claimed his estates.  Landulph

asked for documents and papers.  Fridolin had none to show.  He

said the bequest had been made to him by word of mouth.  Landulph

suggested that he produce a witness and said it in a way which he

thought was very witty, very sarcastic.  This shows that he did

not know the walking delegate.  Fridolin was not disturbed.

He said:



"Appoint your court.  I will bring a witness."



The court thus created consisted of fifteen counts and

barons.  A day was appointed for the trial of the case.  On that

day the judges took their seats in state, and proclamation was

made that the court was ready for business.  Five minutes, ten

minutes, fifteen minutes passed, and yet no Fridolin appeared.

Landulph rose, and was in the act of claiming judgment by default

when a strange clacking sound was heard coming up the stairs.

In another moment Fridolin entered at the door and came walking

in a deep hush down the middle aisle, with a tall skeleton

stalking in his rear.



Amazement and terror sat upon every countenance, for everybody

suspected that the skeleton was Urso's.  It stopped before the

chief judge and raised its bony arm aloft and began to speak,

while all the assembled shuddered, for they could see the

words leak out between its ribs.  It said:



"Brother, why dost thou disturb my blessed rest and withhold

by robbery the gift which I gave thee for the honor of God?"



It seems a strange thing and most irregular, but the verdict

was actually given against Landulph on the testimony of this

wandering rack-heap of unidentified bones.  In our day a skeleton

would not be allowed to testify at all, for a skeleton has no

moral responsibility, and its word could not be believed on oath,

and this was probably one of them.  However, the incident is

valuable as preserving to us a curious sample of the quaint laws

of evidence of that remote time--a time so remote, so far back

toward the beginning of original idiocy, that the difference

between a bench of judges and a basket of vegetables was as yet

so slight that we may say with all confidence that it didn't

really exist.





During several afternoons I have been engaged in an

interesting, maybe useful, piece of work--that is to say, I have

been trying to make the mighty Jungfrau earn her living--earn it

in a most humble sphere, but on a prodigious scale, on a

prodigious scale of necessity, for she couldn't do anything in a

small way with her size and style.  I have been trying to make

her do service on a stupendous dial and check off the hours as

they glide along her pallid face up there against the sky, and

tell the time of day to the populations lying within fifty miles

of her and to the people in the moon, if they have a good

telescope there.



Until late in the afternoon the Jungfrau's aspect is that of

a spotless desert of snow set upon edge against the sky.  But by

mid-afternoon some elevations which rise out of the western

border of the desert, whose presence you perhaps had not detected

or suspected up to that time, began to cast black shadows

eastward across the gleaming surface.  At first there is only one

shadow; later there are two.  Toward 4 P.M. the other day I was

gazing and worshiping as usual when I chanced to notice that

shadow No. 1 was beginning to take itself something of the shape

of the human profile.  By four the back of the head was good, the

military cap was pretty good, the nose was bold and strong, the

upper lip sharp, but not pretty, and there was a great goatee

that shot straight aggressively forward from the chin.



At four-thirty the nose had changed its shape considerably,

and the altered slant of the sun had revealed and made

conspicuous a huge buttress or barrier of naked rock which was so

located as to answer very well for a shoulder or coat-collar to

this swarthy and indiscreet sweetheart who had stolen out there

right before everybody to pillow his head on the Virgin's white

breast and whisper soft sentimentalities to her in the sensuous

music of the crashing ice-domes and the boom and thunder of the

passing avalanche--music very familiar to his ear, for he had

heard it every afternoon at this hour since the day he first came

courting this child of the earth, who lives in the sky, and that

day is far, yes--for he was at this pleasant sport before the

Middle Ages drifted by him in the valley; before the Romans

marched past, and before the antique and recordless barbarians

fished and hunted here and wondered who he might be, and were

probably afraid of him; and before primeval man himself, just

emerged from his four-footed estate, stepped out upon this plain,

first sample of his race, a thousand centuries ago, and cast a

glad eye up there, judging he had found a brother human being and

consequently something to kill; and before the big saurians

wallowed here, still some eons earlier.  Oh yes, a day so far

back that the eternal son was present to see that first visit; a

day so far back that neither tradition nor history was born yet

and a whole weary eternity must come and go before the restless

little creature, of whose face this stupendous Shadow Face was

the prophecy, would arrive in the earth and begin his shabby

career and think of a big thing.  Oh, indeed yes; when you talk

about your poor Roman and Egyptian day-before-yesterday

antiquities, you should choose a time when the hoary Shadow Face

of the Jungfrau is not by.  It antedates all antiquities known or

imaginable; for it was here the world itself created the theater

of future antiquities.  And it is the only witness with a human

face that was there to see the marvel, and remains to us a

memorial of it.



By 4:40 P.M. the nose of the shadow is perfect and is

beautiful.  It is black and is powerfully marked against the

upright canvas of glowing snow, and covers hundreds of acres of

that resplendent surface.



Meantime shadow No. 2 has been creeping out well to the rear

of the face west of it--and at five o'clock has assumed a shape

that has rather a poor and rude semblance of a shoe.



Meantime, also, the great Shadow Face has been gradually changing

for twenty minutes, and now, 5 P.M., it is becoming a quite fair

portrait of Roscoe Conkling.  The likeness is there, and is

unmistakable.  The goatee is shortened, now, and has an end;

formerly it hadn't any, but ran off eastward and arrived nowhere.



By 6 P.M. the face has dissolved and gone, and the goatee

has become what looks like the shadow of a tower with a pointed

roof, and the shoe had turned into what the printers call a

"fist" with a finger pointing.



If I were now imprisoned on a mountain summit a hundred

miles northward of this point, and was denied a timepiece, I

could get along well enough from four till six on clear days, for

I could keep trace of the time by the changing shapes of these

mighty shadows of the Virgin's front, the most stupendous dial I

am acquainted with, the oldest clock in the world by a couple of

million years.



I suppose I should not have noticed the forms of the shadows

if I hadn't the habit of hunting for faces in the clouds and in

mountain crags--a sort of amusement which is very entertaining

even when you don't find any, and brilliantly satisfying when you

do.  I have searched through several bushels of photographs of

the Jungfrau here, but found only one with the Face in it, and in

this case it was not strictly recognizable as a face, which was

evidence that the picture was taken before four o'clock in the

afternoon, and also evidence that all the photographers have

persistently overlooked one of the most fascinating features of

the Jungfrau show.  I say fascinating, because if you once detect

a human face produced on a great plan by unconscious nature, you

never get tired of watching it.  At first you can't make another

person see it at all, but after he has made it out once he can't

see anything else afterward.





The King of Greece is a man who goes around quietly enough

when off duty.  One day this summer he was traveling in an

ordinary first-class compartment, just in his other suit, the one

which he works the realm in when he is at home, and so he was not

looking like anybody in particular, but a good deal like

everybody in general.  By and by a hearty and healthy German-

American got in and opened up a frank and interesting and

sympathetic conversation with him, and asked him a couple of

thousand questions about himself, which the king answered good-

naturedly, but in a more or less indefinite way as to private

particulars.



"Where do you live when you are at home?"



"In Greece."



"Greece!  Well, now, that is just astonishing!  Born there?"



"No."



"Do you speak Greek?"



"Yes."



"Now, ain't that strange!  I never expected to live to see

that.  What is your trade?  I mean how do you get your living?

What is your line of business?"



"Well, I hardly know how to answer.  I am only a kind of

foreman, on a salary; and the business--well, is a very general

kind of business."



"Yes, I understand--general jobbing--little of everything--

anything that there's money in."



"That's about it, yes."



"Are you traveling for the house now?"



"Well, partly; but not entirely.  Of course I do a stroke of

business if it falls in the way--"



"Good!  I like that in you!  That's me every time.  Go on."



"I was only going to say I am off on my vacation now."



"Well that's all right.  No harm in that.  A man works all

the better for a little let-up now and then.  Not that I've been

used to having it myself; for I haven't.  I reckon this is my

first.  I was born in Germany, and when I was a couple of weeks

old shipped to America, and I've been there ever since, and

that's sixty-four years by the watch.  I'm an American in

principle and a German at heart, and it's the boss combination.

Well, how do you get along, as a rule--pretty fair?"



"I've a rather large family--"



"There, that's it--big family and trying to raise them on a

salary.  Now, what did you go to do that for?"



"Well, I thought--"



"Of course you did.  You were young and confident and

thought you could branch out and make things go with a whirl, and

here you are, you see!  But never mind about that.  I'm not

trying to discourage you.  Dear me!  I've been just where you are

myself!  You've got good grit; there's good stuff in you, I can

see that.  You got a wrong start, that's the whole trouble.  But

you hold your grip, and we'll see what can be done.  Your case

ain't half as bad as it might be.  You are going to come out all

right--I'm bail for that.  Boys and girls?"



"My family?  Yes, some of them are boys--"



"And the rest girls.  It's just as I expected.  But that's

all right, and it's better so, anyway.  What are the boys doing--

learning a trade?"



"Well, no--I thought--"



"It's a big mistake.  It's the biggest mistake you ever

made.  You see that in your own case.  A man ought always to have

a trade to fall back on.  Now, I was harness-maker at first.  Did

that prevent me from becoming one of the biggest brewers in

America?  Oh no.  I always had the harness trick to fall back on

in rough weather.  Now, if you had learned how to make harness--

However, it's too late now; too late.  But it's no good plan to

cry over spilt milk.  But as to the boys, you see--what's to

become of them if anything happens to you?"



"It has been my idea to let the eldest one succeed me--"



"Oh, come!  Suppose the firm don't want him?"



"I hadn't thought of that, but--"



"Now, look here; you want to get right down to business and

stop dreaming.  You are capable of immense things--man.  You can

make a perfect success in life.  All you want is somebody to

steady you and boost you along on the right road.  Do you own

anything in the business?"



"No--not exactly; but if I continue to give satisfaction, I

suppose I can keep my--"



"Keep your place--yes.  Well, don't you depend on anything

of the kind.  They'll bounce you the minute you get a little old

and worked out; they'll do it sure.  Can't you manage somehow to

get into the firm?  That's the great thing, you know."



"I think it is doubtful; very doubtful."



"Um--that's bad--yes, and unfair, too.  Do you suppose that

if I should go there and have a talk with your people--  Look

here--do you think you could run a brewery?"



"I have never tried, but I think I could do it after a

little familiarity with the business."



The German was silent for some time.  He did a good deal of

thinking, and the king waited curiously to see what the result

was going to be.  Finally the German said:



"My mind's made up.  You leave that crowd--you'll never

amount to anything there.  In these old countries they never give

a fellow a show.  Yes, you come over to America--come to my place

in Rochester; bring the family along.  You shall have a show in

the business and the foremanship, besides.  George--you said your

name was George?--I'll make a man of you.  I give you my word.

You've never had a chance here, but that's all going to change.

By gracious! I'll give you a lift that'll make your hair curl!"



------------------------------------------------------------------





AT THE SHRINE OF ST. WAGNER





Bayreuth, Aug. 2d, 1891





It was at Nuremberg that we struck the inundation of music-

mad strangers that was rolling down upon Bayreuth.  It had been

long since we had seen such multitudes of excited and struggling

people.  It took a good half-hour to pack them and pair them into

the train--and it was the longest train we have yet seen in

Europe.  Nuremberg had been witnessing this sort of experience a

couple of times a day for about two weeks.  It gives one an

impressive sense of the magnitude of this biennial pilgrimage.

For a pilgrimage is what it is.  The devotees come from the very

ends of the earth to worship their prophet in his own Kaaba in

his own Mecca.



If you are living in New York or San Francisco or Chicago or

anywhere else in America, and you conclude, by the middle of May,

that you would like to attend the Bayreuth opera two months and a

half later, you must use the cable and get about it immediately

or you will get no seats, and you must cable for lodgings, too.

Then if you are lucky you will get seats in the last row and

lodgings in the fringe of the town.  If you stop to write you

will get nothing.  There were plenty of people in Nuremberg when

we passed through who had come on pilgrimage without first

securing seats and lodgings.  They had found neither in Bayreuth;

they had walked Bayreuth streets a while in sorrow, then had gone

to Nuremberg and found neither beds nor standing room, and had

walked those quaint streets all night, waiting for the hotels to

open and empty their guests into trains, and so make room for

these, their defeated brethren and sisters in the faith.  They

had endured from thirty to forty hours' railroading on the

continent of Europe--with all which that implies of worry,

fatigue, and financial impoverishment--and all they had got and

all they were to get for it was handiness and accuracy in kicking

themselves, acquired by practice in the back streets of the two

towns when other people were in bed; for back they must go over

that unspeakable journey with their pious mission unfulfilled.

These humiliated outcasts had the frowsy and unbrushed and

apologetic look of wet cats, and their eyes were glazed with

drowsiness, their bodies were adroop from crown to sole, and all

kind-hearted people refrained from asking them if they had been

to Bayreuth and failed to connect, as knowing they would lie.



We reached here (Bayreuth) about mid-afternoon of a rainy

Saturday.  We were of the wise, and had secured lodgings and

opera seats months in advance.



I am not a musical critic, and did not come here to write

essays about the operas and deliver judgment upon their merits.

The little children of Bayreuth could do that with a finer

sympathy and a broader intelligence than I.  I only care to bring

four or five pilgrims to the operas, pilgrims able to appreciate

them and enjoy them.  What I write about the performance to put

in my odd time would be offered to the public as merely a cat's

view of a king, and not of didactic value.



Next day, which was Sunday, we left for the opera-house--

that is to say, the Wagner temple--a little after the middle of

the afternoon.  The great building stands all by itself, grand

and lonely, on a high ground outside the town.  We were warned

that if we arrived after four o'clock we should be obliged to pay

two dollars and a half extra by way of fine.  We saved that; and

it may be remarked here that this is the only opportunity that

Europe offers of saving money.  There was a big crowd in the

grounds about the building, and the ladies' dresses took the sun

with fine effect.  I do not mean to intimate that the ladies were

in full dress, for that was not so.  The dresses were pretty, but

neither sex was in evening dress.



The interior of the building is simple--severely so; but

there is no occasion for color and decoration, since the people

sit in the dark.  The auditorium has the shape of a keystone,

with the stage at the narrow end.  There is an aisle on each

side, but no aisle in the body of the house.  Each row of seats

extends in an unbroken curve from one side of the house to the

other.  There are seven entrance doors on each side of the

theater and four at the butt, eighteen doors to admit and emit

1,650 persons.  The number of the particular door by which you

are to enter the house or leave it is printed on your ticket, and

you can use no door but that one.  Thus, crowding and confusion

are impossible.  Not so many as a hundred people use any one

door.  This is better than having the usual (and useless)

elaborate fireproof arrangements.  It is the model theater of the

world.  It can be emptied while the second hand of a watch makes

its circuit.  It would be entirely safe, even if it were built of

lucifer matches.



If your seat is near the center of a row and you enter late

you must work your way along a rank of about twenty-five ladies

and gentlemen to get to it.  Yet this causes no trouble, for

everybody stands up until all the seats are full, and the filling

is accomplished in a very few minutes.  Then all sit down, and

you have a solid mass of fifteen hundred heads, making a steep

cellar-door slant from the rear of the house down to the stage.



All the lights were turned low, so low that the congregation

sat in a deep and solemn gloom.  The funereal rustling of dresses

and the low buzz of conversation began to die swiftly down, and

presently not the ghost of a sound was left.  This profound and

increasingly impressive stillness endured for some time--the best

preparation for music, spectacle, or speech conceivable.  I should

think our show people would have invented or imported that simple

and impressive device for securing and solidifying the attention

of an audience long ago; instead of which there continue to this

day to open a performance against a deadly competition in the

form of noise, confusion, and a scattered interest.



Finally, out of darkness and distance and mystery soft rich

notes rose upon the stillness, and from his grave the dead

magician began to weave his spells about his disciples and steep

their souls in his enchantments.  There was something strangely

impressive in the fancy which kept intruding itself that the

composer was conscious in his grave of what was going on here,

and that these divine souls were the clothing of thoughts which

were at this moment passing through his brain, and not recognized

and familiar ones which had issued from it at some former time.



The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a dark

house with the curtain down.  It was exquisite; it was delicious.

But straightway thereafter, or course, came the singing, and it

does seem to me that nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely

perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the

vocal parts.  I wish I could see a Wagner opera done in pantomime

once.  Then one would have the lovely orchestration unvexed to

listen to and bathe his spirit in, and the bewildering beautiful

scenery to intoxicate his eyes with, and the dumb acting couldn't

mar these pleasures, because there isn't often anything in the

Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as

acting; as a rule all you would see would be a couple of silent

people, one of them standing still, the other catching flies.  Of

course I do not really mean that he would be catching flies; I

only mean that the usual operatic gestures which consist in

reaching first one hand out into the air and then the other might

suggest the sport I speak of if the operator attended strictly to

business and uttered no sound.



This present opera was "Parsifal."  Madame Wagner does not

permit its representation anywhere but in Bayreuth.  The first

act of the three occupied two hours, and I enjoyed that in spite

of the singing.



I trust that I know as well as anybody that singing is one

of the most entrancing and bewitching and moving and eloquent of

all the vehicles invented by man for the conveying of feeling;

but it seems to me that the chief virtue in song is melody, air,

tune, rhythm, or what you please to call it, and that when this

feature is absent what remains is a picture with the color left

out.  I was not able to detect in the vocal parts of "Parsifal"

anything that might with confidence be called rhythm or tune or

melody; one person performed at a time--and a long time, too--

often in a noble, and always in a high-toned, voice; but he only

pulled out long notes, then some short ones, then another long

one, then a sharp, quick, peremptory bark or two--and so on and

so on; and when he was done you saw that the information which he

had conveyed had not compensated for the disturbance.  Not

always, but pretty often.  If two of them would but put in a duet

occasionally and blend the voices; but no, they don't do that.

The great master, who knew so well how to make a hundred

instruments rejoice in unison and pour out their souls in mingled

and melodious tides of delicious sound, deals only in barren

solos when he puts in the vocal parts.  It may be that he was

deep, and only added the singing to his operas for the sake of

the contrast it would make with the music.  Singing!  It does

seem the wrong name to apply to it.  Strictly described, it is a

practicing of difficult and unpleasant intervals, mainly.  An

ignorant person gets tired of listening to gymnastic intervals in

the long run, no matter how pleasant they may be.  In "Parsifal"

there is a hermit named Gurnemanz who stands on the stage in one

spot and practices by the hour, while first one and then another

character of the cast endures what he can of it and then retires

to die.



During the evening there was an intermission of three-

quarters of an hour after the first act and one an hour long

after the second.  In both instances the theater was totally

emptied.  People who had previously engaged tables in the one

sole eating-house were able to put in their time very

satisfactorily; the other thousand went hungry.  The opera was

concluded at ten in the evening or a little later.  When we

reached home we had been gone more than seven hours.  Seven hours

at five dollars a ticket is almost too much for the money.



While browsing about the front yard among the crowd between

the acts I encountered twelve or fifteen friends from different

parts of America, and those of them who were most familiar with

Wagner said that "Parsifal" seldom pleased at first, but that

after one had heard it several times it was almost sure to become

a favorite.  It seemed impossible, but it was true, for the

statement came from people whose word was not to be doubted.



And I gathered some further information.  On the ground I

found part of a German musical magazine, and in it a letter

written by Uhlic thirty-three years ago, in which he defends the

scorned and abused Wagner against people like me, who found fault

with the comprehensive absence of what our kind regards as

singing.  Uhlic says Wagner despised "JENE PLAPPERUDE MUSIC," and

therefore "runs, trills, and SCHNORKEL are discarded by him."  I

don't know what a SCHNORKEL is, but now that I know it has been

left out of these operas I never have missed so much in my life.

And Uhlic further says that Wagner's song is true:  that it is

"simply emphasized intoned speech."  That certainly describes it

--in "Parsifal" and some of the operas; and if I understand

Uhlic's elaborate German he apologizes for the beautiful airs in

"Tannh:auser."  Very well; now that Wagner and I understand each

other, perhaps we shall get along better, and I shall stop

calling Waggner, on the American plan, and thereafter call him

Waggner as per German custom, for I feel entirely friendly now.

The minute we get reconciled to a person, how willing we are to

throw aside little needless puctilios and pronounce his name

right!



Of course I came home wondering why people should come from

all corners of America to hear these operas, when we have lately

had a season or two of them in New York with these same singers

in the several parts, and possibly this same orchestra.  I

resolved to think that out at all hazards.



TUESDAY.--Yesterday they played the only operatic favorite I

have ever had--an opera which has always driven me mad with

ignorant delight whenever I have heard it--"Tannh:auser."  I

heard it first when I was a youth; I heard it last in the last

German season in New York.  I was busy yesterday and I did not

intend to go, knowing I should have another "Tannh:auser"

opportunity in a few days; but after five o'clock I found myself

free and walked out to the opera-house and arrived about the

beginning of the second act.  My opera ticket admitted me to the

grounds in front, past the policeman and the chain, and I thought

I would take a rest on a bench for an hour and two and wait for

the third act.



In a moment or so the first bugles blew, and the multitude

began to crumble apart and melt into the theater.  I will explain

that this bugle-call is one of the pretty features here.  You

see, the theater is empty, and hundreds of the audience are a

good way off in the feeding-house; the first bugle-call is blown

about a quarter of an hour before time for the curtain to rise.

This company of buglers, in uniform, march out with military step

and send out over the landscape a few bars of the theme of the

approaching act, piercing the distances with the gracious notes;

then they march to the other entrance and repeat.  Presently they

do this over again.  Yesterday only about two hundred people were

still left in front of the house when the second call was blown;

in another half-minute they would have been in the house, but

then a thing happened which delayed them--the only solitary thing

in this world which could be relied on with certainty to

accomplish it, I suppose--an imperial princess appeared in the

balcony above them.  They stopped dead in their tracks and began

to gaze in a stupor of gratitude and satisfaction.  The lady

presently saw that she must disappear or the doors would be

closed upon these worshipers, so she returned to her box.  This

daughter-in-law of an emperor was pretty; she had a kind face;

she was without airs; she is known to be full of common human

sympathies.  There are many kinds of princesses, but this kind is

the most harmful of all, for wherever they go they reconcile

people to monarchy and set back the clock of progress.  The

valuable princes, the desirable princes, are the czars and their

sort.  By their mere dumb presence in the world they cover with

derision every argument that can be invented in favor of royalty

by the most ingenious casuist.  In his time the husband of this

princess was valuable.  He led a degraded life, he ended it with

his own hand in circumstances and surroundings of a hideous sort,

and was buried like a god.



In the opera-house there is a long loft back of the

audience, a kind of open gallery, in which princes are displayed.

It is sacred to them; it is the holy of holies.  As soon as the

filling of the house is about complete the standing multitude

turn and fix their eyes upon the princely layout and gaze mutely

and longingly and adoringly and regretfully like sinners looking

into heaven.  They become rapt, unconscious, steeped in worship.

There is no spectacle anywhere that is more pathetic than this.

It is worth crossing many oceans to see.  It is somehow not the

same gaze that people rivet upon a Victor Hugo, or Niagara, or

the bones of the mastodon, or the guillotine of the Revolution,

or the great pyramid, or distant Vesuvius smoking in the sky, or

any man long celebrated to you by his genius and achievements, or

thing long celebrated to you by the praises of books and

pictures--no, that gaze is only the gaze of intense curiosity,

interest, wonder, engaged in drinking delicious deep draughts

that taste good all the way down and appease and satisfy the

thirst of a lifetime.  Satisfy it--that is the word.  Hugo and

the mastodon will still have a degree of intense interest

thereafter when encountered, but never anything approaching the

ecstasy of that first view.  The interest of a prince is

different.  It may be envy, it may be worship, doubtless it is a

mixture of both--and it does not satisfy its thirst with one

view, or even noticeably diminish it.  Perhaps the essence of the

thing is the value which men attach to a valuable something which

has come by luck and not been earned.  A dollar picked up in the

road is more satisfaction to you than the ninety-and-nine which

you had to work for, and money won at faro or in stocks snuggles

into your heart in the same way.  A prince picks up grandeur,

power, and a permanent holiday and gratis support by a pure

accident, the accident of birth, and he stands always before the

grieved eye of poverty and obscurity a monumental representative

of luck.  And then--supremest value of all-his is the only high

fortune on the earth which is secure.  The commercial millionaire

may become a beggar; the illustrious statesman can make a vital

mistake and be dropped and forgotten; the illustrious general can

lose a decisive battle and with it the consideration of men; but

once a prince always a prince--that is to say, an imitation god,

and neither hard fortune nor an infamous character nor an addled

brain nor the speech of an ass can undeify him.  By common

consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable

thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or

undeserved.  It follows without doubt or question, then, that the

most desirable position possible is that of a prince.  And I

think it also follows that the so-called usurpations with which

history is littered are the most excusable misdemeanors which men

have committed.  To usurp a usurpation--that is all it amounts

to, isn't it?



A prince is not to us what he is to a European, of course.

We have not been taught to regard him as a god, and so one good

look at him is likely to so nearly appease our curiosity as to

make him an object of no greater interest the next time.  We want

a fresh one.  But it is not so with the European.  I am quite

sure of it.  The same old one will answer; he never stales.

Eighteen years ago I was in London and I called at an

Englishman's house on a bleak and foggy and dismal December

afternoon to visit his wife and married daughter by appointment.

I waited half an hour and then they arrived, frozen.  They

explained that they had been delayed by an unlooked-for

circumstance:  while passing in the neighborhood of Marlborough

House they saw a crowd gathering and were told that the Prince of

Wales was about to drive out, so they stopped to get a sight of

him.  They had waited half an hour on the sidewalk, freezing with

the crowd, but were disappointed at last--the Prince had changed

his mind.  I said, with a good deal of surprise, "Is it possible

that you two have lived in London all your lives and have never

seen the Prince of Wales?"



Apparently it was their turn to be surprised, for they

exclaimed:  "What an idea!  Why, we have seen him hundreds of

times."



They had seem him hundreds of times, yet they had waited

half an hour in the gloom and the bitter cold, in the midst of a

jam of patients from the same asylum, on the chance of seeing him

again.  It was a stupefying statement, but one is obliged to

believe the English, even when they say a thing like that.  I

fumbled around for a remark, and got out this one:



"I can't understand it at all.  If I had never seen General

Grant I doubt if I would do that even to get a sight of him."

With a slight emphasis on the last word.



Their blank faces showed that they wondered where the

parallel came in.  Then they said, blankly:  "Of course not.  He

is only a President."



It is doubtless a fact that a prince is a permanent

interest, an interest not subject to deterioration.  The general

who was never defeated, the general who never held a council of

war, the only general who ever commanded a connected battle-front

twelve hundred miles long, the smith who welded together the

broken parts of a great republic and re-established it where it

is quite likely to outlast all the monarchies present and to

come, was really a person of no serious consequence to these

people.  To them, with their training, my General was only a man,

after all, while their Prince was clearly much more than that--a

being of a wholly unsimilar construction and constitution, and

being of no more blood and kinship with men than are the serene

eternal lights of the firmament with the poor dull tallow candles

of commerce that sputter and die and leave nothing behind but a

pinch of ashes and a stink.



I saw the last act of "Tannh:auser."  I sat in the gloom and

the deep stillness, waiting--one minute, two minutes, I do not

know exactly how long--then the soft music of the hidden

orchestra began to breathe its rich, long sighs out from under

the distant stage, and by and by the drop-curtain parted in the

middle and was drawn softly aside, disclosing the twilighted wood

and a wayside shrine, with a white-robed girl praying and a man

standing near.  Presently that noble chorus of men's voices was

heard approaching, and from that moment until the closing of the

curtain it was music, just music--music to make one drunk with

pleasure, music to make one take scrip and staff and beg his way

round the globe to hear it.



To such as are intending to come here in the Wagner season

next year I wish to say, bring your dinner-pail with you.  If you

do, you will never cease to be thankful.  If you do not, you will

find it a hard fight to save yourself from famishing in Bayreuth.

Bayreuth is merely a large village, and has no very large hotels

or eating-houses.  The principal inns are the Golden Anchor and

the Sun.  At either of these places you can get an excellent

meal--no, I mean you can go there and see other people get it.

There is no charge for this.  The town is littered with

restaurants, but they are small and bad, and they are overdriven

with custom.  You must secure a table hours beforehand, and often

when you arrive you will find somebody occupying it.  We have had

this experience.  We have had a daily scramble for life; and when

I say we, I include shoals of people.  I have the impression that

the only people who do not have to scramble are the veterans--the

disciples who have been here before and know the ropes.  I think

they arrive about a week before the first opera, and engage all

the tables for the season.  My tribe had tried all kinds of

places--some outside of the town, a mile or two--and have

captured only nibblings and odds and ends, never in any instance

a complete and satisfying meal.  Digestible?  No, the reverse.

These odds and ends are going to serve as souvenirs of Bayreuth,

and in that regard their value is not to be overestimated.

Photographs fade, bric-a-brac gets lost, busts of Wagner get

broken, but once you absorb a Bayreuth-restaurant meal it is your

possession and your property until the time comes to embalm the

rest of you.  Some of these pilgrims here become, in effect,

cabinets; cabinets of souvenirs of Bayreuth.  It is believed

among scientists that you could examine the crop of a dead

Bayreuth pilgrim anywhere in the earth and tell where he came

from.  But I like this ballast.  I think a "Hermitage" scrap-up

at eight in the evening, when all the famine-breeders have been

there and laid in their mementoes and gone, is the quietest thing

you can lay on your keelson except gravel.



THURSDAY.--They keep two teams of singers in stock for the

chief roles, and one of these is composed of the most renowned

artists in the world, with Materna and Alvary in the lead.  I

suppose a double team is necessary; doubtless a single team would

die of exhaustion in a week, for all the plays last from four in

the afternoon till ten at night.  Nearly all the labor falls upon

the half-dozen head singers, and apparently they are required to

furnish all the noise they can for the money.  If they feel a

soft, whispery, mysterious feeling they are required to open out

and let the public know it.  Operas are given only on Sundays,

Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with three days of ostensible

rest per week, and two teams to do the four operas; but the

ostensible rest is devoted largely to rehearsing.  It is said

that the off days are devoted to rehearsing from some time in the

morning till ten at night.  Are there two orchestras also?  It is

quite likely, since there are one hundred and ten names in the

orchestra list.



Yesterday the opera was "Tristan and Isolde."  I have seen

all sorts of audiences--at theaters, operas, concerts, lectures,

sermons, funerals--but none which was twin to the Wagner audience

of Bayreuth for fixed and reverential attention.  Absolute

attention and petrified retention to the end of an act of the

attitude assumed at the beginning of it.  You detect no movement

in the solid mass of heads and shoulders.  You seem to sit with

the dead in the gloom of a tomb.  You know that they are being

stirred to their profoundest depths; that there are times when

they want to rise and wave handkerchiefs and shout their

approbation, and times when tears are running down their faces,

and it would be a relief to free their pent emotions in sobs or

screams; yet you hear not one utterance till the curtain swings

together and the closing strains have slowly faded out and died;

then the dead rise with one impulse and shake the building with

their applause.  Every seat is full in the first act; there is

not a vacant one in the last.  If a man would be conspicuous, let

him come here and retire from the house in the midst of an act.

It would make him celebrated.



This audience reminds me of nothing I have ever seen and of

nothing I have read about except the city in the Arabian tale

where all the inhabitants have been turned to brass and the

traveler finds them after centuries mute, motionless, and still

retaining the attitudes which they last knew in life.  Here the

Wagner audience dress as they please, and sit in the dark and

worship in silence.  At the Metropolitan in New York they sit in

a glare, and wear their showiest harness; they hum airs, they

squeak fans, they titter, and they gabble all the time.  In some

of the boxes the conversation and laughter are so loud as to

divide the attention of the house with the stage.  In large

measure the Metropolitan is a show-case for rich fashionables who

are not trained in Wagnerian music and have no reverence for it,

but who like to promote art and show their clothes.



Can that be an agreeable atmosphere to persons in whom this

music produces a sort of divine ecstasy and to whom its creator

is a very deity, his stage a temple, the works of his brain and

hands consecrated things, and the partaking of them with eye and

ear a sacred solemnity?  Manifestly, no.  Then, perhaps the

temporary expatriation, the tedious traversing of seas and

continents, the pilgrimage to Bayreuth stands explained.  These

devotees would worship in an atmosphere of devotion.  It is only

here that they can find it without fleck or blemish or any

worldly pollution.  In this remote village there are no sights to

see, there is no newspaper to intrude the worries of the distant

world, there is nothing going on, it is always Sunday.  The

pilgrim wends to his temple out of town, sits out his moving

service, returns to his bed with his heart and soul and his body

exhausted by long hours of tremendous emotion, and he is in no

fit condition to do anything but to lie torpid and slowly gather

back life and strength for the next service.  This opera of

"Tristan and Isolde" last night broke the hearts of all witnesses

who were of the faith, and I know of some who have heard of many

who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away.  I feel

strongly out of place here.  Sometimes I feel like the sane

person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one

blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the

college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a

heretic in heaven.



But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that

this is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.  I

have never seen anything like this before.  I have never seen

anything so great and fine and real as this devotion.



FRIDAY.--Yesterday's opera was "Parsifal" again.  The others

went and they show marked advance in appreciation; but I went

hunting for relics and reminders of the Margravine Wilhelmina,

she of the imperishable "Memoirs."  I am properly grateful to her

for her (unconscious) satire upon monarchy and nobility, and

therefore nothing which her hand touched or her eye looked upon

is indifferent to me.  I am her pilgrim; the rest of this

multitude here are Wagner's.



TUESDAY.--I have seen my last two operas; my season is

ended, and we cross over into Bohemia this afternoon.  I was

supposing that my musical regeneration was accomplished and

perfected, because I enjoyed both of these operas, singing and

all, and, moreover, one of them was "Parsifal," but the experts

have disenchanted me.  They say:



"Singing!  That wasn't singing; that was the wailing,

screeching of third-rate obscurities, palmed off on us in the

interest of economy."



Well, I ought to have recognized the sign--the old, sure

sign that has never failed me in matters of art.  Whenever I

enjoy anything in art it means that it is mighty poor.  The

private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going to pieces

with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo.  However, my

base instinct does bring me profit sometimes; I was the only man

out of thirty-two hundred who got his money back on those two operas.





WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS







Is it true that the sun of a man's mentality touches noon at

forty and then begins to wane toward setting?  Doctor Osler is

charged with saying so.  Maybe he said it, maybe he didn't; I

don't know which it is.  But if he said it, I can point him to a

case which proves his rule.  Proves it by being an exception to

it.  To this place I nominate Mr. Howells.



I read his VENETIAN DAYS about forty years ago.  I compare

it with his paper on Machiavelli in a late number of HARPER, and

I cannot find that his English has suffered any impairment.  For

forty years his English has been to me a continual delight and

astonishment.  In the sustained exhibition of certain great

qualities--clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced

and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing--he is, in my

belief, without his peer in the English-writing world.  SUSTAINED.

I entrench myself behind that protecting word.  There are others

who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he does, but only

by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of

veiled and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells's moon sails

cloudless skies all night and all the nights.



In the matter of verbal exactness Mr. Howells has no superior,

I suppose.  He seems to be almost always able to find that

elusive and shifty grain of gold, the RIGHT WORD.  Others have

to put up with approximations, more or less frequently; he

has better luck.  To me, the others are miners working with the

gold-pan--of necessity some of the gold washes over and escapes;

whereas, in my fancy, he is quicksilver raiding down a riffle--no

grain of the metal stands much chance of eluding him.  A powerful

agent is the right word:  it lights the reader's way and makes it

plain; a close approximation to it will answer, and much

traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do

not welcome it and applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when THE

right one blazes out on us.  Whenever we come upon one of those

intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting

effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt:

it tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and

tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn-butter that

creams the sumac-berry.  One has no time to examine the word and

vote upon its rank and standing, the automatic recognition of its

supremacy is so immediate.  There is a plenty of acceptable

literature which deals largely in approximations, but it may be

likened to a fine landscape seen through the rain; the right word

would dismiss the rain, then you would see it better.  It doesn't

rain when Howells is at work.



And where does he get the easy and effortless flow of his

speech? and its cadenced and undulating rhythm? and its

architectural felicities of construction, its graces of

expression, its pemmican quality of compression, and all that?

Born to him, no doubt.  All in shining good order in the

beginning, all extraordinary; and all just as shining, just as

extraordinary today, after forty years of diligent wear and tear

and use.  He passed his fortieth year long and long ago; but I

think his English of today--his perfect English, I wish to say --

can throw down the glove before his English of that antique time

and not be afraid.



I will got back to the paper on Machiavelli now, and ask the

reader to examine this passage from it which I append.  I do not

mean examine it in a bird's-eye way; I mean search it, study it.

And, of course, read it aloud.  I may be wrong, still it is my

conviction that one cannot get out of finely wrought literature

all that is in it by reading it mutely:





Mr. Dyer is rather of the opinion, first luminously

suggested by Macaulay, that Machiavelli was in earnest, but must

not be judged as a political moralist of our time and race would

be judged.  He thinks that Machiavelli was in earnest, as none

but an idealist can be, and he is the first to imagine him an

idealist immersed in realities, who involuntarily transmutes the

events under his eye into something like the visionary issues of

reverie.  The Machiavelli whom he depicts does not cease to be

politically a republican and socially a just man because he holds

up an atrocious despot like Caesar Borgia as a mirror for rulers.

What Machiavelli beheld round him in Italy was a civic disorder

in which there was oppression without statecraft, and revolt

without patriotism.  When a miscreant like Borgia appeared upon

the scene and reduced both tyrants and rebels to an apparent

quiescence, he might very well seem to such a dreamer the savior

of society whom a certain sort of dreamers are always looking

for.  Machiavelli was no less honest when he honored the

diabolical force than Carlyle was when at different times he

extolled the strong man who destroys liberty in creating order.

But Carlyle has only just ceased to be mistaken for a reformer,

while it is still Machiavelli's hard fate to be so trammeled in

his material that his name stands for whatever is most malevolent

and perfidious in human nature.





You see how easy and flowing it is; how unvexed by ruggednesses,

clumsinesses, broken meters; how simple and--so far as you or I

can make out--unstudied; how clear, how limpid, how understandable,

how unconfused by cross-currents, eddies, undertows; how seemingly

unadorned, yet is all adornment, like the lily-of-the-valley;

and how compressed, how compact, without a complacency-signal

hung out anywhere to call attention to it.



There are twenty-three lines in the quoted passage.  After reading

it several times aloud, one perceives that a good deal of matter

is crowded into that small space.  I think it is a model

of compactness.  When I take its materials apart and work them

over and put them together in my way, I find I cannot crowd the

result back into the same hole, there not being room enough.  I

find it a case of a woman packing a man's trunk:  he can get the

things out, but he can't ever get them back again.



The proffered paragraph is a just and fair sample; the rest

of the article is as compact as it is; there are no waste words.

The sample is just in other ways:  limpid, fluent, graceful, and

rhythmical as it is, it holds no superiority in these respects

over the rest of the essay.  Also, the choice phrasing noticeable

in the sample is not lonely; there is a plenty of its kin

distributed through the other paragraphs.  This is claiming much

when that kin must face the challenge of a phrase like the one in

the middle sentence:  "an idealist immersed in realities who

involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something

like the visionary issues of reverie."  With a hundred words to

do it with, the literary artisan could catch that airy thought

and tie it down and reduce it to a concrete condition, visible,

substantial, understandable and all right, like a cabbage; but

the artist does it with twenty, and the result is a flower.



The quoted phrase, like a thousand others that have come

from the same source, has the quality of certain scraps of verse

which take hold of us and stay in our memories, we do not

understand why, at first:  all the words being the right words,

none of them is conspicuous, and so they all seem inconspicuous,

therefore we wonder what it is about them that makes their

message take hold.





The mossy marbles rest

On the lips that he has prest

In their bloom,



And the names he loved to hear

Have been carved for many a year

On the tomb.





It is like a dreamy strain of moving music, with no sharp

notes in it.  The words are all "right" words, and all the same

size.  We do not notice it at first.  We get the effect, it goes

straight home to us, but we do not know why.  It is when the

right words are conspicuous that they thunder:





The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome!





When I got back from Howells old to Howells young I find him

arranging and clustering English words well, but not any better

than now.  He is not more felicitous in concreting abstractions

now than he was in translating, then, the visions of the eyes of

flesh into words that reproduced their forms and colors:





In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest.  It

is at once shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked

FACCHINI; and now in St. Mark's Place the music of innumerable

shovels smote upon my ear; and I saw the shivering legion of

poverty as it engaged the elements in a struggle for the

possession of the Piazza.  But the snow continued to fall, and

through the twilight of the descending flakes all this toil and

encountered looked like that weary kind of effort in dreams, when

the most determined industry seems only to renew the task.  The

lofty crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling

snow, and I could no longer see the golden angel upon its summit.

But looked at across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St.

Mark's Church was perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting

threads of the snowfall were woven into a spell of novel

enchantment around the structure that always seemed to me too

exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be anything but the

creation of magic.  The tender snow had compassionated the

beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so hid the

stains and ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the

hand of the builder--or, better said, just from the brain of the

architect.  There was marvelous freshness in the colors of the

mosaics in the great arches of the facade, and all that gracious

harmony into which the temple rises, or marble scrolls and leafy

exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a

hundred times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the

drifting flakes.  The snow lay lightly on the golden gloves that

tremble like peacocks-crests above the vast domes, and plumed

them with softest white; it robed the saints in ermine; and it

danced over all its works, as if exulting in its beauty--beauty

which filled me with subtle, selfish yearning to keep such

evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer of my whole

life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless

shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture or poem.



Through the wavering snowfall, the Saint Theodore upon one

of the granite pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as

his wont is, and the winged lion on the other might have been a

winged lamb, so gentle and mild he looked by the tender light of

the storm.  The towers of the island churches loomed faint and

far away in the dimness; the sailors in the rigging of the ships

that lay in the Basin wrought like phantoms among the shrouds;

the gondolas stole in and out of the opaque distance more

noiselessly and dreamily than ever; and a silence, almost

palpable, lay upon the mutest city in the world.





The spirit of Venice is there:  of a city where Age and

Decay, fagged with distributing damage and repulsiveness among

the other cities of the planet in accordance with the policy and

business of their profession, come for rest and play between

seasons, and treat themselves to the luxury and relaxation of

sinking the shop and inventing and squandering charms all about,

instead of abolishing such as they find, as it their habit when

not on vacation.



In the working season they do business in Boston sometimes,

and a character in THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY takes accurate note

of pathetic effects wrought by them upon the aspects of a street

of once dignified and elegant homes whose occupants have moved

away and left them a prey to neglect and gradual ruin and

progressive degradation; a descent which reaches bottom at last,

when the street becomes a roost for humble professionals of the

faith-cure and fortune-telling sort.





What a queer, melancholy house, what a queer, melancholy

street!  I don't think I was ever in a street before when quite

so many professional ladies, with English surnames, preferred

Madam to Mrs. on their door-plates.  And the poor old place has

such a desperately conscious air of going to the deuce.  Every

house seems to wince as you go by, and button itself up to the

chin for fear you should find out it had no shirt on--so to

speak.  I don't know what's the reason, but these material tokens

of a social decay afflict me terribly; a tipsy woman isn't

dreadfuler than a haggard old house, that's once been a home, in

a street like this.





Mr. Howells's pictures are not mere stiff, hard, accurate

photographs; they are photographs with feeling in them, and

sentiment, photographs taken in a dream, one might say.



As concerns his humor, I will not try to say anything, yet I

would try, if I had the words that might approximately reach up

to its high place.  I do not think any one else can play with

humorous fancies so gracefully and delicately and deliciously as

he does, nor has so many to play with, nor can come so near

making them look as if they were doing the playing themselves and

he was not aware that they were at it.  For they are unobtrusive,

and quiet in their ways, and well conducted.  His is a humor

which flows softly all around about and over and through the mesh

of the page, pervasive, refreshing, health-giving, and makes no

more show and no more noise than does the circulation of the

blood.



There is another thing which is contentingly noticeable in

Mr. Howells's books.  That is his "stage directions"--those

artifices which authors employ to throw a kind of human

naturalness around a scene and a conversation, and help the

reader to see the one and get at meanings in the other which

might not be perceived if entrusted unexplained to the bare words

of the talk.  Some authors overdo the stage directions, they

elaborate them quite beyond necessity; they spend so much time

and take up so much room in telling us how a person said a thing

and how he looked and acted when he said it that we get tired and

vexed and wish he hadn't said it all.  Other authors' directions

are brief enough, but it is seldom that the brevity contains

either wit or information.  Writers of this school go in rags, in

the matter of state directions; the majority of them having

nothing in stock but a cigar, a laugh, a blush, and a bursting

into tears.  In their poverty they work these sorry things to the

bone.  They say:



". . . replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar."

(This explains nothing; it only wastes space.)



". . . responded Richard, with a laugh."  (There was nothing

to laugh about; there never is.  The writer puts it in from

habit--automatically; he is paying no attention to his work; or

he would see that there is nothing to laugh at; often, when a

remark is unusually and poignantly flat and silly, he tries to

deceive the reader by enlarging the stage direction and making

Richard break into "frenzies of uncontrollable laughter."  This

makes the reader sad.)



". . . murmured Gladys, blushing."  (This poor old shop-worn

blush is a tiresome thing.  We get so we would rather Gladys

would fall out of the book and break her neck than do it again.

She is always doing it, and usually irrelevantly.  Whenever it is

her turn to murmur she hangs out her blush; it is the only thing

she's got.  In a little while we hate her, just as we do

Richard.)



". . . repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears."  (This kind

keep a book damp all the time.  They can't say a thing without

crying.  They cry so much about nothing that by and by when they

have something to cry ABOUT they have gone dry; they sob, and

fetch nothing; we are not moved.  We are only glad.)



They gavel me, these stale and overworked stage directions,

these carbon films that got burnt out long ago and cannot now

carry any faintest thread of light.  It would be well if they

could be relieved from duty and flung out in the literary back

yard to rot and disappear along with the discarded and forgotten

"steeds" and "halidomes" and similar stage-properties once so

dear to our grandfathers.  But I am friendly to Mr. Howells's

stage directions; more friendly to them than to any one else's, I

think.  They are done with a competent and discriminating art,

and are faithful to the requirements of a state direction's

proper and lawful office, which is to inform.  Sometimes they

convey a scene and its conditions so well that I believe I could

see the scene and get the spirit and meaning of the accompanying

dialogue if some one would read merely the stage directions to me

and leave out the talk.  For instance, a scene like this, from

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY:



". . . and she laid her arms with a beseeching gesture on

her father's shoulder."



". . . she answered, following his gesture with a glance."



". . . she said, laughing nervously."



". . . she asked, turning swiftly upon him that strange, searching glance."



". . . she answered, vaguely."



". . . she reluctantly admitted."



". . . but her voice died wearily away, and she stood looking

into his face with puzzled entreaty."



Mr. Howells does not repeat his forms, and does not need to;

he can invent fresh ones without limit.  It is mainly the

repetition over and over again, by the third-rates, of worn and

commonplace and juiceless forms that makes their novels such a

weariness and vexation to us, I think.  We do not mind one or two

deliveries of their wares, but as we turn the pages over and keep

on meeting them we presently get tired of them and wish they

would do other things for a change.



". . . replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar."



". . . responded Richard, with a laugh."



". . . murmured Gladys, blushing."



". . . repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears."



". . . replied the Earl, flipping the ash from his cigar."



". . . responded the undertaker, with a laugh."



". . . murmured the chambermaid, blushing."



". . . repeated the burglar, bursting into tears."



". . . replied the conductor, flipping the ash from his cigar."



". . . responded Arkwright, with a laugh."



". . . murmured the chief of police, blushing."



". . . repeated the house-cat, bursting into tears."



And so on and so on; till at last it ceases to excite.  I

always notice stage directions, because they fret me and keep me

trying to get out of their way, just as the automobiles do.  At

first; then by and by they become monotonous and I get run over.



Mr. Howells has done much work, and the spirit of it is as

beautiful as the make of it.  I have held him in admiration and

affection so many years that I know by the number of those years

that he is old now; but his heart isn't, nor his pen; and years

do not count.  Let him have plenty of them; there is profit in

them for us.



-------------------------------------------------------------------





ENGLISH AS SHE IS TAUGHT



In the appendix to Croker's Boswell's Johnson one finds this anecdote:





CATO'S SOLILOQUY.--One day Mrs. Gastrel set a little girl to

repeat to him [Dr. Samuel Johnson] Cato's Soliloquy, which she

went through very correctly.  The Doctor, after a pause, asked

the child:



"What was to bring Cato to an end?"



She said it was a knife.



"No, my dear, it was not so."



"My aunt Polly said it was a knife."



"Why, Aunt Polly's knife MAY DO, but it was a DAGGER, my dear."



He then asked her the meaning of "bane and antidote," which

she was unable to give.  Mrs. Gastrel said:



"You cannot expect so young a child to know the meaning of such words."



He then said:



"My dear, how many pence are there in SIXPENCE?"



"I cannot tell, sir," was the half-terrified reply.



On this, addressing himself to Mrs. Gastrel, he said:



"Now, my dear lady, can anything be more ridiculous than to

teach a child Cato's Soliloquy, who does not know how many pence

there are in a sixpence?"





In a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society Professor

Ravenstein quoted the following list of frantic questions, and

said that they had been asked in an examination:





Mention all names of places in the world derived from Julius

Caesar or Augustus Caesar.



Where are the following rivers:  Pisuerga, Sakaria,

Guadalete, Jalon, Mulde?



All you know of the following:  Machacha, Pilmo, Schebulos,

Crivoscia, Basces, Mancikert, Taxhem, Citeaux, Meloria, Zutphen.



The highest peaks of the Karakorum range.



The number of universities in Prussia.



Why are the tops of mountains continually covered with snow [sic]?



Name the length and breadth of the streams of lava which

issued from the Skaptar Jokul in the eruption of 1783.





That list would oversize nearly anybody's geographical

knowledge.  Isn't it reasonably possible that in our schools many

of the questions in all studies are several miles ahead of where

the pupil is?--that he is set to struggle with things that are

ludicrously beyond his present reach, hopelessly beyond his

present strength?  This remark in passing, and by way of text;

now I come to what I was going to say.



I have just now fallen upon a darling literary curiosity.

It is a little book, a manuscript compilation, and the compiler

sent it to me with the request that I say whether I think it

ought to be published or not.  I said, Yes; but as I slowly grow

wise I briskly grow cautious; and so, now that the publication is

imminent, it has seemed to me that I should feel more comfortable

if I could divide up this responsibility with the public by

adding them to the court.  Therefore I will print some extracts

from the book, in the hope that they may make converts to my

judgment that the volume has merit which entitles it to publication.



As to its character.  Every one has sampled "English as She

is Spoke" and "English as She is Wrote"; this little volume

furnishes us an instructive array of examples of "English as She

is Taught"--in the public schools of--well, this country.  The

collection is made by a teacher in those schools, and all the

examples in it are genuine; none of them have been tampered with,

or doctored in any way.  From time to time, during several years,

whenever a pupil has delivered himself of anything peculiarly

quaint or toothsome in the course of his recitations, this

teacher and her associates have privately set that thing down in

a memorandum-book; strictly following the original, as to

grammar, construction, spelling, and all; and the result is this

literary curiosity.



The contents of the book consist mainly of answers given by

the boys and girls to questions, said answers being given

sometimes verbally, sometimes in writing.  The subjects touched

upon are fifteen in number:  I. Etymology; II. Grammar; III.

Mathematics; IV. Geography; V. "Original"; VI. Analysis; VII.

History; VIII. "Intellectual"; IX. Philosophy; X. Physiology; XI.

Astronomy; XII. Politics; XIII. Music; XIV. Oratory; XV.

Metaphysics.



You perceive that the poor little young idea has taken a

shot at a good many kinds of game in the course of the book.  Now

as to results.  Here are some quaint definitions of words.  It

will be noticed that in all of these instances the sound of the

word, or the look of it on paper, has misled the child:





ABORIGINES, a system of mountains.



ALIAS, a good man in the Bible.



AMENABLE, anything that is mean.



AMMONIA, the food of the gods.



ASSIDUITY, state of being an acid.



AURIFEROUS, pertaining to an orifice.



CAPILLARY, a little caterpillar.



CORNIFEROUS, rocks in which fossil corn is found.



EMOLUMENT, a headstone to a grave.



EQUESTRIAN, one who asks questions.



EUCHARIST, one who plays euchre.



FRANCHISE, anything belonging to the French.



IDOLATER, a very idle person.



IPECAC, a man who likes a good dinner.



IRRIGATE, to make fun of.



MENDACIOUS, what can be mended.



MERCENARY, one who feels for another.



PARASITE, a kind of umbrella.



PARASITE, the murder of an infant.



PUBLICAN, a man who does his prayers in public.



TENACIOUS, ten acres of land.





Here is one where the phrase "publicans and sinners" has got

mixed up in the child's mind with politics, and the result is a

definition which takes one in a sudden and unexpected way:





REPUBLICAN, a sinner mentioned in the Bible.





Also in Democratic newspapers now and then.  Here are two where

the mistake has resulted from sound assisted by remote fact:





PLAGIARIST, a writer of plays.



DEMAGOGUE, a vessel containing beer and other liquids.





I cannot quite make out what it was that misled the pupil in

the following instances; it would not seem to have been the sound

of the word, nor the look of it in print:





ASPHYXIA, a grumbling, fussy temper.



QUARTERNIONS, a bird with a flat beak and no bill, living in

New Zealand.



QUARTERNIONS, the name given to a style of art practiced by

the Phoenicians.



QUARTERNIONS, a religious convention held every hundred

years.



SIBILANT, the state of being idiotic.



CROSIER, a staff carried by the Deity.





In the following sentences the pupil's ear has been

deceiving him again:





The marriage was illegible.



He was totally dismasted with the whole performance.



He enjoys riding on a philosopher.



She was very quick at repertoire.



He prayed for the waters to subsidize.



The leopard is watching his sheep.



They had a strawberry vestibule.





Here is one which--well, now, how often we do slam right

into the truth without ever suspecting it:





The men employed by the Gas Company go around and

speculate the meter.





Indeed they do, dear; and when you grow up, many and many's

the time you will notice it in the gas bill.  In the following

sentences the little people have some information to convey,

every time; but in my case they fail to connect:  the light

always went out on the keystone word:





The coercion of some things is remarkable; as bread and molasses.



Her hat is contiguous because she wears it on one side.



He preached to an egregious congregation.



The captain eliminated a bullet through the man's heart.



You should take caution and be precarious.



The supercilious girl acted with vicissitude when the

perennial time came.





The last is a curiously plausible sentence; one seems to

know what it means, and yet he knows all the time that he

doesn't.  Here is an odd (but entirely proper) use of a word, and

a most sudden descent from a lofty philosophical altitude to a

very practical and homely illustration:





We should endeavor to avoid extremes--like those of wasps and bees.





And here--with "zoological" and "geological" in his mind,

but not ready to his tongue--the small scholar has innocently

gone and let out a couple of secrets which ought never to have

been divulged in any circumstances:





There are a good many donkeys in theological gardens.



Some of the best fossils are found in theological gardens.





Under the head of "Grammar" the little scholars furnish the

following information:





Gender is the distinguishing nouns without regard to sex.



A verb is something to eat.



Adverbs should always be used as adjectives and adjectives as adverbs.



Every sentence and name of God must begin with a caterpillar.





"Caterpillar" is well enough, but capital letter would have

been stricter.  The following is a brave attempt at a solution,

but it failed to liquify:





When they are going to say some prose or poetry before they

say the poetry or prose they must put a semicolon just after the

introduction of the prose or poetry.





The chapter on "Mathematics" is full of fruit.  From it I

take a few samples--mainly in an unripe state:





A straight line is any distance between two places.



Parallel lines are lines that can never meet until they run together.



A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.



Things which are equal to each other are equal to anything else.



To find the number of square feet in a room you multiply the

room by the number of the feet.  The product is the result.





Right you are.  In the matter of geography this little book

is unspeakably rich.  The questions do not appear to have applied

the microscope to the subject, as did those quoted by Professor

Ravenstein; still, they proved plenty difficult enough without

that.  These pupils did not hunt with a microscope, they hunted

with a shot-gun; this is shown by the crippled condition of the

game they brought in:





America is divided into the Passiffic slope and the Mississippi valey.



North America is separated by Spain.



America consists from north to south about five hundred miles.



The United States is quite a small country compared with

some other countrys, but it about as industrious.



The capital of the United States is Long Island.



The five seaports of the U.S. are Newfunlan and Sanfrancisco.



The principal products of the U.S. is earthquakes and volcanoes.



The Alaginnies are mountains in Philadelphia.



The Rocky Mountains are on the western side of Philadelphia.



Cape Hateras is a vast body of water surrounded by land and

flowing into the Gulf of Mexico.



Mason and Dixon's line is the Equator.



One of the leading industries of the United States is

mollasses, book-covers, numbers, gas, teaching, lumber,

manufacturers, paper-making, publishers, coal.



In Austria the principal occupation is gathering Austrich feathers.



Gibraltar is an island built on a rock.



Russia is very cold and tyrannical.



Sicily is one of the Sandwich Islands.



Hindoostan flows through the Ganges and empties into the

Mediterranean Sea.



Ireland is called the Emigrant Isle because it is so

beautiful and green.



The width of the different zones Europe lies in depend upon

the surrounding country.



The imports of a country are the things that are paid for,

the exports are the things that are not.



Climate lasts all the time and weather only a few days.



The two most famous volcanoes of Europe are Sodom and Gomorrah.





The chapter headed "Analysis" shows us that the pupils in

our public schools are not merely loaded up with those showy

facts about geography, mathematics, and so on, and left in that

incomplete state; no, there's machinery for clarifying and

expanding their minds.  They are required to take poems and

analyze them, dig out their common sense, reduce them to

statistics, and reproduce them in a luminous prose translation

which shall tell you at a glance what the poet was trying to get

at.  One sample will do.  Here is a stanza from "The Lady of the

Lake," followed by the pupil's impressive explanation of it:





Alone, but with unbated zeal,

The horseman plied with scourge and steel;

For jaded now and spent with toil,

Embossed with foam and dark with soil,

While every gasp with sobs he drew,

The laboring stag strained full in view.





The man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an

instrument made of steel alone with strong ardor not diminishing,

for, being tired from the time passed with hard labor overworked

with anger and ignorant with weariness, while every breath for

labor he drew with cries full or sorrow, the young deer made

imperfect who worked hard filtered in sight.





I see, now, that I never understood that poem before.  I

have had glimpses of its meaning, it moments when I was not as

ignorant with weariness as usual, but this is the first time the

whole spacious idea of it ever filtered in sight.  If I were a

public-school pupil I would put those other studies aside and

stick to analysis; for, after all, it is the thing to spread your

mind.



We come now to historical matters, historical remains, one

might say.  As one turns the pages he is impressed with the depth

to which one date has been driven into the American child's head

--1492.  The date is there, and it is there to stay.  And it is

always at hand, always deliverable at a moment's notice.  But the

Fact that belongs with it?  That is quite another matter.  Only

the date itself is familiar and sure:  its vast Fact has failed

of lodgment.  It would appear that whenever you ask a public-

school pupil when a thing--anything, no matter what--happened,

and he is in doubt, he always rips out his 1492.  He applies it

to everything, from the landing of the ark to the introduction of

the horse-car.  Well, after all, it is our first date, and so it

is right enough to honor it, and pay the public schools to teach

our children to honor it:





George Washington was born in 1492.



Washington wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1492.



St. Bartholemew was massacred in 1492.



The Brittains were the Saxons who entered England in 1492

under Julius Caesar.



The earth is 1492 miles in circumference.







To proceed with "History"





Christopher Columbus was called the Father of his Country.



Queen Isabella of Spain sold her watch and chain and other

millinery so that Columbus could discover America.



The Indian wars were very desecrating to the country.



The Indians pursued their warfare by hiding in the bushes

and then scalping them.



Captain John Smith has been styled the father of his country.

His life was saved by his daughter Pochahantas.



The Puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds of America.



The Stamp Act was to make everybody stamp all materials so

they should be null and void.



Washington died in Spain almost broken-hearted.  His remains

were taken to the cathedral in Havana.



Gorilla warfare was where men rode on gorillas.



John Brown was a very good insane man who tried to get

fugitives slaves into Virginia.  He captured all the inhabitants,

but was finally conquered and condemned to his death.  The

confederasy was formed by the fugitive slaves.



Alfred the Great reigned 872 years.  He was distinguished

for letting some buckwheat cakes burn, and the lady scolded him.



Henry Eight was famous for being a great widower haveing

lost several wives.



Lady Jane Grey studied Greek and Latin and was beheaded

after a few days.



John Bright is noted for an incurable disease.



Lord James Gordon Bennet instigated the Gordon Riots.



The Middle Ages come in between antiquity and posterity.



Luther introduced Christianity into England a good many

thousand years ago.  His birthday was November 1883.  He was once

a Pope.  He lived at the time of the Rebellion of Worms.



Julius Caesar is noted for his famous telegram dispatch I

came I saw I conquered.



Julius Caesar was really a very great man.  He was a very

great soldier and wrote a book for beginners in the Latin.



Cleopatra was caused by the death of an asp which she

dissolved in a wine cup.



The only form of government in Greece was a limited monkey.



The Persian war lasted about 500 years.



Greece had only 7 wise men.



Socrates . . . destroyed some statues and had to drink Shamrock.





Here is a fact correctly stated; and yet it is phrased with

such ingenious infelicity that it can be depended upon to convey

misinformation every time it is uncarefully unread:





By the Salic law no woman or descendant of a woman could

occupy the throne.





To show how far a child can travel in history with judicious

and diligent boosting in the public school, we select the

following mosaic:





Abraham Lincoln was born in Wales in 1599.





In the chapter headed "Intellectual" I find a great number of most

interesting statements.  A sample or two may be found not amiss:



Bracebridge Hall was written by Henry Irving.



Show Bound was written by Peter Cooper.



The House of the Seven Gables was written by Lord Bryant.



Edgar A. Poe was a very curdling writer.



Cotton Mather was a writer who invented the cotten gin and

wrote histories.



Beowulf wrote the Scriptures.



Ben Johnson survived Shakspeare in some respects.



In the Canterbury Tale it gives account of King Alfred on

his way to the shrine of Thomas Bucket.



Chaucer was the father of English pottery.



Chaucer was a bland verse writer of the third century.



Chaucer was succeeded by H. Wads. Longfellow an American

Writer.  His writings were chiefly prose and nearly one hundred

years elapsed.



Shakspere translated the Scriptures and it was called St.

James because he did it.





In the middle of the chapter I find many pages of

information concerning Shakespeare's plays, Milton's works, and

those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Fielding, Richardson,

Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope, Swift, Goldsmith, Burns,

Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge, Hood, Scott,

Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Browning,

Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli--a fact which shows that

into the restricted stomach of the public-school pupil is

shoveled every year the blood, bone, and viscera of a gigantic

literature, and the same is there digested and disposed of in a

most successful and characteristic and gratifying public-school

way.  I have space for but a trifling few of the results:





Lord Byron was the son of an heiress and a drunken man.



Wm. Wordsworth wrote the Barefoot Boy and Imitations on Immortality.



Gibbon wrote a history of his travels in Italy.  This was original.



George Eliot left a wife and children who mourned greatly for his genius.



George Eliot Miss Mary Evans Mrs. Cross Mrs. Lewis was the greatest

female poet unless George Sands is made an exception of.



Bulwell is considered a good writer.



Sir Walter Scott Charles Bronte Alfred the Great and Johnson

were the first great novelists.



Thomas Babington Makorlay graduated at Harvard and then studied law,

he was raised to the peerage as baron in 1557 and died in 1776.





Here are two or three miscellaneous facts that may be of value,

if taken in moderation:





Homer's writings are Homer's Essays Virgil the Aenid and

Paradise lost some people say that these poems were not written

by Homer but by another man of the same name.



A sort of sadness kind of shone in Bryant's poems.



Holmes is a very profligate and amusing writer.





When the public-school pupil wrestles with the political

features of the Great Republic, they throw him sometimes:





A bill becomes a law when the President vetoes it.



The three departments of the government is the President rules

the world, the governor rules the State, the mayor rules the city.



The first conscientious Congress met in Philadelphia.



The Constitution of the United States was established to

ensure domestic hostility.





Truth crushed to earth will rise again.  As follows:





The Constitution of the United States is that part of the

book at the end which nobody reads.





And here she rises once more and untimely.  There should be

a limit to public-school instruction; it cannot be wise or well

to let the young find out everything:





Congress is divided into civilized half civilized and savage.





Here are some results of study in music and oratory:





An interval in music is the distance on the keyboard from

one piano to the next.



A rest means you are not to sing it.



Emphasis is putting more distress on one word than another.





The chapter on "Physiology" contains much that ought not to

be lost to science:



Physillogigy is to study about your bones stummick and vertebry.



Occupations which are injurious to health are cabolic acid

gas which is impure blood.



We have an upper and lower skin.  The lower skin moves all

the time and the upper skin moves when we do.



The body is mostly composed of water and about one half is

avaricious tissue.



The stomach is a small pear-shaped bone situated in the body.



The gastric juice keeps the bones from creaking.



The Chyle flows up the middle of the backbone and reaches

the heart where it meets the oxygen and is purified.



The salivary glands are used to salivate the body.



In the stomach starch is changed to cane sugar and cane

sugar to sugar cane.



The olfactory nerve enters the cavity of the orbit and is

developed into the special sense of hearing.



The growth of a tooth begins in the back of the mouth and

extends to the stomach.



If we were on a railroad track and a train was coming the train

would deafen our ears so that we couldn't see to get off the track.





If, up to this point, none of my quotations have added

flavor to the Johnsonian anecdote at the head of this article,

let us make another attempt:





The theory that intuitive truths are discovered by the light

of nature originated from St. John's interpretation of a passage

in the Gospel of Plato.



The weight of the earth is found by comparing a mass of

known lead with that of a mass of unknown lead.



To find the weight of the earth take the length of a degree

on a meridian and multiply by 6 1/2 pounds.



The spheres are to each other as the squares of their

homologous sides.



A body will go just as far in the first second as the body

will go plus the force of gravity and that's equal to twice what

the body will go.



Specific gravity is the weight to be compared weight of an

equal volume of or that is the weight of a body compared with the

weight of an equal volume.



The law of fluid pressure divide the different forms of

organized bodies by the form of attraction and the number

increased will be the form.



Inertia is that property of bodies by virtue of which it

cannot change its own condition of rest or motion.  In other

words it is the negative quality of passiveness either in

recoverable latency or insipient latescence.





If a laugh is fair here, not the struggling child, nor the

unintelligent teacher--or rather the unintelligent Boards,

Committees, and Trustees--are the proper target for it.  All

through this little book one detects the signs of a certain

probable fact--that a large part of the pupil's "instruction"

consists in cramming him with obscure and wordy "rules" which he

does not understand and has no time to understand.  It would be

as useful to cram him with brickbats; they would at least stay.

In a town in the interior of New York, a few years ago, a

gentleman set forth a mathematical problem and proposed to give a

prize to every public-school pupil who should furnish the correct

solution of it.  Twenty-two of the brightest boys in the public

schools entered the contest.  The problem was not a very

difficult one for pupils of their mathematical rank and standing,

yet they all failed--by a hair--through one trifling mistake or

another.  Some searching questions were asked, when it turned out

that these lads were as glib as parrots with the "rules," but

could not reason out a single rule or explain the principle

underlying it.  Their memories had been stocked, but not their

understandings.  It was a case of brickbat culture, pure and

simple.



There are several curious "compositions" in the little book,

and we must make room for one.  It is full of naivete, brutal

truth, and unembarrassed directness, and is the funniest

(genuine) boy's composition I think I have ever seen:







ON GIRLS



Girls are very stuck up and dignefied in their maner and be

have your.  They think more of dress than anything and like to

play with dowls and rags.  They cry if they see a cow in a far

distance and are afraid of guns.  They stay at home all the time

and go to church on Sunday.  They are al-ways sick.  They are al-

ways funy and making fun of boy's hands and they say how dirty.

They cant play marbels.  I pity them poor things.  They make fun

of boys and then turn round and love them.  I dont beleave they

ever kiled a cat or anything.  They look out every nite and say

oh ant the moon lovely.  Thir is one thing I have not told and

that is they al-ways now their lessons bettern boys.





From Mr. Edward Channing's recent article in SCIENCE:





The marked difference between the books now being produced

by French, English, and American travelers, on the one hand, and

German explorers, on the other, is too great to escape attention.

That difference is due entirely to the fact that in school and

university the German is taught, in the first place to see, and

in the second place to understand what he does see.



------------------------------------------------------------------







A SIMPLIFIED ALPHABET





(This article, written during the autumn of 1899, was about

the last writing done by Mark Twain on any impersonal subject.)





I have had a kindly feeling, a friendly feeling, a cousinly

feeling toward Simplified Spelling, from the beginning of the

movement three years ago, but nothing more inflamed than that.

It seemed to me to merely propose to substitute one inadequacy

for another; a sort of patching and plugging poor old dental

relics with cement and gold and porcelain paste; what was really

needed was a new set of teeth.  That is to say, a new ALPHABET.



The heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet.  It

doesn't know how to spell, and can't be taught.  In this it is

like all other alphabets except one--the phonographic.  This is

the only competent alphabet in the world.  It can spell and

correctly pronounce any word in our language.



That admirable alphabet, that brilliant alphabet, that

inspired alphabet, can be learned in an hour or two.  In a week

the student can learn to write it with some little facility, and

to read it with considerable ease.  I know, for I saw it tried in

a public school in Nevada forty-five years ago, and was so

impressed by the incident that it has remained in my memory ever

since.



I wish we could adopt it in place of our present written

(and printed) character.  I mean SIMPLY the alphabet; simply the

consonants and the vowels--I don't mean any REDUCTIONS or

abbreviations of them, such as the shorthand writer uses in order

to get compression and speed.  No, I would SPELL EVERY WORD OUT.



I will insert the alphabet here as I find it in Burnz's

PHONIC SHORTHAND.  [Figure 1]  It is arranged on the basis of

Isaac Pitman's PHONOGRAPHY.  Isaac Pitman was the originator and

father of scientific phonography.  It is used throughout the

globe.  It was a memorable invention.  He made it public seventy-

three years ago.  The firm of Isaac Pitman & Sons, New York,

still exists, and they continue the master's work.



What should we gain?



First of all, we could spell DEFINITELY--and correctly--any

word you please, just by the SOUND of it.  We can't do that with

our present alphabet.  For instance, take a simple, every-day

word PHTHISIS.  If we tried to spell it by the sound of it, we

should make it TYSIS, and be laughed at by every educated person.



Secondly, we should gain in REDUCTION OF LABOR in writing.



Simplified Spelling makes valuable reductions in the case of

several hundred words, but the new spelling must be LEARNED.  You

can't spell them by the sound; you must get them out of the book.



But even if we knew the simplified form for every word in

the language, the phonographic alphabet would still beat the

Simplified Speller "hands down" in the important matter of

economy of labor.  I will illustrate:



PRESENT FORM:  through, laugh, highland.



SIMPLIFIED FORM:  thru, laff, hyland.



PHONOGRAPHIC FORM:  [Figure 2]



To write the word "through," the pen has to make twenty-one strokes.



To write the word "thru," then pen has to make twelve strokes--

a good saving.



To write that same word with the phonographic alphabet, the

pen has to make only THREE strokes.



To write the word "laugh," the pen has to make FOURTEEN

strokes.



To write "laff," the pen has to make the SAME NUMBER of

strokes--no labor is saved to the penman.



To write the same word with the phonographic alphabet, the

pen has to make only THREE strokes.



To write the word "highland," the pen has to make twenty-two

strokes.



To write "hyland," the pen has to make eighteen strokes.



To write that word with the phonographic alphabet, the pen

has to make only FIVE strokes.  [Figure 3]



To write the words "phonographic alphabet," the pen has to

make fifty-three strokes.



To write "fonografic alfabet," the pen has to make fifty strokes.

To the penman, the saving in labor is insignificant.



To write that word (with vowels) with the phonographic

alphabet, the pen has to make only SEVENTEEN strokes.



Without the vowels, only THIRTEEN strokes. [Figure 4]  The

vowels are hardly necessary, this time.



We make five pen-strokes in writing an m.  Thus:  [Figure 5]

a stroke down; a stroke up; a second stroke down; a second stroke

up; a final stroke down.  Total, five.  The phonographic alphabet

accomplishes the m with a single stroke--a curve, like a

parenthesis that has come home drunk and has fallen face down

right at the front door where everybody that goes along will see

him and say, Alas!



When our written m is not the end of a word, but is

otherwise located, it has to be connected with the next letter,

and that requires another pen-stroke, making six in all, before

you get rid of that m.  But never mind about the connecting

strokes--let them go.  Without counting them, the twenty-six

letters of our alphabet consumed about eighty pen-strokes for

their construction--about three pen-strokes per letter.



It is THREE TIMES THE NUMBER required by the phonographic

alphabet.  It requires but ONE stroke for each letter.



My writing-gait is--well, I don't know what it is, but I

will time myself and see.  Result:  it is twenty-four words per

minute.  I don't mean composing; I mean COPYING.  There isn't any

definite composing-gait.



Very well, my copying-gait is 1,440 words per hour--say

1,500.  If I could use the phonographic character with facility I

could do the 1,500 in twenty minutes.  I could do nine hours'

copying in three hours; I could do three years' copying in one

year.  Also, if I had a typewriting machine with the phonographic

alphabet on it--oh, the miracles I could do!



I am not pretending to write that character well.  I have

never had a lesson, and I am copying the letters from the book.

But I can accomplish my desire, at any rate, which is, to make

the reader get a good and clear idea of the advantage it would be

to us if we could discard our present alphabet and put this

better one in its place--using it in books, newspapers, with the

typewriter, and with the pen.



[Figure 6] --MAN DOG HORSE.  I think it is graceful and

would look comely in print.  And consider--once more, I beg--what

a labor-saver it is!  Ten pen-strokes with the one system to

convey those three words above, and thirty-three by the other!

[Figure 6]  I mean, in SOME ways, not in all.  I suppose I might

go so far as to say in most ways, and be within the facts, but

never mind; let it go at SOME.  One of the ways in which it

exercises this birthright is--as I think--continuing to use our

laughable alphabet these seventy-three years while there was a

rational one at hand, to be had for the taking.



It has taken five hundred years to simplify some of

Chaucer's rotten spelling--if I may be allowed to use to frank a

term as that--and it will take five hundred years more to get our

exasperating new Simplified Corruptions accepted and running

smoothly. And we sha'n't be any better off then than we are now;

for in that day we shall still have the privilege the Simplifiers

are exercising now:  ANYBODY can change the spelling that wants

to.



BUT YOU CAN'T CHANGE THE PHONOGRAPHIC SPELLING; THERE ISN'T

ANY WAY.  It will always follow the SOUND.  If you want to change

the spelling, you have to change the sound first.



Mind, I myself am a Simplified Speller; I belong to that

unhappy guild that is patiently and hopefully trying to reform

our drunken old alphabet by reducing his whiskey.  Well, it will

improve him.  When they get through and have reformed him all

they can by their system he will be only HALF drunk.  Above that

condition their system can never lift him.  There is no

competent, and lasting, and real reform for him but to take away

his whiskey entirely, and fill up his jug with Pitman's wholesome

and undiseased alphabet.



One great drawback to Simplified Spelling is, that in print

a simplified word looks so like the very nation! and when you

bunch a whole squadron of the Simplified together the spectacle

is very nearly unendurable.



The da ma ov koars kum when the publik ma be expektd to get

rekonsyled to the bezair asspekt of the Simplified Kombynashuns,

but--if I may be allowed the expression--is it worth the wasted

time? [Figure 7]



To see our letters put together in ways to which we are not accustomed

offends the eye, and also takes the EXPRESSION out of the words.



La on, Makduf, and damd be he hoo furst krys hold, enuf!



It doesn't thrill you as it used to do.  The simplifications

have sucked the thrill all out of it.



But a written character with which we are NOT ACQUAINTED

does not offend us--Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Arabic, and the

others--they have an interesting look, and we see beauty in them,

too.  And this is true of hieroglyphics, as well.  There is

something pleasant and engaging about the mathematical signs when

we do not understand them.  The mystery hidden in these things

has a fascination for us: we can't come across a printed page of

shorthand without being impressed by it and wishing we could read

it.



Very well, what I am offering for acceptance and adopting is

not shorthand, but longhand, written with the SHORTHAND ALPHABET

UNREACHED.  You can write three times as many words in a minute

with it as you can write with our alphabet.  And so, in a way, it

IS properly a shorthand.  It has a pleasant look, too; a

beguiling look, an inviting look.  I will write something in it,

in my rude and untaught way:  [Figure 8]



Even when _I_ do it it comes out prettier than it does in

Simplified Spelling.  Yes, and in the Simplified it costs one

hundred and twenty-three pen-strokes to write it, whereas in the

phonographic it costs only twenty-nine.



[Figure 9] is probably [Figure 10].



Let us hope so, anyway.





AS CONCERNS INTERPRETING THE DEITY





I



This line of hieroglyphics was for fourteen years the

despair of all the scholars who labored over the mysteries of the

Rosetta stone:  [Figure 1]





After five years of study Champollion translated it thus:





Therefore let the worship of Epiphanes be maintained in all

the temples, this upon pain of death.





That was the twenty-forth translation that had been

furnished by scholars.  For a time it stood.  But only for a

time.  Then doubts began to assail it and undermine it, and the

scholars resumed their labors.  Three years of patient work

produced eleven new translations; among them, this, by

Gr:unfeldt, was received with considerable favor:





The horse of Epiphanes shall be maintained at the public expense;

this upon pain of death.





But the following rendering, by Gospodin, was received by

the learned world with yet greater favor:





The priest shall explain the wisdom of Epiphanes to all these people,

and these shall listen with reverence, upon pain of death.





Seven years followed, in which twenty-one fresh and widely

varying renderings were scored--none of them quite convincing.

But now, at last, came Rawlinson, the youngest of all the

scholars, with a translation which was immediately and

universally recognized as being the correct version, and his name

became famous in a day.  So famous, indeed, that even the

children were familiar with it; and such a noise did the

achievement itself make that not even the noise of the monumental

political event of that same year--the flight from Elba--was able

to smother it to silence.  Rawlinson's version reads as follows:





Therefore, walk not away from the wisdom of Epiphanes, but

turn and follow it; so shall it conduct thee to the temple's

peace, and soften for thee the sorrows of life and the pains of

death.





Here is another difficult text:  [Figure 2]





It is demotic--a style of Egyptian writing and a phase of

the language which has perished from the knowledge of all men

twenty-five hundred years before the Christian era.



Our red Indians have left many records, in the form of

pictures, upon our crags and boulders.  It has taken our most

gifted and painstaking students two centuries to get at the

meanings hidden in these pictures; yet there are still two little

lines of hieroglyphics among the figures grouped upon the Dighton

Rocks which they have not succeeds in interpreting to their

satisfaction.  These:  [Figure 3]





The suggested solutions are practically innumerable; they

would fill a book.



Thus we have infinite trouble in solving man-made mysteries;

it is only when we set out to discover the secret of God that our

difficulties disappear.  It was always so.  In antique Roman

times it was the custom of the Deity to try to conceal His

intentions in the entrails of birds, and this was patiently and

hopefully continued century after century, although the attempted

concealment never succeeded, in a single recorded instance.  The

augurs could read entrails as easily as a modern child can read

coarse print.  Roman history is full of the marvels of

interpretation which these extraordinary men performed.  These

strange and wonderful achievements move our awe and compel our

admiration.  Those men could pierce to the marrow of a mystery

instantly.  If the Rosetta-stone idea had been introduced it

would have defeated them, but entrails had no embarrassments for

them.  Entrails have gone out, now--entrails and dreams.  It was

at last found out that as hiding-places for the divine intentions

they were inadequate.





A part of the wall of Valletri in former times been struck

with thunder, the response of the soothsayers was, that a native

of that town would some time or other arrive at supreme power.--

BOHN'S SUETONIUS, p. 138.





"Some time or other."  It looks indefinite, but no matter,

it happened, all the same; one needed only to wait, and be

patient, and keep watch, then he would find out that the thunder-

stroke had Caesar Augustus in mind, and had come to give notice.



There were other advance-advertisements.  One of them

appeared just before Caesar Augustus was born, and was most

poetic and touching and romantic in its feelings and aspects.

It was a dream.  It was dreamed by Caesar Augustus's mother,

and interpreted at the usual rates:





Atia, before her delivery, dreamed that her bowels stretched

to the stars and expanded through the whole circuit of heaven

and earth.--SUETONIUS, p. 139.





That was in the augur's line, and furnished him no

difficulties, but it would have taken Rawlinson and Champollion

fourteen years to make sure of what it meant, because they would

have been surprised and dizzy.  It would have been too late to be

valuable, then, and the bill for service would have been barred

by the statute of limitation.



In those old Roman days a gentleman's education was not

complete until he had taken a theological course at the seminary

and learned how to translate entrails.  Caesar Augustus's

education received this final polish.  All through his life,

whenever he had poultry on the menu he saved the interiors and

kept himself informed of the Deity's plans by exercising upon

those interiors the arts of augury.





In his first consulship, while he was observing the

auguries, twelve vultures presented themselves, as they had done

to Romulus.  And when he offered sacrifice, the livers of all

the victims were folded inward in the lower part; a circumstance

which was regarded by those present who had skill in things of

that nature, as an indubitable prognostic of great and wonderful

fortune.--SUETONIUS, p. 141.





"Indubitable" is a strong word, but no doubt it was

justified, if the livers were really turned that way.  In those

days chicken livers were strangely and delicately sensitive to

coming events, no matter how far off they might be; and they

could never keep still, but would curl and squirm like that,

particularly when vultures came and showed interest in that

approaching great event and in breakfast.





II



We may now skip eleven hundred and thirty or forty years,

which brings us down to enlightened Christian times and the

troubled days of King Stephen of England.  The augur has had his

day and has been long ago forgotten; the priest had fallen heir

to his trade.



King Henry is dead; Stephen, that bold and outrageous

person, comes flying over from Normandy to steal the throne from

Henry's daughter.  He accomplished his crime, and Henry of

Huntington, a priest of high degree, mourns over it in his

Chronicle.  The Archbishop of Canterbury consecrated Stephen:

"wherefore the Lord visited the Archbishop with the same judgment

which he had inflicted upon him who struck Jeremiah the great

priest:  he died with a year."



Stephen's was the greater offense, but Stephen could wait;

not so the Archbishop, apparently.





The kingdom was a prey to intestine wars; slaughter, fire,

and rapine spread ruin throughout the land; cries of distress,

horror, and woe rose in every quarter.





That was the result of Stephen's crime.  These unspeakable

conditions continued during nineteen years.  Then Stephen died as

comfortably as any man ever did, and was honorably buried.  It

makes one pity the poor Archbishop, and with that he, too, could

have been let off as leniently.  How did Henry of Huntington know

that the Archbishop was sent to his grave by judgment of God for

consecrating Stephen?  He does not explain.  Neither does he

explain why Stephen was awarded a pleasanter death than he was

entitled to, while the aged King Henry, his predecessor, who had

ruled England thirty-five years to the people's strongly worded

satisfaction, was condemned to close his life in circumstances

most distinctly unpleasant, inconvenient, and disagreeable.  His

was probably the most uninspiring funeral that is set down in

history.  There is not a detail about it that is attractive.  It

seems to have been just the funeral for Stephen, and even at this

far-distant day it is matter of just regret that by an

indiscretion the wrong man got it.



Whenever God punishes a man, Henry of Huntington knows why

it was done, and tells us; and his pen is eloquent with

admiration; but when a man has earned punishment, and escapes, he

does not explain.  He is evidently puzzled, but he does not say

anything.  I think it is often apparent that he is pained by

these discrepancies, but loyally tries his best not to show it.

When he cannot praise, he delivers himself of a silence so marked

that a suspicious person could mistake it for suppressed

criticism.  However, he has plenty of opportunities to feel

contented with the way things go--his book is full of them.





King David of Scotland . . . under color of religion caused

his followers to deal most barbarously with the English.  They

ripped open women, tossed children on the points of spears,

butchered priests at the altars, and, cutting off the heads from

the images on crucifixes, placed them on the bodies of the slain,

while in exchange they fixed on the crucifixes the heads of their

victims.  Wherever the Scots came, there was the same scene of

horror and cruelty:  women shrieking, old men lamenting, amid the

groans of the dying and the despair of the living.





But the English got the victory.





Then the chief of the men of Lothian fell, pierced by an arrow,

and all his followers were put to flight.  For the Almighty was

offended at them and their strength was rent like a cobweb.





Offended at them for what?  For committing those fearful

butcheries?  No, for that was the common custom on both sides,

and not open to criticism.  Then was it for doing the butcheries

"under cover of religion"?  No, that was not it; religious

feeling was often expressed in that fervent way all through those

old centuries.  The truth is, He was not offended at "them" at all;

He was only offended at their king, who had been false to an oath.

Then why did not He put the punishment upon the king instead of

upon "them"?  It is a difficult question.  One can see by the

Chronicle that the "judgments" fell rather customarily upon

the wrong person, but Henry of Huntington does not explain why.

Here is one that went true; the chronicler's satisfaction

in it is not hidden:





In the month of August, Providence displayed its justice in

a remarkable manner; for two of the nobles who had converted

monasteries into fortifications, expelling the monks, their sin

being the same, met with a similar punishment.  Robert Marmion

was one, Godfrey de Mandeville the other.  Robert Marmion,

issuing forth against the enemy, was slain under the walls of the

monastery, being the only one who fell, though he was surrounded

by his troops.  Dying excommunicated, he became subject to death

everlasting.  In like manner Earl Godfrey was singled out among

his followers, and shot with an arrow by a common foot-soldier.

He made light of the wound, but he died of it in a few days,

under excommunication.  See here the like judgment of God,

memorable through all ages!





The exaltation jars upon me; not because of the death of the

men, for they deserved that, but because it is death eternal, in

white-hot fire and flame.  It makes my flesh crawl.  I have not

known more than three men, or perhaps four, in my whole lifetime,

*whom I would rejoice to see writhing in those fires for even a

year, let alone forever.  I believe I would relent before the

year was up, and get them out if I could.  I think that in

the long run, if a man's wife and babies, who had not harmed me,

should come crying and pleading, I couldn't stand it; I know I

should forgive him and let him go, even if he had violated a

monastery.  Henry of Huntington has been watching Godfrey and

Marmion for nearly seven hundred and fifty years, now, but I

couldn't do it, I know I couldn't.  I am soft and gentle in my

nature, and I should have forgiven them seventy-and-seven times,

long ago.  And I think God has; but this is only an opinion,

and not authoritative, like Henry of Huntington's interpretations.

I could learn to interpret, but I have never tried; I get so

little time.



All through his book Henry exhibits his familiarity with the

intentions of God, and with the reasons for his intentions.

Sometimes--very often, in fact--the act follows the intention

after such a wide interval of time that one wonders how Henry

could fit one act out of a hundred to one intention out of a

hundred and get the thing right every time when there was such

abundant choice among acts and intentions.  Sometimes a man

offends the Deity with a crime, and is punished for it thirty

years later; meantime he was committed a million other crimes:

no matter, Henry can pick out the one that brought the worms.

Worms were generally used in those days for the slaying of

particularly wicked people.  This has gone out, now, but in old

times it was a favorite.  It always indicated a case of "wrath."

For instance:





. . . the just God avenging Robert Fitzhilderbrand's

perfidy, a worm grew in his vitals, which gradually gnawing its

way through his intestines fattened on the abandoned man till,

tortured with excruciating sufferings and venting himself in

bitter moans, he was by a fitting punishment brought to his end.

--(P. 400.)





It was probably an alligator, but we cannot tell; we only

know it was a particular breed, and only used to convey wrath.

Some authorities think it was an ichthyosaurus, but there is

much doubt.



However, one thing we do know; and that is that that worm had been

due years and years.  Robert F. had violated a monastery once;

he had committed unprintable crimes since, and they had been

permitted--under disapproval--but the ravishment of the monastery

had not been forgotten nor forgiven, and the worm came at last.



Why were these reforms put off in this strange way?  What was to

be gained by it?  Did Henry of Huntington really know his facts,

or was he only guessing?  Sometimes I am half persuaded that

he is only a guesser, and not a good one.  The divine wisdom

must surely be of the better quality than he makes it out to be.



Five hundred years before Henry's time some forecasts of the

Lord's purposes were furnished by a pope, who perceived, by

certain perfectly trustworthy signs furnished by the Deity for

the information of His familiars, that the end of the world was





. . . about to come.  But as this end of the world draws

near many things are at hand which have not before happened, as

changes in the air, terrible signs in the heavens, tempests out

of the common order of the seasons, wars, famines, pestilences,

earthquakes in various places; all which will not happen in our

days, but after our days all will come to pass.





Still, the end was so near that these signs were "sent before

that we may be careful for our souls and be found prepared

to meet the impending judgment."



That was thirteen hundred years ago.  This is really no

improvement on the work of the Roman augurs.



-------------------------------------------------------------------





CONCERNING TOBACCO



As concerns tobacco, there are many superstitions.  And the

chiefest is this--that there is a STANDARD governing the matter,

whereas there is nothing of the kind.  Each man's own preference

is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept,

the only one which can command him.  A congress of all the

tobacco-lovers in the world could not elect a standard which

would be binding upon you or me, or would even much influence us.



The next superstition is that a man has a standard of his own.

He hasn't.  He thinks he has, but he hasn't.  He thinks he can

tell what he regards as a good cigar from what he regards as a

bad one--but he can't.  He goes by the brand, yet imagines he goes

by the flavor.  One may palm off the worst counterfeit upon him;

if it bears his brand he will smoke it contentedly and never suspect.



Children of twenty-five, who have seven years experience,

try to tell me what is a good cigar and what isn't.

Me, who never learned to smoke, but always smoked;

me, who came into the world asking for a light.



No one can tell me what is a good cigar--for me.  I am the

only judge.  People who claim to know say that I smoke the worst

cigars in the world.  They bring their own cigars when they come

to my house.  They betray an unmanly terror when I offer them

a cigar; they tell lies and hurry away to meet engagements

which they have not made when they are threatened with the

hospitalities of my box.  Now then, observe what superstition,

assisted by a man's reputation, can do.  I was to have twelve

personal friends to supper one night.  One of them was as

notorious for costly and elegant cigars as I was for cheap and

devilish ones.  I called at his house and when no one was looking

borrowed a double handful of his very choicest; cigars which cost

him forty cents apiece and bore red-and-gold labels in sign of

their nobility.  I removed the labels and put the cigars into a

box with my favorite brand on it--a brand which those people all

knew, and which cowed them as men are cowed by an epidemic.  They

took these cigars when offered at the end of the supper, and lit

them and sternly struggled with them--in dreary silence, for

hilarity died when the fell brand came into view and started

around--but their fortitude held for a short time only; then they

made excuses and filed out, treading on one another's heels with

indecent eagerness; and in the morning when I went out to observe

results the cigars lay all between the front door and the gate.

All except one--that one lay in the plate of the man from whom I

had cabbaged the lot.  One or two whiffs was all he could stand.

He told me afterward that some day I would get shot for giving

people that kind of cigars to smoke.



Am I certain of my own standard?  Perfectly; yes, absolutely

--unless somebody fools me by putting my brand on some other kind

of cigar; for no doubt I am like the rest, and know my cigar by

the brand instead of by the flavor.  However, my standard is a

pretty wide one and covers a good deal of territory.  To me,

almost any cigar is good that nobody else will smoke, and to me

almost all cigars are bad that other people consider good.

Nearly any cigar will do me, except a Havana.  People think they

hurt my feelings when then come to my house with their life

preservers on--I mean, with their own cigars in their pockets.

It is an error; I take care of myself in a similar way.  When I

go into danger--that is, into rich people's houses, where, in the

nature of things, they will have high-tariff cigars, red-and-gilt

girded and nested in a rosewood box along with a damp sponge,

cigars which develop a dismal black ash and burn down the side

and smell, and will grow hot to the fingers, and will go on

growing hotter and hotter, and go on smelling more and more

infamously and unendurably the deeper the fire tunnels down

inside below the thimbleful of honest tobacco that is in the

front end, the furnisher of it praising it all the time and

telling you how much the deadly thing cost--yes, when I go into

that sort of peril I carry my own defense along; I carry my own

brand--twenty-seven cents a barrel--and I live to see my family

again.  I may seem to light his red-gartered cigar, but that is

only for courtesy's sake; I smuggle it into my pocket for the

poor, of whom I know many, and light one of my own; and while he

praises it I join in, but when he says it cost forty-five cents I

say nothing, for I know better.



However, to say true, my tastes are so catholic that I have

never seen any cigars that I really could not smoke, except those

that cost a dollar apiece.  I have examined those and know that

they are made of dog-hair, and not good dog-hair at that.



I have a thoroughly satisfactory time in Europe, for all

over the Continent one finds cigars which not even the most

hardened newsboys in New York would smoke.  I brought cigars with

me, the last time; I will not do that any more.  In Italy, as in

France, the Government is the only cigar-peddler.  Italy has

three or four domestic brands:  the Minghetti, the Trabuco, the

Virginia, and a very coarse one which is a modification of the

Virginia.  The Minghettis are large and comely, and cost three

dollars and sixty cents a hundred; I can smoke a hundred in seven

days and enjoy every one of them.  The Trabucos suit me, too; I

don't remember the price.  But one has to learn to like the

Virginia, nobody is born friendly to it.  It looks like a rat-

tail file, but smokes better, some think.  It has a straw through

it; you pull this out, and it leaves a flue, otherwise there

would be no draught, not even as much as there is to a nail.

Some prefer a nail at first.  However, I like all the French,

Swiss, German, and Italian domestic cigars, and have never cared

to inquire what they are made of; and nobody would know, anyhow,

perhaps.  There is even a brand of European smoking-tobacco that

I like.  It is a brand used by the Italian peasants.  It is loose

and dry and black, and looks like tea-grounds.  When the fire is

applied it expands, and climbs up and towers above the pipe, and

presently tumbles off inside of one's vest.  The tobacco itself

is cheap, but it raises the insurance.  It is as I remarked in

the beginning--the taste for tobacco is a matter of superstition.

There are no standards--no real standards.  Each man's preference

is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept,

the only one which can command him.



------------------------------------------------------------------





THE BEE



It was Maeterlinck who introduced me to the bee.  I mean, in

the psychical and in the poetical way.  I had had a business

introduction earlier.  It was when I was a boy.  It is strange

that I should remember a formality like that so long; it must be

nearly sixty years.



Bee scientists always speak of the bee as she.  It is

because all the important bees are of that sex.  In the hive

there is one married bee, called the queen; she has fifty

thousand children; of these, about one hundred are sons; the rest

are daughters.  Some of the daughters are young maids, some are

old maids, and all are virgins and remain so.



Every spring the queen comes out of the hive and flies away

with one of her sons and marries him.  The honeymoon lasts only

an hour or two; then the queen divorces her husband and returns

home competent to lay two million eggs.  This will be enough to

last the year, but not more than enough, because hundreds of bees

are drowned every day, and other hundreds are eaten by birds, and

it is the queen's business to keep the population up to standard

--say, fifty thousand.  She must always have that many children

on hand and efficient during the busy season, which is summer, or

winter would catch the community short of food.  She lays from

two thousand to three thousand eggs a day, according to the

demand; and she must exercise judgment, and not lay more than are

needed in a slim flower-harvest, nor fewer than are required in a

prodigal one, or the board of directors will dethrone her and

elect a queen that has more sense.



There are always a few royal heirs in stock and ready to

take her place--ready and more than anxious to do it, although

she is their own mother.  These girls are kept by themselves, and

are regally fed and tended from birth.  No other bees get such

fine food as they get, or live such a high and luxurious life.

By consequence they are larger and longer and sleeker than their

working sisters.  And they have a curved sting, shaped like a

scimitar, while the others have a straight one.



A common bee will sting any one or anybody, but a royalty

stings royalties only.  A common bee will sting and kill another

common bee, for cause, but when it is necessary to kill the queen

other ways are employed.  When a queen has grown old and slack

and does not lay eggs enough one of her royal daughters is

allowed to come to attack her, the rest of the bees looking on at

the duel and seeing fair play.  It is a duel with the curved

stings.  If one of the fighters gets hard pressed and gives it up

and runs, she is brought back and must try again--once, maybe

twice; then, if she runs yet once more for her life, judicial

death is her portion; her children pack themselves into a ball

around her person and hold her in that compact grip two or three

days, until she starves to death or is suffocated.  Meantime the

victor bee is receiving royal honors and performing the one royal

function--laying eggs.



As regards the ethics of the judicial assassination of the

queen, that is a matter of politics, and will be discussed later,

in its proper place.



During substantially the whole of her short life of five or

six years the queen lives in Egyptian darkness and stately

seclusion of the royal apartments, with none about her but

plebeian servants, who give her empty lip-affection in place of

the love which her heart hungers for; who spy upon her in the

interest of her waiting heirs, and report and exaggerate her

defects and deficiencies to them; who fawn upon her and flatter

her to her face and slander her behind her back; who grovel

before her in the day of her power and forsake her in her age and

weakness.  There she sits, friendless, upon her throne through

the long night of her life, cut off from the consoling sympathies

and sweet companionship and loving endearments which she craves,

by the gilded barriers of her awful rank; a forlorn exile in her

own house and home, weary object of formal ceremonies and

machine-made worship, winged child of the sun, native to the free

air and the blue skies and the flowery fields, doomed by the

splendid accident of her birth to trade this priceless heritage

for a black captivity, a tinsel grandeur, and a loveless life,

with shame and insult at the end and a cruel death--and condemned

by the human instinct in her to hold the bargain valuable!



Huber, Lubbock, Maeterlinck--in fact, all the great

authorities--are agreed in denying that the bee is a member of

the human family.  I do not know why they have done this, but I

think it is from dishonest motives.  Why, the innumerable facts

brought to light by their own painstaking and exhaustive

experiments prove that if there is a master fool in the world, it

is the bee.  That seems to settle it.



But that is the way of the scientist.  He will spend thirty

years in building up a mountain range of facts with the intent to

prove a certain theory; then he is so happy in his achievement

that as a rule he overlooks the main chief fact of all--that his

accumulation proves an entirely different thing.  When you point

out this miscarriage to him he does not answer your letters; when

you call to convince him, the servant prevaricates and you do not

get in.  Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up

their theory; then you can borrow money of them.



To be strictly fair, I will concede that now and then one of

them will answer your letter, but when they do they avoid the

issue--you cannot pin them down.  When I discovered that the bee

was human I wrote about it to all those scientists whom I have

just mentioned.  For evasions, I have seen nothing to equal the

answers I got.



After the queen, the personage next in importance in the

hive is the virgin.  The virgins are fifty thousand or one

hundred thousand in number, and they are the workers, the

laborers.  No work is done, in the hive or out of it, save by

them.  The males do not work, the queen does no work, unless

laying eggs is work, but it does not seem so to me.  There are

only two million of them, anyway, and all of five months to

finish the contract in.  The distribution of work in a hive is as

cleverly and elaborately specialized as it is in a vast American

machine-shop or factory.  A bee that has been trained to one of

the many and various industries of the concern doesn't know how

to exercise any other, and would be offended if asked to take a

hand in anything outside of her profession.  She is as human as a

cook; and if you should ask the cook to wait on the table, you

know what will happen.  Cooks will play the piano if you like,

but they draw the line there.  In my time I have asked a cook to

chop wood, and I know about these things.  Even the hired girl

has her frontiers; true, they are vague, they are ill-defined,

even flexible, but they are there.  This is not conjecture; it is

founded on the absolute.  And then the butler.  You ask the

butler to wash the dog.  It is just as I say; there is much to be

learned in these ways, without going to books.  Books are very well,

but books do not cover the whole domain of esthetic human culture.

Pride of profession is one of the boniest bones in existence,

if not the boniest.  Without doubt it is so in the hive.







TAMING THE BICYCLE



In the early eighties Mark Twain learned to ride one of the

old high-wheel bicycles of that period.  He wrote an account of

his experience, but did not offer it for publication.  The form

of bicycle he rode long ago became antiquated, but in the humor

of his pleasantry is a quality which does not grow old.





A. B. P.







I



I thought the matter over, and concluded I could do it.  So

I went down a bought a barrel of Pond's Extract and a bicycle.

The Expert came home with me to instruct me.  We chose the

back yard, for the sake of privacy, and went to work.



Mine was not a full-grown bicycle, but only a colt--a

fifty-inch, with the pedals shortened up to forty-eight--and

skittish, like any other colt.  The Expert explained the thing's

points briefly, then he got on its back and rode around a little,

to show me how easy it was to do.  He said that the dismounting

was perhaps the hardest thing to learn, and so we would leave

that to the last.  But he was in error there.  He found, to his

surprise and joy, that all that he needed to do was to get me on

to the machine and stand out of the way; I could get off, myself.

Although I was wholly inexperienced, I dismounted in the best

time on record.  He was on that side, shoving up the machine;

we all came down with a crash, he at the bottom, I next,

and the machine on top.



We examined the machine, but it was not in the least

injured.  This was hardly believable.  Yet the Expert assured me

that it was true; in fact, the examination proved it.  I was

partly to realize, then, how admirably these things are

constructed.  We applied some Pond's Extract, and resumed.  The

Expert got on the OTHER side to shove up this time, but I

dismounted on that side; so the result was as before.



The machine was not hurt.  We oiled ourselves again, and resumed.

This time the Expert took up a sheltered position behind,

but somehow or other we landed on him again.



He was full of admiration; said it was abnormal.  She was

all right, not a scratch on her, not a timber started anywhere.

I said it was wonderful, while we were greasing up, but he said

that when I came to know these steel spider-webs I would realize

that nothing but dynamite could cripple them.  Then he limped out

to position, and we resumed once more.  This time the Expert took

up the position of short-stop, and got a man to shove up behind.

We got up a handsome speed, and presently traversed a brick, and

I went out over the top of the tiller and landed, head down, on

the instructor's back, and saw the machine fluttering in the air

between me and the sun.  It was well it came down on us, for that

broke the fall, and it was not injured.



Five days later I got out and was carried down to the

hospital, and found the Expert doing pretty fairly.  In a few

more days I was quite sound.  I attribute this to my prudence in

always dismounting on something soft.  Some recommend a feather

bed, but I think an Expert is better.



The Expert got out at last, brought four assistants with

him.  It was a good idea.  These four held the graceful cobweb

upright while I climbed into the saddle; then they formed in

column and marched on either side of me while the Expert pushed

behind; all hands assisted at the dismount.



The bicycle had what is called the "wabbles," and had them

very badly.  In order to keep my position, a good many things

were required of me, and in every instance the thing required was

against nature.  That is to say, that whatever the needed thing

might be, my nature, habit, and breeding moved me to attempt it

in one way, while some immutable and unsuspected law of physics

required that it be done in just the other way.  I perceived by

this how radically and grotesquely wrong had been the life-long

education of my body and members.  They were steeped in

ignorance; they knew nothing--nothing which it could profit them

to know.  For instance, if I found myself falling to the right, I

put the tiller hard down the other way, by a quite natural

impulse, and so violated a law, and kept on going down.  The law

required the opposite thing--the big wheel must be turned in the

direction in which you are falling.  It is hard to believe this,

when you are told it.  And not merely hard to believe it, but

impossible; it is opposed to all your notions.  And it is just as

hard to do it, after you do come to believe it.  Believing it,

and knowing by the most convincing proof that it is true, does

not help it:  you can't any more DO it than you could before; you

can neither force nor persuade yourself to do it at first.  The

intellect has to come to the front, now.  It has to teach the

limbs to discard their old education and adopt the new.



The steps of one's progress are distinctly marked.  At the

end of each lesson he knows he has acquired something, and he

also knows what that something is, and likewise that it will stay

with him.  It is not like studying German, where you mull along,

in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just

as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you,

and there you are.  No--and I see now, plainly enough, that the

great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off

it and hurt yourself.  There is nothing like that feature to make

you attend strictly to business.  But I also see, by what I have

learned of bicycling, that the right and only sure way to learn

German is by the bicycling method.  That is to say, take a grip

on one villainy of it at a time, leaving that one half learned.



When you have reached the point in bicycling where you can

balance the machine tolerably fairly and propel it and steer it,

then comes your next task--how to mount it.  You do it in this

way:  you hop along behind it on your right foot, resting the

other on the mounting-peg, and grasping the tiller with your

hands.  At the word, you rise on the peg, stiffen your left leg,

hang your other one around in the air in a general in indefinite

way, lean your stomach against the rear of the saddle, and then

fall off, maybe on one side, maybe on the other; but you fall off.

You get up and do it again; and once more; and then several times.



By this time you have learned to keep your balance; and also

to steer without wrenching the tiller out by the roots (I say

tiller because it IS a tiller; "handle-bar" is a lamely

descriptive phrase).  So you steer along, straight ahead, a little

while, then you rise forward, with a steady strain, bringing your

right leg, and then your body, into the saddle, catch your

breath, fetch a violent hitch this way and then that, and down

you go again.



But you have ceased to mind the going down by this time; you

are getting to light on one foot or the other with considerable

certainty.  Six more attempts and six more falls make you

perfect.  You land in the saddle comfortably, next time, and stay

there--that is, if you can be content to let your legs dangle,

and leave the pedals alone a while; but if you grab at once for

the pedals, you are gone again.  You soon learn to wait a little

and perfect your balance before reaching for the pedals; then the

mounting-art is acquired, is complete, and a little practice will

make it simple and easy to you, though spectators ought to keep

off a rod or two to one side, along at first, if you have nothing

against them.



And now you come to the voluntary dismount; you learned the

other kind first of all.  It is quite easy to tell one how to do

the voluntary dismount; the words are few, the requirement

simple, and apparently undifficult; let your left pedal go down

till your left leg is nearly straight, turn your wheel to the

left, and get off as you would from a horse.  It certainly does

sound exceedingly easy; but it isn't.  I don't know why it isn't

but it isn't.  Try as you may, you don't get down as you would

from a horse, you get down as you would from a house afire.  You

make a spectacle of yourself every time.





II



During the eight days I took a daily lesson an hour and a

half.  At the end of this twelve working-hours' appreticeship I

was graduated--in the rough.  I was pronounced competent to

paddle my own bicycle without outside help.  It seems incredible,

this celerity of acquirement.  It takes considerably longer than

that to learn horseback-riding in the rough.



Now it is true that I could have learned without a teacher,

but it would have been risky for me, because of my natural

clumsiness.  The self-taught man seldom knows anything

accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have

known if he had worked under teachers; and, besides, he brags,

and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going

and doing as he himself has done.  There are those who imagine

that the unlucky accidents of life--life's "experiences"--are in

some way useful to us.  I wish I could find out how.  I never

knew one of them to happen twice.  They always change off and

swap around and catch you on your inexperienced side.  If

personal experience can be worth anything as an education, it

wouldn't seem likely that you could trip Methuselah; and yet if

that old person could come back here it is more that likely that

one of the first things he would do would be to take hold of one

of these electric wires and tie himself all up in a knot.  Now

the surer thing and the wiser thing would be for him to ask

somebody whether it was a good thing to take hold of.  But that

would not suit him; he would be one of the self-taught kind that

go by experience; he would want to examine for himself.  And he

would find, for his instruction, that the coiled patriarch shuns

the electric wire; and it would be useful to him, too, and would

leave his education in quite a complete and rounded-out

condition, till he should come again, some day, and go to

bouncing a dynamite-can around to find out what was in it.



But we wander from the point.  However, get a teacher; it

saves much time and Pond's Extract.



Before taking final leave of me, my instructor inquired

concerning my physical strength, and I was able to inform him

that I hadn't any.  He said that that was a defect which would

make up-hill wheeling pretty difficult for me at first; but he

also said the bicycle would soon remove it.  The contrast between

his muscles and mine was quite marked.  He wanted to test mine,

so I offered my biceps--which was my best.  It almost made him

smile.  He said, "It is pulpy, and soft, and yielding, and

rounded; it evades pressure, and glides from under the fingers;

in the dark a body might think it was an oyster in a rag."

Perhaps this made me look grieved, for he added, briskly:  "Oh,

that's all right, you needn't worry about that; in a little while

you can't tell it from a petrified kidney.  Just go right along

with your practice; you're all right."



Then he left me, and I started out alone to seek adventures.

You don't really have to seek them--that is nothing but a phrase

--they come to you.



I chose a reposeful Sabbath-day sort of a back street which

was about thirty yards wide between the curbstones.  I knew it

was not wide enough; still, I thought that by keeping strict

watch and wasting no space unnecessarily I could crowd through.



Of course I had trouble mounting the machine, entirely on my

own responsibility, with no encouraging moral support from the

outside, no sympathetic instructor to say, "Good! now you're

doing well--good again--don't hurry--there, now, you're all right

--brace up, go ahead."  In place of this I had some other

support.  This was a boy, who was perched on a gate-post munching

a hunk of maple sugar.



He was full of interest and comment.  The first time I

failed and went down he said that if he was me he would dress up

in pillows, that's what he would do.  The next time I went down

he advised me to go and learn to ride a tricycle first.  The

third time I collapsed he said he didn't believe I could stay on

a horse-car.  But the next time I succeeded, and got clumsily

under way in a weaving, tottering, uncertain fashion, and

occupying pretty much all of the street.  My slow and lumbering

gait filled the boy to the chin with scorn, and he sung out, "My,

but don't he rip along!"  Then he got down from his post and

loafed along the sidewalk, still observing and occasionally

commenting.  Presently he dropped into my wake and followed along

behind.  A little girl passed by, balancing a wash-board on her

head, and giggled, and seemed about to make a remark, but the boy

said, rebukingly, "Let him alone, he's going to a funeral."



I have been familiar with that street for years, and had

always supposed it was a dead level; but it was not, as the

bicycle now informed me, to my surprise.  The bicycle, in the

hands of a novice, is as alert and acute as a spirit-level in the

detecting the delicate and vanishing shades of difference in

these matters.  It notices a rise where your untrained eye would

not observe that one existed; it notices any decline which water

will run down.  I was toiling up a slight rise, but was not aware

of it.  It made me tug and pant and perspire; and still, labor as

I might, the machine came almost to a standstill every little while.

At such times the boy would say:  "That's it! take a rest--

there ain't no hurry.  They can't hold the funeral without YOU."



Stones were a bother to me.  Even the smallest ones gave me a

panic when I went over them.  I could hit any kind of a stone,

no matter how small, if I tried to miss it; and of course at

first I couldn't help trying to do that.  It is but natural.

It is part of the ass that is put in us all, for some

inscrutable reason.



It was at the end of my course, at last, and it was necessary

for me to round to.  This is not a pleasant thing, when you

undertake it for the first time on your own responsibility,

and neither is it likely to succeed.  Your confidence oozes away,

you fill steadily up with nameless apprehensions, every fiber of

you is tense with a watchful strain, you start a cautious and

gradual curve, but your squirmy nerves are all full of electric

anxieties, so the curve is quickly demoralized into a jerky and

perilous zigzag; then suddenly the nickel-clad horse takes the

bit in its mouth and goes slanting for the curbstone, defying all

prayers and all your powers to change its mind--your heart stands

still, your breath hangs fire, your legs forget to work, straight

on you go, and there are but a couple of feet between you and the

curb now.  And now is the desperate moment, the last chance to

save yourself; of course all your instructions fly out of your

head, and you whirl your wheel AWAY from the curb instead of

TOWARD it, and so you go sprawling on that granite-bound

inhospitable shore.  That was my luck; that was my experience.  I

dragged myself out from under the indestructible bicycle and sat

down on the curb to examine.



I started on the return trip.  It was now that I saw a

farmer's wagon poking along down toward me, loaded with cabbages.

If I needed anything to perfect the precariousness of my steering,

it was just that.  The farmer was occupying the middle of the road

with his wagon, leaving barely fourteen or fifteen yards of space

on either side.  I couldn't shout at him--a beginner can't shout;

if he opens his mouth he is gone; he must keep all his attention

on his business.  But in this grisly emergency, the boy came

to the rescue, and for once I had to be grateful to him.

He kept a sharp lookout on the swiftly varying impulses and

inspirations of my bicycle, and shouted to the man accordingly:



"To the left!  Turn to the left, or this jackass 'll run over you!"

The man started to do it.  "No, to the right, to the right!

Hold on! THAT won't do!--to the left!--to the right!--to the

LEFT--right! left--ri--  Stay where you ARE, or you're a goner!"



And just then I caught the off horse in the starboard and went

down in a pile.  I said, "Hang it!  Couldn't you SEE I was coming?"



"Yes, I see you was coming, but I couldn't tell which WAY you

was coming.  Nobody could--now, COULD they?  You couldn't

yourself--now, COULD you?  So what could _I_ do?



There was something in that, and so I had the magnanimity to

say so.  I said I was no doubt as much to blame as he was.



Within the next five days I achieved so much progress that

the boy couldn't keep up with me.  He had to go back to his gate-

post, and content himself with watching me fall at long range.



There was a row of low stepping-stones across one end of the

street, a measured yard apart.  Even after I got so I could steer

pretty fairly I was so afraid of those stones that I always hit

them.  They gave me the worst falls I ever got in that street,

except those which I got from dogs.  I have seen it stated that

no expert is quick enough to run over a dog; that a dog is always

able to skip out of his way.  I think that that may be true:  but

I think that the reason he couldn't run over the dog was because

he was trying to.  I did not try to run over any dog.  But I ran

over every dog that came along.  I think it makes a great deal of

difference.  If you try to run over the dog he knows how to

calculate, but if you are trying to miss him he does not know how

to calculate, and is liable to jump the wrong way every time.  It

was always so in my experience.  Even when I could not hit a

wagon I could hit a dog that came to see me practice.  They all

liked to see me practice, and they all came, for there was very

little going on in our neighborhood to entertain a dog.  It took

time to learn to miss a dog, but I achieved even that.



I can steer as well as I want to, now, and I will catch that

boy one of these days and run over HIM if he doesn't reform.



Get a bicycle.  You will not regret it, if you live.







IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?



(from My Autobiography)





Scattered here and there through the stacks of unpublished

manuscript which constitute this formidable Autobiography and

Diary of mine, certain chapters will in some distant future be

found which deal with "Claimants"--claimants historically

notorious:  Satan, Claimant; the Golden Calf, Claimant; the

Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, Claimant; Louis XVII., Claimant;

William Shakespeare, Claimant; Arthur Orton, Claimant; Mary Baker

G. Eddy, Claimant--and the rest of them.  Eminent Claimants,

successful Claimants, defeated Claimants, royal Claimants, pleb

Claimants, showy Claimants, shabby Claimants, revered Claimants,

despised Claimants, twinkle star-like here and there and yonder

through the mists of history and legend and tradition--and, oh,

all the darling tribe are clothed in mystery and romance, and we

read about them with deep interest and discuss them with loving

sympathy or with rancorous resentment, according to which side we

hitch ourselves to.  It has always been so with the human race.

There was never a Claimant that couldn't get a hearing, nor one

that couldn't accumulate a rapturous following, no matter how

flimsy and apparently unauthentic his claim might be.  Arthur

Orton's claim that he was the lost Tichborne baronet come to life

again was as flimsy as Mrs. Eddy's that she wrote SCIENCE AND

HEALTH from the direct dictation of the Deity; yet in England

nearly forty years ago Orton had a huge army of devotees and

incorrigible adherents, many of whom remained stubbornly

unconvinced after their fat god had been proven an impostor and

jailed as a perjurer, and today Mrs. Eddy's following is not only

immense, but is daily augmenting in numbers and enthusiasm.

Orton had many fine and educated minds among his adherents, Mrs.

Eddy has had the like among hers from the beginning.  Her Church

is as well equipped in those particulars as is any other Church.

Claimants can always count upon a following, it doesn't matter

who they are, nor what they claim, nor whether they come with

documents or without.  It was always so.  Down out of the long-

vanished past, across the abyss of the ages, if you listen, you

can still hear the believing multitudes shouting for Perkin

Warbeck and Lambert Simnel.



A friend has sent me a new book, from England--THE

SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM RESTATED--well restated and closely reasoned;

and my fifty years' interest in that matter--asleep for the last

three years--is excited once more.  It is an interest which was

born of Delia Bacon's book--away back in the ancient day--1857,

or maybe 1856.  About a year later my pilot-master, Bixby,

transferred me from his own steamboat to the PENNSYLVANIA, and

placed me under the orders and instructions of George Ealer--dead

now, these many, many years.  I steered for him a good many

months--as was the humble duty of the pilot-apprentice:  stood a

daylight watch and spun the wheel under the severe

superintendence and correction of the master.  He was a prime

chess-player and an idolater of Shakespeare.  He would play chess

with anybody; even with me, and it cost his official dignity

something to do that.  Also--quite uninvited--he would read

Shakespeare to me; not just casually, but by the hour, when it

was his watch and I was steering.  He read well, but not

profitably for me, because he constantly injected commands into

the text.  That broke it all up, mixed it all up, tangled it all

up--to that degree, in fact, that if we were in a risky and

difficult piece of river an ignorant person couldn't have told,

sometimes, which observations were Shakespeare's and which were

Ealer's.  For instance:





What man dare, _I_ dare!



Approach thou WHAT are you laying in the leads for? what a

hell of an idea! like the rugged ease her off a little, ease her

off! rugged Russian bear, the armed rhinoceros or the THERE she

goes! meet her, meet her! didn't you KNOW she'd smell the reef if

you crowded in like that?  Hyrcan tiger; take any ship but that

and my firm nerves she'll be in the WOODS the first you know!

stop he starboard! come ahead strong on the larboard! back the

starboard! . . . NOW then, you're all right; come ahead on the

starboard; straighten up and go 'long, never tremble:  or be

alive again, and dare me to the desert DAMNATION can't you keep

away from that greasy water? pull her down! snatch her! snatch

her baldheaded! with thy sword; if trembling I inhabit then, lay

in the leads!--no, only with the starboard one, leave the other

alone, protest me the baby of a girl.  Hence horrible shadow!

eight bells--that watchman's asleep again, I reckon, go down and

call Brown yourself, unreal mockery, hence!





He certainly was a good reader, and splendidly thrilling and

stormy and tragic, but it was a damage to me, because I have

never since been able to read Shakespeare in a calm and sane way.

I cannot rid it of his explosive interlardings, they break in

everywhere with their irrelevant, "What in hell are you up to

NOW! pull her down! more! MORE!--there now, steady as you go,"

and the other disorganizing interruptions that were always

leaping from his mouth.  When I read Shakespeare now I can hear

them as plainly as I did in that long-departed time--fifty-one

years ago.  I never regarded Ealer's readings as educational.

Indeed, they were a detriment to me.



His contributions to the text seldom improved it, but

barring that detail he was a good reader; I can say that much for

him.  He did not use the book, and did not need to; he knew his

Shakespeare as well as Euclid ever knew his multiplication table.



Did he have something to say--this Shakespeare-adoring

Mississippi pilot--anent Delia Bacon's book?



Yes.  And he said it; said it all the time, for months--in

the morning watch, the middle watch, and dog watch; and probably

kept it going in his sleep.  He bought the literature of the

dispute as fast as it appeared, and we discussed it all through

thirteen hundred miles of river four times traversed in every

thirty-five days--the time required by that swift boat to achieve

two round trips.  We discussed, and discussed, and discussed, and

disputed and disputed and disputed; at any rate, HE did, and I

got in a word now and then when he slipped a cog and there was a

vacancy.  He did his arguing with heat, with energy, with

violence; and I did mine with the reverse and moderation of a

subordinate who does not like to be flung out of a pilot-house

and is perched forty feet above the water.  He was fiercely loyal

to Shakespeare and cordially scornful of Bacon and of all the

pretensions of the Baconians.  So was I--at first.  And at first

he was glad that that was my attitude.  There were even

indications that he admired it; indications dimmed, it is true,

by the distance that lay between the lofty boss-pilotical

altitude and my lowly one, yet perceptible to me; perceptible,

and translatable into a compliment--compliment coming down from

about the snow-line and not well thawed in the transit, and not

likely to set anything afire, not even a cub-pilot's self-

conceit; still a detectable complement, and precious.



Naturally it flattered me into being more loyal to Shakespeare--

if possible--than I was before, and more prejudiced against

Bacon--if possible--that I was before.  And so we discussed

and discussed, both on the same side, and were happy.

For a while.  Only for a while.  Only for a very little while,

a very, very, very little while.  Then the atmosphere began

to change; began to cool off.



A brighter person would have seen what the trouble was,

earlier than I did, perhaps, but I saw it early enough for all

practical purposes.  You see, he was of an argumentative

disposition.  Therefore it took him but a little time to get

tired of arguing with a person who agreed with everything he said

and consequently never furnished him a provocative to flare up

and show what he could do when it came to clear, cold, hard,

rose-cut, hundred-faceted, diamond-flashing REASONING.  That was

his name for it.  It has been applied since, with complacency, as

many as several times, in the Bacon-Shakespeare scuffle.  On the

Shakespeare side.



Then the thing happened which has happened to more persons

than to me when principle and personal interest found themselves

in opposition to each other and a choice had to be made:  I let

principle go, and went over to the other side.  Not the entire

way, but far enough to answer the requirements of the case.  That

is to say, I took this attitude--to wit, I only BELIEVED Bacon

wrote Shakespeare, whereas I KNEW Shakespeare didn't.  Ealer was

satisfied with that, and the war broke loose.  Study, practice,

experience in handling my end of the matter presently enabled me

to take my new position almost seriously; a little bit later,

utterly seriously; a little later still, lovingly, gratefully,

devotedly; finally:  fiercely, rabidly, uncompromisingly.  After

that I was welded to my faith, I was theoretically ready to die

for it, and I looked down with compassion not unmixed with scorn

upon everybody else's faith that didn't tally with mine.  That

faith, imposed upon me by self-interest in that ancient day,

remains my faith today, and in it I find comfort, solace, peace,

and never-failing joy.  You see how curiously theological it is.

The "rice Christian" of the Orient goes through the very same

steps, when he is after rice and the missionary is after HIM; he

goes for rice, and remains to worship.



Ealer did a lot of our "reasoning"--not to say substantially

all of it.  The slaves of his cult have a passion for calling it

by that large name.  We others do not call our inductions and

deductions and reductions by any name at all.  They show for

themselves what they are, and we can with tranquil confidence

leave the world to ennoble them with a title of its own choosing.



Now and then when Ealer had to stop to cough, I pulled my

induction-talents together and hove the controversial lead

myself:  always getting eight feet, eight and a half, often nine,

sometimes even quarter-less-twain--as _I_ believed; but always

"no bottom," as HE said.



I got the best of him only once.  I prepared myself.  I

wrote out a passage from Shakespeare--it may have been the very

one I quoted awhile ago, I don't remember--and riddled it with

his wild steamboatful interlardings.  When an unrisky opportunity

offered, one lovely summer day, when we had sounded and buoyed a

tangled patch of crossings known as Hell's Half Acre, and were

aboard again and he had sneaked the PENNSYLVANIA triumphantly

through it without once scraping sand, and the A. T. LACEY had

followed in our wake and got stuck, and he was feeling good, I

showed it to him.  It amused him.  I asked him to fire it off--

READ it; read it, I diplomatically added, as only HE could read

dramatic poetry.  The compliment touched him where he lived.  He

did read it; read it with surpassing fire and spirit; read it as

it will never be read again; for HE know how to put the right

music into those thunderous interlardings and make them seem a

part of the text, make them sound as if they were bursting from

Shakespeare's own soul, each one of them a golden inspiration and

not to be left out without damage to the massed and magnificent

whole.



I waited a week, to let the incident fade; waited longer;

waited until he brought up for reasonings and vituperation my pet

position, my pet argument, the one which I was fondest of, the

one which I prized far above all others in my ammunition-wagon--

to wit, that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare's

words, for the reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly

familiar with the laws, and the law-courts, and law-proceedings,

and lawyer-talk, and lawyer-ways--and if Shakespeare was

possessed of the infinitely divided star-dust that constituted

this vast wealth, HOW did he get it, and WHERE and WHEN?



"From books."



From books!  That was always the idea.  I answered as my

readings of the champions of my side of the great controversy had

taught me to answer:  that a man can't handle glibly and easily

and comfortably and successfully the argot of a trade at which he

has not personally served.  He will make mistakes; he will not,

and cannot, get the trade-phrasings precisely and exactly right;

and the moment he departs, by even a shade, from a common trade-

form, the reader who has served that trade will know the writer

HASN'T.  Ealer would not be convinced; he said a man could learn

how to correctly handle the subtleties and mysteries and free-

masonries of ANY trade by careful reading and studying.  But when

I got him to read again the passage from Shakespeare with the

interlardings, he perceived, himself, that books couldn't teach a

student a bewildering multitude of pilot-phrases so thoroughly

and perfectly that he could talk them off in book and play or

conversation and make no mistake that a pilot would not

immediately discover.  It was a triumph for me.  He was silent

awhile, and I knew what was happening--he was losing his temper.

And I knew he would presently close the session with the same old

argument that was always his stay and his support in time of

need; the same old argument, the one I couldn't answer, because I

dasn't--the argument that I was an ass, and better shut up.  He

delivered it, and I obeyed.



O dear, how long ago it was--how pathetically long ago!  And

here am I, old, forsaken, forlorn, and alone, arranging to get

that argument out of somebody again.



When a man has a passion for Shakespeare, it goes without

saying that he keeps company with other standard authors.  Ealer

always had several high-class books in the pilot-house, and he

read the same ones over and over again, and did not care to

change to newer and fresher ones.  He played well on the flute,

and greatly enjoyed hearing himself play.  So did I.  He had a

notion that a flute would keep its health better if you took it

apart when it was not standing a watch; and so, when it was not

on duty it took its rest, disjointed, on the compass-shelf under

the breastboard.  When the PENNSYLVANIA blew up and became a

drifting rack-heap freighted with wounded and dying poor souls

(my young brother Henry among them), pilot Brown had the watch

below, and was probably asleep and never knew what killed him;

but Ealer escaped unhurt.  He and his pilot-house were shot up

into the air; then they fell, and Ealer sank through the ragged

cavern where the hurricane-deck and the boiler-deck had been, and

landed in a nest of ruins on the main deck, on top of one of the

unexploded boilers, where he lay prone in a fog of scald and

deadly steam.  But not for long.  He did not lose his head--long

familiarity with danger had taught him to keep it, in any and all

emergencies.  He held his coat-lapels to his nose with one hand,

to keep out the steam, and scrabbled around with the other till

he found the joints of his flute, then he took measures to save

himself alive, and was successful.  I was not on board.  I had

been put ashore in New Orleans by Captain Klinenfelter.  The

reason--however, I have told all about it in the book called OLD

TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI, and it isn't important, anyway, it is

so long ago.





II



When I was a Sunday-school scholar, something more than

sixty years ago, I became interested in Satan, and wanted to find

out all I could about him.  I began to ask questions, but my

class-teacher, Mr. Barclay, the stone-mason, was reluctant about

answering them, it seemed to me.  I was anxious to be praised for

turning my thoughts to serious subjects when there wasn't another

boy in the village who could be hired to do such a thing.  I was

greatly interested in the incident of Eve and the serpent, and

thought Eve's calmness was perfectly noble.  I asked Mr. Barclay

if he had ever heard of another woman who, being approached by a

serpeant, would not excuse herself and break for the nearest

timber.  He did not answer my question, but rebuked me for

inquiring into matters above my age and comprehension.  I will

say for Mr. Barclay that he was willing to tell me the facts of

Satan's history, but he stopped there:  he wouldn't allow any

discussion of them.



In the course of time we exhausted the facts.  There were

only five or six of them; you could set them all down on a

visiting-card.  I was disappointed.  I had been meditating a

biography, and was grieved to find that there were no materials.

I said as much, with the tears running down.  Mr. Barclay's

sympathy and compassion were aroused, for he was a most kind and

gentle-spirited man, and he patted me on the head and cheered me

up by saying there was a whole vast ocean of materials!  I can

still feel the happy thrill which these blessed words shot

through me.



Then he began to bail out that ocean's riches for my

encouragement  and joy.  Like this:  it was "conjectured"--though

not established--that Satan was originally an angel in Heaven;

that he fell; that he rebelled, and brought on a war; that he was

defeated, and banished to perdition.  Also, "we have reason to

believe" that later he did so and so; that "we are warranted in

supposing" that at a subsequent time he traveled extensively,

seeking whom he might devour; that a couple of centuries

afterward, "as tradition instructs us," he took up the cruel

trade of tempting people to their ruin, with vast and fearful

results; that by and by, "as the probabilities seem to indicate,"

he may have done certain things, he might have done certain other

things, he must have done still other things.



And so on and so on.  We set down the five known facts by

themselves on a piece of paper, and numbered it "page 1"; then on

fifteen hundred other pieces of paper we set down the

"conjectures," and "suppositions," and "maybes," and "perhapses,"

and "doubtlesses," and "rumors," and guesses," and

"probabilities," and "likelihoods," and "we are permitted to

thinks," and "we are warranted in believings," and "might have

beens," and "could have beens," and "must have beens," and

"unquestionablys," and "without a shadow of doubt"--and behold!



MATERIALS?  Why, we had enough to build a biography of Shakespeare!



Yet he made me put away my pen; he would not let me write

the history of Satan.  Why?  Because, as he said, he had

suspicions--suspicions that my attitude in the matter was not

reverent, and that a person must be reverent when writing about

the sacred characters.  He said any one who spoke flippantly of

Satan would be frowned upon by the religious world and also be

brought to account.



I assured him, in earnest and sincere words, that he had

wholly misconceived my attitude; that I had the highest respect

for Satan, and that my reverence for him equaled, and possibly

even exceeded, that of any member of the church.  I said it

wounded me deeply to perceive by his words that he thought I

would make fun of Satan, and deride him, laugh at him, scoff at

him; whereas in truth I had never thought of such a thing, but

had only a warm desire to make fun of those others and laugh at

THEM.  "What others?  "Why, the Supposers, the Perhapsers, the

Might-Have-Beeners, the Could-Have-Beeners, the Must-Have-Beeners,

the Without-a-Shadow-of-Doubters, the We-Are-Warranted-in-Believingers,

and all that funny crop of solemn architects who have taken a

good solid foundation of five indisputable and unimportant facts

and built upon it a Conjectural Satan thirty miles high."



What did Mr. Barclay do then?  Was he disarmed?  Was he

silenced?  No.  He was shocked.  He was so shocked that he

visibly shuddered.  He said the Satanic Traditioners and

Perhapsers and Conjecturers were THEMSELVES sacred!  As sacred as

their work.  So sacred that whoso ventured to mock them or make

fun of their work, could not afterward enter any respectable

house, even by the back door.



How true were his words, and how wise!  How fortunate it

would have been for me if I had heeded them.  But I was young, I

was but seven years of age, and vain, foolish, and anxious to

attract attention.  I wrote the biography, and have never been in

a respectable house since.





III



How curious and interesting is the parallel--as far as

poverty of biographical details is concerned--between Satan and

Shakespeare.  It is wonderful, it is unique, it stands quite

alone, there is nothing resembling it in history, nothing

resembling it in romance, nothing approaching it even in

tradition.  How sublime is their position, and how over-topping,

how sky-reaching, how supreme--the two Great Unknowns, the two

Illustrious Conjecturabilities!  They are the best-known unknown

persons that have ever drawn breath upon the planet.



For the instruction of the ignorant I will make a list, now,

of those details of Shakespeare's history which are FACTS--

verified facts, established facts, undisputed facts.







Facts



He was born on the 23d of April, 1564.



Of good farmer-class parents who could not read, could not

write, could not sign their names.



At Stratford, a small back settlement which in that day was

shabby and unclean, and densely illiterate.  Of the nineteen

important men charged with the government of the town, thirteen

had to "make their mark" in attesting important documents,

because they could not write their names.



Of the first eighteen years of his life NOTHING is known.

They are a blank.



On the 27th of November (1582) William Shakespeare took out

a license to marry Anne Whateley.



Next day William Shakespeare took out a license to marry

Anne Hathaway.  She was eight years his senior.



William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway.  In a hurry.  By

grace of a reluctantly granted dispensation there was but one

publication of the banns.



Within six months the first child was born.



About two (blank) years followed, during which period

NOTHING AT ALL HAPPENED TO SHAKESPEARE, so far as anybody knows.



Then came twins--1585.  February.



Two blank years follow.



Then--1587--he makes a ten-year visit to London, leaving the family behind.



Five blank years follow.  During this period NOTHING

HAPPENED TO HIM, as far as anybody actually knows.



Then--1592--there is mention of him as an actor.



Next year--1593--his name appears in the official list of players.



Next year--1594--he played before the queen.  A detail of no

consequence:  other obscurities did it every year of the forty-

five of her reign.  And remained obscure.



Three pretty full years follow.  Full of play-acting.  Then*



In 1597 he bought New Place, Stratford.



Thirteen or fourteen busy years follow; years in which he

accumulated money, and also reputation as actor and manager.



 Meantime his name, liberally and variously spelt, had

become associated with a number of great plays and poems, as

(ostensibly) author of the same.



Some of these, in these years and later, were pirated, but

he made no protest.



Then--1610-11--he returned to Stratford and settled down for

good and all, and busied himself in lending money, trading in

tithes, trading in land and houses; shirking a debt of forty-one

shillings, borrowed by his wife during his long desertion of his

family; suing debtors for shillings and coppers; being sued

himself for shillings and coppers; and acting as confederate to a

neighbor who tried to rob the town of its rights in a certain

common, and did not succeed.



He lived five or six years--till 1616--in the joy of these

elevated pursuits.  Then he made a will, and signed each of its

three pages with his name.



A thoroughgoing business man's will.  It named in minute

detail every item of property he owned in the world--houses,

lands, sword, silver-gilt bowl, and so on--all the way down to

his "second-best bed" and its furniture.



It carefully and calculatingly distributed his riches among

the members of his family, overlooking no individual of it.  Not

even his wife:  the wife he had been enabled to marry in a hurry

by urgent grace of a special dispensation before he was nineteen;

the wife whom he had left husbandless so many years; the wife who

had had to borrow forty-one shillings in her need, and which the

lender was never able to collect of the prosperous husband, but

died at last with the money still lacking.  No, even this wife

was remembered in Shakespeare's will.



He left her that "second-best bed."



And NOT ANOTHER THING; not even a penny to bless her lucky

widowhood with.



It was eminently and conspicuously a business man's will,

not a poet's.



It mentioned NOT A SINGLE BOOK.



Books were much more precious than swords and silver-gilt

bowls and second-best beds in those days, and when a departing

person owned one he gave it a high place in his will.



The will mentioned NOT A PLAY, NOT A POEM, NOT AN UNFINISHED

LITERARY WORK, NOT A SCRAP OF MANUSCRIPT OF ANY KIND.



Many poets have died poor, but this is the only one in

history that has died THIS poor; the others all left literary

remains behind.  Also a book.  Maybe two.



If Shakespeare had owned a dog--but we not go into that:  we

know he would have mentioned it in his will.  If a good dog,

Susanna would have got it; if an inferior one his wife would have

got a downer interest in it.  I wish he had had a dog, just so we

could see how painstakingly he would have divided that dog among

the family, in his careful business way.



He signed the will in three places.



In earlier years he signed two other official documents.



These five signatures still exist.



There are NO OTHER SPECIMENS OF HIS PENMANSHIP IN EXISTENCE.

Not a line.



Was he prejudiced against the art?  His granddaughter, whom

he loved, was eight years old when he died, yet she had had no

teaching, he left no provision for her education, although he was

rich, and in her mature womanhood she couldn't write and couldn't

tell her husband's manuscript from anybody else's--she thought it

was Shakespeare's.



When Shakespeare died in Stratford, IT WAS NOT AN EVENT.  It

made no more stir in England than the death of any other

forgotten theater-actor would have made.  Nobody came down from

London; there were no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national

tears--there was merely silence, and nothing more.  A striking

contrast with what happened when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon,

and Spenser, and Raleigh, and the other distinguished literary

folk of Shakespeare's time passed from life!  No praiseful voice

was lifted for the lost Bard of Avon; even Ben Jonson waited

seven years before he lifted his.



SO FAR AS ANYBODY ACTUALLY KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, Shakespeare

of Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life.





SO FAR AS ANY ONE KNOWS, HE RECEIVED ONLY ONE LETTER

DURING HIS LIFE.



So far as any one KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, Shakespeare of

Stratford wrote only one poem during his life.  This one is

authentic.  He did write that one--a fact which stands

undisputed; he wrote the whole of it; he wrote the whole of it

out of his own head.  He commanded that this work of art be

engraved upon his tomb, and he was obeyed.  There it abides to

this day.  This is it:





Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones

And curst be he yt moves my bones.





In the list as above set down will be found EVERY POSITIVELY

KNOWN fact of Shakespeare's life, lean and meager as the invoice

is.  Beyond these details we know NOT A THING about him.  All the

rest of his vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is

built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories,

conjectures--an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high

from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential

facts.





IV



Conjectures



The historians "suppose" that Shakespeare attended the Free

School in Stratford from the time he was seven years old till he

was thirteen.  There is no EVIDENCE in existence that he ever

went to school at all.



The historians "infer" that he got his Latin in that school

--the school which they "suppose" he attended.



They "suppose" his father's declining fortunes made it

necessary for him to leave the school they supposed he attended,

and get to work and help support his parents and their ten

children.  But there is no evidence that he ever entered or

returned from the school they suppose he attended.



They "suppose" he assisted his father in the butchering

business; and that, being only a boy, he didn't have to do full-

grown butchering, but only slaughtering calves.  Also, that

whenever he killed a calf he made a high-flown speech over it.

This supposition rests upon the testimony of a man who wasn't

there at the time; a man who got it from a man who could have

been there, but did not say whether he was nor not; and neither

of them thought to mention it for decades, and decades, and

decades, and two more decades after Shakespeare's death (until

old age and mental decay had refreshed and vivified their

memories).  They hadn't two facts in stock about the long-dead

distinguished citizen, but only just the one:  he slaughtered

calves and broke into oratory while he was at it.  Curious.  They

had only one fact, yet the distinguished citizen had spent

twenty-six years in that little town--just half his lifetime.

However, rightly viewed, it was the most important fact, indeed

almost the only important fact, of Shakespeare's life in

Stratford.  Rightly viewed.  For experience is an author's most

valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and

the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.  Rightly

viewed, calf-butchering accounts for "Titus Andronicus," the only

play--ain't it?--that the Stratford Shakespeare ever wrote; and

yet it is the only one everybody tried to chouse him out of, the

Baconians included.



The historians find themselves "justified in believing" that

the young Shakespeare poached upon Sir Thomas Lucy's deer preserves

and got haled before that magistrate for it.  But there is no shred

of respectworthy evidence that anything of the kind happened.



The historians, having argued the thing that MIGHT have

happened into the thing that DID happen, found no trouble in

turning Sir Thomas Lucy into Mr. Justice Shallow.  They have long

ago convinced the world--on surmise and without trustworthy

evidence--that Shallow IS Sir Thomas.



The next addition to the young Shakespeare's Stratford

history comes easy.  The historian builds it out of the surmised

deer-steeling, and the surmised trial before the magistrate, and

the surmised vengeance-prompted satire upon the magistrate in the

play:  result, the young Shakespeare was a wild, wild, wild, oh,

SUCH a wild young scamp, and that gratuitous slander is

established for all time!  It is the very way Professor Osborn

and I built the colossal skeleton brontosaur that stands fifty-

seven feet long and sixteen feet high in the Natural History

Museum, the awe and admiration of all the world, the stateliest

skeleton that exists on the planet.  We had nine bones, and we

built the rest of him out of plaster of Paris.  We ran short of

plaster of Paris, or we'd have built a brontosaur that could sit

down beside the Stratford Shakespeare and none but an expert

could tell which was biggest or contained the most plaster.



Shakespeare pronounced "Venus and Adonis" "the first heir of

his invention," apparently implying that it was his first effort

at literary composition.  He should not have said it.  It has

been an embarrassment to his historians these many, many years.

They have to make him write that graceful and polished and

flawless and beautiful poem before he escaped from Stratford and

his family--1586 or '87--age, twenty-two, or along there; because

within the next five years he wrote five great plays, and could

not have found time to write another line.



It is sorely embarrassing.  If he began to slaughter calves,

and poach deer, and rollick around, and learn English, at the

earliest likely moment--say at thirteen, when he was supposably

wretched from that school where he was supposably storing up

Latin for future literary use--he had his youthful hands full,

and much more than full.  He must have had to put aside his

Warwickshire dialect, which wouldn't be understood in London, and

study English very hard.  Very hard indeed; incredibly hard,

almost, if the result of that labor was to be the smooth and

rounded and flexible and letter-perfect English of the "Venus and

Adonis" in the space of ten years; and at the same time learn

great and fine and unsurpassable literary FORM.



However, it is "conjectured" that he accomplished all this

and more, much more:  learned law and its intricacies; and the

complex procedure of the law-courts; and all about soldiering,

and sailoring, and the manners and customs and ways of royal

courts and aristocratic society; and likewise accumulated in his

one head every kind of knowledge the learned then possessed, and

every kind of humble knowledge possessed by the lowly and the

ignorant; and added thereto a wider and more intimate knowledge

of the world's great literatures, ancient and modern, than was

possessed by any other man of his time--for he was going to make

brilliant and easy and admiration-compelling use of these

splendid treasures the moment he got to London.  And according to

the surmisers, that is what he did.  Yes, although there was no

one in Stratford able to teach him these things, and no library in

the little village to dig them out of.  His father could not read,

and even the surmisers surmise that he did not keep a library.



It is surmised by the biographers that the young Shakespeare

got his vast knowledge of the law and his familiar and accurate

acquaintance with the manners and customs and shop-talk of

lawyers through being for a time the CLERK OF A STRATFORD COURT;

just as a bright lad like me, reared in a village on the banks of

the Mississippi, might become perfect in knowledge of the Bering

Strait whale-fishery and the shop-talk of the veteran exercises

of that adventure-bristling trade through catching catfish with a

"trot-line" Sundays.  But the surmise is damaged by the fact that

there is no evidence--and not even tradition--that the young

Shakespeare was ever clerk of a law-court.



It is further surmised that the young Shakespeare

accumulated his law-treasures in the first years of his sojourn

in London, through "amusing himself" by learning book-law in his

garret and by picking up lawyer-talk and the rest of it through

loitering about the law-courts and listening.  But it is only

surmise; there is no EVIDENCE that he ever did either of those

things.  They are merely a couple of chunks of plaster of Paris.



There is a legend that he got his bread and butter by

holding horses in front of the London theaters, mornings and

afternoons.  Maybe he did.  If he did, it seriously shortened his

law-study hours and his recreation-time in the courts.  In those

very days he was writing great plays, and needed all the time he

could get.  The horse-holding legend ought to be strangled; it

too formidably increases the historian's difficulty in accounting

for the young Shakespeare's erudition--an erudition which he was

acquiring, hunk by hunk and chunk by chunk, every day in those

strenuous times, and emptying each day's catch into next day's

imperishable drama.



He had to acquire a knowledge of war at the same time; and a

knowledge of soldier-people and sailor-people and their ways and

talk; also a knowledge of some foreign lands and their languages:

for he was daily emptying fluent streams of these various knowledges,

too, into his dramas.  How did he acquire these rich assets?



In the usual way:  by surmise.  It is SURMISED that he

traveled in Italy and Germany and around, and qualified himself

to put their scenic and social aspects upon paper; that he

perfected himself in French, Italian, and Spanish on the road;

that he went in Leicester's expedition to the Low Countries, as

soldier or sutler or something, for several months or years--or

whatever length of time a surmiser needs in his business--and

thus became familiar with soldiership and soldier-ways and

soldier-talk and generalship and general-ways and general-talk,

and seamanship and sailor-ways and sailor-talk.



Maybe he did all these things, but I would like to know who

held the horses in the mean time; and who studied the books in

the garret; and who frolicked in the law-courts for recreation.

Also, who did the call-boying and the play-acting.



For he became a call-boy; and as early as '93 he became a

"vagabond"--the law's ungentle term for an unlisted actor; and in

'94 a "regular" and properly and officially listed member of that

(in those days) lightly valued and not much respected profession.



Right soon thereafter he became a stockholder in two

theaters, and manager of them.  Thenceforward he was a busy and

flourishing business man, and was raking in money with both hands

for twenty years.  Then in a noble frenzy of poetic inspiration

he wrote his one poem--his only poem, his darling--and laid him

down and died:





Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones

And curst be he yt moves my bones.





He was probably dead when he wrote it.  Still, this is only

conjecture.  We have only circumstantial evidence.  Internal

evidence.



Shall I set down the rest of the Conjectures which

constitute the giant Biography of William Shakespeare?  It would

strain the Unabridged Dictionary to hold them.  He is a

brontosaur:  nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of

Paris.







 V



"We May Assume"



In the Assuming trade three separate and independent cults

are transacting business.  Two of these cults are known as the

Shakespearites and the Baconians, and I am the other one--the

Brontosaurian.



The Shakespearite knows that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's

Works; the Baconian knows that Francis Bacon wrote them; the

Brontosaurian doesn't really know which of them did it, but is

quite composedly and contentedly sure that Shakespeare DIDN'T,

and strongly suspects that Bacon DID.  We all have to do a good

deal of assuming, but I am fairly certain that in every case I

can call to mind the Baconian assumers have come out ahead of the

Shakespearites.  Both parties handle the same materials, but the

Baconians seem to me to get much more reasonable and rational and

persuasive results out of them than is the case with the

Shakespearites.  The Shakespearite conducts his assuming upon a

definite principle, an unchanging and immutable law:  which is:

2 and 8 and 7 and 14, added together, make 165.  I believe this

to be an error.  No matter, you cannot get a habit-sodden

Shakespearite to cipher-up his materials upon any other basis.

With the Baconian it is different.  If you place before him the

above figures and set him to adding them up, he will never in any

case get more than 45 out of them, and in nine cases out of ten

he will get just the proper 31.



Let me try to illustrate the two systems in a simple and

homely way calculated to bring the idea within the grasp of the

ignorant and unintelligent.  We will suppose a case:  take a lap-

bred, house-fed, uneducated, inexperienced kitten; take a rugged

old Tom that's scarred from stem to rudder-post with the

memorials of strenuous experience, and is so cultured, so

educated, so limitlessly erudite that one may say of him "all

cat-knowledge is his province"; also, take a mouse.  Lock the

three up in a holeless, crackless, exitless prison-cell.  Wait

half an hour, then open the cell, introduce a Shakespearite and a

Baconian, and let them cipher and assume.  The mouse is missing:

the question to be decided is, where is it?  You can guess both

verdicts beforehand.  One verdict will say the kitten contains

the mouse; the other will as certainly say the mouse is in the

tom-cat.



The Shakespearite will Reason like this--(that is not my

word, it is his).  He will say the kitten MAY HAVE BEEN attending

school when nobody was noticing; therefore WE ARE WARRANTED IN

ASSUMING that it did so; also, it COULD HAVE BEEN training in a

court-clerk's office when no one was noticing; since that could

have happened, WE ARE JUSTIFIED IN ASSUMING that it did happen;

it COULD HAVE STUDIED CATOLOGY IN A GARRET when no one was

noticing--therefore it DID; it COULD HAVE attended cat-assizes on

the shed-roof nights, for recreation, when no one was noticing,

and have harvested a knowledge of cat court-forms and cat lawyer-

talk in that way:  it COULD have done it, therefore without a

doubt it DID; it COULD HAVE gone soldiering with a war-tribe when

no one was noticing, and learned soldier-wiles and soldier-ways,

and what to do with a mouse when opportunity offers; the plain

inference, therefore, is that that is what it DID.  Since all

these manifold things COULD have occurred, we have EVERY RIGHT TO

BELIEVE they did occur.  These patiently and painstakingly

accumulated vast acquirements and competences needed but one

thing more--opportunity--to convert themselves into triumphal

action.  The opportunity came, we have the result; BEYOND SHADOW

OF QUESTION the mouse is in the kitten.



It is proper to remark that when we of the three cults plant

a "WE THINK WE MAY ASSUME," we expect it, under careful watering

and fertilizing and tending, to grow up into a strong and hardy

and weather-defying "THERE ISN'T A SHADOW OF A DOUBT" at last--

and it usually happens.



We know what the Baconian's verdict would be:  "THERE IS NOT

A RAG OF EVIDENCE THAT THE KITTEN HAS HAD ANY TRAINING, ANY

EDUCATION, ANY EXPERIENCE QUALIFYING IT FOR THE PRESENT OCCASION,

OR IS INDEED EQUIPPED FOR ANY ACHIEVEMENT ABOVE LIFTING SUCH

UNCLAIMED MILK AS COMES ITS WAY; BUT THERE IS ABUNDANT EVIDENCE--

UNASSAILABLE PROOF, IN FACT--THAT THE OTHER ANIMAL IS EQUIPPED,

TO THE LAST DETAIL, WITH EVERY QUALIFICATION NECESSARY FOR THE

EVENT.  WITHOUT SHADOW OF DOUBT THE TOM-CAT CONTAINS THE MOUSE."





VI



When Shakespeare died, in 1616, great literary productions

attributed to him as author had been before the London world and

in high favor for twenty-four years.  Yet his death was not an

event.  It made no stir, it attracted no attention.  Apparently

his eminent literary contemporaries did not realize that a

celebrated poet had passed from their midst.  Perhaps they knew a

play-actor of minor rank had disappeared, but did not regard him

as the author of his Works.  "We are justified in assuming" this.



His death was not even an event in the little town of

Stratford.  Does this mean that in Stratford he was not regarded

as a celebrity of ANY kind?



"We are privileged to assume"--no, we are indeed OBLIGED to

assume--that such was the case.  He had spent the first twenty-

two or twenty-three years of his life there, and of course knew

everybody and was known by everybody of that day in the town,

including the dogs and the cats and the horses.  He had spent the

last five or six years of his life there, diligently trading in

every big and little thing that had money in it; so we are

compelled to assume that many of the folk there in those said

latter days knew him personally, and the rest by sight and

hearsay.  But not as a CELEBRITY?  Apparently not.  For everybody

soon forgot to remember any contact with him or any incident

connected with him.  The dozens of townspeople, still alive, who

had known of him or known about him in the first twenty-three

years of his life were in the same unremembering condition:  if

they knew of any incident connected with that period of his life

they didn't tell about it.  Would the if they had been asked?  It

is most likely.  Were they asked?  It is pretty apparent that

they were not.  Why weren't they?  It is a very plausible guess

that nobody there or elsewhere was interested to know.



For seven years after Shakespeare's death nobody seems to have been

interested in him.  Then the quarto was published, and Ben Jonson

awoke out of his long indifference and sang a song of praise and

put it in the front of the book.  Then silence fell AGAIN.



For sixty years.  Then inquiries into Shakespeare's Stratford

life began to be made, of Stratfordians.  Of Stratfordians

who had known Shakespeare or had seen him?  No.  Then of

Stratfordians who had seen people who had known or seen

people who had seen Shakespeare?  No.  Apparently the inquires

were only made of Stratfordians who were not Stratfordians of

Shakespeare's day, but later comers; and what they had learned

had come to them from persons who had not seen Shakespeare; and

what they had learned was not claimed as FACT, but only as legend--

dim and fading and indefinite legend; legend of the calf-slaughtering

rank, and not worth remembering either as history or fiction.



Has it ever happened before--or since--that a celebrated

person who had spent exactly half of a fairly long life in the

village where he was born and reared, was able to slip out of

this world and leave that village voiceless and gossipless behind

him--utterly voiceless., utterly gossipless?  And permanently so?

I don't believe it has happened in any case except Shakespeare's.

And couldn't and wouldn't have happened in his case if he had

been regarded as a celebrity at the time of his death.



When I examine my own case--but let us do that, and see if

it will not be recognizable as exhibiting a condition of things

quite likely to result, most likely to result, indeed

substantially SURE to result in the case of a celebrated person,

a benefactor of the human race.  Like me.



My parents brought me to the village of Hannibal, Missouri,

on the banks of the Mississippi, when I was two and a half years

old.  I entered school at five years of age, and drifted from one

school to another in the village during nine and a half years.

Then my father died, leaving his family in exceedingly straitened

circumstances; wherefore my book-education came to a standstill

forever, and I became a printer's apprentice, on board and

clothes, and when the clothes failed I got a hymn-book in place

of them.  This for summer wear, probably.  I lived in Hannibal

fifteen and a half years, altogether, then ran away, according to

the custom of persons who are intending to become celebrated.  I

never lived there afterward.  Four years later I became a "cub"

on a Mississippi steamboat in the St. Louis and New Orleans

trade, and after a year and a half of hard study and hard work

the U.S. inspectors rigorously examined me through a couple of

long sittings and decided that I knew every inch of the

Mississippi--thirteen hundred miles--in the dark and in the day--

as well as a baby knows the way to its mother's paps day or

night.  So they licensed me as a pilot--knighted me, so to speak

--and I rose up clothed with authority, a responsible servant of

the United States Government.



Now then.  Shakespeare died young--he was only fifty-two.

He had lived in his native village twenty-six years, or about

that.  He died celebrated (if you believe everything you read in

the books).  Yet when he died nobody there or elsewhere took any

notice of it; and for sixty years afterward no townsman

remembered to say anything about him or about his life in

Stratford.  When the inquirer came at last he got but one fact--

no, LEGEND--and got that one at second hand, from a person who

had only heard it as a rumor and didn't claim copyright in it as

a production of his own.  He couldn't, very well, for its date

antedated his own birth-date.  But necessarily a number of

persons were still alive in Stratford who, in the days of their

youth, had seen Shakespeare nearly every day in the last five

years of his life, and they would have been able to tell that

inquirer some first-hand things about him if he had in those last

days been a celebrity and therefore a person of interest to the

villagers.  Why did not the inquirer hunt them up and interview

them?  Wasn't it worth while?  Wasn't the matter of sufficient

consequence?  Had the inquirer an engagement to see a dog-fight

and couldn't spare the time?



It all seems to mean that he never had any literary celebrity,

there or elsewhere, and no considerable repute as actor and manager.



Now then, I am away along in life--my seventy-third year

being already well behind me--yet SIXTEEN of my Hannibal

schoolmates are still alive today, and can tell--and do tell--

inquirers dozens and dozens of incidents of their young lives and

mine together; things that happened to us in the morning of life,

in the blossom of our youth, in the good days, the dear days,

"the days when we went gipsying, a long time ago."  Most of them

creditable to me, too.  One child to whom I paid court when she

was five years old and I eight still lives in Hannibal, and she

visited me last summer, traversing the necessary ten or twelve

hundred miles of railroad without damage to her patience or to

her old-young vigor.  Another little lassie to whom I paid

attention in Hannibal when she was nine years old and I the same,

is still alive--in London--and hale and hearty, just as I am.

And on the few surviving steamboats--those lingering ghosts and

remembrancers of great fleets that plied the big river in the

beginning of my water-career--which is exactly as long ago as the

whole invoice of the life-years of Shakespeare numbers--there are

still findable two or three river-pilots who saw me do creditable

things in those ancient days; and several white-headed engineers;

and several roustabouts and mates; and several deck-hands who

used to heave the lead for me and send up on the still night the

"Six--feet--SCANT!" that made me shudder, and the "M-a-r-k--

TWAIN!" that took the shudder away, and presently the darling "By

the d-e-e-p--FOUR!" that lifted me to heaven for joy. [1]  They

know about me, and can tell.  And so do printers, from St. Louis

to New York; and so do newspaper reporters, from Nevada to San

Francisco.  And so do the police.  If Shakespeare had really been

celebrated, like me, Stratford could have told things about him;

and if my experience goes for anything, they'd have done it.



------

1.  Four fathoms--twenty-four feet.





VII



If I had under my superintendence a controversy appointed to

decide whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare or not, I believe

I would place before the debaters only the one question,

WAS SHAKESPEARE EVER A PRACTICING LAWYER? and leave everything

else out.



It is maintained that the man who wrote the plays was not

merely myriad-minded, but also myriad-accomplished:  that he not

only knew some thousands of things about human life in all its

shades and grades, and about the hundred arts and trades and

crafts and professions which men busy themselves in, but that he

could TALK about the men and their grades and trades accurately,

making no mistakes.  Maybe it is so, but have the experts spoken,

or is it only Tom, Dick, and Harry?  Does the exhibit stand upon

wide, and loose, and eloquent generalizing--which is not

evidence, and not proof--or upon details, particulars,

statistics, illustrations, demonstrations?



Experts of unchallengeable authority have testified

definitely as to only one of Shakespeare's multifarious craft-

equipments, so far as my recollections of Shakespeare-Bacon talk

abide with me--his law-equipment.  I do not remember that

Wellington or Napoleon ever examined Shakespeare's battles and

sieges and strategies, and then decided and established for good

and all that they were militarily flawless; I do not remember

that any Nelson, or Drake, or Cook ever examined his seamanship

and said it showed profound and accurate familiarity with that

art; I don't remember that any king or prince or duke has ever

testified that Shakespeare was letter-perfect in his handling of

royal court-manners and the talk and manners of aristocracies; I

don't remember that any illustrious Latinist or Grecian or

Frenchman or Spaniard or Italian has proclaimed him a past-master

in those languages; I don't remember--well, I don't remember that

there is TESTIMONY--great testimony--imposing testimony--

unanswerable and unattackable testimony as to any of

Shakespeare's hundred specialties, except one--the law.



Other things change, with time, and the student cannot trace

back with certainty the changes that various trades and their

processes and technicalities have undergone in the long stretch

of a century or two and find out what their processes and

technicalities were in those early days, but with the law it is

different:  it is mile-stoned and documented all the way back,

and the master of that wonderful trade, that complex and

intricate trade, that awe-compelling trade, has competent ways of

knowing whether Shakespeare-law is good law or not; and whether

his law-court procedure is correct or not, and whether his legal

shop-talk is the shop-talk of a veteran practitioner or only a

machine-made counterfeit of it gathered from books and from

occasional loiterings in Westminster.



Richard H. Dana served two years before the mast, and had

every experience that falls to the lot of the sailor before the

mast of our day.  His sailor-talk flows from his pen with the

sure touch and the ease and confidence of a person who has LIVED

what he is talking about, not gathered it from books and random

listenings.  Hear him:





Having hove short, cast off the gaskets, and made the bunt

of each sail fast by the jigger, with a man on each yard, at the

word the whole canvas of the ship was loosed, and with the

greatest rapidity possible everything was sheeted home and

hoisted up, the anchor tripped and cat-headed, and the ship under

headway.





Again:





The royal yards were all crossed at once, and royals and

sky-sails set, and, as we had the wind free, the booms were run

out, and all were aloft, active as cats, laying out on the yards

and booms, reeving the studding-sail gear; and sail after sail

the captain piled upon her, until she was covered with canvas,

her sails looking like a great white cloud resting upon a black

speck.





Once more.  A race in the Pacific:





Our antagonist was in her best trim.  Being clear of the

point, the breeze became stiff, and the royal-masts bent under

our sails, but we would not take them in until we saw three boys

spring into the rigging of the CALIFORNIA; then they were all

furled at once, but with orders to our boys to stay aloft at the

top-gallant mast-heads and loose them again at the word.  It was

my duty to furl the fore-royal; and while standing by to loose it

again, I had a fine view of the scene.  From where I stood, the

two vessels seemed nothing but spars and sails, while their

narrow decks, far below, slanting over by the force of the wind

aloft, appeared hardly capable of supporting the great fabrics

raised upon them.  The CALIFORNIA was to windward of us, and had

every advantage; yet, while the breeze was stiff we held our own.

As soon as it began to slacken she ranged a little ahead, and the

order was given to loose the royals.  In an instant the gaskets

were off and the bunt dropped.  "Sheet home the fore-royal!"--

"Weather sheet's home!"--"Lee sheet's home!"--"Hoist away, sir!"

is bawled from aloft.  "Overhaul your clew-lines!" shouts the

mate.  "Aye-aye, sir, all clear!"--"Taut leech! belay!  Well the

lee brace; haul taut to windward!" and the royals are set.





What would the captain of any sailing-vessel of our time say

to that?  He would say, "The man that wrote that didn't learn his

trade out of a book, he has BEEN there!"  But would this same

captain be competent to sit in judgment upon Shakespeare's

seamanship--considering the changes in ships and ship-talk that

have necessarily taken place, unrecorded, unremembered, and lost

to history in the last three hundred years?  It is my conviction

that Shakespeare's sailor-talk would be Choctaw to him.  For

instance--from "The Tempest":





MASTER.  Boatswain!



BOATSWAIN.  Here, master; what cheer?



MASTER.  Good, speak to the mariners:  fall to 't, yarely,

or we run ourselves to ground; bestir, bestir!

(ENTER MARINERS.)



BOATSWAIN.  Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts!

yare, yare!  Take in the topsail.  Tend to the master's whistle.

. . .  Down with the topmast! yare! lower, lower!  Bring her to

try wi' the main course. . . .  Lay her a-hold, a-hold!  Set her

two courses.  Off to sea again; lay her off.



That will do, for the present; let us yare a little, now,

for a change.





If a man should write a book and in it make one of his

characters say, "Here, devil, empty the quoins into the standing

galley and the imposing-stone into the hell-box; assemble the

comps around the frisket and let them jeff for takes and be quick

about it," I should recognize a mistake or two in the phrasing,

and would know that the writer was only a printer theoretically,

not practically.



I have been a quartz miner in the silver regions--a pretty

hard life; I know all the palaver of that business:  I know all

about discovery claims and the subordinate claims; I know all

about lodes, ledges, outcroppings, dips, spurs, angles, shafts,

drifts, inclines, levels, tunnels, air-shafts, "horses," clay

casings, granite casings; quartz mills and their batteries;

arastras, and how to charge them with quicksilver and sulphate of

copper; and how to clean them up, and how to reduce the resulting

amalgam in the retorts, and how to cast the bullion into pigs;

and finally I know how to screen tailings, and also how to hunt

for something less robust to do, and find it.  I know the argot

and the quartz-mining and milling industry familiarly; and so

whenever Bret Harte introduces that industry into a story, the

first time one of his miners opens his mouth I recognize from his

phrasing that Harte got the phrasing by listening--like

Shakespeare--I mean the Stratford one--not by experience.  No one

can talk the quartz dialect correctly without learning it with

pick and shovel and drill and fuse.



I have been a surface miner--gold--and I know all its

mysteries, and the dialects that belongs with them; and whenever

Harte introduces that industry into a story I know by the

phrasing of his characters that neither he nor they have ever

served that trade.



I have been a "pocket" miner--a sort of gold mining not

findable in any but one little spot in the world, so far as I

know.  I know how, with horn and water, to find the trail of a

pocket and trace it step by step and stage by stage up the

mountain to its source, and find the compact little nest of

yellow metal reposing in its secret home under the ground.  I

know the language of that trade, that capricious trade, that

fascinating buried-treasure trade, and can catch any writer who

tries to use it without having learned it by the sweat of his

brow and the labor of his hands.



I know several other trades and the argot that goes with

them; and whenever a person tries to talk the talk peculiar to

any of them without having learned it at its source I can trap

him always before he gets far on his road.



And so, as I have already remarked, if I were required to

superintend a Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, I would narrow the

matter down to a single question--the only one, so far as the

previous controversies have informed me, concerning which

illustrious experts of unimpeachable competency have testified:

WAS THE AUTHOR OF SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS A LAWYER?--a lawyer deeply

read and of limitless experience?  I would put aside the guesses

and surmises, and perhapes, and might-have-beens, and could-have-

beens, and must-have-beens, and we-are-justified-in-presumings,

and the rest of those vague specters and shadows and

indefintenesses, and stand or fall, win or lose, by the verdict

rendered by the jury upon that single question.  If the verdict

was Yes, I should feel quite convinced that the Stratford

Shakespeare, the actor, manager, and trader who died so obscure,

so forgotten, so destitute of even village consequence, that

sixty years afterward no fellow-citizen and friend of his later

days remembered to tell anything about him, did not write the Works.



Chapter XIII of THE SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM RESTATED bears the

heading "Shakespeare as a Lawyer," and comprises some fifty pages

of expert testimony, with comments thereon, and I will copy the

first nine, as being sufficient all by themselves, as it seems to

me, to settle the question which I have conceived to be the

master-key to the Shakespeare-Bacon puzzle.







VIII



Shakespeare as a Lawyer [1]





The Plays and Poems of Shakespeare supply ample evidence

that their author not only had a very extensive and accurate

knowledge of law, but that he was well acquainted with the

manners and customs of members of the Inns of Court and with

legal life generally.



"While novelists and dramatists are constantly making

mistakes as to the laws of marriage, of wills, of inheritance, to

Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he expounds it, there can neither

be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error."  Such

was the testimony borne by one of the most distinguished lawyers

of the nineteenth century who was raised to the high office of

Lord Chief Justice in 1850, and subsequently became Lord

Chancellor.  Its weight will, doubtless, be more appreciated by

lawyers than by laymen, for only lawyers know how impossible it

is for those who have not served an apprenticeship to the law to

avoid displaying their ignorance if they venture to employ legal

terms and to discuss legal doctrines.  "There is nothing so

dangerous," wrote Lord Campbell, "as for one not of the craft to

tamper with our freemasonry."  A layman is certain to betray

himself by using some expression which a lawyer would never

employ.  Mr. Sidney Lee himself supplies us with an example of

this.  He writes (p. 164):  "On February 15, 1609, Shakespeare .

. . obtained judgment from a jury against Addenbroke for the

payment of No. 6, and No. 1, 5s. 0d. costs."  Now a lawyer would

never have spoken of obtaining "judgment from a jury," for it is

the function of a jury not to deliver judgment (which is the

prerogative of the court), but to find a verdict on the facts.

The error is, indeed, a venial one, but it is just one of those

little things which at once enable a lawyer to know if the writer

is a layman or "one of the craft."



But when a layman ventures to plunge deeply into legal

subjects, he is naturally apt to make an exhibition of his

incompetence.  "Let a non-professional man, however acute,"

writes Lord Campbell again, "presume to talk law, or to draw

illustrations from legal science in discussing other subjects,

and he will speedily fall into laughable absurdity."



And what does the same high authority say about Shakespeare?

He had "a deep technical knowledge of the law," and an easy

familiarity with "some of the most abstruse proceedings in

English jurisprudence."  And again:  "Whenever he indulges this

propensity he uniformly lays down good law."  Of "Henry IV.,"

Part 2, he says: "If Lord Eldon could be supposed to have written

the play, I do not see how he could be chargeable with having

forgotten any of his law while writing it."  Charles and Mary

Cowden Clarke speak of "the marvelous intimacy which he displays

with legal terms, his frequent adoption of them in illustration,

and his curiously technical knowledge of their form and force."

Malone, himself a lawyer, wrote:  "His knowledge of legal terms

is not merely such as might be acquired by the casual observation

of even his all-comprehending mind; it has the appearance of

technical skill."  Another lawyer and well-known Shakespearean,

Richard Grant White, says:  "No dramatist of the time, not even

Beaumont, who was the younger son of a judge of the Common Pleas,

and who after studying in the Inns of Court abandoned law for the

drama, used legal phrases with Shakespeare's readiness and

exactness.  And the significance of this fact is heightened by

another, that is only to the language of the law that he exhibits

this inclination.  The phrases peculiar to other occupations

serve him on rare occasions by way of description, comparison, or

illustration, generally when something in the scene suggests

them, but legal phrases flow from his pen as part of his

vocabulary and parcel of his thought.  Take the word 'purchase'

for instance, which, in ordinary use, means to acquire by giving

value, but applies in law to all legal modes of obtaining

property except by inheritance or descent, and in this peculiar

sense the word occurs five times in Shakespeare's thirty-four

plays, and only in one single instance in the fifty-four plays of

Beaumont and Fletcher.  It has been suggested that it was in

attendance upon the courts in London that he picked up his legal

vocabulary.  But this supposition not only fails to account for

Shakespeare's peculiar freedom and exactness in the use of that

phraseology, it does not even place him in the way of learning

those terms his use of which is most remarkable, which are not

such as he would have heard at ordinary proceedings at NISI

PRIUS, but such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real

property, 'fine and recovery,' 'statutes merchant,' 'purchase,'

'indenture,' 'tenure,' 'double voucher,' 'fee simple,' 'fee

farm,' 'remainder,' 'reversion,' 'forfeiture,' etc. This

conveyancer's jargon could not have been picked up by hanging

round the courts of law in London two hundred and fifty years

ago, when suits as to the title of real property were

comparatively rare.  And besides, Shakespeare uses his law just

as freely in his first plays, written in his first London years,

as in those produced at a later period.  Just as exactly, too;

for the correctness and propriety with which these terms are

introduced have compelled the admiration of a Chief Justice and a

Lord Chancellor."



Senator Davis wrote:  "We seem to have something more than a

sciolist's temerity of indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar

art.  No legal solecisms will be found.  The abstrusest elements

of the common law are impressed into a disciplined service.  Over

and over again, where such knowledge is unexampled in writers

unlearned in the law, Shakespeare appears in perfect possession

of it.  In the law of real property, its rules of tenure and

descents, its entails, its fines and recoveries, their vouchers

and double vouchers, in the procedure of the Courts, the method

of bringing writs and arrests, the nature of actions, the rules

of pleading, the law of escapes and of contempt of court, in the

principles of evidence, both technical and philosophical, in the

distinction between the temporal and spiritual tribunals, in the

law of attainder and forfeiture, in the requisites of a valid

marriage, in the presumption of legitimacy, in the learning of

the law of prerogative, in the inalienable character of the

Crown, this mastership appears with surprising authority."



To all this testimony (and there is much more which I have

not cited) may now be added that of a great lawyer of our own

times, VIZ.:  Sir James Plaisted Wilde, Q.C. 1855, created a

Baron of the Exchequer in 1860, promoted to the post of Judge-

Ordinary and Judge of the Courts of Probate and Divorce in 1863,

and better known to the world as Lord Penzance, to which dignity

he was raised in 1869.  Lord Penzance, as all lawyers know, and

as the late Mr. Inderwick, K.C., has testified, was one of the

first legal authorities of his day, famous for his "remarkable

grasp of legal principles," and "endowed by nature with a

remarkable facility for marshaling facts, and for a clear

expression of his views."



Lord Penzance speaks of Shakespeare's "perfect familiarity

with not only the principles, axioms, and maxims, but the

technicalities of English law, a knowledge so perfect and

intimate that he was never incorrect and never at fault. . . .

The mode in which this knowledge was pressed into service on all

occasions to express his meaning and illustrate his thoughts was

quite unexampled.  He seems to have had a special pleasure in his

complete and ready mastership of it in all its branches.  As

manifested in the plays, this legal knowledge and learning had

therefore a special character which places it on a wholly

different footing from the rest of the multifarious knowledge

which is exhibited in page after page of the plays.  At every

turn and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile,

or illustration, his mind ever turned FIRST to the law.  He seems

almost to have THOUGHT in legal phrases, the commonest of legal

expressions were ever at the end of his pen in description or

illustration.  That he should have descanted in lawyer language

when he had a forensic subject in hand, such as Shylock's bond,

was to be expected, but the knowledge of law in 'Shakespeare' was

exhibited in a far different manner:  it protruded itself on all

occasions, appropriate or inappropriate, and mingled itself with

strains of thought widely divergent from forensic subjects."

Again:  "To acquire a perfect familiarity with legal principles,

and an accurate and ready use of the technical terms and phrases

not only of the conveyancer's office, but of the pleader's

chambers and the Courts at Westminster, nothing short of

employment in some career involving constant contact with legal

questions and general legal work would be requisite.  But a

continuous employment involves the element of time, and time was

just what the manager of two theaters had not at his disposal.

In what portion of Shakespeare's (i.e., Shakspere's) career would

it be possible to point out that time could be found for the

interposition of a legal employment in the chambers or offices of

practicing lawyers?"



Stratfordians, as is well known, casting about for some

possible explanation of Shakespeare's extraordinary knowledge of

law, have made the suggestion that Shakespeare might,

conceivably, have been a clerk in an attorney's office before he

came to London.  Mr. Collier wrote to Lord Campbell to ask his

opinion as to the probability of this being true.  His answer was

as follows:  "You require us to believe implicitly a fact, of

which, if true, positive and irrefragable evidence in his own

handwriting might have been forthcoming to establish it.  Not

having been actually enrolled as an attorney, neither the records

of the local court at Stratford nor of the superior Court at

Westminster would present his name as being concerned in any suit

as an attorney, but it might reasonably have been expected that

there would be deeds or wills witnessed by him still extant, and

after a very diligent search none such can be discovered."



Upon this Lord Penzance commends:  "It cannot be doubted

that Lord Campbell was right in this.  No young man could have

been at work in an attorney's office without being called upon

continually to act as a witness, and in many other ways leaving

traces of his work and name."  There is not a single fact or

incident in all that is known of Shakespeare, even by rumor or

tradition, which supports this notion of a clerkship.  And after

much argument and surmise which has been indulged in on this subject,

we may, I think, safely put the notion on one side, for no less

an authority than Mr. Grant White says finally that the idea of

his having been clerk to an attorney has been "blown to pieces."



It is altogether characteristic of Mr. Churton Collins that

he, nevertheless, adopts this exploded myth.  "That Shakespeare

was in early life employed as a clerk in an attorney's office may

be correct.  At Stratford there was by royal charter a Court of

Record sitting every fortnight, with six attorneys, besides the

town clerk, belonging to it, and it is certainly not straining

probability to suppose that the young Shakespeare may have had

employment in one of them.  There is, it is true, no tradition to

this effect, but such traditions as we have about Shakespeare's

occupation between the time of leaving school and going to London

are so loose and baseless that no confidence can be placed in

them.  It is, to say the least, more probable that he was in an

attorney's office than that he was a butcher killing calves 'in a

high style,' and making speeches over them."



This is a charming specimen of Stratfordian argument.  There

is, as we have seen, a very old tradition that Shakespeare was a

butcher's apprentice.  John Dowdall, who made a tour of

Warwickshire in 1693, testifies to it as coming from the old

clerk who showed him over the church, and it is unhesitatingly

accepted as true by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps.  (Vol. I, p. 11, and

Vol. II, pp. 71, 72.)  Mr. Sidney Lee sees nothing improbable in

it, and it is supported by Aubrey, who must have written his

account some time before 1680, when his manuscript was completed.

Of the attorney's clerk hypothesis, on the other hand, there is

not the faintest vestige of a tradition.  It has been evolved out

of the fertile imaginations of embarrassed Stratfordians, seeking

for some explanation of the Stratford rustic's marvelous

acquaintance with law and legal terms and legal life.  But Mr.

Churton Collins has not the least hesitation in throwing over the

tradition which has the warrant of antiquity and setting up in

its stead this ridiculous invention, for which not only is there

no shred of positive evidence, but which, as Lord Campbell and

Lord Penzance pointed out, is really put out of court by the

negative evidence, since "no young man could have been at work in

an attorney's office without being called upon continually to act

as a witness, and in many other ways leaving traces of his work

and name."  And as Mr. Edwards further points out, since the day

when Lord Campbell's book was published (between forty and fifty

years ago), "every old deed or will, to say nothing of other

legal papers, dated during the period of William Shakespeare's

youth, has been scrutinized over half a dozen shires, and not one

signature of the young man has been found."



Moreover, if Shakespeare had served as clerk in an attorney's

office it is clear that he must have served for a considerable

period in order to have gained (if, indeed, it is credible that

he could have so gained) his remarkable knowledge of the law.

Can we then for a moment believe that, if this had been so,

tradition would have been absolutely silent on the matter?

That Dowdall's old clerk, over eighty years of age,

should have never heard of it (though he was sure enough

about the butcher's apprentice) and that all the other

ancient witnesses should be in similar ignorance!



But such are the methods of Stratfordian controversy.

Tradition is to be scouted when it is found inconvenient, but

cited as irrefragable truth when it suits the case.  Shakespeare

of Stratford was the author of the Plays and Poems, but the

author of the Plays and Poems could not have been a butcher's

apprentice.  Anyway, therefore, with tradition.  But the author

of the Plays and Poems MUST have had a very large and a very

accurate knowledge of the law.  Therefore, Shakespeare of

Stratford must have been an attorney's clerk!  The method is

simplicity itself.  By similar reasoning Shakespeare has been

made a country schoolmaster, a soldier, a physician, a printer,

and a good many other things besides, according to the

inclination and the exigencies of the commentator.  It would not

be in the least surprising to find that he was studying Latin as

a schoolmaster and law in an attorney's office at the same time.



However, we must do Mr. Collins the justice of saying that

he has fully recognized, what is indeed tolerable obvious, that

Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training.  "It may, of

course, be urged," he writes, "that Shakespeare's knowledge of

medicine, and particularly that branch of it which related to

morbid psychology, is equally remarkable, and that no one has

ever contended that he was a physician.  (Here Mr. Collins is

wrong; that contention also has been put forward.)  It may be

urged that his acquaintance with the technicalities of other

crafts and callings, notably of marine and military affairs, was

also extraordinary, and yet no one has suspected him of being a

sailor or a soldier.  (Wrong again.  Why, even Messrs. Garnett

and Gosse "suspect" that he was a soldier!)  This may be

conceded, but the concession hardly furnishes an analogy.  To

these and all other subjects he recurs occasionally, and in

season, but with reminiscences of the law his memory, as is

abundantly clear, was simply saturated.  In season and out of

season now in manifest, now in recondite application, he presses

it into the service of expression and illustration.  At least a

third of his myriad metaphors are derived from it.  It would

indeed be difficult to find a single act in any of his dramas,

nay, in some of them, a single scene, the diction and imagery of

which are not colored by it.  Much of his law may have been

acquired from three books easily accessible to him--namely,

Tottell's PRECEDENTS (1572), Pulton's STATUTES (1578), and

Fraunce's LAWIER'S LOGIKE (1588), works with which he certainly

seems to have been familiar; but much of it could only have come

from one who had an intimate acquaintance with legal proceedings.

We quite agree with Mr. Castle that Shakespeare's legal knowledge

is not what could have been picked up in an attorney's office,

but could only have been learned by an actual attendance at the

Courts, at a Pleader's Chambers, and on circuit, or by

associating intimately with members of the Bench and Bar."



This is excellent.  But what is Mr. Collins's explanation?

"Perhaps the simplest solution of the problem is to accept the

hypothesis that in early life he was in an attorney's office (!),

that he there contracted a love for the law which never left him,

that as a young man in London he continued to study or dabble in

it for his amusement, to stroll in leisure hours into the Courts,

and to frequent the society of lawyers.  On no other supposition

is it possible to explain the attraction which the law evidently

had for him, and his minute and undeviating accuracy in a subject

where no layman who has indulged in such copious and ostentatious

display of legal technicalities has ever yet succeeded in keeping

himself from tripping."



A lame conclusion.  "No other supposition" indeed! Yes,

there is another, and a very obvious supposition--namely, that

Shakespeare was himself a lawyer, well versed in his trade,

versed in all the ways of the courts, and living in close

intimacy with judges and members of the Inns of Court.



One is, of course, thankful that Mr. Collins has appreciated

the fact that Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training,

but I may be forgiven if I do not attach quite so much importance

to his pronouncements on this branch of the subject as to those

of Malone, Lord Campbell, Judge Holmes, Mr. Castle, K.C., Lord

Penzance, Mr. Grant White, and other lawyers, who have expressed

their opinion on the matter of Shakespeare's legal acquirements.

. . .



Here it may, perhaps, be worth while to quote again from

Lord Penzance's book as to the suggestion that Shakespeare had

somehow or other managed "to acquire a perfect familiarity with

legal principles, and an accurate and ready use of the technical

terms and phrases, not only of the conveyancer's office, but of

the pleader's chambers and the Courts at Westminster."  This, as

Lord Penzance points out, "would require nothing short of

employment in some career involving CONSTANT CONTACT with legal

questions and general legal work."  But "in what portion of

Shakespeare's career would it be possible to point out that time

could be found for the interposition of a legal employment in the

chambers or offices of practicing lawyers? . . .  It is beyond

doubt that at an early period he was called upon to abandon his

attendance at school and assist his father, and was soon after,

at the age of sixteen, bound apprentice to a trade.  While under

the obligation of this bond he could not have pursued any other

employment.  Then he leaves Stratford and comes to London.  He

has to provide himself with the means of a livelihood, and this

he did in some capacity at the theater.  No one doubt that.  The

holding of horses is scouted by many, and perhaps with justice,

as being unlikely and certainly unproved; but whatever the nature

of his employment was at the theater, there is hardly room for

the belief that it could have been other than continuous, for his

progress there was so rapid.  Ere long he had been taken into the

company as an actor, and was soon spoken of as a "Johannes

Factotum.'  His rapid accumulation of wealth speaks volumes for

the constancy and activity of his services.  One fails to see

when there could be a break in the current of his life at this

period of it, giving room or opportunity for legal or indeed any

other employment.  'In 1589,' says Knight, 'we have undeniable

evidence that he had not only a casual engagement, was not only a

salaried servant, as may players were, but was a shareholder in

the company of the Queen's players with other shareholders below

him on the list.'  This (1589) would be within two years after

his arrival in London, which is placed by White and Halliwell-

Phillipps about the year 1587.  The difficulty in supposing that,

starting with a state of ignorance in 1587, when he is supposed

to have come to London, he was induced to enter upon a course of

most extended study and mental culture, is almost insuperable.

Still it was physically possible, provided always that he could

have had access to the needful books.  But this legal training

seems to me to stand on a different footing.  It is not only

unaccountable and incredible, but it is actually negatived by the

known facts of his career."  Lord Penzance then refers to the

fact that "by 1592 (according to the best authority, Mr. Grant

White) several of the plays had been written.  'The Comedy of

Errors' in 1589, 'Love's Labour's Lost' in 1589, 'Two Gentlemen

of Verona' in 1589 or 1590," and so forth, and then asks, "with

this catalogue of dramatic work on hand . . . was it possible

that he could have taken a leading part in the management and

conduct of two theaters, and if Mr. Phillipps is to be relied

upon, taken his share in the performances of the provincial tours

of his company--and at the same time devoted himself to the study

of the law in all its branches so efficiently as to make himself

complete master of its principles and practice, and saturate his

mind with all its most technical terms?"



I have cited this passage from Lord Penzance's book, because

it lay before me, and I had already quoted from it on the matter

of Shakespeare's legal knowledge; but other writers have still

better set forth the insuperable difficulties, as they seem to

me, which beset the idea that Shakespeare might have found them

in some unknown period of early life, amid multifarious other

occupations, for the study of classics, literature, and law, to

say nothing of languages and a few other matters.  Lord Penzance

further asks his readers:  "Did you ever meet with or hear of an

instance in which a young man in this country gave himself up to

legal studies and engaged in legal employments, which is the only

way of becoming familiar with the technicalities of practice, unless

with the view of practicing in that profession?  I do not believe

that it would be easy, or indeed possible, to produce an instance

in which the law has been seriously studied in all its branches,

except as a qualification for practice in the legal profession."





This testimony is so strong, so direct, so authoritative;

and so uncheapened, unwatered by guesses, and surmises, and

maybe-so's, and might-have-beens, and could-have-beens, and must-

have-beens, and the rest of that ton of plaster of Paris out of

which the biographers have built the colossal brontosaur which

goes by the Stratford actor's name, that it quite convinces me

that the man who wrote Shakespeare's Works knew all about law and

lawyers.  Also, that that man could not have been the Stratford

Shakespeare--and WASN'T.



Who did write these Works, then?



I wish I knew.



-----

1.  From Chapter XIII of THE SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM RESTATED.

By George G. Greenwood, M.P.  John Lane Company, publishers.





IX



Did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare's Works?  Nobody knows.



We cannot say we KNOW a thing when that thing has not been

proved.  KNOW is too strong a word to use when the evidence is

not final and absolutely conclusive.  We can infer, if we want

to, like those slaves. . . .  No, I will not write that word,

it is not kind, it is not courteous.  The upholders of the

Stratford-Shakespeare superstition call US the hardest names they

can think of, and they keep doing it all the time; very well,

if they like to descend to that level, let them do it, but I

will not so undignify myself as to follow them.  I cannot call

them harsh names; the most I can do is to indicate them by terms

reflecting my disapproval; and this without malice, without venom.



To resume.  What I was about to say was, those thugs have built

their entire superstition upon INFERENCES, not upon known and

established facts.  It is a weak method, and poor, and I am

glad to be able to say our side never resorts to it while there

is anything else to resort to.



But when we must, we must; and we have now arrived at a

place of that sort. . . .  Since the Stratford Shakespeare

couldn't have written the Works, we infer that somebody did.

Who was it, then?  This requires some more inferring.



Ordinarily when an unsigned poem sweeps across the continent

like a tidal wave whose roar and boom and thunder are made up of

admiration, delight, and applause, a dozen obscure people rise up

and claim the authorship.  Why a dozen, instead of only one or

two?  One reason is, because there are a dozen that are

recognizably competent to do that poem.  Do you remember

"Beautiful Snow"?  Do you remember "Rock Me to Sleep, Mother,

Rock Me to Sleep"?  Do you remember "Backward, turn, backward, O

Time, in thy flight!  Make me a child again just for tonight"?  I

remember them very well.  Their authorship was claimed by most of

the grown-up people who were alive at the time, and every

claimant had one plausible argument in his favor, at least--to

wit, he could have done the authoring; he was competent.



Have the Works been claimed by a dozen?  They haven't.

There was good reason.  The world knows there was but one man on

the planet at the time who was competent--not a dozen, and not

two.  A long time ago the dwellers in a far country used now and

then to find a procession of prodigious footprints stretching

across the plain--footprints that were three miles apart, each

footprint a third of a mile long and a furlong deep, and with

forests and villages mashed to mush in it.  Was there any doubt

as to who made that mighty trail?  Were there a dozen claimants?

Where there two?  No--the people knew who it was that had been

along there:  there was only one Hercules.



There has been only one Shakespeare.  There couldn't be two;

certainly there couldn't be two at the same time.  It takes ages

to bring forth a Shakespeare, and some more ages to match him.

This one was not matched before his time; nor during his time;

and hasn't been matched since.  The prospect of matching him in

our time is not bright.



The Baconians claim that the Stratford Shakespeare was not

qualified to write the Works, and that Francis Bacon was.

They claim that Bacon possessed the stupendous equipment--both

natural and acquired--for the miracle; and that no other

Englishman of his day possessed the like; or, indeed,

anything closely approaching it.



Macaulay, in his Essay, has much to say about the splendor

and horizonless magnitude of that equipment.  Also, he has

synopsized Bacon's history--a thing which cannot be done for the

Stratford Shakespeare, for he hasn't any history to synopsize.

Bacon's history is open to the world, from his boyhood to his

death in old age--a history consisting of known facts, displayed

in minute and multitudinous detail; FACTS, not guesses and

conjectures and might-have-beens.



Whereby it appears that he was born of a race of statesmen,

and had a Lord Chancellor for his father, and a mother who was

"distinguished both as a linguist and a theologian:  she

corresponded in Greek with Bishop Jewell, and translated his

APOLOGIA from the Latin so correctly that neither he nor

Archbishop Parker could suggest a single alteration."  It is the

atmosphere we are reared in that determines how our inclinations

and aspirations shall tend.  The atmosphere furnished by the

parents to the son in this present case was an atmosphere

saturated with learning; with thinkings and ponderings upon deep

subjects; and with polite culture.  It had its natural effect.

Shakespeare of Stratford was reared in a house which had no use

for books, since its owners, his parents, were without education.

This may have had an effect upon the son, but we do not know,

because we have no history of him of an informing sort.  There

were but few books anywhere, in that day, and only the well-to-do

and highly educated possessed them, they being almost confined to

the dead languages.  "All the valuable books then extant in all

the vernacular dialects of Europe would hardly have filled a

single shelf"--imagine it!  The few existing books were in the

Latin tongue mainly.  "A person who was ignorant of it was shut

out from all acquaintance--not merely with Cicero and Virgil, but

with the most interesting memoirs, state papers, and pamphlets of

his own time"--a literature necessary to the Stratford lad, for

his fictitious reputation's sake, since the writer of his Works

would begin to use it wholesale and in a most masterly way before

the lad was hardly more than out of his teens and into his

twenties.



At fifteen Bacon was sent to the university, and he spent

three years there.  Thence he went to Paris in the train of the

English Ambassador, and there he mingled daily with the wise, the

cultured, the great, and the aristocracy of fashion, during

another three years.  A total of six years spent at the sources

of knowledge; knowledge both of books and of men.  The three

spent at the university were coeval with the second and last

three spent by the little Stratford lad at Stratford school

supposedly, and perhapsedly, and maybe, and by inference--with

nothing to infer from.  The second three of the Baconian six were

"presumably" spent by the Stratford lad as apprentice to a

butcher.  That is, the thugs presume it--on no evidence of any

kind.  Which is their way, when they want a historical fact.

Fact and presumption are, for business purposes, all the same to

them.  They know the difference, but they also know how to blink

it.  They know, too, that while in history-building a fact is

better than a presumption, it doesn't take a presumption long to

bloom into a fact when THEY have the handling of it.  They know

by old experience that when they get hold of a presumption-

tadpole he is not going to STAY tadpole in their history-tank;

no, they know how to develop him into the giant four-legged

bullfrog of FACT, and make him sit up on his hams, and puff out

his chin, and look important and insolent and come-to-stay; and

assert his genuine simon-pure authenticity with a thundering

bellow that will convince everybody because it is so loud.

The thug is aware that loudness convinces sixty persons where

reasoning convinces but one.  I wouldn't be a thug, not even if--

but never mind about that, it has nothing to do with the argument,

and it is not noble in spirit besides.  If I am better than a thug,

is the merit mine?  No, it is His.  Then to Him be the praise.

That is the right spirit.



They "presume" the lad severed his "presumed" connection

with the Stratford school to become apprentice to a butcher.

They also "presume" that the butcher was his father.  They don't

know.  There is no written record of it, nor any other actual

evidence.  If it would have helped their case any, they would

have apprenticed him to thirty butchers, to fifty butchers, to a

wilderness of butchers--all by their patented method "presumption."

If it will help their case they will do it yet; and if it will

further help it, they will "presume" that all those butchers

were his father.  And the week after, they will SAY it.

Why, it is just like being the past tense of the compound

reflexive adverbial incandescent hypodermic irregular

accusative Noun of Multitude; which is father to the expression

which the grammarians call Verb.  It is like a whole ancestry,

with only one posterity.



To resume.  Next, the young Bacon took up the study of law,

and mastered that abstruse science.  From that day to the end of

his life he was daily in close contact with lawyers and judges;

not as a casual onlooker in intervals between holding horses in

front of a theater, but as a practicing lawyer--a great and

successful one, a renowned one, a Launcelot of the bar, the most

formidable lance in the high brotherhood of the legal Table

Round; he lived in the law's atmosphere thenceforth, all his

years, and by sheer ability forced his way up its difficult

steeps to its supremest summit, the Lord-Chancellorship, leaving

behind him no fellow-craftsman qualified to challenge his divine

right to that majestic place.



When we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance and the

other illustrious experts upon the legal condition and legal

aptnesses, brilliances, profundities, and felicities so

prodigally displayed in the Plays, and try to fit them to the

historyless Stratford stage-manager, they sound wild, strange,

incredible, ludicrous; but when we put them in the mouth of Bacon

they do not sound strange, they seem in their natural and

rightful place, they seem at home there.  Please turn back and

read them again.  Attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford they are

meaningless, they are inebriate extravagancies--intemperate

admirations of the dark side of the moon, so to speak; attributed

to Bacon, they are admirations of the golden glories of the

moon's front side, the moon at the full--and not intemperate, not

overwrought, but sane and right, and justified.  "At ever turn

and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile, or

illustration, his mind ever turned FIRST to the law; he seems

almost to have THOUGHT in legal phrases; the commonest legal

phrases, the commonest of legal expressions, were ever at the end

of his pen."  That could happen to no one but a person whose

TRADE was the law; it could not happen to a dabbler in it.

Veteran mariners fill their conversation with sailor-phrases and

draw all their similes from the ship and the sea and the storm,

but no mere PASSENGER ever does it, be he of Stratford or

elsewhere; or could do it with anything resembling accuracy, if

he were hardy enough to try.  Please read again what Lord

Campbell and the other great authorities have said about Bacon

when they thought they were saying it about Shakespeare of Stratford.







X



The Rest of the Equipment





The author of the Plays was equipped, beyond every other man

of his time, with wisdom, erudition, imagination, capaciousness

of mind, grace, and majesty of expression.  Everyone one had said

it, no one doubts it.  Also, he had humor, humor in rich

abundance, and always wanting to break out.  We have no evidence

of any kind that Shakespeare of Stratford possessed any of these

gifts or any of these acquirements.  The only lines he ever

wrote, so far as we know, are substantially barren of them--

barren of all of them.





Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones

And curst be he yt moves my bones.

Ben Jonson says of Bacon, as orator:





His language, WHERE HE COULD SPARE AND PASS BY A JEST, was

nobly censorious.  No man ever spoke more neatly, more pressly,

more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in

what he uttered.  No member of his speech but consisted of his

(its) own graces. . . .  The fear of every man that heard him was

lest he should make an end.





From Macaulay:





He continued to distinguish himself in Parliament,

particularly by his exertions in favor of one excellent measure

on which the King's heart was set--the union of England and

Scotland.  It was not difficult for such an intellect to discover

many irresistible arguments in favor of such a scheme.  He

conducted the great case of the POST NATI in the Exchequer

Chamber; and the decision of the judges--a decision the legality

of which may be questioned, but the beneficial effect of which

must be acknowledged--was in a great measure attributed to his

dexterous management.





Again:





While actively engaged in the House of Commons and in the courts

of law, he still found leisure for letters and philosophy.

The noble treatise on the ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING, which at a

later period was expanded into the DE AUGMENTIS, appeared in 1605.



The WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS, a work which, if it had

proceeded from any other writer, would have been considered as a

masterpiece of wit and learning, was printed in 1609.



In the mean time the NOVUM ORGANUM was slowly proceeding.

Several distinguished men of learning had been permitted to see

portions of that extraordinary book, and they spoke with the

greatest admiration of his genius.



Even Sir Thomas Bodley, after perusing the COGITATA ET VISA,

one of the most precious of those scattered leaves out of which

the great oracular volume was afterward made up, acknowledged

that "in all proposals and plots in that book, Bacon showed

himself a master workman"; and that "it could not be gainsaid but

all the treatise over did abound with choice conceits of the

present state of learning, and with worthy contemplations of the

means to procure it."



In 1612 a new edition of the ESSAYS appeared, with additions

surpassing the original collection both in bulk and quality.



Nor did these pursuits distract Bacon's attention from a

work the most arduous, the most glorious, and the most useful

that even his mighty powers could have achieved, "the reducing

and recompiling," to use his own phrase, "of the laws of England."





To serve the exacting and laborious offices of Attorney-General

and Solicitor-General would have satisfied the appetite of any

other man for hard work, but Bacon had to add the vast literary

industries just described, to satisfy his.  He was a born worker.





The service which he rendered to letters during the last

five years of his life, amid ten thousand distractions and

vexations, increase the regret with which we think on the many

years which he had wasted, to use the words of Sir Thomas Bodley,

"on such study as was not worthy such a student."



He commenced a digest of the laws of England, a History of

England under the Princes of the House of Tudor, a body of

National History, a Philosophical Romance.  He made extensive and

valuable additions to his Essays.  He published the inestimable

TREATISE DE AUGMENTIS SCIENTIARUM.





Did these labors of Hercules fill up his time to his contentment,

and quiet his appetite for work?  Not entirely:





The trifles with which he amused himself in hours of pain and languor

bore the mark of his mind.  THE BEST JEST-BOOK IN THE WORLD is that

which he dictated from memory, without referring to any book,

on a day on which illness had rendered him incapable of serious study.





Here are some scattered remarks (from Macaulay) which throw

light upon Bacon, and seem to indicate--and maybe demonstrate--

that he was competent to write the Plays and Poems:





With great minuteness of observation he had an amplitude of comprehension

such as has never yet been vouchsafed to any other human being.





The ESSAYS contain abundant proofs that no nice feature of

character, no peculiarity in the ordering of a house, a garden,

or a court-masque, could escape the notice of one whose mind was

capable of taking in the whole world of knowledge.





His understanding resembled the tent which the fairy

Paribanou gave to Prince Ahmed:  fold it, and it seemed a toy for

the hand of a lady; spread it, and the armies of the powerful

Sultans might repose beneath its shade.





The knowledge in which Bacon excelled all men was a knowledge

of the mutual relations of all departments of knowledge.





In a letter written when he was only thirty-one, to his uncle,

Lord Burleigh, he said, "I have taken all knowledge to be my province."





Though Bacon did not arm his philosophy with the weapons of logic,

he adorned her profusely with all the richest decorations of rhetoric.





The practical faculty was powerful in Bacon; but not, like

his wit, so powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his

reason and to tyrannize over the whole man.





There are too many places in the Plays where this happens.

Poor old dying John of Gaunt volleying second-rate puns at his

own name, is a pathetic instance of it.  "We may assume" that it is

Bacon's fault, but the Stratford Shakespeare has to bear the blame.





No imagination was ever at once so strong and so thoroughly

subjugated.  It stopped at the first check from good sense.





In truth, much of Bacon's life was passed in a visionary world--

amid things as strange as any that are described in the ARABIAN TALES

. . . amid buildings more sumptuous than the palace of Aladdin,

fountains more wonderful than the golden water of Parizade,

conveyances more rapid than the hippogryph of Ruggiero, arms more

formidable than the lance of Astolfo, remedies more effacious

than the balsam of Fierabras.  Yet in his magnificent day-dreams

there was nothing wild--nothing but what sober reason sanctioned.





Bacon's greatest performance is the first book of the NOVUM

ORGANUM. . . .  Every part of it blazes with wit, but with wit

which is employed only to illustrate and decorate truth.  No book

ever made so great a revolution in the mode of thinking,

overthrew so may prejudices, introduced so many new opinions.





But what we most admire is the vast capacity of that

intellect which, without effort, takes in at once all the domains

of science--all the past, the present and the future, all the

errors of two thousand years, all the encouraging signs of the

passing times, all the bright hopes of the coming age.





He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close and

rendering it portable.





His eloquence would alone have entitled him to a high rank

in literature.





It is evident that he had each and every one of the mental gifts

and each and every one of the acquirements that are so prodigally

displayed in the Plays and Poems, and in much higher and richer

degree than any other man of his time or of any previous time.

He was a genius without a mate, a prodigy not matable.  There was

only one of him; the planet could not produce two of him at

one birth, nor in one age.  He could have written anything that

is in the Plays and Poems.  He could have written this:







The cloud-cap'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like an insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff

As dreams are made of, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.





Also, he could have written this, but he refrained:





Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones

And curst be he yt moves my bones.





When a person reads the noble verses about the cloud-cap'd

towers, he ought not to follow it immediately with Good friend

for Iesus sake forbeare, because he will find the transition from

great poetry to poor prose too violent for comfort.  It will give

him a shock.  You never notice how commonplace and unpoetic

gravel is until you bite into a layer of it in a pie.







 XI





Am I trying to convince anybody that Shakespeare did not

write Shakespeare's Works?  Ah, now, what do you take me for?

Would I be so soft as that, after having known the human race

familiarly for nearly seventy-four years?  It would grieve me to

know that any one could think so injuriously of me, so

uncomplimentarily, so unadmiringly of me.  No, no, I am aware

that when even the brightest mind in our world has been trained

up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be

possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely,

dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any

circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity

of that superstition.  I doubt if I could do it myself.  We

always get at second hand our notions about systems of

government; and high tariff and low tariff; and prohibition and

anti-prohibition; and the holiness of peace and the glories of

war; and codes of honor and codes of morals; and approval of the

duel and disapproval of it; and our beliefs concerning the nature

of cats; and our ideas as to whether the murder of helpless wild

animals is base or is heroic; and our preferences in the matter

of religious and political parties; and our acceptance or

rejection of the Shakespeares and the Author Ortons and the Mrs.

Eddys.  We get them all at second hand, we reason none of them

out for ourselves.  It is the way we are made.  It is the way we

are all made, and we can't help it, we can't change it.  And

whenever we have been furnished a fetish, and have been taught to

believe in it, and love it and worship it, and refrain from

examining it, there is no evidence, howsoever clear and strong,

that can persuade us to withdraw from it our loyalty and our

devotion.  In morals, conduct, and beliefs we take the color of

our environment and associations, and it is a color that can

safely be warranted to wash.  Whenever we have been furnished

with a tar baby ostensibly stuffed with jewels, and warned that

it will be dishonorable and irreverent to disembowel it and test

the jewels, we keep our sacrilegious hands off it.  We submit,

not reluctantly, but rather gladly, for we are privately afraid

we should find, upon examination that the jewels are of the sort

that are manufactured at North Adams, Mass.



I haven't any idea that Shakespeare will have to vacate his

pedestal this side of the year 2209.  Disbelief in him cannot

come swiftly, disbelief in a healthy and deeply-loved tar baby

has never been known to disintegrate swiftly; it is a very slow

process.  It took several thousand years to convince our fine

race--including every splendid intellect in it--that there is no

such thing as a witch; it has taken several thousand years to

convince the same fine race--including every splendid intellect

in it--that there is no such person as Satan; it has taken

several centuries to remove perdition from the Protestant

Church's program of post-mortem entertainments; it has taken a

weary long time to persuade American Presbyterians to give up

infant damnation and try to bear it the best they can; and it

looks as if their Scotch brethren will still be burning babies in

the everlasting fires when Shakespeare comes down from his perch.



We are The Reasoning Race.  We can't prove it by the above

examples, and we can't prove it by the miraculous "histories"

built by those Stratfordolaters out of a hatful of rags and a

barrel of sawdust, but there is a plenty of other things we can

prove it by, if I could think of them.  We are The Reasoning

Race, and when we find a vague file of chipmunk-tracks stringing

through the dust of Stratford village, we know by our reasoning

bowers that Hercules has been along there.  I feel that our

fetish is safe for three centuries yet.  The bust, too--there in

the Stratford Church.  The precious bust, the priceless bust, the

calm bust, the serene bust, the emotionless bust, with the dandy

mustache, and the putty face, unseamed of care--that face which

has looked passionlessly down upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred

and fifty years and will still look down upon the awed pilgrim

three hundred more, with the deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle,

subtle expression of a bladder.









XII





Irreverence



One of the most trying defects which I find in these--these

--what shall I call them? for I will not apply injurious epithets

to them, the way they do to us, such violations of courtesy being

repugnant to my nature and my dignity.  The farthest I can go in

that direction is to call them by names of limited reverence--

names merely descriptive, never unkind, never offensive, never

tainted by harsh feeling.  If THEY would do like this, they would

feel better in their hearts.  Very well, then--to proceed.  One

of the most trying defects which I find in these

Stratfordolaters, these Shakesperiods, these thugs, these

bangalores, these troglodytes, these herumfrodites, these

blatherskites, these buccaneers, these bandoleers, is their

spirit of irreverence.  It is detectable in every utterance of

theirs when they are talking about us.  I am thankful that in me

there is nothing of that spirit.  When a thing is sacred to me it

is impossible for me to be irreverent toward it.  I cannot call

to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent,

except towards the things which were sacred to other people.  Am

I in the right?  I think so.  But I ask no one to take my

unsupported word; no, look at the dictionary; let the dictionary

decide.  Here is the definition:





IRREVERENCE.  The quality or condition of irreverence toward

God and sacred things.





What does the Hindu say?  He says it is correct.  He says

irreverence is lack of respect for Vishnu, and Brahma, and

Chrishna, and his other gods, and for his sacred cattle, and for

his temples and the things within them.  He endorses the

definition, you see; and there are 300,000,000 Hindus or their

equivalents back of him.



The dictionary had the acute idea that by using the capital

G it could restrict irreverence to lack of reverence for OUR

Deity and our sacred things, but that ingenious and rather sly

idea miscarried:  for by the simple process of spelling HIS

deities with capitals the Hindu confiscates the definition and

restricts it to his own sects, thus making it clearly compulsory

upon us to revere HIS gods and HIS sacred things, and nobody's

else.  We can't say a word, for he had our own dictionary at his

back, and its decision is final.



This law, reduced to its simplest terms, is this:

1. Whatever is sacred to the Christian must be held in reverence by

everybody else; 2.  whatever is sacred to the Hindu must be held

in reverence by everybody else; 3.  therefore, by consequence,

logically, and indisputably, whatever is sacred to ME must be

held in reverence by everybody else.



Now then, what aggravates me is that these troglodytes and

muscovites and bandoleers and buccaneers are ALSO trying to crowd

in and share the benefit of the law, and compel everybody to

revere their Shakespeare and hold him sacred.  We can't have

that:  there's enough of us already.  If you go on widening and

spreading and inflating the privilege, it will presently come to

be conceded that each man's sacred things are the ONLY ones, and

the rest of the human race will have to be humbly reverent toward

them or suffer for it.  That can surely happen, and when it

happens, the word Irreverence will be regarded as the most

meaningless, and foolish, and self-conceited, and insolent, and

impudent, and dictatorial word in the language.  And people will

say, "Whose business is it what gods I worship and what things

hold sacred?  Who has the right to dictate to my conscience, and

where did he get that right?"



We cannot afford to let that calamity come upon us.  We must

save the word from this destruction.  There is but one way to do

it, and that is to stop the spread of the privilege and strictly

confine it to its present limits--that is, to all the Christian

sects, to all the Hindu sects, and me.  We do not need any more,

the stock is watered enough, just as it is.



It would be better if the privilege were limited to me

alone.  I think so because I am the only sect that knows how to

employ it gently, kindly, charitably, dispassionately.  The other

sects lack the quality of self-restraint.  The Catholic Church

says the most irreverent things about matters which are sacred to

the Protestants, and the Protestant Church retorts in kind about

the confessional and other matters which Catholics hold sacred;

then both of these irreverencers turn upon Thomas Paine and

charge HIM with irreverence.  This is all unfortunate, because it

makes it difficult for students equipped with only a low grade of

mentality to find out what Irreverence really IS.



It will surely be much better all around if the privilege of

regulating the irreverent and keeping them in order shall

eventually be withdrawn from all the sects but me.  Then there

will be no more quarreling, no more bandying of disrespectful

epithets, no more heartburnings.



There will then be nothing sacred involved in this Bacon-

Shakespeare controversy except what is sacred to me.  That will

simplify the whole matter, and trouble will cease.  There will be

irreverence no longer, because I will not allow it.  The first

time those criminals charge me with irreverence for calling their

Stratford myth an Arthur-Orton-Mary-Baker-Thompson-Eddy-Louis-

the-Seventeenth-Veiled-Prophet-of-Khorassan will be the last.

Taught by the methods found effective in extinguishing earlier

offenders by the Inquisition, of holy memory, I shall know how to

quiet them.







XIII





Isn't it odd, when you think of it, that you may list all

the celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen of modern

times, clear back to the first Tudors--a list containing five

hundred names, shall we say?--and you can go to the histories,

biographies, and cyclopedias and learn the particulars of the

lives of every one of them.  Every one of them except one--the

most famous, the most renowned--by far the most illustrious of

them all--Shakespeare!  You can get the details of the lives of

all the celebrated ecclesiastics in the list; all the celebrated

tragedians, comedians, singers, dancers, orators, judges,

lawyers, poets, dramatists, historians, biographers, editors,

inventors, reformers, statesmen, generals, admirals, discoverers,

prize-fighters, murderers, pirates, conspirators, horse-jockeys,

bunco-steerers, misers, swindlers, explorers, adventurers by land

and sea, bankers, financiers, astronomers, naturalists,

claimants, impostors, chemists, biologists, geologists,

philologists, college presidents and professors, architects,

engineers, painters, sculptors, politicians, agitators, rebels,

revolutionists, patriots, demagogues, clowns, cooks, freaks,

philosophers, burglars, highwaymen, journalists, physicians,

surgeons--you can get the life-histories of all of them but ONE.

Just ONE--the most extraordinary and the most celebrated of them all--

Shakespeare!



You may add to the list the thousand celebrated persons

furnished by the rest of Christendom in the past four centuries,

and you can find out the life-histories of all those people, too.

You will then have listed fifteen hundred celebrities, and you

can trace the authentic life-histories of the whole of them.

Save one--far and away the most colossal prodigy of the entire

accumulation--Shakespeare!  About him you can find out NOTHING.

Nothing of even the slightest importance.  Nothing worth the

trouble of stowing away in your memory.  Nothing that even

remotely indicates that he was ever anything more than a

distinctly commonplace person--a manager, an actor of inferior

grade, a small trader in a small village that did not regard him

as a person of any consequence, and had forgotten all about him

before he was fairly cold in his grave.  We can go to the records

and find out the life-history of every renowned RACE-HORSE of

modern times--but not Shakespeare's!  There are many reasons why,

and they have been furnished in cart-loads (of guess and

conjecture) by those troglodytes; but there is one that is worth

all the rest of the reasons put together, and is abundantly

sufficient all by itself--HE HADN'T ANY HISTORY TO RECORD.  There

is no way of getting around that deadly fact.  And no sane way

has yet been discovered of getting around its formidable

significance.



Its quite plain significance--to any but those thugs (I do

not use the term unkindly) is, that Shakespeare had no prominence

while he lived, and none until he had been dead two or three

generations.  The Plays enjoyed high fame from the beginning; and

if he wrote them it seems a pity the world did not find it out.

He ought to have explained that he was the author, and not merely

a NOM DE PLUME for another man to hide behind.  If he had been

less intemperately solicitous about his bones, and more

solicitous about his Works, it would have been better for his

good name, and a kindness to us.  The bones were not important.

They will moulder away, they will turn to dust, but the Works

will endure until the last sun goes down.







Mark Twain.





P.S.  MARCH 25.  About two months ago I was illuminating

this Autobiography with some notions of mine concerning the

Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, and I then took occasion to air

the opinion that the Stratford Shakespeare was a person of no

public consequence or celebrity during his lifetime, but was

utterly obscure and unimportant.  And not only in great London,

but also in the little village where he was born, where he lived

a quarter of a century, and where he died and was buried.  I

argued that if he had been a person of any note at all, aged

villagers would have had much to tell about him many and many a

year after his death, instead of being unable to furnish

inquirers a single fact connected with him.  I believed, and I

still believe, that if he had been famous, his notoriety would

have lasted as long as mine has lasted in my native village out

in Missouri.  It is a good argument, a prodigiously strong one,

and most formidable one for even the most gifted and ingenious

and plausible Stratfordolator to get around or explain away.

Today a Hannibal COURIER-POST of recent date has reached me, with

an article in it which reinforces my contention that a really

celebrated person cannot be forgotten in his village in the short

space of sixty years.  I will make an extract from it:





Hannibal, as a city, may have many sins to answer for, but

ingratitude is not one of them, or reverence for the great men

she has produced, and as the years go by her greatest son, Mark

Twain, or S. L. Clemens as a few of the unlettered call him,

grows in the estimation and regard of the residents of the town

he made famous and the town that made him famous.  His name is

associated with every old building that is torn down to make way

for the modern structures demanded by a rapidly growing city, and

with every hill or cave over or through which he might by any

possibility have roamed, while the many points of interest which

he wove into his stories, such as Holiday Hill, Jackson's Island,

or Mark Twain Cave, are now monuments to his genius.  Hannibal is

glad of any opportunity to do him honor as he had honored her.



So it has happened that the "old timers" who went to school

with Mark or were with him on some of his usual escapades have

been honored with large audiences whenever they were in a

reminiscent mood and condescended to tell of their intimacy with

the ordinary boy who came to be a very extraordinary humorist and

whose every boyish act is now seen to have been indicative of

what was to come.  Like Aunt Becky and Mrs. Clemens, they can now

see that Mark was hardly appreciated when he lived here and that

the things he did as a boy and was whipped for doing were not all

bad, after all.  So they have been in no hesitancy about drawing

out the bad things he did as well as the good in their efforts to

get a "Mark Twain" story, all incidents being viewed in the light

of his present fame, until the volume of "Twainiana" is already

considerable and growing in proportion as the "old timers" drop

away and the stories are retold second and third hand by their

descendants.  With some seventy-three years and living in a villa

instead of a house, he is a fair target, and let him incorporate,

copyright, or patent himself as he will, there are some of his

"works" that will go swooping up Hannibal chimneys as long as

graybeards gather about the fires and begin with, "I've heard

father tell," or possibly, "Once when I."

The Mrs. Clemens referred to is my mother--WAS my mother.



And here is another extract from a Hannibal paper, of date

twenty days ago:



Miss Becca Blankenship died at the home of William Dickason,

408 Rock Street, at 2.30 o'clock yesterday afternoon, aged 72

years.  The deceased was a sister of "Huckleberry Finn," one of

the famous characters in Mark Twain's TOM SAWYER.  She had been a

member of the Dickason family--the housekeeper--for nearly forty-

five years, and was a highly respected lady.  For the past eight

years she had been an invalid, but was as well cared for by

Mr. Dickason and his family as if she had been a near relative.

She was a member of the Park Methodist Church and a Christian woman.





I remember her well.  I have a picture of her in my mind

which was graven there, clear and sharp and vivid, sixty-three

years ago.  She was at that time nine years old, and I was about

eleven.  I remember where she stood, and how she looked; and I

can still see her bare feet, her bare head, her brown face, and

her short tow-linen frock.  She was crying.  What it was about I

have long ago forgotten.  But it was the tears that preserved the

picture for me, no doubt.  She was a good child, I can say that

for her.  She knew me nearly seventy years ago.  Did she forget

me, in the course of time?  I think not.  If she had lived in

Stratford in Shakespeare's time, would she have forgotten him?

Yes.  For he was never famous during his lifetime, he was utterly

obscure in Stratford, and there wouldn't be any occasion to

remember him after he had been dead a week.



"Injun Joe," "Jimmy Finn," and "General Gaines" were

prominent and very intemperate ne'er-do-weels in Hannibal two

generations ago.  Plenty of grayheads there remember them to this

day, and can tell you about them.  Isn't it curious that two

"town drunkards" and one half-breed loafer should leave behind

them, in a remote Missourian village, a fame a hundred times

greater and several hundred times more particularized in the

matter of definite facts than Shakespeare left behind him in the

village where he had lived the half of his lifetime?





Mark Twain.





End of The Project Gutenberg Edition of "What Is Man?" by Mark Twain













THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER



by Mark Twain







CONTENTS:



THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER

A FABLE

HUNTING THE DECEITFUL TURKEY

THE McWILLIAMSES AND THE BURGLAR ALARM









THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER





Chapter 1



It was in 1590--winter.  Austria was far away from the world, and asleep;

it was still the Middle Ages in Austria, and promised to remain so

forever.  Some even set it away back centuries upon centuries and said

that by the mental and spiritual clock it was still the Age of Belief in

Austria.  But they meant it as a compliment, not a slur, and it was so

taken, and we were all proud of it.  I remember it well, although I was

only a boy; and I remember, too, the pleasure it gave me.



Yes, Austria was far from the world, and asleep, and our village was in

the middle of that sleep, being in the middle of Austria.  It drowsed in

peace in the deep privacy of a hilly and woodsy solitude where news from

the world hardly ever came to disturb its dreams, and was infinitely

content.  At its front flowed the tranquil river, its surface painted

with cloud-forms and the reflections of drifting arks and stone-boats;

behind it rose the woody steeps to the base of the lofty precipice; from

the top of the precipice frowned a vast castle, its long stretch of

towers and bastions mailed in vines; beyond the river, a league to the

left, was a tumbled expanse of forest-clothed hills cloven by winding

gorges where the sun never penetrated; and to the right a precipice

overlooked the river, and between it and the hills just spoken of lay a

far-reaching plain dotted with little homesteads nested among orchards

and shade trees.



The whole region for leagues around was the hereditary property of a

prince, whose servants kept the castle always in perfect condition for

occupancy, but neither he nor his family came there oftener than once in

five years.  When they came it was as if the lord of the world had

arrived, and had brought all the glories of its kingdoms along; and when

they went they left a calm behind which was like the deep sleep which

follows an orgy.



Eseldorf was a paradise for us boys.  We were not overmuch pestered with

schooling.  Mainly we were trained to be good Christians; to revere the

Virgin, the Church, and the saints above everything.  Beyond these

matters we were not required to know much; and, in fact, not allowed to.

Knowledge was not good for the common people, and could make them

discontented with the lot which God had appointed for them, and God would

not endure discontentment with His plans.  We had two priests.  One of

them, Father Adolf, was a very zealous and strenuous priest, much

considered.



There may have been better priests, in some ways, than Father Adolf, but

there was never one in our commune who was held in more solemn and awful

respect.  This was because he had absolutely no fear of the Devil.  He

was the only Christian I have ever known of whom that could be truly

said.  People stood in deep dread of him on that account; for they

thought that there must be something supernatural about him, else he

could not be so bold and so confident.  All men speak in bitter

disapproval of the Devil, but they do it reverently, not flippantly; but

Father Adolf's way was very different; he called him by every name he

could lay his tongue to, and it made everyone shudder that heard him; and

often he would even speak of him scornfully and scoffingly; then the

people crossed themselves and went quickly out of his presence, fearing

that something fearful might happen.



Father Adolf had actually met Satan face to face more than once, and

defied him.  This was known to be so.  Father Adolf said it himself.  He

never made any secret of it, but spoke it right out.  And that he was

speaking true there was proof in at least one instance, for on that

occasion he quarreled with the enemy, and intrepidly threw his bottle at

him; and there, upon the wall of his study, was the ruddy splotch where

it struck and broke.



But it was Father Peter, the other priest, that we all loved best and

were sorriest for.  Some people charged him with talking around in

conversation that God was all goodness and would find a way to save all

his poor human children.  It was a horrible thing to say, but there was

never any absolute proof that Father Peter said it; and it was out of

character for him to say it, too, for he was always good and gentle and

truthful.  He wasn't charged with saying it in the pulpit, where all the

congregation could hear and testify, but only outside, in talk; and it is

easy for enemies to manufacture that.  Father Peter had an enemy and a

very powerful one, the astrologer who lived in a tumbled old tower up the

valley, and put in his nights studying the stars.  Every one knew he

could foretell wars and famines, though that was not so hard, for there

was always a war, and generally a famine somewhere.  But he could also

read any man's life through the stars in a big book he had, and find lost

property, and every one in the village except Father Peter stood in awe

of him.  Even Father Adolf, who had defied the Devil, had a wholesome

respect for the astrologer when he came through our village wearing his

tall, pointed hat and his long, flowing robe with stars on it, carrying

his big book, and a staff which was known to have magic power.  The

bishop himself sometimes listened to the astrologer, it was said, for,

besides studying the stars and prophesying, the astrologer made a great

show of piety, which would impress the bishop, of course.



But Father Peter took no stock in the astrologer.  He denounced him

openly as a charlatan--a fraud with no valuable knowledge of any kind, or

powers beyond those of an ordinary and rather inferior human being, which

naturally made the astrologer hate Father Peter and wish to ruin him.  It

was the astrologer, as we all believed, who originated the story about

Father Peter's shocking remark and carried it to the bishop.  It was said

that Father Peter had made the remark to his niece, Marget, though Marget

denied it and implored the bishop to believe her and spare her old uncle

from poverty and disgrace.  But the bishop wouldn't listen.  He suspended

Father Peter indefinitely, though he wouldn't go so far as to

excommunicate him on the evidence of only one witness; and now Father

Peter had been out a couple of years, and our other priest, Father Adolf,

had his flock.



Those had been hard years for the old priest and Marget.  They had been

favorites, but of course that changed when they came under the shadow of

the bishop's frown.  Many of their friends fell away entirely, and the

rest became cool and distant.  Marget was a lovely girl of eighteen when

the trouble came, and she had the best head in the village, and the most

in it.  She taught the harp, and earned all her clothes and pocket money

by her own industry.  But her scholars fell off one by one now; she was

forgotten when there were dances and parties among the youth of the

village; the young fellows stopped coming to the house, all except

Wilhelm Meidling--and he could have been spared; she and her uncle were

sad and forlorn in their neglect and disgrace, and the sunshine was gone

out of their lives.  Matters went worse and worse, all through the two

years.  Clothes were wearing out, bread was harder and harder to get.

And now, at last, the very end was come.  Solomon Isaacs had lent all the

money he was willing to put on the house, and gave notice that to-morrow

he would foreclose.









Chapter 2



Three of us boys were always together, and had been so from the cradle,

being fond of one another from the beginning, and this affection deepened

as the years went on--Nikolaus Bauman, son of the principal judge of the

local court; Seppi Wohlmeyer, son of the keeper of the principal inn, the

"Golden Stag," which had a nice garden, with shade trees reaching down to

the riverside, and pleasure boats for hire; and I was the third--Theodor

Fischer, son of the church organist, who was also leader of the village

musicians, teacher of the violin, composer, tax-collector of the commune,

sexton, and in other ways a useful citizen, and respected by all.  We

knew the hills and the woods as well as the birds knew them; for we were

always roaming them when we had leisure--at least, when we were not

swimming or boating or fishing, or playing on the ice or sliding down

hill.



And we had the run of the castle park, and very few had that.  It was

because we were pets of the oldest servingman in the castle--Felix

Brandt; and often we went there, nights, to hear him talk about old times

and strange things, and to smoke with him (he taught us that) and to

drink coffee; for he had served in the wars, and was at the siege of

Vienna; and there, when the Turks were defeated and driven away, among

the captured things were bags of coffee, and the Turkish prisoners

explained the character of it and how to make a pleasant drink out of it,

and now he always kept coffee by him, to drink himself and also to

astonish the ignorant with.  When it stormed he kept us all night; and

while it thundered and lightened outside he told us about ghosts and

horrors of every kind, and of battles and murders and mutilations, and

such things, and made it pleasant and cozy inside; and he told these

things from his own experience largely.  He had seen many ghosts in his

time, and witches and enchanters, and once he was lost in a fierce storm

at midnight in the mountains, and by the glare of the lightning had seen

the Wild Huntsman rage on the blast with his specter dogs chasing after

him through the driving cloud-rack.  Also he had seen an incubus once,

and several times he had seen the great bat that sucks the blood from the

necks of people while they are asleep, fanning them softly with its wings

and so keeping them drowsy till they die.



He encouraged us not to fear supernatural things, such as ghosts, and

said they did no harm, but only wandered about because they were lonely

and distressed and wanted kindly notice and compassion; and in time we

learned not to be afraid, and even went down with him in the night to the

haunted chamber in the dungeons of the castle.  The ghost appeared only

once, and it went by very dim to the sight and floated noiseless through

the air, and then disappeared; and we scarcely trembled, he had taught us

so well.  He said it came up sometimes in the night and woke him by

passing its clammy hand over his face, but it did him no hurt; it only

wanted sympathy and notice.  But the strangest thing was that he had seen

angels--actual angels out of heaven--and had talked with them.  They had

no wings, and wore clothes, and talked and looked and acted just like any

natural person, and you would never know them for angels except for the

wonderful things they did which a mortal could not do, and the way they

suddenly disappeared while you were talking with them, which was also a

thing which no mortal could do.  And he said they were pleasant and

cheerful, not gloomy and melancholy, like ghosts.



It was after that kind of a talk one May night that we got up next

morning and had a good breakfast with him and then went down and crossed

the bridge and went away up into the hills on the left to a woody hill-

top which was a favorite place of ours, and there we stretched out on the

grass in the shade to rest and smoke and talk over these strange things,

for they were in our minds yet, and impressing us.  But we couldn't

smoke, because we had been heedless and left our flint and steel behind.



Soon there came a youth strolling toward us through the trees, and he sat

down and began to talk in a friendly way, just as if he knew us.  But we

did not answer him, for he was a stranger and we were not used to

strangers and were shy of them.  He had new and good clothes on, and was

handsome and had a winning face and a pleasant voice, and was easy and

graceful and unembarrassed, not slouchy and awkward and diffident, like

other boys.  We wanted to be friendly with him, but didn't know how to

begin.  Then I thought of the pipe, and wondered if it would be taken as

kindly meant if I offered it to him.  But I remembered that we had no

fire, so I was sorry and disappointed.  But he looked up bright and

pleased, and said:



"Fire?  Oh, that is easy; I will furnish it."



I was so astonished I couldn't speak; for I had not said anything.  He

took the pipe and blew his breath on it, and the tobacco glowed red, and

spirals of blue smoke rose up.  We jumped up and were going to run, for

that was natural; and we did run a few steps, although he was yearningly

pleading for us to stay, and giving us his word that he would not do us

any harm, but only wanted to be friends with us and have company.  So we

stopped and stood, and wanted to go back, being full of curiosity and

wonder, but afraid to venture.  He went on coaxing, in his soft,

persuasive way; and when we saw that the pipe did not blow up and nothing

happened, our confidence returned by little and little, and presently our

curiosity got to be stronger than our fear, and we ventured back--but

slowly, and ready to fly at any alarm.



He was bent on putting us at ease, and he had the right art; one could

not remain doubtful and timorous where a person was so earnest and simple

and gentle, and talked so alluringly as he did; no, he won us over, and

it was not long before we were content and comfortable and chatty, and

glad we had found this new friend.  When the feeling of constraint was

all gone we asked him how he had learned to do that strange thing, and he

said he hadn't learned it at all; it came natural to him--like other

things--other curious things.



"What ones?"



"Oh, a number; I don't know how many."



"Will you let us see you do them?"



"Do--please!" the others said.



"You won't run away again?"



"No--indeed we won't.  Please do.  Won't you?"



"Yes, with pleasure; but you mustn't forget your promise, you know."



We said we wouldn't, and he went to a puddle and came back with water in

a cup which he had made out of a leaf, and blew upon it and threw it out,

and it was a lump of ice the shape of the cup.  We were astonished and

charmed, but not afraid any more; we were very glad to be there, and

asked him to go on and do some more things.  And he did.  He said he

would give us any kind of fruit we liked, whether it was in season or

not.  We all spoke at once;



"Orange!"



"Apple!"



"Grapes!"



"They are in your pockets," he said, and it was true.  And they were of

the best, too, and we ate them and wished we had more, though none of us

said so.



"You will find them where those came from," he said, "and everything else

your appetites call for; and you need not name the thing you wish; as

long as I am with you, you have only to wish and find."



And he said true.  There was never anything so wonderful and so

interesting.  Bread, cakes, sweets, nuts--whatever one wanted, it was

there.  He ate nothing himself, but sat and chatted, and did one curious

thing after another to amuse us.  He made a tiny toy squirrel out of

clay, and it ran up a tree and sat on a limb overhead and barked down at

us.  Then he made a dog that was not much larger than a mouse, and it

treed the squirrel and danced about the tree, excited and barking, and

was as alive as any dog could be.  It frightened the squirrel from tree

to tree and followed it up until both were out of sight in the forest.

He made birds out of clay and set them free, and they flew away, singing.



At last I made bold to ask him to tell us who he was.



"An angel," he said, quite simply, and set another bird free and clapped

his hands and made it fly away.



A kind of awe fell upon us when we heard him say that, and we were afraid

again; but he said we need not be troubled, there was no occasion for us

to be afraid of an angel, and he liked us, anyway.  He went on chatting

as simply and unaffectedly as ever; and while he talked he made a crowd

of little men and women the size of your finger, and they went diligently

to work and cleared and leveled off a space a couple of yards square in

the grass and began to build a cunning little castle in it, the women

mixing the mortar and carrying it up the scaffoldings in pails on their

heads, just as our work-women have always done, and the men laying the

courses of masonry--five hundred of these toy people swarming briskly

about and working diligently and wiping the sweat off their faces as

natural as life.  In the absorbing interest of watching those five

hundred little people make the castle grow step by step and course by

course, and take shape and symmetry, that feeling and awe soon passed

away and we were quite comfortable and at home again.  We asked if we

might make some people, and he said yes, and told Seppi to make some

cannon for the walls, and told Nikolaus to make some halberdiers, with

breastplates and greaves and helmets, and I was to make some cavalry,

with horses, and in allotting these tasks he called us by our names, but

did not say how he knew them.  Then Seppi asked him what his own name

was, and he said, tranquilly, "Satan," and held out a chip and caught a

little woman on it who was falling from the scaffolding and put her back

where she belonged, and said, "She is an idiot to step backward like that

and not notice what she is about."



It caught us suddenly, that name did, and our work dropped out of our

hands and broke to pieces--a cannon, a halberdier, and a horse.  Satan

laughed, and asked what was the matter.  I said, "Nothing, only it seemed

a strange name for an angel." He asked why.



"Because it's--it's--well, it's his name, you know."



"Yes--he is my uncle."



He said it placidly, but it took our breath for a moment and made our

hearts beat.  He did not seem to notice that, but mended our halberdiers

and things with a touch, handing them to us finished, and said, "Don't

you remember?--he was an angel himself, once."



"Yes--it's true," said Seppi; "I didn't think of that."



"Before the Fall he was blameless."



"Yes," said Nikolaus, "he was without sin."



"It is a good family--ours," said Satan; "there is not a better.  He is

the only member of it that has ever sinned."



I should not be able to make any one understand how exciting it all was.

You know that kind of quiver that trembles around through you when you

are seeing something so strange and enchanting and wonderful that it is

just a fearful joy to be alive and look at it; and you know how you gaze,

and your lips turn dry and your breath comes short, but you wouldn't be

anywhere but there, not for the world.  I was bursting to ask one

question--I had it on my tongue's end and could hardly hold it back--but

I was ashamed to ask it; it might be a rudeness.  Satan set an ox down

that he had been making, and smiled up at me and said:



"It wouldn't be a rudeness, and I should forgive it if it was.  Have I

seen him?  Millions of times.  From the time that I was a little child a

thousand years old I was his second favorite among the nursery angels of

our blood and lineage--to use a human phrase--yes, from that time until

the Fall, eight thousand years, measured as you count time."



"Eight--thousand!"



"Yes." He turned to Seppi, and went on as if answering something that was

in Seppi's mind: "Why, naturally I look like a boy, for that is what I

am.  With us what you call time is a spacious thing; it takes a long

stretch of it to grow an angel to full age."  There was a question in my

mind, and he turned to me and answered it, "I am sixteen thousand years

old--counting as you count."  Then he turned to Nikolaus and said: "No,

the Fall did not affect me nor the rest of the relationship.  It was only

he that I was named for who ate of the fruit of the tree and then

beguiled the man and the woman with it.  We others are still ignorant of

sin; we are not able to commit it; we are without blemish, and shall

abide in that estate always.  We--" Two of the little workmen were

quarreling, and in buzzing little bumblebee voices they were cursing and

swearing at each other; now came blows and blood; then they locked

themselves together in a life-and-death struggle.  Satan reached out his

hand and crushed the life out of them with his fingers, threw them away,

wiped the red from his fingers on his handkerchief, and went on talking

where he had left off: "We cannot do wrong; neither have we any

disposition to do it, for we do not know what it is."



It seemed a strange speech, in the circumstances, but we barely noticed

that, we were so shocked and grieved at the wanton murder he had

committed--for murder it was, that was its true name, and it was without

palliation or excuse, for the men had not wronged him in any way.  It

made us miserable, for we loved him, and had thought him so noble and so

beautiful and gracious, and had honestly believed he was an angel; and to

have him do this cruel thing--ah, it lowered him so, and we had had such

pride in him.  He went right on talking, just as if nothing had happened,

telling about his travels, and the interesting things he had seen in the

big worlds of our solar systems and of other solar systems far away in

the remotenesses of space, and about the customs of the immortals that

inhabit them, somehow fascinating us, enchanting us, charming us in spite

of the pitiful scene that was now under our eyes, for the wives of the

little dead men had found the crushed and shapeless bodies and were

crying over them, and sobbing and lamenting, and a priest was kneeling

there with his hands crossed upon his breast, praying; and crowds and

crowds of pitying friends were massed about them, reverently uncovered,

with their bare heads bowed, and many with the tears running down--a

scene which Satan paid no attention to until the small noise of the

weeping and praying began to annoy him, then he reached out and took the

heavy board seat out of our swing and brought it down and mashed all

those people into the earth just as if they had been flies, and went on

talking just the same.



An angel, and kill a priest!  An angel who did not know how to do wrong,

and yet destroys in cold blood hundreds of helpless poor men and women

who had never done him any harm!  It made us sick to see that awful deed,

and to think that none of those poor creatures was prepared except the

priest, for none of them had ever heard a mass or seen a church.  And we

were witnesses; we had seen these murders done and it was our duty to

tell, and let the law take its course.



But he went on talking right along, and worked his enchantments upon us

again with that fatal music of his voice.  He made us forget everything;

we could only listen to him, and love him, and be his slaves, to do with

us as he would.  He made us drunk with the joy of being with him, and of

looking into the heaven of his eyes, and of feeling the ecstasy that

thrilled along our veins from the touch of his hand.









Chapter 3



The Stranger had seen everything, he had been everywhere, he knew

everything, and he forgot nothing.  What another must study, he learned

at a glance; there were no difficulties for him.  And he made things live

before you when he told about them.  He saw the world made; he saw Adam

created; he saw Samson surge against the pillars and bring the temple

down in ruins about him; he saw Caesar's death; he told of the daily life

in heaven; he had seen the damned writhing in the red waves of hell; and

he made us see all these things, and it was as if we were on the spot and

looking at them with our own eyes.  And we felt them, too, but there was

no sign that they were anything to him beyond mere entertainments.  Those

visions of hell, those poor babes and women and girls and lads and men

shrieking and supplicating in anguish--why, we could hardly bear it, but

he was as bland about it as if it had been so many imitation rats in an

artificial fire.



And always when he was talking about men and women here on the earth and

their doings--even their grandest and sublimest--we were secretly

ashamed, for his manner showed that to him they and their doings were of

paltry poor consequence; often you would think he was talking about

flies, if you didn't know.  Once he even said, in so many words, that our

people down here were quite interesting to him, notwithstanding they were

so dull and ignorant and trivial and conceited, and so diseased and

rickety, and such a shabby, poor, worthless lot all around.  He said it

in a quite matter-of-course way and without bitterness, just as a person

might talk about bricks or manure or any other thing that was of no

consequence and hadn't feelings.  I could see he meant no offense, but in

my thoughts I set it down as not very good manners.



"Manners!" he said.  "Why, it is merely the truth, and truth is good

manners; manners are a fiction.  The castle is done.  Do you like it?"



Any one would have been obliged to like it.  It was lovely to look at, it

was so shapely and fine, and so cunningly perfect in all its particulars,

even to the little flags waving from the turrets.  Satan said we must put

the artillery in place now, and station the halberdiers and display the

cavalry.  Our men and horses were a spectacle to see, they were so little

like what they were intended for; for, of course, we had no art in making

such things.  Satan said they were the worst he had seen; and when he

touched them and made them alive, it was just ridiculous the way they

acted, on account of their legs not being of uniform lengths.  They

reeled and sprawled around as if they were drunk, and endangered

everybody's lives around them, and finally fell over and lay helpless and

kicking.  It made us all laugh, though it was a shameful thing to see.

The guns were charged with dirt, to fire a salute, but they were so

crooked and so badly made that they all burst when they went off, and

killed some of the gunners and crippled the others.  Satan said we would

have a storm now, and an earthquake, if we liked, but we must stand off a

piece, out of danger.  We wanted to call the people away, too, but he

said never mind them; they were of no consequence, and we could make

more, some time or other, if we needed them.



A small storm-cloud began to settle down black over the castle, and the

miniature lightning and thunder began to play, and the ground to quiver,

and the wind to pipe and wheeze, and the rain to fall, and all the people

flocked into the castle for shelter.  The cloud settled down blacker and

blacker, and one could see the castle only dimly through it; the

lightning blazed out flash upon flash and pierced the castle and set it

on fire, and the flames shone out red and fierce through the cloud, and

the people came flying out, shrieking, but Satan brushed them back,

paying no attention to our begging and crying and imploring; and in the

midst of the howling of the wind and volleying of the thunder the

magazine blew up, the earthquake rent the ground wide, and the castle's

wreck and ruin tumbled into the chasm, which swallowed it from sight, and

closed upon it, with all that innocent life, not one of the five hundred

poor creatures escaping.  Our hearts were broken; we could not keep from

crying.



"Don't cry," Satan said; "they were of no value."



"But they are gone to hell!"



"Oh, it is no matter; we can make plenty more."



It was of no use to try to move him; evidently he was wholly without

feeling, and could not understand.  He was full of bubbling spirits, and

as gay as if this were a wedding instead of a fiendish massacre.  And he

was bent on making us feel as he did, and of course his magic

accomplished his desire.  It was no trouble to him; he did whatever he

pleased with us.  In a little while we were dancing on that grave, and he

was playing to us on a strange, sweet instrument which he took out of his

pocket; and the music--but there is no music like that, unless perhaps in

heaven, and that was where he brought it from, he said.  It made one mad,

for pleasure; and we could not take our eyes from him, and the looks that

went out of our eyes came from our hearts, and their dumb speech was

worship.  He brought the dance from heaven, too, and the bliss of

paradise was in it.



Presently he said he must go away on an errand.  But we could not bear

the thought of it, and clung to him, and pleaded with him to stay; and

that pleased him, and he said so, and said he would not go yet, but would

wait a little while and we would sit down and talk a few minutes longer;

and he told us Satan was only his real name, and he was to be known by it

to us alone, but he had chosen another one to be called by in the

presence of others; just a common one, such as people have--Philip Traum.



It sounded so odd and mean for such a being!  But it was his decision,

and we said nothing; his decision was sufficient.



We had seen wonders this day; and my thoughts began to run on the

pleasure it would be to tell them when I got home, but he noticed those

thoughts, and said:



"No, all these matters are a secret among us four.  I do not mind your

trying to tell them, if you like, but I will protect your tongues, and

nothing of the secret will escape from them."



It was a disappointment, but it couldn't be helped, and it cost us a sigh

or two.  We talked pleasantly along, and he was always reading our

thoughts and responding to them, and it seemed to me that this was the

most wonderful of all the things he did, but he interrupted my musings

and said:



"No, it would be wonderful for you, but it is not wonderful for me.  I am

not limited like you.  I am not subject to human conditions.  I can

measure and understand your human weaknesses, for I have studied them;

but I have none of them.  My flesh is not real, although it would seem

firm to your touch; my clothes are not real; I am a spirit.  Father Peter

is coming."  We looked around, but did not see any one.  "He is not in

sight yet, but you will see him presently."



"Do you know him, Satan?"



"No."



"Won't you talk with him when he comes?  He is not ignorant and dull,

like us, and he would so like to talk with you.  Will you?"



"Another time, yes, but not now.  I must go on my errand after a little.

There he is now; you can see him.  Sit still, and don't say anything."



We looked up and saw Father Peter approaching through the chestnuts.  We

three were sitting together in the grass, and Satan sat in front of us in

the path.  Father Peter came slowly along with his head down, thinking,

and stopped within a couple of yards of us and took off his hat and got

out his silk handkerchief, and stood there mopping his face and looking

as if he were going to speak to us, but he didn't.  Presently he

muttered, "I can't think what brought me here; it seems as if I were in

my study a minute ago--but I suppose I have been dreaming along for an

hour and have come all this stretch without noticing; for I am not myself

in these troubled days."  Then he went mumbling along to himself and

walked straight through Satan, just as if nothing were there.  It made us

catch our breath to see it.  We had the impulse to cry out, the way you

nearly always do when a startling thing happens, but something

mysteriously restrained us and we remained quiet, only breathing fast.

Then the trees hid Father Peter after a little, and Satan said:



"It is as I told you--I am only a spirit."



"Yes, one perceives it now," said Nikolaus, "but we are not spirits.  It

is plain he did not see you, but were we invisible, too?  He looked at

us, but he didn't seem to see us."



"No, none of us was visible to him, for I wished it so."



It seemed almost too good to be true, that we were actually seeing these

romantic and wonderful things, and that it was not a dream.  And there he

sat, looking just like anybody--so natural and simple and charming, and

chatting along again the same as ever, and--well, words cannot make you

understand what we felt.  It was an ecstasy; and an ecstasy is a thing

that will not go into words; it feels like music, and one cannot tell

about music so that another person can get the feeling of it.  He was

back in the old ages once more now, and making them live before us.  He

had seen so much, so much!  It was just a wonder to look at him and try

to think how it must seem to have such experience behind one.



But it made you seem sorrowfully trivial, and the creature of a day, and

such a short and paltry day, too.  And he didn't say anything to raise up

your drooping pride--no, not a word.  He always spoke of men in the same

old indifferent way--just as one speaks of bricks and manure-piles and

such things; you could see that they were of no consequence to him, one

way or the other.  He didn't mean to hurt us, you could see that; just as

we don't mean to insult a brick when we disparage it; a brick's emotions

are nothing to us; it never occurs to us to think whether it has any or

not.



Once when he was bunching the most illustrious kings and conquerors and

poets and prophets and pirates and beggars together--just a brick-pile--I

was shamed into putting in a word for man, and asked him why he made so

much difference between men and himself.  He had to struggle with that a

moment; he didn't seem to understand how I could ask such a strange

question.  Then he said:



"The difference between man and me?  The difference between a mortal and

an immortal?  between a cloud and a spirit?" He picked up a wood-louse

that was creeping along a piece of bark: "What is the difference between

Caesar and this?"



I said, "One cannot compare things which by their nature and by the

interval between them are not comparable."



"You have answered your own question," he said.  "I will expand it.  Man

is made of dirt--I saw him made.  I am not made of dirt.  Man is a museum

of diseases, a home of impurities; he comes to-day and is gone to-morrow;

he begins as dirt and departs as stench; I am of the aristocracy of the

Imperishables.  And man has the Moral Sense.  You understand?  He has the

Moral Sense.  That would seem to be difference enough between us, all by

itself."



He stopped there, as if that settled the matter.  I was sorry, for at

that time I had but a dim idea of what the Moral Sense was.  I merely

knew that we were proud of having it, and when he talked like that about

it, it wounded me, and I felt as a girl feels who thinks her dearest

finery is being admired and then overhears strangers making fun of it.

For a while we were all silent, and I, for one, was depressed.  Then

Satan began to chat again, and soon he was sparkling along in such a

cheerful and vivacious vein that my spirits rose once more.  He told some

very cunning things that put us in a gale of laughter; and when he was

telling about the time that Samson tied the torches to the foxes' tails

and set them loose in the Philistines' corn, and Samson sitting on the

fence slapping his thighs and laughing, with the tears running down his

cheeks, and lost his balance and fell off the fence, the memory of that

picture got him to laughing, too, and we did have a most lovely and jolly

time.  By and by he said:



"I am going on my errand now."



"Don't!" we all said.  "Don't go; stay with us.  You won't come back."



"Yes, I will; I give you my word."



"When?  To-night?  Say when."



"It won't be long.  You will see."



"We like you."



"And I you.  And as a proof of it I will show you something fine to see.

Usually when I go I merely vanish; but now I will dissolve myself and let

you see me do it."



He stood up, and it was quickly finished.  He thinned away and thinned

away until he was a soap-bubble, except that he kept his shape.  You

could see the bushes through him as clearly as you see things through a

soap-bubble, and all over him played and flashed the delicate iridescent

colors of the bubble, and along with them was that thing shaped like a

window-sash which you always see on the globe of the bubble.  You have

seen a bubble strike the carpet and lightly bound along two or three

times before it bursts.  He did that.  He sprang--touched the grass--

bounded--floated along--touched again--and so on, and presently exploded

--puff! and in his place was vacancy.



It was a strange and beautiful thing to see.  We did not say anything,

but sat wondering and dreaming and blinking; and finally Seppi roused up

and said, mournfully sighing:



"I suppose none of it has happened."



Nikolaus sighed and said about the same.



I was miserable to hear them say it, for it was the same cold fear that

was in my own mind.  Then we saw poor old Father Peter wandering along

back, with his head bent down, searching the ground.  When he was pretty

close to us he looked up and saw us, and said, "How long have you been

here, boys?"



"A little while, Father."



"Then it is since I came by, and maybe you can help me.  Did you come up

by the path?"



"Yes, Father."



"That is good.  I came the same way.  I have lost my wallet.  There

wasn't much in it, but a very little is much to me, for it was all I had.

I suppose you haven't seen anything of it?"



"No, Father, but we will help you hunt."



"It is what I was going to ask you.  Why, here it is!"



We hadn't noticed it; yet there it lay, right where Satan stood when he

began to melt--if he did melt and it wasn't a delusion.  Father Peter

picked it up and looked very much surprised.



"It is mine," he said, "but not the contents.  This is fat; mine was

flat; mine was light; this is heavy."  He opened it; it was stuffed as

full as it could hold with gold coins.  He let us gaze our fill; and of

course we did gaze, for we had never seen so much money at one time

before.  All our mouths came open to say "Satan did it!" but nothing came

out.  There it was, you see--we couldn't tell what Satan didn't want

told; he had said so himself.



"Boys, did you do this?"



It made us laugh.  And it made him laugh, too, as soon as he thought what

a foolish question it was.



"Who has been here?"



Our mouths came open to answer, but stood so for a moment, because we

couldn't say "Nobody," for it wouldn't be true, and the right word didn't

seem to come; then I thought of the right one, and said it:



"Not a human being."



"That is so," said the others, and let their mouths go shut.



"It is not so," said Father Peter, and looked at us very severely.  "I

came by here a while ago, and there was no one here, but that is nothing;

some one has been here since.  I don't mean to say that the person didn't

pass here before you came, and I don't mean to say you saw him, but some

one did pass, that I know.  On your honor--you saw no one?"



"Not a human being."



"That is sufficient; I know you are telling me the truth."



He began to count the money on the path, we on our knees eagerly helping

to stack it in little piles.



"It's eleven hundred ducats odd!" he said.  "Oh dear!  if it were only

mine--and I need it so!" and his voice broke and his lips quivered.



"It is yours, sir!" we all cried out at once, "every heller!"



"No--it isn't mine.  Only four ducats are mine; the rest...!" He fell to

dreaming, poor old soul, and caressing some of the coins in his hands,

and forgot where he was, sitting there on his heels with his old gray

head bare; it was pitiful to see.  "No," he said, waking up, "it isn't

mine.  I can't account for it.  I think some enemy...  it must be a

trap."



Nikolaus said: "Father Peter, with the exception of the astrologer you

haven't a real enemy in the village--nor Marget, either.  And not even a

half-enemy that's rich enough to chance eleven hundred ducats to do you a

mean turn.  I'll ask you if that's so or not?"



He couldn't get around that argument, and it cheered him up.  "But it

isn't mine, you see--it isn't mine, in any case."



He said it in a wistful way, like a person that wouldn't be sorry, but

glad, if anybody would contradict him.



"It is yours, Father Peter, and we are witness to it.  Aren't we, boys?"



"Yes, we are--and we'll stand by it, too."



"Bless your hearts, you do almost persuade me; you do, indeed.  If I had

only a hundred-odd ducats of it!  The house is mortgaged for it, and

we've no home for our heads if we don't pay to-morrow.  And that four

ducats is all we've got in the--"



"It's yours, every bit of it, and you've got to take it--we are bail that

it's all right.  Aren't we, Theodor?  Aren't we, Seppi?"



We two said yes, and Nikolaus stuffed the money back into the shabby old

wallet and made the owner take it.  So he said he would use two hundred

of it, for his house was good enough security for that, and would put the

rest at interest till the rightful owner came for it; and on our side we

must sign a paper showing how he got the money--a paper to show to the

villagers as proof that he had not got out of his troubles dishonestly.









Chapter 4



It made immense talk next day, when Father Peter paid Solomon Isaacs in

gold and left the rest of the money with him at interest.  Also, there

was a pleasant change; many people called at the house to congratulate

him, and a number of cool old friends became kind and friendly again;

and, to top all, Marget was invited to a party.



And there was no mystery; Father Peter told the whole circumstance just

as it happened, and said he could not account for it, only it was the

plain hand of Providence, so far as he could see.



One or two shook their heads and said privately it looked more like the

hand of Satan; and really that seemed a surprisingly good guess for

ignorant people like that.  Some came slyly buzzing around and tried to

coax us boys to come out and "tell the truth;" and promised they wouldn't

ever tell, but only wanted to know for their own satisfaction, because

the whole thing was so curious.  They even wanted to buy the secret, and

pay money for it; and if we could have invented something that would

answer--but we couldn't; we hadn't the ingenuity, so we had to let the

chance go by, and it was a pity.



We carried that secret around without any trouble, but the other one, the

big one, the splendid one, burned the very vitals of us, it was so hot to

get out and we so hot to let it out and astonish people with it.  But we

had to keep it in; in fact, it kept itself in.  Satan said it would, and

it did.  We went off every day and got to ourselves in the woods so that

we could talk about Satan, and really that was the only subject we

thought of or cared anything about; and day and night we watched for him

and hoped he would come, and we got more and more impatient all the time.

We hadn't any interest in the other boys any more, and wouldn't take part

in their games and enterprises.  They seemed so tame, after Satan; and

their doings so trifling and commonplace after his adventures in

antiquity and the constellations, and his miracles and meltings and

explosions, and all that.



During the first day we were in a state of anxiety on account of one

thing, and we kept going to Father Peter's house on one pretext or

another to keep track of it.  That was the gold coin; we were afraid it

would crumble and turn to dust, like fairy money.  If it did--But it

didn't.  At the end of the day no complaint had been made about it, so

after that we were satisfied that it was real gold, and dropped the

anxiety out of our minds.



There was a question which we wanted to ask Father Peter, and finally we

went there the second evening, a little diffidently, after drawing

straws, and I asked it as casually as I could, though it did not sound as

casual as I wanted, because I didn't know how:



"What is the Moral Sense, sir?"



He looked down, surprised, over his great spectacles, and said, "Why, it

is the faculty which enables us to distinguish good from evil."



It threw some light, but not a glare, and I was a little disappointed,

also to some degree embarrassed.  He was waiting for me to go on, so, in

default of anything else to say, I asked, "Is it valuable?"



"Valuable?  Heavens! lad, it is the one thing that lifts man above the

beasts that perish and makes him heir to immortality!"



This did not remind me of anything further to say, so I got out, with the

other boys, and we went away with that indefinite sense you have often

had of being filled but not fatted.  They wanted me to explain, but I was

tired.



We passed out through the parlor, and there was Marget at the spinnet

teaching Marie Lueger.  So one of the deserting pupils was back; and an

influential one, too; the others would follow.  Marget jumped up and ran

and thanked us again, with tears in her eyes--this was the third time--

for saving her and her uncle from being turned into the street, and we

told her again we hadn't done it; but that was her way, she never could

be grateful enough for anything a person did for her; so we let her have

her say.  And as we passed through the garden, there was Wilhelm Meidling

sitting there waiting, for it was getting toward the edge of the evening,

and he would be asking Marget to take a walk along the river with him

when she was done with the lesson.  He was a young lawyer, and succeeding

fairly well and working his way along, little by little.  He was very

fond of Marget, and she of him.  He had not deserted along with the

others, but had stood his ground all through.  His faithfulness was not

lost on Marget and her uncle.  He hadn't so very much talent, but he was

handsome and good, and these are a kind of talents themselves and help

along.  He asked us how the lesson was getting along, and we told him it

was about done.  And maybe it was so; we didn't know anything about it,

but we judged it would please him, and it did, and didn't cost us

anything.









Chapter 5



On the fourth day comes the astrologer from his crumbling old tower up

the valley, where he had heard the news, I reckon.  He had a private talk

with us, and we told him what we could, for we were mightily in dread of

him.  He sat there studying and studying awhile to himself; then he

asked:



"How many ducats did you say?"



"Eleven hundred and seven, sir."



Then he said, as if he were talking to himself: "It is ver-y singular.

Yes...  very strange.  A curious coincidence."  Then he began to ask

questions, and went over the whole ground from the beginning, we

answering.  By and by he said: "Eleven hundred and six ducats.  It is a

large sum."



"Seven," said Seppi, correcting him.



"Oh, seven, was it?  Of course a ducat more or less isn't of consequence,

but you said eleven hundred and six before."



It would not have been safe for us to say he was mistaken, but we knew he

was.  Nikolaus said, "We ask pardon for the mistake, but we meant to say

seven."



"Oh, it is no matter, lad; it was merely that I noticed the discrepancy.

It is several days, and you cannot be expected to remember precisely.

One is apt to be inexact when there is no particular circumstance to

impress the count upon the memory."



"But there was one, sir," said Seppi, eagerly.



"What was it, my son?" asked the astrologer, indifferently.



"First, we all counted the piles of coin, each in turn, and all made it

the same--eleven hundred and six.  But I had slipped one out, for fun,

when the count began, and now I slipped it back and said, 'I think there

is a mistake--there are eleven hundred and seven; let us count again.'

We did, and of course I was right.  They were astonished; then I told how

it came about."



The astrologer asked us if this was so, and we said it was.



"That settles it," he said.  "I know the thief now.  Lads, the money was

stolen."



Then he went away, leaving us very much troubled, and wondering what he

could mean.  In about an hour we found out; for by that time it was all

over the village that Father Peter had been arrested for stealing a great

sum of money from the astrologer.  Everybody's tongue was loose and

going.  Many said it was not in Father Peter's character and must be a

mistake; but the others shook their heads and said misery and want could

drive a suffering man to almost anything.  About one detail there were no

differences; all agreed that Father Peter's account of how the money came

into his hands was just about unbelievable--it had such an impossible

look.  They said it might have come into the astrologer's hands in some

such way, but into Father Peter's, never!  Our characters began to suffer

now.  We were Father Peter's only witnesses; how much did he probably pay

us to back up his fantastic tale?  People talked that kind of talk to us

pretty freely and frankly, and were full of scoffings when we begged them

to believe really we had told only the truth.  Our parents were harder on

us than any one else.  Our fathers said we were disgracing our families,

and they commanded us to purge ourselves of our lie, and there was no

limit to their anger when we continued to say we had spoken true.  Our

mothers cried over us and begged us to give back our bribe and get back

our honest names and save our families from shame, and come out and

honorably confess.  And at last we were so worried and harassed that we

tried to tell the whole thing, Satan and all--but no, it wouldn't come

out.  We were hoping and longing all the time that Satan would come and

help us out of our trouble, but there was no sign of him.



Within an hour after the astrologer's talk with us, Father Peter was in

prison and the money sealed up and in the hands of the officers of the

law.  The money was in a bag, and Solomon Isaacs said he had not touched

it since he had counted it; his oath was taken that it was the same

money, and that the amount was eleven hundred and seven ducats.  Father

Peter claimed trial by the ecclesiastical court, but our other priest,

Father Adolf, said an ecclesiastical court hadn't jurisdiction over a

suspended priest.  The bishop upheld him.  That settled it; the case

would go to trial in the civil court.  The court would not sit for some

time to come.  Wilhelm Meidling would be Father Peter's lawyer and do the

best he could, of course, but he told us privately that a weak case on

his side and all the power and prejudice on the other made the outlook

bad.



So Marget's new happiness died a quick death.  No friends came to condole

with her, and none were expected; an unsigned note withdrew her

invitation to the party.  There would be no scholars to take lessons.

How could she support herself?  She could remain in the house, for the

mortgage was paid off, though the government and not poor Solomon Isaacs

had the mortgage-money in its grip for the present.  Old Ursula, who was

cook, chambermaid, housekeeper, laundress, and everything else for Father

Peter, and had been Marget's nurse in earlier years, said God would

provide.  But she said that from habit, for she was a good Christian.

She meant to help in the providing, to make sure, if she could find a

way.



We boys wanted to go and see Marget and show friendliness for her, but

our parents were afraid of offending the community and wouldn't let us.

The astrologer was going around inflaming everybody against Father Peter,

and saying he was an abandoned thief and had stolen eleven hundred and

seven gold ducats from him.  He said he knew he was a thief from that

fact, for it was exactly the sum he had lost and which Father Peter

pretended he had "found."



In the afternoon of the fourth day after the catastrophe old Ursula

appeared at our house and asked for some washing to do, and begged my

mother to keep this secret, to save Marget's pride, who would stop this

project if she found it out, yet Marget had not enough to eat and was

growing weak.  Ursula was growing weak herself, and showed it; and she

ate of the food that was offered her like a starving person, but could

not be persuaded to carry any home, for Marget would not eat charity

food.  She took some clothes down to the stream to wash them, but we saw

from the window that handling the bat was too much for her strength; so

she was called back and a trifle of money offered her, which she was

afraid to take lest Marget should suspect; then she took it, saying she

would explain that she found it in the road.  To keep it from being a lie

and damning her soul, she got me to drop it while she watched; then she

went along by there and found it, and exclaimed with surprise and joy,

and picked it up and went her way.  Like the rest of the village, she

could tell every-day lies fast enough and without taking any precautions

against fire and brimstone on their account; but this was a new kind of

lie, and it had a dangerous look because she hadn't had any practice in

it.  After a week's practice it wouldn't have given her any trouble.  It

is the way we are made.



I was in trouble, for how would Marget live?  Ursula could not find a

coin in the road every day--perhaps not even a second one.  And I was

ashamed, too, for not having been near Marget, and she so in need of

friends; but that was my parents' fault, not mine, and I couldn't help

it.



I was walking along the path, feeling very down-hearted, when a most

cheery and tingling freshening-up sensation went rippling through me, and

I was too glad for any words, for I knew by that sign that Satan was by.

I had noticed it before.  Next moment he was alongside of me and I was

telling him all my trouble and what had been happening to Marget and her

uncle.  While we were talking we turned a curve and saw old Ursula

resting in the shade of a tree, and she had a lean stray kitten in her

lap and was petting it.  I asked her where she got it, and she said it

came out of the woods and followed her; and she said it probably hadn't

any mother or any friends and she was going to take it home and take care

of it.  Satan said:



"I understand you are very poor.  Why do you want to add another mouth to

feed?  Why don't you give it to some rich person?"



Ursula bridled at this and said: "Perhaps you would like to have it.  You

must be rich, with your fine clothes and quality airs."  Then she sniffed

and said: "Give it to the rich--the idea!  The rich don't care for

anybody but themselves; it's only the poor that have feeling for the

poor, and help them.  The poor and God.  God will provide for this

kitten."



"What makes you think so?"



Ursula's eyes snapped with anger.  "Because I know it!" she said.  "Not a

sparrow falls to the ground without His seeing it."



"But it falls, just the same.  What good is seeing it fall?"



Old Ursula's jaws worked, but she could not get any word out for the

moment, she was so horrified.  When she got her tongue, she stormed out,

"Go about your business, you puppy, or I will take a stick to you!"



I could not speak, I was so scared.  I knew that with his notions about

the human race Satan would consider it a matter of no consequence to

strike her dead, there being "plenty more"; but my tongue stood still, I

could give her no warning.  But nothing happened; Satan remained

tranquil--tranquil and indifferent.  I suppose he could not be insulted

by Ursula any more than the king could be insulted by a tumble-bug.  The

old woman jumped to her feet when she made her remark, and did it as

briskly as a young girl.  It had been many years since she had done the

like of that.  That was Satan's influence; he was a fresh breeze to the

weak and the sick, wherever he came.  His presence affected even the lean

kitten, and it skipped to the ground and began to chase a leaf.  This

surprised Ursula, and she stood looking at the creature and nodding her

head wonderingly, her anger quite forgotten.



"What's come over it?" she said.  "Awhile ago it could hardly walk."



"You have not seen a kitten of that breed before," said Satan.



Ursula was not proposing to be friendly with the mocking stranger, and

she gave him an ungentle look and retorted: "Who asked you to come here

and pester me, I'd like to know?  And what do you know about what I've

seen and what I haven't seen?"



"You haven't seen a kitten with the hair-spines on its tongue pointing to

the front, have you?"



"No--nor you, either."



"Well, examine this one and see."



Ursula was become pretty spry, but the kitten was spryer, and she could

not catch it, and had to give it up.  Then Satan said:



"Give it a name, and maybe it will come."



Ursula tried several names, but the kitten was not interested.



"Call it Agnes.  Try that."



The creature answered to the name and came.  Ursula examined its tongue.

"Upon my word, it's true!" she said.  "I have not seen this kind of a cat

before.  Is it yours?"



"No."



"Then how did you know its name so pat?"



"Because all cats of that breed are named Agnes; they will not answer to

any other."



Ursula was impressed.  "It is the most wonderful thing!" Then a shadow of

trouble came into her face, for her superstitions were aroused, and she

reluctantly put the creature down, saying: "I suppose I must let it go; I

am not afraid--no, not exactly that, though the priest--well, I've heard

people--indeed, many people...  And, besides, it is quite well now and

can take care of itself."  She sighed, and turned to go, murmuring: "It

is such a pretty one, too, and would be such company--and the house is so

sad and lonesome these troubled days...  Miss Marget so mournful and just

a shadow, and the old master shut up in jail."



"It seems a pity not to keep it," said Satan.



Ursula turned quickly--just as if she were hoping some one would

encourage her.



"Why?" she asked, wistfully.



"Because this breed brings luck."



"Does it?  Is it true?  Young man, do you know it to be true?  How does

it bring luck?"



"Well, it brings money, anyway."



Ursula looked disappointed.  "Money?  A cat bring money?  The idea!  You

could never sell it here; people do not buy cats here; one can't even

give them away."  She turned to go.



"I don't mean sell it.  I mean have an income from it.  This kind is

called the Lucky Cat.  Its owner finds four silver groschen in his pocket

every morning."



I saw the indignation rising in the old woman's face.  She was insulted.

This boy was making fun of her.  That was her thought.  She thrust her

hands into her pockets and straightened up to give him a piece of her

mind.  Her temper was all up, and hot.  Her mouth came open and let out

three words of a bitter sentence,...  then it fell silent, and the anger

in her face turned to surprise or wonder or fear, or something, and she

slowly brought out her hands from her pockets and opened them and held

them so.  In one was my piece of money, in the other lay four silver

groschen.  She gazed a little while, perhaps to see if the groschen would

vanish away; then she said, fervently:



"It's true--it's true--and I'm ashamed and beg forgiveness, O dear master

and benefactor!" And she ran to Satan and kissed his hand, over and over

again, according to the Austrian custom.



In her heart she probably believed it was a witch-cat and an agent of the

Devil; but no matter, it was all the more certain to be able to keep its

contract and furnish a daily good living for the family, for in matters

of finance even the piousest of our peasants would have more confidence

in an arrangement with the Devil than with an archangel.  Ursula started

homeward, with Agnes in her arms, and I said I wished I had her privilege

of seeing Marget.



Then I caught my breath, for we were there.  There in the parlor, and

Marget standing looking at us, astonished.  She was feeble and pale, but

I knew that those conditions would not last in Satan's atmosphere, and it

turned out so.  I introduced Satan--that is, Philip Traum--and we sat

down and talked.  There was no constraint.  We were simple folk, in our

village, and when a stranger was a pleasant person we were soon friends.

Marget wondered how we got in without her hearing us.  Traum said the

door was open, and we walked in and waited until she should turn around

and greet us.  This was not true; no door was open; we entered through

the walls or the roof or down the chimney, or somehow; but no matter,

what Satan wished a person to believe, the person was sure to believe,

and so Marget was quite satisfied with that explanation.  And then the

main part of her mind was on Traum, anyway; she couldn't keep her eyes

off him, he was so beautiful.  That gratified me, and made me proud.  I

hoped he would show off some, but he didn't.  He seemed only interested

in being friendly and telling lies.  He said he was an orphan.  That made

Marget pity him.  The water came into her eyes.  He said he had never

known his mamma; she passed away while he was a young thing; and said his

papa was in shattered health, and had no property to speak of--in fact,

none of any earthly value--but he had an uncle in business down in the

tropics, and he was very well off and had a monopoly, and it was from

this uncle that he drew his support.  The very mention of a kind uncle

was enough to remind Marget of her own, and her eyes filled again.  She

said she hoped their two uncles would meet, some day.  It made me

shudder.  Philip said he hoped so, too; and that made me shudder again.



"Maybe they will," said Marget.  "Does your uncle travel much?"



"Oh yes, he goes all about; he has business everywhere."



And so they went on chatting, and poor Marget forgot her sorrow for one

little while, anyway.  It was probably the only really bright and cheery

hour she had known lately.  I saw she liked Philip, and I knew she would.

And when he told her he was studying for the ministry I could see that

she liked him better than ever.  And then, when he promised to get her

admitted to the jail so that she could see her uncle, that was the

capstone.  He said he would give the guards a little present, and she

must always go in the evening after dark, and say nothing, "but just show

this paper and pass in, and show it again when you come out"--and he

scribbled some queer marks on the paper and gave it to her, and she was

ever so thankful, and right away was in a fever for the sun to go down;

for in that old, cruel time prisoners were not allowed to see their

friends, and sometimes they spent years in the jails without ever seeing

a friendly face.  I judged that the marks on the paper were an

enchantment, and that the guards would not know what they were doing, nor

have any memory of it afterward; and that was indeed the way of it.

Ursula put her head in at the door now and said:



"Supper's ready, miss."  Then she saw us and looked frightened, and

motioned me to come to her, which I did, and she asked if we had told

about the cat.  I said no, and she was relieved, and said please don't;

for if Miss Marget knew, she would think it was an unholy cat and would

send for a priest and have its gifts all purified out of it, and then

there wouldn't be any more dividends.  So I said we wouldn't tell, and

she was satisfied.  Then I was beginning to say good-by to Marget, but

Satan interrupted and said, ever so politely--well, I don't remember just

the words, but anyway he as good as invited himself to supper, and me,

too.  Of course Marget was miserably embarrassed, for she had no reason

to suppose there would be half enough for a sick bird.  Ursula heard him,

and she came straight into the room, not a bit pleased.  At first she was

astonished to see Marget looking so fresh and rosy, and said so; then she

spoke up in her native tongue, which was Bohemian, and said--as I learned

afterward--"Send him away, Miss Marget; there's not victuals enough."



Before Marget could speak, Satan had the word, and was talking back to

Ursula in her own language--which was a surprise to her, and for her

mistress, too.  He said, "Didn't I see you down the road awhile ago?"



"Yes, sir."



"Ah, that pleases me; I see you remember me."  He stepped to her and

whispered: "I told you it is a Lucky Cat.  Don't be troubled; it will

provide."



That sponged the slate of Ursula's feelings clean of its anxieties, and a

deep, financial joy shone in her eyes.  The cat's value was augmenting.

It was getting full time for Marget to take some sort of notice of

Satan's invitation, and she did it in the best way, the honest way that

was natural to her.  She said she had little to offer, but that we were

welcome if we would share it with her.



We had supper in the kitchen, and Ursula waited at table.  A small fish

was in the frying-pan, crisp and brown and tempting, and one could see

that Marget was not expecting such respectable food as this.  Ursula

brought it, and Marget divided it between Satan and me, declining to take

any of it herself; and was beginning to say she did not care for fish to-

day, but she did not finish the remark.  It was because she noticed that

another fish had appeared in the pan.  She looked surprised, but did not

say anything.  She probably meant to inquire of Ursula about this later.

There were other surprises: flesh and game and wines and fruits--things

which had been strangers in that house lately; but Marget made no

exclamations, and now even looked unsurprised, which was Satan's

influence, of course.  Satan talked right along, and was entertaining,

and made the time pass pleasantly and cheerfully; and although he told a

good many lies, it was no harm in him, for he was only an angel and did

not know any better.  They do not know right from wrong; I knew this,

because I remembered what he had said about it.  He got on the good side

of Ursula.  He praised her to Marget, confidentially, but speaking just

loud enough for Ursula to hear.  He said she was a fine woman, and he

hoped some day to bring her and his uncle together.  Very soon Ursula was

mincing and simpering around in a ridiculous girly way, and smoothing out

her gown and prinking at herself like a foolish old hen, and all the time

pretending she was not hearing what Satan was saying.  I was ashamed, for

it showed us to be what Satan considered us, a silly race and trivial.

Satan said his uncle entertained a great deal, and to have a clever woman

presiding over the festivities would double the attractions of the place.



"But your uncle is a gentleman, isn't he?" asked Marget.



"Yes," said Satan indifferently; "some even call him a Prince, out of

compliment, but he is not bigoted; to him personal merit is everything,

rank nothing."



My hand was hanging down by my chair; Agnes came along and licked it; by

this act a secret was revealed.  I started to say, "It is all a mistake;

this is just a common, ordinary cat; the hair-needles on her tongue point

inward, not outward."  But the words did not come, because they couldn't.

Satan smiled upon me, and I understood.



When it was dark Marget took food and wine and fruit, in a basket, and

hurried away to the jail, and Satan and I walked toward my home.  I was

thinking to myself that I should like to see what the inside of the jail

was like; Satan overheard the thought, and the next moment we were in the

jail.  We were in the torture-chamber, Satan said.  The rack was there,

and the other instruments, and there was a smoky lantern or two hanging

on the walls and helping to make the place look dim and dreadful.  There

were people there--and executioners--but as they took no notice of us, it

meant that we were invisible.  A young man lay bound, and Satan said he

was suspected of being a heretic, and the executioners were about to

inquire into it.  They asked the man to confess to the charge, and he

said he could not, for it was not true.  Then they drove splinter after

splinter under his nails, and he shrieked with the pain.  Satan was not

disturbed, but I could not endure it, and had to be whisked out of there.

I was faint and sick, but the fresh air revived me, and we walked toward

my home.  I said it was a brutal thing.



"No, it was a human thing.  You should not insult the brutes by such a

misuse of that word; they have not deserved it," and he went on talking

like that.  "It is like your paltry race--always lying, always claiming

virtues which it hasn't got, always denying them to the higher animals,

which alone possess them.  No brute ever does a cruel thing--that is the

monopoly of those with the Moral Sense.  When a brute inflicts pain he

does it innocently; it is not wrong; for him there is no such thing as

wrong.  And he does not inflict pain for the pleasure of inflicting it--

only man does that.  Inspired by that mongrel Moral Sense of his!  A

sense whose function is to distinguish between right and wrong, with

liberty to choose which of them he will do.  Now what advantage can he

get out of that?  He is always choosing, and in nine cases out of ten he

prefers the wrong.  There shouldn't be any wrong; and without the Moral

Sense there couldn't be any.  And yet he is such an unreasoning creature

that he is not able to perceive that the Moral Sense degrades him to the

bottom layer of animated beings and is a shameful possession.  Are you

feeling better?  Let me show you something."









Chapter 6



In a moment we were in a French village.  We walked through a great

factory of some sort, where men and women and little children were

toiling in heat and dirt and a fog of dust; and they were clothed in

rags, and drooped at their work, for they were worn and half starved, and

weak and drowsy.  Satan said:



"It is some more Moral Sense.  The proprietors are rich, and very holy;

but the wage they pay to these poor brothers and sisters of theirs is

only enough to keep them from dropping dead with hunger.  The work-hours

are fourteen per day, winter and summer--from six in the morning till

eight at night--little children and all.  And they walk to and from the

pigsties which they inhabit--four miles each way, through mud and slush,

rain, snow, sleet, and storm, daily, year in and year out.  They get four

hours of sleep.  They kennel together, three families in a room, in

unimaginable filth and stench; and disease comes, and they die off like

flies.  Have they committed a crime, these mangy things?  No.  What have

they done, that they are punished so?  Nothing at all, except getting

themselves born into your foolish race.  You have seen how they treat a

misdoer there in the jail; now you see how they treat the innocent and

the worthy.  Is your race logical?  Are these ill-smelling innocents

better off than that heretic?  Indeed, no; his punishment is trivial

compared with theirs.  They broke him on the wheel and smashed him to

rags and pulp after we left, and he is dead now, and free of your

precious race; but these poor slaves here--why, they have been dying for

years, and some of them will not escape from life for years to come.  It

is the Moral Sense which teaches the factory proprietors the difference

between right and wrong--you perceive the result.  They think themselves

better than dogs.  Ah, you are such an illogical, unreasoning race!  And

paltry--oh, unspeakably!"



Then he dropped all seriousness and just overstrained himself making fun

of us, and deriding our pride in our warlike deeds, our great heroes, our

imperishable fames, our mighty kings, our ancient aristocracies, our

venerable history--and laughed and laughed till it was enough to make a

person sick to hear him; and finally he sobered a little and said, "But,

after all, it is not all ridiculous; there is a sort of pathos about it

when one remembers how few are your days, how childish your pomps, and

what shadows you are!"



Presently all things vanished suddenly from my sight, and I knew what it

meant.  The next moment we were walking along in our village; and down

toward the river I saw the twinkling lights of the Golden Stag.  Then in

the dark I heard a joyful cry:



"He's come again!"



It was Seppi Wohlmeyer.  He had felt his blood leap and his spirits rise

in a way that could mean only one thing, and he knew Satan was near,

although it was too dark to see him.  He came to us, and we walked along

together, and Seppi poured out his gladness like water.  It was as if he

were a lover and had found his sweetheart who had been lost.  Seppi was a

smart and animated boy, and had enthusiasm and expression, and was a

contrast to Nikolaus and me.  He was full of the last new mystery, now--

the disappearance of Hans Oppert, the village loafer.  People were

beginning to be curious about it, he said.  He did not say anxious--

curious was the right word, and strong enough.  No one had seen Hans for

a couple of days.



"Not since he did that brutal thing, you know," he said.



"What brutal thing?" It was Satan that asked.



"Well, he is always clubbing his dog, which is a good dog, and his only

friend, and is faithful, and loves him, and does no one any harm; and two

days ago he was at it again, just for nothing--just for pleasure--and the

dog was howling and begging, and Theodor and I begged, too, but he

threatened us, and struck the dog again with all his might and knocked

one of his eyes out, and he said to us, 'There, I hope you are satisfied

now; that's what you have got for him by your damned meddling'--and he

laughed, the heartless brute."  Seppi's voice trembled with pity and

anger.  I guessed what Satan would say, and he said it.



"There is that misused word again--that shabby slander.  Brutes do not

act like that, but only men."



"Well, it was inhuman, anyway."



"No, it wasn't, Seppi; it was human--quite distinctly human.  It is not

pleasant to hear you libel the higher animals by attributing to them

dispositions which they are free from, and which are found nowhere but in

the human heart.  None of the higher animals is tainted with the disease

called the Moral Sense.  Purify your language, Seppi; drop those lying

phrases out of it."



He spoke pretty sternly--for him--and I was sorry I hadn't warned Seppi

to be more particular about the word he used.  I knew how he was feeling.

He would not want to offend Satan; he would rather offend all his kin.

There was an uncomfortable silence, but relief soon came, for that poor

dog came along now, with his eye hanging down, and went straight to

Satan, and began to moan and mutter brokenly, and Satan began to answer

in the same way, and it was plain that they were talking together in the

dog language.  We all sat down in the grass, in the moonlight, for the

clouds were breaking away now, and Satan took the dog's head in his lap

and put the eye back in its place, and the dog was comfortable, and he

wagged his tail and licked Satan's hand, and looked thankful and said the

same; I knew he was saying it, though I did not understand the words.

Then the two talked together a bit, and Satan said:



"He says his master was drunk."



"Yes, he was," said we.



"And an hour later he fell over the precipice there beyond the Cliff

Pasture."



"We know the place; it is three miles from here."



"And the dog has been often to the village, begging people to go there,

but he was only driven away and not listened to."



We remembered it, but hadn't understood what he wanted.



"He only wanted help for the man who had misused him, and he thought only

of that, and has had no food nor sought any.  He has watched by his

master two nights.  What do you think of your race?  Is heaven reserved

for it, and this dog ruled out, as your teachers tell you?  Can your race

add anything to this dog's stock of morals and magnanimities?" He spoke

to the creature, who jumped up, eager and happy, and apparently ready for

orders and impatient to execute them.  "Get some men; go with the dog--he

will show you that carrion; and take a priest along to arrange about

insurance, for death is near."



With the last word he vanished, to our sorrow and disappointment.  We got

the men and Father Adolf, and we saw the man die.  Nobody cared but the

dog; he mourned and grieved, and licked the dead face, and could not be

comforted.  We buried him where he was, and without a coffin, for he had

no money, and no friend but the dog.  If we had been an hour earlier the

priest would have been in time to send that poor creature to heaven, but

now he was gone down into the awful fires, to burn forever.  It seemed

such a pity that in a world where so many people have difficulty to put

in their time, one little hour could not have been spared for this poor

creature who needed it so much, and to whom it would have made the

difference between eternal joy and eternal pain.  It gave an appalling

idea of the value of an hour, and I thought I could never waste one again

without remorse and terror.  Seppi was depressed and grieved, and said it

must be so much better to be a dog and not run such awful risks.  We took

this one home with us and kept him for our own.  Seppi had a very good

thought as we were walking along, and it cheered us up and made us feel

much better.  He said the dog had forgiven the man that had wronged him

so, and maybe God would accept that absolution.



There was a very dull week, now, for Satan did not come, nothing much was

going on, and we boys could not venture to go and see Marget, because the

nights were moonlit and our parents might find us out if we tried.  But

we came across Ursula a couple of times taking a walk in the meadows

beyond the river to air the cat, and we learned from her that things were

going well.  She had natty new clothes on and bore a prosperous look.

The four groschen a day were arriving without a break, but were not being

spent for food and wine and such things--the cat attended to all that.



Marget was enduring her forsakenness and isolation fairly well, all

things considered, and was cheerful, by help of Wilhelm Meidling.  She

spent an hour or two every night in the jail with her uncle, and had

fattened him up with the cat's contributions.  But she was curious to

know more about Philip Traum, and hoped I would bring him again.  Ursula

was curious about him herself, and asked a good many questions about his

uncle.  It made the boys laugh, for I had told them the nonsense Satan

had been stuffing her with.  She got no satisfaction out of us, our

tongues being tied.



Ursula gave us a small item of information: money being plenty now, she

had taken on a servant to help about the house and run errands.  She

tried to tell it in a commonplace, matter-of-course way, but she was so

set up by it and so vain of it that her pride in it leaked out pretty

plainly.  It was beautiful to see her veiled delight in this grandeur,

poor old thing, but when we heard the name of the servant we wondered if

she had been altogether wise; for although we were young, and often

thoughtless, we had fairly good perception on some matters.  This boy was

Gottfried Narr, a dull, good creature, with no harm in him and nothing

against him personally; still, he was under a cloud, and properly so, for

it had not been six months since a social blight had mildewed the family

--his grandmother had been burned as a witch.  When that kind of a malady

is in the blood it does not always come out with just one burning.  Just

now was not a good time for Ursula and Marget to be having dealings with

a member of such a family, for the witch-terror had risen higher during

the past year than it had ever reached in the memory of the oldest

villagers.  The mere mention of a witch was almost enough to frighten us

out of our wits.  This was natural enough, because of late years there

were more kinds of witches than there used to be; in old times it had

been only old women, but of late years they were of all ages--even

children of eight and nine; it was getting so that anybody might turn out

to be a familiar of the Devil--age and sex hadn't anything to do with it.

In our little region we had tried to extirpate the witches, but the more

of them we burned the more of the breed rose up in their places.



Once, in a school for girls only ten miles away, the teachers found that

the back of one of the girls was all red and inflamed, and they were

greatly frightened, believing it to be the Devil's marks.  The girl was

scared, and begged them not to denounce her, and said it was only fleas;

but of course it would not do to let the matter rest there.  All the

girls were examined, and eleven out of the fifty were badly marked, the

rest less so.  A commission was appointed, but the eleven only cried for

their mothers and would not confess.  Then they were shut up, each by

herself, in the dark, and put on black bread and water for ten days and

nights; and by that time they were haggard and wild, and their eyes were

dry and they did not cry any more, but only sat and mumbled, and would

not take the food.  Then one of them confessed, and said they had often

ridden through the air on broomsticks to the witches' Sabbath, and in a

bleak place high up in the mountains had danced and drunk and caroused

with several hundred other witches and the Evil One, and all had

conducted themselves in a scandalous way and had reviled the priests and

blasphemed God.  That is what she said--not in narrative form, for she

was not able to remember any of the details without having them called to

her mind one after the other; but the commission did that, for they knew

just what questions to ask, they being all written down for the use of

witch-commissioners two centuries before.  They asked, "Did you do so and

so?" and she always said yes, and looked weary and tired, and took no

interest in it.  And so when the other ten heard that this one confessed,

they confessed, too, and answered yes to the questions.  Then they were

burned at the stake all together, which was just and right; and everybody

went from all the countryside to see it.  I went, too; but when I saw

that one of them was a bonny, sweet girl I used to play with, and looked

so pitiful there chained to the stake, and her mother crying over her and

devouring her with kisses and clinging around her neck, and saying, "Oh,

my God!  oh, my God!" it was too dreadful, and I went away.



It was bitter cold weather when Gottfried's grandmother was burned.  It

was charged that she had cured bad headaches by kneading the person's

head and neck with her fingers--as she said--but really by the Devil's

help, as everybody knew.  They were going to examine her, but she stopped

them, and confessed straight off that her power was from the Devil.  So

they appointed to burn her next morning, early, in our market-square.

The officer who was to prepare the fire was there first, and prepared it.

She was there next--brought by the constables, who left her and went to

fetch another witch.  Her family did not come with her.  They might be

reviled, maybe stoned, if the people were excited.  I came, and gave her

an apple.  She was squatting at the fire, warming herself and waiting;

and her old lips and hands were blue with the cold.  A stranger came

next.  He was a traveler, passing through; and he spoke to her gently,

and, seeing nobody but me there to hear, said he was sorry for her.  And

he asked if what she confessed was true, and she said no.  He looked

surprised and still more sorry then, and asked her:



"Then why did you confess?"



"I am old and very poor," she said, "and I work for my living.  There was

no way but to confess.  If I hadn't they might have set me free.  That

would ruin me, for no one would forget that I had been suspected of being

a witch, and so I would get no more work, and wherever I went they would

set the dogs on me.  In a little while I would starve.  The fire is best;

it is soon over.  You have been good to me, you two, and I thank you."



She snuggled closer to the fire, and put out her hands to warm them, the

snow-flakes descending soft and still on her old gray head and making it

white and whiter.  The crowd was gathering now, and an egg came flying

and struck her in the eye, and broke and ran down her face.  There was a

laugh at that.



I told Satan all about the eleven girls and the old woman, once, but it

did not affect him.  He only said it was the human race, and what the

human race did was of no consequence.  And he said he had seen it made;

and it was not made of clay; it was made of mud--part of it was, anyway.

I knew what he meant by that--the Moral Sense.  He saw the thought in my

head, and it tickled him and made him laugh.  Then he called a bullock

out of a pasture and petted it and talked with it, and said:



"There--he wouldn't drive children mad with hunger and fright and

loneliness, and then burn them for confessing to things invented for them

which had never happened.  And neither would he break the hearts of

innocent, poor old women and make them afraid to trust themselves among

their own race; and he would not insult them in their death-agony.  For

he is not besmirched with the Moral Sense, but is as the angels are, and

knows no wrong, and never does it."



Lovely as he was, Satan could be cruelly offensive when he chose; and he

always chose when the human race was brought to his attention.  He always

turned up his nose at it, and never had a kind word for it.



Well, as I was saying, we boys doubted if it was a good time for Ursula

to be hiring a member of the Narr family.  We were right.  When the

people found it out they were naturally indignant.  And, moreover, since

Marget and Ursula hadn't enough to eat themselves, where was the money

coming from to feed another mouth?  That is what they wanted to know; and

in order to find out they stopped avoiding Gottfried and began to seek

his society and have sociable conversations with him.  He was pleased--

not thinking any harm and not seeing the trap--and so he talked

innocently along, and was no discreeter than a cow.



"Money!" he said; "they've got plenty of it.  They pay me two groschen a

week, besides my keep.  And they live on the fat of the land, I can tell

you; the prince himself can't beat their table."



This astonishing statement was conveyed by the astrologer to Father Adolf

on a Sunday morning when he was returning from mass.  He was deeply

moved, and said:



"This must be looked into."



He said there must be witchcraft at the bottom of it, and told the

villagers to resume relations with Marget and Ursula in a private and

unostentatious way, and keep both eyes open.  They were told to keep

their own counsel, and not rouse the suspicions of the household.  The

villagers were at first a bit reluctant to enter such a dreadful place,

but the priest said they would be under his protection while there, and

no harm could come to them, particularly if they carried a trifle of holy

water along and kept their beads and crosses handy.  This satisfied them

and made them willing to go; envy and malice made the baser sort even

eager to go.



And so poor Marget began to have company again, and was as pleased as a

cat.  She was like 'most anybody else--just human, and happy in her

prosperities and not averse from showing them off a little; and she was

humanly grateful to have the warm shoulder turned to her and be smiled

upon by her friends and the village again; for of all the hard things to

bear, to be cut by your neighbors and left in contemptuous solitude is

maybe the hardest.



The bars were down, and we could all go there now, and we did--our

parents and all--day after day.  The cat began to strain herself.  She

provided the top of everything for those companies, and in abundance--

among them many a dish and many a wine which they had not tasted before

and which they had not even heard of except at second-hand from the

prince's servants.  And the tableware was much above ordinary, too.



Marget was troubled at times, and pursued Ursula with questions to an

uncomfortable degree; but Ursula stood her ground and stuck to it that it

was Providence, and said no word about the cat.  Marget knew that nothing

was impossible to Providence, but she could not help having doubts that

this effort was from there, though she was afraid to say so, lest

disaster come of it.  Witchcraft occurred to her, but she put the thought

aside, for this was before Gottfried joined the household, and she knew

Ursula was pious and a bitter hater of witches.  By the time Gottfried

arrived Providence was established, unshakably intrenched, and getting

all the gratitude.  The cat made no murmur, but went on composedly

improving in style and prodigality by experience.



In any community, big or little, there is always a fair proportion of

people who are not malicious or unkind by nature, and who never do unkind

things except when they are overmastered by fear, or when their self-

interest is greatly in danger, or some such matter as that.  Eseldorf had

its proportion of such people, and ordinarily their good and gentle

influence was felt, but these were not ordinary times--on account of the

witch-dread--and so we did not seem to have any gentle and compassionate

hearts left, to speak of.  Every person was frightened at the

unaccountable state of things at Marget's house, not doubting that

witchcraft was at the bottom of it, and fright frenzied their reason.

Naturally there were some who pitied Marget and Ursula for the danger

that was gathering about them, but naturally they did not say so; it

would not have been safe.  So the others had it all their own way, and

there was none to advise the ignorant girl and the foolish woman and warn

them to modify their doings.  We boys wanted to warn them, but we backed

down when it came to the pinch, being afraid.  We found that we were not

manly enough nor brave enough to do a generous action when there was a

chance that it could get us into trouble.  Neither of us confessed this

poor spirit to the others, but did as other people would have done--

dropped the subject and talked about something else.  And I knew we all

felt mean, eating and drinking Marget's fine things along with those

companies of spies, and petting her and complimenting her with the rest,

and seeing with self-reproach how foolishly happy she was, and never

saying a word to put her on her guard.  And, indeed, she was happy, and

as proud as a princess, and so grateful to have friends again.  And all

the time these people were watching with all their eyes and reporting all

they saw to Father Adolf.



But he couldn't make head or tail of the situation.  There must be an

enchanter somewhere on the premises, but who was it?  Marget was not seen

to do any jugglery, nor was Ursula, nor yet Gottfried; and still the

wines and dainties never ran short, and a guest could not call for a

thing and not get it.  To produce these effects was usual enough with

witches and enchanters--that part of it was not new; but to do it without

any incantations, or even any rumblings or earthquakes or lightnings or

apparitions--that was new, novel, wholly irregular.  There was nothing in

the books like this.  Enchanted things were always unreal.  Gold turned

to dirt in an unenchanted atmosphere, food withered away and vanished.

But this test failed in the present case.  The spies brought samples:

Father Adolf prayed over them, exorcised them, but it did no good; they

remained sound and real, they yielded to natural decay only, and took the

usual time to do it.



Father Adolf was not merely puzzled, he was also exasperated; for these

evidences very nearly convinced him--privately--that there was no

witchcraft in the matter.  It did not wholly convince him, for this could

be a new kind of witchcraft.  There was a way to find out as to this: if

this prodigal abundance of provender was not brought in from the outside,

but produced on the premises, there was witchcraft, sure.









Chapter 7



Marget announced a party, and invited forty people; the date for it was

seven days away.  This was a fine opportunity.  Marget's house stood by

itself, and it could be easily watched.  All the week it was watched

night and day.  Marget's household went out and in as usual, but they

carried nothing in their hands, and neither they nor others brought

anything to the house.  This was ascertained.  Evidently rations for

forty people were not being fetched.  If they were furnished any

sustenance it would have to be made on the premises.  It was true that

Marget went out with a basket every evening, but the spies ascertained

that she always brought it back empty.



The guests arrived at noon and filled the place.  Father Adolf followed;

also, after a little, the astrologer, without invitation.  The spies had

informed him that neither at the back nor the front had any parcels been

brought in.  He entered, and found the eating and drinking going on

finely, and everything progressing in a lively and festive way.  He

glanced around and perceived that many of the cooked delicacies and all

of the native and foreign fruits were of a perishable character, and he

also recognized that these were fresh and perfect.  No apparitions, no

incantations, no thunder.  That settled it.  This was witchcraft.  And

not only that, but of a new kind--a kind never dreamed of before.  It was

a prodigious power, an illustrious power; he resolved to discover its

secret.  The announcement of it would resound throughout the world,

penetrate to the remotest lands, paralyze all the nations with amazement-

-and carry his name with it, and make him renowned forever.  It was a

wonderful piece of luck, a splendid piece of luck; the glory of it made

him dizzy.



All the house made room for him; Marget politely seated him; Ursula

ordered Gottfried to bring a special table for him.  Then she decked it

and furnished it, and asked for his orders.



"Bring me what you will," he said.



The two servants brought supplies from the pantry, together with white

wine and red--a bottle of each.  The astrologer, who very likely had

never seen such delicacies before, poured out a beaker of red wine, drank

it off, poured another, then began to eat with a grand appetite.



I was not expecting Satan, for it was more than a week since I had seen

or heard of him, but now he came in--I knew it by the feel, though people

were in the way and I could not see him.  I heard him apologizing for

intruding; and he was going away, but Marget urged him to stay, and he

thanked her and stayed.  She brought him along, introducing him to the

girls, and to Meidling, and to some of the elders; and there was quite a

rustle of whispers: "It's the young stranger we hear so much about and

can't get sight of, he is away so much."  "Dear, dear, but he is

beautiful--what is his name?" "Philip Traum."  "Ah, it fits him!" (You

see, "Traum" is German for "Dream.") "What does he do?" "Studying for the

ministry, they say."  "His face is his fortune--he'll be a cardinal some

day."  "Where is his home?"  "Away down somewhere in the tropics, they

say--has a rich uncle down there."  And so on.  He made his way at once;

everybody was anxious to know him and talk with him.  Everybody noticed

how cool and fresh it was, all of a sudden, and wondered at it, for they

could see that the sun was beating down the same as before, outside, and

the sky was clear of clouds, but no one guessed the reason, of course.



The astrologer had drunk his second beaker; he poured out a third.  He

set the bottle down, and by accident overturned it.  He seized it before

much was spilled, and held it up to the light, saying, "What a pity--it

is royal wine."  Then his face lighted with joy or triumph, or something,

and he said, "Quick!  Bring a bowl."



It was brought--a four-quart one.  He took up that two-pint bottle and

began to pour; went on pouring, the red liquor gurgling and gushing into

the white bowl and rising higher and higher up its sides, everybody

staring and holding their breath--and presently the bowl was full to the

brim.



"Look at the bottle," he said, holding it up; "it is full yet!" I glanced

at Satan, and in that moment he vanished.  Then Father Adolf rose up,

flushed and excited, crossed himself, and began to thunder in his great

voice, "This house is bewitched and accursed!" People began to cry and

shriek and crowd toward the door.  "I summon this detected household

to--"



His words were cut off short.  His face became red, then purple, but he

could not utter another sound.  Then I saw Satan, a transparent film,

melt into the astrologer's body; then the astrologer put up his hand, and

apparently in his own voice said, "Wait--remain where you are."  All

stopped where they stood.  "Bring a funnel!"  Ursula brought it,

trembling and scared, and he stuck it in the bottle and took up the great

bowl and began to pour the wine back, the people gazing and dazed with

astonishment, for they knew the bottle was already full before he began.

He emptied the whole of the bowl into the bottle, then smiled out over

the room, chuckled, and said, indifferently: "It is nothing--anybody can

do it!  With my powers I can even do much more."



A frightened cry burst out everywhere.  "Oh, my God, he is possessed!"

and there was a tumultuous rush for the door which swiftly emptied the

house of all who did not belong in it except us boys and Meidling.

We boys knew the secret, and would have told it if we could, but we

couldn't.  We were very thankful to Satan for furnishing that good help

at the needful time.



Marget was pale, and crying; Meidling looked kind of petrified; Ursula

the same; but Gottfried was the worst--he couldn't stand, he was so weak

and scared.  For he was of a witch family, you know, and it would be bad

for him to be suspected.  Agnes came loafing in, looking pious and

unaware, and wanted to rub up against Ursula and be petted, but Ursula

was afraid of her and shrank away from her, but pretending she was not

meaning any incivility, for she knew very well it wouldn't answer to have

strained relations with that kind of a cat.  But we boys took Agnes and

petted her, for Satan would not have befriended her if he had not had a

good opinion of her, and that was indorsement enough for us.  He seemed

to trust anything that hadn't the Moral Sense.



Outside, the guests, panic-stricken, scattered in every direction and

fled in a pitiable state of terror; and such a tumult as they made with

their running and sobbing and shrieking and shouting that soon all the

village came flocking from their houses to see what had happened, and

they thronged the street and shouldered and jostled one another in

excitement and fright; and then Father Adolf appeared, and they fell

apart in two walls like the cloven Red Sea, and presently down this lane

the astrologer came striding and mumbling, and where he passed the lanes

surged back in packed masses, and fell silent with awe, and their eyes

stared and their breasts heaved, and several women fainted; and when he

was gone by the crowd swarmed together and followed him at a distance,

talking excitedly and asking questions and finding out the facts.

Finding out the facts and passing them on to others, with improvements--

improvements which soon enlarged the bowl of wine to a barrel, and made

the one bottle hold it all and yet remain empty to the last.



When the astrologer reached the market-square he went straight to a

juggler, fantastically dressed, who was keeping three brass balls in the

air, and took them from him and faced around upon the approaching crowd

and said: "This poor clown is ignorant of his art.  Come forward and see

an expert perform."



So saying, he tossed the balls up one after another and set them whirling

in a slender bright oval in the air, and added another, then another and

another, and soon--no one seeing whence he got them--adding, adding,

adding, the oval lengthening all the time, his hands moving so swiftly

that they were just a web or a blur and not distinguishable as hands; and

such as counted said there were now a hundred balls in the air.  The

spinning great oval reached up twenty feet in the air and was a shining

and glinting and wonderful sight.  Then he folded his arms and told the

balls to go on spinning without his help--and they did it.  After a

couple of minutes he said, "There, that will do," and the oval broke and

came crashing down, and the balls scattered abroad and rolled every

whither.  And wherever one of them came the people fell back in dread,

and no one would touch it.  It made him laugh, and he scoffed at the

people and called them cowards and old women.  Then he turned and saw the

tight-rope, and said foolish people were daily wasting their money to see

a clumsy and ignorant varlet degrade that beautiful art; now they should

see the work of a master.  With that he made a spring into the air and

lit firm on his feet on the rope.  Then he hopped the whole length of it

back and forth on one foot, with his hands clasped over his eyes; and

next he began to throw somersaults, both backward and forward, and threw

twenty-seven.



The people murmured, for the astrologer was old, and always before had

been halting of movement and at times even lame, but he was nimble enough

now and went on with his antics in the liveliest manner.  Finally he

sprang lightly down and walked away, and passed up the road and around

the corner and disappeared.  Then that great, pale, silent, solid crowd

drew a deep breath and looked into one another's faces as if they said:

"Was it real?  Did you see it, or was it only I--and was I dreaming?"

Then they broke into a low murmur of talking, and fell apart in couples,

and moved toward their homes, still talking in that awed way, with faces

close together and laying a hand on an arm and making other such gestures

as people make when they have been deeply impressed by something.



We boys followed behind our fathers, and listened, catching all we could

of what they said; and when they sat down in our house and continued

their talk they still had us for company.  They were in a sad mood, for

it was certain, they said, that disaster for the village must follow this

awful visitation of witches and devils.  Then my father remembered that

Father Adolf had been struck dumb at the moment of his denunciation.



"They have not ventured to lay their hands upon an anointed servant of

God before," he said; "and how they could have dared it this time I

cannot make out, for he wore his crucifix.  Isn't it so?"



"Yes," said the others, "we saw it."



"It is serious, friends, it is very serious.  Always before, we had a

protection.  It has failed."



The others shook, as with a sort of chill, and muttered those words over-

-"It has failed."  "God has forsaken us."



"It is true," said Seppi Wohlmeyer's father; "there is nowhere to look

for help."



"The people will realize this," said Nikolaus's father, the judge, "and

despair will take away their courage and their energies.  We have indeed

fallen upon evil times."



He sighed, and Wohlmeyer said, in a troubled voice: "The report of it all

will go about the country, and our village will be shunned as being under

the displeasure of God.  The Golden Stag will know hard times."



"True, neighbor," said my father; "all of us will suffer--all in repute,

many in estate.  And, good God!--"



"What is it?"



"That can come--to finish us!"



"Name it--um Gottes Willen!"



"The Interdict!"



It smote like a thunderclap, and they were like to swoon with the terror

of it.  Then the dread of this calamity roused their energies, and they

stopped brooding and began to consider ways to avert it.  They discussed

this, that, and the other way, and talked till the afternoon was far

spent, then confessed that at present they could arrive at no decision.

So they parted sorrowfully, with oppressed hearts which were filled with

bodings.



While they were saying their parting words I slipped out and set my

course for Marget's house to see what was happening there.  I met many

people, but none of them greeted me.  It ought to have been surprising,

but it was not, for they were so distraught with fear and dread that they

were not in their right minds, I think; they were white and haggard, and

walked like persons in a dream, their eyes open but seeing nothing, their

lips moving but uttering nothing, and worriedly clasping and unclasping

their hands without knowing it.



At Marget's it was like a funeral.  She and Wilhelm sat together on the

sofa, but said nothing, and not even holding hands.  Both were steeped in

gloom, and Marget's eyes were red from the crying she had been doing.

She said:



"I have been begging him to go, and come no more, and so save himself

alive.  I cannot bear to be his murderer.  This house is bewitched, and

no inmate will escape the fire.  But he will not go, and he will be lost

with the rest."



Wilhelm said he would not go; if there was danger for her, his place was

by her, and there he would remain.  Then she began to cry again, and it

was all so mournful that I wished I had stayed away.  There was a knock,

now, and Satan came in, fresh and cheery and beautiful, and brought that

winy atmosphere of his and changed the whole thing.  He never said a word

about what had been happening, nor about the awful fears which were

freezing the blood in the hearts of the community, but began to talk and

rattle on about all manner of gay and pleasant things; and next about

music--an artful stroke which cleared away the remnant of Marget's

depression and brought her spirits and her interests broad awake.  She

had not heard any one talk so well and so knowingly on that subject

before, and she was so uplifted by it and so charmed that what she was

feeling lit up her face and came out in her words; and Wilhelm noticed it

and did not look as pleased as he ought to have done.  And next Satan

branched off into poetry, and recited some, and did it well, and Marget

was charmed again; and again Wilhelm was not as pleased as he ought to

have been, and this time Marget noticed it and was remorseful.



I fell asleep to pleasant music that night--the patter of rain upon the

panes and the dull growling of distant thunder.  Away in the night Satan

came and roused me and said: "Come with me.  Where shall we go?"



"Anywhere--so it is with you."



Then there was a fierce glare of sunlight, and he said, "This is China."



That was a grand surprise, and made me sort of drunk with vanity and

gladness to think I had come so far--so much, much farther than anybody

else in our village, including Bartel Sperling, who had such a great

opinion of his travels.  We buzzed around over that empire for more than

half an hour, and saw the whole of it.  It was wonderful, the spectacles

we saw; and some were beautiful, others too horrible to think.  For

instance--However, I may go into that by and by, and also why Satan chose

China for this excursion instead of another place; it would interrupt my

tale to do it now.  Finally we stopped flitting and lit.



We sat upon a mountain commanding a vast landscape of mountain-range and

gorge and valley and plain and river, with cities and villages slumbering

in the sunlight, and a glimpse of blue sea on the farther verge.  It was

a tranquil and dreamy picture, beautiful to the eye and restful to the

spirit.  If we could only make a change like that whenever we wanted to,

the world would be easier to live in than it is, for change of scene

shifts the mind's burdens to the other shoulder and banishes old, shop-

worn wearinesses from mind and body both.



We talked together, and I had the idea of trying to reform Satan and

persuade him to lead a better life.  I told him about all those things he

had been doing, and begged him to be more considerate and stop making

people unhappy.  I said I knew he did not mean any harm, but that he

ought to stop and consider the possible consequences of a thing before

launching it in that impulsive and random way of his; then he would not

make so much trouble.  He was not hurt by this plain speech; he only

looked amused and surprised, and said:



"What?  I do random things?  Indeed, I never do.  I stop and consider

possible consequences?  Where is the need?  I know what the consequences

are going to be--always."



"Oh, Satan, then how could you do these things?"



"Well, I will tell you, and you must understand if you can.  You belong

to a singular race.  Every man is a suffering-machine and a happiness-

machine combined.  The two functions work together harmoniously, with a

fine and delicate precision, on the give-and-take principle.  For every

happiness turned out in the one department the other stands ready to

modify it with a sorrow or a pain--maybe a dozen.  In most cases the

man's life is about equally divided between happiness and unhappiness.

When this is not the case the unhappiness predominates--always; never the

other.  Sometimes a man's make and disposition are such that his misery-

machine is able to do nearly all the business.  Such a man goes through

life almost ignorant of what happiness is.  Everything he touches,

everything he does, brings a misfortune upon him.  You have seen such

people?  To that kind of a person life is not an advantage, is it?  It is

only a disaster.  Sometimes for an hour's happiness a man's machinery

makes him pay years of misery.  Don't you know that?  It happens every

now and then.  I will give you a case or two presently.  Now the people

of your village are nothing to me--you know that, don't you?"



I did not like to speak out too flatly, so I said I had suspected it.



"Well, it is true that they are nothing to me.  It is not possible that

they should be.  The difference between them and me is abysmal,

immeasurable.  They have no intellect."



"No intellect?"



"Nothing that resembles it.  At a future time I will examine what man

calls his mind and give you the details of that chaos, then you will see

and understand.  Men have nothing in common with me--there is no point of

contact; they have foolish little feelings and foolish little vanities

and impertinences and ambitions; their foolish little life is but a

laugh, a sigh, and extinction; and they have no sense.  Only the Moral

Sense.  I will show you what I mean.  Here is a red spider, not so big as

a pin's head.  Can you imagine an elephant being interested in him--

caring whether he is happy or isn't, or whether he is wealthy or poor, or

whether his sweetheart returns his love or not, or whether his mother is

sick or well, or whether he is looked up to in society or not, or whether

his enemies will smite him or his friends desert him, or whether his

hopes will suffer blight or his political ambitions fail, or whether he

shall die in the bosom of his family or neglected and despised in a

foreign land?  These things can never be important to the elephant; they

are nothing to him; he cannot shrink his sympathies to the microscopic

size of them.  Man is to me as the red spider is to the elephant.  The

elephant has nothing against the spider--he cannot get down to that

remote level; I have nothing against man.  The elephant is indifferent; I

am indifferent.  The elephant would not take the trouble to do the spider

an ill turn; if he took the notion he might do him a good turn, if it

came in his way and cost nothing.  I have done men good service, but no

ill turns.



"The elephant lives a century, the red spider a day; in power, intellect,

and dignity the one creature is separated from the other by a distance

which is simply astronomical.  Yet in these, as in all qualities, man is

immeasurably further below me than is the wee spider below the elephant.



"Man's mind clumsily and tediously and laboriously patches little

trivialities together and gets a result--such as it is.  My mind creates!

Do you get the force of that?  Creates anything it desires--and in a

moment.  Creates without material.  Creates fluids, solids, colors--

anything, everything--out of the airy nothing which is called Thought.  A

man imagines a silk thread, imagines a machine to make it, imagines a

picture, then by weeks of labor embroiders it on canvas with the thread.

I think the whole thing, and in a moment it is before you--created.



"I think a poem, music, the record of a game of chess--anything--and it

is there.  This is the immortal mind--nothing is beyond its reach.

Nothing can obstruct my vision; the rocks are transparent to me, and

darkness is daylight.  I do not need to open a book; I take the whole of

its contents into my mind at a single glance, through the cover; and in a

million years I could not forget a single word of it, or its place in the

volume.  Nothing goes on in the skull of man, bird, fish, insect, or

other creature which can be hidden from me.  I pierce the learned man's

brain with a single glance, and the treasures which cost him threescore

years to accumulate are mine; he can forget, and he does forget, but I

retain.



"Now, then, I perceive by your thoughts that you are understanding me

fairly well.  Let us proceed.  Circumstances might so fall out that the

elephant could like the spider--supposing he can see it--but he could not

love it.  His love is for his own kind--for his equals.  An angel's love

is sublime, adorable, divine, beyond the imagination of man--infinitely

beyond it!  But it is limited to his own august order.  If it fell upon

one of your race for only an instant, it would consume its object to

ashes.  No, we cannot love men, but we can be harmlessly indifferent to

them; we can also like them, sometimes.  I like you and the boys, I like

Father Peter, and for your sakes I am doing all these things for the

villagers."



He saw that I was thinking a sarcasm, and he explained his position.



"I have wrought well for the villagers, though it does not look like it

on the surface.  Your race never know good fortune from ill.  They are

always mistaking the one for the other.  It is because they cannot see

into the future.  What I am doing for the villagers will bear good fruit

some day; in some cases to themselves; in others, to unborn generations

of men.  No one will ever know that I was the cause, but it will be none

the less true, for all that.  Among you boys you have a game: you stand a

row of bricks on end a few inches apart; you push a brick, it knocks its

neighbor over, the neighbor knocks over the next brick--and so on till

all the row is prostrate.  That is human life.  A child's first act

knocks over the initial brick, and the rest will follow inexorably.  If

you could see into the future, as I can, you would see everything that

was going to happen to that creature; for nothing can change the order of

its life after the first event has determined it.  That is, nothing will

change it, because each act unfailingly begets an act, that act begets

another, and so on to the end, and the seer can look forward down the

line and see just when each act is to have birth, from cradle to grave."



"Does God order the career?"



"Foreordain it?  No.  The man's circumstances and environment order it.

His first act determines the second and all that follow after.  But

suppose, for argument's sake, that the man should skip one of these acts;

an apparently trifling one, for instance; suppose that it had been

appointed that on a certain day, at a certain hour and minute and second

and fraction of a second he should go to the well, and he didn't go.

That man's career would change utterly, from that moment; thence to the

grave it would be wholly different from the career which his first act as

a child had arranged for him.  Indeed, it might be that if he had gone to

the well he would have ended his career on a throne, and that omitting to

do it would set him upon a career that would lead to beggary and a

pauper's grave.  For instance: if at any time--say in boyhood--Columbus

had skipped the triflingest little link in the chain of acts projected

and made inevitable by his first childish act, it would have changed his

whole subsequent life, and he would have become a priest and died obscure

in an Italian village, and America would not have been discovered for two

centuries afterward.  I know this.  To skip any one of the billion acts

in Columbus's chain would have wholly changed his life.  I have examined

his billion of possible careers, and in only one of them occurs the

discovery of America.  You people do not suspect that all of your acts

are of one size and importance, but it is true; to snatch at an appointed

fly is as big with fate for you as is any other appointed act--"



"As the conquering of a continent, for instance?"



"Yes.  Now, then, no man ever does drop a link--the thing has never

happened!  Even when he is trying to make up his mind as to whether he

will do a thing or not, that itself is a link, an act, and has its proper

place in his chain; and when he finally decides an act, that also was the

thing which he was absolutely certain to do.  You see, now, that a man

will never drop a link in his chain.  He cannot.  If he made up his mind

to try, that project would itself be an unavoidable link--a thought bound

to occur to him at that precise moment, and made certain by the first act

of his babyhood."



It seemed so dismal!



"He is a prisoner for life," I said sorrowfully, "and cannot get free."



"No, of himself he cannot get away from the consequences of his first

childish act.  But I can free him."



I looked up wistfully.



"I have changed the careers of a number of your villagers."



I tried to thank him, but found it difficult, and let it drop.



"I shall make some other changes.  You know that little Lisa Brandt?"



"Oh yes, everybody does.  My mother says she is so sweet and so lovely

that she is not like any other child.  She says she will be the pride of

the village when she grows up; and its idol, too, just as she is now."



"I shall change her future."



"Make it better?" I asked.



"Yes.  And I will change the future of Nikolaus."



I was glad, this time, and said, "I don't need to ask about his case; you

will be sure to do generously by him."



"It is my intention."



Straight off I was building that great future of Nicky's in my

imagination, and had already made a renowned general of him and

hofmeister at the court, when I noticed that Satan was waiting for me to

get ready to listen again.  I was ashamed of having exposed my cheap

imaginings to him, and was expecting some sarcasms, but it did not

happen.  He proceeded with his subject:



"Nicky's appointed life is sixty-two years."



"That's grand!" I said.



"Lisa's, thirty-six.  But, as I told you, I shall change their lives and

those ages.  Two minutes and a quarter from now Nikolaus will wake out of

his sleep and find the rain blowing in.  It was appointed that he should

turn over and go to sleep again.  But I have appointed that he shall get

up and close the window first.  That trifle will change his career

entirely.  He will rise in the morning two minutes later than the chain

of his life had appointed him to rise.  By consequence, thenceforth

nothing will ever happen to him in accordance with the details of the old

chain."  He took out his watch and sat looking at it a few moments, then

said: "Nikolaus has risen to close the window.  His life is changed, his

new career has begun.  There will be consequences."



It made me feel creepy; it was uncanny.



"But for this change certain things would happen twelve days from now.

For instance, Nikolaus would save Lisa from drowning.  He would arrive on

the scene at exactly the right moment--four minutes past ten, the long-

ago appointed instant of time--and the water would be shoal, the

achievement easy and certain.  But he will arrive some seconds too late,

now; Lisa will have struggled into deeper water.  He will do his best,

but both will drown."



"Oh, Satan!  oh, dear Satan!" I cried, with the tears rising in my eyes,

"save them!  Don't let it happen.  I can't bear to lose Nikolaus, he is

my loving playmate and friend; and think of Lisa's poor mother!"



I clung to him and begged and pleaded, but he was not moved.  He made me

sit down again, and told me I must hear him out.



"I have changed Nikolaus's life, and this has changed Lisa's.  If I had

not done this, Nikolaus would save Lisa, then he would catch cold from

his drenching; one of your race's fantastic and desolating scarlet fevers

would follow, with pathetic after-effects; for forty-six years he would

lie in his bed a paralytic log, deaf, dumb, blind, and praying night and

day for the blessed relief of death.  Shall I change his life back?"



"Oh no!  Oh, not for the world!  In charity and pity leave it as it is."



"It is best so.  I could not have changed any other link in his life and

done him so good a service.  He had a billion possible careers, but not

one of them was worth living; they were charged full with miseries and

disasters.  But for my intervention he would do his brave deed twelve

days from now--a deed begun and ended in six minutes--and get for all

reward those forty-six years of sorrow and suffering I told you of.  It

is one of the cases I was thinking of awhile ago when I said that

sometimes an act which brings the actor an hour's happiness and self-

satisfaction is paid for--or punished--by years of suffering."



I wondered what poor little Lisa's early death would save her from.  He

answered the thought:



"From ten years of pain and slow recovery from an accident, and then from

nineteen years' pollution, shame, depravity, crime, ending with death at

the hands of the executioner.  Twelve days hence she will die; her mother

would save her life if she could.  Am I not kinder than her mother?"



"Yes--oh, indeed yes; and wiser."



"Father Peter's case is coming on presently.  He will be acquitted,

through unassailable proofs of his innocence."



"Why, Satan, how can that be?  Do you really think it?"



"Indeed, I know it.  His good name will be restored, and the rest of his

life will be happy."



"I can believe it.  To restore his good name will have that effect."



"His happiness will not proceed from that cause.  I shall change his life

that day, for his good.  He will never know his good name has been

restored."



In my mind--and modestly--I asked for particulars, but Satan paid no

attention to my thought.  Next, my mind wandered to the astrologer, and I

wondered where he might be.



"In the moon," said Satan, with a fleeting sound which I believed was a

chuckle.  "I've got him on the cold side of it, too.  He doesn't know

where he is, and is not having a pleasant time; still, it is good enough

for him, a good place for his star studies.  I shall need him presently;

then I shall bring him back and possess him again.  He has a long and

cruel and odious life before him, but I will change that, for I have no

feeling against him and am quite willing to do him a kindness.  I think I

shall get him burned."



He had such strange notions of kindness!  But angels are made so, and do

not know any better.  Their ways are not like our ways; and, besides,

human beings are nothing to them; they think they are only freaks.  It

seems to me odd that he should put the astrologer so far away; he could

have dumped him in Germany just as well, where he would be handy.



"Far away?" said Satan.  "To me no place is far away; distance does not

exist for me.  The sun is less than a hundred million miles from here,

and the light that is falling upon us has taken eight minutes to come;

but I can make that flight, or any other, in a fraction of time so minute

that it cannot be measured by a watch.  I have but to think the journey,

and it is accomplished."



I held out my hand and said, "The light lies upon it; think it into a

glass of wine, Satan."



He did it.  I drank the wine.



"Break the glass," he said.



I broke it.



"There--you see it is real.  The villagers thought the brass balls were

magic stuff and as perishable as smoke.  They were afraid to touch them.

You are a curious lot--your race.  But come along; I have business.  I

will put you to bed."  Said and done.  Then he was gone; but his voice

came back to me through the rain and darkness saying, "Yes, tell Seppi,

but no other."



It was the answer to my thought.









Chapter 8



Sleep would not come.  It was not because I was proud of my travels and

excited about having been around the big world to China, and feeling

contemptuous of Bartel Sperling, "the traveler," as he called himself,

and looked down upon us others because he had been to Vienna once and was

the only Eseldorf boy who had made such a journey and seen the world's

wonders.  At another time that would have kept me awake, but it did not

affect me now.  No, my mind was filled with Nikolaus, my thoughts ran

upon him only, and the good days we had seen together at romps and

frolics in the woods and the fields and the river in the long summer

days, and skating and sliding in the winter when our parents thought we

were in school.  And now he was going out of this young life, and the

summers and winters would come and go, and we others would rove and play

as before, but his place would be vacant; we should see him no more.  To-

morrow he would not suspect, but would be as he had always been, and it

would shock me to hear him laugh, and see him do lightsome and frivolous

things, for to me he would be a corpse, with waxen hands and dull eyes,

and I should see the shroud around his face; and next day he would not

suspect, nor the next, and all the time his handful of days would be

wasting swiftly away and that awful thing coming nearer and nearer, his

fate closing steadily around him and no one knowing it but Seppi and me.

Twelve days--only twelve days.  It was awful to think of.  I noticed that

in my thoughts I was not calling him by his familiar names, Nick and

Nicky, but was speaking of him by his full name, and reverently, as one

speaks of the dead.  Also, as incident after incident of our comradeship

came thronging into my mind out of the past, I noticed that they were

mainly cases where I had wronged him or hurt him, and they rebuked me and

reproached me, and my heart was wrung with remorse, just as it is when we

remember our unkindnesses to friends who have passed beyond the veil, and

we wish we could have them back again, if only for a moment, so that we

could go on our knees to them and say, "Have pity, and forgive."



Once when we were nine years old he went a long errand of nearly two

miles for the fruiterer, who gave him a splendid big apple for reward,

and he was flying home with it, almost beside himself with astonishment

and delight, and I met him, and he let me look at the apple, not thinking

of treachery, and I ran off with it, eating it as I ran, he following me

and begging; and when he overtook me I offered him the core, which was

all that was left; and I laughed.  Then he turned away, crying, and said

he had meant to give it to his little sister.  That smote me, for she was

slowly getting well of a sickness, and it would have been a proud moment

for him, to see her joy and surprise and have her caresses.  But I was

ashamed to say I was ashamed, and only said something rude and mean, to

pretend I did not care, and he made no reply in words, but there was a

wounded look in his face as he turned away toward his home which rose

before me many times in after years, in the night, and reproached me and

made me ashamed again.  It had grown dim in my mind, by and by, then it

disappeared; but it was back now, and not dim.



Once at school, when we were eleven, I upset my ink and spoiled four

copy-books, and was in danger of severe punishment; but I put it upon

him, and he got the whipping.



And only last year I had cheated him in a trade, giving him a large fish-

hook which was partly broken through for three small sound ones.  The

first fish he caught broke the hook, but he did not know I was blamable,

and he refused to take back one of the small hooks which my conscience

forced me to offer him, but said, "A trade is a trade; the hook was bad,

but that was not your fault."



No, I could not sleep.  These little, shabby wrongs upbraided me and

tortured me, and with a pain much sharper than one feels when the wrongs

have been done to the living.  Nikolaus was living, but no matter; he was

to me as one already dead.  The wind was still moaning about the eaves,

the rain still pattering upon the panes.



In the morning I sought out Seppi and told him.  It was down by the

river.  His lips moved, but he did not say anything, he only looked dazed

and stunned, and his face turned very white.  He stood like that a few

moments, the tears welling into his eyes, then he turned away and I

locked my arm in his and we walked along thinking, but not speaking.  We

crossed the bridge and wandered through the meadows and up among the

hills and the woods, and at last the talk came and flowed freely, and it

was all about Nikolaus and was a recalling of the life we had lived with

him.  And every now and then Seppi said, as if to himself:



"Twelve days!--less than twelve days."



We said we must be with him all the time; we must have all of him we

could; the days were precious now.  Yet we did not go to seek him.  It

would be like meeting the dead, and we were afraid.  We did not say it,

but that was what we were feeling.  And so it gave us a shock when we

turned a curve and came upon Nikolaus face to face.  He shouted, gaily:



"Hi-hi!  What is the matter?  Have you seen a ghost?"



We couldn't speak, but there was no occasion; he was willing to talk for

us all, for he had just seen Satan and was in high spirits about it.

Satan had told him about our trip to China, and he had begged Satan to

take him a journey, and Satan had promised.  It was to be a far journey,

and wonderful and beautiful; and Nikolaus had begged him to take us, too,

but he said no, he would take us some day, maybe, but not now.  Satan

would come for him on the 13th, and Nikolaus was already counting the

hours, he was so impatient.



That was the fatal day.  We were already counting the hours, too.



We wandered many a mile, always following paths which had been our

favorites from the days when we were little, and always we talked about

the old times.  All the blitheness was with Nikolaus; we others could not

shake off our depression.  Our tone toward Nikolaus was so strangely

gentle and tender and yearning that he noticed it, and was pleased; and

we were constantly doing him deferential little offices of courtesy, and

saying, "Wait, let me do that for you," and that pleased him, too.  I

gave him seven fish-hooks--all I had--and made him take them; and Seppi

gave him his new knife and a humming-top painted red and yellow--

atonements for swindles practised upon him formerly, as I learned later,

and probably no longer remembered by Nikolaus now.  These things touched

him, and he could not have believed that we loved him so; and his pride

in it and gratefulness for it cut us to the heart, we were so undeserving

of them.  When we parted at last, he was radiant, and said he had never

had such a happy day.



As we walked along homeward, Seppi said, "We always prized him, but never

so much as now, when we are going to lose him."



Next day and every day we spent all of our spare time with Nikolaus; and

also added to it time which we (and he) stole from work and other duties,

and this cost the three of us some sharp scoldings, and some threats of

punishment.  Every morning two of us woke with a start and a shudder,

saying, as the days flew along, "Only ten days left;" "only nine days

left;" "only eight;" "only seven."  Always it was narrowing.  Always

Nikolaus was gay and happy, and always puzzled because we were not.  He

wore his invention to the bone trying to invent ways to cheer us up, but

it was only a hollow success; he could see that our jollity had no heart

in it, and that the laughs we broke into came up against some obstruction

or other and suffered damage and decayed into a sigh.  He tried to find

out what the matter was, so that he could help us out of our trouble or

make it lighter by sharing it with us; so we had to tell many lies to

deceive him and appease him.



But the most distressing thing of all was that he was always making

plans, and often they went beyond the 13th!  Whenever that happened it

made us groan in spirit.  All his mind was fixed upon finding some way to

conquer our depression and cheer us up; and at last, when he had but

three days to live, he fell upon the right idea and was jubilant over it-

-a boys-and-girls' frolic and dance in the woods, up there where we first

met Satan, and this was to occur on the 14th.  It was ghastly, for that

was his funeral day.  We couldn't venture to protest; it would only have

brought a "Why?" which we could not answer.  He wanted us to help him

invite his guests, and we did it--one can refuse nothing to a dying

friend.  But it was dreadful, for really we were inviting them to his

funeral.



It was an awful eleven days; and yet, with a lifetime stretching back

between to-day and then, they are still a grateful memory to me, and

beautiful.  In effect they were days of companionship with one's sacred

dead, and I have known no comradeship that was so close or so precious.

We clung to the hours and the minutes, counting them as they wasted away,

and parting with them with that pain and bereavement which a miser feels

who sees his hoard filched from him coin by coin by robbers and is

helpless to prevent it.



When the evening of the last day came we stayed out too long; Seppi and I

were in fault for that; we could not bear to part with Nikolaus; so it

was very late when we left him at his door.  We lingered near awhile,

listening; and that happened which we were fearing.  His father gave him

the promised punishment, and we heard his shrieks.  But we listened only

a moment, then hurried away, remorseful for this thing which we had

caused.  And sorry for the father, too; our thought being, "If he only

knew--if he only knew!"



In the morning Nikolaus did not meet us at the appointed place, so we

went to his home to see what the matter was.  His mother said:



"His father is out of all patience with these goings-on, and will not

have any more of it.  Half the time when Nick is needed he is not to be

found; then it turns out that he has been gadding around with you two.

His father gave him a flogging last night.  It always grieved me before,

and many's the time I have begged him off and saved him, but this time he

appealed to me in vain, for I was out of patience myself."



"I wish you had saved him just this one time," I said, my voice trembling

a little; "it would ease a pain in your heart to remember it some day."



She was ironing at the time, and her back was partly toward me.  She

turned about with a startled or wondering look in her face and said,

"What do you mean by that?"



I was not prepared, and didn't know anything to say; so it was awkward,

for she kept looking at me; but Seppi was alert and spoke up:



"Why, of course it would be pleasant to remember, for the very reason we

were out so late was that Nikolaus got to telling how good you are to

him, and how he never got whipped when you were by to save him; and he

was so full of it, and we were so full of the interest of it, that none

of us noticed how late it was getting."



"Did he say that?  Did he?" and she put her apron to her eyes.



"You can ask Theodor--he will tell you the same."



"It is a dear, good lad, my Nick," she said.  "I am sorry I let him get

whipped; I will never do it again.  To think--all the time I was sitting

here last night, fretting and angry at him, he was loving me and praising

me!  Dear, dear, if we could only know!  Then we shouldn't ever go wrong;

but we are only poor, dumb beasts groping around and making mistakes.  I

shan't ever think of last night without a pang."



She was like all the rest; it seemed as if nobody could open a mouth, in

these wretched days, without saying something that made us shiver.  They

were "groping around," and did not know what true, sorrowfully true

things they were saying by accident.



Seppi asked if Nikolaus might go out with us.



"I am sorry," she answered, "but he can't.  To punish him further, his

father doesn't allow him to go out of the house to-day."



We had a great hope!  I saw it in Seppi's eyes.  We thought, "If he

cannot leave the house, he cannot be drowned."  Seppi asked, to make

sure:



"Must he stay in all day, or only the morning?"



"All day.  It's such a pity, too; it's a beautiful day, and he is so

unused to being shut up.  But he is busy planning his party, and maybe

that is company for him.  I do hope he isn't too lonesome."



Seppi saw that in her eye which emboldened him to ask if we might go up

and help him pass his time.



"And welcome!" she said, right heartily.  "Now I call that real

friendship, when you might be abroad in the fields and the woods, having

a happy time.  You are good boys, I'll allow that, though you don't

always find satisfactory ways of improving it.  Take these cakes--for

yourselves--and give him this one, from his mother."



The first thing we noticed when we entered Nikolaus's room was the time--

a quarter to 10.  Could that be correct?  Only such a few minutes to

live!  I felt a contraction at my heart.  Nikolaus jumped up and gave us

a glad welcome.  He was in good spirits over his plannings for his party

and had not been lonesome.



"Sit down," he said, "and look at what I've been doing.  And I've

finished a kite that you will say is a beauty.  It's drying, in the

kitchen; I'll fetch it."



He had been spending his penny savings in fanciful trifles of various

kinds, to go as prizes in the games, and they were marshaled with fine

and showy effect upon the table.  He said:



"Examine them at your leisure while I get mother to touch up the kite

with her iron if it isn't dry enough yet."



Then he tripped out and went clattering down-stairs, whistling.



We did not look at the things; we couldn't take any interest in anything

but the clock.  We sat staring at it in silence, listening to the

ticking, and every time the minute-hand jumped we nodded recognition--one

minute fewer to cover in the race for life or for death.  Finally Seppi

drew a deep breath and said:



"Two minutes to ten.  Seven minutes more and he will pass the death-

point.  Theodor, he is going to be saved!  He's going to--"



"Hush!  I'm on needles.  Watch the clock and keep still."



Five minutes more.  We were panting with the strain and the excitement.

Another three minutes, and there was a footstep on the stair.



"Saved!" And we jumped up and faced the door.



The old mother entered, bringing the kite.  "Isn't it a beauty?" she

said.  "And, dear me, how he has slaved over it--ever since daylight, I

think, and only finished it awhile before you came."  She stood it

against the wall, and stepped back to take a view of it.  "He drew the

pictures his own self, and I think they are very good.  The church isn't

so very good, I'll have to admit, but look at the bridge--any one can

recognize the bridge in a minute.  He asked me to bring it up....  Dear

me!  it's seven minutes past ten, and I--"



"But where is he?"



"He?  Oh, he'll be here soon; he's gone out a minute."



"Gone out?"



"Yes.  Just as he came down-stairs little Lisa's mother came in and said

the child had wandered off somewhere, and as she was a little uneasy I

told Nikolaus to never mind about his father's orders--go and look her

up....  Why, how white you two do look!  I do believe you are sick.  Sit

down; I'll fetch something.  That cake has disagreed with you.  It is a

little heavy, but I thought--"



She disappeared without finishing her sentence, and we hurried at once to

the back window and looked toward the river.  There was a great crowd at

the other end of the bridge, and people were flying toward that point

from every direction.



"Oh, it is all over--poor Nikolaus!  Why, oh, why did she let him get out

of the house!"



"Come away," said Seppi, half sobbing, "come quick--we can't bear to meet

her; in five minutes she will know."



But we were not to escape.  She came upon us at the foot of the stairs,

with her cordials in her hands, and made us come in and sit down and take

the medicine.  Then she watched the effect, and it did not satisfy her;

so she made us wait longer, and kept upbraiding herself for giving us the

unwholesome cake.



Presently the thing happened which we were dreading.  There was a sound

of tramping and scraping outside, and a crowd came solemnly in, with

heads uncovered, and laid the two drowned bodies on the bed.



"Oh, my God!" that poor mother cried out, and fell on her knees, and put

her arms about her dead boy and began to cover the wet face with kisses.

"Oh, it was I that sent him, and I have been his death.  If I had obeyed,

and kept him in the house, this would not have happened.  And I am

rightly punished; I was cruel to him last night, and him begging me, his

own mother, to be his friend."



And so she went on and on, and all the women cried, and pitied her, and

tried to comfort her, but she could not forgive herself and could not be

comforted, and kept on saying if she had not sent him out he would be

alive and well now, and she was the cause of his death.



It shows how foolish people are when they blame themselves for anything

they have done.  Satan knows, and he said nothing happens that your first

act hasn't arranged to happen and made inevitable; and so, of your own

motion you can't ever alter the scheme or do a thing that will break a

link.  Next we heard screams, and Frau Brandt came wildly plowing and

plunging through the crowd with her dress in disorder and hair flying

loose, and flung herself upon her dead child with moans and kisses and

pleadings and endearments; and by and by she rose up almost exhausted

with her outpourings of passionate emotion, and clenched her fist and

lifted it toward the sky, and her tear-drenched face grew hard and

resentful, and she said:



"For nearly two weeks I have had dreams and presentiments and warnings

that death was going to strike what was most precious to me, and day and

night and night and day I have groveled in the dirt before Him praying

Him to have pity on my innocent child and save it from harm--and here is

His answer!"



Why, He had saved it from harm--but she did not know.



She wiped the tears from her eyes and cheeks, and stood awhile gazing

down at the child and caressing its face and its hair with her hands;

then she spoke again in that bitter tone: "But in His hard heart is no

compassion.  I will never pray again."



She gathered her dead child to her bosom and strode away, the crowd

falling back to let her pass, and smitten dumb by the awful words they

had heard.  Ah, that poor woman!  It is as Satan said, we do not know

good fortune from bad, and are always mistaking the one for the other.

Many a time since I have heard people pray to God to spare the life of

sick persons, but I have never done it.



Both funerals took place at the same time in our little church next day.

Everybody was there, including the party guests.  Satan was there, too;

which was proper, for it was on account of his efforts that the funerals

had happened.  Nikolaus had departed this life without absolution, and a

collection was taken up for masses, to get him out of purgatory.  Only

two-thirds of the required money was gathered, and the parents were going

to try to borrow the rest, but Satan furnished it.  He told us privately

that there was no purgatory, but he had contributed in order that

Nikolaus's parents and their friends might be saved from worry and

distress.  We thought it very good of him, but he said money did not cost

him anything.



At the graveyard the body of little Lisa was seized for debt by a

carpenter to whom the mother owed fifty groschen for work done the year

before.  She had never been able to pay this, and was not able now.  The

carpenter took the corpse home and kept it four days in his cellar, the

mother weeping and imploring about his house all the time; then he buried

it in his brother's cattle-yard, without religious ceremonies.  It drove

the mother wild with grief and shame, and she forsook her work and went

daily about the town, cursing the carpenter and blaspheming the laws of

the emperor and the church, and it was pitiful to see.  Seppi asked Satan

to interfere, but he said the carpenter and the rest were members of the

human race and were acting quite neatly for that species of animal.  He

would interfere if he found a horse acting in such a way, and we must

inform him when we came across that kind of horse doing that kind of

human thing, so that he could stop it.  We believed this was sarcasm, for

of course there wasn't any such horse.



But after a few days we found that we could not abide that poor woman's

distress, so we begged Satan to examine her several possible careers, and

see if he could not change her, to her profit, to a new one.  He said the

longest of her careers as they now stood gave her forty-two years to

live, and her shortest one twenty-nine, and that both were charged with

grief and hunger and cold and pain.  The only improvement he could make

would be to enable her to skip a certain three minutes from now; and he

asked us if he should do it.  This was such a short time to decide in

that we went to pieces with nervous excitement, and before we could pull

ourselves together and ask for particulars he said the time would be up

in a few more seconds; so then we gasped out, "Do it!"



"It is done," he said; "she was going around a corner; I have turned her

back; it has changed her career."



"Then what will happen, Satan?"



"It is happening now.  She is having words with Fischer, the weaver.  In

his anger Fischer will straightway do what he would not have done but for

this accident.  He was present when she stood over her child's body and

uttered those blasphemies."



"What will he do?"



"He is doing it now--betraying her.  In three days she will go to the

stake."



We could not speak; we were frozen with horror, for if we had not meddled

with her career she would have been spared this awful fate.  Satan

noticed these thoughts, and said:



"What you are thinking is strictly human-like--that is to say, foolish.

The woman is advantaged.  Die when she might, she would go to heaven.  By

this prompt death she gets twenty-nine years more of heaven than she is

entitled to, and escapes twenty-nine years of misery here."



A moment before we were bitterly making up our minds that we would ask no

more favors of Satan for friends of ours, for he did not seem to know any

way to do a person a kindness but by killing him; but the whole aspect of

the case was changed now, and we were glad of what we had done and full

of happiness in the thought of it.



After a little I began to feel troubled about Fischer, and asked,

timidly, "Does this episode change Fischer's life-scheme, Satan?"



"Change it?  Why, certainly.  And radically.  If he had not met Frau

Brandt awhile ago he would die next year, thirty-four years of age.  Now

he will live to be ninety, and have a pretty prosperous and comfortable

life of it, as human lives go."



We felt a great joy and pride in what we had done for Fischer, and were

expecting Satan to sympathize with this feeling; but he showed no sign

and this made us uneasy.  We waited for him to speak, but he didn't; so,

to assuage our solicitude we had to ask him if there was any defect in

Fischer's good luck.  Satan considered the question a moment, then said,

with some hesitation:



"Well, the fact is, it is a delicate point.  Under his several former

possible life-careers he was going to heaven."



We were aghast.  "Oh, Satan!  and under this one--"



"There, don't be so distressed.  You were sincerely trying to do him a

kindness; let that comfort you."



"Oh, dear, dear, that cannot comfort us.  You ought to have told us what

we were doing, then we wouldn't have acted so."



But it made no impression on him.  He had never felt a pain or a sorrow,

and did not know what they were, in any really informing way.  He had no

knowledge of them except theoretically--that is to say, intellectually.

And of course that is no good.  One can never get any but a loose and

ignorant notion of such things except by experience.  We tried our best

to make him comprehend the awful thing that had been done and how we were

compromised by it, but he couldn't seem to get hold of it.  He said he

did not think it important where Fischer went to; in heaven he would not

be missed, there were "plenty there."  We tried to make him see that he

was missing the point entirely; that Fischer, and not other people, was

the proper one to decide about the importance of it; but it all went for

nothing; he said he did not care for Fischer--there were plenty more

Fischers.



The next minute Fischer went by on the other side of the way, and it made

us sick and faint to see him, remembering the doom that was upon him, and

we the cause of it.  And how unconscious he was that anything had

happened to him!  You could see by his elastic step and his alert manner

that he was well satisfied with himself for doing that hard turn for poor

Frau Brandt.  He kept glancing back over his shoulder expectantly.  And,

sure enough, pretty soon Frau Brandt followed after, in charge of the

officers and wearing jingling chains.  A mob was in her wake, jeering and

shouting, "Blasphemer and heretic!" and some among them were neighbors

and friends of her happier days.  Some were trying to strike her, and the

officers were not taking as much trouble as they might to keep them from

it.



"Oh, stop them, Satan!" It was out before we remembered that he could not

interrupt them for a moment without changing their whole after-lives.  He

puffed a little puff toward them with his lips and they began to reel and

stagger and grab at the empty air; then they broke apart and fled in

every direction, shrieking, as if in intolerable pain.  He had crushed a

rib of each of them with that little puff.  We could not help asking if

their life-chart was changed.



"Yes, entirely.  Some have gained years, some have lost them.  Some few

will profit in various ways by the change, but only that few."



We did not ask if we had brought poor Fischer's luck to any of them.  We

did not wish to know.  We fully believed in Satan's desire to do us

kindnesses, but we were losing confidence in his judgment.  It was at

this time that our growing anxiety to have him look over our life-charts

and suggest improvements began to fade out and give place to other

interests.



For a day or two the whole village was a chattering turmoil over Frau

Brandt's case and over the mysterious calamity that had overtaken the

mob, and at her trial the place was crowded.  She was easily convicted of

her blasphemies, for she uttered those terrible words again and said she

would not take them back.  When warned that she was imperiling her life,

she said they could take it in welcome, she did not want it, she would

rather live with the professional devils in perdition than with these

imitators in the village.  They accused her of breaking all those ribs by

witchcraft, and asked her if she was not a witch?  She answered

scornfully:



"No.  If I had that power would any of you holy hypocrites be alive five

minutes?  No; I would strike you all dead.  Pronounce your sentence and

let me go; I am tired of your society."



So they found her guilty, and she was excommunicated and cut off from the

joys of heaven and doomed to the fires of hell; then she was clothed in a

coarse robe and delivered to the secular arm, and conducted to the

market-place, the bell solemnly tolling the while.  We saw her chained to

the stake, and saw the first film of blue smoke rise on the still air.

Then her hard face softened, and she looked upon the packed crowd in

front of her and said, with gentleness:



"We played together once, in long-agone days when we were innocent little

creatures.  For the sake of that, I forgive you."



We went away then, and did not see the fires consume her, but we heard

the shrieks, although we put our fingers in our ears.  When they ceased

we knew she was in heaven, notwithstanding the excommunication; and we

were glad of her death and not sorry that we had brought it about.



One day, a little while after this, Satan appeared again.  We were always

watching out for him, for life was never very stagnant when he was by.

He came upon us at that place in the woods where we had first met him.

Being boys, we wanted to be entertained; we asked him to do a show for

us.



"Very well," he said; "would you like to see a history of the progress of

the human race?--its development of that product which it calls

civilization?"



We said we should.



So, with a thought, he turned the place into the Garden of Eden, and we

saw Abel praying by his altar; then Cain came walking toward him with his

club, and did not seem to see us, and would have stepped on my foot if I

had not drawn it in.  He spoke to his brother in a language which we did

not understand; then he grew violent and threatening, and we knew what

was going to happen, and turned away our heads for the moment; but we

heard the crash of the blows and heard the shrieks and the groans; then

there was silence, and we saw Abel lying in his blood and gasping out his

life, and Cain standing over him and looking down at him, vengeful and

unrepentant.



Then the vision vanished, and was followed by a long series of unknown

wars, murders, and massacres.  Next we had the Flood, and the Ark tossing

around in the stormy waters, with lofty mountains in the distance showing

veiled and dim through the rain.  Satan said:



"The progress of your race was not satisfactory.  It is to have another

chance now."



The scene changed, and we saw Noah overcome with wine.



Next, we had Sodom and Gomorrah, and "the attempt to discover two or

three respectable persons there," as Satan described it.  Next, Lot and

his daughters in the cave.



Next came the Hebraic wars, and we saw the victors massacre the survivors

and their cattle, and save the young girls alive and distribute them

around.



Next we had Jael; and saw her slip into the tent and drive the nail into

the temple of her sleeping guest; and we were so close that when the

blood gushed out it trickled in a little, red stream to our feet, and we

could have stained our hands in it if we had wanted to.



Next we had Egyptian wars, Greek wars, Roman wars, hideous drenchings of

the earth with blood; and we saw the treacheries of the Romans toward the

Carthaginians, and the sickening spectacle of the massacre of those brave

people.  Also we saw Caesar invade Britain--"not that those barbarians

had done him any harm, but because he wanted their land, and desired to

confer the blessings of civilization upon their widows and orphans," as

Satan explained.



Next, Christianity was born.  Then ages of Europe passed in review before

us, and we saw Christianity and Civilization march hand in hand through

those ages, "leaving famine and death and desolation in their wake, and

other signs of the progress of the human race," as Satan observed.



And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars--all over

Europe, all over the world.  "Sometimes in the private interest of royal

families," Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a war

started by the aggressor for any clean purpose--there is no such war in

the history of the race."



"Now," said Satan, "you have seen your progress down to the present, and

you must confess that it is wonderful--in its way.  We must now exhibit

the future."



He showed us slaughters more terrible in their destruction of life, more

devastating in their engines of war, than any we had seen.



"You perceive," he said, "that you have made continual progress.  Cain

did his murder with a club; the Hebrews did their murders with javelins

and swords; the Greeks and Romans added protective armor and the fine

arts of military organization and generalship; the Christian has added

guns and gunpowder; a few centuries from now he will have so greatly

improved the deadly effectiveness of his weapons of slaughter that all

men will confess that without Christian civilization war must have

remained a poor and trifling thing to the end of time."



Then he began to laugh in the most unfeeling way, and make fun of the

human race, although he knew that what he had been saying shamed us and

wounded us.  No one but an angel could have acted so; but suffering is

nothing to them; they do not know what it is, except by hearsay.



More than once Seppi and I had tried in a humble and diffident way to

convert him, and as he had remained silent we had taken his silence as a

sort of encouragement; necessarily, then, this talk of his was a

disappointment to us, for it showed that we had made no deep impression

upon him.  The thought made us sad, and we knew then how the missionary

must feel when he has been cherishing a glad hope and has seen it

blighted.  We kept our grief to ourselves, knowing that this was not the

time to continue our work.



Satan laughed his unkind laugh to a finish; then he said: "It is a

remarkable progress.  In five or six thousand years five or six high

civilizations have risen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the world,

then faded out and disappeared; and not one of them except the latest

ever invented any sweeping and adequate way to kill people.  They all did

their best--to kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the

earliest incident in its history--but only the Christian civilization has

scored a triumph to be proud of.  Two or three centuries from now it will

be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the

pagan world will go to school to the Christian--not to acquire his

religion, but his guns.  The Turk and the Chinaman will buy those to kill

missionaries and converts with."



By this time his theater was at work again, and before our eyes nation

after nation drifted by, during two or three centuries, a mighty

procession, an endless procession, raging, struggling, wallowing through

seas of blood, smothered in battle-smoke through which the flags glinted

and the red jets from the cannon darted; and always we heard the thunder

of the guns and the cries of the dying.



"And what does it amount to?" said Satan, with his evil chuckle.

"Nothing at all.  You gain nothing; you always come out where you went

in.  For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating

itself and monotonously reperforming this dull nonsense--to what end?  No

wisdom can guess!  Who gets a profit out of it?  Nobody but a parcel of

usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel

defiled if you touched them; would shut the door in your face if you

proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not

ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you

and you are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your

alms, yet assume toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who

address you in the language of master to slave, and are answered in the

language of slave to master; who are worshiped by you with your mouth,

while in your heart--if you have one--you despise yourselves for it.  The

first man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities which have not yet

failed in his line; it is the foundation upon which all civilizations

have been built.  Drink to their perpetuation!  Drink to their

augmentation!  Drink to--" Then he saw by our faces how much we were

hurt, and he cut his sentence short and stopped chuckling, and his manner

changed.  He said, gently: "No, we will drink one another's health, and

let civilization go.  The wine which has flown to our hands out of space

by desire is earthly, and good enough for that other toast; but throw

away the glasses; we will drink this one in wine which has not visited

this world before."



We obeyed, and reached up and received the new cups as they descended.

They were shapely and beautiful goblets, but they were not made of any

material that we were acquainted with.  They seemed to be in motion, they

seemed to be alive; and certainly the colors in them were in motion.

They were very brilliant and sparkling, and of every tint, and they were

never still, but flowed to and fro in rich tides which met and broke and

flashed out dainty explosions of enchanting color.  I think it was most

like opals washing about in waves and flashing out their splendid fires.

But there is nothing to compare the wine with.  We drank it, and felt a

strange and witching ecstasy as of heaven go stealing through us, and

Seppi's eyes filled and he said worshipingly:



"We shall be there some day, and then--"



He glanced furtively at Satan, and I think he hoped Satan would say,

"Yes, you will be there some day," but Satan seemed to be thinking about

something else, and said nothing.  This made me feel ghastly, for I knew

he had heard; nothing, spoken or unspoken, ever escaped him.  Poor Seppi

looked distressed, and did not finish his remark.  The goblets rose and

clove their way into the sky, a triplet of radiant sundogs, and

disappeared.  Why didn't they stay?  It seemed a bad sign, and depressed

me.  Should I ever see mine again?  Would Seppi ever see his?









Chapter 9



It was wonderful, the mastery Satan had over time and distance.  For him

they did not exist.  He called them human inventions, and said they were

artificialities.  We often went to the most distant parts of the globe

with him, and stayed weeks and months, and yet were gone only a fraction

of a second, as a rule.  You could prove it by the clock.  One day when

our people were in such awful distress because the witch commission were

afraid to proceed against the astrologer and Father Peter's household, or

against any, indeed, but the poor and the friendless, they lost patience

and took to witch-hunting on their own score, and began to chase a born

lady who was known to have the habit of curing people by devilish arts,

such as bathing them, washing them, and nourishing them instead of

bleeding them and purging them through the ministrations of a barber-

surgeon in the proper way.  She came flying down, with the howling and

cursing mob after her, and tried to take refuge in houses, but the doors

were shut in her face.  They chased her more than half an hour, we

following to see it, and at last she was exhausted and fell, and they

caught her.  They dragged her to a tree and threw a rope over the limb,

and began to make a noose in it, some holding her, meantime, and she

crying and begging, and her young daughter looking on and weeping, but

afraid to say or do anything.



They hanged the lady, and I threw a stone at her, although in my heart I

was sorry for her; but all were throwing stones and each was watching his

neighbor, and if I had not done as the others did it would have been

noticed and spoken of.  Satan burst out laughing.



All that were near by turned upon him, astonished and not pleased.  It

was an ill time to laugh, for his free and scoffing ways and his

supernatural music had brought him under suspicion all over the town and

turned many privately against him.  The big blacksmith called attention

to him now, raising his voice so that all should hear, and said:



"What are you laughing at?  Answer!  Moreover, please explain to the

company why you threw no stone."



"Are you sure I did not throw a stone?"



"Yes.  You needn't try to get out of it; I had my eye on you."



"And I--I noticed you!" shouted two others.



"Three witnesses," said Satan: "Mueller, the blacksmith; Klein, the

butcher's man; Pfeiffer, the weaver's journeyman.  Three very ordinary

liars.  Are there any more?"



"Never mind whether there are others or not, and never mind about what

you consider us--three's enough to settle your matter for you.  You'll

prove that you threw a stone, or it shall go hard with you."



"That's so!" shouted the crowd, and surged up as closely as they could to

the center of interest.



"And first you will answer that other question," cried the blacksmith,

pleased with himself for being mouthpiece to the public and hero of the

occasion.  "What are you laughing at?"



Satan smiled and answered, pleasantly: "To see three cowards stoning a

dying lady when they were so near death themselves."



You could see the superstitious crowd shrink and catch their breath,

under the sudden shock.  The blacksmith, with a show of bravado, said:



"Pooh!  What do you know about it?"



"I?  Everything.  By profession I am a fortune-teller, and I read the

hands of you three--and some others--when you lifted them to stone the

woman.  One of you will die to-morrow week; another of you will die to-

night; the third has but five minutes to live--and yonder is the clock!"



It made a sensation.  The faces of the crowd blanched, and turned

mechanically toward the clock.  The butcher and the weaver seemed smitten

with an illness, but the blacksmith braced up and said, with spirit:



"It is not long to wait for prediction number one.  If it fails, young

master, you will not live a whole minute after, I promise you that."



No one said anything; all watched the clock in a deep stillness which was

impressive.  When four and a half minutes were gone the blacksmith gave a

sudden gasp and clapped his hands upon his heart, saying, "Give me

breath!  Give me room!" and began to sink down.  The crowd surged back,

no one offering to support him, and he fell lumbering to the ground and

was dead.  The people stared at him, then at Satan, then at one another;

and their lips moved, but no words came.  Then Satan said:



"Three saw that I threw no stone.  Perhaps there are others; let them

speak."



It struck a kind of panic into them, and, although no one answered him,

many began to violently accuse one another, saying, "You said he didn't

throw," and getting for reply, "It is a lie, and I will make you eat it!"

And so in a moment they were in a raging and noisy turmoil, and beating

and banging one another; and in the midst was the only indifferent one--

the dead lady hanging from her rope, her troubles forgotten, her spirit

at peace.



So we walked away, and I was not at ease, but was saying to myself, "He

told them he was laughing at them, but it was a lie--he was laughing at

me."



That made him laugh again, and he said, "Yes, I was laughing at you,

because, in fear of what others might report about you, you stoned the

woman when your heart revolted at the act--but I was laughing at the

others, too."



"Why?"



"Because their case was yours."



"How is that?"



"Well, there were sixty-eight people there, and sixty-two of them had no

more desire to throw a stone than you had."



"Satan!"



"Oh, it's true.  I know your race.  It is made up of sheep.  It is

governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities.  It suppresses its

feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most

noise.  Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no

matter, the crowd follows it.  The vast majority of the race, whether

savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting

pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they

don't dare to assert themselves.  Think of it!  One kind-hearted creature

spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps in iniquities

which revolt both of them.  Speaking as an expert, I know that ninety-

nine out of a hundred of your race were strongly against the killing of

witches when that foolishness was first agitated by a handful of pious

lunatics in the long ago.  And I know that even to-day, after ages of

transmitted prejudice and silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts

any real heart into the harrying of a witch.  And yet apparently

everybody hates witches and wants them killed.  Some day a handful will

rise up on the other side and make the most noise--perhaps even a single

daring man with a big voice and a determined front will do it--and in a

week all the sheep will wheel and follow him, and witch-hunting will come

to a sudden end.



"Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large

defect in your race--the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his

desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's

eye.  These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and

always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always

be and remain slaves of minorities.  There was never a country where the

majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these

institutions."



I did not like to hear our race called sheep, and said I did not think

they were.



"Still, it is true, lamb," said Satan.  "Look at you in war--what mutton

you are, and how ridiculous!"



"In war?  How?"



"There has never been a just one, never an honorable one--on the part of

the instigator of the war.  I can see a million years ahead, and this

rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances.  The loud

little handful--as usual--will shout for the war.  The pulpit will--

warily and cautiously--object--at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the

nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a

war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and

dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it."  Then the handful will

shout louder.  A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason

against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and

be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them,

and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity.

Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the

platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their

secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers--as earlier--

but do not dare to say so.  And now the whole nation--pulpit and all--

will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man

who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to

open.  Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon

the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those

conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse

to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince

himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he

enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."









Chapter 10



Days and days went by now, and no Satan.  It was dull without him.  But

the astrologer, who had returned from his excursion to the moon, went

about the village, braving public opinion, and getting a stone in the

middle of his back now and then when some witch-hater got a safe chance

to throw it and dodge out of sight.  Meantime two influences had been

working well for Marget.  That Satan, who was quite indifferent to her,

had stopped going to her house after a visit or two had hurt her pride,

and she had set herself the task of banishing him from her heart.

Reports of Wilhelm Meidling's dissipation brought to her from time to

time by old Ursula had touched her with remorse, jealousy of Satan being

the cause of it; and so now, these two matters working upon her together,

she was getting a good profit out of the combination--her interest in

Satan was steadily cooling, her interest in Wilhelm as steadily warming.

All that was needed to complete her conversion was that Wilhelm should

brace up and do something that should cause favorable talk and incline

the public toward him again.



The opportunity came now.  Marget sent and asked him to defend her uncle

in the approaching trial, and he was greatly pleased, and stopped

drinking and began his preparations with diligence.  With more diligence

than hope, in fact, for it was not a promising case.  He had many

interviews in his office with Seppi and me, and threshed out our

testimony pretty thoroughly, thinking to find some valuable grains among

the chaff, but the harvest was poor, of course.



If Satan would only come!  That was my constant thought.  He could invent

some way to win the case; for he had said it would be won, so he

necessarily knew how it could be done.  But the days dragged on, and

still he did not come.  Of course I did not doubt that it would be won,

and that Father Peter would be happy for the rest of his life, since

Satan had said so; yet I knew I should be much more comfortable if he

would come and tell us how to manage it.  It was getting high time for

Father Peter to have a saving change toward happiness, for by general

report he was worn out with his imprisonment and the ignominy that was

burdening him, and was like to die of his miseries unless he got relief

soon.



At last the trial came on, and the people gathered from all around to

witness it; among them many strangers from considerable distances.  Yes,

everybody was there except the accused.  He was too feeble in body for

the strain.  But Marget was present, and keeping up her hope and her

spirit the best she could.  The money was present, too.  It was emptied

on the table, and was handled and caressed and examined by such as were

privileged.



The astrologer was put in the witness-box.  He had on his best hat and

robe for the occasion.



QUESTION.  You claim that this money is yours?



ANSWER.  I do.



Q.  How did you come by it?



A.  I found the bag in the road when I was returning from a journey.



Q.  When?



A.  More than two years ago.



Q.  What did you do with it?



A.  I brought it home and hid it in a secret place in my observatory,

intending to find the owner if I could.



Q.  You endeavored to find him?



A.  I made diligent inquiry during several months, but nothing came of

it.



Q.  And then?



A.  I thought it not worth while to look further, and was minded to use

the money in finishing the wing of the foundling-asylum connected with

the priory and nunnery.  So I took it out of its hiding-place and counted

it to see if any of it was missing.  And then--



Q.  Why do you stop?  Proceed.



A.  I am sorry to have to say this, but just as I had finished and was

restoring the bag to its place, I looked up and there stood Father Peter

behind me.



Several murmured, "That looks bad," but others answered, "Ah, but he is

such a liar!"



Q.  That made you uneasy?



A.  No; I thought nothing of it at the time, for Father Peter often came

to me unannounced to ask for a little help in his need.



Marget blushed crimson at hearing her uncle falsely and impudently

charged with begging, especially from one he had always denounced as a

fraud, and was going to speak, but remembered herself in time and held

her peace.



Q.  Proceed.



A.  In the end I was afraid to contribute the money to the foundling-

asylum, but elected to wait yet another year and continue my inquiries.

When I heard of Father Peter's find I was glad, and no suspicion entered

my mind; when I came home a day or two later and discovered that my own

money was gone I still did not suspect until three circumstances

connected with Father Peter's good fortune struck me as being singular

coincidences.



Q.  Pray name them.



A.  Father Peter had found his money in a path--I had found mine in a

road.  Father Peter's find consisted exclusively of gold ducats--mine

also.  Father Peter found eleven hundred and seven ducats--I exactly the

same.



This closed his evidence, and certainly it made a strong impression on

the house; one could see that.



Wilhelm Meidling asked him some questions, then called us boys, and we

told our tale.  It made the people laugh, and we were ashamed.  We were

feeling pretty badly, anyhow, because Wilhelm was hopeless, and showed

it.  He was doing as well as he could, poor young fellow, but nothing was

in his favor, and such sympathy as there was was now plainly not with his

client.  It might be difficult for court and people to believe the

astrologer's story, considering his character, but it was almost

impossible to believe Father Peter's.  We were already feeling badly

enough, but when the astrologer's lawyer said he believed he would not

ask us any questions--for our story was a little delicate and it would be

cruel for him to put any strain upon it--everybody tittered, and it was

almost more than we could bear.  Then he made a sarcastic little speech,

and got so much fun out of our tale, and it seemed so ridiculous and

childish and every way impossible and foolish, that it made everybody

laugh till the tears came; and at last Marget could not keep up her

courage any longer, but broke down and cried, and I was so sorry for her.



Now I noticed something that braced me up.  It was Satan standing

alongside of Wilhelm!  And there was such a contrast!--Satan looked so

confident, had such a spirit in his eyes and face, and Wilhelm looked so

depressed and despondent.  We two were comfortable now, and judged that

he would testify and persuade the bench and the people that black was

white and white black, or any other color he wanted it.  We glanced

around to see what the strangers in the house thought of him, for he was

beautiful, you know--stunning, in fact--but no one was noticing him; so

we knew by that that he was invisible.



The lawyer was saying his last words; and while he was saying them Satan

began to melt into Wilhelm.  He melted into him and disappeared; and then

there was a change, when his spirit began to look out of Wilhelm's eyes.



That lawyer finished quite seriously, and with dignity.  He pointed to

the money, and said:



"The love of it is the root of all evil.  There it lies, the ancient

tempter, newly red with the shame of its latest victory--the dishonor of

a priest of God and his two poor juvenile helpers in crime.  If it could

but speak, let us hope that it would be constrained to confess that of

all its conquests this was the basest and the most pathetic."



He sat down.  Wilhelm rose and said:



"From the testimony of the accuser I gather that he found this money in a

road more than two years ago.  Correct me, sir, if I misunderstood you."



The astrologer said his understanding of it was correct.



"And the money so found was never out of his hands thenceforth up to a

certain definite date--the last day of last year.  Correct me, sir, if I

am wrong."



The astrologer nodded his head.  Wilhelm turned to the bench and said:



"If I prove that this money here was not that money, then it is not his?"



"Certainly not; but this is irregular.  If you had such a witness it was

your duty to give proper notice of it and have him here to--" He broke

off and began to consult with the other judges.  Meantime that other

lawyer got up excited and began to protest against allowing new witnesses

to be brought into the case at this late stage.



The judges decided that his contention was just and must be allowed.



"But this is not a new witness," said Wilhelm.  "It has already been

partly examined.  I speak of the coin."



"The coin?  What can the coin say?"



"It can say it is not the coin that the astrologer once possessed.  It

can say it was not in existence last December.  By its date it can say

this."



And it was so!  There was the greatest excitement in the court while that

lawyer and the judges were reaching for coins and examining them and

exclaiming.  And everybody was full of admiration of Wilhelm's brightness

in happening to think of that neat idea.  At last order was called and

the court said:



"All of the coins but four are of the date of the present year.  The

court tenders its sincere sympathy to the accused, and its deep regret

that he, an innocent man, through an unfortunate mistake, has suffered

the undeserved humiliation of imprisonment and trial.  The case is

dismissed."



So the money could speak, after all, though that lawyer thought it

couldn't.  The court rose, and almost everybody came forward to shake

hands with Marget and congratulate her, and then to shake with Wilhelm

and praise him; and Satan had stepped out of Wilhelm and was standing

around looking on full of interest, and people walking through him every

which way, not knowing he was there.  And Wilhelm could not explain why

he only thought of the date on the coins at the last moment, instead of

earlier; he said it just occurred to him, all of a sudden, like an

inspiration, and he brought it right out without any hesitation, for,

although he didn't examine the coins, he seemed, somehow, to know it was

true.  That was honest of him, and like him; another would have pretended

he had thought of it earlier, and was keeping it back for a surprise.



He had dulled down a little now; not much, but still you could notice

that he hadn't that luminous look in his eyes that he had while Satan was

in him.  He nearly got it back, though, for a moment when Marget came and

praised him and thanked him and couldn't keep him from seeing how proud

she was of him.  The astrologer went off dissatisfied and cursing, and

Solomon Isaacs gathered up the money and carried it away.  It was Father

Peter's for good and all, now.



Satan was gone.  I judged that he had spirited himself away to the jail

to tell the prisoner the news; and in this I was right.  Marget and the

rest of us hurried thither at our best speed, in a great state of

rejoicing.



Well, what Satan had done was this: he had appeared before that poor

prisoner, exclaiming, "The trial is over, and you stand forever disgraced

as a thief--by verdict of the court!"



The shock unseated the old man's reason.  When we arrived, ten minutes

later, he was parading pompously up and down and delivering commands to

this and that and the other constable or jailer, and calling them Grand

Chamberlain, and Prince This and Prince That, and Admiral of the Fleet,

Field Marshal in Command, and all such fustian, and was as happy as a

bird.  He thought he was Emperor!



Marget flung herself on his breast and cried, and indeed everybody was

moved almost to heartbreak.  He recognized Marget, but could not

understand why she should cry.  He patted her on the shoulder and said:



"Don't do it, dear; remember, there are witnesses, and it is not becoming

in the Crown Princess.  Tell me your trouble--it shall be mended; there

is nothing the Emperor cannot do."  Then he looked around and saw old

Ursula with her apron to her eyes.  He was puzzled at that, and said,

"And what is the matter with you?"



Through her sobs she got out words explaining that she was distressed to

see him--"so."  He reflected over that a moment, then muttered, as if to

himself: "A singular old thing, the Dowager Duchess--means well, but is

always snuffling and never able to tell what it is about.  It is because

she doesn't know."  His eyes fell on Wilhelm.  "Prince of India," he

said, "I divine that it is you that the Crown Princess is concerned

about.  Her tears shall be dried; I will no longer stand between you; she

shall share your throne; and between you you shall inherit mine.  There,

little lady, have I done well?  You can smile now--isn't it so?"



He petted Marget and kissed her, and was so contented with himself and

with everybody that he could not do enough for us all, but began to give

away kingdoms and such things right and left, and the least that any of

us got was a principality.  And so at last, being persuaded to go home,

he marched in imposing state; and when the crowds along the way saw how

it gratified him to be hurrahed at, they humored him to the top of his

desire, and he responded with condescending bows and gracious smiles, and

often stretched out a hand and said, "Bless you, my people!"



As pitiful a sight as ever I saw.  And Marget, and old Ursula crying all

the way.



On my road home I came upon Satan, and reproached him with deceiving me

with that lie.  He was not embarrassed, but said, quite simply and

composedly:



"Ah, you mistake; it was the truth.  I said he would be happy the rest of

his days, and he will, for he will always think he is the Emperor, and

his pride in it and his joy in it will endure to the end.  He is now, and

will remain, the one utterly happy person in this empire."



"But the method of it, Satan, the method!  Couldn't you have done it

without depriving him of his reason?"



It was difficult to irritate Satan, but that accomplished it.



"What an ass you are!" he said.  "Are you so unobservant as not to have

found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination?  No

sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a

fearful thing it is.  Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those.

The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the rest are no

happier than the sane.  Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind

at any time, but I have been referring to the extreme cases.  I have

taken from this man that trumpery thing which the race regards as a Mind;

I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction; you see the

result--and you criticize!  I said I would make him permanently happy,

and I have done it.  I have made him happy by the only means possible to

his race--and you are not satisfied!" He heaved a discouraged sigh, and

said, "It seems to me that this race is hard to please."



There it was, you see.  He didn't seem to know any way to do a person a

favor except by killing him or making a lunatic out of him.  I

apologized, as well as I could; but privately I did not think much of his

processes--at that time.



Satan was accustomed to say that our race lived a life of continuous and

uninterrupted self-deception.  It duped itself from cradle to grave with

shams and delusions which it mistook for realities, and this made its

entire life a sham.  Of the score of fine qualities which it imagined it

had and was vain of, it really possessed hardly one.  It regarded itself

as gold, and was only brass.  One day when he was in this vein he

mentioned a detail--the sense of humor.  I cheered up then, and took

issue.  I said we possessed it.



"There spoke the race!" he said; "always ready to claim what it hasn't

got, and mistake its ounce of brass filings for a ton of gold-dust.  You

have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you

possess that.  This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade

and trivial things--broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries,

absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh.  The ten thousand high-grade

comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision.

Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these

juvenilities and laugh at them--and by laughing at them destroy them?

For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective

weapon--laughter.  Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution--

these can lift at a colossal humbug--push it a little--weaken it a

little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and

atoms at a blast.  Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons.  Do you ever

use that one?  No; you leave it lying rusting.  As a race, do you ever

use it at all?  No; you lack sense and the courage."



We were traveling at the time and stopped at a little city in India and

looked on while a juggler did his tricks before a group of natives.  They

were wonderful, but I knew Satan could beat that game, and I begged him

to show off a little, and he said he would.  He changed himself into a

native in turban and breech-cloth, and very considerately conferred on me

a temporary knowledge of the language.



The juggler exhibited a seed, covered it with earth in a small flower-

pot, then put a rag over the pot; after a minute the rag began to rise;

in ten minutes it had risen a foot; then the rag was removed and a little

tree was exposed, with leaves upon it and ripe fruit.  We ate the fruit,

and it was good.  But Satan said:



"Why do you cover the pot?  Can't you grow the tree in the sunlight?"



"No," said the juggler; "no one can do that."



"You are only an apprentice; you don't know your trade.  Give me the

seed.  I will show you."  He took the seed and said, "What shall I raise

from it?"



"It is a cherry seed; of course you will raise a cherry."



"Oh no; that is a trifle; any novice can do that.  Shall I raise an

orange-tree from it?"



"Oh yes!" and the juggler laughed.



"And shall I make it bear other fruits as well as oranges?"



"If God wills!" and they all laughed.



Satan put the seed in the ground, put a handful of dust on it, and said,

"Rise!"



A tiny stem shot up and began to grow, and grew so fast that in five

minutes it was a great tree, and we were sitting in the shade of it.

There was a murmur of wonder, then all looked up and saw a strange and

pretty sight, for the branches were heavy with fruits of many kinds and

colors--oranges, grapes, bananas, peaches, cherries, apricots, and so on.

Baskets were brought, and the unlading of the tree began; and the people

crowded around Satan and kissed his hand, and praised him, calling him

the prince of jugglers.  The news went about the town, and everybody came

running to see the wonder--and they remembered to bring baskets, too.

But the tree was equal to the occasion; it put out new fruits as fast as

any were removed; baskets were filled by the score and by the hundred,

but always the supply remained undiminished.  At last a foreigner in

white linen and sun-helmet arrived, and exclaimed, angrily:



"Away from here!  Clear out, you dogs; the tree is on my lands and is my

property."



The natives put down their baskets and made humble obeisance.  Satan made

humble obeisance, too, with his fingers to his forehead, in the native

way, and said:



"Please let them have their pleasure for an hour, sir--only that, and no

longer.  Afterward you may forbid them; and you will still have more

fruit than you and the state together can consume in a year."



This made the foreigner very angry, and he cried out, "Who are you, you

vagabond, to tell your betters what they may do and what they mayn't!"

and he struck Satan with his cane and followed this error with a kick.



The fruits rotted on the branches, and the leaves withered and fell.  The

foreigner gazed at the bare limbs with the look of one who is surprised,

and not gratified.  Satan said:



"Take good care of the tree, for its health and yours are bound together.

It will never bear again, but if you tend it well it will live long.

Water its roots once in each hour every night--and do it yourself; it

must not be done by proxy, and to do it in daylight will not answer.  If

you fail only once in any night, the tree will die, and you likewise.  Do

not go home to your own country any more--you would not reach there; make

no business or pleasure engagements which require you to go outside your

gate at night--you cannot afford the risk; do not rent or sell this

place--it would be injudicious."



The foreigner was proud and wouldn't beg, but I thought he looked as if

he would like to.  While he stood gazing at Satan we vanished away and

landed in Ceylon.



I was sorry for that man; sorry Satan hadn't been his customary self and

killed him or made him a lunatic.  It would have been a mercy.  Satan

overheard the thought, and said:



"I would have done it but for his wife, who has not offended me.  She is

coming to him presently from their native land, Portugal.  She is well,

but has not long to live, and has been yearning to see him and persuade

him to go back with her next year.  She will die without knowing he can't

leave that place."



"He won't tell her?"



"He?  He will not trust that secret with any one; he will reflect that it

could be revealed in sleep, in the hearing of some Portuguese guest's

servant some time or other."



"Did none of those natives understand what you said to him?"



"None of them understood, but he will always be afraid that some of them

did.  That fear will be torture to him, for he has been a harsh master to

them.  In his dreams he will imagine them chopping his tree down.  That

will make his days uncomfortable--I have already arranged for his

nights."



It grieved me, though not sharply, to see him take such a malicious

satisfaction in his plans for this foreigner.



"Does he believe what you told him, Satan?"



"He thought he didn't, but our vanishing helped.  The tree, where there

had been no tree before--that helped.  The insane and uncanny variety of

fruits--the sudden withering--all these things are helps.  Let him think

as he may, reason as he may, one thing is certain, he will water the

tree.  But between this and night he will begin his changed career with a

very natural precaution--for him."



"What is that?"



"He will fetch a priest to cast out the tree's devil.  You are such a

humorous race--and don't suspect it."



"Will he tell the priest?"



"No.  He will say a juggler from Bombay created it, and that he wants the

juggler's devil driven out of it, so that it will thrive and be fruitful

again.  The priest's incantations will fail; then the Portuguese will

give up that scheme and get his watering-pot ready."



"But the priest will burn the tree.  I know it; he will not allow it to

remain."



"Yes, and anywhere in Europe he would burn the man, too.  But in India

the people are civilized, and these things will not happen.  The man will

drive the priest away and take care of the tree."



I reflected a little, then said, "Satan, you have given him a hard life,

I think."



"Comparatively.  It must not be mistaken for a holiday."



We flitted from place to place around the world as we had done before,

Satan showing me a hundred wonders, most of them reflecting in some way

the weakness and triviality of our race.  He did this now every few days-

-not out of malice--I am sure of that--it only seemed to amuse and

interest him, just as a naturalist might be amused and interested by a

collection of ants.









Chapter 11



For as much as a year Satan continued these visits, but at last he came

less often, and then for a long time he did not come at all.  This always

made me lonely and melancholy.  I felt that he was losing interest in our

tiny world and might at any time abandon his visits entirely.  When one

day he finally came to me I was overjoyed, but only for a little while.

He had come to say good-by, he told me, and for the last time.  He had

investigations and undertakings in other corners of the universe, he

said, that would keep him busy for a longer period than I could wait for

his return.



"And you are going away, and will not come back any more?"



"Yes," he said.  "We have comraded long together, and it has been

pleasant--pleasant for both; but I must go now, and we shall not see each

other any more."



"In this life, Satan, but in another?  We shall meet in another, surely?"



Then, all tranquilly and soberly, he made the strange answer, "There is

no other."



A subtle influence blew upon my spirit from his, bringing with it a

vague, dim, but blessed and hopeful feeling that the incredible words

might be true--even must be true.



"Have you never suspected this, Theodor?"



"No.  How could I?  But if it can only be true--"



"It is true."



A gust of thankfulness rose in my breast, but a doubt checked it before

it could issue in words, and I said, "But--but--we have seen that future

life--seen it in its actuality, and so--"



"It was a vision--it had no existence."



I could hardly breathe for the great hope that was struggling in me.

"A vision?--a vi--"



"Life itself is only a vision, a dream."



It was electrical.  By God!  I had had that very thought a thousand times

in my musings!



"Nothing exists; all is a dream.  God--man--the world--the sun, the moon,

the wilderness of stars--a dream, all a dream; they have no existence.

Nothing exists save empty space--and you!"



"I!"



"And you are not you--you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a

thought.  I myself have no existence; I am but a dream--your dream,

creature of your imagination.  In a moment you will have realized this,

then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the

nothingness out of which you made me....



"I am perishing already--I am failing--I am passing away.  In a little

while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless

solitudes without friend or comrade forever--for you will remain a

thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable,

indestructible.  But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself

and set you free.  Dream other dreams, and better!



"Strange!  that you should not have suspected years ago--centuries, ages,

eons, ago!--for you have existed, companionless, through all the

eternities.  Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that

your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction!

Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane--like all

dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet

preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy,

yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life,

yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness

unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels

painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and

maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell--mouths

mercy and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied

by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other

people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them

all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the

responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it

where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine

obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!...



"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a

dream.  You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly

creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks--in a

word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it.  The dream-marks

are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.



"It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no

universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell.  It is all

a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream.  Nothing exists but you.  And you

are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless

thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"



He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he

had said was true.













A FABLE



Once upon a time an artist who had painted a small and very beautiful

picture placed it so that he could see it in the mirror.  He said, "This

doubles the distance and softens it, and it is twice as lovely as it was

before."



The animals out in the woods heard of this through the housecat, who was

greatly admired by them because he was so learned, and so refined and

civilized, and so polite and high-bred, and could tell them so much which

they didn't know before, and were not certain about afterward.  They were

much excited about this new piece of gossip, and they asked questions, so

as to get at a full understanding of it.  They asked what a picture was,

and the cat explained.



"It is a flat thing," he said; "wonderfully flat, marvelously flat,

enchantingly flat and elegant.  And, oh, so beautiful!"



That excited them almost to a frenzy, and they said they would give the

world to see it.  Then the bear asked:



"What is it that makes it so beautiful?"



"It is the looks of it," said the cat.



This filled them with admiration and uncertainty, and they were more

excited than ever.  Then the cow asked:



"What is a mirror?"



"It is a hole in the wall," said the cat.  "You look in it, and there you

see the picture, and it is so dainty and charming and ethereal and

inspiring in its unimaginable beauty that your head turns round and

round, and you almost swoon with ecstasy."



The ass had not said anything as yet; he now began to throw doubts.

He said there had never been anything as beautiful as this before, and

probably wasn't now.  He said that when it took a whole basketful of

sesquipedalian adjectives to whoop up a thing of beauty, it was time for

suspicion.



It was easy to see that these doubts were having an effect upon the

animals, so the cat went off offended.  The subject was dropped for a

couple of days, but in the meantime curiosity was taking a fresh start,

aid there was a revival of interest perceptible.  Then the animals

assailed the ass for spoiling what could possibly have been a pleasure to

them, on a mere suspicion that the picture was not beautiful, without any

evidence that such was the case.  The ass was not, troubled; he was calm,

and said there was one way to find out who was in the right, himself or

the cat: he would go and look in that hole, and come back and tell what

he found there.  The animals felt relieved and grateful, and asked him to

go at once--which he did.



But he did not know where he ought to stand; and so, through error, he

stood between the picture and the mirror.  The result was that the

picture had no chance, and didn't show up.  He returned home and said:



"The cat lied.  There was nothing in that hole but an ass.  There wasn't

a sign of a flat thing visible.  It was a handsome ass, and friendly, but

just an ass, and nothing more."



The elephant asked:



"Did you see it good and clear?  Were you close to it?"



"I saw it good and clear, O Hathi, King of Beasts.  I was so close that I

touched noses with it."



"This is very strange," said the elephant; "the cat was always truthful

before--as far as we could make out.  Let another witness try.  Go,

Baloo, look in the hole, and come and report."



So the bear went.  When he came back, he said:



"Both the cat and the ass have lied; there was nothing in the hole but a

bear."



Great was the surprise and puzzlement of the animals.  Each was now

anxious to make the test himself and get at the straight truth.  The

elephant sent them one at a time.



First, the cow.  She found nothing in the hole but a cow.



The tiger found nothing in it but a tiger.



The lion found nothing in it but a lion.



The leopard found nothing in it but a leopard.



The camel found a camel, and nothing more.



Then Hathi was wroth, and said he would have the truth, if he had to go

and fetch it himself.  When he returned, he abused his whole subjectry

for liars, and was in an unappeasable fury with the moral and mental

blindness of the cat.  He said that anybody but a near-sighted fool could

see that there was nothing in the hole but an elephant.



                            MORAL, BY THE CAT



You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it

and the mirror of your imagination.  You may not see your ears, but they

will be there.













HUNTING THE DECEITFUL TURKEY



When I was a boy my uncle and his big boys hunted with the rifle, the

youngest boy Fred and I with a shotgun--a small single-barrelled shotgun

which was properly suited to our size and strength; it was not much

heavier than a broom.  We carried it turn about, half an hour at a time.

I was not able to hit anything with it, but I liked to try.  Fred and I

hunted feathered small game, the others hunted deer, squirrels, wild

turkeys, and such things.  My uncle and the big boys were good shots.

They killed hawks and wild geese and such like on the wing; and they

didn't wound or kill squirrels, they stunned them.  When the dogs treed a

squirrel, the squirrel would scamper aloft and run out on a limb and

flatten himself along it, hoping to make himself invisible in that way--

and not quite succeeding.  You could see his wee little ears sticking up.

You couldn't see his nose, but you knew where it was.  Then the hunter,

despising a "rest" for his rifle, stood up and took offhand aim at the

limb and sent a bullet into it immediately under the squirrel's nose, and

down tumbled the animal, unwounded,  but unconscious; the dogs gave him a

shake and he was dead.  Sometimes when the distance was great and the

wind not accurately allowed for, the bullet would hit the squirrel's

head; the dogs could do as they pleased with that one--the hunter's pride

was hurt, and he wouldn't allow it to go into the gamebag.



In the first faint gray of the dawn the stately wild turkeys would be

stalking around in great flocks, and ready to be sociable and answer

invitations to come and converse with other excursionists of their kind.

The hunter concealed himself and imitated the turkey-call by sucking the

air through the leg-bone of a turkey which had previously answered a call

like that and lived only just long enough to regret it.  There is nothing

that furnishes a perfect turkey-call except that bone.  Another of

Nature's treacheries, you see.  She is full of them; half the time she

doesn't know which she likes best--to betray her chid or protect it.

In the case of the turkey she is badly mixed: she gives it a bone to be

used in getting it into trouble, and she also furnishes it with a trick

for getting itself out of the trouble again.  When a mamma-turkey answers

an invitation and finds she has made a mistake in accepting it, she does

as the mamma-partridge does--remembers a previous engagement--and goes

limping and scrambling away, pretending to be very lame; and at the same

time she is saying to her not-visible children, "Lie low, keep still,

don't expose yourselves; I shall be back as soon as I have beguiled this

shabby swindler out of the country."



When a person is ignorant and confiding, this immoral device can have

tiresome results.  I followed an ostensibly lame turkey over a

considerable part of the United States one morning, because I believed in

her and could not think she would deceive a mere boy, and one who was

trusting her and considering her honest.  I had the single-barrelled

shotgun, but my idea was to catch her alive.  I often got within rushing

distance of her, and then made my rush; but always, just as I made my

final plunge and put my hand down where her back had been, it wasn't

there; it was only two or three inches from there and I brushed the tail-

feathers as I landed on my stomach--a very close call, but still not

quite close enough; that is, not close enough for success, but just close

enough to convince me that I could do it next time.  She always waited

for me, a little piece away, and let on to be resting and greatly

fatigued; which was a lie, but I believed it, for I still thought her

honest long after I ought to have begun to doubt her, suspecting that

this was no way for a high-minded bird to be acting.  I followed, and

followed, and followed, making my periodical rushes, and getting up and

brushing the dust off, and resuming the voyage with patient confidence;

indeed, with a confidence which grew, for I could see by the change of

climate and vegetation that we were getting up into the high latitudes,

and as she always looked a little tireder and a little more discouraged

after each rush, I judged that I was safe to win, in the end, the

competition being purely a matter of staying power and the advantage

lying with me from the start because she was lame.



Along in the afternoon I began to feel fatigued myself.  Neither of us

had had any rest since we first started on the excursion, which was

upwards of ten hours before, though latterly we had paused awhile after

rushes, I letting on to be thinking about something else; but neither of

us sincere, and both of us waiting for the other to call game but in no

real hurry about it, for indeed those little evanescent snatches of rest

were very grateful to the feelings of us both; it would naturally be so,

skirmishing along like that ever since dawn and not a bite in the

meantime; at least for me, though sometimes as she lay on her side

fanning herself with a wing and praying for strength to get out of this

difficulty a grasshopper happened along whose time had come, and that was

well for her, and fortunate, but I had nothing--nothing the whole day.



More than once, after I was very tired, I gave up taking her alive, and

was going to shoot her, but I never did it, although it was my right, for

I did not believe I could hit her; and besides, she always stopped and

posed, when I raised the gun, and this made me suspicious that she knew

about me and my marksmanship, and so I did not care to expose myself to

remarks.



I did not get her, at all.  When she got tired of the game at last, she

rose from almost under my hand and flew aloft with the rush and whir of a

shell and lit on the highest limb of a great tree and sat down and

crossed her legs and smiled down at me, and seemed gratified to see me so

astonished.



I was ashamed, and also lost; and it was while wandering the woods

hunting for myself that I found a deserted log cabin and had one of the

best meals there that in my life-days I have eaten.  The weed-grown

garden was full of ripe tomatoes, and I ate them ravenously, though I had

never liked them before.  Not more than two or three times since have I

tasted anything that was so delicious as those tomatoes.  I surfeited

myself with them, and did not taste another one until I was in middle

life.  I can eat them now, but I do not like the look of them.  I suppose

we have all experienced a surfeit at one time or another.  Once, in

stress of circumstances, I ate part of a barrel of sardines, there being

nothing else at hand, but since then I have always been able to get along

without sardines.













THE McWILLIAMSES AND THE BURGLAR ALARM



The conversation drifted smoothly and pleasantly along from weather to

crops, from crops to literature, from literature to scandal, from scandal

to religion; then took a random jump, and landed on the subject of

burglar alarms.  And now for the first time Mr. McWilliams showed

feeling.  Whenever I perceive this sign on this man's dial, I comprehend

it, and lapse into silence, and give him opportunity to unload his heart.

Said he, with but ill-controlled emotion:



"I do not go one single cent on burglar alarms, Mr. Twain--not a single

cent--and I will tell you why.  When we were finishing our house, we

found we had a little cash left over, on account of the plumber not

knowing it.  I was for enlightening the heathen with it, for I was always

unaccountably down on the heathen somehow; but Mrs. McWilliams said no,

let's have a burglar alarm.  I agreed to this compromise.  I will explain

that whenever I want a thing, and Mrs. McWilliams wants another thing,

and we decide upon the thing that Mrs. McWilliams wants--as we always do

--she calls that a compromise.  Very well: the man came up from New York

and put in the alarm, and charged three hundred and twenty-five dollars

for it, and said we could sleep without uneasiness now.  So we did for

awhile--say a month.  Then one night we smelled smoke, and I was advised

to get up and see what the matter was.  I lit a candle, and started

toward the stairs, and met a burglar coming out of a room with a basket

of tinware, which he had mistaken for solid silver in the dark.  He was

smoking a pipe.  I said, 'My friend, we do not allow smoking in this

room.'  He said he was a stranger, and could not be expected to know the

rules of the house: said he had been in many houses just as good as this

one, and it had never been objected to before.  He added that as far as

his experience went, such rules had never been considered to apply to

burglars, anyway.



"I said: 'Smoke along, then, if it is the custom, though I think that the

conceding of a privilege to a burglar which is denied to a bishop is a

conspicuous sign of the looseness of the times.  But waiving all that,

what business have you to be entering this house in this furtive and

clandestine way, without ringing the burglar alarm?'



"He looked confused and ashamed, and said, with embarrassment: 'I beg a

thousand pardons.  I did not know you had a burglar alarm, else I would

have rung it.  I beg you will not mention it where my parents may hear of

it, for they are old and feeble, and such a seemingly wanton breach of

the hallowed conventionalities of our Christian civilization might all

too rudely sunder the frail bridge which hangs darkling between the pale

and evanescent present and the solemn great deeps of the eternities.  May

I trouble you for a match?'



"I said: 'Your sentiments do you honor, but if you will allow me to say

it, metaphor is not your best hold.  Spare your thigh; this kind light

only on the box, and seldom there, in fact, if my experience may be

trusted.  But to return to business: how did you get in here?'



"'Through a second-story window.'



"It was even so.  I redeemed the tinware at pawnbroker's rates, less cost

of advertising, bade the burglar good-night, closed the window after him,

and retired to headquarters to report.  Next morning we sent for the

burglar-alarm man, and he came up and explained that the reason the alarm

did not 'go off' was that no part of the house but the first floor was

attached to the alarm.  This was simply idiotic; one might as well have

no armor on at all in battle as to have it only on his legs.  The expert

now put the whole second story on the alarm, charged three hundred

dollars for it, and went his way.  By and by, one night, I found a

burglar in the third story, about to start down a ladder with a lot of

miscellaneous property.  My first impulse was to crack his head with a

billiard cue; but my second was to refrain from this attention, because

he was between me and the cue rack.  The second impulse was plainly the

soundest, so I refrained, and proceeded to compromise.  I redeemed the

property at former rates, after deducting ten per cent. for use of

ladder, it being my ladder, and, next day we sent down for the expert

once more, and had the third story attached to the alarm, for three

hundred dollars.



"By this time the 'annunciator' had grown to formidable dimensions.  It

had forty-seven tags on it, marked with the names of the various rooms

and chimneys, and it occupied the space of an ordinary wardrobe.  The

gong was the size of a wash-bowl, and was placed above the head of our

bed.  There was a wire from the house to the coachman's quarters in the

stable, and a noble gong alongside his pillow.



"We should have been comfortable now but for one defect.  Every morning

at five the cook opened the kitchen door, in the way of business, and rip

went that gong!  The first time this happened I thought the last day was

come sure.  I didn't think it in bed--no, but out of it--for the first

effect of that frightful gong is to hurl you across the house, and slam

you against the wall, and then curl you up, and squirm you like a spider

on a stove lid, till somebody shuts the kitchen door.  In solid fact,

there is no clamor that is even remotely comparable to the dire clamor

which that gong makes.  Well, this catastrophe happened every morning

regularly at five o'clock, and lost us three hours sleep; for, mind you,

when that thing wakes you, it doesn't merely wake you in spots; it wakes

you all over, conscience and all, and you are good for eighteen hours of

wide-awakeness subsequently--eighteen hours of the very most

inconceivable wide-awakeness that you ever experienced in your life.

A stranger died on our hands one time, aid we vacated and left him in our

room overnight.  Did that stranger wait for the general judgment?  No,

sir; he got up at five the next morning in the most prompt and

unostentatious way.  I knew he would; I knew it mighty well.  He

collected his life-insurance, and lived happy ever after, for there was

plenty of proof as to the perfect squareness of his death.



"Well, we were gradually fading toward a better land, on account of the

daily loss of sleep; so we finally had the expert up again, and he ran a

wire to the outside of the door, and placed a switch there, whereby

Thomas, the butler, always made one little mistake--he switched the alarm

off at night when he went to bed, and switched it on again at daybreak in

the morning, just in time for the cook to open the kitchen door, and

enable that gong to slam us across the house, sometimes breaking a window

with one or the other of us.  At the end of a week we recognized that

this switch business was a delusion and a snare.  We also discovered that

a band of burglars had been lodging in the house the whole time--not

exactly to steal, for there wasn't much left now, but to hide from the

police, for they were hot pressed, and they shrewdly judged that the

detectives would never think of a tribe of burglars taking sanctuary in a

house notoriously protected by the most imposing and elaborate burglar

alarm in America.



"Sent down for the expert again, and this time he struck a most dazzling

idea--he fixed the thing so that opening the kitchen door would take off

the alarm.  It was a noble idea, and he charged accordingly.  But you

already foresee the result.  I switched on the alarm every night at bed-

time, no longer trusting on Thomas's frail memory; and as soon as the

lights were out the burglars walked in at the kitchen door, thus taking

the alarm off without waiting for the cook to do it in the morning.  You

see how aggravatingly we were situated.  For months we couldn't have any

company.  Not a spare bed in the house; all occupied by burglars.



"Finally, I got up a cure of my own.  The expert answered the call, and

ran another ground wire to the stable, and established a switch there, so

that the coachman could put on and take off the alarm.  That worked first

rate, and a season of peace ensued, during which we got to inviting

company once more and enjoying life.



"But by and by the irrepressible alarm invented a new kink.  One winter's

night we were flung out of bed by the sudden music of that awful gong,

and when we hobbled to the annunciator, turned up the gas, and saw the

word 'Nursery' exposed, Mrs. McWilliams fainted dead away, and I came

precious near doing the same thing myself.  I seized my shotgun, and

stood timing the coachman whilst that appalling buzzing went on.  I knew

that his gong had flung him out, too, and that he would be along with his

gun as soon as he could jump into his clothes.  When I judged that the

time was ripe, I crept to the room next the nursery, glanced through the

window, and saw the dim outline of the coachman in the yard below,

standing at present-arms and waiting for a chance.  Then I hopped into

the nursery and fired, and in the same instant the coachman fired at the

red flash of my gun.  Both of us were successful; I crippled a nurse, and

he shot off all my back hair.  We turned up the gas, and telephoned for a

surgeon.  There was not a sign of a burglar, and no window had been

raised.  One glass was absent, but that was where the coachman's charge

had come through.  Here was a fine mystery--a burglar alarm 'going off'

at midnight of its own accord, and not a burglar in the neighborhood!



"The expert answered the usual call, and explained that it was a 'False

alarm.' Said it was easily fixed.  So he overhauled the nursery window,

charged a remunerative figure for it, and departed.



"What we suffered from false alarms for the next three years no

stylographic pen can describe.  During the next three months I always

flew with my gun to the room indicated, and the coachman always sallied

forth with his battery to support me.  But there was never anything to

shoot at--windows all tight and secure.  We always sent down for the

expert next day, and he fixed those particular windows so they would keep

quiet a week or so, and always remembered to send us a bill about like

this:



          Wire ............................$2.15

          Nipple...........................  .75

          Two hours' labor ................ 1.50

          Wax..............................  .47

          Tape.............................  .34

          Screws...........................  .15

          Recharging battery ..............  .98

          Three hours' labor .............. 2.25

          String...........................  .02

          Lard ............................  .66

          Pond's Extract .................. 1.25

          Springs at 50.................... 2.00

          Railroad fares................... 7.25





"At length a perfectly natural thing came about--after we had answered

three or four hundred false alarms--to wit, we stopped answering them.

Yes, I simply rose up calmly, when slammed across the house by the alarm,

calmly inspected the annunciator, took note of the room indicated; and

then calmly disconnected that room from the alarm, and went back to bed

as if nothing had happened.  Moreover, I left that room off permanently,

and did not send for the expert.  Well, it goes without saying that in

the course of time all the rooms were taken off, and the entire machine

was out of service.



"It was at this unprotected time that the heaviest calamity of all

happened.  The burglars walked in one night and carried off the burglar

alarm! yes, sir, every hide and hair of it: ripped it out, tooth and

nail; springs, bells, gongs, battery, and all; they took a hundred and

fifty miles of copper wire; they just cleaned her out, bag and baggage,

and never left us a vestige of her to swear at--swear by, I mean.



"We had a time of it to get her back; but we accomplished it finally, for

money.  The alarm firm said that what we needed now was to have her put

in right--with their new patent springs in the windows to make false

alarms impossible, and their new patent clock attached to take off and

put on the alarm morning and night without human assistance.  That seemed

a good scheme.  They promised to have the whole thing finished in ten

days.  They began work, and we left for the summer.  They worked a couple

of days; then they left for the summer.  After which the burglars moved

in, and began their summer vacation.  When we returned in the fall, the

house was as empty as a beer closet in premises where painters have been

at work.  We refurnished, and then sent down to hurry up the expert.  He

came up and finished the job, and said: 'Now this clock is set to put on

the alarm every night at 10, and take it off every morning at 5:45.  All

you've got to do is to wind her up every week, and then leave her alone--

she will take care of the alarm herself.'



"After that we had a most tranquil season during three months.  The bill

was prodigious, of course, and I had said I would not pay it until the

new machinery had proved itself to be flawless.  The time stipulated was

three months.  So I paid the bill, and the very next day the alarm went

to buzzing like ten thousand bee swarms at ten o'clock in the morning.

I turned the hands around twelve hours, according to instructions, and

this took off the alarm; but there was another hitch at night, and I had

to set her ahead twelve hours once more to get her to put the alarm on

again.  That sort of nonsense went on a week or two, then the expert came

up and put in a new clock.  He came up every three months during the next

three years, and put in a new clock.  But it was always a failure.  His

clocks all had the same perverse defect: they would put the alarm on in

the daytime, and they would not put it on at night; and if you forced it

on yourself, they would take it off again the minute your back was

turned.



"Now there is the history of that burglar alarm--everything just as it

happened; nothing extenuated, and naught set down in malice.  Yes, sir,--

and when I had slept nine years with burglars, and maintained an

expensive burglar alarm the whole time, for their protection, not mine,

and at my sole cost--for not a d---d cent could I ever get THEM to

contribute--I just said to Mrs.  McWilliams that I had had enough of that

kind of pie; so with her full consent I took the whole thing out and

traded it off for a dog, and shot the dog.  I don't know what you think

about it, Mr.  Twain; but I think those things are made solely in the

interest of the burglars.  Yes, sir, a burglar alarm combines in its

person all that is objectionable about a fire, a riot, and a harem, and

at the same time had none of the compensating advantages, of one sort or

another, that customarily belong with that combination.  Good-by: I get

off here."









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Mysterious Stranger

by Mark Twain













A DOUBLE BARRELLED DETECTIVE



by Mark Twain









PART I



          "We ought never to do wrong when people are looking."





I



The first scene is in the country, in Virginia; the time, 1880.  There

has been a wedding, between a handsome young man of slender means and a

rich young girl--a case of love at first sight and a precipitate

marriage; a marriage bitterly opposed by the girl's widowed father.



Jacob Fuller, the bridegroom, is twenty-six years old, is of an old but

unconsidered family which had by compulsion emigrated from Sedgemoor, and

for King James's purse's profit, so everybody said--some maliciously the

rest merely because they believed it.  The bride is nineteen and

beautiful.  She is intense, high-strung, romantic, immeasurably proud of

her Cavalier blood, and passionate in her love for her young husband.

For its sake she braved her father's displeasure, endured his reproaches,

listened with loyalty unshaken to his warning predictions and went from

his house without his blessing, proud and happy in the proofs she was

thus giving of the quality of the affection which had made its home in

her heart.



The morning after the marriage there was a sad surprise for her.  Her

husband put aside her proffered caresses, and said:



"Sit down.  I have something to say to you.  I loved you.  That was

before I asked your father to give you to me.  His refusal is not my

grievance--I could have endured that.  But the things he said of me to

you--that is a different matter.  There--you needn't speak; I know quite

well what they were; I got them from authentic sources.  Among other

things he said that my character was written in my face; that I was

treacherous, a dissembler, a coward, and a brute without sense of pity or

compassion: the 'Sedgemoor trade-mark,' he called it--and 'white-sleeve

badge.'  Any other man in my place would have gone to his house and shot

him down like a dog.  I wanted to do it, and was minded to do it, but a

better thought came to me: to put him to shame; to break his heart; to

kill him by inches.  How to do it?  Through my treatment of you, his

idol!  I would marry you; and then--Have patience.  You will see."



From that moment onward, for three months, the young wife suffered all

the humiliations, all the insults, all the miseries that the diligent and

inventive mind of the husband could contrive, save physical injuries

only.  Her strong pride stood by her, and she kept the secret of her

troubles.  Now and then the husband said, "Why don't you go to your

father and tell him?"  Then he invented new tortures, applied them, and

asked again.  She always answered, "He shall never know by my mouth," and

taunted him with his origin; said she was the lawful slave of a scion of

slaves, and must obey, and would--up to that point, but no further; he

could kill her if he liked, but he could not break her; it was not in the

Sedgemoor breed to do it.  At the end of the three months he said, with a

dark significance in his manner, "I have tried all things but one"--and

waited for her reply.  "Try that," she said, and curled her lip in

mockery.



That night he rose at midnight and put on his clothes, then said to her:



"Get up and dress!"



She obeyed--as always, without a word.  He led her half a mile from the

house, and proceeded to lash her to a tree by the side of the public

road; and succeeded, she screaming and struggling.  He gagged her then,

struck her across the face with his cowhide, and set his bloodhounds on

her.  They tore the clothes off her, and she was naked.  He called the

dogs off, and said:



"You will be found--by the passing public.  They will be dropping along

about three hours from now, and will spread the news--do you hear?  Good-

by.  You have seen the last of me."



He went away then.  She moaned to herself:



"I shall bear a child--to him!  God grant it may be a boy!"





The farmers released her by and by--and spread the news, which was

natural.  They raised the country with lynching intentions, but the bird

had flown.  The young wife shut herself up in her father's house; he shut

himself up with her, and thenceforth would see no one.  His pride was

broken, and his heart; so he wasted away, day by day, and even his

daughter rejoiced when death relieved him.



Then she sold the estate and disappeared.









II



In 1886 a young woman was living in a modest house near a secluded New

England village, with no company but a little boy about five years old.

She did her own work, she discouraged acquaintanceships, and had none.

The butcher, the baker, and the others that served her could tell the

villagers nothing about her further than that her name was Stillman, and

that she called the child Archy.  Whence she came they had not been able

to find out, but they said she talked like a Southerner.  The child had

no playmates and no comrade, and no teacher but the mother.  She taught

him diligently and intelligently, and was satisfied with the results--

even a little proud of them.  One day Archy said:



"Mamma, am I different from other children?"



"Well, I suppose not.  Why?"



"There was a child going along out there and asked me if the postman had

been by and I said yes, and she said how long since I saw him and I said

I hadn't seen him at all, and she said how did I know he'd been by, then,

and I said because I smelt his track on the sidewalk, and she said I was

a dum fool and made a mouth at me.  What did she do that for?"



The young woman turned white, and said to herself, "It's a birth mark!

The gift of the bloodhound is in him."  She snatched the boy to her

breast and hugged him passionately, saying, "God has appointed the way!"

Her eyes were burning with a fierce light, and her breath came short and

quick with excitement.  She said to herself: "The puzzle is solved now;

many a time it has been a mystery to me, the impossible things the child

has done in the dark, but it is all clear to me now."



She set him in his small chair, and said:



"Wait a little till I come, dear; then we will talk about the matter."



She went up to her room and took from her dressing-table several small

articles and put them out of sight: a nail-file on the floor under the

bed; a pair of nail-scissors under the bureau; a small ivory paper-knife

under the wardrobe.  Then she returned, and said:



"There!  I have left some things which I ought to have brought down."

She named them, and said, "Run up and bring them, dear."



The child hurried away on his errand and was soon back again with the

things.



"Did you have any difficulty, dear?"



"No, mamma; I only went where you went."



During his absence she had stepped to the bookcase, taken several books

from the bottom shelf, opened each, passed her hand over a page, noting

its number in her memory, then restored them to their places.  Now she

said:



"I have been doing something while you have been gone, Archy.  Do you

think you can find out what it was?"



The boy went to the bookcase and got out the books that had been touched,

and opened them at the pages which had been stroked.



The mother took him in her lap, and said:



"I will answer your question now, dear.  I have found out that in one way

you are quite different from other people.  You can see in the dark, you

can smell what other people cannot, you have the talents of a bloodhound.

They are good and valuable things to have, but you must keep the matter a

secret.  If people found it out, they would speak of you as an odd child,

a strange child, and children would be disagreeable to you, and give you

nicknames.  In this world one must be like everybody else if he doesn't

want to provoke scorn or envy or jealousy.  It is a great and fine

distinction which has been born to you, and I am glad; but you will keep

it a secret, for mamma's sake, won't you?"



The child promised, without understanding.



All the rest of the day the mother's brain was busy with excited

thinkings; with plans, projects, schemes, each and all of them uncanny,

grim, and dark.  Yet they lit up her face; lit it with a fell light of

their own; lit it with vague fires of hell.  She was in a fever of

unrest; she could not sit, stand, read, sew; there was no relief for her

but in movement.  She tested her boy's gift in twenty ways, and kept

saying to herself all the time, with her mind in the past: "He broke my

father's heart, and night and day all these years I have tried, and all

in vain, to think out a way to break his.  I have found it now--I have

found it now."



When night fell, the demon of unrest still possessed her.  She went on

with her tests; with a candle she traversed the house from garret to

cellar, hiding pins, needles, thimbles, spools, under pillows, under

carpets, in cracks in the walls, under the coal in the bin; then sent the

little fellow in the dark to find them; which he did, and was happy and

proud when she praised him and smothered him with caresses.



From this time forward life took on a new complexion for her.  She said,

"The future is secure--I can wait, and enjoy the waiting."  The most of

her lost interests revived.  She took up music again, and languages,

drawing, painting, and the other long-discarded delights of her

maidenhood.  She was happy once more, and felt again the zest of life.

As the years drifted by she watched the development of her boy, and was

contented with it.  Not altogether, but nearly that.  The soft side of

his heart was larger than the other side of it.  It was his only defect,

in her eyes.  But she considered that his love for her and worship of her

made up for it.  He was a good hater--that was well; but it was a

question if the materials of his hatreds were of as tough and enduring a

quality as those of his friendships--and that was not so well.





The years drifted on.  Archy was become a handsome, shapely, athletic

youth, courteous, dignified, companionable, pleasant in his ways, and

looking perhaps a trifle older than he was, which was sixteen.  One

evening his mother said she had something of grave importance to say to

him, adding that he was old enough to hear it now, and old enough and

possessed of character enough and stability enough to carry out a stern

plan which she had been for years contriving and maturing.  Then she told

him her bitter story, in all its naked atrociousness.  For a while the

boy was paralyzed; then he said:



"I understand.  We are Southerners; and by our custom and nature there is

but one atonement.  I will search him out and kill him."



"Kill him?  No!  Death is release, emancipation; death is a favor.  Do I

owe him favors?  You must not hurt a hair of his head."



The boy was lost in thought awhile; then he said:



"You are all the world to me, and your desire is my law and my pleasure.

Tell me what to do and I will do it."



The mother's eyes beamed with satisfaction, and she said:



"You will go and find him.  I have known his hiding-place for eleven

years; it cost me five years and more of inquiry, and much money, to

locate it.  He is a quartz-miner in Colorado, and well-to-do.  He lives

in Denver.  His name is Jacob Fuller.  There--it is the first time I have

spoken it since that unforgettable night.  Think!  That name could have

been yours if I had not saved you that shame and furnished you a cleaner

one.  You will drive him from that place; you will hunt him down and

drive him again; and yet again, and again, and again, persistently,

relentlessly, poisoning his life, filling it with mysterious terrors,

loading it with weariness and misery, making him wish for death, and that

he had a suicide's courage; you will make of him another Wandering Jew;

he shall know no rest any more, no peace of mind, no placid sleep; you

shall shadow him, cling to him, persecute him, till you break his heart,

as he broke my father's and mine."



"I will obey, mother."



"I believe it, my child.  The preparations are all made; everything is

ready.  Here is a letter of credit; spend freely, there is no lack of

money.  At times you may need disguises.  I have provided them; also some

other conveniences."  She took from the drawer of the typewriter-table

several squares of paper.  They all bore these typewritten words:



                           $10,000 REWARD



It is believed that a certain man who is wanted in an Eastern state

is sojourning here.  In 1880, in the night, he tied his young wife

to a tree by the public road, cut her across the face with a

cowhide, and made his dogs tear her clothes from her, leaving her

naked.  He left her there, and fled the country.  A blood-relative

of hers has searched for him for seventeen years.  Address .  .  .

.  .  .  .  .  .  , .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  , Post-office.

The above reward will be paid in cash to the person who will furnish

the seeker, in a personal interview, the criminal's address.



"When you have found him and acquainted yourself with his scent, you will

go in the night and placard one of these upon the building he occupies,

and another one upon the post-office or in some other prominent place.

It will be the talk of the region.  At first you must give him several

days in which to force a sale of his belongings at something approaching

their value.  We will ruin him by and by, but gradually; we must not

impoverish him at once, for that could bring him to despair and injure

his health, possibly kill him."



She took three or four more typewritten forms from the drawer--

duplicates--and read one:



.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  , .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  , 18.

                                                          .  .  .

To Jacob Fuller:



You have .  .  .  .  .  .  days in which to settle your affairs.

You will not be disturbed during that limit, which will expire at .

.  .  .  .  .  M., on the .  .  .  .  .  .  of .  .  .  .  .  .  .

You must then MOVE ON.  If you are still in the place after the

named hour, I will placard you on all the dead walls, detailing your

crime once more, and adding the date, also the scene of it, with all

names concerned, including your own.  Have no fear of bodily injury

--it will in no circumstances ever be inflicted upon you.  You

brought misery upon an old man, and ruined his life and broke his

heart.  What he suffered, you are to suffer.



"You will add no signature.  He must receive this before he learns of the

reward placard--before he rises in the morning--lest he lose his head and

fly the place penniless."



"I shall not forget."



"You will need to use these forms only in the beginning--once may he

enough.  Afterward, when you are ready for him to vanish out of a place,

see that he gets a copy of this form, which merely says:



              "MOVE ON.  You have .  .  .  .  .  .  days."



"He will obey.  That is sure."









III



Extracts from letters to the mother:



                                              DENVER, April 3, 1897

I have now been living several days in the same hotel with Jacob Fuller.

I have his scent; I could track him through ten divisions of infantry and

find him.  I have often been near him and heard him talk.  He owns a good

mine, and has a fair income from it; but he is not rich.  He learned

mining in a good way--by working at it for wages.  He is a cheerful

creature, and his forty-three years sit lightly upon him; he could pass

for a younger man--say thirty-six or thirty-seven.  He has never married

again--passes himself off for a widower.  He stands well, is liked, is

popular, and has many friends.  Even I feel a drawing toward him--the

paternal blood in me making its claim.  How blind and unreasoning and

arbitrary are some of the laws of nature--the most of them, in fact!  My

task is become hard now--you realize it?  you comprehend, and make

allowances?--and the fire of it has cooled, more than I like to confess

to myself, But I will carry it out.  Even with the pleasure paled, the

duty remains, and I will not spare him.



And for my help, a sharp resentment rises in me when I reflect that he

who committed that odious crime is the only one who has not suffered by

it.  The lesson of it has manifestly reformed his character, and in the

change he is happy.  He, the guilty party, is absolved from all

suffering; you, the innocent, are borne down with it.  But be comforted--

he shall harvest his share.





                                                  SILVER GULCH, May 19

I placarded Form No. 1 at midnight of April 3; an hour later I slipped

Form No. 2 under his chamber door, notifying him to leave Denver at or

before 11.50 the night of the 14th.



Some late bird of a reporter stole one of my placards, then hunted the

town over and found the other one, and stole that.  In this manner he

accomplished what the profession call a "scoop"--that is, he got a

valuable item, and saw to it that no other paper got it.  And so his

paper--the principal one in the town--had it in glaring type on the

editorial page in the morning, followed by a Vesuvian opinion of our

wretch a column long, which wound up by adding a thousand dollars to our

reward on the paper's account!  The journals out here know how to do the

noble thing--when there's business in it.



At breakfast I occupied my usual seat--selected because it afforded a

view of papa Fuller's face, and was near enough for me to hear the talk

that went on at his table.  Seventy-five or a hundred people were in the

room, and all discussing that item, and saying they hoped the seeker

would find that rascal and remove the pollution of his presence from the

town--with a rail, or a bullet, or something.



When Fuller came in he had the Notice to Leave--folded up--in one hand,

and the newspaper in the other; and it gave me more than half a pang to

see him.  His cheerfulness was all gone, and he looked old and pinched

and ashy.  And then--only think of the things he had to listen to!

Mamma, he heard his own unsuspecting friends describe him with epithets

and characterizations drawn from the very dictionaries and phrase-books

of Satan's own authorized editions down below.  And more than that, he

had to agree with the verdicts and applaud them.  His applause tasted

bitter in his mouth, though; he could not disguise that from me; and it

was observable that his appetite was gone; he only nibbled; he couldn't

eat.  Finally a man said:



"It is quite likely that that relative is in the room and hearing what

this town thinks of that unspeakable scoundrel.  I hope so."



Ah, dear, it was pitiful the way Fuller winced, and glanced around

scared!  He couldn't endure any more, and got up and left.



During several days he gave out that he had bought a mine in Mexico, and

wanted to sell out and go down there as soon as he could, and give the

property his personal attention.  He played his cards well; said he would

take $40,000--a quarter in cash, the rest in safe notes; but that as he

greatly needed money on account of his new purchase, he would diminish

his terms for cash in full, He sold out for $30,000.  And then, what do

you think he did?  He asked for greenbacks, and took them, saying the man

in Mexico was a New-Englander, with a head full of crotchets, and

preferred greenbacks to gold or drafts.  People thought it queer, since a

draft on New York could produce greenbacks quite conveniently.  There was

talk of this odd thing, but only for a day; that is as long as any topic

lasts in Denver.



I was watching, all the time.  As soon as the sale was completed and the

money paid--which was on the 11th--I began to stick to Fuller's track

without dropping it for a moment.  That night--no, 12th, for it was a

little past midnight--I tracked him to his room, which was four doors

from mine in the same hall; then I went back and put on my muddy day-

laborer disguise, darkened my complexion, and sat down in my room in the

gloom, with a gripsack handy, with a change in it, and my door ajar.  For

I suspected that the bird would take wing now.  In half an hour an old

woman passed by, carrying a grip: I caught the familiar whiff, and

followed with my grip, for it was Fuller.  He left the hotel by a side

entrance, and at the corner he turned up an unfrequented street and

walked three blocks in a light rain and a heavy darkness, and got into a

two-horse hack, which of course was waiting for him by appointment.  I

took a seat (uninvited) on the trunk platform behind, and we drove

briskly off.  We drove ten miles, and the hack stopped at a way-station

and was discharged.  Fuller got out and took a seat on a barrow under the

awning, as far as he could get from the light; I went inside, and watched

the ticket-office.  Fuller bought no ticket; I bought none.  Presently

the train came along, and he boarded a car; I entered the same car at the

other end, and came down the aisle and took the seat behind him.  When he

paid the conductor and named his objective point, I dropped back several

seats, while the conductor was changing a bill, and when he came to me I

paid to the same place--about a hundred miles westward.



From that time for a week on end he led me a dance.  He traveled here and

there and yonder--always on a general westward trend--but he was not a

woman after the first day.  He was a laborer, like myself, and wore bushy

false whiskers.  His outfit was perfect, and he could do the character

without thinking about it, for he had served the trade for wages.  His

nearest friend could not have recognized him.  At last he located himself

here, the obscurest little mountain camp in Montana; he has a shanty, and

goes out prospecting daily; is gone all day, and avoids society.  I am

living at a miner's boardinghouse, and it is an awful place: the bunks,

the food, the dirt--everything.



We have been here four weeks, and in that time I have seen him but once;

but every night I go over his track and post myself.  As soon as he

engaged a shanty here I went to a town fifty miles away and telegraphed

that Denver hotel to keep my baggage till I should send for it.  I need

nothing here but a change of army shirts, and I brought that with me.





                                                 SILVER GULCH, June 12

The Denver episode has never found its way here, I think.  I know the

most of the men in camp, and they have never referred to it, at least in

my hearing.  Fuller doubtless feels quite safe in these conditions.  He

has located a claim, two miles away, in an out-of-the-way place in the

mountains; it promises very well, and he is working it diligently.  Ah,

but the change in him!  He never smiles, and he keeps quite to himself,

consorting with no one--he who was so fond of company and so cheery only

two months ago.  I have seen him passing along several times recently--

drooping, forlorn, the spring gone from his step, a pathetic figure.  He

calls himself David Wilson.



I can trust him to remain here until we disturb him.  Since you insist, I

will banish him again, but I do not see how he can be unhappier than he

already is.  I will go hack to Denver and treat myself to a little season

of comfort, and edible food, and endurable beds, and bodily decency; then

I will fetch my things, and notify poor papa Wilson to move on.





                                                       DENVER, June 19

They miss him here.  They all hope he is prospering in Mexico, and they

do not say it just with their mouths, but out of their hearts.  You know

you can always tell.  I am loitering here overlong, I confess it.  But if

you were in my place you would have charity for me.  Yes, I know what you

will say, and you are right: if I were in your place, and carried your

scalding memories in my heart--



I will take the night train back to-morrow.





                                                   DENVER, June 20

God forgive us, mother, me are hunting the wrong man!  I have not slept

any all night.  I am now awaiting, at dawn, for the morning train--and

how the minutes drag, how they drag!



This Jacob Fuller is a cousin of the guilty one.  How stupid we have been

not to reflect that the guilty one would never again wear his own name

after that fiendish deed!  The Denver Fuller is four years younger than

the other one; he came here a young widower in '79, aged twenty-one--a

year before you were married; and the documents to prove it are

innumerable.  Last night I talked with familiar friends of his who have

known him from the day of his arrival.  I said nothing, but a few days

from now I will land him in this town again, with the loss upon his mine

made good; and there will be a banquet, and a torch-light procession, and

there will not be any expense on anybody but me.  Do you call this

"gush"?  I am only a boy, as you well know; it is my privilege.  By and

by I shall not be a boy any more.





                                                  SILVER GULCH, July 3

Mother, he is gone!  Gone, and left no trace.  The scent was cold when I

came.  To-day I am out of bed for the first time since.  I wish I were

not a boy; then I could stand shocks better.  They all think he went

west.  I start to-night, in a wagon--two or three hours of that, then I

get a train.  I don't know where I'm going, but I must go; to try to keep

still would be torture.



Of course he has effaced himself with a new name and a disguise.  This

means that I may have to search the whole globe to find him.  Indeed it

is what I expect.  Do you see, mother?  It is I that am the Wandering

Jew.  The irony of it!  We arranged that for another.



Think of the difficulties!  And there would be none if I only could

advertise for him.  But if there is any way to do it that would not

frighten him, I have not been able to think it out, and I have tried till

my brains are addled.  "If the gentleman who lately bought a mine in

Mexico and sold one in Denver will send his address to" (to whom,

mother!), "it will be explained to him that it was all a mistake; his

forgiveness will be asked, and full reparation made for a loss which he

sustained in a certain matter."  Do you see?  He would think it a trap.

Well, any one would.  If I should say, "It is now known that he was not

the man wanted, but another man--a man who once bore the same name, but

discarded it for good reasons"--would that answer?  But the Denver people

would wake up then and say "Oho!" and they would remember about the

suspicious greenbacks, and say, "Why did he run away if he wasn't the

right man?--it is too thin."  If I failed to find him he would be ruined

there--there where there is no taint upon him now.  You have a better

head than mine.  Help me.



I have one clue, and only one.  I know his handwriting.  If he puts his

new false name upon a hotel register and does not disguise it too much,

it will be valuable to me if I ever run across it.





                                          SAN FRANCISCO, June 28, 1898

You already know how well I have searched the states from Colorado to the

Pacific, and how nearly I came to getting him once.  Well, I have had

another close miss.  It was here, yesterday.  I struck his trail, hot, on

the street, and followed it on a run to a cheap hotel.  That was a costly

mistake; a dog would have gone the other way.  But I am only part dog,

and can get very humanly stupid when excited.  He had been stopping in

that house ten days; I almost know, now, that he stops long nowhere, the

past six or eight months, but is restless and has to keep moving.  I

understand that feeling!  and I know what it is to feel it.  He still

uses the name he had registered when I came so near catching him nine

months ago--"James Walker"; doubtless the same he adopted when he fled

from Silver Gulch.  An unpretending man, and has small taste for fancy

names.  I recognized the hand easily, through its slight disguise.  A

square man, and not good at shams and pretenses.



They said he was just gone, on a journey; left no address; didn't say

where he was going; looked frightened when asked to leave his address;

had no baggage but a cheap valise; carried it off on foot--a "stingy old

person, and not much loss to the house."  "Old!" I suppose he is, now I

hardly heard; I was there but a moment.  I rushed along his trail, and it

led me to a wharf.  Mother, the smoke of the steamer he had taken was

just fading out on the horizon!  I should have saved half on hour if I

had gone in the right direction at first.  I could have taken a fast tug,

and should have stood a chance of catching that vessel.  She is bound for

Melbourne.





                              HOPE CANYON, CALIFORNIA, October 3, 1900

You have a right to complain.  "A letter a year" is a paucity; I freely

acknowledge it; but how can one write when there is nothing to write

about but failures?  No one can keep it up; it breaks the heart,



I told you--it seems ages ago, now--how I missed him at Melbourne, and

then chased him all over Australasia for months on end.



Well, then, after that I followed him to India; almost saw him in Bombay;

traced him all around--to Baroda, Rawal-Pindi, Lucknow, Lahore, Cawnpore,

Allahabad, Calcutta, Madras--oh, everywhere; week after week, month after

month, through the dust and swelter--always approximately on his track,

sometimes close upon him, get never catching him.  And down to Ceylon,

and then to--Never mind; by and by I will write it all out.



I chased him home to California, and down to Mexico, and back again to

California.  Since then I have been hunting him about the state from the

first of last January down to a month ago.  I feel almost sure he is not

far from Hope Canyon; I traced him to a point thirty miles from here, but

there I lost the trail; some one gave him a lift in a wagon, I suppose.



I am taking a rest, now--modified by searchings for the lost trail.  I

was tired to death, mother, and low-spirited, and sometimes coming

uncomfortably near to losing hope; but the miners in this little camp are

good fellows, and I am used to their sort this long time back; and their

breezy ways freshen a person up and make him forget his troubles.  I have

been here a month.  I am cabining with a young fellow named "Sammy"

Hillyer, about twenty-five, the only son of his mother--like me--and

loves her dearly, and writes to her every week--part of which is like me.

He is a timid body, and in the matter of intellect--well, he cannot be

depended upon to set a river on fire; but no matter, he is well liked; he

is good and fine, and it is meat and bread and rest and luxury to sit and

talk with him and have a comradeship again.  I wish "James Walker" could

have it.  He had friends; he liked company.  That brings up that picture

of him, the time that I saw him last.  The pathos of it!  It comes before

me often and often.  At that very time, poor thing, I was girding up my

conscience to make him move on again!



Hillyer's heart is better than mine, better than anybody's in the

community, I suppose, for he is the one friend of the black sheep of the

camp--Flint Buckner--and the only man Flint ever talks with or allows to

talk with him.  He says he knows Flint's history, and that it is trouble

that has made him what he is, and so one ought to be as charitable toward

him as one can.  Now none but a pretty large heart could find space to

accommodate a lodger like Flint Buckner, from all I hear about him

outside.  I think that this one detail will give you a better idea of

Sammy's character than any labored-out description I could furnish you of

him.  In one of our talks he said something about like this: "Flint is a

kinsman of mine, and he pours out all his troubles to me--empties his

breast from time to time, or I reckon it would burst.  There couldn't be

any unhappier man, Archy Stillman; his life had been made up of misery of

mind--he isn't near as old as he looks.  He has lost the feel of

reposefulness and peace--oh, years and years ago!  He doesn't know what

good luck is--never has had any; often says he wishes he was in the other

hell, he is so tired of this one."









IV

           "No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the

            presence of ladies."



It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October.  The lilacs and

laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing

in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind Nature for the wingless

wild things that have their homes in the tree-tops and would visit

together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow

flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of the

woodland; the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose

upon the swooning atmosphere; far in he empty sky a solitary oesophagus

slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and

the peace of God.



October is the time--1900; Hope Canyon is the place, a silver-mining camp

away down in the Esmeralda region.  It is a secluded spot, high and

remote; recent as to discovery; thought by its occupants to be rich in

metal--a year or two's prospecting will decide that matter one way or the

other.  For inhabitants, the camp has about two hundred miners, one white

woman and child, several Chinese washermen, five squaws, and a dozen

vagrant buck Indians in rabbit-skin robes, battered plug hats, and tin-

can necklaces.  There are no mills as yet; no church, no newspaper.  The

camp has existed but two years; it has made no big strike; the world is

ignorant of its name and place.



On both sides of the canyon the mountains rise wall-like, three thousand

feet, and the long spiral of straggling huts down in its narrow bottom

gets a kiss from the sun only once a day, when he sails over at noon.

The village is a couple of miles long; the cabins stand well apart from

each other.  The tavern is the only "frame" house--the only house, one

might say.  It occupies a central position, and is the evening resort of

the population.  They drink there, and play seven-up and dominoes; also

billiards, for there is a table, crossed all over with torn places

repaired with court-plaster; there are some cues, but no leathers; some

chipped balls which clatter when they run, and do not slow up gradually,

but stop suddenly and sit down; there is a part of a cube of chalk, with

a projecting jag of flint in it; and the man who can score six on a

single break can set up the drinks at the bar's expense.



Flint Buckner's cabin was the last one of the village, going south; his

silver-claim was at the other end of the village, northward, and a little

beyond the last hut in that direction.  He was a sour creature,

unsociable, and had no companionships.  People who had tried to get

acquainted with him had regretted it and dropped him.  His history was

not known.  Some believed that Sammy Hillyer knew it; others said no.

If asked, Hillyer said no, he was not acquainted with it.  Flint had a

meek English youth of sixteen or seventeen with him, whom he treated

roughly, both in public and in private; and of course this lad was

applied to for information, but with no success.  Fetlock Jones--name of

the youth--said that Flint picked him up on a prospecting tramp, and as

he had neither home nor friends in America, he had found it wise to stay

and take Buckner's hard usage for the sake of the salary, which was bacon

and beans.  Further than this he could offer no testimony.



Fetlock had been in this slavery for a month now, and under his meek

exterior he was slowly consuming to a cinder with the insults and

humiliations which his master had put upon him.  For the meek suffer

bitterly from these hurts; more bitterly, perhaps, than do the manlier

sort, who can burst out and get relief with words or blows when the limit

of endurance has been reached.  Good-hearted people wanted to help

Fetlock out of his trouble, and tried to get him to leave Buckner; but

the boy showed fright at the thought, and said he "dasn't."  Pat Riley

urged him, and said:



"You leave the damned hunks and come with me; don't you be afraid.  I'll

take care of him."



The boy thanked him with tears in his eyes, but shuddered and said he

"dasn't risk it"; he said Flint would catch him alone, some time, in the

night, and then--"Oh, it makes me sick, Mr.  Riley, to think of it."



Others said, "Run away from him; we'll stake you; skip out for the coast

some night."  But all these suggestions failed; he said Flint would hunt

him down and fetch him back, just for meanness.



The people could not understand this.  The boy's miseries went steadily

on, week after week.  It is quite likely that the people would have

understood if they had known how he was employing his spare time.  He

slept in an out-cabin near Flint's; and there, nights, he nursed his

bruises and his humiliations, and studied and studied over a single

problem--how he could murder Flint Buckner and not be found out.  It was

the only joy he had in life; these hours were the only ones in the

twenty-four which he looked forward to with eagerness and spent in

happiness.



He thought of poison.  No--that would not serve; the inquest would reveal

where it was procured and who had procured it.  He thought of a shot in

the back in a lonely place when Flint would be homeward bound at

midnight--his unvarying hour for the trip.  No--somebody might be near,

and catch him.  He thought of stabbing him in his sleep.  No--he might

strike an inefficient blow, and Flint would seize him.  He examined a

hundred different ways--none of them would answer; for in even the very

obscurest and secretest of them there was always the fatal defect of a

risk, a chance, a possibility that he might be found out.  He would have

none of that.



But he was patient, endlessly patient.  There was no hurry, he said to

himself.  He would never leave Flint till he left him a corpse; there was

no hurry--he would find the way.  It was somewhere, and he would endure

shame and pain and misery until he found it.  Yes, somewhere there was a

way which would leave not a trace, not even the faintest clue to the

murderer--there was no hurry--he would find that way, and then--oh, then,

it would just be good to be alive!  Meantime he would diligently keep up

his reputation for meekness; and also, as always theretofore, he would

allow no one to hear him say a resentful or offensive thing about his

oppressor.



Two days before the before-mentioned October morning Flint had bought

some things, and he and Fetlock had brought them home to Flint's cabin: a

fresh box of candles, which they put in the corner; a tin can of

blasting-powder, which they placed upon the candle-box; a keg of

blasting-powder, which they placed under Flint's bunk; a huge coil of

fuse, which they hung on a peg.  Fetlock reasoned that Flint's mining

operations had outgrown the pick, and that blasting was about to begin

now.  He had seen blasting done, and he had a notion of the process, but

he had never helped in it.  His conjecture was right--blasting-time had

come.  In the morning the pair carried fuse, drills, and the powder-can

to the shaft; it was now eight feet deep, and to get into it and out of

it a short ladder was used.  They descended, and by command Fetlock held

the drill--without any instructions as to the right way to hold it--and

Flint proceeded to strike.  The sledge came down; the drill sprang out of

Fetlock's hand, almost as a matter of course.



"You mangy son of a nigger, is that any way to hold a drill?  Pick it up!

Stand it up!  There--hold fast.  D--you!  I'll teach you!"



At the end of an hour the drilling was finished.



"Now, then, charge it."



The boy started to pour in the powder.



"Idiot!"



A heavy bat on the jaw laid the lad out.



"Get up!  You can't lie sniveling there.  Now, then, stick in the fuse

first.  Now put in the powder.  Hold on, hold on!  Are you going to fill

the hole all up?  Of all the sap-headed milksops I--Put in some dirt!

Put in some gravel!  Tamp it down!  Hold on, hold on!  Oh, great Scott!

get out of the way!" He snatched the iron and tamped the charge himself,

meantime cursing and blaspheming like a fiend.  Then he fired the fuse,

climbed out of the shaft, and ran fifty yards away, Fetlock following.

They stood waiting a few minutes, then a great volume of smoke and rocks

burst high into the air with a thunderous explosion; after a little there

was a shower of descending stones; then all was serene again.



"I wish to God you'd been in it!" remarked the master.



They went down the shaft, cleaned it out, drilled another hole, and put

in another charge.



"Look here!  How much fuse are you proposing to waste?  Don't you know

how to time a fuse?"



"No, sir."



"You don't!  Well, if you don't beat anything I ever saw!"



He climbed out of the shaft and spoke down:



"Well, idiot, are you going to be all day?  Cut the fuse and light it!"



The trembling creature began:



"If you please, sir, I--"



"You talk back to me?  Cut it and light it!"



The boy cut and lit.



"Ger-reat Scott!  a one-minute fuse!  I wish you were in--"



In his rage he snatched the ladder out of the shaft and ran.  The boy was

aghast.



"Oh, my God!  Help.  Help!  Oh, save me!" he implored.  "Oh, what can I

do!  What can I do!"



He backed against the wall as tightly as he could; the sputtering fuse

frightened the voice out of him; his breath stood still; he stood gazing

and impotent; in two seconds, three seconds, four he would be flying

toward the sky torn to fragments.  Then he had an inspiration.  He sprang

at the fuse; severed the inch of it that was left above ground, and was

saved.



He sank down limp and half lifeless with fright, his strength gone; but

he muttered with a deep joy:



"He has learnt me!  I knew there was a way, if I would wait."



After a matter of five minutes Buckner stole to the shaft, looking

worried and uneasy, and peered down into it.  He took in the situation;

he saw what had happened.  He lowered the ladder, and the boy dragged

himself weakly up it.  He was very white.  His appearance added something

to Buckner's uncomfortable state, and he said, with a show of regret and

sympathy which sat upon him awkwardly from lack of practice:



"It was an accident, you know.  Don't say anything about it to anybody;

I was excited, and didn't notice what I was doing.  You're not looking

well; you've worked enough for to-day; go down to my cabin and eat what

you want, and rest.  It's just an accident, you know, on account of my

being excited."



"It scared me," said the lad, as he started away; "but I learnt

something, so I don't mind it."



"Damned easy to please!" muttered Buckner, following him with his eye.

"I wonder if he'll tell?  Mightn't he?...  I wish it had killed him."



The boy took no advantage of his holiday in the matter of resting; he

employed it in work, eager and feverish and happy work.  A thick growth

of chaparral extended down the mountainside clear to Flint's cabin; the

most of Fetlock's labor was done in the dark intricacies of that stubborn

growth; the rest of it was done in his own shanty.  At last all was

complete, and he said:



"If he's got any suspicions that I'm going to tell on him, he won't keep

them long, to-morrow.  He will see that I am the same milksop as I always

was--all day and the next.  And the day after to-morrow night there 'll

be an end of him; nobody will ever guess who finished him up nor how it

was done.  He dropped me the idea his own self, and that's odd."









V



The next day came and went.



It is now almost midnight, and in five minutes the new morning will

begin.  The scene is in the tavern billiard-room.  Rough men in rough

clothing, slouch-hats, breeches stuffed into boot-tops, some with vests,

none with coats, are grouped about the boiler-iron stove, which has ruddy

cheeks and is distributing a grateful warmth; the billiard-balls are

clacking; there is no other sound--that is, within; the wind is fitfully

moaning without.  The men look bored; also expectant.  A hulking broad-

shouldered miner, of middle age, with grizzled whiskers, and an

unfriendly eye set in an unsociable face, rises, slips a coil of fuse

upon his arm, gathers up some other personal properties, and departs

without word or greeting to anybody.  It is Flint Buckner.  As the door

closes behind him a buzz of talk breaks out.



"The regularest man that ever was," said Jake Parker, the blacksmith:

"you can tell when it's twelve just by him leaving, without looking at

your Waterbury."



"And it's the only virtue he's got, as fur as I know," said Peter Hawes,

miner.



"He's just a blight on this society," said Wells-Fargo's man, Ferguson.

"If I was running this shop I'd make him say something, some time or

other, or vamos the ranch."  This with a suggestive glance at the

barkeeper, who did not choose to see it, since the man under discussion

was a good customer, and went home pretty well set up, every night, with

refreshments furnished from the bar.



"Say," said Ham Sandwich, miner, "does any of you boys ever recollect of

him asking you to take a drink?"



"Him?  Flint Buckner?  Oh, Laura!"



This sarcastic rejoinder came in a spontaneous general outburst in one

form of words or another from the crowd.  After a brief silence, Pat

Riley, miner, said:



"He's the 15-puzzle, that cuss.  And his boy's another one.  I can't make

them out."



"Nor anybody else," said Ham Sandwich; "and if they are 15-puzzles how

are you going to rank up that other one?  When it comes to A 1 right-down

solid mysteriousness, he lays over both of them.  Easy--don't he?"



"You bet!"



Everybody said it.  Every man but one.  He was the new-comer--Peterson.

He ordered the drinks all round, and asked who No. 3 might be.  All

answered at once, "Archy Stillman!"



"Is he a mystery?" asked Peterson.



"Is he a mystery?  Is Archy Stillman a mystery?" said Wells-Fargo's man,

Ferguson.  "Why, the fourth dimension's foolishness to him."



For Ferguson was learned.



Peterson wanted to hear all about him; everybody wanted to tell him;

everybody began.  But Billy Stevens, the barkeeper, called the house to

order, and said one at a time was best.  He distributed the drinks, and

appointed Ferguson to lead.  Ferguson said:



"Well, he's a boy.  And that is just about all we know about him.  You

can pump him till you are tired; it ain't any use; you won't get

anything.  At least about his intentions, or line of business, or where

he's from, and such things as that.  And as for getting at the nature and

get-up of his main big chief mystery, why, he'll just change the subject,

that's all.  You can guess till you're black in the face--it's your

privilege--but suppose you do, where do you arrive at?  Nowhere, as near

as I can make out."



"What is his big chief one?"



"Sight, maybe.  Hearing, maybe.  Instinct, maybe.  Magic, maybe.  Take

your choice--grownups, twenty-five; children and servants, half price.

Now I'll tell you what he can do.  You can start here, and just

disappear; you can go and hide wherever you want to, I don't care where

it is, nor how far--and he'll go straight and put his finger on you."



"You don't mean it!"



"I just do, though.  Weather's nothing to him--elemental conditions is

nothing to him--he don't even take notice of them."



"Oh, come!  Dark?  Rain?  Snow?  Hey?"



"It's all the same to him.  He don't give a damn."



"Oh, say--including fog, per'aps?"



"Fog!  he's got an eye 't can plunk through it like a bullet."



"Now, boys, honor bright, what's he giving me?"



"It's a fact!" they all shouted.  "Go on, Wells-Fargo."



"Well, sir, you can leave him here, chatting with the boys, and you can

slip out and go to any cabin in this camp and open a book--yes, sir, a

dozen of them--and take the page in your memory, and he'll start out and

go straight to that cabin and open every one of them books at the right

page, and call it off, and never make a mistake."



"He must be the devil!"



"More than one has thought it.  Now I'll tell you a perfectly wonderful

thing that he done.  The other night he--"



There was a sudden great murmur of sounds outside, the door flew open,

and an excited crowd burst in, with the camp's one white woman in the

lead and crying:



"My child!  my child!  she's lost and gone!  For the love of God help me

to find Archy Stillman; we've hunted everywhere!"



Said the barkeeper:



"Sit down, sit down, Mrs.  Hogan, and don't worry.  He asked for a bed

three hours ago, tuckered out tramping the trails the way he's always

doing, and went up-stairs.  Ham Sandwich, run up and roust him out; he's

in No. 14."



The youth was soon down-stairs and ready.  He asked Mrs. Hogan for

particulars.



"Bless you, dear, there ain't any; I wish there was.  I put her to sleep

at seven in the evening, and when I went in there an hour ago to go to

bed myself, she was gone.  I rushed for your cabin, dear, and you wasn't

there, and I've hunted for you ever since, at every cabin down the gulch,

and now I've come up again, and I'm that distracted and scared and heart-

broke; but, thanks to God, I've found you at last, dear heart, and you'll

find my child.  Come on! come quick!"



"Move right along; I'm with you, madam.  Go to your cabin first."



The whole company streamed out to join the hunt.  All the southern half

of the village was up, a hundred men strong, and waiting outside, a vague

dark mass sprinkled with twinkling lanterns.  The mass fell into columns

by threes and fours to accommodate itself to the narrow road, and strode

briskly along southward in the wake of the leaders.  In a few minutes the

Hogan cabin was reached.



"There's the bunk," said Mrs.  Hogan; "there's where she was; it's where

I laid her at seven o'clock; but where she is now, God only knows."



"Hand me a lantern," said Archy.  He set it on the hard earth floor and

knelt by it, pretending to examine the ground closely.  "Here's her

track," he said, touching the ground here and there and yonder with his

finger.  "Do you see?"



Several of the company dropped upon their knees and did their best to

see.  One or two thought they discerned something like a track; the

others shook their heads and confessed that the smooth hard surface had

no marks upon it which their eyes were sharp enough to discover.  One

said, "Maybe a child's foot could make a mark on it, but I don't see

how."



Young Stillman stepped outside, held the light to the ground, turned

leftward, and moved three steps, closely examining; then said, "I've got

the direction--come along; take the lantern, somebody."



He strode off swiftly southward, the files following, swaying and bending

in and out with the deep curves of the gorge.  Thus a mile, and the mouth

of the gorge was reached; before them stretched the sagebrush plain, dim,

vast, and vague.  Stillman called a halt, saying, "We mustn't start

wrong, now; we must take the direction again."



He took a lantern and examined the ground for a matter of twenty yards;

then said, "Come on; it's all right," and gave up the lantern.  In and

out among the sage-bushes he marched, a quarter of a mile, bearing

gradually to the right; then took a new direction and made another great

semicircle; then changed again and moved due west nearly half a mile--and

stopped.



"She gave it up, here, poor little chap.  Hold the lantern.  You can see

where she sat."



But this was in a slick alkali flat which was surfaced like steel, and no

person in the party was quite hardy enough to claim an eyesight that

could detect the track of a cushion on a veneer like that.  The bereaved

mother fell upon her knees and kissed the spot, lamenting.



"But where is she, then?" some one said.  "She didn't stay here.  We can

see that much, anyway."



Stillman moved about in a circle around the place, with the lantern,

pretending to hunt for tracks.



"Well!" he said presently, in an annoyed tone, "I don't understand it."

He examined again.  "No use.  She was here--that's certain; she never

walked away from here--and that's certain.  It's a puzzle; I can't make

it out."



The mother lost heart then.



"Oh, my God! oh, blessed Virgin! some flying beast has got her.  I'll

never see her again!"



"Ah, don't give up," said Archy.  "We'll find her--don't give up."



"God bless you for the words, Archy Stillman!" and she seized his hand

and kissed it fervently.



Peterson, the new-comer, whispered satirically in Ferguson's ear:



"Wonderful performance to find this place, wasn't it?  Hardly worth while

to come so far, though; any other supposititious place would have

answered just as well--hey?"



Ferguson was not pleased with the innuendo.  He said, with some warmth:



"Do you mean to insinuate that the child hasn't been here?  I tell you

the child has been here!  Now if you want to get yourself into as tidy a

little fuss as--"



"All right!" sang out Stillman.  "Come, everybody, and look at this!  It

was right under our noses all the time, and we didn't see it."



There was a general plunge for the ground at the place where the child

was alleged to have rested, and many eyes tried hard and hopefully to see

the thing that Archy's finger was resting upon.  There was a pause, then

a several-barreled sigh of disappointment.  Pat Riley and Ham Sandwich

said, in the one breath:



"What is it, Archy?  There's nothing here."



"Nothing?  Do you call that nothing?" and he swiftly traced upon the

ground a form with his finger.  "There--don't you recognize it now?  It's

Injun Billy's track.  He's got the child."



"God be praised!" from the mother.



"Take away the lantern.  I've got the direction.  Follow!"



He started on a run, racing in and out among the sage-bushes a matter of

three hundred yards, and disappeared over a sand-wave; the others

struggled after him, caught him up, and found him waiting.  Ten steps

away was a little wickiup, a dim and formless shelter of rags and old

horse-blankets, a dull light showing through its chinks.



"You lead, Mrs. Hogan," said the lad.  "It's your privilege to be first."



All followed the sprint she made for the wickiup, and saw, with her, the

picture its interior afforded.  Injun Billy was sitting on the ground;

the child was asleep beside him.  The mother hugged it with a wild

embrace, which included Archy Stillman, the grateful tears running down

her face, and in a choked and broken voice she poured out a golden stream

of that wealth of worshiping endearments which has its home in full

richness nowhere but in the Irish heart.



"I find her bymeby it is ten o'clock," Billy explained.  "She 'sleep out

yonder, ve'y tired--face wet, been cryin', 'spose; fetch her home, feed

her, she heap much hungry--go 'sleep 'gin."



In her limitless gratitude the happy mother waived rank and hugged him

too, calling him "the angel of God in disguise."  And he probably was in

disguise if he was that kind of an official.  He was dressed for the

character.



At half past one in the morning the procession burst into the village

singing, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," waving its lanterns and

swallowing the drinks that were brought out all along its course.  It

concentrated at the tavern, and made a night of what was left of the

morning.













PART II





I



The next afternoon the village was electrified with an immense sensation.

A grave and dignified foreigner of distinguished bearing and appearance

had arrived at the tavern, and entered this formidable name upon the

register:



                            SHERLOCK HOLMES



The news buzzed from cabin to cabin, from claim to claim; tools were

dropped, and the town swarmed toward the center of interest.  A man

passing out at the northern end of the village shouted it to Pat Riley,

whose claim was the next one to Flint Buckner's.  At that time Fetlock

Jones seemed to turn sick.  He muttered to himself:



"Uncle Sherlock!  The mean luck of it!--that he should come just when..."

He dropped into a reverie, and presently said to himself: "But what's the

use of being afraid of him?  Anybody that knows him the way I do knows he

can't detect a crime except where he plans it all out beforehand and

arranges the clues and hires some fellow to commit it according to

instructions....  Now there ain't going to be any clues this time--so,

what show has he got?  None at all.  No, sir; everything's ready.  If I

was to risk putting it off--No, I won't run any risk like that.  Flint

Buckner goes out of this world to-night, for sure."  Then another trouble

presented itself.  "Uncle Sherlock 'll be wanting to talk home matters

with me this evening, and how am I going to get rid of him? for I've got

to be at my cabin a minute or two about eight o'clock."  This was an

awkward matter, and cost him much thought.  But he found a way to beat

the difficulty.  "We'll go for a walk, and I'll leave him in the road a

minute, so that he won't see what it is I do: the best way to throw a

detective off the track, anyway, is to have him along when you are

preparing the thing.  Yes, that's the safest--I'll take him with me."





Meantime the road in front of the tavern was blocked with villagers

waiting and hoping for a glimpse of the great man.  But he kept his room,

and did not appear.  None but Ferguson, Jake Parker the blacksmith, and

Ham Sandwich had any luck.  These enthusiastic admirers of the great

scientific detective hired the tavern's detained-baggage lockup, which

looked into the detective's room across a little alleyway ten or twelve

feet wide, ambushed themselves in it, and cut some peep-holes in the

window-blind.  Mr. Holmes's blinds were down; but by and by he raised

them.  It gave the spies a hair-lifting but pleasurable thrill to find

themselves face to face with the Extraordinary Man who had filled the

world with the fame of his more than human ingenuities.  There he sat

--not a myth, not a shadow, but real, alive, compact of substance, and

almost within touching distance with the hand.



"Look at that head!" said Ferguson, in an awed voice.  "By gracious!

that's a head!"



"You bet!" said the blacksmith, with deep reverence.  "Look at his nose!

look at his eyes!  Intellect?  Just a battery of it!"



"And that paleness," said Ham Sandwich.  "Comes from thought--that's what

it comes from.  Hell!  duffers like us don't know what real thought is."



"No more we don't," said Ferguson.  "What we take for thinking is just

blubber-and-slush."



"Right you are, Wells-Fargo.  And look at that frown--that's deep

thinking--away down, down, forty fathom into the bowels of things.  He's

on the track of something."



"Well, he is, and don't you forget it.  Say--look at that awful gravity--

look at that pallid solemness--there ain't any corpse can lay over it."



"No, sir, not for dollars!  And it's his'n by hereditary rights, too;

he's been dead four times a'ready, and there's history for it.  Three

times natural, once by accident.  I've heard say he smells damp and cold,

like a grave.  And he--"



"'Sh!  Watch him!  There--he's got his thumb on the bump on the near

corner of his forehead, and his forefinger on the off one.  His think-

works is just a-grinding now, you bet your other shirt."



"That's so.  And now he's gazing up toward heaven and stroking his

mustache slow, and--"



"Now he has rose up standing, and is putting his clues together on his

left fingers with his right finger.  See?  he touches the forefinger--now

middle finger--now ring-finger--"



"Stuck!"



"Look at him scowl!  He can't seem to make out that clue.  So he--"



"See him smile!--like a tiger--and tally off the other fingers like

nothing!  He's got it, boys; he's got it sure!"



"Well, I should say!  I'd hate to be in that man's place that he's

after."



Mr.  Holmes drew a table to the window, sat down with his back to the

spies, and proceeded to write.  The spies withdrew their eyes from the

peep-holes, lit their pipes, and settled themselves for a comfortable

smoke and talk.  Ferguson said, with conviction:



"Boys, it's no use talking, he's a wonder!  He's got the signs of it all

over him."



"You hain't ever said a truer word than that, Wells-Fargo," said Jake

Parker.  "Say, wouldn't it 'a' been nuts if he'd a-been here last night?"



"Oh, by George, but wouldn't it!" said Ferguson.  "Then we'd have seen

scientific work.  Intellect--just pure intellect--away up on the upper

levels, dontchuknow.  Archy is all right, and it don't become anybody to

belittle him, I can tell you.  But his gift is only just eyesight, sharp

as an owl's, as near as I can make it out just a grand natural animal

talent, no more, no less, and prime as far as it goes, but no intellect

in it, and for awfulness and marvelousness no more to be compared to what

this man does than--than--Why, let me tell you what he'd have done.  He'd

have stepped over to Hogan's and glanced--just glanced, that's all--at

the premises, and that's enough.  See everything?  Yes, sir, to the last

little detail; and he'll know more about that place than the Hogans would

know in seven years.  Next, he would sit down on the bunk, just as ca'm,

and say to Mrs. Hogan--Say, Ham, consider that you are Mrs.  Hogan.  I'll

ask the questions; you answer them."



"All right; go on."



"'Madam, if you please--attention--do not let your mind wander.  Now,

then--sex of the child?'



"'Female, your Honor.'



"'Um--female.  Very good, very good.  Age?'



"'Turned six, your Honor.'



"'Um--young, weak--two miles.  Weariness will overtake it then.  It will

sink down and sleep.  We shall find it two miles away, or less.  Teeth?'



"'Five, your Honor, and one a-coming.'



"'Very good, very good, very good, indeed.' You see, boys, he knows a

clue when he sees it, when it wouldn't mean a dern thing to anybody else.

'Stockings, madam?  Shoes?'



"'Yes, your Honor--both.'



"'Yarn, perhaps?  Morocco?'



"'Yarn, your Honor.  And kip.'



"'Um--kip.  This complicates the matter.  However, let it go--we shall

manage.  Religion?'



"'Catholic, your Honor.'



"'Very good.  Snip me a bit from the bed blanket, please.  Ah, thanks.

Part wool--foreign make.  Very well.  A snip from some garment of the

child's, please.  Thanks.  Cotton.  Shows wear.  An excellent clue,

excellent.  Pass me a pallet of the floor dirt, if you'll be so kind.

Thanks, many thanks.  Ah, admirable, admirable!  Now we know where we

are, I think.' You see, boys, he's got all the clues he wants now; he

don't need anything more.  Now, then, what does this Extraordinary Man

do?  He lays those snips and that dirt out on the table and leans over

them on his elbows, and puts them together side by side and studies them

--mumbles to himself, 'Female'; changes them around--mumbles, 'Six years

old'; changes them this way and that--again mumbles: 'Five teeth--one a-

coming--Catholic--yarn--cotton--kip--damn that kip.'  Then he straightens

up and gazes toward heaven, and plows his hands through his hair--plows

and plows, muttering, 'Damn that kip!'  Then he stands up and frowns, and

begins to tally off his clues on his fingers--and gets stuck at the ring-

finger.  But only just a minute--then his face glares all up in a smile

like a house afire, and he straightens up stately and majestic, and says

to the crowd, 'Take a lantern, a couple of you, and go down to Injun

Billy's and fetch the child--the rest of you go 'long home to bed; good-

night, madam; good-night, gents.' And he bows like the Matterhorn, and

pulls out for the tavern.  That's his style, and the Only--scientific,

intellectual--all over in fifteen minutes--no poking around all over the

sage-brush range an hour and a half in a mass-meeting crowd for him,

boys--you hear me!"



"By Jackson, it's grand!" said Ham Sandwich.  "Wells-Fargo, you've got

him down to a dot.  He ain't painted up any exacter to the life in the

books.  By George, I can just see him--can't you, boys?"



"You bet you!  It's just a photograft, that's what it is."



Ferguson was profoundly pleased with his success, and grateful.  He sat

silently enjoying his happiness a little while, then he murmured, with a

deep awe in his voice,



"I wonder if God made him?"



There was no response for a moment; then Ham Sandwich said, reverently:



"Not all at one time, I reckon."









VII



At eight o'clock that evening two persons were groping their way past

Flint Buckner's cabin in the frosty gloom.  They were Sherlock Holmes and

his nephew.



"Stop here in the road a moment, uncle," said Fetlock, "while I run to my

cabin; I won't be gone a minute."



He asked for something--the uncle furnished it--then he disappeared in

the darkness, but soon returned, and the talking-walk was resumed.  By

nine o'clock they had wandered back to the tavern.  They worked their way

through the billiard-room, where a crowd had gathered in the hope of

getting a glimpse of the Extraordinary Man.  A royal cheer was raised.

Mr. Holmes acknowledged the compliment with a series of courtly bows, and

as he was passing out his nephew said to the assemblage:



"Uncle Sherlock's got some work to do, gentlemen, that 'll keep him till

twelve or one; but he'll be down again then, or earlier if he can, and

hopes some of you'll be left to take a drink with him."



"By George, he's just a duke, boys!  Three cheers for Sherlock Holmes,

the greatest man that ever lived!" shouted Ferguson.  "Hip, hip, hip--"



"Hurrah!  hurrah!  hurrah!  Tiger!"



The uproar shook the building, so hearty was the feeling the boys put

into their welcome.  Up-stairs the uncle reproached the nephew gently,

saying:



"What did you get me into that engagement for?"



"I reckon you don't want to be unpopular, do you, uncle?  Well, then,

don't you put on any exclusiveness in a mining-camp, that's all.  The

boys admire you; but if you was to leave without taking a drink with

them, they'd set you down for a snob.  And besides, you said you had home

talk enough in stock to keep us up and at it half the night."



The boy was right, and wise--the uncle acknowledged it.  The boy was wise

in another detail which he did not mention--except to himself: "Uncle and

the others will come handy--in the way of nailing an alibi where it can't

be budged."



He and his uncle talked diligently about three hours.  Then, about

midnight, Fetlock stepped down-stairs and took a position in the dark a

dozen steps from the tavern, and waited.  Five minutes later Flint

Buckner came rocking out of the billiard-room and almost brushed him as

he passed.



"I've got him!" muttered the boy.  He continued to himself, looking after

the shadowy form: "Good-by--good-by for good, Flint Buckner; you called

my mother a--well, never mind what: it's all right, now; you're taking

your last walk, friend."



He went musing back into the tavern.  "From now till one is an hour.

We'll spend it with the boys; it's good for the alibi."



He brought Sherlock Holmes to the billiard-room, which was jammed with

eager and admiring miners; the guest called the drinks, and the fun

began.  Everybody was happy; everybody was complimentary; the ice was

soon broken, songs, anecdotes, and more drinks followed, and the pregnant

minutes flew.  At six minutes to one, when the jollity was at its

highest--



BOOM!!



There was silence instantly.  The deep sound came rolling and rumbling

frown peak to peak up the gorge, then died down, and ceased.  The spell

broke, then, and the men made a rush for the door, saying:



"Something's blown up!"



Outside, a voice in the darkness said, "It's away down the gorge; I saw

the flash."



The crowd poured down the canyon--Holmes, Fetlock, Archy Stillman,

everybody.  They made the mile in a few minutes.  By the light of a

lantern they found the smooth and solid dirt floor of Flint Buckner's

cabin; of the cabin itself not a vestige remained, not a rag nor a

splinter.  Nor any sign of Flint.  Search-parties sought here and there

and yonder, and presently a cry went up.



"Here he is!"



It was true.  Fifty yards down the gulch they had found him--that is,

they had found a crushed and lifeless mass which represented him.

Fetlock Jones hurried thither with the others and looked.



The inquest was a fifteen-minute affair.  Ham Sandwich, foreman of the

jury, handed up the verdict, which was phrased with a certain unstudied

literary grace, and closed with this finding, to wit: that "deceased came

to his death by his own act or some other person or persons unknown to

this jury not leaving any family or similar effects behind but his cabin

which was blown away and God have mercy on his soul amen."



Then the impatient jury rejoined the main crowd, for the storm-center of

interest was there--Sherlock Holmes.  The miners stood silent and

reverent in a half-circle, inclosing a large vacant space which included

the front exposure of the site of the late premises.  In this

considerable space the Extraordinary Man was moving about, attended by

his nephew with a lantern.  With a tape he took measurements of the cabin

site; of the distance from the wall of chaparral to the road; of the

height of the chaparral bushes; also various other measurements.  He

gathered a rag here, a splinter there, and a pinch of earth yonder,

inspected them profoundly, and preserved them.  He took the "lay" of the

place with a pocket-compass, allowing two seconds for magnetic variation.

He took the time (Pacific) by his watch, correcting it for local time.

He paced off the distance from the cabin site to the corpse, and

corrected that for tidal differentiation.  He took the altitude with a

pocket-aneroid, and the temperature with a pocket-thermometer.  Finally

he said, with a stately bow:



"It is finished.  Shall we return, gentlemen?"



He took up the line of march for the tavern, and the crowd fell into his

wake, earnestly discussing and admiring the Extraordinary Man, and

interlarding guesses as to the origin of the tragedy and who the author

of it might he.



"My, but it's grand luck having him here--hey, boys?" said Ferguson.



"It's the biggest thing of the century," said Ham Sandwich.  "It 'll go

all over the world; you mark my words."



"You bet!" said Jake Parker, the blacksmith.  "It 'll boom this camp.

Ain't it so, Wells-Fargo?"



"Well, as you want my opinion--if it's any sign of how I think about it,

I can tell you this: yesterday I was holding the Straight Flush claim at

two dollars a foot; I'd like to see the man that can get it at sixteen

to-day."



"Right you are, Wells-Fargo!  It's the grandest luck a new camp ever

struck.  Say, did you see him collar them little rags and dirt and

things?  What an eye!  He just can't overlook a clue--'tain't in him."



"That's so.  And they wouldn't mean a thing to anybody else; but to him,

why, they're just a book--large print at that."



"Sure's you're born!  Them odds and ends have got their little old

secret, and they think there ain't anybody can pull it; but, land!  when

he sets his grip there they've got to squeal, and don't you forget it."



"Boys, I ain't sorry, now, that he wasn't here to roust out the child;

this is a bigger thing, by a long sight.  Yes, sir, and more tangled up

and scientific and intellectual."



"I reckon we're all of us glad it's turned out this way.  Glad?  'George!

it ain't any name for it.  Dontchuknow, Archy could 've learnt something

if he'd had the nous to stand by and take notice of how that man works

the system.  But no; he went poking up into the chaparral and just missed

the whole thing."



"It's true as gospel; I seen it myself.  Well, Archy's young.  He'll know

better one of these days."



"Say, boys, who do you reckon done it?"



That was a difficult question, and brought out a world of unsatisfying

conjecture.  Various men were mentioned as possibilities, but one by one

they were discarded as not being eligible.  No one but young Hillyer had

been intimate with Flint Buckner; no one had really had a quarrel with

him; he had affronted every man who had tried to make up to him, although

not quite offensively enough to require bloodshed.  There was one name

that was upon every tongue from the start, but it was the last to get

utterance--Fetlock Jones's.  It was Pat Riley that mentioned it.



"Oh, well," the boys said, "of course we've all thought of him, because

he had a million rights to kill Flint Buckner, and it was just his plain

duty to do it.  But all the same there's two things we can't get around:

for one thing, he hasn't got the sand; and for another, he wasn't

anywhere near the place when it happened."



"I know it," said Pat.  "He was there in the billiard-room with us when

it happened."



"Yes, and was there all the time for an hour before it happened."



"It's so.  And lucky for him, too.  He'd have been suspected in a minute

if it hadn't been for that."









III



The tavern dining-room had been cleared of all its furniture save one

six-foot pine table and a chair.  This table was against one end of the

room; the chair was on it; Sherlock Holmes, stately, imposing,

impressive, sat in the chair.  The public stood.  The room was full.  The

tobacco-smoke was dense, the stillness profound.



The Extraordinary Man raised his hand to command additional silence; held

it in the air a few moments; then, in brief, crisp terms he put forward

question after question, and noted the answers with "Um-ums," nods of the

head, and so on.  By this process he learned all about Flint Buckner,

his character, conduct, and habits, that the people were able to tell

him.  It thus transpired that the Extraordinary Man's nephew was the only

person in the camp who had a killing-grudge against Flint Buckner.

Mr. Holmes smiled compassionately upon the witness, and asked, languidly:



"Do any of you gentlemen chance to know where the lad Fetlock Jones was

at the time of the explosion?"



A thunderous response followed:



"In the billiard-room of this house!"



"Ah.  And had he just come in?"



"Been there all of an hour!"



"Ah.  It is about--about--well, about how far might it be to the scene of

the explosions"



"All of a mile!"



"Ah.  It isn't much of an alibi, 'tis true, but--"



A storm-burst of laughter, mingled with shouts of "By jiminy, but he's

chain-lightning!" and "Ain't you sorry you spoke, Sandy?" shut off the

rest of the sentence, and the crushed witness drooped his blushing face

in pathetic shame.  The inquisitor resumed:



"The lad Jones's somewhat distant connection with the case" (laughter)

"having been disposed of, let us now call the eye-witnesses of the

tragedy, and listen to what they have to say."



He got out his fragmentary clues and arranged them on a sheet of

cardboard on his knee.  The house held its breath and watched.



"We have the longitude and the latitude, corrected for magnetic

variation, and this gives us the exact location of the tragedy.  We have

the altitude, the temperature, and the degree of humidity prevailing--

inestimably valuable, since they enable us to estimate with precision the

degree of influence which they would exercise upon the mood and

disposition of the assassin at that time of the night."



(Buzz of admiration; muttered remark, "By George, but he's deep.") He

fingered his clues.  "And now let us ask these mute witnesses to speak to

us.



"Here we have an empty linen shot-bag.  What is its message?  This: that

robbery was the motive, not revenge.  What is its further message?  This:

that the assassin was of inferior intelligence--shall we say light-

witted, or perhaps approaching that?  How do we know this?  Because a

person of sound intelligence would not have proposed to rob the man

Buckner, who never had much money with him.  But the assassin might have

been a stranger?  Let the bag speak again.  I take from it this article.

It is a bit of silver-bearing quartz.  It is peculiar.  Examine it,

please--you--and you--and you.  Now pass it back, please.  There is but

one lode on this coast which produces just that character and color of

quartz; and that is a lode which crops out for nearly two miles on a

stretch, and in my opinion is destined, at no distant day, to confer upon

its locality a globe-girdling celebrity, and upon its two hundred owners

riches beyond the dreams of avarice.  Name that lode, please."



"The Consolidated Christian Science and Mary Ann!" was the prompt

response.



A wild crash of hurrahs followed, and every man reached for his

neighbor's hand and wrung it, with tears in his eyes; and Wells-Fargo

Ferguson shouted, "The Straight Flush is on the lode, and up she goes to

a hunched and fifty a foot--you hear me!"



When quiet fell, Mr.  Holmes resumed:



"We perceive, then, that three facts are established, to wit: the

assassin was approximately light-witted; he was not a stranger; his

motive was robbery, not revenge.  Let us proceed.  I hold in my hand a

small fragment of fuse, with the recent smell of fire upon it.  What is

its testimony?  Taken with the corroborative evidence of the quartz, it

reveals to us that the assassin was a miner.  What does it tell us

further?  This, gentlemen: that the assassination was consummated by

means of an explosive.  What else does it say?  This: that the explosive

was located against the side of the cabin nearest the road--the front

side--for within six feet of that spot I found it.



"I hold in my fingers a burnt Swedish match--the kind one rubs on a

safety-box.  I found it in the road, six hundred and twenty-two feet from

the abolished cabin.  What does it say?  This: that the train was fired

from that point.  What further does it tell us?  This: that the assassin

was left-handed.  How do I know this?  I should not be able to explain to

you, gentlemen, how I know it, the signs being so subtle that only long

experience and deep study can enable one to detect them.  But the signs

are here, and they are reinforced by a fact which you must have often

noticed in the great detective narratives--that all assassins are left-

handed."



"By Jackson, that's so."  said Ham Sandwich, bringing his great hand down

with a resounding slap upon his thigh; "blamed if I ever thought of it

before."



"Nor I!" "Nor I!" cried several.  "Oh, there can't anything escape him--

look at his eye!"



"Gentlemen, distant as the murderer was from his doomed victim, he did

not wholly escape injury.  This fragment of wood which I now exhibit to

you struck him.  It drew blood.  Wherever he is, he bears the telltale

mark.  I picked it up where he stood when he fired the fatal train,"

He looked out over the house from his high perch, and his countenance

began to darken; he slowly raised his hand, and pointed:



"There stands the assassin!"



For a moment the house was paralyzed with amazement; then twenty voices

burst out with:



"Sammy Hillyer?  Oh, hell, no!  Him?  It's pure foolishness!"



"Take care, gentlemen--be not hasty.  Observe--he has the blood-mark on

his brow."



Hillyer turned white with fright.  He was near to crying.  He turned this

way and that, appealing to every face for help and sympathy; and held out

his supplicating hands toward Holmes and began to plead:



"Don't, oh, don't!  I never did it; I give my word I never did it.  The

way I got this hurt on my forehead was--"



"Arrest him, constable!" cried Holmes.  "I will swear out the warrant."



The constable moved reluctantly forward--hesitated--stopped.



Hillyer broke out with another appeal.  "Oh, Archy, don't let them do it;

it would kill mother!  You know how I got the hurt.  Tell them, and save

me, Archy; save me!"



Stillman worked his way to the front, and said:



"Yes, I'll save you.  Don't be afraid."  Then he said to the house,

"Never mind how he got the hurt; it hasn't anything to do with this case,

and isn't of any consequence."



"God bless you, Archy, for a true friend!"



"Hurrah for Archy!  Go in, boy, and play 'em a knock-down flush to their

two pair 'n' a jack!" shouted the house, pride in their home talent and a

patriotic sentiment of loyalty to it rising suddenly in the public heart

and changing the whole attitude of the situation.



Young Stillman waited for the noise to cease; then he said:



"I will ask Tom Jeffries to stand by that door yonder, and Constable

Harris to stand by the other one here, and not let anybody leave the

room.



"Said and done.  Go on, old man!"



"The criminal is present, I believe.  I will show him to you before long,

in case I am right in my guess.  Now I will tell you all about the

tragedy, from start to finish.  The motive wasn't robbery; it was

revenge.  The murderer wasn't light-witted.  He didn't stand six hundred

and twenty-two feet away.  He didn't get hit with a piece of wood.  He

didn't place the explosive against the cabin.  He didn't bring a shot-bag

with him, and he wasn't left-handed.  With the exception of these errors,

the distinguished guest's statement of the case is substantially

correct."



A comfortable laugh rippled over the house; friend nodded to friend, as

much as to say, "That's the word, with the bark on it.  Good lad, good

boy.  He ain't lowering his flag any!"



The guest's serenity was not disturbed.  Stillman resumed:



"I also have some witnesses; and I will presently tell you where you can

find some more."  He held up a piece of coarse wire; the crowd craned

their necks to see.  "It has a smooth coating of melted tallow on it.

And here is a candle which is burned half-way down.  The remaining half

of it has marks cut upon it an inch apart.  Soon I will tell you where I

found these things.  I will now put aside reasonings, guesses, the

impressive hitchings of odds and ends of clues together, and the other

showy theatricals of the detective trade, and tell you in a plain,

straightforward way just how this dismal thing happened."



He paused a moment, for effect--to allow silence and suspense to

intensify and concentrate the house's interest; then he went on:



"The assassin studied out his plan with a good deal of pains.  It was a

good plan, very ingenious, and showed an intelligent mind, not a feeble

one.  It was a plan which was well calculated to ward off all suspicion

from its inventor.  In the first place, he marked a candle into spaces an

inch apart, and lit it and timed it.  He found it took three hours to

burn four inches of it.  I tried it myself for half an hour, awhile ago,

up-stairs here, while the inquiry into Flint Buckner's character and ways

was being conducted in this room, and I arrived in that way at the rate

of a candle's consumption when sheltered from the wind.  Having proved

his trial candle's rate, he blew it out--I have already shown it to you--

and put his inch-marks on a fresh one.



"He put the fresh one into a tin candlestick.  Then at the five-hour mark

he bored a hole through the candle with a red-hot wire.  I have already

shown you the wire, with a smooth coat of tallow on it--tallow that had

been melted and had cooled.



"With labor--very hard labor, I should say--he struggled up through the

stiff chaparral that clothes the steep hillside back of Flint Buckner's

place, tugging an empty flour-barrel with him.  He placed it in that

absolutely secure hiding-place, and in the bottom of it he set the

candlestick.  Then he measured off about thirty-five feet of fuse--the

barrel's distance from the back of the cabin.  He bored a hole in the

side of the barrel--here is the large gimlet he did it with.  He went on

and finished his work; and when it was done, one end of the fuse was in

Buckner's cabin, and the other end, with a notch chipped in it to expose

the powder, was in the hole in the candle--timed to blow the place up at

one o'clock this morning, provided the candle was lit about eight o'clock

yesterday evening--which I am betting it was--and provided there was an

explosive in the cabin and connected with that end of the fuse--which I

am also betting there was, though I can't prove it.  Boys, the barrel is

there in the chaparral, the candle's remains are in it in the tin stick;

the burnt-out fuse is in the gimlet-hole, the other end is down the hill

where the late cabin stood.  I saw them all an hour or two ago, when the

Professor here was measuring off unimplicated vacancies and collecting

relics that hadn't anything to do with the case."



He paused.  The house drew a long, deep breath, shook its strained cords

and muscles free and burst into cheers.  "Dang him!" said Ham Sandwich,

"that's why he was snooping around in the chaparral, instead of picking

up points out of the P'fessor's game.  Looky here--he ain't no fool,

boys."



"No, sir!  Why, great Scott--"



But Stillman was resuming:



"While we were out yonder an hour or two ago, the owner of the gimlet and

the trial candle took them from a place where he had concealed them--it

was not a good place--and carried them to what he probably thought was a

better one, two hundred yards up in the pine woods, and hid them there,

covering them over with pine needles.  It was there that I found them.

The gimlet exactly fits the hole in the barrel.  And now--"



The Extraordinary Man interrupted him.  He said, sarcastically:



"We have had a very pretty fairy tale, gentlemen--very pretty indeed.

Now I would like to ask this young man a question or two."



Some of the boys winced, and Ferguson said:



"I'm afraid Archy's going to catch it now."



The others lost their smiles and sobered down.  Mr.  Holmes said:



"Let us proceed to examine into this fairy tale in a consecutive and

orderly way--by geometrical progression, so to speak--linking detail to

detail in a steadily advancing and remorselessly consistent and

unassailable march upon this tinsel toy fortress of error, the dream

fabric of a callow imagination.  To begin with, young sir, I desire to

ask you but three questions at present--at present.  Did I understand you

to say it was your opinion that the supposititious candle was lighted at

about eight o'clock yesterday evening?"



"Yes, sir--about eight."



"Could you say exactly eight?"



"Well, no, I couldn't be that exact."



"Um.  If a person had been passing along there just about that time, he

would have been almost sure to encounter that assassin, do you think?"



"Yes, I should think so."



"Thank you, that is all.  For the present.  I say, all for the present."



"Dern him.  he's laying for Archy," said Ferguson.



"It's so," said Ham Sandwich.  "I don't like the look of it."



Stillman said, glancing at the guest, "I was along there myself at half-

past eight--no, about nine."



"In-deed?  This is interesting--this is very interesting.  Perhaps you

encountered the assassin?"



"No, I encountered no one."



"Ah.  Then--if you will excuse the remark--I do not quite see the

relevancy of the information."



"It has none.  At present.  I say it has none--at present."



He paused.  Presently he resumed: "I did not encounter the assassin, but

I am on his track, I am sure, for I believe he is in this room.  I will

ask you all to pass one by one in front of me--here, where there is a

good light--so that I can see your feet."



A buzz of excitement swept the place, and the march began, the guest

looking on with an iron attempt at gravity which was not an unqualified

success.  Stillman stooped, shaded his eyes with his hand, and gazed down

intently at each pair of feet as it passed.  Fifty men tramped

monotonously by--with no result.  Sixty.  Seventy.  The thing was

beginning to look absurd.  The guest remarked, with suave irony:



"Assassins appear to be scarce this evening."



The house saw the humor if it, and refreshed itself with a cordial laugh.

Ten or twelve more candidates tramped by--no, danced by, with airy and

ridiculous capers which convulsed the spectators--then suddenly Stillman

put out his hand and said:



"This is the assassin!"



"Fetlock Jones, by the great Sanhedrim!" roared the crowd; and at once

let fly a pyrotechnic explosion and dazzle and confusion of stirring

remarks inspired by the situation.



At the height of the turmoil the guest stretched out his hand, commanding

peace.  The authority of a great name and a great personality laid its

mysterious compulsion upon the house, and it obeyed.  Out of the panting

calm which succeeded, the guest spoke, saying, with dignity and feeling:



"This is serious.  It strikes at an innocent life.  Innocent beyond

suspicion!  Innocent beyond peradventure!  Hear me prove it; observe how

simple a fact can brush out of existence this witless lie.  Listen.  My

friends, that lad was never out of my sight yesterday evening at any

time!"



It made a deep impression.  Men turned their eyes upon Stillman with

grave inquiry in them.  His face brightened, and he said:



"I knew there was another one!" He stepped briskly to the table and

glanced at the guest's feet, then up at his face, and said: "You were

with him!  You were not fifty steps from him when he lit the candle that

by and by fired the powder!"  (Sensation.)  "And what is more, you

furnished the matches yourself!"



Plainly the guest seemed hit; it looked so to the public.  He opened his

mouth to speak; the words did not come freely.



"This--er--this is insanity--this--"



Stillman pressed his evident advantage home.  He held up a charred match.



"Here is one of them.  I found it in the barrel--and there's another one

there."



The guest found his voice at once.



"Yes--and put them there yourself!"



It was recognized a good shot.  Stillman retorted.



"It is wax--a breed unknown to this camp.  I am ready to be searched for

the box.  Are you?"



The guest was staggered this time--the dullest eye could see it.  He

fumbled with his hands; once or twice his lips moved, but the words did

not come.  The house waited and watched, in tense suspense, the stillness

adding effect to the situation.  Presently Stillman said, gently:



"We are waiting for your decision."



There was silence again during several moments; then the guest answered,

in a low voice:



"I refuse to be searched."



There was no noisy demonstration, but all about the house one voice after

another muttered:



"That settles it!  He's Archy's meat."



What to do now?  Nobody seemed to know.  It was an embarrassing situation

for the moment--merely, of course, because matters had taken such a

sudden and unexpected turn that these unpractised minds were not prepared

for it, and had come to a standstill, like a stopped clock, under the

shock.  But after a little the machinery began to work again,

tentatively, and by twos and threes the men put their heads together and

privately buzzed over this and that and the other proposition.  One of

these propositions met with much favor; it was, to confer upon the

assassin a vote of thanks for removing Flint Buckner, and let him go.

But the cooler heads opposed it, pointing out that addled brains in the

Eastern states would pronounce it a scandal, and make no end of foolish

noise about it.  Finally the cool heads got the upper hand, and obtained

general consent to a proposition of their own; their leader then called

the house to order and stated it--to this effect: that Fetlock Jones be

jailed and put upon trial.



The motion was carried.  Apparently there was nothing further to do now,

and the people were glad, for, privately, they were impatient to get out

and rush to the scene of the tragedy, and see whether that barrel and the

other things were really there or not.



But no--the break-up got a check.  The surprises were not over yet.  For

a while Fetlock Jones had been silently sobbing, unnoticed in the

absorbing excitements which had been following one another so

persistently for some time; but when his arrest and trial were decreed,

he broke out despairingly, and said:



"No!  it's no use.  I don't want any jail, I don't want any trial; I've

had all the hard luck I want, and all the miseries.  Hang me now, and let

me out!  It would all come out, anyway--there couldn't anything save me.

He has told it all, just as if he'd been with me and seen it--I don't

know how he found out; and you'll find the barrel and things, and then I

wouldn't have any chance any more.  I killed him; and you'd have done it

too, if he'd treated you like a dog, and you only a boy, and weak and

poor, and not a friend to help you."



"And served him damned well right!" broke in Ham Sandwich.  "Looky here,

boys--"



From the constable: "Order!  Order, gentlemen!"



A voice: "Did your uncle know what you was up to?"



"No, he didn't."



"Did he give you the matches, sure enough?"



"Yes, he did; but he didn't know what I wanted them for."



"When you was out on such a business as that, how did you venture to risk

having him along--and him a detective?  How's that?"



The boy hesitated, fumbled with his buttons in an embarrassed way, then

said, shyly:



"I know about detectives, on account of having them in the family; and if

you don't want them to find out about a thing, it's best to have them

around when you do it."



The cyclone of laughter which greeted this native discharge of wisdom did

not modify the poor little waif's embarrassment in any large degree.









IV



      From a letter to Mrs.  Stillman, dated merely "Tuesday."



Fetlock Jones was put under lock and key in an unoccupied log cabin, and

left there to await his trial.  Constable Harris provided him with a

couple of days' rations, instructed him to keep a good guard over

himself, and promised to look in on him as soon as further supplies

should be due.



Next morning a score of us went with Hillyer, out of friendship, and

helped him bury his late relative, the unlamented Buckner, and I acted as

first assistant pall-bearer, Hillyer acting as chief.  Just as we had

finished our labors a ragged and melancholy stranger, carrying an old

hand-bag, limped by with his head down, and I caught the scent I had

chased around the globe!  It was the odor of Paradise to my perishing

hope!



In a moment I was at his side and had laid a gentle hand upon his

shoulder.  He slumped to the ground as if a stroke of lightning had

withered him in his tracks; and as the boys came running he struggled to

his knees and put up his pleading hands to me, and out of his chattering

jaws he begged me to persecute him no more, and said:



"You have hunted me around the world, Sherlock Holmes, yet God is my

witness I have never done any man harm!"



A glance at his wild eyes showed us that he was insane.  That was my

work, mother!  The tidings of your death can some day repeat the misery I

felt in that moment, but nothing else can ever do it.  The boys lifted

him up, and gathered about him, and were full of pity of him, and said

the gentlest and touchingest things to him, and said cheer up and don't

be troubled, he was among friends now, and they would take care of him,

and protect him, and hang any man that laid a hand on him.  They are just

like so many mothers, the rough mining-camp boys are, when you wake up

the south side of their hearts; yes, and just like so many reckless and

unreasoning children when you wake up the opposite of that muscle.  They

did everything they could think of to comfort him, but nothing succeeded

until Wells-Fargo Ferguson, who is a clever strategist, said:



"If it's only Sherlock Holmes that's troubling you, you needn't worry any

more."



"Why?" asked the forlorn lunatic, eagerly.



"Because he's dead again."



"Dead!  Dead!  Oh, don't trifle with a poor wreck like me.  Is he dead?

On honor, now--is he telling me true, boys?"



"True as you're standing there!" said Ham Sandwich, and they all backed

up the statement in a body.



"They hung him in San Bernardino last week," added Ferguson, clinching

the matter, "whilst he was searching around after you.  Mistook him for

another man.  They're sorry, but they can't help it now."



"They're a-building him a monument," said Ham Sandwich, with the air of a

person who had contributed to it, and knew.



"James Walker" drew a deep sigh--evidently a sigh of relief--and said

nothing; but his eyes lost something of their wildness, his countenance

cleared visibly, and its drawn look relaxed a little.  We all went to our

cabin, and the boys cooked him the best dinner the camp could furnish the

materials for, and while they were about it Hillyer and I outfitted him

from hat to shoe-leather with new clothes of ours, and made a comely and

presentable old gentleman of him.  "Old" is the right word, and a pity,

too: old by the droop of him, and the frost upon his hair, and the marks

which sorrow and distress have left upon his face; though he is only in

his prime in the matter of years.  While he ate, we smoked and chatted;

and when he was finishing he found his voice at last, and of his own

accord broke out with his personal history.  I cannot furnish his exact

words, but I will come as near it as I can.





                        THE "WRONG MAN'S" STORY



It happened like this: I was in Denver.  I had been there many years;

sometimes I remember how many, sometimes I don't--but it isn't any

matter.  All of a sudden I got a notice to leave, or I would be exposed

for a horrible crime committed long before--years and years before--in

the East.



I knew about that crime, but I was not the criminal; it was a cousin of

mine of the same name.  What should I better do?  My head was all

disordered by fear, and I didn't know.  I was allowed very little time--

only one day, I think it was.  I would be ruined if I was published, and

the people would lynch me, and not believe what I said.  It is always the

way with lynchings: when they find out it is a mistake they are sorry,

but it is too late--the same as it was with Mr. Holmes, you see.  So I

said I would sell out and get money to live on, and run away until it

blew over and I could come back with my proofs.  Then I escaped in the

night and went a long way off in the mountains somewhere, and lived

disguised and had a false name.



I got more and more troubled and worried, and my troubles made me see

spirits and hear voices, and I could not think straight and clear on any

subject, but got confused and involved and had to give it up, because my

head hurt so.  It got to be worse and worse; more spirits and more

voices.  They were about me all the time; at first only in the night,

then in the day too.  They were always whispering around my bed and

plotting against me, and it broke my sleep and kept me fagged out,

because I got no good rest.



And then came the worst.  One night the whispers said, "We'll never

manage, because we can't see him, and so can't point him out to the

people."



They sighed; then one said: "We must bring Sherlock Holmes.  He can be

here in twelve days."



They all agreed, and whispered and jibbered with joy.  But my heart

broke; for I had read about that man, and knew what it would be to have

him upon my track, with his superhuman penetration and tireless energies.



The spirits went away to fetch him, and I got up at once in the middle of

the night and fled away, carrying nothing but the hand-bag that had my

money in it--thirty thousand dollars; two-thirds of it are in the bag

there yet.  It was forty days before that man caught up on my track.

I just escaped.  From habit he had written his real name on a tavern

register, but had scratched it out and written "Dagget Barclay" in the

place of it.  But fear gives you a watchful eye and keen, and I read the

true name through the scratches, and fled like a deer.



He has hunted me all over this world for three years and a half--the

Pacific states, Australasia, India--everywhere you can think of; then

back to Mexico and up to California again, giving me hardly any rest; but

that name on the registers always saved me, and what is left of me is

alive yet.  And I am so tired!  A cruel time he has given me, yet I give

you my honor I have never harmed him nor any man.



That was the end of the story, and it stirred those boys to blood-heat,

he sure of it.  As for me--each word burnt a hole in me where it struck.



We voted that the old man should bunk with us, and be my guest and

Hillyer's.  I shall keep my own counsel, naturally; but as soon as he is

well rested and nourished, I shall take him to Denver and rehabilitate

his fortunes.



The boys gave the old fellow the bone-smashing good-fellowship handshake

of the mines, and then scattered away to spread the news.



At dawn next morning Wells-Fargo Ferguson and Ham Sandwich called us

softly out, and said, privately:



"That news about the way that old stranger has been treated has spread

all around, and the camps are up.  They are piling in from everywhere,

and are going to lynch the P'fessor.  Constable Harris is in a dead funk,

and has telephoned the sheriff.  Come along!"



We started on a run.  The others were privileged to feel as they chose,

but in my heart's privacy I hoped the sheriff would arrive in time; for I

had small desire that Sherlock Holmes should hang for my deeds, as you

can easily believe.  I had heard a good deal about the sheriff, but for

reassurance's sake I asked:



"Can he stop a mob?"



"Can he stop a mob!  Can Jack Fairfax stop a mob!  Well, I should smile!

Ex-desperado--nineteen scalps on his string.  Can he!  Oh, I say!"



As we tore up the gulch, distant cries and shouts and yells rose faintly

on the still air, and grew steadily in strength as we raced along.  Roar

after roar burst out, stronger and stronger, nearer and nearer; and at

last, when we closed up upon the multitude massed in the open area in

front of the tavern, the crash of sound was deafening.  Some brutal

roughs from Daly's gorge had Holmes in their grip, and he was the calmest

man there; a contemptuous smile played about his lips, and if any fear of

death was in his British heart, his iron personality was master of it and

no sign of it was allowed to appear.



"Come to a vote, men!" This from one of the Daly gang, Shadbelly Higgins.

"Quick! is it hang, or shoot?"



"Neither!" shouted one of his comrades.  "He'll be alive again in a week;

burning's the only permanency for him."



The gangs from all the outlying camps burst out in a thundercrash of

approval, and went struggling and surging toward the prisoner, and closed

around him, shouting, "Fire!  fire's the ticket!" They dragged him to the

horse-post, backed him against it, chained him to it, and piled wood and

pine cones around him waist-deep.  Still the strong face did not blench,

and still the scornful smile played about the thin lips.



"A match!  fetch a match!"



Shadbelly struck it, shaded it with his hand, stooped, and held it under

a pine cone.  A deep silence fell upon the mob.  The cone caught, a tiny

flame flickered about it a moment or two.  I seemed to catch the sound of

distant hoofs--it grew more distinct--still more and more distinct, more

and more definite, but the absorbed crowd did not appear to notice it.

The match went out.  The man struck another, stooped, and again the flame

rose; this time it took hold and began to spread--here and there men

turned away their faces.  The executioner stood with the charred match in

his fingers, watching his work.  The hoof-beats turned a projecting crag,

and now they came thundering down upon us.  Almost the next moment there

was a shout:



"The sheriff!"



And straightway he came tearing into the midst, stood his horse almost on

his hind feet, and said:



"Fall back, you gutter-snipes!"



He was obeyed.  By all but their leader.  He stood his ground, and his

hand went to his revolver.  The sheriff covered him promptly, and said:



"Drop your hand, you parlor desperado.  Kick the fire away.  Now unchain

the stranger."



The parlor desperado obeyed.  Then the sheriff made a speech; sitting his

horse at martial ease, and not warming his words with any touch of fire,

but delivering them in a measured and deliberate way, and in a tone which

harmonized with their character and made them impressively disrespectful.



"You're a nice lot--now ain't you?  Just about eligible to travel with

this bilk here--Shadbelly Higgins--this loud-mouthed sneak that shoots

people in the back and calls himself a desperado.  If there's anything I

do particularly despise, it's a lynching mob; I've never seen one that

had a man in it.  It has to tally up a hundred against one before it can

pump up pluck enough to tackle a sick tailor.  It's made up of cowards,

and so is the community that breeds it; and ninety-nine times out of a

hundred the sheriff's another one."  He paused--apparently to turn that

last idea over in his mind and taste the juice of it--then he went on:

"The sheriff that lets a mob take a prisoner away from him is the lowest-

down coward there is.  By the statistics there was a hundred and eighty-

two of them drawing sneak pay in America last year.  By the way it's

going, pretty soon there 'll be a new disease in the doctor-books--

sheriff complaint."  That idea pleased him--any one could see it.

"People will say, 'Sheriff sick again?'  'Yes; got the same old thing.'

And next there 'll be a new title.  People won't say, 'He's running for

sheriff of Rapaho County,' for instance; they'll say, 'He's running for

Coward of Rapaho.'  Lord, the idea of a grown-up person being afraid of a

lynch mob!"



He turned an eye on the captive, and said, "Stranger, who are you, and

what have you been doing?"



"My name is Sherlock Holmes, and I have not been doing anything."



It was wonderful, the impression which the sound of that name made on the

sheriff, notwithstanding he must have come posted.  He spoke up with

feeling, and said it was a blot on the county that a man whose marvelous

exploits had filled the world with their fame and their ingenuity, and

whose histories of them had won every reader's heart by the brilliancy

and charm of their literary setting, should be visited under the Stars

and Stripes by an outrage like this.  He apologized in the name of the

whole nation, and made Holmes a most handsome bow, and told Constable

Harris to see him to his quarters, and hold himself personally

responsible if he was molested again.  Then he turned to the mob and

said:



"Hunt your holes, you scum!" which they did; then he said: "Follow me,

Shadbelly; I'll take care of your case myself.  No--keep your popgun;

whenever I see the day that I'll be afraid to have you behind me with

that thing, it 'll be time for me to join last year's hundred and eighty-

two"; and he rode off in a walk, Shadbelly following.



When we were on our way back to our cabin, toward breakfast-time, we ran

upon the news that Fetlock Jones had escaped from his lock-up in the

night and is gone!  Nobody is sorry.  Let his uncle track him out if he

likes; it is in his line; the camp is not interested.









V



Ten days later.



"James Walker" is all right in body now, and his mind shows improvement

too.  I start with him for Denver to-morrow morning.



Next night.  Brief note, mailed at a way-station.



As we were starting, this morning, Hillyer whispered to me: "Keep this

news from Walker until you think it safe and not likely to disturb his

mind and check his improvement: the ancient crime he spoke of was really

committed--and by his cousin, as he said.  We buried the real criminal

the other day--the unhappiest man that has lived in a century--Flint

Buckner.  His real name was Jacob Fuller!"  There, mother, by help of me,

an unwitting mourner, your husband and my father is in his grave.  Let

him rest.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Double Barrelled Detective

by Mark Twain













A DOG'S TALE



by Mark Twain







CHAPTER I



My father was a St. Bernard, my mother was a collie, but I am a

Presbyterian.  This is what my mother told me, I do not know these nice

distinctions myself.  To me they are only fine large words meaning

nothing.  My mother had a fondness for such; she liked to say them, and

see other dogs look surprised and envious, as wondering how she got so

much education.  But, indeed, it was not real education; it was only

show: she got the words by listening in the dining-room and drawing-room

when there was company, and by going with the children to Sunday-school

and listening there; and whenever she heard a large word she said it over

to herself many times, and so was able to keep it until there was a

dogmatic gathering in the neighborhood, then she would get it off, and

surprise and distress them all, from pocket-pup to mastiff, which

rewarded her for all her trouble.  If there was a stranger he was nearly

sure to be suspicious, and when he got his breath again he would ask her

what it meant.  And she always told him.  He was never expecting this but

thought he would catch her; so when she told him, he was the one that

looked ashamed, whereas he had thought it was going to be she.  The

others were always waiting for this, and glad of it and proud of her, for

they knew what was going to happen, because they had had experience.

When she told the meaning of a big word they were all so taken up with

admiration that it never occurred to any dog to doubt if it was the right

one; and that was natural, because, for one thing, she answered up so

promptly that it seemed like a dictionary speaking, and for another

thing, where could they find out whether it was right or not? for she was

the only cultivated dog there was.  By and by, when I was older, she

brought home the word Unintellectual, one time, and worked it pretty hard

all the week at different gatherings, making much unhappiness and

despondency; and it was at this time that I noticed that during that week

she was asked for the meaning at eight different assemblages, and flashed

out a fresh definition every time, which showed me that she had more

presence of mind than culture, though I said nothing, of course.  She had

one word which she always kept on hand, and ready, like a life-preserver,

a kind of emergency word to strap on when she was likely to get washed

overboard in a sudden way--that was the word Synonymous.  When she

happened to fetch out a long word which had had its day weeks before and

its prepared meanings gone to her dump-pile, if there was a stranger

there of course it knocked him groggy for a couple of minutes, then he

would come to, and by that time she would be away down wind on another

tack, and not expecting anything; so when he'd hail and ask her to cash

in, I (the only dog on the inside of her game) could see her canvas

flicker a moment--but only just a moment--then it would belly out taut

and full, and she would say, as calm as a summer's day, "It's synonymous

with supererogation," or some godless long reptile of a word like that,

and go placidly about and skim away on the next tack, perfectly

comfortable, you know, and leave that stranger looking profane and

embarrassed, and the initiated slatting the floor with their tails in

unison and their faces transfigured with a holy joy.



And it was the same with phrases.  She would drag home a whole phrase, if

it had a grand sound, and play it six nights and two matinees, and

explain it a new way every time--which she had to, for all she cared for

was the phrase; she wasn't interested in what it meant, and knew those

dogs hadn't wit enough to catch her, anyway.  Yes, she was a daisy!  She

got so she wasn't afraid of anything, she had such confidence in the

ignorance of those creatures.  She even brought anecdotes that she had

heard the family and the dinner-guests laugh and shout over; and as a

rule she got the nub of one chestnut hitched onto another chestnut,

where, of course, it didn't fit and hadn't any point; and when she

delivered the nub she fell over and rolled on the floor and laughed and

barked in the most insane way, while I could see that she was wondering

to herself why it didn't seem as funny as it did when she first heard it.

But no harm was done; the others rolled and barked too, privately ashamed

of themselves for not seeing the point, and never suspecting that the

fault was not with them and there wasn't any to see.



You can see by these things that she was of a rather vain and frivolous

character; still, she had virtues, and enough to make up, I think.  She

had a kind heart and gentle ways, and never harbored resentments for

injuries done her, but put them easily out of her mind and forgot them;

and she taught her children her kindly way, and from her we learned also

to be brave and prompt in time of danger, and not to run away, but face

the peril that threatened friend or stranger, and help him the best we

could without stopping to think what the cost might be to us.  And she

taught us not by words only, but by example, and that is the best way and

the surest and the most lasting.  Why, the brave things she did, the

splendid things! she was just a soldier; and so modest about it--well,

you couldn't help admiring her, and you couldn't help imitating her; not

even a King Charles spaniel could remain entirely despicable in her

society.  So, as you see, there was more to her than her education.









CHAPTER II



When I was well grown, at last, I was sold and taken away, and I never

saw her again.  She was broken-hearted, and so was I, and we cried; but

she comforted me as well as she could, and said we were sent into this

world for a wise and good purpose, and must do our duties without

repining, take our life as we might find it, live it for the best good of

others, and never mind about the results; they were not our affair.  She

said men who did like this would have a noble and beautiful reward by and

by in another world, and although we animals would not go there, to do

well and right without reward would give to our brief lives a worthiness

and dignity which in itself would be a reward.  She had gathered these

things from time to time when she had gone to the Sunday-school with the

children, and had laid them up in her memory more carefully than she had

done with those other words and phrases; and she had studied them deeply,

for her good and ours.  One may see by this that she had a wise and

thoughtful head, for all there was so much lightness and vanity in it.



So we said our farewells, and looked our last upon each other through our

tears; and the last thing she said--keeping it for the last to make me

remember it the better, I think--was, "In memory of me, when there is a

time of danger to another do not think of yourself, think of your mother,

and do as she would do."



Do you think I could forget that?  No.









CHAPTER III



It was such a charming home!--my new one; a fine great house, with

pictures, and delicate decorations, and rich furniture, and no gloom

anywhere, but all the wilderness of dainty colors lit up with flooding

sunshine; and the spacious grounds around it, and the great garden--oh,

greensward, and noble trees, and flowers, no end!  And I was the same as

a member of the family; and they loved me, and petted me, and did not

give me a new name, but called me by my old one that was dear to me

because my mother had given it me--Aileen Mavourneen.  She got it out of

a song; and the Grays knew that song, and said it was a beautiful name.



Mrs. Gray was thirty, and so sweet and so lovely, you cannot imagine it;

and Sadie was ten, and just like her mother, just a darling slender

little copy of her, with auburn tails down her back, and short frocks;

and the baby was a year old, and plump and dimpled, and fond of me, and

never could get enough of hauling on my tail, and hugging me, and

laughing out its innocent happiness; and Mr. Gray was thirty-eight, and

tall and slender and handsome, a little bald in front, alert, quick in

his movements, business-like, prompt, decided, unsentimental, and with

that kind of trim-chiseled face that just seems to glint and sparkle with

frosty intellectuality!  He was a renowned scientist.  I do not know what

the word means, but my mother would know how to use it and get effects.

She would know how to depress a rat-terrier with it and make a lap-dog

look sorry he came.  But that is not the best one; the best one was

Laboratory.  My mother could organize a Trust on that one that would skin

the tax-collars off the whole herd.  The laboratory was not a book, or a

picture, or a place to wash your hands in, as the college president's dog

said--no, that is the lavatory; the laboratory is quite different, and is

filled with jars, and bottles, and electrics, and wires, and strange

machines; and every week other scientists came there and sat in the

place, and used the machines, and discussed, and made what they called

experiments and discoveries; and often I came, too, and stood around and

listened, and tried to learn, for the sake of my mother, and in loving

memory of her, although it was a pain to me, as realizing what she was

losing out of her life and I gaining nothing at all; for try as I might,

I was never able to make anything out of it at all.



Other times I lay on the floor in the mistress's work-room and slept, she

gently using me for a foot-stool, knowing it pleased me, for it was a

caress; other times I spent an hour in the nursery, and got well tousled

and made happy; other times I watched by the crib there, when the baby

was asleep and the nurse out for a few minutes on the baby's affairs;

other times I romped and raced through the grounds and the garden with

Sadie till we were tired out, then slumbered on the grass in the shade of

a tree while she read her book; other times I went visiting among the

neighbor dogs--for there were some most pleasant ones not far away, and

one very handsome and courteous and graceful one, a curly-haired Irish

setter by the name of Robin Adair, who was a Presbyterian like me, and

belonged to the Scotch minister.



The servants in our house were all kind to me and were fond of me, and

so, as you see, mine was a pleasant life.  There could not be a happier

dog that I was, nor a gratefuller one.  I will say this for myself, for

it is only the truth:  I tried in all ways to do well and right, and

honor my mother's memory and her teachings, and earn the happiness that

had come to me, as best I could.



By and by came my little puppy, and then my cup was full, my happiness

was perfect.  It was the dearest little waddling thing, and so smooth and

soft and velvety, and had such cunning little awkward paws, and such

affectionate eyes, and such a sweet and innocent face; and it made me so

proud to see how the children and their mother adored it, and fondled it,

and exclaimed over every little wonderful thing it did.  It did seem to

me that life was just too lovely to--



Then came the winter.  One day I was standing a watch in the nursery.

That is to say, I was asleep on the bed.  The baby was asleep in the

crib, which was alongside the bed, on the side next the fireplace.  It

was the kind of crib that has a lofty tent over it made of gauzy stuff

that you can see through.  The nurse was out, and we two sleepers were

alone.  A spark from the wood-fire was shot out, and it lit on the slope

of the tent.  I suppose a quiet interval followed, then a scream from the

baby awoke me, and there was that tent flaming up toward the ceiling!

Before I could think, I sprang to the floor in my fright, and in a second

was half-way to the door; but in the next half-second my mother's

farewell was sounding in my ears, and I was back on the bed again.

I reached my head through the flames and dragged the baby out by the

waist-band, and tugged it along, and we fell to the floor together in a

cloud of smoke; I snatched a new hold, and dragged the screaming little

creature along and out at the door and around the bend of the hall, and

was still tugging away, all excited and happy and proud, when the

master's voice shouted:



"Begone you cursed beast!" and I jumped to save myself; but he was

furiously quick, and chased me up, striking furiously at me with his

cane, I dodging this way and that, in terror, and at last a strong blow

fell upon my left foreleg, which made me shriek and fall, for the moment,

helpless; the came went up for another blow, but never descended, for the

nurse's voice rang wildly out, "The nursery's on fire!" and the master

rushed away in that direction, and my other bones were saved.



The pain was cruel, but, no matter, I must not lose any time; he might

come back at any moment; so I limped on three legs to the other end of

the hall, where there was a dark little stairway leading up into a garret

where old boxes and such things were kept, as I had heard say, and where

people seldom went.  I managed to climb up there, then I searched my way

through the dark among the piles of things, and hid in the secretest

place I could find.  It was foolish to be afraid there, yet still I was;

so afraid that I held in and hardly even whimpered, though it would have

been such a comfort to whimper, because that eases the pain, you know.

But I could lick my leg, and that did some good.



For half an hour there was a commotion downstairs, and shoutings, and

rushing footsteps, and then there was quiet again.  Quiet for some

minutes, and that was grateful to my spirit, for then my fears began to

go down; and fears are worse than pains--oh, much worse.  Then came a

sound that froze me.  They were calling me--calling me by name--hunting

for me!



It was muffled by distance, but that could not take the terror out of it,

and it was the most dreadful sound to me that I had ever heard.  It went

all about, everywhere, down there:  along the halls, through all the

rooms, in both stories, and in the basement and the cellar; then outside,

and farther and farther away--then back, and all about the house again,

and I thought it would never, never stop.  But at last it did, hours and

hours after the vague twilight of the garret had long ago been blotted

out by black darkness.



Then in that blessed stillness my terrors fell little by little away, and

I was at peace and slept.  It was a good rest I had, but I woke before

the twilight had come again.  I was feeling fairly comfortable, and I

could think out a plan now.  I made a very good one; which was, to creep

down, all the way down the back stairs, and hide behind the cellar door,

and slip out and escape when the iceman came at dawn, while he was inside

filling the refrigerator; then I would hide all day, and start on my

journey when night came; my journey to--well, anywhere where they would

not know me and betray me to the master.  I was feeling almost cheerful

now; then suddenly I thought:  Why, what would life be without my puppy!



That was despair.  There was no plan for me; I saw that; I must say where

I was; stay, and wait, and take what might come--it was not my affair;

that was what life is--my mother had said it.  Then--well, then the

calling began again!  All my sorrows came back.  I said to myself, the

master will never forgive.  I did not know what I had done to make him so

bitter and so unforgiving, yet I judged it was something a dog could not

understand, but which was clear to a man and dreadful.



They called and called--days and nights, it seemed to me.  So long that

the hunger and thirst near drove me mad, and I recognized that I was

getting very weak.  When you are this way you sleep a great deal, and I

did.  Once I woke in an awful fright--it seemed to me that the calling

was right there in the garret!  And so it was:  it was Sadie's voice, and

she was crying; my name was falling from her lips all broken, poor thing,

and I could not believe my ears for the joy of it when I heard her say:



"Come back to us--oh, come back to us, and forgive--it is all so sad

without our--"



I broke in with SUCH a grateful little yelp, and the next moment Sadie

was plunging and stumbling through the darkness and the lumber and

shouting for the family to hear, "She's found, she's found!"



 The days that followed--well, they were wonderful.  The mother and Sadie

and the servants--why, they just seemed to worship me.  They couldn't

seem to make me a bed that was fine enough; and as for food, they

couldn't be satisfied with anything but game and delicacies that were out

of season; and every day the friends and neighbors flocked in to hear

about my heroism--that was the name they called it by, and it means

agriculture.  I remember my mother pulling it on a kennel once, and

explaining it in that way, but didn't say what agriculture was, except

that it was synonymous with intramural incandescence; and a dozen times a

day Mrs. Gray and Sadie would tell the tale to new-comers, and say I

risked my life to say the baby's, and both of us had burns to prove it,

and then the company would pass me around and pet me and exclaim about

me, and you could see the pride in the eyes of Sadie and her mother; and

when the people wanted to know what made me limp, they looked ashamed and

changed the subject, and sometimes when people hunted them this way and

that way with questions about it, it looked to me as if they were going

to cry.



And this was not all the glory; no, the master's friends came, a whole

twenty of the most distinguished people, and had me in the laboratory,

and discussed me as if I was a kind of discovery; and some of them said

it was wonderful in a dumb beast, the finest exhibition of instinct they

could call to mind; but the master said, with vehemence, "It's far above

instinct; it's REASON, and many a man, privileged to be saved and go with

you and me to a better world by right of its possession, has less of it

that this poor silly quadruped that's foreordained to perish"; and then

he laughed, and said:  "Why, look at me--I'm a sarcasm! bless you, with

all my grand intelligence, the only think I inferred was that the dog had

gone mad and was destroying the child, whereas but for the beast's

intelligence--it's REASON, I tell you!--the child would have perished!"



They disputed and disputed, and I was the very center of subject of it

all, and I wished my mother could know that this grand honor had come to

me; it would have made her proud.



Then they discussed optics, as they called it, and whether a certain

injury to the brain would produce blindness or not, but they could not

agree about it, and said they must test it by experiment by and by; and

next they discussed plants, and that interested me, because in the summer

Sadie and I had planted seeds--I helped her dig the holes, you know--and

after days and days a little shrub or a flower came up there, and it was

a wonder how that could happen; but it did, and I wished I could talk--I

would have told those people about it and shown then how much I knew, and

been all alive with the subject; but I didn't care for the optics; it was

dull, and when the came back to it again it bored me, and I went to

sleep.



Pretty soon it was spring, and sunny and pleasant and lovely, and the

sweet mother and the children patted me and the puppy good-by, and went

away on a journey and a visit to their kin, and the master wasn't any

company for us, but we played together and had good times, and the

servants were kind and friendly, so we got along quite happily and

counted the days and waited for the family.



And one day those men came again, and said, now for the test, and they

took the puppy to the laboratory, and I limped three-leggedly along, too,

feeling proud, for any attention shown to the puppy was a pleasure to me,

of course.  They discussed and experimented, and then suddenly the puppy

shrieked, and they set him on the floor, and he went staggering around,

with his head all bloody, and the master clapped his hands and shouted:



"There, I've won--confess it!  He's a blind as a bat!"



And they all said:



"It's so--you've proved your theory, and suffering humanity owes you a

great debt from henceforth," and they crowded around him, and wrung his

hand cordially and thankfully, and praised him.



But I hardly saw or heard these things, for I ran at once to my little

darling, and snuggled close to it where it lay, and licked the blood, and

it put its head against mine, whimpering softly, and I knew in my heart

it was a comfort to it in its pain and trouble to feel its mother's

touch, though it could not see me.  Then it dropped down, presently, and

its little velvet nose rested upon the floor, and it was still, and did

not move any more.



Soon the master stopped discussing a moment, and rang in the footman, and

said, "Bury it in the far corner of the garden," and then went on with

the discussion, and I trotted after the footman, very happy and grateful,

for I knew the puppy was out of its pain now, because it was asleep.  We

went far down the garden to the farthest end, where the children and the

nurse and the puppy and I used to play in the summer in the shade of a

great elm, and there the footman dug a hole, and I saw he was going to

plant the puppy, and I was glad, because it would grow and come up a fine

handsome dog, like Robin Adair, and be a beautiful surprise for the

family when they came home; so I tried to help him dig, but my lame leg

was no good, being stiff, you know, and you have to have two, or it is no

use.  When the footman had finished and covered little Robin up, he

patted my head, and there were tears in his eyes, and he said:  "Poor

little doggie, you saved HIS child!"



I have watched two whole weeks, and he doesn't come up!  This last week a

fright has been stealing upon me.  I think there is something terrible

about this.  I do not know what it is, but the fear makes me sick, and I

cannot eat, though the servants bring me the best of food; and they pet

me so, and even come in the night, and cry, and say, "Poor doggie--do

give it up and come home; don't break our hearts!" and all this terrifies

me the more, and makes me sure something has happened.  And I am so weak;

since yesterday I cannot stand on my feet anymore.  And within this hour

the servants, looking toward the sun where it was sinking out of sight

and the night chill coming on, said things I could not understand, but

they carried something cold to my heart.



"Those poor creatures!  They do not suspect.  They will come home in the

morning, and eagerly ask for the little doggie that did the brave deed,

and who of us will be strong enough to say the truth to them:  'The

humble little friend is gone where go the beasts that perish.'"









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of A Dog's Tale

by Mark Twain













 THE $30,000 BEQUEST

 and Other Stories



 by

 Mark Twain

 (Samuel L. Clemens)



 The $30,000 Bequest

 A Dog's Tale

 Was It Heaven?  Or Hell?

 A Cure for the Blues

 The Enemy Conquered; or, Love Triumphant

 The Californian's Tale

 A Helpless Situation

 A Telephonic Conversation

 Edward Mills and George Benton:  A Tale

 The Five Boons of Life

 The First Writing-machines

 Italian without a Master

 Italian with Grammar

 A Burlesque Biography

 How to Tell a Story

 General Washington's Negro Body-servant

 Wit Inspirations of the "Two-year-olds"

 An Entertaining Article

 A Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury

 Amended Obituaries

 A Monument to Adam

 A Humane Word from Satan

 Introduction to "The New Guide of the

 Conversation in Portuguese and English"

 Advice to Little Girls

 Post-mortem Poetry

 The Danger of Lying in Bed

 Portrait of King William III

 Does the Race of Man Love a Lord?

 Extracts from Adam's Diary

 Eve's Diary





***





THE $30,000 BEQUEST





CHAPTER I





Lakeside was a pleasant little town of five or six thousand inhabitants,

and a rather pretty one, too, as towns go in the Far West.

It had church accommodations for thirty-five thousand, which is

the way of the Far West and the South, where everybody is religious,

and where each of the Protestant sects is represented and has a plant

of its own.  Rank was unknown in Lakeside--unconfessed, anyway;

everybody knew everybody and his dog, and a sociable friendliness

was the prevailing atmosphere.



Saladin Foster was book-keeper in the principal store, and the only

high-salaried man of his profession in Lakeside.  He was thirty-five

years old, now; he had served that store for fourteen years;

he had begun in his marriage-week at four hundred dollars a year,

and had climbed steadily up, a hundred dollars a year, for four years;

from that time forth his wage had remained eight hundred--a handsome

figure indeed, and everybody conceded that he was worth it.



His wife, Electra, was a capable helpmeet, although--like himself--

a dreamer of dreams and a private dabbler in romance.  The first thing

she did, after her marriage--child as she was, aged only nineteen--

was to buy an acre of ground on the edge of the town, and pay

down the cash for it--twenty-five dollars, all her fortune.

Saladin had less, by fifteen.  She instituted a vegetable garden there,

got it farmed on shares by the nearest neighbor, and made it pay

her a hundred per cent.  a year.  Out of Saladin's first year's wage

she put thirty dollars in the savings-bank, sixty out of his second,

a hundred out of his third, a hundred and fifty out of his fourth.

His wage went to eight hundred a year, then, and meantime two children

had arrived and increased the expenses, but she banked two hundred

a year from the salary, nevertheless, thenceforth.  When she had been

married seven years she built and furnished a pretty and comfortable

two-thousand-dollar house in the midst of her garden-acre, paid

half of the money down and moved her family in.  Seven years later

she was out of debt and had several hundred dollars out earning

its living.



Earning it by the rise in landed estate; for she had long ago bought

another acre or two and sold the most of it at a profit to pleasant

people who were willing to build, and would be good neighbors and

furnish a general comradeship for herself and her growing family.

She had an independent income from safe investments of about a hundred

dollars a year; her children were growing in years and grace;

and she was a pleased and happy woman.  Happy in her husband, happy in

her children, and the husband and the children were happy in her.

It is at this point that this history begins.



The youngest girl, Clytemnestra--called Clytie for short--

was eleven; her sister, Gwendolen--called Gwen for short--

was thirteen; nice girls, and comely.  The names betray the latent

romance-tinge in the parental blood, the parents' names indicate

that the tinge was an inheritance.  It was an affectionate family,

hence all four of its members had pet names, Saladin's was a curious

and unsexing one--Sally; and so was Electra's--Aleck.  All day

long Sally was a good and diligent book-keeper and salesman;

all day long Aleck was a good and faithful mother and housewife,

and thoughtful and calculating business woman; but in the cozy

living-room at night they put the plodding world away, and lived in

another and a fairer, reading romances to each other, dreaming dreams,

comrading with kings and princes and stately lords and ladies in the

flash and stir and splendor of noble palaces and grim and ancient castles.







CHAPTER II





Now came great news!  Stunning news--joyous news, in fact.

It came from a neighboring state, where the family's only surviving

relative lived.  It was Sally's relative--a sort of vague and indefinite

uncle or second or third cousin by the name of Tilbury Foster,

seventy and a bachelor, reputed well off and corresponding sour

and crusty.  Sally had tried to make up to him once, by letter,

in a bygone time, and had not made that mistake again.  Tilbury now

wrote to Sally, saying he should shortly die, and should leave him

thirty thousand dollars, cash; not for love, but because money

had given him most of his troubles and exasperations, and he wished

to place it where there was good hope that it would continue its

malignant work.  The bequest would be found in his will, and would

be paid over.  PROVIDED, that Sally should be able to prove to the

executors that he had TAKEN NO NOTICE OF THE GIFT BY SPOKEN WORD OR

BY LETTER, HAD MADE NO INQUIRIES CONCERNING THE MORIBUND'S PROGRESS

TOWARD THE EVERLASTING TROPICS, AND HAD NOT ATTENDED THE FUNERAL.



As soon as Aleck had partially recovered from the tremendous

emotions created by the letter, she sent to the relative's habitat

and subscribed for the local paper.



Man and wife entered into a solemn compact, now, to never mention

the great news to any one while the relative lived, lest some

ignorant person carry the fact to the death-bed and distort it

and make it appear that they were disobediently thankful for

the bequest, and just the same as confessing it and publishing it,

right in the face of the prohibition.



For the rest of the day Sally made havoc and confusion with his books,

and Aleck could not keep her mind on her affairs, not even take up

a flower-pot or book or a stick of wood without forgetting what she

had intended to do with it.  For both were dreaming.



"Thir-ty thousand dollars!"



All day long the music of those inspiring words sang through

those people's heads.



From his marriage-day forth, Aleck's grip had been upon the purse,

and Sally had seldom known what it was to be privileged to squander

a dime on non-necessities.



"Thir-ty thousand dollars!" the song went on and on.  A vast sum,

an unthinkable sum!



All day long Aleck was absorbed in planning how to invest it,

Sally in planning how to spend it.



There was no romance-reading that night.  The children took

themselves away early, for their parents were silent, distraught,

and strangely unentertaining.  The good-night kisses might as well

have been impressed upon vacancy, for all the response they got;

the parents were not aware of the kisses, and the children had

been gone an hour before their absence was noticed.  Two pencils

had been busy during that hour--note-making; in the way of plans.

It was Sally who broke the stillness at last.  He said, with exultation:



"Ah, it'll be grand, Aleck!  Out of the first thousand we'll have

a horse and a buggy for summer, and a cutter and a skin lap-robe

for winter."



Aleck responded with decision and composure--



"Out of the CAPITAL?  Nothing of the kind.  Not if it was a million!"



Sally was deeply disappointed; the glow went out of his face.



"Oh, Aleck!" he said, reproachfully.  "We've always worked so hard

and been so scrimped:  and now that we are rich, it does seem--"



He did not finish, for he saw her eye soften; his supplication

had touched her.  She said, with gentle persuasiveness:



"We must not spend the capital, dear, it would not be wise.

Out of the income from it--"



"That will answer, that will answer, Aleck!  How dear and good you are!

There will be a noble income and if we can spend that--"



"Not ALL of it, dear, not all of it, but you can spend a part of it.

That is, a reasonable part.  But the whole of the capital--

every penny of it--must be put right to work, and kept at it.

You see the reasonableness of that, don't you?"



"Why, ye-s. Yes, of course.  But we'll have to wait so long.

Six months before the first interest falls due."



"Yes--maybe longer."



"Longer, Aleck?  Why?  Don't they pay half-yearly?"



"THAT kind of an investment--yes; but I sha'n't invest in that way."



"What way, then?"



"For big returns."



"Big.  That's good.  Go on, Aleck.  What is it?"



"Coal.  The new mines.  Cannel.  I mean to put in ten thousand.

Ground floor.  When we organize, we'll get three shares for one."



"By George, but it sounds good, Aleck!  Then the shares will be worth--

how much?  And when?"



"About a year.  They'll pay ten per cent.  half yearly, and be

worth thirty thousand.  I know all about it; the advertisement

is in the Cincinnati paper here."



"Land, thirty thousand for ten--in a year!  Let's jam in the whole

capital and pull out ninety!  I'll write and subscribe right now--

tomorrow it maybe too late."



He was flying to the writing-desk, but Aleck stopped him and put

him back in his chair.  She said:



"Don't lose your head so.  WE mustn't subscribe till we've got

the money; don't you know that?"



Sally's excitement went down a degree or two, but he was not

wholly appeased.



"Why, Aleck, we'll HAVE it, you know--and so soon, too.  He's probably

out of his troubles before this; it's a hundred to nothing he's

selecting his brimstone-shovel this very minute.  Now, I think--"



Aleck shuddered, and said:



"How CAN you, Sally!  Don't talk in that way, it is perfectly scandalous."



"Oh, well, make it a halo, if you like, _I_ don't care for his outfit,

I was only just talking.  Can't you let a person talk?"



"But why should you WANT to talk in that dreadful way?  How would

you like to have people talk so about YOU, and you not cold yet?"



"Not likely to be, for ONE while, I reckon, if my last act was

giving away money for the sake of doing somebody a harm with it.

But never mind about Tilbury, Aleck, let's talk about something worldly.

It does seem to me that that mine is the place for the whole thirty.

What's the objection?"



"All the eggs in one basket--that's the objection."



"All right, if you say so.  What about the other twenty?

What do you mean to do with that?"



"There is no hurry; I am going to look around before I do anything

with it."



"All right, if your mind's made up," signed Sally.  He was deep

in thought awhile, then he said:



"There'll be twenty thousand profit coming from the ten a year

from now.  We can spend that, can we, Aleck?"



Aleck shook her head.



"No, dear," she said, "it won't sell high till we've had the first

semi-annual dividend.  You can spend part of that."



"Shucks, only THAT--and a whole year to wait!  Confound it, I--"



"Oh, do be patient!  It might even be declared in three months--

it's quite within the possibilities."



"Oh, jolly! oh, thanks!" and Sally jumped up and kissed his wife

in gratitude.  "It'll be three thousand--three whole thousand!

how much of it can we spend, Aleck?  Make it liberal!--do, dear,

that's a good fellow."



Aleck was pleased; so pleased that she yielded to the pressure and

conceded a sum which her judgment told her was a foolish extravagance--

a thousand dollars.  Sally kissed her half a dozen times and even

in that way could not express all his joy and thankfulness.

This new access of gratitude and affection carried Aleck quite

beyond the bounds of prudence, and before she could restrain

herself she had made her darling another grant--a couple

of thousand out of the fifty or sixty which she meant to clear

within a year of the twenty which still remained of the bequest.

The happy tears sprang to Sally's eyes, and he said:



"Oh, I want to hug you!"  And he did it.  Then he got his

notes and sat down and began to check off, for first purchase,

the luxuries which he should earliest wish to secure.

"Horse--buggy--cutter--lap-robe--patent-leathers--dog--plug-hat--

church-pew--stem-winder--new teeth--SAY, Aleck!"



"Well?"



"Ciphering away, aren't you?  That's right.  Have you got the twenty

thousand invested yet?"



"No, there's no hurry about that; I must look around first,

and think."



"But you are ciphering; what's it about?"



"Why, I have to find work for the thirty thousand that comes out

of the coal, haven't I?"



"Scott, what a head!  I never thought of that.  How are you

getting along?  Where have you arrived?"



"Not very far--two years or three.  I've turned it over twice;

once in oil and once in wheat."



"Why, Aleck, it's splendid!  How does it aggregate?"



"I think--well, to be on the safe side, about a hundred and eighty

thousand clear, though it will probably be more."



"My! isn't it wonderful?  By gracious! luck has come our way at last,

after all the hard sledding, Aleck!"



"Well?"



"I'm going to cash in a whole three hundred on the missionaries--

what real right have we care for expenses!"



"You couldn't do a nobler thing, dear; and it's just like your

generous nature, you unselfish boy."



The praise made Sally poignantly happy, but he was fair and just

enough to say it was rightfully due to Aleck rather than to himself,

since but for her he should never have had the money.



Then they went up to bed, and in their delirium of bliss they forgot

and left the candle burning in the parlor.  They did not remember

until they were undressed; then Sally was for letting it burn;

he said they could afford it, if it was a thousand.  But Aleck went

down and put it out.



A good job, too; for on her way back she hit on a scheme that would

turn the hundred and eighty thousand into half a million before it

had had time to get cold.







CHAPTER III





The little newspaper which Aleck had subscribed for was a Thursday sheet;

it would make the trip of five hundred miles from Tilbury's village

and arrive on Saturday.  Tilbury's letter had started on Friday,

more than a day too late for the benefactor to die and get into

that week's issue, but in plenty of time to make connection for the

next output.  Thus the Fosters had to wait almost a complete week to

find out whether anything of a satisfactory nature had happened to him

or not.  It was a long, long week, and the strain was a heavy one.

The pair could hardly have borne it if their minds had not had the

relief of wholesome diversion.  We have seen that they had that.

The woman was piling up fortunes right along, the man was spending them--

spending all his wife would give him a chance at, at any rate.



At last the Saturday came, and the WEEKLY SAGAMORE arrived.

Mrs. Eversly Bennett was present.  She was the Presbyterian

parson's wife, and was working the Fosters for a charity.

Talk now died a sudden death--on the Foster side.  Mrs. Bennett

presently discovered that her hosts were not hearing a word she

was saying; so she got up, wondering and indignant, and went away.

The moment she was out of the house, Aleck eagerly tore the wrapper

from the paper, and her eyes and Sally's swept the columns for the

death-notices. Disappointment!  Tilbury was not anywhere mentioned.

Aleck was a Christian from the cradle, and duty and the force of

habit required her to go through the motions.  She pulled herself

together and said, with a pious two-per-cent. trade joyousness:



"Let us be humbly thankful that he has been spared; and--"



"Damn his treacherous hide, I wish--"



"Sally!  For shame!"



"I don't care!" retorted the angry man.  "It's the way YOU feel,

and if you weren't so immorally pious you'd be honest and say so."



Aleck said, with wounded dignity:



"I do not see how you can say such unkind and unjust things.

There is no such thing as immoral piety."



Sally felt a pang, but tried to conceal it under a shuffling attempt

to save his case by changing the form of it--as if changing the form

while retaining the juice could deceive the expert he was trying

to placate.  He said:



"I didn't mean so bad as that, Aleck; I didn't really mean

immoral piety, I only meant--meant--well, conventional piety,

you know; er--shop piety; the--the--why, YOU know what I mean.

Aleck--the--well, where you put up that plated article and play

it for solid, you know, without intending anything improper,

but just out of trade habit, ancient policy, petrified custom,

loyalty to--to--hang it, I can't find the right words, but YOU

know what I mean, Aleck, and that there isn't any harm in it.

I'll try again.  You see, it's this way.  If a person--"



"You have said quite enough," said Aleck, coldly; "let the subject

be dropped."



"I'M willing," fervently responded Sally, wiping the sweat from

his forehead and looking the thankfulness he had no words for.

Then, musingly, he apologized to himself.  "I certainly held threes--

I KNOW it--but I drew and didn't fill.  That's where I'm so often

weak in the game.  If I had stood pat--but I didn't. I never do.

I don't know enough."



Confessedly defeated, he was properly tame now and subdued.

Aleck forgave him with her eyes.



The grand interest, the supreme interest, came instantly to the

front again; nothing could keep it in the background many minutes

on a stretch.  The couple took up the puzzle of the absence

of Tilbury's death-notice. They discussed it every which way,

more or less hopefully, but they had to finish where they began,

and concede that the only really sane explanation of the absence

of the notice must be--and without doubt was--that Tilbury was

not dead.  There was something sad about it, something even a

little unfair, maybe, but there it was, and had to be put up with.

They were agreed as to that.  To Sally it seemed a strangely

inscrutable dispensation; more inscrutable than usual, he thought;

one of the most unnecessary inscrutable he could call to mind,

in fact--and said so, with some feeling; but if he was hoping

to draw Aleck he failed; she reserved her opinion, if she had one;

she had not the habit of taking injudicious risks in any market,

worldly or other.



The pair must wait for next week's paper--Tilbury had

evidently postponed.  That was their thought and their decision.

So they put the subject away and went about their affairs

again with as good heart as they could.





Now, if they had but known it, they had been wronging Tilbury

all the time.  Tilbury had kept faith, kept it to the letter;

he was dead, he had died to schedule.  He was dead more than four

days now and used to it; entirely dead, perfectly dead, as dead

as any other new person in the cemetery; dead in abundant time to get

into that week's SAGAMORE, too, and only shut out by an accident;

an accident which could not happen to a metropolitan journal,

but which happens easily to a poor little village rag like the SAGAMORE.

On this occasion, just as the editorial page was being locked up,

a gratis quart of strawberry ice-water arrived from Hostetter's

Ladies and Gents Ice-Cream Parlors, and the stickful of rather

chilly regret over Tilbury's translation got crowded out to make

room for the editor's frantic gratitude.



On its way to the standing-galley Tilbury's notice got pied.

Otherwise it would have gone into some future edition, for WEEKLY

SAGAMORES do not waste "live" matter, and in their galleys "live"

matter is immortal, unless a pi accident intervenes.  But a thing

that gets pied is dead, and for such there is no resurrection;

its chance of seeing print is gone, forever and ever.  And so,

let Tilbury like it or not, let him rave in his grave to his fill,

no matter--no mention of his death would ever see the light in the

WEEKLY SAGAMORE.







CHAPTER IV





Five weeks drifted tediously along.  The SAGAMORE arrived regularly on

the Saturdays, but never once contained a mention of Tilbury Foster.

Sally's patience broke down at this point, and he said, resentfully:



"Damn his livers, he's immortal!"



Aleck give him a very severe rebuke, and added with icy solemnity:



"How would you feel if you were suddenly cut out just after such

an awful remark had escaped out of you?"



Without sufficient reflection Sally responded:



"I'd feel I was lucky I hadn't got caught with it IN me."



Pride had forced him to say something, and as he could not think

of any rational thing to say he flung that out.  Then he stole a base--

as he called it--that is, slipped from the presence, to keep from

being brayed in his wife's discussion-mortar.



Six months came and went.  The SAGAMORE was still silent about Tilbury.

Meantime, Sally had several times thrown out a feeler--that is,

a hint that he would like to know.  Aleck had ignored the hints.

Sally now resolved to brace up and risk a frontal attack.

So he squarely proposed to disguise himself and go to Tilbury's

village and surreptitiously find out as to the prospects.

Aleck put her foot on the dangerous project with energy and decision.

She said:



"What can you be thinking of?  You do keep my hands full!

You have to be watched all the time, like a little child, to keep

you from walking into the fire.  You'll stay right where you are!"



"Why, Aleck, I could do it and not be found out--I'm certain of it."



"Sally Foster, don't you know you would have to inquire around?"



"Of course, but what of it?  Nobody would suspect who I was."



"Oh, listen to the man!  Some day you've got to prove to the

executors that you never inquired.  What then?"



He had forgotten that detail.  He didn't reply; there wasn't

anything to say.  Aleck added:



"Now then, drop that notion out of your mind, and don't ever meddle

with it again.  Tilbury set that trap for you.  Don't you know it's

a trap?  He is on the watch, and fully expecting you to blunder

into it.  Well, he is going to be disappointed--at least while I

am on deck.  Sally!"



"Well?"



"As long as you live, if it's a hundred years, don't you ever make

an inquiry.  Promise!"



"All right," with a sigh and reluctantly.



Then Aleck softened and said:



"Don't be impatient.  We are prospering; we can wait; there is

no hurry.  Our small dead-certain income increases all the time;

and as to futures, I have not made a mistake yet--they are piling

up by the thousands and tens of thousands.  There is not another

family in the state with such prospects as ours.  Already we are

beginning to roll in eventual wealth.  You know that, don't you?"



"Yes, Aleck, it's certainly so."



"Then be grateful for what God is doing for us and stop worrying.

You do not believe we could have achieved these prodigious results

without His special help and guidance, do you?"



Hesitatingly, "N-no, I suppose not."  Then, with feeling

and admiration, "And yet, when it comes to judiciousness

in watering a stock or putting up a hand to skin Wall Street

I don't give in that YOU need any outside amateur help, if I do wish I--"



"Oh, DO shut up!  I know you do not mean any harm or any irreverence,

poor boy, but you can't seem to open your mouth without letting out

things to make a person shudder.  You keep me in constant dread.

For you and for all of us.  Once I had no fear of the thunder,

but now when I hear it I--"



Her voice broke, and she began to cry, and could not finish.

The sight of this smote Sally to the heart and he took her in his

arms and petted her and comforted her and promised better conduct,

and upbraided himself and remorsefully pleaded for forgiveness.

And he was in earnest, and sorry for what he had done and ready for any

sacrifice that could make up for it.



And so, in privacy, he thought long and deeply over the matter,

resolving to do what should seem best.  It was easy to PROMISE reform;

indeed he had already promised it.  But would that do any real good,

any permanent good?  No, it would be but temporary--he knew

his weakness, and confessed it to himself with sorrow--he could

not keep the promise.  Something surer and better must be devised;

and he devised it.  At cost of precious money which he had long

been saving up, shilling by shilling, he put a lightning-rod on

the house.



At a subsequent time he relapsed.



What miracles habit can do! and how quickly and how easily habits

are acquired--both trifling habits and habits which profoundly change us.

If by accident we wake at two in the morning a couple of nights

in succession, we have need to be uneasy, for another repetition can

turn the accident into a habit; and a month's dallying with whiskey--

but we all know these commonplace facts.



The castle-building habit, the day-dreaming habit--how it grows!

what a luxury it becomes; how we fly to its enchantments at every

idle moment, how we revel in them, steep our souls in them,

intoxicate ourselves with their beguiling fantasies--oh yes,

and how soon and how easily our dram life and our material life

become so intermingled and so fused together that we can't quite

tell which is which, any more.



By and by Aleck subscribed to a Chicago daily and for the WALL

STREET POINTER.  With an eye single to finance she studied these

as diligently all the week as she studied her Bible Sundays.

Sally was lost in admiration, to note with what swift and sure strides

her genius and judgment developed and expanded in the forecasting and

handling of the securities of both the material and spiritual markets.

He was proud of her nerve and daring in exploiting worldly stocks,

and just as proud of her conservative caution in working her

spiritual deals.  He noted that she never lost her head in either case;

that with a splendid courage she often went short on worldly futures,

but heedfully drew the line there--she was always long on the others.

Her policy was quite sane and simple, as she explained it to him:

what she put into earthly futures was for speculation, what she put

into spiritual futures was for investment; she was willing to go into

the one on a margin, and take chances, but in the case of the other,

"margin her no margins"--she wanted to cash in a hundred cents per

dollar's worth, and have the stock transferred on the books.



It took but a very few months to educate Aleck's imagination

and Sally's. Each day's training added something to the spread

and effectiveness of the two machines.  As a consequence, Aleck made

imaginary money much faster than at first she had dreamed of making it,

and Sally's competency in spending the overflow of it kept pace with

the strain put upon it, right along.  In the beginning, Aleck had

given the coal speculation a twelvemonth in which to materialize,

and had been loath to grant that this term might possibly be shortened

by nine months.  But that was the feeble work, the nursery work,

of a financial fancy that had had no teaching, no experience,

no practice.  These aids soon came, then that nine months vanished,

and the imaginary ten-thousand-dollar investment came marching

home with three hundred per cent.  profit on its back!



It was a great day for the pair of Fosters.  They were speechless

for joy.  Also speechless for another reason:  after much watching

of the market, Aleck had lately, with fear and trembling, made her

first flyer on a "margin," using the remaining twenty thousand of

the bequest in this risk.  In her mind's eye she had seen it climb,

point by point--always with a chance that the market would break--

until at last her anxieties were too great for further endurance--

she being new to the margin business and unhardened, as yet--and she

gave her imaginary broker an imaginary order by imaginary telegraph

to sell.  She said forty thousand dollars' profit was enough.

The sale was made on the very day that the coal venture had returned

with its rich freight.  As I have said, the couple were speechless.

they sat dazed and blissful that night, trying to realize that they were

actually worth a hundred thousand dollars in clean, imaginary cash.

Yet so it was.



It was the last time that ever Aleck was afraid of a margin;

at least afraid enough to let it break her sleep and pale her cheek

to the extent that this first experience in that line had done.



Indeed it was a memorable night.  Gradually the realization that they

were rich sank securely home into the souls of the pair, then they

began to place the money.  If we could have looked out through

the eyes of these dreamers, we should have seen their tidy little

wooden house disappear, and two-story brick with a cast-iron fence

in front of it take its place; we should have seen a three-globed

gas-chandelier grow down from the parlor ceiling; we should have seen

the homely rag carpet turn to noble Brussels, a dollar and a half

a yard; we should have seen the plebeian fireplace vanish away and

a recherch'e, big base-burner with isinglass windows take position

and spread awe around.  And we should have seen other things,

too; among them the buggy, the lap-robe, the stove-pipe hat, and so on.



From that time forth, although the daughters and the neighbors

saw only the same old wooden house there, it was a two-story

brick to Aleck and Sally and not a night went by that Aleck did

not worry about the imaginary gas-bills, and get for all comfort

Sally's reckless retort:  "What of it?  We can afford it."



Before the couple went to bed, that first night that they were rich,

they had decided that they must celebrate.  They must give a party--

that was the idea.  But how to explain it--to the daughters and

the neighbors?  They could not expose the fact that they were rich.

Sally was willing, even anxious, to do it; but Aleck kept her head

and would not allow it.  She said that although the money was as

good as in, it would be as well to wait until it was actually in.

On that policy she took her stand, and would not budge.

The great secret must be kept, she said--kept from the daughters and

everybody else.



The pair were puzzled.  They must celebrate, they were determined

to celebrate, but since the secret must be kept, what could

they celebrate?  No birthdays were due for three months.

Tilbury wasn't available, evidently he was going to live forever;

what the nation COULD they celebrate?  That was Sally's way

of putting it; and he was getting impatient, too, and harassed.

But at last he hit it--just by sheer inspiration, as it seemed to him--

and all their troubles were gone in a moment; they would celebrate

the Discovery of America.  A splendid idea!



Aleck was almost too proud of Sally for words--she said SHE never would

have thought of it.  But Sally, although he was bursting with delight

in the compliment and with wonder at himself, tried not to let on,

and said it wasn't really anything, anybody could have done it.

Whereat Aleck, with a prideful toss of her happy head, said:



"Oh, certainly!  Anybody could--oh, anybody!  Hosannah Dilkins,

for instance!  Or maybe Adelbert Peanut--oh, DEAR--yes!  Well, I'd like

to see them try it, that's all.  Dear-me-suz, if they could think

of the discovery of a forty-acre island it's more than _I_ believe

they could; and as for the whole continent, why, Sally Foster,

you know perfectly well it would strain the livers and lights

out of them and THEN they couldn't!"



The dear woman, she knew he had talent; and if affection made

her over-estimate the size of it a little, surely it was a sweet

and gentle crime, and forgivable for its source's sake.







CHAPTER V





The celebration went off well.  The friends were all present,

both the young and the old.  Among the young were Flossie and

Gracie Peanut and their brother Adelbert, who was a rising young

journeyman tinner, also Hosannah Dilkins, Jr., journeyman plasterer,

just out of his apprenticeship.  For many months Adelbert and Hosannah

had been showing interest in Gwendolen and Clytemnestra Foster,

and the parents of the girls had noticed this with private satisfaction.

But they suddenly realized now that that feeling had passed.

They recognized that the changed financial conditions had raised

up a social bar between their daughters and the young mechanics.

The daughters could now look higher--and must.  Yes, must.  They need

marry nothing below the grade of lawyer or merchant; poppa and momma

would take care of this; there must be no m'esalliances.



However, these thinkings and projects of their were private,

and did not show on the surface, and therefore threw no shadow

upon the celebration.  What showed upon the surface was a serene

and lofty contentment and a dignity of carriage and gravity of

deportment which compelled the admiration and likewise the wonder

of the company.  All noticed it and all commented upon it, but none

was able to divine the secret of it.  It was a marvel and a mystery.

Three several persons remarked, without suspecting what clever

shots they were making:



"It's as if they'd come into property."



That was just it, indeed.



Most mothers would have taken hold of the matrimonial matter in the

old regulation way; they would have given the girls a talking to,

of a solemn sort and untactful--a lecture calculated to defeat its

own purpose, by producing tears and secret rebellion; and the said

mothers would have further damaged the business by requesting

the young mechanics to discontinue their attentions.  But this

mother was different.  She was practical.  She said nothing to any

of the young people concerned, nor to any one else except Sally.

He listened to her and understood; understood and admired.

He said:



"I get the idea.  Instead of finding fault with the samples on view,

thus hurting feelings and obstructing trade without occasion,

you merely offer a higher class of goods for the money, and leave

nature to take her course.  It's wisdom, Aleck, solid wisdom,

and sound as a nut.  Who's your fish?  Have you nominated him yet?"



No, she hadn't. They must look the market over--which they did.

To start with, they considered and discussed Brandish, rising young

lawyer, and Fulton, rising young dentist.  Sally must invite them

to dinner.  But not right away; there was no hurry, Aleck said.

Keep an eye on the pair, and wait; nothing would be lost by going

slowly in so important a matter.



It turned out that this was wisdom, too; for inside of three

weeks Aleck made a wonderful strike which swelled her imaginary

hundred thousand to four hundred thousand of the same quality.

She and Sally were in the clouds that evening.  For the first

time they introduced champagne at dinner.  Not real champagne,

but plenty real enough for the amount of imagination expended on it.

It was Sally that did it, and Aleck weakly submitted.  At bottom both

were troubled and ashamed, for he was a high-up Son of Temperance,

and at funerals wore an apron which no dog could look upon and retain

his reason and his opinion; and she was a W. C. T. U., with all that

that implies of boiler-iron virtue and unendurable holiness.  But there

is was; the pride of riches was beginning its disintegrating work.

They had lived to prove, once more, a sad truth which had been proven

many times before in the world:  that whereas principle is a great

and noble protection against showy and degrading vanities and vices,

poverty is worth six of it.  More than four hundred thousand

dollars to the good.  They took up the matrimonial matter again.

Neither the dentist nor the lawyer was mentioned; there was no occasion,

they were out of the running.  Disqualified.  They discussed the son

of the pork-packer and the son of the village banker.  But finally,

as in the previous case, they concluded to wait and think, and go

cautiously and sure.



Luck came their way again.  Aleck, ever watchful saw a great

and risky chance, and took a daring flyer.  A time of trembling,

of doubt, of awful uneasiness followed, for non-success meant absolute

ruin and nothing short of it.  Then came the result, and Aleck,

faint with joy, could hardly control her voice when she said:



"The suspense is over, Sally--and we are worth a cold million!"



Sally wept for gratitude, and said:



"Oh, Electra, jewel of women, darling of my heart, we are free

at last, we roll in wealth, we need never scrimp again.  it's a

case for Veuve Cliquot!" and he got out a pint of spruce-beer

and made sacrifice, he saying "Damn the expense," and she rebuking

him gently with reproachful but humid and happy eyes.



They shelved the pork-packer's son and the banker's son, and sat

down to consider the Governor's son and the son of the Congressman.







CHAPTER VI





It were a weariness to follow in detail the leaps and bounds the Foster

fictitious finances took from this time forth.  It was marvelous,

it was dizzying, it was dazzling.  Everything Aleck touched turned

to fairy gold, and heaped itself glittering toward the firmament.

Millions upon millions poured in, and still the mighty stream flowed

thundering along, still its vast volume increased.  Five millions--

ten millions--twenty--thirty--was there never to be an end?



Two years swept by in a splendid delirium, the intoxicated Fosters

scarcely noticing the flight of time.  They were now worth three hundred

million dollars; they were in every board of directors of every

prodigious combine in the country; and still as time drifted along,

the millions went on piling up, five at a time, ten at a time,

as fast as they could tally them off, almost.  The three hundred

double itself--then doubled again--and yet again--and yet once more.



Twenty-four hundred millions!



The business was getting a little confused.  It was necessary

to take an account of stock, and straighten it out.  The Fosters

knew it, they felt it, they realized that it was imperative;

but they also knew that to do it properly and perfectly the task

must be carried to a finish without a break when once it was begun.

A ten-hours' job; and where could THEY find ten leisure hours

in a bunch?  Sally was selling pins and sugar and calico all day

and every day; Aleck was cooking and washing dishes and sweeping

and making beds all day and every day, with none to help,

for the daughters were being saved up for high society.  The Fosters

knew there was one way to get the ten hours, and only one.

Both were ashamed to name it; each waited for the other to do it.

Finally Sally said:



"Somebody's got to give in.  It's up to me.  Consider that I've

named it--never mind pronouncing it out aloud."



Aleck colored, but was grateful.  Without further remark, they fell.

Fell, and--broke the Sabbath.  For that was their only free

ten-hour stretch.  It was but another step in the downward path.

Others would follow.  Vast wealth has temptations which fatally

and surely undermine the moral structure of persons not habituated

to its possession.



They pulled down the shades and broke the Sabbath.  With hard

and patient labor they overhauled their holdings and listed them.

And a long-drawn procession of formidable names it was!

Starting with the Railway Systems, Steamer Lines, Standard Oil,

Ocean Cables, Diluted Telegraph, and all the rest, and winding

up with Klondike, De Beers, Tammany Graft, and Shady Privileges

in the Post-office Department.



Twenty-four hundred millions, and all safely planted in Good Things,

gilt-edged and interest-bearing. Income, $120,000,000 a year.

Aleck fetched a long purr of soft delight, and said:



"Is it enough?"



"It is, Aleck."



"What shall we do?"



"Stand pat."



"Retire from business?"



"That's it."



"I am agreed.  The good work is finished; we will take a long rest

and enjoy the money."



"Good!  Aleck!"



"Yes, dear?"



"How much of the income can we spend?"



"The whole of it."



It seemed to her husband that a ton of chains fell from his limbs.

He did not say a word; he was happy beyond the power of speech.



After that, they broke the Sabbaths right along as fast as they

turned up.  It is the first wrong step that counts.  Every Sunday

they put in the whole day, after morning service, on inventions--

inventions of ways to spend the money.  They got to continuing this

delicious dissipation until past midnight; and at every s'eance Aleck

lavished millions upon great charities and religious enterprises,

and Sally lavished like sums upon matters to which (at first)

he gave definite names.  Only at first.  Later the names gradually

lost sharpness of outline, and eventually faded into "sundries,"

thus becoming entirely--but safely--undescriptive.  For Sally

was crumbling.  The placing of these millions added seriously

and most uncomfortably to the family expenses--in tallow candles.

For a while Aleck was worried.  Then, after a little, she ceased

to worry, for the occasion of it was gone.  She was pained,

she was grieved, she was ashamed; but she said nothing, and so became

an accessory.  Sally was taking candles; he was robbing the store.

It is ever thus.  Vast wealth, to the person unaccustomed to it,

is a bane; it eats into the flesh and bone of his morals.

When the Fosters were poor, they could have been trusted with

untold candles.  But now they--but let us not dwell upon it.

From candles to apples is but a step:  Sally got to taking apples;

then soap; then maple-sugar; then canned goods; then crockery.

How easy it is to go from bad to worse, when once we have started upon a

downward course!



Meantime, other effects had been milestoning the course of the Fosters'

splendid financial march.  The fictitious brick dwelling had

given place to an imaginary granite one with a checker-board

mansard roof; in time this one disappeared and gave place to a

still grander home--and so on and so on.  Mansion after mansion,

made of air, rose, higher, broader, finer, and each in its turn

vanished away; until now in these latter great days, our dreamers

were in fancy housed, in a distant region, in a sumptuous vast

palace which looked out from a leafy summit upon a noble prospect

of vale and river and receding hills steeped in tinted mists--

and all private, all the property of the dreamers; a palace swarming

with liveried servants, and populous with guests of fame and power,

hailing from all the world's capitals, foreign and domestic.



This palace was far, far away toward the rising sun, immeasurably remote,

astronomically remote, in Newport, Rhode Island, Holy Land

of High Society, ineffable Domain of the American Aristocracy.

As a rule they spent a part of every Sabbath--after morning service--

in this sumptuous home, the rest of it they spent in Europe,

or in dawdling around in their private yacht.  Six days of sordid

and plodding fact life at home on the ragged edge of Lakeside

and straitened means, the seventh in Fairlyand--such had been

their program and their habit.



In their sternly restricted fact life they remained as of old--

plodding, diligent, careful, practical, economical.  They stuck

loyally to the little Presbyterian Church, and labored faithfully

in its interests and stood by its high and tough doctrines with all

their mental and spiritual energies.  But in their dream life they

obeyed the invitations of their fancies, whatever they might be,

and howsoever the fancies might change.  Aleck's fancies were not

very capricious, and not frequent, but Sally's scattered a good deal.

Aleck, in her dream life, went over to the Episcopal camp, on account

of its large official titles; next she became High-church on account

of the candles and shows; and next she naturally changed to Rome,

where there were cardinals and more candles.  But these excursions

were a nothing to Sally's. His dream life was a glowing and continuous

and persistent excitement, and he kept every part of it fresh and

sparkling by frequent changes, the religious part along with the rest.

He worked his religions hard, and changed them with his shirt.



The liberal spendings of the Fosters upon their fancies began

early in their prosperities, and grew in prodigality step by step

with their advancing fortunes.  In time they became truly enormous.

Aleck built a university or two per Sunday; also a hospital or two;

also a Rowton hotel or so; also a batch of churches; now and then

a cathedral; and once, with untimely and ill-chosen playfulness,

Sally said, "It was a cold day when she didn't ship a cargo of

missionaries to persuade unreflecting Chinamen to trade off twenty-four

carat Confucianism for counterfeit Christianity."



This rude and unfeeling language hurt Aleck to the heart, and she

went from the presence crying.  That spectacle went to his own heart,

and in his pain and shame he would have given worlds to have

those unkind words back.  She had uttered no syllable of reproach--

and that cut him.  Not one suggestion that he look at his own record--

and she could have made, oh, so many, and such blistering ones!

Her generous silence brought a swift revenge, for it turned his

thoughts upon himself, it summoned before him a spectral procession,

a moving vision of his life as he had been leading it these past

few years of limitless prosperity, and as he sat there reviewing

it his cheeks burned and his soul was steeped in humiliation.

Look at her life--how fair it was, and tending ever upward; and look

at his own--how frivolous, how charged with mean vanities, how selfish,

how empty, how ignoble!  And its trend--never upward, but downward,

ever downward!



He instituted comparisons between her record and his own.  He had found

fault with her--so he mused--HE!  And what could he say for himself?

When she built her first church what was he doing?  Gathering other

blas'e multimillionaires into a Poker Club; defiling his own palace

with it; losing hundreds of thousands to it at every sitting,

and sillily vain of the admiring notoriety it made for him.

When she was building her first university, what was he doing?

Polluting himself with a gay and dissipated secret life in the

company of other fast bloods, multimillionaires in money and paupers

in character.  When she was building her first foundling asylum,

what was he doing?  Alas!  When she was projecting her noble Society

for the Purifying of the Sex, what was he doing?  Ah, what, indeed!

When she and the W. C. T. U. and the Woman with the Hatchet,

moving with resistless march, were sweeping the fatal bottle from

the land, what was he doing?  Getting drunk three times a day.

When she, builder of a hundred cathedrals, was being gratefully

welcomed and blest in papal Rome and decorated with the Golden Rose

which she had so honorably earned, what was he doing?  Breaking the

bank at Monte Carlo.



He stopped.  He could go no farther; he could not bear the rest.

He rose up, with a great resolution upon his lips:  this secret

life should be revealing, and confessed; no longer would he live

it clandestinely, he would go and tell her All.



And that is what he did.  He told her All; and wept upon

her bosom; wept, and moaned, and begged for her forgiveness.

It was a profound shock, and she staggered under the blow, but he

was her own, the core of her heart, the blessing of her eyes,

her all in all, she could deny him nothing, and she forgave him.

She felt that he could never again be quite to her what he had

been before; she knew that he could only repent, and not reform;

yet all morally defaced and decayed as he was, was he not her own,

her very own, the idol of her deathless worship?  She said she

was his serf, his slave, and she opened her yearning heart and took

him in.







CHAPTER VII





One Sunday afternoon some time after this they were sailing the

summer seas in their dream yacht, and reclining in lazy luxury under

the awning of the after-deck. There was silence, for each was busy

with his own thoughts.  These seasons of silence had insensibly

been growing more and more frequent of late; the old nearness and

cordiality were waning.  Sally's terrible revelation had done its work;

Aleck had tried hard to drive the memory of it out of her mind,

but it would not go, and the shame and bitterness of it were

poisoning her gracious dream life.  She could see now (on Sundays)

that her husband was becoming a bloated and repulsive Thing.

She could not close her eyes to this, and in these days she

no longer looked at him, Sundays, when she could help it.



But she--was she herself without blemish?  Alas, she knew she was not.

She was keeping a secret from him, she was acting dishonorably

toward him, and many a pang it was costing her.  SHE WAS BREAKING

THE COMPACT, AND CONCEALING IT FROM HIM.  Under strong temptation

she had gone into business again; she had risked their whole

fortune in a purchase of all the railway systems and coal and steel

companies in the country on a margin, and she was now trembling,

every Sabbath hour, lest through some chance word of hers he find

it out.  In her misery and remorse for this treachery she could

not keep her heart from going out to him in pity; she was filled

with compunctions to see him lying there, drunk and contented,

and ever suspecting.  Never suspecting--trusting her with a perfect

and pathetic trust, and she holding over him by a thread a possible

calamity of so devastating a--



"SAY--Aleck?"



The interrupting words brought her suddenly to herself.  She was

grateful to have that persecuting subject from her thoughts,

and she answered, with much of the old-time tenderness in her tone:



"Yes, dear."



"Do you know, Aleck, I think we are making a mistake--that is,

you are.  I mean about the marriage business."  He sat up, fat and

froggy and benevolent, like a bronze Buddha, and grew earnest.

"Consider--it's more than five years.  You've continued the same

policy from the start:  with every rise, always holding on for five

points higher.  Always when I think we are going to have some weddings,

you see a bigger thing ahead, and I undergo another disappointment.

_I_ think you are too hard to please.  Some day we'll get left.

First, we turned down the dentist and the lawyer.  That was all right--

it was sound.  Next, we turned down the banker's son and the

pork-butcher's heir--right again, and sound.  Next, we turned

down the Congressman's son and the Governor's--right as a trivet,

I confess it.  Next the Senator's son and the son of the Vice-President

of the United States--perfectly right, there's no permanency about

those little distinctions.  Then you went for the aristocracy;

and I thought we had struck oil at last--yes.  We would make

a plunge at the Four Hundred, and pull in some ancient lineage,

venerable, holy, ineffable, mellow with the antiquity of a hundred

and fifty years, disinfected of the ancestral odors of salt-cod

and pelts all of a century ago, and unsmirched by a day's work since,

and then! why, then the marriages, of course.  But no, along comes

a pair a real aristocrats from Europe, and straightway you throw over

the half-breeds. It was awfully discouraging, Aleck!  Since then,

what a procession!  You turned down the baronets for a pair

of barons; you turned down the barons for a pair of viscounts;

the viscounts for a pair of earls; the earls for a pair of marquises;

the marquises for a brace of dukes.  NOW, Aleck, cash in!--

you've played the limit.  You've got a job lot of four dukes

under the hammer; of four nationalities; all sound in the wind

and limb and pedigree, all bankrupt and in debt up to the ears.

They come high, but we can afford it.  Come, Aleck, don't delay

any longer, don't keep up the suspense:  take the whole lay-out,

and leave the girls to choose!"



Aleck had been smiling blandly and contentedly all through this

arraignment of her marriage policy, a pleasant light, as of triumph

with perhaps a nice surprise peeping out through it, rose in her eyes,

and she said, as calmly as she could:



"Sally, what would you say to--ROYALTY?"



Prodigious!  Poor man, it knocked him silly, and he fell over the

garboard-strake and barked his shin on the cat-heads. He was dizzy

for a moment, then he gathered himself up and limped over and sat

down by his wife and beamed his old-time admiration and affection

upon her in floods, out of his bleary eyes.



"By George!" he said, fervently, "Aleck, you ARE great--the greatest

woman in the whole earth!  I can't ever learn the whole size of you.

I can't ever learn the immeasurable deeps of you.  Here I've been

considering myself qualified to criticize your game.  _I!_ Why,

if I had stopped to think, I'd have known you had a lone hand up

your sleeve.  Now, dear heart, I'm all red-hot impatience--tell me

about it!"



The flattered and happy woman put her lips to his ear and whispered

a princely name.  It made him catch his breath, it lit his face

with exultation.



"Land!" he said, "it's a stunning catch!  He's got a gambling-hall,

and a graveyard, and a bishop, and a cathedral--all his very own.

And all gilt-edged five-hundred-per-cent. stock, every detail of it;

the tidiest little property in Europe.  and that graveyard--

it's the selectest in the world:  none but suicides admitted;

YES, sir, and the free-list suspended, too, ALL the time.

There isn't much land in the principality, but there's enough:

eight hundred acres in the graveyard and forty-two outside.

It's a SOVEREIGNTY--that's the main thing; LAND'S nothing.

There's plenty land, Sahara's drugged with it."



Aleck glowed; she was profoundly happy.  She said:



"Think of it, Sally--it is a family that has never married outside

the Royal and Imperial Houses of Europe:  our grandchildren will

sit upon thrones!"



"True as you live, Aleck--and bear scepters, too; and handle

them as naturally and nonchantly as I handle a yardstick.

it's a grand catch, Aleck.  He's corralled, is he?  Can't get away?

You didn't take him on a margin?"



"No. Trust me for that.  He's not a liability, he's an asset.

So is the other one."



"Who is it, Aleck?"



"His Royal Highness

Sigismund-Siegfriend-Lauenfeld-Dinkelspiel-Schwartzenberg

Blutwurst, Hereditary Grant Duke of Katzenyammer."



"No!  You can't mean it!"



"It's as true as I'm sitting here, I give you my word," she answered.



His cup was full, and he hugged her to his heart with rapture, saying:



"How wonderful it all seems, and how beautiful!  It's one of the

oldest and noblest of the three hundred and sixty-four ancient

German principalities, and one of the few that was allowed to

retain its royal estate when Bismarck got done trimming them.

I know that farm, I've been there.  It's got a rope-walk and a

candle-factory and an army.  Standing army.  Infantry and cavalry.

Three soldier and a horse.  Aleck, it's been a long wait, and full

of heartbreak and hope deferred, but God knows I am happy now.

Happy, and grateful to you, my own, who have done it all.

When is it to be?"



"Next Sunday."



"Good.  And we'll want to do these weddings up in the very regalest

style that's going.  It's properly due to the royal quality of the

parties of the first part.  Now as I understand it, there is only one

kind of marriage that is sacred to royalty, exclusive to royalty:

it's the morganatic."



"What do they call it that for, Sally?"



"I don't know; but anyway it's royal, and royal only."



"Then we will insist upon it.  More--I will compel it.

It is morganatic marriage or none."



"That settles it!" said Sally, rubbing his hands with delight.

"And it will be the very first in America.  Aleck, it will make

Newport sick."



Then they fell silent, and drifted away upon their dream wings

to the far regions of the earth to invite all the crowned heads

and their families and provide gratis transportation to them.







CHAPTER VIII





During three days the couple walked upon air, with their heads in

the clouds.  They were but vaguely conscious of their surroundings;

they saw all things dimly, as through a veil; they were steeped

in dreams, often they did not hear when they were spoken to;

they often did not understand when they heard; they answered confusedly

or at random; Sally sold molasses by weight, sugar by the yard,

and furnished soap when asked for candles, and Aleck put the cat

in the wash and fed milk to the soiled linen.  Everybody was stunned

and amazed, and went about muttering, "What CAN be the matter

with the Fosters?"



Three days.  Then came events!  Things had taken a happy turn,

and for forty-eight hours Aleck's imaginary corner had been booming.

Up--up--still up!  Cost point was passed.  Still up--and up--

and up!  Cost point was passed.  STill up--and up--and up!

Five points above cost--then ten--fifteen--twenty!  Twenty points

cold profit on the vast venture, now, and Aleck's imaginary brokers

were shouting frantically by imaginary long-distance, "Sell! sell!

for Heaven's sake SELL!"



She broke the splendid news to Sally, and he, too, said,

"Sell! sell--oh, don't make a blunder, now, you own the earth!--

sell, sell!"  But she set her iron will and lashed it amidships,

and said she would hold on for five points more if she died for it.



It was a fatal resolve.  The very next day came the historic crash,

the record crash, the devastating crash, when the bottom fell out

of Wall Street, and the whole body of gilt-edged stocks dropped

ninety-five points in five hours, and the multimillionaire was seen

begging his bread in the Bowery.  Aleck sternly held her grip

and "put up" ass long as she could, but at last there came a call

which she was powerless to meet, and her imaginary brokers sold

her out.  Then, and not till then, the man in her was vanished,

and the woman in her resumed sway.  She put her arms about her

husband's neck and wept, saying:



"I am to blame, do not forgive me, I cannot bear it.  We are paupers!

Paupers, and I am so miserable.  The weddings will never come off;

all that is past; we could not even buy the dentist, now."



A bitter reproach was on Sally's tongue:  "I BEGGED you to sell,

but you--" He did not say it; he had not the heart to add a hurt

to that broken and repentant spirit.  A nobler thought came to him

and he said:



"Bear up, my Aleck, all is not lost!  You really never invested

a penny of my uncle's bequest, but only its unmaterialized future;

what we have lost was only the incremented harvest from that future

by your incomparable financial judgment and sagacity.  Cheer up,

banish these griefs; we still have the thirty thousand untouched;

and with the experience which you have acquired, think what you will

be able to do with it in a couple years!  The marriages are not off,

they are only postponed."



These are blessed words.  Aleck saw how true they were, and their

influence was electric; her tears ceased to flow, and her great spirit

rose to its full stature again.  With flashing eye and grateful heart,

and with hand uplifted in pledge and prophecy, she said:



"Now and here I proclaim--"



But she was interrupted by a visitor.  It was the editor and proprietor

of the SAGAMORE.  He had happened into Lakeside to pay a duty-call upon

an obscure grandmother of his who was nearing the end of her pilgrimage,

and with the idea of combining business with grief he had looked up

the Fosters, who had been so absorbed in other things for the past

four years that they neglected to pay up their subscription.

Six dollars due.  No visitor could have been more welcome.  He would

know all about Uncle Tilbury and what his chances might be getting

to be, cemeterywards.  They could, of course, ask no questions,

for that would squelch the bequest, but they could nibble around on

the edge of the subject and hope for results.  The scheme did not work.

The obtuse editor did not know he was being nibbled at; but at last,

chance accomplished what art had failed in.  In illustration of something

under discussion which required the help of metaphor, the editor said:



"Land, it's a tough as Tilbury Foster!--as WE say."



It was sudden, and it made the Fosters jump.  The editor noticed,

and said, apologetically:



"No harm intended, I assure you.  It's just a saying; just a joke,

you know--nothing of it.  Relation of yours?"



Sally crowded his burning eagerness down, and answered with all

the indifference he could assume:



"I--well, not that I know of, but we've heard of him."  The editor

was thankful, and resumed his composure.  Sally added:  "Is he--

is he--well?"



"Is he WELL?  Why, bless you he's in Sheol these five years!"



The Fosters were trembling with grief, though it felt like joy.

Sally said, non-committally--and tentatively:



"Ah, well, such is life, and none can escape--not even the rich

are spared."



The editor laughed.



"If you are including Tilbury," said he, "it don't apply.

HE hadn't a cent; the town had to bury him."



The Fosters sat petrified for two minutes; petrified and cold.

Then, white-faced and weak-voiced, Sally asked:



"Is it true?  Do you KNOW it to be true?"



"Well, I should say!  I was one of the executors.  He hadn't

anything to leave but a wheelbarrow, and he left that to me.

It hadn't any wheel, and wasn't any good.  Still, it was something,

and so, to square up, I scribbled off a sort of a little obituarial

send-off for him, but it got crowded out."



The Fosters were not listening--their cup was full, it could

contain no more.  They sat with bowed heads, dead to all things

but the ache at their hearts.



An hour later.  Still they sat there, bowed, motionless, silent,

the visitor long ago gone, they unaware.



Then they stirred, and lifted their heads wearily, and gazed at each

other wistfully, dreamily, dazed; then presently began to twaddle

to each other in a wandering and childish way.  At intervals they

lapsed into silences, leaving a sentence unfinished, seemingly either

unaware of it or losing their way.  Sometimes, when they woke

out of these silences they had a dim and transient consciousness

that something had happened to their minds; then with a dumb

and yearning solicitude they would softly caress each other's

hands in mutual compassion and support, as if they would say:

"I am near you, I will not forsake you, we will bear it together;

somewhere there is release and forgetfulness, somewhere there

is a grave and peace; be patient, it will not be long."



They lived yet two years, in mental night, always brooding,

steeped in vague regrets and melancholy dreams, never speaking;

then release came to both on the same day.



Toward the end the darkness lifted from Sally's ruined mind

for a moment, and he said:



"Vast wealth, acquired by sudden and unwholesome means, is a snare.

It did us no good, transient were its feverish pleasures;

yet for its sake we threw away our sweet and simple and happy life--

let others take warning by us."



He lay silent awhile, with closed eyes; then as the chill of death

crept upward toward his heart, and consciousness was fading from

his brain, he muttered:



"Money had brought him misery, and he took his revenge upon us,

who had done him no harm.  He had his desire:  with base and cunning

calculation he left us but thirty thousand, knowing we would try

to increase it, and ruin our life and break our hearts.  Without added

expense he could have left us far above desire of increase, far above

the temptation to speculate, and a kinder soul would have done it;

but in him was no generous spirit, no pity, no--"



***







A DOG'S TALE







CHAPTER I





My father was a St. Bernard, my mother was a collie, but I am

a Presbyterian.  This is what my mother told me, I do not know

these nice distinctions myself.  To me they are only fine large

words meaning nothing.  My mother had a fondness for such;

she liked to say them, and see other dogs look surprised and envious,

as wondering how she got so much education.  But, indeed, it was not

real education; it was only show:  she got the words by listening

in the dining-room and drawing-room when there was company,

and by going with the children to Sunday-school and listening there;

and whenever she heard a large word she said it over to herself

many times, and so was able to keep it until there was a dogmatic

gathering in the neighborhood, then she would get it off,

and surprise and distress them all, from pocket-pup to mastiff,

which rewarded her for all her trouble.  If there was a stranger

he was nearly sure to be suspicious, and when he got his breath

again he would ask her what it meant.  And she always told him.

He was never expecting this but thought he would catch her;

so when she told him, he was the one that looked ashamed,

whereas he had thought it was going to be she.  The others were

always waiting for this, and glad of it and proud of her, for they

knew what was going to happen, because they had had experience.

When she told the meaning of a big word they were all so taken up

with admiration that it never occurred to any dog to doubt if it

was the right one; and that was natural, because, for one thing,

she answered up so promptly that it seemed like a dictionary speaking,

and for another thing, where could they find out whether it was right

or not? for she was the only cultivated dog there was.  By and by,

when I was older, she brought home the word Unintellectual, one time,

and worked it pretty hard all the week at different gatherings,

making much unhappiness and despondency; and it was at this time

that I noticed that during that week she was asked for the meaning

at eight different assemblages, and flashed out a fresh definition

every time, which showed me that she had more presence of mind

than culture, though I said nothing, of course.  She had one word

which she always kept on hand, and ready, like a life-preserver,

a kind of emergency word to strap on when she was likely to get

washed overboard in a sudden way--that was the word Synonymous.

When she happened to fetch out a long word which had had its day

weeks before and its prepared meanings gone to her dump-pile,

if there was a stranger there of course it knocked him groggy for

a couple of minutes, then he would come to, and by that time she

would be away down wind on another tack, and not expecting anything;

so when he'd hail and ask her to cash in, I (the only dog on

the inside of her game) could see her canvas flicker a moment--

but only just a moment--then it would belly out taut and full,

and she would say, as calm as a summer's day, "It's synonymous

with supererogation," or some godless long reptile of a word

like that, and go placidly about and skim away on the next tack,

perfectly comfortable, you know, and leave that stranger looking

profane and embarrassed, and the initiated slatting the floor

with their tails in unison and their faces transfigured with a

holy joy.



And it was the same with phrases.  She would drag home a whole phrase,

if it had a grand sound, and play it six nights and two matinees,

and explain it a new way every time--which she had to, for all she

cared for was the phrase; she wasn't interested in what it meant,

and knew those dogs hadn't wit enough to catch her, anyway.

Yes, she was a daisy!  She got so she wasn't afraid of anything,

she had such confidence in the ignorance of those creatures.

She even brought anecdotes that she had heard the family and the

dinner-guests laugh and shout over; and as a rule she got the nub

of one chestnut hitched onto another chestnut, where, of course,

it didn't fit and hadn't any point; and when she delivered the nub

she fell over and rolled on the floor and laughed and barked

in the most insane way, while I could see that she was wondering

to herself why it didn't seem as funny as it did when she first

heard it.  But no harm was done; the others rolled and barked too,

privately ashamed of themselves for not seeing the point, and never

suspecting that the fault was not with them and there wasn't any

to see.



You can see by these things that she was of a rather vain and

frivolous character; still, she had virtues, and enough to make up,

I think.  She had a kind heart and gentle ways, and never harbored

resentments for injuries done her, but put them easily out of her

mind and forgot them; and she taught her children her kindly way,

and from her we learned also to be brave and prompt in time of danger,

and not to run away, but face the peril that threatened friend

or stranger, and help him the best we could without stopping to think

what the cost might be to us.  And she taught us not by words only,

but by example, and that is the best way and the surest and the

most lasting.  Why, the brave things she did, the splendid things! she

was just a soldier; and so modest about it--well, you couldn't help

admiring her, and you couldn't help imitating her; not even a King

Charles spaniel could remain entirely despicable in her society.

So, as you see, there was more to her than her education.







CHAPTER II





When I was well grown, at last, I was sold and taken away,

and I never saw her again.  She was broken-hearted, and so was I,

and we cried; but she comforted me as well as she could, and said

we were sent into this world for a wise and good purpose, and must

do our duties without repining, take our life as we might find it,

live it for the best good of others, and never mind about the results;

they were not our affair.  She said men who did like this would have

a noble and beautiful reward by and by in another world, and although

we animals would not go there, to do well and right without reward

would give to our brief lives a worthiness and dignity which in

itself would be a reward.  She had gathered these things from time

to time when she had gone to the Sunday-school with the children,

and had laid them up in her memory more carefully than she had done

with those other words and phrases; and she had studied them deeply,

for her good and ours.  One may see by this that she had a wise

and thoughtful head, for all there was so much lightness and vanity

in it.



So we said our farewells, and looked our last upon each other through

our tears; and the last thing she said--keeping it for the last

to make me remember it the better, I think--was, "In memory of me,

when there is a time of danger to another do not think of yourself,

think of your mother, and do as she would do."



Do you think I could forget that?  No.







CHAPTER III





It was such a charming home!--my new one; a fine great house,

with pictures, and delicate decorations, and rich furniture,

and no gloom anywhere, but all the wilderness of dainty colors lit up

with flooding sunshine; and the spacious grounds around it, and the

great garden--oh, greensward, and noble trees, and flowers, no end!

And I was the same as a member of the family; and they loved me,

and petted me, and did not give me a new name, but called me by my

old one that was dear to me because my mother had given it me--

Aileen Mavoureen.  She got it out of a song; and the Grays knew

that song, and said it was a beautiful name.



Mrs. Gray was thirty, and so sweet and so lovely, you cannot

imagine it; and Sadie was ten, and just like her mother, just a

darling slender little copy of her, with auburn tails down her back,

and short frocks; and the baby was a year old, and plump and dimpled,

and fond of me, and never could get enough of hauling on my tail,

and hugging me, and laughing out its innocent happiness; and Mr. Gray

was thirty-eight, and tall and slender and handsome, a little bald

in front, alert, quick in his movements, business-like, prompt,

decided, unsentimental, and with that kind of trim-chiseled face

that just seems to glint and sparkle with frosty intellectuality!

He was a renowned scientist.  I do not know what the word means,

but my mother would know how to use it and get effects.  She would

know how to depress a rat-terrier with it and make a lap-dog

look sorry he came.  But that is not the best one; the best one

was Laboratory.  My mother could organize a Trust on that one that

would skin the tax-collars off the whole herd.  The laboratory

was not a book, or a picture, or a place to wash your hands in,

as the college president's dog said--no, that is the lavatory;

the laboratory is quite different, and is filled with jars,

and bottles, and electrics, and wires, and strange machines;

and every week other scientists came there and sat in the place,

and used the machines, and discussed, and made what they called

experiments and discoveries; and often I came, too, and stood

around and listened, and tried to learn, for the sake of my mother,

and in loving memory of her, although it was a pain to me, as realizing

what she was losing out of her life and I gaining nothing at all;

for try as I might, I was never able to make anything out of it

at all.



Other times I lay on the floor in the mistress's work-room and slept,

she gently using me for a foot-stool, knowing it pleased me,

for it was a caress; other times I spent an hour in the nursery,

and got well tousled and made happy; other times I watched by the

crib there, when the baby was asleep and the nurse out for a few

minutes on the baby's affairs; other times I romped and raced

through the grounds and the garden with Sadie till we were tired out,

then slumbered on the grass in the shade of a tree while she read

her book; other times I went visiting among the neighbor dogs--

for there were some most pleasant ones not far away, and one very

handsome and courteous and graceful one, a curly-haired Irish

setter by the name of Robin Adair, who was a Presbyterian like me,

and belonged to the Scotch minister.



The servants in our house were all kind to me and were fond of me,

and so, as you see, mine was a pleasant life.  There could not be

a happier dog that I was, nor a gratefuler one.  I will say this

for myself, for it is only the truth:  I tried in all ways to do

well and right, and honor my mother's memory and her teachings,

and earn the happiness that had come to me, as best I could.



By and by came my little puppy, and then my cup was full, my happiness

was perfect.  It was the dearest little waddling thing, and so smooth

and soft and velvety, and had such cunning little awkward paws,

and such affectionate eyes, and such a sweet and innocent face;

and it made me so proud to see how the children and their mother

adored it, and fondled it, and exclaimed over every little wonderful

thing it did.  It did seem to me that life was just too lovely to--



Then came the winter.  One day I was standing a watch in the nursery.

That is to say, I was asleep on the bed.  The baby was asleep in

the crib, which was alongside the bed, on the side next the fireplace.

It was the kind of crib that has a lofty tent over it made of gauzy

stuff that you can see through.  The nurse was out, and we two

sleepers were alone.  A spark from the wood-fire was shot out, and it

lit on the slope of the tent.  I suppose a quiet interval followed,

then a scream from the baby awoke me, and there was that tent

flaming up toward the ceiling!  Before I could think, I sprang

to the floor in my fright, and in a second was half-way to the door;

but in the next half-second my mother's farewell was sounding

in my ears, and I was back on the bed again., I reached my head

through the flames and dragged the baby out by the waist-band,

and tugged it along, and we fell to the floor together in a cloud

of smoke; I snatched a new hold, and dragged the screaming little

creature along and out at the door and around the bend of the hall,

and was still tugging away, all excited and happy and proud,

when the master's voice shouted:



"Begone you cursed beast!" and I jumped to save myself; but he

was furiously quick, and chased me up, striking furiously at me

with his cane, I dodging this way and that, in terror, and at last a

strong blow fell upon my left foreleg, which made me shriek and fall,

for the moment, helpless; the came went up for another blow,

but never descended, for the nurse's voice rang wildly out,

"The nursery's on fire!" and the master rushed away in that direction,

and my other bones were saved.



The pain was cruel, but, no matter, I must not lose any time;

he might come back at any moment; so I limped on three legs to the

other end of the hall, where there was a dark little stairway leading

up into a garret where old boxes and such things were kept, as I had

heard say, and where people seldom went.  I managed to climb up there,

then I searched my way through the dark among the piles of things,

and hid in the secretest place I could find.  It was foolish to be

afraid there, yet still I was; so afraid that I held in and hardly

even whimpered, though it would have been such a comfort to whimper,

because that eases the pain, you know.  But I could lick my leg,

and that did some good.



For half an hour there was a commotion downstairs, and shoutings,

and rushing footsteps, and then there was quiet again.  Quiet for

some minutes, and that was grateful to my spirit, for then my fears

began to go down; and fears are worse than pains--oh, much worse.

Then came a sound that froze me.  They were calling me--calling me

by name--hunting for me!



It was muffled by distance, but that could not take the terror out of it,

and it was the most dreadful sound to me that I had ever heard.

It went all about, everywhere, down there:  along the halls, through all

the rooms, in both stories, and in the basement and the cellar;

then outside, and farther and farther away--then back, and all

about the house again, and I thought it would never, never stop.

But at last it did, hours and hours after the vague twilight of

the garret had long ago been blotted out by black darkness.



Then in that blessed stillness my terrors fell little by little away,

and I was at peace and slept.  It was a good rest I had, but I woke

before the twilight had come again.  I was feeling fairly comfortable,

and I could think out a plan now.  I made a very good one;

which was, to creep down, all the way down the back stairs,

and hide behind the cellar door, and slip out and escape when the

iceman came at dawn, while he was inside filling the refrigerator;

then I would hide all day, and start on my journey when night came;

my journey to--well, anywhere where they would not know me and betray

me to the master.  I was feeling almost cheerful now; then suddenly

I thought:  Why, what would life be without my puppy!



That was despair.  There was no plan for me; I saw that;

I must say where I was; stay, and wait, and take what might come--

it was not my affair; that was what life is--my mother had said it.

Then--well, then the calling began again!  All my sorrows came back.

I said to myself, the master will never forgive.  I did not know

what I had done to make him so bitter and so unforgiving, yet I

judged it was something a dog could not understand, but which was

clear to a man and dreadful.



They called and called--days and nights, it seemed to me.

So long that the hunger and thirst near drove me mad, and I

recognized that I was getting very weak.  When you are this way you

sleep a great deal, and I did.  Once I woke in an awful fright--

it seemed to me that the calling was right there in the garret!

And so it was:  it was Sadie's voice, and she was crying; my name

was falling from her lips all broken, poor thing, and I could not

believe my ears for the joy of it when I heard her say:



"Come back to us--oh, come back to us, and forgive--it is all so sad

without our--"



I broke in with SUCH a grateful little yelp, and the next moment

Sadie was plunging and stumbling through the darkness and the lumber

and shouting for the family to hear, "She's found, she's found!"





The days that followed--well, they were wonderful.  The mother

and Sadie and the servants--why, they just seemed to worship me.

They couldn't seem to make me a bed that was fine enough;

and as for food, they couldn't be satisfied with anything but game

and delicacies that were out of season; and every day the friends

and neighbors flocked in to hear about my heroism--that was the

name they called it by, and it means agriculture.  I remember my

mother pulling it on a kennel once, and explaining it in that way,

but didn't say what agriculture was, except that it was synonymous

with intramural incandescence; and a dozen times a day Mrs. Gray

and Sadie would tell the tale to new-comers, and say I risked my life

to say the baby's, and both of us had burns to prove it, and then

the company would pass me around and pet me and exclaim about me,

and you could see the pride in the eyes of Sadie and her mother;

and when the people wanted to know what made me limp, they looked

ashamed and changed the subject, and sometimes when people hunted

them this way and that way with questions about it, it looked to me

as if they were going to cry.



And this was not all the glory; no, the master's friends came,

a whole twenty of the most distinguished people, and had me in

the laboratory, and discussed me as if I was a kind of discovery;

and some of them said it was wonderful in a dumb beast, the finest

exhibition of instinct they could call to mind; but the master said,

with vehemence, "It's far above instinct; it's REASON, and many a man,

privileged to be saved and go with you and me to a better world

by right of its possession, has less of it that this poor silly

quadruped that's foreordained to perish"; and then he laughed,

and said:  "Why, look at me--I'm a sarcasm! bless you, with all

my grand intelligence, the only think I inferred was that the dog

had gone mad and was destroying the child, whereas but for the

beast's intelligence--it's REASON, I tell you!--the child would

have perished!"



They disputed and disputed, and _I_ was the very center of subject

of it all, and I wished my mother could know that this grand honor

had come to me; it would have made her proud.



Then they discussed optics, as they called it, and whether a certain

injury to the brain would produce blindness or not, but they could

not agree about it, and said they must test it by experiment by and by;

and next they discussed plants, and that interested me, because in

the summer Sadie and I had planted seeds--I helped her dig the holes,

you know--and after days and days a little shrub or a flower came

up there, and it was a wonder how that could happen; but it did,

and I wished I could talk--I would have told those people about it

and shown then how much I knew, and been all alive with the subject;

but I didn't care for the optics; it was dull, and when the came back

to it again it bored me, and I went to sleep.



Pretty soon it was spring, and sunny and pleasant and lovely,

and the sweet mother and the children patted me and the puppy

good-by, and went away on a journey and a visit to their kin,

and the master wasn't any company for us, but we played together

and had good times, and the servants were kind and friendly,

so we got along quite happily and counted the days and waited

for the family.



And one day those men came again, and said, now for the test,

and they took the puppy to the laboratory, and I limped

three-leggedly along, too, feeling proud, for any attention shown

to the puppy was a pleasure to me, of course.  They discussed

and experimented, and then suddenly the puppy shrieked,

and they set him on the floor, and he went staggering around,

with his head all bloody, and the master clapped his hands and shouted:



"There, I've won--confess it!  He's a blind as a bat!"



And they all said:



"It's so--you've proved your theory, and suffering humanity owes

you a great debt from henceforth," and they crowded around him,

and wrung his hand cordially and thankfully, and praised him.



But I hardly saw or heard these things, for I ran at once to my

little darling, and snuggled close to it where it lay, and licked

the blood, and it put its head against mine, whimpering softly,

and I knew in my heart it was a comfort to it in its pain and

trouble to feel its mother's touch, though it could not see me.

Then it dropped down, presently, and its little velvet nose rested

upon the floor, and it was still, and did not move any more.



Soon the master stopped discussing a moment, and rang in the footman,

and said, "Bury it in the far corner of the garden," and then went

on with the discussion, and I trotted after the footman, very happy

and grateful, for I knew the puppy was out of its pain now, because it

was asleep.  We went far down the garden to the farthest end,

where the children and the nurse and the puppy and I used to play

in the summer in the shade of a great elm, and there the footman dug

a hole, and I saw he was going to plant the puppy, and I was glad,

because it would grow and come up a fine handsome dog, like Robin Adair,

and be a beautiful surprise for the family when they came home;

so I tried to help him dig, but my lame leg was no good, being stiff,

you know, and you have to have two, or it is no use.  When the

footman had finished and covered little Robin up, he patted my head,

and there were tears in his eyes, and he said:  "Poor little doggie,

you saved HIS child!"



I have watched two whole weeks, and he doesn't come up!  This last week

a fright has been stealing upon me.  I think there is something terrible

about this.  I do not know what it is, but the fear makes me sick,

and I cannot eat, though the servants bring me the best of food;

and they pet me so, and even come in the night, and cry, and say,

"Poor doggie--do give it up and come home; DON't break our hearts!"

and all this terrifies me the more, and makes me sure something

has happened.  And I am so weak; since yesterday I cannot stand on my

feet anymore.  And within this hour the servants, looking toward the

sun where it was sinking out of sight and the night chill coming on,

said things I could not understand, but they carried something cold

to my heart.



"Those poor creatures!  They do not suspect.  They will come home

in the morning, and eagerly ask for the little doggie that did

the brave deed, and who of us will be strong enough to say the truth

to them:  'The humble little friend is gone where go the beasts

that perish.'"





***









WAS IT HEAVEN?  OR HELL?







CHAPTER I





"You told a LIE?"



"You confess it--you actually confess it--you told a lie!"







CHAPTER II





The family consisted of four persons:  Margaret Lester, widow,

aged thirty six; Helen Lester, her daughter, aged sixteen;

Mrs. Lester's maiden aunts, Hannah and Hester Gray, twins, aged

sixty-seven. Waking and sleeping, the three women spent their days

and night in adoring the young girl; in watching the movements

of her sweet spirit in the mirror of her face; in refreshing their

souls with the vision of her bloom and beauty; in listening to the

music of her voice; in gratefully recognizing how rich and fair

for them was the world with this presence in it; in shuddering

to think how desolate it would be with this light gone out of it.



By nature--and inside--the aged aunts were utterly dear and lovable

and good, but in the matter of morals and conduct their training

had been so uncompromisingly strict that it had made them

exteriorly austere, not to say stern.  Their influence was effective

in the house; so effective that the mother and the daughter

conformed to its moral and religious requirements cheerfully,

contentedly, happily, unquestionably.  To do this was become

second nature to them.  And so in this peaceful heaven there

were no clashings, no irritations, no fault-finding, no heart-burnings.



In it a lie had no place.  In it a lie was unthinkable.

In it speech was restricted to absolute truth, iron-bound truth,

implacable and uncompromising truth, let the resulting consequences

be what they might.  At last, one day, under stress of circumstances,

the darling of the house sullied her lips with a lie--and confessed it,

with tears and self-upbraidings. There are not any words that can paint

the consternation of the aunts.  It was as if the sky had crumpled

up and collapsed and the earth had tumbled to ruin with a crash.

They sat side by side, white and stern, gazing speechless upon

the culprit, who was on her knees before them with her face

buried first in one lap and then the other, moaning and sobbing,

and appealing for sympathy and forgiveness and getting no response,

humbly kissing the hand of the one, then of the other, only to see

it withdrawn as suffering defilement by those soiled lips.



Twice, at intervals, Aunt Hester said, in frozen amazement:



"You told a LIE?"



Twice, at intervals, Aunt Hannah followed with the muttered

and amazed ejaculation:



"You confess it--you actually confess it--you told a lie!"



It was all they could say.  The situation was new, unheard of,

incredible; they could not understand it, they did not know

how to take hold of it, it approximately paralyzed speech.



At length it was decided that the erring child must be taken to

her mother, who was ill, and who ought to know what had happened.

Helen begged, besought, implored that she might be spared this

further disgrace, and that her mother might be spared the grief

and pain of it; but this could not be:  duty required this sacrifice,

duty takes precedence of all things, nothing can absolve one from

a duty, with a duty no compromise is possible.



Helen still begged, and said the sin was her own, her mother had

had no hand in it--why must she be made to suffer for it?



But the aunts were obdurate in their righteousness, and said the

law that visited the sins of the parent upon the child was by all

right and reason reversible; and therefore it was but just that the

innocent mother of a sinning child should suffer her rightful share

of the grief and pain and shame which were the allotted wages of the sin.



The three moved toward the sick-room.





At this time the doctor was approaching the house.  He was still

a good distance away, however.  He was a good doctor and a good man,

and he had a good heart, but one had to know him a year to get

over hating him, two years to learn to endure him, three to learn

to like him, and four and five to learn to live him.  It was a slow

and trying education, but it paid.  He was of great stature; he had

a leonine head, a leonine face, a rough voice, and an eye which was

sometimes a pirate's and sometimes a woman's, according to the mood.

He knew nothing about etiquette, and cared nothing about it; in speech,

manner, carriage, and conduct he was the reverse of conventional.

He was frank, to the limit; he had opinions on all subjects; they were

always on tap and ready for delivery, and he cared not a farthing

whether his listener liked them or didn't. Whom he loved he loved,

and manifested it; whom he didn't live he hated, and published

it from the housetops.  In his young days he had been a sailor,

and the salt-airs of all the seas blew from him yet.  He was a sturdy

and loyal Christian, and believed he was the best one in the land,

and the only one whose Christianity was perfectly sound, healthy,

full-charged with common sense, and had no decayed places in it.

People who had an ax to grind, or people who for any reason wanted

wanted to get on the soft side of him, called him The Christian--

a phrase whose delicate flattery was music to his ears, and whose

capital T was such an enchanting and vivid object to him that he

could SEE it when it fell out of a person's mouth even in the dark.

Many who were fond of him stood on their consciences with both feet

and brazenly called him by that large title habitually, because it

was a pleasure to them to do anything that would please him;

and with eager and cordial malice his extensive and diligently

cultivated crop of enemies gilded it, beflowered it, expanded it

to "The ONLY Christian."  Of these two titles, the latter had

the wider currency; the enemy, being greatly in the majority,

attended to that.  Whatever the doctor believed, he believed with

all his heart, and would fight for it whenever he got the chance;

and if the intervals between chances grew to be irksomely wide,

he would invent ways of shortening them himself.  He was

severely conscientious, according to his rather independent lights,

and whatever he took to be a duty he performed, no matter whether

the judgment of the professional moralists agreed with his own

or not.  At sea, in his young days, he had used profanity freely,

but as soon as he was converted he made a rule, which he rigidly stuck

to ever afterward, never to use it except on the rarest occasions,

and then only when duty commanded.  He had been a hard drinker at sea,

but after his conversion he became a firm and outspoken teetotaler,

in order to be an example to the young, and from that time forth he

seldom drank; never, indeed, except when it seemed to him to be a duty--

a condition which sometimes occurred a couple of times a year, but never

as many as five times.



Necessarily, such a man is impressionable, impulsive, emotional.

This one was, and had no gift at hiding his feelings; or if he

had it he took no trouble to exercise it.  He carried his soul's

prevailing weather in his face, and when he entered a room

the parasols or the umbrellas went up--figuratively speaking--

according to the indications.  When the soft light was in his eye

it meant approval, and delivered a benediction; when he came with a

frown he lowered the temperature ten degrees.  He was a well-beloved

man in the house of his friends, but sometimes a dreaded one.



He had a deep affection for the Lester household and its several

members returned this feeling with interest.  They mourned over

his kind of Christianity, and he frankly scoffed at theirs;

but both parties went on loving each other just the same.



He was approaching the house--out of the distance; the aunts

and the culprit were moving toward the sick-chamber.







CHAPTER III





The three last named stood by the bed; the aunts austere,

the transgressor softly sobbing.  The mother turned her head

on the pillow; her tired eyes flamed up instantly with sympathy

and passionate mother-love when they fell upon her child,

and she opened the refuge and shelter of her arms.



"Wait!" said Aunt Hannah, and put out her hand and stayed the girl

from leaping into them.



"Helen," said the other aunt, impressively, "tell your mother all.

Purge your soul; leave nothing unconfessed."



Standing stricken and forlorn before her judges, the young girl

mourned her sorrowful tale through the end, then in a passion

of appeal cried out:



"Oh, mother, can't you forgive me? won't you forgive me?--I am

so desolate!"



"Forgive you, my darling?  Oh, come to my arms!--there, lay your head

upon my breast, and be at peace.  If you had told a thousand lies--"



There was a sound--a warning--the clearing of a throat.  The aunts

glanced up, and withered in their clothes--there stood the doctor,

his face a thunder-cloud. Mother and child knew nothing of

his presence; they lay locked together, heart to heart, steeped in

immeasurable content, dead to all things else.  The physician

stood many moments glaring and glooming upon the scene before him;

studying it, analyzing it, searching out its genesis; then he put

up his hand and beckoned to the aunts.  They came trembling to him,

and stood humbly before him and waited.  He bent down and whispered:



"Didn't I tell you this patient must be protected from all excitement?

What the hell have you been doing?  Clear out of the place?"



They obeyed.  Half an hour later he appeared in the parlor,

serene, cheery, clothed in sunshine, conducting Helen, with his

arm about her waist, petting her, and saying gentle and playful

things to her; and she also was her sunny and happy self again.



"Now, then;" he said, "good-by, dear.  Go to your room, and keep

away from your mother, and behave yourself.  But wait--put out

your tongue.  There, that will do--you're as sound as a nut!"

He patted her cheek and added, "Run along now; I want to talk

to these aunts."



She went from the presence.  His face clouded over again at once;

and as he sat down he said:



"You too have been doing a lot of damage--and maybe some good.

Some good, yes--such as it is.  That woman's disease is typhoid!

You've brought it to a show-up, I think, with your insanities,

and that's a service--such as it is.  I hadn't been able to determine

what it was before."



With one impulse the old ladies sprang to their feet, quaking with terror.



"Sit down!  What are you proposing to do?"



"Do?  We must fly to her.  We--"



"You'll do nothing of the kind; you've done enough harm for one day.

Do you want to squander all your capital of crimes and follies on a

single deal?  Sit down, I tell you.  I have arranged for her to sleep;

she needs it; if you disturb her without my orders, I'll brain you--

if you've got the materials for it.



They sat down, distressed and indignant, but obedient, under compulsion.

He proceeded:



"Now, then, I want this case explained.  THEY wanted to explain it

to me--as if there hadn't been emotion or excitement enough already.

You knew my orders; how did you dare to go in there and get up

that riot?"



Hester looked appealing at Hannah; Hannah returned a beseeching look

at Hester--neither wanted to dance to this unsympathetic orchestra.

The doctor came to their help.  He said:



"Begin, Hester."



Fingering at the fringes of her shawl, and with lowered eyes,

Hester said, timidly:



"We should not have disobeyed for any ordinary cause, but this

was vital.  This was a duty.  With a duty one has no choice;

one must put all lighter considerations aside and perform it.

We were obliged to arraign her before her mother.  She had told

a lie."



The doctor glowered upon the woman a moment, and seemed

to be trying to work up in his mind an understand of a wholly

incomprehensible proposition; then he stormed out:



"She told a lie!  DID she?  God bless my soul!  I tell a million a day!

And so does every doctor.  And so does everybody--including you--

for that matter.  And THAT was the important thing that authorized

you to venture to disobey my orders and imperil that woman's life!

Look here, Hester Gray, this is pure lunacy; that girl COULDN'T tell

a lie that was intended to injure a person.  The thing is impossible--

absolutely impossible.  You know it yourselves--both of you;

you know it perfectly well."



Hannah came to her sister's rescue:



"Hester didn't mean that it was that kind of a lie, and it wasn't.

But it was a lie."



"Well, upon my word, I never heard such nonsense!  Haven't you

got sense enough to discriminate between lies!  Don't you know

the difference between a lie that helps and a lie that hurts?"



"ALL lies are sinful," said Hannah, setting her lips together

like a vise; "all lies are forbidden."



The Only Christian fidgeted impatiently in his chair.  He went to attack

this proposition, but he did not quite know how or where to begin.

Finally he made a venture:



"Hester, wouldn't you tell a lie to shield a person from an undeserved

injury or shame?"



"No."



"Not even a friend?"



"No."



"Not even your dearest friend?"



"No. I would not."



The doctor struggled in silence awhile with this situation;

then he asked:



"Not even to save him from bitter pain and misery and grief?"



"No. Not even to save his life."



Another pause.  Then:



"Nor his soul?"



There was a hush--a silence which endured a measurable interval--

then Hester answered, in a low voice, but with decision:



"Nor his soul?"



No one spoke for a while; then the doctor said:



"Is it with you the same, Hannah?"



"Yes," she answered.



"I ask you both--why?"



"Because to tell such a lie, or any lie, is a sin, and could cost

us the loss of our own souls--WOULD, indeed, if we died without

time to repent."



"Strange . . . strange . . . it is past belief."  Then he

asked, roughly:  "Is such a soul as that WORTH saving?"

He rose up, mumbling and grumbling, and started for the door,

stumping vigorously along.  At the threshold he turned and rasped

out an admonition:  "Reform!  Drop this mean and sordid and selfish

devotion to the saving of your shabby little souls, and hunt up

something to do that's got some dignity to it!  RISK your souls! risk

them in good causes; then if you lose them, why should you care?  Reform!"



The good old gentlewomen sat paralyzed, pulverized, outraged, insulted,

and brooded in bitterness and indignation over these blasphemies.

They were hurt to the heart, poor old ladies, and said they could

never forgive these injuries.



"Reform!"



They kept repeating that word resentfully.  "Reform--and learn

to tell lies!"



Time slipped along, and in due course a change came over their spirits.

They had completed the human being's first duty--which is to think

about himself until he has exhausted the subject, then he is in a

condition to take up minor interests and think of other people.

This changes the complexion of his spirits--generally wholesomely.

The minds of the two old ladies reverted to their beloved niece

and the fearful disease which had smitten her; instantly they forgot

the hurts their self-love had received, and a passionate desire

rose in their hearts to go to the help of the sufferer and comfort

her with their love, and minister to her, and labor for her the best

they could with their weak hands, and joyfully and affectionately

wear out their poor old bodies in her dear service if only they might

have the privilege.



"And we shall have it!" said Hester, with the tears running

down her face.  "There are no nurses comparable to us, for there

are no others that will stand their watch by that bed till they

drop and die, and God knows we would do that."



"Amen," said Hannah, smiling approval and endorsement through the

mist of moisture that blurred her glasses.  "The doctor knows us,

and knows we will not disobey again; and he will call no others.

He will not dare!"



"Dare?" said Hester, with temper, and dashing the water from her eyes;

"he will dare anything--that Christian devil!  But it will do no

good for him to try it this time--but, laws!  Hannah! after all's

said and done, he is gifted and wise and good, and he would not

think of such a thing.  . . . It is surely time for one of us to go

to that room.  What is keeping him?  Why doesn't he come and say so?"



They caught the sound of his approaching step.  He entered, sat down,

and began to talk.



"Margaret is a sick woman," he said.  "She is still sleeping,

but she will wake presently; then one of you must go to her.

She will be worse before she is better.  Pretty soon a night-and-day

watch must be set.  How much of it can you two undertake?"



"All of it!" burst from both ladies at once.



The doctor's eyes flashed, and he said, with energy:



"You DO ring true, you brave old relics!  And you SHALL do all of

the nursing you can, for there's none to match you in that divine

office in this town; but you can't do all of it, and it would

be a crime to let you."  It was grand praise, golden praise,

coming from such a source, and it took nearly all the resentment

out of the aged twin's hearts.  "Your Tilly and my old Nancy shall

do the rest--good nurses both, white souls with black skins,

watchful, loving, tender--just perfect nurses!--and competent liars

from the cradle.  . . . Look you! keep a little watch on Helen;

she is sick, and is going to be sicker."



The ladies looked a little surprised, and not credulous; and Hester said:



"How is that?  It isn't an hour since you said she was as sound

as a nut."



The doctor answered, tranquilly:



"It was a lie."



The ladies turned upon him indignantly, and Hannah said:



"How can you make an odious confession like that, in so indifferent

a tone, when you know how we feel about all forms of--"



"Hush!  You are as ignorant as cats, both of you, and you don't know

what you are talking about.  You are like all the rest of the moral moles;

you lie from morning till night, but because you don't do it with

your mouths, but only with your lying eyes, your lying inflections,

your deceptively misplaced emphasis, and your misleading gestures,

you turn up your complacent noses and parade before God and

the world as saintly and unsmirched Truth-Speakers, in whose

cold-storage souls a lie would freeze to death if it got there!

Why will you humbug yourselves with that foolish notion that no

lie is a lie except a spoken one?  What is the difference between

lying with your eyes and lying with your mouth?  There is none;

and if you would reflect a moment you would see that it is so.

There isn't a human being that doesn't tell a gross of lies every day

of his life; and you--why, between you, you tell thirty thousand;

yet you flare up here in a lurid hypocritical horror because I

tell that child a benevolent and sinless lie to protect her from

her imagination, which would get to work and warm up her blood to a

fever in an hour, if I were disloyal enough to my duty to let it.

Which I should probably do if I were interested in saving my soul

by such disreputable means.



"Come, let us reason together.  Let us examine details.  When you

two were in the sick-room raising that riot, what would you have

done if you had known I was coming?"



"Well, what?"



"You would have slipped out and carried Helen with you--wouldn't you?"



The ladies were silent.



"What would be your object and intention?"



"Well, what?"



"To keep me from finding out your guilt; to beguile me to infer that

Margaret's excitement proceeded from some cause not known to you.

In a word, to tell me a lie--a silent lie.  Moreover, a possibly

harmful one."



The twins colored, but did not speak.



"You not only tell myriads of silent lies, but you tell lies

with your mouths--you two."



"THAT is not so!"



"It is so.  But only harmless ones.  You never dream of uttering

a harmful one.  Do you know that that is a concession--and a confession?"



"How do you mean?"



"It is an unconscious concession that harmless lies are not criminal;

it is a confession that you constantly MAKE that discrimination.

For instance, you declined old Mrs. Foster's invitation last week

to meet those odious Higbies at supper--in a polite note in which you

expressed regret and said you were very sorry you could not go.

It was a lie.  It was as unmitigated a lie as was ever uttered.

Deny it, Hester--with another lie."



Hester replied with a toss of her head.



"That will not do.  Answer.  Was it a lie, or wasn't it?"



The color stole into the cheeks of both women, and with a struggle

and an effort they got out their confession:



"It was a lie."



"Good--the reform is beginning; there is hope for you yet;

you will not tell a lie to save your dearest friend's soul, but you

will spew out one without a scruple to save yourself the discomfort

of telling an unpleasant truth."



He rose.  Hester, speaking for both, said; coldly:



"We have lied; we perceive it; it will occur no more.  To lie is

a sin.  We shall never tell another one of any kind whatsoever,

even lies of courtesy or benevolence, to save any one a pang

or a sorrow decreed for him by God."



"Ah, how soon you will fall!  In fact, you have fallen already;

for what you have just uttered is a lie.  Good-by. Reform!

One of you go to the sick-room now."







CHAPTER IV





Twelve days later.



Mother and child were lingering in the grip of the hideous disease.

Of hope for either there was little.  The aged sisters looked white

and worn, but they would not give up their posts.  Their hearts

were breaking, poor old things, but their grit was steadfast

and indestructible.  All the twelve days the mother had pined for

the child, and the child for the mother, but both knew that the prayer

of these longings could not be granted.  When the mother was told--

on the first day--that her disease was typhoid, she was frightened,

and asked if there was danger that Helen could have contracted it the

day before, when she was in the sick-chamber on that confession visit.

Hester told her the doctor had poo-pooed the idea.  It troubled

Hester to say it, although it was true, for she had not believed

the doctor; but when she saw the mother's joy in the news, the pain

in her conscience lost something of its force--a result which made

her ashamed of the constructive deception which she had practiced,

though not ashamed enough to make her distinctly and definitely

wish she had refrained from it.  From that moment the sick woman

understood that her daughter must remain away, and she said she would

reconcile herself to the separation the best she could, for she

would rather suffer death than have her child's health imperiled.

That afternoon Helen had to take to her bed, ill.  She grew worse

during the night.  In the morning her mother asked after her:



"Is she well?"



Hester turned cold; she opened her lips, but the words refused to come.

The mother lay languidly looking, musing, waiting; suddenly she

turned white and gasped out:



"Oh, my God! what is it? is she sick?"



Then the poor aunt's tortured heart rose in rebellion, and words came:



"No--be comforted; she is well."



The sick woman put all her happy heart in her gratitude:



"Thank God for those dear words!  Kiss me.  How I worship you

for saying them!"



Hester told this incident to Hannah, who received it with

a rebuking look, and said, coldly:



"Sister, it was a lie."



Hester's lips trembled piteously; she choked down a sob, and said:



"Oh, Hannah, it was a sin, but I could not help it.  I could not

endure the fright and the misery that were in her face."



"No matter.  It was a lie.  God will hold you to account for it."



"Oh, I know it, I know it," cried Hester, wringing her hands,

"but even if it were now, I could not help it.  I know I should do

it again."



"Then take my place with Helen in the morning.  I will make

the report myself."



Hester clung to her sister, begging and imploring.



"Don't, Hannah, oh, don't--you will kill her."



"I will at least speak the truth."



In the morning she had a cruel report to bear to the mother,

and she braced herself for the trial.  When she returned from

her mission, Hester was waiting, pale and trembling, in the hall.

She whispered:



"Oh, how did she take it--that poor, desolate mother?"



Hannah's eyes were swimming in tears.  She said:



"God forgive me, I told her the child was well!"



Hester gathered her to her heart, with a grateful "God bless you, Hannah!"

and poured out her thankfulness in an inundation of worshiping praises.



After that, the two knew the limit of their strength, and accepted

their fate.  They surrendered humbly, and abandoned themselves to the

hard requirements of the situation.  Daily they told the morning lie,

and confessed their sin in prayer; not asking forgiveness, as not

being worthy of it, but only wishing to make record that they

realized their wickedness and were not desiring to hide it or excuse it.



Daily, as the fair young idol of the house sank lower and lower,

the sorrowful old aunts painted her glowing bloom and her fresh young

beauty to the wan mother, and winced under the stabs her ecstasies

of joy and gratitude gave them.



In the first days, while the child had strength to hold a pencil,

she wrote fond little love-notes to her mother, in which she concealed

her illness; and these the mother read and reread through happy

eyes wet with thankful tears, and kissed them over and over again,

and treasured them as precious things under her pillow.



Then came a day when the strength was gone from the hand, and the

mind wandered, and the tongue babbled pathetic incoherences.

this was a sore dilemma for the poor aunts.  There were no love-notes

for the mother.  They did not know what to do.  Hester began a

carefully studied and plausible explanation, but lost the track of it

and grew confused; suspicion began to show in the mother's face,

then alarm.  Hester saw it, recognized the imminence of the danger,

and descended to the emergency, pulling herself resolutely together

and plucking victor from the open jaws of defeat.  In a placid

and convincing voice she said:



"I thought it might distress you to know it, but Helen spent the night

at the Sloanes'. There was a little party there, and, although she

did not want to go, and you so sick, we persuaded her, she being

young and needing the innocent pastimes of youth, and we believing

you would approve.  Be sure she will write the moment she comes."



"How good you are, and how dear and thoughtful for us both!

Approve?  Why, I thank you with all my heart.  My poor little exile!

Tell her I want her to have every pleasure she can--I would not rob

her of one.  Only let her keep her health, that is all I ask.

Don't let that suffer; I could not bear it.  How thankful I am that she

escaped this infection--and what a narrow risk she ran, Aunt Hester!

Think of that lovely face all dulled and burned with fever.

I can't bear the thought of it.  Keep her health.  Keep her bloom!

I can see her now, the dainty creature--with the big, blue, earnest eyes;

and sweet, oh, so sweet and gentle and winning!  Is she as beautiful

as ever, dear Aunt Hester?"



"Oh, more beautiful and bright and charming than ever she was before,

if such a thing can be"--and Hester turned away and fumbled with

the medicine-bottles, to hide her shame and grief.







CHAPTER V





After a little, both aunts were laboring upon a difficult and baffling

work in Helen's chamber.  Patiently and earnestly, with their stiff

old fingers, they were trying to forge the required note.  They made

failure after failure, but they improved little by little all the time.

The pity of it all, the pathetic humor of it, there was none to see;

they themselves were unconscious of it.  Often their tears fell

upon the notes and spoiled them; sometimes a single misformed word

made a note risky which could have been ventured but for that;

but at last Hannah produced one whose script was a good enough

imitation of Helen's to pass any but a suspicious eye, and bountifully

enriched it with the petting phrases and loving nicknames that

had been familiar on the child's lips from her nursery days.

She carried it to the mother, who took it with avidity, and kissed it,

and fondled it, reading its precious words over and over again,

and dwelling with deep contentment upon its closing paragraph:



"Mousie darling, if I could only see you, and kiss your eyes,

and feel your arms about me!  I am so glad my practicing does not

disturb you.  Get well soon.  Everybody is good to me, but I am

so lonesome without you, dear mamma."



"The poor child, I know just how she feels.  She cannot be quite

happy without me; and I--oh, I live in the light of her eyes!

Tell her she must practice all she pleases; and, Aunt Hannah--

tell her I can't hear the piano this far, nor hear dear voice

when she sings:  God knows I wish I could.  No one knows how sweet

that voice is to me; and to think--some day it will be silent!

What are you crying for?



"Only because--because--it was just a memory.  When I came away she

was singing, 'Loch Lomond.'  The pathos of it!  It always moves

me so when she sings that."



"And me, too.  How heartbreakingly beautiful it is when some youthful

sorrow is brooding in her breast and she sings it for the mystic

healing it brings.  . . . Aunt Hannah?"



"Dear Margaret?"



"I am very ill.  Sometimes it comes over me that I shall never hear

that dear voice again."



"Oh, don't--don't, Margaret!  I can't bear it!"



Margaret was moved and distressed, and said, gently:



"There--there--let me put my arms around you.

Don't cry.  There--put your cheek to mine.  Be comforted.

I wish to live.  I will live if I can.  Ah, what could she

do without me! . . . Does she often speak of me?--but I know she does."



"Oh, all the time--all the time!"



"My sweet child!  She wrote the note the moment she came home?"



"Yes--the first moment.  She would not wait to take off her things."



"I knew it.  It is her dear, impulsive, affectionate way.  I knew it

without asking, but I wanted to hear you say it.  The petted wife

knows she is loved, but she makes her husband tell her so every day,

just for the joy of hearing it.  . . . She used the pen this time.

That is better; the pencil-marks could rub out, and I should grieve

for that.  Did you suggest that she use the pen?"



"Y--no--she--it was her own idea.



The mother looked her pleasure, and said:



"I was hoping you would say that.  There was never such a dear

and thoughtful child! . . . Aunt Hannah?"



"Dear Margaret?"



"Go and tell her I think of her all the time, and worship her.

Why--you are crying again.  Don't be so worried about me, dear;

I think there is nothing to fear, yet."



The grieving messenger carried her message, and piously delivered

it to unheeding ears.  The girl babbled on unaware; looking up

at her with wondering and startled eyes flaming with fever,

eyes in which was no light of recognition:



"Are you--no, you are not my mother.  I want her--oh, I want her!

She was here a minute ago--I did not see her go.  Will she come? will

she come quickly? will she come now? . . . There are so many houses

. . . and they oppress me so . . . and everything whirls and turns

and whirls . . . oh, my head, my head!"--and so she wandered on

and on, in her pain, flitting from one torturing fancy to another,

and tossing her arms about in a weary and ceaseless persecution

of unrest.



Poor old Hannah wetted the parched lips and softly stroked the

hot brow, murmuring endearing and pitying words, and thanking

the Father of all that the mother was happy and did not know.







CHAPTER VI





Daily the child sank lower and steadily lower towards the grave,

and daily the sorrowing old watchers carried gilded tidings of her

radiant health and loveliness to the happy mother, whose pilgrimage

was also now nearing its end.  And daily they forged loving and cheery

notes in the child's hand, and stood by with remorseful consciences

and bleeding hearts, and wept to see the grateful mother devour

them and adore them and treasure them away as things beyond price,

because of their sweet source, and sacred because her child's hand

had touched them.



At last came that kindly friend who brings healing and peace to all.

The lights were burning low.  In the solemn hush which precedes the

dawn vague figures flitted soundless along the dim hall and gathered

silent and awed in Helen's chamber, and grouped themselves about

her bed, for a warning had gone forth, and they knew.  The dying

girl lay with closed lids, and unconscious, the drapery upon her

breast faintly rising and falling as her wasting life ebbed away.

At intervals a sigh or a muffled sob broke upon the stillness.

The same haunting thought was in all minds there:  the pity of

this death, the going out into the great darkness, and the mother

not here to help and hearten and bless.



Helen stirred; her hands began to grope wistfully about as if they

sought something--she had been blind some hours.  The end was come;

all knew it.  With a great sob Hester gathered her to her breast,

crying, "Oh, my child, my darling!"  A rapturous light broke in the

dying girl's face, for it was mercifully vouchsafed her to mistake

those sheltering arms for another's; and she went to her rest murmuring,

"Oh, mamma, I am so happy--I longed for you--now I can die."





Two hours later Hester made her report.  The mother asked:



"How is it with the child?"



"She is well."







CHAPTER VII





A sheaf of white crape and black was hung upon the door of the house,

and there it swayed and rustled in the wind and whispered its tidings.

At noon the preparation of the dead was finished, and in the

coffin lay the fair young form, beautiful, and in the sweet face

a great peace.  Two mourners sat by it, grieving and worshipping--

Hannah and the black woman Tilly.  Hester came, and she was trembling,

for a great trouble was upon her spirit.  She said:



"She asks for a note."



Hannah's face blanched.  She had not thought of this; it had seemed

that that pathetic service was ended.  But she realized now that

that could not be.  For a little while the two women stood looking

into each other's face, with vacant eyes; then Hannah said:



"There is no way out of it--she must have it; she will suspect, else."



"And she would find out."



"Yes.  It would break her heart."  She looked at the dead face,

and her eyes filled.  "I will write it," she said.



Hester carried it.  The closing line said:



"Darling Mousie, dear sweet mother, we shall soon be together again.

Is not that good news?  And it is true; they all say it is true."



The mother mourned, saying:



"Poor child, how will she bear it when she knows?  I shall never see

her again in life.  It is hard, so hard.  She does not suspect?

You guard her from that?"



"She thinks you will soon be well."



"How good you are, and careful, dear Aunt Hester!  None goes near

herr who could carry the infection?"



"It would be a crime."



"But you SEE her?"



"With a distance between--yes."



"That is so good.  Others one could not trust; but you two guardian

angels--steel is not so true as you.  Others would be unfaithful;

and many would deceive, and lie."



Hester's eyes fell, and her poor old lips trembled.



"Let me kiss you for her, Aunt Hester; and when I am gone,

and the danger is past, place the kiss upon her dear lips some day,

and say her mother sent it, and all her mother's broken heart is

in it."



Within the hour, Hester, raining tears upon the dead face,

performed her pathetic mission.







CHAPTER VIII





Another day dawned, and grew, and spread its sunshine in the earth.

Aunt Hannah brought comforting news to the failing mother, and a

happy note, which said again, "We have but a little time to wait,

darling mother, then se shall be together."



The deep note of a bell came moaning down the wind.



"Aunt Hannah, it is tolling.  Some poor soul is at rest.

As I shall be soon.  You will not let her forget me?"



"Oh, God knows she never will!"



"Do not you hear strange noises, Aunt Hannah?  It sounds like

the shuffling of many feet."



"We hoped you would not hear it, dear.  It is a little company

gathering, for--for Helen's sake, poor little prisoner.  There will

be music--and she loves it so.  We thought you would not mind."



"Mind?  Oh no, no--oh, give her everything her dear heart can desire.

How good you two are to her, and how good to me!  God bless you

both always!"



After a listening pause:



"How lovely!  It is her organ.  Is she playing it herself, do you think?"

Faint and rich and inspiring the chords floating to her ears on

the still air.  "Yes, it is her touch, dear heart, I recognize it.

They are singing.  Why--it is a hymn! and the sacredest of all,

the most touching, the most consoling.  . . . It seems to open

the gates of paradise to me.  . . . If I could die now.  . . ."



Faint and far the words rose out of the stillness:





Nearer, my God, to Thee,



Nearer to Thee,



E'en though it be a cross



That raiseth me.





With the closing of the hymn another soul passed to its rest,

and they that had been one in life were not sundered in death.

The sisters, mourning and rejoicing, said:



"How blessed it was that she never knew!"







CHAPTER IX





At midnight they sat together, grieving, and the angel of the Lord

appeared in the midst transfigured with a radiance not of earth;

and speaking, said:



"For liars a place is appointed.  There they burn in the fires

of hell from everlasting unto everlasting.  Repent!"



The bereaved fell upon their knees before him and clasped their

hands and bowed their gray heads, adoring.  But their tongues

clove to the roof of their mouths, and they were dumb.



"Speak! that I may bear the message to the chancery of heaven

and bring again the decree from which there is no appeal."



Then they bowed their heads yet lower, and one said:



"Our sin is great, and we suffer shame; but only perfect and final

repentance can make us whole; and we are poor creatures who have learned

our human weakness, and we know that if we were in those hard straits

again our hearts would fail again, and we should sin as before.

The strong could prevail, and so be saved, but we are lost."



They lifted their heads in supplication.  The angel was gone.

While they marveled and wept he came again; and bending low,

he whispered the decree.







CHAPTER X





Was it Heaven?  Or Hell?





***







A CURE FOR THE BLUES







By courtesy of Mr. Cable I came into possession of a singular book

eight or ten years ago.  It is likely that mine is now the only copy

in existence.  Its title-page, unabbreviated, reads as follows:



"The Enemy Conquered; or, Love Triumphant.  By G. Ragsdale McClintock,

[1] author of 'An Address,' etc., delivered at Sunflower Hill,

South Carolina, and member of the Yale Law School.  New Haven:

published by T. H. Pease, 83 Chapel Street, 1845."



No one can take up this book and lay it down again unread.

Whoever reads one line of it is caught, is chained; he has become

the contented slave of its fascinations; and he will read and read,

devour and devour, and will not let it go out of his hand till it

is finished to the last line, though the house be on fire over

his head.  And after a first reading he will not throw it aside,

but will keep it by him, with his Shakespeare and his Homer,

and will take it up many and many a time, when the world is dark

and his spirits are low, and be straightway cheered and refreshed.

Yet this work has been allowed to lie wholly neglected, unmentioned,

and apparently unregretted, for nearly half a century.



The reader must not imagine that he is to find in it wisdom,

brilliancy, fertility of invention, ingenuity of construction,

excellence of form, purity of style, perfection of imagery,

truth to nature, clearness of statement, humanly possible situations,

humanly possible people, fluent narrative, connected sequence of events--

or philosophy, or logic, or sense.  No; the rich, deep, beguiling charm

of the book lies in the total and miraculous ABSENCE from it of all

these qualities--a charm which is completed and perfected by the

evident fact that the author, whose naive innocence easily and surely

wins our regard, and almost our worship, does not know that they

are absent, does not even suspect that they are absent.  When read

by the light of these helps to an understanding of the situation,

the book is delicious--profoundly and satisfyingly delicious.



I call it a book because the author calls it a book, I call it a work

because he calls it a work; but, in truth, it is merely a duodecimo

pamphlet of thirty-one pages.  It was written for fame and money,

as the author very frankly--yes, and very hopefully, too, poor fellow--

says in his preface.  The money never came--no penny of it ever came;

and how long, how pathetically long, the fame has been deferred--

forty-seven years!  He was young then, it would have been so much to

him then; but will he care for it now?



As time is measured in America, McClintock's epoch is antiquity.

In his long-vanished day the Southern author had a passion for

"eloquence"; it was his pet, his darling.  He would be eloquent,

or perish.  And he recognized only one kind of eloquence--the lurid,

the tempestuous, the volcanic.  He liked words--big words,

fine words, grand words, rumbling, thundering, reverberating words;

with sense attaching if it could be got in without marring the sound,

but not otherwise.  He loved to stand up before a dazed world,

and pour forth flame and smoke and lava and pumice-stone into

the skies, and work his subterranean thunders, and shake himself

with earthquakes, and stench himself with sulphur fumes.  If he

consumed his own fields and vineyards, that was a pity, yes; but he

would have his eruption at any cost.  Mr. McClintock's eloquence--

and he is always eloquent, his crater is always spouting--is of the

pattern common to his day, but he departs from the custom of the time

in one respect:  his brethren allowed sense to intrude when it did

not mar the sound, but he does not allow it to intrude at all.

For example, consider this figure, which he used in the village

"Address" referred to with such candid complacency in the title-page

above quoted--"like the topmost topaz of an ancient tower."

Please read it again; contemplate it; measure it; walk around it;

climb up it; try to get at an approximate realization of the size of it.

Is the fellow to that to be found in literature, ancient or modern,

foreign or domestic, living or dead, drunk or sober?  One notices

how fine and grand it sounds.  We know that if it was loftily uttered,

it got a noble burst of applause from the villagers; yet there isn't

a ray of sense in it, or meaning to it.



McClintock finished his education at Yale in 1843, and came to

Hartford on a visit that same year.  I have talked with men who at

that time talked with him, and felt of him, and knew he was real.

One needs to remember that fact and to keep fast hold of it;

it is the only way to keep McClintock's book from undermining one's

faith in McClintock's actuality.



As to the book.  The first four pages are devoted to an inflamed eulogy

of Woman--simply woman in general, or perhaps as an institution--

wherein, among other compliments to her details, he pays a unique

one to her voice.  He says it "fills the breast with fond alarms,

echoed by every rill."  It sounds well enough, but it is not true.

After the eulogy he takes up his real work and the novel begins.

It begins in the woods, near the village of Sunflower Hill.





Brightening clouds seemed to rise from the mist of the fair Chattahoochee,

to spread their beauty over the thick forest, to guide the hero whose

bosom beats with aspirations to conquer the enemy that would tarnish

his name, and to win back the admiration of his long-tried friend.





It seems a general remark, but it is not general; the hero mentioned

is the to-be hero of the book; and in this abrupt fashion,

and without name or description, he is shoveled into the tale.

"With aspirations to conquer the enemy that would tarnish his name"

is merely a phrase flung in for the sake of the sound--let it

not mislead the reader.  No one is trying to tarnish this person;

no one has thought of it.  The rest of the sentence is also merely

a phrase; the man has no friend as yet, and of course has had no

chance to try him, or win back his admiration, or disturb him in any

other way.



The hero climbs up over "Sawney's Mountain," and down the other side,

making for an old Indian "castle"--which becomes "the red man's hut"

in the next sentence; and when he gets there at last, he "surveys

with wonder and astonishment" the invisible structure, "which time

has buried in the dust, and thought to himself his happiness was

not yet complete."  One doesn't know why it wasn't, nor how near it

came to being complete, nor what was still wanting to round it up

and make it so.  Maybe it was the Indian; but the book does not say.

At this point we have an episode:





Beside the shore of the brook sat a young man, about eighteen or twenty,

who seemed to be reading some favorite book, and who had a remarkably

noble countenance--eyes which betrayed more than a common mind.

This of course made the youth a welcome guest, and gained him

friends in whatever condition of his life he might be placed.

The traveler observed that he was a well-built figure which showed

strength and grace in every movement.  He accordingly addressed

him in quite a gentlemanly manner, and inquired of him the way

to the village.  After he had received the desired information,

and was about taking his leave, the youth said, "Are you not

Major Elfonzo, the great musician [2]--the champion of a noble cause--

the modern Achilles, who gained so many victories in the Florida War?"

"I bear that name," said the Major, "and those titles,

trusting at the same time that the ministers of grace will carry

me triumphantly through all my laudable undertakings, and if,"

continued the Major, "you, sir, are the patronizer of noble deeds,

I should like to make you my confidant and learn your address."

The youth looked somewhat amazed, bowed low, mused for a moment,

and began:  "My name is Roswell.  I have been recently admitted

to the bar, and can only give a faint outline of my future success

in that honorable profession; but I trust, sir, like the Eagle, I shall

look down from the lofty rocks upon the dwellings of man, and shall

ever be ready to give you any assistance in my official capacity,

and whatever this muscular arm of mine can do, whenever it shall be

called from its buried GREATNESS."  The Major grasped him by the hand,

and exclaimed:  "O! thou exalted spirit of inspiration--thou flame

of burning prosperity, may the Heaven-directed blaze be the glare

of thy soul, and battle down every rampart that seems to impede

your progress!"





There is a strange sort of originality about McClintock;

he imitates other people's styles, but nobody can imitate his,

not even an idiot.  Other people can be windy, but McClintock blows

a gale; other people can blubber sentiment, but McClintock spews it;

other people can mishandle metaphors, but only McClintock knows

how to make a business of it.  McClintock is always McClintock,

he is always consistent, his style is always his own style.  He does

not make the mistake of being relevant on one page and irrelevant

on another; he is irrelevant on all of them.  He does not make

the mistake of being lucid in one place and obscure in another;

he is obscure all the time.  He does not make the mistake of slipping

in a name here and there that is out of character with his work;

he always uses names that exactly and fantastically fit his lunatics.

In the matter of undeviating consistency he stands alone in authorship.

It is this that makes his style unique, and entitles it to a name

of its own--McClintockian.  It is this that protects it from being

mistaken for anybody else's. Uncredited quotations from other writers

often leave a reader in doubt as to their authorship, but McClintock

is safe from that accident; an uncredited quotation from him would

always be recognizable.  When a boy nineteen years old, who had

just been admitted to the bar, says, "I trust, sir, like the Eagle,

I shall look down from lofty rocks upon the dwellings of man,"

we know who is speaking through that boy; we should recognize

that note anywhere.  There be myriads of instruments in this

world's literary orchestra, and a multitudinous confusion of sounds

that they make, wherein fiddles are drowned, and guitars smothered,

and one sort of drum mistaken for another sort; but whensoever the

brazen note of the McClintockian trombone breaks through that fog

of music, that note is recognizable, and about it there can be no blur

of doubt.



The novel now arrives at the point where the Major goes home to see

his father.  When McClintock wrote this interview he probably

believed it was pathetic.





The road which led to the town presented many attractions Elfonzo

had bid farewell to the youth of deep feeling, and was now wending

his way to the dreaming spot of his fondness.  The south winds

whistled through the woods, as the waters dashed against the banks,

as rapid fire in the pent furnace roars.  This brought him to

remember while alone, that he quietly left behind the hospitality

of a father's house, and gladly entered the world, with higher hopes

than are often realized.  But as he journeyed onward, he was mindful

of the advice of his father, who had often looked sadly on the ground,

when tears of cruelly deceived hope moistened his eyes.  Elfonzo had

been somewhat a dutiful son; yet fond of the amusements of life--

had been in distant lands--had enjoyed the pleasure of the world,

and had frequently returned to the scenes of his boyhood,

almost destitute of many of the comforts of life.  In this condition,

he would frequently say to his father, "Have I offended you,

that you look upon me as a stranger, and frown upon me with

stinging looks?  Will you not favor me with the sound of your voice?

If I have trampled upon your veneration, or have spread a humid veil

of darkness around your expectations, send me back into the world,

where no heart beats for me--where the foot of man had never yet trod;

but give me at least one kind word--allow me to come into the presence

sometimes of thy winter-worn locks."  "Forbid it, Heaven, that I

should be angry with thee," answered the father, "my son, and yet

I send thee back to the children of the world--to the cold charity

of the combat, and to a land of victory.  I read another destiny

in thy countenance--I learn thy inclinations from the flame that has

already kindled in my soul a strange sensation.  It will seek thee,

my dear ELFONZO, it will find thee--thou canst not escape that

lighted torch, which shall blot out from the remembrance of men

a long train of prophecies which they have foretold against thee.

I once thought not so.  Once, I was blind; but now the path of life

is plain before me, and my sight is clear; yet, Elfonzo, return to thy

worldly occupation--take again in thy hand that chord of sweet sounds--

struggle with the civilized world and with your own heart;

fly swiftly to the enchanted ground--let the night-OWL send forth

its screams from the stubborn oak--let the sea sport upon the beach,

and the stars sing together; but learn of these, Elfonzo, thy doom,

and thy hiding-place. Our most innocent as well as our most lawful

DESIRES must often be denied us, that we may learn to sacrifice them

to a Higher will."



Remembering such admonitions with gratitude, Elfonzo was immediately

urged by the recollection of his father's family to keep moving.





McClintock has a fine gift in the matter of surprises; but as a

rule they are not pleasant ones, they jar upon the feelings.

His closing sentence in the last quotation is of that sort.

It brings one down out of the tinted clouds in too sudden and collapsed

a fashion.  It incenses one against the author for a moment.

It makes the reader want to take him by this winter-worn locks,

and trample on his veneration, and deliver him over to the cold

charity of combat, and blot him out with his own lighted torch.

But the feeling does not last.  The master takes again in his hand that

concord of sweet sounds of his, and one is reconciled, pacified.





His steps became quicker and quicker--he hastened through the PINY woods,

dark as the forest was, and with joy he very soon reached the little

village of repose, in whose bosom rested the boldest chivalry.

His close attention to every important object--his modest questions

about whatever was new to him--his reverence for wise old age,

and his ardent desire to learn many of the fine arts, soon brought

him into respectable notice.



One mild winter day, as he walked along the streets toward the Academy,

which stood upon a small eminence, surrounded by native growth--

some venerable in its appearance, others young and prosperous--

all seemed inviting, and seemed to be the very place for learning as

well as for genius to spend its research beneath its spreading shades.

He entered its classic walls in the usual mode of southern manners.





The artfulness of this man!  None knows so well as he how to pique

the curiosity of the reader--and how to disappoint it.  He raises

the hope, here, that he is going to tell all about how one enters

a classic wall in the usual mode of Southern manners; but does he?

No; he smiles in his sleeve, and turns aside to other matters.





The principal of the Institution begged him to be seated and listen

to the recitations that were going on.  He accordingly obeyed

the request, and seemed to be much pleased.  After the school

was dismissed, and the young hearts regained their freedom,

with the songs of the evening, laughing at the anticipated pleasures

of a happy home, while others tittered at the actions of the past day,

he addressed the teacher in a tone that indicated a resolution--

with an undaunted mind.  He said he had determined to become

a student, if he could meet with his approbation.  "Sir," said he,

"I have spent much time in the world.  I have traveled among

the uncivilized inhabitants of America.  I have met with friends,

and combated with foes; but none of these gratify my ambition,

or decide what is to be my destiny.  I see the learned world

have an influence with the voice of the people themselves.

The despoilers of the remotest kingdoms of the earth refer their

differences to this class of persons.  This the illiterate and

inexperienced little dream of; and now if you will receive me as I am,

with these deficiencies--with all my misguided opinions, I will give

you my honor, sir, that I will never disgrace the Institution,

or those who have placed you in this honorable station."

The instructor, who had met with many disappointments, knew how to

feel for a stranger who had been thus turned upon the charities

of an unfeeling community.  He looked at him earnestly, and said:

"Be of good cheer--look forward, sir, to the high destination you

may attain.  Remember, the more elevated the mark at which you aim,

the more sure, the more glorious, the more magnificent the prize."

From wonder to wonder, his encouragement led the impatient listener.

A strange nature bloomed before him--giant streams promised

him success--gardens of hidden treasures opened to his view.

All this, so vividly described, seemed to gain a new witchery from his

glowing fancy.





It seems to me that this situation is new in romance.  I feel

sure it has not been attempted before.  Military celebrities have

been disguised and set at lowly occupations for dramatic effect,

but I think McClintock is the first to send one of them to school.

Thus, in this book, you pass from wonder to wonder, through gardens

of hidden treasure, where giant streams bloom before you,

and behind you, and all around, and you feel as happy, and groggy,

and satisfied with your quart of mixed metaphor aboard as you would

if it had been mixed in a sample-room and delivered from a jug.



Now we come upon some more McClintockian surprise--a sweetheart

who is sprung upon us without any preparation, along with a name

for her which is even a little more of a surprise than she herself is.





In 1842 he entered the class, and made rapid progress in the English

and Latin departments.  Indeed, he continued advancing with such

rapidity that he was like to become the first in his class,

and made such unexpected progress, and was so studious, that he had

almost forgotten the pictured saint of his affections.  The fresh

wreaths of the pine and cypress had waited anxiously to drop once

more the dews of Heaven upon the heads of those who had so often

poured forth the tender emotions of their souls under its boughs.

He was aware of the pleasure that he had seen there.  So one evening ,as

he was returning from his reading, he concluded he would pay a visit

to this enchanting spot.  Little did he think of witnessing a shadow

of his former happiness, though no doubt he wished it might be so.

He continued sauntering by the roadside, meditating on the past.

The nearer he approached the spot, the more anxious he became.

At that moment a tall female figure flitted across his path, with a

bunch of roses in her hand; her countenance showed uncommon vivacity,

with a resolute spirit; her ivory teeth already appeared as she

smiled beautifully, promenading--while her ringlets of hair dangled

unconsciously around her snowy neck.  Nothing was wanting to complete

her beauty.  The tinge of the rose was in full bloom upon her cheek;

the charms of sensibility and tenderness were always her associates.

In Ambulinia's bosom dwelt a noble soul--one that never faded--

one that never was conquered.





Ambulinia!  It can hardly be matched in fiction.  The full name

is Ambulinia Valeer.  Marriage will presently round it out and

perfect it.  Then it will be Mrs. Ambulinia Valeer Elfonzo.

It takes the chromo.





Her heart yielded to no feeling but the love of Elfonzo, on whom

she gazed with intense delight, and to whom she felt herself

more closely bound, because he sought the hand of no other.

Elfonzo was roused from his apparent reverie.  His books no longer

were his inseparable companions--his thoughts arrayed themselves

to encourage him to the field of victory.  He endeavored to speak

to his supposed Ambulinia, but his speech appeared not in words.

No, his effort was a stream of fire, that kindled his soul into

a flame of admiration, and carried his senses away captive.

Ambulinia had disappeared, to make him more mindful of his duty.

As she walked speedily away through the piny woods, she calmly echoed:

"O!  Elfonzo, thou wilt now look from thy sunbeams.  Thou shalt

now walk in a new path--perhaps thy way leads through darkness;

but fear not, the stars foretell happiness."





To McClintock that jingling jumble of fine words meant something,

no doubt, or seemed to mean something; but it is useless for us to try

to divine what it was.  Ambulinia comes--we don't know whence nor why;

she mysteriously intimates--we don't know what; and then she goes

echoing away--we don't know whither; and down comes the curtain.

McClintock's art is subtle; McClintock's art is deep.





Not many days afterward, as surrounded by fragrant flowers she sat

one evening at twilight, to enjoy the cool breeze that whispered

notes of melody along the distant groves, the little birds perched

on every side, as if to watch the movements of their new visitor.

The bells were tolling, when Elfonzo silently stole along by the wild

wood flowers, holding in his hand his favorite instrument of music--

his eye continually searching for Ambulinia, who hardly seemed

to perceive him, as she played carelessly with the songsters

that hopped from branch to branch.  Nothing could be more striking

than the difference between the two.  Nature seemed to have given

the more tender soul to Elfonzo, and the stronger and more courageous

to Ambulinia.  A deep feeling spoke from the eyes of Elfonzo--

such a feeling as can only be expressed by those who are blessed

as admirers, and by those who are able to return the same with

sincerity of heart.  He was a few years older than Ambulinia:

she had turned a little into her seventeenth.  He had almost grown

up in the Cherokee country, with the same equal proportions as one

of the natives.  But little intimacy had existed between them until

the year forty-one--because the youth felt that the character of such

a lovely girl was too exalted to inspire any other feeling than

that of quiet reverence.  But as lovers will not always be insulted,

at all times and under all circumstances, by the frowns and cold

looks of crabbed old age, which should continually reflect dignity

upon those around, and treat the unfortunate as well as the fortunate

with a graceful mien, he continued to use diligence and perseverance.

All this lighted a spark in his heart that changed his whole character,

and like the unyielding Deity that follows the storm to check its

rage in the forest, he resolves for the first time to shake off

his embarrassment and return where he had before only worshiped.





At last we begin to get the Major's measure.  We are able to put

this and that casual fact together, and build the man up before

our eyes, and look at him.  And after we have got him built, we find

him worth the trouble.  By the above comparison between his age

and Ambulinia's, we guess the war-worn veteran to be twenty-two;

and the other facts stand thus:  he had grown up in the Cherokee

country with the same equal proportions as one of the natives--

how flowing and graceful the language, and yet how tantalizing

as to meaning!--he had been turned adrift by his father, to whom he

had been "somewhat of a dutiful son"; he wandered in distant lands;

came back frequently "to the scenes of his boyhood, almost destitute

of many of the comforts of life," in order to get into the presence

of his father's winter-worn locks, and spread a humid veil of

darkness around his expectations; but he was always promptly sent

back to the cold charity of the combat again; he learned to play

the fiddle, and made a name for himself in that line; he had dwelt

among the wild tribes; he had philosophized about the despoilers

of the kingdoms of the earth, and found out--the cunning creature--

that they refer their differences to the learned for settlement;

he had achieved a vast fame as a military chieftain, the Achilles

of the Florida campaigns, and then had got him a spelling-book

and started to school; he had fallen in love with Ambulinia Valeer

while she was teething, but had kept it to himself awhile, out of

the reverential awe which he felt for the child; but now at last,

like the unyielding Deity who follows the storm to check its rage in

the forest, he resolves to shake off his embarrassment, and to return

where before he had only worshiped.  The Major, indeed, has made up

his mind to rise up and shake his faculties together, and to see

if HE can't do that thing himself.  This is not clear.  But no matter

about that:  there stands the hero, compact and visible; and he is

no mean structure, considering that his creator had never structure,

considering that his creator had never created anything before,

and hadn't anything but rags and wind to build with this time.

It seems to me that no one can contemplate this odd creature, this quaint

and curious blatherskite, without admiring McClintock, or, at any rate,

loving him and feeling grateful to him; for McClintock made him,

he gave him to us; without McClintock we could not have had him,

and would now be poor.



But we must come to the feast again.  Here is a courtship scene, down

there in the romantic glades among the raccoons, alligators, and things,

that has merit, peculiar literary merit.  See how Achilles woos.

Dwell upon the second sentence (particularly the close of it) and the

beginning of the third.  Never mind the new personage, Leos, who is

intruded upon us unheralded and unexplained.  That is McClintock's way;

it is his habit; it is a part of his genius; he cannot help it;

he never interrupts the rush of his narrative to make introductions.





It could not escape Ambulinia's penetrating eye that he sought

an interview with her, which she as anxiously avoided, and assumed

a more distant calmness than before, seemingly to destroy all hope.

After many efforts and struggles with his own person, with timid

steps the Major approached the damsel, with the same caution

as he would have done in a field of battle.  "Lady Ambulinia,"

said he, trembling, "I have long desired a moment like this.

I dare not let it escape.  I fear the consequences; yet I hope

your indulgence will at least hear my petition.  Can you not

anticipate what I would say, and what I am about to express?

Will not you, like Minerva, who sprung from the brain of Jupiter,

release me from thy winding chains or cure me--" "Say no more,

Elfonzo," answered Ambulinia, with a serious look, raising her hand

as if she intended to swear eternal hatred against the whole world;

"another lady in my place would have perhaps answered your question

in bitter coldness.  I know not the little arts of my sex.

I care but little for the vanity of those who would chide me,

and am unwilling as well as ashamed to be guilty of anything

that would lead you to think 'all is not gold that glitters';

so be no rash in your resolution.  It is better to repent now,

than to do it in a more solemn hour.  Yes, I know what you would say.

I know you have a costly gift for me--the noblest that man can make--

YOUR HEART!  You should not offer it to one so unworthy.

Heaven, you know, has allowed my father's house to be made a house

of solitude, a home of silent obedience, which my parents say

is more to be admired than big names and high-sounding titles.

Notwithstanding all this, let me speak the emotions of an honest heart--

allow me to say in the fullness of my hopes that I anticipate

better days.  The bird may stretch its wings toward the sun,

which it can never reach; and flowers of the field appear to

ascend in the same direction, because they cannot do otherwise;

but man confides his complaints to the saints in whom he believes;

for in their abodes of light they know no more sorrow.  From your

confession and indicative looks, I must be that person; if so deceive

not yourself."



Elfonzo replied, "Pardon me, my dear madam, for my frankness.

I have loved you from my earliest days--everything grand and beautiful

hath borne the image of Ambulinia; while precipices on every hand

surrounded me, your GUARDIAN ANGEL stood and beckoned me away from

the deep abyss.  In every trial, in every misfortune, I have met

with your helping hand; yet I never dreamed or dared to cherish

thy love, till a voice impaired with age encouraged the cause,

and declared they who acquired thy favor should win a victory.

I saw how Leos worshiped thee.  I felt my own unworthiness.

I began to KNOW JEALOUSLY, a strong guest--indeed, in my bosom,--

yet I could see if I gained your admiration Leos was to be my rival.

I was aware that he had the influence of your parents, and the wealth

of a deceased relative, which is too often mistaken for permanent

and regular tranquillity; yet I have determined by your permission

to beg an interest in your prayers--to ask you to animate my drooping

spirits by your smiles and your winning looks; for if you but speak

I shall be conqueror, my enemies shall stagger like Olympus shakes.

And though earth and sea may tremble, and the charioteer of the sun

may forget his dashing steed, yet I am assured that it is only

to arm me with divine weapons which will enable me to complete my

long-tried intention."



"Return to yourself, Elfonzo," said Ambulinia, pleasantly:  "a dream

of vision has disturbed your intellect; you are above the atmosphere,

dwelling in the celestial regions; nothing is there that urges

or hinders, nothing that brings discord into our present litigation.

I entreat you to condescend a little, and be a man, and forget it all.

When Homer describes the battle of the gods and noble men fighting

with giants and dragons, they represent under this image our struggles

with the delusions of our passions.  You have exalted me, an unhappy girl,

to the skies; you have called me a saint, and portrayed in your

imagination an angel in human form.  Let her remain such to you,

let her continue to be as you have supposed, and be assured that she

will consider a share in your esteem as her highest treasure.

Think not that I would allure you from the path in which your

conscience leads you; for you know I respect the conscience of others,

as I would die for my own.  Elfonzo, if I am worthy of thy love,

let such conversation never again pass between us.  Go, seek a nobler

theme! we will seek it in the stream of time, as the sun set in

the Tigris."  As she spake these words she grasped the hand of Elfonzo,

saying at the same time--"Peace and prosperity attend you, my hero;

be up and doing!"  Closing her remarks with this expression,

she walked slowly away, leaving Elfonzo astonished and amazed.

He ventured not to follow or detain her.  Here he stood alone,

gazing at the stars; confounded as he was, here he stood.





Yes; there he stood.  There seems to be no doubt about that.

Nearly half of this delirious story has now been delivered to the reader.

It seems a pity to reduce the other half to a cold synopsis.

Pity! it is more than a pity, it is a crime; for to synopsize McClintock

is to reduce a sky-flushing conflagration to dull embers, it is to

reduce barbaric splendor to ragged poverty.  McClintock never wrote

a line that was not precious; he never wrote one that could be spared;

he never framed one from which a word could be removed without damage.

Every sentence that this master has produced may be likened to a

perfect set of teeth, white, uniform, beautiful.  If you pull one,

the charm is gone.



Still, it is now necessary to begin to pull, and to keep it up;

for lack of space requires us to synopsize.



We left Elfonzo standing there amazed.  At what, we do not know.

Not at the girl's speech.  No; we ourselves should have been

amazed at it, of course, for none of us has ever heard anything

resembling it; but Elfonzo was used to speeches made up of noise

and vacancy, and could listen to them with undaunted mind like

the "topmost topaz of an ancient tower"; he was used to making

them himself; he--but let it go, it cannot be guessed out; we shall

never know what it was that astonished him.  He stood there awhile;

then he said, "Alas! am I now Grief's disappointed son at last?"

He did not stop to examine his mind, and to try to find out what

he probably meant by that, because, for one reason, "a mixture

of ambition and greatness of soul moved upon his young heart,"

and started him for the village.  He resumed his bench in school,

"and reasonably progressed in his education."  His heart was heavy,

but he went into society, and sought surcease of sorrow in its

light distractions.  He made himself popular with his violin,

"which seemed to have a thousand chords--more symphonious than the

Muses of Apollo, and more enchanting than the ghost of the Hills."

This is obscure, but let it go.



During this interval Leos did some unencouraged courting, but at last,

"choked by his undertaking," he desisted.



Presently "Elfonzo again wends his way to the stately walls and

new-built village."  He goes to the house of his beloved; she opens

the door herself.  To my surprise--for Ambulinia's heart had still

seemed free at the time of their last interview--love beamed from the

girl's eyes.  One sees that Elfonzo was surprised, too; for when he caught

that light, "a halloo of smothered shouts ran through every vein."

A neat figure--a very neat figure, indeed!  Then he kissed her.

"The scene was overwhelming."  They went into the parlor.  The girl

said it was safe, for her parents were abed, and would never know.

Then we have this fine picture--flung upon the canvas with hardly

an effort, as you will notice.





Advancing toward him, she gave a bright display of her rosy neck,

and from her head the ambrosial locks breathed divine fragrance;

her robe hung waving to his view, while she stood like a goddess

confessed before him.





There is nothing of interest in the couple's interview.  Now at this

point the girl invites Elfonzo to a village show, where jealousy is

the motive of the play, for she wants to teach him a wholesome lesson,

if he is a jealous person.  But this is a sham, and pretty shallow.

McClintock merely wants a pretext to drag in a plagiarism of his upon

a scene or two in "Othello."



The lovers went to the play.  Elfonzo was one of the fiddlers.

He and Ambulinia must not been seen together, lest trouble follow with

the girl's malignant father; we are made to understand that clearly.

So the two sit together in the orchestra, in the midst of the musicians.

This does not seem to be good art.  In the first place, the girl would

be in the way, for orchestras are always packed closely together,

and there is no room to spare for people's girls; in the next place,

one cannot conceal a girl in an orchestra without everybody taking

notice of it.  There can be no doubt, it seems to me, that this is

bad art.



Leos is present.  Of course, one of the first things that catches

his eye is the maddening spectacle of Ambulinia "leaning upon

Elfonzo's chair."  This poor girl does not seem to understand even

the rudiments of concealment.  But she is "in her seventeenth,"

as the author phrases it, and that is her justification.



Leos meditates, constructs a plan--with personal violence as a basis,

of course.  It was their way down there.  It is a good plain plan,

without any imagination in it.  He will go out and stand at the

front door, and when these two come out he will "arrest Ambulinia

from the hands of the insolent Elfonzo," and thus make for himself

a "more prosperous field of immortality than ever was decreed

by Omnipotence, or ever pencil drew or artist imagined."  But, dear me,

while he is waiting there the couple climb out at the back window

and scurry home!  This is romantic enough, but there is a lack

of dignity in the situation.



At this point McClintock puts in the whole of his curious play--

which we skip.



Some correspondence follows now.  The bitter father and the

distressed lovers write the letters.  Elopements are attempted.

They are idiotically planned, and they fail.  Then we have several

pages of romantic powwow and confusion dignifying nothing.

Another elopement is planned; it is to take place on Sunday,

when everybody is at church.  But the "hero" cannot keep the secret;

he tells everybody.  Another author would have found another

instrument when he decided to defeat this elopement; but that is

not McClintock's way.  He uses the person that is nearest at hand.



The evasion failed, of course.  Ambulinia, in her flight,

takes refuge in a neighbor's house.  Her father drags her home.

The villagers gather, attracted by the racket.





Elfonzo was moved at this sight.  The people followed on to see

what was going to become of Ambulinia, while he, with downcast looks,

kept at a distance, until he saw them enter the abode of the father,

thrusting her, that was the sigh of his soul, out of his presence

into a solitary apartment, when she exclaimed, "Elfonzo!  Elfonzo! oh,

Elfonzo! where art thou, with all thy heroes? haste, oh! haste,

come thou to my relief.  Ride on the wings of the wind!  Turn thy

force loose like a tempest, and roll on thy army like a whirlwind,

over this mountain of trouble and confusion.  Oh friends! if any

pity me, let your last efforts throng upon the green hills,

and come to the relief of Ambulinia, who is guilty of nothing

but innocent love."  Elfonzo called out with a loud voice, "My God,

can I stand this! arouse up, I beseech you, and put an end to

this tyranny.  Come, my brave boys," said he, "are you ready to go

forth to your duty?"  They stood around him.  "Who," said he,

"will call us to arms?  Where are my thunderbolts of war?  Speak ye,

the first who will meet the foe!  Who will go forward with me

in this ocean of grievous temptation?  If there is one who desires

to go, let him come and shake hands upon the altar of devotion,

and swear that he will be a hero; yes, a Hector in a cause like this,

which calls aloud for a speedy remedy."  "Mine be the deed,"

said a young lawyer, "and mine alone; Venus alone shall quit her

station before I will forsake one jot or tittle of my promise to you;

what is death to me? what is all this warlike army, if it is not

to win a victory?  I love the sleep of the lover and the mighty;

nor would I give it over till the blood of my enemies should wreak

with that of my own.  But God forbid that our fame should soar

on the blood of the slumberer."  Mr. Valeer stands at his door

with the frown of a demon upon his brow, with his dangerous weapon

[3] ready to strike the first man who should enter his door.

"Who will arise and go forward through blood and carnage to the rescue

of my Ambulinia?" said Elfonzo.  "All," exclaimed the multitude;

and onward they went, with their implements of battle.  Others, of a

more timid nature, stood among the distant hills to see the result of

the contest.





It will hardly be believed that after all this thunder and lightning

not a drop of rain fell; but such is the fact.  Elfonzo and his

gang stood up and black-guarded Mr. Valeer with vigor all night,

getting their outlay back with interest; then in the early

morning the army and its general retired from the field,

leaving the victory with their solitary adversary and his crowbar.

This is the first time this has happened in romantic literature.

The invention is original.  Everything in this book is original;

there is nothing hackneyed about it anywhere.  Always, in other

romances, when you find the author leading up to a climax,

you know what is going to happen.  But in this book it is different;

the thing which seems inevitable and unavoidable never happens;

it is circumvented by the art of the author every time.



Another elopement was attempted.  It failed.



We have now arrived at the end.  But it is not exciting.

McClintock thinks it is; but it isn't. One day Elfonzo sent Ambulinia

another note--a note proposing elopement No. 16.  This time the plan

is admirable; admirable, sagacious, ingenious, imaginative, deep--

oh, everything, and perfectly easy.  One wonders why it was never

thought of before.  This is the scheme.  Ambulinia is to leave the

breakfast-table, ostensibly to "attend to the placing of those flowers,

which should have been done a week ago"--artificial ones, of course;

the others wouldn't keep so long--and then, instead of fixing

the flowers, she is to walk out to the grove, and go off with Elfonzo.

The invention of this plan overstrained the author that is plain,

for he straightway shows failing powers.  The details of the plan

are not many or elaborate.  The author shall state them himself--

this good soul, whose intentions are always better than his English:





"You walk carelessly toward the academy grove, where you will find

me with a lightning steed, elegantly equipped to bear you off

where we shall be joined in wedlock with the first connubial rights."





Last scene of all, which the author, now much enfeebled,

tries to smarten up and make acceptable to his spectacular heart

by introducing some new properties--silver bow, golden harp,

olive branch--things that can all come good in an elopement,

no doubt, yet are not to be compared to an umbrella for real

handiness and reliability in an excursion of that kind.





And away she ran to the sacred grove, surrounded with glittering pearls,

that indicated her coming.  Elfonzo hails her with his silver bow

and his golden harp.  The meet--Ambulinia's countenance brightens--

Elfonzo leads up the winged steed.  "Mount," said he, "ye true-hearted,

ye fearless soul--the day is ours."  She sprang upon the back

of the young thunderbolt, a brilliant star sparkles upon her head,

with one hand she grasps the reins, and with the other she holds

an olive branch.  "Lend thy aid, ye strong winds," they exclaimed,

"ye moon, ye sun, and all ye fair host of heaven, witness the

enemy conquered."  "Hold," said Elfonzo, "thy dashing steed."

"Ride on," said Ambulinia, "the voice of thunder is behind us."

And onward they went, with such rapidity that they very soon arrived

at Rural Retreat, where they dismounted, and were united with all

the solemnities that usually attended such divine operations.





There is but one Homer, there is but one Shakespeare, there is but

one McClintock--and his immortal book is before you.  Homer could

not have written this book, Shakespeare could not have written it,

I could not have done it myself.  There is nothing just like it

in the literature of any country or of any epoch.  It stands alone;

it is monumental.  It adds G. Ragsdale McClintock's to the sum of

the republic's imperishable names.



- - -



1.  The name here given is a substitute for the one actually

attached to the pamphlet.



2.  Further on it will be seen that he is a country expert

on the fiddle, and has a three-township fame.



3.  It is a crowbar.





***







THE CURIOUS BOOK





Complete







[The foregoing review of the great work of G. Ragsdale McClintock is

liberally illuminated with sample extracts, but these cannot appease

the appetite.  Only the complete book, unabridged, can do that.

Therefore it is here printed.--M.T.]







THE ENEMY CONQUERED; OR, LOVE TRIUMPHANT







Sweet girl, thy smiles are full of charms,



Thy voice is sweeter still,



It fills the breast with fond alarms,



Echoed by every rill.





I begin this little work with an eulogy upon woman, who has ever

been distinguished for her perseverance, her constancy, and her

devoted attention to those upon whom she has been pleased to place

her AFFECTIONS.  Many have been the themes upon which writers and

public speakers have dwelt with intense and increasing interest.

Among these delightful themes stands that of woman, the balm

to all our sighs and disappointments, and the most pre-eminent

of all other topics.  Here the poet and orator have stood and gazed

with wonder and with admiration; they have dwelt upon her innocence,

the ornament of all her virtues.  First viewing her external charms,

such as set forth in her form and benevolent countenance, and then passing

to the deep hidden springs of loveliness and disinterested devotion.

In every clime, and in every age, she has been the pride of her NATION.

Her watchfulness is untiring; she who guarded the sepulcher was

the first to approach it, and the last to depart from its awful

yet sublime scene.  Even here, in this highly favored land,

we look to her for the security of our institutions, and for our

future greatness as a nation.  But, strange as it may appear,

woman's charms and virtues are but slightly appreciated by thousands.

Those who should raise the standard of female worth, and paint her

value with her virtues, in living colors, upon the banners that are

fanned by the zephyrs of heaven, and hand them down to posterity

as emblematical of a rich inheritance, do not properly estimate them.



Man is not sensible, at all times, of the nature and the emotions

which bear that name; he does not understand, he will not comprehend;

his intelligence has not expanded to that degree of glory which

drinks in the vast revolution of humanity, its end, its mighty

destination, and the causes which operated, and are still operating,

to produce a more elevated station, and the objects which energize

and enliven its consummation.  This he is a stranger to;

he is not aware that woman is the recipient of celestial love,

and that man is dependent upon her to perfect his character;

that without her, philosophically and truly speaking, the brightest

of his intelligence is but the coldness of a winter moon,

whose beams can produce no fruit, whose solar light is not its own,

but borrowed from the great dispenser of effulgent beauty.

We have no disposition in the world to flatter the fair sex,

we would raise them above those dastardly principles which only

exist in little souls, contracted hearts, and a distracted brain.

Often does she unfold herself in all her fascinating loveliness,

presenting the most captivating charms; yet we find man frequently

treats such purity of purpose with indifference.  Why does he do it?

Why does he baffle that which is inevitably the source of his

better days?  Is he so much of a stranger to those excellent qualities

as not to appreciate woman, as not to have respect to her dignity?

Since her art and beauty first captivated man, she has been his

delight and his comfort; she has shared alike in his misfortunes

and in his prosperity.



Whenever the billows of adversity and the tumultuous waves of trouble

beat high, her smiles subdue their fury.  Should the tear of sorrow

and the mournful sigh of grief interrupt the peace of his mind,

her voice removes them all, and she bends from her circle to encourage

him onward.  When darkness would obscure his mind, and a thick cloud

of gloom would bewilder its operations, her intelligent eye darts

a ray of streaming light into his heart.  Mighty and charming is that

disinterested devotion which she is ever ready to exercise toward man,

not waiting till the last moment of his danger, but seeks to relieve

him in his early afflictions.  It gushes forth from the expansive

fullness of a tender and devoted heart, where the noblest, the purest,

and the most elevated and refined feelings are matured and developed

in those may kind offices which invariably make her character.



In the room of sorrow and sickness, this unequaled characteristic

may always been seen, in the performance of the most charitable acts;

nothing that she can do to promote the happiness of him who she

claims to be her protector will be omitted; all is invigorated by

the animating sunbeams which awaken the heart to songs of gaiety.

Leaving this point, to notice another prominent consideration,

which is generally one of great moment and of vital importance.

Invariably she is firm and steady in all her pursuits and aims.

There is required a combination of forces and extreme opposition to

drive her from her position; she takes her stand, not to be moved by

the sound of Apollo's lyre or the curved bow of pleasure.



Firm and true to what she undertakes, and that which she requires

by her own aggrandizement, and regards as being within the strict rules

of propriety, she will remain stable and unflinching to the last.

A more genuine principle is not to be found in the most determined,

resolute heart of man.  For this she deserves to be held in the

highest commendation, for this she deserves the purest of all

other blessings, and for this she deserves the most laudable reward

of all others.  It is a noble characteristic and is worthy of imitation

of any age.  And when we look at it in one particular aspect,

it is still magnified, and grows brighter and brighter the more we

reflect upon its eternal duration.  What will she not do, when her

word as well as her affections and LOVE are pledged to her lover?

Everything that is dear to her on earth, all the hospitalities

of kind and loving parents, all the sincerity and loveliness

of sisters, and the benevolent devotion of brothers, who have

surrounded her with every comfort; she will forsake them all,

quit the harmony and sweet sound of the lute and the harp,

and throw herself upon the affections of some devoted admirer,

in whom she fondly hopes to find more than she has left behind,

which is not often realized by many.  Truth and virtue all combined!

How deserving our admiration and love!  Ah cruel would it be in man,

after she has thus manifested such an unshaken confidence in him,

and said by her determination to abandon all the endearments and

blandishments of home, to act a villainous part, and prove a traitor

in the revolution of his mission, and then turn Hector over the

innocent victim whom he swore to protect, in the presence of Heaven,

recorded by the pen of an angel.



Striking as this train may unfold itself in her character,

and as pre-eminent as it may stand among the fair display of her

other qualities, yet there is another, which struggles into existence,

and adds an additional luster to what she already possesses.

I mean that disposition in woman which enables her, in sorrow,

in grief, and in distress, to bear all with enduring patience.

This she has done, and can and will do, amid the din of war and

clash of arms.  Scenes and occurrences which, to every appearance,

are calculated to rend the heart with the profoundest emotions of trouble,

do not fetter that exalted principle imbued in her very nature.

It is true, her tender and feeling heart may often be moved (as she

is thus constituted), but she is not conquered, she has not given up

to the harlequin of disappointments, her energies have not become

clouded in the last movement of misfortune, but she is continually

invigorated by the archetype of her affections.  She may bury her face

in her hands, and let the tear of anguish roll, she may promenade

the delightful walks of some garden, decorated with all the flowers

of nature, or she may steal out along some gently rippling stream,

and there, as the silver waters uninterruptedly move forward,

shed her silent tears; they mingle with the waves, and take a last

farewell of their agitated home, to seek a peaceful dwelling among

the rolling floods; yet there is a voice rushing from her breast,

that proclaims VICTORY along the whole line and battlement of

her affections.  That voice is the voice of patience and resignation;

that voice is one that bears everything calmly and dispassionately,

amid the most distressing scenes; when the fates are arrayed against

her peace, and apparently plotting for her destruction, still she

is resigned.



Woman's affections are deep, consequently her troubles may be made

to sink deep.  Although you may not be able to mark the traces of her

grief and the furrowings of her anguish upon her winning countenance,

yet be assured they are nevertheless preying upon her inward person,

sapping the very foundation of that heart which alone was made

for the weal and not the woe of man.  The deep recesses of the soul

are fields for their operation.  But they are not destined simply

to take the regions of the heart for their dominion, they are not

satisfied merely with interrupting her better feelings; but after

a while you may see the blooming cheek beginning to droop and fade,

her intelligent eye no longer sparkles with the starry light of heaven,

her vibrating pulse long since changed its regular motion, and her

palpitating bosom beats once more for the midday of her glory.

Anxiety and care ultimately throw her into the arms of the haggard

and grim monster death.  But, oh, how patient, under every

pining influence!  Let us view the matter in bolder colors;

see her when the dearest object of her affections recklessly seeks

every bacchanalian pleasure, contents himself with the last rubbish

of creation.  With what solicitude she awaits his return!  Sleep fails

to perform its office--she weeps while the nocturnal shades of the

night triumph in the stillness.  Bending over some favorite book,

whilst the author throws before her mind the most beautiful imagery,

she startles at every sound.  The midnight silence is broken

by the solemn announcement of the return of another morning.

He is still absent; she listens for that voice which has so often

been greeted by the melodies of her own; but, alas! stern silence

is all that she receives for her vigilance.



Mark her unwearied watchfulness, as the night passes away.

At last, brutalized by the accursed thing, he staggers along

with rage, and, shivering with cold, he makes his appearance.

Not a murmur is heard from her lips.  On the contrary, she meets him

with a smile--she caresses him with tender arms, with all the gentleness

and softness of her sex.  Here, then, is seen her disposition,

beautifully arrayed.  Woman, thou art more to be admired than the spicy

gales of Arabia, and more sought for than the gold of Golconda.

We believe that Woman should associate freely with man, and we believe

that it is for the preservation of her rights.  She should become

acquainted with the metaphysical designs of those who condescended

to sing the siren song of flattery.  This, we think, should be

according to the unwritten law of decorum, which is stamped upon

every innocent heart.  The precepts of prudery are often steeped

in the guilt of contamination, which blasts the expectations of

better moments.  Truth, and beautiful dreams--loveliness, and delicacy

of character, with cherished affections of the ideal woman--

gentle hopes and aspirations, are enough to uphold her in the storms

of darkness, without the transferred colorings of a stained sufferer.

How often have we seen it in our public prints, that woman occupies

a false station in the world! and some have gone so far as to say it

was an unnatural one.  So long has she been regarded a weak creature,

by the rabble and illiterate--they have looked upon her as an

insufficient actress on the great stage of human life--a mere puppet,

to fill up the drama of human existence--a thoughtless, inactive being--

that she has too often come to the same conclusion herself, and has

sometimes forgotten her high destination, in the meridian of her glory.

We have but little sympathy or patience for those who treat her as

a mere Rosy Melindi--who are always fishing for pretty complements--

who are satisfied by the gossamer of Romance, and who can be

allured by the verbosity of high-flown words, rich in language,

but poor and barren in sentiment.  Beset, as she has been, by the

intellectual vulgar, the selfish, the designing, the cunning, the hidden,

and the artful--no wonder she has sometimes folded her wings in despair,

and forgotten her HEAVENLY mission in the delirium of imagination;

no wonder she searches out some wild desert, to find a peaceful home.

But this cannot always continue.  A new era is moving gently onward,

old things are rapidly passing away; old superstitions, old prejudices,

and old notions are now bidding farewell to their old associates

and companions, and giving way to one whose wings are plumed

with the light of heaven and tinged by the dews of the morning.

There is a remnant of blessedness that clings to her in spite of all

evil influence, there is enough of the Divine Master left to accomplish

the noblest work ever achieved under the canopy of the vaulted skies;

and that time is fast approaching, when the picture of the true

woman will shine from its frame of glory, to captivate, to win back,

to restore, and to call into being once more, THE OBJECT OF HER MISSION.





Star of the brave! thy glory shed,



O'er all the earth, thy army led--



Bold meteor of immortal birth!



Why come from Heaven to dwell on Earth?





Mighty and glorious are the days of youth; happy the moments

of the LOVER, mingled with smiles and tears of his devoted,

and long to be remembered are the achievements which he gains with a

palpitating heart and a trembling hand.  A bright and lovely dawn,

the harbinger of a fair and prosperous day, had arisen over the

beautiful little village of Cumming, which is surrounded by the

most romantic scenery in the Cherokee country.  Brightening clouds

seemed to rise from the mist of the fair Chattahoochee, to spread

their beauty over the the thick forest, to guide the hero whose

bosom beats with aspirations to conquer the enemy that would tarnish

his name, and to win back the admiration of his long-tried friend.

He endeavored to make his way through Sawney's Mountain, where many meet

to catch the gales that are continually blowing for the refreshment

of the stranger and the traveler.  Surrounded as he was by hills

on every side, naked rocks dared the efforts of his energies.

Soon the sky became overcast, the sun buried itself in the clouds,

and the fair day gave place to gloomy twilight, which lay heavily

on the Indian Plains.  He remembered an old Indian Castle,

that once stood at the foot of the mountain.  He thought if he could

make his way to this, he would rest contented for a short time.

The mountain air breathed fragrance--a rosy tinge rested on the glassy

waters that murmured at its base.  His resolution soon brought him

to the remains of the red man's hut:  he surveyed with wonder and

astonishment the decayed building, which time had buried in the dust,

and thought to himself, his happiness was not yet complete.

Beside the shore of the brook sat a young man, about eighteen or twenty,

who seemed to be reading some favorite book, and who had a remarkably

noble countenance--eyes which betrayed more than a common mind.

This of course made the youth a welcome guest, and gained him

friends in whatever condition of life he might be placed.

The traveler observed that he was a well-built figure, which showed

strength and grace in every movement.  He accordingly addressed

him in quite a gentlemanly manner, and inquired of him the way

to the village.  After he had received the desired information,

and was about taking his leave, the youth said, "Are you not

Major Elfonzo, the great musician--the champion of a noble cause--

the modern Achilles, who gained so many victories in the Florida War?"

"I bear that name," said the Major, "and those titles,

trusting at the same time that the ministers of grace will carry

me triumphantly through all my laudable undertakings, and if,"

continued the Major, "you, sir, are the patronizer of noble deeds,

I should like to make you my confidant and learn your address."

The youth looked somewhat amazed, bowed low, mused for a moment,

and began:  "My name is Roswell.  I have been recently admitted

to the bar, and can only give a faint outline of my future success

in that honorable profession; but I trust, sir, like the Eagle,

I shall look down from lofty rocks upon the dwellings of man, and shall

ever be ready to give you any assistance in my official capacity,

and whatever this muscular arm of mine can do, whenever it shall be

called from its buried GREATNESS."  The Major grasped him by the hand,

and exclaimed:  "O! thou exalted spirit of inspiration--thou flame

of burning prosperity, may the Heaven-directed blaze be the glare

of thy soul, and battle down every rampart that seems to impede

your progress!"



The road which led to the town presented many attractions.

Elfonzo had bid farewell to the youth of deep feeling, and was

not wending his way to the dreaming spot of his fondness.

The south winds whistled through the woods, as the waters dashed

against the banks, as rapid fire in the pent furnace roars.

This brought him to remember while alone, that he quietly left behind

the hospitality of a father's house, and gladly entered the world,

with higher hopes than are often realized.  But as he journeyed onward,

he was mindful of the advice of his father, who had often looked

sadly on the ground when tears of cruelly deceived hope moistened

his eye.  Elfonzo had been somewhat of a dutiful son; yet fond

of the amusements of life--had been in distant lands--had enjoyed

the pleasure of the world and had frequently returned to the scenes

of his boyhood, almost destitute of many of the comforts of life.

In this condition, he would frequently say to his father, "Have I

offended you, that you look upon me as a stranger, and frown upon

me with stinging looks?  Will you not favor me with the sound of

your voice?  If I have trampled upon your veneration, or have spread

a humid veil of darkness around your expectations, send me back into

the world where no heart beats for me--where the foot of man has

never yet trod; but give me at least one kind word--allow me to come

into the presence sometimes of thy winter-worn locks."  "Forbid it,

Heaven, that I should be angry with thee," answered the father,

"my son, and yet I send thee back to the children of the world--

to the cold charity of the combat, and to a land of victory.  I read

another destiny in thy countenance--I learn thy inclinations from

the flame that has already kindled in my soul a stranger sensation.

It will seek thee, my dear ELFONZO, it will find thee--thou canst

not escape that lighted torch, which shall blot out from the

remembrance of men a long train of prophecies which they have

foretold against thee.  I once thought not so.  Once, I was blind;

but now the path of life is plain before me, and my sight is clear;

yet Elfonzo, return to thy worldly occupation--take again in thy

hand that chord of sweet sounds--struggle with the civilized world,

and with your own heart; fly swiftly to the enchanted ground--

let the night-OWL send forth its screams from the stubborn oak--

let the sea sport upon the beach, and the stars sing together;

but learn of these, Elfonzo, thy doom, and thy hiding-place. Our most

innocent as well as our most lawful DESIRES must often be denied us,

that we may learn to sacrifice them to a Higher will."



Remembering such admonitions with gratitude, Elfonzo was immediately

urged by the recollection of his father's family to keep moving.

His steps became quicker and quicker--he hastened through the PINY woods,

dark as the forest was, and with joy he very soon reached the little

village or repose, in whose bosom rested the boldest chivalry.

His close attention to every important object--his modest questions

about whatever was new to him--his reverence for wise old age,

and his ardent desire to learn many of the fine arts, soon brought him

into respectable notice.



One mild winter day as he walked along the streets toward the Academy,

which stood upon a small eminence, surrounded by native growth--

some venerable in its appearance, others young and prosperous--

all seemed inviting, and seemed to be the very place for learning as

well as for genius to spend its research beneath its spreading shades.

He entered its classic walls in the usual mode of southern manners.

The principal of the Institution begged him to be seated and listen

to the recitations that were going on.  He accordingly obeyed

the request, and seemed to be much pleased.  After the school

was dismissed, and the young hearts regained their freedom,

with the songs of the evening, laughing at the anticipated pleasures

of a happy home, while others tittered at the actions of the past day,

he addressed the teacher in a tone that indicated a resolution--

with an undaunted mind.  He said he had determined to become

a student, if he could meet with his approbation.  "Sir," said he,

"I have spent much time in the world.  I have traveled among

the uncivilized inhabitants of America.  I have met with friends,

and combated with foes; but none of these gratify my ambition,

or decide what is to be my destiny.  I see the learned would

have an influence with the voice of the people themselves.

The despoilers of the remotest kingdoms of the earth refer their

differences to this class of persons.  This the illiterate and

inexperienced little dream of; and now if you will receive me as I am,

with these deficiencies--with all my misguided opinions, I will give

you my honor, sir, that I will never disgrace the Institution,

or those who have placed you in this honorable station."

The instructor, who had met with many disappointments, knew how to

feel for a stranger who had been thus turned upon the charities

of an unfeeling community.  He looked at him earnestly, and said:

"Be of good cheer--look forward, sir, to the high destination you

may attain.  Remember, the more elevated the mark at which you aim,

the more sure, the more glorious, the more magnificent the prize."

From wonder to wonder, his encouragement led the impatient listener.

A stranger nature bloomed before him--giant streams promised

him success--gardens of hidden treasures opened to his view.

All this, so vividly described, seemed to gain a new witchery from his

glowing fancy.



In 1842 he entered the class, and made rapid progress in the English

and Latin departments.  Indeed, he continued advancing with such

rapidity that he was like to become the first in his class,

and made such unexpected progress, and was so studious, that he had

almost forgotten the pictured saint of his affections.  The fresh

wreaths of the pine and cypress had waited anxiously to drop once

more the dews of Heavens upon the heads of those who had so often

poured forth the tender emotions of their souls under its boughs.

He was aware of the pleasure that he had seen there.  So one evening,

as he was returning from his reading, he concluded he would pay a visit

to this enchanting spot.  Little did he think of witnessing a shadow

of his former happiness, though no doubt he wished it might be so.

He continued sauntering by the roadside, meditating on the past.

The nearer he approached the spot, the more anxious he became.

At the moment a tall female figure flitted across his path, with a

bunch of roses in her hand; her countenance showed uncommon vivacity,

with a resolute spirit; her ivory teeth already appeared as she

smiled beautifully, promenading--while her ringlets of hair dangled

unconsciously around her snowy neck.  Nothing was wanting to complete

her beauty.  The tinge of the rose was in full bloom upon her cheek;

the charms of sensibility and tenderness were always her associates..

In Ambulinia's bosom dwelt a noble soul--one that never faded--

one that never was conquered.  Her heart yielded to no feeling

but the love of Elfonzo, on whom she gazed with intense delight,

and to whom she felt herself more closely bound ,because he sought

the hand of no other.  Elfonzo was roused from his apparent reverie.

His books no longer were his inseparable companions--his thoughts

arrayed themselves to encourage him in the field of victory.

He endeavored to speak to his supposed Ambulinia, but his speech

appeared not in words.  No, his effort was a stream of fire,

that kindled his soul into a flame of admiration, and carried

his senses away captive.  Ambulinia had disappeared, to make him

more mindful of his duty.  As she walked speedily away through

the piny woods she calmly echoed:  "O!  Elfonzo, thou wilt

now look from thy sunbeams.  Thou shalt now walk in a new path--

perhaps thy way leads through darkness; but fear not, the stars

foretell happiness."



Not many days afterward, as surrounded by fragrant flowers she sat

one evening at twilight, to enjoy the cool breeze that whispered

notes of melody along the distant groves, the little birds perched

on every side, as if to watch the movements of their new visitor.

The bells were tolling when Elfonzo silently stole along by the wild

wood flowers, holding in his hand his favorite instrument of music--

his eye continually searching for Ambulinia, who hardly seemed

to perceive him, as she played carelessly with the songsters

that hopped from branch to branch.  Nothing could be more striking

than the difference between the two.  Nature seemed to have given

the more tender soul to Elfonzo, and the stronger and more courageous

to Ambulinia.  A deep feeling spoke from the eyes of Elfonzo--

such a feeling as can only be expressed by those who are blessed

as admirers, and by those who are able to return the same with

sincerity of heart.  He was a few years older than Ambulinia:

she had turned a little into her seventeenth.  He had almost grown

up in the Cherokee country, with the same equal proportions as one

of the natives.  But little intimacy had existed between them until

the year forty-one--because the youth felt that the character of such

a lovely girl was too exalted to inspire any other feeling than

that of quiet reverence.  But as lovers will not always be insulted,

at all times and under all circumstances, by the frowns and cold

looks of crabbed old age, which should continually reflect dignity

upon those around, and treat unfortunate as well as the fortunate

with a graceful mien, he continued to use diligence and perseverance.

All this lighted a spark in his heart that changed his whole character,

and like the unyielding Deity that follows the storm to check its

rage in the forest, he resolves for the first time to shake off

his embarrassment and return where he had before only worshiped.



It could not escape Ambulinia's penetrating eye that he sought

an interview with her, which she as anxiously avoided, and assumed

a more distant calmness than before, seemingly to destroy all hope.

After many efforts and struggles with his own person, with timid

steps the Major approached the damsel, with the same caution

as he would have done in a field of battle.  "Lady Ambulinia,"

said he, trembling, "I have long desired a moment like this.

I dare not let it escape.  I fear the consequences; yet I hope

your indulgence will at least hear my petition.  Can you not

anticipate what I would say, and what I am about to express?

Will not you, like Minerva, who sprung from the brain of Jupiter,

release me from thy winding chains or cure me--" "Say no more,

Elfonzo," answered Ambulinia, with a serious look, raising her hand

as if she intended to swear eternal hatred against the whole world;

"another lady in my place would have perhaps answered your question

in bitter coldness.  I know not the little arts of my sex.

I care but little for the vanity of those who would chide me,

and am unwilling as well as shamed to be guilty of anything

that would lead you to think 'all is not gold that glitters';

so be not rash in your resolution.  It is better to repent now than

to do it in a more solemn hour.  Yes, I know what you would say.

I know you have a costly gift for me--the noblest that man can make--

YOUR HEART! you should not offer it to one so unworthy.

Heaven, you know, has allowed my father's house to be made a house

of solitude, a home of silent obedience, which my parents say

is more to be admired than big names and high-sounding titles.

Notwithstanding all this, let me speak the emotions of an honest heart;

allow me to say in the fullness of my hopes that I anticipate

better days.  The bird may stretch its wings toward the sun,

which it can never reach; and flowers of the field appear to

ascend in the same direction, because they cannot do otherwise;

but man confides his complaints to the saints in whom he believes;

for in their abodes of light they know no more sorrow.  From your

confession and indicative looks, I must be that person; if so,

deceive not yourself."



Elfonzo replied, "Pardon me, my dear madam, for my frankness.

I have loved you from my earliest days; everything grand and beautiful

hath borne the image of Ambulinia; while precipices on every hand

surrounded me, your GUARDIAN ANGEL stood and beckoned me away from

the deep abyss.  In every trial, in every misfortune, I have met

with your helping hand; yet I never dreamed or dared to cherish

thy love till a voice impaired with age encouraged the cause,

and declared they who acquired thy favor should win a victory.

I saw how Leos worshipped thee.  I felt my own unworthiness.

I began to KNOW JEALOUSY--a strong guest, indeed, in my bosom--

yet I could see if I gained your admiration Leos was to be my rival.

I was aware that he had the influence of your parents, and the wealth

of a deceased relative, which is too often mistaken for permanent

and regular tranquillity; yet I have determined by your permission

to beg an interest in your prayers--to ask you to animate my dropping

spirits by your smiles and your winning looks; for if you but speak

I shall be conqueror, my enemies shall stagger like Olympus shakes.

And though earth and sea may tremble, and the charioteer of the sun

may forget his dashing steed, yet I am assured that it is only

to arm me with divine weapons which will enable me to complete my

long-tried intention."



"Return to your self, Elfonzo," said Ambulinia, pleasantly; "a dream

of vision has disturbed your intellect; you are above the atmosphere,

dwelling in the celestial regions; nothing is there that urges

or hinders, nothing that brings discord into our present litigation.

I entreat you to condescend a little, and be a man, and forget it all.

When Homer describes the battle of the gods and noble men fighting

with giants and dragons, they represent under this image our struggles

with the delusions of our passions.  You have exalted me, an unhappy girl,

to the skies; you have called me a saint, and portrayed in your

imagination an angel in human form.  Let her remain such to you,

let her continue to be as you have supposed, and be assured that she

will consider a share in your esteem as her highest treasure.

Think not that I would allure you from the path in which your

conscience leads you; for you know I respect the conscience of others,

as I would die for my own.  Elfonzo, if I am worthy of thy love,

let such conversation never again pass between us.  Go, seek a nobler

theme! we will seek it in the stream of time as the sun set in

the Tigris."  As she spake these words she grasped the hand of Elfonzo,

saying at the same time, "Peace and prosperity attend you, my hero:

be up and doing!'  Closing her remarks with this expression,

she walked slowly away, leaving Elfonzo astonished and amazed.

He ventured not to follow or detain her.  Here he stood alone,

gazing at the stars; confounded as he was, here he stood.  The rippling

stream rolled on at his feet.  Twilight had already begun to draw

her sable mantle over the earth, and now and then the fiery smoke

would ascend from the little town which lay spread out before him.

The citizens seemed to be full of life and good-humor; but poor Elfonzo

saw not a brilliant scene.  No; his future life stood before him,

stripped of the hopes that once adorned all his sanguine desires.

"Alas!" said he, "am I now Grief's disappointed son at last."

Ambulinia's image rose before his fancy.  A mixture of ambition

and greatness of soul moved upon his young heart, and encouraged

him to bear all his crosses with the patience of a Job,

notwithstanding he had to encounter with so many obstacles.

He still endeavored to prosecute his studies, and reasonable

progressed in his education.  Still, he was not content; there was

something yet to be done before his happiness was complete.

He would visit his friends and acquaintances.  They would invite him

to social parties, insisting that he should partake of the amusements

that were going on.  This he enjoyed tolerably well.  The ladies

and gentlemen were generally well pleased with the Major; as he

delighted all with his violin, which seemed to have a thousand chords--

more symphonious than the Muses of Apollo and more enchanting

than the ghost of the Hills.  He passed some days in the country.

During that time Leos had made many calls upon Ambulinia, who was

generally received with a great deal of courtesy by the family.

They thought him to be a young man worthy of attention, though he

had but little in his soul to attract the attention or even win

the affections of her whose graceful manners had almost made

him a slave to every bewitching look that fell from her eyes.

Leos made several attempts to tell her of his fair prospects--

how much he loved her, and how much it would add to his bliss if he

could but think she would be willing to share these blessings

with him; but, choked by his undertaking, he made himself more like an

inactive drone than he did like one who bowed at beauty's shrine.



Elfonzo again wends his way to the stately walls and new-built village.

He now determines to see the end of the prophesy which had been

foretold to him.  The clouds burst from his sight; he believes

if he can but see his Ambulinia, he can open to her view the bloody

altars that have been misrepresented to stigmatize his name.

He knows that her breast is transfixed with the sword of reason,

and ready at all times to detect the hidden villainy of her enemies.

He resolves to see her in her own home, with the consoling theme:

"'I can but perish if I go.'  Let the consequences be what they may,"

said he, "if I die, it shall be contending and struggling for my

own rights."



Night had almost overtaken him when he arrived in town.  Colonel Elder,

a noble-hearted, high-minded, and independent man, met him at

his door as usual, and seized him by the hand.  "Well, Elfonzo,"

said the Colonel, "how does the world use you in your efforts?"

"I have no objection to the world," said Elfonzo, "but the people

are rather singular in some of their opinions."  "Aye, well,"

said the Colonel, "you must remember that creation is made up of

many mysteries; just take things by the right handle; be always sure

you know which is the smooth side before you attempt your polish;

be reconciled to your fate, be it what it may; and never find fault

with your condition, unless your complaining will benefit it.

Perseverance is a principle that should be commendable in those who have

judgment to govern it.  I should never had been so successful in my

hunting excursions had I waited till the deer, by some magic dream,

had been drawn to the muzzle of the gun before I made an attempt to fire

at the game that dared my boldness in the wild forest.  The great

mystery in hunting seems to be--a good marksman, a resolute mind,

a fixed determination, and my world for it, you will never return

home without sounding your horn with the breath of a new victory.

And so with every other undertaking.  Be confident that your ammunition

is of the right kind--always pull your trigger with a steady hand,

and so soon as you perceive a calm, touch her off, and the spoils

are yours."



This filled him with redoubled vigor, and he set out with a stronger

anxiety than ever to the home of Ambulinia.  A few short steps soon

brought him to the door, half out of breath.  He rapped gently.

Ambulinia, who sat in the parlor alone, suspecting Elfonzo was near,

ventured to the door, opened it, and beheld the hero, who stood

in an humble attitude, bowed gracefully, and as they caught each

other's looks the light of peace beamed from the eyes of Ambulinia.

Elfonzo caught the expression; a halloo of smothered shouts ran

through every vein, and for the first time he dared to impress a kiss

upon her cheek.  The scene was overwhelming; had the temptation

been less animating, he would not have ventured to have acted

so contrary to the desired wish of his Ambulinia; but who could

have withstood the irrestistable temptation!  What society condemns

the practice but a cold, heartless, uncivilized people that know

nothing of the warm attachments of refined society?  Here the dead

was raised to his long-cherished hopes, and the lost was found.

Here all doubt and danger were buried in the vortex of oblivion;

sectional differences no longer disunited their opinions; like the freed

bird from the cage, sportive claps its rustling wings, wheels about

to heaven in a joyful strain, and raises its notes to the upper sky.

Ambulinia insisted upon Elfonzo to be seated, and give her a history

of his unnecessary absence; assuring him the family had retired,

consequently they would ever remain ignorant of his visit.

Advancing toward him, she gave a bright display of her rosy neck,

and from her head the ambrosial locks breathed divine fragrance;

her robe hung waving to his view, while she stood like a goddess

confessed before him.



"It does seem to me, my dear sir," said Ambulinia, "that you have

been gone an age.  Oh, the restless hours I have spent since I last

saw you, in yon beautiful grove.  There is where I trifled with your

feelings for the express purpose of trying your attachment for me.

I now find you are devoted; but ah!  I trust you live not unguarded

by the powers of Heaven.  Though oft did I refuse to join my hand

with thine, and as oft did I cruelly mock thy entreaties with

borrowed shapes:  yes, I feared to answer thee by terms, in words

sincere and undissembled.  O! could I pursue, and you have leisure

to hear the annals of my woes, the evening star would shut Heaven's

gates upon the impending day before my tale would be finished,

and this night would find me soliciting your forgiveness."



"Dismiss thy fears and thy doubts," replied Elfonzo.



"Look, O! look:  that angelic look of thine--bathe not thy visage

in tears; banish those floods that are gathering; let my confession

and my presence being thee some relief."  "Then, indeed, I will

be cheerful," said Ambulinia, "and I think if we will go to the

exhibition this evening, we certainly will see something worthy

of our attention.  One of the most tragical scenes is to be acted

that has ever been witnessed, and one that every jealous-hearted person

should learn a lesson from.  It cannot fail to have a good effect,

as it will be performed by those who are young and vigorous,

and learned as well as enticing.  You are aware, Major Elfonzo, who are

to appear on the stage, and what the characters are to represent."

"I am acquainted with the circumstances," replied Elfonzo, "and as I

am to be one of the musicians upon that interesting occasion,

I should be much gratified if you would favor me with your company

during the hours of the exercises."



"What strange notions are in your mind?" inquired Ambulinia.

"Now I know you have something in view, and I desire you to tell

me why it is that you are so anxious that I should continue

with you while the exercises are going on; though if you think I

can add to your happiness and predilections, I have no particular

objection to acquiesce in your request.  Oh, I think I foresee,

now, what you anticipate."  "And will you have the goodness to tell

me what you think it will be?" inquired Elfonzo.  "By all means,"

answered Ambulinia; "a rival, sir, you would fancy in your own mind;

but let me say for you, fear not! fear not!  I will be one of the

last persons to disgrace my sex by thus encouraging every one who

may feel disposed to visit me, who may honor me with their graceful

bows and their choicest compliments.  It is true that young men too

often mistake civil politeness for the finer emotions of the heart,

which is tantamount to courtship; but, ah! how often are they deceived,

when they come to test the weight of sunbeams with those on whose

strength hangs the future happiness of an untried life."



The people were now rushing to the Academy with impatient anxiety;

the band of music was closely followed by the students; then the parents

and guardians; nothing interrupted the glow of spirits which ran

through every bosom, tinged with the songs of a Virgil and the tide

of a Homer.  Elfonzo and Ambulinia soon repaired to the scene,

and fortunately for them both the house was so crowded that they took

their seats together in the music department, which was not in view

of the auditory.  This fortuitous circumstances added more the bliss

of the Major than a thousand such exhibitions would have done.

He forgot that he was man; music had lost its charms for him;

whenever he attempted to carry his part, the string of the instrument

would break, the bow became stubborn, and refused to obey the loud

calls of the audience.  Here, he said, was the paradise of his home,

the long-sought-for opportunity; he felt as though he could

send a million supplications to the throne of Heaven for such

an exalted privilege.  Poor Leos, who was somewhere in the crowd,

looking as attentively as if he was searching for a needle in a haystack;

here is stood, wondering to himself why Ambulinia was not there.

"Where can she be?  Oh! if she was only here, how I could relish

the scene!  Elfonzo is certainly not in town; but what if he is?

I have got the wealth, if I have not the dignity, and I am sure that

the squire and his lady have always been particular friends of mine,

and I think with this assurance I shall be able to get upon the blind

side of the rest of the family and make the heaven-born Ambulinia

the mistress of all I possess."  Then, again, he would drop his head,

as if attempting to solve the most difficult problem in Euclid.

While he was thus conjecturing in his own mind, a very interesting

part of the exhibition was going on, which called the attention

of all present.  The curtains of the stage waved continually

by the repelled forces that were given to them, which caused

Leos to behold Ambulinia leaning upon the chair of Elfonzo.

Her lofty beauty, seen by the glimmering of the chandelier,

filled his heart with rapture, he knew not how to contain himself;

to go where they were would expose him to ridicule; to continue

where he was, with such an object before him, without being allowed

an explanation in that trying hour, would be to the great injury

of his mental as well as of his physical powers; and, in the name

of high heaven, what must he do?  Finally, he resolved to contain

himself as well as he conveniently could, until the scene was over,

and then he would plant himself at the door, to arrest Ambulinia from

the hands of the insolent Elfonzo, and thus make for himself a more

prosperous field of immortality than ever was decreed by Omnipotence,

or ever pencil drew or artist imagined.  Accordingly he made

himself sentinel, immediately after the performance of the evening--

retained his position apparently in defiance of all the world; he waited,

he gazed at every lady, his whole frame trembled; here he stood,

until everything like human shape had disappeared from the institution,

and he had done nothing; he had failed to accomplish that which he

so eagerly sought for.  Poor, unfortunate creature! he had not

the eyes of an Argus, or he might have seen his Juno and Elfonzo,

assisted by his friend Sigma, make their escape from the window,

and, with the rapidity of a race-horse, hurry through the blast of

the storm to the residence of her father, without being recognized.

He did not tarry long, but assured Ambulinia the endless chain

of their existence was more closely connected than ever, since he

had seen the virtuous, innocent, imploring, and the constant

Amelia murdered by the jealous-hearted Farcillo, the accursed of

the land.



The following is the tragical scene, which is only introduced

to show the subject-matter that enabled Elfonzo to come to such

a determinate resolution that nothing of the kind should ever

dispossess him of his true character, should he be so fortunate

as to succeed in his present undertaking.



Amelia was the wife of Farcillo, and a virtuous woman; Gracia,

a young lady, was her particular friend and confidant.  Farcillo grew

jealous of Amelia, murders her, finds out that he was deceived,

AND STABS HIMSELF.  Amelia appears alone, talking to herself.



A. Hail, ye solitary ruins of antiquity, ye sacred tombs and

silent walks! it is your aid I invoke; it is to you, my soul,

wrapt in deep mediating, pours forth its prayer.  Here I wander upon

the stage of mortality, since the world hath turned against me.

Those whom I believed to be my friends, alas! are now my enemies,

planting thorns in all my paths, poisoning all my pleasures,

and turning the past to pain.  What a lingering catalogue of sighs

and tears lies just before me, crowding my aching bosom with

the fleeting dream of humanity, which must shortly terminate.

And to what purpose will all this bustle of life, these agitations

and emotions of the heart have conduced, if it leave behind it

nothing of utility, if it leave no traces of improvement?  Can it

be that I am deceived in my conclusions?  No, I see that I have

nothing to hope for, but everything for fear, which tends to drive

me from the walks of time.





Oh! in this dead night, if loud winds arise,



To lash the surge and bluster in the skies,



May the west its furious rage display,



Toss me with storms in the watery way.





(Enter Gracia.)





G. Oh, Amelia, is it you, the object of grief, the daughter of opulence,

of wisdom and philosophy, that thus complaineth?  It cannot be you

are the child of misfortune, speaking of the monuments of former ages,

which were allotted not for the reflection of the distressed,

but for the fearless and bold.



A. Not the child of poverty, Gracia, or the heir of glory and peace,

but of fate.  Remember, I have wealth more than wit can number; I have

had power more than kings could emcompass; yet the world seems a desert;

all nature appears an afflictive spectacle of warring passions.

This blind fatality, that capriciously sports with the rules

and lives of mortals, tells me that the mountains will never again

send forth the water of their springs to my thirst.  Oh, that I

might be freed and set at liberty from wretchedness!  But I fear,

I fear this will never be.



G. Why, Amelia, this untimely grief?  What has caused the sorrows

that bespeak better and happier days, to those lavish out such

heaps of misery?  You are aware that your instructive lessons

embellish the mind with holy truths, by wedding its attention

to none but great and noble affections.



A. This, of course, is some consolation.  I will ever love my own

species with feelings of a fond recollection, and while I am

studying to advance the universal philanthropy, and the spotless

name of my own sex, I will try to build my own upon the pleasing

belief that I have accelerated the advancement of one who whispers

of departed confidence.





And I, like some poor peasant fated to reside



Remote from friends, in a forest wide.



Oh, see what woman's woes and human wants require,



Since that great day hath spread the seed of sinful fire.





G. Look up, thou poor disconsolate; you speak of quitting

earthly enjoyments.  Unfold thy bosom to a friend, who would be

willing to sacrifice every enjoyment for the restoration of the

dignity and gentleness of mind which used to grace your walks,

and which is so natural to yourself; not only that, but your

paths were strewed with flowers of every hue and of every order.





With verdant green the mountains glow,



For thee, for thee, the lilies grow;



Far stretched beneath the tented hills,



A fairer flower the valley fills.





A. Oh, would to Heaven I could give you a short narrative of my

former prospects for happiness, since you have acknowledged to be

an unchangeable confidant--the richest of all other blessings.

Oh, ye names forever glorious, ye celebrated scenes, ye renowned

spot of my hymeneal moments; how replete is your chart with

sublime reflections!  How many profound vows, decorated with

immaculate deeds, are written upon the surface of that precious

spot of earth where I yielded up my life of celibacy, bade youth

with all its beauties a final adieu, took a last farewell of the

laurels that had accompanied me up the hill of my juvenile career.

It was then I began to descend toward the valley of disappointment

and sorrow; it was then I cast my little bark upon a mysterious ocean

of wedlock, with him who then smiled and caressed me, but, alas! now

frowns with bitterness, and has grown jealous and cold toward me,

because the ring he gave me is misplaced or lost.  Oh, bear me,

ye flowers of memory, softly through the eventful history of

past times; and ye places that have witnessed the progression of man

in the circle of so many societies, and, of, aid my recollection,

while I endeavor to trace the vicissitudes of a life devoted

in endeavoring to comfort him that I claim as the object of my wishes.





Ah! ye mysterious men, of all the world, how few



Act just to Heaven and to your promise true!



But He who guides the stars with a watchful eye,



The deeds of men lay open without disguise;



Oh, this alone will avenge the wrongs I bear,



For all the oppressed are His peculiar care.





(F. makes a slight noise.)





A. Who is there--Farcillo?



G. Then I must gone.  Heaven protect you.  Oh, Amelia, farewell,

be of good cheer.





May you stand like Olympus' towers,



Against earth and all jealous powers!



May you, with loud shouts ascend on high



Swift as an eagle in the upper sky.





A. Why so cold and distant tonight, Farcillo?  Come, let us each

other greet, and forget all the past, and give security for the future.



F. Security! talk to me about giving security for the future--

what an insulting requisition!  Have you said your prayers tonight,

Madam Amelia?



A. Farcillo, we sometimes forget our duty, particularly when we

expect to be caressed by others.



F. If you bethink yourself of any crime, or of any fault, that is

yet concealed from the courts of Heaven and the thrones of grace,

I bid you ask and solicit forgiveness for it now.



A. Oh, be kind, Farcillo, don't treat me so.  What do you mean

by all this?



F. Be kind, you say; you, madam, have forgot that kindness you owe

to me, and bestowed it upon another; you shall suffer for your

conduct when you make your peace with your God.  I would not slay thy

unprotected spirit.  I call to Heaven to be my guard and my watch--

I would not kill thy soul, in which all once seemed just, right,

and perfect; but I must be brief, woman.



A. What, talk you of killing?  Oh, Farcillo, Farcillo, what is

the matter?



F. Aye, I do, without doubt; mark what I say, Amelia.



A. Then, O God, O Heaven, and Angels, be propitious, and have mercy

upon me.



F. Amen to that, madam, with all my heart, and with all my soul.



A. Farcillo, listen to me one moment; I hope you will not kill me.



F. Kill you, aye, that I will; attest it, ye fair host of light,

record it, ye dark imps of hell!



A. Oh, I fear you--you are fatal when darkness covers your brow;

yet I know not why I should fear, since I never wronged you in all

my life.  I stand, sir, guiltless before you.



F. You pretend to say you are guiltless!  Think of thy sins,

Amelia; think, oh, think, hidden woman.



A. Wherein have I not been true to you?  That death is unkind,

cruel, and unnatural, that kills for living.



F. Peace, and be still while I unfold to thee.



A. I will, Farcillo, and while I am thus silent, tell me the cause

of such cruel coldness in an hour like this.



F. That RING, oh, that ring I so loved, and gave thee as the ring

of my heart; the allegiance you took to be faithful, when it

was presented; the kisses and smiles with which you honored it.

You became tired of the donor, despised it as a plague, and finally

gave it to Malos, the hidden, the vile traitor.



A. No, upon my word and honor, I never did; I appeal to the Most

High to bear me out in this matter.  Send for Malos, and ask him.



F. Send for Malos, aye!  Malos you wish to see; I thought so.

I knew you could not keep his name concealed.  Amelia, sweet Amelia,

take heed, take heed of perjury; you are on the stage of death,

to suffer for YOUR SINS.



A. What, not to die I hope, my Farcillo, my ever beloved.



F. Yes, madam, to die a traitor's death.  Shortly your spirit shall

take its exit; therefore confess freely thy sins, for to deny tends

only to make me groan under the bitter cup thou hast made for me.

Thou art to die with the name of traitor on thy brow!



A. Then, O Lord, have mercy upon me; give me courage, give me grace

and fortitude to stand this hour of trial.



F. Amen, I say, with all my heart.



A. And, oh, Farcillo, will you have mercy, too?  I never

intentionally offended you in all my life, never LOVED Malos,

never gave him cause to think so, as the high court of Justice

will acquit me before its tribunal.



F. Oh, false, perjured woman, thou didst chill my blood, and makest

me a demon like thyself.  I saw the ring.



A. He found it, then, or got it clandestinely; send for him,

and let him confess the truth; let his confession be sifted.



F. And you still with to see him!  I tell you, madam, he hath

already confessed, and thou knowest the darkness of thy heart.



A. What, my deceived Farcillo, that I gave him the ring, in which

all my affections were concentrated?  Oh, surely not.



F. Aye, he did.  Ask thy conscience, and it will speak with a voice

of thunder to thy soul.



A. He will not say so, he dare not, he cannot.



F. No, he will not say so now, because his mouth, I trust, is hushed

in death, and his body stretched to the four winds of heaven,

to be torn to pieces by carnivorous birds.



A. What, he is dead, and gone to the world of spirits with that

declaration in his mouth?  Oh, unhappy man!  Oh, insupportable hour!



F. Yes, and had all his sighs and looks and tears been lives, my great

revenge could have slain them all, without the least condemnation.



A. Alas! he is ushered into eternity without testing the matter

for which I am abused and sentenced and condemned to die.



F. Cursed, infernal woman!  Weepest thou for him to my face?  He that

hath robbed me of my peace, my energy, the whole love of my life?

Could I call the fabled Hydra, I would have him live and perish,

survive and die, until the sun itself would grow dim with age.

I would make him have the thirst of a Tantalus, and roll the

wheel of an Ixion, until the stars of heaven should quit their

brilliant stations.



A. Oh, invincible God, save me!  Oh, unsupportable moment!  Oh, heavy

hour!  Banish me,, Farcillo--send me where no eye can ever see me, where

no sound shall ever great my ear; but, oh, slay me not, Farcillo; vent thy

rage and thy spite upon this emaciated frame of mine, only spare my life.



F. Your petitions avail nothing, cruel Amelia.



A. Oh, Farcillo, perpetrate the dark deed tomorrow; let me live

till then, for my past kindness to you, and it may be some kind

angel will show to you that I am not only the object of innocence,

but one who never loved another but your noble self.



F. Amelia, the decree has gone forth, it is to be done, and that quickly;

thou art to die, madam.



A. But half an hour allow me, to see my father and my only child,

to tell her the treachery and vanity of this world.



F. There is no alternative, there is no pause:  my daughter shall

not see its deceptive mother die; your father shall not know that his

daughter fell disgraced, despised by all but her enchanting Malos.



A. Oh, Farcillo, put up thy threatening dagger into its scabbard;

let it rest and be still, just while I say one prayer for thee and

for my child.



F. It is too late, thy doom is fixed, thou hast not confessed

to Heaven or to me, my child's protector--thou art to die.

Ye powers of earth and heaven, protect and defend me in this alone.

(STABS HER WHILE IMPLORING FOR MERCY.)



A. Oh, Farcillo, Farcillo, a guiltless death I die.



F. Die! die! die!





(Gracia enters running, falls on her knees weeping, and kisses Amelia.)





G. Oh, Farcillo, Farcillo! oh, Farcillo!



F. I am here, the genius of the age, and the avenger of my wrongs.



G. Oh, lady, speak once more; sweet Amelia, on, speak again.

Gone, gone--yes, forever gone!  Farcillo, oh, cold-hearted Farcillo,

some evil fiend hath urged you to do this, Farcillo.



F. Say not so again, or you shall receive the same fate.  I did

the glorious deed, madam--beware, then, how you talk.



G. I fear not your implements of war; I will let you know you have

not the power to do me harm.  If you have a heart of triple brass,

it shall be reached and melted, and thy blood shall chill thy veins

and grow stiff in thy arteries.  Here is the ring of the virtuous

and innocent murdered Amelia; I obtained it from Malos, who yet lives,

in hopes that he will survive the wound given him, and says he got

it clandestinely--declares Amelia to be the princess of truth and virtue,

invulnerable to anything like forgetting her first devotion to thee.

The world has heard of your conduct and your jealousy, and with

one universal voice declares her to be the best of all in piety;

that she is the star of this great universe, and a more virtuous

woman never lived since the wheels of time began.  Oh, had you waited

till tomorrow, or until I had returned, some kind window would have

been opened to her relief.  But, alas! she is gone--yes, forever gone,

to try the realities of an unknown world!





(Farcillo leaning over the body of Amelia.)





F. Malos not dead, and here is my ring!  Oh, Amelia! falsely murdered!

Oh, bloody deed!  Oh, wretch that I am!  Oh, angels forgive me!  Oh, God,

withhold thy vengeance!  Oh, Amelia! if Heaven would make a thousand

worlds like this, set with diamonds, and all of one perfect chrysolite,

I would not have done this for them all, I would not have frowned

and cursed as I did.  Oh, she was heavenly true, nursed in the very

lap of bright angels!  Cursed slave that I am!  Jealousy, oh! thou

infernal demon!  Lost, lost to every sense of honor!  Oh!  Amelia--

heaven-born Amelia--dead, dead!  Oh! oh! oh!--then let me die with

thee.  Farewell! farewell! ye world that deceived me!  (STABS HIMSELF.)





Soon after the excitement of this tragical scene was over,

and the enlisted feeling for Amelia had grown more buoyant with

Elfonzo and Ambulinia, he determined to visit his retired home,

and make the necessary improvements to enjoy a better day;

consequently he conveyed the following lines to Ambulinia:





Go tell the world that hope is glowing,



Go bid the rocks their silence break,



Go tell the stars that love is glowing,



Then bid the hero his lover take.





In the region where scarcely the foot of man hath ever trod,

where the woodman hath not found his way, lies a blooming grove,

seen only by the sun when he mounts his lofty throne, visited only

by the light of the stars, to whom are entrusted the guardianship

of earth, before the sun sinks to rest in his rosy bed.  High cliffs

of rocks surround the romantic place, and in the small cavity of

the rocky wall grows the daffodil clear and pure; and as the wind

blows along the enchanting little mountain which surrounds the

lonely spot, it nourishes the flowers with the dew-drops of heaven.

Here is the seat of Elfonzo; darkness claims but little victory over

this dominion, and in vain does she spread out her gloomy wings.

Here the waters flow perpetually, and the trees lash their tops

together to bid the welcome visitor a happy muse.  Elfonzo, during his

short stay in the country, had fully persuaded himself that it was

his duty to bring this solemn matter to an issue.  A duty that he

individually owed, as a gentleman, to the parents of Ambulinia,

a duty in itself involving not only his own happiness and his own

standing in society, but one that called aloud the act of the parties

to make it perfect and complete.  How he should communicate his

intentions to get a favorable reply, he was at a loss to know;

he knew not whether to address Esq. Valeer in prose or in poetry,

in a jocular or an argumentative manner, or whether he should use

moral suasion, legal injunction, or seizure and take by reprisal;

if it was to do the latter, he would have no difficulty in deciding

in his own mind, but his gentlemanly honor was at stake; so he

concluded to address the following letter to the father and mother

of Ambulinia, as his address in person he knew would only aggravate

the old gentleman, and perhaps his lady.







Cumming, Ga., January 22, 1844



Mr. and Mrs. Valeer--





Again I resume the pleasing task of addressing you, and once more beg

an immediate answer to my many salutations.  From every circumstance

that has taken place, I feel in duty bound to comply with my obligations;

to forfeit my word would be more than I dare do; to break my pledge,

and my vows that have been witnessed, sealed, and delivered in the

presence of an unseen Deity, would be disgraceful on my part, as well

as ruinous to Ambulinia.  I wish no longer to be kept in suspense

about this matter.  I wish to act gentlemanly in every particular.

It is true, the promises I have made are unknown to any but Ambulinia,

and I think it unnecessary to here enumerate them, as they who

promise the most generally perform the least.  Can you for a moment

doubt my sincerity or my character?  My only wish is, sir, that you

may calmly and dispassionately look at the situation of the case,

and if your better judgment should dictate otherwise, my obligations

may induce me to pluck the flower that you so diametrically opposed.

We have sword by the saints--by the gods of battle, and by that

faith whereby just men are made perfect--to be united.  I hope,

my dear sir, you will find it convenient as well as agreeable

to give me a favorable answer, with the signature of Mrs. Valeer,

as well as yourself.





With very great esteem,



your humble servant,



J. I. Elfonzo.







The moon and stars had grown pale when Ambulinia had retired

to rest.  A crowd of unpleasant thoughts passed through her bosom.

Solitude dwelt in her chamber--no sound from the neighboring

world penetrated its stillness; it appeared a temple of silence,

of repose, and of mystery.  At that moment she heard a still voice

calling her father.  In an instant, like the flash of lightning,

a thought ran through her mind that it must be the bearer

of Elfonzo's communication.  "It is not a dream!" she said,

"no, I cannot read dreams.  Oh!  I would to Heaven I was near

that glowing eloquence--that poetical language--it charms the

mind in an inexpressible manner, and warms the coldest heart."

While consoling herself with this strain, her father rushed into

her room almost frantic with rage, exclaiming:  "Oh, Ambulinia!

Ambulinia!! undutiful, ungrateful daughter!  What does this mean?

Why does this letter bear such heart-rending intelligence?

Will you quit a father's house with this debased wretch, without a

place to lay his distracted head; going up and down the country,

with every novel object that many chance to wander through this region.

He is a pretty man to make love known to his superiors, and you,

Ambulinia, have done but little credit to yourself by honoring

his visits.  Oh, wretchedness! can it be that my hopes of happiness

are forever blasted!  Will you not listen to a father's entreaties,

and pay some regard to a mother's tears.  I know, and I do pray that God

will give me fortitude to bear with this sea of troubles, and rescue

my daughter, my Ambulinia, as a brand from the eternal burning."

"Forgive me, father, oh! forgive thy child," replied Ambulinia.

"My heart is ready to break, when I see you in this grieved state

of agitation.  Oh! think not so meanly of me, as that I mourn

for my own danger.  Father, I am only woman.  Mother, I am only

the templement of thy youthful years, but will suffer courageously

whatever punishment you think proper to inflict upon me, if you will

but allow me to comply with my most sacred promises--if you will but

give me my personal right and my personal liberty.  Oh, father! if

your generosity will but give me these, I ask nothing more.

When Elfonzo offered me his heart, I gave him my hand, never to

forsake him, and now may the mighty God banish me before I leave him

in adversity.  What a heart must I have to rejoice in prosperity

with him whose offers I have accepted, and then, when poverty comes,

haggard as it may be, for me to trifle with the oracles of Heaven,

and change with every fluctuation that may interrupt our happiness--

like the politician who runs the political gantlet for office one day,

and the next day, because the horizon is darkened a little, he is

seen running for his life, for fear he might perish in its ruins.

Where is the philosophy, where is the consistency, where is the charity,

in conduct like this?  Be happy then, my beloved father, and forget me;

let the sorrow of parting break down the wall of separation and make

us equal in our feeling; let me now say how ardently I love you;

let me kiss that age-worn cheek, and should my tears bedew thy face,

I will wipe them away.  Oh, I never can forget you; no, never, never!"



"Weep not," said the father, "Ambulinia.  I will forbid Elfonzo

my house, and desire that you may keep retired a few days.  I will

let him know that my friendship for my family is not linked together

by cankered chains; and if he ever enters upon my premises again,

I will send him to his long home."  "Oh, father! let me entreat you

to be calm upon this occasion, and though Elfonzo may be the sport

of the clouds and winds, yet I feel assured that no fate will send

him to the silent tomb until the God of the Universe calls him

hence with a triumphant voice."



Here the father turned away, exclaiming:  "I will answer his letter

in a very few words, and you, madam, will have the goodness to stay

at home with your mother; and remember, I am determined to protect

you from the consuming fire that looks so fair to your view."







Cumming, January 22, 1844.





Sir--In regard to your request, I am as I ever have been, utterly opposed

to your marrying into my family; and if you have any regard for yourself,

or any gentlemanly feeling, I hope you will mention it to me no more;

but seek some other one who is not so far superior to you in standing.





W. W. Valeer.







When Elfonzo read the above letter, he became so much depressed

in spirits that many of his friends thought it advisable to use

other means to bring about the happy union.  "Strange," said he,

"that the contents of this diminutive letter should cause me to have

such depressed feelings; but there is a nobler theme than this.  I know

not why my MILITARY TITLE is not as great as that of SQUIRE VALEER.

For my life I cannot see that my ancestors are inferior to those

who are so bitterly opposed to my marriage with Ambulinia.  I know

I have seen huge mountains before me, yet, when I think that I know

gentlemen will insult me upon this delicate matter, should I become

angry at fools and babblers, who pride themselves in their impudence

and ignorance?  No. My equals!  I know not where to find them.

My inferiors!  I think it beneath me; and my superiors!  I think

it presumption; therefore, if this youthful heart is protected

by any of the divine rights, I never will betray my trust."



He was aware that Ambulinia had a confidence that was, indeed,

as firm and as resolute as she was beautiful and interesting.

He hastened to the cottage of Louisa, who received him in her usual

mode of pleasantness, and informed him that Ambulinia had just that

moment left.  "Is it possible?" said Elfonzo.  "Oh, murdered hours!

Why did she not remain and be the guardian of my secrets?

But hasten and tell me how she has stood this trying scene,

and what are her future determinations."  "You know," said Louisa,

"Major Elfonzo, that you have Ambulinia's first love, which is

of no small consequence.  She came here about twilight, and shed

many precious tears in consequence of her own fate with yours.

We walked silently in yon little valley you see, where we spent

a momentary repose.  She seemed to be quite as determined as ever,

and before we left that beautiful spot she offered up a prayer

to Heaven for thee."  "I will see her then," replied Elfonzo,

"though legions of enemies may oppose.  She is mine by foreordination--

she is mine by prophesy--she is mine by her own free will, and I

will rescue her from the hands of her oppressors.  Will you not,

Miss Louisa, assist me in my capture?"



"I will certainly, by the aid of Divine Providence," answered Louisa,

"endeavor to break those slavish chains that bind the richest of prizes;

though allow me, Major, to entreat you to use no harsh means on this

important occasion; take a decided stand, and write freely to Ambulinia

upon this subject, and I will see that no intervening cause hinders

its passage to her.  God alone will save a mourning people.  Now is

the day and now is the hour to obey a command of such valuable worth."

The Major felt himself grow stronger after this short interview

with Louisa.  He felt as if he could whip his weight in wildcats--

he knew he was master of his own feelings, and could now write

a letter that would bring this litigation to AN ISSUE.







Cumming, January 24, 1844.



Dear Ambulinia--





We have now reached the most trying moment of our lives; we are

pledged not to forsake our trust; we have waited for a favorable hour

to come, thinking your friends would settle the matter agreeably

among themselves, and finally be reconciled to our marriage;

but as I have waited in vain, and looked in vain, I have determined

in my own mind to make a proposition to you, though you may think

it not in accord with your station, or compatible with your rank;

yet, "sub loc signo vinces."  You know I cannot resume my visits,

in consequence of the utter hostility that your father has to me;

therefore the consummation of our union will have to be sought

for in a more sublime sphere, at the residence of a respectable

friend of this village.  You cannot have an scruples upon this

mode of proceeding, if you will but remember it emanates from one

who loves you better than his own life--who is more than anxious

to bid you welcome to a new and happy home.  Your warmest associates

say come; the talented, the learned, the wise, and the experienced

say come;--all these with their friends say, come.  Viewing these,

with many other inducements, I flatter myself that you will come

to the embraces of your Elfonzo; for now is the time of your

acceptance of the day of your liberation.  You cannot be ignorant,

Ambulinia, that thou art the desire of my heart; its thoughts

are too noble, and too pure, to conceal themselves from you.

I shall wait for your answer to this impatiently, expecting that you

will set the time to make your departure, and to be in readiness

at a moment's warning to share the joys of a more preferable life.

This will be handed to you by Louisa, who will take a pleasure in

communicating anything to you that may relieve your dejected spirits,

and will assure you that I now stand ready, willing, and waiting

to make good my vows.



I am, dear Ambulinia, your



truly, and forever,



J. I. Elfonzo.







Louisa made it convenient to visit Mr. Valeer's, though they

did not suspect her in the least the bearer of love epistles;

consequently, she was invited in the room to console Ambulinia,

where they were left alone.  Ambulinia was seated by a small table--

her head resting on her hand--her brilliant eyes were bathed in tears.

Louisa handed her the letter of Elfonzo, when another spirit animated

her features--the spirit of renewed confidence that never fails

to strengthen the female character in an hour of grief and sorrow

like this, and as she pronounced the last accent of his name,

she exclaimed, "And does he love me yet!  I never will forget

your generosity, Louisa.  Oh, unhappy and yet blessed Louisa! may you

never feel what I have felt--may you never know the pangs of love.

Had I never loved, I never would have been unhappy; but I turn to Him

who can save, and if His wisdom does not will my expected union,

I know He will give me strength to bear my lot.  Amuse yourself

with this little book, and take it as an apology for my silence,"

said Ambulinia, "while I attempt to answer this volume of consolation."

"Thank you," said Louisa, "you are excusable upon this occasion;

but I pray you, Ambulinia, to be expert upon this momentous subject,

that there may be nothing mistrustful upon my part."  "I will,"

said Ambulinia, and immediately resumed her seat and addressed the

following to Elfonzo:







Cumming, Ga., January 28, 1844.



Devoted Elfonzo--





I hail your letter as a welcome messenger of faith, and can now

say truly and firmly that my feelings correspond with yours.

Nothing shall be wanting on my part to make my obedience your fidelity.

Courage and perseverance will accomplish success.  Receive this

as my oath, that while I grasp your hand in my own imagination,

we stand united before a higher tribunal than any on earth.

All the powers of my life, soul, and body, I devote to thee.

Whatever dangers may threaten me, I fear not to encounter them.

Perhaps I have determined upon my own destruction, by leaving

the house of the best of parents; be it so; I flee to you; I share

your destiny, faithful to the end.  The day that I have concluded

upon for this task is SABBATH next, when the family with the citizens

are generally at church.  For Heaven's sake let not that day

pass unimproved:  trust not till tomorrow, it is the cheat of life--

the future that never comes--the grave of many noble births--

the cavern of ruined enterprise:  which like the lightning's

flash is born, and dies, and perishes, ere the voice of him

who sees can cry, BEHOLD!  BEHOLD!! You may trust to what I say,

no power shall tempt me to betray confidence.  Suffer me to add one

word more.





I will soothe thee, in all thy grief,



Beside the gloomy river;



And though thy love may yet be brief;



Mine is fixed forever.





Receive the deepest emotions of my heart for thy constant love,

and may the power of inspiration by thy guide, thy portion, and thy all.

In great haste,



Yours faithfully,



Ambulinia.







"I now take my leave of you, sweet girl," said Louisa, "sincerely

wishing you success on Sabbath next."  When Ambulinia's letter was

handed to Elfonzo, he perused it without doubting its contents.

Louisa charged him to make but few confidants; but like most young

men who happened to win the heart of a beautiful girl, he was so

elated with the idea that he felt as a commanding general on parade,

who had confidence in all, consequently gave orders to all.

The appointed Sabbath, with a delicious breeze and cloudless sky,

made its appearance.  The people gathered in crowds to the church--

the streets were filled with neighboring citizens, all marching

to the house of worship.  It is entirely useless for me to attempt

to describe the feelings of Elfonzo and Ambulinia, who were silently

watching the movements of the multitude, apparently counting them as then

entered the house of God, looking for the last one to darken the door.

The impatience and anxiety with which they waited, and the bliss

they anticipated on the eventful day, is altogether indescribable.

Those that have been so fortunate as to embark in such a noble

enterprise know all its realities; and those who have not had this

inestimable privilege will have to taste its sweets before they can

tell to others its joys, its comforts, and its Heaven-born worth.

Immediately after Ambulinia had assisted the family off to church,

she took advantage of that opportunity to make good her promises.

She left a home of enjoyment to be wedded to one whose love had

been justifiable.  A few short steps brought her to the presence

of Louisa, who urged her to make good use of her time, and not

to delay a moment, but to go with her to her brother's house,

where Elfonzo would forever make her happy.  With lively speed,

and yet a graceful air, she entered the door and found herself

protected by the champion of her confidence.  The necessary

arrangements were fast making to have the two lovers united--

everything was in readiness except the parson; and as they are

generally very sanctimonious on such occasions, the news got

to the parents of Ambulinia before the everlasting knot was tied,

and they both came running, with uplifted hands and injured feelings,

to arrest their daughter from an unguarded and hasty resolution.

Elfonzo desired to maintain his ground, but Ambulinia thought

it best for him to leave, to prepare for a greater contest.

He accordingly obeyed, as it would have been a vain endeavor for him

to have battled against a man who was armed with deadly weapons;

and besides, he could not resist the request of such a pure heart.

Ambulinia concealed herself in the upper story of the house, fearing

the rebuke of her father; the door was locked, and no chastisement

was now expected.  Esquire Valeer, whose pride was already touched,

resolved to preserve the dignity of his family.  He entered the house

almost exhausted, looking wildly for Ambulinia.  "Amazed and astonished

indeed I am," said he, "at a people who call themselves civilized,

to allow such behavior as this.  Ambulinia, Ambulinia!" he cried,

"come to the calls of your first, your best, and your only friend.

I appeal to you, sir," turning to the gentleman of the house,

"to know where Ambulinia has gone, or where is she?"  "Do you mean

to insult me, sir, in my own house?" inquired the gentleman.

"I will burst," said Mr. V., "asunder every door in your dwelling,

in search of my daughter, if you do not speak quickly, and tell me

where she is.  I care nothing about that outcast rubbish of creation,

that mean, low-lived Elfonzo, if I can but obtain Ambulinia.

Are you not going to open this door?" said he.  "By the Eternal

that made Heaven and earth!  I will go about the work instantly,

if this is not done!"  The confused citizens gathered from all

parts of the village, to know the cause of this commotion.

Some rushed into the house; the door that was locked flew open,

and there stood Ambulinia, weeping.  "Father, be still," said she,

"and I will follow thee home."  But the agitated man seized her,

and bore her off through the gazing multitude.  "Father!" she exclaimed,

"I humbly beg your pardon--I will be dutiful--I will obey thy commands.

Let the sixteen years I have lived in obedience to thee by my

future security."  "I don't like to be always giving credit,

when the old score is not paid up, madam," said the father.  The mother

followed almost in a state of derangement, crying and imploring

her to think beforehand, and ask advice from experienced persons,

and they would tell her it was a rash undertaking.  "Oh!" said she,

"Ambulinia, my daughter, did you know what I have suffered--

did you know how many nights I have whiled away in agony,

in pain, and in fear, you would pity the sorrows of a heartbroken

mother."



"Well, mother," replied Ambulinia, "I know I have been disobedient;

I am aware that what I have done might have been done much better;

but oh! what shall I do with my honor? it is so dear to me;

I am pledged to Elfonzo.  His high moral worth is certainly worth

some attention; moreover, my vows, I have no doubt, are recorded

in the book of life, and must I give these all up? must my fair

hopes be forever blasted?  Forbid it, father; oh! forbid it, mother;

forbid it, Heaven."  "I have seen so many beautiful skies overclouded,"

replied the mother, "so many blossoms nipped by the frost,

that I am afraid to trust you to the care of those fair days,

which may be interrupted by thundering and tempestuous nights.

You no doubt think as I did--life's devious ways were strewn with

sweet-scented flowers, but ah! how long they have lingered around me

and took their flight in the vivid hope that laughs at the drooping

victims it has murdered."  Elfonzo was moved at this sight.

The people followed on to see what was going to become of Ambulinia,

while he, with downcast looks, kept at a distance, until he saw

them enter the abode of the father, thrusting her, that was the

sigh of his soul, out of his presence into a solitary apartment,

when she exclaimed, "Elfonzo!  Elfonzo! oh, Elfonzo! where art thou,

with all thy heroes? haste, oh! haste, come thou to my relief.

Ride on the wings of the wind!  Turn thy force loose like a tempest,

and roll on thy army like a whirlwind, over this mountain of trouble

and confusion.  Oh, friends! if any pity me, let your last efforts

throng upon the green hills, and come to the relief of Ambulinia,

who is guilty of nothing but innocent love."  Elfonzo called out with

a loud voice, "My God, can I stand this! arise up, I beseech you,

and put an end to this tyranny.  Come, my brave boys," said he,

"are you ready to go forth to your duty?"  They stood around him.

"Who," said he, "will call us to arms?  Where are my thunderbolts of war?

Speak ye, the first who will meet the foe!  Who will go forward with me

in this ocean of grievous temptation?  If there is one who desires

to go, let him come and shake hands upon the altar of devotion,

and swear that he will be a hero; yes, a Hector in a cause like this,

which calls aloud for a speedy remedy."  "Mine be the deed,"

said a young lawyer, "and mine alone; Venus alone shall quit her

station before I will forsake one jot or tittle of my promise to you;

what is death to me? what is all this warlike army, if it is not

to win a victory?  I love the sleep of the lover and the mighty;

nor would I give it over till the blood of my enemies should wreak

with that of my own.  But God forbid that our fame should soar

on the blood of the slumberer."  Mr. Valeer stands at his door

with the frown of a demon upon his brow, with his dangerous

weapon ready to strike the first man who should enter his door.

"Who will arise and go forward through blood and carnage to the rescue

of my Ambulinia?" said Elfonzo.  "All," exclaimed the multitude;

and onward they went, with their implements of battle.  Others, of a

more timid nature, stood among the distant hills to see the result of

the contest.



Elfonzo took the lead of his band.  Night arose in clouds;

darkness concealed the heavens; but the blazing hopes that stimulated

them gleamed in every bosom.  All approached the anxious spot;

they rushed to the front of the house and, with one exclamation,

demanded Ambulinia.  "Away, begone, and disturb my peace no more,"

said Mr. Valeer.  "You are a set of base, insolent, and infernal rascals.

Go, the northern star points your path through the dim twilight of

the night; go, and vent your spite upon the lonely hills; pour forth

your love, you poor, weak-minded wretch, upon your idleness and upon

your guitar, and your fiddle; they are fit subjects for your admiration,

for let me assure you, though this sword and iron lever are cankered,

yet they frown in sleep, and let one of you dare to enter my

house this night and you shall have the contents and the weight

of these instruments."  "Never yet did base dishonor blur my name,"

said Elfonzo; "mine is a cause of renown; here are my warriors;

fear and tremble, for this night, though hell itself should oppose,

I will endeavor to avenge her whom thou hast banished in solitude.

The voice of Ambulinia shall be heard from that dark dungeon."

At that moment Ambulinia appeared at the window above, and with a

tremulous voice said, "Live, Elfonzo! oh! live to raise my stone

of moss! why should such language enter your heart? why should thy

voice rend the air with such agitation?  I bid thee live, once more

remembering these tears of mine are shed alone for thee, in this dark

and gloomy vault, and should I perish under this load of trouble,

join the song of thrilling accents with the raven above my grave,

and lay this tattered frame beside the banks of the Chattahoochee

or the stream of Sawney's brook; sweet will be the song of death to

your Ambulinia.  My ghost shall visit you in the smiles of Paradise,

and tell your high fame to the minds of that region, which is far more

preferable than this lonely cell.  My heart shall speak for thee till

the latest hour; I know faint and broken are the sounds of sorrow,

yet our souls, Elfonzo, shall hear the peaceful songs together.

One bright name shall be ours on high, if we are not permitted to be

united here; bear in mind that I still cherish my old sentiments,

and the poet will mingle the names of Elfonzo and Ambulinia

in the tide of other days."  "Fly, Elfonzo, " said the voices

of his united band, "to the wounded heart of your beloved.

All enemies shall fall beneath thy sword.  Fly through the clefts,

and the dim spark shall sleep in death."  Elfonzo rushes forward

and strikes his shield against the door, which was barricaded,

to prevent any intercourse.  His brave sons throng around him.

The people pour along the streets, both male and female, to prevent or

witness the melancholy scene.



"To arms, to arms!" cried Elfonzo; "here is a victory to be won,

a prize to be gained that is more to me that the whole world beside."

"It cannot be done tonight," said Mr. Valeer.  "I bear the clang

of death; my strength and armor shall prevail.  My Ambulinia shall

rest in this hall until the break of another day, and if we fall,

we fall together.  If we die, we die clinging to our tattered rights,

and our blood alone shall tell the mournful tale of a murdered

daughter and a ruined father."  Sure enough, he kept watch all night,

and was successful in defending his house and family.  The bright

morning gleamed upon the hills, night vanished away, the Major

and his associates felt somewhat ashamed that they had not been as

fortunate as they expected to have been; however, they still leaned

upon their arms in dispersed groups; some were walking the streets,

others were talking in the Major's behalf.  Many of the citizen

suspended business, as the town presented nothing but consternation.

A novelty that might end in the destruction of some worthy

and respectable citizens.  Mr. Valeer ventured in the streets,

though not without being well armed.  Some of his friends congratulated

him on the decided stand he had taken, and hoped he would settle

the matter amicably with Elfonzo, without any serious injury.

"Me," he replied, "what, me, condescend to fellowship with a coward,

and a low-lived, lazy, undermining villain? no, gentlemen, this cannot be;

I had rather be borne off, like the bubble upon the dark blue ocean,

with Ambulinia by my side, than to have him in the ascending

or descending line of relationship.  Gentlemen," continued he,

"if Elfonzo is so much of a distinguished character, and is so

learned in the fine arts, why do you not patronize such men? why

not introduce him into your families, as a gentleman of taste

and of unequaled magnanimity? why are you so very anxious that he

should become a relative of mine?  Oh, gentlemen, I fear you yet

are tainted with the curiosity of our first parents, who were

beguiled by the poisonous kiss of an old ugly serpent, and who,

for one APPLE, DAMNED all mankind.  I wish to divest myself, as far

as possible, of that untutored custom.  I have long since learned

that the perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy,

is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambition to

our capacities; we will then be a happy and a virtuous people."

Ambulinia was sent off to prepare for a long and tedious journey.

Her new acquaintances had been instructed by her father how to treat her,

and in what manner, and to keep the anticipated visit entirely secret.

Elfonzo was watching the movements of everybody; some friends

had told him of the plot that was laid to carry off Ambulinia.

At night, he rallied some two or three of his forces, and went

silently along to the stately mansion; a faint and glimmering light

showed through the windows; lightly he steps to the door; there were

many voices rallying fresh in fancy's eye; he tapped the shutter;

it was opened instantly, and he beheld once more, seated beside

several ladies, the hope of all his toils; he rushed toward her,

she rose from her seat, rejoicing; he made one mighty grasp,

when Ambulinia exclaimed, "Huzza for Major Elfonzo!  I will defend

myself and you, too, with this conquering instrument I hold in my hand;

huzza, I say, I now invoke time's broad wing to shed around us some

dewdrops of verdant spring."



But the hour had not come for this joyous reunion; her friends

struggled with Elfonzo for some time, and finally succeeded

in arresting her from his hands.  He dared not injure them,

because they were matrons whose courage needed no spur;

she was snatched from the arms of Elfonzo, with so much eagerness,

and yet with such expressive signification, that he calmly withdrew

from this lovely enterprise, with an ardent hope that he should be

lulled to repose by the zephyrs which whispered peace to his soul.

Several long days and night passed unmolested, all seemed to have

grounded their arms of rebellion, and no callidity appeared to be

going on with any of the parties.  Other arrangements were made

by Ambulinia; she feigned herself to be entirely the votary of a

mother's care, and she, by her graceful smiles, that manhood might

claim his stern dominion in some other region, where such boisterous

love was not so prevalent.  This gave the parents a confidence

that yielded some hours of sober joy; they believed that Ambulinia

would now cease to love Elfonzo, and that her stolen affections

would now expire with her misguided opinions.  They therefore

declined the idea of sending her to a distant land.  But oh! they

dreamed not of the rapture that dazzled the fancy of Ambulinia,

who would say, when alone, youth should not fly away on his rosy

pinions, and leave her to grapple in the conflict with unknown admirers.





No frowning age shall control



The constant current of my soul,



Nor a tear from pity's eye



Shall check my sympathetic sigh.





With this resolution fixed in her mind, one dark and dreary night,

when the winds whistled and the tempest roared, she received intelligence

that Elfonzo was then waiting, and every preparation was then ready,

at the residence of Dr. Tully, and for her to make a quick escape

while the family was reposing.  Accordingly she gathered her books,

went the wardrobe supplied with a variety of ornamental dressing,

and ventured alone in the streets to make her way to Elfonzo,

who was near at hand, impatiently looking and watching her arrival.

"What forms," said she, "are those rising before me?  What is

that dark spot on the clouds?  I do wonder what frightful ghost

that is, gleaming on the red tempest?  Oh, be merciful and tell me

what region you are from.  Oh, tell me, ye strong spirits, or ye

dark and fleeting clouds, that I yet have a friend."  "A friend,"

said a low, whispering voice.  "I am thy unchanging, thy aged,

and thy disappointed mother.  Why brandish in that hand of thine

a javelin of pointed steel?  Why suffer that lip I have kissed

a thousand times to equivocate?  My daughter, let these tears sink

deep into thy soul, and no longer persist in that which may be your

destruction and ruin.  Come, my dear child, retract your steps,

and bear me company to your welcome home."  Without one retorting word,

or frown from her brow, she yielded to the entreaties of her mother,

and with all the mildness of her former character she went along

with the silver lamp of age, to the home of candor and benevolence.

Her father received her cold and formal politeness--"Where has

Ambulinia been, this blustering evening, Mrs. Valeer?" inquired he.

"Oh, she and I have been taking a solitary walk," said the mother;

"all things, I presume, are now working for the best."



Elfonzo heard this news shortly after it happened.  "What," said he,

"has heaven and earth turned against me?  I have been disappointed

times without number.  Shall I despair?--must I give it over?

Heaven's decrees will not fade; I will write again--I will try again;

and if it traverses a gory field, I pray forgiveness at the altar

of justice."







Desolate Hill, Cumming, Geo., 1844.



Unconquered and Beloved Ambulinia--



I have only time to say to you, not to despair; thy fame shall

not perish; my visions are brightening before me.  The whirlwind's

rage is past, and we now shall subdue our enemies without doubt.

On Monday morning, when your friends are at breakfast, they will

not suspect your departure, or even mistrust me being in town,

as it has been reported advantageously that I have left for the west.

You walk carelessly toward the academy grove, where you will find

me with a lightning steed, elegantly equipped to bear you off where

we shall be joined in wedlock with the first connubial rights.

Fail not to do this--think not of the tedious relations of our wrongs--

be invincible.  You alone occupy all my ambition, and I alone will

make you my happy spouse, with the same unimpeached veracity.

I remain, forever, your devoted friend and admirer, J. L. Elfonzo.







The appointed day ushered in undisturbed by any clouds; nothing disturbed

Ambulinia's soft beauty.  With serenity and loveliness she obeys

the request of Elfonzo.  The moment the family seated themselves

at the table--"Excuse my absence for a short time," said she,

"while I attend to the placing of those flowers, which should have

been done a week ago."  And away she ran to the sacred grove,

surrounded with glittering pearls, that indicated her coming.

Elfonzo hails her with his silver bow and his golden harp.  They meet--

Ambulinia's countenance brightens--Elfonzo leads up his winged steed.

"Mount," said he, "ye true-hearted, ye fearless soul--the day

is ours."  She sprang upon the back of the young thunder bolt,

a brilliant star sparkles upon her head, with one hand she

grasps the reins, and with the other she holds an olive branch.

"Lend thy aid, ye strong winds," they exclaimed, "ye moon, ye sun,

and all ye fair host of heaven, witness the enemy conquered."

"Hold," said Elfonzo, "thy dashing steed."  "Ride on," said Ambulinia,

"the voice of thunder is behind us."  And onward they went,

with such rapidity that they very soon arrived at Rural Retreat,

where they dismounted, and were united with all the solemnities

that usually attend such divine operations.  They passed the day

in thanksgiving and great rejoicing, and on that evening they

visited their uncle, where many of their friends and acquaintances

had gathered to congratulate them in the field of untainted bliss.

The kind old gentleman met them in the yard:  "Well," said he, "I wish

I may die, Elfonzo, if you and Ambulinia haven't tied a knot with your

tongue that you can't untie with your teeth.  But come in, come in,

never mind, all is right--the world still moves on, and no one has

fallen in this great battle."



Happy now is there lot!  Unmoved by misfortune, they live among the

fair beauties of the South.  Heaven spreads their peace and fame upon

the arch of the rainbow, and smiles propitiously at their triumph,

THROUGH THE TEARS OF THE STORM.





***







THE CALIFORNIAN'S TALE







Thirty-five years ago I was out prospecting on the Stanislaus,

tramping all day long with pick and pan and horn, and washing a hatful

of dirt here and there, always expecting to make a rich strike,

and never doing it.  It was a lovely reason, woodsy, balmy, delicious,

and had once been populous, long years before, but now the

people had vanished and the charming paradise was a solitude.

They went away when the surface diggings gave out.  In one place,

where a busy little city with banks and newspapers and fire companies

and a mayor and aldermen had been, was nothing but a wide expanse

of emerald turf, with not even the faintest sign that human life

had ever been present there.  This was down toward Tuttletown.

In the country neighborhood thereabouts, along the dusty roads,

one found at intervals the prettiest little cottage homes, snug and cozy,

and so cobwebbed with vines snowed thick with roses that the doors

and windows were wholly hidden from sight--sign that these were

deserted homes, forsaken years ago by defeated and disappointed

families who could neither sell them nor give them away.  Now and then,

half an hour apart, one came across solitary log cabins of the earliest

mining days, built by the first gold-miners, the predecessors of the

cottage-builders. In some few cases these cabins were still occupied;

and when this was so, you could depend upon it that the occupant

was the very pioneer who had built the cabin; and you could depend

on another thing, too--that he was there because he had once had

his opportunity to go home to the States rich, and had not done it;

had rather lost his wealth, and had then in his humiliation resolved

to sever all communication with his home relatives and friends,

and be to them thenceforth as one dead.  Round about California

in that day were scattered a host of these living dead men--

pride-smitten poor fellows, grizzled and old at forty, whose secret

thoughts were made all of regrets and longings--regrets for their

wasted lives, and longings to be out of the struggle and done with it all.



It was a lonesome land!  Not a sound in all those peaceful expanses

of grass and woods but the drowsy hum of insects; no glimpse

of man or beast; nothing to keep up your spirits and make you glad

to be alive.  And so, at last, in the early part of the afternoon,

when I caught sight of a human creature, I felt a most grateful uplift.

This person was a man about forty-five years old, and he was

standing at the gate of one of those cozy little rose-clad cottages

of the sort already referred to.  However, this one hadn't

a deserted look; it had the look of being lived in and petted

and cared for and looked after; and so had its front yard,

which was a garden of flowers, abundant, gay, and flourishing.

I was invited in, of course, and required to make myself at home--

it was the custom of the country..



It was delightful to be in such a place, after long weeks of daily

and nightly familiarity with miners' cabins--with all which this

implies of dirt floor, never-made beds, tin plates and cups,

bacon and beans and black coffee, and nothing of ornament but war

pictures from the Eastern illustrated papers tacked to the log walls.

That was all hard, cheerless, materialistic desolation, but here was a

nest which had aspects to rest the tired eye and refresh that something

in one's nature which, after long fasting, recognizes, when confronted

by the belongings of art, howsoever cheap and modest they may be,

that it has unconsciously been famishing and now has found nourishment.

I could not have believed that a rag carpet could feast me so,

and so content me; or that there could be such solace to the soul

in wall-paper and framed lithographs, and bright-colored tidies

and lamp-mats, and Windsor chairs, and varnished what-nots, with

sea-shells and books and china vases on them, and the score of little

unclassifiable tricks and touches that a woman's hand distributes

about a home, which one sees without knowing he sees them, yet would

miss in a moment if they were taken away.  The delight that was

in my heart showed in my face, and the man saw it and was pleased;

saw it so plainly that he answered it as if it had been spoken.



"All her work," he said, caressingly; "she did it all herself--

every bit," and he took the room in with a glance which was full

of affectionate worship.  One of those soft Japanese fabrics

with which women drape with careful negligence the upper part of a

picture-frame was out of adjustment.  He noticed it, and rearranged

it with cautious pains, stepping back several times to gauge

the effect before he got it to suit him.  Then he gave it a light

finishing pat or two with his hand, and said:  "She always does that.

You can't tell just what it lacks, but it does lack something

until you've done that--you can see it yourself after it's done,

but that is all you know; you can't find out the law of it.

It's like the finishing pats a mother gives the child's hair

after she's got it combed and brushed, I reckon.  I've seen her

fix all these things so much that I can do them all just her way,

though I don't know the law of any of them.  But she knows the law.

She knows the why and the how both; but I don't know the why;

I only know the how."



He took me into a bedroom so that I might wash my hands; such a bedroom

as I had not seen for years:  white counterpane, white pillows,

carpeted floor, papered walls, pictures, dressing-table, with mirror

and pin-cushion and dainty toilet things; and in the corner a wash-stand,

with real china-ware bowl and pitcher, and with soap in a china dish,

and on a rack more than a dozen towels--towels too clean and white

for one out of practice to use without some vague sense of profanation.

So my face spoke again, and he answered with gratified words:



"All her work; she did it all herself--every bit.  Nothing here

that hasn't felt the touch of her hand.  Now you would think--

But I mustn't talk so much."



By this time I was wiping my hands and glancing from detail to detail

of the room's belongings, as one is apt to do when he is in a new place,

where everything he sees is a comfort to his eye and his spirit;

and I became conscious, in one of those unaccountable ways,

you know, that there was something there somewhere that the man

wanted me to discover for myself.  I knew it perfectly, and I knew

he was trying to help me by furtive indications with his eye, so I

tried hard to get on the right track, being eager to gratify him.

I failed several times, as I could see out of the corner of my eye

without being told; but at last I knew I must be looking straight

at the thing--knew it from the pleasure issuing in invisible waves

from him.  He broke into a happy laugh, and rubbed his hands together,

and cried out:



"That's it!  You've found it.  I knew you would.  It's her picture."



I went to the little black-walnut bracket on the farther wall,

and did find there what I had not yet noticed--a daguerreotype-case.

It contained the sweetest girlish face, and the most beautiful,

as it seemed to me, that I had ever seen.  The man drank the admiration

from my face, and was fully satisfied.



"Nineteen her last birthday," he said, as he put the picture back;

"and that was the day we were married.  When you see her--ah, just wait

till you see her!"



"Where is she?  When will she be in?"



"Oh, she's away now.  She's gone to see her people.  They live

forty or fifty miles from here.  She's been gone two weeks today."



"When do you expect her back?"



"This is Wednesday.  She'll be back Saturday, in the evening--

about nine o'clock, likely."



I felt a sharp sense of disappointment.



"I'm sorry, because I'll be gone then," I said, regretfully.



"Gone?  No--why should you go?  Don't go.  She'll be disappointed."



She would be disappointed--that beautiful creature!  If she had said

the words herself they could hardly have blessed me more.  I was

feeling a deep, strong longing to see her--a longing so supplicating,

so insistent, that it made me afraid.  I said to myself:  "I will

go straight away from this place, for my peace of mind's sake."



"You see, she likes to have people come and stop with us--

people who know things, and can talk--people like you.  She delights

in it; for she knows--oh, she knows nearly everything herself,

and can talk, oh, like a bird--and the books she reads, why, you would

be astonished.  Don't go; it's only a little while, you know,

and she'll be so disappointed."



I heard the words, but hardly noticed them, I was so deep in my

thinkings and strugglings.  He left me, but I didn't know.

Presently he was back, with the picture case in his hand, and he

held it open before me and said:



"There, now, tell her to her face you could have stayed to see her,

and you wouldn't."



That second glimpse broke down my good resolution.  I would stay

and take the risk.  That night we smoked the tranquil pipe,

and talked till late about various things, but mainly about her;

and certainly I had had no such pleasant and restful time for many

a day.  The Thursday followed and slipped comfortably away.

Toward twilight a big miner from three miles away came--one of

the grizzled, stranded pioneers--and gave us warm salutation,

clothed in grave and sober speech.  Then he said:



"I only just dropped over to ask about the little madam, and when

is she coming home.  Any news from her?"



"Oh, yes, a letter.  Would you like to hear it, Tom?"



"Well, I should think I would, if you don't mind, Henry!"



Henry got the letter out of his wallet, and said he would skip

some of the private phrases, if we were willing; then he went

on and read the bulk of it--a loving, sedate, and altogether

charming and gracious piece of handiwork, with a postscript full

of affectionate regards and messages to Tom, and Joe, and Charley,

and other close friends and neighbors.



As the reader finished, he glanced at Tom, and cried out:



"Oho, you're at it again!  Take your hands away, and let me see

your eyes.  You always do that when I read a letter from her.

I will write and tell her."



"Oh no, you mustn't, Henry.  I'm getting old, you know, and any

little disappointment makes me want to cry.  I thought she'd

be here herself, and now you've got only a letter."



"Well, now, what put that in your head?  I thought everybody knew

she wasn't coming till Saturday."



"Saturday!  Why, come to think, I did know it.  I wonder

what's the matter with me lately?  Certainly I knew it.

Ain't we all getting ready for her?  Well, I must be going now.

But I'll be on hand when she comes, old man!"



Late Friday afternoon another gray veteran tramped over from his

cabin a mile or so away, and said the boys wanted to have a little

gaiety and a good time Saturday night, if Henry thought she wouldn't

be too tired after her journey to be kept up.



"Tired?  She tired!  Oh, hear the man!  Joe, YOU know she'd sit up

six weeks to please any one of you!"



When Joe heard that there was a letter, he asked to have it read,

and the loving messages in it for him broke the old fellow all up;

but he said he was such an old wreck that THAT would happen to him

if she only just mentioned his name.  "Lord, we miss her so!"

he said.



Saturday afternoon I found I was taking out my watch pretty often.

Henry noticed it, and said, with a startled look:



"You don't think she ought to be here soon, do you?"



I felt caught, and a little embarrassed; but I laughed, and said

it was a habit of mine when I was in a state of expenctancy.

But he didn't seem quite satisfied; and from that time on he began

to show uneasiness.  Four times he walked me up the road to a point

whence we could see a long distance; and there he would stand,

shading his eyes with his hand, and looking.  Several times he said:



"I'm getting worried, I'm getting right down worried.  I know

she's not due till about nine o'clock, and yet something seems

to be trying to warn me that something's happened.  You don't

think anything has happened, do you?"



I began to get pretty thoroughly ashamed of him for his childishness;

and at last, when he repeated that imploring question still another time,

I lost my patience for the moment, and spoke pretty brutally to him.

It seemed to shrivel him up and cow him; and he looked so wounded

and so humble after that, that I detested myself for having done

the cruel and unnecessary thing.  And so I was glad when Charley,

another veteran, arrived toward the edge of the evening, and nestled

up to Henry to hear the letter read, and talked over the preparations

for the welcome.  Charley fetched out one hearty speech after another,

and did his best to drive away his friend's bodings and apprehensions.



"Anything HAPPENED to her?  Henry, that's pure nonsense.  There isn't

anything going to happen to her; just make your mind easy as to that.

What did the letter say?  Said she was well, didn't it?  And said

she'd be here by nine o'clock, didn't it?  Did you ever know her

to fail of her word?  Why, you know you never did.  Well, then,

don't you fret; she'll BE here, and that's absolutely certain,

and as sure as you are born.  Come, now, let's get to decorating--

not much time left."



Pretty soon Tom and Joe arrived, and then all hands set about adoring

the house with flowers.  Toward nine the three miners said that

as they had brought their instruments they might as well tune up,

for the boys and girls would soon be arriving now, and hungry for

a good, old-fashioned break-down. A fiddle, a banjo, and a clarinet--

these were the instruments.  The trio took their places side by side,

and began to play some rattling dance-music, and beat time with

their big boots.



It was getting very close to nine.  Henry was standing in the door

with his eyes directed up the road, his body swaying to the torture

of his mental distress.  He had been made to drink his wife's

health and safety several times, and now Tom shouted:



"All hands stand by!  One more drink, and she's here!"



Joe brought the glasses on a waiter, and served the party.

I reached for one of the two remaining glasses, but Joe growled

under his breath:



"Drop that!  Take the other."



Which I did.  Henry was served last.  He had hardly swallowed his

drink when the clock began to strike.  He listened till it finished,

his face growing pale and paler; then he said:



"Boys, I'm sick with fear.  Help me--I want to lie down!"



They helped him to the sofa.  He began to nestle and drowse,

but presently spoke like one talking in his sleep, and said:

"Did I hear horses' feet?  Have they come?"



One of the veterans answered, close to his ear:  "It was Jimmy

Parish come to say the party got delayed, but they're right up

the road a piece, and coming along.  Her horse is lame, but she'll

be here in half an hour."



"Oh, I'm SO thankful nothing has happened!"



He was asleep almost before the words were out of his mouth.

In a moment those handy men had his clothes off, and had tucked

him into his bed in the chamber where I had washed my hands.

They closed the door and came back.  Then they seemed preparing to leave;

but I said:  "Please don't go, gentlemen.  She won't know me; I am

a stranger."



They glanced at each other.  Then Joe said:



"She?  Poor thing, she's been dead nineteen years!"



"Dead?"



"That or worse.  She went to see her folks half a year after she

was married, and on her way back, on a Saturday evening, the Indians

captured her within five miles of this place, and she's never been

heard of since."



"And he lost his mind in consequence?"



"Never has been sane an hour since.  But he only gets bad when

that time of year comes round.  Then we begin to drop in here,

three days before she's due, to encourage him up, and ask if he's heard

from her, and Saturday we all come and fix up the house with flowers,

and get everything ready for a dance.  We've done it every year

for nineteen years.  The first Saturday there was twenty-seven

of us, without counting the girls; there's only three of us now,

and the girls are gone.  We drug him to sleep, or he would go wild;

then he's all right for another year--thinks she's with him till the

last three or four days come round; then he begins to look for her,

and gets out his poor old letter, and we come and ask him to read it

to us.  Lord, she was a darling!"





***









A HELPLESS SITUATION







Once or twice a year I get a letter of a certain pattern,

a pattern that never materially changes, in form and substance,

yet I cannot get used to that letter--it always astonishes me.

It affects me as the locomotive always affects me:  I saw to myself,

"I have seen you a thousand times, you always look the same way,

yet you are always a wonder, and you are always impossible; to contrive

you is clearly beyond human genius--you can't exist, you don't exist,

yet here you are!"



I have a letter of that kind by me, a very old one.  I yearn to print it,

and where is the harm?  The writer of it is dead years ago, no doubt,

and if I conceal her name and address--her this-world address--

I am sure her shade will not mind.  And with it I wish to print

the answer which I wrote at the time but probably did not send.

If it went--which is not likely--it went in the form of a copy,

for I find the original still here, pigeonholed with the said letter.

To that kind of letters we all write answers which we do not send,

fearing to hurt where we have no desire to hurt; I have done it many

a time, and this is doubtless a case of the sort.





THE LETTER





X------, California, JUNE 3, 1879.



Mr. S. L. Clemens, HARTFORD, CONN.:





Dear Sir,--You will doubtless be surprised to know who has presumed

to write and ask a favor of you.  let your memory go back to your days

in the Humboldt mines--'62-'63. You will remember, you and Clagett

and Oliver and the old blacksmith Tillou lived in a lean-to which was

half-way up the gulch, and there were six log cabins in the camp--

strung pretty well separated up the gulch from its mouth at the

desert to where the last claim was, at the divide.  The lean-to

you lived in was the one with a canvas roof that the cow fell down

through one night, as told about by you in ROUGHING IT--my uncle

Simmons remembers it very well.  He lived in the principal cabin,

half-way up the divide, along with Dixon and Parker and Smith.

It had two rooms, one for kitchen and the other for bunks,

and was the only one that had.  You and your party were there on

the great night, the time they had dried-apple-pie, Uncle Simmons

often speaks of it.  It seems curious that dried-apple-pie should

have seemed such a great thing, but it was, and it shows how far

Humboldt was out of the world and difficult to get to, and how slim

the regular bill of fare was.  Sixteen years ago--it is a long time.

I was a little girl then, only fourteen.  I never saw you, I lived

in Washoe.  But Uncle Simmons ran across you every now and then,

all during those weeks that you and party were there working

your claim which was like the rest.  The camp played out long

and long ago, there wasn't silver enough in it to make a button.

You never saw my husband, but he was there after you left, AND LIVED

IN THAT VERY LEAN-TO, a bachelor then but married to me now.

He often wishes there had been a photographer there in those days,

he would have taken the lean-to. He got hurt in the old Hal Clayton

claim that was abandoned like the others, putting in a blast

and not climbing out quick enough, though he scrambled the best

he could.  It landed him clear down on the train and hit a Piute.

For weeks they thought he would not get over it but he did,

and is all right, now.  Has been ever since.  This is a long

introduction but it is the only way I can make myself known.

The favor I ask I feel assured your generous heart will grant:

Give me some advice about a book I have written.  I do not claim

anything for it only it is mostly true and as interesting as most

of the books of the times.  I am unknown in the literary world

and you know what that means unless one has some one of influence

(like yourself) to help you by speaking a good word for you.

I would like to place the book on royalty basis plan with any one you

would suggest.



This is a secret from my husband and family.  I intend

it as a surprise in case I get it published.



Feeling you will take an interest in this and if possible write

me a letter to some publisher, or, better still, if you could see

them for me and then let me hear.



I appeal to you to grant me this favor.  With deepest gratitude I

think you for your attention.





One knows, without inquiring, that the twin of that embarrassing

letter is forever and ever flying in this and that and the other

direction across the continent in the mails, daily, nightly, hourly,

unceasingly, unrestingly.  It goes to every well-known merchant,

and railway official, and manufacturer, and capitalist, and Mayor,

and Congressman, and Governor, and editor, and publisher, and author,

and broker, and banker--in a word, to every person who is supposed

to have "influence."  It always follows the one pattern:  "You do

not know me, BUT YOU ONCE KNEW A RELATIVE OF MINE," etc., etc.

We should all like to help the applicants, we should all be glad

to do it, we should all like to return the sort of answer that

is desired, but--Well, there is not a thing we can do that would

be a help, for not in any instance does that latter ever come from

anyone who CAN be helped.  The struggler whom you COULD help does

his own helping; it would not occur to him to apply to you, stranger.

He has talent and knows it, and he goes into his fight eagerly and

with energy and determination--all alone, preferring to be alone.

That pathetic letter which comes to you from the incapable,

the unhelpable--how do you who are familiar with it answer it?

What do you find to say?  You do not want to inflict a wound;

you hunt ways to avoid that.  What do you find?  How do you get out

of your hard place with a contend conscience?  Do you try to explain?

The old reply of mine to such a letter shows that I tried that once.

Was I satisfied with the result?  Possibly; and possibly not;

probably not; almost certainly not.  I have long ago forgotten all

about it.  But, anyway, I append my effort:





THE REPLY





I know Mr. H., and I will go to him, dear madam, if upon reflection

you find you still desire it.  There will be a conversation.

I know the form it will take.  It will be like this:





MR.  H. How do her books strike you?



MR.  CLEMENS.  I am not acquainted with them.



H. Who has been her publisher?



C. I don't know.



H. She HAS one, I suppose?



C. I--I think not.



H. Ah.  You think this is her first book?



C. Yes--I suppose so.  I think so.



H. What is it about?  What is the character of it?



C. I believe I do not know.



H. Have you seen it?



C. Well--no, I haven't.



H. Ah-h. How long have you known her?



C. I don't know her.



H. Don't know her?



C. No.



H. Ah-h. How did you come to be interested in her book, then?



C. Well, she--she wrote and asked me to find a publisher for her,

and mentioned you.



H. Why should she apply to you instead of me?



C. She wished me to use my influence.



H. Dear me, what has INFLUENCE to do with such a matter?



C. Well, I think she thought you would be more likely to examine

her book if you were influenced.



H. Why, what we are here FOR is to examine books--anybody's book

that comes along.  It's our BUSINESS.  Why should we turn away

a book unexamined because it's a stranger's? It would be foolish.

No publisher does it.  On what ground did she request your influence,

since you do not know her?  She must have thought you knew her

literature and could speak for it.  Is that it?



C. No; she knew I didn't.



H. Well, what then?  She had a reason of SOME sort for believing you

competent to recommend her literature, and also under obligations

to do it?



C. Yes, I--I knew her uncle.



H. Knew her UNCLE?



C. Yes.



H. Upon my word!  So, you knew her uncle; her uncle knows her literature;

he endorses it to you; the chain is complete, nothing further needed;

you are satisfied, and therefore--



C. NO, that isn't all, there are other ties.  I know the cabin

her uncle lived in, in the mines; I knew his partners, too; also I

came near knowing her husband before she married him, and I DID

know the abandoned shaft where a premature blast went off and he

went flying through the air and clear down to the trail and hit

an Indian in the back with almost fatal consequences.



H. To HIM, or to the Indian?



C. She didn't say which it was.



H. (WITH A SIGH). It certainly beats the band!  You don't know HER,

you don't know her literature, you don't know who got hurt when

the blast went off, you don't know a single thing for us to build

an estimate of her book upon, so far as I--



C. I knew her uncle.  You are forgetting her uncle.



H. Oh, what use is HE?  Did you know him long?  How long was it?



C. Well, I don't know that I really knew him, but I must have

met him, anyway.  I think it was that way; you can't tell about

these things, you know, except when they are recent.



H. Recent?  When was all this?



C. Sixteen years ago.



H. What a basis to judge a book upon!  As first you said you knew him,

and not you don't know whether you did or not.



C. Oh yes, I know him; anyway, I think I thought I did; I'm perfectly

certain of it.



H. What makes you think you thought you knew him?



C. Why, she says I did, herself.



H. SHE says so!



C. Yes, she does, and I DID know him, too, though I don't remember

it now.



H. Come--how can you know it when you don't remember it.



C. _I_ don't know.  That is, I don't know the process, but I DO know

lots of things that I don't remember, and remember lots of things

that I don't know.  It's so with every educated person.



H. (AFTER A PAUSE). Is your time valuable?



C. No--well, not very.



H. Mine is.



So I came away then, because he was looking tired.  Overwork, I reckon;

I never do that; I have seen the evil effects of it.  My mother

was always afraid I work overwork myself, but I never did.



Dear madam, you see how it would happen if I went there.  He would

ask me those questions, and I would try to answer them to suit him,

and he would hunt me here and there and yonder and get me embarrassed

more and more all the time, and at last he would look tired on

account of overwork, and there it would end and nothing done.

I wish I could be useful to you, but, you see, they do not

care for uncles or any of those things; it doesn't move them,

it doesn't have the least effect, they don't care for anything

but the literature itself, and they as good as despise influence.

But they do care for books, and are eager to get them and examine them,

no matter whence they come, nor from whose pen.  If you will send

yours to a publisher--any publisher--he will certainly examine it,

I can assure you of that.





***







A TELEPHONIC CONVERSATION







Consider that a conversation by telephone--when you are simply siting

by and not taking any part in that conversation--is one of the solemnest

curiosities of modern life.  Yesterday I was writing a deep article

on a sublime philosophical subject while such a conversation was

going on in the room.  I notice that one can always write best when

somebody is talking through a telephone close by.  Well, the thing

began in this way.  A member of our household came in and asked me

to have our house put into communication with Mr. Bagley's downtown.

I have observed, in many cities, that the sex always shrink from

calling up the central office themselves.  I don't know why,

but they do.  So I touched the bell, and this talk ensued:



CENTRAL OFFICE.  (GRUFFY.) Hello!



I. Is it the Central Office?



C. O. Of course it is.  What do you want?



I. Will you switch me on to the Bagleys, please?



C. O. All right.  Just keep your ear to the telephone.



Then I heard K-LOOK, K-LOOK, K'LOOK--KLOOK-KLOOK-KLOOK-LOOK-LOOK! then

a horrible "gritting" of teeth, and finally a piping female voice:

Y-e-s? (RISING INFLECTION.) Did you wish to speak to me?



Without answering, I handed the telephone to the applicant, and sat down.

Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world--

a conversation with only one end of it.  You hear questions asked;

you don't hear the answer.  You hear invitations given; you hear

no thanks in return.  You have listening pauses of dead silence,

followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations

of glad surprise or sorrow or dismay.  You can't make head or tail

of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the

other end of the wire says.  Well, I heard the following remarkable

series of observations, all from the one tongue, and all shouted--

for you can't ever persuade the sex to speak gently into a telephone:



Yes?  Why, how did THAT happen?



Pause.



What did you say?



Pause.



Oh no, I don't think it was.



Pause.



NO!  Oh no, I didn't mean THAT.  I meant, put it in while it

is still boiling--or just before it COMES to a boil.



Pause.



WHAT?



Pause.



I turned it over with a backstitch on the selvage edge.



Pause.



Yes, I like that way, too; but I think it's better to baste it

on with Valenciennes or bombazine, or something of that sort.

It gives it such an air--and attracts so much noise.



Pause.



It's forty-ninth Deuteronomy, sixty-forth to ninety-seventh inclusive.

I think we ought all to read it often.



Pause.



Perhaps so; I generally use a hair pin.



Pause.



What did you say?  (ASIDE.) Children, do be quiet!



Pause



OH!  B FLAT!  Dear me, I thought you said it was the cat!



Pause.



Since WHEN?



Pause.



Why, _I_ never heard of it.



Pause.



You astound me!  It seems utterly impossible!



Pause.



WHO did?



Pause.



Good-ness gracious!



Pause.



Well, what IS this world coming to?  Was it right in CHURCH?



Pause.



And was her MOTHER there?



Pause.



Why, Mrs. Bagley, I should have died of humiliation!  What did

they DO?



Long pause.



I can't be perfectly sure, because I haven't the notes by me;

but I think it goes something like this:  te-rolly-loll-loll, loll

lolly-loll-loll, O tolly-loll-loll-LEE-LY-LI-I-do! And then REPEAT,

you know.



Pause.



Yes, I think it IS very sweet--and very solemn and impressive,

if you get the andantino and the pianissimo right.



Pause.



Oh, gum-drops, gum-drops! But I never allow them to eat striped candy.

And of course they CAN'T, till they get their teeth, anyway.



Pause.



WHAT?



Pause.



Oh, not in the least--go right on.  He's here writing--it doesn't

bother HIM.



Pause.



Very well, I'll come if I can.  (ASIDE.) Dear me, how it does tire

a person's arm to hold this thing up so long!  I wish she'd--



Pause.



Oh no, not at all; I LIKE to talk--but I'm afraid I'm keeping you

from your affairs.



Pause.



Visitors?



Pause.



No, we never use butter on them.



Pause.



Yes, that is a very good way; but all the cook-books say they

are very unhealthy when they are out of season.  And HE doesn't

like them, anyway--especially canned.



Pause.



Oh, I think that is too high for them; we have never paid over fifty

cents a bunch.



Pause.



MUST you go?  Well, GOOD-by.



Pause.



Yes, I think so.  GOOD-by.



Pause.



Four o'clock, then--I'll be ready.  GOOD-by.



Pause.



Thank you ever so much.  GOOD-by.



Pause.



Oh, not at all!--just as fresh--WHICH?  Oh, I'm glad to hear you

say that.  GOOD-by.



(Hangs up the telephone and says, "Oh, it DOES tire a person's

arm so!")



A man delivers a single brutal "Good-by," and that is the end of it.

Not so with the gentle sex--I say it in their praise; they cannot

abide abruptness.







***





EDWARD MILLS AND GEORGE BENTON:  A TALE







These two were distantly related to each other--seventh cousins,

or something of that sort.  While still babies they became orphans,

and were adopted by the Brants, a childless couple, who quickly

grew very fond of them.  The Brants were always saying:  "Be pure,

honest, sober, industrious, and considerate of others, and success

in life is assured."  The children heard this repeated some thousands

of times before they understood it; they could repeat it themselves

long before they could say the Lord's Prayer; it was painted over

the nursery door, and was about the first thing they learned to read.

It was destined to be the unswerving rule of Edward Mills's life.

Sometimes the Brants changed the wording a little, and said:

"Be pure, honest, sober, industrious, considerate, and you will never

lack friends."



Baby Mills was a comfort to everybody about him.  When he wanted

candy and could not have it, he listened to reason, and contented

himself without it.  When Baby Benton wanted candy, he cried for it

until he got it.  Baby Mills took care of his toys; Baby Benton

always destroyed his in a very brief time, and then made himself

to insistently disagreeable that, in order to have peace in the house,

little Edward was persuaded to yield up his play-things to him.



When the children were a little older, Georgie became a heavy expense

in one respect:  he took no care of his clothes; consequently, he

shone frequently in new ones, with was not the case with Eddie.

The boys grew apace.  Eddie was an increasing comfort, Georgie an

increasing solicitude.  It was always sufficient to say, in answer

to Eddie's petitions, "I would rather you would not do it"--

meaning swimming, skating, picnicking, berrying, circusing,

and all sorts of things which boys delight in.  But NO answer

was sufficient for Georgie; he had to be humored in his desires,

or he would carry them with a high hand.  Naturally, no boy got

more swimming skating, berrying, and so forth than he; no body

ever had a better time.  The good Brants did not allow the boys

to play out after nine in summer evenings; they were sent to bed

at that hour; Eddie honorably remained, but Georgie usually slipped

out of the window toward ten, and enjoyed himself until midnight.

It seemed impossible to break Georgie of this bad habit, but the

Brants managed it at last by hiring him, with apples and marbles,

to stay in.  The good Brants gave all their time and attention

to vain endeavors to regulate Georgie; they said, with grateful

tears in their eyes, that Eddie needed no efforts of theirs,

he was so good, so considerate, and in all ways so perfect.



By and by the boys were big enough to work, so they were apprenticed

to a trade:  Edward went voluntarily; George was coaxed and bribed.

Edward worked hard and faithfully, and ceased to be an expense to the

good Brants; they praised him, so did his master; but George ran away,

and it cost Mr. Brant both money and trouble to hunt him up and get

him back.  By and by he ran away again--more money and more trouble.

He ran away a third time--and stole a few things to carry with him.

Trouble and expense for Mr. Brant once more; and, besides, it was with

the greatest difficulty that he succeeded in persuading the master

to let the youth go unprosecuted for the theft.



Edward worked steadily along, and in time became a full partner

in his master's business.  George did not improve; he kept the loving

hearts of his aged benefactors full of trouble, and their hands full

of inventive activities to protect him from ruin.  Edward, as a boy,

had interested himself in Sunday-schools, debating societies,

penny missionary affairs, anti-tobacco organizations, anti-profanity

associations, and all such things; as a man, he was a quiet but

steady and reliable helper in the church, the temperance societies,

and in all movements looking to the aiding and uplifting of men.  This

excited no remark, attracted no attention--for it was his "natural bent."



Finally, the old people died.  The will testified their loving

pride in Edward, and left their little property to George--

because he "needed it"; whereas, "owing to a bountiful Providence,"

such was not the case with Edward.  The property was left to

George conditionally:  he must buy out Edward's partner with it;

else it must go to a benevolent organization called the Prisoner's

Friend Society.  The old people left a letter, in which they begged

their dear son Edward to take their place and watch over George,

and help and shield him as they had done.



Edward dutifully acquiesced, and George became his partner in

the business.  He was not a valuable partner:  he had been meddling

with drink before; he soon developed into a constant tippler now,

and his flesh and eyes showed the fact unpleasantly.  Edward had

been courting a sweet and kindly spirited girl for some time.

They loved each other dearly, and--But about this period George began

to haunt her tearfully and imploringly, and at last she went crying

to Edward, and said her high and holy duty was plain before her--

she must not let her own selfish desires interfere with it:

she must marry "poor George" and "reform him."  It would break

her heart, she knew it would, and so on; but duty was duty.

So she married George, and Edward's heart came very near breaking,

as well as her own.  However, Edward recovered, and married another girl--

a very excellent one she was, too.



Children came to both families.  Mary did her honest best to reform

her husband, but the contract was too large.  George went on drinking,

and by and by he fell to misusing her and the little ones sadly.

A great many good people strove with George--they were always at it,

in fact--but he calmly took such efforts as his due and their duty,

and did not mend his ways.  He added a vice, presently--that of

secret gambling.  He got deeply in debt; he borrowed money on the

firm's credit, as quietly as he could, and carried this system so far

and so successfully that one morning the sheriff took possession of

the establishment, and the two cousins found themselves penniless.



Times were hard, now, and they grew worse.  Edward moved his family

into a garret, and walked the streets day and night, seeking work.

He begged for it, but in was really not to be had.  He was astonished

to see how soon his face became unwelcome; he was astonished

and hurt to see how quickly the ancient interest which people had

had in him faded out and disappeared.  Still, he MUST get work;

so he swallowed his chagrin, and toiled on in search of it.

At last he got a job of carrying bricks up a ladder in a hod,

and was a grateful man in consequence; but after that NOBODY knew

him or cared anything about him.  He was not able to keep up

his dues in the various moral organizations to which he belonged,

and had to endure the sharp pain of seeing himself brought under

the disgrace of suspension.



But the faster Edward died out of public knowledge and interest,

the faster George rose in them.  He was found lying, ragged and drunk,

in the gutter one morning.  A member of the Ladies' Temperance Refuge

fished him out, took him in hand, got up a subscription for him,

kept him sober a whole week, then got a situation for him.

An account of it was published.



General attention was thus drawn to the poor fellow, and a great

many people came forward and helped him toward reform with their

countenance and encouragement.  He did not drink a drop for two months,

and meantime was the pet of the good.  Then he fell--in the gutter;

and there was general sorrow and lamentation.  But the noble

sisterhood rescued him again.  They cleaned him up, they fed him,

they listened to the mournful music of his repentances, they got

him his situation again.  An account of this, also, was published,

and the town was drowned in happy tears over the re-restoration

of the poor beast and struggling victim of the fatal bowl.

A grand temperance revival was got up, and after some rousing

speeches had been made the chairman said, impressively:  "We are

not about to call for signers; and I think there is a spectacle

in store for you which not many in this house will be able to view

with dry eyes."  There was an eloquent pause, and then George Benton,

escorted by a red-sashed detachment of the Ladies of the Refuge,

stepped forward upon the platform and signed the pledge.  The air

was rent with applause, and everybody cried for joy.  Everybody wrung

the hand of the new convert when the meeting was over; his salary

was enlarged next day; he was the talk of the town, and its hero.

An account of it was published.



George Benton fell, regularly, every three months, but was faithfully

rescued and wrought with, every time, and good situations were

found for him.  Finally, he was taken around the country lecturing,

as a reformed drunkard, and he had great houses and did an immense

amount of good.



He was so popular at home, and so trusted--during his sober intervals--

that he was enabled to use the name of a principal citizen, and get

a large sum of money at the bank.  A mighty pressure was brought

to bear to save him from the consequences of his forgery, and it

was partially successful--he was "sent up" for only two years.

When, at the end of a year, the tireless efforts of the benevolent

were crowned with success, and he emerged from the penitentiary

with a pardon in his pocket, the Prisoner's Friend Society met him

at the door with a situation and a comfortable salary, and all

the other benevolent people came forward and gave him advice,

encouragement and help.  Edward Mills had once applied to the Prisoner's

Friend Society for a situation, when in dire need, but the question,

"Have you been a prisoner?" made brief work of his case.



While all these things were going on, Edward Mills had been

quietly making head against adversity.  He was still poor, but was

in receipt of a steady and sufficient salary, as the respected

and trusted cashier of a bank.  George Benton never came near him,

and was never heard to inquire about him.  George got to indulging

in long absences from the town; there were ill reports about him,

but nothing definite.



One winter's night some masked burglars forced their way into the bank,

and found Edward Mills there alone.  They commanded him to reveal

the "combination," so that they could get into the safe.  He refused.

They threatened his life.  He said his employers trusted him,

and he could not be traitor to that trust.  He could die, if he must,

but while he lived he would be faithful; he would not yield up

the "combination."  The burglars killed him.



The detectives hunted down the criminals; the chief one proved

to be George Benton.  A wide sympathy was felt for the widow and

orphans of the dead man, and all the newspapers in the land begged

that all the banks in the land would testify their appreciation

of the fidelity and heroism of the murdered cashier by coming

forward with a generous contribution of money in aid of his family,

now bereft of support.  The result was a mass of solid cash amounting

to upward of five hundred dollars--an average of nearly three-eights

of a cent for each bank in the Union.  The cashier's own bank

testified its gratitude by endeavoring to show (but humiliatingly

failed in it) that the peerless servant's accounts were not square,

and that he himself had knocked his brains out with a bludgeon

to escape detection and punishment.



George Benton was arraigned for trial.  Then everybody seemed to

forget the widow and orphans in their solicitude for poor George.

Everything that money and influence could do was done to save him,

but it all failed; he was sentenced to death.  Straightway the

Governor was besieged with petitions for commutation or pardon;

they were brought by tearful young girls; by sorrowful old maids;

by deputations of pathetic widows; by shoals of impressive orphans.

But no, the Governor--for once--would not yield.



Now George Benton experienced religion.  The glad news flew all around.

From that time forth his cell was always full of girls and women and

fresh flowers; all the day long there was prayer, and hymn-singing,

and thanksgiving, and homilies, and tears, with never an interruption,

except an occasional five-minute intermission for refreshments.



This sort of thing continued up to the very gallows, and George

Benton went proudly home, in the black cap, before a wailing

audience of the sweetest and best that the region could produce.

His grave had fresh flowers on it every day, for a while,

and the head-stone bore these words, under a hand pointing aloft:

"He has fought the good fight."



The brave cashier's head-stone has this inscription:  "Be pure,

honest, sober, industrious, considerate, and you will never--"



Nobody knows who gave the order to leave it that way, but it was

so given.



The cashier's family are in stringent circumstances, now, it is said;

but no matter; a lot of appreciative people, who were not willing

that an act so brave and true as his should go unrewarded,

have collected forty-two thousand dollars--and built a Memorial

Church with it.





***







THE FIVE BOONS OF LIFE







Chapter I





In the morning of life came a good fairy with her basket, and said:



"Here are gifts.  Take one, leave the others.  And be wary,

chose wisely; oh, choose wisely! for only one of them is valuable."



The gifts were five:  Fame, Love, Riches, Pleasure, Death.

The youth said, eagerly:



"There is no need to consider"; and he chose Pleasure.



He went out into the world and sought out the pleasures that youth

delights in.  But each in its turn was short-lived and disappointing,

vain and empty; and each, departing, mocked him.  In the end he said:

"These years I have wasted.  If I could but choose again, I would

choose wisely.







Chapter II





The fairy appeared, and said:



"Four of the gifts remain.  Choose once more; and oh, remember--

time is flying, and only one of them is precious."



The man considered long, then chose Love; and did not mark the tears

that rose in the fairy's eyes.



After many, many years the man sat by a coffin, in an empty home.

And he communed with himself, saying:  "One by one they have gone

away and left me; and now she lies here, the dearest and the last.

Desolation after desolation has swept over me; for each hour

of happiness the treacherous trader, Love, as sold me I have paid

a thousand hours of grief.  Out of my heart of hearts I curse him."







Chapter III





"Choose again."  It was the fairy speaking.



"The years have taught you wisdom--surely it must be so.

Three gifts remain.  Only one of them has any worth--remember it,

and choose warily."



The man reflected long, then chose Fame; and the fairy, sighing,

went her way.



Years went by and she came again, and stood behind the man where he

sat solitary in the fading day, thinking.  And she knew his thought:



"My name filled the world, and its praises were on every tongue,

and it seemed well with me for a little while.  How little a while

it was!  Then came envy; then detraction; then calumny; then hate;

then persecution.  Then derision, which is the beginning of the end.

And last of all came pity, which is the funeral of fame.  Oh,

the bitterness and misery of renown! target for mud in its prime,

for contempt and compassion in its decay."







Chapter IV





"Chose yet again."  It was the fairy's voice.



"Two gifts remain.  And do not despair.  In the beginning there

was but one that was precious, and it is still here."



"Wealth--which is power!  How blind I was!" said the man.

"Now, at last, life will be worth the living.  I will spend,

squander, dazzle.  These mockers and despisers will crawl in the

dirt before me, and I will feed my hungry heart with their envy.

I will have all luxuries, all joys, all enchantments of the spirit,

all contentments of the body that man holds dear.  I will buy,

buy, buy! deference, respect, esteem, worship--every pinchbeck

grace of life the market of a trivial world can furnish forth.

I have lost much time, and chosen badly heretofore, but let that pass;

I was ignorant then, and could but take for best what seemed so."



Three short years went by, and a day came when the man sat shivering

in a mean garret; and he was gaunt and wan and hollow-eyed,

and clothed in rags; and he was gnawing a dry crust and mumbling:



"Curse all the world's gifts, for mockeries and gilded lies!

And miscalled, every one.  They are not gifts, but merely lendings.

Pleasure, Love, Fame, Riches:  they are but temporary disguises for

lasting realities--Pain, Grief, Shame, Poverty.  The fairy said true;

in all her store there was but one gift which was precious,

only one that was not valueless.  How poor and cheap and mean I

know those others now to be, compared with that inestimable one,

that dear and sweet and kindly one, that steeps in dreamless and

enduring sleep the pains that persecute the body, and the shames

and griefs that eat the mind and heart.  Bring it!  I am weary,

I would rest."







Chapter V





The fairy came, bringing again four of the gifts, but Death was wanting.

She said:



"I gave it to a mother's pet, a little child.  It was ignorant,

but trusted me, asking me to choose for it.  You did not ask me

to choose."



"Oh, miserable me!  What is left for me?"



"What not even you have deserved:  the wanton insult of Old Age."





***







THE FIRST WRITING-MACHINES





From My Unpublished Autobiography







Some days ago a correspondent sent in an old typewritten sheet,

faded by age, containing the following letter over the signature

of Mark Twain:





"Hartford, March 10, 1875.





"Please do not use my name in any way.  Please do not even divulge

that fact that I own a machine.  I have entirely stopped using

the typewriter, for the reason that I never could write a letter

with it to anybody without receiving a request by return mail that I

would not only describe the machine, but state what progress I had

made in the use of it, etc., etc.  I don't like to write letters,

and so I don't want people to know I own this curiosity-breeding

little joker."





A note was sent to Mr. Clemens asking him if the letter was genuine

and whether he really had a typewriter as long ago as that.

Mr. Clemens replied that his best answer is the following chapter

from his unpublished autobiography:







1904.  VILLA QUARTO, FLORENCE, JANUARY.





Dictating autobiography to a typewriter is a new experience for me,

but it goes very well, and is going to save time and "language"--

the kind of language that soothes vexation.



I have dictated to a typewriter before--but not autobiography.

Between that experience and the present one there lies a mighty gap--

more than thirty years!  It is sort of lifetime.  In that wide interval

much has happened--to the type-machine as well as to the rest of us.

At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity.

The person who owned one was a curiosity, too.  But now it is the

other way about:  the person who DOESN'T own one is a curiosity.

I saw a type-machine for the first time in--what year?  I suppose it

was 1873--because Nasby was with me at the time, and it was in Boston.

We must have been lecturing, or we could not have been in Boston,

I take it.  I quitted the platform that season.



But never mind about that, it is no matter.  Nasby and I saw

the machine through a window, and went in to look at it.

The salesman explained it to us, showed us samples of its work,

and said it could do fifty-seven words a minute--a statement

which we frankly confessed that we did not believe.  So he put

his type-girl to work, and we timed her by the watch.  She actually

did the fifty-seven in sixty seconds.  We were partly convinced,

but said it probably couldn't happen again.  But it did.

We timed the girl over and over again--with the same result always:

she won out.  She did her work on narrow slips of paper, and we

pocketed them as fast as she turned them out, to show as curiosities.

The price of the machine was one hundred and twenty-five dollars.

I bought one, and we went away very much excited.



At the hotel we got out our slips and were a little disappointed

to find that they contained the same words.  The girl had economized

time and labor by using a formula which she knew by heart.

However, we argued--safely enough--that the FIRST type-girl must

naturally take rank with the first billiard-player: neither of them

could be expected to get out of the game any more than a third or a

half of what was in it.  If the machine survived--IF it survived--

experts would come to the front, by and by, who would double the girl's

output without a doubt.  They would do one hundred words a minute--

my talking speed on the platform.  That score has long ago been beaten.



At home I played with the toy, repeated and repeating and repeated "The

Boy stood on the Burning Deck," until I could turn that boy's adventure

out at the rate of twelve words a minute; then I resumed the pen,

for business, and only worked the machine to astonish inquiring visitors.

They carried off many reams of the boy and his burning deck.



By and by I hired a young woman, and did my first dictating (letters,

merely), and my last until now.  The machine did not do both capitals

and lower case (as now), but only capitals.  Gothic capitals they were,

and sufficiently ugly.  I remember the first letter I dictated.

it was to Edward Bok, who was a boy then.  I was not acquainted

with him at that time.  His present enterprising spirit is not new--

he had it in that early day.  He was accumulating autographs, and was

not content with mere signatures, he wanted a whole autograph LETTER.

I furnished it--in type-written capitals, SIGNATURE AND ALL.

It was long; it was a sermon; it contained advice; also reproaches.

I said writing was my TRADE, my bread-and-butter; I said it was

not fair to ask a man to give away samples of his trade; would he

ask the blacksmith for a horseshoe? would he ask the doctor for

a corpse?



Now I come to an important matter--as I regard it.  In the year

'74 the young woman copied a considerable part of a book of mine

ON THE MACHINE.  In a previous chapter of this Autobiography I

have claimed that I was the first person in the world that ever had

a telephone in the house for practical purposes; I will now claim--

until dispossess--that I was the first person in the world to APPLY

THE TYPE-MACHINE TO LITERATURE.  That book must have been THE

ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER.  I wrote the first half of it in '72,

the rest of it in '74.  My machinist type-copied a book for me

in '74, so I concluded it was that one.



That early machine was full of caprices, full of defects--devilish ones.

It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues.

After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character,

so I thought I would give it to Howells.  He was reluctant, for he

was suspicious of novelties and unfriendly toward them, and he remains

so to this day.  But I persuaded him.  He had great confidence in me,

and I got him to believe things about the machine that I did not

believe myself.  He took it home to Boston, and my morals began

to improve, but his have never recovered.



He kept it six months, and then returned it to me.  I gave it away

twice after that, but it wouldn't stay; it came back.  Then I

gave it to our coachman, Patrick McAleer, who was very grateful,

because he did not know the animal, and thought I was trying to

make him wiser and better.  As soon as he got wiser and better he

traded it to a heretic for a side-saddle which he could not use,

and there my knowledge of its history ends.





***







ITALIAN WITHOUT A MASTER







It is almost a fortnight now that I am domiciled in a medieval

villa in the country, a mile or two from Florence.  I cannot speak

the language; I am too old not to learn how, also too busy when I

am busy, and too indolent when I am not; wherefore some will

imagine that I am having a dull time of it.  But it is not so.

The "help" are all natives; they talk Italian to me, I answer

in English; I do not understand them, they do not understand me,

consequently no harm is done, and everybody is satisfied.  In order

to be just and fair, I throw in an Italian word when I have one,

and this has a good influence.  I get the word out of the morning paper.

I have to use it while it is fresh, for I find that Italian words

do not keep in this climate.  They fade toward night, and next

morning they are gone.  But it is no matter; I get a new one out

of the paper before breakfast, and thrill the domestics with it

while it lasts.  I have no dictionary, and I do not want one;

I can select words by the sound, or by orthographic aspect.

Many of them have French or German or English look, and these are

the ones I enslave for the day's service.  That is, as a rule.

Not always.  If I find a learnable phrase that has an imposing look

and warbles musically along I do not care to know the meaning of it;

I pay it out to the first applicant, knowing that if I pronounce it

carefully HE will understand it, and that's enough.



Yesterday's word was AVANTI.  It sounds Shakespearian, and probably

means Avaunt and quit my sight.  Today I have a whole phrase:

SONO DISPIACENTISSIMO.  I do not know what it means, but it seems

to fit in everywhere and give satisfaction.  Although as a rule

my words and phrases are good for one day and train only, I have

several that stay by me all the time, for some unknown reason,

and these come very handy when I get into a long conversation and need

things to fire up with in monotonous stretches.  One of the best ones

is DOV' `E IL GATTO.  It nearly always produces a pleasant surprise,

therefore I save it up for places where I want to express applause

or admiration.  The fourth word has a French sound, and I think

the phrase means "that takes the cake."



During my first week in the deep and dreamy stillness of this woodsy

and flowery place I was without news of the outside world, and was

well content without it.  It has been four weeks since I had seen

a newspaper, and this lack seemed to give life a new charm and grace,

and to saturate it with a feeling verging upon actual delight.

Then came a change that was to be expected:  the appetite for news

began to rise again, after this invigorating rest.  I had to feed it,

but I was not willing to let it make me its helpless slave again;

I determined to put it on a diet, and a strict and limited one.

So I examined an Italian paper, with the idea of feeding it on that,

and on that exclusively.  On that exclusively, and without help of

a dictionary.  In this way I should surely be well protected against

overloading and indigestion.



A glance at the telegraphic page filled me with encouragement.

There were no scare-heads. That was good--supremely good.  But there

were headings--one-liners and two-liners--and that was good too;

for without these, one must do as one does with a German paper--pay our

precious time in finding out what an article is about, only to discover,

in many cases, that there is nothing in it of interest to you.

The headline is a valuable thing.



Necessarily we are all fond of murders, scandals, swindles,

robberies, explosions, collisions, and all such things, when we

knew the people, and when they are neighbors and friends, but when

they are strangers we do not get any great pleasure out of them,

as a rule.  Now the trouble with an American paper is that it has

no discrimination; it rakes the whole earth for blood and garbage,

and the result is that you are daily overfed and suffer a surfeit.

By habit you stow this muck every day, but you come by and by to

take no vital interest in it--indeed, you almost get tired of it.

As a rule, forty-nine-fiftieths of it concerns strangers only--

people away off yonder, a thousand miles, two thousand miles,

ten thousand miles from where you are.  Why, when you come to think

of it, who cares what becomes of those people?  I would not give

the assassination of one personal friend for a whole massacre

of those others.  And, to my mind, one relative or neighbor mixed

up in a scandal is more interesting than a whole Sodom and Gomorrah

of outlanders gone rotten.  Give me the home product every time.



Very well.  I saw at a glance that the Florentine paper would

suit me:  five out of six of its scandals and tragedies were local;

they were adventures of one's very neighbors, one might almost say

one's friends.  In the matter of world news there was not too much,

but just about enough.  I subscribed.  I have had no occasion

to regret it.  Every morning I get all the news I need for the day;

sometimes from the headlines, sometimes from the text.  I have never

had to call for a dictionary yet.  I read the paper with ease.

Often I do not quite understand, often some of the details escape me,

but no matter, I get the idea.  I will cut out a passage or two,

then you see how limpid the language is:





Il ritorno dei Beati d'Italia



Elargizione del Re all' Ospedale italiano





The first line means that the Italian sovereigns are coming back--

they have been to England.  The second line seems to mean that they

enlarged the King at the Italian hospital.  With a banquet, I suppose.

An English banquet has that effect.  Further:





Il ritorno dei Sovrani



a Roma





ROMA, 24, ore 22,50.--I Sovrani e le Principessine Reali si attendono

a Roma domani alle ore 15,51.





Return of the sovereigns to Rome, you see.  Date of the telegram,

Rome, November 24, ten minutes before twenty-three o'clock. The

telegram seems to say, "The Sovereigns and the Royal Children expect

themselves at Rome tomorrow at fifty-one minutes after fifteen o'clock."



I do not know about Italian time, but I judge it begins at midnight

and runs through the twenty-four hours without breaking bulk.

In the following ad, the theaters open at half-past twenty.

If these are not matinees, 20.30 must mean 8.30 P.M., by my reckoning.





Spettacolli del di 25



TEATRO DELLA PERGOLA--(Ore 20,30)--Opera.  BOH`EME. TEATRO

ALFIERI.--Compagnia drammatica Drago--(Ore 20,30)--LA LEGGE.

ALHAMBRA--(Ore 20,30)--Spettacolo variato.  SALA EDISON--

Grandiosoo spettacolo Cinematografico:  QUO VADIS?--Inaugurazione della

Chiesa Russa--In coda al Direttissimo--Vedute di Firenze con

gran movimeno--America:  Transporto tronchi giganteschi--I ladri

in casa del Diavolo--Scene comiche.  CINEMATOGRAFO--Via Brunelleschi

n.  4.--Programma straordinario, DON CHISCIOTTE--Prezzi populari.





The whole of that is intelligible to me--and sane and rational, too--

except the remark about the Inauguration of a Russian Chinese.

That one oversizes my hand.  Give me five cards.



This is a four-page paper; and as it is set in long primer leaded

and has a page of advertisements, there is no room for the crimes,

disasters, and general sweepings of the outside world--thanks be!

Today I find only a single importation of the off-color sort:





Una Principessa



che fugge con un cocchiere





PARIGI, 24.--Il MATIN ha da Berlino che la principessa

Schovenbare-Waldenbure scomparve il 9 novembre.  Sarebbe partita

col suo cocchiere.



La Principassa ha 27 anni.





Twenty-seven years old, and scomparve--scampered--on the 9th November.

You see by the added detail that she departed with her coachman.

I hope Sarebbe has not made a mistake, but I am afraid the chances

are that she has.  SONO DISPIACENTISSIMO.



There are several fires:  also a couple of accidents.  This is

one of them:





Grave disgrazia sul Ponte Vecchio





Stammattina, circe le 7,30, mentre Giuseppe Sciatti, di anni 55,

di Casellina e Torri, passava dal Ponte Vecchio, stando seduto sopra

un barroccio carico di verdura, perse l' equilibrio e cadde al suolo,

rimanendo con la gamba destra sotto una ruota del veicolo.



Lo Sciatti fu subito raccolto da alcuni cittadini, che, per mezzo

della pubblica vettura n.  365, lo transporto a San Giovanni di Dio.



Ivi il medico di guardia gli riscontro la frattura della gamba

destra e alcune lievi escoriazioni giudicandolo guaribile in 50

giorni salvo complicazioni.





What it seems to say is this:  "Serious Disgrace on the Old

Old Bridge.  This morning about 7.30, Mr. Joseph Sciatti, aged 55,

of Casellina and Torri, while standing up in a sitting posture

on top of a carico barrow of vedure (foliage? hay? vegetables?),

lost his equilibrium and fell on himself, arriving with his left

leg under one of the wheels of the vehicle.



"Said Sciatti was suddenly harvested (gathered in?) by several citizens,

who by means of public cab No. 365 transported to St. John of God."



Paragraph No. 3 is a little obscure, but I think it says that

the medico set the broken left leg--right enough, since there

was nothing the matter with the other one--and that several

are encouraged to hope that fifty days well fetch him around

in quite giudicandolo-guaribile way, if no complications intervene.



I am sure I hope so myself.



There is a great and peculiar charm about reading news-scraps in a

language which you are not acquainted with--the charm that always goes

with the mysterious and the uncertain.  You can never be absolutely

sure of the meaning of anything you read in such circumstances;

you are chasing an alert and gamy riddle all the time, and the

baffling turns and dodges of the prey make the life of the hunt.

A dictionary would spoil it.  Sometimes a single word of doubtful

purport will cast a veil of dreamy and golden uncertainty over a

whole paragraph of cold and practical certainties, and leave steeped

in a haunting and adorable mystery an incident which had been vulgar

and commonplace but for that benefaction.  Would you be wise to draw

a dictionary on that gracious word? would you be properly grateful?



After a couple of days' rest I now come back to my subject and seek

a case in point.  I find it without trouble, in the morning paper;

a cablegram from Chicago and Indiana by way of Paris.  All the words

save one are guessable by a person ignorant of Italian:





Revolverate in teatro





PARIGI, 27.--La PATRIE ha da Chicago:



Il guardiano del teatro dell'opera di Walace (Indiana), avendo voluto

espellare uno spettatore che continuava a fumare malgrado il diviety,

questo spalleggiato dai suoi amici tir`o diversi colpi di rivoltella.

Il guardiano ripose.  Nacque una scarica generale.  Grande panico

tra gli spettatori.  Nessun ferito.





TRANSLATION.--"Revolveration in Theater.  PARIS, 27TH.  LA PATRIE

has from Chicago:  The cop of the theater of the opera of Wallace,

Indiana, had willed to expel a spectator which continued to smoke

in spite of the prohibition, who, spalleggiato by his friends,

tir'o (Fr. TIR'E, Anglice PULLED) manifold revolver-shots;

great panic among the spectators.  Nobody hurt."



It is bettable that that harmless cataclysm in the theater of the opera

of Wallace, Indiana, excited not a person in Europe but me, and so

came near to not being worth cabling to Florence by way of France.

But it does excite me.  It excites me because I cannot make out,

for sure, what it was that moved the spectator to resist the officer.

I was gliding along smoothly and without obstruction or accident,

until I came to that word "spalleggiato," then the bottom fell out.

You notice what a rich gloom, what a somber and pervading mystery,

that word sheds all over the whole Wallachian tragedy.  That is the charm

of the thing, that is the delight of it.  This is where you begin,

this is where you revel.  You can guess and guess, and have all

the fun you like; you need not be afraid there will be an end to it;

none is possible, for no amount of guessing will ever furnish you

a meaning for that word that you can be sure is the right one.

All the other words give you hints, by their form, their sound,

or their spelling--this one doesn't, this one throws out no hints,

this one keeps its secret.  If there is even the slightest slight

shadow of a hint anywhere, it lies in the very meagerly suggestive

fact that "spalleggiato" carries our word "egg" in its stomach.

Well, make the most out of it, and then where are you at?

You conjecture that the spectator which was smoking in spite

of the prohibition and become reprohibited by the guardians,

was "egged on" by his friends, and that was owing to that evil

influence that he initiated the revolveration in theater that has

galloped under the sea and come crashing through the European

press without exciting anybody but me.  But are you sure,

are you dead sure, that that was the way of it?  No. Then the

uncertainty remains, the mystery abides, and with it the charm.

Guess again.



If I had a phrase-book of a really satisfactory sort I would

study it, and not give all my free time to undictionarial readings,

but there is no such work on the market.  The existing phrase-books

are inadequate.  They are well enough as far as they go, but when

you fall down and skin your leg they don't tell you what to say.





***







ITALIAN WITH GRAMMAR







I found that a person of large intelligence could read this beautiful

language with considerable facility without a dictionary, but I presently

found that to such a parson a grammar could be of use at times.

It is because, if he does not know the WERE'S and the WAS'S and the

MAYBE'S and the HAS-BEENS'S apart, confusions and uncertainties

can arise.  He can get the idea that a thing is going to happen next

week when the truth is that it has already happened week before last.

Even more previously, sometimes.  Examination and inquiry showed

me that the adjectives and such things were frank and fair-minded

and straightforward, and did not shuffle; it was the Verb that mixed

the hands, it was the Verb that lacked stability, it was the Verb that

had no permanent opinion about anything, it was the Verb that was always

dodging the issue and putting out the light and making all the trouble.



Further examination, further inquiry, further reflection,

confirmed this judgment, and established beyond peradventure the

fact that the Verb was the storm-center. This discovery made plain

the right and wise course to pursue in order to acquire certainty

and exactness in understanding the statements which the newspaper

was daily endeavoring to convey to me:  I must catch a Verb and

tame it.  I must find out its ways, I must spot its eccentricities,

I must penetrate its disguises, I must intelligently foresee and

forecast at least the commoner of the dodges it was likely to try

upon a stranger in given circumstances, I must get in on its main

shifts and head them off, I must learn its game and play the limit.



I had noticed, in other foreign languages, that verbs are bred

in families, and that the members of each family have certain features

or resemblances that are common to that family and distinguish it

from the other families--the other kin, the cousins and what not.

I had noticed that this family-mark is not usually the nose or the hair,

so to speak, but the tail--the Termination--and that these tails

are quite definitely differentiated; insomuch that an expert can

tell a Pluperfect from a Subjunctive by its tail as easily and as

certainly as a cowboy can tell a cow from a horse by the like process,

the result of observation and culture.  I should explain that I

am speaking of legitimate verbs, those verbs which in the slang

of the grammar are called Regular.  There are other--I am not meaning

to conceal this; others called Irregulars, born out of wedlock,

of unknown and uninteresting parentage, and naturally destitute

of family resemblances, as regards to all features, tails included.

But of these pathetic outcasts I have nothing to say.  I do not

approve of them, I do not encourage them; I am prudishly delicate

and sensitive, and I do not allow them to be used in my presence.



But, as I have said, I decided to catch one of the others and break

it into harness.  One is enough.  Once familiar with its assortment

of tails, you are immune; after that, no regular verb can conceal

its specialty from you and make you think it is working the past

or the future or the conditional or the unconditional when it is

engaged in some other line of business--its tail will give it away.

I found out all these things by myself, without a teacher.



I selected the verb AMARE, TO LOVE.  Not for any personal reason,

for I am indifferent about verbs; I care no more for one verb than

for another, and have little or no respect for any of them; but in

foreign languages you always begin with that one.  Why, I don't know.

It is merely habit, I suppose; the first teacher chose it,

Adam was satisfied, and there hasn't been a successor since with

originality enough to start a fresh one.  For they ARE a pretty

limited lot, you will admit that?  Originality is not in their line;

they can't think up anything new, anything to freshen up the old

moss-grown dullness of the language lesson and put life and "go"

into it, and charm and grace and picturesqueness.



I knew I must look after those details myself; therefore I thought

them out and wrote them down, and set for the FACCHINO and explained

them to him, and said he must arrange a proper plant, and get together

a good stock company among the CONTADINI, and design the costumes,

and distribute the parts; and drill the troupe, and be ready in three

days to begin on this Verb in a shipshape and workman-like manner.

I told him to put each grand division of it under a foreman,

and each subdivision under a subordinate of the rank of sergeant

or corporal or something like that, and to have a different uniform

for each squad, so that I could tell a Pluperfect from a Compound

Future without looking at the book; the whole battery to be under

his own special and particular command, with the rank of Brigadier,

and I to pay the freight.



I then inquired into the character and possibilities of the selected verb,

and was much disturbed to find that it was over my size, it being

chambered for fifty-seven rounds--fifty-seven ways of saying I LOVE

without reloading; and yet none of them likely to convince a girl

that was laying for a title, or a title that was laying for rocks.



It seemed to me that with my inexperience it would be foolish to go

into action with this mitrailleuse, so I ordered it to the rear

and told the facchino to provide something a little more primitive

to start with, something less elaborate, some gentle old-fashioned

flint-lock, smooth-bore, double-barreled thing, calculated to cripple

at two hundred yards and kill at forty--an arrangement suitable for a

beginner who could be satisfied with moderate results on the offstart

and did not wish to take the whole territory in the first campaign.



But in vain.  He was not able to mend the matter, all the verbs being

of the same build, all Gatlings, all of the same caliber and delivery,

fifty-seven to the volley, and fatal at a mile and a half.

But he said the auxiliary verb AVERE, TO HAVE, was a tidy thing,

and easy to handle in a seaway, and less likely to miss stays in

going about than some of the others; so, upon his recommendation I

chose that one, and told him to take it along and scrape its bottom

and break out its spinnaker and get it ready for business.



I will explain that a facchino is a general-utility domestic.

Mine was a horse-doctor in his better days, and a very good one.





At the end of three days the facchino-doctor-brigadier was ready.

I was also ready, with a stenographer.  We were in a room called

the Rope-Walk. This is a formidably long room, as is indicated

by its facetious name, and is a good place for reviews.  At 9:30

the F.-D.-B. took his place near me and gave the word of command;

the drums began to rumble and thunder, the head of the forces appeared

at an upper door, and the "march-past" was on.  Down they filed,

a blaze of variegated color, each squad gaudy in a uniform of its own

and bearing a banner inscribed with its verbal rank and quality:

first the Present Tense in Mediterranean blue and old gold, then the

Past Definite in scarlet and black, then the Imperfect in green

and yellow, then the Indicative Future in the stars and stripes,

then the Old Red Sandstone Subjunctive in purple and silver--

and so on and so on, fifty-seven privates and twenty commissioned

and non-commissioned officers; certainly one of the most fiery and

dazzling and eloquent sights I have ever beheld.  I could not keep back

the tears.  Presently:



"Halt!" commanded the Brigadier.



"Front--face!"



"Right dress!"



"Stand at ease!"



"One--two--three.  In unison--RECITE!"



It was fine.  In one noble volume of sound of all the fifty-seven

Haves in the Italian language burst forth in an exalting

and splendid confusion.  Then came commands:



"About--face!  Eyes--front!  Helm alee--hard aport!  Forward--march!"

and the drums let go again.



When the last Termination had disappeared, the commander said

the instruction drill would now begin, and asked for suggestions.

I said:



"They say I HAVE, THOU HAST, HE HAS, and so on, but they don't say WHAT.

It will be better, and more definite, if they have something

to have; just an object, you know, a something--anything will do;

anything that will give the listener a sort of personal as well

as grammatical interest in their joys and complaints, you see."



He said:



"It is a good point.  Would a dog do?"



I said I did not know, but we could try a dog and see.  So he sent

out an aide-de-camp to give the order to add the dog.





The six privates of the Present Tense now filed in, in charge

of Sergeant AVERE (TO HAVE), and displaying their banner.

They formed in line of battle, and recited, one at a time, thus:



"IO HO UN CANE, I have a dog."



"TU HAI UN CANE, thou hast a dog."



"EGLI HA UN CANE, he has a dog."



"NOI ABBIAMO UN CANE, we have a dog."



"VOI AVETE UN CANE, you have a dog."



"EGLINO HANNO UN CANE, they have a dog."



No comment followed.  They returned to camp, and I reflected a while.

The commander said:



"I fear you are disappointed."



"Yes," I said; "they are too monotonous, too singsong, to dead-and-alive;

they have no expression, no elocution.  It isn't natural; it could

never happen in real life.  A person who had just acquired a dog

is either blame' glad or blame' sorry.  He is not on the fence.

I never saw a case.  What the nation do you suppose is the matter

with these people?"



He thought maybe the trouble was with the dog.  He said:



"These are CONTADINI, you know, and they have a prejudice against dogs--

that is, against marimane.  Marimana dogs stand guard over people's

vines and olives, you know, and are very savage, and thereby a grief

and an inconvenience to persons who want other people's things

at night.  In my judgment they have taken this dog for a marimana,

and have soured on him."



I saw that the dog was a mistake, and not functionable:

we must try something else; something, if possible, that could

evoke sentiment, interest, feeling.



"What is cat, in Italian?"  I asked.



"Gatto."



"Is it a gentleman cat, or a lady?"



"Gentleman cat."



"How are these people as regards that animal?"



"We-ll, they--they--"



"You hesitate:  that is enough.  How are they about chickens?"



He tilted his eyes toward heaven in mute ecstasy.  I understood.



"What is chicken, in Italian?"  I asked.



"Pollo, PODERE."  (Podere is Italian for master.  It is a title

of courtesy, and conveys reverence and admiration.) "Pollo is one

chicken by itself; when there are enough present to constitute

a plural, it is POLLI."



"Very well, polli will do.  Which squad is detailed for duty next?"



"The Past Definite."



"Send out and order it to the front--with chickens.  And let them

understand that we don't want any more of this cold indifference."



He gave the order to an aide, adding, with a haunting tenderness

in his tone and a watering mouth in his aspect:



"Convey to them the conception that these are unprotected chickens."

He turned to me, saluting with his hand to his temple, and explained,

"It will inflame their interest in the poultry, sire."



A few minutes elapsed.  Then the squad marched in and formed up,

their faces glowing with enthusiasm, and the file-leader shouted:



"EBBI POLLI, I had chickens!"



"Good!"  I said.  "Go on, the next."



"AVEST POLLI, thou hadst chickens!"



"Fine!  Next!"



"EBBE POLLI, he had chickens!"



"Moltimoltissimo!  Go on, the next!"



"AVEMMO POLLI, we had chickens!"



"Basta-basta aspettatto avanti--last man--CHARGE!"



"EBBERO POLLI, they had chickens!"



Then they formed in echelon, by columns of fours, refused the left,

and retired in great style on the double-quick. I was enchanted,

and said:



"Now, doctor, that is something LIKE!  Chickens are the ticket,

there is no doubt about it.  What is the next squad?"



"The Imperfect."



"How does it go?"



"IO AVENA, I had, TU AVEVI, thou hadst, EGLI AVENA, he had,

NOI AV--"



Wait--we've just HAD the hads.  what are you giving me?"



"But this is another breed."



"What do we want of another breed?  Isn't one breed enough?

HAD is HAD, and your tricking it out in a fresh way of spelling

isn't going to make it any hadder than it was before; now you know

that yourself."



"But there is a distinction--they are not just the same Hads."



"How do you make it out?"



"Well, you use that first Had when you are referring to something

that happened at a named and sharp and perfectly definite moment;

you use the other when the thing happened at a vaguely defined time

and in a more prolonged and indefinitely continuous way."



'Why, doctor, it is pure nonsense; you know it yourself.  Look here:

If I have had a had, or have wanted to have had a had, or was in a

position right then and there to have had a had that hadn't had any chance

to go out hadding on account of this foolish discrimination which lets

one Had go hadding in any kind of indefinite grammatical weather but

restricts the other one to definite and datable meteoric convulsions,

and keeps it pining around and watching the barometer all the time,

and liable to get sick through confinement and lack of exercise,

and all that sort of thing, why--why, the inhumanity of it is enough,

let alone the wanton superfluity and uselessness of any such a loafing

consumptive hospital-bird of a Had taking up room and cumbering

the place for nothing.  These finical refinements revolt me;

it is not right, it is not honorable; it is constructive nepotism

to keep in office a Had that is so delicate it can't come out when

the wind's in the nor'west--I won't have this dude on the payroll.

Cancel his exequator; and look here--"



"But you miss the point.  It is like this.  You see--"



"Never mind explaining, I don't care anything about it.  Six Hads

is enough for me; anybody that needs twelve, let him subscribe;

I don't want any stock in a Had Trust.  Knock out the Prolonged

and Indefinitely Continuous; four-fifths of it is water, anyway."



"But I beg you, podere!  It is often quite indispensable in cases where--"



"Pipe the next squad to the assault!"



But it was not to be; for at that moment the dull boom of the noon gun

floated up out of far-off Florence, followed by the usual softened

jangle of church-bells, Florentine and suburban, that bursts out in

murmurous response; by labor-union law the COLAZIONE [1] must stop;

stop promptly, stop instantly, stop definitely, like the chosen

and best of the breed of Hads.



- - -



1.  Colazione is Italian for a collection, a meeting, a seance,

a sitting.--M.T.





***







A BURLESQUE BIOGRAPHY







Two or three persons having at different times intimated that if I

would write an autobiography they would read it when they got leisure,

I yield at last to this frenzied public demand and herewith tender

my history.



Ours is a noble house, and stretches a long way back into antiquity.

The earliest ancestor the Twains have any record of was a friend of

the family by the name of Higgins.  This was in the eleventh century,

when our people were living in Aberdeen, county of Cork, England.

Why it is that our long line has ever since borne the maternal

name (except when one of them now and then took a playful

refuge in an alias to avert foolishness), instead of Higgins,

is a mystery which none of us has ever felt much desire to stir.

It is a kind of vague, pretty romance, and we leave it alone.

All the old families do that way.



Arthour Twain was a man of considerable note--a solicitor on the

highway in William Rufus's time.  At about the age of thirty he went

to one of those fine old English places of resort called Newgate,

to see about something, and never returned again.  While there he

died suddenly.



Augustus Twain seems to have made something of a stir about the

year 1160.  He was as full of fun as he could be, and used to take his old

saber and sharpen it up, and get in a convenient place on a dark night,

and stick it through people as they went by, to see them jump.

He was a born humorist.  But he got to going too far with it;

and the first time he was found stripping one of these parties,

the authorities removed one end of him, and put it up on a nice high

place on Temple Bar, where it could contemplate the people and have

a good time.  He never liked any situation so much or stuck to it so long.



Then for the next two hundred years the family tree shows

a succession of soldiers--noble, high-spirited fellows,

who always went into battle singing, right behind the army,

and always went out a-whooping, right ahead of it.



This is a scathing rebuke to old dead Froissart's poor witticism

that our family tree never had but one limb to it, and that that

one stuck out at right angles, and bore fruit winter and summer.



Early in the fifteenth century we have Beau Twain, called "the Scholar."

He wrote a beautiful, beautiful hand.  And he could imitate anybody's

hand so closely that it was enough to make a person laugh his head

off to see it.  He had infinite sport with his talent.  But by and

by he took a contract to break stone for a road, and the roughness

of the work spoiled his hand.  Still, he enjoyed life all the time

he was in the stone business, which, with inconsiderable intervals,

was some forty-two years.  In fact, he died in harness.  During all

those long years he gave such satisfaction that he never was through

with one contract a week till the government gave him another.  He was

a perfect pet.  And he was always a favorite with his fellow-artists,

and was a conspicuous member of their benevolent secret society,

called the Chain Gang.  He always wore his hair short, had a

preference for striped clothes, and died lamented by the government.

He was a sore loss to his country.  For he was so regular.



Some years later we have the illustrious John Morgan Twain.

He came over to this country with Columbus in 1492 as a passenger.

He appears to have been of a crusty, uncomfortable disposition.

He complained of the food all the way over, and was always threatening

to go ashore unless there was a change.  He wanted fresh shad.

Hardly a day passed over his head that he did not go idling about

the ship with his nose in the air, sneering about the commander,

and saying he did not believe Columbus knew where he was going

to or had ever been there before.  The memorable cry of "Land ho!"

thrilled every heart in the ship but his.  He gazed awhile through a

piece of smoked glass at the penciled line lying on the distant water,

and then said:  "Land be hanged--it's a raft!"



When this questionable passenger came on board the ship, be brought

nothing with him but an old newspaper containing a handkerchief

marked "B. G.," one cotton sock marked "L. W. C.," one woolen one

marked "D. F.," and a night-shirt marked "O. M. R." And yet during

the voyage he worried more about his "trunk," and gave himself more

airs about it, than all the rest of the passengers put together.

If the ship was "down by the head," and would not steer, he would

go and move his "trunk" further aft, and then watch the effect.

If the ship was "by the stern," he would suggest to Columbus to detail

some men to "shift that baggage."  In storms he had to be gagged,

because his wailings about his "trunk" made it impossible for the

men to hear the orders.  The man does not appear to have been

openly charged with any gravely unbecoming thing, but it is noted

in the ship's log as a "curious circumstance" that albeit he brought

his baggage on board the ship in a newspaper, he took it ashore in

four trunks, a queensware crate, and a couple of champagne baskets.

But when he came back insinuating, in an insolent, swaggering way,

that some of this things were missing, and was going to search

the other passengers' baggage, it was too much, and they threw

him overboard.  They watched long and wonderingly for him to

come up, but not even a bubble rose on the quietly ebbing tide.

But while every one was most absorbed in gazing over the side,

and the interest was momentarily increasing, it was observed with

consternation that the vessel was adrift and the anchor-cable hanging

limp from the bow.  Then in the ship's dimmed and ancient log we

find this quaint note:



"In time it was discouvered yt ye troblesome passenger hadde gone

downe and got ye anchor, and toke ye same and solde it to ye dam

sauvages from ye interior, saying yt he hadde founde it, ye sonne

of a ghun!"



Yet this ancestor had good and noble instincts, and it is with

pride that we call to mind the fact that he was the first white

person who ever interested himself in the work of elevating

and civilizing our Indians.  He built a commodious jail and put

up a gallows, and to his dying day he claimed with satisfaction

that he had had a more restraining and elevating influence on

the Indians than any other reformer that ever labored among them.

At this point the chronicle becomes less frank and chatty,

and closes abruptly by saying that the old voyager went to see

his gallows perform on the first white man ever hanged in America,

and while there received injuries which terminated in his death.



The great-grandson of the "Reformer" flourished in sixteen hundred

and something, and was known in our annals as "the old Admiral,"

though in history he had other titles.  He was long in command of

fleets of swift vessels, well armed and manned, and did great service

in hurrying up merchantmen.  Vessels which he followed and kept

his eagle eye on, always made good fair time across the ocean.

But if a ship still loitered in spite of all he could do,

his indignation would grow till he could contain himself no longer--

and then he would take that ship home where he lived and keep it

there carefully, expecting the owners to come for it, but they never did.

And he would try to get the idleness and sloth out of the sailors

of that ship by compelling them to take invigorating exercise and

a bath.  He called it "walking a plank."  All the pupils liked it.

At any rate, they never found any fault with it after trying it.

When the owners were late coming for their ships, the Admiral always

burned them, so that the insurance money should not be lost.

At last this fine old tar was cut down in the fullness of his years

and honors.  And to her dying day, his poor heart-broken widow believed

that if he had been cut down fifteen minutes sooner he might have

been resuscitated.



Charles Henry Twain lived during the latter part of the seventeenth

century, and was a zealous and distinguished missionary.

He converted sixteen thousand South Sea islanders, and taught them

that a dog-tooth necklace and a pair of spectacles was not enough

clothing to come to divine service in.  His poor flock loved

him very, very dearly; and when his funeral was over, they got up

in a body (and came out of the restaurant) with tears in their eyes,

and saying, one to another, that he was a good tender missionary,

and they wished they had some more of him.



Pah-go-to-wah-wah-pukketekeewis (Mighty-Hunter-with-a-Hog-Eye-Twain)

adorned the middle of the eighteenth century, and aided General

Braddock with all his heart to resist the oppressor Washington.

It was this ancestor who fired seventeen times at our Washington

from behind a tree.  So far the beautiful romantic narrative

in the moral story-books is correct; but when that narrative goes

on to say that at the seventeenth round the awe-stricken savage

said solemnly that that man was being reserved by the Great Spirit

for some mighty mission, and he dared not lift his sacrilegious rifle

against him again, the narrative seriously impairs the integrity

of history.  What he did say was:



"It ain't no (hic) no use.  'At man's so drunk he can't stan'

still long enough for a man to hit him.  I (hic) I can't 'ford

to fool away any more am'nition on him."



That was why he stopped at the seventeenth round, and it was a good,

plain, matter-of-fact reason, too, and one that easily commends itself

to us by the eloquent, persuasive flavor of probability there is about it.



I also enjoyed the story-book narrative, but I felt a marring misgiving

that every Indian at Braddock's Defeat who fired at a soldier

a couple of times (two easily grows to seventeen in a century),

and missed him, jumped to the conclusion that the Great Spirit

was reserving that soldier for some grand mission; and so I somehow

feared that the only reason why Washington's case is remembered

and the others forgotten is, that in his the prophecy came true,

and in that of the others it didn't. There are not books enough

on earth to contain the record of the prophecies Indians and other

unauthorized parties have made; but one may carry in his overcoat

pockets the record of all the prophecies that have been fulfilled.



I will remark here, in passing, that certain ancestors of mine are

so thoroughly well-known in history by their aliases, that I have

not felt it to be worth while to dwell upon them, or even mention

them in the order of their birth.  Among these may be mentioned

Richard Brinsley Twain, alias Guy Fawkes; John Wentworth Twain,

alias Sixteen-String Jack; William Hogarth Twain, alias Jack Sheppard;

Ananias Twain, alias Baron Munchausen; John George Twain,

alias Captain Kydd; and then there are George Francis Twain,

Tom Pepper, Nebuchadnezzar, and Baalam's Ass--they all belong

to our family, but to a branch of it somewhat distinctly removed

from the honorable direct line--in fact, a collateral branch,

whose members chiefly differ from the ancient stock in that, in order

to acquire the notoriety we have always yearned and hungered for,

they have got into a low way of going to jail instead of getting hanged.



It is not well, when writing an autobiography, to follow your ancestry

down too close to your own time--it is safest to speak only vaguely

of your great-grandfather, and then skip from there to yourself,

which I now do.



I was born without teeth--and there Richard III.  had the advantage

of me; but I was born without a humpback, likewise, and there I

had the advantage of him.  My parents were neither very poor nor

conspicuously honest.



But now a thought occurs to me.  My own history would really seem

so tame contrasted with that of my ancestors, that it is simply wisdom

to leave it unwritten until I am hanged.  If some other biographies I

have read had stopped with the ancestry until a like event occurred,

it would have been a felicitous thing for the reading public.

How does it strike you?





***







HOW TO TELL A STORY



The Humorous Story an American Development.--Its Difference



from Comic and Witty Stories







I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told.

I only claim to know how a story ought to be told, for I have been

almost daily in the company of the most expert story-tellers for

many years.



There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind--

the humorous.  I will talk mainly about that one.  The humorous story

is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French.

The humorous story depends for its effect upon the MANNER of the telling;

the comic story and the witty story upon the MATTER.



The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander

around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular;

but the comic and witty stories must be brief and end with a point.

The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst.



The humorous story is strictly a work of art--high and delicate art--

and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling

the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it.  The art of telling

a humorous story--understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print--

was created in America, and has remained at home.



The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best

to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is

anything funny about it; but the teller of the comic story tells you

beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard,

then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh

when he gets through.  And sometimes, if he has had good success,

he is so glad and happy that he will repeat the "nub" of it

and glance around from face to face, collecting applause,

and then repeat it again.  It is a pathetic thing to see.



Very often, of course, the rambling and disjointed humorous story

finishes with a nub, point, snapper, or whatever you like to call it.

Then the listener must be alert, for in many cases the teller will

divert attention from that nub by dropping it in a carefully casual

and indifferent way, with the pretense that he does not know it

is a nub.



Artemus Ward used that trick a good deal; then when the belated audience

presently caught the joke he would look up with innocent surprise,

as if wondering what they had found to laugh at.  Dan Setchell

used it before him, Nye and Riley and others use it today.



But the teller of the comic story does not slur the nub;

he shouts it at you--every time.  And when he prints it,

in England, France, Germany, and Italy, he italicizes it,

puts some whopping exclamation-points after it, and sometimes

explains it in a parenthesis.  All of which is very depressing,

and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life.



Let me set down an instance of the comic method, using an anecdote

which has been popular all over the world for twelve or fifteen

hundred years.  The teller tells it in this way:





THE WOUNDED SOLDIER





In the course of a certain battle a soldier whose leg had been shot off

appealed to another soldier who was hurrying by to carry him to the rear,

informing him at the same time of the loss which he had sustained;

whereupon the generous son of Mars, shouldering the unfortunate,

proceeded to carry out his desire.  The bullets and cannon-balls

were flying in all directions, and presently one of the latter

took the wounded man's head off--without, however, his deliverer

being aware of it.  In no long time he was hailed by an officer,

who said:



"Where are you going with that carcass?"



"To the rear, sir--he's lost his leg!"



"His leg, forsooth?" responded the astonished officer; "you mean

his head, you booby."



Whereupon the soldier dispossessed himself of his burden, and stood

looking down upon it in great perplexity.  At length he said:



"It is true, sir, just as you have said."  Then after a pause he added,

"BUT HE TOLD ME IT WAS HIS LEG!!!!!"





Here the narrator bursts into explosion after

explosion of thunderous horse-laughter, repeating that

nub from time to time through his gasping and shriekings and suffocatings.



It takes only a minute and a half to tell that in its comic-story form;

and isn't worth the telling, after all.  Put into the humorous-story

form it takes ten minutes, and is about the funniest thing I have

ever listened to--as James Whitcomb Riley tells it.



He tells it in the character of a dull-witted old farmer who has

just heard it for the first time, thinks it is unspeakably funny,

and is trying to repeat it to a neighbor.  But he can't remember it;

so he gets all mixed up and wanders helplessly round and round,

putting in tedious details that don't belong in the tale and only

retard it; taking them out conscientiously and putting in others

that are just as useless; making minor mistakes now and then

and stopping to correct them and explain how he came to make them;

remembering things which he forgot to put in in their proper place

and going back to put them in there; stopping his narrative a good

while in order to try to recall the name of the soldier that was hurt,

and finally remembering that the soldier's name was not mentioned,

and remarking placidly that the name is of no real importance, anyway--

better, of course, if one knew it, but not essential, after all--

and so on, and so on, and so on.



The teller is innocent and happy and pleased with himself,

and has to stop every little while to hold himself in and keep

from laughing outright; and does hold in, but his body quakes

in a jelly-like way with interior chuckles; and at the end of the

ten minutes the audience have laughed until they are exhausted,

and the tears are running down their faces.



The simplicity and innocence and sincerity and unconsciousness

of the old farmer are perfectly simulated, and the result

is a performance which is thoroughly charming and delicious.

This is art--and fine and beautiful, and only a master can compass it;

but a machine could tell the other story.



To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering

and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they

are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position

is correct.  Another feature is the slurring of the point.  A third

is the dropping of a studied remark apparently without knowing it,

as if one where thinking aloud.  The fourth and last is the pause.



Artemus Ward dealt in numbers three and four a good deal.  He would

begin to tell with great animation something which he seemed to

think was wonderful; then lose confidence, and after an apparently

absent-minded pause add an incongruous remark in a soliloquizing way;

and that was the remark intended to explode the mine--and it did.



For instance, he would say eagerly, excitedly, "I once knew a man

in New Zealand who hadn't a tooth in his head"--here his animation

would die out; a silent, reflective pause would follow, then he

would say dreamily, and as if to himself, "and yet that man could

beat a drum better than any man I ever saw."



The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story,

and a frequently recurring feature, too.  It is a dainty thing,

and delicate, and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must

be exactly the right length--no more and no less--or it fails

of its purpose and makes trouble.  If the pause is too short the

impressive point is passed, and the audience have had time to divine

that a surprise is intended--and then you can't surprise them,

of course.



On the platform I used to tell a negro ghost story that had a pause

in front of the snapper on the end, and that pause was the most important

thing in the whole story.  If I got it the right length precisely,

I could spring the finishing ejaculation with effect enough to make

some impressible girl deliver a startled little yelp and jump out

of her seat--and that was what I was after.  This story was called

"The Golden Arm," and was told in this fashion.  You can practice

with it yourself--and mind you look out for the pause and get it right.





THE GOLDEN ARM





Once 'pon a time dey wuz a momsus mean man, en he live 'way out in de

prairie all 'lone by hisself, 'cep'n he had a wife.  En bimeby she died,

en he tuck en toted her way out dah in de prairie en buried her.

Well, she had a golden arm--all solid gold, fum de shoulder down.

He wuz pow'ful mean--pow'ful; en dat night he couldn't sleep,

caze he want dat golden arm so bad.



When it come midnight he couldn't stan' it no mo'; so he git up,

he did, en tuck his lantern en shoved out thoo de storm en dug her

up en got de golden arm; en he bent his head down 'gin de 'win, en

plowed en plowed en plowed thoo de snow.  Den all on a sudden he

stop (make a considerable pause here, and look startled, and take

a listening attitude) en say:  "My LAN', what's dat?"



En he listen--en listen--en de win' say (set your teeth together

and imitate the wailing and wheezing singsong of the wind),

"Bzzz-z-zzz"--en den, way back yonder whah de grave is, he hear

a VOICE!--he hear a voice all mix' up in de win'--can't hardly

tell 'em 'part--"Bzzz--zzz--W-h-o--g-o-t--m-y--g-o-l-d-e-n ARM?"

(You must begin to shiver violently now.)



En he begin to shiver en shake, en say, "Oh, my!  OH, my lan'!" en de win'

blow de lantern out, en de snow en sleet blow in his face en mos'

choke him, en he start a-plowin' knee-deep toward home mos' dead,

he so sk'yerd--en pooty soon he hear de voice agin, en (pause) it 'us

comin AFTER him!  "Bzzz--zzz--zzz W-h-o--g-o-t--m-y--g-o-l-d-e-n--ARM?"



When he git to de pasture he hear it agin--closter now,

en A-COMIN'!--a-comin' back dah in de dark en de storm--(repeat

the wind and the voice). When he git to de house he rush upstairs

en jump in de bed en kiver up, head and years, en lay da shiverin'

en shakin'--en den way out dah he hear it AGIN!--en a-COMIN'! En

bimeby he hear (pause--awed, listening attitude)--pat--pat--pat HIT'S

A-COMIN' UPSTAIRS!  Den he hear de latch, en he KNOW it's in de room!



Den pooty soon he know it's a-STANNIN' BY DE BED!  (Pause.) Den--

he know it's a-BENDIN' DOWN OVER HIM--en he cain't skasely git

his breath!  Den--den--he seem to feel someth'n' C-O-L-D, right down

'most agin his head!  (Pause.)



Den de voice say, RIGHT AT HIS YEAR--"W-h-o--g-o-t--m-y g-o-l-d-e-n ARM?"

(You must wail it out very plaintively and accusingly; then you stare

steadily and impressively into the face of the farthest-gone auditor--

a girl, preferably--and let that awe-inspiring pause begin to build

itself in the deep hush.  When it has reached exactly the right length,

jump suddenly at that girl and yell, "YOU'VE got it!"



If you've got the PAUSE right, she'll fetch a dear little yelp and

spring right out of her shoes.  But you MUST get the pause right;

and you will find it the most troublesome and aggravating and

uncertain thing you ever undertook.





***







GENERAL WASHINGTON'S NEGRO BODY-SERVANT





A Biographical Sketch







The stirring part of this celebrated colored man's life properly began

with his death--that is to say, the notable features of his biography

began with the first time he died.  He had been little heard of up

to that time, but since then we have never ceased to hear of him;

we have never ceased to hear of him at stated, unfailing intervals.

His was a most remarkable career, and I have thought that its history

would make a valuable addition to our biographical literature.

Therefore, I have carefully collated the materials for such a work,

from authentic sources, and here present them to the public.  I have

rigidly excluded from these pages everything of a doubtful character,

with the object in view of introducing my work into the schools

for the instruction of the youth of my country.



The name of the famous body-servant of General Washington was George.

After serving his illustrious master faithfully for half a century,

and enjoying throughout his long term his high regard and confidence,

it became his sorrowful duty at last to lay that beloved master

to rest in his peaceful grave by the Potomac.  Ten years afterward--

in 1809--full of years and honors, he died himself, mourned by all

who knew him.  The Boston GAZETTE of that date thus refers to

the event:





George, the favorite body-servant of the lamented Washington,

died in Richmond, Va., last Tuesday, at the ripe age of 95 years.

His intellect was unimpaired, and his memory tenacious, up to

within a few minutes of his decease.  He was present at the second

installation of Washington as President, and also at his funeral,

and distinctly remembered all the prominent incidents connected with

those noted events.





From this period we hear no more of the favorite body-servant of

General Washington until May, 1825, at which time he died again.

A Philadelphia paper thus speaks of the sad occurrence:





At Macon, Ga., last week, a colored man named George, who was the

favorite body-servant of General Washington, died at the advanced

age of 95 years.  Up to within a few hours of his dissolution he

was in full possession of all his faculties, and could distinctly

recollect the second installation of Washington, his death

and burial, the surrender of Cornwallis, the battle of Trenton,

the griefs and hardships of Valley Forge, etc.  Deceased was

followed to the grave by the entire population of Macon.





On the Fourth of July, 1830, and also of 1834 and 1836, the subject

of this sketch was exhibited in great state upon the rostrum

of the orator of the day, and in November of 1840 he died again.

The St. Louis REPUBLICAN of the 25th of that month spoke as follows:





"ANOTHER RELIC OF THE REVOLUTION GONE.





"George, once the favorite body-servant of General Washington,

died yesterday at the house of Mr. John Leavenworth in this city,

at the venerable age of 95 years.  He was in the full possession

of his faculties up to the hour of his death, and distinctly

recollected the first and second installations and death of

President Washington, the surrender of Cornwallis, the battles

of Trenton and Monmouth, the sufferings of the patriot army at

Valley Forge, the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence,

the speech of Patrick Henry in the Virginia House of Delegates,

and many other old-time reminiscences of stirring interest.

Few white men die lamented as was this aged negro.  The funeral

was very largely attended."





During the next ten or eleven years the subject of this sketch

appeared at intervals at Fourth-of-July celebrations in various

parts of the country, and was exhibited upon the rostrum with

flattering success.  But in the fall of 1855 he died again.

The California papers thus speak of the event:





ANOTHER OLD HERO GONE





Died, at Dutch Flat, on the 7th of March, George (once the confidential

body-servant of General Washington), at the great age of 95 years.

His memory, which did not fail him till the last, was a wonderful

storehouse of interesting reminiscences.  He could distinctly recollect

the first and second installations and death of President Washington,

the surrender of Cornwallis, the battles of Trenton and Monmouth,

and Bunker Hill, the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence,

and Braddock's defeat.  George was greatly respected in Dutch Flat,

and it is estimated that there were 10,000 people present at

his funeral.





The last time the subject of this sketch died was in June, 1864; and until

we learn the contrary, it is just to presume that he died permanently

this time.  The Michigan papers thus refer to the sorrowful event:





ANOTHER CHERISHED REMNANT OF THE REVOLUTION GONE





George, a colored man, and once the favorite body-servant of

George Washington, died in Detroit last week, at the patriarchal age

of 95 years.  To the moment of his death his intellect was unclouded,

and he could distinctly remember the first and second installations

and death of Washington, the surrender of Cornwallis, the battles

of Trenton and Monmouth, and Bunker Hill, the proclamation of the

Declaration of Independence, Braddock's defeat, the throwing over

of the tea in Boston harbor, and the landing of the Pilgrims.

He died greatly respected, and was followed to the grave by a vast

concourse of people.





The faithful old servant is gone!  We shall never see him more until

he turns up again.  He has closed his long and splendid career

of dissolution, for the present, and sleeps peacefully, as only they sleep

who have earned their rest.  He was in all respects a remarkable man.

He held his age better than any celebrity that has figured in history;

and the longer he lived the stronger and longer his memory grew.

If he lives to die again, he will distinctly recollect the discovery

of America.



The above r'esum'e of his biography I believe to be substantially

correct, although it is possible that he may have died once or twice

in obscure places where the event failed of newspaper notoriety.

One fault I find in all the notices of his death I have quoted,

and this ought to be correct.  In them he uniformly and impartially

died at the age of 95.  This could not have been.  He might have

done that once, or maybe twice, but he could not have continued

it indefinitely.  Allowing that when he first died, he died at

the age of 95, he was 151 years old when he died last, in 1864.

But his age did not keep pace with his recollections.  When he died

the last time, he distinctly remembered the landing of the Pilgrims,

which took place in 1620.  He must have been about twenty years

old when he witnessed that event, wherefore it is safe to assert

that the body-servant of General Washington was in the neighborhood

of two hundred and sixty or seventy years old when he departed this

life finally.



Having waited a proper length of time, to see if the subject of his

sketch had gone from us reliably and irrevocably, I now publish his

biography with confidence, and respectfully offer it to a mourning nation.



P.S.--I see by the papers that this imfamous old fraud has just

died again, in Arkansas.  This makes six times that he is known

to have died, and always in a new place.  The death of Washington's

body-servant has ceased to be a novelty; it's charm is gone;

the people are tired of it; let it cease.  This well-meaning

but misguided negro has not put six different communities to the

expense of burying him in state, and has swindled tens of thousands

of people into following him to the grave under the delusion that

a select and peculiar distinction was being conferred upon them.

Let him stay buried for good now; and let that newspaper suffer

the severest censure that shall ever, in all the future time,

publish to the world that General Washington's favorite colored

body-servant has died again.





***







WIT INSPIRATIONS OF THE "TWO-YEAR-OLDS"







All infants appear to have an impertinent and disagreeable fashion

nowadays of saying "smart" things on most occasions that offer,

and especially on occasions when they ought not to be saying anything

at all.  Judging by the average published specimens of smart sayings,

the rising generation of children are little better than idiots.

And the parents must surely be but little better than the children,

for in most cases they are the publishers of the sunbursts of infantile

imbecility which dazzle us from the pages of our periodicals.

I may seem to speak with some heat, not to say a suspicion of

personal spite; and I do admit that it nettles me to hear about so

many gifted infants in these days, and remember that I seldom said

anything smart when I was a child.  I tried it once or twice, but it

was not popular.  The family were not expecting brilliant remarks

from me, and so they snubbed me sometimes and spanked me the rest.

But it makes my flesh creep and my blood run cold to think what might

have happened to me if I had dared to utter some of the smart things

of this generation's "four-year-olds" where my father could hear me.

To have simply skinned me alive and considered his duty at an end

would have seemed to him criminal leniency toward one so sinning.

He was a stern, unsmiling man, and hated all forms of precocity.

If I had said some of the things I have referred to, and said them in

his hearing, he would have destroyed me.  He would, indeed.  He would,

provided the opportunity remained with him.  But it would not,

for I would have had judgment enough to take some strychnine first

and say my smart thing afterward.  The fair record of my life has

been tarnished by just one pun.  My father overheard that, and he

hunted me over four or five townships seeking to take my life.

If I had been full-grown, of course he would have been right;

but, child as I was, I could not know how wicked a thing I

had done.



I made one of those remarks ordinarily called "smart things"

before that, but it was not a pun.  Still, it came near causing a

serious rupture between my father and myself.  My father and mother,

my uncle Ephraim and his wife, and one or two others were present,

and the conversation turned on a name for me.  I was lying there

trying some India-rubber rings of various patterns, and endeavoring

to make a selection, for I was tired of trying to cut my teeth on

people's fingers, and wanted to get hold of something that would

enable me to hurry the thing through and get something else.

Did you ever notice what a nuisance it was cutting your teeth on

your nurse's finger, or how back-breaking and tiresome it was trying

to cut them on your big toe?  And did you never get out of patience

and wish your teeth were in Jerico long before you got them half cut?

To me it seems as if these things happened yesterday.  And they did,

to some children.  But I digress.  I was lying there trying the

India-rubber rings.  I remember looking at the clock and noticing

that in an hour and twenty-five minutes I would be two weeks old,

and thinking how little I had done to merit the blessings that were so

unsparingly lavished upon me.  My father said:



"Abraham is a good name.  My grandfather was named Abraham."



My mother said:



"Abraham is a good name.  Very well.  Let us have Abraham for one

of his names."



I said:



"Abraham suits the subscriber."



My father frowned, my mother looked pleased; my aunt said:



"What a little darling it is!"



My father said:



"Isaac is a good name, and Jacob is a good name."



My mother assented, and said:



"No names are better.  Let us add Isaac and Jacob to his names."



I said:



"All right.  Isaac and Jacob are good enough for yours truly.

Pass me that rattle, if you please.  I can't chew India-rubber rings

all day."



Not a soul made a memorandum of these sayings of mine, for publication.

I saw that, and did it myself, else they would have been utterly lost.

So far from meeting with a generous encouragement like other children

when developing intellectually, I was now furiously scowled upon

by my father; my mother looked grieved and anxious, and even my aunt

had about her an expression of seeming to think that maybe I had

gone too far.  I took a vicious bite out of an India-rubber ring,

and covertly broke the rattle over the kitten's head, but said nothing.

Presently my father said:



"Samuel is a very excellent name."



I saw that trouble was coming.  Nothing could prevent it.  I laid

down my rattle; over the side of the cradle I dropped my uncle's

silver watch, the clothes-brush, the toy dog, my tin soldier,

the nutmeg-grater, and other matters which I was accustomed to examine,

and meditate upon and make pleasant noises with, and bang and batter

and break when I needed wholesome entertainment.  Then I put on my

little frock and my little bonnet, and took my pygmy shoes in one

hand and my licorice in the other, and climbed out on the floor.

I said to myself, Now, if the worse comes to worst, I am ready.

Then I said aloud, in a firm voice:



"Father, I cannot, cannot wear the name of Samuel."



"My son!"



"Father, I mean it.  I cannot."



"Why?"



"Father, I have an invincible antipathy to that name."



"My son, this is unreasonable.  Many great and good men have been

named Samuel."



"Sir, I have yet to hear of the first instance."



"What!  There was Samuel the prophet.  Was not he great and good?"



"Not so very."



"My son!  With His own voice the Lord called him."



"Yes, sir, and had to call him a couple times before he could come!"



And then I sallied forth, and that stern old man sallied forth after me.

He overtook me at noon the following day, and when the interview was

over I had acquired the name of Samuel, and a thrashing, and other

useful information; and by means of this compromise my father's

wrath was appeased and a misunderstanding bridged over which might

have become a permanent rupture if I had chosen to be unreasonable.

But just judging by this episode, what would my father have done

to me if I had ever uttered in his hearing one of the flat,

sickly things these "two-years-olds" say in print nowadays?

In my opinion there would have been a case of infanticide in our family.





***







AN ENTERTAINING ARTICLE







I take the following paragraph from an article in the Boston ADVERTISER:





AN ENGLISH CRITIC ON MARK TWAIN





Perhaps the most successful flights of humor of Mark Twain have been

descriptions of the persons who did not appreciate his humor at all.

We have become familiar with the Californians who were thrilled with

terror by his burlesque of a newspaper reporter's way of telling a story,

and we have heard of the Pennsylvania clergyman who sadly returned

his INNOCENTS ABROAD to the book-agent with the remark that "the

man who could shed tears over the tomb of Adam must be an idiot."

But Mark Twain may now add a much more glorious instance to his string

of trophies.  The SATURDAY REVIEW, in its number of October 8th,

reviews his book of travels, which has been republished in England,

and reviews it seriously.  We can imagine the delight of the humorist

in reading this tribute to his power; and indeed it is so amusing

in itself that he can hardly do better than reproduce the article

in full in his next monthly Memoranda.





(Publishing the above paragraph thus, gives me a sort of authority

for reproducing the SATURDAY REVIEW'S article in full in these pages.

I dearly wanted to do it, for I cannot write anything half so

delicious myself.  If I had a cast-iron dog that could read this

English criticism and preserve his austerity, I would drive him

off the door-step.)





(From the London "Saturday Review.")





REVIEWS OF NEW BOOKS





THE INNOCENTS ABROAD.  A Book of Travels.  By Mark Twain.

London:  Hotten, publisher.  1870.





Lord Macaulay died too soon.  We never felt this so deeply as when we

finished the last chapter of the above-named extravagant work.

Macaulay died too soon--for none but he could mete out complete

and comprehensive justice to the insolence, the impertinence,

the presumption, the mendacity, and, above all, the majestic ignorance

of this author.



To say that the INNOCENTS ABROAD is a curious book, would be to

use the faintest language--would be to speak of the Matterhorn

as a neat elevation or of Niagara as being "nice" or "pretty."

"Curious" is too tame a word wherewith to describe the imposing insanity

of this work.  There is no word that is large enough or long enough.

Let us, therefore, photograph a passing glimpse of book and author,

and trust the rest to the reader.  Let the cultivated English student

of human nature picture to himself this Mark Twain as a person capable

of doing the following-described things--and not only doing them,

but with incredible innocence PRINTING THEM calmly and tranquilly

in a book.  For instance:



He states that he entered a hair-dresser's in Paris to get shaved,

and the first "rake" the barber gave him with his razor it LOOSENED

HIS "HIDE" and LIFTED HIM OUT OF THE CHAIR.



This is unquestionably exaggerated.  In Florence he was so annoyed

by beggars that he pretends to have seized and eaten one in a

frantic spirit of revenge.  There is, of course, no truth in this.

He gives at full length a theatrical program seventeen or eighteen

hundred years old, which he professes to have found in the ruins

of the Coliseum, among the dirt and mold and rubbish.  It is a

sufficient comment upon this statement to remark that even a cast-iron

program would not have lasted so long under such circumstances.

In Greece he plainly betrays both fright and flight upon one occasion,

but with frozen effrontery puts the latter in this falsely tamed form:

"We SIDLED toward the Piraeus."  "Sidled," indeed!  He does not hesitate

to intimate that at Ephesus, when his mule strayed from the proper course,

he got down, took him under his arm, carried him to the road again,

pointed him right, remounted, and went to sleep contentedly till

it was time to restore the beast to the path once more.  He states

that a growing youth among his ship's passengers was in the constant

habit of appeasing his hunger with soap and oakum between meals.

In Palestine he tells of ants that came eleven miles to spend

the summer in the desert and brought their provisions with them;

yet he shows by his description of the country that the feat was

an impossibility.  He mentions, as if it were the most commonplace

of matters, that he cut a Moslem in two in broad daylight in Jerusalem,

with Godfrey de Bouillon's sword, and would have shed more blood IF

HE HAD HAD A GRAVEYARD OF HIS OWN.  These statements are unworthy

a moment's attention.  Mr. Twain or any other foreigner who did

such a thing in Jerusalem would be mobbed, and would infallibly

lose his life.  But why go on?  Why repeat more of his audacious

and exasperating falsehoods?  Let us close fittingly with this one:

he affirms that "in the mosque of St. Sophia at Constantinople

I got my feet so stuck up with a complication of gums, slime,

and general impurity, that I wore out more than two thousand

pair of bootjacks getting my boots off that night, and even then

some Christian hide peeled off with them."  It is monstrous.

Such statements are simply lies--there is no other name for them.

Will the reader longer marvel at the brutal ignorance that pervades

the American nation when we tell him that we are informed upon perfectly

good authority that this extravagant compilation of falsehoods,

this exhaustless mine of stupendous lies, this INNOCENTS ABROAD,

has actually been adopted by the schools and colleges of several

of the states as a text-book!



But if his falsehoods are distressing, his innocence and his ignorance

are enough to make one burn the book and despise the author.  In one

place he was so appalled at the sudden spectacle of a murdered man,

unveiled by the moonlight, that he jumped out of the window,

going through sash and all, and then remarks with the most childlike

simplicity that he "was not scared, but was considerably agitated."

It puts us out of patience to note that the simpleton is densely

unconscious that Lucrezia Borgia ever existed off the stage.

He is vulgarly ignorant of all foreign languages, but is frank enough

to criticize, the Italians' use of their own tongue.  He says they

spell the name of their great painter "Vinci, but pronounce it Vinchy"--

and then adds with a na:ivet'e possible only to helpless ignorance,

"foreigners always spell better than they pronounce."  In another

place he commits the bald absurdity of putting the phrase "tare

an ouns" into an Italian's mouth.  In Rome he unhesitatingly

believes the legend that St. Philip Neri's heart was so inflamed

with divine love that it burst his ribs--believes it wholly

because an author with a learned list of university degrees strung

after his name endorses it--"otherwise," says this gentle idiot,

"I should have felt a curiosity to know what Philip had for dinner."

Our author makes a long, fatiguing journey to the Grotto del Cane

on purpose to test its poisoning powers on a dog--got elaborately

ready for the experiment, and then discovered that he had no dog.

A wiser person would have kept such a thing discreetly to himself,

but with this harmless creature everything comes out.  He hurts

his foot in a rut two thousand years old in exhumed Pompeii,

and presently, when staring at one of the cinder-like corpses unearthed

in the next square, conceives the idea that maybe it is the remains

of the ancient Street Commissioner, and straightway his horror softens

down to a sort of chirpy contentment with the condition of things.

In Damascus he visits the well of Ananias, three thousand years old,

and is as surprised and delighted as a child to find that the water

is "as pure and fresh as if the well had been dug yesterday."

In the Holy Land he gags desperately at the hard Arabic and Hebrew

Biblical names, and finally concludes to call them Baldwinsville,

Williamsburgh, and so on, "for convenience of spelling."



We have thus spoken freely of this man's stupefying simplicity

and innocence, but we cannot deal similarly with his colossal ignorance.

We do not know where to begin.  And if we knew where to begin,

we certainly would not know where to leave off.  We will give

one specimen, and one only.  He did not know, until he got to Rome,

that Michael Angelo was dead!  And then, instead of crawling away

and hiding his shameful ignorance somewhere, he proceeds to express

a pious, grateful sort of satisfaction that he is gone and out

of his troubles!



No, the reader may seek out the author's exhibition of his

uncultivation for himself.  The book is absolutely dangerous,

considering the magnitude and variety of its misstatements,

and the convincing confidence with which they are made.

And yet it is a text-book in the schools of America.



The poor blunderer mouses among the sublime creations of the

Old Masters, trying to acquire the elegant proficiency in

art-knowledge, which he has a groping sort of comprehension is a

proper thing for a traveled man to be able to display.  But what is

the manner of his study?  And what is the progress he achieves?

To what extent does he familiarize himself with the great pictures

of Italy, and what degree of appreciation does he arrive at?  Read:



"When we see a monk going about with a lion and looking up into heaven,

we know that that is St. Mark.  When we see a monk with a book and a pen,

looking tranquilly up to heaven, trying to think of a word, we know

that that is St. Matthew.  When we see a monk sitting on a rock,

looking tranquilly up to heaven, with a human skull beside him,

and without other baggage, we know that that is St. Jerome.

Because we know that he always went flying light in the matter

of baggage.  When we see other monks looking tranquilly up to heaven,

but having no trade-mark, we always ask who those parties are.

We do this because we humbly wish to learn."



He then enumerates the thousands and thousand of copies of these

several pictures which he has seen, and adds with accustomed

simplicity that he feels encouraged to believe that when he has seen

"Some More" of each, and had a larger experience, he will eventually

"begin to take an absorbing interest in them"--the vulgar boor.



That we have shown this to be a remarkable book, we think no one

will deny.  That is a pernicious book to place in the hands of the

confiding and uniformed, we think we have also shown.  That the book

is a deliberate and wicked creation of a diseased mind, is apparent

upon every page.  Having placed our judgment thus upon record,

let us close with what charity we can, by remarking that even in this

volume there is some good to be found; for whenever the author talks

of his own country and lets Europe alone, he never fails to make

himself interesting, and not only interesting but instructive.

No one can read without benefit his occasional chapters and paragraphs,

about life in the gold and silver mines of California and Nevada;

about the Indians of the plains and deserts of the West,

and their cannibalism; about the raising of vegetables in kegs of

gunpowder by the aid of two or three teaspoons of guano; about the

moving of small arms from place to place at night in wheelbarrows

to avoid taxes; and about a sort of cows and mules in the Humboldt

mines, that climb down chimneys and disturb the people at night.

These matters are not only new, but are well worth knowing.

It is a pity the author did not put in more of the same kind.

His book is well written and is exceedingly entertaining, and so it

just barely escaped being quite valuable also.





(One month later)





Latterly I have received several letters, and see a number of

newspaper paragraphs, all upon a certain subject, and all of about

the same tenor.  I here give honest specimens.  One is from a New

York paper, one is from a letter from an old friend, and one is

from a letter from a New York publisher who is a stranger to me.

I humbly endeavor to make these bits toothsome with the remark that

the article they are praising (which appeared in the December GALAXY,

and PRETENDED to be a criticism from the London SATURDAY REVIEW

on my INNOCENTS ABROAD) WAS WRITTEN BY MYSELF, EVERY LINE OF IT:





The HERALD says the richest thing out is the "serious critique"

in the London SATURDAY REVIEW, on Mark Twain's INNOCENTS ABROAD.

We thought before we read it that it must be "serious," as everybody

said so, and were even ready to shed a few tears; but since perusing it,

we are bound to confess that next to Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog"

it's the finest bit of humor and sarcasm that we've come across in many

a day.





(I do not get a compliment like that every day.)





I used to think that your writings were pretty good, but after reading

the criticism in THE GALAXY from the LONDON REVIEW, have discovered

what an ass I must have been.  If suggestions are in order, mine is,

that you put that article in your next edition of the INNOCENTS,

as an extra chapter, if you are not afraid to put your own humor

in competition with it.  It is as rich a thing as I ever read.





(Which is strong commendation from a book publisher.)





The London Reviewer, my friend, is not the stupid, "serious" creature

he pretends to be, _I_ think; but, on the contrary, has a keep

appreciation and enjoyment of your book.  As I read his article in

THE GALAXY, I could imagine him giving vent to many a hearty laugh.

But he is writing for Catholics and Established Church people,

and high-toned, antiquated, conservative gentility, whom it is

a delight to him to help you shock, while he pretends to shake his

head with owlish density.  He is a magnificent humorist himself.





(Now that is graceful and handsome.  I take off my hat to my life-long

friend and comrade, and with my feet together and my fingers spread

over my heart, I say, in the language of Alabama, "You do me proud.")



I stand guilty of the authorship of the article, but I did not mean

any harm.  I saw by an item in the Boston ADVERTISER that a solemn,

serious critique on the English edition of my book had appeared

in the London SATURDAY REVIEW, and the idea of SUCH a literary

breakfast by a stolid, ponderous British ogre of the quill was too

much for a naturally weak virtue, and I went home and burlesqued it--

reveled in it, I may say.  I never saw a copy of the real SATURDAY

REVIEW criticism until after my burlesque was written and mailed

to the printer.  But when I did get hold of a copy, I found it

to be vulgar, awkwardly written, ill-natured, and entirely serious

and in earnest.  The gentleman who wrote the newspaper paragraph

above quoted had not been misled as to its character.



If any man doubts my word now, I will kill him.  No, I will not

kill him; I will win his money.  I will bet him twenty to one,

and let any New York publisher hold the stakes, that the statements I

have above made as to the authorship of the article in question are

entirely true.  Perhaps I may get wealthy at this, for I am willing

to take all the bets that offer; and if a man wants larger odds,

I will give him all he requires.  But he ought to find out whether

I am betting on what is termed "a sure thing" or not before he

ventures his money, and he can do that by going to a public

library and examining the London SATURDAY REVIEW of October 8th,

which contains the real critique.



Bless me, some people thought that _I_ was the "sold" person!





P.S.--I cannot resist the temptation to toss in this most savory

thing of all--this easy, graceful, philosophical disquisition,

with his happy, chirping confidence.  It is from the Cincinnati ENQUIRER:





Nothing is more uncertain than the value of a fine cigar.

Nine smokers out of ten would prefer an ordinary domestic article,

three for a quarter, to fifty-cent Partaga, if kept in ignorance

of the cost of the latter.  The flavor of the Partaga is too delicate

for palates that have been accustomed to Connecticut seed leaf.

So it is with humor.  The finer it is in quality, the more danger

of its not being recognized at all.  Even Mark Twain has been taken

in by an English review of his INNOCENTS ABROAD.  Mark Twain is by

no means a coarse humorist, but the Englishman's humor is so much

finer than his, that he mistakes it for solid earnest, and "lafts

most consumedly."





A man who cannot learn stands in his own light.  Hereafter, when I

write an article which I know to be good, but which I may have reason

to fear will not, in some quarters, be considered to amount to much,

coming from an American, I will aver that an Englishman wrote it

and that it is copied from a London journal.  And then I will occupy

a back seat and enjoy the cordial applause.





(Still later)





Mark Twain at last sees that the SATURDAY REVIEW'S criticism of his

INNOCENTS ABROAD was not serious, and he is intensely mortified at the

thought of having been so badly sold.  He takes the only course left him,

and in the last GALAXY claims that HE wrote the criticism himself,

and published it in THE GALAXY to sell the public.  This is ingenious,

but unfortunately it is not true.  If any of our readers will take

the trouble to call at this office we sill show them the original

article in the SATURDAY REVIEW of October 8th, which, on comparison,

will be found to be identical with the one published in THE GALAXY.

The best thing for Mark to do will be to admit that he was sold,

and say no more about it.





The above is from the Cincinnati ENQUIRER, and is a falsehood.

Come to the proof.  If the ENQUIRER people, through any agent,

will produce at THE GALAXY office a London SATURDAY REVIEW

of October 8th, containing an "article which, on comparison,

will be found to be identical with the one published in THE GALAXY,

I will pay to that agent five hundred dollars cash.  Moreover, if at

any specified time I fail to produce at the same place a copy

of the London SATURDAY REVIEW of October 8th, containing a lengthy

criticism upon the INNOCENTS ABROAD, entirely different, in every

paragraph and sentence, from the one I published in THE GALAXY,

I will pay to the ENQUIRER agent another five hundred dollars cash.

I offer Sheldon & Co., publishers, 500 Broadway, New York,

as my "backers."  Any one in New York, authorized by the ENQUIRER,

will receive prompt attention.  It is an easy and profitable way

for the ENQUIRER people to prove that they have not uttered a pitiful,

deliberate falsehood in the above paragraphs.  Will they swallow

that falsehood ignominiously, or will they send an agent to THE

GALAXY office.  I think the Cincinnati ENQUIRER must be edited

by children.





***







A LETTER TO THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY







Riverdale-on-the-Hudson, OCTOBER 15, 1902.



THE HON.  THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY, WASHINGTON, D. C.:





Sir,--Prices for the customary kinds of winter fuel having reached

an altitude which puts them out of the reach of literary persons in

straitened circumstances, I desire to place with you the following order:



Forty-five tons best old dry government bonds, suitable for furnace,

gold 7 per cents., 1864, preferred.



Twelve tons early greenbacks, range size, suitable for cooking.



Eight barrels seasoned 25 and 50 cent postal currency, vintage of 1866,

eligible for kindlings.



Please deliver with all convenient despatch at my house in Riverdale

at lowest rates for spot cash, and send bill to



Your obliged servant,



Mark Twain, Who will be very grateful, and will vote right.





***







AMENDED OBITUARIES



TO THE EDITOR:





Sir,--I am approaching seventy; it is in sight; it is only three

years away.  Necessarily, I must go soon.  It is but matter-of-course

wisdom, then, that I should begin to set my worldly house in

order now, so that it may be done calmly and with thoroughness,

in place of waiting until the last day, when, as we have often seen,

the attempt to set both houses in order at the same time has been

marred by the necessity for haste and by the confusion and waste

of time arising from the inability of the notary and the ecclesiastic

to work together harmoniously, taking turn about and giving each

other friendly assistance--not perhaps in fielding, which could

hardly be expected, but at least in the minor offices of keeping

game and umpiring; by consequence of which conflict of interests

and absence of harmonious action a draw has frequently resulted

where this ill-fortune could not have happened if the houses had been

set in order one at a time and hurry avoided by beginning in season,

and giving to each the amount of time fairly and justly proper to it.



In setting my earthly house in order I find it of moment that I

should attend in person to one or two matters which men in my

position have long had the habit of leaving wholly to others,

with consequences often most regrettable.  I wish to speak of only

one of these matters at this time:  Obituaries.  Of necessity,

an Obituary is a thing which cannot be so judiciously edited by any hand

as by that of the subject of it.  In such a work it is not the Facts

that are of chief importance, but the light which the obituarist

shall throw upon them, the meaning which he shall dress them in,

the conclusions which he shall draw from them, and the judgments

which he shall deliver upon them.  The Verdicts, you understand:

that is the danger-line.



In considering this matter, in view of my approaching change,

it has seemed to me wise to take such measures as may be feasible,

to acquire, by courtesy of the press, access to my standing obituaries,

with the privilege--if this is not asking too much--of editing,

not their Facts, but their Verdicts.  This, not for the present profit,

further than as concerns my family, but as a favorable influence

usable on the Other Side, where there are some who are not friendly

to me.



With this explanation of my motives, I will now ask you of your

courtesy to make an appeal for me to the public press.  It is my

desire that such journals and periodicals as have obituaries of me

lying in their pigeonholes, with a view to sudden use some day,

will not wait longer, but will publish them now, and kindly send

me a marked copy.  My address is simply New York City--I have no

other that is permanent and not transient.



I will correct them--not the Facts, but the Verdicts--striking out

such clauses as could have a deleterious influence on the Other Side,

and replacing them with clauses of a more judicious character.

I should, of course, expect to pay double rates for both the omissions

and the substitutions; and I should also expect to pay quadruple

rates for all obituaries which proved to be rightly and wisely worded

in the originals, thus requiring no emendations at all.



It is my desire to leave these Amended Obituaries neatly bound

behind me as a perennial consolation and entertainment to my family,

and as an heirloom which shall have a mournful but definite

commercial value for my remote posterity.



I beg, sir, that you will insert this Advertisement (1t-eow, agate,

inside), and send the bill to



Yours very respectfully.



Mark Twain.





P.S.--For the best Obituary--one suitable for me to read in public,

and calculated to inspire regret--I desire to offer a Prize,

consisting of a Portrait of me done entirely by myself in pen and ink

without previous instructions.  The ink warranted to be the kind

used by the very best artists.





***







A MONUMENT TO ADAM







Some one has revealed to the TRIBUNE that I once suggested

to Rev. Thomas K. Beecher, of Elmira, New York, that we get up

a monument to Adam, and that Mr. Beecher favored the project.

There is more to it than that.  The matter started as a joke,

but it came somewhat near to materializing.



It is long ago--thirty years.  Mr. Darwin's DESCENT OF MAN has been

in print five or six years, and the storm of indignation raised

by it was still raging in pulpits and periodicals.  In tracing

the genesis of the human race back to its sources, Mr. Darwin had

left Adam out altogether.  We had monkeys, and "missing links,"

and plenty of other kinds of ancestors, but no Adam.  Jesting with

Mr. Beecher and other friends in Elmira, I said there seemed to be

a likelihood that the world would discard Adam and accept the monkey,

and that in the course of time Adam's very name would be forgotten

in the earth; therefore this calamity ought to be averted;

a monument would accomplish this, and Elmira ought not to waste

this honorable opportunity to do Adam a favor and herself a credit.



Then the unexpected happened.  Two bankers came forward and took

hold of the matter--not for fun, not for sentiment, but because they

saw in the monument certain commercial advantages for the town.

The project had seemed gently humorous before--it was more than

that now, with this stern business gravity injected into it.

The bankers discussed the monument with me.  We met several times.

They proposed an indestructible memorial, to cost twenty-five

thousand dollars.  The insane oddity of a monument set up in a village

to preserve a name that would outlast the hills and the rocks without

any such help, would advertise Elmira to the ends of the earth--

and draw custom.  It would be the only monument on the planet

to Adam, and in the matter of interest and impressiveness could

never have a rival until somebody should set up a monument to the

Milky Way.



People would come from every corner of the globe and stop off

to look at it, no tour of the world would be complete that left out

Adam's monument.  Elmira would be a Mecca; there would be pilgrim

ships at pilgrim rates, pilgrim specials on the continent's railways;

libraries would be written about the monument, every tourist would

kodak it, models of it would be for sale everywhere in the earth,

its form would become as familiar as the figure of Napoleon.



One of the bankers subscribed five thousand dollars, and I think

the other one subscribed half as much, but I do not remember with

certainty now whether that was the figure or not.  We got designs made--

some of them came from Paris.



In the beginning--as a detail of the project when it was yet a joke--

I had framed a humble and beseeching and perfervid petition to

Congress begging the government to built the monument, as a testimony

of the Great Republic's gratitude to the Father of the Human Race

and as a token of her loyalty to him in this dark day of humiliation

when his older children were doubting and deserting him.  It seemed

to me that this petition ought to be presented, now--it would be

widely and feelingly abused and ridiculed and cursed, and would

advertise our scheme and make our ground-floor stock go off briskly.

So I sent it to General Joseph R. Hawley, who was then in the House,

and he said he would present it.  But he did not do it.  I think

he explained that when he came to read it he was afraid of it:

it was too serious, to gushy, too sentimental--the House might take it

for earnest.



We ought to have carried out our monument scheme; we could

have managed it without any great difficulty, and Elmira would

now be the most celebrated town in the universe.



Very recently I began to build a book in which one of the minor

characters touches incidentally upon a project for a monument to Adam,

and now the TRIBUNE has come upon a trace of the forgotten jest of

thirty years ago.  Apparently mental telegraphy is still in business.

It is odd; but the freaks of mental telegraphy are usually odd.





***







A HUMANE WORD FROM SATAN







[The following letter, signed by Satan and purporting to come from him,

we have reason to believe was not written by him, but by Mark Twain.--

Editor.]



TO THE EDITOR OF HARPER'S WEEKLY:





Dear Sir and Kinsman,--Let us have done with this frivolous talk.

The American Board accepts contributions from me every year:

then why shouldn't it from Mr. Rockefeller?  In all the ages,

three-fourths of the support of the great charities has been

conscience-money, as my books will show:  then what becomes of

the sting when that term is applied to Mr. Rockefeller's gift?

The American Board's trade is financed mainly from the graveyards.

Bequests, you understand.  Conscience-money. Confession of an old

crime and deliberate perpetration of a new one; for deceased's

contribution is a robbery of his heirs.  Shall the Board decline

bequests because they stand for one of these offenses every time and

generally for both?



Allow me to continue.  The charge must persistently and resentfully

and remorselessly dwelt upon is that Mr. Rockefeller's contribution is

incurably tainted by perjury--perjury proved against him in the courts.

IT MAKES US SMILE--down in my place!  Because there isn't a rich

man in your vast city who doesn't perjure himself every year before

the tax board.  They are all caked with perjury, many layers thick.

Iron-clad, so to speak.  If there is one that isn't, I desire

to acquire him for my museum, and will pay Dinosaur rates.

Will you say it isn't infraction of the law, but only annual evasion

of it?  Comfort yourselves with that nice distinction if you like--

FOR THE PRESENT.  But by and by, when you arrive, I will show you

something interesting:  a whole hell-full of evaders!  Sometimes a

frank law-breaker turns up elsewhere, but I get those others every time.



To return to my muttons.  I wish you to remember that my rich

perjurers are contributing to the American Board with frequency:

it is money filched from the sworn-off personal tax; therefore it

is the wages of sin; therefore it is my money; therefore it is _I_

that contribute it; and, finally, it is therefore as I have said:

since the Board daily accepts contributions from me, why should it

decline them from Mr. Rockefeller, who is as good as I am, let the

courts say what they may?





Satan.





***









INTRODUCTION TO "THE NEW GUIDE OF THE CONVERSATION IN



PORTUGUESE AND ENGLISH"





by Pedro Carolino







In this world of uncertainties, there is, at any rate, one thing

which may be pretty confidently set down as a certainty:  and that is,

that this celebrated little phrase-book will never die while the

English language lasts.  Its delicious unconscious ridiculousness,

and its enchanting na:ivet'e, as are supreme and unapproachable,

in their way, as are Shakespeare's sublimities.  Whatsoever is

perfect in its kind, in literature, is imperishable:  nobody can

imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow;

it is perfect, it must and will stand alone:  its immortality

is secure.



It is one of the smallest books in the world, but few big books have

received such wide attention, and been so much pondered by the grave

and learned, and so much discussed and written about by the thoughtful,

the thoughtless, the wise, and the foolish.  Long notices of it

have appeared, from time to time, in the great English reviews,

and in erudite and authoritative philological periodicals; and it

has been laughed at, danced upon, and tossed in a blanket by nearly

every newspaper and magazine in the English-speaking world.

Every scribbler, almost, has had his little fling at it, at one time

or another; I had mine fifteen years ago.  The book gets out of print,

every now and then, and one ceases to hear of it for a season;

but presently the nations and near and far colonies of our tongue

and lineage call for it once more, and once more it issues from some

London or Continental or American press, and runs a new course around

the globe, wafted on its way by the wind of a world's laughter.



Many persons have believed that this book's miraculous stupidities

were studied and disingenuous; but no one can read the volume

carefully through and keep that opinion.  It was written in

serious good faith and deep earnestness, by an honest and upright

idiot who believed he knew something of the English language,

and could impart his knowledge to others.  The amplest proof

of this crops out somewhere or other upon each and every page.

There are sentences in the book which could have been manufactured

by a man in his right mind, and with an intelligent and deliberate

purposes to seem innocently ignorant; but there are other sentences,

and paragraphs, which no mere pretended ignorance could ever achieve--

nor yet even the most genuine and comprehensive ignorance,

when unbacked by inspiration.



It is not a fraud who speaks in the following paragraph of the

author's Preface, but a good man, an honest man, a man whose conscience

is at rest, a man who believes he has done a high and worthy work for

his nation and his generation, and is well pleased with his performance:





We expect then, who the little book (for the care what we wrote him,

and for her typographical correction) that may be worth the

acceptation of the studious persons, and especially of the Youth,

at which we dedicate him particularly.





One cannot open this book anywhere and not find richness.

To prove that this is true, I will open it at random and copy

the page I happen to stumble upon.  Here is the result:







DIALOGUE 16





For To See the Town







Anothony, go to accompany they gentilsmen, do they see the town.



We won't to see all that is it remarquable here.



Come with me, if you please.  I shall not folget nothing what can

to merit your attention.  Here we are near to cathedral; will you

come in there?



We will first to see him in oudside, after we shall go in there

for to look the interior.



Admire this master piece gothic architecture's.



The chasing of all they figures is astonishing' indeed.



The cupola and the nave are not less curious to see.



What is this palace how I see yonder?



It is the town hall.



And this tower here at this side?



It is the Observatory.



The bridge is very fine, it have ten arches, and is constructed

of free stone.



The streets are very layed out by line and too paved.



What is the circuit of this town?



Two leagues.



There is it also hospitals here?



It not fail them.



What are then the edifices the worthest to have seen?



It is the arsnehal, the spectacle's hall, the Cusiomhouse,

and the Purse.



We are going too see the others monuments such that the public

pawnbroker's office, the plants garden's, the money office's,

the library.



That it shall be for another day; we are tired.







DIALOGUE 17





To Inform One'self of a Person







How is that gentilman who you did speak by and by?



Is a German.



I did think him Englishman.



He is of the Saxony side.



He speak the french very well.



Tough he is German, he speak so much well italyan, french, spanish

and english, that among the Italyans, they believe him Italyan,

he speak the frenche as the Frenches himselves.  The Spanishesmen

believe him Spanishing, and the Englishes, Englishman.  It is

difficult to enjoy well so much several languages.





The last remark contains a general truth; but it ceases to be a truth

when one contracts it and apples it to an individual--provided that

that individual is the author of this book, Sehnor Pedro Carolino.

I am sure I should not find it difficult "to enjoy well so much

several languages"--or even a thousand of them--if he did the

translating for me from the originals into his ostensible English.





***







ADVICE TO LITTLE GIRLS







Good little girls ought not to make mouths at their teachers for

every trifling offense.  This retaliation should only be resorted

to under peculiarly aggravated circumstances.



If you have nothing but a rag-doll stuffed with sawdust, while one

of your more fortunate little playmates has a costly China one,

you should treat her with a show of kindness nevertheless.

And you ought not to attempt to make a forcible swap with her unless

your conscience would justify you in it, and you know you are able

to do it.



You ought never to take your little brother's "chewing-gum" away

from him by main force; it is better to rope him in with the promise

of the first two dollars and a half you find floating down the

river on a grindstone.  In the artless simplicity natural to this

time of life, he will regard it as a perfectly fair transaction.

In all ages of the world this eminently plausible fiction has lured

the obtuse infant to financial ruin and disaster.



If at any time you find it necessary to correct your brother,

do not correct him with mud--never, on any account, throw mud at him,

because it will spoil his clothes.  It is better to scald him a little,

for then you obtain desirable results.  You secure his immediate

attention to the lessons you are inculcating, and at the same time

your hot water will have a tendency to move impurities from his person,

and possibly the skin, in spots.



If your mother tells you to do a thing, it is wrong to reply

that you won't. It is better and more becoming to intimate

that you will do as she bids you, and then afterward act quietly

in the matter according to the dictates of your best judgment.



You should ever bear in mind that it is to your kind parents that you

are indebted for your food, and for the privilege of staying home

from school when you let on that you are sick.  Therefore you ought

to respect their little prejudices, and humor their little whims,

and put up with their little foibles until they get to crowding you

too much.



Good little girls always show marked deference for the aged.

You ought never to "sass" old people unless they "sass" you first.





***







POST-MORTEM POETRY [1]







In Philadelphia they have a custom which it would be pleasant

to see adopted throughout the land.  It is that of appending to

published death-notices a little verse or two of comforting poetry.

Any one who is in the habit of reading the daily Philadelphia

LEDGER must frequently be touched by these plaintive tributes

to extinguished worth.  In Philadelphia, the departure of a child

is a circumstance which is not more surely followed by a burial

than by the accustomed solacing poesy in the PUBLIC LEDGER.

In that city death loses half its terror because the knowledge

of its presence comes thus disguised in the sweet drapery of verse.

For instance, in a late LEDGER I find the following (I change

the surname):





DIED





Hawks.--On the 17th inst., Clara, the daughter of Ephraim

and Laura Hawks, aged 21 months and 2 days.





That merry shout no more I hear,



No laughing child I see,



No little arms are around my neck,



No feet upon my knee;





No kisses drop upon my cheek,



These lips are sealed to me.



Dear Lord, how could I give Clara up



To any but to Thee?





A child thus mourned could not die wholly discontented.

From the LEDGER of the same date I make the following extract,

merely changing the surname, as before:





Becket.--On Sunday morning, 19th inst., John P., infant son

of George and Julia Becket, aged 1 year, 6 months, and 15 days.





That merry shout no more I hear,



No laughing child I see,



No little arms are round my neck,



No feet upon my knee;





No kisses drop upon my cheek;



These lips are sealed to me.



Dear Lord, how could I give Johnnie up



To any but to Thee?





The similarity of the emotions as produced in the mourners in these

two instances is remarkably evidenced by the singular similarity

of thought which they experienced, and the surprising coincidence

of language used by them to give it expression.



In the same journal, of the same date, I find the following

(surname suppressed, as before):





Wagner.--On the 10th inst., Ferguson G., the son of William

L. and Martha Theresa Wagner, aged 4 weeks and 1 day.





That merry shout no more I hear,



No laughing child I see,



No little arms are round my neck,



No feet upon my knee;





No kisses drop upon my cheek,



These lips are sealed to me.



Dear Lord, how could I give Ferguson up



To any but to Thee?





It is strange what power the reiteration of an essentially poetical

thought has upon one's feelings.  When we take up the LEDGER

and read the poetry about little Clara, we feel an unaccountable

depression of the spirits.  When we drift further down the column

and read the poetry about little Johnnie, the depression and spirits

acquires and added emphasis, and we experience tangible suffering.

When we saunter along down the column further still and read

the poetry about little Ferguson, the word torture but vaguely

suggests the anguish that rends us.



In the LEDGER (same copy referred to above) I find the following

(I alter surname, as usual):





Welch.--On the 5th inst., Mary C. Welch, wife of William B. Welch,

and daughter of Catharine and George W. Markland, in the 29th year

of her age.





A mother dear, a mother kind,



Has gone and left us all behind.



Cease to weep, for tears are vain,



Mother dear is out of pain.





Farewell, husband, children dear,



Serve thy God with filial fear,



And meet me in the land above,



Where all is peace, and joy, and love.





What could be sweeter than that?  No collection of salient facts

(without reduction to tabular form) could be more succinctly stated

than is done in the first stanza by the surviving relatives,

and no more concise and comprehensive program of farewells,

post-mortuary general orders, etc., could be framed in any

form than is done in verse by deceased in the last stanza.

These things insensibly make us wiser and tenderer, and better.

Another extract:





Ball.--On the morning of the 15th inst., Mary E., daughter of John

and Sarah F. Ball.





'Tis sweet to rest in lively hope



That when my change shall come



Angels will hover round my bed,



To waft my spirit home.





The following is apparently the customary form for heads of families:





Burns.--On the 20th inst., Michael Burns, aged 40 years.





Dearest father, thou hast left us,



Hear thy loss we deeply feel;



But 'tis God that has bereft us,



He can all our sorrows heal.





Funeral at 2 o'clock sharp.





There is something very simple and pleasant about the following,

which, in Philadelphia, seems to be the usual form for consumptives

of long standing.  (It deplores four distinct cases in the single

copy of the LEDGER which lies on the Memoranda editorial table):





Bromley.--On the 29th inst., of consumption, Philip Bromley,

in the 50th year of his age.





Affliction sore long time he bore,



Physicians were in vain--



Till God at last did hear him mourn,



And eased him of his pain.





That friend whom death from us has torn,



We did not think so soon to part;



An anxious care now sinks the thorn



Still deeper in our bleeding heart.





This beautiful creation loses nothing by repetition.  On the contrary,

the oftener one sees it in the LEDGER, the more grand and awe-inspiring

it seems.



With one more extract I will close:





Doble.--On the 4th inst., Samuel Pervil Worthington Doble,

aged 4 days.





Our little Sammy's gone,



His tiny spirit's fled;



Our little boy we loved so dear



Lies sleeping with the dead.





A tear within a father's eye,



A mother's aching heart,



Can only tell the agony



How hard it is to part.





Could anything be more plaintive than that, without requiring further

concessions of grammar?  Could anything be likely to do more toward

reconciling deceased to circumstances, and making him willing to go?

Perhaps not.  The power of song can hardly be estimated.  There is

an element about some poetry which is able to make even physical

suffering and death cheerful things to contemplate and consummations

to be desired.  This element is present in the mortuary poetry

of Philadelphia degree of development.



The custom I have been treating of is one that should be adopted

in all the cities of the land.



It is said that once a man of small consequence died, and the

Rev. T. K. Beecher was asked to preach the funeral sermon--

a man who abhors the lauding of people, either dead or alive,

except in dignified and simple language, and then only for merits

which they actually possessed or possess, not merits which they

merely ought to have possessed.  The friends of the deceased got

up a stately funeral.  They must have had misgivings that the

corpse might not be praised strongly enough, for they prepared

some manuscript headings and notes in which nothing was left

unsaid on that subject that a fervid imagination and an unabridged

dictionary could compile, and these they handed to the minister

as he entered the pulpit.  They were merely intended as suggestions,

and so the friends were filled with consternation when the minister

stood in the pulpit and proceeded to read off the curious odds

and ends in ghastly detail and in a loud voice!  And their

consternation solidified to petrification when he paused at the end,

contemplated the multitude reflectively, and then said, impressively:



"The man would be a fool who tried to add anything to that.

Let us pray!"



And with the same strict adhesion to truth it can be said that the

man would be a fool who tried to add anything to the following

transcendent obituary poem.  There is something so innocent,

so guileless, so complacent, so unearthly serene and self-satisfied

about this peerless "hog-wash," that the man must be made of stone

who can read it without a dulcet ecstasy creeping along his backbone

and quivering in his marrow.  There is no need to say that this

poem is genuine and in earnest, for its proofs are written all

over its face.  An ingenious scribbler might imitate it after

a fashion, but Shakespeare himself could not counterfeit it.

It is noticeable that the country editor who published it did

not know that it was a treasure and the most perfect thing of its

kind that the storehouses and museums of literature could show.

He did not dare to say no to the dread poet--for such a poet

must have been something of an apparition--but he just shoveled

it into his paper anywhere that came handy, and felt ashamed,

and put that disgusted "Published by Request" over it, and hoped

that his subscribers would overlook it or not feel an impulse to read it:





(Published by Request





LINES



Composed on the death of Samuel and Catharine Belknap's children





by M. A. Glaze







Friends and neighbors all draw near,



And listen to what I have to say;



And never leave your children dear



When they are small, and go away.





But always think of that sad fate,



That happened in year of '63;



Four children with a house did burn,



Think of their awful agony.





Their mother she had gone away,



And left them there alone to stay;



The house took fire and down did burn;



Before their mother did return.





Their piteous cry the neighbors heard,



And then the cry of fire was given;



But, ah! before they could them reach,



Their little spirits had flown to heaven.





Their father he to war had gone,



And on the battle-field was slain;



But little did he think when he went away,



But what on earth they would meet again.





The neighbors often told his wife



Not to leave his children there,



Unless she got some one to stay,



And of the little ones take care.





The oldest he was years not six,



And the youngest only eleven months old,



But often she had left them there alone,



As, by the neighbors, I have been told.





How can she bear to see the place.



Where she so oft has left them there,



Without a single one to look to them,



Or of the little ones to take good care.





Oh, can she look upon the spot,



Whereunder their little burnt bones lay,



But what she thinks she hears them say,



''Twas God had pity, and took us on high.'





And there may she kneel down and pray,



And ask God her to forgive;



And she may lead a different life



While she on earth remains to live.





Her husband and her children too,



God has took from pain and woe.



May she reform and mend her ways,



That she may also to them go.





And when it is God's holy will,



O, may she be prepared



To meet her God and friends in peace,



And leave this world of care.



- - -





1.  Written in 1870.





***







THE DANGER OF LYING IN BED







The man in the ticket-office said:



"Have an accident insurance ticket, also?"



"No," I said, after studying the matter over a little.  "No, I

believe not; I am going to be traveling by rail all day today.

However, tomorrow I don't travel.  Give me one for tomorrow."



The man looked puzzled.  He said:



"But it is for accident insurance, and if you are going to travel

by rail--"



"If I am going to travel by rail I sha'n't need it.  Lying at home

in bed is the thing _I_ am afraid of."



I had been looking into this matter.  Last year I traveled twenty

thousand miles, almost entirely by rail; the year before, I traveled

over twenty-five thousand miles, half by sea and half by rail;

and the year before that I traveled in the neighborhood of ten

thousand miles, exclusively by rail.  I suppose if I put in all

the little odd journeys here and there, I may say I have traveled

sixty thousand miles during the three years I have mentioned.

AND NEVER AN ACCIDENT.



For a good while I said to myself every morning:  "Now I

have escaped thus far, and so the chances are just that much

increased that I shall catch it this time.  I will be shrewd,

and buy an accident ticket."  And to a dead moral certainty I

drew a blank, and went to bed that night without a joint started

or a bone splintered.  I got tired of that sort of daily bother,

and fell to buying accident tickets that were good for a month.

I said to myself, "A man CAN'T buy thirty blanks in one bundle."



But I was mistaken.  There was never a prize in the the lot.

I could read of railway accidents every day--the newspaper

atmosphere was foggy with them; but somehow they never came my way.

I found I had spent a good deal of money in the accident business,

and had nothing to show for it.  My suspicions were aroused, and I

began to hunt around for somebody that had won in this lottery.

I found plenty of people who had invested, but not an individual

that had ever had an accident or made a cent.  I stopped buying

accident tickets and went to ciphering.  The result was astounding.

THE PERIL LAY NOT IN TRAVELING, BUT IN STAYING AT HOME.



I hunted up statistics, and was amazed to find that after all

the glaring newspaper headlines concerning railroad disasters,

less than THREE HUNDRED people had really lost their lives by those

disasters in the preceding twelve months.  The Erie road was set

down as the most murderous in the list.  It had killed forty-six--

or twenty-six, I do not exactly remember which, but I know the

number was double that of any other road.  But the fact straightway

suggested itself that the Erie was an immensely long road, and did

more business than any other line in the country; so the double

number of killed ceased to be matter for surprise.



By further figuring, it appeared that between New York and Rochester

the Erie ran eight passenger-trains each way every day--16 altogether;

and carried a daily average of 6,000 persons.  That is about a million

in six months--the population of New York City.  Well, the Erie kills

from 13 to 23 persons of ITS million in six months; and in the same

time 13,000 of New York's million die in their beds!  My flesh crept,

my hair stood on end.  "This is appalling!"  I said.  "The danger

isn't in traveling by rail, but in trusting to those deadly beds.

I will never sleep in a bed again."



I had figured on considerably less than one-half the length of

the Erie road.  It was plain that the entire road must transport

at least eleven or twelve thousand people every day.  There are

many short roads running out of Boston that do fully half as much;

a great many such roads.  There are many roads scattered about the

Union that do a prodigious passenger business.  Therefore it was fair

to presume that an average of 2,500 passengers a day for each road

in the country would be almost correct.  There are 846 railway

lines in our country, and 846 times 2,500 are 2,115,000. So the

railways of America move more than two millions of people every day;

six hundred and fifty millions of people a year, without counting

the Sundays.  They do that, too--there is no question about it;

though where they get the raw material is clear beyond the jurisdiction

of my arithmetic; for I have hunted the census through and through,

and I find that there are not that many people in the United States,

by a matter of six hundred and ten millions at the very least.

They must use some of the same people over again, likely.



San Francisco is one-eighth as populous as New York; there are 60

deaths a week in the former and 500 a week in the latter--if they

have luck.  That is 3,120 deaths a year in San Francisco, and eight

times as many in New York--say about 25,000 or 26,000. The health

of the two places is the same.  So we will let it stand as a fair

presumption that this will hold good all over the country, and that

consequently 25,000 out of every million of people we have must die

every year.  That amounts to one-fortieth of our total population.

One million of us, then, die annually.  Out of this million ten

or twelve thousand are stabbed, shot, drowned, hanged, poisoned,

or meet a similarly violent death in some other popular way,

such as perishing by kerosene-lamp and hoop-skirt conflagrations,

getting buried in coal-mines, falling off house-tops, breaking

through church, or lecture-room floors, taking patent medicines,

or committing suicide in other forms.  The Erie railroad kills 23 to 46;

the other 845 railroads kill an average of one-third of a man each;

and the rest of that million, amounting in the aggregate to that

appalling figure of 987,631 corpses, die naturally in their beds!



You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds.

The railroads are good enough for me.



And my advice to all people is, Don't stay at home any more than

you can help; but when you have GOT to stay at home a while,

buy a package of those insurance tickets and sit up nights.

You cannot be too cautious.



[One can see now why I answered that ticket-agent in the manner

recorded at the top of this sketch.]



The moral of this composition is, that thoughtless people grumble

more than is fair about railroad management in the United States.

When we consider that every day and night of the year full fourteen

thousand railway-trains of various kinds, freighted with life

and armed with death, go thundering over the land, the marvel is,

NOT that they kill three hundred human beings in a twelvemonth,

but that they do not kill three hundred times three hundred!





***







PORTRAIT OF KING WILLIAM III







I never can look at those periodical portraits in THE GALAXY magazine

without feeling a wild, tempestuous ambition to be an artist.

I have seen thousands and thousands of pictures in my time--

acres of them here and leagues of them in the galleries of Europe--

but never any that moved me as these portraits do.



There is a portrait of Monsignore Capel in the November number,

now COULD anything be sweeter than that?  And there was Bismarck's,

in the October number; who can look at that without being purer

and stronger and nobler for it?  And Thurlow and Weed's picture

in the September number; I would not have died without seeing that,

no, not for anything this world can give.  But looks back still

further and recall my own likeness as printed in the August number;

if I had been in my grave a thousand years when that appeared,

I would have got up and visited the artist.



I sleep with all these portraits under my pillow every night, so that I

can go on studying them as soon as the day dawns in the morning.

I know them all as thoroughly as if I had made them myself; I know

every line and mark about them.  Sometimes when company are present

I shuffle the portraits all up together, and then pick them out

one by one and call their names, without referring to the printing

on the bottom.  I seldom make a mistake--never, when I am calm.



I have had the portraits framed for a long time, waiting till

my aunt gets everything ready for hanging them up in the parlor.

But first one thing and then another interferes, and so the thing

is delayed.  Once she said they would have more of the peculiar kind

of light they needed in the attic.  The old simpleton! it is as dark

as a tomb up there.  But she does not know anything about art,

and so she has no reverence for it.  When I showed her my "Map of

the Fortifications of Paris," she said it was rubbish.



Well, from nursing those portraits so long, I have come at last

to have a perfect infatuation for art.  I have a teacher now,

and my enthusiasm continually and tumultuously grows, as I learn

to use with more and more facility the pencil, brush, and graver.

I am studying under De Mellville, the house and portrait painter.

[His name was Smith when he lived in the West.] He does any kind

of artist work a body wants, having a genius that is universal,

like Michael Angelo.  Resembles that great artist, in fact.

The back of his head is like this, and he wears his hat-brim tilted

down on his nose to expose it.



I have been studying under De Mellville several months now.

The first month I painted fences, and gave general satisfaction.

The next month I white-washed a barn.  The third, I was doing

tin roofs; the forth, common signs; the fifth, statuary to stand

before cigar shops.  This present month is only the sixth, and I am

already in portraits!



The humble offering which accompanies these remarks [see figure]--

the portrait of his Majesty William III., King of Prussia--

is my fifth attempt in portraits, and my greatest success.

It has received unbounded praise from all classes of the community,

but that which gratifies me most is the frequent and cordial verdict

that it resembles the GALAXY portraits.  Those were my first love,

my earliest admiration, the original source and incentive of my

art-ambition. Whatever I am in Art today, I owe to these portraits.

I ask no credit for myself--I deserve none.  And I never take any,

either.  Many a stranger has come to my exhibition (for I have had my

portrait of King William on exhibition at one dollar a ticket), and

would have gone away blessing ME, if I had let him, but I never did.

I always stated where I got the idea.



King William wears large bushy side-whiskers, and some critics have

thought that this portrait would be more complete if they were added.

But it was not possible.  There was not room for side-whiskers and

epaulets both, and so I let the whiskers go, and put in the epaulets,

for the sake of style.  That thing on his hat is an eagle.

The Prussian eagle--it is a national emblem.  When I saw hat I

mean helmet; but it seems impossible to make a picture of a helmet

that a body can have confidence in.



I wish kind friends everywhere would aid me in my endeavor to attract

a little attention to the GALAXY portraits.  I feel persuaded it can

be accomplished, if the course to be pursued be chosen with judgment.

I write for that magazine all the time, and so do many abler men,

and if I can get these portraits into universal favor, it is all I ask;

the reading-matter will take care of itself.





COMMENDATIONS OF THE PORTRAIT





There is nothing like it in the Vatican.  Pius IX.





It has none of that vagueness, that dreamy spirituality about it,

which many of the first critics of Arkansas have objected to in the

Murillo school of Art.  Ruskin.





The expression is very interesting.  J.W. Titian.





(Keeps a macaroni store in Venice, at the old family stand.)





It is the neatest thing in still life I have seen for years.



Rosa Bonheur.





The smile may be almost called unique.  Bismarck.





I never saw such character portrayed in a picture face before.

De Mellville.





There is a benignant simplicity about the execution of this

work which warms the heart toward it as much, full as much,

as it fascinates the eye.  Landseer.





One cannot see it without longing to contemplate the artist.



Frederick William.





Send me the entire edition--together with the plate and the

original portrait--and name your own price.  And--would you

like to come over and stay awhile with Napoleon at Wilhelmsh:ohe?

It shall not cost you a cent.  William III.





***







DOES THE RACE OF MAN LOVE A LORD?







Often a quite assified remark becomes sanctified by use and

petrified by custom; it is then a permanency, its term of activity

a geologic period.







The day after the arrival of Prince Henry I met an English friend,

and he rubbed his hands and broke out with a remark that was charged

to the brim with joy--joy that was evidently a pleasant salve

to an old sore place:



"Many a time I've had to listen without retort to an old saying

that is irritatingly true, and until now seemed to offer no chance

for a return jibe:  'An Englishman does dearly love a lord';

but after this I shall talk back, and say, 'How about the Americans?'"



It is a curious thing, the currency that an idiotic saying can get.

The man that first says it thinks he has made a discovery.

The man he says it to, thinks the same.  It departs on its travels,

is received everywhere with admiring acceptance, and not only as

a piece of rare and acute observation, but as being exhaustively

true and profoundly wise; and so it presently takes its place

in the world's list of recognized and established wisdoms,

and after that no one thinks of examining it to see whether it is

really entitled to its high honors or not.  I call to mind instances

of this in two well-established proverbs, whose dullness is not

surpassed by the one about the Englishman and his love for a lord:

one of them records the American's Adoration of the Almighty Dollar,

the other the American millionaire-girl's ambition to trade cash for

a title, with a husband thrown in.



It isn't merely the American that adores the Almighty Dollar,

it is the human race.  The human race has always adored the hatful

of shells, or the bale of calico, or the half-bushel of brass rings,

or the handful of steel fish-hooks, or the houseful of black wives,

or the zareba full of cattle, or the two-score camels and asses,

or the factory, or the farm, or the block of buildings, or the

railroad bonds, or the bank stock, or the hoarded cash, or--

anything that stands for wealth and consideration and independence,

and can secure to the possessor that most precious of all things,

another man's envy.  It was a dull person that invented the idea

that the American's devotion to the dollar is more strenuous than

another's.



Rich American girls do buy titles, but they did not invent that idea;

it had been worn threadbare several hundred centuries before America

was discovered.  European girls still exploit it as briskly as ever;

and, when a title is not to be had for the money in hand, they buy

the husband without it.  They must put up the "dot," or there is

no trade.  The commercialization of brides is substantially universal,

except in America.  It exists with us, to some little extent,

but in no degree approaching a custom.



"The Englishman dearly loves a lord."



What is the soul and source of this love?  I think the thing could

be more correctly worded:



"The human race dearly envies a lord."



That is to say, it envies the lord's place.  Why?  On two accounts,

I think:  its Power and its Conspicuousness.



Where Conspicuousness carries with it a Power which, by the light

of our own observation and experience, we are able to measure

and comprehend, I think our envy of the possessor is as deep and as

passionate as is that of any other nation.  No one can care less

for a lord than the backwoodsman, who has had no personal contact

with lords and has seldom heard them spoken of; but I will not

allow that any Englishman has a profounder envy of a lord than has

the average American who has lived long years in a European capital

and fully learned how immense is the position the lord occupies.



Of any ten thousand Americans who eagerly gather, at vast inconvenience,

to get a glimpse of Prince Henry, all but a couple of hundred

will be there out of an immense curiosity; they are burning up

with desire to see a personage who is so much talked about.

They envy him; but it is Conspicuousness they envy mainly, not the

Power that is lodged in his royal quality and position, for they

have but a vague and spectral knowledge and appreciation of that;

though their environment and associations they have been accustomed

to regard such things lightly, and as not being very real; consequently,

they are not able to value them enough to consumingly envy them.



But, whenever an American (or other human being) is in the presence,

for the first time, of a combination of great Power and Conspicuousness

which he thoroughly understands and appreciates, his eager curiosity

and pleasure will be well-sodden with that other passion--envy--

whether he suspects it or not.  At any time, on any day, in any part

of America, you can confer a happiness upon any passing stranger

by calling his attention to any other passing stranger and saying:



"Do you see that gentleman going along there?  It is Mr. Rockefeller."



Watch his eye.  It is a combination of power and conspicuousness

which the man understands.



When we understand rank, we always like to rub against it.

When a man is conspicuous, we always want to see him.  Also, if he

will pay us an attention we will manage to remember it.  Also, we

will mention it now and then, casually; sometimes to a friend,

or if a friend is not handy, we will make out with a stranger.



Well, then, what is rank, and what is conspicuousness?  At once we

think of kings and aristocracies, and of world-wide celebrities

in soldierships, the arts, letters, etc., and we stop there.

But that is a mistake.  Rank holds its court and receives its homage

on every round of the ladder, from the emperor down to the rat-catcher;

and distinction, also, exists on every round of the ladder,

and commands its due of deference and envy.



To worship rank and distinction is the dear and valued privilege

of all the human race, and it is freely and joyfully exercised

in democracies as well as in monarchies--and even, to some extent,

among those creatures whom we impertinently call the Lower Animals.

For even they have some poor little vanities and foibles, though in

this matter they are paupers as compared to us.



A Chinese Emperor has the worship of his four hundred millions

of subjects, but the rest of the world is indifferent to him.

A Christian Emperor has the worship of his subjects and of a large

part of the Christian world outside of his domains; but he is

a matter of indifference to all China.  A king, class A, has an

extensive worship; a king, class B, has a less extensive worship;

class C, class D, class E get a steadily diminishing share of worship;

class L (Sultan of Zanzibar), class P (Sultan of Sulu), and class W

(half-king of Samoa), get no worship at all outside their own little

patch of sovereignty.



Take the distinguished people along down.  Each has his group

of homage-payers. In the navy, there are many groups; they start

with the Secretary and the Admiral, and go down to the quartermaster--

and below; for there will be groups among the sailors, and each of

these groups will have a tar who is distinguished for his battles,

or his strength, or his daring, or his profanity, and is admired

and envied by his group.  The same with the army; the same

with the literary and journalistic craft; the publishing craft;

the cod-fishery craft; Standard Oil; U. S. Steel; the class A hotel--

and the rest of the alphabet in that line; the class A prize-fighter--

and the rest of the alphabet in his line--clear down to the lowest

and obscurest six-boy gang of little gamins, with its one boy

that can thrash the rest, and to whom he is king of Samoa,

bottom of the royal race, but looked up to with a most ardent

admiration and envy.



There is something pathetic, and funny, and pretty, about this

human race's fondness for contact with power and distinction,

and for the reflected glory it gets out of it.  The king, class A,

is happy in the state banquet and the military show which the

emperor provides for him, and he goes home and gathers the queen

and the princelings around him in the privacy of the spare room,

and tells them all about it, and says:



"His Imperial Majesty put his hand upon my shoulder in the most

friendly way--just as friendly and familiar, oh, you can't imagine it!--

and everybody SEEING him do it; charming, perfectly charming!"



The king, class G, is happy in the cold collation and the police

parade provided for him by the king, class B, and goes home

and tells the family all about it, and says:



"And His Majesty took me into his own private cabinet for a smoke

and a chat, and there we sat just as sociable, and talking away

and laughing and chatting, just the same as if we had been born

in the same bunk; and all the servants in the anteroom could see

us doing it!  Oh, it was too lovely for anything!"



The king, class Q, is happy in the modest entertainment furnished him

by the king, class M, and goes home and tells the household about it,

and is as grateful and joyful over it as were his predecessors

in the gaudier attentions that had fallen to their larger lot.



Emperors, kings, artisans, peasants, big people, little people--at the

bottom we are all alike and all the same; all just alike on the inside,

and when our clothes are off, nobody can tell which of us is which.

We are unanimous in the pride we take in good and genuine compliments

paid us, and distinctions conferred upon us, in attentions shown.

There is not one of us, from the emperor down,, but is made like that.

Do I mean attentions shown us by the guest?  No, I mean simply

flattering attentions, let them come whence they may.  We despise

no source that can pay us a pleasing attention--there is no source

that is humble enough for that.  You have heard a dear little girl

say to a frowzy and disreputable dog:  "He came right to me and let

me pat him on the head, and he wouldn't let the others touch him!"

and you have seen her eyes dance with pride in that high distinction.

You have often seen that.  If the child were a princess, would that

random dog be able to confer the like glory upon her with his

pretty compliment?  Yes; and even in her mature life and seated

upon a throne, she would still remember it, still recall it,

still speak of it with frank satisfaction.  That charming and

lovable German princess and poet, Carmen Sylva, Queen of Roumania,

remembers yet that the flowers of the woods and fields "talked to her"

when she was a girl, and she sets it down in her latest book;

and that the squirrels conferred upon her and her father the valued

compliment of not being afraid of them; and "once one of them,

holding a nut between its sharp little teeth, ran right up against

my father"--it has the very note of "He came right to me and let

me pat him on the head"--"and when it saw itself reflected in his

boot it was very much surprised, and stopped for a long time to

contemplate itself in the polished leather"--then it went its way.

And the birds! she still remembers with pride that "they came

boldly into my room," when she had neglected her "duty" and put

no food on the window-sill for them; she knew all the wild birds,

and forgets the royal crown on her head to remember with pride

that they knew her; also that the wasp and the bee were personal

friends of hers, and never forgot that gracious relationship

to her injury:  "never have I been stung by a wasp or a bee."

And here is that proud note again that sings in that little child's

elation in being singled out, among all the company of children,

for the random dog's honor-conferring attentions.  "Even in the very

worst summer for wasps, when, in lunching out of doors, our table

was covered with them and every one else was stung, they never

hurt me."



When a queen whose qualities of mind and heart and character are

able to add distinction to so distinguished a place as a throne,

remembers with grateful exultation, after thirty years, honors and

distinctions conferred upon her by the humble, wild creatures of

the forest, we are helped to realize that complimentary attentions,

homage, distinctions, are of no caste, but are above all cast--

that they are a nobility-conferring power apart.



We all like these things.  When the gate-guard at the railway-station

passes me through unchallenged and examines other people's tickets,

I feel as the king, class A, felt when the emperor put the imperial

hand on his shoulder, "everybody seeing him do it"; and as the child

felt when the random dog allowed her to pat his head and ostracized

the others; and as the princess felt when the wasps spared her

and stung the rest; and I felt just so, four years ago in Vienna

(and remember it yet), when the helmeted police shut me off,

with fifty others, from a street which the Emperor was to pass through,

and the captain of the squad turned and saw the situation and said

indignantly to that guard:



"Can't you see it is the Herr Mark Twain?  Let him through!"



It was four years ago; but it will be four hundred before I forget

the wind of self-complacency that rose in me, and strained my

buttons when I marked the deference for me evoked in the faces of my

fellow-rabble, and noted, mingled with it, a puzzled and resentful

expression which said, as plainly as speech could have worded it:

"And who in the nation is the Herr Mark Twain UM GOTTESWILLEN?"



How many times in your life have you heard this boastful remark:



"I stood as close to him as I am to you; I could have put out my

hand and touched him."



We have all heard it many and many a time.  It was a proud

distinction to be able to say those words.  It brought envy to

the speaker, a kind of glory; and he basked in it and was happy

through all his veins.  And who was it he stood so close to?

The answer would cover all the grades.  Sometimes it was a king;

sometimes it was a renowned highwayman; sometimes it was an unknown

man killed in an extraordinary way and made suddenly famous by it;

always it was a person who was for the moment the subject of public

interest of a village.



"I was there, and I saw it myself."  That is a common and

envy-compelling remark.  It can refer to a battle; to a handing;

to a coronation; to the killing of Jumbo by the railway-train;

to the arrival of Jenny Lind at the Battery; to the meeting of the

President and Prince Henry; to the chase of a murderous maniac;

to the disaster in the tunnel; to the explosion in the subway;

to a remarkable dog-fight; to a village church struck by lightning.

It will be said, more or less causally, by everybody in America who has

seen Prince Henry do anything, or try to.  The man who was absent

and didn't see him to anything, will scoff.  It is his privilege;

and he can make capital out of it, too; he will seem, even to himself,

to be different from other Americans, and better.  As his opinion

of his superior Americanism grows, and swells, and concentrates

and coagulates, he will go further and try to belittle the distinction

of those that saw the Prince do things, and will spoil their pleasure

in it if he can.  My life has been embittered by that kind of persons.

If you are able to tell of a special distinction that has fallen

to your lot, it gravels them; they cannot bear it; and they try

to make believe that the thing you took for a special distinction

was nothing of the kind and was meant in quite another way.

Once I was received in private audience by an emperor.  Last week

I was telling a jealous person about it, and I could see him wince

under it, see him bite, see him suffer.  I revealed the whole episode

to him with considerable elaboration and nice attention to detail.

When I was through, he asked me what had impressed me most.

I said:



"His Majesty's delicacy.  They told me to be sure and back

out from the presence, and find the door-knob as best I could;

it was not allowable to face around.  Now the Emperor knew it would

be a difficult ordeal for me, because of lack of practice; and so,

when it was time to part, he turned, with exceeding delicacy,

and pretended to fumble with things on his desk, so I could get

out in my own way, without his seeing me."



It went home!  It was vitriol!  I saw the envy and disgruntlement rise

in the man's face; he couldn't keep it down.  I saw him try to fix

up something in his mind to take the bloom off that distinction.

I enjoyed that, for I judged that he had his work cut out for him.

He struggled along inwardly for quite a while; then he said,

with a manner of a person who has to say something and hasn't anything

relevant to say:



"You said he had a handful of special-brand cigars on the table?"



"Yes; _I_ never said anything to match them."



I had him again.  He had to fumble around in his mind as much

as another minute before he could play; then he said in as mean

a way as I ever heard a person say anything:



"He could have been counting the cigars, you know."



I cannot endure a man like that.  It is nothing to him how unkind

he is, so long as he takes the bloom off.  It is all he cares for.



"An Englishman (or other human being) does dearly love a lord,"

(or other conspicuous person.) It includes us all.  We love to be

noticed by the conspicuous person; we love to be associated with such,

or with a conspicuous event, even in a seventh-rate fashion,

even in the forty-seventh, if we cannot do better.  This accounts

for some of our curious tastes in mementos.  It accounts for the large

private trade in the Prince of Wales's hair, which chambermaids

were able to drive in that article of commerce when the Prince made

the tour of the world in the long ago--hair which probably did

not always come from his brush, since enough of it was marketed

to refurnish a bald comet; it accounts for the fact that the rope

which lynches a negro in the presence of ten thousand Christian

spectators is salable five minutes later at two dollars and inch;

it accounts for the mournful fact that a royal personage does not

venture to wear buttons on his coat in public.



We do love a lord--and by that term I mean any person whose situation

is higher than our own.  The lord of the group, for instance:

a group of peers, a group of millionaires, a group of hoodlums,

a group of sailors, a group of newsboys, a group of saloon politicians,

a group of college girls.  No royal person has ever been the object

of a more delirious loyalty and slavish adoration than is paid

by the vast Tammany herd to its squalid idol in Wantage.  There is

not a bifurcated animal in that menagerie that would not be proud

to appear in a newspaper picture in his company.  At the same time,

there are some in that organization who would scoff at the people

who have been daily pictured in company with Prince Henry, and would

say vigorously that THEY would not consent to be photographed

with him--a statement which would not be true in any instance.

There are hundreds of people in America who would frankly say to you

that they would not be proud to be photographed in a group with

the Prince, if invited; and some of these unthinking people would

believe it when they said it; yet in no instance would it be true.

We have a large population, but we have not a large enough one,

by several millions, to furnish that man.  He has not yet been begotten,

and in fact he is not begettable.



You may take any of the printed groups, and there isn't a person

in the dim background who isn't visibly trying to be vivid; if it

is a crowd of ten thousand--ten thousand proud, untamed democrats,

horny-handed sons of toil and of politics, and fliers of the eagle--

there isn't one who is trying to keep out of range, there isn't one

who isn't plainly meditating a purchase of the paper in the morning,

with the intention of hunting himself out in the picture and of framing

and keeping it if he shall find so much of his person in it as his

starboard ear.



We all love to get some of the drippings of Conspicuousness, and we

will put up with a single, humble drip, if we can't get any more.

We may pretend otherwise, in conversation; but we can't pretend

it to ourselves privately--and we don't. We do confess in public

that we are the noblest work of God, being moved to it by long habit,

and teaching, and superstition; but deep down in the secret places

of our souls we recognize that, if we ARE the noblest work, the less

said about it the better.



We of the North poke fun at the South for its fondness of titles--

a fondness for titles pure and simple, regardless of whether they

are genuine or pinchbeck.  We forget that whatever a Southerner

likes the rest of the human race likes, and that there is no law of

predilection lodged in one people that is absent from another people.

There is no variety in the human race.  We are all children,

all children of the one Adam, and we love toys.  We can soon acquire

that Southern disease if some one will give it a start.  It already

has a start, in fact.  I have been personally acquainted with over

eighty-four thousand persons who, at one time or another in their lives,

have served for a year or two on the staffs of our multitudinous

governors, and through that fatality have been generals temporarily,

and colonels temporarily, and judge-advocates temporarily; but I

have known only nine among them who could be hired to let the title

go when it ceased to be legitimate.  I know thousands and thousands

of governors who ceased to be governors away back in the last century;

but I am acquainted with only three who would answer your letter

if you failed to call them "Governor" in it.  I know acres and acres

of men who have done time in a legislature in prehistoric days,

but among them is not half an acre whose resentment you would not

raise if you addressed them as "Mr." instead of "Hon." The first thing

a legislature does is to convene in an impressive legislative attitude,

and get itself photographed.  Each member frames his copy and takes

it to the woods and hangs it up in the most aggressively conspicuous

place in his house; and if you visit the house and fail to inquire

what that accumulation is, the conversation will be brought around

to it by that aforetime legislator, and he will show you a figure

in it which in the course of years he has almost obliterated

with the smut of his finger-marks, and say with a solemn joy, "It's me!"



Have you ever seen a country Congressman enter the hotel breakfast-room

in Washington with his letters?--and sit at his table and let on

to read them?--and wrinkle his brows and frown statesman-like?--

keeping a furtive watch-out over his glasses all the while to see

if he is being observed and admired?--those same old letters

which he fetches in every morning?  Have you seen it?  Have you

seen him show off?  It is THE sight of the national capital.

Except one; a pathetic one.  That is the ex-Congressman: the poor

fellow whose life has been ruined by a two-year taste of glory

and of fictitious consequence; who has been superseded, and ought

to take his heartbreak home and hide it, but cannot tear himself

away from the scene of his lost little grandeur; and so he lingers,

and still lingers, year after year, unconsidered, sometimes snubbed,

ashamed of his fallen estate, and valiantly trying to look otherwise;

dreary and depressed, but counterfeiting breeziness and gaiety,

hailing with chummy familiarity, which is not always welcomed,

the more-fortunes who are still in place and were once his mates.

Have you seen him?  He clings piteously to the one little shred that

is left of his departed distinction--the "privilege of the floor";

and works it hard and gets what he can out of it.  That is the saddest

figure I know of.



Yes, we do so love our little distinctions!  And then we loftily

scoff at a Prince for enjoying his larger ones; forgetting that if we

only had his chance--ah!  "Senator" is not a legitimate title.

A Senator has no more right to be addressed by it than have you

or I; but, in the several state capitals and in Washington,

there are five thousand Senators who take very kindly to

that fiction, and who purr gratefully when you call them by it--

which you may do quite unrebuked.  Then those same Senators smile

at the self-constructed majors and generals and judges of the South!



Indeed, we do love our distinctions, get them how we may.

And we work them for all they are worth.  In prayer we call

ourselves "worms of the dust," but it is only on a sort of tacit

understanding that the remark shall not be taken at par.  WE--

worms of the dust!  Oh, no, we are not that.  Except in fact;

and we do not deal much in fact when we are contemplating ourselves.



As a race, we do certainly love a lord--let him be Croker, or a duke,

or a prize-fighter, or whatever other personage shall chance to be the

head of our group.  Many years ago, I saw a greasy youth in overalls

standing by the HERALD office, with an expectant look in his face.

Soon a large man passed out, and gave him a pat on the shoulder.

That was what the boy was waiting for--the large man's notice.

The pat made him proud and happy, and the exultation inside of him

shone out through his eyes; and his mates were there to see the pat

and envy it and wish they could have that glory.  The boy belonged

down cellar in the press-room, the large man was king of the

upper floors, foreman of the composing-room. The light in the boy's

face was worship, the foreman was his lord, head of his group.

The pat was an accolade.  It was as precious to the boy as it would

have been if he had been an aristocrat's son and the accolade had

been delivered by his sovereign with a sword.  The quintessence

of the honor was all there; there was no difference in values;

in truth there was no difference present except an artificial one--

clothes.



All the human race loves a lord--that is, loves to look upon

or be noticed by the possessor of Power or Conspicuousness;

and sometimes animals, born to better things and higher ideals,

descend to man's level in this matter.  In the Jardin des Plantes

I have see a cat that was so vain of being the personal friend

of an elephant that I was ashamed of her.





***







EXTRACTS FROM ADAM'S DIARY







MONDAY.--This new creature with the long hair is a good deal

in the way.  It is always hanging around and following me about.

I don't like this; I am not used to company.  I wish it would stay

with the other animals.  . . . Cloudy today, wind in the east;

think we shall have rain.  . . . WE?  Where did I get that word--

the new creature uses it.



TUESDAY.--Been examining the great waterfall.  It is the finest thing

on the estate, I think.  The new creature calls it Niagara Falls--

why, I am sure I do not know.  Says it LOOKS like Niagara Falls.

That is not a reason, it is mere waywardness and imbecility.

I get no chance to name anything myself.  The new creature names

everything that comes along, before I can get in a protest.

And always that same pretext is offered--it LOOKS like the thing.

There is a dodo, for instance.  Says the moment one looks at it

one sees at a glance that it "looks like a dodo."  It will have to

keep that name, no doubt.  It wearies me to fret about it, and it

does no good, anyway.  Dodo!  It looks no more like a dodo than

I do.



WEDNESDAY.--Built me a shelter against the rain, but could not

have it to myself in peace.  The new creature intruded.  When I

tried to put it out it shed water out of the holes it looks with,

and wiped it away with the back of its paws, and made a noise

such as some of the other animals make when they are in distress.

I wish it would not talk; it is always talking.  That sounds like a

cheap fling at the poor creature, a slur; but I do not mean it so.

I have never heard the human voice before, and any new and strange

sound intruding itself here upon the solemn hush of these dreaming

solitudes offends my ear and seems a false note.  And this new sound

is so close to me; it is right at my shoulder, right at my ear,

first on one side and then on the other, and I am used only to sounds

that are more or less distant from me.



FRIDAY.  The naming goes recklessly on, in spite of anything I can do.

I had a very good name for the estate, and it was musical and pretty--

GARDEN OF EDEN.  Privately, I continue to call it that, but not any

longer publicly.  The new creature says it is all woods and rocks

and scenery, and therefore has no resemblance to a garden.  Says it

LOOKS like a park, and does not look like anything BUT a park.

Consequently, without consulting me, it has been new-named NIAGARA

FALLS PARK.  This is sufficiently high-handed, it seems to me.

And already there is a sign up:





KEEP OFF





THE GRASS





My life is not as happy as it was.



SATURDAY.--The new creature eats too much fruit.  We are going

to run short, most likely.  "We" again--that is ITS word; mine, too,

now, from hearing it so much.  Good deal of fog this morning.

I do not go out in the fog myself.  This new creature does.

It goes out in all weathers, and stumps right in with its muddy feet.

And talks.  It used to be so pleasant and quiet here.



SUNDAY.--Pulled through.  This day is getting to be more and more trying.

It was selected and set apart last November as a day of rest.

I had already six of them per week before.  This morning found

the new creature trying to clod apples out of that forbidden tree.



MONDAY.--The new creature says its name is Eve.  That is all right,

I have no objections.  Says it is to call it by, when I want it

to come.  I said it was superfluous, then.  The word evidently

raised me in its respect; and indeed it is a large, good word

and will bear repetition.  It says it is not an It, it is a She.

This is probably doubtful; yet it is all one to me; what she is were

nothing to me if she would but go by herself and not talk.



TUESDAY.--She has littered the whole estate with execrable names

and offensive signs:





This way to the Whirlpool





This way to Goat Island





Cave of the Winds this way





She says this park would make a tidy summer resort if there was

any custom for it.  Summer resort--another invention of hers--

just words, without any meaning.  What is a summer resort?

But it is best not to ask her, she has such a rage for explaining.



FRIDAY.--She has taken to beseeching me to stop going over the Falls.

What harm does it do?  Says it makes her shudder.  I wonder why;

I have always done it--always liked the plunge, and coolness.

I supposed it was what the Falls were for.  They have no other

use that I can see, and they must have been made for something.

She says they were only made for scenery--like the rhinoceros and

the mastodon.



I went over the Falls in a barrel--not satisfactory to her.

Went over in a tub--still not satisfactory.  Swam the Whirlpool and

the Rapids in a fig-leaf suit.  It got much damaged.  Hence, tedious

complaints about my extravagance.  I am too much hampered here.

What I need is a change of scene.



SATURDAY.--I escaped last Tuesday night, and traveled two days,

and built me another shelter in a secluded place, and obliterated my

tracks as well as I could, but she hunted me out by means of a beast

which she has tamed and calls a wolf, and came making that pitiful

noise again, and shedding that water out of the places she looks with.

I was obliged to return with her, but will presently emigrate again

when occasion offers.  She engages herself in many foolish things;

among others; to study out why the animals called lions and tigers

live on grass and flowers, when, as she says, the sort of teeth they

wear would indicate that they were intended to eat each other.

This is foolish, because to do that would be to kill each other,

and that would introduce what, as I understand, is called "death";

and death, as I have been told, has not yet entered the Park.

Which is a pity, on some accounts.



SUNDAY.--Pulled through.



MONDAY.--I believe I see what the week is for:  it is to give time

to rest up from the weariness of Sunday.  It seems a good idea.

. . . She has been climbing that tree again.  Clodded her out of it.

She said nobody was looking.  Seems to consider that a sufficient

justification for chancing any dangerous thing.  Told her that.

The word justification moved her admiration--and envy, too, I thought.

It is a good word.



TUESDAY.--She told me she was made out of a rib taken from my body.

This is at least doubtful, if not more than that.  I have not

missed any rib.  . . . She is in much trouble about the buzzard;

says grass does not agree with it; is afraid she can't raise it;

thinks it was intended to live on decayed flesh.  The buzzard must

get along the best it can with what is provided.  We cannot overturn

the whole scheme to accommodate the buzzard.



SATURDAY.--She fell in the pond yesterday when she was looking at

herself in it, which she is always doing.  She nearly strangled,

and said it was most uncomfortable.  This made her sorry for the

creatures which live in there, which she calls fish, for she continues

to fasten names on to things that don't need them and don't come

when they are called by them, which is a matter of no consequence

to her, she is such a numbskull, anyway; so she got a lot of them out

and brought them in last night and put them in my bed to keep warm,

but I have noticed them now and then all day and I don't see that

they are any happier there then they were before, only quieter.

When night comes I shall throw them outdoors.  I will not sleep

with them again, for I find them clammy and unpleasant to lie among

when a person hasn't anything on.



SUNDAY.--Pulled through.



TUESDAY.--She has taken up with a snake now.  The other animals are glad,

for she was always experimenting with them and bothering them;

and I am glad because the snake talks, and this enables me to get

a rest.



FRIDAY.--She says the snake advises her to try the fruit of the tree,

and says the result will be a great and fine and noble education.

I told her there would be another result, too--it would introduce

death into the world.  That was a mistake--it had been better

to keep the remark to myself; it only gave her an idea--she could

save the sick buzzard, and furnish fresh meat to the despondent

lions and tigers.  I advised her to keep away from the tree.

She said she wouldn't. I foresee trouble.  Will emigrate.



WEDNESDAY.--I have had a variegated time.  I escaped last night,

and rode a horse all night as fast as he could go, hoping to get

clear of the Park and hide in some other country before the

trouble should begin; but it was not to be.  About an hour after

sun-up, as I was riding through a flowery plain where thousands

of animals were grazing, slumbering, or playing with each other,

according to their wont, all of a sudden they broke into a tempest

of frightful noises, and in one moment the plain was a frantic commotion

and every beast was destroying its neighbor.  I knew what it meant--

Eve had eaten that fruit, and death was come into the world.

. . . The tigers ate my house, paying no attention when I ordered

them to desist, and they would have eaten me if I had stayed--

which I didn't, but went away in much haste.  . . . I found this place,

outside the Park, and was fairly comfortable for a few days, but she

has found me out.  Found me out, and has named the place Tonawanda--

says it LOOKS like that.  In fact I was not sorry she came,

for there are but meager pickings here, and she brought some

of those apples.  I was obliged to eat them, I was so hungry.

It was against my principles, but I find that principles have no

real force except when one is well fed.  . . . She came curtained

in boughs and bunches of leaves, and when I asked her what she

meant by such nonsense, and snatched them away and threw them down,

she tittered and blushed.  I had never seen a person titter

and blush before, and to me it seemed unbecoming and idiotic.

She said I would soon know how it was myself.  This was correct.

Hungry as I was, I laid down the apple half-eaten--certainly the

best one I ever saw, considering the lateness of the season--

and arrayed myself in the discarded boughs and branches, and then

spoke to her with some severity and ordered her to go and get some

more and not make a spectacle or herself.  She did it, and after this

we crept down to where the wild-beast battle had been, and collected

some skins, and I made her patch together a couple of suits proper

for public occasions.  They are uncomfortable, it is true, but stylish,

and that is the main point about clothes.  . . . I find she is a

good deal of a companion.  I see I should be lonesome and depressed

without her, now that I have lost my property.  Another thing,

she says it is ordered that we work for our living hereafter.

She will be useful.  I will superintend.



TEN DAYS LATER.--She accuses ME of being the cause of our disaster!

She says, with apparent sincerity and truth, that the Serpent assured

her that the forbidden fruit was not apples, it was chestnuts.

I said I was innocent, then, for I had not eaten any chestnuts.

She said the Serpent informed her that "chestnut" was a figurative

term meaning an aged and moldy joke.  I turned pale at that,

for I have made many jokes to pass the weary time, and some of them

could have been of that sort, though I had honestly supposed

that they were new when I made them.  She asked me if I had made

one just at the time of the catastrophe.  I was obliged to admit

that I had made one to myself, though not aloud.  It was this.

I was thinking about the Falls, and I said to myself, "How wonderful

it is to see that vast body of water tumble down there!"

Then in an instant a bright thought flashed into my head, and I let

it fly, saying, "It would be a deal more wonderful to see it tumble

UP there!"--and I was just about to kill myself with laughing at

it when all nature broke loose in war and death and I had to flee

for my life.  "There," she said, with triumph, "that is just it;

the Serpent mentioned that very jest, and called it the First Chestnut,

and said it was coeval with the creation."  Alas, I am indeed

to blame.  Would that I were not witty; oh, that I had never had

that radiant thought!



NEXT YEAR.--We have named it Cain.  She caught it while I was up country

trapping on the North Shore of the Erie; caught it in the timber a

couple of miles from our dug-out--or it might have been four, she isn't

certain which.  It resembles us in some ways, and may be a relation.

That is what she thinks, but this is an error, in my judgment.

The difference in size warrants the conclusion that it is a different

and new kind of animal--a fish, perhaps, though when I put it in the

water to see, it sank, and she plunged in and snatched it out before

there was opportunity for the experiment to determine the matter.

I still think it is a fish, but she is indifferent about what it is,

and will not let me have it to try.  I do not understand this.

The coming of the creature seems to have changed her whole nature

and made her unreasonable about experiments.  She thinks more

of it than she does of any of the other animals, but is not able

to explain why.  Her mind is disordered--everything shows it.

Sometimes she carries the fish in her arms half the night when it

complains and wants to get to the water.  At such times the water

comes out of the places in her face that she looks out of, and she

pats the fish on the back and makes soft sounds with her mouth

to soothe it, and betrays sorrow and solicitude in a hundred ways.

I have never seen her do like this with any other fish, and it

troubles me greatly.  She used to carry the young tigers around so,

and play with them, before we lost our property, but it was only play;

she never took on about them like this when their dinner disagreed

with them.



SUNDAY.--She doesn't work, Sundays, but lies around all tired out,

and likes to have the fish wallow over her; and she makes fool

noises to amuse it, and pretends to chew its paws, and that makes

it laugh.  I have not seen a fish before that could laugh.

This makes me doubt.  . . . I have come to like Sunday myself.

Superintending all the week tires a body so.  There ought to be

more Sundays.  In the old days they were tough, but now they

come handy.



WEDNESDAY.--It isn't a fish.  I cannot quite make out what it is.

It makes curious devilish noises when not satisfied, and says "goo-goo"

when it is.  It is not one of us, for it doesn't walk; it is not

a bird, for it doesn't fly; it is not a frog, for it doesn't hop;

it is not a snake, for it doesn't crawl; I feel sure it is not a fish,

though I cannot get a chance to find out whether it can swim or not.

It merely lies around, and mostly on its back, with its feet up.

I have not seen any other animal do that before.  I said I believed it

was an enigma; but she only admired the word without understanding it.

In my judgment it is either an enigma or some king of a bug.

If it dies, I will take it apart and see what its arrangements are.

I never had a thing perplex me so.



THREE MONTHS LATER.--The perplexity augments instead of diminishing.

I sleep but little.  It has ceased from lying around, and goes about on

its four legs now.  Yet it differs from the other four legged animals,

in that its front legs are unusually short, consequently this

causes the main part of its person to stick up uncomfortably high

in the air, and this is not attractive.  It is built much as we are,

but its method of traveling shows that it is not of our breed.

The short front legs and long hind ones indicate that it is a of

the kangaroo family, but it is a marked variation of that species,

since the true kangaroo hops, whereas this one never does.

Still it is a curious and interesting variety, and has not been

catalogued before.  As I discovered it, I have felt justified

in securing the credit of the discovery by attaching my name to it,

and hence have called it KANGAROORUM ADAMIENSIS.  . . . It must have

been a young one when it came, for it has grown exceedingly since.

It must be five times as big, now, as it was then, and when

discontented it is able to make from twenty-two to thirty-eight times

the noise it made at first.  Coercion does not modify this, but has

the contrary effect.  For this reason I discontinued the system.

She reconciles it by persuasion, and by giving it things which she

had previously told me she wouldn't give it.  As already observed,

I was not at home when it first came, and she told me she found it

in the woods.  It seems odd that it should be the only one, yet it

must be so, for I have worn myself out these many weeks trying to find

another one to add to my collection, and for this to play with;

for surely then it would be quieter and we could tame it more easily.

But I find none, nor any vestige of any; and strangest of all,

no tracks.  It has to live on the ground, it cannot help itself;

therefore, how does it get about without leaving a track?

I have set a dozen traps, but they do no good.  I catch all small

animals except that one; animals that merely go into the trap out

of curiosity, I think, to see what the milk is there for.  They never

drink it.



THREE MONTHS LATER.--The Kangaroo still continues to grow, which is

very strange and perplexing.  I never knew one to be so long getting

its growth.  It has fur on its head now; not like kangaroo fur,

but exactly like our hair except that it is much finer and softer,

and instead of being black is red.  I am like to lose my mind over

the capricious and harassing developments of this unclassifiable

zoological freak.  If I could catch another one--but that is hopeless;

it is a new variety, and the only sample; this is plain.  But I

caught a true kangaroo and brought it in, thinking that this one,

being lonesome, would rather have that for company than have no kin

at all, or any animal it could feel a nearness to or get sympathy

from in its forlorn condition here among strangers who do not

know its ways or habits, or what to do to make it feel that it

is among friends; but it was a mistake--it went into such fits at

the sight of the kangaroo that I was convinced it had never seen

one before.  I pity the poor noisy little animal, but there is

nothing I can do to make it happy.  If I could tame it--but that is

out of the question; the more I try the worse I seem to make it.

It grieves me to the heart to see it in its little storms of sorrow

and passion.  I wanted to let it go, but she wouldn't hear of it.

That seemed cruel and not like her; and yet she may be right.

It might be lonelier than ever; for since I cannot find another one,

how could IT?



FIVE MONTHS LATER.--It is not a kangaroo.  No, for it supports

itself by holding to her finger, and thus goes a few steps on its

hind legs, and then falls down.  It is probably some kind of a bear;

and yet it has no tail--as yet--and no fur, except upon its head.

It still keeps on growing--that is a curious circumstance,

for bears get their growth earlier than this.  Bears are dangerous--

since our catastrophe--and I shall not be satisfied to have this

one prowling about the place much longer without a muzzle on.

I have offered to get her a kangaroo if she would let this one go,

but it did no good--she is determined to run us into all sorts

of foolish risks, I think.  She was not like this before she lost

her mind.



A FORTNIGHT LATER.--I examined its mouth.  There is no danger yet:

it has only one tooth.  It has no tail yet.  It makes more noise

now than it ever did before--and mainly at night.  I have moved out.

But I shall go over, mornings, to breakfast, and see if it has

more teeth.  If it gets a mouthful of teeth it will be time for it

to go, tail or no tail, for a bear does not need a tail in order to

be dangerous.



FOUR MONTHS LATER.--I have been off hunting and fishing a month,

up in the region that she calls Buffalo; I don't know why, unless it

is because there are not any buffaloes there.  Meantime the bear

has learned to paddle around all by itself on its hind legs,

and says "poppa" and "momma."  It is certainly a new species.

This resemblance to words may be purely accidental, of course,

and may have no purpose or meaning; but even in that case it is

still extraordinary, and is a thing which no other bear can do.

This imitation of speech, taken together with general absence of fur

and entire absence of tail, sufficiently indicates that this is a new

kind of bear.  The further study of it will be exceedingly interesting.

Meantime I will go off on a far expedition among the forests of

the north and make an exhaustive search.  There must certainly be

another one somewhere, and this one will be less dangerous when it

has company of its own species.  I will go straightway; but I will

muzzle this one first.



THREE MONTHS LATER.--It has been a weary, weary hunt, yet I have

had no success.  In the mean time, without stirring from the

home estate, she has caught another one!  I never saw such luck.

I might have hunted these woods a hundred years, I never would

have run across that thing.



NEXT DAY.--I have been comparing the new one with the old one,

and it is perfectly plain that they are of the same breed.

I was going to stuff one of them for my collection, but she

is prejudiced against it for some reason or other; so I have

relinquished the idea, though I think it is a mistake.  It would

be an irreparable loss to science if they should get away.

The old one is tamer than it was and can laugh and talk like a parrot,

having learned this, no doubt, from being with the parrot so much,

and having the imitative faculty in a high developed degree.

I shall be astonished if it turns out to be a new kind of parrot;

and yet I ought not to be astonished, for it has already been

everything else it could think of since those first days when it

was a fish.  The new one is as ugly as the old one was at first;

has the same sulphur-and-raw-meat complexion and the same singular

head without any fur on it.  She calls it Abel.



TEN YEARS LATER.--They are BOYS; we found it out long ago.

It was their coming in that small immature shape that puzzled us;

we were not used to it.  There are some girls now.  Abel is a good boy,

but if Cain had stayed a bear it would have improved him.  After all

these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning;

it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it

without her.  At first I thought she talked too much; but now I should

be sorry to have that voice fall silent and pass out of my life.

Blessed be the chestnut that brought us near together and taught me

to know the goodness of her heart and the sweetness of her spirit!





***







EVE'S DIARY





Translated from the Original







SATURDAY.--I am almost a whole day old, now.  I arrived yesterday.

That is as it seems to me.  And it must be so, for if there was

a day-before-yesterday I was not there when it happened, or I

should remember it.  It could be, of course, that it did happen,

and that I was not noticing.  Very well; I will be very watchful now,

and if any day-before-yesterdays happen I will make a note of it.

It will be best to start right and not let the record get confused,

for some instinct tells me that these details are going to be

important to the historian some day.  For I feel like an experiment,

I feel exactly like an experiment; it would be impossible for a person

to feel more like an experiment than I do, and so I am coming to feel

convinced that that is what I AM--an experiment; just an experiment,

and nothing more.



Then if I am an experiment, am I the whole of it?  No, I think not;

I think the rest of it is part of it.  I am the main part of it,

but I think the rest of it has its share in the matter.  Is my

position assured, or do I have to watch it and take care of it?

The latter, perhaps.  Some instinct tells me that eternal vigilance

is the price of supremacy.  [That is a good phrase, I think, for one

so young.]



Everything looks better today than it did yesterday.  In the rush of

finishing up yesterday, the mountains were left in a ragged condition,

and some of the plains were so cluttered with rubbish and remnants

that the aspects were quite distressing.  Noble and beautiful works

of art should not be subjected to haste; and this majestic new world

is indeed a most noble and beautiful work.  And certainly marvelously

near to being perfect, notwithstanding the shortness of the time.

There are too many stars in some places and not enough in others,

but that can be remedied presently, no doubt.  The moon got

loose last night, and slid down and fell out of the scheme--

a very great loss; it breaks my heart to think of it.  There isn't

another thing among the ornaments and decorations that is comparable

to it for beauty and finish.  It should have been fastened better.

If we can only get it back again--



But of course there is no telling where it went to.  And besides,

whoever gets it will hide it; I know it because I would do it myself.

I believe I can be honest in all other matters, but I already

begin to realize that the core and center of my nature is love

of the beautiful, a passion for the beautiful, and that it would

not be safe to trust me with a moon that belonged to another person

and that person didn't know I had it.  I could give up a moon that I

found in the daytime, because I should be afraid some one was looking;

but if I found it in the dark, I am sure I should find some kind

of an excuse for not saying anything about it.  For I do love moons,

they are so pretty and so romantic.  I wish we had five or six;

I would never go to bed; I should never get tired lying on the moss-bank

and looking up at them.



Stars are good, too.  I wish I could get some to put in my hair.

But I suppose I never can.  You would be surprised to find how far

off they are, for they do not look it.  When they first showed,

last night, I tried to knock some down with a pole, but it didn't reach,

which astonished me; then I tried clods till I was all tired out,

but I never got one.  It was because I am left-handed and cannot

throw good.  Even when I aimed at the one I wasn't after I

couldn't hit the other one, though I did make some close shots,

for I saw the black blot of the clod sail right into the midst of

the golden clusters forty or fifty times, just barely missing them,

and if I could have held out a little longer maybe I could have

got one.



So I cried a little, which was natural, I suppose, for one of my age,

and after I was rested I got a basket and started for a place on the

extreme rim of the circle, where the stars were close to the ground

and I could get them with my hands, which would be better, anyway,

because I could gather them tenderly then, and not break them.

But it was farther than I thought, and at last I had go give it up;

I was so tired I couldn't drag my feet another step; and besides,

they were sore and hurt me very much.



I couldn't get back home; it was too far and turning cold;

but I found some tigers and nestled in among them and was most

adorably comfortable, and their breath was sweet and pleasant,

because they live on strawberries.  I had never seen a tiger before,

but I knew them in a minute by the stripes.  If I could have one

of those skins, it would make a lovely gown.



Today I am getting better ideas about distances.  I was so eager

to get hold of every pretty thing that I giddily grabbed for it,

sometimes when it was too far off, and sometimes when it was but

six inches away but seemed a foot--alas, with thorns between!

I learned a lesson; also I made an axiom, all out of my own head--

my very first one; THE SCRATCHED EXPERIMENT SHUNS THE THORN.

I think it is a very good one for one so young.



I followed the other Experiment around, yesterday afternoon,

at a distance, to see what it might be for, if I could.  But I was

not able to make out.  I think it is a man.  I had never seen a man,

but it looked like one, and I feel sure that that is what it is.

I realize that I feel more curiosity about it than about any

of the other reptiles.  If it is a reptile, and I suppose it is;

for it has frowzy hair and blue eyes, and looks like a reptile.

It has no hips; it tapers like a carrot; when it stands, it spreads

itself apart like a derrick; so I think it is a reptile, though it may

be architecture.



I was afraid of it at first, and started to run every time it

turned around, for I thought it was going to chase me; but by

and by I found it was only trying to get away, so after that I

was not timid any more, but tracked it along, several hours,

about twenty yards behind, which made it nervous and unhappy.

At last it was a good deal worried, and climbed a tree.  I waited

a good while, then gave it up and went home.



Today the same thing over.  I've got it up the tree again.



SUNDAY.--It is up there yet.  Resting, apparently.  But that is

a subterfuge:  Sunday isn't the day of rest; Saturday is appointed

for that.  It looks to me like a creature that is more interested

in resting than it anything else.  It would tire me to rest so much.

It tires me just to sit around and watch the tree.  I do wonder

what it is for; I never see it do anything.



They returned the moon last night, and I was SO happy!  I think

it is very honest of them.  It slid down and fell off again,

but I was not distressed; there is no need to worry when one has

that kind of neighbors; they will fetch it back.  I wish I could

do something to show my appreciation.  I would like to send them

some stars, for we have more than we can use.  I mean I, not we,

for I can see that the reptile cares nothing for such things.



It has low tastes, and is not kind.  When I went there yesterday

evening in the gloaming it had crept down and was trying to catch

the little speckled fishes that play in the pool, and I had

to clod it to make it go up the tree again and let them alone.

I wonder if THAT is what it is for?  Hasn't it any heart?

Hasn't it any compassion for those little creature?  Can it be

that it was designed and manufactured for such ungentle work?

It has the look of it.  One of the clods took it back of the ear,

and it used language.  It gave me a thrill, for it was the first time I

had ever heard speech, except my own.  I did not understand the words,

but they seemed expressive.



When I found it could talk I felt a new interest in it, for I

love to talk; I talk, all day, and in my sleep, too, and I am

very interesting, but if I had another to talk to I could be twice

as interesting, and would never stop, if desired.



If this reptile is a man, it isn't an IT, is it?  That wouldn't

be grammatical, would it?  I think it would be HE.  I think so.

In that case one would parse it thus:  nominative, HE; dative, HIM;

possessive, HIS'N. Well, I will consider it a man and call it he

until it turns out to be something else.  This will be handier

than having so many uncertainties.



NEXT WEEK SUNDAY.--All the week I tagged around after him and tried

to get acquainted.  I had to do the talking, because he was shy,

but I didn't mind it.  He seemed pleased to have me around, and I

used the sociable "we" a good deal, because it seemed to flatter him

to be included.



WEDNESDAY.--We are getting along very well indeed, now, and getting

better and better acquainted.  He does not try to avoid me any more,

which is a good sign, and shows that he likes to have me with him.

That pleases me, and I study to be useful to him in every way I can,

so as to increase his regard.  During the last day or two I

have taken all the work of naming things off his hands, and this

has been a great relief to him, for he has no gift in that line,

and is evidently very grateful.  He can't think of a rational name

to save him, but I do not let him see that I am aware of his defect.

Whenever a new creature comes along I name it before he has time

to expose himself by an awkward silence.  In this way I have

saved him many embarrassments.  I have no defect like this.

The minute I set eyes on an animal I know what it is.  I don't

have to reflect a moment; the right name comes out instantly,

just as if it were an inspiration, as no doubt it is, for I am

sure it wasn't in me half a minute before.  I seem to know just

by the shape of the creature and the way it acts what animal

it is.



When the dodo came along he thought it was a wildcat--I saw it

in his eye.  But I saved him.  And I was careful not to do it

in a way that could hurt his pride.  I just spoke up in a quite

natural way of pleasing surprise, and not as if I was dreaming

of conveying information, and said, "Well, I do declare, if there

isn't the dodo!"  I explained--without seeming to be explaining--

how I know it for a dodo, and although I thought maybe he was

a little piqued that I knew the creature when he didn't, it was

quite evident that he admired me.  That was very agreeable, and I

thought of it more than once with gratification before I slept.

How little a thing can make us happy when we feel that we have

earned it!



THURSDAY.--my first sorrow.  Yesterday he avoided me and seemed

to wish I would not talk to him.  I could not believe it,

and thought there was some mistake, for I loved to be with him,

and loved to hear him talk, and so how could it be that he could

feel unkind toward me when I had not done anything?  But at last it

seemed true, so I went away and sat lonely in the place where I first

saw him the morning that we were made and I did not know what he

was and was indifferent about him; but now it was a mournful place,

and every little think spoke of him, and my heart was very sore.

I did not know why very clearly, for it was a new feeling; I had

not experienced it before, and it was all a mystery, and I could

not make it out.



But when night came I could not bear the lonesomeness, and went

to the new shelter which he has built, to ask him what I had done

that was wrong and how I could mend it and get back his kindness again;

but he put me out in the rain, and it was my first sorrow.



SUNDAY.--It is pleasant again, now, and I am happy; but those were

heavy days; I do not think of them when I can help it.



I tried to get him some of those apples, but I cannot learn to

throw straight.  I failed, but I think the good intention pleased him.

They are forbidden, and he says I shall come to harm; but so I

come to harm through pleasing him, why shall I care for that harm?



MONDAY.--This morning I told him my name, hoping it would interest him.

But he did not care for it.  It is strange.  If he should tell me

his name, I would care.  I think it would be pleasanter in my ears

than any other sound.



He talks very little.  Perhaps it is because he is not bright,

and is sensitive about it and wishes to conceal it.  It is

such a pity that he should feel so, for brightness is nothing;

it is in the heart that the values lie.  I wish I could make him

understand that a loving good heart is riches, and riches enough,

and that without it intellect is poverty.



Although he talks so little, he has quite a considerable

vocabulary.  This morning he used a surprisingly good word.

He evidently recognized, himself, that it was a good one, for he

worked in in twice afterward, casually.  It was good casual art,

still it showed that he possesses a certain quality of perception.

Without a doubt that seed can be made to grow, if cultivated.



Where did he get that word?  I do not think I have ever used it.



No, he took no interest in my name.  I tried to hide my disappointment,

but I suppose I did not succeed.  I went away and sat on the

moss-bank with my feet in the water.  It is where I go when I hunger

for companionship, some one to look at, some one to talk to.

It is not enough--that lovely white body painted there in the pool--

but it is something, and something is better than utter loneliness.

It talks when I talk; it is sad when I am sad; it comforts me with

its sympathy; it says, "Do not be downhearted, you poor friendless girl;

I will be your friend."  It IS a good friend to me, and my only one;

it is my sister.



That first time that she forsook me! ah, I shall never forget that--

never, never.  My heart was lead in my body!  I said, "She was all

I had, and now she is gone!"  In my despair I said, "Break, my heart;

I cannot bear my life any more!" and hid my face in my hands,

and there was no solace for me.  And when I took them away,

after a little, there she was again, white and shining and beautiful,

and I sprang into her arms!



That was perfect happiness; I had known happiness before, but it was

not like this, which was ecstasy.  I never doubted her afterward.

Sometimes she stayed away--maybe an hour, maybe almost the

whole day, but I waited and did not doubt; I said, "She is busy,

or she is gone on a journey, but she will come."  And it was so:

she always did.  At night she would not come if it was dark, for she

was a timid little thing; but if there was a moon she would come.

I am not afraid of the dark, but she is younger than I am; she was

born after I was.  Many and many are the visits I have paid her;

she is my comfort and my refuge when my life is hard--and it is

mainly that.



TUESDAY.--All the morning I was at work improving the estate;

and I purposely kept away from him in the hope that he would get

lonely and come.  But he did not.



At noon I stopped for the day and took my recreation by flitting all

about with the bees and the butterflies and reveling in the flowers,

those beautiful creatures that catch the smile of God out of the

sky and preserve it!  I gathered them, and made them into wreaths

and garlands and clothed myself in them while I ate my luncheon--

apples, of course; then I sat in the shade and wished and waited.

But he did not come.



But no matter.  Nothing would have come of it, for he does not

care for flowers.  He called them rubbish, and cannot tell one

from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.  He does

not care for me, he does not care for flowers, he does not care

for the painted sky at eventide--is there anything he does care for,

except building shacks to coop himself up in from the good clean rain,

and thumping the melons, and sampling the grapes, and fingering

the fruit on the trees, to see how those properties are coming along?



I laid a dry stick on the ground and tried to bore a hole in it

with another one, in order to carry out a scheme that I had,

and soon I got an awful fright.  A thin, transparent bluish film

rose out of the hole, and I dropped everything and ran!  I thought

it was a spirit, and I WAS so frightened!  But I looked back, and it

was not coming; so I leaned against a rock and rested and panted,

and let my limps go on trembling until they got steady again;

then I crept warily back, alert, watching, and ready to fly if there

was occasion; and when I was come near, I parted the branches

of a rose-bush and peeped through--wishing the man was about,

I was looking so cunning and pretty--but the sprite was gone.

I went there, and there was a pinch of delicate pink dust in the hole.

I put my finger in, to feel it, and said OUCH! and took it

out again.  It was a cruel pain.  I put my finger in my mouth;

and by standing first on one foot and then the other, and grunting,

I presently eased my misery; then I was full of interest, and began

to examine.



I was curious to know what the pink dust was.  Suddenly the name of it

occurred to me, though I had never heard of it before.  It was FIRE!

I was as certain of it as a person could be of anything in the world.

So without hesitation I named it that--fire.



I had created something that didn't exist before; I had added

a new thing to the world's uncountable properties; I realized this,

and was proud of my achievement, and was going to run and find him

and tell him about it, thinking to raise myself in his esteem--

but I reflected, and did not do it.  No--he would not care for it.

He would ask what it was good for, and what could I answer? for if it

was not GOOD for something, but only beautiful, merely beautiful--



So I sighed, and did not go.  For it wasn't good for anything;

it could not build a shack, it could not improve melons, it could

not hurry a fruit crop; it was useless, it was a foolishness

and a vanity; he would despise it and say cutting words.

But to me it was not despicable; I said, "Oh, you fire, I love you,

you dainty pink creature, for you are BEAUTIFUL--and that is enough!"

and was going to gather it to my breast.  But refrained.

Then I made another maxim out of my head, though it was so nearly

like the first one that I was afraid it was only a plagiarism:

"THE BURNT EXPERIMENT SHUNS THE FIRE."



I wrought again; and when I had made a good deal of fire-dust I emptied

it into a handful of dry brown grass, intending to carry it home

and keep it always and play with it; but the wind struck it and it

sprayed up and spat out at me fiercely, and I dropped it and ran.

When I looked back the blue spirit was towering up and stretching

and rolling away like a cloud, and instantly I thought of the name

of it--SMOKE!--though, upon my word, I had never heard of smoke before.



Soon brilliant yellow and red flares shot up through the smoke,

and I named them in an instant--FLAMES--and I was right, too,

though these were the very first flames that had ever been

in the world.  They climbed the trees, then flashed splendidly

in and out of the vast and increasing volume of tumbling smoke,

and I had to clap my hands and laugh and dance in my rapture,

it was so new and strange and so wonderful and so beautiful!



He came running, and stopped and gazed, and said not a word for

many minutes.  Then he asked what it was.  Ah, it was too bad that he

should ask such a direct question.  I had to answer it, of course,

and I did.  I said it was fire.  If it annoyed him that I should know

and he must ask; that was not my fault; I had no desire to annoy him.

After a pause he asked:



"How did it come?"



Another direct question, and it also had to have a direct answer.



"I made it."



The fire was traveling farther and farther off.  He went to the edge

of the burned place and stood looking down, and said:



"What are these?"



"Fire-coals."



He picked up one to examine it, but changed his mind and put it

down again.  Then he went away.  NOTHING interests him.



But I was interested.  There were ashes, gray and soft and delicate

and pretty--I knew what they were at once.  And the embers;

I knew the embers, too.  I found my apples, and raked them out,

and was glad; for I am very young and my appetite is active.

But I was disappointed; they were all burst open and spoiled.

Spoiled apparently; but it was not so; they were better than raw ones.

Fire is beautiful; some day it will be useful, I think.



FRIDAY.--I saw him again, for a moment, last Monday at nightfall,

but only for a moment.  I was hoping he would praise me for trying

to improve the estate, for I had meant well and had worked hard.

But he was not pleased, and turned away and left me.  He was also

displeased on another account:  I tried once more to persuade him

to stop going over the Falls.  That was because the fire had revealed

to me a new passion--quite new, and distinctly different from love,

grief, and those others which I had already discovered--FEAR.  And it

is horrible!--I wish I had never discovered it; it gives me dark moments,

it spoils my happiness, it makes me shiver and tremble and shudder.

But I could not persuade him, for he has not discovered fear yet,

and so he could not understand me.





Extract from Adam's Diary





Perhaps I ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl and

make allowances.  She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world

is to her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy; she can't speak for

delight when she finds a new flower, she must pet it and caress it

and smell it and talk to it, and pour out endearing names upon it.

And she is color-mad: brown rocks, yellow sand, gray moss, green foliage,

blue sky; the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountains,

the golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon

sailing through the shredded cloud-rack, the star-jewels glittering

in the wastes of space--none of them is of any practical value,

so far as I can see, but because they have color and majesty,

that is enough for her, and she loses her mind over them.

If she could quiet down and keep still a couple minutes at a time,

it would be a reposeful spectacle.  In that case I think I could

enjoy looking at her; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming

to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely creature--

lithe, slender, trim, rounded, shapely, nimble, graceful; and once

when she was standing marble-white and sun-drenched on a boulder,

with her young head tilted back and her hand shading her eyes,

watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognized that she

was beautiful.



MONDAY NOON.--If there is anything on the planet that she is not

interested in it is not in my list.  There are animals that I am

indifferent to, but it is not so with her.  She has no discrimination,

she takes to all of them, she thinks they are all treasures,

every new one is welcome.



When the mighty brontosaurus came striding into camp, she regarded

it as an acquisition, I considered it a calamity; that is a good

sample of the lack of harmony that prevails in our views of things.

She wanted to domesticate it, I wanted to make it a present of the

homestead and move out.  She believed it could be tamed by kind

treatment and would be a good pet; I said a pet twenty-one feet

high and eight-four feet long would be no proper thing to have

about the place, because, even with the best intentions and without

meaning any harm, it could sit down on the house and mash it,

for any one could see by the look of its eye that it was absent-minded.



Still, her heart was set upon having that monster, and she

couldn't give it up.  She thought we could start a dairy with it,

and wanted me to help milk it; but I wouldn't; it was too risky.

The sex wasn't right, and we hadn't any ladder anyway.  Then she

wanted to ride it, and look at the scenery.  Thirty or forty feet

of its tail was lying on the ground, like a fallen tree, and she

thought she could climb it, but she was mistaken; when she got

to the steep place it was too slick and down she came, and would

have hurt herself but for me.



Was she satisfied now?  No. Nothing ever satisfies her but demonstration;

untested theories are not in her line, and she won't have them.

It is the right spirit, I concede it; it attracts me; I feel the

influence of it; if I were with her more I think I should take it

up myself.  Well, she had one theory remaining about this colossus:

she thought that if we could tame it and make him friendly we could

stand in the river and use him for a bridge.  It turned out that he

was already plenty tame enough--at least as far as she was concerned--

so she tried her theory, but it failed:  every time she got him

properly placed in the river and went ashore to cross over him,

he came out and followed her around like a pet mountain.  Like the

other animals.  They all do that.





FRIDAY.--Tuesday--Wednesday--Thursday--and today:  all without

seeing him.  It is a long time to be alone; still, it is better

to be alone than unwelcome.



I HAD to have company--I was made for it, I think--so I made

friends with the animals.  They are just charming, and they have

the kindest disposition and the politest ways; they never look sour,

they never let you feel that you are intruding, they smile at you

and wag their tail, if they've got one, and they are always ready

for a romp or an excursion or anything you want to propose.

I think they are perfect gentlemen.  All these days we have had such

good times, and it hasn't been lonesome for me, ever.  Lonesome!  No,

I should say not.  Why, there's always a swarm of them around--

sometimes as much as four or five acres--you can't count them;

and when you stand on a rock in the midst and look out over the

furry expanse it is so mottled and splashed and gay with color

and frisking sheen and sun-flash, and so rippled with stripes,

that you might think it was a lake, only you know it isn't;

and there's storms of sociable birds, and hurricanes of whirring wings;

and when the sun strikes all that feathery commotion, you have a blazing

up of all the colors you can think of, enough to put your eyes out.



We have made long excursions, and I have see a great deal of the world;

almost all of it, I think; and so I am the first traveler,

and the only one.  When we are on the march, it is an imposing sight--

there's nothing like it anywhere.  For comfort I ride a tiger

or a leopard, because it is soft and has a round back that fits me,

and because they are such pretty animals; but for long distance

or for scenery I ride the elephant.  He hoists me up with his trunk,

but I can get off myself; when we are ready to camp, he sits and I

slide down the back way.



The birds and animals are all friendly to each other, and there

are no disputes about anything.  They all talk, and they all talk

to me, but it must be a foreign language, for I cannot make out

a word they say; yet they often understand me when I talk back,

particularly the dog and the elephant.  It makes me ashamed.

It shows that they are brighter than I am, for I want to be the

principal Experiment myself--and I intend to be, too.



I have learned a number of things, and am educated, now, but I

wasn't at first.  I was ignorant at first.  At first it used to vex

me because, with all my watching, I was never smart enough to be

around when the water was running uphill; but now I do not mind it.

I have experimented and experimented until now I know it never

does run uphill, except in the dark.  I know it does in the dark,

because the pool never goes dry, which it would, of course,

if the water didn't come back in the night.  It is best to prove

things by actual experiment; then you KNOW; whereas if you depend

on guessing and supposing and conjecturing, you never get educated.



Some things you CAN'T find out; but you will never know you can't

by guessing and supposing:  no, you have to be patient and go on

experimenting until you find out that you can't find out.  And it is

delightful to have it that way, it makes the world so interesting.

If there wasn't anything to find out, it would be dull.  Even trying

to find out and not finding out is just as interesting as trying

to find out and finding out, and I don't know but more so.

The secret of the water was a treasure until I GOT it; then the

excitement all went away, and I recognized a sense of loss.



By experiment I know that wood swims, and dry leaves, and feathers,

and plenty of other things; therefore by all that cumulative evidence

you know that a rock will swim; but you have to put up with simply

knowing it, for there isn't any way to prove it--up to now.

But I shall find a way--then THAT excitement will go.  Such things

make me sad; because by and by when I have found out everything

there won't be any more excitements, and I do love excitements so!

The other night I couldn't sleep for thinking about it.



At first I couldn't make out what I was made for, but now I think it

was to search out the secrets of this wonderful world and be happy

and thank the Giver of it all for devising it.  I think there are many

things to learn yet--I hope so; and by economizing and not hurrying

too fast I think they will last weeks and weeks.  I hope so.  When you

cast up a feather it sails away on the air and goes out of sight;

then you throw up a clod and it doesn't. It comes down, every time.

I have tried it and tried it, and it is always so.  I wonder why

it is?  Of course it DOESN'T come down, but why should it SEEM to?

I suppose it is an optical illusion.  I mean, one of them is.

I don't know which one.  It may be the feather, it may be the clod;

I can't prove which it is, I can only demonstrate that one or the other

is a fake, and let a person take his choice.



By watching, I know that the stars are not going to last.

I have seen some of the best ones melt and run down the sky.

Since one can melt, they can all melt; since they can all melt,

they can all melt the same night.  That sorrow will come--I know it.

I mean to sit up every night and look at them as long as I can

keep awake; and I will impress those sparkling fields on my memory,

so that by and by when they are taken away I can by my fancy restore

those lovely myriads to the black sky and make them sparkle again,

and double them by the blur of my tears.





After the Fall





When I look back, the Garden is a dream to me.  It was beautiful,

surpassingly beautiful, enchantingly beautiful; and now it is lost,

and I shall not see it any more.



The Garden is lost, but I have found HIM, and am content.

He loves me as well as he can; I love him with all the strength

of my passionate nature, and this, I think, is proper to my youth

and sex.  If I ask myself why I love him, I find I do not know,

and do not really much care to know; so I suppose that this kind

of love is not a product of reasoning and statistics, like one's

love for other reptiles and animals.  I think that this must be so.

I love certain birds because of their song; but I do not love Adam

on account of his singing--no, it is not that; the more he sings

the more I do not get reconciled to it.  Yet I ask him to sing,

because I wish to learn to like everything he is interested in.

I am sure I can learn, because at first I could not stand it,

but now I can.  It sours the milk, but it doesn't matter; I can get

used to that kind of milk.



It is not on account of his brightness that I love him--no, it is

not that.  He is not to blame for his brightness, such as it is,

for he did not make it himself; he is as God make him, and that

is sufficient.  There was a wise purpose in it, THAT I know.

In time it will develop, though I think it will not be sudden;

and besides, there is no hurry; he is well enough just as he is.



It is not on account of his gracious and considerate ways and

his delicacy that I love him.  No, he has lacks in this regard,

but he is well enough just so, and is improving.



It is not on account of his industry that I love him--no, it is

not that.  I think he has it in him, and I do not know why he

conceals it from me.  It is my only pain.  Otherwise he is frank

and open with me, now.  I am sure he keeps nothing from me but this.

It grieves me that he should have a secret from me, and sometimes it

spoils my sleep, thinking of it, but I will put it out of my mind;

it shall not trouble my happiness, which is otherwise full

to overflowing.



It is not on account of his education that I love him--no, it is

not that.  He is self-educated, and does really know a multitude

of things, but they are not so.



It is not on account of his chivalry that I love him--no, it is not that.

He told on me, but I do not blame him; it is a peculiarity of sex,

I think, and he did not make his sex.  Of course I would not have

told on him, I would have perished first; but that is a peculiarity

of sex, too, and I do not take credit for it, for I did not make

my sex.



Then why is it that I love him?  MERELY BECAUSE HE IS MASCULINE,

I think.



At bottom he is good, and I love him for that, but I could love

him without it.  If he should beat me and abuse me, I should go

on loving him.  I know it.  It is a matter of sex, I think.



He is strong and handsome, and I love him for that, and I admire him

and am proud of him, but I could love him without those qualities.

He he were plain, I should love him; if he were a wreck, I should

love him; and I would work for him, and slave over him, and pray

for him, and watch by his bedside until I died.



Yes, I think I love him merely because he is MINE and is MASCULINE.

There is no other reason, I suppose.  And so I think it is as I

first said:  that this kind of love is not a product of reasonings

and statistics.  It just COMES--none knows whence--and cannot

explain itself.  And doesn't need to.



It is what I think.  But I am only a girl, the first that has

examined this matter, and it may turn out that in my ignorance

and inexperience I have not got it right.





Forty Years Later





It is my prayer, it is my longing, that we may pass from this

life together--a longing which shall never perish from the earth,

but shall have place in the heart of every wife that loves,

until the end of time; and it shall be called by my name.



But if one of us must go first, it is my prayer that it shall be I;

for he is strong, I am weak, I am not so necessary to him as he is

to me--life without him would not be life; now could I endure it?

This prayer is also immortal, and will not cease from being offered up

while my race continues.  I am the first wife; and in the last wife I

shall be repeated.





At Eve's Grave





ADAM:  Wheresoever she was, THERE was Eden.





***



The End of Project Gutenberg etext of "The $30,000 Bequest"













A HORSE'S TALE



By Mark Twain







CHAPTER I - SOLDIER BOY - PRIVATELY TO HIMSELF



I am Buffalo Bill's horse.  I have spent my life under his saddle -

with him in it, too, and he is good for two hundred pounds, without

his clothes; and there is no telling how much he does weigh when he

is out on the war-path and has his batteries belted on.  He is over

six feet, is young, hasn't an ounce of waste flesh, is straight,

graceful, springy in his motions, quick as a cat, and has a

handsome face, and black hair dangling down on his shoulders, and

is beautiful to look at; and nobody is braver than he is, and

nobody is stronger, except myself.  Yes, a person that doubts that

he is fine to see should see him in his beaded buck-skins, on my

back and his rifle peeping above his shoulder, chasing a hostile

trail, with me going like the wind and his hair streaming out

behind from the shelter of his broad slouch.  Yes, he is a sight to

look at then - and I'm part of it myself.



I am his favorite horse, out of dozens.  Big as he is, I have

carried him eighty-one miles between nightfall and sunrise on the

scout; and I am good for fifty, day in and day out, and all the

time.  I am not large, but I am built on a business basis.  I have

carried him thousands and thousands of miles on scout duty for the

army, and there's not a gorge, nor a pass, nor a valley, nor a

fort, nor a trading post, nor a buffalo-range in the whole sweep of

the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains that we don't know as well

as we know the bugle-calls.  He is Chief of Scouts to the Army of

the Frontier, and it makes us very important.  In such a position

as I hold in the military service one needs to be of good family

and possess an education much above the common to be worthy of the

place.  I am the best-educated horse outside of the hippodrome,

everybody says, and the best-mannered.  It may be so, it is not for

me to say; modesty is the best policy, I think.  Buffalo Bill

taught me the most of what I know, my mother taught me much, and I

taught myself the rest.  Lay a row of moccasins before me - Pawnee,

Sioux, Shoshone, Cheyenne, Blackfoot, and as many other tribes as

you please - and I can name the tribe every moccasin belongs to by

the make of it.  Name it in horse-talk, and could do it in American

if I had speech.



I know some of the Indian signs - the signs they make with their

hands, and by signal-fires at night and columns of smoke by day.

Buffalo Bill taught me how to drag wounded soldiers out of the line

of fire with my teeth; and I've done it, too; at least I've dragged

HIM out of the battle when he was wounded.  And not just once, but

twice.  Yes, I know a lot of things.  I remember forms, and gaits,

and faces; and you can't disguise a person that's done me a

kindness so that I won't know him thereafter wherever I find him.

I know the art of searching for a trail, and I know the stale track

from the fresh.  I can keep a trail all by myself, with Buffalo

Bill asleep in the saddle; ask him - he will tell you so.  Many a

time, when he has ridden all night, he has said to me at dawn,

"Take the watch, Boy; if the trail freshens, call me."  Then he

goes to sleep.  He knows he can trust me, because I have a

reputation.  A scout horse that has a reputation does not play with

it.



My mother was all American - no alkali-spider about HER, I can tell

you; she was of the best blood of Kentucky, the bluest Blue-grass

aristocracy, very proud and acrimonious - or maybe it is

ceremonious.  I don't know which it is.  But it is no matter; size

is the main thing about a word, and that one's up to standard.  She

spent her military life as colonel of the Tenth Dragoons, and saw a

deal of rough service - distinguished service it was, too.  I mean,

she CARRIED the Colonel; but it's all the same.  Where would he be

without his horse?  He wouldn't arrive.  It takes two to make a

colonel of dragoons.  She was a fine dragoon horse, but never got

above that.  She was strong enough for the scout service, and had

the endurance, too, but she couldn't quite come up to the speed

required; a scout horse has to have steel in his muscle and

lightning in his blood.



My father was a bronco.  Nothing as to lineage - that is, nothing

as to recent lineage - but plenty good enough when you go a good

way back.  When Professor Marsh was out here hunting bones for the

chapel of Yale University he found skeletons of horses no bigger

than a fox, bedded in the rocks, and he said they were ancestors of

my father.  My mother heard him say it; and he said those skeletons

were two million years old, which astonished her and made her

Kentucky pretensions look small and pretty antiphonal, not to say

oblique.  Let me see. . . . I used to know the meaning of those

words, but . . . well, it was years ago, and 'tisn't as vivid now

as it was when they were fresh.  That sort of words doesn't keep,

in the kind of climate we have out here.  Professor Marsh said

those skeletons were fossils.  So that makes me part blue grass and

part fossil; if there is any older or better stock, you will have

to look for it among the Four Hundred, I reckon.  I am satisfied

with it.  And am a happy horse, too, though born out of wedlock.



And now we are back at Fort Paxton once more, after a forty-day

scout, away up as far as the Big Horn.  Everything quiet.  Crows

and Blackfeet squabbling - as usual - but no outbreaks, and

settlers feeling fairly easy.



The Seventh Cavalry still in garrison, here; also the Ninth

Dragoons, two artillery companies, and some infantry.  All glad to

see me, including General Alison, commandant.  The officers' ladies

and children well, and called upon me - with sugar.  Colonel Drake,

Seventh Cavalry, said some pleasant things; Mrs. Drake was very

complimentary; also Captain and Mrs. Marsh, Company B, Seventh

Cavalry; also the Chaplain, who is always kind and pleasant to me,

because I kicked the lungs out of a trader once.  It was Tommy

Drake and Fanny Marsh that furnished the sugar - nice children, the

nicest at the post, I think.



That poor orphan child is on her way from France - everybody is

full of the subject.  Her father was General Alison's brother;

married a beautiful young Spanish lady ten years ago, and has never

been in America since.  They lived in Spain a year or two, then

went to France.  Both died some months ago.  This little girl that

is coming is the only child.  General Alison is glad to have her.

He has never seen her.  He is a very nice old bachelor, but is an

old bachelor just the same and isn't more than about a year this

side of retirement by age limit; and so what does he know about

taking care of a little maid nine years old?  If I could have her

it would be another matter, for I know all about children, and they

adore me.  Buffalo Bill will tell you so himself.



I have some of this news from over-hearing the garrison-gossip, the

rest of it I got from Potter, the General's dog.  Potter is the

great Dane.  He is privileged, all over the post, like Shekels, the

Seventh Cavalry's dog, and visits everybody's quarters and picks up

everything that is going, in the way of news.  Potter has no

imagination, and no great deal of culture, perhaps, but he has a

historical mind and a good memory, and so he is the person I depend

upon mainly to post me up when I get back from a scout.  That is,

if Shekels is out on depredation and I can't get hold of him.









CHAPTER II - LETTER FROM ROUEN - TO GENERAL ALISON



My dear Brother-in-Law, - Please let me write again in Spanish, I

cannot trust my English, and I am aware, from what your brother

used to say, that army officers educated at the Military Academy of

the United States are taught our tongue.  It is as I told you in my

other letter:  both my poor sister and her husband, when they found

they could not recover, expressed the wish that you should have

their little Catherine - as knowing that you would presently be

retired from the army - rather than that she should remain with me,

who am broken in health, or go to your mother in California, whose

health is also frail.



You do not know the child, therefore I must tell you something

about her.  You will not be ashamed of her looks, for she is a copy

in little of her beautiful mother - and it is that Andalusian

beauty which is not surpassable, even in your country.  She has her

mother's charm and grace and good heart and sense of justice, and

she has her father's vivacity and cheerfulness and pluck and spirit

of enterprise, with the affectionate disposition and sincerity of

both parents.



My sister pined for her Spanish home all these years of exile; she

was always talking of Spain to the child, and tending and

nourishing the love of Spain in the little thing's heart as a

precious flower; and she died happy in the knowledge that the

fruitage of her patriotic labors was as rich as even she could

desire.



Cathy is a sufficiently good little scholar, for her nine years;

her mother taught her Spanish herself, and kept it always fresh

upon her ear and her tongue by hardly ever speaking with her in any

other tongue; her father was her English teacher, and talked with

her in that language almost exclusively; French has been her

everyday speech for more than seven years among her playmates here;

she has a good working use of governess - German and Italian.  It

is true that there is always a faint foreign fragrance about her

speech, no matter what language she is talking, but it is only just

noticeable, nothing more, and is rather a charm than a mar, I

think.  In the ordinary child-studies Cathy is neither before nor

behind the average child of nine, I should say.  But I can say this

for her:  in love for her friends and in high-mindedness and good-

heartedness she has not many equals, and in my opinion no

superiors.  And I beg of you, let her have her way with the dumb

animals - they are her worship.  It is an inheritance from her

mother.  She knows but little of cruelties and oppressions - keep

them from her sight if you can.  She would flare up at them and

make trouble, in her small but quite decided and resolute way; for

she has a character of her own, and lacks neither promptness nor

initiative.  Sometimes her judgment is at fault, but I think her

intentions are always right.  Once when she was a little creature

of three or four years she suddenly brought her tiny foot down upon

the floor in an apparent outbreak of indignation, then fetched it a

backward wipe, and stooped down to examine the result.  Her mother

said:



"Why, what is it, child?  What has stirred you so?"



"Mamma, the big ant was trying to kill the little one."



"And so you protected the little one."



"Yes, manure, because he had no friend, and I wouldn't let the big

one kill him."



"But you have killed them both."



Cathy was distressed, and her lip trembled.  She picked up the

remains and laid them upon her palm, and said:



"Poor little anty, I'm so sorry; and I didn't mean to kill you, but

there wasn't any other way to save you, it was such a hurry."



She is a dear and sweet little lady, and when she goes it will give

me a sore heart.  But she will be happy with you, and if your heart

is old and tired, give it into her keeping; she will make it young

again, she will refresh it, she will make it sing.  Be good to her,

for all our sakes!



My exile will soon be over now.  As soon as I am a little stronger

I shall see my Spain again; and that will make me young again!



MERCEDES.









CHAPTER III - GENERAL ALISON TO HIS MOTHER



I am glad to know that you are all well, in San Bernardino.



. . . That grandchild of yours has been here - well, I do not quite

know how many days it is; nobody can keep account of days or

anything else where she is!  Mother, she did what the Indians were

never able to do.  She took the Fort - took it the first day!  Took

me, too; took the colonels, the captains, the women, the children,

and the dumb brutes; took Buffalo Bill, and all his scouts; took

the garrison - to the last man; and in forty-eight hours the Indian

encampment was hers, illustrious old Thunder-Bird and all.  Do I

seem to have lost my solemnity, my gravity, my poise, my dignity?

You would lose your own, in my circumstances.  Mother, you never

saw such a winning little devil.  She is all energy, and spirit,

and sunshine, and interest in everybody and everything, and pours

out her prodigal love upon every creature that will take it, high

or low, Christian or pagan, feathered or furred; and none has

declined it to date, and none ever will, I think.  But she has a

temper, and sometimes it catches fire and flames up, and is likely

to burn whatever is near it; but it is soon over, the passion goes

as quickly as it comes.  Of course she has an Indian name already;

Indians always rechristen a stranger early.  Thunder-Bird attended

to her case.  He gave her the Indian equivalent for firebug, or

fire-fly.  He said:



"'Times, ver' quiet, ver' soft, like summer night, but when she mad

she blaze."



Isn't it good?  Can't you see the flare?  She's beautiful, mother,

beautiful as a picture; and there is a touch of you in her face,

and of her father - poor George! and in her unresting activities,

and her fearless ways, and her sunbursts and cloudbursts, she is

always bringing George back to me.  These impulsive natures are

dramatic.  George was dramatic, so is this Lightning-Bug, so is

Buffalo Bill.  When Cathy first arrived - it was in the forenoon -

Buffalo Bill was away, carrying orders to Major Fuller, at Five

Forks, up in the Clayton Hills.  At mid-afternoon I was at my desk,

trying to work, and this sprite had been making it impossible for

half an hour.  At last I said:



"Oh, you bewitching little scamp, CAN'T you be quiet just a minute

or two, and let your poor old uncle attend to a part of his

duties?"



"I'll try, uncle; I will, indeed," she said.



"Well, then, that's a good child - kiss me.  Now, then, sit up in

that chair, and set your eye on that clock.  There - that's right.

If you stir - if you so much as wink - for four whole minutes, I'll

bite you!"



It was very sweet and humble and obedient she looked, sitting

there, still as a mouse; I could hardly keep from setting her free

and telling her to make as much racket as she wanted to.  During as

much as two minutes there was a most unnatural and heavenly quiet

and repose, then Buffalo Bill came thundering up to the door in all

his scout finery, flung himself out of the saddle, said to his

horse, "Wait for me, Boy," and stepped in, and stopped dead in his

tracks - gazing at the child.  She forgot orders, and was on the

floor in a moment, saying:



"Oh, you are so beautiful!  Do you like me?"



"No, I don't, I love you!" and he gathered her up with a hug, and

then set her on his shoulder - apparently nine feet from the floor.



She was at home.  She played with his long hair, and admired his

big hands and his clothes and his carbine, and asked question after

question, as fast as he could answer, until I excused them both for

half an hour, in order to have a chance to finish my work.  Then I

heard Cathy exclaiming over Soldier Boy; and he was worthy of her

raptures, for he is a wonder of a horse, and has a reputation which

is as shining as his own silken hide.







CHAPTER IV - CATHY TO HER AUNT MERCEDES







Oh, it is wonderful here, aunty dear, just paradise!  Oh, if you

could only see it! everything so wild and lovely; such grand

plains, stretching such miles and miles and miles, all the most

delicious velvety sand and sage-brush, and rabbits as big as a dog,

and such tall and noble jackassful ears that that is what they name

them by; and such vast mountains, and so rugged and craggy and

lofty, with cloud-shawls wrapped around their shoulders, and

looking so solemn and awful and satisfied; and the charming

Indians, oh, how you would dote on them, aunty dear, and they would

on you, too, and they would let you hold their babies, the way they

do me, and they ARE the fattest, and brownest, and sweetest little

things, and never cry, and wouldn't if they had pins sticking in

them, which they haven't, because they are poor and can't afford

it; and the horses and mules and cattle and dogs - hundreds and

hundreds and hundreds, and not an animal that you can't do what you

please with, except uncle Thomas, but I don't mind him, he's

lovely; and oh, if you could hear the bugles:  TOO - TOO - TOO-TOO

- TOO - TOO, and so on - perfectly beautiful!  Do you recognize

that one?  It's the first toots of the REVEILLE; it goes, dear me,

SO early in the morning! - then I and every other soldier on the

whole place are up and out in a minute, except uncle Thomas, who is

most unaccountably lazy, I don't know why, but I have talked to him

about it, and I reckon it will be better, now.  He hasn't any

faults much, and is charming and sweet, like Buffalo Bill, and

Thunder-Bird, and Mammy Dorcas, and Soldier Boy, and Shekels, and

Potter, and Sour-Mash, and - well, they're ALL that, just angels,

as you may say.



The very first day I came, I don't know how long ago it was,

Buffalo Bill took me on Soldier Boy to Thunder-Bird's camp, not the

big one which is out on the plain, which is White Cloud's, he took

me to THAT one next day, but this one is four or five miles up in

the hills and crags, where there is a great shut-in meadow, full of

Indian lodges and dogs and squaws and everything that is

interesting, and a brook of the clearest water running through it,

with white pebbles on the bottom and trees all along the banks cool

and shady and good to wade in, and as the sun goes down it is

dimmish in there, but away up against the sky you see the big peaks

towering up and shining bright and vivid in the sun, and sometimes

an eagle sailing by them, not flapping a wing, the same as if he

was asleep; and young Indians and girls romping and laughing and

carrying on, around the spring and the pool, and not much clothes

on except the girls, and dogs fighting, and the squaws busy at

work, and the bucks busy resting, and the old men sitting in a

bunch smoking, and passing the pipe not to the left but to the

right, which means there's been a row in the camp and they are

settling it if they can, and children playing JUST the same as any

other children, and little boys shooting at a mark with bows, and I

cuffed one of them because he hit a dog with a club that wasn't

doing anything, and he resented it but before long he wished he

hadn't:  but this sentence is getting too long and I will start

another.  Thunder-Bird put on his Sunday-best war outfit to let me

see him, and he was splendid to look at, with his face painted red

and bright and intense like a fire-coal and a valance of eagle

feathers from the top of his head all down his back, and he had his

tomahawk, too, and his pipe, which has a stem which is longer than

my arm, and I never had such a good time in an Indian camp in my

life, and I learned a lot of words of the language, and next day BB

took me to the camp out on the Plains, four miles, and I had

another good time and got acquainted with some more Indians and

dogs; and the big chief, by the name of White Cloud, gave me a

pretty little bow and arrows and I gave him my red sash-ribbon, and

in four days I could shoot very well with it and beat any white boy

of my size at the post; and I have been to those camps plenty of

times since; and I have learned to ride, too, BB taught me, and

every day he practises me and praises me, and every time I do

better than ever he lets me have a scamper on Soldier Boy, and

THAT'S the last agony of pleasure! for he is the charmingest horse,

and so beautiful and shiny and black, and hasn't another color on

him anywhere, except a white star in his forehead, not just an

imitation star, but a real one, with four points, shaped exactly

like a star that's hand-made, and if you should cover him all up

but his star you would know him anywhere, even in Jerusalem or

Australia, by that.  And I got acquainted with a good many of the

Seventh Cavalry, and the dragoons, and officers, and families, and

horses, in the first few days, and some more in the next few and

the next few and the next few, and now I know more soldiers and

horses than you can think, no matter how hard you try.  I am

keeping up my studies every now and then, but there isn't much time

for it.  I love you so! and I send you a hug and a kiss.



CATHY.



P.S. - I belong to the Seventh Cavalry and Ninth Dragoons, I am an

officer, too, and do not have to work on account of not getting any

wages.









CHAPTER V - GENERAL ALISON TO MERCEDES



She has been with us a good nice long time, now.  You are troubled

about your sprite because this is such a wild frontier, hundreds of

miles from civilization, and peopled only by wandering tribes of

savages?  You fear for her safety?  Give yourself no uneasiness

about her.  Dear me, she's in a nursery! and she's got more than

eighteen hundred nurses.  It would distress the garrison to suspect

that you think they can't take care of her.  They think they can.

They would tell you so themselves.  You see, the Seventh Cavalry

has never had a child of its very own before, and neither has the

Ninth Dragoons; and so they are like all new mothers, they think

there is no other child like theirs, no other child so wonderful,

none that is so worthy to be faithfully and tenderly looked after

and protected.  These bronzed veterans of mine are very good

mothers, I think, and wiser than some other mothers; for they let

her take lots of risks, and it is a good education for her; and the

more risks she takes and comes successfully out of, the prouder

they are of her.  They adopted her, with grave and formal military

ceremonies of their own invention - solemnities is the truer word;

solemnities that were so profoundly solemn and earnest, that the

spectacle would have been comical if it hadn't been so touching.

It was a good show, and as stately and complex as guard-mount and

the trooping of the colors; and it had its own special music,

composed for the occasion by the bandmaster of the Seventh; and the

child was as serious as the most serious war-worn soldier of them

all; and finally when they throned her upon the shoulder of the

oldest veteran, and pronounced her "well and truly adopted," and

the bands struck up and all saluted and she saluted in return, it

was better and more moving than any kindred thing I have seen on

the stage, because stage things are make-believe, but this was real

and the players' hearts were in it.



It happened several weeks ago, and was followed by some additional

solemnities.  The men created a couple of new ranks, thitherto

unknown to the army regulations, and conferred them upon Cathy,

with ceremonies suitable to a duke.  So now she is Corporal-General

of the Seventh Cavalry, and Flag-Lieutenant of the Ninth Dragoons,

with the privilege (decreed by the men) of writing U.S.A. after her

name!  Also, they presented her a pair of shoulder-straps - both

dark blue, the one with F. L. on it, the other with C. G.  Also, a

sword.  She wears them.  Finally, they granted her the SALUTE.  I

am witness that that ceremony is faithfully observed by both

parties - and most gravely and decorously, too.  I have never seen

a soldier smile yet, while delivering it, nor Cathy in returning

it.



Ostensibly I was not present at these proceedings, and am ignorant

of them; but I was where I could see.  I was afraid of one thing -

the jealousy of the other children of the post; but there is

nothing of that, I am glad to say.  On the contrary, they are proud

of their comrade and her honors.  It is a surprising thing, but it

is true.  The children are devoted to Cathy, for she has turned

their dull frontier life into a sort of continuous festival; also

they know her for a stanch and steady friend, a friend who can

always be depended upon, and does not change with the weather.



She has become a rather extraordinary rider, under the tutorship of

a more than extraordinary teacher - BB, which is her pet name for

Buffalo Bill.  She pronounces it BEEBY.  He has not only taught her

seventeen ways of breaking her neck, but twenty-two ways of

avoiding it.  He has infused into her the best and surest

protection of a horseman - CONFIDENCE.  He did it gradually,

systematically, little by little, a step at a time, and each step

made sure before the next was essayed.  And so he inched her along

up through terrors that had been discounted by training before she

reached them, and therefore were not recognizable as terrors when

she got to them.  Well, she is a daring little rider, now, and is

perfect in what she knows of horsemanship.  By-and-by she will know

the art like a West Point cadet, and will exercise it as

fearlessly.  She doesn't know anything about side-saddles.  Does

that distress you?  And she is a fine performer, without any saddle

at all.  Does that discomfort you?  Do not let it; she is not in

any danger, I give you my word.



You said that if my heart was old and tired she would refresh it,

and you said truly.  I do not know how I got along without her,

before.  I was a forlorn old tree, but now that this blossoming

vine has wound itself about me and become the life of my life, it

is very different.  As a furnisher of business for me and for Mammy

Dorcas she is exhaustlessly competent, but I like my share of it

and of course Dorcas likes hers, for Dorcas "raised" George, and

Cathy is George over again in so many ways that she brings back

Dorcas's youth and the joys of that long-vanished time.  My father

tried to set Dorcas free twenty years ago, when we still lived in

Virginia, but without success; she considered herself a member of

the family, and wouldn't go.  And so, a member of the family she

remained, and has held that position unchallenged ever since, and

holds it now; for when my mother sent her here from San Bernardino

when we learned that Cathy was coming, she only changed from one

division of the family to the other.  She has the warm heart of her

race, and its lavish affections, and when Cathy arrived the pair

were mother and child in five minutes, and that is what they are to

date and will continue.  Dorcas really thinks she raised George,

and that is one of her prides, but perhaps it was a mutual raising,

for their ages were the same - thirteen years short of mine.  But

they were playmates, at any rate; as regards that, there is no room

for dispute.



Cathy thinks Dorcas is the best Catholic in America except herself.

She could not pay any one a higher compliment than that, and Dorcas

could not receive one that would please her better.  Dorcas is

satisfied that there has never been a more wonderful child than

Cathy.  She has conceived the curious idea that Cathy is TWINS, and

that one of them is a boy-twin and failed to get segregated - got

submerged, is the idea.  To argue with her that this is nonsense is

a waste of breath - her mind is made up, and arguments do not

affect it.  She says:



"Look at her; she loves dolls, and girl-plays, and everything a

girl loves, and she's gentle and sweet, and ain't cruel to dumb

brutes - now that's the girl-twin, but she loves boy-plays, and

drums and fifes and soldiering, and rough-riding, and ain't afraid

of anybody or anything - and that's the boy-twin; 'deed you needn't

tell ME she's only ONE child; no, sir, she's twins, and one of them

got shet up out of sight.  Out of sight, but that don't make any

difference, that boy is in there, and you can see him look out of

her eyes when her temper is up."



Then Dorcas went on, in her simple and earnest way, to furnish

illustrations.



"Look at that raven, Marse Tom.  Would anybody befriend a raven but

that child?  Of course they wouldn't; it ain't natural.  Well, the

Injun boy had the raven tied up, and was all the time plaguing it

and starving it, and she pitied the po' thing, and tried to buy it

from the boy, and the tears was in her eyes.  That was the girl-

twin, you see.  She offered him her thimble, and he flung it down;

she offered him all the doughnuts she had, which was two, and he

flung them down; she offered him half a paper of pins, worth forty

ravens, and he made a mouth at her and jabbed one of them in the

raven's back.  That was the limit, you know.  It called for the

other twin.  Her eyes blazed up, and she jumped for him like a

wild-cat, and when she was done with him she was rags and he wasn't

anything but an allegory.  That was most undoubtedly the other

twin, you see, coming to the front.  No, sir; don't tell ME he

ain't in there.  I've seen him with my own eyes - and plenty of

times, at that."



"Allegory?  What is an allegory?"



"I don't know, Marse Tom, it's one of her words; she loves the big

ones, you know, and I pick them up from her; they sound good and I

can't help it."



"What happened after she had converted the boy into an allegory?"



"Why, she untied the raven and confiscated him by force and fetched

him home, and left the doughnuts and things on the ground.  Petted

him, of course, like she does with every creature.  In two days she

had him so stuck after her that she - well, YOU know how he follows

her everywhere, and sets on her shoulder often when she rides her

breakneck rampages - all of which is the girl-twin to the front,

you see - and he does what he pleases, and is up to all kinds of

devilment, and is a perfect nuisance in the kitchen.  Well, they

all stand it, but they wouldn't if it was another person's bird."



Here she began to chuckle comfortably, and presently she said:



"Well, you know, she's a nuisance herself, Miss Cathy is, she IS so

busy, and into everything, like that bird.  It's all just as

innocent, you know, and she don't mean any harm, and is so good and

dear; and it ain't her fault, it's her nature; her interest is

always a-working and always red-hot, and she can't keep quiet.

Well, yesterday it was 'Please, Miss Cathy, don't do that'; and,

'Please, Miss Cathy, let that alone'; and, 'Please, Miss Cathy,

don't make so much noise'; and so on and so on, till I reckon I had

found fault fourteen times in fifteen minutes; then she looked up

at me with her big brown eyes that can plead so, and said in that

odd little foreign way that goes to your heart,



"'Please, mammy, make me a compliment."



"And of course you did it, you old fool?"



"Marse Tom, I just grabbed her up to my breast and says, 'Oh, you

po' dear little motherless thing, you ain't got a fault in the

world, and you can do anything you want to, and tear the house

down, and yo' old black mammy won't say a word!'"



"Why, of course, of course - I knew you'd spoil the child."



She brushed away her tears, and said with dignity:



"Spoil the child? spoil THAT child, Marse Tom?  There can't ANYBODY

spoil her.  She's the king bee of this post, and everybody pets her

and is her slave, and yet, as you know, your own self, she ain't

the least little bit spoiled."  Then she eased her mind with this

retort:  "Marse Tom, she makes you do anything she wants to, and

you can't deny it; so if she could be spoilt, she'd been spoilt

long ago, because you are the very WORST!  Look at that pile of

cats in your chair, and you sitting on a candle-box, just as

patient; it's because they're her cats."



If Dorcas were a soldier, I could punish her for such large

frankness as that.  I changed the subject, and made her resume her

illustrations.  She had scored against me fairly, and I wasn't

going to cheapen her victory by disputing it.  She proceeded to

offer this incident in evidence on her twin theory:



"Two weeks ago when she got her finger mashed open, she turned

pretty pale with the pain, but she never said a word.  I took her

in my lap, and the surgeon sponged off the blood and took a needle

and thread and began to sew it up; it had to have a lot of

stitches, and each one made her scrunch a little, but she never let

go a sound.  At last the surgeon was so full of admiration that he

said, 'Well, you ARE a brave little thing!' and she said, just as

ca'm and simple as if she was talking about the weather, 'There

isn't anybody braver but the Cid!'  You see? it was the boy-twin

that the surgeon was a-dealing with.



"Who is the Cid?"



"I don't know, sir - at least only what she says.  She's always

talking about him, and says he was the bravest hero Spain ever had,

or any other country.  They have it up and down, the children do,

she standing up for the Cid, and they working George Washington for

all he is worth."



"Do they quarrel?"



"No; it's only disputing, and bragging, the way children do.  They

want her to be an American, but she can't be anything but a

Spaniard, she says.  You see, her mother was always longing for

home, po' thing! and thinking about it, and so the child is just as

much a Spaniard as if she'd always lived there.  She thinks she

remembers how Spain looked, but I reckon she don't, because she was

only a baby when they moved to France.  She is very proud to be a

Spaniard."



Does that please you, Mercedes?  Very well, be content; your niece

is loyal to her allegiance:  her mother laid deep the foundations

of her love for Spain, and she will go back to you as good a

Spaniard as you are yourself.  She has made me promise to take her

to you for a long visit when the War Office retires me.



I attend to her studies myself; has she told you that?  Yes, I am

her school-master, and she makes pretty good progress, I think,

everything considered.  Everything considered - being translated -

means holidays.  But the fact is, she was not born for study, and

it comes hard.  Hard for me, too; it hurts me like a physical pain

to see that free spirit of the air and the sunshine laboring and

grieving over a book; and sometimes when I find her gazing far away

towards the plain and the blue mountains with the longing in her

eyes, I have to throw open the prison doors; I can't help it.  A

quaint little scholar she is, and makes plenty of blunders.  Once I

put the question:



"What does the Czar govern?"



She rested her elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand and took

that problem under deep consideration.  Presently she looked up and

answered, with a rising inflection implying a shade of uncertainty,



"The dative case?"



Here are a couple of her expositions which were delivered with

tranquil confidence:



"CHAPLAIN, diminutive of chap.  LASS is masculine, LASSIE is

feminine."



She is not a genius, you see, but just a normal child; they all

make mistakes of that sort.  There is a glad light in her eye which

is pretty to see when she finds herself able to answer a question

promptly and accurately, without any hesitation; as, for instance,

this morning:



"Cathy dear, what is a cube?"



"Why, a native of Cuba."



She still drops a foreign word into her talk now and then, and

there is still a subtle foreign flavor or fragrance about even her

exactest English - and long may this abide! for it has for me a

charm that is very pleasant.  Sometimes her English is daintily

prim and bookish and captivating.  She has a child's sweet tooth,

but for her health's sake I try to keep its inspirations under

cheek.  She is obedient - as is proper for a titled and recognized

military personage, which she is - but the chain presses sometimes.

For instance, we were out for a walk, and passed by some bushes

that were freighted with wild goose-berries.  Her face brightened

and she put her hands together and delivered herself of this

speech, most feelingly:



"Oh, if I was permitted a vice it would be the GOURMANDISE!"



Could I resist that?  No.  I gave her a gooseberry.



You ask about her languages.  They take care of themselves; they

will not get rusty here; our regiments are not made up of natives

alone - far from it.  And she is picking up Indian tongues

diligently.









CHAPTER VI - SOLDIER BOY AND THE MEXICAN PLUG



"When did you come?"



"Arrived at sundown."



"Where from?"



"Salt Lake."



"Are you in the service?"



"No.  Trade."



"Pirate trade, I reckon."



"What do you know about it?"



"I saw you when you came.  I recognized your master.  He is a bad

sort.  Trap-robber, horse-thief, squaw-man, renegado - Hank Butters

- I know him very well.  Stole you, didn't he?"



"Well, it amounted to that."



"I thought so.  Where is his pard?"



"He stopped at White Cloud's camp."



"He is another of the same stripe, is Blake Haskins."  (ASIDE.)

They are laying for Buffalo Bill again, I guess.  (ALOUD.)  "What

is your name?"



"Which one?"



"Have you got more than one?"



"I get a new one every time I'm stolen.  I used to have an honest

name, but that was early; I've forgotten it.  Since then I've had

thirteen ALIASES."



"Aliases?  What is alias?"



"A false name."



"Alias.  It's a fine large word, and is in my line; it has quite a

learned and cerebrospinal incandescent sound.  Are you educated?"



"Well, no, I can't claim it.  I can take down bars, I can

distinguish oats from shoe-pegs, I can blaspheme a saddle-boil with

the college-bred, and I know a few other things - not many; I have

had no chance, I have always had to work; besides, I am of low

birth and no family.  You speak my dialect like a native, but you

are not a Mexican Plug, you are a gentleman, I can see that; and

educated, of course."



"Yes, I am of old family, and not illiterate.  I am a fossil."



"A which?"



"Fossil.  The first horses were fossils.  They date back two

million years."



"Gr-eat sand and sage-brush! do you mean it?"



"Yes, it is true.  The bones of my ancestors are held in reverence

and worship, even by men.  They do not leave them exposed to the

weather when they find them, but carry them three thousand miles

and enshrine them in their temples of learning, and worship them."



"It is wonderful!  I knew you must be a person of distinction, by

your fine presence and courtly address, and by the fact that you

are not subjected to the indignity of hobbles, like myself and the

rest.  Would you tell me your name?"



"You have probably heard of it - Soldier Boy."



"What! - the renowned, the illustrious?"



"Even so."



"It takes my breath!  Little did I dream that ever I should stand

face to face with the possessor of that great name.  Buffalo Bill's

horse!  Known from the Canadian border to the deserts of Arizona,

and from the eastern marches of the Great Plains to the foot-hills

of the Sierra!  Truly this is a memorable day.  You still serve the

celebrated Chief of Scouts?"



"I am still his property, but he has lent me, for a time, to the

most noble, the most gracious, the most excellent, her Excellency

Catherine, Corporal-General Seventh Cavalry and Flag-Lieutenant

Ninth Dragoons, U.S.A., - on whom be peace!"



"Amen.  Did you say HER Excellency?"



"The same.  A Spanish lady, sweet blossom of a ducal house.  And

truly a wonder; knowing everything, capable of everything; speaking

all the languages, master of all sciences, a mind without horizons,

a heart of gold, the glory of her race!  On whom be peace!"



"Amen.  It is marvellous!"



"Verily.  I knew many things, she has taught me others.  I am

educated.  I will tell you about her."



"I listen - I am enchanted."



"I will tell a plain tale, calmly, without excitement, without

eloquence.  When she had been here four or five weeks she was

already erudite in military things, and they made her an officer -

a double officer.  She rode the drill every day, like any soldier;

and she could take the bugle and direct the evolutions herself.

Then, on a day, there was a grand race, for prizes - none to enter

but the children.  Seventeen children entered, and she was the

youngest.  Three girls, fourteen boys - good riders all.  It was a

steeplechase, with four hurdles, all pretty high.  The first prize

was a most cunning half-grown silver bugle, and mighty pretty, with

red silk cord and tassels.  Buffalo Bill was very anxious; for he

had taught her to ride, and he did most dearly want her to win that

race, for the glory of it.  So he wanted her to ride me, but she

wouldn't; and she reproached him, and said it was unfair and

unright, and taking advantage; for what horse in this post or any

other could stand a chance against me? and she was very severe with

him, and said, 'You ought to be ashamed - you are proposing to me

conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.'  So he just tossed

her up in the air about thirty feet and caught her as she came

down, and said he was ashamed; and put up his handkerchief and

pretended to cry, which nearly broke her heart, and she petted him,

and begged him to forgive her, and said she would do anything in

the world he could ask but that; but he said he ought to go hang

himself, and he MUST, if he could get a rope; it was nothing but

right he should, for he never, never could forgive himself; and

then SHE began to cry, and they both sobbed, the way you could hear

him a mile, and she clinging around his neck and pleading, till at

last he was comforted a little, and gave his solemn promise he

wouldn't hang himself till after the race; and wouldn't do it at

all if she won it, which made her happy, and she said she would win

it or die in the saddle; so then everything was pleasant again and

both of them content.  He can't help playing jokes on her, he is so

fond of her and she is so innocent and unsuspecting; and when she

finds it out she cuffs him and is in a fury, but presently forgives

him because it's him; and maybe the very next day she's caught with

another joke; you see she can't learn any better, because she

hasn't any deceit in her, and that kind aren't ever expecting it in

another person.



"It was a grand race.  The whole post was there, and there was such

another whooping and shouting when the seventeen kids came flying

down the turf and sailing over the hurdles - oh, beautiful to see!

Half-way down, it was kind of neck and neck, and anybody's race and

nobody's.  Then, what should happen but a cow steps out and puts

her head down to munch grass, with her broadside to the battalion,

and they a-coming like the wind; they split apart to flank her, but

SHE? - why, she drove the spurs home and soared over that cow like

a bird! and on she went, and cleared the last hurdle solitary and

alone, the army letting loose the grand yell, and she skipped from

the horse the same as if he had been standing still, and made her

bow, and everybody crowded around to congratulate, and they gave

her the bugle, and she put it to her lips and blew 'boots and

saddles' to see how it would go, and BB was as proud as you can't

think!  And he said, 'Take Soldier Boy, and don't pass him back

till I ask for him!' and I can tell you he wouldn't have said that

to any other person on this planet.  That was two months and more

ago, and nobody has been on my back since but the Corporal-General

Seventh Cavalry and Flag-Lieutenant of the Ninth Dragoons, U.S.A.,

- on whom be peace!"



"Amen.  I listen - tell me more."



"She set to work and organized the Sixteen, and called it the First

Battalion Rocky Mountain Rangers, U.S.A., and she wanted to be

bugler, but they elected her Lieutenant-General and Bugler.  So she

ranks her uncle the commandant, who is only a Brigadier.  And

doesn't she train those little people!  Ask the Indians, ask the

traders, ask the soldiers; they'll tell you.  She has been at it

from the first day.  Every morning they go clattering down into the

plain, and there she sits on my back with her bugle at her mouth

and sounds the orders and puts them through the evolutions for an

hour or more; and it is too beautiful for anything to see those

ponies dissolve from one formation into another, and waltz about,

and break, and scatter, and form again, always moving, always

graceful, now trotting, now galloping, and so on, sometimes near

by, sometimes in the distance, all just like a state ball, you

know, and sometimes she can't hold herself any longer, but sounds

the 'charge,' and turns me loose! and you can take my word for it,

if the battalion hasn't too much of a start we catch up and go over

the breastworks with the front line.



"Yes, they are soldiers, those little people; and healthy, too, not

ailing any more, the way they used to be sometimes.  It's because

of her drill.  She's got a fort, now - Fort Fanny Marsh.  Major-

General Tommy Drake planned it out, and the Seventh and Dragoons

built it.  Tommy is the Colonel's son, and is fifteen and the

oldest in the Battalion; Fanny Marsh is Brigadier-General, and is

next oldest - over thirteen.  She is daughter of Captain Marsh,

Company B, Seventh Cavalry.  Lieutenant-General Alison is the

youngest by considerable; I think she is about nine and a half or

three-quarters.  Her military rig, as Lieutenant-General, isn't for

business, it's for dress parade, because the ladies made it.  They

say they got it out of the Middle Ages - out of a book - and it is

all red and blue and white silks and satins and velvets; tights,

trunks, sword, doublet with slashed sleeves, short cape, cap with

just one feather in it; I've heard them name these things; they got

them out of the book; she's dressed like a page, of old times, they

say.  It's the daintiest outfit that ever was - you will say so,

when you see it.  She's lovely in it - oh, just a dream!  In some

ways she is just her age, but in others she's as old as her uncle,

I think.  She is very learned.  She teaches her uncle his book.  I

have seen her sitting by with the book and reciting to him what is

in it, so that he can learn to do it himself.



"Every Saturday she hires little Injuns to garrison her fort; then

she lays siege to it, and makes military approaches by make-believe

trenches in make-believe night, and finally at make-believe dawn

she draws her sword and sounds the assault and takes it by storm.

It is for practice.  And she has invented a bugle-call all by

herself, out of her own head, and it's a stirring one, and the

prettiest in the service.  It's to call ME - it's never used for

anything else.  She taught it to me, and told me what it says:  'IT

IS I, SOLDIER - COME!' and when those thrilling notes come floating

down the distance I hear them without fail, even if I am two miles

away; and then - oh, then you should see my heels get down to

business!



"And she has taught me how to say good-morning and good-night to

her, which is by lifting my right hoof for her to shake; and also

how to say good-bye; I do that with my left foot - but only for

practice, because there hasn't been any but make-believe good-

byeing yet, and I hope there won't ever be.  It would make me cry

if I ever had to put up my left foot in earnest.  She has taught me

how to salute, and I can do it as well as a soldier.  I bow my head

low, and lay my right hoof against my cheek.  She taught me that

because I got into disgrace once, through ignorance.  I am

privileged, because I am known to be honorable and trustworthy, and

because I have a distinguished record in the service; so they don't

hobble me nor tie me to stakes or shut me tight in stables, but let

me wander around to suit myself.  Well, trooping the colors is a

very solemn ceremony, and everybody must stand uncovered when the

flag goes by, the commandant and all; and once I was there, and

ignorantly walked across right in front of the band, which was an

awful disgrace:  Ah, the Lieutenant-General was so ashamed, and so

distressed that I should have done such a thing before all the

world, that she couldn't keep the tears back; and then she taught

me the salute, so that if I ever did any other unmilitary act

through ignorance I could do my salute and she believed everybody

would think it was apology enough and would not press the matter.

It is very nice and distinguished; no other horse can do it; often

the men salute me, and I return it.  I am privileged to be present

when the Rocky Mountain Rangers troop the colors and I stand

solemn, like the children, and I salute when the flag goes by.  Of

course when she goes to her fort her sentries sing out 'Turn out

the guard!' and then . . . do you catch that refreshing early-

morning whiff from the mountain-pines and the wild flowers?  The

night is far spent; we'll hear the bugles before long.  Dorcas, the

black woman, is very good and nice; she takes care of the

Lieutenant-General, and is Brigadier-General Alison's mother, which

makes her mother-in-law to the Lieutenant-General.  That is what

Shekels says.  At least it is what I think he says, though I never

can understand him quite clearly. He - "



"Who is Shekels?"



"The Seventh Cavalry dog.  I mean, if he IS a dog.  His father was

a coyote and his mother was a wild-cat.  It doesn't really make a

dog out of him, does it?"



"Not a real dog, I should think.  Only a kind of a general dog, at

most, I reckon.  Though this is a matter of ichthyology, I suppose;

and if it is, it is out of my depth, and so my opinion is not

valuable, and I don't claim much consideration for it."



"It isn't ichthyology; it is dogmatics, which is still more

difficult and tangled up.  Dogmatics always are."



"Dogmatics is quite beyond me, quite; so I am not competing.  But

on general principles it is my opinion that a colt out of a coyote

and a wild-cat is no square dog, but doubtful.  That is my hand,

and I stand pat."



"Well, it is as far as I can go myself, and be fair and

conscientious.  I have always regarded him as a doubtful dog, and

so has Potter.  Potter is the great Dane.  Potter says he is no

dog, and not even poultry - though I do not go quite so far as

that.



"And I wouldn't, myself.  Poultry is one of those things which no

person can get to the bottom of, there is so much of it and such

variety.  It is just wings, and wings, and wings, till you are

weary:  turkeys, and geese, and bats, and butterflies, and angels,

and grasshoppers, and flying-fish, and - well, there is really no

end to the tribe; it gives me the heaves just to think of it.  But

this one hasn't any wings, has he?"



"No."



"Well, then, in my belief he is more likely to be dog than poultry.

I have not heard of poultry that hadn't wings.  Wings is the SIGN

of poultry; it is what you tell poultry by.  Look at the mosquito."



"What do you reckon he is, then?  He must be something."



"Why, he could be a reptile; anything that hasn't wings is a

reptile."



"Who told you that?"



"Nobody told me, but I overheard it."



"Where did you overhear it?"



"Years ago.  I was with the Philadelphia Institute expedition in

the Bad Lands under Professor Cope, hunting mastodon bones, and I

overheard him say, his own self, that any plantigrade circumflex

vertebrate bacterium that hadn't wings and was uncertain was a

reptile.  Well, then, has this dog any wings?  No.  Is he a

plantigrade circumflex vertebrate bacterium?  Maybe so, maybe not;

but without ever having seen him, and judging only by his illegal

and spectacular parentage, I will bet the odds of a bale of hay to

a bran mash that he looks it.  Finally, is he uncertain?  That is

the point - is he uncertain?  I will leave it to you if you have

ever heard of a more uncertainer dog than what this one is?"



"No, I never have."



"Well, then, he's a reptile.  That's settled."



"Why, look here, whatsyourname"



"Last alias, Mongrel."



"A good one, too.  I was going to say, you are better educated than

you have been pretending to be.  I like cultured society, and I

shall cultivate your acquaintance.  Now as to Shekels, whenever you

want to know about any private thing that is going on at this post

or in White Cloud's camp or Thunder-Bird's, he can tell you; and if

you make friends with him he'll be glad to, for he is a born

gossip, and picks up all the tittle-tattle.  Being the whole

Seventh Cavalry's reptile, he doesn't belong to anybody in

particular, and hasn't any military duties; so he comes and goes as

he pleases, and is popular with all the house cats and other

authentic sources of private information.  He understands all the

languages, and talks them all, too.  With an accent like gritting

your teeth, it is true, and with a grammar that is no improvement

on blasphemy - still, with practice you get at the meat of what he

says, and it serves. . . Hark!  That's the reveille. . . .



[THE REVEILLE]



"Faint and far, but isn't it clear, isn't it sweet?  There's no

music like the bugle to stir the blood, in the still solemnity of

the morning twilight, with the dim plain stretching away to nothing

and the spectral mountains slumbering against the sky.  You'll hear

another note in a minute - faint and far and clear, like the other

one, and sweeter still, you'll notice.  Wait . . . listen.  There

it goes!  It says, 'IT IS I, SOLDIER - COME!' . . .



[SOLDIER BOY'S BUGLE CALL]



. . . Now then, watch me leave a blue streak behind!"









CHAPTER VII - SOLDIER BOY AND SHEKELS



"Did you do as I told you?  Did you look up the Mexican Plug?"



"Yes, I made his acquaintance before night and got his friendship."



"I liked him.  Did you?"



"Not at first.  He took me for a reptile, and it troubled me,

because I didn't know whether it was a compliment or not.  I

couldn't ask him, because it would look ignorant.  So I didn't say

anything, and soon liked him very well indeed.  Was it a

compliment, do you think?"



"Yes, that is what it was.  They are very rare, the reptiles; very

few left, now-a-days."



"Is that so?  What is a reptile?"



"It is a plantigrade circumflex vertebrate bacterium that hasn't

any wings and is uncertain."



"Well, it - it sounds fine, it surely does."



"And it IS fine.  You may be thankful you are one."



"I am.  It seems wonderfully grand and elegant for a person that is

so humble as I am; but I am thankful, I am indeed, and will try to

live up to it.  It is hard to remember.  Will you say it again,

please, and say it slow?"



"Plantigrade circumflex vertebrate bacterium that hasn't any wings

and is uncertain."



"It is beautiful, anybody must grant it; beautiful, and of a noble

sound.  I hope it will not make me proud and stuck-up - I should

not like to be that.  It is much more distinguished and honorable

to be a reptile than a dog, don't you think, Soldier?"



"Why, there's no comparison.  It is awfully aristocratic.  Often a

duke is called a reptile; it is set down so, in history."



"Isn't that grand!  Potter wouldn't ever associate with me, but I

reckon he'll be glad to when he finds out what I am."



"You can depend upon it."



"I will thank Mongrel for this. He is a very good sort, for a

Mexican Plug.  Don't you think he is?"



"It is my opinion of him; and as for his birth, he cannot help

that.  We cannot all be reptiles, we cannot all be fossils; we have

to take what comes and be thankful it is no worse.  It is the true

philosophy."



"For those others?"



"Stick to the subject, please.  Did it turn out that my suspicions

were right?"



"Yes, perfectly right.  Mongrel has heard them planning.  They are

after BB's life, for running them out of Medicine Bow and taking

their stolen horses away from them."



"Well, they'll get him yet, for sure."



"Not if he keeps a sharp look-out."



"HE keep a sharp lookout!  He never does; he despises them, and all

their kind.  His life is always being threatened, and so it has

come to be monotonous."



"Does he know they are here?"



"Oh yes, he knows it.  He is always the earliest to know who comes

and who goes.  But he cares nothing for them and their threats; he

only laughs when people warn him.  They'll shoot him from behind a

tree the first he knows.  Did Mongrel tell you their plans?"



"Yes.  They have found out that he starts for Fort Clayton day

after to-morrow, with one of his scouts; so they will leave to-

morrow, letting on to go south, but they will fetch around north

all in good time."



"Shekels, I don't like the look of it."









CHAPTER VIII - THE SCOUT-START.  BB AND LIEUTENANT-GENERAL ALISON



BB (SALUTING).  "Good! handsomely done!  The Seventh couldn't beat

it!  You do certainly handle your Rangers like an expert, General.

And where are you bound?"



"Four miles on the trail to Fort Clayton."



"Glad am I, dear!  What's the idea of it?"



"Guard of honor for you and Thorndike."



"Bless - your - HEART!  I'd rather have it from you than from the

Commander-in-Chief of the armies of the United States, you

incomparable little soldier! - and I don't need to take any oath to

that, for you to believe it."



"I THOUGHT you'd like it, BB."



"LIKE it?  Well, I should say so!  Now then - all ready - sound the

advance, and away we go!"









CHAPTER IX - SOLDIER BOY AND SHEKELS AGAIN



"Well, this is the way it happened.  We did the escort duty; then

we came back and struck for the plain and put the Rangers through a

rousing drill - oh, for hours!  Then we sent them home under

Brigadier-General Fanny Marsh; then the Lieutenant-General and I

went off on a gallop over the plains for about three hours, and

were lazying along home in the middle of the afternoon, when we met

Jimmy Slade, the drummer-boy, and he saluted and asked the

Lieutenant-General if she had heard the news, and she said no, and

he said:



"'Buffalo Bill has been ambushed and badly shot this side of

Clayton, and Thorndike the scout, too; Bill couldn't travel, but

Thorndike could, and he brought the news, and Sergeant Wilkes and

six men of Company B are gone, two hours ago, hotfoot, to get Bill.

And they say - '



"'GO!' she shouts to me - and I went."



"Fast?"



"Don't ask foolish questions.  It was an awful pace.  For four

hours nothing happened, and not a word said, except that now and

then she said, 'Keep it up, Boy, keep it up, sweetheart; we'll save

him!'  I kept it up.  Well, when the dark shut down, in the rugged

hills, that poor little chap had been tearing around in the saddle

all day, and I noticed by the slack knee-pressure that she was

tired and tottery, and I got dreadfully afraid; but every time I

tried to slow down and let her go to sleep, so I could stop, she

hurried me up again; and so, sure enough, at last over she went!



"Ah, that was a fix to be in I for she lay there and didn't stir,

and what was I to do?  I couldn't leave her to fetch help, on

account of the wolves.  There was nothing to do but stand by.  It

was dreadful.  I was afraid she was killed, poor little thing!  But

she wasn't.  She came to, by-and-by, and said, 'Kiss me, Soldier,'

and those were blessed words.  I kissed her - often; I am used to

that, and we like it.  But she didn't get up, and I was worried.

She fondled my nose with her hand, and talked to me, and called me

endearing names - which is her way - but she caressed with the same

hand all the time.  The other arm was broken, you see, but I didn't

know it, and she didn't mention it.  She didn't want to distress

me, you know.



"Soon the big gray wolves came, and hung around, and you could hear

them snarl, and snap at each other, but you couldn't see anything

of them except their eyes, which shone in the dark like sparks and

stars.  The Lieutenant-General said, 'If I had the Rocky Mountain

Rangers here, we would make those creatures climb a tree.'  Then

she made believe that the Rangers were in hearing, and put up her

bugle and blew the 'assembly'; and then, 'boots and saddles'; then

the 'trot'; 'gallop'; 'charge!'  Then she blew the 'retreat,' and

said, 'That's for you, you rebels; the Rangers don't ever retreat!'



"The music frightened them away, but they were hungry, and kept

coming back.  And of course they got bolder and bolder, which is

their way.  It went on for an hour, then the tired child went to

sleep, and it was pitiful to hear her moan and nestle, and I

couldn't do anything for her.  All the time I was laying for the

wolves.  They are in my line; I have had experience.  At last the

boldest one ventured within my lines, and I landed him among his

friends with some of his skull still on him, and they did the rest.

In the next hour I got a couple more, and they went the way of the

first one, down the throats of the detachment.  That satisfied the

survivors, and they went away and left us in peace.



"We hadn't any more adventures, though I kept awake all night and

was ready.  From midnight on the child got very restless, and out

of her head, and moaned, and said, 'Water, water - thirsty'; and

now and then, 'Kiss me, Soldier'; and sometimes she was in her fort

and giving orders to her garrison; and once she was in Spain, and

thought her mother was with her.  People say a horse can't cry; but

they don't know, because we cry inside.



"It was an hour after sunup that I heard the boys coming, and

recognized the hoof-beats of Pomp and Caesar and Jerry, old mates

of mine; and a welcomer sound there couldn't ever be.



Buffalo Bill was in a horse-litter, with his leg broken by a

bullet, and Mongrel and Blake Haskins's horse were doing the work.

Buffalo Bill and Thorndike had lolled both of those toughs.



"When they got to us, and Buffalo Bill saw the child lying there so

white, he said, 'My God!' and the sound of his voice brought her to

herself, and she gave a little cry of pleasure and struggled to get

up, but couldn't, and the soldiers gathered her up like the

tenderest women, and their eyes were wet and they were not ashamed,

when they saw her arm dangling; and so were Buffalo Bill's, and

when they laid her in his arms he said, 'My darling, how does this

come?' and she said, 'We came to save you, but I was tired, and

couldn't keep awake, and fell off and hurt myself, and couldn't get

on again.'  'You came to save me, you dear little rat?  It was too

lovely of you!'  'Yes, and Soldier stood by me, which you know he

would, and protected me from the wolves; and if he got a chance he

kicked the life out of some of them - for you know he would, BB.'

The sergeant said, 'He laid out three of them, sir, and here's the

bones to show for it.'  'He's a grand horse,' said BB; 'he's the

grandest horse that ever was! and has saved your life, Lieutenant-

General Alison, and shall protect it the rest of his life - he's

yours for a kiss!'  He got it, along with a passion of delight, and

he said, 'You are feeling better now, little Spaniard - do you

think you could blow the advance?'  She put up the bugle to do it,

but he said wait a minute first.  Then he and the sergeant set her

arm and put it in splints, she wincing but not whimpering; then we

took up the march for home, and that's the end of the tale; and I'm

her horse.  Isn't she a brick, Shekels?



"Brick?  She's more than a brick, more than a thousand bricks -

she's a reptile!"



"It's a compliment out of your heart, Shekels.  God bless you for

it!"









CHAPTER X - GENERAL ALISON AND DORCAS



"Too much company for her, Marse Tom.  Betwixt you, and Shekels,

the Colonel's wife, and the Cid - "



"The Cid?  Oh, I remember - the raven."



 " - and Mrs. Captain Marsh and Famine and Pestilence the baby

COYOTES, and Sour-Mash and her pups, and Sardanapalus and her

kittens - hang these names she gives the creatures, they warp my

jaw - and Potter:   you - all sitting around in the house, and

Soldier Boy at the window the entire time, it's a wonder to me she

comes along as well as she does.  She - "



"You want her all to yourself, you stingy old thing!"



"Marse Tom, you know better.  It's too much company.  And then the

idea of her receiving reports all the time from her officers, and

acting upon them, and giving orders, the same as if she was well!

It ain't good for her, and the surgeon don't like it, and tried to

persuade her not to and couldn't; and when he ORDERED her, she was

that outraged and indignant, and was very severe on him, and

accused him of insubordination, and said it didn't become him to

give orders to an officer of her rank.  Well, he saw he had excited

her more and done more harm than all the rest put together, so he

was vexed at himself and wished he had kept still.  Doctors DON'T

know much, and that's a fact.  She's too much interested in things

- she ought to rest more.  She's all the time sending messages to

BB, and to soldiers and Injuns and whatnot, and to the animals."



"To the animals?"



"Yes, sir."



"Who carries them?"



"Sometimes Potter, but mostly it's Shekels."



"Now come! who can find fault with such pretty make-believe as

that?"



"But it ain't make-believe, Marse Tom.  She does send them."



"Yes, I don't doubt that part of it."



"Do you doubt they get them, sir?"



"Certainly.  Don't you?"



"No, sir.  Animals talk to one another.  I know it perfectly well,

Marse Tom, and I ain't saying it by guess."



"What a curious superstition!"



"It ain't a superstition, Marse Tom.  Look at that Shekels - look

at him, NOW.  Is he listening, or ain't he?  NOW you see! he's

turned his head away.  It's because he was caught - caught in the

act.  I'll ask you - could a Christian look any more ashamed than

what he looks now? - LAY DOWN!  You see? he was going to sneak out.

Don't tell ME, Marse Tom!  If animals don't talk, I miss MY guess.

And Shekels is the worst.  He goes and tells the animals everything

that happens in the officers' quarters; and if he's short of facts,

he invents them.  He hasn't any more principle than a blue jay; and

as for morals, he's empty.  Look at him now; look at him grovel.

He knows what I am saying, and he knows it's the truth.  You see,

yourself, that he can feel shame; it's the only virtue he's got.

It's wonderful how they find out everything that's going on - the

animals.  They - "



"Do you really believe they do, Dorcas?"



"I don't only just believe it, Marse Tom, I know it.  Day before

yesterday they knew something was going to happen.  They were that

excited, and whispering around together; why, anybody could see

that they -  But my! I must get back to her, and I haven't got to

my errand yet."



"What is it, Dorcas?"



"Well, it's two or three things.  One is, the doctor don't salute

when he comes . . . Now, Marse Tom, it ain't anything to laugh at,

and so - "



"Well, then, forgive me; I didn't mean to laugh - I got caught

unprepared."



"You see, she don't want to hurt the doctor's feelings, so she

don't say anything to him about it; but she is always polite,

herself, and it hurts that kind for people to be rude to them."



"I'll have that doctor hanged."



"Marse Tom, she don't WANT him hanged.  She - "



"Well, then, I'll have him boiled in oil."



"But she don't WANT him boiled.  I - "



"Oh, very well, very well, I only want to please her; I'll have him

skinned."



"Why, SHE don't want him skinned; it would break her heart.  Now -

"



"Woman, this is perfectly unreasonable.  What in the nation DOES

she want?"



"Marse Tom, if you would only be a little patient, and not fly off

the handle at the least little thing.  Why, she only wants you to

speak to him."



"Speak to him!  Well, upon my word!  All this unseemly rage and row

about such a - a -  Dorcas, I never saw you carry on like this

before.  You have alarmed the sentry; he thinks I am being

assassinated; he thinks there's a mutiny, a revolt, an

insurrection; he - "



"Marse Tom, you are just putting on; you know it perfectly well; I

don't know what makes you act like that - but you always did, even

when you was little, and you can't get over it, I reckon.  Are you

over it now, Marse Tom?"



"Oh, well, yes; but it would try anybody to be doing the best he

could, offering every kindness he could think of, only to have it

rejected with contumely and . . . Oh, well, let it go; it's no

matter - I'll talk to the doctor.  Is that satisfactory, or are you

going to break out again?"



"Yes, sir, it is; and it's only right to talk to him, too, because

it's just as she says; she's trying to keep up discipline in the

Rangers, and this insubordination of his is a bad example for them

- now ain't it so, Marse Tom?"



"Well, there IS reason in it, I can't deny it; so I will speak to

him, though at bottom I think hanging would be more lasting.  What

is the rest of your errand, Dorcas?"



"Of course her room is Ranger headquarters now, Marse Tom, while

she's sick.  Well, soldiers of the cavalry and the dragoons that

are off duty come and get her sentries to let them relieve them and

serve in their place.  It's only out of affection, sir, and because

they know military honors please her, and please the children too,

for her sake; and they don't bring their muskets; and so - "



"I've noticed them there, but didn't twig the idea.  They are

standing guard, are they?"



"Yes, sir, and she is afraid you will reprove them and hurt their

feelings, if you see them there; so she begs, if - if you don't

mind coming in the back way - "



"Bear me up, Dorcas; don't let me faint."



"There - sit up and behave, Marse Tom.  You are not going to faint;

you are only pretending - you used to act just so when you was

little; it does seem a long time for you to get grown up."



"Dorcas, the way the child is progressing, I shall be out of my job

before long - she'll have the whole post in her hands.  I must make

a stand, I must not go down without a struggle.  These

encroachments. . . . Dorcas, what do you think she will think of

next?"



"Marse Tom, she don't mean any harm."



"Are you sure of it?"



"Yes, Marse Tom."



"You feel sure she has no ulterior designs?"



"I don't know what that is, Marse Tom, but I know she hasn't."



"Very well, then, for the present I am satisfied.  What else have

you come about?"



"I reckon I better tell you the whole thing first, Marse Tom, then

tell you what she wants.  There's been an emeute, as she calls it.

It was before she got back with BB.  The officer of the day

reported it to her this morning.  It happened at her fort.  There

was a fuss betwixt Major-General Tommy Drake and Lieutenant-Colonel

Agnes Frisbie, and he snatched her doll away, which is made of

white kid stuffed with sawdust, and tore every rag of its clothes

off, right before them all, and is under arrest, and the charge is

conduct un - "



"Yes, I know - conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman - a

plain case, too, it seems to me.  This is a serious matter.  Well,

what is her pleasure?"



"Well, Marse Tom, she has summoned a court-martial, but the doctor

don't think she is well enough to preside over it, and she says

there ain't anybody competent but her, because there's a major-

general concerned; and so she - she - well, she says, would you

preside over it for her? . . . Marse Tom, SIT up!  You ain't any

more going to faint than Shekels is."



"Look here, Dorcas, go along back, and be tactful.  Be persuasive;

don't fret her; tell her it's all right, the matter is in my hands,

but it isn't good form to hurry so grave a matter as this.  Explain

to her that we have to go by precedents, and that I believe this

one to be new.  In fact, you can say I know that nothing just like

it has happened in our army, therefore I must be guided by European

precedents, and must go cautiously and examine them carefully.

Tell her not to be impatient, it will take me several days, but it

will all come out right, and I will come over and report progress

as I go along.  Do you get the idea, Dorcas?"



"I don't know as I do, sir."



"Well, it's this.  You see, it won't ever do for me, a brigadier in

the regular army, to preside over that infant court-martial - there

isn't any precedent for it, don't you see.  Very well.  I will go

on examining authorities and reporting progress until she is well

enough to get me out of this scrape by presiding herself.  Do you

get it now?"



"Oh, yes, sir, I get it, and it's good, I'll go and fix it with

her.  LAY DOWN! and stay where you are."



"Why, what harm is he doing?"



"Oh, it ain't any harm, but it just vexes me to see him act so."



"What was he doing?"



"Can't you see, and him in such a sweat?  He was starting out to

spread it all over the post.  NOW I reckon you won't deny, any

more, that they go and tell everything they hear, now that you've

seen it with yo' own eyes."



"Well, I don't like to acknowledge it, Dorcas, but I don't see how

I can consistently stick to my doubts in the face of such

overwhelming proof as this dog is furnishing."



"There, now, you've got in yo' right mind at last!  I wonder you

can be so stubborn, Marse Tom.  But you always was, even when you

was little.  I'm going now."



"Look here; tell her that in view of the delay, it is my judgment

that she ought to enlarge the accused on his parole."



"Yes, sir, I'll tell her.  Marse Tom?"



"Well?"



"She can't get to Soldier Boy, and he stands there all the time,

down in the mouth and lonesome; and she says will you shake hands

with him and comfort him?  Everybody does."



"It's a curious kind of lonesomeness; but, all right, I will."









CHAPTER XI - SEVERAL MONTHS LATER.  ANTONIO AND THORNDIKE



"Thorndike, isn't that Plug you're riding an assert of the scrap

you and Buffalo Bill had with the late Blake Haskins and his pal a

few months back?"



"Yes, this is Mongrel - and not a half-bad horse, either."



"I've noticed he keeps up his lick first-rate.  Say - isn't it a

gaudy morning?"



"Right you are!"



"Thorndike, it's Andalusian! and when that's said, all's said."



"Andalusian AND Oregonian, Antonio!  Put it that way, and you have

my vote.  Being a native up there, I know.  You being Andalusian-

born - "



"Can speak with authority for that patch of paradise?  Well, I can.

Like the Don! like Sancho!  This is the correct Andalusian dawn now

- crisp, fresh, dewy, fragrant, pungent - "





"'What though the spicy breezes

Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle - '





- GIT up, you old cow! stumbling like that when we've just been

praising you! out on a scout and can't live up to the honor any

better than that?  Antonio, how long have you been out here in the

Plains and the Rockies?"



"More than thirteen years."



"It's a long time.  Don't you ever get homesick?"



"Not till now."



"Why NOW? - after such a long cure."



"These preparations of the retiring commandant's have started it

up."



"Of course.  It's natural."



"It keeps me thinking about Spain.  I know the region where the

Seventh's child's aunt lives; I know all the lovely country for

miles around; I'll bet I've seen her aunt's villa many a time; I'll

bet I've been in it in those pleasant old times when I was a

Spanish gentleman."



"They say the child is wild to see Spain."



"It's so; I know it from what I hear."



"Haven't you talked with her about it?"



"No.  I've avoided it.  I should soon be as wild as she is.  That

would not be comfortable."



"I wish I was going, Antonio.  There's two things I'd give a lot to

see.  One's a railroad."



"She'll see one when she strikes Missouri."



"The other's a bull-fight."



"I've seen lots of them; I wish I could see another."



"I don't know anything about it, except in a mixed-up, foggy way,

Antonio, but I know enough to know it's grand sport."



"The grandest in the world!  There's no other sport that begins

with it.  I'll tell you what I've seen, then you can judge.  It was

my first, and it's as vivid to me now as it was when I saw it.  It

was a Sunday afternoon, and beautiful weather, and my uncle, the

priest, took me as a reward for being a good boy and because of my

own accord and without anybody asking me I had bankrupted my

savings-box and given the money to a mission that was civilizing

the Chinese and sweetening their lives and softening their hearts

with the gentle teachings of our religion, and I wish you could

have seen what we saw that day, Thorndike.



"The amphitheatre was packed, from the bull-ring to the highest row

- twelve thousand people in one circling mass, one slanting, solid

mass - royalties, nobles, clergy, ladies, gentlemen, state

officials, generals, admirals, soldiers, sailors, lawyers, thieves,

merchants, brokers, cooks, housemaids, scullery-maids, doubtful

women, dudes, gamblers, beggars, loafers, tramps, American ladies,

gentlemen, preachers, English ladies, gentlemen, preachers, German

ditto, French ditto, and so on and so on, all the world

represented:  Spaniards to admire and praise, foreigners to enjoy

and go home and find fault - there they were, one solid, sloping,

circling sweep of rippling and flashing color under the downpour of

the summer sun - just a garden, a gaudy, gorgeous flower-garden!

Children munching oranges, six thousand fans fluttering and

glimmering, everybody happy, everybody chatting gayly with their

intimates, lovely girl-faces smiling recognition and salutation to

other lovely girl-faces, gray old ladies and gentlemen dealing in

the like exchanges with each other - ah, such a picture of cheery

contentment and glad anticipation! not a mean spirit, nor a sordid

soul, nor a sad heart there - ah, Thorndike, I wish I could see it

again.



"Suddenly, the martial note of a bugle cleaves the hum and murmur -

clear the ring!



"They clear it.  The great gate is flung open, and the procession

marches in, splendidly costumed and glittering:  the marshals of

the day, then the picadores on horseback, then the matadores on

foot, each surrounded by his quadrille of CHULOS.  They march to

the box of the city fathers, and formally salute.  The key is

thrown, the bull-gate is unlocked.  Another bugle blast - the gate

flies open, the bull plunges in, furious, trembling, blinking in

the blinding light, and stands there, a magnificent creature,

centre of those multitudinous and admiring eyes, brave, ready for

battle, his attitude a challenge.  He sees his enemy:  horsemen

sitting motionless, with long spears in rest, upon blindfolded

broken-down nags, lean and starved, fit only for sport and

sacrifice, then the carrion-heap.



"The bull makes a rush, with murder in his eye, but a picador meets

him with a spear-thrust in the shoulder.  He flinches with the

pain, and the picador skips out of danger.  A burst of applause for

the picador, hisses for the bull.  Some shout 'Cow!' at the bull,

and call him offensive names.  But he is not listening to them, he

is there for business; he is not minding the cloak-bearers that

come fluttering around to confuse him; he chases this way, he

chases that way, and hither and yon, scattering the nimble

banderillos in every direction like a spray, and receiving their

maddening darts in his neck as they dodge and fly - oh, but it's a

lively spectacle, and brings down the house!  Ah, you should hear

the thundering roar that goes up when the game is at its wildest

and brilliant things are done!



"Oh, that first bull, that day, was great!  From the moment the

spirit of war rose to flood-tide in him and he got down to his

work, he began to do wonders.  He tore his way through his

persecutors, flinging one of them clear over the parapet; he bowled

a horse and his rider down, and plunged straight for the next, got

home with his horns, wounding both horse and man; on again, here

and there and this way and that; and one after another he tore the

bowels out of two horses so that they gushed to the ground, and

ripped a third one so badly that although they rushed him to cover

and shoved his bowels back and stuffed the rents with tow and rode

him against the bull again, he couldn't make the trip; he tried to

gallop, under the spur, but soon reeled and tottered and fell, all

in a heap.  For a while, that bull-ring was the most thrilling and

glorious and inspiring sight that ever was seen.  The bull

absolutely cleared it, and stood there alone! monarch of the place.

The people went mad for pride in him, and joy and delight, and you

couldn't hear yourself think, for the roar and boom and crash of

applause."



"Antonio, it carries me clear out of myself just to hear you tell

it; it must have been perfectly splendid.  If I live, I'll see a

bull-fight yet before I die.  Did they kill him?"



"Oh yes; that is what the bull is for.  They tired him out, and got

him at last.  He kept rushing the matador, who always slipped

smartly and gracefully aside in time, waiting for a sure chance;

and at last it came; the bull made a deadly plunge for him - was

avoided neatly, and as he sped by, the long sword glided silently

into him, between left shoulder and spine - in and in, to the hilt.

He crumpled down, dying."



"Ah, Antonio, it IS the noblest sport that ever was.  I would give

a year of my life to see it.  Is the bull always killed?"



"Yes.  Sometimes a bull is timid, finding himself in so strange a

place, and he stands trembling, or tries to retreat.  Then

everybody despises him for his cowardice and wants him punished and

made ridiculous; so they hough him from behind, and it is the

funniest thing in the world to see him hobbling around on his

severed legs; the whole vast house goes into hurricanes of laughter

over it; I have laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks to see

it.  When he has furnished all the sport he can, he is not any

longer useful, and is killed."



"Well, it is perfectly grand, Antonio, perfectly beautiful.

Burning a nigger don't begin."









CHAPTER XII - MONGREL AND THE OTHER HORSE



"Sage-Brush, you have been listening?"



"Yes."



"Isn't it strange?"



"Well, no, Mongrel, I don't know that it is."



"Why don't you?"



"I've seen a good many human beings in my time.  They are created

as they are; they cannot help it.  They are only brutal because

that is their make; brutes would be brutal if it was THEIR make."



"To me, Sage-Brush, man is most strange and unaccountable.  Why

should he treat dumb animals that way when they are not doing any

harm?"



"Man is not always like that, Mongrel; he is kind enough when he is

not excited by religion."



"Is the bull-fight a religious service?"



"I think so.  I have heard so.  It is held on Sunday."



(A REFLECTIVE PAUSE, LASTING SOME MOMENTS.)  Then:



"When we die, Sage-Brush, do we go to heaven and dwell with man?"



"My father thought not.  He believed we do not have to go there

unless we deserve it."









PART II - IN SPAIN









CHAPTER XIII - GENERAL ALISON TO HIS MOTHER







It was a prodigious trip, but delightful, of course, through the

Rockies and the Black Hills and the mighty sweep of the Great

Plains to civilization and the Missouri border - where the

railroading began and the delightfulness ended.  But no one is the

worse for the journey; certainly not Cathy, nor Dorcas, nor Soldier

Boy; and as for me, I am not complaining.



Spain is all that Cathy had pictured it - and more, she says.  She

is in a fury of delight, the maddest little animal that ever was,

and all for joy.  She thinks she remembers Spain, but that is not

very likely, I suppose.  The two - Mercedes and Cathy - devour each

other.  It is a rapture of love, and beautiful to see.  It is

Spanish; that describes it.  Will this be a short visit?



No.  It will be permanent.  Cathy has elected to abide with Spain

and her aunt.  Dorcas says she (Dorcas) foresaw that this would

happen; and also says that she wanted it to happen, and says the

child's own country is the right place for her, and that she ought

not to have been sent to me, I ought to have gone to her.  I

thought it insane to take Soldier Boy to Spain, but it was well

that I yielded to Cathy's pleadings; if he had been left behind,

half of her heart would have remained with him, and she would not

have been contented.  As it is, everything has fallen out for the

best, and we are all satisfied and comfortable.  It may be that

Dorcas and I will see America again some day; but also it is a case

of maybe not.



We left the post in the early morning.  It was an affecting time.

The women cried over Cathy, so did even those stern warriors, the

Rocky Mountain Rangers; Shekels was there, and the Cid, and

Sardanapalus, and Potter, and Mongrel, and Sour-Mash, Famine, and

Pestilence, and Cathy kissed them all and wept; details of the

several arms of the garrison were present to represent the rest,

and say good-bye and God bless you for all the soldiery; and there

was a special squad from the Seventh, with the oldest veteran at

its head, to speed the Seventh's Child with grand honors and

impressive ceremonies; and the veteran had a touching speech by

heart, and put up his hand in salute and tried to say it, but his

lips trembled and his voice broke, but Cathy bent down from the

saddle and kissed him on the mouth and turned his defeat to

victory, and a cheer went up.



The next act closed the ceremonies, and was a moving surprise.  It

may be that you have discovered, before this, that the rigors of

military law and custom melt insensibly away and disappear when a

soldier or a regiment or the garrison wants to do something that

will please Cathy.  The bands conceived the idea of stirring her

soldierly heart with a farewell which would remain in her memory

always, beautiful and unfading, and bring back the past and its

love for her whenever she should think of it; so they got their

project placed before General Burnaby, my successor, who is Cathy's

newest slave, and in spite of poverty of precedents they got his

permission.  The bands knew the child's favorite military airs.  By

this hint you know what is coming, but Cathy didn't.  She was asked

to sound the "reveille," which she did.



[REVEILLE]



With the last note the bands burst out with a crash:  and woke the

mountains with the "Star-Spangled Banner" in a way to make a body's

heart swell and thump and his hair rise!  It was enough to break a

person all up, to see Cathy's radiant face shining out through her

gladness and tears.  By request she blew the "assembly," now. . . .



[THE ASSEMBLY]



. . . Then the bands thundered in, with "Rally round the flag,

boys, rally once again!"  Next, she blew another call ("to the

Standard") . . .



[TO THE STANDARD]



. . .  and the bands responded with "When we were marching through

Georgia."  Straightway she sounded "boots and saddles," that

thrilling and most expediting call. . . .



[BOOTS AND SADDLES]



and the bands could hardly hold in for the final note; then they

turned their whole strength loose on "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys

are marching," and everybody's excitement rose to blood-heat.



Now an impressive pause - then the bugle sang "TAPS" -

translatable, this time, into "Good-bye, and God keep us all!" for

taps is the soldier's nightly release from duty, and farewell:

plaintive, sweet, pathetic, for the morning is never sure, for him;

always it is possible that he is hearing it for the last time. . .

.



[TAPS]



. . . Then the bands turned their instruments towards Cathy and

burst in with that rollicking frenzy of a tune, "Oh, we'll all get

blind drunk when Johnny comes marching home - yes, we'll all get

blind drunk when Johnny comes marching home!" and followed it

instantly with "Dixie," that antidote for melancholy, merriest and

gladdest of all military music on any side of the ocean - and that

was the end.  And so - farewell!



I wish you could have been there to see it all, hear it all, and

feel it:  and get yourself blown away with the hurricane huzza that

swept the place as a finish.



When we rode away, our main body had already been on the road an

hour or two - I speak of our camp equipage; but we didn't move off

alone:  when Cathy blew the "advance" the Rangers cantered out in

column of fours, and gave us escort, and were joined by White Cloud

and Thunder -Bird in all their gaudy bravery, and by Buffalo Bill

and four subordinate scouts.  Three miles away, in the Plains, the

Lieutenant-General halted, sat her horse like a military statue,

the bugle at her lips, and put the Rangers through the evolutions

for half an hour; and finally, when she blew the "charge," she led

it herself.  "Not for the last time," she said, and got a cheer,

and we said good-bye all around, and faced eastward and rode away.



POSTSCRIPT.  A DAY LATER.  Soldier Boy was stolen last night.

Cathy is almost beside herself, and we cannot comfort her.

Mercedes and I are not much alarmed about the horse, although this

part of Spain is in something of a turmoil, politically, at

present, and there is a good deal of lawlessness.  In ordinary

times the thief and the horse would soon be captured.  We shall

have them before long, I think.







CHAPTER XIV - SOLDIER BOY - TO HIMSELF







It is five months.  Or is it six?  My troubles have clouded my

memory.  I have been all over this land, from end to end, and now I

am back again since day before yesterday, to that city which we

passed through, that last day of our long journey, and which is

near her country home.  I am a tottering ruin and my eyes are dim,

but I recognized it.  If she could see me she would know me and

sound my call.  I wish I could hear it once more; it would revive

me, it would bring back her face and the mountains and the free

life, and I would come - if I were dying I would come!  She would

not know ME, looking as I do, but she would know me by my star.

But she will never see me, for they do not let me out of this

shabby stable - a foul and miserable place, with most two wrecks

like myself for company.



How many times have I changed hands?  I think it is twelve times -

I cannot remember; and each time it was down a step lower, and each

time I got a harder master.  They have been cruel, every one; they

have worked me night and day in degraded employments, and beaten

me; they have fed me ill, and some days not at all.  And so I am

but bones, now, with a rough and frowsy skin humped and cornered

upon my shrunken body - that skin which was once so glossy, that

skin which she loved to stroke with her hand.  I was the pride of

the mountains and the Great Plains; now I am a scarecrow and

despised.  These piteous wrecks that are my comrades here say we

have reached the bottom of the scale, the final humiliation; they

say that when a horse is no longer worth the weeds and discarded

rubbish they feed to him, they sell him to the bull-ring for a

glass of brandy, to make sport for the people and perish for their

pleasure.



To die - that does not disturb me; we of the service never care for

death.  But if I could see her once more! if I could hear her bugle

sing again and say, "It is I, Soldier - come!"







CHAPTER XV - GENERAL ALISON TO MRS. DRAKE, THE COLONEL'S WIFE







To return, now, to where I was, and tell you the rest.  We shall

never know how she came to be there; there is no way to account for

it.  She was always watching for black and shiny and spirited

horses - watching, hoping, despairing, hoping again; always giving

chase and sounding her call, upon the meagrest chance of a

response, and breaking her heart over the disappointment; always

inquiring, always interested in sales-stables and horse

accumulations in general.  How she got there must remain a mystery.



At the point which I had reached in a preceding paragraph of this

account, the situation was as follows:  two horses lay dying; the

bull had scattered his persecutors for the moment, and stood

raging, panting, pawing the dust in clouds over his back, when the

man that had been wounded returned to the ring on a remount, a poor

blindfolded wreck that yet had something ironically military about

his bearing - and the next moment the bull had ripped him open and

his bowls were dragging upon the ground:  and the bull was charging

his swarm of pests again.  Then came pealing through the air a

bugle-call that froze my blood - "IT IS I, SOLDIER - COME!"  I

turned; Cathy was flying down through the massed people; she

cleared the parapet at a bound, and sped towards that riderless

horse, who staggered forward towards the remembered sound; but his

strength failed, and he fell at her feet, she lavishing kisses upon

him and sobbing, the house rising with one impulse, and white with

horror!  Before help could reach her the bull was back again -



She was never conscious again in life.  We bore her home, all

mangled and drenched in blood, and knelt by her and listened to her

broken and wandering words, and prayed for her passing spirit, and

there was no comfort - nor ever will be, I think.  But she was

happy, for she was far away under another sky, and comrading again

with her Rangers, and her animal friends, and the soldiers.  Their

names fell softly and caressingly from her lips, one by one, with

pauses between.  She was not in pain, but lay with closed eyes,

vacantly murmuring, as one who dreams.  Sometimes she smiled,

saying nothing; sometimes she smiled when she uttered a name - such

as Shekels, or BB, or Potter.  Sometimes she was at her fort,

issuing commands; sometimes she was careering over the plain at the

head of her men; sometimes she was training her horse; once she

said, reprovingly, "You are giving me the wrong foot; give me the

left - don't you know it is good-bye?"



After this, she lay silent some time; the end was near.  By-and-by

she murmured, "Tired . . . sleepy . . . take Cathy, mamma."  Then,

"Kiss me, Soldier."  For a little time, she lay so still that we

were doubtful if she breathed.  Then she put out her hand and began

to feel gropingly about; then said, "I cannot find it; blow

'taps.'"  It was the end.









End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of A Horse's Tale, by Mark Twain













CHRISTIAN SCIENCE



by Mark Twain







PREFACE



Book I of this volume occupies a quarter or a third of the volume,

and consists of matter written about four years ago, but not hitherto

published in book form.  It contained errors of judgment and of fact.

I have now corrected these to the best of my ability and later knowledge.





Book II was written at the beginning of 1903, and has not until now

appeared in any form.  In it my purpose has been to present a character-

portrait of Mrs. Eddy, drawn from her own acts and words solely, not from

hearsay and rumor; and to explain the nature and scope of her Monarchy,

as revealed in the Laws by which she governs it, and which she wrote

herself.



MARK TWAIN

NEW YORK.  January, 1907.











BOOK I CHRISTIAN SCIENCE



     "It is the first time since the dawn-days of Creation that

     a Voice has gone crashing through space with such

     placid and complacent confidence and command."







CHAPTER I

VIENNA 1899.



This last summer, when I was on my way back to Vienna from the Appetite-

Cure in the mountains, I fell over a cliff in the twilight, and broke

some arms and legs and one thing or another, and by good luck was found

by some peasants who had lost an ass, and they carried me to the nearest

habitation, which was one of those large, low, thatch-roofed farm-houses,

with apartments in the garret for the family, and a cunning little porch

under the deep gable decorated with boxes of bright colored flowers and

cats; on the ground floor a large and light sitting-room, separated from

the milch-cattle apartment by a partition; and in the front yard rose

stately and fine the wealth and pride of the house, the manure-pile.

That sentence is Germanic, and shows that I am acquiring that sort of

mastery of the art and spirit of the language which enables a man to

travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.



There was a village a mile away, and a horse doctor lived there, but

there was no surgeon.  It seemed a bad outlook; mine was distinctly a

surgery case.  Then it was remembered that a lady from Boston was

summering in that village, and she was a Christian Science doctor and

could cure anything.  So she was sent for.  It was night by this time,

and she could not conveniently come, but sent word that it was no matter,

there was no hurry, she would give me "absent treatment" now, and come

in the morning; meantime she begged me to make myself tranquil and

comfortable and remember that there was nothing the matter with me.

I thought there must be some mistake.



"Did you tell her I walked off a cliff seventy-five feet high?"



"Yes."



"And struck a boulder at the bottom and bounced?"



"Yes."



"And struck another one and bounced again?"



"Yes."



"And struck another one and bounced yet again?"



"Yes."



"And broke the boulders?"



"Yes."



"That accounts for it; she is thinking of the boulders.  Why didn't you

tell her I got hurt, too?"



"I did.  I told her what you told me to tell her: that you were now but

an incoherent series of compound fractures extending from your scalp-lock

to your heels, and that the comminuted projections caused you to look

like a hat-rack."



"And it was after this that she wished me to remember that there was

nothing the matter with me?"



"Those were her words."



"I do not understand it.  I believe she has not diagnosed the case with

sufficient care.  Did she look like a person who was theorizing, or did

she look like one who has fallen off precipices herself and brings to the

aid of abstract science the confirmations of personal experience?"



"Bitte?"



It was too large a contract for the Stubenmadchen's vocabulary; she

couldn't call the hand.  I allowed the subject to rest there, and asked

for something to eat and smoke, and something hot to drink, and a basket

to pile my legs in; but I could not have any of these things.



"Why?"



"She said you would need nothing at all."



"But I am hungry and thirsty, and in desperate pain."



"She said you would have these delusions, but must pay no attention to

them.  She wants you to particularly remember that there are no such

things as hunger and thirst and pain.''



"She does does she?"



"It is what she said."



Does she seem to be in full and functionable possession of her

intellectual plant, such as it is?"



"Bitte?"



"Do they let her run at large, or do they tie her up?"



"Tie her up?"



"There, good-night, run along, you are a good girl, but your mental

Geschirr is not arranged for light and airy conversation.  Leave me to my

delusions."









CHAPTER II



It was a night of anguish, of course-at least, I supposed it was, for it

had all the symptoms of it--but it passed at last, and the Christian

Scientist came, and I was glad She was middle-aged, and large and bony,

and erect, and had an austere face and a resolute jaw and a Roman beak

and was a widow in the third degree, and her name was Fuller.  I was

eager to get to business and find relief, but she was distressingly

deliberate.  She unpinned and unhooked and uncoupled her upholsteries one

by one, abolished the wrinkles with a flirt of her hand, and hung the

articles up; peeled off her gloves and disposed of them, got a book out

of her hand-bag, then drew a chair to the bedside, descended into it

without hurry, and I hung out my tongue.  She said, with pity but without

passion:



"Return it to its receptacle.  We deal with the mind only, not with its

dumb servants."



I could not offer my pulse, because the connection was broken; but she

detected the apology before I could word it, and indicated by a negative

tilt of her head that the pulse was another dumb servant that she had no

use for.  Then I thought I would tell her my symptoms and how I felt, so

that she would understand the case; but that was another inconsequence,

she did not need to know those things; moreover, my remark about how I

felt was an abuse of language, a misapplication of terms.



"One does not feel," she explained; "there is no such thing as feeling:

therefore, to speak of a non-existent thing as existent is a

contradiction.  Matter has no existence; nothing exists but mind; the

mind cannot feel pain, it can only imagine it."



"But if it hurts, just the same--"



"It doesn't.  A thing which is unreal cannot exercise the functions of

reality.  Pain is unreal; hence, pain cannot hurt."



In making a sweeping gesture to indicate the act of shooing the illusion

of pain out of the mind, she raked her hand on a pin in her dress, said

"Ouch!" and went tranquilly on with her talk.  "You should never allow

yourself to speak of how you feel, nor permit others to ask you how you

are feeling; you should never concede that you are ill, nor permit others

to talk about disease or pain or death or similar nonexistences in your

presence.  Such talk only encourages the mind to continue its empty

imaginings."  Just at that point the Stuben-madchen trod on the cat's

tail, and the cat let fly a frenzy of cat-profanity.  I asked, with

caution:



"Is a cat's opinion about pain valuable?"



"A cat has no opinion; opinions proceed from mind only; the lower

animals, being eternally perishable, have not been granted mind; without

mind, opinion is impossible."



"She merely imagined she felt a pain--the cat?"



"She cannot imagine a pain, for imagining is an effect of mind; without

mind, there is no imagination.  A cat has no imagination."



"Then she had a real pain?"



"I have already told you there is no such thing as real pain."



"It is strange and interesting.  I do wonder what was the matter with the

cat.  Because, there being no such thing as a real pain, and she not

being able to imagine an imaginary one, it would seem that God in His

pity has compensated the cat with some kind of a mysterious emotion

usable when her tail is trodden on which, for the moment, joins cat and

Christian in one common brotherhood of--"



She broke in with an irritated--



"Peace!  The cat feels nothing, the Christian feels nothing.  Your empty

and foolish imaginings are profanation and blasphemy, and can do you an

injury.  It is wiser and better and holier to recognize and confess that

there is no such thing as disease or pain or death."



"I am full of imaginary tortures," I said, "but I do not think I could be

any more uncomfortable if they were real ones.  What must I do to get rid

of them?"



"There is no occasion to get rid of them.  since they do not exist.  They

are illusions propagated by matter, and matter has no existence; there is

no such thing as matter."



"It sounds right and clear, but yet it seems in a degree elusive; it

seems to slip through, just when you think you are getting a grip on it."



"Explain."



"Well, for instance: if there is no such thing as matter, how can matter

propagate things?"



In her compassion she almost smiled.  She would have smiled if there were

any such thing as a smile.



"It is quite simple," she said; "the fundamental propositions of

Christian Science explain it, and they are summarized in the four

following self-evident propositions:

1.  God is All in all.

2.  God is good.  Good is Mind

3.  God, Spirit, being all, nothing is matter

4.  Life, God, omnipotent Good, deny death, evil, sin, disease.



"There--now you see."



It seemed nebulous; it did not seem to say anything about the difficulty

in hand--how non-existent matter can propagate illusions I said, with

some hesitancy:



"Does--does it explain?"



"Doesn't it?  Even if read backward it will do it."



With a budding hope, I asked her to do it backwards.



"Very well.  Disease sin evil death deny Good omnipotent God life matter

is nothing all being Spirit God Mind is Good good is God all in All is

God.  There do you understand now?



"It--it--well, it is plainer than it was before; still--"



"Well?"



"Could you try it some more ways?"



"As many as you like; it always means the same.  Interchanged in any way

you please it cannot be made to mean anything different from what it

means when put in any other way.  Because it is perfect.  You can jumble

it all up, and it makes no difference: it always comes out the way it was

before.  It was a marvelous mind that produced it.  As a mental tour de

force it is without a mate, it defies alike the simple, the concrete, and

the occult."



"It seems to be a corker."



I blushed for the word, but it was out before I could stop it.



"A what?"



"A--wonderful structure--combination, so to speak, of profound thoughts--

unthinkable ones--um--"



It is true.  Read backward, or forward, or perpendicularly, or at any

given angle, these four propositions will always be found to agree in

statement and proof."



"Ah--proof.  Now we are coming at it.  The statements agree; they agree

with--with--anyway, they agree; I noticed that; but what is it they prove

I mean, in particular?"



"Why, nothing could be clearer.  They prove:



"1.  GOD--Principle, Life,

Truth, Love, Soul, Spirit, Mind.  Do you get that?"



"I--well, I seem to.  Go on, please."



"2.  MAN--God's universal idea, individual, perfect, eternal.  Is it

clear?"



"It--I think so.  Continue."



"3.  IDEA--An image in Mind; the immediate object of understanding.

There it is--the whole sublime Arcana of Christian Science in a nutshell.

Do you find a weak place in it anywhere?"



"Well--no; it seems strong."



"Very well There is more.  Those three constitute the Scientific

Definition of Immortal Mind.  Next, we have the Scientific Definition of

Mortal Mind.  Thus.  FIRST DEGREE: Depravity I.  Physical-Passions and

appetites, fear, depraved will, pride, envy, deceit, hatred, revenge,

sin, disease, death."



"Phantasms, madam--unrealities, as I understand it."



"Every one.  SECOND DEGREE: Evil Disappearing.  I.  Moral-Honesty,

affection, compassion, hope, faith, meekness, temperance.  Is it clear?"



"Crystal."



"THIRD DEGREE: Spiritual Salvation.  I.  Spiritual-Faith, wisdom, power,

purity, understanding, health, love.  You see how searchingly and co-

ordinately interdependent and anthropomorphous it all is.  In this Third

Degree, as we know by the revelations of Christian Science, mortal mind

disappears."



"Not earlier?"



"No, not until the teaching and preparation for the Third Degree are

completed."



"It is not until then that one is enabled to take hold of Christian

Science effectively, and with the right sense of sympathy and kinship,

as I understand you.  That is to say, it could not succeed during the

processes of the Second Degree, because there would still be remains of

mind left; and therefore--but I interrupted you.  You were about to

further explain the good results proceeding from the erosions and

disintegrations effected by the Third Degree.  It is very interesting;

go on, please."



"Yes, as I was saying, in this Third Degree mortal mind disappears.

Science so reverses the evidence before the corporeal human senses as to

make this scriptural testimony true in our hearts, 'the last shall be

first and the first shall be last,' that God and His idea may be to us--

what divinity really is, and must of necessity be all-inclusive."



"It is beautiful.  And with what exhaustive exactness your choice and

arrangement of words confirm and establish what you have claimed for the

powers and functions of the Third Degree.  The Second could probably

produce only temporary absence of mind; it is reserved to the Third to

make it permanent.  A sentence framed under the auspices of the Second

could have a kind of meaning--a sort of deceptive semblance of it--

whereas it is only under the magic of the Third that that defect would

disappear.  Also, without doubt, it is the Third Degree that contributes

another remarkable specialty to Christian Science--viz., ease and flow

and lavishness of words, and rhythm and swing and smoothness.  There must

be a special reason for this?"



"Yes--God--all, all--God, good God, non-Matter, Matteration, Spirit,

Bones, Truth."



"That explains it."



"There is nothing in Christian Science that is not explicable; for God is

one, Time is one, Individuality is one, and may be one of a series, one

of many, as an individual man, individual horse; whereas God is one, not

one of a series, but one alone and without an equal."



"These are noble thoughts.  They make one burn to know more.  How does

Christian Science explain the spiritual relation of systematic duality to

incidental deflection?"



"Christian Science reverses the seeming relation of Soul and body--as

astronomy reverses the human perception of the movement of the solar

system--and makes body tributary to the Mind.  As it is the earth which

is in motion, While the sun is at rest, though in viewing the sun rise

one finds it impossible to believe the sun not to be really rising, so

the body is but the humble servant of the restful Mind, though it seems

otherwise to finite sense; but we shall never understand this while we

admit that soul is in body, or mind in matter, and that man is included

in non-intelligence.  Soul is God, unchangeable and eternal; and man

coexists with and reflects Soul, for the All-in-all is the Altogether,

and the Altogether embraces the All-one, Soul-Mind, Mind-Soul, Love,

Spirit, Bones, Liver, one of a series, alone and without an equal."



"What is the origin of Christian Science?  Is it a gift of God, or did it

just happen?"



"In a sense, it is a gift of God.  That is to say, its powers are from

Him, but the credit of the discovery of the powers and what they are for

is due to an American lady."



"Indeed?  When did this occur?"



"In 1866.  That is the immortal date when pain and disease and death

disappeared from the earth to return no more forever.  That is, the

fancies for which those terms stand disappeared.  The things themselves

had never existed; therefore, as soon as it was perceived that there were

no such things, they were easily banished.  The history and nature of the

great discovery are set down in the book here, and--"



"Did the lady write the book?"



"Yes, she wrote it all, herself.  The title is Science and Health, with

Key to the Scriptures--for she explains the Scriptures; they were not

understood before.  Not even by the twelve Disciples.  She begins thus--

I will read it to you."



But she had forgotten to bring her glasses.



"Well, it is no matter," she said.  "I remember the words--indeed, all

Christian Scientists know the book by heart; it is necessary in our

practice.  We should otherwise make mistakes and do harm.  She begins

thus: 'In the year 1866 I discovered the Science of Metaphysical

Healing, and named it Christian Science.'  And She says quite beautifully,

I think--'Through Christian Science, religion and medicine are inspired

with a diviner nature and essence, fresh pinions are given to faith and

understanding, and thoughts acquaint themselves intelligently with God.'

Her very words."



"It is elegant.  And it is a fine thought, too--marrying religion to

medicine, instead of medicine to the undertaker in the old way; for

religion and medicine properly belong together, they being the basis of

all spiritual and physical health.  What kind of medicine do you give for

the ordinary diseases, such as--"



"We never give medicine in any circumstances whatever!  We--"



"But, madam, it says--"



"I don't care what it says, and I don't wish to talk about it."



"I am sorry if I have offended, but you see the mention seemed in some

way inconsistent, and--"



"There are no inconsistencies in Christian Science.  The thing is

impossible, for the Science is absolute.  It cannot be otherwise, since

it proceeds directly from the All-in-all and the Everything-in-Which,

also Soul, Bones, Truth, one of a series, alone and without equal.  It is

Mathematics purified from material dross and made spiritual."



"I can see that, but--"



"It rests upon the immovable basis of an Apodictical Principle."



The word flattened itself against my mind in trying to get in, and

disordered me a little, and before I could inquire into its pertinency,

she was already throwing the needed light:



"This Apodictical Principle is the absolute Principle of Scientific Mind-

healing, the sovereign Omnipotence which delivers the children of men

from pain, disease, decay, and every ill that flesh is heir to."



"Surely not every ill, every decay?"



"Every one; there are no exceptions; there is no such thing as decay--it

is an unreality, it has no existence."



"But without your glasses your failing eyesight does not permit you to--"



"My eyesight cannot fail; nothing can fail; the Mind is master, and the

Mind permits no retrogression."



She was under the inspiration of the Third Degree, therefore there could

be no profit in continuing this part of the subject.  I shifted to other

ground and inquired further concerning the Discoverer of the Science.



"Did the discovery come suddenly, like Klondike, or after long study and

calculation, like America?"



"The comparisons are not respectful, since they refer to trivialities--

but let it pass.  I will answer in the Discoverer's own words: 'God had

been graciously fitting me, during many years, for the reception of a

final revelation of the absolute Principle of Scientific Mind-healing."



"Many years.  How many?"



"Eighteen centuries!"



"All--God, God--good, good--God, Truth, Bones, Liver, one of a series,

alone and without equal--it is amazing!"



"You may well say it, sir.  Yet it is but the truth This American lady,

our revered and sacred Founder, is distinctly referred to, and her coming

prophesied, in the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse; she could not have

been more plainly indicated by St. John without actually mentioning her

name."



"How strange, how wonderful!"



"I will quote her own words, from her Key to the Scriptures: 'The twelfth

chapter of the Apocalypse has a special suggestiveness in connection with

this nineteenth century.' There--do you note that?  Think--note it well."





"But--what does it mean?"



"Listen, and you will know.  I quote her inspired words again: 'In the

opening of the Sixth Seal, typical of six thousand years since Adam,

there is one distinctive feature which has special reference to the

present age.  Thus:



"'Revelation xii.  I.  And there appeared a great wonder in heaven--a

woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her

head a crown of twelve stars.'



"That is our Head, our Chief, our Discoverer of Christian Science--

nothing can be plainer, nothing surer.  And note this:



"'Revelation xii.  6.  And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she

had a place prepared of God.'



"That is Boston.  I recognize it, madam.  These are sublime things, and

impressive; I never understood these passages before; please go on with

the--with the--proofs."



"Very well.  Listen:



"'And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a

cloud; and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the

sun, and his feet as pillars of fire.  And he held in his hand a little

book.'



"A little book, merely a little book--could words be modester?  Yet how

stupendous its importance!  Do you know what book that was?"



"Was it--"



"I hold it in my hand--Christian Science!"



"Love, Livers, Lights, Bones, Truth, Kidneys, one of a series, alone and

without equal--it is beyond imagination for wonder!"



"Hear our Founder's eloquent words: 'Then will a voice from harmony cry,

"Go and take the little book: take it and eat it up, and it shall make

thy belly bitter; but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey."  Mortal,

obey the heavenly evangel.  Take up Divine Science.  Read it from

beginning to end.  Study it, ponder it.  It will be, indeed, sweet at its

first taste, when it heals you; but murmur not over Truth, if you find

its digestion bitter.' You now know the history of our dear and holy

Science, sir, and that its origin is not of this earth, but only its

discovery.  I will leave the book with you and will go, now; but give

yourself no uneasiness--I will give you absent treatment from now till I

go to bed."









CHAPTER III



Under the powerful influence of the near treatment and the absent

treatment together, my bones were gradually retreating inward and

disappearing from view.  The good work took a brisk start, now, and went

on swiftly.  My body was diligently straining and stretching, this way

and that, to accommodate the processes of restoration, and every minute

or two I heard a dull click inside and knew that the two ends of a

fracture had been successfully joined.  This muffled clicking and

gritting and grinding and rasping continued during the next three hours,

and then stopped--the connections had all been made.  All except

dislocations; there were only seven of these: hips, shoulders, knees,

neck; so that was soon over; one after another they slipped into their

sockets with a sound like pulling a distant cork, and I jumped up as good

as new, as to framework, and sent for the horse-doctor.



I was obliged to do this because I had a stomach-ache and a cold in the

head, and I was not willing to trust these things any longer in the hands

of a woman whom I did not know, and whose ability to successfully treat

mere disease I had lost all confidence.  My position was justified by the

fact that the cold and the ache had been in her charge from the first,

along with the fractures, but had experienced not a shade of relief; and,

indeed, the ache was even growing worse and worse, and more and more

bitter, now, probably on account of the protracted abstention from food

and drink.



The horse-doctor came, a pleasant man and full of hope and professional

interest in the case.  In the matter of smell he was pretty aromatic--in

fact, quite horsy--and I tried to arrange with him for absent treatment,

but it was not in his line, so, out of delicacy, I did not press it.  He

looked at my teeth and examined my hock, and said my age and general

condition were favorable to energetic measures; therefore he would give

me something to turn the stomach-ache into the botts and the cold in the

head into the blind staggers; then he should be on his own beat and would

know what to do.  He made up a bucket of bran-mash, and said a dipperful

of it every two hours, alternated with a drench with turpentine and axle-

grease in it, would either knock my ailments out of me in twenty-four

hours, or so interest me in other ways as to make me forget they were on

the premises.  He administered my first dose himself, then took his

leave, saying I was free to eat and drink anything I pleased and in any

quantity I liked.  But I was not hungry any more, and did not care for

food.



I took up the Christian Science book and read half of it, then took a

dipperful of drench and read the other half.  The resulting experiences

were full of interest and adventure.  All through the rumblings and

grindings and quakings and effervescings accompanying the evolution of

the ache into the botts and the cold into the blind staggers I could note

the generous struggle for mastery going on between the mash and the

drench and the literature; and often I could tell which was ahead, and

could easily distinguish the literature from the others when the others

were separate, though not when they were mixed; for when a bran-mash and

an eclectic drench are mixed together they look just like the Apodictical

Principle out on a lark, and no one can tell it from that.  The finish

was reached at last, the evolutions were complete, and a fine success,

but I think that this result could have been achieved with fewer

materials.  I believe the mash was necessary to the conversion of the

stomach-ache into the botts, but I think one could develop the blind

staggers out of the literature by itself; also, that blind staggers

produced in this way would be of a better quality and more lasting than

any produced by the artificial processes of the horse-doctor.



For of all the strange and frantic and incomprehensible and

uninterpretable books which the imagination of man has created, surely

this one is the prize sample.  It is written with a limitless confidence

and complacency, and with a dash and stir and earnestness which often

compel the effects of eloquence, even when the words do not seem to have

any traceable meaning.  There are plenty of people who imagine they

understand the book; I know this, for I have talked with them; but in all

cases they were people who also imagined that there were no such things

as pain, sickness, and death, and no realities in the world; nothing

actually existent but Mind.  It seems to me to modify the value of their

testimony.  When these people talk about Christian Science they do as

Mrs. Fuller did: they do not use their own language, but the book's; they

pour out the book's showy incoherences, and leave you to find out later

that they were not originating, but merely quoting; they seem to know the

volume by heart, and to revere it as they would a Bible--another Bible,

perhaps I ought to say.  Plainly the book was written under the mental

desolations of the Third Degree, and I feel sure that none but the

membership of that Degree can discover meanings in it.  When you read it

you seem to be listening to a lively and aggressive and oracular speech

delivered in an unknown tongue, a speech whose spirit you get but not the

particulars; or, to change the figure, you seem to be listening to a

vigorous instrument which is making a noise which it thinks is a tune,

but which, to persons not members of the band, is only the martial

tooting of a trombone, and merrily stirs the soul through the noise, but

does not convey a meaning.



The book's serenities of self-satisfaction do almost seem to smack of a

heavenly origin--they have no blood-kin in the earth.  It is more than

human to be so placidly certain about things, and so finely superior, and

so airily content with one's performance.  Without ever presenting

anything which may rightfully be called by the strong name of Evidence,

and sometimes without even mentioning a reason for a deduction at all, it

thunders out the startling words, "I have Proved" so and so.  It takes

the Pope and all the great guns of his Church in battery assembled to

authoritatively settle and establish the meaning of a sole and single

unclarified passage of Scripture, and this at vast cost of time and study

and reflection, but the author of this work is superior to all that: she

finds the whole Bible in an unclarified audition, and at small expense of

time and no expense of mental effort she clarifies it from lid to lid,

reorganizes and improves the meanings, then authoritatively settles and

establishes them with formulas which you cannot tell from "Let there be

light!" and "Here you have it!" It is the first time since the dawn-days

of Creation that a Voice has gone crashing through space with such placid

and complacent confidence and command.



[January, 1903.  The first reading of any book whose terminology is

new and strange is nearly sure to leave the reader in a bewildered and

sarcastic state of mind.  But now that, during the past two months, I

have, by diligence gained a fair acquaintanceship with Science and Health

technicalities, I no longer find the bulk of that work hard to

understand.--M.  T.]



P.S.  The wisdom harvested from the foregoing thoughts has already done

me a service and saved me a sorrow.  Nearly a month ago there came to me

from one of the universities a tract by Dr.  Edward Anthony Spitzka on

the "Encephalic Anatomy of the Races."  I judged that my opinion was

desired by the university, and I was greatly pleased with this attention

and wrote and said I would furnish it as soon as I could.  That night I

put my plodding and disheartening Christian Science mining aside and took

hold of the matter.  I wrote an eager chapter, and was expecting to

finish my opinion the next day, but was called away for a week, and my

mind was soon charged with other interests.  It was not until to-day,

after the lapse of nearly a month, that I happened upon my Encephalic

chapter again.  Meantime, the new wisdom had come to me, and I read it

with shame.  I recognized that I had entered upon that work in far from

the right temper--far from the respectful and judicial spirit which was

its due of reverence.  I had begun upon it with the following paragraph

for fuel:



"FISSURES OF THE PARIETAL AND OCCIPITAL LOBES (LATERAL SURFACE).--The

Postcentral Fissural Complex--In this hemicerebrum, the postcentral and

subcentral are combined to form a continuous fissure, attaining a length

of 8.5 cm.  Dorsally, the fissure bifurcates, embracing the gyre indented

by the caudal limb of the paracentral.  The caudal limb of the

postcentral is joined by a transparietal piece.  In all, five additional

rami spring from the combined fissure.  A vadum separates it from the

parietal; another from the central."



It humiliates me, now, to see how angry I got over that; and how

scornful.  I said that the style was disgraceful; that it was labored and

tumultuous, and in places violent, that the treatment was involved and

erratic, and almost, as a rule, bewildering; that to lack of simplicity

was added a lack of vocabulary; that there was quite too much feeling

shown; that if I had a dog that would get so excited and incoherent over

a tranquil subject like Encephalic Anatomy I would not pay his tax; and

at that point I got excited myself and spoke bitterly of these mongrel

insanities, and said a person might as well try to understand Science and

Health.



[I know, now, where the trouble was, and am glad of the interruption that

saved me from sending my verdict to the university.  It makes me cold to

think what those people might have thought of me.--M.  T.]









CHAPTER IV



No one doubts--certainly not I--that the mind exercises a powerful

influence over the body.  From the beginning of time, the sorcerer, the

interpreter of dreams, the fortune-teller, the charlatan, the quack, the

wild medicine-man, the educated physician, the mesmerist, and the

hypnotist have made use of the client's imagination to help them in their

work.  They have all recognized the potency and availability of that

force.  Physicians cure many patients with a bread pill; they know that

where the disease is only a fancy, the patient's confidence in the doctor

will make the bread pill effective.



Faith in the doctor.  Perhaps that is the entire thing.  It seems to look

like it.  In old times the King cured the king's evil by the touch of the

royal hand.  He frequently made extraordinary cures.  Could his footman

have done it?  No--not in his own clothes.  Disguised as the King, could

he have done it?  I think we may not doubt it.  I think we may feel sure

that it was not the King's touch that made the cure in any instance, but

the patient's faith in the efficacy of a King's touch.  Genuine and

remarkable cures have been achieved through contact with the relics of a

saint.  Is it not likely that any other bones would have done as well if

the substitution had been concealed from the patient?  When I was a boy a

farmer's wife who lived five miles from our village had great fame as a

faith-doctor--that was what she called herself.  Sufferers came to her

from all around, and she laid her hand upon them and said, "Have faith--

it is all that is necessary," and they went away well of their ailments.

She was not a religious woman, and pretended to no occult powers.  She

said that the patient's faith in her did the work.  Several times I saw

her make immediate cures of severe toothaches.  My mother was the

patient.  In Austria there is a peasant who drives a great trade in this

sort of industry, and has both the high and the low for patients.  He

gets into prison every now and then for practising without a diploma, but

his business is as brisk as ever when he gets out, for his work is

unquestionably successful and keeps his reputation high.  In Bavaria

there is a man who performed so many great cures that he had to retire

from his profession of stage-carpentering in order to meet the demand of

his constantly increasing body of customers.  He goes on from year to

year doing his miracles, and has become very rich.  He pretends to no

religious helps, no supernatural aids, but thinks there is something in

his make-up which inspires the confidence of his patients, and that it is

this confidence which does the work, and not some mysterious power

issuing from himself.



Within the last quarter of a century, in America, several sects of curers

have appeared under various names and have done notable things in the way

of healing ailments without the use of medicines.  There are the Mind

Cure the Faith Cure, the Prayer Cure, the Mental Science Cure, and the

Christian-Science Cure; and apparently they all do their miracles with

the same old, powerful instrument--the patient's imagination.  Differing

names, but no difference in the process.  But they do not give that

instrument the credit; each sect claims that its way differs from the

ways of the others.



They all achieve some cures, there is no question about it; and the Faith

Cure and the Prayer Cure probably do no harm when they do no good, since

they do not forbid the patient to help out the cure with medicines if he

wants to; but the others bar medicines, and claim ability to cure every

conceivable human ailment through the application of their mental forces

alone.  There would seem to be an element of danger here.  It has the

look of claiming too much, I think.  Public confidence would probably be

increased if less were claimed.



The Christian Scientist was not able to cure my stomach-ache and my cold;

but the horse-doctor did it.  This convinces me that Christian Science

claims too much.  In my opinion it ought to let diseases alone and

confine itself to surgery.  There it would have everything its own way.



The horse-doctor charged me thirty kreutzers, and I paid him; in fact, I

doubled it and gave him a shilling.  Mrs. Fuller brought in an itemized

bill for a crate of broken bones mended in two hundred and thirty-four

places--one dollar per fracture.



"Nothing exists but Mind?"



"Nothing," she answered.  "All else is substanceless, all else is

imaginary."



I gave her an imaginary check, and now she is suing me for substantial

dollars.  It looks inconsistent.









CHAPTER V



Let us consider that we are all partially insane.  It will explain us to

each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple

many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and

obscurities now.



Those of us who are not in the asylum, and not demonstrably due there,

are nevertheless, no doubt, insane in one or two particulars.  I think we

must admit this; but I think that we are otherwise healthy-minded.  I

think that when we all see one thing alike, it is evidence that, as

regards that one thing, our minds are perfectly sound.  Now there are

really several things which we do all see alike; things which we all

accept, and about which we do not dispute.  For instance, we who are

outside of the asylum all agree that water seeks its level; that the sun

gives light and heat; that fire consumes; that fog is damp; that six

times six are thirty-six, that two from ten leaves eight; that eight and

seven are fifteen.  These are, perhaps, the only things we are agreed

about; but, although they are so few, they are of inestimable value,

because they make an infallible standard of sanity.  Whosoever accepts

them him we know to be substantially sane; sufficiently sane; in the

working essentials, sane.  Whoever disputes a single one of them him we

know to be wholly insane, and qualified for the asylum.



Very well, the man who disputes none of them we concede to be entitled to

go at large.  But that is concession enough.  We cannot go any further

than that; for we know that in all matters of mere opinion that same man

is insane--just as insane as we are; just as insane as Shakespeare was.

We know exactly where to put our finger upon his insanity: it is where

his opinion differs from ours.



That is a simple rule, and easy to remember.  When I, a thoughtful and

unblessed Presbyterian, examine the Koran, I know that beyond any

question every Mohammedan is insane; not in all things, but in religious

matters.  When a thoughtful and unblessed Mohammedan examines the

Westminster Catechism, he knows that beyond any question I am spiritually

insane.  I cannot prove to him that he is insane, because you never can

prove anything to a lunatic--for that is a part of his insanity and the

evidence of it.  He cannot prove to me that I am insane, for my mind has

the same defect that afflicts his.  All Democrats are insane, but not one

of them knows it; none but the Republicans and Mugwumps know it.  All the

Republicans are insane, but only the Democrats and Mugwumps can perceive

it.  The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are

insane.  When I look around me, I am often troubled to see how many

people are mad.  To mention only a few:



The Atheist, The Theosophists, The Infidel, The Swedenborgians, The

Agnostic, The Shakers, The Baptist, The Millerites, The Methodist, The

Mormons, The Christian Scientist, The Laurence Oliphant Harrisites, The

Catholic, and the 115 Christian sects, the Presbyterian excepted, The

Grand Lama's people, The Monarchists, The Imperialists, The 72 Mohammedan

sects, The Democrats, The Republicans (but not the Mugwumps), The

Buddhist, The Blavatsky-Buddhist, The Mind-Curists, The Faith-Curists,

The Nationalist, The Mental Scientists, The Confucian, The Spiritualist,

The Allopaths, The 2000 East Indian sects, The Homeopaths, The

Electropaths, The Peculiar People, The----



But there's no end to the list; there are millions of them!  And all

insane; each in his own way; insane as to his pet fad or opinion, but

otherwise sane and rational.  This should move us to be charitable

towards one another's lunacies.  I recognize that in his special belief

the Christian Scientist is insane, because he does not believe as I do;

but I hail him as my mate and fellow, because I am as insane as he insane

from his point of view, and his point of view is as authoritative as mine

and worth as much.  That is to say, worth a brass farthing.  Upon a great

religious or political question, the opinion of the dullest head in the

world is worth the same as the opinion of the brightest head in the

world--a brass farthing.  How do we arrive at this?  It is simple.  The

affirmative opinion of a stupid man is neutralized by the negative

opinion of his stupid neighbor no decision is reached; the affirmative

opinion of the intellectual giant Gladstone is neutralized by the

negative opinion of the intellectual giant Newman--no decision is

reached.  Opinions that prove nothing are, of course, without value any

but a dead person knows that much.  This obliges us to admit the truth of

the unpalatable proposition just mentioned above--that, in disputed

matters political and religious, one man's opinion is worth no more than

his peer's, and hence it followers that no man's opinion possesses any

real value.  It is a humbling thought, but there is no way to get around

it: all opinions upon these great subjects are brass-farthing opinions.



It is a mere plain, simple fact--as clear and as certain as that eight

and seven make fifteen.  And by it we recognize that we are all insane,

as concerns those matters.  If we were sane, we should all see a

political or religious doctrine alike; there would be no dispute: it

would be a case of eight and seven--just as it is in heaven, where all

are sane and none insane.  There there is but one religion, one belief;

the harmony is perfect; there is never a discordant note.



Under protection of these preliminaries, I suppose I may now repeat

without offence that the Christian Scientist is insane.  I mean him no

discourtesy, and I am not charging--nor even imagining--that he is

insaner than the rest of the human race.  I think he is more

picturesquely insane than some of us.  At the same time, I am quite sure

that in one important and splendid particular he is much saner than is

the vast bulk of the race.



Why is he insane?  I told you before: it is because his opinions are not

ours.  I know of no other reason, and I do not need any other; it is the

only way we have of discovering insanity when it is not violent.  It is

merely the picturesqueness of his insanity that makes it more interesting

than my kind or yours.  For instance, consider his "little book"; the

"little book" exposed in the sky eighteen centuries ago by the flaming

angel of the Apocalypse, and handed down in our day to Mrs. Mary Baker G.

Eddy, of New Hampshire, and translated by her, word for word, into

English (with help of a polisher), and now published and distributed in

hundreds of editions by her at a clear profit per volume, above cost, of

seven hundred per cent.!--a profit which distinctly belongs to the angel

of the Apocalypse, and let him collect it if he can; a "little book"

which the C.S.  very frequently calls by just that name, and always

enclosed in quotation-marks to keep its high origin exultantly in mind; a

"little book" which "explains" and reconstructs and new-paints and

decorates the Bible, and puts a mansard roof on it and a lightning-rod

and all the other modern improvements; a "little book" which for the

present affects to travel in yoke with the Bible and be friendly to it,

and within half a century will hitch the Bible in the rear and

thenceforth travel tandem, itself in the lead, in the coming great march

of Christian Scientism through the Protestant dominions of the planet.









CHAPTER VI



"Hungry ones throng to hear the Bible read in connection with the text-

book of Christian Science, Science and Health, with Key to the

Scriptures, by Mary Baker G.  Eddy.  These are our only preachers.  They

are the word of God."  "Christian Science Journal", October, 1898.



Is that picturesque?  A lady has told me that in a chapel of the Mosque

in Boston there is a picture or image of Mrs. Eddy, and that before it

burns a never-extinguished light.  Is that picturesque?  How long do you

think it will be before the Christian Scientist will be worshipping that

picture or image and praying to it?  How long do you think it will be

before it is claimed that Mrs. Eddy is a Redeemer, a Christ, and Christ's

equal?  Already her army of disciples speak of her reverently as "Our

Mother."



How long will it be before they place her on the steps of the Throne

beside the Virgin--and, later, a step higher?  First, Mary the Virgin and

Mary the Matron; later, with a change of precedence, Mary the Matron and

Mary the Virgin.  Let the artist get ready with his canvas and his

brushes; the new Renaissance is on its way, and there will be money in

altar-canvases--a thousand times as much as the Popes and their Church

ever spent on the Old Masters; for their riches were poverty as compared

with what is going to pour into the treasure-chest of the Christian-

Scientist Papacy by-and-by, let us not doubt it.  We will examine the

financial outlook presently and see what it promises.  A favorite subject

of the new Old Master will be the first verse of the twelfth chapter of

Revelation--a verse which Mrs. Eddy says (in her Annex to the Scriptures)

has "one distinctive feature which has special reference to the present

age"--and to her, as is rather pointedly indicated:



"And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the

sun, and the moon under her feet," etc.



The woman clothed with the sun will be a portrait of Mrs. Eddy.



Is it insanity to believe that Christian Scientism is destined to make

the most formidable show that any new religion has made in the world

since the birth and spread of Mobammedanism, and that within a century

from now it may stand second to Rome only, in numbers and power in

Christendom?



If this is a wild dream it will not be easy to prove it so just yet, I

think.  There seems argument that it may come true.  The Christian-

Science "boom," proper, is not yet five years old; yet already it has two

hundred and fifty churches.



It has its start, you see, and it is a phenomenally good one.  Moreover,

it is latterly spreading with a constantly accelerating swiftness.  It

has a better chance to grow and prosper and achieve permanency than any

other existing "ism"; for it has more to offer than any other.  The past

teaches us that in order to succeed, a movement like this must not be a

mere philosophy, it must be a religion; also, that it must not claim

entire originality, but content itself with passing for an improvement on

an existing religion, and show its hand later, when strong and

prosperous--like Mohammedanism.



Next, there must be money--and plenty of it.



Next, the power and authority and capital must be concentrated in the

grip of a small and irresponsible clique, with nobody outside privileged

to ask questions or find fault.



Next, as before remarked, it must bait its hook with some new and

attractive advantages over the baits offered by its competitors.  A new

movement equipped with some of these endowments--like spiritualism, for

instance may count upon a considerable success; a new movement equipped

with the bulk of them--like Mohammedanism, for instance--may count upon

a widely extended conquest.  Mormonism had all the requisites but one it

had nothing new and nothing valuable to bait with.  Spiritualism lacked

the important detail of concentration of money and authority in the hands

of an irresponsible clique.



The above equipment is excellent, admirable, powerful, but not perfect.

There is yet another detail which is worth the whole of it put together

and more; a detail which has never been joined (in the beginning of a

religious movement) to a supremely good working equipment since the world

began, until now: a new personage to worship.  Christianity had the

Saviour, but at first and for generations it lacked money and

concentrated power.  In Mrs. Eddy, Christian Science possesses the new

personage for worship, and in addition--here in the very beginning--a

working equipment that has not a flaw in it.  In the beginning,

Mohammedanism had no money; and it has never had anything to offer its

client but heaven--nothing here below that was valuable.  In addition to

heaven hereafter, Christian Science has present health and a cheerful

spirit to offer; and in comparison with this bribe all other this-world

bribes are poor and cheap.  You recognize that this estimate is

admissible, do you not?



To whom does Bellamy's "Nationalism" appeal?  Necessarily to the few:

people who read and dream, and are compassionate, and troubled for the

poor and the hard-driven.  To whom does Spiritualism appeal?  Necessarily

to the few; its "boom" has lasted for half a century, and I believe it

claims short of four millions of adherents in America.  Who are attracted

by Swedenborgianism and some of the other fine and delicate "isms"?  The

few again: educated people, sensitively organized, with superior mental

endowments, who seek lofty planes of thought and find their contentment

there.  And who are attracted by Christian Science?  There is no limit;

its field is horizonless; its appeal is as universal as is the appeal of

Christianity itself.  It appeals to the rich, the poor, the high, the

low, the cultured, the ignorant, the gifted, the stupid, the modest, the

vain, the wise, the silly, the soldier, the civilian, the hero, the

coward, the idler, the worker, the godly, the godless, the freeman, the

slave, the adult, the child; they who are ailing in body or mind, they

who have friends that are ailing in body or mind.  To mass it in a

phrase, its clientage is the Human Race.  Will it march?  I think so.



Remember its principal great offer: to rid the Race of pain and disease.

Can it do so?  In large measure, yes.  How much of the pain and disease

in the world is created by the imaginations of the sufferers, and then

kept alive by those same imaginations?  Four-fifths?  Not anything short

of that, I should think.  Can Christian Science banish that four-fifths?

I think so.  Can any other (organized) force do it?  None that I know of.

Would this be a new world when that was accomplished?  And a pleasanter

one--for us well people, as well as for those fussy and fretting sick

ones?  Would it seem as if there was not as much gloomy weather as there

used to be?  I think so.



In the mean time, would the Scientist kill off a good many patients?

I think so.  More than get killed off now by the legalized methods?

I will take up that question presently.



At present, I wish to ask you to examine some of the Scientist's

performances, as registered in his magazine, The Christian Science

Journal--October number, 1898.  First, a Baptist clergyman gives us this

true picture of "the average orthodox Christian"--and he could have added

that it is a true picture of the average (civilized) human being:



"He is a worried and fretted and fearful man; afraid of himself and his

propensities, afraid of colds and fevers, afraid of treading on serpents

or drinking deadly things."



Then he gives us this contrast:



"The average Christian Scientist has put all anxiety and fretting under

his feet.  He does have a victory over fear and care that is not achieved

by the average orthodox Christian."



He has put all anxiety and fretting under his feet.  What proportion of

your earnings or income would you be willing to pay for that frame of

mind, year in, year out?  It really outvalues any price that can be put

upon it.  Where can you purchase it, at any outlay of any sort, in any

Church or out of it, except the Scientist's?



Well, it is the anxiety and fretting about colds, and fevers, and

draughts, and getting our feet wet, and about forbidden food eaten in

terror of indigestion, that brings on the cold and the fever and the

indigestion and the most of our other ailments; and so, if the Science

can banish that anxiety from the world I think it can reduce the world's

disease and pain about four-fifths.



In this October number many of the redeemed testify and give thanks; and

not coldly, but with passionate gratitude.  As a rule they seem drunk

with health, and with the surprise of it, the wonder of it, the

unspeakable glory and splendor of it, after a long, sober spell spent in

inventing imaginary diseases and concreting them with doctor-stuff.  The

first witness testifies that when "this most beautiful Truth first dawned

on him" he had "nearly all the ills that flesh is heir to"; that those he

did not have he thought he had--and this made the tale about complete.

What was the natural result?  Why, he was a dump-pit "for all the

doctors, druggists, and patent medicines of the country."  Christian

Science came to his help, and "the old sick conditions passed away," and

along with them the "dismal forebodings" which he had been accustomed to

employ in conjuring up ailments.  And so he was a healthy and cheerful

man, now, and astonished.



But I am not astonished, for from other sources I know what must have

been his method of applying Christian Science.  If I am in the right, he

watchfully and diligently diverted his mind from unhealthy channels and

compelled it to travel in healthy ones.  Nothing contrivable by human

invention could be more formidably effective than that, in banishing

imaginary ailments and in closing the entrances against sub-sequent

applicants of their breed.  I think his method was to keep saying, "I am

well!  I am sound!--sound and well!  well and sound!  Perfectly sound,

perfectly well!  I have no pain; there's no such thing as pain!  I have

no disease; there's no such thing as disease!  Nothing is real but Mind;

all is Mind, All-Good Good-Good, Life, Soul, Liver, Bones, one of a

series, ante and pass the buck!"



I do not mean that that was exactly the formula used, but that it

doubtless contains the spirit of it.  The Scientist would attach value to

the exact formula, no doubt, and to the religious spirit in which it was

used.  I should think that any formula that would divert the mind from

unwholesome channels and force it into healthy ones would answer every

purpose with some people, though not with all.  I think it most likely

that a very religious man would find the addition of the religious spirit

a powerful reinforcement in his case.



The second witness testifies that the Science banished "an old organic

trouble," which the doctor and the surgeon had been nursing with drugs

and the knife for seven years.



He calls it his "claim."  A surface-miner would think it was not his

claim at all, but the property of the doctor and his pal the surgeon--for

he would be misled by that word, which is Christian-Science slang for

"ailment."  The Christian Scientist has no ailment; to him there is no

such thing, and he will not use the hateful word.  All that happens to

him is that upon his attention an imaginary disturbance sometimes

obtrudes itself which claims to be an ailment but isn't.



This witness offers testimony for a clergyman seventy years old who had

preached forty years in a Christian church, and has now gone over to the

new sect.  He was "almost blind and deaf."  He was treated by the C. S.

method, and "when he heard the voice of Truth he saw spiritually."  Saw

spiritually?  It is a little indefinite; they had better treat him again.

Indefinite testimonies might properly be waste-basketed, since there is

evidently no lack of definite ones procurable; but this C. S.  magazine

is poorly edited, and so mistakes of this kind must be expected.



The next witness is a soldier of the Civil War.  When Christian Science

found him, he had in stock the following claims:



Indigestion,

Rheumatism,

Catarrh,

Chalky deposits in

Shoulder-joints,

Arm-joints,

Hand-joints,

Insomnia,

Atrophy of the muscles of

Arms.

Shoulders,

Stiffness of all those joints,

Excruciating pains most of the time.



These claims have a very substantial sound.  They came of exposure in the

campaigns.  The doctors did all they could, but it was little.  Prayers

were tried, but "I never realized any physical relief from that source."

After thirty years of torture, he went to a Christian Scientist and took

an hour's treatment and went home painless.  Two days later, he "began to

eat like a well man."  Then "the claims vanished--some at once, others

more gradually"; finally, "they have almost entirely disappeared."  And--

a thing which is of still greater value--he is now "contented and happy."

That is a detail which, as earlier remarked, is a Scientist-Church

specialty.  And, indeed, one may go further and assert with little or no

exaggeration that it is a Christian-Science monopoly.  With thirty-one

years' effort, the Methodist Church had not succeeded in furnishing it to

this harassed soldier.



And so the tale goes on.  Witness after witness bulletins his claims,

declares their prompt abolishment, and gives Mrs. Eddy's Discovery the

praise.  Milk-leg is cured; nervous prostration is cured; consumption is

cured; and St.  Vitus's dance is made a pastime.  Even without a fiddle.

And now and then an interesting new addition to the Science slang appears

on the page.  We have "demonstrations over chilblains" and such things.

It seems to be a curtailed way of saying "demonstrations of the power of

Christian-Science Truth over the fiction which masquerades under the name

of Chilblains."  The children, as well as the adults, share in the

blessings of the Science.  "Through the study of the 'little book' they

are learning how to be healthful, peaceful, and wise."  Sometimes they

are cured of their little claims by the professional healer, and

sometimes more advanced children say over the formula and cure

themselves.



A little Far-Western girl of nine, equipped with an adult vocabulary,

states her age and says, "I thought I would write a demonstration to

you."  She had a claim, derived from getting flung over a pony's head and

landed on a rockpile.  She saved herself from disaster by remembering to

say "God is All" while she was in the air.  I couldn't have done it.  I

shouldn't even have thought of it.  I should have been too excited.

Nothing but Christian Science could have enabled that child to do that

calm and thoughtful and judicious thing in those circumstances.  She came

down on her head, and by all the rules she should have broken it; but the

intervention of the formula prevented that, so the only claim resulting

was a blackened eye.  Monday morning it was still swollen and shut.  At

school "it hurt pretty badly--that is, it seemed to."  So "I was excused,

and went down to the basement and said, 'Now I am depending on mamma

instead of God, and I will depend on God instead of mamma.'" No doubt

this would have answered; but, to make sure, she added Mrs. Eddy to the

team and recited "the Scientific Statement of Being," which is one of the

principal incantations, I judge.  Then "I felt my eye opening."  Why,

dear, it would have opened an oyster.  I think it is one of the

touchingest things in child-history, that pious little rat down cellar

pumping away at the Scientific Statement of Being.



There is a page about another good child--little Gordon.  Little Gordon

"came into the world without the assistance of surgery or anaesthetics."

He was a "demonstration."  A painless one; therefore, his coming evoked

"joy and thankfulness to God and the Discoverer of Christian Science."

It is a noticeable feature of this literature--the so frequent linking

together of the Two Beings in an equal bond; also of Their Two Bibles.

When little Gordon was two years old, "he was playing horse on the bed,

where I had left my 'little book.' I noticed him stop in his play, take

the book carefully in his little hands, kiss it softly, then look about

for the highest place of safety his arms could reach, and put it there."

This pious act filled the mother "with such a train of thought as I had

never experienced before.  I thought of the sweet mother of long ago who

kept things in her heart," etc.  It is a bold comparison; however,

unconscious profanations are about as common in the mouths of the lay

member ship of the new Church as are frank and open ones in the mouths of

its consecrated chiefs.



Some days later, the family library--Christian-Science books--was lying

in a deep-seated window.  This was another chance for the holy child to

show off.  He left his play and went there and pushed all the books to

one side, except the Annex "It he took in both hands, slowly raised it to

his lips, then removed it carefully, and seated himself in the window."

It had seemed to the mother too wonderful to be true, that first time;

but now she was convinced that "neither imagination nor accident had

anything to do with it."  Later, little Gordon let the author of his

being see him do it.  After that he did it frequently; probably every

time anybody was looking.  I would rather have that child than a chromo.

If this tale has any object, it is to intimate that the inspired book was

supernaturally able to convey a sense of its sacred and awful character

to this innocent little creature, without the intervention of outside

aids.  The magazine is not edited with high-priced discretion.  The

editor has a "claim," and he ought to get it treated.



Among other witnesses there is one who had a "jumping toothache," which

several times tempted her to "believe that there was sensation in matter,

but each time it was overcome by the power of Truth."  She would not

allow the dentist to use cocaine, but sat there and let him punch and

drill and split and crush the tooth, and tear and slash its ulcerations,

and pull out the nerve, and dig out fragments of bone; and she wouldn't

once confess that it hurt.  And to this day she thinks it didn't, and I

have not a doubt that she is nine-tenths right, and that her Christian-

Science faith did her better service than she could have gotten out of

cocaine.



There is an account of a boy who got broken all up into small bits by an

accident, but said over the Scientific Statement of Being, or some of the

other incantations, and got well and sound without having suffered any

real pain and without the intrusion of a surgeon.



Also, there is an account of the restoration to perfect health, in a

single night, of a fatally injured horse, by the application of Christian

Science.  I can stand a good deal, but I recognize that the ice is

getting thin, here.  That horse had as many as fifty claims; how could he

demonstrate over them?  Could he do the All-Good, Good-Good, Good-

Gracious, Liver, Bones, Truth, All down but Nine, Set them up on the

Other Alley?  Could he intone the Scientific Statement of Being?  Now,

could he?  Wouldn't it give him a relapse?  Let us draw the line at

horses.  Horses and furniture.



There is plenty of other testimonies in the magazine, but these quoted

samples will answer.  They show the kind of trade the Science is driving.

Now we come back to the question, Does the Science kill a patient here

and there and now and then?  We must concede it.  Does it compensate for

this?  I am persuaded that it can make a plausible showing in that

direction.  For instance: when it lays its hand upon a soldier who has

suffered thirty years of helpless torture and makes him whole in body and

mind, what is the actual sum of that achievement?  This, I think: that it

has restored to life a subject who had essentially died ten deaths a year

for thirty years, and each of them a long and painful one.  But for its

interference that man in the three years which have since elapsed, would

have essentially died thirty times more.  There are thousands of young

people in the land who are now ready to enter upon a life-long death

similar to that man's.  Every time the Science captures one of these and

secures to him life-long immunity from imagination-manufactured disease,

it may plausibly claim that in his person it has saved three hundred

lives.  Meantime, it will kill a man every now and then.  But no matter,

it will still be ahead on the credit side.



[NOTE.--I have received several letters (two from educated and ostensibly

intelligent persons), which contained, in substance, this protest: "I

don't object to men and women chancing their lives with these people, but

it is a burning shame that the law should allow them to trust their

helpless little children in their deadly hands.  "Isn't it touching?

Isn't it deep?  Isn't it modest?  It is as if the person said: "I know

that to a parent his child is the core of his heart, the apple of his

eye, a possession so dear, so precious that he will trust its life in no

hands but those which he believes, with all his soul, to be the very best

and the very safest, but it is a burning shame that the law does not

require him to come to me to ask what kind of healer I will allow him to

call."  The public is merely a multiplied "me."--M.T.]









CHAPTER VII



"We consciously declare that Science and Health, with Key to the

Scriptures, was foretold, as well as its author, Mary Baker Eddy, in

Revelation x.  She is the 'mighty angel,' or God's highest thought to

this age (verse 1), giving us the spiritual interpretation of the Bible

in the 'little book open' (verse 2).  Thus we prove that Christian

Science is the second coming of Christ-Truth-Spirit."--Lecture by Dr.

George Tomkins, D.D. C.S.



There you have it in plain speech.  She is the mighty angel; she is the

divinely and officially sent bearer of God's highest thought.  For the

present, she brings the Second Advent.  We must expect that before she

has been in her grave fifty years she will be regarded by her following

as having been herself the Second Advent.  She is already worshiped, and

we must expect this feeling to spread, territorially, and also to deepen

in intensity.



Particularly after her death; for then, as any one can foresee, Eddy-

Worship will be taught in the Sunday-schools and pulpits of the cult.

Already whatever she puts her trade-mark on, though it be only a

memorial-spoon, is holy and is eagerly and gratefully bought by the

disciple, and becomes a fetish in his house.  I say bought, for the

Boston Christian-Science Trust gives nothing away; everything it has is

for sale.  And the terms are cash; and not only cash, but cash in

advance.  Its god is Mrs. Eddy first, then the Dollar.  Not a spiritual

Dollar, but a real one.  From end to end of the Christian Science

literature not a single (material) thing in the world is conceded to be

real, except the Dollar.  But all through and through its advertisements

that reality is eagerly and persistently recognized.



The Dollar is hunted down in all sorts of ways; the Christian-Science

Mother-Church and Bargain-Counter in Boston peddles all kinds of

spiritual wares to the faithful, and always on the one condition--cash,

cash in advance.  The Angel of the Apocalypse could not go there and get

a copy of his own pirated book on credit.  Many, many precious Christian-

Science things are to be had there for cash: Bible Lessons; Church

Manual; C. S.  Hymnal; History of the building of the Mother-Church; lot

of Sermons; Communion Hymn, "Saw Ye My Saviour," by Mrs. Eddy, half a

dollar a copy, "words used by special permission of Mrs. Eddy."  Also we

have Mrs. Eddy's and the Angel's little Blue-Annex in eight styles of

binding at eight kinds of war-prices; among these a sweet thing in

"levant, divinity circuit, leather lined to edge, round corners, gold

edge, silk sewed, each, prepaid, $6," and if you take a million you get

them a shilling cheaper--that is to say, "prepaid, $5.75."  Also we have

Mrs. Eddy's Miscellaneous Writings, at 'andsome big prices, the divinity-

circuit style heading the exertions, shilling discount where you take an

edition Next comes Christ and Christmas, by the fertile Mrs. Eddy--a

poem--would God I could see it!--price $3, cash in advance.  Then

follow five more books by Mrs. Eddy, at highwayman's rates, some of them

in "leatherette covers," some of them in "pebble cloth," with divinity-

circuit, compensation-balance, twin-screw, and the other modern

improvements; and at the same bargain-counter can be had The Christian

Science Journal.



Christian-Science literary discharges are a monopoly of the Mother-Church

Headquarters Factory in Boston; none genuine without the trade-mark of

the Trust.  You must apply there and not elsewhere.



One hundred dollars for it.  And I have a case among my statistics where

the student had a three weeks' course and paid three hundred for it.



The Trust does love the Dollar, when it isn't a spiritual one.



In order to force the sale of Mrs Eddy's Bible-Annex, no healer,

Metaphysical-College-bred or other, is allowed to practice the game

unless he possesses a copy of that book.  That means a large and

constantly augmenting income for the Trust.  No C.S.  family would

consider itself loyal or pious or pain-proof without an Annex or two in

the house.  That means an income for the Trust, in the near future, of

millions; not thousands-millions a year.



No member, young or old, of a branch Christian-Scientist church can

acquire and retain membership in the Mother-Church unless he pay

"capitation tax" (of "not less than a dollar," say the By-Laws) to the

Boston Trust every year.  That means an income for the Trust, in the near

future, of--let us venture to say--millions more per year.



It is a reasonably safe guess that in America in 1920 there will be ten

million Christian Scientists, and three millions in Great Britain; that

these figures will be trebled in 1930; that in America in 1920 the

Christian Scientists will be a political force, in 1930 politically

formidable, and in 1940 the governing power in the Republic--to remain

that, permanently.  And I think it a reasonable guess that the Trust

(which is already in our day pretty brusque in its ways) will then be the

most insolent and unscrupulous and tyrannical politico-religious master

that has dominated a people since the palmy days of the Inquisition.  And

a stronger master than the strongest of bygone times, because this one

will have a financial strength not dreamed of by any predecessor; as

effective a concentration of irresponsible power as any predecessor has

had; in the railway, the telegraph, and the subsidized newspaper, better

facilities for watching and managing his empire than any predecessor has

had; and, after a generation or two, he will probably divide Christendom

with the Catholic Church.



The Roman Church has a perfect organization, and it has an effective

centralization of power--but not of its cash.  Its multitude of Bishops

are rich, but their riches remain in large measure in their own hands.

They collect from two hundred millions of people, but they keep the bulk

of the result at home.  The Boston Pope of by-and-by will draw his

dollar-a-head capitation-tax from three hundred millions of the human

race, and the Annex and the rest of his book-shop stock will fetch in as

much more; and his Metaphysical Colleges, the annual Pilgrimage to Mrs.

Eddy's tomb, from all over the world-admission, the Christian-Science

Dollar (payable in advance)--purchases of consecrated glass beads,

candles, memorial spoons, aureoled chrome-portraits and bogus autographs

of Mrs. Eddy; cash offerings at her shrine no crutches of cured cripples

received, and no imitations of miraculously restored broken legs and

necks allowed to be hung up except when made out of the Holy Metal and

proved by fire-assay; cash for miracles worked at the tomb: these money-

sources, with a thousand to be yet invented and ambushed upon the

devotee, will bring the annual increment well up above a billion.  And

nobody but the Trust will have the handling of it.  In that day, the

Trust will monopolize the manufacture and sale of the Old and New

Testaments as well as the Annex, and raise their price to Annex rates,

and compel the devotee to buy (for even to-day a healer has to have the

Annex and the Scriptures or he is not allowed to work the game), and that

will bring several hundred million dollars more.  In those days, the

Trust will have an income approaching five million dollars a day, and no

expenses to be taken out of it; no taxes to pay, and no charities to

support.  That last detail should not be lightly passed over by the

reader; it is well entitled to attention.



No charities to support.  No, nor even to contribute to.  One searches in

vain the Trust's advertisements and the utterances of its organs for any

suggestion that it spends a penny on orphans, widows, discharged

prisoners, hospitals, ragged schools, night missions, city missions,

libraries, old people's homes, or any other object that appeals to a

human being's purse through his heart.



I have hunted, hunted, and hunted, by correspondence and otherwise, and

have not yet got upon the track of a farthing that the Trust has spent

upon any worthy object.  Nothing makes a Scientist so uncomfortable as to

ask him if he knows of a case where Christian Science has spent money on

a benevolence, either among its own adherents or elsewhere.  He is

obliged to say "No" And then one discovers that the person questioned has

been asked the question many times before, and that it is getting to be a

sore subject with him.  Why a sore subject?  Because he has written his

chiefs and asked with high confidence for an answer that will confound

these questioners--and the chiefs did not reply.  He has written again,

and then again--not with confidence, but humbly, now--and has begged for

defensive ammunition in the voice of supplication.  A reply does at last

come to this effect: "We must have faith in Our Mother, and rest content

in the conviction that whatever She does with the money it is in

accordance with orders from Heaven, for She does no act of any kind

without first 'demonstrating over' it."



That settles it--as far as the disciple is concerned.  His mind is

satisfied with that answer; he gets down his Annex and does an

incantation or two, and that mesmerizes his spirit and puts that to

sleep--brings it peace.  Peace and comfort and joy, until some inquirer

punctures the old sore again.



Through friends in America I asked some questions, and in some cases got

definite and informing answers; in other cases the answers were not

definite and not valuable.  To the question, "Does any of the money go to

charities?" the answer from an authoritative source was: "No, not in the

sense usually conveyed by this word."  (The italics are mine.) That

answer is cautious.  But definite, I think--utterly and unassailably

definite--although quite Christian-Scientifically foggy in its phrasing.

Christian-Science testimony is generally foggy, generally diffuse,

generally garrulous.  The writer was aware that the first word in his

phrase answered the question which I was asking, but he could not help

adding nine dark words.  Meaningless ones, unless explained by him.  It

is quite likely, as intimated by him, that Christian Science has invented

a new class of objects to apply the word "charity" to, but without an

explanation we cannot know what they are.  We quite easily and naturally

and confidently guess that they are in all cases objects which will

return five hundred per cent. on the Trust's investment in them, but

guessing is not knowledge; it is merely, in this case, a sort of nine-

tenths certainty deducible from what we think we know of the Trust's

trade principles and its sly and furtive and shifty ways.



Sly?  Deep?  Judicious?  The Trust understands its business.  The Trust

does not give itself away.  It defeats all the attempts of us

impertinents to get at its trade secrets.  To this day, after all our

diligence, we have not been able to get it to confess what it does with

the money.  It does not even let its own disciples find out.  All it says

is, that the matter has been "demonstrated over."  Now and then a lay

Scientist says, with a grateful exultation, that Mrs. Eddy is enormously

rich, but he stops there; as to whether any of the money goes to other

charities or not, he is obliged to admit that he does not know.  However,

the Trust is composed of human beings; and this justifies the conjecture

that if it had a charity on its list which it was proud of, we should

soon hear of it.



"Without money and without price."  Those used to be the terms.  Mrs.

Eddy's Annex cancels them.  The motto of Christian Science is, "The

laborer is worthy of his hire."  And now that it has been "demonstrated

over," we find its spiritual meaning to be, "Do anything and everything

your hand may find to do; and charge cash for it, and collect the money

in advance."  The Scientist has on his tongue's end a cut-and-dried,

Boston-supplied set of rather lean arguments, whose function is to show

that it is a Heaven-commanded duty to do this, and that the croupiers of

the game have no choice but to obey.



The Trust seems to be a reincarnation.  Exodus xxxii. 4.



I have no reverence for the Trust, but I am not lacking in reverence for

the sincerities of the lay membership of the new Church.  There is every

evidence that the lay members are entirely sincere in their faith, and I

think sincerity is always entitled to honor and respect, let the

inspiration of the sincerity be what it may.  Zeal and sincerity can

carry a new religion further than any other missionary except fire and

sword, and I believe that the new religion will conquer the half of

Christendom in a hundred years.  I am not intending this as a compliment

to the human race; I am merely stating an opinion.  And yet I think that

perhaps it is a compliment to the race.  I keep in mind that saying of an

orthodox preacher--quoted further back.  He conceded that this new

Christianity frees its possessor's life from frets, fears, vexations,

bitterness, and all sorts of imagination-propagated maladies and pains,

and fills his world with sunshine and his heart with gladness.  If

Christian Science, with this stupendous equipment--and final salvation

added--cannot win half the Christian globe, I must be badly mistaken in

the make-up of the human race.



I think the Trust will be handed down like Me other Papacy, and will

always know how to handle its limitless cash.  It will press the button;

the zeal, the energy, the sincerity, the enthusiasm of its countless

vassals will do the rest.









CHAPTER VIII



The power which a man's imagination has over his body to heal it or make

it sick is a force which none of us is born without.  The first man had

it, the last one will possess it.  If left to himself, a man is most

likely to use only the mischievous half of the force--the half which

invents imaginary ailments for him and cultivates them; and if he is one

of these--very wise people, he is quite likely to scoff at the beneficent

half of the force and deny its existence.  And so, to heal or help that

man, two imaginations are required: his own and some outsider's.  The

outsider, B, must imagine that his incantations are the healing-power

that is curing A, and A must imagine that this is so.  I think it is not

so, at all; but no matter, the cure is effected, and that is the main

thing.  The outsider's work is unquestionably valuable; so valuable that

it may fairly be likened to the essential work performed by the engineer

when he handles the throttle and turns on the steam; the actual power is

lodged exclusively in the engine, but if the engine were left alone it

would never start of itself.  Whether the engineer be named Jim, or Bob,

or Tom, it is all one--his services are necessary, and he is entitled to

such wage as he can get you to pay.  Whether he be named Christian

Scientist, or Mental Scientist, or Mind Curist, or King's-Evil Expert, or

Hypnotist, it is all one; he is merely the Engineer; he simply turns on

the same old steam and the engine does the whole work.



The Christian-Scientist engineer drives exactly the same trade as the

other engineers, yet he out-prospers the whole of them put together.



Is it because he has captured the takingest name?  I think that that is

only a small part of it.  I think that the secret of his high prosperity

lies elsewhere.



The Christian Scientist has organized the business.  Now that was

certainly a gigantic idea.  Electricity, in limitless volume, has existed

in the air and the rocks and the earth and everywhere since time began--

and was going to waste all the while.  In our time we have organized that

scattered and wandering force and set it to work, and backed the business

with capital, and concentrated it in few and competent hands, and the

results are as we see.



The Christian Scientist has taken a force which has been lying idle in

every member of the human race since time began, and has organized it,

and backed the business with capital, and concentrated it at Boston

headquarters in the hands of a small and very competent Trust, and there

are results.



Therein lies the promise that this monopoly is going to extend its

commerce wide in the earth.  I think that if the business were conducted

in the loose and disconnected fashion customary with such things, it

would achieve but little more than the modest prosperity usually secured

by unorganized great moral and commercial ventures; but I believe that so

long as this one remains compactly organized and closely concentrated in

a Trust, the spread of its dominion will continue.









CHAPTER IX



Four years ago I wrote the preceding chapters.  I was assured by the wise

that Christian Science was a fleeting craze and would soon perish.  This

prompt and all-competent stripe of prophet is always to be had in the

market at ground-floor rates.  He does not stop to load, or consider, or

take aim, but lets fly just as he stands.  Facts are nothing to him, he

has no use for such things; he works wholly by inspiration.  And so, when

he is asked why he considers a new movement a passing fad and quickly

perishable, he finds himself unprepared with a reason and is more or less

embarrassed.  For a moment.  Only for a moment.  Then he waylays the

first spectre of a reason that goes flitting through the desert places of

his mind, and is at once serene again and ready for conflict.  Serene and

confident.  Yet he should not be so, since he has had no chance to

examine his catch, and cannot know whether it is going to help his

contention or damage it.



The impromptu reason furnished by the early prophets of whom I have

spoken was this:



"There is nothing to Christian Science; there is nothing about it that

appeals to the intellect; its market will be restricted to the

unintelligent, the mentally inferior, the people who do not think."



They called that a reason why the cult would not flourish and endure.  It

seems the equivalent of saying:



"There is no money in tinware; there is nothing about it that appeals to

the rich; its market will be restricted to the poor."



It is like bringing forward the best reason in the world why Christian

Science should flourish and live, and then blandly offering it as a

reason why it should sicken and die.



That reason was furnished me by the complacent and unfrightened prophets

four years ago, and it has been furnished me again to-day.  If

conversions to new religions or to old ones were in any considerable

degree achieved through the intellect, the aforesaid reason would be

sound and sufficient, no doubt; the inquirer into Christian Science might

go away unconvinced and unconverted.  But we all know that conversions

are seldom made in that way; that such a thing as a serious and

painstaking and fairly competent inquiry into the claims of a religion or

of a political dogma is a rare occurrence; and that the vast mass of men

and women are far from being capable of making such an examination.  They

are not capable, for the reason that their minds, howsoever good they may

be, are not trained for such examinations.  The mind not trained for that

work is no more competent to do it than are lawyers and farmers competent

to make successful clothes without learning the tailor's trade.  There

are seventy-five million men and women among us who do not know how to

cut out and make a dress-suit, and they would not think of trying; yet

they all think they can competently think out a political or religious

scheme without any apprenticeship to the business, and many of them

believe they have actually worked that miracle.  But, indeed, the truth

is, almost all the men and women of our nation or of any other get their

religion and their politics where they get their astronomy--entirely at

second hand.  Being untrained, they are no more able to intelligently

examine a dogma or a policy than they are to calculate an eclipse.



Men are usually competent thinkers along the lines of their specialized

training only.  Within these limits alone are their opinions and

judgments valuable; outside of these limits they grope and are lost--

usually without knowing it.  In a church assemblage of five hundred

persons, there will be a man or two whose trained minds can seize upon

each detail of a great manufacturing scheme and recognize its value or

its lack of value promptly; and can pass the details in intelligent

review, section by section, and finally as a whole, and then deliver a

verdict upon the scheme which cannot be flippantly set aside nor easily

answered.  And there will be one or two other men there who can do the

same thing with a great and complicated educational project; and one or

two others who can do the like with a large scheme for applying

electricity in a new and unheard-of way; and one or two others who can do

it with a showy scheme for revolutionizing the scientific world's

accepted notions regarding geology.  And so on, and so on.  But the

manufacturing experts will not be competent to examine the educational

scheme intelligently, and their opinion about it would not be valuable;

neither of these two groups will be able to understand and pass upon the

electrical scheme; none of these three batches of experts will be able to

understand and pass upon the geological revolution; and probably not one

man in the entire lot will be competent to examine, capably, the

intricacies of a political or religious scheme, new or old, and deliver a

judgment upon it which any one need regard as precious.



There you have the top crust.  There will be four hundred and seventy-

five men and women present who can draw upon their training and deliver

incontrovertible judgments concerning cheese, and leather, and cattle,

and hardware, and soap, and tar, and candles, and patent medicines, and

dreams, and apparitions, and garden trucks, and cats, and baby food, and

warts, and hymns, and time-tables, and freight-rates, and summer resorts,

and whiskey, and law, and surgery, and dentistry, and blacksmithing, and

shoemaking, and dancing, and Huyler's candy, and mathematics, and dog

fights, and obstetrics, and music, and sausages, and dry goods, and

molasses, and railroad stocks, and horses, and literature, and labor

unions, and vegetables, and morals, and lamb's fries, and etiquette, and

agriculture.  And not ten among the five hundred--let their minds be ever

so good and bright--will be competent, by grace of the requisite

specialized mental training, to take hold of a complex abstraction of any

kind and make head or tail of it.



The whole five hundred are thinkers, and they are all capable thinkers--

but only within the narrow limits of their specialized trainings.  Four

hundred and ninety of them cannot competently examine either a religious

plan or a political one.  A scattering few of them do examine both--that

is, they think they do.  With results as precious as when I examine the

nebular theory and explain it to myself.



If the four hundred and ninety got their religion through their minds,

and by weighed and measured detail, Christian Science would not be a

scary apparition.  But they don't; they get a little of it through their

minds, more of it through their feelings, and the overwhelming bulk of it

through their environment.



Environment is the chief thing to be considered when one is proposing to

predict the future of Christian Science.  It is not the ability to reason

that makes the Presbyterian, or the Baptist, or the Methodist, or the

Catholic, or the Mohammedan, or the Buddhist, or the Mormon; it is

environment.  If religions were got by reasoning, we should have the

extraordinary spectacle of an American family with a Presbyterian in it,

and a Baptist, a Methodist, a Catholic, a Mohammedan, a Buddhist, and a

Mormon.  A Presbyterian family does not produce Catholic families or

other religious brands, it produces its own kind; and not by intellectual

processes, but by association.  And so also with Mohammedanism, the cult

which in our day is spreading with the sweep of a world-conflagration

through the Orient, that native home of profound thought and of subtle

intellectual fence, that fertile womb whence has sprung every great

religion that exists.  Including our own; for with all our brains we

cannot invent a religion and market it.



The language of my quoted prophets recurs to us now, and we wonder to

think how small a space in the world the mighty Mohammedan Church would

be occupying now, if a successful trade in its line of goods had been

conditioned upon an exhibit that would "appeal to the intellect" instead

of to "the unintelligent, the mentally inferior, the people who do not

think."



The Christian Science Church, like the Mohammedan Church, makes no

embarrassing appeal to the intellect, has no occasion to do it, and can

get along quite well without it.



Provided.  Provided what?  That it can secure that thing which is worth

two or three hundred thousand times more than an "appeal to the

intellect"--an environment.  Can it get that?  Will it be a menace to

regular Christianity if it gets that?  Is it time for regular

Christianity to get alarmed?  Or shall regular Christianity smile a smile

and turn over and take another nap?  Won't it be wise and proper for

regular Christianity to do the old way, Me customary way, the historical

way--lock the stable-door after the horse is gone?  Just as Protestantism

has smiled and nodded this long time (while the alert and diligent

Catholic was slipping in and capturing the public schools), and is now

beginning to hunt around for the key when it is too late?



Will Christian Science get a chance to show its wares?  It has already

secured that chance.  Will it flourish and spread and prosper if it shall

create for itself the one thing essential to those conditions--an

environment?  It has already created an environment.  There are families

of Christian Scientists in every community in America, and each family is

a factory; each family turns out a Christian Science product at the

customary intervals, and contributes it to the Cause in the only way in

which contributions of recruits to Churches are ever made on a large

scale--by the puissant forces of personal contact and association.  Each

family is an agency for the Cause, and makes converts among the

neighbors, and starts some more factories.



Four years ago there were six Christian Scientists in a certain town that

I am acquainted with; a year ago there were two hundred and fifty there;

they have built a church, and its membership now numbers four hundred.

This has all been quietly done; done without frenzied revivals, without

uniforms, brass bands, street parades, corner oratory, or any of the

other customary persuasions to a godly life.  Christian Science, like

Mohammedanism, is "restricted" to the "unintelligent, the people who do

not think."  There lies the danger.  It makes Christian Science

formidable.  It is "restricted" to ninety-nine one-hundredths of the

human race, and must be reckoned with by regular Christianity.  And will

be, as soon as it is too late.













BOOK II



"There were remarkable things about the stranger called the Man--Mystery-

things so very extraordinary that they monopolized attention and made all

of him seem extraordinary; but this was not so, the most of his qualities

being of the common, every-day size and like anybody else's.  It was

curious.  He was of the ordinary stature, and had the ordinary aspects;

yet in him were hidden such strange contradictions and disproportions!

He was majestically fearless and heroic; he had the strength of thirty

men and the daring of thirty thousand; handling armies, organizing

states, administering governments--these were pastimes to him; he

publicly and ostentatiously accepted the human race at its own valuation-

-as demigods--and privately and successfully dealt with it at quite

another and juster valuation--as children and slaves; his ambitions were

stupendous, and his dreams had no commerce with the humble plain, but

moved with the cloud-rack among the snow-summits.  These features of him

were, indeed, extraordinary, but the rest of him was ordinary and usual.

He was so mean-minded, in the matter of jealousy, that it was thought he

was descended from a god; he was vain in little ways, and had a pride in

trivialities; he doted on ballads about moonshine and bruised hearts; in

education he was deficient, he was indifferent to literature, and knew

nothing of art; he was dumb upon all subjects but one, indifferent to all

except that one--the Nebular Theory.  Upon that one his flow of words was

full and free, he was a geyser.  The official astronomers disputed his

facts and deeded his views, and said that he had invented both, they not

being findable in any of the books.  But many of the laity, who wanted

their nebulosities fresh, admired his doctrine and adopted it, and it

attained to great prosperity in spite of the hostility of the experts."

--The Legend of the Man-Mystery, ch. i.









CHAPTER I



JANUARY, 1903.  When we do not know a public man personally, we guess him

out by the facts of his career.  When it is Washington, we all arrive at

about one and the same result.  We agree that his words and his acts

clearly interpret his character to us, and that they never leave us in

doubt as to the motives whence the words and acts proceeded.  It is the

same with Joan of Arc, it is the same with two or three or five or six

others among the immortals.  But in the matter of motives and of a few

details of character we agree to disagree upon Napoleon, Cromwell, and

all the rest; and to this list we must add Mrs. Eddy.  I think we can

peacefully agree as to two or three extraordinary features of her make-

up, but not upon the other features of it.  We cannot peacefully agree as

to her motives, therefore her character must remain crooked to some of us

and straight to the others.



No matter, she is interesting enough without an amicable agreement.  In

several ways she is the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the

most extraordinary.  The same may be said of her career, and the same may

be said of its chief result.  She started from nothing.  Her enemies

charge that she surreptitiously took from Quimby a peculiar system of

healing which was mind-cure with a Biblical basis.  She and her friends

deny that she took anything from him.  This is a matter which we can

discuss by-and-by.  Whether she took it or invented it, it was--

materially--a sawdust mine when she got it, and she has turned it into a

Klondike; its spiritual dock had next to no custom, if any at all: from

it she has launched a world-religion which has now six hundred and sixty-

three churches, and she charters a new one every four days.  When we do

not know a person--and also when we do--we have to judge his size by the

size and nature of his achievements, as compared with the achievements of

others in his special line of business--there is no other way.  Measured

by this standard, it is thirteen hundred years since the world has

produced any one who could reach up to Mrs. Eddy's waistbelt.



Figuratively speaking, Mrs. Eddy is already as tall as the Eiffel tower.

She is adding surprisingly to her stature every day.  It is quite within

the probabilities that a century hence she will be the most imposing

figure that has cast its shadow across the globe since the inauguration

of our era.  I grant that after saying these strong things, it is

necessary that I offer some details calculated to satisfactorily

demonstrate the proportions which I have claimed for her.  I will do that

presently; but before exhibiting the matured sequoia gigantea, I believe

it will be best to exhibit the sprout from which it sprang.  It may save

the reader from making miscalculations.  The person who imagines that a

Big Tree sprout is bigger than other kinds of sprouts is quite mistaken.

It is the ordinary thing; it makes no show, it compels no notice, it

hasn't a detectible quality in it that entitles it to attention, or

suggests the future giant its sap is suckling.  That is the kind of

sprout Mrs. Eddy was.



From her childhood days up to where she was running a half-century a

close race and gaining on it, she was most humanly commonplace.



She is the witness I am drawing this from.  She has revealed it in her

autobiography not intentionally, of course--I am not claiming that.  An

autobiography is the most treacherous thing there is.  It lets out every

secret its author is trying to keep; it lets the truth shine unobstructed

through every harmless little deception he tries to play; it pitilessly

exposes him as a tin hero worshipping himself as Big Metal every time he

tries to do the modest-unconsciousness act before the reader.  This is

not guessing; I am speaking from autobiographical personal experience; I

was never able to refrain from mentioning, with a studied casualness that

could deceive none but the most incautious reader, that an ancestor of

mine was sent ambassador to Spain by Charles I., nor that in a remote

branch of my family there exists a claimant to an earldom, nor that an

uncle of mine used to own a dog that was descended from the dog that was

in the Ark; and at the same time I was never able to persuade myself to

call a gibbet by its right name when accounting for other ancestors of

mine, but always spoke of it as the "platform"--puerilely intimating that

they were out lecturing when it happened.



It is Mrs. Eddy over again.  As regards her minor half, she is as

commonplace as the rest of us.  Vain of trivial things all the first half

of her life, and still vain of them at seventy and recording them with

naive satisfaction--even rescuing some early rhymes of hers of the sort

that we all scribble in the innocent days of our youth--rescuing them and

printing them without pity or apology, just as the weakest and commonest

of us do in our gray age.  More--she still frankly admires them; and in

her introduction of them profanely confers upon them the holy name of

"poetry."  Sample:



     "And laud the land whose talents rock

     The cradle of her power,

     And wreaths are twined round Plymouth Rock

     From erudition's bower."



     "Minerva's silver sandals still

     Are loosed and not effete."



You note it is not a shade above the thing which all human beings churn

out in their youth.



You would not think that in a little wee primer--for that is what the

Autobiography is--a person with a tumultuous career of seventy years

behind her could find room for two or three pages of padding of this

kind, but such is the case.  She evidently puts narrative together with

difficulty and is not at home in it, and is glad to have something ready-

made to fill in with.  Another sample:



     "Here fame-honored Hickory rears his bold form,

     And bears a brave breast to the lightning and storm,

     While Palm, Bay, and Laurel in classical glee,

     Chase Tulip, Magnolia, and fragrant Fringe-tree."



Vivid?  You can fairly see those trees galloping around.  That she could

still treasure up, and print, and manifestly admire those Poems,

indicates that the most daring and masculine and masterful woman that has

appeared in the earth in centuries has the same soft, girly-girly places

in her that the rest of us have.



When it comes to selecting her ancestors she is still human, natural,

vain, commonplace--as commonplace as I am myself when I am sorting

ancestors for my autobiography.  She combs out some creditable Scots, and

labels them and sets them aside for use, not overlooking the one to whom

Sir William Wallace gave "a heavy sword encased in a brass scabbard," and

naively explaining which Sir William Wallace it was, lest we get the

wrong one by the hassock; this is the one "from whose patriotism and

bravery comes that heart-stirring air, 'Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled.'"

Hannah More was related to her ancestors.  She explains who Hannah More

was.



Whenever a person informs us who Sir William Wallace was, or who wrote

"Hamlet," or where the Declaration of Independence was fought, it fills

us with a suspicion wellnigh amounting to conviction, that that person

would not suspect us of being so empty of knowledge if he wasn't

suffering from the same "claim" himself.  Then we turn to page 20 of the

Autobiography and happen upon this passage, and that hasty suspicion

stands rebuked:



"I gained book-knowledge with far less labor than is usually requisite.

At ten years of age I was as familiar with Lindley Murray's Grammar as

with the Westminster Catechism; and the latter I had to repeat every

Sunday.  My favorite studies were Natural Philosophy, Logic, and Moral

Science.  From my brother A1bert I received lessons in the ancient

tongues, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin."



You catch your breath in astonishment, and feel again and still again the

pang of that rebuke.  But then your eye falls upon the next sentence but

one, and the pain passes away and you set up the suspicion again with

evil satisfaction:



"After my discovery of Christian Science, most of the knowledge I had

gleaned from school-books vanished like a dream."



That disappearance accounts for much in her miscellaneous writings.  As I

was saying, she handles her "ancestral shadows," as she calls them, just

as I do mine.  It is remarkable.  When she runs across "a relative of my

Grandfather Baker, General Henry Knox, of Revolutionary fame," she sets

him down; when she finds another good one, "the late Sir John Macneill,

in the line of my Grandfather Baker's family," she sets him down, and

remembers that he "was prominent in British politics, and at one time

held the position of ambassador to Persia"; when she discovers that her

grandparents "were likewise connected with Captain John Lovewell, whose

gallant leadership and death in the Indian troubles of 1722-25 caused

that prolonged contest to be known historically as Lovewell's War," she

sets the Captain down; when it turns out that a cousin of her grandmother

"was John Macneill, the New Hampshire general, who fought at Lundy's Lane

and won distinction in 1814 at the battle of Chippewa," she catalogues

the General.  (And tells where Chippewa was.) And then she skips all her

platform people; never mentions one of them.  It shows that she is just

as human as any of us.



Yet, after all, there is something very touching in her pride in these

worthy small-fry, and something large and fine in her modesty in not

caring to remember that their kinship to her can confer no distinction

upon her, whereas her mere mention of their names has conferred upon them

a faceless earthly immortality.









CHAPTER II



When she wrote this little biography her great life-work had already been

achieved, she was become renowned; to multitudes of reverent disciples

she was a sacred personage, a familiar of God, and His inspired channel

of communication with the human race.  Also, to them these following

things were facts, and not doubted:



She had written a Bible in middle age, and had published it; she had

recast it, enlarged it, and published it again; she had not stopped

there, but had enlarged it further, polished its phrasing, improved its

form, and published it yet again.  It was at last become a compact,

grammatical, dignified, and workman-like body of literature.  This was

good training, persistent training; and in all arts it is training that

brings the art to perfection.  We are now confronted with one of the most

teasing and baffling riddles of Mrs. Eddy's history--a riddle which may

be formulated thus:



How is it that a primitive literary gun which began as a hundred-yard

flint-lock smooth-bore muzzle-loader, and in the course of forty years

has acquired one notable improvement after another--percussion cap; fixed

cartridge; rifled barrel; efficiency at half a mile how is it that such a

gun, sufficiently good on an elephant hunt (Christian Science) from the

beginning, and growing better and better all the time during forty years,

has always collapsed back to its original flint-lock estate the moment

the huntress trained it on any other creature than an elephant?



Something more than a generation ago Mrs. Eddy went out with her flint-

lock on the rabbit range; and this was a part of the result:



"After his decease, and a severe casualty deemed fatal by skilful

physicians, we discovered that the Principle of all healing and the law

that governs it is God, a divine Principle, and a spiritual not material

law, and regained health."--Preface to Science and Health, first

revision, 1883.



N.B.  Not from the book itself; from the Preface.



You will notice the awkwardness of that English.  If you should carry

that paragraph up to the Supreme Court of the United States in order to

find out for good and all whether the fatal casualty happened to the dead

man--as the paragraph almost asserts--or to some person or persons not

even hinted at in the paragraph, the Supreme Court would be obliged to

say that the evidence established nothing with certainty except that

there had been a casualty--victim not known.



The context thinks it explains who the victim was, but it does nothing of

the kind.  It furnishes some guessing-material of a sort which enables

you to infer that it was "we" that suffered the mentioned injury, but if

you should carry the language to a court you would not be able to prove

that it necessarily meant that.  "We" are Mrs. Eddy; a funny little

affectation.  She replaced it later with the more dignified third person.





The quoted paragraph is from Mrs. Eddy's preface to the first revision of

Science and Health (1883).  Sixty-four pages further along--in the body

of the book (the elephant-range), she went out with that same flint-lock

and got this following result.  Its English is very nearly as straight

and clean and competent as is the English of the latest revision of

Science and Health after the gun has been improved from smooth-bore

musket up to globe-sighted, long distance rifle:



"Man controlled by his Maker has no physical suffering.  His body is

harmonious, his days are multiplying instead of diminishing, he is

journeying towards Life instead of death, and bringing out the new man

and crucifying the old affections, cutting them off in every material

direction until he learns the utter supremacy of Spirit and yields

obedience thereto."



In the latest revision of Science and Health (1902), the perfected gun

furnishes the following.  The English is clean, compact, dignified,

almost perfect.  But it is observable that it is not prominently better

than it is in the above paragraph, which was a product of the primitive

flint-lock:



"How unreasonable is the belief that we are wearing out life and

hastening to death, and at the same time we are communing with

immortality?  If the departed are in rapport with mortality, or matter,

they are not spiritual, but must still be mortal, sinful, suffering, and

dying.  Then wherefore look to them--even were communication possible--

for proofs of immortality and accept them as oracles?"--Edition of 1902,

page 78.



With the above paragraphs compare these that follow.  It is Mrs. Eddy

writing--after a good long twenty years of pen-practice.  Compare also

with the alleged Poems already quoted.  The prominent characteristic of

the Poems is affectation, artificiality; their makeup is a complacent and

pretentious outpour of false figures and fine writing, in the sophomoric

style.  The same qualities and the same style will be found, unchanged,

unbettered, in these following paragraphs--after a lapse of more than

fifty years, and after--as aforesaid--long literary training.  The

italics are mine:



1.  "What plague spot or bacilli were [sic] gnawing [sic] at the heart of

this metropolis .  .  .  and bringing it [the heart] on bended knee?

Why, it was an institute that had entered its vitals--that, among other

things, taught games," et cetera.--C.S.  Journal, p.  670, article

entitled "A Narrative--by Mary Baker G.  Eddy."



2.  "Parks sprang up [sic] .  .  .  electric-cars run [sic] merrily

through several streets, concrete sidewalks and macadamized roads dotted

[sic] the place," et cetera.--Ibid.



3.  "Shorn [sic] of its suburbs it had indeed little left to admire, save

to [sic] such as fancy a skeleton above ground breathing [sic] slowly

through a barren [sic] breast."--Ibid.



This is not English--I mean, grown-up English.  But it is fifteen-year--

old English, and has not grown a month since the same mind produced the

Poems.  The standard of the Poems and of the plague-spot-and-bacilli

effort is exactly the same.  It is most strange that the same intellect

that worded the simple and self-contained and clean-cut paragraph

beginning with "How unreasonable is the belief," should in the very same

lustrum discharge upon the world such a verbal chaos as the utterance

concerning that plague-spot or bacilli which were gnawing at the insides

of the metropolis and bringing its heart on bended knee, thus exposing to

the eye the rest of the skeleton breathing slowly through a barren

breast.



The immense contrast between the legitimate English of Science and Health

and the bastard English of Mrs. Eddy's miscellaneous work, and between

the maturity of the one diction and the juvenility of the other,

suggests--compels--the question, Are there two guns?  It would seem so.

Is there a poor, foolish, old, scattering flint-lock for rabbit, and a

long-range, centre-driving, up-to-date Mauser-magazine for elephant?  It

looks like it.  For it is observable that in Science and Health (the

elephant-ground) the practice was good at the start and has remained so,

and that the practice in the miscellaneous, outside, small-game field was

very bad at the start and was never less bad at any later time.



I wish to say that of Mrs. Eddy I am not requiring perfect English, but

only good English.  No one can write perfect English and keep it up

through a stretch of ten chapters.  It has never been done.  It was

approached in the "well of English undefiled"; it has been approached in

Mrs. Eddy's Annex to that Book; it has been approached in several English

grammars; I have even approached it myself; but none of us has made port.



Now, the English of Science and Health is good.  In passages to be found

in Mrs. Eddy's Autobiography (on pages 53, 57, 101, and 113), and on page

6 of her squalid preface to Science and Health, first revision, she seems

to me to claim the whole and sole authorship of the book.  That she wrote

the Autobiography, and that preface, and the Poems, and the Plague-spot-

Bacilli, we are not permitted to doubt.  Indeed, we know she wrote them.

But the very certainty that she wrote these things compels a doubt that

she wrote Science and Health.  She is guilty of little awkwardnesses of

expression in the Autobiography which a practiced pen would hardly allow

to go uncorrected in even a hasty private letter, and could not dream of

passing by uncorrected in passages intended for print.  But she passes

them placidly by; as placidly as if she did not suspect that they were

offenses against third-class English.  I think that that placidity was

born of that very unawareness, so to speak.  I will cite a few instances

from the Autobiography.  The italics are mine:



"I remember reading in my childhood certain manuscripts containing

Scriptural Sonnets, besides other verses and enigmas," etc.  Page 7.



[On page 27.] "Many pale cripples went into the Church leaning on

crutches who came out carrying them on their shoulders."



It is awkward, because at the first glance it seems to say that the

cripples went in leaning on crutches which went out carrying the cripples

on their shoulders.  It would have cost her no trouble to put her "who"

after her "cripples."  I blame her a little; I think her proof-reader

should have been shot.  We may let her capital C pass, but it is another

awkwardness, for she is talking about a building, not about a religious

society.



"Marriage and Parentage "[Chapter-heading.  Page 30].  You imagine that

she is going to begin a talk about her marriage and finish with some

account of her father and mother.  And so you will be deceived.

"Marriage" was right, but "Parentage" was not the best word for the rest

of the record.  It refers to the birth of her own child.  After a certain

period of time "my babe was born."  Marriage and Motherhood-Marriage and

Maternity-Marriage and Product-Marriage and Dividend--either of these

would have fitted the facts and made the matter clear.



"Without my knowledge he was appointed a guardian."  Page 32.



She is speaking of her child.  She means that a guardian for her child

was appointed, but that isn't what she says.



"If spiritual conclusions are separated from their premises, the nexus is

lost, and the argument with its rightful conclusions, becomes

correspondingly obscure."  Page 34.



We shall never know why she put the word "correspondingly" in there.  Any

fine, large word would have answered just as well: psychosuperintangibly

--electroincandescently--oligarcheologically--sanchrosynchro-

stereoptically--any of these would have answered, any of these would have

filled the void.



"His spiritual noumenon and phenomenon silenced portraiture."  Page 34.



Yet she says she forgot everything she knew, when she discovered

Christian Science.  I realize that noumenon is a daisy; and I will not

deny that I shall use it whenever I am in a company which I think I can

embarrass with it; but, at the same time, I think it is out of place

among friends in an autobiography.  There, I think a person ought not to

have anything up his sleeve.  It undermines confidence.  But my

dissatisfaction with the quoted passage is not on account of noumenon; it

is on account of the misuse of the word "silenced."  You cannot silence

portraiture with a noumenon; if portraiture should make a noise, a way

could be found to silence it, but even then it could not be done with a

noumenon.  Not even with a brick, some authorities think.



"It may be that the mortal life-battle still wages," etc.  Page 35.



That is clumsy.  Battles do not wage, battles are waged.  Mrs. Eddy has

one very curious and interesting peculiarity: whenever she notices that

she is chortling along without saying anything, she pulls up with a

sudden "God is over us all," or some other sounding irrelevancy, and for

the moment it seems to light up the whole district; then, before you can

recover from the shock, she goes flitting pleasantly and meaninglessly

along again, and you hurry hopefully after her, thinking you are going to

get something this time; but as soon as she has led you far enough away

from her turkey lot she takes to a tree.  Whenever she discovers that she

is getting pretty disconnected, she couples-up with an ostentatious "But"

which has nothing to do with anything that went before or is to come

after, then she hitches some empties to the train-unrelated verses from

the Bible, usually--and steams out of sight and leaves you wondering how

she did that clever thing.  For striking instances, see bottom paragraph

on page 34 and the paragraph on page 35 of her Autobiography.  She has a

purpose--a deep and dark and artful purpose--in what she is saying in the

first paragraph, and you guess what it is, but that is due to your own

talent, not hers; she has made it as obscure as language could do it.

The other paragraph has no meaning and no discoverable intention.  It is

merely one of her God-over-alls.  I cannot spare room for it in this

place.



"I beheld with ineffable awe our great Master's marvelous skill in

demanding neither obedience to hygienic laws nor," etc.  Page 41.



The word is loosely chosen-skill.  She probably meant judgment,

intuition, penetration, or wisdom.



"Naturally, my first jottings were but efforts to express in feeble

diction Truth's ultimate."  Page 42.



One understands what she means, but she should have been able to say what

she meant--at any time before she discovered Christian Science and forgot

everything she knew--and after it, too.  If she had put "feeble" in front

of "efforts" and then left out "in" and "diction," she would have scored.



" .  .  .  its written expression increases in perfection under the

guidance of the great Master."  Page 43.



It is an error.  Not even in those advantageous circumstances can

increase be added to perfection.



"Evil is not mastered by evil; it can only be overcome with Good.  This

brings out the nothingness of evil, and the eternal Somethingness

vindicates the Divine Principle and improves the race of Adam."  Page 76.



This is too extraneous for me.  That is the trouble with Mrs. Eddy when

she sets out to explain an over-large exhibit: the minute you think the

light is bursting upon you the candle goes out and your mind begins to

wander.



"No one else can drain the cup which I have drunk to the dregs, as the

discoverer and teacher of Christian Science" Page 47.



That is saying we cannot empty an empty cup.  We knew it before; and we

know she meant to tell us that that particular cup is going to remain

empty.  That is, we think that that was the idea, but we cannot be sure.

She has a perfectly astonishing talent for putting words together in such

a way as to make successful inquiry into their intention impossible.



She generally makes us uneasy when she begins to tune up on her fine-

writing timbrel.  It carries me back to her Plague-Spot and Poetry days,

and I just dread those:



"Into mortal mind's material obliquity I gazed and stood abashed.

Blanched was the cheek of pride.  My heart bent low before the

omnipotence of Spirit, and a tint of humility soft as the heart of a

moonbeam mantled the earth.  Bethlehem and Bethany, Gethsemane and

Calvary, spoke to my chastened sense as by the tearful lips of a babe."

Page 48.



The heart of a moonbeam is a pretty enough Friendship's-Album expression

--let it pass, though I do think the figure a little strained; but

humility has no tint, humility has no complexion, and if it had it could

not mantle the earth.  A moonbeam might--I do not know--but she did not

say it was the moonbeam.  But let it go, I cannot decide it, she mixes me

up so.  A babe hasn't "tearful lips," it's its eyes.  You find none of

Mrs. Eddy's kind of English in Science and Health--not a line of it.









CHAPTER III



Setting aside title-page, index, etc., the little Autobiography begins on

page 7 and ends on page 130.  My quotations are from the first forty

pages.  They seem to me to prove the presence of the 'prentice hand.  The

style of the forty pages is loose and feeble and 'prentice-like.  The

movement of the narrative is not orderly and sequential, but rambles

around, and skips forward and back and here and there and yonder,

'prentice-fashion.  Many a journeyman has broken up his narrative and

skipped about and rambled around, but he did it for a purpose, for an

advantage; there was art in it, and points to be scored by it; the

observant reader perceived the game, and enjoyed it and respected it, if

it was well played.  But Mrs. Eddy's performance was without intention,

and destitute of art.  She could score no points by it on those terms,

and almost any reader can see that her work was the uncalculated

puttering of a novice.



In the above paragraph I have described the first third of the booklet.

That third being completed, Mrs. Eddy leaves the rabbit-range, crosses

the frontier, and steps out upon her far-spreading big-game territory--

Christian Science and there is an instant change!  The style smartly

improves; and the clumsy little technical offenses disappear.  In these

two-thirds of the booklet I find only one such offence, and it has the

look of being a printer's error.



I leave the riddle with the reader.  Perhaps he can explain how it is

that a person-trained or untrained--who on the one day can write nothing

better than Plague-Spot-Bacilli and feeble and stumbling and wandering

personal history littered with false figures and obscurities and

technical blunders, can on the next day sit down and write fluently,

smoothly, compactly, capably, and confidently on a great big thundering

subject, and do it as easily and comfortably as a whale paddles around

the globe.



As for me, I have scribbled so much in fifty years that I have become

saturated with convictions of one sort and another concerning a

scribbler's limitations; and these are so strong that when I am familiar

with a literary person's work I feel perfectly sure that I know enough

about his limitations to know what he can not do.  If Mr. Howells should

pretend to me that he wrote the Plague-Spot Bacilli rhapsody, I should

receive the statement courteously; but I should know it for a--well, for

a perversion.  If the late Josh Billings should rise up and tell me that

he wrote Herbert Spencer's philosophies; I should answer and say that the

spelling casts a doubt upon his claim.  If the late Jonathan Edwards

should rise up and tell me he wrote Mr. Dooley's books, I should answer

and say that the marked difference between his style and Dooley's is

argument against the soundness of his statement.  You see how much I

think of circumstantial evidence.  In literary matters--in my belief--it

is often better than any person's word, better than any shady character's

oath.  It is difficult for me to believe that the same hand that wrote

the Plague-Spot-Bacilli and the first third of the little Eddy biography

wrote also Science and Health.  Indeed, it is more than difficult, it is

impossible.



Largely speaking, I have read acres of what purported to be Mrs. Eddy's

writings, in the past two months.  I cannot know, but I am convinced,

that the circumstantial evidence shows that her actual share in the work

of composing and phrasing these things was so slight as to be

inconsequential.  Where she puts her literary foot down, her trail across

her paid polisher's page is as plain as the elephant's in a Sunday-school

procession.  Her verbal output, when left undoctored by her clerks, is

quite unmistakable It always exhibits the strongly distinctive features

observable in the virgin passages from her pen already quoted by me:



Desert vacancy, as regards thought.

Self-complacency.

Puerility.

Sentimentality.

Affectations of scholarly learning.

Lust after eloquent and flowery expression.

Repetition of pet poetic picturesquenesses.

Confused and wandering statement.

Metaphor gone insane.

Meaningless words, used because they are pretty, or showy, or unusual.

Sorrowful attempts at the epigrammatic.

Destitution of originality.



The fat volume called Miscellaneous Writings of Mrs. Eddy contains

several hundred pages.  Of the five hundred and fifty-four pages of prose

in it I find ten lines, on page 319, to be Mrs. Eddy's; also about a page

of the preface or "Prospectus"; also about fifteen pages scattered along

through the book.  If she wrote any of the rest of the prose, it was

rewritten after her by another hand.  Here I will insert two-thirds of

her page of the prospectus.  It is evident that whenever, under the

inspiration of the Deity, she turns out a book, she is always allowed to

do some of the preface.  I wonder why that is?  It always mars the work.

I think it is done in humorous malice I think the clerks like to see her

give herself away.  They know she will, her stock of usable materials

being limited and her procedure in employing them always the same,

substantially.  They know that when the initiated come upon her first

erudite allusion, or upon any one of her other stage-properties, they can

shut their eyes and tell what will follow.  She usually throws off an

easy remark all sodden with Greek or Hebrew or Latin learning; she

usually has a person watching for a star--she can seldom get away from

that poetic idea--sometimes it is a Chaldee, sometimes a Walking

Delegate, sometimes an entire stranger, but be he what he may, he is

generally there when the train is ready to move, and has his pass in his

hat-band; she generally has a Being with a Dome on him, or some other

cover that is unusual and out of the fashion; she likes to fire off a

Scripture-verse where it will make the handsomest noise and come nearest

to breaking the connection; she often throws out a Forefelt, or a

Foresplendor, or a Foreslander where it will have a fine nautical

foreto'gallant sound and make the sentence sing; after which she is

nearly sure to throw discretion away and take to her deadly passion,

Intoxicated Metaphor.  At such a time the Mrs. Eddy that does not

hesitate is lost:



"The ancient Greek looked longingly for the Olympiad.  The Chaldee

watched the appearing of a star; to him no higher destiny dawned on the

dome of being than that foreshadowed by signs in the heavens.  The meek

Nazarene, the scoffed of all scoffers, said, 'Ye can discern the face of

the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?'--for He forefelt

and foresaw the ordeal of a perfect Christianity, hated by sinners.



"To kindle all minds with a gleam of gratitude, the new idea that comes

welling up from infinite Truth needs to be understood.  The seer of this

age should be a sage.



"Humility is the stepping-stone to a higher recognition of Deity.  The

mounting sense gathers fresh forms and strange fire from the ashes of

dissolving self, and drops the world.  Meekness heightens immortal

attributes, only by removing the dust that dims them.  Goodness reveals

another scene and another self seemingly rolled up in shades, but brought

to light by the evolutions of advancing thought, whereby we discern the

power of Truth and Love to heal the sick.



"Pride is ignorance; those assume most who have the least wisdom or

experience; and they steal from their neighbor, because they have so

little of their own."--Miscellaneous Writings, page 1, and six lines at

top of page 2.



It is not believable that the hand that wrote those clumsy and affected

sentences wrote the smooth English of Science and Health.









CHAPTER IV



It is often said in print that Mrs. Eddy claims that God was the Author

of Science and Health.  Mr. Peabody states in his pamphlet that "she says

not she but God was the Author."  I cannot find that in her autobiography

she makes this transference of the authorship, but I think that in it she

definitely claims that she did her work under His inspiration--definitely

for her; for as a rule she is not a very definite person, even when she

seems to be trying her best to be clear and positive.  Speaking of the

early days when her Science was beginning to unfold itself and gather

form in her mind, she says (Autobiography, page 43):



"The divine hand led me into a new world of light and Life, a fresh

universe--old to God, but new to His 'little one.'"



She being His little one, as I understand it.



The divine hand led her.  It seems to mean "God inspired me"; but when a

person uses metaphors instead of statistics--and that is Mrs. Eddy's

common fashion--one cannot always feel sure about the intention.



[Page 56.] "Even the Scripture gave no direct interpretation of the

Scientific basis for demonstrating the spiritual Principle of healing,

until our Heavenly Father saw fit, through the Key to the Scriptures, in

Science and Health, to unlock this 'mystery of godliness.'"



Another baffling metaphor.  If she had used plain forecastle English, and

said "God wrote the Key and I put it in my book"; or if she had said "God

furnished me the solution of the mystery and I put it on paper"; or if

she had said "God did it all," then we should understand; but her phrase

is open to any and all of those translations, and is a Key which unlocks

nothing--for us.  However, it seems to at least mean "God inspired me,"

if nothing more.



There was personal and intimate communion, at any rate we get that much

out of the riddles.  The connection extended to business, after the

establishment of the teaching and healing industry.



[Page 71.] "When God impelled me to set a price on my instruction," etc.

Further down: "God has since shown me, in multitudinous ways, the wisdom

of this decision."



She was not able to think of a "financial equivalent"--meaning a

pecuniary equivalent--for her "instruction in Christian Science Mind-

healing."  In this emergency she was "led" to charge three hundred

dollars for a term of "twelve half-days."  She does not say who led her,

she only says that the amount greatly troubled her.  I think it means

that the price was suggested from above, "led" being a theological term

identical with our commercial phrase "personally conducted."  She "shrank

from asking it, but was finally led, by a strange providence, to accept

this fee."  "Providence" is another theological term.  Two leds and a

providence, taken together, make a pretty strong argument for

inspiration.  I think that these statistics make it clear that the price

was arranged above.  This view is constructively supported by the fact,

already quoted, that God afterwards approved, "in multitudinous ways,"

her wisdom in accepting the mentioned fee.  "Multitudinous ways"--

multitudinous encoring--suggests enthusiasm.  Business enthusiasm.  And

it suggests nearness.  God's nearness to his "little one."  Nearness, and

a watchful personal interest.  A warm, palpitating, Standard-Oil

interest, so to speak.  All this indicates inspiration.  We may assume,

then, two inspirations: one for the book, the other for the business.



The evidence for inspiration is further augmented by the testimony of

Rev. George Tomkins, D.D., already quoted, that Mrs. Eddy and her book

were foretold in Revelation, and that Mrs. Eddy "is God's brightest

thought to this age, giving us the spiritual interpretation of the Bible

in the 'little book'" of the Angel.



I am aware that it is not Mr. Tomkins that is speaking, but Mrs. Eddy.

The commissioned lecturers of the Christian Science Church have to be

members of the Board of Lectureship.  (By-laws Sec. 2, p. 70.) The

Board of Lectureship is selected by the Board of Directors of the Church.

(By-laws, Sec.  3, p. 70.) The Board of Directors of the Church is the

property of Mrs. Eddy.  (By-laws, p. 22.) Mr. Tomkins did not make that

statement without authorization from headquarters.  He necessarily got it

from the Board of Directors, the Board of Directors from Mrs. Eddy, Mrs.

Eddy from the Deity.  Mr. Tomkins would have been turned down by that

procession if his remarks had been unsatisfactory to it.



It may be that there is evidence somewhere--as has been claimed--that

Mrs. Eddy has charged upon the Deity the verbal authorship of Science and

Health.  But if she ever made the charge, she has withdrawn it (as it

seems to me), and in the most formal and unqualified; of all ways.  See

Autobiography, page 57:



"When the demand for this book increased .  .  .  the copyright was

infringed.  I entered a suit at Law, and my copyright was protected."



Thus it is plain that she did not plead that the Deity was the (verbal)

Author; for if she had done that, she would have lost her case--and with

rude promptness.  It was in the old days before the Berne Convention and

before the passage of our amended law of 1891, and the court would have

quoted the following stern clause from the existing statute and frowned

her out of the place:



"No Foreigner can acquire copyright in the United States."



To sum up.  The evidence before me indicates three things:



1.  That Mrs. Eddy claims the verbal author ship for herself.

2.  That she denies it to the Deity.

3.  That--in her belief--she wrote the book under the inspiration of the

Deity, but furnished the language herself.



In one place in the Autobiography she claims both the language and the

ideas; but when this witness is testifying, one must draw the line

somewhere, or she will prove both sides of her case-nine sides, if

desired.



It is too true.  Much too true.  Many, many times too true.  She is a

most trying witness--the most trying witness that ever kissed the Book, I

am sure.  There is no keeping up with her erratic testimony.  As soon as

you have got her share of the authorship nailed where you half hope and

half believe it will stay and cannot be joggled loose any more, she

joggles it loose again--or seems to; you cannot be sure, for her habit of

dealing in meaningless metaphors instead of in plain, straightforward

statistics, makes it nearly always impossible to tell just what it is she

is trying to say.  She was definite when she claimed both the language

and the ideas of the book.  That seemed to settle the matter.  It seemed

to distribute the percentages of credit with precision between the

collaborators: ninety-two per cent.  to Mrs. Eddy, who did all the work,

and eight per cent.  to the Deity, who furnished the inspiration not

enough of it to damage the copyright in a country closed against

Foreigners, and yet plenty to advertise the book and market it at famine

rates.  Then Mrs. Eddy does not keep still, but fetches around and comes

forward and testifies again.  It is most injudicious.  For she resorts to

metaphor this time, and it makes trouble, for she seems to reverse the

percentages and claim only the eight per cent.  for her self.  I quote

from Mr. Peabody's book (Eddyism, or Christian Science.  Boston: 15 Court

Square, price twenty-five cents):



"Speaking of this book, Mrs. Eddy, in January last (1901) said: 'I should

blush to write of Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, as I

have, were it of human origin, and I, apart from God, its author; but as

I was only a scribe echoing the harmonies of Heaven in divine

metaphysics, I cannot be supermodest of the Christian Science text-

book."'



Mr. Peabody's comment:



"Nothing could be plainer than that.  Here is a distinct avowal that the

book entitled Science and Health was the work of Almighty God."



It does seem to amount to that.  She was only a "scribe."  Confound the

word, it is just a confusion, it has no determinable meaning there, it

leaves us in the air.  A scribe is merely a person who writes.  He may be

a copyist, he may be an amanuensis, he may be a writer of originals, and

furnish both the language and the ideas.  As usual with Mrs. Eddy, the

connection affords no help--"echoing" throws no light upon "scribe."  A

rock can reflect an echo, a wall can do it, a mountain can do it, many

things can do it, but a scribe can't.  A scribe that could reflect an

echo could get over thirty dollars a week in a side-show.  Many

impresarios would rather have him than a cow with four tails.  If we

allow that this present scribe was setting down the "harmonies of

Heaven"--and certainly that seems to have been the case then there was

only one way to do it that I can think of: listen to the music and put

down the notes one after another as they fell.  In that case Mrs. Eddy

did not invent the tune, she only entered it on paper.  Therefore

dropping the metaphor--she was merely an amanuensis, and furnished

neither the language of Science and Health nor the ideas.  It reduces her

to eight per cent.  (and the dividends on that and the rest).



Is that it?  We shall never know.  For Mrs. Eddy is liable to testify

again at any time.  But until she does it, I think we must conclude that

the Deity was Author of the whole book, and Mrs. Eddy merely His

telephone and stenographer.  Granting this, her claim as the Voice of God

stands-for the present--justified and established.









POSTSCRIPT



I overlooked something.  It appears that there was more of that utterance

than Mr. Peabody has quoted in the above paragraph.  It will be found in

Mrs. Eddy's organ, the Christian Science Journal (January, 1901) and

reads as follows:



"It was not myself .  .  .  which dictated Science and Health, with Key

to the Scriptures."



That is certainly clear enough.  The words which I have removed from that

important sentence explain Who it was that did the dictating.  It was

done by



"the divine power of Truth and Love, infinitely above me."



Certainly that is definite.  At last, through her personal testimony, we

have a sure grip upon the following vital facts, and they settle the

authorship of Science and Health beyond peradventure:



1.  Mrs. Eddy furnished "the ideas and the language."

2.  God furnished the ideas and the language.



It is a great comfort to have the matter authoritatively settled.









CHAPTER V



It is hard to locate her, she shifts about so much.  She is a shining

drop of quicksilver which you put your finger on and it isn't there.

There is a paragraph in the Autobiography (page 96) which places in

seemingly darkly significant procession three Personages:



1.  The Virgin Mary

2.  Jesus of Nazareth.

3.  Mrs. Eddy.



This is the paragraph referred to:



"No person can take the individual place of the Virgin Mary.  No person

can compass or fulfil the individual mission of Jesus of Nazareth.  No

person can take the place of the author of Science and Health, the

discoverer and founder of Christian Science.  Each individual must fill

his own niche in time and eternity."



I have read it many times, but I still cannot be sure that I rightly

understand it.  If the Saviour's name had been placed first and the

Virgin Mary's second and Mrs. Eddy's third, I should draw the inference

that a descending scale from First Importance to Second Importance and

then to Small Importance was indicated; but to place the Virgin first,

the Saviour second, and Mrs. Eddy third, seems to turn the scale the

other way and make it an ascending scale of Importances, with Mrs. Eddy

ranking the other two and holding first place.



I think that that was perhaps the intention, but none but a seasoned

Christian Scientist can examine a literary animal of Mrs. Eddy's creation

and tell which end of it the tail is on.  She is easily the most baffling

and bewildering writer in the literary trade.



Eddy is a commonplace name, and would have an unimpressive aspect in the

list of the reformed Holy Family.  She has thought of that.  In the book

of By-laws written by her--"impelled by a power not one's own"--there is

a paragraph which explains how and when her disciples came to confer a

title upon her; and this explanation is followed by a warning as to what

will happen to any female Scientist who shall desecrate it:



"The title of Mother.  Therefore if a student of Christian Science shall

apply this title, either to herself or to others, except as the term for

kinship according to the flesh, it shall be regarded by the Church as an

indication of disrespect for their Pastor Emeritus, and unfitness to be a

member of the Mother-Church."



She is the Pastor Emeritus.



While the quoted paragraph about the Procession seems to indicate that

Mrs. Eddy is expecting to occupy the First Place in it, that expectation

is not definitely avowed.  In an earlier utterance of hers she is

clearer--clearer, and does not claim the first place all to herself, but

only the half of it.  I quote from Mr. Peabody's book again:



"In the Christian Science Journal for April, 1889, when it was her

property, and published by her, it was claimed for her, and with her

sanction, that she was equal with Jesus, and elaborate effort was made to

establish the claim.



"Mrs. Eddy has distinctly authorized the claim in her behalf that she

herself was the chosen successor to and equal of Jesus."



In her Miscellaneous Writings (using her once favorite "We" for "I") she

says that "While we entertain decided views .  .  .  and shall express

them as duty demands, we shall claim no especial gift from our divine

origin," etc.



Our divine origin.  It suggests Equal again.  It is inferable, then, that

in the near by-and-by the new Church will officially rank the Holy Family

in the following order:



1.  Jesus of Nazareth.--1.  Our Mother.

2.  The Virgin Mary.









SUMMARY



I am not playing with Christian Science and its founder, I am examining

them; and I am doing it because of the interest I feel in the inquiry.

My results may seem inadequate to the reader, but they have for me

clarified a muddle and brought a sort of order out of a chaos, and so I

value them.



My readings of Mrs. Eddy's uninspired miscellaneous literary efforts have

convinced me of several things:



1.  That she did not write Science and Health.

2.  That the Deity did (or did not) write it.

3.  That She thinks She wrote it.

4.  That She believes She wrote it under the Deity's inspiration.

5.  That She believes She is a Member of the Holy Family.

6.  That She believes She is the equal of the Head of it.



Finally, I think She is now entitled to the capital S--on her own

evidence.









CHAPTER VI



Thus far we have a part of Mrs. Eddy's portrait.  Not made of fictions,

surmises, reports, rumors, innuendoes, dropped by her enemies; no, she

has furnished all of the materials herself, and laid them on the canvas,

under my general superintendence and direction.  As far as she has gone

with it, it is the presentation of a complacent, commonplace, illiterate

New England woman who "forgot everything she knew" when she discovered

her discovery, then wrote a Bible in good English under the inspiration

of God, and climbed up it to the supremest summit of earthly grandeur

attainable by man--where she sits serene to-day, beloved and worshiped by

a multitude of human beings of as good average intelligence as is

possessed by those that march under the banner of any competing cult.

This is not intended to flatter the competing cults, it is merely a

statement of cold fact.



That a commonplace person should go climbing aloft and become a god or a

half-god or a quarter-god and be worshiped by men and women of average

intelligence, is nothing.  It has happened a million times, it will

happen a hundred million more.  It has been millions of years since the

first of these supernaturals appeared, and by the time the last one in

that inconceivably remote future shall have performed his solemn little

high-jinks on the stage and closed the business, there will be enough of

them accumulated in the museum on the Other Side to start a heaven of

their own-and jam it.



Each in his turn those little supernaturals of our by-gone ages and aeons

joined the monster procession of his predecessors and marched

horizonward, disappeared, and was forgotten.  They changed nothing, they

built nothing, they left nothing behind them to remember them by, nothing

to hold their disciples together, nothing to solidify their work and

enable it to defy the assaults of time and the weather.  They passed, and

left a vacancy.  They made one fatal mistake; they all made it, each in

his turn: they failed to organize their forces, they failed to centralize

their strength, they failed to provide a fresh Bible and a sure and

perpetual cash income for business, and often they failed to provide a

new and accepted Divine Personage to worship.



Mrs. Eddy is not of that small fry.  The materials that go to the making

of the rest of her portrait will prove it.  She will furnish them

herself:



She published her book.  She copyrighted it.  She copyrights everything.

If she should say, "Good-morning; how do you do?" she would copyright it;

for she is a careful person, and knows the value of small things.



She began to teach her Science, she began to heal, she began to gather

converts to her new religion--fervent, sincere, devoted, grateful people.

A year or two later she organized her first Christian Science

"Association," with six of her disciples on the roster.



She continued to teach and heal.  She was charging nothing, she says,

although she was very poor.  She taught and healed gratis four years

altogether, she says.



Then, in 1879-81 she was become strong enough, and well enough

established, to venture a couple of impressively important moves.  The

first of these moves was to aggrandize the "Association" to a "Church."

Brave?  It is the right name for it, I think.  The former name suggests

nothing, invited no remark, no criticism, no inquiry, no hostility; the

new name invited them all.  She must have made this intrepid venture on

her own motion.  She could have had no important advisers at that early

day.  If we accept it as her own idea and her own act--and I think we

must--we have one key to her character.  And it will explain subsequent

acts of hers that would merely stun us and stupefy us without it.  Shall

we call it courage?  Or shall we call it recklessness?  Courage observes;

reflects; calculates; surveys the whole situation; counts the cost,

estimates the odds, makes up its mind; then goes at the enterprise

resolute to win or perish.  Recklessness does not reflect, it plunges

fearlessly in with a hurrah, and takes the risks, whatever they may be,

regardless of expense.  Recklessness often fails, Mrs. Eddy has never

failed--from the point of view of her followers.  The point of view of

other people is naturally not a matter of weighty importance to her.



The new Church was not born loose-jointed and featureless, but had a

defined plan, a definite character, definite aims, and a name which was a

challenge, and defied all comers.  It was "a Mind-healing Church."  It

was "without a creed."  Its name, "The Church of Christ, Scientist."



Mrs. Eddy could not copyright her Church, but she chartered it, which was

the same thing and relieved the pain.  It had twenty-six charter members.

Mrs. Eddy was at once installed as its pastor.



The other venture, above referred to, was Mrs. Eddy's Massachusetts

Metaphysical College, in which was taught "the pathology of spiritual

power."  She could not copyright it, but she got it chartered.  For

faculty it had herself, her husband of the period (Dr.  Eddy), and her

adopted son, Dr.  Foster-Eddy.  The college term was "barely three

weeks," she says.  Again she was bold, brave, rash, reckless--choose for

yourself--for she not only began to charge the student, but charged him a

hundred dollars a week for the enlightenments.  And got it?  some may

ask.  Easily.  Pupils flocked from far and near.  They came by the

hundred.  Presently the term was cut down nearly half, but the price

remained as before.  To be exact, the term-cut was to seven lessons--

price, three hundred dollars.  The college "yielded a large income."

This is believable.  In seven years Mrs. Eddy taught, as she avers, over

four thousand students in it.  (Preface to 1902 edition of Science and

Health.) Three hundred times four thousand is--but perhaps you can cipher

it yourself.  I could do it ordinarily, but I fell down yesterday and

hurt my leg.  Cipher it; you will see that it is a grand sum for a woman

to earn in seven years.  Yet that was not all she got out of her college

in the seven.



At the time that she was charging the primary student three hundred

dollars for twelve lessons she was not content with this tidy assessment,

but had other ways of plundering him.  By advertisement she offered him

privileges whereby he could add eighteen lessons to his store for five

hundred dollars more.  That is to say, he could get a total of thirty

lessons in her college for eight hundred dollars.



Four thousand times eight hundred is--but it is a difficult sum for a

cripple who has not been "demonstrated over" to cipher; let it go.  She

taught "over" four thousand students in seven years.  "Over" is not

definite, but it probably represents a non-paying surplus of learners

over and above the paying four thousand.  Charity students, doubtless.  I

think that as interesting an advertisement as has been printed since the

romantic old days of the other buccaneers is this one from the Christian

Science Journal for September, 1886:





"MASSACHUSETTS METAPHYSICAL COLLEGE



"Rev. MARY BAKER G.  EDDY, PRESIDENT



"571 Columbus Avenue, Boston



"The collegiate course in Christian Science metaphysical healing includes

twelve lessons.  Tuition, three hundred dollars.



"Course in metaphysical obstetrics includes six daily lectures, and is

open only to students from this college.  Tuition, one hundred dollars.



"Class in theology, open (like the above) to graduates, receives six

additional lectures on the Scriptures, and summary of the principle and

practice of Christian Science, two hundred dollars.



"Normal class is open to those who have taken the first course at this

college; six daily lectures complete the Normal course.  Tuition, two

hundred dollars.



"No invalids, and only persons of good moral character, are accepted as

students.  All students are subject to examination and rejection; and

they are liable to leave the class if found unfit to remain in it.



"A limited number of clergymen received free of charge.



"Largest discount to indigent students, one hundred dollars on the first

course.



"No deduction on the others.



"Husband and wife, entered together, three hundred dollars.



"Tuition for all strictly in advance."





There it is--the horse-leech's daughter alive again, after a three-

century vacation.  Fifty or sixty hours' lecturing for eight hundred

dollars.



I was in error as to one matter: there are no charity students.  Gratis-

taught clergymen must not be placed under that head; they are merely an

advertisement.  Pauper students can get into the infant class on a two-

third rate (cash in advance), but not even an archangel can get into the

rest of the game at anything short of par, cash down.  For it is "in the

spirit of Christ's charity, as one who is joyful to bear healing to the

sick "that Mrs. Eddy is working the game.  She sends the healing to them

outside.  She cannot bear it to them inside the college, for the reason

that she does not allow a sick candidate to get in.  It is true that this

smells of inconsistency, but that is nothing; Mrs. Eddy would not be Mrs.

Eddy if she should ever chance to be consistent about anything two days

running.



Except in the matter of the Dollar.  The Dollar, and appetite for power

and notoriety.  English must also be added; she is always consistent, she

is always Mrs. Eddy, in her English: it is always and consistently

confused and crippled and poor.  She wrote the Advertisement; her

literary trade-marks are there.  When she says all "students" are subject

to examination, she does not mean students, she means candidates for that

lofty place When she says students are "liable" to leave the class if

found unfit to remain in it, she does not mean that if they find

themselves unfit, or be found unfit by others, they will be likely to ask

permission to leave the class; she means that if she finds them unfit she

will be "liable" to fire them out.  When she nobly offers "tuition for

all strictly in advance," she does not mean "instruction for all in

advance-payment for it later."  No, that is only what she says, it is not

what she means.  If she had written Science and Health, the oldest man in

the world would not be able to tell with certainty what any passage in it

was intended to mean.



Her Church was on its legs.



She was its pastor.  It was prospering.



She was appointed one of a committee to draught By-laws for its

government.  It may be observed, without overplus of irreverence, that

this was larks for her.  She did all of the draughting herself.  From the

very beginning she was always in the front seat when there was business

to be done; in the front seat, with both eyes open, and looking sharply

out for Number One; in the front seat, working Mortal Mind with fine

effectiveness and giving Immortal Mind a rest for Sunday.  When her

Church was reorganized, by-and-by, the By-laws were retained.  She saw to

that.  In these Laws for the government of her Church, her empire, her

despotism, Mrs. Eddy's character is embalmed for good and all.  I think a

particularized examination of these Church-laws will be found

interesting.  And not the less so if we keep in mind that they were

"impelled by a power not one's own," as she says--Anglice.  the

inspiration of God.



It is a Church "without a creed."  Still, it has one.  Mrs. Eddy

draughted it--and copyrighted it.  In her own name.  You cannot become a

member of the Mother-Church (nor of any Christian Science Church) without

signing it.  It forms the first chapter of the By-laws, and is called

"Tenets."  "Tenets of The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ,

Scientist."  It has no hell in it--it throws it overboard.









THE PASTOR EMERITUS



About the time of the reorganization, Mrs. Eddy retired from her position

of pastor of her Church, abolished the office of pastor in all branch

Churches, and appointed her book, Science and Health, to be pastor-

universal.  Mrs. Eddy did not disconnect herself from the office

entirely, when she retired, but appointed herself Pastor Emeritus.  It is

a misleading title, and belongs to the family of that phrase "without a

creed."  It advertises her as being a merely honorary official, with

nothing to do, and no authority.  The Czar of Russia is Emperor Emeritus

on the same terms.  Mrs. Eddy was Autocrat of the Church before, with

limitless authority, and she kept her grip on that limitless authority

when she took that fictitious title.



It is curious and interesting to note with what an unerring instinct the

Pastor Emeritus has thought out and forecast all possible encroachments

upon her planned autocracy, and barred the way against them, in the By-

laws which she framed and copyrighted--under the guidance of the Supreme

Being.









THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS



For instance, when Article I.  speaks of a President and Board of

Directors, you think you have discovered a formidable check upon the

powers and ambitions of the honorary pastor, the ornamental pastor, the

functionless pastor, the Pastor Emeritus, but it is a mistake.  These

great officials are of the phrase--family of the Church-Without-a-Creed

and the Pastor-With-Nothing-to-Do; that is to say, of the family of

Large-Names-Which-Mean-Nothing.  The Board is of so little consequence

that the By-laws do not state how it is chosen, nor who does it; but they

do state, most definitely, that the Board cannot fill a vacancy in its

number "except the candidate is approved by the Pastor Emeritus."



The "candidate."  The Board cannot even proceed to an election until the

Pastor Emeritus has examined the list and squelched such candidates as

are not satisfactory to her.



Whether the original first Board began as the personal property of Mrs.

Eddy or not, it is foreseeable that in time, under this By-law, she would

own it.  Such a first Board might chafe under such a rule as that, and

try to legislate it out of existence some day.  But Mrs. Eddy was awake.

She foresaw that danger, and added this ingenious and effective clause:



"This By-law can neither be amended nor annulled, except by consent of

Mrs. Eddy, the Pastor Emeritus"









THE PRESIDENT



The Board of Directors, or Serfs, or Ciphers, elects the President.



On these clearly worded terms: "Subject to the approval of the Pastor

Emeritus."



Therefore She elects him.



A long term can invest a high official with influence and power, and make

him dangerous.  Mrs. Eddy reflected upon that; so she limits the

President's term to a year.  She has a capable commercial head, an

organizing head, a head for government.









TREASURER AND CLERK



There are a Treasurer and a Clerk.  They are elected by the Board of

Directors.  That is to say, by Mrs. Eddy.



Their terms of office expire on the first Tuesday in June of each year,

"or upon the election of their successors."  They must be watchfully

obedient and satisfactory to her, or she will elect and install their

successors with a suddenness that can be unpleasant to them.  It goes

without saying that the Treasurer manages the Treasury to suit Mrs. Eddy,

and is in fact merely Temporary Deputy Treasurer.



Apparently the Clerk has but two duties to perform: to read messages from

Mrs. Eddy to First Members assembled in solemn Council, and provide lists

of candidates for Church membership.  The select body entitled First

Members are the aristocracy of the Mother-Church, the Charter Members,

the Aborigines, a sort of stylish but unsalaried little College of

Cardinals, good for show, but not indispensable.  Nobody is indispensable

in Mrs. Eddy's empire; she sees to that.



When the Pastor Emeritus sends a letter or message to that little

Sanhedrin, it is the Clerk's "imperative duty" to read it "at the place

and time specified."  Otherwise, the world might come to an end.  These

are fine, large frills, and remind us of the ways of emperors and such.

Such do not use the penny-post, they send a gilded and painted special

messenger, and he strides into the Parliament, and business comes to a

sudden and solemn and awful stop; and in the impressive hush that

follows, the Chief Clerk reads the document.  It is his "imperative

duty."  If he should neglect it, his official life would end.  It is the

same with this Mother-Church Clerk; "if he fail to perform this important

function of his office," certain majestic and unshirkable solemnities

must follow: a special meeting "shall" be called; a member of the Church

"shall" make formal complaint; then the Clerk "shall" be "removed from

office."  Complaint is sufficient, no trial is necessary.



There is something very sweet and juvenile and innocent and pretty about

these little tinsel vanities, these grave apings of monarchical fuss and

feathers and ceremony, here on our ostentatiously democratic soil.  She

is the same lady that we found in the Autobiography, who was so naively

vain of all that little ancestral military riffraff that she had dug up

and annexed.  A person's nature never changes.  What it is in childhood,

it remains.  Under pressure, or a change of interest, it can partially or

wholly disappear from sight, and for considerable stretches of time, but

nothing can ever permanently modify it, nothing can ever remove it.









BOARD OF TRUSTEES



There isn't any--now.  But with power and money piling up higher and

higher every day and the Church's dominion spreading daily wider and

farther, a time could come when the envious and ambitious could start the

idea that it would be wise and well to put a watch upon these assets--

a watch equipped with properly large authority.  By custom, a Board of

Trustees.  Mrs. Eddy has foreseen that probability--for she is a woman

with a long, long look ahead, the longest look ahead that ever a woman

had--and she has provided for that emergency.  In Art. I., Sec. 5, she

has decreed that no Board of Trustees shall ever exist in the Mother-

Church "except it be constituted by the Pastor Emeritus."



The magnificence of it, the daring of it!  Thus far, she is



The Massachusetts Metaphysical College;

Pastor Emeritus;

President;

Board of Directors;

Treasurer;

Clerk;

and future Board of Trustees;



and is still moving onward, ever onward.  When I contemplate her from a

commercial point of view, there are no words that can convey my

admiration of her.









READERS



These are a feature of first importance in the church-machinery of

Christian Science.  For they occupy the pulpit.  They hold the place that

the preacher holds in the other Christian Churches.  They hold that

place, but they do not preach.  Two of them are on duty at a time--a man

and a woman.  One reads a passage from the Bible, the other reads the

explanation of it from Science and Health--and so they go on alternating.

This constitutes the service--this, with choir-music.  They utter no word

of their own.  Art. IV., Sec. 6, closes their mouths with this

uncompromising gag:



"They shall make no remarks explanatory of the Lesson-Sermon at any time

during the service."



It seems a simple little thing.  One is not startled by it at a first

reading of it; nor at the second, nor the third.  One may have to read it

a dozen times before the whole magnitude of it rises before the mind.  It

far and away oversizes and outclasses the best business-idea yet invented

for the safe-guarding and perpetuating of a religion.  If it had been

thought of and put in force eighteen hundred and seventy years ago, there

would be but one Christian sect in the world now, instead of ten dozens

of them.



There are many varieties of men in the world, consequently there are many

varieties of minds in its pulpits.  This insures many differing

interpretations of important Scripture texts, and this in turn insures

the splitting up of a religion into many sects.  It is what has happened;

it was sure to happen.



Mrs. Eddy has noted this disastrous result of preaching, and has put up

the bars.  She will have no preaching in her Church.  She has explained

all essential Scriptures, and set the explanations down in her book.  In

her belief her underlings cannot improve upon those explanations, and in

that stern sentence "they shall make no explanatory remarks" she has

barred them for all time from trying.  She will be obeyed; there is no

question about that.



In arranging her government she has borrowed ideas from various sources--

not poor ones, but the best in the governmental market--but this one is

new, this one came out of no ordinary business-head, this one must have

come out of her own, there has been no other commercial skull in a

thousand centuries that was equal to it.  She has borrowed freely and

wisely, but I am sure that this idea is many times larger than all her

borrowings bulked together.  One must respect the business-brain that

produced it--the splendid pluck and impudence that ventured to promulgate

it, anyway.









ELECTION OF READERS



Readers are not taken at hap-hazard, any more than preachers are taken at

hap-hazard for the pulpits of other sects.  No, Readers are elected by

the Board of Directors.  But--



"Section 3.  The Board shall inform the Pas.  for Emeritus of the names

of candidates for Readers before they are elected, and if she objects to

the nomination, said candidates shall not be chosen."



Is that an election--by the Board?  Thus far I have not been able to find

out what that Board of Spectres is for.  It certainly has no real

function, no duty which the hired girl could not perform, no office

beyond the mere recording of the autocrat's decrees.



There are no dangerously long office-terms in Mrs. Eddy's government.

The Readers are elected for but one year.  This insures their

subserviency to their proprietor.



Readers are not allowed to copy out passages and read them from the

manuscript in the pulpit; they must read from Mrs. Eddy's book itself.

She is right.  Slight changes could be slyly made, repeated, and in time

get acceptance with congregations.  Branch sects could grow out of these

practices.  Mrs. Eddy knows the human race, and how far to trust it.  Her

limit is not over a quarter of an inch.  It is all that a wise person

will risk.



Mrs. Eddy's inborn disposition to copyright everything, charter

everything, secure the rightful and proper credit to herself for

everything she does, and everything she thinks she does, and everything

she thinks, and everything she thinks she thinks or has thought or

intends to think, is illustrated in Sec. 5 of Art. IV., defining the

duties of official Readers--in church:



"Naming Book and Author.  The Reader of Science and Health, with Key to

the Scriptures, before commencing to read from this book, shall

distinctly announce its full title and give the author's name."



Otherwise the congregation might get the habit of forgetting who

(ostensibly) wrote the book.









THE ARISTOCRACY



This consists of First Members and their apostolic succession.  It is a

close corporation, and its membership limit is one hundred.  Forty will

answer, but if the number fall below that, there must be an election, to

fill the grand quorum.



This Sanhedrin can't do anything of the slightest importance, but it can

talk.  It can "discuss."  That is, it can discuss "important questions

relative to Church members", evidently persons who are already Church

members.  This affords it amusement, and does no harm.



It can "fix the salaries of the Readers."



Twice a year it "votes on" admitting candidates.  That is, for Church

membership.  But its work is cut out for it beforehand, by Art. IX.:



"Every recommendation for membership In the Church 'shall be

countersigned by a loyal student of Mrs. Eddy's, by a Director of this

Church, or by a First Member.'"



All these three classes of beings are the personal property of Mrs. Eddy.

She has absolute control of the elections.



Also it must "transact any Church business that may properly come before

it."



"Properly" is a thoughtful word.  No important business can come before

it.  The By laws have attended to that.  No important business goes

before any one for the final word except Mrs. Eddy.  She has looked to

that.



The Sanhedrin "votes on" candidates for admission to its own body.  But

is its vote worth any more than mine would be?  No, it isn't.  Sec.  4,

of Art.  V.--Election of First Members--makes this quite plain:



"Before being elected, the candidates for First Members shall be approved

by the Pastor Emeritus over her own signature."



Thus the Sanhedrin is the personal property of Mrs. Eddy.  She owns it.

It has no functions, no authority, no real existence.  It is another

Board of Shadows.  Mrs. Eddy is the Sanhedrin herself.



But it is time to foot up again and "see where we are at."  Thus far,

Mrs. Eddy is



The Massachusetts Metaphysical College;

Pastor Emeritus,

President;

Board of Directors;

Treasurer;

Clerk;

Future Board of Trustees;

Proprietor of the Priesthood:

Dictator of the Services;

Proprietor of the Sanhedrin.  She has come far, and is still on her way.









CHURCH MEMBERSHIP



In this Article there is another exhibition of a couple of the large

features of Mrs. Eddy's remarkable make-up: her business-talent and her

knowledge of human nature.



She does not beseech and implore people to join her Church.  She knows

the human race better than that.  She gravely goes through the motions of

reluctantly granting admission to the applicant as a favor to him.  The

idea is worth untold shekels.  She does not stand at the gate of the fold

with welcoming arms spread, and receive the lost sheep with glad emotion

and set up the fatted calf and invite the neighbor and have a time.  No,

she looks upon him coldly, she snubs him, she says:



"Who are you?  Who is your sponsor?  Who asked you to come here?  Go

away, and don't come again until you are invited."



It is calculated to strikingly impress a person accustomed to Moody and

Sankey and Sam Jones revivals; accustomed to brain-turning appeals to the

unknown and unendorsed sinner to come forward and enter into the joy,

etc.--"just as he is"; accustomed to seeing him do it; accustomed to

seeing him pass up the aisle through sobbing seas of welcome, and love,

and congratulation, and arrive at the mourner's bench and be received

like a long-lost government bond.



No, there is nothing of that kind in Mrs. Eddy's system.  She knows that

if you wish to confer upon a human being something which he is not sure

he wants, the best way is to make it apparently difficult for him to get

it--then he is no son of Adam if that apple does not assume an interest

in his eyes which it lacked before.  In time this interest can grow into

desire.  Mrs. Eddy knows that when you cannot get a man to try--free of

cost--a new and effective remedy for a disease he is afflicted with, you

can generally sell it to him if you will put a price upon it which he

cannot afford.  When, in the beginning, she taught Christian Science

gratis (for good reasons), pupils were few and reluctant, and required

persuasion; it was when she raised the limit to three hundred dollars for

a dollar's worth that she could not find standing room for the invasion

of pupils that followed.



With fine astuteness she goes through the motions of making it difficult

to get membership in her Church.  There is a twofold value in this

system: it gives membership a high value in the eyes of the applicant;

and at the same time the requirements exacted enable Mrs. Eddy to keep

him out if she has doubts about his value to her.  A word further as to

applications for membership:



"Applications of students of the Metaphysical College must be signed by

the Board of Directors."



That is safe.  Mrs. Eddy is proprietor of that Board.



Children of twelve may be admitted if invited by "one of Mrs. Eddy's

loyal students, or by a First Member, or by a Director."



These sponsors are the property of Mrs. Eddy, therefore her Church is

safeguarded from the intrusion of undesirable children.



Other Students.  Applicants who have not studied with Mrs. Eddy can get

in only "by invitation and recommendation from students of Mrs. Eddy....

or from members of the Mother-Church."



Other paragraphs explain how two or three other varieties of applicants

are to be challenged and obstructed, and tell us who is authorized to

invite them, recommend them endorse them, and all that.



The safeguards are definite, and would seem to be sufficiently strenuous

--to Mr. Sam Jones, at any rate.  Not for Mrs. Eddy.  She adds this

clincher:



"The candidates be elected by a majority vote of the First Members

present."



That is the aristocracy, the aborigines, the Sanhedrin.  It is Mrs.

Eddy's property.  She herself is the Sanhedrin.  No one can get into the

Church if she wishes to keep him out.



This veto power could some time or other have a large value for her,

therefore she was wise to reserve it.



It is likely that it is not frequently used.  It is also probable that

the difficulties attendant upon getting admission to membership have been

instituted more to invite than to deter, more to enhance the value of

membership and make people long for it than to make it really difficult

to get.  I think so, because the Mother.  Church has many thousands of

members more than its building can accommodate.









AND SOME ENGLISH REQUIRED



Mrs. Eddy is very particular as regards one detail curiously so, for her,

all things considered.  The Church Readers must be "good English

scholars"; they must be "thorough English scholars."



She is thus sensitive about the English of her subordinates for cause,

possibly.  In her chapter defining the duties of the Clerk there is an

indication that she harbors resentful memories of an occasion when the

hazy quality of her own English made unforeseen and mortifying trouble:



"Understanding Communications.  Sec.  2.  If the Clerk of this Church

shall receive a communication from the Pastor Emeritus which he does not

fully understand, he shall inform her of this fact before presenting it

to the Church, and obtain a clear understanding of the matter--then act

in accordance therewith."



She should have waited to calm down, then, but instead she added this,

which lacks sugar:



"Failing to adhere to this By-law, the Clerk must resign."



I wish I could see that communication that broke the camel's back.  It

was probably the one beginning: "What plague spot or bacilli were gnawing

at the heart of this metropolis and bringing it on bended knee?" and I

think it likely that the kindly disposed Clerk tried to translate it into

English and lost his mind and had to go to the hospital.  That Bylaw was

not the offspring of a forecast, an intuition, it was certainly born of a

sorrowful experience.  Its temper gives the fact away.



The little book of By-laws has manifestly been tinkered by one of Mrs.

Eddy's "thorough English scholars," for in the majority of cases its

meanings are clear.  The book is not even marred by Mrs. Eddy's peculiar

specialty--lumbering clumsinesses of speech.  I believe the salaried

polisher has weeded them all out but one.  In one place, after referring

to Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy goes on to say "the Bible and the above-

-named book, with other works by the same author," etc.



It is an unfortunate sentence, for it could mislead a hasty or careless

reader for a moment.  Mrs. Eddy framed it--it is her very own--it bears

her trade-mark.  "The Bible and Science and Health, with other works by

the same author," could have come from no literary vacuum but the one

which produced the remark (in the Autobiography): "I remember reading, in

my childhood, certain manuscripts containing Scriptural Sonnets, besides

other verses and enigmas."



We know what she means, in both instances, but a low-priced Clerk would

not necessarily know, and on a salary like his he could quite excusably

aver that the Pastor Emeritus had commanded him to come and make

proclamation that she was author of the Bible, and that she was thinking

of discharging some Scriptural sonnets and other enigmas upon the

congregation.  It could lose him his place, but it would not be fair, if

it happened before the edict about "Understanding Communications" was

promulgated.









"READERS" AGAIN



The By-law book makes a showy pretence of orderliness and system, but it

is only a pretence.  I will not go so far as to say it is a harum-scarum

jumble, for it is not that, but I think it fair to say it is at least

jumbulacious in places.  For instance, Articles III.  and IV.  set forth

in much detail the qualifications and duties of Readers, she then skips

some thirty pages and takes up the subject again.  It looks like

slovenliness, but it may be only art.  The belated By-law has a

sufficiently quiet look, but it has a ton of dynamite in it.  It makes

all the Christian Science Church Readers on the globe the personal

chattels of Mrs. Eddy.  Whenever she chooses, she can stretch her long

arm around the world's fat belly and flirt a Reader out of his pulpit,

though he be tucked away in seeming safety and obscurity in a lost

village in the middle of China:



"In any Church.  Sec.  2.  The Pastor Emeritus of the Mother-Church shall

have the right (through a letter addressed to the individual and Church

of which he is the Reader) to remove a Reader from this office in any

Church of Christ, Scientist, both in America and in foreign nations; or

to appoint the Reader to fill any office belonging to the Christian

Science denomination."



She does not have to prefer charges against him, she does not have to

find him lazy, careless, incompetent, untidy, ill-mannered, unholy,

dishonest, she does not have to discover a fault of any kind in him, she

does not have to tell him nor his congregation why she dismisses and

disgraces him and insults his meek flock, she does not have to explain to

his family why she takes the bread out of their mouths and turns them

out-of-doors homeless and ashamed in a strange land; she does not have to

do anything but send a letter and say: "Pack!--and ask no questions!"



Has the Pope this power?--the other Pope--the one in Rome.  Has he

anything approaching it?  Can he turn a priest out of his pulpit and

strip him of his office and his livelihood just upon a whim, a caprice,

and meanwhile furnishing no reasons to the parish?  Not in America.  And

not elsewhere, we may believe.



It is odd and strange, to see intelligent and educated people among us

worshipping this self-seeking and remorseless tyrant as a God.  This

worship is denied--by persons who are themselves worshippers of Mrs.

Eddy.  I feel quite sure that it is a worship which will continue during

ages.



That Mrs. Eddy wrote that amazing By-law with her own hand we have much

better evidence than her word.  We have her English.  It is there.  It

cannot be imitated.  She ought never to go to the expense of copyrighting

her verbal discharges.  When any one tries to claim them she should call

me; I can always tell them from any other literary apprentice's at a

glance.  It was like her to call America a "nation"; she would call a

sand-bar a nation if it should fall into a sentence in which she was

speaking of peoples, for she would not know how to untangle it and get it

out and classify it by itself.  And the closing arrangement of that By-

law is in true Eddysonian form, too.  In it she reserves authority to

make a Reader fill any office connected with a Science church-sexton,

grave-digger, advertising-agent, Annex-polisher, leader of the choir,

President, Director, Treasurer, Clerk, etc.  She did not mean that.  She

already possessed that authority.  She meant to clothe herself with

power, despotic and unchallengeable, to appoint all Science Readers to

their offices, both at home and abroad.  The phrase "or to appoint" is

another miscarriage of intention; she did not mean "or," she meant "and."





That By-law puts into Mrs. Eddy's hands absolute command over the most

formidable force and influence existent in the Christian Science kingdom

outside of herself, and it does this unconditionally and (by auxiliary

force of Laws already quoted) irrevocably.  Still, she is not quite

satisfied.  Something might happen, she doesn't know what.  Therefore she

drives in one more nail, to make sure, and drives it deep:



"This By-law can neither be amended nor annulled, except by consent of

the Pastor Emeritus."



Let some one with a wild and delirious fancy try and see if he can

imagine her furnishing that consent.









MONOPOLY OF SPIRITUAL BREAD



Very properly, the first qualification for membership in the Mother-

Church is belief in the doctrines of Christian Science.



But these doctrines must not be gathered from secondary sources.  There

is but one recognized source.  The candidate must be a believer in the

doctrines of Christian Science "according to the platform and teaching

contained in the Christian Science text-book, 'Science and Health, with

Key to the Scriptures,' by Rev. Mary Baker G.  Eddy."



That is definite, and is final.  There are to be no commentaries, no

labored volumes of exposition and explanation by anybody except Mrs.

Eddy.  Because such things could sow error, create warring opinions,

split the religion into sects, and disastrously cripple its power.  Mrs.

Eddy will do the whole of the explaining, Herself--has done it, in fact.

She has written several books.  They are to be had (for cash in advance),

they are all sacred; additions to them can never be needed and will never

be permitted.  They tell the candidate how to instruct himself, how to

teach others, how to do all things comprised in the business--and they

close the door against all would-be competitors, and monopolize the

trade:



"The Bible and the above--named book [Science and Health], with other

works by the same author," must be his only text-books for the commerce--

he cannot forage outside.



Mrs. Eddy's words are to be the sole elucidators of the Bible and Science

and Health--forever.  Throughout the ages, whenever there is doubt as to

the meaning of a passage in either of these books the inquirer will not

dream of trying to explain it to himself; he would shudder at the thought

of such temerity, such profanity, he would be haled to the Inquisition

and thence to the public square and the stake if he should be caught

studying into text-meanings on his own hook; he will be prudent and seek

the meanings at the only permitted source, Mrs. Eddy's commentaries.



Value of this Strait-jacket.  One must not underrate the magnificence of

this long-headed idea, one must not underestimate its giant possibilities

in the matter of trooping the Church solidly together and keeping it so.

It squelches independent inquiry, and makes such a thing impossible,

profane, criminal, it authoritatively settles every dispute that can

arise.  It starts with finality--a point which the Roman Church has

travelled towards fifteen or sixteen centuries, stage by stage, and has

not yet reached.  The matter of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin

Mary was not authoritatively settled until the days of Pius IX.--

yesterday, so to speak.



As already noticed, the Protestants are broken up into a long array of

sects, a result of disputes about the meanings of texts, disputes made

unavoidable by the absence of an infallible authority to submit doubtful

passages to.  A week or two ago (I am writing in the middle of January,

1903), the clergy and others hereabouts had a warm dispute in the papers

over this question: Did Jesus anywhere claim to be God?  It seemed an

easy question, but it turned out to be a hard one.  It was ably and

elaborately discussed, by learned men of several denominations, but in

the end it remained unsettled.



A week ago, another discussion broke out.  It was over this text:



"Sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor."



One verdict was worded as follows:



"When Christ answered the rich young man and said for him to give to the

poor all he possessed or he could not gain everlasting life, He did not

mean it in the literal sense.  My interpretation of His words is that we

should part with what comes between us and Christ.



"There is no doubt that Jesus believed that the rich young man thought

more of his wealth than he did of his soul, and, such being the case, it

was his duty to give up the wealth.



"Every one of us knows that there is something we should give up for

Christ.  Those who are true believers and followers know what they have

given up, and those who are not yet followers know down in their hearts

what they must give up."



Ten clergymen of various denominations were interviewed, and nine of them

agreed with that verdict.  That did not settle the matter, because the

tenth said the language of Jesus was so strait and definite that it

explained itself: "Sell all," not a percentage.



There is a most unusual feature about that dispute: the nine persons who

decided alike, quoted not a single authority in support of their

position.  I do not know when I have seen trained disputants do the like

of that before.  The nine merely furnished their own opinions, founded

upon--nothing at all.  In the other dispute ("Did Jesus anywhere claim to

be God?") the same kind of men--trained and learned clergymen--backed up

their arguments with chapter and verse.  On both sides.  Plenty of

verses.  Were no reinforcing verses to be found in the present case?  It

looks that way.



The opinion of the nine seems strange to me, for it is unsupported by

authority, while there was at least constructive authority for the

opposite view.



It is hair-splitting differences of opinion over disputed text-meanings

that have divided into many sects a once united Church.  One may infer

from some of the names in the following list that some of the differences

are very slight--so slight as to be not distinctly important, perhaps--

yet they have moved groups to withdraw from communions to which they

belonged and set up a sect of their own.  The list--accompanied by

various Church statistics for 1902, compiled by Rev. Dr.  H.  K.

Carroll--was published, January 8, 1903, in the New York Christian

Advocate:



Adventists (6 bodies), Baptists (13 bodies), Brethren (Plymouth) (4

bodies), Brethren (River) (3 bodies), Catholics (8 bodies), Catholic

Apostolic, Christadelphians, Christian Connection, Christian Catholics,

Christian Missionary Association, Christian Scientists, Church of God

(Wine-brennarian), Church of the New Jerusalem, Congregationalists,

Disciples of Christ, Dunkards (4 bodies), Evangelical (2 bodies), Friends

(4 bodies), Friends of the Temple, German Evangelical Protestant, German

Evangelical Synod, Independent congregations, Jews (2 bodies), Latter-day

Saints (2 bodies), Lutherans (22 bodies), Mennonites (12 bodies),

Methodists (17 bodies), Moravians, Presbyterians (12 bodies), Protestant

Episcopal (2 bodies), Reformed (3 bodies), Schwenkfeldians, Social

Brethren, Spiritualists, Swedish Evangelical Miss.  Covenant

(Waldenstromians), Unitarians, United Brethren (2 bodies), Universalists,



Total of sects and splits--139.



In the present month (February), Mr. E. I. Lindh, A..M., has

communicated to the Boston Transcript a hopeful article on the solution

of the problem of the "divided church."  Divided is not too violent a

term.  Subdivided could have been permitted if he had thought of it.  He

came near thinking of it, for he mentions some of the subdivisions

himself: "the 12 kinds of Presbyterians, the 17 kinds of Methodists, the

13 kinds of Baptists, etc."  He overlooked the 12 kinds of Mennonites and

the 22 kinds of Lutherans, but they are in Rev. Mr. Carroll's list.

Altogether, 76 splits under 5 flags.  The Literary Digest (February 14th)

is pleased with Mr. Lindh's optimistic article, and also with the signs

of the times, and perceives that "the idea of Church unity is in the

air."



Now, then, is not Mrs. Eddy profoundly wise in forbidding, for all time,

all explanations of her religion except such as she shall let on to be

her own?



I think so.  I think there can be no doubt of it.  In a way, they will be

her own; for, no matter which member of her clerical staff shall furnish

the explanations, not a line of them will she ever allow to be printed

until she shall have approved it, accepted it, copyrighted it, cabbaged

it.  We may depend on that with a four-ace confidence.









THE NEW INFALLIBILITY



All in proper time Mrs. Eddy's factory will take hold of that

Commandment, and explain it for good and all.  It may be that one member

of the shift will vote that the word "all" means all; it may be that ten

members of the shift will vote that "all" means only a percentage; but it

is Mrs. Eddy, not the eleven, who will do the deciding.  And if she says

it is percentage, then percentage it is, forevermore--and that is what I

am expecting, for she doesn't sell all herself, nor any considerable part

of it, and as regards the poor, she doesn't declare any dividend; but if

she says "all" means all, then all it is, to the end of time, and no

follower of hers will ever be allowed to reconstruct that text, or shrink

it, or inflate it, or meddle with it in any way at all.  Even to-day--

right here in the beginning--she is the sole person who, in the matter of

Christian Science exegesis, is privileged to exploit the Spiral Twist.

The Christian world has two Infallibles now.



Of equal power?  For the present only.  When Leo XIII.  passes to his

rest another Infallible will ascend his throne; others, and yet others,

and still others will follow him, and be as infallible as he, and decide

questions of doctrine as long as they may come up, all down the far

future; but Mary Baker G.  Eddy is the only Infallible that will ever

occupy the Science throne.  Many a Science Pope will succeed her, but she

has closed their mouths; they will repeat and reverently praise and adore

her infallibilities, but venture none themselves.  In her grave she will

still outrank all other Popes, be they of what Church they may.  She will

hold the supremest of earthly titles, The Infallible--with a capital T.

Many in the world's history have had a hunger for such nuggets and slices

of power as they might reasonably hope to grab out of an empire's or a

religion's assets, but Mrs. Eddy is the only person alive or dead who has

ever struck for the whole of them.  For small things she has the eye of a

microscope, for large ones the eye of a telescope, and whatever she sees,

she wants.  Wants it all.









THE SACRED POEMS



When Mrs. Eddy's "sacred revelations" (that is the language of the By-

laws) are read in public, their authorship must be named.  The By-laws

twice command this, therefore we mention it twice, to be fair.



But it is also commanded that when a member publicly quotes "from the

poems of our Pastor Emeritus" the authorship shall be named.  For these

are sacred, too.  There are kindly people who may suspect a hidden

generosity in that By-law; they may think it is there to protect the

Official Reader from the suspicion of having written the poems himself.

Such do not know Mrs. Eddy.  She does an inordinate deal of protecting,

but in no distinctly named and specified case in her history has Number

Two been the object of it.  Instances have been claimed, but they have

failed of proof, and even of plausibility.



"Members shall also instruct their students" to look out and advertise

the authorship when they read those poems and things.  Not on Mrs. Eddy's

account, but "for the good of our Cause."









THE CHURCH EDIFICE



1.  Mrs. Eddy gave the land.  It was not of much value at the time, but

it is very valuable now.

2.  Her people built the Mother-Church edifice on it, at a cost of two

hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

3.  Then they gave the whole property to her.

4.  Then she gave it to the Board of Directors.  She is the Board of

Directors.  She took it out of one pocket and put it in the other.

5.  Sec.  10 (of the deed).  "Whenever said Directors shall determine

that it is inexpedient to maintain preaching, reading, or speaking in

said church in accordance with the terms of this deed, they are

authorized and required to reconvey forthwith said lot of land with the

building thereon to Mary Baker G.  Eddy, her heirs and assigns forever,

by a proper deed of conveyance."



She is never careless, never slipshod, about a matter of business.

Owning the property through her Board of Waxworks was safe enough, still

it was sound business to set another grip on it to cover accidents, and

she did it.  Her barkers (what a curious name; I wonder if it is

copyrighted); her barkers persistently advertise to the public her

generosity in giving away a piece of land which cost her a trifle, and a

two--hundred--and--fifty--thousand--dollar church which cost her nothing;

and they can hardly speak of the unselfishness of it without breaking

down and crying; yet they know she gave nothing away, and never intended

to.  However, such is the human race.  Often it does seem such a pity

that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.



Some of the hostiles think that Mrs. Eddy's idea in protecting this

property in the interest of her heirs, and in accumulating a great money

fortune, is, that she may leave her natural heirs well provided for when

she goes.  I think it is a mistake.  I think she is of late years giving

herself large concern about only one interest-her power and glory, and

the perpetuation and worship of her Name--with a capital N.  Her Church

is her pet heir, and I think it will get her wealth.  It is the torch

which is to light the world and the ages with her glory.



I think she once prized money for the ease and comfort it could bring,

the showy vanities it could furnish, and the social promotion it could

command; for we have seen that she was born into the world with little

ways and instincts and aspirations and affectations that are duplicates

of our own.  I do not think her money-passion has ever diminished in

ferocity, I do not think that she has ever allowed a dollar that had no

friends to get by her alive, but I think her reason for wanting it has

changed.  I think she wants it now to increase and establish and

perpetuate her power and glory with, not to add to her comforts and

luxuries, not to furnish paint and fuss and feathers for vain display.  I

think her ambitions have soared away above the fuss-and-feather stage.

She still likes the little shows and vanities--a fact which she exposed

in a public utterance two or three days ago when she was not noticing--

but I think she does not place a large value upon them now.  She could

build a mighty and far-shining brass-mounted palace if she wanted to, but

she does not do it.  She would have had that kind of an ambition in the

early scrabbling times.  She could go to England to-day and be worshiped

by earls, and get a comet's attention from the million, if she cared for

such things.  She would have gone in the early scrabbling days for much

less than an earl, and been vain of it, and glad to show off before the

remains of the Scotch kin.  But those things are very small to her now--

next to invisible, observed through the cloud-rack from the dizzy summit

where she perches in these great days.  She does not want that church

property for herself.  It is worth but a quarter of a million--a sum she

could call in from her far-spread flocks to-morrow with a lift of her

hand.  Not a squeeze of it, just a lift.  It would come without a murmur;

come gratefully, come gladly.  And if her glory stood in more need of the

money in Boston than it does where her flocks are propagating it, she

would lift the hand, I think.



She is still reaching for the Dollar, she will continue to reach for it;

but not that she may spend it upon herself; not that she may spend it

upon charities; not that she may indemnify an early deprivation and

clothe herself in a blaze of North Adams gauds; not that she may have

nine breeds of pie for breakfast, as only the rich New-Englander can; not

that she may indulge any petty material vanity or appetite that once was

hers and prized and nursed, but that she may apply that Dollar to

statelier uses, and place it where it may cast the metallic sheen of her

glory farthest across the receding expanses of the globe.









PRAYER



A brief and good one is furnished in the book of By-laws.  The Scientist

is required to pray it every day.









THE LORD'S PRAYER-AMENDED



This is not in the By-laws, it is in the first chapter of Science and

Health, edition of 1902.  I do not find it in the edition of 1884.  It is

probable that it had not at that time been handed down.  Science and

Health's (latest) rendering of its "spiritual sense" is as follows:



"Our Father-Mother God' all-harmonious, adorable One.  Thy kingdom is

within us, Thou art ever-present.  Enable us to know--as in heaven, so on

earth--God is supreme.  Give us grace for to-day; feed the famished

affections.  And infinite Love is reflected in love.  And Love leadeth us

not into temptation, but delivereth from sin, disease, and death.  For

God is now and forever all Life, Truth, and Love."



If I thought my opinion was desired and would be properly revered, I

should say that in my judgment that is as good a piece of carpentering as

any of those eleven Commandment--experts could do with the material after

all their practice.  I notice only one doubtful place."  Lead us not into

temptation" seems to me to be a very definite request, and that the new

rendering turns the definite request into a definite assertion.  I shall

be glad to have that turned back to the old way and the marks of the

Spiral Twist removed, or varnished over; then I shall be satisfied, and

will do the best I can with what is left.  At the same time, I do feel

that the shrinkage in our spiritual assets is getting serious.  First the

Commandments, now the Prayer.  I never expected to see these steady old

reliable securities watered down to this.  And this is not the whole of

it.  Last summer the Presbyterians extended the Calling and Election

suffrage to nearly everybody entitled to salvation.  They did not even

stop there, but let out all the unbaptized American infants we had been

accumulating for two hundred years and more.  There are some that believe

they would have let the Scotch ones out, too, if they could have done it.

Everything is going to ruin; in no long time we shall have nothing left

but the love of God.









THE NEW UNPARDONABLE SIN



"Working Against the Cause.  Sec.  2.  If a member of this Church shall

work against the accomplishment of what the Discoverer and Founder of

Christian Science understands is advantageous to the individual, to this

Church, and to the Cause of Christian Science"--out he goes.  Forever.



The member may think that what he is doing will advance the Cause, but he

is not invited to do any thinking.  More than that, he is not permitted

to do any--as he will clearly gather from this By-law.  When a person

joins Mrs. Eddy's Church he must leave his thinker at home.  Leave it

permanently.  To make sure that it will not go off some time or other

when he is not watching, it will be safest for him to spike it.  If he

should forget himself and think just once, the By-law provides that he

shall be fired out-instantly-forever-no return.



"It shall be the duty of this Church immediately to call a meeting, and

drop forever the name of this member from its records."



My, but it breathes a towering indignation!



There are forgivable offenses, but this is not one of them; there are

admonitions, probations, suspensions, in several minor cases; mercy is

shown the derelict, in those cases he is gently used, and in time he can

get back into the fold--even when he has repeated his offence.  But let

him think, just once, without getting his thinker set to Eddy time, and

that is enough; his head comes off.  There is no second offence, and

there is no gate open to that lost sheep, ever again.



"This rule cannot be changed, amended, or annulled, except by unanimous

vote of all the First Members."



The same being Mrs. Eddy.  It is naively sly and pretty to see her keep

putting forward First Members, and Boards of This and That, and other

broideries and ruffles of her raiment, as if they were independent

entities, instead of a part of her clothes, and could do things all by

themselves when she was outside of them.



Mrs. Eddy did not need to copyright the sentence just quoted, its English

would protect it.  None but she would have shovelled that comically

superfluous "all" in there.



The former Unpardonable Sin has gone out of service.  We may frame the

new Christian Science one thus:



"Whatsoever Member shall think, and without Our Mother's permission act

upon his think, the same shall be cut off from the Church forever."



It has been said that I make many mistakes about Christian Science

through being ignorant of the spiritual meanings of its terminology.  I

believe it is true.  I have been misled all this time by that word

Member, because there was no one to tell me that its spiritual meaning

was Slave.









AXE AND BLOCK



There is a By-law which forbids Members to practice hypnotism; the

penalty is excommunication.



1.  If a member is found to be a mental practitioner--

2.  Complaint is to be entered against him--

3.  By the Pastor Emeritus, and by none else;

4.  No member is allowed to make complaint to her in the matter;

5.  Upon Mrs. Eddy's mere "complaint"--unbacked by evidence or proof, and

without giving the accused a chance to be heard--" his name shall be

dropped from this Church."



Mrs. Eddy has only to say a member is guilty--that is all.  That ends it.

It is not a case of he "may" be cut off from Christian Science salvation,

it is a case of he "shall" be.  Her serfs must see to it, and not say a

word.



Does the other Pope possess this prodigious and irresponsible power?

Certainly not in our day.



Some may be curious to know how Mrs. Eddy finds out that a member is

practicing hypnotism, since no one is allowed to come before her throne

and accuse him.  She has explained this in Christian Science History,

first and second editions, page 16:



"I possess a spiritual sense of what the malicious mental practitioner is

mentally arguing which cannot be deceived; I can discern in the human

mind thoughts, motives, and purposes, and neither mental arguments nor

psychic power can affect this spiritual insight."



A marvelous woman; with a hunger for power such as has never been seen in

the world before.  No thing, little or big, that contains any seed or

suggestion of power escapes her avaricious eye; and when once she gets

that eye on it, her remorseless grip follows.  There isn't a Christian

Scientist who isn't ecclesiastically as much her property as if she had

bought him and paid for him, and copyrighted him and got a charter.  She

cannot be satisfied when she has handcuffed a member, and put a leg-chain

and ball on him and plugged his ears and removed his thinker, she goes on

wrapping needless chains round and round him, just as a spider would.

For she trusts no one, believes in no one's honesty, judges every one by

herself.  Although we have seen that she has absolute and irresponsible

command over her spectral Boards and over every official and servant of

her Church, at home and abroad, over every minute detail of her Church's

government, present and future, and can purge her membership of guilty or

suspected persons by various plausible formalities and whenever she will,

she is still not content, but must set her queer mind to work and invent

a way by which she can take a member--any member--by neck and crop and

fling him out without anything resembling a formality at all.



She is sole accuser and sole witness, and her testimony is final and

carries uncompromising and irremediable doom with it.



The Sole-Witness Court!  It should make the Council of Ten and the

Council of Three turn in their graves for shame, to see how little they

knew about satanic concentrations of irresponsible power.  Here we have

one Accuser, one Witness, one Judge, one Headsman--and all four bunched

together in Mrs. Eddy, the Inspired of God, His Latest Thought to His

People, New Member of the Holy Family, the Equal of Jesus.



When a Member is not satisfactory to Mrs. Eddy, and yet is blameless in

his life and faultless in his membership and in his Christian Science

walk and conversation, shall he hold up his head and tilt his hat over

one ear and imagine himself safe because of these perfections?  Why, in

that very moment Mrs. Eddy will cast that spiritual X-ray of hers through

his dungarees and say:



"I see his hypnotism working, among his insides--remove him to the

block!"



What shall it profit him to know it isn't so?  Nothing.  His testimony is

of no value.  No one wants it, no one will ask for it.  He is not present

to offer it (he does not know he has been accused), and if he were there

to offer it, it would not be listened to.



It was out of powers approaching Mrs. Eddy's--though not equalling them

--that the Inquisition and the devastations of the Interdict grew.  She

will transmit hers.  The man born two centuries from now will think he

has arrived in hell; and all in good time he will think he knows it.

Vast concentrations of irresponsible power have never in any age been

used mercifully, and there is nothing to suggest that the Christian

Science Papacy is going to spend money on novelties.



Several Christian Scientists have asked me to refrain from prophecy.

There is no prophecy in our day but history.  But history is a

trustworthy prophet.  History is always repeating itself, because

conditions are always repeating themselves.  Out of duplicated conditions

history always gets a duplicate product.









READING LETTERS AT MEETINGS



I wonder if there is anything a Member can do that will not raise Mrs.

Eddy's jealousy?  The By-laws seem to hunt him from pillar to post all

the time, and turn all his thoughts and acts and words into sins against

the meek and lowly new deity of his worship.  Apparently her jealousy

never sleeps.  Apparently any trifle can offend it, and but one penalty

appease it--excommunication.  The By-laws might properly and reasonably

be entitled Laws for the Coddling and Comforting of Our Mother's Petty

Jealousies.  The By-law named at the head of this paragraph reads its

transgressor out of the Church if he shall carry a letter from Mrs. Eddy

to the congregation and forget to read it or fail to read the whole of

it.









HONESTY REQUISITE



Dishonest members are to be admonished; if they continue in dishonest

practices, excommunication follows.  Considering who it is that draughted

this law, there is a certain amount of humor in it.









FURTHER APPLICATIONS OF THE AXE



Here follow the titles of some more By-laws whose infringement is

punishable by excommunication:





Silence Enjoined.

Misteaching.

Departure from Tenets.

Violation of Christian Fellowship.

Moral Offences.

Illegal Adoption.

Broken By-laws.

Violation of By-laws.  (What is the difference?)

Formulas Forbidden.

Official Advice.  (Forbids Tom, Dick, and Harry's clack.)

Unworthy of Membership.

Final Excommunication.

Organizing Churches.



This looks as if Mrs. Eddy had devoted a large share of her time and

talent to inventing ways to get rid of her Church members.  Yet in

another place she seems to invite membership.  Not in any urgent way, it

is true, still she throws out a bait to such as like notice and

distinction (in other words, the Human Race).  Page 82:



"It is important that these seemingly strict conditions be complied with,

as the names of the Members of the Mother-Church will be recorded in the

history of the Church and become a part thereof."



We all want to be historical.









MORE SELF-PROTECTIONS



The Hymnal.  There is a Christian Science Hymnal.  Entrance to it was

closed in 1898.  Christian Science students who make hymns nowadays may

possibly get them sung in the Mother-Church, "but not unless approved by

the Pastor Emeritus."  Art.  XXVII, Sec.  2.



Solo Singers.  Mrs. Eddy has contributed the words of three of the hymns

in the Hymnal.  Two of them appear in it six times altogether, each of

them being set to three original forms of musical anguish.  Mrs. Eddy,

always thoughtful, has promulgated a By-law requiring the singing of one

of her three hymns in the Mother Church "as often as once each month."

It is a good idea.  A congregation could get tired of even Mrs. Eddy's

muse in the course of time, without the cordializing incentive of

compulsion.  We all know how wearisome the sweetest and touchingest

things can become, through rep-rep-repetition, and still rep-rep-

repetition, and more rep-rep-repetition-like "the sweet by-and-by, in the

sweet by-and-by," for instance, and "Tah-rah-rah boom-de-aye"; and surely

it is not likely that Mrs. Eddy's machine has turned out goods that could

outwear those great heart-stirrers, without the assistance of the lash.

"O'er Waiting Harpstrings of the Mind" is pretty good, quite fair to

middling--the whole seven of the stanzas--but repetition would be certain

to take the excitement out of it in the course of time, even if there

were fourteen, and then it would sound like the multiplication table, and

would cease to save.  The congregation would be perfectly sure to get

tired; in fact, did get tired--hence the compulsory By-law.  It is a

measure born of experience, not foresight.



The By-laws say that "if a solo singer shall neglect or refuse to sing

alone" one of those three hymns as often as once a month, and oftener if

so directed by the Board of Directors--which is Mrs. Eddy--the singer's

salary shall be stopped.  It is circumstantial evidence that some

soloists neglected this sacrament and others refused it.  At least that

is the charitable view to take of it.  There is only one other view to

take: that Mrs. Eddy did really foresee that there would be singers who

would some day get tired of doing her hymns and proclaiming the

authorship, unless persuaded by a Bylaw, with a penalty attached.  The

idea could of course occur to her wise head, for she would know that a

seven-stanza break might well be a calamitous strain upon a soloist, and

that he might therefore avoid it if unwatched.  He could not curtail it,

for the whole of anything that Mrs. Eddy does is sacred, and cannot be

cut.









BOARD OF EDUCATION



It consists of four members, one of whom is President of it.  Its members

are elected annually.  Subject to Mrs. Eddy's approval.  Art. XXX., Sec. 2.



She owns the Board--is the Board.



Mrs. Eddy is President of the Metaphysical College.  If at any time she

shall vacate that office, the Directors of the College (that is to say,

Mrs. Eddy) "shall" elect to the vacancy the President of the Board of

Education (which is merely re-electing herself).



It is another case of "Pastor Emeritus."  She gives up the shadow of

authority, but keeps a good firm hold on the substance.









PUBLIC TEACHERS



Applicants for admission to this industry must pass a thorough three

days' examination before the Board of Education "in Science and Health,

chapter on 'Recapitulation'; the Platform of Christian Science; page 403

of Christian Science Practice, from line second to the second paragraph

of page 405; and page 488, second and third paragraphs."









BOARD OF LECTURESHIP



The lecturers are exceedingly important servants of Mrs. Eddy, and she

chooses them with great care.  Each of them has an appointed territory in

which to perform his duties--in the North, the South, the East, the West,

in Canada, in Great Britain, and so on--and each must stick to his own

territory and not forage beyond its boundaries.  I think it goes without

saying--from what we have seen of Mrs. Eddy--that no lecture is delivered

until she has examined and approved it, and that the lecturer is not

allowed to change it afterwards.



The members of the Board of Lectureship are elected annually--



"Subject to the approval of Rev. Mary Baker G.  Eddy."









MISSIONARIES



There are but four.  They are elected--like the rest of the domestics--

annually.  So far as I can discover, not a single servant of the Sacred

Household has a steady job except Mrs. Eddy.  It is plain that she trusts

no human being but herself.









THE BY-LAWS



The branch Churches are strictly forbidden to use them.



So far as I can see, they could not do it if they wanted to.  The By-laws

are merely the voice of the master issuing commands to the servants.

There is nothing and nobody for the servants to re-utter them to.



That useless edict is repeated in the little book, a few pages farther

on.  There are several other repetitions of prohibitions in the book that

could be spared-they only take up room for nothing.









THE CREED

It is copyrighted.  I do not know why, but I suppose it is to keep

adventurers from some day claiming that they invented it, and not Mrs.

Eddy and that "strange Providence" that has suggested so many clever

things to her.



No Change.  It is forbidden to change the Creed.  That is important, at

any rate.







COPYRIGHT



I can understand why Mrs. Eddy copyrighted the early editions and

revisions of Science and Health, and why she had a mania for copyrighting

every scrap of every sort that came from her pen in those jejune days

when to be in print probably seemed a wonderful distinction to her in her

provincial obscurity, but why she should continue this delirium in these

days of her godship and her far-spread fame, I cannot explain to myself.

And particularly as regards Science and Health.  She knows, now, that

that Annex is going to live for many centuries; and so, what good is a

fleeting forty-two-year copyright going to do it?



Now a perpetual copyright would be quite another matter.  I would like to

give her a hint.  Let her strike for a perpetual copyright on that book.

There is precedent for it.  There is one book in the world which bears

the charmed life of perpetual copyright (a fact not known to twenty

people in the world).  By a hardy perversion of privilege on the part of

the lawmaking power the Bible has perpetual copyright in Great Britain.

There is no justification for it in fairness, and no explanation of it

except that the Church is strong enough there to have its way, right or

wrong.  The recent Revised Version enjoys perpetual copyright, too--a

stronger precedent, even, than the other one.



Now, then, what is the Annex but a Revised Version itself?  Which of

course it is--Lord's Prayer and all.  With that pair of formidable

British precedents to proceed upon, what Congress of ours--



But how short-sighted I am.  Mrs. Eddy has thought of it long ago.  She

thinks of everything.  She knows she has only to keep her copyright of

1902 alive through its first stage of twenty-eight years, and perpetuity

is assured.  A Christian Science Congress will reign in the Capitol then.

She probably attaches small value to the first edition (1875).  Although

it was a Revelation from on high, it was slim, lank, incomplete, padded

with bales of refuse rags, and puffs from lassoed celebrities to fill it

out, an uncreditable book, a book easily sparable, a book not to be

mentioned in the same year with the sleek, fat, concise, compact,

compressed, and competent Annex of to-day, in its dainty flexible covers,

gilt--edges, rounded corners, twin screw, spiral twist, compensation

balance, Testament-counterfeit, and all that; a book just born to curl up

on the hymn-book-shelf in church and look just too sweet and holy for

anything.  Yes, I see now what she was copyrighting that child for.









CHRISTIAN SCIENCE PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION



It is true in matters of business Mrs. Eddy thinks of everything.  She

thought of an organ, to disseminate the Truth as it was in Mrs. Eddy.

Straightway she started one--the Christian Science Journal.



It is true--in matters of business Mrs. Eddy thinks of everything.  As

soon as she had got the Christian Science Journal sufficiently in debt to

make its presence on the premises disagreeable to her, it occurred to her

to make somebody a present of it.  Which she did, along with its debts.

It was in the summer of 1889.  The victim selected was her Church--

called, in those days, The National Christian Scientist Association.



She delivered this sorrow to those lambs as a "gift" in consideration of

their "loyalty to our great cause."



Also--still thinking of everything--she told them to retain Mr. Bailey in

the editorship and make Mr. Nixon publisher.  We do not know what it was

she had against those men; neither do we know whether she scored on

Bailey or not, we only know that God protected Nixon, and for that I am

sincerely glad, although I do not know Nixon and have never even seen

him.



Nixon took the Journal and the rest of the Publishing Society's

liabilities, and demonstrated over them during three years, then brought

in his report:



"On assuming my duties as publisher, there was not a dollar in the

treasury; but on the contrary the Society owed unpaid printing and paper

bills to the amount of several hundred dollars, not to mention a

contingent liability of many more hundreds"--represented by advance--

subscriptions paid for the Journal and the "Series," the which goods Mrs.

Eddy had not delivered.  And couldn't, very well, perhaps, on a

Metaphysical College income of but a few thousand dollars a day, or a

week, or whatever it was in those magnificently flourishing times.  The

struggling Journal had swallowed up those advance-payments, but its

"claim" was a severe one and they had failed to cure it.  But Nixon cured

it in his diligent three years, and joyously reported the news that he

had cleared off all the debts and now had a fat six thousand dollars in

the bank.



It made Mrs. Eddy's mouth water.



At the time that Mrs. Eddy had unloaded that dismal gift on to her

National Association, she had followed her inveterate custom: she had

tied a string to its hind leg, and kept one end of it hitched to her

belt.  We have seen her do that in the case of the Boston Mosque.  When

she deeds property, she puts in that string-clause.  It provides that

under certain conditions she can pull the string and land the property in

the cherished home of its happy youth.  In the present case she believed

that she had made provision that if at any time the National Christian

Science Association should dissolve itself by a formal vote, she could

pull.



A year after Nixon's handsome report, she writes the Association that she

has a "unique request to lay before it."  It has dissolved, and she is

not quite sure that the Christian Science Journal has "already fallen

into her hands" by that act, though it "seems" to her to have met with

that accident; so she would like to have the matter decided by a formal

vote.  But whether there is a doubt or not, "I see the wisdom," she says,

"of again owning this Christian Science waif."



I think that that is unassailable evidence that the waif was making

money, hands down.



She pulled her gift in.  A few years later she donated the Publishing

Society, along with its real estate, its buildings, its plant, its

publications, and its money--the whole worth twenty--two thousand

dollars, and free of debt--to--Well, to the Mother-Church!



That is to say, to herself.  There is an act count of it in the Christian

Science Journal, and of how she had already made some other handsome

gifts--to her Church--and others to--to her Cause besides "an almost

countless number of private charities" of cloudy amount and otherwise

indefinite.  This landslide of generosities overwhelmed one of her

literary domestics.  While he was in that condition he tried to express

what he felt:



"Let us endeavor to lift up our hearts in thankfulness to .  .  .  our

Mother in Israel for these evidences of generosity and self-sacrifice

that appeal to our deepest sense of gratitude, even while surpassing our

comprehension."



A year or two later, Mrs. Eddy promulgated some By-laws of a self-

sacrificing sort which assuaged him, perhaps, and perhaps enabled his

surpassed comprehension to make a sprint and catch up.  These are to be

found in Art. XII., entitled.









THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE PUBLISHING SOCIETY



This Article puts the whole publishing business into the hands of a

publishing Board--special.  Mrs. Eddy appoints to its vacancies.



The profits go semi-annually to the Treasurer of the Mother-Church.  Mrs.

Eddy owns the Treasurer.



Editors and publishers of the Christian Science Journal cannot be elected

or removed without Mrs. Eddy's knowledge and consent.



Every candidate for employment in a high capacity or a low one, on the

other periodicals or in the publishing house, must first be "accepted by

Mrs. Eddy as suitable."  And "by the Board of Directors"--which is

surplusage, since Mrs. Eddy owns the Board.



If at any time a weekly shall be started, "it shall be owned by The First

Church of Christ, Scientist"--which is Mrs. Eddy.









CHAPTER VIII



I think that any one who will carefully examine the By-laws (I have

placed all of the important ones before the reader), will arrive at the

conclusion that of late years the master-passion in Mrs. Eddy's heart is

a hunger for power and glory; and that while her hunger for money still

remains, she wants it now for the expansion and extension it can furnish

to that power and glory, rather than what it can do for her towards

satisfying minor and meaner ambitions.



I wish to enlarge a little upon this matter.  I think it is quite clear

that the reason why Mrs. Eddy has concentrated in herself all powers, all

distinctions, all revenues that are within the command of the Christian

Science Church Universal is that she desires and intends to devote them

to the purpose just suggested--the upbuilding of her personal glory--

hers, and no one else's; that, and the continuing of her name's glory

after she shall have passed away.  If she has overlooked a single power,

howsoever minute, I cannot discover it.  If she has found one, large or

small, which she has not seized and made her own, there is no record of

it, no trace of it.  In her foragings and depredations she usually puts

forward the Mother-Church--a lay figure--and hides behind it.  Whereas,

she is in manifest reality the Mother-Church herself.  It has an

impressive array of officials, and committees, and Boards of Direction,

of Education, of Lectureship, and so on--geldings, every one, shadows,

spectres, apparitions, wax-figures: she is supreme over them all, she can

abolish them when she will; blow them out as she would a candle.  She is

herself the Mother-Church.  Now there is one By-law which says that the

Mother-Church:



"shall be officially controlled by no other church."



That does not surprise us--we know by the rest of the By-laws that that

is a quite irrelevant remark.  Yet we do vaguely and hazily wonder why

she takes the trouble to say it; why she wastes the words; what her

object can be--seeing that that emergency has been in so many, many ways,

and so effectively and drastically barred off and made impossible.  Then

presently the object begins to dawn upon us.  That is, it does after we

have read the rest of the By-law three or four times, wondering and

admiring to see Mrs. Eddy--Mrs. Eddy--Mrs. Eddy, of all persons--throwing

away power!--making a fair exchange--doing a fair thing for once more,

an almost generous thing!  Then we look it through yet once more

unsatisfied, a little suspicious--and find that it is nothing but a sly,

thin make-believe, and that even the very title of it is a sarcasm and

embodies a falsehood--"self" government:



"Local Self-Government.  The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in

Boston, Massachusetts, shall assume no official control of other churches

of this denomination.  It shall be officially controlled by no other

church."



It has a most pious and deceptive give-and-take air of perfect fairness,

unselfishness, magnanimity--almost godliness, indeed.  But it is all art.





In the By-laws, Mrs. Eddy, speaking by the mouth of her other self, the

Mother-Church, proclaims that she will assume no official control of

other churches-branch churches.  We examine the other By-laws, and they

answer some important questions for us:



1.  What is a branch Church?  It is a body of Christian Scientists,

organized in the one and only permissible way--by a member, in good

standing, of the Mother-Church, and who is also a pupil of one of Mrs.

Eddy's accredited students.  That is to say, one of her properties.  No

other can do it.  There are other indispensable requisites; what are

they?



2.  The new Church cannot enter upon its functions until its members have

individually signed, and pledged allegiance to, a Creed furnished by Mrs.

Eddy.



3.  They are obliged to study her books, and order their lives by them.

And they must read no outside religious works.



4.  They must sing the hymns and pray the prayers provided by her, and

use no others in the services, except by her permission.



5.  They cannot have preachers and pastors.  Her law.



6.  In their Church they must have two Readers--a man and a woman.



7.  They must read the services framed and appointed by her.



8.  She--not the branch Church--appoints those Readers.



9.  She--not the branch Church--dismisses them and fills the vacancies.



1O.  She can do this without consulting the branch Church, and without

explaining.



11.  The branch Church can have a religious lecture from time to time.

By applying to Mrs. Eddy.  There is no other way.



12.  But the branch Church cannot select the lecturer.  Mrs. Eddy does

it.



13.  The branch Church pays his fee.



14.  The harnessing of all Christian Science wedding-teams, members of

the branch Church, must be done by duly authorized and consecrated

Christian Science functionaries.  Her factory is the only one that makes

and licenses them.



[15.  Nothing is said about christenings.  It is inferable from this that

a Christian Science child is born a Christian Scientist and requires no

tinkering.]



[16.  Nothing is said about funerals.  It is inferable, then, that a

branch Church is privileged to do in that matter as it may choose.]



To sum up.  Are any important Church-functions absent from the list?  I

cannot call any to mind.  Are there any lacking ones whose exercise could

make the branch in any noticeable way independent of the Mother.  Church?

--even in any trifling degree?  I think of none.  If the named functions

were abolished would there still be a Church left?  Would there be even a

shadow of a Church left?  Would there be anything at all left?  even the

bare name?



Manifestly not.  There isn't a single vital and essential Church-function

of any kind, that is not named in the list.  And over every one of them

the Mother-Church has permanent and unchallengeable control, upon every

one of them Mrs. Eddy has set her irremovable grip.  She holds, in

perpetuity, autocratic and indisputable sovereignty and control over

every branch Church in the earth; and yet says, in that sugary, naive,

angel-beguiling way of hers, that the Mother-Church:



"shall assume no official control of other churches of this

denomination."



Whereas in truth the unmeddled-with liberties of a branch Christian

Science Church are but very, very few in number, and are these:



1.  It can appoint its own furnace-stoker, winters.

2.  It can appoint its own fan-distributors, summers.

3.  It can, in accordance with its own choice in the matter, burn, bury,

or preserve members who are pretending to be dead--whereas there is no

such thing as death.

4.  It can take up a collection.



The branch Churches have no important liberties, none that give them an

important voice in their own affairs.  Those are all locked up, and Mrs.

Eddy has the key.  "Local Self-Government" is a large name and sounds

well; but the branch Churches have no more of it than have the privates

in the King of Dahomey's army.









"MOTHER-CHURCH UNIQUE"



Mrs. Eddy, with an envious and admiring eye upon the solitary and

rivalless and world-shadowing majesty of St.  Peter's, reveals in her By-

laws her purpose to set the Mother-Church apart by itself in a stately

seclusion and make it duplicate that lone sublimity under the Western

sky.  The By-law headed "Mother-Church Unique "says--



"In its relation to other Christian Science churches, the Mother-Church

stands alone.



"It occupies a position that no other Church can fill.



"Then for a branch Church to assume such position would be disastrous to

Christian Science,



"Therefore--"



Therefore no branch Church is allowed to have branches.  There shall be

no Christian Science St. Peter's in the earth but just one--the Mother-

Church in Boston.









"NO FIRST MEMBERS"



But for the thoughtful By-law thus entitled, every Science branch in the

earth would imitate the Mother-Church and set up an aristocracy.  Every

little group of ground-floor Smiths and Furgusons and Shadwells and

Simpsons that organized a branch would assume that great title, of "First

Members," along with its vast privileges of "discussing" the weather and

casting blank ballots, and soon there would be such a locust-plague of

them burdening the globe that the title would lose its value and have to

be abolished.



But where business and glory are concerned, Mrs. Eddy thinks of

everything, and so she did not fail to take care of her Aborigines, her

stately and exclusive One Hundred, her college of functionless cardinals,

her Sanhedrin of Privileged Talkers (Limited).  After taking away all the

liberties of the branch Churches, and in the same breath disclaiming all

official control over their affairs, she smites them on the mouth with

this--the very mouth that was watering for those nobby ground-floor

honors--



"No First Members.  Branch Churches shall not organize with First

Members, that special method of organization being adapted to the Mother-

Church alone."



And so, first members being prohibited, we pierce through the cloud of

Mrs. Eddy's English and perceive that they must then necessarily organize

with Subsequent Members.  There is no other way.  It will occur to them

by-and-by to found an aristocracy of Early Subsequent Members.  There is

no By-law against it.









"THE"



I uncover to that imperial word.  And to the mind, too, that conceived

the idea of seizing and monopolizing it as a title.  I believe it is Mrs.

Eddy's dazzlingest invention.  For show, and style, and grandeur, and

thunder and lightning and fireworks it outclasses all the previous

inventions of man, and raises the limit on the Pope.  He can never put

his avid hand on that word of words--it is pre-empted.  And copyrighted,

of course.  It lifts the Mother-Church away up in the sky, and

fellowships it with the rare and select and exclusive little company of

the THE's of deathless glory--persons and things whereof history and the

ages could furnish only single examples, not two: the Saviour, the

Virgin, the Milky Way, the Bible, the Earth, the Equator, the Devil, the

Missing Link--and now The First Church, Scientist.  And by clamor of

edict and By-law Mrs. Eddy gives personal notice to all branch Scientist

Churches on this planet to leave that THE alone.



She has demonstrated over it and made it sacred to the Mother-Church:



"The article 'The' must not be used before the titles of branch

Churches--



"Nor written on applications for membership in naming such churches."



Those are the terms.  There can and will be a million First Churches of

Christ, Scientist, scattered over the world, in a million towns and

villages and hamlets and cities, and each may call itself (suppressing

the article), "First Church of Christ.  Scientist"--it is permissible,

and no harm; but there is only one The Church of Christ, Scientist, and

there will never be another.  And whether that great word fall in the

middle of a sentence or at the beginning of it, it must always have its

capital T.



I do not suppose that a juvenile passion for fussy little worldly shows

and vanities can furnish a match to this, anywhere in the history of the

nursery.  Mrs. Eddy does seem to be a shade fonder of little special

distinctions and pomps than is usual with human beings.



She instituted that immodest "The" with her own hand; she did not wait

for somebody else to think of it.









A LIFE-TERM MONOPOLY



There is but one human Pastor in the whole Christian Science world; she

reserves that exalted place to herself.









A PERPETUAL ONE



There is but one other object in the whole Christian Science world

honored with that title and holding that office: it is her book, the

Annex--permanent Pastor of The First Church, and of all branch Churches.



With her own hand she draughted the By-laws which make her the only

really absolute sovereign that lives to-day in Christendom.



She does not allow any objectionable pictures to be exhibited in the room

where her book is sold, nor any indulgence in idle gossip there; and from

the general look of that By-law I judge that a lightsome and improper

person can be as uncomfortable in that place as he could be in heaven.









THE SANCTUM SANCTORUM AND SACRED CHAIR



In a room in The First Church of Christ, Scientist, there is a museum of

objects which have attained to holiness through contact with Mrs. Eddy--

among them an electrically lighted oil-picture of a chair which she used

to sit in--and disciples from all about the world go softly in there, in

restricted groups, under proper guard, and reverently gaze upon those

relics.  It is worship.  Mrs. Eddy could stop it if she was not fond of

it, for her sovereignty over that temple is supreme.



The fitting-up of that place as a shrine is not an accident, nor a

casual, unweighed idea; it is imitated from age--old religious custom.

In Treves the pilgrim reverently gazes upon the Seamless Robe, and humbly

worships; and does the same in that other continental church where they

keep a duplicate; and does likewise in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,

in Jerusalem, where memorials of the Crucifixion are preserved; and now,

by good fortune we have our Holy Chair and things, and a market for our

adorations nearer home.



But is there not a detail that is new, fresh, original?  Yes, whatever

old thing Mrs. Eddy touches gets something new by the contact--something

not thought of before by any one--something original, all her own, and

copyrightable.  The new feature is self worship--exhibited in permitting

this shrine to be installed during her lifetime, and winking her sacred

eye at it.



A prominent Christian Scientist has assured me that the Scientists do not

worship Mrs. Eddy, and I think it likely that there may be five or six of

the cult in the world who do not worship her, but she herself is

certainly not of that company.  Any healthy-minded person who will

examine Mrs. Eddy's little Autobiography and the Manual of By-laws

written by her will be convinced that she worships herself; and that she

brings to this service a fervor of devotion surpassing even that which

she formerly laid at the feet of the Dollar, and equalling any which

rises to the Throne of Grace from any quarter.



I think this is as good a place as any to salve a hurt which I was the

means of inflicting upon a Christian Scientist lately.  The first third

of this book was written in 1899 in Vienna.  Until last summer I had

supposed that that third had been printed in a book which I published

about a year later--a hap which had not happened.  I then sent the

chapters composing it to the North American Review, but failed.  in one

instance, to date them.  And so, In an undated chapter I said a lady told

me "last night" so and so.  There was nothing to indicate to the reader

that that "last night" was several years old, therefore the phrase seemed

to refer to a night of very recent date.  What the lady had told me was,

that in a part of the Mother-Church in Boston she had seen Scientists

worshipping a portrait of Mrs. Eddy before which a light was kept

constantly burning.



A Scientist came to me and wished me to retract that "untruth."  He said

there was no such portrait, and that if I wanted to be sure of it I could

go to Boston and see for myself.  I explained that my "last night" meant

a good while ago; that I did not doubt his assertion that there was no

such portrait there now, but that I should continue to believe it had

been there at the time of the lady's visit until she should retract her

statement herself.  I was at no time vouching for the truth of the

remark, nevertheless I considered it worth par.



And yet I am sorry the lady told me, since a wound which brings me no

happiness has resulted.  I am most willing to apply such salve as I can.

The best way to set the matter right and make everything pleasant and

agreeable all around will be to print in this place a description of the

shrine as it appeared to a recent visitor, Mr. Frederick W.  Peabody, of

Boston.  I will copy his newspaper account, and the reader will see that

Mrs. Eddy's portrait is not there now:



"We lately stood on the threshold of the Holy of Holies of the Mother-

Church, and with a crowd of worshippers patiently waited for admittance

to the hallowed precincts of the 'Mother's Room.' Over the doorway was a

sign informing us that but four persons at a time would be admitted; that

they would be permitted to remain but five minutes only, and would please

retire from the 'Mother's Room' at the ringing of the bell.  Entering

with three of the faithful, we looked with profane eyes upon the

consecrated furnishings.  A show-woman in attendance monotonously

announced the character of the different appointments.  Set in a recess

of the wall and illumined with electric light was an oil-painting the

show-woman seriously declared to be a lifelike and realistic picture of

the Chair in which the Mother sat when she composed her 'inspired' work.

It was a picture of an old-fashioned?  country, hair cloth rocking-chair,

and an exceedingly commonplace-looking table with a pile of manuscript,

an ink-bottle, and pen conspicuously upon it.  On the floor were sheets

of manuscript.  'The mantel-piece is of pure onyx,' continued the show-

woman, 'and the beehive upon the window-sill is made from one solid block

of onyx; the rug is made of a hundred breasts of eider-down ducks, and

the toilet-room you see in the corner is of the latest design, with gold-

plated drain-pipes; the painted windows are from the Mother's poem,

"Christ and Christmas," and that case contains complete copies of all the

Mother's books.' The chairs upon which the sacred person of the Mother

had reposed were protected from sacrilegious touch by a broad band of

satin ribbon.  My companions expressed their admiration in subdued and

reverent tones, and at the tinkling of the bell we reverently tiptoed out

of the room to admit another delegation of the patient waiters at the

door."



Now, then, I hope the wound is healed.  I am willing to relinquish the

portrait, and compromise on the Chair.  At the same time, if I were going

to worship either, I should not choose the Chair.



As a picturesquely and persistently interesting personage, there is no

mate to Mrs. Eddy, the accepted Equal of the Saviour.  But some of her

tastes are so different from His!  I find it quite impossible to imagine

Him, in life, standing sponsor for that museum there, and taking pleasure

in its sumptuous shows.  I believe He would put that Chair in the fire,

and the bell along with it; and I think He would make the show-woman go

away.  I think He would break those electric bulbs, and the "mantel-piece

of pure onyx," and say reproachful things about the golden drain-pipes of

the lavatory, and give the costly rug of duck-breasts to the poor, and

sever the satin ribbon and invite the weary to rest and ease their aches

in the consecrated chairs.  What He would do with the painted windows we

can better conjecture when we come presently to examine their

peculiarities.









THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE PASTOR-UNIVERSAL



When Mrs. Eddy turned the pastors out of all the Christian Science

churches and abolished the office for all time as far as human occupancy

is concerned--she appointed the Holy Ghost to fill their place.  If this

language be blasphemous, I did not invent the blasphemy, I am merely

stating a fact.  I will quote from page 227 of Science and Health

(edition 1899), as a first step towards an explanation of this startling

matter--a passage which sets forth and classifies the Christian Science

Trinity:



"Life, Truth, and Love constitute the triune God, or triply divine

Principle.  They represent a trinity in unity, three in one--the same in

essence, though multiform in office: God the Father; Christ the type of

Sonship; Divine Science, or the Holy Comforter.  .  .



"The Holy Ghost, or Spirit, reveals this triune Principle, and (the Holy

Ghost) is expressed in Divine Science, which is the Comforter, leading

into all Truth, and revealing the divine Principle of the universe--

universal and perpetual harmony."



I will cite another passage.  Speaking of Jesus--



"His students then received the Holy Ghost.  By this is meant, that by

all they had witnessed and suffered they were roused to an enlarged

understanding of Divine Science, even to the spiritual interpretation . .

. . . of His teachings," etc.



Also, page 579, in the chapter called the Glossary:



"HOLY GHOST.  Divine Science; the developments of Life, Truth, and Love."



The Holy Ghost reveals the massed spirit of the fused trinity; this

massed spirit is expressed in Divine Science, and is the Comforter;

Divine Science conveys to men the "spiritual interpretation" of the

Saviour's teachings.  That seems to be the meaning of the quoted

passages.



Divine Science is Christian Science; the book Science and Health is a

"revelation" of the whole spirit of the Trinity, and is therefore "The

Holy Ghost"; it conveys to men the "spiritual interpretation" of the

Bible's teachings.  and therefore is "the Comforter."



I do not find this analyzing work easy, I would rather saw wood; and a

person can never tell whether he has added up a Science and Health sum

right or not, anyway, after all his trouble.  Neither can he easily find

out whether the texts are still on the market or have been discarded from

the Book; for two hundred and fifty-eight editions of it have been

issued, and no two editions seem to be alike.  The annual changes--in

technical terminology; in matter and wording; in transpositions of

chapters and verses; in leaving out old chapters and verses and putting

in new ones--seem to be next to innumerable, and as there is no index,

there is no way to find a thing one wants without reading the book

through.  If ever I inspire a Bible-Annex I will not rush at it in a

half-digested, helter-skelter way and have to put in thirty-eight years

trying to get some of it the way I want it, I will sit down and think it

out and know what it is I want to say before I begin.  An inspirer cannot

inspire for Mrs. Eddy and keep his reputation.  I have never seen such

slipshod work, bar the ten that interpreted for the home market the "sell

all thou hast."  I have quoted one "spiritual" rendering of the Lord's

Prayer, I have seen one other one, and am told there are five more.  Yet

the inspirer of Mrs. Eddy the new Infallible casts a complacent critical

stone at the other Infallible for being unable to make up its mind about

such things.  Science and Health, edition 1899, page 33:



"The decisions, by vote of Church Councils, as to what should and should

not be considered Holy Writ, the manifest mistakes in the ancient

versions: the thirty thousand different readings in the Old Testament and

the three hundred thousand in the New--these facts show how a mortal and

material sense stole into the divine record, darkening, to some extent,

the inspired pages with its own hue."



To some extent, yes--speaking cautiously.  But it is nothing, really

nothing; Mrs. Eddy is only a little way behind, and if her inspirer lives

to get her Annex to suit him that Catholic record will have to "go 'way

back and set down," as the ballad says.  Listen to the boastful song of

Mrs. Eddy's organ, the Christian Science Journal for March, 1902, about

that year's revamping and half-soling of Science and Health, whose

official name is the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, and who is now the

Official Pastor and Infallible and Unerring Guide of every Christian

Science church in the two hemispheres, hear Simple Simon that met the

pieman brag of the Infallible's fallibility:



"Throughout the entire book the verbal changes are so numerous as to

indicate the vast amount of time and labor Mrs. Eddy has devoted to this

revision.  The time and labor thus bestowed is relatively as great as

that of--the committee who revised the Bible....  Thus we have

additional evidence of the herculean efforts our beloved Leader has made

and is constantly making for the promulgation of Truth and the

furtherance of her divinely bestowed mission," etc.



It is a steady job.  I could help inspire if desired; I am not doing much

now, and would work for half-price, and should not object to the country.









PRICE OF THE PASTOR-UNIVERSAL



The price of the Pastor-Universal, Science and Health, called in Science

literature the Comforter--and by that other sacred Name--is three

dollars in cloth, as heretofore, six when it is finely bound, and shaped

to imitate the Testament, and is broken into verses.  Margin of profit

above cost of manufacture, from five hundred to seven hundred per cent.,

as already noted In the profane subscription-trade, it costs the

publisher heavily to canvass a three-dollar book; he must pay the general

agent sixty per cent. commission--that is to say, one dollar and eighty-

cents.  Mrs. Eddy escapes this blistering tax, because she owns the

Christian Science canvasser, and can compel him to work for nothing.

Read the following command--not request--fulminated by Mrs. Eddy, over

her signature, in the Christian Science Journal for March, 1897, and

quoted by Mr. Peabody in his book.  The book referred to is Science and

Health:



"It shall be the duty of all Christian Scientists to circulate and to

sell as many of these books as they can."



That is flung at all the elect, everywhere that the sun shines, but no

penalty is shaken over their heads to scare them.  The same command was

issued to the members (numbering to-day twenty-five thousand) of The

Mother-Church, also, but with it went a threat, of the infliction, in

case of disobedience, of the most dreaded punishment that has a place in

the Church's list of penalties for transgressions of Mrs. Eddy's edicts

--excommunication:



"If a member of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, shall fail to obey

this injunction, it will render him liable to lose his membership in this

Church.  MARY BAKER EDDY."



It is the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition.



None but accepted and well established gods can venture an affront like

that and do it with confidence.  But the human race will take anything

from that class.  Mrs. Eddy knows the human race; knows it better than

any mere human being has known it in a thousand centuries.  My confidence

in her human-beingship is getting shaken, my confidence in her godship is

stiffening.









SEVEN HUNDRED PER CENT.



A Scientist out West has visited a bookseller--with intent to find fault

with me--and has brought away the information that the price at which

Mrs. Eddy sells Science and Health is not an unusually high one for the

size and make of the book.  That is true.  But in the book-trade--that

profit-devourer unknown to Mrs. Eddy's book--a three-dollar book that is

made for thirty-five or forty cents in large editions is put at three

dollars because the publisher has to pay author, middleman, and

advertising, and if the price were much below three the profit accruing

would not pay him fairly for his time and labor.  At the same time, if he

could get ten dollars for the book he would take it, and his morals would

not fall under criticism.



But if he were an inspired person commissioned by the Deity to receive

and print and spread broadcast among sorrowing and suffering and poor men

a precious message of healing and cheer and salvation, he would have to

do as Bible Societies do--sell the book at a pinched margin above cost to

such as could pay, and give it free to all that couldn't; and his name

would be praised.  But if he sold it at seven hundred per cent. profit

and put the money in his pocket, his name would be mocked and derided.

Just as Mrs. Eddy's is.  And most justifiably, as it seems to me.



The complete Bible contains one million words.  The New Testament by

itself contains two hundred and forty thousand words.



My '84 edition of Science and Health contains one hundred and twenty

thousand words--just half as many as the New Testament.



Science and Health has since been so inflated by later inspirations that

the 1902 edition contains one hundred and eighty thousand words--not

counting the thirty thousand at the back, devoted by Mrs. Eddy to

advertising the book's healing abilities--and the inspiring continues

right along.



If you have a book whose market is so sure and so great that you can give

a printer an everlasting order for thirty or forty or fifty thousand

copies a year he will furnish them at a cheap rate, because whenever

there is a slack time in his press-room and bindery he can fill the idle

intervals on your book and be making something instead of losing.  That

is the kind of contract that can be let on Science and Health every year.

I am obliged to doubt that the three-dollar Science and Health costs Mrs.

Eddy above fifteen cents, or that the six dollar copy costs her above

eighty cents.  I feel quite sure that the average profit to her on these

books, above cost of manufacture, is all of seven hundred per cent.



Every proper Christian Scientist has to buy and own (and canvass for)

Science and Health (one hundred and eighty thousand words), and he must

also own a Bible (one million words).  He can buy the one for from three

to six dollars, and the other for fifteen cents.  Or, if three dollars is

all the money he has, he can get his Bible for nothing.  When the Supreme

Being disseminates a saving Message through uninspired agents--the New

Testament, for instance--it can be done for five cents a copy, but when

He sends one containing only two-thirds as many words through the shop of

a Divine Personage, it costs sixty times as much.  I think that in

matters of such importance it is bad economy to employ a wild-cat agency.



Here are some figures which are perfectly authentic, and which seem to

justify my opinion.



"These [Bible] societies, inspired only by a sense of religious duty, are

issuing the Bible at a price so small that they have made it the cheapest

book printed.  For example, the American Bible Society offers an edition

of the whole Bible as low as fifteen cents and the New Testament at five

cents, and the British Society at sixpence and one penny, respectively.

These low prices, made possible by their policy of selling the books at

cost or below cost," etc.--New York Sun, February 25, 1903.









CHAPTER IX



We may now make a final footing-up of Mrs. Eddy, and see what she is, in

the fulness of her powers.  She is



The Massachusetts Metaphysical College

Pastor Emeritus;

President;

Board of Directors;

Board of Education;

Board of Lectureships;

Future Board of Trustees,

Proprietor of the Publishing-House and Periodicals;

Treasurer;

Clerk;

Proprietor of the Teachers;

Proprietor of the Lecturers;

Proprietor of the Missionaries;

Proprietor of the Readers;

Dictator of the Services; sole Voice of the Pulpit;

Proprietor of the Sanhedrin;

Sole Proprietor of the Creed.  (Copyrighted.);

Indisputable Autocrat of the Branch Churches, with their life and death

in her hands;

Sole Thinker for The First Church (and the others);

Sole and Infallible Expounder of Doctrine, in life and in death;

Sole permissible Discoverer, Denouncer, Judge, and Executioner of

Ostensible Hypnotists;

Fifty-handed God of Excommunication--with a thunderbolt in every hand;

Appointer and Installer of the Pastor of all the Churches--the Perpetual

Pastor-Universal, Science and Health, "the Comforter."









CHAPTER X



There she stands-painted by herself.  No witness but herself has been

allowed to testify.  She stands there painted by her acts, and decorated

by her words.  When she talks, she has only a decorative value as a

witness, either for or against herself, for she deals mainly in

unsupported assertion; and in the rare cases where she puts forward a

verifiable fact she gets out of it a meaning which it refuses to furnish

to anybody else.  Also, when she talks, she is unstable, she wanders, she

is incurably inconsistent; what she says to-day she contradicts tomorrow.



But her acts are consistent.  They are always faithful to her, they never

misinterpret her, they are a mirror which always reflects her exactly,

precisely, minutely, unerringly, and always the same, to date, with only

those progressive little natural changes in stature, dress, complexion,

mood, and carriage that mark--exteriorly--the march of the years and

record the accumulations of experience, while--interiorly--through all

this steady drift of evolution the one essential detail, the commanding

detail, the master detail of the make-up remains as it was in the

beginning, suffers no change and can suffer none; the basis of the

character; the temperament, the disposition, that indestructible iron

framework upon which the character is built, and whose shape it must

take, and keep, throughout life.  We call it a person's nature.



The man who is born stingy can be taught to give liberally--with his

hands; but not with his heart.  The man born kind and compassionate can

have that disposition crushed down out of sight by embittering

experience; but if it were an organ the post-mortem would find it still

in his corpse.  The man born ambitious of power and glory may live long

without finding it out, but when the opportunity comes he will know, will

strike for the largest thing within the limit of his chances at the time-

constable, perhaps--and will be glad and proud when he gets it, and will

write home about it.  But he will not stop with that start; his appetite

will come again; and by-and-by again, and yet again; and when he has

climbed to police commissioner it will at last begin to dawn upon him

that what his Napoleon soul wants and was born for is something away

higher up--he does not quite know what, but Circumstance and Opportunity

will indicate the direction and he will cut a road through and find out.



I think Mrs. Eddy was born with a far-seeing business-eye, but did not

know it; and with a great organizing and executive talent, and did not

know it; and with a large appetite for power and distinction, and did not

know it.  I think the reason that her make did not show up until middle

life was that she had General Grant's luck--Circumstance and Opportunity

did not come her way when she was younger.  The qualities that were born

in her had to wait for circumstance and opportunity--but they were there:

they were there to stay, whether they ever got a chance to fructify or

not.  If they had come early, they would have found her ready and

competent.  And they--not she--would have determined what they would set

her at and what they would make of her.  If they had elected to

commission her as second-assistant cook in a bankrupt boarding-house,

I know the rest of it--I know what would have happened.  She would have

owned the boarding-house within six months; she would have had the late

proprietor on salary and humping himself, as the worldly say; she would

have had that boarding-house spewing money like a mint; she would have

worked the servants and the late landlord up to the limit; she would have

squeezed the boarders till they wailed, and by some mysterious quality

born in her she would have kept the affections of certain of the lot

whose love and esteem she valued, and flung the others down the back

area; in two years she would own all the boarding-houses in the town, in

five all the boarding-houses in the State, in twenty all the hotels in

America, in forty all the hotels on the planet, and would sit at home

with her finger on a button and govern the whole combination as easily as

a bench-manager governs a dog-show.



It would be a grand thing to see, and I feel a kind of disappointment--

but never mind, a religion is better and larger; and there is more to it.

And I have not been steeping myself in Christian Science all these weeks

without finding out that the one sensible thing to do with a

disappointment is to put it out of your mind and think of something

cheerfuler.



We outsiders cannot conceive of Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science Religion as

being a sudden and miraculous birth, but only as a growth from a seed

planted by circumstances, and developed stage by stage by command and

compulsion of the same force.  What the stages were we cannot know, but

are privileged to guess.  She may have gotten the mental-healing idea

from Quimby--it had been experimented with for ages, and was no one's

special property.  [For the present, for convenience' sake, let us

proceed upon the hypothesis that that was all she got of him, and that

she put up the rest of the assets herself.  This will strain us, but let

us try it.] In each and all its forms and under all its many names,

mental healing had had limits, always, and they were rather narrow ones--

Mrs. Eddy, let us imagine, removed the fence, abolished the frontiers.

Not by expanding mental-healing, but by absorbing its small bulk into the

vaster bulk of Christian Science--Divine Science, The Holy Ghost, the

Comforter--which was a quite different and sublimer force, and one which

had long lain dormant and unemployed.



The Christian Scientist believes that the Spirit of God (life and love)

pervades the universe like an atmosphere; that whoso will study Science

and Health can get from it the secret of how to inhale that transforming

air; that to breathe it is to be made new; that from the new man all

sorrow, all care, all miseries of the mind vanish away, for that only

peace, contentment and measureless joy can live in that divine fluid;

that it purifies the body from disease, which is a vicious creation of

the gross human mind, and cannot continue to exist in the presence of the

Immortal Mind, the renewing Spirit of God.



The Scientist finds this reasonable, natural, and not harder to believe

than that the disease germ, a creature of darkness, perishes when exposed

to the light of the great sun--a new revelation of profane science which

no one doubts.  He reminds us that the actinic ray, shining upon lupus,

cures it--a horrible disease which was incurable fifteen years ago, and

had been incurable for ten million years before; that this wonder,

unbelievable by the physicians at first, is believed by them now; and so

he is tranquilly confident that the time is coming when the world will be

educated up to a point where it will comprehend and grant that the light

of the Spirit of God, shining unobstructed upon the soul, is an actinic

ray which can purge both mind and body from disease and set them free and

make them whole.



It is apparent, then, that in Christian Science it is not one man's mind

acting upon another man's mind that heals; that it is solely the Spirit

of God that heals; that the healer's mind performs no office but to

convey that force to the patient; that it is merely the wire which

carries the electric fluid, so to speak, and delivers the message.

Therefore, if these things be true, mental-healing and Science-healing

are separate and distinct processes, and no kinship exists between them.



To heal the body of its ills and pains is a mighty benefaction, but in

our day our physicians and surgeons work a thousand miracles--prodigies

which would have ranked as miracles fifty years ago--and they have so

greatly extended their domination over disease that we feel so well

protected that we are able to look with a good deal of composure and

absence of hysterics upon the claims of new competitors in that field.



But there is a mightier benefaction than the healing of the body, and

that is the healing of the spirit--which is Christian Science's other

claim.  So far as I know, so far as I can find out, it makes it good.

Personally I have not known a Scientist who did not seem serene,

contented, unharassed.  I have not found an outsider whose observation of

Scientists furnished him a view that differed from my own.  Buoyant

spirits, comfort of mind, freedom from care these happinesses we all

have, at intervals; but in the spaces between, dear me, the black hours!

They have put a curse upon the life of every human being I have ever

known, young or old.  I concede not a single exception.  Unless it might

be those Scientists just referred to.  They may have been playing a part

with me; I hope they were not, and I believe they were not.



Time will test the Science's claim.  If time shall make it good; if time

shall prove that the Science can heal the persecuted spirit of man and

banish its troubles and keep it serene and sunny and content--why, then

Mrs. Eddy will have a monument that will reach above the clouds.  For if

she did not hit upon that imperial idea and evolve it and deliver it, its

discoverer can never be identified with certainty, now, I think.  It is

the giant feature, it is the sun that rides in the zenith of Christian

Science, the auxiliary features are of minor consequence [Let us still

leave the large "if" aside, for the present, and proceed as if it had no

existence.]



It is not supposable that Mrs. Eddy realized, at first, the size of her

plunder.  (No, find--that is the word; she did not realize the size of

her find, at first.) It had to grow upon her, by degrees, in accordance

with the inalterable custom of Circumstance, which works by stages, and

by stages only, and never furnishes any mind with all the materials for a

large idea at one time.



In the beginning, Mrs. Eddy was probably interested merely in the mental-

healing detail And perhaps mainly interested in it pecuniary, for she was

poor.



She would succeed in anything she undertook.  She would attract pupils,

and her commerce would grow.  She would inspire in patient and pupil

confidence in her earnestness, her history is evidence that she would not

fail of that.



There probably came a time, in due course, when her students began to

think there was something deeper in her teachings than they had been

suspecting--a mystery beyond mental-healing, and higher.  It is

conceivable that by consequence their manner towards her changed little

by little, and from respectful became reverent.  It is conceivable that

this would have an influence upon her; that it would incline her to

wonder if their secret thought--that she was inspired--might not be a

well-grounded guess.  It is conceivable that as time went on the thought

in their minds and its reflection in hers might solidify into conviction.



She would remember, then, that as a child she had been called, more than

once, by a mysterious voice--just as had happened to little Samuel.

(Mentioned in her Autobiography.) She would be impressed by that ancient

reminiscence, now, and it could have a prophetic meaning for her.



It is conceivable that the persuasive influences around her and within

her would give a new and powerful impulse to her philosophizings, and

that from this, in time, would result that great birth, the healing of

body and mind by the inpouring of the Spirit of God--the central and

dominant idea of Christian Science--and that when this idea came she

would not doubt that it was an inspiration direct from Heaven.









CHAPTER XI



[I must rest a little, now.  To sit here and painstakingly spin out a

scheme which imagines Mrs. Eddy, of all people, working her mind on a

plane above commercialism; imagines her thinking, philosophizing,

discovering majestic things; and even imagines her dealing in

sincerities--to be frank, I find it a large contract But I have begun it,

and I will go through with it.]









CHAPTER XII



It is evident that she made disciples fast, and that their belief in her

and in the authenticity of her heavenly ambassadorship was not of the

lukewarm and half-way sort, but was profoundly earnest and sincere.  Her

book was issued from the press in 1875, it began its work of convert-

making, and within six years she had successfully launched a new Religion

and a new system of healing, and was teaching them to crowds of eager

students in a College of her own, at prices so extraordinary that we are

almost compelled to accept her statement (no, her guarded intimation)

that the rates were arranged on high, since a mere human being

unacquainted with commerce and accustomed to think in pennies could

hardly put up such a hand as that without supernatural help.



From this stage onward--Mrs. Eddy being what she was--the rest of the

development--stages would follow naturally and inevitably.



But if she had been anybody else, there would have been a different

arrangement of them, with different results.  Being the extraordinary

person she was, she realized her position and its possibilities; realized

the possibilities, and had the daring to use them for all they were

worth.



We have seen what her methods were after she passed the stage where her

divine ambassadorship was granted its executer in the hearts and minds of

her followers; we have seen how steady and fearless and calculated and

orderly was her march thenceforth from conquest to conquest; we have seen

her strike dead, without hesitancy, any hostile or questionable force

that rose in her path: first, the horde of pretenders that sprang up and

tried to take her Science and its market away from her--she crushed them,

she obliterated them; when her own National Christian Science Association

became great in numbers and influence, and loosely and dangerously

garrulous, and began to expound the doctrines according to its own

uninspired notions, she took up her sponge without a tremor of fear and

wiped that Association out; when she perceived that the preachers in her

pulpits were becoming afflicted with doctrine-tinkering, she recognized

the danger of it, and did not hesitate nor temporize, but promptly

dismissed the whole of them in a day, and abolished their office

permanently; we have seen that, as fast as her power grew, she was

competent to take the measure of it, and that as fast as its expansion

suggested to her gradually awakening native ambition a higher step she

took it; and so, by this evolutionary process, we have seen the gross

money-lust relegated to second place, and the lust of empire and glory

rise above it.  A splendid dream; and by force of the qualities born in

her she is making it come true.



These qualities--and the capacities growing out of them by the nurturing

influences of training, observation, and experience seem to be clearly

indicated by the character of her career and its achievements.  They seem

to be:



A clear head for business, and a phenomenally long one;

Clear understanding of business situations;

Accuracy in estimating the opportunities they offer;

Intelligence in planning a business move;

Firmness in sticking to it after it has been decided upon;

Extraordinary daring;

Indestructible persistency;

Devouring ambition;

Limitless selfishness;

A knowledge of the weaknesses and poverties and docilities of human

nature and how to turn them to account which has never been surpassed, if

ever equalled;



And--necessarily--the foundation-stone of Mrs. Eddy's character is a

never-wavering confidence in herself.



It is a granite character.  And--quite naturally--a measure of the talc

of smallnesses common to human nature is mixed up in it and distributed

through it.  When Mrs. Eddy is not dictating servilities from her throne

in the clouds to her official domestics in Boston or to her far-spread

subjects round about the planet, but is down on the ground, she is kin to

us and one of us: sentimental as a girl, garrulous, ungrammatical,

incomprehensible, affected, vain of her little human ancestry, unstable,

inconsistent, unreliable in statement, and naively and everlastingly

self-contradictory-oh, trivial and common and commonplace as the

commonest of us! just a Napoleon as Madame de Remusat saw him, a brass

god with clay legs.









CHAPTER XIII



In drawing Mrs. Eddy's portrait it has been my purpose to restrict myself

to materials furnished by herself, and I believe I have done that.  If I

have misinterpreted any of her acts, it was not done intentionally.



It will be noticed that in skeletonizing a list of the qualities which

have carried her to the dizzy summit which she occupies, I have not

mentioned the power which was the commanding force employed in achieving

that lofty flight.  It did not belong in that list; it was a force that

was not a detail of her character, but was an outside one.  It was the

power which proceeded from her people's recognition of her as a

supernatural personage, conveyer of the Latest Word, and divinely

commissioned to deliver it to the world.  The form which such a

recognition takes, consciously or unconsciously, is worship; and worship

does not question nor criticize, it obeys.  The object of it does not

need to coddle it, bribe it, beguile it, reason with it, convince it--it

commands it; that is sufficient; the obedience rendered is not reluctant,

but prompt and whole-hearted.  Admiration for a Napoleon, confidence in

him, pride in him, affection for him, can lift him high and carry him

far; and these are forms of worship, and are strong forces, but they are

worship of a mere human being, after all, and are infinitely feeble, as

compared with those that are generated by that other worship, the worship

of a divine personage.  Mrs. Eddy has this efficient worship, this massed

and centralized force, this force which is indifferent to opposition,

untroubled by fear, and goes to battle singing, like Cromwell's soldiers;

and while she has it she can command and it will obey, and maintain her

on her throne, and extend her empire.



She will have it until she dies; and then we shall see a curious and

interesting further development of her revolutionary work begin.









CHAPTER XIV



The President and Board of Directors will succeed her, and the government

will go on without a hitch.  The By-laws will bear that interpretation.

All the Mother-Church's vast powers are concentrated in that Board.  Mrs.

Eddy's unlimited personal reservations make the Board's ostensible

supremacy, during her life, a sham, and the Board itself a shadow.  But

Mrs. Eddy has not made those reservations for any one but herself--they

are distinctly personal, they bear her name, they are not usable by

another individual.  When she dies her reservations die, and the Board's

shadow-powers become real powers, without the change of any important By-

law, and the Board sits in her place as absolute and irresponsible a

sovereign as she was.



It consists of but five persons, a much more manageable Cardinalate than

the Roman Pope's.  I think it will elect its Pope from its own body, and

that it will fill its own vacancies.  An elective Papacy is a safe and

wise system, and a long-liver.









CHAPTER XV



We may take that up now.



It is not a single if, but a several-jointed one; not an oyster, but a

vertebrate.



1.  Did Mrs. Eddy borrow from Quimby the Great Idea, or only the little

one, the old-timer, the ordinary mental-healing-healing by "mortal" mind?



2.  If she borrowed the Great Idea, did she carry it away in her head, or

in manuscript?



3.  Did she hit upon the Great Idea herself?  By the Great Idea I mean,

of course, the conviction that the Force involved was still existent, and

could be applied now just as it was applied by Christ's Disciples and

their converts, and as successfully.

4.  Did she philosophize it, systematize it, and write it down in a book?



5.  Was it she, and not another, that built a new Religion upon the book

and organized it?



I think No.  5 can be answered with a Yes, and dismissed from the

controversy.  And I think that the Great Idea, great as it was, would

have enjoyed but a brief activity, and would then have gone to sleep

again for some more centuries, but for the perpetuating impulse it got

from that organized and tremendous force.



As for Nos.  1, 2, and 4, the hostiles contend that Mrs. Eddy got the

Great Idea from Quimby and carried it off in manuscript.  But their

testimony, while of consequence, lacks the most important detail; so far

as my information goes, the Quimby manuscript has not been produced.  I

think we cannot discuss No. 1 and No. 2 profitably.  Let them go.



For me, No. 3 has a mild interest, and No. 4 a violent one.



As regards No.  3, Mrs. Eddy was brought up, from the cradle, an old-

time, boiler-iron, Westminster-Catechism Christian, and knew her Bible as

well as Captain Kydd knew his, "when he sailed, when he sailed," and

perhaps as sympathetically.  The Great Idea had struck a million Bible-

readers before her as being possible of resurrection and application--it

must have struck as many as that, and been cogitated, indolently,

doubtingly, then dropped and forgotten--and it could have struck her, in

due course.  But how it could interest her, how it could appeal to her--

with her make this a thing that is difficult to understand.



For the thing back of it is wholly gracious and beautiful: the power,

through loving mercifulness and compassion, to heal fleshly ills and

pains and grief--all--with a word, with a touch of the hand!  This power

was given by the Saviour to the Disciples, and to all the converted.

All--every one.  It was exercised for generations afterwards.  Any

Christian who was in earnest and not a make-believe, not a policy--

Christian, not a Christian for revenue only, had that healing power, and

could cure with it any disease or any hurt or damage possible to human

flesh and bone.  These things are true, or they are not.  If they were

true seventeen and eighteen and nineteen centuries ago it would be

difficult to satisfactorily explain why or how or by what argument that

power should be nonexistent in Christians now.



To wish to exercise it could occur to Mrs. Eddy--but would it?



Grasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees--money,

power, glory--vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent,

pitiless where thinkers and hypnotists are concerned, illiterate,

shallow, incapable of reasoning outside of commercial lines, immeasurably

selfish--



Of course the Great Idea could strike her, we have to grant that, but why

it should interest her is a question which can easily overstrain the

imagination and bring on nervous prostration, or something like that, and

is better left alone by the judicious, it seems to me--



Unless we call to our help the alleged other side of Mrs. Eddy's make and

character the side which her multitude of followers see, and sincerely

believe in.  Fairness requires that their view be stated here.  It is the

opposite of the one which I have drawn from Mrs. Eddy's history and from

her By-laws.  To her followers she is this:



Patient, gentle, loving, compassionate, noble hearted, unselfish,

sinless, widely cultured, splendidly equipped mentally, a profound

thinker, an able writer, a divine personage, an inspired messenger whose

acts are dictated from the Throne, and whose every utterance is the Voice

of God.



She has delivered to them a religion which has revolutionized their

lives, banished the glooms that shadowed them, and filled them and

flooded them with sunshine and gladness and peace; a religion which has

no hell; a religion whose heaven is not put off to another time, with a

break and a gulf between, but begins here and now, and melts into

eternity as fancies of the waking day melt into the dreams of sleep.



They believe it is a Christianity that is in the New Testament; that it

has always been there, that in the drift of ages it was lost through

disuse and neglect, and that this benefactor has found it and given it

back to men, turning the night of life into day, its terrors into myths,

its lamentations into songs of emancipation and rejoicing.



There we have Mrs. Eddy as her followers see her.  She has lifted them

out of grief and care and doubt and fear, and made their lives beautiful;

she found them wandering forlorn in a wintry wilderness, and has led them

to a tropic paradise like that of which the poet sings:



     "O, islands there are on the face of the deep

     Where the leaves never fade and the skies never weep."



To ask them to examine with a microscope the character of such a

benefactor; to ask them to examine it at all; to ask them to look at a

blemish which another person believes he has found in it--well, in their

place could you do it?  Would you do it?  Wouldn't you be ashamed to do

it?  If a tramp had rescued your child from fire and death, and saved its

mother's heart from breaking, could you see his rags?  Could you smell

his breath?  Mrs. Eddy has done more than that for these people.



They are prejudiced witnesses.  To the credit of human nature it is not

possible that they should be otherwise.  They sincerely believe that Mrs.

Eddy's character is pure and perfect and beautiful, and her history

without stain or blot or blemish.  But that does not settle it.  They

sincerely believe she did not borrow the Great Idea from Quimby, but hit

upon it herself.  It may be so, and it could be so.  Let it go--there is

no way to settle it.  They believe she carried away no Quimby

manuscripts.  Let that go, too--there is no way to settle it.  They

believe that she, and not another, built the Religion upon the book, and

organized it.  I believe it, too.



Finally, they believe that she philosophized Christian Science, explained

it, systematized it, and wrote it all out with her own hand in the book

Science and Health.



I am not able to believe that.  Let us draw the line there.  The known

and undisputed products of her pen are a formidable witness against her.

They do seem to me to prove, quite clearly and conclusively, that

writing, upon even simple subjects, is a difficult labor for her: that

she has never been able to write anything above third-rate English; that

she is weak in the matter of grammar; that she has but a rude and dull

sense of the values of words; that she so lacks in the matter of literary

precision that she can seldom put a thought into words that express it

lucidly to the reader and leave no doubts in his mind as to whether he

has rightly understood or not; that she cannot even draught a Preface

that a person can fully comprehend, nor one which can by any art be

translated into a fully understandable form; that she can seldom inject

into a Preface even single sentences whose meaning is uncompromisingly

clear--yet Prefaces are her specialty, if she has one.



Mrs. Eddy's known and undisputed writings are very limited in bulk; they

exhibit no depth, no analytical quality, no thought above school

composition size, and but juvenile ability in handling thoughts of even

that modest magnitude.  She has a fine commercial ability, and could

govern a vast railway system in great style; she could draught a set of

rules that Satan himself would say could not be improved on--for

devilish effectiveness--by his staff; but we know, by our excursions

among the Mother-Church's By-laws, that their English would discredit the

deputy baggage-smasher.  I am quite sure that Mrs. Eddy cannot write well

upon any subject, even a commercial one.



In the very first revision of Science and Health (1883), Mrs. Eddy wrote

a Preface which is an unimpeachable witness that the rest of the book was

written by somebody else.  I have put it in the Appendix along with a

page or two taken from the body of the book, and will ask the reader to

compare the labored and lumbering and confused gropings of this Preface

with the easy and flowing and direct English of the other exhibit, and

see if he can believe that the one hand and brain produced both.



And let him take the Preface apart, sentence by sentence, and searchingly

examine each sentence word by word, and see if he can find half a dozen

sentences whose meanings he is so sure of that he can rephrase them--in

words of his own--and reproduce what he takes to be those meanings.

Money can be lost on this game.  I know, for I am the one that lost it.



Now let the reader turn to the excerpt which I have made from the chapter

on "Prayer" (last year's edition of Science and Health), and compare that

wise and sane and elevated and lucid and compact piece of work with the

aforesaid Preface, and with Mrs. Eddy's poetry concerning the gymnastic

trees, and Minerva's not yet effete sandals, and the wreaths imported

from Erudition's bower for the decoration of Plymouth Rock, and the

Plague-spot and Bacilli, and my other exhibits (turn back to my Chapters

I.  and II.) from the Autobiography, and finally with the late

Communication concerning me, and see if he thinks anybody's affirmation,

or anybody's sworn testimony, or any other testimony of any imaginable

kind would ever be likely to convince him that Mrs. Eddy wrote that

chapter on Prayer.



I do not wish to impose my opinion on any one who will not permit it, but

such as it is I offer it here for what it is worth.  I cannot believe,

and I do not believe, that Mrs. Eddy originated any of the thoughts and

reasonings out of which the book Science and Health is constructed; and I

cannot believe, and do not believe that she ever wrote any part of that

book.



I think that if anything in the world stands proven, and well and solidly

proven, by unimpeachable testimony--the treacherous testimony of her own

pen in her known and undisputed literary productions--it is that Mrs.

Eddy is not capable of thinking upon high planes, nor of reasoning

clearly nor writing intelligently upon low ones.



Inasmuch as--in my belief--the very first editions of the book Science

and Health were far above the reach of Mrs. Eddy's mental and literary

abilities, I think she has from the very beginning been claiming as her

own another person's book, and wearing as her own property laurels

rightfully belonging to that person--the real author of Science and

Health.  And I think the reason--and the only reason--that he has not

protested is because his work was not exposed to print until after he was

safely dead.



That with an eye to business, and by grace of her business talent, she

has restored to the world neglected and abandoned features of the

Christian religion which her thousands of followers find gracious and

blessed and contenting, I recognize and confess; but I am convinced that

every single detail of the work except just that one--the delivery of the

Product to the world--was conceived and performed by another.









APPENDIX A



ORIGINAL FIRST PREFACE TO SCIENCE AND HEALTH



There seems a Christian necessity of learning God's power and purpose to

heal both mind and body.  This thought grew out of our early seeking Him

in all our ways, and a hopeless as singular invalidism that drugs

increased instead of diminished, and hygiene benefited only for a season.

By degrees we have drifted into more spiritual latitudes of thought, and

experimented as we advanced until demonstrating fully the power of mind

over the body.  About the year 1862, having heard of a mesmerist in

Portland who was treating the sick by manipulation, we visited him; he

helped us for a time, then we relapsed somewhat.  After his decease, and

a severe casualty deemed fatal by skilful physicians, we discovered that

the Principle of all healing and the law that governs it is God, a divine

Principle, and a spiritual not material law, and regained health.



It was not an individual or mortal mind acting upon another so-called

mind that healed us.  It was the glorious truths of Christian Science

that we discovered as we neared that verge of so-called material life

named death; yea, it was the great Shekinah, the spirit of Life, Truth,

and Love illuminating our understanding of the action and might of

Omnipotence!  The old gentleman to whom we have referred had some very

advanced views on healing, but he was not avowedly religious neither

scholarly.  We interchanged thoughts on the subject of healing the sick.

I restored some patients of his that he failed to heal, and left in his

possession some manuscripts of mine containing corrections of his

desultory pennings, which I am informed at his decease passed into the

hands of a patient of his, now residing in Scotland.  He died in 1865 and

left no published works.  The only manuscript that we ever held of his,

longer than to correct it, was one of perhaps a dozen pages, most of

which we had composed.  He manipulated the sick; hence his ostensible

method of healing was physical instead of mental.



We helped him in the esteem of the public by our writings, but never knew

of his stating orally or in writing that he treated his patients

mentally; never heard him give any directions to that effect; and have it

from one of his patients, who now asserts that he was the founder of

mental healing, that he never revealed to anyone his method.  We refer to

these facts simply to refute the calumnies and false claims of our

enemies, that we are preferring dishonest claims to the discovery and

founding at this period of Metaphysical Healing or Christian Science.



The Science and laws of a purely mental healing and their method of

application through spiritual power alone, else a mental argument against

disease, are our own discovery at this date.  True, the Principle is

divine and eternal, but the application of it to heal the sick had been

lost sight of, and required to be again spiritually discerned and its

science discovered, that man might retain it through the understanding.

Since our discovery in 1866 of the divine science of Christian Healing,

we have labored with tongue and pen to found this system.  In this

endeavor every obstacle has been thrown in our path that the envy and

revenge of a few disaffected students could devise.  The superstition and

ignorance of even this period have not failed to contribute their mite

towards misjudging us, while its Christian advancement and scientific

research have helped sustain our feeble efforts.



Since our first Edition of Science and Health, published in 1875, two of

the aforesaid students have plagiarized and pirated our works.  In the

issues of E. J. A., almost exclusively ours, were thirteen paragraphs,

without credit, taken verbatim from our books.



Not one of our printed works was ever copied or abstracted from the

published or from the unpublished writings of anyone.  Throughout our

publications of Metaphysical Healing or Christian Science, when writing

or dictating them, we have given ourselves to contemplation wholly apart

from the observation of the material senses: to look upon a copy would

have distracted our thoughts from the subject before us.  We were seldom

able to copy our own compositions, and have employed an amanuensis for

the last six years.  Every work that we have had published has been

extemporaneously written; and out of fifty lectures and sermons that we

have delivered the last year, forty-four have been extemporaneous.  We

have distributed many of our unpublished manuscripts; loaned to one of

our youngest students, R. K--------y, between three and four hundred pages,

of which we were sole author--giving him liberty to copy but not to

publish them.



Leaning on the sustaining Infinite with loving trust, the trials of to-

day grow brief, and to-morrow is big with blessings.



The wakeful shepherd, tending his flocks, beholds from the mountain's top

the first faint morning beam ere cometh the risen day.  So from Soul's

loftier summits shines the pale star to prophet-shepherd, and it

traverses night, over to where the young child lies, in cradled

obscurity, that shall waken a world.  Over the night of error dawn the

morning beams and guiding star of Truth, and "the wise men" are led by it

to Science, which repeats the eternal harmony that it reproduced, in

proof of immortality.  The time for thinkers has come; and the time for

revolutions, ecclesiastical and civil, must come.  Truth, independent of

doctrines or time-honored systems, stands at the threshold of history.

Contentment with the past, or the cold conventionality of custom, may no

longer shut the door on science; though empires fall, "He whose right it

is shall reign."  Ignorance of God should no longer be the stepping-stone

to faith; understanding Him, "whom to know aright is Life eternal," is

the only guaranty of obedience.



This volume may not open a new thought, and make it at once familiar.  It

has the sturdy task of a pioneer, to hack away at the tall oaks and cut

the rough granite, leaving future ages to declare what it has done.  We

made our first discovery of the adaptation of metaphysics to the

treatment of disease in the winter of 1866; since then we have tested the

Principle on ourselves and others, and never found it to fail to prove

the statements herein made of it.  We must learn the science of Life, to

reach the perfection of man.  To understand God as the Principle of all

being, and to live in accordance with this Principle, is the Science of

Life.  But to reproduce this harmony of being, the error of personal

sense must yield to science, even as the science of music corrects tones

caught from the ear, and gives the sweet concord of sound.  There are

many theories of physic and theology, and many calls in each of their

directions for the right way; but we propose to settle the question of

"What is Truth?" on the ground of proof, and let that method of healing

the sick and establishing Christianity be adopted that is found to give

the most health and to make the best Christians; science will then have a

fair field, in which case we are assured of its triumph over all opinions

and beliefs.  Sickness and sin have ever had their doctors; but the

question is, Have they become less because of them?  The longevity of our

antediluvians would say, No!  and the criminal records of today utter

their voices little in favor of such a conclusion.  Not that we would

deny to Caesar the things that are his, but that we ask for the things

that belong to Truth; and safely affirm, from the demonstrations we have

been able to make, that the science of man understood would have

eradicated sin, sickness, and death, in a less period than six thousand

years.  We find great difficulties in starting this work right.  Some

shockingly false claims are already made to a metaphysical practice;

mesmerism, its very antipodes, is one of them.  Hitherto we have never,

in a single instance of our discovery, found the slightest resemblance

between mesmerism and metaphysics.  No especial idiosyncrasy is requisite

to acquire a knowledge of metaphysical healing; spiritual sense is more

important to its discernment than the intellect; and those who would

learn this science without a high moral standard of thought and action,

will fail to understand it until they go up higher.  Owing to our

explanations constantly vibrating between the same points, an irksome

repetition of words must occur; also the use of capital letters, genders,

and technicalities peculiar to the science.  Variety of language, or

beauty of diction, must give place to close analysis and unembellished

thought.  "Hoping all things, enduring all things," to do good to our

enemies, to bless them that curse us, and to bear to the sorrowing and

the sick consolation and healing, we commit these pages to posterity.



MARY BAKER G.  EDDY.









APPENDIX B



The Gospel narratives bear brief testimony even to the life of our great

Master.  His spiritual noumenon and phenomenon, silenced portraiture.

Writers, less wise than the Apostles, essayed in the Apocryphal New

Testament, a legendary and traditional history of the early life of

Jesus.  But Saint Paul summarized the character of Jesus as the model of

Christianity, in these words: "Consider Him who endured such

contradictions of sinners against Himself.  Who for the joy that was set

before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at

the right hand of the throne of God."



It may be that the mortal life battle still wages, and must continue till

its involved errors are vanquished by victory-bringing Science; but this

triumph will come!  God is over all.  He alone is our origin, aim, and

Being.  The real man is not of the dust, nor is he ever created through

the flesh; for his father and mother are the one Spirit, and his brethren

are all the children of one parent, the eternal Good.



Any kind of literary composition was excessively difficult for Mrs. Eddy.

She found it grinding hard work to dig out anything to say.  She

realized, at the above stage in her life, that with all her trouble she

had not been able to scratch together even material enough for a child's

Autobiography, and also that what she had secured was in the main not

valuable, not important, considering the age and the fame of the person

she was writing about; and so it occurred to her to attempt, in that

paragraph, to excuse the meagreness and poor quality of the feast she was

spreading, by letting on that she could do ever so much better if she

wanted to, but was under constraint of Divine etiquette.  To feed with

more than a few indifferent crumbs a plebeian appetite for personal

details about Personages in her class was not the correct thing, and she

blandly points out that there is Precedent for this reserve.  When Mrs.

Eddy tries to be artful--in literature--it is generally after the

manner of the ostrich; and with the ostrich's luck.  Please try to find

the connection between the two paragraphs.--M.  T.









APPENDIX C



The following is the spiritual signification of the Lord's Prayer:



Principle, eternal and harmonious,

Nameless and adorable Intelligence,

Thou art ever present and supreme.

And when this supremacy of Spirit shall appear, the dream of matter will

disappear.

Give us the understanding of Truth and Love.

And loving we shall learn God, and Truth will destroy all error.

And lead us unto the Life that is Soul, and deliver us from the errors of

sense, sin, sickness, and death,

For God is Life, Truth, and Love for ever.

--Science and Health, edition of 1881.



It seems to me that this one is distinctly superior to the one that was

inspired for last year's edition.  It is strange, but to my mind plain,

that inspiring is an art which does not improve with practice.--M.  T.









APPENDIX D



"For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain,

Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in

his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come

to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.  Therefore I say unto you,

What things soever ye desire when ye pray, believe that ye receive them,

and ye shall have them.



"Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him."

--CHRIST JESUS.



The prayer that reclaims the sinner and heals the sick, is an absolute

faith that all things are possible to God--a spiritual understanding of

Him--an unselfed love.  Regardless of what another may say or think on

this subject, I speak from experience.  This prayer, combined with self-

sacrifice and toil, is the means whereby God has enabled me to do what I

have done for the religion and health of mankind.



Thoughts unspoken are not unknown to the divine Mind.  Desire is prayer;

and no less can occur from trusting God with our desires, that they may

be moulded and exalted before they take form in audible word, and in

deeds.



What are the motives for prayer?  Do we pray to make ourselves better, or

to benefit those that hear us; to enlighten the Infinite, or to be heard

of men?  Are we benefited by praying?  Yes, the desire which goes forth

hungering after righteousness is blessed of our Father, and it does not

return unto us void.



God is not moved by the breath of praise to do more than He has already

done; nor can the Infinite do less than bestow all good, since He is

unchanging Wisdom and Love.  We can do more for ourselves by humble

fervent petitions; but the All-loving does not grant them simply on the

ground of lip-service, for He already knows all.



Prayer cannot change the Science of Being, but it does bring us into

harmony with it.  Goodness reaches the demonstration of Truth.  A request

that another may work for us never does our work.  The habit of pleading

with the divine Mind, as one pleads with a human being, perpetuates the

belief in God as humanly circumscribed--an error which impedes spiritual

growth.



God is Love.  Can we ask Him to be more?  God is Intelligence.  Can we

inform the infinite Mind, or tell Him anything He does not already

comprehend?  Do we hope to change perfection?  Shall we plead for more at

the open fount, which always pours forth more than we receive?  The

unspoken prayer does bring us nearer the Source of all existence and

blessedness.



Asking God to be God is a "vain repetition."  God is "the same yesterday,

and to-day, and forever"; and He who is immutably right will do right,

without being reminded of His province.  The wisdom of man is not

sufficient to warrant him in advising God.



Who would stand before a blackboard, and pray the principle of

mathematics to work out the problem?  The rule is already established,

and it is our task to work out the solution.  Shall we ask the divine

Principle of all goodness to do His own work?  His work is done; and we

have only to avail ourselves of God's rule, in order to receive the

blessing thereof.



The divine Being must be reflected by man--else man is not the image and

likeness of the patient, tender, and true, the one "altogether lovely";

but to understand God is the work of eternity, and demands absolute

concentration of thought and energy.



How empty are our conceptions of Deity!  We admit theoretically that God

is good, omnipotent, omnipresent, infinite, and then we try to give

information to this infinite Mind; and plead for unmerited pardon, and a

liberal outpouring of benefactions.  Are we really grateful for the good

already received?  Then we shall avail ourselves of the blessings we

have, and thus be fitted to receive more.  Gratitude is much more than a

verbal expression of thanks Action expresses more gratitude than speech.



If we are ungrateful for Life, Truth, and Love, and yet return thanks to

God for all blessings, we are insincere; and incur the sharp censure our

Master pronounces on hypocrites.  In such a case the only acceptable

prayer is to put the finger on the lips and remember our blessings.

While the heart is far from divine Truth and Love, we cannot conceal the

ingratitude of barren lives, for God knoweth all things.



What we most need is the prayer of fervent desire for growth in grace,

expressed in patience, meekness, love, and good deeds.  To keep the

commandments of our Master and follow his example, is our proper debt to

Him, and the only worthy evidence of our gratitude for all He has done.

Outward worship is not of itself sufficient to express loyal and

heartfelt gratitude, since He has said: "If ye love Me, keep My

Commandments."



The habitual struggle to be always good, is unceasing prayer.  Its

motives are made manifest in the blessings they bring--which, if not

acknowledged in audible words, attest our worthiness to be made partakers

of Love.



Simply asking that we may love God will never make us love Him; but the

longing to be better and holier--expressed in daily watchfulness, and in

striving to assimilate more of the divine character--this will mould and

fashion us anew, until we awake in His likeness.  We reach the Science of

Christianity through demonstration of the divine nature; but in this

wicked world goodness will "be evil spoken of," and patience must work

experience.



Audible prayer can never do the works of spiritual understanding, which

regenerates; but silent prayer, watchfulness, and devout obedience,

enable us to follow Jesus' example.  Long prayers, ecclesiasticism, and

creeds, have clipped the divine pinions of Love, and clad religion in

human robes.  They materialize worship, hinder the Spirit, and keep man

from demonstrating his power over error.



Sorrow for wrong-doing is but one step towards reform, and the very

easiest step.  The next and great step required by Wisdom is the test of

our sincerity--namely, reformation.  To this end we are placed under the

stress of circumstances.  Temptation bids us repeat the offence, and woe

comes in return for what is done.  So it will ever be, till we learn that

there is no discount in the law of justice, and that we must pay "the

uttermost farthing."  The measure ye mete "shall be measured to you

again," and it will be full "and running over."



Saints and sinners get their full award, but not always in this world.

The followers of Christ drank His cup.  Ingratitude and persecution

filled it to the brim; but God pours the riches of His love into the

understanding and affections, giving us strength according to our day.

Sinners flourish "like a green bay-tree"; but, looking farther, the

Psalmist could see their end--namely, the destruction of sin through

suffering.



Prayer is sometimes used, as a confessional to cancel sin.  This error

impedes true religion.  Sin is forgiven, only as it is destroyed by

Christ-Truth and Life If prayer nourishes the belief that sin is

cancelled, and that man is made better by merely praying, it is an evil.

He grows worse who continues in sin because he thinks himself forgiven.



An apostle says that the Son of God (Christ) came to "destroy the works

of the devil."  We should follow our divine Exemplar, and seek the

destruction of all evil works, error and disease included.  We cannot

escape the penalty due for sin.  The Scriptures say, that if we deny

Christ, "He also will deny us."



The divine Love corrects and governs man.  Men may pardon, but this

divine Principle alone reforms the sinner.  God is not separate from the

wisdom He bestows.  The talents He gives we must improve.  Calling on Him

to forgive our work, badly done or left undone, implies the vain

supposition that we have nothing to do but to ask pardon, and that

afterwards we shall be free to repeat the offence.



To cause suffering, as the result of sin, is the means of destroying sin.

Every supposed pleasure in sin will furnish more than its equivalent of

pain, until belief in material life and sin is destroyed.  To reach

heaven, the harmony of Being, we must understand the divine Principle of

Being.



"God is Love."  More than this we cannot ask; higher we cannot look;

farther we cannot go.  To suppose that God forgives or punishes sin,

according as His mercy is sought or unsought, is to misunderstand Love

and make prayer the safety-valve for wrong-doing.



Jesus uncovered and rebuked sin before He cast it out.  Of a sick woman

He said that Satan had bound her; and to Peter He said, "Thou art an

offense unto me."  He came teaching and showing men how to destroy sin,

sickness, and death.  He said of the fruitless tree, "It is hewn down."



It is believed by many that a certain magistrate, who lived in the time

of Jesus, left this record: "His rebuke is fearful."  The strong language

of our Master confirms this description.



The only civil sentence which He had for error was, "Get thee behind Me,

Satan."  Still stronger evidence that Jesus' reproof was pointed and

pungent is in His own words--showing the necessity for such forcible

utterance, when He cast out devils and healed the sick and sinful.  The

relinquishment of error deprives material sense of its false claims.



Audible prayer is impressive; it gives momentary solemnity and elevation

to thought; but does it produce any lasting benefit?  Looking deeply into

these things, we find that "a zeal .  .  .  not according to knowledge,"

gives occasion for reaction unfavorable to spiritual growth, sober

resolve, and wholesome perception of God's requirements.  The motives for

verbal prayer may embrace too much love of applause to induce or

encourage Christian sentiment.



Physical sensation, not Soul, produces material ecstasy, and emotions.

If spiritual sense always guided men at such times, there would grow out

of those ecstatic moments a higher experience and a better life, with

more devout self-abnegation, and purity.  A self-satisfied ventilation of

fervent sentiments never makes a Christian.  God is not influenced by

man.  The "divine ear" is not an auditoria!  nerve.  It is the all-

hearing and all-knowing Mind, to whom each want of man is always known,

and by whom it will be supplied.



The danger from audible prayer is, that it may lead us into temptation.

By it we may become involuntary hypocrites, uttering desires which are

not real, and consoling ourselves in the midst of sin, with the

recollection that we have prayed over it--or mean to ask forgiveness at

some later day.  Hypocrisy is fatal to religion.



A wordy prayer may afford a quiet sense of self-justification, though it

makes the sinner a hypocrite.  We never need despair of an honest heart,

but there is little hope for those who only come spasmodically face to

face with their wickedness, and then seek to hide it.  Their prayers are

indexes which do not correspond with their character.  They hold secret

fellowship with sin; and such externals are spoken of by Jesus as "like

unto whited sepulchres .  .  .  full of all uncleanness."



If a man, though apparently fervent and prayerful, is impure, and

therefore insincere, what must be the comment upon him?  If he had

reached the loftiness of his prayer, there would be no occasion for such

comment.  If we feel the aspiration, humility, gratitude, and love which

our words express--this God accepts; and it is wise not to try to deceive

our.  selves or others, for "there is nothing covered that shall not be

revealed."  Professions and audible prayers are like charity in one

respect--they "cover a multitude of sins."  Praying for humility, with

whatever fervency of expression, does not always mean a desire for it.

If we turn away from the poor, we are not ready to receive the reward of

Him who blesses the poor.  We confess to having a very wicked heart, and

ask that it may be laid bare before us; but do we not already know more

of this heart than we are willing to have our neighbor see?



We ought to examine ourselves, and learn what is the affection and

purpose of the heart; for this alone can show us what we honestly are.

If a friend informs us of a fault, do we listen to the rebuke patiently,

and credit what is said?  Do we not rather give thanks that we are "not

as other men?" During many years the author has been most grateful for

merited rebuke.  The sting lies in unmerited censure--in the falsehood

which does no one any good.



The test of all prayer lies in the answer to these questions: Do we love

our neighbor better because of this asking?  Do we pursue the old

selfishness, satisfied with having prayed for something better, though we

give no evidence of the sincerity of our requests by living consistently

with our prayer?  If selfishness has given place to kindness, we shall

regard our neighbor unselfishly, and bless them that curse us; but we

shall never meet this great duty by simply asking that it may be done.

There is a cross to be taken up, before we can enjoy the fruition of our

hope and faith.



Dost thou "love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy

soul, and with all thy mind?" This command includes much--even the

surrender of all merely material sensation, affection, and worship.  This

is the E1 Dorado of Christianity.  It involves the Science of Life, and

recognizes only the divine control of Spirit, wherein Soul is our master,

and material sense and human will have no place.



Are you willing to leave all for Christ, for Truth, and so be counted

among sinners?  No!  Do you really desire to attain this point?  No!

Then why make long prayers about it, and ask to be Christians, since you

care not to tread in the footsteps of our dear Master?  If unwilling to

follow His example, wherefore pray with the lips that you may be

partakers of His nature?  Consistent prayer is the desire to do right.

Prayer means that we desire to, and will, walk in the light so far as we

receive it, even though with bleeding footsteps, and waiting patiently on

the Lord, will leave our real desires to be rewarded by Him.



The world must grow to the spiritual understanding of prayer.  If good

enough to profit by Jesus' cup of earthly sorrows, God will sustain us

under these sorrows.  Until we are thus divinely qualified, and willing

to drink His cup, millions of vain repetitions will never pour into

prayer the unction of Spirit, in demonstration of power, and "with signs

following."  Christian Science reveals a necessity for overcoming the

world, the flesh and evil, and thus destroying all error.



Seeking is not sufficient.  It is striving which enables us to enter.

Spiritual attainments open the door to a higher understanding of the

divine Life.



One of the forms of worship in Thibet is to carry a praying-machine

through the streets, and stop at the doors to earn a penny by grinding

out a prayer; whereas civilization pays for clerical prayers, in lofty

edifices.  Is the difference very great, after all?



Experience teaches us that we do not always receive the blessings we ask

for in prayer.



There is some misapprehension of the source and means of all goodness and

blessedness, or we should certainly receive what we ask for.  The

Scriptures say: "Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye

may consume it upon your lusts."  What we desire and ask for it is not

always best for us to receive.  In this case infinite Love will not grant

the request.  Do you ask Wisdom to be merciful and not punish sin?  Then

"ye ask amiss."  Without punishment, sin would multiply.  Jesus' prayer,

"forgive us our debts," specified also the terms of forgiveness.  When

forgiving the adulterous woman He said, "Go, and sin no more."



A magistrate sometimes remits the penalty, but this may be no moral

benefit to the criminal; and at best, it only saves him from one form of

punishment.  The moral law, which has the right to acquit or condemn,

always demands restitution, before mortals can "go up higher."  Broken

law brings penalty, in order to compel this progress.



Mere legal pardon (and there is no other, for divine Principle never

pardons our sins or mistakes till they are corrected) leaves the offender

free to repeat the offense; if, indeed, he has not already suffered

sufficiently from vice to make him turn from it with loathing.  Truth

bestows no pardon upon error, but wipes it out in the most effectual

manner.  Jesus suffered for our sins, not to annul the divine sentence

against an individual's sin, but to show that sin must bring inevitable

suffering.



Petitions only bring to mortals the results of their own faith.  We know

that a desire for holiness is requisite in order to gain it; but if we

desire holiness above all else, we shall sacrifice everything for it.  We

must be willing to do this, that we may walk securely in the only

practical road to holiness.  Prayer alone cannot change the unalterable

Truth, or give us an understanding of it; but prayer coupled with a

fervent habitual desire to know and do the will of God will bring us into

all Truth.  Such a desire has little need of audible expression.  It is

best expressed in thought and life.









APPENDIX E



Reverend Heber Newton on Christian Science:



To begin, then, at the beginning, Christian Science accepts the work of

healing sickness as an integral part of the discipleship of Jesus Christ.

In Christ it finds, what the Church has always recognized, theoretically,

though it has practically ignored the fact--the Great Physician.  That

Christ healed the sick, we none of us question.  It stands plainly upon

the record.  This ministry of healing was too large a part of His work to

be left out from any picture of that life.  Such service was not an

incident of His career--it was an essential element of that career.  It

was an integral factor in His mission.  The Evangelists leave us no

possibility of confusion on this point.  Co-equal with his work of

instruction and inspiration was His work of healing.



The records make it equally clear that the Master laid His charge upon

His disciples to do as He had done.  "When He had called unto Him His

twelve disciples, He gave them power over unclean spirits, to cast them

out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease."  In

sending them forth, "He commanded them, saying, .  .  .  As ye go,

preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.  Heal the sick, cleanse

the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons."



That the twelve disciples undertook to do the Master's work of healing,

and that they, in their measure, succeeded, seems beyond question.  They

found in themselves the same power that the Master found in Himself, and

they used it as He had used His power.  The record of The Acts of the

Apostles, if at all trustworthy history, shows that they, too, healed the

sick.



Beyond the circle of the original twelve, it is equally clear that the

early disciples believed themselves charged with the same mission, and

that they sought to fulfil it.  The records of the early Church make it

indisputable that powers of healing were recognized as among the gifts of

the Spirit.  St.  Paul's letters render it certain that these gifts were

not a privilege of the original twelve, merely, but that they were the

heritage into which all the disciples entered.



Beyond the era of the primitive Church, through several generations, the

early Christians felt themselves called to the same ministry of healing,

and enabled with the same secret of power.  Through wellnigh three

centuries, the gifts of healing appear to have been, more or less,

recognized and exercised in the Church.  Through those generations,

however, there was a gradual disuse of this power, following upon a

failing recognition of its possession.  That which was originally the

rule became the exception.  By degrees, the sense of authority and power

to heal passed out from the consciousness of the Church.  It ceased to be

a sign of the indwelling Spirit.  For fifteen centuries, the recognition

of this authority and power has been altogether exceptional.  Here and

there, through the history of these centuries, there have been those who

have entered into this belief of their own privilege and duty, and have

used the gift which they recognized.  The Church has never been left

without a line of witnesses to this aspect of the discipleship of Christ.

But she has come to accept it as the normal order of things that what was

once the rule in the Christian Church should be now only the exception.

Orthodoxy has framed a theory of the words of Jesus to account for this

strange departure of His Church from them.  It teaches us to believe that

His example was not meant to be followed, in this respect, by all His

disciples.  The power of healing which was in Him was a purely

exceptional power.  It was used as an evidence of His divine mission.  It

was a miraculous gift.  The gift of working miracles was not bestowed

upon His Church at large.  His original disciples, the twelve apostles,

received this gift, as a necessity of the critical epoch of Christianity

--the founding of the Church.  Traces of the power lingered on, in

weakening activity, until they gradually ceased, and the normal condition

of the Church was entered upon, in which miracles are no longer possible.





We accept this, unconsciously, as the true state of things in

Christianity.  But it is a conception which will not bear a moment's

examination.  There is not the slightest suggestion upon record that

Christ set any limit to this charge which He gave His disciples.  On the

contrary, there are not lacking hints that He looked for the possession

and exercise of this power wherever His spirit breathed in men.



Even if the concluding paragraph of St. Mark's Gospel were a later

appendix, it may none the less have been a faithful echo of words of the

Master, as it certainly is a trustworthy record of the belief of the

early Christians as to the thought of Jesus concerning His followers.  In

that interesting passage, Jesus, after His death, appeared to the eleven,

and formally commissioned them, again, to take up His work in the world;

bidding them, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every

creature."  "And these signs," He tells them, "shall follow them that

believe"--not the apostles only, but "them that believe," without limit

of time; "in My name they shall cast out devils .  .  .  they shall lay

hands on the sick and they shall recover."  The concluding discourse to

the disciples, recorded in the Gospel according to St.  John, affirms the

same expectation on the part of Jesus; emphasizing it in His solemn way:

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on Me, the works that

I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do."









APPENDIX F



Few will deny that an intelligence apart from man formed and governs the

spiritual universe and man; and this intelligence is the eternal Mind,

and neither matter nor man created this intelligence and divine

Principle; nor can this Principle produce aught unlike itself.  All that

we term sin, sickness, and death is comprised in the belief of matter.

The realm of the real is spiritual; the opposite of Spirit is matter; and

the opposite of the real is unreal or material.  Matter is an error of

statement, for there is no matter.  This error of premises leads to error

of conclusion in every statement of matter as a basis.  Nothing we can

say or believe regarding matter is true, except that matter is unreal,

simply a belief that has its beginning and ending.



The conservative firm called matter and mind God never formed.  The

unerring and eternal Mind destroys this imaginary copartnership, formed

only to be dissolved in a manner and at a period unknown.  This

copartnership is obsolete.  Placed under the microscope of metaphysics

matter disappears.  Only by understanding there are not two, matter and

mind, is a logical and correct conclusion obtained by either one.

Science gathers not grapes of thorns or figs of thistles.  Intelligence

never produced non-intelligence, such as matter: the immortal never

produced mortality, good never resulted in evil.  The science of Mind

shows conclusively that matter is a myth.  Metaphysics are above physics,

and drag not matter, or what is termed that, into one of its premises or

conclusions.  Metaphysics resolves things into thoughts, and exchanges

the objects of sense for the ideas of Soul.  These ideas are perfectly

tangible and real to consciousness, and they have this advantage--they

are eternal.  Mind and its thoughts comprise the whole of God, the

universe, and of man.  Reason and revelation coincide with this

statement, and support its proof every hour, for nothing is harmonious or

eternal that is not spiritual: the realization of this will bring out

objects from a higher source of thought; hence more beautiful and

immortal.



The fact of spiritualization produces results in striking contrast to the

farce of materialization: the one produces the results of chastity and

purity, the other the downward tendencies and earthward gravitation of

sensualism and impurity.



The exalting and healing effects of metaphysics show their fountain.

Nothing in pathology has exceeded the application of metaphysics.

Through mind alone we have prevented disease and preserved health.  In

cases of chronic and acute diseases, in their severest forms, we have

changed the secretions, renewed structure, and restored health; have

elongated shortened limbs, relaxed rigid muscles, made cicatrized joints

supple; restored carious bones to healthy conditions, renewed that which

is termed the lost substance of the lungs; and restored healthy

organizations where disease was organic instead of functional.









MRS. EDDY IN ERROR



I feel almost sure that Mrs. Eddy's inspiration--works are getting out of

repair.  I think so because they made some errors in a statement which

she uttered through the press on the 17th of January.  Not large ones,

perhaps, still it is a friend's duty to straighten such things out and

get them right when he can.  Therefore I will put my other duties aside

for a moment and undertake this helpful service.  She said as follows:



"In view of the circulation of certain criticisms from the pen of Mark

Twain, I submit the following statement:



"It is a fact, well understood, that I begged the students who first gave

me the endearing appellative 'mother' not to name me thus.  But, without

my consent, that word spread like wildfire.  I still must think the name

is not applicable to me.  I stand in relation to this century as a

Christian discoverer, founder, and leader.  I regard self-deification as

blasphemous; I may be more loved, but I am less lauded, pampered,

provided for, and cheered than others before me--and wherefore?  Because

Christian Science is not yet popular, and I refuse adulation.



"My visit to the Mother-Church after it was built and dedicated pleased

me, and the situation was satisfactory.  The dear members wanted to greet

me with escort and the ringing of bells, but I declined, and went alone

in my carriage to the church, entered it, and knelt in thanks upon the

steps of its altar.  There the foresplendor of the beginnings of truth

fell mysteriously upon my spirit.  I believe in one Christ, teach one

Christ, know of but one Christ.  I believe in but one incarnation, one

Mother Mary, and know I am not that one, and never claimed to be.  It

suffices me to learn the Science of the Scriptures relative to this

subject.



"Christian Scientists have no quarrel with Protestants, Catholics, or any

other sect.  They need to be understood as following the divine Principle

God, Love and not imagined to be unscientific worshippers of a human

being.



"In the aforesaid article, of which I have seen only extracts, Mark

Twain's wit was not wasted In certain directions.  Christian Science

eschews divine rights in human beings.  If the individual governed human

consciousness, my statement of Christian Science would be disproved, but

to understand the spiritual idea is essential to demonstrate Science and

its pure monotheism--one God, one Christ, no idolatry, no human

propaganda.  Jesus taught and proved that what feeds a few feeds all.

His life-work subordinated the material to the spiritual, and He left

this legacy of truth to mankind.  His metaphysics is not the sport of

philosophy, religion, or Science; rather it is the pith and finale of

them all.



"I have not the inspiration or aspiration to be a first or second Virgin-

Mother--her duplicate, antecedent, or subsequent.  What I am remains to

be proved by the good I do.  We need much humility, wisdom, and love to

perform the functions of foreshadowing and foretasting heaven within us.

This glory is molten in the furnace of affliction."



She still thinks the name of Our Mother not applicable to her; and she is

also able to remember that it distressed her when it was conferred upon

her, and that she begged to have it suppressed.  Her memory is at fault

here.  If she will take her By-laws, and refer to Section 1 of Article

XXII., written with her own hand--she will find that she has reserved

that title to herself, and is so pleased with it, and so--may we say

jealous?--about it, that she threatens with excommunication any sister

Scientist who shall call herself by it.  This is that Section 1:



"The Title of Mother.  In the year 1895 loyal Christian Scientists had

given to the author of their text-book, the Founder of Christian Science,

the individual, endearing term of Mother.  Therefore, if a student of

Christian Science shall apply this title, either to herself or to others,

except as the term for kinship according to the flesh, it shall be

regarded by the Church as an indication of disrespect for their Pastor

Emeritus, and unfitness to be a member of the Mother-Church."



Mrs. Eddy is herself the Mother-Church--its powers and authorities are in

her possession solely--and she can abolish that title whenever it may

please her to do so.  She has only to command her people, wherever they

may be in the earth, to use it no more, and it will never be uttered

again.  She is aware of this.



It may be that she "refuses adulation" when she is not awake, but when

she is awake she encourages it and propagates it in that museum called

"Our Mother's Room," in her Church in Boston.  She could abolish that

institution with a word, if she wanted to.  She is aware of that.  I will

say a further word about the museum presently.



Further down the column, her memory is unfaithful again:



"I believe in .  .  .  but one Mother Mary, and know I am not that one,

and never claimed to be."



At a session of the National Christian Science Association, held in the

city of New York on the 27th of May, 1890, the secretary was "instructed

to send to our Mother greetings and words of affection from her assembled

children."



Her telegraphic response was read to the Association at next day's

meeting:



"All hail!  He hath filled the hungry with good things and the sick hath

He not sent empty away.--MOTHER MARY."



Which Mother Mary is this one?  Are there two?  If so, she is both of

them; for, when she signed this telegram in this satisfied and

unprotesting way, the Mother-title which she was going to so strenuously

object to, and put from her with humility, and seize with both hands, and

reserve as her sole property, and protect her monopoly of it with a stern

By-law, while recognizing with diffidence that it was "not applicable" to

her (then and to-day)--that Mother--title was not yet born, and would not

be offered to her until five years later.  The date of the above "Mother

Mary" is 1890; the "individual, endearing title of Mother" was given her

"in 1895"--according to her own testimony.  See her By-law quoted above.



In his opening Address to that Convention of 1890, the President

recognized this Mary--our Mary-and abolished all previous ones.  He said:



"There is but one Moses, one Jesus; and there is but one Mary."



The confusions being now dispersed, we have this clarified result:



Were had been a Moses at one time, and only one; there had been a Jesus

at one time, and only one; there is a Mary and "only one."  She is not a

Has Been, she is an Is--the "Author of Science and Health; and we cannot

ignore her."



1.  In 1890, there was but one Mother Mary.  The President said so.

2.  Mrs. Eddy was that one.  She said so, in signing the telegram.

3.  Mrs. Eddy was not that one for she says so, in her Associated Press

utterance of January 17th.

4.  And has "never claimed to be "that one--unless the signature to the

telegram is a claim.



Thus it stands proven and established that she is that Mary and isn't,

and thought she was and knows she wasn't.  That much is clear.



She is also "The Mother," by the election of 1895, and did not want the

title, and thinks it is not applicable to her, end will excommunicate any

one that tries to take it away from her.  So that is clear.



I think that the only really troublesome confusion connected with these

particular matters has arisen from the name Mary.  Much vexation, much

misunderstanding, could have been avoided if Mrs. Eddy had used some of

her other names in place of that one.  "Mother Mary" was certain to stir

up discussion.  It would have been much better if she had signed the

telegram "Mother Baker"; then there would have been no Biblical

competition, and, of course, that is a thing to avoid.  But it is not too

late, yet.



I wish to break in here with a parenthesis, and then take up this

examination of Mrs. Eddy's Claim of January 17th again.



The history of her "Mother Mary" telegram--as told to me by one who ought

to be a very good authority--is curious and interesting.  The telegram

ostensibly quotes verse 53 from the "Magnificat," but really makes some

pretty formidable changes in it.  This is St.  Luke's version:



"He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He hath sent

empty away."



This is "Mother Mary's" telegraphed version:



"He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the sick hath He not

sent empty away."



To judge by the Official Report, the bursting of this bombshell in that

massed convention of trained Christians created no astonishment, since it

caused no remark, and the business of the convention went tranquilly on,

thereafter, as if nothing had happened.



Did those people detect those changes?  We cannot know.  I think they

must have noticed them, the wording of St.  Luke's verse being as

familiar to all Christians as is the wording of the Beatitudes; and I

think that the reason the new version provoked no surprise and no comment

was, that the assemblage took it for a "Key"--a spiritualized explanation

of verse 53, newly sent down from heaven through Mrs. Eddy.  For all

Scientists study their Bibles diligently, and they know their Magnificat.

I believe that their confidence in the authenticity of Mrs. Eddy's

inspirations is so limitless and so firmly established that no change,

however violent, which she might make in a Bible text could disturb their

composure or provoke from them a protest.



Her improved rendition of verse 53 went into the convention's report and

appeared in a New York paper the next day.  The (at that time) Scientist

whom I mentioned a minute ago, and who had not been present at the

convention, saw it and marvelled; marvelled and was indignant--indignant

with the printer or the telegrapher, for making so careless and so

dreadful an error.  And greatly distressed, too; for, of course, the

newspaper people would fall foul of it, and be sarcastic, and make fun of

it.  and have a blithe time over it, and be properly thankful for the

chance.  It shows how innocent he was; it shows that he did not know the

limitations of newspaper men in the matter of Biblical knowledge.  The

new verse 53 raised no insurrection in the press; in fact, it was not

even remarked upon; I could have told him the boys would not know there

was anything the matter with it.  I have been a newspaper man myself, and

in those days I had my limitations like the others.



The Scientist hastened to Concord and told Mrs. Eddy what a disastrous

mistake had been made, but he found to his bewilderment that she was

tranquil about it, and was not proposing to correct it.  He was not able

to get her to promise to make a correction.  He asked her secretary if he

had heard aright when the telegram was dictated to him; the secretary

said he had, and took the filed copy of it and verified its authenticity

by comparing it with the stenographic notes.



Mrs. Eddy did make the correction, two months later, in her official

organ.  It attracted no attention among the Scientists; and, naturally,

none elsewhere, for that periodical's circulation was practically

confined to disciples of the cult.



That is the tale as it was told to me by an ex-Scientist.  Verse 53--

renovated and spiritualized--had a narrow escape from a tremendous

celebrity.  The newspaper men would have made it as famous as the

assassination of Caesar, but for their limitations.



To return to the Claim.  I find myself greatly embarrassed by Mrs. Eddy's

remark: "I regard self-deification as blasphemous."  If she is right

about that, I have written a half-ream of manuscript this past week which

I must not print, either in the book which I am writing, or elsewhere:

for it goes into that very matter with extensive elaboration, citing, in

detail, words and acts of Mrs. Eddy's which seem to me to prove that she

is a faithful and untiring worshipper of herself, and has carried self-

deification to a length which has not been before ventured in ages.  If

ever.  There is not room enough in this chapter for that Survey, but I

can epitomize a portion of it here.



With her own untaught and untrained mind, and without outside help, she

has erected upon a firm and lasting foundation the most minutely perfect,

and wonderful, and smoothly and exactly working, and best safe-guarded

system of government that has yet been devised in the world, as I

believe, and as I am sure I could prove if I had room for my documentary

evidences here.



It is a despotism (on this democratic soil); a sovereignty more absolute

than the Roman Papacy, more absolute than the Russian Czarship; it has

not a single power, not a shred of authority, legislative or executive,

which is not lodged solely in the sovereign; all its dreams, its

functions, its energies, have a single object, a single reason for

existing, and only the one--to build to the sky the glory of the

sovereign, and keep it bright to the end of time.



Mrs. Eddy is the sovereign; she devised that great place for herself, she

occupies that throne.



In 1895, she wrote a little primer, a little body of autocratic laws,

called the Manual of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and put those

laws in force, in permanence.  Her government is all there; all in that

deceptively innocent-looking little book, that cunning little devilish

book, that slumbering little brown volcano, with hell in its bowels.  In

that book she has planned out her system, and classified and defined its

purposes and powers.









MAIN PARTS OF THE MACHINE



A Supreme Church.  At Boston.

Branch Churches.  All over the world

One Pastor for the whole of them: to wit, her book, Science and Health.

Term of the book's office--forever.



In every C.S. pulpit, two "Readers," a man and a woman.  No talkers, no

preachers, in any Church-readers only.  Readers of the Bible and her

books--no others.  No commentators allowed to write or print.



A Church Service.  She has framed it--for all the C.S. Churches--

selected its readings, its prayers, and the hymns to be used, and has

appointed the order of procedure.  No changes permitted.



A Creed.  She wrote it.  All C.S. Churches must subscribe to it.  No

other permitted.



A Treasury.  At Boston.  She carries the key.



A C.S. Book--Publishing House.  For books approved by her.  No others

permitted.



Journals and Magazines.  These are organs of hers, and are controlled by

her.



A College.  For teaching C.S.









DISTRIBUTION OF THE MACHINE'S POWERS AND DIGNITIES



Supreme Church.

Pastor Emeritus--Mrs. Eddy.

Board of Directors.

Board of Education.

Board of Finance.

College Faculty.

Various Committees.

Treasurer.

Clerk.

First Members (of the Supreme Church).

Members of the Supreme Church.



It looks fair, it looks real, but it is all a fiction.



Even the little "Pastor Emeritus" is a fiction.  Instead of being merely

an honorary and ornamental official, Mrs. Eddy is the only official in

the entire body that has the slightest power.  In her Manual, she has

provided a prodigality of ways and forms whereby she can rid herself of

any functionary in the government whenever she wants to.  The officials

are all shadows, save herself; she is the only reality.  She allows no

one to hold office more than a year--no one gets a chance to become

over-popular or over-useful, and dangerous.  "Excommunication" is the

favorite penalty-it is threatened at every turn.  It is evidently the pet

dread and terror of the Church's membership.



The member who thinks, without getting his thought from Mrs. Eddy before

uttering it, is banished permanently.  One or two kinds of sinners can

plead their way back into the fold, but this one, never.  To think--in

the Supreme Church--is the New Unpardonable Sin.



To nearly every severe and fierce rule, Mrs. Eddy adds this rivet: "This

By-law shall not be changed without the consent of the Pastor Emeritus."



Mrs. Eddy is the entire Supreme Church, in her own person, in the matter

of powers and authorities.



Although she has provided so many ways of getting rid of unsatisfactory

members and officials, she was still afraid she might have left a life-

preserver lying around somewhere, therefore she devised a rule to cover

that defect.  By applying it, she can excommunicate (and this is

perpetual again) every functionary connected with the Supreme Church, and

every one of the twenty-five thousand members of that Church, at an

hour's notice--and do it all by herself without anybody's help.



By authority of this astonishing By-law, she has only to say a person

connected with that Church is secretly practicing hypnotism or mesmerism;

whereupon, immediate excommunication, without a hearing, is his portion!

She does not have to order a trial and produce evidence--her accusation

is all that is necessary.



Where is the Pope? and where the Czar?  As the ballad says:



     "Ask of the winds that far away

     With fragments strewed the sea!"



The Branch Church's pulpit is occupied by two "Readers."  Without them

the Branch Church is as dead as if its throat had been cut.  To have

control, then, of the Readers, is to have control of the Branch Churches.

Mrs. Eddy has that control--a control wholly without limit, a control

shared with no one.



1.  No Reader can be appointed to any Church in the Christian Science

world without her express approval.



2.  She can summarily expel from his or her place any Reader, at home or

abroad, by a mere letter of dismissal, over her signature, and without

furnishing any reason for it, to either the congregation or the Reader.



Thus she has as absolute control over all Branch Churches as she has over

the Supreme Church.  This power exceeds the Pope's.



In simple truth, she is the only absolute sovereign in all Christendom.

The authority of the other sovereigns has limits, hers has none, none

whatever.  And her yoke does not fret, does not offend.  Many of the

subjects of the other monarchs feel their yoke, and are restive under it;

their loyalty is insincere.  It is not so with this one's human property;

their loyalty is genuine, earnest, sincere, enthusiastic.  The sentiment

which they feel for her is one which goes out in sheer perfection to no

other occupant of a throne; for it is love, pure from doubt, envy,

exaction, fault-seeking, a love whose sun has no spot--that form of love,

strong, great, uplifting, limitless, whose vast proportions are

compassable by no word but one, the prodigious word, Worship.  And it is

not as a human being that her subjects worship her, but as a supernatural

one, a divine one, one who has comradeship with God, and speaks by His

voice.



Mrs. Eddy has herself created all these personal grandeurs and

autocracies--with others which I have not (in this article) mentioned.

They place her upon an Alpine solitude and supremacy of power and

spectacular show not hitherto attained by any other self-seeking enslaver

disguised in the Christian name, and they persuade me that, although she

may regard "self-deification as blasphemous," she is as fond of it as I

am of pie.



She knows about "Our Mother's Room" in the Supreme Church in Boston--

above referred to--for she has been in it.  In a recently published North

American Review article, I quoted a lady as saying Mrs. Eddy's portrait

could be seen there in a shrine, lit by always-burning lights, and that

C.S. disciples came and worshiped it.  That remark hurt the feelings of

more than one Scientist.  They said it was not true, and asked me to

correct it.  I comply with pleasure.  Whether the portrait was there four

years ago or not, it is not there now, for I have inquired.  The only

object in the shrine now, and lit by electrics--and worshiped--is an oil-

portrait of the horse-hair chair Mrs. Eddy used to sit in when she was

writing Science and Health!  It seems to me that adulation has struck

bottom, here.



Mrs. Eddy knows about that.  She has been there, she has seen it, she has

seen the worshippers.  She could abolish that sarcasm with a word.  She

withholds the word.  Once more I seem to recognize in her exactly the

same appetite for self-deification that I have for pie.  We seem to be

curiously alike; for the love of self-deification is really only the

spiritual form of the material appetite for pie, and nothing could be

more strikingly Christian-Scientifically "harmonious."



I note this phrase:



"Christian Science eschews divine rights in human beings."



"Rights" is vague; I do not know what it means there.  Mrs. Eddy is not

well acquainted with the English language, and she is seldom able to say

in it what she is trying to say.  She has no ear for the exact word, and

does not often get it.  "Rights."  Does it mean "honors?" "attributes?"



"Eschews."  This is another umbrella where there should be a torch; it

does not illumine the sentence, it only deepens the shadows.  Does she

mean "denies?" "refuses?" "forbids?" or something in that line?  Does she

mean:



"Christian Science denies divine honors to human beings?" Or:



"Christian Science refuses to recognize divine attributes in human

beings?" Or:



"Christian Science forbids the worship of human beings?"



The bulk of the succeeding sentence is to me a tunnel, but, when I emerge

at this end of it, I seem to come into daylight.  Then I seem to

understand both sentences--with this result:



"Christian Science recognizes but one God, forbids the worship of human

beings, and refuses to recognize the possession of divine attributes by

any member of the race."



I am subject to correction, but I think that that is about what Mrs. Eddy

was intending to convey.  Has her English--which is always difficult to

me--beguiled me into misunderstanding the following remark, which she

makes (calling herself "we," after an old regal fashion of hers) in her

preface to her Miscellaneous Writings?



"While we entertain decided views as to the best method for elevating the

race physically, morally, and spiritually, and shall express these views

as duty demands, we shall claim no especial gift from our divine organ,

no supernatural power."



Was she meaning to say:



"Although I am of divine origin and gifted with supernatural power, I

shall not draw upon these resources in determining the best method of

elevating the race?"



If she had left out the word "our," she might then seem to say:



"I claim no especial or unusual degree of divine origin--"



Which is awkward--most awkward; for one either has a divine origin or

hasn't; shares in it, degrees of it, are surely impossible.  The idea of

crossed breeds in cattle is a thing we can entertain, for we are used to

it, and it is possible; but the idea of a divine mongrel is unthinkable.



Well, then, what does she mean?  I am sure I do not know, for certain.

It is the word "our" that makes all the trouble.  With the "our" in, she

is plainly saying "my divine origin."  The word "from" seems to be

intended to mean "on account of."  It has to mean that or nothing, if

"our" is allowed to stay.  The clause then says:



"I shall claim no especial gift on account of my divine origin."



And I think that the full sentence was intended to mean what I have

already suggested:



"Although I am of divine origin, and gifted with supernatural power, I

shall not draw upon these resources in determining the best method of

elevating the race."



When Mrs. Eddy copyrighted that Preface seven years ago, she had long

been used to regarding herself as a divine personage.  I quote from Mr.

F. W. Peabody's book:



"In the Christian Science Journal for April, 1889, when it was her

property, and published by her, it was claimed for her, and with her

sanction, that she was equal with Jesus, and elaborate effort was made to

establish the claim."



"Mrs. Eddy has distinctly authorized the claim in her behalf, that she

herself was the chosen successor to and equal of Jesus."



The following remark in that April number, quoted by Mr. Peabody,

indicates that her claim had been previously made, and had excited

"horror" among some "good people":



"Now, a word about the horror many good people have of our making the

Author of Science and Health 'equal with Jesus.'"



Surely, if it had excited horror in Mrs. Eddy also, she would have

published a disclaimer.  She owned the paper; she could say what she

pleased in its columns.  Instead of rebuking her editor, she lets him

rebuke those "good people" for objecting to the claim.



These things seem to throw light upon those words, "our [my] divine

origin."



It may be that "Christian Science eschews divine rights in human beings,"

and forbids worship of any but "one God, one Christ"; but, if that is the

case, it looks as if Mrs. Eddy is a very unsound Christian Scientist, and

needs disciplining.  I believe she has a serious malady--"self-

deification"; and that it will be well to have one of the experts

demonstrate over it.



Meantime, let her go on living--for my sake.  Closely examined,

painstakingly studied, she is easily the most interesting person on the

planet, and, in several ways, as easily the most extraordinary woman that

was ever born upon it.





P.S.--Since I wrote the foregoing, Mr. McCrackan's article appeared (in

the March number of the North American Review).  Before his article

appeared--that is to say, during December, January, and February--I had

written a new book, a character-portrait of Mrs. Eddy, drawn from her own

acts and words, and it was then--together with the three brief articles

previously published in the North American Review--ready to be delivered

to the printer for issue in book form.  In that book, by accident and

good luck, I have answered the objections made by Mr. McCrackan to my

views, and therefore do not need to add an answer here.  Also, in it I

have corrected certain misstatements of mine which he has noticed, and

several others which he has not referred to.  There are one or two

important matters of opinion upon which he and I are not in disagreement;

but there are others upon which we must continue to disagree, I suppose;

indeed, I know we must; for instance, he believes Mrs. Eddy wrote Science

and Health, whereas I am quite sure I can convince a person unhampered by

predilections that she did not.



As concerns one considerable matter I hope to convert him.  He believes

Mrs. Eddy's word; in his article he cites her as a witness, and takes her

testimony at par; but if he will make an excursion through my book when

it comes out, and will dispassionately examine her testimonies as there

accumulated, I think he will in candor concede that she is by a large

percentage the most erratic and contradictory and untrustworthy witness

that has occupied the stand since the days of the lamented Ananias.









CONCLUSION



Broadly speaking, the hostiles reject and repudiate all the pretensions

of Christian Science Christianity.  They affirm that it has added nothing

new to Christianity; that it can do nothing that Christianity could not

do and was not doing before Christian Science was born.



In that case is there no field for the new Christianity, no opportunity

for usefulness, precious usefulness, great and distinguished usefulness?

I think there is.  I am far from being confident that it can fill it, but

I will indicate that unoccupied field--without charge--and if it can

conquer it, it will deserve the praise and gratitude of the Christian

world, and will get it, I am sure.



The present Christianity makes an excellent private Christian, but its

endeavors to make an excellent public one go for nothing, substantially.



This is an honest nation--in private life.  The American Christian is a

straight and clean and honest man, and in his private commerce with his

fellows can be trusted to stand faithfully by the principles of honor and

honesty imposed upon him by his religion.  But the moment he comes

forward to exercise a public trust he can be confidently counted upon to

betray that trust in nine cases out of ten, if "party loyalty" shall

require it.



If there are two tickets in the field in his city, one composed of honest

men and the other of notorious blatherskites and criminals, he will not

hesitate to lay his private Christian honor aside and vote for the

blatherskites if his "party honor" shall exact it.  His Christianity is

of no use to him and has no influence upon him when he is acting in a

public capacity.  He has sound and sturdy private morals, but he has no

public ones.  In the last great municipal election in New York, almost a

complete one-half of the votes representing 3,500,000 Christians were

cast for a ticket that had hardly a man on it whose earned and proper

place was outside of a jail.  But that vote was present at church next

Sunday the same as ever, and as unconscious of its perfidy as if nothing

had happened.



Our Congresses consist of Christians.  In their private life they are

true to every obligation of honor; yet in every session they violate them

all, and do it without shame; because honor to party is above honor to

themselves.  It is an accepted law of public life that in it a man may

soil his honor in the interest of party expediency--must do it when

party expediency requires it.  In private life those men would bitterly

resent--and justly--any insinuation that it would not be safe to leave

unwatched money within their reach; yet you could not wound their

feelings by reminding them that every time they vote ten dollars to the

pension appropriation nine of it is stolen money and they the marauders.

They have filched the money to take care of the party; they believe it

was right to do it; they do not see how their private honor is affected;

therefore their consciences are clear and at rest.  By vote they do

wrongful things every day, in the party interest, which they could not be

persuaded to do in private life.  In the interest of party expediency

they give solemn pledges, they make solemn compacts; in the interest of

party expediency they repudiate them without a blush.  They would not

dream of committing these strange crimes in private life.



Now then, can Christian Science introduce the Congressional Blush?  There

are Christian Private Morals, but there are no Christian Public Morals,

at the polls, or in Congress or anywhere else--except here and there and

scattered around like lost comets in the solar system.  Can Christian

Science persuade the nation and Congress to throw away their public

morals and use none but their private ones henceforth in all their

activities, both public and private?



I do not think so; but no matter about me: there is the field--a grand

one, a splendid one, a sublime one, and absolutely unoccupied.  Has

Christian Science confidence enough in itself to undertake to enter in

and try to possess it?



Make the effort, Christian Science; it is a most noble cause, and it

might succeed.  It could succeed.  Then we should have a new literature,

with romances entitled, How To Be an Honest Congressman Though a

Christian; How To Be a Creditable Citizen Though a Christian.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Christian Science,

by Mark Twain













EXTRACT FROM CAPTAIN STORMFIELD'S VISIT TO HEAVEN



By Mark Twain







CHAPTER I







Well, when I had been dead about thirty years I begun to get a

little anxious.  Mind you, had been whizzing through space all that

time, like a comet.  LIKE a comet!  Why, Peters, I laid over the

lot of them!  Of course there warn't any of them going my way, as a

steady thing, you know, because they travel in a long circle like

the loop of a lasso, whereas I was pointed as straight as a dart

for the Hereafter; but I happened on one every now and then that

was going my way for an hour or so, and then we had a bit of a

brush together.  But it was generally pretty one-sided, because I

sailed by them the same as if they were standing still.  An

ordinary comet don't make more than about 200,000 miles a minute.

Of course when I came across one of that sort - like Encke's and

Halley's comets, for instance - it warn't anything but just a flash

and a vanish, you see.  You couldn't rightly call it a race.  It

was as if the comet was a gravel-train and I was a telegraph

despatch.  But after I got outside of our astronomical system, I

used to flush a comet occasionally that was something LIKE.  WE

haven't got any such comets - ours don't begin.  One night I was

swinging along at a good round gait, everything taut and trim, and

the wind in my favor - I judged I was going about a million miles a

minute - it might have been more, it couldn't have been less - when

I flushed a most uncommonly big one about three points off my

starboard bow.  By his stern lights I judged he was bearing about

northeast-and-by-north-half-east.  Well, it was so near my course

that I wouldn't throw away the chance; so I fell off a point,

steadied my helm, and went for him.  You should have heard me whiz,

and seen the electric fur fly!  In about a minute and a half I was

fringed out with an electrical nimbus that flamed around for miles

and miles and lit up all space like broad day.  The comet was

burning blue in the distance, like a sickly torch, when I first

sighted him, but he begun to grow bigger and bigger as I crept up

on him.  I slipped up on him so fast that when I had gone about

150,000,000 miles I was close enough to be swallowed up in the

phosphorescent glory of his wake, and I couldn't see anything for

the glare.  Thinks I, it won't do to run into him, so I shunted to

one side and tore along.  By and by I closed up abreast of his

tail.  Do you know what it was like?  It was like a gnat closing up

on the continent of America.  I forged along.  By and by I had

sailed along his coast for a little upwards of a hundred and fifty

million miles, and then I could see by the shape of him that I

hadn't even got up to his waistband yet.  Why, Peters, WE don't

know anything about comets, down here.  If you want to see comets

that ARE comets, you've got to go outside of our solar system -

where there's room for them, you understand.  My friend, I've seen

comets out there that couldn't even lay down inside the ORBITS of

our noblest comets without their tails hanging over.



Well, I boomed along another hundred and fifty million miles, and

got up abreast his shoulder, as you may say.  I was feeling pretty

fine, I tell you; but just then I noticed the officer of the deck

come to the side and hoist his glass in my direction.  Straight off

I heard him sing out - "Below there, ahoy!  Shake her up, shake her

up!  Heave on a hundred million billion tons of brimstone!"



"Ay-ay, sir!"



"Pipe the stabboard watch!  All hands on deck!"



"Ay-ay, sir!"



"Send two hundred thousand million men aloft to shake out royals

and sky-scrapers!"



"Ay-ay, sir!"



"Hand the stuns'ls!  Hang out every rag you've got!  Clothe her

from stem to rudder-post!"



"Ay-ay, sir!"



In about a second I begun to see I'd woke up a pretty ugly

customer, Peters.  In less than ten seconds that comet was just a

blazing cloud of red-hot canvas.  It was piled up into the heavens

clean out of sight - the old thing seemed to swell out and occupy

all space; the sulphur smoke from the furnaces - oh, well, nobody

can describe the way it rolled and tumbled up into the skies, and

nobody can half describe the way it smelt.  Neither can anybody

begin to describe the way that monstrous craft begun to crash

along.  And such another powwow - thousands of bo's'n's whistles

screaming at once, and a crew like the populations of a hundred

thousand worlds like ours all swearing at once.  Well, I never

heard the like of it before.



We roared and thundered along side by side, both doing our level

best, because I'd never struck a comet before that could lay over

me, and so I was bound to beat this one or break something.  I

judged I had some reputation in space, and I calculated to keep it.

I noticed I wasn't gaining as fast, now, as I was before, but still

I was gaining.  There was a power of excitement on board the comet.

Upwards of a hundred billion passengers swarmed up from below and

rushed to the side and begun to bet on the race.  Of course this

careened her and damaged her speed.  My, but wasn't the mate mad!

He jumped at that crowd, with his trumpet in his hand, and sung out

-



"Amidships! amidships, you -! (1) or I'll brain the last idiot of

you!"



Well, sir, I gained and gained, little by little, till at last I

went skimming sweetly by the magnificent old conflagration's nose.

By this time the captain of the comet had been rousted out, and he

stood there in the red glare for'ard, by the mate, in his shirt-

sleeves and slippers, his hair all rats' nests and one suspender

hanging, and how sick those two men did look!  I just simply

couldn't help putting my thumb to my nose as I glided away and

singing out:



"Ta-ta! ta-ta!  Any word to send to your family?"



Peters, it was a mistake.  Yes, sir, I've often regretted that - it

was a mistake.  You see, the captain had given up the race, but

that remark was too tedious for him - he couldn't stand it.  He

turned to the mate, and says he -



"Have we got brimstone enough of our own to make the trip?"



"Yes, sir."



"Sure?"



"Yes, sir - more than enough."



"How much have we got in cargo for Satan?"



"Eighteen hundred thousand billion quintillions of kazarks."



"Very well, then, let his boarders freeze till the next comet

comes.  Lighten ship!  Lively, now, lively, men!  Heave the whole

cargo overboard!"



Peters, look me in the eye, and be calm.  I found out, over there,

that a kazark is exactly the bulk of a HUNDRED AND SIXTY-NINE

WORLDS LIKE OURS!  They hove all that load overboard.  When it fell

it wiped out a considerable raft of stars just as clean as if

they'd been candles and somebody blowed them out.  As for the race,

that was at an end.  The minute she was lightened the comet swung

along by me the same as if I was anchored.  The captain stood on

the stern, by the after-davits, and put his thumb to his nose and

sung out -



"Ta-ta! ta-ta!  Maybe YOU'VE got some message to send your friends

in the Everlasting Tropics!"



Then he hove up his other suspender and started for'ard, and inside

of three-quarters of an hour his craft was only a pale torch again

in the distance.  Yes, it was a mistake, Peters - that remark of

mine.  I don't reckon I'll ever get over being sorry about it.  I'd

'a' beat the bully of the firmament if I'd kept my mouth shut.





But I've wandered a little off the track of my tale; I'll get back

on my course again.  Now you see what kind of speed I was making.

So, as I said, when I had been tearing along this way about thirty

years I begun to get uneasy.  Oh, it was pleasant enough, with a

good deal to find out, but then it was kind of lonesome, you know.

Besides, I wanted to get somewhere.  I hadn't shipped with the idea

of cruising forever.  First off, I liked the delay, because I

judged I was going to fetch up in pretty warm quarters when I got

through; but towards the last I begun to feel that I'd rather go to

- well, most any place, so as to finish up the uncertainty.



Well, one night - it was always night, except when I was rushing by

some star that was occupying the whole universe with its fire and

its glare - light enough then, of course, but I necessarily left it

behind in a minute or two and plunged into a solid week of darkness

again.  The stars ain't so close together as they look to be.

Where was I?  Oh yes; one night I was sailing along, when I

discovered a tremendous long row of blinking lights away on the

horizon ahead.  As I approached, they begun to tower and swell and

look like mighty furnaces.  Says I to myself -



"By George, I've arrived at last - and at the wrong place, just as

I expected!"



Then I fainted.  I don't know how long I was insensible, but it

must have been a good while, for, when I came to, the darkness was

all gone and there was the loveliest sunshine and the balmiest,

fragrantest air in its place.  And there was such a marvellous

world spread out before me - such a glowing, beautiful, bewitching

country.  The things I took for furnaces were gates, miles high,

made all of flashing jewels, and they pierced a wall of solid gold

that you couldn't see the top of, nor yet the end of, in either

direction.  I was pointed straight for one of these gates, and a-

coming like a house afire.  Now I noticed that the skies were black

with millions of people, pointed for those gates.  What a roar they

made, rushing through the air!  The ground was as thick as ants

with people, too - billions of them, I judge.



I lit.  I drifted up to a gate with a swarm of people, and when it

was my turn the head clerk says, in a business-like way -



"Well, quick!  Where are you from?"



"San Francisco," says I.



"San Fran - WHAT?" says he.



"San Francisco."



He scratched his head and looked puzzled, then he says -



"Is it a planet?"



By George, Peters, think of it!  "PLANET?" says I; "it's a city.

And moreover, it's one of the biggest and finest and - "



"There, there!" says he, "no time here for conversation.  We don't

deal in cities here.  Where are you from in a GENERAL way?"



"Oh," I says, "I beg your pardon.  Put me down for California."



I had him AGAIN, Peters!  He puzzled a second, then he says, sharp

and irritable -



"I don't know any such planet - is it a constellation?"



"Oh, my goodness!" says I.  "Constellation, says you?  No - it's a

State."



"Man, we don't deal in States here.  WILL you tell me where you are

from IN GENERAL - AT LARGE, don't you understand?"



"Oh, now I get your idea," I says.  "I'm from America, - the United

States of America."



Peters, do you know I had him AGAIN?  If I hadn't I'm a clam!  His

face was as blank as a target after a militia shooting-match.  He

turned to an under clerk and says -



"Where is America?  WHAT is America?"



The under clerk answered up prompt and says -



"There ain't any such orb."



"ORB?" says I.  "Why, what are you talking about, young man?  It

ain't an orb; it's a country; it's a continent.  Columbus

discovered it; I reckon likely you've heard of HIM, anyway.

America - why, sir, America - "



"Silence!" says the head clerk.  "Once for all, where - are - you -

FROM?"



"Well," says I, "I don't know anything more to say - unless I lump

things, and just say I'm from the world."



"Ah," says he, brightening up, "now that's something like!  WHAT

world?"



Peters, he had ME, that time.  I looked at him, puzzled, he looked

at me, worried.  Then he burst out -



"Come, come, what world?"



Says I, "Why, THE world, of course."



"THE world!" he says.  "H'm! there's billions of them! . . . Next!"



That meant for me to stand aside.  I done so, and a sky-blue man

with seven heads and only one leg hopped into my place.  I took a

walk.  It just occurred to me, then, that all the myriads I had

seen swarming to that gate, up to this time, were just like that

creature.  I tried to run across somebody I was acquainted with,

but they were out of acquaintances of mine just then.  So I thought

the thing all over and finally sidled back there pretty meek and

feeling rather stumped, as you may say.



"Well?" said the head clerk.



"Well, sir," I says, pretty humble, "I don't seem to make out which

world it is I'm from.  But you may know it from this - it's the one

the Saviour saved."



He bent his head at the Name.  Then he says, gently -



"The worlds He has saved are like to the gates of heaven in number

- none can count them.  What astronomical system is your world in?

- perhaps that may assist."



"It's the one that has the sun in it - and the moon - and Mars" -

he shook his head at each name - hadn't ever heard of them, you see

- "and Neptune - and Uranus - and Jupiter - "



"Hold on!" says he - "hold on a minute!  Jupiter . . . Jupiter . .

. Seems to me we had a man from there eight or nine hundred years

ago - but people from that system very seldom enter by this gate."

All of a sudden he begun to look me so straight in the eye that I

thought he was going to bore through me.  Then he says, very

deliberate, "Did you come STRAIGHT HERE from your system?"



"Yes, sir," I says - but I blushed the least little bit in the

world when I said it.



He looked at me very stern, and says -



"That is not true; and this is not the place for prevarication.

You wandered from your course.  How did that happen?"



Says I, blushing again -



"I'm sorry, and I take back what I said, and confess.  I raced a

little with a comet one day - only just the least little bit - only

the tiniest lit - "



"So - so," says he - and without any sugar in his voice to speak

of.



I went on, and says -



"But I only fell off just a bare point, and I went right back on my

course again the minute the race was over."



"No matter - that divergence has made all this trouble.  It has

brought you to a gate that is billions of leagues from the right

one.  If you had gone to your own gate they would have known all

about your world at once and there would have been no delay.  But

we will try to accommodate you."  He turned to an under clerk and

says -



"What system is Jupiter in?"



"I don't remember, sir, but I think there is such a planet in one

of the little new systems away out in one of the thinly worlded

corners of the universe.  I will see."



He got a balloon and sailed up and up and up, in front of a map

that was as big as Rhode Island.  He went on up till he was out of

sight, and by and by he came down and got something to eat and went

up again.  To cut a long story short, he kept on doing this for a

day or two, and finally he came down and said he thought he had

found that solar system, but it might be fly-specks.  So he got a

microscope and went back.  It turned out better than he feared.  He

had rousted out our system, sure enough.  He got me to describe our

planet and its distance from the sun, and then he says to his chief

-



"Oh, I know the one he means, now, sir.  It is on the map.  It is

called the Wart."



Says I to myself, "Young man, it wouldn't be wholesome for you to

go down THERE and call it the Wart."



Well, they let me in, then, and told me I was safe forever and

wouldn't have any more trouble.



Then they turned from me and went on with their work, the same as

if they considered my case all complete and shipshape.  I was a

good deal surprised at this, but I was diffident about speaking up

and reminding them.  I did so hate to do it, you know; it seemed a

pity to bother them, they had so much on their hands.  Twice I

thought I would give up and let the thing go; so twice I started to

leave, but immediately I thought what a figure I should cut

stepping out amongst the redeemed in such a rig, and that made me

hang back and come to anchor again.  People got to eying me -

clerks, you know - wondering why I didn't get under way.  I

couldn't stand this long - it was too uncomfortable.  So at last I

plucked up courage and tipped the head clerk a signal.  He says -



"What! you here yet?  What's wanting?"



Says I, in a low voice and very confidential, making a trumpet with

my hands at his ear -



"I beg pardon, and you mustn't mind my reminding you, and seeming

to meddle, but hain't you forgot something?"



He studied a second, and says -



"Forgot something? . . . No, not that I know of."



"Think," says I.



He thought.  Then he says -



"No, I can't seem to have forgot anything.  What is it?"



"Look at me," says I, "look me all over."



He done it.



"Well?" says he.



"Well," says I, "you don't notice anything?  If I branched out

amongst the elect looking like this, wouldn't I attract

considerable attention? - wouldn't I be a little conspicuous?"



"Well," he says, "I don't see anything the matter.  What do you

lack?"



"Lack!  Why, I lack my harp, and my wreath, and my halo, and my

hymn-book, and my palm branch - I lack everything that a body

naturally requires up here, my friend."



Puzzled?  Peters, he was the worst puzzled man you ever saw.

Finally he says -



"Well, you seem to be a curiosity every way a body takes you.  I

never heard of these things before."



I looked at the man awhile in solid astonishment; then I says -



"Now, I hope you don't take it as an offence, for I don't mean any,

but really, for a man that has been in the Kingdom as long as I

reckon you have, you do seem to know powerful little about its

customs."



"Its customs!" says he.  "Heaven is a large place, good friend.

Large empires have many and diverse customs.  Even small dominions

have, as you doubtless know by what you have seen of the matter on

a small scale in the Wart.  How can you imagine I could ever learn

the varied customs of the countless kingdoms of heaven?  It makes

my head ache to think of it.  I know the customs that prevail in

those portions inhabited by peoples that are appointed to enter by

my own gate - and hark ye, that is quite enough knowledge for one

individual to try to pack into his head in the thirty-seven

millions of years I have devoted night and day to that study.  But

the idea of learning the customs of the whole appalling expanse of

heaven - O man, how insanely you talk!  Now I don't doubt that this

odd costume you talk about is the fashion in that district of

heaven you belong to, but you won't be conspicuous in this section

without it."



I felt all right, if that was the case, so I bade him good-day and

left.  All day I walked towards the far end of a prodigious hall of

the office, hoping to come out into heaven any moment, but it was a

mistake.  That hall was built on the general heavenly plan - it

naturally couldn't be small.  At last I got so tired I couldn't go

any farther; so I sat down to rest, and begun to tackle the

queerest sort of strangers and ask for information, but I didn't

get any; they couldn't understand my language, and I could not

understand theirs.  I got dreadfully lonesome.  I was so down-

hearted and homesick I wished a hundred times I never had died.  I

turned back, of course.  About noon next day, I got back at last

and was on hand at the booking-office once more.  Says I to the

head clerk -



"I begin to see that a man's got to be in his own Heaven to be

happy."



"Perfectly correct," says he.  "Did you imagine the same heaven

would suit all sorts of men?"



"Well, I had that idea - but I see the foolishness of it.  Which

way am I to go to get to my district?"



He called the under clerk that had examined the map, and he gave me

general directions.  I thanked him and started; but he says -



"Wait a minute; it is millions of leagues from here.  Go outside

and stand on that red wishing-carpet; shut your eyes, hold your

breath, and wish yourself there."



"I'm much obliged," says I; "why didn't you dart me through when I

first arrived?"



"We have a good deal to think of here; it was your place to think

of it and ask for it.  Good-by; we probably sha'n't see you in this

region for a thousand centuries or so."



"In that case, O REVOOR," says I.



I hopped onto the carpet and held my breath and shut my eyes and

wished I was in the booking-office of my own section.  The very

next instant a voice I knew sung out in a business kind of a way -



"A harp and a hymn-book, pair of wings and a halo, size 13, for

Cap'n Eli Stormfield, of San Francisco! - make him out a clean bill

of health, and let him in."



I opened my eyes.  Sure enough, it was a Pi Ute Injun I used to

know in Tulare County; mighty good fellow - I remembered being at

his funeral, which consisted of him being burnt and the other

Injuns gauming their faces with his ashes and howling like

wildcats.  He was powerful glad to see me, and you may make up your

mind I was just as glad to see him, and feel that I was in the

right kind of a heaven at last.



Just as far as your eye could reach, there was swarms of clerks,

running and bustling around, tricking out thousands of Yanks and

Mexicans and English and Arabs, and all sorts of people in their

new outfits; and when they gave me my kit and I put on my halo and

took a look in the glass, I could have jumped over a house for joy,

I was so happy.  "Now THIS is something like!" says I.  "Now," says

I, "I'm all right - show me a cloud."



Inside of fifteen minutes I was a mile on my way towards the cloud-

banks and about a million people along with me.  Most of us tried

to fly, but some got crippled and nobody made a success of it.  So

we concluded to walk, for the present, till we had had some wing

practice.



We begun to meet swarms of folks who were coming back.  Some had

harps and nothing else; some had hymn-books and nothing else; some

had nothing at all; all of them looked meek and uncomfortable; one

young fellow hadn't anything left but his halo, and he was carrying

that in his hand; all of a sudden he offered it to me and says -



"Will you hold it for me a minute?"



Then he disappeared in the crowd.  I went on.  A woman asked me to

hold her palm branch, and then SHE disappeared.  A girl got me to

hold her harp for her, and by George, SHE disappeared; and so on

and so on, till I was about loaded down to the guards.  Then comes

a smiling old gentleman and asked me to hold HIS things.  I swabbed

off the perspiration and says, pretty tart -



"I'll have to get you to excuse me, my friend, - I ain't no hat-

rack."



About this time I begun to run across piles of those traps, lying

in the road.  I just quietly dumped my extra cargo along with them.

I looked around, and, Peters, that whole nation that was following

me were loaded down the same as I'd been.  The return crowd had got

them to hold their things a minute, you see.  They all dumped their

loads, too, and we went on.



When I found myself perched on a cloud, with a million other

people, I never felt so good in my life.  Says I, "Now this is

according to the promises; I've been having my doubts, but now I am

in heaven, sure enough."  I gave my palm branch a wave or two, for

luck, and then I tautened up my harp-strings and struck in.  Well,

Peters, you can't imagine anything like the row we made.  It was

grand to listen to, and made a body thrill all over, but there was

considerable many tunes going on at once, and that was a drawback

to the harmony, you understand; and then there was a lot of Injun

tribes, and they kept up such another war-whooping that they kind

of took the tuck out of the music.  By and by I quit performing,

and judged I'd take a rest.  There was quite a nice mild old

gentleman sitting next me, and I noticed he didn't take a hand; I

encouraged him, but he said he was naturally bashful, and was

afraid to try before so many people.  By and by the old gentleman

said he never could seem to enjoy music somehow.  The fact was, I

was beginning to feel the same way; but I didn't say anything.  Him

and I had a considerable long silence, then, but of course it

warn't noticeable in that place.  After about sixteen or seventeen

hours, during which I played and sung a little, now and then -

always the same tune, because I didn't know any other - I laid down

my harp and begun to fan myself with my palm branch.  Then we both

got to sighing pretty regular.  Finally, says he -



"Don't you know any tune but the one you've been pegging at all

day?"



"Not another blessed one," says I.



"Don't you reckon you could learn another one?" says he.



"Never," says I; "I've tried to, but I couldn't manage it."



"It's a long time to hang to the one - eternity, you know."



"Don't break my heart," says I; "I'm getting low-spirited enough

already."



After another long silence, says he -



"Are you glad to be here?"



Says I, "Old man, I'll be frank with you.  This AIN'T just as near

my idea of bliss as I thought it was going to be, when I used to go

to church."



Says he, "What do you say to knocking off and calling it half a

day?"



"That's me," says I.  "I never wanted to get off watch so bad in my

life."



So we started.  Millions were coming to the cloud-bank all the

time, happy and hosannahing; millions were leaving it all the time,

looking mighty quiet, I tell you.  We laid for the new-comers, and

pretty soon I'd got them to hold all my things a minute, and then I

was a free man again and most outrageously happy.  Just then I ran

across old Sam Bartlett, who had been dead a long time, and stopped

to have a talk with him.  Says I -



"Now tell me - is this to go on forever?  Ain't there anything else

for a change?"



Says he -



"I'll set you right on that point very quick.  People take the

figurative language of the Bible and the allegories for literal,

and the first thing they ask for when they get here is a halo and a

harp, and so on.  Nothing that's harmless and reasonable is refused

a body here, if he asks it in the right spirit.  So they are

outfitted with these things without a word.  They go and sing and

play just about one day, and that's the last you'll ever see them

in the choir.  They don't need anybody to tell them that that sort

of thing wouldn't make a heaven - at least not a heaven that a sane

man could stand a week and remain sane.  That cloud-bank is placed

where the noise can't disturb the old inhabitants, and so there

ain't any harm in letting everybody get up there and cure himself

as soon as he comes.



"Now you just remember this - heaven is as blissful and lovely as

it can be; but it's just the busiest place you ever heard of.

There ain't any idle people here after the first day.  Singing

hymns and waving palm branches through all eternity is pretty when

you hear about it in the pulpit, but it's as poor a way to put in

valuable time as a body could contrive.  It would just make a

heaven of warbling ignoramuses, don't you see?  Eternal Rest sounds

comforting in the pulpit, too.  Well, you try it once, and see how

heavy time will hang on your hands.  Why, Stormfield, a man like

you, that had been active and stirring all his life, would go mad

in six months in a heaven where he hadn't anything to do.  Heaven

is the very last place to come to REST in, - and don't you be

afraid to bet on that!"



Says I -



"Sam, I'm as glad to hear it as I thought I'd be sorry.  I'm glad I

come, now."



Says he -



"Cap'n, ain't you pretty physically tired?"



Says I -



"Sam, it ain't any name for it!  I'm dog-tired."



"Just so - just so.  You've earned a good sleep, and you'll get it.

You've earned a good appetite, and you'll enjoy your dinner.  It's

the same here as it is on earth - you've got to earn a thing,

square and honest, before you enjoy it.  You can't enjoy first and

earn afterwards.  But there's this difference, here:  you can

choose your own occupation, and all the powers of heaven will be

put forth to help you make a success of it, if you do your level

best.  The shoe-maker on earth that had the soul of a poet in him

won't have to make shoes here."



"Now that's all reasonable and right," says I.  "Plenty of work,

and the kind you hanker after; no more pain, no more suffering - "



"Oh, hold on; there's plenty of pain here - but it don't kill.

There's plenty of suffering here, but it don't last.  You see,

happiness ain't a THING IN ITSELF - it's only a CONTRAST with

something that ain't pleasant.  That's all it is.  There ain't a

thing you can mention that is happiness in its own self - it's only

so by contrast with the other thing.  And so, as soon as the

novelty is over and the force of the contrast dulled, it ain't

happiness any longer, and you have to get something fresh.  Well,

there's plenty of pain and suffering in heaven - consequently

there's plenty of contrasts, and just no end of happiness."



Says I, "It's the sensiblest heaven I've heard of yet, Sam, though

it's about as different from the one I was brought up on as a live

princess is different from her own wax figger."





Along in the first months I knocked around about the Kingdom,

making friends and looking at the country, and finally settled down

in a pretty likely region, to have a rest before taking another

start.  I went on making acquaintances and gathering up

information.  I had a good deal of talk with an old bald-headed

angel by the name of Sandy McWilliams.  He was from somewhere in

New Jersey.  I went about with him, considerable.  We used to lay

around, warm afternoons, in the shade of a rock, on some meadow-

ground that was pretty high and out of the marshy slush of his

cranberry-farm, and there we used to talk about all kinds of

things, and smoke pipes.  One day, says I -



"About how old might you be, Sandy?"



"Seventy-two."



"I judged so.  How long you been in heaven?"



"Twenty-seven years, come Christmas."



"How old was you when you come up?"



"Why, seventy-two, of course."



"You can't mean it!"



"Why can't I mean it?"



"Because, if you was seventy-two then, you are naturally ninety-

nine now."



"No, but I ain't.  I stay the same age I was when I come."



"Well," says I, "come to think, there's something just here that I

want to ask about.  Down below, I always had an idea that in heaven

we would all be young, and bright, and spry."



"Well, you can be young if you want to.  You've only got to wish."



"Well, then, why didn't you wish?"



"I did.  They all do.  You'll try it, some day, like enough; but

you'll get tired of the change pretty soon."



"Why?"



"Well, I'll tell you.  Now you've always been a sailor; did you

ever try some other business?"



"Yes, I tried keeping grocery, once, up in the mines; but I

couldn't stand it; it was too dull - no stir, no storm, no life

about it; it was like being part dead and part alive, both at the

same time.  I wanted to be one thing or t'other.  I shut up shop

pretty quick and went to sea."



"That's it.  Grocery people like it, but you couldn't.  You see you

wasn't used to it.  Well, I wasn't used to being young, and I

couldn't seem to take any interest in it.  I was strong, and

handsome, and had curly hair, - yes, and wings, too! - gay wings

like a butterfly.  I went to picnics and dances and parties with

the fellows, and tried to carry on and talk nonsense with the

girls, but it wasn't any use; I couldn't take to it - fact is, it

was an awful bore.  What I wanted was early to bed and early to

rise, and something to DO; and when my work was done, I wanted to

sit quiet, and smoke and think - not tear around with a parcel of

giddy young kids.  You can't think what I suffered whilst I was

young."



"How long was you young?"



"Only two weeks.  That was plenty for me.  Laws, I was so lonesome!

You see, I was full of the knowledge and experience of seventy-two

years; the deepest subject those young folks could strike was only

A-B-C to me.  And to hear them argue - oh, my! it would have been

funny, if it hadn't been so pitiful.  Well, I was so hungry for the

ways and the sober talk I was used to, that I tried to ring in with

the old people, but they wouldn't have it.  They considered me a

conceited young upstart, and gave me the cold shoulder.  Two weeks

was a-plenty for me.  I was glad to get back my bald head again,

and my pipe, and my old drowsy reflections in the shade of a rock

or a tree."



"Well," says I, "do you mean to say you're going to stand still at

seventy-two, forever?"



"I don't know, and I ain't particular.  But I ain't going to drop

back to twenty-five any more - I know that, mighty well.  I know a

sight more than I did twenty-seven years ago, and I enjoy learning,

all the time, but I don't seem to get any older.  That is, bodily -

my mind gets older, and stronger, and better seasoned, and more

satisfactory."



Says I, "If a man comes here at ninety, don't he ever set himself

back?"



"Of course he does.  He sets himself back to fourteen; tries it a

couple of hours, and feels like a fool; sets himself forward to

twenty; it ain't much improvement; tries thirty, fifty, eighty, and

finally ninety - finds he is more at home and comfortable at the

same old figure he is used to than any other way.  Or, if his mind

begun to fail him on earth at eighty, that's where he finally

sticks up here.  He sticks at the place where his mind was last at

its best, for there's where his enjoyment is best, and his ways

most set and established."



"Does a chap of twenty-five stay always twenty-five, and look it?"



"If he is a fool, yes.  But if he is bright, and ambitious and

industrious, the knowledge he gains and the experiences he has,

change his ways and thoughts and likings, and make him find his

best pleasure in the company of people above that age; so he allows

his body to take on that look of as many added years as he needs to

make him comfortable and proper in that sort of society; he lets

his body go on taking the look of age, according as he progresses,

and by and by he will be bald and wrinkled outside, and wise and

deep within."



"Babies the same?"



"Babies the same.  Laws, what asses we used to be, on earth, about

these things!  We said we'd be always young in heaven.  We didn't

say HOW young - we didn't think of that, perhaps - that is, we

didn't all think alike, anyway.  When I was a boy of seven, I

suppose I thought we'd all be twelve, in heaven; when I was twelve,

I suppose I thought we'd all be eighteen or twenty in heaven; when

I was forty, I begun to go back; I remember I hoped we'd all be

about THIRTY years old in heaven.  Neither a man nor a boy ever

thinks the age he HAS is exactly the best one - he puts the right

age a few years older or a few years younger than he is.  Then he

makes that ideal age the general age of the heavenly people.  And

he expects everybody TO STICK at that age - stand stock-still - and

expects them to enjoy it! - Now just think of the idea of standing

still in heaven!  Think of a heaven made up entirely of hoop-

rolling, marble-playing cubs of seven years! - or of awkward,

diffident, sentimental immaturities of nineteen! - or of vigorous

people of thirty, healthy-minded, brimming with ambition, but

chained hand and foot to that one age and its limitations like so

many helpless galley-slaves!  Think of the dull sameness of a

society made up of people all of one age and one set of looks,

habits, tastes and feelings.  Think how superior to it earth would

be, with its variety of types and faces and ages, and the

enlivening attrition of the myriad interests that come into

pleasant collision in such a variegated society."



"Look here," says I, "do you know what you're doing?"



"Well, what am I doing?"



"You are making heaven pretty comfortable in one way, but you are

playing the mischief with it in another."



"How d'you mean?"



"Well," I says, "take a young mother that's lost her child, and - "



"Sh!" he says.  "Look!"



It was a woman.  Middle-aged, and had grizzled hair.  She was

walking slow, and her head was bent down, and her wings hanging

limp and droopy; and she looked ever so tired, and was crying, poor

thing!  She passed along by, with her head down, that way, and the

tears running down her face, and didn't see us.  Then Sandy said,

low and gentle, and full of pity:



"SHE'S hunting for her child!  No, FOUND it, I reckon.  Lord, how

she's changed!  But I recognized her in a minute, though it's

twenty-seven years since I saw her.  A young mother she was, about

twenty two or four, or along there; and blooming and lovely and

sweet? oh, just a flower!  And all her heart and all her soul was

wrapped up in her child, her little girl, two years old.  And it

died, and she went wild with grief, just wild!  Well, the only

comfort she had was that she'd see her child again, in heaven -

'never more to part,' she said, and kept on saying it over and

over, 'never more to part.'  And the words made her happy; yes,

they did; they made her joyful, and when I was dying, twenty-seven

years ago, she told me to find her child the first thing, and say

she was coming - 'soon, soon, VERY soon, she hoped and believed!'"



"Why, it's pitiful, Sandy."



He didn't say anything for a while, but sat looking at the ground,

thinking.  Then he says, kind of mournful:



"And now she's come!"



"Well?  Go on."



"Stormfield, maybe she hasn't found the child, but I think she has.

Looks so to me.  I've seen cases before.  You see, she's kept that

child in her head just the same as it was when she jounced it in

her arms a little chubby thing.  But here it didn't elect to STAY a

child.  No, it elected to grow up, which it did.  And in these

twenty-seven years it has learned all the deep scientific learning

there is to learn, and is studying and studying and learning and

learning more and more, all the time, and don't give a damn for

anything BUT learning; just learning, and discussing gigantic

problems with people like herself."



"Well?"



"Stormfield, don't you see?  Her mother knows CRANBERRIES, and how

to tend them, and pick them, and put them up, and market them; and

not another blamed thing!  Her and her daughter can't be any more

company for each other NOW than mud turtle and bird o' paradise.

Poor thing, she was looking for a baby to jounce; I think she's

struck a disapp'intment."



"Sandy, what will they do - stay unhappy forever in heaven?"



"No, they'll come together and get adjusted by and by.  But not

this year, and not next.  By and by."







CHAPTER II







I had been having considerable trouble with my wings.  The day

after I helped the choir I made a dash or two with them, but was

not lucky.  First off, I flew thirty yards, and then fouled an

Irishman and brought him down - brought us both down, in fact.

Next, I had a collision with a Bishop - and bowled him down, of

course.  We had some sharp words, and I felt pretty cheap, to come

banging into a grave old person like that, with a million strangers

looking on and smiling to themselves.



I saw I hadn't got the hang of the steering, and so couldn't

rightly tell where I was going to bring up when I started.  I went

afoot the rest of the day, and let my wings hang.  Early next

morning I went to a private place to have some practice.  I got up

on a pretty high rock, and got a good start, and went swooping

down, aiming for a bush a little over three hundred yards off; but

I couldn't seem to calculate for the wind, which was about two

points abaft my beam.  I could see I was going considerable to

looard of the bush, so I worked my starboard wing slow and went

ahead strong on the port one, but it wouldn't answer; I could see I

was going to broach to, so I slowed down on both, and lit.  I went

back to the rock and took another chance at it.  I aimed two or

three points to starboard of the bush - yes, more than that -

enough so as to make it nearly a head-wind.  I done well enough,

but made pretty poor time.  I could see, plain enough, that on a

head-wind, wings was a mistake.  I could see that a body could sail

pretty close to the wind, but he couldn't go in the wind's eye.  I

could see that if I wanted to go a-visiting any distance from home,

and the wind was ahead, I might have to wait days, maybe, for a

change; and I could see, too, that these things could not be any

use at all in a gale; if you tried to run before the wind, you

would make a mess of it, for there isn't anyway to shorten sail -

like reefing, you know - you have to take it ALL in - shut your

feathers down flat to your sides.  That would LAND you, of course.

You could lay to, with your head to the wind - that is the best you

could do, and right hard work you'd find it, too.  If you tried any

other game, you would founder, sure.



I judge it was about a couple of weeks or so after this that I

dropped old Sandy McWilliams a note one day - it was a Tuesday -

and asked him to come over and take his manna and quails with me

next day; and the first thing he did when he stepped in was to

twinkle his eye in a sly way, and say, -



"Well, Cap, what you done with your wings?"



I saw in a minute that there was some sarcasm done up in that rag

somewheres, but I never let on.  I only says, -



"Gone to the wash."



"Yes," he says, in a dry sort of way, "they mostly go to the wash -

about this time - I've often noticed it.  Fresh angels are powerful

neat.  When do you look for 'em back?"



"Day after to-morrow," says I.



He winked at me, and smiled.



Says I, -



"Sandy, out with it.  Come - no secrets among friends.  I notice

you don't ever wear wings - and plenty others don't.  I've been

making an ass of myself - is that it?"



"That is about the size of it.  But it is no harm.  We all do it at

first.  It's perfectly natural.  You see, on earth we jump to such

foolish conclusions as to things up here.  In the pictures we

always saw the angels with wings on - and that was all right; but

we jumped to the conclusion that that was their way of getting

around - and that was all wrong.  The wings ain't anything but a

uniform, that's all.  When they are in the field - so to speak, -

they always wear them; you never see an angel going with a message

anywhere without his wings, any more than you would see a military

officer presiding at a court-martial without his uniform, or a

postman delivering letters, or a policeman walking his beat, in

plain clothes.  But they ain't to FLY with!  The wings are for

show, not for use.  Old experienced angels are like officers of the

regular army - they dress plain, when they are off duty.  New

angels are like the militia - never shed the uniform - always

fluttering and floundering around in their wings, butting people

down, flapping here, and there, and everywhere, always imagining

they are attracting the admiring eye - well, they just think they

are the very most important people in heaven.  And when you see one

of them come sailing around with one wing tipped up and t'other

down, you make up your mind he is saying to himself:  'I wish Mary

Ann in Arkansaw could see me now.  I reckon she'd wish she hadn't

shook me.'  No, they're just for show, that's all - only just for

show."



"I judge you've got it about right, Sandy," says I.



"Why, look at it yourself," says he.  "YOU ain't built for wings -

no man is.  You know what a grist of years it took you to come here

from the earth - and yet you were booming along faster than any

cannon-ball could go.  Suppose you had to fly that distance with

your wings - wouldn't eternity have been over before you got here?

Certainly.  Well, angels have to go to the earth every day -

millions of them - to appear in visions to dying children and good

people, you know - it's the heft of their business.  They appear

with their wings, of course, because they are on official service,

and because the dying persons wouldn't know they were angels if

they hadn't wings - but do you reckon they fly with them?  It

stands to reason they don't.  The wings would wear out before they

got half-way; even the pin-feathers would be gone; the wing frames

would be as bare as kite sticks before the paper is pasted on.  The

distances in heaven are billions of times greater; angels have to

go all over heaven every day; could they do it with their wings

alone?  No, indeed; they wear the wings for style, but they travel

any distance in an instant by WISHING.  The wishing-carpet of the

Arabian Nights was a sensible idea - but our earthly idea of angels

flying these awful distances with their clumsy wings was foolish.



"Our young saints, of both sexes, wear wings all the time - blazing

red ones, and blue and green, and gold, and variegated, and

rainbowed, and ring-streaked-and-striped ones - and nobody finds

fault.  It is suitable to their time of life.  The things are

beautiful, and they set the young people off.  They are the most

striking and lovely part of their outfit - a halo don't BEGIN."



"Well," says I, "I've tucked mine away in the cupboard, and I allow

to let them lay there till there's mud."



"Yes - or a reception."



"What's that?"



"Well, you can see one to-night if you want to.  There's a

barkeeper from Jersey City going to be received."



"Go on - tell me about it."



"This barkeeper got converted at a Moody and Sankey meeting, in New

York, and started home on the ferry-boat, and there was a collision

and he got drowned.  He is of a class that think all heaven goes

wild with joy when a particularly hard lot like him is saved; they

think all heaven turns out hosannahing to welcome them; they think

there isn't anything talked about in the realms of the blest but

their case, for that day.  This barkeeper thinks there hasn't been

such another stir here in years, as his coming is going to raise. -

And I've always noticed this peculiarity about a dead barkeeper -

he not only expects all hands to turn out when he arrives, but he

expects to be received with a torchlight procession."



"I reckon he is disappointed, then."



"No, he isn't.  No man is allowed to be disappointed here.

Whatever he wants, when he comes - that is, any reasonable and

unsacrilegious thing - he can have.  There's always a few millions

or billions of young folks around who don't want any better

entertainment than to fill up their lungs and swarm out with their

torches and have a high time over a barkeeper.  It tickles the

barkeeper till he can't rest, it makes a charming lark for the

young folks, it don't do anybody any harm, it don't cost a rap, and

it keeps up the place's reputation for making all comers happy and

content."



"Very good.  I'll be on hand and see them land the barkeeper."



"It is manners to go in full dress.  You want to wear your wings,

you know, and your other things."



"Which ones?"



"Halo, and harp, and palm branch, and all that."



"Well," says I, "I reckon I ought to be ashamed of myself, but the

fact is I left them laying around that day I resigned from the

choir.  I haven't got a rag to wear but this robe and the wings."



"That's all right.  You'll find they've been raked up and saved for

you.  Send for them."



"I'll do it, Sandy.  But what was it you was saying about

unsacrilegious things, which people expect to get, and will be

disappointed about?"



"Oh, there are a lot of such things that people expect and don't

get.  For instance, there's a Brooklyn preacher by the name of

Talmage, who is laying up a considerable disappointment for

himself.  He says, every now and then in his sermons, that the

first thing he does when he gets to heaven, will be to fling his

arms around Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and kiss them and weep on

them.  There's millions of people down there on earth that are

promising themselves the same thing.  As many as sixty thousand

people arrive here every single day, that want to run straight to

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and hug them and weep on them.  Now mind

you, sixty thousand a day is a pretty heavy contract for those old

people.  If they were a mind to allow it, they wouldn't ever have

anything to do, year in and year out, but stand up and be hugged

and wept on thirty-two hours in the twenty-four.  They would be

tired out and as wet as muskrats all the time.  What would heaven

be, to THEM?  It would be a mighty good place to get out of - you

know that, yourself.  Those are kind and gentle old Jews, but they

ain't any fonder of kissing the emotional highlights of Brooklyn

than you be.  You mark my words, Mr. T.'s endearments are going to

be declined, with thanks.  There are limits to the privileges of

the elect, even in heaven.  Why, if Adam was to show himself to

every new comer that wants to call and gaze at him and strike him

for his autograph, he would never have time to do anything else but

just that.  Talmage has said he is going to give Adam some of his

attentions, as well as A., I. and J.  But he will have to change

his mind about that."



"Do you think Talmage will really come here?"



"Why, certainly, he will; but don't you be alarmed; he will run

with his own kind, and there's plenty of them.  That is the main

charm of heaven - there's all kinds here - which wouldn't be the

case if you let the preachers tell it.  Anybody can find the sort

he prefers, here, and he just lets the others alone, and they let

him alone.  When the Deity builds a heaven, it is built right, and

on a liberal plan."



Sandy sent home for his things, and I sent for mine, and about nine

in the evening we begun to dress.  Sandy says, -



"This is going to be a grand time for you, Stormy.  Like as not

some of the patriarchs will turn out."



"No, but will they?"



"Like as not.  Of course they are pretty exclusive.  They hardly

ever show themselves to the common public.  I believe they never

turn out except for an eleventh-hour convert.  They wouldn't do it

then, only earthly tradition makes a grand show pretty necessary on

that kind of an occasion."



"Do they an turn out, Sandy?"



"Who? - all the patriarchs?  Oh, no - hardly ever more than a

couple.  You will be here fifty thousand years - maybe more -

before you get a glimpse of all the patriarchs and prophets.  Since

I have been here, Job has been to the front once, and once Ham and

Jeremiah both at the same time.  But the finest thing that has

happened in my day was a year or so ago; that was Charles Peace's

reception - him they called 'the Bannercross Murderer' - an

Englishman.  There were four patriarchs and two prophets on the

Grand Stand that time - there hasn't been anything like it since

Captain Kidd came; Abel was there - the first time in twelve

hundred years.  A report got around that Adam was coming; well, of

course, Abel was enough to bring a crowd, all by himself, but there

is nobody that can draw like Adam.  It was a false report, but it

got around, anyway, as I say, and it will be a long day before I

see the like of it again.  The reception was in the English

department, of course, which is eight hundred and eleven million

miles from the New Jersey line.  I went, along with a good many of

my neighbors, and it was a sight to see, I can tell you.  Flocks

came from all the departments.  I saw Esquimaux there, and Tartars,

Negroes, Chinamen - people from everywhere.  You see a mixture like

that in the Grand Choir, the first day you land here, but you

hardly ever see it again.  There were billions of people; when they

were singing or hosannahing, the noise was wonderful; and even when

their tongues were still the drumming of the wings was nearly

enough to burst your head, for all the sky was as thick as if it

was snowing angels.  Although Adam was not there, it was a great

time anyway, because we had three archangels on the Grand Stand -

it is a seldom thing that even one comes out."



"What did they look like, Sandy?"



"Well, they had shining faces, and shining robes, and wonderful

rainbow wings, and they stood eighteen feet high, and wore swords,

and held their heads up in a noble way, and looked like soldiers."



"Did they have halos?"



"No - anyway, not the hoop kind.  The archangels and the upper-

class patriarchs wear a finer thing than that.  It is a round,

solid, splendid glory of gold, that is blinding to look at.  You

have often seen a patriarch in a picture, on earth, with that thing

on - you remember it? - he looks as if he had his head in a brass

platter.  That don't give you the right idea of it at all - it is

much more shining and beautiful."



"Did you talk with those archangels and patriarchs, Sandy?"



"Who - I?  Why, what can you be thinking about, Stormy?  I ain't

worthy to speak to such as they."



"Is Talmage?"



"Of course not.  You have got the same mixed-up idea about these

things that everybody has down there.  I had it once, but I got

over it.  Down there they talk of the heavenly King - and that is

right - but then they go right on speaking as if this was a

republic and everybody was on a dead level with everybody else, and

privileged to fling his arms around anybody he comes across, and be

hail-fellow-well-met with all the elect, from the highest down.

How tangled up and absurd that is!  How are you going to have a

republic under a king?  How are you going to have a republic at

all, where the head of the government is absolute, holds his place

forever, and has no parliament, no council to meddle or make in his

affairs, nobody voted for, nobody elected, nobody in the whole

universe with a voice in the government, nobody asked to take a

hand in its matters, and nobody ALLOWED to do it?  Fine republic,

ain't it?"



"Well, yes - it IS a little different from the idea I had - but I

thought I might go around and get acquainted with the grandees,

anyway - not exactly splice the main-brace with them, you know, but

shake hands and pass the time of day."



"Could Tom, Dick and Harry call on the Cabinet of Russia and do

that? - on Prince Gortschakoff, for instance?"



"I reckon not, Sandy."



"Well, this is Russia - only more so.  There's not the shadow of a

republic about it anywhere.  There are ranks, here.  There are

viceroys, princes, governors, sub-governors, sub-sub-governors, and

a hundred orders of nobility, grading along down from grand-ducal

archangels, stage by stage, till the general level is struck, where

there ain't any titles.  Do you know what a prince of the blood is,

on earth?"



"No."



"Well, a prince of the blood don't belong to the royal family

exactly, and he don't belong to the mere nobility of the kingdom;

he is lower than the one, and higher than t'other.  That's about

the position of the patriarchs and prophets here.  There's some

mighty high nobility here - people that you and I ain't worthy to

polish sandals for - and THEY ain't worthy to polish sandals for

the patriarchs and prophets.  That gives you a kind of an idea of

their rank, don't it?  You begin to see how high up they are, don't

you? just to get a two-minute glimpse of one of them is a thing for

a body to remember and tell about for a thousand years.  Why,

Captain, just think of this:  if Abraham was to set his foot down

here by this door, there would be a railing set up around that

foot-track right away, and a shelter put over it, and people would

flock here from all over heaven, for hundreds and hundreds of

years, to look at it.  Abraham is one of the parties that Mr.

Talmage, of Brooklyn, is going to embrace, and kiss, and weep on,

when he comes.  He wants to lay in a good stock of tears, you know,

or five to one he will go dry before he gets a chance to do it."



"Sandy," says I, "I had an idea that I was going to be equals with

everybody here, too, but I will let that drop.  It don't matter,

and I am plenty happy enough anyway."



"Captain, you are happier than you would be, the other way.  These

old patriarchs and prophets have got ages the start of you; they

know more in two minutes than you know in a year.  Did you ever try

to have a sociable improving-time discussing winds, and currents

and variations of compass with an undertaker?"



"I get your idea, Sandy.  He couldn't interest me.  He would be an

ignoramus in such things - he would bore me, and I would bore him."



"You have got it.  You would bore the patriarchs when you talked,

and when they talked they would shoot over your head.  By and by

you would say, 'Good morning, your Eminence, I will call again' -

but you wouldn't.  Did you ever ask the slush-boy to come up in the

cabin and take dinner with you?"



"I get your drift again, Sandy.  I wouldn't be used to such grand

people as the patriarchs and prophets, and I would be sheepish and

tongue-tied in their company, and mighty glad to get out of it.

Sandy, which is the highest rank, patriarch or prophet?"



"Oh, the prophets hold over the patriarchs.  The newest prophet,

even, is of a sight more consequence than the oldest patriarch.

Yes, sir, Adam himself has to walk behind Shakespeare."



"Was Shakespeare a prophet?"



"Of course he was; and so was Homer, and heaps more.  But

Shakespeare and the rest have to walk behind a common tailor from

Tennessee, by the name of Billings; and behind a horse-doctor named

Sakka, from Afghanistan.  Jeremiah, and Billings and Buddha walk

together, side by side, right behind a crowd from planets not in

our astronomy; next come a dozen or two from Jupiter and other

worlds; next come Daniel, and Sakka and Confucius; next a lot from

systems outside of ours; next come Ezekiel, and Mahomet, Zoroaster,

and a knife-grinder from ancient Egypt; then there is a long

string, and after them, away down toward the bottom, come

Shakespeare and Homer, and a shoemaker named Marais, from the back

settlements of France."



"Have they really rung in Mahomet and all those other heathens?"



"Yes - they all had their message, and they all get their reward.

The man who don't get his reward on earth, needn't bother - he will

get it here, sure."



"But why did they throw off on Shakespeare, that way, and put him

away down there below those shoe-makers and horse-doctors and

knife-grinders - a lot of people nobody ever heard of?"



"That is the heavenly justice of it - they warn't rewarded

according to their deserts, on earth, but here they get their

rightful rank.  That tailor Billings, from Tennessee, wrote poetry

that Homer and Shakespeare couldn't begin to come up to; but nobody

would print it, nobody read it but his neighbors, an ignorant lot,

and they laughed at it.  Whenever the village had a drunken frolic

and a dance, they would drag him in and crown him with cabbage

leaves, and pretend to bow down to him; and one night when he was

sick and nearly starved to death, they had him out and crowned him,

and then they rode him on a rail about the village, and everybody

followed along, beating tin pans and yelling.  Well, he died before

morning.  He wasn't ever expecting to go to heaven, much less that

there was going to be any fuss made over him, so I reckon he was a

good deal surprised when the reception broke on him."



"Was you there, Sandy?"



"Bless you, no!"



"Why?  Didn't you know it was going to come off?"



"Well, I judge I did.  It was the talk of these realms - not for a

day, like this barkeeper business, but for twenty years before the

man died."



"Why the mischief didn't you go, then?"



"Now how you talk!  The like of me go meddling around at the

reception of a prophet?  A mudsill like me trying to push in and

help receive an awful grandee like Edward J. Billings?  Why, I

should have been laughed at for a billion miles around.  I

shouldn't ever heard the last of it."



"Well, who did go, then?"



"Mighty few people that you and I will ever get a chance to see,

Captain.  Not a solitary commoner ever has the luck to see a

reception of a prophet, I can tell you.  All the nobility, and all

the patriarchs and prophets - every last one of them - and all the

archangels, and all the princes and governors and viceroys, were

there, - and NO small fry - not a single one.  And mind you, I'm

not talking about only the grandees from OUR world, but the princes

and patriarchs and so on from ALL the worlds that shine in our sky,

and from billions more that belong in systems upon systems away

outside of the one our sun is in.  There were some prophets and

patriarchs there that ours ain't a circumstance to, for rank and

illustriousness and all that.  Some were from Jupiter and other

worlds in our own system, but the most celebrated were three poets,

Saa, Bo and Soof, from great planets in three different and very

remote systems.  These three names are common and familiar in every

nook and corner of heaven, clear from one end of it to the other -

fully as well known as the eighty Supreme Archangels, in fact -

where as our Moses, and Adam, and the rest, have not been heard of

outside of our world's little corner of heaven, except by a few

very learned men scattered here and there - and they always spell

their names wrong, and get the performances of one mixed up with

the doings of another, and they almost always locate them simply IN

OUR SOLAR SYSTEM, and think that is enough without going into

little details such as naming the particular world they are from.

It is like a learned Hindoo showing off how much he knows by saying

Longfellow lives in the United States - as if he lived all over the

United States, and as if the country was so small you couldn't

throw a brick there without hitting him.  Between you and me, it

does gravel me, the cool way people from those monster worlds

outside our system snub our little world, and even our system.  Of

course we think a good deal of Jupiter, because our world is only a

potato to it, for size; but then there are worlds in other systems

that Jupiter isn't even a mustard-seed to - like the planet Goobra,

for instance, which you couldn't squeeze inside the orbit of

Halley's comet without straining the rivets.  Tourists from Goobra

(I mean parties that lived and died there - natives) come here, now

and then, and inquire about our world, and when they find out it is

so little that a streak of lightning can flash clear around it in

the eighth of a second, they have to lean up against something to

laugh.  Then they screw a glass into their eye and go to examining

us, as if we were a curious kind of foreign bug, or something of

that sort.  One of them asked me how long our day was; and when I

told him it was twelve hours long, as a general thing, he asked me

if people where I was from considered it worth while to get up and

wash for such a day as that.  That is the way with those Goobra

people - they can't seem to let a chance go by to throw it in your

face that their day is three hundred and twenty-two of our years

long.  This young snob was just of age - he was six or seven

thousand of his days old - say two million of our years - and he

had all the puppy airs that belong to that time of life - that

turning-point when a person has got over being a boy and yet ain't

quite a man exactly.  If it had been anywhere else but in heaven, I

would have given him a piece of my mind.  Well, anyway, Billings

had the grandest reception that has been seen in thousands of

centuries, and I think it will have a good effect.  His name will

be carried pretty far, and it will make our system talked about,

and maybe our world, too, and raise us in the respect of the

general public of heaven.  Why, look here - Shakespeare walked

backwards before that tailor from Tennessee, and scattered flowers

for him to walk on, and Homer stood behind his chair and waited on

him at the banquet.  Of course that didn't go for much THERE,

amongst all those big foreigners from other systems, as they hadn't

heard of Shakespeare or Homer either, but it would amount to

considerable down there on our little earth if they could know

about it.  I wish there was something in that miserable

spiritualism, so we could send them word.  That Tennessee village

would set up a monument to Billings, then, and his autograph would

outsell Satan's.  Well, they had grand times at that reception - a

small-fry noble from Hoboken told me all about it - Sir Richard

Duffer, Baronet."



"What, Sandy, a nobleman from Hoboken?  How is that?"



"Easy enough.  Duffer kept a sausage-shop and never saved a cent in

his life because he used to give all his spare meat to the poor, in

a quiet way.  Not tramps, - no, the other sort - the sort that will

starve before they will beg - honest square people out of work.

Dick used to watch hungry-looking men and women and children, and

track them home, and find out all about them from the neighbors,

and then feed them and find them work.  As nobody ever saw him give

anything to anybody, he had the reputation of being mean; he died

with it, too, and everybody said it was a good riddance; but the

minute he landed here, they made him a baronet, and the very first

words Dick the sausage-maker of Hoboken heard when he stepped upon

the heavenly shore were, 'Welcome, Sir Richard Duffer!'  It

surprised him some, because he thought he had reasons to believe he

was pointed for a warmer climate than this one."





All of a sudden the whole region fairly rocked under the crash of

eleven hundred and one thunder blasts, all let off at once, and

Sandy says, -



"There, that's for the barkeep."



I jumped up and says, -



"Then let's be moving along, Sandy; we don't want to miss any of

this thing, you know."



"Keep your seat," he says; "he is only just telegraphed, that is

all."



"How?"



"That blast only means that he has been sighted from the signal-

station.  He is off Sandy Hook.  The committees will go down to

meet him, now, and escort him in.  There will be ceremonies and

delays; they won't he coming up the Bay for a considerable time,

yet.  It is several billion miles away, anyway."



"I could have been a barkeeper and a hard lot just as well as not,"

says I, remembering the lonesome way I arrived, and how there

wasn't any committee nor anything.



"I notice some regret in your voice," says Sandy, "and it is

natural enough; but let bygones be bygones; you went according to

your lights, and it is too late now to mend the thing."



"No, let it slide, Sandy, I don't mind.  But you've got a Sandy

Hook HERE, too, have you?"



"We've got everything here, just as it is below.  All the States

and Territories of the Union, and all the kingdoms of the earth and

the islands of the sea are laid out here just as they are on the

globe - all the same shape they are down there, and all graded to

the relative size, only each State and realm and island is a good

many billion times bigger here than it is below.  There goes

another blast."



"What is that one for?"



"That is only another fort answering the first one.  They each fire

eleven hundred and one thunder blasts at a single dash - it is the

usual salute for an eleventh-hour guest; a hundred for each hour

and an extra one for the guest's sex; if it was a woman we would

know it by their leaving off the extra gun."



"How do we know there's eleven hundred and one, Sandy, when they

all go off at once? - and yet we certainly do know."



"Our intellects are a good deal sharpened up, here, in some ways,

and that is one of them.  Numbers and sizes and distances are so

great, here, that we have to be made so we can FEEL them - our old

ways of counting and measuring and ciphering wouldn't ever give us

an idea of them, but would only confuse us and oppress us and make

our heads ache."



After some more talk about this, I says:  "Sandy, I notice that I

hardly ever see a white angel; where I run across one white angel,

I strike as many as a hundred million copper-colored ones - people

that can't speak English.  How is that?"



"Well, you will find it the same in any State or Territory of the

American corner of heaven you choose to go to.  I have shot along,

a whole week on a stretch, and gone millions and millions of miles,

through perfect swarms of angels, without ever seeing a single

white one, or hearing a word I could understand.  You see, America

was occupied a billion years and more, by Injuns and Aztecs, and

that sort of folks, before a white man ever set his foot in it.

During the first three hundred years after Columbus's discovery,

there wasn't ever more than one good lecture audience of white

people, all put together, in America - I mean the whole thing,

British Possessions and all; in the beginning of our century there

were only 6,000,000 or 7,000,000 - say seven; 12,000,000 or

14,000,000 in 1825; say 23,000,000 in 1850; 40,000,000 in 1875.

Our death-rate has always been 20 in 1000 per annum.  Well, 140,000

died the first year of the century; 280,000 the twenty-fifth year;

500,000 the fiftieth year; about a million the seventy-fifth year.

Now I am going to be liberal about this thing, and consider that

fifty million whites have died in America from the beginning up to

to-day - make it sixty, if you want to; make it a hundred million -

it's no difference about a few millions one way or t'other.  Well,

now, you can see, yourself, that when you come to spread a little

dab of people like that over these hundreds of billions of miles of

American territory here in heaven, it is like scattering a ten-cent

box of homoeopathic pills over the Great Sahara and expecting to

find them again.  You can't expect us to amount to anything in

heaven, and we DON'T - now that is the simple fact, and we have got

to do the best we can with it.  The learned men from other planets

and other systems come here and hang around a while, when they are

touring around the Kingdom, and then go back to their own section

of heaven and write a book of travels, and they give America about

five lines in it.  And what do they say about us?  They say this

wilderness is populated with a scattering few hundred thousand

billions of red angels, with now and then a curiously complected

DISEASED one.  You see, they think we whites and the occasional

nigger are Injuns that have been bleached out or blackened by some

leprous disease or other - for some peculiarly rascally SIN, mind

you.  It is a mighty sour pill for us all, my friend - even the

modestest of us, let alone the other kind, that think they are

going to be received like a long-lost government bond, and hug

Abraham into the bargain.  I haven't asked you any of the

particulars, Captain, but I judge it goes without saying - if my

experience is worth anything - that there wasn't much of a hooraw

made over you when you arrived - now was there?"



"Don't mention it, Sandy," says I, coloring up a little; "I

wouldn't have had the family see it for any amount you are a mind

to name.  Change the subject, Sandy, change the subject."



"Well, do you think of settling in the California department of

bliss?"



"I don't know.  I wasn't calculating on doing anything really

definite in that direction till the family come.  I thought I would

just look around, meantime, in a quiet way, and make up my mind.

Besides, I know a good many dead people, and I was calculating to

hunt them up and swap a little gossip with them about friends, and

old times, and one thing or another, and ask them how they like it

here, as far as they have got.  I reckon my wife will want to camp

in the California range, though, because most all her departed will

be there, and she likes to be with folks she knows."



"Don't you let her.  You see what the Jersey district of heaven is,

for whites; well, the Californian district is a thousand times

worse.  It swarms with a mean kind of leather-headed mud-colored

angels - and your nearest white neighbor is likely to be a million

miles away.  WHAT A MAN MOSTLY MISSES, IN HEAVEN, IS COMPANY -

company of his own sort and color and language.  I have come near

settling in the European part of heaven once or twice on that

account."



"Well, why didn't you, Sandy?"



"Oh, various reasons.  For one thing, although you SEE plenty of

whites there, you can't understand any of them, hardly, and so you

go about as hungry for talk as you do here.  I like to look at a

Russian or a German or an Italian - I even like to look at a

Frenchman if I ever have the luck to catch him engaged in anything

that ain't indelicate - but LOOKING don't cure the hunger - what

you want is talk."



"Well, there's England, Sandy - the English district of heaven."



"Yes, but it is not so very much better than this end of the

heavenly domain.  As long as you run across Englishmen born this

side of three hundred years ago, you are all right; but the minute

you get back of Elizabeth's time the language begins to fog up, and

the further back you go the foggier it gets.  I had some talk with

one Langland and a man by the name of Chaucer - old-time poets -

but it was no use, I couldn't quite understand them, and they

couldn't quite understand me.  I have had letters from them since,

but it is such broken English I can't make it out.  Back of those

men's time the English are just simply foreigners, nothing more,

nothing less; they talk Danish, German, Norman French, and

sometimes a mixture of all three; back of THEM, they talk Latin,

and ancient British, Irish, and Gaelic; and then back of these come

billions and billions of pure savages that talk a gibberish that

Satan himself couldn't understand.  The fact is, where you strike

one man in the English settlements that you can understand, you

wade through awful swarms that talk something you can't make head

nor tail of.  You see, every country on earth has been overlaid so

often, in the course of a billion years, with different kinds of

people and different sorts of languages, that this sort of mongrel

business was bound to be the result in heaven."



"Sandy," says I, "did you see a good many of the great people

history tells about?"



"Yes - plenty.  I saw kings and all sorts of distinguished people."



"Do the kings rank just as they did below?"



"No; a body can't bring his rank up here with him.  Divine right is

a good-enough earthly romance, but it don't go, here.  Kings drop

down to the general level as soon as they reach the realms of

grace.  I knew Charles the Second very well - one of the most

popular comedians in the English section - draws first rate.  There

are better, of course - people that were never heard of on earth -

but Charles is making a very good reputation indeed, and is

considered a rising man.  Richard the Lion-hearted is in the prize-

ring, and coming into considerable favor.  Henry the Eighth is a

tragedian, and the scenes where he kills people are done to the

very life.  Henry the Sixth keeps a religious-book stand."



"Did you ever see Napoleon, Sandy?"



"Often - sometimes in the Corsican range, sometimes in the French.

He always hunts up a conspicuous place, and goes frowning around

with his arms folded and his field-glass under his arm, looking as

grand, gloomy and peculiar as his reputation calls for, and very

much bothered because he don't stand as high, here, for a soldier,

as he expected to."



"Why, who stands higher?"



"Oh, a LOT of people WE never heard of before - the shoemaker and

horse-doctor and knife-grinder kind, you know - clodhoppers from

goodness knows where that never handled a sword or fired a shot in

their lives - but the soldiership was in them, though they never

had a chance to show it.  But here they take their right place, and

Caesar and Napoleon and Alexander have to take a back seat.  The

greatest military genius our world ever produced was a brick-layer

from somewhere back of Boston - died during the Revolution - by the

name of Absalom Jones.  Wherever he goes, crowds flock to see him.

You see, everybody knows that if he had had a chance he would have

shown the world some generalship that would have made all

generalship before look like child's play and 'prentice work.  But

he never got a chance; he tried heaps of times to enlist as a

private, but he had lost both thumbs and a couple of front teeth,

and the recruiting sergeant wouldn't pass him.  However, as I say,

everybody knows, now, what he WOULD have been, - and so they flock

by the million to get a glimpse of him whenever they hear he is

going to be anywhere.  Caesar, and Hannibal, and Alexander, and

Napoleon are all on his staff, and ever so many more great

generals; but the public hardly care to look at THEM when HE is

around.  Boom!  There goes another salute.  The barkeeper's off

quarantine now."





Sandy and I put on our things.  Then we made a wish, and in a

second we were at the reception-place.  We stood on the edge of the

ocean of space, and looked out over the dimness, but couldn't make

out anything.  Close by us was the Grand Stand - tier on tier of

dim thrones rising up toward the zenith.  From each side of it

spread away the tiers of seats for the general public.  They spread

away for leagues and leagues - you couldn't see the ends.  They

were empty and still, and hadn't a cheerful look, but looked

dreary, like a theatre before anybody comes - gas turned down.

Sandy says, -



"We'll sit down here and wait.  We'll see the head of the

procession come in sight away off yonder pretty soon, now."



Says I, -



"It's pretty lonesome, Sandy; I reckon there's a hitch somewheres.

Nobody but just you and me - it ain't much of a display for the

barkeeper."



"Don't you fret, it's all right.  There'll be one more gun-fire -

then you'll see.



In a little while we noticed a sort of a lightish flush, away off

on the horizon.



"Head of the torchlight procession," says Sandy.



It spread, and got lighter and brighter:  soon it had a strong

glare like a locomotive headlight; it kept on getting brighter and

brighter till it was like the sun peeping above the horizon-line at

sea - the big red rays shot high up into the sky.



"Keep your eyes on the Grand Stand and the miles of seats - sharp!"

says Sandy, "and listen for the gun-fire."



Just then it burst out, "Boom-boom-boom!" like a million

thunderstorms in one, and made the whole heavens rock.  Then there

was a sudden and awful glare of light all about us, and in that

very instant every one of the millions of seats was occupied, and

as far as you could see, in both directions, was just a solid pack

of people, and the place was all splendidly lit up!  It was enough

to take a body's breath away.  Sandy says, -



"That is the way we do it here.  No time fooled away; nobody

straggling in after the curtain's up.  Wishing is quicker work than

travelling.  A quarter of a second ago these folks were millions of

miles from here.  When they heard the last signal, all they had to

do was to wish, and here they are."



The prodigious choir struck up, -





We long to hear thy voice,

To see thee face to face.





It was noble music, but the uneducated chipped in and spoilt it,

just as the congregations used to do on earth.



The head of the procession began to pass, now, and it was a

wonderful sight.  It swept along, thick and solid, five hundred

thousand angels abreast, and every angel carrying a torch and

singing - the whirring thunder of the wings made a body's head

ache.  You could follow the line of the procession back, and

slanting upward into the sky, far away in a glittering snaky rope,

till it was only a faint streak in the distance.  The rush went on

and on, for a long time, and at last, sure enough, along comes the

barkeeper, and then everybody rose, and a cheer went up that made

the heavens shake, I tell you!  He was all smiles, and had his halo

tilted over one ear in a cocky way, and was the most satisfied-

looking saint I ever saw.  While he marched up the steps of the

Grand Stand, the choir struck up, -





The whole wide heaven groans,

And waits to hear that voice."





There were four gorgeous tents standing side by side in the place

of honor, on a broad railed platform in the centre of the Grand

Stand, with a shining guard of honor round about them.  The tents

had been shut up all this time.  As the barkeeper climbed along up,

bowing and smiling to everybody, and at last got to the platform,

these tents were jerked up aloft all of a sudden, and we saw four

noble thrones of gold, all caked with jewels, and in the two middle

ones sat old white-whiskered men, and in the two others a couple of

the most glorious and gaudy giants, with platter halos and

beautiful armor.  All the millions went down on their knees, and

stared, and looked glad, and burst out into a joyful kind of

murmurs.  They said, -



"Two archangels! - that is splendid.  Who can the others be?"



The archangels gave the barkeeper a stiff little military bow; the

two old men rose; one of them said, "Moses and Esau welcome thee!"

and then all the four vanished, and the thrones were empty.



The barkeeper looked a little disappointed, for he was calculating

to hug those old people, I judge; but it was the gladdest and

proudest multitude you ever saw - because they had seen Moses and

Esau.  Everybody was saying, "Did you see them? - I did - Esau's

side face was to me, but I saw Moses full in the face, just as

plain as I see you this minute!"



The procession took up the barkeeper and moved on with him again,

and the crowd broke up and scattered.  As we went along home, Sandy

said it was a great success, and the barkeeper would have a right

to be proud of it forever.  And he said we were in luck, too; said

we might attend receptions for forty thousand years to come, and

not have a chance to see a brace of such grand moguls as Moses and

Esau.  We found afterwards that we had come near seeing another

patriarch, and likewise a genuine prophet besides, but at the last

moment they sent regrets.  Sandy said there would be a monument put

up there, where Moses and Esau had stood, with the date and

circumstances, and all about the whole business, and travellers

would come for thousands of years and gawk at it, and climb over

it, and scribble their names on it.







Footnotes:



(1)  The captain could not remember what this word was.  He said it

was in a foreign tongue.











End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain

[Extract]













IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?

FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY







CHAPTER I





Scattered here and there through the stacks of unpublished

manuscript which constitute this formidable Autobiography and Diary

of mine, certain chapters will in some distant future be found

which deal with "Claimants"--claimants historically notorious:

Satan, Claimant; the Golden Calf, Claimant; the Veiled Prophet of

Khorassan, Claimant; Louis XVII., Claimant; William Shakespeare,

Claimant; Arthur Orton, Claimant; Mary Baker G. Eddy, Claimant--and

the rest of them.  Eminent Claimants, successful Claimants,

defeated Claimants, royal Claimants, pleb Claimants, showy

Claimants, shabby Claimants, revered Claimants, despised Claimants,

twinkle starlike here and there and yonder through the mists of

history and legend and tradition--and oh, all the darling tribe are

clothed in mystery and romance, and we read about them with deep

interest and discuss them with loving sympathy or with rancorous

resentment, according to which side we hitch ourselves to.  It has

always been so with the human race.  There was never a Claimant

that couldn't get a hearing, nor one that couldn't accumulate a

rapturous following, no matter how flimsy and apparently

unauthentic his claim might be.  Arthur Orton's claim that he was

the lost Tichborne baronet come to life again was as flimsy as Mrs.

Eddy's that she wrote Science and Health from the direct dictation

of the Deity; yet in England near forty years ago Orton had a huge

army of devotees and incorrigible adherents, many of whom remained

stubbornly unconvinced after their fat god had been proven an

impostor and jailed as a perjurer, and to-day Mrs. Eddy's following

is not only immense, but is daily augmenting in numbers and

enthusiasm.  Orton had many fine and educated minds among his

adherents, Mrs. Eddy has had the like among hers from the

beginning.  Her church is as well equipped in those particulars as

is any other church.  Claimants can always count upon a following,

it doesn't matter who they are, nor what they claim, nor whether

they come with documents or without.  It was always so.  Down out

of the long-vanished past, across the abyss of the ages, if you

listen you can still hear the believing multitudes shouting for

Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel.



A friend has sent me a new book, from England--The Shakespeare

Problem Restated--well restated and closely reasoned; and my fifty

years' interest in that matter--asleep for the last three years--is

excited once more.  It is an interest which was born of Delia

Bacon's book--away back in that ancient day--1857, or maybe 1856.

About a year later my pilot-master, Bixby, transferred me from his

own steamboat to the Pennsylvania, and placed me under the orders

and instructions of George Ealer--dead now, these many, many years.

I steered for him a good many months--as was the humble duty of the

pilot-apprentice:  stood a daylight watch and spun the wheel under

the severe superintendence and correction of the master.  He was a

prime chess player and an idolater of Shakespeare.  He would play

chess with anybody; even with me, and it cost his official dignity

something to do that.  Also--quite uninvited--he would read

Shakespeare to me; not just casually, but by the hour, when it was

his watch, and I was steering.  He read well, but not profitably

for me, because he constantly injected commands into the text.

That broke it all up, mixed it all up, tangled it all up--to that

degree, in fact, that if we were in a risky and difficult piece of

river an ignorant person couldn't have told, sometimes, which

observations were Shakespeare's and which were Ealer's.  For

instance:





What man dare, _I_ dare!



Approach thou WHAT are you laying in the leads for? what a hell of

an idea! like the rugged ease her off a little, ease her off!

rugged Russian bear, the armed rhinoceros or the THERE she goes!

meet her, meet her! didn't you KNOW she'd smell the reef if you

crowded it like that?  Hyrcan tiger; take any shape but that and my

firm nerves she'll be in the WOODS the first you know! stop the

starboard! come ahead strong on the larboard! back the starboard! .

. . NOW then, you're all right; come ahead on the starboard;

straighten up and go 'long, never tremble:  or be alive again, and

dare me to the desert damnation can't you keep away from that

greasy water? pull her down! snatch her! snatch her baldheaded!

with thy sword; if trembling I inhabit then, lay in the leads!--no,

only the starboard one, leave the other alone, protest me the baby

of a girl.  Hence horrible shadow! eight bells--that watchman's

asleep again, I reckon, go down and call Brown yourself, unreal

mockery, hence!"





He certainly was a good reader, and splendidly thrilling and stormy

and tragic, but it was a damage to me, because I have never since

been able to read Shakespeare in a calm and sane way.  I cannot rid

it of his explosive interlardings, they break in everywhere with

their irrelevant "What in hell are you up to NOW! pull her down!

more! MORE!--there now, steady as you go," and the other

disorganizing interruptions that were always leaping from his

mouth.  When I read Shakespeare now, I can hear them as plainly as

I did in that long-departed time--fifty-one years ago.  I never

regarded Ealer's readings as educational.  Indeed they were a

detriment to me.



His contributions to the text seldom improved it, but barring that

detail he was a good reader, I can say that much for him.  He did

not use the book, and did not need to; he knew his Shakespeare as

well as Euclid ever knew his multiplication table.



Did he have something to say--this Shakespeare-adoring Mississippi

pilot--anent Delia Bacon's book?  Yes.  And he said it; said it all

the time, for months--in the morning watch, the middle watch, the

dog watch; and probably kept it going in his sleep.  He bought the

literature of the dispute as fast as it appeared, and we discussed

it all through thirteen hundred miles of river four times traversed

in every thirty-five days--the time required by that swift boat to

achieve two round trips.  We discussed, and discussed, and

discussed, and disputed and disputed and disputed; at any rate he

did, and I got in a word now and then when he slipped a cog and

there was a vacancy.  He did his arguing with heat, with energy,

with violence; and I did mine with the reserve and moderation of a

subordinate who does not like to be flung out of a pilot-house that

is perched forty feet above the water.  He was fiercely loyal to

Shakespeare and cordially scornful of Bacon and of all the

pretensions of the Baconians.  So was I--at first.  And at first he

was glad that that was my attitude.  There were even indications

that he admired it; indications dimmed, it is true, by the distance

that lay between the lofty boss-pilotical altitude and my lowly

one, yet perceptible to me; perceptible, and translatable into a

compliment--compliment coming down from above the snow-line and not

well thawed in the transit, and not likely to set anything afire,

not even a cub-pilot's self-conceit; still a detectable compliment,

and precious.



Naturally it flattered me into being more loyal to Shakespeare--if

possible--than I was before, and more prejudiced against Bacon--if

possible than I was before.  And so we discussed and discussed,

both on the same side, and were happy.  For a while.  Only for a

while.  Only for a very little while, a very, very, very little

while.  Then the atmosphere began to change; began to cool off.



A brighter person would have seen what the trouble was, earlier

than I did, perhaps, but I saw it early enough for all practical

purposes.  You see, he was of an argumentative disposition.

Therefore it took him but a little time to get tired of arguing

with a person who agreed with everything he said and consequently

never furnished him a provocative to flare up and show what he

could do when it came to clear, cold, hard, rose-cut, hundred-

faceted, diamond-flashing reasoning.  That was his name for it.  It

has been applied since, with complacency, as many as several times,

in the Bacon-Shakespeare scuffle.  On the Shakespeare side.



Then the thing happened which has happened to more persons than to

me when principle and personal interest found themselves in

opposition to each other and a choice had to be made:  I let

principle go, and went over to the other side.  Not the entire way,

but far enough to answer the requirements of the case.  That is to

say, I took this attitude, to wit:  I only BELIEVED Bacon wrote

Shakespeare, whereas I KNEW Shakespeare didn't.  Ealer was

satisfied with that, and the war broke loose.  Study, practice,

experience in handling my end of the matter presently enabled me to

take my new position almost seriously; a little bit later, utterly

seriously; a little later still, lovingly, gratefully, devotedly;

finally:  fiercely, rabidly, uncompromisingly.  After that, I was

welded to my faith, I was theoretically ready to die for it, and I

looked down with compassion not unmixed with scorn, upon everybody

else's faith that didn't tally with mine.  That faith, imposed upon

me by self-interest in that ancient day, remains my faith to-day,

and in it I find comfort, solace, peace, and never-failing joy.

You see how curiously theological it is.  The "rice Christian" of

the Orient goes through the very same steps, when he is after rice

and the missionary is after HIM; he goes for rice, and remains to

worship.



Ealer did a lot of our "reasoning"--not to say substantially all of

it.  The slaves of his cult have a passion for calling it by that

large name.  We others do not call our inductions and deductions

and reductions by any name at all.  They show for themselves, what

they are, and we can with tranquil confidence leave the world to

ennoble them with a title of its own choosing.



Now and then when Ealer had to stop to cough, I pulled my

induction-talents together and hove the controversial lead myself:

always getting eight feet, eight-and-a-half, often nine, sometimes

even quarter-less-twain--as _I_ believed; but always "no bottom,"

as HE said.



I got the best of him only once.  I prepared myself.  I wrote out a

passage from Shakespeare--it may have been the very one I quoted a

while ago, I don't remember--and riddled it with his wild

steamboatful interlardings.  When an unrisky opportunity offered,

one lovely summer day, when we had sounded and buoyed a tangled

patch of crossings known as Hell's Half Acre, and were aboard again

and he had sneaked the Pennsylvania triumphantly through it without

once scraping sand, and the A. T. Lacey had followed in our wake

and got stuck, and he was feeling good, I showed it to him.  It

amused him.  I asked him to fire it off:  read it; read it, I

diplomatically added, as only he could read dramatic poetry.  The

compliment touched him where he lived.  He did read it; read it

with surpassing fire and spirit; read it as it will never be read

again; for HE knew how to put the right music into those thunderous

interlardings and make them seem a part of the text, make them

sound as if they were bursting from Shakespeare's own soul, each

one of them a golden inspiration and not to be left out without

damage to the massed and magnificent whole.



I waited a week, to let the incident fade; waited longer; waited

until he brought up for reasonings and vituperation my pet

position, my pet argument, the one which I was fondest of, the one

which I prized far above all others in my ammunition-wagon, to wit:

that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare's works, for the

reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly familiar with

the laws, and the law-courts, and law-proceedings, and lawyer-talk,

and lawyer-ways--and if Shakespeare was possessed of the

infinitely-divided star-dust that constituted this vast wealth, how

did he get it, and WHERE, and WHEN?



"From books."



From books!  That was always the idea.  I answered as my readings

of the champions of my side of the great controversy had taught me

to answer:  that a man can't handle glibly and easily and

comfortably and successfully the argot of a trade at which he has

not personally served.  He will make mistakes; he will not, and

cannot, get the trade-phrasings precisely and exactly right; and

the moment he departs, by even a shade, from a common trade-form,

the reader who has served that trade will know the writer HASN'T.

Ealer would not be convinced; he said a man could learn how to

correctly handle the subtleties and mysteries and free-masonries of

any trade by careful reading and studying.  But when I got him to

read again the passage from Shakespeare with the interlardings, he

perceived, himself, that books couldn't teach a student a

bewildering multitude of pilot-phrases so thoroughly and perfectly

that he could talk them off in book and play or conversation and

make no mistake that a pilot would not immediately discover.  It

was a triumph for me.  He was silent awhile, and I knew what was

happening:  he was losing his temper.  And I knew he would

presently close the session with the same old argument that was

always his stay and his support in time of need; the same old

argument, the one I couldn't answer--because I dasn't:  the

argument that I was an ass, and better shut up.  He delivered it,

and I obeyed.



Oh, dear, how long ago it was--how pathetically long ago!  And here

am I, old, forsaken, forlorn and alone, arranging to get that

argument out of somebody again.



When a man has a passion for Shakespeare, it goes without saying

that he keeps company with other standard authors.  Ealer always

had several high-class books in the pilot-house, and he read the

same ones over and over again, and did not care to change to newer

and fresher ones.  He played well on the flute, and greatly enjoyed

hearing himself play.  So did I.  He had a notion that a flute

would keep its health better if you took it apart when it was not

standing a watch; and so, when it was not on duty it took its rest,

disjointed, on the compass-shelf under the breast-board.  When the

Pennsylvania blew up and became a drifting rack-heap freighted with

wounded and dying poor souls (my young brother Henry among them),

pilot Brown had the watch below, and was probably asleep and never

knew what killed him; but Ealer escaped unhurt.  He and his pilot-

house were shot up into the air; then they fell, and Ealer sank

through the ragged cavern where the hurricane deck and the boiler

deck had been, and landed in a nest of ruins on the main deck, on

top of one of the unexploded boilers, where he lay prone in a fog

of scalding and deadly steam.  But not for long.  He did not lose

his head:  long familiarity with danger had taught him to keep it,

in any and all emergencies.  He held his coat-lappels to his nose

with one hand, to keep out the steam, and scrabbled around with the

other till he found the joints of his flute, then he is took

measures to save himself alive, and was successful.  I was not on

board.  I had been put ashore in New Orleans by Captain

Klinefelter.  The reason--however, I have told all about it in the

book called Old Times on the Mississippi, and it isn't important

anyway, it is so long ago.







CHAPTER II







When I was a Sunday-school scholar something more than sixty years

ago, I became interested in Satan, and wanted to find out all I

could about him.  I began to ask questions, but my class-teacher,

Mr. Barclay the stone-mason, was reluctant about answering them, it

seemed to me.  I was anxious to be praised for turning my thoughts

to serious subjects when there wasn't another boy in the village

who could be hired to do such a thing.  I was greatly interested in

the incident of Eve and the serpent, and thought Eve's calmness was

perfectly noble.  I asked Mr. Barclay if he had ever heard of

another woman who, being approached by a serpent, would not excuse

herself and break for the nearest timber.  He did not answer my

question, but rebuked me for inquiring into matters above my age

and comprehension.  I will say for Mr. Barclay that he was willing

to tell me the facts of Satan's history, but he stopped there:  he

wouldn't allow any discussion of them.



In the course of time we exhausted the facts.  There were only five

or six of them, you could set them all down on a visiting-card.  I

was disappointed.  I had been meditating a biography, and was

grieved to find that there were no materials.  I said as much, with

the tears running down.  Mr. Barclay's sympathy and compassion were

aroused, for he was a most kind and gentle-spirited man, and he

patted me on the head and cheered me up by saying there was a whole

vast ocean of materials!  I can still feel the happy thrill which

these blessed words shot through me.



Then he began to bail out that ocean's riches for my encouragement

and joy.  Like this:  it was "conjectured"--though not established-

-that Satan was originally an angel in heaven; that he fell; that

he rebelled, and brought on a war; that he was defeated, and

banished to perdition.  Also, "we have reason to believe" that

later he did so-and-so; that "we are warranted in supposing" that

at a subsequent time he travelled extensively, seeking whom he

might devour; that a couple of centuries afterward, "as tradition

instructs us," he took up the cruel trade of tempting people to

their ruin, with vast and fearful results; that by-and-by, "as the

probabilities seem to indicate," he may have done certain things,

he might have done certain other things, he must have done still

other things.



And so on and so on.  We set down the five known facts by

themselves, on a piece of paper, and numbered it "page 1"; then on

fifteen hundred other pieces of paper we set down the

"conjectures," and "suppositions," and "maybes," and "perhapses,"

and "doubtlesses," and "rumors," and "guesses," and

"probabilities," and "likelihoods," and "we are permitted to

thinks," and "we are warranted in believings," and "might have

beens," and "could have beens," and "must have beens," and

"unquestionablys," and "without a shadow of doubts"--and behold!



MATERIALS?  Why, we had enough to build a biography of Shakespeare!



Yet he made me put away my pen; he would not let me write the

history of Satan.  Why?  Because, as he said, he had suspicions;

suspicions that my attitude in this matter was not reverent; and

that a person must be reverent when writing about the sacred

characters.  He said any one who spoke flippantly of Satan would be

frowned upon by the religious world and also be brought to account.



I assured him, in earnest and sincere words, that he had wholly

misconceived my attitude; that I had the highest respect for Satan,

and that my reverence for him equalled, and possibly even exceeded,

that of any member of any church.  I said it wounded me deeply to

perceive by his words that he thought I would make fun of Satan,

and deride him, laugh at him, scoff at him:  whereas in truth I had

never thought of such a thing, but had only a warm desire to make

fun of those others and laugh at THEM.  "What others?"  "Why, the

Supposers, the Perhapsers, the Might-Have-Beeners, the Could-Have-

Beeners, the Must-Have-Beeners, the Without-a-Shadow-of-Doubters,

the We-are-Warranted-in-Believingers, and all that funny crop of

solemn architects who have taken a good solid foundation of five

indisputable and unimportant facts and built upon it a Conjectural

Satan thirty miles high."



What did Mr. Barclay do then?  Was he disarmed?  Was he silenced?

No.  He was shocked.  He was so shocked that he visibly shuddered.

He said the Satanic Traditioners and Perhapsers and Conjecturers

were THEMSELVES sacred!  As sacred as their work.  So sacred that

whoso ventured to mock them or make fun of their work, could not

afterward enter any respectable house, even by the back door.



How true were his words, and how wise!  How fortunate it would have

been for me if I had heeded them.  But I was young, I was but seven

years of age, and vain, foolish, and anxious to attract attention.

I wrote the biography, and have never been in a respectable house

since.







CHAPTER III







How curious and interesting is the parallel--as far as poverty of

biographical details is concerned--between Satan and Shakespeare.

It is wonderful, it is unique, it stands quite alone, there is

nothing resembling it in history, nothing resembling it in romance,

nothing approaching it even in tradition.  How sublime is their

position, and how over-topping, how sky-reaching, how supreme--the

two Great Unknowns, the two Illustrious Conjecturabilities!  They

are the best-known unknown persons that have ever drawn breath upon

the planet.



For the instruction of the ignorant I will make a list, now, of

those details of Shakespeare's history which are FACTS--verified

facts, established facts, undisputed facts.





FACTS





He was born on the 23d of April, 1564.



Of good farmer-class parents who could not read, could not write,

could not sign their names.



At Stratford, a small back settlement which in that day was shabby

and unclean, and densely illiterate.  Of the nineteen important men

charged with the government of the town, thirteen had to "make

their mark" in attesting important documents, because they could

not write their names.



Of the first eighteen years of his life NOTHING is known.  They are

a blank.



On the 27th of November (1582) William Shakespeare took out a

license to marry Anne Whateley.



Next day William Shakespeare took out a license to marry Anne

Hathaway.  She was eight years his senior.



William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway.  In a hurry.  By grace

of a reluctantly-granted dispensation there was but one publication

of the banns.



Within six months the first child was born.



About two (blank) years followed, during which period NOTHING AT

ALL HAPPENED TO SHAKESPEARE, so far as anybody knows.



Then came twins--1585.  February.



Two blank years follow.



Then--1587--he makes a ten-year visit to London, leaving the family

behind.



Five blank years follow.  During this period NOTHING HAPPENED TO

HIM, as far as anybody actually knows.



Then--1592--there is mention of him as an actor.



Next year--1593--his name appears in the official list of players.



Next year--1594--he played before the queen.  A detail of no

consequence:  other obscurities did it every year of the forty-five

of her reign.  And remained obscure.



Three pretty full years follow.  Full of play-acting.  Then



In 1597 he bought New Place, Stratford.



Thirteen or fourteen busy years follow; years in which he

accumulated money, and also reputation as actor and manager.



Meantime his name, liberally and variously spelt, had become

associated with a number of great plays and poems, as (ostensibly)

author of the same.



Some of these, in these years and later, were pirated, but he made

no protest.  Then--1610-11--he returned to Stratford and settled

down for good and all, and busied himself in lending money, trading

in tithes, trading in land and houses; shirking a debt of forty-one

shillings, borrowed by his wife during his long desertion of his

family; suing debtors for shillings and coppers; being sued himself

for shillings and coppers; and acting as confederate to a neighbor

who tried to rob the town of its rights in a certain common, and

did not succeed.



He lived five or six years--till 1616--in the joy of these elevated

pursuits.  Then he made a will, and signed each of its three pages

with his name.



A thoroughgoing business man's will.  It named in minute detail

every item of property he owned in the world--houses, lands, sword,

silver-gilt bowl, and so on--all the way down to his "second-best

bed" and its furniture.



It carefully and calculatingly distributed his riches among the

members of his family, overlooking no individual of it. Not even

his wife:  the wife he had been enabled to marry in a hurry by

urgent grace of a special dispensation before he was nineteen; the

wife whom he had left husbandless so many years; the wife who had

had to borrow forty-one shillings in her need, and which the lender

was never able to collect of the prosperous husband, but died at

last with the money still lacking.  No, even this wife was

remembered in Shakespeare's will.



He left her that "second-best bed."



And NOT ANOTHER THING; not even a penny to bless her lucky

widowhood with.



It was eminently and conspicuously a business man's will, not a

poet's.



It mentioned NOT A SINGLE BOOK.



Books were much more precious than swords and silver-gilt bowls and

second-best beds in those days, and when a departing person owned

one he gave it a high place in his will.



The will mentioned NOT A PLAY, NOT A POEM, NOT AN UNFINISHED

LITERARY WORK, NOT A SCRAP OF MANUSCRIPT OF ANY KIND.



Many poets have died poor, but this is the only one in history that

has died THIS poor; the others all left literary remains behind.

Also a book.  Maybe two.



If Shakespeare had owned a dog--but we need not go into that:  we

know he would have mentioned it in his will.  If a good dog,

Susanna would have got it; if an inferior one his wife would have

got a dower interest in it.  I wish he had had a dog, just so we

could see how painstakingly he would have divided that dog among

the family, in his careful business way.



He signed the will in three places.



In earlier years he signed two other official documents.



These five signatures still exist.



There are NO OTHER SPECIMENS OF HIS PENMANSHIP IN EXISTENCE.  Not a

line.



Was he prejudiced against the art?  His granddaughter, whom he

loved, was eight years old when he died, yet she had had no

teaching, he left no provision for her education although he was

rich, and in her mature womanhood she couldn't write and couldn't

tell her husband's manuscript from anybody else's--she thought it

was Shakespeare's.



When Shakespeare died in Stratford IT WAS NOT AN EVENT.  It made no

more stir in England than the death of any other forgotten theatre-

actor would have made.  Nobody came down from London; there were no

lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national tears--there was merely

silence, and nothing more.  A striking contrast with what happened

when Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon, and Spenser, and Raleigh and

the other distinguished literary folk of Shakespeare's time passed

from life!  No praiseful voice was lifted for the lost Bard of

Avon; even Ben Jonson waited seven years before he lifted his.



SO FAR AS ANYBODY ACTUALLY KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, Shakespeare of

Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life.



SO FAR AS ANYBODY KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, he never wrote a letter to

anybody in his life.



SO FAR AS ANY ONE KNOWS, HE RECEIVED ONLY ONE LETTER DURING HIS

LIFE.



So far as any one KNOWS AND CAN PROVE, Shakespeare of Stratford

wrote only one poem during his life.  This one is authentic.  He

did write that one--a fact which stands undisputed; he wrote the

whole of it; he wrote the whole of it out of his own head.  He

commanded that this work of art be engraved upon his tomb, and he

was obeyed.  There it abides to this day.  This is it:





Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones

And curst be he yt moves my bones.





In the list as above set down, will be found EVERY POSITIVELY KNOWN

fact of Shakespeare's life, lean and meagre as the invoice is.

Beyond these details we know NOT A THING about him.  All the rest

of his vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up,

course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures--

an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat

and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.







CHAPTER IV







CONJECTURES





The historians "suppose" that Shakespeare attended the Free School

in Stratford from the time he was seven years old till he was

thirteen.  There is no EVIDENCE in existence that he ever went to

school at all.



The historians "infer" that he got his Latin in that school--the

school which they "suppose" he attended.



They "suppose" his father's declining fortunes made it necessary

for him to leave the school they supposed he attended, and get to

work and help support his parents and their ten children.  But

there is no evidence that he ever entered or retired from the

school they suppose he attended.



They "suppose" he assisted his father in the butchering business;

and that, being only a boy, he didn't have to do full-grown

butchering, but only slaughtered calves.  Also, that whenever he

killed a calf he made a high-flown speech over it.  This

supposition rests upon the testimony of a man who wasn't there at

the time; a man who got it from a man who could have been there,

but did not say whether he was or not; and neither of them thought

to mention it for decades, and decades, and decades, and two more

decades after Shakespeare's death (until old age and mental decay

had refreshed and vivified their memories).  They hadn't two facts

in stock about the long-dead distinguished citizen, but only just

the one:  he slaughtered calves and broke into oratory while he was

at it.  Curious.  They had only one fact, yet the distinguished

citizen had spent twenty-six years in that little town--just half

his lifetime.  However, rightly viewed, it was the most important

fact, indeed almost the only important fact, of Shakespeare's life

in Stratford.  Rightly viewed.  For experience is an author's most

valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and

the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.  Rightly

viewed, calf-butchering accounts for Titus Andronicus, the only

play--ain't it?--that the Stratford Shakespeare ever wrote; and yet

it is the only one everybody tries to chouse him out of, the

Baconians included.



The historians find themselves "justified in believing" that the

young Shakespeare poached upon Sir Thomas Lucy's deer preserves and

got haled before that magistrate for it.  But there is no shred of

respectworthy evidence that anything of the kind happened.



The historians, having argued the thing that MIGHT have happened

into the thing that DID happen, found no trouble in turning Sir

Thomas Lucy into Mr. Justice Shallow.  They have long ago convinced

the world--on surmise and without trustworthy evidence--that

Shallow IS Sir Thomas.



The next addition to the young Shakespeare's Stratford history

comes easy.  The historian builds it out of the surmised deer-

stealing, and the surmised trial before the magistrate, and the

surmised vengeance-prompted satire upon the magistrate in the play:

result, the young Shakespeare was a wild, wild, wild, oh SUCH a

wild young scamp, and that gratuitous slander is established for

all time!  It is the very way Professor Osborn and I built the

colossal skeleton brontosaur that stands fifty-seven feet long and

sixteen feet high in the Natural History Museum, the awe and

admiration of all the world, the stateliest skeleton that exists on

the planet.  We had nine bones, and we built the rest of him out of

plaster of paris.  We ran short of plaster of paris, or we'd have

built a brontosaur that could sit down beside the Stratford

Shakespeare and none but an expert could tell which was biggest or

contained the most plaster.



Shakespeare pronounced Venus and Adonis "the first heir of his

invention," apparently implying that it was his first effort at

literary composition.  He should not have said it.  It has been an

embarrassment to his historians these many, many years.  They have

to make him write that graceful and polished and flawless and

beautiful poem before he escaped from Stratford and his family--

1586 or '87--age, twenty-two, or along there; because within the

next five years he wrote five great plays, and could not have found

time to write another line.



It is sorely embarrassing.  If he began to slaughter calves, and

poach deer, and rollick around, and learn English, at the earliest

likely moment--say at thirteen, when he was supposably wrenched

from that school where he was supposably storing up Latin for

future literary use--he had his youthful hands full, and much more

than full.  He must have had to put aside his Warwickshire dialect,

which wouldn't be understood in London, and study English very

hard.  Very hard indeed; incredibly hard, almost, if the result of

that labor was to be the smooth and rounded and flexible and

letter-perfect English of the Venus and Adonis in the space of ten

years; and at the same time learn great and fine and unsurpassable

literary form.



However, it is "conjectured" that he accomplished all this and

more, much more:  learned law and its intricacies; and the complex

procedure of the law courts; and all about soldiering, and

sailoring, and the manners and customs and ways of royal courts and

aristocratic society; and likewise accumulated in his one head

every kind of knowledge the learned then possessed, and every kind

of humble knowledge possessed by the lowly and the ignorant; and

added thereto a wider and more intimate knowledge of the world's

great literatures, ancient and modern, than was possessed by any

other man of his time--for he was going to make brilliant and easy

and admiration-compelling use of these splendid treasures the

moment he got to London.  And according to the surmisers, that is

what he did.  Yes, although there was no one in Stratford able to

teach him these things, and no library in the little village to dig

them out of.  His father could not read, and even the surmisers

surmise that he did not keep a library.



It is surmised by the biographers that the young Shakespeare got

his vast knowledge of the law and his familiar and accurate

acquaintance with the manners and customs and shop-talk of lawyers

through being for a time the CLERK OF A STRATFORD COURT; just as a

bright lad like me, reared in a village on the banks of the

Mississippi, might become perfect in knowledge of the Behring

Strait whale-fishery and the shop-talk of the veteran exercisers of

that adventure-bristling trade through catching catfish with a

"trot-line" Sundays.  But the surmise is damaged by the fact that

there is no evidence--and not even tradition--that the young

Shakespeare was ever clerk of a law court.



It is further surmised that the young Shakespeare accumulated his

law-treasures in the first years of his sojourn in London, through

"amusing himself" by learning book-law in his garret and by picking

up lawyer-talk and the rest of it through loitering about the law-

courts and listening.  But it is only surmise; there is no EVIDENCE

that he ever did either of those things.  They are merely a couple

of chunks of plaster of paris.



There is a legend that he got his bread and butter by holding

horses in front of the London theatres, mornings and afternoons.

Maybe he did.  If he did, it seriously shortened his law-study

hours and his recreation-time in the courts.  In those very days he

was writing great plays, and needed all the time he could get.  The

horse-holding legend ought to be strangled; it too formidably

increases the historian's difficulty in accounting for the young

Shakespeare's erudition--an erudition which he was acquiring, hunk

by hunk and chunk by chunk every day in those strenuous times, and

emptying each day's catch into next day's imperishable drama.



He had to acquire a knowledge of war at the same time; and a

knowledge of soldier-people and sailor-people and their ways and

talk; also a knowledge of some foreign lands and their languages:

for he was daily emptying fluent streams of these various

knowledges, too, into his dramas.  How did he acquire these rich

assets?



In the usual way:  by surmise.  It is SURMISED that he travelled in

Italy and Germany and around, and qualified himself to put their

scenic and social aspects upon paper; that he perfected himself in

French, Italian and Spanish on the road; that he went in

Leicester's expedition to the Low Countries, as soldier or sutler

or something, for several months or years--or whatever length of

time a surmiser needs in his business--and thus became familiar

with soldiership and soldier-ways and soldier-talk, and generalship

and general-ways and general-talk, and seamanship and sailor-ways

and sailor-talk.



Maybe he did all these things, but I would like to know who held

the horses in the meantime; and who studied the books in the

garret; and who frollicked in the law-courts for recreation.  Also,

who did the call-boying and the play-acting.



For he became a call-boy; and as early as '93 he became a

"vagabond"--the law's ungentle term for an unlisted actor; and in

'94 a "regular" and properly and officially listed member of that

(in those days) lightly-valued and not much respected profession.



Right soon thereafter he became a stockholder in two theatres, and

manager of them.  Thenceforward he was a busy and flourishing

business man, and was raking in money with both hands for twenty

years.  Then in a noble frenzy of poetic inspiration he wrote his

one poem--his only poem, his darling--and laid him down and died:





Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones

And curst be he yt moves my bones.





He was probably dead when he wrote it.  Still, this is only

conjecture.  We have only circumstantial evidence.  Internal

evidence.



Shall I set down the rest of the Conjectures which constitute the

giant Biography of William Shakespeare?  It would strain the

Unabridged Dictionary to hold them.  He is a Brontosaur:  nine

bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of paris.







CHAPTER V







"We May Assume"



In the Assuming trade three separate and independent cults are

transacting business.  Two of these cults are known as the

Shakespearites and the Baconians, and I am the other one--the

Brontosaurian.



The Shakespearite knows that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's Works;

the Baconian knows that Francis Bacon wrote them; the Brontosaurian

doesn't really know which of them did it, but is quite composedly

and contentedly sure that Shakespeare DIDN'T, and strongly suspects

that Bacon DID.  We all have to do a good deal of assuming, but I

am fairly certain that in every case I can call to mind the

Baconian assumers have come out ahead of the Shakespearites.  Both

parties handle the same materials, but the Baconians seem to me to

get much more reasonable and rational and persuasive results out of

them than is the case with the Shakespearites.  The Shakespearite

conducts his assuming upon a definite principle, an unchanging and

immutable law--which is:  2 and 8 and 7 and 14, added together,

make 165.  I believe this to be an error.  No matter, you cannot

get a habit-sodden Shakespearite to cipher-up his materials upon

any other basis.  With the Baconian it is different.  If you place

before him the above figures and set him to adding them up, he will

never in any case get more than 45 out of them, and in nine cases

out of ten he will get just the proper 31.



Let me try to illustrate the two systems in a simple and homely way

calculated to bring the idea within the grasp of the ignorant and

unintelligent.  We will suppose a case:  take a lap-bred, house-

fed, uneducated, inexperienced kitten; take a rugged old Tom that's

scarred from stem to rudder-post with the memorials of strenuous

experience, and is so cultured, so educated, so limitlessly erudite

that one may say of him "all cat-knowledge is his province"; also,

take a mouse.  Lock the three up in a holeless, crackless, exitless

prison-cell.  Wait half an hour, then open the cell, introduce a

Shakespearite and a Baconian, and let them cipher and assume.  The

mouse is missing:  the question to be decided is, where is it?  You

can guess both verdicts beforehand.  One verdict will say the

kitten contains the mouse; the other will as certainly say the

mouse is in the tomcat.



The Shakespearite will Reason like this--(that is not my word, it

is his).  He will say the kitten MAY HAVE BEEN attending school

when nobody was noticing; therefore WE ARE WARRANTED IN ASSUMING

that it did so; also, it COULD HAVE BEEN training in a court-

clerk's office when no one was noticing; since that could have

happened, WE ARE JUSTIFIED IN ASSUMING that it did happen; it COULD

HAVE STUDIED CATOLOGY IN A GARRET when no one was noticing--

therefore it DID; it COULD HAVE attended cat-assizes on the shed-

roof nights, for recreation, when no one was noticing, and

harvested a knowledge of cat court-forms and cat lawyer-talk in

that way:  it COULD have done it, therefore without a doubt it did;

it could have gone soldiering with a war-tribe when no one was

noticing, and learned soldier-wiles and soldier-ways, and what to

do with a mouse when opportunity offers; the plain inference,

therefore is, that that is what it DID.  Since all these manifold

things COULD have occurred, we have EVERY RIGHT TO BELIEVE they did

occur.  These patiently and painstakingly accumulated vast

acquirements and competences needed but one thing more--

opportunity--to convert themselves into triumphant action.  The

opportunity came, we have the result; BEYOND SHADOW OF QUESTION the

mouse is in the kitten.



It is proper to remark that when we of the three cults plant a "WE

THINK WE MAY ASSUME," we expect it, under careful watering and

fertilizing and tending, to grow up into a strong and hardy and

weather-defying "THERE ISN'T A SHADOW OF A DOUBT" at last--and it

usually happens.



We know what the Baconian's verdict would be:  "THERE IS NOT A RAG

OF EVIDENCE THAT THE KITTEN HAS HAD ANY TRAINING, ANY EDUCATION,

ANY EXPERIENCE QUALIFYING IT FOR THE PRESENT OCCASION, OR IS INDEED

EQUIPPED FOR ANY ACHIEVEMENT ABOVE LIFTING SUCH UNCLAIMED MILK AS

COMES ITS WAY; BUT THERE IS ABUNDANT EVIDENCE--UNASSAILABLE PROOF,

IN FACT--THAT THE OTHER ANIMAL IS EQUIPPED, TO THE LAST DETAIL,

WITH EVERY QUALIFICATION NECESSARY FOR THE EVENT.  WITHOUT SHADOW

OF DOUBT THE TOMCAT CONTAINS THE MOUSE."







CHAPTER VI







When Shakespeare died, in 1616, great literary productions

attributed to him as author had been before the London world and in

high favor for twenty-four years.  Yet his death was not an event.

It made no stir, it attracted no attention.  Apparently his eminent

literary contemporaries did not realize that a celebrated poet had

passed from their midst.  Perhaps they knew a play-actor of minor

rank had disappeared, but did not regard him as the author of his

Works.  "We are justified in assuming" this.



His death was not even an event in the little town of Stratford.

Does this mean that in Stratford he was not regarded as a celebrity

of ANY kind?



"We are privileged to assume"--no, we are indeed OBLIGED to assume-

-that such was the case.  He had spent the first twenty-two or

twenty-three years of his life there, and of course knew everybody

and was known by everybody of that day in the town, including the

dogs and the cats and the horses.  He had spent the last five or

six years of his life there, diligently trading in every big and

little thing that had money in it; so we are compelled to assume

that many of the folk there in those said latter days knew him

personally, and the rest by sight and hearsay.  But not as a

CELEBRITY?  Apparently not.  For everybody soon forgot to remember

any contact with him or any incident connected with him.  The

dozens of townspeople, still alive, who had known of him or known

about him in the first twenty-three years of his life were in the

same unremembering condition:  if they knew of any incident

connected with that period of his life they didn't tell about it.

Would they if they had been asked?  It is most likely.  Were they

asked?  It is pretty apparent that they were not.  Why weren't

they?  It is a very plausible guess that nobody there or elsewhere

was interested to know.



For seven years after Shakespeare's death nobody seems to have been

interested in him.  Then the quarto was published, and Ben Jonson

awoke out of his long indifference and sang a song of praise and

put it in the front of the book.  Then silence fell AGAIN.



For sixty years.  Then inquiries into Shakespeare's Stratford life

began to be made, of Stratfordians.  Of Stratfordians who had known

Shakespeare or had seen him?  No.  Then of Stratfordians who had

seen people who had known or seen people who had seen Shakespeare?

No.  Apparently the inquiries were only made of Stratfordians who

were not Stratfordians of Shakespeare's day, but later comers; and

what they had learned had come to them from persons who had not

seen Shakespeare; and what they had learned was not claimed as

FACT, but only as legend--dim and fading and indefinite legend;

legend of the calf-slaughtering rank, and not worth remembering

either as history or fiction.



Has it ever happened before--or since--that a celebrated person who

had spent exactly half of a fairly long life in the village where

he was born and reared, was able to slip out of this world and

leave that village voiceless and gossipless behind him--utterly

voiceless, utterly gossipless?  And permanently so?  I don't

believe it has happened in any case except Shakespeare's.  And

couldn't and wouldn't have happened in his case if he had been

regarded as a celebrity at the time of his death.



When I examine my own case--but let us do that, and see if it will

not be recognizable as exhibiting a condition of things quite

likely to result, most likely to result, indeed substantially SURE

to result in the case of a celebrated person, a benefactor of the

human race.  Like me.



My parents brought me to the village of Hannibal, Missouri, on the

banks of the Mississippi, when I was two and a half years old.  I

entered school at five years of age, and drifted from one school to

another in the village during nine and a half years.  Then my

father died, leaving his family in exceedingly straitened

circumstances; wherefore my book-education came to a standstill

forever, and I became a printer's apprentice, on board and clothes,

and when the clothes failed I got a hymn-book in place of them.

This for summer wear, probably.  I lived in Hannibal fifteen and a

half years, altogether, then ran away, according to the custom of

persons who are intending to become celebrated.  I never lived

there afterward.  Four years later I became a "cub" on a

Mississippi steamboat in the St. Louis and New Orleans trade, and

after a year and a half of hard study and hard work the U. S.

inspectors rigorously examined me through a couple of long sittings

and decided that I knew every inch of the Mississippi--thirteen

hundred miles--in the dark and in the day--as well as a baby knows

the way to its mother's paps day or night.  So they licensed me as

a pilot--knighted me, so to speak--and I rose up clothed with

authority, a responsible servant of the United States government.



Now then.  Shakespeare died young--he was only fifty-two.  He had

lived in his native village twenty-six years, or about that.  He

died celebrated (if you believe everything you read in the books).

Yet when he died nobody there or elsewhere took any notice of it;

and for sixty years afterward no townsman remembered to say

anything about him or about his life in Stratford.  When the

inquirer came at last he got but one fact--no, LEGEND--and got that

one at second hand, from a person who had only heard it as a rumor,

and didn't claim copyright in it as a production of his own.  He

couldn't, very well, for its date antedated his own birth-date.

But necessarily a number of persons were still alive in Stratford

who, in the days of their youth, had seen Shakespeare nearly every

day in the last five years of his life, and they would have been

able to tell that inquirer some first-hand things about him if he

had in those last days been a celebrity and therefore a person of

interest to the villagers.  Why did not the inquirer hunt them up

and interview them?  Wasn't it worth while?  Wasn't the matter of

sufficient consequence?  Had the inquirer an engagement to see a

dog-fight and couldn't spare the time?



It all seems to mean that he never had any literary celebrity,

there or elsewhere, and no considerable repute as actor and

manager.



Now then, I am away along in life--my seventy-third year being

already well behind me--yet SIXTEEN of my Hannibal schoolmates are

still alive to-day, and can tell--and do tell--inquirers dozens and

dozens of incidents of their young lives and mine together; things

that happened to us in the morning of life, in the blossom of our

youth, in the good days, the dear days, "the days when we went

gipsying, a long time ago."  Most of them creditable to me, too.

One child to whom I paid court when she was five years old and I

eight still lives in Hannibal, and she visited me last summer,

traversing the necessary ten or twelve hundred miles of railroad

without damage to her patience or to her old-young vigor.  Another

little lassie to whom I paid attention in Hannibal when she was

nine years old and I the same, is still alive--in London--and hale

and hearty, just as I am.  And on the few surviving steamboats--

those lingering ghosts and remembrancers of great fleets that plied

the big river in the beginning of my water-career--which is exactly

as long ago as the whole invoice of the life-years of Shakespeare

number--there are still findable two or three river-pilots who saw

me do creditable things in those ancient days; and several white-

headed engineers; and several roustabouts and mates; and several

deck-hands who used to heave the lead for me and send up on the

still night air the "six--feet--SCANT!" that made me shudder, and

the "M-a-r-k--twain!" that took the shudder away, and presently the

darling "By the d-e-e-p--four!" that lifted me to heaven for joy.

{1}  They know about me, and can tell.  And so do printers, from

St. Louis to New York; and so do newspaper reporters, from Nevada

to San Francisco.  And so do the police.  If Shakespeare had really

been celebrated, like me, Stratford could have told things about

him; and if my experience goes for anything, they'd have done it.







CHAPTER VII







If I had under my superintendence a controversy appointed to decide

whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare or not, I believe I would

place before the debaters only the one question, WAS SHAKESPEARE

EVER A PRACTICING LAWYER? and leave everything else out.



It is maintained that the man who wrote the plays was not merely

myriad-minded, but also myriad-accomplished:  that he not only knew

some thousands of things about human life in all its shades and

grades, and about the hundred arts and trades and crafts and

professions which men busy themselves in, but that he could TALK

about the men and their grades and trades accurately, making no

mistakes.  Maybe it is so, but have the experts spoken, or is it

only Tom, Dick, and Harry?  Does the exhibit stand upon wide, and

loose, and eloquent generalizing--which is not evidence, and not

proof--or upon details, particulars, statistics, illustrations,

demonstrations?



Experts of unchallengeable authority have testified definitely as

to only one of Shakespeare's multifarious craft-equipments, so far

as my recollections of Shakespeare-Bacon talk abide with me--his

law-equipment.  I do not remember that Wellington or Napoleon ever

examined Shakespeare's battles and sieges and strategies, and then

decided and established for good and all, that they were militarily

flawless; I do not remember that any Nelson, or Drake or Cook ever

examined his seamanship and said it showed profound and accurate

familiarity with that art; I don't remember that any king or prince

or duke has ever testified that Shakespeare was letter-perfect in

his handling of royal court-manners and the talk and manners of

aristocracies; I don't remember that any illustrious Latinist or

Grecian or Frenchman or Spaniard or Italian has proclaimed him a

past-master in those languages; I don't remember--well, I don't

remember that there is TESTIMONY--great testimony--imposing

testimony--unanswerable and unattackable testimony as to any of

Shakespeare's hundred specialties, except one--the law.



Other things change, with time, and the student cannot trace back

with certainty the changes that various trades and their processes

and technicalities have undergone in the long stretch of a century

or two and find out what their processes and technicalities were in

those early days, but with the law it is different:  it is mile-

stoned and documented all the way back, and the master of that

wonderful trade, that complex and intricate trade, that awe-

compelling trade, has competent ways of knowing whether

Shakespeare-law is good law or not; and whether his law-court

procedure is correct or not, and whether his legal shop-talk is the

shop-talk of a veteran practitioner or only a machine-made

counterfeit of it gathered from books and from occasional

loiterings in Westminster.



Richard H. Dana served two years before the mast, and had every

experience that falls to the lot of the sailor before the mast of

our day.  His sailor-talk flows from his pen with the sure touch

and the ease and confidence of a person who has LIVED what he is

talking about, not gathered it from books and random listenings.

Hear him:





Having hove short, cast off the gaskets, and made the bunt of each

sail fast by the jigger, with a man on each yard, at the word the

whole canvas of the ship was loosed, and with the greatest rapidity

possible everything was sheeted home and hoisted up, the anchor

tripped and cat-headed, and the ship under headway.





Again:





The royal yards were all crossed at once, and royals and sky-sails

set, and, as we had the wind free, the booms were run out, and all

were aloft, active as cats, laying out on the yards and booms,

reeving the studding-sail gear; and sail after sail the captain

piled upon her, until she was covered with canvas, her sails

looking like a great white cloud resting upon a black speck.





Once more.  A race in the Pacific:





Our antagonist was in her best trim.  Being clear of the point, the

breeze became stiff, and the royal-masts bent under our sails, but

we would not take them in until we saw three boys spring into the

rigging of the California; then they were all furled at once, but

with orders to our boys to stay aloft at the top-gallant mast-heads

and loose them again at the word.  It was my duty to furl the fore-

royal; and while standing by to loose it again, I had a fine view

of the scene.  From where I stood, the two vessels seemed nothing

but spars and sails, while their narrow decks, far below, slanting

over by the force of the wind aloft, appeared hardly capable of

supporting the great fabrics raised upon them.  The California was

to windward of us, and had every advantage; yet, while the breeze

was stiff we held our own.  As soon as it began to slacken she

ranged a little ahead, and the order was given to loose the royals.

In an instant the gaskets were off and the bunt dropped.  "Sheet

home the fore-royal!"--"Weather sheet's home!"--"Lee sheet's

home!"--"Hoist away, sir!" is bawled from aloft.  "Overhaul your

clewlines!" shouts the mate.  "Aye-aye, sir, all clear!"--"Taut

leech! belay!  Well the lee brace; haul taut to windward!" and the

royals are set.





What would the captain of any sailing-vessel of our time say to

that?  He would say, "The man that wrote that didn't learn his

trade out of a book, he has BEEN there!"  But would this same

captain be competent to sit in judgment upon Shakespeare's

seamanship--considering the changes in ships and ship-talk that

have necessarily taken place, unrecorded, unremembered, and lost to

history in the last three hundred years?  It is my conviction that

Shakespeare's sailor-talk would be Choctaw to him.  For instance--

from The Tempest:





Master.  Boatswain!



Boatswain.  Here, master; what cheer?



Master.  Good, speak to the mariners:  fall to't, yarely, or we run

ourselves to ground; bestir, bestir!



(Enter mariners.)



Boatswain.  Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare,

yare!  Take in the topsail.  Tend to the master's whistle . . .

Down with the topmast! yare! lower, lower!  Bring her to try wi'

the main course . . . Lay her a-hold, a-hold!  Set her two courses.

Off to sea again; lay her off.





That will do, for the present; let us yare a little, now, for a

change.



If a man should write a book and in it make one of his characters

say, "Here, devil, empty the quoins into the standing galley and

the imposing stone into the hell-box; assemble the comps around the

frisket and let them jeff for takes and be quick about it," I

should recognize a mistake or two in the phrasing, and would know

that the writer was only a printer theoretically, not practically.



I have been a quartz miner in the silver regions--a pretty hard

life; I know all the palaver of that business:  I know all about

discovery claims and the subordinate claims; I know all about

lodes, ledges, outcroppings, dips, spurs, angles, shafts, drifts,

inclines, levels, tunnels, air-shafts, "horses," clay casings,

granite casings; quartz mills and their batteries; arastras, and

how to charge them with quicksilver and sulphate of copper; and how

to clean them up, and how to reduce the resulting amalgam in the

retorts, and how to cast the bullion into pigs; and finally I know

how to screen tailings, and also how to hunt for something less

robust to do, and find it.  I know the argot of the quartz-mining

and milling industry familiarly; and so whenever Bret Harte

introduces that industry into a story, the first time one of his

miners opens his mouth I recognize from his phrasing that Harte got

the phrasing by listening--like Shakespeare--I mean the Stratford

one--not by experience.  No one can talk the quartz dialect

correctly without learning it with pick and shovel and drill and

fuse.



I have been a surface-miner--gold--and I know all its mysteries,

and the dialect that belongs with them; and whenever Harte

introduces that industry into a story I know by the phrasing of his

characters that neither he nor they have ever served that trade.



I have been a "pocket" miner--a sort of gold mining not findable in

any but one little spot in the world, so far as I know.  I know

how, with horn and water, to find the trail of a pocket and trace

it step by step and stage by stage up the mountain to its source,

and find the compact little nest of yellow metal reposing in its

secret home under the ground.  I know the language of that trade,

that capricious trade, that fascinating buried-treasure trade, and

can catch any writer who tries to use it without having learned it

by the sweat of his brow and the labor of his hands.



I know several other trades and the argot that goes with them; and

whenever a person tries to talk the talk peculiar to any of them

without having learned it at its source I can trap him always

before he gets far on his road.



And so, as I have already remarked, if I were required to

superintend a Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, I would narrow the

matter down to a single question--the only one, so far as the

previous controversies have informed me, concerning which

illustrious experts of unimpeachable competency have testified:

WAS THE AUTHOR OF SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS A LAWYER?--a lawyer deeply

read and of limitless experience?  I would put aside the guesses,

and surmises, and perhapses, and might-have-beens, and could-have

beens, and must-have-beens, and we-are justified-in-presumings, and

the rest of those vague spectres and shadows and indefinitenesses,

and stand or fall, win or lose, by the verdict rendered by the jury

upon that single question.  If the verdict was Yes, I should feel

quite convinced that the Stratford Shakespeare, the actor, manager,

and trader who died so obscure, so forgotten, so destitute of even

village consequence that sixty years afterward no fellow-citizen

and friend of his later days remembered to tell anything about him,

did not write the Works.



Chapter XIII of The Shakespeare Problem Restated bears the heading

"Shakespeare as a Lawyer," and comprises some fifty pages of expert

testimony, with comments thereon, and I will copy the first nine,

as being sufficient all by themselves, as it seems to me, to settle

the question which I have conceived to be the master-key to the

Shakespeare-Bacon puzzle.







CHAPTER VIII







Shakespeare as a Lawyer {2}



The Plays and Poems of Shakespeare supply ample evidence that their

author not only had a very extensive and accurate knowledge of law,

but that he was well acquainted with the manners and customs of

members of the Inns of Court and with legal life generally.



"While novelists and dramatists are constantly making mistakes as

to the laws of marriage, of wills, and inheritance, to

Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he expounds it, there can neither be

demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error."  Such was the

testimony borne by one of the most distinguished lawyers of the

nineteenth century who was raised to the high office of Lord Chief

Justice in 1850, and subsequently became Lord Chancellor.  Its

weight will, doubtless, be more appreciated by lawyers than by

laymen, for only lawyers know how impossible it is for those who

have not served an apprenticeship to the law to avoid displaying

their ignorance if they venture to employ legal terms and to

discuss legal doctrines.  "There is nothing so dangerous," wrote

Lord Campbell, "as for one not of the craft to tamper with our

freemasonry."  A layman is certain to betray himself by using some

expression which a lawyer would never employ.  Mr. Sidney Lee

himself supplies us with an example of this.  He writes (p. 164):

"On February 15, 1609, Shakespeare . . . obtained judgment from a

jury against Addenbroke for the payment of No. 6, and No. 1. 5s.

0d. costs."  Now a lawyer would never have spoken of obtaining

"judgment from a jury," for it is the function of a jury not to

deliver judgment (which is the prerogative of the court), but to

find a verdict on the facts.  The error is, indeed, a venial one,

but it is just one of those little things which at once enable a

lawyer to know if the writer is a layman or "one of the craft."



But when a layman ventures to plunge deeply into legal subjects, he

is naturally apt to make an exhibition of his incompetence.  "Let a

non-professional man, however acute," writes Lord Campbell again,

"presume to talk law, or to draw illustrations from legal science

in discussing other subjects, and he will speedily fall into

laughable absurdity."



And what does the same high authority say about Shakespeare?  He

had "a deep technical knowledge of the law," and an easy

familiarity with "some of the most abstruse proceedings in English

jurisprudence."  And again:  "Whenever he indulges this propensity

he uniformly lays down good law."  Of Henry IV., Part 2, he says:

"If Lord Eldon could be supposed to have written the play, I do not

see how he could be chargeable with having forgotten any of his law

while writing it."  Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke speak of "the

marvelous intimacy which he displays with legal terms, his frequent

adoption of them in illustration, and his curiously technical

knowledge of their form and force."  Malone, himself a lawyer,

wrote:  "His knowledge of legal terms is not merely such as might

be acquired by the casual observation of even his all-comprehending

mind; it has the appearance of technical skill."  Another lawyer

and well-known Shakespearean, Richard Grant White, says:  "No

dramatist of the time, not even Beaumont, who was the younger son

of a judge of the Common Pleas, and who after studying in the Inns

of Court abandoned law for the drama, used legal phrases with

Shakespeare's readiness and exactness.  And the significance of

this fact is heightened by another, that it is only to the language

of the law that he exhibits this inclination.  The phrases peculiar

to other occupations serve him on rare occasions by way of

description, comparison or illustration, generally when something

in the scene suggests them, but legal phrases flow from his pen as

part of his vocabulary, and parcel of his thought.  Take the word

'purchase' for instance, which, in ordinary use, means to acquire

by giving value, but applies in law to all legal modes of obtaining

property except by inheritance or descent, and in this peculiar

sense the word occurs five times in Shakespeare's thirty-four

plays, and only in one single instance in the fifty-four plays of

Beaumont and Fletcher.  It has been suggested that it was in

attendance upon the courts in London that he picked up his legal

vocabulary.  But this supposition not only fails to account for

Shakespeare's peculiar freedom and exactness in the use of that

phraseology, it does not even place him in the way of learning

those terms his use of which is most remarkable, which are not such

as he would have heard at ordinary proceedings at nisi prius, but

such as refer to the tenure or transfer of real property, 'fine and

recovery,' 'statutes merchant,' 'purchase,' 'indenture,' 'tenure,'

'double voucher,' 'fee simple,' 'fee farm,' 'remainder,'

'reversion,' 'forfeiture,' etc.  This conveyancer's jargon could

not have been picked up by hanging round the courts of law in

London two hundred and fifty years ago, when suits as to the title

of real property were comparatively rare.  And beside, Shakespeare

uses his law just as freely in his first plays, written in his

first London years, as in those produced at a later period.  Just

as exactly, too; for the correctness and propriety with which these

terms are introduced have compelled the admiration of a Chief

Justice and a Lord Chancellor."



Senator Davis wrote:  "We seem to have something more than a

sciolist's temerity of indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar

art.  No legal solecisms will be found.  The abstrusest elements of

the common law are impressed into a disciplined service.  Over and

over again, where such knowledge is unexampled in writers unlearned

in the law, Shakespeare appears in perfect possession of it.  In

the law of real property, its rules of tenure and descents, its

entails, its fines and recoveries, their vouchers and double

vouchers, in the procedure of the Courts, the method of bringing

writs and arrests, the nature of actions, the rules of pleading,

the law of escapes and of contempt of court, in the principles of

evidence, both technical and philosophical, in the distinction

between the temporal and spiritual tribunals, in the law of

attainder and forfeiture, in the requisites of a valid marriage, in

the presumption of legitimacy, in the learning of the law of

prerogative, in the inalienable character of the Crown, this

mastership appears with surprising authority."



To all this testimony (and there is much more which I have not

cited) may now be added that of a great lawyer of our own times,

viz.:  Sir James Plaisted Wilde, Q.C. created a Baron of the

Exchequer in 1860, promoted to the post of Judge-Ordinary and Judge

of the Courts of Probate and Divorce in 1863, and better known to

the world as Lord Penzance, to which dignity he was raised in 1869.

Lord Penzance, as all lawyers know, and as the late Mr. Inderwick,

K.C., has testified, was one of the first legal authorities of his

day, famous for his "remarkable grasp of legal principles," and

"endowed by nature with a remarkable facility for marshalling

facts, and for a clear expression of his views."



Lord Penzance speaks of Shakespeare's "perfect familiarity with not

only the principles, axioms, and maxims, but the technicalities of

English law, a knowledge so perfect and intimate that he was never

incorrect and never at fault . . . The mode in which this knowledge

was pressed into service on all occasions to express his meaning

and illustrate his thoughts, was quite unexampled.  He seems to

have had a special pleasure in his complete and ready mastership of

it in all its branches.  As manifested in the plays, this legal

knowledge and learning had therefore a special character which

places it on a wholly different footing from the rest of the

multifarious knowledge which is exhibited in page after page of the

plays.  At every turn and point at which the author required a

metaphor, simile, or illustration, his mind ever turned FIRST to

the law.  He seems almost to have THOUGHT in legal phrases, the

commonest of legal expressions were ever at the end of his pen in

description or illustration.  That he should have descanted in

lawyer language when he had a forensic subject in hand, such as

Shylock's bond, was to be expected, but the knowledge of law in

'Shakespeare' was exhibited in a far different manner:  it

protruded itself on all occasions, appropriate or inappropriate,

and mingled itself with strains of thought widely divergent from

forensic subjects."  Again:  "To acquire a perfect familiarity with

legal principles, and an accurate and ready use of the technical

terms and phrases not only of the conveyancer's office but of the

pleader's chambers and the Courts at Westminster, nothing short of

employment in some career involving constant contact with legal

questions and general legal work would be requisite.  But a

continuous employment involves the element of time, and time was

just what the manager of two theatres had not at his disposal.  In

what portion of Shakespeare's (i.e. Shakspere's) career would it be

possible to point out that time could be found for the

interposition of a legal employment in the chambers or offices of

practising lawyers?"



Stratfordians, as is well known, casting about for some possible

explanation of Shakespeare's extraordinary knowledge of law, have

made the suggestion that Shakespeare might, conceivably, have been

a clerk in an attorney's office before he came to London.  Mr.

Collier wrote to Lord Campbell to ask his opinion as to the

probability of this being true.  His answer was as follows:  "You

require us to believe implicitly a fact, of which, if true,

positive and irrefragable evidence in his own handwriting might

have been forthcoming to establish it.  Not having been actually

enrolled as an attorney, neither the records of the local court at

Stratford nor of the superior Courts at Westminster would present

his name as being concerned in any suit as an attorney, but it

might reasonably have been expected that there would be deeds or

wills witnessed by him still extant, and after a very diligent

search none such can be discovered."



Upon this Lord Penzance comments:  "It cannot be doubted that Lord

Campbell was right in this.  No young man could have been at work

in an attorney's office without being called upon continually to

act as a witness, and in many other ways leaving traces of his work

and name."  There is not a single fact or incident in all that is

known of Shakespeare, even by rumor or tradition, which supports

this notion of a clerkship.  And after much argument and surmise

which has been indulged in on this subject, we may, I think, safely

put the notion on one side, for no less an authority than Mr. Grant

White says finally that the idea of his having been clerk to an

attorney has been "blown to pieces."



It is altogether characteristic of Mr. Churton Collins that he,

nevertheless, adopts this exploded myth.  "That Shakespeare was in

early life employed as a clerk in an attorney's office, may be

correct.  At Stratford there was by royal charter a Court of Record

sitting every fortnight, with six attorneys, beside the town clerk,

belonging to it, and it is certainly not straining probability to

suppose that the young Shakespeare may have had employment in one

of them.  There is, it is true, no tradition to this effect, but

such traditions as we have about Shakespeare's occupation between

the time of leaving school and going to London are so loose and

baseless that no confidence can be placed in them.  It is, to say

the least, more probable that he was in an attorney's office than

that he was a butcher killing calves 'in a high style,' and making

speeches over them."



This is a charming specimen of Stratfordian argument.  There is, as

we have seen, a very old tradition that Shakespeare was a butcher's

apprentice.  John Dowdall, who made a tour in Warwickshire in 1693,

testifies to it as coming from the old clerk who showed him over

the church, and it is unhesitatingly accepted as true by Mr.

Halliwell-Phillipps.  (Vol I, p. 11, and see Vol. II, p. 71, 72.)

Mr. Sidney Lee sees nothing improbable in it, and it is supported

by Aubrey, who must have written his account some time before 1680,

when his manuscript was completed.  Of the attorney's clerk

hypothesis, on the other hand, there is not the faintest vestige of

a tradition.  It has been evolved out of the fertile imaginations

of embarrassed Stratfordians, seeking for some explanation of the

Stratford rustic's marvellous acquaintance with law and legal terms

and legal life.  But Mr. Churton Collins has not the least

hesitation in throwing over the tradition which has the warrant of

antiquity and setting up in its stead this ridiculous invention,

for which not only is there no shred of positive evidence, but

which, as Lord Campbell and Lord Penzance point out, is really put

out of court by the negative evidence, since "no young man could

have been at work in an attorney's office without being called upon

continually to act as a witness, and in many other ways leaving

traces of his work and name."  And as Mr. Edwards further points

out, since the day when Lord Campbell's book was published (between

forty and fifty years ago), "every old deed or will, to say nothing

of other legal papers, dated during the period of William

Shakespeare's youth, has been scrutinized over half a dozen shires,

and not one signature of the young man has been found."



Moreover, if Shakespeare had served as clerk in an attorney's

office it is clear that he must have so served for a considerable

period in order to have gained (if indeed it is credible that he

could have so gained) his remarkable knowledge of law.  Can we then

for a moment believe that, if this had been so, tradition would

have been absolutely silent on the matter?  That Dowdall's old

clerk, over eighty years of age, should have never heard of it

(though he was sure enough about the butcher's apprentice), and

that all the other ancient witnesses should be in similar

ignorance!



But such are the methods of Stratfordian controversy.  Tradition is

to be scouted when it is found inconvenient, but cited as

irrefragable truth when it suits the case.  Shakespeare of

Stratford was the author of the Plays and Poems, but the author of

the Plays and Poems could not have been a butcher's apprentice.

Away, therefore, with tradition.  But the author of the Plays and

Poems must have had a very large and a very accurate knowledge of

the law.  Therefore, Shakespeare of Stratford must have been an

attorney's clerk!  The method is simplicity itself.  By similar

reasoning Shakespeare has been made a country schoolmaster, a

soldier, a physician, a printer, and a good many other things

beside, according to the inclination and the exigencies of the

commentator.  It would not be in the least surprising to find that

he was studying Latin as a schoolmaster and law in an attorney's

office at the same time.



However, we must do Mr. Collins the justice of saying that he has

fully recognized, what is indeed tolerably obvious, that

Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training.  "It may, of

course, be urged," he writes, "that Shakespeare's knowledge of

medicine, and particularly that branch of it which related to

morbid psychology, is equally remarkable, and that no one has ever

contended that he was a physician.  (Here Mr. Collins is wrong;

that contention also has been put forward.)  It may be urged that

his acquaintance with the technicalities of other crafts and

callings, notably of marine and military affairs, was also

extraordinary, and yet no one has suspected him of being a sailor

or a soldier.  (Wrong again.  Why even Messrs. Garnett and Gosse

'suspect' that he was a soldier!)  This may be conceded, but the

concession hardly furnishes an analogy.  To these and all other

subjects he recurs occasionally, and in season, but with

reminiscences of the law his memory, as is abundantly clear, was

simply saturated.  In season and out of season now in manifest, now

in recondite application, he presses it into the service of

expression and illustration.  At least a third of his myriad

metaphors are derived from it.  It would indeed be difficult to

find a single act in any of his dramas, nay, in some of them, a

single scene, the diction and imagery of which is not colored by

it.  Much of his law may have been acquired from three books easily

accessible to him, namely Tottell's Precedents (1572), Pulton's

Statutes (1578), and Fraunce's Lawier's Logike (1588), works with

which he certainly seems to have been familiar; but much of it

could only have come from one who had an intimate acquaintance with

legal proceedings.  We quite agree with Mr. Castle that

Shakespeare's legal knowledge is not what could have been picked up

in an attorney's office, but could only have been learned by an

actual attendance at the Courts, at a Pleader's Chambers, and on

circuit, or by associating intimately with members of the Bench and

Bar."



This is excellent.  But what is Mr. Collins' explanation.  "Perhaps

the simplest solution of the problem is to accept the hypothesis

that in early life he was in an attorney's office (!), that he

there contracted a love for the law which never left him, that as a

young man in London, he continued to study or dabble in it for his

amusement, to stroll in leisure hours into the Courts, and to

frequent the society of lawyers.  On no other supposition is it

possible to explain the attraction which the law evidently had for

him, and his minute and undeviating accuracy in a subject where no

layman who has indulged in such copious and ostentatious display of

legal technicalities has ever yet succeeded in keeping himself from

tripping."



A lame conclusion.  "No other supposition" indeed!  Yes, there is

another, and a very obvious supposition, namely, that Shakespeare

was himself a lawyer, well versed in his trade, versed in all the

ways of the courts, and living in close intimacy with judges and

members of the Inns of Court.



One is, of course, thankful that Mr. Collins has appreciated the

fact that Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training, but I

may be forgiven if I do not attach quite so much importance to his

pronouncements on this branch of the subject as to those of Malone,

Lord Campbell, Judge Holmes, Mr. Castle, K.C., Lord Penzance, Mr.

Grant White, and other lawyers, who have expressed their opinion on

the matter of Shakespeare's legal acquirements.



Here it may, perhaps, be worth while to quote again from Lord

Penzance's book as to the suggestion that Shakespeare had somehow

or other managed "to acquire a perfect familiarity with legal

principles, and an accurate and ready use of the technical terms

and phrases, not only of the conveyancer's office, but of the

pleader's chambers and the courts at Westminster."  This, as Lord

Penzance points out, "would require nothing short of employment in

some career involving CONSTANT CONTACT with legal questions and

general legal work."  But "in what portion of Shakespeare's career

would it be possible to point out that time could be found for the

interposition of a legal employment in the chambers or offices of

practising lawyers? . . . It is beyond doubt that at an early

period he was called upon to abandon his attendance at school and

assist his father, and was soon after, at the age of sixteen, bound

apprentice to a trade.  While under the obligation of this bond he

could not have pursued any other employment.  Then he leaves

Stratford and comes to London.  He has to provide himself with the

means of a livelihood, and this he did in some capacity at the

theatre.  No one doubts that.  The holding of horses is scouted by

many, and perhaps with justice, as being unlikely and certainly

unproved; but whatever the nature of his employment was at the

theatre, there is hardly room for the belief that it could have

been other than continuous, for his progress there was so rapid.

Ere long he had been taken into the company as an actor, and was

soon spoken of as a 'Johannes Factotum.'  His rapid accumulation of

wealth speaks volumes for the constancy and activity of his

services.  One fails to see when there could be a break in the

current of his life at this period of it, giving room or

opportunity for legal or indeed any other employment.  'In 1589,'

says Knight, 'we have undeniable evidence that he had not only a

casual engagement, was not only a salaried servant, as many players

were, but was a shareholder in the company of the Queen's players

with other shareholders below him on the list.'  This (1589) would

be within two years after his arrival in London, which is placed by

White and Halliwell-Phillipps about the year 1587.  The difficulty

in supposing that, starting with a state of ignorance in 1587, when

he is supposed to have come to London, he was induced to enter upon

a course of most extended study and mental culture, is almost

insuperable.  Still it was physically possible, provided always

that he could have had access to the needful books.  But this legal

training seems to me to stand on a different footing.  It is not

only unaccountable and incredible, but it is actually negatived by

the known facts of his career."  Lord Penzance then refers to the

fact that "by 1592 (according to the best authority, Mr. Grant

White) several of the plays had been written.  The Comedy of Errors

in 1589, Love's Labour's Lost in 1589, Two Gentlemen of Verona in

1589 or 1590, and so forth, and then asks, "with this catalogue of

dramatic work on hand . . . was it possible that he could have

taken a leading part in the management and conduct of two theatres,

and if Mr. Phillipps is to be relied upon, taken his share in the

performances of the provincial tours of his company--and at the

same time devoted himself to the study of the law in all its

branches so efficiently as to make himself complete master of its

principles and practice, and saturate his mind with all its most

technical terms?"



I have cited this passage from Lord Penzance's book, because it lay

before me, and I had already quoted from it on the matter of

Shakespeare's legal knowledge; but other writers have still better

set forth the insuperable difficulties, as they seem to me, which

beset the idea that Shakespeare might have found time in some

unknown period of early life, amid multifarious other occupations,

for the study of classics, literature and law, to say nothing of

languages and a few other matters.  Lord Penzance further asks his

readers:  "Did you ever meet with or hear of an instance in which a

young man in this country gave himself up to legal studies and

engaged in legal employments, which is the only way of becoming

familiar with the technicalities of practice, unless with the view

of practicing in that profession?  I do not believe that it would

be easy, or indeed possible, to produce an instance in which the

law has been seriously studied in all its branches, except as a

qualification for practice in the legal profession."





This testimony is so strong, so direct, so authoritative; and so

uncheapened, unwatered by guesses, and surmises, and maybe-so's,

and might-have-beens, and could-have-beens, and must-have-beens,

and the rest of that ton of plaster of paris out of which the

biographers have built the colossal brontosaur which goes by the

Stratford actor's name, that it quite convinces me that the man who

wrote Shakespeare's Works knew all about law and lawyers.  Also,

that that man could not have been the Stratford Shakespeare--and

WASN'T.



Who did write these Works, then?



I wish I knew.







CHAPTER IX







Did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare's Works?



Nobody knows.



We cannot say we KNOW a thing when that thing has not been proved.

KNOW is too strong a word to use when the evidence is not final and

absolutely conclusive.  We can infer, if we want to, like those

slaves . . . No, I will not write that word, it is not kind, it is

not courteous.  The upholders of the Stratford-Shakespeare

superstition call US the hardest names they can think of, and they

keep doing it all the time; very well, if they like to descend to

that level, let them do it, but I will not so undignify myself as

to follow them.  I cannot call them harsh names; the most I can do

is to indicate them by terms reflecting my disapproval; and this

without malice, without venom.



To resume.  What I was about to say, was, those thugs have built

their entire superstition upon INFERENCES, not upon known and

established facts.  It is a weak method, and poor, and I am glad to

be able to say our side never resorts to it while there is anything

else to resort to.



But when we must, we must; and we have now arrived at a place of

that sort.



Since the Stratford Shakespeare couldn't have written the Works, we

infer that somebody did.  Who was it, then?  This requires some

more inferring.



Ordinarily when an unsigned poem sweeps across the continent like a

tidal wave, whose roar and boom and thunder are made up of

admiration, delight and applause, a dozen obscure people rise up

and claim the authorship.  Why a dozen, instead of only one or two?

One reason is, because there's a dozen that are recognizably

competent to do that poem.  Do you remember "Beautiful Snow"?  Do

you remember "Rock Me to Sleep, Mother, Rock Me to Sleep"?  Do you

remember "Backward, turn backward, O Time, in thy flight!  Make me

a child again just for to-night"?  I remember them very well.

Their authorship was claimed by most of the grown-up people who

were alive at the time, and every claimant had one plausible

argument in his favor, at least:  to wit, he could have done the

authoring; he was competent.



Have the Works been claimed by a dozen?  They haven't.  There was

good reason.  The world knows there was but one man on the planet

at the time who was competent--not a dozen, and not two.  A long

time ago the dwellers in a far country used now and then to find a

procession of prodigious footprints stretching across the plain--

footprints that were three miles apart, each footprint a third of a

mile long and a furlong deep, and with forests and villages mashed

to mush in it.  Was there any doubt as to who had made that mighty

trail?  Were there a dozen claimants?  Were there two?  No--the

people knew who it was that had been along there:  there was only

one Hercules.



There has been only one Shakespeare.  There couldn't be two;

certainly there couldn't be two at the same time.  It takes ages to

bring forth a Shakespeare, and some more ages to match him.  This

one was not matched before his time; nor during his time; and

hasn't been matched since.  The prospect of matching him in our

time is not bright.



The Baconians claim that the Stratford Shakespeare was not

qualified to write the Works, and that Francis Bacon was.  They

claim that Bacon possessed the stupendous equipment--both natural

and acquired--for the miracle; and that no other Englishman of his

day possessed the like; or, indeed, anything closely approaching

it.



Macaulay, in his Essay, has much to say about the splendor and

horizonless magnitude of that equipment.  Also, he has synopsized

Bacon's history:  a thing which cannot be done for the Stratford

Shakespeare, for he hasn't any history to synopsize.  Bacon's

history is open to the world, from his boyhood to his death in old

age--a history consisting of known facts, displayed in minute and

multitudinous detail; FACTS, not guesses and conjectures and might-

have-beens.



Whereby it appears that he was born of a race of statesmen, and had

a Lord Chancellor for his father, and a mother who was

"distinguished both as a linguist and a theologian:  she

corresponded in Greek with Bishop Jewell, and translated his

Apologia from the Latin so correctly that neither he nor Archbishop

Parker could suggest a single alteration."  It is the atmosphere we

are reared in that determines how our inclinations and aspirations

shall tend.  The atmosphere furnished by the parents to the son in

this present case was an atmosphere saturated with learning; with

thinkings and ponderings upon deep subjects; and with polite

culture.  It had its natural effect.  Shakespeare of Stratford was

reared in a house which had no use for books, since its owners, his

parents, were without education.  This may have had an effect upon

the son, but we do not know, because we have no history of him of

an informing sort.  There were but few books anywhere, in that day,

and only the well-to-do and highly educated possessed them, they

being almost confined to the dead languages.  "All the valuable

books then extant in all the vernacular dialects of Europe would

hardly have filled a single shelf"--imagine it!  The few existing

books were in the Latin tongue mainly.  "A person who was ignorant

of it was shut out from all acquaintance--not merely with Cicero

and Virgil, but with the most interesting memoirs, state papers,

and pamphlets of his own time"--a literature necessary to the

Stratford lad, for his fictitious reputation's sake, since the

writer of his Works would begin to use it wholesale and in a most

masterly way before the lad was hardly more than out of his teens

and into his twenties.



At fifteen Bacon was sent to the university, and he spent three

years there.  Thence he went to Paris in the train of the English

Ambassador, and there he mingled daily with the wise, the cultured,

the great, and the aristocracy of fashion, during another three

years.  A total of six years spent at the sources of knowledge;

knowledge both of books and of men.  The three spent at the

university were coeval with the second and last three spent by the

little Stratford lad at Stratford school supposedly, and

perhapsedly, and maybe, and by inference--with nothing to infer

from.  The second three of the Baconian six were "presumably" spent

by the Stratford lad as apprentice to a butcher.  That is, the

thugs presume it--on no evidence of any kind.  Which is their way,

when they want a historical fact.  Fact and presumption are, for

business purposes, all the same to them.  They know the difference,

but they also know how to blink it.  They know, too, that while in

history-building a fact is better than a presumption, it doesn't

take a presumption long to bloom into a fact when THEY have the

handling of it.  They know by old experience that when they get

hold of a presumption-tadpole he is not going to STAY tadpole in

their history-tank; no, they know how to develop him into the giant

four-legged bullfrog of FACT, and make him sit up on his hams, and

puff out his chin, and look important and insolent and come-to-

stay; and assert his genuine simon-pure authenticity with a

thundering bellow that will convince everybody because it is so

loud.  The thug is aware that loudness convinces sixty persons

where reasoning convinces but one.  I wouldn't be a thug, not even

if--but never mind about that, it has nothing to do with the

argument, and it is not noble in spirit besides.  If I am better

than a thug, is the merit mine?  No, it is His.  Then to Him be the

praise.  That is the right spirit.



They "presume" the lad severed his "presumed" connection with the

Stratford school to become apprentice to a butcher.  They also

"presume" that the butcher was his father.  They don't know.  There

is no written record of it, nor any other actual evidence.  If it

would have helped their case any, they would have apprenticed him

to thirty butchers, to fifty butchers, to a wilderness of butchers-

-all by their patented method "presumption."  If it will help their

case they will do it yet; and if it will further help it, they will

"presume" that all those butchers were his father.  And the week

after, they will SAY it.  Why, it is just like being the past tense

of the compound reflexive adverbial incandescent hypodermic

irregular accusative Noun of Multitude; which is father to the

expression which the grammarians call Verb.  It is like a whole

ancestry, with only one posterity.



To resume.  Next, the young Bacon took up the study of law, and

mastered that abstruse science.  From that day to the end of his

life he was daily in close contact with lawyers and judges; not as

a casual onlooker in intervals between holding horses in front of a

theatre, but as a practicing lawyer--a great and successful one, a

renowned one, a Launcelot of the bar, the most formidable lance in

the high brotherhood of the legal Table Round; he lived in the

law's atmosphere thenceforth, all his years, and by sheer ability

forced his way up its difficult steeps to its supremest summit, the

Lord Chancellorship, leaving behind him no fellow craftsman

qualified to challenge his divine right to that majestic place.



When we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance and the other

illustrious experts upon the legal condition and legal aptnesses,

brilliances, profundities and felicities so prodigally displayed in

the Plays, and try to fit them to the history-less Stratford stage-

manager, they sound wild, strange, incredible, ludicrous; but when

we put them in the mouth of Bacon they do not sound strange, they

seem in their natural and rightful place, they seem at home there.

Please turn back and read them again.  Attributed to Shakespeare of

Stratford they are meaningless, they are inebriate extravagancies--

intemperate admirations of the dark side of the moon, so to speak;

attributed to Bacon, they are admirations of the golden glories of

the moon's front side, the moon at the full--and not intemperate,

not overwrought, but sane and right, and justified.  "At every turn

and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile or

illustration, his mind ever turned FIRST to the law; he seems

almost to have THOUGHT in legal phrases; the commonest legal

phrases, the commonest of legal expressions were ever at the end of

his pen."  That could happen to no one but a person whose TRADE was

the law; it could not happen to a dabbler in it.  Veteran mariners

fill their conversation with sailor-phrases and draw all their

similes from the ship and the sea and the storm, but no mere

PASSENGER ever does it, be he of Stratford or elsewhere; or could

do it with anything resembling accuracy, if he were hardy enough to

try.  Please read again what Lord Campbell and the other great

authorities have said about Bacon when they thought they were

saying it about Shakespeare of Stratford.







CHAPTER X







The Rest of the Equipment



The author of the Plays was equipped, beyond every other man of his

time, with wisdom, erudition, imagination, capaciousness of mind,

grace and majesty of expression.  Every one has said it, no one

doubts it.  Also, he had humor, humor in rich abundance, and always

wanting to break out.  We have no evidence of any kind that

Shakespeare of Stratford possessed any of these gifts or any of

these acquirements.  The only lines he ever wrote, so far as we

know, are substantially barren of them--barren of all of them.





Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones

And curst be he yt moves my bones.





Ben Jonson says of Bacon, as orator:





His language, WHERE HE COULD SPARE AND PASS BY A JEST, was nobly

censorious.  No man ever spoke more neatly, more pressly, more

weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he

uttered.  No member of his speech but consisted of his (its) own

graces . . . The fear of every man that heard him was lest he

should make an end.





From Macaulay:





He continued to distinguish himself in Parliament, particularly by

his exertions in favor of one excellent measure on which the King's

heart was set--the union of England and Scotland.  It was not

difficult for such an intellect to discover many irresistible

arguments in favor of such a scheme.  He conducted the great case

of the Post Nati in the Exchequer Chamber; and the decision of the

judges--a decision the legality of which may be questioned, but the

beneficial effect of which must be acknowledged--was in a great

measure attributed to his dexterous management.





Again:





While actively engaged in the House of Commons and in the courts of

law, he still found leisure for letters and philosophy.  The noble

treatise on the Advancement of Learning, which at a later period

was expanded into the De Augmentis, appeared in 1605



The Wisdom of the Ancients, a work which if it had proceeded from

any other writer would have been considered as a masterpiece of wit

and learning, was printed in 1609.



In the meantime the Novum Organum was slowly proceeding.  Several

distinguished men of learning had been permitted to see portions of

that extraordinary book, and they spoke with the greatest

admiration of his genius.



Even Sir Thomas Bodley, after perusing the Cogitata et Visa, one of

the most precious of those scattered leaves out of which the great

oracular volume was afterward made up, acknowledged that "in all

proposals and plots in that book, Bacon showed himself a master

workman"; and that "it could not be gainsaid but all the treatise

over did abound with choice conceits of the present state of

learning, and with worthy contemplations of the means to procure

it."



In 1612 a new edition of the Essays appeared, with additions

surpassing the original collection both in bulk and quality.



Nor did these pursuits distract Bacon's attention from a work the

most arduous, the most glorious, and the most useful that even his

mighty powers could have achieved, "the reducing and recompiling,"

to use his own phrase, "of the laws of England."



To serve the exacting and laborious offices of Attorney General and

Solicitor General would have satisfied the appetite of any other

man for hard work, but Bacon had to add the vast literary

industries just described, to satisfy his.  He was a born worker.





The service which he rendered to letters during the last five years

of his life, amid ten thousand distractions and vexations, increase

the regret with which we think on the many years which he had

wasted, to use the words of Sir Thomas Bodley, "on such study as

was not worthy such a student."



He commenced a digest of the laws of England, a History of England

under the Princes of the House of Tudor, a body of National

History, a Philosophical Romance.  He made extensive and valuable

additions to his Essays.  He published the inestimable Treatise De

Argumentis Scientiarum.





Did these labors of Hercules fill up his time to his contentment,

and quiet his appetite for work?  Not entirely:





The trifles with which he amused himself in hours of pain and

languor bore the mark of his mind.  THE BEST JESTBOOK IN THE WORLD

is that which he dictated from memory, without referring to any

book, on a day on which illness had rendered him incapable of

serious study.





Here are some scattered remarks (from Macaulay) which throw light

upon Bacon, and seem to indicate--and maybe demonstrate--that he

was competent to write the Plays and Poems:





With great minuteness of observation he had an amplitude of

comprehension such as has never yet been vouchsafed to any other

human being.



The "Essays" contain abundant proofs that no nice feature of

character, no peculiarity in the ordering of a house, a garden or a

court-masque, could escape the notice of one whose mind was capable

of taking in the whole world of knowledge.





His understanding resembled the tent which the fairy Paribanou gave

to Prince Ahmed:  fold it, and it seemed a toy for the hand of a

lady; spread it, and the armies of powerful Sultans might repose

beneath its shade.





The knowledge in which Bacon excelled all men was a knowledge of

the mutual relations of all departments of knowledge.





In a letter written when he was only thirty-one, to his uncle, Lord

Burleigh, he said, "I have taken all knowledge to be my province."





Though Bacon did not arm his philosophy with the weapons of logic,

he adorned her profusely with all the richest decorations of

rhetoric.





The practical faculty was powerful in Bacon; but not, like his wit,

so powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his reason, and

to tyrannize over the whole man.





There are too many places in the Plays where this happens.  Poor

old dying John of Gaunt volleying second-rate puns at his own name,

is a pathetic instance of it.  "We may assume" that it is Bacon's

fault, but the Stratford Shakespeare has to bear the blame.



No imagination was ever at once so strong and so thoroughly

subjugated.  It stopped at the first check from good sense.





In truth much of Bacon's life was passed in a visionary world--amid

things as strange as any that are described in the "Arabian Tales"

. . . amid buildings more sumptuous than the palace of Aladdin,

fountains more wonderful than the golden water of Parizade,

conveyances more rapid than the hippogryph of Ruggiero, arms more

formidable than the lance of Astolfo, remedies more efficacious

than the balsam of Fierabras.  Yet in his magnificent day-dreams

there was nothing wild--nothing but what sober reason sanctioned.





Bacon's greatest performance is the first book of the Novum Organum

. . . Every part of it blazes with wit, but with wit which is

employed only to illustrate and decorate truth.  No book ever made

so great a revolution in the mode of thinking, overthrew so many

prejudices, introduced so many new opinions.



But what we most admire is the vast capacity of that intellect

which, without effort, takes in at once all the domains of science-

-all the past, the present and the future, all the errors of two

thousand years, all the encouraging signs of the passing times, all

the bright hopes of the coming age.





He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close and rendering

it portable.





His eloquence would alone have entitled him to a high rank in

literature.





It is evident that he had each and every one of the mental gifts

and each and every one of the acquirements that are so prodigally

displayed in the Plays and Poems, and in much higher and richer

degree than any other man of his time or of any previous time.  He

was a genius without a mate, a prodigy not matable.  There was only

one of him; the planet could not produce two of him at one birth,

nor in one age.  He could have written anything that is in the

Plays and Poems.  He could have written this:





The cloud-cap'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like an insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.





Also, he could have written this, but he refrained:





Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones

And curst be ye yt moves my bones.





When a person reads the noble verses about the cloud-cap'd towers,

he ought not to follow it immediately with Good friend for Iesus

sake forbeare, because he will find the transition from great

poetry to poor prose too violent for comfort.  It will give him a

shock.  You never notice how commonplace and unpoetic gravel is,

until you bite into a layer of it in a pie.







CHAPTER XI







Am I trying to convince anybody that Shakespeare did not write

Shakespeare's Works?  Ah, now, what do you take me for?  Would I be

so soft as that, after having known the human race familiarly for

nearly seventy-four years?  It would grieve me to know that any one

could think so injuriously of me, so uncomplimentarily, so

unadmiringly of me.  No-no, I am aware that when even the brightest

mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a

superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind,

in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and

conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem

to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition.  I doubt if

I could do it myself.  We always get at second hand our notions

about systems of government; and high-tariff and low-tariff; and

prohibition and anti-prohibition; and the holiness of peace and the

glories of war; and codes of honor and codes of morals; and

approval of the duel and disapproval of it; and our beliefs

concerning the nature of cats; and our ideas as to whether the

murder of helpless wild animals is base or is heroic; and our

preferences in the matter of religious and political parties; and

our acceptance or rejection of the Shakespeares and the Arthur

Ortons and the Mrs. Eddys.  We get them all at second-hand, we

reason none of them out for ourselves.  It is the way we are made.

It is the way we are all made, and we can't help it, we can't

change it.  And whenever we have been furnished a fetish, and have

been taught to believe in it, and love it and worship it, and

refrain from examining it, there is no evidence, howsoever clear

and strong, that can persuade us to withdraw from it our loyalty

and our devotion.  In morals, conduct, and beliefs we take the

color of our environment and associations, and it is a color that

can safely be warranted to wash.  Whenever we have been furnished

with a tar baby ostensibly stuffed with jewels, and warned that it

will be dishonorable and irreverent to disembowel it and test the

jewels, we keep our sacrilegious hands off it.  We submit, not

reluctantly, but rather gladly, for we are privately afraid we

should find, upon examination, that the jewels are of the sort that

are manufactured at North Adams, Mass.



I haven't any idea that Shakespeare will have to vacate his

pedestal this side of the year 2209.  Disbelief in him cannot come

swiftly, disbelief in a healthy and deeply-loved tar baby has never

been known to disintegrate swiftly, it is a very slow process.  It

took several thousand years to convince our fine race--including

every splendid intellect in it--that there is no such thing as a

witch; it has taken several thousand years to convince that same

fine race--including every splendid intellect in it--that there is

no such person as Satan; it has taken several centuries to remove

perdition from the Protestant Church's program of postmortem

entertainments; it has taken a weary long time to persuade American

Presbyterians to give up infant damnation and try to bear it the

best they can; and it looks as if their Scotch brethren will still

be burning babies in the everlasting fires when Shakespeare comes

down from his perch.



We are The Reasoning Race.  We can't prove it by the above

examples, and we can't prove it by the miraculous "histories" built

by those Stratfordolaters out of a hatful of rags and a barrel of

sawdust, but there is a plenty of other things we can prove it by,

if I could think of them.  We are The Reasoning Race, and when we

find a vague file of chipmunk-tracks stringing through the dust of

Stratford village, we know by our reasoning powers that Hercules

has been along there.  I feel that our fetish is safe for three

centuries yet.  The bust, too--there in the Stratford Church.  The

precious bust, the priceless bust, the calm bust, the serene bust,

the emotionless bust, with the dandy moustache, and the putty face,

unseamed of care--that face which has looked passionlessly down

upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred and fifty years and will still

look down upon the awed pilgrim three hundred more, with the deep,

deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle, expression of a bladder.







CHAPTER XII







Irreverence



One of the most trying defects which I find in these--these--what

shall I call them? for I will not apply injurious epithets to them,

the way they do to us, such violations of courtesy being repugnant

to my nature and my dignity.  The furthest I can go in that

direction is to call them by names of limited reverence--names

merely descriptive, never unkind, never offensive, never tainted by

harsh feeling.  If THEY would do like this, they would feel better

in their hearts.  Very well, then--to proceed.  One of the most

trying defects which I find in these Stratfordolaters, these

Shakesperoids, these thugs, these bangalores, these troglodytes,

these herumfrodites, these blatherskites, these buccaneers, these

bandoleers, is their spirit of irreverence.  It is detectable in

every utterance of theirs when they are talking about us.  I am

thankful that in me there is nothing of that spirit.  When a thing

is sacred to me it is impossible for me to be irreverent toward it.

I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been

irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other

people.  Am I in the right?  I think so.  But I ask no one to take

my unsupported word; no, look at the dictionary; let the dictionary

decide.  Here is the definition:





Irreverence.  The quality or condition of irreverence toward God

and sacred things.





What does the Hindu say?  He says it is correct.  He says

irreverence is lack of respect for Vishnu, and Brahma, and

Chrishna, and his other gods, and for his sacred cattle, and for

his temples and the things within them.  He endorses the

definition, you see; and there are 300,000,000 Hindus or their

equivalents back of him.



The dictionary had the acute idea that by using the capital G it

could restrict irreverence to lack of reverence for OUR Deity and

our sacred things, but that ingenious and rather sly idea

miscarried:  for by the simple process of spelling HIS deities with

capitals the Hindu confiscates the definition and restricts it to

his own sects, thus making it clearly compulsory upon us to revere

HIS gods and HIS sacred things, and nobody's else.  We can't say a

word, for he has our own dictionary at his back, and its decision

is final.



This law, reduced to its simplest terms, is this:  1.  Whatever is

sacred to the Christian must be held in reverence by everybody

else; 2, whatever is sacred to the Hindu must be held in reverence

by everybody else; 3, therefore, by consequence, logically, and

indisputably, whatever is sacred to ME must be held in reverence by

everybody else.



Now then, what aggravates me is, that these troglodytes and

muscovites and bandoleers and buccaneers are ALSO trying to crowd

in and share the benefit of the law, and compel everybody to revere

their Shakespeare and hold him sacred.  We can't have that:

there's enough of us already.  If you go on widening and spreading

and inflating the privilege, it will presently come to be conceded

that each man's sacred things are the ONLY ones, and the rest of

the human race will have to be humbly reverent toward them or

suffer for it.  That can surely happen, and when it happens, the

word Irreverence will be regarded as the most meaningless, and

foolish, and self-conceited, and insolent, and impudent and

dictatorial word in the language.  And people will say, "Whose

business is it, what gods I worship and what things hold sacred?

Who has the right to dictate to my conscience, and where did he get

that right?"



We cannot afford to let that calamity come upon us.  We must save

the word from this destruction.  There is but one way to do it, and

that is, to stop the spread of the privilege, and strictly confine

it to its present limits:  that is, to all the Christian sects, to

all the Hindu sects, and me.  We do not need any more, the stock is

watered enough, just as it is.



It would be better if the privilege were limited to me alone.  I

think so because I am the only sect that knows how to employ it

gently, kindly, charitably, dispassionately.  The other sects lack

the quality of self-restraint.  The Catholic Church says the most

irreverent things about matters which are sacred to the

Protestants, and the Protestant Church retorts in kind about the

confessional and other matters which Catholics hold sacred; then

both of these irreverencers turn upon Thomas Paine and charge HIM

with irreverence.  This is all unfortunate, because it makes it

difficult for students equipped with only a low grade of mentality

to find out what Irreverence really IS.



It will surely be much better all around if the privilege of

regulating the irreverent and keeping them in order shall

eventually be withdrawn from all the sects but me.  Then there will

be no more quarrelling, no more bandying of disrespectful epithets,

no more heart burnings.



There will then be nothing sacred involved in this Bacon-

Shakespeare controversy except what is sacred to me.  That will

simplify the whole matter, and trouble will cease.  There will be

irreverence no longer, because I will not allow it.  The first time

those criminals charge me with irreverence for calling their

Stratford myth an Arthur-Orton-Mary-Baker-Thompson-Eddy-Louis-the-

Seventeenth-Veiled-Prophet-of-Khorassan will be the last.  Taught

by the methods found effective in extinguishing earlier offenders

by the Inquisition, of holy memory, I shall know how to quiet them.







CHAPTER XIII







Isn't it odd, when you think of it:  that you may list all the

celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen of modern times,

clear back to the first Tudors--a list containing five hundred

names, shall we say?--and you can go to the histories, biographies

and cyclopedias and learn the particulars of the lives of every one

of them.  Every one of them except one--the most famous, the most

renowned--by far the most illustrious of them all--Shakespeare!

You can get the details of the lives of all the celebrated

ecclesiastics in the list; all the celebrated tragedians,

comedians, singers, dancers, orators, judges, lawyers, poets,

dramatists, historians, biographers, editors, inventors, reformers,

statesmen, generals, admirals, discoverers, prize-fighters,

murderers, pirates, conspirators, horse-jockeys, bunco-steerers,

misers, swindlers, explorers, adventurers by land and sea, bankers,

financiers, astronomers, naturalists, Claimants, impostors,

chemists, biologists, geologists, philologists, college presidents

and professors, architects, engineers, painters, sculptors,

politicians, agitators, rebels, revolutionists, patriots,

demagogues, clowns, cooks, freaks, philosophers, burglars,

highwaymen, journalists, physicians, surgeons--you can get the

life-histories of all of them but ONE.  Just one--the most

extraordinary and the most celebrated of them all--Shakespeare!



You may add to the list the thousand celebrated persons furnished

by the rest of Christendom in the past four centuries, and you can

find out the life-histories of all those people, too.  You will

then have listed 1500 celebrities, and you can trace the authentic

life-histories of the whole of them.  Save one--far and away the

most colossal prodigy of the entire accumulation--Shakespeare!

About him you can find out NOTHING.  Nothing of even the slightest

importance.  Nothing worth the trouble of stowing away in your

memory.  Nothing that even remotely indicates that he was ever

anything more than a distinctly common-place person--a manager, an

actor of inferior grade, a small trader in a small village that did

not regard him as a person of any consequence, and had forgotten

all about him before he was fairly cold in his grave.  We can go to

the records and find out the life-history of every renowned RACE-

HORSE of modern times--but not Shakespeare's!  There are many

reasons why, and they have been furnished in cartloads (of guess

and conjecture) by those troglodytes; but there is one that is

worth all the rest of the reasons put together, and is abundantly

sufficient all by itself--HE HADN'T ANY HISTORY TO RECORD.  There

is no way of getting around that deadly fact.  And no sane way has

yet been discovered of getting around its formidable significance.



Its quite plain significance--to any but those thugs (I do not use

the term unkindly) is, that Shakespeare had no prominence while he

lived, and none until he had been dead two or three generations.

The Plays enjoyed high fame from the beginning; and if he wrote

them it seems a pity the world did not find it out.  He ought to

have explained that he was the author, and not merely a nom de

plume for another man to hide behind.  If he had been less

intemperately solicitous about his bones, and more solicitous about

his Works, it would have been better for his good name, and a

kindness to us.  The bones were not important.  They will moulder

away, they will turn to dust, but the Works will endure until the

last sun goes down.



MARK TWAIN.





P.S.  March 25.  About two months ago I was illuminating this

Autobiography with some notions of mine concerning the Bacon-

Shakespeare controversy, and I then took occasion to air the

opinion that the Stratford Shakespeare was a person of no public

consequence or celebrity during his lifetime, but was utterly

obscure and unimportant.  And not only in great London, but also in

the little village where he was born, where he lived a quarter of a

century, and where he died and was buried.  I argued that if he had

been a person of any note at all, aged villagers would have had

much to tell about him many and many a year after his death,

instead of being unable to furnish inquirers a single fact

connected with him.  I believed, and I still believe, that if he

had been famous, his notoriety would have lasted as long as mine

has lasted in my native village out in Missouri.  It is a good

argument, a prodigiously strong one, and a most formidable one for

even the most gifted, and ingenious, and plausible Stratfordolater

to get around or explain away.  To-day a Hannibal Courier-Post of

recent date has reached me, with an article in it which reinforces

my contention that a really celebrated person cannot be forgotten

in his village in the short space of sixty years.  I will make an

extract from it:





Hannibal, as a city, may have many sins to answer for, but

ingratitude is not one of them, or reverence for the great men she

has produced, and as the years go by her greatest son Mark Twain,

or S. L. Clemens as a few of the unlettered call him, grows in the

estimation and regard of the residents of the town he made famous

and the town that made him famous.  His name is associated with

every old building that is torn down to make way for the modern

structures demanded by a rapidly growing city, and with every hill

or cave over or through which he might by any possibility have

roamed, while the many points of interest which he wove into his

stories, such as Holiday Hill, Jackson's Island, or Mark Twain

Cave, are now monuments to his genius.  Hannibal is glad of any

opportunity to do him honor as he has honored her.



So it has happened that the "old timers" who went to school with

Mark or were with him on some of his usual escapades have been

honored with large audiences whenever they were in a reminiscent

mood and condescended to tell of their intimacy with the ordinary

boy who came to be a very extraordinary humorist and whose every

boyish act is now seen to have been indicative of what was to come.

Like Aunt Beckey and Mrs. Clemens, they can now see that Mark was

hardly appreciated when he lived here and that the things he did as

a boy and was whipped for doing were not all bad after all.  So

they have been in no hesitancy about drawing out the bad things he

did as well as the good in their efforts to get a "Mark Twain

story," all incidents being viewed in the light of his present

fame, until the volume of "Twainiana" is already considerable and

growing in proportion as the "old timers" drop away and the stories

are retold second and third hand by their descendants.  With some

seventy-three years young and living in a villa instead of a house

he is a fair target, and let him incorporate, copyright, or patent

himself as he will, there are some of his "works" that will go

swooping up Hannibal chimneys as long as gray-beards gather about

the fires and begin with "I've heard father tell" or possibly "Once

when I."





The Mrs. Clemens referred to is my mother--WAS my mother.



And here is another extract from a Hannibal paper.  Of date twenty

days ago:





Miss Becca Blankenship died at the home of William Dickason, 408

Rock Street, at 2.30 o'clock yesterday afternoon, aged 72 years.

The deceased was a sister of "Huckleberry Finn," one of the famous

characters in Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer.  She had been a member of

the Dickason family--the housekeeper--for nearly forty-five years,

and was a highly respected lady.  For the past eight years she had

been an invalid, but was as well cared for by Mr. Dickason and his

family as if she had been a near relative.  She was a member of the

Park Methodist Church and a Christian woman.





I remember her well.  I have a picture of her in my mind which was

graven there, clear and sharp and vivid, sixty-three years ago.

She was at that time nine years old, and I was about eleven.  I

remember where she stood, and how she looked; and I can still see

her bare feet, her bare head, her brown face, and her short tow-

linen frock.  She was crying.  What it was about, I have long ago

forgotten.  But it was the tears that preserved the picture for me,

no doubt.  She was a good child, I can say that for her.  She knew

me nearly seventy years ago.  Did she forget me, in the course of

time?  I think not.  If she had lived in Stratford in Shakespeare's

time, would she have forgotten him?  Yes.  For he was never famous

during his lifetime, he was utterly obscure in Stratford, and there

wouldn't be any occasion to remember him after he had been dead a

week.



"Injun Joe," "Jimmy Finn," and "General Gaines" were prominent and

very intemperate ne'er-do-weels in Hannibal two generations ago.

Plenty of gray-heads there remember them to this day, and can tell

you about them.  Isn't it curious that two "town-drunkards" and one

half-breed loafer should leave behind them, in a remote Missourian

village, a fame a hundred times greater and several hundred times

more particularized in the matter of definite facts than

Shakespeare left behind him in the village where he had lived the

half of his lifetime?



MARK TWAIN.







Footnotes:



{1}  Four fathoms--twenty-four feet.



{2}  From chapter XIII of "The Shakespeare Problem Restated."









End of the Project Gutenberg eText Is Shakespeare Dead?













ON THE DECAY OF THE ART OF LYING



by Mark Twain [Samuel Clemens]









ESSAY, FOR DISCUSSION, READ AT A MEETING OF THE HISTORICAL

AND ANTIQUARIAN CLUB OF HARTFORD, AND OFFERED FOR THE

THIRTY-DOLLAR PRIZE.[*]



[*] Did not take the prize.









  Observe, I do not mean to suggest that the _custom_ of lying has

suffered any decay or interruption--no, for the Lie, as a Virtue, A Principle,

is eternal; the Lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the

fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend, is immortal, and

cannot perish from the earth while this club remains. My complaint simply

concerns the decay of the _art_ of lying. No high-minded man, no man of right

feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day

without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted. In this veteran presence I

naturally enter upon this theme with diffidence; it is like an old maid trying

to teach nursery matters to the mothers in Israel. It would not become to me

to criticise you, gentlemen--who are nearly all my elders--and my superiors,

in this thing--if I should here and there _seem_ to do it, I trust it will in

most cases be more in a spirit of admiration than fault-finding; indeed if

this finest of the fine arts had everywhere received the attention, the

encouragement, and conscientious practice and development which this club has

devoted to it, I should not need to utter this lament, or shred a single tear.

I do not say this to flatter: I say it in a spirit of just and appreciative

recognition. [It had been my intention, at this point, to mention names and

to give illustrative specimens, but indications observable about me admonished

me to beware of the particulars and confine myself to generalities.]



  No fact is more firmly established than that lying is a necessity of our

circumstances--the deduction that it is then a Virtue goes without saying.

No virtue can reach its highest usefulness without careful and diligent

cultivation--therefore, it goes without saying that this one ought to be

taught in the public schools--even in the newspapers. What chance has the

ignorant uncultivated liar against the educated expert? What chance have I

against Mr. Per--against a lawyer? _Judicious_ lying is what the world needs.

I sometimes think it were even better and safer not to lie at all than to lie

injudiciously. An awkward, unscientific lie is often as ineffectual as the

truth.



  Now let us see what the philosophers say. Note that venerable proverb:

Children and fools _always_ speak the truth. The deduction is plain--adults

and wise persons _never_speak it. Parkman, the historian, says, "The principle

of truth may itself be carried into an absurdity." In another place in the same

chapters he says, "The saying is old that truth should not be spoken at all

times; and those whom a sick conscience worries into habitual violation of

the maxim are imbeciles and nuisances." It is strong language, but true. None

of us could _live_ with an habitual truth-teller; but thank goodness none of

us has to. An habitual truth-teller is simply an impossible creature; he does

not exist; he never has existed. Of course there are people who _think_ they

never lie, but it is not so--and this ignorance is one of the very things that

shame our so-called civilization. Everybody lies--every day; every hour;

awake; asleep; in his dreams; in his joy; in his mourning; if he keeps his

tongue still, his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude, will convey

deception--and purposely. Even in sermons--but that is a platitude.



  In a far country where I once lived the ladies used to go around paying

calls, under the humane and kindly pretence of wanting to see each other;

and when they returned home, they would cry out with a glad voice, saying,

"We made sixteen calls and found fourteen of them out"--not meaning that

they found out anything important against the fourteen--no, that was only

a colloquial phrase to signify that they were not at home--and their manner

of saying it expressed their lively satisfaction in that fact. Now their

pretence of wanting to see the fourteen--and the other two whom they had been

less lucky with--was that commonest and mildest form of lying which is

sufficiently described as a deflection from the truth. Is it justifiable?

Most certainly. It is beautiful, it is noble; for its object is, _not_ to reap

profit, but to convey a pleasure to the sixteen. The iron-souled truth-monger

would plainly manifest, or even utter the fact that he didn't want to see

those people--and he would be an ass, and inflict totally unnecessary pain.

And next, those ladies in that far country--but never mind, they had a thousand

pleasant ways of lying, that grew out of gentle impulses, and were a credit

to their intelligence and an honor to their hearts. Let the particulars go.



  The men in that far country were liars, every one. Their mere howdy-do was a

lie, because _they_ didn't care how you did, except they were undertakers. To

the ordinary inquirer you lied in return; for you made no conscientious

diagnostic of your case, but answered at random, and usually missed it

considerably. You lied to the undertaker, and said your health was failing--a

wholly commendable lie, since it cost you nothing and pleased the other man.

If a stranger called and interrupted you, you said with your hearty tongue,

"I'm glad to see you," and said with your heartier soul, "I wish you were with

the cannibals and it was dinner-time." When he went, you said regretfully,

"_Must_ you go?" and followed it with a "Call again;" but you did no harm, for

you did not deceive anybody nor inflict any hurt, whereas the truth would have

made you both unhappy.



  I think that all this courteous lying is a sweet and loving art, and should

be cultivated. The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful

edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of

charitable and unselfish lying.



  What I bemoan is the growing prevalence of the brutal truth. Let us do what

we can to eradicate it. An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie.

Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth lest

his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a

soul is not strictly worth saving. The man who tells a lie to help a poor

devil out of trouble, is one of whom the angels doubtless say, "Lo, here is

an heroic soul who casts his own welfare in jeopardy to succor his neighbor's;

let us exalt this magnanimous liar."



  An injurious lie is an uncommendable thing; and so, also, and in the same

degree, is an injurious truth--a fact that is recognized by the law of libel.



  Among other common lies, we have the _silent_ lie--the deception which one

conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate

truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they _speak_ no

lie, they lie not at all. In that far country where I once lived, there was

a lovely spirit, a lady whose impulses were always high and pure, and whose

character answered to them. One day I was there at dinner, and remarked, in

a general way, that we are all liars. She was amazed, and said, "Not _all_?"

It was before "Pinafore's" time. so I did not make the response which would

naturally follow in our day, but frankly said, "Yes, _all_--we are all liars.

There are no exceptions." She looked almost offended, "Why, do you include

_me_?" "Certainly," I said. "I think you even rank as an expert." She said

"Sh-'sh! the children!" So the subject was changed in deference to the

children's presence, and we went on talking about other things. But as soon

as the young people were out of the way, the lady came warmly back to the

matter and said, "I have made a rule of my life to never tell a lie; and I

have never departed from it in a single instance." I said, "I don't mean the

least harm or disrespect, but really you have been lying like smoke ever

since I've been sitting here. It has caused me a good deal of pain, because

I'm not used to it." She required of me an instance--just a single instance.

So I said--



  "Well, here is the unfilled duplicate of the blank, which the Oakland

hospital people sent to you by the hand of the sick-nurse when she came here

to nurse your little nephew through his dangerous illness. This blank asks

all manners of questions as to the conduct of that sick-nurse: 'Did she ever

sleep on her watch? Did she ever forget to give the medicine?' and so forth

and so on. You are warned to be very careful and explicit in your answers, for

the welfare of the service requires that the nurses be promptly fined or

otherwise punished for derelictions. You told me you were perfectly delighted

with this nurse--that she had a thousand perfections and only one fault: you

found you never could depend on her wrapping Johnny up half sufficiently while

he waited in a chilly chair for her to rearrange the warm bed.

You filled up the duplicate of this paper, and sent it back to the hospital

by the hand of the nurse. How did you answer this question--'Was the nurse

at any time guilty of a negligence which was likely to result in the patient's

taking cold?' Come--everything is decided by a bet here in California: ten

dollars to ten cents you lied when you answered that question." She said, "I

didn't; _I left it blank!_" "Just so--you have told a _silent_ lie; you have

left it to be inferred that you had no fault to find in that matter." She said,

"Oh, was that a lie? And _how_ could I mention her one single fault, and she

is so good?--It would have been cruel." I said, "One ought always to lie, when

one can do good by it; your impulse was right, but your judgment was crude;

this comes of unintelligent practice. Now observe the results of this inexpert

deflection of yours. You know Mr. Jones's Willie is lying very low with

scarlet-fever; well, your recommendation was so enthusiastic that that girl

is there nursing him, and the worn-out family have all been trustingly sound

asleep for the last fourteen hours, leaving their darling with full confidence

in those fatal hands, because you, like young George Washington, have a reputa--

However, if you are not going to have anything to do, I will come around

to-morrow and we'll attend the funeral together, for, of course, you'll

naturally feel a peculiar interest in Willie's case--as personal a one, in

fact, as the undertaker."



  But that was not all lost. Before I was half-way through she was in a carriage

and making thirty miles an hour toward the Jones mansion to save what was left

of Willie and tell all she knew about the deadly nurse. All of which was

unnecessary, as Willie wasn't sick; I had been lying myself. But that same day,

all the same, she sent a line to the hospital which filled up the neglected

blank, and stated the _facts,_ too, in the squarest possible manner.



  Now, you see, this lady's fault was _not_ in lying, but in lying

injudiciously. She should have told the truth, _there,_ and made it up to the

nurse with a fraudulent compliment further along in the paper. She could have

said, "In one respect this sick-nurse is perfection--when she is on the watch,

she never snores." Almost any little pleasant lie would have taken the sting

out of that troublesome but necessary expression of the truth.



  Lying is universal--we _all_ do it. Therefore, the wise thing is for us

diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with

a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our

own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully,

maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily;

to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously,

with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling. Then shall we

be rid of the rank and pestilent truth that is rotting the land; then shall

we be great and good and beautiful, and worthy dwellers in a world where even

benign Nature habitually lies, except when she promises execrable weather.

Then--But am I but a new and feeble student in this gracious art; I cannot

instruct _this_ club.



  Joking aside, I think there is much need of wise examination into what sorts

of lies are best and wholesomest to be indulged, seeing we _must_ all lie and

we _do_ all lie, and what sorts it may be best to avoid--and this is a thing

which I feel I can confidently put into the hands of this experienced Club--a

ripe body, who may be termed, in this regard, and without undue flattery, Old

Masters.











End of Project Gutenberg Etext On the Decay of the Art of Lying, by Twain













GOLDSMITH'S FRIEND ABROAD AGAIN



by Mark Twain







NOTE.--No experience is set down in the following letters which had to be

invented.  Fancy is not needed to give variety to the history of a

Chinaman's sojourn in America.  Plain fact is amply sufficient.





LETTER I



                                             SHANGHAI, 18--.

DEAR CHING-FOO: It is all settled, and I am to leave my oppressed and

overburdened native land and cross the sea to that noble realm where all

are free and all equal, and none reviled or abused--America!  America,

whose precious privilege it is to call herself the Land of the Free and

the Home of the Brave.  We and all that are about us here look over the

waves longingly, contrasting the privations of this our birthplace with

the opulent comfort of that happy refuge.  We know how America has

welcomed the Germans and the Frenchmen and the stricken and sorrowing

Irish, and we know how she has given them bread and work, and liberty,

and how grateful they are.  And we know that America stands ready to

welcome all other oppressed peoples and offer her abundance to all that

come, without asking what their nationality is, or their creed or color.

And, without being told it, we know that the, foreign sufferers she has

rescued from oppression and starvation are the most eager of her children

to welcome us, because, having suffered themselves, they know what

suffering is, and having been generously succored, they long to be

generous to other unfortunates and thus show that magnanimity is not

wasted upon them.

                                             AH SONG HI.







LETTER II



                                                  AT SEA, 18--.

DEAR CHING-FOO:  We are far away at sea now; on our way to the beautiful

Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.  We shall soon be where all men

are alike, and where sorrow is not known.



The good American who hired me to go to his country is to pay me $12 a

month, which is immense wages, you know--twenty times as much as one gets

in China.  My passage in the ship is a very large sum--indeed, it is a

fortune--and this I must pay myself eventually, but I am allowed ample

time to make it good to my employer in, he advancing it now.  For a mere

form, I have turned over my wife, my boy, and my two daughters to my

employer's partner for security for the payment of the ship fare.  But my

employer says they are in no danger of being sold, for he knows I will be

faithful to him, and that is the main security.



I thought I would have twelve dollars to, begin life with in America, but

the American Consul took two of them for making a certificate that I was

shipped on the steamer.  He has no right to do more than charge the ship

two dollars for one certificate for the ship, with the number of her

Chinese passengers set down in it; but he chooses to force a certificate

upon each and every Chinaman and put the two dollars in his pocket.  As

1,300 of my countrymen are in this vessel, the Consul received $2,600 for

certificates.  My employer tells me that the Government at Washington

know of this fraud, and are so bitterly opposed to the existence of such

a wrong that they tried hard to have the extor--the fee, I mean,

legalised by the last Congress;--[Pacific and Mediterranean steamship

bills.(Ed.  Mem.)]--but as the bill did not pass, the Consul will have

to take the fee dishonestly until next Congress makes it legitimate.  It

is a great and good and noble country, and hates all forms of vice and

chicanery.



We are in that part of the vessel always reserved for my countrymen.

It is called the steerage.  It is kept for us, my employer says, because

it is not subject to changes of temperature and dangerous drafts of air.

It is only another instance of the loving unselfishness of the Americans

for all unfortunate foreigners.  The steerage is a little crowded, and

rather warm and close, but no doubt it is best for us that it should be

so.



Yesterday our people got to quarrelling among themselves, and the captain

turned a volume of hot steam upon a mass of them and scalded eighty or

ninety of them more or less severely.  Flakes and ribbons of skin came

off some of them.  There was wild shrieking and struggling while the

vapour enveloped the great throng, and so some who were not scalded got

trampled upon and hurt.  We do not complain, for my employer says this is

the usual way of quieting disturbances on board the ship, and that it is

done in the cabins among the Americans every day or two.



Congratulate me, Ching-Fool In ten days more I shall step upon the shore

of America, and be received by her great-hearted people; and I shall

straighten myself up and feel that I am a free man among freemen.



                                                       AH SONG HI.







LETTER III



                                             SAN FRANCISCO, 18--.

DEAR CHING-FOO: I stepped ashore jubilant!  I wanted to dance, shout,

sing, worship the generous Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.  But

as I walked from the gangplank a man in a gray uniform--[Policeman]--

kicked me violently behind and told me to look out--so my employer

translated it.  As I turned, another officer of the same kind struck me

with a short club and also instructed me to look out.  I was about to

take hold of my end of the pole which had mine and Hong-Wo's basket and

things suspended from it, when a third officer hit me with his club to

signify that I was to drop it, and then kicked me to signify that he was

satisfied with my promptness.  Another person came now, and searched all

through our basket and bundles, emptying everything out on the dirty

wharf.  Then this person and another searched us all over.  They found a

little package of opium sewed into the artificial part of Hong-Wo's

queue, and they took that, and also they made him prisoner and handed him

over to an officer, who marched him away.  They took his luggage, too,

because of his crime, and as our luggage was so mixed together that they

could not tell mine from his, they took it all.  When I offered to help

divide it, they kicked me and desired me to look out.



Having now no baggage and no companion, I told my employer that if he was

willing, I would walk about a little and see the city and the people

until he needed me.  I did not like to seem disappointed with my

reception in the good land of refuge for the oppressed, and so I looked

and spoke as cheerily as I could.  But he said, wait a minute--I must be

vaccinated to prevent my taking the small-pox.  I smiled and said I had

already had the small-pox, as he could see by the marks, and so I need

not wait to be "vaccinated," as he called it.  But he said it was the

law, and I must be vaccinated anyhow.  The doctor would never let me

pass, for the law obliged him to vaccinate all Chinamen and charge them

ten dollars apiece for it, and I might be sure that no doctor who would

be the servant of that law would let a fee slip through his fingers to

accommodate any absurd fool who had seen fit to have the disease in some

other country.  And presently the doctor came and did his work and took

my last penny--my ten dollars which were the hard savings of nearly a

year and a half of labour and privation.  Ah, if the law-makers had only

known there were plenty of doctors in the city glad of a chance to

vaccinate people for a dollar or two, they would never have put the price

up so high against a poor friendless Irish, or Italian, or Chinese pauper

fleeing to the good land to escape hunger and hard times.



                                                            AH SONG HI.









LETTER IV



                                             SAN FRANCISCO, 18--.

DEAR CHING-FOO: I have been here about a month now, and am learning a

little of the language every day.  My employer was disappointed in the

matter of hiring us out to service to the plantations in the far eastern

portion of this continent.  His enterprise was a failure, and so he set

us all free, merely taking measures to secure to himself the repayment of

the passage money which he paid for us.  We are to make this good to him

out of the first moneys we earn here.  He says it is sixty dollars

apiece.



We were thus set free about two weeks after we reached here.  We had been

massed together in some small houses up to that time, waiting.  I walked

forth to seek my fortune.  I was to begin life a stranger in a strange

land, without a friend, or a penny, or any clothes but those I had on my

back.  I had not any advantage on my side in the world--not one, except

good health and the lack of any necessity to waste any time or anxiety on

the watching of my baggage.  No, I forget.  I reflected that I had one

prodigious advantage over paupers in other lands--I was in America!  I

was in the heaven-provided refuge of the oppressed and the forsaken!



Just as that comforting thought passed through my mind, some young men

set a fierce dog on me.  I tried to defend myself, but could do nothing.

I retreated to the recess of a closed doorway, and there the dog had me

at his mercy, flying at my throat and face or any part of my body that

presented itself.  I shrieked for help, but the young men only jeered and

laughed.  Two men in gray uniforms ( policemen is their official title)

looked on for a minute and then walked leisurely away.  But a man stopped

them and brought them back and told them it was a shame to leave me in

such distress.  Then the two policemen beat off the dog with small clubs,

and a comfort it was to be rid of him, though I was just rags and blood

from head to foot.  The man who brought the policemen asked the young men

why they abused me in that way, and they said they didn't want any of his

meddling.  And they said to him:



"This Ching divil comes till Ameriky to take the bread out o' dacent

intilligent white men's mouths, and whir they try to defind their rights

there's a dale o' fuss made about it."



They began to threaten my benefactor, and as he saw no friendliness in

the faces that had gathered meanwhile, he went on his way.  He got many a

curse when he was gone.  The policemen now told me I was under arrest and

must go with them.  I asked one of them what wrong I had done to any one

that I should be arrested, and he only struck me with his club and

ordered me to "hold my yap."  With a jeering crowd of street boys and

loafers at my heels, I was taken up an alley and into a stone-paved

dungeon which had large cells all down one side of it, with iron gates to

them.  I stood up by a desk while a man behind it wrote down certain

things about me on a slate.  One of my captors said:



"Enter a charge against this Chinaman of being disorderly and disturbing

the peace."



I attempted to say a word, but he said:



"Silence!  Now ye had better go slow, my good fellow.  This is two or

three times you've tried to get off some of your d---d insolence.  Lip

won't do here.  You've got to simmer down, and if you don't take to it

paceable we'll see if we can't make you.  Fat's your name?"



"Ah Song Hi."



"Alias what?"



I said I did not understand, and he said what he wanted was my true name,

for he guessed I picked up this one since I stole my last chickens.  They

all laughed loudly at that.



Then they searched me.  They found nothing, of course.  They seemed very

angry and asked who I supposed would "go my bail or pay my fine."  When

they explained these things to me, I said I had done nobody any harm, and

why should I need to have bail or pay a fine?  Both of them kicked me and

warned me that I would find it to my advantage to try and be as civil as

convenient.  I protested that I had not meant anything disrespectful.

Then one of them took me to one side and said:



"Now look here, Johnny, it's no use you playing softly wid us.  We mane

business, ye know; and the sooner ye put us on the scent of a V, the

asier yell save yerself from a dale of trouble.  Ye can't get out o' this

for anny less.  Who's your frinds?"



I told him I had not a single friend in all the land of America, and that

I was far from home and help, and very poor.  And I begged him to let me

go.



He gathered the slack of my blouse collar in his grip and jerked and

shoved and hauled at me across the dungeon, and then unlocking an iron

cell-gate thrust me in with a kick and said:



"Rot there, ye furrin spawn, till ye lairn that there's no room in

America for the likes of ye or your nation."



                                                  AH SONG HI.









LETTER V



                                                  SAN FRANCISCO, 18--.

DEAR CHING-FOO: You will remember that I had just been thrust violently

into a cell in the city prison when I wrote last.  I stumbled and fell on

some one.  I got a blow and a curse= and on top of these a kick or two

and a shove.  In a second or two it was plain that I was in a nest of

prisoners and was being "passed around"--for the instant I was knocked

out of the way of one I fell on the head or heels of another and was

promptly ejected, only to land on a third prisoner and get a new

contribution of kicks and curses and a new destination.  I brought up at

last in an unoccupied corner, very much battered and bruised and sore,

but glad enough to be let alone for a little while.  I was on the flag-

stones, for there was, no furniture in the den except a long, broad

board, or combination of boards, like a barn-door, and this bed was

accommodating five or six persons, and that was its full capacity.  They

lay stretched side by side, snoring--when not fighting.  One end of the

board was four, inches higher than the other, and so the slant answered

for a pillow.  There were no blankets, and the night was a little chilly;

the nights are always a little chilly in San Francisco, though never

severely cold.  The board was a deal more comfortable than the stones,

and occasionally some flag-stone plebeian like me would try to creep to a

place on it; and then the aristocrats would hammer him good and make him

think a flag pavement was a nice enough place after all.



I lay quiet in my corner, stroking my bruises, and listening to the

revelations the prisoners made to each other--and to me for some that

were near me talked to me a good deal.  I had long had an idea that

Americans, being free, had no need of prisons, which are a contrivance of

despots for keeping restless patriots out of mischief.  So I was

considerably surprised to find out my mistake.



Ours was a big general cell, it seemed, for the temporary accommodation

of all comers whose crimes were trifling.  Among us they were two

Americans, two "Greasers" (Mexicans), a Frenchman, a German, four

Irishmen, a Chilenean (and, in the next cell, only separated from us by a

grating, two women), all drunk, and all more or less noisy; and as night

fell and advanced, they grew more and more discontented and disorderly,

occasionally; shaking the prison bars and glaring through them at the

slowly pacing officer, and cursing him with all their hearts.  The two

women were nearly middle-aged, and they had only had enough liquor to

stimulate instead of stupefy them.  Consequently they would fondle and

kiss each other for some minutes, and then fall to fighting and keep it

up till they were just two grotesque tangles of rags and blood and

tumbled hair.  Then they would rest awhile and pant and swear.  While

they were affectionate they always spoke of each other as "ladies," but

while they were fighting "strumpet" was the mildest name they could think

of--and they could only make that do by tacking some sounding profanity

to it.  In their last fight, which was toward midnight, one of them bit

off the other's finger, and then the officer interfered and put the

"Greaser" into the "dark cell" to answer for it because the woman that

did it laid it on him, and the other woman did not deny it because, as

she said afterward, she "wanted another crack at the huzzy when her

finger quit hurting," and so she did not want her removed.  By this time

those two women had mutilated each other's clothes to that extent that

there was not sufficient left to cover their nakedness.  I found that one

of these creatures had spent nine years in the county jail, and that the

other one had spent about four or five years in the same place.  They had

done it from choice.  As soon as they were discharged from captivity they

would go straight and get drunk, and then steal some trifling thing while

an officer was observing them.  That would entitle them to another two,

months in jail, and there they would occupy clean, airy apartments, and

have good food in plenty, and being at no expense at all, they, could

make shirts for the clothiers at half a dollar apiece and thus keep

themselves in smoking tobacco and such other luxuries as they wanted.

When the two months were up they would go just as straight as they could

walk to Mother Leonard's and get drunk; and from there to Kearney street

and steal something; and thence to this city prison, and next day back to

the old quarters in the county jail again.  One of them had really kept

this up for nine years and the other four or five, and both said they

meant to end their days in that prison. **--[**The former of the two

did.--Ed. Men.]--Finally, both these creatures fell upon me while I was

dozing with my head against their grating, and battered me considerably,

because they discovered that I was a Chinaman, and they said I was "a

bloody interlopin' loafer come from the devil's own country to take the

bread out of dacent people's mouths and put down the wages for work whin

it was all a Christian could do to kape body and sowl together as it

was."  "Loafer" means one who will not work.

                                                       AH SONG HI.









LETTER VI



                                             SAN FRANCISCO, 18--.



DEAR CHING-FOO:  To continue--the two women became reconciled to each

other again through the common bond of interest and sympathy created

between them by pounding me in partnership, and when they had finished me

they fell to embracing each other again and swearing more eternal

affection like that which had subsisted between them all the evening,

barring occasional interruptions.  They agreed to swear the finger-biting

on the Greaser in open court, and get him sent to the penitentiary for

the crime of mayhem.



Another of our company was a boy of fourteen who had been watched for

some time by officers and teachers, and repeatedly detected in enticing

young girls from the public schools to the lodgings of gentlemen down

town.  He  had been furnished with lures in the form of pictures and

books of a peculiar kind, and these he had distributed among his clients.

There were likenesses of fifteen of these young girls on exhibition (only

to prominent citizens and persons in authority, it was said, though most

people came to get a sight) at the police headquarters, but no punishment

at all was to be inflicted on the poor little misses.  The boy was

afterward sent into captivity at the House of Correction for some months,

and there was a strong disposition to punish the gentlemen who had

employed the boy to entice the girls, but as that could not be done

without making public the names of those gentlemen and thus injuring them

socially, the idea was finally given up.



There was also in our cell that night a photographer (a kind of artist

who makes likenesses of people with a machine), who had been for some

time patching the pictured heads of well-known and respectable young

ladies to the nude, pictured bodies of another class of women; then from

this patched creation he would make photographs and sell them privately

at high prices to rowdies and blackguards, averring that these, the best

young ladies of the city, had hired him to take their likenesses in that

unclad condition.  What a lecture the police judge read that photographer

when he was convicted!  He told him his crime was little less than an

outrage.  He abused that photographer till he almost made him sink

through the floor, and then he fined him a hundred dollars.  And he told

him he might consider himself lucky that he didn't fine him a hundred and

twenty-five dollars.  They are awfully severe on crime here.



About two or two and a half hours after midnight, of that first

experience of mine in the city prison, such of us as were dozing were

awakened by a noise of beating and dragging and groaning, and in a little

while a man was pushed into our den with a "There, d---n you, soak there

a spell!"--and then the gate was closed and the officers went away again.

The man who was thrust among us fell limp and helpless by the grating,

but as nobody could reach him with a kick without the trouble of hitching

along toward him or getting fairly up to deliver it, our people only

grumbled at him, and cursed him, and called him insulting names--for

misery and hardship do not make their victims gentle or charitable toward

each other.  But as he neither tried humbly to conciliate our people nor

swore back at them, his unnatural conduct created surprise, and several

of the party crawled to him where he lay in the dim light that came

through the grating, and examined into his case.  His head was very

bloody and his wits were gone.  After about an hour, he sat up and stared

around; then his eyes grew more natural and he began to tell how that he

was going along with a bag on his shoulder and a brace of policemen

ordered him to stop, which he did not do--was chased and caught, beaten

ferociously about the head on the way to the prison and after arrival

there, and finally I thrown into our den like a dog.



And in a few seconds he sank down again and grew flighty of speech.  One

of our people was at last penetrated with something vaguely akin to

compassion, may be, for he looked out through the gratings at the

guardian officer, pacing to and fro, and said:



"Say, Mickey, this shrimp's goin' to die."



"Stop your noise!" was all the answer he got.  But presently our man

tried it again.  He drew himself to the gratings, grasping them with his

hands, and looking out through them, sat waiting till the officer was

passing once more, and then said:



"Sweetness, you'd better mind your eye, now, because you beats have

killed this cuss.  You've busted his head and he'll pass in his checks

before sun-up.  You better go for a doctor, now, you bet you had."



The officer delivered a sudden rap on our man's knuckles with his club,

that sent him scampering and howling among the sleeping forms on the

flag-stones, and an answering burst of laughter came from the half dozen

policemen idling about the railed desk in the middle of the dungeon.



But there was a putting of heads together out there presently, and a

conversing in low voices, which seemed to show that our man's talk had

made an impression; and presently an officer went away in a hurry, and

shortly came back with a person who entered our cell and felt the bruised

man's pulse and threw the glare of a lantern on his drawn face, striped

with blood, and his glassy eyes, fixed and vacant.  The doctor examined

the man's broken head also, and presently said:



"If you'd called me an hour ago I might have saved this man, may be too

late now."



Then he walked out into the dungeon and the officers surrounded him, and

they kept up a low and earnest buzzing of conversation for fifteen

minutes, I should think, and then the doctor took his departure from the

prison.  Several of the officers now came in and worked a little with the

wounded man, but toward daylight he died.



It was the longest, longest night!  And when the daylight came filtering

reluctantly into the dungeon at last, it was the grayest, dreariest,

saddest daylight!  And yet, when an officer by and by turned off the

sickly yellow gas flame, and immediately the gray of dawn became fresh

and white, there was a lifting of my spirits that acknowledged and

believed that the night was gone, and straightway I fell to stretching my

sore limbs, and looking about me with a grateful sense of relief and a

returning interest in life.  About me lay the evidences that what seemed

now a feverish dream and a nightmare was the memory of a reality instead.

For on the boards lay four frowsy, ragged, bearded vagabonds, snoring--

one turned end-for-end and resting an unclean foot, in a ruined

stocking, on the hairy breast of a neighbour; the young boy was uneasy,

and lay moaning in his sleep; other forms lay half revealed and half

concealed about the floor; in the furthest corner the gray light fell

upon a sheet, whose elevations and depressions indicated the places of

the dead man's face and feet and folded hands; and through the dividing

bars one could discern the almost nude forms of the two exiles from the

county jail twined together in a drunken embrace, and sodden with sleep.



By and by all the animals in all the cages awoke, and stretched

themselves, and exchanged a few cuffs and curses, and then began to

clamour for breakfast.  Breakfast was brought in at last--bread and

beefsteak on tin plates, and black coffee in tin cups, and no grabbing

allowed.  And after several dreary hours of waiting, after this, we were

all marched out into the dungeon and joined there by all manner of

vagrants and vagabonds, of all shades and colours and nationalities, from

the other cells and cages of the place; and pretty soon our whole

menagerie was marched up-stairs and locked fast behind a high railing in

a dirty room with a dirty audience in it.  And this audience stared at

us, and at a man seated on high behind what they call a pulpit in this

country, and at some clerks and other officials seated below him--and

waited.  This was the police court.



The court opened.  Pretty soon I was compelled to notice that a culprit's

nationality made for or against him in this court.  Overwhelming proofs

were necessary to convict an Irishman of crime, and even then his

punishment amounted to little; Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Italians had

strict and unprejudiced justice meted out to them, in exact accordance

with the evidence; negroes were promptly punished, when there was the

slightest preponderance of testimony against them; but Chinamen were

punished always, apparently.  Now this gave me some uneasiness, I

confess.  I knew that this state of things must of necessity be

accidental, because in this country all men were free and equal, and one

person could not take to himself an advantage not accorded to all other

individuals.  I knew that, and yet in spite of it I was uneasy.



And I grew still more uneasy, when I found that any succored and

befriended refugee from Ireland or elsewhere could stand up before that

judge and swear, away the life or liberty or character of a refugee from

China; but that by the law of the land the Chinaman could not testify

against the Irishman.  I was really and truly uneasy, but still my faith

in the universal liberty that America accords and defends, and my deep

veneration for the land that offered all distressed outcasts a home and

protection, was strong within me, and I said to myself that it would all

come out right yet.

                                                  AH SONG HI.









LETTER VII



                                                  SAN FRANCISCO, 18--.

DEAR CHING FOO:  I was glad enough when my case came up.  An hour's

experience had made me as tired of the police court as of the dungeon.

I was not uneasy about the result of the trial, but on the contrary felt

that as soon as the large auditory of Americans present should hear how

that the rowdies had set the dogs on me when I was going peacefully along

the street, and how, when I was all torn and bleeding, the officers

arrested me and put me in jail and let the rowdies go free, the gallant

hatred of oppression which is part of the very flesh and blood of every

American would be stirred to its utmost, and I should be instantly set at

liberty.  In truth I began to fear for the other side.  There in full

view stood the ruffians who had misused me, and I began to fear that in

the first burst of generous anger occasioned by the revealment of what

they had done, they might be harshly handled, and possibly even banished

the country as having dishonoured her and being no longer worthy to

remain upon her sacred soil.



The official interpreter of the court asked my name, and then spoke it

aloud so that all could hear.  Supposing that all was now ready, I

cleared my throat and began--in Chinese, because of my imperfect English:



"Hear, O high and mighty mandarin, and believe!  As I went about my

peaceful business in the street, behold certain men set a dog on me,

and--



"Silence!"



It was the judge that spoke.  The interpreter whispered to me that I must

keep perfectly still.  He said that no statement would be received from

me--I must only talk through my lawyer.



I had no lawyer.  In the early morning a police court lawyer (termed, in

the higher circles of society, a "shyster") had come into our den in the

prison and offered his services to me, but I had been obliged to go

without them because I could not pay in advance or give security.  I told

the interpreter how the matter stood.  He said I must take my chances on

the witnesses then.  I glanced around, and my failing confidence revived.



"Call those four Chinamen yonder," I said.  "They saw it all.  I remember

their faces perfectly.  They will prove that the white men set the dog on

me when I was not harming them."



"That won't work," said he.  "In this country white men can testify

against Chinamen all they want to, but Chinamen ain't allowed to testify

against white men!"



What a chill went through me!  And then I felt the indignant blood rise

to my cheek at this libel upon the Home of the Oppressed, where all men

are free and equal--perfectly equal--perfectly free and perfectly equal.

I despised this Chinese-speaking Spaniard for his mean slander of the

land that was sheltering and feeding him.  I sorely wanted to sear his

eyes with that sentence from the great and good American Declaration of

Independence which we have copied in letters of gold in China and keep

hung up over our family altars and in our temples--I mean the one about

all men being created free and equal.



But woe is me, Ching Foo, the man was right.  He was right, after all.

There were my witnesses, but I could not use them.  But now came a new

hope.  I saw my white friend come in, and I felt that he had come there

purposely to help me.  I may almost say I knew it.  So I grew easier.

He passed near enough to me to say under his breath, "Don't be afraid,"

and then I had no more fear.  But presently the rowdies recognised him

and began to scowl at him in no friendly way, and to make threatening

signs at him.  The two officers that arrested me fixed their eyes

steadily on his; he bore it well, but gave in presently, and dropped his

eyes.  They still gazed at his eyebrows, and every time he raised his

eyes he encountered their winkless stare--until after a minute or two he

ceased to lift his head at all.  The judge had been giving some

instructions privately to some one for a little while, but now he was

ready to resume business.  Then the trial so unspeakably important to me,

and freighted with such prodigious consequence to my wife and children,

began, progressed, ended, was recorded in the books, noted down by the

newspaper reporters, and forgotten by everybody but me--all in the little

space of two minutes!



"Ah Song Hi, Chinaman.  Officers O'Flannigan and O'Flaherty, witnesses.

Come forward, Officer O'Flannigan."



OFFICER--"He was making a disturbance in Kearny street."



JUDGE--"Any witnesses on the other side?"  No response.  The white friend

raised his eyes encountered Officer O'Flaherty's--blushed a little--got

up and left the courtroom, avoiding all glances and not taking his own

from the floor.



JUDGE--"Give him five dollars or ten days."



In my desolation there was a glad surprise in the words; but it passed

away when I found that he only meant that I was to be fined five dollars

or imprisoned ten days longer in default of it.



There were twelve or fifteen Chinamen in our crowd of prisoners, charged

with all manner of little thefts and misdemeanors, and their cases were

quickly disposed of, as a general thing.  When the charge came from a

policeman or other white man, he made his statement and that was the end

of it, unless the Chinaman's lawyer could find some white person to

testify in his client's behalf, for, neither the accused Chinaman nor his

countrymen being allowed to say anything, the statement of the officers

or other white person was amply sufficient to convict.  So, as I said,

the Chinamen's cases were quickly disposed of, and fines and imprisonment

promptly distributed among them.  In one or two of the cases the charges

against Chinamen were brought by Chinamen themselves, and in those cases

Chinamen testified against Chinamen, through the interpreter; but the

fixed rule of the court being that the preponderance of testimony in such

cases should determine the prisoner's guilt or innocence, and there being

nothing very binding about an oath administered to the lower orders of

our people without the ancient solemnity of cutting off a chicken's head

and burning some yellow paper at the same time, the interested parties

naturally drum up a cloud of witnesses who are cheerfully willing to give

evidence without ever knowing anything about the matter in hand.  The

judge has a custom of rattling through with as much of this testimony as

his patience will stand, and then shutting off the rest and striking an

average.



By noon all the business of the court was finished, and then several of

us who had not fared well were remanded to prison; the judge went home;

the lawyers, and officers, and spectators departed their several ways,

and left the uncomely court-room to silence, solitude, and Stiggers, the

newspaper reporter, which latter would now write up his items (said an

ancient Chinaman to me), in the which he would praise all the policemen

indiscriminately and abuse the Chinamen and dead people.



                                                       AH SONG HI.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Goldsmiths Friend Abroad Again,

by Mark Twain













HOW TO TELL A STORY AND OTHERS



by Mark Twain









CONTENTS:

     HOW TO TELL A STORY

          THE WOUNDED SOLDIER

          THE GOLDEN ARM

     MENTAL TELEGRAPHY AGAIN

     THE INVALIDS STORY







HOW TO TELL A STORY



          The Humorous Story an American Development.--Its Difference

          from Comic and Witty Stories.



I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told.  I only

claim to know how a story ought to be told, for I have been almost daily

in the company of the most expert story-tellers for many years.



There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind--the

humorous.  I will talk mainly about that one.  The humorous story is

American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French.  The

humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling;

the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.



The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around

as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic

and witty stories must be brief and end with a point.  The humorous story

bubbles gently along, the others burst.



The humorous story is strictly a work of art--high and delicate art--

and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the

comic and the witty story; anybody can do it.  The art of telling a

humorous story--understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print--was

created in America, and has remained at home.



The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal

the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about

it; but the teller of the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one

of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager

delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through.  And

sometimes, if he has had good success, he is so glad and happy that he

will repeat the "nub" of it and glance around from face to face,

collecting applause, and then repeat it again.  It is a pathetic thing to

see.



Very often, of course, the rambling and disjointed humorous story

finishes with a nub, point, snapper, or whatever you like to call it.

Then the listener must be alert, for in many cases the teller will divert

attention from that nub by dropping it in a carefully casual and

indifferent way, with the pretence that he does not know it is a nub.



Artemus Ward used that trick a good deal; then when the belated audience

presently caught the joke he would look up with innocent surprise, as if

wondering what they had found to laugh at.  Dan Setchell used it before

him, Nye and Riley and others use it to-day.



But the teller of the comic story does not slur the nub; he shouts it at

you--every time.  And when he prints it, in England, France, Germany, and

Italy, he italicizes it, puts some whooping exclamation-points after it,

and sometimes explains it in a parenthesis.  All of which is very

depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life.



Let me set down an instance of the comic method, using an anecdote which

has been popular all over the world for twelve or fifteen hundred years.

The teller tells it in this way:



                           THE WOUNDED SOLDIER.



In the course of a certain battle a soldier whose leg had been shot off

appealed to another soldier who was hurrying by to carry him to the rear,

informing him at the same time of the loss which he had sustained;

whereupon the generous son of Mars, shouldering the unfortunate,

proceeded to carry out his desire.  The bullets and cannon-balls were

flying in all directions, and presently one of the latter took the

wounded man's head off--without, however, his deliverer being aware of

it.  In no-long time he was hailed by an officer, who said:



"Where are you going with that carcass?"



"To the rear, sir--he's lost his leg!"



"His leg, forsooth?" responded the astonished officer; "you mean his

head, you booby."



Whereupon the soldier dispossessed himself of his burden, and stood

looking down upon it in great perplexity.  At length he said:



"It is true, sir, just as you have said."  Then after a pause he added,

"But he TOLD me IT WAS HIS LEG!  !  !  !  !"





Here the narrator bursts into explosion after explosion of thunderous

horse-laughter, repeating that nub from time to time through his gaspings

and shriekings and suffocatings.



It takes only a minute and a half to tell that in its comic-story form;

and isn't worth the telling, after all.  Put into the humorous-story form

it takes ten minutes, and is about the funniest thing I have ever

listened to--as James Whitcomb Riley tells it.



He tells it in the character of a dull-witted old farmer who has just

heard it for the first time, thinks it is unspeakably funny, and is

trying to repeat it to a neighbor.  But he can't remember it; so he gets

all mixed up and wanders helplessly round and round, putting in tedious

details that don't belong in the tale and only retard it; taking them out

conscientiously and putting in others that are just as useless; making

minor mistakes now and then and stopping to correct them and explain how

he came to make them; remembering things which he forgot to put in in

their proper place and going back to put them in there; stopping his

narrative a good while in order to try to recall the name of the soldier

that was hurt, and finally remembering that the soldier's name was not

mentioned, and remarking placidly that the name is of no real importance,

anyway--better, of course, if one knew it, but not essential, after all--

and so on, and so on, and so on.



The teller is innocent and happy and pleased with himself, and has to

stop every little while to hold himself in and keep from laughing

outright; and does hold in, but his body quakes in a jelly-like way with

interior chuckles; and at the end of the ten minutes the audience have

laughed until they are exhausted, and the tears are running down their

faces.



The simplicity and innocence and sincerity and unconsciousness of the old

farmer are perfectly simulated, and the result is a performance which is

thoroughly charming and delicious.  This is art and fine and beautiful,

and only a master can compass it; but a machine could tell the other

story.



To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and

sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are

absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.

Another feature is the slurring of the point.  A third is the dropping of

a studied remark apparently without knowing it, as if one were thinking

aloud.  The fourth and last is the pause.



Artemus Ward dealt in numbers three and four a good deal.  He would begin

to tell with great animation something which he seemed to think was

wonderful; then lose confidence, and after an apparently absent-minded

pause add an incongruous remark in a soliloquizing way; and that was the

remark intended to explode the mine--and it did.



For instance, he would say eagerly, excitedly, "I once knew a man in New

Zealand who hadn't a tooth in his head"--here his animation would die

out; a silent, reflective pause would follow, then he would say dreamily,

and as if to himself, "and yet that man could beat a drum better than any

man I ever saw."



The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a

frequently recurring feature, too.  It is a dainty thing, and delicate,

and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right

length--no more and no less--or it fails of its purpose and makes

trouble.  If the pause is too short the impressive point is passed, and

[and if too long] the audience have had time to divine that a surprise is

intended--and then you can't surprise them, of course.



On the platform I used to tell a negro ghost story that had a pause in

front of the snapper on the end, and that pause was the most important

thing in the whole story.  If I got it the right length precisely, I

could spring the finishing ejaculation with effect enough to make some

impressible girl deliver a startled little yelp and jump out of her seat

--and that was what I was after.  This story was called "The Golden Arm,"

and was told in this fashion.  You can practise with it yourself--and

mind you look out for the pause and get it right.



                             THE GOLDEN ARM.



Once 'pon a time dey wuz a monsus mean man, en he live 'way out in de

prairie all 'lone by hisself, 'cep'n he had a wife.  En bimeby she died,

en he tuck en toted her way out dah in de prairie en buried her.  Well,

she had a golden arm--all solid gold, fum de shoulder down.  He wuz

pow'ful mean--pow'ful; en dat night he couldn't sleep, Gaze he want dat

golden arm so bad.



When it come midnight he couldn't stan' it no mo'; so he git up, he did,

en tuck his lantern en shoved out thoo de storm en dug her up en got de

golden arm; en he bent his head down 'gin de win', en plowed en plowed en

plowed thoo de snow.  Den all on a sudden he stop (make a considerable

pause here, and look startled, and take a listening attitude) en say:

"My LAN', what's dat!"



En he listen--en listen--en de win' say (set your teeth together and

imitate the wailing and wheezing singsong of the wind), "Bzzz-z-zzz"---

en den, way back yonder whah de grave is, he hear a voice!  he hear a

voice all mix' up in de win' can't hardly tell 'em 'part--" Bzzz-zzz--

W-h-o--g-o-t--m-y--g-o-l-d-e-n arm?  --zzz--zzz-- W-h-o g-o-t m-y g-o-l-

d-e-n arm!" (You must begin to shiver violently now.)



En he begin to shiver en shake, en say, "Oh, my!  OH, my lan'!  "en de

win' blow de lantern out, en de snow en sleet blow in his face en mos'

choke him, en he start a-plowin' knee-deep towards home mos' dead, he so

sk'yerd--en pooty soon he hear de voice agin, en (pause) it 'us comin'

after him!  "Bzzz--zzz--zzz--W-h-o--g-o-t m-y--g-o-l-d-e-n--arm?"



When he git to de pasture he hear it agin closter now, en a-comin'!--

a-comin' back dah in de dark en de storm--(repeat the wind and the

voice).  When he git to de house he rush up-stairs en jump in de bed en

kiver up, head and years, en lay dah shiverin' en shakin'--en den way out

dah he hear it agin!--en a-comin'!  En bimeby he hear (pause--awed,

listening attitude)--pat--pat--pat--hit's acomin' up-stairs!  Den he

hear de latch, en he know it's in de room!



Den pooty soon he know it's a-stannin' by de bed!  (Pause.) Den--he know

it's a-bendin' down over him--en he cain't skasely git his breath!  Den--

den--he seem to feel someth' n c-o-l-d, right down 'most agin his head!

(Pause.)



Den de voice say, right at his year--"W-h-o g-o-t--m-y--g-o-l-d-e-n

arm?" (You must wail it out very plaintively and accusingly; then you

stare steadily and impressively into the face of the farthest-gone

auditor--a girl, preferably--and let that awe-inspiring pause begin to

build itself in the deep hush.  When it has reached exactly the right

length, jump suddenly at that girl and yell, "You've got it!")



If you've got the pause right, she'll fetch a dear little yelp and spring

right out of her shoes.  But you must get the pause right; and you will

find it the most troublesome and aggravating and uncertain thing you ever

undertook.















MENTAL TELEGRAPHY AGAIN



I have three or four curious incidents to tell about.  They seem to come

under the head of what I named "Mental Telegraphy" in a paper written

seventeen years ago, and published long afterwards.--[The paper entitled

"Mental Telegraphy," which originally appeared in Harper's Magazine for

December, 1893, is included in the volume entitled The American Claimant

and Other Stories and Sketches.]



Several years ago I made a campaign on the platform with Mr. George W.

Cable.  In Montreal we were honored with a reception.  It began at two in

the afternoon in a long drawing-room in the Windsor Hotel.  Mr. Cable and

I stood at one end of this room, and the ladies and gentlemen entered it

at the other end, crossed it at that end, then came up the long left-hand

side, shook hands with us, said a word or two, and passed on, in the

usual way.  My sight is of the telescopic sort, and I presently

recognized a familiar face among the throng of strangers drifting in at

the distant door, and I said to myself, with surprise and high

gratification, "That is Mrs. R.; I had forgotten that she was a

Canadian."  She had been a great friend of mine in Carson City, Nevada,

in the early days.  I had not seen her or heard of her for twenty years;

I had not been thinking about her; there was nothing to suggest her to

me, nothing to bring her to my mind; in fact, to me she had long ago

ceased to exist, and had disappeared from my consciousness.  But I knew

her instantly; and I saw her so clearly that I was able to note some of

the particulars of her dress, and did note them, and they remained in my

mind.  I was impatient for her to come.  In the midst of the hand-

shakings I snatched glimpses of her and noted her progress with the slow-

moving file across the end of the room; then I saw her start up the side,

and this gave me a full front view of her face.  I saw her last when she

was within twenty-five feet of me.  For an hour I kept thinking she must

still be in the room somewhere and would come at last, but I was

disappointed.



When I arrived in the lecture-hall that evening some one said: "Come into

the waiting-room; there's a friend of yours there who wants to see you.

You'll not be introduced--you are to do the recognizing without help if

you can."



I said to myself: "It is Mrs. R.; I shan't have any trouble."



There were perhaps ten ladies present, all seated.  In the midst of them

was Mrs. R., as I had expected.  She was dressed exactly as she was when

I had seen her in the afternoon.  I went forward and shook hands with her

and called her by name, and said:



"I knew you the moment you appeared at the reception this afternoon."

She looked surprised, and said: "But I was not at the reception.  I have

just arrived from Quebec, and have not been in town an hour."



It was my turn to be surprised now.  I said: "I can't help it.  I give

you my word of honor that it is as I say.  I saw you at the reception,

and you were dressed precisely as you are now.  When they told me a

moment ago that I should find a friend in this room, your image rose

before me, dress and all, just as I had seen you at the reception."



Those are the facts.  She was not at the reception at all, or anywhere

near it; but I saw her there nevertheless, and most clearly and

unmistakably.  To that I could make oath.  How is one to explain this?  I

was not thinking of her at the time; had not thought of her for years.

But she had been thinking of me, no doubt; did her thoughts flit through

leagues of air to me, and bring with it that clear and pleasant vision of

herself?  I think so.  That was and remains my sole experience in the

matter of apparitions--I mean apparitions that come when one is

(ostensibly) awake.  I could have been asleep for a moment; the

apparition could have been the creature of a dream.  Still, that is

nothing to the point; the feature of interest is the happening of the

thing just at that time, instead of at an earlier or later time, which is

argument that its origin lay in thought-transference.



My next incident will be set aside by most persons as being merely

a "coincidence," I suppose.  Years ago I used to think sometimes of

making a lecturing trip through the antipodes and the borders of the

Orient, but always gave up the idea, partly because of the great length

of the journey and partly because my wife could not well manage to go

with me.  Towards the end of last January that idea, after an interval of

years, came suddenly into my head again--forcefully, too, and without any

apparent reason.  Whence came it?  What suggested it?  I will touch upon

that presently.



I was at that time where I am now--in Paris.  I wrote at once to Henry M.

Stanley (London), and asked him some questions about his Australian

lecture tour, and inquired who had conducted him and what were the terms.

After a day or two his answer came.  It began:



          "The lecture agent for Australia and New Zealand is par

          excellence Mr.  R. S. Smythe, of Melbourne."



He added his itinerary, terms, sea expenses, and some other matters, and

advised me to write Mr. Smythe, which I did--February 3d.  I began my

letter by saying in substance that while he did not know me personally we

had a mutual friend in Stanley, and that would answer for an

introduction.  Then I proposed my trip, and asked if he would give me the

same terms which he had given Stanley.



I mailed my letter to Mr. Smythe February 6th, and three days later I got

a letter from the selfsame Smythe, dated Melbourne, December 17th.  I

would as soon have expected to get a letter from the late George

Washington.  The letter began somewhat as mine to him had begun--with a

self-introduction:



          "DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--It is so long since Archibald Forbes and I

          spent that pleasant afternoon in your comfortable house at

          Hartford that you have probably quite forgotten the occasion."



In the course of his letter this occurs:



          "I am willing to give you" [here be named the terms which he

          had given Stanley] "for an antipodean tour to last, say, three

          months."



Here was the single essential detail of my letter answered three days

after I had mailed my inquiry.  I might have saved myself the trouble and

the postage--and a few years ago I would have done that very thing, for I

would have argued that my sudden and strong impulse to write and ask some

questions of a stranger on the under side of the globe meant that the

impulse came from that stranger, and that he would answer my questions of

his own motion if I would let him alone.



Mr. Smythe's letter probably passed under my nose on its way to lose

three weeks traveling to America and back, and gave me a whiff of its

contents as it went along.  Letters often act like that.  Instead of the

thought coming to you in an instant from Australia, the (apparently)

unsentient letter imparts it to you as it glides invisibly past your

elbow in the mail-bag.



Next incident.  In the following month--March--I was in America.  I spent

a Sunday at Irvington-on-the-Hudson with Mr. John Brisben Walker, of the

Cosmopolitan magazine.  We came into New York next morning, and went to

the Century Club for luncheon.  He said some praiseful things about the

character of the club and the orderly serenity and pleasantness of its

quarters, and asked if I had never tried to acquire membership in it.

I said I had not, and that New York clubs were a continuous expense to

the country members without being of frequent use or benefit to them.



"And now I've got an idea!" said I.  "There's the Lotos--the first New

York club I was ever a member of--my very earliest love in that line.

I have been a member of it for considerably more than twenty years, yet

have seldom had a chance to look in and see the boys.  They turn gray and

grow old while I am not watching.  And my dues go on.  I am going to

Hartford this afternoon for a day or two, but as soon as I get back I

will go to John Elderkin very privately and say: 'Remember the veteran

and confer distinction upon him, for the sake of old times.  Make me an

honorary member and abolish the tax.  If you haven't any such thing as

honorary membership, all the better--create it for my honor and glory.'

That would be a great thing; I will go to John Elderkin as soon as I get

back from Hartford."



I took the last express that afternoon, first telegraphing Mr. F. G.

Whitmore to come and see me next day.  When he came he asked: "Did you

get a letter from Mr. John Elderkin, secretary of the Lotos Club, before

you left New York?"



"Then it just missed you.  If I had known you were coming I would have

kept it.  It is beautiful, and will make you proud.  The Board of

Directors, by unanimous vote, have made you a life member, and squelched

those dues; and, you are to be on hand and receive your distinction on

the night of the 30th, which is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the

founding of the club, and it will not surprise me if they have some great

times there."



What put the honorary membership in my head that day in the Century Club?

for I had never thought of it before.  I don't know what brought the

thought to me at that particular time instead of earlier, but I am well

satisfied that it originated with the Board of Directors, and had been on

its way to my brain through the air ever since the moment that saw their

vote recorded.



Another incident.  I was in Hartford two or three days as a guest of the

Rev. Joseph H. Twichell.  I have held the rank of Honorary Uncle to his

children for a quarter of a century, and I went out with him in the

trolley-car to visit one of my nieces, who is at Miss Porter's famous

school in Farmington.  The distance is eight or nine miles.  On the way,

talking, I illustrated something with an anecdote.  This is the anecdote:



Two years and a half ago I and the family arrived at Milan on our way to

Rome, and stopped at the Continental.  After dinner I went below and took

a seat in the stone-paved court, where the customary lemon-trees stand in

the customary tubs, and said to myself, "Now this is comfort, comfort and

repose, and nobody to disturb it; I do not know anybody in Milan."



Then a young gentleman stepped up and shook hands, which damaged my

theory.  He said, in substance:



"You won't remember me, Mr. Clemens, but I remember you very well.  I was

a cadet at West Point when you and Rev. Joseph H. Twichell came there

some years ago and talked to us on a Hundredth Night.  I am a lieutenant

in the regular army now, and my name is H.  I am in Europe, all alone,

for a modest little tour; my regiment is in Arizona."



We became friendly and sociable, and in the course of the talk he told me

of an adventure which had befallen him--about to this effect:



"I was at Bellagio, stopping at the big hotel there, and ten days ago I

lost my letter of credit.  I did not know what in the world to do.  I was

a stranger; I knew no one in Europe; I hadn't a penny in my pocket; I

couldn't even send a telegram to London to get my lost letter replaced;

my hotel bill was a week old, and the presentation of it imminent--so

imminent that it could happen at any moment now.  I was so frightened

that my wits seemed to leave me.  I tramped and tramped, back and forth,

like a crazy person.  If anybody approached me I hurried away, for no

matter what a person looked like, I took him for the head waiter with the

bill.



"I was at last in such a desperate state that I was ready to do any wild

thing that promised even the shadow of help, and so this is the insane

thing that I did.  I saw a family lunching at a small table on the

veranda, and recognized their nationality--Americans--father, mother, and

several young daughters--young, tastefully dressed, and pretty--the rule

with our people.  I went straight there in my civilian costume, named my

name, said I was a lieutenant in the army, and told my story and asked

for help.



"What do you suppose the gentleman did?  But you would not guess in

twenty years.  He took out a handful of gold coin and told me to help

myself--freely.  That is what he did."



The next morning the lieutenant told me his new letter of credit had

arrived in the night, so we strolled to Cook's to draw money to pay back

the benefactor with.  We got it, and then went strolling through the

great arcade.  Presently he said, "Yonder they are; come and be

introduced."  I was introduced to the parents and the young ladies; then

we separated, and I never saw him or them any m---



"Here we are at Farmington," said Twichell, interrupting.



We left the trolley-car and tramped through the mud a hundred yards or so

to the school, talking about the time we and Warner walked out there

years ago, and the pleasant time we had.



We had a visit with my niece in the parlor, then started for the trolley

again.  Outside the house we encountered a double rank of twenty or

thirty of Miss Porter's young ladies arriving from a walk, and we stood

aside, ostensibly to let them have room to file past, but really to look

at them.  Presently one of them stepped out of the rank and said:



"You don't know me, Mr. Twichell; but I know your daughter, and that

gives me the privilege of shaking hands with you."



Then she put out her hand to me, and said:



"And I wish to shake hands with you too, Mr. Clemens.  You don't remember

me, but you were introduced to me in the arcade in Milan two years and a

half ago by Lieutenant H."



What had put that story into my head after all that stretch of time?  Was

it just the proximity of that young girl, or was it merely an odd

accident?















THE INVALID'S STORY



I seem sixty and married, but these effects are due to my condition and

sufferings, for I am a bachelor, and only forty-one.  It will be hard for

you to believe that I, who am now but a shadow, was a hale, hearty man

two short years ago, a man of iron, a very athlete!--yet such is the

simple truth.  But stranger still than this fact is the way in which I

lost my health.  I lost it through helping to take care of a box of guns

on a two-hundred-mile railway journey one winter's night.  It is the

actual truth, and I will tell you about it.



I belong in Cleveland, Ohio.  One winter's night, two years ago, I

reached home just after dark, in a driving snow-storm, and the first

thing I heard when I entered the house was that my dearest boyhood friend

and schoolmate, John B. Hackett, had died the day before, and that his

last utterance had been a desire that I would take his remains home to

his poor old father and mother in Wisconsin.  I was greatly shocked and

grieved, but there was no time to waste in emotions; I must start at

once.  I took the card, marked "Deacon Levi Hackett, Bethlehem,

Wisconsin," and hurried off through the whistling storm to the railway

station.  Arrived there I found the long white-pine box which had been

described to me; I fastened the card to it with some tacks, saw it put

safely aboard the express car, and then ran into the eating-room to

provide myself with a sandwich and some cigars.  When I returned,

presently, there was my coffin-box back again, apparently, and a young

fellow examining around it, with a card in his hands, and some tacks and

a hammer!  I was astonished and puzzled.  He began to nail on his card,

and I rushed out to the express car, in a good deal of a state of mind,

to ask for an explanation.  But no--there was my box, all right, in the

express car; it hadn't been disturbed.  [The fact is that without my

suspecting it a prodigious mistake had been made.  I was carrying off a

box of guns which that young fellow had come to the station to ship to a

rifle company in Peoria, Illinois, and he had got my corpse!]  Just then

the conductor sung out "All aboard," and I jumped into the express car

and got a comfortable seat on a bale of buckets.  The expressman was

there, hard at work,--a plain man of fifty, with a simple, honest, good-

natured face, and a breezy, practical heartiness in his general style.

As the train moved off a stranger skipped into the car and set a package

of peculiarly mature and capable Limburger cheese on one end of my

coffin-box--I mean my box of guns.  That is to say, I know now that it

was Limburger cheese, but at that time I never had heard of the article

in my life, and of course was wholly ignorant of its character.  Well, we

sped through the wild night, the bitter storm raged on, a cheerless

misery stole over me, my heart went down, down, down!  The old expressman

made a brisk remark or two about the tempest and the arctic weather,

slammed his sliding doors to, and bolted them, closed his window down

tight, and then went bustling around, here and there and yonder, setting

things to rights, and all the time contentedly humming "Sweet By and By,"

in a low tone, and flatting a good deal.  Presently I began to detect a

most evil and searching odor stealing about on the frozen air.  This

depressed my spirits still more, because of course I attributed it to my

poor departed friend.  There was something infinitely saddening about his

calling himself to my remembrance in this dumb pathetic way, so it was

hard to keep the tears back.  Moreover, it distressed me on account of

the old expressman, who, I was afraid, might notice it.  However, he went

humming tranquilly on, and gave no sign; and for this I was grateful.

Grateful, yes, but still uneasy; and soon I began to feel more and more

uneasy every minute, for every minute that went by that odor thickened up

the more, and got to be more and more gamey and hard to stand.

Presently, having got things arranged to his satisfaction, the expressman

got some wood and made up a tremendous fire in his stove.



This distressed me more than I can tell, for I could not but feel that it

was a mistake.  I was sure that the effect would be deleterious upon my

poor departed friend.  Thompson--the expressman's name was Thompson, as I

found out in the course of the night--now went poking around his car,

stopping up whatever stray cracks he could find, remarking that it didn't

make any difference what kind of a night it was outside, he calculated to

make us comfortable, anyway.  I said nothing, but I believed he was not

choosing the right way.  Meantime he was humming to himself just as

before; and meantime, too, the stove was getting hotter and hotter, and

the place closer and closer.  I felt myself growing pale and qualmish,

but grieved in silence and said nothing.



Soon I noticed that the "Sweet By and By" was gradually fading out; next

it ceased altogether, and there was an ominous stillness.  After a few

moments Thompson said,



"Pfew!  I reckon it ain't no cinnamon 't I've loaded up thish-yer stove

with!"



He gasped once or twice, then moved toward the cof--gun-box, stood over

that Limburger cheese part of a moment, then came back and sat down near

me, looking a good deal impressed.  After a contemplative pause, he said,

indicating the box with a gesture,



"Friend of yourn?"



"Yes," I said with a sigh.



"He's pretty ripe, ain't he!"



Nothing further was said for perhaps a couple of minutes, each being busy

with his own thoughts; then Thompson said, in a low, awed voice,



"Sometimes it's uncertain whether they're really gone or not,--seem gone,

you know--body warm, joints limber--and so, although you think they're

gone, you don't really know.  I've had cases in my car.  It's perfectly

awful, becuz you don't know what minute they'll rise up and look at you!"

Then, after a pause, and slightly lifting his elbow toward the box,--

"But he ain't in no trance!  No, sir, I go bail for him!"



We sat some time, in meditative silence, listening to the wind and the

roar of the train; then Thompson said, with a good deal of feeling,



"Well-a-well, we've all got to go, they ain't no getting around it.  Man

that is born of woman is of few days and far between, as Scriptur' says.

Yes, you look at it any way you want to, it's awful solemn and cur'us:

they ain't nobody can get around it; all's got to go--just everybody, as

you may say.  One day you're hearty and strong"--here he scrambled to his

feet and broke a pane and stretched his nose out at it a moment or two,

then sat down again while I struggled up and thrust my nose out at the

same place, and this we kept on doing every now and then--" and next day

he's cut down like the grass, and the places which knowed him then knows

him no more forever, as Scriptur' says.  Yes'ndeedy, it's awful solemn

and cur'us; but we've all got to go, one time or another; they ain't no

getting around it."



There was another long pause; then,--



"What did he die of?"



I said I didn't know.



"How long has he ben dead?"



It seemed judicious to enlarge the facts to fit the probabilities; so I

said,



"Two or three days."



But it did no good; for Thompson received it with an injured look which

plainly said, "Two or three years, you mean."  Then he went right along,

placidly ignoring my statement, and gave his views at considerable length

upon the unwisdom of putting off burials too long.  Then he lounged off

toward the box, stood a moment, then came back on a sharp trot and

visited the broken pane, observing,



"'Twould 'a' ben a dum sight better, all around, if they'd started him

along last summer."



Thompson sat down and buried his face in his red silk handkerchief, and

began to slowly sway and rock his body like one who is doing his best to

endure the almost unendurable.  By this time the fragrance--if you may

call it fragrance--was just about suffocating, as near as you can come at

it.  Thompson's face was turning gray; I knew mine hadn't any color left

in it.  By and by Thompson rested his forehead in his left hand, with his

elbow on his knee, and sort of waved his red handkerchief towards the box

with his other hand, and said,--



"I've carried a many a one of 'em,--some of 'em considerable overdue,

too,--but, lordy, he just lays over 'em all!--and does it easy Cap., they

was heliotrope to HIM!"



This recognition of my poor friend gratified me, in spite of the sad

circumstances, because it had so much the sound of a compliment.



Pretty soon it was plain that something had got to be done.  I suggested

cigars.  Thompson thought it was a good idea.  He said,



"Likely it'll modify him some."



We puffed gingerly along for a while, and tried hard to imagine that

things were improved.  But it wasn't any use.  Before very long, and

without any consultation, both cigars were quietly dropped from our

nerveless fingers at the same moment.  Thompson said, with a sigh,



"No, Cap., it don't modify him worth a cent.  Fact is, it makes him

worse, becuz it appears to stir up his ambition.  What do you reckon we

better do, now?"



I was not able to suggest anything; indeed, I had to be swallowing and

swallowing, all the time, and did not like to trust myself to speak.

Thompson fell to maundering, in a desultory and low-spirited way, about

the miserable experiences of this night; and he got to referring to my

poor friend by various titles,--sometimes military ones, sometimes civil

ones; and I noticed that as fast as my poor friend's effectiveness grew,

Thompson promoted him accordingly,--gave him a bigger title.  Finally he

said,



"I've got an idea.  Suppos' n we buckle down to it and give the Colonel a

bit of a shove towards t'other end of the car? --about ten foot, say.  He

wouldn't have so much influence, then, don't you reckon?"



I said it was a good scheme.  So we took in a good fresh breath at the

broken pane, calculating to hold it till we got through; then we went

there and bent over that deadly cheese and took a grip on the box.

Thompson nodded "All ready," and then we threw ourselves forward with all

our might; but Thompson slipped, and slumped down with his nose on the

cheese, and his breath got loose.  He gagged and gasped, and floundered

up and made a break for the door, pawing the air and saying hoarsely,

"Don't hender me! --gimme the road!  I'm a-dying; gimme the road!"

Out on the cold platform I sat down and held his head a while, and he

revived.  Presently he said,



"Do you reckon we started the Gen'rul any?"



I said no; we hadn't budged him.



"Well, then, that idea's up the flume.  We got to think up something

else.  He's suited wher' he is, I reckon; and if that's the way he feels

about it, and has made up his mind that he don't wish to be disturbed,

you bet he's a-going to have his own way in the business.  Yes, better

leave him right wher' he is, long as he wants it so; becuz he holds all

the trumps, don't you know, and so it stands to reason that the man that

lays out to alter his plans for him is going to get left."



But we couldn't stay out there in that mad storm; we should have frozen

to death.  So we went in again and shut the door, and began to suffer

once more and take turns at the break in the window.  By and by, as we

were starting away from a station where we had stopped a moment Thompson.

pranced in cheerily, and exclaimed,



"We're all right, now!  I reckon we've got the Commodore this time.  I

judge I've got the stuff here that'll take the tuck out of him."



It was carbolic acid.  He had a carboy of it.  He sprinkled it all around

everywhere; in fact he drenched everything with it, rifle-box, cheese and

all.  Then we sat down, feeling pretty hopeful.  But it wasn't for long.

You see the two perfumes began to mix, and then--well, pretty soon we

made a break for the door; and out there Thompson swabbed his face with

his bandanna and said in a kind of disheartened way,



"It ain't no use.  We can't buck agin him.  He just utilizes everything

we put up to modify him with, and gives it his own flavor and plays it

back on us.  Why, Cap., don't you know, it's as much as a hundred times

worse in there now than it was when he first got a-going.  I never did

see one of 'em warm up to his work so, and take such a dumnation interest

in it.  No, Sir, I never did, as long as I've ben on the road; and I've

carried a many a one of 'em, as I was telling you."



We went in again after we were frozen pretty stiff; but my, we couldn't

stay in, now.  So we just waltzed back and forth, freezing, and thawing,

and stifling, by turns.  In about an hour we stopped at another station;

and as we left it Thompson came in with a bag, and said,--



"Cap., I'm a-going to chance him once more,--just this once; and if we

don't fetch him this time, the thing for us to do, is to just throw up

the sponge and withdraw from the canvass.  That's the way I put it up."

He had brought a lot of chicken feathers, and dried apples, and leaf

tobacco, and rags, and old shoes, and sulphur, and asafoetida, and one

thing or another; and he, piled them on a breadth of sheet iron in the

middle of the floor, and set fire to them.



When they got well started, I couldn't see, myself, how even the corpse

could stand it.  All that went before was just simply poetry to that

smell,--but mind you, the original smell stood up out of it just as

sublime as ever,--fact is, these other smells just seemed to give it a

better hold; and my, how rich it was!  I didn't make these reflections

there--there wasn't time--made them on the platform.  And breaking for

the platform, Thompson got suffocated and fell; and before I got him

dragged out, which I did by the collar, I was mighty near gone myself.

When we revived, Thompson said dejectedly,--



"We got to stay out here, Cap.  We got to do it.  They ain't no other

way.  The Governor wants to travel alone, and he's fixed so he can

outvote us."



And presently he added,



"And don't you know, we're pisoned.  It's our last trip, you can make up

your mind to it.  Typhoid fever is what's going to come of this.  I feel

it acoming right now.  Yes, sir, we're elected, just as sure as you're

born."



We were taken from the platform an hour later, frozen and insensible, at

the next station, and I went straight off into a virulent fever, and

never knew anything again for three weeks.  I found out, then, that I had

spent that awful night with a harmless box of rifles and a lot of

innocent cheese; but the news was too late to save me; imagination had

done its work, and my health was permanently shattered; neither Bermuda

nor any other land can ever bring it back tome.  This is my last trip; I

am on my way home to die.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of How Tell a Story and Others

by Mark Twain













MARK TWAIN'S SPEECHES



by Mark Twain







CONTENTS:



     INTRODUCTION

     PREFACE

     THE STORY OF A SPEECH

     PLYMOUTH ROCK AND THE PILGRIMS

     COMPLIMENTS AND DEGREES

     BOOKS, AUTHORS, AND HATS

     DEDICATION SPEECH

     DIE SCHRECKEN DER DEUTSCHEN SPRACHE.

     THE HORRORS OF THE GERMAN LANGUAGE

     GERMAN FOR THE HUNGARIANS

     A NEW GERMAN WORD

     UNCONSCIOUS PLAGIARISM

     THE WEATHER

     THE BABIES

     OUR CHILDREN AND GREAT DISCOVERIES

     EDUCATING THEATRE-GOERS

     THE EDUCATIONAL THEATRE

     POETS AS POLICEMEN

     PUDD'NHEAD WILSON DRAMATIZED

     DALY THEATRE

     THE DRESS OF CIVILIZED WOMAN

     DRESS REFORM AND COPYRIGHT

     COLLEGE GIRLS

     GIRLS

     THE LADIES

     WOMAN'S PRESS CLUB

     VOTES FOR WOMEN

     WOMAN-AN OPINION

     ADVICE TO GIRLS

     TAXES AND MORALS

     TAMMANY AND CROKER

     MUNICIPAL CORRUPTION

     MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT

     CHINA AND THE PHILIPPINES

     THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL MORALS

     LAYMAN'S SERMON

     UNIVERSITY SETTLEMENT SOCIETY

     PUBLIC EDUCATION ASSOCIATION

     EDUCATION AND CITIZENSHIP

     COURAGE

     THE DINNER TO MR. CHOATE

     ON STANLEY AND LIVINGSTONE

     HENRY M. STANLEY

     DINNER TO MR. JEROME

     HENRY IRVING

     DINNER TO HAMILTON W. MABIE

     INTRODUCING NYE AND RILEY

     DINNER TO WHITELAW REID

     ROGERS AND RAILROADS

     THE OLD-FASHIONED PRINTER

     SOCIETY OF AMERICAN AUTHORS

     READING-ROOM OPENING

     LITERATURE

     DISAPPEARANCE OF LITERATURE

     THE NEW YORK PRESS CLUB DINNER

     THE ALPHABET AND SIMPLIFIED SPELLING

     SPELLING AND PICTURES

     BOOKS AND BURGLARS

     AUTHORS' CLUB

     BOOKSELLERS

     "MARK TWAIN's FIRST APPEARANCE"

     MORALS AND MEMORY

     QUEEN VICTORIA

     JOAN OF ARC

     ACCIDENT INSURANCE--ETC.

     OSTEOPATHY

     WATER-SUPPLY

     MISTAKEN IDENTITY

     CATS AND CANDY

     OBITUARY POETRY

     CIGARS AND TOBACCO

     BILLIARDS

     THE UNION RIGHT OR WRONG?

     AN IDEAL FRENCH ADDRESS

     STATISTICS

     GALVESTON ORPHAN BAZAAR

     SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE

     CHARITY AND ACTORS

     RUSSIAN REPUBLIC

     RUSSIAN SUFFERERS

     WATTERSON AND TWAIN AS REBELS

     ROBERT FULTON FUND

     FULTON DAY, JAMESTOWN

     LOTOS CLUB DINNER IN HONOR OF MARK TWAIN

     COPYRIGHT

     IN AID OF THE BLIND

     DR. MARK TWAIN, FARMEOPATH

     MISSOURI UNIVERSITY SPEECH

     BUSINESS

     CARNEGIE THE BENEFACTOR

     ON POETRY, VERACITY, AND SUICIDE

     WELCOME HOME

     AN UNDELIVERED SPEECH

     SIXTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY

     TO THE WHITEFRIARS

     THE ASCOT GOLD CUP

     THE SAVAGE CLUB DINNER

     GENERAL MILES AND THE DOG

     WHEN IN DOUBT, TELL THE TRUTH

     THE DAY WE CELEBRATE

     INDEPENDENCE DAY

     AMERICANS AND THE ENGLISH

     ABOUT LONDON

     PRINCETON

     THE ST. LOUIS HARBOR-BOAT "MARK TWAIN"

     SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY









INTRODUCTION



These speeches will address themselves to the minds and hearts of those

who read them, but not with the effect they had with those who heard

them; Clemens himself would have said, not with half the effect.  I have

noted elsewhere how he always held that the actor doubled the value of

the author's words; and he was a great actor as well as a great author.

He was a most consummate actor, with this difference from other actors,

that he was the first to know the thoughts and invent the fancies to

which his voice and action gave the color of life.  Representation is the

art of other actors; his art was creative as well as representative; it

was nothing at second hand.



I never heard Clemens speak when I thought he quite failed; some burst

or spurt redeemed him when he seemed flagging short of the goal, and,

whoever else was in the running, he came in ahead.  His near-failures

were the error of a rare trust to the spontaneity in which other speakers

confide, or are believed to confide, when they are on their feet.  He

knew that from the beginning of oratory the orator's spontaneity was for

the silence and solitude of the closet where he mused his words to an

imagined audience; that this was the use of orators from Demosthenes and

Cicero up and down.  He studied every word and syllable, and memorized

them by a system of mnemonics peculiar to himself, consisting of an

arbitrary arrangement of things on a table--knives, forks, salt-cellars;

inkstands, pens, boxes, or whatever was at hand--which stood for points

and clauses and climaxes, and were at once indelible diction and constant

suggestion.  He studied every tone and every gesture, and he forecast the

result with the real audience from its result with that imagined

audience.  Therefore, it was beautiful to see him and to hear him; he

rejoiced in the pleasure he gave and the blows of surprise which he

dealt; and because he had his end in mind, he knew when to stop.



I have been talking of his method and manner; the matter the reader has

here before him; and it is good matter, glad, honest, kind, just.



                                             W.  D.  HOWELLS.













PREFACE



FROM THE PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION OF "MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES"



If I were to sell the reader a barrel of molasses, and he, instead of

sweetening his substantial dinner with the same at judicious intervals,

should eat the entire barrel at one sitting, and then abuse me for making

him sick, I would say that he deserved to be made sick for not knowing

any better how to utilize the blessings this world affords.  And if I

sell to the reader this volume of nonsense, and he, instead of seasoning

his graver reading with a chapter of it now and then, when his mind

demands such relaxation, unwisely overdoses himself with several chapters

of it at a single sitting, he will deserve to be nauseated, and he will

have nobody to blame but himself if he is.  There is no more sin in

publishing an entire volume of nonsense than there is in keeping a

candy-store with no hardware in it.  It lies wholly with the customer

whether he will injure himself by means of either, or will derive from

them the benefits which they will afford him if he uses their

possibilities judiciously.

                                   Respectfully submitted,

                                                       THE AUTHOR.











                          MARK TWAIN'S SPEECHES









THE STORY OF A SPEECH



          An address delivered in 1877, and a review of it twenty-nine

          years later.  The original speech was delivered at a dinner

          given by the publishers of The Atlantic Monthly in honor of the

          seventieth anniversary o f the birth of John Greenleaf

          Whittier, at the Hotel Brunswick, Boston, December 17, 1877.



This is an occasion peculiarly meet for the digging up of pleasant

reminiscences concerning literary folk; therefore I will drop lightly

into history myself.  Standing here on the shore of the Atlantic and

contemplating certain of its largest literary billows, I am reminded of a

thing which happened to me thirteen years ago, when I had just succeeded

in stirring up a little Nevadian literary puddle myself, whose

spume-flakes were beginning to blow thinly Californiaward.  I started an

inspection tramp through the southern mines of California.  I was callow

and conceited, and I resolved to try the virtue of my 'nom de guerre'.



I very soon had an opportunity.  I knocked at a miner's lonely log cabin

in the foot-hills of the Sierras just at nightfall.  It was snowing at

the time.  A jaded, melancholy man of fifty, barefooted, opened the door

to me.  When he heard my 'nom de guerre' he looked more dejected than

before.  He let me in--pretty reluctantly, I thought--and after the

customary bacon and beans, black coffee and hot whiskey, I took a pipe.

This sorrowful man had not said three words up to this time.  Now he

spoke up and said, in the voice of one who is secretly suffering, "You're

the fourth--I'm going to move."  "The fourth what?" said I.  "The fourth

littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours--I'm going to move."

"You don't tell me!" said I; "who were the others?"  "Mr. Longfellow,

Mr. Emerson, and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes--consound the lot!"



You can, easily believe I was interested.  I supplicated--three hot

whiskeys did the rest--and finally the melancholy miner began.  Said he:



"They came here just at dark yesterday evening, and I let them in of

course.  Said they were going to the Yosemite.  They were a rough lot,

but that's nothing; everybody looks rough that travels afoot.

Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed.  Mr. Holmes was

as fat as a balloon; he weighed as much as three hundred, and had double

chins all the way down to his stomach.  Mr. Longfellow was built like a

prizefighter.  His head was cropped and bristly, like as if he had a wig

made of hair-brushes.  His nose lay straight down, his face, like a

finger with the end joint tilted up.  They had been drinking, I could see

that.  And what queer talk they used!  Mr. Holmes inspected this cabin,

then he took me by the buttonhole, and says he:



          "'Through the deep caves of thought

          I hear a voice that sings,

          Build thee more stately mansions,

          O my soul!'



"Says I, 'I can't afford it, Mr. Holmes, and moreover I don't want to.'

Blamed if I liked it pretty well, either, coming from a stranger, that

way.  However, I started to get out my bacon and beans, when Mr. Emerson

came and looked on awhile, and then he takes me aside by the buttonhole

and says:



          "'Give me agates for my meat;

          Give me cantharids to eat;

          From air and ocean bring me foods,

          From all zones and altitudes.'



"Says I, 'Mr. Emerson, if you'll excuse me, this ain't no hotel.'

You see it sort of riled me--I warn't used to the ways of littery swells.

But I went on a-sweating over my work, and next comes Mr. Longfellow and

buttonholes me, and interrupts me.  Says he:



          "'Honor be to Mudjekeewis!

          You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis--'



"But I broke in, and says I, 'Beg your pardon, Mr. Longfellow, if you'll

be so kind as to hold your yawp for about five minutes and let me get

this grub ready, you'll do me proud.'  Well, sir, after they'd filled up

I set out the jug.  Mr. Holmes looks at it, and then he fires up all of a

sudden and yells:



          "Flash out a stream of blood-red wine!

          For I would drink to other days.'



"By George, I was getting kind of worked up.  I don't deny it, I was

getting kind of worked up.  I turns to Mr. Holmes, and says I, 'Looky

here, my fat friend, I'm a-running this shanty, and if the court knows

herself, you'll take whiskey straight or you'll go dry.'  Them's the very

words I said to him.  Now I don't want to sass such famous littery

people, but you see they kind of forced me.  There ain't nothing

onreasonable 'bout me; I don't mind a passel of guests a-treadin' on my

tail three or four times, but when it comes to standing on it it's

different, 'and if the court knows herself,' I says, 'you'll take whiskey

straight or you'll go dry.'  Well, between drinks they'd swell around the

cabin and strike attitudes and spout; and pretty soon they got out a

greasy old deck and went to playing euchre at ten cents a corner--on

trust.  I began to notice some pretty suspicious things.  Mr. Emerson

dealt, looked at his hand, shook his head, says:



          "'I am the doubter and the doubt--'



and ca'mly bunched the hands and went to shuffling for a new layout.

Says he:



          "'They reckon ill who leave me out;

          They know not well the subtle ways I keep.

          I pass and deal again!'



Hang'd if he didn't go ahead and do it, too!  Oh, he was a cool one!

Well, in about a minute things were running pretty tight, but all of a

sudden I see by Mr. Emerson's eye he judged he had 'em.  He had already

corralled two tricks, and each of the others one.  So now he kind of

lifts a little in his chair and says:



          "'I tire of globes and aces!

          Too long the game is played!'



--and down he fetched a right bower.  Mr. Longfellow smiles as sweet as

pie and says:



          "'Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,

          For the lesson thou hast taught,'



--and blamed if he didn't down with another right bower!  Emerson claps

his hand on his bowie, Longfellow claps his on his revolver, and I went

under a bunk.  There was going to be trouble; but that monstrous Holmes

rose up, wobbling his double chins, and says he, 'Order, gentlemen; the

first man that draws, I'll lay down on him and smother him!'  All quiet

on the Potomac, you bet!



"They were pretty how-come-you-so' by now, and they begun to blow.

Emerson says, 'The nobbiest thing I ever wrote was "Barbara Frietchie."'

Says Longfellow, 'It don't begin with my "Biglow Papers."'  Says Holmes,

'My "Thanatopsis" lays over 'em both.'  They mighty near ended in a fight.

Then they wished they had some more company--and Mr. Emerson pointed to

me and says:



          "'Is yonder squalid peasant all

          That this proud nursery could breed?'



He was a-whetting his bowie on his boot--so I let it pass.  Well, sir,

next they took it into their heads that they would like some music; so

they made me stand up and sing "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" till I

dropped-at thirteen minutes past four this morning.  That's what I've

been through, my friend.  When I woke at seven, they were leaving, thank

goodness, and Mr. Longfellow had my only boots on, and his'n under his

arm.  Says I, 'Hold on, there, Evangeline, what are you going to do with

them?'  He says, 'Going to make tracks with 'em; because:



          "'Lives of great men all remind us

          We can make our lives sublime;

          And, departing, leave behind us

          Footprints on the sands of time.'



"As I said, Mr. Twain, you are the fourth in twenty-four hours--and I'm

going to move; I ain't suited to a littery atmosphere."



I said to the miner, "Why, my dear sir, these were not the gracious

singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these

were impostors."



The miner investigated me with a calm eye for a while; then said he, "Ah!

impostors, were they?  Are you?"



I did not pursue the subject, and since then I have not travelled on my

'nom de guerre' enough to hurt.  Such was the reminiscence I was moved to

contribute, Mr. Chairman.  In my enthusiasm I may have exaggerated the

details a little, but you will easily forgive me that fault, since I

believe it is the first time I have ever deflected from perpendicular

fact on an occasion like this.



                        .........................



From Mark Twain's Autobiography.



                                             January 11, 1906.



Answer to a letter received this morning:



     DEAR MRS. H.,--I am forever your debtor for reminding me of that

     curious passage in my life.  During the first year or, two after it

     happened, I could not bear to think of it.  My pain and shame were

     so intense, and my sense of having been an imbecile so settled,

     established and confirmed, that I drove the episode entirely from my

     mind--and so all these twenty-eight or twenty-nine years I have

     lived in the conviction that my performance of that time was coarse,

     vulgar, and destitute of humor.  But your suggestion that you and

     your family found humor in it twenty-eight years ago moved me to

     look into the matter.  So I commissioned a Boston typewriter to

     delve among the Boston papers of that bygone time and send me a copy

     of it.



     It came this morning, and if there is any vulgarity about it I am

     not able to discover it.  If it isn't innocently and ridiculously

     funny, I am no judge.  I will see to it that you get a copy.





What I have said to Mrs. H. is true.  I did suffer during a year or two

from the deep humiliations of that episode.  But at last, in 1888, in

Venice, my wife and I came across Mr. and Mrs.  A. P. C., of Concord,

Massachusetts, and a friendship began then of the sort which nothing but

death terminates.  The C.'s were very bright people and in every way

charming and companionable.  We were together a month or two in Venice

and several months in Rome, afterward, and one day that lamented break of

mine was mentioned.  And when I was on the point of lathering those

people for bringing it to my mind when I had gotten the memory of it

almost squelched, I perceived with joy that the C.'s were indignant about

the way that my performance had been received in Boston.  They poured out

their opinions most freely and frankly about the frosty attitude of the

people who were present at that performance, and about the Boston

newspapers for the position they had taken in regard to the matter.

That position was that I had been irreverent beyond belief, beyond

imagination.  Very well; I had accepted that as a fact for a year or two,

and had been thoroughly miserable about it whenever I thought of it

--which was not frequently, if I could help it.  Whenever I thought of it

I wondered how I ever could have been inspired to do so unholy a thing.

Well, the C.'s comforted me, but they did not persuade me to continue to

think about the unhappy episode.  I resisted that.  I tried to get it out

of my mind, and let it die, and I succeeded.  Until Mrs. H.'s letter

came, it had been a good twenty-five years since I had thought of that

matter; and when she said that the thing was funny I wondered if possibly

she might be right.  At any rate, my curiosity was aroused, and I wrote

to Boston and got the whole thing copied, as above set forth.



I vaguely remember some of the details of that gathering--dimly I can see

a hundred people--no, perhaps fifty--shadowy figures sitting at tables

feeding, ghosts now to me, and nameless forevermore.  I don't know who

they were, but I can very distinctly see, seated at the grand table and

facing the rest of us, Mr. Emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling;

Mr. Whittier, grave, lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his

face; Mr. Longfellow, with his silken white hair and his benignant face;

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all good-

fellowship everywhere like a rose-diamond whose facets are being turned

toward the light first one way and then another--a charming man, and

always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he was sitting

still (what he would call still, but what would be more or less motion to

other people).  I can see those figures with entire distinctness across

this abyss of time.



One other feature is clear--Willie Winter (for these past thousand years

dramatic editor of the New York Tribune, and still occupying that high

post in his old age) was there.  He was much younger then than he is now,

and he showed 'it.  It was always a pleasure to me to see Willie Winter

at a banquet.  During a matter of twenty years I was seldom at a banquet

where Willie Winter was not also present, and where he did not read a

charming poem written for the occasion.  He did it this time, and it was

up to standard: dainty, happy, choicely phrased, and as good to listen to

as music, and sounding exactly as if it was pouring unprepared out of

heart and brain.



Now at that point ends all that was pleasurable about that notable

celebration of Mr. Whittier's seventieth birthday--because I got up at

that point and followed Winter, with what I have no doubt I supposed

would be the gem of the evening--the gay oration above quoted from the

Boston paper.  I had written it all out the day before and had perfectly

memorized it, and I stood up there at my genial and happy and self-

satisfied ease, and began to deliver it.  Those majestic guests; that row

of venerable and still active volcanoes, listened; as did everybody else

in the house, with attentive interest.  Well, I delivered myself of--

we'll say the first two hundred words of my speech.  I was expecting no

returns from that part of the speech, but this was not the case as

regarded the rest of it.  I arrived now at the dialogue:  "The old miner

said, 'You are the fourth, I'm going to move.'  'The fourth what?' said

I.  He answered, 'The fourth littery man that has been here in twenty-

four hours.  I am going to move.'  'Why, you don't tell me;' said I.

'Who were the others?'  'Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Oliver Wendell

Holmes, consound the lot--'"



Now, then, the house's attention continued, but the expression of

interest in the faces turned to a sort of black frost.  I wondered what

the trouble was.  I didn't know.  I went on, but with difficulty--

I struggled along, and entered upon that miner's fearful description of

the bogus Emerson, the bogus Holmes, the bogus Longfellow, always hoping

--but with a gradually perishing hope that somebody--would laugh, or that

somebody would at least smile, but nobody did.  I didn't know enough to

give it up and sit down, I was too new to public speaking, and so I went

on with this awful performance, and carried it clear through to the end,

in front of a body of people who seemed turned to stone with horror.

It was the sort of expression their faces would have worn if I had been

making these remarks about the Deity and the rest of the Trinity; there

is no milder way, in which to describe the petrified condition and the

ghastly expression of those people.



When I sat down it was with a heart which had long ceased to beat.

I shall never be as dead again as I was then.  I shall never be as

miserable again as I was then.  I speak now as one who doesn't know what

the condition of things may be in the next world, but in this one I shall

never be as wretched again as I was then.  Howells, who was near me,

tried to say a comforting word, but couldn't get beyond a gasp.  There

was no use--he understood the whole size of the disaster.  He had good

intentions, but the words froze before they could get out.  It was an

atmosphere that would freeze anything.  If Benvenuto Cellini's salamander

had been in that place he would not have survived to be put into

Cellini's autobiography.  There was a frightful pause.  There was an

awful silence, a desolating silence.  Then the next man on the list had

to get up--there was no help for it.  That was Bishop--Bishop had just

burst handsomely upon the world with a most acceptable novel, which had

appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, a place which would make any novel

respectable and any author noteworthy.  In this case the novel itself was

recognized as being, without extraneous help, respectable.  Bishop was

away up in the public favor, and he was an object of high interest,

consequently there was a sort of national expectancy in the air; we may

say our American millions were standing, from Maine to Texas and from

Alaska to Florida, holding their breath, their lips parted, their hands

ready to applaud, when Bishop should get up on that occasion, and for the

first time in his life speak in public.  It was under these damaging

conditions that he got up to "make good," as the vulgar say.  I had

spoken several times before, and that is the reason why I was able to go

on without dying in my tracks, as I ought to have done--but Bishop had

had no experience.  He was up facing those awful deities--facing those

other people, those strangers--facing human beings for the first time in

his life, with a speech to utter.  No doubt it was well packed away in

his memory, no doubt it was fresh and usable, until I had been heard

from.  I suppose that after that, and under the smothering pall of that

dreary silence, it began to waste away and disappear out of his head like

the rags breaking from the edge of a fog, and presently there wasn't any

fog left.  He didn't go on--he didn't last long.  It was not many

sentence's after his first before he began to hesitate, and break, and

lose his grip, and totter, and wobble, and at last he slumped down in a

limp and mushy pile.



Well, the programme for the occasion was probably not more than one-

third finished, but it ended there.  Nobody rose.  The next man hadn't

strength enough to get up, and everybody looked so dazed, so stupefied,

paralyzed; it was impossible for anybody to do anything, or even try.

Nothing could go on in that strange atmosphere.  Howells mournfully, and

without words, hitched himself to Bishop and me and supported us out of

the room.  It was very kind--he was most generous.  He towed us tottering

away into same room in that building, and we sat down there.  I don't

know what my remark was now, but I know the nature of it.  It was the

kind of remark you make when you know that nothing in the world can help

your case.  But Howells was honest--he had to say the heart-breaking

things he did say: that there was no help for this calamity, this

shipwreck, this cataclysm; that this was the most disastrous thing that

had ever happened in anybody's history--and then he added, "That is, for

you--and consider what you have done for Bishop.  It is bad enough in

your case, you deserve, to suffer.  You have committed this crime, and

you deserve to have all you are going to get.  But here is an innocent

man.  Bishop had never done you any harm, and see what you have done to

him.  He can never hold his head up again.  The world can never look upon

Bishop as being a live person.  He is a corpse."



That is the history of that episode of twenty-eight years ago, which

pretty nearly killed me with shame during that first year or two whenever

it forced its way into my mind.



Now then, I take that speech up and examine it.  As I said, it arrived

this morning, from Boston.  I have read it twice, and unless I am an

idiot, it hasn't a single defect in it from the first word to the last.

It is just as good as good can be.  It is smart; it is saturated with

humor.  There isn't a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it

anywhere.  What could have been the matter with that house?  It is

amazing, it is incredible, that they didn't shout with laughter, and

those deities the loudest of them all.  Could the fault have been with

me?  Did I lose courage when I saw those great men up there whom I was

going to describe in such a strange fashion?  If that happened, if I

showed doubt, that can account for it, for you can't be successfully

funny if you show that you are afraid of it.  Well, I can't account for

it, but if I had those beloved and revered old literary immortals back

here now on the platform at Carnegie Hall I would take that same old

speech, deliver it, word for word, and melt them till they'd run all over

that stage.  Oh, the fault must have been with me, it is not in the

speech at all.













PLYMOUTH ROCK AND THE PILGRIMS



          ADDRESS AT THE FIRST ANNUAL DINNER, N. E.  SOCIETY,

          PHILADELPHIA, DECEMBER 22, 1881



          On calling upon Mr. Clemens to make response,

          President Rollins said:



          "This sentiment has been assigned to one who was never exactly

          born in New England, nor, perhaps, were any of his ancestors.

          He is not technically, therefore, of New England descent.

          Under the painful circumstances in which he has found himself,

          however, he has done the best he could--he has had all his

          children born there, and has made of himself a New England

          ancestor.  He is a self-made man.  More than this, and better

          even, in cheerful, hopeful, helpful literature he is of New

          England ascent.  To ascend there in any thing that's reasonable

          is difficult; for--confidentially, with the door shut--we all

          know that they are the brightest, ablest sons of that goodly

          land who never leave it, and it is among and above them that

          Mr. Twain has made his brilliant and permanent ascent--become

          a man of mark."



I rise to protest.  I have kept still for years; but really I think there

is no sufficient justification for this sort of thing.  What do you want

to celebrate those people for?--those ancestors of yours of 1620--the

Mayflower tribe, I mean.  What do you want to celebrate them for?  Your

pardon: the gentleman at my left assures me that you are not celebrating

the Pilgrims themselves, but the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth rock

on the 22d of December.  So you are celebrating their landing.  Why, the

other pretext was thin enough, but this is thinner than ever; the other

was tissue, tinfoil, fish-bladder, but this is gold-leaf.  Celebrating

their lauding!  What was there remarkable about it, I would like to know?

What can you be thinking of?  Why, those Pilgrims had been at sea three

or four months.  It was the very middle of winter: it was as cold as

death off Cape Cod there.  Why shouldn't they come ashore?  If they

hadn't landed there would be some reason for celebrating the fact: It

would have been a case of monumental leatherheadedness which the world

would not willingly let die.  If it had been you, gentlemen, you probably

wouldn't have landed, but you have no shadow of right to be celebrating,

in your ancestors, gifts which they did not exercise, but only

transmitted.  Why, to be celebrating the mere landing of the Pilgrims--

to be trying to make out that this most natural and simple and customary

procedure was an extraordinary circumstance--a circumstance to be amazed

at, and admired, aggrandized and glorified, at orgies like this for two

hundred and sixty years--hang it, a horse would have known enough to

land; a horse--Pardon again; the gentleman on my right assures me that

it was not merely the landing of the Pilgrims that we are celebrating,

but the Pilgrims themselves.  So we have struck an inconsistency here--

one says it was the landing, the other says it was the Pilgrims.  It is

an inconsistency characteristic of your intractable and disputatious

tribe, for you never agree about anything but Boston.  Well, then, what

do you want to celebrate those Pilgrims for?  They were a mighty hard

lot--you know it.  I grant you, without the slightest unwillingness, that

they were a deal more gentle and merciful and just than were the people

of Europe of that day; I grant you that they are better than their

predecessors.  But what of that?--that is nothing.  People always

progress.  You are better than your fathers and grandfathers were (this

is the first time I have ever aimed a measureless slander at the

departed, for I consider such things improper).  Yes, those among you who

have not been in the penitentiary, if such there be, are better than your

fathers and grandfathers were; but is that any sufficient reason, for

getting up annual dinners and celebrating you?  No, by no means--by no

means.  Well, I repeat, those Pilgrims were a hard lot.  They took good

care of themselves, but they abolished everybody else's ancestors.  I am

a border-ruffian from the State of Missouri.  I am a Connecticut Yankee

by adoption.  In me, you have Missouri morals, Connecticut culture; this,

gentlemen, is the combination which makes the perfect man.  But where are

my ancestors?  Whom shall I celebrate?  Where shall I find the raw

material?



My first American ancestor, gentlemen, was an Indian--an early Indian.

Your ancestors skinned him alive, and I am an orphan.  Not one drop of my

blood flows in that Indian's veins today.  I stand here, lone and

forlorn, without an ancestor.  They skinned him!  I do not object to

that, if they needed his fur; but alive, gentlemen-alive!  They skinned

him alive--and before company!  That is what rankles.  Think how he must

have felt; for he was a sensitive person and easily embarrassed.  If he

had been a bird, it would have been all right, and no violence done to

his feelings, because he would have been considered "dressed."  But he

was not a bird, gentlemen, he was a man, and probably one of the most

undressed men that ever was.  I ask you to put yourselves in his place.

I ask it as a favor; I ask it as a tardy act of justice; I ask it in the

interest of fidelity to the traditions of your ancestors; I ask it that

the world may contemplate, with vision unobstructed by disguising

swallow-tails and white cravats, the spectacle which the true New England

Society ought to present.  Cease to come to these annual orgies in this

hollow modern mockery--the surplusage of raiment.  Come in character;

come in the summer grace, come in the unadorned simplicity, come in the

free and joyous costume which your sainted ancestors provided for mine.



Later ancestors of mine were the Quakers William Robinson, Marmaduke

Stevenson, et al.  Your tribe chased them put of the country for their

religion's sake; promised them death if they came back; for your

ancestors had forsaken the homes they loved, and braved the perils of the

sea, the implacable climate, and the savage wilderness, to acquire that

highest and most precious of boons, freedom for every man on this broad

continent to worship according to the dictates of his own conscience--and

they were not going to allow a lot of pestiferous Quakers to interfere

with it.  Your ancestors broke forever the chains of political slavery,

and gave the vote to every man in this wide land, excluding none!--none

except those who did not belong to the orthodox church.  Your ancestors--

yes, they were a hard lot; but, nevertheless, they gave us religious

liberty to worship as they required us to worship, and political liberty

to vote as the church required; and so I the bereft one, I the forlorn

one, am here to do my best to help you celebrate them right.



The Quaker woman Elizabeth Hooton was an ancestress of mine.  Your people

were pretty severe with her you will confess that.  But, poor thing!

I believe they changed her opinions before she died, and took her into

their fold; and so we have every reason to presume that when she died she

went to the same place which your ancestors went to.  It is a great pity,

for she was a good woman.  Roger Williams was an ancestor of mine.

I don't really remember what your people did with him.  But they banished

him to Rhode Island, anyway.  And then, I believe, recognizing that this

was really carrying harshness to an unjustifiable extreme, they took pity

on him and burned him.  They were a hard lot!  All those Salem witches

were ancestors of mine!  Your people made it tropical for them.  Yes,

they did; by pressure and the gallows they made such a clean deal with

them that there hasn't been a witch and hardly a halter in our family

from that day to this, and that is one hundred and eighty-nine years.

The first slave brought into New England out of Africa by your

progenitors was an ancestor of mine--for I am of a mixed breed, an

infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel.  I'm not one of your sham

meerschaums that you can color in a week.  No, my complexion is the

patient art of eight generations.  Well, in my own time, I had acquired a

lot of my kin--by purchase, and swapping around, and one way and another

--and was getting along very well.  Then, with the inborn perversity of

your lineage, you got up a war, and took them all away from me.  And so,

again am I bereft, again am I forlorn; no drop of my blood flows in the

veins of any living being who is marketable.



O my friends, hear me and reform!  I seek your good, not mine.  You have

heard the speeches.  Disband these New England societies--nurseries of a

system of steadily augmenting laudation and hosannaing, which; if

persisted in uncurbed, may some day in the remote future beguile you into

prevaricating and bragging.  Oh, stop, stop, while you are still

temperate in your appreciation of your ancestors!  Hear me, I beseech

you; get up an auction and sell Plymouth Rock!  The Pilgrims were a

simple and ignorant race.  They never had seen any good rocks before, or

at least any that were not watched, and so they were excusable for

hopping ashore in frantic delight and clapping an iron fence around this

one.  But you, gentlemen, are educated; you are enlightened; you know

that in the rich land of your nativity, opulent New England, overflowing

with rocks, this one isn't worth, at the outside, more than thirty-five

cents.  Therefore, sell it, before it is injured by exposure, or at least

throw it open to the patent-medicine advertisements, and let it earn its

taxes:



Yes, hear your true friend-your only true friend--list to his voice.

Disband these societies, hotbeds of vice, of moral decay--perpetuators of

ancestral superstition.  Here on this board I see water, I see milk, I

see the wild and deadly lemonade.  These are but steps upon the downward

path.  Next we shall see tea, then chocolate, then coffee--hotel coffee.

A few more years--all too few, I fear--mark my words, we shall have

cider!  Gentlemen, pause ere it be too late.  You are on the broad road

which leads to dissipation, physical ruin, moral decay, gory crime and

the gallows!  I beseech you, I implore you, in the name of your anxious

friends, in the name of your suffering families, in the name of your

impending widows and orphans, stop ere it be too late.  Disband these New

England societies, renounce these soul-blistering saturnalia, cease from

varnishing the rusty reputations of your long-vanished ancestors--the

super-high-moral old iron-clads of Cape Cod, the pious buccaneers of

Plymouth Rock--go home, and try to learn to behave!



However, chaff and nonsense aside, I think I honor and appreciate your

Pilgrim stock as much as you do yourselves, perhaps; and I endorse and

adopt a sentiment uttered by a grandfather of mine once--a man of sturdy

opinions, of sincere make of mind, and not given to flattery.  He said:

"People may talk as they like about that Pilgrim stock, but, after all's

said and done, it would be pretty hard to improve on those people; and,

as for me, I don't mind coming out flatfooted and saying there ain't any

way to improve on them--except having them born in, Missouri!"













COMPLIMENTS AND DEGREES



          DELIVERED AT THE LOTOS CLUB, JANUARY 11, 1908



          In introducing Mr. Clemens, Frank R.  Lawrence, the President

          of the Lotos Club, recalled the fact that the first club dinner

          in the present club-house, some fourteen years ago, was in

          honor of Mark Twain.



I wish to begin this time at the beginning, lest I forget it altogether;

that is to say, I wish to thank you for this welcome that you are giving,

and the welcome which you gave me seven years ago, and which I forgot to

thank you for at that time.  I also wish to thank you for the welcome you

gave me fourteen years ago, which I also forgot to thank you for at the

time.



I hope you will continue this custom to give me a dinner every seven

years before I join the hosts in the other world--I do not know which

world.



Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Porter have paid me many compliments.  It is very

difficult to take compliments.  I do not care whether you deserve the

compliments or not, it is just as difficult to take them.  The other

night I was at the Engineers' Club, and enjoyed the sufferings of

Mr. Carnegie.  They were complimenting him there; there it was all

compliments, and none of them deserved.  They say that you cannot live

by bread alone, but I can live on compliments.



I do not make any pretence that I dislike compliments.  The stronger the

better, and I can manage to digest them.  I think I have lost so much by

not making a collection of compliments, to put them away and take them

out again once in a while.  When in England I said that I would start to

collect compliments, and I began there and I have brought some of them

along.



The first one of these lies--I wrote them down and preserved them--

I think they are mighty good and extremely just.  It is one of Hamilton

Mabie's compliments.  He said that La Salle was the first one to make a

voyage of the Mississippi, but Mark Twain was the first to chart, light,

and navigate it for the whole world.



If that had been published at the time that I issued that book [Life on

the Mississippi], it would have been money in my pocket.  I tell you, it

is a talent by itself to pay compliments gracefully and have them ring

true.  It's an art by itself.



Here is another compliment by Albert Bigelow Paine, my biographer.  He is

writing four octavo volumes about me, and he has been at my elbow two and

one-half years.



I just suppose that he does not know me, but says he knows me.  He says

"Mark Twain is not merely a great writer, a great philosopher, a great

man; he is the supreme expression of the human being, with his strength

and his weakness."  What a talent for compression!  It takes a genius in

compression to compact as many facts as that.



W. D. Howells spoke of me as first of Hartford, and ultimately of the

solar system, not to say of the universe:



You know how modest Howells is.  If it can be proved that my fame reaches

to Neptune and Saturn; that will satisfy even me.  You know how modest

and retiring Howells seems to be, but deep down he is as vain as I am.



Mr. Howells had been granted a degree at Oxford, whose gown was red.

He had been invited to an exercise at Columbia, and upon inquiry had been

told that it was usual to wear the black gown: Later he had found that

three other men wore bright gowns, and he had lamented that he had been

one of the black mass, and not a red torch.



Edison wrote: "The average American loves his family.  If he has any love

left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain."



Now here's the compliment of a little Montana girl which came to me

indirectly.  She was in a room in which there was a large photograph of

me.  After gazing at it steadily for a time, she said:



"We've got a John the Baptist like that."  She also said: "Only ours has

more trimmings."



I suppose she meant the halo.  Now here is a gold-miner's compliment.

It is forty-two years old.  It was my introduction to an audience to

which I lectured in a log school-house.  There were no ladies there.

I wasn't famous then.  They didn't know me.  Only the miners were there,

with their breeches tucked into their boottops and with clay all over

them.  They wanted some one to introduce me, and they selected a miner,

who protested, saying:



"I don't know anything about this man.  Anyhow, I only know two things

about him.  One is, he has never been in jail, and the other is, I don't

know why."



There's one thing I want to say about that English trip.  I knew his

Majesty the King of England long years ago, and I didn't meet him for the

first time then.  One thing that I regret was that some newspapers said

I talked with the Queen of England with my hat on.  I don't do that with

any woman.  I did not put it on until she asked me to.  Then she told me

to put it on, and it's a command there.  I thought I had carried my

American democracy far enough.  So I put it on.  I have no use for a hat,

and never did have.



Who was it who said that the police of London knew me?  Why, the police

know me everywhere.  There never was a day over there when a policeman

did not salute me, and then put up his hand and stop the traffic of the

world.  They treated me as though I were a duchess.



The happiest experience I had in England was at a dinner given in the

building of the Punch publication, a humorous paper which is appreciated

by all Englishmen.  It was the greatest privilege ever allowed a

foreigner.  I entered the dining-room of the building, where those men

get together who have been running the paper for over fifty years.  We

were about to begin dinner when the toastmaster said: "Just a minute;

there ought to be a little ceremony."  Then there was that meditating

silence for a while, and out of a closet there came a beautiful little

girl dressed in pink, holding in her hand a copy of the previous week's

paper, which had in it my cartoon.  It broke me all up.  I could not even

say "Thank you."  That was the prettiest incident of the dinner, the

delight of all that wonderful table.  When she was about to go; I said,

"My child, you are not going to leave me; I have hardly got acquainted

with you." She replied, "You know I've got to go; they never let me come

in here before, and they never will again."  That is one of the beautiful

incidents that I cherish.



          [At the conclusion of his speech, and while the diners were

          still cheering him, Colonel Porter brought forward the red-and-

          gray gown of the Oxford "doctor," and Mr. Clemens was made to

          don it.  The diners rose to their feet in their enthusiasm.

          With the mortar-board on his head, and looking down admiringly

          at himself, Mr. Twain said--]



I like that gown.  I always did like red.  The redder it is the better

I like it.  I was born for a savage.  Now, whoever saw any red like this?

There is no red outside the arteries of an archangel that could compare

with this.  I know you all envy me.  I am going to have luncheon shortly

with ladies just ladies.  I will be the only lady of my sex present, and

I shall put on this gown and make those ladies look dim.













BOOKS, AUTHORS, AND HATS



          ADDRESS AT THE PILGRIMS' CLUB LUNCHEON, GIVEN IN HONOR OF Mr.

          CLEMENS AT THE SAVOY HOTEL, LONDON, JUNE 25, 1907.



          Mr. Birrell, M.P., Chief-Secretary for Ireland, in introducing

          Mr. Clemens said: "We all love Mark Twain, and we are here to

          tell him so.  One more point--all the world knows it, and that

          is why it is dangerous to omit it--our guest is a distinguished

          citizen of the Great Republic beyond the seas.  In America his

          'Huckleberry Finn' and his 'Tom Sawyer' are what 'Robinson

          Crusoe' and 'Tom Brown's School Days' have been to us.  They

          are racy of the soil.  They are books to which it is impossible

          to place any period of termination.  I will not speak of the

          classics--reminiscences of much evil in our early lives.  We do

          not meet here to-day as critics with our appreciations and

          depreciations, our twopenny little prefaces or our forewords.

          I am not going to say what the world a thousand years hence

          will think of Mark Twain.  Posterity will take care of itself,

          will read what it wants to read, will forget what it chooses to

          forget, and will pay no attention whatsoever to our critical

          mumblings and jumblings.  Let us therefore be content to say to

          our friend and guest that we are here speaking for ourselves

          and for our children, to say what he has been to us.  I

          remember in Liverpool, in 1867, first buying the copy, which I

          still preserve, of the celebrated 'Jumping Frog.'  It had a few

          words of preface which reminded me then that our guest in those

          days was called 'the wild humorist of the Pacific slope,' and a

          few lines later down, 'the moralist of the Main.'  That was

          some forty years ago.  Here he is, still the humorist, still

          the moralist.  His humor enlivens and enlightens his morality,

          and his morality is all the better for his humor.  That is one

          of the reasons why we love him.  I am not here to mention any

          book of his--that is a subject of dispute in my family circle,

          which is the best and which is the next best--but I must put in

          a word, lest I should not be true to myself--a terrible thing--

          for his Joan of Arc, a book of chivalry, of nobility, and of

          manly sincerity for which I take this opportunity of thanking

          him.  But you can all drink this toast, each one of you with

          his own intention.  You can get into it what meaning you like.

          Mark Twain is a man whom English and Americans do well to

          honor.  He is the true consolidator of nations.  His delightful

          humor is of the kind which dissipates and destroys national

          prejudices.  His truth and his honor, his love of truth, and

          his love of honor, overflow all boundaries.  He has made the

          world better by his presence.  We rejoice to see him here.

          Long may he live to reap the plentiful harvest of hearty,

          honest human affection!"



Pilgrims, I desire first to thank those undergraduates of Oxford.  When a

man has grown so old as I am, when he has reached the verge of seventy-

two years, there is nothing that carries him back to the dreamland of his

life, to his boyhood, like recognition of those young hearts up yonder.

And so I thank them out of my heart.  I desire to thank the Pilgrims of

New York also for their kind notice and message which they have cabled

over here.  Mr. Birrell says he does not know how he got here.  But he

will be able to get away all right--he has not drunk anything since he

came here.  I am glad to know about those friends of his, Otway and

Chatterton--fresh, new names to me.  I am glad of the disposition he has

shown to rescue them from the evils of poverty, and if they are still in

London, I hope to have a talk with them.  For a while I thought he was

going to tell us the effect which my book had upon his growing manhood.

I thought he was going to tell us how much that effect amounted to, and

whether it really made him what he now is, but with the discretion born

of Parliamentary experience he dodged that, and we do not know now

whether he read the book or not.  He did that very neatly.  I could not

do it any better myself.



My books have had effects, and very good ones, too, here and there, and

some others not so good.  There is no doubt about that.  But I remember

one monumental instance of it years and years ago.  Professor Norton, of

Harvard, was over here, and when he came back to Boston I went out with

Howells to call on him.  Norton was allied in some way by marriage with

Darwin.



Mr. Norton was very gentle in what he had to say, and almost delicate,

and he said: "Mr. Clemens, I have been spending some time with Mr. Darwin

in England, and I should like to tell you something connected with that

visit.  You were the object of it, and I myself would have been very

proud of it, but you may not be proud of it.  At any rate, I am going to

tell you what it was, and to leave to you to regard it as you please.

Mr. Darwin took me up to his bedroom and pointed out certain things

there-pitcher-plants, and so on, that he was measuring and watching from

day to day--and he said: 'The chambermaid is permitted to do what she

pleases in this room, but she must never touch those plants and never

touch those books on that table by that candle.  With those books I read

myself to sleep every night.'  Those were your own books."  I said:

"There is no question to my mind as to whether I should regard that as a

compliment or not.  I do regard it as a very great compliment and a very

high honor that that great mind, laboring for the whole human race,

should rest itself on my books.  I am proud that he should read himself

to sleep with them."



Now, I could not keep that to myself--I was so proud of it.  As soon as I

got home to Hartford I called up my oldest friend--and dearest enemy on

occasion--the Rev. Joseph Twichell, my pastor, and I told him about that,

and, of course, he was full of interest and venom.  Those people who get

no compliments like that feel like that.  He went off.  He did not issue

any applause of any kind, and I did not hear of that subject for some

time.  But when Mr. Darwin passed away from this life, and some time

after Darwin's Life and Letters came out, the Rev. Mr. Twichell procured

an early copy of that work and found something in it which he considered

applied to me.  He came over to my house--it was snowing, raining,

sleeting, but that did not make any difference to Twichell.  He produced

the book, and turned over and over, until he came to a certain place,

when he said: "Here, look at this letter from Mr. Darwin to Sir Joseph

Hooker."  What Mr. Darwin said--I give you the idea and not the very

words--was this: I do not know whether I ought to have devoted my whole

life to these drudgeries in natural history and the other sciences or

not, for while I may have gained in one way I have lost in another.  Once

I had a fine perception and appreciation of high literature, but in me

that quality is atrophied.  "That was the reason," said Mr. Twichell, "he

was reading your books."



Mr. Birrell has touched lightly--very lightly, but in not an

uncomplimentary way--on my position in this world as a moralist.  I am

glad to have that recognition, too, because I have suffered since I have

been in this town; in the first place, right away, when I came here, from

a newsman going around with a great red, highly displayed placard in the

place of an apron.  He was selling newspapers, and there were two

sentences on that placard which would have been all right if they had

been punctuated; but they ran those two sentences together without a

comma or anything, and that would naturally create a wrong impression,

because it said, "Mark Twain arrives Ascot Cup stolen."  No doubt many a

person was misled by those sentences joined together in that unkind way.

I have no doubt my character has suffered from it.  I suppose I ought to

defend my character, but how can I defend it?  I can say here and now--

and anybody can see by my face that I am sincere, that I speak the truth-

-that I have never seen that Cup.  I have not got the Cup--I did not have

a chance to get it.  I have always had a good character in that way.  I

have hardly ever stolen anything, and if I did steal anything I had

discretion enough to know about the value of it first.  I do not steal

things that are likely to get myself into trouble.  I do not think any of

us do that.  I know we all take things--that is to be expected--but

really, I have never taken anything, certainly in England, that amounts

to any great thing.  I do confess that when I was here seven years ago I

stole a hat, but that did not amount to anything.  It was not a good hat,

and was only a clergyman's hat, anyway.



I was at a luncheon party, and Archdeacon Wilberforce was there also.  I

dare say he is Archdeacon now--he was a canon then--and he was serving in

the Westminster battery, if that is the proper term--I do not know, as

you mix military and ecclesiastical things together so much.  He left the

luncheon table before I did.  He began this.  I did steal his hat, but he

began by taking mine.  I make that interjection because I would not

accuse Archdeacon Wilberforce of stealing my hat--I should not think of

it.  I confine that phrase to myself.  He merely took my hat.

And with good judgment, too--it was a better hat than his.  He came out

before the luncheon was over, and sorted the hats in the hall, and

selected one which suited.  It happened to be mine.  He went off with it.

When I came out by-and-by there was no hat there which would go on my

head except his, which was left behind.  My head was not the customary

size just at that time.  I had been receiving a good many very nice and

complimentary attentions, and my head was a couple of sizes larger than

usual, and his hat just suited me.  The bumps and corners were all right

intellectually.  There were results pleasing to me--possibly so to him.

He found out whose hat it was, and wrote me saying it was pleasant that

all the way home, whenever he met anybody his gravities, his solemnities,

his deep thoughts, his eloquent remarks were all snatched up by the

people he met, and mistaken for brilliant humorisms.



I had another experience.  It was not unpleasing.  I was received with a

deference which was entirely foreign to my experience by everybody whom I

met, so that before I got home I had a much higher opinion of myself than

I have ever had before or since.  And there is in that very connection an

incident which I remember at that old date which is rather melancholy to

me, because it shows how a person can deteriorate in a mere seven years.

It is seven years ago.  I have not that hat now.  I was going down Pall-

Mall, or some other of your big streets, and I recognized that that hat

needed ironing.  I went into a big shop and passed in my hat, and asked

that it might be ironed.  They were courteous, very courteous, even

courtly.  They brought that hat back to me presently very sleek and nice,

and I asked how much there was to pay.  They replied that they did not

charge the clergy anything.  I have cherished the delight of that moment

from that day to this.  It was the first thing I did the other day to go

and hunt up that shop and hand in my hat to have it ironed.  I said when

it came back, "How much to pay?"  They said, "Ninepence."  In seven years

I have acquired all that worldliness, and I am sorry to be back where I

was seven years ago.



But now I am chaffing and chaffing and chaffing here, and I hope you will

forgive me for that; but when a man stands on the verge of seventy-two

you know perfectly well that he never reached that place without knowing

what this life is heart-breaking bereavement.  And so our reverence is

for our dead.  We do not forget them; but our duty is toward the living;

and if we can be cheerful, cheerful in spirit, cheerful in speech and in

hope, that is a benefit to those who are around us.



My own history includes an incident which will always connect me with

England in a pathetic way, for when I arrived here seven years ago with

my wife and my daughter--we had gone around the globe lecturing to raise

money to clear off a debt--my wife and one of my daughters started across

the ocean to bring to England our eldest daughter.  She was twenty four

years of age and in the bloom of young womanhood, and we were

unsuspecting.  When my wife and daughter--and my wife has passed from

this life since--when they had reached mid Atlantic, a cablegram--one of

those heartbreaking cablegrams which we all in our days have to

experience--was put into my hand.  It stated that that daughter of ours

had gone to her long sleep. And so, as I say, I cannot always be

cheerful, and I cannot always be chaffing; I must sometimes lay the cap

and bells aside, and recognize that I am of the human race like the rest,

and must have my cares and griefs.  And therefore I noticed what Mr.

Birrell said--I was so glad to hear him say it--something that was in the

nature of these verses here at the top of this:



              "He lit our life with shafts of sun

               And vanquished pain.

               Thus two great nations stand as one

               In honoring Twain."



I am very glad to have those verses.  I am very glad and very grateful

for what Mr. Birrell said in that connection.  I have received since I

have been here, in this one week, hundreds of letters from all conditions

of people in England--men, women, and children--and there is in them

compliment, praise, and, above all and better than all, there is in them

a note of affection.  Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection

--that is the last and final and most precious reward that any man can

win, whether by character or achievement, and I am very grateful to have

that reward.  All these letters make me feel that here in England--as in

America--when I stand under the English flag, I am not a stranger.  I am

not an alien, but at home.













DEDICATION SPEECH



          AT THE DEDICATION OF THE COLLEGE OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK,

          MAY 16, 1908



          Mr. Clemens wore his gown as Doctor of Laws, Oxford University.

          Ambassador Bryce and Mr. Choate had made the formal addresses.



How difficult, indeed, is the higher education.  Mr. Choate needs a

little of it.  He is not only short as a statistician of New York, but he

is off, far off, in his mathematics.  The four thousand citizens of

Greater New York, indeed!



But I don't think it was wise or judicious on the part of Mr. Choate to

show this higher education he has obtained.  He sat in the lap of that

great education (I was there at the time), and see the result--the

lamentable result.  Maybe if he had had a sandwich here to sustain him

the result would not have been so serious.



For seventy-two years I have been striving to acquire that higher

education which stands for modesty and diffidence, and it doesn't work.



And then look at Ambassador Bryce, who referred to his alma mater,

Oxford.  He might just as well have included me.  Well, I am a later

production.



If I am the latest graduate, I really and sincerely hope I am not the

final flower of its seven centuries; I hope it may go on for seven ages

longer.













DIE SCHRECKEN DER DEUTSCHEN SPRACHE [THE HORRORS OF THE GERMAN LANGUAGE]



          ADDRESS TO THE VIENNA PRESS CLUB, NOVEMBER 21, 1897,

          DELIVERED IN GERMAN [Here in literal translation]



It has me deeply touched, my gentlemen, here so hospitably received to

be.  From colleagues out of my own profession, in this from my own home

so far distant land.  My heart is full of gratitude, but my poverty of

German words forces me to greater economy of expression.  Excuse you, my

gentlemen, that I read off, what I you say will.  [But he didn't read].



The German language speak I not good, but have numerous connoisseurs me

assured that I her write like an angel.  Maybe--maybe--I know not.  Have

till now no acquaintance with the angels had.  That comes later--when it

the dear God please--it has no hurry.



Since long, my gentlemen, have I the passionate longing nursed a speech

on German to hold, but one has me not permitted.  Men, who no feeling for

the art had, laid me ever hindrance in the way and made naught my desire

--sometimes by excuses, often by force.  Always said these men to me:

"Keep you still, your Highness!  Silence!  For God's sake seek another

way and means yourself obnoxious to make."



In the present case, as usual it is me difficult become, for me the

permission to obtain.  The committee sorrowed deeply, but could me the

permission not grant on account of a law which from the Concordia demands

she shall the German language protect.  Du liebe Zeit!  How so had one to

me this say could--might--dared--should?  I am indeed the truest friend

of the German language--and not only now, but from long since--yes,

before twenty years already.  And never have I the desire had the noble

language to hurt; to the contrary, only wished she to improve--I would

her only reform.  It is the dream of my life been.  I have already visits

by the various German governments paid and for contracts prayed.  I am

now to Austria in the same task come.  I would only some changes effect.

I would only the language method--the luxurious, elaborate construction

compress, the eternal parenthesis suppress, do away with, annihilate; the

introduction of more than thirteen subjects in one sentence forbid; the

verb so far to the front pull that one it without a telescope discover

can.  With one word, my gentlemen, I would your beloved language simplify

so that, my gentlemen, when you her for prayer need, One her yonder-up

understands.



I beseech you, from me yourself counsel to let, execute these mentioned

reforms.  Then will you an elegant language possess, and afterward, when

you some thing say will, will you at least yourself understand what you

said had.  But often nowadays, when you a mile-long sentence from you

given and you yourself somewhat have rested, then must you have a

touching inquisitiveness have yourself to determine what you actually

spoken have.  Before several days has the correspondent of a local paper

a sentence constructed which hundred and twelve words contain, and

therein were seven parentheses smuggled in, and the subject seven times

changed.  Think you only, my gentlemen, in the course of the voyage of a

single sentence must the poor, persecuted, fatigued subject seven times

change position!



Now, when we the mentioned reforms execute, will it no longer so bad be.

Doch noch eins.  I might gladly the separable verb also a little bit

reform.  I might none do let what Schiller did: he has the whole history

of the Thirty Years' War between the two members of a separable verb in-

pushed.  That has even Germany itself aroused, and one has Schiller the

permission refused the History of the Hundred Years' War to compose--God

be it thanked!  After all these reforms established be will, will the

German language the noblest and the prettiest on the world be.



Since to you now, my gentlemen, the character of my mission known is,

beseech I you so friendly to be and to me your valuable help grant.

Mr. Potzl has the public believed make would that I to Vienna come am in

order the bridges to clog up and the traffic to hinder, while I

observations gather and note.  Allow you yourselves but not from him

deceived.  My frequent presence on the bridges has an entirely innocent

ground.  Yonder gives it the necessary space, yonder can one a noble long

German sentence elaborate, the bridge-railing along, and his whole

contents with one glance overlook.  On the one end of the railing pasted

I the first member of a separable verb and the final member cleave I to

the other end--then spread the body of the sentence between it out!

Usually are for my purposes the bridges of the city long enough; when I

but Potzl's writings study will I ride out and use the glorious endless

imperial bridge.  But this is a calumny; Potzl writes the prettiest

German.  Perhaps not so pliable as the mine, but in many details much

better.  Excuse you these flatteries.  These are well deserved.



Now I my speech execute--no, I would say I bring her to the close.  I am a

foreigner--but here, under you, have I it entirely forgotten.  And so

again and yet again proffer I you my heartiest thanks.













GERMAN FOR THE HUNGARIANS



          ADDRESS AT THE JUBILEE CELEBRATION OF THE EMANCIPATION OF THE

          HUNGARIAN PRESS,  MARCH 26, 1899



          The Ministry and members of Parliament were present.  The

          subject was the "Ausgleich"--i. e., the arrangement for the

          apportionment of the taxes between Hungary and Austria.

          Paragraph 14 of the ausgleich fixes the proportion each country

          must pay to the support of the army.  It is the paragraph which

          caused the trouble and prevented its renewal.



Now that we are all here together, I think it will be a good idea to

arrange the ausgleich.  If you will act for Hungary I shall be quite

willing to act for Austria, and this is the very time for it.  There

couldn't be a better, for we are all feeling friendly, fair-minded, and

hospitable now, and, full of admiration for each other, full of

confidence in each other, full of the spirit of welcome, full of the

grace of forgiveness, and the disposition to let bygones be bygones.



Let us not waste this golden, this beneficent, this providential

opportunity.  I am willing to make any concession you want, just so we

get it settled.  I am not only willing to let grain come in free, I am

willing to pay the freight on it, and you may send delegates to the

Reichsrath if you like.  All I require is that they shall be quiet,

peaceable people like your own deputies, and not disturb our proceedings.



If you want the Gegenseitigengeldbeitragendenverhaltnismassigkeiten

rearranged and readjusted I am ready for that.  I will let you off at

twenty-eight per cent.--twenty-seven--even twenty-five if you insist,

for there is nothing illiberal about me when I am out on a diplomatic

debauch.



Now, in return for these concessions, I am willing to take anything in

reason, and I think we may consider the business settled and the

ausgleich ausgegloschen at last for ten solid years, and we will sign the

papers in blank, and do it here and now.



Well, I am unspeakably glad to have that ausgleich off my hands.  It has

kept me awake nights for anderthalbjahr.



But I never could settle it before, because always when I called at the

Foreign Office in Vienna to talk about it, there wasn't anybody at home,

and that is not a place where you can go in and see for yourself whether

it is a mistake or not, because the person who takes care of the front

door there is of a size that discourages liberty of action and the free

spirit of investigation.  To think the ausgleich is abgemacht at last!

It is a grand and beautiful consummation, and I am glad I came.



The way I feel now I do honestly believe I would rather be just my own

humble self at this moment than paragraph 14.













A NEW GERMAN WORD



          To aid a local charity Mr. Clemens appeared before a

          fashionable audience in Vienna, March 10, 1899, reading his

          sketch "The Lucerne Girl," and describing how he had been

          interviewed and ridiculed.  He said in part:



I have not sufficiently mastered German, to allow my using it with

impunity.  My collection of fourteen-syllable German words is still

incomplete.  But I have just added to that collection a jewel--

a veritable jewel.  I found it in a telegram from Linz, and it contains

ninety-five letters:



Personaleinkommensteuerschatzungskommissionsmitgliedsreisekostenrechnungs

erganzungsrevisionsfund



If I could get a similar word engraved upon my tombstone I should sleep

beneath it in peace.













UNCONSCIOUS PLAGIARISM



          DELIVERED AT THE DINNER GIVEN BY THE PUBLISHERS OF "THE

          ATLANTIC MONTHLY" TO OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, IN HONOR OF HIS

          SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY, AUGUST 29, 1879



I would have travelled a much greater distance than I have come to

witness the paying of honors to Doctor Holmes; for my feeling toward him

has always been one of peculiar warmth.  When one receives a letter from

a great man for the first time in his life, it is a large event to him,

as all of you know by your own experience.  You never can receive letters

enough from famous men afterward to obliterate that one, or dim the

memory of the pleasant surprise it was, and the gratification it gave

you.  Lapse of time cannot make it commonplace or cheap.



Well, the first great man who ever wrote me a letter was our guest--

Oliver Wendell Holmes.  He was also the first great literary man I ever

stole anything from--and that is how I came to write to him and he to me.

When my first book was new, a friend of mine said to me, "The dedication

is very neat."  Yes, I said, I thought it was.  My friend said, "I always

admired it, even before I saw it in The Innocents Abroad."  I naturally

said: "What do you mean?   Where did you ever see it before?"  "Well, I

saw it first some years ago as Doctor Holmes's dedication to his Songs in

Many Keys."  Of course, my first impulse was to prepare this man's

remains for burial, but upon reflection I said I would reprieve him for a

moment or two and give him a chance to prove his assertion if he could:

We stepped into a book-store, and he did prove it.  I had really stolen

that dedication, almost word for word.  I could not imagine how this

curious thing had happened; for I knew one thing--that a certain amount

of pride always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, and that this

pride protects a man from deliberately stealing other people's ideas.

That is what a teaspoonful of brains will do for a man--and admirers had

often told me I had nearly a basketful--though they were rather reserved

as to the size of the basket.



However, I thought the thing out, and solved the mystery.  Two years

before, I had been laid up a couple of weeks in the Sandwich Islands, and

had read and re-read Doctor Holmes's poems till my mental reservoir was

filled up with them to the brim.  The dedication lay on the top, and

handy, so, by-and-by, I unconsciously stole it.  Perhaps I unconsciously

stole the rest of the volume, too, for many people have told me that my

book was pretty poetical, in one way or another.  Well, of course, I

wrote Doctor Holmes and told him I hadn't meant to steal, and he wrote

back and said in the kindest way that it was all right and no harm done;

and added that he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas

gathered in reading and hearing, imagining they were original with

ourselves.  He stated a truth, and did it in such a pleasant way, and

salved over my sore spot so gently and so healingly, that I was rather

glad I had committed the crime, far the sake of the letter.  I afterward

called on him and told him to make perfectly free with any ideas of mine

that struck him as being good protoplasm for poetry.  He could see by

that that there wasn't anything mean about me; so we got along right from

the start.  I have not met Doctor Holmes many times since; and lately he

said--However, I am wandering wildly away from the one thing which I got

on my feet to do; that is, to make my compliments to you, my fellow-

teachers of the great public, and likewise to say that I am right glad to

see that Doctor Holmes is still in his prime and full of generous life;

and as age is not determined by years, but by trouble and infirmities of

mind and body, I hope it may be a very long time yet before any one can

truthfully say, "He is growing old."













THE WEATHER



          ADDRESS AT THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY'S SEVENTY FIRST

          ANNUAL DINNER, NEW YORK CITY



The next toast was: "The Oldest Inhabitant-The Weather of New England."



                   "Who can lose it and forget it?

                    Who can have it and regret it?

                    Be interposer 'twixt us Twain."

                                        --Merchant of Venice.



I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in

New England but the weather.  I don't know who makes that, but I think it

must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk's factory who experiment and

learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted

to make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take

their custom elsewhere if they don't get it.  There is a sumptuous

variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger's

admiration--and regret.  The weather is always doing something there;

always attending strictly to business; always getting up new designs and

trying them on the people to see how they will go.  But it gets through

more business in spring than in any other season.  In the spring I have

counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of

four-and-twenty hours.  It was I that made the fame and fortune of that

man that had that marvellous collection of weather on exhibition at the

Centennial, that so astounded the foreigners.  He was going to travel all

over the world and get specimens from all the climes.  I said, "Don't you

do it; you come to New England on a favorable spring day."  I told him

what we could do in the way of style, variety, and quantity.  Well, he

came and he made his collection in four days.  As to variety, why, he

confessed that he got hundreds of kinds of weather that he had never

heard of before.  And as to quantity well, after he had picked out and

discarded all that was blemished in any way, he not only had weather

enough, but weather to spare; weather to hire out; weather to sell; to

deposit; weather to invest; weather to give to the poor.  The people of

New England are by nature patient and forbearing, but there are some

things which they will not stand.  Every year they kill a lot of poets

for writing about "Beautiful Spring."  These are generally casual

visitors, who bring their notions of spring from somewhere else, and

cannot, of course, know how the natives feel about spring.  And so the

first thing they know the opportunity to inquire how they feel has

permanently gone by.  Old Probabilities has a mighty reputation for

accurate prophecy, and thoroughly well deserves it.  You take up the

paper and observe how crisply and confidently he checks off what to-day's

weather is going to be on the Pacific, down South, in the Middle States,

in the Wisconsin region.  See him sail along in the joy and pride of his

power till he gets to New England, and then see his tail drop.

He doesn't know what the weather is going to be in New England.

Well, he mulls over it, and by and-by he gets out something about like

this:  Probably northeast to southwest winds, varying to the southward

and westward and eastward, and points between, high and low barometer

swapping around from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail,

and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes, with thunder and

lightning.  Then he jots down his postscript from his wandering mind, to

cover accidents.  "But it is possible that the programme may be wholly

changed in the mean time."  Yes, one of the brightest gems in the New

England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it.  There is only one

thing certain about it: you are certain there is going to be plenty of

it--a perfect grand review; but you never can tell which end of the

procession is going to move first.  You fix up for the drought; you leave

your umbrella in the house and sally out, and two to one you get

drowned.  You make up your mind that the earthquake is due; you stand

from under, and take hold of something to steady yourself, and the first

thing you know you get struck by lightning.  These are great

disappointments; but they can't be helped.  The lightning there is

peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't

leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether--Well, you'd

think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there.

And the thunder.  When the thunder begins to merely tune up and scrape

and saw, and key up the instruments for the performance, strangers say,

"Why, what awful thunder you have here!" But when the baton is raised and

the real concert begins, you'll find that stranger down in the cellar

with his head in the ash-barrel.  Now as to the size of the weather in

New England--lengthways, I mean.  It is utterly disproportioned to the

size of that little country.  Half the time, when it is packed as full as

it can stick, you will see that New England weather sticking out beyond

the edges and projecting around hundreds and hundreds of miles over the

neighboring States.  She can't hold a tenth part of her weather.  You can

see cracks all about where she has strained herself trying to do it.

I could speak volumes about the inhuman perversity of the New England

weather, but I will give but a single specimen.  I like to hear rain on a

tin roof.  So I covered part of my roof with tin, with an eye to that

luxury.  Well, sir, do you think it ever rains on that tin?  No, sir;

skips it every time.  Mind, in this speech I have been trying merely to

do honor to the New England weather--no language could do it justice.

But, after all, there is at least one or two things about that weather

(or, if you please, effects produced by it) which we residents would not

like to part with.  If we hadn't our bewitching autumn foliage, we should

still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for

all its bullying vagaries--the ice-storm: when a leafless tree is clothed

with ice from the bottom to the top--ice that is as bright and clear as

crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dew-

drops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of

Persia's diamond plume.  Then the wind waves the branches and the sun

comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that

glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change

and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red

to green, and green to gold--the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very

explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax,

the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating,

intolerable magnificence.  One cannot make the words too strong.













THE BABIES



THE BABIES



          DELIVERED AT THE BANQUET, IN CHICAGO, GIVEN BY THE ARMY OF THE

          TENNESSEE TO THEIR FIRST COMMANDER, GENERAL U. S. GRANT,

          NOVEMBER, 1879



          The fifteenth regular toast was "The Babies.--As they comfort

          us in our sorrows, let us not forget them in our festivities."



I like that.  We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies.  We have

not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works

down to the babies, we stand on common ground.  It is a shame that for a

thousand years the world's banquets have utterly ignored the baby, as if

he didn't amount to anything.  If you will stop and think a minute--if

you will go back fifty or one hundred years to your early married life

and recontemplate your first baby--you will remember that he amounted to

a good deal, and even something over.  You soldiers all know that when

that little fellow arrived at family headquarters you had to hand in your

resignation.  He took entire command.  You became his lackey, his mere

body-servant, and you had to stand around too.  He was not a commander

who made allowances for time, distance, weather, or anything else.  You

had to execute his order whether it was possible or not.  And there was

only one form of marching in his manual of tactics, and that was the

double-quick.  He treated you with every sort of insolence and

disrespect, and the bravest of you didn't dare to say a word.  You could

face the death-storm at Donelson and Vicksburg, and give back blow for

blow; but when he clawed your whiskers, and pulled your hair, and twisted

your nose, you had to take it.  When the thunders of war were sounding in

your ears you set your faces toward the batteries, and advanced with

steady tread; but when he turned on the terrors of his war whoop you

advanced in the other direction, and mighty glad of the chance, too.

When he called for soothing-syrup, did you venture to throw out any side-

remarks about certain services being unbecoming an officer and a

gentleman?  No.  You got up and got it.  When he ordered his pap bottle

and it was not warm, did you talk back?  Not you.  You went to work and

warmed it.  You even descended so far in your menial office as to take a

suck at that warm, insipid stuff yourself, to see if it was right--three

parts water to one of milk, a touch of sugar to modify the colic, and a

drop of peppermint to kill those immortal hiccoughs.  I can taste that

stuff yet.  And how many things you learned as you went along!

Sentimental young folks still take stock in that beautiful old saying

that when the baby smiles in his sleep, it is because the angels are

whispering to him.  Very pretty, but too thin--simply wind on the

stomach, my friends.  If the baby proposed to take a walk at his usual

hour, two o'clock in the morning, didn't you rise up promptly and remark,

with a mental addition which would not improve a Sunday-school book much,

that that was the very thing you were about to propose yourself?  Oh!

you were under good discipline, and as you went fluttering up and down

the room in your undress uniform, you not only prattled undignified baby-

talk, but even tuned up your martial voices and tried to sing!--Rock a-by

Baby in the Tree-top, for instance.  What a spectacle far an Army of the

Tennessee!  And what an affliction for the neighbors, too; for it is not

everybody within, a mile around that likes military music at three in the

morning.  And, when you had been keeping this sort of thing up two or

three hours, and your little velvet head intimated that nothing suited

him like exercise and noise, what did you do?  You simply went on until

you dropped in the last ditch.  The idea that a baby doesn't amount to

anything!  Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself.

One baby can, furnish more business than you and your whole Interior

Department can attend to.  He is enterprising, irrepressible, brimful of

lawless activities.  Do what you please, you can't make him stay on the

reservation.  Sufficient unto the day is one baby.  As long as you are in

your right mind don't you ever pray for twins.  Twins amount to a

permanent riot.  And there ain't any real difference between triplets and

an insurrection.



Yes, it was high time for a toast-master to recognize the importance of

the babies.  Think what is in store for the present crop!  Fifty years

from now we shall all be dead, I trust, and then this flag, if it still

survive (and let us hope it may), will be floating over a Republic

numbering 200,000,000 souls, according to the settled laws of our

increase.  Our present schooner of State will have grown into a political

leviathan--a Great Eastern.  The cradled babies of to-day will be on

deck.  Let them be well trained, for we are going to leave a big contract

on their hands.  Among the three or four million cradles now rocking in

the land are some which this nation would preserve for ages as sacred

things, if we could know which ones they are.  In one of these cradles

the unconscious Farragut of the future is at this moment teething think

of it! and putting in a world of dead earnest, unarticulated, but

perfectly justifiable profanity over it, too.  In another the future

renowned astronomer is blinking at the shining Milky Way with but a

languid interest poor little chap!--and wondering what has become of that

other one they call the wet-nurse.  In another the future great historian

is lying--and doubtless will continue to lie until his earthly mission is

ended.  In another the future President is busying himself with no

profounder problem of state than what the mischief has become of his hair

so early; and in a mighty array of other cradles there are now some

60,000 future office-seekers, getting ready to furnish him occasion to

grapple with that same old problem a second, time.  And in still one more

cradle, some where under the flag, the future illustrious commander-in-

chief of the American armies is so little burdened with his approaching

grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole strategic mind

at this moment to trying to find out some way to get his big toe into his

mouth--an achievement which, meaning no disrespect, the illustrious guest

of this evening turned his entire attention to some fifty-six years ago;

and if the child is but a prophecy of the man, there are mighty few who

will doubt that he succeeded.













OUR CHILDREN AND GREAT DISCOVERIES



          DELIVERED AT THE AUTHORS' CLUB, NEW YORK



Our children--yours--and--mine.  They seem like little things to talk

about--our children, but little things often make up the sum of human

life--that's a good sentence.  I repeat it, little things often produce

great things.  Now, to illustrate, take Sir Isaac Newton--I presume some

of you have heard of Mr. Newton.  Well, once when Sir Isaac Newton--

a mere lad--got over into the man's apple orchard--I don't know what he

was doing there--I didn't come all the way from Hartford to q-u-e-s-t-i-

o-n Mr. Newton's honesty--but when he was there--in the main orchard--

he saw an apple fall and he was a-t-t-racted toward it, and that led to

the discovery--not of Mr. Newton but of the great law of attraction and

gravitation.



And there was once another great discoverer--I've forgotten his name,

and I don't remember what he discovered, but I know it was something very

important, and I hope you will all tell your children about it when you

get home.  Well, when the great discoverer was once loafn' around down in

Virginia, and a-puttin' in his time flirting with Pocahontas--oh!

Captain John Smith, that was the man's name--and while he and Poca were

sitting in Mr. Powhatan's garden, he accidentally put his arm around her

and picked something simple weed, which proved to be tobacco--and now we

find it in every Christian family, shedding its civilizing influence

broadcast throughout the whole religious community.



Now there was another great man, I can't think of his name either, who

used to loaf around and watch the great chandelier in the cathedral at

Pisa., which set him to thinking about the great law of gunpowder, and

eventually led to the discovery of the cotton-gin.



Now, I don't say this as an inducement for our young men to loaf around

like Mr. Newton and Mr. Galileo and Captain Smith, but they were once

little babies two days old, and they show what little things have

sometimes accomplished.













EDUCATING THEATRE-GOERS



          The children of the Educational Alliance gave a performance of

          "The Prince and the Pauper" on the afternoon of April 14, 1907,

          in the theatre of the Alliance Building in East Broadway.  The

          audience was composed of nearly one thousand children of the

          neighborhood.  Mr. Clemens, Mr. Howells, and Mr. Daniel Frohman

          were among the invited guests.



I have not enjoyed a play so much, so heartily, and so thoroughly since I

played Miles Hendon twenty-two years ago.  I used to play in this piece

(" The Prince and the Pauper") with my children, who, twenty-two years

ago, were little youngsters.  One of my daughters was the Prince, and a

neighbor's daughter was the Pauper, and the children of other neighbors

played other parts.  But we never gave such a performance as we have seen

here to-day.  It would have been beyond us.



My late wife was the dramatist and stage-manager.  Our coachman was the

stage-manager, second in command.  We used to play it in this simple way,

and the one who used to bring in the crown on a cushion--he was a little

fellow then--is now a clergyman way up high--six or seven feet high--and

growing higher all the time.  We played it well, but not as well as you

see it here, for you see it done by practically trained professionals.



I was especially interested in the scene which we have just had, for

Miles Hendon was my part.  I did it as well as a person could who never

remembered his part.  The children all knew their parts.  They did not

mind if I did not know mine.  I could thread a needle nearly as well as

the player did whom you saw to-day.  The words of my part I could supply

on the spot.  The words of the song that Miles Hendon sang here I did not

catch.  But I was great in that song.



          [Then Mr. Clemens hummed a bit of doggerel that the reporter

          made out as this:



                   "There was a woman in her town,

                    She loved her husband well,

                    But another man just twice as well."



          "How is that?" demanded Mr. Clemens.  Then resuming]



It was so fresh and enjoyable to make up a new set of words each time

that I played the part.



If I had a thousand citizens in front of me, I would like to give them

information, but you children already know all that I have found out

about the Educational Alliance.  It's like a man living within thirty

miles of Vesuvius and never knowing about a volcano.  It's like living

for a lifetime in Buffalo, eighteen miles from Niagara, and never going

to see the Falls.  So I had lived in New York and knew nothing about the

Educational Alliance.



This theatre is a part of the work, and furnishes pure and clean plays.

This theatre is an influence.  Everything in the world is accomplished by

influences which train and educate.  When you get to be seventy-one and a

half, as I am, you may think that your education is over, but it isn't.



If we had forty theatres of this kind in this city of four millions, how

they would educate and elevate!  We should have a body of educated

theatre-goers.



It would make better citizens, honest citizens.  One of the best gifts a

millionaire could make would be a theatre here and a theatre there.  It

would make of you a real Republic, and bring about an educational level.













THE EDUCATIONAL THEATRE



          On November 19, 1907, Mr. Clemens entertained a party of six or

          seven hundred of his friends, inviting them to witness the

          representation of "The Prince and the Pauper," flayed by boys

          and girls of the East Side at the Children's Educational

          Theatre, New York.



Just a word or two to let you know how deeply I appreciate the honor

which the children who are the actors and frequenters of this cozy

playhouse have conferred upon me.  They have asked me to be their

ambassador to invite the hearts and brains of New York to come down here

and see the work they are doing.  I consider it a grand distinction to be

chosen as their intermediary.  Between the children and myself there is

an indissoluble bond of friendship.



I am proud of this theatre and this performance--proud, because I am

naturally vain--vain of myself and proud of the children.



I wish we could reach more children at one time.  I am glad to see that

the children of the East Side have turned their backs on the Bowery

theatres to come to see the pure entertainments presented here.



This Children's Theatre is a great educational institution.  I hope the

time will come when it will be part of every public school in the land.

I may be pardoned in being vain.  I was born vain, I guess.  [At this

point the stage-manager's whistle interrupted Mr. Clemens.]  That settles

it; there's my cue to stop.  I was to talk until the whistle blew, but it

blew before I got started.  It takes me longer to get started than most

people.  I guess I was born at slow speed.  My time is up, and if you'll

keep quiet for two minutes I'll tell you something about Miss Herts, the

woman who conceived this splendid idea.  She is the originator and the

creator of this theatre.  Educationally, this institution coins the gold

of young hearts into external good.





          [On April 23, 1908, he spoke again at the same place]



I will be strictly honest with you; I am only fit to be honorary

president.  It is not to be expected that I should be useful as a real

president.  But when it comes to things ornamental I, of course, have no

objection.  There is, of course, no competition.  I take it as a very

real compliment because there are thousands of children who have had a

part in this request.  It is promotion in truth.



It is a thing worth doing that is done here.  You have seen the children

play.  You saw how little Sally reformed her burglar.  She could reform

any burglar.  She could reform me.  This is the only school in which can

be taught the highest and most difficult lessons--morals.  In other

schools the way of teaching morals is revolting.  Here the children who

come in thousands live through each part.



They are terribly anxious for the villain to get his bullet, and that I

take to be a humane and proper sentiment.  They spend freely the ten

cents that is not saved without a struggle.  It comes out of the candy

money, and the money that goes for chewing-gum and other necessaries of

life.  They make the sacrifice freely.  This is the only school which

they are sorry to leave.













POETS AS POLICEMEN



          Mr. Clemens was one of the speakers at the Lotos Club dinner to

          Governor Odell, March 24, 1900.  The police problem was

          referred to at length.



Let us abolish policemen who carry clubs and revolvers, and put in a

squad of poets armed to the teeth with poems on Spring and Love.  I would

be very glad to serve as commissioner, not because I think I am

especially qualified, but because I am too tired to work and would like

to take a rest.



Howells would go well as my deputy.  He is tired too, and needs a rest

badly.



I would start in at once to elevate, purify, and depopulate the red-light

district.  I would assign the most soulful poets to that district,

all heavily armed with their poems.  Take Chauncey Depew as a sample.

I would station them on the corners after they had rounded up all the

depraved people of the district so they could not escape, and then have

them read from their poems to the poor unfortunates.  The plan would be

very effective in causing an emigration of the depraved element.













PUDD'NHEAD WILSON DRAMATIZED



          When Mr. Clemens arrived from Europe in 1895 one of the first

          things he did was to see the dramatization of Pudd'nhead

          Wilson.  The audience becoming aware of the fact that Mr.

          Clemens was in the house called upon him for a speech.



Never in my life have I been able to make a speech without preparation,

and I assure you that this position in which I find myself is one totally

unexpected.



I have been hemmed in all day by William Dean Howells and other frivolous

persons, and I have been talking about everything in the world except

that of which speeches are constructed.  Then, too, seven days on the

water is not conducive to speech-making.  I will only say that I

congratulate Mr. Mayhew; he has certainly made a delightful play out of

my rubbish.  His is a charming gift.  Confidentially I have always had

an idea that I was well equipped to write plays, but I have never

encountered a manager who has agreed with me.













DALY THEATRE



          ADDRESS AT A DINNER AFTER THE ONE HUNDREDTH PERFORMANCE OF

          "THE TAMING OF THE SHREW."



          Mr. Clemens made the following speech, which he incorporated

          afterward in Following the Equator.



I am glad to be here.  This is the hardest theatre in New York to get

into, even at the front door.  I never, got in without hard work.  I am

glad we have got so far in at last.  Two or three years ago I had an

appointment to meet Mr. Daly on the stage of this theatre at eight

o'clock in the evening.  Well, I got on a train at Hartford to come to

New York and keep the appointment.  All I had to do was to come to the

back door of the theatre on Sixth Avenue.  I did not believe that; I did

not believe it could be on Sixth Avenue, but that is what Daly's note

said--come to that door, walk right in, and keep the appointment.  It

looked very easy.  It looked easy enough, but I had not much confidence

in the Sixth Avenue door.



Well, I was kind of bored on the train, and I bought some newspapers--New

Haven newspapers--and there was not much news in them, so I read the

advertisements.  There was one advertisement of a bench-show.  I had

heard of bench-shows, and I often wondered what there was about them to

interest people.  I had seen bench-shows--lectured to bench-shows, in

fact--but I didn't want to advertise them or to brag about them.  Well,

I read on a little, and learned that a bench-show was not a bench-show

--but dogs, not benches at all--only dogs.  I began to be interested,

and as there was nothing else to do I read every bit of the

advertisement, and learned that the biggest thing in this show was a St.

Bernard dog that weighed one hundred and forty-five pounds.  Before I got

to New York I was so interested in the bench-shows that I made up my mind

to go to one the first chance I got.  Down on Sixth Avenue, near where

that back door might be, I began to take things leisurely.  I did not

like to be in too much of a hurry.  There was not anything in sight that

looked like a back door.  The nearest approach to it was a cigar store.

So I went in and bought a cigar, not too expensive, but it cost enough to

pay for any information I might get and leave the dealer a fair profit.

Well, I did not like to be too abrupt, to make the man think me crazy, by

asking him if that was the way to Daly's Theatre, so I started gradually

to lead up to the subject, asking him first if that was the way to Castle

Garden.  When I got to the real question, and he said he would show me

the way, I was astonished.  He sent me through a long hallway, and I

found myself in a back yard.  Then I went through a long passageway and

into a little room, and there before my eyes was a big St. Bernard dog

lying on a bench.  There was another door beyond and I went there, and

was met by a big, fierce man with a fur cap on and coat off, who

remarked, "Phwat do yez want?"  I told him I wanted to see Mr. Daly.

"Yez can't see Mr. Daly this time of night," he responded.  I urged that

I had an appointment with Mr. Daly, and gave him my card, which did not

seem to impress him much.  "Yez can't get in and yez can't shmoke here.

Throw away that cigar.  If yez want to see Mr. Daly, yez 'll have to be

after going to the front door and buy a ticket, and then if yez have luck

and he's around that way yez may see him."  I was getting discouraged,

but I had one resource left that had been of good service in similar

emergencies.  Firmly but kindly I told him my name was Mark Twain, and I

awaited results.  There was none.  He was not fazed a bit.  "Phwere's

your order to see Mr. Daly?" he asked.  I handed him the note, and he

examined it intently.  "My friend," I remarked, "you can read that better

if you hold it the other side up."  But he took no notice of the

suggestion, and finally asked: "Where's Mr. Daly's name?"  "There it is,"

I told him, "on the top of the page."  "That's all right," he said,

"that's where he always puts it; but I don't see the 'W' in his name,"

and he eyed me distrustfully.  Finally, he asked, "Phwat do yez want to

see Mr. Daly for?"  "Business."  "Business?"  "Yes."  It was my only

hope.  "Phwat kind--theatres?" that was too much.  "No."  "What kind of

shows, then?"  "Bench-shows."  It was risky, but I was desperate."

Bench--shows, is it--where?"  The big man's face changed, and he began to

look interested.  "New Haven."  "New Haven, it is?  Ah, that's going to

be a fine show.  I'm glad to see you.  Did you see a big dog in the other

room?"  "Yes."  "How much do you think that dog weighs?"  "One hundred

and forty-five pounds."  "Look at that, now!  He's a good judge of dogs,

and no mistake.  He weighs all of one hundred and thirty-eight.  Sit down

and shmoke--go on and shmoke your cigar, I'll tell Mr. Daly you are

here."  In a few minutes I was on the stage shaking hands with Mr. Daly,

and the big man standing around glowing with satisfaction.  "Come around

in front," said Mr. Daly, "and see the performance.  I will put you into

my own box."  And as I moved away I heard my honest friend mutter, "Well,

he desarves it."













THE DRESS OF CIVILIZED WOMAN



A large part of the daughter of civilization is her dress--as it should

be.  Some civilized women would lose half their charm without dress, and

some would lose all of it.  The daughter Of modern civilization dressed

at her utmost best is a marvel of exquisite and beautiful art and

expense.  All the lands, all the climes, and all the arts are laid under

tribute to furnish her forth.  Her linen is from Belfast, her robe is

from Paris, her lace is from Venice, or Spain, or France, her feathers

are from the remote regions of Southern Africa, her furs from the remoter

region of the iceberg and the aurora, her fan from Japan, her diamonds

from Brazil, her bracelets from California, her pearls from Ceylon, her

cameos from Rome.  She has gems and trinkets from buried Pompeii, and

others that graced comely Egyptian forms that have been dust and ashes

now for forty centuries.  Her watch is from Geneva, her card case is from

China, her hair is from--from--I don't know where her hair is from; I

never could find out; that is, her other hair--her public hair, her

Sunday hair; I don't mean the hair she goes to bed with.



And that reminds me of a trifle.  Any time you want to you can glance

around the carpet of a Pullman car, and go and pick up a hair-pin; but

not to save your life can you get any woman in that car to acknowledge

that hair-pin.  Now, isn't that strange?  But it's true.  The woman who

has never swerved from cast-iron veracity and fidelity in her whole life

will, when confronted with this crucial test, deny her hair-pin.  She

will deny that hair-pin before a hundred witnesses.  I have stupidly got

into more trouble and more hot water trying to hunt up the owner of a

hair-pin in a Pullman than by any other indiscretion of my life.













DRESS REFORM AND COPYRIGHT



          When the present copyright law was under discussion, Mr.

          Clemens appeared before the committee.  He had sent Speaker

          Cannon the following letter:



          "DEAR UNCLE JOSEPH,--Please get me the thanks of Congress, not

          next week but right away.  It is very necessary.  Do accomplish

          this for your affectionate old friend right away--

          by, persuasion if you can, by violence if you must, for it is

          imperatively necessary that I get on the floor of the House for

          two or three hours and talk to the members, man by man, in

          behalf of support; encouragement, and protection of one of the

          nation's most valuable assets and industries--its literature.

          I have arguments with me--also a barrel with liquid in it.



          "Give me a chance.  Get me the thanks of Congress.  Don't wait

          for others--there isn't time; furnish them to me yourself and

          let Congress ratify later.  I have stayed away and let Congress

          alone for seventy-one years and am entitled to the thanks.

          Congress knows this perfectly well, and I have long felt hurt

          that this quite proper and earned expression of gratitude has

          been merely felt by the House and never publicly uttered.



          "Send me an order on the sergeant-at-arms quick.  When shall I

          come?

                                   "With love and a benediction,

                                                       "MARK TWAIN."





          While waiting to appear before the committee, My.  Clemens

          talked to the reporters:



Why don't you ask why I am wearing such apparently unseasonable clothes?

I'll tell you.  I have found that when a man reaches the advanced age of

seventy-one years, as I have, the continual sight of dark clothing is

likely to have a depressing effect upon him.  Light-colored clothing is

more pleasing to the eye and enlivens the spirit.  Now, of course, I

cannot compel every one to wear such clothing just for my especial

benefit, so I do the next best thing and wear it myself.



Of course, before a man reaches my years the fear of criticism might

prevent him from indulging his fancy.  I am not afraid of that.  I am

decidedly for pleasing color combinations in dress.  I like to see the

women's clothes, say, at the opera.  What can be more depressing than the

sombre black which custom requires men to wear upon state occasions?

A group of men in evening clothes looks like a flock of crows, and is

just about as inspiring.



After all, what is the purpose of clothing?  Are not clothes intended

primarily to preserve dignity and also to afford comfort to their wearer?

Now I know of nothing more uncomfortable than the present-day clothes of

men.  The finest clothing made is a person's own skin, but, of course,

society demands something more than this.



The best-dressed man I have ever seen, however, was a native of the

Sandwich Islands who attracted my attention thirty years ago.  Now, when

that man wanted to don especial dress to honor a public occasion or a

holiday, why, he occasionally put on a pair of spectacles.  Otherwise the

clothing with which God had provided him sufficed.



Of course, I have ideas of dress reform.  For one thing, why not adopt

some of the women's styles?  Goodness knows, they adopt enough of ours.

Take the peek-a-boo waist, for instance.  It has the obvious advantages

of being cool and comfortable, and in addition it is almost always made

up in pleasing colors which cheer and do not depress.



It is true that I dressed the Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court

in a plug-hat, but, let's see, that was twenty-five years ago.  Then no

man was considered fully dressed until he donned a plug-hat.  Nowadays I

think that no man is dressed until he leaves it home.  Why, when I left

home yesterday they trotted out a plug-hat for me to wear.



"You must wear it," they told me; "why, just think of going to Washington

without a plug-hat!"  But I said no; I would wear a derby or nothing.

Why, I believe I could walk along the streets of New York--I never do--

but still I think I could--and I should never see a well-dressed man

wearing a plug-hat.  If I did I should suspect him of something.  I don't

know just what, but I would suspect him.



Why, when I got up on the second story of that Pennsylvania ferry-boat

coming down here yesterday I saw Howells coming along.  He was the only

man on the boat with a plug-hat, and I tell you he felt ashamed of

himself.  He said he had been persuaded to wear it against his better

sense.  But just think of a man nearly seventy years old who has not a

mind of his own on such matters!



"Are you doing any work now?" the youngest and most serious reporter

asked.



Work?  I retired from work on my seventieth birthday.  Since then I have

been putting in merely twenty-six hours a day dictating my autobiography,

which, as John Phoenix said in regard to his autograph, may be relied

upon as authentic, as it is written exclusively by me.  But it is not to

be published in full until I am thoroughly dead.  I have made it as

caustic, fiendish, and devilish as possible.  It will fill many volumes,

and I shall continue writing it until the time comes for me to join the

angels.  It is going to be a terrible autobiography.  It will make the

hair of some folks curl.  But it cannot be published until I am dead, and

the persons mentioned in it and their children and grandchildren are

dead.  It is something awful!



"Can you tell us the names of some of the notables that are here to see

you off?"



I don't know.  I am so shy.  My shyness takes a peculiar phase.  I never

look a person in the face.  The reason is that I am afraid they may know

me and that I may not know them, which makes it very embarrassing for

both of us.  I always wait for the other person to speak.  I know lots of

people, but I don't know who they are.  It is all a matter of ability to

observe things.  I never observe anything now.  I gave up the habit years

ago.  You should keep a habit up if you want to become proficient in it.

For instance, I was a pilot once, but I gave it up, and I do not believe

the captain of the Minneapolis would let me navigate his ship to London.

Still, if I think that he is not on the job I may go up on the bridge and

offer him a few suggestions.













COLLEGE GIRLS



          Five hundred undergraduates, under the auspices of the Woman's

          University Club, New York, welcomed Mr. Clemens as their guest,

          April 3, 1906, and gave him the freedom of the club, which the

          chairman explained was freedom to talk individually to any girl

          present.



I've worked for the public good thirty years, so for the rest of my life

I shall work for my personal contentment.  I am glad Miss Neron has fed

me, for there is no telling what iniquity I might wander into on an empty

stomach--I mean, an empty mind.



I am going to tell you a practical story about how once upon a time I was

blind--a story I should have been using all these months, but I never

thought about telling it until the other night, and now it is too late,

for on the nineteenth of this month I hope to take formal leave of the

platform forever at Carnegie Hall--that is, take leave so far as talking

for money and for people who have paid money to hear me talk.  I shall

continue to infest the platform on these conditions--that there is nobody

in the house who has paid to hear me, that I am not paid to be heard, and

that there will be none but young women students in the audience.  [Here

Mr. Clemens told the story of how he took a girl to the theatre while he

was wearing tight boots, which appears elsewhere in this volume, and

ended by saying:  "And now let this be a lesson to you--I don't know what

kind of a lesson; I'll let you think it out."]













GIRLS



In my capacity of publisher I recently received a manuscript from a

teacher which embodied a number of answers given by her pupils to

questions propounded.  These answers show that the children had nothing

but the sound to go by--the sense was perfectly empty.  Here are some of

their answers to words they were asked to define:  Auriferous--pertaining

to an orifice; ammonia--the food of the gods; equestrian--one who asks

questions; parasite--a kind of umbrella; ipecaca--man who likes a good

dinner.  And here is the definition of an ancient word honored by a great

party: Republican--a sinner mentioned in the Bible.  And here is an

innocent deliverance of a zoological kind: "There are a good many donkeys

in the theological gardens."  Here also is a definition which really

isn't very bad in its way: Demagogue--a vessel containing beer and other

liquids.  Here, too, is a sample of a boy's composition on girls, which,

I must say, I rather like:



"Girls are very stuckup and dignified in their manner and behaveyour.

They think more of dress than anything and like to play with dowls and

rags.  They cry if they see a cow in a far distance and are afraid of

guns.  They stay at home all the time and go to church every Sunday.

They are al-ways sick.  They are al-ways furry and making fun of boys

hands and they say how dirty.  They cant play marbles.  I pity them poor

things.  They make fun of boys and then turn round and love them.

I don't belave they ever kiled a cat or anything.  They look out every

nite and say, 'Oh, a'nt the moon lovely!'--Thir is one thing I have not

told and that is they al-ways now their lessons bettern boys."













THE LADIES



          DELIVERED AT THE ANNIVERSARY FESTIVAL, 1872, OF THE SCOTTISH

          CORPORATION OF LONDON



          Mr. Clemens replied to the toast "The Ladies."



I am proud, indeed, of the distinction of being chosen to respond to this

especial toast, to "The Ladies," or to women if you please, for that is

the preferable term, perhaps; it is certainly the older, and therefore

the more entitled to reverence.  I have noticed that the Bible, with that

plain, blunt honesty which is such a conspicuous characteristic of the

Scriptures, is always particular to never refer to even the illustrious

mother of all mankind as a "lady," but speaks of her as a woman.  It is

odd, but you will find it is so.  I am peculiarly proud of this honor,

because I think that the toast to women is one which, by right and by

every rule of gallantry, should take precedence of all others--of the

army, of the navy, of even royalty itself--perhaps, though the latter is

not necessary in this day and in this land, for the reason that, tacitly,

you do drink a broad general health to all good women when you drink the

health of the Queen of England and the Princess of Wales.  I have in mind

a poem just now which is familiar to you all, familiar to everybody.  And

what an inspiration that was, and how instantly the present toast recalls

the verses to all our minds when the most noble, the most gracious, the

purest, and sweetest of all poets says:



                         "Woman!  O woman!---er

                         Wom----"



However, you remember the lines; and you remember how feelingly, how

daintily, how almost imperceptibly the verses raise up before you,

feature by feature, the ideal of a true and perfect woman; and how, as

you contemplate the finished marvel, your homage grows into worship of

the intellect that could create so fair a thing out of mere breath, mere

words.  And you call to mind now, as I speak, how the poet, with stern

fidelity to the history of all humanity, delivers this beautiful child of

his heart and his brain over to the trials and sorrows that must come to

all, sooner or later, that abide in the earth, and how the pathetic story

culminates in that apostrophe--so wild, so regretful, so full of mournful

retrospection.  The lines run thus:



                        "Alas!--alas!--a--alas!

                         ----Alas!--------alas!"



--and so on.  I do not remember the rest; but, taken together, it seems

to me that poem is the noblest tribute to woman that human genius has

ever brought forth--and I feel that if I were to talk hours I could not

do my great theme completer or more graceful justice than I have now done

in simply quoting that poet's matchless words.  The phases of the womanly

nature are infinite in their variety.  Take any type of woman, and you

shall find in it something to respect, something to admire, something to

love.  And you shall find the whole joining you heart and hand.  Who was

more patriotic than Joan of Arc?  Who was braver?  Who has given us a

grander instance of self-sacrificing devotion?  Ah! you remember, you

remember well, what a throb of pain, what a great tidal wave of grief

swept over us all when Joan of Arc fell at Waterloo.  Who does not sorrow

for the loss of Sappho, the sweet singer of Israel?  Who among us does

not miss the gentle ministrations, the softening influences, the humble

piety of Lucretia Borgia?  Who can join in the heartless libel that says

woman is extravagant in dress when he can look back and call to mind our

simple and lowly mother Eve arrayed in her modification of the Highland

costume?  Sir, women have been soldiers, women have been painters, women

have been poets.  As long as language lives the name of Cleopatra will

live.  And not because she conquered George III.--but because she wrote

those divine lines:



                   "Let dogs delight to bark and bite,

                    For God hath made them so."



The story of the world is adorned with the names of illustrious ones of

our own sex--some of, them sons of St. Andrew, too--Scott, Bruce, Burns,

the warrior Wallace, Ben Nevis--the gifted Ben Lomond, and the great new

Scotchman, Ben Disraeli.--[Mr. Benjamin Disraeli, at that time Prime

Minister of England, had just been elected Lord Rector of Glasgow

University, and had made a speech which gave rise to a world of

discussion]--Out of the great plains of history tower whole mountain

ranges of sublime women: the Queen of Sheba, Josephine, Semiramis, Sairey

Gamp; the list is endless--but I will not call the mighty roll, the names

rise up in your own memories at the mere suggestion, luminous with the

glory of deeds that cannot die, hallowed by the loving worship of the

good and the true of all epochs and all climes.  Suffice it for our pride

and our honor that we in our day have added to it such names as those of

Grace Darling and Florence Nightingale.  Woman is all that she should be

gentle, patient, longsuffering, trustful, unselfish, full of generous

impulses.  It is her blessed mission to comfort the sorrowing, plead for

the erring, encourage the faint of purpose, succor the distressed, uplift

the fallen, befriend the friendless--in a word, afford the healing of her

sympathies and a home in her heart for all the bruised and persecuted

children that knock at its hospitable door.  And when I say, God bless

her, there is none among us who has known the ennobling affection of a

wife, or the steadfast devotion of a mother but in his heart will say,

Amen!













WOMAN'S PRESS CLUB



          On October 27, 1900, the New York Woman's Press Club gave a tea

          in Carnegie Hall.  Mr. Clemens was the guest of honor.



If I were asked an opinion I would call this an ungrammatical nation.

There is no such thing as perfect grammar, and I don't always speak good

grammar myself.  But I have been foregathering for the past few days with

professors of American universities, and I've heard them all say things

like this: "He don't like to do it."  [There was a stir.] Oh, you'll hear

that to-night if you listen, or, "He would have liked to have done it."

You'll catch some educated Americans saying that.  When these men take

pen in hand they write with as good grammar as any.  But the moment they

throw the pen aside they throw grammatical morals aside with it.



To illustrate the desirability and possibility of concentration, I must

tell you a story of my little six-year-old daughter.  The governess had

been teaching her about the reindeer, and, as the custom was, she related

it to the family.  She reduced the history of that reindeer to two or

three sentences when the governess could not have put it into a page.

She said:  "The reindeer is a very swift animal.  A reindeer once drew a

sled four hundred miles in two hours."  She appended the comment:  "This

was regarded as extraordinary."  And concluded:  "When that reindeer was

done drawing that sled four hundred miles in two hours it died."



As a final instance of the force of limitations in the development of

concentration, I must mention that beautiful creature, Helen Keller, whom

I have known for these many years.  I am filled with the wonder of her

knowledge, acquired because shut out from all distraction.  If I could

have been deaf, dumb, and blind I also might have arrived at something.













VOTES FOR WOMEN



          AT THE ANNUAL MEETING OF THE HEBREW TECHNICAL SCHOOL FOR GIRLS,

          HELD IN THE TEMPLE EMMANUEL, JANUARY 20, 1901



          Mr. Clemens was introduced by President Meyer, who said: "In

          one of Mr. Clemens's works he expressed his opinion of men,

          saying he had no choice between Hebrew and Gentile, black men

          or white; to him all men were alike.  But I never could find

          that he expressed his opinion of women; perhaps that opinion

          was so exalted that he could not express it.  We shall now be

          called to hear what he thinks of women."



LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,--It is a small help that I can afford, but it is

just such help that one can give as coming from the heart through the

mouth.  The report of Mr. Meyer was admirable, and I was as interested in

it as you have been.  Why, I'm twice as old as he, and I've had so much

experience that I would say to him, when he makes his appeal for help:

"Don't make it for to-day or to-morrow, but collect the money on the

spot."



We are all creatures of sudden impulse.  We must be worked up by steam,

as it were.  Get them to write their wills now, or it may be too late by

-and-by.  Fifteen or twenty years ago I had an experience I shall never

forget.  I got into a church which was crowded by a sweltering and

panting multitude.  The city missionary of our town--Hartford--made a

telling appeal for help.  He told of personal experiences among the poor

in cellars and top lofts requiring instances of devotion and help.  The

poor are always good to the poor.  When a person with his millions gives

a hundred thousand dollars it makes a great noise in the world, but he

does not miss it; it's the widow's mite that makes no noise but does the

best work.



I remember on that occasion in the Hartford church the collection was

being taken up.  The appeal had so stirred me that I could hardly wait

for the hat or plate to come my way.  I had four hundred dollars in my

pocket, and I was anxious to drop it in the plate and wanted to borrow

more.  But the plate was so long in coming my way that the fever-heat of

beneficence was going down lower and lower--going down at the rate of a

hundred dollars a minute.  The plate was passed too late.  When it

finally came to me, my enthusiasm had gone down so much that I kept my

four hundred dollars--and stole a dime from the plate.  So, you see, time

sometimes leads to crime.



Oh, many a time have I thought of that and regretted it, and I adjure you

all to give while the fever is on you.



Referring to woman's sphere in life, I'll say that woman is always right.

For twenty-five years I've been a woman's rights man.  I have always

believed, long before my mother died, that, with her gray hairs and

admirable intellect, perhaps she knew as much as I did.  Perhaps she knew

as much about voting as I.



I should like to see the time come when women shall help to make the

laws.  I should like to see that whip-lash, the ballot, in the hands of

women.  As for this city's government, I don't want to say much, except

that it is a shame--a shame; but if I should live twenty-five years

longer--and there is no reason why I shouldn't--I think I'll see women

handle the ballot.  If women had the ballot to-day, the state of things

in this town would not exist.



If all the women in this town had a vote to-day they would elect a mayor

at the next election, and they would rise in their might and change the

awful state of things now existing here.













WOMAN-AN OPINION



          ADDRESS AT AN EARLY BANQUET OF THE WASHINGTON

          CORRESPONDENTS' CLUB



          The twelfth toast was as follows: "Woman--The pride of any

          profession, and the jewel of ours."



MR. PRESIDENT,--I do not know why I should be singled out to receive the

greatest distinction of the evening--for so the office of replying to the

toast of woman has been regarded in every age. I do not know why I have

received his distinction, unless it be that I am a trifle less homely

than the other members of the club.  But be this as it may, Mr.

President, I am proud of the position, and you could not have chosen any

one who would have accepted it more gladly, or labored with a heartier

good-will to do the subject justice than I--because, sir, I love the sex.

I love all the women, irrespective of age or color.



Human intellect cannot estimate what we owe to woman, sir.  She sews on

our buttons; she mends our clothes; she ropes us in at the church fairs;

she confides in us; she tells us whatever she can find out about the

little private affairs of the neighbors; she gives us good advice, and

plenty of it; she soothes our aching brows; she bears our children--ours

as a general thing.  In all relations of life, sir, it is but a just and

graceful tribute to woman to say of her that she is a brick.



Wheresoever you place woman, sir--in whatever position or estate--she is

an ornament to the place she occupies, and a treasure to the world. [Here

Mr. Clemens paused, looked inquiringly at his hearers, and remarked that

the applause should come in at this point. It came in. He resumed his

eulogy.]  Look at Cleopatra! look at Desdemona!--look at Florence

Nightingale!--look at Joan of Arc!--look at Lucretia Borgia!

[Disapprobation expressed.]  Well [said Mr. Clemens, scratching his head,

doubtfully], suppose we let Lucretia slide.  Look at Joyce Heth!--look at

Mother Eve!  You need not look at her unless you want to, but [said Mr.

Clemens, reflectively, after a pause] Eve was ornamental, sir--

particularly before the fashions changed.  I repeat, sir, look at the

illustrious names of history. Look at the Widow Machree!--look at Lucy

Stone!--look at Elizabeth Cady Stanton!--look at George Francis Train!

And, sir, I say it with bowed head and deepest veneration--look at the

mother of Washington!  She raised a boy that could not tell a lie--could

not tell a lie!  But he never had any chance.  It might have been

different if he had belonged to the Washington Newspaper Correspondents'

Club.



I repeat, sir, that in whatever position you place a woman she is an

ornament to society and a treasure to the world.  As a sweetheart, she

has few equals and no superiors; as a cousin, she is convenient; as a

wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper, she is precious; as a

wetnurse, she has no equal among men.



What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman?  They would be

scarce, sir, almighty scarce.  Then let us cherish her; let us protect

her; let us give her our support, our encouragement, our sympathy,

ourselves--if we get a chance.



But, jesting aside, Mr. President, woman is lovable, gracious, kind of

heart, beautiful--worthy of all respect, of all esteem, of all deference.

Not any here will refuse to drink her health right cordially in this

bumper of wine, for each and every one has personally known, and loved,

and honored the very best one of them all--his own mother.













ADVICE TO GIRLS



          In 1907 a young girl whom Mr. Clemens met on the steamer

          Minnehaha called him "grandpa," and he called her his

          granddaughter.  She was attending St. Timothy's School, at

          Catonsville, Maryland, and Mr. Clemens promised her to see her

          graduate.  He accordingly made the journey from New York on

          June 10, 1909, and delivered a short address.



I don't know what to tell you girls to do.  Mr. Martin has told you

everything you ought to do, and now I must give you some don'ts.



There are three things which come to my mind which I consider excellent

advice:



First, girls, don't smoke--that is, don't smoke to excess.  I am seventy-

three and a half years old, and have been smoking seventy-three of them.

But I never smoke to excess--that is, I smoke in moderation, only one

cigar at a time.



Second, don't drink--that is, don't drink to excess.



Third, don't marry--I mean, to excess.



Honesty is the best policy.  That is an old proverb; but you don't want

ever to forget it in your journey through life.













TAXES AND MORALS



ADDRESS DELIVERED IN NEW YORK, JANUARY 22, 1906



          At the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Tuskeegee

          Institute by Booker Washington, Mr. Choate presided, and in

          introducing Mr. Clemens made fun of him because he made play

          his work, and that when he worked hardest he did so lying in

          bed.



I came here in the responsible capacity of policeman to watch Mr. Choate.

This is an occasion of grave and serious importance, and it seems

necessary for me to be present, so that if he tried to work off any

statement that required correction, reduction, refutation, or exposure,

there would be a tried friend of the public to protect the house.  He has

not made one statement whose veracity fails to tally exactly with my own

standard.  I have never seen a person improve so.  This makes me thankful

and proud of a country that can produce such men--two such men.  And all

in the same country.  We can't be with you always; we are passing away,

and then--well, everything will have to stop, I reckon.  It is a sad

thought.  But in spirit I shall still be with you.  Choate, too--if he

can.



Every born American among the eighty millions, let his creed or

destitution of creed be what it may, is indisputably a Christian--to this

degree that his moral constitution is Christian.



There are two kinds of Christian morals, one private and the other

public.  These two are so distinct, so unrelated, that they are no more

akin to each other than are archangels and politicians.  During three

hundred and sixty-three days in the year the American citizen is true to

his Christian private morals, and keeps undefiled the nation's character

at its best and highest; then in the other two days of the year he leaves

his Christian private morals at home and carries his Christian public

morals to the tax office and the polls, and does the best he can to

damage and undo his whole year's faithful and righteous work.  Without a

blush he will vote for an unclean boss if that boss is his party's Moses,

without compunction he will vote against the best man in the whole land

if he is on the other ticket.  Every year in a number of cities and

States he helps put corrupt men in office, whereas if he would but throw

away his Christian public morals, and carry his Christian private morals

to the polls, he could promptly purify the public service and make the

possession of office a high and honorable distinction.



Once a year he lays aside his Christian private morals and hires a ferry-

boat and piles up his bonds in a warehouse in New Jersey for three days,

and gets out his Christian public morals and goes to the tax office and

holds up his hands and swears he wishes he may never--never if he's got a

cent in the world, so help him.  The next day the list appears in the

papers--a column and a quarter of names, in fine print, and every man in

the list a billionaire and member of a couple of churches.  I know all

those people.  I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the

whole lot of them.  They never miss a sermon when they are so's to be

around, and they never miss swearing-off day, whether they are so's to be

around or not.



I used to be an honest man.  I am crumbling.  No--I have crumbled.  When

they assessed me at $75,000 a fortnight ago I went out and tried to

borrow the money, and couldn't; then when I found they were letting a

whole crop of millionaires live in New York at a third of the price they

were charging me I was hurt, I was indignant, and said: "This is the last

feather.  I am not going to run this town all by myself."  In that

moment--in that memorable moment--I began to crumble.  In fifteen minutes

the disintegration was complete.  In fifteen minutes I had become just a

mere moral sand-pile; and I lifted up my hand along with those seasoned

and experienced deacons and swore off every rag of personal property I've

got in the world, clear down to cork leg, glass eye, and what is left of

my wig.



Those tax officers were moved; they were profoundly moved.  They had long

been accustomed to seeing hardened old grafters act like that, and they

could endure the spectacle; but they were expecting better things of me,

a chartered, professional moralist, and they were saddened.



I fell visibly in their respect and esteem, and I should have fallen in

my own, except that I had already struck bottom, and there wasn't any

place to fall to.



At Tuskeegee they will jump to misleading conclusions from insufficient

evidence, along with Doctor Parkhurst, and they will deceive the student

with the superstition that no gentleman ever swears.



Look at those good millionaires; aren't they gentlemen?  Well, they

swear.  Only once in a year, maybe, but there's enough bulk to it to make

up for the lost time.  And do they lose anything by it?  No, they don't;

they save enough in three minutes to support the family seven years.

When they swear, do we shudder?  No--unless they say "damn!"  Then we do.

It shrivels us all up.  Yet we ought not to feel so about it, because we

all swear--everybody.  Including the ladies.  Including Doctor Parkhurst,

that strong and brave and excellent citizen, but superficially educated.



For it is not the word that is the sin, it is the spirit back of the

word.  When an irritated lady says "oh!" the spirit back of it is "damn!"

and that is the way it is going to be recorded against her.  It always

makes me so sorry when I hear a lady swear like that.  But if she says

"damn," and says it in an amiable, nice way, it isn't going to be

recorded at all.



The idea that no gentleman ever swears is all wrong; he can swear and

still be a gentleman if he does it in a nice and, benevolent and

affectionate way.  The historian, John Fiske, whom I knew well and loved,

was a spotless and most noble and upright Christian gentleman, and yet he

swore once.  Not exactly that, maybe; still, he--but I will tell you

about it.



One day, when he was deeply immersed in his work, his wife came in, much

moved and profoundly distressed, and said: "I am sorry to disturb you,

John, but I must, for this is a serious matter, and needs to be attended

to at once."



Then, lamenting, she brought a grave accusation against their little son.

She said: "He has been saying his Aunt Mary is a fool and his Aunt Martha

is a damned fool."  Mr. Fiske reflected upon the matter a minute, then

said: "Oh, well, it's about the distinction I should make between them

myself."



Mr. Washington, I beg you to convey these teachings to your great and

prosperous and most beneficent educational institution, and add them to

the prodigal mental and moral riches wherewith you equip your fortunate

proteges for the struggle of life.













TAMMANY AND CROKER



          Mr. Clemens made his debut as a campaign orator on October 7,

          1901, advocating the election of Seth Low for Mayor, not as a

          Republican, but as a member of the "Acorns," which he described

          as a "third party having no political affiliation, but was

          concerned only in the selection of the best candidates and the

          best member."



Great Britain had a Tammany and a Croker a good while ago.  This Tammany

was in India, and it began its career with the spread of the English

dominion after the Battle of Plassey.  Its first boss was Clive, a

sufficiently crooked person sometimes, but straight as a yard stick

when compared with the corkscrew crookedness of the second boss, Warren

Hastings.



That old-time Tammany was the East India Company's government, and had

its headquarters at Calcutta.  Ostensibly it consisted of a Great Council

of four persons, of whom one was the Governor-General, Warren Hastings;

really it consisted of one person--Warren Hastings; for by usurpation he

concentrated all authority in himself and governed the country like an

autocrat.



Ostensibly the Court of Directors, sitting in London and representing the

vast interests of the stockholders, was supreme in authority over the

Calcutta Great Council, whose membership it appointed and removed at

pleasure, whose policies it dictated, and to whom it conveyed its will in

the form of sovereign commands; but whenever it suited Hastings, he

ignored even that august body's authority and conducted the mighty

affairs of the British Empire in India to suit his own notions.



At his mercy was the daily bread of every official, every trader, every

clerk, every civil servant, big and little, in the whole huge India

Company's machine, and the man who hazarded his bread by any failure of

subserviency to the boss lost it.



Now then, let the supreme masters of British India, the giant corporation

of the India Company of London, stand for the voters of the city of New

York; let the Great Council of Calcutta stand for Tammany; let the

corrupt and money-grubbing great hive of serfs which served under the

Indian Tammany's rod stand for New York Tammany's serfs; let Warren

Hastings stand for Richard Croker, and it seems to me that the parallel

is exact and complete.  And so let us be properly grateful and thank God

and our good luck that we didn't invent Tammany.



Edmund Burke, regarded by many as the greatest orator of all times,

conducted the case against Warren Hastings in that renowned trial which

lasted years, and which promises to keep its renown for centuries to

come.  I wish to quote some of the things he said.  I wish to imagine him

arraigning Mr. Croker and Tammany before the voters of New York City and

pleading with them for the overthrow of that combined iniquity of the 5th

of November, and will substitute for "My Lords," read "Fellow-Citizens";

for "Kingdom," read "City"; for "Parliamentary Process," read "Political

Campaign"; for "Two Houses," read "Two Parties," and so it reads:



"Fellow--citizens, I must look upon it as an auspicious circumstance to

this cause, in which the honor of the city is involved, that from the

first commencement of our political campaign to this the hour of solemn

trial not the smallest difference of opinion has arisen, between the two

parties.



"You will see, in the progress of this cause, that there is not only a

long, connected, systematic series of misdemeanors, but an equally

connected system of maxims and principles invented to justify them.

Upon both of these you must judge.



"It is not only the interest of the city of New York, now the most

considerable part of the city of the Americans, which is concerned, but

the credit and honor of the nation itself will be decided by this

decision."



          At a later meeting of the Acorn Club, Mr. Clemens said:



Tammany is dead, and there's no use in blackguarding a corpse.



The election makes me think of a story of a man who was dying.  He had

only two minutes to live, so he sent for a clergyman and asked him,

"Where is the best place to go to?"  He was undecided about it.  So the

minister told him that each place had its advantages--heaven for climate,

and hell for society.













MUNICIPAL CORRUPTION



          ADDRESS AT THE CITY CLUB DINNER, JANUARY 4,1901



          Bishop Potter told how an alleged representative of Tammany

          Hall asked him in effect if he would cease his warfare upon the

          Police Department if a certain captain and inspector were

          dismissed.  He replied that he would never be satisfied until

          the "man at the top" and the "system" which permitted evils in

          the Police Department were crushed.



The Bishop has just spoken of a condition of things which none of us can

deny, and which ought not to exist; that is, the lust of gain--a lust

which does not stop short of the penitentiary or the jail to accomplish

its ends.  But we may be sure of one thing, and that is that this sort of

thing is not universal.  If it were, this country would not be.  You may

put this down as a fact: that out of every fifty men, forty-nine are

clean.  Then why is it, you may ask, that the forty-nine don't have

things the way they want them?  I'll tell you why it is.  A good deal has

been said here to-night about what is to be accomplished by organization.

That's just the thing.  It's because the fiftieth fellow and his pals are

organized and the other forty-nine are not that the dirty one rubs it

into the clean fellows every time.



You may say organize, organize, organize; but there may be so much

organization that it will interfere with the work to be done.  The Bishop

here had an experience of that sort, and told all about it down-town the

other night.  He was painting a barn--it was his own barn--and yet he was

informed that his work must stop; he was a non-union painter, and

couldn't continue at that sort of job.



Now, all these conditions of which you complain should be remedied, and I

am here to tell you just how to do it.  I've been a statesman without

salary for many years, and I have accomplished great and widespread good.

I don't know that it has benefited anybody very much, even if it was

good; but I do know that it hasn't harmed me very much, and is hasn't

made me any richer.



We hold the balance of power.  Put up your best men for office, and we

shall support the better one.  With the election of the best man for

Mayor would follow the selection of the best man for Police Commissioner

and Chief of Police.



My first lesson in the craft of statesmanship was taken at an early age.

Fifty-one years ago I was fourteen years old, and we had a society in the

town I lived in, patterned after the Freemasons, or the Ancient Order of

United Farmers, or some such thing--just what it was patterned after

doesn't matter.  It had an inside guard and an outside guard, and a past-

grand warden, and a lot of such things, so as to give dignity to the

organization and offices to the members.



Generally speaking it was a pretty good sort of organization, and some of

the very best boys in the village, including--but I mustn't get personal

on an occasion like this--and the society would have got along pretty

well had it not been for the fact that there were a certain number of the

members who could be bought.  They got to be an infernal nuisance.  Every

time we had an election the candidates had to go around and see the

purchasable members.  The price per vote was paid in doughnuts, and it

depended somewhat on the appetites of the individuals as to the price

of the votes.



This thing ran along until some of us, the really very best boys in the

organization, decided that these corrupt practices must stop, and for the

purpose of stopping them we organized a third party.  We had a name, but

we were never known by that name. Those who didn't like us called us the

Anti-Doughnut party, but we didn't mind that.



We said: "Call us what you please; the name doesn't matter.  We are

organized for a principle."  By-and-by the election came around, and

we made a big mistake.  We were triumphantly beaten.  That taught us a

lesson.  Then and there we decided never again to nominate anybody for

anything.  We decided simply to force the other two parties in the

society to nominate their very best men.  Although we were organized for

a principle, we didn't care much about that.  Principles aren't of much

account anyway, except at election-time.  After that you hang them up to

let them season.



The next time we had an election we told both the other parties that we'd

beat any candidates put up by any one of them of whom we didn't approve.

In that election we did business.  We got the man we wanted.  I suppose

they called us the Anti-Doughnut party because they couldn't buy us with

their doughnuts.  They didn't have enough of them.  Most reformers arrive

at their price sooner or later, and I suppose we would have had our

price; but our opponents weren't offering anything but doughnuts, and

those we spurned.



Now it seems to me that an Anti-Doughnut party is just what is wanted in

the present emergency. I would have the Anti-Doughnuts felt in every city

and hamlet and school district in this State and in the United States.

I was an Anti-Doughnut in my boyhood, and I'm an Anti-Doughnut still.

The modern designation is Mugwump.  There used to be quite a number of us

Mugwumps, but I think I'm the only one left.  I had a vote this fall, and

I began to make some inquiries as to what I had better do with it.



I don't know anything about finance, and I never did, but I know some

pretty shrewd financiers, and they told me that Mr. Bryan wasn't safe on

any financial question.  I said to myself, then, that it wouldn't do for

me to vote for Bryan, and I rather thought--I know now--that McKinley

wasn't just right on this Philippine question, and so I just didn't vote

for anybody.  I've got that vote yet, and I've kept it clean, ready to

deposit at some other election.  It wasn't cast for any wildcat financial

theories, and it wasn't cast to support the man who sends our boys as

volunteers out into the Philippines to get shot down under a polluted

flag.













MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT



ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL DINNER OF THE ST. NICHOLAS SOCIETY, NEW YORK,

DECEMBER 6, 1900



          Doctor Mackay, in his response to the toast "St. Nicholas,"

          referred to Mr. Clemens, saying:--"Mark Twain is as true a

          preacher of true righteousness as any bishop, priest, or

          minister of any church to-day, because he moves men to forget

          their faults by cheerful well-doing instead of making them sour

          and morbid by everlastingly bending their attention to the

          seamy and sober side of life."



MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN OF THE ST. NICHOLAS SOCIETY,--These are,

indeed, prosperous days for me.  Night before last, in a speech, the

Bishop of the Diocese of New York complimented me for my contribution to

theology, and to-night the Reverend Doctor Mackay has elected me to the

ministry.  I thanked Bishop Potter then for his compliment, and I thank

Doctor Mackay now for that promotion.  I think that both have discerned

in me what I long ago discerned, but what I was afraid the world would

never learn to recognize.



In this absence of nine years I find a great improvement in the city of

New York.  I am glad to speak on that as a toast--"The City of New York."

Some say it has improved because I have been away.  Others, and I agree

with them, say it has improved because I have come back.  We must judge

of a city, as of a man, by its external appearances and by its inward

character.  In externals the foreigner coming to these shores is more

impressed at first by our sky-scrapers.  They are new to him.  He has not

done anything of the sort since he built the tower of Babel.  The

foreigner is shocked by them.



In the daylight they are ugly.  They are--well, too chimneyfied and too

snaggy--like a mouth that needs attention from a dentist; like a cemetery

that is all monuments and no gravestones.  But at night, seen from the

river where they are columns towering against the sky, all sparkling with

light, they are fairylike; they are beauty more satisfactory to the soul

and more enchanting than anything that man has dreamed of since the

Arabian nights.  We can't always have the beautiful aspect of things.

Let us make the most of our sights that are beautiful and let the others

go.  When your foreigner makes disagreeable comments on New York by

daylight, float him down the river at night.



What has made these sky-scrapers possible is the elevator.  The cigar-box

which the European calls a "lift" needs but to be compared with our

elevators to be appreciated.  The lift stops to reflect between floors.

That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators.  The American

elevator acts like the man's patent purge--it worked.  As the inventor

said, "This purge doesn't waste any time fooling around; it attends

strictly to business."



That New-Yorkers have the cleanest, quickest, and most admirable system

of street railways in the world has been forced upon you by the abnormal

appreciation you have of your hackman.  We ought always to be grateful to

him for that service.  Nobody else would have brought such a system into

existence for us.  We ought to build him a monument.  We owe him one as

much as we owe one to anybody.  Let it be a tall one.  Nothing permanent,

of course; build it of plaster, say.  Then gaze at it and realize how

grateful we are--for the time being--and then pull it down and throw it

on the ash-heap.  That's the way to honor your public heroes.



As to our streets, I find them cleaner than they used to be.  I miss

those dear old landmarks, the symmetrical mountain ranges of dust and

dirt that used to be piled up along the streets for the wind and rain to

tear down at their pleasure.  Yes, New York is cleaner than Bombay.

I realize that I have been in Bombay, that I now am in New York; that it

is not my duty to flatter Bombay, but rather to flatter New York.



Compared with the wretched attempts of London to light that city, New

York may fairly be said to be a well-lighted city.  Why, London's attempt

at good lighting is almost as bad as London's attempt at rapid transit.

There is just one good system of rapid transit in London--the "Tube," and

that, of course, had been put in by Americans.  Perhaps, after a while,

those Americans will come back and give New York also a good underground

system.  Perhaps they have already begun.  I have been so busy since I

came back that I haven't had time as yet to go down cellar.



But it is by the laws of the city, it is by the manners of the city, it

is by the ideals of the city, it is by the customs of the city and by the

municipal government which all these elements correct, support, and

foster, by which the foreigner judges the city.  It is by these that he

realizes that New York may, indeed, hold her head high among the cities

of the world.  It is by these standards that he knows whether to class

the city higher or lower than the other municipalities of the world.



Gentlemen, you have the best municipal government in the world--

the purest and the most fragrant.  The very angels envy you, and wish

they could establish a government like it in heaven.  You got it by a

noble fidelity to civic duty.  You got it by stern and ever-watchful

exertion of the great powers with which you are charged by the rights

which were handed down to you by your forefathers, by your manly refusal

to let base men invade the high places of your government, and by instant

retaliation when any public officer has insulted you in the city's name

by swerving in the slightest from the upright and full performance of his

duty.  It is you who have made this city the envy of the cities of the

world.  God will bless you for it--God will bless you for it.  Why, when

you approach the final resting-place the angels of heaven will gather at

the gates and cry out:



"Here they come!  Show them to the archangel's box, and turn the lime-

light on them!"











CHINA AND THE PHILIPPINES



          AT A DINNER GIVEN IN THE WALDORF-ASTORIA HOTEL, DECEMBER, 1900



          Winston Spencer Churchill was introduced by Mr. Clemens.



For years I've been a self-appointed missionary to bring about the union

of America and the motherland.  They ought to be united.  Behold America,

the refuge of the oppressed from everywhere (who can pay fifty dollars'

admission)--any one except a Chinaman--standing up for human rights

everywhere, even helping China let people in free when she wants to

collect fifty dollars upon them.  And how unselfishly England has wrought

for the open door for all!  And how piously America has wrought for that

open door in all cases where it was not her own!



Yes, as a missionary I've sung my songs of praise.  And yet I think that

England sinned when she got herself into a war in South Africa which she

could have avoided, just as we sinned in getting into a similar war in

the Philippines.  Mr. Churchill, by his father, is an Englishman; by his

mother he is an American--no doubt a blend that makes the perfect man.

England and America; yes, we are kin.  And now that we are also kin in

sin, there is nothing more to be desired.  The harmony is complete, the

blend is perfect.













THEORETICAL MORALS



          The New Vagabonds Club of London, made up of the leading

          younger literary men of the day, gave a dinner in honor of Mr.

          and Mrs. Clemens, July 8, 1899.



It has always been difficult--leave that word difficult--not exceedingly

difficult, but just difficult, nothing more than that, not the slightest

shade to add to that--just difficult--to respond properly, in the right

phraseology, when compliments are paid to me; but it is more than

difficult when the compliments are paid to a better than I--my wife.



And while I am not here to testify against myself--I can't be expected to

do so, a prisoner in your own country is not admitted to do so--as to

which member of the family wrote my books, I could say in general that

really I wrote the books myself.  My wife puts the facts in, and they

make it respectable.  My modesty won't suffer while compliments are being

paid to literature, and through literature to my family.  I can't get

enough of them.



I am curiously situated to-night.  It so rarely happens that I am

introduced by a humorist; I am generally introduced by a person of grave

walk and carriage.  That makes the proper background of gravity for

brightness.  I am going to alter to suit, and haply I may say some

humorous things.



When you start with a blaze of sunshine and upburst of humor, when you

begin with that, the proper office of humor is to reflect, to put you

into that pensive mood of deep thought, to make you think of your sins,

if you wish half an hour to fly.  Humor makes me reflect now to-night, it

sets the thinking machinery in motion.  Always, when I am thinking, there

come suggestions of what I am, and what we all are, and what we are

coming to.  A sermon comes from my lips always when I listen to a

humorous speech.



I seize the opportunity to throw away frivolities, to say something to

plant the seed, and make all better than when I came.  In Mr. Grossmith's

remarks there was a subtle something suggesting my favorite theory of the

difference between theoretical morals and practical morals.  I try to

instil practical morals in the place of theatrical--I mean theoretical;

but as an addendum--an annex--something added to theoretical morals.



When your chairman said it was the first time he had ever taken the

chair, he did not mean that he had not taken lots of other things; he

attended my first lecture and took notes.  This indicated the man's

disposition.  There was nothing else flying round, so he took notes; he

would have taken anything he could get.



I can bring a moral to bear here which shows the difference between

theoretical morals and practical morals.  Theoretical morals are the sort

you get on your mother's knee, in good books, and from the pulpit.  You

gather them in your head, and not in your heart; they are theory without

practice.  Without the assistance of practice to perfect them, it is

difficult to teach a child to "be honest, don't steal."



I will teach you how it should be done, lead you into temptation, teach

you how to steal, so that you may recognize when you have stolen and feel

the proper pangs.  It is no good going round and bragging you have never

taken the chair.



As by the fires of experience, so by commission of crime, you learn real

morals.  Commit all the crimes, familiarize yourself with all sins, take

them in rotation (there are only two or three thousand of them), stick to

it, commit two or three every day, and by-and-by you will be proof

against them.  When you are through you will be proof against all sins

and morally perfect.  You will be vaccinated against every possible

commission of them.  This is the only way.



I will read you a written statement upon the subject that I wrote three

years ago to read to the Sabbath-schools.  [Here the lecturer turned his

pockets out, but without success.] No!  I have left it at home.  Still,

it was a mere statement of fact, illustrating the value of practical

morals produced by the commission of crime.



It was in my boyhood just a statement of fact, reading is only more

formal, merely facts, merely pathetic facts, which I can state so as to

be understood.  It relates to the first time I ever stole a watermelon;

that is, I think it was the first time; anyway, it was right along there

somewhere.



I stole it out of a farmer's wagon while he was waiting on another

customer.  "Stole" is a harsh term.  I withdrew--I retired that

watermelon.  I carried it to a secluded corner of a lumber-yard.  I broke

it open.  It was green--the greenest watermelon raised in the valley that

year.



The minute I saw it was green I was sorry, and began to reflect--

reflection is the beginning of reform.  If you don't reflect when you

commit a crime then that crime is of no use; it might just as well have

been committed by some one else: You must reflect or the value is lost;

you are not vaccinated against committing it again.



I began to reflect.  I said to myself: "What ought a boy to do who has

stolen a green watermelon?  What would George Washington do, the father

of his country, the only American who could not tell a lie?  What would

he do?  There is only one right, high, noble thing for any boy to do who

has stolen a watermelon of that class he must make restitution; he must

restore that stolen property to its rightful owner."  I said I would do

it when I made that good resolution.  I felt it to be a noble, uplifting

obligation.  I rose up spiritually stronger and refreshed.  I carried

that watermelon back--what was left of it--and restored it to the farmer,

and made him give me a ripe one in its place.



Now you see that this constant impact of crime upon crime protects you

against further commission of crime.  It builds you up.  A man can't

become morally perfect by stealing one or a thousand green watermelons,

but every little helps.



I was at a great school yesterday (St. Paul's), where for four hundred

years they have been busy with brains, and building up England by

producing Pepys, Miltons, and Marlboroughs.  Six hundred boys left to

nothing in the world but theoretical morality.  I wanted to become the

professor of practical morality, but the high master was away, so I

suppose I shall have to go on making my living the same old way--

by adding practical to theoretical morality.



What are the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, compared

to the glory and grandeur and majesty of a perfected morality such as you

see before you?



The New Vagabonds are old vagabonds (undergoing the old sort of reform).

You drank my health; I hope I have not been unuseful.  Take this system

of morality to your hearts.  Take it home to your neighbors and your

graves, and I hope that it will be a long time before you arrive there.













LAYMAN'S SERMON



          The Young Men's Christian Association asked Mr. Clemens to

          deliver a lay sermon at the Majestic Theatre, New York, March

          4, 1906.  More than five thousand young men tried to get into

          the theatre, and in a short time traffic was practically

          stopped in the adjacent streets.  The police reserves had to be

          called out to thin the crowd.  Doctor Fagnani had said

          something before about the police episode, and Mr. Clemens took

          it up.



I have been listening to what was said here, and there is in it a lesson

of citizenship.  You created the police, and you are responsible for

them.  One must pause, therefore, before criticising them too harshly.

They are citizens, just as we are.  A little of citizenship ought to be

taught at the mother's knee and in the nursery.  Citizenship is what

makes a republic; monarchies can get along without it.  What keeps a

republic on its legs is good citizenship.



Organization is necessary in all things.  It is even necessary in reform.

I was an organization myself once--for twelve hours.  I was in Chicago a

few years ago about to depart for New York.  There were with me Mr.

Osgood, a publisher, and a stenographer.  I picked out a state-room on a

train, the principal feature of which was that it contained the privilege

of smoking.  The train had started but a short time when the conductor

came in and said that there had been a mistake made, and asked that we

vacate the apartment.  I refused, but when I went out on the platform

Osgood and the stenographer agreed to accept a section.  They were too

modest.



Now, I am not modest.  I was born modest, but it didn't last.  I asserted

myself; insisted upon my rights, and finally the Pullman Conductor and

the train conductor capitulated, and I was left in possession.



I went into the dining--car the next morning for breakfast.  Ordinarily

I only care for coffee and rolls, but this particular morning I espied an

important-looking man on the other side of the car eating broiled

chicken.  I asked for broiled chicken, and I was told by the waiter and

later by the dining-car conductor that there was no broiled chicken.

There must have been an argument, for the Pullman conductor came in and

remarked: "If he wants broiled chicken, give it to him.  If you haven't

got it on the train, stop somewhere.  It will be better for all

concerned!"  I got the chicken.



It is from experiences such as these that you get your education of life,

and you string them into jewels or into tinware, as you may choose.

I have received recently several letters asking my counsel or advice.

The principal request is for some incident that may prove helpful to the

young.  There were a lot of incidents in my career to help me along--

sometimes they helped me along faster than I wanted to go.



Here is such a request.  It is a telegram from Joplin, Missouri, and it

reads:  "In what one of your works can we find the definition of a

gentleman?"



I have not answered that telegram, either; I couldn't.  It seems to me

that if  any man has just merciful and kindly instincts he would be a

gentleman, for he would need nothing else in the world.



I received the other day a letter from my old friend, William Dean

Howells--Howells, the head of American literature.  No one is able to

stand with him.  He is an old, old friend of mine, and he writes me,

"To-morrow I shall be sixty-nine years old."  Why, I am surprised at

Howells writing that!  I have known him longer than that.  I'm sorry to

see a man trying to appear so young.  Let's see.  Howells says now,

"I see you have been burying Patrick.  I suppose he was old, too."



No, he was never old--Patrick.  He came to us thirty-six years ago.  He

was my coachman on the morning that I drove my young bride to our new

home.  He was a young Irishman, slender, tall, lithe, honest, truthful,

and he never changed in all his life.  He really was with us but twenty-

five years, for he did not go with us to Europe, but he never regarded

that as separation.  As the children grew up he was their guide.  He was

all honor, honesty, and affection.  He was with us in New Hampshire, with

us last summer, and his hair was just as black, his eyes were just as

blue, his form just as straight, and his heart just as good as on the day

we first met.  In all the long years Patrick never made a mistake.  He

never needed an order, he never received a command.  He knew.  I have

been asked for my idea of an ideal gentleman, and I give it to you

Patrick McAleer.













UNIVERSITY SETTLEMENT SOCIETY



          After the serious addresses were made, Seth Low introduced Mr.

          Clemens at the Settlement House, February 2, 1901.



The older we grow the greater becomes our, wonder at how much ignorance

one can contain without bursting one's clothes.  Ten days ago I did not

know anything about the University Settlement except what I'd read in the

pamphlets sent me.  Now, after being here and hearing Mrs. Hewitt and

Mrs. Thomas, it seems to me I know of nothing like it at all.  It's a

charity that carries no humiliation with it.  Marvellous it is, to think

of schools where you don't have to drive the children in but drive them

out.  It was not so in my day.



Down-stairs just now I saw a dancing lesson going on.  You must pay a

cent for a lesson.  You can't get it for nothing.  That's the reason I

never learned to dance.



But it was the pawnbroker's shop you have here that interested me

mightily.  I've known something about pawnbrokers' shops in my time, but

here you have a wonderful plan.  The ordinary pawnbroker charges thirty--

six per cent. a year for a loan, and I've paid more myself, but here a

man or woman in distress can obtain a loan for one per cent. a month!

It's wonderful!



I've been interested in all I've heard to-day, especially in the romances

recounted by Mrs. Thomas, which reminds me that I have a romance of my

own in my autobiography, which I am building for the instruction of the

world.



In San Francisco, many years ago, when I was a newspaper reporter

(perhaps I should say I had been and was willing to be), a pawnbroker was

taking care of what property I had.  There was a friend of mine, a poet,

out of a job, and he was having a hard time of it, too.  There was

passage in it, but I guess I've got to keep that for the autobiography.



Well, my friend the poet thought his life was a failure, and I told him I

thought it was, and then he said he thought he ought to commit suicide,

and I said "all right," which was disinterested advice to a friend in

trouble; but, like all such advice, there was just a little bit of self-

interest back of it, for if I could get a "scoop" on the other newspapers

I could get a job.



The poet could be spared, and so, largely for his own good and partly for

mine, I kept the thing in his mind, which was necessary, as would-be

suicides are very changeable aid hard to hold to their purpose.  He had a

preference for a pistol, which was an extravagance, for we hadn't enough

between us to hire a pistol.  A fork would have been easier.



And so he concluded to drown himself, and I said it was an excellent

idea--the only trouble being that he was so good a swimmer.  So we went

down to the beach.  I went along to see that the thing was done right.

Then something most romantic happened.  There came in on the sea

something that had been on its way for three years.  It rolled in across

the broad Pacific with a message that was full of meaning to that poor

poet and cast itself at his feet.  It was a life-preserver!  This was a

complication.  And then I had an idea--he never had any, especially when

he was going to write poetry; I suggested that we pawn the life-preserver

and get a revolver.



The pawnbroker gave us an old derringer with a bullet as big as a hickory

nut.  When he heard that it was only a poet that was going to kill

himself he did not quibble.  Well, we succeeded in sending a bullet right

through his head.  It was a terrible moment when he placed that pistol

against his forehead and stood for an instant.  I said, "Oh, pull the

trigger!" and he did, and cleaned out all the gray matter in his brains.

It carried the poetic faculty away, and now he's a useful member of

society.



Now, therefore, I realize that there's no more beneficent institution

than this penny fund of yours, and I want all the poets to know this.

I did think about writing you a check, but now I think I'll send you a

few copies of what one of your little members called 'Strawberry Finn'.













PUBLIC EDUCATION ASSOCIATION



          ADDRESS AT A MEETING OF THE BERKELEY LYCEUM, NEW YORK,

          NOVEMBER 23, 1900



I don't suppose that I am called here as an expert on education, for that

would show a lack of foresight on your part and a deliberate intention to

remind me of my shortcomings.



As I sat here looking around for an idea it struck me that I was called

for two reasons.  One was to do good to me, a poor unfortunate traveller

on the world's wide ocean, by giving me a knowledge of the nature and

scope of your society and letting me know that others beside myself have

been of some use in the world.  The other reason that I can see is that

you have called me to show by way of contrast what education can

accomplish if administered in the right sort of doses.



Your worthy president said that the school pictures, which have received

the admiration of the world at the Paris Exposition, have been sent to

Russia, and this was a compliment from that Government--which is very

surprising to me.  Why, it is only an hour since I read a cablegram in

the newspapers beginning "Russia Proposes to Retrench."  I was not

expecting such a thunderbolt, and I thought what a happy thing it will be

for Russians when the retrenchment will bring home the thirty thousand

Russian troops now in Manchuria, to live in peaceful pursuits.  I thought

this was what Germany should do also without delay, and that France and

all the other nations in China should follow suit.



Why should not China be free from the foreigners, who are only making

trouble on her soil?  If they would only all go home, what a pleasant

place China would be for the Chinese!  We do not allow Chinamen to come

here, and I say in all seriousness that it would be a graceful thing to

let China decide who shall go there.



China never wanted foreigners any more than foreigners wanted Chinamen,

and on this question I am with the Boxers every time.  The Boxer is a

patriot.  He loves his country better than he does the countries of other

people.  I wish him success.  The Boxer believes in driving us out of his

country.  I am a Boxer too, for I believe in driving him out of our

country.



When I read the Russian despatch further my dream of world peace

vanished.  It said that the vast expense of maintaining the army had made

it necessary to retrench, and so the Government had decided that to

support the army it would be necessary to withdraw the appropriation from

the public schools.  This is a monstrous idea to us.



We believe that out of the public school grows the greatness of a nation.



It is curious to reflect how history repeats itself the world over.  Why,

I remember the same thing was done when I was a boy on the Mississippi

River.  There was a proposition in a township there to discontinue public

schools because they were too expensive.  An old farmer spoke up and said

if they stopped the schools they would not save anything, because every

time a school was closed a jail had to be built.



It's like feeding a dog on his own tail.  He'll never get fat.  I believe

it is better to support schools than jails.



The work of your association is better and shows more wisdom than the

Czar of Russia and all his people.  This is not much of a compliment, but

it's the best I've got in stock.













EDUCATION AND CITIZENSHIP



          On the evening of May 14, 1908, the alumni of the College of

          the City of New York celebrated the opening of the new college

          buildings at a banquet in the Waldorf Astoria.  Mr. Clemens

          followed Mayor McClellan.



I agreed when the Mayor said that there was not a man within hearing who

did not agree that citizenship should be placed above everything else,

even learning.



Have you ever thought about this?  Is there a college in the whole

country where there is a chair of good citizenship?  There is a kind of

bad citizenship which is taught in the schools, but no real good

citizenship taught.  There are some which teach insane citizenship,

bastard citizenship, but that is all.  Patriotism!  Yes; but patriotism

is usually the refuge of the scoundrel.  He is the man who talks the

loudest.



You can begin that chair of citizenship in the College of the City of New

York.  You can place it above mathematics and literature, and that is

where it belongs.



We used to trust in God.  I think it was in 1863 that some genius

suggested that it be put upon the gold and silver coins which circulated

among the rich.  They didn't put it on the nickels and coppers because

they didn't think the poor folks had any trust in God.



Good citizenship would teach accuracy of thinking and accuracy of

statement.  Now, that motto on the coin is an overstatement.  Those

Congressmen had no right to commit this whole country to a theological

doctrine.  But since they did, Congress ought to state what our creed

should be.



There was never a nation in the world that put its whole trust in God.

It is a statement made on insufficient evidence.  Leaving out the

gamblers, the burglars, and the plumbers, perhaps we do put our trust in

God after a fashion.  But, after all, it is an overstatement.



If the cholera or black plague should come to these shores, perhaps the

bulk of the nation would pray to be delivered from it, but the rest would

put their trust in the Health Board of the City of New York.



I read in the papers within the last day or two of a poor young girl who

they said was a leper.  Did the people in that populous section of the

country where she was--did they put their trust in God?  The girl was

afflicted with the leprosy, a disease which cannot be communicated from

one person to another.



Yet, instead of putting their trust in God, they harried that poor

creature, shelterless and friendless, from place to place, exactly as

they did in the Middle Ages, when they made lepers wear bells, so that

people could be warned of their approach and avoid them.  Perhaps those

people in the Middle Ages thought they were putting their trust in God.



The President ordered the removal of that motto from the coin, and I

thought that it was well.  I thought that overstatement should not stay

there.  But I think it would better read, "Within certain judicious

limitations we trust in God," and if there isn't enough room on the coin

for this, why, enlarge the coin.



Now I want to tell a story about jumping at conclusions.  It was told to

me by Bram Stoker, and it concerns a christening.  There was a little

clergyman who was prone to jump at conclusions sometimes.  One day he was

invited to officiate at a christening.  He went.  There sat the

relatives--intelligent-looking relatives they were.  The little

clergyman's instinct came to him to make a great speech.  He was given to

flights of oratory that way--a very dangerous thing, for often the wings

which take one into clouds of oratorical enthusiasm are wax and melt up

there, and down you come.



But the little clergyman couldn't resist.  He took the child in his arms,

and, holding it, looked at it a moment.  It wasn't much of a child.  It

was little, like a sweet-potato.  Then the little clergyman waited

impressively, and then: "I see in your countenances," he said,

"disappointment of him.  I see you are disappointed with this baby.  Why?

Because he is so little.  My friends, if you had but the power of looking

into the future you might see that great things may come of little

things.  There is the great ocean, holding the navies of the world, which

comes from little drops of water no larger than a woman's tears.  There

are the great constellations in the sky, made up of little bits of stars.

Oh, if you could consider his future you might see that he might become

the greatest poet of the universe, the greatest warrior the world has

ever known, greater than Caesar, than Hannibal, than--er--er" (turning to

the father)--"what's his name?"



The father hesitated, then whispered back: "His name?  Well, his name is

Mary Ann."













COURAGE



          At a beefsteak dinner, given by artists, caricaturists, and

          humorists of New York City, April 18, 1908, Mr. Clemens, Mr. H.

          H. Rogers, and Mr. Patrick McCarren were the guests of honor.

          Each wore a white apron, and each made a short speech.



In the matter of courage we all have our limits.



There never was a hero who did not have his bounds.  I suppose it may be

said of Nelson and all the others whose courage has been advertised that

there came times in their lives when their bravery knew it had come to

its limit.



I have found mine a good many times.  Sometimes this was expected--often

it was unexpected.  I know a man who is not afraid to sleep with a

rattlesnake, but you could not get him to sleep with a safety-razor.



I never had the courage to talk across a long, narrow room I should be at

the end of the room facing all the audience.  If I attempt to talk across

a room I find myself turning this way and that, and thus at alternate

periods I have part of the audience behind me.  You ought never to have

any part of the audience behind you; you never can tell what they are

going to do.



I'll sit down.













THE DINNER TO MR. CHOATE



          AT A DINNER GIVEN IN HONOR OF AMBASSADOR JOSEPH H. CHOATE AT

          THE LOTOS CLUB, NOVEMBER 24, 7902



          The speakers, among others, were: Senator Depew, William Henry

          White, Speaker Thomas Reed, and Mr. Choate.  Mr. Clemens spoke,

          in part, as follows:



The greatness of this country rests on two anecdotes.  The first one is

that of Washington and his hatchet, representing the foundation of true

speaking, which is the characteristic of our people.  The second one is

an old one, and I've been waiting to hear it to-night; but as nobody has

told it yet, I will tell it.



You've heard it before, and you'll hear it many, many times more.  It is

an anecdote of our guest, of the time when he was engaged as a young man

with a gentle Hebrew, in the process of skinning the client.  The main

part in that business is the collection of the bill for services in

skinning the man.  "Services" is the term used in that craft for the

operation of that kind-diplomatic in its nature.



Choate's--co-respondent--made out a bill for $500 for his services, so

called.  But Choate told him he had better leave the matter to him, and

the next day he collected the bill for the services and handed the Hebrew

$5000, saying, "That's your half of the loot," and inducing that

memorable response: "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian."



The deep-thinkers didn't merely laugh when that happened.  They stopped

to think, and said "There's a rising man.  He must be rescued from the

law and consecrated to diplomacy.  The commercial advantages of a great

nation lie there in that man's keeping.  We no longer require a man to

take care of our moral character before the world.  Washington and his

anecdote have done that.  We require a man to take care of our commercial

prosperity."



Mr. Choate has carried that trait with him, and, as Mr. Carnegie has

said, he has worked like a mole underground.



We see the result when American railroad iron is sold so cheap in England

that the poorest family can have it.  He has so beguiled that Cabinet of

England.



He has been spreading the commerce of this nation, and has depressed

English commerce in the same ratio.  This was the principle underlying

that anecdote, and the wise men saw it; the principle of give and take--

give one and take ten--the principle of diplomacy.













ON STANLEY AND LIVINGSTONE



          Mr. Clemens was entertained at dinner by the Whitefriars' Club,

          London, at the Mitre Tavern, on the evening of August 6, 1872.

          In reply to the toast in his honor he said:



GENTLEMEN,--I thank you very heartily indeed for this expression of

kindness toward me.  What I have done for England and civilization in the

arduous affairs which I have engaged in (that is good: that is so smooth

that I will say it again and again)--what I have done for England and

civilization in the arduous part I have performed I have done with a

single-hearted devotion and with no hope of reward.  I am proud, I am

very proud, that it was reserved for me to find Doctor Livingstone and

for Mr. Stanley to get all the credit.  I hunted for that man in Africa

all over seventy-five or one hundred parishes, thousands and thousands of

miles in the wilds and deserts all over the place, sometimes riding

negroes and sometimes travelling by rail.  I didn't mind the rail or

anything else, so that I didn't come in for the tar and feathers.  I

found that man at Ujiji--a place you may remember if you have ever been

there--and it was a very great satisfaction that I found him just in the

nick of time.  I found that poor old man deserted by his niggers and by

his geographers, deserted by all of his kind except the gorillas--

dejected, miserable, famishing, absolutely famishing--but he was

eloquent.  Just as I found him he had eaten his last elephant, and he

said to me: "God knows where I shall get another."  He had nothing to

wear except his venerable and honorable naval suit, and nothing to eat

but his diary.



But I said to him: "It is all right; I have discovered you, and Stanley

will be here by the four-o'clock train and will discover you officially,

and then we will turn to and have a reg'lar good time."  I said: "Cheer

up, for Stanley has got corn, ammunition, glass beads, hymn-books,

whiskey, and everything which the human heart can desire; he has got all

kinds of valuables, including telegraph-poles and a few cart-loads of

money.  By this time communication has been made with the land of Bibles

and civilization, and property will advance."  And then we surveyed all

that country, from Ujiji, through Unanogo and other places, to

Unyanyembe.  I mention these names simply for your edification, nothing

more--do not expect it--particularly as intelligence to the Royal

Geographical Society.  And then, having filled up the old man, we were

all too full for utterance and departed.  We have since then feasted on

honors.



Stanley has received a snuff-box and I have received considerable snuff;

he has got to write a book and gather in the rest of the credit, and I am

going to levy on the copyright and to collect the money.  Nothing comes

amiss to me--cash or credit; but, seriously, I do feel that Stanley is

the chief man and an illustrious one, and I do applaud him with all my

heart.  Whether he is an American or a Welshman by birth, or one, or

both, matters not to me.  So far as I am personally concerned, I am

simply here to stay a few months, and to see English people and to learn

English manners and customs, and to enjoy myself; so the simplest thing I

can do is to thank you for the toast you have honored me with and for the

remarks you have made, and to wish health and prosperity to the

Whitefriars' Club, and to sink down to my accustomed level.













HENRY M.  STANLEY



          ADDRESS DELIVERED IN BOSTON, NOVEMBER, 1886



          Mr. Clemens introduced Mr. Stanley.



LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, if any should ask, Why is it that you are here as

introducer of the lecturer?  I should answer that I happened to be around

and was asked to perform this function.  I was quite willing to do so,

and, as there was no sort of need of an introduction, anyway, it could be

necessary only that some person come forward for a moment and do an

unnecessary thing, and this is quite in my line.  Now, to introduce so

illustrious a name as Henry M. Stanley by any detail of what the man has

done is clear aside from my purpose; that would be stretching the

unnecessary to an unconscionable degree.  When I contrast what I have

achieved in my measurably brief life with what he has achieved in his

possibly briefer one, the effect is to sweep utterly away the ten-story

edifice of my own self-appreciation and leave nothing behind but the

cellar.  When you compare these achievements of his with the achievements

of really great men who exist in history, the comparison, I believe, is

in his favor.  I am not here to disparage Columbus.



No, I won't do that; but when you come to regard the achievements of

these two men, Columbus and Stanley, from the standpoint of the

difficulties they encountered, the advantage is with Stanley and against

Columbus.  Now, Columbus started out to discover America.  Well, he

didn't need to do anything at all but sit in the cabin of his ship and

hold his grip and sail straight on, and America would discover itself.

Here it was, barring his passage the whole length and breadth of the

South American continent, and he couldn't get by it.  He'd got to

discover it.  But Stanley started out to find Doctor Livingstone, who was

scattered abroad, as you may say, over the length and breadth of a vast

slab of Africa as big as the United States.



It was a blind kind of search.  He was the worst scattered of men.  But I

will throw the weight of this introduction upon one very peculiar feature

of Mr. Stanley's character, and that is his indestructible Americanism--

an Americanism which he is proud of.  And in this day and time, when it

is the custom to ape and imitate English methods and fashion, it is like

a breath of fresh air to stand in the presence of this untainted American

citizen who has been caressed and complimented by half of the crowned

heads of Europe who could clothe his body from his head to his heels with

the orders and decorations lavished upon him.  And yet, when the untitled

myriads of his own country put out their hands in welcome to him and

greet him, "Well done," through the Congress of the United States, that

is the crown that is worth all the rest to him.  He is a product of

institutions which exist in no other country on earth-institutions that

bring out all that is best and most heroic in a man.  I introduce Henry

M. Stanley.













DINNER TO MR. JEROME



          A dinner to express their confidence in the integrity and good

          judgment of District-Attorney Jerome was given at Delmonico's

          by over three hundred of his admirers on the evening of May 7,

          1909.



Indeed, that is very sudden.  I was not informed that the verdict was

going to depend upon my judgment, but that makes not the least difference

in the world when you already know all about it.  It is not any matter

when you are called upon to express it; you can get up and do it, and my

verdict has already been recorded in my heart and in my head as regards

Mr. Jerome and his administration of the criminal affairs of this county.



I agree with everything Mr. Choate has said in his letter regarding Mr.

Jerome; I agree with everything Mr. Shepard has said; and I agree with

everything Mr. Jerome has said in his own commendation.  And I thought

Mr. Jerome was modest in that.  If he had been talking about another

officer of this county, he could have painted the joys and sorrows of

office and his victories in even stronger language than he did.



I voted for Mr. Jerome in those old days, and I should like to vote for

him again if he runs for any office.  I moved out of New York, and that

is the reason, I suppose, I cannot vote for him again.  There may be some

way, but I have not found it out.  But now I am a farmer--a farmer up in

Connecticut, and winning laurels.  Those people already speak with such

high favor, admiration, of my farming, and they say that I am the only

man that has ever come to that region who could make two blades of grass

grow where only three grew before.



Well, I cannot vote for him.  You see that.  As it stands now, I cannot.

I am crippled in that way and to that extent, for I would ever so much

like to do it.  I am not a Congress, and I cannot distribute pensions,

and I don't know any other legitimate way to buy a vote.  But if I should

think of any legitimate way, I shall make use of it, and then I shall

vote for Mr. Jerome.













HENRY IRVING



          The Dramatic and Literary Society of London gave a welcome-home

          dinner to Sir Henry Irving at the Savoy Hotel, London, June 9,

          1900.  In proposing the toast of "The Drama" Mr. Clemens said:



I find my task a very easy one.  I have been a dramatist for thirty

years.  I have had an ambition in all that time to overdo the work of the

Spaniard who said he left behind him four hundred dramas when he died.

I leave behind me four hundred and fifteen, and am not yet dead.



The greatest of all the arts is to write a drama.  It is a most difficult

thing.  It requires the highest talent possible and the rarest gifts.

No, there is another talent that ranks with it--for anybody can write a

drama--I had four hundred of them--but to get one accepted requires real

ability.  And I have never had that felicity yet.



But human nature is so constructed, we are so persistent, that when we

know that we are born to a thing we do not care what the world thinks

about it.  We go on exploiting that talent year after year, as I have

done.  I shall go on writing dramas, and some day the impossible may

happen, but I am not looking for it.



In writing plays the chief thing is novelty.  The world grows tired of

solid forms in all the arts.  I struck a new idea myself years ago.

I was not surprised at it.  I was always expecting it would happen.

A person who has suffered disappointment for many years loses confidence,

and I thought I had better make inquiries before I exploited my new idea

of doing a drama in the form of a dream, so I wrote to a great authority

on knowledge of all kinds, and asked him whether it was new.



I could depend upon him.  He lived in my dear home in America--that dear

home, dearer to me through taxes.  He sent me a list of plays in which

that old device had been used, and he said that there was also a modern

lot.  He travelled back to China and to a play dated two thousand six

hundred years before the Christian era.  He said he would follow it up

with a list of the previous plays of the kind, and in his innocence would

have carried them back to the Flood.



That is the most discouraging thing that has ever happened to me in my

dramatic career.  I have done a world of good in a silent and private

way, and have furnished Sir Henry Irving with plays and plays and plays.

What has he achieved through that influence.  See where he stands now--

on the summit of his art in two worlds and it was I who put him there

--that partly put him there.



I need not enlarge upon the influence the drama has exerted upon

civilization.  It has made good morals entertaining.  I am to be followed

by Mr. Pinero.  I conceive that we stand at the head of the profession.

He has not written as many plays as I have, but he has lead that God-

given talent, which I lack, of working hem off on the manager.  I couple

his name with this toast, and add the hope that his influence will be

supported in exercising his masterly handicraft in that great gift, and

that he will long live to continue his fine work.













DINNER TO HAMILTON W. MABIE



          ADDRESS DELIVERED APRIL 29, 1901



          In introducing Mr. Clemens, Doctor Van Dyke said:



          "The longer the speaking goes on to-night the more I wonder how

          I got this job, and the only explanation I can give for it is

          that it is the same kind of compensation for the number of

          articles I have sent to The Outlook, to be rejected by Hamilton

          W. Mabie.  There is one man here to-night that has a job cut

          out for him that none of you would have had--a man whose humor

          has put a girdle of light around the globe, and whose sense of

          humor has been an example for all five continents.  He is going

          to speak to you.  Gentlemen, you know him best as Mark Twain."



MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN,--This man knows now how it feels to be the

chief guest, and if he has enjoyed it he is the first man I have ever

seen in that position that did enjoy it.  And I know, by side-remarks

which he made to me before his ordeal came upon him, that he was feeling

as some of the rest of us have felt under the same circumstances.  He was

afraid that he would not do himself justice; but he did--to my surprise.

It is a most serious thing to be a chief guest on an occasion like this,

and it is admirable, it is fine.  It is a great compliment to a man that

he shall come out of it so gloriously as Mr. Mabie came out of it

tonight--to my surprise.  He did it well.



He appears to be editor of The Outlook, and notwithstanding that, I have

every admiration, because when everything is said concerning The Outlook,

after all one must admit that it is frank in its delinquencies, that it

is outspoken in its departures from fact, that it is vigorous in its

mistaken criticisms of men like me.  I have lived in this world a long,

long time, and I know you must not judge a man by the editorials that he

puts in his paper.  A man is always better than his printed opinions.

A man always reserves to himself on the inside a purity and an honesty

and a justice that are a credit to him, whereas the things that he prints

are just the reverse.



Oh yes, you must not judge a man by what he writes in his paper.  Even in

an ordinary secular paper a man must observe some care about it; he must

be better than the principles which he puts in print.  And that is the

case with Mr. Mabie.  Why, to see what he writes about me and the

missionaries you would think he did not have any principles.  But that is

Mr. Mabie in his public capacity.  Mr. Mabie in his private capacity is

just as clean a man as I am.



In this very room, a month or two ago, some people admired that portrait;

some admired this, but the great majority fastened on that, and said,

"There is a portrait that is a beautiful piece of art."  When that

portrait is a hundred years old it will suggest what were the manners and

customs in our time.  Just as they talk about Mr. Mabie to-night, in that

enthusiastic way, pointing out the various virtues of the man and the

grace of his spirit, and all that, so was that portrait talked about.

They were enthusiastic, just as we men have been over the character and

the work of Mr. Mabie.  And when they were through they said that

portrait, fine as it is, that work, beautiful as it is, that piece of

humanity on that canvas, gracious and fine as it is, does not rise to

those perfections that exist in the man himself.  Come up, Mr. Alexander.

[The reference was to James W. Alexander, who happened to be sitting--

beneath the portrait of himself on the wall.]  Now, I should come up and

show myself.  But he cannot do it, he cannot do it.  He was born that

way, he was reared in that way.  Let his modesty be an example, and I

wish some of you had it, too.  But that is just what I have been saying

--that portrait, fine as it is, is not as fine as the man it represents,

and all the things that have been said about Mr. Mabie, and certainly

they have been very nobly worded and beautiful, still fall short of the

real Mabie.













INTRODUCING NYE AND RILEY



          James Whitcomb Riley and Edgar Wilson Nye (Bill Nye) were to

          give readings in Tremont Temple, Boston, November, 1888.  Mr.

          Clemens was induced to introduce Messrs. Riley and Nye.  His

          appearance on the platform was a surprise to the audience, and

          when they recognized him there was a tremendous demonstration.



I am very glad indeed to introduce these young people to you, and at the

same time get acquainted with them myself.  I have seen them more than

once for a moment, but have not had the privilege of knowing them

personally as intimately as I wanted to.  I saw them first, a great many

years ago, when Mr. Barnum had them, and they were just fresh from Siam.

The ligature was their best hold then, the literature became their best

hold later, when one of them committed an indiscretion, and they had to

cut the old bond to accommodate the sheriff.



In that old former time this one was Chang, that one was Eng.  The

sympathy existing between the two was most extraordinary; it was so fine,

so strong, so subtle, that what the one ate the other digested; when one

slept, the other snored; if one sold a thing, the other scooped the

usufruct.  This independent and yet dependent action was observable in

all the details of their daily life--I mean this quaint and arbitrary

distribution of originating cause and resulting effect between the two-

between, I may say, this dynamo and the other always motor, or, in other

words, that the one was always the creating force, the other always the

utilizing force; no, no, for while it is true that within certain well-

defined zones of activity the one was always dynamo and the other always

motor, within certain other well-defined zones these positions became

exactly reversed.



For instance, in moral matters Mr. Chang Riley was always dynamo, Mr. Eng

Nye was always motor; for while Mr. Chang Riley had a high--in fact, an

abnormally high and fine moral sense, he had no machinery to work it

with; whereas, Mr. Eng Nye, who hadn't any moral sense at all, and hasn't

yet, was equipped with all the necessary plant for putting a noble deed

through, if he could only get the inspiration on reasonable terms

outside.



In intellectual matters, on the other hand, Mr. Eng Nye was always

dynamo, Mr. Chang Riley was always motor; Mr. Eng Nye had a stately

intellect, but couldn't make it go; Mr. Chang Riley hadn't, but could.

That is to say, that while Mr. Chang Riley couldn't think things himself,

he had a marvellous natural grace in setting them down and weaving them

together when his pal furnished the raw material.



Thus, working together, they made a strong team; laboring together, they

could do miracles; but break the circuit, and both were impotent.  It has

remained so to this day: they must travel together, hoe, and plant, and

plough, and reap, and sell their public together, or there's no result.



I have made this explanation, this analysis, this vivisection, so to

speak, in order that you may enjoy these delightful adventurers

understandingly.  When Mr. Eng Nye's deep and broad and limpid

philosophies flow by in front of you, refreshing all the regions round

about with their gracious floods, you will remember that it isn't his

water; it's the other man's, and he is only working the pump.  And when

Mr. Chang Riley enchants your ear, and soothes your spirit, and touches

your heart with the sweet and genuine music of his poetry--as sweet and

as genuine as any that his friends, the birds and the bees, make about

his other friends, the woods and the flowers--you will remember, while

placing justice where justice is due, that it isn't his music, but the

other man's--he is only turning the crank.



I beseech for these visitors a fair field, a singleminded, one-eyed

umpire, and a score bulletin barren of goose-eggs if they earn it--and I

judge they will and hope they will.  Mr. James Whitcomb Chang Riley will

now go to the bat.













DINNER TO WHITELAW REID



          ADDRESS AT THE DINNER IN HONOR OF AMBASSADOR REID, GIVEN BY THE

          PILGRIMS' CLUB OF NEW YORK ON FEBRUARY 19, 1908



I am very proud to respond to this toast, as it recalls the proudest day

of my life.  The delightful hospitality shown me at the time of my visit

to Oxford I shall cherish until I die.  In that long and distinguished

career of mine I value that degree above all other honors.  When the ship

landed even the stevedores gathered on the shore and gave an English

cheer.  Nothing could surpass in my life the pleasure of those four

weeks.  No one could pass by me without taking my hand, even the

policemen.  I've been in all the principal capitals of Christendom in my

life, and have always been an object of interest to policemen.  Sometimes

there was suspicion in their eyes, but not always.  With their puissant

hand they would hold up the commerce of the world to let me pass.



I noticed in the papers this afternoon a despatch from Washington, saying

that Congress would immediately pass a bill restoring to our gold coinage

the motto "In God We Trust."  I'm glad of that; I'm glad of that.  I was

troubled when that motto was removed.  Sure enough, the prosperities of

the whole nation went down in a heap when we ceased to trust in God in

that conspicuously advertised way.  I knew there would be trouble.  And

if Pierpont Morgan hadn't stepped in--Bishop Lawrence may now add to his

message to the old country that we are now trusting in God again.  So we

can discharge Mr. Morgan from his office with honor.



Mr. Reid said an hour or so ago something about my ruining my activities

last summer.  They are not ruined, they are renewed.  I am stronger now

--much stronger.  I suppose that the spiritual uplift I received

increased my physical power more than anything I ever had before.  I was

dancing last night at 1.30 o'clock.



Mr. Choate has mentioned Mr. Reid's predecessors.  Mr. Choate's head is

full of history, and some of it is true, too.  I enjoyed hearing him tell

about the list of the men who had the place before he did.  He mentioned

a long list of those predecessors, people I never heard of before, and

elected five of them to the Presidency by his own vote.  I'm glad and

proud to find Mr. Reid in that high position, because he didn't look it

when I knew him forty years ago.  I was talking to Reid the other day,

and he showed me my autograph on an old paper twenty years old.  I didn't

know I had an autograph twenty years ago.  Nobody ever asked me for it.



I remember a dinner I had long ago with Whitelaw Reid and John Hay at

Reid's expense.  I had another last summer when I was in London at the

embassy that Choate blackguards so.  I'd like to live there.



Some people say they couldn't live on the salary, but I could live on the

salary and the nation together.  Some of us don't appreciate what this

country can do.  There's John Hay, Reid, Choate, and me.  This is the

only country in the world where youth, talent, and energy can reach such

heights.  It shows what we could do without means, and what people can do

with talent and energy when they find it in people like us.



When I first came to New York they were all struggling young men, and I

am glad to see that they have got on in the world.  I knew John Hay when

I had no white hairs in my head and more hair than Reid has now.  Those

were days of joy and hope.  Reid and Hay were on the staff of the

Tribune.  I went there once in that old building, and I looked all around

and I finally found a door ajar and looked in.  It wasn't Reid or Hay

there, but it was Horace Greeley.  Those were in the days when Horace

Greeley was a king.  That was the first time I ever saw him and the last.



I was admiring him when he stopped and seemed to realize that there was a

fine presence there somewhere.  He tried to smile, but he was out of

smiles.  He looked at me a moment, and said:



"What in H---do you want?"



He began with that word "H." That's a long word and a profane word.

I don't remember what the word was now, but I recognized the power of it.

I had never used that language myself, but at that moment I was

converted.  It has been a great refuge for me in time of trouble.  If a

man doesn't know that language he can't express himself on strenuous

occasions.  When you have that word at your command let trouble come.



But later Hay rose, and you know what summit Whitelaw Reid has reached,

and you see me.  Those two men have regulated troubles of nations and

conferred peace upon mankind.  And in my humble way, of which I am quite

vain, I was the principal moral force in all those great international

movements.  These great men illustrated what I say.  Look at us great

people--we all come from the dregs of society.  That's what can be done

in this country.  That's what this country does for you.



Choate here--he hasn't got anything to say, but he says it just the same,

and he can do it so felicitously, too.  I said long ago he was the

handsomest man America ever produced.  May the progress of civilization

always rest on such distinguished men as it has in the past!













ROGERS AND RAILROADS



          AT A BANQUET GIVEN MR. H. H. ROGERS BY THE BUSINESS MEN OF

          NORFOLK, VA., CELEBRATING THE OPENING OF THE VIRGINIAN RAILWAY,

          APRIL, 3, 1909



          Toastmaster:



          "I have often thought that when the time comes, which must come

          to all of us, when we reach that Great Way in the Great Beyond,

          and the question is propounded, 'What have you done to gain

          admission into this great realm?' if the answer could be

          sincerely made, 'I have made men laugh,' it would be the surest

          passport to a welcome entrance.  We have here to-night one who

          has made millions laugh--not the loud laughter that bespeaks

          the vacant mind, but the laugh of intelligent mirth that helps

          the human heart and the human mind.  I refer, of course, to

          Doctor Clemens.  I was going to say Mark Twain, his literary

          title, which is a household phrase in more homes than that of

          any other man, and you know him best by that dear old title."



I thank you, Mr. Toastmaster, for the compliment which you have paid me,

and I am sure I would rather have made people laugh than cry, yet in my

time I have made some of them cry; and before I stop entirely I hope to

make some more of them cry.  I like compliments.  I deal in them myself.

I have listened with the greatest pleasure to the compliments which the

chairman has paid to Mr. Rogers and that road of his to-night, and I hope

some of them are deserved.



It is no small distinction to a man like that to sit here before an

intelligent crowd like this and to be classed with Napoleon and Caesar.

Why didn't he say that this was the proudest day of his life?  Napoleon

and Caesar are dead, and they can't be here to defend themselves.  But

I'm here!



The chairman said, and very truly, that the most lasting thing in the

hands of man are the roads which Caesar built, and it is true that he

built a lot of them; and they are there yet.



Yes, Caesar built a lot of roads in England, and you can find them.  But

Rogers has only built one road, and he hasn't finished that yet.  I like

to hear my old friend complimented, but I don't like to hear it overdone.



I didn't go around to-day with the others to see what he is doing.  I

will do that in a quiet time, when there is not anything going on, and

when I shall not be called upon to deliver intemperate compliments on a

railroad in which I own no stock.



They proposed that I go along with the committee and help inspect that

dump down yonder.  I didn't go.  I saw that dump.  I saw that thing when

I was coming in on the steamer, and I didn't go because I was diffident,

sentimentally diffident, about going and looking at that thing again--

that great, long, bony thing; it looked just like Mr. Rogers's foot.



The chairman says Mr. Rogers is full of practical wisdom, and he is.

It is intimated here that he is a very ingenious man, and he, is a very

competent financier.  Maybe he is now, but it was not always so.  I know

lots of private things in his life which people don't know, and I know

how he started; and it was not a very good start.  I could have done

better myself.  The first time he crossed the Atlantic he had just made

the first little strike in oil, and he was so young he did not like to

ask questions.  He did not like to appear ignorant.  To this day he don't

like to appear ignorant, but he can look as ignorant as anybody.

On board the ship they were betting on the run of the ship, betting a

couple of shillings, or half a crown, and they proposed that this youth

from the oil regions should bet on the run of the ship.  He did not like

to ask what a half-crown was, and he didn't know; but rather than be

ashamed of himself he did bet half a crown on the run of the ship, and in

bed he could not sleep.  He wondered if he could afford that outlay in

case he lost.  He kept wondering over it, and said to himself: "A king's

crown must be worth $20,000, so half a crown would cost $10,000."

He could not afford to bet away $10,000 on the run of the ship, so he

went up to the stakeholder and gave him $150 to let him off.



I like to hear Mr. Rogers complimented.  I am not stingy in compliments

to him myself.  Why, I did it to-day when I sent his wife a telegram to

comfort her.  That is the kind of person I am.  I knew she would be

uneasy about him.  I knew she would be solicitous about what he might do

down here, so I did it to quiet her and to comfort her.  I said he was

doing well for a person out of practice.  There is nothing like it.

He is like I used to be.  There were times when I was careless--careless

in my dress when I got older.  You know how uncomfortable your wife can

get when you are going away without her superintendence.  Once when my

wife could not go with me (she always went with me when she could--

I always did meet that kind of luck), I was going to Washington once, a

long time ago, in Mr. Cleveland's first administration, and she could not

go; but, in her anxiety that I should not desecrate the house, she made

preparation.  She knew that there was to be a reception of those authors

at the White House at seven o'clock in the evening.  She said, "If I

should tell you now what I want to ask of you, you would forget it before

you get to Washington, and, therefore, I have written it on a card, and

you will find it in your dress--vest pocket when you are dressing at the

Arlington--when you are dressing to see the President."  I never thought

of it again until I was dressing, and I felt in that pocket and took it

out, and it said, in a kind of imploring way, "Don't wear your arctics in

the White House."



You complimented Mr. Rogers on his energy, his foresightedness,

complimented him in various ways, and he has deserved those compliments,

although I say it myself; and I enjoy them all.  There is one side of Mr.

Rogers that has not been mentioned.  If you will leave that to me I will

touch upon that.  There was a note in an editorial in one of the Norfolk

papers this morning that touched upon that very thing, that hidden side

of Mr. Rogers, where it spoke of Helen Keller and her affection for Mr.

Rogers, to whom she dedicated her life book.  And she has a right to feel

that way, because, without the public knowing anything about it, he

rescued, if I may use that term, that marvellous girl, that wonderful

Southern girl, that girl who was stone deaf, blind, and dumb from

scarlet-fever when she was a baby eighteen months old; and who now is as

well and thoroughly educated as any woman on this planet at twenty-nine

years of age.  She is the most marvellous person of her sex that has

existed on this earth since Joan of Arc.



That is not all Mr. Rogers has done; but you never see that side of his

character, because it is never protruding; but he lends a helping hand

daily out of that generous heart of his.  You never hear of it.  He is

supposed to be a moon which has one side dark and the other bright.

But the other side, though you don't see it, is not dark; it is bright,

and its rays penetrate, and others do see it who are not God.



I would take this opportunity to tell something that I have never been

allowed to tell by Mr. Rogers, either by my mouth or in print, and if I

don't look at him I can tell it now.



In 1893, when the publishing company of Charles L. Webster, of which I

was financial agent, failed, it left me heavily in debt.  If you will

remember what commerce was at that time you will recall that you could

not sell anything, and could not buy anything, and I was on my back; my

books were not worth anything at all, and I could not give away my

copyrights.  Mr. Rogers had long enough vision ahead to say, "Your books

have supported you before, and after the panic is over they will support

you again," and that was a correct proposition.  He saved my copyrights,

and saved me from financial ruin.  He it was who arranged with my

creditors to allow me to roam the face of the earth for four years and

persecute the nations thereof with lectures, promising that at the end of

four years I would pay dollar for dollar.  That arrangement was made;

otherwise I would now be living out-of-doors under an umbrella, and a

borrowed one at that.



You see his white mustache and his head trying to get white (he is always

trying to look like me--I don't blame him for that).  These are only

emblematic of his character, and that is all.  I say, without exception,

hair and all, he is the whitest man I have ever known.













THE OLD-FASHIONED PRINTER



          ADDRESS AT THE TYPOTHETAE DINNER GIVEN AT DELMONICO'S,

          JANUARY 18, 1886, COMMEMORATING THE BIRTHDAY OF

          BENJAMIN FRANKLIN



          Mr. Clemens responded to the toast "The Compositor."



The chairman's historical reminiscences of Gutenberg have caused me to

fall into reminiscences, for I myself am something of an antiquity.

All things change in the procession of years, and it may be that I am

among strangers.  It may be that the printer of to-day is not the printer

of thirty-five years ago.  I was no stranger to him.  I knew him well.

I built his fire for him in the winter mornings; I brought his water from

the village pump; I swept out his office; I picked up his type from under

his stand; and, if he were there to see, I put the good type in his case

and the broken ones among the "hell matter"; and if he wasn't there to

see, I dumped it all with the "pi" on the imposing-stone--for that was

the furtive fashion of the cub, and I was a cub.  I wetted down the paper

Saturdays, I turned it Sundays--for this was a country weekly; I rolled,

I washed the rollers, I washed the forms, I folded the papers, I carried

them around at dawn Thursday mornings.  The carrier was then an object of

interest to all the dogs in town.  If I had saved up all the bites I ever

received, I could keep M. Pasteur busy for a year.  I enveloped the

papers that were for the mail--we had a hundred town subscribers and

three hundred and fifty country ones; the town subscribers paid in

groceries and the country ones in cabbages and cord-wood--when they paid

at all, which was merely sometimes, and then we always stated the fact in

the paper, and gave them a puff; and if we forgot it they stopped the

paper.  Every man on the town list helped edit the thing--that is,

he gave orders as to how it was to be edited; dictated its opinions,

marked out its course for it, and every time the boss failed to connect

he stopped his paper.  We were just infested with critics, and we tried

to satisfy them all over.  We had one subscriber who paid cash, and he

was more trouble than all the rest.  He bought us once a year, body and

soul, for two dollars.  He used to modify our politics every which way,

and he made us change our religion four times in five years.  If we ever

tried to reason with him, he would threaten to stop his paper, and, of

course, that meant bankruptcy and destruction. That man used to write

articles a column and a half long, leaded long primer, and sign them

"Junius," or "Veritas," or "Vox Populi," or some other high-sounding rot;

and then, after it was set up, he would come in and say he had changed

his mind-which was a gilded figure of speech, because he hadn't any--and

order it to be left out.  We couldn't afford "bogus" in that office, so

we always took the leads out, altered the signature, credited the article

to the rival paper in the next village, and put it in.  Well, we did have

one or two kinds of "bogus."  Whenever there was a barbecue, or a circus,

or a baptizing, we knocked off for half a day, and then to make up for

short matter we would "turn over ads"--turn over the whole page and

duplicate it.  The other "bogus" was deep philosophical stuff, which we

judged nobody ever read; so we kept a galley of it standing, and kept on

slapping the same old batches of it in, every now and then, till it got

dangerous.  Also, in the early days of the telegraph we used to economize

on the news.  We picked out the items that were pointless and barren of

information and stood them on a galley, and changed the dates and

localities, and used them over and over again till the public interest in

them was worn to the bone.  We marked the ads, but we seldom paid any

attention to the marks afterward; so the life of a "td" ad and a "tf" ad

was equally eternal.  I have seen a "td" notice of a sheriff's sale still

booming serenely along two years after the sale was over, the sheriff

dead, and the whole circumstance become ancient history.  Most of the

yearly ads were patent-medicine stereotypes, and we used to fence with

them.



I can see that printing-office of prehistoric times yet, with its horse

bills on, the walls, its "d" boxes clogged with tallow, because we always

stood the candle in the "k" box nights, its towel, which was not

considered soiled until it could stand alone, and other signs and symbols

that marked the establishment of that kind in the Mississippi Valley;

and I can see, also, the tramping "jour," who flitted by in the summer

and tarried a day, with his wallet stuffed with one shirt and a hatful of

handbills; for if he couldn't get any type to set he would do a

temperance lecture.  His way of life was simple, his needs not complex;

all he wanted was plate and bed and money enough to get drunk on, and he

was satisfied.  But it may be, as I have said, that I am among strangers,

and sing the glories of a forgotten age to unfamiliar ears, so I will

"make even" and stop.













SOCIETY OF AMERICAN AUTHORS



          On November 15, 1900, the society gave a reception to Mr.

          Clemens, who came with his wife and daughter.  So many members

          surrounded the guests that Mr. Clemens asked: "Is this genuine

          popularity or is it all a part of a prearranged programme?"



MR. CHAIRMAN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,--It seems a most difficult thing for

any man to say anything about me that is not complimentary.  I don't know

what the charm is about me which makes it impossible for a person to say

a harsh thing about me and say it heartily, as if he was glad to say it.



If this thing keeps on it will make me believe that I am what these kind

chairmen say of me.  In introducing me, Judge Ransom spoke of my modesty

as if he was envious of me.  I would like to have one man come out flat-

footed and say something harsh and disparaging of me, even if it were

true.  I thought at one time, as the learned judge was speaking, that I

had found that man; but he wound up, like all the others, by saying

complimentary things.



I am constructed like everybody else, and enjoy a compliment as well as

any other fool, but I do like to have the other side presented.  And

there is another side.  I have a wicked side.  Estimable friends who know

all about it would tell you and take a certain delight in telling you

things that I have done, and things further that I have not repented.



The real life that I live, and the real life that I suppose all of you

live, is a life of interior sin.  That is what makes life valuable and

pleasant.  To lead a life of undiscovered sin!  That is true joy.



Judge Ransom seems to have all the virtues that he ascribes to me.  But,

oh my! if you could throw an X-ray through him.  We are a pair.  I have

made a life-study of trying to appear to be what he seems to think I am.

Everybody believes that I am a monument of all the virtues, but it is

nothing of the sort.  I am living two lives, and it keeps me pretty busy.



Some day there will be a chairman who will forget some of these merits of

mine, and then he will make a speech.



I have more personal vanity than modesty, and twice as much veracity as

the two put together.



When that fearless  and forgetful chairman is found there will be another

story told.  At the Press Club recently I thought that I had found

him.  He started in in the way that I knew I should be painted with all

sincerity, and was leading to things that would not be to my credit; but

when he said that he never read a book of mine I knew at once that he was

a liar, because he never could have had all the wit and intelligence with

which he was blessed unless he had read my works as a basis.



I like compliments.  I like to go home and tell them all over again to

the members of my family.  They don't believe them, but I like to tell

them in the home circle, all the same.  I like to dream of them if I can.



I thank everybody for their compliments, but I don't think that I am

praised any more than I am entitled to be.













READING-ROOM OPENING



          On October 13, 1900, Mr. Clemens made his last address

          preceding his departure for America at Kensal Rise, London.



I formally declare this reading-room open, and I think that the

legislature should not compel a community to provide itself with

intelligent food, but give it the privilege of providing it if the

community so desires.



If the community is anxious to have a reading-room it would put its hand

in its pocket and bring out the penny tax.  I think it a proof of the

healthy, moral, financial, and mental condition of the community if it

taxes itself for its mental food.



A reading-room is the proper introduction to a library, leading up

through the newspapers and magazines to other literature.  What would we

do without newspapers?



Look at the rapid manner in which the news of the Galveston disaster was

made known to the entire world.  This reminds me of an episode which

occurred fifteen years ago when I was at church in Hartford, Connecticut.



The clergyman decided to make a collection for the survivors, if any.

He did not include me among the leading citizens who took the plates

around for collection.  I complained to the governor of his lack of

financial trust in me, and he replied: "I would trust you myself--if you

had a bell-punch."



You have paid me many compliments, and I like to listen to compliments.

I indorse all your chairman has said to you about the union of England

and America.  He also alluded to my name, of which I am rather fond.



A little girl wrote me from New Zealand in a letter I received yesterday,

stating that her father said my proper name was not Mark Twain but Samuel

Clemens, but that she knew better, because Clemens was the name of the

man who sold the patent medicine, and his name was not Mark.  She was

sure it was Mark Twain, because Mark is in the Bible and Twain is in the

Bible.



I was very glad to get that expression of confidence in my origin, and as

I now know my name to be a scriptural one, I am not without hopes of

making it worthy.













LITERATURE



          ADDRESS AT THE ROYAL LITERARY FUND BANQUET, LONDON, MAY 4, 1900



          Anthony Hope introduced Mr. Clemens to make the response to the

          toast "Literature."



MR. HOPE has been able to deal adequately with this toast without

assistance from me.  Still, I was born generous.  If he had advanced any

theories that needed refutation or correction I would have attended to

them, and if he had made any statements stronger than those which he is

in the habit of making I would have dealt with them.



In fact, I was surprised at the mildness of his statements.  I could not

have made such statements if I had preferred to, because to exaggerate is

the only way I can approximate to the truth.  You cannot have a theory

without principles.  Principles is another name for prejudices.  I have

no prejudices in politics, religion, literature, or anything else.



I am now on my way to my own country to run for the presidency because

there are not yet enough candidates in the field, and those who have

entered are too much hampered by their own principles, which are

prejudices.



I propose to go there to purify the political atmosphere.  I am in favor

of everything everybody is in favor of.  What you should do is to satisfy

the whole nation, not half of it, for then you would only be half a

President.



There could not be a broader platform than mine.  I am in favor of

anything and everything--of temperance and intemperance, morality and

qualified immorality, gold standard and free silver.



I have tried all sorts of things, and that is why I want to by the great

position of ruler of a country.  I have been in turn reporter, editor,

publisher, author, lawyer, burglar.  I have worked my way up, and wish to

continue to do so.



I read to-day in a magazine article that Christendom issued last year

fifty-five thousand new books.  Consider what that means!  Fifty-five

thousand new books meant fifty-four thousand new authors.  We are going

to have them all on our hands to take care of sooner or later.

Therefore, double your, subscriptions to the literary fund!













DISAPPEARANCE OF LITERATURE



          ADDRESS AT THE DINNER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY CLUB, AT

          SHERRY'S, NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 20, 1900



          Mr. Clemens spoke to the toast "The Disappearance of

          Literature."  Doctor Gould presided, and in introducing

          Mr. Clemens said that he (the speaker), when in Germany, had to

          do a lot of apologizing for a certain literary man who was

          taking what the Germans thought undue liberties with their

          language.



It wasn't necessary for your chairman to apologize for me in Germany.

It wasn't necessary at all.  Instead of that he ought to have impressed

upon those poor benighted Teutons the service I rendered them.  Their

language had needed untangling for a good many years.  Nobody else seemed

to want to take the job, and so I took it, and I flatter myself that I

made a pretty good job of it.  The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting

up their verbs.  Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world

when it's all together.  It's downright inhuman to split it up.  But

that's just what those Germans do.  They take part of a verb and put it

down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it

away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they

just shovel in German.  I maintain that there is no necessity for

apologizing for a man who helped in a small way to stop such mutilation.



We have heard a discussion to-night on the disappearance of literature.

That's no new thing.  That's what certain kinds of literature have been

doing for several years.  The fact is, my friends, that the fashion in

literature changes, and the literary tailors have to change their cuts or

go out of business.  Professor Winchester here, if I remember fairly

correctly what he said, remarked that few, if any, of the novels produced

to-day would live as long as the novels of Walter Scott.  That may be his

notion.  Maybe he is right; but so far as I am concerned, I don't care if

they don't.



Professor Winchester also said something about there being no modern

epics like Paradise Lost.  I guess he's right.  He talked as if he was

pretty familiar with that piece of literary work, and nobody would

suppose that he never had read it.  I don't believe any of you have ever

read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to.  That's something that you

just want to take on trust.  It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester

says, and it meets his definition of a classic--something that everybody

wants to have read and nobody wants to read.



Professor Trent also had a good deal to say about the disappearance of

literature.  He said that Scott would outlive all his critics.  I guess

that's true.  The fact of the business is, you've got to be one of two

ages to appreciate Scott.  When you're eighteen you can read Ivanhoe, and

you want to wait until you are ninety to read some of the rest.  It takes

a pretty well-regulated, abstemious critic to live ninety years.



But as much as these two gentlemen have talked about the disappearance of

literature, they didn't say anything about my books.  Maybe they think

they've disappeared.  If they do, that just shows their ignorance on the

general subject of literature.  I am not as young as I was several years

ago, and maybe I'm not so fashionable, but I'd be willing to take my

chances with Mr. Scott to-morrow morning in selling a piece of literature

to the Century Publishing Company.  And I haven't got much of a pull

here, either.  I often think that the highest compliment ever paid to my

poor efforts was paid by Darwin through President Eliot, of Harvard

College.  At least, Eliot said it was a compliment, and I always take the

opinion of great men like college presidents on all such subjects as

that.



I went out to Cambridge one day a few years ago and called on President

Eliot.  In the course of the conversation he said that he had just

returned from England, and that he was very much touched by what he

considered the high compliment Darwin was paying to my books, and he went

on to tell me something like this:



"Do you know that there is one room in Darwin's house, his bedroom, where

the housemaid is never allowed to touch two things?  One is a plant he is

growing and studying while it grows" (it was one of those insect-

devouring plants which consumed bugs and beetles and things for the

particular delectation of Mr. Darwin) "and the other some books that lie

on the night table at the head of his bed.  They are your books, Mr.

Clemens, and Mr. Darwin reads them every night to lull him to sleep."



My friends, I thoroughly appreciated that compliment, and considered it

the highest one that was ever paid to me.  To be the means of soothing to

sleep a brain teeming with bugs and squirming things like Darwin's was

something that I had never hoped for, and now that he is dead I never

hope to be able to do it again.













THE NEW YORK PRESS CLUB DINNER



          AT THE ANNUAL DINNER, NOVEMBER 13, 1900



          Col. William L. Brown, the former editor of the Daily News, as

          president of the club, introduced Mr. Clemens as the principal

          ornament of American literature.



I must say that I have already begun to regret that I left my gun at

home.  I've said so many times when a chairman has distressed me with

just such compliments that the next time such a thing occurs I will

certainly use a gun on that chairman.  It is my privilege to compliment

him in return.  You behold before you a very, very old man.  A cursory

glance at him would deceive the most penetrating.  His features seem to

reveal a person dead to all honorable instincts--they seem to bear the

traces of all the known crimes, instead of the marks of a life spent for

the most part, and now altogether, in the Sunday-school of a life that

may well stand as an example to all generations that have risen or will

riz--I mean to say, will rise.  His private character is altogether

suggestive of virtues which to all appearances he has got.  If you

examine his past history you will find it as deceptive as his features,

because it is marked all over with waywardness and misdemeanor--mere

effects of a great spirit upon a weak body--mere accidents of a great

career.  In his heart he cherishes every virtue on the list of virtues,

and he practises them all--secretly--always secretly.  You all know him

so well that there is no need for him to be introduced here.  Gentlemen,

Colonel Brown.













THE ALPHABET AND SIMPLIFIED SPELLING



          ADDRESS AT THE DINNER GIVEN TO MR. CARNEGIE AT THE DEDICATION

          OF THE NEW YORK ENGINEERS' CLUB, DECEMBER 9, 1907



          Mr. Clemens was introduced by the president of the club, who,

          quoting from the Mark Twain autobiography, recalled the day

          when the distinguished writer came to New York with $3 in small

          change in his pockets and a $10 bill sewed in his clothes.



It seems to me that I was around here in the neighborhood of the Public

Library about fifty or sixty years ago.  I don't deny the circumstance,

although I don't see how you got it out of my autobiography, which was

not to be printed until I am dead, unless I'm dead now.  I had that $3 in

change, and I remember well the $10 which was sewed in my coat.  I have

prospered since.  Now I have plenty of money and a disposition to

squander it, but I can't.  One of those trust companies is taking care of

it.



Now, as this is probably the last time that I shall be out after

nightfall this winter, I must say that I have come here with a mission,

and I would make my errand of value.



Many compliments have been paid to Mr. Carnegie to-night.  I was

expecting them.  They are very gratifying to me.



I have been a guest of honor myself, and I know what Mr. Carnegie is

experiencing now.  It is embarrassing to get compliments and compliments

and only compliments, particularly when he knows as well as the rest of

us that on the other side of him there are all sorts of things worthy of

our condemnation.



Just look at Mr. Carnegie's face.  It is fairly scintillating with

fictitious innocence.  You would think, looking at him, that he had never

committed a crime in his life.  But no--look at his pestiferious

simplified spelling.  You can't any of you imagine what a crime that has

been.  Torquemada was nothing to Mr. Carnegie.  That old fellow shed some

blood in the Inquisition, but Mr. Carnegie has brought destruction to the

entire race.  I know he didn't mean it to be a crime, but it was, just

the same.  He's got us all so we can't spell anything.



The trouble with him is that he attacked orthography at the wrong end.

He meant well, but he, attacked the symptoms and not the cause of the

disease.  He ought to have gone to work on the alphabet.  There's not a

vowel in it with a definite value, and not a consonant that you can hitch

anything to.  Look at the "h's" distributed all around.  There's

"gherkin."  What are you going to do with the "h" in that?  What the

devil's the use of "h" in gherkin, I'd like to know.  It's one thing I

admire the English for: they just don't mind anything about them at all.



But look at the "pneumatics" and the "pneumonias" and the rest of them.

A real reform would settle them once and for all, and wind up by giving

us an alphabet that we wouldn't have to spell with at all, instead of

this present silly alphabet, which I fancy was invented by a drunken

thief.  Why, there isn't a man who doesn't have to throw out about

fifteen hundred words a day when he writes his letters because he can't

spell them!  It's like trying to do a St. Vitus's dance with wooden legs.



Now I'll bet there isn't a man here who can spell "pterodactyl," not even

the prisoner at the bar.  I'd like to hear him try once--but not in

public, for it's too near Sunday, when all extravagant histrionic

entertainments are barred.  I'd like to hear him try in private, and when

he got through trying to spell "pterodactyl" you wouldn't know whether it

was a fish or a beast or a bird, and whether it flew on its legs or

walked with its wings.  The chances are that he would give it tusks and

make it lay eggs.



Let's get Mr. Carnegie to reform the alphabet, and we'll pray for him--

if he'll take the risk.  If we had adequate, competent vowels, with a

system of accents, giving to each vowel its own soul and value, so every

shade of that vowel would be shown in its accent, there is not a word in

any tongue that we could not spell accurately.  That would be competent,

adequate, simplified spelling, in contrast to the clipping, the hair

punching, the carbuncles, and the cancers which go by the name of

simplified spelling.  If I ask you what b-o-w spells you can't tell me

unless you know which b-o-w I mean, and it is the same with r-o-w, b-o-r-

e, and the whole family of words which were born out of lawful wedlock

and don't know their own origin.



Now, if we had an alphabet that was adequate and competent, instead of

inadequate and incompetent, things would be different.  Spelling reform

has only made it bald-headed and unsightly.  There is the whole tribe of

them, "row" and "read" and "lead"--a whole family who don't know who they

are.  I ask you to pronounce s-o-w, and you ask me what kind of a one.



If we had a sane, determinate alphabet, instead of a hospital of

comminuted eunuchs, you would know whether one referred to the act of a

man casting the seed over the ploughed land or whether one wished to

recall the lady hog and the future ham.



It's a rotten alphabet.  I appoint Mr. Carnegie to get after it, and

leave simplified spelling alone.



Simplified spelling brought about sun-spots, the San Francisco

earthquake, and the recent business depression, which we would never have

had if spelling had been left all alone.



Now, I hope I have soothed Mr. Carnegie and made him more comfortable

than he would have been had he received only compliment after compliment,

and I wish to say to him that simplified spelling is all right, but, like

chastity, you can carry it too far.













SPELLING AND PICTURES



          ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL DINNER OF THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, AT THE

          WALDORF-ASTORIA, SEPTEMBER 18, 1906



I am here to make an appeal to the nations in behalf of the simplified

spelling.  I have come here because they cannot all be reached except

through you.  There are only two forces that can carry light to all the

corners of the globe--only two--the sun in the heavens and the Associated

Press down here.  I may seem to be flattering the sun, but I do not mean

it so; I am meaning only to be just and fair all around.  You speak with

a million voices; no one can reach so many races, so many hearts and

intellects, as you--except Rudyard Kipling, and he cannot do it without

your help.  If the Associated Press will adopt and use our simplified

forms, and thus spread them to the ends of the earth, covering the whole

spacious planet with them as with a garden of flowers, our difficulties

are at an end.



Every day of the three hundred and sixty-five the only pages of the

world's countless newspapers that are read by all the human beings and

angels and devils that can read, are these pages that are built out of

Associated Press despatches.  And so I beg you, I beseech you--oh, I

implore you to spell them in our simplified forms.  Do this daily,

constantly, persistently, for three months--only three months--it is all

I ask.  The infallible result?--victory, victory all down the line.  For

by that time all eyes here and above and below will have become adjusted

to the change and in love with it, and the present clumsy and ragged

forms will be grotesque to the eye and revolting to the soul.  And we

shall be rid of phthisis and phthisic and pneumonia and pneumatics, and

diphtheria and pterodactyl, and all those other insane words which no man

addicted to the simple Christian life can try to spell and not lose some

of the bloom of his piety in the demoralizing attempt.  Do not doubt it.

We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change places with

an easy and blessed facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and

happy in it.  We do not regret our old, yellow fangs and snags and tushes

after we have worn nice, fresh, uniform store teeth a while.



Do I seem to be seeking the good of the world?  That is the idea.  It is

my public attitude; privately I am merely seeking my own profit.  We all

do it, but it is sound and it is virtuous, for no public interest is

anything other or nobler than a massed accumulation of private interests.

In 1883, when the simplified-spelling movement first tried to make a

noise, I was indifferent to it; more--I even irreverently scoffed at it.

What I needed was an object-lesson, you see.  It is the only way to teach

some people.  Very well, I got it.  At that time I was scrambling along,

earning the family's bread on magazine work at seven cents a word,

compound words at single rates, just as it is in the dark present.

I was the property of a magazine, a seven-cent slave under a boiler-iron

contract.  One day there came a note from the editor requiring me to

write ten pages--on this revolting text: "Considerations concerning the

alleged subterranean holophotal extemporaneousness of the conchyliaceous

superimbrication of the Ornithorhyncus, as foreshadowed by the

unintelligibility of its plesiosaurian anisodactylous aspects."



Ten pages of that.  Each and every word a seventeen-jointed vestibuled

railroad train.  Seven cents a word.  I saw starvation staring the family

in the face.  I went to the editor, and I took a stenographer along so as

to have the interview down in black and white, for no magazine editor can

ever remember any part of a business talk except the part that's got

graft in it for him and the magazine.  I said, "Read that text, Jackson,

and let it go on the record; read it out loud."  He read it:

"Considerations concerning the alleged subterranean holophotal

extemporaneousness of the conchyliaceous superimbrication of the

Ornithorhyncus, as foreshadowed by the unintelligibility of its

plesiosaurian anisodactylous aspects."



I said, "You want ten pages of those rumbling, great, long, summer

thunderpeals, and you expect to get them at seven cents a peal?"



He said, "A word's a word, and seven cents is the contract; what are you

going to do about it?"



I said, "Jackson, this is cold-blooded oppression.  What's an average

English word?"



He said, "Six letters."



I said, "Nothing of the kind; that's French, and includes the spaces

between the words; an average English word is four letters and a half.

By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary

and shaved it down till the average is three letters and a half.  I can

put one thousand and two hundred words on your page, and there's not

another man alive that can come within two hundred of it.  My page is

worth eighty-four dollars to me.  It takes exactly as long to fill your

magazine page with long words as it does with short ones-four hours.

Now, then, look at the criminal injustice of this requirement of yours.

I am careful, I am economical of my time and labor.  For the family's

sake I've got to be so.  So I never write 'metropolis' for seven cents,

because I can get the same money for 'city.' I never write 'policeman,'

because I can get the same price for 'cop.' And so on and so on.  I never

write 'valetudinarian' at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can

humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents;

I wouldn't do it for fifteen.  Examine your obscene text, please; count

the words."



He counted and said it was twenty-four.  I asked him to count the

letters.  He made it two hundred and three.



I said, "Now, I hope you see the whole size of your crime.  With my

vocabulary I would make sixty words out of those two hundred and five

letters, and get four dollars and twenty cents for it; whereas for your

inhuman twenty-four I would get only one dollar and sixty-eight cents.

Ten pages of these sky-scrapers of yours would pay me only about three

hundred dollars; in my simplified vocabulary the same space and the same

labor would pay me eight hundred and forty dollars.  I do not wish to

work upon this scandalous job by the piece.  I want to be hired by the

year."  He coldly refused.  I said:



"Then for the sake of the family, if you have no feeling for me, you

ought at least to allow me overtime on that word extemporaneousness."

Again he coldly refused.  I seldom say a harsh word to any one, but I was

not master of myself then, and I spoke right out and called him an

anisodactylous plesiosaurian conchyliaceous Ornithorhyncus, and rotten to

the heart with holoaophotal subterranean extemporaneousness.  God forgive

me for that wanton crime; he lived only two hours.



From that day to this I have been a devoted and hard-working member of

the heaven-born institution, the International Association for the

Prevention of Cruelty to Authors, and now I am laboring with Carnegie's

Simplified Committee, and with my heart in the work .  .  .  .



Now then, let us look at this mighty question reasonably, rationally,

sanely--yes, and calmly, not excitedly.  What is the real function, the

essential function, the supreme function, of language?  Isn't it merely

to convey ideas and emotions?  Certainly.  Then if we can do it with

words of fonetic brevity and compactness, why keep the present cumbersome

forms?  But can we?  Yes.  I hold in my hand the proof of it.  Here is a

letter written by a woman, right out of her heart of hearts.  I think she

never saw a spelling-book in her life.  The spelling is her own.  There

isn't a waste letter in it anywhere.  It reduces the fonetics to the last

gasp--it squeezes the surplusage out of every word--there's no spelling

that can begin with it on this planet outside of the White House.  And as

for the punctuation, there isn't any.  It is all one sentence, eagerly

and breathlessly uttered, without break or pause in it anywhere.  The

letter is absolutely genuine--I have the proofs of that in my possession.

I  can't stop to spell the words for you, but you can take the letter

presently and comfort your eyes with it.  I will read the letter:



"Miss dear freind I took some Close into the armerry and give them to you

to Send too the suffrers out to California and i Hate to treble you but i

got to have one of them Back it was a black oll wolle Shevyott With a

jacket to Mach trimed Kind of Fancy no 38 Burst measure and palsy

menterry acrost the front And the color i woodent Trubble you but it

belonged to my brothers wife and she is Mad about it i thoght she was

willin but she want she says she want done with it and she was going to

Wear it a Spell longer she ant so free harted as what i am and she Has

got more to do with Than i have having a Husband to Work and slave For

her i gels you remember Me I am shot and stout and light complected i

torked with you quite a spell about the suffrars and said it was orful

about that erth quake I shoodent wondar if they had another one rite off

seeine general Condision of the country is Kind of Explossive i hate to

take that Black dress away from the suffrars but i will hunt round And

see if i can get another One if i can i will call to the armerry for it

if you will jest lay it asside so no more at present from your True

freind



"i liked your

appearance very Much"



Now you see what simplified spelling can do.



It can convey any fact you need to convey; and it can pour out emotions

like a sewer.  I beg you, I beseech you, to adopt our spelling, and print

all your despatches in it.



Now I wish to say just one entirely serious word:



I have reached a time of life, seventy years and a half, where none of

the concerns of this world have much interest for me personally.  I think

I can speak dispassionately upon this matter, because in the little while

that I have got to remain here I can get along very well with these old-

fashioned forms, and I don't propose to make any trouble about it at all.

I shall soon be where they won't care how I spell so long as I keep the

Sabbath.



There are eighty-two millions of us people that use this orthography, and

it ought to be simplified in our behalf, but it is kept in its present

condition to satisfy one million people who like to have their literature

in the old form.  That looks to me to be rather selfish, and we keep the

forms as they are while we have got one million people coming in here

from foreign countries every year and they have got to struggle with this

orthography of ours, and it keeps them back and damages their citizenship

for years until they learn to spell the language, if they ever do learn.

This is merely sentimental argument.



People say it is the spelling of Chaucer and Spencer and Shakespeare and

a lot of other people who do not know how to spell anyway, and it has

been transmitted to us and we preserved it and wish to preserve it

because of its ancient and hallowed associations.



Now, I don't see that there is any real argument about that.  If that

argument is good, then it would be a good argument not to banish the

flies and the cockroaches from hospitals because they have been there so

long that the patients have got used to them and they feel a tenderness

for them on account of the associations.  Why, it is like preserving a

cancer in a family because it is a family cancer, and we are bound to it

by the test of affection and reverence and old, mouldy antiquity.



I think that this declaration to improve this orthography of ours is our

family cancer, and I wish we could reconcile ourselves to have it cut out

and let the family cancer go.



Now, you see before you the wreck and ruin of what was once a young

person like yourselves.  I am exhausted by the heat of the day.  I must

take what is left of this wreck and run out of your presence and carry it

away to my home and spread it out there and sleep the sleep of the

righteous.  There is nothing much left of me but my age and my

righteousness, but I leave with you my love and my blessing, and may you

always keep your youth.













BOOKS AND BURGLARS



          ADDRESS TO THE REDDING (CONN.) LIBRARY ASSOCIATION,

          OCTOBER 28, 1908



Suppose this library had been in operation a few weeks ago, and the

burglars who happened along and broke into my house--taking a lot of

things they didn't need, and for that matter which I didn't need--had

first made entry into this institution.



Picture them seated here on the floor, poring by the light of their dark-

lanterns over some of the books they found, and thus absorbing moral

truths and getting a moral uplift.  The whole course of their lives would

have been changed.  As it was, they kept straight on in their immoral way

and were sent to jail.



For all we know, they may next be sent to Congress.



And, speaking of burglars, let us not speak of them too harshly.  Now, I

have known so many burglars--not exactly known, but so many of them have

come near me in my various dwelling-places, that I am disposed to allow

them credit for whatever good qualities they possess.



Chief among these, and, indeed, the only one I just now think of, is

their great care while doing business to avoid disturbing people's sleep.



Noiseless as they may be while at work, however, the effect of their

visitation is to murder sleep later on.



Now we are prepared for these visitors.  All sorts of alarm devices have

been put in the house, and the ground for half a mile around it has been

electrified.  The burglar who steps within this danger zone will set

loose a bedlam of sounds, and spring into readiness for action our

elaborate system of defences.  As for the fate of the trespasser, do not

seek to know that.  He will never be heard of more.















AUTHORS' CLUB



          ADDRESS AT THE DINNER GIVEN IN HONOR OF MR. CLEMENS, LONDON,

          JUNE, 1899



          Mr. Clemens was introduced by Sir Walter Besant.



It does not embarrass me to hear my books praised so much.  It only

pleases and delights me.  I have not gone beyond the age when

embarrassment is possible, but I have reached the age when I know how to

conceal it.  It is such a satisfaction to me to hear Sir Walter Besant,

who is much more capable than I to judge of my work, deliver a judgment

which is such a contentment to my spirit.



Well, I have thought well of the books myself, but I think more of them

now.  It charms me also to hear Sir Spencer Walpole deliver a similar

judgment, and I shall treasure his remarks also.  I shall not discount

the praises in any possible way.  When I report them to my family they

shall lose nothing.  There are, however, certain heredities which come

down to us which our writings of the present day may be traced to.

I, for instance, read the Walpole Letters when I was a boy.  I absorbed

them, gathered in their grace, wit, and humor, and put them away to be

used by-and-by.  One does that so unconsciously with things one really

likes.  I am reminded now of what use those letters have been to me.



They must not claim credit in America for what was really written in

another form so long ago.  They must only claim that I trimmed this,

that, and the other, and so changed their appearance as to make them seem

to be original.  You now see what modesty I have in stock.  But it has

taken long practice to get it there.



But I must not stand here talking.  I merely meant to get up and give my

thanks for the pleasant things that preceding speakers have said of me.

I wish also to extend my thanks to the Authors' Club for constituting me

a member, at a reasonable price per year, and for giving me the benefit

of your legal adviser.



I believe you keep a lawyer.  I have always kept a lawyer, too, though I

have never made anything out of him.  It is service to an author to have

a lawyer.  There is something so disagreeable in having a personal

contact with a publisher.  So it is better to work through a lawyer--and

lose your case.  I understand that the publishers have been meeting

together also like us.  I don't know what for, but possibly they are

devising new and mysterious ways for remunerating authors.  I only wish

now to thank you for electing me a member of this club--I believe I have

paid my dues--and to thank you again for the pleasant things you have

said of me.



Last February, when Rudyard Kipling was ill in America, the sympathy

which was poured out to him was genuine and sincere, and I believe that

which cost Kipling so much will bring England and America closer

together.  I have been proud and pleased to see this growing affection

and respect between the two countries.  I hope it will continue to grow,

and, please God, it will continue to grow.  I trust we authors will leave

to posterity, if we have nothing else to leave, a friendship between

England and America that will count for much.  I will now confess that

I have been engaged for the past eight days in compiling a publication.

I have brought it here to lay at your feet.  I do not ask your indulgence

in presenting it, but for your applause.



Here it is:  "Since England and America may be joined together in

Kipling, may they not be severed in 'Twain.'"













BOOKSELLERS



          Address at banquet on Wednesday evening, May 20, 1908, of the

          American Booksellers' Association, which included most of the

          leading booksellers of America, held at the rooms of the Aldine

          Association, New York.



This annual gathering of booksellers from all over America comes together

ostensibly to eat and drink, but really to discuss, business; therefore

I am required to, talk shop.  I am required to furnish a statement of the

indebtedness under which I lie to you gentlemen for your help in enabling

me to earn my living.  For something over forty years I have acquired my

bread by print, beginning with The Innocents Abroad, followed at

intervals of a year or so by Roughing It, Tom Sawyer, Gilded Age, and so

on.  For thirty-six years my books were sold by subscription.  You are

not interested in those years, but only in the four which have since

followed.  The books passed into the hands of my present publishers at

the beginning of 1900, and you then became the providers of my diet.

I think I may say, without flattering you, that you have done exceedingly

well by me.  Exceedingly well is not too strong a phrase, since the

official statistics show that in four years you have sold twice as many

volumes of my venerable books as my contract with my publishers bound you

and them to sell in five years.  To your sorrow you are aware that

frequently, much too frequently, when a book gets to be five or ten years

old its annual sale shrinks to two or three hundred copies, and after an

added ten or twenty years ceases to sell.  But you sell thousands of my

moss-backed old books every year--the youngest of them being books that

range from fifteen to twenty-seven years old, and the oldest reaching

back to thirty-five and forty.



By the terms of my contract my publishers had to account to me for,

50,000 volumes per year for five years, and pay me for them whether they

sold them or not.  It is at this point that you gentlemen come in, for it

was your business to unload 250,000 volumes upon the public in five years

if you possibly could.  Have you succeeded?  Yes, you have--and more.

For in four years, with a year still to spare, you have sold the 250,000

volumes, and 240,000 besides.



Your sales have increased each year.  In the first year you sold 90,328;

in the second year, 104,851; in the third, 133,975; in the fourth year--

which was last year--you sold 160,000.  The aggregate for the four years

is 500,000 volumes, lacking 11,000.



Of the oldest book, The Innocents Abroad,--now forty years old--you sold

upward of 46,000 copies in the four years; of Roughing It--now thirty-

eight years old; I think--you sold 40,334; of Tom Sawyer, 41,000.  And so

on.



And there is one thing that is peculiarly gratifying to me: the Personal

Recollections of Joan of Arc is a serious book; I wrote it for love, and

never expected it to sell, but you have pleasantly disappointed me in

that matter.  In your hands its sale has increased each year.  In 1904

you sold 1726 copies; in 1905, 2445; in 1906, 5381; and last year, 6574.













"MARK TWAIN'S FIRST APPEARANCE"



          On October 5, 1906, Mr. Clemens, following a musical recital by

          his daughter in Norfolk, Conn., addressed her audience on the

          subject of stage-fright.  He thanked the people for making

          things as easy as possible for his daughter's American debut as

          a contralto, and then told of his first experience before the

          public.



My heart goes out in sympathy to any one who is making his first

appearance before an audience of human beings.  By a direct process of

memory I go back forty years, less one month--for I'm older than I look.



I recall the occasion of my first appearance.  San Francisco knew me then

only as a reporter, and I was to make my bow to San Francisco as a

lecturer.  I knew that nothing short of compulsion would get me to the

theatre.  So I bound myself by a hard-and-fast contract so that I could

not escape.  I got to the theatre forty-five minutes before the hour set

for the lecture.  My knees were shaking so that I didn't know whether I

could stand up.  If there is an awful, horrible malady in the world, it

is stage-fright-and seasickness.  They are a pair.  I had stage-fright

then for the first and last time.  I was only seasick once, too.  It was

on a little ship on which there were two hundred other passengers.  I--

was--sick.  I was so sick that there wasn't any left for those other two

hundred passengers.



It was dark and lonely behind the scenes in that theatre, and I peeked

through the little peekholes they have in theatre curtains and looked

into the big auditorium.  That was dark and empty, too.  By-and-by it

lighted up, and the audience began to arrive.



I had got a number of friends of mine, stalwart men, to sprinkle

themselves through the audience armed with big clubs.  Every time I said

anything they could possibly guess I intended to be funny they were to

pound those clubs on the floor.  Then there was a kind lady in a box up

there, also a good friend of mine, the wife of the Governor.  She was to

watch me intently, and whenever I glanced toward her she was going to

deliver a gubernatorial laugh that would lead the whole audience into

applause.



At last I began.  I had the manuscript tucked under a United States flag

in front of me where I could get at it in case of need.  But I managed to

get started without it.  I walked up and down--I was young in those days

and needed the exercise--and talked and talked.



Right in the middle of the speech I had placed a gem.  I had put in a

moving, pathetic part which was to get at the hearts and souls of my

hearers.  When I delivered it they did just what I hoped and expected.

They sat silent and awed.  I had touched them.  Then I happened to glance

up at the box where the Governor's wife was--you know what happened.



Well, after the first agonizing five minutes, my stage-fright left me,

never to return.  I know if I was going to be hanged I could get up and

make a good showing, and I intend to.  But I shall never forget my

feelings before the agony left me, and I got up here to thank you for her

for helping my daughter, by your kindness, to live through her first

appearance.  And I want to thank you for your appreciation of her

singing, which is, by-the-way, hereditary.













MORALS AND MEMORY



          Mr. Clemens was the guest of honor at a reception held at

          Barnard College (Columbia University), March 7, 1906, by the

          Barnard Union.  One of the young ladies presented Mr. Clemens,

          and thanked him for his amiability in coming to make them an

          address.  She closed with the expression of the great joy it

          gave her fellow-collegians, "because we all love you."



If any one here loves me, she has my sincere thanks.  Nay, if any one

here is so good as to love me--why, I'll be a brother to her.  She shall

have my sincere, warm, unsullied affection.  When I was coming up in the

car with the very kind young lady who was delegated to show me the way,

she asked me what I was going to talk about.  And I said I wasn't sure.

I said I had some illustrations, and I was going to bring them in.

I said I was certain to give those illustrations, but that I hadn't the

faintest notion what they were going to illustrate.



Now, I've been thinking it over in this forest glade [indicating the

woods of Arcady on the scene setting], and I've decided to work them in

with something about morals and the caprices of memory.  That seems to me

to be a pretty good subject.  You see, everybody has a memory and it's

pretty sure to have caprices.  And, of course, everybody has morals.



It's my opinion that every one I know has morals, though I wouldn't like

to ask.  I know I have.  But I'd rather teach them than practice them any

day.  "Give them to others"--that's my motto.  Then you never have any

use for them when you're left without.  Now, speaking of the caprices of

memory in general, and of mine in particular, it's strange to think of

all the tricks this little mental process plays on us.  Here we're

endowed with a faculty of mind that ought to be more supremely

serviceable to us than them all.  And what happens?  This memory of ours

stores up a perfect record of the most useless facts and anecdotes and

experiences.  And all the things that we ought to know--that we need to

know--that we'd profit by knowing--it casts aside with the careless

indifference of a girl refusing her true lover.  It's terrible to think

of this phenomenon.  I tremble in all my members when I consider all the

really valuable things that I've forgotten in seventy years--when I

meditate upon the caprices of my memory.



There's a bird out in California that is one perfect symbol of the human

memory.  I've forgotten the bird's name (just because it would be

valuable for me to know it--to recall it to your own minds, perhaps).



But this fool of a creature goes around collecting the most ridiculous

things you can imagine and storing them up.  He never selects a thing

that could ever prove of the slightest help to him; but he goes about

gathering iron forks, and spoons, and tin cans, and broken mouse-traps

--all sorts of rubbish that is difficult for him to carry and yet be any

use when he gets it.  Why, that bird will go by a gold watch to bring

back one of those patent cake-pans.



Now, my mind is just like that, and my mind isn't very different from

yours--and so our minds are just like that bird.  We pass by what would

be of inestimable value to us, and pack our memories with the most

trivial odds and ends that never by any chance; under any circumstances

whatsoever, could be of the slightest use to any one.



Now, things that I have remembered are constantly popping into my head.

And I am repeatedly startled by the vividness with which they recur to me

after the lapse of years and their utter uselessness in being remembered

at all.



I was thinking over some on my way up here.  They were the illustrations

I spoke about to the young lady on the way up.  And I've come to the

conclusion, curious though it is, that I can use every one of these

freaks of memory to teach you all a lesson.  I'm convinced that each one

has its moral.  And I think it's my duty to hand the moral on to you.



Now, I recall that when I was a boy I was a good boy--I was a very good

boy.  Why, I was the best boy in my school.  I was the best boy in that

little Mississippi town where I lived.  The population was only about

twenty million.  You may not believe it, but I was the best boy in that

State--and in the United States, for that matter.



But I don't know why I never heard any one say that but myself.  I always

recognized it.  But even those nearest and dearest to me couldn't seem to

see it.  My mother, especially, seemed to think there was something wrong

with that estimate.  And she never got over that prejudice.



Now, when my mother got to be eighty-five years old her memory failed

her.  She forgot little threads that hold life's patches of meaning

together.  She was living out West then, and I went on to visit her.



I hadn't seen my mother in a year or so.  And when I got there she knew

my face; knew I was married; knew I had a family, and that I was living

with them.  But she couldn't, for the life of her, tell my name or who I

was.  So I told her I was her boy.



"But you don't live with me," she said.



"No," said I, "I'm living in Rochester."



"What are you doing there?"



"Going to school."



"Large school?"



"Very large."



"All boys?"



"All boys."



"And how do you stand?" said my mother.



"I'm the best boy in that school," I answered.



"Well," said my mother, with a return of her old fire, "I'd like to know

what the other boys are like."



Now, one point in this story is the fact that my mother's mind went back

to my school days, and remembered my little youthful self-prejudice when

she'd forgotten everything else about me.



The other point is the moral.  There's one there that you will find if

you search for it.



Now, here's something else I remember.  It's about the first time I ever

stole a watermelon.  "Stole" is a strong word.  Stole?  Stole?  No, I

don't mean that.  It was the first time I ever withdrew a watermelon.

It was the first time I ever extracted a watermelon.  That is exactly the

word I want--"extracted." It is definite.  It is precise.  It perfectly

conveys my idea.  Its use in dentistry connotes the delicate shade of

meaning I am looking for.  You know we never extract our own teeth.



And it was not my watermelon that I extracted.  I extracted that

watermelon from a farmer's wagon while he was inside negotiating with an

other customer.  I carried that watermelon to one of the secluded

recesses of the lumber-yard, and there I broke it open.



It was a green watermelon.



Well, do you know when I saw that I began to feel sorry--sorry--sorry.

It seemed to me that I had done wrong.  I reflected deeply.  I reflected

that I was young--I think I was just eleven.  But I knew that though

immature I did not lack moral advancement.  I knew what a boy ought to do

who had extracted a watermelon--like that.



I considered George Washington, and what action he would have taken under

similar circumstances.  Then I knew there was just one thing to make me

feel right inside, and that was--Restitution.



So I said to myself:  "I will do that.  I will take that green watermelon

back where I got it from."  And the minute I had said it I felt that

great moral uplift that comes to you when you've made a noble resolution.



So I gathered up the biggest fragments, and I carried them back to the

farmer's wagon, and I restored the watermelon--what was left of it.  And

I made him give me a good one in place of it, too.



And I told him he ought to be ashamed of himself going around working off

his worthless, old, green watermelons on trusting purchasers who had to

rely on him.  How could they tell from the outside whither the melons

were good or not?  That was his business.  Arid if he didn't reform, I

told him I'd see that he didn't get any more of my trade--nor anybody,

else's I knew, if I could help it.



You know that man was as contrite as a revivalist's last convert.

He said he was all broken up to think I'd gotten a green watermelon.

He promised the he would never carry another green watermelon if he

starved for it.  And he drove off--a better man.



Now, do you see what I did for that man?  He was on a downward path, and

I rescued him.  But all I got out of it was a watermelon.



Yet I'd rather have that memory--just that memory of the good I did for

that depraved farmer--than all the material gain you can think of.  Look

at the lesson he got!  I never got anything like that from it.  But I

ought to be satisfied:  I was only eleven years old, but I secured

everlasting benefit to other people.



The moral in this is perfectly clear, and I think there's one in they

next memory I'm going to tell you about.



To go back to my childhood, there's another little incident that comes to

me from which you can draw even another moral.  It's about one of the

times I went fishing.  You see, in our house there was a sort of family

prejudice against going fishing if you hadn't permission.  But it would

frequently be bad judgment to ask.  So I went fishing secretly, as it

were--way up the Mississippi.  It was an exquisitely happy trip, I

recall, with a very pleasant sensation.



Well, while I was away there was a tragedy in our town.  A stranger,

stopping over on his way East from California; was stabbed to death in an

unseemly brawl.



Now; my father was justice of the peace, and because he was justice of

the peace he was coroner; and since he was coroner he was also constable;

and being constable he vas sheriff; and out of consideration for his

holding the office of sheriff he was likewise county clerk and a dozen

other officials I don't think of just this minute.



I thought he had power of life or death, only he didn't use it over other

boys.  He was sort of an austere man.  Somehow I didn't like being round

him when I'd done anything he, disapproved of.  So that's the reason I

wasn't often around.



Well, when this gentleman got knifed they communicated with the proper

authority; the coroner, and they laid, the corpse out in the coroner's

office--our front sitting-room--in preparation for the inquest the next

morning.



About 9 or 10 o'clock I got back from fishing.  It was a little too late

for me to be received by my folks, so I took my shoes off and slipped

noiselessly up the back way to the sitting-room.  I was very tired, and I

didn't wish to disturb my people.  So I groped my way to the sofa and lay

down.



Now, I didn't know anything of what had happened during my absence.

But I was sort of nervous on my own account-afraid of being caught,

and rather dubious about the morning affair.  And I had been lying there

a few moments when my eyes gradually got used to the darkness, and I

became aware of something on the other side of the room.



It was something foreign to the apartment.  It had an uncanny appearance.

And I sat up looking very hard, and wondering what in heaven this long,

formless, vicious-looking thing might be.



First I thought I'd go and see.  Then I thought, "Never mind that."



Mind you, I had no cowardly sensations whatever, but it didn't seem

exactly prudent to investigate.  But I somehow couldn't keep my eyes off

the thing.  And the more I looked at it the more disagreeably it grew on

me.  But I was resolved to play the man.  So I decided to turn over and

count a hundred, and let the patch of moonlight creep up and show me what

the dickens it was.



I turned over and tried to count, but I couldn't keep my mind on it.

I kept thinking of that grewsome mass.  I was losing count all the time,

and going back and beginning over again.  Oh no; I wasn't frightened--

just annoyed.  But by the time I'd gotten to the century mark I turned

cautiously over and opened my eyes with great fortitude.



The moonlight revealed to me a marble-white human hand.  Well, maybe I

wasn't embarrassed!  But then that changed to a creepy feeling again, and

I thought I'd try the counting again.  I don't know how many hours or

weeks it was that I lay there counting hard.  But the moonlight crept up

that white arm, and it showed me a lead face and a terrible wound over

the heart.



I could scarcely say that I was terror-stricken or anything like that.

But somehow his eyes interested me so that I went right out of the

window.  I didn't need the sash.  But it seemed easier to take it than

leave it behind.



Now, let that teach you a lesson--I don't know just what it is.  But at

seventy years old I find that memory of peculiar value to me.  I have

been unconsciously guided by it all these years.  Things that seemed

pigeon-holed and remote are a perpetual influence.  Yes, you're taught in

so many ways.  And you're so felicitously taught when you don't know it.



Here's something else that taught me a good deal.



When I was seventeen I was very bashful, and a sixteen-year-old girl came

to stay a week with us.  She was a peach, and I was seized with a

happiness not of this world.



One evening my mother suggested that, to entertain her, I take her to the

theatre.  I didn't really like to, because I was seventeen and sensitive

about appearing in the streets with a girl.  I couldn't see my way to

enjoying my delight in public.  But we went.



I didn't feel very happy.  I couldn't seem to keep my mind on the play.

I became conscious, after a while, that that was due less to my lovely

company than my boots.  They were sweet to look upon, as smooth as skin,

but fitted ten time as close.  I got oblivious to the play and the girl

and the other people and everything but my boots until--I hitched one

partly off.  The sensation was sensuously perfect: I couldn't help it.  I

had to get the other off, partly.  Then I was obliged to get them off

altogether, except that I kept my feet in the legs so they couldn't get

away.



From that time I enjoyed the play.  But the first thing I knew the

curtain came down, like that, without my notice, and--I hadn't any boots

on.  What's more, they wouldn't go on.  I tugged strenuously.  And the

people in our row got up and fussed and said things until the peach and I

simply had to move on.



We moved--the girl on one arm and the boots under the other.



We walked home that way, sixteen blocks, with a retinue a mile long:

Every time we passed a lamp-post, death gripped one at the throat.  But

we, got home--and I had on white socks.



If I live to be nine hundred and ninety-nine years old I don't suppose I

could ever forget that walk.  I, remember, it about as keenly as the

chagrin I suffered on another occasion.



At one time in our domestic history we had a colored butler who had a

failing.  He could never remember to ask people who came to the door to

state their business.  So I used to suffer a good many calls

unnecessarily.



One morning when I was especially busy he brought me a card engraved with

a name I did not know.  So I said, "What does he wish to see me for?" and

Sylvester said, "Ah couldn't ask him, sah; he, wuz a genlinun."  "Return

instantly," I thundered, "and inquire his mission.  Ask him what's his

game."  Well, Sylvester returned with the announcement that he had

lightning-rods to sell.  "Indeed," said I, "things are coming to a fine

pass when lightning-rod agents send up engraved cards."  "He has

pictures," added Sylvester.  "Pictures, indeed!  He maybe peddling

etchings.  Has he a Russia leather case?"  But Sylvester was too

frightened to remember.  I said; "I am going down to make it hot for that

upstart!"



I went down the stairs, working up my temper all the way.  When I got to

the parlor I was in a fine frenzy concealed beneath a veneer of frigid

courtesy.  And when I looked in the door, sure enough he had a Russia

leather case in his hand.  But I didn't happen to notice that it was our

Russia leather case.



And if you'd believe me, that man was sitting with a whole gallery of

etchings spread out before him.  But I didn't happen to notice that they

were our etchings, spread out by some member of my family for some

unguessed purpose.



Very curtly I asked the gentleman his business.  With a surprised, timid

manner he faltered that he had met my wife and daughter at Onteora, and

they had asked him to call.  Fine lie, I thought, and I froze him.



He seemed to be kind of non-plussed, and sat there fingering the etchings

in the case until I told him he needn't bother, because we had those.

That pleased him so much that he leaned over, in an embarrassed way, to

pick up another from the floor.  But I stopped him.  I said, "We've got

that, too." He seemed pitifully amazed, but I was congratulating myself

on my great success.



Finally the gentleman asked where Mr. Winton lived; he'd met him in the

mountains, too.  So I said I'd show him gladly.  And I did on the spot.

And when he was gone I felt queer, because there were all his etchings

spread out on the floor.



Well, my wife came in and asked me who had been in.  I showed her the

card, and told her all exultantly.  To my dismay she nearly fainted. She

told me he had been a most kind friend to them in the country, and had

forgotten to tell me that he was expected our way.  And she pushed me out

of the door, and commanded me to get over to the Wintons in a hurry and

get him back.



I came into the drawing-room, where Mrs. Winton was sitting up very stiff

in a chair, beating me at my own game.  Well, I began, to put another

light on things.  Before many seconds Mrs. Winton saw it was time to

change her temperature.  In five minutes I had asked the man to luncheon,

and she to dinner, and so on.



We made that fellow change his trip and stay a week, and we gave him the

time of his life.  Why, I don't believe we let him get sober the whole

time.



I trust that you will carry away some good thought from these lessons I

have given you, and that the memory of them will inspire you to higher

things, and elevate you to plans far above the old--and--and--



And I tell you one thing, young ladies: I've had a better time with you

to-day than with that peach fifty-three years ago.













QUEEN VICTORIA



          ADDRESS TO THE BRITISH SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES CLUB, AT

          DELMONICO'S, MONDAY, MAY 25, IN HONOR OF QUEEN VICTORIA'S

          BIRTHDAY



          Mr. Clemens told the story of his duel with a rival editor: how

          he practised firing at a barn door and failed to hit it, but a

          friend of his took off the head of a little bird at thirty-five

          yards and attributed the shot to Mark twain.  The duel did not

          take place.  Mr. Clemens continued as follows:



It also happened that I was the means of stopping duelling in Nevada, for

a law was passed sending all duellists to jail for two years, and the

Governor, hearing of my marksmanship, said that if he got me I should go

to prison for the full term.  That's why I left Nevada, and I have not

been there since.



You do me a high honor, indeed, in selecting me to speak of my country

in this commemoration of the birthday of that noble lady whose life was

consecrated to the virtues and the humanities and to the promotion of

lofty ideals, and was a model upon which many a humbler life was formed

and made beautiful while she lived, and upon which many such lives will

still be formed in the generations that are to come--a life which finds

its just image in the star which falls out of its place in the sky and

out of existence, but whose light still streams with unfaded lustre

across the abysses of space long after its fires have been extinguished

at their source.



As a woman the Queen was all that the most exacting standards could

require.  As a far-reaching and effective beneficent moral force she had

no peer in her time among either, monarchs or commoners.  As a monarch

she was without reproach in her great office.  We may not venture,

perhaps, to say so sweeping a thing as this in cold blood about any

monarch that preceded her upon either her own throne or upon any other.

It is a colossal eulogy, but it is justified.



In those qualities of the heart which beget affection in all sorts and

conditions of men she was rich, surprisingly rich, and for this she will

still be remembered and revered in the far-off ages when the political

glories of her reign shall have faded from vital history and fallen to a

place in that scrap-heap of unverifiable odds and ends which we call

tradition.  Which is to say, in briefer phrase, that her name will live

always.  And with it her character--a fame rare in the history of

thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, since it will not rest

upon harvested selfish and sordid ambitions, but upon love, earned and

freely vouchsafed.  She mended broken hearts where she could, but she

broke none.



What she did for us in America in our time of storm and stress we shall

not forget, and whenever we call it to mind we shall always remember the

wise and righteous mind that guided her in it and sustained and supported

her--Prince Albert's.  We need not talk any idle talk here to-night about

either possible or impossible war between the two countries; there will

be no war while we remain sane and the son of Victoria and Albert sits

upon the throne.  In conclusion, I believe I may justly claim to utter

the voice of my country in saying that we hold him in deep honor, and

also in cordially wishing him a long life and a happy reign.













JOAN OF ARC



          ADDRESS AT THE DINNER OF THE SOCIETY OF ILLUSTRATORS, GIVEN AT

          THE ALDINE ASSOCIATION CLUB, DECEMBER 22, 1905



          Just before Mr. Clemens made his speech, a young woman attired

          as Joan of Arc, with a page bearing her flag of battle,

          courtesied reverently and tendered Mr. Clemens a laurel wreath

          on a satin pillow.  He tried to speak, but his voice failed

          from excess of emotion. "I thank you!" he finally exclaimed,

          and, pulling him self together, he began his speech.



Now there is an illustration [pointing to the retreating Joan of Arc].

That is exactly what I wanted--precisely what I wanted--when I was

describing to myself Joan of Arc, after studying her history and her

character for twelve years diligently.



That was the product--not the conventional Joan of Arc.  Wherever you

find the conventional Joan of Arc in history she is an offence to anybody

who knows the story of that wonderful girl.



Why, she was--she was almost supreme in several details.  She had a

marvellous intellect; she had a great heart, had a noble spirit, was

absolutely pure in her character, her feeling, her language, her words,

her everything--she was only eighteen years old.



Now put that heart into such a breast--eighteen years old--and give it

that masterly intellect which showed in the face, and furnish it with

that almost god-like spirit, and what are you going to have?

The conventional Joan of Arc?  Not by any means.  That is impossible.

I cannot comprehend any such thing as that.



You must have a creature like that young and fair and beautiful girl we

just saw.  And her spirit must look out of the eyes.  The figure should

be--the figure should be in harmony with all that, but, oh, what we get

in the conventional picture, and it is always the conventional picture!



I hope you will allow me to say that your guild, when you take the

conventional, you have got it at second-hand.  Certainly, if you had

studied and studied, then you might have something else as a result, but

when you have the common convention you stick to that.



You cannot prevail upon the artist to do it; he always gives you a Joan

of Arc--that lovely creature that started a great career at thirteen, but

whose greatness arrived when she was eighteen; and merely, because she

was a girl he can not see the divinity in her, and so he paints a

peasant, a coarse and lubberly figure--the figure of a cotton-bale, and

he clothes that in the coarsest raiment of the peasant region just like a

fish woman, her hair cropped short like a Russian peasant, and that face

of hers, which should be beautiful and which should radiate all the

glories which are in the spirit and in her heart that expression in that

face is always just the fixed expression of a ham.



But now Mr. Beard has intimated a moment ago, and so has Sir Purdon-

Clarke also, that the artist, the, illustrator, does not often get the

idea of the man whose book he is illustrating.  Here is a very remarkable

instance of the other thing in Mr. Beard, who illustrated a book of mine.

You may never have heard of it.  I will tell you about it now--A Yankee

in King Arthur's Court.



Now, Beard got everything that I put into that book and a little more

besides.  Those pictures of Beard's in that book--oh, from the first page

to the last is one vast sardonic laugh at the trivialities, the

servilities of our poor human race, and also at the professions and the

insolence of priest-craft and king-craft--those creatures that make

slaves of themselves and have not the manliness to shake it off.  Beard

put it all in that book.  I meant it to be there.  I put a lot of it

there and Beard put the rest.



What publisher of mine in Hartford had an eye for the pennies, and he

saved them.  He did not waste any on the illustrations.  He had a very

good artist--Williams--who had never taken a lesson in drawing.

Everything he did was original.  The publisher hired the cheapest wood-

engraver he could find, and in my early books you can see a trace of

that.  You can see that if Williams had had a chance he would have made

some very good pictures.  He had a good heart and good intentions.



I had a character in the first book he illustrated--The Innocents Abroad.

That was a boy seventeen or eighteen years old--Jack Van Nostrand--a New

York boy, who, to my mind, was a very remarkable creature.  He and I

tried to get Williams to understand that boy, and make a picture of Jack

that would be worthy of Jack.



Jack was a most singular combination.  He was born and reared in New York

here.  He was as delicate in his feelings, as clean and pure and refined

in his feelings as any lovely girl that ever was, but whenever he

expressed a feeling he did it in Bowery slang, and it was a most curious

combination--that delicacy of his and that apparent coarseness.  There

was no coarseness inside of Jack at all, and Jack, in the course of

seventeen or eighteen years, had acquired a capital of ignorance that was

marvellous--ignorance of various things, not of all things.  For

instance, he did not know anything about the Bible.  He had never been in

Sunday-school.  Jack got more out of the Holy Land than anybody else,

because the others knew what they were expecting, but it was a land of

surprises to him.



I said in the book that we found him watching a turtle on a log, stoning

that turtle, and he was stoning that turtle because he had read that "The

song of the turtle was heard in the land," and this turtle wouldn't sing.

It sounded absurd, but it was charged on Jack as a fact, and as he went

along through that country he had a proper foil in an old rebel colonel,

who was superintendent and head engineer in a large Sunday-school in

Wheeling, West Virginia.  That man was full of enthusiasm wherever he

went, and would stand and deliver himself of speeches, and Jack would

listen to those speeches of the colonel and wonder.



Jack had made a trip as a child almost across this continent in the first

overland stage-coach.  That man's name who ran that line of stages--well,

I declare that name is gone.  Well, names will go.



Halliday--ah, that's the name--Ben Halliday, your uncle [turning to Mr.

Carnegie].  That was the fellow--Ben Halliday--and Jack was full of

admiration at the prodigious speed that that line of stages made--and it

was good speed--one hundred and twenty-five miles a day, going day and

night, and it was the event of Jack's life, and there at the Fords of the

Jordan the colonel was inspired to a speech (he was always making a

speech), so he called us up to him.  He called up five sinners and three

saints.  It has been only lately that Mr. Carnegie beatified me.  And he

said: "Here are the Fords of the Jordan--a monumental place.  At this

very point, when Moses brought the children of Israel through--he brought

the children of Israel from Egypt through the desert you see them--he

guarded them through that desert patiently, patiently during forty years,

and brought them to this spot safe and sound.  There you see--there is

the scene of what Moses did."



And Jack said: "Moses who?"



"Oh," he says, "Jack, you ought not to ask that!  Moses, the great law-

giver!  Moses, the great patriot!  Moses, the great warrior!  Moses, the

great guide, who, as I tell you, brought these people through these three

hundred miles of sand in forty years, and landed there safe and sound."



Jack said: "There's nothin' in that three hundred miles in forty years.

Ben Halliday would have snaked 'em through in thirty--six hours."



Well, I was speaking of Jack's innocence, and it was beautiful.  Jack was

not ignorant on all subjects.  That boy was a deep student in the history

of Anglo-Saxon liberty, and he was a patriot all the way through to the

marrow.  There was a subject that interested him all the time.  Other

subjects were of no concern to Jack, but that quaint, inscrutable

innocence of his I could not get Williams to put into the picture.



Yes, Williams wanted to do it.  He said: "I will make him as innocent as

a virgin."  He thought a moment, and then said, "I will make him as

innocent as an unborn virgin;" which covered the ground.



I was reminded of Jack because I came across a letter to-day which is

over thirty years old that Jack wrote.  Jack was doomed to consumption.

He was very long and slim, poor creature; and in a year or two after he

got back from that excursion, to the Holy Land he went on a ride on

horseback through Colorado, and he did not last but a year or two.



He wrote this letter, not to me, but to a friend of mine; and he said:

"I have ridden horseback"--this was three years after--"I hate ridden

horseback four hundred miles through a desert country where you never see

anything but cattle now and then, and now and then a cattle station--ten

miles apart, twenty miles apart.  Now you tell Clemens that in all that

stretch of four hundred miles I have seen only two books--the Bible and

'Innocents Abroad'.  Tell Clemens the Bible was in a very good

condition."



I say that he had studied, and he had, the real Saxon liberty, the

acquirement of our liberty, and Jack used to repeat some verses--I don't

know where they came from, but I thought of them to-day when I saw that

letter--that that boy could have been talking of himself in those quoted

lines from that unknown poet:



               "For he had sat at Sidney's feet

               And walked with him in plain apart,

               And through the centuries heard the beat

               Of Freedom's march through Cromwell's heart."



And he was that kind of a boy.  He should have lived, and yet he should

not have lived, because he died at that early age--he couldn't have been

more than twenty--he had seen all there was to see in the world that was

worth the trouble of living in it; he had seen all of this world that is

valuable; he had seen all of this world that was illusion, and illusion,

is the only valuable thing in it.  He had arrived at that point where

presently the illusions would cease and he would have entered upon the

realities of life, and God help the man that has arrived at that point.













ACCIDENT INSURANCE--ETC.



          DELIVERED IN HARTFORD, AT A DINNER TO CORNELIUS WALFORD,

          OF LONDON



GENTLEMAN,--I am glad, indeed, to assist in welcoming the distinguished

guest of this occasion to a city whose fame as an insurance centre has

extended to all lands, and given us the name of being a quadruple band of

brothers working sweetly hand in hand--the Colt's arms company making the

destruction of our race easy and convenient, our life-insurance citizens

paying for the victims when they pass away, Mr. Batterson perpetuating

their memory with his stately monuments, and our fire-insurance comrades

taking care of their hereafter.  I am glad to assist in welcoming our

guest--first, because he is an Englishman, and I owe a heavy debt of

hospitality to certain of his fellow-countrymen; and secondly, because he

is in sympathy with insurance, and has been the means of making many

other men cast their sympathies in the same direction.



Certainly there is no nobler field for human effort than the insurance

line of business--especially accident insurance.  Ever since I have been

a director in an accident-insurance company I have felt that I am a

better man.  Life has seemed more precious.  Accidents have assumed a

kindlier aspect.  Distressing special providences have lost half their

horror.  I look upon a cripple now with affectionate interest--as an

advertisement.  I do not seem, to care for poetry any more.  I do not

care for politics--even agriculture does not excite me.  But to me now

there is a charm about a railway collision that is unspeakable.



There is nothing more beneficent than accident insurance.  I have seen an

entire family lifted out of poverty and into affluence by the simple boon

of a broken leg.  I have had people come to me on crutches, with tears in

their eyes, to bless this beneficent institution.  In all my experience

of life, I have seen nothing so seraphic as the look that comes into a

freshly mutilated man's face when he feels in his vest pocket with his

remaining hand and finds his accident ticket all right.  And I have seen

nothing so sad as the look that came into another splintered customer's

face when he found he couldn't collect on a wooden leg.



I will remark here, by way of advertisement, that that noble charity

which we have named the HARTFORD ACCIDENT INSURANCE COMPANY is an

institution, which is peculiarly to be depended upon.  A man is bound to

prosper who gives it his custom.  No man pan take out a policy in it and

not get crippled before the year is out.  Now there was one indigent man

who had been disappointed so often with other companies that he had grown

disheartened, his appetite left him, he ceased to smile--said life was

but a weariness.  Three weeks ago I got him to insure with us, and now he

is the brightest, happiest spirit in this land--has a good steady income

and a stylish suit of new bandages every day, and travels around on a

shutter.



I will say in conclusion, that my share of the welcome to our guest is

none the less hearty because I talk so much nonsense, and I know that I

curl say the same far the rest of the speakers.













OSTEOPATHY



          On February 27, 1901, Mr. Clemens appeared before the Assembly

          Committee in Albany, New York, in favor of the Seymour bill

          legalizing the practice of osteopathy.



MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN,--Dr. Van Fleet is the gentleman who gave me

the character.  I have heard my character discussed a thousand times

before you were born, sir, and shown the iniquities in it, and you did

not get more than half of them.



I was touched and distressed when they brought that part of a child in

here, and proved that you cannot take a child to pieces in that way.

What remarkable names those diseases have!  It makes me envious of the

man that has them all.  I have had many diseases, and am thankful for all

I have had.



One of the gentlemen spoke of the knowledge of something else found in

Sweden, a treatment which I took.  It is, I suppose, a kindred thing.

There is apparently no great difference between them.  I was a year and a

half in London and Sweden, in the hands of that grand old man, Mr.

Kildren.



I cannot call him a doctor, for he has not the authority to give a

certificate if a patient should die, but fortunately they don't.



The State stands as a mighty Gibraltar clothed with power.  It stands

between me and my body, and tells me what kind of a doctor I must employ.

When my soul is sick unlimited spiritual liberty is given me by the

State.  Now then, it doesn't seem logical that the State shall depart

from this great policy, the health of the soul, and change about and take

the other position in the matter of smaller consequence--the health of

the body.



The Bell bill limitations would drive the osteopaths out of the State.

Oh, dear me! when you drive somebody out of the State you create the same

condition as prevailed in the Garden of Eden.



You want the thing that you can't have.  I didn't care much about the

osteopaths, but as soon as I found they were going to drive them out I

got in a state of uneasiness, and I can't sleep nights now.



I know how Adam felt in the Garden of Eden about the prohibited apple.

Adam didn't want the apple till he found out he couldn't have it,

just as he would have wanted osteopathy if he couldn't have it.



Whose property is my body?  Probably mine.  I so regard it.  If I

experiment with it, who must be answerable?  I, not the State.  If I

choose injudiciously, does the State die?  Oh no.



I was the subject of my mother's experiment.  She was wise.  She made

experiments cautiously.  She didn't pick out just any child in the flock.

No, she chose judiciously.  She chose one she could spare, and she

couldn't spare the others.  I was the choice child of the flock; so I had

to take all of the experiments.



In 1844 Kneipp filled the world with the wonder of the water cure.

Mother wanted to try it, but on sober second thought she put me through.

A bucket of ice-water was poured over to see the effect.  Then I was

rubbed down with flannels, sheet was dipped in the water, and I was put

to bed.  I perspired so much that mother put a life-preserver to bed with

me.



But this had nothing but a spiritual effect on me, and I didn't care for

that.  When they took off the sheet it was yellow from the output of my

conscience, the exudation of sin.  It purified me spiritually, and it

remains until this day.



I have experimented with osteopathy and allopathy.  I took a chance at

the latter for old times' sake, for, three tines, when a boy, mother's

new methods got me so near death's door she had to call in the family

physician to pull me out.



The physicians think they are moved by regard for the best interests of

the public.  Isn't there a little touch of self-interest back of it all?

It seems to me there is, and I don't claim to have all the virtues--only

nine or ten of them.



I was born in the "Banner State," and by "Banner State" I mean Missouri.

Osteopathy was born in the same State, and both of us are getting along

reasonably well.  At a time during my younger days my attention was

attracted to a picture of a house which bore the inscription, "Christ

Disputing with the Doctors."



I could attach no other meaning to it than that Christ was actually

quarreling with the doctors.  So I asked an old slave, who was a sort of

a herb doctor in a small way--unlicensed, of course--what the meaning of

the picture was.  "What had has done?" I asked.  And the colored man

replied "Humph, he ain't got no license."













WATER-SUPPLY



          Mr. Clemens visited Albany on February 21 and 28, 1901. The

          privileges of the floor were granted and he was asked to make a

          short address to the Senate.



MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN,--I do not know how to thank you sufficiently

for this high honor which you are conferring upon me.  I have for the

second time now enjoyed this kind of prodigal hospitality--in the other

House yesterday, to-day in this one.  I am a modest man, and diffident

about appearing before legislative bodies, and yet utterly an entirely

appreciative of a courtesy like this when it is extended to me, and I

thank you very much for it.



If I had the privilege, which unfortunately I have not got, of suggesting

things to the legislators in my individual capacity, I would so enjoy the

opportunity that I would not charge anything for it at all.  I would do

that without a salary.  I would give them the benefit of my wisdom and

experience in legislative bodies, and if I could have had the privilege

for a few minutes of giving advice to the other House I should have liked

to, but of course I could not undertake it, as they did not ask me to do

it--but if they had only asked me!



Now that the House is considering a measure which is to furnish a water-

supply to the city of New York, why, permit me to say I live in New York

myself.  I know all about its ways, its desires, and its residents, and--

if I had the privilege--I should have urged them not to weary themselves

over a measure like that to furnish water to the city of New York, for we

never drink it.



But I will not venture to advise this body, as I only venture to advise

bodies who are, not present.













MISTAKEN IDENTITY



ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL "LADIES' DAY," PAPYRUS CLUB, BOSTON



LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,--I am perfectly astonished--a-s-t-o-n-i-s-h-e-d--

ladies and gentlemen--astonished at the way history repeats itself.

I find myself situated at this moment exactly and precisely as I was once

before, years ago, to a jot, to a tittle--to a very hair.  There isn't a

shade of difference.  It is the most astonishing coincidence that ever--

but wait.  I will tell you the former instance, and then you will see it

for yourself.  Years ago I arrived one day at Salamanca, New York,

eastward bound; must change cars there and take the sleeper train.  There

were crowds of people there, and they were swarming into the long sleeper

train and packing it full, and it was a perfect purgatory of dust and

confusion and gritting of teeth and soft, sweet, and low profanity.

I asked the young man in the ticket-office if I could have a sleeping-

section, and he answered "No," with a snarl that shrivelled me up like

burned leather.  I went off, smarting under this insult to my dignity,

and asked another local official, supplicatingly, if I couldn't have some

poor little corner somewhere in a sleeping-car; but he cut me short with

a venomous "No, you can't; every corner is full.  Now, don't bother me

any more"; and he turned his back and walked off.  My dignity was in a

state now which cannot be described.  I was so ruffled that--well, I said

to my companion, "If these people knew who I am they--"But my companion

cut me short there--"Don't talk such folly," he said; "if they did know

who you are, do you suppose it would help your high-mightiness to a

vacancy in a train which has no vacancies in it?"



This did not improve my condition any to speak of, but just then I

observed that the colored porter of a sleeping-car had his eye on me.

I saw his dark countenance light up.  He whispered to the uniformed

conductor, punctuating with nods and jerks toward me, and straightway

this conductor came forward, oozing politeness from every pore.



"Can I be of any service to you ?" he asked.  "Will you have a place in

the sleeper?"



"Yes," I said, "and much oblige me, too.  Give me anything--anything will

answer."



"We have nothing left but the big family state-room," he continued, "with

two berths and a couple of arm-chairs in it, but it is entirely at your

disposal.  Here, Tom, take these satchels aboard!"



Then he touched his hat and we and the colored Tom moved along.  I was

bursting to drop just one little remark to my companion, but I held in

and waited.  Tom made us comfortable in that sumptuous great apartment,

and then said, with many bows and a perfect affluence of smiles:



"Now, is dey anything you want, sah?  Case you kin have jes' anything you

wants.  It don't make no difference what it is."



"Can I have some hot water and a tumbler at nine to-night-blazing hot?"

I asked.  "You know about the right temperature for a hot Scotch punch?"



"Yes, sah, dat you kin; you kin pen on it; I'll get it myself."



"Good!  Now, that lamp is hung too high.  Can I have a big coach candle

fixed up just at the head of my bed, so that I can read comfortably?"



"Yes, sah, you kin; I'll fix her up myself, an' I'll fix her so she'll

burn all night.  Yes, sah; an' you can jes' call for anything you want,

and dish yer whole railroad'll be turned wrong end up an' inside out for

to get it for you.  Dat's so."  And he disappeared.



Well, I tilted my head back, hooked my thumbs in my armholes, smiled a

smile on my companion, and said, gently:



"Well, what do you say now?"



My companion was not in the humor to respond, and didn't.  The next

moment that smiling black face was thrust in at the crack of the door,

and this speech followed:



"Laws bless you, sah, I knowed you in a minute.  I told de conductah so.

Laws!  I knowed you de minute I sot eyes on you."



"Is that so, my boy?" (Handing him a quadruple fee.) "Who am I?"



"Jenuel McClellan," and he disappeared again.



My companion said, vinegarishly, "Well, well!  what do you say now?"

Right there comes in the marvellous coincidence I mentioned a while ago

--viz., I was speechless, and that is my condition now.  Perceive it?













CATS AND CANDY



          The following address was delivered at a social meeting of

          literary men in New York in 1874:



When I was fourteen I was living with my parents, who were very poor--and

correspondently honest.  We had a youth living with us by the name of Jim

Wolfe.  He was an excellent fellow, seventeen years old, and very

diffident.  He and I slept together--virtuously; and one bitter winter's

night a cousin Mary--she's married now and gone--gave what they call a

candy-pulling in those days in the West, and they took the saucers of hot

candy outside of the house into the snow, under a sort of old bower that

came from the eaves--it was a sort of an ell then, all covered with

vines--to cool this hot candy in the snow, and they were all sitting

there.  In the mean time we were gone to bed.  We were not invited to

attend this party; we were too young.



The young ladies and gentlemen were assembled there, and Jim and I were

in bed.  There was about four inches of snow on the roof of this ell, and

our windows looked out on it; and it was frozen hard.  A couple of tom-

cats--it is possible one might have been of the opposite sex--were

assembled on the chimney in the middle of this ell, and they were

growling at a fearful rate, and switching their tails about and going on,

and we couldn't sleep at all.



Finally Jim said, "For two cents I'd go out and snake them cats off that

chimney."  So I said, "Of course you would."  He said, "Well, I would;

I have a mighty good notion to do it."  Says I, "Of course you have;

certainly you have, you have a great notion to do it."  I hoped he might

try it, but I was afraid he wouldn't.



Finally I did get his ambition up, and he raised the window and climbed

out on the icy roof, with nothing on but his socks and a very short

shirt.  He went climbing along on all fours on the roof toward the

chimney where the cats were.  In the mean time these young ladies and

gentlemen were enjoying themselves down under the eaves, and when Jim got

almost to that chimney he made a pass at the cats, and his heels flew up

and he shot down and crashed through those vines, and lit in the midst of

the ladies and gentlemen, and sat down in those hot saucers of candy.



There was a stampede, of course, and he came up-stairs dropping pieces of

chinaware and candy all the way up, and when he got up there--now anybody

in the world would have gone into profanity or something calculated to

relieve the mind, but he didn't; he scraped the candy off his legs,

nursed his blisters a little, and said, "I could have ketched them cats

if I had had on a good ready."



[Does any reader know what a "ready" was in 1840?  D.W.]













OBITUARY POETRY



          ADDRESS AT THE ACTORS' FUND FAIR, PHILADELPHIA, in 1895



LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,--The--er this--er--welcome occasion gives me an--

er--opportunity to make an--er--explanation that I have long desired to

deliver myself of.  I rise to the highest honors before a Philadelphia

audience.  In the course of my checkered career I have, on divers

occasions, been charged--er--maliciously with a more or less serious

offence.  It is in reply to one of the more--er--important of these that

I wish to speak.  More than once I have been accused of writing obituary

poetry in the Philadelphia Ledger.



I wish right here to deny that dreadful assertion.  I will admit that

once, when a compositor in the Ledger establishment, I did set up some of

that poetry, but for a worse offence than that no indictment can be found

against me.  I did not write that poetry--at least, not all of it.













CIGARS AND TOBACCO



My friends for some years now have remarked that I am an inveterate

consumer of tobacco.  That is true, but my habits with regard to tobacco

have changed.  I have no doubt that you will say, when I have explained

to you what my present purpose is, that my taste has deteriorated, but I

do not so regard it.



Whenever I held a smoking-party at my house, I found that my guests had

always just taken the pledge.



Let me tell you briefly the history of my personal relation to tobacco.

It began, I think, when I was a lad, and took the form of a quid, which I

became expert in tucking under my tongue.  Afterward I learned the

delights of the pipe, and I suppose there was no other youngster of my

age who could more deftly cut plug tobacco so as to make it available for

pipe-smoking.



Well, time ran on, and there came a time when I was able to gratify one

of my youthful ambitions--I could buy the choicest Havana cigars without

seriously interfering with my income.  I smoked a good many, changing off

from the Havana cigars to the pipe in the course of a day's smoking.



At last it occurred to n1e that something was lacking in the Havana

cigar.  It did not quite fulfil my youthful anticipations.

I experimented.  I bought what was called a seed-leaf cigar with a

Connecticut wrapper.  After a while I became satiated of these, and I

searched for something else, The Pittsburg stogy was recommended to me.

It certainly had the merit of cheapness, if that be a merit in tobacco,

and I experimented with the stogy.



Then, once more, I changed off, so that I might acquire the subtler

flavor of the Wheeling toby.  Now that palled, and I looked around New

York in the hope of finding cigars which would seem to most people vile,

but which, I am sure, would be ambrosial to me.  I couldn't find any.

They put into my hands some of those little things that cost ten cents a

box, but they are a delusion.



I said to a friend, "I want to know if you can direct me to an honest

tobacco merchant who will tell me what is the worst cigar in the New York

market, excepting those made for Chinese consumption--I want real

tobacco.  If you will do this and I find the man is as good as his word,

I will guarantee him a regular market for a fair amount of his cigars."



We found a tobacco dealer who would tell the truth--who, if a cigar was

bad, would boldly say so.  He produced what he called the very worst

cigars he had ever had in his shop.  He let me experiment with one then

and there.  The test was satisfactory.



This was, after all, the real thing.  I negotiated for a box of them and

took them away with me, so that I might be sure of having them handy when

I want them.



I discovered that the "worst cigars," so called, are the best for me,

after all.













BILLIARDS



          Mr. Clemens attended a billiard tourney on the evening of April

          24, 1906, and was called on to tell a story.



The game of billiards has destroyed my naturally sweet disposition.

Once, when I was an underpaid reporter in Virginia City, whenever I

wished to play billiards I went out to look for an easy mark.  One day a

stranger came to town and opened a billiard parlor.  I looked him over

casually.  When he proposed a game, I answered, "All right."



"Just knock the balls around a little so that I can get your gait," he

said; and when I had done so, he remarked: "I will be perfectly fair with

you.  I'll play you left-handed."  I felt hurt, for he was cross-eyed,

freckled, and had red hair, and I determined to teach him a lesson.  He

won first shot, ran out, took my half-dollar, and all I got was the

opportunity to chalk my cue.



"If you can play like that with your left hand," I said, "I'd like to see

you play with your right."



"I can't," he said.  "I'm left-handed."













THE UNION RIGHT OR WRONG



          REMINISCENCES OF NEVADA



I can assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that Nevada had lively newspapers

in those days.



My great competitor among the reporters was Boggs, of the Union, an

excellent reporter.



Once in three or four months he would get a little intoxicated; but, as a

general thing, he was a wary and cautious drinker, although always ready

to damp himself a little with the enemy.



He had the advantage of me in one thing: he could get the monthly public-

school report and I could not, because the principal hated my sheet--the

'Enterprise'.



One snowy night, when the report was due, I started out, sadly wondering

how I was to get it.



Presently, a few steps up the almost deserted street, I stumbled on

Boggs, and asked him where he was going.



"After the school report."



"I'll go along with you."



"No, Sir.  I'll excuse you."



"Have it your own way."



A saloon-keeper's boy passed by with a steaming pitcher of hot punch, and

Boggs snuffed the fragrance gratefully.



He gazed fondly after the boy, and saw him start up the Enterprise

stairs.



I said:



"I wish you could help me get that school business, but since you can't,

I must run up to the Union office and see if I can get a proof of it

after it's set up, though I don't begin to suppose I can.  Good night."



"Hold on a minute.  I don't mind getting the report and sitting around

with the boys a little while you copy it, if you're willing to drop down

to the principal's with me."



"Now you talk like a human being.  Come along."



We ploughed a couple of blocks through the snow, got the report--a short

document--and soon copied it in our office.



Meantime, Boggs helped himself to the punch.



I gave the manuscript back to him, and we started back to get an inquest.



At four o'clock in the morning, when we had gone to press and were having

a relaxing concert as usual (for some of the printers were good singers

and others good performers on the guitar and on that atrocity the

accordion), the proprietor of the Union strode in and asked if anybody

had heard anything of Boggs or the school report.



We stated the case, and all turned out to help hunt for the delinquent.



We found him standing on a table in a saloon, with an old tin lantern in

one hand and the school report in the other, haranguing a gang of

"corned" miners on, the iniquity of squandering the public money on

education "when hundreds and hundreds of honest, hard-working men were

literally starving for whiskey."



He had been assisting in a regal spree with those parties for hours.



We dragged him away, and put him into bed.



Of course there was no school report in the Union, and Boggs held me

accountable, though I was innocent of any intention or desire to compass

its absence from that paper, and was as sorry as any one that the

misfortune had occurred.  But we were perfectly friendly.



The day the next school report was due the proprietor of the Tennessee

Mine furnished us a buggy, and asked us to go down and write something

about the property--a very common request, and one always gladly acceded

to when people furnished buggies, for we were as fond of pleasure

excursions as other people.



The "mine" was a hole in the ground ninety feet deep, and no way of

getting down into it but by holding on to a rope and being lowered with a

windlass.



The workmen had just gone off somewhere to dinner.



I was not strong enough to lower Boggs's bulk, so I took an unlighted

candle in my teeth, made a loop for my foot in the end of the rope,

implored Boggs not to go to sleep or let the windlass get the start of

him, and then swung out over the shaft.



I reached the bottom muddy and bruised about the elbows, but safe.



I lit the candle, made an examination of the rock, selected some

specimens, and shouted to Boggs to hoist away.



No answer.



Presently a head appeared in the circle of daylight away aloft, and a

voice came down:



"Are you all set?"



"All set-hoist away!"



"Are you comfortable?"



"Perfectly."



"Could you wait a little?"



"Oh, certainly-no particular hurry."



"Well-good-bye."



"Why, where are you going?"



"After the school report!"



And he did.



I stayed down there an hour, and surprised the workmen when they hauled

up and found a man on the rope instead of a bucket of rock.



I walked home, too--five miles-up-hill.



We had no school report next morning--but the Union had.













AN IDEAL FRENCH ADDRESS



     EXTRACT FROM "PARIS NOTES," IN "TOM SAWYER ABROAD," ETC.



I am told that a French sermon is like a French speech--it never names an

historical event, but only the date of it; if you are not up in dates,

you get left.  A French speech is something like this:



"Comrades, citizens, brothers, noble parts of the only sublime and

perfect nation, let us not forget that the 21st January cast off our

chains; that the 10th August relieved us of the shameful presence of

foreign spies; that the 5th September was its own justification before

Heaven and humanity; that the 18th Brumaire contained the seeds of its

own punishment; that the 14th July was the mighty voice of liberty

proclaiming the resurrection, the new day, and inviting the oppressed

peoples of the earth to look upon the divine face of France and live;

and let us here record our everlasting curse against the man of the

2d December, and declare in thunder tones, the native tones of France,

that but for him there had been no 17th Mardi in history, no 12th

October, nor 9th January, no 22d April, no 16th November, no 30th

September, no 2d July, no 14th February, no 29th June, no 15th August, no

31st May--that but for him, France, the pure, the grand, the peerless,

had had a serene and vacant almanac to-day."



I have heard of one French sermon which closed in this odd yet eloquent

way:



"My hearers, we have sad cause to remember the man of the 13th January.

The results of the vast crime of the 13th January have been in just

proportion to the magnitude of the act itself.  But for it there had been

no 30th November--sorrowful spectacle!  The grisly deed of the 16th June

had not been done but for it, nor had the man of the 16th June known

existence; to it alone the 3d September was due, also the fatal 12th

October.  Shall we, then, be grateful for the 13th January, with its

freight of death for you and me and all that breathe?  Yes, my friends,

for it gave us also that which had never come but for it, and it alone--

the blessed 25th December."



It may be well enough to explain.  The man of the 13th January is Adam;

the crime of that date was the eating of the apple; the sorrowful

spectacle of the 30th November was the expulsion from Eden; the grisly

deed of the 16th June was the murder of Abel; the act of the 3d September

was the beginning of the journey to the land of Nod; the 12th day of

October, the last mountaintops disappeared under the flood.  When you go

to church in France, you want to take your almanac with you--annotated.













STATISTICS



          EXTRACT FROM "THE HISTORY OF THE SAVAGE CLUB"



          During that period of gloom when domestic bereavement had

          forced Mr. Clemens and his dear ones to secure the privacy they

          craved until their wounds should heal, his address was known to

          only a very few of his closest friends.  One old friend in New

          York, after vain efforts to get his address, wrote him a letter

          addressed as follows



                    MARK TWAIN,

                         God Knows Where,

                                   Try London.



          The letter found him, and Mr. Clemens replied to the letter

          expressing himself surprised and complimented that the person

          who was credited with knowing his whereabouts should take so

          much interest in him, adding: "Had the letter been addressed to

          the care of the 'other party,' I would naturally have expected

          to receive it without delay."



          His correspondent tried again, and addressed the second letter:



                    MARK TWAIN,

                         The Devil Knows Where,

                              Try London.



          This found him also no less promptly.



          On June 9, 1899, he consented to visit the Savage Club, London,

          on condition that there was to be no publicity and no speech

          was to be expected from him.  The toastmaster, in proposing the

          health of their guest, said that as a Scotchman, and therefore

          as a born expert, he thought Mark Twain had little or no claim

          to the title of humorist.  Mr. Clemens had tried to be funny

          but had failed, and his true role in life was statistics; that

          he was a master of statistics, and loved them for their own

          sake, and it would be the easiest task he ever undertook if he

          would try to count all the real jokes he had ever made.  While

          the toastmaster was speaking, the members saw Mr. Clemens's

          eyes begin to sparkle and his cheeks to flush.  He jumped up,

          and made a characteristic speech.



Perhaps I am not a humorist, but I am a first-class fool--a simpleton;

for up to this moment I have believed Chairman MacAlister to be a decent

person whom I could allow to mix up with my friends and relatives.  The

exhibition he has just made of himself reveals him to be a scoundrel and

a knave of the deepest dye.  I have been cruelly deceived, and it serves

me right for trusting a Scotchman.  Yes, I do understand figures, and I

can count.  I have counted the words in MacAlister's drivel (I certainly

cannot call it a speech), and there were exactly three thousand four

hundred and thirty-nine.  I also carefully counted the lies--there were

exactly three thousand four hundred and thirty-nine.  Therefore, I leave

MacAlister to his fate.



I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors,

because they have a sad habit of dying off.  Chaucer is dead, Spencer is

dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I am not feeling very well

myself.













GALVESTON ORPHAN BAZAAR



          ADDRESS AT A FAIR HELD AT THE WALDORF-ASTORIA, NEW YORK, IN

          OCTOBER, 1900, IN AID OF THE ORPHANS AT GALVESTON



I expected that the Governor of Texas would occupy this place first and

would speak to you, and in the course of his remarks would drop a text

for me to talk from; but with the proverbial obstinacy that is proverbial

with governors, they go back on their duties, and he has not come here,

and has not furnished me with a text, and I am here without a text.  I

have no text except what you furnish me with your handsome faces, and--

but I won't continue that, for I could go on forever about attractive

faces, beautiful dresses, and other things.  But, after all, compliments

should be in order in a place like this.



I have been in New York two or three days, and have been in a condition

of strict diligence night and day, the object of this diligence being to

regulate the moral and political situation on this planet--put it on a

sound basis--and when you are regulating the conditions of a planet it

requires a great deal of talk in a great many kinds of ways, and when you

have talked a lot the emptier you get, and get also in a position of

corking.  When I am situated like that, with nothing to say, I feel as

though I were a sort of fraud; I seem to be playing a part, and please

consider I am playing a part for want of something better, and this, is

not unfamiliar to me; I have often done this before.



When I was here about eight years ago I was coming up in a car of the

elevated road.  Very few people were in that car, and on one end of it

there was no one, except on the opposite seat, where sat a man about

fifty years old, with a most winning face and an elegant eye--a beautiful

eye; and I took him from his dress to be a master mechanic, a man who had

a vocation.  He had with him a very fine little child of about four or

five years.  I was watching the affection which existed between those

two.  I judged he was the grandfather, perhaps.  It was really a pretty

child, and I was admiring her, and as soon as he saw I was admiring her

he began to notice me.



I could see his admiration of me in his eye, and I did what everybody

else would do--admired the child four times as much, knowing I would get

four times as much of his admiration.  Things went on very pleasantly.

I was making my way into his heart.



By-and-by, when he almost reached the station where he was to get off,

he got up, crossed over, and he said: "Now I am going to say something to

you which I hope you will regard as a compliment."  And then he went on

to say: "I have never seen Mark Twain, but I have seen a portrait of him,

and any friend of mine will tell you that when I have once seen a

portrait of a man I place it in my eye and store it away in my memory,

and I can tell you now that you look enough like Mark Twain to be his

brother.  Now," he said, "I hope you take this as a compliment.  Yes, you

are a very good imitation; but when I come to look closer, you are

probably not that man."



I said: "I will be frank with you.  In my desire to look like that

excellent character I have dressed for the character; I have been playing

a part."



He said: "That is all right, that is all right; you look very well on the

outside, but when it comes to the inside you are not in it with the

original"



So when I come to a place like this with nothing valuable to say I always

play a part.  But I will say before I sit down that when it comes to

saying anything here I will express myself in this way: I am heartily in

sympathy with you in your efforts to help those who were sufferers in

this calamity, and in your desire to heap those who were rendered

homeless, and in saying this I wish to impress on you the fact that I am

not playing a part.













SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE



          After the address at the Robert Fulton Fund meeting, June 19,

          1906, Mr. Clemens talked to the assembled reporters about the

          San Francisco earthquake.



I haven't been there since 1868, and that great city of San Francisco has

grown up since my day.  When I was there she had one hundred and eighteen

thousand people, and of this number eighteen thousand were Chinese.

I was a reporter on the Virginia City Enterprise in Nevada in 1862, and

stayed there, I think, about two years, when I went to San Francisco and

got a job as a reporter on The Call.  I was there three or four

years.



I remember one day I was walking down Third Street in San Francisco.  It

was a sleepy, dull Sunday afternoon, and no one was stirring.  Suddenly

as I looked up the street about three hundred yards the whole side of a

house fell out.  The street was full of bricks and mortar.  At the same

time I was knocked against the side of a house, and stood there stunned

for a moment.



I thought it was an earthquake.  Nobody else had heard anything about it

and no one said earthquake to me afterward, but I saw it and I wrote it.

Nobody else wrote it, and the house I saw go into the street was the only

house in the city that felt it.  I've always wondered if it wasn't a

little performance gotten up for my especial entertainment by the nether

regions.













CHARITY AND ACTORS



          ADDRESS AT THE ACTORS' FUND FAIR IN THE METROPOLITAN

          OPERA HOUSE, NEW YORK, MAY 6, 1907



          Mr. Clemens, in his white suit, formally declared the fair

          open.  Mr. Daniel Frohman, in introducing Mr. Clemens, said:



          "We intend to make this a banner week in the history of the

          Fund, which takes an interest in every one on the stage, be he

          actor, singer, dancer, or workman.  We have spent more than

          $40,000 during the past year.  Charity covers a multitude of

          sins, but it also reveals a multitude of virtues.  At the

          opening of the former fair we had the assistance of Edwin Booth

          and Joseph Jefferson.  In their place we have to-day that

          American institution and apostle of wide humanity--Mark Twain."



As Mr. Frohman has said, charity reveals a multitude of virtues.  This is

true, and it is to be proved here before the week is over.  Mr. Frohman

has told you something of the object and something of the character of

the work.  He told me he would do this--and he has kept his word!  I had

expected to hear of it through the newspapers.  I wouldn't trust anything

between Frohman and the newspapers--except when it's a case of charity!



You should all remember that the actor has been your benefactor many and

many a year.  When you have been weary and downcast he has lifted your

heart out of gloom and given you a fresh impulse.  You are all under

obligation to him.  This is your opportunity to be his benefactor--to

help provide for him in his old age and when he suffers from infirmities.



At this fair no one is to be persecuted to buy.  If you offer a twenty-

dollar bill in payment for a purchase of $1 you will receive $19 in

change.  There is to be no robbery here.  There is to be no creed here--

no religion except charity.  We want to raise $250,000--and that is a

great task to attempt.



The President has set the fair in motion by pressing the button in

Washington.  Now your good wishes are to be transmuted into cash.



By virtue of the authority in me vested I declare the fair open.  I call

the ball game.  Let the transmuting begin!













RUSSIAN REPUBLIC



The American auxiliary movement to aid the cause of freedom in Russia was

launched on the evening of April 11, 1906, at the Club A house, 3 Fifth

Avenue, with Mr. Clemens and Maxim Gorky as the principal spokesmen.

Mr. Clemens made an introductory address, presenting Mr. Gorky.



If we can build a Russian republic to give to the persecuted people of

the Tsar's domain the same measure of freedom that we enjoy, let us go

ahead and do it.  We need not discuss the methods by which that purpose

is to be attained.  Let us hope that fighting will be postponed or

averted.  for a while, but if it must come--



I am most emphatically in sympathy with the movement, now on foot in

Russia, to make that country free.  I am certain that it will be

successful, as it deserves to be.  Any such movement should have and

deserves our earnest and unanimous co-operation, and such a petition for

funds as has been explained by Mr. Hunter, with its just and powerful

meaning, should have the utmost support of each and every one of us.

Anybody whose ancestors were in this country when we were trying to free

ourselves from oppression, must sympathize with those who now are trying

to do the same thing in Russia.



The parallel I have just drawn only goes to show that it makes no

difference whether the oppression is bitter or not; men with red, warm

blood in their veins will not endure it, but will seek to cast it off.

If we keep our hearts in this matter Russia will be free.













RUSSIAN SUFFERERS



          On December 18, 1905, an entertainment was given at the Casino

          for the benefit of the Russian sufferers.  After the

          performance Mr. Clemens spoke.



LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,--It seems a sort of cruelty to inflict upon an

audience like this our rude English tongue, after we have heard that

divine speech flowing in that lucid Gallic tongue.



It has always been a marvel to me--that French language; it has always

been a puzzle to me.  How beautiful that language is.  How expressive it

seems to be.  How full of grace it is.



And when it comes from lips like those, how eloquent and how liquid it

is.  And, oh, I am always deceived--I always think I am going to

understand it.



Oh, it is such a delight to me, such a delight to me, to meet Madame

Bernhardt, and laugh hand to hand and heart to heart with her.



I have seen her play, as we all have, and oh, that is divine; but I have

always wanted to know Madame Bernhardt herself--her fiery self.  I have

wanted to know that beautiful character.



Why, she is the youngest person I ever saw, except myself--for I always

feel young when I come in the presence of young people.



I have a pleasant recollection of an incident so many years ago--when

Madame Bernhardt came to Hartford, where I lived, and she was going to

play and the tickets were three dollars, and there were two lovely women

--a widow and her daughter--neighbors of ours, highly cultivated ladies

they were; their tastes were fine and elevated, but they were very poor,

and they said "Well, we must not spend six dollars on a pleasure of the

mind, a pleasure of the intellect; we must spend it, if it must go at

all, to furnish to somebody bread to eat."



And so they sorrowed over the fact that they had to give up that great

pleasure of seeing Madame Bernhardt, but there were two neighbors equally

highly cultivated and who could not afford bread, and those good-hearted

Joneses sent that six dollars--deprived themselves of it--and sent it to

those poor Smiths to buy bread with.  And those Smiths took it and bought

tickets with it to see Madame Bernhardt.



Oh yes, some people have tastes and intelligence also.



Now, I was going to make a speech--I supposed I was, but I am not.  It is

late, late; and so I am going to tell a story; and there is this

advantage about a story, anyway, that whatever moral or valuable thing

you put into a speech, why, it gets diffused among those involuted

sentences and possibly your audience goes away without finding out what

that valuable thing was that you were trying to confer upon it; but, dear

me, you put the same jewel into a story and it becomes the keystone of

that story, and you are bound to get it--it flashes, it flames, it is the

jewel in the toad's head--you don't overlook that.



Now, if I am going to talk on such a subject as, for instance, the lost

opportunity--oh, the lost opportunity.  Anybody in this house who has

reached the turn of life--sixty, or seventy, or even fifty, or along

there--when he goes back along his history, there he finds it mile-stoned

all the way with the lost opportunity, and you know how pathetic that is.



You younger ones cannot know the full pathos that lies in those words--

the lost opportunity; but anybody who is old, who has really lived and

felt this life, he knows the pathos of the lost opportunity.



Now, I will tell you a story whose moral is that, whose lesson is that,

whose lament is that.



I was in a village which is a suburb of New Bedford several years ago--

well, New Bedford is a suburb of Fair Haven, or perhaps it is the other

way; in any case, it took both of those towns to make a great centre of

the great whaling industry of the first half of the nineteenth century,

and I was up there at Fair Haven some years ago with a friend of mine.



There was a dedication of a great town-hall, a public building, and we

were there in the afternoon.  This great building was filled, like this

great theatre, with rejoicing villagers, and my friend and I started down

the centre aisle.  He saw a man standing in that aisle, and he said "Now,

look at that bronzed veteran--at that mahogany-faced man.  Now, tell me,

do you see anything about that man's face that is emotional?  Do you see

anything about it that suggests that inside that man anywhere there are

fires that can be started?  Would you ever imagine that that is a human

volcano?"



"Why, no," I said, "I would not.  He looks like a wooden Indian in front

of a cigar store."



"Very well," said my friend, "I will show you that there is emotion even

in that unpromising place.  I will just go to that man and I will just

mention in the most casual way an incident in his life.  That man is

getting along toward ninety years old.  He is past eighty.  I will

mention an incident of fifty or sixty years ago.  Now, just watch the

effect, and it will be so casual that if you don't watch you won't know

when I do say that thing--but you just watch the effect."



He went on down there and accosted this antiquity, and made a remark or

two.  I could not catch up.  They were so casual I could not recognize

which one it was that touched that bottom, for in an instant that old man

was literally in eruption and was filling the whole place with profanity

of the most exquisite kind.  You never heard such accomplished profanity.

I never heard it also delivered with such eloquence.



I never enjoyed profanity as I enjoyed it then--more than if I had been

uttering it myself.  There is nothing like listening to an artist--all

his passions passing away in lava, smoke, thunder, lightning, and

earthquake.



Then this friend said to me: "Now, I will tell you about that.  About

sixty years ago that man was a young fellow of twenty-three, and had just

come home from a three years' whaling voyage.  He came into that village

of his, happy and proud because now, instead of being chief mate, he was

going to be master of a whaleship, and he was proud and happy about it.



"Then he found that there had been a kind of a cold frost come upon that

town and the whole region roundabout; for while he had been away the

Father Mathew temperance excitement had come upon the whole region.

Therefore, everybody had taken the pledge; there wasn't anybody for miles

and miles around that had not taken the pledge.



"So you can see what a solitude it was to this young man, who was fond of

his grog.  And he was just an outcast, because when they found he would

not join Father Mathew's Society they ostracized him, and he went about

that town three weeks, day and night, in utter loneliness--the only human

being in the whole place who ever took grog, and he had to take it

privately.



"If you don't know what it is to be ostracized, to be shunned by your

fellow-man, may you never know it.  Then he recognized that there was

something more valuable in this life than grog, and that is the

fellowship of your fellow-man.  And at last he gave it up, and at nine

o'clock one night he went down to the Father Mathew Temperance Society,

and with a broken heart he said: 'Put my name down for membership in this

society.'



"And then he went away crying, and at earliest dawn the next morning they

came for him and routed him out, and they said that new ship of his was

ready to sail on a three years' voyage.  In a minute he was on board that

ship and gone.



"And he said--well, he was not out of sight of that town till he began to

repent, but he had made up his mind that he would not take a drink, and

so that whole voyage of three years was a three years' agony to that man

because he saw all the time the mistake he had made.



"He felt it all through; he had constant reminders of it, because the

crew would pass him with their grog, come out on the deck and take it,

and there was the torturous Smell of it.



"He went through the whole, three years of suffering, and at last coming

into port it was snowy, it was cold, he was stamping through the snow two

feet deep on the deck and longing to get home, and there was his crew

torturing him to the last minute with hot grog, but at last he had his

reward.  He really did get to shore at fast, and jumped and ran and

bought a jug and rushed to the society's office, and said to the

secretary:



"'Take my name off your membership books, and do it right away!  I have

got a three years' thirst on.'



"And the secretary said: 'It is not necessary.  You were blackballed!'"













WATTERSON AND TWAIN AS REBELS



          ADDRESS AT THE CELEBRATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S 92D BIRTHDAY

          ANNIVERSARY, CARNEGIE HALL, FEBRUARY 11, 1901, TO RAISE FUNDS

          FOR THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY AT CUMBERLAND GAP, TENN.



LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,--The remainder of my duties as presiding chairman

here this evening are but two--only two.  One of them is easy, and the

other difficult.  That is to say, I must introduce the orator, and then

keep still and give him a chance.  The name of Henry Watterson carries

with it its own explanation.  It is like an electric light on top of

Madison Square Garden; you touch the button and the light flashes up out

of the darkness.  You mention the name of Henry Watterson, and your minds

are at once illuminated with the splendid radiance of his fame and

achievements.  A journalist, a soldier, an orator, a statesman, a rebel.

Yes, he was a rebel; and, better still, now he is a reconstructed rebel.



It is a curious circumstance, a circumstance brought about without any

collusion or prearrangement, that he and I, both of whom were rebels

related by blood to each other, should be brought here together this

evening bearing a tribute in our hands and bowing our heads in reverence

to that noble soul who for three years we tried to destroy.  I don't know

as the fact has ever been mentioned before, but it is a fact,

nevertheless.  Colonel Watterson and I were both rebels, and we are blood

relations.  I was a second lieutenant in a Confederate company for a

while--oh, I could have stayed on if I had wanted to.  I made myself

felt, I left tracks all around the country.  I could have stayed on, but

it was such weather.  I never saw such weather to be out-of-doors in, in

all my life.



The Colonel commanded a regiment, and did his part, I suppose, to destroy

the Union.  He did not succeed, yet if he had obeyed me he would have

done so.  I had a plan, and I fully intended to drive General Grant into

the Pacific Ocean--if I could get transportation.  I told Colonel

Watterson about it.  I told him what he had to do.  What I wanted him to

do was to surround the Eastern army and wait until I came up.  But he was

insubordinate; he stuck on some quibble of military etiquette about a

second lieutenant giving orders to a colonel or something like that.  And

what was the consequence?  The Union was preserved.  This is the first

time I believe that that secret has ever been revealed.



No one outside of the family circle, I think, knew it before; but there

the facts are.  Watterson saved the Union; yes, he saved the Union.  And

yet there he sits, and not a step has been taken or a movement made

toward granting him a pension.  That is the way things are done.  It is a

case where some blushing ought to be done.  You ought to blush, and I

ought to blush, and he--well, he's a little out of practice now.













ROBERT FULTON FUND



          ADDRESS MADE ON THE EVENING OF APRIL 19, 1906



          Mr. Clemens had been asked to address the association by Gen.

          Frederick D. Grant, president.  He was offered a fee of $1,000,

          but refused it, saying:



          "I shall be glad to do it, but I must stipulate that you keep

          the $1,000, and add it to the Memorial Fund as my contribution

          to erect a monument in New York to the memory of the man who

          applied steam to navigation."



          At this meeting Mr. Clemens made this formal announcement from

          the platform:



          "This is my last appearance on the paid platform.  I shall not

          retire from the gratis platform until I am buried, and courtesy

          will compel me to keep still and not disturb the others.  Now,

          since I must, I shall say good-bye.  I see many faces in this

          audience well known to me.  They are all my friends, and I feel

          that those I don't know are my friends, too.  I wish to

          consider that you represent the nation, and  that in saying

          good-bye to you I am saying good-bye to the nation.  In the

          great name of humanity, let me say this final word: I offer an

          appeal in behalf of that vast, pathetic multitude of fathers,

          mothers, and helpless little children.  They were sheltered and

          happy two days ago.  Now they are wandering, forlorn, hopeless,

          and homeless, the victims of a great disaster.  So I beg of

          you, I beg of you, to open your hearts and open your purses and

          remember San Francisco, the smitten city."



I wish to deliver a historical address.  I've been studying the history

of---er--a--let me see--a [then he stopped in confusion, and walked over

to Gen. Fred D.  Grant, who sat at the head of the platform.  He leaned

over an a whisper, and then returned to the front of the stage and

continued].  Oh yes!  I've been studying Robert Fulton.  I've been

studying a biographical sketch of Robert Fulton, the inventor of--er--a--

let's see--ah yes, the inventor of the electric telegraph and the Morse

sewing--machine.  Also, I understand he invented the air--diria--pshaw!

I have it at last--the dirigible balloon.  Yes, the dirigible--but it is

a difficult word, and I don't see why anybody should marry a couple of

words like that when they don't want to be married at all and are likely

to quarrel with each other all the time.  I should put that couple of

words under the ban of the United States Supreme Court, under its

decision of a few days ago, and take 'em out and drown 'em.



I used to know Fulton.  It used to do me good to see him dashing through

tile town on a wild broncho.



And Fulton was born in---er--a--Well, it doesn't make much difference

where he was born, does it?  I remember a man who came to interview me

once, to get a sketch of my life.  I consulted with a friend--a practical

man--before he came, to know how I should treat him.



"Whenever you give the interviewer a fact," he said, "give him another

fact that will contradict it.  Then he'll go away with a jumble that he

can't use at all.  Be gentle, be sweet, smile like an idiot--just be

natural."  That's what my friend told me to do, and I did it.



"Where were you born?" asked the interviewer.



"Well-er-a," I began, "I was born in Alabama, or Alaska, or the Sandwich

Islands; I don't know where, but right around there somewhere.  And you

had better put it down before you forget it."



"But you weren't born in all those places," he said.



"Well, I've offered you three places.  Take your choice.  They're all at

the same price."



"How old are you?" he asked.



"I shall be nineteen in June," I said.



"Why, there's such a discrepancy between your age and your looks," he

said.



"Oh, that's nothing," I said, "I was born discrepantly."



Then we got to talking about my brother Samuel, and he told me my

explanations were confusing.



"I suppose he is dead," I said.  "Some said that he was dead and some

said that he wasn't."



"Did you bury him without knowing whether he was dead or not?" asked the

reporter.



"There was a mystery," said I.  "We were twins, and one day when we were

two weeks old--that is, he was one week old, and I was one week old--we

got mixed up in the bath-tub, and one of us drowned.  We never could tell

which.  One of us had a strawberry birthmark on the back of his hand.

There it is on my hand.  This is the one that was drowned.  There's no

doubt about it.



"Where's the mystery?" he said.



"Why, don't you see how stupid it was to bury the wrong twin?"

I answered.  I didn't explain it any more because he said the explanation

confused him.  To me it is perfectly plain.



But, to get back to Fulton.  I'm going along like an old man I used to

know who used to start to tell a story about his grandfather.  He had an

awfully retentive memory, and he never finished the story, because he

switched off into something else.  He used to tell about how his

grandfather one day went into a pasture, where there was a ram.  The old

man dropped a silver dime in the grass, and stooped over to pick it up.

The ram was observing him, and took the old man's action as an

invitation.



Just as he was going to finish about the ram this friend of mine would

recall that his grandfather had a niece who had a glass eye.  She used to

loan that glass eye to another lady friend, who used it when she received

company.  The eye didn't fit the friend's face, and it was loose.  And

whenever she winked it would turn aver.



Then he got on the subject of accidents, and he would tell a story about

how he believed accidents never happened.



"There was an Irishman coming down a ladder with a hod of bricks," he

said, "and a Dutchman was standing on the ground below.  The Irishman

fell on the Dutchman and killed him.  Accident?  Never!  If the Dutchman

hadn't been there the Irishman would have been killed.  Why didn't the

Irishman fall on a dog which was next, to the Dutchman?  Because the dog

would have seen him coming."



Then he'd get off from the Dutchman to an uncle named Reginald Wilson.

Reginald went into a carpet factory one day, and got twisted into the

machinery's belt.  He went excursioning around the factory until he was

properly distributed and was woven into sixty-nine yards of the best

three-ply carpet.  His wife bought the carpet, and then she erected a

monument to his memory.  It read:



                          Sacred to the memory

                                   of

             sixty-nine yards of the best three-ply carpet

                  containing the mortal remainders of



                            REGINALD WILSON



                        Go thou and do likewise



And so an he would ramble about telling the story of his grandfather

until we never were told whether he found the ten-cent piece or whether

something else happened.













FULTON DAY, JAMESTOWN



          ADDRESS DELIVERED SEPTEMBER 23, 1907



          Lieutenant-Governor Ellyson, of Virginia, in introducing Mr.

          Clemens, said:



          "The people have come here to bring a tribute of affectionate

          recollection for the man who has contributed so much to the

          progress of the world and the happiness of mankind."  As Mr.

          Clemens came down to the platform the applause became louder

          and louder, until Mr. Clemens held out his hand for silence.

          It was a great triumph, and it was almost a minute after the

          applause ceased before Mr. Clemens could speak.  He attempted

          it once, and when the audience noticed his emotion, it cheered

          again loudly.



LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,--I am but human, and when you, give me a reception

like that I am obliged to wait a little while I get my voice.  When you

appeal to my head, I don't feel it; but when you appeal to my heart, I do

feel it.



We are here to celebrate one of the greatest events of American history,

and not only in American history, but in the world's history.



Indeed it was--the application of steam by Robert Fulton.



It was a world event--there are not many of them.  It is peculiarly an

American event, that is true, but the influence was very broad in effect.

We should regard this day as a very great American holiday.  We have not

many that are exclusively American holidays.  We have the Fourth of July,

which we regard as an American holiday, but it is nothing of the kind.

I am waiting for a dissenting voice.  All great efforts that led up to

the Fourth of July were made, not by Americans, but by English residents

of America, subjects of the King of England.



They fought all the fighting that was done, they shed and spilt all the

blood that was spilt, in securing to us the invaluable liberties which

are incorporated in the Declaration of Independence; but they were not

Americans.  They signed the Declaration of Independence; no American's

name is signed to that document at all.  There never was an American such

as you and I are until after the Revolution, when it had all been fought

out and liberty secured, after the adoption of the Constitution, and the

recognition of the Independence of America by all powers.



While we revere the Fourth of July--and let us always revere it, and the

liberties it conferred upon us--yet it was not an American event, a great

American day.



It was an American who applied that steam successfully.  There are not a

great many world events, and we have our full share.  The telegraph,

telephone, and the application of steam to navigation--these are great

American events.



To-day I have been requested, or I have requested myself, not to confine

myself to furnishing you with information, but to remind you of things,

and to introduce one of the nation's celebrants.



Admiral Harrington here is going to tell you all that I have left untold.

I am going to tell you all that I know, and then he will follow up with

such rags and remnants as he can find, and tell you what he knows.



No doubt you have heard a great deal about Robert Fulton and the

influences that have grown from his invention, but the little steamboat

is suffering neglect.



You probably do not know a great deal about that boat.  It was the most

important steamboat in the world.  I was there and saw it.  Admiral

Harrington was there at the time.  It need not surprise you, for he is

not as old as he looks.  That little boat was interesting in every way.

The size of it.  The boat was one [consults Admiral], he said ten feet

long.  The breadth of that boat [consults Admiral], two hundred feet.

You see, the first and most important detail is the length, then the

breadth, and then the depth; the depth of that boat was [consults again]

--the Admiral says it was a flat boat.  Then her tonnage--you know

nothing about a boat until you know two more things: her speed and her

tonnage.  We know the speed she made.  She made four miles---and

sometimes five miles.  It was on her initial trip, on, August 11, 1807,

that she made her initial trip, when she went from [consults Admiral]

Jersey City--to Chicago.  That's right.  She went by way of Albany.

Now comes the tonnage of that boat.  Tonnage of a boat means the amount

of displacement; displacement means the amount of water a vessel can

shove in a day.  The tonnage of man is estimated by the amount of whiskey

he can displace in a day.



Robert Fulton named the 'Clermont' in honor of his bride, that is,

Clermont was the name of the county-seat.



I feel that it surprises you that I know so much.  In my remarks of

welcome of Admiral Harrington I am not going to give him compliments.

Compliments always embarrass a man.  You do not know anything to say.

It does not inspire you with words.  There is nothing you can say in

answer to a compliment.  I have been complimented myself a great many

times, and they always embarrass me--I always feel that they have not

said enough.



The Admiral and myself have held public office, and were associated

together a great deal a friendly way in the time of Pocahontas.  That

incident where Pocahontas saves the life of Smith from her father,

Powhatan's club, was gotten up by the Admiral and myself to advertise

Jamestown.



At that time the Admiral and myself did not have the facilities of

advertising that you have.



I have known Admiral Harrington in all kinds of situations--in public

service, on the platform, and in the chain-gang now and then--but it was

a mistake.  A case of mistaken identity.  I do not think it is at all a

necessity to tell you Admiral Harrington's public history.  You know that

it is in the histories.  I am not here to tell you anything about his

public life, but to expose his private life.



I am something of a poet.  When the great poet laureate, Tennyson, died,

and I found that the place was open, I tried to get it--but I did not get

it.  Anybody can write the first line of a poem, but it is a very

difficult task to make the second line rhyme with the first.  When I was

down in Australia there were two towns named Johnswood and Par-am.  I

made this rhyme:



               "The people of Johnswood are pious and good;

               The people of Par-am they don't care a----."



I do not want to compliment Admiral Harrington, but as long as such men

as he devote their lives to the public service the credit of the country

will never cease.  I will say that the same high qualities, the same

moral and intellectual attainments, the same graciousness of manner, of

conduct, of observation, and expression have caused Admiral Harrington to

be mistaken for me--and I have been mistaken for him.



A mutual compliment can go no further, and I now have the honor and

privilege of introducing to you Admiral Harrington.













LOTOS CLUB DINNER IN HONOR OF MARK TWAIN



          ADDRESS AT THE FIRST FORMAL DINNER IN THE NEW CLUB-HOUSE,

          NOVEMBER 11, 1893



          In introducing the guest of the evening, Mr. Lawrence said:



          "To-night the old faces appear once more amid new surroundings.

          The place where last we met about the table has vanished, and

          to-night we have our first Lotos dinner in a home that is all

          our own.  It is peculiarly fitting that the board should now be

          spread in honor of one who has been a member of the club for

          full a score of years, and it is a happy augury for the future

          that our fellow-member whom we assemble to greet should be the

          bearer of a most distinguished name in the world of letters;

          for the Lotos Club is ever at its best when paying homage to

          genius in literature or in art.  Is there a civilized being who

          has not heard the name of Mark Twain?  We knew him long years

          ago, before he came out of the boundless West, brimful of wit

          and eloquence, with no reverence for anything, and went abroad

          to educate the untutored European in the subtleties of the

          American joke.  The world has looked on and applauded while he

          has broken many images.  He has led us in imagination all over

          the globe.  With him as our guide we have traversed alike the

          Mississippi and the Sea of Galilee.  At his bidding we have

          laughed at a thousand absurdities.  By a laborious process of

          reasoning he has convinced us that the Egyptian mummies are

          actually dead.  He has held us spellbound upon the plain at the

          foot of the great Sphinx, and we have joined him in weeping

          bitter tears at the tomb of Adam.  To-night we greet him in the

          flesh.  What name is there in literature that can be likened to

          his?  Perhaps some of the distinguished gentlemen about this

          table can tell us, but I know of none.  Himself his only

          parallel!"



MR. PRESIDENT, GENTLEMEN, AND MY FELLOW-MEMBERS OF THE LOTOS CLUB,--I

have seldom in my lifetime listened to compliments so felicitously

phrased or so well deserved.  I return thanks for them from a full heart

and an appreciative spirit, and I will say this in self-defence:  While I

am charged with having no reverence for anything, I wish to say that I

have reverence for the man who can utter such truths, and I also have a

deep reverence and a sincere one for a club that can do such justice to

me.  To be the chief guest of such a club is something to be envied, and

if I read your countenances rightly I am envied.  I am glad to see this

club in such palatial quarters.  I remember it twenty years ago when it

was housed in a stable.



Now when I was studying for the ministry there were two or three things

that struck my attention particularly.  At the first banquet mentioned in

history that other prodigal son who came back from his travels was

invited to stand up and have his say.  They were all there, his brethren,

David and Goliath, and--er, and if he had had such experience as I have

had he would have waited until those other people got through talking.

He got up and testified to all his failings.  Now if he had waited before

telling all about his riotous living until the others had spoken he might

not have given himself away as he did, and I think that I would give

myself away if I should go on.  I think I'd better wait until the others

hand in their testimony; then if it is necessary for me to make an

explanation, I will get up and explain, and if I cannot do that, I'll

deny it happened.



          Later in the evening Mr. Clemens made another speech, replying

          to a fire of short speeches by Charles Dudley Warner, Charles

          A. Dana, Seth Low, General Porter, and many others, each

          welcoming the guest of honor.



I don't see that I have a great deal to explain.  I got off very well,

considering the opportunities that these other fellows had.  I don't see

that Mr. Low said anything against me, and neither did Mr. Dana.

However, I will say that I never heard so many lies told in one evening

as were told by Mr. McKelway--and I consider myself very capable; but

even in his case, when he got through, I was gratified by finding how

much he hadn't found out.  By accident he missed the very things that I

didn't want to have said, and now, gentlemen, about Americanism.



I have been on the continent of Europe for two and a half years.  I have

met many Americans there, some sojourning for a short time only, others

making protracted stays, and it has been very gratifying to me to find

that nearly all preserved their Americanism.  I have found they all like

to see the Flag fly, and that their hearts rise when they see the Stars

and Stripes.  I met only one lady who had forgotten the land of her birth

and glorified monarchical institutions.



I think it is a great thing to say that in two and a half years I met

only one person who had fallen a victim to the shams--I think we may call

them shams--of nobilities and of heredities.  She was entirely lost in

them.  After I had listened to her for a long time, I said to her:  "At

least you must admit that we have one merit.  We are not like the

Chinese, who refuse to allow their citizens who are tired of the country

to leave it.  Thank God, we don't!"













COPYRIGHT



          With Mr. Howells, Edward Everett Hale, Thomas Nelson Page, and

          a number of other authors, Mr. Clemens appeared before the

          committee December 6, 1906.  The new Copyright Bill

          contemplated an author's copyright for the term of his life and

          for fifty years thereafter, applying also for the benefit of

          artists, musicians, and others, but the authors did most of the

          talking.  F. D. Millet made a speech for the artists, and John

          Philip Sousa for the musicians.



          Mr. Clemens was the last speaker of the day, and its chief

          feature.  He made a speech, the serious parts of which created

          a strong impression, and the humorous parts set the Senators

          and Representatives in roars of laughter.



I have read this bill.  At least I have read such portions as I could

understand.  Nobody but a practised legislator can read the bill and

thoroughly understand it, and I am not a practised legislator.



I am interested particularly and especially in the part of the bill which

concerns my trade.  I like that extension of copyright life to the

author's life and fifty years afterward.  I think that would satisfy any

reasonable author, because it would take care of his children.  Let the

grandchildren take care of themselves.  That would take care of my

daughters, and after that I am not particular.  I shall then have long

been out of this struggle, independent of it, indifferent to it.



It isn't objectionable to me that all the trades and professions in the

United States are protected by the bill.  I like that.  They are all

important and worthy, and if we can take care of them under the Copyright

law I should like to see it done.  I should like to see oyster culture

added, and anything else.



I am aware that copyright must have a limit, because that is required by

the Constitution of the United States, which sets aside the earlier

Constitution, which we call the decalogue.  The decalogue says you shall

not take away from any man his profit.  I don't like to be obliged to use

the harsh term.  What the decalogue really says is, "Thou shaft not

steal," but I am trying to use more polite language.



The laws of England and America do take it away, do select but one class,

the people who create the literature of the land.  They always talk

handsomely about the literature of the land, always what a fine, great,

monumental thing a great literature is, and in the midst of their

enthusiasm they turn around and do what they can to discourage it.



I know we must have a limit, but forty-two years is too much of a limit.

I am quite unable to guess why there should be a limit at all to the

possession of the product of a man's labor.  There is no limit to real

estate.



Doctor Bale has suggested that a man might just as well, after

discovering a coal-mine and working it forty-two years, have the

Government step in and take it away.



What is the excuse?  It is that the author who produced that book has had

the profit of it long enough, and therefore the Government takes a profit

which does not belong to it and generously gives it to the 88,000,000 of

people.  But it doesn't do anything of the kind.  It merely takes the

author's property, takes his children's bread, and gives the publisher

double profit.  He goes on publishing the book and as many of his

confederates as choose to go into the conspiracy do so, and they rear

families in affluence.



And they continue the enjoyment of those ill-gotten gains generation

after generation forever, for they never die.  In a few weeks or months

or years I shall be out of it, I hope under a monument.  I hope I shall

not be entirely forgotten, and I shall subscribe to the monument myself.

But I shall not be caring what happens if there are fifty years left of

my copyright.  My copyright produces annually a good deal more than I can

use, but my children can use it.  I can get along; I know a lot of

trades.  But that goes to my daughters, who can't get along as well as I

can because I have carefully raised them as young ladies, who don't know

anything and can't do anything.  I hope Congress will extend to them the

charity which they have failed to get from me.



Why, if a man who is not even mad, but only strenuous--strenuous about

race-suicide--should come to me and try to get me to use my large

political and ecclesiastical influence to get a bill passed by this

Congress limiting families to twenty-two children by one mother, I should

try to calm him down.  I should reason with him.  I should say to him,

"Leave it alone.  Leave it alone and it will take care of itself.  Only

one couple a year in the United States can reach that limit.  If they

have reached that limit let them go right on.  Let them have all the

liberty they want.  In restricting that family to twenty-two children you

are merely conferring discomfort and unhappiness on one family per year

in a nation of 88,000,000, which is not worth while."



It is the very same with copyright.  One author per year produces a book

which can outlive the forty-two-year limit; that's all.  This nation

can't produce two authors a year that can do it; the thing is

demonstrably impossible.  All that the limited copyright can do is to

take the bread out of the mouths of the children of that one author per

year.



I made an estimate some years ago, when I appeared before a committee of

the House of Lords, that we had published in this country since the

Declaration of Independence 220,000 books.  They have all gone.  They had

all perished before they were ten years old.  It is only one book in 1000

that can outlive the forty-two year limit.  Therefore why put a limit at

all?  You might as well limit the family to twenty-two children.



If you recall the Americans in the nineteenth century who wrote books

that lived forty-two years you will have to begin with Cooper; you can

follow with Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allan Poe,

and there you have to wait a long time.  You come to Emerson, and you

have to stand still and look further.  You find Howells and T. B.

Aldrich, and then your numbers begin to run pretty thin, and you question

if you can name twenty persons in the United States who--in a whole

century have written books that would live forty-two years.  Why, you

could take them all and put them on one bench there [pointing].  Add the

wives and children and you could put the result on, two or three more

benches.



One hundred persons--that is the little, insignificant crowd whose bread-

and-butter is to be taken away for what purpose, for what profit to

anybody?  You turn these few books into the hands of the pirate and of

the legitimate publisher, too, and they get the profit that should have

gone to the wife and children.



When I appeared before that committee of the House of Lords the chairman

asked me what limit I would propose.  I said, "Perpetuity." I could see

some resentment in his manner, and he said the idea was illogical, for

the reason that it has long ago been decided that there can be no such

thing as property in ideas.  I said there was property in ideas before

Queen Anne's time; they had perpetual copyright.  He said, "What is a

book?  A book is just built from base to roof on ideas, and there can be

no property in it."



I said I wished he could mention any kind of property on this planet that

had a pecuniary value which was not derived from an idea or ideas.



He said real estate.  I put a supposititious case, a dozen Englishmen who

travel through South Africa and camp out, and eleven of them see

nothing at all; they are mentally blind.  But there is one in the party

who knows what this harbor means and what the lay of the land means.  To

him it means that some day a railway will go through here, and there on

that harbor a great city will spring up.  That is his idea.  And he has

another idea, which is to go and trade his last bottle of Scotch whiskey

and his last horse-blanket to the principal chief of that region and

buy a piece of land the size of Pennsylvania.



That was the value of an idea that the day would come when the Cape to

Cairo Railway would be built.



Every improvement that is put upon the real estate is the result of an

idea in somebody's head.  The skyscraper is another idea; the railroad is

another; the telephone and all those things are merely symbols which

represent ideas.  An andiron, a wash-tub, is the result of an idea that

did not exist before.



So if, as that gentleman said, a book does consist solely of ideas, that

is the best argument in the world that it is property, and should not be

under any limitation at all.  We don't ask for that.  Fifty years from

now we shall ask for it.



I hope the bill will pass without any deleterious amendments.  I do seem

to be extraordinarily interested in a whole lot of arts and things that I

have got nothing to do with.  It is a part of my generous, liberal

nature; I can't help it.  I feel the same sort of charity to everybody

that was manifested by a gentleman who arrived at home at two o'clock in

the morning from the club and was feeling so perfectly satisfied with

life, so happy, and so comfortable, and there was his house weaving,

weaving, weaving around.  He watched his chance, and by and by when the

steps got in his neighborhood he made a jump and climbed up and got on

the portico.



And the house went on weaving and weaving and weaving, but he watched the

door, and when it came around his way he plunged through it.  He got to

the stairs, and when he went up on all fours the house was so unsteady

that he could hardly make his way, but at last he got to the top and

raised his foot and put it on the top step.  But only the toe hitched on

the step, and he rolled down and fetched up on the bottom step, with his

arm around the newel-post, and he said:



"God pity the poor sailors out at sea on a night like this."













IN AID OF THE BLIND



          ADDRESS AT A PUBLIC MEETING OF THE NEW YORK ASSOCIATION FOR

          PROMOTING THE INTERESTS OF THE BLIND AT THE WALDORF ASTORIA,

          MARCH 29, 1906



If you detect any awkwardness in my movements and infelicities in my

conduct I will offer the explanation that I never presided at a meeting

of any kind before in my life, and that I do find it out of my line.

I supposed I could do anything anybody else could, but I recognize that

experience helps, and I do feel the lack of that experience.  I don't

feel as graceful and easy as I ought to be in order to impress an

audience.  I shall not pretend that I know how to umpire a meeting like

this, and I shall just take the humble place of the Essex band.



There was a great gathering in a small New England town, about twenty-

five years ago.  I remember that circumstance because there was something

that happened at that time.  It was a great occasion.  They gathered in

the militia and orators and everybody from all the towns around.  It was

an extraordinary occasion.



The little local paper threw itself into ecstasies of admiration and

tried to do itself proud from beginning to end.  It praised the orators,

the militia, and all the bands that came from everywhere, and all this in

honest country newspaper detail, but the writer ran out of adjectives

toward the end.  Having exhausted his whole magazine of praise and

glorification, he found he still had one band left over.  He had to say

something about it, and he said: "The Essex band done the best it could."



I am an Essex band on this occasion, and I am going to get through as

well as inexperience and good intentions will enable me.  I have got all

the documents here necessary to instruct you in the objects and

intentions of this meeting and also of the association which has called

the meeting.  But they are too voluminous.  I could not pack those

statistics into my head, and I had to give it up.  I shall have to just

reduce all that mass of statistics to a few salient facts.  There are too

many statistics and figures for me.  I never could do anything with

figures, never had any talent for mathematics, never accomplished

anything in my efforts at that rugged study, and to-day the only

mathematics I know is multiplication, and the minute I get away up in

that, as soon as I reach nine times seven--



[Mr. Clemens lapsed into deep thought for a moment.  He was trying to

figure out nine times seven, but it was a hopeless task, and he turned to

St. Clair McKelway, who sat near him.  Mr. McKelway whispered the answer,

and the speaker resumed:]



I've got it now.  It's eighty-four.  Well, I can get that far all right

with a little hesitation.  After that I am uncertain, and I can't manage

a statistic.



"This association for the--"



[Mr. Clemens was in another dilemma.  Again he was obliged to turn to Mr.

McKelway.]



Oh yes, for promoting the interests of the blind.  It's a long name.  If

I could I would write it out for you and let you take it home and study

it, but I don't know how to spell it.  And Mr. Carnegie is down in

Virginia somewhere.  Well, anyway, the object of that association which

has been recently organized, five months ago, in fact, is in the hands of

very, very energetic, intelligent, and capable people, and they will push

it to success very surely, and all the more surely if you will give them

a little of your assistance out of your pockets.



The intention, the purpose, is to search out all the blind and find work

for them to do so that they may earn, their own bread.  Now it is dismal

enough to be blind--it is dreary, dreary life at best, but it can be

largely ameliorated by finding something for these poor blind people to

do with their hands.  The time passes so heavily that it is never day or

night with them, it is always night, and when they have to sit with

folded hands and with nothing to do to amuse or entertain or employ their

minds, it is drearier and drearier.



And then the knowledge they have that they must subsist on charity, and

so often reluctant charity, it would renew their lives if they could have

something to do with their hands and pass their time and at the same time

earn their bread, and know the sweetness of the bread which is the result

of the labor of one's own hands.  They need that cheer and pleasure.  It

is the only way you can turn their night into day, to give them happy

hearts, the only thing you can put in the place of the blessed sun.  That

you can do in the way I speak of.



Blind people generally who have seen the light know what it is to miss

the light.  Those who have gone blind since they were twenty years old--

their lives are unendingly dreary.  But they can be taught to use their

hands and to employ themselves at a great many industries.  That

association from which this draws its birth in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

has taught its blind to make many things.  They make them better than

most people, and more honest than people who have the use of their eyes.

The goods they make are readily salable.  People like them.  And so they

are supporting themselves, and it is a matter of cheer, cheer.  They pass

their time now not too irksomely as they formerly did.



What this association needs and wants is $15,000.  The figures are set

down, and what the money is for, and there is no graft in it or I would

not be here.  And they hope to beguile that out of your pockets, and you

will find affixed to the programme an opportunity, that little blank

which you will fill out and promise so much money now or to-morrow or

some time.  Then, there is another opportunity which is still better, and

that is that you shall subscribe an annual sum.



I have invented a good many useful things in my time, but never anything

better than that of getting money out of people who don't want to part

with it.  It is always for good objects, of course.  This is the plan:

When you call upon a person to contribute to a great and good object, and

you think he should furnish about $1,000, he disappoints you as like as

not.  Much the best way to work him to supply that thousand dollars is to

split it into parts and contribute, say a hundred dollars a year, or

fifty, or whatever the sum maybe.  Let him contribute ten or twenty a

year.  He doesn't feel that, but he does feel it when you call upon him

to contribute a large amount.  When you get used to it you would rather

contribute than borrow money.



I tried it in Helen Keller's case.  Mr. Hutton wrote me in 1896 or 1897

when I was in London and said: "The gentleman who has been so liberal in

taking care of Helen Keller has died without making provision for her in

his will, and now they don't know what to do."  They were proposing to

raise a fund, and he thought $50,000 enough to furnish an income of $2400

or $2500 a year for the support of that wonderful girl and her wonderful

teacher, Miss Sullivan, now Mrs.  Macy.  I wrote to Mr. Hutton and said:

"Go on, get up your fund.  It will be slow, but if you want quick work,

I propose this system," the system I speak of, of asking people to

contribute such and such a sum from year to year and drop out whenever

they please, and he would find there wouldn't be any difficulty, people

wouldn't feel the burden of it.  And he wrote back saying he had raised

the $2400 a year indefinitely by that system in, a single afternoon.  We

would like to do something just like that to-night.  We will take as many

checks as you care to give.  You can leave your donations in the big room

outside.



I knew once what it was to be blind.  I shall never forget that

experience.  I have been as blind as anybody ever was for three or four

hours, and the sufferings that I endured and the mishaps and the

accidents that are burning in my memory make my sympathy rise when I feel

for the blind and always shall feel.  I once went to Heidelberg on an

excursion.  I took a clergyman along with me, the Rev. Joseph Twichell,

of Hartford, who is still among the living despite that fact.  I always

travel with clergymen when I can.  It is better for them, it is better

for me.  And any preacher who goes out with me in stormy weather and

without a lightning rod is a good one.  The Reverend Twichell is one of

those people filled with patience and endurance, two good ingredients for

a man travelling with me, so we got along very well together.  In that

old town they have not altered a house nor built one in 1500 years.  We

went to the inn and they placed Twichell and me in a most colossal

bedroom, the largest I ever saw or heard of.  It was as big as this room.



I didn't take much notice of the place.  I didn't really get my bearings.

I noticed Twichell got a German bed about two feet wide, the kind in

which you've got to lie on your edge, because there isn't room to lie on

your back, and he was way down south in that big room, and I was way up

north at the other end of it, with a regular Sahara in between.



We went to bed.  Twichell went to sleep, but then he had his conscience

loaded and it was easy for him to get to sleep.  I couldn't get to sleep.

It was one of those torturing kinds of lovely summer nights when you hear

various kinds of noises now and then.  A mouse away off in the southwest.

You throw things at the mouse.  That encourages the mouse.  But I

couldn't stand it, and about two o'clock I got up and thought I would

give it up and go out in the square where there was one of those tinkling

fountains, and sit on its brink and dream, full of romance.



I got out of bed, and I ought to have lit a candle, but I didn't think of

it until it was too late.  It was the darkest place that ever was.  There

has never been darkness any thicker than that.  It just lay in cakes.



I thought that before dressing I would accumulate my clothes.  I pawed

around in the dark and found everything packed together on the floor

except one sock.  I couldn't get on the track of that sock.  It might

have occurred to me that maybe it was in the wash.  But I didn't think of

that.  I went excursioning on my hands and knees.  Presently I thought,

"I am never going to find it; I'll go back to bed again."  That is what I

tried to do during the next three hours.  I had lost the bearings of that

bed.  I was going in the wrong direction all the time.  By-and-by I came

in collision with a chair and that encouraged me.



It seemed to me, as far as I could recollect, there was only a chair here

and there and yonder, five or six of them scattered over this territory,

and I thought maybe after I found that chair I might find the next one.

Well, I did.  And I found another and another and another.  I kept going

around on my hands and knees, having those sudden collisions, and finally

when I banged into another chair I almost lost my temper.  And I raised

up, garbed as I was, not for public exhibition, right in front of a

mirror fifteen or sixteen feet high.



I hadn't noticed the mirror; didn't know it was there.  And when I saw

myself in the mirror I was frightened out of my wits.  I don't allow any

ghosts to bite me, and I took up a chair and smashed at it.  A million

pieces.  Then I reflected.  That's the way I always do, and it's

unprofitable unless a man has had much experience that way and has clear

judgment.  And I had judgment, and I would have had to pay for that

mirror if I hadn't recollected to say it was Twichell who broke it.



Then I got down, on my hands and knees and went on another exploring

expedition.



As far as I could  remember there were six chairs in that Oklahoma, and

one table, a great big heavy table, not a good table to hit with your

head when rushing madly along.  In the course of time I collided with

thirty-five chairs and tables enough to stock that dining-room out there.

It was a hospital for decayed furniture, and it was in a worse condition

when I got through with it.  I went on and on, and at last got to a place

where I could feel my way up, and there was a shelf.  I knew that wasn't

in the middle of the room.  Up to that time I was afraid I had gotten out

of the city.



I was very careful and pawed along that shelf, and there was a pitcher of

water about a foot high, and it was at the head of Twichell's bed, but I

didn't know it.  I felt that pitcher going and I grabbed at it, but it

didn't help any and came right down in Twichell's face and nearly drowned

him.  But it woke him up.  I was grateful to have company on any terms.

He lit a match, and there I was, way down south when I ought to have been

back up yonder.  My bed was out of sight it was so far away.  You needed

a telescope to find it.  Twichell comforted me and I scrubbed him off and

we got sociable.



But that night wasn't wasted.  I had my pedometer on my leg.  Twichell

and I were in a pedometer match.  Twichell had longer legs than I.  The

only way I could keep up was to wear my pedometer to bed.  I always walk

in my sleep, and on this occasion I gained sixteen miles on him.  After

all, I never found that sock.  I never have seen it from that day to

this.  But that adventure taught me what it is to be blind.  That was one

of the most serious occasions of my whole life, yet I never can speak of

it without somebody thinking it isn't serious.  You try it and see how

serious it is to be as the blind are and I was that night.



[Mr. Clemens read several letters of regret.  He then introduced Joseph

H. Choate, saying:]



It is now my privilege to present to you Mr. Choate.  I don't have to

really introduce him.  I don't have to praise him, or to flatter him.

I could say truly that in the forty-seven years I have been familiarly

acquainted with him he has always been the handsomest man America has

ever produced.  And I hope and believe he will hold the belt forty-five

years more.  He has served his country ably, faithfully, and brilliantly.

He stands at the summit, at the very top in the esteem and regard of his

countrymen, and if I could say one word which would lift him any higher

in his countrymen's esteem and affection, I would say that word whether

it was true or not.













DR. MARK TWAIN, FARMEOPATH



          ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL DINNER OF THE NEW YORK POST-GRADUATE

          MEDICAL SCHOOL AND HOSPITAL, JANUARY 21, 1909



          The president, Dr.  George N.  Miller, in introducing Mr.

          Clemens, referred to his late experience with burglars.



GENTLEMEN AND DOCTORS,--I am glad to be among my own kind to-night.

I was once a sharpshooter, but now I practise a much higher and equally

as deadly a profession.  It wasn't so very long ago that I became a

member of your cult, and for the time I've been in the business my record

is one that can't be scoffed at.



As to the burglars, I am perfectly familiar with these people.  I have

always had a good deal to do with burglars--not officially, but through

their attentions to me.  I never suffered anything at the hands of a

burglar.  They have invaded my house time and time again.  They never got

anything.  Then those people who burglarized our house in September--we

got back the plated ware they took off, we jailed them, and I have been

sorry ever since.  They did us a great service they scared off all the

servants in the place.



I consider the Children's Theatre, of which I am president, and the Post-

Graduate Medical School as the two greatest institutions in the country.

This school, in bringing its twenty thousand physicians from all parts of

the country, bringing them up to date, and sending them back with renewed

confidence, has surely saved hundreds of thousands of lives which

otherwise would have been lost.



I have been practising now for seven months.  When I settled on my farm

in Connecticut in June I found the Community very thinly settled--and

since I have been engaged in practice it has become more thinly settled

still.  This gratifies me, as indicating that I am making an impression

on my community.  I suppose it is the same with all of you.



I have always felt that I ought to do something for you, and so I

organized a Redding (Connecticut) branch of the Post-Graduate School.

I am only a country farmer up there, but I am doing the best I can.



Of course, the practice of medicine and surgery in a remote country

district has its disadvantages, but in my case I am happy in a division

of responsibility.  I practise in conjunction with a horse-doctor, a

sexton, and an undertaker.  The combination is air-tight, and once a man

is stricken in our district escape is impossible for him.



These four of us--three in the regular profession and the fourth an

undertaker--are all good men.  There is Bill Ferguson, the Redding

undertaker.  Bill is there in every respect.  He is a little lukewarm on

general practice, and writes his name with a rubber stamp.  Like my old

Southern, friend, he is one of the finest planters anywhere.



Then there is Jim Ruggles, the horse-doctor.  Ruggles is one of the best

men I have got.  He also is not much on general medicine, but he is a

fine horse-doctor.  Ferguson doesn't make any money off him.



You see, the combination started this way.  When I got up to Redding and

had become a doctor, I looked around to see what my chances were for

aiding in, the great work.  The first thing I did was to determine what

manner of doctor I was to be.  Being a Connecticut farmer, I naturally

consulted my farmacopia, and at once decided to become a farmeopath.



Then I got circulating about, and got in touch with Ferguson and

Ruggles.  Ferguson joined readily in my ideas, but Ruggles kept saying

that, while it was all right for an undertaker to get aboard, he couldn't

see where it helped horses.



Well, we started to find out what was the trouble with the community, and

it didn't take long to find out that there was just one disease, and that

was race-suicide.  And driving about the country-side I was told by my

fellow-farmers that it was the only rational human and valuable disease.

But it is cutting into our profits so that we'll either have to stop it

or we'll have to move.



We've had some funny experiences up there in Redding.  Not long ago a

fellow came along with a rolling gait and a distressed face.  We asked

him what was the matter.  We always hold consultations on every case, as

there isn't business enough for four.  He said he didn't know, but that

he was a sailor, and perhaps that might help us to give a diagnosis.  We

treated him for that, and I never saw a man die more peacefully.



That same afternoon my dog Tige treed an African gentleman.  We chained

up the dog, and then the gentleman came down and said he had

appendicitis.  We asked him if he wanted to be cut open, and he said yes,

that he'd like to know if there was anything in it.  So we cut him open

and found nothing in him but darkness.  So we diagnosed his case as

infidelity, because he was dark inside.  Tige is a very clever dog, and

aids us greatly.



The other day a patient came to me and inquired if I was old Doctor

Clemens--



As a practitioner I have given a great deal of my attention to Bright's

disease. I have made some rules for treating it that may be valuable.

Listen:



Rule 1.  When approaching the bedside of one whom an all-wise President--

I mean an all-wise Providence--well, anyway, it's the same thing--has

seen fit to afflict with disease--well, the rule is simple, even if it is

old-fashioned.



Rule 2.  I've forgotten just what it is, but--



Rule 3.  This is always indispensable: Bleed your patient.













MISSOURI UNIVERSITY SPEECH



          ADDRESS DELIVERED JUNE 4, 1902, AT COLUMBIA, MO.



          When the name of Samuel L. Clemens was called the humorist

          stepped forward, put his hand to his hair, and apparently

          hesitated.  There was a dead silence for a moment.  Suddenly

          the entire audience rose and stood in silence.  Some one began

          to spell out the word Missouri with an interval between the

          letters.  All joined in.  Then the house again became silent.

          Mr. Clemens broke the spell:



As you are all standing [he drawled in his characteristic voice], I

guess, I suppose I had better stand too.



[Then came a laugh and loud cries for a speech.  As the great humorist

spoke of his recent visit to Hannibal, his old home, his voice trembled.]



You cannot know what a strain it was on my emotions [he said].  In fact,

when I found myself shaking hands with persons I had not seen for fifty

years and looking into wrinkled faces that were so young and joyous when

I last saw them, I experienced emotions that I had never expected, and

did not know were in me.  I was profoundly moved anal saddened to think

that this was the last time, perhaps, that I would ever behold those kind

old faces and dear old scenes of childhood.



[The humorist then changed to a lighter mood, and for a time the audience

was in a continual roar of laughter.  He was particularly amused at the

eulogy on himself read by Gardiner Lathrop in conferring the degree.] He

has a fine opportunity to distinguish himself [said Mr. Clemens] by

telling the truth about me.



I have seen it stated in print that as a boy I had been guilty of

stealing peaches, apples, and watermelons.  I read a story to this effect

very closely not long ago, and I was convinced of one thing, which was

that the man who wrote it was of the opinion that it was wrong to steal,

and that I had not acted right in doing so.  I wish now, however, to make

an honest statement, which is that I do not believe, in all my checkered

career, I stole a ton of peaches.



One night I stole--I mean I removed--a watermelon from a wagon while the

owner was attending to another customer.  I crawled off to a secluded

spot, where I found that it was green.  It was the greenest melon in the

Mississippi Valley.  Then I began to reflect.  I began to be sorry.  I

wondered what George Washington would have done had he been in my place.

I thought a long time, and then suddenly felt that strange feeling which

comes to a man with a good resolution, and I took up that watermelon and

took it back to its owner.  I handed him the watermelon and told him to

reform.  He took my lecture much to heart, and, when he gave me a good

one in place of the green melon, I forgave him.



I told him that I would still be a customer of his, and that I cherished

no ill-feeling because of the incident--that would remain green in my

memory.













BUSINESS



          The alumni of Eastman College gave their annual banquet,

          March 30, 1901, at the Y. M. C. A. Building. Mr. James G.

          Cannon, of the Fourth National Bank, made the first speech of

          the evening, after which Mr. Clemens was introduced by Mr.

          Bailey as the personal friend of Tom Sawyer, who was one of the

          types of successful business men.



MR. CANNON has furnished me with texts enough to last as slow a speaker

as myself all the rest of the night.  I took exception to the introducing

of Mr. Cannon as a great financier, as if he were the only great

financier present.  I am a financier.  But my methods are not the same as

Mr. Cannon's.



I cannot say that I have turned out the great business man that I thought

I was when I began life.  But I am comparatively young yet, and may

learn.  I am rather inclined to believe that what troubled me was that I

got the big-head early in the game.  I want to explain to you a few

points of difference between the principles of business as I see them and

those that Mr. Cannon believes in.



He says that the primary rule of business success is loyalty to your

employer.  That's all right--as a theory.  What is the matter with

loyalty to yourself?  As nearly as I can understand Mr. Cannon's

methods, there is one great drawback to them.  He wants you to work a

great deal.  Diligence is a good thing, but taking things easy is much

more-restful.  My idea is that the employer should be the busy man, and

the employee the idle one.  The employer should be the worried man, and

the employee the happy one.  And why not?  He gets the salary.  My plan

is to get another man to do the work for me.  In that there's more

repose.  What I want is repose first, last, and all the time.



Mr. Cannon says that there are three cardinal rules of business success;

they are diligence, honesty, and truthfulness.  Well, diligence is all

right.  Let it go as a theory.  Honesty is the best policy--when there is

money in it.  But truthfulness is one of the most dangerous--why, this

man is misleading you.



I had an experience to-day with my wife which illustrates this.  I was

acknowledging a belated invitation to another dinner for this evening,

which seemed to have been sent about ten days ago.  It only reached me

this morning.  I was mortified at the discourtesy into which I had been

brought by this delay, and wondered what was being thought of me by my

hosts.  As I had accepted your invitation, of course I had to send

regrets to my other friends.



When I started to write this note my wife came up and stood looking over

my shoulder.  Women always want to know what is going on.  Said she

"Should not that read in the third person?"  I conceded that it should,

put aside what I was writing, and commenced over again.  That seemed to

satisfy her, and so she sat down and let me proceed.  I then--finished my

first note--and so sent what I intended.  I never could have done this if

I had let my wife know the truth about it.  Here is what I wrote:



     TO THE OHIO SOCIETY,--I have at this moment received a most kind

     invitation (eleven days old) from Mr. Southard, president; and a

     like one (ten days old) from Mr. Bryant, president of the Press

     Club.  I thank the society cordially for the compliment of these

     invitations, although I am booked elsewhere and cannot come.



     But, oh, I should like to know the name of the Lightning Express by

     which they were forwarded; for I owe a friend a dozen chickens, and

     I believe it will be cheaper to send eggs instead, and let them

     develop on the road.

                    Sincerely yours,

                                        Mark TWAIN.





I want to tell you of some of my experiences in business, and then I will

be in a position to lay down one general rule for the guidance of those

who want to succeed in business.  My first effort was about twenty-five

years ago.  I took hold of an invention--I don't know now what it was all

about, but some one came to me tend told me it was a good thing, and that

there was lots of money in it.  He persuaded me to invest $15,000, and I

lived up to my beliefs by engaging a man to develop it.  To make a long

story short, I sunk $40,000 in it.



Then I took up the publication of a book.  I called in a publisher and

said to him: "I want you to publish this book along lines which I shall

lay down.  I am the employer, and you are the employee.  I am going to

show them some new kinks in the publishing business.  And I want you to

draw on me for money as you go along," which he did.  He drew on me for

$56,000.  Then I asked him to take the book and call it off.  But he

refused to do that.



My next venture was with a machine for doing something or other.  I knew

less about that than I did about the invention.  But I sunk $170,000 in

the business, and I can't for the life of me recollect what it was the

machine was to do.



I was still undismayed.  You see, one of the strong points about my

business life was that I never gave up.  I undertook to publish General

Grant's book, and made $140,000 in six months.  My axiom is, to succeed

in business: avoid my example.













CARNEGIE THE BENEFACTOR



          At the dinner given in honor of Andrew Carnegie by the Lotos

          Club, March 17, 1909, Mr. Clemens appeared in a white suit from

          head to feet.  He wore a white double-breasted coat, white

          trousers, and white shoes.  The only relief was a big black

          cigar, which he confidentially informed the company was not

          from his usual stack bought at $3 per barrel.



The State of Missouri has for its coat of arms a barrel-head with two

Missourians, one on each side of it, and mark the motto--"United We

Stand, Divided We Fall."  Mr. Carnegie, this evening, has suffered from

compliments.  It is interesting to hear what people will say about a man.

Why, at the banquet given by this club in my honor, Mr. Carnegie had the

inspiration for which the club is now honoring him.  If Dunfermline

contributed so much to the United States in contributing Mr. Carnegie,

what would have happened if all Scotland had turned out?  These

Dunfermline folk have acquired advantages in coming to America.



Doctor McKelway paid the top compliment, the cumulation, when he said of

Mr. Carnegie:



"There is a man who wants to pay more taxes than he is charged." Richard

Watson Gilder did very well for a poet.  He advertised his magazine.  He

spoke of hiring Mr. Carnegie--the next thing he will be trying to hire

me.



If I undertook--to pay compliments I would do it stronger than any others

have done it, for what Mr. Carnegie wants are strong compliments.  Now,

the other side of seventy, I have preserved, as my chiefest virtue,

modesty.













ON POETRY, VERACITY, AND SUICIDE



          ADDRESS AT A DINNER OF THE MANHATTAN DICKENS FELLOWSHIP,

          NEW YORK CITY, FEBRUARY 7, 1906



          This dinner was in commemoration of the ninety-fourth

          anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens.  On an other

          occasion Mr. Clemens told the same story with variations and a

          different conclusion to the University Settlement Society.



I always had taken an interest in young people who wanted to become

poets.  I remember I was particularly interested in one budding poet when

I was a reporter.  His name was Butter.



One day he came to me and said, disconsolately, that he was going to

commit suicide--he was tired of life, not being able to express his

thoughts in poetic form.  Butter asked me what I thought of the idea.



I said I would; that it was a good idea.  "You can do me a friendly turn.

You go off in a private place and do it there, and I'll get it all.  You

do it, and I'll do as much for you some time."



At first he determined to drown himself.  Drowning is so nice and clean,

and writes up so well in a newspaper.



But things ne'er do go smoothly in weddings, suicides, or courtships.

Only there at the edge of the water, where Butter was to end himself,

lay a life-preserver--a big round canvas one, which would float after the

scrap-iron was soaked out of it.



Butter wouldn't kill himself with the life-preserver in sight, and so I

had an idea.  I took it to a pawnshop, and [soaked] it for a revolver:

The pawnbroker didn't think much of the exchange, but when I explained

the situation he acquiesced.  We went up on top of a high building, and

this is what happened to the poet:



He put the revolver to his forehead and blew a tunnel straight through

his head.  The tunnel was about the size of your finger.  You could look

right through it.  The job was complete; there was nothing in it.



Well, after that that man never could write prose, but he could write

poetry.  He could write it after he had blown his brains out.  There is

lots of that talent all over the country, but the trouble is they don't

develop it.



I am suffering now from the fact that I, who have told the truth a good

many times in my life, have lately received more letters than anybody

else urging me to lead a righteous life.  I have more friends who want to

see me develop on a high level than anybody else.



Young John D. Rockefeller, two weeks ago, taught his Bible class all

about veracity, and why it was better that everybody should always keep a

plentiful supply on hand.  Some of the letters I have received suggest

that I ought to attend his class and learn, too.  Why, I know Mr.

Rockefeller, and he is a good fellow.  He is competent in many ways to

teach a Bible class, but when it comes to veracity he is only thirty-five

years old.  I'm seventy years old.  I have been familiar with veracity

twice as long as he.



And the story about George Washington and his little hatchet has also

been suggested to me in these letters--in a fugitive way, as if I needed

some of George Washington and his hatchet in my constitution.  Why, dear

me, they overlook the real point in that story.  The point is not the one

that is usually suggested, and you can readily see that.



The point is not that George said to his father, "Yes, father, I cut down

the cheery-tree; I can't tell a lie," but that the little boy--only seven

years old--should have his sagacity developed under such circumstances.

He was a boy wise beyond his years.  His conduct then was a prophecy of

later years.  Yes, I think he was the most remarkable man the country

ever produced-up to my time, anyway.



Now then, little George realized that circumstantial evidence was against

him.  He knew that his father would know from the size of the chips that

no full-grown hatchet cut that tree down, and that no man would have

haggled it so.  He knew that his father would send around the plantation

and inquire for a small boy with a hatchet, and he had the wisdom to come

out and confess it.  Now, the idea that his father was overjoyed when he

told little George that he would rather have him cut down, a thousand

cheery-trees than tell a lie is all nonsense.  What did he really mean?

Why, that he was absolutely astonished that he had a son who had the

chance to tell a lie and didn't.



I admire old George--if that was his name--for his discernment.  He knew

when he said that his son couldn't tell a lie that he was stretching it a

good deal.  He wouldn't have to go to John D. Rockefeller's Bible class

to find that out.  The way the old George Washington story goes down it

doesn't do anybody any good.  It only discourages people who can tell a

lie.













WELCOME HOME



          ADDRESS AT THE DINNER IN HIS HONOR AT THE LOTOS CLUB,

          NOVEMBER 10, 1900



In August, 1895, just before sailing for Australia, Mr. Clemens issued

the following statement:



"It has been reported that I sacrificed, for the benefit of the

creditors, the property of the publishing firm whose financial backer I

was, and that I am now lecturing for my own benefit.



"This is an error.  I intend the lectures, as well as the property, for

the creditors.  The law recognizes no mortgage on a man's brains, and a

merchant who has given up all he has may take advantage of the laws of

insolvency and may start free again for himself.  But I am not a business

man, and honor is a harder master than the law.  It cannot compromise for

less than one hundred cents on a dollar, and its debts are never

outlawed.



"I had a two-thirds interest in the publishing firm whose capital I

furnished.  If the firm had prospered I would have expected to collect

two-thirds of the profits.  As it is, I expect to pay all the debts.  My

partner has no resources, and I do not look for assistance to my wife,

whose contributions in cash from her own means have nearly equalled the

claims of all the creditors combined.  She has taken nothing; on the

contrary, she has helped and intends to help me to satisfy the

obligations due to the rest of the creditors.



"It is my intention to ask my creditors to accept that as a legal

discharge, and trust to my honor to pay the other fifty per cent. as fast

as I can earn it.  From my reception thus far on my lecturing tour, I am

confident that if I live I can pay off the last debt within four years.



"After which, at the age of sixty-four, I can make a fresh and

unincumbered start in life.  I am going to Australia, India, and South

Africa, and next year I hope to make a tour of the great cities of the

United States."



I thank you all out of my heart for this fraternal welcome, and it seems

almost too fine, almost too magnificent, for a humble Missourian such as

I am, far from his native haunts on the banks of the Mississippi; yet my

modesty is in a degree fortified by observing that I am not the only

Missourian who has been honored here to-night, for I see at this very

table-here is a Missourian [indicating Mr. McKelway], and there is a

Missourian [indicating Mr. Depew], and there is another Missourian--and

Hendrix and Clemens; and last but not least, the greatest Missourian of

them all--here he sits--Tom Reed, who has always concealed his birth till

now.  And since I have been away I know what has been happening in his

case: he has deserted politics, and now is leading a creditable life.  He

has reformed, and God prosper him; and I judge, by a remark which he made

up-stairs awhile ago, that he had found a new business that is utterly

suited to his make and constitution, and all he is doing now is that he

is around raising the average of personal beauty.



But I am grateful to the president for the kind words which he has said

of me, and it is not for me to say whether these praises were deserved or

not.  I prefer to accept them just as they stand, without concerning

myself with the statistics upon which they have been built, but only with

that large matter, that essential matter, the good-fellowship, the

kindliness, the magnanimity, and generosity that prompted their

utterance.  Well, many things have happened since I sat here before, and

now that I think of it, the president's reference to the debts which were

left by the bankrupt firm of Charles L. Webster & Co. gives me an

opportunity to say a word which I very much wish to say, not for myself,

but for ninety-five men and women whom I shall always hold in high esteem

and in pleasant remembrance--the creditors of that firm.  They treated me

well; they treated me handsomely.  There were ninety-six of them, and by

not a finger's weight did ninety-five of them add to the burden of that

time for me.  Ninety-five out of the ninety-six--they didn't indicate by

any word or sign that they were anxious about their money.  They treated

me well, and I shall not forget it; I could not forget it if I wanted to.

Many of them said, "Don't you worry, don't you hurry"; that's what they

said.  Why, if I could have that kind of creditors always, and that

experience, I would recognize it as a personal loss to be out of debt.

I owe those ninety-five creditors a debt of homage, and I pay it now in

such measure as one may pay so fine a debt in mere words.  Yes, they said

that very thing.  I was not personally acquainted with ten of them, and

yet they said, "Don't you worry, and don't you hurry."  I know that

phrase by heart, and if all the other music should perish out of the

world it would still sing to me.  I appreciate that; I am glad to say

this word; people say so much about me, and they forget those creditors.

They were handsomer than I was--or Tom Reed.



Oh, you have been doing many things in this time that I have been absent;

you have done lots of things, some that are well worth remembering, too.

Now, we have fought a righteous war since I have gone, and that is rare

in history--a righteous war is so rare that it is almost unknown in

history; but by the grace of that war we set Cuba free, and we joined her

to those three or four nations that exist on this earth; and we started

out to set those poor Filipinos free, too, and why, why, why that most

righteous purpose of ours has apparently miscarried I suppose I never

shall know.



But we have made a most creditable record in China in these days--our

sound and level-headed administration has made a most creditable record

over there, and there are some of the Powers that cannot say that by any

means.  The Yellow Terror is threatening this world to-day.  It is

looming vast and ominous on that distant horizon.  I do not know what is

going to be the result of that Yellow Terror, but our government has had

no hand in evoking it, and let's be happy in that and proud of it.



We have nursed free silver, we watched by its cradle; we have done the

best we could to raise that child, but those pestiferous Republicans have

--well, they keep giving it the measles every chance they get, and we

never shall raise that child.  Well, that's no matter--there's plenty of

other things to do, and we must think of something else.  Well, we have

tried a President four years, criticised him and found fault with him the

whole time, and turned around a day or two ago with votes enough to spare

to elect another.  O consistency!  consistency!  thy name--I don't know

what thy name is--Thompson will do--any name will do--but you see there

is the fact, there is the consistency.  Then we have tried for governor

an illustrious Rough Rider, and we liked him so much in that great office

that now we have made him Vice-President--not in order that that office

shall give him distinction, but that he may confer distinction upon that

office.  And it's needed, too--it's needed.  And now, for a while anyway,

we shall not be stammering and embarrassed when a stranger asks us, "What

is the name of the Vice-President?"  This one is known; this one is

pretty well known, pretty widely known, and in some quarters favorably.

I am not accustomed to dealing in these fulsome compliments, and I am

probably overdoing it a little; but--well, my old affectionate admiration

for Governor Roosevelt has probably betrayed me into the complimentary

excess; but I know him, and you know him; and if you give him rope

enough--I mean if--oh yes, he will justify that compliment; leave it just

as it is.  And now we have put in his place Mr. Odell, another Rough

Rider, I suppose; all the fat things go to that profession now.  Why, I

could have been a Rough Rider myself if I had known that this political

Klondike was going to open up, and I would have been a Rough Rider if I

could have gone to war on an automobile but not on a horse!  No, I know

the horse too well; I have known the horse in war and in peace, and there

is no place where a horse is comfortable.  The horse has too many

caprices, and he is too much given to initiative.  He invents too many

new ideas.  No, I don't want anything to do with a horse.



And then we have taken Chauncey Depew out of a useful and active life and

made him a Senator--embalmed him, corked him up.  And I am not grieving.

That man has said many a true thing about me in his time, and I always

said something would happen to him.  Look at that [pointing to Mr. Depew]

gilded mummy!  He has made my life a sorrow to me at many a banquet on

both sides of the ocean, and now he has got it.  Perish the hand that

pulls that cork!



All these things have happened, all these things have come to pass, while

I have been away, and it just shows how little a Mugwump can be missed in

a cold, unfeeling world, even when he is the last one that is left--

a GRAND OLD PARTY all by himself.  And there is another thing that has

happened, perhaps the most imposing event of them all: the institution

called the Daughters of the--Crown--the Daughters of the Royal Crown--has

established itself and gone into business. Now, there's an American idea

for you; there's an idea born of God knows what kind of specialized

insanity, but not softening of the brain--you cannot soften a thing that

doesn't exist--the Daughters of the Royal Crown!  Nobody eligible but

American descendants of Charles II.  Dear me, how the fancy product of

that old harem still holds out!



Well, I am truly glad to foregather with you again, and partake of the

bread and salt of this hospitable house once more.  Seven years ago, when

I was your guest here, when I was old and despondent, you gave me the

grip and the word that lift a man up and make him glad to be alive; and

now I come back from my exile young again, fresh and alive, and ready to

begin life once more, and your welcome puts the finishing touch upon my

restored youth and makes it real to me, and not a gracious dream that

must vanish with the morning.  I thank you.













AN UNDELIVERED SPEECH



          The steamship St. Paul was to have been launched from Cramp's

          shipyard in Philadelphia on March 25, 1895.  After the

          launching a luncheon was to nave been given, at which Mr.

          Clemens was to make a speech.  Just before the final word was

          given a reporter asked Mr. Clemens for a copy of his speech to

          be delivered at the luncheon.  To facilitate the work of the

          reporter he loaned him a typewritten copy of the speech.  It

          happened, however, that when the blocks were knocked away the

          big ship refused to budge, and no amount of labor could move

          her an inch.  She had stuck fast upon the ways.  As a result,

          the launching was postponed for a week or two; but in the mean

          time Mr. Clemens had gone to Europe.  Years after a reporter

          called on Mr. Clemens and submitted the manuscript of the

          speech, which was as follows:



Day after to-morrow I sail for England in a ship of this line, the Paris.

It will be my fourteenth crossing in three years and a half.  Therefore,

my presence here, as you see, is quite natural, quite commercial.  I am

interested in ships.  They interest me more now than hotels do.  When a

new ship is launched I feel a desire to go and see if she will be good

quarters for me to live in, particularly if she belongs to this line, for

it is by this line that I have done most of my ferrying.



People wonder why I go so much.  Well, I go partly for my health, partly

to familiarize myself with the road.  I have gone over the same road so

many times now that I know all the whales that belong along the route,

and latterly it is an embarrassment to me to meet them, for they do not

look glad to see me, but annoyed, and they seem to say: "Here is this old

derelict again."



Earlier in life this would have pained me and made me ashamed, but I am

older now, and when I am behaving myself, and doing right, I do not care

for a whale's opinion about me.  When we are young we generally estimate

an opinion by the size of the person that holds it, but later we find

that that is an uncertain rule, for we realize that there are times when

a hornet's opinion disturbs us more than an emperor's.



I do not mean that I care nothing at all for a whale's opinion, for that

would be going to too great a length.  Of course, it is better to have

the good opinion of a whale than his disapproval; but my position is that

if you cannot have a whale's good opinion, except at some sacrifice of

principle or personal dignity, it is better to try to live without it.

That is my idea about whales.



Yes, I have gone over that same route so often that I know my way without

a compass, just by the waves.  I know all the large waves and a good many

of the small ones.  Also the sunsets.  I know every sunset and where it

belongs just by its color.  Necessarily, then, I do not make the passage

now for scenery.  That is all gone by.



What I prize most is safety, and in, the second place swift transit and

handiness.  These are best furnished, by the American line, whose

watertight compartments have no passage through them; no doors to be left

open, and consequently no way for water to get from one of them to

another in time of collision.  If you nullify the peril which collisions

threaten you with, you nullify the only very serious peril which attends

voyages in the great liners of our day, and makes voyaging safer than

staying at home.



When the Paris was half-torn to pieces some years ago, enough of the

Atlantic ebbed and flowed through one end of her, during her long agony,

to sink the fleets of the world if distributed among them; but she

floated in perfect safety, and no life was lost.  In time of collision

the rock of Gibraltar is not safer than the Paris and other great ships

of this line.  This seems to be the only great line in the world that

takes a passenger from metropolis to metropolis without the intervention

of tugs and barges or bridges--takes him through without breaking bulk,

so to speak.



On the English side he lands at a dock; on the dock a special train is

waiting; in an hour and three-quarters he is in, London.  Nothing could

be handier.  If your journey were from a sand-pit on our side to a

lighthouse on the other, you could make it quicker by other lines, but

that is not the case.  The journey is from the city of New York to the

city of London, and no line can do that journey quicker than this one,

nor anywhere near as conveniently and handily.  And when the passenger

lands on our side he lands on the American side of the river, not in the

provinces.  As a very learned man said on the last voyage (he is head

quartermaster of the New York land garboard streak of the middle watch)



"When we land a passenger on the American side there's nothing betwix him

and his hotel but hell and the hackman."



I am glad, with you and the nation, to welcome the new ship.  She is

another pride, another consolation, for a great country whose mighty

fleets have all vanished, and which has almost forgotten, what it is to

fly its flag to sea.  I am not sure as to which St. Paul she is named

for.  Some think it is the one that is on the upper Mississippi, but the

head quartermaster told me it was the one that killed Goliath.  But it is

not important.  No matter which it is, let us give her hearty welcome and

godspeed.













SIXTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY



          AT THE METROPOLITAN CLUB, NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 28, 1902



          Address at a dinner given in honor of Mr. Clemens by Colonel

          Harvey, President of Harper & Brothers.



I think I ought to be allowed to talk as long as I want to, for the

reason that I have cancelled all my winter's engagements of every kind,

for good and sufficient reasons, and am making no new engagements for

this winter, and, therefore, this is the only chance I shall have to

disembowel my skull for a year--close the mouth in that portrait for a

year.  I want to offer thanks and homage to the chairman for this

innovation which he has introduced here, which is an improvement, as I

consider it, on the old-fashioned style of conducting occasions like

this.  That was bad that was a bad, bad, bad arrangement.  Under that old

custom the chairman got up and made a speech, he introduced the prisoner

at the bar, and covered him all over with compliments, nothing but

compliments, not a thing but compliments, never a slur, and sat down and

left that man to get up and talk without a text.  You cannot talk on

compliments; that is not a text.  No modest person, and I was born one,

can talk on compliments.  A man gets up and is filled to the eyes with

happy emotions, but his tongue is tied; he has nothing to say; he is in

the condition of Doctor Rice's friend who came home drunk and explained

it to his wife, and his wife said to him, "John, when you have drunk all

the whiskey you want, you ought to ask for sarsaparilla."  He said, "Yes,

but when I have drunk all the whiskey I want I can't say sarsaparilla."

And so I think it is much better to leave a man unmolested until the

testimony and pleadings are all in.  Otherwise he is dumb--he is at the

sarsaparilla stage.



Before I get to the higgledy-piggledy point, as Mr. Howells suggested I

do, I want to thank you, gentlemen, for this very high honor you are

doing me, and I am quite competent to estimate it at its value.  I see

around me captains of all the illustrious industries, most distinguished

men; there are more than fifty here, and I believe I know thirty-nine of

them well.  I could probably borrow money from--from the others, anyway.

It is a proud thing to me, indeed, to see such a distinguished company

gather here on such an occasion as this, when there is no foreign prince

to be feted--when you have come here not to do honor to hereditary

privilege and ancient lineage, but to do reverence to mere moral

excellence and elemental veracity-and, dear me, how old it seems to make

me!  I look around me and I see three or four persons I have known so

many, many years.  I have known Mr. Secretary Hay--John Hay, as the

nation and the rest of his friends love to call him--I have known John

Hay and Tom Reed and the Reverend Twichell close upon thirty-six years.

Close upon thirty-six years I have known those venerable men.  I have

known Mr. Howells nearly thirty-four years, and I knew Chauncey Depew

before he could walk straight, and before he learned to tell the truth.

Twenty-seven years ago, I heard him make the most noble and eloquent and

beautiful speech that has ever fallen from even his capable lips.  Tom

Reed said that my principal defect was inaccuracy of statement.  Well,

suppose that that is true.  What's the use of telling the truth all the

time?  I never tell the truth about Tom Reed--but that is his defect,

truth; he speaks the truth always.  Tom Reed has a good heart, and he has

a good intellect, but he hasn't any judgment.  Why, when Tom Reed was

invited to lecture to the Ladies' Society for the Procreation or

Procrastination, or something, of morals, I don't know what it was--

advancement, I suppose, of pure morals--he had the immortal indiscretion

to begin by saying that some of us can't be optimists, but by judiciously

utilizing the opportunities that Providence puts in our way we can all be

bigamists.  You perceive his limitations.  Anything he has in his mind he

states, if he thinks it is true.  Well, that was true, but that was no

place to say it--so they fired him out.



A lot of accounts have been settled here tonight for me; I have held

grudges against some of these people, but they have all been wiped out by

the very handsome compliments that have been paid me.  Even Wayne

MacVeagh--I have had a grudge against him many years.  The first time I

saw Wayne MacVeagh was at a private dinner-party at Charles A. Dana's,

and when I got there he was clattering along, and I tried to get a word

in here and there; but you know what Wayne MacVeagh is when he is

started, and I could not get in five words to his one--or one word to his

five.  I struggled along and struggled along, and--well, I wanted to tell

and I was trying to tell a dream I had had the night before, and it was a

remarkable dream, a dream worth people's while to listen to, a dream

recounting Sam Jones the revivalist's reception in heaven.  I was on a

train, and was approaching the celestial way-station--I had a through

ticket--and I noticed a man sitting alongside of me asleep, and he had

his ticket in his hat.  He was the remains of the Archbishop of

Canterbury; I recognized him by his photograph.  I had nothing against

him, so I took his ticket and let him have mine.  He didn't object--he

wasn't in a condition to object--and presently when the train stopped at

the heavenly station--well, I got off, and he went on by request--but

there they all were, the angels, you know, millions of them, every one

with a torch; they had arranged for a torch-light procession; they were

expecting the Archbishop, and when I got off they started to raise a

shout, but it didn't materialize.  I don't know whether they were

disappointed.  I suppose they had a lot of superstitious ideas about the

Archbishop and what he should look like, and I didn't fill the bill, and

I was trying to explain to Saint Peter, and was doing it in the German

tongue, because I didn't want to be too explicit.  Well, I found it was

no use, I couldn't get along, for Wayne MacVeagh was occupying the whole

place, and I said to Mr. Dana, "What is the matter with that man?  Who is

that man with the long tongue?  What's the trouble with him, that long,

lank cadaver, old oil-derrick out of a job--who is that?"  "Well, now,"

Mr. Dana said, "you don't want to meddle with him; you had better keep

quiet; just keep quiet, because that's a bad man.  Talk!  He was born to

talk. Don't let him get out with you; he'll skin you."  I said, "I have

been skinned, skinned, and skinned for years, there is nothing left."

He said, "Oh, you'll find there is; that man is the very seed and

inspiration of that proverb which says, 'No matter how close you skin an

onion, a clever man can always peel it again.'"  Well, I reflected and

I quieted down.  That would never occur to Tom Reed.  He's got no

discretion.  Well, MacVeagh is just the same man; he hasn't changed a bit

in all those years; he has been peeling Mr. Mitchell lately.  That's the

kind of man he is.



Mr. Howells--that poem of his is admirable; that's the way to treat a

person.  Howells has a peculiar gift for seeing the merits of people,

and he has always exhibited them in my favor.  Howells has never written

anything about me that I couldn't read six or seven times a day; he is

always just and always fair; he has written more appreciatively of me

than any one in this world, and published it in the North American

Review.  He did me the justice to say that my intentions--he italicized

that--that my intentions were always good, that I wounded people's

conventions rather than their convictions.  Now, I wouldn't want anything

handsomer than that said of me.  I would rather wait, with anything harsh

I might have to say, till the convictions become conventions.  Bangs has

traced me all the way down.  He can't find that honest man, but I will

look for him in the looking-glass when I get home.  It was intimated by

the Colonel that it is New England that makes New York and builds up this

country and makes it great, overlooking the fact that there's a lot of

people here who came from elsewhere, like John Hay from away out West,

and Howells from Ohio, and St. Clair McKelway and me from Missouri, and

we are doing what we can to build up New York a little-elevate it.  Why,

when I was living in that village of Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of

the Mississippi, and Hay up in the town of Warsaw, also on the banks of

the Mississippi River it is an emotional bit of the Mississippi, and when

it is low water you have to climb up to it on a ladder, and when it

floods you have to hunt for it; with a deep-sea lead--but it is a great

and beautiful country.  In that old time it was a paradise for

simplicity--it was a simple, simple life, cheap but comfortable, and full

of sweetness, and there was nothing of this rage of modern civilization

there at all.  It was a delectable land.  I went out there last June,

and I met in that town of Hannibal a schoolmate of mine, John Briggs,

whom I had not seen for more than fifty years. I tell you, that was a

meeting!  That pal whom I had known as a little boy long ago, and knew

now as a stately man three or four inches over six feet and browned by

exposure to many climes, he was back there to see that old place again.

We spent a whole afternoon going about here and there and yonder, and

hunting up the scenes and talking of the crimes which we had committed so

long ago.  It was a heartbreaking delight, full of pathos, laughter, and

tears, all mixed together; and we called the roll of the boys and girls

that we picnicked and sweethearted with so many years ago, and there were

hardly half a dozen of them left; the rest were in their graves; and we

went up there on the summit of that hill, a treasured place in my memory,

the summit of Holiday's Hill, and looked out again over that magnificent

panorama of the Mississippi River, sweeping along league after league, a

level green paradise on one side, and retreating capes and promontories

as far as you could see on the other, fading away in the soft, rich

lights of the remote distance.  I recognized then that I was seeing now

the most enchanting river view the planet could furnish.  I never knew it

when I was a boy; it took an educated eye that had travelled over the

globe to know and appreciate it; and John said, "Can you point out the

place where Bear Creek used to be before the railroad came?"  I said,

"Yes, it ran along yonder."  "And can you point out the swimming-hole?"

"Yes, out there."  And he said, "Can you point out the place where we

stole the skiff?"  Well, I didn't know which one he meant.  Such a

wilderness of events had intervened since that day, more than fifty years

ago, it took me more than five minutes to call back that little incident,

and then I did call it back; it was a white skiff, and we painted it red

to allay suspicion.  And the saddest, saddest man came along--a stranger

he was--and he looked that red skiff over so pathetically, and he said:

"Well, if it weren't for the complexion I'd know whose skiff that was."

He said it in that pleading way, you know, that appeals for sympathy and

suggestion; we were full of sympathy for him, but we weren't in any

condition to offer suggestions.  I can see him yet as he turned away with

that same sad look on his face and vanished out of history forever.

I wonder what became of that man.  I know what became of the skiff.

Well, it was a beautiful life, a lovely life.  There was no crime.

Merely little things like pillaging orchards and watermelon-patches and

breaking the Sabbath--we didn't break the Sabbath often enough to

signify--once a week perhaps.  But we were good boys, good Presbyterian

boys, all Presbyterian boys, and loyal and all that; anyway, we were good

Presbyterian boys when the weather was doubtful; when it was fair, we did

wander a little from the fold.



Look at John Hay and me.  There we were in obscurity, and look where we

are now.  Consider the ladder which he has climbed, the illustrious

vocations he has served--and vocations is the right word; he has in all

those vocations acquitted himself with high credit and honor to his

country and to the mother that bore him.  Scholar, soldier, diplomat,

poet, historian--now, see where we are.  He is Secretary of State and I

am a gentleman.  It could not happen in any other country.  Our

institutions give men the positions that of right belong to them through

merit; all you men have won your places, not by heredities, and not by

family influence or extraneous help, but only by the natural gifts God

gave you at your birth, made effective by your own energies; this is the

country to live in.



Now, there is one invisible guest here.  A part of me is present; the

larger part, the better part, is yonder at her home; that is my wife,

and she has a good many personal friends here, and I think it won't

distress any one of them to know that, although she is going to be

confined to that bed for many months to come from that nervous

prostration, there is not any danger and she is coming along very well--

and I think it quite appropriate that I should speak of her.  I knew her

for the first time just in the same year that I first knew John Hay and

Tom Reed and Mr. Twichell--thirty-six years ago--and she has been the

best friend I have ever had, and that is saying a good deal; she has

reared me--she and Twichell together--and what I am I owe to them.

Twichell why, it is such a pleasure to look upon Twichell's face!

For five-and-twenty years I was under the Rev.  Mr. Twichell's tuition,

I was in his pastorate, occupying a pew in his church, and held him in

due reverence.  That man is full of all the graces that go to make a

person companionable and beloved; and wherever Twichell goes to start a

church the people flock there to buy the land; they find real estate goes

up all around the spot, and the envious and the thoughtful always try to

get Twichell to move to their neighborhood and start a church; and

wherever you see him go you can go and buy land there with confidence,

feeling sure that there will be a double price for you before very long.

I am not saying this to flatter Mr. Twichell; it is the fact.  Many and

many a time I have attended the annual sale in his church, and bought up

all the pews on a margin--and it would have been better for me

spiritually and financially if I had stayed under his wing.



I have tried to do good in this world, and it is marvellous in how many

different ways I have done good, and it is comfortable to reflect--now,

there's Mr. Rogers--just out of the affection I bear that man many a time

I have given him points in finance that he had never thought of--and if

he could lay aside envy, prejudice, and superstition, and utilize those

ideas in his business, it would make a difference in his bank account.



Well, I like the poetry.  I like all the speeches and the poetry, too.

I liked Doctor Van Dyke's poem.  I wish I could return thanks in proper

measure to you, gentlemen, who have spoken and violated your feelings to

pay me compliments; some were merited and some you overlooked, it is

true; and Colonel Harvey did slander every one of you, and put things

into my mouth that I never said, never thought of at all.



And now, my wife and I, out of our single heart, return you our deepest

and most grateful thanks, and--yesterday was her birthday.













TO THE WHITEFRIARS



          ADDRESS AT THE DINNER GIVEN BY THE WHITEFRIARS CLUB IN HONOR OF

          MR. CLEMENS, LONDON, JUNE 20, 1899



          The Whitefriars Club was founded by Dr. Samuel Johnson, and Mr.

          Clemens was made an honorary member in 1874.  The members are

          representative of literary and journalistic London.  The toast

          of "Our Guest" was proposed by Louis F. Austin, of the

          Illustrated London News, and in the course of some humorous

          remarks he referred to the vow and to the imaginary woes of the

          "Friars," as the members of the club style themselves.



MR. CHAIRMAN AND BRETHREN OF THE VOW--in whatever the vow is; for

although I have been a member of this club for five-and twenty years,

I don't know any more about what that vow is than Mr. Austin seems to.

But what ever the vow is, I don't care what it is.  I have made a

thousand vows.



There is no pleasure comparable to making a vow in the presence of one

who appreciates that vow, in the presence of men who honor and appreciate

you for making the vow, and men who admire you for making the vow.



There is only one pleasure higher than that, and that is to get outside

and break the vow.  A vow is always a pledge of some kind or other for

the protection of your own morals and principles or somebody else's,

and generally, by the irony of fate, it is for the protection of your own

morals.



Hence we have pledges that make us eschew tobacco or wine, and while you

are taking the pledge there is a holy influence about that makes you feel

you are reformed, and that you can never be so happy again in this world

until--you get outside and take a drink.



I had forgotten that I was a member of this club--it is so long ago.

But now I remember that I was here five-and-twenty years ago, and that I

was then at a dinner of the Whitefriars Club, and it was in those old

days when you had just made two great finds.  All London was talking

about nothing else than that they had found Livingstone, and that the

lost Sir Roger Tichborne had been found--and they were trying him for it.



And at the dinner, Chairman (I do not know who he was)--failed to come to

time.  The gentleman who had been appointed to pay me the customary

compliments and to introduce me forgot the compliments, and did not know

what they were.



And George Augustus Sala came in at the last moment, just when I was

about to go without compliments altogether.  And that man was a gifted

man.  They just called on him instantaneously, while he was going to sit

down, to introduce the stranger, and Sala, made one of those marvellous

speeches which he was capable of making.  I think no man talked so fast

as Sala did.  One did not need wine while he was making a speech.  The

rapidity of his utterance made a man drunk in a minute.  An incomparable

speech was that, an impromptu speech, and--an impromptu speech is a

seldom thing, and he did it so well.



He went into the whole history of the United States, and made it entirely

new to me.  He filled it with episodes and incidents that Washington

never heard of, and he did it so convincingly that although I knew none

of it had happened, from that day to this I do not know any history but

Sala's.



I do not know anything so sad as a dinner where you are going to get up

and say something by-and-by, and you do not know what it is.  You sit and

wonder and wonder what the gentleman is going to say who is going to

introduce you.  You know that if he says something severe, that if he

will deride you, or traduce you, or do anything of that kind, he will

furnish you with a text, because anybody can get up and talk against

that.



Anybody can get up and straighten out his character.  But when a

gentleman gets up and merely tells the truth about you, what can you do?



Mr. Austin has done well.  He has supplied so many texts that I will have

to drop out a lot of them, and that is about as difficult as when you do

not have any text at all.  Now, he made a beautiful and smooth speech

without any difficulty at all, and I could have done that if I had gone

on with the schooling with which I began.  I see here a gentleman on my

left who was my master in the art of oratory more than twenty-five years

ago.



When I look upon the inspiring face of Mr. Depew, it carries me a long

way back.  An old and valued friend of mine is he, and I saw his career

as it came along, and it has reached pretty well up to now, when he, by

another miscarriage of justice, is a United States Senator.  But those

were delightful days when I was taking lessons in oratory.



My other master the Ambassador-is not here yet.  Under those two

gentlemen I learned to make after-dinner speeches, and it was charming.



You know the New England dinner is the great occasion on the other side

of the water.  It is held every year to celebrate the landing of the

Pilgrims.  Those Pilgrims were a lot of people who were not needed in

England, and you know they had great rivalry, and they were persuaded to

go elsewhere, and they chartered a ship called Mayflower and set sail,

and I have heard it said that they pumped the Atlantic Ocean through that

ship sixteen times.



They fell in over there with the Dutch from Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and a

lot of other places with profane names, and it is from that gang that Mr.

Depew is descended.



On the other hand, Mr. Choate is descended from those Puritans who landed

on a bitter night in December.  Every year those people used to meet at a

great banquet in New York, and those masters of mind in oratory had to

make speeches.  It was Doctor Depew's business to get up there and

apologise for the Dutch, and Mr. Choate had to get up later and explain

the crimes of the Puritans, and grand, beautiful times we used to have.



It is curious that after that long lapse of time I meet the Whitefriars

again, some looking as young and fresh as in the old days, others showing

a certain amount of wear and tear, and here, after all this time, I find

one of the masters of oratory and the others named in the list.



And here we three meet again as exiles on one pretext or another, and you

will notice that while we are absent there is a pleasing tranquillity in

America--a building up of public confidence.  We are doing the best we

can for our country.  I think we have spent our lives in serving our

country, and we never serve it to greater advantage than when we get out

of it.



But impromptu speaking--that is what I was trying to learn.  That is a

difficult thing.  I used to do it in this way.  I used to begin about a

week ahead, and write out my impromptu, speech and get it by heart.  Then

I brought it to the New England dinner printed on a piece of paper in my

pocket, so that I could pass it to the reporters all cut and dried, and

in order to do an impromptu speech as it should be done you have to

indicate the places for pauses and hesitations.  I put them all in it.

And then you want the applause in the right places.



When I got to the place where it should come in, if it did not come in

I did not care, but I had it marked in the paper.  And these masters of

mind used to wonder why it was my speech came out in the morning in the

first person, while theirs went through the butchery of synopsis.



I do that kind of speech (I mean an offhand speech), and do it well, and

make no mistake in such a way to deceive the audience completely and make

that audience believe it is an impromptu speech--that is art.



I was frightened out of it at last by an experience of Doctor Hayes.  He

was a sort of Nansen of that day.  He had been to the North Pole, and it

made him celebrated.  He had even seen the polar bear climb the pole.



He had made one of those magnificent voyages such as Nansen made, and in

those days when a man did anything which greatly distinguished him for

the moment he had to come on to the lecture platform and tell all about

it.



Doctor Hayes was a great, magnificent creature like Nansen, superbly

built.  He was to appear in Boston.  He wrote his lecture out, and it was

his purpose to read it from manuscript; but in an evil hour he concluded

that it would be a good thing to preface it with something rather

handsome, poetical, and beautiful that he could get off by heart and

deliver as if it were the thought of the moment.



He had not had my experience, and could not do that.  He came on the

platform, held his manuscript down, and began with a beautiful piece of

oratory.  He spoke something like this:



"When a lonely human being, a pigmy in the midst of the architecture of

nature, stands solitary on those icy waters and looks abroad to the

horizon and sees mighty castles and temples of eternal ice raising up

their pinnacles tipped by the pencil of the departing sun--"



Here a man came across the platform and touched him on the shoulder, and

said: "One minute."  And then to the audience:



"Is Mrs. John Smith in the house?  Her husband has slipped on the ice and

broken his leg."



And you could see the Mrs. John Smiths get up everywhere and drift out of

the house, and it made great gaps everywhere.  Then Doctor Hayes began

again: "When a lonely man, a pigmy in the architecture--"  The janitor

came in again and shouted: "It is not Mrs. John Smith!  It is Mrs. John

Jones!"



Then all the Mrs. Jones got up and left.  Once more the speaker started,

and was in the midst of the sentence when he was interrupted again, and

the result was that the lecture was not delivered.  But the lecturer

interviewed the janitor afterward in a private room, and of the fragments

of the janitor they took "twelve basketsful."



Now, I don't want to sit down just in this way.  I have been talking with

so much levity that I have said no serious thing, and you are really no

better or wiser, although Robert Buchanan has suggested that I am a

person who deals in wisdom.  I have said nothing which would make you

better than when you came here.



I should be sorry to sit down without having said one serious word which

you can carry home and relate to your children and the old people who are

not able to get away.



And this is just a little maxim which has saved me from many a difficulty

and many a disaster, and in times of tribulation and uncertainty has come

to my rescue, as it shall to yours if you observe it as I do day and

night.



I always use it in an emergency, and you can take it home as a legacy

from me, and it is "When in doubt, tell the truth."













THE ASCOT GOLD CUP



          The news of Mr. Clemens's arrival in England in June, 1907, was

          announced in the papers with big headlines.  Immediately

          following the announcement was the news--also with big

          headlines--that the Ascot Gold Cup had been stolen the same

          day.  The combination, MARK TWAIN ARRIVES-ASCOT CUP STOLEN,

          amused the public.  The Lord Mayor of London gave a banquet at

          the Mansion House in honor of Mr. Clemens.



I do assure you that I am not so dishonest as I look.  I have been so

busy trying to rehabilitate my honor about that Ascot Cup that I have had

no time to prepare a speech.



I was not so honest in former days as I am now, but I have always been

reasonably honest.  Well, you know how a man is influenced by his

surroundings.  Once upon a time I went to a public meeting where the

oratory of a charitable worker so worked on my feelings that, in common

with others, I would have dropped something substantial in the hat--if it

had come round at that moment.



The speaker had the power of putting those vivid pictures before one.

We were all affected.  That was the moment for the hat.  I would have put

two hundred dollars in.  Before he had finished I could have put in four

hundred dollars.  I felt I could have filled up a blank check--with

somebody else's name--and dropped it in.



Well, now, another speaker got up, and in fifteen minutes damped my

spirit; and during the speech of the third speaker all my enthusiasm went

away.  When at last the hat came round I dropped in ten cents--and took

out twenty-five.



I came over here to get the honorary degree from Oxford, and I would have

encompassed the seven seas for an honor like that--the greatest honor

that has ever fallen to my share.  I am grateful to Oxford for conferring

that honor upon me, and I am sure my country appreciates it, because

first and foremost it is an honor to my country.



And now I am going home again across the sea.  I am in spirit young but

in the flesh old, so that it is unlikely that when I go away I shall ever

see England again.  But I shall go with the recollection of the generous

and kindly welcome I have had.



I suppose I must say "Good-bye."  I say it not with my lips only, but

from the heart.













THE SAVAGE CLUB DINNER



          A portrait of Mr. Clemens, signed by all the members of the

          club attending the dinner, was presented to him, July 6, 1907,

          and in submitting the toast "The Health of Mark Twain" Mr. J.

          Scott Stokes recalled the fact that he had read parts of Doctor

          Clemens's works to Harold Frederic during Frederic's last

          illness.



MR. CHAIRMAN AND FELLOW-SAVAGES,--I am very glad indeed to have that

portrait.  I think it is the best one that I have ever had, and there

have been opportunities before to get a good photograph.  I have sat to

photographers twenty-two times to-day.  Those sittings added to those

that have preceded them since I have been in Europe--if we average at

that rate--must have numbered one hundred to two hundred sittings.  Out

of all those there ought to be some good photographs.  This is the best I

have had, and I am glad to have your honored names on it.  I did not know

Harold Frederic personally, but I have heard a great deal about him, and

nothing that was not pleasant and nothing except such things as lead a

man to honor another man and to love him.  I consider that it is a

misfortune of mine that I have never had the luck to meet him, and if any

book of mine read to him in his last hours made those hours easier for

him and more comfortable, I am very glad and proud of that.  I call to

mind such a case many years ago of an English authoress, well known in

her day, who wrote such beautiful child tales, touching and lovely in

every possible way.  In a little biographical sketch of her I found that

her last hours were spent partly in reading a book of mine, until she was

no longer able to read.  That has always remained in my mind, and I have

always cherished it as one of the good things of my life.  I had read

what she had written, and had loved her for what she had done.



Stanley apparently  carried a book of mine feloniously away to Africa,

and I have not a doubt that it had a noble and uplifting influence there

in the wilds of Africa--because on his previous journeys he never carried

anything to read except Shakespeare and the Bible.  I did not know of

that circumstance.  I did not know that he had carried a book of mine.

I only noticed that when he came back he was a reformed man.  I knew

Stanley very well in those old days.  Stanley was the first man who ever

reported a lecture of mine, and that was in St. Louis.  When I was down

there the next time to give the same lecture I was told to give them

something fresh, as they had read that in the papers.  I met Stanley here

when he came back from that first expedition of his which closed with the

finding of Livingstone.  You remember how he would break out at the

meetings of the British Association, and find fault with what people

said, because Stanley had notions of his own, and could not contain them.

They had to come out or break him up--and so he would go round and

address geographical societies.  He was always on the warpath in those

days, and people always had to have Stanley contradicting their geography

for them and improving it.  But he always came back and sat drinking beer

with me in the hotel up to two in the morning, and he was then one of the

most civilized human beings that ever was.



I saw in a newspaper this evening a reference to an interview which

appeared in one of the papers the other day, in which the interviewer

said that I characterized Mr. Birrell's speech the other day at the

Pilgrims' Club as "bully."  Now, if you will excuse me, I never use slang

to an interviewer or anybody else.  That distresses me.  Whatever I said

about Mr. Birrell's speech was said in English, as good English as

anybody uses.  If I could not describe Mr. Birrell's delightful speech

without using slang I would not describe it at all.  I would close my

mouth and keep it closed, much as it would discomfort me.



Now that comes of interviewing a man in the first person, which is an

altogether wrong way to interview him.  It is entirely wrong because none

of you, I, or anybody else, could interview a man--could listen to a man

talking any length of time and then go off and reproduce that talk in the

first person.  It can't be done.  What results is merely that the

interviewer gives the substance of what is said and puts it in his own

language and puts it in your mouth.  It will always be either better

language than you use or worse, and in my case it is always worse.

I have a great respect for the English language.  I am one of its

supporters, its promoters, its elevators.  I don't degrade it.  A slip of

the tongue would be the most that you would get from me.  I have always

tried hard and faithfully to improve my English and never to degrade it.

I always try to use the best English to describe what I think and what I

feel, or what I don't feel and what I don't think.



I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to

facts.  I don't know anything that mars good literature so completely as

too much truth.  Facts contain a deal of poetry, but you can't use too

many of them without damaging your literature.  I love all literature,

and as long as I am a doctor of literature--I have suggested to you for

twenty years I have been diligently trying to improve my own literature,

and now, by virtue of the University of Oxford, I mean to doctor

everybody else's.



Now I think I ought to apologize for my clothes.  At home I venture

things that I am not permitted by my family to venture in foreign parts.

I was instructed before I left home and ordered to refrain from white

clothes in England.  I meant to keep that command fair and clean, and I

would have done it if I had been in the habit of obeying instructions,

but I can't invent a new process in life right away.  I have not had

white clothes on since I crossed the ocean until now.



In these three or four weeks I have grown so tired of gray and black that

you have earned my gratitude in permitting me to come as I have.  I wear

white clothes in the depth of winter in my home, but I don't go out in

the streets in them.  I don't go out to attract too much attention.

I like to attract some, and always I would like to be dressed so that I

may be more conspicuous than anybody else.



If I had been an ancient Briton, I would not have contented myself with

blue paint, but I would have bankrupted the rainbow.  I so enjoy gay

clothes in which women clothe themselves that it always grieves me when I

go to the opera to see that, while women look like a flower-bed, the men

are a few gray stumps among them in their black evening dress.  These are

two or three reasons why I wish to wear white clothes:  When I find

myself in assemblies like this, with everybody in black clothes, I know I

possess something that is superior to everybody else's.  Clothes are

never clean.  You don't know whether they are clean or not, because you

can't see.



Here or anywhere you must scour your head every two or three days or it

is full of grit.  Your clothes must collect just as much dirt as your

hair.  If you wear white clothes you are clean, and your cleaning bill

gets so heavy that you have to take care.  I am proud to say that I can

wear a white suit of clothes without a blemish for three days.  If you

need any further instruction in the matter of clothes I shall be glad to

give it to you.  I hope I have convinced some of you that it is just as

well to wear white clothes as any other kind.  I do not want to boast.

I only want to make you understand that you are not clean.



As to age, the fact that I am nearly seventy-two years old does not

clearly indicate how old I am, because part of every day--it is with me

as with you, you try to describe your age, and you cannot do it.

Sometimes you are only fifteen; sometimes you are twenty-five.  It is

very seldom in a day that I am seventy-two years old.  I am older now

sometimes than I was when I used to rob orchards; a thing which I would

not do to-day--if the orchards were watched.  I am so glad to be here to-

night.  I am so glad to renew with the Savages that now ancient time when

I first sat with a company of this club in London in 1872.  That is a

long time ago.  But I did stay with the Savages a night in London long

ago, and as I had come into a very strange land, and was with friends,

as I could see, that has always remained in my mind as a peculiarly

blessed evening, since it brought me into contact with men of my own kind

and my own feelings.



I am glad to be here, and to see you all again, because it is very likely

that I shall not see you again.  It is easier than I thought to come

across the Atlantic.  I have been received, as you know, in the most

delightfully generous way in England ever since I came here.  It keeps me

choked up all the time.  Everybody is so generous, and they do seem to

give you such a hearty welcome.  Nobody in the world can appreciate it

higher than I do.  It did not wait till I got to London, but when I came

ashore at Tilbury the stevedores on the dock raised the first welcome

--a good and hearty welcome from the men who do the heavy labor in the

world, and save you and me having to do it.  They are the men who with

their hands build empires and make them prosper.  It is because of them

that the others are wealthy and can live in luxury.  They received me

with a "Hurrah!" that went to my heart.  They are the men that build

civilization, and without them no civilization can be built.  So I came

first to the authors and creators of civilization, and I blessedly end

this happy meeting with the Savages who destroy it.













GENERAL MILES AND THE DOG



          Mr. Clemens was the guest of honor at a dinner given by the

          Pleiades Club at the Hotel Brevoort, December 22, 1907.  The

          toastmaster introduced the guest of the evening with a high

          tribute to his place in American literature, saying that he was

          dear to the hearts of all Americans.



It is hard work to make a speech when you have listened to compliments

from the powers in authority.  A compliment is a hard text to preach to.

When the chairman introduces me as a person of merit, and when he says

pleasant things about me, I always feel like answering simply that what

he says is true; that it is all right; that, as far as I am concerned,

the things he said can stand as they are.  But you always have to say

something, and that is what frightens me.



I remember out in Sydney once having to respond to some complimentary

toast, and my one desire was to turn in my tracks like any other worm--

and run, for it.  I was remembering that occasion at a later date when I

had to introduce a speaker.  Hoping, then, to spur his speech by putting

him, in joke, on the defensive, I accused him in my introduction of

everything I thought it impossible for him to have committed.  When I

finished there was an awful calm.  I had been telling his life history by

mistake.



One must keep up one's character.  Earn a character first if you can, and

if you can't, then assume one.  From the code of morals I have been

following and revising and revising for seventy-two years I remember one

detail.  All my life I have been honest--comparatively honest.  I could

never use money I had not made honestly--I could only lend it.



Last spring I met General Miles again, and he commented on the fact that

we had known each other thirty years.  He said it was strange that we had

not met years before, when we had both been in Washington.  At that point

I changed the subject, and I changed it with art.  But the facts are

these:



I was then under contract for my Innocents Abroad, but did not have a

cent to live on while I wrote it.  So I went to Washington to do a little

journalism.  There I met an equally poor friend, William Davidson, who

had not a single vice, unless you call it a vice in a Scot to love

Scotch.  Together we devised the first and original newspaper syndicate,

selling two letters a week to twelve newspapers and getting $1 a letter.

That $24 a week would have been enough for us--if we had not had to

support the jug.



But there was a day when we felt that we must have $3 right away--$3 at

once.  That was how I met the General.  It doesn't matter now what we

wanted so much money at one time for, but that Scot and I did

occasionally want it.  The Scot sent me out one day to get it.  He had a

great belief in Providence, that Scottish friend of mine.  He said: "The

Lord will provide."



I had given up trying to find the money lying about, and was in a hotel

lobby in despair, when I saw a beautiful unfriended dog.  The dog saw me,

too, and at once we became acquainted.  Then General Miles came in,

admired the dog, and asked me to price it.  I priced it at $3.  He

offered me an opportunity to reconsider the value of the beautiful

animal, but I refused to take more than Providence knew I needed.  The

General carried the dog to his room.



Then came in a sweet little middle-aged man, who at once began looking

around the lobby.



"Did you lose a dog?" I asked.  He said he had.



"I think I could find it," I volunteered, "for a small sum."



"'How much?'" he asked.  And I told him $3.



He urged me to accept more, but I did not wish to outdo Providence.  Then

I went to the General's room and asked for the dog back.  He was very

angry, and wanted to know why I had sold him a dog that did not belong to

me.



"That's a singular question to ask me, sir," I replied.  "Didn't you ask

me to sell him?  You started it."  And he let me have him.  I gave him

back his $3 and returned the dog, collect, to its owner.  That second $3

I earned home to the Scot, and we enjoyed it, but the first $3, the money

I got from the General, I would have had to lend.



The General seemed not to remember my part in that adventure, and I never

had the heart to tell him about it.













WHEN IN DOUBT, TELL THE TRUTH



          Mark Twain's speech at the dinner of the "Freundschaft

          Society," March 9, 1906, had as a basis the words of

          introduction used by Toastmaster Frank, who, referring to

          Pudd'nhead Wilson, used the phrase, "When in doubt, tell the

          truth."



MR. CHAIRMAN, Mr. PUTZEL, AND GENTLEMEN OF THE FREUNDSCHAFT,--That maxim

I did invent, but never expected it to be applied to me.  I did say,

"When you are in doubt," but when I am in doubt myself I use more

sagacity.



Mr. Grout suggested that if I have anything to say against Mr. Putzel, or

any criticism of his career or his character, I am the last person to

come out on account of that maxim and tell the truth.  That is altogether

a mistake.



I do think it is right for other people to be virtuous so that they can

be happy hereafter, but if I knew every impropriety that even Mr. Putzel

has committed in his life, I would not mention one of them.  My judgment

has been maturing for seventy years, and I have got to that point where I

know better than that.



Mr. Putzel stands related to me in a very tender way (through the tax

office), and it does not behoove me to say anything which could by any

possibility militate against that condition of things.



Now, that word--taxes, taxes, taxes!  I have heard it to-night.  I have

heard it all night.  I wish somebody would change that subject; that is a

very sore subject to me.



I was so relieved when judge Leventritt did find something that was not

taxable--when he said that the commissioner could not tax your patience.

And that comforted me.  We've got so much taxation.  I don't know of a

single foreign product that enters this country untaxed except the answer

to prayer.



On an occasion like this the proprieties require that you merely pay

compliments to the guest of the occasion, and I am merely here to pay

compliments to the guest of the occasion, not to criticise him in any

way, and I can say only complimentary things to him.



When I went down to the tax office some time ago, for the first time in

New York, I saw Mr. Putzel sitting in the "Seat of Perjury." I recognized

him right away.  I warmed to him on the spot.  I didn't know that I had

ever seen him before, but just as soon as I saw him I recognized him.

I had met him twenty-five years before, and at that time had achieved a

knowledge of his abilities and something more than that.



I thought: "Now, this is the man whom I saw twenty-five years ago."

On that occasion I not only went free at his hands, but carried off

something more than that.  I hoped it would happen again.



It was twenty-five years ago when I saw a young clerk in Putnam's

bookstore.  I went in there and asked for George Haven Putnam, and handed

him my card, and then the young man said Mr. Putnam was busy and I

couldn't see him.  Well, I had merely called in a social way, and so it

didn't matter.



I was going out when I saw a great big, fat, interesting-looking book

lying there, and I took it up.  It was an account of the invasion of

England in the fourteenth century by the Preaching Friar, and it

interested me.



I asked him the price of it, and he said four dollars.



"Well," I said, "what discount do you allow to publishers?"



He said: "Forty percent. off."



I said: "All right, I am a publisher."



He put down the figure, forty per cent. off, on a card.



Then I said: "What discount do you allow to authors?"



He said: "Forty per cent. off."



"Well," I said,  "set me down as an author."



"Now," said I, "what discount do you allow to the clergy?"



He said: "Forty per cent. off."



I said to him that I was only on the road, and that I was studying for

the ministry.  I asked him wouldn't he knock off twenty per cent. for

that.  He set down the figure, and he never smiled once.



I was working off these humorous brilliancies on him and getting no

return--not a scintillation in his eye, not a spark of recognition of

what I was doing there.  I was almost in despair.



I thought I might try him once more, so I said "Now, I am also a member

of the human race.  Will you let me have the ten per cent. off for that?"

He set it down, and never smiled.



Well, I gave it up.  I said: "There is my card with my address on it,

but I have not any money with me.  Will you please send the bill to

Hartford?"  I took up the book and was going away.



He said: "Wait a minute.  There is forty cents coming to you."



When I met him in the tax office I thought maybe I could make something

again, but I could not.  But I had not any idea I could when I came, and

as it turned out I did get off entirely free.



I put up my hand and made a statement.  It gave me a good deal of pain to

do that.  I was not used to it.  I was born and reared in the higher

circles of Missouri, and there we don't do such things--didn't in my

time, but we have got that little matter settled--got a sort of tax

levied on me.



Then he touched me.  Yes, he touched me this time, because he cried--

cried!  He was moved to tears to see that I, a virtuous person only a

year before, after immersion for one year--during one year in the New

York morals--had no more conscience than a millionaire.













THE DAY WE CELEBRATE,



          ADDRESS AT THE FOURTH-OF-JULY DINNER OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY,

          LONDON, 1899.



I noticed in Ambassador Choate's speech that he said: "You may be

Americans or Englishmen, but you cannot be both at the same time."

You responded by applause.



Consider the effect of a short residence here.  I find the Ambassador

rises first to speak to a toast, followed by a Senator, and I come third.

What a subtle tribute that to monarchial influence of the country when

you place rank above respectability!



I was born modest, and if I had not been things like this would force it

upon me.  I understand it quite well.  I am here to see that between them

they do justice to the day we celebrate, and in case they do not I must

do it myself.  But I notice they have considered this day merely from one

side--its sentimental, patriotic, poetic side.  But it has another side.

It has a commercial, a business side that needs reforming.  It has a

historical side.



I do not say "an" historical side, because I am speaking the American

language.  I do not see why our cousins should continue to say "an"

hospital, "an" historical fact, "an" horse.  It seems to me the Congress

of Women, now in session, should look to it.  I think "an" is having a

little too much to do with it.  It comes of habit, which accounts for

many things.



Yesterday, for example, I was at a luncheon party.  At the end of the

party a great dignitary of the English Established Church went away half

an hour before anybody else and carried off my hat.  Now, that was an

innocent act on his part.  He went out first, and of course had the

choice of hats.  As a rule I try to get out first myself.  But I hold

that it was an innocent, unconscious act, due, perhaps, to heredity.

He was thinking about ecclesiastical matters, and when a man is in that

condition of mind he will take anybody's hat.  The result was that the

whole afternoon I was under the influence of his clerical hat and could

not tell a lie.  Of course, he was hard at it.



It is a compliment to both of us.  His hat fitted me exactly; my hat

fitted him exactly.  So I judge I was born to rise to high dignity in the

Church some how or other, but I do not know what he was born for.  That

is an illustration of the influence of habit, and it is perceptible here

when they say "an" hospital, "an" European, "an" historical.



The business aspects of the Fourth of July is not perfect as it stands.

See what it costs us every year with loss of life, the crippling of

thousands with its fireworks, and the burning down of property.  It is

not only sacred to patriotism sand universal freedom, but to the surgeon,

the undertaker, the insurance offices--and they are working, it for all

it is worth.



I am pleased to see that we have a cessation of war for the time.  This

coming from me, a soldier, you will appreciate.  I was a soldier in the

Southern war for two weeks, and when gentlemen get up to speak of the

great deeds our army and navy have recently done, why, it goes all

through me and fires up the old war spirit.  I had in my first engagement

three horses shot under me.  The next ones went over my head, the next

hit me in the back.  Then I retired to meet an engagement.



I thank you, gentlemen, for making even a slight reference to the war

profession, in which I distinguished myself, short as my career was.













INDEPENDENCE DAY



          The American Society in London gave a banquet, July 4, 1907, at

          the Hotel Cecil.  Ambassador Choate called on Mr. Clemens to

          respond to the toast "The Day We Celebrate."



MR. CHAIRMAN, MY LORD, AND GENTLEMEN,--Once more it happens, as it has

happened so often since I arrived in England a week or two ago, that

instead of celebrating the Fourth of July properly as has been indicated,

I have to first take care of my personal character.  Sir Mortimer Durand

still remains unconvinced.  Well, I tried to convince these people from

the beginning that I did not take the Ascot Cup; and as I have failed to

convince anybody that I did not take the cup, I might as well confess I

did take it and be done with it.  I don't see why this uncharitable

feeling should follow me everywhere, and why I should have that crime

thrown up to me on all occasions.  The tears that I have wept over it

ought to have created a different feeling than this--and, besides,

I don't think it is very right or fair that, considering England has been

trying to take a cup of ours for forty years--I don't see why they should

take so much trouble when I tried to go into the business myself.



Sir Mortimer Durand, too, has had trouble from going to a dinner here,

and he has told you what he suffered in consequence.  But what did he

suffer?  He only missed his train, and one night of discomfort, and he

remembers it to this day.  Oh! if you could only think what I have

suffered from a similar circumstance.  Two or three years ago, in New

York, with that Society there which is made up of people from all British

Colonies, and from Great Britain generally, who were educated in British

colleges and.  British schools, I was there to respond to a toast of some

kind or other, and I did then what I have been in the habit of doing,

from a selfish motive, for a long time, and that is, I got myself placed

No, 3 in the list of speakers--then you get home early.



I had to go five miles up-river, and had to catch a, particular train or

not get there.  But see the magnanimity which is born in me, which I have

cultivated all my life.  A very famous and very great British clergyman

came to me presently, and he said: "I am away down in the list; I have

got to catch a certain train this Saturday night; if I don't catch that

train I shall be carried beyond midnight and break the Sabbath.  Won't

you change places with me?"  I said: "Certainly I will." I did it at

once.  Now, see what happened.



Talk about Sir Mortimer Durand's sufferings for a single night!  I have

suffered ever since because I saved that gentleman from breaking the

Sabbath-yes, saved him.  I took his place, but I lost my train, and it

was I who broke the Sabbath.  Up to that time I never had broken the

Sabbath in my life, and from that day to this I never have kept it.



Oh!  I am learning much here to-night.  I find I didn't know anything

about the American Society--that is, I didn't know its chief virtue.

I didn't know its chief virtue until his Excellency our Ambassador

revealed it--I may say, exposed it.  I was intending to go home on the

13th of this month, but I look upon that in a different light now.  I am

going to stay here until the American Society pays my passage.



Our Ambassador has spoken of our Fourth of July and the noise it makes.

We have got a double Fourth of July--a daylight Fourth and a midnight

Fourth.  During the day in America, as our Ambassador has indicated, we

keep the Fourth of July properly in a reverent spirit.  We devote it to

teaching our children patriotic things--reverence for the Declaration of

Independence.  We honor the day all through the daylight hours, and when

night comes we dishonor it.  Presently--before long--they are getting

nearly ready to begin now--on the Atlantic coast, when night shuts down,

that pandemonium will begin, and there will be noise, and noise, and

noise--all night long--and there will be more than noise there will be

people crippled, there will be people killed, there will be people who

will lose their eyes, and all through that permission which we give to

irresponsible boys to play with firearms and fire-crackers, and all sorts

of dangerous things: We turn that Fourth of July, alas! over to rowdies

to drink and get drunk and make the night hideous, and we cripple and

kill more people than you would imagine.



We probably began to celebrate our Fourth-of-July night in that way one

hundred and twenty-five years ago, and on every Fourth-of-July night

since these horrors have grown and grown, until now, in our five thousand

towns of America, somebody gets killed or crippled on every Fourth-of-

July night, besides those cases of sick persons whom we never hear of,

who die as the result of the noise or the shock.  They cripple and kill

more people on the Fourth of July in, America than they kill and cripple

in our wars nowadays, and there are no pensions for these folk.  And,

too, we burn houses.  Really we destroy more property on every Fourth-of-

July night than the whole of the United States was worth one hundred and

twenty-five years ago.  Really our Fourth of July is our day of mourning,

our day of sorrow.  Fifty thousand people who have lost friends, or who

have had friends crippled, receive that Fourth of July, when it comes, as

a day of mourning for the losses they have sustained in their families.



I have suffered in that way myself.  I have had relatives killed in that

way.  One was in Chicago years ago--an uncle of mine, just as good an

uncle as I have ever had, and I had lots of them--yes, uncles to burn,

uncles to spare.  This poor uncle, full of patriotism, opened his mouth

to hurrah, and a rocket went down his throat.  Before that man could ask

for a drink of water to quench that thing, it blew up and scattered him

all, over the forty-five States, and--really, now, this is true--I know

about it myself--twenty-four hours after that it was raining buttons,

recognizable as his, on the Atlantic seaboard.  A person cannot have a

disaster like that and be entirely cheerful the rest of his life.  I had

another uncle, on an entirely different Fourth of July, who was blown up

that way, and really it trimmed him as it would a tree.  He had hardly a

limb left on him anywhere.  All we have left now is an expurgated edition

of that uncle.  But never mind about these things; they are merely

passing matters.  Don't let me make you sad.



Sir Mortimer Durand said that you, the English people, gave up your

colonies over there--got tired of them--and did it with reluctance.

Now I wish you just to consider that he was right about that, and that he

had his reasons for saying that England did not look upon our Revolution

as a foreign war, but as a civil war fought by Englishmen.



Our Fourth of July which we honor so much, and which we love so much, and

which we take so much pride in, is an English institution, not an

American one, and it comes of a great ancestry.  The first Fourth of July

in that noble genealogy dates back seven centuries lacking eight years.

That is the day of the Great Charter--the Magna Charta--which was born at

Runnymede in the next to the last year of King John, and portions of the

liberties secured thus by those hardy Barons from that reluctant King

John are a part of our Declaration of Independence, of our Fourth of

July, of our American liberties.  And the second of those Fourths of July

was not born, until four centuries later, in, Charles the First's time,

in the Bill of Rights, and that is ours, that is part of our liberties.

The next one was still English, in New England, where they established

that principle which remains with us to this day, and will continue to

remain with us--no taxation without representation.  That is always going

to stand, and that the English Colonies in New England gave us.



The Fourth of July, and the one which you are celebrating now, born, in

Philadelphia on the 4th of July, 1776--that is English, too.  It is not

American.  Those were English colonists, subjects of King George III.,

Englishmen at heart, who protested against the oppressions of the Home

Government.  Though they proposed to cure those oppressions and remove

them, still remaining under the Crown, they were not intending a

revolution.  The revolution was brought about by circumstances which they

could not control.  The Declaration of Independence was written by a

British subject, every name signed to it was the name of a British

subject.  There was not the name of a single American attached to the

Declaration of Independence--in fact, there was not an American in the

country in that day except the Indians out on the plains.  They were

Englishmen, all Englishmen--Americans did not begin until seven, years

later, when that Fourth of July had become seven years old, and then, the

American Republic was established.  Since then, there have been

Americans.  So you see what we owe to England in the matter of liberties.



We have, however, one Fourth of July which is absolutely our own, and

that is that great proclamation issued forty years ago by that great

American to whom Sir Mortimer Durand paid that just and beautiful

tribute--Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln's proclamation, which not only set the

black slaves free, but set the white man free also.  The owner was set

free from the burden and offence, that sad condition of things where he

was in so many instances a master and owner of slaves when he did not

want to be.  That proclamation set them all free.  But even in this

matter England suggested it, for England had set her slaves free thirty

years before, and we followed her example.  We always followed her

example, whether it was good or bad.



And it was an English judge that issued that other great proclamation,

and established that great principle that, when a slave, let him belong

to whom he may, and let him come whence he may, sets his foot upon

English soil, his fetters by that act fall away and he is a free man

before the world.  We followed the example of 1833, and we freed our

slaves as I have said.



It is true, then, that all our Fourths of July, and we have five of them,

England gave to us, except that one that I have mentioned--the

Emancipation Proclamation, and, lest we forget, let us all remember that

we owe these things to England.  Let us be able to say to Old England,

this great-hearted, venerable old mother of the race, you gave us our

Fourths of July that we love and that we honor and revere, you gave us

the Declaration of Independence, which is the Charter of our rights, you,

the venerable Mother of Liberties, the Protector of Anglo-Saxon Freedom-

you gave us these things, and we do most honestly thank you for them.













AMERICANS AND THE ENGLISH



     ADDRESS AT A GATHERING OF AMERICANS IN LONDON, JULY 4, 1872



MR. CHAIRMAN AND LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,--I thank you for the compliment

which has just been tendered me, and to show my appreciation of it I will

not afflict you with many words.  It is pleasant to celebrate in this

peaceful way, upon this old mother soil, the anniversary of an experiment

which was born of war with this same land so long ago, and wrought out to

a successful issue by the devotion of our ancestors.  It has taken nearly

a hundred years to bring the English and Americans into kindly and

mutually appreciative relations, but I believe it has been accomplished

at last.  It was a great step when the two last misunderstandings were

settled by arbitration instead of cannon.  It is another great step when

England adopts our sewing-machines without claiming the invention--as

usual.  It was another when they imported one of our sleeping-cars the

other day.  And it warmed my heart more than, I can tell, yesterday, when

I witnessed the spectacle of an Englishman, ordering an American sherry

cobbler of his own free will and accord--and not only that but with a

great brain and a level head reminding the barkeeper not to forget the

strawberries.  With a common origin, a common language, a common

literature, a common religion, and--common drinks, what is longer needful

to the cementing of the two nations together in a permanent bond of

brotherhood?



This is an age of progress, and ours is a progressive land.  A great and

glorious land, too--a land which has developed a Washington, a Franklin,

a Wm. M. Tweed, a Longfellow, a Motley, a Jay Gould, a Samuel C.

Pomeroy, a recent Congress which has never had its equal (in some

respects), and a United States Army which conquered sixty Indians in

eight months by tiring them out which is much better than uncivilized

slaughter, God knows.  We have a criminal jury system which is superior

to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty

of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read.

And I may observe that we have an insanity plea that would have saved

Cain.  I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some

legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.



I refer with effusion to our railway system, which consents to let us

live, though it might do the opposite, being our owners.  It only

destroyed three thousand and seventy lives last year by collisions, and

twenty-seven thousand two hundred and sixty by running over heedless and

unnecessary people at crossings.  The companies seriously regretted the

killing of these thirty thousand people, and went so far as to pay for

some of them--voluntarily, of course, for the meanest of us would not

claim that we possess a court treacherous enough to enforce a law against

a railway company.  But, thank Heaven, the railway companies are

generally disposed to do the right and kindly thing without--compulsion.

I know of an instance which greatly touched me at the time.  After an

accident the company sent home the remains of a dear distant old relative

of mine in a basket, with the remark, "Please state what figure you hold

him at--and return the basket."  Now there couldn't be anything

friendlier than that.



But I must not stand here and brag all night. However, you won't mind a

body bragging a little about his country on the Fourth of July.  It is a

fair and legitimate time to fly the eagle.  I will say only one more word

of brag--and a hopeful one.  It is this.  We have a form of government

which gives each man a fair chance and no favor.  With us no individual

is born with a right to look down upon his neighbor and hold him in

contempt.  Let such of us as are not dukes find our consolation in that.

And we may find hope for the future in the fact that as unhappy as is the

condition of our political morality to-day, England has risen up out of a

far fouler since the days when Charles I. ennobled courtesans and all

political place was a matter of bargain and sale.  There is hope for us

yet.*



          *At least the above is the speech which I was going to make,

          but our minister, General Schenck, presided, and after the

          blessing, got up and made a great, long, inconceivably dull

          harangue, and wound up by saying that inasmuch as speech-making

          did not seem to exhilarate the guests much, all further oratory

          would be dispensed with during the evening, and we could just

          sit and talk privately to our elbow-neighbors and have a good,

          sociable time.  It is known that in consequence of that remark

          forty-four perfected speeches died in the womb.  The

          depression, the gloom, the solemnity that reigned over the

          banquet from that time forth will be a lasting memory with many

          that were there.  By that one thoughtless remark General

          Schenck lost forty-four of the best friends he had in England.

          More than one said that night: "And this is the sort of person

          that is sent to represent us in a great sister empire!"













ABOUT LONDON



          ADDRESS AT A DINNER GIVEN BY THE SAVAGE CLUB,

          LONDON, SEPTEMBER 28, 1872.



          Reported by Moncure D. Conway in the Cincinnati Commercial.



It affords me sincere pleasure to meet this distinguished club, a club

which has extended its hospitalities and its cordial welcome to so many

of my countrymen.  I hope [and here the speaker's voice became low and

fluttering] you will excuse these clothes.  I am going to the theatre;

that will explain these clothes.  I have other clothes than these.

Judging human nature by what I have seen of it, I suppose that the

customary thing for a stranger to do when he stands here is to make a pun

on the name of this club, under the impression, of course, that he is the

first man that that idea has occurred to.  It is a credit to our human

nature, not a blemish upon it; for it shows that underlying all our

depravity (and God knows and you know we are depraved enough) and all our

sophistication, and untarnished by them, there is a sweet germ of

innocence and simplicity still.  When a stranger says to me, with a glow

of inspiration in his eye, some gentle, innocuous little thing about

"Twain and one flesh," and all that sort of thing, I don't try to crush

that man into the earth--no.  I feel like saying: "Let me take you by the

hand, sir; let me embrace you; I have not heard that pun for weeks."

We will deal in palpable puns.  We will call parties named King "Your

Majesty," and we will say to the Smiths that we think we have heard that

name before somewhere.  Such is human nature.  We cannot alter this.

It is God that made us so for some good and wise purpose.  Let us not

repine.  But though I may seem strange, may seem eccentric, I mean to

refrain from punning upon the name of this club, though I could make a

very good one if I had time to think about it--a week.



I cannot express to you what entire enjoyment I find in this first visit

to this prodigious metropolis of yours.  Its wonders seem to me to be

limitless.  I go about as in a dream--as in a realm of enchantment--where

many things are rare and beautiful, and all things are strange and

marvellous.  Hour after hour I stand--I stand spellbound, as it were--and

gaze upon the statuary in Leicester Square.  [Leicester Square being a

horrible chaos, with the relic of an equestrian statue in the centre, the

king being headless and limbless, and the horse in little better

condition.] I visit the mortuary effigies of noble old Henry VIII., and

Judge Jeffreys, and the preserved gorilla, and try to make up my mind

which of my ancestors I admire the most.  I go to that matchless Hyde

Park and drive all around it, and then I start to enter it at the Marble

Arch---and--am induced to "change my mind."  [Cabs are not permitted in

Hyde Park--nothing less aristocratic than a private carriage.]  It is a

great benefaction--is Hyde Park.  There, in his hansom cab, the invalid

can go--the poor, sad child of misfortune--and insert his nose between

the railings, and breathe the pure, health--giving air of the country and

of heaven.  And if he is a swell invalid, who isn't obliged to depend

upon parks for his country air, he can drive inside--if he owns his

vehicle.  I drive round and round Hyde Park, and the more I see of the

edges of it the more grateful I am that the margin is extensive.



And I have been to the Zoological Gardens.  What a wonderful place that

is!  I never have seen such a curious and interesting variety of wild

animals in any garden before--except "Mabilie."  I never believed before

there were so many different kinds of animals in the world as you can

find there--and I don't believe it yet.  I have been to the British

Museum.  I would advise you to drop in there some time when you have

nothing to do for--five minutes--if you have never been there: It seems

to me the noblest monument that this nation has yet erected to her

greatness.  I say to her, our greatness--as a nation.  True, she has

built other monuments, and stately ones, as well; but these she has

uplifted in honor of two or three colossal demigods who have stalked

across the world's stage, destroying tyrants and delivering nations, and

whose prodigies will still live in the memories of men ages after their

monuments shall have crumbled to dust--I refer to the Wellington and

Nelson monuments, and--the Albert memorial.  [Sarcasm.  The Albert

memorial is the finest monument in the world, and celebrates the

existence of as commonplace a person as good luck ever lifted out of

obscurity.]



The library at the British Museum I find particularly astounding.

I have read there hours together, and hardly made an impression on it.

I revere that library.  It is the author's friend.  I don't care how mean

a book is, it always takes one copy.  [A copy of every book printed in

Great Britain must by law be sent to the British Museum, a law much

complained of by publishers.]  And then every day that author goes there

to gaze at that book, and is encouraged to go on in the good work.

And what a touching sight it is of a Saturday afternoon to see the poor,

careworn clergymen gathered together in that vast reading--room cabbaging

sermons for Sunday.  You will pardon my referring to these things.



Everything in this monster city interests me, and I cannot keep from

talking, even at the risk of being instructive.  People here seem always

to express distances by parables.  To a stranger it is just a little

confusing to be so parabolic--so to speak.  I collar a citizen, and I

think I am going to get some valuable information out of him.  I ask him

how far it is to Birmingham, and he says it is twenty-one shillings and

sixpence.  Now we know that doesn't help a man who is trying to learn.

I find myself down-town somewhere, and I want to get some sort of idea

where I am--being usually lost when alone--and I stop a citizen and say:

"How far is it to Charing Cross?"  "Shilling fare in a cab," and off he

goes.  I suppose if I were to ask a Londoner how far it, is from the

sublime to the ridiculous, he would try to express it in coin.  But I am

trespassing upon your time with these geological statistics and

historical reflections.  I will not longer keep you from your orgies.

'Tis a real pleasure for me to be here, and I thank you for it.  The name

of the Savage Club is associated in my mind with the kindly interest and

the friendly offices which you lavished upon an old friend of mine who

came among you a stranger, and you opened your English hearts to him and

gave him welcome and a home--Artemus Ward.  Asking that you will join me,

I give you his memory.













PRINCETON



          Mr. Clemens spent several days in May, 1901, in Princeton, New

          Jersey, as the guest of Lawrence Hutton.  He gave a reading one

          evening before a large audience composed of university students

          and professors.  Before the reading Mr. Clemens said:



I feel exceedingly surreptitious in coming down here without an

announcement of any kind.  I do not want to see any advertisements

around, for the reason that I'm not a lecturer any longer.  I reformed

long ago, and I break over and commit this sin only just one time this

year: and that is moderate, I think, for a person of my disposition.  It

is not my purpose to lecture any more as long as I live.  I never intend

to stand up on a platform any more--unless by the request of a sheriff or

something like that.













THE ST. LOUIS HARBOR-BOAT "MARK TWAIN"



          The Countess de Rochambeau christened the St. Louis harbor-boat

          'Mark Twain' in honor of Mr. Clemens, June 6, 1902.  Just

          before the luncheon he acted as pilot.



          "Lower away lead!" boomed out the voice of the pilot.



          "Mark twain, quarter five and one-half-six feet!" replied the

          leadsman below.



          "You are all dead safe as long as I have the wheel--but this is

          my last time at the wheel."



          At the luncheon Mr. Clemens made a short address.



First of all, no--second of all--I wish to offer my thanks for the honor

done me by naming this last rose of summer of the Mississippi Valley for

me, this boat which represents a perished interest, which I fortified

long ago, but did not save its life.  And, in the first place, I wish to

thank the Countess de Rochambeau for the honor she has done me in

presiding at this christening.



I believe that it is peculiarly appropriate that I should be allowed the

privilege of joining my voice with the general voice of St. Louis and

Missouri in welcoming to the Mississippi Valley and this part of the

continent these illustrious visitors from France.



When La Salle came down this river a century and a quarter ago there was

nothing on its banks but savages.  He opened up this great river, and by

his simple act was gathered in this great Louisiana territory.  I would

have done it myself for half the money.













SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY



          ADDRESS AT A DINNER GIVEN BY COLONEL GEORGE HARVEY AT

          DELMONICO'S, DECEMBER 5, 1905, TO CELEBRATE THE SEVENTIETH

          ANNIVERSARY OF MR. CLEMENS' BIRTH



          Mr. Howells introduced Mr. Clemens:



          "Now, ladies and gentlemen, and Colonel Harvey, I will try not

          to be greedy on your behalf in wishing the health of our

          honored and, in view of his great age, our revered guest.  I

          will not say, 'Oh King, live forever!' but 'Oh King, live as

          long as you like!'" [Amid great applause and waving of napkins

          all rise and drink to Mark Twain.]



Well, if I made that joke, it is the best one I ever made, and it is in

the prettiest language, too.--I never can get quite to that height.  But

I appreciate that joke, and I shall remember it--and I shall use it when

occasion requires.



I have had a great many birthdays in my time. I remember the first one

very well, and I always think of it with indignation; everything was so

crude, unaesthetic, primeval.  Nothing like this at all.  No proper

appreciative preparation made; nothing really ready.  Now, for a person

born with high and delicate instincts--why, even the cradle wasn't

whitewashed--nothing ready at all.  I hadn't any hair, I hadn't any

teeth, I hadn't any clothes, I had to go to my first banquet just like

that.  Well, everybody came swarming in.  It was the merest little bit of

a village--hardly that, just a little hamlet, in the backwoods of

Missouri, where nothing ever happened, and the people were all

interested, and they all came; they looked me over to see if there was

anything fresh in my line.  Why, nothing ever happened in that village--

I--why, I was the only thing that had really happened there for months

and months and months; and although I say it myself that shouldn't, I

came the nearest to being a real event that had happened in that village

in more than, two years.  Well, those people came, they came with that

curiosity which is so provincial, with that frankness which also is so

provincial, and they examined me all around and gave their opinion.

Nobody asked them, and I shouldn't have minded if anybody had paid me a

compliment, but nobody did.  Their opinions were all just green with

prejudice, and I feel those opinions to this day.  Well, I stood that as

long as--well, you know I was born courteous, and I stood it to the

limit.  I stood it an hour, and then the worm turned.  I was the warm; it

was my turn to turn, and I turned.  I knew very well the strength of my

position; I knew that I was the only spotlessly pure and innocent person

in that whole town, and I came out and said so: And they could not say a

word.  It was so true: They blushed; they were embarrassed.  Well, that

was the first after-dinner speech I ever made: I think it was after

dinner.



It's a long stretch between that first birthday speech and this one.

That was my cradle-song; and this is my swan-song, I suppose.  I am used

to swan-songs; I have sung them several, times.



This is my seventieth birthday, and I wonder if you all rise to the size

of that proposition, realizing all the significance of that phrase,

seventieth birthday.



The seventieth birthday!  It is the time of life when you arrive at a new

and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which

have oppressed you for a generation and stand unafraid and unabashed upon

your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach--unrebuked.  You can

tell the world how you got there.  It is what they all do.  You shall

never get tired of telling by what delicate arts and deep moralities you

climbed up to that great place.  You will explain the process and dwell

on the particulars with senile rapture.  I have been anxious to explain

my own system this long time, and now at last I have the right.



I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly

to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else.  It sounds like an

exaggeration, but that is really the common rule for attaining to old

age.  When we examine the programme of any of these garrulous old people

we always find that the habits which have preserved them would have

decayed us; that the way of life which enabled them to live upon the

property of their heirs so long, as Mr. Choate says, would have put us

out of commission ahead of time.  I will offer here, as a sound maxim,

this: That we can't reach old age by another man's road.



I will now teach, offering my way of life to whomsoever desires to commit

suicide by the scheme which has enabled me to beat the doctor and the

hangman for seventy years.  Some of the details may sound untrue, but

they are not.  I am not here to deceive; I am here to teach.



We have no permanent habits until we are forty.  Then they begin to

harden, presently they petrify, then business begins.  Since forty I have

been regular about going to bed and getting up--and that is one of the

main things.  I have made it a rule to go to bed when there wasn't

anybody left to sit up with; and I have made it a rule to get up when I

had to.  This has resulted in an unswerving regularity of irregularity.

It has saved me sound, but it would injure another person.



In the matter of diet--which is another main thing--I have been

persistently strict in sticking to the things which didn't agree with me

until one or the other of us got the best of it.  Until lately I got the

best of it myself.  But last spring I stopped frolicking with mince-pie

after midnight; up to then I had always believed it wasn't loaded.  For

thirty years I have taken coffee and bread at eight in the morning, and

no bite nor sup until seven-thirty in the evening.  Eleven hours.  That

is all right for me, and is wholesome, because I have never had a

headache in my life, but headachy people would not reach seventy

comfortably by that road, and they would be foolish to try it.  And I

wish to urge upon you this--which I think is wisdom--that if you find you

can't make seventy by any but an uncomfortable road, don't you go.  When

they take off the Pullman and retire you to the rancid smoker, put on

your things, count your checks, and get out at the first way station

where there's a cemetery.



I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.

I have no other restriction as regards smoking.  I do not know just when

I began to smoke, I only know that it was in my father's lifetime, and

that I was discreet.  He passed from this life early in 1847, when I was

a shade past eleven; ever since then I have smoked publicly.  As an

example to others, and--not that I care for moderation myself, it has

always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when

awake.  It is a good rule.  I mean, for me; but some of you know quite

well that it wouldn't answer for everybody that's trying to get to be

seventy.



I smoke in bed until I have to go to sleep; I wake up in the night,

sometimes once, sometimes twice; sometimes three times, and I never waste

any of these opportunities to smoke.  This habit is so old and dear and

precious to me that I would feel as you, sir, would feel if you should

lose the only moral you've got--meaning the chairman--if you've got one:

I am making no charges: I will grant, here, that I have stopped smoking

now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it

was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a

slave to my habits and couldn't break my bonds.



To-day it is all of sixty years since I began to smoke the limit.  I have

never bought cigars with life-belts around them.  I early found that

those were too expensive for me: I have always bought cheap cigars--

reasonably cheap, at any rate.  Sixty years ago they cost me four dollars

a barrel, but my taste has improved, latterly, and I pay seven, now.  Six

or seven.  Seven, I think.  Yes; it's seven.  But that includes the

barrel.  I often have smoking-parties at my house; but the people that

come have always just taken the pledge.  I wonder why that is?



As for drinking, I  have no rule about that.  When the others drink I

like to help; otherwise I remain dry, by habit and preference.  This

dryness does not hurt me, but it could easily hurt you, because you are

different.  You let it alone.



Since I was seven years old I have seldom take, a dose of medicine, and

have still seldomer needed one.  But up to seven I lived exclusively on

allopathic medicines.  Not that I needed them, for I don't think I did;

it was for economy; my father took a drug-store for a debt, and it made

cod-liver oil cheaper than the other breakfast foods.  We had nine

barrels of it, and it lasted me seven years.  Then I was weaned.  The

rest of the family had to get along with rhubarb and ipecac and such

things, because I was the pet.  I was the first Standard Oil Trust.

I had it all.  By the time the drugstore was exhausted my health was

established, and there has never been much the matter with me since.

But you know very well it would be foolish for the average child to start

for seventy on that basis.  It happened to be just the thing for me,

but that was merely an accident; it couldn't happen again in a century.



I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never

intend to take any.  Exercise is loathsome.  And it cannot be any benefit

when you are tired; and I was always tired.  But let another person try

my way, and see where he will come out.  I desire now to repeat and

emphasise that maxim: We can't reach old age by another man's road.  My

habits protect my life, but they would assassinate you.



I have lived a severely moral life.  But it would be a mistake for other

people to try that, or for me to recommend it.  Very few would succeed:

you have to have a perfectly colossal stock of morals; and you can't get

them on a margin; you have to have the whole thing, and put them in your

box.  Morals are an acquirement--like music, like a foreign language,

like piety, poker, paralysis--no man is born with them.  I wasn't myself,

I started poor.  I hadn't a single moral.  There is hardly a man in this

house that is poorer than I was then.  Yes, I started like that--the

world before me, not a moral in the slot.  Not even an insurance moral.

I can remember the first one I ever got.  I can remember the landscape,

the weather, the--I can remember how everything looked.  It was an old

moral, an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn't fit,

anyway.  But if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a

dry place, and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World's

Fairs, and so on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat

of whitewash once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she

will last and how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive.

When I got that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing, because she

hadn't any exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all.

Under this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and

served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then she

got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and

character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for

business.  She was a great loss to me.  Yet not all loss.  I sold her--

ah, pathetic skeleton, as she was--I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King

of Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad

to get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet

high, and they think she's a brontosaur.  Well, she looks it.  They

believe it will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match.



Morals are of inestimable value, for every man is born crammed with sin

microbes, and the only thing that can extirpate these sin microbes is

morals.  Now you take a sterilized Christian--I mean, you take the

sterilized Christian, for there's only one.  Dear sir, I wish you

wouldn't look at me like that.



Threescore years and ten!



It is the Scriptural statute of limitations.  After that, you owe no

active duties; for you the strenuous life is over.  You are a time-

expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: You have served your term,

well or less well, and you are mustered out.  You are become an honorary

member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions are not for you,

nor any bugle-tail but "lights out."  You pay the time-worn duty bills if

you choose, or decline if you prefer--and without prejudice--for they are

not legally collectable.



The previous-engagement plea, which in forty years has cost you so many

tinges, you cam lay aside forever; on this side of the grave you will

never need it again.  If you shrink at thought of night, and winter, and

the late home-coming from the banquet and the lights and the laughter

through the deserted streets--a desolation which would not remind you

now, as for a generation it did, that your friends are sleeping, and you

must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them, but would only remind you

that you need not tiptoe, you can never disturb them more--if you shrink

at thought of these things, you need only reply, "Your invitation honors

me, and pleases me because you still keep me in your remembrance, but I

am seventy; seventy, and would nestle in the chimney-corner, and smoke my

pipe, and read my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all

affection; and that when you in your return shall arrive at pier No. 70

you may step aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay

your course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart."









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Mark Twain's Speeches

by Mark Twain













MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS, Complete



ARRANGED WITH COMMENT BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE









VOLUME I



1835[1853]-1866







FOREWORD



Nowhere is the human being more truly revealed than in his letters.

Notin literary letters--prepared with care, and the thought of possible

publication--but in those letters wrought out of the press of

circumstances, and with no idea of print in mind.  A collection of such

documents, written by one whose life has become of interest to mankind at

large, has a value quite aside from literature, in that it reflects in

some degree at least the soul of the writer.



The letters of Mark Twain are peculiarly of the revealing sort.  He was a

man of few restraints and of no affectations.  In his correspondence,

as in his talk, he spoke what was in his mind, untrammeled by literary

conventions.



Necessarily such a collection does not constitute a detailed life story,

but is supplementary to it.  An extended biography of Mark Twain has

already been published.  His letters are here gathered for those who wish

to pursue the subject somewhat more exhaustively from the strictly

personal side.  Selections from this correspondence were used in the

biography mentioned.  Most of these are here reprinted in the belief that

an owner of the "Letters" will wish the collection to be reasonably

complete.





[Etext Editor's Note:  A. B. Paine considers this compendium a supplement

to his "Mark Twain, A Biography", I have arranged the volumes of the

"Letters" to correspond as closely as possible with the dates of the

Project Gutenberg six volumes of the "Biography".  D.W.]







MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS



MARK TWAIN--A BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY



SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS, for nearly half a century known and celebrated

as "Mark Twain," was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835.

He was one of the foremost American philosophers of his day; he was the

world's most famous humorist of any day.  During the later years of his

life he ranked not only as America's chief man of letters, but likewise

as her best known and best loved citizen.



The beginnings of that life were sufficiently unpromising.  The family

was a good one, of old Virginia and Kentucky stock, but its circumstances

were reduced, its environment meager and disheartening.  The father, John

Marshall Clemens--a lawyer by profession, a merchant by vocation--had

brought his household to Florida from Jamestown, Tennessee, somewhat

after the manner of judge Hawkins as pictured in The Gilded Age.  Florida

was a small town then, a mere village of twenty-one houses located on

Salt River, but judge Clemens, as he was usually called, optimistic and

speculative in his temperament, believed in its future.  Salt River would

be made navigable; Florida would become a metropolis.  He established a

small business there, and located his family in the humble frame cottage

where, five months later, was born a baby boy to whom they gave the name

of Samuel--a family name--and added Langhorne, after an old Virginia

friend of his father.



The child was puny, and did not make a very sturdy fight for life.

Still he weathered along, season after season, and survived two stronger

children, Margaret and Benjamin.  By 1839 Judge Clemens had lost faith in

Florida.  He removed his family to Hannibal, and in this Mississippi

River town the little lad whom the world was to know as Mark Twain spent

his early life.  In Tom Sawyer we have a picture of the Hannibal of those

days and the atmosphere of his boyhood there.



His schooling was brief and of a desultory kind.  It ended one day in

1847, when his father died and it became necessary that each one should

help somewhat in the domestic crisis.  His brother Orion, ten years his

senior, was already a printer by trade.  Pamela, his sister; also

considerably older, had acquired music, and now took a few pupils.

The little boy Sam, at twelve, was apprenticed to a printer named Ament.

His wages consisted of his board and clothes--"more board than clothes,"

as he once remarked to the writer.



He remained with Ament until his brother Orion bought out a small paper

in Hannibal in 1850.  The paper, in time, was moved into a part of the

Clemens home, and the two brothers ran it, the younger setting most of

the type.  A still younger brother, Henry, entered the office as an

apprentice.  The Hannibal journal was no great paper from the beginning,

and it did not improve with time.  Still, it managed to survive--country

papers nearly always manage to survive--year after year, bringing in some

sort of return.  It was on this paper that young Sam Clemens began his

writings--burlesque, as a rule, of local characters and conditions--

usually published in his brother's absence; generally resulting in

trouble on his return.  Yet they made the paper sell, and if Orion had

but realized his brother's talent he might have turned it into capital

even then.



In 1853 (he was not yet eighteen) Sam Clemens grew tired of his

limitations and pined for the wider horizon of the world.  He gave out to

his family that he was going to St. Louis, but he kept on to New York,

where a World's Fair was then going on.  In New York he found employment

at his trade, and during the hot months of 1853 worked in a printing-

office in Cliff Street.  By and by he went to Philadelphia, where he

worked a brief time; made a trip to Washington, and presently set out for

the West again, after an absence of more than a year.



Orion, meanwhile, had established himself at Muscatine, Iowa, but soon

after removed to Keokuk, where the brothers were once more together,

till following their trade.  Young Sam Clemens remained in Keokuk until

the winter of 1856-57, when he caught a touch of the South-American fever

then prevalent; and decided to go to Brazil.  He left Keokuk for

Cincinnati, worked that winter in a printing-office there, and in April

took the little steamer, Paul Jones, for New Orleans, where he expected

to find a South-American vessel.  In Life on the Mississippi we have his

story of how he met Horace Bixby and decided to become a pilot instead of

a South American adventurer--jauntily setting himself the stupendous task

of learning the twelve hundred miles of the Mississippi River between St.

Louis and New Orleans--of knowing it as exactly and as unfailingly, even

in the dark, as one knows the way to his own features.  It seems

incredible to those who knew Mark Twain in his later years--dreamy,

unpractical, and indifferent to details--that he could have acquired so

vast a store of minute facts as were required by that task.  Yet within

eighteen months he had become not only a pilot, but one of the best and

most careful pilots on the river, intrusted with some of the largest and

most valuable steamers.  He continued in that profession for two and a

half years longer, and during that time met with no disaster that cost

his owners a single dollar for damage.



Then the war broke out.  South Carolina seceded in December, 1860 and

other States followed.  Clemens was in New Orleans in January, 1861, when

Louisiana seceded, and his boat was put into the Confederate service and

sent up the Red River.  His occupation gone, he took steamer for the

North--the last one before the blockade closed.  A blank cartridge was

fired at them from Jefferson Barracks when they reached St. Louis, but

they did not understand the signal, and kept on.  Presently a shell

carried away part of the pilot-house and considerably disturbed its

inmates.  They realized, then, that war had really begun.



In those days Clemens's sympathies were with the South.  He hurried up to

Hannibal and enlisted with a company of young fellows who were recruiting

with the avowed purpose of "throwing off the yoke of the invader." They

were ready for the field, presently, and set out in good order, a sort of

nondescript cavalry detachment, mounted on animals more picturesque than

beautiful.  Still, it was a resolute band, and might have done very well,

only it rained a good deal, which made soldiering disagreeable and hard.

Lieutenant Clemens resigned at the end of two weeks, and decided to go to

Nevada with Orion, who was a Union abolitionist and had received an

appointment from Lincoln as Secretary of the new Territory.



In 'Roughing It' Mark Twain gives us the story of the overland journey

made by the two brothers, and a picture of experiences at the other end

--true in aspect, even if here and there elaborated in detail.  He was

Orion's private secretary, but there was no private-secretary work to do,

and no salary attached to the position.  The incumbent presently went to

mining, adding that to his other trades.



He became a professional miner, but not a rich one.  He was at Aurora,

California, in the Esmeralda district, skimping along, with not much to

eat and less to wear, when he was summoned by Joe Goodman, owner and

editor of the Virginia City Enterprise, to come up and take the local

editorship of that paper.  He had been contributing sketches to it now

and then, under the pen, name of "Josh," and Goodman, a man of fine

literary instincts, recognized a talent full of possibilities.  This was

in the late summer of 1862.  Clemens walked one hundred and thirty miles

over very bad roads to take the job, and arrived way-worn and travel-

stained.  He began on a salary of twenty-five dollars a week, picking up

news items here and there, and contributing occasional sketches,

burlesques, hoaxes, and the like.  When the Legislature convened at

Carson City he was sent down to report it, and then, for the first time,

began signing his articles "Mark Twain," a river term, used in making

soundings, recalled from his piloting days.  The name presently became

known up and down the Pacific coast.  His articles were, copied and

commented upon.  He was recognized as one of the foremost among a little

coterie of overland writers, two of whom, Mark Twain and Bret Harte, were

soon to acquire a world-wide fame.



He left Carson City one day, after becoming involved in a duel, the

result of an editorial squib written in Goodman's absence, and went

across the Sierras to San Francisco.  The duel turned out farcically

enough, but the Nevada law, which regarded even a challenge or its

acceptance as a felony, was an inducement to his departure.  Furthermore,

he had already aspired to a wider field of literary effort.  He attached

himself to the Morning Call, and wrote occasionally for one or two

literary papers--the Golden Era and the Californian---prospering well

enough during the better part of the year.  Bret Harte and the rest of

the little Pacific-slope group were also on the staff of these papers,

and for a time, at least, the new school of American humor mustered in

San Francisco.



The connection with the Call was not congenial.  In due course it came to

a natural end, and Mark Twain arranged to do a daily San Francisco letter

for his old paper, the Enterprise.  The Enterprise letters stirred up

trouble.  They criticized the police of San Francisco so severely that

the officials found means of making the writer's life there difficult and

comfortless.  With Jim Gillis, brother of a printer of whom he was fond,

and who had been the indirect cause of his troubles, he went up into

Calaveras County, to a cabin on jackass Hill.  Jim Gillis, a lovable,

picturesque character (the Truthful James of Bret Harte), owned mining

claims.  Mark Twain decided to spend his vacation in pocket-mining, and

soon added that science to his store of knowledge.  It was a halcyon,

happy three months that he lingered there, but did not make his fortune;

he only laid the corner-stone.



They tried their fortune at Angel's Camp, a place well known to readers

of Bret Harte.  But it rained pretty steadily, and they put in most of

their time huddled around the single stove of the dingy hotel of Angel's,

telling yarns.  Among the stories was one told by a dreary narrator named

Ben Coon.  It was about a frog that had been trained to jump, but failed

to win a wager because the owner of a rival frog had surreptitiously

loaded him with shot.  The story had been circulated among the camps, but

Mark Twain had never heard it until then.  The tale and the tiresome

fashion of its telling amused him.  He made notes to remember it.



Their stay in Angel's Camp came presently to an end.  One day, when the

mining partners were following the specks of gold that led to a pocket

somewhere up the hill, a chill, dreary rain set in.  Jim, as usual was

washing, and Clemens was carrying water.  The "color" became better and

better as they ascended, and Gillis, possessed with the mining passion,

would have gone on, regardless of the rain.  Clemens, however, protested,

and declared that each pail of water was his last.  Finally he said, in

his deliberate drawl:



"Jim, I won't carry any more water.  This work is too disagreeable.

Let's go to the house and wait till it clears up."



Gillis had just taken out a pan of earth.  "Bring one more pail, Sam," he

pleaded.



"I won't do it, Jim!  Not a drop!  Not if I knew there was a million

dollars in that pan!"



They left the pan standing there and went back to Angel's Camp.  The rain

continued and they returned to jackass Hill without visiting their claim

again.  Meantime the rain had washed away the top of the pan of earth

left standing on the slope above Angel's, and exposed a handful of

nuggets-pure gold.  Two strangers came along and, observing it, had sat

down to wait until the thirty-day claim-notice posted by Jim Gillis

should expire.  They did not mind the rain--not with that gold in sight--

and the minute the thirty days were up they followed the lead a few pans

further, and took out-some say ten, some say twenty, thousand dollars.

It was a good pocket.  Mark Twain missed it by one pail of water.  Still,

it is just as well, perhaps, when one remembers The Jumping Frog.



Matters having quieted down in San Francisco, he returned and took up his

work again.  Artemus Ward, whom he had met in Virginia City, wrote him

for something to use in his (Ward's) new book.  Clemens sent the frog

story, but he had been dilatory in preparing it, and when it reached New

York, Carleton, the publisher, had Ward's book about ready for the press.

It did not seem worth while to Carleton to include the frog story, and

handed it over to Henry Clapp, editor of the Saturday Press--a perishing

sheet-saying:



"Here, Clapp, here's something you can use."



The story appeared in the Saturday Press of November 18, 1865.  According

to the accounts of that time it set all New York in a roar, which

annoyed, rather than gratified, its author.  He had thought very little

of it, indeed, yet had been wondering why some of his more highly

regarded work had not found fuller recognition.



But The Jumping Frog did not die.  Papers printed it and reprinted it,

and it was translated into foreign tongues.  The name of "Mark Twain"

became known as the author of that sketch, and the two were permanently

associated from the day of its publication.



Such fame as it brought did not yield heavy financial return.  Its author

continued to win a more or less precarious livelihood doing miscellaneous

work, until March, 1866, when he was employed by the Sacramento Union to

contribute a series of letters from the Sandwich Islands.  They were

notable letters, widely read and freely copied, and the sojourn there was

a generally fortunate one.  It was during his stay in the islands that

the survivors of the wrecked vessel, the Hornet, came in, after long

privation at sea.  Clemens was sick at the time, but Anson Burlingame,

who was in Honolulu, on the way to China, had him carried in a cot to the

hospital, where he could interview the surviving sailors and take down

their story.  It proved a great "beat" for the Union, and added

considerably to its author's prestige.  On his return to San Francisco he

contributed an article on the Hornet disaster to Harper's Magazine, and

looked forward to its publication as a beginning of a real career.  But,

alas!  when it appeared the printer and the proof-reader had somehow

converted "Mark Twain" into "Mark Swain," and his dreams perished.



Undecided as to his plans, he was one day advised by a friend to deliver

a lecture.  He was already known as an entertaining talker, and his

adviser judged his possibilities well.  In Roughing It we find the story

of that first lecture and its success.  He followed it with other

lectures up and down the Coast.  He had added one more profession to his

intellectual stock in trade.



Mark Twain, now provided with money, decided to pay a visit to his

people.  He set out for the East in December, 1866, via Panama, arriving

in New York in January.  A few days later he was with his mother, then

living with his sister, in St. Louis.  A little later he lectured in

Keokuk, and in Hannibal, his old home.



It was about this time that the first great Mediterranean steamship

excursion began to be exploited.  No such ocean picnic had ever been

planned before, and it created a good deal of interest East and West.

Mark Twain heard of it and wanted to go.  He wrote to friends on the

'Alta California,' of San Francisco, and the publishers of that paper had

sufficient faith to advance the money for his passage, on the

understanding that he was to contribute frequent letters, at twenty

dollars apiece.  It was a liberal offer, as rates went in those days, and

a godsend in the fullest sense of the word to Mark Twain.



Clemens now hurried to New York in order to be there in good season for

the sailing date, which was in June.  In New York he met Frank Fuller,

whom he had known as territorial Governor of Utah, an energetic and

enthusiastic admirer of the Western humorist.  Fuller immediately

proposed that Clemens give a lecture in order to establish his reputation

on the Atlantic coast.  Clemens demurred, but Fuller insisted, and

engaged Cooper Union for the occasion.  Not many tickets were sold.

Fuller, however, always ready for an emergency, sent out a flood of

complimentaries to the school-teachers of New York and adjacent

territory, and the house was crammed.  It turned out to be a notable

event.  Mark Twain was at his best that night; the audience laughed

until, as some of them declared when the lecture was over, they were too

weak to leave their seats.  His success as a lecturer was assured.



The Quaker City was the steamer selected for the great oriental tour.

It sailed as advertised, June 8, 1867, and was absent five months, during

which Mark Twain contributed regularly to the 'Alta-California', and

wrote several letters for the New York Tribune.  They were read and

copied everywhere.  They preached a new gospel in travel literature--

a gospel of seeing with an overflowing honesty; a gospel of sincerity in

according praise to whatever he considered genuine, and ridicule to the

things believed to be shams.  It was a gospel that Mark Twain continued

to preach during his whole career.  It became, in fact, his chief

literary message to the world, a world ready for that message.



He returned to find himself famous.  Publishers were ready with plans for

collecting the letters in book form.  The American Publishing Company,

of Hartford, proposed a volume, elaborately illustrated, to be sold by

subscription.  He agreed with them as to terms, and went to Washington'

to prepare copy.  But he could not work quietly there, and presently was

back in San Francisco, putting his book together, lecturing occasionally,

always to crowded houses.  He returned in August, 1868, with the

manuscript of the Innocents Abroad, and that winter, while his book was

being manufactured, lectured throughout the East and Middle West, making

his headquarters in Hartford, and in Elmira, New York.



He had an especial reason for going to Elmira.  On the Quaker City he had

met a young man by the name of Charles Langdon, and one day, in the Bay

of Smyrna, had seen a miniature of the boy's sister, Olivia Langdon, then

a girl of about twenty-two.  He fell in love with that picture, and still

more deeply in love with the original when he met her in New York on his

return.  The Langdon home was in Elmira, and it was for this reason that

as time passed he frequently sojourned there.  When the proofs of the

Innocents Abroad were sent him he took them along, and he and sweet

"Livy" Langdon read them together.  What he lacked in those days in

literary delicacy she detected, and together they pruned it away.  She

became his editor that winter--a position which she held until her death.



The book was published in July, 1869, and its success was immediate and

abundant.  On his wedding-day, February 2, 1870, Clemens received a check

from his publishers for more than four thousand dollars, royalty

accumulated during the three months preceding.  The sales soon amounted

to more than fifty thousand copies, and had increased to very nearly one

hundred thousand at the end of the first three years.  It was a book of

travel, its lowest price three dollars and fifty cents.  Even with our

increased reading population no such sale is found for a book of that

description to-day.  And the Innocents Abroad holds its place--still

outsells every other book in its particular field. [This in 1917. D.W.]



Mark Twain now decided to settle down.  He had bought an interest in the

Express, of Buffalo, New York, and took up his residence in that city in

a house presented to the young couple by Mr. Langdon.  It did not prove a

fortunate beginning.  Sickness, death, and trouble of many kinds put a

blight on the happiness of their first married year and gave, them a

distaste for the home in which they had made such a promising start.

A baby boy, Langdon Clemens, came along in November, but he was never a

strong child.  By the end of the following year the Clemenses had

arranged for a residence in Hartford, temporary at first, later made

permanent.  It was in Hartford that little Langdon died, in 1872.



Clemens, meanwhile, had sold out his interest in the Express, severed his

connection with the Galaxy, a magazine for which he was doing a

department each month, and had written a second book for the American

Publishing Company, Roughing It, published in 1872.  In August of the

same year he made a trip to London, to get material for a book on

England, but was too much sought after, too continuously feted, to do any

work.  He went alone, but in November returned with the purpose of taking

Mrs. Clemens and the new baby, Susy, to England the following spring.

They sailed in April, 1873, and spent a good portion of the year in

England and Scotland.  They returned to America in November, and Clemens

hurried back to London alone to deliver a notable series of lectures

under the management of George Dolby, formerly managing agent for Charles

Dickens.  For two months Mark Twain lectured steadily to London

audiences--the big Hanover Square rooms always filled.  He returned to

his family in January, 1874.



Meantime, a home was being built for them in Hartford, and in the autumn

of 1874 they took up residence in ita happy residence, continued through

seventeen years--well-nigh perfect years.  Their summers they spent in

Elmira, on Quarry Farm--a beautiful hilltop, the home of Mrs. Clemens's

sister.  It was in Elmira that much of Mark Twain's literary work was

done.  He had a special study there, some distance from the house, where

he loved to work out his fancies and put them into visible form.



It was not so easy to work at Hartford; there was too much going on.

The Clemens home was a sort of general headquarters for literary folk,

near and far, and for distinguished foreign visitors of every sort.

Howells and Aldrich used it as their half-way station between Boston and

New York, and every foreign notable who visited America made a pilgrimage

to Hartford to see Mark Twain.  Some even went as far as Elmira, among

them Rudyard Kipling, who recorded his visit in a chapter of his American

Notes.  Kipling declared he had come all the way from India to see Mark

Twain.



Hartford had its own literary group.  Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe lived

near the Clemens home; also Charles Dudley Warner.  The Clemens and

Warner families were constantly associated, and The Gilded Age, published

in 1873, resulted from the friendship of Warner and Mark Twain.  The

character of Colonel Sellers in that book has become immortal, and it is

a character that only Mark Twain could create, for, though drawn from his

mother's cousin, James Lampton, it embodies--and in no very exaggerated

degree--characteristics that were his own.  The tendency to make millions

was always imminent; temptation was always hard to resist.  Money-making

schemes are continually being placed before men of means and prominence,

and Mark Twain, to the day of his death, found such schemes fatally

attractive.



It was because of the Sellers characteristics in him that he invested in

a typesetting-machine which cost him nearly two hundred thousand dollars

and helped to wreck his fortunes by and by.  It was because of this

characteristic that he invested in numberless schemes of lesser

importance, but no less disastrous in the end.  His one successful

commercial venture was his association with Charles L. Webster in the

publication of the Grant Memoirs, of which enough copies were sold to pay

a royalty of more than four hundred thousand dollars to Grant's widow--

the largest royalty ever paid from any single publication.  It saved the

Grant family from poverty.  Yet even this triumph was a misfortune to

Mark Twain, for it led to scores of less profitable book ventures and

eventual disaster.



Meanwhile he had written and published a number of books.  Tom Sawyer,

The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, and

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court were among the volumes that

had entertained the world and inspired it with admiration and love for

their author.  In 1878-79 he had taken his family to Europe, where they

spent their time in traveling over the Continent.  It was during this

period that he was joined by his intimate friend, the Rev. Joseph H.

Twichell, of Hartford, and the two made a journey, the story of which is

told in A Tramp Abroad.



In 1891 the Hartford house was again closed, this time indefinitely,

and the family, now five in number, took up residence in Berlin.  The

typesetting-machine and the unfortunate publishing venture were drawing

heavily on the family finances at this period, and the cost of the

Hartford establishment was too great to be maintained.  During the next

three years he was distracted by the financial struggle which ended in

April, 1894, with the failure of Charles L. Webster & Co. Mark Twain now

found himself bankrupt, and nearly one hundred thousand dollars in debt.

It had been a losing fight, with this bitter ending always in view;

yet during this period of hard, hopeless effort he had written a large

portion of the book which of all his works will perhaps survive the

longest--his tender and beautiful story of Joan of Arc.  All his life

Joan had been his favorite character in the world's history, and during

those trying months and years of the early nineties--in Berlin, in

Florence, in Paris--he was conceiving and putting his picture of that

gentle girl-warrior into perfect literary form.  It was published in

Harper's Magazine--anonymously, because, as he said, it would not have

been received seriously had it appeared over his own name.  The

authorship was presently recognized.  Exquisitely, reverently, as the

story was told, it had in it the, touch of quaint and gentle humor which

could only have been given to it by Mark Twain.



It was only now and then that Mark Twain lectured during these years.

He had made a reading tour with George W. Cable during the winter of

1884-85, but he abominated the platform, and often vowed he would never

appear before an audience again.  Yet, in 1895, when he was sixty years

old, he decided to rebuild his fortunes by making a reading tour around

the world.  It was not required of him to pay his debts in full.  The

creditors were willing to accept fifty per cent. of the liabilities, and

had agreed to a settlement on that basis.  But this did not satisfy Mrs.

Clemens, and it did not satisfy him.  They decided to pay dollar for

dollar.  They sailed for America, and in July, 1895, set out from Elmira

on the long trail across land and sea.  Mrs. Clemens, and Clara Clemens,

joined this pilgrimage, Susy and Jean Clemens remaining at Elmira with

their aunt.  Looking out of the car windows, the travelers saw Susy

waving them an adieu.  It was a picture they would long remember.



The reading tour was one of triumph.  High prices and crowded houses

prevailed everywhere.  The author-reader visited Australia, New Zealand,

India, Ceylon, South Africa, arriving in England, at last, with the money

and material which would pay off the heavy burden of debt and make him

once more free before the world.  And in that hour of triumph came the

heavy blow.  Susy Clemens, never very strong, had been struck down.  The

first cable announced her illness.  The mother and Clara sailed at once.

Before they were half-way across the ocean a second cable announced that

Susy was dead.  The father had to meet and endure the heartbreak alone;

he could not reach America, in time for the burial.  He remained in

England, and was joined there by the sorrowing family.



They passed that winter in London, where he worked at the story of his

travels, Following the Equator, the proofs of which he read the next

summer in Switzerland.  The returns from it, and from his reading

venture, wiped away Mark Twain's indebtedness and made him free.  He

could go back to America; as he said, able to look any man in the face

again.



Yet he did not go immediately.  He could live more economically abroad,

and economy was still necessary.  The family spent two winters in Vienna,

and their apartments there constituted a veritable court where the

world's notables gathered.  Another winter in England followed, and then,

in the latter part of 1900, they went home--that is, to America.  Mrs.

Clemens never could bring herself to return to Hartford, and never saw

their home there again.



Mark Twain's return to America, was in the nature of a national event.

Wherever he appeared throngs turned out to bid him welcome.  Mighty

banquets were planned in his honor.



In a house at 14 West Tenth Street, and in a beautiful place at

Riverdale, on the Hudson, most of the next three years were passed.  Then

Mrs. Clemens's health failed, and in the autumn of 1903 the family went

to Florence for her benefit.  There, on the 5th of June, 1904, she died.

They brought her back and laid her beside Susy, at Elmira.  That winter

the family took up residence at 21 Fifth Avenue, New York, and remained

there until the completion of Stormfield, at Redding, Connecticut, in

1908.



In his later life Mark Twain was accorded high academic honors.  Already,

in 1888, he had received from Yale College the degree of Master of Arts,

and the same college made him a Doctor of Literature in 1901.  A year

later the university of his own State, at Columbia, Missouri, conferred

the same degree, and then, in 1907, came the crowning honor, when

venerable Oxford tendered him the doctor's robe.



"I don't know why they should give me a degree like that," he said,

quaintly.  "I never doctored any literature--I wouldn't know how."



He had thought never to cross the ocean again, but he declared he would

travel to Mars and back, if necessary, to get that Oxford degree.

He appreciated its full meaning-recognition by the world's foremost

institution of learning of the achievements of one who had no learning of

the institutionary kind.  He sailed in June, and his sojourn in England

was marked by a continuous ovation.  His hotel was besieged by callers.

Two secretaries were busy nearly twenty hours a day attending to visitors

and mail.  When he appeared on the street his name went echoing in every

direction and the multitudes gathered.  On the day when he rose, in his

scarlet robe and black mortar-board, to receive his degree (he must have

made a splendid picture in that dress, with his crown of silver hair),

the vast assembly went wild.  What a triumph, indeed, for the little

Missouri printer-boy!  It was the climax of a great career.



Mark Twain's work was always of a kind to make people talk, always

important, even when it was mere humor.  Yet it was seldom that; there

was always wisdom under it, and purpose, and these things gave it dynamic

force and enduring life.  Some of his aphorisms--so quaint in form as to

invite laughter--are yet fairly startling in their purport.  His

paraphrase, "When in doubt, tell the truth," is of this sort.  "Frankness

is a jewel; only the young can afford it," he once said to the writer,

apropos of a little girl's remark.  His daily speech was full of such

things.  The secret of his great charm was his great humanity and the

gentle quaintness and sincerity of his utterance.



His work did not cease when the pressing need of money came to an end.

He was full of ideas, and likely to begin a new article or story at any

time.  He wrote and published a number of notable sketches, articles,

stories, even books, during these later years, among them that marvelous

short story--"The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg." In that story, as in

most of his later work, he proved to the world that he was much more than

a humorist--that he was, in fact, a great teacher, moralist, philosopher-

-the greatest, perhaps, of his age.



His life at Stormfield--he had never seen the place until the day of his

arrival, June 18, 1908--was a peaceful and serene old age.  Not that he

was really old; he never was that.  His step, his manner, his point of

view, were all and always young.  He was fond of children and frequently

had them about him.  He delighted in games--especially in billiards--and

in building the house at Stormfield the billiard-room was first

considered.  He had a genuine passion for the sport; without it his

afternoon was not complete.  His mornings he was likely to pass in bed,

smoking--he was always smoking--and attending to his correspondence and

reading.  History and the sciences interested him, and his bed was strewn

with biographies and stories of astronomical and geological research.

The vastness of distances and periods always impressed him.  He had no

head for figures, but he would labor for hours over scientific

calculations, trying to compass them and to grasp their gigantic import.

I remember once finding him highly elated over the fact that he had

figured out for himself the length in hours and minutes of a "light

year." He showed me the pages covered with figures, and was more proud of

them than if they had been the pages of an immortal story.  Then we

played billiards, but even his favorite game could not make him

altogether forget his splendid achievement.



It was on the day before Christmas, 1909, that heavy bereavement once

more came into the life of Mark Twain.  His daughter Jean, long subject

to epileptic attacks, was seized with a convulsion while in her bath and

died before assistance reached her.  He was dazed by the suddenness of

the blow.  His philosophy sustained him.  He was glad, deeply glad for

the beautiful girl that had been released.



"I never greatly envied anybody but the dead," he said, when he had

looked at her.  "I always envy the dead."



The coveted estate of silence, time's only absolute gift, it was the one

benefaction he had ever considered worth while.



Yet the years were not unkindly to Mark Twain.  They brought him sorrow,

but they brought him likewise the capacity and opportunity for large

enjoyment, and at the last they laid upon him a kind of benediction.

Naturally impatient, he grew always more gentle, more generous, more

tractable and considerate as the seasons passed.  His final days may be

said to have been spent in the tranquil light of a summer afternoon.



His own end followed by a few months that of his daughter.  There were

already indications that his heart was seriously affected, and soon after

Jean's death he sought the warm climate of Bermuda.  But his malady made

rapid progress, and in April he returned to Stormfield.  He died there

just a week later, April 21, 1910.



Any attempt to designate Mark Twain's place in the world's literary

history would be presumptuous now.  Yet I cannot help thinking that he

will maintain his supremacy in the century that produced him.  I think so

because, of all the writers of that hundred years, his work was the most

human his utterances went most surely to the mark.  In the long analysis

of the ages it is the truth that counts, and he never approximated, never

compromised, but pronounced those absolute verities to which every human

being of whatever rank must instantly respond.



His understanding of subjective human nature--the vast, unwritten life

within--was simply amazing.  Such knowledge he acquired at the

fountainhead--that is, from himself.  He recognized in himself an extreme

example of the human being with all the attributes of power and of

weakness, and he made his exposition complete.



The world will long miss Mark Twain; his example and his teaching will be

neither ignored nor forgotten.  Genius defies the laws of perspective and

looms larger as it recedes.  The memory of Mark Twain remains to us a

living and intimate presence that today, even more than in life,

constitutes a stately moral bulwark reared against hypocrisy and

superstition--a mighty national menace to sham.













                           MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS





I



EARLY LETTERS, 1853.  NEW YORK AND PHILADELPHIA



     We have no record of Mark Twain's earliest letters.  Very likely

     they were soiled pencil notes, written to some school sweetheart--

     to "Becky Thatcher," perhaps--and tossed across at lucky moments,

     or otherwise, with happy or disastrous results.  One of those

     smudgy, much-folded school notes of the Tom Sawyer period would be

     priceless to-day, and somewhere among forgotten keepsakes it may

     exist, but we shall not be likely to find it.  No letter of his

     boyhood, no scrap of his earlier writing, has come to light except

     his penciled name, SAM CLEMENS, laboriously inscribed on the inside

     of a small worn purse that once held his meager, almost non-existent

     wealth.  He became a printer's apprentice at twelve, but as he

     received no salary, the need of a purse could not have been urgent.

     He must have carried it pretty steadily, however, from its

     appearance--as a kind of symbol of hope, maybe--a token of that

     Sellers-optimism which dominated his early life, and was never

     entirely subdued.



     No other writing of any kind has been preserved from Sam Clemens's

     boyhood, none from that period of his youth when he had served his

     apprenticeship and was a capable printer on his brother's paper, a

     contributor to it when occasion served.  Letters and manuscripts of

     those days have vanished--even his contributions in printed form are

     unobtainable.  It is not believed that a single number of Orion

     Clemens's paper, the Hannibal Journal, exists to-day.



     It was not until he was seventeen years old that Sam Clemens wrote a

     letter any portion of which has survived.  He was no longer in

     Hannibal.  Orion's unprosperous enterprise did not satisfy him.

     His wish to earn money and to see the world had carried him first to

     St. Louis, where his sister Pamela was living, then to New York

     City, where a World's Fair in a Crystal Palace was in progress.

     The letter tells of a visit to this great exhibition.  It is not

     complete, and the fragment bears no date, but it was written during

     the summer of 1853.





      Fragment of a letter from Sam L.  Clemens to his sister

           Pamela Moffett, in St. Louis, summer of 1853:



.  .  .  From the gallery (second floor) you have a glorious sight--the

flags of the different countries represented, the lofty dome, glittering

jewelry, gaudy tapestry, &c., with the busy crowd passing to and fro--tis

a perfect fairy palace--beautiful beyond description.



The Machinery department is on the main floor, but I cannot enumerate any

of it on account of the lateness of the hour (past 8 o'clock.) It would

take more than a week to examine everything on exhibition; and as I was

only in a little over two hours tonight, I only glanced at about one-

third of the articles; and having a poor memory; I have enumerated

scarcely any of even the principal objects.  The visitors to the Palace

average 6,000 daily--double the population of Hannibal.  The price of

admission being 50 cents, they take in about $3,000.



The Latting Observatory (height about 280 feet) is near the Palace--from

it you can obtain a grand view of the city and the country round.  The

Croton Aqueduct, to supply the city with water, is the greatest wonder

yet.  Immense sewers are laid across the bed of the Hudson River, and

pass through the country to Westchester county, where a whole river is

turned from its course, and brought to New York.  From the reservoir in

the city to the Westchester county reservoir, the distance is thirty-

eight miles! and if necessary, they could supply every family in New York

with one hundred barrels of water per day!



I am very sorry to learn that Henry has been sick.  He ought to go to the

country and take exercise; for he is not half so healthy as Ma thinks he

is.  If he had my walking to do, he would be another boy entirely.  Four

times every day I walk a little over one mile; and working hard all day,

and walking four miles, is exercise--I am used to it, now, though, and it

is no trouble.  Where is it Orion's going to?  Tell Ma my promises are

faithfully kept, and if I have my health I will take her to Ky. in the

spring--I shall save money for this.  Tell Jim and all the rest of them

to write, and give me all the news.  I am sorry to hear such bad news

from Will and Captain Bowen.  I shall write to Will soon.  The Chatham-

square Post Office and the Broadway office too, are out of my way, and I

always go to the General Post Office; so you must write the direction of

my letters plain, "New York City, N. Y.," without giving the street or

anything of the kind, or they may go to some of the other offices.  (It

has just struck 2 A.M.  and I always get up at 6, and am at work at 7.)

You ask me where I spend my evenings.  Where would you suppose, with a

free printers' library containing more than 4,000 volumes within a

quarter of a mile of me, and nobody at home to talk to?  I shall write to

Ella soon.  Write soon

                         Truly your Brother

                                             SAM.



P. S.  I have written this by a light so dim that you nor Ma could not

read by it.





     He was lodging in a mechanics' cheap boarding-house in Duane Street,

     and we may imagine the bareness of his room, the feeble poverty of

     his lamp.



     "Tell Ma my promises are faithfully kept."  It was the day when he

     had left Hannibal.  His mother, Jane Clemens, a resolute, wiry woman

     of forty-nine, had put together his few belongings.  Then, holding

     up a little Testament:



     "I want you to take hold of the end of this, Sam," she said, "and

     make me a promise.  I want you to repeat after me these words:

     'I do solemnly swear that I will not throw a card, or drink a drop

     of liquor while I am gone.'"



     It was this oath, repeated after her, that he was keeping

     faithfully.  The Will Bowen mentioned is a former playmate, one of

     Tom Sawyer's outlaw band.  He had gone on the river to learn

     piloting with an elder brother, the "Captain."  What the bad news

     was is no longer remembered, but it could not have been very

     serious, for the Bowen boys remained on the river for many years.

     "Ella" was Samuel Clemens's cousin and one-time sweetheart, Ella

     Creel.  "Jim" was Jim Wolfe, an apprentice in Orion's office, and

     the hero of an adventure which long after Mark Twain wrote under the

     title of, "Jim Wolfe and the Cats."



     There is scarcely a hint of the future Mark Twain in this early

     letter.  It is the letter of a boy of seventeen who is beginning to

     take himself rather seriously--who, finding himself for the first

     time far from home and equal to his own responsibilities, is willing

     to carry the responsibility of others.  Henry, his brother, three

     years younger, had been left in the printing-office with Orion, who,

     after a long, profitless fight, is planning to remove from Hannibal.

     The young traveler is concerned as to the family outlook, and will

     furnish advice if invited.  He feels the approach of prosperity, and

     will take his mother on a long-coveted trip to her old home in the

     spring.  His evenings?  Where should he spend them, with a free

     library of four thousand volumes close by?  It is distinctly a

     youthful letter, a bit pretentious, and wanting in the spontaneity

     and humor of a later time.  It invites comment, now, chiefly because

     it is the first surviving document in the long human story.



     He was working in the printing-office of John A. Gray and Green, on

     Cliff Street, and remained there through the summer.  He must have

     written more than once during this period, but the next existing

     letter--also to Sister Pamela--was written in October.  It is

     perhaps a shade more natural in tone than the earlier example, and

     there is a hint of Mark Twain in the first paragraph.





                      To Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                              NEW YORK .  .  .  , Oct. Saturday '53.

MY DEAR SISTER,--I have not written to any of the family for some time,

from the fact, firstly, that I didn't know where they were, and secondly,

because I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to

leave New York every day for the last two weeks.  I have taken a liking

to the abominable place, and every time I get ready to leave, I put it

off a day or so, from some unaccountable cause.  It is as hard on my

conscience to leave New York, as it was easy to leave Hannibal.  I think

I shall get off Tuesday, though.



Edwin Forrest has been playing, for the last sixteen days, at the

Broadway Theatre, but I never went to see him till last night.  The play

was the "Gladiator."  I did not like parts of it much, but other portions

were really splendid.  In the latter part of the last act, where the

"Gladiator" (Forrest) dies at his brother's feet, (in all the fierce

pleasure of gratified revenge,) the man's whole soul seems absorbed in

the part he is playing; and it is really startling to see him.  I am

sorry I did not see him play "Damon and Pythias" the former character

being his greatest.  He appears in Philadelphia on Monday night.



I have not received a letter from home lately, but got a "'Journal'" the

other day, in which I see the office has been sold.  I suppose Ma, Orion

and Henry are in St. Louis now.  If Orion has no other project in his

head, he ought to take the contract for getting out some weekly paper, if

he cannot get a foremanship.  Now, for such a paper as the "Presbyterian"

(containing about 60,000,--[Sixty thousand ems, type measurement.])

he could get $20 or $25 per week, and he and Henry could easily do the

work; nothing to do but set the type and make up the forms....



If my letters do not come often, you need not bother yourself about me;

for if you have a brother nearly eighteen years of age, who is not able

to take care of himself a few miles from home, such a brother is not

worth one's thoughts: and if I don't manage to take care of No. 1, be

assured you will never know it.  I am not afraid, however; I shall ask

favors from no one, and endeavor to be (and shall be) as "independent as

a wood-sawyer's clerk."



I never saw such a place for military companies as New York.  Go on the

street when you will, you are sure to meet a company in full uniform,

with all the usual appendages of drums, fifes, &c.  I saw a large company

of soldiers of 1812 the other day, with a '76 veteran scattered here and

there in the ranks.  And as I passed through one of the parks lately,

I came upon a company of boys on parade.  Their uniforms were neat, and

their muskets about half the common size.  Some of them were not more

than seven or eight years of age; but had evidently been well-drilled.



Passage to Albany (160 miles) on the finest steamers that ply' the

Hudson, is now 25 cents--cheap enough, but is generally cheaper than that

in the summer.



I want you to write as soon as I tell you where to direct your letter.

I would let you know now, if I knew myself.  I may perhaps be here a week

longer; but I cannot tell.  When you write tell me the whereabouts of the

family.  My love to Mr. Moffett and Ella.  Tell Ella I intend to write to

her soon, whether she wants me to nor not.

                              Truly your Brother,

                                        SAML L. CLEMENS.





     He was in Philadelphia when he wrote the nest letter that has come

     down to us, and apparently satisfied with the change.  It is a

     letter to Orion Clemens, who had disposed of his paper, but

     evidently was still in Hannibal.  An extended description of a trip

     to Fairmount Park is omitted because of its length, its chief

     interest being the tendency it shows to descriptive writing--the

     field in which he would make his first great fame.  There is,

     however, no hint of humor, and only a mild suggestion of the author

     of the Innocents Abroad in this early attempt.  The letter as here

     given is otherwise complete, the omissions being indicated.





                      To Orion Clemens, in Hannibal:



                                   PHILADELPHIA, PA. Oct. 26,1853.

MY DEAR BROTHER,--It was at least two weeks before I left New York, that

I received my last letter from home: and since then, not a word have I

heard from any of you.  And now, since I think of it, it wasn't a letter,

either, but the last number of the "Daily Journal," saying that that

paper was sold, and I very naturally supposed from that, that the family

had disbanded, and taken up winter quarters in St. Louis.  Therefore, I

have been writing to Pamela, till I've tired of it, and have received no

answer.  I have been writing for the last two or three weeks, to send Ma

some money, but devil take me if I knew where she was, and so the money

has slipped out of my pocket somehow or other, but I have a dollar left,

and a good deal owing to me, which will be paid next Monday.  I shall

enclose the dollar in this letter, and you can hand it to her.  I know

it's a small amount, but then it will buy her a handkerchief, and at the

same time serve as a specimen of the kind of stuff we are paid with in

Philadelphia, for you see it's against the law, in Pennsylvania, to keep

or pass a bill of less denomination than $5.  I have only seen two or

three bank bills since I have been in the State.  On Monday the hands are

paid off in sparkling gold, fresh from the Mint; so your dreams are not

troubled with the fear of having doubtful money in your pocket.



I am subbing at the Inquirer office.  One man has engaged me to work for

him every Sunday till the first of next April, (when I shall return home

to take Ma to Ky;) and another has engaged my services for the 24th of

next month; and if I want it, I can get subbing every night of the week.

I go to work at 7 o'clock in the evening, and work till 3 o'clock the

next morning.  I can go to the theatre and stay till 12 o'clock and then

go to the office, and get work from that till 3 the next morning; when I

go to bed, and sleep till 11 o'clock, then get up and loaf the rest of

the day.  The type is mostly agate and minion, with some bourgeois; and

when one gets a good agate take,--["Agate," "minion," etc., sizes of

type; "take," a piece of work.  Type measurement is by ems, meaning the

width of the letter 'm'.]--he is sure to make money.  I made $2.50 last

Sunday, and was laughed at by all the hands, the poorest of whom sets

11,000 on Sunday; and if I don't set 10,000, at least, next Sunday, I'll

give them leave to laugh as much as they want to.  Out of the 22

compositors in this office, 12 at least, set 15,000 on Sunday.



Unlike New York, I like this Philadelphia amazingly, and the people in

it.  There is only one thing that gets my "dander" up--and that is the

hands are always encouraging me: telling me--"it's no use to get

discouraged--no use to be down-hearted, for there is more work here than

you can do!"  "Down-hearted," the devil!  I have not had a particle of

such a feeling since I left Hannibal, more than four months ago.  I fancy

they'll have to wait some time till they see me down-hearted or afraid of

starving while I have strength to work and am in a city of 400,000

inhabitants.  When I was in Hannibal, before I had scarcely stepped out

of the town limits, nothing could have convinced me that I would starve

as soon as I got a little way from home....



The grave of Franklin is in Christ Church-yard, corner of Fifth and Arch

streets.  They keep the gates locked, and one can only see the flat slab

that lies over his remains and that of his wife; but you cannot see the

inscription distinctly enough to read it.  The inscription, I believe,

reads thus:



                        "Benjamin  |

                         and       |  Franklin"

                         Deborah   |



I counted 27 cannons (6 pounders) planted in the edge of the sidewalk in

Water St. the other day.  They are driven into the ground, about a foot,

with the mouth end upwards.  A ball is driven fast into the mouth of

each, to exclude the water; they look like so many posts.  They were put

there during the war.  I have also seen them planted in this manner,

round the old churches, in N. Y.....



There is one fine custom observed in Phila.  A gentleman is always

expected to hand up a lady's money for her.  Yesterday, I sat in the

front end of the 'bus, directly under the driver's box--a lady sat

opposite me.  She handed me her money, which was right.  But, Lord!

a St. Louis lady would think herself ruined, if she should be so familiar

with a stranger.  In St. Louis a man will sit in the front end of the

stage, and see a lady stagger from the far end, to pay her fare.  The

Phila. 'bus drivers cannot cheat.  In the front of the stage is a thing

like an office clock, with figures from 0 to 40, marked on its face.

When the stage starts, the hand of the clock is turned toward the 0.

When you get in and pay your fare, the driver strikes a bell, and the

hand moves to the figure 1--that is, "one fare, and paid for," and there

is your receipt, as good as if you had it in your pocket.  When a

passenger pays his fare and the driver does not strike the bell

immediately, he is greeted "Strike that bell!  will you?"



I must close now.  I intend visiting the Navy Yard, Mint, etc., before I

write again.  You must write often.  You see I have nothing to write

interesting to you, while you can write nothing that will not interest

me.  Don't say my letters are not long enough.  Tell Jim Wolfe to write.

Tell all the boys where I am, and to write.  Jim Robinson, particularly.

I wrote to him from N. Y.  Tell me all that is going on in H--l.

                                   Truly your brother

                                                       SAM.





Those were primitive times.  Imagine a passenger in these easy-going days

calling to a driver or conductor to "Strike that bell!"



"H--l" is his abbreviation for Hannibal.  He had first used it in a title

of a poem which a few years before, during one of Orion's absences, he

had published in the paper.  "To Mary in Hannibal" was too long to set as

a display head in single column.  The poem had no great merit, but under

the abbreviated title it could hardly fail to invite notice.  It was one

of several things he did to liven up the circulation during a brief

period of his authority.



The doubtful money he mentions was the paper issued by private banks,

"wild cat," as it was called.  He had been paid with it in New York,

and found it usually at a discount--sometimes even worthless.  Wages and

money were both better in Philadelphia, but the fund for his mother's

trip to Kentucky apparently did not grow very rapidly.



The next letter, written a month later, is also to Orion Clemens, who had

now moved to Muscatine, Iowa, and established there a new paper with an

old title, 'The Journal'.





                  To Orion Clemens, in Muscatine, Iowa:



                                   PHILADELPHIA, Nov. 28th, 1853.

MY DEAR BROTHER,--I received your letter today.  I think Ma ought to

spend the winter in St. Louis.  I don't believe in that climate--it's too

cold for her.



The printers' annual ball and supper came off the other night.  The

proceeds amounted to about $1,000.  The printers, as well as other

people, are endeavoring to raise money to erect a monument to Franklin,

but there are so many abominable foreigners here (and among printers,

too,) who hate everything American, that I am very certain as much money

for such a purpose could be raised in St. Louis, as in Philadelphia.

I was in Franklin's old office this morning--the "North American"

(formerly "Philadelphia Gazette") and there was at least one foreigner

for every American at work there.



How many subscribers has the Journal got?  What does the job-work pay?

and what does the whole concern pay?.....



I will try to write for the paper occasionally, but I fear my letters

will be very uninteresting, for this incessant night-work dulls one's

ideas amazingly.



From some cause, I cannot set type nearly so fast as when I was at home.

Sunday is a long day, and while others set 12 and 15,000, yesterday, I

only set 10,000.  However, I will shake this laziness off, soon, I reckon

....



How do you like "free-soil?"--I would like amazingly to see a good old-

fashioned negro.

                                   My love to all

                                        Truly your brother

                                                       SAM.





     We may believe that it never occurred to the young printer, looking

     up landmarks of Ben Franklin, that time would show points of

     resemblance between the great Franklin's career and his own.  Yet

     these seem now rather striking.  Like Franklin, he had been taken

     out of school very young and put at the printer's trade; like

     Franklin, he had worked in his brother's office, and had written for

     the paper.  Like him, too, he had left quietly for New York and

     Philadelphia to work at the trade of printing, and in time Samuel

     Clemens, like Benjamin Franklin, would become a world-figure, many-

     sided, human, and of incredible popularity.  The boy Sam Clemens may

     have had such dreams, but we find no trace of them.



     There is but one more letter of this early period.  Young Clemens

     spent some time in Washington, but if he wrote from there his

     letters have disappeared.  The last letter is from Philadelphia and

     seems to reflect homesickness.  The novelty of absence and travel

     was wearing thin.





                      To Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                                   PHILADELPHIA, Dec. 5, '53.

MY DEAR SISTER,--I have already written two letters within the last two

hours, and you will excuse me if this is not lengthy.  If I had the

money, I would come to St. Louis now, while the river is open; but within

the last two or three weeks I have spent about thirty dollars for

clothing, so I suppose I shall remain where I am.  I only want to return

to avoid night-work, which is injuring my eyes.  I have received one or

two letters from home, but they are not written as they should be, and I

know no more about what is going on there than the man in the moon.  One

only has to leave home to learn how to write an interesting letter to an

absent friend when he gets back.  I suppose you board at Mrs. Hunter's

yet--and that, I think, is somewhere in Olive street above Fifth.

Philadelphia is one of the healthiest places in the Union.  I wanted to

spend this winter in a warm climate, but it is too late now.  I don't

like our present prospect for cold weather at all.

                                   Truly your brother

                                                       SAM.





     But he did not return to the West for another half year.  The

     letters he wrote during that period have not survived.  It was late

     in the summer of 1854 when he finally started for St. Louis.  He sat

     up for three days and nights in a smoking-car to make the journey,

     and arrived exhausted.  The river packet was leaving in a few hours

     for Muscatine, Iowa, where his mother and his two brothers were now

     located.  He paid his sister a brief visit, and caught the boat.

     Worn-out, he dropped into his berth and slept the thirty-six hours

     of the journey.



     It was early when-he arrived--too early to arouse the family.  In

     the office of the little hotel where he waited for daylight he found

     a small book.  It contained portraits of the English rulers, with

     the brief facts of their reigns.  Young Clemens entertained himself

     by learning this information by heart.  He had a fine memory for

     such things, and in an hour or two had the printed data perfectly

     and permanently committed.  This incidentally acquired knowledge

     proved of immense value to him.  It was his groundwork for all

     English history.









II



LETTERS 1856-61.  KEOKUK, AND THE RIVER.  END OF PILOTING



     There comes a period now of nearly four years, when Samuel Clemens

     was either a poor correspondent or his letters have not been

     preserved.  Only two from this time have survived--happily of

     intimate biographical importance.



     Young Clemens had not remained in Muscatine.  His brother had no

     inducements to offer, and he presently returned to St. Louis, where

     he worked as a compositor on the Evening News until the following

     spring, rooming with a young man named Burrough, a journeyman chair-

     maker with a taste for the English classics.  Orion Clemens,

     meantime, on a trip to Keokuk, had casually married there, and a

     little later removed his office to that city.  He did not move the

     paper; perhaps it did not seem worth while, and in Keokuk he

     confined himself to commercial printing.  The Ben Franklin Book and

     Job Office started with fair prospects.  Henry Clemens and a boy

     named Dick Hingham were the assistants, and somewhat later, when

     brother Sam came up from St. Louis on a visit, an offer of five

     dollars a week and board induced him to remain.  Later, when it

     became increasingly difficult to pay the five dollars, Orion took

     his brother into partnership, which perhaps relieved the financial

     stress, though the office methods would seem to have left something

     to be desired.  It is about at this point that the first of the two

     letters mentioned was written.  The writer addressed it to his

     mother and sister--Jane Clemens having by this time taken up her

     home with her daughter, Mrs. Moffett.





             To Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                                        KEOKUK, Iowa, June 10th, 1856.

MY DEAR MOTHER & SISTER,--I have nothing to write.  Everything is going

on well.  The Directory is coming on finely.  I have to work on it

occasionally, which I don't like a particle I don't like to work at too

many things at once.  They take Henry and Dick away from me too.  Before

we commenced the Directory, I could tell before breakfast just how much

work could be done during the day, and manage accordingly--but now, they

throw all my plans into disorder by taking my hands away from their work.

I have nothing to do with the book--if I did I would have the two book

hands do more work than they do, or else I would drop it.  It is not a

mere supposition that they do not work fast enough--I know it; for

yesterday the two book hands were at work all day, Henry and Dick all the

afternoon, on the advertisements, and they set up five pages and a half-

and I set up two pages and a quarter of the same matter after supper,

night before last, and I don't work fast on such things.  They are either

excessively slow motioned or very lazy.  I am not getting along well with

the job work.  I can't work blindly--without system.  I gave Dick a job

yesterday, which I calculated he would set in two hours and I could work

off in three, and therefore just finish it by supper time, but he was

transferred to the Directory, and the job, promised this morning, remains

untouched.  Through all the great pressure of job work lately, I never

before failed in a promise of the kind.

                                        Your Son

                                                  SAM

Excuse brevity this is my 3rd letter to-night.





     Samuel Clemens was never celebrated for his patience; we may imagine

     that the disorder of the office tried his nerves.  He seems, on the

     whole, however, to have been rather happy in Keokuk.  There were

     plenty of young people there, and he was a favorite among them.  But

     he had grown dissatisfied, and when one day some weeks later there

     fell into His hands an account of the riches of the newly explored

     regions of the upper Amazon, he promptly decided to find his fortune

     at the headwaters of the great South-American river.  The second

     letter reports this momentous decision.  It was written to Henry

     Clemens, who was temporarily absent-probably in Hannibal.





                            To Henry Clemens:



                                        KEOKUK, August 5th, '56.

MY DEAR BROTHER,--..... Ward and I held a long consultation, Sunday

morning, and the result was that we two have determined to start to

Brazil, if possible, in six weeks from now, in order to look carefully

into matters there and report to Dr.  Martin in time for him to follow on

the first of March.  We propose going via New York.  Now, between you and

I and the fence you must say nothing about this to Orion, for he thinks

that Ward is to go clear through alone, and that I am to stop at New York

or New Orleans until he reports.  But that don't suit me.  My confidence

in human nature does not extend quite that far.  I won't depend upon

Ward's judgment, or anybody's else--I want to see with my own eyes, and

form my own opinion.  But you know what Orion is.  When he gets a notion

into his head, and more especially if it is an erroneous one, the Devil

can't get it out again.  So I know better than to combat his arguments

long, but apparently yielded, inwardly determined to go clear through.

Ma knows my determination, but even she counsels me to keep it from

Orion.  She says I can treat him as I did her when I started to St. Louis

and went to New York--I can start to New York and go to South America!

Although Orion talks grandly about furnishing me with fifty or a hundred

dollars in six weeks, I could not depend upon him for ten dollars, so I

have "feelers" out in several directions, and have already asked for a

hundred dollars from one source (keep it to yourself.) I will lay on my

oars for awhile, and see how the wind sets, when I may probably try to

get more.  Mrs. Creel is a great friend of mine, and has some influence

with Ma and Orion, though I reckon they would not acknowledge it.  I am

going up there tomorrow, to press her into my service.  I shall take care

that Ma and Orion are plentifully supplied with South American books.

They have Herndon's Report now.  Ward and the Dr. and myself will hold a

grand consultation tonight at the office.  We have agreed that no more

shall be admitted into our company.



I believe the Guards went down to Quincy today to escort our first

locomotive home.

                         Write soon.

                                   Your Brother,

                                                  SAM.





     Readers familiar with the life of Mark Twain know that none of the

     would-be adventurers found their way to the Amazon: His two

     associates gave up the plan, probably for lack of means.  Young

     Clemens himself found a fifty-dollar bill one bleak November day

     blowing along the streets of Keokuk, and after duly advertising his

     find without result, set out for the Amazon, by way of Cincinnati

     and New Orleans.



     "I advertised the find and left for the Amazon the same day," he

     once declared, a statement which we may take with a literary

     discount.



     He remained in Cincinnati that winter (1856-57) working at his

     trade.  No letters have been preserved from that time, except two

     that were sent to a Keokuk weekly, the Saturday Post, and as these

     were written for publication, and are rather a poor attempt at

     burlesque humor--their chief feature being a pretended illiteracy--

     they would seem to bear no relation to this collection.  He roomed

     that winter with a rugged, self-educated Scotchman--a mechanic, but

     a man of books and philosophies, who left an impress on Mark Twain's

     mental life.



     In April he took up once more the journey toward South America, but

     presently forgot the Amazon altogether in the new career that opened

     to him.  All through his boyhood and youth Samuel Clemens had wanted

     to be a pilot.  Now came the long-deferred opportunity.  On the

     little Cincinnati steamer, the Paul Jones, there was a pilot named

     Horace Bixby.  Young Clemens idling in the pilot-house was one

     morning seized with the old ambition, and laid siege to Bixby to

     teach him the river.  The terms finally agreed upon specified a fee

     to Bixby of five hundred dollars, one hundred down, the balance when

     the pupil had completed the course and was earning money.  But all

     this has been told in full elsewhere, and is only summarized here

     because the letters fail to complete the story.



     Bixby soon made some trips up the Missouri River, and in his absence

     turned his apprentice, or "cub," over to other pilots, such being

     the river custom.  Young Clemens, in love with the life, and a

     favorite with his superiors, had a happy time until he came under a

     pilot named Brown.  Brown was illiterate and tyrannical, and from

     the beginning of their association pilot and apprentice disliked

     each other cordially.



     It is at this point that the letters begin once more--the first

     having been written when young Clemens, now twenty-two years old,

     had been on the river nearly a year.  Life with Brown, of course,

     was not all sorrow, and in this letter we find some of the fierce

     joy of adventure which in those days Samuel Clemens loved.





               To Orion Clemens and Wife, in Keokuk, Iowa:



                                        SAINT LOUIS, March 9th, 1858.

DEAR BROTHER AND SISTER,--I must take advantage of the opportunity now

presented to write you, but I shall necessarily be dull, as I feel

uncommonly stupid.  We have had a hard trip this time.  Left Saint Louis

three weeks ago on the Pennsylvania.  The weather was very cold, and the

ice running densely.  We got 15 miles below town, landed the boat, and

then one pilot.  Second Mate and four deck hands took the sounding boat

and shoved out in the ice to hunt the channel.  They failed to find it,

and the ice drifted them ashore.  The pilot left the men with the boat

and walked back to us, a mile and a half.  Then the other pilot and

myself, with a larger crew of men started out and met with the same fate.

We drifted ashore just below the other boat.  Then the fun commenced.  We

made fast a line 20 fathoms long, to the bow of the yawl, and put the men

(both crews) to it like horses, on the shore.  Brown, the pilot, stood in

the bow, with an oar, to keep her head out, and I took the tiller.  We

would start the men, and all would go well till the yawl would bring up

on a heavy cake of ice, and then the men would drop like so many ten-

pins, while Brown assumed the horizontal in the bottom of the boat.

After an hour's hard work we got back, with ice half an inch thick on the

oars.  Sent back and warped up the other yawl, and then George (the first

mentioned pilot,) and myself, took a double crew of fresh men and tried

it again.  This time we found the channel in less than half an hour,

and landed on an island till the Pennsylvania came along and took us off.

The next day was colder still.  I was out in the yawl twice, and then we

got through, but the infernal steamboat came near running over us.  We

went ten miles further, landed, and George and I cleared out again--found

the channel first trial, but got caught in the gorge and drifted

helplessly down the river.  The Ocean Spray came along and started into

the ice after us, but although she didn't succeed in her kind intention

of taking us aboard, her waves washed us out, and that was all we wanted.

We landed on an island, built a big fire and waited for the boat.  She

started, and ran aground!  It commenced raining and sleeting, and a very

interesting time we had on that barren sandbar for the next four hours,

when the boat got off and took us aboard.  The next day was terribly

cold.  We sounded Hat Island, warped up around a bar and sounded again--

but in order to understand our situation you will have to read Dr. Kane.

It would have been impossible to get back to the boat.  But the Maria

Denning was aground at the head of the island--they hailed us--we ran

alongside and they hoisted us in and thawed us out.  We had then been out

in the yawl from 4 o'clock in the morning till half past 9 without being

near a fire.  There was a thick coating of ice over men, yawl, ropes and

everything else, and we looked like rock-candy statuary.  We got to Saint

Louis this morning, after an absence of 3 weeks--that boat generally

makes the trip in 2.



Henry was doing little or nothing here, and I sent him to our clerk to

work his way for a trip, by measuring wood piles, counting coal boxes,

and other clerkly duties, which he performed satisfactorily.  He may go

down with us again, for I expect he likes our bill of fare better than

that of his boarding house.



I got your letter at Memphis as I went down.  That is the best place to

write me at.  The post office here is always out of my route, somehow or

other.  Remember the direction: "S.L.C., Steamer Pennsylvania Care Duval

& Algeo, Wharfboat, Memphis."  I cannot correspond with a paper, because

when one is learning the river, he is not allowed to do or think about

anything else.



I am glad to see you in such high spirits about the land, and I hope you

will remain so, if you never get richer.  I seldom venture to think about

our landed wealth, for "hope deferred maketh the heart sick."



I did intend to answer your letter, but I am too lazy and too sleepy now.

We have had a rough time during the last 24 hours working through the ice

between Cairo and Saint Louis, and I have had but little rest.



I got here too late to see the funeral of the 10 victims by the burning

of the Pacific hotel in 7th street.  Ma says there were 10 hearses, with

the fire companies (their engines in mourning--firemen in uniform,) the

various benevolent societies in uniform and mourning, and a multitude of

citizens and strangers, forming, altogether, a procession of 30,000

persons!  One steam fire engine was drawn by four white horses, with

crape festoons on their heads.

                    Well I am--just--about--asleep--

                                   Your brother

                                                  SAM.





     Among other things, we gather from this letter that Orion Clemens

     had faith in his brother as a newspaper correspondent, though the

     two contributions from Cincinnati, already mentioned, were not

     promising.  Furthermore, we get an intimation of Orion's unfailing

     confidence in the future of the "land"--that is to say, the great

     tract of land in Eastern Tennessee which, in an earlier day, his

     father had bought as a heritage for his children.  It is the same

     Tennessee land that had "millions in it" for Colonel Sellers--the

     land that would become, as Orion Clemens long afterward phrased it,

     "the worry of three generations."



     The Doctor Kane of this letter is, of course, Dr. Elisha Kent Kane,

     the American Arctic explorer.  Any book of exploration always

     appealed to Mark Twain, and in those days Kane was a favorite.



     The paragraph concerning Henry, and his employment on the

     Pennsylvania, begins the story of a tragedy.  The story has been

     fully told elsewhere,--[Mark Twain: A Biography, by same author.]--

     and need only be sketched briefly here.  Henry, a gentle, faithful

     boy, shared with his brother the enmity of the pilot Brown.  Some

     two months following the date of the foregoing letter, on a down

     trip of the Pennsylvania, an unprovoked attack made by Brown upon

     the boy brought his brother Sam to the rescue.  Brown received a

     good pummeling at the hands of the future humorist, who, though

     upheld by the captain, decided to quit the Pennsylvania at New

     Orleans and to come up the river by another boat.  The Brown episode

     has no special bearing on the main tragedy, though now in retrospect

     it seems closely related to it.  Samuel Clemens, coming up the river

     on the A. T. Lacey, two days behind the Pennsylvania, heard a voice

     shout as they approached the Greenville, Mississippi, landing:



     "The Pennsylvania is blown up just below Memphis, at Ship Island!

     One hundred and fifty lives lost!"



     It was a true report.  At six o'clock of a warm, mid-June morning,

     while loading wood, sixty miles below Memphis, the Pennsylvania's

     boilers had exploded with fearful results.  Henry Clemens was among

     the injured.  He was still alive when his brother reached Memphis on

     the Lacey, but died a few days later.  Samuel Clemens had idolized

     the boy, and regarded himself responsible for his death.  The letter

     that follows shows that he was overwrought by the scenes about him

     and the strain of watching, yet the anguish of it is none the less

     real.





                          To Mrs. Orion Clemens:



                              MEMPHIS, TENN., Friday, June 18th, 1858.

DEAR SISTER MOLLIE,--Long before this reaches you, my poor Henry my

darling, my pride, my glory, my all, will have finished his blameless

career, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter darkness.

(O, God!  this is hard to bear.)  Hardened, hopeless,--aye, lost--lost--

lost and ruined sinner as I am--I, even I, have humbled myself to the

ground and prayed as never man prayed before, that the great God might

let this cup pass from me--that he would strike me to the earth, but

spare my brother--that he would pour out the fulness of his just wrath

upon my wicked head, but have mercy, mercy, mercy upon that unoffending

boy.  The horrors of three days have swept over me--they have blasted my

youth and left me an old man before my time.  Mollie, there are gray

hairs in my head tonight.  For forty-eight hours I labored at the bedside

of my poor burned and bruised, but uncomplaining brother, and then the

star of my hope went out and left me in the gloom of despair.  Men take

me by the hand and congratulate me, and call me "lucky" because I was not

on the Pennsylvania when she blew up!  May God forgive them, for they

know not what they say.



Mollie you do not understand why I was not on that boat--I will tell you.

I left Saint Louis on her, but on the way down, Mr. Brown, the pilot that

was killed by the explosion (poor fellow,) quarreled with Henry without

cause, while I was steering.  Henry started out of the pilot-house--Brown

jumped up and collared him--turned him half way around and struck him in

the face!--and him nearly six feet high--struck my little brother.  I was

wild from that moment.  I left the boat to steer herself, and avenged the

insult--and the Captain said I was right--that he would discharge Brown

in N. Orleans if he could get another pilot, and would do it in St.

Louis, anyhow.  Of course both of us could not return to St. Louis on the

same boat--no pilot could be found, and the Captain sent me to the A. T.

Lacey, with orders to her Captain to bring me to Saint Louis.  Had

another pilot been found, poor Brown would have been the "lucky" man.



I was on the Pennsylvania five minutes before she left N. Orleans, and I

must tell you the truth, Mollie--three hundred human beings perished by

that fearful disaster.  Henry was asleep--was blown up--then fell back on

the hot boilers, and I suppose that rubbish fell on him, for he is

injured internally.  He got into the water and swam to shore, and got

into the flatboat with the other survivors.--[Henry had returned once to

the Pennsylvania to render assistance to the passengers.  Later he had

somehow made his way to the flatboat.]--He had nothing on but his wet

shirt, and he lay there burning up with a southern sun and freezing in

the wind till the Kate Frisbee carne along.  His wounds were not dressed

till he got to Memphis, 15 hours after the explosion.  He was senseless

and motionless for 12 hours after that.  But may God bless Memphis, the

noblest city on the face of the earth.  She has done her duty by these

poor afflicted creatures--especially Henry, for he has had five--aye,

ten, fifteen, twenty times the care and attention that any one else has

had.  Dr. Peyton, the best physician in Memphis (he is exactly like the

portraits of Webster) sat by him for 36 hours.  There are 32 scalded men

in that room, and you would know Dr. Peyton better than I can describe

him, if you could follow him around and hear each man murmur as he

passes, "May the God of Heaven bless you, Doctor!"  The ladies have done

well, too.  Our second Mate, a handsome, noble hearted young fellow, will

die.  Yesterday a beautiful girl of 15 stooped timidly down by his side

and handed him a pretty bouquet.  The poor suffering boy's eyes kindled,

his lips quivered out a gentle "God bless you, Miss," and he burst into

tears.  He made them write her name on a card for him, that he might not

forget it.



Pray for me, Mollie, and pray for my poor sinless brother.

                         Your unfortunate Brother,

                                        SAML. L. CLEMENS.



P. S.  I got here two days after Henry.





     It is said that Mark Twain never really recovered from the tragedy

     of his brother's death--that it was responsible for the serious,

     pathetic look that the face of the world's greatest laugh-maker

     always wore in repose.



     He went back to the river, and in September of the same year, after

     an apprenticeship of less than eighteen months, received his license

     as a St. Louis and New Orleans pilot, and was accepted by his old

     chief, Bixby, as full partner on an important boat.  In Life on the

     Mississippi Mark Twain makes the period of his study from two to two

     and a half years, but this is merely an attempt to magnify his

     dullness.  He was, in fact, an apt pupil and a pilot of very high

     class.



     Clemens was now suddenly lifted to a position of importance.  The

     Mississippi River pilot of those days was a person of distinction,

     earning a salary then regarded as princely.  Certainly two hundred

     and fifty dollars a month was large for a boy of twenty-three.  At

     once, of course, he became the head of the Clemens family.  His

     brother Orion was ten years older, but he had not the gift of

     success.  By common consent the younger brother assumed permanently

     the position of family counselor and financier.  We expect him to

     feel the importance of his new position, and he is too human to

     disappoint us.  Incidentally, we notice an improvement in his

     English.  He no longer writes "between you and I"





         Fragment of a letter to Orion Clemens.  Written at St.

                             Louis in 1859:



.....I am not talking nonsense, now--I am in earnest, I want you to keep

your troubles and your plans out of the reach of meddlers, until the

latter are consummated, so that in case you fail, no one will know it but

yourself.



Above all things (between you and me) never tell Ma any of your troubles;

she never slept a wink the night your last letter came, and she looks

distressed yet.  Write only cheerful news to her.  You know that she will

not be satisfied so long as she thinks anything is going on that she is

ignorant of--and she makes a little fuss about it when her suspicions are

awakened; but that makes no difference--.  I know that it is better that

she be kept in the dark concerning all things of an unpleasant nature.

She upbraids me occasionally for giving her only the bright side of my

affairs (but unfortunately for her she has to put up with it, for I know

that troubles that I curse awhile and forget, would disturb her slumbers

for some time.) (Parenthesis No. 2--Possibly because she is deprived of

the soothing consolation of swearing.) Tell her the good news and me the

bad.



Putting all things together, I begin to think I am rather lucky than

otherwise--a notion which I was slow to take up.  The other night I was

about to round to for a storm--but concluded that I could find a smoother

bank somewhere.  I landed 5 miles below.  The storm came--passed away and

did not injure us.  Coming up, day before yesterday, I looked at the spot

I first chose, and half the trees on the bank were torn to shreds.  We

couldn't have lived 5 minutes in such a tornado.  And I am also lucky in

having a berth, while all the young pilots are idle.  This is the

luckiest circumstance that ever befell me.  Not on account of the wages--

for that is a secondary consideration--but from the fact that the City of

Memphis is the largest boat in the trade and the hardest to pilot, and

consequently I can get a reputation on her, which is a thing I never

could accomplish on a transient boat.  I can "bank" in the neighborhood

of $100 a month on her, and that will satisfy me for the present

(principally because the other youngsters are sucking their fingers.)

Bless me! what a pleasure there is in revenge! and what vast respect

Prosperity commands!  Why, six months ago, I could enter the "Rooms," and

receive only a customary fraternal greeting--but now they say, "Why, how

are you, old fellow--when did you get in?"



And the young pilots who used to tell me, patronizingly, that I could

never learn the river cannot keep from showing a little of their chagrin

at seeing me so far ahead of them.  Permit me to "blow my horn," for I

derive a living pleasure from these things, and I must confess that when

I go to pay my dues, I rather like to let the d---d rascals get a glimpse

of a hundred dollar bill peeping out from amongst notes of smaller

dimensions, whose face I do not exhibit!  You will despise this egotism,

but I tell you there is a "stern joy" in it.....



Pilots did not remain long on one boat, as a rule; just why it is not so

easy to understand.  Perhaps they liked the experience of change; perhaps

both captain and pilot liked the pursuit of the ideal.  In the light-

hearted letter that follows--written to a friend of the family, formerly

of Hannibal--we get something of the uncertainty of the pilot's

engagements.





               To Mrs. Elizabeth W.  Smith, in Jackson,

                      Cape Girardeau County, Mo.:



                                   ST.  Louis, Oct. 31 [probably 1859].

DEAR AUNT BETSEY,--Ma has not written you, because she did not know when

I would get started down the river again.....



You see, Aunt Betsey, I made but one trip on the packet after you left,

and then concluded to remain at home awhile.  I have just discovered this

morning that I am to go to New Orleans on the "Col.  Chambers"--fine,

light-draught, swift-running passenger steamer--all modern accommodations

and improvements--through with dispatch--for freight or passage apply on

board, or to--but--I have forgotten the agent's name--however, it makes

no difference--and as I was saying, or had intended to say, Aunt Betsey,

probably, if you are ready to come up, you had better take the "Ben

Lewis," the best boat in the packet line.  She will be at Cape Girardeau

at noon on Saturday (day after tomorrow,) and will reach here at

breakfast time, Sunday.  If  Mr. Hamilton is chief clerk,--very well,

I am slightly acquainted with him.  And if Messrs. Carter Gray and Dean

Somebody (I have forgotten his other name,) are in the pilot-house--very

well again-I am acquainted with them.  Just tell Mr. Gray, Aunt Betsey--

that I wish him to place himself at your command.



All the family are well--except myself--I am in a bad way again--disease,

Love, in its most malignant form.  Hopes are entertained of my recovery,

however.  At the dinner table--excellent symptom--I am still as "terrible

as an army with banners."



Aunt Betsey--the wickedness of this world--but I haven't time to moralize

this morning.

                                   Goodbye

                                        SAM CLEMENS.





     As we do not hear of this "attack" again, the recovery was probably

     prompt.  His letters are not frequent enough for us to keep track of

     his boats, but we know that he was associated with Bixby from time

     to time, and now and again with one of the Bowen boys, his old

     Hannibal schoolmates.  He was reveling in the river life, the ease

     and distinction and romance of it.  No other life would ever suit

     him as well.  He was at the age to enjoy just what it brought him

     --at the airy, golden, overweening age of youth.





                    To Orion Clemens, in Keokuk, Iowa:



                                        ST. LOUIS, Mch. 1860.

MY DEAR BRO.,--Your last has just come to hand.  It reminds me strongly

of Tom Hood's letters to his family, (which I have been reading lately).

But yours only remind me of his, for although there is a striking

likeness, your humour is much finer than his, and far better expressed.

Tom Hood's wit, (in his letters) has a savor of labor about it which is

very disagreeable.  Your letter is good.  That portion of it wherein the

old sow figures is the very best thing I have seen lately.  Its quiet

style resembles Goldsmith's "Citizen of the World," and "Don Quixote,"--

which are my beau ideals of fine writing.



You have paid the preacher!  Well, that is good, also.  What a man wants

with religion in these breadless times, surpasses my comprehension.



Pamela and I have just returned from a visit to the most wonderfully

beautiful painting which this city has ever seen--Church's "Heart of the

Andes"--which represents a lovely valley with its rich vegetation in all

the bloom and glory of a tropical summer--dotted with birds and flowers

of all colors and shades of color, and sunny slopes, and shady corners,

and twilight groves, and cool cascades--all grandly set off with a

majestic mountain in the background with its gleaming summit clothed in

everlasting ice and snow!  I have seen it several times, but it is always

a new picture--totally new--you seem to see nothing the second time which

you saw the first.  We took the opera glass, and examined its beauties

minutely, for the naked eye cannot discern the little wayside flowers,

and soft shadows and patches of sunshine, and half-hidden bunches of

grass and jets of water which form some of its most enchanting features.

There is no slurring of perspective effect about it--the most distant--

the minutest object in it has a marked and distinct personality--so that

you may count the very leaves on the trees.  When you first see the tame,

ordinary-looking picture, your first impulse is to turn your back upon

it, and say "Humbug"--but your third visit will find your brain gasping

and straining with futile efforts to take all the wonder in--and

appreciate it in its fulness--and understand how such a miracle could

have been conceived and executed by human brain and human hands.  You

will never get tired of looking at the picture, but your reflections--

your efforts to grasp an intelligible Something--you hardly know what

--will grow so painful that you will have to go away from the thing,

in order to obtain relief.  You may find relief, but you cannot banish

the picture--It remains with you still.  It is in my mind now--and the

smallest feature could not be removed without my detecting it.  So much

for the "Heart of the Andes."



Ma was delighted with her trip, but she was disgusted with the girls for

allowing me to embrace and kiss them--and she was horrified at the

Schottische as performed by Miss Castle and myself.  She was perfectly

willing for me to dance until 12 o'clock at the imminent peril of my

going to sleep on the after watch--but then she would top off with a very

inconsistent sermon on dancing in general; ending with a terrific

broadside aimed at that heresy of heresies, the Schottische.



I took Ma and the girls in a carriage, round that portion of New Orleans

where the finest gardens and residences are to be seen, and although it

was a blazing hot dusty day, they seemed hugely delighted.  To use an

expression which is commonly ignored in polite society, they were "hell-

bent" on stealing some of the luscious-looking oranges from branches

which overhung the fences, but I restrained them.  They were not aware

before that shrubbery could be made to take any queer shape which a

skilful gardener might choose to twist it into, so they found not only

beauty but novelty in their visit.  We went out to Lake Pontchartrain in

the cars.

                                   Your Brother

                                             SAM CLEMENS





     We have not before heard of Miss Castle, who appears to have been

     one of the girls who accompanied Jane Clemens on the trip which her

     son gave her to New Orleans, but we may guess that the other was his

     cousin and good comrade, Ella Creel.  One wishes that he might have

     left us a more extended account of that long-ago river journey, a

     fuller glimpse of a golden age that has vanished as completely as

     the days of Washington.



     We may smile at the natural youthful desire to air his reading, and

     his art appreciation, and we may find his opinions not without

     interest.  We may even commend them--in part.  Perhaps we no longer

     count the leaves on Church's trees, but Goldsmith and Cervantes

     still deserve the place assigned them.



     He does not tell us what boat he was on at this time, but later in

     the year he was with Bixby again, on the Alonzo Child.  We get a bit

     of the pilot in port in his next.





                    To Orion Clemens, in Keokuk, Iowa:



                         "ALONZO CHILD," N. ORLEANS, Sep. 28th 1860.

DEAR BROTHER,--I just received yours and Mollies letter yesterday--they

had been here two weeks--forwarded from St. Louis.  We got here

yesterday--will leave at noon to-day.  Of course I have had no time, in

24 hours, to do anything.  Therefore I'll answer after we are under way

again.  Yesterday, I had many things to do, but Bixby and I got with the

pilots of two other boats and went off dissipating on a ten dollar dinner

at a French restaurant breathe it not unto Ma!--where we ate sheep-head,

fish with mushrooms, shrimps and oysters--birds--coffee with brandy burnt

in it, &c &c,-ate, drank and smoked, from 2 p.m. until 5 o'clock, and

then--then the day was too far gone to do any thing.



Please find enclosed and acknowledge receipt of--$20.00

                                   In haste

                                        SAM L. CLEMENS





     It should be said, perhaps, that when he became pilot Jane Clemens

     had released her son from his pledge in the matter of cards and

     liquor.  This license did not upset him, however.  He cared very

     little for either of these dissipations.  His one great indulgence

     was tobacco, a matter upon which he was presently to receive some

     grave counsel.  He reports it in his next letter, a sufficiently

     interesting document.  The clairvoyant of this visit was Madame

     Caprell, famous in her day.  Clemens had been urged to consult her,

     and one idle afternoon concluded to make the experiment.  The letter

     reporting the matter to his brother is fragmentary, and is the last

     remaining to us of the piloting period.





         Fragment of a letter to Orion Clemens, in Keokuk, Iowa:



                                        NEW ORLEANS February 6, 1862.

.....She's a very pleasant little lady--rather pretty--about 28,--say

5 feet 2 and one quarter--would weigh 116--has black eyes and hair--is

polite and intelligent--used good language, and talks much faster than I

do.



She invited me into the little back parlor, closed the door; and we were

alone.  We sat down facing each other.  Then she asked my age.  Then she

put her hands before her eyes a moment, and commenced talking as if she

had a good deal to say and not much time to say it in.  Something after

this style:



MADAME.  Yours is a watery planet; you gain your livelihood on the water;

but you should have been a lawyer--there is where your talents lie: you

might have distinguished yourself as an orator, or as an editor; you have

written a great deal; you write well--but you are rather out of practice;

no matter--you will be in practice some day; you have a superb

constitution, and as excellent health as any man in the world; you have

great powers of endurance; in your profession your strength holds out

against the longest sieges, without flagging; still, the upper part of

your lungs, the top of them is slightly affected--you must take care of

yourself; you do not drink, but you use entirely too much tobacco; and

you must stop it; mind, not moderate, but stop the use of it totally;

then I can almost promise you 86 when you will surely die; otherwise look

out for 28, 31, 34, 47, and 65; be careful--for you are not of a long-

lived race, that is on your father's side; you are the only healthy

member of your family, and the only one in it who has anything like the

certainty of attaining to a great age--so, stop using tobacco, and be

careful of yourself.....  In some respects you take after your father,

but you are much more like your mother, who belongs to the long-lived,

energetic side of the house....  You never brought all your energies to

bear upon any subject but what you accomplished it--for instance, you are

self-made, self-educated.



S. L. C.  Which proves nothing.



MADAME.  Don't interrupt.  When you sought your present occupation you

found a thousand obstacles in the way--obstacles unknown--not even

suspected by any save you and me, since you keep such matters to

yourself--but you fought your way, and hid the long struggle under a mask

of cheerfulness, which saved your friends anxiety on your account.  To do

all this requires all the qualities I have named.



S. L. C.  You flatter well, Madame.



MADAME.  Don't interrupt: Up to within a short time you had always lived

from hand to mouth-now you are in easy circumstances--for which you need

give credit to no one but yourself.  The turning point in your life

occurred in 1840-7-8.



S. L. C.  Which was?



MADAME.  A death perhaps, and this threw you upon the world and made you

what you are; it was always intended that you should make yourself;

therefore, it was well that this calamity occurred as early as it did.

You will never die of water, although your career upon it in the future

seems well sprinkled with misfortune.  You will continue upon the water

for some time yet; you will not retire finally until ten years from now

....  What is your brother's age?  35--and a lawyer? and in pursuit of an

office?  Well, he stands a better chance than the other two, and he may

get it; he is too visionary--is always flying off on a new hobby; this

will never do--tell him I said so.  He is a good lawyer--a, very good

lawyer--and a fine speaker--is very popular and much respected, and makes

many friends; but although he retains their friendship, he loses their

confidence by displaying his instability of character.....  The land he

has now will be very valuable after a while--



S. L. C.  Say a 50 years hence, or thereabouts.  Madame--



MADAME.  No--less time-but never mind the land, that is a secondary

consideration--let him drop that for the present, and devote himself to

his business and politics with all his might, for he must hold offices

under the Government.....



After a while you will possess a good deal of property--retire at the end

of ten years--after which your pursuits will be literary--try the law--

you will certainly succeed.  I am done now.  If you have any questions to

ask--ask them freely--and if it be in my power, I will answer without

reserve--without reserve.



I asked a few questions of minor importance--paid her $2--and left, under

the decided impression that going to the fortune teller's was just as

good as going to the opera, and the cost scarcely a trifle more--ergo,

I will disguise myself and go again, one of these days, when other

amusements fail.  Now isn't she the devil?  That is to say, isn't she a

right smart little woman?



When you want money, let Ma know, and she will send it.  She and Pamela

are always fussing about change, so I sent them a hundred and twenty

quarters yesterday--fiddler's change enough to last till I get back, I

reckon.

                                             SAM.





     It is not so difficult to credit Madame Caprell with clairvoyant

     powers when one has read the letters of Samuel Clemens up to this

     point.  If we may judge by those that have survived, her prophecy of

     literary distinction for him was hardly warranted by anything she

     could have known of his past performance.  These letters of his

     youth have a value to-day only because they were written by the man

     who later was to become Mark Twain.  The squibs and skits which he

     sometimes contributed to the New Orleans papers were bright,

     perhaps, and pleasing to his pilot associates, but they were without

     literary value.  He was twenty-five years old.  More than one author

     has achieved reputation at that age.  Mark Twain was of slower

     growth; at that age he had not even developed a definite literary

     ambition:  Whatever the basis of Madame Caprell's prophecy, we must

     admit that she was a good guesser on several matters, "a right smart

     little woman," as Clemens himself phrased it.



     She overlooked one item, however: the proximity of the Civil War.

     Perhaps it was too close at hand for second sight.  A little more

     than two months after the Caprell letter was written Fort Sumter was

     fired upon.  Mask Twain had made his last trip as a pilot up the

     river to St. Louis--the nation was plunged into a four years'

     conflict.



     There are no letters of this immediate period.  Young Clemens went

     to Hannibal, and enlisting in a private company, composed mainly of

     old schoolmates, went soldiering for two rainy, inglorious weeks,

     by the end of which he had had enough of war, and furthermore had

     discovered that he was more of a Union abolitionist than a slave-

     holding secessionist, as he had at first supposed.  Convictions were

     likely to be rather infirm during those early days of the war, and

     subject to change without notice.  Especially was this so in a

     border State.









III



LETTERS 1861-62.  ON THE FRONTIER.  MINING ADVENTURES.

JOURNALISTIC BEGINNINGS



     Clemens went from the battle-front to Keokuk, where Orion was

     preparing to accept the appointment prophesied by Madame Caprell.

     Orion was a stanch Unionist, and a member of Lincoln's Cabinet had

     offered him the secretaryship of the new Territory of Nevada.  Orion

     had accepted, and only needed funds to carry him to his destination.

     His pilot brother had the funds, and upon being appointed "private"

     secretary, agreed to pay both passages on the overland stage, which

     would bear them across the great plains from St. Jo to Carson City.

     Mark Twain, in Roughing It, has described that glorious journey and

     the frontier life that followed it.  His letters form a supplement

     of realism to a tale that is more or less fictitious, though

     marvelously true in color and background.  The first bears no date,

     but it was written not long after their arrival, August 14, 1861.

     It is not complete, but there is enough of it to give us a very fair

     picture of Carson City, "a wooden town; its population two thousand

     souls."





           Part of a letter to Mrs. Jane Clemens, in St. Louis:



                              (Date not given, but Sept, or Oct., 1861.)

MY DEAR MOTHER,--I hope you will all come out here someday.  But I shan't

consent to invite you, until we can receive you in style.  But I guess we

shall be able to do that, one of these days.  I intend that Pamela shall

live on Lake Bigler until she can knock a bull down with her fist--say,

about three months.



"Tell everything as it is--no better, and no worse."



Well, "Gold Hill" sells at $5,000 per foot, cash down; "Wild cat" isn't

worth ten cents.  The country is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper,

lead, coal, iron, quick silver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of Paris,

(gypsum,) thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers,

Christians, Indians, Chinamen, Spaniards, gamblers, sharpers, coyotes

(pronounced Ki-yo-ties,) poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits.

I overheard a gentleman say, the other day, that it was "the d---dest

country under the sun."--and that comprehensive conception I fully

subscribe to.  It never rains here, and the dew never falls.  No flowers

grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye.  The birds that fly over

the land carry their provisions with them.  Only the crow and the raven

tarry with us.  Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the purest--

most unadulterated, and compromising sand--in which infernal soil nothing

but that fag-end of vegetable creation, "sage-brush," ventures to grow.

If you will take a Lilliputian cedar tree for a model, and build a dozen

imitations of it with the stiffest article of telegraph wire--set them

one foot apart and then try to walk through them, you'll understand

(provided the floor is covered 12 inches deep with sand,) what it is to

wander through a sage-brush desert.  When crushed, sage brush emits an

odor which isn't exactly magnolia and equally isn't exactly polecat but

is a sort of compromise between the two.  It looks a good deal like

grease-wood, and is the ugliest plant that was ever conceived of.  It is

gray in color.  On the plains, sage-brush and grease-wood grow about

twice as large as the common geranium--and in my opinion they are a very

good substitute for that useless vegetable.  Grease-wood is a perfect-

most perfect imitation in miniature of a live oak tree-barring the color

of it.  As to the other fruits and flowers of the country, there ain't

any, except "Pulu" or "Tuler," or what ever they call it,--a species of

unpoetical willow that grows on the banks of the Carson--a RIVER, 20

yards wide, knee deep, and so villainously rapid and crooked, that it

looks like it had wandered into the country without intending it, and had

run about in a bewildered way and got lost, in its hurry to get out again

before some thirsty man came along and drank it up.  I said we are

situated in a flat, sandy desert--true.  And surrounded on all sides by

such prodigious mountains, that when you gaze at them awhile,--and begin

to conceive of their grandeur--and next to feel their vastness expanding

your soul--and ultimately find yourself growing and swelling and

spreading into a giant--I say when this point is reached, you look

disdainfully down upon the insignificant village of Carson, and in that

instant you are seized with a burning desire to stretch forth your hand,

put the city in your pocket, and walk off with it.



As to churches, I believe they have got a Catholic one here, but like

that one the New York fireman spoke of, I believe "they don't run her

now:" Now, although we are surrounded by sand, the greatest part of the

town is built upon what was once a very pretty grassy spot; and the

streams of pure water that used to poke about it in rural sloth and

solitude, now pass through on dusty streets and gladden the hearts of men

by reminding them that there is at least something here that hath its

prototype among the homes they left behind them.  And up "King's Canon,"

(please pronounce canyon, after the manner of the natives,) there are

"ranches," or farms, where they say hay grows, and grass, and beets and

onions, and turnips, and other "truck" which is suitable for cows--yes,

and even Irish potatoes; also, cabbage, peas and beans.



The houses are mostly frame, unplastered, but "papered" inside with

flour-sacks sewed together, and the handsomer the "brand" upon the sacks

is, the neater the house looks.  Occasionally, you stumble on a stone

house.  On account of the dryness of the country, the shingles on the

houses warp till they look like short joints of stove pipe split

lengthwise.



(Remainder missing.)





     In this letter is something of the "wild freedom of the West," which

     later would contribute to his fame.  The spirit of the frontier--of

     Mark Twain--was beginning to stir him.



     There had been no secretary work for him to do, and no provision for

     payment.  He found his profit in studying human nature and in

     prospecting native resources.  He was not interested in mining not

     yet.  With a boy named John Kinney he made an excursion to Lake

     Bigler--now Tahoe--and located a timber claim, really of great

     value.  They were supposed to build a fence around it, but they were

     too full of the enjoyment of camp-life to complete it.  They put in

     most of their time wandering through the stately forest or drifting

     over the transparent lake in a boat left there by lumbermen.  They

     built themselves a brush house, but they did not sleep in it.  In

     'Roughing It' he writes, "It never occurred to us, for one thing;

     and, besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was enough.

     We did not wish to strain it."



     They were having a glorious time, when their camp-fire got away from

     them and burned up their claim.  His next letter, of which the

     beginning is missing, describes the fire.





             Fragment of a letter to Mrs. Jane Clemens and

                      Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



.....The level ranks of flame were relieved at intervals by the standard-

bearers, as we called the tall dead trees, wrapped in fire, and waving

their blazing banners a hundred feet in the air.  Then we could turn from

this scene to the Lake, and see every branch, and leaf, and cataract of

flame upon its bank perfectly reflected as in a gleaming, fiery mirror.

The mighty roaring of the conflagration, together with our solitary and

somewhat unsafe position (for there was no one within six miles of us,)

rendered the scene very impressive.  Occasionally, one of us would remove

his pipe from his mouth and say, "Superb!  magnificent!  Beautiful!  but-

by the Lord God Almighty, if we attempt to sleep in this little patch

tonight, we'll never live till morning! for if we don't burn up, we'll

certainly suffocate."  But he was persuaded to sit up until we felt

pretty safe as far as the fire was concerned, and then we turned in, with

many misgivings.  When we got up in the morning, we found that the fire

had burned small pieces of drift wood within six feet of our boat, and

had made its way to within 4 or 5 steps of us on the South side.  We

looked like lava men, covered as we were with ashes, and begrimed with

smoke.  We were very black in the face, but we soon washed ourselves

white again.



John D. Kinney, a Cincinnati boy, and a first-rate fellow, too, who came

out with judge Turner, was my comrade.  We staid at the Lake four days--

I had plenty of fun, for John constantly reminded me of Sam Bowen when we

were on our campaign in Missouri.  But first and foremost, for Annie's,

Mollies, and Pamela's comfort, be it known that I have never been guilty

of profane language since I have been in this Territory, and Kinney

hardly ever swears.--But sometimes human nature gets the better of him.

On the second day we started to go by land to the lower camp, a distance

of three miles, over the mountains, each carrying an axe.  I don't think

we got lost exactly, but we wandered four hours over the steepest,

rockiest and most dangerous piece of country in the world.  I couldn't

keep from laughing at Kinney's distress, so I kept behind, so that he

could not see me.  After he would get over a dangerous place, with

infinite labor and constant apprehension, he would stop, lean on his axe,

and look around, then behind, then ahead, and then drop his head and

ruminate awhile.--Then he would draw a long sigh, and say: "Well--could

any Billygoat have scaled that place without breaking his --- ------ neck?"

And I would reply, "No,--I don't think he could."  "No--you don't think

he could--" (mimicking me,) "Why don't you curse the infernal place?

You know you want to.--I do, and will curse the --- ------ thieving

country as long as I live."  Then we would toil on in silence for awhile.

Finally I told him--"Well, John, what if we don't find our way out of

this today--we'll know all about the country when we do get out."  "Oh

stuff--I know enough--and too much about the d---d villainous locality

already."  Finally, we reached the camp.  But as we brought no provisions

with us, the first subject that presented itself to us was, how to get

back.  John swore he wouldn't walk back, so we rolled a drift log apiece

into the Lake, and set about making paddles, intending to straddle the

logs and paddle ourselves back home sometime or other.  But the Lake

objected--got stormy, and we had to give it up.  So we set out for the

only house on this side of the Lake--three miles from there, down the

shore.  We found the way without any trouble, reached there before

sundown, played three games of cribbage, borrowed a dug-out and pulled

back six miles to the upper camp.  As we had eaten nothing since sunrise,

we did not waste time in cooking our supper or in eating it, either.

After supper we got out our pipes--built a rousing camp fire in the open

air-established a faro bank (an institution of this country,) on our huge

flat granite dining table, and bet white beans till one o'clock, when

John went to bed.  We were up before the sun the next morning, went out

on the Lake and caught a fine trout for breakfast.  But unfortunately, I

spoilt part of the breakfast.  We had coffee and tea boiling on the fire,

in coffee-pots and fearing they might not be strong enough, I added more

ground coffee, and more tea, but--you know mistakes will happen.--I put

the tea in the coffee-pot, and the coffee in the teapot--and if you

imagine that they were not villainous mixtures, just try the effect once.



And so Bella is to be married on the 1st of Oct.  Well, I send her and

her husband my very best wishes, and--I may not be here--but wherever I

am on that night, we'll have a rousing camp-fire and a jollification in

honor of the event.



In a day or two we shall probably go to the Lake and build another cabin

and fence, and get everything into satisfactory trim before our trip to

Esmeralda about the first of November.



What has become of Sam Bowen?  I would give my last shirt to have him out

here.  I will make no promises, but I believe if John would give him a

thousand dollars and send him out here he would not regret it.  He might

possibly do very well here, but he could do little without capital.



Remember me to all my St. Louis and Keokuk friends, and tell Challie and

Hallie Renson that I heard a military band play "What are the Wild Waves

Saying?" the other night, and it reminded me very forcibly of them.  It

brought Ella Creel and Belle across the Desert too in an instant, for

they sang the song in Orion's yard the first time I ever heard it.  It

was like meeting an old friend.  I tell you I could have swallowed that

whole band, trombone and all, if such a compliment would have been any

gratification to them.

                         Love to the young folks,

                                                  SAM.





The reference in the foregoing letter to Esmeralda has to do with mining

plans.  He was beginning to be mildly interested, and, with his brother

Orion, had acquired "feet" in an Esmeralda camp, probably at a very small

price--so small as to hold out no exciting prospect of riches.  In his

next letter he gives us the size of this claim, which he has visited.

His interest, however, still appears to be chiefly in his timber claim on

Lake Bigler (Tahoe), though we are never to hear of it again after this

letter.





                      To Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                                             CARSON CITY, Oct. 25, 1861.

MY DEAR SISTER,--I have just finished reading your letter and Ma's of

Sept. 8th.  How in the world could they have been so long coming?  You

ask me if I have for gotten my promise to lay a claim for Mr. Moffett.

By no means.  I have already laid a timber claim on the borders of a lake

(Bigler) which throws Como in the shade--and if we succeed in getting one

Mr. Jones, to move his saw-mill up there, Mr. Moffett can just consider

that claim better than bank stock.  Jones says he will move his mill up

next spring.  In that claim I took up about two miles in length by one in

width--and the names in it are as follows: "Sam. L  Clemens, Wm. A.

Moffett, Thos. Nye" and three others.  It is situated on "Sam Clemens

Bay"--so named by Capt. Nye--and it goes by that name among the

inhabitants of that region.  I had better stop about "the Lake," though,

--for whenever I think of it I want to go there and die, the place is so

beautiful.  I'll build a country seat there one of these days that will

make the Devil's mouth water if he ever visits the earth.  Jim Lampton

will never know whether I laid a claim there for him or not until he

comes here himself.  We have now got about 1,650 feet of mining ground--

and if it proves good, Mr. Moffett's name will go in--if not, I can get

"feet" for him in the Spring which will be good.  You see, Pamela, the

trouble does not consist in getting mining ground--for that is plenty

enough--but the money to work it with after you get it is the mischief.

When I was in Esmeralda, a young fellow gave me fifty feet in the "Black

Warrior"--an unprospected claim.  The other day he wrote me that he had

gone down eight feet on the ledge, and found it eight feet thick--and

pretty good rock, too.  He said he could take out rock now if there were

a mill to crush it--but the mills are all engaged (there are only four of

them) so, if I were willing, he would suspend work until Spring.  I wrote

him to let it alone at present--because, you see, in the Spring I can go

down myself and help him look after it.  There will then be twenty mills

there.  Orion and I have confidence enough in this country to think that

if the war will let us alone we can make Mr. Moffett rich without its

ever costing him a cent of money or particle of trouble.  We shall lay

plenty of claims for him, but if they never pay him anything, they will

never cost him anything, Orion and I are not financiers.  Therefore, you

must persuade Uncle Jim to come out here and help us in that line.

I have written to him twice to come.  I wrote him today.  In both letters

I told him not to let you or Ma know that we dealt in such romantic

nonsense as "brilliant prospects," because I always did hate for anyone

to know what my plans or hopes or prospects were--for, if I kept people

in ignorance in these matters, no one could be disappointed but myself,

if they were not realized.  You know I never told you that I went on the

river under a promise to pay Bixby $500, until I had paid the money and

cleared my skirts of the possibility of having my judgment criticised.

I would not say anything about our prospects now, if we were nearer home.

But I suppose at this distance you are more anxious than you would be if

you saw us every month-and therefore it is hardly fair to keep you in the

dark.  However, keep these matters to yourselves, and then if we fail,

we'll keep the laugh in the family.



What we want now is something that will commence paying immediately.

We have got a chance to get into a claim where they say a tunnel has been

run 150 feet, and the ledge struck.  I got a horse yesterday, and went

out with the Attorney-General and the claim-owner--and we tried to go to

the claim by a new route, and got lost in the mountains--sunset overtook

us before we found the claim--my horse got too lame to carry me, and I

got down and drove him ahead of me till within four miles of town--then

we sent Rice on ahead.  Bunker, (whose horse was in good condition,)

undertook, to lead mine, and I followed after him.  Darkness shut him out

from my view in less than a minute, and within the next minute I lost the

road and got to wandering in the sage brush.  I would find the road

occasionally and then lose it again in a minute or so.  I got to Carson

about nine o'clock, at night, but not by the road I traveled when I left

it.  The General says my horse did very well for awhile, but soon refused

to lead.  Then he dismounted, and had a jolly time driving both horses

ahead of him and chasing them here and there through the sage brush (it

does my soul good when I think of it) until he got to town, when both

animals deserted him, and he cursed them handsomely and came home alone.

Of course the horses went to their stables.



Tell Sammy I will lay a claim for him, and he must come out and attend to

it.  He must get rid of that propensity for tumbling down, though, for

when we get fairly started here, I don't think we shall have time to pick

up those who fall.....



That is Stoughter's house, I expect, that Cousin Jim has moved into.

This is just the country for Cousin Jim to live in.  I don't believe it

would take him six months to make $100,000 here, if he had 3,000 dollars

to commence with.  I suppose he can't leave his family though.



Tell Mrs. Benson I never intend to be a lawyer.  I have been a slave

several times in my life, but I'll never be one again.  I always intend

to be so situated (unless I marry,) that I can "pull up stakes" and clear

out whenever I feel like it.



We are very thankful to you, Pamela, for the papers you send.  We have

received half a dozen or more, and, next to letters, they are the most

welcome visitors we have.

                              Write oftener, Pamela.

                                             Yr.  Brother

                                                            SAM.





The "Cousin Jim" mentioned in this letter is the original of the

character of Colonel Sellers.  Whatever Mark Twain's later opinion of

Cousin Jim Lampton's financial genius may have been, he seems to have

respected it at this time.



More than three months pass until we have another letter, and in that

time the mining fever had become well seated.  Mark Twain himself was

full of the Sellers optimism, and it was bound to overflow, fortify as he

would against it.



He met with little enough encouragement.  With three companions, in

midwinter, he made a mining excursion to the much exploited Humboldt

region, returning empty-handed after a month or two of hard experience.

This is the trip picturesquely described in Chapters XXVII to XXXIII of

Roughing It.--[It is set down historically in Mark Twain 'A Biography.'

Harper & brothers.]--He, mentions the Humboldt in his next letter, but

does not confess his failure.





           To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                                             CARSON CITY, Feb. 8, 1862.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--By George Pamela, I begin to fear that I have

invoked a Spirit of some kind or other which I will find some difficulty

in laying.  I wasn't much terrified by your growing inclinations, but

when you begin to call presentiments to your aid, I confess that I

"weaken."  Mr. Moffett is right, as I said before--and I am not much

afraid of his going wrong.  Men are easily dealt with--but when you get

the women started, you are in for it, you know.  But I have decided on

two things, viz: Any of you, or all of you, may live in California, for

that is the Garden of Eden reproduced--but you shall never live in

Nevada; and secondly, none of you, save Mr. Moffett, shall ever cross the

Plains.  If you were only going to Pike's Peak, a little matter of 700

miles from St. Jo, you might take the coach, and I wouldn't say a word.

But I consider it over 2,000 miles from St. Jo to Carson, and the first

6 or 800 miles is mere Fourth of July, compared to the balance of the

route.  But Lord bless you, a man enjoys every foot of it.  If you ever

come here or to California, it must be by sea.  Mr. Moffett must come by

overland coach, though, by all means.  He would consider it the jolliest

little trip he ever took in his life.  Either June, July, or August are

the proper months to make the journey in.  He could not suffer from heat,

and three or four heavy army blankets would make the cold nights

comfortable.  If the coach were full of passengers, two good blankets

would probably be sufficient.  If he comes, and brings plenty of money,

and fails to invest it to his entire satisfaction; I will prophesy no

more.



But I will tell you a few things which you wouldn't have found out if I

hadn't got myself into this scrape.  I expect to return to St. Louis in

July--per steamer.  I don't say that I will return then, or that I shall

be able to do it--but I expect to--you bet.  I came down here from

Humboldt, in order to look after our Esmeralda interests, and my sore-

backed horse and the bad roads have prevented me from making the journey.

Yesterday one of my old Esmeralda friends, Bob Howland, arrived here, and

I have had a talk with him.  He owns with me in the "Horatio and Derby"

ledge.  He says our tunnel is in 52 feet, and a small stream of water has

been struck, which bids fair to become a "big thing" by the time the

ledge is reached--sufficient to supply a mill.  Now, if you knew anything

of the value of water, here; you would perceive, at a glance that if the

water should amount to 50 or 100 inches, we wouldn't care whether school

kept or not.  If the ledge should prove to be worthless, we'd sell the

water for money enough to give us quite a lift.  But you see, the ledge

will not prove to be worthless.  We have located, near by, a fine site

for a mill; and when we strike the ledge, you know, we'll have a mill-

site, water power, and pay-rock, all handy.  Then we shan't care whether

we have capital or not.  Mill-folks will build us a mill, and wait for

their pay.  If nothing goes wrong, we'll strike the ledge in June--and if

we do, I'll be home in July, you know.



Pamela, don't you know that undemonstrated human calculations won't do

to bet on?  Don't you know that I have only talked, as yet, but proved

nothing?  Don't you know that I have expended money in this country but

have made none myself?  Don't you know that I have never held in my hands

a gold or silver bar that belonged to me?  Don't you know that it's all

talk and no cider so far?  Don't you know that people who always feel

jolly, no matter where they are or what happens to them--who have the

organ of hope preposterously developed--who are endowed with an

uncongealable sanguine temperament--who never feel concerned about the

price of corn--and who cannot, by any possibility, discover any but the

bright side of a picture--are very apt to go to extremes, and exaggerate

with 40-horse microscopic power?  Of course I never tried to raise these

suspicions in your mind, but then your knowledge of the fact that some

people's poor frail human nature is a sort of crazy institution anyhow,

ought to have suggested them to you.  Now, if I hadn't thoughtlessly got

you into the notion of coming out here, and thereby got myself into a

scrape, I wouldn't have given you that highly-colored paragraph about the

mill, etc., because, you know, if that pretty little picture should fail,

and wash out, and go the Devil generally, it wouldn't cost me the loss of

an hour's sleep, but you fellows would be so much distressed on my

account as I could possibly be if "circumstances beyond my control" were

to prevent my being present at my own funeral.  But--but--



               "In the bright lexicon of youth,

               There's no such word as Fail--"

                                             and I'll prove it!



And look here.  I came near forgetting it.  Don't you say a word to me

about "trains" across the plains.  Because I am down on that arrangement.

That sort of thing is "played out," you know.  The Overland Coach or the

Mail Steamer is the thing.



You want to know something about the route between California and Nevada

Territory?  Suppose you take my word for it, that it is exceedingly

jolly.  Or take, for a winter view, J. Ross Brown's picture, in Harper's

Monthly, of pack mules tumbling fifteen hundred feet down the side of a

mountain.  Why bless you, there's scenery on that route.  You can stand

on some of those noble peaks and see Jerusalem and the Holy Land.  And

you can start a boulder, and send it tearing up the earth and crashing

over trees-down-down-down-to the very devil, Madam.  And you would

probably stand up there and look, and stare and wonder at the

magnificence spread out before you till you starved to death, if let

alone.  But you should take someone along to keep you moving.



Since you want to know, I will inform you that an eight-stamp water mill,

put up and ready for business would cost about $10,000 to $12,000.  Then,

the water to run it with would cost from $1,000 to $30,000--and even

more, according to the location.  What I mean by that, is, that water

powers in THIS vicinity, are immensely valuable.  So, also, in Esmeralda.

But Humboldt is a new country, and things don't cost so much there yet.

I saw a good water power sold there for $750.00.  But here is the way the

thing is managed.  A man with a good water power on Carson river will

lean his axe up against a tree (provided you find him chopping cord-wood

at $4 a day,) and taking his chalk pipe out of his mouth to afford him an

opportunity to answer your questions, will look you coolly in the face

and tell you his little property is worth forty or fifty thousand

dollars!  But you can easily fix him.  You tell him that you'll build a

quartz mill on his property, and make him a fourth or a third, or half

owner in said mill in consideration of the privilege of using said

property--and that will bring him to his milk in a jiffy.  So he spits on

his hands, and goes in again with his axe, until the mill is finished,

when lo! out pops the quondam wood-chopper, arrayed in purple and fine

linen, and prepared to deal in bank-stock, or bet on the races, or take

government loans, with an air, as to the amount, of the most don't care-

a-d---dest unconcern that you can conceive of.  By George, if I just had

a thousand dollars--I'd be all right!  Now there's the "Horatio," for

instance.  There are five or six shareholders in it, and I know I could

buy half of their interests at, say $20 per foot, now that flour is worth

$50 per barrel and they are pressed for money.  But I am hard up myself,

and can't buy--and in June they'll strike the ledge and then "good-bye

canary."  I can't get it for love or money.  Twenty dollars a foot!

Think of it.  For ground that is proven to be rich.  Twenty dollars,

Madam--and we wouldn't part with a foot of our 75 for five times the sum.

So it will be in Humboldt next summer.  The boys will get pushed and sell

ground for a song that is worth a fortune.  But I am at the helm, now.

I have convinced Orion that he hasn't business talent enough to carry on

a peanut stand, and he has solemnly promised me that he will meddle no

more with mining, or other matters not connected with the Secretary's

office.  So, you see, if mines are to be bought or sold, or tunnels run,

or shafts sunk, parties have to come to me--and me only.  I'm the "firm,"

you know.



"How long does it take one of those infernal trains to go through?"

Well, anywhere between three and five months.



Tell Margaret that if you ever come to live in California, that you can

promise her a home for a hundred years, and a bully one--but she wouldn't

like the country.  Some people are malicious enough to think that if the

devil were set at liberty and told to confine himself to Nevada

Territory, that he would come here--and look sadly around, awhile, and

then get homesick and go back to hell again.  But I hardly believe it,

you know.  I am saying, mind you, that Margaret wouldn't like the

country, perhaps--nor the devil either, for that matter, or any other man

but I like it.  When it rains here, it never lets up till it has done all

the raining it has got to do--and after that, there's a dry spell, you

bet.  Why, I have had my whiskers and moustaches so full of alkali dust

that you'd have thought I worked in a starch factory and boarded in a

flour barrel.



Since we have been here there has not been a fire--although the houses

are built of wood.  They "holler" fire sometimes, though, but I am always

too late to see the smoke before the fire is out, if they ever have any.

Now they raised a yell here in front of the office a moment ago.  I put

away my papers, and locked up everything of value, and changed my boots,

and pulled off my coat, and went and got a bucket of water, and came back

to see what the matter was, remarking to myself, "I guess I'll be on hand

this time, any way."  But I met a friend on the pavement, and he said,

"Where you been?  Fire's out half an hour ago."



Ma says Axtele was above "suspition"--but I have searched through

Webster's Unabridged, and can't find the word.  However, it's of no

consequence--I hope he got down safely.  I knew Axtele and his wife as

well as I know Dan Haines.  Mrs. A. once tried to embarrass me in the

presence of company by asking me to name her baby, when she was well

aware that I didn't know the sex of that Phenomenon.  But I told her to

call it Frances, and spell it to suit herself.  That was about nine years

ago, and Axtele had no property, and could hardly support his family by

his earnings.  He was a pious cuss, though.  Member of Margaret Sexton's

Church.



And Ma says "it looks like a man can't hold public office and be honest."

Why, certainly not, Madam.  A man can't hold public office and be honest.

Lord bless you, it is a common practice with Orion to go about town

stealing little things that happen to be lying around loose.  And I don't

remember having heard him speak the truth since we have been in Nevada.

He even tries to prevail upon me to do these things, Ma, but I wasn't

brought up in that way, you know.  You showed the public what you could

do in that line when you raised me, Madam.  But then you ought to have

raised me first, so that Orion could have had the benefit of my example.

Do you know that he stole all the stamps out of an 8 stamp quartz mill

one night, and brought them home under his over-coat and hid them in the

back room?

                              Yrs. etc.,

                                             SAM





     A little later he had headed for the Esmeralda Hills.  Some time in

     February he was established there in a camp with a young man by the

     name of Horatio Phillips (Raish).  Later he camped with Bob Howland,

     who, as City Marshal of Aurora, became known as the most fearless

     man in the Territory, and, still later, with Calvin H. Higbie (Cal),

     to whom 'Roughing It' would one day be dedicated.  His own funds

     were exhausted by this time, and Orion, with his rather slender

     salary, became the financial partner of the firm.



     It was a comfortless life there in the Esmeralda camp.  Snow covered

     everything.  There was nothing to do, and apparently nothing to

     report; for there are no letters until April.  Then the first one is

     dated Carson City, where he seems to be making a brief sojourn.  It

     is a rather heavy attempt to be light-hearted; its playfulness

     suggests that of a dancing bear.





                   To Mrs. Jane Clemens, in St. Louis:



                                        CARSON CITY, April 2, 1862.

MY DEAR MOTHER,--Yours of March 2nd has just been received.  I see I am

in for it again--with Annie.  But she ought to know that I was always

stupid.  She used to try to teach me lessons from the Bible, but I never

could understand them.  Doesn't she remember telling me the story of

Moses, one Sunday, last Spring, and how hard she tried to explain it and

simplify it so that I could understand it--but I couldn't?  And how she

said it was strange that while her ma and her grandma and her uncle Orion

could understand anything in the world, I was so dull that I couldn't

understand the "ea-siest thing?"  And doesn't she remember that finally a

light broke in upon me and I said it was all right--that I knew old Moses

himself--and that he kept a clothing store in Market Street?  And then

she went to her ma and said she didn't know what would become of her

uncle Sam he was too dull to learn anything--ever!  And I'm just as dull

yet.  Now I have no doubt her letter was spelled right, and was correct

in all particulars--but then I had to read it according to my lights; and

they being inferior, she ought to overlook the mistakes I make specially,

as it is not my fault that I wasn't born with good sense.  I am sure she

will detect an encouraging ray of intelligence in that last argument.....



I am waiting here, trying to rent a better office for Orion.  I have got

the refusal after next week of a room on first floor of a fire-proof

brick-rent, eighteen hundred dollars a year.  Don't know yet whether we

can get it or not.  If it is not rented before the week is up, we can.



I was sorry to hear that Dick was killed.  I gave him his first lesson in

the musket drill.  We had half a dozen muskets in our office when it was

over Isbell's Music Rooms.



I hope I am wearing the last white shirt that will embellish my person

for many a day--for I do hope that I shall be out of Carson long before

this reaches you.

                                   Love to all.

                                             Very Respectfully

                                                                 SAM.





     The "Annie" in this letter was his sister Pamela's little daughter;

     long years after, she would be the wife of Charles L. Webster, Mark

     Twain's publishing partner.  "Dick" the reader may remember as Dick

     Hingham, of the Keokuk printing-office; he was killed in charging

     the works at Fort Donelson.



     Clemens was back in Esmeralda when the next letter was written, and

     we begin now to get pictures of that cheerless mining-camp, and to

     know something of the alternate hopes and discouragements of the

     hunt for gold--the miner one day soaring on wings of hope, on the

     next becoming excited, irritable, profane.  The names of new mines

     appear constantly and vanish almost at a touch, suggesting the

     fairy-like evanescence of their riches.



     But a few of the letters here will best speak for themselves; not

     all of them are needed.  It is perhaps unnecessary to say that there

     is no intentional humor in these documents.





                    To Orion Clemens, in Carson City:



                                        ESMERALDA, 13th April, 1862.

MY DEAR BROTHER,--Wasson got here night before last "from the wars."

Tell Lockhart he is not wounded and not killed--is altogether unhurt.

He says the whites left their stone fort before he and Lieut. Noble got

there.  A large amount of provisions and ammunition, which they left

behind them, fell into the hands of the Indians.  They had a pitched

battle with the savages some fifty miles from the fort, in which Scott

(sheriff) and another man was killed.  This was the day before the

soldiers came up with them.  I mean Noble's men, and those under Cols.

Evans and Mayfield, from Los Angeles.  Evans assumed the chief command--

and next morning the forces were divided into three parties, and marched

against the enemy.  Col. Mayfield was killed, and Sergeant Gillespie,

also Noble's colonel was wounded.  The California troops went back home,

and Noble remained, to help drive the stock over here.  And, as Cousin

Sally Dillard says, this is all I know about the fight.



Work not yet begun on the H. and Derby--haven't seen it yet.  It is still

in the snow.  Shall begin on it within 3 or 4 weeks--strike the ledge in

July.  Guess it is good--worth from $30 to $50 a foot in California.



Why didn't you send the "Live Yankee" deed-the very one I wanted?  Have

made no inquiries about it, much.  Don't intend to until I get the deed.

Send it along--by mail--d---n the Express--have to pay three times for

all express matter; once in Carson and twice here.  I don't expect to

take the saddle-bags out of the express office.  I paid twenty-five cts.

for the Express deeds.



Man named Gebhart shot here yesterday while trying to defend a claim on

Last Chance Hill.  Expect he will die.



These mills here are not worth a d---n-except Clayton's--and it is not in

full working trim yet.



Send me $40 or $50--by mail--immediately.



The Red Bird is probably good--can't work on the tunnel on account of

snow.  The "Pugh" I have thrown away--shan't re-locate it.  It is nothing

but bed-rock croppings--too much work to find the ledge, if there is one.

Shan't record the "Farnum" until I know more about it--perhaps not at

all.



"Governor" under the snow.



"Douglas" and "Red Bird" are both recorded.



I have had opportunities to get into several ledges, but refused all but

three--expect to back out of two of them.



Stir yourself as much as possible, and lay up $100 or $15,000, subject to

my call.  I go to work to-morrow, with pick and shovel.  Something's got

to come, by G--, before I let go, here.



Col. Youngs says you must rent Kinkead's room by all means--Government

would rather pay $150 a month for your office than $75 for Gen. North's.

Says you are playing your hand very badly, for either the Government's

good opinion or anybody's else, in keeping your office in a shanty.  Says

put Gov. Nye in your place and he would have a stylish office, and no

objections would ever be made, either.  When old Col. Youngs talks this

way, I think it time to get a fine office.  I wish you would take that

office, and fit it up handsomely, so that I can omit telling people that

by this time you are handsomely located, when I know it is no such thing.



I am living with "Ratio Phillips."  Send him one of those black

portfolios--by the stage, and put a couple of pen-holders and a dozen

steel pens in it.



If you should have occasion to dispose of the long desk before I return,

don't forget to break open the middle drawer and take out my things.

Envelop my black cloth coat in a newspaper and hang it in the back room.



Don't buy anything while I am here--but save up some money for me.  Don't

send any money home.  I shall have your next quarter's salary spent

before you get it, I think.  I mean to make or break here within the next

two or three months.

                                   Yrs.

                                             SAM





The "wars" mentioned in the opening paragraph of this letter were

incident to the trouble concerning the boundary line between California

and Nevada.  The trouble continued for some time, with occasional

bloodshed.  The next letter is an exultant one.  There were few enough of

this sort.  We cannot pretend to keep track of the multiplicity of mines

and shares which lure the gold-hunters, pecking away at the flinty

ledges, usually in the snow.  It has been necessary to abbreviate this

letter, for much of it has lost all importance with the years, and is

merely confusing.  Hope is still high in the writer's heart, and

confidence in his associates still unshaken.  Later he was to lose faith

in "Raish," whether with justice or not we cannot know now.





                     To Orion Clowns, in Carson City:



                                        ESMERALDA, May 11, 1862.

MY DEAR BRO.,--TO use a French expression I have "got my d--d satisfy" at

last.  Two years' time will make us capitalists, in spite of anything.

Therefore, we need fret and fume, and worry and doubt no more, but just

lie still and put up with privations for six months.  Perhaps three

months will "let us out."  Then, if Government refuses to pay the rent on

your new office we can do it ourselves.  We have got to wait six weeks,

anyhow, for a dividend, maybe longer--but that it will come there is no

shadow of a doubt, I have got the thing sifted down to a dead moral

certainty.  I own one-eighth of the new "Monitor Ledge, Clemens Company,"

and money can't buy a foot of it; because I know it to contain our

fortune.  The ledge is six feet wide, and one needs no glass to see gold

and silver in it.  Phillips and I own one half of a segregated claim in

the "Flyaway" discovery, and good interests in two extensions on it.

We put men to work on our part of the discovery yesterday, and last night

they brought us some fine specimens.  Rock taken from ten feet below the

surface on the other part of the discovery, has yielded $150.00 to the

ton in the mill and we are at work 300 feet from their shaft.



May 12--Yours by the mail received last night.  "Eighteen hundred feet in

the C. T. Rice's Company!"  Well, I am glad you did not accept of the 200

feet.  Tell Rice to give it to some poor man.



But hereafter, when anybody holds up a glittering prospect before you,

just argue in this wise, viz: That, if all spare change be devoted to

working the "Monitor" and "Flyaway," 12 months, or 24 at furthest, will

find all our earthly wishes satisfied, so far as money is concerned--and

the more "feet" we have, the more anxiety we must bear--therefore, why

not say "No--d---n your 'prospects,' I wait on a sure thing--and a man

is less than a man, if he can't wait 2 years for a fortune?"  When you

and I came out here, we did not expect '63 or '64 to find us rich men--

and if that proposition had been made, we would have accepted it gladly.

Now, it is made.



Well, I am willing, now, that "Neary's tunnel," or anybody else's tunnel

shall succeed.  Some of them may beat us a few months, but we shall be on

hand in the fullness of time, as sure as fate.  I would hate to swap

chances with any member of the "tribe"--in fact, I am so lost to all

sense and reason as to be capable of refusing to trade "Flyaway" (with

but 200 feet in the Company of four,) foot for foot for that splendid

"Lady Washington," with its lists of capitalist proprietors, and its

35,000 feet of Priceless ground.



I wouldn't mind being in some of those Clear Creek claims, if I lived in

Carson and we could spare the money.  But I have struck my tent in

Esmeralda, and I care for no mines but those which I can superintend

myself.  I am a citizen here now, and I am satisfied--although R. and I

are strapped and we haven't three days' rations in the house.



Raish is looking anxiously for money and so am I.  Send me whatever you

can spare conveniently--I want it to work the Flyaway with.  My fourth of

that claim only cost me $50, (which isn't paid yet, though,) and I

suppose I could sell it here in town for ten times that amount today, but

I shall probably hold onto it till the cows come home.  I shall work the

"Monitor" and the other claims with my own hands.  I prospected of a

pound of "M," yesterday, and Raish reduced it with the blow-pipe, and got

about ten or twelve cents in gold and silver, besides the other half of

it which we spilt on the floor and didn't get.  The specimen came from

the croppings, but was a choice one, and showed much free gold to the

naked eye.



Well, I like the corner up-stairs office amazingly--provided, it has one

fine, large front room superbly carpeted, for the safe and a $150 desk,

or such a matter--one handsome room amidships, less handsomely gotten up,

perhaps, for records and consultations, and one good-sized bedroom and

adjoining it a kitchen, neither of which latter can be entered by anybody

but yourself--and finally, when one of the ledges begins to pay, the

whole to be kept in parlor order by two likely contrabands at big wages,

the same to be free of expense to the Government.  You want the entire

second story--no less room than you would have had in Harris and Co's.

Make them fix for you before the 1st of July-for maybe you might want to

"come out strong" on the 4th, you know.



No, the Post Office is all right and kept by a gentleman but W. F.

Express isn't.  They charge 25 cts to express a letter from here, but I

believe they have quit charging twice for letters that arrive prepaid.



The "Flyaway" specimen I sent you, (taken by myself from DeKay's shaft,

300 feet from where we are going to sink) cannot be called "choice,"

exactly--say something above medium, to be on the safe side.  But I have

seen exceedingly choice chunks from that shaft.  My intention at first in

sending the Antelope specimen was that you might see that it resembles

the Monitor--but, come to think, a man can tell absolutely nothing about

that without seeing both ledges themselves.  I tried to break a handsome

chunk from a huge piece of my darling Monitor which we brought from the

croppings yesterday, but it all splintered up, and I send you the scraps.

I call that "choice"--any d---d fool would.  Don't ask if it has been

assayed, for it hasn't.  It don't need it.  It is amply able to speak for

itself.  It is six feet wide on top, and traversed through and through

with veins whose color proclaims their worth.  What the devil does a man

want with any more feet when he owns in the Flyaway and the invincible

bomb-proof Monitor?



If I had anything more to say I have forgotten what it was, unless,

perhaps, that I want a sum of money--anywhere from $20 to $150, as soon

as possible.



Raish sends regards.  He or I, one will drop a line to the "Age"

occasionally.  I suppose you saw my letters in the "Enterprise."

                                   Yr.  BRO,

                                             SAM



P. S.  I suppose Pamela never will regain her health, but she could

improve it by coming to California--provided the trip didn't kill her.



You see Bixby is on the flag-ship.  He always was the best pilot on the

Mississippi, and deserves his "posish."  They have done a reckless thing,

though, in putting Sam Bowen on the "Swan"--for if a bomb-shell happens

to come his way, he will infallibly jump overboard.



Send me another package of those envelopes, per Bagley's coat pocket.





     We see how anxious he was for his brother to make a good official

     showing.  If a niggardly Government refused to provide decent

     quarters--no matter; the miners, with gold pouring in, would

     themselves pay for a suite "superbly carpeted," and all kept in

     order by "two likely contrabands"--that is to say, negroes.  Samuel

     Clemens in those days believed in expansion and impressive

     surroundings.  His brother, though also mining mad, was rather

     inclined to be penny wise in the matter of office luxury--not a bad

     idea, as it turned out.



     Orion, by the way, was acquiring "feet" on his own account, and in

     one instance, at least, seems to have won his brother's

     commendation.



     The 'Enterprise' letters mentioned we shall presently hear of again.





                    To Orion Clemens, in Carson City:



                                        ESMERALDA, Sunday, May--, 1862.

MY DEAR BROTHER,--Well, if you haven't "struck it rich--"that is, if the

piece of rock you sent me came from a bona fide ledge--and it looks as if

it did.  If that is a ledge, and you own 200 feet in it, why, it's a big

thing--and I have nothing more to say.  If you have actually made

something by helping to pay somebody's prospecting expenses it is a

wonder of the first magnitude, and deserves to rank as such.



If that rock came from a well-defined ledge, that particular vein must be

at least an inch wide, judging from this specimen, which is fully that

thick.



When I came in the other evening, hungry and tired and ill-natured, and

threw down my pick and shovel, Raish gave me your specimen--said Bagley

brought it, and asked me if it were cinnabar.  I examined it by the

waning daylight, and took the specks of fine gold for sulphurets--wrote

you I did not think much of it--and posted the letter immediately.



But as soon as I looked at it in the broad light of day, I saw my

mistake.  During the week, we have made three horns, got a blow-pipe, &c,

and yesterday, all prepared, we prospected the "Mountain House."  I broke

the specimen in two, and found it full of fine gold inside.  Then we

washed out one-fourth of it, and got a noble prospect.  This we reduced

with the blow-pipe, and got about two cents (herewith enclosed) in pure

gold.



As the fragment prospected weighed rather less than an ounce, this would

give about $500 to the ton.  We were eminently well satisfied.

Therefore, hold on to the "Mountain House," for it is a "big thing."

Touch it lightly, as far as money is concerned, though, for it is well to

reserve the code of justice in the matter of quartz ledges--that is,

consider them all (and their owners) guilty (of "shenanigan") until they

are proved innocent.



P. S.--Monday--Ratio and I have bought one-half of a segregated claim in

the original "Flyaway," for $100--$50 down.  We haven't a cent in the

house.  We two will work the ledge, and have full control, and pay all

expenses.  If you can spare $100 conveniently, let me have it--or $50,

anyhow, considering that I own one fourth of this, it is of course more

valuable than one 1/7 of the "Mountain House," although not so rich ....





     There is too much of a sameness in the letters of this period to use

     all of them.  There are always new claims, and work done, apparently

     without system or continuance, hoping to uncover sudden boundless

     affluence.



     In the next letter and the one following it we get a hint of an

     episode, or rather of two incidents which he combined into an

     episode in Roughing It.  The story as told in that book is an

     account of what might have happened, rather than history.  There was

     never really any money in the "blind lead" of the Wide West claim,

     except that which was sunk in it by unfortunate investors.  Only

     extracts from these letters are given.  The other portions are

     irrelevant and of slight value.





         Extract from a letter to Orion Clemens, in Carson City:



                                                            1862.

Two or three of the old "Salina" company entered our hole on the Monitor

yesterday morning, before our men got there, and took possession, armed

with revolvers.  And according to the d---d laws of this forever d---d

country, nothing but the District Court (and there ain't any) can touch

the matter, unless it assumes the shape of an infernal humbug which they

call "forcible entry and detainer," and in order to bring that about, you

must compel the jumpers to use personal violence toward you!  We went up

and demanded possession, and they refused.  Said they were in the hole,

armed and meant to die for it, if necessary.



I got in with them, and again demanded possession.  They said I might

stay in it as long as I pleased, and work but they would do the same.

I asked one of our company to take my place in the hole, while I went to

consult a lawyer.  He did so.  The lawyer said it was no go.  They must

offer some "force."



Our boys will try to be there first in the morning--in which case they

may get possession and keep it.  Now you understand the shooting scrape

in which Gebhart was killed the other day.  The Clemens Company--all of

us--hate to resort to arms in this matter, and it will not be done until

it becomes a forced hand--but I think that will be the end of it, never-

the-less.





     The mine relocated in this letter was not the "Wide West," but it

     furnished the proper incident.  The only mention of the "Wide West"

     is found in a letter written in July.





         Extract from a letter to Orion Clemens, in Carson City:

                                                                 1862

If I do not forget it, I will send you, per next mail, a pinch of decom.

(decomposed rock) which I pinched with thumb and finger from "Wide West"

ledge awhile ago.  Raish and I have secured 200 out of a 400 ft. in it,

which perhaps (the ledge, I mean) is a spur from the W. W.--our shaft is

about 100 ft.  from the W. W. shaft.  In order to get in, we agreed to

sink 30 ft.  We have sub-let to another man for 50 ft., and we pay for

powder and sharpening tools.





     The "Wide West" claim was forfeited, but there is no evidence to

     show that Clemens and his partners were ever, except in fiction,

     "millionaires for ten days."  The background, the local color, and

     the possibilities are all real enough, but Mark Twain's aim in this,

     as in most of his other reminiscent writing, was to arrange and

     adapt his facts to the needs of a good story.



     The letters of this summer (1862) most of them bear evidence of

     waning confidence in mining as a source of fortune--the miner has

     now little faith in his own judgment, and none at all in that of his

     brother, who was without practical experience.





                 Letter to Orion Clemens, in Carson City:



                                             ESMERALDA, Thursday.

MY DEAR BRO.,--Yours of the 17th, per express, just received.  Part of it

pleased me exceedingly, and part of it didn't.  Concerning the letter,

for instance: You have PROMISED me that you would leave all mining

matters, and everything involving an outlay of money, in my hands.



Sending a man fooling around the country after ledges, for God's sake!

when there are hundreds of feet of them under my nose here, begging for

owners, free of charge.  I don't want any more feet, and I won't touch

another foot--so you see, Orion, as far as any ledges of Perry's are

concerned, (or any other except what I examine first with my own eyes,)

I freely yield my right to share ownership with you.



The balance of your letter, I say, pleases me exceedingly.  Especially

that about the H. and D. being worth from $30 to $50 in Cal.  It pleases

me because, if the ledges prove to be worthless, it will be a pleasant

reflection to know that others were beaten worse than ourselves.  Raish

sold a man 30 feet, yesterday, at $20 a foot, although I was present at

the sale, and told the man the ground wasn't worth a d---n.  He said he

had been hankering after a few feet in the H. and D. for a long time, and

he had got them at last, and he couldn't help thinking he had secured a

good thing.  We went and looked at the ledges, and both of them

acknowledged that there was nothing in them but good "indications."  Yet

the owners in the H. and D.  will part with anything else sooner than

with feet in these ledges.  Well, the work goes slowly--very slowly on,

in the tunnel, and we'll strike it some day.  But--if we "strike it

rich,"--I've lost my guess, that's all.  I expect that the way it got so

high in Cal. was, that Raish's brother, over there was offered $750.00

for 20 feet of it, and he refused .....



Couldn't go on the hill today.  It snowed.  It always snows here, I

expect.



Don't you suppose they have pretty much quit writing, at home?



When you receive your next 1/4 yr's salary, don't send any of it here

until after you have told me you have got it.  Remember this.  I am

afraid of that H. and D.



They have struck the ledge in the Live Yankee tunnel, and I told the

President, Mr. Allen, that it wasn't as good as the croppings.  He said

that was true enough, but they would hang to it until it did prove rich.

He is much of a gentleman, that man Allen.



And ask Gaslerie why the devil he don't send along my commission as

Deputy Sheriff.  The fact of my being in California, and out of his

country, wouldn't amount to a d---n with me, in the performance of my

official duties.



I have nothing to report, at present, except that I shall find out all I

want to know about this locality before I leave it.



How do the Records pay?

                              Yr.  Bro.

                                        SAM.





     In one of the foregoing letters--the one dated May 11 there is a

     reference to the writer's "Enterprise Letters."  Sometimes, during

     idle days in the camp, the miner had followed old literary impulses

     and written an occasional burlesque sketch, which he had signed

     "Josh," and sent to the Territorial Enterprise, at Virginia City.--

     [One contribution was sent to a Keokuk paper, The Gate City, and a

     letter written by Mrs. Jane Clemens at the time would indicate that

     Mark Twain's mother did not always approve of her son's literary

     efforts.  She hopes that he will do better, and some time write

     something "that his kin will be proud of."]--The rough, vigorous

     humor of these had attracted some attention, and Orion, pleased with

     any measure of success that might come to his brother, had allowed

     the authorship of them to become known.  When, in July, the

     financial situation became desperate, the Esmeralda miner was moved

     to turn to literature for relief.  But we will let him present the

     situation himself.





                    To Orion Clemens, in Carson City:



                                        ESMERALDA, July 23d, 1862.

MY DEAR BRO.,--No, I don't own a foot in the "Johnson" ledge--I will tell

the story some day in a more intelligible manner than Tom has told it.

You needn't take the trouble to deny Tom's version, though.  I own 25

feet (1-16) of the 1st east ex. on it--and Johnson himself has contracted

to find the ledge for 100 feet.  Contract signed yesterday.  But as the

ledge will be difficult to find he is allowed six months to find it in.

An eighteenth of the Ophir was a fortune to John D. Winters--and the

Ophir can't beat the Johnson any.....



My debts are greater than I thought for; I bought $25 worth of clothing,

and sent $25 to Higbie, in the cement diggings.  I owe about $45 or $50,

and have got about $45 in my pocket.  But how in the h--l I am going to

live on something over $100 until October or November, is singular.  The

fact is, I must have something to do, and that shortly, too.....



Now write to the Sacramento Union folks, or to Marsh, and tell them I'll

write as many letters a week as they want, for $10 a week--my board must

be paid.  Tell them I have corresponded with the N. Orleans Crescent, and

other papers--and the Enterprise.  California is full of people who have

interests here, and it's d---d seldom they hear from this country.

I can't write a specimen letter--now, at any rate--I'd rather undertake

to write a Greek poem.  Tell 'em the mail and express leave three times a

week, and it costs from 25 to 50 cents to send letters by the blasted

express.  If they want letters from here, who'll run from morning till

night collecting materials cheaper.  I'll write a short letter twice a

week, for the present, for the "Age," for $5 per week.  Now it has been a

long time since I couldn't make my own living, and it shall be a long

time before I loaf another year.....



If I get the other 25 feet in the Johnson ex., I shan't care a d---n.

I'll be willing to curse awhile and wait.  And if I can't move the bowels

of those hills this fall, I will come up and clerk for you until I get

money enough to go over the mountains for the winter.

                                   Yr.  Bro.

                                                  SAM.





     The Territorial Enterprise at Virginia City was at this time owned

     by Joseph T. Goodman, who had bought it on the eve of the great

     Comstock silver-mining boom, and from a struggling, starving sheet

     had converted it into one of the most important--certainly the most

     picturesque-papers on the coast.  The sketches which the Esmeralda

     miner had written over the name of "Josh" fitted into it exactly,

     and when a young man named Barstow, in the business office, urged

     Goodman to invite "Josh" to join their staff, the Enterprise owner

     readily fell in with the idea.  Among a lot of mining matters of no

     special interest, Clemens, July 3oth, wrote his brother: "Barstow

     has offered me the post as local reporter for the Enterprise at $25

     a week, and I have written him that I will let him know next mail,

     if possible."



     In Roughing It we are told that the miner eagerly accepted the

     proposition to come to Virginia City, but the letters tell a

     different story.  Mark Twain was never one to abandon any

     undertaking easily.  His unwillingness to surrender in a lost cause

     would cost him more than one fortune in the years to come.  A week

     following the date of the foregoing he was still undecided.





                    To Orion Clemens, in Carson City:



                                        ESMERALDA, Aug. 7, 1862.

MY DEAR BRO,--Barstow wrote that if I wanted the place I could have it.

I wrote him that I guessed I would take it, and asked him how long before

I must come up there.  I have not heard from him since.



Now, I shall leave at mid-night tonight, alone and on foot for a walk of

60 or 70 miles through a totally uninhabited country, and it is barely

possible that mail facilities may prove infernally "slow" during the few

weeks I expect to spend out there.  But do you write Barstow that I have

left here for a week or so, and in case he should want me he must write

me here, or let me know through you.



The Contractors say they will strike the Fresno next week.  After fooling

with those assayers a week, they concluded not to buy "Mr. Flower" at

$50, although they would have given five times the sum for it four months

ago.  So I have made out a deed for one half of all Johnny's ground and

acknowledged and left in judge F. K. Becktel's hands, and if judge Turner

wants it he must write to Becktel and pay him his Notary fee of $1.50.

I would have paid that fee myself, but I want money now as I leave town

tonight.  However, if you think it isn't right, you can pay the fee to

judge Turner yourself.



Hang to your money now.  I may want some when I get back.....



See that you keep out of debt-to anybody.  Bully for B.!  Write him that

I would write him myself, but I am to take a walk tonight and haven't

time.  Tell him to bring his family out with him.  He can rely upon what

I say--and I say the land has lost its ancient desolate appearance; the

rose and the oleander have taken the place of the departed sage-bush; a

rich black loam, garnished with moss, and flowers, and the greenest of

grass, smiles to Heaven from the vanished sand-plains; the "endless

snows" have all disappeared, and in their stead, or to repay us for their

loss, the mountains rear their billowy heads aloft, crowned with a

fadeless and eternal verdure; birds, and fountains, and trees-tropical

bees--everywhere!--and the poet dreamt of Nevada when he wrote:



               "and Sharon waves, in solemn praise,

               Her silent groves of palm."



and today the royal Raven listens in a dreamy stupor to the songs of the

thrush and the nightingale and the canary--and shudders when the gaudy--

plumaged birds of the distant South sweep by him to the orange groves of

Carson.  Tell him he wouldn't recognize the d--d country.  He should

bring his family by all means.



I intended to write home, but I haven't done it.

                                             Yr.  Bro.

                                                       SAM.





     In this letter we realize that he had gone into the wilderness to

     reflect--to get a perspective on the situation.  He was a great

     walker in those days, and sometimes with Higbie, sometimes alone,

     made long excursions.  One such is recorded in Roughing It, the trip

     to Mono Lake.  We have no means of knowing where his seventy-mile

     tour led him now, but it is clear that he still had not reached a

     decision on his return.  Indeed, we gather that he is inclined to

     keep up the battle among the barren Esmeralda hills.





        Last mining letter; written to Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                                   ESMERALDA, CAL., Aug. 15, 1862.

MY DEAR SISTER,-I mailed a letter to you and Ma this morning, but since

then I have received yours to Orion and me.  Therefore, I must answer

right away, else I may leave town without doing it at all.  What in

thunder are pilot's wages to me? which question, I beg humbly to observe,

is of a general nature, and not discharged particularly at you.  But it

is singular, isn't it, that such a matter should interest Orion, when it

is of no earthly consequence to me?  I never have once thought of

returning home to go on the river again, and I never expect to do any

more piloting at any price.  My livelihood must be made in this country--

and if I have to wait longer than I expected, let it be so--I have no

fear of failure.  You know I have extravagant hopes, for Orion tells you

everything which he ought to keep to himself--but it's his nature to do

that sort of thing, and I let him alone.  I did think for awhile of going

home this fall--but when I found that that was and had been the cherished

intention and the darling aspiration every year, of these old care-worn

Californians for twelve weary years--I felt a little uncomfortable, but

I stole a march on Disappointment and said I would not go home this fall.

I will spend the winter in San Francisco, if possible.  Do not tell any

one that I had any idea of piloting again at present--for it is all a

mistake.  This country suits me, and--it shall suit me, whether or no....



Dan Twing and I and Dan's dog, "cabin" together--and will continue to do

so for awhile--until I leave for--



The mansion is 10x12, with a "domestic" roof.  Yesterday it rained--the

first shower for five months.  "Domestic," it appears to me, is not

water-proof.  We went outside to keep from getting wet.  Dan makes the

bed when it is his turn to do it--and when it is my turn, I don't, you

know.  The dog is not a good hunter, and he isn't worth shucks to watch--

but he scratches up the dirt floor of the cabin, and catches flies, and

makes himself generally useful in the way of washing dishes.  Dan gets up

first in the morning and makes a fire--and I get up last and sit by it,

while he cooks breakfast.  We have a cold lunch at noon, and I cook

supper--very much against my will.  However, one must have one good meal

a day, and if I were to live on Dan's abominable cookery, I should lose

my appetite, you know.  Dan attended Dr. Chorpenning's funeral yesterday,

and he felt as though he ought to wear a white shirt--and we had a jolly

good time finding such an article.  We turned over all our traps, and he

found one at last--but I shall always think it was suffering from yellow

fever.  He also found an old black coat, greasy, and wrinkled to that

degree that it appeared to have been quilted at some time or other.  In

this gorgeous costume he attended the funeral.  And when he returned, his

own dog drove him away from the cabin, not recognizing him.  This is

true.



You would not like to live in a country where flour was $40 a barrel?

Very well; then, I suppose you would not like to live here, where flour

was $100 a barrel when I first came here.  And shortly afterwards, it

couldn't be had at any price--and for one month the people lived on

barley, beans and beef--and nothing beside.  Oh, no--we didn't luxuriate

then!  Perhaps not.  But we said wise and severe things about the vanity

and wickedness of high living.  We preached our doctrine and practised

it.  Which course I respectfully recommend to the clergymen of St. Louis.



Where is Beack Jolly?--[a pilot]--and Bixby?

                                             Your Brother

                                                            SAM.









IV



LETTERS 1863-64.  "MARK TWAIN."  COMSTOCK JOURNALISM.  ARTEMUS WARD



There is a long hiatus in the correspondence here.  For a space of many

months there is but one letter to continue the story.  Others were

written, of course, but for some reason they have not survived.  It was

about the end of August (1862) when the miner finally abandoned the

struggle, and with his pack on his shoulders walked the one and thirty

miles over the mountains to Virginia City, arriving dusty, lame, and

travel-stained to claim at last his rightful inheritance.  At the

Enterprise office he was welcomed, and in a brief time entered into his

own.  Goodman, the proprietor, himself a man of great ability, had

surrounded himself with a group of gay-hearted fellows, whose fresh, wild

way of writing delighted the Comstock pioneers far more than any sober

presentation of mere news.  Samuel Clemens fitted exactly into this

group.  By the end of the year he had become a leader of it.  When he

asked to be allowed to report the coming Carson legislature, Goodman

consented, realizing that while Clemens knew nothing of parliamentary

procedure, he would at least make the letters picturesque.



It was in the midst of this work that he adopted the name which he was to

make famous throughout the world.  The story of its adoption has been

fully told elsewhere and need not be repeated here.--[See Mark Twain: A

Biography, by the same author; Chapter XL.]



"Mark Twain" was first signed to a Carson letter, February 2, 1863, and

from that time was attached to all of Samuel Clemens's work.  The letters

had already been widely copied, and the name now which gave them

personality quickly obtained vogue.  It was attached to himself as well

as to the letters; heretofore he had been called Sam or Clemens, now he

became almost universally Mark Twain and Mark.



This early period of Mark Twain's journalism is full of delicious

history, but we are permitted here to retell only such of it as will

supply connection to the infrequent letters.  He wrote home briefly in

February, but the letter contained nothing worth preserving.  Then two

months later he gives us at least a hint of his employment.





           To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                                             VIRGINIA, April 11, 1863.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--It is very late at night, and I am writing

in my room, which is not quite as large or as nice as the one I had at

home.  My board, washing and lodging cost me seventy-five dollars a

month.



I have just received your letter, Ma, from Carson--the one in which you

doubt my veracity about the statements I made in a letter to you.  That's

right.  I don't recollect what the statements were, but I suppose they

were mining statistics.  I have just finished writing up my report for

the morning paper, and giving the Unreliable a column of advice about how

to conduct himself in church, and now I will tell you a few more lies,

while my hand is in.  For instance, some of the boys made me a present of

fifty feet in the East India G. and S. M.  Company ten days ago.  I was

offered ninety-five dollars a foot for it, yesterday, in gold.  I refused

it--not because I think the claim is worth a cent for I don't but because

I had a curiosity to see how high it would go, before people find out how

worthless it is.  Besides, what if one mining claim does fool me?  I have

got plenty more.  I am not in a particular hurry to get rich.  I suppose

I couldn't well help getting rich here some time or other, whether I

wanted to or not.  You folks do not believe in Nevada, and I am glad you

don't.  Just keep on thinking so.



I was at the Gould and Curry mine, the other day, and they had two or

three tons of choice rock piled up, which was valued at $20,000 a ton.

I gathered up a hat-full of chunks, on account of their beauty as

specimens--they don't let everybody supply themselves so liberally.  I

send Mr. Moffett a little specimen of it for his cabinet.  If you don't

know what the white stuff on it is, I must inform you that it is purer

silver than the minted coin.  There is about as much gold in it as there

is silver, but it is not visible.  I will explain to you some day how to

detect it.



Pamela, you wouldn't do for a local reporter--because you don't

appreciate the interest that attaches to names.  An item is of no use

unless it speaks of some person, and not then, unless that person's name

is distinctly mentioned.  The most interesting letter one can write, to

an absent friend, is one that treats of persons he has been acquainted

with rather than the public events of the day.  Now you speak of a young

lady who wrote to Hollie Benson that she had seen me; and you didn't

mention her name.  It was just a mere chance that I ever guessed who she

was--but I did, finally, though I don't remember her name, now.  I was

introduced to her in San Francisco by Hon. A. B. Paul, and saw her

afterwards in Gold Hill.  They were a very pleasant lot of girls--she and

her sisters.



P. S.  I have just heard five pistol shots down street--as such things

are in my line, I will go and see about it.



P. S.  No 2--5 A.M.--The pistol did its work well--one man--a Jackson

County Missourian, shot two of my friends, (police officers,) through the

heart--both died within three minutes.  Murderer's name is John Campbell.



     The "Unreliable" of this letter was a rival reporter on whom Mark

     Twain had conferred this name during the legislative session.  His

     real name was Rice, and he had undertaken to criticize Clemens's

     reports.  The brisk reply that Rice's letters concealed with a show

     of parliamentary knowledge a "festering mass of misstatements the

     author of whom should be properly termed the 'Unreliable," fixed

     that name upon him for life.  This burlesque warfare delighted the

     frontier and it did not interfere with friendship.  Clemens and Rice

     were constant associates, though continually firing squibs at each

     other in their respective papers--a form of personal journalism much

     in vogue on the Comstock.



     In the next letter we find these two journalistic "blades" enjoying

     themselves together in the coast metropolis.  This letter is labeled

     "No. 2," meaning, probably, the second from San Francisco, but No. 1

     has disappeared, and even No, 2 is incomplete.





           To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



No. 2--($20.00 Enclosed)

                                        LICK HOUSE, S. F., June 1, '63.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--The Unreliable and myself are still here,

and still enjoying ourselves.  I suppose I know at least a thousand

people here--a, great many of them citizens of San Francisco, but the

majority belonging in Washoe--and when I go down Montgomery street,

shaking hands with Tom, Dick and Harry, it is just like being in Main

street in Hannibal and meeting the old familiar faces.  I do hate to go

back to Washoe.  We fag ourselves completely out every day, and go to

sleep without rocking, every night.  We dine out and we lunch out, and we

eat, drink and are happy--as it were.  After breakfast, I don't often see

the hotel again until midnight--or after.  I am going to the Dickens

mighty fast.  I know a regular village of families here in the house, but

I never have time to call on them.  Thunder! we'll know a little more

about this town, before we leave, than some of the people who live in it.

We take trips across the Bay to Oakland, and down to San Leandro, and

Alameda, and those places; and we go out to the Willows, and Hayes Park,

and Fort Point, and up to Benicia; and yesterday we were invited out on a

yachting excursion, and had a sail in the fastest yacht on the Pacific

Coast.  Rice says: "Oh, no--we are not having any fun, Mark--Oh, no, I

reckon not--it's somebody else--it's probably the 'gentleman in the

wagon'!" (popular slang phrase.)  When I invite Rice to the Lick House to

dinner, the proprietors send us champagne and claret, and then we do put

on the most disgusting airs.  Rice says our calibre is too light--we

can't stand it to be noticed!



I rode down with a gentleman to the Ocean House, the other day, to see

the sea horses, and also to listen to the roar of the surf, and watch the

ships drifting about, here, and there, and far away at sea.  When I stood

on the beach and let the surf wet my feet, I recollected doing the same

thing on the shores of the Atlantic--and then I had a proper appreciation

of the vastness of this country--for I had traveled from ocean to ocean

across it.

                         (Remainder missing.)





     Not far from Virginia City there are some warm springs that

     constantly send up jets of steam through fissures in the

     mountainside.  The place was a health resort, and Clemens, always

     subject to bronchial colds, now and again retired there for a cure.



     A letter written in the late summer--a gay, youthful document--

     belongs to one of these periods of convalescence.





           To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



No. 12--$20 enclosed.

                              STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, August 19, '63.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--Ma, you have given my vanity a deadly thrust.

Behold, I am prone to boast of having the widest reputation, as a local

editor, of any man on the Pacific coast, and you gravely come forward and

tell me "if I work hard and attend closely to my business, I may aspire

to a place on a big San Francisco daily, some day."  There's a comment on

human vanity for you!  Why, blast it, I was under the impression that I

could get such a situation as that any time I asked for it.  But I don't

want it.  No paper in the United States can afford to pay me what my

place on the "Enterprise" is worth.  If I were not naturally a lazy,

idle, good-for-nothing vagabond, I could make it pay me $20,000 a year.

But I don't suppose I shall ever be any account.  I lead an easy life,

though, and I don't care a cent whether school keeps or not.  Everybody

knows me, and I fare like a prince wherever I go, be it on this side of

the mountains or the other.  And I am proud to say I am the most

conceited ass in the Territory.



You think that picture looks old?  Well, I can't help it--in reality I am

not as old as I was when I was eighteen.



I took a desperate cold more than a week ago, and I seduced Wilson (a

Missouri boy, reporter of the Daily Union,) from his labors, and we went

over to Lake Bigler.  But I failed to cure my cold.  I found the "Lake

House" crowded with the wealth and fashion of Virginia, and I could not

resist the temptation to take a hand in all the fun going.  Those

Virginians--men and women both--are a stirring set, and I found if I went

with them on all their eternal excursions, I should bring the consumption

home with me--so I left, day before yesterday, and came back into the

Territory again.  A lot of them had purchased a site for a town on the

Lake shore, and they gave me a lot.  When you come out, I'll build you a

house on it.  The Lake seems more supernaturally beautiful now, than

ever.  It is the masterpiece of the Creation.



The hotel here at the Springs is not so much crowded as usual, and I am

having a very comfortable time of it.  The hot, white steam puffs up out

of fissures in the earth like the jets that come from a steam-boat's

'scape pipes, and it makes a boiling, surging noise like a steam-boat,

too-hence the name.  We put eggs in a handkerchief and dip them in the

springs--they "soft boil" in 2 Minutes, and boil as hard as a rock in

4 minutes.  These fissures extend more than a quarter of a mile, and the

long line of steam columns looks very pretty.  A large bath house is

built over one of the springs, and we go in it and steam ourselves as

long as we can stand it, and then come out and take a cold shower bath.

You get baths, board and lodging, all for $25 a week--cheaper than living

in Virginia without baths.....

                                   Yrs aft

                                             MARK.





     It was now the autumn of 1863.  Mark Twain was twenty-eight years

     old.  On the Coast he had established a reputation as a gaily

     original newspaper writer.  Thus far, however, he had absolutely no

     literary standing, nor is there any evidence that he had literary

     ambitions; his work was unformed, uncultivated--all of which seems

     strange, now, when we realize that somewhere behind lay the

     substance of immortality.  Rudyard Kipling at twenty-eight had done

     his greatest work.



     Even Joseph Goodman, who had a fine literary perception and a deep

     knowledge of men, intimately associated with Mark Twain as he was,

     received at this time no hint of his greater powers.  Another man on

     the staff of the Enterprise, William Wright, who called himself "Dan

     de Quille," a graceful humorist, gave far more promise, Goodman

     thought, of future distinction.



     It was Artemus Ward who first suspected the value of Mark Twain's

     gifts, and urged him to some more important use of them.  Artemus in

     the course of a transcontinental lecture tour, stopped in Virginia

     City, and naturally found congenial society on the Enterprise staff.

     He had intended remaining but a few days, but lingered three weeks,

     a period of continuous celebration, closing only with the holiday

     season.  During one night of final festivities, Ward slipped away

     and gave a performance on his own account.  His letter to Mark

     Twain, from Austin, Nevada, written a day or two later, is most

     characteristic.





                   Artemus Ward's letter to Mark Twain:



                                             AUSTIN, Jan. 1, '64.

MY DEAREST LOVE,--I arrived here yesterday a.m. at 2 o'clock.  It is a

wild, untamable place, full of lionhearted boys.  I speak tonight.  See

small bills.



Why did you not go with me and save me that night?--I mean the night I

left you after that dinner party.  I went and got drunker, beating, I may

say, Alexander the Great, in his most drinkinist days, and I blackened my

face at the Melodeon, and made a gibbering, idiotic speech.  God-dam it!

I suppose the Union will have it.  But let it go.  I shall always

remember Virginia as a bright spot in my existence, as all others must or

rather cannot be, as it were.



Love to Jo. Goodman and Dan.  I shall write soon, a powerfully convincing

note to my friends of "The Mercury."  Your notice, by the way, did much

good here, as it doubtlessly will elsewhere.  The miscreants of the Union

will be batted in the snout if they ever dare pollute this rapidly rising

city with their loathsome presence.



Some of the finest intellects in the world have been blunted by liquor.



Do not, sir--do not flatter yourself that you are the only chastely-

humorous writer onto the Pacific slopes.



Good-bye, old boy--and God bless you!  The matter of which I spoke to you

so earnestly shall be just as earnestly attended to--and again with very

many warm regards for Jo. and Dan., and regards to many of the good

friends we met.

                         I am Faithfully, gratefully yours,

                                                  ARTEMUS WARD.





     The Union which Ward mentions was the rival Virginia.  City paper;

     the Mercury was the New York Sunday Mercury, to which he had urged

     Mark Twain to contribute.  Ward wrote a second letter, after a siege

     of illness at Salt Lake City.  He was a frail creature, and three

     years later, in London, died of consumption.  His genius and

     encouragement undoubtedly exerted an influence upon Mark Twain.

     Ward's second letter here follows.





                      Artemus Ward to S. L. Clemens:



                                        SALT LAKE CITY, Jan. 21, '64.

MY DEAR MARK,--I have been dangerously ill for the past two weeks here,

of congestive fever.  Very grave fears were for a time entertained of my

recovery, but happily the malady is gone, though leaving me very, very

weak.  I hope to be able to resume my journey in a week or so.  I think

I shall speak in the Theater here, which is one of the finest

establishments of the kind in America.



The Saints have been wonderfully kind to me, I could not have been better

or more tenderly nursed at home--God bless them!



I am still exceedingly weak--can't write any more.  Love to Jo and Dan,

and all the rest.  Write me at St. Louis.

                                        Always yours,

                                                  ARTEMUS WARD.





     If one could only have Mark Twain's letters in reply to these!  but

     they have vanished and are probably long since dust.  A letter which

     he wrote to his mother assures us that he undertook to follow Ward's

     advice.  He was not ready, however, for serious literary effort.

     The article, sent to the Mercury, was distinctly of the Comstock

     variety; it was accepted, but it apparently made no impression, and

     he did not follow it up.



     For one thing, he was just then too busy reporting the Legislature

     at Carson City and responding to social demands.  From having been a

     scarcely considered unit during the early days of his arrival in

     Carson Mark Twain had attained a high degree of importance in the

     little Nevada capital.  In the Legislature he was a power; as

     correspondent for the Enterprise he was feared and respected as well

     as admired.  His humor, his satire, and his fearlessness were

     dreaded weapons.



     Also, he was of extraordinary popularity.  Orion's wife, with her

     little daughter, Jennie, had come out from the States.  The Governor

     of Nevada had no household in Carson City, and was generally absent.

     Orion Clemens reigned in his stead, and indeed was usually addressed

     as "Governor" Clemens.  His home became the social center of the

     capital, and his brilliant brother its chief ornament.  From the

     roughest of miners of a year before he had become, once more, almost

     a dandy in dress, and no occasion was complete without him.  When

     the two Houses of the Legislature assembled, in January, 1864, a

     burlesque Third House was organized and proposed to hold a session,

     as a church benefit.  After very brief consideration it was decided

     to select Mark Twain to preside at this Third House assembly under

     the title of "Governor," and a letter of invitation was addressed to

     him.  His reply to it follows:





                 To S. Pixley and G. A. Sears, Trustees:



                                        CARSON CITY, January 23, 1864.

GENTLEMEN, Certainly.  If the public can find anything in a grave state

paper worth paying a dollar for, I am willing that they should pay that

amount, or any other; and although I am not a very dusty Christian

myself, I take an absorbing interest in religious affairs, and would

willingly inflict my annual message upon the Church itself if it might

derive benefit thereby.  You can charge what you please; I promise the

public no amusement, but I do promise a reasonable amount of instruction.

I am responsible to the Third House only, and I hope to be permitted to

make it exceedingly warm for that body, without caring whether the

sympathies of the public and the Church be enlisted in their favor, and

against myself, or not.

                                   Respectfully,

                                             MARK TWAIN.





     There is a quality in this letter more suggestive of the later Mark

     Twain than anything that has preceded it.  His Third House address,

     unfortunately, has not been preserved, but those who heard it

     regarded it as a classic.  It probably abounded in humor of the

     frontier sort-unsparing ridicule of the Governor, the Legislature,

     and individual citizens.  It was all taken in good part, of course,

     and as a recognition of his success he received a gold watch, with

     the case properly inscribed to "The Governor of the Third House."

     This was really his first public appearance in a field in which he

     was destined to achieve very great fame.









V



LETTERS 1864-66.  SAN FRANCISCO AND HAWAII



     Life on the Comstock came to an end for Mark Twain in May, 1864.  It

     was the time of The Flour Sack Sanitary Fund, the story of which he

     has told in Roughing It.  He does not, however, refer to the

     troubles which this special fund brought upon himself.  Coming into

     the Enterprise office one night, after a gay day of "Fund"

     celebration, Clemens wrote, for next day's paper, a paragraph

     intended to be merely playful, but which proved highly offending to

     certain ladies concerned with the flour-sack enterprise.  No files

     of the paper exist today, so we cannot judge of the quality of humor

     that stirred up trouble.



     The trouble, however, was genuine enough, Virginia's rival paper

     seized upon the chance to humiliate its enemy, and presently words

     were passed back and forth until nothing was left to write but a

     challenge.  The story of this duel, which did not come off, has been

     quite fully told elsewhere, both by Mark Twain and the present

     writer; but the following letter--a revelation of his inner feelings

     in the matter of his offense--has never before been published.





                     To Mrs. Cutler, in Carson City:



                                        VIRGINIA, May 23rd, 1864.

MRS. W. K.  CUTLER:



MADAM,--I address a lady in every sense of the term.  Mrs. Clemens has

informed me of everything that has occurred in Carson in connection with

that unfortunate item of mine about the Sanitary Funds accruing from the

ball, and from what I can understand, you are almost the only lady in

your city who has understood the circumstances under which my fault was

committed, or who has shown any disposition to be lenient with me.  Had

the note of the ladies been properly worded, I would have published an

ample apology instantly--and possibly I might even have done so anyhow,

had that note arrived at any other time--but it came at a moment when I

was in the midst of what ought to have been a deadly quarrel with the

publishers of the Union, and I could not come out and make public

apologies to any one at such a time.  It is bad policy to do it even now

(as challenges have already passed between myself and a proprietor of the

Union, and the matter is still in abeyance,) but I suppose I had better

say a word or two to show the ladies that I did not wilfully and

maliciously do them a wrong.



But my chief object, Mrs. Cutler, in writing you this note (and you will

pardon the liberty I have taken,) was to thank you very kindly and

sincerely for the consideration you have shown me in this matter, and for

your continued friendship for Mollie while others are disposed to

withdraw theirs on account of a fault for which I alone am responsible.

                              Very truly yours,

                                             SAM. L. CLEMENS.





     The matter did not end with the failure of the duel.  A very strict

     law had just been passed, making it a felony even to send or accept

     a challenge.  Clemens, on the whole, rather tired of Virginia City

     and Carson, thought it a good time to go across the mountains to San

     Francisco.  With Steve Gillis, a printer, of whom he was very fond--

     an inveterate joker, who had been more than half responsible for the

     proposed duel, and was to have served as his second--he took the

     stage one morning, and in due time was in the California metropolis,

     at work on the Morning Call.



     Clemens had been several times in San Francisco, and loved the

     place.  We have no letter of that summer, the first being dated

     several months after his arrival.  He was still working on the Call

     when it was written, and contributing literary articles to the

     Californian, of which Bret Harte, unknown to fame, was editor.

     Harte had his office just above the rooms of the Call, and he and

     Clemens were good friends.  San Francisco had a real literary group

     that, for a time at least, centered around the offices of the Golden

     Era.  In a letter that follows Clemens would seem to have scorned

     this publication, but he was a frequent contributor to it at one

     period.  Joaquin Miller was of this band of literary pioneers; also

     Prentice Mulford, Charles Warren Stoddard, Fitzhugh Ludlow, and

     Orpheus C.  Kerr.





           To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                                                  Sept. 25, 1864.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--You can see by my picture that this superb

climate agrees with me.  And it ought, after living where I was never out

of sight of snow peaks twenty-four hours during three years.  Here we

have neither snow nor cold weather; fires are never lighted, and yet

summer clothes are never worn--you wear spring clothing the year round.



Steve Gillis, who has been my comrade for two years, and who came down

here with me, is to be married, in a week or two, to a very pretty girl

worth $130,000 in her own right--and then I shall be alone again, until

they build a house, which they will do shortly.



We have been here only four months, yet we have changed our lodgings five

times, and our hotel twice.  We are very comfortably fixed where we are,

now, and have no fault to find with the rooms or with the people--we are

the only lodgers in a well-to-do private family, with one grown daughter

and a piano in the parlor adjoining our room.  But I need a change, and

must move again.  I have taken rooms further down the street.  I shall

stay in this little quiet street, because it is full of gardens and

shrubbery, and there are none but dwelling houses in it.



I am taking life easy, now, and I mean to keep it up for awhile.  I don't

work at night any more.  I told the "Call" folks to pay me $25 a week and

let me work only in daylight.  So I get up at ten every morning, and quit

work at five or six in the afternoon.  You ask if I work for greenbacks?

Hardly.  What do you suppose I could do with greenbacks here?



I have engaged to write for the new literary paper--the "Californian"--

same pay I used to receive on the "Golden Era"--one article a week, fifty

dollars a month.  I quit the "Era," long ago.  It wasn't high-toned

enough.  The "Californian" circulates among the highest class of the

community, and is the best weekly literary paper in the United States

--and I suppose I ought to know.



I work as I always did--by fits and starts.  I wrote two articles last

night for the Californian, so that lets me out for two weeks.  That would

be about seventy-five dollars, in greenbacks, wouldn't it?



Been down to San Jose (generally pronounced Sannozay--emphasis on last

syllable)--today fifty miles from here, by railroad.  Town of 6,000

inhabitants, buried in flowers and shrubbery.  The climate is finer than

ours here, because it is not so close to the ocean, and is protected from

the winds by the coast range.



I had an invitation today, to go down on an excursion to San Luis Obispo,

and from thence to the city of Mexico, to be gone six or eight weeks, or

possibly longer, but I could not accept, on account of my contract to act

as chief mourner or groomsman at Steve's wedding.



I have triumphed.  They refused me and other reporters some information

at a branch of the Coroner's office--Massey's undertaker establishment,

a few weeks ago.  I published the wickedest article on them I ever wrote

in my life, and you can rest assured we got all the information we wanted

after that.



By the new census, San Francisco has a population of 130,000.  They don't

count the hordes of Chinamen.

                                   Yrs aftly,

                                             SAM.





I send a picture for Annie, and one for Aunt Ella--that is, if she will

have it.





     Relations with the Call ceased before the end of the year, though

     not in the manner described in Roughing It.  Mark Twain loved to

     make fiction of his mishaps, and to show himself always in a bad

     light.  As a matter of fact, he left the Call with great

     willingness, and began immediately contributing a daily letter to

     the Enterprise, which brought him a satisfactory financial return.



     In the biographical sketch with which this volume opens, and more

     extendedly elsewhere, has been told the story of the trouble growing

     out of the Enterprise letters, and of Mark Twain's sojourn with

     James Gillis in the Tuolumne Hills.  Also how, in the frowsy hotel

     at Angel's Camp, he heard the frog anecdote that would become the

     corner-stone of his fame.  There are no letters of this period--only

     some note-book entries.  It is probable that he did not write home,

     believing, no doubt, that he had very little to say.



     For more than a year there is not a line that has survived.  Yet it

     had been an important year; the jumping frog story, published in New

     York, had been reprinted East and West, and laughed over in at least

     a million homes.  Fame had not come to him, but it was on the way.



     Yet his outlook seems not to have been a hopeful one.





           To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                                        SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 20, 1866.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--I do not know what to write; my life is so

uneventful.  I wish I was back there piloting up and down the river

again.  Verily, all is vanity and little worth--save piloting.



To think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused for

thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a

villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!  "Jim Smiley and His

Jumping Frog"--a squib which would never have been written but to please

Artemus Ward, and then it reached New York too late to appear in his

book.



But no matter.  His book was a wretchedly poor one, generally speaking,

and it could be no credit to either of us to appear between its covers.



This paragraph is from the New York correspondence of the San Francisco

Alta:



(Clipping pasted in.)



     "Mark Twain's story in the Saturday Press of November 18th, called

     'Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,' has set all New York in a roar,

     and he may be said to have made his mark.  I have been asked fifty

     times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and

     near.  It is voted the best thing of the day.  Cannot the

     Californian afford to keep Mark all to itself?  It should not let

     him scintillate so widely without first being filtered through the

     California press."



The New York publishing house of Carleton & Co.  gave the sketch to the

Saturday Press when they found it was too late for the book.



Though I am generally placed at the head of my breed of scribblers in

this part of the country, the place properly belongs to Bret Harte,

I think, though he denies it, along with the rest.  He wants me to club a

lot of old sketches together with a lot of his, and publish a book.

I wouldn't do it, only he agrees to take all the trouble.  But I want to

know whether we are going to make anything out of it, first.  However, he

has written to a New York publisher, and if we are offered a bargain that

will pay for a month's labor we will go to work and prepare the volume

for the press.

                                   Yours affy,

                                             SAM.





     Bret Harte and Clemens had by this time quit the Californian,

     expecting to contribute to Eastern periodicals.  Clemens, however,

     was not yet through with Coast journalism.  There was much interest

     just at this time in the Sandwich Islands, and he was selected by

     the foremost Sacramento paper to spy out the islands and report

     aspects and conditions there.  His letters home were still

     infrequent, but this was something worth writing.





           To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                                   SAN FRANCISCO, March 5th, 1866.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--I start to do Sandwich Islands day after

tomorrow, (I suppose Annie is geographer enough by this time to find them

on the map), in the steamer "Ajax."  We shall arrive there in about

twelve days.  My friends seem determined that I shall not lack

acquaintances, for I only decided today to go, and they have already sent

me letters of introduction to everybody down there worth knowing.  I am

to remain there a month and ransack the islands, the great cataracts and

the volcanoes completely, and write twenty or thirty letters to the

Sacramento Union--for which they pay me as much money as I would get if I

staid at home.



If I come back here I expect to start straight across the continent by

way of the Columbia river, the Pend d'Oreille Lakes, through Montana and

down the Missouri river,--only 200 miles of land travel from San

Francisco to New Orleans.

                              Goodbye for the present.

                                        Yours,

                                                  SAM.





     His home letters from the islands are numerous enough; everything

     there being so new and so delightful that he found joy in telling of

     it; also, he was still young enough to air his triumphs a little,

     especially when he has dined with the Grand Chamberlain and is going

     to visit the King!



     The languorous life of the islands exactly suited Mask Twain.  All

     his life he remembered them--always planning to return, some day, to

     stay there until he died.  In one of his note-books he wrote: "Went

     with Mr. Dam to his cool, vine-shaded home; no care-worn or eager,

     anxious faces in this land of happy contentment.  God, what a

     contrast with California and the Washoe!"



     And again:



     "Oh, Islands there are on the face of the deep

     Where the leaves never fade and the skies never weep."



     The letters tell the story of his sojourn, which stretched itself

     into nearly five months.



           To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                              HONOLULU, SANDWICH ISLANDS, April 3, 1866.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--I have been here two or three weeks, and like

the beautiful tropical climate better and better.  I have ridden on

horseback all over this island (Oahu) in the meantime, and have visited

all the ancient battle-fields and other places of interest.  I have got a

lot of human bones which I took from one of these battle-fields--I guess

I will bring you some of them.  I went with the American Minister and

took dinner this evening with the King's Grand Chamberlain, who is

related to the royal family, and although darker than a mulatto, he has

an excellent English education and in manners is an accomplished

gentleman.  The dinner was as ceremonious as any I ever attended in

California--five regular courses, and five kinds of wine and one of

brandy.  He is to call for me in the morning with his carriage, and we

will visit the King at the palace--both are good Masons--the King is a

Royal Arch Mason.  After dinner tonight they called in the "singing

girls," and we had some beautiful music; sung in the native tongue.



The steamer I came here in sails tomorrow, and as soon as she is gone I

shall sail for the other islands of the group and visit the great

volcano--the grand wonder of the world.  Be gone two months.

                                        Yrs.

                                                  SAM.





           To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                                   WAILUKU SUGAR PLANTATION,

                                   ISLAND OF MAUI, H. I., May 4,1866.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--11 O'clock at night.--This is the

infernalist darkest country, when the moon don't shine; I stumbled and

fell over my horse's lariat a minute ago and hurt my leg, so I must stay

here tonight.



I got the same leg hurt last week; I said I hadn't got hold of a spirited

horse since I had been on the island, and one of the proprietors loaned

me a big vicious colt; he was altogether too spirited; I went to tighten

the cinch before mounting him, when he let out with his left leg (?) and

kicked me across a ten-acre lot.  A native rubbed and doctored me so well

that I was able to stand on my feet in half an hour.  It was then half

after four and I had an appointment to go seven miles and get a girl and

take her to a card party at five.



I have been clattering around among the plantations for three weeks, now,

and next week I am going to visit the extinct crater of Mount Haleakala--

the largest in the world; it is ten miles to the foot of the mountain; it

rises 10,000 feet above the valley; the crater is 29 miles in

circumference and 1,000 feet deep.  Seen from the summit, the city of St.

Louis would look like a picture in the bottom of it.



As soon as I get back from Haleakala (pronounced Hally-ekka-lah) I will

sail for Honolulu again and thence to the Island of Hawaii (pronounced

Hah-wy-ye,) to see the greatest active volcano in the world--that of

Kilauea (pronounced Kee-low-way-ah)--and from thence back to San

Francisco--and then, doubtless, to the States.  I have been on this trip

two months, and it will probably be two more before I get back to

California.

                                   Yrs affy

                                             SAM.





     He was having a glorious time--one of the most happy, carefree

     adventures of his career.  No form of travel or undertaking could

     discountenance Mark Twain at thirty.





                  To Mrs. Orion Clemens, in Carson City:



                                             HONOLULU, May 22, 1866.

MY DEAR SISTER,--I have just got back from a sea voyage--from the

beautiful island of Maui, I have spent five weeks there, riding backwards

and forwards among the sugar plantations--looking up the splendid scenery

and visiting the lofty crater of Haleakala.  It has been a perfect

jubilee to me in the way of pleasure.



I have not written a single line, and have not once thought of business,

or care or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness.  Few such months

come in a lifetime.



I set sail again, a week hence, for the island of Hawaii, to see the

great active volcano of Kilauea.  I shall not get back here for four or

five weeks, and shall not reach San Francisco before the latter part of

July.



So it is no use to wait for me to go home.  Go on yourselves.



If I were in the east now, I could stop the publication of a piratical

book which has stolen some of my sketches.



It is late-good-bye, Mollie,

                                   Yr Bro

                                             SAM.





          To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St.  Louis:



                              HONOLULU, SANDWICH ISLANDS, June 21,1866.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--I have just got back from a hard trip through

the Island of Hawaii, begun on the 26th of May and finished on the 18th

of June--only six or seven days at sea--all the balance horse-back, and

the hardest mountain road in the world.  I staid at the volcano about a

week and witnessed the greatest eruption that has occurred for years.

I lived well there.  They charge $4 a day for board, and a dollar or two

extra for guides and horses.  I had a pretty good time.  They didn't

charge me anything.  I have got back sick--went to bed as soon as I

arrived here--shall not be strong again for several days yet.  I rushed

too fast.  I ought to have taken five or six weeks on that trip.



A week hence I start for the Island of Kauai, to be gone three weeks and

then I go back to California.



The Crown Princess is dead and thousands of natives cry and wail and

dance and dance for the dead, around the King's Palace all night and

every night.  They will keep it up for a month and then she will be

buried.



Hon. Anson Burlingame, U. S. Minister to China, and Gen. Van Valkenburgh,

Minister to Japan, with their families and suites, have just arrived here

en route.  They were going to do me the honor to call on me this morning,

and that accounts for my being out of bed now.  You know what condition

my room is always in when you are not around--so I climbed out of bed and

dressed and shaved pretty quick and went up to the residence of the

American Minister and called on them.  Mr. Burlingame told me a good deal

about Hon. Jere Clemens and that Virginia Clemens who was wounded in a

duel.  He was in Congress years with both of them.  Mr. B. sent for his

son, to introduce him--said he could tell that frog story of mine as well

as anybody.  I told him I was glad to hear it for I never tried to tell

it myself without making a botch of it.  At his request I have loaned Mr.

Burlingame pretty much everything I ever wrote.  I guess he will be an

almighty wise man by the time he wades through that lot.



If the New United States Minister to the Sandwich Islands (Hon. Edwin

McCook,) were only here now, so that I could get his views on this new

condition of Sandwich Island politics, I would sail for California at

once.  But he will not arrive for two weeks yet and so I am going to

spend that interval on the island of Kauai.



I stopped three days with Hon. Mr. Cony, Deputy Marshal of the Kingdom,

at Hilo, Hawaii, last week and by a funny circumstance he knew everybody

that I ever knew in Hannibal and Palmyra.  We used to sit up all night

talking and then sleep all day.  He lives like a Prince.  Confound that

Island!  I had a streak of fat and a streak of lean all over it--got lost

several times and had to sleep in huts with the natives and live like a

dog.



Of course I couldn't speak fifty words of the language.  Take it

altogether, though, it was a mighty hard trip.

                                        Yours Affect.

                                                       SAM.





     Burlingame and Van Valkenburgh were on their way to their posts,

     and their coming to the islands just at this time proved a most

     important circumstance to Mark Twain.  We shall come to this

     presently, in a summary of the newspaper letters written to the

     Union.  June 27th he wrote to his mother and sister a letter, only a

     fragment of which survives, in which he tells of the arrival in

     Honolulu of the survivors of the ship Hornet, burned on the line,

     and of his securing the first news report of the lost vessel.





  Part of a letter to Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                                             HONOLULU, June 27, 1866 .

.  .  .  with a gill of water a day to each man.  I got the whole story

from the third mate and two of the sailors.  If my account gets to the

Sacramento Union first, it will be published first all over the United

States, France, England, Russia and Germany--all over the world; I may

say.  You will see it.  Mr. Burlingame went with me all the time, and

helped me question the men--throwing away invitations to dinner with the

princes and foreign dignitaries, and neglecting all sorts of things to

accommodate me.  You know how I appreciate that kind of thing--especially

from such a man, who is acknowledged to have no superior in the

diplomatic circles of the world, and obtained from China concessions in

favor of America which were refused to Sir Frederick Bruce and Envoys of

France and Russia until procured for them by Burlingame himself--which

service was duly acknowledged by those dignitaries.  He hunted me up as

soon as he came here, and has done me a hundred favors since, and says if

I will come to China in the first trip of the great mail steamer next

January and make his house in Pekin my home, he will afford me facilities

that few men can have there for seeing and learning.  He will give me

letters to the chiefs of the great Mail Steamship Company which will be

of service to me in this matter.  I expect to do all this, but I expect

to go to the States first--and from China to the Paris World's Fair.



Don't show this letter.

                                   Yours affly

                                                  SAM.



P. S.  The crown Princess of this Kingdom will be buried tomorrow with

great ceremony--after that I sail in two weeks for California.





     This concludes Mark Twain's personal letters from the islands.

     Of his descriptive news letters there were about twenty, and they

     were regarded by the readers of the Union as distinctly notable.

     Re-reading those old letters to-day it is not altogether easy to

     understand why.  They were set in fine nonpareil type, for one

     thing, which present-day eyes simply refuse at any price, and the

     reward, by present-day standards, is not especially tempting.



     The letters began in the Union with the issue of April the 16th,

     1866.  The first--of date March 18th--tells of the writer's arrival

     at Honolulu.  The humor in it is not always of a high order; it

     would hardly pass for humor today at all.  That the same man who

     wrote the Hawaiian letters in 1866 (he was then over thirty years

     old) could, two years later, have written that marvelous book, the

     Innocents Abroad, is a phenomenon in literary development.



     The Hawaiian letters, however, do show the transition stage between

     the rough elemental humor of the Comstock and the refined and subtle

     style which flowered in the Innocents Abroad.  Certainly Mark

     Twain's genius was finding itself, and his association with the

     refined and cultured personality of Anson Burlingame undoubtedly

     aided in that discovery.  Burlingame pointed out his faults to him,

     and directed him to a better way.  No more than that was needed at

     such a time to bring about a transformation.



     The Sandwich Islands letters, however, must have been precisely

     adapted to their audience--a little more refined than the log

     Comstock, a little less subtle than the Atlantic public--and they

     added materially to his Coast prestige.  But let us consider a

     sample extract from the first Sandwich Islands letter:





Our little band of passengers were as well and thoughtfully cared for by

the friends they left weeping upon the wharf, as ever were any similar

body of pilgrims.  The traveling outfit conferred upon me began with a

naval uniform, continued with a case of wine, a small assortment of

medicinal liquors and brandy, several boxes of cigars, a bunch of

matches, a fine-toothed comb, and a cake of soap, and ended with a pair

of socks.  (N. B.  I gave the soap to Brown, who bit into it, and then.

shook his head and said that, as a general thing, he liked to prospect

curious, foreign dishes, and find out what they were made of, but he

couldn't go that, and threw it overboard.)



     It is nearly impossible to imagine humor in this extract, yet it is

     a fair sample of the entire letter.



     He improves in his next, at least, in description, and gives us a

     picture of the crater.  In this letter, also, he writes well and

     seriously, in a prophetic strain, of the great trade that is to be

     established between San Francisco and Hawaii, and argues for a line

     of steamers between the ports, in order that the islands might be

     populated by Americans, by which course European trade in that

     direction could be superseded.  But the humor in this letter, such

     as it is, would scarcely provoke a smile to-day.



     As the letters continue, he still urges the fostering of the island

     trade by the United States, finds himself impressed by the work of

     the missionaries, who have converted cannibals to Christians, and

     gives picturesque bits of the life and scenery.



     Hawaii was then dominated chiefly by French and English; though the

     American interests were by no means small.



     Extract from letter No. 4:





Cap. Fitch said "There's the king.  That's him in the buggy.  I know him

as far as I can see him."



I had never seen a king, and I naturally took out a note-book and put him

down: "Tall, slender, dark, full-bearded; green frock-coat, with lapels

and collar bordered with gold band an inch wide; plug hat, broad gold

band around it; royal costume looks too much like livery; this man is not

as fleshy as I thought he was."



I had just got these notes when Cap. Fitch discovered that he'd got hold

of the wrong king, or rather, that he'd got hold of the king's driver,

or a carriage driver of one of the nobility.  The king wasn't present at

all.  It was a great disappointment to me.  I heard afterwards that the

comfortable, easy-going king, Kamehameha V., had been seen sitting on a

barrel on the wharf, the day before, fishing.  But there was no

consolation in that.  That did not restore me my lost king.





     This has something of the flavor of the man we were to know later;

     the quaint, gentle resignation to disappointment which is one of the

     finest touches in his humor.



     Further on he says: "I had not shaved since I left San Francisco.

     As soon as I got ashore I hunted up a striped pole, and shortly

     found one.  I always had a yearning to be a king.  This may never

     be, I suppose, but, at any rate, it will always be a satisfaction to

     me to know that, if I am not a king, I am the next thing to it.

     I have been shaved by the king's barber."



     Honolulu was a place of cats.  He saw cats of every shade and

     variety.  He says: "I saw cats--tomcats, Mary-Ann cats, bobtailed

     cats, blind cats, one-eyed cats, wall-eyed cats, cross-eyed cats,

     gray cats, black cats, white cats, yellow cats, striped cats,

     spotted cats, tame cats, wild cats, singed cats, individual cats,

     groups of cats, platoons of cats, companies of cats, armies of cats,

     multitudes of cats, millions of cats, and all of them sleek, fat,

     and lazy, and sound asleep."  Which illustrates another

     characteristic of the humor we were to know later--the humor of

     grotesque exaggeration, in which he was always strong.



     He found the islands during his periods of inaction conducive to

     indolence.  "If I were not so fond of looking into the rich mass of

     green leaves," he says, "that swathe the stately tamarind right

     before my door, I would idle less, and write more, I think."



     The Union made good use of his letters.  Sometimes it printed them

     on the front page.  Evidently they were popular from the beginning.

     The Union was a fine, handsome paper--beautiful in its minute

     typography, and in its press-work; more beautiful than most papers

     of to-day, with their machine-set type, their vulgar illustrations,

     and their chain-lightning presses.  A few more extracts:



     "The only cigars here are those trifling, insipid, tasteless,

     flavorless things they call Manilas--ten for twenty-five cents--and

     it would take a thousand of them to be worth half the money.  After

     you have smoked about thirty-five dollars' worth of them in the

     forenoon, you feel nothing but a desperate yearning to go out

     somewhere and take a smoke."



     "Captains and ministers form about half the population.  The third

     fourth is composed of Kanakas and mercantile foreigners and their

     families.  The final fourth is made up of high officers of the

     Hawaiian government, and there are just about enough cats to go

     round."



     In No. 6, April the 2d, he says: "An excursion to Diamond Head, and

     the king's cocoanut grove, was planned to-day, at 4.30 P. M., the

     party to consist of half a dozen gentlemen and three ladies.  They

     all started at the appointed hour except myself.  Somebody remarked

     that it was twenty minutes past five o'clock, and that woke me up.

     It was a fortunate circumstance that Cap. Phillips was there with

     his 'turn-out,' as he calls his top buggy that Cap. Cook brought

     here in 1778, and a horse that was here when Cap. Cook came."



     This bit has something the savor of his subsequent work, but, as a

     rule, the humor compares poorly with that which was to come later.



     In No. 7 he speaks of the natives singing American songs--not always

     to his comfort.  "Marching Through Georgia" was one of their

     favorite airs.  He says: "If it had been all the same to Gen.

     Sherman, I wish he had gone around by the way of the Gulf of Mexico,

     instead of marching through Georgia."



     Letters Nos. 8, 9, and 10 were not of special importance.  In No. 10

     he gives some advice to San Francisco as to the treatment of

     whalers.  He says:



     "If I were going to advise San Francisco as to the best strategy to

     employ in order to secure the whaling trade, I should say, 'Cripple

     your facilities for "pulling" sea captains on any pretence that

     sailors can trump up, and show the whaler a little more

     consideration when he is in port."'



     In No. 11, May 24th, he tells of a trip to the Kalehi Valley, and

     through historic points.  At one place he looked from a precipice

     over which old Kamehameha I. drove the army of Oahu, three-quarters

     of a century before.



     The vegetation and glory of the tropics attracted him.  "In one open

     spot a vine of a species unknown had taken possession of two tall

     dead stumps, and wound around and about them, and swung out from

     their tops, and twined their meeting tendrils together into a

     faultless arch.  Man, with all his art, could not improve upon its

     symmetry."



     He saw Sam Brannan's palace, "The Bungalow," built by one Shillaber

     of San Francisco at a cost of from thirty to forty thousand dollars.

     In its day it had outshone its regal neighbor, the palace of the

     king, but had fallen to decay after passing into Brannan's hands,

     and had become a picturesque Theban ruin by the time of Mark Twain's

     visit.



     In No. 12, June 20th (written May 23d), he tells of the Hawaiian

     Legislature, and of his trip to the island of Maui, where, as he

     says, he never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place

     good-by so regretfully.



     In No. 13 he continues the Legislature, and gives this picture of

     Minister Harris: "He is six feet high, bony and rather slender;

     long, ungainly arms; stands so straight he leans back a little; has

     small side whiskers; his head long, up and down; he has no command

     of language or ideas; oratory all show and pretence; a big washing

     and a small hang-out; weak, insipid, and a damn fool in general."



     In No. 14, June 22d, published July 16th, he tells of the death and

     burial ceremonies of the Princess Victoria K. K., and, what was to

     be of more importance to him, of the arrival of Anson Burlingame,

     U. S. Minister to China, and Gen. Van Valkenburgh, U. S. Minister to

     Japan.  They were to stay ten or fourteen days, he said, but an

     effort would be made to have them stay over July 4th.



     Speaking of Burlingame: "Burlingame is a man who could be esteemed,

     respected, and popular anywhere, no matter whether he was among

     Christians or cannibals."  Then, in the same letter, comes the great

     incident.  "A letter arrived here yesterday, giving a meagre account

     of the arrival, on the Island of Hawaii, of nineteen poor, starving

     wretches, who had been buffeting a stormy sea, in an open boat, for

     forty-three days.  Their ship, the Hornet, from New York, with a

     quantity of kerosene on board had taken fire and burned in Lat. 2d.

     north, and Long. 35d. west.  When they had been entirely out of

     provisions for a day or two, and the cravings of hunger become

     insufferable, they yielded to the ship-wrecked mariner's fearful and

     awful alternative, and solemnly drew lots to determine who of their

     number should die, to furnish food for his comrades; and then the

     morning mists lifted, and they saw land.  They are being cared for

     at Sanpahoe (Not yet corroborated)."



     The Hornet disaster was fully told in his letter of June 27th.  The

     survivors were brought to Honolulu, and with the assistance of the

     Burlingame party, Clemens, laid up with saddle boils, was carried on

     a stretcher to the hospital, where, aided by Burlingame, he

     interviewed the shipwrecked men, securing material for the most

     important piece of serious writing he had thus far performed.

     Letter No. 15 to the Union--of date June 25th--occupied the most of

     the first page in the issue of July 19.  It was a detailed account

     of the sufferings of officers and crew, as given by the third

     officer and members of the crew.



     From letter No. 15:



In the postscript of a letter which I wrote two or three days ago, and

sent by the ship "Live Yankee," I gave you the substance of a letter

received here from Hilo, by Walker Allen and Co., informing them that a

boat, containing fifteen men in a helpless and starving condition, had

drifted ashore at Sanpahoe, Island of Hawaii, and that they had belonged

to the clipper ship "Hornet"--Cap. Mitchell, master--had been afloat

since the burning of that vessel, about one hundred miles north of the

equator, on the third of May--forty-three days.



The Third Mate, and ten of the seamen have arrived here, and are now in

the hospital.  Cap. Mitchell, one seaman named Antonio Passene, and two

passengers, Samuel and Henry Ferguson, of New York City, eighteen and

twenty-eight years, are still at Hilo, but are expected here within the

week.  In the Captain's modest epitome of the terrible romance you detect

the fine old hero through it.  It reads like Grant.





     Here follows the whole terrible narrative, which has since been

     published in more substantial form, and has been recognized as

     literature.  It occupied three and a half columns on the front page

     of the Union, and, of course, constituted a great beat for that

     paper--a fact which they appreciated to the extent of one hundred

     dollars the column upon the writer's return from the islands.



     In letters Nos. 14. and 15. he gives further particulars of the

     month of mourning for the princess, and funeral ceremonials.  He

     refers to Burlingame, who was still in the islands.  The remaining

     letters are unimportant.



     The Hawaiian episode in Mark Twain's life was one of those spots

     that seemed to him always filled with sunlight.  From beginning to

     end it had been a long luminous dream; in the next letter, written

     on the homeward-bound ship, becalmed under a cloudless sky, we

     realize the fitting end of the experience.





           To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                                        ON BOARD SHIP Smyrniote,

                                        AT SEA, July 30, 1866.

DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--I write, now, because I must go hard at work as

soon as I get to San Francisco, and then I shall have no time for other

things--though truth to say I have nothing now to write which will be

calculated to interest you much.  We left the, Sandwich Islands eight or

ten days--or twelve days ago--I don't know which, I have been so hard at

work until today (at least part of each day,) that the time has slipped

away almost unnoticed.  The first few days we came at a whooping gait

being in the latitude of the "North-east trades," but we soon ran out of

them.  We used them as long as they lasted-hundred of miles--and came

dead straight north until exactly abreast of San Francisco precisely

straight west of the city in a bee-line--but a long bee-line, as we were

about two thousand miles at sea-consequently, we are not a hundred yards

nearer San Francisco than you are.  And here we lie becalmed on a glassy

sea--we do not move an inch-we throw banana and orange peel overboard and

it lies still on the water by the vessel's side.  Sometimes the ocean is

as dead level as the Mississippi river, and glitters glassily as if

polished--but usually, of course, no matter how calm the weather is, we

roll and surge over the grand ground-swell.  We amuse ourselves tying

pieces of tin to the ship's log and sinking them to see how far we can

distinguish them under water--86 feet was the deepest we could see a

small piece of tin, but a white plate would show about as far down as the

steeple of Dr. Bullard's church would reach, I guess.  The sea is very

dark and blue here.



Ever since we got becalmed--five days--I have been copying the diary of

one of the young Fergusons (the two boys who starved and suffered, with

thirteen others, in an open boat at sea for forty-three days, lately,

after their ship, the "Hornet," was burned on the equator.)  Both these

boys, and Captain Mitchell, are passengers with us.  I am copying the

diary to publish in Harper's Magazine, if I have time to fix it up

properly when I get to San Francisco.



I suppose, from present appearances,--light winds and calms,--that we

shall be two or three weeks at sea, yet--and I hope so--I am in no hurry

to go to work.





                                             Sunday Morning, Aug. 6.

This is rather slow.  We still drift, drift, drift along--at intervals a

spanking breeze and then--drift again--hardly move for half a day.  But I

enjoy it.  We have such snowy moonlight, and such gorgeous sunsets.

And the ship is so easy--even in a gale she rolls very little, compared

to other vessels--and in this calm we could dance on deck, if we chose.

You can walk a crack, so steady is she.  Very different from the Ajax.

My trunk used to get loose in the stateroom and rip and tear around the

place as if it had life in it, and I always had to take my clothes off in

bed because I could not stand up and do it.



There is a ship in sight--the first object we have seen since we left

Honolulu.  We are still 1300 or 1400 miles from land and so anything like

this that varies the vast solitude of the ocean makes all hands light-

hearted and cheerful.  We think the ship is the "Comet," which left

Honolulu several hours before we did.  She is about twelve miles away,

and so we cannot see her hull, but the sailors think it is the Comet

because of some peculiarity about her fore-top-gallant sails.  We have

watched her all the forenoon.



Afternoon We had preaching on the quarter-deck by Rev. Mr. Rising, of

Virginia City, old friend of mine.  Spread a flag on the booby-hatch,

which made a very good pulpit, and then ranged the chairs on either side

against the bulwarks; last Sunday we had the shadow of the mainsail, but

today we were on the opposite tack, close hauled, and had the sun.  I am

leader of the choir on this ship, and a sorry lead it is.  I hope they

will have a better opinion of our music in Heaven than I have down here.

If they don't a thunderbolt will come down and knock the vessel endways.



The other ship is the Comet--she is right abreast three miles away,

sailing on our course--both of us in a dead calm.  With the glasses we

can see what we take to be men and women on her decks.  I am well

acquainted with nearly all her passengers, and being so close seems right

sociable.



Monday 7--I had just gone to bed a little after midnight when the 2d mate

came and roused up the captain and said "The Comet has come round and is

standing away on the other tack."  I went up immediately, and so did all

our passengers, without waiting to dress-men, women and children.  There

was a perceptible breeze.  Pretty soon the other ship swept down upon us

with all her sails set, and made a fine show in the luminous starlight.

She passed within a hundred yards of us, so we could faintly see persons

on her decks.  We had two minutes' chat with each other, through the

medium of hoarse shouting, and then she bore away to windward.



In the morning she was only a little black peg standing out of the glassy

sea in the distant horizon--an almost invisible mark in the bright sky.

Dead calm.  So the ships have stood, all day long--have not moved 100

yards.



Aug. 8--The calm continues.  Magnificent weather. The gentlemen have all

turned boys.  They play boyish games on the poop and quarter-deck.  For

instance: They lay a knife on the fife-rail of the mainmast--stand off

three steps, shut one eye, walk up and strike at it with the fore-finger;

(seldom hit it;) also they lay a knife on the deck and walk seven or

eight steps with eyes close shut, and try to find it.  They kneel--place

elbows against knees--extend hands in front along the deck--place knife

against end of fingers--then clasp hands behind back and bend forward and

try to pick up the knife with their teeth and rise up from knees without

rolling over or losing their balance.  They tie a string to the shrouds--

stand with back against it walk three steps (eyes shut)--turn around

three times and go and put finger on the string; only a military man can

do it.  If you want to know how perfectly ridiculous a grown man looks

performing such absurdities in the presence of ladies, get one to try it.



Afternoon--The calm is no more.  There are three vessels in sight.  It is

so sociable to have them hovering about us on this broad waste of water.

It is sunny and pleasant, but blowing hard.  Every rag about the ship is

spread to the breeze and she is speeding over the sea like a bird.  There

is a large brig right astern of us with all her canvas set and chasing us

at her best.  She came up fast while the winds were light, but now it is

hard to tell whether she gains or not.  We can see the people on the

forecastle with the glass.  The race is exciting.  I am sorry to know

that we shall soon have to quit the vessel and go ashore if she keeps up

this speed.



Friday, Aug. 10--We have breezes and calms alternately.  The brig is two

miles to three astern, and just stays there.  We sail directly east--this

brings the brig, with all her canvas set, almost in the eye of the sun,

when it sets--beautiful.  She looks sharply cut and black as a coal,

against a background of fire and in the midst of a sea of blood.



San Francisco, Aug. 20.--We never saw the Comet again till the 13th, in

the morning, three miles away.  At three o'clock that afternoon, 25 days

out from Honolulu, both ships entered the Golden Gate of San Francisco

side by side, and 300 yards apart.  There was a gale blowing, and both

vessels clapped on every stitch of canvas and swept up through the

channel and past the fortresses at a magnificent gait.



I have been up to Sacramento and squared accounts with the Union.  They

paid me a great deal more than they promised me.

                                   Yrs aff

                                             SAM.









VI.



LETTERS 1866-67.  THE LECTURER.  SUCCESS ON THE COAST.  IN NEW YORK.

THE GREAT OCEAN EXCURSION



     It was August 13th when he reached San Francisco and wrote in his

     note-book, "Home again.  No--not home again--in prison again, and

     all the wild sense of freedom gone.  City seems so cramped and so

     dreary with toil and care and business anxieties.  God help me, I

     wish I were at sea again!"



     The transition from the dreamland of a becalmed sailing-vessel to

     the dull, cheerless realities of his old life, and the uncertainties

     of his future, depressed him--filled him with forebodings.  At one

     moment he felt himself on the verge of suicide--the world seemed so

     little worth while.



     He wished to make a trip around the world, a project that required

     money.  He contemplated making a book of his island letters and

     experiences, and the acceptance by Harper's Magazine of the revised

     version of the Hornet Shipwreck story encouraged this thought.



     Friends urged him to embody in a lecture the picturesque aspect of

     Hawaiian life.  The thought frightened him, but it also appealed to

     him strongly.  He believed he could entertain an audience, once he

     got started on the right track.  As Governor of the Third House at

     Carson City he had kept the audience in hand.  Men in whom he had

     the utmost confidence insisted that he follow up the lecture idea

     and engage the largest house in the city for his purpose.  The

     possibility of failure appalled him, but he finally agreed to the

     plan.



     In Roughing It, and elsewhere, has been told the story of this

     venture--the tale of its splendid success.  He was no longer

     concerned, now, as to his immediate future.  The lecture field was

     profitable.  His audience laughed and shouted.  He was learning the

     flavor of real success and exulting in it.  With Dennis McCarthy,

     formerly one of the partners in the Enterprise, as manager, he made

     a tour of California and Nevada.





              To Mrs. Jane Clemens and others, in St. Louis:



                                        VIRGINIA CITY, Nov. 1, 1866.

ALL THE FOLKS, AFFECTIONATE GREETING,--You know the flush time's are

past, and it has long been impossible to more than half fill the Theatre

here, with any sort of attraction, but they filled it for me, night

before last--full--dollar all over the house.



I was mighty dubious about Carson, but the enclosed call and some

telegrams set that all right--I lecture there tomorrow night.



They offer a full house and no expense in Dayton--go there next.  Sandy

Baldwin says I have made the most sweeping success of any man he knows

of.



I have lectured in San Francisco, Sacramento, Marysville, Grass Valley,

Nevada, You Bet, Red Dog and Virginia.  I am going to talk in Carson,

Gold Hill, Silver City, Dayton, Washoe, San Francisco again, and again

here if I have time to re-hash the lecture.



Then I am bound for New York--lecture on the Steamer, maybe.



I'll leave toward 1st December--but I'll telegraph you.

                                   Love to all.

                                             Yrs.

                                                  MARK.





His lecture tour continued from October until December, a period of

picturesque incident, the story of which has been recorded elsewhere.

--[See Mark Twain: A Biography, by the same author]--It paid him well;

he could go home now, without shame.  Indeed, from his next letter, full

of the boyish elation which always to his last years was the complement

of his success, we gather that he is going home with special honors--

introductions from ministers and the like to distinguished personages of

the East.





              To Mrs. Jane Clemens and family, in St. Louis:



                                             SAN F., Dec. 4, 1866.

MY DEAR FOLKS,--I have written to Annie and Sammy and Katie some time

ago--also, to the balance of you.



I called on Rev. Dr. Wadsworth last night with the City College man,

but he wasn't at home.  I was sorry, because I wanted to make his

acquaintance.  I am thick as thieves with the Rev. Stebbings, and I am

laying for the Rev. Scudder and the Rev. Dr. Stone.  I am running on

preachers, now, altogether.  I find them gay.  Stebbings is a regular

brick.  I am taking letters of introduction to Henry Ward Beecher, Rev.

Dr. Tyng, and other eminent parsons in the east.  Whenever anybody offers

me a letter to a preacher, now I snaffle it on the spot.  I shall make

Rev. Dr. Bellows trot out the fast nags of the cloth for me when I get to

New York.  Bellows is an able, upright and eloquent man--a man of

imperial intellect and matchless power--he is Christian in the truest

sense of the term and is unquestionably a brick....



Gen. Drum has arrived in Philadelphia and established his head-quarters

there, as Adjutant Genl. to Maj. Gen. Meade.  Col. Leonard has received a

letter from him in which he offers me a complimentary benefit if I will

come there.  I am much obliged, really, but I am afraid I shan't lecture

much in the States.



The China Mail Steamer is getting ready and everybody says I am throwing

away a fortune in not going in her.  I firmly believe it myself.



I sail for the States in the Opposition steamer of the 5th inst.,

positively and without reserve.  My room is already secured for me, and

is the choicest in the ship.  I know all the officers.



                                   Yrs.  Affy

                                             MARK.





     We get no hint of his plans, and perhaps he had none.  If his

     purpose was to lecture in the East, he was in no hurry to begin.

     Arriving in New York, after an adventurous voyage, he met a number

     of old Californians--men who believed in him--and urged him to

     lecture.  He also received offers of newspaper engagements, and from

     Charles Henry Webb, who had published the Californian, which Bret

     Harte had edited, came the proposal to collect his published

     sketches, including the jumping Frog story, in book form.  Webb

     himself was in New York, and offered the sketches to several

     publishers, including Canton, who had once refused the Frog story by

     omitting it from Artemus Ward's book.  It seems curious that Canton

     should make a second mistake and refuse it again, but publishers

     were wary in those days, and even the newspaper success of the Frog

     story did not tempt him to venture it as the title tale of a book.

     Webb finally declared he would publish the book himself, and

     Clemens, after a few weeks of New York, joined his mother and family

     in St. Louis and gave himself up to a considerable period of

     visiting, lecturing meantime in both Hannibal and Keokuk.



     Fate had great matters in preparation for him.  The Quaker City

     Mediterranean excursion, the first great ocean picnic, was announced

     that spring, and Mark Twain realized that it offered a possible

     opportunity for him to see something of the world.  He wrote at once

     to the proprietors of the Alta-California and proposed that they

     send him as their correspondent.  To his delight his proposition was

     accepted, the Alta agreeing to the twelve hundred dollars passage

     money, and twenty dollars each for letters.



     The Quaker City was not to sail until the 8th of June, but the Alta

     wished some preliminary letters from New York.  Furthermore, Webb

     had the Frog book in press, and would issue it May 1st.  Clemens,

     therefore, returned to New York in April, and now once more being

     urged by the Californians to lecture, he did not refuse.  Frank

     Fuller, formerly Governor of Utah, took the matter in hand and

     engaged Cooper Union for the venture.  He timed it for May 6th,

     which would be a few days after the appearance of Webb's book.

     Clemens was even more frightened at the prospect of this lecture

     than he had been in San Francisco, and with more reason, for in New

     York his friends were not many, and competition for public favor was

     very great.  There are two letters written May 1st, one to his

     people, and one to Bret Harte, in San Francisco; that give us the

     situation.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Letters Vol. 1, by Mark Twain













MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS 1867-1875



ARRANGED WITH COMMENT BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE







VOLUME II.







                     To Bret Harte, in San Francisco:



                                   WESTMINSTER HOTEL, May 1, 1867.

DEAR BRET,--I take my pen in hand to inform you that I am well and hope

these few lines will find you enjoying the same God's blessing.



The book is out, and is handsome.  It is full of damnable errors of

grammar and deadly inconsistencies of spelling in the Frog sketch because

I was away and did not read the proofs; but be a friend and say nothing

about these things.  When my hurry is over, I will send you an autograph

copy to pisen the children with.



I am to lecture in Cooper Institute next Monday night.  Pray for me.



We sail for the Holy Land June 8.  Try to write me (to this hotel,) and

it will be forwarded to Paris, where we remain 10 or 15 days.



Regards and best wishes to Mrs. Bret and the family.

                              Truly Yr Friend

                                                  MARK.





              To Mrs. Jane Clemens and family, in St. Louis:



                                   WESTMINSTER HOTEL, May 1, 1867.

DEAR FOLKS,--Don't expect me to write for a while.  My hands are full of

business on account of my lecture for the 6th inst., and everything looks

shady, at least, if not dark.  I have got a good agent--but now after we

have hired Cooper Institute and gone to an expense in one way or another

of $500, it comes out that I have got to play against Speaker Colfax at

Irving Hall, Ristori, and also the double troupe of Japanese jugglers,

the latter opening at the great Academy of Music--and with all this

against me I have taken the largest house in New York and cannot back

water.  Let her slide!  If nobody else cares I don't.



I'll send the book soon.  I am awfully hurried now, but not worried.

                                   Yrs.

                                             SAM.





The Cooper Union lecture proved a failure, and a success.  When it became

evident to Fuller that the venture was not going to pay, he sent out a

flood of complimentaries to the school-teachers of New York City and the

surrounding districts.  No one seems to have declined them.  Clemens

lectured to a jammed house and acquired much reputation.  Lecture

proposals came from several directions, but he could not accept them now.

He wrote home that he was eighteen Alta letters behind and had refused

everything.  Thos. Nast, the cartoonist, then in his first fame, propped

a joint tour, Clemens to lecture while he, Nast, would illustrate with

"lightning" sketches; but even this could not be considered now.  In a

little while he would sail, and the days were overfull.  A letter written

a week before he sailed is full of the hurry and strain of these last

days.





              To Mrs. Jane Clemens and family, in St. Louis:



                         WESTMINSTER HOTEL, NEW YORK, June 1, 1867.

DEAR FOLKS,--I know I ought to write oftener (just got your last,) and

more fully, but I cannot overcome my repugnance to telling what I am

doing or what I expect to do or propose to do.  Then, what have I left to

write about?  Manifestly nothing.



It isn't any use for me to talk about the voyage, because I can have no

faith in that voyage till the ship is under way.  How do I know she will

ever sail?  My passage is paid, and if the ship sails, I sail in her--but

I make no calculations, have bought no cigars, no sea-going clothing

--have made no preparation whatever--shall not pack my trunk till the

morning we sail.  Yet my hands are full of what I am going to do the day

before we sail--and what isn't done that day will go undone.



All I do know or feel, is, that I am wild with impatience to move--move

--move!  Half a dozen times I have wished I had sailed long ago in some

ship that wasn't going to keep me chained here to chafe for lagging ages

while she got ready to go.  Curse the endless delays!  They always kill

me--they make me neglect every duty and then I have a conscience that

tears me like a wild beast.  I wish I never had to stop anywhere a month.

I do more mean things, the moment I get a chance to fold my hands and sit

down than ever I can get forgiveness for.



Yes, we are to meet at Mr. Beach's next Thursday night, and I suppose we

shall have to be gotten up regardless of expense, in swallow-tails, white

kids and everything en regle.



I am resigned to Rev. Mr. Hutchinson's or anybody else's supervision.

I don't mind it.  I am fixed.  I have got a splendid, immoral, tobacco-

smoking, wine-drinking, godless room-mate who is as good and true and

right-minded a man as ever lived--a man whose blameless conduct and

example will always be an eloquent sermon to all who shall come within

their influence.  But send on the professional preachers--there are none

I like better to converse with.  If they're not narrow minded and bigoted

they make good companions.



I asked them to send the N. Y. Weekly to you--no charge.  I am not going

to write for it.  Like all other, papers that pay one splendidly it

circulates among stupid people and the 'canaille.'  I have made no

arrangement with any New York paper--I will see about that Monday or

Tuesday.

                              Love to all

                                   Good bye,

                                        Yrs affy

                                                  SAM.





     The "immoral" room-mate whose conduct was to be an "eloquent

     example" was Dan Slote, immortalized in the Innocents as "Dan"

     --a favorite on the ship, and later beloved by countless readers.



     There is one more letter, written the night before the Quaker City

     sailed-a letter which in a sense marks the close of the first great

     period of his life--the period of aimless wandering--adventure

     --youth.



     Perhaps a paragraph of explanation should precede this letter.

     Political changes had eliminated Orion in Nevada, and he was now

     undertaking the practice of law.  "Bill Stewart" was Senator

     Stewart, of Nevada, of whom we shall hear again.  The "Sandwich

     Island book," as may be imagined, was made up of his letters to the

     Sacramento Union.  Nothing came of the venture, except some chapters

     in 'Roughing It', rewritten from the material.  "Zeb and John

     Leavenworth" were pilots whom he had known on the river.





              To Mrs. Jane Clemens and family in St. Louis:



                                        NEW YORK, June 7th, 1867.

DEAR FOLKS, I suppose we shall be many a league at sea tomorrow night,

and goodness knows I shall be unspeakably glad of it.



I haven't got anything to write, else I would write it.  I have just

written myself clear out in letters to the Alta, and I think they are the

stupidest letters that were ever written from New York.  Corresponding

has been a perfect drag ever since I got to the states.  If it continues

abroad, I don't know what the Tribune and Alta folks will think.

I have withdrawn the Sandwich Island book--it would be useless to publish

it in these dull publishing times.  As for the Frog book, I don't believe

that will ever pay anything worth a cent.  I published it simply to

advertise myself--not with the hope of making anything out of it.



Well, I haven't anything to write, except that I am tired of staying in

one place--that I am in a fever to get away.  Read my Alta letters--they

contain everything I could possibly write to you.  Tell Zeb and John

Leavenworth to write me.  They can get plenty of gossip from the pilots.



An importing house sent two cases of exquisite champagne aboard the ship

for me today--Veuve Clicquot and Lac d'Or.  I and my room-mate have set

apart every Saturday as a solemn fast day, wherein we will entertain no

light matters of frivolous conversation, but only get drunk.  (That is a

joke.) His mother and sisters are the best and most homelike people I

have yet found in a brown stone front.  There is no style about them,

except in house and furniture.



I wish Orion were going on this voyage, for I believe he could not help

but be cheerful and jolly.  I often wonder if his law business is going

satisfactorily to him, but knowing that the dull season is setting in now

(it looked like it had already set in before) I have felt as if I could

almost answer the question myself--which is to say in plain words, I was

afraid to ask.  I wish I had gone to Washington in the winter instead of

going West.  I could have gouged an office out of Bill Stewart for him,

and that would atone for the loss of my home visit.  But I am so

worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish anything

that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory.  My mind is stored full of

unworthy conduct toward Orion and towards you all, and an accusing

conscience gives me peace only in excitement and restless moving from

place to place.  If I could say I had done one thing for any of you that

entitled me to your good opinion, (I say nothing of your love, for I am

sure of that, no matter how unworthy of it I may make myself, from Orion

down you have always given me that, all the days of my life, when God

Almighty knows I seldom deserve it,) I believe I could go home and stay

there and I know I would care little for the world's praise or blame.

There is no satisfaction in the world's praise anyhow, and it has no

worth to me save in the way of business.  I tried to gather up its

compliments to send to you, but the work was distasteful and I dropped

it.



You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that is

angry with me and gives me freely its contempt.  I can get away from that

at sea, and be tranquil and satisfied-and so, with my parting love and

benediction for Orion and all of you, I say goodbye and God bless you

all--and welcome the wind that wafts a weary soul to the sunny lands of

the Mediterranean!

                              Yrs.  Forever,

                                             SAM.









VII.



LETTERS 1867.  THE TRAVELER.  THE VOYAGE OF THE "QUAKER CITY"



Mark Twain, now at sea, was writing many letters; not personal letters,

but those unique descriptive relations of travel which would make him his

first great fame--those fresh first impressions preserved to us now as

chapters of The Innocents Abroad.  Yet here and there in the midst of

sight-seeing and reporting he found time to send a brief line to those at

home, merely that they might have a word from his own hand, for he had

ordered the papers to which he was to contribute--the Alta and the New

York Tribune--sent to them, and these would give the story of his

travels.  The home letters read like notebook entries.





          Letters to Mrs. Jane Clemens and family, in St. Louis:





                                   FAYAL (Azores,) June 20th, 1867.

DEAR FOLKS,--We are having a lively time here, after a stormy trip.  We

meant to go to San Miguel, but were driven here by stress of weather.

Beautiful climate.

                         Yrs.

                              Affect.

                                        SAM.





                                   GIBRALTAR, June 30th, 1867.

DEAR FOLKS,--Arrived here this morning, and am clear worn out with

riding and climbing in and over and around this monstrous rock and its

fortifications.  Summer climate and very pleasant.

                                   Yrs.

                                        SAM.





                              TANGIER, MOROCCO, (AFRICA), July 1, 1867.

DEAR FOLKS, Half a dozen of us came here yesterday from Gibraltar and

some of the company took the other direction; went up through Spain, to

Paris by rail.  We decided that Gibraltar and San Roque were all of Spain

that we wanted to see at present and are glad we came here among the

Africans, Moors, Arabs and Bedouins of the desert.  I would not give this

experience for all the balance of the trip combined.  This is the

infernalest hive of infernally costumed barbarians I have ever come

across yet.

                              Yrs.

                                   SAM.





                                        AT SEA, July 2, 1867.

DR. FOLKS,--We are far up the intensely blue and ravishingly beautiful

Mediterranean.  And now we are just passing the island of Minorca.  The

climate is perfectly lovely and it is hard to drive anybody to bed, day

or night.  We remain up the whole night through occasionally, and by this

means enjoy the rare sensation of seeing the sun rise.  But the sunsets

are soft, rich, warm and superb!



We had a ball last night under the awnings of the quarter deck, and the

share of it of three of us was masquerade.  We had full, flowing,

picturesque Moorish costumes which we purchased in the bazaars of

Tangier.

                              Yrs.

                                   SAM.





                                   MARSEILLES, FRANCE, July 5, 1867.

We are here.  Start for Paris tomorrow.  All well.  Had gorgeous 4th of

July jollification yesterday at sea.

                              Yrs.

                                   SAM.





     The reader may expand these sketchy outlines to his heart's content

     by following the chapters in The Innocents Abroad, which is very

     good history, less elaborated than might be supposed.  But on the

     other hand, the next letter adds something of interest to the book-

     circumstances which a modest author would necessarily omit.





              To Mrs. Jane Clemens and family, in St. Louis:



                                        YALTA, RUSSIA, Aug.  25, 1867.

DEAR FOLKS,--We have been representing the United States all we knew how

today.  We went to Sebastopol, after we got tired of Constantinople (got

your letter there, and one at Naples,) and there the Commandant and the

whole town came aboard and were as jolly and sociable as old friends.

They said the Emperor of Russia was at Yalta, 30 miles or 40 away, and

urged us to go there with the ship and visit him--promised us a cordial

welcome.  They insisted on sending a telegram to the Emperor, and also a

courier overland to announce our coming.  But we knew that a great

English Excursion party, and also the Viceroy of Egypt, in his splendid

yacht, had been refused an audience within the last fortnight, so we

thought it not safe to try it.  They said, no difference--the Emperor

would hardly visit our ship, because that would be a most extraordinary

favor, and one which he uniformly refuses to accord under any

circumstances, but he would certainly receive us at his palace.  We still

declined.  But we had to go to Odessa, 250 miles away, and there the

Governor General urged us, and sent a telegram to the Emperor, which we

hardly expected to be answered, but it was, and promptly.  So we sailed

back to Yalta.



We all went to the palace at noon, today, (3 miles) in carriages and on

horses sent by the Emperor, and we had a jolly time.  Instead of the

usual formal audience of 15 minutes, we staid 4 hours and were made a

good deal more at home than we could have been in a New York drawing-

room.  The whole tribe turned out to receive our party-Emperor, Empress,

the oldest daughter (Grand-Duchess Marie, a pretty girl of 14,) a little

Grand Duke, her brother, and a platoon of Admirals, Princes, Peers of the

Empire, etc., and in a little while an aid-de-camp arrived with a request

from the Grand Duke Michael, the Emperor's brother, that we would visit

his palace and breakfast with him.  The Emperor also invited us, on

behalf of his absent eldest son and heir (aged 22,) to visit his palace

and consider it a visit to him.  They all talk English and they were all

very neatly but very plainly dressed.  You all dress a good deal finer

than they were dressed.  The Emperor and his family threw off all reserve

and showed us all over the palace themselves.  It is very rich and very

elegant, but in no way gaudy.



I had been appointed chairman of a committee to draught an address to the

Emperor in behalf of the passengers, and as I fully expected, and as they

fully intended, I had to write the address myself.  I didn't mind it,

because I have no modesty and would as soon write to an Emperor as to

anybody else--but considering that there were 5 on the committee I

thought they might have contributed one paragraph among them, anyway.

They wanted me to read it to him, too, but I declined that honor--not

because I hadn't cheek enough (and some to spare,) but because our Consul

at Odessa was along, and also the Secretary of our Legation at St.

Petersburgh, and of course one of those ought to read it.  The Emperor

accepted the address--it was his business to do it--and so many others

have praised it warmly that I begin to imagine it must be a wonderful

sort of document and herewith send you the original draught of it to be

put into alcohol and preserved forever like a curious reptile.



They live right well at the Grand Duke Michael's their breakfasts are not

gorgeous but very excellent--and if Mike were to say the word I would go

there and breakfast with him tomorrow.

                                   Yrs aff

                                             SAM.



P. S.  [Written across the face of the last page.] They had told us it

would be polite to invite the Emperor to visit the ship, though he would

not be likely to do it.  But he didn't give us a chance--he has requested

permission to come on board with his family and all his relations

tomorrow and take a sail, in case it is calm weather.  I can, entertain

them.  My hand is in, now, and if you want any more Emperors feted in

style, trot them out.





     The next letter is of interest in that it gives us the program and

     volume of his work.  With all the sight seeing he was averaging a

     full four letters a week--long letters, requiring careful

     observation and inquiry.  How fresh and impressionable and full of

     vigor he was, even in that fierce southern heat! No one makes the

     Mediterranean trip in summer to-day, and the thought of adding

     constant letter-writing to steady travel through southern France,

     Italy, Greece, and Turkey in blazing midsummer is stupefying.  And

     Syria and Egypt in September!





              To Mrs. Jane Clemens and family, in St. Louis:



                                        CONSTANTINOPLE, Sept. 1, '67.



DEAR FOLKS,--All well.  Do the Alta's come regularly?  I wish I knew

whether my letters reach them or not.  Look over the back papers and see.

I wrote them as follows:

     1 Letter from Fayal, in the Azores Islands.

     1 from Gibraltar, in Spain.

     1 from Tangier, in Africa.

     2 from Paris and Marseilles, in France.

     1 from Genoa, in Italy.

     1 from Milan.

     1 from Lake Como.

     1 from some little place in Switzerland--have forgotten the name.

     4 concerning Lecce, Bergamo, Padua, Verona, Battlefield of Marengo,

Pestachio, and some other cities in Northern Italy.

     2 from Venice.

     1 about Bologna.

     1 from Florence.

     1 from Pisa.

     1 from Leghorn.

     1 from Rome and Civita Vecchia.

     2 from Naples.

     1 about Pazzuoli, where St. Paul landed, the Baths of Nero, and the

ruins of Baia, Virgil's tomb, the Elysian Fields, the Sunken Cities and

the spot where Ulysses landed.

     1 from Herculaneum and Vesuvius.

     1 from Pompeii.

     1 from the Island of Ischia.

     1 concerning the Volcano of Stromboli, the city and Straits of

Messina, the land of Sicily, Scylla and Charybdis etc.

     1 about the Grecian Archipelago.

     1 about a midnight visit to Athens, the Piraeus and the ruins of the

Acropolis.

     1 about the Hellespont, the site of ancient Troy, the Sea of

Marmara, etc.

     2 about Constantinople, the Golden Horn and the beauties of the

Bosphorus.

     1 from Odessa and Sebastopol in Russia, the Black Sea, etc.

     2 from Yalta, Russia, concerning a visit to the Czar.

And yesterday I wrote another letter from Constantinople and

     1 today about its neighbor in Asia, Scatter.  I am not done with

Turkey yet.  Shall write 2 or 3 more.



I have written to the New York Herald 2 letters from Naples, (no name

signed,) and 1 from Constantinople.



To the New York Tribune I have written

     1 from Fayal.

     1 from Civita Vecchia in the Roman States.

     2 from Yalta, Russia.

     And 1 from Constantinople.



I have never seen any of these letters in print except the one to the

Tribune from Fayal and that was not worth printing.



We sail hence tomorrow, perhaps, and my next letters will be mailed at

Smyrna, in Syria.  I hope to write from the Sea of Tiberius, Damascus,

Jerusalem, Joppa, and possibly other points in the Holy Land.  The

letters from Egypt, the Nile and Algiers I will look out for, myself.

I will bring them in my pocket.



They take the finest photographs in the world here.  I have ordered some.

They will be sent to Alexandria, Egypt.



You cannot conceive of anything so beautiful as Constantinople, viewed

from the Golden Horn or the Bosphorus.  I think it must be the handsomest

city in the world.  I will go on deck and look at it for you, directly.

I am staying in the ship, tonight.  I generally stay on shore when we are

in port.  But yesterday I just ran myself down.  Dan Slote, my room-mate,

is on shore.  He remained here while we went up the Black Sea, but it

seems he has not got enough of it yet.  I thought Dan had got the state-

room pretty full of rubbish at last, but a while ago his dragoman arrived

with a bran new, ghastly tomb-stone of the Oriental pattern, with his

name handsomely carved and gilded on it, in Turkish characters.  That

fellow will buy a Circassian slave, next.



I am tired.  We are going on a trip, tomorrow.  I must to bed.  Love to

all.

               Yrs

                    SAM.





               U. S. CONSUL'S OFFICE, BEIRUT, SYRIA, Sept. 11. (1867)

DEAR FOLKS,--We are here, eight of us, making a contract with a dragoman

to take us to Baalbek, then to Damascus, Nazareth, &c.  then to Lake

Genassareth (Sea of Tiberias,) then South through all the celebrated

Scriptural localities to Jerusalem--then to the Dead Sea, the Cave of

Macpelah and up to Joppa where the ship will be.  We shall be in the

saddle three weeks--we have horses, tents, provisions, arms, a dragoman

and two other servants, and we pay five dollars a day apiece, in gold.

                         Love to all, yrs.

                                             SAM.



We leave tonight, at two o'clock in the morning.





     There appear to be no further home letters written from Syria--and

     none from Egypt.  Perhaps with the desert and the delta the heat at

     last became too fearful for anything beyond the actual requirements

     of the day.  When he began his next it was October, and the fiercer

     travel was behind him.





              To Mrs. Jane Clemens and family, in St. Louis:



                                   CAGHARI, SARDINIA, Oct, 12, 1867.

DEAR FOLKS,--We have just dropped anchor before this handsome city and--



                                   ALGIERS, AFRICA, Oct. 15.

They would not let us land at Caghari on account of cholera.  Nothing to

write.



                                   MALAGA, SPAIN, Oct.  17.

The Captain and I are ashore here under guard, waiting to know whether

they will let the ship anchor or not.  Quarantine regulations are very

strict here on all vessels coming from Egypt.  I am a little anxious

because I want to go inland to Granada and see the Alhambra.  I can go on

down by Seville and Cordova, and be picked up at Cadiz.



Later: We cannot anchor--must go on.  We shall be at Gibraltar before

midnight and I think I will go horseback (a long days) and thence by rail

and diligence to Cadiz.  I will not mail this till I see the Gibraltar

lights--I begin to think they won't let us in anywhere.



11.30 P. M.--Gibraltar.

At anchor and all right, but they won't let us land till morning--it is a

waste of valuable time.  We shall reach New York middle of November.

                                   Yours,

                                             SAM.





                                        CADIZ, Oct 24, 1867.

DEAR FOLKS,--We left Gibraltar at noon and rode to Algeciras, (4 hours)

thus dodging the quarantine, took dinner and then rode horseback all

night in a swinging trot and at daylight took a caleche (a wheeled

vehicle) and rode 5 hours--then took cars and traveled till twelve at

night.  That landed us at Seville and we were over the hard part of our

trip, and somewhat tired.  Since then we have taken things comparatively

easy, drifting around from one town to another and attracting a good deal

of attention, for I guess strangers do not wander through Andalusia and

the other Southern provinces of Spain often.  The country is precisely as

it was when Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were possible characters.



But I see now what the glory of Spain must have been when it was under

Moorish domination.  No, I will not say that, but then when one is

carried away, infatuated, entranced, with the wonders of the Alhambra and

the supernatural beauty of the Alcazar, he is apt to overflow with

admiration for the splendid intellects that created them.



I cannot write now.  I am only dropping a line to let you know I am well.

The ship will call for us here tomorrow.  We may stop at Lisbon, and

shall at the Bermudas, and will arrive in New York ten days after this

letter gets there.

                                   SAM.



     This is the last personal letter written during that famous first

     sea-gipsying, and reading it our regret grows that he did not put

     something of his Spanish excursion into his book.  He never returned

     to Spain, and he never wrote of it.  Only the barest mention of

     "seven beautiful days" is found in The Innocents Abroad.









VIII.



LETTERS 1867-68.  WASHINGTON AND SAN FRANCISCO. THE PROPOSED BOOK OF

TRAVEL.  A NEW LECTURE



     From Mark Twain's home letters we get several important side-lights

     on this first famous book.  We learn, for in stance, that it was he

     who drafted the ship address to the Emperor--the opening lines of

     which became so wearisome when repeated by the sailors.

     Furthermore, we learn something of the scope and extent of his

     newspaper correspondence, which must have kept him furiously busy,

     done as it was in the midst of super-heated and continuous sight-

     seeing.  He wrote fifty three letters to the Alta-California, six to

     the New York Tribune, and at least two to the New York Herald more

     than sixty, all told, of an average, length of three to four

     thousand words each. Mark Twain always claimed to be a lazy man, and

     certainly he was likely to avoid an undertaking not suited to his

     gifts, but he had energy in abundance for work in his chosen field.

     To have piled up a correspondence of that size in the time, and

     under the circumstances already noted, quality considered, may be

     counted a record in the history of travel letters.



     They made him famous.  Arriving in New York, November 19, 1867, Mark

     Twain found himself no longer unknown to the metropolis, or to any

     portion of America.  Papers East and West had copied his Alta and

     Tribune letters and carried his name into every corner of the States

     and Territories.  He had preached a new gospel in travel literature,

     the gospel of frankness and sincerity that Americans could

     understand.  Also his literary powers had awakened at last.  His

     work was no longer trivial, crude, and showy; it was full of

     dignity, beauty, and power; his humor was finer, worthier.  The

     difference in quality between the Quaker City letters and those

     written from the Sandwich Islands only a year before can scarcely be

     measured.



     He did not remain in New York, but went down to Washington, where he

     had arranged for a private secretaryship with Senator William M.

     Stewart,--[The "Bill" Stewart mentioned in the preceding chapter.]

     whom he had known in Nevada.  Such a position he believed would make

     but little demand upon his time, and would afford him an insight

     into Washington life, which he could make valuable in the shape of

     newspaper correspondence.



     But fate had other plans for him.  He presently received the

     following letter:



                   From Elisha Bliss, Jr., in Hartford

                OFFICE OF THE AMERICAN PUBLISHING COMPANY.



                                        HARTFORD, CONN, Nov 21, 1867.

SAMUEL L. CLEMENS Esq.

Tribune Office, New York.



DR. SIR,--We take the liberty to address you this, in place of a letter

which we had recently written and was about to forward to you, not

knowing your arrival home was expected so soon.  We are desirous of

obtaining from you a work of some kind, perhaps compiled from your

letters from the East, &c., with such interesting additions as may be

proper.  We are the publishers of A. D. Richardson's works, and flatter

ourselves that we can give an author as favorable terms and do as full

justice to his productions as any other house in the country.  We are

perhaps the oldest subscription house in the country, and have never

failed to give a book an immense circulation.  We sold about 100,000

copies of Richardson's F. D. & E.  (Field, Dungeon and Escape) and are

now printing 41,000, of "Beyond the Mississippi," and large orders ahead.

If you have any thought of writing a book, or could be induced to do so,

we should be pleased to see you; and will do so.  Will you do us the

favor to reply at once, at your earliest convenience.

                                   Very truly, &c.,

                                                  E. BLISS, Jr.

                                                       Secty.



     Clemens had already the idea of a book in mind and.  welcomed this

     proposition.





                    To Elisha Bliss, Jr., in Hartford:



                                        WASHINGTON, Dec.  2, 1867.

E. BLISS, Jr. Esq.

Sec'y American Publishing Co.--



DEAR SIR,--I only received your favor of Nov. 21st last night, at the

rooms of the Tribune Bureau here.  It was forwarded from the Tribune

office, New York, where it had lain eight or ten days.  This will be

a sufficient apology for the seeming discourtesy of my silence.



I wrote fifty-two (three) letters for the San Francisco "Alta California"

during the Quaker City excursion, about half of which number have been

printed, thus far.  The "Alta" has few exchanges in the East, and I

suppose scarcely any of these letters have been copied on this side of

the Rocky Mountains.  I could weed them of their chief faults of

construction and inelegancies of expression and make a volume that would

be more acceptable in many respects than any I could now write.  When

those letters were written my impressions were fresh, but now they have

lost that freshness; they were warm then--they are cold, now.  I could

strike out certain letters, and write new ones wherewith to supply their

places.  If you think such a book would suit your purpose, please drop me

a line, specifying the size and general style of the volume; when the

matter ought to be ready; whether it should have pictures in it or not;

and particularly what your terms with me would be, and what amount of

money I might possibly make out of it.  The latter clause has a degree of

importance for me which is almost beyond my own comprehension.  But you

understand that, of course.



I have other propositions for a book, but have doubted the propriety of

interfering with good newspaper engagements, except my way as an author

could be demonstrated to be plain before me.  But I know Richardson, and

learned from him some months ago, something of an idea of the

subscription plan of publishing.  If that is your plan invariably, it

looks safe.



I am on the N. Y. Tribune staff here as an "occasional,", among other

things, and a note from you addressed to

                                   Very truly &c.

                                             SAM L. CLEMENS,



New York Tribune Bureau, Washington, will find me, without fail.





     The exchange of these two letters marked the beginning of one of the

     most notable publishing connections in American literary history.

     The book, however, was not begun immediately.  Bliss was in poor

     health and final arrangements were delayed; it was not until late in

     January that Clemens went to Hartford and concluded the arrangement.



     Meantime, fate had disclosed another matter of even greater

     importance; we get the first hint of it in the following letter,

     though to him its beginning had been earlier--on a day in the blue

     harbor of Smyrna, when young Charles Langdon, a fellow-passenger on

     the Quaker City, had shown to Mark Twain a miniature of young

     Langdon's sister at home:





           To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                                   224 F. STREET, WASH, Jan. 8, 1868.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--And so the old Major has been there, has he?

I would like mighty well to see him.  I was a sort of benefactor to him

once.  I helped to snatch him out when he was about to ride into a

Mohammedan Mosque in that queer old Moorish town of Tangier, in Africa.

If he had got in, the Moors would have knocked his venerable old head

off, for his temerity.



I have just arrived from New York-been there ever since Christmas staying

at the house of Dan Slote my Quaker City room-mate, and having a splendid

time.  Charley Langdon, Jack Van Nostrand, Dan and I, (all Quaker City

night-hawks,) had a blow-out at Dan's' house and a lively talk over old

times.  We went through the Holy Land together, and I just laughed till

my sides ached, at some of our reminiscences.  It was the unholiest gang

that ever cavorted through Palestine, but those are the best boys in the

world.  We needed Moulton badly.  I started to make calls, New Year's

Day, but I anchored for the day at the first house I came to--Charlie

Langdon's sister was there (beautiful girl,) and Miss Alice Hooker,

another beautiful girl, a niece of Henry Ward Beecher's.  We sent the old

folks home early, with instructions not to send the carriage till

midnight, and then I just staid there and worried the life out of those

girls.  I am going to spend a few days with the Langdon's in Elmira, New

York, as soon as I get time, and a few days at Mrs. Hooker's in Hartford,

Conn., shortly.



Henry Ward Beecher sent for me last Sunday to come over and dine (he

lives in Brooklyn, you know,) and I went.  Harriet Beecher Stowe was

there, and Mrs. and Miss Beecher, Mrs. Hooker and my old Quaker City

favorite, Emma Beach.



We had a very gay time, if it was Sunday.  I expect I told more lies than

I have told before in a month.



I went back by invitation, after the evening service, and finished the

blow-out, and then staid all night at Mr. Beach's.  Henry Ward is a

brick.



I found out at 10 o'clock, last night, that I was to lecture tomorrow

evening and so you must be aware that I have been working like sin all

night to get a lecture written.  I have finished it, I call it "Frozen

Truth."  It is a little top-heavy, though, because there is more truth in

the title than there is in the lecture.



But thunder, I mustn't sit here writing all day, with so much business

before me.



Good by, and kind regards to all.

                         Yrs affy

                                   SAM L. CLEMENS.





     Jack Van Nostrand of this letter is "Jack" of the Innocents.  Emma

     Beach was the daughter of Moses S.  Beach, of the 'New York Sun.'

     Later she became the wife of the well-known painter, Abbot H.

     Thayer.



     We do not hear of Miss Langdon again in the letters of that time,

     but it was not because she was absent from his thoughts.  He had

     first seen her with her father and brother at the old St. Nicholas

     Hotel, on lower Broadway, where, soon after the arrival of the

     Quaker City in New York, he had been invited to dine.  Long

     afterward he said: "It is forty years ago; from that day to this she

     has never been out of my mind."



     From his next letter we learn of the lecture which apparently was

     delivered in Washington.





           To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                                        WASH. Jan. 9, 1868.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--That infernal lecture is over, thank Heaven!

It came near being a villainous failure.  It was not advertised at all.

The manager was taken sick yesterday, and the man who was sent to tell

me, never got to me till afternoon today.  There was the dickens to pay.

It was too late to do anything--too late to stop the lecture.  I scared

up a door-keeper, and was ready at the proper time, and by pure good luck

a tolerably good house assembled and I was saved!  I hardly knew what I

was going to talk about, but it went off in splendid style.  I was to

have preached again Saturday night, but I won't--I can't get along

without a manager.



I have been in New York ever since Christmas, you know, and now I shall

have to work like sin to catch up my correspondence.



And I have got to get up that book, too.  Cut my letters out of the

Alta's and send them to me in an envelop.  Some, here, that are not

mailed yet, I shall have to copy, I suppose.



I have got a thousand things to do, and am not doing any of them.  I feel

perfectly savage.

                         Good bye

                                   Yrs aff

                                             SAM.





     On the whole, matters were going well with him.  His next letter is

     full of his success--overflowing with the boyish radiance which he

     never quite outgrew.





           To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                                        HARTFORD, CONN.  Jan. 24-68.

DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--This is a good week for me.  I stopped in the

Herald office as I came through New York, to see the boys on the staff,

and young James Gordon Bennett asked me to write twice a week,

impersonally, for the Herald, and said if I would I might have full

swing, and (write) about anybody and everybody I wanted to.  I said I

must have the very fullest possible swing, and he said "all right."

I said "It's a contract--" and that settled that matter.



I'll make it a point to write one letter a week, any-how.



But the best thing that has happened was here.  This great American

Publishing Company kept on trying to bargain with me for a book till I

thought I would cut the matter short by coming up for a talk.  I met Rev.

Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, and with his usual whole-souled way of

dropping his own work to give other people a lift when he gets a chance,

he said, "Now, here, you are one of the talented men of the age--nobody

is going to deny that---but in matters of business, I don't suppose you

know more than enough to came in when it rains.  I'll tell you what to

do, and how to do it."  And he did.



And I listened well, and then came up here and made a splendid contract

for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large pages, with illustrations, the

manuscript to be placed in the publishers' hands by the middle of July.

My percentage is to be a fifth more than they have ever paid any author,

except Horace Greeley.  Beecher will be surprised, I guess, when he hears

this.



But I had my mind made up to one thing--I wasn't going to touch a book

unless there was money in it, and a good deal of it.  I told them so.

I had the misfortune to "bust out" one author of standing.  They had his

manuscript, with the understanding that they would publish his book if

they could not get a book from me, (they only publish two books at a

time, and so my book and Richardson's Life of Grant will fill the bill

for next fall and winter)--so that manuscript was sent back to its author

today.



These publishers get off the most tremendous editions of their books you

can imagine.  I shall write to the Enterprise and Alta every week,

as usual, I guess, and to the Herald twice a week--occasionally to the

Tribune and the Magazines (I have a stupid article in the Galaxy, just

issued) but I am not going to write to this, that and the other paper any

more.



The Chicago Tribune wants letters, but I hope and pray I have charged

them so much that they will not close the contract.  I am gradually

getting out of debt, but these trips to New York do cost like sin.

I hope you have cut out and forwarded my printed letters to Washington

--please continue to do so as they arrive.



I have had a tip-top time, here, for a few days (guest of Mr. Jno.

Hooker's family--Beecher's relatives-in a general way of Mr. Bliss, also,

who is head of the publishing firm.) Puritans are mighty straight-laced

and they won't let me smoke in the parlor, but the Almighty don't make

any better people.



Love to all-good-bye.  I shall be in New York 3 days--then go on to the

Capital.

                    Yrs affly, especially Ma.,

                                                  Yr SAM.



I have to make a speech at the annual Herald dinner on the 6th of May.





     No formal contract for the book had been made when this letter was

     written.  A verbal agreement between Bliss and Clemens had been

     reached, to be ratified by an exchange of letters in the near

     future.  Bliss had made two propositions, viz., ten thousand

     dollars, cash in hand, or a 5-per-cent. royalty on the selling price

     of the book.  The cash sum offered looked very large to Mark Twain,

     and he was sorely tempted to accept it.  He had faith, however, in

     the book, and in Bliss's ability to sell it.  He agreed, therefore,

     to the royalty proposition; "The best business judgment I ever

     displayed" he often declared in after years.  Five per cent.

     royalty sounds rather small in these days of more liberal contracts.

     But the American Publishing Company sold its books only by

     subscription, and the agents' commissions and delivery expenses ate

     heavily into the profits.  Clemens was probably correct in saying

     that his percentage was larger than had been paid to any previous

     author except Horace Greeley.  The John Hooker mentioned was the

     husband of Henry Ward Beecher's sister, Isabel.  It was easy to

     understand the Beecher family's robust appreciation of Mark Twain.



     From the office of Dan Slote, his room-mate of the Quaker City--

     "Dan" of the Innocents--Clemens wrote his letter that closed the

     agreement with Bliss.





                    To Elisha Bliss, Jr., in Hartford:



               Office of SLOTE & WOODMAN, Blank Book Manufacturers,

                                   Nos. 119-121 William St.

                                        NEW YORK, January 27, 1868.

Mr. E. Bliss, Jr.

     Sec'y American Publishing Co.

          Hartford Conn.



DEAR SIR, Your favor of Jan. 25th is received, and in reply, I will say

that I accede to your several propositions, viz: That I furnish to the

American Publishing Company, through you, with MSS sufficient for a

volume of 500 to 600 pages, the subject to be the Quaker City, the

voyage, description of places, &c., and also embodying the substance of

the letters written by me during that trip, said MSS to be ready about

the first of August, next, I to give all the usual and necessary

attention in preparing said MSS for the press, and in preparation of

illustrations, in correction of proofs--no use to be made by me of the

material for this work in any way which will conflict with its interest

--the book to be sold by the American Publishing Co., by subscription--

and for said MS and labor on my part said Company to pay me a copyright

of 5 percent, upon the subscription price of the book for all copies

sold.



As further proposed by you, this understanding, herein set forth shall be

considered a binding contract upon all parties concerned, all minor

details to be arranged between us hereafter.

                         Very truly yours,

                                   SAM. L. CLEMENS.





                          (Private and General.)



I was to have gone to Washington tonight, but have held over a day, to

attend a dinner given by a lot of newspaper Editors and literary

scalliwags, at the Westminster Hotel.  Shall go down to-morrow, if I

survive the banquet.

                         Yrs truly

                              SAM. CLEMENS.





     Mark Twain, in Washington, was in line for political preferment: His

     wide acquaintance on the Pacific slope, his new fame and growing

     popularity, his powerful and dreaded pen, all gave him special

     distinction at the capital.  From time to time the offer of one

     office or another tempted him, but he wisely, or luckily, resisted.

     In his letters home are presented some of his problems.





           To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                              224 F. STREET WASHINGTON Feb.  6, 1868.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--For two months there have been some fifty

applications before the government for the postmastership of San

Francisco, which is the heaviest concentration of political power on the

coast and consequently is a post which is much coveted.,



When I found that a personal friend of mine, the Chief Editor of the Alta

was an applicant I said I didn't want it--I would not take $10,000 a year

out of a friend's pocket.



The two months have passed, I heard day before yesterday that a new and

almost unknown candidate had suddenly turned up on the inside track, and

was to be appointed at once.  I didn't like that, and went after his case

in a fine passion.  I hunted up all our Senators and representatives and

found that his name was actually to come from the President early in the

morning.



Then Judge Field said if I wanted the place he could pledge me the

President's appointment--and Senator Conness said he would guarantee me

the Senate's confirmation.  It was a great temptation, but it would

render it impossible to fill my book contract, and I had to drop the

idea.



I have to spend August and September in Hartford which isn't San

Francisco.  Mr. Conness offers me any choice out of five influential

California offices.  Now, some day or other I shall want an office and

then, just my luck, I can't get it, I suppose.



They want to send me abroad, as a Consul or a Minister.  I said I didn't

want any of the pie.  God knows I am mean enough and lazy enough, now,

without being a foreign consul.



Sometime in the course of the present century I think they will create a

Commissioner of Patents, and then I hope to get a berth for Orion.



I published 6 or 7 letters in the Tribune while I was gone, now I cannot

get them.  I suppose I must have them copied.

                                   Love to all

                                              SAM.





Orion Clemens was once more a candidate for office: Nevada had become a

State; with regularly elected officials, and Orion had somehow missed

being chosen.  His day of authority had passed, and the law having failed

to support him, he was again back at his old occupation, setting type in

St. Louis.  He was, as ever, full of dreams and inventions that would

some day lead to fortune.  With the gift of the Sellers imagination,

inherited by all the family, he lacked the driving power which means

achievement.  More and more as the years went by he would lean upon his

brother for moral and physical support.  The chances for him in

Washington do not appear to have been bright.  The political situation

under Andrew Johnson was not a happy one.





                     To Orion Clemens, in St. Louis:



                              224 F. STREET, WASH., Feb. 21. (1868)

MY DEAR BRO.,--I am glad you do not want the clerkship, for that Patent

Office is in such a muddle that there would be no security for the

permanency of a place in it.  The same remark will apply to all offices

here, now, and no doubt will, till the close of the present

administration.



Any man who holds a place here, now, stands prepared at all times to

vacate it.  You are doing, now, exactly what I wanted you to do a year

ago.



We chase phantoms half the days of our lives.



It is well if we learn wisdom even then, and save the other half.



I am in for it.  I must go on chasing them until I marry--then I am done

with literature and all other bosh,--that is, literature wherewith to

please the general public.



I shall write to please myself, then.  I hope you will set type till you

complete that invention, for surely government pap must be nauseating

food for a man--a man whom God has enabled to saw wood and be

independent.  It really seemed to me a falling from grace, the idea of

going back to San Francisco nothing better than a mere postmaster, albeit

the public would have thought I came with gilded honors, and in great

glory.



I only retain correspondence enough, now, to make a living for myself,

and have discarded all else, so that I may have time to spare for the

book.  Drat the thing, I wish it were done, or that I had no other

writing to do.



This is the place to get a poor opinion of everybody in.  There isn't one

man in Washington, in civil office, who has the brains of Anson

Burlingame--and I suppose if China had not seized and saved his great

talents to the world, this government would have discarded him when his

time was up.



There are more pitiful intellects in this Congress!  Oh, geeminy!  There

are few of them that I find pleasant enough company to visit.



I am most infernally tired of Wash.  and its "attractions."  To be busy

is a man's only happiness--and I am--otherwise I should die

                                             Yrs.  aff

                                                  SAM.





     The secretarial position with Senator Stewart was short-lived.  One

     cannot imagine Mark Twain as anybody's secretary, and doubtless

     there was little to be gained on either side by the arrangement.

     They parted without friction, though in later years, when Stewart

     had become old and irascible, he used to recount a list of

     grievances and declare that he had been obliged to threaten violence

     in order to bring Mark to terms; but this was because the author of

     Roughing It had in that book taken liberties with the Senator, to

     the extent of an anecdote and portrait which, though certainly

     harmless enough, had for some reason given deep offense.



     Mark Twain really had no time for secretary work.  For one thing he

     was associated with John Swinton in supplying a Washington letter to

     a list of newspapers, and then he was busy collecting his Quaker

     City letters, and preparing the copy for his book.  Matters were

     going well enough, when trouble developed from an unexpected

     quarter.  The Alta-California had copyrighted the letters and

     proposed to issue them in book form.  There had been no contract

     which would prevent this, and the correspondence which Clemens

     undertook with the Alta management led to nothing.  He knew that he

     had powerful friends among the owners, if he could reach them

     personally, and he presently concluded to return to San Francisco,

     make what arrangement he could, and finish his book there.  It was

     his fashion to be prompt; in his next letter we find him already on

     the way.





              To Mrs. Jane Clemens and family, in St. Louis:



                              AT SEA, Sunday, March 15, Lat. 25. (1868)

DEAR FOLKS,--I have nothing to write, except that I am well--that the

weather is fearfully hot-that the Henry Chauncey is a magnificent ship--

that we have twelve hundred, passengers on board-that I have two

staterooms, and so am not crowded--that I have many pleasant friends

here, and the people are not so stupid as on the Quaker City--that we had

Divine Service in the main saloon at 10.30 this morning--that we expect

to meet the upward bound vessel in Latitude 23, and this is why I am

writing now.



We shall reach Aspinwall Thursday morning at 6 o'clock, and San Francisco

less than two weeks later.  I worry a great deal about being obliged to

go without seeing you all, but it could not be helped.



Dan Slote, my splendid room-mate in the Quaker City and the noblest man

on earth, will call to see you within a month.  Make him dine with you

and spend the evening.  His house is my home always in.  New York.

                                             Yrs affy,

                                                  SAM.





The San Francisco trip proved successful.  Once on the ground Clemens had

little difficulty in convincing the Alta publishers that they had

received full value in the newspaper use of the letters, and that the

book rights remained with the author.  A letter to Bliss conveys the

situation.





                    To Elisha Bliss, Jr., in Hartford:



                                        SAN FRANCISCO, May 5, '68.



E.  BLISS, Jr.  Esq.



Dr. SIR,--The Alta people, after some hesitation, have given me

permission to use my printed letters, and have ceased to think of

publishing them themselves in book form.  I am steadily at work, and

shall start East with the completed Manuscript, about the middle of June.



I lectured here, on the trip, the other night-over sixteen hundred

dollars in gold in the house--every seat taken and paid for before night.

                              Yrs truly,

                                        MARK TWAIN.





     But he did not sail in June.  His friends persuaded him to cover his

     lecture circuit of two years before, telling the story of his

     travels.  This he did with considerable profit, being everywhere

     received with great honors.  He ended this tour with a second

     lecture in San Francisco, announced in a droll and characteristic

     fashion which delighted his Pacific admirers, and insured him a

     crowded house.--[See Mark Twain: A Biography, chap  xlvi, and

     Appendix H.]



     His agreement had been to deliver his MS. about August 1st.

     Returning by the Chauncey, July 28th, he was two days later in

     Hartford, and had placid the copy for the new book in Bliss's hands.

     It was by no means a compilation of his newspaper letters.  His

     literary vision was steadily broadening.  All of the letters had

     been radically edited, some had been rewritten, some entirely

     eliminated.  He probably thought very well of the book, an opinion

     shared by Bliss, but it is unlikely that either of them realized

     that it was to become a permanent classic, and the best selling book

     of travel for at least fifty years.









IX.



LETTERS 1868-70.  COURTSHIP, AND "THE INNOCENTS ABROAD"



     The story of Mark Twain's courtship has been fully told in the

     completer story of his life; it need only be briefly sketched here

     as a setting for the letters of this period.  In his letter of

     January 8th we note that he expects to go to Elmira for a few days

     as soon as he has time.



     But he did not have time, or perhaps did not receive a pressing

     invitation until he had returned with his MS. from California.

     Then, through young Charles Langdon, his Quaker City shipmate, he

     was invited to Elmira.  The invitation was given for a week, but

     through a subterfuge--unpremeditated, and certainly fair enough in

     a matter of love-he was enabled to considerably prolong his visit.

     By the end of his stay he had become really "like one of the

     family," though certainly not yet accepted as such.  The fragmentary

     letter that follows reflects something of his pleasant situation.

     The Mrs. Fairbanks mentioned in this letter had been something more

     than a "shipmother" to Mark Twain.  She was a woman of fine literary

     taste, and Quaker City correspondent for her husband's paper, the

     Cleveland Herald.  She had given Mark Twain sound advice as to his

     letters, which he had usually read to her, and had in no small

     degree modified his early natural tendency to exaggeration and

     outlandish humor.  He owed her much, and never failed to pay her

     tribute.



     Part of a letter to Mrs. Jane Clemens and family, in St. Louis:



                                   ELMIRA, N.Y.  Aug.  26, 1868.

DEAR FOLKS,--You see I am progressing--though slowly.  I shall be here

a week yet maybe two--for Charlie Langdon cannot get away until his

father's chief business man returns from a journey--and a visit to Mrs.

Fairbanks, at Cleveland, would lose half its pleasure if Charlie were not

along.  Moulton of St. Louis ought to be there too.  We three were Mrs.

F's "cubs," in the Quaker City.  She took good care that we were at

church regularly on Sundays; at the 8-bells prayer meeting every night;

and she kept our buttons sewed on and our clothing in order--and in a

word was as busy and considerate, and as watchful over her family of

uncouth and unruly cubs, and as patient and as long-suffering, withal, as

a natural mother.  So we expect.....



                                        Aug.  25th.

Didn't finish yesterday.  Something called me away.  I am most

comfortably situated here.  This is the pleasantest family I ever knew.

I only have one trouble, and that is they give me too much thought and

too much time and invention to the object of making my visit pass

delightfully.  It needs----



     Just how and when he left the Langdon home the letters do not

     record.  Early that fall he began a lecture engagement with James

     Redpath, proprietor of the Boston Lyceum Bureau, and his engagements

     were often within reach of Elmira.  He had a standing invitation now

     to the Langdon home, and the end of the week often found him there.

     Yet when at last he proposed for the hand of Livy Langdon the

     acceptance was by no means prompt.  He was a favorite in the Langdon

     household, but his suitability as a husband for the frail and gentle

     daughter was questioned.



     However, he was carrying everything, just then, by storm.  The

     largest houses everywhere were crowded to hear him.  Papers spoke of

     him as the coming man of the age, people came to their doors to see

     him pass.  There is but one letter of this period, but it gives us

     the picture.





              To Mrs. Jane Clemens and family, in St. Louis:



                                             CLEVELAND, Nov. 20, 1868.

DEAR FOLKS,--I played against the Eastern favorite, Fanny Kemble, in

Pittsburgh, last night.  She had 200 in her house, and I had upwards of

1,500.  All the seats were sold (in a driving rain storm, 3 days ago,)

as reserved seats at 25 cents extra, even those in the second and third

tiers--and when the last seat was gone the box office had not been open

more than 2 hours.  When I reached the theatre they were turning people

away and the house was crammed, 150 or 200 stood up, all the evening.



I go to Elmira tonight.  I am simply lecturing for societies, at $100 a

pop.

                         Yrs

                                   SAM.





     It would be difficult for any family to refuse relationship with one

     whose star was so clearly ascending, especially when every

     inclination was in his favor, and the young lady herself encouraged

     his suit.  A provisional engagement was presently made, but it was

     not finally ratified until February of the following year.  Then in

     a letter from one of his lecture points he tells his people

     something of his happiness.





              To Mrs. Jane Clemens and family, in St. Louis:



                                        LOCKPORT, N. Y.  Feb. 27, 1868.

DEAR FOLKS,--I enclose $20 for Ma.  I thought I was getting ahead of her

little assessments of $35 a month, but find I am falling behind with her

instead, and have let her go without money.  Well, I did not mean to do

it.  But you see when people have been getting ready for months in a

quiet way to get married, they are bound to grow stingy, and go to saving

up money against that awful day when it is sure to be needed.  I am

particularly anxious to place myself in a position where I can carry on

my married life in good shape on my own hook, because I have paddled my

own canoe so long that I could not be satisfied now to let anybody help

me--and my proposed father-in-law is naturally so liberal that it would

be just like him to want to give us a start in life.  But I don't want it

that way.  I can start myself.  I don't want any help.  I can run this

institution without any outside assistance, and I shall have a wife who

will stand by me like a soldier through thick and thin, and never

complain.  She is only a little body, but she hasn't her peer in

Christendom.  I gave her only a plain gold engagement ring, when fashion

imperatively demands a two-hundred dollar diamond one, and told her it

was typical of her future lot--namely, that she would have to flourish on

substantials rather than luxuries.  (But you see I know the girl--she

don't care anything about luxuries.) She is a splendid girl.  She spends

no money but her usual year's allowance, and she spends nearly every cent

of that on other people.  She will be a good sensible little wife,

without any airs about her.  I don't make intercession for her beforehand

and ask you to love her, for there isn't any use in that--you couldn't

help it if you were to try.



I warn you that whoever comes within the fatal influence of her beautiful

nature is her willing slave for evermore.  I take my affidavit on that

statement.  Her father and mother and brother embrace and pet her

constantly, precisely as if she were a sweetheart, instead of a blood

relation.  She has unlimited power over her father, and yet she never

uses it except to make him help people who stand in need of help....



But if I get fairly started on the subject of my bride, I never shall get

through--and so I will quit right here.  I went to Elmira a little over a

week ago, and staid four days and then had to go to New York on business.



                         ......................



     No further letters have been preserved until June, when he is in

     Elmira and with his fiancee reading final proofs on the new book.

     They were having an idyllic good time, of course, but it was a

     useful time, too, for Olivia Langdon had a keen and refined literary

     instinct, and the Innocents Abroad, as well as Mark Twain's other

     books, are better to-day for her influence.



     It has been stated that Mark Twain loved the lecture platform, but

     from his letters we see that even at this early date, when he was at

     the height of his first great vogue as a public entertainer, he had

     no love for platform life.  Undoubtedly he rejoiced in the brief

     periods when he was actually before his audience and could play upon

     it with his master touch, but the dreary intermissions of travel and

     broken sleep were too heavy a price to pay.





              To Mrs. Jane Clemens and family, in St. Louis



                                        ELMIRA, June 4. (1868)

DEAR FOLKS,--Livy sends you her love and loving good wishes, and I send

you mine.  The last 3 chapters of the book came tonight--we shall read it

in the morning and then thank goodness, we are done.



In twelve months (or rather I believe it is fourteen,) I have earned just

eighty dollars by my pen--two little magazine squibs and one newspaper

letter--altogether the idlest, laziest 14 months I ever spent in my life.

And in that time my absolute and necessary expenses have been scorchingly

heavy--for I have now less than three thousand six hundred dollars in

bank out of the eight or nine thousand I have made during those months,

lecturing.  My expenses were something frightful during the winter.

I feel ashamed of my idleness, and yet I have had really no inclination

to do anything but court Livy.  I haven't any other inclination yet.

I have determined not to work as hard traveling, any more, as I did last

winter, and so I have resolved not to lecture outside of the 6 New

England States next winter.  My Western course would easily amount to

$10,000, but I would rather make 2 or 3 thousand in New England than

submit again to so much wearing travel.  (I have promised to talk ten

nights for a thousand dollars in the State of New York, provided the

places are close together.) But after all if I get located in a newspaper

in a way to suit me, in the meantime, I don't want to lecture at all next

winter, and probably shan't.  I most cordially hate the lecture field.

And after all, I shudder to think that I may never get out of it.



In all conversations with Gough, and Anna Dickinson, Nasby, Oliver

Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips and the other old stagers, I could not

observe that they ever expected or hoped to get out of the business.

I don't want to get wedded to it as they are.  Livy thinks we can live on

a very moderate sum and that we'll not need to lecture.  I know very well

that she can live on a small allowance, but I am not so sure about

myself.  I can't scare her by reminding her that her father's family

expenses are forty thousand dollars a year, because she produces the

documents at once to show that precious little of this outlay is on her

account.  But I must not commence writing about Livy, else I shall never

stop.  There isn't such another little piece of perfection in the world

as she is.



My time is become so short, now, that I doubt if I get to California this

summer.  If I manage to buy into a paper, I think I will visit you a

while and not go to Cal. at all.  I shall know something about it after

my next trip to Hartford.  We all go there on the l0th--the whole family

--to attend a wedding, on the 17th.  I am offered an interest in a

Cleveland paper which would pay me $2,300 to $2,500 a year, and a salary

added of $3,000.  The salary is fair enough, but the interest is not

large enough, and so I must look a little further.  The Cleveland folks

say they can be induced to do a little better by me, and urge me to come

out and talk business.  But it don't strike me--I feel little or no

inclination to go.



I believe I haven't anything else to write, and it is bed-time.  I want

to write to Orion, but I keep putting it off--I keep putting everything

off.  Day after day Livy and I are together all day long and until 10 at

night, and then I feel dreadfully sleepy.  If Orion will bear with me and

forgive me I will square up with him yet.  I will even let him kiss Livy.



My love to Mollie and Annie and Sammie and all.  Good-bye.

                              Affectionately,

                                                  SAM.





     It is curious, with his tendency to optimism and general expansion

     of futures, that he says nothing of the possible sales of the new

     book, or of his expectations in that line.  It was issued in July,

     and by June the publishers must have had promising advance orders

     from their canvassers; but apparently he includes none of these

     chickens in his financial forecast.  Even when the book had been out

     a full month, and was being shipped at the rate of several hundreds

     a day, he makes no reference to it in a letter to his sister, other

     than to ask if she has not received a copy.  This, however, was a

     Mark Twain peculiarity.  Writing was his trade; the returns from it

     seldom excited him.  It was only when he drifted into strange and

     untried fields that he began to chase rainbows, to blow iridescent

     bubbles, and count unmined gold.





                     To Mrs.  Moffett, in St. Louis:



                                        BUFFALO, Aug. 20, 1869.

MY DEAR SISTER,--I have only time to write a line.  I got your letter

this morning and mailed it to Livy.  She will be expecting me tonight and

I am sorry to disappoint her so, but then I couldn't well get away.  I

will go next Saturday.



I have bundled up Livy's picture and will try and recollect to mail it

tomorrow.  It is a porcelaintype and I think you will like it.



I am sorry I never got to St. Louis, because I may be too busy to go, for

a long time.  But I have been busy all the time and St. Louis is clear

out of the way, and remote from the world and all ordinary routes of

travel.  You must not place too much weight upon this idea of moving the

capital from Washington.  St. Louis is in some respects a better place

for it than Washington, though there isn't more than a toss-up between

the two after all.  One is dead and the other in a trance.  Washington is

in the centre of population and business, while St. Louis is far removed

from both.  And you know there is no geographical centre any more.  The

railroads and telegraph have done away with all that.  It is no longer

a matter of sufficient importance to be gravely considered by thinking

men.  The only centres, now, are narrowed down to those of intelligence,

capital and population. As I said before Washington is the nearest to

those and you don't have to paddle across a river on ferry boats of a

pattern popular in the dark ages to get to it, nor have to clamber up

vilely paved hills in rascally omnibuses along with a herd of all sorts

of people after you are there. Secondly, the removal of the capital is

one of those old, regular, reliable dodges that are the bread-and meat of

back country congressmen.  It is agitated every year.  It always has

been, it always will be; It is not new in any respect.  Thirdly.  The

Capitol has cost $40,000,000 already and lacks a good deal of being

finished, yet.  There are single stones in the Treasury building (and a

good many of them) that cost twenty-seven thousand dollars apiece--and

millions were spent in the construction of that and the Patent Office and

the other great government buildings.  To move to St. Louis, the country

must throw away a hundred millions of capital invested in those

buildings, and go right to work to spend a hundred millions on new

buildings in St. Louis.  Shall we ever have a Congress, a majority of

whose members are hopelessly insane?  Probably not.  But it is possible-

unquestionably such a thing is possible.  Only I don't believe it will

happen in our time; and I am satisfied the capital will not be moved

until it does happen.  But if St. Louis would donate the ground and the

buildings, it would be a different matter.  No, Pamela, I don't see any

good reason to believe you or I will ever see the capital moved.



I have twice instructed the publishers to send you a book--it was the

first thing I did--long before the proofs were finished.  Write me if it

is not yet done.



Livy says we must have you all at our marriage, and I say we can't.

It will be at Christmas or New Years, when such a trip across the country

would be equivalent to murder & arson & everything else.--And it would

cost five hundred dollars--an amount of money she don't know the value of

now, but will before a year is gone.  She grieves over it, poor little

rascal, but it can't be helped.  She must wait awhile, till I am firmly

on my legs, & then she shall see you.  She says her father and mother

will invite you just as soon as the wedding date is definitely fixed,

anyway--& she thinks that's bound to settle it.  But the ice & snow, &

the long hard journey, & the injudiciousness of laying out any money

except what we are obliged to part with while we are so much in debt,

settles the case differently.  For it is a debt.



.....Mr. Langdon is just as good as bound for $25,000 for me, and has

already advanced half of it in cash.  I wrote and asked whether I had

better send him my note, or a due-bill, or how he would prefer to have

the indebtedness made of record and he answered every other topic in the

letter pleasantly but never replied to that at all.  Still, I shall give

my note into the hands of his business agent here, and pay him the

interest as it falls due.  We must "go slow."  We are not in the

Cleveland Herald.  We are a hundred thousand times better off, but there

isn't so much money in it.



(Remainder missing.)





     In spite of the immediate success of his book--a success the like of

     which had scarcely been known in America-Mark Twain held himself to

     be, not a literary man, but a journalist: He had no plans for

     another book; as a newspaper owner and editor he expected, with his

     marriage, to settle down and devote the rest of his life to

     journalism.  The paper was the Buffalo Express; his interest in it

     was one-third--the purchase price, twenty-five thousand dollars, of

     which he had paid a part, Jervis Langdon, his future father-in-law,

     having furnished cash and security for the remainder.  He was

     already in possession in August, but he was not regularly in Buffalo

     that autumn, for he had agreed with Redpath to deliver his Quaker

     City lecture, and the tour would not end until a short time before

     his wedding-day, February 2, 1870.



     Our next letter hardly belongs in this collection; as it was

     doubtless written with at least the possibility of publication in

     view.  But it is too amusing, too characteristic of Mark Twain, to

     be omitted.  It was sent in response to an invitation from the New

     York Society of California Pioneers to attend a banquet given in New

     York City, October 13, 1869, and was, of course, read to the

     assembled diners.





    To the New York Society of California Pioneers, in New York City:



                                        ELMIRA, October 11, 1869.

GENTLEMEN,--Circumstances render it out of my power to take advantage of

the invitation extended to me through Mr. Simonton, and be present at

your dinner at New York.  I regret this very much, for there are several

among you whom I would have a right to join hands with on the score of

old friendship, and I suppose I would have a sublime general right to

shake hands with the rest of you on the score of kinship in California

ups and downs in search of fortune.



If I were to tell some of my experience, you would recognize California

blood in me; I fancy the old, old story would sound familiar, no doubt.

I have the usual stock of reminiscences.  For instance: I went to

Esmeralda early.  I purchased largely in the "Wide West,"  "Winnemucca,"

and other fine claims, and was very wealthy.  I fared sumptuously on

bread when flour was $200 a barrel and had beans for dinner every Sunday,

when none but bloated aristocrats could afford such grandeur.  But I

finished by feeding batteries in a quartz mill at $15 a week, and wishing

I was a battery myself and had somebody to feed me.  My claims in

Esmeralda are there yet.  I suppose I could be persuaded to sell.



I went to Humboldt District when it was new; I became largely interested

in the "Alba Nueva" and other claims with gorgeous names, and was rich

again--in prospect.  I owned a vast mining property there.  I would not

have sold out for less than $400,000 at that time.  But I will now.

Finally I walked home--200 miles partly for exercise, and partly because

stage fare was expensive.  Next I entered upon an affluent career in

Virginia City, and by a judicious investment of labor and the capital of

friends, became the owner of about all the worthless wild cat mines there

were in that part of the country.  Assessments did the business for me

there.  There were a hundred and seventeen assessments to one dividend,

and the proportion of income to outlay was a little against me.  My

financial barometer went down to 32 Fahrenheit, and the subscriber was

frozen out.



I took up extensions on the main lead-extensions that reached to British

America, in one direction, and to the Isthmus of Panama in the other--and

I verily believe I would have been a rich man if I had ever found those

infernal extensions.  But I didn't.  I ran tunnels till I tapped the

Arctic Ocean, and I sunk shafts till I broke through the roof of

perdition; but those extensions turned up missing every time.  I am

willing to sell all that property and throw in the improvements.



Perhaps you remember that celebrated "North Ophir?"  I bought that mine.

It was very rich in pure silver.  You could take it out in lumps as large

as a filbert.  But when it was discovered that those lumps were melted

half dollars, and hardly melted at that, a painful case of "salting" was

apparent, and the undersigned adjourned to the poorhouse again.



I paid assessments on "Hale and Norcross" until they sold me out, and I

had to take in washing for a living--and the next month that infamous

stock went up to $7,000 a foot.



I own millions and millions of feet of affluent silver leads in Nevada--

in fact the entire undercrust of that country nearly, and if Congress

would move that State off my property so that I could get at it, I would

be wealthy yet.  But no, there she squats--and here am I.  Failing health

persuades me to sell.  If you know of any one desiring a permanent

investment, I can furnish one that will have the virtue of being eternal.



I have been through the California mill, with all its "dips, spurs and

angles, variations and sinuosities."  I have worked there at all the

different trades and professions known to the catalogues.  I have been

everything, from a newspaper editor down to a cow-catcher on a

locomotive, and I am encouraged to believe that if there had been a few

more occupations to experiment on, I might have made a dazzling success

at last, and found out what mysterious designs Providence had in creating

me.



But you perceive that although I am not a Pioneer, I have had a

sufficiently variegated time of it to enable me to talk Pioneer like a

native, and feel like a Forty-Niner.  Therefore, I cordially welcome you

to your old-remembered homes and your long deserted firesides, and close

this screed with the sincere hope that your visit here will be a happy

one, and not embittered by the sorrowful surprises that absence and lapse

of years are wont to prepare for wanderers; surprises which come in the

form of old friends missed from their places; silence where familiar

voices should be; the young grown old; change and decay everywhere; home

a delusion and a disappointment; strangers at hearthstone; sorrow where

gladness was; tears for laughter; the melancholy-pomp of death where the

grace of life has been!



With all good wishes for the Returned Prodigals, and regrets that I

cannot partake of a small piece of the fatted calf (rare and no gravy,)

                         I am yours, cordially,

                                        MARK TWAIN.





     In the next letter we find him in the midst of a sort of confusion

     of affairs, which, in one form or another, would follow him

     throughout the rest of his life.  It was the price of his success

     and popularity, combined with his general gift for being concerned

     with a number of things, and a natural tendency for getting into hot

     water, which becomes more evident as the years and letters pass in

     review.  Orion Clemens, in his attempt to save money for the

     government, had employed methods and agents which the officials at

     Washington did not understand, and refused to recognize.  Instead of

     winning the credit and commendation he had expected, he now found

     himself pursued by claims of considerable proportions.  The "land"

     referred to is the Tennessee tract, the heritage which John Clemens

     had provided for his children.  Mark Twain had long since lost faith

     in it, and was not only willing, but eager to renounce his rights.



     "Nasby" is, of course, David R.  Locke, of the Toledo Blade, whose

     popularity at this time both as a lecturer and writer was very

     great.  Clemens had met him here and there on their platform tour,

     and they had become good friends.  Clemens, in fact, had once

     proposed to Nasby a joint trip to the Pacific coast.



     The California idea had been given up, but both Mark Twain and Nasby

     found engagements enough, and sufficient profit east of the

     Mississippi.  Boston was often their headquarters that winter ('69

     and '70), and they were much together.  "Josh Billings," another of

     Redpath's lecturers, was likewise often to be found in the Lyceum

     offices.  There is a photograph of Mark Twain, Nasby, and Josh

     Billings together.



     Clemens also, that winter, met William Dean Howells, then in the

     early days of his association with the Atlantic Monthly.  The two

     men, so widely different, became firm friends at sight, and it was

     to Howells in the years to come that Mark Twain would write more

     letters, and more characteristic letters, than to any other living

     man.  Howells had favorably reviewed 'The Innocents Abroad,' and

     after the first moment of their introduction had passed Clemens

     said: "When I read that review of yours I felt like the woman who

     said that she was so glad that her baby had come white."  It was not

     the sort of thing that Howells would have said, but it was the sort

     of thing that he could understand and appreciate from Mark Twain.



     In company with Nasby Clemens, that season, also met Oliver Wendell

     Holmes.  Later he had sent Holmes a copy of his book and received a

     pleasantly appreciative reply.  "I always like," wrote Holmes, "to

     hear what one of my fellow countrymen, who is not a Hebrew scholar,

     or a reader of hiero-glyphics, but a good-humored traveler with a

     pair of sharp, twinkling Yankee (in the broader sense) eyes in his

     head, has to say about the things that learned travelers often make

     unintelligible, and sentimental ones ridiculous or absurd ....  I

     hope your booksellers will sell a hundred thousand copies of your

     travels."  A wish that was realized in due time, though it is

     doubtful if Doctor Holmes or any one else at the moment believed

     that a book of that nature and price (it was $3.50 a copy) would

     ever reach such a sale.







                      To Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:



                                                  BOSTON, Nov. 9, 1869.

MY DEAR SISTER,--Three or four letters just received from home.  My first

impulse was to send Orion a check on my publisher for the money he wants,

but a sober second thought suggested that if he has not defrauded the

government out of money, why pay, simply because the government chooses

to consider him in its debt?  No: Right is right.  The idea don't suit

me.  Let him write the Treasury the state of the case, and tell them he

has no money.  If they make his sureties pay, then I will make the

sureties whole, but I won't pay a cent of an unjust claim.  You talk of

disgrace.  To my mind it would be just as disgraceful to allow one's self

to be bullied into paying that which is unjust.



Ma thinks it is hard that Orion's share of the land should be swept away

just as it is right on the point (as it always has been) of becoming

valuable.  Let her rest easy on that point.  This letter is his ample

authority to sell my share of the land immediately and appropriate the

proceeds--giving no account to me, but repaying the amount to Ma first,

or in case of her death, to you or your heirs, whenever in the future he

shall be able to do it.  Now, I want no hesitation in this matter.  I

renounce my ownership from this date, for this purpose, provided it is

sold just as suddenly as he can sell it.



In the next place--Mr. Langdon is old, and is trying hard to withdraw

from business and seek repose.  I will not burden him with a purchase--

but I will ask him to take full possession of a coal tract of the land

without paying a cent, simply conditioning that he shall mine and throw

the coal into market at his own cost, and pay to you and all of you what

he thinks is a fair portion of the profits accruing--you can do as you

please with the rest of the land.  Therefore, send me (to Elmira,)

information about the coal deposits so framed that he can comprehend the

matter and can intelligently instruct an agent how to find it and go to

work.



Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience--

4,000 critics--and on the success of this matter depends my future

success in New England.  But I am not distressed.  Nasby is in the same

boat.  Tonight decides the fate of his brand-new lecture.  He has just

left my room--been reading his lecture to me--was greatly depressed.  I

have convinced him that he has little to fear.



I get just about five hundred more applications to lecture than I can

possibly fill--and in the West they say "Charge all you please, but

come."  I shan't go West at all.  I stop lecturing the 22d of January,

sure.  But I shall talk every night up to that time.  They flood me with

high-priced invitations to write for magazines and papers, and publishers

besiege me to write books.  Can't do any of these things.



I am twenty-two thousand dollars in debt, and shall earn the money and

pay it within two years--and therefore I am not spending any money except

when it is necessary.



I had my life insured for $10,000 yesterday (what ever became of Mr.

Moffett' s life insurance?) "for the benefit of my natural heirs"--the

same being my mother, for Livy wouldn't claim it, you may be sure of

that.  This has taken $200 out of my pocket which I was going to send to

Ma.  But I will send her some, soon.  Tell Orion to keep a stiff upper

lip--when the worst comes to the worst I will come forward.  Must talk in

Providence, R. I., tonight.  Must leave now.  I thank Mollie and Orion

and the rest for your letters, but you see how I am pushed--ought to have

6 clerks.

                              Affectionately,

                                                  SAM.





     By the end of January, 1870 more than thirty thousand copies of the

     Innocents had been sold, and in a letter to his publisher the author

     expressed his satisfaction.





                      To Elisha Bliss, in Hartford:



                                        ELMIRA, Jan. 28 '70.

FRIEND BLISS,--..... Yes, I am satisfied with the way you are running the

book.  You are running it in staving, tip-top, first-class style.  I

never wander into any corner of the country but I find that an agent has

been there before me, and many of that community have read the book.  And

on an average about ten people a day come and hunt me up to thank me and

tell me I'm a benefactor!  I guess this is a part of the programme we

didn't expect in the first place.



I think you are rushing this book in a manner to be proud of; and you

will make the finest success of it that has ever been made with a

subscription book, I believe.  What with advertising, establishing

agencies, &c., you have got an enormous lot of machinery under way and

hard at work in a wonderfully short space of time.  It is easy to see,

when one travels around, that one must be endowed with a deal of genuine

generalship in order to maneuvre a publication whose line of battle

stretches from end to end of a great continent, and whose foragers and

skirmishers invest every hamlet and besiege every village hidden away in

all the vast space between.



I'll back you against any publisher in America, Bliss--or elsewhere.

                                        Yrs as ever

                                                  CLEMENS.





     There is another letter written just at this time which of all

     letters must not be omitted here.  Only five years earlier Mark

     Twain, poor, and comparatively unknown, had been carrying water

     while Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker washed out the pans of dirt in

     search of the gold pocket which they did not find.  Clemens must

     have received a letter from Gillis referring to some particular

     occasion, but it has disappeared; the reply, however, always

     remained one of James Gillis's treasured possessions.





              To James Gillis, in his cabin on Jackass Hill,

                         Tuolumne Co., California:



                                        ELMIRA, N.Y.  Jan.  26, '70.

DEAR JIM,--I remember that old night just as well! And somewhere among my

relics I have your remembrance stored away.  It makes my heart ache yet

to call to mind some of those days.  Still, it shouldn't--for right in

the depths of their poverty and their pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the

germ of my coming good fortune. You remember the one gleam of jollity

that shot across our dismal sojourn in the rain and mud of Angels' Camp

I mean that day we sat around the tavern stove and heard that chap tell

about the frog and how they filled him with shot.  And you remember how

we quoted from the yarn and laughed over it, out there on the hillside

while you and dear old Stoker panned and washed.  I jotted the story down

in my note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen

dollars for it--I was just that blind.  But then we were so hard up!

I published that story, and it became widely known in America, India,

China, England--and the reputation it made for me has paid me thousands

and thousands of dollars since.  Four or five months ago I bought into

the Express (I have ordered it sent to you as long as you live--and if

the book keeper sends you any bills, you let me hear of it.) I went

heavily in debt never could have dared to do that, Jim, if we hadn't

heard the jumping Frog story that day.



And wouldn't I love to take old Stoker by the hand, and wouldn't I love

to see him in his great specialty, his wonderful rendition of "Rinalds"

in the" Burning Shame!"  Where is Dick and what is he doing?  Give him my

fervent love and warm old remembrances.



A week from today I shall be married to a girl even better, and lovelier

than the peerless "Chapparal Quails."  You can't come so far, Jim, but

still I cordially invite you to come, anyhow--and I invite Dick, too.

And if you two boys were to land here on that pleasant occasion, we would

make you right royally welcome.

                              Truly your friend,

                                        SAML L. CLEMENS.



P. S.  "California plums are good, Jim--particularly when they are

stewed."





     Steve Gillis, who sent a copy of his letter to the writer, added:

     "Dick Stoker--dear, gentle unselfish old Dick-died over three years

     ago, aged 78.  I am sure it will be a melancholy pleasure to Mark to

     know that Dick lived in comfort all his later life, sincerely loved

     and respected by all who knew him.  He never left Jackass Hill.  He

     struck a pocket years ago containing enough not only to build

     himself a comfortable house near his old cabin, but to last him,

     without work, to his painless end.  He was a Mason, and was buried

     by the Order in Sonora.



     "The 'Quails'--the beautiful, the innocent, the wild little Quails--

     lived way out in the Chapparal; on a little ranch near the

     Stanislaus River, with their father and mother.  They were famous

     for their beauty and had many suitors."



     The mention of "California plums" refers to some inedible fruit

     which Gillis once, out of pure goodness of heart, bought of a poor

     wandering squaw, and then, to conceal his motive, declared that they

     were something rare and fine, and persisted in eating them, though

     even when stewed they nearly choked him.









X.



LETTERS 1870-71.  MARK TWAIN IN BUFFALO.  MARRIAGE. THE BUFFALO EXPRESS.

"MEMORANDA."  LECTURES.  A NEW BOOK



     Samuel L. Clemens and Olivia Langdon were married in the Langdon

     home at Elmira, February 2, 1870, and took up their residence in

     Buffalo in a beautiful home, a wedding present from the bride's

     father.  The story of their wedding, and the amusing circumstances

     connected with their establishment in Buffalo, have been told

     elsewhere.--[Mark Twain: A Biography, chap. lxxiv.]



     Mark Twain now believed that he was through with lecturing.  Two

     letters to Redpath, his agent, express his comfortable condition.





                       To James Redpath, in Boston:



                                             BUFFALO, March 22, 1890.

DEAR RED,--I am not going to lecture any more forever.  I have got things

ciphered down to a fraction now.  I know just about what it will cost us

to live and I can make the money without lecturing.  Therefore old man,

count me out.

          Your friend,

                    S.  L.  CLEMENS.





                       To James Redpath, in Boston:



                                   ELMIRA, N. Y.  May 10, 1870.

FRIEND REDPATH,--I guess I am out of the field permanently.



Have got a lovely wife; a lovely house, bewitchingly furnished; a lovely

carriage, and a coachman whose style and dignity are simply awe-

inspiring--nothing less--and I am making more money than necessary--by

considerable, and therefore why crucify myself nightly on the platform.

The subscriber will have to be excused from the present season at least.



Remember me to Nasby, Billings and Fall.--[Redpath's partner in the

lecture lyceum.]--Luck to you!  I am going to print your menagerie,

Parton and all, and make comments.



In next Galaxy I give Nasby's friend and mine from Philadelphia (John

Quill, a literary thief) a "hyste."

                         Yours always and after.

                                                  MARK.





     The reference to the Galaxy in the foregoing letter has to do with a

     department called Memoranda, which he had undertaken to conduct for

     the new magazine.  This work added substantially to his income, and

     he believed it would be congenial.  He was allowed free hand to

     write and print what he chose, and some of his best work at this

     time was published in the new department, which he continued for a

     year.



     Mark Twain now seemed to have his affairs well regulated.  His

     mother and sister were no longer far away in St. Louis.  Soon after

     his marriage they had, by his advice, taken up residence at

     Fredonia, New York, where they could be easily visited from Buffalo.



     Altogether, the outlook seemed bright to Mark Twain and his wife,

     during the first months of their marriage.  Then there came a

     change.  In a letter which Clemens wrote to his mother and sister we

     get the first chapter of disaster.





       To Mrs. Jane Clemens, and Mrs. Moffett, in Fredonia, N. Y.:



                                        ELMIRA, N. Y.  June 25, 1870.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--We were called here suddenly by telegram, 3

days ago.  Mr. Langdon is very low.  We have well-nigh lost hope--all of

us except Livy.



Mr. Langdon, whose hope is one of his most prominent characteristics,

says himself, this morning, that his recovery is only a possibility, not

a probability.  He made his will this morning--that is, appointed

executors--nothing else was necessary.  The household is sad enough

Charley is in Bavaria.  We telegraphed Munroe & Co. Paris, to notify

Charley to come home--they sent the message to Munich.  Our message left

here at 8 in the morning and Charley's answer arrived less than eight

hours afterward.  He sailed immediately.



He will reach home two weeks from now.  The whole city is troubled.  As I

write (at the office,) a dispatch arrives from Charley who has reached

London, and will sail thence on 28th.  He wants news.  We cannot send him

any.

                         Affectionately

                                        SAM.



P. S.  I sent $300 to Fredonia Bank for Ma--It is in her name.





     Mrs. Clemens, herself, was not in the best of health at this time,

     but devotion to her father took her to his bedside, where she

     insisted upon standing long, hard watches, the strain of which told

     upon her severely.  Meantime, work must go on; the daily demand of

     the newspaper and the monthly call of the Memoranda could not go

     unheeded.  Also, Bliss wanted a new book, and met Mark Twain at

     Elmira to arrange for it.  In a letter to Orion we learn of this

     project.





                     To Orion Clemens, in St. Louis:



                                             ELMIRA, July 15, 1870

MY DEAR BRO.,--Per contract I must have another 600-page book ready for

my publisher Jan.  z, and I only began it today.  The subject of it is a

secret, because I may possibly change it.  But as it stands, I propose to

do up Nevada and Cal., beginning with the trip across the country in the

stage.  Have you a memorandum of the route we took--or the names of any

of the Stations we stopped at?  Do you remember any of the scenes, names,

incidents or adventures of the coach trip?--for I remember next to

nothing about the matter.  Jot down a foolscap page of items for me.

I wish I could have two days' talk with you.



I suppose I am to get the biggest copyright, this time, ever paid on a

subscription book in this country.



Give our love to Mollie.--Mr. Langdon is very low.

                         Yr Bro

                                   SAM.





     The "biggest copyright," mentioned in this letter, was a royalty of

     7 1/2 per cent., which Bliss had agreed to pay, on the retail price

     of the book.  The book was Roughing It, though this title was not

     decided upon until considerably later.  Orion Clemens eagerly

     furnished a detailed memorandum of the route of their overland

     journey, which brought this enthusiastic acknowledgment:





                     To Orion Clemens, in St. Louis:



                                                  BUF., 1870.

DEAR BRO.,--I find that your little memorandum book is going to be ever

so much use to me, and will enable me to make quite a coherent narrative

of the Plains journey instead of slurring it over and jumping 2,000 miles

at a stride.  The book I am writing will sell.  In return for the use of

the little memorandum book I shall take the greatest pleasure in

forwarding to you the third $1,000 which the publisher of the forthcoming

work sends me or the first $1,000, I am not particular--they will both be

in the first quarterly statement of account from the publisher.

                                   In great haste,

                                                  Yr Obliged Bro.

                                                                 SAM.



Love to Mollie.  We are all getting along tolerably well.





     Mr. Langdon died early in August, and Mrs. Clemens returned to

     Buffalo, exhausted in mind and body.  If she hoped for rest now, in

     the quiet of her own home, she was disappointed, as the two brief

     letters that follow clearly show.





                   To Mrs. Moffett, in Fredonia, N. Y.:



                                                  BUFFALO, Aug.  31, 70.

MY DEAR SISTER,--I know I ought to be thrashed for not writing you, but

I have kept putting it off.  We get heaps of letters every day; it is a

comfort to have somebody like you that will let us shirk and be patient

over it.  We got the book and I did think I wrote a line thanking you for

it-but I suppose I neglected it.



We are getting along tolerably well.  Mother [Mrs. Langdon] is here, and

Miss Emma Nye.  Livy cannot sleep since her father's death--but I give

her a narcotic every night and make her.  I am just as busy as I can be--

am still writing for the Galaxy and also writing a book like the

"Innocents" in size and style.  I have got my work ciphered down to days,

and I haven't a single day to spare between this and the date which, by

written contract I am to deliver the M.S. of the book to the publisher.

                             ----In a hurry

                                        Affectionately

                                                  SAM





                     To Orion Clemens, in St, Louis:



                                        BUF.  Sept. 9th, 1870.

MY DEAR BRO,--O here!  I don't want to be consulted at all about Tenn.

I don't want it even mentioned to me.  When I make a suggestion it is for

you to act upon it or throw it aside, but I beseech you never to ask my

advice, opinion or consent about that hated property.  If it was because

I felt the slightest personal interest in the infernal land that I ever

made a suggestion, the suggestion would never be made.



Do exactly as you please with the land--always remember this--that so

trivial a percentage as ten per cent will never sell it.



It is only a bid for a somnambulist.



I have no time to turn round, a young lady visitor (schoolmate of Livy's)

is dying in the house of typhoid fever (parents are in South Carolina)

and the premises are full of nurses and doctors and we are all fagged

out.

                              Yrs.

                                        SAM.





     Miss Nye, who had come to cheer her old schoolmate, had been

     prostrated with the deadly fever soon after her arrival.  Another

     period of anxiety and nursing followed.  Mrs. Clemens, in spite of

     her frail health, devoted much time to her dying friend, until by

     the time the end came she was herself in a precarious condition.

     This was at the end of September.  A little more than a month later,

     November 7th, her first child, Langdon Clemens, was prematurely

     born.  To the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell and wife, of Hartford, Mark

     Twain characteristically announced the new arrival.





         To Rev. Joseph H. Twichell and wife, in Hartford, Conn.:



                                        BUFFALO, Nov 12, '70.

DEAR UNCLE AND AUNT,--I came into the world on the 7th inst., and

consequently am about five days old, now.  I have had wretched health

ever since I made my appearance.  First one thing and then another has

kept me under the weather, and as a general thing I have been chilly and

uncomfortable.



I am not corpulent, nor am I robust in any way.  At birth I only weighed

4 1/2 pounds with my clothes on--and the clothes were the chief feature of

the weight, too, I am obliged to confess.  But I am doing finely,

all things considered.  I was at a standstill for 3 days and a half, but

during the last 24 hours I have gained nearly an ounce, avoirdupois.



They all say I look very old and venerable-and I am aware, myself, that I

never smile.  Life seems a serious thing, what I have seen of it--and my

observation teaches me that it is made up mainly of hiccups, unnecessary

washings, and colic.  But no doubt you, who are old, have long since

grown accustomed and reconciled to what seems to me such a disagreeable

novelty.



My father said, this morning, when my face was in repose and thoughtful,

that I looked precisely as young Edward Twichell of Hartford used to look

some is months ago--chin, mouth, forehead, expression--everything.



My little mother is very bright and cheery, and I guess she is pretty

happy, but I don't know what about.  She laughs a great deal,

notwithstanding she is sick abed.  And she eats a great deal, though she

says that is because the nurse desires it.  And when she has had all the

nurse desires her to have, she asks for more.  She is getting along very

well indeed.



My aunt Susie Crane has been here some ten days or two weeks, but goes

home today, and Granny Fairbanks of Cleveland arrives to take her place.

--[Mrs. Fairbanks, of the Quaker City excursion.]

                                   Very lovingly,

                                             LANGDON CLEMENS.



P. S.  Father said I had better write because you would be more

interested in me, just now, than in the rest of the family.





     Clemens had made the acquaintance of the Rev. Joseph Hopkins

     Twichell and his wife during his several sojourns in Hartford, in

     connection with his book publication, and the two men had

     immediately become firm friends.  Twichell had come to Elmira in

     February to the wedding to assist Rev. Thos. K. Beecher in the

     marriage ceremony.  Joseph Twichell was a devout Christian, while

     Mark Twain was a doubter, even a scoffer, where orthodoxy was

     concerned, yet the sincerity and humanity of the two men drew them

     together; their friendship was lifelong.



     A second letter to Twichell, something more than a month later,

     shows a somewhat improved condition in the Clemens household.





                      To Rev. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                             BUF. Dec. 19th, 1870.

DEAR J. H.,--All is well with us, I believe--though for some days the

baby was quite ill.  We consider him nearly restored to health now,

however.  Ask my brother about us--you will find him at Bliss's

publishing office, where he is gone to edit Bliss's new paper--left here

last Monday.  Make his and his wife's acquaintance.  Take Mrs. T. to see

them as soon as they are fixed.



Livy is up, and the prince keeps her busy and anxious these latter days

and nights, but I am a bachelor up stairs and don't have to jump up and

get the soothing syrup--though I would as soon do it as not, I assure

you.  (Livy will be certain to read this letter.)



Tell Harmony (Mrs. T.) that I do hold the baby, and do it pretty handily,

too, although with occasional apprehensions that his loose head will fall

off.  I don't have to quiet him--he hardly ever utters a cry.  He is

always thinking about something.  He is a patient, good little baby.



Smoke?  I always smoke from 3 till 5 Sunday afternoons--and in New York

the other day I smoked a week, day and night.  But when Livy is well I

smoke only those two hours on Sunday.  I'm "boss" of the habit, now, and

shall never let it boss me any more.  Originally, I quit solely on Livy's

account, (not that I believed there was the faintest reason in the

matter, but just as I would deprive myself of sugar in my coffee if she

wished it, or quit wearing socks if she thought them immoral,) and I

stick to it yet on Livy's account, and shall always continue to do so,

without a pang.  But somehow it seems a pity that you quit, for Mrs. T.

didn't mind it if I remember rightly.  Ah, it is turning one's back upon

a kindly Providence to spurn away from us the good creature he sent to

make the breath of life a luxury as well as a necessity, enjoyable as

well as useful, to go and quit smoking when then ain't any sufficient

excuse for it!  Why, my old boy, when they use to tell me I would shorten

my life ten years by smoking, they little knew the devotee they were

wasting their puerile word upon--they little knew how trivial and

valueless I would regard a decade that had no smoking in it!  But I won't

persuade you, Twichell--I won't until I see you again--but then we'll

smoke for a week together, and then shut off again.



I would have gone to Hartford from New York last Saturday, but I got so

homesick I couldn't.  But maybe I'll come soon.



No, Sir, catch me in the metropolis again, to get homesick.



I didn't know Warner had a book out.



We send oceans and continents of love--I have worked myself down, today.

                              Yrs always

                                        MARK.





     With his establishment in Buffalo, Clemens, as already noted, had

     persuaded his sister, now a widow, and his mother, to settle in

     Fredonia, not far away.  Later, he had found a position for Orion,

     as editor of a small paper which Bliss had established.  What with

     these several diversions and the sorrows and sicknesses of his own

     household, we can readily imagine that literary work had been

     performed under difficulties.  Certainly, humorous writing under

     such disturbing conditions could not have been easy, nor could we

     expect him to accept an invitation to be present and make a comic

     speech at an agricultural dinner, even though Horace Greeley would

     preside.  However, he sent to the secretary of the association a

     letter which might be read at the gathering:





       To A.  B.  Crandall, in Woodberry Falls, N. Y., to be read

                       at an agricultural dinner:



                                        BUFFALO, Dec. 26, 1870.

GENTLEMEN,--I thank you very much for your invitation to the Agricultural

dinner, and would promptly accept it and as promptly be there but for the

fact that Mr. Greeley is very busy this month and has requested me to

clandestinely continue for him in The Tribune the articles "What I Know

about Farming."  Consequently the necessity of explaining to the readers

of that journal why buttermilk cannot be manufactured profitably at 8

cents a quart out of butter that costs 60 cents a pound compels my stay

at home until the article is written.

                         With reiterated thanks, I am

                                    Yours truly,

                                             MARK TWAIN.





     In this letter Mark Twain made the usual mistake as to the title of

     the Greeley farming series, "What I Know of Farming" being the

     correct form.



     The Buffalo Express, under Mark Twain's management, had become a

     sort of repository for humorous efforts, often of an indifferent

     order.  Some of these things, signed by nom de plumes, were charged

     to Mark Twain.  When Bret Harte's "Heathen Chinee" devastated the

     country, and was so widely parodied, an imitation of it entitled,

     "Three Aces," and signed "Carl Byng," was printed in the Express.

     Thomas Bailey Aldrich, then editor of Every Saturday, had not met

     Mark Twain, and, noticing the verses printed in the exchanges over

     his signature, was one of those who accepted them as Mark Twain's

     work.  He wrote rather an uncomplimentary note in Every Saturday

     concerning the poem and its authorship, characterizing it as a

     feeble imitation of Bret Harte's "Heathen Chinee."  Clemens promptly

     protested to Aldrich, then as promptly regretted having done so,

     feeling that he was making too much of a small matter.  Hurriedly he

     sent a second brief note.





         To Thomas Bailey Aldrich, editor of "Every Saturday,"

                         Boston, Massachusetts:



                                        BUFFALO, Jan. 22, 1870.

DEAR SIR,--Please do not publish the note I sent you the other day about

"Hy. Slocum's" plagiarism entitled "Three Aces"--it is not important

enough for such a long paragraph.  Webb writes me that he has put in a

paragraph about it, too--and I have requested him to suppress it.  If you

would simply state, in a line and a half under "Literary Notes," that you

mistook one "Hy.  Slocum" (no, it was one "Carl Byng," I perceive) "Carl

Byng" for Mark Twain, and that it was the former who wrote the plagiarism

entitled "Three Aces," I think that would do a fair justice without any

unseemly display.  But it is hard to be accused of plagiarism--a crime I

never have committed in my life.

                              Yrs.  Truly

                                        MARK TWAIN.





     But this came too late.  Aldrich replied that he could not be

     prevented from doing him justice, as forty-two thousand copies of

     the first note, with the editor's apology duly appended, were

     already in press.  He would withdraw his apology in the next number

     of Every Saturday, if Mark Twain said so.  Mark Twain's response

     this time assumed the proportions of a letter.





                   To Thomas Bailey Aldrich, in Boston:



                                   472 DELAWARE ST., BUFFALO, Jan. 28.

DEAR MR. ALDRICH,--No indeed, don't take back the apology!  Hang it, I

don't want to abuse a man's civility merely because he gives me the

chance.



I hear a good deal about doing things on the "spur of the moment"--

I invariably regret the things I do on the spur of the moment.  That

disclaimer of mine was a case in point.  I am ashamed every time I think

of my bursting out before an unconcerned public with that bombastic pow-

wow about burning publishers' letters, and all that sort of imbecility,

and about my not being an imitator, etc.  Who would find out that I am a

natural fool if I kept always cool and never let nature come to the

surface?  Nobody.



But I did hate to be accused of plagiarizing Bret Harte, who trimmed and

trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward

utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to a writer of paragraphs and chapters

that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very

decentest people in the land--and this grateful remembrance of mine ought

to be worth its face, seeing that Bret broke our long friendship a year

ago without any cause or provocation that I am aware of.



Well, it is funny, the reminiscences that glare out from murky corners of

one's memory, now and then, without warning.  Just at this moment a

picture flits before me: Scene--private room in Barnum's Restaurant,

Virginia, Nevada; present, Artemus Ward, Joseph T.  Goodman, (editor and

proprietor Daily "Enterprise"), and "Dan de Quille" and myself, reporters

for same; remnants of the feast thin and scattering, but such tautology

and repetition of empty bottles everywhere visible as to be offensive to

the sensitive eye; time, 2.30 A.M.; Artemus thickly reciting a poem about

a certain infant you wot of, and interrupting himself and being

interrupted every few lines by poundings of the table and shouts of

"Splendid, by Shorzhe!"  Finally, a long, vociferous, poundiferous and

vitreous jingling of applause announces the conclusion, and then Artemus:

"Let every man 'at loves his fellow man and 'preciates a poet 'at loves

his fellow man, stan' up!--Stan' up and drink health and long life to

Thomas Bailey Aldrich!--and drink it stanning!" (On all hands fervent,

enthusiastic, and sincerely honest attempts to comply.) Then Artemus:

"Well--consider it stanning, and drink it just as ye are!"  Which was

done.



You must excuse all this stuff from a stranger, for the present, and when

I see you I will apologize in full.



Do you know the prettiest fancy and the neatest that ever shot through

Harte's brain?  It was this:  When they were trying to decide upon a

vignette for the cover of the Overland, a grizzly bear (of the arms of

the State of California) was chosen.  Nahl Bras. carved him and the page

was printed, with him in it, looking thus: [Rude sketch of a grizzly

bear.]



As a bear, he was a success--he was a good bear--.  But then, it was

objected, that he was an objectless bear--a bear that meant nothing in

particular, signified nothing,--simply stood there snarling over his

shoulder at nothing--and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-

natured intruder upon the fair page.  All hands said that--none were

satisfied.  They hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as much

to have him there when there was no paint to him.  But presently Harte

took a pencil and drew these two simple lines under his feet and behold

he was a magnificent success!--the ancient symbol of California savagery

snarling at the approaching type of high and progressive Civilization,

the first Overland locomotive!: [Sketch of a small section of railway

track.]



I just think that was nothing less than inspiration itself.



Once more I apologize, and this time I do it "stanning!"

                         Yrs.  Truly

                              SAML. L. CLEMENS.





     The "two simple lines," of course, were the train rails under the

     bear's feet, and completed the striking cover design of the Overland

     monthly.



     The brief controversy over the "Three Aces" was the beginning of

     along and happy friendship between Aldrich and Mark Twain.  Howells,

     Aldrich, Twichell, and Charles Dudley Warner--these were Mark

     Twain's intimates, men that he loved, each for his own special charm

     and worth.



     Aldrich he considered the most brilliant of living men.



     In his reply to Clemens's letter, Aldrich declared that he was glad

     now that, for the sake of such a letter, he had accused him falsely,

     and added:



     "Mem.  Always abuse people.



     "When you come to Boston, if you do not make your presence manifest

     to me, I'll put in a !! in 'Every Saturday' to the effect that

     though you are generally known as Mark Twain your favorite nom de

     plume is 'Barry Gray.'"



     Clemens did not fail to let Aldrich know when he was in Boston

     again, and the little coterie of younger writers forgathered to give

     him welcome.



     Buffalo agreed with neither Mrs. Clemens nor the baby.  What with

     nursing and anguish of mind, Mark Twain found that he could do

     nothing on the new book, and that he must give up his magazine

     department.  He had lost interest in his paper and his surroundings

     in general.  Journalism and authorship are poor yoke-mates.  To

     Orion Clemens, at this time editing Bliss's paper at Hartford, he

     explained the situation.





                      To Orion Clemens, in Hartford:



                                             BUFFALO, 4th 1871.

MY DEAR BRO,--What I wanted of the "Liar" Sketch, was to work it into the

California book--which I shall do.  But day before yesterday I concluded

to go out of the Galaxy on the strength of it, so I have turned it into

the last Memoranda I shall ever write, and published it as a "specimen

chapter" of my forthcoming book.



I have written the Galaxy people that I will never furnish them another

article long or short, for any price but $500.00 cash--and have requested

them not to ask me for contributions any more, even at that price.



I hope that lets them out, for I will stick to that.  Now do try and

leave me clear out of the 'Publisher' for the present, for I am

endangering my reputation by writing too much--I want to get out of the

public view for awhile.



I am still nursing Livy night and day and cannot write anything.  I am

nearly worn out.  We shall go to Elmira ten days hence (if Livy can

travel on a mattress then,) and stay there till I have finished the

California book--say three months.  But I can't begin work right away

when I get there--must have a week's rest, for I have been through 30

days' terrific siege.



That makes it after the middle of March before I can go fairly to work--

and then I'll have to hump myself and not lose a moment.  You and Bliss

just put yourselves in my place and you will see that my hands are full

and more than full.



When I told Bliss in N. Y. that I would write something for the Publisher

I could not know that I was just about to lose fifty days.  Do you see

the difference it makes?  Just as soon as ever I can, I will send some

of the book M.S. but right in the first chapter I have got to alter the

whole style of one of my characters and re-write him clear through to

where I am now.  It is no fool of a job, I can tell you, but the book

will be greatly bettered by it.  Hold on a few days--four or five--and

I will see if I can get a few chapters fixed to send to Bliss.



I have offered this dwelling house and the Express for sale, and when we

go to Elmira we leave here for good.  I shall not select a new home till

the book is finished, but we have little doubt that Hartford will be the

place.



We are almost certain of that.  Ask Bliss how it would be to ship our

furniture to Hartford, rent an upper room in a building and unbox it and

store it there where somebody can frequently look after it.  Is not the

idea good?  The furniture is worth $10,000 or $12,000 and must not be

jammed into any kind of a place and left unattended to for a year.



The first man that offers $25,000 for our house can take it--it cost

that.  What are taxes there?  Here, all bunched together--of all kinds,

they are 7 per cent--simply ruin.



The things you have written in the Publisher are tip-top.

                         In haste,

                                   Yr Bro

                                             SAM





     There are no further letters until the end of April, by which time

     the situation had improved.  Clemens had sold his interest in the

     Express (though at a loss), had severed his magazine connection, and

     was located at Quarry Farm, on a beautiful hilltop above Elmira, the

     home of Mrs. Clemens's sister, Mrs. Theodore Crane.  The pure air

     and rest of that happy place, where they were to spend so many

     idyllic summers, had proved beneficial to the sick ones, and work on

     the new book progressed in consequence.  Then Mark Twain's old

     editor, "Joe" Goodman, came from Virginia City for a visit, and his

     advice and encouragement were of the greatest value.  Clemens even

     offered to engage Goodman on a salary, to remain until he had

     finished his book.  Goodman declined the salary, but extended his

     visit, and Mark Twain at last seems to have found himself working

     under ideal conditions.  He jubilantly reports his progress.





                      To Elisha Bliss, in Hartford:



                                   ELMIRA, Monday.  May 15th 1871

FRIEND BLISS,--Yrs rec'd enclosing check for $703.35  The old "Innocents"

holds out handsomely.



I have MS. enough on hand now, to make (allowing for engravings) about

400 pages of the book--consequently am two-thirds done.  I intended to

run up to Hartford about the middle of the week and take it along;

because it has chapters in it that ought by all means to be in the

prospectus; but I find myself so thoroughly interested in my work, now

(a thing I have not experienced for months) that I can't bear to lose a

single moment of the inspiration.  So I will stay here and peg away as

long as it lasts.  My present idea is to write as much more as I have

already written, and then cull from the mass the very best chapters and

discard the rest.  I am not half as well satisfied with the first part of

the book as I am with what I am writing now.  When I get it done I want

to see the man who will begin to read it and not finish it.  If it falls

short of the "Innocents" in any respect I shall lose my guess.



When I was writing the "Innocents" my daily stunt was 30 pages of MS and

I hardly ever got beyond it; but I have gone over that nearly every day

for the last ten.  That shows that I am writing with a red-hot interest.

Nothing grieves me now--nothing troubles me, nothing bothers me or gets

my attention--I don't think of anything but the book, and I don't have an

hour's unhappiness about anything and don't care two cents whether school

keeps or not.  It will be a bully book.  If I keep up my present lick

three weeks more I shall be able and willing to scratch out half of the

chapters of the Overland narrative--and shall do it.



You do not mention having received my second batch of MS, sent a week or

two ago--about 100 pages.



If you want to issue a prospectus and go right to canvassing, say the

word and I will forward some more MS--or send it by hand--special

messenger.  Whatever chapters you think are unquestionably good, we will

retain of course, so they can go into a prospectus as well one time as

another.  The book will be done soon, now.  I have 1200 pages of MS

already written and am now writing 200 a week--more than that, in fact;

during the past week wrote 23 one day, then 30, 33, 35, 52, and 65.

--How's that?



It will be a starchy book, and should be full of snappy pictures--

especially pictures worked in with the letterpress.  The dedication will

be worth the price of the volume--thus:



                           To the Late Cain.

                        This Book is Dedicated:



Not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little respect;

not on account of sympathy with him, for his bloody deed placed him

without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking: but out of a mere human

commiseration for him that it was his misfortune to live in a dark age

that knew not the beneficent Insanity Plea.



I think it will do.

                         Yrs.  CLEMENS.



P. S.--The reaction is beginning and my stock is looking up.  I am

getting the bulliest offers for books and almanacs; am flooded with

lecture invitations, and one periodical offers me $6,000 cash for 12

articles, of any length and on any subject, treated humorously or

otherwise.





     The suggested dedication "to the late Cain" may have been the

     humoristic impulse of the moment.  At all events, it did not

     materialize.



     Clemens's enthusiasm for work was now such that he agreed with

     Redpath to return to the platform that autumn, and he began at once

     writing lectures.  His disposal of the Buffalo paper had left him

     considerably in debt, and platforming was a sure and quick method of

     retrenchment.  More than once in the years ahead Mark Twain would

     return to travel and one-night stands to lift a burden of debt.

     Brief letters to Redpath of this time have an interest and even a

     humor of their own.





                   Letters to James Redpath, in Boston:



                                        ELMIRA, June 27, 1871.

DEAR RED,--Wrote another lecture--a third one-today.  It is the one I am

going to deliver.  I think I shall call it "Reminiscences of Some

Pleasant Characters Whom I Have Met," (or should the "whom" be left out?)

It covers my whole acquaintance--kings, lunatics, idiots and all.

Suppose you give the item a start in the Boston papers.  If I write fifty

lectures I shall only choose one and talk that one only.



No sir: Don't you put that scarecrow (portrait) from the Galaxy in, I

won't stand that nightmare.

                              Yours,

                                        MARK.





                                        ELMIRA, July 10, 1871.

DEAR REDPATH,--I never made a success of a lecture delivered in a church

yet.  People are afraid to laugh in a church.  They can't be made to do

it in any possible way.



Success to Fall's carbuncle and many happy returns.

                              Yours,

                                        MARK.





                         To Mr. Fall, in Boston:



                                        ELMIRA, N. Y. July 20, 1871.

FRIEND FALL,--Redpath tells me to blow up.  Here goes!  I wanted you to

scare Rondout off with a big price.  $125 ain't big.  I got $100 the

first time I ever talked there and now they have a much larger hall.

It is a hard town to get to--I run a chance of getting caught by the ice

and missing next engagement.  Make the price $150 and let them draw out.

                              Yours

                                        MARK





                   Letters to James Redpath, in Boston:



                                        HARTFORD, Tuesday Aug. 8, 1871.

DEAR RED,--I am different from other women; my mind changes oftener.

People who have no mind can easily be steadfast and firm, but when a man

is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy sea of

foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo.  See?

Therefore, if you will notice, one week I am likely to give rigid

instructions to confine me to New England; next week, send me to Arizona;

the next week withdraw my name; the next week give you full untrammelled

swing; and the week following modify it.  You must try to keep the run of

my mind, Redpath, it is your business being the agent, and it always was

too many for me.  It appears to me to be one of the finest pieces of

mechanism I have ever met with.  Now about the West, this week, I am

willing that you shall retain all the Western engagements.  But what I

shall want next week is still with God.



Let us not profane the mysteries with soiled hands and prying eyes of

sin.

                              Yours,

                                        MARK.



P. S.  Shall be here 2 weeks, will run up there when Nasby comes.





                                        ELMIRA, N. Y. Sept. 15, 1871.

DEAR REDPATH,--I wish you would get me released from the lecture at

Buffalo.  I mortally hate that society there, and I don't doubt they

hired me.  I once gave them a packed house free of charge, and they never

even had the common politeness to thank me.  They left me to shift for

myself, too, a la Bret Harte at Harvard.  Get me rid of Buffalo!

Otherwise I'll have no recourse left but to get sick the day I lecture

there.  I can get sick easy enough, by the simple process of saying the

word--well never mind what word--I am not going to lecture there.

                              Yours,

                                   MARK.





                                        BUFFALO, Sept. 26, 1871.

DEAR REDPATH,--We have thought it all over and decided that we can't

possibly talk after Feb. 2.



We shall take up our residence in Hartford 6 days from now

                              Yours

                                   MARK.









XI.



LETTERS 1871-72.  REMOVAL TO HARTFORD.  A LECTURE TOUR.  "ROUGHING IT."

FIRST LETTER TO HOWELLS



     The house they had taken in Hartford was the Hooker property on

     Forest Street, a handsome place in a distinctly literary

     neighborhood.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dudley Warner, and

     other well-known writers were within easy walking distance; Twichell

     was perhaps half a mile away.



     It was the proper environment for Mark Twain.  He settled his little

     family there, and was presently at Redpath's office in Boston, which

     was a congenial place, as we have seen before.  He did not fail to

     return to the company of Nasby, Josh Billings, and those others of

     Redpath's "attractions" as long and as often as distance would

     permit.  Bret Harte, who by this time had won fame, was also in

     Boston now, and frequently, with Howells, Aldrich, and Mark Twain,

     gathered in some quiet restaurant corner for a luncheon that lasted

     through a dim winter afternoon--a period of anecdote, reminiscence,

     and mirth.  They were all young then, and laughed easily.  Howells,

     has written of one such luncheon given by Ralph Keeler, a young

     Californian--a gathering at which James T. Fields was present

     "Nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and

     aimless and joyful talk-play, beginning and ending nowhere, of eager

     laughter, of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat-lightning

     shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional concentration of our

     joint mockeries upon our host, who took it gladly."



     But a lecture circuit cannot be restricted to the radius of Boston.

     Clemens was presently writing to Redpath from Washington and points

     farther west.





                       To James Redpath, in Boston:



                                   WASHINGTON, Tuesday, Oct. 28, 1871.

DEAR RED,--I have come square out, thrown "Reminiscences" overboard, and

taken "Artemus Ward, Humorist," for my subject.  Wrote it here on Friday

and Saturday, and read it from MS last night to an enormous house.  It

suits me and I'll never deliver the nasty, nauseous "Reminiscences" any

more.

                              Yours,

                                   MARK.





     The Artemus Ward lecture lasted eleven days, then he wrote:





                     To Redpath and Fall, in Boston:



                                   BUFFALO DEPOT, Dec. 8, 1871.

REDPATH & FALL, BOSTON,--Notify all hands that from this time I shall

talk nothing but selections from my forthcoming book "Roughing It."

Tried it last night.  Suits me tip-top.

                                   SAM'L L. CLEMENS.





     The Roughing It chapters proved a success, and continued in high

     favor through the rest of the season.





                       To James Redpath, in Boston:



                                   LOGANSPORT, IND.  Jan. 2, 1872.

FRIEND REDPATH,--Had a splendid time with a splendid audience in

Indianapolis last night--a perfectly jammed house, just as I have had all

the time out here.  I like the new lecture but I hate the "Artemus Ward"

talk and won't talk it any more.  No man ever approved that choice of

subject in my hearing, I think.



Give me some comfort.  If I am to talk in New York am I going to have a

good house?  I don't care now to have any appointments cancelled.  I'll

even "fetch" those Dutch Pennsylvanians with this lecture.



Have paid up $4000 indebtedness.  You are the, last on my list.  Shall

begin to pay you in a few days and then I shall be a free man again.

                              Yours,

                                        MARK.





     With his debts paid, Clemens was anxious to be getting home.  Two

     weeks following the above he wrote Redpath that he would accept no

     more engagements at any price, outside of New England, and added,

     "The fewer engagements I have from this time forth the better I

     shall be pleased."  By the end of February he was back in Hartford,

     refusing an engagement in Boston, and announcing to Redpath, "If I

     had another engagement I'd rot before I'd fill it."  From which we

     gather that he was not entirely happy in the lecture field.



     As a matter of fact, Mark Twain loathed the continuous travel and

     nightly drudgery of platform life.  He was fond of entertaining, and

     there were moments of triumph that repaid him for a good deal, but

     the tyranny of a schedule and timetables was a constant

     exasperation.



     Meantime, Roughing It had appeared and was selling abundantly.  Mark

     Twain, free of debt, and in pleasant circumstances, felt that the

     outlook was bright.  It became even more so when, in March, the

     second child, a little girl, Susy, was born, with no attending

     misfortunes.  But, then, in the early summer little Langdon died.

     It was seldom, during all of Mark Twain's life, that he enjoyed more

     than a brief period of unmixed happiness.



     It was in June of that year that Clemens wrote his first letter to

     William Dean Howells the first of several hundred that would follow

     in the years to come, and has in it something that is characteristic

     of nearly all the Clemens-Howells letters--a kind of tender

     playfulness that answered to something in Howells's make-up, his

     sense of humor, his wide knowledge of a humanity which he pictured

     so amusingly to the world.





                   To William Dean Howells, in Boston:



                                             HARTFORD, June 15, 1872.

FRIEND HOWELLS,--Could you tell me how I could get a copy of your

portrait as published in Hearth and Home?  I hear so much talk about it

as being among the finest works of art which have yet appeared in that

journal, that I feel a strong desire to see it.  Is it suitable for

framing?  I have written the publishers of H & H time and again, but they

say that the demand for the portrait immediately exhausted the edition

and now a copy cannot be had, even for the European demand, which has now

begun.  Bret Harte has been here, and says his family would not be

without that portrait for any consideration.  He says his children get up

in the night and yell for it.  I would give anything for a copy of that

portrait to put up in my parlor.  I have Oliver Wendell Holmes and Bret

Harte's, as published in Every Saturday, and of all the swarms that come

every day to gaze upon them none go away that are not softened and

humbled and made more resigned to the will of God.  If I had yours to put

up alongside of them, I believe the combination would bring more souls to

earnest reflection and ultimate conviction of their lost condition, than

any other kind of warning would.  Where in the nation can I get that

portrait?  Here are heaps of people that want it,--that need it.  There

is my uncle.  He wants a copy.  He is lying at the point of death.  He

has been lying at the point of death for two years.  He wants a copy--and

I want him to have a copy.  And I want you to send a copy to the man that

shot my dog.  I want to see if he is dead to every human instinct.



Now you send me that portrait.  I am sending you mine, in this letter;

and am glad to do it, for it has been greatly admired.  People who are

judges of art, find in the execution a grandeur which has not been

equalled in this country, and an expression which has not been approached

in any.

                                   Yrs truly,

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.



P. S.  62,000 copies of "Roughing It" sold and delivered in 4 months.





     The Clemens family did not spend the summer at Quarry Farm that

     year.  The sea air was prescribed for Mrs. Clemens and the baby, and

     they went to Saybrook, Connecticut, to Fenwick Hall.  Clemens wrote

     very little, though he seems to have planned Tom Sawyer, and perhaps

     made its earliest beginning, which was in dramatic form.



     His mind, however, was otherwise active.  He was always more or less

     given to inventions, and in his next letter we find a description of

     one which he brought to comparative perfection.



     He had also conceived the idea of another book of travel, and this

     was his purpose of a projected trip to England.





                      To Orion Clemens, in Hartford:



                                        FENWICK HALL, SAYBROOK, CONN.

                                        Aug. 11, 1872.

MY DEAR BRO.--I shall sail for England in the Scotia, Aug. 21.



But what I wish to put on record now, is my new invention--hence this

note, which you will preserve.  It is this--a self-pasting scrap-book

--good enough idea if some juggling tailor does not come along and ante-

date me a couple of months, as in the case of the elastic veststrap.



The nuisance of keeping a scrap-book is:  1.  One never has paste or gum

tragacanth handy;  2.  Mucilage won't stick, or stay, 4 weeks;

3.  Mucilage sucks out the ink and makes the scraps unreadable;

4.  To daub and paste 3 or 4 pages of scraps is tedious, slow, nasty and

tiresome.  My idea is this: Make a scrap-book with leaves veneered or

coated with gum-stickum of some kind; wet the page with sponge, brush,

rag or tongue, and dab on your scraps like postage stamps.



Lay on the gum in columns of stripes.



Each stripe of gum the length of say 20 ems, small pica, and as broad as

your finger; a blank about as broad as your finger between each 2

stripes--so in wetting the paper you need not wet any more of the gum

than your scrap or scraps will cover--then you may shut up the book and

the leaves won't stick together.



Preserve, also, the envelope of this letter--postmark ought to be good

evidence of the date of this great humanizing and civilizing invention.



I'll put it into Dan Slote's hands and tell him he must send you all over

America, to urge its use upon stationers and booksellers--so don't buy

into a newspaper.  The name of this thing is "Mark Twain's Self-Pasting

Scrapbook."



All well here.  Shall be up a P. M.  Tuesday.  Send the carriage.

                                   Yr Bro.

                                             S.  L.  CLEMENS.





     The Dan Slote of this letter is, of course, his old Quaker City

     shipmate, who was engaged in the blank-book business, the firm being

     Slote & Woodman, located at 119 and 121 William Street, New York.









XII.



LETTERS 1872-73.  MARK TWAIN IN ENGLAND.  LONDON HONORS.  ACQUAINTANCE

WITH DR. JOHN BROWN.  A LECTURE TRIUMPH.  "THE GILDED AGE"



     Clemens did, in fact, sail for England on the given date, and was

     lavishly received there.  All literary London joined in giving him a

     good time.  He had not as yet been received seriously by the older

     American men of letters, but England made no question as to his

     title to first rank.  Already, too, they classified him as of the

     human type of Lincoln, and reveled in him without stint.  Howells

     writes: "In England, rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him.

     Lord Mayors, Lord Chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were

     his hosts."



     He was treated so well and enjoyed it all so much that he could not

     write a book--the kind of book he had planned.  One could not poke

     fun at a country or a people that had welcomed him with open arms.

     He made plenty of notes, at first, but presently gave up the book

     idea and devoted himself altogether to having a good time.



     He had one grievance--a publisher by the name of Hotten, a sort of

     literary harpy, of which there were a great number in those days of

     defective copyright, not merely content with pilfering his early

     work, had reprinted, under the name of Mark Twain, the work of a

     mixed assortment of other humorists, an offensive volume bearing the

     title, Screamers and Eye-openers, by Mark Twain.



     They besieged him to lecture in London, and promised him overflowing

     houses.  Artemus Ward, during his last days, had earned London by

     storm with his platform humor, and they promised Mark Twain even

     greater success.  For some reason, however, he did not welcome the

     idea; perhaps there was too much gaiety.  To Mrs. Clemens he wrote:





                      To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford:



                                             LONDON, Sep. 15, 1872.

Livy, darling, everybody says lecture-lecture-lecture--but I have not the

least idea of doing it--certainly not at present.  Mr. Dolby, who took

Dickens to America, is coming to talk business to me tomorrow, though I

have sent him word once before, that I can't be hired to talk here,

because I have no time to spare.



There is too much sociability--I do not get along fast enough with work.

Tomorrow I lunch with Mr. Toole and a Member of Parliament--Toole is the

most able Comedian of the day.  And then I am done for a while.  On

Tuesday I mean to hang a card to my keybox, inscribed--"Gone out of the

City for a week"--and then I shall go to work and work hard.  One can't

be caught in a hive of 4,000,000 people, like this.



I have got such a perfectly delightful razor.  I have a notion to buy

some for Charley, Theodore and Slee--for I know they have no such razors

there.  I have got a neat little watch-chain for Annie--$20.



I love you my darling.  My love to all of you.

                                                  SAML.





     That Mark Twain should feel and privately report something of his

     triumphs we need not wonder at.  Certainly he was never one to give

     himself airs, but to have the world's great literary center paying

     court to him, who only ten years before had been penniless and

     unknown, and who once had been a barefoot Tom Sawyer in Hannibal,

     was quite startling.  It is gratifying to find evidence of human

     weakness in the following heart-to-heart letter to his publisher,

     especially in view of the relating circumstances.





                      To Elisha Bliss, in Hartford:



                                             LONDON, Sept. 28, 1872.

FRIEND BLISS,--I have been received in a sort of tremendous way, tonight,

by the brains of London, assembled at the annual dinner of the Sheriffs

of London--mine being (between you and me) a name which was received with

a flattering outburst of spontaneous applause when the long list of

guests was called.



I might have perished on the spot but for the friendly support and

assistance of my excellent friend Sir John Bennett--and I want you to

paste the enclosed in a couple of the handsomest copies of the

"Innocents" and "Roughing It," and send them to him.  His address is



          "Sir John Bennett,

               Cheapside,

                    London."

                         Yrs Truly

                              S. L. CLEMENS.





     The "relating circumstances" were these: At the abovementioned

     dinner there had been a roll-call of the distinguished guests

     present, and each name had been duly applauded.  Clemens, conversing

     in a whisper with his neighbor, Sir John Bennett, did not give very

     close attention to the names, applauding mechanically with the

     others.



     Finally, a name was read that brought out a vehement hand-clapping.

     Mark Twain, not to be outdone in cordiality, joined vigorously, and

     kept his hands going even after the others finished.  Then,

     remarking the general laughter, he whispered to Sir John: "Whose

     name was that we were just applauding?"



     "Mark Twain's."



     We may believe that the "friendly support" of Sir John Bennett was

     welcome for the moment.  But the incident could do him no harm; the

     diners regarded it as one of his jokes, and enjoyed him all the more

     for it.



     He was ready to go home by November, but by no means had he had

     enough of England.  He really had some thought of returning there

     permanently.  In a letter to Mrs. Crane, at Quarry Farm, he wrote:



     "If you and Theodore will come over in the Spring with Livy and me,

     and spend the summer you will see a country that is so beautiful

     that you will be obliged to believe in Fairyland..... and Theodore

     can browse with me among dusty old dens that look now as they looked

     five hundred years ago; and puzzle over books in the British Museum

     that were made before Christ was born; and in the customs of their

     public dinners, and the ceremonies of every official act, and the

     dresses of a thousand dignitaries, trace the speech and manners of

     all the centuries that have dragged their lagging decades over

     England since the Heptarchy fell asunder.  I would a good deal

     rather live here if I could get the rest of you over."



     In a letter home, to his mother and sister, we get a further picture

     of his enjoyment.





                  To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett:



                                             LONDON, Nov. 6, 1872.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--I have been so everlasting busy that I

couldn't write--and moreover I have been so unceasingly lazy that I

couldn't have written anyhow.  I came here to take notes for a book, but

I haven't done much but attend dinners and make speeches.  But have had a

jolly good time and I do hate to go away from these English folks; they

make a stranger feel entirely at home--and they laugh so easily that it

is a comfort to make after-dinner speeches here.  I have made hundreds of

friends; and last night in the crush of the opening of the New Guild-hall

Library and Museum, I was surprised to meet a familiar face every few

steps.  Nearly 4,000 people, of both sexes, came and went during the

evening, so I had a good opportunity to make a great many new

acquaintances.



Livy is willing to come here with me next April and stay several months

--so I am going home next Tuesday.  I would sail on Saturday, but that is

the day of the Lord Mayor's annual grand state dinner, when they say 900

of the great men of the city sit down to table, a great many of them in

their fine official and court paraphernalia, so I must not miss it.

However, I may yet change my mind and sail Saturday.  I am looking at a

fine Magic lantern which will cost a deal of money, and if I buy it Sammy

may come and learn to make the gas and work the machinery, and paint

pictures for it on glass.  I mean to give exhibitions for charitable

purposes in Hartford, and charge a dollar a head.

                    In a hurry,

                              Ys affly

                                        SAM.





     He sailed November 12th on the Batavia, arriving in New York two

     weeks later.  There had been a presidential election in his absence.

     General Grant had defeated Horace Greeley, a result, in some measure

     at least, attributed to the amusing and powerful pictures of the

     cartoonist, Thomas Nast.  Mark Twain admired Greeley's talents, but

     he regarded him as poorly qualified for the nation's chief

     executive.  He wrote:





                    To Th. Nast, in Morristown, N. J.:



                                             HARTFORD, Nov. 1872.

Nast, you more than any other man have won a prodigious victory for

Grant--I mean, rather, for civilization and progress.  Those pictures

were simply marvelous, and if any man in the land has a right to hold his

head up and be honestly proud of his share in this year's vast events

that man is unquestionably yourself.  We all do sincerely honor you, and

are proud of you.

                                   MARK TWAIN.





     Perhaps Mark Twain was too busy at this time to write letters.  His

     success in England had made him more than ever popular in America,

     and he could by no means keep up with the demands on him.  In

     January he contributed to the New York Tribune some letters on the

     Sandwich Islands, but as these were more properly articles they do

     not seem to belong here.



     He refused to go on the lecture circuit, though he permitted Redpath

     to book him for any occasional appearance, and it is due to one of

     these special engagements that we have the only letter preserved

     from this time.  It is to Howells, and written with that

     exaggeration with which he was likely to embellish his difficulties.

     We are not called upon to believe that there were really any such

     demonstrations as those ascribed to Warner and himself.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                   FARMINGTON AVE, Hartford Feb. 27.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I am in a sweat and Warner is in another.  I told

Redpath some time ago I would lecture in Boston any two days he might

choose provided they were consecutive days--



I never dreamed of his choosing days during Lent since that was his

special horror--but all at once he telegraphs me, and hollers at me in

ail manner of ways that I am booked for Boston March 5 of all days in the

year--and to make matters just as mixed and uncertain as possible, I

can't find out to save my life whether he means to lecture me on the 6th

or not.



Warner's been in here swearing like a lunatic, and saying he had written

you to come on the 4th,--and I said, "You leather-head, if I talk in

Boston both afternoon and evening March 5, I'll have to go to Boston the

4th,"--and then he just kicked up his heels and went off cursing after a

fashion I never heard of before.



Now let's just leave this thing to Providence for 24 hours--you bet it

will come out all right.

                                   Yours ever

                                             MARK.





     He was writing a book with Warner at this time--The Gilded Age--

     the two authors having been challenged by their wives one night at

     dinner to write a better book than the current novels they had been

     discussing with some severity.  Clemens already had a story in his

     mind, and Warner agreed to collaborate in the writing.  It was begun

     without delay.  Clemens wrote the first three hundred and ninety-

     nine pages, and read there aloud to Warner, who took up the story at

     this point and continued it through twelve chapters, after which

     they worked alternately, and with great enjoyment.  They also worked

     rapidly, and in April the story was completed.  For a collaboration

     by two men so different in temperament and literary method it was a

     remarkable performance.



     Another thing Mark Twain did that winter was to buy some land on

     Farmington Avenue and begin the building of a home.  He had by no

     means given up returning to England, and made his plans to sail with

     Mrs. Clemens and Susy in May.  Miss Clara Spaulding, of Elmira--

     [Later Mrs. John B. Stanchfield, of New York.]--a girlhood friend of

     Mrs. Clemens--was to accompany them.



     The Daily Graphic heard of the proposed journey, and wrote, asking

     for a farewell word.  His characteristic reply is the only letter of

     any kind that has survived from that spring.





         To the Editor of "The Daily Graphic," in New York City:



                                        HARTFORD, Apl. 17, 1873.

ED. GRAPHIC,--Your note is received.  If the following two lines which I

have cut from it are your natural handwriting, then I understand you to

ask me "for a farewell letter in the name of the American people."  Bless

you, the joy of the American people is just a little premature; I haven't

gone yet.  And what is more, I am not going to stay, when I do go.



Yes, it is true.  I am only going to remain beyond the sea, six months,

that is all.  I love stir and excitement; and so the moment the spring

birds begin to sing, and the lagging weariness of summer to threaten,

I grow restless, I get the fidgets; I want to pack off somewhere where

there's something going on.  But you know how that is--you must have felt

that way.  This very day I saw the signs in the air of the coming

dullness, and I said to myself, "How glad I am that I have already

chartered a steamship!"  There was absolutely nothing in the morning

papers.  You can see for yourself what the telegraphic headings were:



     BY TELEGRAPH



A Father Killed by His Son



A Bloody Fight in Kentucky



A Court House Fired, and

Negroes Therein Shot

while Escaping



A Louisiana Massacre



An Eight-year-old murderer

Two to Three Hundred Men Roasted Alive!



A Town in a State of General Riot



A Lively Skirmish in Indiana

(and thirty other similar headings.)



The items under those headings all bear date yesterday, Apl. 16 (refer to

your own paper)--and I give you my word of honor that that string of

commonplace stuff was everything there was in the telegraphic columns

that a body could call news.  Well, said I to myself this is getting

pretty dull; this is getting pretty dry; there don't appear to be

anything going on anywhere; has this progressive nation gone to sleep?

Have I got to stand another month of this torpidity before I can begin to

browse among the lively capitals of Europe?



But never mind-things may revive while I am away.  During the last two

months my next-door neighbor, Chas. Dudley Warner, has dropped his "Back-

Log Studies," and he and I have written a bulky novel in partnership.

He has worked up the fiction and I have hurled in the facts.  I consider

it one of the most astonishing novels that ever was written.  Night after

night I sit up reading it over and over again and crying.  It will be

published early in the Fall, with plenty of pictures.  Do you consider

this an advertisement?--and if so, do you charge for such things when a

man is your friend?

                         Yours truly,

                                   SAML.  L.  CLEMENS,

                                   "MARK TWAIN,"





     An amusing, even if annoying, incident happened about the time of

     Mark Twain's departure.  A man named Chew related to Twichell a most

     entertaining occurrence.  Twichell saw great possibilities in it,

     and suggested that Mark Twain be allowed to make a story of it,

     sharing the profits with Chew.  Chew agreed, and promised to send

     the facts, carefully set down.  Twichell, in the mean time, told the

     story to Clemens, who was delighted with it and strongly tempted to

     write it at once, while he was in the spirit, without waiting on

     Chew.  Fortunately, he did not do so, for when Chew's material came

     it was in the form of a clipping, the story having been already

     printed in some newspaper.  Chew's knowledge of literary ethics

     would seem to have been slight.  He thought himself entitled to

     something under the agreement with Twichell.  Mark Twain, by this

     time in London, naturally had a different opinion.





                   To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                                  LONDON, June 9, '73.

DEAR OLD JOE,--I consider myself wholly at liberty to decline to pay Chew

anything, and at the same time strongly tempted to sue him into the

bargain for coming so near ruining me.  If he hadn't happened to send me

that thing in print, I would have used the story (like an innocent fool)

and would straightway have been hounded to death as a plagiarist.  It

would have absolutely destroyed me. I cannot conceive of a man being such

a hopeless ass (after serving as a legislative reporter, too) as to

imagine that I or any other literary man in his senses would consent to

chew over old stuff that had already been in print.  If that man wern't

an infant in swaddling clothes, his only reply to our petition would have

been, "It has been in print."  It makes me as mad as the very Old Harry

every time I think of Mr. Chew and the frightfully narrow escape I have

had at his hands.  Confound Mr. Chew, with all my heart!  I'm willing

that he should have ten dollars for his trouble of warming over his cold

victuals--cheerfully willing to that--but no more.  If I had had him near

when his letter came, I would have got out my tomahawk and gone for him.

He didn't tell the story half as well as you did, anyhow.



I wish to goodness you were here this moment--nobody in our parlor but

Livy and me,--and a very good view of London to the fore.  We have a

luxuriously ample suite of apartments in the Langham Hotel, 3rd floor,

our bedroom looking straight up Portland Place and our parlor having a

noble array of great windows looking out upon both streets (Portland

Place and the crook that joins it to Regent Street.)



9 P.M.  Full twilight--rich sunset tints lingering in the west.



I am not going to write anything--rather tell it when I get back.  I love

you and Harmony, and that is all the fresh news I've got, anyway.  And I

mean to keep that fresh all the time.

                                   Lovingly

                                             MARK.



P. S.--Am luxuriating in glorious old Pepy's Diary, and smoking.





     Letters are exceedingly scarce through all this period.  Mark Twain,

     now on his second visit to London, was literally overwhelmed with

     honors and entertainment; his rooms at the Langham were like a

     court.  Such men as Robert Browning, Turgenieff, Sir John Millais,

     and Charles Kingsley hastened to call.  Kingsley and others gave him

     dinners.  Mrs. Clemens to her sister wrote: "It is perfectly

     discouraging to try to write you."



     The continuous excitement presently told on her.  In July all

     further engagements were canceled, and Clemens took his little

     family to Scotland, for quiet and rest.  They broke the journey at

     York, and it was there that Mark Twain wrote the only letter

     remaining from this time.





       Part of a letter to Mrs. Jervis Langdon, of Elmira, N.  Y.:



For the present we shall remain in this queer old walled town, with its

crooked, narrow lanes, that tell us of their old day that knew no wheeled

vehicles; its plaster-and-timber dwellings, with upper stories far

overhanging the street, and thus marking their date, say three hundred

years ago; the stately city walls, the castellated gates, the ivy-grown,

foliage-sheltered, most noble and picturesque ruin of St. Mary's Abbey,

suggesting their date, say five hundred years ago, in the heart of

Crusading times and the glory of English chivalry and romance; the vast

Cathedral of York, with its worn carvings and quaintly pictured windows,

preaching of still remoter days; the outlandish names of streets and

courts and byways that stand as a record and a memorial, all these

centuries, of Danish dominion here in still earlier times; the hint here

and there of King Arthur and his knights and their bloody fights with

Saxon oppressors round about this old city more than thirteen hundred

years gone by; and, last of all, the melancholy old stone coffins and

sculptured inscriptions, a venerable arch and a hoary tower of stone that

still remain and are kissed by the sun and caressed by the shadows every

day, just as the sun and the shadows have kissed and caressed them every

lagging day since the Roman Emperor's soldiers placed them here in the

times when Jesus the Son of Mary walked the streets of Nazareth a youth,

with no more name or fame than the Yorkshire boy who is loitering down

this street this moment.



     Their destination was Edinburgh, where they remained a month.  Mrs.

     Clemens's health gave way on their arrival there, and her husband,

     knowing the name of no other physician in the place, looked up Dr.

     John Brown, author of Rab and His Friends, and found in him not only

     a skilful practitioner, but a lovable companion, to whom they all

     became deeply attached.  Little Susy, now seventeen months old,

     became his special favorite.  He named her Megalops, because of her

     great eyes.



     Mrs. Clemens regained her strength and they returned to London.

     Clemens, still urged to lecture, finally agreed with George Dolby to

     a week's engagement, and added a promise that after taking his wife

     and daughter back to America he would return immediately for a more

     extended course.  Dolby announced him to appear at the Queen's

     Concert Rooms, Hanover Square, for the week of October 13-18, his

     lecture to be the old Sandwich Islands talk that seven years before

     had brought him his first success.  The great hall, the largest in

     London, was thronged at each appearance, and the papers declared

     that Mark Twain had no more than "whetted the public appetite" for

     his humor.  Three days later, October 1873, Clemens, with his

     little party, sailed for home.  Half-way across the ocean he wrote

     the friend they had left in Scotland:





                     To Dr. John Brown, in Edinburgh:



                                        MID-ATLANTIC, Oct. 30, 1873.

OUR DEAR FRIEND THE DOCTOR,--We have plowed a long way over the sea,

and there's twenty-two hundred miles of restless water between us, now,

besides the railway stretch.  And yet you are so present with us, so

close to us that a span and a whisper would bridge the distance.



The first three days were stormy, and wife, child, maid, and Miss

Spaulding were all sea-sick 25 hours out of the 24, and I was sorry I

ever started.  However, it has been smooth, and balmy, and sunny and

altogether lovely for a day or two now, and at night there is a broad

luminous highway stretching over the sea to the moon, over which the

spirits of the sea are traveling up and down all through the secret night

and having a genuine good time, I make no doubt.



Today they discovered a "collie" on board!  I find (as per advertisement

which I sent you) that they won't carry dogs in these ships at any price.

This one has been concealed up to this time.  Now his owner has to pay

L10 or heave him overboard.  Fortunately the doggie is a performing

doggie and the money will be paid.  So after all it was just as well you

didn't intrust your collie to us.



A poor little child died at midnight and was buried at dawn this morning

--sheeted and shotted, and sunk in the middle of the lonely ocean in

water three thousand fathoms deep.  Pity the poor mother.

                                        With our love.

                                                  S. L. CLEMENS.





     Mark Twain was back in London, lecturing again at the Queen's

     Concert Rooms, after barely a month's absence.  Charles Warren

     Stoddard, whom he had known in California, shared his apartment at

     the Langham, and acted as his secretary--a very necessary office,

     for he was besieged by callers and bombarded with letters.



     He remained in London two months, lecturing steadily at Hanover

     Square to full houses.  It is unlikely that there is any other

     platform record to match it.  One letter of this period has been

     preserved.  It is written to Twichell, near the end of his

     engagement.





                   To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                             LONDON, Jan. 5 1874.

MY DEAR OLD JOE,--I knew you would be likely to graduate into an ass if

I came away; and so you have--if you have stopped smoking.  However, I

have a strong faith that it is not too late, yet, and that the

judiciously managed influence of a bad example will fetch you back again.



I wish you had written me some news--Livy tells me precious little.  She

mainly writes to hurry me home and to tell me how much she respects me:

but she's generally pretty slow on news.  I had a letter from her along

with yours, today, but she didn't tell me the book is out.  However, it's

all right.  I hope to be home 20 days from today, and then I'll see her,

and that will make up for a whole year's dearth of news.  I am right down

grateful that she is looking strong and "lovelier than ever."  I only

wish I could see her look her level best, once--I think it would be a

vision.



I have just spent a good part of this day browsing through the Royal

Academy Exhibition of Landseer's paintings.  They fill four or five great

salons, and must number a good many hundreds.  This is the only

opportunity ever to see them, because the finest of them belong to the

queen and she keeps them in her private apartments.  Ah, they're

wonderfully beautiful!  There are such rich moonlights and dusks in "The

Challenge" and "The Combat;" and in that long flight of birds across a

lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or sunrise--for no man can ever tell

tother from which in a picture, except it has the filmy morning mist

breathing itself up from the water).  And there is such a grave

analytical profundity in the faces of "The Connoisseurs;" and such pathos

in the picture of the fawn suckling its dead mother, on a snowy waste,

with only the blood in the footprints to hint that she is not asleep.

And the way he makes animals absolute flesh and blood--insomuch that if

the room were darkened ever so little and a motionless living animal

placed beside a painted one, no man could tell which was which.



I interrupted myself here, to drop a line to Shirley Brooks and suggest

a cartoon for Punch.  It was this.  In one of the Academy salons (in the

suite where these pictures are), a fine bust of Landseer stands on a

pedestal in the centre of the room.  I suggest that some of Landseer's

best known animals be represented as having come down out of their frames

in the moonlight and grouped themselves about the bust in mourning

attitudes.



Well, old man, I am powerful glad to hear from you and shall be powerful

glad to see you and Harmony.  I am not going to the provinces because I

cannot get halls that are large enough.  I always felt cramped in Hanover

Square Rooms, but I find that everybody here speaks with awe and respect

of that prodigious place, and wonder that I could fill it so long.



I am hoping to be back in 20 days, but I have so much to go home to and

enjoy with a jubilant joy, that it seems hardly possible that it can ever

come to pass in so uncertain a world as this.



I have read the novel--[The Gilded Age, published during his absence,

December, 1873.]--here, and I like it.  I have made no inquiries about

it, though.  My interest in a book ceases with the printing of it.

                                   With a world of love,

                                             SAML.









XIII.



LETTERS 1874.  HARTFORD AND ELMIRA.  A NEW STUDY.  BEGINNING "TOM

SAWYER."  THE SELLERS PLAY.



Naturally Redpath would not give him any peace now.  His London success

must not be wasted.  At first his victim refused point-blank, and with

great brevity.  But he was overborne and persuaded, and made occasional

appearances, wiring at last this final defiant word:





                  Telegram to James Redpath, in Boston:



                                        HARTFORD, March 3, 1874.

JAMES REDPATH,--Why don't you congratulate me?



I never expect to stand on a lecture platform again after Thursday night.

                                        MARK.





     That he was glad to be home again we may gather from a letter sent

     at this time to Doctor Brown, of Edinburgh.





                     To Dr. John Brown, in Edinburgh:



                                        FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD

                                        Feby.  28, 1874.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--We are all delighted with your commendations of the

Gilded Age-and the more so because some of our newspapers have set forth

the opinion that Warner really wrote the book and I only added my name to

the title page in order to give it a larger sale.  I wrote the first

eleven chapters, every word.  and every line.  I also wrote chapters 24,

25, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 21, 42,  43,  45, 51, 52.  53, 57,

59, 60, 61, 62, and portions of 35, 49 and 56.  So I wrote 32 of the 63

chapters entirely and part of 3 others beside.



The fearful financial panic hit the book heavily, for we published it in

the midst of it.  But nevertheless in the 8 weeks that have now elapsed

since the day we published, we have sold 40,000 copies; which gives

L3,000 royalty to be divided between the authors.  This is really the

largest two-months' sale which any American book has ever achieved

(unless one excepts the cheaper editions of Uncle Tom's Cabin).  The

average price of our book is 16 shillings a copy--Uncle Tom was 2

shillings a copy.  But for the panic our sale would have been doubled,

I verily believe.  I do not believe the sale will ultimately go over

100,000 copies.



I shipped to you, from Liverpool, Barley's Illustrations of Judd's

"Margaret" (the waiter at the Adelphi Hotel agreeing to ship it securely

per parcel delivery,) and I do hope it did not miscarry, for we in

America think a deal of Barley's--[Felix Octavius Carr barley, 1822-1888,

illustrator of the works of Irving, Cooper, etc.  Probably the most

distinguished American illustrator of his time.]--work.  I shipped the

novel (" Margaret") to you from here a week ago.



Indeed I am thankful for the wife and the child--and if there is one

individual creature on all this footstool who is more thoroughly and

uniformly and unceasingly happy than I am I defy the world to produce him

and prove him.  In my opinion, he doesn't exist.  I was a mighty rough,

coarse, unpromising subject when Livy took charge of me 4 years ago, and

I may still be, to the rest of the world, but not to her.  She has made a

very creditable job of me.



Success to the Mark Twain Club!-and the novel shibboleth of the Whistle.

Of course any member rising to speak would be required to preface his

remark with a keen respectful whistle at the chair-the chair recognizing

the speaker with an answering shriek, and then as the speech proceeded

its gravity and force would be emphasized and its impressiveness

augmented by the continual interjection of whistles in place of

punctuation-pauses; and the applause of the audience would be manifested

in the same way ....



They've gone to luncheon, and I must follow.  With strong love from us

both.

                    Your friend,

                                   SAML. L. CLEMENS.





     These were the days when the Howells and Clemens families began

     visiting back and forth between Boston and Hartford, and sometimes

     Aldrich came, though less frequently, and the gatherings at the

     homes of Warner and Clemens were full of never-to-be-forgotten

     happiness.  Of one such visit Howells wrote:



     "In the good-fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two such

     days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round.  There was

     constant running in and out of friendly houses, where the lively

     hosts and guests called one another by their christian names or

     nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at

     doors.  Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he

     satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another

     sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which

     enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance."



     It was the delight of such a visit that kept Clemens constantly

     urging its repetition.  One cannot but feel the genuine affection of

     these letters.





                      To W. D.  Howells, in Boston:



                                                  Mch. 1, 1876.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Now you will find us the most reasonable people in the

world.  We had thought of precipitating upon you George Warner and wife

one day; Twichell and his jewel of a wife another day, and Chas. Perkins

and wife another.  Only those--simply members of our family, they are.

But I'll close the door against them all--which will "fix" all of the lot

except Twichell, who will no more hesitate to climb in at the back window

than nothing.



And you shall go to bed when you please, get up when you please, talk

when you please, read when you please.  Mrs. Howells may even go to New

York Saturday if she feels that she must, but if some gentle, unannoying

coaxing can beguile her into putting that off a few days, we shall be

more than glad, for I do wish she and Mrs. Clemens could have a good

square chance to get acquainted with each other.  But first and last and

all the time, we want you to feel untrammeled and wholly free from

restraint, here.



The date suits--all dates suit.

                              Yrs ever

                                        MARK.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                         FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD, Mch. 20, 1876.

DEAR HOWELLS,--You or Aldrich or both of you must come to Hartford to

live.  Mr. Hall, who lives in the house next to Mrs. Stowe's (just where

we drive in to go to our new house) will sell for $16,000 or $17,000.

The lot is 85 feet front and 150 deep--long time and easy payments on the

purchase?  You can do your work just as well here as in Cambridge, can't

you?  Come, will one of you boys buy that house?  Now say yes.



Mrs. Clemens is an invalid yet, but is getting along pretty fairly.



We send best regards.

                              MARK.





     April found the Clemens family in Elmira.  Mrs. Clemens was not

     over-strong, and the cares of house-building were many.  They went

     early, therefore, remaining at the Langdon home in the city until

     Quarry Farm should feel a touch of warmer sun, Clemens wrote the

     news to Doctor Brown.





                     To Dr. John Brown, in Edinburgh:



                                   ELMIRA, N. Y., April 27, '86.

DEAR DOCTOR,--This town is in the interior of the State of New York--

and was my wife's birth-place.  We are here to spend the whole summer.

Although it is so near summer, we had a great snow-storm yesterday, and

one the day before.  This is rather breaking in upon our plans, as it may

keep us down here in the valley a trifle longer than we desired.  It gets

fearfully hot here in the summer, so we spend our summers on top of a

hill 6 or 700 feet high, about two or three miles from here--it never

gets hot up there.



Mrs. Clemens is pretty strong, and so is the "little wifie" barring a

desperate cold in the head the child grows in grace and beauty

marvellously.  I wish the nations of the earth would combine in a baby

show and give us a chance to compete.  I must try to find one of her

latest photographs to enclose in this.  And this reminds me that Mrs.

Clemens keeps urging me to ask you for your photograph and last night she

said, "and be sure to ask him for a photograph of his sister, and Jock-

but say Master Jock--do not be headless and forget that courtesy; he is

Jock in our memories and our talk, but he has a right to his title when a

body uses his name in a letter."  Now I have got it all in--I can't have

made any mistake this time.  Miss Clara Spaulding looked in, a moment,

yesterday morning, as bright and good as ever.  She would like to lay

her love at your feet if she knew I was writing--as would also fifty

friends of ours whom you have never seen, and whose homage is as fervent

as if the cold and clouds and darkness of a mighty sea did not lie

between their hearts and you.  Poor old Rab had not many "friends" at

first, but if all his friends of today could gather to his grave from the

four corners of the earth what a procession there would be!  And Rab's

friends are your friends.



I am going to work when we get on the hill-till then I've got to lie

fallow, albeit against my will.  We join in love to you and yours.

                                   Your friend ever,

                                             SAML. L. CLEMENS.



P. S.  I enclose a specimen of villainy.  A man pretends to be my brother

and my lecture agent--gathers a great audience together in a city more

than a thousand miles from here, and then pockets the money and elopes,

leaving the audience to wait for the imaginary lecturer!  I am after him

with the law.





     It was a historic summer at the Farm.  A new baby arrived in June; a

     new study was built for Mark Twain by Mrs. Crane, on the hillside

     near the old quarry; a new book was begun in it--The Adventures of

     Tom Sawyer--and a play, the first that Mark Twain had really

     attempted, was completed--the dramatization of The Gilded Age.



     An early word went to Hartford of conditions at the Farm.





                 To Rev. and Mrs. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                             ELMIRA, June 11, 1874.



MY DEAR OLD JOE AND HARMONY,--The baby is here and is the great American

Giantess--weighing 7 3/4 pounds.  We had to wait a good long time for

her, but she was full compensation when she did come.



The Modoc was delighted with it, and gave it her doll at once.  There is

nothing selfish about the Modoc.  She is fascinated with the new baby.

The Modoc rips and tears around out doors, most of the time, and

consequently is as hard as a pine knot and as brown as an Indian.  She

is bosom friend to all the ducks, chickens, turkeys and guinea hens on

the place.  Yesterday as she marched along the winding path that leads up

the hill through the red clover beds to the summer-house, there was a

long procession of these fowls stringing contentedly after her, led by a

stately rooster who can look over the Modoc's head.  The devotion of

these vassals has been purchased with daily largess of Indian meal, and

so the Modoc, attended by her bodyguard, moves in state wherever she

goes.



Susie Crane has built the loveliest study for me, you ever saw.  It is

octagonal, with a peaked roof, each octagon filled with a spacious

window, and it sits perched in complete isolation on top of an elevation

that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant

blue hills.  It is a cosy nest, with just room in it for a sofa and a

table and three or four chairs--and when the storms sweep down the remote

valley and the lightning flashes above the hills beyond, and the rain

beats upon the roof over my head, imagine the luxury of it!  It stands

500 feet above the valley and 2 1/2 miles from it.



However one must not write all day.  We send continents of love to you

and yours.

                         Affectionately

                                        MARK.





     We have mentioned before that Clemens had settled his mother and

     sister at Fredonia, New York, and when Mrs. Clemens was in condition

     to travel he concluded to pay them a visit.



     It proved an unfortunate journey; the hot weather was hard on Mrs.

     Clemens, and harder still, perhaps, on Mark Twain's temper.  At any

     period of his life a bore exasperated him, and in these earlier days

     he was far more likely to explode than in his mellower age.  Remorse

     always followed--the price he paid was always costly.  We cannot

     know now who was the unfortunate that invited the storm, but in the

     next letter we get the echoes of it and realize something of its

     damage.





           To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in Fredonia:



                                             ELMIRA, Aug. 15.

MX DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--I came away from Fredonia ashamed of myself;

--almost too much humiliated to hold up my head and say good-bye.  For I

began to comprehend how much harm my conduct might do you socially in

your village.  I would have gone to that detestable oyster-brained bore

and apologized for my inexcusable rudeness to him, but that I was

satisfied he was of too small a calibre to know how to receive an apology

with magnanimity.



Pamela appalled me by saying people had hinted that they wished to visit

Livy when she came, but that she had given them no encouragement.

I feared that those people would merely comprehend that their courtesies

were not wanted, and yet not know exactly why they were not wanted.



I came away feeling that in return for your constant and tireless efforts

to secure our bodily comfort and make our visit enjoyable, I had basely

repaid you by making you sad and sore-hearted and leaving you so.  And

the natural result has fallen to me likewise--for a guilty conscience has

harassed me ever since, and I have not had one short quarter of an hour

of peace to this moment.



You spoke of Middletown.  Why not go there and live?  Mr. Crane says it

is only about a hundred miles this side of New York on the Erie road.

The fact that one or two of you might prefer to live somewhere else is

not a valid objection--there are no 4 people who would all choose the

same place--so it will be vain to wait for the day when your tastes shall

be a unit.  I seriously fear that our visit has damaged you in Fredonia,

and so I wish you were out of it.



The baby is fat and strong, and Susie the same.  Susie was charmed with

the donkey and the doll.

                    Ys affectionately

                                        SAML.



P. S.--DEAR MA AND PAMELA--I am mainly grieved because I have been rude

to a man who has been kind to you--and if you ever feel a desire to

apologize to him for me, you may be sure that I will endorse the apology,

no matter how strong it may be.  I went to his bank to apologize to him,

but my conviction was strong that he was not man enough to know how to

take an apology and so I did not make it.





     William Dean Howells was in those days writing those vividly

     realistic, indeed photographic stories which fixed his place among

     American men of letters.  He had already written 'Their Wedding

     Journey' and 'A Chance Acquaintance' when 'A Foregone Conclusion'

     appeared.  For the reason that his own work was so different, and

     perhaps because of his fondness for the author, Clemens always

     greatly admired the books of Howells.  Howells's exact observation

     and his gift for human detail seemed marvelous to Mark Twain, who

     with a bigger brush was inclined to record the larger rather than

     the minute aspects of life.  The sincerity of his appreciation of

     Howells, however, need not be questioned, nor, for that matter, his

     detestation of Scott.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             ELMIRA, Aug. 22, 1874.

DEAR HOWELLS,--I have just finished reading the 'Foregone Conclusion' to

Mrs. Clemens and we think you have even outdone yourself.  I should think

that this must be the daintiest, truest, most admirable workmanship that

was ever put on a story.  The creatures of God do not act out their

natures more unerringly than yours do.  If your genuine stories can die,

I wonder by what right old Walter Scott's artificialities shall continue

to live.



I brought Mrs. Clemens back from her trip in a dreadfully broken-down

condition--so by the doctor's orders we unpacked the trunks sorrowfully

to lie idle here another month instead of going at once to Hartford and

proceeding to furnish the new house which is now finished.  We hate to

have it go longer desolate and tenantless, but cannot help it.



By and by, if the madam gets strong again, we are hoping to have the

Grays there, and you and the Aldrich households, and Osgood, down to

engage in an orgy with them.

                              Ys Ever

                                        MARK





     Howells was editor of the Atlantic by this time, and had been urging

     Clemens to write something suitable for that magazine.  He had done

     nothing, however, until this summer at Quarry Farm.  There, one

     night in the moonlight, Mrs. Crane's colored cook, who had been a

     slave, was induced to tell him her story.  It was exactly the story

     to appeal to Mark Twain, and the kind of thing he could write.  He

     set it down next morning, as nearly in her own words and manner as

     possible, without departing too far from literary requirements.



     He decided to send this to Howells.  He did not regard it very

     highly, but he would take the chance.  An earlier offering to the

     magazine had been returned.  He sent the "True Story," with a brief

     note:





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             ELMIRA, Sept. 2, '74.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--.....I enclose also a "True Story" which has no humor

in it.  You can pay as lightly as you choose for that, if you want it,

for it is rather out of my line.  I have not altered the old colored

woman's story except to begin at the beginning, instead of the middle, as

she did--and traveled both ways.....

                                   Yrs Ever

                                             MARK.



     But Howells was delighted with it.  He referred to its "realest kind

     of black talk," and in another place added, "This little story

     delights me more and more.  I wish you had about forty of them."



     Along with the "True Story" Mark Twain had sent the "Fable for Good

     Old Boys and Girls"; but this Howells returned, not, as he said,

     because he didn't like it, but because the Atlantic on matters of

     religion was just in that "Good Lord, Good Devil condition when a

     little fable like yours wouldn't leave it a single Presbyterian,

     Baptist, Unitarian, Episcopalian, Methodist, or Millerite paying

     subscriber, while all the deadheads would stick to it and abuse it

     in the denominational newspapers!"



     But the shorter MS. had been only a brief diversion.  Mark Twain was

     bowling along at a book and a play.  The book was Tom Sawyer, as

     already mentioned, and the play a dramatization from The Gilded Age.

     Clemens had all along intended to dramatize the story of Colonel

     Sellers, and was one day thunderstruck to receive word from

     California that a San Francisco dramatist had appropriated his

     character in a play written for John T. Raymond.  Clemens had taken

     out dramatic copyright on the book, and immediately stopped the

     performance by telegraph.  A correspondence between the author and

     the dramatist followed, leading to a friendly arrangement by which

     the latter agreed to dispose of his version to Mark Twain.  A good

     deal of discussion from time to time having arisen over the

     authorship of the Sellers play, as presented by Raymond, certain

     among the letters that follow may be found of special interest.

     Meanwhile we find Clemens writing to Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh,

     on these matters and events in general.  The book MS., which he

     mentions as having put aside, was not touched again for nearly a

     year.





                     To Dr. John Brown, in Edinburgh:



                                   QUARRY FARM, NEAR ELMIRA, N. Y.

                                   Sept.  4, 1874.

DEAR FRIEND,--I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an

average, for sometime now, on a book (a story) and consequently have been

so wrapped up in it and so dead to anything else, that I have fallen

mighty short in letter-writing.  But night before last I discovered that

that day's chapter was a failure, in conception, moral truth to nature,

and execution--enough blemish to impair the excellence of almost any

chapter--and so I must burn up the day's work and do it all over again.

It was plain that I had worked myself out, pumped myself dry.  So I

knocked off, and went to playing billiards for a change.  I haven't had

an idea or a fancy for two days, now--an excellent time to write to

friends who have plenty of ideas and fancies of their own, and so will

prefer the offerings of the heart before those of the head.  Day after

to-morrow I go to a neighboring city to see a five-act-drama of mine

brought out, and suggest amendments in it, and would about as soon spend

a night in the Spanish Inquisition as sit there and be tortured with all

the adverse criticisms I can contrive to imagine the audience is

indulging in.  But whether the play be successful or not, I hope I shall

never feel obliged to see it performed a second time.  My interest in my

work dies a sudden and violent death when the work is done.



I have invented and patented a pretty good sort of scrap-book (I think)

but I have backed down from letting it be known as mine just at present

--for I can't stand being under discussion on a play and a scrap-book at

the same time!



I shall be away two days, and then return to take our tribe to New York,

where we shall remain five days buying furniture for the new house, and

then go to Hartford and settle solidly down for the winter.  After all

that fallow time I ought to be able to go to work again on the book.

We shall reach Hartford about the middle of September, I judge.



We have spent the past four months up here on top of a breezy hill, six

hundred feet high, some few miles from Elmira, N. Y., and overlooking

that town; (Elmira is my wife's birthplace and that of Susie and the new

baby).  This little summer house on the hill-top (named Quarry Farm

because there's a quarry on it,) belongs to my wife's sister, Mrs. Crane.



A photographer came up the other day and wanted to make some views,

and I shall send you the result per this mail.



My study is a snug little octagonal den, with a coal-grate, 6 big

windows, one little one, and a wide doorway (the latter opening upon the

distant town.) On hot days I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers

down with brickbats and write in the midst of the hurricanes, clothed in

the same thin linen we make shirts of.  The study is nearly on the peak

of the hill; it is right in front of the little perpendicular wall of

rock left where they used to quarry stones.  On the peak of the hill is

an old arbor roofed with bark and covered with the vine you call the

"American Creeper"--its green is almost bloodied with red.  The Study is

30 yards below the old arbor and 200 yards above the dwelling-house-it is

remote from all noises.....



Now isn't the whole thing pleasantly situated?



In the picture of me in the study you glimpse (through the left-hand

window) the little rock bluff that rises behind the pond, and the bases

of the little trees on top of it.  The small square window is over the

fireplace; the chimney divides to make room for it.  Without the

stereoscope it looks like a framed picture.  All the study windows have

Venetian blinds; they long ago went out of fashion in America but they

have not been replaced with anything half as good yet.



The study is built on top of a tumbled rock-heap that has morning-glories

climbing about it and a stone stairway leading down through and dividing

it.



There now--if you have not time to read all this, turn it over to "Jock"

and drag in the judge to help.



Mrs. Clemens must put in a late picture of Susie--a picture which she

maintains is good, but which I think is slander on the child.



We revisit the Rutland Street home many a time in fancy, for we hold

every individual in it in happy and grateful memory.

                              Goodbye,

                                   Your friend,

                                        SAML. L. CLEMENS.



P. S.--I gave the P. O. Department a blast in the papers about sending

misdirected letters of mine back to the writers for reshipment, and got a

blast in return, through a New York daily, from the New York postmaster.

But I notice that misdirected letters find me, now, without any

unnecessary fooling around.





     The new house in Hartford was now ready to be occupied, and in a

     letter to Howells, written a little more than a fortnight after the

     foregoing, we find them located in "part" of it.  But what seems

     more interesting is that paragraph of the letter which speaks of

     close friendly relations still existing with the Warners, in that it

     refutes a report current at this time that there was a break between

     Clemens and Warner over the rights in the Sellers play.  There was,

     in fact, no such rupture.  Warner, realizing that he had no hand in

     the character of Sellers, and no share in the work of dramatization,

     generously yielded all claim to any part of the returns.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                         FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD, Sept. 20, 1876.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--All right, my boy, send proof sheets here.  I amend

dialect stuff by talking and talking and talking it till it sounds right-

and I had difficulty with this negro talk because a negro sometimes

(rarely) says "goin" and sometimes "gwyne," and they make just such

discrepancies in other words--and when you come to reproduce them on

paper they look as if the variation resulted from the writer's

carelessness.  But I want to work at the proofs and get the dialect as

nearly right as possible.



We are in part of the new house.  Goodness knows when we'll get in the

rest of it--full of workmen yet.



I worked a month at my play, and launched it in New York last Wednesday.

I believe it will go.  The newspapers have been complimentary.  It is

simply a setting for the one character, Col. Sellers--as a play I guess

it will not bear a critical assault in force.



The Warners are as charming as ever.  They go shortly to the devil for a

year--(which is but a poetical way of saying they are going to afflict

themselves with the unsurpassable--(bad word) of travel for a spell.)

I believe they mean to go and see you, first-so they mean to start from

heaven to the other place; not from earth.  How is that?



I think that is no slouch of a compliment--kind of a dim religious light

about it.  I enjoy that sort of thing.

                                   Yrs ever

                                             MARK.





     Raymond, in a letter to the Sun, stated that not "one line" of the

     California dramatization had been used by Mark Twain, "except that

     which was taken bodily from The Gilded Age."  Clemens himself, in a

     statement that he wrote for the Hartford Post, but suppressed,

     probably at the request of his wife, gave a full history of the

     play's origin, a matter of slight interest to-day.



     Sellers on the stage proved a great success.  The play had no

     special merit as a literary composition, but the character of

     Sellers delighted the public, and both author and actor were richly

     repaid for their entertainment.









XIV.



LETTERS 1874.  MISSISSIPPI CHAPTERS.  VISITS TO BOSTON.

A JOKE ON ALDRICH



"Couldn't you send me some such story as that colored one for our January

number--that is, within a month?" wrote Howells, at the end of September,

and during the week following Mark Twain struggled hard to comply, but

without result.  When the month was nearly up he wrote:





                      To W. D.  Howells, in Boston:



                                             HARTFORD, Oct. 23, 1874.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I have delayed thus long, hoping I might do something

for the January number and Mrs. Clemens has diligently persecuted me day

by day with urgings to go to work and do that something, but it's no use

--I find I can't.  We are in such a state of weary and endless confusion

that my head won't go.  So I give it up.....

                              Yrs ever,

                                        MARK.





     But two hours later, when he had returned from one of the long walks

     which he and Twichell so frequently took together, he told a

     different story.





Later, P.M.  HOME, 24th '74.



MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I take back the remark that I can't write for the Jan.

number.  For Twichell and I have had a long walk in the woods and I got

to telling him about old Mississippi days of steam-boating glory and

grandeur as I saw them (during 5 years) from the pilothouse.  He said

"What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!" I hadn't thought of that

before.  Would you like a series of papers to run through 3 months or 6

or 9?--or about 4 months, say?

                         Yrs ever,

                                   MARK.





     Howells himself had come from a family of pilots, and rejoiced in

     the idea.  A few days later Mark Twain forwarded the first

     instalment of the new series--those wonderful chapters that begin,

     now, with chapter four in the Mississippi book.  Apparently he was

     not without doubt concerning the manuscript, and accompanied it with

     a brief line.





                      To W.  D.  Howells, in Boston:



DEAR HOWELLS,--Cut it, scarify it, reject it handle it with entire

freedom.

                         Yrs ever,

                                   MARK.





     But Howells had no doubts as to the quality of the new find.  He

     declared that the "piece" about the Mississippi was capital, that it

     almost made the water in their ice-pitcher turn muddy as he read it.

     "The sketch of the low-lived little town was so good that I could

     have wished that there was more of it.  I want the sketches, if you

     can make them, every month."



     The "low-lived little town" was Hannibal, and the reader can turn to

     the vivid description of it in the chapter already mentioned.



     In the same letter Howells refers to a "letter from Limerick," which

     he declares he shall keep until he has shown it around--especially

     to Aldrich and Osgood.



     The "letter from Limerick" has to do with a special episode.

     Mention has just been made of Mark Twain's walk with Twichell.

     Frequently their walks were extended tramps, and once in a daring

     moment one or the other of them proposed to walk to Boston.  The

     time was November, and the bracing air made the proposition seem

     attractive.  They were off one morning early, Twichell carrying a

     little bag, and Clemens a basket of luncheon.  A few days before,

     Clemens had written Redpath that the Rev. J. H. Twichell and he

     expected to start at eight o'clock Thursday morning "to walk to

     Boston in twenty-four hours--or more.  We shall telegraph Young's

     Hotel for rooms Saturday night, in order to allow for a low average

     of pedestrianism."



     They did not get quite to Boston.  In fact, they got only a little

     farther than the twenty-eight miles they made the first day.

     Clemens could hardly walk next morning, but they managed to get to

     North Ashford, where they took a carriage for the nearest railway

     station.  There they telegraphed to Redpath and Howells that they

     would be in Boston that evening.  Howells, of course, had a good

     supper and good company awaiting them at his home, and the

     pedestrians spent two happy days visiting and recounting their

     adventures.



     It was one morning, at his hotel, that Mark Twain wrote the Limerick

     letter.  It was addressed to Mrs. Clemens, but was really intended

     for Howells and Twichell and the others whom it mentions.  It was an

     amusing fancy, rather than a letter, but it deserves place here.





          To Mrs. Clemens---intended for Howells, Aldrich, etc.



                                   BOSTON, Nov. 16, 1935. [1874]

DEAR LIVY, You observe I still call this beloved old place by the name it

had when I was young.  Limerick!  It is enough to make a body sick.



The gentlemen-in-waiting stare to see me sit here telegraphing this

letter to you, and no doubt they are smiling in their sleeves.  But let

them!  The slow old fashions are good enough for me, thank God, and I

will none other.  When I see one of these modern fools sit absorbed,

holding the end of a telegraph wire in his hand, and reflect that a

thousand miles away there is another fool hitched to the other end of it,

it makes me frantic with rage; and then am I more implacably fixed and

resolved than ever, to continue taking twenty minutes to telegraph you

what I communicate in ten sends by the new way if I would so debase

myself.  And when I see a whole silent, solemn drawing-room full of

idiots sitting with their hands on each other's foreheads "communing," I

tug the white hairs from my head and curse till my asthma brings me the

blessed relief of suffocation.  In our old day such a gathering talked

pure drivel and "rot," mostly, but better that, a thousand times, than

these dreary conversational funerals that oppress our spirits in this mad

generation.



It is sixty years since I was here before.  I walked hither, then, with

my precious old friend.  It seems incredible, now, that we did it in two

days, but such is my recollection.  I no longer mention that we walked

back in a single day, it makes me so furious to see doubt in the face of

the hearer.  Men were men in those old times.  Think of one of the

puerile organisms in this effeminate age attempting such a feat.



My air-ship was delayed by a collision with a fellow from China loaded

with the usual cargo of jabbering, copper-colored missionaries, and so I

was nearly an hour on my journey.  But by the goodness of God thirteen of

the missionaries were crippled and several killed, so I was content to

lose the time.  I love to lose time, anyway, because it brings soothing

reminiscences of the creeping railroad days of old, now lost to us

forever.



Our game was neatly played, and successfully.--None expected us, of

course.  You should have seen the guards at the ducal palace stare when

I said, "Announce his grace the Archbishop of Dublin and the Rt. Hon.

the Earl of Hartford."  Arrived within, we were all eyes to see the Duke

of Cambridge and his Duchess, wondering if we might remember their faces,

and they ours.  In a moment, they came tottering in; he, bent and

withered and bald; she blooming with wholesome old age.  He peered

through his glasses a moment, then screeched in a reedy voice: "Come to

my arms!  Away with titles--I'll know ye by no names but Twain and

Twichell!  Then fell he on our necks and jammed his trumpet in his ear,

the which we filled with shoutings to this effect: God bless you, old

Howells what is left of you!"



We talked late that night--none of your silent idiot "communings" for us

--of the olden time.  We rolled a stream of ancient anecdotes over our

tongues and drank till the lord Archbishop grew so mellow in the mellow

past that Dublin ceased to be Dublin to him and resumed its sweeter

forgotten name of New York.  In truth he almost got back into his ancient

religion, too, good Jesuit, as he has always been since O'Mulligan the

First established that faith in the Empire.



And we canvassed everybody.  Bailey Aldrich, Marquis of Ponkapog, came

in, got nobly drunk, and told us all about how poor Osgood lost his

earldom and was hanged for conspiring against the second Emperor--but

he didn't mention how near he himself came to being hanged, too, for

engaging in the same enterprise.  He was as chaffy as he was sixty years

ago, too, and swore the Archbishop and I never walked to Boston--but

there was never a day that Ponkapog wouldn't lie, so be it by the grace

of God he got the opportunity.



The Lord High Admiral came in, a hale gentleman close upon seventy and

bronzed by the suns and storms of many climes and scarred with the wounds

got in many battles, and I told him how I had seen him sit in a high

chair and eat fruit and cakes and answer to the name of Johnny.  His

granddaughter (the eldest) is but lately warned to the youngest of the

Grand Dukes, and so who knows but a day may come when the blood of the

Howells's may reign in the land?  I must not forget to say, while I think

of it, that your new false teeth are done, my dear, and your wig.  Keep

your head well bundled with a shawl till the latter comes, and so cheat

your persecuting neuralgias and rheumatisms.  Would you believe it?--the

Duchess of Cambridge is deafer than you--deafer than her husband.  They

call her to breakfast with a salvo of artillery; and usually when it

thunders she looks up expectantly and says "come in....."



The monument to the author of "Gloverson and His Silent partners" is

finished.  It is the stateliest and the costliest ever erected to the

memory of any man.  This noble classic has now been translated into all

the languages of the earth and is adored by all nations and known to all

creatures.  Yet I have conversed as familiarly with the author of it as I

do with my own great-grandchildren.



I wish you could see old Cambridge and Ponkapog.  I love them as dearly

as ever, but privately, my dear, they are not much improvement on idiots.

It is melancholy to hear them jabber over the same pointless anecdotes

three and four times of an evening, forgetting that they had jabbered

them over three or four times the evening before.  Ponkapog still writes

poetry, but the old-time fire has mostly gone out of it.  Perhaps his

best effort of late years is this:



               "O soul, soul, soul of mine:

               Soul, soul, soul of thine!

               Thy soul, my soul, two souls entwine,

               And sing thy lauds in crystal wine!"



This he goes about repeating to everybody, daily and nightly, insomuch

that he is become a sore affliction to all that know him.



But I must desist.  There are drafts here, everywhere and my gout is

something frightful.  My left foot hath resemblance to a snuff-bladder.

                         God be with you.

                                        HARTFORD.



These to Lady Hartford, in the earldom of Hartford, in the upper portion

of the city of Dublin.





     One may imagine the joy of Howells and the others in this ludicrous

     extravaganza, which could have been written by no one but Mark

     Twain.  It will hardly take rank as prophecy, though certainly true

     forecast in it is not wholly lacking.



     Clemens was now pretty well satisfied with his piloting story, but

     he began to have doubts as to its title, "Old Times on the

     Mississippi."  It seemed to commit him to too large an undertaking.





                      To W.  D.  Howells, in Boston:



                                                  Dec. 3, 1874.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Let us change the heading to "Piloting on the Miss in

the Old Times"--or to "Steamboating on the M. in Old Times"--or to

"Personal Old Times on the Miss."--We could change it for Feb. if now

too late for Jan.--I suggest it because the present heading is too

pretentious, too broad and general.  It seems to command me to deliver a

Second Book of Revelation to the world, and cover all the Old Times the

Mississippi (dang that word, it is worse than "type" or "Egypt ") ever

saw--whereas here I have finished Article No. III and am about to start

on No. 4.  and yet I have spoken of nothing but of Piloting as a science

so far; and I doubt if I ever get beyond that portion of my subject.

And I don't care to.  Any muggins can write about Old Times on the Miss.

of 500 different kinds, but I am the only man alive that can scribble

about the piloting of that day--and no man ever has tried to scribble

about it yet.  Its newness pleases me all the time--and it is about the

only new subject I know of.  If I were to write fifty articles they would

all be about pilots and piloting--therefore let's get the word Piloting

into the heading.  There's a sort of freshness about that, too.

                                   Ys ever,

                                             MARK.





     But Howells thought the title satisfactory, and indeed it was the

     best that could have been selected for the series.  He wrote every

     few days of his delight in the papers, and cautioned the author not

     to make an attempt to please any "supposed Atlantic audience,"

     adding, "Yarn it off into my sympathetic ear."  Clemens replied:





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             H't'f'd.  Dec. 8, 1874.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--It isn't the Atlantic audience that distresses me; for

it is the only audience that I sit down before in perfect serenity (for

the simple reason that it doesn't require a "humorist" to paint himself

striped and stand on his head every fifteen minutes.) The trouble was,

that I was only bent on "working up an atmosphere" and that is to me a

most fidgety and irksome thing, sometimes.  I avoid it, usually, but in

this case it was absolutely necessary, else every reader would be

applying the atmosphere of his own or sea experiences, and that shirt

wouldn't fit, you know.



I could have sent this Article II a week ago, or more, but I couldn't

bring myself to the drudgery of revising and correcting it.  I have been

at that tedious work 3 hours, now, and by George but I am glad it is

over.



Say--I am as prompt as a clock, if I only know the day a thing is wanted

--otherwise I am a natural procrastinaturalist.  Tell me what day and

date you want Nos. 3 and 4, and I will tackle and revise them and they'll

be there to the minute.



I could wind up with No. 4., but there are some things more which I am

powerfully moved to write.  Which is natural enough, since I am a person

who would quit authorizing in a minute to go to piloting, if the madam

would stand it.  I would rather sink a steamboat than eat, any time.



My wife was afraid to write you--so I said with simplicity, "I will give

you the language--and ideas."  Through the infinite grace of God there

has not been such another insurrection in the family before as followed

this.  However, the letter was written, and promptly, too--whereas,

heretofore she has remained afraid to do such things.



With kind regards to Mrs. Howells,

                         Yrs ever,

                                   MARK.





     The "Old Times" papers appeared each month in the Atlantic until

     July, 1875, and take rank to-day with Mark Twain's best work.  When

     the first number appeared, John Hay wrote: "It is perfect; no more

     nor less.  I don't see how you do it."  Which was reported to

     Howells, who said: "What business has Hay, I should like to know,

     praising a favorite of mine?  It's interfering."



     These were the days when the typewriter was new.  Clemens and

     Twichell, during their stay in Boston, had seen the marvel in

     operation, and Clemens had been unable to resist owning one.  It was

     far from being the perfect machine of to-day; the letters were all

     capitals, and one was never quite certain, even of those.  Mark

     Twain, however, began with enthusiasm and practised faithfully.  On

     the day of its arrival he wrote two letters that have survived, the

     first to his brother, the other to Howells.





             Typewritten letter to W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                   HARTFORD, Dec. 9, 1874.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I want to add a short paragraph to article No. 1, when

the proof comes.  Merely a line or two, however.



I don't know whether I am going to make this typewriting machine go or

nto: that last word was intended for n-not; but I guess I shall make some

sort of a succss of it before I run it very long.  I am so thick-fingered

that I miss the keys.



You needn't a swer this; I am only practicing to get three; another slip-

up there; only practici?ng to get the hang of the thing.  I notice I miss

fire & get in a good many unnecessary letters and punctuation marks.

I am simply using you for a target to bang at.  Blame my cats but this

thing requires genius in order to work it just right.

                         Yours ever,

                                        (M)ARK.







     Knowing Mark Twain, Howells wrote: "When you get tired of the

     machine send it to me."  Clemens naturally did get tired of the

     machine; it was ruining his morals, he said.  He presently offered

     it to Howells, who by this time hesitated, but eventually yielded

     and accepted it.  If he was blasted by its influence the fact has

     not been recorded.



     One of the famous Atlantic dinners came along in December.  "Don't

     you dare to refuse that invitation," wrote Howells, "to meet

     Emerson, Aldrich, and all those boys at the Parker House, at six

     o'clock, Tuesday, December 15th.  Come!"



     Clemens had no desire to refuse; he sent word that he would come,

     and followed it with a characteristic line.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                                  HARTFORD, Sunday.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I want you to ask Mrs. Howells to let you stay all

night at the Parker House and tell lies and have an improving time, and

take breakfast with me in the morning.  I will have a good room for you,

and a fire.  Can't you tell her it always makes you sick to go home late

at night, or something like that?  That sort of thing rouses Mrs.

Clemens's sympathies, easily; the only trouble is to keep them up.

Twichell and I talked till 2 or 3 in the morning, the night we supped at

your house and it restored his health, on account of his being drooping

for some time and made him much more robuster than what he was before.

Will Mrs. Howells let you?

                              Yrs ever,

                                        S. L. C.



     Aldrich had issued that year a volume of poems, and he presented

     Clemens with a copy of it during this Boston visit.  The letter of

     appreciation which follows contains also reference to an amusing

     incident; but we shall come to that presently.





                   To T. B. Aldrich, in Ponkapog, Mass.



                                        FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD.

                                        Dec.  18, 1874.

MY DEAR ALDRICH,--I read the "Cloth of Gold" through, coming down in the

cars, and it is just lightning poetry--a thing which it gravels me to say

because my own efforts in that line have remained so persistently

unrecognized, in consequence of the envy and jealousy of this generation.

"Baby Bell" always seemed perfection, before, but now that I have

children it has got even beyond that.  About the hour that I was reading

it in the cars, Twichell was reading it at home and forthwith fell upon

me with a burst of enthusiasm about it when I saw him.  This was

pleasant, because he has long been a lover of it.



"Thos. Bailey Aldrich responded" etc., "in one of the brightest speeches

of the evening."



That is what the Tribune correspondent says.  And that is what everybody

that heard it said.  Therefore, you keep still.  Don't ever be so unwise

as to go on trying to unconvince those people.



I've been skating around the place all day with some girls, with Mrs.

Clemens in the window to do the applause.  There would be a power of fun

in skating if you could do it with somebody else's muscles.--There are

about twenty boys booming by the house, now, and it is mighty good to

look at.



I'm keeping you in mind, you see, in the matter of photographs.  I have

a couple to enclose in this letter and I want you to say you got them,

and then I shall know I have been a good truthful child.



I am going to send more as I ferret them out, about the place.--And I

won't forget that you are a "subscriber."



The wife and I unite in warm regards to you and Mrs. Aldrich.

                              Yrs ever,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     A letter bearing the same date as the above went back to Howells, we

     find, in reference to still another incident, which perhaps should

     come first.



     Mark Twain up to this time had worn the black "string" necktie of

     the West--a decoration which disturbed Mrs. Clemens, and invited

     remarks from his friends.  He had persisted in it, however, up to

     the date of the Atlantic dinner, when Howells and Aldrich decided

     that something must be done about it.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        HARTFORD, Dec.  18, 1874.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I left No. 3, (Miss. chapter) in my eldest's reach, and

it may have gone to the postman and it likewise may have gone into the

fire.  I confess to a dread that the latter is the case and that that

stack of MS will have to be written over again.  If so, O for the return

of the lamented Herod!



You and Aldrich have made one woman deeply and sincerely grateful--Mrs.

Clemens.  For months--I may even say years--she had shown unaccountable

animosity toward my neck-tie, even getting up in the night to take it

with the tongs and blackguard it--sometimes also going so far as to

threaten it.



When I said you and Aldrich had given me two new neck-ties, and that they

were in a paper in my overcoat pocket, she was in a fever of happiness

until she found I was going to frame them; then all the venom in her

nature gathered itself together,--insomuch that I, being near to a door,

went without, perceiving danger.



Now I wear one of the new neck-ties, nothing being sacred in Mrs.

Clemens's eyes that can be perverted to a gaud that shall make the person

of her husband more alluring than it was aforetime.



Jo Twichell was the delightedest old boy I ever saw, when he read the

words you had written in that book.  He and I went to the Concert of the

Yale students last night and had a good time.



Mrs. Clemens dreads our going to New Orleans, but I tell her she'll have

to give her consent this time.



With kindest regards unto ye both.

                              Yrs ever,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     The reference to New Orleans at the end of this letter grew

     naturally out of the enthusiasm aroused by the Mississippi papers.

     The more Clemens wrote about the river the more he wished to revisit

     it and take Howells with him.  Howells was willing enough to go and

     they eventually arranged to take their wives on the excursion.  This

     seemed all very well and possible, so long as the time was set for

     some date in the future still unfixed.  But Howells was a busy

     editor, and it was much more easy for him to promise good-naturedly

     than to agree on a definite time of departure.  He explained at

     length why he could not make the journey, and added: "Forgive me

     having led you on to fix a time; I never thought it would come to

     that; I supposed you would die, or something.  I am really more

     sorry and ashamed than I can make it appear."  So the beautiful plan

     was put aside, though it was not entirely abandoned for a long time.



     We now come to the incident mentioned in Mark Twain's letter to

     Aldrich, of December the 18th.  It had its beginning at the Atlantic

     dinner, where Aldrich had abused Clemens for never sending him any

     photographs of himself.  It was suggested by one or the other that

     his name be put down as a "regular subscriber" for all Mark Twain

     photographs as they "came out."  Clemens returned home and hunted up

     fifty-two different specimens, put each into an envelope, and began

     mailing them to him, one each morning.  When a few of them had

     arrived Aldrich wrote, protesting.



     "The police," he said, "have a way of swooping down on that kind of

     publication.  The other day they gobbled up an entire edition of

     'The Life in New York.'"



     Whereupon Clemens bundled up the remaining collection--forty-five

     envelopes of photographs and prints-and mailed them together.



     Aldrich wrote, now, violently declaring the perpetrator of the

     outrage to be known to the police; that a sprawling yellow figure

     against a green background had been recognized as an admirable

     likeness of Mark Twain, alias the jumping Frog, a well-known

     Californian desperado, formerly the chief of Henry Plummer's band of

     road agents in Montana.  The letter was signed, "T. Bayleigh, Chief

     of Police."  On the back of the envelope "T. Bayleigh" had also

     written that it was "no use for the person to send any more letters,

     as the post-office at that point was to be blown up.  Forty-eight

     hogs-head of nitroglycerine had been syrupticiously introduced into

     the cellar of the building, and more was expected.  R.W.E.  H.W.L.

     O.W.H., and other conspirators in masks have been seen flitting

     about the town for some days past.  The greatest excitement combined

     with the most intense quietness reigns at Ponkapog."









XV.



LETTERS FROM HARTFORD, 1875.  MUCH CORRESPONDENCE WITH HOWELLS



Orion Clemens had kept his job with Bliss only a short time.  His mental

make-up was such that it was difficult for him to hold any position long.

He meant to do well, but he was unfortunate in his efforts.  His ideas

were seldom practical, his nature was yielding and fickle.  He had

returned to Keokuk presently, and being convinced there was a fortune in

chickens, had prevailed upon his brother to purchase for him a little

farm not far from the town.  But the chicken business was not lively and

Orion kept the mail hot with manuscripts and propositions of every sort,

which he wanted his brother to take under advisement.



Certainly, to Mark Twain Orion Clemens was a trial.  The letters of the

latter show that scarcely one of them but contains the outline of some

rainbow-chasing scheme, full of wild optimism, and the certainty that

somewhere just ahead lies the pot of gold.  Only, now and then, there is

a letter of abject humiliation and complete surrender, when some golden

vision, some iridescent soap-bubble, had vanished at his touch.  Such

depression did not last; by sunrise he was ready with a new dream, new

enthusiasm, and with a new letter inviting his "brother Sam's" interest

and investment.  Yet, his fear of incurring his brother's displeasure was

pitiful, regardless of the fact that he constantly employed the very

means to insure that result.  At one time Clemens made him sign a sworn

agreement that he would not suggest any plan or scheme of investment for

the period of twelve months.  Orion must have kept this agreement.  He

would have gone to the stake before he would have violated an oath, but

the stake would have probably been no greater punishment than his

sufferings that year.



On the whole, Samuel Clemens was surprisingly patient and considerate

with Orion, and there was never a time that he was not willing to help.

Yet there were bound to be moments of exasperation; and once, when his

mother, or sister, had written, suggesting that he encourage his

brother's efforts, he felt moved to write at considerable freedom.





        To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in Fredonia, N. Y.:



                                             HARTFORD, Sunday, 1875.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--I Saw Gov. Newell today and he said he was

still moving in the matter of Sammy's appointment--[As a West Point

cadet.]--and would stick to it till he got a result of a positive nature

one way or the other, but thus far he did not know whether to expect

success or defeat.



Ma, whenever you need money I hope you won't be backward about saying so

--you can always have it.  We stint ourselves in some ways, but we have

no desire to stint you.  And we don't intend to, either.



I can't "encourage" Orion.  Nobody can do that, conscientiously, for the

reason that before one's letter has time to reach him he is off on some

new wild-goose chase.  Would you encourage in literature a man who, the

older he grows the worse he writes?  Would you encourage Orion in the

glaring insanity of studying law?  If he were packed and crammed full of

law, it would be worthless lumber to him, for his is such a capricious

and ill-regulated mind that he would apply the principles of the law with

no more judgment than a child of ten years.  I know what I am saying.

I laid one of the plainest and simplest of legal questions before Orion

once, and the helpless and hopeless mess he made of it was absolutely

astonishing.  Nothing aggravates me so much as to have Orion mention law

or literature to me.



Well, I cannot encourage him to try the ministry, because he would change

his religion so fast that he would have to keep a traveling agent under

wages to go ahead of him to engage pulpits and board for him.



I cannot conscientiously encourage him to do anything but potter around

his little farm and put in his odd hours contriving new and impossible

projects at the rate of 365 a year--which is his customary average.

He says he did well in Hannibal!  Now there is a man who ought to be

entirely satisfied with the grandeurs, emoluments and activities of a hen

farm--



If you ask me to pity Orion, I can do that.  I can do it every day and

all day long.  But one can't "encourage" quick-silver, because the

instant you put your finger on it it isn't there.  No, I am saying too

much--he does stick to his literary and legal aspirations; and he

naturally would select the very two things which he is wholly and

preposterously unfitted for.  If I ever become able, I mean to put Orion

on a regular pension without revealing the fact that it is a pension.

That is best for him.  Let him consider it a periodical loan, and pay

interest out of the principal.  Within a year's time he would be looking

upon himself as a benefactor of mine, in the way of furnishing me a good

permanent investment for money, and that would make him happy and

satisfied with himself.  If he had money he would share with me in a

moment and I have no disposition to be stingy with him.

                                   Affly

                                        SAM.

Livy sends love.





     The New Orleans plan was not wholly dead at this time.  Howells

     wrote near the end of January that the matter was still being

     debated, now and then, but was far from being decided upon.  He

     hoped to go somewhere with Mrs. Howells for a brief time in March,

     he said.  Clemens, in haste, replied:





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             HARTFORD, Jan.  26, 1875.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--When Mrs. Clemens read your letter she said: "Well,

then, wherever they go, in March, the direction will be southward and so

they must give us a visit on the way."  I do not know what sort of

control you may be under, but when my wife speaks as positively as that,

I am not in the habit of talking back and getting into trouble.  Situated

as I am, I would not be able to understand, now, how you could pass by

this town without feeling that you were running a wanton risk and doing a

daredevil thing.  I consider it settled that you are to come in March,

and I would be sincerely sorry to learn that you and Mrs. Howells feel

differently about it.



The piloting material has been uncovering itself by degrees, until it has

exposed such a huge hoard to my view that a whole book will be required

to contain it if I use it.  So I have agreed to write the book for Bliss.

--[The book idea was later given up for the time being.]--I won't be

able to run the articles in the Atlantic later than the September number,

for the reason that a subscription book issued in the fall has a much

larger sale than if issued at any other season of the year.  It is funny

when I reflect that when I originally wrote you and proposed to do from 6

to 9 articles for the magazine, the vague thought in my mind was that 6

might exhaust the material and 9 would be pretty sure to do it.  Or

rather it seems to me that that was my thought--can't tell at this

distance.  But in truth 9 chapters don't now seem to more than open up

the subject fairly and start the yarn to wagging.



I have been sick a-bed several days, for the first time in 21 years.

How little confirmed invalids appreciate their advantages.  I was able to

read the English edition of the Greville Memoirs through without

interruption, take my meals in bed, neglect all business without a pang,

and smoke 18 cigars a day.  I try not to look back upon these 21 years

with a feeling of resentment, and yet the partialities of Providence do

seem to me to be slathered around (as one may say) without that gravity

and attention to detail which the real importance of the matter would

seem to suggest.

                              Yrs ever

                                        MARK.





     The New Orleans idea continued to haunt the letters.  The thought of

     drifting down the Mississippi so attracted both Clemens and Howells,

     that they talked of it when they met, and wrote of it when they were

     separated.  Howells, beset by uncertainties, playfully tried to put

     the responsibility upon his wife.  Once he wrote: "She says in the

     noblest way, 'Well, go to New Orleans, if you want to so much' (you

     know the tone).  I suppose it will do if I let you know about the

     middle of February?"



     But they had to give it up in the end.  Howells wrote that he had

     been under the weather, and on half work the whole winter.  He did

     not feel that he had earned his salary, he said, or that he was

     warranted in taking a three weeks' pleasure trip.  Clemens offered

     to pay all the expenses of the trip, but only indefinite

     postponement followed.  It would be seven years more before Mark

     Twain would return to the river, and then not with Howells.



     In a former chapter mention has been made of Charles Warren

     Stoddard, whom Mark Twain had known in his California days.  He was

     fond of Stoddard, who was a facile and pleasing writer of poems and

     descriptive articles.  During the period that he had been acting as

     Mark Twain's secretary in London, he had taken pleasure in

     collecting for him the news reports of the celebrated Tichborn

     Claimant case, then in the English courts.  Clemens thought of

     founding a story on it, and did, in fact, use the idea, though 'The

     American Claimant,' which he wrote years later, had little or no

     connection with the Tichborn episode.





                            To C. W. Stoddard:



                                        HARTFORD, Feb. 1, 1875.

DEAR CHARLEY,--All right about the Tichborn scrapbooks; send them along

when convenient.  I mean to have the Beecher-Tilton trial scrap-book as a

companion.....



I am writing a series of 7-page articles for the Atlantic at $20 a page;

but as they do not pay anybody else as much as that, I do not complain

(though at the same time I do swear that I am not content.)  However the

awful respectability of the magazine makes up.



I have cut your articles about San Marco out of a New York paper (Joe

Twichell saw it and brought it home to me with loud admiration,) and sent

it to Howells.  It is too bad to fool away such good literature in a

perishable daily journal.



Do remember us kindly to Lady Hardy and all that rare family--my wife and

I so often have pleasant talks about them.

                         Ever your friend,

                                   SAML. L. CLEMENS.





     The price received by Mark Twain for the Mississippi papers, as

     quoted in this letter, furnishes us with a realizing sense of the

     improvement in the literary market, with the advent of a flood of

     cheap magazines and the Sunday newspaper.  The Atlantic page

     probably contained about a thousand words, which would make his

     price average, say, two cents per word.  Thirty years later, when

     his fame was not much more extended, his pay for the same matter

     would have been fifteen times as great, that is to say, at the rate

     of thirty cents per word.  But in that early time there were no

     Sunday magazines--no literary magazines at all except the Atlantic,

     and Harpers, and a few fashion periodicals.  Probably there were

     news-stands, but it is hard to imagine what they must have looked

     like without the gay pictorial cover-femininity that to-day pleases

     and elevates the public and makes author and artist affluent.



     Clemens worked steadily on the river chapters, and Howells was

     always praising him and urging him to go on.  At the end of January

     he wrote: "You're doing the science of piloting splendidly.  Every

     word's interesting.  And don't you drop the series 'til you've got

     every bit of anecdote and reminiscence into it."





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        HARTFORD, Feb. 10, 1875.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Your praises of my literature gave me the solidest

gratification; but I never did have the fullest confidence in my critical

penetration, and now your verdict on S-----has knocked what little I did

have gully-west!  I didn't enjoy his gush, but I thought a lot of his

similes were ever so vivid and good.  But it's just my luck; every time I

go into convulsions of admiration over a picture and want to buy it right

away before I've lost the chance, some wretch who really understands art

comes along and damns it.  But I don't mind.  I would rather have my

ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have got so much more

of it.



I send you No. 5 today.  I have written and re-written the first half of

it three different times, yesterday and today, and at last Mrs. Clemens

says it will do.  I never saw a woman so hard to please about things she

doesn't know anything about.

                              Yours ever,

                                        MARK.





     Of course, the reference to his wife's criticism in this is tenderly

     playful, as always--of a pattern with the severity which he pretends

     for her in the next.





                   To Mrs. W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                                            1875

DEAR MRS. HOWELLS,--Mrs. Clemens is delighted to get the pictures, and so

am I.  I can perceive in the group, that Mr. Howells is feeling as I so

often feel, viz: "Well, no doubt I am in the wrong, though I do not know

how or where or why--but anyway it will be safest to look meek, and walk

circumspectly for a while, and not discuss the thing."  And you look

exactly as Mrs. Clemens does after she has said, "Indeed I do not wonder

that you can frame no reply: for you know only too well, that your

conduct admits of no excuse, palliation or argument--none!"



I shall just delight in that group on account of the good old human

domestic spirit that pervades it--bother these family groups that put on

a state aspect to get their pictures taken in.



We want a heliotype made of our eldest daughter.  How soft and rich and

lovely the picture is.  Mr. Howells must tell me how to proceed in the

matter.

                    Truly Yours

                         SAM. L. CLEMENS.





     In the next letter we have a picture of Susy--[This spelling of the

     name was adopted somewhat later and much preferred.  It appears as

     "Susie" in most of the earlier letters.]--Clemens's third birthday,

     certainly a pretty picture, and as sweet and luminous and tender

     today as it was forty years ago-as it will be a hundred years hence,

     if these lines should survive that long.  The letter is to her uncle

     Charles Langdon, the "Charlie" of the Quaker City.  "Atwater" was

     associated with the Langdon coal interests in Elmira.  "The play"

     is, of course, "The Gilded Age."





                      To Charles Langdon, in Elmira:



                                                  Mch. 19, 1875.

DEAR CHARLIE,--Livy, after reading your letter, used her severest form of

expression about Mr. Atwater--to wit: She did not "approve" of his

conduct.  This made me shudder; for it was equivalent to Allie

Spaulding's saying "Mr. Atwater is a mean thing;" or Rev. Thomas

Beecher's saying "Damn that Atwater," or my saying "I wish Atwater was

three hundred million miles in----!"



However, Livy does not often get into one of these furies, God be

thanked.



In Brooklyn, Baltimore, Washington, Cincinnati, St. Louis and Chicago,

the play paid me an average of nine hundred dollars a week.  In smaller

towns the average is $400 to $500.



This is Susie's birth-day.  Lizzie brought her in at 8.30 this morning

(before we were up) hooded with a blanket, red curl-papers in her hair, a

great red japonica, in one hand (for Livy) and a yellow rose-bud nestled

in violets (for my buttonhole) in the other--and she looked wonderfully

pretty.  She delivered her memorials and received her birth-day kisses.

Livy laid her japonica, down to get a better "holt" for kissing-which

Susie presently perceived, and became thoughtful: then said sorrowfully,

turning the great deeps of her eyes upon her mother: "Don't you care for

you wow?"



Right after breakfast we got up a rousing wood fire in the main hall

(it is a cold morning) illuminated the place with a rich glow from all

the globes of the newell chandelier, spread a bright rug before the fire,

set a circling row of chairs (pink ones and dove-colored) and in the

midst a low invalid-table covered with a fanciful cloth and laden with

the presents--a pink azalia in lavish bloom from Rosa; a gold inscribed

Russia-leather bible from Patrick and Mary; a gold ring (inscribed) from

"Maggy Cook;" a silver thimble (inscribed with motto and initials) from

Lizzie; a rattling mob of Sunday clad dolls from Livy and Annie, and a

Noah's Ark from me, containing 200 wooden animals such as only a human

being could create and only God call by name without referring to the

passenger list.  Then the family and the seven servants assembled there,

and Susie and the "Bay" arrived in state from above, the Bay's head being

fearfully and wonderfully decorated with a profusion of blazing red

flowers and overflowing cataracts of lycopodium.  Wee congratulatory

notes accompanied the presents of the servants.  I tell you it was a

great occasion and a striking and cheery group, taking all the

surroundings into account and the wintry aspect outside.



(Remainder missing.)





     There was to be a centennial celebration that year of the battles of

     Lexington and Concord, and Howells wrote, urging Clemens and his

     wife to visit them and attend it.  Mrs. Clemens did not go, and

     Clemens and Howells did not go, either--to the celebration.  They

     had their own ideas about getting there, but found themselves unable

     to board the thronged train at Concord, and went tramping about in

     the cold and mud, hunting a conveyance, only to return at length to

     the cheer of the home, defeated and rather low in spirits.



     Twichell, who went on his own hook, had no such difficulties.  To

     Howells, Mark Twain wrote the adventures of this athletic and

     strenuous exponent of the gospel.



     The "Winnie" mentioned in this letter was Howells's daughter

     Winifred.  She had unusual gifts, but did not live to develop them.





                      To W.  D.  Howells, in Boston:



                         FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD.  Apl. 23, 1875.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I've got Mrs. Clemens's picture before me, and hope I

shall not forget to send it with this.



Joe Twichell preached morning and evening here last Sunday; took midnight

train for Boston; got an early breakfast and started by rail at 7.30

A. M.  for Concord; swelled around there until 1 P. M., seeing

everything; then traveled on top of a train to Lexington; saw everything

there; traveled on top of a train to Boston, (with hundreds in company)

deluged with dust, smoke and cinders; yelled and hurrahed all the way

like a schoolboy; lay flat down to dodge numerous bridges, and sailed

into the depot, howling with excitement and as black as a chimney-sweep;

got to Young's Hotel at 7 P. M.; sat down in reading-room and immediately

fell asleep; was promptly awakened by a porter who supposed he was drunk;

wandered around an hour and a half; then took 9 P. M. train, sat down in

smoking car and remembered nothing more until awakened by conductor as

the train came into Hartford at 1.30 A. M.  Thinks he had simply a

glorious time--and wouldn't have missed the Centennial for the world.

He would have run out to see us a moment at Cambridge, but was too dirty.

I wouldn't have wanted him there--his appalling energy would have been an

insufferable reproach to mild adventurers like you and me.



Well, he is welcome to the good time he had--I had a deal better one.

My narrative has made Mrs. Clemens wish she could have been there.--When

I think over what a splendid good sociable time I had in your house I

feel ever so thankful to the wise providence that thwarted our several

ably-planned and ingenious attempts to get to Lexington.  I am coming

again before long, and then she shall be of the party.



Now you said that you and Mrs. Howells could run down here nearly any

Saturday.  Very well then, let us call it next Saturday, for a "starter."

Can you do that?  By that time it will really be spring and you won't

freeze.  The birds are already out; a small one paid us a visit

yesterday.  We entertained it and let it go again, Susie protesting.



The spring laziness is already upon me--insomuch that the spirit begins

to move me to cease from Mississippi articles and everything else and

give myself over to idleness until we go to New Orleans.  I have one

article already finished, but somehow it doesn't seem as proper a chapter

to close with as the one already in your hands.  I hope to get in a mood

and rattle off a good one to finish with--but just now all my moods are

lazy ones.



Winnie's literature sings through me yet!  Surely that child has one of

these "futures" before her.



Now try to come--will you?



With the warmest regards of the two of us--

                         Yrs ever,

                              S. L. CLEMENS.



Mrs. Clemens sent a note to Mrs. Howells, which will serve as a pendant

to the foregoing.





              From Mrs. Clemens to Mrs. Howells, in Boston:



MY DEAR MRS. HOWELLS,--Don't dream for one instant that my not getting a

letter from you kept me from Boston.  I am too anxious to go to let such

a thing as that keep me.



Mr. Clemens did have such a good time with you and Mr. Howells.

He evidently has no regret that he did not get to the Centennial.  I was

driven nearly distracted by his long account of Mr. Howells and his

wanderings.  I would keep asking if they ever got there, he would never

answer but made me listen to a very minute account of everything that

they did.  At last I found them back where they started from.



If you find misspelled words in this note, you will remember my infirmity

and not hold me responsible.

                         Affectionately yours,

                                        LIVY L. CLEMENS.



In spite of his success with the Sellers play and his itch to follow it

up, Mark Twain realized what he believed to be his literary limitations.

All his life he was inclined to consider himself wanting in the finer

gifts of character-shading and delicate portrayal.  Remembering Huck

Finn, and the rare presentation of Joan of Arc, we may not altogether

agree with him.  Certainly, he was never qualified to delineate those

fine artificialities of life which we are likely to associate with

culture, and perhaps it was something of this sort that caused the

hesitation confessed in the letter that follows.  Whether the plan

suggested interested Howells or not we do not know.  In later years

Howells wrote a novel called The Story of a Play; this may have been its

beginning.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                         FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD, Apl. 26, 1875.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--An actor named D. H. Harkins has been here to ask me to

put upon paper a 5-act play which he has been mapping out in his mind for

3 or 4 years.   He sat down and told me his plot all through, in a clear,

bright way, and I was a deal taken with it; but it is a line of

characters whose fine shading and artistic development requires an abler

hand than mine; so I easily perceived that I must not make the attempt.

But I liked the man, and thought there was a good deal of stuff in him;

and therefore I wanted his play to be written, and by a capable hand,

too.  So I suggested you, and said I would write and see if you would be

willing to undertake it.  If you like the idea, he will call upon you in

the course of two or three weeks and describe his plot and his

characters.  Then if it doesn't strike you favorably, of course you can

simply decline; but it seems to me well worth while that you should hear

what he has to say.  You could also "average" him while he talks, and

judge whether he could play your priest--though I doubt if any man can do

that justice.



Shan't I write him and say he may call?  If you wish to communicate

directly with him instead, his address is "Larchmont Manor, Westchester

Co., N. Y."



Do you know, the chill of that 19th of April seems to be in my bones yet?

I am inert and drowsy all the time.  That was villainous weather for a

couple of wandering children to be out in.

                                        Ys ever

                                                  MARK.





     The sinister typewriter did not find its way to Howells for nearly a

     year.  Meantime, Mark Twain had refused to allow the manufacturers

     to advertise his ownership.  He wrote to them:





                                        HARTFORD, March 19, 1875.

Please do not use my name in any way.  Please do not even divulge the

fact that I own a machine.  I have entirely stopped using the typewriter,

for the reason that I never could write a letter with it to anybody

without receiving a request by return mail that I would not only describe

the machine, but state what progress I had made in the use of it, etc.,

etc.  I don't like to write letters, and so I don't want people to know

I own this curiosity-breeding little joker.





     Three months later the machine was still in his possession.  Bliss

     had traded a twelve-dollar saddle for it, but apparently showed

     little enthusiasm in his new possession.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                                  June 25, 1875.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I told Patrick to get some carpenters and box the

machine and send it to you--and found that Bliss had sent for the machine

and earned it off.



I have been talking to you and writing to you as if you were present when

I traded the machine to Bliss for a twelve-dollar saddle worth $25

(cheating him outrageously, of course--but conscience got the upper hand

again and I told him before I left the premises that I'd pay for the

saddle if he didn't like the machine--on condition that he donate said

machine to a charity)



This was a little over five weeks ago--so I had long ago concluded that

Bliss didn't want the machine and did want the saddle--wherefore I jumped

at the chance of shoving the machine off onto you, saddle or no saddle so

I got the blamed thing out of my sight.



The saddle hangs on Tara's walls down below in the stable, and the

machine is at Bliss's grimly pursuing its appointed mission, slowly and

implacably rotting away another man's chances for salvation.



I have sent Bliss word not to donate it to a charity (though it is a pity

to fool away a chance to do a charity an ill turn,) but to let me know

when he has got his dose, because I've got another candidate for

damnation.  You just wait a couple of weeks and if you don't see the

Type-Writer come tilting along toward Cambridge with an unsatisfied

appetite in its eye, I lose my guess.



Don't you be mad about this blunder, Howells--it only comes of a bad

memory, and the stupidity which is inseparable from true genius.  Nothing

intentionally criminal in it.

                              Yrs ever

                                        MARK.





     It was November when Howells finally fell under the baleful

     influence of the machine.  He wrote:



     "The typewriter came Wednesday night, and is already beginning to

     have its effect on me.  Of course, it doesn't work: if I can

     persuade some of the letters to get up against the ribbon they won't

     get down again without digital assistance.  The treadle refuses to

     have any part or parcel in the performance; and I don't know how to

     get the roller to turn with the paper.  Nevertheless I have begun

     several letters to My d-a-r lemans, as it prefers to spell your

     respected name, and I don't despair yet of sending you something in

     its beautiful handwriting--after I've had a man out from the agent's

     to put it in order.  It's fascinating in the meantime, and it wastes

     my time like an old friend."



     The Clemens family remained in Hartford that summer, with the

     exception of a brief season at Bateman's Point, R. I., near

     Newport.  By this time Mark Twain had taken up and finished the Tom

     Sawyer story begun two years before.  Naturally he wished Howells to

     consider the MS.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             HARTFORD, July 5th, 1875.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I have finished the story and didn't take the chap

beyond boyhood.  I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but

autobiographically--like Gil Blas.  I perhaps made a mistake in not

writing it in the first person.  If I went on, now, and took him into

manhood, he would just like like all the one-horse men in literature and

the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him.  It is not a boy's

book, at all.  It will only be read by adults.  It is only written for

adults.



Moreover the book is plenty long enough as it stands.  It is about 900

pages of MS, and may be 1000 when I shall have finished "working up"

vague places; so it would make from 130 to 150 pages of the Atlantic--

about what the Foregone Conclusion made, isn't it?



I would dearly like to see it in the Atlantic, but I doubt if it would

pay the publishers to buy the privilege, or me to sell it.  Bret Harte

has sold his novel (same size as mine, I should say) to Scribner's

Monthly for $6,500 (publication to begin in September, I think,) and he

gets a royalty of 7 1/2 per cent from Bliss in book form afterwards.  He

gets a royalty of ten per cent on it in England (issued in serial

numbers) and the same royalty on it in book form afterwards, and is to

receive an advance payment of five hundred pounds the day the first No.

of the serial appears.  If I could do as well, here, and there, with

mine, it might possibly pay me, but I seriously doubt it though it is

likely I could do better in England than Bret, who is not widely known

there.



You see I take a vile, mercenary view of things--but then my household

expenses are something almost ghastly.



By and by I shall take a boy of twelve and run him on through life (in

the first person) but not Tom Sawyer--he would not be a good character

for it.



I wish you would promise to read the MS of Tom Sawyer some time, and see

if you don't really decide that I am right in closing with him as a boy-

and point out the most glaring defects for me.  It is a tremendous favor

to ask, and I expect you to refuse and would be ashamed to expect you to

do otherwise.  But the thing has been so many months in my mind that it

seems a relief to snake it out.  I don't know any other person whose

judgment I could venture to take fully and entirely.  Don't hesitate

about saying no, for I know how your time is taxed, and I would have

honest need to blush if you said yes.



Osgood and I are "going for" the puppy G---- on infringement of

trademark.  To win one or two suits of this kind will set literary folks

on a firmer bottom.  I wish Osgood would sue for stealing Holmes's poem.

Wouldn't it be gorgeous to sue R---- for petty larceny?  I will promise

to go into court and swear I think him capable of stealing pea-nuts from

a blind pedlar.

                         Yrs ever,

                                   CLEMENS.





     Of course Howells promptly replied that he would read the story,

     adding: "You've no idea what I may ask you to do for me, some day.

     I'm sorry that you can't do it for the Atlantic, but I succumb.

     Perhaps you will do Boy No. 2 for us."  Clemens, conscience-

     stricken, meantime, hastily put the MS. out of reach of temptation.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                                  July 13, 1875

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Just as soon as you consented I realized all the

atrocity of my request, and straightway blushed and weakened.

I telegraphed my theatrical agent to come here and carry off the MS and

copy it.



But I will gladly send it to you if you will do as follows: dramatize it,

if you perceive that you can, and take, for your remuneration, half of

the first $6000 which I receive for its representation on the stage.  You

could alter the plot entirely, if you chose.  I could help in the work,

most cheerfully, after you had arranged the plot.  I have my eye upon two

young girls who can play "Tom" and "Huck."  I believe a good deal of a

drama can be made of it.  Come--can't you tackle this in the odd hours of

your vacation?  or later, if you prefer?



I do wish you could come down once more before your holiday.  I'd give

anything!

                    Yrs ever,

                              MARK.





Howells wrote that he had no time for the dramatization and urged Clemens

to undertake it himself.  He was ready to read the story, whenever it

should arrive.  Clemens did not hurry, however, The publication of Tom

Sawyer could wait.  He already had a book in press--the volume of

Sketches New and Old, which he had prepared for Bliss several years

before.



Sketches was issued that autumn, and Howells gave it a good notice--

possibly better than it deserved.



Considered among Mark Twain's books to-day, the collection of sketches

does not seem especially important.  With the exception of the frog story

and the "True Story" most of those included--might be spared.  Clemens

himself confessed to Howells that He wished, when it was too late, that

he had destroyed a number of them.  The book, however, was distinguished

in a special way: it contains Mark Twain's first utterance in print on

the subject of copyright, a matter in which he never again lost interest.

The absurdity and injustice of the copyright laws both amused and

irritated him, and in the course of time he would be largely instrumental

in their improvement.  In the book his open petition to Congress that all

property rights, as well as literary ownership, should be put on the

copyright basis and limited to a "beneficent term of forty-two years,"

was more or less of a joke, but, like so many of Mark Twain's jokes, it

was founded on reason and justice.



He had another idea, that was not a joke: an early plan in the direction

of international copyright.  It was to be a petition signed by the

leading American authors, asking the United States to declare itself to

be the first to stand for right and justice by enacting laws against the

piracy of foreign books.  It was a rather utopian scheme, as most schemes

for moral progress are, in their beginning.  It would not be likely ever

to reach Congress, but it would appeal to Howells and his Cambridge

friends.  Clemens wrote, outlining his plan of action.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        HARTFORD, Sept. 18, 1875.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--My plan is this--you are to get Mr. Lowell and Mr.

Longfellow to be the first signers of my copyright petition; you must

sign it yourself and get Mr. Whittier to do likewise.  Then Holmes will

sign--he said he would if he didn't have to stand at the head.  Then I'm

fixed.  I will then put a gentlemanly chap under wages and send him

personally to every author of distinction in the country, and corral the

rest of the signatures.  Then I'll have the whole thing lithographed

(about a thousand copies) and move upon the President and Congress in

person, but in the subordinate capacity of a party who is merely the

agent of better and wiser men--men whom the country cannot venture to

laugh at.



I will ask the President to recommend the thing in his message (and if he

should ask me to sit down and frame the paragraph for him I should blush

--but still I would frame it.)



Next I would get a prime leader in Congress: I would also see that votes

enough to carry the measure were privately secured before the bill was

offered.  This I would try through my leader and my friends there.



And then if Europe chose to go on stealing from us, we would say with

noble enthusiasm, "American lawmakers do steal but not from foreign

authors--Not from foreign authors!"



You see, what I want to drive into the Congressional mind is the simple

fact that the moral law is "Thou shalt not steal"--no matter what Europe

may do.



I swear I can't see any use in robbing European authors for the benefit

of American booksellers, anyway.



If we can ever get this thing through Congress, we can try making

copyright perpetual, some day.  There would be no sort of use in it,

since only one book in a hundred millions outlives the present copyright

term--no sort of use except that the writer of that one book have his

rights--which is something.



If we only had some God in the country's laws, instead of being in such a

sweat to get Him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.



The only man who ever signed my petition with alacrity, and said that the

fact that a thing was right was all-sufficient, was Rev. Dr. Bushnell.



I have lost my old petition, (which was brief) but will draft and enclose

another--not in the words it ought to be, but in the substance.  I want

Mr. Lowell to furnish the words (and the ideas too,) if he will do it.



Say--Redpath beseeches me to lecture in Boston in November--telegraphs

that Beecher's and Nast's withdrawal has put him in the tightest kind of

a place.  So I guess I'll do that old "Roughing It" lecture over again in

November and repeat it 2 or 3 times in New York while I am at it.



Can I take a carriage after the lecture and go out and stay with you that

night, provided you find at that distant time that it will not

inconvenience you?  Is Aldrich home yet?

                              With love to you all

                                        Yrs ever,

                                             S. L. C.





     Of course the petition never reached Congress.  Holmes's comment

     that governments were not in the habit of setting themselves up as

     high moral examples, except for revenue, was shared by too many

     others.  The petition was tabled, but Clemens never abandoned his

     purpose and lived to see most of his dream fulfilled.  Meantime,

     Howells's notice of the Sketches appeared in the Atlantic, and

     brought grateful acknowledgment from the author.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                   HARTFORD, Oct. 19, 1875.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--That is a perfectly superb notice.  You can easily

believe that nothing ever gratified me so much before.  The newspaper

praises bestowed upon the "Innocents Abroad" were large and generous, but

somehow I hadn't confidence in the critical judgement of the parties who

furnished them.  You know how that is, yourself, from reading the

newspaper notices of your own books.  They gratify a body, but they

always leave a small pang behind in the shape of a fear that the critic's

good words could not safely be depended upon as authority.  Yours is the

recognized critical Court of Last Resort in this country; from its

decision there is no appeal; and so, to have gained this decree of yours

before I am forty years old, I regard as a thing to be right down proud

of.  Mrs. Clemens says, "Tell him I am just as grateful to him as I can

be."  (It sounds as if she were grateful to you for heroically trampling

the truth under foot in order to praise me but in reality it means that

she is grateful to you for being bold enough to utter a truth which she

fully believes all competent people know, but which none has heretofore

been brave enough to utter.)  You see, the thing that gravels her is that

I am so persistently glorified as a mere buffoon, as if that entirely

covered my case--which she denies with venom.



The other day Mrs. Clemens was planning a visit to you, and so I am

waiting with a pleasurable hope for the result of her deliberations.

We are expecting visitors every day, now, from New York; and afterward

some are to come from Elmira.  I judge that we shall then be free to go

Bostonward.  I should be just delighted; because we could visit in

comfort, since we shouldn't have to do any shopping--did it all in New

York last week, and a tremendous pull it was too.



Mrs. C. said the other day, "We will go to Cambridge if we have to walk;

for I don't believe we can ever get the Howellses to come here again

until we have been there."  I was gratified to see that there was one

string, anyway, that could take her to Cambridge.  But I will do her the

justice to say that she is always wanting to go to Cambridge, independent

of the selfish desire to get a visit out of you by it.  I want her to get

started, now, before children's diseases are fashionable again, because

they always play such hob with visiting arrangements.

                              With love to you all

                                        Yrs Ever

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.





     Mark Twain's trips to Boston were usually made alone.  Women require

     more preparation to go visiting, and Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Howells

     seem to have exchanged visits infrequently.  For Mark Twain,

     perhaps, it was just as well that his wife did not always go with

     him; his absent-mindedness and boyish ingenuousness often led him

     into difficulties which Mrs. Clemens sometimes found embarrassing.

     In the foregoing letter they were planning a visit to Cambridge.  In

     the one that follows they seem to have made it--with certain

     results, perhaps not altogether amusing at the moment.





                      To W.  D.  Howells, in Boston:



                                                  Oct. 4, '75.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--We had a royal good time at your house, and have had a

royal good time ever since, talking about it, both privately and with the

neighbors.



Mrs. Clemens's bodily strength came up handsomely under that cheery

respite from household and nursery cares.  I do hope that Mrs. Howells's

didn't go correspondingly down, under the added burden to her cares and

responsibilities.  Of course I didn't expect to get through without

committing some crimes and hearing of them afterwards, so I have taken

the inevitable lashings and been able to hum a tune while the punishment

went on.  I "caught it" for letting Mrs. Howells bother and bother about

her coffee when it was "a good deal better than we get at home."

I "caught it" for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last moment and losing her

the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that MS when the

printers are done with it.  I "caught it" once more for personating that

drunken Col. James.  I "caught it" for mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's

picture was slightly damaged; and when, after a lull in the storm,

I confessed, shame-facedly, that I had privately suggested to you that we

hadn't any frames, and that if you wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton,

&c., &c., &c., the Madam was simply speechless for the space of a minute.

Then she said:



"How could you, Youth!  The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his

sensitive nature, upon such a repulsive er--"



"Oh, Howells won't mind it!  You don't know Howells.  Howells is a man

who--" She was gone.  But George was the first person she stumbled on in

the hall, so she took it out of George.  I was glad of that, because it

saved the babies.



I've got another rattling good character for my novel!  That great work

is mulling itself into shape gradually.



Mrs. Clemens sends love to Mrs. Howells--meantime she is diligently

laying up material for a letter to her.

                              Yrs ever

                                        MARK.





     The "George" of this letter was Mark Twain's colored butler, a

     valued and even beloved member of the household--a most picturesque

     character, who "one day came to wash windows," as Clemens used to

     say, "and remained eighteen years."  The fiction of Mrs. Clemens's

     severity he always found amusing, because of its entire contrast

     with the reality of her gentle heart.



     Clemens carried the Tom Sawyer MS. to Boston himself and placed it

     in Howells's hands.  Howells had begged to be allowed to see the

     story, and Mrs. Clemens was especially anxious that he should do so.

     She had doubts as to certain portions of it, and had the fullest

     faith in Howells's opinion.



     It was a gratifying one when it came.  Howells wrote: "I finished

     reading Tom Sawyer a week ago, sitting up till one A.M. to get to

     the end, simply because it was impossible to leave off.  It's

     altogether the best boy's story I ever read.  It will be an immense

     success.  But I think you ought to treat it explicitly as a boy's

     story.  Grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do; and if you

     should put it forth as a study of boy character from the grown-up

     point of view, you give the wrong key to it....  The adventures are

     enchanting.  I wish I had been on that island.  The treasure-

     hunting, the loss in the cave--it's all exciting and splendid.

     I shouldn't think of publishing this story serially.  Give me a hint

     when it's to be out, and I'll start the sheep to jumping in the

     right places"--meaning that he would have an advance review ready

     for publication in the Atlantic, which was a leader of criticism in

     America.



     Mark Twain was writing a great deal at this time.  Howells was

     always urging him to send something to the Atlantic, declaring a

     willingness to have his name appear every month in their pages, and

     Clemens was generally contributing some story or sketch.  The

     "proof" referred to in the next letter was of one of these articles.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        HARTFORD, Nov. 23, '75.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Herewith is the proof.  In spite of myself, how

awkwardly I do jumble words together; and how often I do use three words

where one would answer--a thing I am always trying to guard against.

I shall become as slovenly a writer as Charles Francis Adams, if I don't

look out.  (That is said in jest; because of course I do not seriously

fear getting so bad as that.  I never shall drop so far toward his and

Bret Harte's level as to catch myself saying "It must have been wiser to

have believed that he might have accomplished it if he could have felt

that he would have been supported by those who should have &c.  &c.  &c.")

The reference to Bret Harte reminds me that I often accuse him of being a

deliberate imitator of Dickens; and this in turn reminds me that I have

charged unconscious plagiarism upon Charley Warner; and this in turn

reminds me that I have been delighting my soul for two weeks over a bran

new and ingenious way of beginning a novel--and behold, all at once it

flashes upon me that Charley Warner originated the idea 3 years ago and

told me about it!  Aha!  So much for self-righteousness!  I am well

repaid.  Here are 108 pages of MS, new and clean, lying disgraced in the

waste paper basket, and I am beginning the novel over again in an

unstolen way.  I would not wonder if I am the worst literary thief in the

world, without knowing it.



It is glorious news that you like Tom Sawyer so well.  I mean to see to

it that your review of it shall have plenty of time to appear before the

other notices.  Mrs. Clemens decides with you that the book should issue

as a book for boys, pure and simple--and so do I.  It is surely the

correct idea.  As to that last chapter, I think of just leaving it off

and adding nothing in its place.  Something told me that the book was

done when I got to that point--and so the strong temptation to put Huck's

life at the Widow's into detail, instead of generalizing it in a

paragraph was resisted.  Just send Sawyer to me by express--I enclose

money for it.  If it should get lost it will be no great matter.



Company interfered last night, and so "Private Theatricals" goes over

till this evening, to be read aloud.  Mrs. Clemens is mad, but the story

will take that all out.  This is going to be a splendid winter night for

fireside reading, anyway.



I am almost at a dead stand-still with my new story, on account of the

misery of having to do it all over again.  We--all send love to you--all.

                              Yrs ever

                                        MARK.





The "story" referred to may have been any one of several begun by him at

this time.  His head was full of ideas for literature of every sort.

Many of his beginnings came to nothing, for the reason that he started

wrong, or with no definitely formed plan.  Others of his literary

enterprises were condemned by his wife for their grotesqueness or for the

offense they might give in one way or another, however worthy the

intention behind them.  Once he wrote a burlesque on family history "The

Autobiography of a Damned Fool."  "Livy wouldn't have it," he said later,

"so I gave it up."  The world is indebted to Mark Twain's wife for the

check she put upon his fantastic or violent impulses.  She was his

public, his best public--clearheaded and wise.  That he realized this,

and was willing to yield, was by no means the least of his good fortunes.

We may believe that he did not always yield easily, and perhaps sometimes

only out of love for her.  In the letter which he wrote her on her

thirtieth birthday we realize something of what she had come to mean in

his life.





                To Mrs. Clemens on her Thirtieth Birthday:



                                        HARTFORD, November 27, 1875.

Livy darling, six years have gone by since I made my first great success

in life and won you, and thirty years have passed since Providence made

preparation for that happy success by sending you into the world.  Every

day we live together adds to the security of my confidence, that we can

never any more wish to be separated than that we can ever imagine a

regret that we were ever joined.  You are dearer to me to-day, my child,

than you were upon the last anniversary of this birth-day; you were

dearer then than you were a year before--you have grown more and more

dear from the first of those anniversaries, and I do not doubt that this

precious progression will continue on to the end.



Let us look forward to the coming anniversaries, with their age and their

gray hairs without fear and without depression, trusting and believing

that the love we bear each other will be sufficient to make them blessed.



So, with abounding affection for you and our babies, I hail this day that

brings you the matronly grace and dignity of three decades!



                              Always Yours

                                        S. L. C.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Letters Vol. 2, by Mark Twain













MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS 1876-1885



ARRANGED WITH COMMENT BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE







VOLUME III.





XVI.



LETTERS, 1876, CHIEFLY TO W. D. HOWELLS.  LITERATURE AND POLITICS.

PLANNING A PLAY WITH BRET HARTE



     The Monday Evening Club of Hartford was an association of most of

     the literary talent of that city, and it included a number of very

     distinguished members.  The writers, the editors, the lawyers, and

     the ministers of the gospel who composed it were more often than not

     men of national or international distinction.  There was but one

     paper at each meeting, and it was likely to be a paper that would

     later find its way into some magazine.



     Naturally Mark Twain was one of its favorite members, and his

     contributions never failed to arouse interest and discussion.  A

     "Mark Twain night" brought out every member.  In the next letter we

     find the first mention of one of his most memorable contributions--a

     story of one of life's moral aspects.  The tale, now included in his

     collected works, is, for some reason, little read to-day; yet the

     curious allegory, so vivid in its seeming reality, is well worth

     consideration.





                      To W.  D.  Howells, in Boston:



                                             HARTFORD, Jan. 11, '76.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Indeed we haven't forgotten the Howellses, nor scored

up a grudge of any kind against them; but the fact is I was under the

doctor's hands for four weeks on a stretch and have been disabled from

working for a week or so beside.  I thought I was well, about ten days

ago, so I sent for a short-hand writer and dictated answers to a bushel

or so of letters that had been accumulating during my illness.  Getting

everything shipshape and cleared up, I went to work next day upon an

Atlantic article, which ought to be worth $20 per page (which is the

price they usually pay for my work, I believe) for although it is only 70

pages MS (less than two days work, counting by bulk,) I have spent 3 more

days trimming, altering and working at it.  I shall put in one more day's

polishing on it, and then read it before our Club, which is to meet at

our house Monday evening, the 24th inst.  I think it will bring out

considerable discussion among the gentlemen of the Club--though the title

of the article will not give them much notion of what is to follow,--this

title being "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in

Connecticut"--which reminds me that today's Tribune says there will be a

startling article in the current Atlantic, in which a being which is

tangible bud invisible will figure-exactly the case with the sketch of

mine which I am talking about!  However, mine can lie unpublished a year

or two as well as not--though I wish that contributor of yours had not

interfered with his coincidence of heroes.



But what I am coming at, is this: won't you and Mrs. Howells come down

Saturday the 22nd and remain to the Club on Monday night?  We always have

a rattling good time at the Club and we do want you to come, ever so

much.  Will you?  Now say you will.  Mrs. Clemens and I are persuading

ourselves that you twain will come.



My volume of sketches is doing very well, considering the times; received

my quarterly statement today from Bliss, by which I perceive that 20,000

copies have been sold--or rather, 20,000 had been sold 3 weeks ago; a lot

more, by this time, no doubt.



I am on the sick list again--and was, day before yesterday--but on the

whole I am getting along.

                              Yrs ever

                                        MARK





     Howells wrote that he could not come down to the club meeting,

     adding that sickness was "quite out of character" for Mark Twain,

     and hardly fair on a man who had made so many other people feel

     well.  He closed by urging that Bliss "hurry out" 'Tom Sawyer.'

     "That boy is going to make a prodigious hit."  Clemens answered:





                      To W.  D.  Howells, in Boston.



                                             HARTFORD, Jan. 18, '76.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Thanks, and ever so many, for the good opinion of 'Tom

Sawyer.'  Williams has made about 300 rattling pictures for it--some of

them very dainty.  Poor devil, what a genius he has and how he does

murder it with rum.  He takes a book of mine, and without suggestion from

anybody builds no end of pictures just from his reading of it.



There was never a man in the world so grateful to another as I was to you

day before yesterday, when I sat down (in still rather wretched health)

to set myself to the dreary and hateful task of making final revision of

Tom Sawyer, and discovered, upon opening the package of MS that your

pencil marks were scattered all along.  This was splendid, and swept away

all labor.  Instead of reading the MS, I simply hunted out the pencil

marks and made the emendations which they suggested.  I reduced the boy

battle to a curt paragraph; I finally concluded to cut the Sunday school

speech down to the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire,

since the book is to be for boys and girls; I tamed the various

obscenities until I judged that they no longer carried offense.  So, at a

single sitting I began and finished a revision which I had supposed would

occupy 3 or 4.  days and leave me mentally and physically fagged out at

the end.  I was careful not to inflict the MS upon you until I had

thoroughly and painstakingly revised it.  Therefore, the only faults left

were those that would discover themselves to others, not me--and these

you had pointed out.



There was one expression which perhaps you overlooked.  When Huck is

complaining to Tom of the rigorous system in vogue at the widow's, he

says the servants harass him with all manner of compulsory decencies, and

he winds up by saying: "and they comb me all to hell."  (No exclamation

point.) Long ago, when I read that to Mrs. Clemens, she made no comment;

another time I created occasion to read that chapter to her aunt and her

mother (both sensitive and loyal subjects of the kingdom of heaven, so to

speak) and they let it pass.  I was glad, for it was the most natural

remark in the world for that boy to make (and he had been allowed few

privileges of speech in the book;) when I saw that you, too, had let it

go without protest, I was glad, and afraid; too--afraid you hadn't

observed it.  Did you?  And did you question the propriety of it?  Since

the book is now professedly and confessedly a boy's and girl's hook, that

darn word bothers me some, nights, but it never did until I had ceased to

regard the volume as being for adults.



Don't bother to answer now, (for you've writing enough to do without

allowing me to add to the burden,) but tell me when you see me again!



Which we do hope will be next Saturday or Sunday or Monday.  Couldn't you

come now and mull over the alterations which you are going to make in

your MS, and make them after you go back?  Wouldn't it assist the work if

you dropped out of harness and routine for a day or two and have that

sort of revivification which comes of a holiday-forgetfulness of the

work-shop?  I can always work after I've been to your house; and if you

will come to mine, now, and hear the club toot their various horns over

the exasperating metaphysical question which I mean to lay before them in

the disguise of a literary extravaganza, it would just brace you up like

a cordial.



(I feel sort of mean trying to persuade a man to put down a critical

piece of work at a critical time, but yet I am honest in thinking it

would not hurt the work nor impair your interest in it to come under the

circumstances.) Mrs. Clemens says, "Maybe the Howellses could come Monday

if they cannot come Saturday; ask them; it is worth trying."  Well, how's

that?  Could you?  It would be splendid if you could.  Drop me a postal

card--I should have a twinge of conscience if I forced you to write a

letter, (I am honest about that,)--and if you find you can't make out to

come, tell me that you bodies will come the next Saturday if the thing is

possible, and stay over Sunday.

                                   Yrs ever

                                             MARK.





     Howells, however, did not come to the club meeting, but promised to

     come soon when they could have a quiet time to themselves together.

     As to Huck's language, he declared:



     "I'd have that swearing out in an instant.  I suppose I didn't

     notice it because the locution was so familiar to my Western sense,

     and so exactly the thing that Huck would say."  Clemens changed the

     phrase to, "They comb me all to thunder," and so it stands to-day.



     The "Carnival of Crime," having served its purpose at the club,

     found quick acceptance by Howells for the Atlantic.  He was so

     pleased with it, in fact, that somewhat later he wrote, urging that

     its author allow it to be printed in a dainty book, by Osgood, who

     made a specialty of fine publishing.  Meantime Howells had written

     his Atlantic notice of Tom Sawyer, and now inclosed Clemens a proof

     of it.  We may judge from the reply that it was satisfactory.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                                  Apl 3, '76.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--It is a splendid notice and will embolden weak-kneed

journalistic admirers to speak out, and will modify or shut up the

unfriendly.  To "fear God and dread the Sunday school" exactly described

that old feeling which I used to have, but I couldn't have formulated it.

I want to enclose one of the illustrations in this letter, if I do not

forget it.  Of course the book is to be elaborately illustrated, and I

think that many of the pictures are considerably above the American

average, in conception if not in execution.



I do not re-enclose your review to you, for you have evidently read and

corrected it, and so I judge you do not need it.  About two days after

the Atlantic issues I mean to begin to send books to principal journals

and magazines.



I read the "Carnival of Crime" proof in New York when worn and witless

and so left some things unamended which I might possibly have altered had

I been at home.  For instance, "I shall always address you in your own

S-n-i-v-e-l-i-n-g d-r-a-w-l, baby."  I saw that you objected to something

there, but I did not understand what!  Was it that it was too personal?

Should the language be altered?--or the hyphens taken out?  Won't you

please fix it the way it ought to be, altering the language as you

choose, only making it bitter and contemptuous?



"Deuced" was not strong enough; so I met you halfway with "devilish."



Mrs. Clemens has returned from New York with dreadful sore throat, and

bones racked with rheumatism.  She keeps her bed.  "Aloha nui!" as the

Kanakas say.

                         MARK.





     Henry Irving once said to Mark Twain: "You made a mistake by not

     adopting the stage as a profession.  You would have made even a

     greater actor than a writer."



     Mark Twain would have made an actor, certainly, but not a very

     tractable one.  His appearance in Hartford in "The Loan of a Lover"

     was a distinguished event, and his success complete, though he made

     so many extemporaneous improvements on the lines of thick-headed

     Peter Spuyk, that he kept the other actors guessing as to their

     cues, and nearly broke up the performance.  It was, of course, an

     amateur benefit, though Augustin Daly promptly wrote, offering to

     put it on for a long run.



     The "skeleton novelette" mentioned in the next letter refers to a

     plan concocted by Howells and Clemens, by which each of twelve

     authors was to write a story, using the same plot, "blindfolded" as

     to what the others had written.  It was a regular "Mark Twain"

     notion, and it is hard to-day to imagine Howells's continued

     enthusiasm in it.  Neither he nor Clemens gave up the idea for a

     long time.  It appears in their letters again and again, though

     perhaps it was just as well for literature that it was never carried

     out.





                      To W.  D.  Howells, in Boston:



                                             Apl.  22, 1876.

MY DEAR HOWELLS, You'll see per enclosed slip that I appear for the first

time on the stage next Wednesday.  You and Mrs. H. come down and you

shall skip in free.



I wrote my skeleton novelette yesterday and today.  It will make a little

under 12 pages.



Please tell Aldrich I've got a photographer engaged, and tri-weekly issue

is about to begin.  Show him the canvassing specimens and beseech him to

subscribe.

                    Ever yours,

                              S. L. C.





     In his next letter Mark Twain explains why Tom Sawyer is not to

     appear as soon as planned.  The reference to "The Literary

     Nightmare" refers to the "Punch, Conductor, Punch with Care" sketch,

     which had recently appeared in the Atlantic.  Many other versifiers

     had had their turn at horse-car poetry, and now a publisher was

     anxious to collect it in a book, provided he could use the Atlantic

     sketch.  Clemens does not tell us here the nature of Carlton's

     insult, forgiveness of which he was not yet qualified to grant, but

     there are at least two stories about it, or two halves of the same

     incident, as related afterward by Clemens and Canton.  Clemens said

     that when he took the Jumping Frog book to Carlton, in 1867, the

     latter, pointing to his stock, said, rather scornfully: "Books?

     I don't want your book; my shelves are full of books now," though

     the reader may remember that it was Carlton himself who had given

     the frog story to the Saturday Press and had seen it become famous.

     Carlton's half of the story was that he did not accept Mark Twain's

     book because the author looked so disreputable.  Long afterward,

     when the two men met in Europe, the publisher said to the now rich

     and famous author: "Mr. Clemens, my one claim on immortality is that

     I declined your first book."





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        HARTFORD, Apl. 25, 1876

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Thanks for giving me the place of honor.



Bliss made a failure in the matter of getting Tom Sawyer ready on time--

the engravers assisting, as usual.  I went down to see how much of a

delay there was going to be, and found that the man had not even put a

canvasser on, or issued an advertisement yet--in fact, that the

electrotypes would not all be done for a month!  But of course the main

fact was that no canvassing had been done--because a subscription harvest

is before publication, (not after, when people have discovered how bad

one's book is.)



Well, yesterday I put in the Courant an editorial paragraph stating that

Tam Sawyer is "ready to issue, but publication is put off in order to

secure English copyright by simultaneous publication there and here.  The

English edition is unavoidably delayed."



You see, part of that is true.  Very well.  When I observed that my

"Sketches" had dropped from a sale of 6 or 7000 a month down to 1200 a

month, I said "this ain't no time to be publishing books; therefore, let

Tom lie still till Autumn, Mr. Bliss, and make a holiday book of him to

beguile the young people withal."



I shall print items occasionally, still further delaying Tom, till I ease

him down to Autumn without shock to the waiting world.



As to that "Literary Nightmare" proposition.  I'm obliged to withhold

consent, for what seems a good reason--to wit: A single page of horse-car

poetry is all that the average reader can stand, without nausea; now, to

stack together all of it that has been written, and then add it to my

article would be to enrage and disgust each and every reader and win the

deathless enmity of the lot.



Even if that reason were insufficient, there would still be a sufficient

reason left, in the fact that Mr. Carlton seems to be the publisher of

the magazine in which it is proposed to publish this horse-car matter.

Carlton insulted me in Feb. 1867, and so when the day arrives that sees

me doing him a civility I shall feel that I am ready for Paradise, since

my list of possible and impossible forgivenesses will then be complete.



Mrs. Clemens says my version of the blindfold novelette "A Murder and A

Marriage" is "good."  Pretty strong language--for her.



The Fieldses are coming down to the play tomorrow, and they promise to

get you and Mrs. Howells to come too, but I hope you'll do nothing of the

kind if it will inconvenience you, for I'm not going to play either

strikingly bad enough or well enough to make the journey pay you.



My wife and I think of going to Boston May 7th to see Anna Dickinson's

debut on the 8th.  If I find we can go, I'll try to get a stage box and

then you and Mrs. Howells must come to Parker's and go with us to the

crucifixion.



(Is that spelt right?--somehow it doesn't look right.)



With our very kindest regards to the whole family.

                              Yrs ever,

                                        MARK.





     The mention of Anna Dickinson, at the end of this letter, recalls a

     prominent reformer and lecturer of the Civil War period.  She had

     begun her crusades against temperance and slavery in 1857, when she

     was but fifteen years old, when her success as a speaker had been

     immediate and extraordinary.  Now, in this later period, at the age

     of thirty-four, she aspired to the stage--unfortunately for her, as

     her gifts lay elsewhere.  Clemens and Howells knew Miss Dickinson,

     and were anxious for the success which they hardly dared hope for.

     Clemens arranged a box party.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                                       May 4, '76.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I shall reach Boston on Monday the 8th, either at

4:30 p.m. or 6 p.m.  (Which is best?) and go straight to Parker's.

If you and Mrs. Howells cannot be there by half past 4, I'll not plan to

arrive till the later train-time (6,) because I don't want to be there

alone--even a minute.  Still, Joe Twichell will doubtless go with me

(forgot that,) he is going to try hard to.  Mrs. Clemens has given up

going, because Susy is just recovering from about the savagest assault of

diphtheria a child ever did recover from, and therefore will not be

entirely her healthy self again by the 8th.



Would you and Mrs. Howells like to invite Mr. and Mrs. Aldrich?  I have

a large proscenium box--plenty of room.  Use your own pleasure about it

--I mainly (that is honest,) suggest it because I am seeking to make

matters pleasant for you and Mrs. Howells.  I invited Twichell because I

thought I knew you'd like that.  I want you to fix it so that you and the

Madam can remain in Boston all night; for I leave next day and we can't

have a talk, otherwise.  I am going to get two rooms and a parlor; and

would like to know what you decide about the Aldriches, so as to know

whether to apply for an additional bedroom or not.



Don't dine that evening, for I shall arrive dinnerless and need your

help.



I'll bring my Blindfold Novelette, but shan't exhibit it unless you

exhibit yours.  You would simply go to work and write a novelette that

would make mine sick.  Because you would know all about where my weak

points lay.  No, Sir, I'm one of these old wary birds!



Don't bother to write a letter--3 lines on a postal card is all that I

can permit from a busy man.

                         Yrs ever

                                   MARK.



P. S.  Good!  You'll not have to feel any call to mention that debut in

the Atlantic--they've made me pay the grand cash for my box!--a thing

which most managers would be too worldly-wise to do, with journalistic

folks.  But I'm most honestly glad, for I'd rather pay three prices, any

time, than to have my tongue half paralyzed with a dead-head ticket.



Hang that Anna Dickinson, a body can never depend upon her debuts!  She

has made five or six false starts already.  If she fails to debut this

time, I will never bet on her again.





     In his book, My Mark Twain, Howells refers to the "tragedy" of Miss

     Dickinson's appearance.  She was the author of numerous plays, some

     of which were successful, but her career as an actress was never

     brilliant.



     At Elmira that summer the Clemenses heard from their good friend

     Doctor Brown, of Edinburgh, and sent eager replies.





                     To Dr. John Brown, in Edinburgh:



                              ELMIRA, NEW YORK, U. S. June 22, 1876.

DEAR FRIEND THE DOCTOR,--It was a perfect delight to see the well-known

handwriting again!  But we so grieve to know that you are feeling

miserable.  It must not last--it cannot last.  The regal summer is come

and it will smile you into high good cheer; it will charm away your

pains, it will banish your distresses.  I wish you were here, to spend

the summer with us.  We are perched on a hill-top that overlooks a little

world of green valleys, shining rivers, sumptuous forests and billowy

uplands veiled in the haze of distance.  We have no neighbors.  It is the

quietest of all quiet places, and we are hermits that eschew caves and

live in the sun.  Doctor, if you'd only come!



I will carry your letter to Mrs. C. now, and there will be a glad woman,

I tell you!  And she shall find one of those pictures to put in this for

Mrs. Barclays and if there isn't one here we'll send right away to

Hartford and get one.  Come over, Doctor John, and bring the Barclays,

the Nicolsons and the Browns, one and all!

                         Affectionately,

                                        SAML. L. CLEMENS.





     From May until August no letters appear to have passed between

     Clemens and Howells; the latter finally wrote, complaining of the

     lack of news.  He was in the midst of campaign activities, he said,

     writing a life of Hayes, and gaily added: "You know I wrote the life

     of Lincoln, which elected him."  He further reported a comedy he had

     completed, and gave Clemens a general stirring up as to his own

     work.



     Mark Twain, in his hillside study, was busy enough.  Summer was his

     time for work, and he had tried his hand in various directions.  His

     mention of Huck Finn in his reply to Howells is interesting, in that

     it shows the measure of his enthusiasm, or lack of it, as a gauge of

     his ultimate achievement





                      To  W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             ELMIRA, Aug. 9, 1876.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I was just about to write you when your letter came--

and not one of those obscene postal cards, either, but reverently, upon

paper.



I shall read that biography, though the letter of acceptance was amply

sufficient to corral my vote without any further knowledge of the man.

Which reminds me that a campaign club in Jersey City wrote a few days ago

and invited me to be present at the raising of a Tilden and Hendricks

flag there, and to take the stand and give them some "counsel."  Well, I

could not go, but gave them counsel and advice by letter, and in the

kindliest terms as to the raising of the flag--advised them "not to raise

it."



Get your book out quick, for this is a momentous time.  If Tilden is

elected I think the entire country will go pretty straight to--Mrs.

Howells's bad place.



I am infringing on your patent--I started a record of our children's

sayings, last night.  Which reminds me that last week I sent down and got

Susie a vast pair of shoes of a most villainous pattern, for I discovered

that her feet were being twisted and cramped out of shape by a smaller

and prettier article.  She did not complain, but looked degraded and

injured.  At night her mamma gave her the usual admonition when she was

about to say her prayers--to wit:



"Now, Susie--think about God."



"Mamma, I can't, with those shoes."



The farm is perfectly delightful this season.  It is as quiet and

peaceful as a South Sea Island.  Some of the sunsets which we have

witnessed from this commanding eminence were marvelous.  One evening a

rainbow spanned an entire range of hills with its mighty arch, and from a

black hub resting upon the hill-top in the exact centre, black rays

diverged upward in perfect regularity to the rainbow's arch and created a

very strongly defined and altogether the most majestic, magnificent and

startling half-sunk wagon wheel you can imagine.  After that, a world of

tumbling and prodigious clouds came drifting up out of the West and took

to themselves a wonderfully rich and brilliant green color--the decided

green of new spring foliage.  Close by them we saw the intense blue of

the skies, through rents in the cloud-rack, and away off in another

quarter were drifting clouds of a delicate pink color.  In one place hung

a pall of dense black clouds, like compacted pitch-smoke.  And the

stupendous wagon wheel was still in the supremacy of its unspeakable

grandeur.  So you see, the colors present in the sky at once and the same

time were blue, green, pink, black, and the vari-colored splendors of the

rainbow.  All strong and decided colors, too.  I don't know whether this

weird and astounding spectacle most suggested heaven, or hell.  The

wonder, with its constant, stately, and always surprising changes, lasted

upwards of two hours, and we all stood on the top of the hill by my study

till the final miracle was complete and the greatest day ended that we

ever saw.



Our farmer, who is a grave man, watched that spectacle to the end, and

then observed that it was "dam funny."



The double-barreled novel lies torpid.  I found I could not go on with

it.  The chapters I had written were still too new and familiar to me.

I may take it up next winter, but cannot tell yet; I waited and waited to

see if my interest in it would not revive, but gave it up a month ago and

began another boys' book--more to be at work than anything else.  I have

written 400 pages on it--therefore it is very nearly half done.  It is

Huck Finn's Autobiography.  I like it only tolerably well, as far as I

have got, and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the MS when it is done.



So the comedy is done, and with a "fair degree of satisfaction."  That

rejoices me, and makes me mad, too--for I can't plan a comedy, and what

have you done that God should be so good to you?  I have racked myself

baldheaded trying to plan a comedy harness for some promising characters

of mine to work in, and had to give it up.  It is a noble lot of blooded

stock and worth no end of money, but they must stand in the stable and be

profitless.  I want to be present when the comedy is produced and help

enjoy the success.



Warner's book is mighty readable, I think.

                         Love to yez.

                              Yrs ever

                                             MARK





     Howells promptly wrote again, urging him to enter the campaign for

     Hayes.  "There is not another man in this country," he said, "who

     could help him so much as you."  The "farce" which Clemens refers to

     in his reply, was "The Parlor Car," which seems to have been about

     the first venture of Howells in that field.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             ELMIRA, August 23, 1876.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I am glad you think I could do Hayes any good, for I

have been wanting to write a letter or make a speech to that end.  I'll

be careful not to do either, however, until the opportunity comes in a

natural, justifiable and unlugged way; and shall not then do anything

unless I've got it all digested and worded just right.  In which case I

might do some good--in any other I should do harm.  When a humorist

ventures upon the grave concerns of life he must do his job better than

another man or he works harm to his cause.



The farce is wonderfully bright and delicious, and must make a hit.  You

read it to me, and it was mighty good; I read it last night and it was

better; I read it aloud to the household this morning and it was better

than ever.  So it would be worth going a long way to see it well played;

for without any question an actor of genius always adds a subtle

something to any man's work that none but the writer knew was there

before.  Even if he knew it.  I have heard of readers convulsing

audiences with my "Aurelia's Unfortunate Young Man."  If there is

anything really funny in the piece, the author is not aware of it.



All right--advertise me for the new volume.  I send you herewith a sketch

which will make 3 pages of the Atlantic.  If you like it and accept it,

you should get it into the December No. because I shall read it in public

in Boston the 13th and 14th of Nov.  If it went in a month earlier it

would be too old for me to read except as old matter; and if it went in a

month later it would be too old for the Atlantic--do you see?  And if you

wish to use it, will you set it up now, and send me three proofs?--one

to correct for Atlantic, one to send to Temple Bar (shall I tell them to

use it not earlier than their November No. and one to use in practising

for my Boston readings.



We must get up a less elaborate and a much better skeleton-plan for the

Blindfold Novels and make a success of that idea.  David Gray spent

Sunday here and said we could but little comprehend what a rattling stir

that thing would make in the country.  He thought it would make a mighty

strike.  So do I.  But with only 8 pages to tell the tale in, the plot

must be less elaborate, doubtless.  What do you think?



When we exchange visits I'll show you an unfinished sketch of Elizabeth's

time which shook David Gray's system up pretty exhaustively.

                                        Yrs ever,

                                                  MARK.





     The MS. sketch mentioned in the foregoing letter was "The

     Canvasser's Tale," later included in the volume, Tom Sawyer Abroad,

     and Other Stories.  It is far from being Mark Twain's best work, but

     was accepted and printed in the Atlantic.  David Gray was an able

     journalist and editor whom Mark Twain had known in Buffalo.



     The "sketch of Elizabeth's time" is a brilliant piece of writing

     --an imaginary record of conversation and court manners in the good

     old days of free speech and performance, phrased in the language of

     the period.  Gray, John Hay, Twichell, and others who had a chance

     to see it thought highly of it, and Hay had it set in type and a few

     proofs taken for private circulation.  Some years afterward a West

     Point officer had a special font of antique type made for it, and

     printed a hundred copies.  But the present-day reader would hardly

     be willing to include "Fireside Conversation in the Time of Queen

     Elizabeth" in Mark Twain's collected works.



     Clemens was a strong Republican in those days, as his letters of

     this period show.  His mention of the "caves" in the next is another

     reference to "The Canvasser's Tale."





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             Sept.  14, 1876.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Yes, the collection of caves was the origin of it.

I changed it to echoes because these being invisible and intangible,

constituted a still more absurd species of property, and yet a man could

really own an echo, and sell it, too, for a high figure--such an echo as

that at the Villa Siminetti, two miles from Milan, for instance.

My first purpose was to have the man make a collection of caves and

afterwards of echoes; but perceived that the element of absurdity and

impracticability was so nearly identical as to amount to a repetition of

an idea.....



I will not, and do not, believe that there is a possibility of Hayes's

defeat, but I want the victory to be sweeping.....



It seems odd to find myself interested in an election.  I never was

before.  And I can't seem to get over my repugnance to reading or

thinking about politics, yet.  But in truth I care little about any

party's politics--the man behind it is the important thing.



You may well know that Mrs. Clemens liked the Parlor Car--enjoyed it ever

so much, and was indignant at you all through, and kept exploding into

rages at you for pretending that such a woman ever existed--closing each

and every explosion with "But it is just what such a woman would do."--

"It is just what such a woman would say."  They all voted the Parlor Car

perfection--except me.  I said they wouldn't have been allowed to court

and quarrel there so long, uninterrupted; but at each critical moment the

odious train-boy would come in and pile foul literature all over them

four or five inches deep, and the lover would turn his head aside and

curse--and presently that train-boy would be back again (as on all those

Western roads) to take up the literature and leave prize candy.



Of course the thing is perfect, in the magazine, without the train-boy;

but I was thinking of the stage and the groundlings.  If the dainty

touches went over their heads, the train-boy and other possible

interruptions would fetch them every time.  Would it mar the flow of the

thing too much to insert that devil?  I thought it over a couple of hours

and concluded it wouldn't, and that he ought to be in for the sake of the

groundlings (and to get new copyright on the piece.)



And it seemed to me that now that the fourth act is so successfully

written, why not go ahead and write the 3 preceding acts?  And then after

it is finished, let me put into it a low-comedy character (the girl's or

the lover's father or uncle) and gobble a big pecuniary interest in your

work for myself.  Do not let this generous proposition disturb your rest

--but do write the other 3 acts, and then it will be valuable to

managers.  And don't go and sell it to anybody, like Harte, but keep it

for yourself.



Harte's play can be doctored till it will be entirely acceptable and then

it will clear a great sum every year.  I am out of all patience with

Harte for selling it.  The play entertained me hugely, even in its

present crude state.

                         Love to you all.

                                   Yrs ever,

                                             MARK





     Following the Sellers success, Clemens had made many attempts at

     dramatic writing.  Such undertakings had uniformly failed, but he

     had always been willing to try again.  In the next letter we get the

     beginning of what proved his first and last direct literary

     association, that is to say, collaboration, with Bret Harte.

     Clemens had great admiration for Harte's ability and believed that

     between them they could turn out a successful play.  Whether or not

     this belief was justified will appear later.  Howells's biography of

     Hayes, meanwhile, had not gone well.  He reported that only two

     thousand copies had been sold in what was now the height of the

     campaign.  "There's success for you," he said; "it makes me despair

     of the Republic."



     Clemens, on his part, had made a speech for Hayes that Howells

     declared had put civil-service reform in a nutshell; he added: "You

     are the only Republican orator, quoted without distinction of party

     by all the newspapers."





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        HARTFORD, Oct. 11, 1876.

MY DEAR HOWELLS, This is a secret, to be known to nobody but you (of

course I comprehend that Mrs. Howells is part of you) that Bret Harte

came up here the other day and asked me to help him write a play and

divide the swag, and I agreed.  I am to put in Scotty Briggs (See Buck

Fanshaw's Funeral, in "Roughing It.") and he is to put in a Chinaman (a,

wonderfully funny creature, as Bret presents him--for 5 minutes--in his

Sandy Bar play.)  This Chinaman is to be the character of the play, and

both of us will work on him and develop him.  Bret is to draw a plot, and

I am to do the same; we shall use the best of the two, or gouge from both

and build a third.  My plot is built--finished it yesterday--six days'

work, 8 or 9 hours a day, and has nearly killed me.



Now the favor I ask of you is that you will have the words "Ah Sin, a

Drama," printed in the middle of a note-paper page and send the same to

me, with Bill.  We don't want anybody to know that we are building this

play.  I can't get this title page printed here without having to lie so

much that the thought of it is disagreeable to one reared as I have been.

And yet the title of the play must be printed--the rest of the

application for copyright is allowable in penmanship.



We have got the very best gang of servants in America, now.  When George

first came he was one of the most religious of men.  He had but one

fault--young George Washington's.  But I have trained him; and now it

fairly breaks Mrs. Clemens's heart to hear George stand at that front

door and lie to the unwelcome visitor.  But your time is valuable; I must

not dwell upon these things.....I'll ask Warner and Harte if they'll do

Blindfold Novelettes.  Some time I'll simplify that plot.  All it needs

is that the hanging and the marriage shall not be appointed for the same

day.  I got over that difficulty, but it required too much MS to

reconcile the thing--so the movement of the story was clogged.



I came near agreeing to make political speeches with our candidate for

Governor the 16th and 23 inst., but I had to give up the idea, for Harte

and I will be here at work then.

                              Yrs ever,

                                        MARK





     Mark Twain was writing few letters these days to any one but

     Howells, yet in November he sent one to an old friend of his youth,

     Burrough, the literary chair-maker who had roomed with him in the

     days when he had been setting type for the St. Louis Evening News.





                      To Mr. Burrough, of St. Louis:



                                             HARTFORD, Nov. 1, 1876.

MY DEAR BURROUGHS,--As you describe me I can picture myself as I was 20

years ago.  The portrait is correct.  You think I have grown some; upon

my word there was room for it.  You have described a callow fool, a self-

sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug.... imagining that he is

remodeling the world and is entirely capable of doing it right.

Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense

and pitiful chuckle-headedness--and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of

it all.  That is what I was at 19 and 20; and that is what the average

Southerner is at 60 today.  Northerners, too, of a certain grade.  It is

of children like this that voters are made.  And such is the primal

source of our government!  A man hardly knows whether to swear or cry

over it.



I think I comprehend the position there--perfect freedom to vote just as

you choose, provided you choose to vote as other people think--social

ostracism, otherwise.  The same thing exists here, among the Irish.

An Irish Republican is a pariah among his people.  Yet that race find

fault with the same spirit in Know-Nothingism.



Fortunately a good deal of experience of men enabled me to choose my

residence wisely.  I live in the freest corner of the country.  There are

no social disabilities between me and my Democratic personal friends.

We break the bread and eat the salt of hospitality freely together and

never dream of such a thing as offering impertinent interference in each

other's political opinions.



Don't you ever come to New York again and not run up here to see me.  I

Suppose we were away for the summer when you were East; but no matter,

you could have telegraphed and found out.  We were at Elmira N. Y. and

right on your road, and could have given you a good time if you had

allowed us the chance.



Yes, Will Bowen and I have exchanged letters now and then for several

years, but I suspect that I made him mad with my last--shortly after you

saw him in St. Louis, I judge.  There is one thing which I can't stand

and won't stand, from many people.  That is sham sentimentality--the kind

a school-girl puts into her graduating composition; the sort that makes

up the Original Poetry column of a country newspaper; the rot that deals

in the "happy days of yore," the "sweet yet melancholy past," with its

"blighted hopes" and its "vanished dreams" and all that sort of drivel.

Will's were always of this stamp.  I stood it years.  When I get a letter

like that from a grown man and he a widower with a family, it gives me

the stomach ache.  And I just told Will Bowen so, last summer.  I told

him to stop being 16 at 40; told him to stop drooling about the sweet yet

melancholy past, and take a pill.  I said there was but one solitary

thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is

the past--can't be restored.  Well, I exaggerated some of these truths a

little--but only a little--but my idea was to kill his sham

sentimentality once and forever, and so make a good fellow of him again.

I went to the unheard-of trouble of re-writing the letter and saying the

same harsh things softly, so as to sugarcoat the anguish and make it a

little more endurable and I asked him to write and thank me honestly for

doing him the best and kindliest favor that any friend ever had done him

--but he hasn't done it yet.  Maybe he will, sometime.  I am grateful to

God that I got that letter off before he was married (I get that news

from you) else he would just have slobbered all over me and drowned me

when that event happened.



I enclose photograph for the young ladies.  I will remark that I do not

wear seal-skin for grandeur, but because I found, when I used to lecture

in the winter, that nothing else was able to keep a man warm sometimes,

in these high latitudes.  I wish you had sent pictures of yourself and

family--I'll trade picture for picture with you, straight through, if you

are commercially inclined.

                    Your old friend,

                              SAML L. CLEMENS.









XVII.



LETTERS, 1877.  TO BERMUDA WITH TWICHELL.  PROPOSITION TO TH. NAST.

THE WHITTIER DINNER



     Mark Twain must have been too busy to write letters that winter.

     Those that have survived are few and unimportant.  As a matter of

     fact, he was writing the play, "Ah Sin," with Bret Harte, and

     getting it ready for production. Harte was a guest in the Clemens

     home while the play was being written, and not always a pleasant

     one.  He was full of requirements, critical as to the 'menage,' to

     the point of sarcasm.  The long friendship between Clemens and Harte

     weakened under the strain of collaboration and intimate daily

     intercourse, never to renew its old fiber.  It was an unhappy

     outcome of an enterprise which in itself was to prove of little

     profit.  The play, "Ah Sin," had many good features, and with

     Charles T. Parsloe in an amusing Chinese part might have been made a

     success, if the two authors could have harmoniously undertaken the

     needed repairs.  It opened in Washington in May, and a letter from

     Parsloe, written at the moment, gives a hint of the situation.





                From Charles T. Parsloe to S. L. Clemens:



                                   WASHINGTON, D. C.  May 11th, 1877.

MR. CLEMENS,--I forgot whether I acknowledged receipt of check by

telegram.  Harte has been here since Monday last and done little or

nothing yet, but promises to have something fixed by tomorrow morning.

We have been making some improvements among ourselves.  The last act is

weak at the end, and I do hope Mr. Harte will have something for a good

finish to the piece.  The other acts I think are all right, now.



Hope you have entirely recovered.  I am not very well myself, the

excitement of a first night is bad enough, but to have the annoyance with

Harte that I have is too much for a beginner.  I ain't used to it.  The

houses have been picking up since Tuesday Mr. Ford has worked well and

hard for us.

               Yours in, haste,

                    CHAS. THOS.  PARSLOE.





     The play drew some good houses in Washington, but it could not hold

     them for a run.  Never mind what was the matter with it; perhaps a

     very small change at the right point would have turned it into a

     fine success.  We have seen in a former letter the obligation which

     Mark Twain confessed to Harte--a debt he had tried in many ways to

     repay--obtaining for him a liberal book contract with Bliss;

     advancing him frequent and large sums of money which Harte could

     not, or did not, repay; seeking to advance his fortunes in many

     directions.  The mistake came when he introduced another genius into

     the intracacies of his daily life.  Clemens went down to Washington

     during the early rehearsals of "Ah Sin."



     Meantime, Rutherford B. Hayes had been elected President, and

     Clemens one day called with a letter of introduction from Howells,

     thinking to meet the Chief Executive.  His own letter to Howells,

     later, probably does not give the real reason of his failure, but it

     will be amusing to those who recall the erratic personality of

     George Francis Train.  Train and Twain were sometimes confused by

     the very unlettered; or pretendedly, by Mark Twain's friends.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        BALTIMORE, May 1, '77.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Found I was not absolutely needed in Washington so I

only staid 24 hours, and am on my way home, now.  I called at the White

House, and got admission to Col. Rodgers, because I wanted to inquire

what was the right hour to go and infest the, President.  It was my luck

to strike the place in the dead waste and middle of the day, the very

busiest time.  I perceived that Mr. Rodgers took me for George Francis

Train and had made up his mind not to let me get at the President; so at

the end of half an hour I took my letter of introduction from the table

and went away.  It was a great pity all round, and a great loss to the

nation, for I was brim full of the Eastern question.  I didn't get to see

the President or the Chief Magistrate either, though I had sort of a

glimpse of a lady at a window who resembled her portraits.

                                   Yrs ever,

                                             MARK.



     Howells condoled with him on his failure to see the President,

     "but," he added, "if you and I had both been there, our combined

     skill would have no doubt procured us to be expelled from the White

     House by Fred Douglass.  But the thing seems to be a complete

     failure as it was."  Douglass at this time being the Marshal of

     Columbia, gives special point to Howells's suggestion.



     Later, in May, Clemens took Twichell for an excursion to Bermuda.

     He had begged Howells to go with them, but Howells, as usual, was

     full of literary affairs.  Twichell and Clemens spent four glorious

     days tramping the length and breadth of the beautiful island, and

     remembered it always as one of their happiest adventures.  "Put it

     down as an Oasis!" wrote Twichell on his return, "I'm afraid I shall

     not see as green a spot again soon.  And it was your invention and

     your gift.  And your company was the best of it.  Indeed, I never

     took more comfort in being with you than on this journey, which, my

     boy, is saying a great deal."





     To Howells, Clemens triumphantly reported the success of the

     excursion.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                              FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD, May 29, 1877.

Confound you, Joe Twichell and I roamed about Bermuda day and night and

never ceased to gabble and enjoy.  About half the talk was--"It is a

burning shame that Howells isn't here."  "Nobody could get at the very

meat and marrow of this pervading charm and deliciousness like Howells;"

"How Howells would revel in the quaintness, and the simplicity of this

people and the Sabbath repose of this land."  "What an imperishable

sketch Howells would make of Capt. West the whaler, and Capt. Hope with

the patient, pathetic face, wanderer in all the oceans for 42 years,

lucky in none; coming home defeated once more, now, minus his ship--

resigned, uncomplaining, being used to this."  "What a rattling chapter

Howells would make out of the small boy Alfred, with his alert eye and

military brevity and exactness of speech; and out of the old landlady;

and her sacred onions; and her daughter; and the visiting clergyman; and

the ancient pianos of Hamilton and the venerable music in vogue there--

and forty other things which we shall leave untouched or touched but

lightly upon, we not being worthy."  "Dam Howells for not being here!"

(this usually from me, not Twichell.)



O, your insufferable pride, which will have a fall some day!  If you had

gone with us and let me pay the $50 which the trip and the board and the

various nicknacks and mementoes would cost, I would have picked up enough

droppings from your conversation to pay me 500 per cent profit in the way

of the several magazine articles which I could have written, whereas I

can now write only one or two and am therefore largely out of pocket by

your proud ways.  Ponder these things.  Lord, what a perfectly bewitching

excursion it was!  I traveled under an assumed name and was never

molested with a polite attention from anybody.

                         Love to you all.

                                        Yrs ever

                                                  MARK





     Aldrich, meantime, had invited the Clemenses to Ponkapog during the

     Bermuda absence, and Clemens hastened to send him a line expressing

     regrets.  At the close he said:





                  To T. B. Aldrich, in Ponkapog, Mass.:



                              FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD, June 3, 1877.

Day after tomorrow we leave for the hills beyond Elmira, N. Y.  for the

summer, when I shall hope to write a book of some sort or other to beat

the people with.  A work similar to your new one in the Atlantic is what

I mean, though I have not heard what the nature of that one is.  Immoral,

I suppose.  Well, you are right.  Such books sell best, Howells says.

Howells says he is going to make his next book indelicate.  He says he

thinks there is money in it.  He says there is a large class of the

young, in schools and seminaries who--But you let him tell you.  He has

ciphered it all down to a demonstration.



With the warmest remembrances to the pair of you

                                   Ever Yours

                                        SAMUEL L. CLEMENS.





     Clemens would naturally write something about Bermuda, and began at

     once, "Random Notes of an Idle Excursion," and presently completed

     four papers, which Howells eagerly accepted for the Atlantic.  Then

     we find him plunging into another play, this time alone.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             ELMIRA, June 27, 1877.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--If you should not like the first 2 chapters, send them

to me and begin with Chapter 3--or Part 3, I believe you call these

things in the magazine.  I have finished No. 4., which closes the series,

and will mail it tomorrow if I think of it.  I like this one, I liked the

preceding one (already mailed to you some time ago) but I had my doubts

about 1 and 2.  Do not hesitate to squelch them, even with derision and

insult.



Today I am deep in a comedy which I began this morning--principal

character, that old detective--I skeletoned the first act and wrote the

second, today; and am dog-tired, now.  Fifty-four close pages of MS in 7

hours.  Once I wrote 55 pages at a sitting--that was on the opening

chapters of the "Gilded Age" novel.  When I cool down, an hour from now,

I shall go to zero, I judge.

                              Yrs ever,

                                        MARK.





     Clemens had doubts as to the quality of the Bermuda papers, and with

     some reason.  They did not represent him at his best.  Nevertheless,

     they were pleasantly entertaining, and Howells expressed full

     approval of them for Atlantic use.  The author remained troubled.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             ELMIRA, July 4,1877.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--It is splendid of you to say those pleasant things.

But I am still plagued with doubts about Parts 1 and 2.  If you have any,

don't print.  If otherwise, please make some cold villain like Lathrop

read and pass sentence on them.  Mind, I thought they were good, at

first--it was the second reading that accomplished its hellish purpose on

me.  Put them up for a new verdict.  Part 4 has lain in my pigeon-hole a

good while, and when I put it there I had a Christian's confidence in 4

aces in it; and you can be sure it will skip toward Connecticut tomorrow

before any fatal fresh reading makes me draw my bet.



I've piled up 151 MS pages on my comedy.  The first, second and fourth

acts are done, and done to my satisfaction, too.  Tomorrow and next day

will finish the 3rd act and the play.  I have not written less than 30

pages any day since I began.  Never had so much fun over anything in my

life-never such consuming interest and delight.  (But Lord bless you the

second reading will fetch it!)  And just think!--I had Sol Smith Russell

in my mind's eye for the old detective's part, and hang it he has gone

off pottering with Oliver Optic, or else the papers lie.



I read everything about the President's doings there with exultation.



I wish that old ass of a private secretary hadn't taken me for George

Francis Train.  If ignorance were a means of grace I wouldn't trade that

gorilla's chances for the Archbishop of Canterbury's.



I shall call on the President again, by and by.  I shall go in my war

paint; and if I am obstructed the nation will have the unusual spectacle

of a private secretary with a pen over one ear a tomahawk over the other.



I read the entire Atlantic this time.  Wonderful number.  Mrs. Rose Terry

Cooke's story was a ten-strike.  I wish she would write 12 old-time New

England tales a year.



Good times to you all!  Mind if you don't run here for a few days you

will go to hence without having had a fore-glimpse of heaven.



                                             MARK.





     The play, "Ah Sin," that had done little enough in Washington, was

     that summer given another trial by Augustin Daly, at the Fifth

     Avenue Theater, New York, with a fine company.  Clemens had

     undertaken to doctor the play, and it would seem to have had an

     enthusiastic reception on the opening night.  But it was a summer

     audience, unspoiled by many attractions.  "Ah Sin" was never a

     success in the New York season--never a money-maker on the road.



     The reference in the first paragraph of the letter that follows is

     to the Bermuda chapters which Mark Twain was publishing

     simultaneously in England and America.





                                             ELMIRA, Aug 3,1877.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I have mailed one set of the slips to London, and told

Bentley you would print Sept. 15, in October Atlantic, and he must not

print earlier in Temple Bar.  Have I got the dates and things right?



I am powerful glad to see that No. 1 reads a nation sight better in print

than it did in MS.  I told Bentley we'd send him the slips, each time, 6

weeks before day of publication.  We can do that can't we?  Two months

ahead would be still better I suppose, but I don't know.



"Ah Sin" went a-booming at the Fifth Avenue.  The reception of Col.

Sellers was calm compared to it.



*The criticisms were just; the criticisms of the great New York dailies

are always just, intelligent, and square and honest--notwithstanding,

by a blunder which nobody was seriously to blame for, I was made to say

exactly the opposite of this in a newspaper some time ago.  Never said it

at all, and moreover I never thought it.  I could not publicly correct it

before the play appeared in New York, because that would look as if I had

really said that thing and then was moved by fears for my pocket and my

reputation to take it back.  But I can correct it now, and shall do it;

for now my motives cannot be impugned.  When I began this letter, it had

not occurred to me to use you in this connection, but it occurs to me

now.  Your opinion and mine, uttered a year ago, and repeated more than

once since, that the candor and ability of the New York critics were

beyond question, is a matter which makes it proper enough that I should

speak through you at this time.  Therefore if you will print this

paragraph somewhere, it may remove the impression that I say unjust

things which I do not think, merely for the pleasure of talking.



There, now, Can't you say--



"In a letter to Mr. Howells of the Atlantic Monthly, Mark Twain describes

the reception of the new comedy 'Ali Sin,' and then goes on to say:" etc.



Beginning at the star with the words, "The criticisms were just."  Mrs.

Clemens says, "Don't ask that of Mr. Howells--it will be disagreeable to

him."  I hadn't thought of it, but I will bet two to one on the

correctness of her instinct.  We shall see.



Will you cut that paragraph out of this letter and precede it with the

remarks suggested (or with better ones,) and send it to the Globe or some

other paper?  You can't do me a bigger favor; and yet if it is in the

least disagreeable, you mustn't think of it.  But let me know, right

away, for I want to correct this thing before it grows stale again.

I explained myself to only one critic (the World)--the consequence was a

noble notice of the play.  This one called on me, else I shouldn't have

explained myself to him.



I have been putting in a deal of hard work on that play in New York, but

it is full of incurable defects.



My old Plunkett family seemed wonderfully coarse and vulgar on the stage,

but it was because they were played in such an outrageously and

inexcusably coarse way.  The Chinaman is killingly funny.  I don't know

when I have enjoyed anything as much as I did him.  The people say there

isn't enough of him in the piece.  That's a triumph--there'll never be

any more of him in it.



John Brougham said, "Read the list of things which the critics have

condemned in the piece, and you have unassailable proofs that the play

contains all the requirements of success and a long life."



That is true.  Nearly every time the audience roared I knew it was over

something that would be condemned in the morning (justly, too) but must

be left in--for low comedies are written for the drawing-room, the

kitchen and the stable, and if you cut out the kitchen and the stable the

drawing-room can't support the play by itself.



There was as much money in the house the first two nights as in the first

ten of Sellers.  Haven't heard from the third--I came away.

                                   Yrs ever,

                                             MARK.





     In a former letter we have seen how Mark Twain, working on a story

     that was to stand as an example of his best work, and become one of

     his surest claims to immortality (The Adventures of Huckleberry

     Finn), displayed little enthusiasm in his undertaking.  In the

     following letter, which relates the conclusion of his detective

     comedy, we find him at the other extreme, on very tiptoe with

     enthusiasm over something wholly without literary value or dramatic

     possibility.  One of the hall-marks of genius is the inability to

     discriminate as to the value of its output.  "Simon Wheeler, Amateur

     Detective" was a dreary, absurd, impossible performance, as wild and

     unconvincing in incident and dialogue as anything out of an asylum

     could well be.  The title which he first chose for it, "Balaam's

     Ass," was properly in keeping with the general scheme.  Yet Mark

     Twain, still warm with the creative fever, had the fullest faith in

     it as a work of art and a winner of fortune.  It would never see the

     light of production, of course.  We shall see presently that the

     distinguished playwright, Dion Boucicault, good-naturedly

     complimented it as being better than "Ahi Sin."  One must wonder

     what that skilled artist really thought, and how he could do even

     this violence to his conscience.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        ELMIRA, Wednesday P.M.  (1877)

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--It's finished.  I was misled by hurried mis-paging.

There were ten pages of notes, and over 300 pages of MS when the play was

done.  Did it in 42 hours, by the clock; 40 pages of the Atlantic--but

then of course it's very "fat."  Those are the figures, but I don't

believe them myself, because the thing's impossible.



But let that pass.  All day long, and every day, since I finished (in the

rough) I have been diligently altering, amending, re-writing, cutting

down.  I finished finally today.  Can't think of anything else in the way

of an improvement.  I thought I would stick to it while the interest was

hot--and I am mighty glad I did.  A week from now it will be frozen--then

revising would be drudgery.  (You see I learned something from the fatal

blunder of putting "Ah Sin" aside before it was finished.)



She's all right, now.  She reads in two hours and 20 minutes and will

play not longer than 2 3/4 hours.  Nineteen characters; 3 acts; (I

bunched 2 into 1.)



Tomorrow I will draw up an exhaustive synopsis to insert in the printed

title-page for copyrighting, and then on Friday or Saturday I go to New

York to remain a week or ten days and lay for an actor.  Wish you could

run down there and have a holiday.  'Twould be fun.



My wife won't have "Balaam's Ass"; therefore I call the piece "Cap'n

Simon Wheeler, The Amateur Detective."

                                   Yrs

                                        MARK.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             ELMIRA, Aug.  29, 1877.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Just got your letter last night.  No, dern that

article,--[One of the Bermuda chapters.]--it made me cry when I read it

in proof, it was so oppressively and ostentatiously poor.  Skim your eye

over it again and you will think as I do.  If Isaac and the prophets of

Baal can be doctored gently and made permissible, it will redeem the

thing: but if it can't, let's burn all of the articles except the tail-

end of it and use that as an introduction to the next article--as I

suggested in my letter to you of day before yesterday.  (I had this proof

from Cambridge before yours came.)



Boucicault says my new play is ever so much better than "Ah Sin;" says

the Amateur detective is a bully character, too.  An actor is chawing

over the play in New York, to see if the old Detective is suited to his

abilities.  Haven't heard from him yet.



If you've got that paragraph by you yet, and if in your judgment it would

be good to publish it, and if you absolutely would not mind doing it,

then I think I'd like to have you do it--or else put some other words in

my mouth that will be properer, and publish them.  But mind, don't think

of it for a moment if it is distasteful--and doubtless it is.  I value

your judgment more than my own, as to the wisdom of saying anything at

all in this matter.  To say nothing leaves me in an injurious position--

and yet maybe I might do better to speak to the men themselves when I go

to New York.  This was my latest idea, and it looked wise.



We expect to leave here for home Sept. 4, reaching there the 8th--but we

may be delayed a week.



Curious thing.  I read passages from my play, and a full synopsis, to

Boucicault, who was re-writing a play, which he wrote and laid aside 3 or

4 years ago.  (My detective is about that age, you know.) Then he read a

passage from his play, where a real detective does some things that are

as idiotic as some of my old Wheeler's performances.  Showed me the

passages, and behold, his man's name is Wheeler!  However, his Wheeler

is not a prominent character, so we'll not alter the names.  My Wheeler's

name is taken from the old jumping Frog sketch.



I am re-reading Ticknor's diary, and am charmed with it, though I still

say he refers to too many good things when he could just as well have

told them.  Think of the man traveling 8 days in convoy and familiar

intercourse with a band of outlaws through the mountain fastnesses of

Spain--he the fourth stranger they had encountered in thirty years--and

compressing this priceless experience into a single colorless paragraph

of his diary!  They spun yarns to this unworthy devil, too.



I wrote you a very long letter a day or two ago, but Susy Crane wanted to

make a copy of it to keep, so it has not gone yet.  It may go today,

possibly.



We unite in warm regards to you and yours.

                              Yrs ever,

                                        MARK.





     The Ticknor referred to in a former letter was Professor George

     Ticknor, of Harvard College, a history-writer of distinction.  On

     the margin of the "Diary" Mark Twain once wrote, "Ticknor is a

     Millet, who makes all men fall in love with him."  And adds: "Millet

     was the cause of lovable qualities in people, and then he admired

     and loved those persons for the very qualities which he (without

     knowing it) had created in them.  Perhaps it would be strictly truer

     of these two men to say that they bore within them the divine

     something in whose presence the evil in people fled away and hid

     itself, while all that was good in them came spontaneously forward

     out of the forgotten walls and comers in their systems where it was

     accustomed to hide."



     It is Frank Millet, the artist, he is speaking of--a knightly soul

     whom all the Clemens household loved, and who would one day meet his

     knightly end with those other brave men that found death together

     when the Titanic went down.



     The Clemens family was still at Quarry Farm at the end of August,

     and one afternoon there occurred a startling incident which Mark

     Twain thought worth setting down in practically duplicate letters to

     Howells and to Dr. John Brown.  It may be of interest to the reader

     to know that John T. Lewis, the colored man mentioned, lived to a

     good old age--a pensioner of the Clemens family and, in the course

     of time, of H. H. Rogers.  Howells's letter follows.  It is the

     "very long letter" referred to in the foregoing.





                  To W. D. Howells and wife, in Boston:



                                             ELMIRA, Aug. 25 '77.

MY DEAR HOWELLSES,--I thought I ought to make a sort of record of it for

further reference; the pleasantest way to do that would be to write it to

somebody; but that somebody would let it leak into print and that we wish

to avoid.  The Howellses would be safe--so let us tell the Howellses

about it.



Day before yesterday was a fine summer day away up here on the summit.

Aunt Marsh and Cousin May Marsh were here visiting Susie Crane and Livy

at our farmhouse.  By and by mother Langdon came up the hill in the "high

carriage" with Nora the nurse and little Jervis (Charley Langdon's little

boy)--Timothy the coachman driving.  Behind these came Charley's wife and

little girl in the buggy, with the new, young, spry, gray horse--a high-

stepper.  Theodore Crane arrived a little later.



The Bay and Susy were on hand with their nurse, Rosa.  I was on hand,

too.  Susy Crane's trio of colored servants ditto--these being Josie,

house-maid; Aunty Cord, cook, aged 62, turbaned, very tall, very broad,

very fine every way (see her portrait in "A True Story just as I Heard

It" in my Sketches;) Chocklate (the laundress) (as the Bay calls her--she

can't say Charlotte,) still taller, still more majestic of proportions,

turbaned, very black, straight as an Indian--age 24.  Then there was the

farmer's wife (colored) and her little girl, Susy.



Wasn't it a good audience to get up an excitement before?  Good

excitable, inflammable material?



Lewis was still down town, three miles away, with his two-horse wagon,

to get a load of manure.  Lewis is the farmer (colored).  He is of mighty

frame and muscle, stocky, stooping, ungainly, has a good manly face and a

clear eye.  Age about 45--and the most picturesque of men, when he sits

in his fluttering work-day rags, humped forward into a bunch, with his

aged slouch hat mashed down over his ears and neck.  It is a spectacle to

make the broken-hearted smile.  Lewis has worked mighty hard and remained

mighty poor.  At the end of each whole year's toil he can't show a gain

of fifty dollars.  He had borrowed money of the Cranes till he owed them

$700 and he being conscientious and honest, imagine what it was to him to

have to carry this stubborn, helpless load year in and year out.



Well, sunset came, and Ida the young and comely (Charley Langdon's wife)

and her little Julia and the nurse Nora, drove out at the gate behind the

new gray horse and started down the long hill--the high carriage

receiving its load under the porte cochere.  Ida was seen to turn her

face toward us across the fence and intervening lawn--Theodore waved

good-bye to her, for he did not know that her sign was a speechless

appeal for help.



The next moment Livy said, "Ida's driving too fast down hill!"  She

followed it with a sort of scream, "Her horse is running away!"



We could see two hundred yards down that descent.  The buggy seemed to

fly.  It would strike obstructions and apparently spring the height of a

man from the ground.



Theodore and I left the shrieking crowd behind and ran down the hill

bare-headed and shouting.  A neighbor appeared at his gate--a tenth of a

second too late! the buggy vanished past him like a thought.  My last

glimpse showed it for one instant, far down the descent, springing high

in the air out of a cloud of dust, and then it disappeared.  As I flew

down the road my impulse was to shut my eyes as I turned them to the

right or left, and so delay for a moment the ghastly spectacle of

mutilation and death I was expecting.



I ran on and on, still spared this spectacle, but saying to myself:

"I shall see it at the turn of the road; they never can pass that turn

alive."  When I came in sight of that turn I saw two wagons there bunched

together--one of them full of people.  I said, "Just so--they are staring

petrified at the remains."



But when I got amongst that bunch, there sat Ida in her buggy and nobody

hurt, not even the horse or the vehicle.  Ida was pale but serene.  As I

came tearing down, she smiled back over her shoulder at me and said,

"Well, we're alive yet, aren't we?"  A miracle had been performed--

nothing else.



You see Lewis, the prodigious, humped upon his front seat, had been

toiling up, on his load of manure; he saw the frantic horse plunging down

the hill toward him, on a full gallop, throwing his heels as high as a

man's head at every jump.  So Lewis turned his team diagonally across the

road just at the "turn," thus making a V with the fence--the running

horse could not escape that, but must enter it.  Then Lewis sprang to the

ground and stood in this V.  He gathered his vast strength, and with a

perfect Creedmoor aim he seized the gray horse's bit as he plunged by and

fetched him up standing!



It was down hill, mind you.  Ten feet further down hill neither Lewis nor

any other man could have saved them, for they would have been on the

abrupt "turn," then.  But how this miracle was ever accomplished at all,

by human strength, generalship and accuracy, is clean beyond my

comprehension--and grows more so the more I go and examine the ground and

try to believe it was actually done.  I know one thing, well; if Lewis

had missed his aim he would have been killed on the spot in the trap he

had made for himself, and we should have found the rest of the remains

away down at the bottom of the steep ravine.



Ten minutes later Theodore and I arrived opposite the house, with the

servants straggling after us, and shouted to the distracted group on the

porch, "Everybody safe!"



Believe it?  Why how could they?  They knew the road perfectly.  We might

as well have said it to people who had seen their friends go over

Niagara.



However, we convinced them; and then, instead of saying something, or

going on crying, they grew very still--words could not express it, I

suppose.



Nobody could do anything that night, or sleep, either; but there was a

deal of moving talk, with long pauses between pictures of that flying

carriage, these pauses represented--this picture intruded itself all the

time and disjointed the talk.



But yesterday evening late, when Lewis arrived from down town he found

his supper spread, and some presents of books there, with very

complimentary writings on the fly-leaves, and certain very complimentary

letters, and more or less greenbacks of dignified denomination pinned to

these letters and fly-leaves,--and one said, among other things, (signed

by the Cranes) "We cancel $400 of your indebtedness to us," &c. &c.



(The end thereof is not yet, of course, for Charley Langdon is West and

will arrive ignorant of all these things, today.)



The supper-room had been kept locked and imposingly secret and mysterious

until Lewis should arrive; but around that part of the house were

gathered Lewis's wife and child, Chocklate, Josie, Aunty Cord and our

Rosa, canvassing things and waiting impatiently.  They were all on hand

when the curtain rose.



Now, Aunty Cord is a violent Methodist and Lewis an implacable Dunker--

Baptist.  Those two are inveterate religious disputants.  The revealments

having been made Aunty Cord said with effusion--



"Now, let folks go on saying there ain't no God!  Lewis, the Lord sent

you there to stop that horse."



Says Lewis:



"Then who sent the horse there in sich a shape?"



But I want to call your attention to one thing.  When Lewis arrived the

other evening, after saving those lives by a feat which I think is the

most marvelous of any I can call to mind--when he arrived, hunched up on

his manure wagon and as grotesquely picturesque as usual, everybody

wanted to go and see how he looked.  They came back and said he was

beautiful.  It was so, too--and yet he would have photographed exactly as

he would have done any day these past 7 years that he has occupied this

farm.



                                                       Aug. 27.

P. S.  Our little romance in real life is happily and satisfactorily

completed.  Charley has come, listened, acted--and now John T. Lewis has

ceased to consider himself as belonging to that class called "the poor."



It has been known, during some years, that it was Lewis's purpose to buy

a thirty dollar silver watch some day, if he ever got where he could

afford it.  Today Ida has given him a new, sumptuous gold Swiss stem-

winding stop-watch; and if any scoffer shall say, "Behold this thing is

out of character," there is an inscription within, which will silence

him; for it will teach him that this wearer aggrandizes the watch, not

the watch the wearer.



I was asked beforehand, if this would be a wise gift, and I said "Yes,

the very wisest of all;" I know the colored race, and I know that in

Lewis's eyes this fine toy will throw the other more valuable

testimonials far away into the shade.  If he lived in England the Humane

Society would give him a gold medal as costly as this watch, and nobody

would say: "It is out of character."  If Lewis chose to wear a town

clock, who would become it better?



Lewis has sound common sense, and is not going to be spoiled.  The

instant he found himself possessed of money, he forgot himself in a plan

to make his old father comfortable, who is wretchedly poor and lives down

in Maryland.  His next act, on the spot, was the proffer to the Cranes of

the $300 of his remaining indebtedness to them.  This was put off by them

to the indefinite future, for he is not going to be allowed to pay that

at all, though he doesn't know it.



A letter of acknowledgment from Lewis contains a sentence which raises it

to the dignity of literature:



"But I beg to say, humbly, that inasmuch as divine providence saw fit to

use me as a instrument for the saving of those presshious lives, the

honner conferd upon me was greater than the feat performed."



That is well said.

                    Yrs ever

                                   MARK.





     Howells was moved to use the story in the.  "Contributors' Club,"

     and warned Clemens against letting it get into the newspapers.  He

     declared he thought it one of the most impressive things he had ever

     read.  But Clemens seems never to have allowed it to be used in any

     form.  In its entirety, therefore, it is quite new matter.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        HARTFORD, Sept.  19, 1877.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I don't really see how the story of the runaway horse

could read well with the little details of names and places and things

left out.  They are the true life of all narrative.  It wouldn't quite

do to print them at this time.  We'll talk about it when you come.

Delicacy--a sad, sad false delicacy--robs literature of the best two

things among its belongings.  Family-circle narrative and obscene

stories.  But no matter; in that better world which I trust we are all

going to I have the hope and belief that they will not be denied us.



Say--Twichell and I had an adventure at sea, 4 months ago, which I did

not put in my Bermuda articles, because there was not enough to it.  But

the press dispatches bring the sequel today, and now there's plenty to

it.  A sailless, wasteless, chartless, compassless, grubless old

condemned tub that has been drifting helpless about the ocean for 4

months and a half, begging bread and water like any other tramp, flying a

signal of distress permanently, and with 13 innocent, marveling

chuckleheaded Bermuda niggers on board, taking a Pleasure Excursion!  Our

ship fed the poor devils on the 25th of last May, far out at sea and left

them to bullyrag their way to New York--and now they ain't as near New

York as they were then by 250 miles!  They have drifted 750 miles and are

still drifting in the relentless Gulf Stream!  What a delicious magazine

chapter it would make--but I had to deny myself.  I had to come right out

in the papers at once, with my details, so as to try to raise the

government's sympathy sufficiently to have better succor sent them than

the cutter Colfax, which went a little way in search of them the other

day and then struck a fog and gave it up.



If the President were in Washington I would telegraph him.



When I hear that the "Jonas Smith" has been found again, I mean to send

for one of those darkies, to come to Hartford and give me his adventures

for an Atlantic article.



Likely you will see my today's article in the newspapers.

                                   Yrs ever,

                                             MARK.



The revenue cutter Colfax went after the Jonas Smith, thinking there was

mutiny or other crime on board.  It occurs to me now that, since there is

only mere suffering and misery and nobody to punish, it ceases to be a

matter which (a republican form of) government will feel authorized to

interfere in further.  Dam a republican form of government.





     Clemens thought he had given up lecturing for good; he was

     prosperous and he had no love for the platform.  But one day an idea

     popped into his head: Thomas Nast, the "father of the American

     cartoon," had delivered a successful series of illustrated lectures-

     talks for which he made the drawings as he went along.  Mark Twain's

     idea was to make a combination with Nast.  His letter gives us the

     plan in full.





                    To Thomas Nast, Morristown, N. J.:



                                             HARTFORD, CONN. 1877.

MY DEAR NAST,--I did not think I should ever stand on a platform again

until the time was come for me to say "I die innocent."  But the same old

offers keep arriving.  I have declined them all, just as usual, though

sorely tempted, as usual.



Now, I do not decline because I mind talking to an audience, but because

(1) traveling alone is so heartbreakingly dreary, and (2) shouldering the

whole show is such a cheer-killing responsibility.



Therefore, I now propose to you what you proposed to me in 1867, ten

years ago (when I was unknown) viz., that you stand on the platform and

make pictures, and I stand by you and blackguard the audience.  I should

enormously enjoy meandering around (to big towns--don't want to go to the

little ones) with you for company.



My idea is not to fatten the lecture agents and lyceums on the spoils,

but put all the ducats religiously into two equal piles, and say to the

artist and lecturer, "Absorb these."



For instance--[Here follows a plan and a possible list of cities to be

visited.  The letter continues]



Call the gross receipts $100,000 for four months and a half, and the

profit from $60,000 to $75,000 (I try to make the figures large enough,

and leave it to the public to reduce them.)



I did not put in Philadelphia because Pugh owns that town, and last

winter when I made a little reading-trip he only paid me $300 and

pretended his concert (I read fifteen minutes in the midst of a concert)

cost him a vast sum, and so he couldn't afford any more.  I could get up

a better concert with a barrel of cats.



I have imagined two or three pictures and concocted the accompanying

remarks to see how the thing would go.  I was charmed.



Well, you think it over, Nast, and drop me a line.  We should have some

fun.

                    Yours truly,

                         SAMUEL L. CLEMENS.





     The plan came to nothing.  Nast, like Clemens, had no special taste

     for platforming, and while undoubtedly there would have been large

     profits in the combination, the promise of the venture did not

     compel his acceptance.



     In spite of his distaste for the platform Mark Twain was always

     giving readings and lectures, without charge, for some worthy

     Hartford cause.  He was ready to do what he could to help an

     entertainment along, if he could do it in his own way--an original

     way, sometimes, and not always gratifying to the committee, whose

     plans were likely to be prearranged.



     For one thing, Clemens, supersensitive in the matter of putting

     himself forward in his own town, often objected to any special

     exploitation of his name.  This always distressed the committee, who

     saw a large profit to their venture in the prestige of his fame.

     The following characteristic letter was written in self-defense

     when, on one such occasion, a committee had become sufficiently

     peevish to abandon a worthy enterprise.





               To an Entertainment Committee, in Hartford:



                                        Nov. 9.

E. S. SYKES, Esq:



Dr. SIR,--Mr. Burton's note puts upon me all the blame of the destruction

of an enterprise which had for its object the succor of the Hartford

poor.  That is to say, this enterprise has been dropped because of the

"dissatisfaction with Mr. Clemens's stipulations."  Therefore I must be

allowed to say a word in my defense.



There were two "stipulations"--exactly two.  I made one of them; if the

other was made at all, it was a joint one, from the choir and me.



My individual stipulation was, that my name should be kept out of the

newspapers.  The joint one was that sufficient tickets to insure a good

sum should be sold before the date of the performance should be set.

(Understand, we wanted a good sum--I do not think any of us bothered

about a good house; it was money we were after)



Now you perceive that my concern is simply with my individual

stipulation.  Did that break up the enterprise?



Eugene Burton said he would sell $300 worth of the tickets himself.--Mr.

Smith said he would sell $200 or $300 worth himself.  My plan for Asylum

Hill Church would have ensured $150 from that quarter.--All this in the

face of my "Stipulation."  It was proposed to raise $1000; did my

stipulation render the raising of $400 or $500 in a dozen churches

impossible?



My stipulation is easily defensible.  When a mere reader or lecturer has

appeared 3 or 4 times in a town of Hartford's size, he is a good deal

more than likely to get a very unpleasant snub if he shoves himself

forward about once or twice more.  Therefore I long ago made up my mind

that whenever I again appeared here, it should be only in a minor

capacity and not as a chief attraction.



Now, I placed that harmless and very justifiable stipulation before the

committee the other day; they carried it to headquarters and it was

accepted there.  I am not informed that any objection was made to it, or

that it was regarded as an offense.  It seems late in the day, now, after

a good deal of trouble has been taken and a good deal of thankless work

done by the committees, to, suddenly tear up the contract and then turn

and bowl me down from long range as being the destroyer of it.



If the enterprise has failed because of my individual stipulation, here

you have my proper and reasonable reasons for making that stipulation.



If it has failed because of the joint stipulation, put the blame there,

and let us share it collectively.



I think our plan was a good one.  I do not doubt that Mr. Burton still

approves of it, too.  I believe the objections come from other quarters,

and not from him.  Mr. Twichell used the following words in last Sunday's

sermon, (if I remember correctly):



"My hearers, the prophet Deuteronomy says this wise thing: 'Though ye

plan a goodly house for the poor, and plan it with wisdom, and do take

off your coats and set to to build it, with high courage, yet shall the

croaker presently come, and lift up his voice, (having his coat on,) and

say, Verily this plan is not well planned--and he will go his way; and

the obstructionist will come, and lift up his voice, (having his coat

on,) and say, Behold, this is but a sick plan--and he will go his way;

and the man that knows it all will come, and lift up his voice, (having

his coat on,) and say, Lo, call they this a plan? then will he go his

way; and the places which knew him once shall know him no more forever,

because he was not, for God took him.  Now therefore I say unto you,

Verily that house will not be budded.  And I say this also: He that

waiteth for all men to be satisfied with his plan, let him seek eternal

life, for he shall need it.'"



This portion of Mr. Twichell's sermon made a great impression upon me,

and I was grieved that some one had not wakened me earlier so that I

might have heard what went before.



                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     Mr. Sykes (of the firm of Sykes & Newton, the Allen House Pharmacy)

     replied that he had read the letter to the committee and that it had

     set those gentlemen right who had not before understood the

     situation.  "If others were as ready to do their part as yourself

     our poor would not want assistance," he said, in closing.



     We come now to an incident which assumes the proportions of an

     episode-even of a catastrophe--in Mark Twain's career.  The disaster

     was due to a condition noted a few pages earlier--the inability of

     genius to judge its own efforts.  The story has now become history--

     printed history--it having been sympathetically told by Howells in

     My Mark Twain, and more exhaustively, with a report of the speech

     that invited the lightning, in a former work by the present writer.



     The speech was made at John Greenleaf Whittier's seventieth birthday

     dinner, given by the Atlantic staff on the evening of December 17,

     1877.  It was intended as a huge joke--a joke that would shake the

     sides of these venerable Boston deities, Longfellow, Emerson,

     Holmes, and the rest of that venerated group.  Clemens had been a

     favorite at the Atlantic lunches and dinners--a speech by him always

     an event.  This time he decided to outdo himself.



     He did that, but not in the way he had intended.  To use one of his

     own metaphors, he stepped out to meet the rainbow and got struck by

     lightning.  His joke was not of the Boston kind or size.  When its

     full nature burst upon the company--when the ears of the assembled

     diners heard the sacred names of Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes

     lightly associated with human aspects removed--oh, very far removed

    --from Cambridge and Concord, a chill fell upon the diners that

     presently became amazement, and then creeping paralysis.  Nobody

     knew afterward whether the great speech that he had so gaily planned

     ever came to a natural end or not.  Somebody--the next on the

     program--attempted to follow him, but presently the company melted

     out of the doors and crept away into the night.



     It seemed to Mark Twain that his career had come to an end.  Back in

     Hartford, sweating and suffering through sleepless nights, he wrote

     Howells his anguish.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                                  Sunday Night.  1877.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--My sense of disgrace does not abate.  It grows.  I see

that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies--a list of

humiliations that extends back to when I was seven years old, and which

keep on persecuting me regardless of my repentancies.



I feel that my misfortune has injured me all over the country; therefore

it will be best that I retire from before the public at present.  It will

hurt the Atlantic for me to appear in its pages, now.  So it is my

opinion and my wife's that the telephone story had better be suppressed.

Will you return those proofs or revises to me, so that I can use the same

on some future occasion?



It seems as if I must have been insane when I wrote that speech and saw

no harm in it, no disrespect toward those men whom I reverenced so much.

And what shame I brought upon you, after what you said in introducing me!

It burns me like fire to think of it.



The whole matter is a dreadful subject--let me drop it here--at least on

paper.

                         Penitently yrs,

                                        MARK.





     Howells sent back a comforting letter.  "I have no idea of dropping

     you out of the Atlantic," he wrote; "and Mr. Houghton has still

     less, if possible.  You are going to help and not hurt us many a

     year yet, if you will....  You are not going to be floored by it;

     there is more justice than that, even in this world."



     Howells added that Charles Elliot Norton had expressed just the

     right feeling concerning the whole affair, and that many who had not

     heard the speech, but read the newspaper reports of it, had found it

     without offense.



     Clemens wrote contrite letters to Holmes, Emerson, and Longfellow,

     and received most gracious acknowledgments.  Emerson, indeed, had

     not heard the speech: His faculties were already blurred by the

     mental mists that would eventually shut him in.  Clemens wrote again

     to Howells, this time with less anguish.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             HARTFORD, Friday, 1877.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Your letter was a godsend; and perhaps the welcomest

part of it was your consent that I write to those gentlemen; for you

discouraged my hints in that direction that morning in Boston--rightly,

too, for my offense was yet too new, then.  Warner has tried to hold up

our hands like the good fellow he is, but poor Twichell could not say a

word, and confessed that he would rather take nearly any punishment than

face Livy and me.  He hasn't been here since.



It is curious, but I pitched early upon Mr. Norton as the very man who

would think some generous thing about that matter, whether he said it or

not.  It is splendid to be a man like that--but it is given to few to be.



I wrote a letter yesterday, and sent a copy to each of the three.  I

wanted to send a copy to Mr. Whittier also, since the offense was done

also against him, being committed in his presence and he the guest of the

occasion, besides holding the well-nigh sacred place he does in his

people's estimation; but I didn't know whether to venture or not, and so

ended by doing nothing.  It seemed an intrusion to approach him, and even

Livy seemed to have her doubts as to the best and properest way to do in

the case.  I do not reverence Mr. Emerson less, but somehow I could

approach him easier.



Send me those proofs, if you have got them handy; I want to submit them

to Wylie; he won't show them to anybody.



Had a very pleasant and considerate letter from Mr. Houghton, today, and

was very glad to receive it.



You can't imagine how brilliant and beautiful that new brass fender is,

and how perfectly naturally it takes its place under the carved oak.  How

they did scour it up before they sent it!  I lied a good deal about it

when I came home--so for once I kept a secret and surprised Livy on a

Christmas morning!



I haven't done a stroke of work since the Atlantic dinner; have only

moped around.  But I'm going to try tomorrow.  How could I ever have.



Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool.  But then I am God's fool, and

all His works must be contemplated with respect.



Livy and I join in the warmest regards to you and yours,

                                        Yrs ever,

                                                  MARK.



Longfellow, in his reply, said: "I do not believe anybody was much hurt.

Certainly I was not, and Holmes tells me he was not.  So I think you may

dismiss the matter from your mind without further remorse."



Holmes wrote: "It never occurred to me for a moment to take offense, or

feel wounded by your playful use of my name."



Miss Ellen Emerson replied for her father (in a letter to Mrs. Clemens)

that the speech had made no impression upon him, giving at considerable

length the impression it had made on herself and other members of the

family.



     Clearly, it was not the principals who were hurt, but only those who

     held them in awe, though one can realize that this would not make it

     much easier for Mark Twain.









XVIII.



LETTERS FROM EUROPE, 1878-79.  TRAMPING WITH TWICHELL.  WRITING A NEW

TRAVEL BOOK.  LIFE IN MUNICH



     Whether the unhappy occurrence at the Whittier dinner had anything

     to do with Mark Twain's resolve to spend a year or two in Europe

     cannot be known now.  There were other good reasons for going, one

     in particular being a demand for another book of travel.  It was

     also true, as he explains in a letter to his mother, that his days

     were full of annoyances, making it difficult for him to work.  He

     had a tendency to invest money in almost any glittering enterprise

     that came along, and at this time he was involved in the promotion

     of a variety of patent rights that brought him no return other than

     assessment and vexation.



     Clemens's mother was by this time living with her son Orion and his

     wife, in Iowa.





                  To Mrs. Jane Clemens, in Keokuk, Iowa:



                                             HARTFORD, Feb. 17, 1878

MY DEAR MOTHER,--I suppose I am the worst correspondent in the whole

world; and yet I grow worse and worse all the time.  My conscience

blisters me for not writing you, but it has ceased to abuse me for not

writing other folks.



Life has come to be a very serious matter with me.  I have a badgered,

harassed feeling, a good part of my time.  It comes mainly of business

responsibilities and annoyances, and the persecution of kindly letters

from well meaning strangers--to whom I must be rudely silent or else put

in the biggest half of my time bothering over answers.  There are other

things also that help to consume my time and defeat my projects.  Well,

the consequence is, I cannot write a book at home.  This cuts my income

down.  Therefore, I have about made up my mind to take my tribe and fly

to some little corner of Europe and budge no more until I shall have

completed one of the half dozen books that lie begun, up stairs.  Please

say nothing about this at present.



We propose to sail the 11th of April.  I shall go to Fredonia to meet

you, but it will not be well for Livy to make that trip I am afraid.

However, we shall see.  I will hope she can go.



Mr. Twichell has just come in, so I must go to him.  We are all well, and

send love to you all.

                              Affly,

                                        SAM.





     He was writing few letters at this time, and doing but little work.

     There were always many social events during the winter, and what

     with his European plans and a diligent study of the German language,

     which the entire family undertook, his days and evenings were full

     enough.  Howells wrote protesting against the European travel and

     berating him for his silence:



     "I never was in Berlin and don't know any family hotel there.

     I should be glad I didn't, if it would keep you from going.  You

     deserve to put up at the Sign of the Savage in Vienna.  Really, it's

     a great blow to me to hear of that prospected sojourn.  It's a

     shame.  I must see you, somehow, before you go.  I'm in dreadfully

     low spirits about it.



     "I was afraid your silence meant something wicked."



     Clemens replied promptly, urging a visit to Hartford, adding a

     postscript for Mrs. Howells, characteristic enough to warrant

     preservation.





                    P. S. to Mrs. Howells, in Boston:



                                                       Feb. '78.

DEAR MRS. HOWELLS.  Mrs. Clemens wrote you a letter, and handed it to me

half an hour ago, while I was folding mine to Mr. Howells.  I laid that

letter on this table before me while I added the paragraph about R,'s

application.  Since then I have been hunting and swearing, and swearing

and hunting, but I can't find a sign of that letter.  It is the most

astonishing disappearance I ever heard of.  Mrs. Clemens has gone off

driving--so I will have to try and give you an idea of her communication

from memory.  Mainly it consisted of an urgent desire that you come to

see us next week, if you can possibly manage it, for that will be a

reposeful time, the turmoil of breaking up beginning the week after.  She

wants you to tell her about Italy, and advise her in that connection, if

you will.  Then she spoke of her plans--hers, mind you, for I never have

anything quite so definite as a plan.  She proposes to stop a fortnight

in (confound the place, I've forgotten what it was,) then go and live in

Dresden till sometime in the summer; then retire to Switzerland for the

hottest season, then stay a while in Venice and put in the winter in

Munich.  This program subject to modifications according to

circumstances.  She said something about some little by-trips here and

there, but they didn't stick in my memory because the idea didn't charm

me.



(They have just telephoned me from the Courant office that Bayard Taylor

and family have taken rooms in our ship, the Holsatia, for the 11th

April.)



Do come, if you possibly can!--and remember and don't forget to avoid

letting Mrs. Clemens find out I lost her letter.  Just answer her the

same as if you had got it.

                              Sincerely yours

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.





     The Howellses came, as invited, for a final reunion before the

     breaking up.  This was in the early half of March; the Clemenses

     were to sail on the 11th of the following month.



     Orion Clemens, meantime, had conceived a new literary idea and was

     piling in his MS. as fast as possible to get his brother's judgment

     on it before the sailing-date.  It was not a very good time to send

     MS., but Mark Twain seems to have read it and given it some

     consideration.  "The Journey in Heaven," of his own, which he

     mentions, was the story published so many years later under the

     title of "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven."  He had began it in

     1868, on his voyage to San Francisco, it having been suggested by

     conversations with Capt.  Ned Wakeman, of one of the Pacific

     steamers.  Wakeman also appears in 'Roughing It,' Chap.  L, as Capt.

     Ned Blakely, and again in one of the "Rambling Notes of an Idle

     Excursion," as "Captain Hurricane Jones."





                       To Orion Clemens, in Keokuk:



                                             HARTFORD, Mch.  23, 1878.

MY DEAR BRO.,--Every man must learn his trade--not pick it up.  God

requires that he learn it by slow and painful processes.  The apprentice-

hand, in black-smithing, in medicine, in literature, in everything, is a

thing that can't be hidden.  It always shows.



But happily there is a market for apprentice work, else the "Innocents

Abroad" would have had no sale.  Happily, too, there's a wider market for

some sorts of apprentice literature than there is for the very best of

journey-work.  This work of yours is exceedingly crude, but I am free to

say it is less crude than I expected it to be, and considerably better

work than I believed you could do, it is too crude to offer to any

prominent periodical, so I shall speak to the N. Y. Weekly people.  To

publish it there will be to bury it.  Why could not same good genius have

sent me to the N. Y. Weekly with my apprentice sketches?



You should not publish it in book form at all--for this reason: it is

only an imitation of Verne--it is not a burlesque.  But I think it may be

regarded as proof that Verne cannot be burlesqued.



In accompanying notes I have suggested that you vastly modify the first

visit to hell, and leave out the second visit altogether.  Nobody would,

or ought to print those things.  You are not advanced enough in

literature to venture upon a matter requiring so much practice.  Let me

show you what a man has got to go through:



Nine years ago I mapped out my "Journey in Heaven."  I discussed it with

literary friends whom I could trust to keep it to themselves.



I gave it a deal of thought, from time to time.  After a year or more I

wrote it up.  It was not a success.  Five years ago I wrote it again,

altering the plan.  That MS is at my elbow now.  It was a considerable

improvement on the first attempt, but still it wouldn't do--last year and

year before I talked frequently with Howells about the subject, and he

kept urging me to do it again.



So I thought and thought, at odd moments and at last I struck what I

considered to be the right plan!  Mind I have never altered the ideas,

from the first--the plan was the difficulty.  When Howells was here last,

I laid before him the whole story without referring to my MS and he said:

"You have got it sure this time.  But drop the idea of making mere

magazine stuff of it.  Don't waste it.  Print it by itself--publish it

first in England--ask Dean Stanley to endorse it, which will draw some of

the teeth of the religious press, and then reprint in America."  I doubt

my ability to get Dean Stanley to do anything of the sort, but I shall do

the rest--and this is all a secret which you must not divulge.



Now look here--I have tried, all these years, to think of some way of

"doing" hell too--and have always had to give it up.  Hell, in my book,

will not occupy five pages of MS I judge--it will be only covert hints,

I suppose, and quickly dropped, I may end by not even referring to it.



And mind you, in my opinion you will find that you can't write up hell so

it will stand printing.  Neither Howells nor I believe in hell or the

divinity of the Savior, but no matter, the Savior is none the less a

sacred Personage, and a man should have no desire or disposition to refer

to him lightly, profanely, or otherwise than with the profoundest

reverence.



The only safe thing is not to introduce him, or refer to him at all,

I suspect.  I have entirely rewritten one book 3 (perhaps 4.) times,

changing the plan every time--1200 pages of MS. wasted and burned--and

shall tackle it again, one of these years and maybe succeed at last.

Therefore you need not expect to get your book right the first time.

Go to work and revamp or rewrite it.  God only exhibits his thunder and

lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention.  These are

God's adjectives.  You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases

to get under the bed, by and by.



Mr. Perkins will send you and Ma your checks when we are gone.  But don't

write him, ever, except a single line in case he forgets the checks--for

the man is driven to death with work.



I see you are half promising yourself a monthly return for your book.

In my experience, previously counted chickens never do hatch.  How many

of mine I have counted!  and never a one of them but failed!  It is much

better to hedge disappointment by not counting.--Unexpected money is a

delight.  The same sum is a bitterness when you expected more.



My time in America is growing mighty short.  Perhaps we can manage in

this way: Imprimis, if the N. Y. Weekly people know that you are my

brother, they will turn that fact into an advertisement--a thing of value

to them, but not to you and me.  This must be prevented.  I will write

them a note to say you have a friend near Keokuk, Charles S. Miller,

who has a MS for sale which you think is a pretty clever travesty on

Verne; and if they want it they might write to him in your care.  Then if

any correspondence ensues between you and them, let Mollie write for you

and sign your name--your own hand writing representing Miller's.  Keep

yourself out of sight till you make a strike on your own merits there is

no other way to get a fair verdict upon your merits.



Later-I've written the note to Smith, and with nothing in it which he can

use as an advertisement.  I'm called--Good bye-love to you both.



We leave here next Wednesday for Elmira: we leave there Apl. 9 or 10--and

sail 11th

                         Yr Bro.

                                   SAM.





     In the letter that follows the mention of Annie and Sam refers, of

     course, to the children of Mrs. Moffett, who had been, Pamela

     Clemens.  They were grown now, and Annie Moffett was married to

     Charles L.  Webster, who later was to become Mark Twain's business

     partner.  The Moffetts and Websters were living in Fredonia at this

     time, and Clemens had been to pay them a good-by visit.  The Taylor

     dinner mentioned was a farewell banquet given to Bayard Taylor, who

     had been appointed Minister to Germany, and was to sail on the ship

     with Mark Twain.  Mark Twain's mother was visiting in Fredonia when

     this letter was written.





                    To Mrs. Jane Clemens, in Fredonia:



                                                  Apr.  7, '78.

MY DEAR MOTHER,--I have told Livy all about Annie's beautiful house, and

about Sam and Charley, and about Charley's ingenious manufactures and his

strong manhood and good promise, and how glad I am that he and Annie

married.  And I have told her about Annie's excellent house-keeping, also

about the great Bacon conflict; (I told you it was a hundred to one that

neither Livy nor the European powers had heard of that desolating

struggle.)



And I have told her how beautiful you are in your age and how bright your

mind is with its old-time brightness, and how she and the children would

enjoy you.  And I have told her how singularly young Pamela is looking,

and what a fine large fellow Sam is, and how ill the lingering syllable

"my" to his name fits his port and figure.



Well, Pamela, after thinking it over for a day or so, I came near

inquiring about a state-room in our ship for Sam, to please you, but my

wiser former resolution came back to me.  It is not for his good that he

have friends in the ship.  His conduct in the Bacon business shows that

he will develop rapidly into a manly man as soon as he is cast loose from

your apron strings.



You don't teach him to push ahead and do and dare things for himself, but

you do just the reverse.  You are assisted in your damaging work by the

tyrannous ways of a village--villagers watch each other and so make

cowards of each other.  After Sam shall have voyaged to Europe by

himself, and rubbed against the world and taken and returned its cuffs,

do you think he will hesitate to escort a guest into any whisky-mill in

Fredonia when he himself has no sinful business to transact there?

No, he will smile at the idea.  If he avoids this courtesy now from

principle, of course I find no fault with it at all--only if he thinks it

is principle he may be mistaken; a close examination may show it is only

a bowing to the tyranny of public opinion.



I only say it may--I cannot venture to say it will.  Hartford is not a

large place, but it is broader than to have ways of that sort.  Three or

four weeks ago, at a Moody and Sankey meeting, the preacher read a letter

from somebody "exposing" the fact that a prominent clergyman had gone

from one of those meetings, bought a bottle of lager beer and drank it on

the premises (a drug store.)



A tempest of indignation swept the town.  Our clergymen and everybody

else said the "culprit" had not only done an innocent thing, but had done

it in an open, manly way, and it was nobody's right or business to find

fault with it.  Perhaps this dangerous latitude comes of the fact that we

never have any temperance "rot" going on in Hartford.



I find here a letter from Orion, submitting some new matter in his story

for criticism.  When you write him, please tell him to do the best he can

and bang away.  I can do nothing further in this matter, for I have but 3

days left in which to settle a deal of important business and answer a

bushel and a half of letters.  I am very nearly tired to death.



I was so jaded and worn, at the Taylor dinner, that I found I could not

remember 3 sentences of the speech I had memorized, and therefore got up

and said so and excused myself from speaking.  I arrived here at 3

o'clock this morning.  I think the next 3 days will finish me.  The idea

of sitting down to a job of literary criticism is simply ludicrous.



A young lady passenger in our ship has been placed under Livy's charge.

Livy couldn't easily get out of it, and did not want to, on her own

account, but fully expected I would make trouble when I heard of it.

But I didn't.  A girl can't well travel alone, so I offered no objection.

She leaves us at Hamburg.  So I've got 6 people in my care, now--which is

just 6 too many for a man of my unexecutive capacity.  I expect nothing

else but to lose some of them overboard.



We send our loving good-byes to all the household and hope to see you

again after a spell.

                         Affly Yrs.

                                        SAM.





     There are no other American letters of this period.  The Clemens

     party, which included Miss Clara Spaulding, of Elmira, sailed as

     planned, on the Holsatia, April 11, 1878.  As before stated, Bayard

     Taylor was on the ship; also Murat Halstead and family.  On the eve

     of departure, Clemens sent to Howells this farewell word:



     "And that reminds me, ungrateful dog that I am, that I owe as much

     to your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city

     boss who takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle

     his art.  I was talking to Mrs. Clemens about this the other day,

     and grieving because I never mentioned it to you, thereby seeming to

     ignore it, or to be unaware of it.  Nothing that has passed under

     your eye needs any revision before going into a volume, while all my

     other stuff does need so much."



     A characteristic tribute, and from the heart.



     The first European letter came from Frankfort, a rest on their way

     to Heidelberg.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                   FRANKFORT ON THE MAIN, May 4, 1878.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I only propose to write a single line to say we are

still around.  Ah, I have such a deep, grateful, unutterable sense of

being "out of it all."  I think I foretaste some of the advantages of

being dead.  Some of the joy of it.  I don't read any newspapers or care

for them.  When people tell me England has declared war, I drop the

subject, feeling that it is none of my business; when they tell me Mrs.

Tilton has confessed and Mr. B. denied, I say both of them have done that

before, therefore let the worn stub of the Plymouth white-wash brush be

brought out once more, and let the faithful spit on their hands and get

to work again regardless of me--for I am out of it all.



We had 2 almost devilish weeks at sea (and I tell you Bayard Taylor is a

really lovable man--which you already knew) then we staid a week in the

beautiful, the very beautiful city of Hamburg; and since then we have

been fooling along, 4 hours per day by rail, with a courier, spending the

other 20 in hotels whose enormous bedchambers and private parlors are an

overpowering marvel to me: Day before yesterday, in Cassel, we had a love

of a bedroom ,31 feet long, and a parlor with 2 sofas, 12 chairs, a

writing desk and 4 tables scattered around, here and there in it.  Made

of red silk, too, by George.



The times and times I wish you were along!  You could throw some fun into

the journey; whereas I go on, day by day, in a smileless state of solemn

admiration.



What a paradise this is!  What clean clothes, what good faces, what

tranquil contentment, what prosperity, what genuine freedom, what superb

government.  And I am so happy, for I am responsible for none of it.  I

am only here to enjoy.  How charmed I am when I overhear a German word

which I understand.  With love from us 2 to you 2.



                                             MARK.



P. S.  We are not taking six days to go from Hamburg to Heidelberg

because we prefer it.  Quite on the contrary.  Mrs. Clemens picked up a

dreadful cold and sore throat on board ship and still keeps them in

stock--so she could only travel 4 hours a day.  She wanted to dive

straight through, but I had different notions about the wisdom of it.

I found that 4 hours a day was the best she could do.  Before I forget

it, our permanent address is Care Messrs. Koester & Co., Backers,

Heidelberg.  We go there tomorrow.



Poor Susy!  From the day we reached German soil, we have required Rosa to

speak German to the children--which they hate with all their souls.  The

other morning in Hanover, Susy came to us (from Rosa, in the nursery) and

said, in halting syllables, "Papa, vie viel uhr ist es?"--then turned

with pathos in her big eyes, and said, "Mamma, I wish Rosa was made in

English."



(Unfinished)





     Frankfort was a brief halting-place, their destination being

     Heidelberg.  They were presently located there in the beautiful

     Schloss hotel, which overlooks the old castle with its forest

     setting, the flowing Neckar, and the distant valley of the Rhine.

     Clemens, who had discovered the location, and loved it, toward the

     end of May reported to Howells his felicities.





               Part of letter to W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                   SCHLOSS-HOTEL HEIDELBERG,

                                   Sunday, a. m., May 26, 1878.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--....divinely located.  From this airy porch among the

shining groves we look down upon Heidelberg Castle, and upon the swift

Neckar, and the town, and out over the wide green level of the Rhine

valley--a marvelous prospect.  We are in a Cul-de-sac formed of hill-

ranges and river; we are on the side of a steep mountain; the river at

our feet is walled, on its other side, (yes, on both sides,) by a steep

and wooded mountain-range which rises abruptly aloft from the water's

edge; portions of these mountains are densely wooded; the plain of the

Rhine, seen through the mouth of this pocket, has many and peculiar

charms for the eye.



Our bedroom has two great glass bird-cages (enclosed balconies) one

looking toward the Rhine valley and sunset, the other looking up the

Neckar cul-de-sac, and naturally we spend nearly all our time in these-

when one is sunny the other is shady.  We have tables and chairs in them;

we do our reading, writing, studying, smoking and suppering in them.



The view from these bird-cages is my despair.  The pictures change from

one enchanting aspect to another in ceaseless procession, never keeping

one form half an hour, and never taking on an unlovely one.



And then Heidelberg on a dark night!  It is massed, away down there,

almost right under us, you know, and stretches off toward the valley.

Its curved and interlacing streets are a cobweb, beaded thick with

lights--a wonderful thing to see; then the rows of lights on the arched

bridges, and their glinting reflections in the water; and away at the far

end, the Eisenbahnhof, with its twenty solid acres of glittering gas-

jets, a huge garden, as one may say, whose every plant is a flame.



These balconies are the darlingest things.  I have spent all the morning

in this north one.  Counting big and little, it has 256 panes of glass in

it; so one is in effect right out in the free sunshine, and yet sheltered

from wind and rain--and likewise doored and curtained from whatever may

be going on in the bedroom.  It must have been a noble genius who devised

this hotel.  Lord, how blessed is the repose, the tranquillity of this

place!  Only two sounds; the happy clamor of the birds in the groves, and

the muffled music of the Neckar, tumbling over the opposing dykes.  It is

no hardship to lie awake awhile, nights, for this subdued roar has

exactly the sound of a steady rain beating upon a roof.  It is so healing

to the spirit; and it bears up the thread of one's imaginings as the

accompaniment bears up a song.



While Livy and Miss Spaulding have been writing at this table, I have sat

tilted back, near by, with a pipe and the last Atlantic, and read Charley

Warner's article with prodigious enjoyment.  I think it is exquisite.

I think it must be the roundest and broadest and completest short essay

he has ever written.  It is clear, and compact, and charmingly done.



The hotel grounds join and communicate with the Castle grounds; so we and

the children loaf in the winding paths of those leafy vastnesses a great

deal, and drink beer and listen to excellent music.



When we first came to this hotel, a couple of weeks ago, I pointed to a

house across the river, and said I meant to rent the centre room on the

3d floor for a work-room.  Jokingly we got to speaking of it as my

office; and amused ourselves with watching "my people" daily in their

small grounds and trying to make out what we could of their dress, &c.,

without a glass.  Well, I loafed along there one day and found on that

house the only sign of the kind on that side of the river: "Moblirte

Wohnung zu Vermiethen!" I went in and rented that very room which I had

long ago selected.  There was only one other room in the whole double-

house unrented.



(It occurs to me that I made a great mistake in not thinking to deliver a

very bad German speech, every other sentence pieced out with English, at

the Bayard Taylor banquet in New York.  I think I could have made it one

of the features of the occasion.)--[He used this plan at a gathering of

the American students in Heidelberg, on July 4th, with great effect; so

his idea was not wasted.]



We left Hartford before the end of March, and I have been idle ever

since.  I have waited for a call to go to work--I knew it would come.

Well, it began to come a week ago; my note-book comes out more and more

frequently every day since; 3 days ago I concluded to move my manuscript

over to my den.  Now the call is loud and decided at last.  So tomorrow I

shall begin regular, steady work, and stick to it till middle of July or

1st August, when I look for Twichell; we will then walk about Germany 2

or 3 weeks, and then I'll go to work again--(perhaps in Munich.)



We both send a power of love to the Howellses, and we do wish you were

here.  Are you in the new house?  Tell us about it.

                                             Yrs Ever

                                                  MARK.





     There has been no former mention in the letters of the coming of

     Twichell; yet this had been a part of the European plan.  Mark Twain

     had invited his walking companion to make a tramp with him through

     Europe, as his guest.  Material for the new book would grow faster

     with Twichell as a companion; and these two in spite of their widely

     opposed views concerning Providence and the general scheme of

     creation, were wholly congenial comrades.  Twichell, in Hartford,

     expecting to receive the final summons to start, wrote: "Oh, my! do

     you realize, Mark, what a symposium it is to be?  I do.  To begin

     with, I am thoroughly tired, and the rest will be worth everything.

     To walk with you and talk with you for weeks together--why, it's my

     dream of luxury."



     August 1st brought Twichell, and the friends set out without delay

     on a tramp through the Black Forest, making short excursions at

     first, but presently extending them in the direction of Switzerland.

     Mrs. Clemens and the others remained in Heidelberg, to follow at

     their leisure.  To Mrs. Clemens her husband sent frequent reports of

     their wanderings.  It will be seen that their tramp did not confine

     itself to pedestrianism, though they did, in fact, walk a great

     deal, and Mark Twain in a note to his mother declared, "I loathe all

     travel, except on foot."  The reports to Mrs. Clemens follow:





                 Letters to Mrs. Clemens, in Heidelberg:



                              ALLERHEILIGEN  Aug. 5, 1878   8:30 p.m.

Livy darling, we had a rattling good time to-day, but we came very near

being left at Baden-Baden, for instead of waiting in the waiting-room, we

sat down on the platform to wait where the trains come in from the other

direction.  We sat there full ten minutes--and then all of a sudden it

occurred to me that that was not the right place.



On the train the principal of the big English school at Nauheim (of which

Mr. Scheiding was a teacher), introduced himself to me, and then he

mapped out our day for us (for today and tomorrow) and also drew a map

and gave us directions how to proceed through Switzerland.  He had his

entire school with him, taking them on a prodigious trip through

Switzerland--tickets for the round trip ten dollars apiece.  He has done

this annually for 10 years.  We took a post carriage from Aachen to

Otterhofen for 7 marks--stopped at the "Pflug" to drink beer, and saw

that pretty girl again at a distance.  Her father, mother, and two

brothers received me like an ancient customer and sat down and talked as

long as I had any German left.  The big room was full of red-vested

farmers (the Gemeindrath of the district, with the Burgermeister at the

head,) drinking beer and talking public business.  They had held an

election and chosen a new member and had been drinking beer at his

expense for several hours.  (It was intensely Black-foresty.)



There was an Australian there (a student from Stuttgart or somewhere,)

and Joe told him who I was and he laid himself out to make our course

plain, for us--so I am certain we can't get lost between here and

Heidelberg.



We walked the carriage road till we came to that place where one sees the

foot path on the other side of the ravine, then we crossed over and took

that.  For a good while we were in a dense forest and judged we were

lost, but met a native women who said we were all right.  We fooled along

and got there at 6 p.m.--ate supper, then followed down the ravine to the

foot of the falls, then struck into a blind path to see where it would

go, and just about dark we fetched up at the Devil's Pulpit on top of the

hills.  Then home.  And now to bed, pretty sleepy.  Joe sends love and I

send a thousand times as much, my darling.

                                                  S. L. C.





                                                  HOTEL GENNIN.

Livy darling, we had a lovely day jogged right along, with a good horse

and sensible driver--the last two hours right behind an open carriage

filled with a pleasant German family--old gentleman and 3 pretty

daughters.  At table d'hote tonight, 3 dishes were enough for me, and

then I bored along tediously through the bill of fare, with a back-ache,

not daring to get up and bow to the German family and leave.  I meant to

sit it through and make them get up and do the bowing; but at last Joe

took pity on me and said he would get up and drop them a curtsy and put

me out of my misery.  I was grateful.  He got up and delivered a

succession of frank and hearty bows, accompanying them with an atmosphere

of good-fellowship which would have made even an English family

surrender.  Of course the Germans responded--then I got right up and they

had to respond to my salaams, too.  So "that was done."



We walked up a gorge and saw a tumbling waterfall which was nothing to

Giessbach, but it made me resolve to drop you a line and urge you to go

and see Giessbach illuminated.  Don't fail--but take a long day's rest,

first.  I love you, sweetheart.

                                             SAML.





                                   OVER THE GEMMI PASS.

                                   4.30 p.m.  Saturday, Aug. 24, 1878.

Livy darling, Joe and I have had a most noble day.  Started to climb (on

foot) at 8.30 this morning among the grandest peaks!  Every half hour

carried us back a month in the season.  We left them harvesting 2d crop

of hay.  At 9 we were in July and found ripe strawberries; at 9.30 we

were in June and gathered flowers belonging to that month; at 10 we were

in May and gathered a flower which appeared in Heidelberg the 17th of

that month; also forget-me-nots, which disappeared from Heidelberg about

mid-May; at 11.30 we were in April (by the flowers;) at noon we had rain

and hail mixed, and wind and enveloping fogs, and considered it March; at

12.30 we had snowbanks above us and snowbanks below us, and considered it

February.  Not good February, though, because in the midst of the wild

desolation the forget-me-not still bloomed, lovely as ever.



What a flower garden the Gemmi Pass is!  After I had got my hands full

Joe made me a paper bag, which I pinned to my lapel and filled with

choice specimens.  I gathered no flowers which I had ever gathered before

except 4 or 5 kinds.  We took it leisurely and I picked all I wanted to.

I mailed my harvest to you a while ago.  Don't send it to Mrs. Brooks

until you have looked it over, flower by flower.  It will pay.



Among the clouds and everlasting snows I found a brave and bright little

forget-me-not growing in the very midst of a smashed and tumbled stone-

debris, just as cheerful as if the barren and awful domes and ramparts

that towered around were the blessed walls of heaven.  I thought how

Lilly Warner would be touched by such a gracious surprise, if she,

instead of I, had seen it.  So I plucked it, and have mailed it to her

with a note.



Our walk was 7 hours--the last 2 down a path as steep as a ladder,

almost, cut in the face of a mighty precipice.  People are not allowed to

ride down it.  This part of the day's work taxed our knees, I tell you.

We have been loafing about this village (Leukerbad) for an hour, now we

stay here over Sunday.  Not tired at all.  (Joe's hat fell over the

precipice--so he came here bareheaded.) I love you, my darling.



                                             SAML.





                                        ST. NICHOLAS, Aug. 26th, '78.

Livy darling, we came through a-whooping today, 6 hours tramp up steep

hills and down steep hills, in mud and water shoe-deep, and in a steady

pouring rain which never moderated a moment.  I was as chipper and fresh

as a lark all the way and arrived without the slightest sense of fatigue.

But we were soaked and my shoes full of water, so we ate at once,

stripped and went to bed for 2 1/2 hours while our traps were thoroughly

dried, and our boots greased in addition.  Then we put our clothes on hot

and went to table d'hote.



Made some nice English friends and shall see them at Zermatt tomorrow.



Gathered a small bouquet of new flowers, but they got spoiled.  I sent

you a safety-match box full of flowers last night from Leukerbad.



I have just telegraphed you to wire the family news to me at Riffel

tomorrow.  I do hope you are all well and having as jolly a time as we

are, for I love you, sweetheart, and also, in a measure, the Bays.--

[Little Susy's word for "babies."]--Give my love to Clara Spaulding and

also to the cubs.

                                          SAML.





     This, as far as it goes, is a truer and better account of the

     excursion than Mark Twain gave in the book that he wrote later.  A

     Tramp Abroad has a quality of burlesque in it, which did not belong

     to the journey at all, but was invented to satisfy the craving for

     what the public conceived to be Mark Twain's humor.  The serious

     portions of the book are much more pleasing--more like himself.

     The entire journey, as will be seen, lasted one week more than a

     month.



     Twichell also made his reports home, some of which give us

     interesting pictures of his walking partner.  In one place he wrote:

     "Mark is a queer fellow.  There is nothing he so delights in as a

     swift, strong stream.  You can hardly get him to leave one when once

     he is within the influence of its fascinations."



     Twichell tells how at Kandersteg they were out together one evening

     where a brook comes plunging down from Gasternthal and how he pushed

     in a drift to see it go racing along the current.  "When I got back

     to the path Mark was running down stream after it as hard as he

     could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstasy,

     and when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam

     below he would jump up and down and yell.  He said afterward that he

     had not been so excited in three months."



     In other places Twichell refers to his companion's consideration for

     the feeling of others, and for animals.  "When we are driving, his

     concern is all about the horse.  He can't bear to see the whip used,

     or to see a horse pull hard."



After the walk over Gemmi Pass he wrote: "Mark to-day was immensely

absorbed in flowers.  He scrambled around and gathered a great variety,

and manifested the intensest pleasure in them.  He crowded a pocket of

his note-book with his specimens, and wanted more room."



Whereupon Twichell got out his needle and thread and some stiff paper he

had and contrived the little paper bag to hang to the front of his vest.



The tramp really ended at Lausanne, where Clemens joined his party, but a

short excursion to Chillon and Chamonix followed, the travelers finally

separating at Geneva, Twichell to set out for home by way of England,

Clemens to remain and try to write the story of their travels.  He

hurried a good-by letter after his comrade:





                        To Rev. J.  H.  Twichell:



                                                       (No date)

DEAR OLD JOE,--It is actually all over!  I was so low-spirited at the

station yesterday, and this morning, when I woke, I couldn't seem to

accept the dismal truth that you were really gone, and the pleasant

tramping and talking at an end.  Ah, my boy!  it has been such a rich

holiday to me, and I feel under such deep and honest obligations to you

for coming.  I am putting out of my mind all memory of the times when I

misbehaved toward you and hurt you: I am resolved to consider it

forgiven, and to store up and remember only the charming hours of the

journeys and the times when I was not unworthy to be with you and share a

companionship which to me stands first after Livy's.  It is justifiable

to do this; for why should I let my small infirmities of disposition live

and grovel among my mental pictures of the eternal sublimities of the

Alps?



Livy can't accept or endure the fact that you are gone.  But you are,

and we cannot get around it.  So take our love with you, and bear it also

over the sea to Harmony, and God bless you both.



                                                  MARK.





     From Switzerland the Clemens party worked down into Italy, sight-

     seeing, a diversion in which Mark Twain found little enough of

     interest.  He had seen most of the sights ten years before, when his

     mind was fresh.  He unburdened himself to Twichell and to Howells,

     after a period of suffering.





                     To J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                                  ROME, Nov. 3, '78.

DEAR JOE,--.....I have received your several letters, and we have

prodigiously enjoyed them.  How I do admire a man who can sit down and

whale away with a pen just the same as if it was fishing--or something

else as full of pleasure and as void of labor.  I can't do it; else, in

common decency, I would when I write to you.  Joe, if I can make a book

out of the matter gathered in your company over here, the book is safe;

but I don't think I have gathered any matter before or since your visit

worth writing up.  I do wish you were in Rome to do my sightseeing for

me.  Rome interests me as much as East Hartford could, and no more.  That

is, the Rome which the average tourist feels an interest in; but there

are other things here which stir me enough to make life worth living.

Livy and Clara Spaulding are having a royal time worshiping the old

Masters, and I as good a time gritting my ineffectual teeth over them.



A friend waits for me.  A power of love to you all.

                                                  Amen.

                                                       MARK.





     In his letter to Howells he said: "I wish I could give those sharp

     satires on European life which you mention, but of course a man

     can't write successful satire except he be in a calm, judicial good-

     humor; whereas I hate travel, and I hate hotels, and I hate the

     opera, and I hate the old masters.  In truth, I don't ever seem to

     be in a good-enough humor with anything to satirize it.  No, I want

     to stand up before it and curse it and foam at the mouth, or take a

     club and pound it to rags and pulp.  I have got in two or three

     chapters about Wagner's operas, and managed to do it without showing

     temper, but the strain of another such effort would burst me!"



     From Italy the Clemens party went to Munich, where they had arranged

     in advance for winter quarters.  Clemens claims, in his report of

     the matter to Howells, that he took the party through without the

     aid of a courier, though thirty years later, in some comment which

     he set down on being shown the letter, he wrote concerning this

     paragraph: "Probably a lie."  He wrote, also, that they acquired a

     great affection for Fraulein Dahlweiner: "Acquired it at once and it

     outlasted the winter we spent in her house."





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                   No 1a, Karlstrasse, 2e Stock.

                                   Care Fraulein Dahlweiner.

                                   MUNICH, Nov. 17, 1878.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--We arrived here night before last, pretty well fagged:

an 8-hour pull from Rome to Florence; a rest there of a day and two

nights; then 5 1/2 hours to Bologna; one night's rest; then from noon to

10:30 p.m.  carried us to Trent, in the Austrian Tyrol, where the

confounded hotel had not received our message, and so at that miserable

hour, in that snowy region, the tribe had to shiver together in fireless

rooms while beds were prepared and warmed, then up at 6 in the morning

and a noble view of snow-peaks glittering in the rich light of a full

moon while the hotel-devils lazily deranged a breakfast for us in the

dreary gloom of blinking candles; then a solid 12 hours pull through the

loveliest snow ranges and snow-draped forest--and at 7 p.m. we hauled up,

in drizzle and fog, at the domicile which had been engaged for us ten

months before.  Munich did seem the horriblest place, the most desolate

place, the most unendurable place!--and the rooms were so small, the

conveniences so meagre, and the porcelain stoves so grim, ghastly,

dismal, intolerable!  So Livy and Clara (Spaulding) sat down forlorn,

and cried, and I retired to a private, place to pray.  By and by we all

retired to our narrow German beds; and when Livy and I finished talking

across the room, it was all decided that we would rest 24 hours then pay

whatever damages were required, and straightway fly to the south of

France.



But you see, that was simply fatigue.  Next morning the tribe fell in

love with the rooms, with the weather, with Munich, and head over heels

in love with Fraulein Dahlweiner.  We got a larger parlor--an ample one

--threw two communicating bedrooms into one, for the children, and now we

are entirely comfortable.  The only apprehension, at present, is that the

climate may not be just right for the children, in which case we shall

have to go to France, but it will be with the sincerest regret.



Now I brought the tribe through from Rome, myself.  We never had so

little trouble before.  The next time anybody has a courier to put out to

nurse, I shall not be in the market.



Last night the forlornities had all disappeared; so we gathered around

the lamp, after supper, with our beer and my pipe, and in a condition of

grateful snugness tackled the new magazines.  I read your new story

aloud, amid thunders of applause, and we all agreed that Captain Jenness

and the old man with the accordion-hat are lovely people and most

skillfully drawn--and that cabin-boy, too, we like.  Of course we are all

glad the girl is gone to Venice--for there is no place like Venice.  Now

I easily understand that the old man couldn't go, because you have a

purpose in sending Lyddy by herself: but you could send the old man over

in another ship, and we particularly want him along.  Suppose you don't

need him there?  What of that?  Can't you let him feed the doves?  Can't

you let him fall in the canal occasionally?  Can't you let his good-

natured purse be a daily prey to guides and beggar-boys?  Can't you let

him find peace and rest and fellowship under Pere Jacopo's kindly wing?

(However, you are writing the book, not I--still, I am one of the people

you are writing it for, you understand.) I only want to insist, in a

friendly way, that the old man shall shed his sweet influence frequently

upon the page--that is all.



The first time we called at the convent, Pere Jacopo was absent; the next

(Just at this moment Miss Spaulding spoke up and said something about

Pere Jacopo--there is more in this acting of one mind upon another than

people think) time, he was there, and gave us preserved rose-leaves to

eat, and talked about you, and Mrs. Howells, and Winnie, and brought out

his photographs, and showed us a picture of "the library of your new

house," but not so--it was the study in your Cambridge house.  He was

very sweet and good.  He called on us next day; the day after that we

left Venice, after a pleasant sojourn Of 3 or 4 weeks.  He expects to

spend this winter in Munich and will see us often, he said.



Pretty soon, I am going to write something, and when I finish it I shall

know whether to put it to itself or in the "Contributors' Club."  That

"Contributors' Club" was a most happy idea.  By the way, I think that the

man who wrote the paragraph beginning at the bottom of page 643 has said

a mighty sound and sensible thing.  I wish his suggestion could be

adopted.



It is lovely of you to keep that old pipe in such a place of honor.



While it occurs to me, I must tell you Susie's last.  She is sorely

badgered with dreams; and her stock dream is that she is being eaten up

by bears.  She is a grave and thoughtful child, as you will remember.

Last night she had the usual dream.  This morning she stood apart (after

telling it,) for some time, looking vacantly at the floor, and absorbed

in meditation.  At last she looked up, and with the pathos of one who

feels he has not been dealt by with even-handed fairness, said "But

Mamma, the trouble is, that I am never the bear, but always the person."



It would not have occurred to me that there might be an advantage, even

in a dream, in occasionally being the eater, instead of always the party

eaten, but I easily perceived that her point was well taken.



I'm sending to Heidelberg for your letter and Winnie's, and I do hope

they haven't been lost.



My wife and I send love to you all.

                                   Yrs ever,

                                             MARK.





     The Howells story, running at this time in the Atlantic, and so much

     enjoyed by the Clemens party, was "The Lady of the Aroostook."  The

     suggestions made for enlarging the part of the "old man" are

     eminently characteristic.



     Mark Twain's forty-third birthday came in Munich, and in his letter

     conveying this fact to his mother we get a brief added outline of

     the daily life in that old Bavarian city.  Certainly, it would seem

     to have been a quieter and more profitable existence than he had

     known amid the confusion of things left behind in, America.





            To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in America:



                                             No. 1a Karlstrasse,

                                             Dec. 1, MUNICH.  1878.

MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,--I broke the back of life yesterday and

started down-hill toward old age.  This fact has not produced any effect

upon me that I can detect.



I suppose we are located here for the winter.  I have a pleasant work-

room a mile from here where I do my writing.  The walk to and from that

place gives me what exercise I need, and all I take.  We staid three

weeks in Venice, a week in Florence, a fortnight in Rome, and arrived

here a couple of weeks ago.  Livy and Miss Spaulding are studying drawing

and German, and the children have a German day-governess.  I cannot see

but that the children speak German as well as they do English.



Susie often translates Livy's orders to the servants.  I cannot work and

study German at the same time: so I have dropped the latter, and do not

even read the language, except in the morning paper to get the news.



We have all pretty good health, latterly, and have seldom had to call the

doctor.  The children have been in the open air pretty constantly for

months now.  In Venice they were on the water in the gondola most of the

time, and were great friends with our gondolier; and in Rome and Florence

they had long daily tramps, for Rosa is a famous hand to smell out the

sights of a strange place.  Here they wander less extensively.



The family all join in love to you all and to Orion and Mollie.

                                   Affly

                                        Your son

                                                  SAM.









XIX.



LETTERS 1879.  RETURN TO AMERICA.  THE GREAT GRANT REUNION



Life went on very well in Munich.  Each day the family fell more in love

with Fraulein Dahlweiner and her house.



Mark Twain, however, did not settle down to his work readily.  His

"pleasant work-room" provided exercise, but no inspiration.  When he

discovered he could not find his Swiss note-book he was ready to give up

his travel-writing altogether.  In the letter that follows we find him

much less enthusiastic concerning his own performances than over the

story by Howells, which he was following in the Atlantic.



The "detective" chapter mentioned in this letter was not included in

'A Tramp Abroad.'  It was published separately, as 'The Stolen White

Elephant' in a volume bearing that title.  The play, which he had now

found "dreadfully witless and flat," was no other than "Simon Wheeler,

Detective," which he had once regarded so highly.  The "Stewart" referred

to was the millionaire merchant, A. T. Stewart, whose body was stolen in

the expectation of reward.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        MUNICH, Jan. 21, (1879)

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--It's no use, your letter miscarried in some way and is

lost.  The consul has made a thorough search and says he has not been

able to trace it.  It is unaccountable, for all the letters I did not

want arrived without a single grateful failure.  Well, I have read-up,

now, as far as you have got, that is, to where there's a storm at sea

approaching,--and we three think you are clear, out-Howellsing Howells.

If your literature has not struck perfection now we are not able to see

what is lacking.  It is all such truth--truth to the life; every where

your pen falls it leaves a photograph.  I did imagine that everything had

been said about life at sea that could be said, but no matter, it was all

a failure and lies, nothing but lies with a thin varnish of fact,--only

you have stated it as it absolutely is.  And only you see people and

their ways, and their insides and outsides as they are, and make them

talk as they do talk.  I think you are the very greatest artist in these

tremendous mysteries that ever lived.  There doesn't seem to be anything

that can be concealed from your awful all-seeing eye.  It must be a

cheerful thing for one to live with you and be aware that you are going

up and down in him like another conscience all the time.  Possibly you

will not be a fully accepted classic until you have been dead a hundred

years,--it is the fate of the Shakespeares and of all genuine prophets,

--but then your books will be as common as Bibles, I believe.  You're not

a weed, but an oak; not a summer-house, but a cathedral.  In that day I

shall still be in the Cyclopedias, too, thus: "Mark Twain; history and

occupation unknown--but he was personally acquainted with Howells."

There--I could sing your praises all day, and feel and believe every bit

of it.



My book is half finished; I wish to heaven it was done.  I have given up

writing a detective novel--can't write a novel, for I lack the faculty;

but when the detectives were nosing around after Stewart's loud remains,

I threw a chapter into my present book in which I have very extravagantly

burlesqued the detective business--if it is possible to burlesque that

business extravagantly.  You know I was going to send you that detective

play, so that you could re-write it.  Well I didn't do it because I

couldn't find a single idea in it that could be useful to you.  It was

dreadfully witless and flat.  I knew it would sadden you and unfit you

for work.



I have always been sorry we threw up that play embodying Orion which you

began.  It was a mistake to do that.  Do keep that MS and tackle it

again.  It will work out all right; you will see.  I don't believe that

that character exists in literature in so well-developed a condition as

it exists in Orion's person.  Now won't you put Orion in a story?  Then

he will go handsomely into a play afterwards.  How deliciously you could

paint him--it would make fascinating reading--the sort that makes a

reader laugh and cry at the same time, for Orion is as good and

ridiculous a soul as ever was.



Ah, to think of Bayard Taylor!  It is too sad to talk about.  I was so

glad there was not a single sting and so many good praiseful words in the

Atlantic's criticism of Deukalion.

                                   Love to you all

                                             Yrs Ever

                                                  MARK



We remain here till middle of March.





     In 'A Tramp Abroad' there is an incident in which the author

     describes himself as hunting for a lost sock in the dark, in a vast

     hotel bedroom at Heilbronn.  The account of the real incident, as

     written to Twichell, seems even more amusing.



     The "Yarn About the Limburger Cheese and the Box of Guns," like "The

     Stolen White Elephant," did not find place in the travel-book, but

     was published in the same volume with the elephant story, added to

     the rambling notes of "An Idle Excursion."



     With the discovery of the Swiss note-book, work with Mark Twain was

     going better.  His letter reflects his enthusiasm.





                  To Rev. J.  H.  Twichell, in Hartford:



                                                  MUNICH, Jan 26 '79.

DEAR OLD JOE,--Sunday.  Your delicious letter arrived exactly at the

right time.  It was laid by my plate as I was finishing breakfast at 12

noon.  Livy and Clara, (Spaulding) arrived from church 5 minutes later;

I took a pipe and spread myself out on the sofa, and Livy sat by and

read, and I warmed to that butcher the moment he began to swear.  There

is more than one way of praying, and I like the butcher's way because the

petitioner is so apt to be in earnest.  I was peculiarly alive to his

performance just at this time, for another reason, to wit: Last night I

awoke at 3 this morning, and after raging to my self for 2 interminable

hours, I gave it up.  I rose, assumed a catlike stealthiness, to keep

from waking Livy, and proceeded to dress in the pitch dark.  Slowly but

surely I got on garment after garment--all down to one sock; I had one

slipper on and the other in my hand.  Well, on my hands and knees I crept

softly around, pawing and feeling and scooping along the carpet, and

among chair-legs for that missing sock; I kept that up; and still kept it

up and kept it up.  At first I only said to myself, "Blame that sock,"

but that soon ceased to answer; my expletives grew steadily stronger and

stronger,--and at last, when I found I was lost, I had to sit flat down

on the floor and take hold of something to keep from lifting the roof off

with the profane explosion that was trying to get out of me.  I could see

the dim blur of the window, but of course it was in the wrong place and

could give me no information as to where I was.  But I had one comfort

--I had not waked Livy; I believed I could find that sock in silence if

the night lasted long enough.  So I started again and softly pawed all

over the place,--and sure enough at the end of half an hour I laid my

hand on the missing article.  I rose joyfully up and butted the wash-bowl

and pitcher off the stand and simply raised----so to speak.  Livy

screamed, then said, "Who is that? what is the matter?" I said "There

ain't anything the matter--I'm hunting for my sock."  She said, "Are you

hunting for it with a club?"



I went in the parlor and lit the lamp, and gradually the fury subsided

and the ridiculous features of the thing began to suggest themselves.

So I lay on the sofa, with note-book and pencil, and transferred the

adventure to our big room in the hotel at Heilbronn, and got it on paper

a good deal to my satisfaction.



I found the Swiss note-book, some time ago.  When it was first lost I was

glad of it, for I was getting an idea that I had lost my faculty of

writing sketches of travel; therefore the loss of that note-book would

render the writing of this one simply impossible, and let me gracefully

out; I was about to write to Bliss and propose some other book, when the

confounded thing turned up, and down went my heart into my boots.  But

there was now no excuse, so I went solidly to work--tore up a great part

of the MS written in Heidelberg,--wrote and tore up,--continued to write

and tear up,--and at last, reward of patient and noble persistence, my

pen got the old swing again!



Since then I'm glad Providence knew better what to do with the Swiss

note-book than I did, for I like my work, now, exceedingly, and often

turn out over 30 MS pages a day and then quit sorry that Heaven makes the

days so short.



One of my discouragements had been the belief that my interest in this

tour had been so slender that I couldn't gouge matter enough out of it to

make a book.  What a mistake.  I've got 900 pages written (not a word in

it about the sea voyage) yet I stepped my foot out of Heidelberg for the

first time yesterday,--and then only to take our party of four on our

first pedestrian tour--to Heilbronn.  I've got them dressed elaborately

in walking costume--knapsacks, canteens, field-glasses, leather leggings,

patent walking shoes, muslin folds around their hats, with long tails

hanging down behind, sun umbrellas, and Alpenstocks.  They go all the way

to Wimpfen by rail-thence to Heilbronn in a chance vegetable cart drawn

by a donkey and a cow; I shall fetch them home on a raft; and if other

people shall perceive that that was no pedestrian excursion, they

themselves shall not be conscious of it.--This trip will take 100 pages

or more,--oh, goodness knows how many!  for the mood is everything, not

the material, and I already seem to see 300 pages rising before me on

that trip.  Then, I propose to leave Heidelberg for good.  Don't you see,

the book (1800 MS pages,) may really be finished before I ever get to

Switzerland?



But there's one thing; I want to tell Frank Bliss and his father to be

charitable toward me in,--that is, let me tear up all the MS I want to,

and give me time to write more.  I shan't waste the time--I haven't the

slightest desire to loaf, but a consuming desire to work, ever since I

got back my swing.  And you see this book is either going to be compared

with the Innocents Abroad, or contrasted with it, to my disadvantage.

I think I can make a book that will be no dead corpse of a thing and I

mean to do my level best to accomplish that.



My crude plans are crystalizing.  As the thing stands now, I went to

Europe for three purposes.  The first you know, and must keep secret,

even from the Blisses; the second is to study Art; and the third to

acquire a critical knowledge of the German language.  My MS already shows

that the two latter objects are accomplished.  It shows that I am moving

about as an Artist and a Philologist, and unaware that there is any

immodesty in assuming these titles.  Having three definite objects has

had the effect of seeming to enlarge my domain and give me the freedom of

a loose costume.  It is three strings to my bow, too.



Well, your butcher is magnificent.  He won't stay out of my mind.--I keep

trying to think of some way of getting your account of him into my book

without his being offended--and yet confound him there isn't anything you

have said which he would see any offense in,--I'm only thinking of his

friends--they are the parties who busy themselves with seeing things for

people.  But I'm bound to have him in.  I'm putting in the yarn about the

Limburger cheese and the box of guns, too--mighty glad Howells declined

it.  It seems to gather richness and flavor with age.  I have very nearly

killed several companies with that narrative,--the American Artists Club,

here, for instance, and Smith and wife and Miss Griffith (they were here

in this house a week or two.)  I've got other chapters that pretty nearly

destroyed the same parties, too.



O, Switzerland!  the further it recedes into the enriching haze of time,

the more intolerably delicious the charm of it and the cheer of it and

the glory and majesty and solemnity and pathos of it grow.  Those

mountains had a soul; they thought; they spoke,--one couldn't hear it

with the ears of the body, but what a voice it was!--and how real.  Deep

down in my memory it is sounding yet.  Alp calleth unto Alp!--that

stately old Scriptural wording is the right one for God's Alps and God's

ocean.  How puny we were in that awful presence--and how painless it was

to be so; how fitting and right it seemed, and how stingless was the

sense of our unspeakable insignificance.  And Lord how pervading were the

repose and peace and blessedness that poured out of the heart of the

invisible Great Spirit of the Mountains.



Now what is it?  There are mountains and mountains and mountains in this

world--but only these take you by the heart-strings.  I wonder what the

secret of it is.  Well, time and time again it has seemed to me that I

must drop everything and flee to Switzerland once more.  It is a longing

--a deep, strong, tugging longing--that is the word.  We must go again,

Joe.--October days, let us get up at dawn and breakfast at the tower.  I

should like that first rate.



Livy and all of us send deluges of love to you and Harmony and all the

children.  I dreamed last night that I woke up in the library at home and

your children were frolicing around me and Julia was sitting in my lap;

you and Harmony and both families of Warners had finished their welcomes

and were filing out through the conservatory door, wrecking Patrick's

flower pots with their dress skirts as they went.  Peace and plenty abide

with you all!

                                        MARK.



I want the Blisses to know their part of this letter, if possible.  They

will see that my delay was not from choice.





     Following the life of Mark Twain, whether through his letters or

     along the sequence of detailed occurrence, we are never more than a

     little while, or a little distance, from his brother Orion.  In one

     form or another Orion is ever present, his inquiries, his proposals,

     his suggestions, his plans for improving his own fortunes, command

     our attention.  He was one of the most human creatures that ever

     lived; indeed, his humanity excluded every form of artificiality--

     everything that needs to be acquired.  Talented, trusting, child-

     like, carried away by the impulse of the moment, despite a keen

     sense of humor he was never able to see that his latest plan or

     project was not bound to succeed.  Mark Twain loved him, pitied him

     --also enjoyed him, especially with Howells.  Orion's new plan to

     lecture in the interest of religion found its way to Munich, with

     the following result:





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        MUNICH, Feb. 9.  (1879)

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I have just received this letter from Orion--take care

of it, for it is worth preserving.  I got as far as 9 pages in my answer

to it, when Mrs. Clemens shut down on it, and said it was cruel, and made

me send the money and simply wish his lecture success.  I said I couldn't

lose my 9 pages--so she said send them to you.  But I will acknowledge

that I thought I was writing a very kind letter.



Now just look at this letter of Orion's.  Did you ever see the

grotesquely absurd and the heart-breakingly pathetic more closely joined

together?  Mrs. Clemens said "Raise his monthly pension."  So I wrote to

Perkins to raise it a trifle.



Now only think of it!  He still has 100 pages to write on his lecture,

yet in one inking of his pen he has already swooped around the United

States and invested the result!



You must put him in a book or a play right away.  You are the only man

capable of doing it.  You might die at any moment, and your very greatest

work would be lost to the world.  I could write Orion's simple biography,

and make it effective, too, by merely stating the bald facts--and this I

will do if he dies before I do; but you must put him into romance.  This

was the understanding you and I had the day I sailed.



Observe Orion's career--that is, a little of it: (1) He has belonged to

as many as five different religious denominations; last March he withdrew

from the deaconship in a Congregational Church and the Superintendency of

its Sunday School, in a speech in which he said that for many months (it

runs in my mind that he said 13 years,) he had been a confirmed infidel,

and so felt it to be his duty to retire from the flock.



2.  After being a republican for years, he wanted me to buy him a

democratic newspaper.  A few days before the Presidential election, he

came out in a speech and publicly went over to the democrats; he

prudently "hedged" by voting for 6 state republicans, also.



The new convert was made one of the secretaries of the democratic

meeting, and placed in the list of speakers.  He wrote me jubilantly of

what a ten-strike he was going to make with that speech.  All right--but

think of his innocent and pathetic candor in writing me something like

this, a week later:



"I was more diffident than I had expected to be, and this was increased

by the silence with which I was received when I came forward; so I seemed

unable to get the fire into my speech which I had calculated upon, and

presently they began to get up and go out; and in a few minutes they all

rose up and went away."



How could a man uncover such a sore as that and show it to another?  Not

a word of complaint, you see--only a patient, sad surprise.



3.  His next project was to write a burlesque upon Paradise Lost.



4.  Then, learning that the Times was paying Harte $100 a column for

stories, he concluded to write some for the same price.  I read his first

one and persuaded him not to write any more.



5.  Then he read proof on the N. Y. Eve. Post at $10 a week and meekly

observed that the foreman swore at him and ordered him around "like a

steamboat mate."



6.  Being discharged from that post, he wanted to try agriculture--was

sure he could make a fortune out of a chicken farm.  I gave him $900 and

he went to a ten-house village a miles above Keokuk on the river bank--

this place was a railway station.  He soon asked for money to buy a horse

and light wagon,--because the trains did not run at church time on Sunday

and his wife found it rather far to walk.



For a long time I answered demands for "loans" and by next mail always

received his check for the interest due me to date.  In the most

guileless way he let it leak out that he did not underestimate the value

of his custom to me, since it was not likely that any other customer of

mine paid his interest quarterly, and this enabled me to use my capital

twice in 6 months instead of only once.  But alas, when the debt at last

reached $1800 or $2500 (I have forgotten which) the interest ate too

formidably into his borrowings, and so he quietly ceased to pay it or

speak of it.  At the end of two years I found that the chicken farm had

long ago been abandoned, and he had moved into Keokuk.  Later in one of

his casual moments, he observed that there was no money in fattening a

chicken on 65 cents worth of corn and then selling it for 50.



7.  Finally, if I would lend him $500 a year for two years, (this was 4

or 5 years ago,) he knew he could make a success as a lawyer, and would

prove it.  This is the pension which we have just increased to $600.  The

first year his legal business brought him $5.  It also brought him an

unremunerative case where some villains were trying to chouse some negro

orphans out of $700.  He still has this case.  He has waggled it around

through various courts and made some booming speeches on it.  The negro

children have grown up and married off, now, I believe, and their

litigated town-lot has been dug up and carted off by somebody--but Orion

still infests the courts with his documents and makes the welkin ring

with his venerable case.  The second year, he didn't make anything.  The

third he made $6, and I made Bliss put a case in his hands--about half an

hour's work.  Orion charged $50 for it--Bliss paid him $15.  Thus four or

five years of laving has brought him $26, but this will doubtless be

increased when he gets done lecturing and buys that "law library."

Meantime his office rent has been $60 a year, and he has stuck to that

lair day by day as patiently as a spider.



8.  Then he by and by conceived the idea of lecturing around America as

"Mark Twain's Brother"--that to be on the bills.  Subject of proposed

lecture, "On the, Formation of Character."



9.  I protested, and he got on his warpaint, couched his lance, and ran a

bold tilt against total abstinence and the Red Ribbon fanatics.  It

raised a fine row among the virtuous Keokukians.



10.  I wrote to encourage him in his good work, but I had let a mail

intervene; so by the time my letter reached him he was already winning

laurels as a Red Ribbon Howler.



11.  Afterward he took a rabid part in a prayer-meeting epidemic; dropped

that to travesty Jules Verne; dropped that, in the middle of the last

chapter, last March, to digest the matter of an infidel book which he

proposed to write; and now he comes to the surface to rescue our "noble

and beautiful religion" from the sacrilegious talons of Bob Ingersoll.



Now come!  Don't fool away this treasure which Providence has laid at

your feet, but take it up and use it.  One can let his imagination run

riot in portraying Orion, for there is nothing so extravagant as to be

out of character with him.



Well-good-bye, and a short life and a merry one be yours.  Poor old

Methusaleh, how did he manage to stand it so long?

                                        Yrs ever,

                                                  MARK.





                             To Orion Clemens

       (Unsent and inclosed with the foregoing, to W. D. Howells):



                                             MUNICH, Feb. 9, (1879)

MY DEAR BRO.,--Yours has just arrived.  I enclose a draft on Hartford for

$25.  You will have abandoned the project you wanted it for, by the time

it arrives,--but no matter, apply it to your newer and present project,

whatever it is.  You see I have an ineradicable faith in your

unsteadfastness,--but mind you, I didn't invent that faith, you conferred

it on me yourself.  But fire away, fire away!  I don't see why a

changeable man shouldn't get as much enjoyment out of his changes, and

transformations and transfigurations as a steadfast man gets out of

standing still and pegging at the same old monotonous thing all the time.

That is to say, I don't see why a kaleidoscope shouldn't enjoy itself as

much as a telescope, nor a grindstone have as good a time as a whetstone,

nor a barometer as good a time as a yardstick.  I don't feel like girding

at you any more about fickleness of purpose, because I recognize and

realize at last that it is incurable; but before I learned to accept this

truth, each new weekly project of yours possessed the power of throwing

me into the most exhausting and helpless convulsions of profanity.  But

fire away, now!  Your magic has lost its might.  I am able to view your

inspirations dispassionately and judicially, now, and say "This one or

that one or the other one is not up to your average flight, or is above

it, or below it."



And so, without passion, or prejudice, or bias of any kind, I sit in

judgment upon your lecture project, and say it was up to your average,

it was indeed above it, for it had possibilities in it, and even

practical ones.  While I was not sorry you abandoned it, I should not be

sorry if you had stuck to it and given it a trial.  But on the whole you

did the wise thing to lay it aside, I think, because a lecture is a most

easy thing to fail in; and at your time of life, and in your own town,

such a failure would make a deep and cruel wound in your heart and in

your pride.  It was decidedly unwise in you to think for a moment of

coming before a community who knew you, with such a course of lectures;

because Keokuk is not unaware that you have been a Swedenborgian, a

Presbyterian, a Congregationalist, and a Methodist (on probation), and

that just a year ago you were an infidel.  If Keokuk had gone to your

lecture course, it would have gone to be amused, not instructed, for when

a man is known to have no settled convictions of his own he can't

convince other people.  They would have gone to be amused and that would

have been a deep humiliation to you.  It could have been safe for you to

appear only where you were unknown--then many of your hearers would think

you were in earnest.  And they would be right.  You are in earnest while

your convictions are new.  But taking it by and large, you probably did

best to discard that project altogether.  But I leave you to judge of

that, for you are the worst judge I know of.



(Unfinished.)





     That Mark Twain in many ways was hardly less child-like than his

     brother is now and again revealed in his letters.  He was of

     steadfast purpose, and he possessed the driving power which Orion

     Clemens lacked; but the importance to him of some of the smaller

     matters of life, as shown in a letter like the following, bespeaks a

     certain simplicity of nature which he never outgrew:





                  To Rev. J.  H.  Twichell, in Hartford:



                                             MUNICH, Feb. 24. (1879)

DEAR OLD JOE,--It was a mighty good letter, Joe--and that idea of yours

is a rattling good one.  But I have not sot down here to answer your

letter,--for it is down at my study,--but only to impart some

information.



For a months I had not shaved without crying.  I'd spend 3/4 of an hour

whetting away on my hand--no use, couldn't get an edge.  Tried a razor

strop-same result.  So I sat down and put in an hour thinking out the

mystery.  Then it seemed plain--to wit: my hand can't give a razor an

edge, it can only smooth and refine an edge that has already been given.

I judge that a razor fresh from the hone is this shape V--the long point

being the continuation of the edge--and that after much use the shape is

this V--the attenuated edge all worn off and gone.  By George I knew that

was the explanation.  And I knew that a freshly honed and freshly

strapped razor won't cut, but after strapping on the hand as a final

operation, it will cut.--So I sent out for an oil-stone; none to be had,

but messenger brought back a little piece of rock the size of a Safety-

match box--(it was bought in a shoemaker's shop) bad flaw in middle of

it, too, but I put 4 drops of fine Olive oil on it, picked out the razor

marked "Thursday" because it was never any account and would be no loss

if I spoiled it--gave it a brisk and reckless honing for 10 minutes, then

tried it on a hair--it wouldn't cut.  Then I trotted it through a

vigorous 20-minute course on a razor-strap and tried it on a hair-it

wouldn't cut--tried it on my face--it made me cry--gave it a 5-minute

stropping on my hand, and my land, what an edge she had!  We thought we

knew what sharp razors were when we were tramping in Switzerland, but it

was a mistake--they were dull beside this old Thursday razor of mine--

which I mean to name Thursday October Christian, in gratitude.  I took my

whetstone, and in 20 minutes I put two more of my razors in splendid

condition--but I leave them in the box--I never use any but Thursday O.

C., and shan't till its edge is gone--and then I'll know how to restore

it without any delay.



We all go to Paris next Thursday--address, Monroe & Co., Bankers.

                                   With love

                                             Ys Ever

                                                       MARK.





     In Paris they found pleasant quarters at the Hotel Normandy, but it

     was a chilly, rainy spring, and the travelers gained a rather poor

     impression of the French capital.  Mark Twain's work did not go

     well, at first, because of the noises of the street.  But then he

     found a quieter corner in the hotel and made better progress.  In a

     brief note to Aldrich he said: "I sleep like a lamb and write like a

     lion--I mean the kind of a lion that writes--if any such."  He

     expected to finish the book in six weeks; that is to say, before

     returning to America.  He was looking after its illustrations

     himself, and a letter to Frank Bliss, of The American Publishing

     Company, refers to the frontpiece, which, from time to time, has

     caused question as to its origin.  To Bliss he says: "It is a thing

     which I manufactured by pasting a popular comic picture into the

     middle of a celebrated Biblical one--shall attribute it to Titian.

     It needs to be engraved by a master."



     The weather continued bad in France and they left there in July to

     find it little better in England.  They had planned a journey to

     Scotland to visit Doctor Brown, whose health was not very good.  In

     after years Mark Twain blamed himself harshly for not making the

     trip, which he declared would have meant so much to Mrs. Clemens.

     He had forgotten by that time the real reasons for not going--the

     continued storms and uncertainty of trains (which made it barely

     possible for them to reach Liverpool in time for their sailing-

     date), and with characteristic self-reproach vowed that only

     perversity and obstinacy on his part had prevented the journey to

     Scotland.  From Liverpool, on the eve of sailing, he sent Doctor

     Brown a good-by word.





                     To Dr. John Brown, in Edinburgh:



                              WASHINGTON HOTEL, LIME STREET, LIVERPOOL.

                                                       Aug.  (1879)

MY DEAR MR. BROWN,--During all the 15 months we have been spending on the

continent, we have been promising ourselves a sight of you as our latest

and most prized delight in a foreign land--but our hope has failed, our

plan has miscarried.  One obstruction after another intruded itself, and

our short sojourn of three or four weeks on English soil was thus

frittered gradually away, and we were at last obliged to give up the idea

of seeing you at all.  It is a great disappointment, for we wanted to

show you how much "Megalopis" has grown (she is 7 now) and what a fine

creature her sister is, and how prettily they both speak German.  There

are six persons in my party, and they are as difficult to cart around as

nearly any other menagerie would be.  My wife and Miss Spaulding are

along, and you may imagine how they take to heart this failure of our

long promised Edinburgh trip.  We never even wrote you, because we were

always so sure, from day to day, that our affairs would finally so shape

themselves as to let us get to Scotland.  But no,--everything went wrong

we had only flying trips here and there in place of the leisurely ones

which we had planned.



We arrived in Liverpool an hour ago very tired, and have halted at this

hotel (by the advice of misguided friends)--and if my instinct and

experience are worth anything, it is the very worst hotel on earth,

without any exception.  We shall move to another hotel early in the

morning to spend to-morrow.  We sail for America next day in the

"Gallic."



We all join in the sincerest love to you, and in the kindest remembrance

to "Jock"--[Son of Doctor Brown.]--and your sister.

                              Truly yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     It was September 3, 1879, that Mark Twain returned to America by the

     steamer Gallic.  In the seventeen months of his absence he had taken

     on a "traveled look" and had added gray hairs.  A New York paper

     said of his arrival that he looked older than when he went to

     Germany, and that his hair had turned quite gray.



     Mark Twain had not finished his book of travel in Paris--in fact,

     it seemed to him far from complete--and he settled down rather

     grimly to work on it at Quarry Farm.  When, after a few days no word

     of greeting came from Howells, Clemens wrote to ask if he were dead

     or only sleeping.  Howells hastily sent a line to say that he had

     been sleeping "The sleep of a torpid conscience.  I will feign that

     I did not know where to write you; but I love you and all of yours,

     and I am tremendously glad that you are home again.  When and where

     shall we meet?  Have you come home with your pockets full of

     Atlantic papers?"  Clemens, toiling away at his book, was, as usual,

     not without the prospect of other plans.  Orion, as literary

     material, never failed to excite him.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             ELMIRA, Sept. 15, 1879.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--When and where?  Here on the farm would be an elegant

place to meet, but of course you cannot come so far.  So we will say

Hartford or Belmont, about the beginning of November.  The date of our

return to Hartford is uncertain, but will be three or four weeks hence,

I judge.  I hope to finish my book here before migrating.



I think maybe I've got some Atlantic stuff in my head, but there's none

in MS, I believe.



Say--a friend of mine wants to write a play with me, I to furnish the

broad-comedy cuss.  I don't know anything about his ability, but his

letter serves to remind me of our old projects.  If you haven't used

Orion or Old Wakeman, don't you think you and I can get together and

grind out a play with one of those fellows in it?  Orion is a field which

grows richer and richer the more he mulches it with each new top-dressing

of religion or other guano.  Drop me an immediate line about this, won't

you?  I imagine I see Orion on the stage, always gentle, always

melancholy, always changing his politics and religion, and trying to

reform the world, always inventing something, and losing a limb by a new

kind of explosion at the end of each of the four acts.  Poor old chap,

he is good material.  I can imagine his wife or his sweetheart

reluctantly adopting each of his new religious in turn, just in time to

see him waltz into the next one and leave her isolated once more.



(Mem.  Orion's wife has followed him into the outer darkness, after 30

years' rabid membership in the Presbyterian Church.)



Well, with the sincerest and most abounding love to you and yours, from

all this family, I am,

                         Yrs ever

                                   MARK.





     The idea of the play interested Howells, but he had twinges of

     conscience in the matter of using Orion as material.  He wrote:

     "More than once I have taken the skeleton of that comedy of ours and

     viewed it with tears..... I really have a compunction or two about

     helping to put your brother into drama.  You can say that he is your

     brother, to do what you like with him, but the alien hand might

     inflict an incurable hurt on his tender heart."



     As a matter of fact, Orion Clemens had a keen appreciation of his

     own shortcomings, and would have enjoyed himself in a play as much

     as any observer of it.  Indeed, it is more than likely that he would

     have been pleased at the thought of such distinguished

     dramatization.  From the next letter one might almost conclude that

     he had received a hint of this plan, and was bent upon supplying

     rich material.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                                  ELMIRA, Oct. 9 '79.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Since my return, the mail facilities have enabled Orion

to keep me informed as to his intentions.  Twenty-eight days ago it was

his purpose to complete a work aimed at religion, the preface to which he

had already written.  Afterward he began to sell off his furniture, with

the idea of hurrying to Leadville and tackling silver-mining--threw up

his law den and took in his sign.  Then he wrote to Chicago and St. Louis

newspapers asking for a situation as "paragrapher"--enclosing a taste of

his quality in the shape of two stanzas of "humorous rhymes."  By a later

mail on the same day he applied to New York and Hartford insurance

companies for copying to do.



However, it would take too long to detail all his projects.  They

comprise a removal to south-west Missouri; application for a reporter's

berth on a Keokuk paper; application for a compositor's berth on a St.

Louis paper; a re-hanging of his attorney's sign, "though it only creaks

and catches no flies;" but last night's letter informs me that he has

retackled the religious question, hired a distant den to write in,

applied to my mother for $50 to re-buy his furniture, which has advanced

in value since the sale--purposes buying $25 worth of books necessary to

his labors which he had previously been borrowing, and his first chapter

is already on its way to me for my decision as to whether it has enough

ungodliness in it or not.  Poor Orion!



Your letter struck me while I was meditating a project to beguile you,

and John Hay and Joe Twichell, into a descent upon Chicago which I dream

of making, to witness the re-union of the great Commanders of the Western

Army Corps on the 9th of next month.  My sluggish soul needs a fierce

upstirring, and if it would not get it when Grant enters the meeting

place I must doubtless "lay" for the final resurrection.  Can you and Hay

go?  At the same time, confound it, I doubt if I can go myself, for this

book isn't done yet.  But I would give a heap to be there.  I mean to

heave some holiness into the Hartford primaries when I go back; and if

there was a solitary office in the land which majestic ignorance and

incapacity, coupled with purity of heart, could fill, I would run for it.

This naturally reminds me of Bret Harte--but let him pass.



We propose to leave here for New York Oct. 21, reaching Hartford 24th or

25th.  If, upon reflection, you Howellses find, you can stop over here on

your way, I wish you would do it, and telegraph me.  Getting pretty

hungry to see you.  I had an idea that this was your shortest way home,

but like as not my geography is crippled again--it usually is.

                                             Yrs ever

                                                       MARK.





     The "Reunion of the Great Commanders," mentioned in the foregoing,

     was a welcome to General Grant after his journey around the world.

     Grant's trip had been one continuous ovation--a triumphal march.

     In '79 most of his old commanders were still alive, and they had

     planned to assemble in Chicago to do him honor.  A Presidential year

     was coming on, but if there was anything political in the project

     there were no surface indications.  Mark Twain, once a Confederate

     soldier, had long since been completely "desouthernized"--at least

     to the point where he felt that the sight of old comrades paying

     tribute to the Union commander would stir his blood as perhaps it

     had not been stirred, even in that earlier time, when that same

     commander had chased him through the Missouri swamps.  Grant,

     indeed, had long since become a hero to Mark Twain, though it is

     highly unlikely that Clemens favored the idea of a third term.  Some

     days following the preceding letter an invitation came for him to be

     present at the Chicago reunion; but by this time he had decided not

     to go.  The letter he wrote has been preserved.





                 To Gen. William E.  Strong, in Chicago:



                                   FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD.

                                   Oct. 28, 1879.

GEN. WM. E. STRONG, CH'M,

     AND GENTLEMEN OF THE COMMITTEE:



I have been hoping during several weeks that it might be my good fortune

to receive an invitation to be present on that great occasion in Chicago;

but now that my desire is accomplished my business matters have so shaped

themselves as to bar me from being so far from home in the first half of

November.  It is with supreme regret that I lost this chance, for I have

not had a thorough stirring up for some years, and I judged that if I

could be in the banqueting hall and see and hear the veterans of the Army

of the Tennessee at the moment that their old commander entered the room,

or rose in his place to speak, my system would get the kind of upheaval

it needs.  General Grant's progress across the continent is of the

marvelous nature of the returning Napoleon's progress from Grenoble to

Paris; and as the crowning spectacle in the one case was the meeting with

the Old Guard, so, likewise, the crowning spectacle in the other will be

our great captain's meeting with his Old Guard--and that is the very

climax which I wanted to witness.



Besides, I wanted to see the General again, any way, and renew the

acquaintance.  He would remember me, because I was the person who did not

ask him for an office.  However, I consume your time, and also wander

from the point--which is, to thank you for the courtesy of your

invitation, and yield up my seat at the table to some other guest who may

possibly grace it better, but will certainly not appreciate its

privileges more, than I should.

                              With great respect,

                                   I am, Gentlemen,

                              Very truly yours,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.



Private:--I beg to apologize for my delay, gentlemen, but the card of

invitation went to Elmira, N. Y. and hence has only just now reached me.





     This letter was not sent.  He reconsidered and sent an acceptance,

     agreeing to speak, as the committee had requested.  Certainly there

     was something picturesque in the idea of the Missouri private who

     had been chased for a rainy fortnight through the swamps of Ralls

     County being selected now to join in welcome to his ancient enemy.



     The great reunion was to be something more than a mere banquet.  It

     would continue for several days, with processions, great

     assemblages, and much oratory.



     Mark Twain arrived in Chicago in good season to see it all.  Three

     letters to Mrs. Clemens intimately present his experiences: his

     enthusiastic enjoyment and his own personal triumph.



     The first was probably written after the morning of his arrival.

     The Doctor Jackson in it was Dr. A. Reeves Jackson, the guide-

     dismaying "Doctor" of Innocents Abroad.





                      To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford:



                                   PALMER HOUSE, CHICAGO, Nov. 11.

Livy darling, I am getting a trifle leg-weary.  Dr. Jackson called and

dragged me out of bed at noon, yesterday, and then went off.  I went down

stairs and was introduced to some scores of people, and among them an

elderly German gentleman named Raster, who said his wife owed her life to

me--hurt in Chicago fire and lay menaced with death a long time, but the

Innocents Abroad kept her mind in a cheerful attitude, and so, with the

doctor's help for the body she pulled through....  They drove me to Dr.

Jackson's and I had an hour's visit with Mrs. Jackson.  Started to walk

down Michigan Avenue, got a few steps on my way and met an erect,

soldierly looking young gentleman who offered his hand; said, "Mr.

Clemens, I believe--I wish to introduce myself--you were pointed out to

me yesterday as I was driving down street--my name is Grant."



"Col. Fred Grant?"



"Yes.  My house is not ten steps away, and I would like you to come and

have a talk and a pipe, and let me introduce my wife."



So we turned back and entered the house next to Jackson's and talked

something more than an hour and smoked many pipes and had a sociable good

time.  His wife is very gentle and intelligent and pretty, and they have

a cunning little girl nearly as big as Bay but only three years old.

They wanted me to come in and spend an evening, after the banquet, with

them and Gen. Grant, after this grand pow-wow is over, but I said I was

going home Friday.  Then they asked me to come Friday afternoon, when

they and the general will receive a few friends, and I said I would.

Col. Grant said he and Gen. Sherman used the Innocents Abroad as their

guide book when they were on their travels.



I stepped in next door and took Dr. Jackson to the hotel and we played

billiards from 7 to 11.30 P.M.  and then went to a beer-mill to meet some

twenty Chicago journalists--talked, sang songs and made speeches till 6

o'clock this morning.  Nobody got in the least degree "under the

influence," and we had a pleasant time.  Read awhile in bed, slept till

11, shaved, went to breakfast at noon, and by mistake got into the

servants' hall.  I remained there and breakfasted with twenty or thirty

male and female servants, though I had a table to myself.



A temporary structure, clothed and canopied with flags, has been erected

at the hotel front, and connected with the second-story windows of a

drawing-room.  It was for Gen. Grant to stand on and review the

procession.  Sixteen persons, besides reporters, had tickets for this

place, and a seventeenth was issued for me.  I was there, looking down on

the packed and struggling crowd when Gen. Grant came forward and was

saluted by the cheers of the multitude and the waving of ladies'

handkerchiefs--for the windows and roofs of all neighboring buildings

were massed full of life.  Gen. Grant bowed to the people two or three

times, then approached my side of the platform and the mayor pulled me

forward and introduced me.  It was dreadfully conspicuous.  The General

said a word or so--I replied, and then said, "But I'll step back,

General, I don't want to interrupt your speech."



"But I'm not going to make any--stay where you are--I'll get you to make

it for me."



General Sherman came on the platform wearing the uniform of a full

General, and you should have heard the cheers.  Gen. Logan was going to

introduce me, but I didn't want any more conspicuousness.



When the head of the procession passed it was grand to see Sheridan, in

his military cloak and his plumed chapeau, sitting as erect and rigid as

a statue on his immense black horse--by far the most martial figure I

ever saw.  And the crowd roared again.



It was chilly, and Gen. Deems lent me his overcoat until night.  He came

a few minutes ago--5.45 P.M., and got it, but brought Gen. Willard, who

lent me his for the rest of my stay, and will get another for himself

when he goes home to dinner.  Mine is much too heavy for this warm

weather.



I have a seat on the stage at Haverley's Theatre, tonight, where the Army

of the Tennessee will receive Gen. Grant, and where Gen. Sherman will

make a speech.  At midnight I am to attend a meeting of the Owl Club.



I love you ever so much, my darling, and am hoping to

get a word from you yet.

                                   SAML.





     Following the procession, which he describes, came the grand

     ceremonies of welcome at Haverley's Theatre.  The next letter is

     written the following morning, or at least soiree time the following

     day, after a night of ratification.





                      To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford:



                                        CHICAGO, Nov. 12, '79.

Livy darling, it was a great time.  There were perhaps thirty people on

the stage of the theatre, and I think I never sat elbow-to-elbow with so

many historic names before.  Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Schofield, Pope,

Logan, Augur, and so on.  What an iron man Grant is!  He sat facing the

house, with his right leg crossed over his left and his right boot-sole

tilted up at an angle, and his left hand and arm reposing on the arm of

his chair--you note that position?  Well, when glowing references were

made to other grandees on the stage, those grandees always showed a

trifle of nervous consciousness--and as these references came frequently,

the nervous change of position and attitude were also frequent.  But

Grant!--he was under a tremendous and ceaseless bombardment of praise and

gratulation, but as true as I'm sitting here he never moved a muscle of

his body for a single instant, during 30 minutes!  You could have played

him on a stranger for an effigy.  Perhaps he never would have moved, but

at last a speaker made such a particularly ripping and blood-stirring

remark about him that the audience rose and roared and yelled and stamped

and clapped an entire minute--Grant sitting as serene as ever--when Gen.

Sherman stepped to him, laid his hand affectionately on his shoulder,

bent respectfully down and whispered in his ear.  Gen. Grant got up and

bowed, and the storm of applause swelled into a hurricane.  He sat down,

took about the same position and froze to it till by and by there was

another of those deafening and protracted roars, when Sherman made him

get up and bow again.  He broke up his attitude once more--the extent of

something more than a hair's breadth--to indicate me to Sherman when the

house was keeping up a determined and persistent call for me, and poor

bewildered Sherman, (who did not know me), was peering abroad over the

packed audience for me, not knowing I was only three feet from him and

most conspicuously located, (Gen. Sherman was Chairman.)



One of the most illustrious individuals on that stage was "Ole Abe," the

historic war eagle.  He stood on his perch--the old savage-eyed rascal--

three or four feet behind Gen. Sherman, and as he had been in nearly

every battle that was mentioned by the orators his soul was probably

stirred pretty often, though he was too proud to let on.



Read Logan's bosh, and try to imagine a burly and magnificent Indian, in

General's uniform, striking a heroic attitude and getting that stuff off

in the style of a declaiming school-boy.



Please put the enclosed scraps in the drawer and I will scrap-book them.



I only staid at the Owl Club till 3 this morning and drank little or

nothing.  Went to sleep without whisky.  Ich liebe dish.



                                             SAML.





     But it is in the third letter that we get the climax.  On the same

     day he wrote a letter to Howells, which, in part, is very similar in

     substance and need not be included here.



     A paragraph, however, must not be omitted.



     "Imagine what it was like to see a bullet-shredded old battle-flag

     reverently unfolded to the gaze of a thousand middle-aged soldiers,

     most of whom hadn't seen it since they saw it advancing over

     victorious fields, when they were in their prime.  And imagine what

     it was like when Grant, their first commander, stepped into view

     while they were still going mad over the flag, and then right in the

     midst of it all somebody struck up, 'When we were marching through

     Georgia.'  Well, you should have heard the thousand voices lift that

     chorus and seen the tears stream down.  If I live a hundred years I

     shan't ever forget these things, nor be able to talk about them ....

     Grand times, my boy, grand times!"



     At the great banquet Mark Twain's speech had been put last on the

     program, to hold the house.  He had been invited to respond to the

     toast of "The Ladies," but had replied that he had already responded

     to that toast more than once.  There was one class of the community,

     he said, commonly overlooked on these occasions--the babies--he

     would respond to that toast.  In his letter to Howells he had not

     been willing to speak freely of his personal triumph, but to Mrs.

     Clemens he must tell it all, and with that child-like ingenuousness

     which never failed him to his last day.





                      To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford:



                                             CHICAGO, Nov. 14 '79.

A little after 5 in the morning.



I've just come to my room, Livy darling, I guess this was the memorable

night of my life.  By George, I never was so stirred since I was born.

I heard four speeches which I can never forget.  One by Emory Storrs, one

by Gen. Vilas (O, wasn't it wonderful!) one by Gen. Logan (mighty

stirring), one by somebody whose name escapes me, and one by that

splendid old soul, Col. Bob Ingersoll,--oh, it was just the supremest

combination of English words that was ever put together since the world

began.  My soul, how handsome he looked, as he stood on that table, in

the midst of those 500 shouting men, and poured the molten silver from

his lips!  Lord, what an organ is human speech when it is played by a

master!  All these speeches may look dull in print, but how the lightning

glared around them when they were uttered, and how the crowd roared in

response!  It was a great night, a memorable night.  I am so richly

repaid for my journey--and how I did wish with all my whole heart that

you were there to be lifted into the very seventh heaven of enthusiasm,

as I was.  The army songs, the military music, the crashing applause--

Lord bless me, it was unspeakable.



Out of compliment they placed me last in the list--No. 15--I was to "hold

the crowd"--and bless my life I was in awful terror when No. 14. rose,

at a o'clock this morning and killed all the enthusiasm by delivering the

flattest, insipidest, silliest of all responses to "Woman" that ever a

weary multitude listened to.  Then Gen. Sherman (Chairman) announced my

toast, and the crowd gave me a good round of applause as I mounted on top

of the dinner table, but it was only on account of my name, nothing more

--they were all tired and wretched.  They let my first sentence go in.

silence, till I paused and added "we stand on common ground"--then they

burst forth like a hurricane and I saw that I had them!  From that time

on, I stopped at the end of each sentence, and let the tornado of

applause and laughter sweep around me--and when I closed with "And if the

child is but the prophecy of the man, there are mighty few who will doubt

that he succeeded," I say it who oughtn't to say it, the house came down

with a crash.  For two hours and a half, now, I've been shaking hands and

listening to congratulations.  Gen. Sherman said, "Lord bless you, my

boy, I don't know how you do it--it's a secret that's beyond me--but it

was great--give me your hand again."



And do you know, Gen. Grant sat through fourteen speeches like a graven

image, but I fetched him!  I broke him up, utterly!  He told me he

laughed till the tears came and every bone in his body ached.  (And do

you know, the biggest part of the success of the speech lay in the fact

that the audience saw that for once in his life he had been knocked out

of his iron serenity.)



Bless your soul, 'twas immense.  I never was so proud in my life.  Lots

and lots of people--hundreds I might say--told me my speech was the

triumph of the evening--which was a lie.  Ladies, Tom, Dick and Harry-

even the policemen--captured me in the halls and shook hands, and scores

of army officers said "We shall always be grateful to you for coming."

General Pope came to bunt me up--I was afraid to speak to him on that

theatre stage last night, thinking it might be presumptuous to tackle a

man so high up in military history.  Gen. Schofield, and other historic

men, paid their compliments.  Sheridan was ill and could not come, but

I'm to go with a General of his staff and see him before I go to Col.

Grant's.  Gen. Augur--well, I've talked with them all, received

invitations from them all--from people living everywhere--and as I said

before, it's a memorable night.  I wouldn't have missed it for anything

in the world.



But my sakes, you should have heard Ingersoll's speech on that table!

Half an hour ago he ran across me in the crowded halls and put his arms

about me and said "Mark, if I live a hundred years, I'll always be

grateful for your speech--Lord what a supreme thing it was."  But I told

him it wasn't any use to talk, he had walked off with the honors of that

occasion by something of a majority.  Bully boy is Ingersoll--traveled

with him in the cars the other day, and you can make up your mind we had

a good time.



Of course I forgot to go and pay for my hotel car and so secure it, but

the army officers told me an hour ago to rest easy, they would go at

once, at this unholy hour of the night and compel the railways to do

their duty by me, and said "You don't need to request the Army of the

Tennessee to do your desires--you can command its services."



Well, I bummed around that banquet hall from 8 in the evening till 2 in

the morning, talking with people and listening to speeches, and I never

ate a single bite or took a sup of anything but ice water, so if I seem

excited now, it is the intoxication of supreme enthusiasm.  By George, it

was a grand night, a historical night.



And now it is a quarter past 6 A.M.--so good bye and God bless you and

the Bays,--[Family word for babies]--my darlings



                                                  SAML.





Show it to Joe if you want to--I saw some of his friends here.



Mark Twain's admiration for Robert Ingersoll was very great, and we may

believe that he was deeply impressed by the Chicago speech, when we find

him, a few days later, writing to Ingersoll for a perfect copy to read to

a young girls' club in Hartford.  Ingersoll sent the speech, also some of

his books, and the next letter is Mark Twain's acknowledgment.





                      To Col. Robert G.  Ingersoll:



                                             HARTFORD, Dec. 14.

MY DEAR INGERSOLL,--Thank you most heartily for the books--I am devouring

them--they have found a hungry place, and they content it and satisfy it

to a miracle.  I wish I could hear you speak these splendid chapters

before a great audience--to read them by myself and hear the boom of the

applause only in the ear of my imagination, leaves a something wanting--

and there is also a still greater lack, your manner, and voice, and

presence.



The Chicago speech arrived an hour too late, but I was all right anyway,

for I found that my memory had been able to correct all the errors.

I read it to the Saturday Club (of young girls) and told them to remember

that it was doubtful if its superior existed in our language.

                              Truly Yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     The reader may remember Mark Twain's Whittier dinner speech of 1877,

     and its disastrous effects.  Now, in 1879, there was to be another

     Atlantic gathering: a breakfast to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, to

     which Clemens was invited.  He was not eager to accept; it would

     naturally recall memories of two years before, but being urged by

     both Howells and Warner, he agreed to attend if they would permit

     him to speak.  Mark Twain never lacked courage and he wanted to

     redeem himself.  To Howells he wrote:





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             HARTFORD, Nov. 28, 1879.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--If anybody talks, there, I shall claim the right to say

a word myself, and be heard among the very earliest--else it would be

confoundedly awkward for me--and for the rest, too.  But you may read

what I say, beforehand, and strike out whatever you choose.



Of course I thought it wisest not to be there at all; but Warner took the

opposite view, and most strenuously.



Speaking of Johnny's conclusion to become an outlaw, reminds me of

Susie's newest and very earnest longing--to have crooked teeth and

glasses--"like Mamma."



I would like to look into a child's head, once, and see what its

processes are.

                    Yrs ever,

                         S. L. CLEMENS.





     The matter turned out well.  Clemens, once more introduced by

     Howells--this time conservatively, it may be said--delivered a

     delicate and fitting tribute to Doctor Holmes, full of graceful

     humor and grateful acknowledgment, the kind of speech he should have

     given at the Whittier dinner of two years before.  No reference was

     made to his former disaster, and this time he came away covered with

     glory, and fully restored in his self-respect.









XX.



LETTERS OF 1880, CHIEFLY TO HOWELLS.  "THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER."  MARK

TWAIN MUGWUMP SOCIETY



The book of travel,--[A Tramp Abroad.]--which Mark Twain had hoped to

finish in Paris, and later in Elmira, for some reason would not come to

an end.  In December, in Hartford, he was still working on it, and he

would seem to have finished it, at last, rather by a decree than by any

natural process of authorship.  This was early in January, 1880.  To

Howells he reports his difficulties, and his drastic method of ending

them.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        HARTFORD, Jan. 8, '80.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Am waiting for Patrick to come with the carriage.

Mrs. Clemens and I are starting (without the children) to stay

indefinitely in Elmira.  The wear and tear of settling the house broke

her down, and she has been growing weaker and weaker for a fortnight.

All that time--in fact ever since I saw you--I have been fighting a life-

and-death battle with this infernal book and hoping to get done some day.

I required 300 pages of MS, and I have written near 600 since I saw you--

and tore it all up except 288.  This I was about to tear up yesterday and

begin again, when Mrs. Perkins came up to the billiard room and said,

"You will never get any woman to do the thing necessary to save her life

by mere persuasion; you see you have wasted your words for three weeks;

it is time to use force; she must have a change; take her home and leave

the children here."



I said, "If there is one death that is painfuller than another, may I get

it if I don't do that thing."



So I took the 288 pages to Bliss and told him that was the very last line

I should ever write on this book.  (A book which required 2600 pages of

MS, and I have written nearer four thousand, first and last.)



I am as soary (and flighty) as a rocket, to-day, with the unutterable joy

of getting that Old Man of the Sea off my back, where he has been

roosting for more than a year and a half.  Next time I make a contract

before writing the book, may I suffer the righteous penalty and be burnt,

like the injudicious believer.



I am mighty glad you are done your book (this is from a man who, above

all others, feels how much that sentence means) and am also mighty glad

you have begun the next (this is also from a man who knows the felicity

of that, and means straightway to enjoy it.) The Undiscovered starts off

delightfully--I have read it aloud to Mrs. C. and we vastly enjoyed it.



Well, time's about up--must drop a line to Aldrich.

                                             Yrs ever,

                                                       MARK.





     In a letter which Mark Twain wrote to his brother Orion at this

     period we get the first hint of a venture which was to play an

     increasingly important part in the Hartford home and fortunes during

     the next ten or a dozen years.  This was the type-setting machine

     investment, which, in the end, all but wrecked Mark Twain's

     finances.  There is but a brief mention of it in the letter to

     Orion, and the letter itself is not worth preserving, but as

     references to the "machine" appear with increasing frequency, it

     seems proper to record here its first mention.  In the same letter

     he suggests to his brother that he undertake an absolutely truthful

     autobiography, a confession in which nothing is to be withheld.  He

     cites the value of Casanova's memories, and the confessions of

     Rousseau.  Of course, any literary suggestion from "Brother Sam" was

     gospel to Orion, who began at once piling up manuscript at a great

     rate.



     Meantime, Mark Twain himself, having got 'A Tramp Abroad' on the

     presses, was at work with enthusiasm on a story begun nearly three

     years before at Quarry Farm-a story for children-its name, as he

     called.  it then, "The Little Prince and The Little Pauper."  He was

     presently writing to Howells his delight in the new work.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        HARTFORD, Mch. 11, '80.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--.....I take so much pleasure in my story that I am loth

to hurry, not wanting to get it done.  Did I ever tell you the plot of

it?  It begins at 9 a.m., Jan. 27, 1547, seventeen and a half hours

before Henry VIII's death, by the swapping of clothes and place, between

the prince of Wales and a pauper boy of the same age and countenance (and

half as much learning and still more genius and imagination) and after

that, the rightful small King has a rough time among tramps and ruffians

in the country parts of Kent, whilst the small bogus King has a gilded

and worshipped and dreary and restrained and cussed time of it on the

throne--and this all goes on for three weeks--till the midst of the

coronation grandeurs in Westminster Abbey, Feb. 20, when the ragged true

King forces his way in but cannot prove his genuineness--until the bogus

King, by a remembered incident of the first day is able to prove it for

him--whereupon clothes are changed and the coronation proceeds under the

new and rightful conditions.



My idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of the

laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the King

himself and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them applied to

others--all of which is to account for certain mildnesses which

distinguished Edward VI's reign from those that preceded and followed it.



Imagine this fact--I have even fascinated Mrs. Clemens with this yarn for

youth.  My stuff generally gets considerable damning with faint praise

out of her, but this time it is all the other way.  She is become the

horseleech's daughter and my mill doesn't grind fast enough to suit her.

This is no mean triumph, my dear sir.



Last night, for the first time in ages, we went to the theatre--to see

Yorick's Love.  The magnificence of it is beyond praise.  The language is

so beautiful, the passion so fine, the plot so ingenious, the whole thing

so stirring, so charming, so pathetic!  But I will clip from the Courant

--it says it right.



And what a good company it is, and how like live people they all acted!

The "thee's" and the "thou's" had a pleasant sound, since it is the

language of the Prince and the Pauper.  You've done the country a service

in that admirable work....

                              Yrs Ever,

                                        MARK.





     The play, "Yorick's Love," mentioned in this letter, was one which

     Howells had done for Lawrence Barrett.



     Orion Clemens, meantime, was forwarding his manuscript, and for once

     seems to have won his brother's approval, so much so that Mark Twain

     was willing, indeed anxious, that Howells should run the

     "autobiography" in the Atlantic.  We may imagine how Orion prized

     the words of commendation which follow:





                            To Orion Clemens:



                                                       May 6, '80.

MY DEAR BROTHER,--It is a model autobiography.



Continue to develop your character in the same gradual inconspicuous and

apparently unconscious way.  The reader, up to this time, may have his

doubts, perhaps, but he can't say decidedly, "This writer is not such a

simpleton as he has been letting on to be."  Keep him in that state of

mind.  If, when you shall have finished, the reader shall say, "The man

is an ass, but I really don't know whether he knows it or not," your work

will be a triumph.



Stop re-writing.  I saw places in your last batch where re-writing had

done formidable injury.  Do not try to find those places, else you will

mar them further by trying to better them.  It is perilous to revise a

book while it is under way.  All of us have injured our books in that

foolish way.



Keep in mind what I told you--when you recollect something which belonged

in an earlier chapter, do not go back, but jam it in where you are.

Discursiveness does not hurt an autobiography in the least.



I have penciled the MS here and there, but have not needed to make any

criticisms or to knock out anything.



The elder Bliss has heart disease badly, and thenceforth his life hangs

upon a thread.

                              Yr Bro

                                        SAM.





     But Howells could not bring himself to print so frank a confession

     as Orion had been willing to make.  "It wrung my heart," he said,

     "and I felt haggard after I had finished it.  The writer's soul is

     laid bare; it is shocking."  Howells added that the best touches in

     it were those which made one acquainted with the writer's brother;

     that is to say, Mark Twain, and that these would prove valuable

     material hereafter--a true prophecy, for Mark Twain's early

     biography would have lacked most of its vital incident, and at least

     half of its background, without those faithful chapters, fortunately

     preserved.  Had Orion continued, as he began, the work might have

     proved an important contribution to literature, but he went trailing

     off into by-paths of theology and discussion where the interest was

     lost.  There were, perhaps, as many as two thousand pages of it,

     which few could undertake to read.



     Mark Twain's mind was always busy with plans and inventions, many of

     them of serious intent, some semi-serious, others of a purely

     whimsical character.  Once he proposed a "Modest Club," of which the

     first and main qualification for membership was modesty.  "At

     present," he wrote, "I am the only member; and as the modesty

     required must be of a quite aggravated type, the enterprise did seem

     for a time doomed to stop dead still with myself, for lack of

     further material; but upon reflection I have come to the conclusion

     that you are eligible.  Therefore, I have held a meeting and voted

     to offer you the distinction of membership.  I do not know that we

     can find any others, though I have had some thought of Hay, Warner,

     Twichell, Aldrich, Osgood, Fields, Higginson, and a few more--

     together with Mrs. Howells, Mrs. Clemens, and certain others of the

     sex."



     Howells replied that the only reason he had for not joining the

     Modest Club was that he was too modest--too modest to confess his

     modesty.  "If I could get over this difficulty I should like to

     join, for I approve highly of the Club and its object....  It ought

     to be given an annual dinner at the public expense.  If you think I

     am not too modest you may put my name down and I will try to think

     the same of you.  Mrs. Howells applauded the notion of the club from

     the very first.  She said that she knew one thing: that she was

     modest enough, anyway.  Her manner of saying it implied that the

     other persons you had named were not, and created a painful

     impression in my mind.  I have sent your letter and the rules to

     Hay, but I doubt his modesty.  He will think he has a right to

     belong to it as much as you or I; whereas, other people ought only

     to be admitted on sufferance."



     Our next letter to Howells is, in the main, pure foolery, but we get

     in it a hint what was to become in time one of Mask Twain's

     strongest interests, the matter of copyright.  He had both a

     personal and general interest in the subject.  His own books were

     constantly pirated in Canada, and the rights of foreign authors were

     not respected in America.  We have already seen how he had drawn a

     petition which Holmes, Lowell, Longfellow, and others were to sign,

     and while nothing had come of this plan he had never ceased to

     formulate others.  Yet he hesitated when he found that the proposed

     protection was likely to work a hardship to readers of the poorer

     class.  Once he wrote: "My notions have mightily changed lately....

     I can buy a lot of the copyright classics, in paper, at from three

     to thirty cents apiece.  These things must find their way into the

     very kitchens and hovels of the country.....  And even if the treaty

     will kill Canadian piracy, and thus save me an average of $5,000 a

     year, I am down on it anyway, and I'd like cussed well to write an

     article opposing the treaty."





                   To W. D. Howells, in Belmont, Mass.:



                                             Thursday, June 6th, 1880.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--There you stick, at Belmont, and now I'm going to

Washington for a few days; and of course, between you and Providence that

visit is going to get mixed, and you'll have been here and gone again

just about the time I get back.  Bother it all, I wanted to astonish you

with a chapter or two from Orion's latest book--not the seventeen which

he has begun in the last four months, but the one which he began last

week.



Last night, when I went to bed, Mrs. Clemens said, "George didn't take

the cat down to the cellar--Rosa says he has left it shut up in the

conservatory."  So I went down to attend to Abner (the cat.) About 3 in

the morning Mrs. C. woke me and said, "I do believe I hear that cat in

the drawing-room--what did you do with him?"  I answered up with the

confidence of a man who has managed to do the right thing for once, and

said "I opened the conservatory doors, took the library off the alarm,

and spread everything open, so that there wasn't any obstruction between

him and the cellar."  Language wasn't capable of conveying this woman's

disgust.  But the sense of what she said, was, "He couldn't have done any

harm in the conservatory--so you must go and make the entire house free

to him and the burglars, imagining that he will prefer the coal-bins to

the drawing-room.  If you had had Mr. Howells to help you, I should have

admired but not been astonished, because I should know that together you

would be equal to it; but how you managed to contrive such a stately

blunder all by yourself, is what I cannot understand."



So, you see, even she knows how to appreciate our gifts.



Brisk times here.--Saturday, these things happened: Our neighbor Chas.

Smith was stricken with heart disease, and came near joining the

majority; my publisher, Bliss, ditto, ditto; a neighbor's child died;

neighbor Whitmore's sixth child added to his five other cases of measles;

neighbor Niles sent for, and responded; Susie Warner down, abed; Mrs.

George Warner threatened with death during several hours; her son Frank,

whilst imitating the marvels in Barnum's circus bills, thrown from his

aged horse and brought home insensible: Warner's friend Max Yortzburgh,

shot in the back by a locomotive and broken into 32 distinct pieces and

his life threatened; and Mrs. Clemens, after writing all these cheerful

things to Clara Spaulding, taken at midnight, and if the doctor had not

been pretty prompt the contemplated Clemens would have called before his

apartments were ready.



However, everybody is all right, now, except Yortzburg, and he is

mending--that is, he is being mended.  I knocked off, during these

stirring times, and don't intend to go to work again till we go away for

the Summer, 3 or 6 weeks hence.  So I am writing to you not because I

have anything to say, but because you don't have to answer and I need

something to do this afternoon.....



I have a letter from a Congressman this morning, and he says Congress

couldn't be persuaded to bother about Canadian pirates at a time like

this when all legislation must have a political and Presidential bearing,

else Congress won't look at it.  So have changed my mind and my course;

I go north, to kill a pirate.  I must procure repose some way, else I

cannot get down to work again.



Pray offer my most sincere and respectful approval to the President--is

approval the proper word?  I find it is the one I most value here in the

household and seldomest get.



With our affection to you both.

                                   Yrs ever

                                             MARK.





     It was always dangerous to send strangers with letters of

     introduction to Mark Twain.  They were so apt to arrive at the wrong

     time, or to find him in the wrong mood.  Howells was willing to risk

     it, and that the result was only amusing instead of tragic is the

     best proof of their friendship.





                   To W. D. Howells, in Belmont, Mass.:



                                                       June 9, '80.

Well, old practical joker, the corpse of Mr. X----has been here, and I

have bedded it and fed it, and put down my work during 24 hours and tried

my level best to make it do something, or say something, or appreciate

something--but no, it was worse than Lazarus.  A kind-hearted, well-

meaning corpse was the Boston young man, but lawsy bless me, horribly

dull company.  Now, old man, unless you have great confidence in Mr. X's

judgment, you ought to make him submit his article to you before he

prints it.  For only think how true I was to you: Every hour that he was

here I was saying, gloatingly, "O G-- d--- you, when you are in bed and

your light out, I will fix you" (meaning to kill him)...., but then the

thought would follow--"  No, Howells sent him--he shall be spared, he

shall be respected he shall travel hell-wards by his own route."



Breakfast is frozen by this time, and Mrs. Clemens correspondingly hot.

Good bye.

                    Yrs ever,

                              MARK.





     "I did not expect you to ask that man to live with you," Howells

     answered.  "What I was afraid of was that you would turn him out of

     doors, on sight, and so I tried to put in a good word for him.

     After this when I want you to board people, I'll ask you.  I am

     sorry for your suffering.  I suppose I have mostly lost my smell for

     bores; but yours is preternaturally keen.  I shall begin to be

     afraid I bore you.  (How does that make you feel?)"



     In a letter to Twichell--a remarkable letter--when baby Jean Clemens

     was about a month old, we get a happy hint of conditions at Quarry

     Farm, and in the background a glimpse of Mark Twain's unfailing

     tragic reflection.





                      To Rev. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                             QUARRY FARM, Aug. 29 ['80].

DEAR OLD JOE,--Concerning Jean Clemens, if anybody said he "didn't see no

pints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog," I should think

he was convicting himself of being a pretty poor sort of observer....

I will not go into details; it is not necessary; you will soon be in

Hartford, where I have already hired a hall; the admission fee will be

but a trifle.



It is curious to note the change in the stock-quotation of the Affection

Board brought about by throwing this new security on the market.  Four

weeks ago the children still put Mamma at the head of the list right

along, where she had always been.  But now:



                    Jean

                    Mamma

                    Motley [a cat]

                    Fraulein [another]

                    Papa



That is the way it stands, now Mamma is become No. 2; I have dropped from

No. 4., and am become No. 5.  Some time ago it used to be nip and tuck

between me and the cats, but after the cats "developed" I didn't stand

any more show.



I've got a swollen ear; so I take advantage of it to lie abed most of the

day, and read and smoke and scribble and have a good time.  Last evening

Livy said with deep concern, "O dear, I believe an abscess is forming in

your ear."



I responded as the poet would have done if he had had a cold in the

head--



          "Tis said that abscess conquers love,

          But O believe it not."



This made a coolness.



Been reading Daniel Webster's Private Correspondence.  Have read a

hundred of his diffuse, conceited, "eloquent," bathotic (or bathostic)

letters written in that dim (no, vanished) Past when he was a student;

and Lord, to think that this boy who is so real to me now, and so booming

with fresh young blood and bountiful life, and sappy cynicisms about

girls, has since climbed the Alps of fame and stood against the sun one

brief tremendous moment with the world's eyes upon him, and then--f-z-t-!

where is he?  Why the only long thing, the only real thing about the

whole shadowy business is the sense of the lagging dull and hoary lapse

of time that has drifted by since then; a vast empty level, it seems,

with a formless spectre glimpsed fitfully through the smoke and mist that

lie along its remote verge.



Well, we are all getting along here first-rate; Livy gains strength

daily, and sits up a deal; the baby is five weeks old and--but no more of

this; somebody may be reading this letter 80 years hence.  And so, my

friend (you pitying snob, I mean, who are holding this yellow paper in

your hand in 1960,) save yourself the trouble of looking further; I know

how pathetically trivial our small concerns will seem to you, and I will

not let your eye profane them.  No, I keep my news; you keep your

compassion.  Suffice it you to know, scoffer and ribald, that the little

child is old and blind, now, and once more toothless; and the rest of us

are shadows, these many, many years.  Yes, and your time cometh!



                                                  MARK.





     At the Farm that year Mark Twain was working on The Prince and the

     Pauper, and, according to a letter to Aldrich, brought it to an end

     September 19th.  It is a pleasant letter, worth preserving.  The

     book by Aldrich here mentioned was 'The Stillwater Tragedy.'





                  To T. B. Aldrich, in Ponkapog, Mass.:



                                             ELMIRA, Sept. 15, '80.

MY DEAR ALDRICH,--Thank you ever so much for the book--I had already

finished it, and prodigiously enjoyed it, in the periodical of the

notorious Howells, but it hits Mrs. Clemens just right, for she is having

a reading holiday, now, for the first time in same months; so between-

times, when the new baby is asleep and strengthening up for another

attempt to take possession of this place, she is going to read it.

Her strong friendship for you makes her think she is going to like it.



I finished a story yesterday, myself.  I counted up and found it between

sixty and eighty thousand words--about the size of your book.  It is for

boys and girls--been at work at it several years, off and on.



I hope Howells is enjoying his journey to the Pacific.  He wrote me that

you and Osgood were going, also, but I doubted it, believing he was in

liquor when he wrote it.  In my opinion, this universal applause over his

book is going to land that man in a Retreat inside of two months.

I notice the papers say mighty fine things about your book, too.

You ought to try to get into the same establishment with Howells.

But applause does not affect me--I am always calm--this is because I am

used to it.



Well, good-bye, my boy, and good luck to you.  Mrs. Clemens asks me to

send her warmest regards to you and Mrs. Aldrich--which I do, and add

those of

                    Yrs ever

                              MARK.





     While Mark Twain was a journalist in San Francisco, there was a

     middle-aged man named Soule, who had a desk near him on the Morning

     Call.  Soule was in those days highly considered as a poet by his

     associates, most of whom were younger and less gracefully poetic.

     But Soule's gift had never been an important one.  Now, in his old

     age, he found his fame still local, and he yearned for wider

     recognition.  He wished to have a volume of poems issued by a

     publisher of recognized standing.  Because Mark Twain had been one

     of Soule's admirers and a warm friend in the old days, it was

     natural that Soule should turn to him now, and equally natural that

     Clemens should turn to Howells.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        Sunday, Oct.  2 '80.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Here's a letter which I wrote you to San Francisco the

second time you didn't go there....  I told Soule he needn't write you,

but simply send the MS. to you.  O dear, dear, it is dreadful to be an

unrecognized poet.  How wise it was in Charles Warren Stoddard to take in

his sign and go for some other calling while still young.



I'm laying for that Encyclopedical Scotchman--and he'll need to lock the

door behind him, when he comes in; otherwise when he hears my proposed

tariff his skin will probably crawl away with him.  He is accustomed to

seeing the publisher impoverish the author--that spectacle must be

getting stale to him--if he contracts with the undersigned he will

experience a change in that programme that will make the enamel peel off

his teeth for very surprise--and joy.  No, that last is what Mrs. Clemens

thinks--but it's not so.  The proposed work is growing, mightily, in my

estimation, day by day; and I'm not going to throw it away for any mere

trifle.  If I make a contract with the canny Scot, I will then tell him

the plan which you and I have devised (that of taking in the humor of all

countries)--otherwise I'll keep it to myself, I think.  Why should we

assist our fellowman for mere love of God?

                                        Yrs ever

                                                  MARK.



     One wishes that Howells might have found value enough in the verses

     of Frank Soule to recommend them to Osgood.  To Clemens he wrote:

     "You have touched me in regard to him, and I will deal gently with

     his poetry.  Poor old fellow!  I can imagine him, and how he must

     have to struggle not to be hard or sour."



     The verdict, however, was inevitable.  Soule's graceful verses

     proved to be not poetry at all.  No publisher of standing could

     afford to give them his imprint.



     The "Encyclopedical Scotchman" mentioned in the preceding letter was

     the publisher Gebbie, who had a plan to engage Howells and Clemens

     to prepare some sort of anthology of the world's literature.  The

     idea came to nothing, though the other plan mentioned--for a library

     of humor--in time grew into a book.



     Mark Twain's contracts with Bliss for the publication of his books

     on the subscription plan had been made on a royalty basis, beginning

     with 5 per cent. on 'The Innocents Abroad' increasing to 7 « per

     cent. on 'Roughing It,' and to 10 per cent. on later books.  Bliss

     had held that these later percentages fairly represented one half

     the profits.  Clemens, however, had never been fully satisfied, and

     his brother Orion had more than once urged him to demand a specific

     contract on the half-profit basis.  The agreement for the

     publication of 'A Tramp Abroad' was made on these terms.  Bliss died

     before Clemens received his first statement of sales.  Whatever may

     have been the facts under earlier conditions, the statement proved

     to Mark Twain's satisfaction; at least, that the half-profit

     arrangement was to his advantage.  It produced another result; it

     gave Samuel Clemens an excuse to place his brother Orion in a

     position of independence.





                    To Orion Clemens, in Keokuk, Iowa:



                                             Sunday, Oct 24 '80.

MY DEAR BRO.,--Bliss is dead.  The aspect of the balance-sheet is

enlightening.  It reveals the fact, through my present contract, (which

is for half the profits on the book above actual cost of paper, printing

and binding,) that I have lost considerably by all this nonsense--sixty

thousand dollars, I should say--and if Bliss were alive I would stay with

the concern and get it all back; for on each new book I would require a

portion of that back pay; but as it is (this in the very strictest

confidence,) I shall probably go to a new publisher 6 or 8 months hence,

for I am afraid Frank, with his poor health, will lack push and drive.



Out of the suspicions you bred in me years ago, has grown this result,

--to wit, that I shall within the twelvemonth get $40,000 out of this

"Tramp" instead Of $20,000.  Twenty thousand dollars, after taxes and

other expenses are stripped away, is worth to the investor about $75 a

month--so I shall tell Mr. Perkins to make your check that amount per

month, hereafter, while our income is able to afford it.  This ends the

loan business; and hereafter you can reflect that you are living not on

borrowed money but on money which you have squarely earned, and which has

no taint or savor of charity about it--and you can also reflect that the

money you have been receiving of me all these years is interest charged

against the heavy bill which the next publisher will have to stand who

gets a book of mine.



Jean got the stockings and is much obliged; Mollie wants to know whom she

most resembles, but I can't tell; she has blue eyes and brown hair, and

three chins, and is very fat and happy; and at one time or another she

has resembled all the different Clemenses and Langdons, in turn, that

have ever lived.



Livy is too much beaten out with the baby, nights, to write, these times;

and I don't know of anything urgent to say, except that a basket full of

letters has accumulated in the 7 days that I have been whooping and

cursing over a cold in the head--and I must attack the pile this very

minute.

                         With love from us

                                        Y aff

                                             SAM

$25 enclosed.







     On the completion of The Prince and Pauper story, Clemens had

     naturally sent it to Howells for consideration.  Howells wrote:

     "I have read the two P's and I like it immensely, it begins well and

     it ends well."  He pointed out some things that might be changed or

     omitted, and added: "It is such a book as I would expect from you,

     knowing what a bottom of fury there is to your fun."  Clemens had

     thought somewhat of publishing the story anonymously, in the fear

     that it would not be accepted seriously over his own signature.



     The "bull story" referred to in the next letter is the one later

     used in the Joan of Arc book, the story told Joan by "Uncle Laxart,"

     how he rode a bull to a funeral.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                                  Xmas Eve, 1880.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I was prodigiously delighted with what you said about

the book--so, on the whole, I've concluded to publish intrepidly, instead

of concealing the authorship.  I shall leave out that bull story.



I wish you had gone to New York.  The company was small, and we had a

first-rate time.  Smith's an enjoyable fellow.  I liked Barrett, too.

And the oysters were as good as the rest of the company.  It was worth

going there to learn how to cook them.



Next day I attended to business--which was, to introduce Twichell to Gen.

Grant and procure a private talk in the interest of the Chinese

Educational Mission here in the U. S.  Well, it was very funny.  Joe had

been sitting up nights building facts and arguments together into a

mighty and unassailable array and had studied them out and got them by

heart--all with the trembling half-hearted hope of getting Grant to add

his signature to a sort of petition to the Viceroy of China; but Grant

took in the whole situation in a jiffy, and before Joe had more than

fairly got started, the old man said: "I'll write the Viceroy a Letter

--a separate letter--and bring strong reasons to bear upon him; I know

him well, and what I say will have weight with him; I will attend to it

right away.  No, no thanks--I shall be glad to do it--it will be a labor

of love."



So all Joe's laborious hours were for naught!  It was as if he had come

to borrow a dollar, and been offered a thousand before he could unfold

his case....



But it's getting dark.  Merry Christmas to all of you.

                                   Yrs Ever,

                                             MARK.





     The Chinese Educational Mission, mentioned in the foregoing, was a

     thriving Hartford institution, projected eight years before by a

     Yale graduate named Yung Wing.  The mission was now threatened, and

     Yung Wing, knowing the high honor in which General Grant was held in

     China, believed that through him it might be saved.  Twichell, of

     course, was deeply concerned and naturally overjoyed at Grant's

     interest.  A day or two following the return to Hartford, Clemens

     received a letter from General Grant, in which he wrote: "Li Hung

     Chang is the most powerful and most influential Chinaman in his

     country.  He professed great friendship for me when I was there, and

     I have had assurances of the same thing since.  I hope, if he is

     strong enough with his government, that the decision to withdraw the

     Chinese students from this country may be changed."



     But perhaps Li Hung Chang was experiencing one of his partial

     eclipses just then, or possibly he was not interested, for the

     Hartford Mission did not survive.









XXI.



LETTERS 1881, TO HOWELLS AND OTHERS.  ASSISTING A YOUNG SCULPTOR.

LITERARY PLANS



With all of Mark Twain's admiration for Grant, he had opposed him as a

third-term President and approved of the nomination of Garfield.  He had

made speeches for Garfield during the campaign just ended, and had been

otherwise active in his support.  Upon Garfield's election, however, he

felt himself entitled to no special favor, and the single request which

he preferred at length could hardly be classed as, personal, though made

for a "personal friend."





          To President-elect James A.  Garfield, in Washington:



                                             HARTFORD, Jany. 12, '81.

GEN. GARFIELD



DEAR SIR,--Several times since your election persons wanting office have

asked me "to use my influence" with you in their behalf.



To word it in that way was such a pleasant compliment to me that I never

complied.  I could not without exposing the fact that I hadn't any

influence with you and that was a thing I had no mind to do.



It seems to me that it is better to have a good man's flattering estimate

of my influence--and to keep it--than to fool it away with trying to get

him an office.  But when my brother--on my wife's side--Mr. Charles J.

Langdon--late of the Chicago Convention--desires me to speak a word for

Mr. Fred Douglass, I am not asked "to use my influence" consequently I am

not risking anything.  So I am writing this as a simple citizen.  I am

not drawing on my fund of influence at all.  A simple citizen may express

a desire with all propriety, in the matter of a recommendation to office,

and so I beg permission to hope that you will retain Mr. Douglass in his

present office of Marshall of the District of Columbia, if such a course

will not clash with your own preferences or with the expediencies and

interest of your administration.  I offer this petition with peculiar

pleasure and strong desire, because I so honor this man's high and

blemishless character and so admire his brave, long crusade for the

liberties and elevation of his race.



He is a personal friend of mine, but that is nothing to the point, his

history would move me to say these things without that, and I feel them

too.

               With great respect

                         I am, General,

                                   Yours truly,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     Clemens would go out of his way any time to grant favor to the

     colored race.  His childhood associations were partly accountable

     for this, but he also felt that the white man owed the negro a debt

     for generations of enforced bondage.  He would lecture any time in a

     colored church, when he would as likely as not refuse point-blank to

     speak for a white congregation.  Once, in Elmira, he received a

     request, poorly and none too politely phrased, to speak for one of

     the churches.  He was annoyed and about to send a brief refusal,

     when Mrs. Clemens, who was present, said:



     "I think I know that church, and if so this preacher is a colored

     man; he does not know how to write a polished letter--how should

     he?"  Her husband's manner changed so suddenly that she added:

     "I will give you a motto, and it will be useful to you if you will

     adopt it: Consider every man colored until he is proved white."





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             HARTFORD, Feb.  27, 1881.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I go to West Point with Twichell tomorrow, but shall be

back Tuesday or Wednesday; and then just as soon thereafter as you and

Mrs. Howells and Winny can come you will find us ready and most glad to

see you--and the longer you can stay the gladder we shall be.  I am not

going to have a thing to do, but you shall work if you want to.  On the

evening of March 10th, I am going to read to the colored folk in the

African Church here (no whites admitted except such as I bring with me),

and a choir of colored folk will sing jubilee songs.  I count on a good

time, and shall hope to have you folks there, and Livy.  I read in

Twichell's chapel Friday night and had a most rattling high time--but the

thing that went best of all was Uncle Remus's Tar Baby.  I mean to try

that on my dusky audience.  They've all heard that tale from childhood--

at least the older members have.



I arrived home in time to make a most noble blunder--invited Charley

Warner here (in Livy's name) to dinner with the Gerhardts, and told him

Livy had invited his wife by letter and by word of mouth also.  I don't

know where I got these impressions, but I came home feeling as one does

who realizes that he has done a neat thing for once and left no flaws or

loop-holes.  Well, Livy said she had never told me to invite Charley and

she hadn't dreamed of inviting Susy, and moreover there wasn't any

dinner, but just one lean duck.  But Susy Warner's intuitions were

correct--so she choked off Charley, and staid home herself--we waited

dinner an hour and you ought to have seen that duck when he was done

drying in the oven.

                              MARK.





     Clemens and his wife were always privately assisting worthy and

     ambitious young people along the way of achievement.  Young actors

     were helped through dramatic schools; young men and women were

     assisted through college and to travel abroad.  Among others Clemens

     paid the way of two colored students, one through a Southern

     institution and another through the Yale law school.



     The mention of the name of Gerhardt in the preceding letter

     introduces the most important, or at least the most extensive, of

     these benefactions.  The following letter gives the beginning of the

     story:





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



Private and Confidential.

                                        HARTFORD, Feb. 21, 1881.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Well, here is our romance.



It happened in this way.  One morning, a month ago--no, three weeks--

Livy, and Clara Spaulding and I were at breakfast, at 10 A.M., and I was

in an irritable mood, for the barber was up stairs waiting and his hot

water getting cold, when the colored George returned from answering the

bell and said: "There's a lady in the drawing-room wants to see you."

"A book agent!" says I, with heat.  "I won't see her; I will die in my

tracks, first."



Then I got up with a soul full of rage, and went in there and bent

scowling over that person, and began a succession of rude and raspy

questions--and without even offering to sit down.



Not even the defendant's youth and beauty and (seeming) timidity were

able to modify my savagery, for a time--and meantime question and answer

were going on.  She had risen to her feet with the first question; and

there she stood, with her pretty face bent floorward whilst I inquired,

but always with her honest eyes looking me in the face when it came her

turn to answer.



And this was her tale, and her plea-diffidently stated, but straight-

forwardly; and bravely, and most winningly simply and earnestly: I put it

in my own fashion, for I do not remember her words:



Mr. Karl Gerhardt, who works in Pratt & Whitney's machine shops, has made

a statue in clay, and would I be so kind as to come and look at it, and

tell him if there is any promise in it?  He has none to go to, and he

would be so glad.



"O, dear me," I said, "I don't know anything about art--there's nothing I

could tell him."



But she went on, just as earnestly and as simply as before, with her

plea--and so she did after repeated rebuffs; and dull as I am, even I

began by and by to admire this brave and gentle persistence, and to

perceive how her heart of hearts was in this thing, and how she couldn't

give it up, but must carry her point.  So at last I wavered, and promised

in general terms that I would come down the first day that fell idle--and

as I conducted her to the door, I tamed more and more, and said I would

come during the very next week--"We shall be so glad--but--but, would you

please come early in the week?--the statue is just finished and we are so

anxious--and--and--we did hope you could come this week--and"--well, I

came down another peg, and said I would come Monday, as sure as death;

and before I got to the dining room remorse was doing its work and I was

saying to myself, "Damnation, how can a man be such a hound? why didn't I

go with her now?"  Yes, and how mean I should have felt if I had known

that out of her poverty she had hired a hack and brought it along to

convey me.  But luckily for what was left of my peace of mind, I didn't

know that.



Well, it appears that from here she went to Charley Warner's.  There was

a better light, there, and the eloquence of her face had a better chance

to do its office.  Warner fought, as I had done; and he was in the midst

of an article and very busy; but no matter, she won him completely.  He

laid aside his MS and said, "Come, let us go and see your father's

statue.  That is--is he your father?"  "No, he is my husband."  So this

child was married, you see.



This was a Saturday.  Next day Warner came to dinner and said "Go!--go

tomorrow--don't fail."  He was in love with the girl, and with her

husband too, and said he believed there was merit in the statue.  Pretty

crude work, maybe, but merit in it.



Patrick and I hunted up the place, next day; the girl saw us driving up,

and flew down the stairs and received me.  Her quarters were the second

story of a little wooden house--another family on the ground floor.  The

husband was at the machine shop, the wife kept no servant, she was there

alone.  She had a little parlor, with a chair or two and a sofa; and the

artist-husband's hand was visible in a couple of plaster busts, one of

the wife, and another of a neighbor's child; visible also in a couple of

water colors of flowers and birds; an ambitious unfinished portrait of

his wife in oils: some paint decorations on the pine mantel; and an

excellent human ear, done in some plastic material at 16.



Then we went into the kitchen, and the girl flew around, with enthusiasm,

and snatched rag after rag from a tall something in the corner, and

presently there stood the clay statue, life size--a graceful girlish

creature, nude to the waist, and holding up a single garment with one

hand the expression attempted being a modified scare--she was interrupted

when about to enter the bath.



Then this young wife posed herself alongside the image and so remained

--a thing I didn't understand.  But presently I did--then I said:



"O, it's you!"



"Yes," she said, "I was the model.  He has no model but me.  I have stood

for this many and many an hour--and you can't think how it does tire one!

But I don't mind it.  He works all day at the shop; and then, nights and

Sundays he works on his statue as long as I can keep up."



She got a big chisel, to use as a lever, and between us we managed to

twist the pedestal round and round, so as to afford a view of the statue

from all points.  Well, sir, it was perfectly charming, this girl's

innocence and purity---exhibiting her naked self, as it were, to a

stranger and alone, and never once dreaming that there was the slightest

indelicacy about the matter.  And so there wasn't; but it will be many

along day before I run across another woman who can do the like and show

no trace of self-consciousness.



Well, then we sat down, and I took a smoke, and she told me all about her

people in Massachusetts--her father is a physician and it is an old and

respectable family--(I am able to believe anything she says.)  And she

told me how "Karl" is 26 years old; and how he has had passionate

longings all his life toward art, but has always been poor and obliged to

struggle for his daily bread; and how he felt sure that if he could only

have one or two lessons in--



"Lessons?  Hasn't he had any lessons?"



No.  He had never had a lesson.



And presently it was dinner time and "Karl" arrived--a slender young

fellow with a marvelous head and a noble eye--and he was as simple and

natural, and as beautiful in spirit as his wife was.  But she had to do

the talking--mainly--there was too much thought behind his cavernous eyes

for glib speech.



I went home enchanted.  Told Livy and Clara Spaulding all about the

paradise down yonder where those two enthusiasts are happy with a yearly

expense of $350.  Livy and Clara went there next day and came away

enchanted.  A few nights later the Gerhardts kept their promise and came

here for the evening.  It was billiard night and I had company and so was

not down; but Livy and Clara became more charmed with these children than

ever.



Warner and I planned to get somebody to criticise the statue whose

judgment would be worth something.  So I laid for Champney, and after two

failures I captured him and took him around, and he said "this statue is

full of faults--but it has merits enough in it to make up for them"--

whereat the young wife danced around as delighted as a child.  When we

came away, Champney said, "I did not want to say too much there, but the

truth is, it seems to me an extraordinary performance for an untrained

hand.  You ask if there is promise enough there to justify the Hartford

folk in going to an expense of training this young man.  I should say,

yes, decidedly; but still, to make everything safe, you had better get

the judgment of a sculptor."



Warner was in New York.  I wrote him, and he said he would fetch up Ward

--which he did.  Yesterday they went to the Gerhardts and spent two

hours, and Ward came away bewitched with those people and marveling at

the winning innocence of the young wife, who dropped naturally into

model-attitude beside the statue (which is stark naked from head to heel,

now--G. had removed the drapery, fearing Ward would think he was afraid

to try legs and hips) just as she has always done before.



Livy and I had two long talks with Ward yesterday evening.  He spoke

strongly.  He said, "if any stranger had told me that this apprentice did

not model that thing from plaster casts, I would not have believed it."

He said "it is full of crudities, but it is full of genius, too.  It is

such a statue as the man of average talent would achieve after two years

training in the schools.  And the boldness of the fellow, in going

straight to nature!  He is an apprentice--his work shows that, all over;

but the stuff is in him, sure.  Hartford must send him to Paris--two

years; then if the promise holds good, keep him there three more--and

warn him to study, study, work, work, and keep his name out of the

papers, and neither ask for orders nor accept them when offered."



Well, you see, that's all we wanted.  After Ward was gone Livy came out

with the thing that was in her mind.  She said, "Go privately and start

the Gerhardts off to Paris, and say nothing about it to any one else."



So I tramped down this morning in the snow-storm--and there was a

stirring time.  They will sail a week or ten days from now.



As I was starting out at the front door, with Gerhardt beside me and the

young wife dancing and jubilating behind, this latter cried out

impulsively, "Tell Mrs. Clemens I want to hug her--I want to hug you

both!"



I gave them my old French book and they were going to tackle the

language, straight off.



Now this letter is a secret--keep it quiet--I don't think Livy would mind

my telling you these things, but then she might, you know, for she is a

queer girl.

                              Yrs ever,

                                        MARK.





     Champney was J. Wells Champney, a portrait-painter of distinction;

     Ward was the sculptor, J. Q. A. Ward.



     The Gerhardts were presently off to Paris, well provided with means

     to make their dreams reality; in due time the letters will report

     them again.



     The Uncle Remus tales of Joel Chandler Harris gave Mark Twain great

     pleasure.  He frequently read them aloud, not only at home but in

     public.  Finally, he wrote Harris, expressing his warm appreciation,

     and mentioning one of the negro stories of his own childhood, "The

     Golden Arm," which he urged Harris to look up and add to his

     collection.



     "You have pinned a proud feather in Uncle-Remus's cap," replied

     Harris.  "I do not know what higher honor he could have than to

     appear before the Hartford public arm in arm with Mark Twain."



     He disclaimed any originality for the stories, adding, "I understand

     that my relations toward Uncle Remus are similar to those that exist

     between an almanac maker and the calendar."  He had not heard the

     "Golden Arm" story and asked for the outlines; also for some

     publishing advice, out of Mark Twain's long experience.





                   To Joel Chandler Harris, in Atlanta:



                                             ELMIRA, N.Y., Aug. 10.

MY DEAR MR. HARRIS,--You can argue yourself into the delusion that the

principle of life is in the stories themselves and not in their setting;

but you will save labor by stopping with that solitary convert, for he is

the only intelligent one you will bag.  In reality the stories are only

alligator pears--one merely eats them for the sake of the salad-dressing.

Uncle Remus is most deftly drawn, and is a lovable and delightful

creation; he, and the little boy, and their relations with each other,

are high and fine literature, and worthy to live, for their own sakes;

and certainly the stories are not to be credited with them.  But enough

of this; I seem to be proving to the man that made the multiplication

table that twice one are two.



I have been thinking, yesterday and to-day (plenty of chance to think, as

I am abed with lumbago at our little summering farm among the solitudes

of the Mountaintops,) and I have concluded that I can answer one of your

questions with full confidence--thus: Make it a subscription book.

Mighty few books that come strictly under the head of literature will

sell by subscription; but if Uncle Remus won't, the gift of prophecy has

departed out of me.  When a book will sell by subscription, it will sell

two or three times as many copies as it would in the trade; and the

profit is bulkier because the retail price is greater.....



You didn't ask me for a subscription-publisher.  If you had, I should

have recommended Osgood to you.  He inaugurates his subscription

department with my new book in the fall.....



Now the doctor has been here and tried to interrupt my yarn about "The

Golden Arm," but I've got through, anyway.



Of course I tell it in the negro dialect--that is necessary; but I have

not written it so, for I can't spell it in your matchless way.  It is

marvelous the way you and Cable spell the negro and creole dialects.



Two grand features are lost in print: the weird wailing, the rising and

falling cadences of the wind, so easily mimicked with one's mouth; and

the impressive pauses and eloquent silences, and subdued utterances,

toward the end of the yarn (which chain the attention of the children

hand and foot, and they sit with parted lips and breathless, to be

wrenched limb from limb with the sudden and appalling "You got it").



Old Uncle Dan'l, a slave of my uncle's' aged 60, used to tell us children

yarns every night by the kitchen fire (no other light;) and the last yarn

demanded, every night, was this one.  By this time there was but a

ghastly blaze or two flickering about the back-log.  We would huddle

close about the old man, and begin to shudder with the first familiar

words; and under the spell of his impressive delivery we always fell a

prey to that climax at the end when the rigid black shape in the twilight

sprang at us with a shout.



When you come to glance at the tale you will recollect it--it is as

common and familiar as the Tar Baby.  Work up the atmosphere with your

customary skill and it will "go" in print.



Lumbago seems to make a body garrulous--but you'll forgive it.

                                   Truly yours

                                        S. L. CLEMENS





     The "Golden Arm" story was one that Clemens often used in his public

     readings, and was very effective as he gave it.



     In his sketch, "How to Tell a Story," it appears about as he used to

     tell it.  Harris, receiving the outlines of the old Missouri tale,

     presently announced that he had dug up its Georgia relative, an

     interesting variant, as we gather from Mark Twain's reply.





                   To Joel Chandler Harris, in Atlanta:



                                             HARTFORD, '81.

MY DEAR MR. HARRIS,--I was very sure you would run across that Story

somewhere, and am glad you have.  A Drummond light--no, I mean a Brush

light--is thrown upon the negro estimate of values by his willingness to

risk his soul and his mighty peace forever for the sake of a silver

sev'm-punce.  And this form of the story seems rather nearer the true

field-hand standard than that achieved by my Florida, Mo., negroes with

their sumptuous arm of solid gold.



I judge you haven't received my new book yet--however, you will in a day

or two.  Meantime you must not take it ill if I drop Osgood a hint about

your proposed story of slave life.....



When you come north I wish you would drop me a line and then follow it in

person and give me a day or two at our house in Hartford.  If you will,

I will snatch Osgood down from Boston, and you won't have to go there at

all unless you want to.  Please to bear this strictly in mind, and don't

forget it.

                         Sincerely yours

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     Charles Warren Stoddard, to whom the next letter is written, was one

     of the old California literary crowd, a graceful writer of verse and

     prose, never quite arriving at the success believed by his friends

     to be his due.  He was a gentle, irresponsible soul, well loved by

     all who knew him, and always, by one or another, provided against

     want.  The reader may remember that during Mark Twain's great

     lecture engagement in London, winter of 1873-74, Stoddard lived with

     him, acting as his secretary.  At a later period in his life he

     lived for several years with the great telephone magnate, Theodore

     N. Vail.  At the time of this letter, Stoddard had decided that in

     the warm light and comfort of the Sandwich Islands he could survive

     on his literary earnings.





           To Charles Warren Stoddard, in the Sandwich Islands:



                                             HARTFORD, Oct. 26 '81.

MY DEAR CHARLIE,--Now what have I ever done to you that you should not

only slide off to Heaven before you have earned a right to go, but must

add the gratuitous villainy of informing me of it?.....



The house is full of carpenters and decorators; whereas, what we really

need here, is an incendiary.  If the house would only burn down, we would

pack up the cubs and fly to the isles of the blest, and shut ourselves up

in the healing solitudes of the crater of Haleakala and get a good rest;

for the mails do not intrude there, nor yet the telephone and the

telegraph.  And after resting, we would come down the mountain a piece

and board with a godly, breech-clouted native, and eat poi and dirt and

give thanks to whom all thanks belong, for these privileges, and never

house-keep any more.



I think my wife would be twice as strong as she is, but for this wearing

and wearying slavery of house-keeping.  However, she thinks she must

submit to it for the sake of the children; whereas, I have always had a

tenderness for parents too, so, for her sake and mine, I sigh for the

incendiary.  When the evening comes and the gas is lit and the wear and

tear of life ceases, we want to keep house always; but next morning we

wish, once more, that we were free and irresponsible boarders.



Work?--one can't you know, to any purpose.  I don't really get anything

done worth speaking of, except during the three or four months that we

are away in the Summer.  I wish the Summer were seven years long.  I keep

three or four books on the stocks all the time, but I seldom add a

satisfactory chapter to one of them at home.  Yes, and it is all because

my time is taken up with answering the letters of strangers.  It can't be

done through a short hand amanuensis--I've tried that--it wouldn't work

--I couldn't learn to dictate.  What does possess strangers to write so

many letters?  I never could find that out.  However, I suppose I did it

myself when I was a stranger.  But I will never do it again.



Maybe you think I am not happy?  the very thing that gravels me is that I

am.  I don't want to be happy when I can't work; I am resolved that

hereafter I won't be.  What I have always longed for, was the privilege

of living forever away up on one of those mountains in the Sandwich

Islands overlooking the sea.

                              Yours ever

                                        MARK.



That magazine article of yours was mighty good: up to your very best I

think.  I enclose a book review written by Howells.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             HARTFORD, Oct. 26 '81.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I am delighted with your review, and so is Mrs.

Clemens.  What you have said, there, will convince anybody that reads it;

a body cannot help being convinced by it.  That is the kind of a review

to have; the doubtful man; even the prejudiced man, is persuaded and

succumbs.



What a queer blunder that was, about the baronet.  I can't quite see how

I ever made it.  There was an opulent abundance of things I didn't know;

and consequently no need to trench upon the vest-pocketful of things I

did know, to get material for a blunder.



Charley Warren Stoddard has gone to the Sandwich Islands permanently.

Lucky devil.  It is the only supremely delightful place on earth.  It

does seem that the more advantage a body doesn't earn, here, the more of

them God throws at his head.  This fellow's postal card has set the

vision of those gracious islands before my mind, again, with not a leaf

withered, nor a rainbow vanished, nor a sun-flash missing from the waves,

and now it will be months, I reckon, before I can drive it away again.

It is beautiful company, but it makes one restless and dissatisfied.



With love and thanks,

                         Yrs ever,

                                   MARK.





     The review mentioned in this letter was of The Prince and the

     Pauper.  What the queer" blunder" about the baronet was, the present

     writer confesses he does not know; but perhaps a careful reader

     could find it, at least in the early edition; very likely it was

     corrected without loss of time.



     Clemens now and then found it necessary to pay a visit to Canada in

     the effort to protect his copyright.  He usually had a grand time on

     these trips, being lavishly entertained by the Canadian literary

     fraternity.  In November, 1881, he made one of these journeys in the

     interest of The Prince and the Pauper, this time with Osgood, who

     was now his publisher.  In letters written home we get a hint of his

     diversions.  The Monsieur Frechette mentioned was a Canadian poet of

     considerable distinction.  "Clara" was Miss Clara Spaulding, of

     Elmira, who had accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Clemens to Europe in 1873,

     and again in 1878.  Later she became Mrs. John B. Staachfield, of

     New York City.  Her name has already appeared in these letters many

     times.





                      To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford:



                                             MONTREAL, Nov. 28 '81.

Livy darling, you and Clara ought to have been at breakfast in the great

dining room this morning.  English female faces, distinctive English

costumes, strange and marvelous English gaits--and yet such honest,

honorable, clean-souled countenances, just as these English women almost

always have, you know.  Right away--



But they've come to take me to the top of Mount Royal, it being a cold,

dry, sunny, magnificent day.  Going in a sleigh.

                         Yours lovingly,

                                        SAML.





                      To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford:



                                   MONTREAL, Sunday, November 27, 1881.

Livy dear, a mouse kept me awake last night till 3 or 4 o'clock--so I am

lying abed this morning.  I would not give sixpence to be out yonder in

the storm, although it is only snow.



[The above paragraph is written in the form of a rebus illustrated with

various sketches.]



There--that's for the children--was not sure that they could read

writing; especially jean, who is strangely ignorant in some things.



I can not only look out upon the beautiful snow-storm, past the vigorous

blaze of my fire; and upon the snow-veiled buildings which I have

sketched; and upon the churchward drifting umbrellas; and upon the

buffalo-clad cabmen stamping their feet and thrashing their arms on the

corner yonder: but I also look out upon the spot where the first white

men stood, in the neighborhood of four hundred years ago, admiring the

mighty stretch of leafy solitudes, and being admired and marveled at by

an eager multitude of naked savages.  The discoverer of this region, and

namer of it, Jacques Cartier, has a square named for him in the city.  I

wish you were here; you would enjoy your birthday, I think.



I hoped for a letter, and thought I had one when the mail was handed in,

a minute ago, but it was only that note from Sylvester Baxter.  You must

write--do you hear?--or I will be remiss myself.



Give my love and a kiss to the children, and ask them to give you my love

and a kiss from

                         SAML.





                      To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford:



                                             QUEBEC, Sunday.  '81.

Livy darling, I received a letter from Monsieur Frechette this morning,

in which certain citizens of Montreal tendered me a public dinner next

Thursday, and by Osgood's advice I accepted it.  I would have accepted

anyway, and very cheerfully but for the delay of two days--for I was

purposing to go to Boston Tuesday and home Wednesday; whereas, now I go

to Boston Friday and home Saturday.  I have to go by Boston on account of

business.



We drove about the steep hills and narrow, crooked streets of this old

town during three hours, yesterday, in a sleigh, in a driving snow-storm.

The people here don't mind snow; they were all out, plodding around on

their affairs--especially the children, who were wallowing around

everywhere, like snow images, and having a mighty good time.  I wish I

could describe the winter costume of the young girls, but I can't.  It is

grave and simple, but graceful and pretty--the top of it is a brimless

fur cap.  Maybe it is the costume that makes pretty girls seem so

monotonously plenty here.  It was a kind of relief to strike a homely

face occasionally.



You descend into some of the streets by long, deep stairways; and in the

strong moonlight, last night, these were very picturesque.  I did wish

you were here to see these things.  You couldn't by any possibility sleep

in these beds, though, or enjoy the food.



Good night, sweetheart, and give my respects to the cubs.



                                        SAML.





     It had been hoped that W. D. Howells would join the Canadian

     excursion, but Howells was not very well that autumn.  He wrote that

     he had been in bed five weeks, "most of the time recovering; so you

     see how bad I must have been to begin with.  But now I am out of any

     first-class pain; I have a good appetite, and I am as abusive and

     peremptory as Guiteau."  Clemens, returning to Hartford, wrote him a

     letter that explains itself.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             HARTFORD, Dec. 16 '81.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--It was a sharp disappointment--your inability to

connect, on the Canadian raid.  What a gaudy good time we should have

had!



Disappointed, again, when I got back to Boston; for I was promising

myself half an hour's look at you, in Belmont; but your note to Osgood

showed that that could not be allowed out yet.



The Atlantic arrived an hour ago, and your faultless and delicious Police

Report brought that blamed Joe Twichell powerfully before me.  There's a

man who can tell such things himself (by word of mouth,) and has as sure

an eye for detecting a thing that is before his eyes, as any man in the

world, perhaps--then why in the nation doesn't he report himself with a

pen?



One of those drenching days last week, he slopped down town with his

cubs, and visited a poor little beggarly shed where were a dwarf, a fat

woman, and a giant of honest eight feet, on exhibition behind tawdry

show-canvases, but with nobody to exhibit to.  The giant had a broom, and

was cleaning up and fixing around, diligently.  Joe conceived the idea of

getting some talk out of him.  Now that never would have occurred to me.

So he dropped in under the man's elbow, dogged him patiently around,

prodding him with questions and getting irritated snarls in return which

would have finished me early--but at last one of Joe's random shafts

drove the centre of that giant's sympathies somehow, and fetched him.

The fountains of his great deep were broken up, and he rained a flood of

personal history that was unspeakably entertaining.



Among other things it turned out that he had been a Turkish (native)

colonel, and had fought all through the Crimean war--and so, for the

first time, Joe got a picture of the Charge of the Six Hundred that made

him see the living spectacle, the flash of flag and tongue-flame, the

rolling smoke, and hear the booming of the guns; and for the first time

also, he heard the reasons for that wild charge delivered from the mouth

of a master, and realized that nobody had "blundered," but that a cold,

logical, military brain had perceived this one and sole way to win an

already lost battle, and so gave the command and did achieve the victory.



And mind you Joe was able to come up here, days afterwards, and reproduce

that giant's picturesque and admirable history.  But dern him, he can't

write it--which is all wrong, and not as it should be.



And he has gone and raked up the MS autobiography (written in 1848,) of

Mrs. Phebe Brown, (author of "I Love to Steal a While Away,") who

educated Yung Wing in her family when he was a little boy; and I came

near not getting to bed at all, last night, on account of the lurid

fascinations of it.  Why in the nation it has never got into print, I

can't understand.



But, by jings! the postman will be here in a minute; so, congratulations

upon your mending health, and gratitude that it is mending; and love to

you all.

                              Yrs Ever

                                   MARK.



Don't answer--I spare the sick.









XXII.



LETTERS, 1882, MAINLY TO HOWELLS.  WASTED FURY. OLD SCENES REVISITED.

THE MISSISSIPPI BOOK



     A man of Mark Twain's profession and prominence must necessarily be

     the subject of much newspaper comment.  Jest, compliment, criticism

     --none of these things disturbed him, as a rule.  He was pleased

     that his books should receive favorable notices by men whose opinion

     he respected, but he was not grieved by adverse expressions.  Jests

     at his expense, if well written, usually amused him; cheap jokes

     only made him sad; but sarcasms and innuendoes were likely to enrage

     him, particularly if he believed them prompted by malice.  Perhaps

     among all the letters he ever wrote, there is none more

     characteristic than this confession of violence and eagerness for

     reprisal, followed by his acknowledgment of error and a manifest

     appreciation of his own weakness.  It should be said that Mark Twain

     and Whitelaw Reid were generally very good friends, and perhaps for

     the moment this fact seemed to magnify the offense.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        HARTFORD, Jan.  28 '82.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Nobody knows better than I, that there are times when

swearing cannot meet the emergency.  How sharply I feel that, at this

moment.  Not a single profane word has issued from my lips this mornin

--I have not even had the impulse to swear, so wholly ineffectual would

swearing have manifestly been, in the circumstances.  But I will tell you

about it.



About three weeks ago, a sensitive friend, approaching his revelation

cautiously, intimated that the N. Y. Tribune was engaged in a kind of

crusade against me.  This seemed a higher compliment than I deserved; but

no matter, it made me very angry.  I asked many questions, and gathered,

in substance, this:  Since Reid's return from Europe, the Tribune had

been flinging sneers and brutalities at me with such persistent frequency

"as to attract general remark."  I was an angered--which is just as good

an expression, I take it, as an hungered.  Next, I learned that Osgood,

among the rest of the "general," was worrying over these constant and

pitiless attacks.  Next came the testimony of another friend, that the

attacks were not merely "frequent," but "almost daily."  Reflect upon

that: "Almost daily" insults, for two months on a stretch.  What would

you have done?



As for me, I did the thing which was the natural thing for me to do, that

is, I set about contriving a plan to accomplish one or the other of two

things: 1. Force a peace; or 2. Get revenge.  When I got my plan

finished, it pleased me marvelously.  It was in six or seven sections,

each section to be used in its turn and by itself; the assault to begin

at once with No. 1, and the rest to follow, one after the other, to keep

the communication open while I wrote my biography of Reid.  I meant to

wind up with this latter great work, and then dismiss the subject for

good.



Well, ever since then I have worked day and night making notes and

collecting and classifying material.  I've got collectors at work in

England.  I went to New York and sat three hours taking evidence while a

stenographer set it down.  As my labors grew, so also grew my

fascination.  Malice and malignity faded out of me--or maybe I drove them

out of me, knowing that a malignant book would hurt nobody but the fool

who wrote it.  I got thoroughly in love with this work; for I saw that I

was going to write a book which the very devils and angels themselves

would delight to read, and which would draw disapproval from nobody but

the hero of it, (and Mrs. Clemens, who was bitter against the whole

thing.)  One part of my plan was so delicious that I had to try my hand

on it right away, just for the luxury of it.  I set about it, and sure

enough it panned out to admiration.  I wrote that chapter most carefully,

and I couldn't find a fault with it.  (It was not for the biography--no,

it belonged to an immediate and deadlier project.)



Well, five days ago, this thought came into my mind(from Mrs. Clemens's):

"Wouldn't it be well to make sure that the attacks have been 'almost

daily'?--and to also make sure that their number and character will

justify me in doing what I am proposing to do?"



I at once set a man to work in New York to seek out and copy every

unpleasant reference which had been made to me in the Tribune from Nov.

1st to date.  On my own part I began to watch the current numbers, for I

had subscribed for the paper.



The result arrived from my New York man this morning.  O, what a pitiable

wreck of high hopes!  The "almost daily" assaults, for two months,

consist of--1. Adverse criticism of P. & P.  from an enraged idiot in the

London Atheneum; 2. Paragraph from some indignant Englishman in the Pall

Mall Gazette who pays me the vast compliment of gravely rebuking some

imaginary ass who has set me up in the neighborhood of Rabelais; 3. A

remark of the Tribune's about the Montreal dinner, touched with an almost

invisible satire; 4. A remark of the Tribune's about refusal of Canadian

copyright, not complimentary, but not necessarily malicious--and of

course adverse criticism which is not malicious is a thing which none but

fools irritate themselves about.



There--that is the prodigious bugaboo, in its entirety!  Can you conceive

of a man's getting himself into a sweat over so diminutive a provocation?

I am sure I can't.  What the devil can those friends of mine have been

thinking about, to spread these 3 or 4  harmless things out into two

months of daily sneers and affronts?  The whole offense, boiled down,

amounts to just this: one uncourteous remark of the Tribune about my

book--not me between Nov. 1 and Dec. 20; and a couple of foreign

criticisms (of my writings, not me,) between Nov. 1 and Jan. 26!  If I

can't stand that amount of friction, I certainly need reconstruction.

Further boiled down, this vast outpouring of malice amounts to simply

this: one jest from the Tribune (one can make nothing more serious than

that out of it.) One jest--and that is all; for the foreign criticisms do

not count, they being matters of news, and proper for publication in

anybody's newspaper.



And to offset that one jest, the Tribune paid me one compliment Dec. 23,

by publishing my note declining the New York New England dinner, while

merely (in the same breath,) mentioning that similar letters were read

from General Sherman and other men whom we all know to be persons of real

consequence.



Well, my mountain has brought forth its mouse, and a sufficiently small

mouse it is, God knows.  And my three weeks' hard work have got to go

into the ignominious pigeon-hole.  Confound it, I could have earned ten

thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble.  However, I shouldn't have

done it, for I am too lazy, now, in my sere and yellow leaf, to be

willing to work for anything but love.....  I kind of envy you people who

are permitted for your righteousness' sake to dwell in a boarding house;

not that I should always want to live in one, but I should like the

change occasionally from this housekeeping slavery to that wild

independence.  A life of don't-care-a-damn in a boarding house is what I

have asked for in many a secret prayer.  I shall come by and by and

require of you what you have offered me there.

                                        Yours ever,

                                                  MARK.





     Howells, who had already known something of the gathering storm,

     replied: "Your letter was an immense relief to me, for although I

     had an abiding faith that you would get sick of your enterprise,

     I wasn't easy until I knew that you had given it up."



     Joel Chandler Harris appears again in the letters of this period.

     Twichell, during a trip South about this time, had called on Harris

     with some sort of proposition or suggestion from Clemens that Harris

     appear with him in public, and tell, or read, the Remus stories from

     the platform.  But Harris was abnormally diffident.  Clemens later

     pronounced him "the shyest full-grown man" he had ever met, and the

     word which Twichell brought home evidently did not encourage the

     platform idea.





                   To Joel Chandler Harris, in Atlanta:



                                             HARTFORD, Apl. 2, '82.

Private.



MY DEAR MR. HARRIS,--Jo Twichell brought me your note and told me of his

talk with you.  He said you didn't believe you would ever be able to

muster a sufficiency of reckless daring to make you comfortable and at

ease before an audience.  Well, I have thought out a device whereby I

believe we can get around that difficulty.  I will explain when I see

you.



Jo says you want to go to Canada within a month or six weeks--I forget

just exactly what he did say; but he intimated the trip could be delayed

a while, if necessary.  If this is so, suppose you meet Osgood and me in

New Orleans early in May--say somewhere between the 1st and 6th?



It will be well worth your while to do this, because the author who goes

to Canada unposted, will not know what course to pursue [to secure

copyright] when he gets there; he will find himself in a hopeless

confusion as to what is the correct thing to do.  Now Osgood is the only

man in America, who can lay out your course for you and tell you exactly

what to do.  Therefore, you just come to New Orleans and have a talk with

him.



Our idea is to strike across lots and reach St. Louis the 20th of April--

thence we propose to drift southward, stopping at some town a few hours

or a night, every day, and making notes.



To escape the interviewers, I shall follow my usual course and use a

fictitious name (C. L. Samuel, of New York.) I don't know what Osgood's

name will be, but he can't use his own.



If you see your way to meet us in New Orleans, drop me a line, now, and

as we approach that city I will telegraph you what day we shall arrive

there.



I would go to Atlanta if I could, but shan't be able.  We shall go back

up the river to St. Paul, and thence by rail X-lots home.



(I am making this letter so dreadfully private and confidential because

my movements must be kept secret, else I shan't be able to pick up the

kind of book-material I want.)



If you are diffident, I suspect that you ought to let Osgood be your

magazine-agent.  He makes those people pay three or four times as much as

an article is worth, whereas I never had the cheek to make them pay more

than double.

                              Yrs Sincerely

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     "My backwardness is an affliction," wrote Harris.....  "The ordeal

     of appearing on the stage would be a terrible one, but my experience

     is that when a diffident man does become familiar with his

     surroundings he has more impudence than his neighbors.  Extremes

     meet."



     He was sorely tempted, but his courage became as water at the

     thought of footlights and assembled listeners.  Once in New York he

     appears to have been caught unawares at a Tile Club dinner and made

     to tell a story, but his agony was such that at the prospect of a

     similar ordeal in Boston he avoided that city and headed straight

     for Georgia and safety.



     The New Orleans excursion with Osgood, as planned by Clemens, proved

     a great success.  The little party took the steamer Gold Dust from

     St. Louis down river toward New Orleans.  Clemens was quickly

     recognized, of course, and his assumed name laid aside.  The author

     of "Uncle Remus" made the trip to New Orleans.  George W. Cable was

     there at the time, and we may believe that in the company of Mark

     Twain and Osgood those Southern authors passed two or three

     delightful days.  Clemens also met his old teacher Bixby in New

     Orleans, and came back up the river with him, spending most of his

     time in the pilot-house, as in the old days.  It was a glorious

     trip, and, reaching St. Louis, he continued it northward, stopping

     off at Hannibal and Quincy.'





                      To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford:



                                        QUINCY, ILL.  May 17, '82.

Livy darling, I am desperately homesick.  But I have promised Osgood, and

must stick it out; otherwise I would take the train at once and break for

home.



I have spent three delightful days in Hannibal, loitering around all day

long, examining the old localities and talking with the grey-heads who

were boys and girls with me 30 or 40 years ago.  It has been a moving

time.  I spent my nights with John and Helen Garth, three miles from

town, in their spacious and beautiful house.  They were children with me,

and afterwards schoolmates.  Now they have a daughter 19 or 20 years old.

Spent an hour, yesterday, with A. W. Lamb, who was not married when I saw

him last.  He married a young lady whom I knew.  And now I have been

talking with their grown-up sons and daughters.  Lieutenant Hickman, the

spruce young handsomely-uniformed volunteer of 1846, called on me--a

grisly elephantine patriarch of 65 now, his grace all vanished.



That world which I knew in its blossoming youth is old and bowed and

melancholy, now; its soft cheeks are leathery and wrinkled, the fire is

gone out in its eyes, and the spring from its step.  It will be dust and

ashes when I come again.  I have been clasping hands with the moribund-

and usually they said, "It is for the last time."



Now I am under way again, upon this hideous trip to St. Paul, with a

heart brimming full of thoughts and images of you and Susie and Bay and

the peerless Jean.  And so good night, my love.



                                             SAML.





     Clemens's trip had been saddened by learning, in New Orleans, the

     news of the death of Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh.  To Doctor

     Brown's son, whom he had known as "Jock," he wrote immediately on

     his return to Hartford.





                     To Mr. John Brown, in Edinburgh



                                        HARTFORD, June 1, 1882.

MY DEAR MR. BROWN,--I was three thousand miles from home, at breakfast in

New Orleans, when the damp morning paper revealed the sorrowful news

among the cable dispatches.  There was no place in America, however

remote, or however rich, or poor or high or humble where words of

mourning for your father were not uttered that morning, for his works had

made him known and loved all over the land.  To Mrs. Clemens and me,

the loss is personal; and our grief the grief one feels for one who was

peculiarly near and dear.  Mrs. Clemens has never ceased to express

regret that we came away from England the last time without going to see

him, and often we have since projected a voyage across the Atlantic for

the sole purpose of taking him by the hand and looking into his kind eyes

once more before he should be called to his rest.



We both thank you greatly for the Edinburgh papers which you sent.  My

wife and I join in affectionate remembrances and greetings to yourself

and your aunt, and in the sincere tender of our sympathies.



                              Faithfully yours,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.



Our Susie is still "Megalops."  He gave her that name:



Can you spare a photograph of your father?  We have none but the one

taken in a group with ourselves.





     William Dean Howells, at the age of forty-five, reached what many

     still regard his highest point of achievement in American realism.

     His novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, which was running as a Century

     serial during the summer of 1882, attracted wide attention, and upon

     its issue in book form took first place among his published novels.

     Mark Twain, to the end of his life, loved all that Howells wrote.

     Once, long afterward, he said: "Most authors give us glimpses of a

     radiant moon, but Howells's moon shines and sails all night long."

     When the instalments of The Rise of Silas Lapham began to appear, he

     overflowed in adjectives, the sincerity of which we need not doubt,

     in view of his quite open criticisms of the author's reading

     delivery.





                   To W. D. Howells, in Belmont, Mass.:



MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I am in a state of wild enthusiasm over this July

instalment of your story.  It's perfectly dazzling--it's masterly--

incomparable.  Yet I heard you read it--without losing my balance.

Well, the difference between your reading and your writing is-remarkable.

I mean, in the effects produced and the impression left behind.  Why, the

one is to the other as is one of Joe Twichell's yarns repeated by a

somnambulist.  Goodness gracious, you read me a chapter, and it is a

gentle, pearly dawn, with a sprinkle of faint stars in it; but by and by

I strike it in print, and shout to myself, "God bless us, how has that

pallid former spectacle been turned into these gorgeous sunset

splendors!"



Well, I don't care how much you read your truck to me, you can't

permanently damage it for me that way.  It is always perfectly fresh and

dazzling when I come on it in the magazine.  Of course I recognize the

form of it as being familiar--but that is all.  That is, I remember it as

pyrotechnic figures which you set up before me, dead and cold, but ready

for the match--and now I see them touched off and all ablaze with

blinding fires.  You can read, if you want to, but you don't read worth a

damn.  I know you can read, because your readings of Cable and your

repeatings of the German doctor's remarks prove that.



That's the best drunk scene--because the truest--that I ever read.  There

are touches in it that I never saw any writer take note of before.  And

they are set before the reader with amazing accuracy.  How very drunk,

and how recently drunk, and how altogether admirably drunk you must have

been to enable you to contrive that masterpiece!



Why I didn't notice that that religious interview between Marcia and Mrs.

Halleck was so deliciously humorous when you read it to me--but dear me,

it's just too lovely for anything.  (Wrote Clark to collar it for the

"Library.")



Hang it, I know where the mystery is, now; when you are reading, you

glide right along, and I don't get a chance to let the things soak home;

but when I catch it in the magazine, I give a page 20 or 30 minutes in

which to gently and thoroughly filter into me.  Your humor is so very

subtle, and elusive--(well, often it's just a vanishing breath of perfume

which a body isn't certain he smelt till he stops and takes another

smell) whereas you can smell other



(Remainder obliterated.)





     Among Mark Twain's old schoolmates in Hannibal was little Helen

     Kercheval, for whom in those early days he had a very tender spot

     indeed.  But she married another schoolmate, John Garth, who in time

     became a banker, highly respected and a great influence.  John and

     Helen Garth have already been mentioned in the letter of May 17th.





                       To John Garth, in Hannibal:



                                             HARTFORD, July 3 '82.

DEAR JOHN,--Your letter of June i9 arrived just one day after we ought to

have been in Elmira, N. Y. for the summer: but at the last moment the

baby was seized with scarlet fever.  I had to telegraph and countermand

the order for special sleeping car; and in fact we all had to fly around

in a lively way and undo the patient preparations of weeks--rehabilitate

the dismantled house, unpack the trunks, and so on.  A couple of days

later, the eldest child was taken down with so fierce a fever that she

was soon delirious--not scarlet fever, however.  Next, I myself was

stretched on the bed with three diseases at once, and all of them fatal.

But I never did care for fatal diseases if I could only have privacy and

room to express myself concerning them.



We gave early warning, and of course nobody has entered the house in all

this time but one or two reckless old bachelors--and they probably wanted

to carry the disease to the children of former flames of theirs.  The

house is still in quarantine and must remain so for a week or two yet--at

which time we are hoping to leave for Elmira.

                    Always your friend

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     By the end of summer Howells was in Europe, and Clemens, in Elmira,

     was trying to finish his Mississippi book, which was giving him a

     great deal of trouble.  It was usually so with his non-fiction

     books; his interest in them was not cumulative; he was prone to grow

     weary of them, while the menace of his publisher's contract was

     maddening.  Howells's letters, meant to be comforting, or at least

     entertaining, did not always contribute to his peace of mind.  The

     Library of American Humor which they had planned was an added

     burden.  Before sailing, Howells had written: "Do you suppose you

     can do your share of the reading at Elmira, while you are writing at

     the Mississippi book?"



     In a letter from London, Howells writes of the good times he is

     having over there with Osgood, Hutton, John Hay, Aldrich, and Alma

     Tadema, excursioning to Oxford, feasting, especially "at the Mitre

     Tavern, where they let you choose your dinner from the joints

     hanging from the rafter, and have passages that you lose yourself in

     every time you try to go to your room.....  Couldn't you and Mrs.

     Clemens step over for a little while?.....  We have seen lots of

     nice people and have been most pleasantly made of; but I would

     rather have you smoke in my face, and talk for half a day just for

     pleasure, than to go to the best house or club in London."  The

     reader will gather that this could not be entirely soothing to a man

     shackled by a contract and a book that refused to come to an end.





                       To W. D. Howells, in London:



                                        HARTFORD, CONN.  Oct 30, 1882.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I do not expect to find you, so I shan't spend many

words on you to wind up in the perdition of some European dead-letter

office.  I only just want to say that the closing installments of the

story are prodigious.  All along I was afraid it would be impossible for

you to keep up so splendidly to the end; but you were only, I see now,

striking eleven.  It is in these last chapters that you struck twelve.

Go on and write; you can write good books yet, but you can never match

this one.  And speaking of the book, I inclose something which has been

happening here lately.



We have only just arrived at home, and I have not seen Clark on our

matters.  I cannot see him or any one else, until I get my book finished.

The weather turned cold, and we had to rush home, while I still lacked

thirty thousand words.  I had been sick and got delayed.  I am going to

write all day and two thirds of the night, until the thing is done, or

break down at it.  The spur and burden of the contract are intolerable to

me.  I can endure the irritation of it no longer.  I went to work at nine

o'clock yesterday morning, and went to bed an hour after midnight.

Result of the day, (mainly stolen from books, tho' credit given,) 9500

words, so I reduced my burden by one third in one day.  It was five days

work in one.  I have nothing more to borrow or steal; the rest must all

be written.  It is ten days work, and unless something breaks, it will be

finished in five.  We all send love to you and Mrs. Howells, and all the

family.

                         Yours as ever,

                                   MARK.





Again, from Villeneuve, on lake Geneva, Howells wrote urging him this

time to spend the winter with them in Florence, where they would write

their great American Comedy of 'Orme's Motor,' "which is to enrich us

beyond the dreams of avarice.... We could have a lot of fun writing it,

and you could go home with some of the good old Etruscan malaria in your

bones, instead of the wretched pinch-beck Hartford article that you are

suffering from now....  it's a great opportunity for you.  Besides,

nobody over there likes you half as well as I do."



It should be added that 'Orme's Motor' was the provisional title that

Clemens and Howells had selected for their comedy, which was to be built,

in some measure, at least, around the character, or rather from the

peculiarities, of Orion Clemens.  The Cable mentioned in Mark Twain's

reply is, of course, George W. Cable, who only a little while before had

come up from New Orleans to conquer the North with his wonderful tales

and readings.





                    To W. D. Howells, in Switzerland:



                                             HARTFORD, Nov.  4th, 1882.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Yes, it would be profitable for me to do that, because

with your society to help me, I should swiftly finish this now apparently

interminable book.  But I cannot come, because I am not Boss here, and

nothing but dynamite can move Mrs. Clemens away from home in the winter

season.



I never had such a fight over a book in my life before.  And the

foolishest part of the whole business is, that I started Osgood to

editing it before I had finished writing it.  As a consequence, large

areas of it are condemned here and there and yonder, and I have the

burden of these unfilled gaps harassing me and the thought of the broken

continuity of the work, while I am at the same time trying to build the

last quarter of the book.  However, at last I have said with sufficient

positiveness that I will finish the book at no particular date; that I

will not hurry it; that I will not hurry myself; that I will take things

easy and comfortably, write when I choose to write, leave it alone when I

so prefer.  The printers must wait, the artists, the canvassers, and all

the rest.  I have got everything at a dead standstill, and that is where

it ought to be, and that is where it must remain; to follow any other

policy would be to make the book worse than it already is.  I ought to

have finished it before showing to anybody, and then sent it across the

ocean to you to be edited, as usual; for you seem to be a great many

shades happier than you deserve to be, and if I had thought of this thing

earlier, I would have acted upon it and taken the tuck somewhat out of

your joyousness.



In the same mail with your letter, arrived the enclosed from Orme the

motor man.  You will observe that he has an office.  I will explain that

this is a law office and I think it probably does him as much good to

have a law office without anything to do in it, as it would another man

to have one with an active business attached.  You see he is on the

electric light lay now.  Going to light the city and allow me to take all

the stock if I want to.  And he will manage it free of charge.  It never

would occur to this simple soul how much less costly it would be to me,

to hire him on a good salary not to manage it.  Do you observe the same

old eagerness, the same old hurry, springing from the fear that if he

does not move with the utmost swiftness, that colossal opportunity will

escape him?  Now just fancy this same frantic plunging after vast

opportunities, going on week after week with this same man, during fifty

entire years, and he has not yet learned, in the slightest degree, that

there isn't any occasion to hurry; that his vast opportunity will always

wait; and that whether it waits or flies, he certainly will never catch

it.  This immortal hopefulness, fortified by its immortal and unteachable

misjudgment, is the immortal feature of this character, for a play; and

we will write that play.  We should be fools else.  That staccato

postscript reads as if some new and mighty business were imminent, for it

is slung on the paper telegraphically, all the small words left out.

I am afraid something newer and bigger than the electric light is

swinging across his orbit.  Save this letter for an inspiration.  I have

got a hundred more.



Cable has been here, creating worshipers on all hands.  He is a marvelous

talker on a deep subject.  I do not see how even Spencer could unwind a

thought more smoothly or orderly, and do it in a cleaner, clearer,

crisper English.  He astounded Twichell with his faculty.  You know when

it comes down to moral honesty, limpid innocence, and utterly blemishless

piety, the Apostles were mere policemen to Cable; so with this in mind

you must imagine him at a midnight dinner in Boston the other night,

where we gathered around the board of the Summerset Club; Osgood, full,

Boyle O'Reilly, full, Fairchild responsively loaded, and Aldrich and

myself possessing the floor, and properly fortified.  Cable told Mrs.

Clemens when he returned here, that he seemed to have been entertaining

himself with horses, and had a dreamy idea that he must have gone to

Boston in a cattle-car.  It was a very large time.  He called it an orgy.

And no doubt it was, viewed from his standpoint.



I wish I were in Switzerland, and I wish we could go to Florence; but we

have to leave these delights to you; there is no helping it.  We all join

in love to you and all the family.

                                   Yours as ever

                                             MARK.









XXIII.



LETTERS, 1883, TO HOWELLS AND OTHERS.  A GUEST OF THE MARQUIS OF LORNE.

THE HISTORY GAME. A PLAY BY HOWELLS AND MARK TWAIN



     Mark Twain, in due season, finished the Mississippi book and placed

     it in Osgood's hands for publication.  It was a sort of partnership

     arrangement in which Clemens was to furnish the money to make the

     book, and pay Osgood a percentage for handling it.  It was, in fact,

     the beginning of Mark Twain's adventures as a publisher.



     Howells was not as happy in Florence as he had hoped to be.  The

     social life there overwhelmed him.  In February he wrote: "Our two

     months in Florence have been the most ridiculous time that ever even

     half-witted people passed.  We have spent them in chasing round

     after people for whom we cared nothing, and being chased by them.

     My story isn't finished yet, and what part of it is done bears the

     fatal marks of haste and distraction.  Of course, I haven't put pen

     to paper yet on the play.  I wring my hands and beat my breast when

     I think of how these weeks have been wasted; and how I have been

     forced to waste them by the infernal social circumstances from which

     I couldn't escape."



     Clemens, now free from the burden of his own book, was light of

     heart and full of ideas and news; also of sympathy and appreciation.

     Howells's story of this time was "A Woman's Reason."  Governor

     Jewell, of this letter, was Marshall Jewell, Governor of Connecticut

     from 1871 to 1873.  Later, he was Minister to Russia, and in 1874

     was United States Postmaster-General.





                      To W. D. Howells, in Florence:



                                        HARTFORD, March 1st, 1883.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--We got ourselves ground up in that same mill, once, in

London, and another time in Paris.  It is a kind of foretaste of hell.

There is no way to avoid it except by the method which you have now

chosen.  One must live secretly and cut himself utterly off from the

human race, or life in Europe becomes an unbearable burden and work an

impossibility.  I learned something last night, and maybe it may

reconcile me to go to Europe again sometime.  I attended one of the

astonishingly popular lectures of a man by the name of Stoddard, who

exhibits interesting stereopticon pictures and then knocks the interest

all out of them with his comments upon them.  But all the world go there

to look and listen, and are apparently well satisfied.  And they ought to

be fully satisfied, if the lecturer would only keep still, or die in the

first act.  But he described how retired tradesmen and farmers in Holland

load a lazy scow with the family and the household effects, and then loaf

along the waterways of the low countries all the summer long, paying no

visits, receiving none, and just lazying a heavenly life out in their own

private unpestered society, and doing their literary work, if they have

any, wholly uninterrupted.  If you had hired such a boat and sent for us

we should have a couple of satisfactory books ready for the press now

with no marks of interruption, vexatious wearinesses, and other

hellishnesses visible upon them anywhere.  We shall have to do this

another time.  We have lost an opportunity for the present.  Do you

forget that Heaven is packed with a multitude of all nations and that

these people are all on the most familiar how-the-hell-are-you footing

with Talmage swinging around the circle to all eternity hugging the

saints and patriarchs and archangels, and forcing you to do the same

unless you choose to make yourself an object of remark if you refrain?

Then why do you try to get to Heaven?  Be warned in time.



We have all read your two opening numbers in the Century, and consider

them almost beyond praise.  I hear no dissent from this verdict.  I did

not know there was an untouched personage in American life, but I had

forgotten the auctioneer.  You have photographed him accurately.



I have been an utterly free person for a month or two; and I do not

believe I ever so greatly appreciated and enjoyed--and realized the

absence of the chains of slavery as I do this time.  Usually my first

waking thought in the morning is, "I have nothing to do to-day, I belong

to nobody, I have ceased from being a slave."  Of course the highest

pleasure to be got out of freedom, and having nothing to do, is labor.

Therefore I labor.  But I take my time about it.  I work one hour or four

as happens to suit my mind, and quit when I please.  And so these days

are days of entire enjoyment.  I told Clark the other day, to jog along

comfortable and not get in a sweat.  I said I believed you would not be

able to enjoy editing that library over there, where you have your own

legitimate work to do and be pestered to death by society besides;

therefore I thought if he got it ready for you against your return, that

that would be best and pleasantest.



You remember Governor Jewell, and the night he told about Russia, down in

the library.  He was taken with a cold about three weeks ago, and I

stepped over one evening, proposing to beguile an idle hour for him with

a yarn or two, but was received at the door with whispers, and the

information that he was dying.  His case had been dangerous during that

day only and he died that night, two hours after I left.  His taking off

was a prodigious surprise, and his death has been most widely and

sincerely regretted.  Win. E. Dodge, the father-in-law of one of Jewell's

daughters, dropped suddenly dead the day before Jewell died, but Jewell

died without knowing that.  Jewell's widow went down to New York, to

Dodge's house, the day after Jewell's funeral, and was to return here day

before yesterday, and she did--in a coffin.  She fell dead, of heart

disease, while her trunks were being packed for her return home.

Florence Strong, one of Jewell's daughters, who lives in Detroit, started

East on an urgent telegram, but missed a connection somewhere, and did

not arrive here in time to see her father alive.  She was his favorite

child, and they had always been like lovers together.  He always sent her

a box of fresh flowers once a week to the day of his death; a custom

which he never suspended even when he was in Russia.  Mrs. Strong had

only just reached her Western home again when she was summoned to

Hartford to attend her mother's funeral.



I have had the impulse to write you several times.  I shall try to

remember better henceforth.



With sincerest regards to all of you,

                                   Yours as ever,

                                             MARK.





     Mark Twain made another trip to Canada in the interest of copyright-

     this time to protect the Mississippi book.  When his journey was

     announced by the press, the Marquis of Lorne telegraphed an

     invitation inviting him to be his guest at Rideau Hall, in Ottawa.

     Clemens accepted, of course, and was handsomely entertained by the

     daughter of Queen Victoria and her husband, then Governor-General of

     Canada.



     On his return to Hartford he found that Osgood had issued a curious

     little book, for which Clemens had prepared an introduction.  It was

     an absurd volume, though originally issued with serious intent, its

     title being The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and

     English.'--[The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and

     English, by Pedro Caxolino, with an introduction by Mark Twain.

     Osgood, Boston, 1883. ]--Evidently the "New Guide" was prepared by

     some simple Portuguese soul with but slight knowledge of English

     beyond that which could be obtained from a dictionary, and his

     literal translation of English idioms are often startling, as, for

     instance, this one, taken at random:



     "A little learneds are happies enough for to may to satisfy their

     fancies on the literature."



     Mark Twain thought this quaint book might amuse his royal hostess,

     and forwarded a copy in what he considered to be the safe and proper

     form.



                  To Col. De Winton, in Ottawa, Canada:



                                             HARTFORD, June 4, '83.

DEAR COLONEL DE WINTON,--I very much want to send a little book to her

Royal Highness--the famous Portuguese phrase book; but I do not know the

etiquette of the matter, and I would not wittingly infringe any rule of

propriety.  It is a book which I perfectly well know will amuse her "some

at most" if she has not seen it before, and will still amuse her "some at

least," even if she has inspected it a hundred times already.  So I will

send the book to you, and you who know all about the proper observances

will protect me from indiscretion, in case of need, by putting the said

book in the fire, and remaining as dumb as I generally was when I was up

there.  I do not rebind the thing, because that would look as if I

thought it worth keeping, whereas it is only worth glancing at and

casting aside.



Will you please present my compliments to Mrs. De Winton and Mrs.

Mackenzie?--and I beg to make my sincere compliments to you, also, for

your infinite kindnesses to me.  I did have a delightful time up there,

most certainly.

                    Truly yours

                              S. L. CLEMENS.



P. S.  Although the introduction dates a year back, the book is only just

now issued.  A good long delay.



                                        S. L. C.



     Howells, writing from Venice, in April, manifested special interest

     in the play project: "Something that would run like Scheherazade,

     for a thousand and one nights," so perhaps his book was going

     better.  He proposed that they devote the month of October to the

     work, and inclosed a letter from Mallory, who owned not only a

     religious paper, The Churchman, but also the Madison Square Theater,

     and was anxious for a Howells play.  Twenty years before Howells had

     been Consul to Venice, and he wrote, now: "The idea of my being here

     is benumbing and silencing.  I feel like the Wandering Jew, or the

     ghost of the Cardiff giant."



     He returned to America in July.  Clemens sent him word of welcome,

     with glowing reports of his own undertakings.  The story on which he

     was piling up MS. was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, begun

     seven years before at Quarry Farm.  He had no great faith in it

     then, and though he had taken it up again in 1880, his interest had

     not lasted to its conclusion.  This time, however, he was in the

     proper spirit, and the story would be finished.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        ELMIRA, July 20, '83.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--We are desperately glad you and your gang are home

again--may you never travel again, till you go aloft or alow.  Charley

Clark has gone to the other side for a run--will be back in August.  He

has been sick, and needed the trip very much.



Mrs. Clemens had a long and wasting spell of sickness last Spring, but

she is pulling up, now.  The children are booming, and my health is

ridiculous, it's so robust, notwithstanding the newspaper misreports.



I haven't piled up MS so in years as I have done since we came here to

the farm three weeks and a half ago.  Why, it's like old times, to step

right into the study, damp from the breakfast table, and sail right in

and sail right on, the whole day long, without thought of running short

of stuff or words.



I wrote 4000 words to-day and I touch 3000 and upwards pretty often, and

don't fall below 1600 any working day.  And when I get fagged out, I lie

abed a couple of days and read and smoke, and then go it again for 6 or 7

days.  I have finished one small book, and am away along in a big 433

one that I half-finished two or three years ago.  I expect to complete it

in a month or six weeks or two months more.  And I shall like it, whether

anybody else does or not.



It's a kind of companion to Tom Sawyer.  There's a raft episode from it

in second or third chapter of life on the Mississippi.....



I'm booming, these days--got health and spirits to waste--got an

overplus; and if I were at home, we would write a play.  But we must do

it anyhow by and by.



We stay here till Sep. 10; then maybe a week at Indian Neck for sea air,

then home.



We are powerful glad you are all back; and send love according.



                         Yrs Ever

                              MARK





               To Orion Clemens and family, in Keokuk, Id.:



                                        ELMIRA, July 22, '83.

Private



DEAR MA AND ORION AND MOLLIE,--I don't know that I have anything new to

report, except that Livy is still gaining, and all the rest of us

flourishing.  I haven't had such booming working-days for many years.

I am piling up manuscript in a really astonishing way.  I believe I shall

complete, in two months, a book which I have been fooling over for

7 years.  This summer it is no more trouble to me to write than it is to

lie.



Day before yesterday I felt slightly warned to knock off work for one

day.  So I did it, and took the open air.  Then I struck an idea for the

instruction of the children, and went to work and carried it out.  It

took me all day.  I measured off 817 feet of the road-way in our farm

grounds, with a foot-rule, and then divided it up among the English

reigns, from the Conqueror down to 1883, allowing one foot to the year.

I whittled out a basket of little pegs and drove one in the ground at the

beginning of each reign, and gave it that King's name--thus:



I measured all the reigns exactly as many feet to the reign as there were

years in it.  You can look out over the grounds and see the little pegs

from the front door--some of them close together, like Richard II,

Richard Cromwell, James II, &c; and some prodigiously wide apart, like

Henry III, Edward III, George III, &c.  It gives the children a realizing

sense of the length or brevity of a reign.  Shall invent a violent game

to go with it.



And in bed, last night, I invented a way to play it indoors--in a far

more voluminous way, as to multiplicity of dates and events--on a

cribbage board.



Hello, supper's ready.

          Love to all.

                    Good bye.

                         SAML.





     Orion Clemens would naturally get excited over the idea of the game

     and its commercial possibilities.  Not more so than his brother,

     however, who presently employed him to arrange a quantity of

     historical data which the game was to teach.  For a season, indeed,

     interest in the game became a sort of midsummer madness which

     pervaded the two households, at Keokuk and at Quarry Farm.  Howells

     wrote his approval of the idea of "learning history by the running

     foot," which was a pun, even if unintentional, for in its out-door

     form it was a game of speed as well as knowledge.



     Howells adds that he has noticed that the newspapers are exploiting

     Mark Twain's new invention of a history game, and we shall presently

     see how this happened.



     Also, in this letter, Howells speaks of an English nobleman to whom

     he has given a letter of introduction.  "He seemed a simple, quiet,

     gentlemanly man, with a good taste in literature, which he evinced

     by going about with my books in his pockets, and talking of yours."





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



MY DEAR HOWELLS,--How odd it seems, to sit down to write a letter with

the feeling that you've got time to do it.  But I'm done work, for this

season, and so have got time.  I've done two seasons' work in one, and

haven't anything left to do, now, but revise.  I've written eight or nine

hundred MS pages in such a brief space of time that I mustn't name the

number of days; I shouldn't believe it myself, and of course couldn't

expect you to.  I used to restrict myself to 4 or 5 hours a day and

5 days in the week, but this time I've wrought from breakfast till

5.15 p.m. six days in the week; and once or twice I smouched a Sunday

when the boss wasn't looking.  Nothing is half so good as literature

hooked on Sunday, on the sly.



I wrote you and Twichell on the same night, about the game, and was

appalled to get a note from him saying he was going to print part of my

letter, and was going to do it before I could get a chance to forbid it.

I telegraphed him, but was of course too late.



If you haven't ever tried to invent an indoor historical game, don't.

I've got the thing at last so it will work, I guess, but I don't want any

more tasks of that kind.  When I wrote you, I thought I had it; whereas I

was only merely entering upon the initiatory difficulties of it.  I might

have known it wouldn't be an easy job, or somebody would have invented a

decent historical game long ago--a thing which nobody had done.  I think

I've got it in pretty fair shape--so I have caveated it.



Earl of Onston--is that it?  All right, we shall be very glad to receive

them and get acquainted with them.  And much obliged to you, too.

There's plenty of worse people than the nobilities.  I went up and spent

a week with the Marquis and the Princess Louise, and had as good a time

as I want.



I'm powerful glad you are all back again; and we will come up there if

our little tribe will give us the necessary furlough; and if we can't get

it, you folks must come to us and give us an extension of time.  We get

home Sept. 11.



Hello, I think I see Waring coming!



Good-by-letter from Clark, which explains for him.



Love to you all from the

                         CLEMENSES.



No--it wasn't Waring.  I wonder what the devil has become of that man.

He was to spend to-day with us, and the day's most gone, now.



We are enjoying your story with our usual unspeakableness; and I'm right

glad you threw in the shipwreck and the mystery--I like it.  Mrs. Crane

thinks it's the best story you've written yet.  We--but we always think

the last one is the best.  And why shouldn't it be?  Practice helps.



P. S.  I thought I had sent all our loves to all of you, but Mrs. Clemens

says I haven't.  Damn it, a body can't think of everything; but a woman

thinks you can.  I better seal this, now--else there'll be more

criticism.



I perceive I haven't got the love in, yet.  Well, we do send the love of

all the family to all the Howellses.

                                        S. L. C.





There had been some delay and postponement in the matter of the play

which Howells and Clemens agreed to write.  They did not put in the

entire month of October as they had planned, but they did put in a

portion of that month, the latter half, working out their old idea.

In the end it became a revival of Colonel Sellers, or rather a caricature

of that gentle hearted old visionary.  Clemens had always complained that

the actor Raymond had never brought out the finer shades of Colonel

Sellers's character, but Raymond in his worst performance never belied

his original as did Howells and Clemens in his dramatic revival.  These

two, working together, let their imaginations run riot with disastrous

results.  The reader can judge something of this himself, from The

American Claimant the book which Mark Twain would later build from the

play.



But at this time they thought it a great triumph.  They had "cracked

their sides" laughing over its construction, as Howells once said, and

they thought the world would do the same over its performance.  They

decided to offer it to Raymond, but rather haughtily, indifferently,

because any number of other actors would be waiting for it.



But this was a miscalculation.  Raymond now turned the tables.  Though

favorable to the idea of a new play, he declared this one did not present

his old Sellers at all, but a lunatic.  In the end he returned the MS.

with a brief note.  Attempts had already been made to interest other

actors, and  would continue for some time.









XXIV



LETTERS, 1884, TO HOWELLS AND OTHERS.  CABLE'S GREAT APRIL FOOL.

"HUCK FINN" IN PRESS.  MARK TWAIN FOR CLEVELAND.  CLEMENS AND CABLE



Mark Twain had a lingering attack of the dramatic fever that winter.

He made a play of the Prince and Pauper, which Howells pronounced "too

thin and slight and not half long enough."  He made another of Tom

Sawyer, and probably destroyed it, for no trace of the MS. exists to-day.

Howells could not join in these ventures, for he was otherwise occupied

and had sickness in his household.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                                  Jan.  7, '84.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--"O my goodn's", as Jean says.  You have now encountered

at last the heaviest calamity that can befall an author.  The scarlet

fever, once domesticated, is a permanent member of the family.  Money may

desert you, friends forsake you, enemies grow indifferent to you, but the

scarlet fever will be true to you, through thick and thin, till you be

all saved or damned, down to the last one.  I say these things to cheer

you.



The bare suggestion of scarlet fever in the family makes me shudder; I

believe I would almost rather have Osgood publish a book for me.



You folks have our most sincere sympathy.  Oh, the intrusion of this

hideous disease is an unspeakable disaster.



My billiard table is stacked up with books relating to the Sandwich

Islands: the walls axe upholstered with scraps of paper penciled with

notes drawn from them.  I have saturated myself with knowledge of that

unimaginably beautiful land and that most strange and fascinating people.

And I have begun a story.  Its hidden motive will illustrate a but-little

considered fact in human nature; that the religious folly you are born in

you will die in, no matter what apparently reasonabler religious folly

may seem to have taken its place meanwhile, and abolished and obliterated

it.  I start Bill Ragsdale at 12 years of age, and the heroine at 4, in

the midst of the ancient idolatrous system, with its picturesque and

amazing customs and superstitions, 3 months before the arrival of the

missionaries and the erection of a shallow Christianity upon the ruins of

the old paganism.  Then these two will become educated Christians, and

highly civilized.



And then I will jump 15 years, and do Ragsdale's leper business.  When we

came to dramatize, we can draw a deal of matter from the story, all ready

to our hand.

                    Yrs Ever

                              MARK.





     He never finished the Sandwich Islands story which he and Howells

     were to dramatize later.  His head filled up with other projects,

     such as publishing plans, reading-tours, and the like.  The type-

     setting machine does not appear in the letters of this period, but

     it was an important factor, nevertheless.  It was costing several

     thousand dollars a month for construction and becoming a heavy drain

     on Mark Twain's finances.  It was necessary to recuperate, and the

     anxiety for a profitable play, or some other adventure that would

     bring a quick and generous return, grew out of this need.



     Clemens had established Charles L.  Webster, his nephew by marriage,

     in a New York office, as selling agent for the Mississippi book and

     for his plays.  He was also planning to let Webster publish the new

     book, Huck Finn.



     George W. Cable had proven his ability as a reader, and Clemens saw

     possibilities in a reading combination, which was first planned to

     include Aldrich, and Howells, and a private car.



     But Aldrich and Howells did not warm to the idea, and the car was

     eliminated from the plan.  Cable came to visit Clemens in Hartford,

     and was taken with the mumps, so that the reading-trip was

     postponed.



     The fortunes of the Sellers play were most uncertain and becoming

     daily more doubtful.  In February, Howells wrote: "If you have got

     any comfort in regard to our play I wish you would heave it into my

     bosom."



     Cable recovered in time, and out of gratitude planned a great April-

     fool surprise for his host.  He was a systematic man, and did it in

     his usual thorough way.  He sent a "private and confidential"

     suggestion to a hundred and fifty of Mark Twain's friends and

     admirers, nearly all distinguished literary men.  The suggestion was

     that each one of them should send a request for Mark Twain's

     autograph, timing it so that it would arrive on the 1st of April.

     All seemed to have responded.  Mark Twain's writing-table on April

     Fool morning was heaped with letters, asking in every ridiculous

     fashion for his "valuable autograph."  The one from Aldrich was a

     fair sample.  He wrote: "I am making a collection of autographs of

     our distinguished writers, and having read one of your works,

     Gabriel Convoy, I would like to add your name to the list."



     Of course, the joke in this was that Gabriel Convoy was by Bret

     Harte, who by this time was thoroughly detested by Mark Twain.  The

     first one or two of the letters puzzled the victim; then he

     comprehended the size and character of the joke and entered into it

     thoroughly.  One of the letters was from Bloodgood H. Cutter, the

     "Poet Lariat" of Innocents Abroad.  Cutter, of course, wrote in

     "poetry," that is to say, doggerel.  Mark Twain's April Fool was a

     most pleasant one.





           Rhymed letter by Bloodgood H. Cutter to Mark Twain:



                                             LITTLE NECK, LONG ISLAND.



         LONG ISLAND FARMER, TO HIS FRIEND AND PILGRIM BROTHER,

                        SAMUEL L.  CLEMENS, ESQ.



Friends, suggest in each one's behalf

To write, and ask your autograph.

To refuse that, I will not do,

After the long voyage had with you.

That was a memorable time You wrote in prose, I wrote in Rhyme To

describe the wonders of each place, And the queer customs of each race.



That is in my memory yet

For while I live I'll not forget.

I often think of that affair

And the many that were with us there.



As your friends think it for the best

I ask your Autograph with the rest,

Hoping you will it to me send

'Twill please and cheer your dear old friend:



                    Yours truly,

                              BLOODGOOD H.  CUTTER.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             HARTFORD, Apl 8, '84.

MY DEAR HOWELLS, It took my breath away, and I haven't recovered it yet,

entirely--I mean the generosity of your proposal to read the proofs of

Huck Finn.



Now if you mean it, old man--if you are in earnest--proceed, in God's

name, and be by me forever blest.  I cannot conceive of a rational man

deliberately piling such an atrocious job upon himself; but if there is

such a man and you be that man, why then pile it on.  It will cost me a

pang every time I think of it, but this anguish will be eingebusst to me

in the joy and comfort I shall get out of the not having to read the

verfluchtete proofs myself.  But if you have repented of your

augenblichlicher Tobsucht and got back to calm cold reason again, I won't

hold you to it unless I find I have got you down in writing somewhere.

Herr, I would not read the proof of one of my books for any fair and

reasonable sum whatever, if I could get out of it.



The proof-reading on the P & P cost me the last rags of my religion.

                         M.





Howells had written that he would be glad to help out in the reading of

the proofs of Huck Finn, which book Webster by this time had in hand.

Replying to Clemens's eager and grateful acceptance now, he wrote: "It is

all perfectly true about the generosity, unless I am going to read your

proofs from one of the shabby motives which I always find at the bottom

of my soul if I examine it."  A characteristic utterance, though we may

be permitted to believe that his shabby motives were fewer and less

shabby than those of mankind in general.



The proofs which Howells was reading pleased him mightily.  Once, during

the summer, he wrote: "if I had written half as good a book as Huck Finn

I shouldn't ask anything better than to read the proofs; even as it is,

I don't, so send them on; they will always find me somewhere."



This was the summer of the Blaine-Cleveland campaign.  Mark Twain, in

company with many other leading men, had mugwumped, and was supporting

Cleveland.  From the next letter we gather something of the aspects of

that memorable campaign, which was one of scandal and vituperation.  We

learn, too, that the young sculptor, Karl Gerhardt, having completed a

three years' study in Paris, had returned to America a qualified artist.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                                  ELMIRA, Aug.  21, '84.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--This presidential campaign is too delicious for

anything.  Isn't human nature the most consummate sham and lie that was

ever invented?  Isn't man a creature to be ashamed of in pretty much all

his aspects?  Man, "know thyself "--and then thou wilt despise thyself,

to a dead moral certainty.  Take three quite good specimens--Hawley,

Warner, and Charley Clark.  Even I do not loathe Blaine more than they

do; yet Hawley is howling for Blaine, Warner and Clark are eating their

daily crow in the paper for him, and all three will vote for him.  O

Stultification, where is thy sting, O slave where is thy hickory!



I suppose you heard how a marble monument for which St. Gaudens was

pecuniarily responsible, burned down in Hartford the other day,

uninsured--for who in the world would ever think of insuring a marble

shaft in a cemetery against a fire?--and left St. Gauden out of pocket

$15,000.



It was a bad day for artists.  Gerhardt finished my bust that day, and

the work was pronounced admirable by all the kin and friends; but in

putting it in plaster (or rather taking it out) next day it got ruined.

It was four or five weeks hard work gone to the dogs.  The news flew, and

everybody on the farm flocked to the arbor and grouped themselves about

the wreck in a profound and moving silence--the farm-help, the colored

servants, the German nurse, the children, everybody--a silence

interrupted at wide intervals by absent-minded ejaculations wising from

unconscious breasts as the whole size of the disaster gradually worked

its way home to the realization of one spirit after another.



Some burst out with one thing, some another; the German nurse put up her

hands and said, "Oh, Schade!  oh, schrecklich!  "But Gerhardt said

nothing; or almost that.  He couldn't word it, I suppose.  But he went to

work, and by dark had everything thoroughly well under way for a fresh

start in the morning; and in three days' time had built a new bust which

was a trifle better than the old one--and to-morrow we shall put the

finishing touches on it, and it will be about as good a one as nearly

anybody can make.

                         Yrs Ever

                                   MARK.





If you run across anybody who wants a bust, be sure and recommend

Gerhardt on my say-so.



But Howells was determinedly for Blaine.  "I shall vote for Blaine," he

replied.  "I do not believe he is guilty of the things they accuse him

of, and I know they are not proved against him.  As for Cleveland, his

private life may be no worse than that of most men, but as an enemy of

that contemptible, hypocritical, lop-sided morality which says a woman

shall suffer all the shame of unchastity and man none, I want to see him

destroyed politically by his past.  The men who defend him would take

their wives to the White House if he were president, but if he married

his concubine--'made her an honest woman' they would not go near him.  I

can't stand that."



Certainly this was sound logic, in that day, at least.  But it left

Clemens far from satisfied.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             ELMIRA, Sept. 17, '84.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Somehow I can't seem to rest quiet under the idea of

your voting for Blaine.  I believe you said something about the country

and the party.  Certainly allegiance to these is well; but as certainly a

man's first duty is to his own conscience and honor--the party or the

country come second to that, and never first.  I don't ask you to vote at

all--I only urge you to not soil yourself by voting for Blaine.



When you wrote before, you were able to say the charges against him were

not proven.  But you know now that they are proven, and it seems to me

that that bars you and all other honest and honorable men (who are

independently situated) from voting for him.



It is not necessary to vote for Cleveland; the only necessary thing to

do, as I understand it, is that a man shall keep himself clean, (by

withholding his vote for an improper man) even though the party and the

country go to destruction in consequence.  It is not parties that make or

save countries or that build them to greatness--it is clean men, clean

ordinary citizens, rank and file, the masses.  Clean masses are not made

by individuals standing back till the rest become clean.



As I said before, I think a man's first duty is to his own honor; not to

his country and not to his party.  Don't be offended; I mean no offence.

I am not so concerned about the rest of the nation, but--well, good-bye.

                                   Ys Ever

                                             MARK.





     There does not appear to be any further discussion of the matter

     between Howells and Clemens.  Their letters for a time contained no

     suggestion of politics.



     Perhaps Mark Twain's own political conscience was not entirely clear

     in his repudiation of his party; at least we may believe from his

     next letter that his Cleveland enthusiasm was qualified by a

     willingness to support a Republican who would command his admiration

     and honor.  The idea of an eleventh-hour nomination was rather

     startling, whatever its motive.





                        To Mr. Pierce, in Boston:



                                             HARTFORD, Oct.  22, '84.

MY DEAR MR. PIERCE,--You know, as well as I do, that the reason the

majority of republicans are going to vote for Blaine is because they feel

that they cannot help themselves.  Do not you believe that if Mr. Edmunds

would consent to run for President, on the Independent ticket--even at

this late day--he might be elected?



Well, if he wouldn't consent, but should even strenuously protest and say

he wouldn't serve if elected, isn't it still wise and fair to nominate

him and vote for him? since his protest would relieve him from all

responsibility; and he couldn't surely find fault with people for forcing

a compliment upon him.  And do not you believe that his name thus

compulsorily placed at the head of the Independent column would work

absolutely certain defeat to Blain and save the country's honor?



Politicians often carry a victory by springing some disgraceful and

rascally mine under the feet of the adversary at the eleventh hour; would

it not be wholesome to vary this thing for once and spring as formidable

a mine of a better sort under the enemy's works?



If Edmunds's name were put up, I would vote for him in the teeth of all

the protesting and blaspheming he could do in a month; and there are lots

of others who would do likewise.



If this notion is not a foolish and wicked one, won't you just consult

with some chief Independents, and see if they won't call a sudden

convention and whoop the thing through?  To nominate Edmunds the 1st of

November, would be soon enough, wouldn't it?



With kindest regards to you and the Aldriches,

                                   Yr Truly

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.





Clemens and Cable set out on their reading-tour in November.  They were a

curiously-assorted pair: Cable was of orthodox religion, exact as to

habits, neat, prim, all that Clemens was not.  In the beginning Cable

undertook to read the Bible aloud to Clemens each evening, but this part

of the day's program was presently omitted by request.  If they spent

Sunday in a town, Cable was up bright and early visiting the various

churches and Sunday-schools, while Mark Twain remained at the hotel, in

bed, reading or asleep.









XXV



THE GREAT YEAR OF 1885.  CLEMENS AND CABLE.  PUBLICATION OF "HUCK FINN."

THE GRANT MEMOIRS.  MARK TWAIN AT FIFTY



     The year 1885 was in some respects the most important, certainly the

     most pleasantly exciting, in Mark Twain's life.  It was the year in

     which he entered fully into the publishing business and launched one

     of the most spectacular of all publishing adventures, The Personal

     Memoirs of General U. S. Grant.  Clemens had not intended to do

     general publishing when he arranged with Webster to become sales-

     agent for the Mississippi book, and later general agent for Huck

     Finn's adventures; he had intended only to handle his own books,

     because he was pretty thoroughly dissatisfied with other publishing

     arrangements.  Even the Library of Humor, which Howells, with Clark,

     of the Courant, had put together for him, he left with Osgood until

     that publisher failed, during the spring of 1885.  Certainly he

     never dreamed of undertaking anything of the proportions of the

     Grant book.



     He had always believed that Grant could make a book.  More than

     once, when they had met, he had urged the General to prepare his

     memoirs for publication.  Howells, in his 'My Mark Twain', tells of

     going with Clemens to see Grant, then a member of the ill-fated firm

     of Grant and Ward, and how they lunched on beans, bacon and coffee

     brought in from a near-by restaurant.  It was while they were eating

     this soldier fare that Clemens--very likely abetted by Howells--

     especially urged the great commander to prepare his memoirs.  But

     Grant had become a financier, as he believed, and the prospect of

     literary earnings, however large, did not appeal to him.

     Furthermore, he was convinced that he was without literary ability

     and that a book by him would prove a failure.



     But then, by and by, came a failure more disastrous than anything he

     had foreseen--the downfall of his firm through the Napoleonic

     rascality of Ward.  General Grant was utterly ruined; he was left

     without income and apparently without the means of earning one.  It

     was the period when the great War Series was appeasing in the

     Century Magazine.  General Grant, hard-pressed, was induced by the

     editors to prepare one or more articles, and, finding that he could

     write them, became interested in the idea of a book.  It is

     unnecessary to repeat here the story of how the publication of this

     important work passed into the hands of Mark Twain; that is to say,

     the firm of Charles L. Webster & Co., the details having been fully

     given elsewhere.--[See Mark Twain: A Biography, chap.  cliv.]--



     We will now return for the moment to other matters, as reported in

     order by the letters.  Clemens and Cable had continued their

     reading-tour into Canada, and in February found themselves in

     Montreal.  Here they were invited by the Toque Bleue Snow-shoe Club

     to join in one of their weekly excursions across Mt. Royal.  They

     could not go, and the reasons given by Mark Twain are not without

     interest.  The letter is to Mr. George Iles, author of Flame,

     Electricity, and the Camera, and many other useful works.





            To George Iles, far the Toque Blew Snow-shoe Club,

                                Montreal:



                                   DETROIT, February 12, 1885.

                                   Midnight, P.S.

MY DEAR ILES,--I got your other telegram a while ago, and answered it,

explaining that I get only a couple of hours in the middle of the day for

social life.  I know it doesn't seem rational that a man should have to

lie abed all day in order to be rested and equipped for talking an hour

at night, and yet in my case and Cable's it is so.  Unless I get a great

deal of rest, a ghastly dulness settles down upon me on the platform, and

turns my performance into work, and hard work, whereas it ought always to

be pastime, recreation, solid enjoyment.  Usually it is just this latter,

but that is because I take my rest faithfully, and prepare myself to do

my duty by my audience.



I am the obliged and appreciative servant of my brethren of the Snow-shoe

Club, and nothing in the world would delight me more than to come to

their house without naming time or terms on my own part--but you see how

it is.  My cast iron duty is to my audience--it leaves me no liberty and

no option.



With kindest regards to the Club, and to you,

               I am Sincerely yours

                              S. L. CLEMENS.



     In the next letter we reach the end of the Clemens-Cable venture and

     get a characteristic summing up of Mark Twain's general attitude

     toward the companion of his travels.  It must be read only in the

     clear realization of Mark Twain's attitude toward orthodoxy, and his

     habit of humor.  Cable was as rigidly orthodox as Mark Twain was

     revolutionary.  The two were never anything but the best of friends.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        PHILADA.  Feb. 27, '85.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--To-night in Baltimore, to-morrow afternoon and night in

Washington, and my four-months platform campaign is ended at last.  It

has been a curious experience.  It has taught me that Cable's gifts of

mind are greater and higher than I had suspected.  But--



That "But" is pointing toward his religion.  You will never, never know,

never divine, guess, imagine, how loathsome a thing the Christian

religion can be made until you come to know and study Cable daily and

hourly.  Mind you, I like him; he is pleasant company; I rage and swear

at him sometimes, but we do not quarrel; we get along mighty happily

together; but in him and his person I have learned to hate all religions.

He has taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath-day and hunt up new and

troublesome ways to dishonor it.



Nat Goodwin was on the train yesterday.  He plays in Washington all the

coming week.  He is very anxious to get our Sellers play and play it

under changed names.  I said the only thing I could do would be to write

to you.  Well, I've done it.

                              Ys Ever

                                        MARK.





     Clemens and Webster were often at the house of General Grant during

     these early days of 1885, and it must have been Webster who was

     present with Clemens on the great occasion described in the

     following telegram.  It was on the last day and hour of President

     Arthur's administration that the bill was passed which placed

     Ulysses S. Grant as full General with full pay on the retired list,

     and it is said that the congressional clock was set back in order

     that this enactment might become a law before the administration

     changed.  General Grant had by this time developed cancer and was

     already in feeble health.





                  Telegram to Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford:



                                             NEW YORK, Mar. 4, 1885.

To MRS. S. L. CLEMENS, We were at General Grant's at noon and a telegram

arrived that the last act of the expiring congress late this morning

retired him with full General's rank and accompanying emoluments.  The

effect upon him was like raising the dead.  We were present when the

telegram was put in his hand.



                              S. L. CLEMENS.





     Something has been mentioned before of Mark Twain's investments and

     the generally unprofitable habit of them.  He had a trusting nature,

     and was usually willing to invest money on any plausible

     recommendation.  He was one of thousands such, and being a person of

     distinction he now and then received letters of inquiry, complaint,

     or condolence.  A minister wrote him that he had bought some stocks

     recommended by a Hartford banker and advertised in a religious

     paper.  He added, "After I made that purchase they wrote me that you

     had just bought a hundred shares and that you were a 'shrewd' man."

     The writer closed by asking for further information.  He received

     it, as follows:





                     To the Rev. J----, in Baltimore:



                                             WASHINGTON, Mch.  2,'85.

MY DEAR SIR,--I take my earliest opportunity to answer your favor of Feb.



B---- was premature in calling me a "shrewd man."  I wasn't one at that

time, but am one now--that is, I am at least too shrewd to ever again

invest in anything put on the market by B----.  I know nothing whatever

about the Bank Note Co., and never did know anything about it.  B----

sold me about $4,000 or $5,000 worth of the stock at $110, and I own it

yet.  He sold me $10,000 worth of another rose-tinted stock about the

same time.  I have got that yet, also.  I judge that a peculiarity of

B----'s stocks is that they are of the staying kind.  I think you should

have asked somebody else whether I was a shrewd man or not for two

reasons: the stock was advertised in a religious paper, a circumstance

which was very suspicious; and the compliment came to you from a man who

was interested to make a purchaser of you.  I am afraid you deserve your

loss.  A financial scheme advertised in any religious paper is a thing

which any living person ought to know enough to avoid; and when the

factor is added that M. runs that religious paper, a dead person ought to

know enough to avoid it.

                              Very Truly Yours

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     The story of Huck Finn was having a wide success.  Webster handled

     it skillfully, and the sales were large.  In almost every quarter

     its welcome was enthusiastic.  Here and there, however, could be

     found an exception; Huck's morals were not always approved of by

     library reading-committees.  The first instance of this kind was

     reported from Concord; and would seem not to have depressed the

     author-publisher.





                   To Chas.  L.  Webster, in New York:



                                                       Mch 18, '85.

DEAR CHARLEY,--The Committee of the Public Library of Concord, Mass, have

given us a rattling tip-top puff which will go into every paper in the

country.  They have expelled Huck from their library as "trash and

suitable only for the slums."  That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure.



                                        S. L. C.





     Perhaps the Concord Free Trade Club had some idea of making amends

     to Mark Twain for the slight put upon his book by their librarians,

     for immediately after the Huck Finn incident they notified him of

     his election to honorary membership.



     Those were the days of "authors' readings," and Clemens and Howells

     not infrequently assisted at these functions, usually given as

     benefits of one kind or another.  From the next letter, written

     following an entertainment given for the Longfellow memorial, we

     gather that Mark Twain's opinion of Howells's reading was steadily

     improving.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             HARTFORD, May 5, '85.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--.....Who taught you to read?  Observation and thought,

I guess.  And practice at the Tavern Club?--yes; and that was the best

teaching of all:



Well, you sent even your daintiest and most delicate and fleeting points

home to that audience--absolute proof of good reading.  But you couldn't

read worth a damn a few years ago.  I do not say this to flatter.  It is

true I looked around for you when I was leaving, but you had already

gone.



Alas, Osgood has failed at last.  It was easy to see that he was on the

very verge of it a year ago, and it was also easy to see that he was

still on the verge of it a month or two ago; but I continued to hope--but

not expect that he would pull through.  The Library of Humor is at his

dwelling house, and he will hand it to you whenever you want it.



To save it from any possibility of getting mixed up in the failure,

perhaps you had better send down and get it.  I told him, the other day,

that an order of any kind from you would be his sufficient warrant for

its delivery to you.



In two days General Grant has dictated 50 pages of foolscap, and thus the

Wilderness and Appomattox stand for all time in his own words.  This

makes the second volume of his book as valuable as the first.



He looks mighty well, these latter days.

                                        Yrs Ever

                                                  MARK.





     "I am exceedingly glad," wrote Howells, "that you approve of my

     reading, for it gives me some hope that I may do something on the

     platform next winter.....  but I would never read within a hundred

     miles of you, if I could help it.  You simply straddled down to the

     footlights and took that house up in the hollow of your hand and

     tickled it."





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        ELMIRA, July 21, 1885.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--You are really my only author; I am restricted to you,

I wouldn't give a damn for the rest.



I bored through Middlemarch during the past week, with its labored and

tedious analyses of feelings and motives, its paltry and tiresome people,

its unexciting and uninteresting story, and its frequent blinding flashes

of single-sentence poetry, philosophy, wit, and what not, and nearly died

from the overwork.  I wouldn't read another of those books for a farm.

I did try to read one other--Daniel Deronda.  I dragged through three

chapters, losing flesh all the time, and then was honest enough to quit,

and confess to myself that I haven't any romance literature appetite, as

far as I can see, except for your books.



But what I started to say, was, that I have just read Part II of Indian

Summer, and to my mind there isn't a waste line in it, or one that could

be improved.  I read it yesterday, ending with that opinion; and read it

again to-day, ending with the same opinion emphasized.  I haven't read

Part I yet, because that number must have reached Hartford after we left;

but we are going to send down town for a copy, and when it comes I am to

read both parts aloud to the family.  It is a beautiful story, and makes

a body laugh all the time, and cry inside, and feel so old and so

forlorn; and gives him gracious glimpses of his lost youth that fill him

with a measureless regret, and build up in him a cloudy sense of his

having been a prince, once, in some enchanted far-off land, and of being

an exile now, and desolate--and Lord, no chance ever to get back there

again!  That is the thing that hurts.  Well, you have done it with

marvelous facility and you make all the motives and feelings perfectly

clear without analyzing the guts out of them, the way George Eliot does.

I can't stand George Eliot and Hawthorne and those people; I see what

they are at a hundred years before they get to it and they just tire me

to death.  And as for "The Bostonians," I would rather be damned to John

Bunyan's heaven than read that.

                                   Yrs Ever

                                             MARK





     It is as easy to understand Mark Twain's enjoyment of Indian Summer

     as his revolt against Daniel Deronda and The Bostonians.  He cared

     little for writing that did not convey its purpose in the simplest

     and most direct terms.  It is interesting to note that in thanking

     Clemens for his compliment Howells wrote: "What people cannot see is

     that I analyze as little as possible; they go on talking about the

     analytical school, which I am supposed to belong to, and I want to

     thank you for using your eyes.....  Did you ever read De Foe's

     'Roxana'?  If not, then read it, not merely for some of the deepest

     insights into the lying, suffering, sinning, well-meaning human

     soul, but for the best and most natural English that a book was ever

     written in."



     General Grant worked steadily on his book, dictating when he could,

     making brief notes on slips of paper when he could no longer speak.

     Clemens visited him at Mt. McGregor and brought the dying soldier

     the comforting news that enough of his books were already sold to

     provide generously for his family, and that the sales would

     aggregate at least twice as much by the end of the year.



     This was some time in July.  On the 23d of that month General Grant

     died.  Immediately there was a newspaper discussion as to the most

     suitable place for the great chieftain to lie.  Mark Twain's

     contribution to this debate, though in the form of an open letter,

     seems worthy of preservation here.





       To the New York "Sun," on the proper place for Grant's Tomb:



To THE EDITOR OP' THE SUN:--SIR,--The newspaper atmosphere is charged

with objections to New York as a place of sepulchre for General Grant,

and the objectors are strenuous that Washington is the right place.  They

offer good reasons--good temporary reasons--for both of these positions.



But it seems to me that temporary reasons are not mete for the occasion.

We need to consider posterity rather than our own generation.  We should

select a grave which will not merely be in the right place now, but will

still be in the right place 500 years from now.



How does Washington promise as to that?  You have only to hit it in one

place to kill it.  Some day the west will be numerically strong enough to

move the seat of government; her past attempts are a fair warning that

when the day comes she will do it.  Then the city of Washington will lose

its consequence and pass out of the public view and public talk.  It is

quite within the possibilities that, a century hence, people would wonder

and say, "How did your predecessors come to bury their great dead in this

deserted place?"



But as long as American civilisation lasts New York will last.  I cannot

but think she has been well and wisely chosen as the guardian of a grave

which is destined to become almost the most conspicuous in the world's

history.  Twenty centuries from now New York will still be New York,

still a vast city, and the most notable object in it will still be the

tomb and monument of General Grant.



I observe that the common and strongest objection to New York is that she

is not "national ground."  Let us give ourselves no uneasiness about

that.  Wherever General Grant's body lies, that is national ground.



                                        S. L. CLEMENS.

ELMIRA, July 27.





     The letter that follows is very long, but it seems too important and

     too interesting to be omitted in any part.  General Grant's early

     indulgence in liquors had long been a matter of wide, though not

     very definite, knowledge.  Every one had heard how Lincoln, on being

     told that Grant drank, remarked something to the effect that he

     would like to know what kind of whisky Grant used so that he might

     get some of it for his other generals.  Henry Ward Beecher, selected

     to deliver a eulogy on the dead soldier, and doubtless wishing

     neither to ignore the matter nor to make too much of it, naturally

     turned for information to the publisher of Grant's own memoirs,

     hoping from an advance copy to obtain light.





                     To Henry Ward Beecher,.Brooklyn:



                                        ELMIRA, N. Y.  Sept. 11, '85.

MY DEAR MR. BEECHER,--My nephew Webster is in Europe making contracts for

the Memoirs.  Before he sailed he came to me with a writing, directed to

the printers and binders, to this effect:



"Honor no order for a sight or copy of the Memoirs while I am absent,

even though it be signed by Mr. Clemens himself."



I gave my permission.  There were weighty reasons why I should not only

give my permission, but hold it a matter of honor to not dissolve the

order or modify it at any time.  So I did all of that--said the order

should stand undisturbed to the end.  If a principal could dissolve his

promise as innocently as he can dissolve his written order unguarded by

his promise, I would send you a copy of the Memoirs instantly.  I did not

foresee you, or I would have made an exception.



                    ...........................



My idea gained from army men, is that the drunkenness (and sometimes

pretty reckless spreeing, nights,) ceased before he came East to be Lt.

General.  (Refer especially to Gen. Wm. B. Franklin--[If you could see

Franklin and talk with him--then he would unbosom,]) It was while Grant

was still in the West that Mr. Lincoln said he wished he could find out

what brand of whisky that fellow used, so he could furnish it to some of

the other generals.  Franklin saw Grant tumble from his horse drunk,

while reviewing troops in New Orleans.  The fall gave him a good deal of

a hurt.  He was then on the point of leaving for the Chattanooga region.

I naturally put "that and that together" when I read Gen. O. O. Howards's

article in the Christian Union, three or four weeks ago--where he

mentions that the new General arrived lame from a recent accident.

(See that article.) And why not write Howard?



Franklin spoke positively of the frequent spreeing.  In camp--in time of

war.



                    .........................



Captain Grant was frequently threatened by the Commandant of his Oregon

post with a report to the War Department of his conduct unless he

modified his intemperance.  The report would mean dismissal from the

service.  At last the report had to be made out; and then, so greatly was

the captain beloved, that he was privately informed, and was thus enabled

to rush his resignation to Washington ahead of the report.  Did the

report go, nevertheless?  I don't know.  If it did, it is in the War

Department now, possibly, and seeable.  I got all this from a regular

army man, but I can't name him to save me.



The only time General Grant ever mentioned liquor to me was about last

April or possibly May.  He said:



"If I could only build up my strength!  The doctors urge whisky and

champagne; but I can't take them; I can't abide the taste of any kind of

liquor."



Had he made a conquest so complete that even the taste of liquor was

become an offense?  Or was he so sore over what had been said about his

habit that he wanted to persuade others and likewise himself that he

hadn't even ever had any taste for it?  It sounded like the latter, but

that's no evidence.



He told me in the fall of '84 that there was something the matter with

his throat, and that at the suggestion of his physicians he had reduced

his smoking to one cigar a day.  Then he added, in a casual fashion, that

he didn't care for that one, and seldom smoked it.



I could understand that feeling.  He had set out to conquer not the habit

but the inclination--the desire.  He had gone at the root, not the trunk.

It's the perfect way and the only true way (I speak from experience.)

How I do hate those enemies of the human race who go around enslaving

God's free people with pledges--to quit drinking instead of to quit

wanting to drink.



But Sherman and Van Vliet know everything concerning Grant; and if you

tell them how you want to use the facts, both of them will testify.

Regular army men have no concealments about each other; and yet they make

their awful statements without shade or color or malice with a frankness

and a child-like naivety, indeed, which is enchanting-and stupefying.

West Point seems to teach them that, among other priceless things not to

be got in any other college in this world.  If we talked about our guild-

mates as I have heard Sherman, Grant, Van Vliet and others talk about

theirs--mates with whom they were on the best possible terms--we could

never expect them to speak to us again.



                    .......................



I am reminded, now, of another matter.  The day of the funeral I sat an

hour over a single drink and several cigars with Van Vliet and Sherman

and Senator Sherman.; and among other things Gen. Sherman said, with

impatient scorn:



"The idea of all this nonsense about Grant not being able to stand rude

language and indelicate stories!  Why Grant was full of humor, and full

of the appreciation of it.  I have sat with him by the hour listening to

Jim Nye's yarns, and I reckon you know the style of Jim Nye's histories,

Clemens.  It makes me sick--that newspaper nonsense.  Grant was no namby-

pamby fool, he was a man--all over--rounded and complete."



I wish I had thought of it!  I would have said to General Grant: "Put

the drunkenness in the Memoirs--and the repentance and reform.  Trust the

people."



But I will wager there is not a hint in the book.  He was sore, there.

As much of the book as I have read gives no hint, as far as I recollect.



The sick-room brought out the points of Gen. Grant's character--some of

them particularly, to wit:



His patience; his indestructible equability of temper; his exceeding

gentleness, kindness, forbearance, lovingness, charity; his loyalty: to

friends, to convictions, to promises, half-promises, infinitesimal

fractions and shadows of promises; (There was a requirement of him which

I considered an atrocity, an injustice, an outrage; I wanted to implore

him to repudiate it; Fred Grant said, "Save your labor, I know him; he is

in doubt as to whether he made that half-promise or not--and, he will

give the thing the benefit of the doubt; he will fulfill that half-

promise or kill himself trying;" Fred Grant was right--he did fulfill

it;) his aggravatingly trustful nature; his genuineness, simplicity,

modesty, diffidence, self-depreciation, poverty in the quality of vanity-

and, in no contradiction of this last, his simple pleasure in the flowers

and general ruck sent to him by Tom, Dick and Harry from everywhere--a

pleasure that suggested a perennial surprise that he should be the object

of so much fine attention--he was the most lovable great child in the

world; (I mentioned his loyalty: you remember Harrison, the colored body-

servant?  the whole family hated him, but that did not make any

difference, the General always stood at his back, wouldn't allow him to

be scolded; always excused his failures and deficiencies with the one

unvarying formula, "We are responsible for these things in his race--it

is not fair to visit our fault upon them--let him alone;" so they did let

him alone, under compulsion, until the great heart that was his shield

was taken away; then--well they simply couldn't stand him, and so they

were excusable for determining to discharge him--a thing which they

mortally hated to do, and by lucky accident were saved from the necessity

of doing;) his toughness as a bargainer when doing business for other

people or for his country (witness his "terms" at Donelson, Vicksburg,

etc.; Fred Grant told me his father wound up an estate for the widow and

orphans of a friend in St. Louis--it took several years; at the end every

complication had been straightened out, and the property put upon a

prosperous basis; great sums had passed through his hands, and when he

handed over the papers there were vouchers to show what had been done

with every penny) and his trusting, easy, unexacting fashion when doing

business for himself (at that same time he was paying out money in

driblets to a man who was running his farm for him--and in his first

Presidency he paid every one of those driblets again (total, $3,000 F.

said,) for he hadn't a scrap of paper to show that he had ever paid them

before; in his dealings with me he would not listen to terms which would

place my money at risk and leave him protected--the thought plainly gave

him pain, and he put it from him, waved it off with his hands, as one

does accounts of crushings and mutilations--wouldn't listen, changed the

subject;) and his fortitude!  He was under, sentence of death last

spring; he sat thinking, musing, several days--nobody knows what about;

then he pulled himself together and set to work to finish that book,

a colossal task for a dying man.  Presently his hand gave out; fate

seemed to have got him checkmated.  Dictation was suggested.  No, he

never could do that; had never tried it; too old to learn, now.  By and

by--if he could only do Appomattox-well.  So he sent for a stenographer,

and dictated 9,000 words at a single sitting!--never pausing, never

hesitating for a word, never repeating--and in the written-out copy he

made hardly a correction.  He dictated again, every two or three days--

the intervals were intervals of exhaustion and slow recuperation--and at

last he was able to tell me that he had written more matter than could be

got into the book.  I then enlarged the book--had to.  Then he lost his

voice.  He was not quite done yet, however:--there was no end of little

plums and spices to be stuck in, here and there; and this work he

patiently continued, a few lines a day, with pad and pencil, till far

into July, at Mt.  McGregor.  One day he put his pencil aside, and said

he was done--there was nothing more to do.  If I had been there I could

have foretold the shock that struck the world three days later.



Well, I've written all this, and it doesn't seem to amount to anything.

But I do want to help, if I only could.  I will enclose some scraps from

my Autobiography--scraps about General Grant--they may be of some trifle

of use, and they may not--they at least verify known traits of his

character.  My Autobiography is pretty freely dictated, but my idea is to

jack-plane it a little before I die, some day or other; I mean the rude

construction and rotten grammar.  It is the only dictating I ever did,

and it was most troublesome and awkward work.  You may return it to

Hartford.

                         Sincerely Yours

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     The old long-deferred Library of Humor came up again for discussion,

     when in the fall of 1885 Howells associated himself with Harper &

     Brothers.  Howells's contract provided that his name was not to

     appear on any book not published by the Harper firm.  He wrote,

     therefore, offering to sell out his interest in the enterprise for

     two thousand dollars, in addition to the five hundred which he had

     already received--an amount considered to be less than he was to

     have received as joint author and compiler.  Mark Twain's answer

     pretty fully covers the details of this undertaking.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        HARTFORD, Oct. 18, 1885.

Private.



MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I reckon it would ruin the book that is, make it

necessary to pigeon-hole it and leave it unpublished.  I couldn't publish

it without a very responsible name to support my own on the title page,

because it has so much of my own matter in it.  I bought Osgood's rights

for $3,000 cash, I have paid Clark $800 and owe him $700 more, which must

of course be paid whether I publish or not.  Yet I fully recognize that I

have no sort of moral right to let that ancient and procrastinated

contract hamper you in any way, and I most certainly won't.  So, it is my

decision,--after thinking over and rejecting the idea of trying to buy

permission of the Harpers for $2,500 to use your name, (a proposition

which they would hate to refuse to a man in a perplexed position, and yet

would naturally have to refuse it,) to pigeon-hole the "Library": not

destroy it, but merely pigeon-hole it and wait a few years and see what

new notion Providence will take concerning it.  He will not desert us

now, after putting in four licks to our one on this book all this time.

It really seems in a sense discourteous not to call it "Providence's

Library of Humor."



Now that deal is all settled, the next question is, do you need and must

you require that $2,000 now?  Since last March, you know, I am carrying a

mighty load, solitary and alone--General Grant's book--and must carry it

till the first volume is 30 days old (Jan. 1st) before the relief money

will begin to flow in.  From now till the first of January every dollar

is as valuable to me as it could be to a famishing tramp.  If you can

wait till then--I mean without discomfort, without inconvenience--it will

be a large accommodation to me; but I will not allow you to do this favor

if it will discommode you.  So, speak right out, frankly, and if you need

the money I will go out on the highway and get it, using violence, if

necessary.



Mind, I am not in financial difficulties, and am not going to be.  I am

merely a starving beggar standing outside the door of plenty--obstructed

by a Yale time-lock which is set for Jan. 1st.  I can stand it, and stand

it perfectly well; but the days do seem to fool along considerable slower

than they used to.



I am mighty glad you are with the Harpers.  I have noticed that good men

in their employ go there to stay.

                              Yours ever,

                                             MARK.





     In the next letter we begin to get some idea of the size of Mark

     Twain's first publishing venture, and a brief summary of results may

     not be out of place here.



     The Grant Life was issued in two volumes.  In the early months of

     the year when the agents' canvass was just beginning, Mark Twain,

     with what seems now almost clairvoyant vision, prophesied a sale of

     three hundred thousand sets.  The actual sales ran somewhat more

     than this number.  On February 27, 1886, Charles L. Webster & Co.

     paid to Mrs. Grant the largest single royalty check in the history

     of book-publishing.  The amount of it was two hundred thousand

     dollars.  Subsequent checks increased the aggregate return to

     considerably more than double this figure.  In a memorandum made by

     Clemens in the midst of the canvass he wrote."



     "During 100 consecutive days the sales (i. e., subscriptions) of

     General Grant's book averaged 3,000 sets (6,000 single volumes) per

     day: Roughly stated, Mrs. Grant's income during all that time was

     $5,000 a day."





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             HOTEL NORMANDIE

                                             NEW YORK, Dec. 2, '85.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I told Webster, this afternoon, to send you that

$2,000; but he is in such a rush, these first days of publication, that

he may possibly forget it; so I write lest I forget it too.  Remind me,

if he should forget.  When I postponed you lately, I did it because I

thought I should be cramped for money until January, but that has turned

out to be an error, so I hasten to cut short the postponement.



I judge by the newspapers that you are in Auburndale, but I don't know it

officially.



I've got the first volume launched safely; consequently, half of the

suspense is over, and I am that much nearer the goal.  We've bound and

shipped 200,000 books; and by the 10th shall finish and ship the

remaining 125,000 of the first edition.  I got nervous and came down to

help hump-up the binderies; and I mean to stay here pretty much all the

time till the first days of March, when the second volume will issue.

Shan't have so much trouble, this time, though, if we get to press pretty

soon, because we can get more binderies then than are to be had in front

of the holidays.  One lives and learns.  I find it takes 7 binderies four

months to bind 325,000 books.



This is a good book to publish.  I heard a canvasser say, yesterday, that

while delivering eleven books he took 7 new subscriptions.  But we shall

be in a hell of a fix if that goes on--it will "ball up" the binderies

again.

               Yrs ever

                         MARK.





     November 30th that year was Mark Twain's fiftieth birthday, an event

     noticed by the newspapers generally, and especially observed by many

     of his friends.  Warner, Stockton and many others sent letters;

     Andrew Lang contributed a fine poem; also Oliver Wendell.  Holmes--

     the latter by special request of Miss Gilder--for the Critic.  These

     attentions came as a sort of crowning happiness at the end of a

     golden year.  At no time in his life were Mark Twain's fortunes and

     prospects brighter; he had a beautiful family and a perfect home.

     Also, he had great prosperity.  The reading-tour with Cable had been

     a fine success.  His latest book, The Adventures of Huckleberry

     Finn, had added largely to his fame and income.  The publication of

     the Grant Memoirs had been a dazzling triumph.  Mark Twain had

     become recognized, not only as America's most distinguished author,

     but as its most envied publisher.  And now, with his fiftieth

     birthday, had come this laurel from Holmes, last of the Brahmins, to

     add a touch of glory to all the rest.  We feel his exaltation in his

     note of acknowledgment.





                 To Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in Boston:



DEAR MR. HOLMES,--I shall never be able to tell you the half of how proud

you have made me.  If I could you would say you were nearly paid for the

trouble you took.  And then the family: If I can convey the electrical

surprise and gratitude and exaltation of the wife and the children last

night, when they happened upon that Critic where I had, with artful

artlessness, spread it open and retired out of view to see what would

happen--well, it was great and fine and beautiful to see, and made me

feel as the victor feels when the shouting hosts march by; and if you

also could have seen it you would have said the account was squared.  For

I have brought them up in your company, as in the company of a warm and

friendly and beneficent but far-distant sun; and so, for you to do this

thing was for the sun to send down out of the skies the miracle of a

special ray and transfigure me before their faces.  I knew what that poem

would be to them; I knew it would raise me up to remote and shining

heights in their eyes, to very fellowship with the chambered Nautilus

itself, and that from that fellowship they could never more dissociate me

while they should live; and so I made sure to be by when the surprise

should come.



Charles Dudley Warner is charmed with the poem for its own felicitous

sake; and so indeed am I, but more because it has drawn the sting of my

fiftieth year; taken away the pain of it, the grief of it, the somehow

shame of it, and made me glad and proud it happened.



With reverence and affection,

                         Sincerely yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     Holmes wrote with his own hand: "Did Miss Gilder tell you I had

     twenty-three letters spread out for answer when her suggestion came

     about your anniversary?  I stopped my correspondence and made my

     letters wait until the lines were done."









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Letters Vol. 3, by Mark Twain













MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS  1886-1900



ARRANGED WITH COMMENT BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE







VOLUME IV.





XXVI



LETTERS, 1886-87.  JANE CLEMENS'S ROMANCE.  UNMAILED LETTERS, ETC.



     When Clemens had been platforming with Cable and returned to

     Hartford for his Christmas vacation, the Warner and Clemens families

     had joined in preparing for him a surprise performance of The Prince

     and the Pauper.  The Clemens household was always given to

     theatricals, and it was about this time that scenery and a stage

     were prepared--mainly by the sculptor Gerhardt--for these home

     performances, after which productions of The Prince and the Pauper

     were given with considerable regularity to audiences consisting of

     parents and invited friends.  The subject is a fascinating one, but

     it has been dwelt upon elsewhere.--[In Mark Twain: A Biography,

     chaps.  cliff and clx.]--We get a glimpse of one of these occasions

     as well as of Mark Twain's financial progress in the next brief

     note.



                       To W. D. Howells; in Boston:



                                                  Jan.  3, '86.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--The date set for the Prince and Pauper play is ten

days hence--Jan. 13.  I hope you and Pilla can take a train that arrives

here during the day; the one that leaves Boston toward the end of the

afternoon would be a trifle late; the performance would have already

begun when you reached the house.



I'm out of the woods.  On the last day of the year I had paid out

$182,000 on the Grant book and it was totally free from debt.

                                        Yrs ever

                                                  MARK.





     Mark Twain's mother was a woman of sturdy character and with a keen

     sense of humor and tender sympathies.  Her husband, John Marshall

     Clemens, had been a man of high moral character, honored by all who

     knew him, respected and apparently loved by his wife.  No one would

     ever have supposed that during all her years of marriage, and almost

     to her death, she carried a secret romance that would only be told

     at last in the weary disappointment of old age.  It is a curious

     story, and it came to light in this curious way:





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        HARTFORD, May 19, '86.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--..... Here's a secret.  A most curious and pathetic

romance, which has just come to light.  Read these things, but don't

mention them.  Last fall, my old mother--then 82--took a notion to attend

a convention of old settlers of the Mississippi Valley in an Iowa town.

My brother's wife was astonished; and represented to her the hardships

and fatigues of such a trip, and said my mother might possibly not even

survive them; and said there could be no possible interest for her in

such a meeting and such a crowd.  But my mother insisted, and persisted;

and finally gained her point.  They started; and all the way my mother

was young again with excitement, interest, eagerness, anticipation.  They

reached the town and the hotel.  My mother strode with the same eagerness

in her eye and her step, to the counter, and said:



"Is Dr. Barrett of St. Louis, here?"



"No.  He was here, but he returned to St. Louis this morning."



"Will he come again?"



"No."



My mother turned away, the fire all gone from her, and said, "Let us go

home."



They went straight back to Keokuk.  My mother sat silent and thinking for

many days--a thing which had never happened before.  Then one day she

said:



"I will tell you a secret.  When I was eighteen, a young medical student

named Barrett lived in Columbia (Ky.) eighteen miles away; and he used to

ride over to see me.  This continued for some time.  I loved him with my

whole heart, and I knew that he felt the same toward me, though no words

had been spoken.  He was too bashful to speak--he could not do it.

Everybody supposed we were engaged--took it for granted we were--but we

were not.  By and by there was to be a party in a neighboring town, and

he wrote my uncle telling him his feelings, and asking him to drive me

over in his buggy and let him (Barrett) drive me back, so that he might

have that opportunity to propose.  My uncle should have done as he was

asked, without explaining anything to me; but instead, he read me the

letter; and then, of course, I could not go--and did not.  He (Barrett)

left the country presently, and I, to stop the clacking tongues, and to

show him that I did not care, married, in a pet.  In all these sixty-four

years I have not seen him since.  I saw in a paper that he was going to

attend that Old Settlers' Convention.  Only three hours before we reached

that hotel, he had been standing there!"



Since then, her memory is wholly faded out and gone; and now she writes

letters to the school-mates who had been dead forty years, and wonders

why they neglect her and do not answer.



Think of her carrying that pathetic burden in her old heart sixty-four

years, and no human being ever suspecting it!

                              Yrs ever,

                                        MARK.



We do not get the idea from this letter that those two long ago

sweethearts quarreled, but Mark Twain once spoke of their having done so,

and there may have been a disagreement, assuming that there was a

subsequent meeting.  It does not matter, now.  In speaking of it, Mark

Twain once said: "It is as pathetic a romance as any that has crossed the

field of my personal experience in a long lifetime."--[When Mark Twain:

A Biography was written this letter had not come to light, and the matter

was stated there in accordance with Mark Twain's latest memory of it.]



Howells wrote: "After all, how poor and hackneyed all the inventions are

compared with the simple and stately facts.  Who could have imagined such

a heart-break as that?  Yet it went along with the fulfillment of

everyday duty and made no more noise than a grave under foot.  I doubt if

fiction will ever get the knack of such things."



Jane Clemens now lived with her son Orion and his wife, in Keokuk, where

she was more contented than elsewhere.  In these later days her memory

had become erratic, her realization of events about her uncertain, but

there were times when she was quite her former self, remembering clearly

and talking with her old-time gaiety of spirit.  Mark Twain frequently

sent her playful letters to amuse her, letters full of such boyish gaiety

as had amused her long years before.  The one that follows is a fair

example.  It was written after a visit which Clemens and his family had

paid to Keokuk.





                       To Jane Clemens, in Keokuk:



                                             ELMIRA, Aug. 7, '86.

DEAR MA,--I heard that Molly and Orion and Pamela had been sick, but I

see by your letter that they are much better now, or nearly well.  When

we visited you a month ago, it seemed to us that your Keokuk weather was

pretty hot; Jean and Clara sat up in bed at Mrs. McElroy's and cried

about it, and so did I; but I judge by your letter that it has cooled

down, now, so that a person is comparatively comfortable, with his skin

off.  Well it did need cooling; I remember that I burnt a hole in my

shirt, there, with some ice cream that fell on it; and Miss Jenkins told

me they never used a stove, but cooked their meals on a marble-topped

table in the drawing-room, just with the natural heat.  If anybody else

had told me, I would not have believed it.  I was told by the Bishop of

Keokuk that he did not allow crying at funerals, because it scalded the

furniture.  If Miss Jenkins had told me that, I would have believed it.

This reminds me that you speak of Dr. Jenkins and his family as if they

were strangers to me.  Indeed they are not.  Don't you suppose I remember

gratefully how tender the doctor was with Jean when she hurt her arm, and

how quickly he got the pain out of the hurt, whereas I supposed it was

going to last at least an hour?  No, I don't forget some things as easily

as I do others.



Yes, it was pretty hot weather.  Now here, when a person is going to die,

he is always in a sweat about where he is going to; but in Keokuk of

course they don't care, because they are fixed for everything.  It has

set me reflecting, it has taught me a lesson.  By and by, when my health

fails, I am going to put all my affairs in order, and bid good-bye to my

friends here, and kill all the people I don't like, and go out to Keokuk

and prepare for death.



They are all well in this family, and we all send love.

                                   Affly Your Son

                                                  SAM.





     The ways of city officials and corporations are often past

     understanding, and Mark Twain sometimes found it necessary to write

     picturesque letters of protest.  The following to a Hartford

     lighting company is a fair example of these documents.





           To a gas and electric-lighting company, in Hartford:



GENTLEMEN,--There are but two places in our whole street where lights

could be of any value, by any accident, and you have measured and

appointed your intervals so ingeniously as to leave each of those places

in the centre of a couple of hundred yards of solid darkness.  When I

noticed that you were setting one of your lights in such a way that I

could almost see how to get into my gate at night, I suspected that it

was a piece of carelessness on the part of the workmen, and would be

corrected as soon as you should go around inspecting and find it out.

My judgment was right; it is always right, when you axe concerned.  For

fifteen years, in spite of my prayers and tears, you persistently kept a

gas lamp exactly half way between my gates, so that I couldn't find

either of them after dark; and then furnished such execrable gas that I

had to hang a danger signal on the lamp post to keep teams from running

into it, nights.  Now I suppose your present idea is, to leave us a

little more in the dark.



Don't mind us--out our way; we possess but one vote apiece, and no rights

which you are in any way bound to respect.  Please take your electric

light and go to--but never mind, it is not for me to suggest; you will

probably find the way; and any way you can reasonably count on divine

assistance if you lose your bearings.



                                   S. L. CLEMENS.



     [Etext Editor's Note: Twain wrote another note to Hartford Gas and

     Electric, which he may not have mailed and which Paine does not

     include in these volumes:

     "Gentleman:--Someday you are going to move me almost to the point

     of irritation with your God-damned chuckle headed fashion of

     turning off your God-damned gas without giving notice to your

     God-damned parishioners--and you did it again last night--"

     D.W.]



     Frequently Clemens did not send letters of this sort after they were

     written.  Sometimes he realized the uselessness of such protest,

     sometimes the mere writing of them had furnished the necessary

     relief, and he put, the letter away, or into the wastebasket, and

     wrote something more temperate, or nothing at all.  A few such

     letters here follow.



     Clemens was all the time receiving application from people who

     wished him to recommend one article or another; books, plays,

     tobacco, and what not.  They were generally persistent people,

     unable to accept a polite or kindly denial.  Once he set down some

     remarks on this particular phase of correspondence.  He wrote:





I



No doubt Mr. Edison has been offered a large interest in many and many an

electrical project, for the use of his name to float it withal.  And no

doubt all men who have achieved for their names, in any line of activity

whatever, a sure market value, have been familiar with this sort of

solicitation.  Reputation is a hall-mark: it can remove doubt from pure

silver, and it can also make the plated article pass for pure.



And so, people without a hall-mark of their own are always trying to get

the loan of somebody else's.



As a rule, that kind of a person sees only one side of the case.  He sees

that his invention or his painting or his book is--apparently--a trifle

better than you yourself can do, therefore why shouldn't you be willing

to put your hall-mark on it?  You will be giving the purchaser his full

money's worth; so who is hurt, and where is the harm?  Besides, are you

not helping a struggling fellow-craftsman, and is it not your duty to do

that?



That side is plenty clear enough to him, but he can't and won't see the

other side, to-wit: that you are a rascal if you put your hall-mark upon

a thing which you did not produce yourself, howsoever good it may be.

How simple that is; and yet there are not two applicants in a hundred who

can, be made to see it.



When one receives an application of this sort, his first emotion is an

indignant sense of insult; his first deed is the penning of a sharp

answer.  He blames nobody but that other person.  That person is a very

base being; he must be; he would degrade himself for money, otherwise it

would not occur to him that you would do such a thing.  But all the same,

that application has done its work, and taken you down in your own

estimation.  You recognize that everybody hasn't as high an opinion of

you as you have of yourself; and in spite of you there ensues an interval

during which you are not, in your own estimation as fine a bird as you

were before.



However, being old and experienced, you do not mail your sharp letter,

but leave it lying a day.  That saves you.  For by that time you have

begun to reflect that you are a person who deals in exaggerations--and

exaggerations are lies.  You meant yours to be playful, and thought you

made them unmistakably so.  But you couldn't make them playfulnesses to a

man who has no sense of the playful and can see nothing but the serious

side of things.  You rattle on quite playfully, and with measureless

extravagance, about how you wept at the tomb of Adam; and all in good

time you find to your astonishment that no end of people took you at your

word and believed you.  And presently they find out that you were not in

earnest.  They have been deceived; therefore, (as they argue--and there

is a sort of argument in it,) you are a deceiver.  If you will deceive in

one way, why shouldn't you in another?  So they apply for the use of your

trade-mark.  You are amazed and affronted.  You retort that you are not

that kind of person.  Then they are amazed and affronted; and wonder

"since when?"



By this time you have got your bearings.  You realize that perhaps there

is a little blame on both sides.  You are in the right frame, now.  So

you write a letter void of offense, declining.  You mail this one; you

pigeon-hole the other.



That is, being old and experienced, you do, but early in your career, you

don't: you mail the first one.





II



An enthusiast who had a new system of musical notation, wrote to me and

suggested that a magazine article from me, contrasting the absurdities of

the old system with the simplicities of his new one, would be sure to

make a "rousing hit."  He shouted and shouted over the marvels wrought by

his system, and quoted the handsome compliments which had been paid it by

famous musical people; but he forgot to tell me what his notation was

like, or what its simplicities consisted in.  So I could not have written

the article if I had wanted to--which I didn't; because I hate strangers

with axes to grind.  I wrote him a courteous note explaining how busy I

was--I always explain how busy I am--and casually drooped this remark:



"I judge the X-X notation to be a rational mode of representing music, in

place of the prevailing fashion, which was the invention of an idiot."



Next mail he asked permission to print that meaningless remark.

I answered, no--courteously, but still, no; explaining that I could not

afford to be placed in the attitude of trying to influence people with a

mere worthless guess.  What a scorcher I got, next mail!  Such irony!

such sarcasm, such caustic praise of my superhonorable loyalty to the

public!  And withal, such compassion for my stupidity, too, in not being

able to understand my own language.  I cannot remember the words of this

letter broadside, but there was about a page used up in turning this idea

round and round and exposing it in different lights.



                             Unmailed Answer:



DEAR SIR,--What is the trouble with you?  If it is your viscera, you

cannot have them taken out and reorganized a moment too soon.  I mean,

if they are inside.  But if you are composed of them, that is another

matter.  Is it your brain?  But it could not be your brain.  Possibly it

is your skull: you want to look out for that.  Some people, when they get

an idea, it pries the structure apart.  Your system of notation has got

in there, and couldn't find room, without a doubt that is what the

trouble is.  Your skull was not made to put ideas in, it was made to

throw potatoes at.

                         Yours Truly.





                              Mailed Answer:



DEAR SIR,--Come, come--take a walk; you disturb the children.

                         Yours Truly.





There was a day, now happily nearly over, when certain newspapers made a

practice of inviting men distinguished in any walk of life to give their

time and effort without charge to express themselves on some subject of

the day, or perhaps they were asked to send their favorite passages in

prose or verse, with the reasons why.  Such symposiums were "features"

that cost the newspapers only the writing of a number of letters,

stationery, and postage.  To one such invitation Mark Twain wrote two

replies.  They follow herewith:



                             Unmailed Answer:



DEAR SIR,--I have received your proposition--which you have imitated from

a pauper London periodical which had previously imitated the idea of this

sort of mendicancy from seventh-rate American journalism, where it

originated as a variation of the inexpensive "interview."



Why do you buy Associated Press dispatches?  To make your paper the more

salable, you answer.  But why don't you try to beg them?  Why do you

discriminate?  I can sell my stuff; why should I give it to you?  Why

don't you ask me for a shirt?  What is the difference between asking me

for the worth of a shirt and asking me for the shirt itself?  Perhaps you

didn't know you were begging.  I would not use that argument--it makes

the user a fool.  The passage of poetry--or prose, if you will--which has

taken deepest root in my thought, and which I oftenest return to and

dwell upon with keenest no matter what, is this:  That the proper place

for journalists who solicit literary charity is on the street corner with

their hats in their hands.





                              Mailed Answer:



DEAR SIR,--Your favor of recent date is received, but I am obliged by

press of work to decline.





     The manager of a traveling theatrical company wrote that he had

     taken the liberty of dramatizing Tom Sawyer, and would like also the

     use of the author's name--the idea being to convey to the public

     that it was a Mark Twain play.  In return for this slight favor the

     manager sent an invitation for Mark Twain to come and see the play--

     to be present on the opening night, as it were, at his (the

     manager's) expense.  He added that if the play should be a go in the

     cities there might be some "arrangement" of profits.  Apparently

     these inducements did not appeal to Mark Twain.  The long unmailed

     reply is the more interesting, but probably the briefer one that

     follows it was quite as effective.



                             Unmailed Answer:



                                             HARTFORD, Sept. 8, '87.

DEAR SIR,--And so it has got around to you, at last; and you also have

"taken the liberty."  You are No. 1365.  When 1364 sweeter and better

people, including the author, have "tried" to dramatize Tom Sawyer and

did not arrive, what sort of show do you suppose you stand?  That is a

book, dear sir, which cannot be dramatized.  One might as well try to

dramatize any other hymn.  Tom Sawyer is simply a hymn, put into prose

form to give it a worldly air.



Why the pale doubt that flitteth dim and nebulous athwart the forecastle

of your third sentence?  Have no fears.  Your piece will be a Go.

It will go out the back door on the first night.  They've all done it

--the 1364.  So will 1365.  Not one of us ever thought of the simple

device of half-soling himself with a stove-lid.  Ah, what suffering a

little hindsight would have saved us.  Treasure this hint.



How kind of you to invite me to the funeral.  Go to; I have attended a

thousand of them.  I have seen Tom Sawyer's remains in all the different

kinds of dramatic shrouds there are.  You cannot start anything fresh.

Are you serious when you propose to pay my expence--if that is the

Susquehannian way of spelling it?  And can you be aware that I charge a

hundred dollars a mile when I travel for pleasure?  Do you realize that

it is 432 miles to Susquehanna?  Would it be handy for you to send me the

$43,200 first, so I could be counting it as I come along; because

railroading is pretty dreary to a sensitive nature when there's nothing

sordid to buck at for Zeitvertreib.



Now as I understand it, dear and magnanimous 1365, you are going to

recreate Tom Sawyer dramatically, and then do me the compliment to put me

in the bills as father of this shady offspring.  Sir, do you know that

this kind of a compliment has destroyed people before now?  Listen.



Twenty-four years ago, I was strangely handsome.  The remains of it are

still visible through the rifts of time.  I was so handsome that human

activities ceased as if spellbound when I came in view, and even

inanimate things stopped to look--like locomotives, and district

messenger boys and so-on.  In San Francisco, in the rainy season I was

often mistaken for fair weather.  Upon one occasion I was traveling in

the Sonora region, and stopped for an hour's nooning, to rest my horse

and myself.  All the town came out to look.  The tribes of Indians

gathered to look.  A Piute squaw named her baby for me,--a voluntary

compliment which pleased me greatly.  Other attentions were paid me.

Last of all arrived the president and faculty of Sonora University and

offered me the post of Professor of Moral Culture and the Dogmatic

Humanities; which I accepted gratefully, and entered at once upon my

duties.  But my name had pleased the Indians, and in the deadly kindness

of their hearts they went on naming their babies after me.  I tried to

stop it, but the Indians could not understand why I should object to so

manifest a compliment.  The thing grew and grew and spread and spread and

became exceedingly embarrassing.  The University stood it a couple of

years; but then for the sake of the college they felt obliged to call a

halt, although I had the sympathy of the whole faculty.  The president

himself said to me, "I am as sorry as I can be for you, and would still

hold out if there were any hope ahead; but you see how it is: there are a

hundred and thirty-two of them already, and fourteen precincts to hear

from.  The circumstance has brought your name into most wide and

unfortunate renown.  It causes much comment--I believe that that is not

an over-statement.  Some of this comment is palliative, but some of it

--by patrons at a distance, who only know the statistics without the

explanation,--is offensive, and in some cases even violent.  Nine

students have been called home.  The trustees of the college have been

growing more and more uneasy all these last months--steadily along with

the implacable increase in your census--and I will not conceal from you

that more than once they have touched upon the expediency of a change in

the Professorship of Moral Culture.  The coarsely sarcastic editorial in

yesterday's Alta, headed Give the Moral Acrobat a Rest--has brought

things to a crisis, and I am charged with the unpleasant duty of

receiving your resignation."



I know you only mean me a kindness, dear 1365, but it is a most deadly

mistake.  Please do not name your Injun for me.  Truly Yours.





                              Mailed Answer:



                                        NEW YORK, Sept. 8.  1887.

DEAR SIR,--Necessarily I cannot assent to so strange a proposition.  And

I think it but fair to warn you that if you put the piece on the stage,

you must take the legal consequences.

                         Yours respectfully,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     Before the days of international copyright no American author's

     books were pirated more freely by Canadian publishers than those of

     Mark Twain.  It was always a sore point with him that these books,

     cheaply printed, found their way into the United States, and were

     sold in competition with his better editions.  The law on the

     subject seemed to be rather hazy, and its various interpretations

     exasperating.  In the next unmailed letter Mark Twain relieves

     himself to a misguided official.  The letter is worth reading today,

     if for no other reason, to show the absurdity of copyright

     conditions which prevailed at that time.





          Unmailed Letter to H. C. Christiancy, on book Piracy:



                                             HARTFORD, Dec. 18, '87.

H. C. CHRISTIANCY, ESQ.



DEAR SIR,--As I understand it, the position of the U. S. Government is

this: If a person be captured on the border with counterfeit bonds in his

hands--bonds of the N. Y. Central Railway, for instance--the procedure in

his case shall be as follows:



1.  If the N. Y. C. have not previously filed in the several police

offices along the border, proof of ownership of the originals of the

bonds, the government officials must collect a duty on the counterfeits,

and then let them go ahead and circulate in this country.



2.  But if there is proof already on file, then the N. Y. C.  may pay the

duty and take the counterfeits.



But in no case will the United States consent to go without its share of

the swag.  It is delicious.  The biggest and proudest government on earth

turned sneak-thief; collecting pennies on stolen property, and pocketing

them with a greasy and libidinous leer; going into partnership with

foreign thieves to rob its own children; and when the child escapes the

foreigner, descending to the abysmal baseness of hanging on and robbing

the infant all alone by itself!  Dear sir, this is not any more

respectable than for a father to collect toll on the forced prostitution

of his own daughter; in fact it is the same thing.  Upon these terms,

what is a U. S. custom house but a "fence?"  That is all it is: a

legalized trader in stolen goods.



And this nasty law, this filthy law, this unspeakable law calls itself a

"regulation for the protection of owners of copyright!"  Can sarcasm go

further than that?  In what way does it protect them?  Inspiration itself

could not furnish a rational answer to that question.  Whom does it

protect, then?  Nobody, as far as I can see, but the foreign thief-

sometimes--and his fellow-footpad the U. S. government, all the time.

What could the Central Company do with the counterfeit bonds after it had

bought them of the star spangled banner Master-thief?  Sell them at a

dollar apiece and fetch down the market for the genuine hundred-dollar

bond?  What could I do with that 20-cent copy of "Roughing It" which the

United States has collared on the border and is waiting to release to me

for cash in case I am willing to come down to its moral level and help

rob myself?  Sell it at ten or fifteen cents--duty added--and destroy the

market for the original $3,50 book?  Who ever did invent that law?  I

would like to know the name of that immortal jackass.



Dear sir, I appreciate your courtesy in stretching your authority in the

desire to do me a kindness, and I sincerely thank you for it.  But I have

no use for that book; and if I were even starving for it I would not pay

duty on in either to get it or suppress it.  No doubt there are ways in

which I might consent to go into partnership with thieves and fences,

but this is not one of them.  This one revolts the remains of my self-

respect; turns my stomach.  I think I could companion with a highwayman

who carried a shot-gun and took many risks; yes, I think I should like

that if I were younger; but to go in with a big rich government that robs

paupers, and the widows and orphans of paupers and takes no risk--why the

thought just gags me.



Oh, no, I shall never pay any duties on pirated books of mine.  I am much

too respectable for that--yet awhile.  But here--one thing that grovels

me is this: as far as I can discover--while freely granting that the

U. S. copyright laws are far and away the most idiotic that exist

anywhere on the face of the earth--they don't authorize the government to

admit pirated books into this country, toll or no toll.  And so I think

that that regulation is the invention of one of those people--as a rule,

early stricken of God, intellectually--the departmental interpreters of

the laws, in Washington.  They can always be depended on to take any

reasonably good law and interpret the common sense all out of it.  They

can be depended on, every time, to defeat a good law, and make it

inoperative--yes, and utterly grotesque, too, mere matter for laughter

and derision.  Take some of the decisions of the Post-office Department,

for instance--though I do not mean to suggest that that asylum is any

worse than the others for the breeding and nourishing of incredible

lunatics--I merely instance it because it happens to be the first to come

into my mind.  Take that case of a few years ago where the P. M. General

suddenly issued an edict requiring you to add the name of the State after

Boston, New York, Chicago, &c, in your superscriptions, on pain of having

your letter stopped and forwarded to the dead-letter office; yes, and I

believe he required the county, too.  He made one little concession in

favor of New York: you could say "New York City," and stop there; but if

you left off the "city," you must add "N. Y."  to your "New York."  Why,

it threw the business of the whole country into chaos and brought

commerce almost to a stand-still.  Now think of that!  When that man goes

to--to--well, wherever he is going to--we shan't want the microscopic

details of his address.  I guess we can find him.



Well, as I was saying, I believe that this whole paltry and ridiculous

swindle is a pure creation of one of those cabbages that used to be at

the head of one of those Retreats down there--Departments, you know--and

that you will find it so, if you will look into it.  And moreover--but

land, I reckon we are both tired by this time.

                              Truly Yours,

                                             MARK TWAIN.











XXVII



MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS OF 1887.  LITERARY ARTICLES.  PEACEFUL DAYS AT THE

FARM.  FAVORITE READING.  APOLOGY TO MRS. CLEVELAND, ETC.



We have seen in the preceding chapter how unknown aspirants in one field

or another were always seeking to benefit by Mark Twain's reputation.

Once he remarked, "The symbol of the human race ought to be an ax; every

human being has one concealed about him somewhere."  He declared when a

stranger called on him, or wrote to him, in nine cases out of ten he

could distinguish the gleam of the ax almost immediately.  The following

letter is closely related to those of the foregoing chapter, only that

this one was mailed--not once, but many times, in some form adapted to

the specific applicant.  It does not matter to whom it was originally

written, the name would not be recognized.





            To Mrs. T.  Concerning unearned credentials, etc.



                                                  HARTFORD, 1887.

MY DEAR MADAM,--It is an idea which many people have had, but it is of no

value.  I have seen it tried out many and many a time.  I have seen a

lady lecturer urged and urged upon the public in a lavishly complimentary

document signed by Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes and some others of

supreme celebrity, but--there was nothing in her and she failed.  If

there had been any great merit in her she never would have needed those

men's help and (at her rather mature age,) would never have consented to

ask for it.



There is an unwritten law about human successes, and your sister must bow

to that law, she must submit to its requirements.  In brief this law is:



     1.  No occupation without an apprenticeship.



     2.  No pay to the apprentice.



This law stands right in the way of the subaltern who wants to be a

General before he has smelt powder; and it stands (and should stand) in

everybody's way who applies for pay or position before he has served his

apprenticeship and proved himself.  Your sister's course is perfectly

plain.  Let her enclose this letter to Maj. J. B. Pond, and offer to

lecture a year for $10 a week and her expenses, the contract to be

annullable by him at any time, after a month's notice, but not annullable

by her at all.  The second year, he to have her services, if he wants

them, at a trifle under the best price offered her by anybody else.



She can learn her trade in those two years, and then be entitled to

remuneration--but she can not learn it in any less time than that, unless

she is a human miracle.



Try it, and do not be afraid.  It is the fair and right thing.  If she

wins, she will win squarely and righteously, and never have to blush.

                                   Truly yours,

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.





     Howells wrote, in February, offering to get a publisher to take the

     Library of Humor off Mark Twain's hands.  Howells had been paid

     twenty-six hundred dollars for the work on it, and his conscience

     hurt him when he reflected that the book might never be used.  In

     this letter he also refers to one of the disastrous inventions in

     which Clemens had invested--a method of casting brass dies for

     stamping book-covers and wall-paper.  Howells's purpose was to

     introduce something of the matter into his next story.  Mark Twain's

     reply gives us a light on this particular invention.





                                             HARTFORD, Feb. 15, '87.

DEAR HOWELLS,--I was in New York five days ago, and Webster mentioned the

Library, and proposed to publish it a year or a year and half hence.

I have written him your proposition to-day.  (The Library is part of the

property of the C. L. W. & Co.  firm.)



I don't remember what that technical phrase was, but I think you will

find it in any Cyclopedia under the head of "Brass."  The thing I best

remember is, that the self-styled "inventor" had a very ingenious way of

keeping me from seeing him apply his invention: the first appointment was

spoiled by his burning down the man's shop in which it was to be done,

the night before; the second was spoiled by his burning down his own shop

the night before.  He unquestionably did both of these things.  He really

had no invention; the whole project was a blackmailing swindle, and cost

me several thousand dollars.



The slip you sent me from the May "Study" has delighted Mrs. Clemens and

me to the marrow.  To think that thing might be possible to many; but to

be brave enough to say it is possible to you only, I certainly believe.

The longer I live the clearer I perceive how unmatchable, how

unapproachable, a compliment one pays when he says of a man "he has the

courage (to utter) his convictions."  Haven't you had reviewers talk Alps

to you, and then print potato hills?



I haven't as good an opinion of my work as you hold of it, but I've

always done what I could to secure and enlarge my good opinion of it.

I've always said to myself, "Everybody reads it and that's something--it

surely isn't pernicious, or the most acceptable people would get pretty

tired of it."  And when a critic said by implication that it wasn't high

and fine, through the remark "High and fine literature is wine" I

retorted (confidentially, to myself,) "yes, high and fine literature is

wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water."



You didn't tell me to return that proof-slip, so I have pasted it into my

private scrap-book.  None will see it there.  With a thousand thanks.

                              Ys Ever

                                        MARK.





     Our next letter is an unmailed answer, but it does not belong with

     the others, having been withheld for reasons of quite a different

     sort.  Jeanette Gilder, then of the Critic, was one of Mark Twain's

     valued friends.  In the comment which he made, when it was shown to

     him twenty-two years later, he tells us why he thinks this letter

     was not sent.  The name, "Rest-and-be-Thankful," was the official

     title given to the summer place at Elmira, but it was more often

     known as "Quarry Farm."





                    To Jeannette Gilder (not mailed):



                                                  HARTFORD, May 14, '87.

MY DEAR MISS GILDER,--We shall spend the summer at the same old place-the

remote farm called "Rest-and-be-Thankful," on top of the hills three

miles from Elmira, N. Y.  Your other question is harder to answer.  It is

my habit to keep four or five books in process of erection all the time,

and every summer add a few courses of bricks to two or three of them; but

I cannot forecast which of the two or three it is going to be.  It takes

seven years to complete a book by this method, but still it is a good

method: gives the public a rest.  I have been accused of "rushing into

print" prematurely, moved thereto by greediness for money; but in truth

I have never done that.  Do you care for trifles of information?  (Well,

then, "Tom Sawyer" and "The Prince and the Pauper" were each on the

stocks two or three years, and "Old Times on the Mississippi" eight.)

One of my unfinished books has been on the stocks sixteen years; another

seventeen.  This latter book could have been finished in a day, at any

time during the past five years.  But as in the first of these two

narratives all the action takes place in Noah's ark, and as in the other

the action takes place in heaven, there seemed to be no hurry, and so I

have not hurried.  Tales of stirring adventure in those localities do not

need to be rushed to publication lest they get stale by waiting.  In

twenty-one years, with all my time at my free disposal I have written and

completed only eleven books, whereas with half the labor that a

journalist does I could have written sixty in that time.  I do not

greatly mind being accused of a proclivity for rushing into print, but

at the same time I don't believe that the charge is really well founded.

Suppose I did write eleven books, have you nothing to be grateful for?

Go to---remember the forty-nine which I didn't write.

                              Truly Yours

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





                  Notes (added twenty-two years later):



Stormfield, April 30, 1909.  It seems the letter was not sent.  I

probably feared she might print it, and I couldn't find a way to say so

without running a risk of hurting her.  No one would hurt Jeannette

Gilder purposely, and no one would want to run the risk of doing it

unintentionally.  She is my neighbor, six miles away, now, and I must

ask her about this ancient letter.



I note with pride and pleasure that I told no untruths in my unsent

answer.  I still have the habit of keeping unfinished books lying around

years and years, waiting.  I have four or five novels on hand at present

in a half-finished condition, and it is more than three years since I

have looked at any of them.  I have no intention of finishing them.

I could complete all of them in less than a year, if the impulse should

come powerfully upon me: Long, long ago money-necessity furnished that

impulse once, (" Following the Equator"), but mere desire for money has

never furnished it, so far as I remember.  Not even money-necessity was

able to overcome me on a couple of occasions when perhaps I ought to have

allowed it to succeed.  While I was a bankrupt and in debt two offers

were made me for weekly literary contributions to continue during a year,

and they would have made a debtless man of me, but I declined them, with

my wife's full approval, for I had known of no instance where a man had

pumped himself out once a week and failed to run "emptyings" before the

year was finished.



As to that "Noah's Ark" book, I began it in Edinburgh in 1873;--[This is

not quite correct.  The "Noah's Ark" book was begun in Buffalo in 1870.]

I don't know where the manuscript is now.  It was a Diary, which

professed to be the work of Shem, but wasn't.  I began it again several

months ago, but only for recreation; I hadn't any intention of carrying

it to a finish

--or even to the end of the first chapter, in fact.



As to the book whose action "takes place in Heaven."  That was a small

thing, ("Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.") It lay in my pigeon-

holes 40 years, then I took it out and printed it in Harper's Monthly

last year.

                         S. L. C.





In the next letter we get a pretty and peaceful picture of "Rest-and-be-

Thankful."  These were Mark Twain's balmy days.  The financial drain of

the type-machine was heavy but not yet exhausting, and the prospect of

vast returns from it seemed to grow brighter each day.  His publishing

business, though less profitable, was still prosperous, his family life

was ideal.  How gratefully, then, he could enter into the peace of that

"perfect day."





                  To Mrs. Orion Clemens, in Keokuk, Ia.:



                                   ON THE HILL NEAR ELMIRA, July 10, '87.

DEAR MOLLIE,--This is a superb Sunday for weather--very cloudy, and the

thermometer as low as 65.  The city in the valley is purple with shade,

as seen from up here at the study.  The Cranes are reading and loafing in

the canvas-curtained summer-house 50 yards away on a higher (the highest)

point; the cats are loafing over at "Ellerslie" which is the children's

estate and dwellinghouse in their own private grounds (by deed from Susie

Crane) a hundred yards from the study, amongst the clover and young oaks

and willows.  Livy is down at the house, but I shall now go and bring her

up to the Cranes to help us occupy the lounges and hammocks--whence a

great panorama of distant hill and valley and city is seeable.  The

children have gone on a lark through the neighboring hills and woods.

It is a perfect day indeed.

                         With love to you all.

                                                  SAM.





Two days after this letter was written we get a hint of what was the

beginning of business trouble--that is to say, of the failing health of

Charles L.  Webster.  Webster was ambitious, nervous, and not robust.

He had overworked and was paying the penalty.  His trouble was

neurasthenia, and he was presently obliged to retire altogether from the

business.  The "Sam and Mary" mentioned were Samuel Moffet and his wife.





               To Mrs. Pamela Moffett, in Fredonia, N.  Y.



                                                  ELMIRA, July 12, '87

MY DEAR SISTER,--I had no idea that Charley's case was so serious.

I knew it was bad, and persistent, but I was not aware of the full size

of the matter.



I have just been writing to a friend in Hartford' who treated what I

imagine was a similar case surgically last fall, and produced a permanent

cure.  If this is a like case, Charley must go to him.



If relief fails there, he must take the required rest, whether the

business can stand it or not.



It is most pleasant to hear such prosperous accounts of Sam and Mary,

I do not see how Sam could well be more advantageously fixed.  He can

grow up with that paper, and achieve a successful life.



It is not all holiday here with Susie and Clara this time.  They have to

put in some little time every day on their studies.  Jean thinks she is

studying too, but I don't know what it is unless it is the horses; she

spends the day under their heels in the stables--and that is but a

continuation of her Hartford system of culture.



With love from us all to you all.

                              Affectionately

                                             SAM.





Mark Twain had a few books that he read regularly every year or two.

Among these were 'Pepys's Diary', Suetonius's 'Lives of the Twelve

Caesars', and Thomas Carlyle's 'French Revolution'.  He had a passion for

history, biography, and personal memoirs of any sort.  In his early life

he had cared very little for poetry, but along in the middle eighties he

somehow acquired a taste for Browning and became absorbed in it.

A Browning club assembled as often as once a week at the Clemens home in

Hartford to listen to his readings of the master.  He was an impressive

reader, and he carefully prepared himself for these occasions, indicating

by graduated underscorings, the exact values he wished to give to words

and phrases.  Those were memorable gatherings, and they must have

continued through at least two winters.  It is one of the puzzling phases

of Mark Twain's character that, notwithstanding his passion for direct

and lucid expression, he should have found pleasure in the poems of

Robert Browning.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             ELMIRA, Aug.  22, '87.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man

while he sleeps.  When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871,

I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it

differently being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and

environment (and Taine and St. Simon): and now I lay the book down once

more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--And not a pale,

characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat.  Carlyle teaches no such gospel

so the change is in me--in my vision of the evidences.



People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it did at

all former milestones in their journey.  I wonder how they can lie so.

It comes of practice, no doubt.  They would not say that of Dickens's or

Scott's books.  Nothing remains the same.  When a man goes back to look

at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk: there is no instance

of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination

call for.  Shrunk how?  Why, to its correct dimensions: the house hasn't

altered; this is the first time it has been in focus.



Well, that's loss.  To have house and Bible shrink so, under the

disillusioning corrected angle, is loss-for a moment.  But there are

compensations.  You tilt the tube skyward and bring planets and comets

and corona flames a hundred and fifty thousand miles high into the field.

Which I see you have done, and found Tolstoi.  I haven't got him in focus

yet, but I've got Browning .  .  .  .

                                   Ys Ever

                                             MARK.





     Mention has been made already of Mark Twain's tendency to

     absentmindedness.  He was always forgetting engagements, or getting

     them wrong.  Once he hurried to an afternoon party, and finding the

     mistress of the house alone, sat down and talked to her comfortably

     for an hour or two, not remembering his errand at all.  It was only

     when he reached home that he learned that the party had taken place

     the week before.  It was always dangerous for him to make

     engagements, and he never seemed to profit by sorrowful experience.

     We, however, may profit now by one of his amusing apologies.





                 To Mrs. Grover Cleveland, in Washington:



                                             HARTFORD, Nov.  6, 1887.

MY DEAR MADAM,--I do not know how it is in the White House, but in this

house of ours whenever the minor half of the administration tries to run

itself without the help of the major half it gets aground.  Last night

when I was offered the opportunity to assist you in the throwing open the

Warner brothers superb benefaction in Bridgeport to those fortunate

women, I naturally appreciated the honor done me, and promptly seized my

chance.  I had an engagement, but the circumstances washed it out of my

mind.  If I had only laid the matter before the major half of the

administration on the spot, there would have been no blunder; but I never

thought of that.  So when I did lay it before her, later, I realized once

more that it will not do for the literary fraction of a combination to

try to manage affairs which properly belong in the office of the business

bulk of it.  I suppose the President often acts just like that: goes and

makes an impossible promise, and you never find it out until it is next

to impossible to break it up and set things straight again.  Well, that

is just our way, exactly-one half of the administration always busy

getting the family into trouble, and the other half busy getting it out

again.  And so we do seem to be all pretty much alike, after all.  The

fact is, I had forgotten that we were to have a dinner party on that

Bridgeport date--I thought it was the next day: which is a good deal of

an improvement for me, because I am more used to being behind a day or

two than ahead.  But that is just the difference between one end of this

kind of an administration and the other end of it, as you have noticed,

yourself--the other end does not forget these things.  Just so with a

funeral; if it is the man's funeral, he is most always there, of course-

but that is no credit to him, he wouldn't be there if you depended on

hint to remember about it; whereas, if on the other hand--but I seem to

have got off from my line of argument somehow; never mind about the

funeral.  Of course I am not meaning to say anything against funerals--

that is, as occasions--mere occasions--for as diversions I don't think

they amount to much But as I was saying--if you are not busy I will look

back and see what it was I was saying.



I don't seem to find the place; but anyway she was as sorry as ever

anybody could be that I could not go to Bridgeport, but there was no help

for it.  And I, I have been not only sorry but very sincerely ashamed of

having made an engagement to go without first making sure that I could

keep it, and I do not know how to apologize enough for my heedless breach

of good manners.

                    With the sincerest respect,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     Samuel Clemens was one of the very few authors to copyright a book

     in England before the enactment of the international copyright law.

     As early as 1872 he copyrighted 'Roughing It' in England, and

     piratical publishers there respected his rights.  Finally, in 1887,

     the inland revenue office assessed him with income tax, which he

     very willingly paid, instructing his London publishers, Chatto &

     Windus, to pay on the full amount he had received from them.  But

     when the receipt for his taxes came it was nearly a yard square with

     due postage of considerable amount.  Then he wrote:





              To Mr. Chatto, of Chatto & Windus, in London:



                                             HARTFORD, Dec. 5, '87.

MY DEAR CHATTO,--Look here, I don't mind paying the tax, but don't you

let the Inland Revenue Office send me any more receipts for it, for the

postage is something perfectly demoralizing.  If they feel obliged to

print a receipt on a horse-blanket, why don't they hire a ship and send

it over at their own expense?



Wasn't it good that they caught me out with an old book instead of a new

one?  The tax on a new book would bankrupt a body.  It was my purpose to

go to England next May and stay the rest of the year, but I've found that

tax office out just in time.  My new book would issue in March, and they

would tax the sale in both countries.  Come, we must get up a compromise

somehow.  You go and work in on the good side of those revenue people and

get them to take the profits and give me the tax.  Then I will come over

and we will divide the swag and have a good time.



I wish you to thank Mr. Christmas for me; but we won't resist.  The

country that allows me copyright has a right to tax me.

                              Sincerely Yours

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     Another English tax assessment came that year, based on the report

     that it was understood that he was going to become an English

     resident, and had leased Buckenham Hall, Norwich, for a year.

     Clemens wrote his publishers: "I will explain that all that about

     Buckenham Hall was an English newspaper's mistake.  I was not in

     England, and if I had been I wouldn't have been at Buckenham Hall,

     anyway, but at Buckingham Palace, or I would have endeavored to find

     out the reason why."  Clemens made literature out of this tax

     experience.  He wrote an open letter to Her Majesty Queen Victoria.

     Such a letter has no place in this collection.  It was published in

     the "Drawer" of Harper's Magazine, December, 1887, and is now

     included in the uniform edition of his works under the title of,

     "A Petition to the Queen of England."



     From the following letter, written at the end of the year, we gather

     that the type-setter costs were beginning to make a difference in

     the Clemens economies.





                      To Mrs. Moffett, in Fredonia:



                                             HARTFORD, Dec. 18, '87.

DEAR PAMELA,--will you take this $15 and buy some candy or some other

trifle for yourself and Sam and his wife to remember that we remember

you, by?



If we weren't a little crowded this year by the typesetter, I'd send a

check large enough to buy a family Bible or some other useful thing like

that.  However we go on and on, but the type-setter goes on forever--at

$3,000 a month; which is much more satisfactory than was the case the

first seventeen months, when the bill only averaged $2,000, and promised

to take a thousand years.  We'll be through, now, in 3 or 4 months, I

reckon, and then the strain will let up and we can breathe freely once

more, whether success ensues or failure.



Even with a type-setter on hand we ought not to be in the least scrimped-

but it would take a long letter to explain why and who is to blame.



All the family send love to all of you and best Christmas wishes for your

prosperity.

                    Affectionately,

                                        SAM.









XXVIII



LETTERS,1888.  A YALE DEGREE.  WORK ON "THE YANKEE." ON INTERVIEWING,

ETC.



     Mark Twain received his first college degree when he was made Master

     of Arts by Yale, in June, 1888.  Editor of the Courant, Charles H.

     Clarke, was selected to notify him of his new title.  Clarke was an

     old friend to whom Clemens could write familiarly.





                   To Charles H.  Clarke, in Hartford:



                                                  ELMIRA, July 2, '88.

MY DEAR CHARLES,--Thanks for your thanks, and for your initiation

intentions.  I shall be ready for you.  I feel mighty proud of that

degree; in fact, I could squeeze the truth a little closer and say vain

of it.  And why shouldn't I be?--I am the only literary animal of my

particular subspecies who has ever been given a degree by any College in

any age of the world, as far as I know.

                                   Sincerely Yours

                                             S. L. Clemens M. A.





                Reply: Charles H. Clarke to S. L Clemens:



MY DEAR FRIEND, You are "the only literary animal of your particular

subspecies" in existence and you've no cause for humility in the fact.

Yale has done herself at least as much credit as she has done you, and

"Don't you forget it."

                              C. H. C.





     With the exception of his brief return to the river in 1882.  Mark

     Twain had been twenty-seven years away from pilots and piloting.

     Nevertheless, he always kept a tender place in his heart for the old

     times and for old river comrades.  Major "Jack" Downing had been a

     Mississippi pilot of early days, but had long since retired from the

     river to a comfortable life ashore, in an Ohio town.  Clemens had

     not heard from him for years when a letter came which invited the

     following answer.





               To Major "Jack" Downing, in Middleport Ohio:



                                        ELMIRA, N. Y.[no month] 1888.

DEAR MAJOR,--And has it come to this that the dead rise up and speak?

For I supposed that you were dead, it has been so long since I heard your

name.



And how young you've grown!  I was a mere boy when I knew you on the

river, where you had been piloting for 35 years, and now you are only a

year and a half older than I am!  I mean to go to Hot Springs myself and

get 30 or 40 years knocked off my age.  It's manifestly the place that

Ponce de Leon was striking for, but the poor fellow lost the trail.



Possibly I may see you, for I shall be in St. Louis a day or two in

November.  I propose to go down the river and "note the changes" once

more before I make the long crossing, and perhaps you can come there.

Will you?  I want to see all the boys that are left alive.



And so Grant Marsh, too, is flourishing yet?  A mighty good fellow, and

smart too.  When we were taking that wood flat down to the Chambers,

which was aground, I soon saw that I was a perfect lubber at piloting

such a thing.  I saw that I could never hit the Chambers with it, so I

resigned in Marsh's favor, and he accomplished the task to my admiration.

We should all have gone to the mischief if I had remained in authority.

I always had good judgement, more judgement than talent, in fact.



No; the nom de plume did not originate in that way.  Capt. Sellers used

the signature, "Mark Twain," himself, when he used to write up the

antiquities in the way of river reminiscences for the New Orleans

Picayune.  He hated me for burlesquing them in an article in the True

Delta; so four years later when he died, I robbed the corpse--that is I

confiscated the nom de plume.  I have published this vital fact 3,000

times now.  But no matter, it is good practice; it is about the only fact

that I can tell the same way every time.  Very glad, indeed, to hear from

you Major, and shall be gladder still to see you in November.



                              Truly yours,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     He did not make the journey down the river planned for that year.

     He had always hoped to make another steamboat trip with Bixby, but

     one thing and another interfered and he did not go again.



     Authors were always sending their books to Mark Twain to read, and

     no busy man was ever more kindly disposed toward such offerings,

     more generously considerate of the senders.  Louis Pendleton was a

     young unknown writer in 1888, but Clemens took time to read his

     story carefully, and to write to him about it a letter that cost

     precious time, thought, and effort.  It must have rejoiced the young

     man's heart to receive a letter like that, from one whom all young

     authors held supreme.





                     To Louis Pendleton, in Georgia:



                                        ELMIRA, N. Y., Aug. 4, '88.

MY DEAR SIR,--I found your letter an hour ago among some others which had

lain forgotten a couple of weeks, and I at once stole time enough to read

Ariadne.  Stole is the right word, for the summer "Vacation" is the only

chance I get for work; so, no minute subtracted from work is borrowed, it

is stolen.  But this time I do not repent.  As a rule, people don't send

me books which I can thank them for, and so I say nothing--which looks

uncourteous.  But I thank you.  Ariadne is a beautiful and satisfying

story; and true, too--which is the best part of a story; or indeed of any

other thing.  Even liars have to admit that, if they are intelligent

liars; I mean in their private [the word conscientious written but

erased] intervals.  (I struck that word out because a man's private

thought can never be a lie; what he thinks, is to him the truth, always;

what he speaks--but these be platitudes.)



If you want me to pick some flaws--very well--but I do it unwillingly.

I notice one thing--which one may notice also in my books, and in all

books whether written by man or God: trifling carelessness of statement

or Expression.  If I think that you meant that she took the lizard from

the water which she had drawn from the well, it is evidence--it is almost

proof--that your words were not as clear as they should have been.  True,

it is only a trifling thing; but so is mist on a mirror.  I would have

hung the pail on Ariadne's arm.  You did not deceive me when you said

that she carried it under her arm, for I knew she didn't; still it was

not your right to mar my enjoyment of the graceful picture.  If the pail

had been a portfolio, I wouldn't be making these remarks.  The engraver

of a fine picture revises, and revises, and revises--and then revises,

and revises, and revises; and then repeats.  And always the charm of that

picture grows, under his hand.  It was good enough before--told its

story, and was beautiful.  True: and a lovely girl is lovely, with

freckles; but she isn't at her level best with them.



This is not hypercriticism; you have had training enough to know that.



So much concerning exactness of statement.  In that other not-small

matter--selection of the exact single word--you are hard to catch.

Still, I should hold that Mrs. Walker considered that there was no

occasion for concealment; that "motive" implied a deeper mental search

than she expended on the matter; that it doesn't reflect the attitude of

her mind with precision.  Is this hypercriticism?  I shan't dispute it.

I only say, that if Mrs. Walker didn't go so far as to have a motive, I

had to suggest that when a word is so near the right one that a body

can't quite tell whether it is or isn't, it's good politics to strike it

out and go for the Thesaurus.  That's all.  Motive may stand; but you

have allowed a snake to scream, and I will not concede that that was the

best word.



I do not apologize for saying these things, for they are not said in the

speck-hunting spirit, but in the spirit of want-to-help-if-I-can.  They

would be useful to me if said to me once a month, they may be useful to

you, said once.



I save the other stories for my real vacation--which is nine months long,

to my sorrow.  I thank you again.

                              Truly Yours

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.





     In the next letter we get a sidelight on the type-setting machine,

     the Frankenstein monster that was draining their substance and

     holding out false hopes of relief and golden return.  The program

     here outlined was one that would continue for several years yet,

     with the end always in sight, but never quite attained.





                    To Orion Clemens, in Keokuk, Ia.:



                                                       Oct. 3, '88.

Private



Saturday 29th, by a closely calculated estimate, there were 85 days' work

to do on the machine.



We can use 4 men, but not constantly.  If they could work constantly it

would complete the machine in 21 days, of course.  They will all be on

hand and under wages, and each will get in all the work there is

opportunity for, but by how much they can reduce the 85 days toward the

21 days, nobody can tell.



To-day I pay Pratt & Whitney $10,000.  This squares back indebtedness and

everything to date.  They began about May or April or March 1886--along

there somewhere, and have always kept from a dozen to two dozen master-

hands on the machine.



That outgo is done; 4 men for a month or two will close up that leak and

caulk it.  Work on the patents is also kind of drawing toward a

conclusion.



Love to you both.  All well here.



And give our love to Ma if she can get the idea.



                                        SAM.





     Mark Twain that year was working pretty steadily on 'The Yankee at

     King Arthur's Court', a book which he had begun two years before.

     He had published nothing since the Huck Finn story, and his company

     was badly in need of a new book by an author of distinction.  Also

     it was highly desirable to earn money for himself; wherefore he set

     to work to finish the Yankee story.  He had worked pretty steadily

     that summer in his Elmira study, but on his return to Hartford found

     a good deal of confusion in the house, so went over to Twichell's,

     where carpenter work was in progress.  He seems to have worked there

     successfully, though what improvement of conditions he found in that

     numerous, lively household, over those at home it would be difficult

     to say.





          To Theodore W.  Crane, at Quarry Farm, Elmira, N.  Y.



                                                  Friday, Oct.,5, '88.

DEAR THEO,--I am here in Twichell's house at work, with the noise of the

children and an army of carpenters to help.  Of course they don't help,

but neither do they hinder.  It's like a boiler-factory for racket, and

in nailing a wooden ceiling onto the room under me the hammering tickles

my feet amazingly sometimes, and jars my table a good deal; but I never

am conscious of the racket at all, and I move my feet into position of

relief without knowing when I do it.  I began here Monday morning, and

have done eighty pages since.  I was so tired last night that I thought I

would lie abed and rest, to-day; but I couldn't resist.  I mean to try to

knock off tomorrow, but it's doubtful if I do.  I want to finish the day

the machine finishes, and a week ago the closest calculations for that

indicated Oct. 22--but experience teaches me that their calculations will

miss fire, as usual.



The other day the children were projecting a purchase, Livy and I to

furnish the money--a dollar and a half.  Jean discouraged the idea.  She

said: "We haven't got any money.  Children, if you would think, you would

remember the machine isn't done."



It's billiards to-night.  I wish you were here.

                    With love to you both

                                             S. L. C.



P. S.  I got it all wrong.  It wasn't the children, it was Marie.  She

wanted a box of blacking, for the children's shoes.  Jean reproved her-

and said:



"Why, Marie, you mustn't ask for things now.  The machine isn't done."



                                             S. L. C.





     The letter that follows is to another of his old pilot friends, one

     who was also a schoolmate, Will Bowen, of Hannibal.  There is today

     no means of knowing the occasion upon which this letter was written,

     but it does not matter; it is the letter itself that is of chief

     value.





                     To Will Bowen, in Hannibal, Mo.:



                                             HARTFORD, Nov 4, '88.

DEAR WILL,--I received your letter yesterday evening, just as I was

starting out of town to attend a wedding, and so my mind was privately

busy, all the evening, in the midst of the maelstrom of chat and chaff

and laughter, with the sort of reflections which create themselves,

examine themselves, and continue themselves, unaffected by surroundings

--unaffected, that is understood, by the surroundings, but not

uninfluenced by them.  Here was the near presence of the two supreme

events of life: marriage, which is the beginning of life, and death which

is the end of it.  I found myself seeking chances to shirk into corners

where I might think, undisturbed; and the most I got out of my thought,

was this: both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises

happiness, doubtless the other assures it.  A long procession of people

filed through my mind--people whom you and I knew so many years ago--so

many centuries ago, it seems like-and these ancient dead marched to the

soft marriage music of a band concealed in some remote room of the house;

and the contented music and the dreaming shades seemed in right accord

with each other, and fitting. Nobody else knew that a procession of the

dead was passing though this noisy swarm of the living, but there it was,

and to me there was nothing uncanny about it; Rio, they were welcome

faces to me.  I would have liked to bring up every creature we knew in

those days--even the dumb animals--it would be bathing in the fabled

Fountain of Youth.



We all feel your deep trouble with you; and we would hope, if we might,

but your words deny us that privilege.  To die one's self is a thing that

must be easy, and of light consequence, but to lose a part of one's self

--well, we know how deep that pang goes, we who have suffered that

disaster, received that wound which cannot heal.

                              Sincerely your friend

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.





     His next is of quite a different nature.  Evidently the typesetting

     conditions had alarmed Orion, and he was undertaking some economies

     with a view of retrenchment.  Orion was always reducing economy to

     science.  Once, at an earlier date, he recorded that he had figured

     his personal living expenses down to sixty cents a week, but

     inasmuch as he was then, by his own confession, unable to earn the

     sixty cents, this particular economy was wasted.  Orion was a trial,

     certainly, and the explosion that follows was not without excuse.

     Furthermore, it was not as bad as it sounds.  Mark Twain's rages

     always had an element of humor in them, a fact which no one more

     than Orion himself would appreciate.  He preserved this letter,

     quietly noting on the envelope, "Letter from Sam, about ma's nurse."





                Letter to Orion Clemens, in Keokuk, Iowa:



                                                       NOV. 29, '88.

Jesus Christ!--It is perilous to write such a man.  You can go crazy on

less material than anybody that ever lived.  What in hell has produced

all these maniacal imaginings?  You told me you had hired an attendant

for ma.  Now hire one instantly, and stop this nonsense of wearing Mollie

and yourself out trying to do that nursing yourselves.  Hire the

attendant, and tell me her cost so that I can instruct Webster & Co. to

add it every month to what they already send.  Don't fool away any more

time about this.  And don't write me any more damned rot about "storms,"

and inability to pay trivial sums of money and--and--hell and damnation!

You see I've read only the first page of your letter; I wouldn't read the

rest for a million dollars.

                                   Yr

                                         SAM.



P. S.  Don't imagine that I have lost my temper, because I swear.  I

swear all day, but I do not lose my temper.  And don't imagine that I am

on my way to the poorhouse, for I am not; or that I am uneasy, for I am

not; or that I am uncomfortable or unhappy--for I never am.  I don't know

what it is to be unhappy or uneasy; and I am not going to try to learn

how, at this late day.

                                   SAM.





     Few men were ever interviewed oftener than Mark Twain, yet he never

     welcomed interviewers and was seldom satisfied with them.  "What I

     say in an interview loses it character in print," he often remarked,

     "all its life and personality.  The reporter realizes this himself,

     and tries to improve upon me, but he doesn't help matters any."



     Edward W. Bok, before he became editor of the Ladies Home Journal,

     was conducting a weekly syndicate column under the title of "Bok's

     Literary Leaves."  It usually consisted of news and gossip of

     writers, comment, etc., literary odds and ends, and occasional

     interviews with distinguished authors.  He went up to Hartford one

     day to interview Mark Twain.  The result seemed satisfactory to Bok,

     but wishing to be certain that it would be satisfactory to Clemens,

     he sent him a copy for approval.  The interview was not returned;

     in the place of it came a letter-not altogether disappointing, as

     the reader may believe.





                     To Edward W.  Bok, in New York:



MY DEAR MR. BOK,--No, no.  It is like most interviews, pure twaddle and

valueless.



For several quite plain and simple reasons, an "interview" must, as a

rule, be an absurdity, and chiefly for this reason--It is an attempt to

use a boat on land or a wagon on water, to speak figuratively.  Spoken

speech is one thing, written speech is quite another.  Print is the

proper vehicle for the latter, but it isn't for the former.  The moment

"talk" is put into print you recognize that it is not what it was when

you heard it; you perceive that an immense something has disappeared from

it.  That is its soul.  You have nothing but a dead carcass left on your

hands.  Color, play of feature, the varying modulations of the voice, the

laugh, the smile, the informing inflections, everything that gave that

body warmth, grace, friendliness and charm and commended it to your

affections--or, at least, to your tolerance--is gone and nothing is left

but a pallid, stiff and repulsive cadaver.



Such is "talk" almost invariably, as you see it lying in state in an

"interview".  The interviewer seldom tries to tell one how a thing was

said; he merely puts in the naked remark and stops there.  When one

writes for print his methods are very different.  He follows forms which

have but little resemblance to conversation, but they make the reader

understand what the writer is trying to convey.  And when the writer is

making a story and finds it necessary to report some of the talk of his

characters observe how cautiously and anxiously he goes at that risky and

difficult thing.  "If he had dared to say that thing in my presence,"

said Alfred, "taking a mock heroic attitude, and casting an arch glance

upon the company, blood would have flowed."



"If he had dared to say that thing in my presence," said Hawkwood, with

that in his eye which caused more than one heart in that guilty

assemblage to quake, "blood would have flowed."



"If he had dared to say that thing in my presence," said the paltry

blusterer, with valor on his tongue and pallor on his lips, "blood would

have flowed."



So painfully aware is the novelist that naked talk in print conveys no

meaning that he loads, and often overloads, almost every utterance of his

characters with explanations and interpretations.  It is a loud

confession that print is a poor vehicle for "talk"; it is a recognition

that uninterpreted talk in print would result in confusion to the reader,

not instruction.



Now, in your interview, you have certainly been most accurate; you have

set down the sentences I uttered as I said them.  But you have not a word

of explanation; what my manner was at several points is not indicated.

Therefore, no reader can possibly know where I was in earnest and where I

was joking; or whether I was joking altogether or in earnest altogether.

Such a report of a conversation has no value.  It can convey many

meanings to the reader, but never the right one.  To add interpretations

which would convey the right meaning is a something which would require

--what?  An art so high and fine and difficult that no possessor of it

would ever be allowed to waste it on interviews.



No; spare the reader, and spare me; leave the whole interview out; it is

rubbish.  I wouldn't talk in my sleep if I couldn't talk better than

that.



If you wish to print anything print this letter; it may have some value,

for it may explain to a reader here and there why it is that in

interviews, as a rule, men seem to talk like anybody but themselves.

                         Very sincerely yours,

                                             MARK TWAIN.









XXIX



LETTERS, 1889.  THE MACHINE.  DEATH OF MR. CRANE.

CONCLUSION OF THE YANKEE



In January, 1889, Clemens believed, after his long seven years of

waiting, fruition had come in the matter of the type machine.  Paige, the

inventor, seemed at last to have given it its finishing touches.  The

mechanical marvel that had cost so much time, mental stress, and a

fortune in money, stood complete, responsive to the human will and touch

--the latest, and one of the greatest, wonders of the world.  To George

Standring, a London printer and publisher, Clemens wrote: "The machine is

finished!" and added, "This is by far the most marvelous invention ever

contrived by man.  And it is not a thing of rags and patches; it is made

of massive steel, and will last a century."



In his fever of enthusiasm on that day when he had actually seen it in

operation, he wrote a number of exuberant letters.  They were more or

less duplicates, but as the one to his brother is of fuller detail and

more intimate than the others, it has been selected for preservation

here.



                       To Orion Clemens, in Keokuk:



                                             HARTFORD, Jan. 5, '89.

DEAR ORION,--At 12.20 this afternoon a line of movable types was spaced

and justified by machinery, for the first time in the history of the

world!  And I was there to see.  It was done automatically--instantly--

perfectly.  This is indeed the first line of movable types that ever was

perfectly spaced and perfectly justified on this earth.



This was the last function that remained to be tested--and so by long

odds the most amazing and extraordinary invention ever born of the brain

of man stands completed and perfect.  Livy is down stairs celebrating.



But it's a cunning devil, is that machine!--and knows more than any man

that ever lived.  You shall see.  We made the test in this way.  We set

up a lot of random letters in a stick--three-fourths of a line; then

filled out the line with quads representing 14 spaces, each space to be

35/1000 of an inch thick.  Then we threw aside the quads and put the

letters into the machine and formed them into 15 two-letter words,

leaving the words separated by two-inch vacancies.  Then we started up

the machine slowly, by hand, and fastened our eyes on the space-selecting

pins.  The first pin-block projected its third pin as the first word came

traveling along the race-way; second block did the same; but the third

block projected its second pin!



"Oh, hell!  stop the machine--something wrong--it's going to set a

30/1000 space!"



General consternation.  "A foreign substance has got into the spacing

plates."  This from the head mathematician.



"Yes, that is the trouble," assented the foreman.



Paige examined.  "No--look in, and you can see that there's nothing of

the kind."  Further examination.  "Now I know what it is--what it must

be: one of those plates projects and binds.  It's too bad--the first

testis a failure."  A pause.  "Well, boys, no use to cry.  Get to work--

take the machine down.--No--Hold on!  don't touch a thing!  Go right

ahead!  We are fools, the machine isn't.  The machine knows what it's

about.  There is a speck of dirt on one of those types, and the machine

is putting in a thinner space to allow for it!"



That was just it.  The machine went right ahead, spaced the line,

justified it to a hair, and shoved it into the galley complete and

perfect!  We took it out and examined it with a glass.  You could not

tell by your eye that the third space was thinner than the others, but

the glass and the calipers showed the difference.  Paige had always said

that the machine would measure invisible particles of dirt and allow for

them, but even he had forgotten that vast fact for the moment.



All the witnesses made written record of the immense historical birth--

the first justification of a line of movable type by machinery--and also

set down the hour and the minute.  Nobody had drank anything, and yet

everybody seemed drunk.  Well-dizzy, stupefied, stunned.



All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly

into commonplace contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle.

Telephones, telegraphs, locomotives, cotton gins, sewing machines,

Babbage calculators, jacquard looms, perfecting presses, Arkwright's

frames--all mere toys, simplicities!  The Paige Compositor marches alone

and far in the lead of human inventions.



In two or three weeks we shall work the stiffness out of her joints and

have her performing as smoothly and softly as human muscles, and then we

shall speak out the big secret and let the world come and gaze.



Return me this letter when you have read it.



                                   SAM.





     Judge of the elation which such a letter would produce in Keokuk!

     Yet it was no greater than that which existed in Hartford--for a

     time.



     Then further delays.  Before the machine got "the stiffness out of

     her joints" that "cunning devil" manifested a tendency to break the

     types, and Paige, who was never happier than when he was pulling

     things to pieces and making improvements, had the type-setter apart

     again and the day of complete triumph was postponed.



     There was sadness at the Elmira farm that spring.  Theodore Crane,

     who had long been in poor health, seemed to grow daily worse.  In

     February he had paid a visit to Hartford and saw the machine in

     operation, but by the end of May his condition was very serious.

     Remembering his keen sense of humor, Clemens reported to him

     cheering and amusing incidents.





               To Mrs. Theodore Crane.  in Elmira, N. Y.:



                                             HARTFORD, May 28, '89.

Susie dear, I want you to tell this to Theodore.  You know how absent-

minded Twichell is, and how desolate his face is when he is in that

frame.  At such times, he passes the word with a friend on the street and

is not aware of the meeting at all.  Twice in a week, our Clara had this

latter experience with him within the past month.  But the second

instance was too much for her, and she woke him up, in his tracks, with a

reproach.  She said:



"Uncle Joe, why do you always look as if you were just going down into

the grave, when you meet a person on the street?"--and then went on to

reveal to him the funereal spectacle which he presented on such

occasions.  Well, she has met Twichell three times since then, and would

swim the Connecticut to avoid meeting him the fourth.  As soon as he

sights her, no matter how public the place nor how far off she is, he

makes a bound into the air, heaves arms and legs into all sorts of

frantic gestures of delight, and so comes prancing, skipping and

pirouetting for her like a drunken Indian entering heaven.



With a full invoice of love from us all to you and Theodore.



                                                  S. L. C.





     The reference in the next to the "closing sentence" in a letter

     written by Howells to Clemens about this time, refers to a heart-

     broken utterance of the former concerning his daughter Winnie, who

     had died some time before.  She had been a gentle talented girl, but

     never of robust health.  Her death had followed a long period of

     gradual decline.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             HARTFORD, Judy 13, '89.

DEAR HOWELLS,--I came on from Elmira a day or two ago, where I left a

house of mourning.  Mr. Crane died, after ten months of pain and two

whole days of dying, at the farm on the hill, the 3rd inst: A man who had

always hoped for a swift death.  Mrs. Crane and Mrs. Clemens and the

children were in a gloom which brought back to me the days of nineteen

years ago, when Mr. Langdon died.  It is heart-breaking to see Mrs.

Crane.  Many a time, in the past ten days, the sight of her has reminded

me, with a pang, of the desolation which uttered itself in the closing

sentence of your last letter to me.  I do see that there is an argument

against suicide: the grief of the worshipers left behind; the awful

famine in their hearts, these are too costly terms for the release.



I shall be here ten days yet, and all alone: nobody in the house but the

servants.  Can't Mrs. Howells spare you to me?  Can't you come and stay

with me?  The house is cool and pleasant; your work will not be

interrupted; we will keep to ourselves and let the rest of the world do

the same; you can have your choice of three bedrooms, and you will find

the Children's schoolroom (which was built for my study,) the perfection

of a retired and silent den for work.  There isn't a fly or a mosquito on

the estate.  Come--say you will.



With kindest regards to Mrs. Howells, and Pilla and John,

                                   Yours Ever

                                             MARK.





Howells was more hopeful.  He wrote: "I read something in a strange book,

The Physical Theory of Another Life, that consoles a little; namely, we

see and feel the power of Deity in such fullness that we ought to infer

the infinite justice and Goodness which we do not see or feel."  And a

few days later, he wrote: "I would rather see and talk with you than any

other man in the world outside my own blood."



A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court was brought to an end that

year and given to the artist and printer.  Dan Beard was selected for the

drawings, and was given a free hand, as the next letter shows.





           To Fred J. Hall, Manager Charles L. Webster & Co.:



[Charles L.  Webster, owing to poor health, had by this time retired

from the firm.]



                                                  ELMIRA, July 20, '89.

DEAR MR. HALL,--Upon reflection--thus: tell Beard to obey his own

inspiration, and when he sees a picture in his mind put that picture on

paper, be it humorous or be it serious.  I want his genius to be wholly

unhampered, I shan't have fears as to the result.  They will be better

pictures than if I mixed in and tried to give him points on his own

trade.



Send this note and he'll understand.

                                        Yr

                                             S. L. C.





     Clemens had made a good choice in selecting Beard for the

     illustrations.  He was well qualified for the work, and being of a

     socialistic turn of mind put his whole soul into it.  When the

     drawings were completed, Clemens wrote: "Hold me under permanent

     obligations.  What luck it was to find you!  There are hundreds of

     artists that could illustrate any other book of mine, but there was

     only one who could illustrate this one.  Yes, it was a fortunate

     hour that I went netting for lightning bugs and caught a meteor.

     Live forever!"



     Clemens, of course, was anxious for Howells to read The Yankee, and

     Mrs. Clemens particularly so.  Her eyes were giving her trouble that

     summer, so that she could not read the MS. for herself, and she had

     grave doubts as to some of its chapters.  It may be said here that

     the book to-day might have been better if Mrs. Clemens had been able

     to read it.  Howells was a peerless critic, but the revolutionary

     subject-matter of the book so delighted him that he was perhaps

     somewhat blinded to its literary defects.  However, this is

     premature.  Howells did not at once see the story.  He had promised

     to come to Hartford, but wrote that trivial matters had made his

     visit impossible.  From the next letter we get the situation at this

     time.  The "Mr. Church" mentioned was Frederick S. Church, the well-

     known artist.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             ELMIRA, July 24, '89.

DEAR HOWELLS,--I, too, was as sorry as I could be; yes, and desperately

disappointed.  I even did a heroic thing: shipped my book off to New York

lest I should forget hospitality and embitter your visit with it.  Not

that I think you wouldn't like to read it, for I think you would; but not

on a holiday that's not the time.  I see how you were situated--another

familiarity of Providence and wholly wanton intrusion--and of course we

could not help ourselves.  Well, just think of it: a while ago, while

Providence's attention was absorbed in disordering some time-tables so as

to break up a trip of mine to Mr. Church's on the Hudson, that Johnstown

dam got loose.  I swear I was afraid to pray, for fear I should laugh.

Well, I'm not going to despair; we'll manage a meet yet.



I expect to go to Hartford again in August and maybe remain till I have

to come back here and fetch the family.  And, along there in August, some

time, you let on that you are going to Mexico, and I will let on that I

am going to Spitzbergen, and then under cover of this clever stratagem we

will glide from the trains at Worcester and have a time.  I have noticed

that Providence is indifferent about Mexico and Spitzbergen.

                                   Ys Ever

                                             MARK.





     Possibly Mark Twain was not particularly anxious that Howells should

     see his MS., fearing that he might lay a ruthless hand on some of

     his more violent fulminations and wild fancies.  However this may

     be, further postponement was soon at an end.  Mrs. Clemens's eyes

     troubled her and would not permit her to read, so she requested that

     the Yankee be passed upon by soberminded critics, such as Howells

     and Edmund Clarence Stedman.  Howells wrote that even if he hadn't

     wanted to read the book for its own sake, or for the author's sake,

     he would still want to do it for Mrs. Clemens's.  Whereupon the

     proofs were started in his direction.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             ELMIRA, Aug.  24, '89.

DEAR HOWELLS,--If you should be moved to speak of my book in the Study,

I shall be glad and proud--and the sooner it gets in, the better for the

book; though I don't suppose you can get it in earlier than the November

number--why, no, you can't get it in till a month later than that.  Well,

anyway I don't think I'll send out any other press copy--except perhaps

to Stedman.  I'm not writing for those parties who miscall themselves

critics, and I don't care to have them paw the book at all.  It's my

swan-song, my retirement from literature permanently, and I wish to pass

to the cemetery unclodded.



I judge that the proofs have begun to reach you about this time, as I had

some (though not revises,) this morning.  I'm sure I'm going to be

charmed with Beard's pictures.  Observe his nice take-off of Middle-Age

art-dinner-table scene.

                              Ys sincerely

                                             MARK.





     Howells's approval of the Yankee came almost in the form of exultant

     shouts, one after reading each batch of proof.  First he wrote:

     "It's charming, original, wonderful!  good in fancy and sound to the

     core in morals."  And again, "It's a mighty great book, and it makes

     my heart burn with wrath.  It seems God did not forget to put a soul

     into you.  He shuts most literary men off with a brain, merely."

     Then, a few days later: "The book is glorious--simply noble; what

     masses of virgin truth never touched in print before!" and, finally,

     "Last night I read your last chapter.  As Stedman says of the whole

     book, it's titanic."





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             HARTFORD, Sept.  22, '89.

DEAR HOWELLS,--It is immensely good of you to grind through that stuff

for me; but it gives peace to Mrs. Clemens's soul; and I am as grateful

to you as a body can be.  I am glad you approve of what I say about the

French Revolution.  Few people will.  It is odd that even to this day

Americans still observe that immortal benefaction through English and

other monarchical eyes, and have no shred of an opinion about it that

they didn't get at second-hand.



Next to the 4th of July and its results, it was the noblest and the

holiest thing and the most precious that ever happened in this earth.

And its gracious work is not done yet--not anywhere in the remote

neighborhood of it.



Don't trouble to send me all the proofs; send me the pages with your

corrections on them, and waste-basket the rest.  We issue the book

Dec. 10; consequently a notice that appears Dec. 20 will be just in good

time.



I am waiting to see your Study set a fashion in criticism.  When that

happens--as please God it must--consider that if you lived three

centuries you couldn't do a more valuable work for this country, or a

humaner.



As a rule a critic's dissent merely enrages, and so does no good; but by

the new art which you use, your dissent must be as welcome as your

approval, and as valuable.  I do not know what the secret of it is,

unless it is your attitude--man courteously reasoning with man and

brother, in place of the worn and wearisome critical attitude of all this

long time--superior being lecturing a boy.



Well, my book is written--let it go.  But if it were only to write over

again there wouldn't be so many things left out.  They burn in me; and

they keep multiplying and multiplying; but now they can't ever be said.

And besides, they would require a library--and a pen warmed up in hell.

                                        Ys Ever

                                                  MARK.





     The type-setting machine began to loom large in the background.

     Clemens believed it perfected by this time.  Paige had got it

     together again and it was running steadily--or approximately so

     --setting type at a marvelous speed and with perfect accuracy.  In

     time an expert operator would be able to set as high as eight

     thousand ems per hour, or about ten times as much as a good

     compositor could set and distribute by hand.  Those who saw it were

     convinced--most of them--that the type-setting problem was solved by

     this great mechanical miracle.  If there were any who doubted, it

     was because of its marvelously minute accuracy which the others only

     admired.  Such accuracy, it was sometimes whispered, required

     absolutely perfect adjustment, and what would happen when the great

     inventor--"the poet in steel," as Clemens once called him--was no

     longer at hand to supervise and to correct the slightest variation.

     But no such breath of doubt came to Mark Twain; he believed the

     machine as reliable as a constellation.



     But now there was need of capital to manufacture and market the

     wonder.  Clemens, casting about in his mind, remembered Senator

     Jones, of Nevada, a man of great wealth, and his old friend, Joe

     Goodman, of Nevada, in whom Jones had unlimited confidence.  He

     wrote to Goodman, and in this letter we get a pretty full exposition

     of the whole matter as it stood in the fall of 1889.  We note in

     this communication that Clemens says that he has been at the machine

     three years and seven months, but this was only the period during

     which he had spent the regular monthly sum of three thousand

     dollars.  His interest in the invention had begun as far back as

     1880.





                    To Joseph T.  Goodman, in Nevada:



                                        Private.  HARTFORD, Oct. 7, '89.

DEAR JOE,-I had a letter from Aleck Badlam day before yesterday, and in

answering him I mentioned a matter which I asked him to consider a secret

except to you and John McComb,--[This is Col. McComb, of the Alta-

California, who had sent Mark Twain on the Quaker City excursion]--as I

am not ready yet to get into the newspapers.



I have come near writing you about this matter several times, but it

wasn't ripe, and I waited.  It is ripe, now.  It is a type-setting

machine which I undertook to build for the inventor(for a consideration).

I have been at it three years and seven months without losing a day, at a

cost of $3,000 a month, and in so private a way that Hartford has known

nothing about it.  Indeed only a dozen men have known of the matter.

I have reported progress from time to time to the proprietors of the

N. Y. Sun, Herald, Times, World, Harper Brothers and John F. Trow; also

to the proprietors of the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe.  Three

years ago I asked all these people to squelch their frantic desire to

load up their offices with the Mergenthaler (N. Y. Tribune) machine, and

wait for mine and then choose between the two.  They have waited--with no

very gaudy patience--but still they have waited; and I could prove to

them to-day that they have not lost anything by it.  But I reserve the

proof for the present--except in the case of the N. Y. Herald; I sent an

invitation there the other day--a courtesy due a paper which ordered

$240,000 worth of our machines long ago when it was still in a crude

condition.  The Herald has ordered its foreman to come up here next

Thursday; but that is the only invitation which will go out for some time

yet.



The machine was finished several weeks ago, and has been running ever

since in the machine shop.  It is a magnificent creature of steel, all of

Pratt & Whitney's super-best workmanship, and as nicely adjusted and as

accurate as a watch.  In construction it is as elaborate and complex as

that machine which it ranks next to, by every right--Man--and in

performance it is as simple and sure.



Anybody can set type on it who can read--and can do it after only 15

minutes' instruction.  The operator does not need to leave his seat at

the keyboard; for the reason that he is not required to do anything but

strike the keys and set type--merely one function; the spacing,

justifying, emptying into the galley, and distributing of dead matter is

all done by the machine without anybody's help--four functions.



The ease with which a cub can learn is surprising.  Day before yesterday

I saw our newest cub set, perfectly space and perfectly justify 2,150 ems

of solid nonpareil in an hour and distribute the like amount in the same

hour--and six hours previously he had never seen the machine or its

keyboard.  It was a good hour's work for 3-year veterans on the other

type-setting machines to do.  We have 3 cubs.  The dean of the trio is a

school youth of 18.  Yesterday morning he had been an apprentice on the

machine 16 working days (8-hour days); and we speeded him to see what he

could do in an hour.  In the hour he set 5,900 ems solid nonpareil, and

the machine perfectly spaced and justified it, and of course distributed

the like amount in the same hour.  Considering that a good fair

compositor sets 700 and distributes 700 in the one hour, this boy did the

work of about 8 x a compositors in that hour.  This fact sends all other

type-setting machines a thousand miles to the rear, and the best of them

will never be heard of again after we publicly exhibit in New York.



We shall put on 3 more cubs.  We have one school boy and two compositors,

now,--and we think of putting on a type writer, a stenographer, and

perhaps a shoemaker, to show that no special gifts or training are

required with this machine.  We shall train these beginners two or three

months--or until some one of them gets up to 7,000 an hour--then we will

show up in New York and run the machine 24 hours a day 7 days in the

week, for several months--to prove that this is a machine which will

never get out of order or cause delay, and can stand anything an anvil

can stand.  You know there is no other typesetting machine that can run

two hours on a stretch without causing trouble and delay with its

incurable caprices.



We own the whole field--every inch of it--and nothing can dislodge us.



Now then, above is my preachment, and here follows the reason and purpose

of it.  I want you to run over here, roost over the machine a week and

satisfy yourself, and then go to John P. Jones or to whom you please, and

sell me a hundred thousand dollars' worth of this property and take ten

per cent in cash or the "property" for your trouble--the latter, if you

are wise, because the price I ask is a long way short of the value.



What I call "property" is this.  A small part of my ownership consists of

a royalty of $500 on every machine marketed under the American patents.

My selling-terms are, a permanent royalty of one dollar on every

American-marketed machine for a thousand dollars cash to me in hand paid.

We shan't market any fewer than 5,000 machines in 15 years--a return of

fifteen thousand dollars for one thousand.  A royalty is better than

stock, in one way--it must be paid, every six months, rain or shine; it

is a debt, and must be paid before dividends are declared.  By and by,

when we become a stock company I shall buy these royalties back for stock

if I can get them for anything like reasonable terms.



I have never borrowed a penny to use on the machine, and never sold a

penny's worth of the property until the machine was entirely finished and

proven by the severest tests to be what she started out to be--perfect,

permanent, and occupying the position, as regards all kindred machines,

which the City of Paris occupies as regards the canvas-backs of the

mercantile marine.



It is my purpose to sell two hundred dollars of my royalties at the above

price during the next two months and keep the other $300.



Mrs. Clemens begs Mrs. Goodman to come with you, and asks pardon for not

writing the message herself--which would be a pathetically-welcome

spectacle to me; for I have been her amanuensis for 8 months, now, since

her eyes failed her.  Yours as always

                                        MARK.





     While this letter with its amazing contents is on its way to

     astonish Joe Goodman, we will consider one of quite a different,

     but equally characteristic sort.  We may assume that Mark Twain's

     sister Pamela had been visiting him in Hartford and was now making

     a visit in Keokuk.





                       To Mrs. Moffett, in Keokuk:



                                             HARTFORD, Oct 9, '89.

DEAR PAMELA,--An hour after you left I was suddenly struck with a

realizing sense of the utter chuckle-headedness of that notion of mine:

to send your trunk after you.  Land! it was idiotic.  None but a lunatic

would, separate himself from his baggage.



Well, I am soulfully glad the baggage fetcher saved me from consummating

my insane inspiration.  I met him on the street in the afternoon and paid

him again.  I shall pay him several times more, as opportunity offers.



I declined the invitation to banquet with the visiting South American

Congress, in a polite note explaining that I had to go to New York today.

I conveyed the note privately to Patrick; he got the envelope soiled,

and asked Livy to put on a clean one.  That is why I am going to the

banquet; also why I have disinvited the boys I thought I was going to

punch billiards with, upstairs to-night.



Patrick is one of the injudiciousest people I ever struck.  And I am the

other.

                         Your Brother

                                             SAM.





     The Yankee was now ready for publication, and advance sheets were

     already in the reviewers' hands.  Just at this moment the Brazilian

     monarchy crumbled, and Clemens was moved to write Sylvester Baxter,

     of the Boston Herald, a letter which is of special interest in its

     prophecy of the new day, the dawn of which was even nearer than he

     suspected.





DEAR MR.  BAXTER, Another throne has gone down, and I swim in oceans of

satisfaction.  I wish I might live fifty years longer; I believe I should

see the thrones of Europe selling at auction for old iron.  I believe I

should really see the end of what is surely the grotesquest of all the

swindles ever invented by man-monarchy.  It is enough to make a graven

image laugh, to see apparently rational people, away down here in this

wholesome and merciless slaughter-day for shams, still mouthing empty

reverence for those moss-backed frauds and scoundrelisms, hereditary

kingship and so-called "nobility."  It is enough to make the monarchs and

nobles themselves laugh--and in private they do; there can be no question

about that.  I think there is only one funnier thing, and that is the

spectacle of these bastard Americans--these Hamersleys and Huntingtons

and such--offering cash, encumbered by themselves, for rotten carcases

and stolen titles.  When our great brethren the disenslaved Brazilians

frame their Declaration of Independence, I hope they will insert this

missing link: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all monarchs

are usurpers, and descendants of usurpers; for the reason that no throne

was ever set up in this world by the will, freely exercised, of the only

body possessing the legitimate right to set it up--the numerical mass of

the nation."



You already have the advance sheets of my forthcoming book in your hands.

If you will turn to about the five hundredth page, you will find a state

paper of my Connecticut Yankee in which he announces the dissolution of

King Arthur's monarchy and proclaims the English Republic.  Compare it

with the state paper which announces the downfall of the Brazilian

monarchy and proclaims the Republic of the United States of Brazil, and

stand by to defend the Yankee from plagiarism.  There is merely a

resemblance of ideas, nothing more.  The Yankee's proclamation was

already in print a week ago.  This is merely one of those odd

coincidences which are always turning up.  Come, protect the Yank from

that cheapest and easiest of all charges--plagiarism.  Otherwise, you

see, he will have to protect himself by charging approximate and

indefinite plagiarism upon the official servants of our majestic twin

down yonder, and then there might be war, or some similar annoyance.



Have you noticed the rumor that the Portuguese throne is unsteady, and

that the Portuguese slaves are getting restive?  Also, that the head

slave-driver of Europe, Alexander III, has so reduced his usual monthly

order for chains that the Russian foundries are running on only half time

now?  Also that other rumor that English nobility acquired an added

stench the other day--and had to ship it to India and the continent

because there wasn't any more room for it at home?  Things are working.

By and by there is going to be an emigration, may be.  Of course we shall

make no preparation; we never do.  In a few years from now we shall have

nothing but played-out kings and dukes on the police, and driving the

horse-cars, and whitewashing fences, and in fact overcrowding all the

avenues of unskilled labor; and then we shall wish, when it is too late,

that we had taken common and reasonable precautions and drowned them at

Castle Garden.





     There followed at this time a number of letters to Goodman, but as

     there is much of a sameness in them, we need not print them all.

     Clemens, in fact, kept the mails warm with letters bulging with

     schemes for capitalization, and promising vast wealth to all

     concerned.  When the letters did not go fast enough he sent

     telegrams.  In one of the letters Goodman is promised "five hundred

     thousand dollars out of the profits before we get anything

     ourselves."  One thing we gather from these letters is that Paige

     has taken the machine apart again, never satisfied with its

     perfection, or perhaps getting a hint that certain of its

     perfections were not permanent.  A letter at the end of November

     seems worth preserving here.





                  To Joseph T.  Goodman, in California:



                                             HARTFORD, Nov. 29, '89.

DEAR JOE, Things are getting into better and more flexible shape every

day.  Papers are now being drawn which will greatly simplify the raising

of capital; I shall be in supreme command; it will not be necessary for

the capitalist to arrive at terms with anybody but me.  I don't want to

dicker with anybody but Jones.  I know him; that is to say, I want to

dicker with you, and through you with Jones.  Try to see if you can't be

here by the 15th of January.



The machine was as perfect as a watch when we took her apart the other

day; but when she goes together again the 15th of January we expect her

to be perfecter than a watch.



Joe, I want you to sell some royalties to the boys out there, if you can,

for I want to be financially strong when we go to New York.  You know the

machine, and you appreciate its future enormous career better than any

man I know.  At the lowest conceivable estimate (2,000 machines a year,)

we shall sell 34,000 in the life of the patent--17 years.



All the family send love to you--and they mean it, or they wouldn't say

it.

                              Yours ever

                                        MARK.





     The Yankee had come from the press, and Howells had praised it in

     the "Editor's Study" in Harper's Magazine.  He had given it his

     highest commendation, and it seems that his opinion of it did not

     change with time.  "Of all fanciful schemes of fiction it pleases me

     most," he in one place declared, and again referred to it as

     "a greatly imagined and symmetrically developed tale."



     In more than one letter to Goodman, Clemens had urged him to come

     East without delay.  "Take the train, Joe, and come along," he wrote

     early in December.  And we judge from the following that Joe had

     decided to come.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             HARTFORD, Dec. 23, '89.

DEAR HOWELLS,--The magazine came last night, and the Study notice is just

great.  The satisfaction it affords us could not be more prodigious if

the book deserved every word of it; and maybe it does; I hope it does,

though of course I can't realize it and believe it.  But I am your

grateful servant, anyway and always.



I am going to read to the Cadets at West Point Jan. 11.  I go from here

to New York the 9th, and up to the Point the 11th.  Can't you go with me?

It's great fun.  I'm going to read the passages in the "Yankee" in which

the Yankee's West Point cadets figure--and shall covertly work in a

lecture on aristocracy to those boys.  I am to be the guest of the

Superintendent, but if you will go I will shake him and we will go to the

hotel.  He is a splendid fellow, and I know him well enough to take that

liberty.



And won't you give me a day or two's visit toward the end of January?

For two reasons: the machine will be at work again by that time, and we

want to hear the rest of the dream-story; Mrs. Clemens keeps speaking

about it and hankering for it.  And we can have Joe Goodman on hand again

by that time, and I want you to get to know him thoroughly.  It's well

worth it.  I am going to run up and stay over night with you as soon as I

can get a chance.



We are in the full rush of the holidays now, and an awful rush it is,

too.  You ought to have been here the other day, to make that day perfect

and complete.  All alone I managed to inflict agonies on Mrs: Clemens,

whereas I was expecting nothing but praises.  I made a party call the day

after the party--and called the lady down from breakfast to receive it.

I then left there and called on a new bride, who received me in her

dressing-gown; and as things went pretty well, I stayed to luncheon.

The error here was, that the appointed reception-hour was 3 in the

afternoon, and not at the bride's house but at her aunt's in another part

of the town.  However, as I meant well, none of these disasters

distressed me.

                         Yrs ever

                                   MARK.





     The Yankee did not find a very hearty welcome in England.  English

     readers did not fancy any burlesque of their Arthurian tales, or

     American strictures on their institutions.  Mark Twain's publishers

     had feared this, and asked that the story be especially edited for

     the English edition.  Clemens, however, would not listen to any

     suggestions of the sort.





              To Messrs.  Chatto & Windus, in London, Eng.:



GENTLEMEN,--Concerning The Yankee, I have already revised the story

twice; and it has been read critically by W. D. Howells and Edmund

Clarence Stedman, and my wife has caused me to strike out several

passages that have been brought to her attention, and to soften others.

Furthermore, I have read chapters of the book in public where Englishmen

were present and have profited by their suggestions.



Now, mind you, I have taken all this pains because I wanted to say a

Yankee mechanic's say against monarchy and its several natural props,

and yet make a book which you would be willing to print exactly as it

comes to you, without altering a word.



We are spoken of (by Englishmen) as a thin-skinned people.  It is you who

are thin-skinned.  An Englishman may write with the most brutal frankness

about any man or institution among us and we republish him without

dreaming of altering a line or a word.  But England cannot stand that

kind of a book written about herself.  It is England that is thin-

skinned.  It causeth me to smile when I read the modifications of my

language which have been made in my English editions to fit them for the

sensitive English palate.



Now, as I say, I have taken laborious pains to so trim this book of

offense that you might not lack the nerve to print it just as it stands.

I am going to get the proofs to you just as early as I can.  I want you

to read it carefully.  If you can publish it without altering a single

word, go ahead.  Otherwise, please hand it to J. R. Osgood in time for

him to have it published at my expense.



This is important, for the reason that the book was not written for

America; it was written for England.  So many Englishmen have done their

sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to

me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good

intent by trying to pry up the English nation to a little higher level of

manhood in turn.

                    Very truly yours,

                              S. L. CLEMENS.





The English nation, at least a considerable portion of it, did not wish

to be "pried up to a higher level of manhood" by a Connecticut Yankee.

The papers pretty generally denounced the book as coarse; in fact, a

vulgar travesty.  Some of the critics concluded that England, after all,

had made a mistake in admiring Mark Twain.  Clemens stood this for a time

and then seems to have decided that something should be done.  One of the

foremost of English critics was his friend and admirer; he would state

the case to him fully and invite his assistance.





                        To Andrew Lang, in London:



[First page missing.]



                                                            1889

They vote but do not print.  The head tells you pretty promptly whether

the food is satisfactory or not; and everybody hears, and thinks the

whole man has spoken.  It is a delusion.  Only his taste and his smell

have been heard from--important, both, in a way, but these do not build

up the man; and preserve his life and fortify it.



The little child is permitted to label its drawings "This is a cow this

is a horse," and so on.  This protects the child.  It saves it from the

sorrow and wrong of hearing its cows and its horses criticized as

kangaroos and work benches.  A man who is white-washing a fence is doing

a useful thing, so also is the man who is adorning a rich man's house

with costly frescoes; and all of us are sane enough to judge these

performances by standards proper to each.  Now, then, to be fair, an

author ought to be allowed to put upon his book an explanatory line:

"This is written for the Head;"  "This is written for the Belly and the

Members."  And the critic ought to hold himself in honor bound to put

away from him his ancient habit of judging all books by one standard, and

thenceforth follow a fairer course.



The critic assumes, every time, that if a book doesn't meet the

cultivated-class standard, it isn't valuable.  Let us apply his law all

around: for if it is sound in the case of novels, narratives, pictures,

and such things, it is certainly sound and applicable to all the steps

which lead up to culture and make culture possible.  It condemns the

spelling book, for a spelling book is of no use to a person of culture;

it condemns all school books and all schools which lie between the

child's primer and Greek, and between the infant school and the

university; it condemns all the rounds of art which lie between the cheap

terra cotta groups and the Venus de Medici, and between the chromo and

the Transfiguration; it requires Whitcomb Riley to sing no more till he

can sing like Shakespeare, and it forbids all amateur music and will

grant its sanction to nothing below the "classic."



Is this an extravagant statement?  No, it is a mere statement of fact.

It is the fact itself that is extravagant and grotesque.  And what is the

result?  This--and it is sufficiently curious: the critic has actually

imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by Raphael is

more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a chromo; and the

august opera than the hurdy-gurdy and the villagers' singing society; and

Homer than the little everybody's-poet whose rhymes are in all mouths

today and will be in nobody's mouth next generation; and the Latin

classics than Kipling's far-reaching bugle-note; and Jonathan Edwards

than the Salvation Army; and the Venus de Medici than the plaster-cast

peddler; the superstition, in a word, that the vast and awful comet that

trails its cold lustre through the remote abysses of space once a century

and interests and instructs a cultivated handful of astronomers is worth

more to the world than the sun which warms and cheers all the nations

every day and makes the crops to grow.



If a critic should start a religion it would not have any object but to

convert angels: and they wouldn't need it.  The thin top crust of

humanity--the cultivated--are worth pacifying, worth pleasing, worth

coddling, worth nourishing and preserving with dainties and delicacies,

it is true; but to be caterer to that little faction is no very dignified

or valuable occupation, it seems to me; it is merely feeding the over-

fed, and there must be small satisfaction in that.  It is not that little

minority who are already saved that are best worth trying to uplift,

I should think, but the mighty mass of the uncultivated who are

underneath.  That mass will never see the Old Masters--that sight is for

the few; but the chromo maker can lift them all one step upward toward

appreciation of art; they cannot have the opera, but the hurdy-gurdy and

the singing class lift them a little way toward that far light; they will

never know Homer, but the passing rhymester of their day leaves them

higher than he found them; they may never even hear of the Latin

classics, but they will strike step with Kipling's drum-beat, and they

will march; for all Jonathan Edwards's help they would die in their

slums, but the Salvation Army will beguile some of them up to pure air

and a cleaner life; they know no sculpture, the Venus is not even a name

to them, but they are a grade higher in the scale of civilization by the

ministrations of the plaster-cast than they were before it took its place

upon then mantel and made it beautiful to their unexacting eyes.



Indeed I have been misjudged, from the very first.  I have never tried in

even one single instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes.

I was not equipped for it, either by native gifts or training.  And I

never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger

game--the masses.  I have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them,

but have done my best to entertain them.  To simply amuse them would have

satisfied my dearest ambition at any time; for they could get instruction

elsewhere, and I had two chances to help to the teacher's one: for

amusement is a good preparation for study and a good healer of fatigue

after it.  My audience is dumb, it has no voice in print, and so I cannot

know whether I have won its approbation or only got its censure.



Yes, you see, I have always catered for the Belly and the Members, but

have been served like the others--criticized from the culture-standard

--to my sorrow and pain; because, honestly, I never cared what became of

the cultured classes; they could go to the theatre and the opera--they

had no use for me and the melodeon.



And now at last I arrive at my object and tender my petition, making

supplication to this effect: that the critics adopt a rule recognizing

the Belly and the Members, and formulate a standard whereby work done for

them shall be judged.  Help me, Mr. Lang; no voice can reach further than

yours in a case of this kind, or carry greater weight of authority.





     Lang's reply was an article in the Illustrated London News on "The

     Art of Mark Twain."  Lang had no admiration to express for the

     Yankee, which he confessed he had not cared to read, but he

     glorified Huck Finn to the highest.  "I can never forget, nor be

     ungrateful for the exquisite pleasure with which I read Huckleberry

     Finn for the first time, years ago," he wrote; "I read it again last

     night, deserting Kenilworth for Huck.  I never laid it down till I

     had finished it."



     Lang closed his article by referring to the story of Huck as the

     "great American novel which had escaped the eyes of those who

     watched to see this new planet swim into their ken."











LETTERS, 1890, CHIEFLY TO JOS. T. GOODMAN.  THE GREAT MACHINE ENTERPRISE



     Dr. John Brown's son, whom Mark Twain and his wife had known in 1873

     as "Jock," sent copies of Dr. John Brown and His Sister Isabella, by

     E.  T.  McLaren.  It was a gift appreciated in the Clemens home.





                To Mr. John Brown, in Edinburgh, Scotland:



                                             HARTFORD, Feby 11, 1890.

DEAR MR. BROWN,--Both copies came, and we are reading and re-reading the

one, and lending the other, to old time adorers of "Rab and his Friends."

It is an exquisite book; the perfection of literary workmanship.  It says

in every line, "Don't look at me, look at him"--and one tries to be good

and obey; but the charm of the painter is so strong that one can't keep

his entire attention on the developing portrait, but must steal side-

glimpses of the artist, and try to divine the trick of her felicitous

brush.  In this book the doctor lives and moves just as he was.  He was

the most extensive slave-holder of his time, and the kindest; and yet he

died without setting one of his bondmen free.  We all send our very, very

kindest regards.

                         Sincerely yours

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     If Mark Twain had been less interested in the type-setting machine

     he might possibly have found a profit that winter in the old Sellers

     play, which he had written with Howells seven years before.  The

     play had eventually been produced at the Lyceum Theatre in New York,

     with A. P. Burbank in the leading role, and Clemens and Howells as

     financial backers.  But it was a losing investment, nor did it pay

     any better when Clemens finally sent Burbank with it on the road.

     Now, however, James A.  Herne, a well-known actor and playwright,

     became interested in the idea, after a discussion of the matter with

     Howells, and there seemed a probability that with changes made under

     Herne's advisement the play might be made sensible and successful.



     But Mark Twain's greater interest was now all in the type-machine,

     and certainly he had no money to put into any other venture.  His

     next letter to Goodman is illuminating--the urgency of his need for

     funds opposed to that conscientiousness which was one of the most

     positive forces of Mark Twain's body spiritual.  The Mr. Arnot of

     this letter was an Elmira capitalist.





                    To Jos. T. Goodman, in California:



                                             HARTFORD, March 31, '90.

DEAR JOE,--If you were here, I should say, "Get you to Washington and beg

Senator Jones to take the chances and put up about ten or "--no, I

wouldn't.  The money would burn a hole in my pocket and get away from me

if the furnisher of it were proceeding upon merely your judgment and mine

and without other evidence.  It is too much of a responsibility.



But I am in as close a place to-day as ever I was; $3,000 due for the

last month's machine-expenses, and the purse empty.  I notified Mr. Arnot

a month ago that I should want $5,000 to-day, and his check arrived last

night; but I sent it back to him, because when he bought of me on the 9th

of December I said that I would not draw upon him for 3 months, and that

before that date Senator Jones would have examined the machine and

approved, or done the other thing.  If Jones should arrive here a week or

ten days from now (as he expects to do,) and should not approve, and

shouldn't buy any royalties, my deal with Arnot would not be

symmetrically square, and then how could I refund?  The surest way was to

return his check.



I have talked with the madam, and here is the result.  I will go down to

the factory and notify Paige that I will scrape together $6,000 to meet

the March and April expenses, and will retire on the 30th of April and

return the assignment to him if in the meantime I have not found

financial relief.



It is very rough; for the machine does at last seem perfect, and just a

bird to go!  I think she's going to be good for 8,000 ems an hour in the

hands of a good ordinary man after a solid year's practice.  I may be in

error, but I most solidly believe it.



There's an improved Mergenthaler in New York; Paige and Davis and I

watched it two whole afternoons.

                         With the love of us all,

                                                  MARK.





     Arnot wrote Clemens urging him to accept the check for five thousand

     dollars in this moment of need.  Clemens was probably as sorely

     tempted to compromise with his conscience as he had ever been in his

     life, but his resolution field firm.





                    To M. H. Arnot, in Elmira, N.  Y.:



MR. M. H. ARNOT



DEAR SIR,--No--no, I could not think of taking it, with you unsatisfied;

and you ought not to be satisfied until you have made personal

examination of the machine and had a consensus of testimony of

disinterested people, besides.  My own perfect knowledge of what is

required of such a machine, and my perfect knowledge of the fact that

this is the only machine that can meet that requirement, make it

difficult for me to realize that a doubt is possible to less well-posted

men; and so I would have taken your money without thinking, and thus

would have done a great wrong to you and a great one to myself.  And now

that I go back over the ground, I remember that where I said I could get

along 3 months without drawing on you, that delay contemplated a visit

from you to the machine in the interval, and your satisfaction with its

character and prospects.  I had forgotten all that.  But I remember it

now; and the fact that it was not "so nominated in the bond" does not

alter the case or justify me in making my call so prematurely.  I do not

know that you regarded all that as a part of the bargain--for you were

thoroughly and magnanimously unexacting--but I so regarded it,

notwithstanding I have so easily managed to forget all about it.



You so gratified me, and did me so much honor in bonding yourself to me

in a large sum, upon no evidence but my word and with no protection but

my honor, that my pride in that is much stronger than my desire to reap a

money advantage from it.



With the sincerest appreciation I am Truly yours

                                             S L. CLEMENS.



P. S.  I have written a good many words and yet I seem to have failed to

say the main thing in exact enough language--which is, that the

transaction between us is not complete and binding until you shall have

convinced yourself that the machine's character and prospects are

satisfactory.



I ought to explain that the grippe delayed us some weeks, and that we

have since been waiting for Mr. Jones.  When he was ready, we were not;

and now we have been ready more than a month, while he has been kept in

Washington by the Silver bill.  He said the other day that to venture out

of the Capitol for a day at this time could easily chance to hurt him if

the bill came up for action, meantime, although it couldn't hurt the

bill, which would pass anyway.  Mrs. Jones said she would send me two or

three days' notice, right after the passage of the bill, and that they

would follow as soon as I should return word that their coming would not

inconvenience us.  I suppose I ought to go to New York without waiting

for Mr. Jones, but it would not be wise to go there without money.



The bill is still pending.





     The Mergenthaler machine, like the Paige, was also at this time in

     the middle stages of experimental development.  It was a slower

     machine, but it was simpler, less expensive, occupied less room.

     There was not so much about it to get out of order; it was not so

     delicate, not so human.  These were immense advantages.



     But no one at this time could say with certainty which typesetter

     would reap the harvest of millions.  It was only sure that at least

     one of them would, and the Mergenthaler people were willing to trade

     stock for stock with the Paige company in order to insure financial

     success for both, whichever won.  Clemens, with a faith that never

     faltered, declined this offer, a decision that was to cost him

     millions.



     Winter and spring had gone and summer had come, but still there had

     been no financial conclusion with Jones, Mackay, and the other rich

     Californians who were to put up the necessary million for the

     machine's manufacture.  Goodman was spending a large part of his

     time traveling back and forth between California and Washington,

     trying to keep business going at both ends.  Paige spent most of his

     time working out improvements for the type-setter, delicate

     attachments which complicated its construction more and more.





                    To Joe T.  Goodman, in Washington:



                                             HARTFORD, June 22, '90.

DEAR JOE,--I have been sitting by the machine 2 hours, this afternoon,

and my admiration of it towers higher than ever.  There is no sort of

mistake about it, it is the Big Bonanza.  In the 2 hours, the time lost

by type-breakage was 3 minutes.



This machine is totally without a rival.  Rivalry with it is impossible.

Last Friday, Fred Whitmore (it was the 28th day of his apprenticeship on

the machine) stacked up 49,700 ems of solid nonpareil in 8 hours, and the

type-breaking delay was only 6 minutes for the day.



I claim yet, as I have always claimed, that the machine's market (abroad

and here together,) is today worth $150,000,000 without saying anything

about the doubling and trebling of this sum that will follow within the

life of the patents.  Now here is a queer fact: I am one of the

wealthiest grandees in America--one of the Vanderbilt gang, in fact--and

yet if you asked me to lend you a couple of dollars I should have to ask

you to take my note instead.



It makes me cheerful to sit by the machine: come up with Mrs. Goodman and

refresh yourself with a draught of the same.

                                        Ys ever

                                                  MARK.





     The machine was still breaking the types now and then, and no doubt

     Paige was itching to take it to pieces, and only restrained by force

     from doing so.  He was never thoroughly happy unless he was taking

     the machine apart or setting it up again.  Finally, he was allowed

     to go at it--a disasterous permission, for it was just then that

     Jones decided to steal a day or two from the Silver Bill and watch

     the type-setter in operation.  Paige already had it in parts when

     this word came from Goodman, and Jones's visit had to be called off.

     His enthusiasm would seem to have weakened from that day.  In July,

     Goodman wrote that both Mackay and Jones had become somewhat

     diffident in the matter of huge capitalization.  He thought it

     partly due, at least, to "the fatal delays that have sicklied over

     the bloom of original enthusiasm."  Clemens himself went down to

     Washington and perhaps warmed Jones with his eloquence; at least,

     Jones seemed to have agreed to make some effort in the matter a

     qualified promise, the careful word of a wary politician and

     capitalist.  How many Washington trips were made is not certain, but

     certainly more than one.  Jones would seem to have suggested forms

     of contracts, but if he came to the point of signing any there is no

     evidence of it to-day.



     Any one who has read Mark Twain's, "A Connecticut Yankee in King

     Arthur's Court," has a pretty good idea of his opinion of kings in

     general, and tyrants in particular.  Rule by "divine right," however

     liberal, was distasteful to him; where it meant oppression it

     stirred him to violence.  In his article, "The Czar's Soliloquy," he

     gave himself loose rein concerning atrocities charged to the master

     of Russia, and in a letter which he wrote during the summer of 1890,

     he offered a hint as to remedies.  The letter was written by

     editorial request, but was never mailed.  Perhaps it seemed too

     openly revolutionary at the moment.



     Yet scarcely more than a quarter of a century was needed to make it

     "timely."  Clemens and his family were spending some weeks in the

     Catskills when it was written.





                    An unpublished letter on the Czar.



                                                  ONTEORA, 1890.

TO THE EDITOR OF FREE RUSSIA,--I thank you for the compliment of your

invitation to say something, but when I ponder the bottom paragraph on

your first page, and then study your statement on your third page, of the

objects of the several Russian liberation-parties, I do not quite know

how to proceed.  Let me quote here the paragraph referred to:



"But men's hearts are so made that the sight of one voluntary victim for

a noble idea stirs them more deeply than the sight of a crowd submitting

to a dire fate they cannot escape.  Besides, foreigners could not see so

clearly as the Russians how much the Government was responsible for the

grinding poverty of the masses; nor could they very well realize the

moral wretchedness imposed by that Government upon the whole of educated

Russia.  But the atrocities committed upon the defenceless prisoners are

there in all their baseness, concrete and palpable, admitting of no

excuse, no doubt or hesitation, crying out to the heart of humanity

against Russian tyranny.  And the Tzar's Government, stupidly confident

in its apparently unassailable position, instead of taking warning from

the first rebukes, seems to mock this humanitarian age by the aggravation

of brutalities.  Not satisfied with slowly killing its prisoners, and

with burying the flower of our young generation in the Siberian desserts,

the Government of Alexander III. resolved to break their spirit by

deliberately submitting them to a regime of unheard-of brutality and

degradation."



When one reads that paragraph in the glare of George Kennan's

revelations, and considers how much it means; considers that all earthly

figures fail to typify the Czar's government, and that one must descend

into hell to find its counterpart, one turns hopefully to your statement

of the objects of the several liberation-parties--and is disappointed.

Apparently none of them can bear to think of losing the present hell

entirely, they merely want the temperature cooled down a little.



I now perceive why all men are the deadly and uncompromising enemies of

the rattlesnake: it is merely because the rattlesnake has not speech.

Monarchy has speech, and by it has been able to persuade men that it

differs somehow from the rattlesnake, has something valuable about it

somewhere, something worth preserving, something even good and high and

fine, when properly "modified," something entitling it to protection from

the club of the first comer who catches it out of its hole.  It seems a

most strange delusion and not reconcilable with our superstition that man

is a reasoning being.  If a house is afire, we reason confidently that it

is the first comer's plain duty to put the fire out in any way he can--

drown it with water, blow it up with dynamite, use any and all means to

stop the spread of the fire and save the rest of the city.  What is the

Czar of Russia but a house afire in the midst of a city of eighty

millions of inhabitants?  Yet instead of extinguishing him, together with

his nest and system, the liberation-parties are all anxious to merely

cool him down a little and keep him.



It seems to me that this is illogical--idiotic, in fact.  Suppose you had

this granite-hearted, bloody-jawed maniac of Russia loose in your house,

chasing the helpless women and little children--your own.  What would you

do with him, supposing you had a shotgun?  Well, he is loose in your

house-Russia.  And with your shotgun in your hand, you stand trying to

think up ways to "modify" him.



Do these liberation-parties think that they can succeed in a project

which has been attempted a million times in the history of the world and

has never in one single instance been successful--the "modification" of a

despotism by other means than bloodshed?  They seem to think they can.

My privilege to write these sanguinary sentences in soft security was

bought for me by rivers of blood poured upon many fields, in many lands,

but I possess not one single little paltry right or privilege that come

to me as a result of petition, persuasion, agitation for reform, or any

kindred method of procedure.  When we consider that not even the most

responsible English monarch ever yielded back a stolen public right until

it was wrenched from them by bloody violence, is it rational to suppose

that gentler methods can win privileges in Russia?



Of course I know that the properest way to demolish the Russian throne

would be by revolution.  But it is not possible to get up a revolution

there; so the only thing left to do, apparently, is to keep the throne

vacant by dynamite until a day when candidates shall decline with thanks.

Then organize the Republic.  And on the whole this method has some large

advantages; for whereas a revolution destroys some lives which cannot

well be spared, the dynamite way doesn't.  Consider this: the

conspirators against the Czar's life are caught in every rank of life,

from the low to the high.  And consider: if so many take an active part,

where the peril is so dire, is this not evidence that the sympathizers

who keep still and do not show their hands, are countless for multitudes?

Can you break the hearts of thousands of families with the awful Siberian

exodus every year for generations and not eventually cover all Russia

from limit to limit with bereaved fathers and mothers and brothers and

sisters who secretly hate the perpetrator of this prodigious crime and

hunger and thirst for his life?  Do you not believe that if your wife or

your child or your father was exiled to the mines of Siberia for some

trivial utterances wrung from a smarting spirit by the Czar's intolerable

tyranny, and you got a chance to kill him and did not do it, that you

would always be ashamed to be in your own society the rest of your life?

Suppose that that refined and lovely Russian lady who was lately stripped

bare before a brutal soldiery and whipped to death by the Czar's hand in

the person of the Czar's creature had been your wife, or your daughter or

your sister, and to-day the Czar should pass within reach of your hand,

how would you feel--and what would you do?  Consider, that all over vast

Russia, from boundary to boundary, a myriad of eyes filled with tears

when that piteous news came, and through those tears that myriad of eyes

saw, not that poor lady, but lost darlings of their own whose fate her

fate brought back with new access of grief out of a black and bitter past

never to be forgotten or forgiven.



If I am a Swinburnian--and clear to the marrow I am--I hold human nature

in sufficient honor to believe there are eighty million mute Russians

that are of the same stripe, and only one Russian family that isn't.



                                             MARK TWAIN.





     Type-setter matters were going badly.  Clemens still had faith in

     Jones, and he had lost no grain of faith in the machine.  The money

     situation, however, was troublesome.  With an expensive

     establishment, and work of one sort or another still to be done on

     the machine, his income would not reach.  Perhaps Goodman had

     already given up hope, for he does not seem to have returned from

     California after the next letter was written--a colorless letter--

     in which we feel a note of resignation.  The last few lines are

     sufficient.





                    To Joe T. Goodman, in California:



DEAR JOE,--...... I wish you could get a day off and make those two or

three Californians buy those privileges, for I'm going to need money

before long.



I don't know where the Senator is; but out on the Coast I reckon.



I guess we've got a perfect machine at last.  We never break a type, now,

and the new device for enabling the operator to touch the last letters

and justify the line simultaneously works, to a charm.

                         With love to you both,

                                                  MARK





     The year closed gloomily enough.  The type-setter seemed to be

     perfected, but capital for its manufacture was not forthcoming.

     The publishing business of Charles L. Webster & Co.  was returning

     little or no profit.  Clemens's mother had died in Keokuk at the end

     of October, and his wife's mother, in Elmira a month later.  Mark

     Twain, writing a short business letter to his publishing manager,

     Fred J. Ball, closed it: "Merry Xmas to you!--and I wish to God I

     could have one myself before I die."









XXXI



LETTERS, 1891, TO HOWELLS, MRS. CLEMENS AND OTHERS.

RETURN TO LITERATURE.  AMERICAN CLAIMANT.  LEAVING HARTFORD.

EUROPE.  DOWN THE RHINE



Clemens was still not without hope in the machine, at the beginning of

the new year (1891) but it was a hope no longer active, and it presently

became a moribund.  Jones, on about the middle of February, backed out

altogether, laying the blame chiefly on Mackay and the others, who, he

said, had decided not to invest.  Jones "let his victim down easy" with

friendly words, but it was the end, for the present, at least, of machine

financiering.



It was also the end of Mark Twain's capital.  His publishing business was

not good.  It was already in debt and needing more money.  There was just

one thing for him to do and he did it at once, not stopping to cry over

spilt milk, but with good courage and the old enthusiasm that never

failed him, he returned to the trade of authorship.  He dug out half-

finished articles and stories, finished them and sold them, and within a

week after the Jones collapse he was at work on a novel based an the old

Sellers idea, which eight years before he and Howells had worked into a

play.  The brief letter in which he reported this news to Howells bears

no marks of depression, though the writer of it was in his fifty-sixth

year; he was by no means well, and his financial prospects were anything

but golden.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                             HARTFORD, Feb. 24, '91

DEAR HOWELLS,--Mrs. Clemens has been sick abed for near two weeks, but is

up and around the room now, and gaining.  I don't know whether she has

written Mrs. Howells or not--I only know she was going to--and will yet,

if she hasn't.  We are promising ourselves a whole world of pleasure in

the visit, and you mustn't dream of disappointing us.



Does this item stir an interest in you?  Began a novel four days ago, and

this moment finished chapter four.  Title of the book



                       "Colonel Mulberry Sellers.

                           American Claimant

                                 Of the

                       Great Earldom of Rossmore'

                                 in the

                       Peerage of Great Britain."



                                        Ys Ever

                                                  MARK.





Probably Mark Twain did not return to literary work reluctantly.  He had

always enjoyed writing and felt now that he was equipped better than ever

for authorship, at least so far as material was concerned.  There exists

a fragmentary copy of a letter to some unknown correspondent, in which he

recites his qualifications.  It bears evidence of having been written

just at this time and is of unusual interest at this point.





                   Fragment of Letter to -------, 1891:



.  .  .  .  I confine myself to life with which I am familiar when

pretending to portray life.  But I confined myself to the boy-life out on

the Mississippi because that had a peculiar charm for me, and not because

I was not familiar with other phases of life.  I was a soldier two weeks

once in the beginning of the war, and was hunted like a rat the whole

time.  Familiar?  My splendid Kipling himself hasn't a more burnt-in,

hard-baked, and unforgetable familiarity with that death-on-the-pale-

horse-with-hell-following-after, which is a raw soldier's first fortnight

in the field--and which, without any doubt, is the most tremendous

fortnight and the vividest he is ever going to see.



Yes, and I have shoveled silver tailings in a quartz-mill a couple of

weeks, and acquired the last possibilities of culture in that direction.

And I've done "pocket-mining" during three months in the one little patch

of ground in the whole globe where Nature conceals gold in pockets--or

did before we robbed all of those pockets and exhausted, obliterated,

annihilated the most curious freak Nature ever indulged in.  There are

not thirty men left alive who, being told there was a pocket hidden on

the broad slope of a mountain, would know how to go and find it, or have

even the faintest idea of how to set about it; but I am one of the

possible 20 or 30 who possess the secret, and I could go and put my hand

on that hidden treasure with a most deadly precision.



And I've been a prospector, and know pay rock from poor when I find it--

just with a touch of the tongue.  And I've been a silver miner and know

how to dig and shovel and drill and put in a blast.  And so I know the

mines and the miners interiorly as well as Bret Harte knows them

exteriorly.



And I was a newspaper reporter four years in cities, and so saw the

inside of many things; and was reporter in a legislature two sessions

and the same in Congress one session, and thus learned to know personally

three sample bodies of the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and

the cowardliest hearts that God makes.



And I was some years a Mississippi pilot, and familiarly knew all the

different kinds of steam-boatmen--a race apart, and not like other folk.



And I was for some years a traveling "jour" printer, and wandered from

city to city--and so I know that sect familiarly.



And I was a lecturer on the public platform a number of seasons and was a

responder to toasts at all the different kinds of banquets--and so I know

a great many secrets about audiences--secrets not to be got out of books,

but only acquirable by experience.



And I watched over one dear project of mine for years, spent a fortune on

it, and failed to make it go--and the history of that would make a large

book in which a million men would see themselves as in a mirror; and they

would testify and say, Verily, this is not imagination; this fellow has

been there--and after would cast dust upon their heads, cursing and

blaspheming.



And I am a publisher, and did pay to one author's widow (General Grant's)

the largest copyright checks this world has seen--aggregating more than

L80,000 in the first year.



And I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.



Now then; as the most valuable capital or culture or education usable in

the building of novels is personal experience I ought to be well equipped

for that trade.



I surely have the equipment, a wide culture, and all of it real, none of

it artificial, for I don't know anything about books.



                             [No signature.]





     Clemens for several years had been bothered by rheumatism in his

     shoulder.  The return now to the steady use of the pen aggravated

     his trouble, and at times he was nearly disabled.  The phonograph

     for commercial dictation had been tried experimentally, and Mark

     Twain was always ready for any innovation.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        HARTFORD, Feb.  28, '91.

DEAR HOWELLS,--Won't you drop-in at the Boylston Building (New England

Phonograph Co) and talk into a phonograph in an ordinary conversation-

voice and see if another person (who didn't hear you do it) can take the

words from the thing without difficulty and repeat them to you.  If the

experiment is satisfactory (also make somebody put in a message which you

don't hear, and see if afterward you can get it out without difficulty)

won't you then ask them on what terms they will rent me a phonograph for

3 months and furnish me cylinders enough to carry 75,000 words.  175

cylinders, ain't it?



I don't want to erase any of them.  My right arm is nearly disabled by

rheumatism, but I am bound to write this book (and sell 100,000 copies of

it--no, I mean a million--next fall) I feel sure I can dictate the book

into a phonograph if I don't have to yell.  I write 2,000 words a day; I

think I can dictate twice as many.



But mind, if this is going to be too much trouble to you--go ahead and do

it, all the same.

                                   Ys ever

                                             MARK.





     Howells, always willing to help, visited the phonograph place, and a

     few days later reported results.  He wrote: "I talked your letter

     into a fonograf in my usual tone at my usual gait of speech.  Then

     the fonograf man talked his answer in at his wonted swing and swell.

     Then we took the cylinder to a type-writer in the next room, and she

     put the hooks into her ears and wrote the whole out.  I send you the

     result.  There is a mistake of one word.  I think that if you have

     the cheek to dictate the story into the fonograf, all the rest is

     perfectly easy.  It wouldn't fatigue me to talk for an hour as I

     did."



     Clemens did not find the phonograph entirely satisfactory, at least

     not for a time, and he appears never to have used it steadily.  His

     early experience with it, however, seems interesting.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        HARTFORD, Apl. 4, '91.

DEAR HOWELLS,--I'm ashamed.  It happened in this way.  I was proposing to

acknowledge the receipt of the play and the little book per phonograph,

so that you could see that the instrument is good enough for mere letter-

writing; then I meant to add the fact that you can't write literature

with it, because it hasn't any ideas and it hasn't any gift for

elaboration, or smartness of talk, or vigor of action, or felicity of

expression, but is just matter-of-fact, compressive, unornamental, and as

grave and unsmiling as the devil.



I filled four dozen cylinders in two sittings, then found I could have

said about as much with the pen and said it a deal better.  Then I

resigned.



I believe it could teach one to dictate literature to a phonographer--and

some time I will experiment in that line.



The little book is charmingly written, and it interested me.  But it

flies too high for me.  Its concretest things are filmy abstractions to

me, and when I lay my grip on one of them and open my hand, I feel as

embarrassed as I use to feel when I thought I had caught a fly.  I'm

going to try to mail it back to you to-day--I mean I am going to charge

my memory.  Charging my memory is one of my chief industries ....



With our loves and our kindest regards distributed among you according to

the proprieties.

                              Yrs ever

                                        MARK.



P. S.--I'm sending that ancient "Mental Telegraphy" article to Harper's

--with a modest postscript.  Probably read it to you years ago.

                                        S. L. C.





     The "little book" mentioned in this letter was by Swedenborg, an

     author in whom the Boston literary set was always deeply interested.

     "Mental Telegraphy" appeared in Harper's Magazine, and is now

     included in the Uniform Edition of Mark Twain's books.  It was

     written in 1878.



     Joe Goodman had long since returned to California, it being clear

     that nothing could be gained by remaining in Washington.  On receipt

     of the news of the type-setter's collapse he sent a consoling word.

     Perhaps he thought Clemens would rage over the unhappy circumstance,

     and possibly hold him in some measure to blame.  But it was

     generally the smaller annoyances of life that made Mark Twain rage;

     the larger catastrophes were likely to stir only his philosophy.



     The Library of American Literature, mentioned in the following

     letter, was a work in many volumes, edited by Edmund Clarence

     Stedman and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson.





                           To Joe T.  Goodman:



                                                  April [?] 1891.

DEAR JOE, Well, it's all right, anyway.  Diplomacy couldn't have saved

it--diplomacy of mine--at that late day.  I hadn't any diplomacy in

stock, anyway.  In order to meet Jones's requirements I had to surrender

the old contract (a contract which made me boss of the situation and gave

me the whip-hand of Paige) and allow the new one to be drafted and put in

its place.  I was running an immense risk, but it was justified by

Jones's promises--promises made to me not merely once but every time I

tallied with him.  When February arrived, I saw signs which were mighty

plain reading.  Signs which meant that Paige was hoping and praying that

Jones would go back on me--which would leave Paige boss, and me robbed

and out in the cold.  His prayers were answered, and I am out in the

cold.  If I ever get back my nine-twentieths interest, it will be by law-

suit--which will be instituted in the indefinite future, when the time

comes.



I am at work again--on a book.  Not with a great deal of spirit, but with

enough--yes, plenty.  And I am pushing my publishing house.  It has

turned the corner after cleaning $50,000 a year for three consecutive

years, and piling every cent of it into one book--Library of American

Literature--and from next January onward it will resume dividends.  But

I've got to earn $50,000 for it between now and then--which I will do if

I keep my health.  This additional capital is needed for that same book,

because its prosperity is growing so great and exacting.



It is dreadful to think of you in ill health--I can't realize it; you are

always to me the same that you were in those days when matchless health.

and glowing spirits and delight in life were commonplaces with us.  Lord

save us all from old age and broken health and a hope-tree that has lost

the faculty of putting out blossoms.



                    With love to you both from us all.

                                        MARK.





     Mark Twain's residence in Hartford was drawing rapidly to a close.

     Mrs. Clemens was poorly, and his own health was uncertain.  They

     believed that some of the European baths would help them.

     Furthermore, Mark Twain could no longer afford the luxury of his

     Hartford home.  In Europe life could be simpler and vastly cheaper.

     He was offered a thousand dollars apiece for six European letters,

     by the McClure syndicate and W. M. Laffan, of the Sun.  This would

     at least give him a start on the other side.  The family began

     immediately their sad arrangements for departure.





         To Fred J. Hall (manager Chas. L. Webster & Co.), N. Y.:



                                   HARTFORD, Apl. 14, '91.

DEAR MR. HALL,--Privately--keep it to yourself--as you, are already

aware, we are going to Europe in June, for an indefinite stay.  We shall

sell the horses and shut up the house.  We wish to provide a place for

our coachman, who has been with us a 21 years, and is sober, active,

diligent, and unusually bright and capable.  You spoke of hiring a

colored man as engineer and helper in the packing room.  Patrick would

soon learn that trade and be very valuable.  We will cease to need him by

the middle or end of June.  Have you made irrevocable arrangements with

the colored man, or would you prefer to have Patrick, if he thinks he

would like to try?



I have not said anything to him about it yet.



                                   Yours

                                             S. L. C.





     It was to be a complete breaking up of their beautiful

     establishment.  Patrick McAleer, George the butler, and others of

     their household help had been like members of the family.  We may

     guess at the heartbreak of it all, even though the letters remain

     cheerful.



     Howells, strangely enough, seems to have been about the last one to

     be told of their European plans; in fact, he first got wind of it

     from the papers, and wrote for information.  Likely enough Clemens

     had not until then had the courage to confess.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        HARTFORD, May 20, '91.

DEAR HOWELLS,--For her health's sake Mrs. Clemens must try baths

somewhere, and this it is that has determined us to go to Europe.

The water required seems to be provided at a little obscure and little-

visited nook up in the hills back of the Rhine somewhere and you get to

it by Rhine traffic-boat and country stage-coach.  Come, get "sick or

sorry enough" and join us.  We shall be a little while at that bath, and

the rest of the summer at Annecy (this confidential to you) in Haute

Savoie, 22 miles from Geneva.  Spend the winters in Berlin.  I don't know

how long we shall be in Europe--I have a vote, but I don't cast it.  I'm

going to do whatever the others desire, with leave to change their mind,

without prejudice, whenever they want to.  Travel has no longer, any

charm for me.  I have seen all the foreign countries I want to see except

heaven and hell, and I have only a vague curiosity as concerns one of

those.



I found I couldn't use the play--I had departed too far from its lines

when I came to look at it.  I thought I might get a great deal of

dialogue out of it, but I got only 15 loosely written pages--they saved

me half a days work.  It was the cursing phonograph.  There was abundance

of good dialogue, but it couldn't befitted into the new conditions of the

story.



Oh, look here--I did to-day what I have several times in past years

thought of doing: answered an interviewing proposition from a rich

newspaper with the reminder that they had not stated the terms; that my

time was all occupied with writing, at good pay, and that as talking was

harder work I should not care to venture it unless I knew the pay was

going to be proportionately higher.  I wish I had thought of this the

other day when Charley Stoddard turned a pleasant Englishman loose on me

and I couldn't think of any rational excuse.

                                        Ys Ever

                                                  MARK.





     Clemens had finished his Sellers book and had disposed of the serial

     rights to the McClure syndicate.  The house in Hartford was closed

     early in June, and on the 6th the family, with one maid, Katie

     Leary, sailed on the Gascogne.  Two weeks later they had begun a

     residence abroad which was to last for more than nine years.



     It was not easy to get to work in Europe.  Clemens's arm remained

     lame, and any effort at writing brought suffering.  The Century

     Magazine proposed another set of letters, but by the end of July he

     had barely begun on those promised to McClure and Laffan.  In

     August, however, he was able to send three: one from Aix about the

     baths there, another from Bayreuth concerning the Wagner festival,

     and a third from Marienbad, in Bohemia, where they rested for a

     time.  He decided that he would arrange for no more European letters

     when the six were finished, but would gather material for a book.

     He would take a courier and a kodak and go tramping again in some

     fashion that would be interesting to do and to write.



     The idea finally matured when he reached Switzerland and settled the

     family at the Hotel Beau Rivage, Ouchy, Lausanne, facing Lake Leman.

     He decided to make a floating trip down the Rhone, and he engaged

     Joseph Very, a courier that had served him on a former European

     trip, to accompany him.  The courier went over to Bourget and bought

     for five dollars a flat-bottomed boat and engaged its owner as their

     pilot.  It was the morning of September 20, when they began their

     floating-trip down the beautiful historic river that flows through

     the loveliest and most romantic region of France.  He wrote daily to

     Mrs. Clemens, and his letters tell the story of that drowsy, happy

     experience better than the notes made with a view to publication.

     Clemens had arrived at Lake Bourget on the evening before the

     morning of their start and slept on the Island of Chatillon, in an

     old castle of the same name.  Lake Bourget connects with the Rhone

     by a small canal.





      Letters and Memoranda to Mrs. Clemens, in Ouchy, Switzerland:



                                             Sept. 20, 1891.

                                             Sunday, 11 a.m.

On the lake Bourget--just started.  The castle of Chatillon high overhead

showing above the trees.  It was a wonderfully still place to sleep in.

Beside us there was nobody in it but a woman, a boy and a dog.  A Pope

was born in the room I slept in.  No, he became a Pope later.



The lake is smooth as glass--a brilliant sun is shining.



Our boat is comfortable and shady with its awning.



11.20  We have crossed the lake and are entering the canal.  Shall

presently be in the Rhone.



Noon.  Nearly down to the Rhone.  Passing the village of Chanaz.



3.15 p. m.  Sunday.  We have been in the Rhone 3 hours. It is

unimaginably still and reposeful and cool and soft and breezy.  No rowing

or work of any kind to do--we merely float with the current--we glide

noiseless and swift--as fast as a London cab-horse rips along--8 miles an

hour--the swiftest current I've ever boated in.  We have the entire river

to ourselves--nowhere a boat of any kind.

                         Good bye Sweetheart

                                        S. L. C.





                                        PORT DE GROLEE, Monday, 4.15 p.m.

                                             [Sept. 21, 1891]

Name of the village which we left five minutes ago.



We went ashore at 5 p. m.  yesterday, dear heart, and walked a short mile

to St. Geuix, a big village, and took quarters at the principal inn; had

a good dinner and afterwards along walk out of town on the banks of the

Guiers till 7.30.



Went to bed at 8.30 and continued to make notes and read books and

newspapers till midnight.  Slept until 8, breakfasted in bed, and lay

till noon, because there had been a very heavy rain in the night and the

day was still dark and lowering.  But at noon the sun broke through and

in 15 minutes we were tramping toward the river.  Got afloat at 1 p. m.

but at 2.40 we had to rush suddenly ashore and take refuge in the above

village.  Just as we got ourselves and traps safely housed in the inn,

the rain let go and came down in great style.  We lost an hour and a half

there, but we are off again, now, with bright sunshine.



I wrote you yesterday my darling, and shall expect to write you every

day.



Good-day, and love to all of you.

                                        SAML.





                                        ON THE RHONE BELOW VILLEBOIS,

                                                  Tuesday noon.

Good morning, sweetheart.  Night caught us yesterday where we had to take

quarters in a peasant's house which was occupied by the family and a lot

of cows and calves--also several rabbits.--[His word for fleas.]--The

latter had a ball, and I was the ball-room; but they were very friendly

and didn't bite.



The peasants were mighty kind and hearty, and flew around and did their

best to make us comfortable.  This morning I breakfasted on the shore in

the open air with two sociable dogs and a cat.  Clean cloth, napkin and

table furniture, white sugar, a vast hunk of excellent butter, good

bread, first class coffee with pure milk, fried fish just caught.

Wonderful that so much cleanliness should come out of such a phenomenally

dirty house.



An hour ago we saw the Falls of the Rhone, a prodigiously rough and

dangerous looking place; shipped a little water but came to no harm.

It was one of the most beautiful pieces of piloting and boat-management

I ever saw.  Our admiral knew his business.



We have had to run ashore for shelter every time it has rained

heretofore, but Joseph has been putting in his odd time making a water-

proof sun-bonnet for the boat, and now we sail along dry although we had

many heavy showers this morning.



With a word of love to you all and particularly you,

                                                       SAML.





                                             ON THE RHONE, BELOW VIENNA.

I salute you, my darling.  Your telegram reached me in Lyons last night

and was very pleasant news indeed.



I was up and shaved before 8 this morning, but we got delayed and didn't

sail from Lyons till 10.3O--an hour and a half lost.  And we've lost

another hour--two of them, I guess--since, by an error.  We came in sight

of Vienne at 2 o'clock, several miles ahead, on a hill, and I proposed to

walk down there and let the boat go ahead of us.  So Joseph and I got out

and struck through a willow swamp along a dim path, and by and by came

out on the steep bank of a slough or inlet or something, and we followed

that bank forever and ever trying to get around the head of that slough.

Finally I noticed a twig standing up in the water, and by George it had a

distinct and even vigorous quiver to it!  I don't know when I have felt

so much like a donkey.  On an island!  I wanted to drown somebody, but I

hadn't anybody I could spare.  However, after another long tramp we found

a lonely native, and he had a scow and soon we were on the mainland--yes,

and a blamed sight further from Vienne than we were when we started.



Notes--I make millions of them; and so I get no time to write to you.  If

you've got a pad there, please send it poste-restante to Avignon.  I may

not need it but I fear I shall.



I'm straining to reach St. Pierre de Boef, but it's going to be a close

fit, I reckon.





                                   AFLOAT, Friday, 3 p.m., '91.

Livy darling, we sailed from St. Pierre de Boef six hours ago, and are

now approaching Tournon, where we shall not stop, but go on and make

Valence, a City Of 25,000 people.  It's too delicious, floating with the

swift current under the awning these superb sunshiny days in deep peace

and quietness.  Some of these curious old historical towns strangely

persuade me, but it is so lovely afloat that I don't stop, but view them

from the outside and sail on.  We get abundance of grapes and peaches for

next to nothing.



Joseph is perfect.  He is at his very best--and never was better in his

life.  I guess he gets discouraged and feels disliked and in the way when

he is lying around--but here he is perfection, and brim full of useful

alacrities and helps and ingenuities.



When I woke up an hour ago and heard the clock strike 4, I said "I seem

to have been asleep an immensely long time; I must have gone to bed

mighty early; I wonder what time I did go to bed."  And I got up and lit

a candle and looked at my watch to see.





                                                       AFLOAT

                                        2 HOURS BELOW BOURG ST. ANDEOL.

                                        Monday, 11 a.m., Sept. 28.

Livy darling, I didn't write yesterday.  We left La Voulte in a driving

storm of cold rain--couldn't write in it--and at 1 p. m.  when we were

not thinking of stopping, we saw a picturesque and mighty ruin on a high

hill back of a village, and I was seized with a desire to explore it; so

we landed at once and set out with rubbers and umbrella, sending the boat

ahead to St. Andeol, and we spent 3 hours clambering about those cloudy

heights among those worn and vast and idiotic ruins of a castle built by

two crusaders 650 years ago.  The work of these asses was full of

interest, and we had a good time inspecting, examining and scrutinizing

it.  All the hills on both sides of the Rhone have peaks and precipices,

and each has its gray and wasted pile of mouldy walls and broken towers.

The Romans displaced the Gauls, the Visigoths displaced the Romans, the

Saracens displaced the Visigoths, the Christians displaced the Saracens,

and it was these pious animals who built these strange lairs and cut each

other's throats in the name and for the glory of God, and robbed and

burned and slew in peace and war; and the pauper and the slave built

churches, and the credit of it went to the Bishop who racked the money

out of them.  These are pathetic shores, and they make one despise the

human race.



We came down in an hour by rail, but I couldn't get your telegram till

this morning, for it was Sunday and they had shut up the post office to

go to the circus.  I went, too.  It was all one family--parents and 5

children--performing in the open air to 200 of these enchanted villagers,

who contributed coppers when called on.  It was a most gay and strange

and pathetic show.  I got up at 7 this morning to see the poor devils

cook their poor breakfast and pack up their sordid fineries.



This is a 9 k-m. current and the wind is with us; we shall make Avignon

before 4 o'clock.  I saw watermelons and pomegranates for sale at St.

Andeol.



               With a power of love, Sweetheart,

                                                  SAML.





                                             HOTEL D'EUROPE, AVIGNON,

                                             Monday, 6 p.m., Sept. 28.

Well, Livy darling, I have been having a perfect feast of letters for an

hour, and I thank you and dear Clam with all my heart.  It's like hearing

from home after a long absence.



It is early to be in bed, but I'm always abed before 9, on this voyage;

and up at 7 or a trifle later, every morning.  If I ever take such a trip

again, I will have myself called at the first tinge of dawn and get to

sea as soon after as possible.  The early dawn on the water-nothing can

be finer, as I know by old Mississippi experience.  I did so long for you

and Sue yesterday morning--the most superb sunrise!--the most marvelous

sunrise! and I saw it all from the very faintest suspicion of the coming

dawn all the way through to the final explosion of glory.  But it had

interest private to itself and not to be found elsewhere in the world;

for between me and it, in the far distant-eastward, was a silhouette

mountain-range in which I had discovered, the previous afternoon, a most

noble face upturned to the sky, and mighty form out stretched, which I

had named Napoleon Dreaming of Universal Empire--and now, this prodigious

face, soft, rich, blue, spirituelle, asleep, tranquil, reposeful, lay

against that giant conflagration of ruddy and golden splendors all rayed

like a wheel with the upstreaming and far-reaching lances of the sun.  It

made one want to cry for delight, it was so supreme in its unimaginable

majesty and beauty.



We had a curious experience today.  A little after I had sealed and

directed my letter to you, in which I said we should make Avignon before

4, we got lost.  We ceased to encounter any village or ruin mentioned in

our "particularizes" and detailed Guide of the Rhone--went drifting along

by the hour in a wholly unknown land and on an uncharted river!  Confound

it, we stopped talking and did nothing but stand up in the boat and

search the horizons with the glass and wonder what in the devil had

happened.  And at last, away yonder at 5 o'clock when some east towers

and fortresses hove in sight we couldn't recognize them for Avignon--yet

we knew by the broken bridge that it was Avignon.



Then we saw what the trouble was--at some time or other we had drifted

down the wrong side of an island and followed a sluggish branch of the

Rhone not frequented in modern times.  We lost an hour and a half by it

and missed one of the most picturesque and gigantic and history-sodden

masses of castellated medieval ruin that Europe can show.



It was dark by the time we had wandered through the town and got the

letters and found the hotel--so I went to bed.



We shall leave here at noon tomorrow and float down to Arles, arriving

about dark, and there bid good bye to the boat, the river-trip finished.

Between Arles and Nimes (and Avignon again,) we shall be till Saturday

morning--then rail it through on that day to Ouchy, reaching the hotel at

11 at night if the train isn't late.



Next day (Sunday) if you like, go to Basel, and Monday to Berlin.  But I

shall be at your disposal, to do exactly as you desire and prefer.



          With no end of love to all of you and twice as much to you,

               sweetheart,

                         SAML.



I believe my arm is a trifle better than it was when I started.





     The mention in the foregoing letter of the Napoleon effigy is the

     beginning of what proved to be a rather interesting episode.  Mark

     Twain thought a great deal of his discovery, as he called it--the

     giant figure of Napoleon outlined by the distant mountain range.

     In his note-book he entered memoranda telling just where it was to

     be seen, and added a pencil sketch of the huge profile.  But then he

     characteristically forgot all about it, and when he recalled the

     incident ten years later, he could not remember the name of the

     village, Beauchastel, from which the great figure could be seen;

     also, that he had made a record of the place.



     But he was by this time more certain than ever that his discovery

     was a remarkable one, which, if known, would become one of the great

     natural wonders, such as Niagara Falls.  Theodore Stanton was

     visiting him at the time, and Clemens urged him, on his return to

     France, to make an excursion to the Rhone and locate the Lost

     Napoleon, as he now called it.  But Clemens remembered the wonder as

     being somewhere between Arles and Avignon, instead of about a

     hundred miles above the last-named town.  Stanton naturally failed

     to find it, and it remained for the writer of these notes, motoring

     up the Rhone one September day, exactly twenty-two years after the

     first discovery, to re-locate the vast reclining figure of the first

     consul of France, "dreaming of Universal Empire."  The re-discovery

     was not difficult--with Mark Twain's memoranda as a guide--and it

     was worth while.  Perhaps the Lost Napoleon is not so important a

     natural wonder as Mark Twain believed, but it is a striking picture,

     and on a clear day the calm blue face outlined against the sky will

     long hold the traveler's attention.



                 To Clara Clemens, in Ouchy, Switzerland:



                              AFLOAT, 11.20 a.m., Sept. 29, Tuesday.

DEAR OLD BEN,--The vast stone masses and huge towers of the ancient papal

palace of Avignon are projected above an intervening wooded island a mile

up the river behind me--for we are already on our way to Arles.  It is a

perfectly still morning, with a brilliant sun, and very hot--outside; but

I am under cover of the linen hood, and it is cool and shady in here.



Please tell mamma I got her very last letter this morning, and I perceive

by it that I do not need to arrive at Ouchy before Saturday midnight.

I am glad, because I couldn't do the railroading I am proposing to do

during the next two or three days and get there earlier.  I could put in

the time till Sunday midnight, but shall not venture it without

telegraphic instructions from her to Nimes day after tomorrow, Oct. 1,

care Hotel Manivet.



The only adventures we have is in drifting into rough seas now and then.

They are not dangerous, but they go thro' all the motions of it.

Yesterday when we shot the Bridge of the Holy Spirit it was probably in

charge of some inexperienced deputy spirit for the day, for we were

allowed to go through the wrong arch, which brought us into a tourbillon

below which tried to make this old scow stand on its head.  Of course I

lost my temper and blew it off in a way to be heard above the roar of the

tossing waters.  I lost it because the admiral had taken that arch in

deference to my opinion that it was the best one, while his own judgment

told him to take the one nearest the other side of the river.  I could

have poisoned him I was so mad to think I had hired such a turnip.

A boatman in command should obey nobody's orders but his own, and yield

to nobody's suggestions.



It was very sweet of you to write me, dear, and I thank you ever so much.

With greatest love and kisses,

                                   PAPA.





                 To Mrs. Clemens, in Ouchy, Switzerland:



                                             ARLES, Sept. 30, noon.

Livy darling, I hain't got no time to write today, because I am sight

seeing industriously and imagining my chapter.



Bade good-bye to the river trip and gave away the boat yesterday evening.

We had ten great days in her.



We reached here after dark.  We were due about 4.30, counting by

distance, but we couldn't calculate on such a lifeless current as we

found.

               I love you, sweetheart.

                                        SAML.





     It had been a long time since Clemens had written to his old friend

     Twichell, but the Rhone trip must have reminded him of those days

     thirteen years earlier, when, comparatively young men, he and

     Twichell were tramping through the Black Forest and scaling Gemmi

     Pass.  He sent Twichell a reminder of that happy time.





              To Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, in Hartford, Conn:



                                                  NIMES, Oct. 1, '91.

DEAR JOE,--I have been ten days floating down the Rhone on a raft, from

Lake Bourget, and a most curious and darling kind of a trip it has been.

You ought to have been along--I could have made room for you easily--and

you would have found that a pedestrian tour in Europe doesn't begin with

a raft-voyage for hilarity and mild adventure, and intimate contact with

the unvisited native of the back settlements, and extinction from the

world and newspapers, and a conscience in a state of coma, and lazy

comfort, and solid happiness.  In fact there's nothing that's so lovely.



But it's all over.  I gave the raft away yesterday at Arles, and am

loafing along back by short stages on the rail to Ouchy-Lausanne where

the tribe are staying.

                         Love to you all

                                        MARK.





     The Clemenses settled in Berlin for the winter, at 7 Kornerstrasse,

     and later at the Hotel Royal.  There had been no permanent

     improvement in Mark Twain's arm and he found writing difficult.

     Some of the letters promised to Laffan and McClure were still

     unfinished.



     Young Hall, his publishing manager in America, was working hard to

     keep the business afloat, and being full of the optimism of his

     years did not fail to make as good a showing as he could.  We may

     believe his letters were very welcome to Clemens and his wife, who

     found little enough in the general prospect to comfort them.





                        To Mr. Hall, in New York:



                                                  BERLIN, Nov. 27, '91.

DEAR MR. HALL,--That kind of a statement is valuable.  It came this

morning.  This is the first time since the business began that I have had

a report that furnished the kind of information I wanted, and was really

enlightening and satisfactory.  Keep it up.  Don't let it fall into

desuetude.



Everything looks so fine and handsome with the business, now, that I feel

a great let-up from depression.  The rewards of your long and patient

industry are on their way, and their arrival safe in port, presently,

seems assured.



By George, I shall be glad when the ship comes in!



My arm is so much better that I was able to make a speech last night to

250 Americans.  But when they threw my portrait on the screen it was a

sorrowful reminder, for it was from a negative of 15 years ago, and

hadn't a gray hair in it.  And now that my arm is better, I have stolen a

couple of days and finished up a couple of McClure letters that have been

lying a long time.



I shall mail one of them to you next Tuesday--registered.  Lookout for

it.



I shall register and mail the other one (concerning the "Jungfrau") next

Friday look out for it also, and drop me a line to let me know they have

arrived.



I shall write the 6th and last letter by and by when I have studied

Berlin sufficiently.



Yours in a most cheerful frame of mind, and with my and all the family's

Thanksgiving greetings and best wishes,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





       Postscript by Mrs. Clemens written on Mr. Clemens's letter:



DEAR MR. HALL,--This is my birthday and your letter this morning was a

happy addition to the little gifts on the breakfast table.  I thought of

going out and spending money for something unnecessary after it came, but

concluded perhaps I better wait a little longer.

                                   Sincerely yours

                                             O. L. CLEMENS.





     "The German Chicago" was the last of the six McClure letters and was

     finished that winter in Berlin.  It is now included in the Uniform

     Edition of Mark Twain's works, and is one of the best descriptive

     articles of the German capital ever written.  He made no use of the

     Rhone notes further than to put them together in literary form.

     They did not seem to him to contain enough substance to warrant

     publication.  A letter to Hall, written toward the end of December,

     we find rather gloomy in tone, though he is still able to extract

     comfort and even cheerfulness from one of Mr. Hall's reports.





                 Memorandum to Fred J. Hall, in New York:



Among the MSS I left with you are a few that have a recent look and are

written on rather stiff pale green paper.  If you will have those type-

writered and keep the originals and send me the copies (one per mail, not

two.) I'll see if I can use them.



But tell Howells and other inquirers that my hopes of writing anything

are very slender--I seem to be disabled for life.



Drop McClure a line and tell him the same.  I can't dare to make an

engagement now for even a single letter.



I am glad Howells is on a magazine, but sorry he gave up the Study.

I shall have to go on a magazine myself if this L. A. L. continues to

hold my nose down to the grind-stone much longer.



I'm going to hold my breath, now, for 30 days--then the annual statement

will arrive and I shall know how we feel!  Merry Xmas to you from us all.



                         Sincerely,

                                   S. L. C.



P. S.  Just finished the above and finished raging at the eternal German

tax-gatherer, and so all the jubilant things which I was going to say

about the past year's business got knocked out of me.  After writing this

present letter I was feeling blue about Huck Finn, but I sat down and

overhauled your reports from now back to last April and compared them

with the splendid Oct.-Nov.  business, and went to bed feeling refreshed

and fine, for certainly it has been a handsome year.  Now rush me along

the Annual Report and let's see how we feel!

                                                  S. L. C.









XXXII



LETTERS, 1892, CHIEFLY TO MR. HALL AND MRS. CRANE.  IN BERLIN, MENTONE,

BAD-NAUHEIM, FLORENCE



Mark Twain was the notable literary figure in Berlin that winter, the

center of every great gathering.  He was entertained by the Kaiser, and

shown many special attentions by Germans of every rank.  His books were

as well known in Berlin as in New York, and at court assemblies and

embassies he was always a chief center of interest.



He was too popular for his own good; the gaiety of the capital told on

him.  Finally, one night, after delivering a lecture in a hot room, he

contracted a severe cold, driving to a ball at General von Versen's, and

a few days later was confined to his bed with pneumonia.  It was not a

severe attack, but it was long continued.  He could write some letters

and even work a little, but he was not allowed to leave his bed for many

weeks, a condition which he did not find a hardship, for no man ever

enjoyed the loose luxury of undress and the comfort of pillows more than

Mark Twain.  In a memorandum of that time he wrote: "I am having a

booming time all to myself."



Meantime, Hall, in America, was sending favorable reports of the

publishing business, and this naturally helped to keep up his spirits.

He wrote frequently to Hall, of course, but the letters for the most part

are purely of a business nature and of little interest to the general

reader.





                      To Fred J.  Hall, in New York:



                                        HOTEL ROYAL, BERLIN, Feb. 12.

DEAR MR. HALL,--Daly wants to get the stage rights of the "American

Claimant."  The foundation from which I wrote the story is a play of the

same name which has been in A. P. Burbank's hands 5 or 6 years.  That

play cost me some money (helping Burbank stage it) but has never brought

me any.  I have written Burbank (Lotos Club) and asked him to give me

back his rights in the old play so that I can treat with Daly and utilize

this chance to even myself up.  Burbank is a lovely fellow, and if he

objects I can't urge him.  But you run in at the Lotos and see him; and

if he relinquishes his claim, then I would like you to conduct the

business with Daly; or have Whitford or some other lawyer do it under

your supervision if you prefer.



This morning I seem to have rheumatism in my right foot.



I am ordered south by the doctor and shall expect to be well enough to

start by the end of this month.



                             [No signature.]







     It is curious, after Clemens and Howells had tried so hard and so

     long to place their "Sellers" Play, that now, when the story

     appeared in book form, Augustin Daly should have thought it worth

     dramatizing.  Daly and Clemens were old friends, and it would seem

     that Daly could hardly have escaped seeing the play when it was

     going the rounds.  But perhaps there is nothing more mysterious in

     the world than the ways and wants of theatrical managers.  The

     matter came to nothing, of course, but the fact that Daly should

     have thought a story built from an old discarded play had a play in

     it seems interesting.



     Clemens and his wife were advised to leave the cold of Berlin as

     soon as he was able to travel.  This was not until the first of

     March, when, taking their old courier, Joseph Very, they left the

     children in good hands and journeyed to the south of France.





                       To Susy Clemens, in Berlin:



                                             MENTONE, Mch 22, '92.

SUSY DEAR,--I have been delighted to note your easy facility with your

pen and proud to note also your literary superiorities of one kind and

another--clearness of statement, directness, felicity of expression,

photographic ability in setting forth an incident--style--good style--no

barnacles on it in the way of unnecessary, retarding words (the Shipman

scrapes off the barnacles when he wants his racer to go her best gait and

straight to the buoy.) You should write a letter every day, long or short

--and so ought I, but I don't.



Mamma says, tell Clara yes, she will have to write a note if the fan

comes back mended.



We couldn't go to Nice to-day--had to give it up, on various accounts--

and this was the last chance.  I am sorry for Mamma--I wish she could

have gone.  She got a heavy fall yesterday evening and was pretty stiff

and lame this morning, but is working it off trunk packing.



Joseph is gone to Nice to educate himself in Kodaking--and to get the

pictures mounted which Mamma thinks she took here; but I noticed she

didn't take the plug out, as a rule.  When she did, she took nine

pictures on top of each other--composites.

                              With lots of love.

                                                  PAPA.





     In the course of their Italian wanderings they reached Florence,

     where they were so comfortable and well that they decided to engage

     a villa for the next winter.  Through Prof. Willard Fiske, they

     discovered the Villa Viviani, near Settignano, an old palace

     beautifully located on the hilltops east of Florence, commanding a

     wonderful view of the ancient city.  Clemens felt that he could work

     there, and time proved that he was right.



     For the summer, however, they returned to Germany, and located at

     Bad-Nauheim.  Clemens presently decided to make a trip to America to

     give some personal attention to business matters.  For one thing,

     his publishing-house, in spite of prosperity, seemed constantly to

     be requiring more capital, and then a Chicago company had been

     persuaded by Paige to undertake the manufacture of the type-setter.

     It was the beginning of a series of feverish trips which he would

     make back and forth across the ocean during the next two years.





                      To Fred J.  Hall, in New York:



                                        BAD-NAUHEIM, June 11, '92.

                                                       Saturday.

DEAR MR. HALL,--If this arrives before I do, let it inform you that I am

leaving Bremen for New York next Tuesday in the "Havel."



If you can meet me when the ship arrives, you can help me to get away

from the reporters; and maybe you can take me to your own or some other

lodgings where they can't find me.



But if the hour is too early or too late for you, I shall obscure myself

somewhere till I can come to the office.



Yours sincerely

                         S. L. C.





     Nothing of importance happened in America.  The new Paige company

     had a factory started in Chicago and expected to manufacture fifty

     machines as a beginning.  They claimed to have capital, or to be

     able to command it, and as the main control had passed from

     Clemens's hands, he could do no more than look over the ground and

     hope for the best.  As for the business, about all that he could do

     was to sign certain notes necessary to provide such additional

     capital as was needed, and agree with Hall that hereafter they would

     concentrate their efforts and resist further temptation in the way

     of new enterprise.  Then he returned to Bad-Nauheim and settled down

     to literature.  This was the middle of July, and he must have worked

     pretty steadily, for he presently had a variety of MSS. ready to

     offer.





                      To Fred J.  Hall, in New York:



                                                       Aug. 10, '92.

DEAR MR. HALT,--I have dropped that novel I wrote you about, because I

saw a more effective way of using the main episode--to wit: by telling it

through the lips of Huck Finn.  So I have started Huck Finn and Tom

Sawyer (still 15 years old) and their friend the freed slave Jim around

the world in a stray balloon, with Huck as narrator, and somewhere after

the end of that great voyage he will work in the said episode and then

nobody will suspect that a whole book has been written and the globe

circumnavigated merely to get that episode in an effective (and at the

same time apparently unintentional) way.  I have written 12,000 words of

this narrative, and find that the humor flows as easily as the adventures

and surprises--so I shall go along and make a book of from 50,000 to

100,000 words.



It is a story for boys, of course, and I think will interest any boy

between 8 years and 80.



When I was in New York the other day Mrs. Dodge, editor of St. Nicholas,

wrote and, offered me $5,000 for (serial right) a story for boys 50,000

words long.  I wrote back and declined, for I had other matter in my

mind, then.



I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so

that it will not only interest boys but will also strongly interest any

man who has ever been a boy.  That immensely enlarges the audience.



Now this story doesn't need to be restricted to a Childs magazine--it is

proper enough for any magazine, I should think, or for a syndicate.  I

don't swear it, but I think so.



Proposed title of the story, "New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."



                             [No signature.]





     The "novel" mentioned in the foregoing was The Extraordinary Twins,

     a story from which Pudd'nhead Wilson would be evolved later.  It was

     a wildly extravagant farce--just the sort of thing that now and then

     Mark Twain plunged into with an enthusiasm that had to work itself

     out and die a natural death, or mellow into something worth while.

     Tom Sawyer Abroad, as the new Huck story was finally called, was

     completed and disposed of to St. Nicholas for serial publication.



     The Twichells were in Europe that summer, and came to Bad-Nauheim.

     The next letter records a pleasant incident.  The Prince of Wales of

     that day later became King Edward VII.





             To Mr. and Mrs. Orion Clemens, in Keokuk, Iowa.:



                                   Private.  BAD-NAUHEIM, Aug. 23, '92.

DEAR ORION AND MOLLIE,--("Private" because no newspaper-man or other

gossip must get hold of it)



Livy is getting along pretty well, and the doctor thinks another summer

here will cure her.



The Twichell's have been here four days and we have had good times with

them.  Joe and I ran over to Homburg, the great pleasure resort,

Saturday, to dine with some friends, and in the morning I went walking in

the promenade and met the British Ambassador to the Court of Berlin, and

he introduced me to the Prince of Wales, and I found him a most unusually

comfortable and unembarrassing Englishman to talk with--quick to see the

obscurest point, and equipped with a laugh which is spontaneous and

catching.  Am invited by a near friend of his to meet him at dinner day

after tomorrow, and there could be a good time, but the brass band will

smash the talk and spoil everything.



We are expecting to move to Florence ten or twelve days hence, but if

this hot weather continues we shall wait for cooler.  I take Clara to

Berlin for the winter-music, mainly, with German and French added.  Thus

far, Jean is our only glib French scholar.



We all send love to you all and to Pamela and Sam's family, and Annie.



                                   SAM





     Clemens and family left Bad-Nauheim for Italy by way of Switzerland.

     In September Mrs. Clemens's sister, Mrs. Crane, who had been with

     them in Europe during the first year, had now returned to America.

     Mrs. Clemens had improved at the baths, though she had by no means

     recovered her health.  We get a general report of conditions from

     the letter which Clemens wrote Mrs. Crane from Lucerne, Switzerland,

     where the party rested for several days.  The "Phelps" mentioned in

     this letter was William Walter Phelps, United States Minister to

     Germany.  The Phelps and Clemens families had been much associated

     in Berlin.  "Mason" was Frank Mason, Consul General at Frankfort,

     and in later years at Paris.  "Charlie and Ida" were Charles and

     Mrs. Langdon, of Elmira.





                    To Mrs. Crane, in Elmira, N.  Y.:



                                             LUCERNE, Sept. 18, '92.

DEAR AUNT SUE,--Imagine how I felt to find that you had actually gone off

without filling my traveling ink stand which you gave me!  I found it out

yesterday.  Livy advised me to write you about it.



I have been driving this pen hard.  I wrote 280 pages on a yarn called

"Tom Sawyer Abroad," then took up the "Twins" again, destroyed the last

half of the manuscript and re-wrote it in another form, and am going to

continue it and finish it in Florence.  "Tom Sawyer" seems rather pale to

the family after the extravagances of the Twins, but they came to like it

after they got used to it



We remained in Nauheim a little too long.  If we had left there four or

five days earlier we should have made Florence in 3 days; but by the time

we got started Livy had got smitten with what we feared might be

erysipelas--greatly swollen neck and face, and unceasing headaches.  We

lay idle in Frankfort 4 days, doctoring.  We started Thursday and made

Bale.  Hard trip, because it was one of those trains that gets tired

every seven minutes and stops to rest three quarters of an hour.  It took

us 3 1/2 hours to get here, instead of the regulation 2.20.  We reached

here Friday evening and will leave tomorrow (Tuesday) morning.  The rest

has made the headaches better.  We shall pull through to Milan tomorrow

if possible.  Next day we shall start at 10 a. m., and try to make

Bologna, 5 hours.  Next day (Thursday) Florence, D. V.  Next year we will

walk, for these excursions have got to be made over again.  I've got

seven trunks, and I undertook to be courier because I meant to express

them to Florence direct, but we were a couple of days too late.  All

continental roads had issued a peremptory order that no baggage should

travel a mile except in the company of the owner.  (All over Europe

people are howling; they are separated from their baggage and can't get

it forwarded to them) I have to re-ship my trunks every day.  It is very

amusing--uncommonly so.  There seemed grave doubts about our being able

to get these trunks over the Italian frontier, but I've got a very

handsome note from the Frankfort Italian Consul General addressed to all

Italian Customs Officers, and we shall get through if anybody does.



The Phelpses came to Frankfort and we had some great times--dinner at his

hotel, the Masons, supper at our inn--Livy not in it.  She was merely

allowed a glimpse, no more.  Of course, Phelps said she was merely

pretending to be ill; was never looking so well and fine.



The children are all right.  They paddle around a little, and drive-so do

we all.  Lucerne seems to be pretty full of tourists.  The Fleulen boat

went out crowded yesterday morning.



The Paris Herald has created a public interest by inoculating one of its

correspondents with cholera.  A man said yesterday he wished to God they

would inoculate all of them.  Yes, the interest is quite general and

strong, and much hope is felt.



Livy says, I have said enough bad things, and better send all our loves

to you and Charley and Ida and all the children and shut up.  Which I do

--and shut up.

                              S. L. C.





     They reached Florence on the 26th, and four days later we find

     Clemens writing again to Mrs. Crane, detailing everything at length.

     Little comment on this letter is required; it fully explains itself.

     Perhaps a word of description from one of his memoranda will not be

     out of place.  Of the villa he wrote: "It is a plain, square

     building, like a box, and is painted light green and has green

     window-shutters.  It stands in a commanding position on the

     artificial terrace of liberal dimensions, which is walled around

     with masonry.  From the walls the vineyards and olive groves of the

     estate slant away toward the valley....  Roses overflow the

     retaining walls and the battered and mossy stone urn on the gate-

     post, in pink and yellow cataracts, exactly as they do on the drop-

     curtains in the theaters.  The house is a very fortress for

     strength."



     The Mrs. Ross in this letter was Janet Ross, daughter of Lady Duff

     Gordon, remembered to-day for her Egyptian letters.  The Ross castle

     was but a little distance away.





                        To Mrs. Crane, in Elmira:



                                   VILLA VIVIANI, SETTIGNANO, FLORENCE.

                                                  Sept.  30, 1892

DEAR SUE,--We have been in the house several days, and certainly it is a

beautiful place,--particularly at this moment, when the skies are a deep

leaden color, the domes of Florence dim in the drizzling rain, and

occasional perpendicular coils of lightning quivering intensely in the

black sky about Galileo's Tower.  It is a charming panorama, and the most

conspicuous towers and domes down in the city look to-day just as they

looked when Boccaccio and Dante used to contemplate them from this

hillock five and six hundred years ago.



The Mademoiselle is a great help to Livy in the housekeeping, and is a

cheery and cheerful presence in the house.  The butler is equipped with a

little French, and it is this fact that enables the house to go--but it

won't go well until the family get some sort of facility with the Italian

tongue, for the cook, the woman-of-all-work and the coachman understand

only that.  It is a stubborn and devilish language to learn, but Jean and

the others will master it.  Livy's German Nauheim girl is the worst off

of anybody, as there is no market for her tongue at all among the help.



With the furniture in and the curtains up the house is very pretty, and

not unhomelike.  At mid-night last night we heard screams up stairs--Susy

had set the lofty window curtains afire with a candle.  This sounds kind

of frightful, whereas when you come to think of it, a burning curtain or

pile of furniture hasn't any element of danger about it in this fortress.

There isn't any conceivable way to burn this house down, or enable a

conflagration on one floor to climb to the next.



Mrs. Ross laid in our wood, wine and servants for us, and they are

excellent.  She had the house scoured from Cellar to rook the curtains

washed and put up, all beds pulled to pieces, beaten, washed and put

together again, and beguiled the Marchese into putting a big porcelain

stove in the vast central hall.  She is a wonderful woman, and we don't

quite see how or when we should have gotten under way without her.



Observe our address above--the post delivers letters daily at the house.



Even with the work and fuss of settling the house Livy has improved--and

the best is yet to come.  There is going to be absolute seclusion here--

a hermit life, in fact.  We (the rest of us) shall run over to the Ross's

frequently, and they will come here now and then and see Livy--that is

all.  Mr. Fiske is away--nobody knows where--and the work on his house

has been stopped and his servants discharged.  Therefore we shall merely

go Rossing--as far as society is concerned--shan't circulate in Florence

until Livy shall be well enough to take a share in it.



This present house is modern.  It is not much more than two centuries

old; but parts of it, and also its foundations are of high antiquity.

The fine beautiful family portraits--the great carved ones in the large

ovals over the doors of the big hall--carry one well back into the past.

One of them is dated 1305--he could have known Dante, you see.  Another

is dated 1343--he could have known Boccaccio and spent his afternoons in

Fiesole listening to the Decameron tales.  Another is dated 1463--

he could have met Columbus.....



Evening.  The storm thundered away until night, and the rain came down in

floods.  For awhile there was a partial break, which furnished about such

a sunset as will be exhibited when the Last Day comes and the universe

tumbles together in wreck and ruin.  I have never seen anything more

spectacular and impressive.



One person is satisfied with the villa, anyway.  Jean prefers it to all

Europe, save Venice.  Jean is eager to get at the Italian tongue again,

now, and I see that she has forgotten little or nothing of what she

learned of it in Rome and Venice last spring.



I am the head French duffer of the family.  Most of the talk goes over my

head at the table.  I catch only words, not phrases.  When Italian comes

to be substituted I shall be even worse off than I am now, I suppose.



This reminds me that this evening the German girl said to Livy, "Man hat

mir gesagt loss Sie una candella verlaught habe"--unconsciously dropping

in a couple of Italian words, you see.  So she is going to join the

polyglots, too, it appears.  They say it is good entertainment to hear

her and the butler talk together in their respective tongues, piecing out

and patching up with the universal sign-language as they go along.  Five

languages in use in the house (including the sign-language-hardest-worked

of them all) and yet with all this opulence of resource we do seem to

have an uncommonly tough time making ourselves understood.



What we lack is a cat.  If we only had Germania!  That was the most

satisfactory all-round cat I have seen yet.  Totally ungermanic in the

raciness of his character and in the sparkle of his mind and the

spontaneity of his movements.  We shall not look upon his like again....



                                        S. L. C.





     Clemens got well settled down to work presently.  He found the

     situation, the climate, the background, entirely suited to literary

     production, and in a little while he had accomplished more than at

     any other time since his arrival in Europe.  From letters to Mrs.

     Crane and to Mr. Hall we learn something of his employments and his

     satisfaction.





                        To Mrs. Crane, in Elmira:



                                                  VILLA VIVIANI

                              SETTIGNANO, FLORENCE.  Oct. 22, '92.

DEAR SUE,--We are getting wonted.  The open fires have driven away the

cold and the doubt, and now a cheery spirit pervades the place.  Livy and

the Kings and Mademoiselle having been taking their tea a number of

times, lately, on the open terrace with the city and the hills and the

sunset for company.  I stop work, a few minutes, as a rule, when the sun

gets down to the hilltops west of Florence, and join the tea-group to

wonder and exclaim.  There is always some new miracle in the view, a new

and exquisite variation in the show, a variation which occurs every 15

minutes between dawn and night.  Once early in the morning, a multitude

of white villas not before perceived, revealed themselves on the far

hills; then we recognized that all those great hills are snowed thick

with them, clear to the summit.



The variety of lovely effects, the infinitude of change, is something not

to be believed by any who has not seen it.  No view that I am acquainted

with in the world is at all comparable to this for delicacy, charm,

exquisiteness, dainty coloring, and bewildering rapidity of change.  It

keeps a person drunk with pleasure all the time.  Sometimes Florence

ceases to be substantial, and becomes just a faint soft dream, with domes

and towers of air, and one is persuaded that he might blow it away with a

puff of his breath.



Livy is progressing admirably.  This is just the place for her.



                           [Remainder missing.]





                      To Fred J.  Hall, in New York:



                                                  Dec.  12, '92.

DEAR MR. HALL,--November check received.



I have lent the Californian's Story to Arthur Stedman for his Author Club

Book, so your suggestion that my new spring-book bear that name arrives

too late, as he probably would not want us to use that story in a book of

ours until the Author book had had its run.  That is for him to decide--

and I don't want him hampered at all in his decision.  I, for my part,

prefer the "$1,000,000 Banknote and Other Stories" by Mark Twain as a

title, but above my judgment I prefer yours.  I mean this--it is not

taffy.



I told Arthur to leave out the former squib or paragraph and use only the

Californian's Story.  Tell him this is because I am going to use that in

the book I am now writing.



I finished "Those Extraordinary Twins" night before last makes 60 or

80,000 words--haven't counted.



The last third of it suits me to a dot.  I begin, to-day, to entirely

recast and re-write the first two-thirds--new plan, with two minor

characters, made very prominent, one major character cropped out, and the

Twins subordinated to a minor but not insignificant place.



The minor character will now become the chiefest, and I will name the

story after him--"Puddn'head Wilson."



Merry Xmas to you, and great prosperity and felicity!



                                                  S. L. CLEMENS.









XXXIII



LETTERS, 1893, TO MR. HALL, MRS.  CLEMENS, AND OTHERS. FLORENCE.

BUSINESS TROUBLES.  "PUDD'NHEAD WILSON."  "JOAN OF ARC."

AT THE PLAYERS, NEW YORK



The reader may have suspected that young Mr. Hall in New York was having

his troubles.  He was by this time one-third owner in the business of

Charles L. Webster & Co., as well as its general manager.  The business

had been drained of its capital one way and another-partly by the

publication of unprofitable books; partly by the earlier demands of the

typesetter, but more than all by the manufacturing cost and agents'

commissions demanded by L. A. L.; that is to say, the eleven large

volumes constituting the Library of American Literature, which Webster

had undertaken to place in a million American homes.  There was plenty of

sale for it--indeed, that was just the trouble; for it was sold on

payments--small monthly payments--while the cost of manufacture and the

liberal agents' commissions were cash items, and it would require a

considerable period before the dribble of collections would swell into a

tide large enough to satisfy the steady outflow of expense.  A sale of

twenty-five sets a day meant prosperity on paper, but unless capital

could be raised from some other source to make and market those books

through a period of months, perhaps even years, to come, it meant

bankruptcy in reality.  It was Hall's job, with Clemens to back him, to

keep their ship afloat on these steadily ebbing financial waters.  It was

also Hall's affair to keep Mark Twain cheerful, to look pleasant himself,

and to show how they were steadily getting rich because orders were

pouring in, though a cloud that resembled bankruptcy loomed always a

little higher upon the horizon.  If Hall had not been young and an

optimist, he would have been frightened out of his boots early in the

game.  As it was, he made a brave steady fight, kept as cheerful and

stiff an upper lip as possible, always hoping that something would

happen--some grand sale of his other books, some unexpected inflow from

the type-setter interests--anything that would sustain his ship until the

L. A. L.  tide should turn and float it into safety.



Clemens had faith in Hall and was fond of him.  He never found fault with

him; he tried to accept his encouraging reports at their face value.  He

lent the firm every dollar of his literary earnings not absolutely needed

for the family's support; he signed new notes; he allowed Mrs. Clemens to

put in such remnants of her patrimony as the type-setter had spared.



The situation in 1893 was about as here outlined.  The letters to Hall of

that year are frequent and carry along the story.  To any who had formed

the idea that Mark Twain was irascible, exacting, and faultfinding, they

will perhaps be a revelation.





                      To Fred J. Hall, in New York:



                                             FLORENCE, Jan. 1, '93.

DEAR MR. HALL,--Yours of Dec. 19 is to hand, and Mrs. Clemens is deeply

distressed, for she thinks I have been blaming you or finding fault with

you about something.  But most surely that cannot be.  I tell her that

although I am prone to write hasty and regrettable things to other

people, I am not a bit likely to write such things to you.  I can't

believe I have done anything so ungrateful.  If I have, pile coals of

fire on my head, for I deserve it!



I wonder if my letter of credit isn't an encumbrance?  Do you have to

deposit the whole amount it calls for?  If that is so, it is an

encumbrance, and we must withdraw it and take the money out of soak.

I have never made drafts upon it except when compelled, because I thought

you deposited nothing against it, and only had to put up money that I

drew upon it; that therefore the less I drew the easier it would be for

you.



I am dreadfully sorry I didn't know it would be a help to you to let my

monthly check pass over a couple of months.  I could have stood that by

drawing what is left of Mrs. Clemens's letter of credit, and we would

have done it cheerfully.



I will write Whitmore to send you the "Century" check for $1,000, and you

can collect Mrs. Dodge's $2,000 (Whitmore has power of attorney which I

think will enable him to endorse it over to you in my name.) If you need

that $3,000 put it in the business and use it, and send Whitmore the

Company's note for a year.  If you don't need it, turn it over to Mr.

Halsey and let him invest it for me.



I've a mighty poor financial head, and I may be all wrong--but tell me if

I am wrong in supposing that in lending my own firm money at 6 per cent I

pay 4 of it myself and so really get only a per cent?  Now don't laugh if

that is stupid.



Of course my friend declined to buy a quarter interest in the L. A. L.

for $200,000.  I judged he would.  I hoped he would offer $100,000, but

he didn't.  If the cholera breaks out in America, a few months hence, we

can't borrow or sell; but if it doesn't we must try hard to raise

$100,000.  I wish we could do it before there is a cholera scare.



I have been in bed two or three days with a cold, but I got up an hour

ago, and I believe I am all right again.



How I wish I had appreciated the need of $100,000 when I was in New York

last summer!  I would have tried my best to raise it.  It would make us

able to stand 1,000 sets of L. A. L.  per month, but not any more, I

guess.



You have done magnificently with the business, and we must raise the

money somehow, to enable you to reap the reward of all that labor.

                              Sincerely Yours

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





"Whitmore," in this letter, was F. G. Whitmore, of Hartford, Mark Twain's

financial agent.  The money due from Mrs. Dodge was a balance on Tom

Sawyer Abroad, which had been accepted by St. Nicholas.  Mr. Halsey was a

down-town broker.



Clemens, who was growing weary of the constant demands of L. A. L., had

conceived the idea that it would be well to dispose of a portion of it

for enough cash to finance its manufacture.



We don't know who the friend was to whom he offered a quarter interest

for the modest sum of two hundred thousand dollars.  But in the next

letter we discover designs on a certain very canny Scotchman of Skibo.





                      To Fred J. Hall, in New York:



                                             FLORENCE, Jan. 28, '92.

DEAR MR. HALL,--I want to throw out a suggestion and see what you think

of it.  We have a good start, and solid ground under us; we have a

valuable reputation; our business organization is practical, sound and

well-devised; our publications are of a respect-worthy character and of a

money-breeding species.  Now then I think that the association with us of

some one of great name and with capital would give our business a

prodigious impetus--that phrase is not too strong.



As I look at it, it is not money merely that is needed; if that were all,

the firm has friends enough who would take an interest in a paying

venture; we need some one who has made his life a success not only from a

business standpoint, but with that achievement back of him, has been

great enough to make his power felt as a thinker and a literary man.  It

is a pretty usual thing for publishers to have this sort of partners.

Now you see what a power Carnegie is, and how far his voice reaches in

the several lines I speak of.  Do you know him?  You do by correspondence

or purely business talks about his books--but personally, I mean? so that

it would not be an intrusion for you to speak to him about this desire of

mine--for I would like you to put it before him, and if you fail to

interest him in it, you will probably get at least some valuable

suggestions from him.  I'll enclose a note of introduction--you needn't

use it if you don't need to.

                                   Yours S. L. C.



P. S.  Yes, I think I have already acknowledged the Dec.  $1,000 and the

Jan. $500--and if another $500 was mailed 3 days ago there's no hiatus.



I think I also reminded you that the new letter of credit does not cover

the unexpended balance of the old one but falls considerably short of it.



Do your best with Carnegie, and don't wait to consider any of my

intermediate suggestions or talks about our raising half of the $200,000

ourselves.  I mean, wait for nothing.  To make my suggestion available I

should have to go over and see Arnot, and I don't want to until I can

mention Carnegie's name to him as going in with us.



My book is type-written and ready for print--"Pudd'nhead Wilson-a Tale."

(Or, "Those Extraordinary Twins," if preferable.)



It makes 82,500 words--12,000 more than Huck Finn.  But I don't know what

to do with it.  Mrs. Clemens thinks it wouldn't do to go to the Am. Pub.

Co. or anywhere outside of our own house; we have no subscription

machinery, and a book in the trade is a book thrown away, as far as

money-profit goes.  I am in a quandary.  Give me a lift out of it.



I will mail the book to you and get you to examine it and see if it is

good or if it is bad.  I think it is good, and I thought the Claimant

bad, when I saw it in print; but as for real judgment, I think I am

destitute of it.



I am writing a companion to the Prince and Pauper, which is half done and

will make 200,000 words; and I have had the idea that if it were gotten

up in handsome style, with many illustrations and put at a high enough

price maybe the L. A. L.  canvassers would take it and run it with that

book.  Would they?  It could be priced anywhere from $4 up to $10,

according to how it was gotten up, I suppose.



I don't want it to go into a magazine.

                                             S. L. C.



I am having several short things type-"writered."  I will send them to

you presently.  I like the Century and Harper's, but I don't know that I

have any business to object to the Cosmopolitan if they pay as good

rates.  I suppose a man ought to stick to one magazine, but that may be

only superstition.  What do you think?

                                             S. L. C.





     "The companion to The Prince and the Pauper," mentioned in this

     letter, was the story of Joan of Arc, perhaps the most finished of

     Mark Twain's literary productions.  His interest in Joan had been

     first awakened when, as a printer's apprentice in Hannibal, he had

     found blowing along the street a stray leaf from some printed story

     of her life.  That fragment of history had pictured Joan in prison,

     insulted and mistreated by ruffians.  It had aroused all the

     sympathy and indignation in the boy, Sam Clemens; also, it had

     awakened his interest in history, and, indeed, in all literature.



     His love for the character of Joan had grown with the years, until

     in time he had conceived the idea of writing her story.  As far back

     as the early eighties he had collected material for it, and had

     begun to make the notes.  One thing and another had interfered, and

     he had found no opportunity for such a story.  Now, however, in

     Florence, in the ancient villa, and in the quiet garden, looking

     across the vineyards and olive groves to the dream city along the

     Arno, he felt moved to take up the tale of the shepherd girl of

     France, the soldier maid, or, as he called her, "The noble child,

     the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable the ages have

     produced."  His surroundings and background would seem to have been

     perfect, and he must have written with considerable ease to have

     completed a hundred thousand words in a period of not more than six

     weeks.



     Perhaps Hall did not even go to see Carnegie; at all events nothing

     seems to have come of the idea.  Once, at a later time, Mask Twain

     himself mentioned the matter to Carnegie, and suggested to him that

     it was poor financiering to put all of one's eggs into one basket,

     meaning into iron.  But Carnegie answered, "That's a mistake; put

     all your eggs into one basket and watch that basket."



     It was March when Clemens felt that once more his presence was

     demanded in America.  He must see if anything could be realized from

     the type-setter or L. A. L.





                      To Fred J. Hall, in New York:



                                                       March 13, '93.

DEAR MR. HALL,--I am busy getting ready to sail the 22d, in the Kaiser

Wilhelm II.



I send herewith 2 magazine articles.



The Story contains 3,800 to 4,000 words.



The "Diary" contains 3,800 words.



Each would make about 4 pages of the Century.



The Diary is a gem, if I do say it myself that shouldn't.



If the Cosmopolitan wishes to pay $600 for either of them or $1,200 for

both, gather in the check, and I will use the money in America instead of

breaking into your treasury.



If they don't wish to trade for either, send the articles to the Century,

without naming a price, and if their check isn't large enough I will call

and abuse them when I come.



I signed and mailed the notes yesterday.

                                        Yours

                                             S. L. C.





     Clemens reached New York on the 3d of April and made a trip to

     Chicago, but accomplished nothing, except to visit the World's Fair

     and be laid up with a severe cold.  The machine situation had not

     progressed.  The financial stringency of 1893 had brought everything

     to a standstill.  The New York bank would advance Webster & Co. no

     more money.  So disturbed were his affairs, so disordered was

     everything, that sometimes he felt himself as one walking amid

     unrealities.  A fragment of a letter to Mrs. Crane conveys this:



     "I dreamed I was born and grew up and was a pilot on the Mississippi

     and a miner and a journalist in Nevada and a pilgrim in the Quaker

     City, and had a wife and children and went to live in a villa at

     Florence--and this dream goes on and on and sometimes seems so real

     that I almost believe it is real.  I wonder if it is?  But there is

     no way to tell, for if one applies tests they would be part of the

     dream, too, and so would simply aid the deceit.  I wish I knew

     whether it is a dream or real."



     He saw Warner, briefly, in America; also Howells, now living in New

     York, but he had little time for visiting.  On May 13th he sailed

     again for Europe on the Kaiser Wilhelm II.  On the night before

     sailing he sent Howells a good-by word.





                   To W. D. Howells, in New York City:



                              MURRAY HILL HOTEL, NEW YORE, May 12, 1893.

                                                            Midnight.

DEAR HOWELLS--I am so sorry I missed you.



I am very glad to have that book for sea entertainment, and I thank you

ever so much for it.



I've had a little visit with Warner at last; I was getting afraid I

wasn't going to have a chance to see him at all.  I forgot to tell you

how thoroughly I enjoyed your account of the country printing office, and

how true it all was and how intimately recognizable in all its details.

But Warner was full of delight over it, and that reminded me, and I am

glad, for I wanted to speak of it.



You have given me a book; Annie Trumbull has sent me her book; I bought a

couple of books; Mr. Hall gave me a choice German book; Laflan gave me

two bottles of whisky and a box of cigars--I go to sea nobly equipped.



Good-bye and all good fortune attend you and yours--and upon you all I

leave my benediction.

                              MARK.





     Mention has already been made of the Ross home being very near to

     Viviani, and the association of the Ross and Clemens families.

     There was a fine vegetable garden on the Ross estate, and it was in

     the interest of it that the next letter was written to the Secretary

     of Agriculture.





            To Hon. J. Sterling Morton, in Washington, D. C.:

           Editorial Department Century Magazine, Union Square,



                                             NEW YORK, April 6, 1893.

TO THE HON. J. STERLING MORTON,--Dear Sir: Your petitioner, Mark Twain,

a poor farmer of Connecticut--indeed, the poorest one there, in the

opinion of many-desires a few choice breeds of seed corn (maize), and in

return will zealously support the Administration in all ways honorable

and otherwise.



To speak by the card, I want these things to hurry to Italy to an English

lady.  She is a neighbor of mine outside of Florence, and has a great

garden and thinks she could raise corn for her table if she had the right

ammunition.  I myself feel a warm interest in this enterprise, both on

patriotic grounds and because I have a key to that garden, which I got

made from a wax impression.  It is not very good soil, still I think she

can grow enough for one table and I am in a position to select the table.

If you are willing to aid and abet a countryman (and Gilder thinks you

are,) please find the signature and address of your petitioner below.



Respectfully and truly yours.

                              MARK TWAIN,



67 Fifth Avenue, New York.



P. S.--A handful of choice (Southern) watermelon seeds would pleasantly

add to that lady's employments and give my table a corresponding lift.





     His idea of business values had moderated considerably by the time

     he had returned to Florence.  He was not hopeless yet, but he was

     clearly a good deal disheartened--anxious for freedom.





                      To Fred J.  Hall, in New York:



                                                  FLORENCE May 30, '93

DEAR MR. HALL,--You were to cable me if you sold any machine royalties--

so I judge you have not succeeded.



This has depressed me.  I have been looking over the past year's letters

and statements and am depressed still more.



I am terribly tired of business.  I am by nature and disposition unfitted

for it and I want to get out of it.  I am standing on the Mount Morris

volcano with help from the machine a long way off--doubtless a long way

further off than the Connecticut Co. imagines.



Now here is my idea for getting out.



The firm owes Mrs. Clemens and me--I do not know quite how much, but it

is about $170,000 or $175,000, 1 suppose (I make this guess from the

documents here, whose technicalities confuse me horribly.)



The firm owes other sums, but there is stock and cash assets to cover the

entire indebtedness and $116,679.20 over.  Is that it?  In addition we

have the L. A. L.  plates and copyright, worth more than $130,000--is

that correct?



That is to say, we have property worth about $250,000 above indebtedness,

I suppose--or, by one of your estimates, $300,000?  The greater part of

the first debts to me is in notes paying 6 percent.  The rest (the old

$70,000 or whatever it is) pays no interest.



Now then, will Harper or Appleton, or Putnam give me $200,000 for those

debts and my two-thirds interest in the firm?  (The firm of course taking

the Mount Morris and all such obligations off my hands and leaving me

clear of all responsibility.)



I don't want much money.  I only want first class notes--$200,000 worth

of them at 6 per cent, payable monthly;--yearly notes, renewable annually

for 3 years, with $5,000 of the principal payable at the beginning and

middle of each year.  After that, the notes renewable annually and

(perhaps) a larger part of the principal payable semi-annually.



Please advise me and suggest alterations and emendations of the above

scheme, for I need that sort of help, being ignorant of business and not

able to learn a single detail of it.



Such a deal would make it easy for a big firm to pour in a big cash

capital and jump L. A. L. up to enormous prosperity.  Then your one-third

would be a fortune--and I hope to see that day!



I enclose an authority to use with Whitmore in case you have sold any

royalties.  But if you can't make this deal don't make any.  Wait a

little and see if you can't make the deal.  Do make the deal if you

possibly can.  And if any presence shall be necessary in order to

complete it I will come over, though I hope it can be done without that.



Get me out of business!



And I will be yours forever gratefully,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.



My idea is, that I am offering my 2/3 of L. A. L. and the business for

thirty or forty thousand dollars.  Is that it?



P. S. S.  The new firm could retain my books and reduce them to a

10 percent royalty.                 S. L. C.





                  To Rev. Jos. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                              VILLA VIVIANI, SETTIGNANO (FLORENCE)

                                                       June 9, '93.

DEAR JOE,--The sea voyage set me up and I reached here May 27 in

tolerable condition--nothing left but weakness, cough all gone.



Old Sir Henry Layard was here the other day, visiting our neighbor Janet

Ross, daughter of Lady Duff Gordon, and since then I have been reading

his account of the adventures of his youth in the far East.  In a

footnote he has something to say about a sailor which I thought might

interest you--viz:



"This same quartermaster was celebrated among the English in Mesopotamia

for an entry which he made in his log-book-after a perilous storm; 'The

windy and watery elements raged.  Tears and prayers was had recourse to,

but was of no manner of use.  So we hauled up the anchor and got round

the point.'"



There--it isn't Ned Wakeman; it was before his day.



               With love,

                         MARK.





     They closed Villa Viviani in June and near the end of the month

     arrived in Munich in order that Mrs. Clemens might visit some of the

     German baths.  The next letter is written by her and shows her deep

     sympathy with Hall in his desperate struggle.  There have been few

     more unselfish and courageous women in history than Mark Twain's

     wife.





               From Mrs. Clemens to Mr. Hall, in New York:



                                                  June 27th 1893

                                                  MUNICH.

DEAR MR. HALL,--Your letter to Mr. Clemens of June 16th has just reached

here; as he has gone to Berlin for Clara I am going to send you just a

line in answer to it.



Mr. Clemens did not realize what trouble you would be in when his letter

should reach you or he would not have sent it just then.  I hope you will

not worry any more than you can help.  Do not let our interests weigh on

you too heavily.  We both know you will, as you always have, look in

every way to the best interests of all.



I think Mr. Clemens is right in feeling that he should get out of

business, that he is not fitted for it; it worries him too much.



But he need be in no haste about it, and of course, it would be the very

farthest from his desire to imperil, in the slightest degree, your

interests in order to save his own.



I am sure that I voice his wish as well as mine when I say that he would

simply like you to bear in mind the fact that he greatly desires to be

released from his present anxiety and worry, at a time when it shall not

endanger your interest or the safety of the business.



I am more sorry than I can express that this letter of Mr. Clemens'

should have reached you when you were struggling under such terrible

pressure.  I hope now that the weight is not quite so heavy.  He would

not have written you about the money if he had known that it was an

inconvenience for you to send it.  He thought the book-keeper whose duty

it is to forward it had forgotten.



We can draw on Mr. Langdon for money for a few weeks until things are a

little easier with you.  As Mr. Clemens wrote you we would say "do not

send us any more money at present" if we were not afraid to do so.  I

will say, however, do not trouble yourself if for a few weeks you are not

able to send the usual amount.



Mr. Clemens and I have the greatest possible desire, not to increase in

any way your burdens, and sincerely wish we might aid you.



I trust my brother may be able, in his talk with you, to throw some

helpful light on the situation.



Hoping you will see a change for the better and begin to reap the fruit

of your long and hard labor.

               Believe me

                    Very Cordially yours

                              OLIVIA L. CLEMENS.





Hall, naturally, did not wish to be left alone with the business.  He

realized that his credit would suffer, both at the bank and with the

public, if his distinguished partner should retire.  He wrote, therefore,

proposing as an alternate that they dispose of the big subscription set

that was swamping them.  It was a good plan--if it would work--and we

find Clemens entering into it heartily.





                      To Fred J.  Hall, in New York:



                                             MUNICH, July 3, '93.

DEAR MR. HALL,--You make a suggestion which has once or twice flitted

dimly through my mind heretofore to wit, sell L. A. L.



I like that better than the other scheme, for it is no doubt feasible,

whereas the other is perhaps not.



The firm is in debt, but L. A. L. is free--and not only free but has

large money owing to it.  A proposition to sell that by itself to a big

house could be made without embarrassment we merely confess that we

cannot spare capital from the rest of the business to run it on the huge

scale necessary to make it an opulent success.



It will be selling a good thing--for somebody; and it will be getting rid

of a load which we are clearly not able to carry.  Whoever buys will have

a noble good opening--a complete equipment, a well organized business,

a capable and experienced manager, and enterprise not experimental but

under full sail, and immediately able to pay 50 per cent a year on every

dollar the publisher shall actually invest in it--I mean in making and

selling the books.



I am miserably sorry to be adding bothers and torments to the over-supply

which you already have in these hideous times, but I feel so troubled,

myself, considering the dreary fact that we are getting deeper and deeper

in debt and the L. A. L.  getting to be a heavier and heavier burden all

the time, that I must bestir myself and seek a way of relief.



It did not occur to me that in selling out I would injure you--for that I

am not going to do.  But to sell L. A. L. will not injure you it will put

you in better shape.

               Sincerely Yours

                         S. L. CLEMENS.





                      To Fred J.  Hall, in New York:



                                                  July 8, '92.

DEAR MR. HALL,--I am sincerely glad you are going to sell L. A. L.  I am

glad you are shutting off the agents, and I hope the fatal book will be

out of our hands before it will be time to put them on again.  With

nothing but our non-existent capital to work with the book has no value

for us, rich a prize as it will be to any competent house that gets it.



I hope you are making an effort to sell before you discharge too many

agents, for I suppose the agents are a valuable part of the property.



We have been stopping in Munich for awhile, but we shall make a break for

some country resort in a few days now.

                         Sincerely Yours

                                   S. L. C.



                                                            July 8

P. S.  No, I suppose I am wrong in suggesting that you wait a moment

before discharging your L. A. L.  agents--in fact I didn't mean that.

I judge your only hope of salvation is in discharging them all at once,

since it is their commissions that threaten to swamp us.  It is they who

have eaten up the $14,000 I left with you in such a brief time, no doubt.



I feel panicky.



I think the sale might be made with better advantage, however, now, than

later when the agents have got out of the purchaser's reach.

                                   S. L. C.



P. S.  No monthly report for many months.





     Those who are old enough to remember the summer of 1893 may recall

     it as a black financial season.  Banks were denying credit,

     businesses were forced to the wall.  It was a poor time to float any

     costly enterprise.  The Chicago company who was trying to build the

     machines made little progress.  The book business everywhere was

     bad.  In a brief note following the foregoing letters Clemens wrote

     Hall:



     "It is now past the middle of July and no cablegram to say the

     machine is finished.  We are afraid you are having miserable days

     and worried nights, and we sincerely wish we could relieve you, but

     it is all black with us and we don't know any helpful thing to say

     or do."



     He inclosed some kind of manuscript proposition for John Brisben

     Walker, of the Cosmopolitan, with the comment: "It is my ingenious

     scheme to protect the family against the alms-house for one more

     year--and after that--well, goodness knows!  I have never felt so

     desperate in my life--and good reason, for I haven't got a penny to

     my name, and Mrs. Clemens hasn't enough laid up with Langdon to keep

     us two months."



     It was like Mark Twain, in the midst of all this turmoil, to project

     an entirely new enterprise; his busy mind was always visioning

     success in unusual undertakings, regardless of immediate conditions

     and the steps necessary to achievement.





                      To Fred J.  Hall, in New York:



                                                       July 26, '93.

DEAR MR. HALL,--..... I hope the machine will be finished this month;

but it took me four years and cost me $100,000 to finish the other

machine after it was apparently entirely complete and setting type like a

house-afire.



I wonder what they call "finished."  After it is absolutely perfect it

can't go into a printing-office until it has had a month's wear, running

night and day, to get the bearings smooth, I judge.



I may be able to run over about mid-October.  Then if I find you relieved

of L. A. L.  we will start a magazine inexpensive, and of an entirely

unique sort.  Arthur Stedman and his father editors of it.  Arthur could

do all the work, merely submitting it to his father for approval.



The first number should pay--and all subsequent ones--25 cents a number.

Cost of first number (20,000 copies) $2,000.  Give most of them away,

sell the rest.  Advertising and other expenses--cost unknown.  Send one

to all newspapers--it would get a notice--favorable, too.



But we cannot undertake it until L. A. L, is out of the way.  With our

hands free and some capital to spare, we could make it hum.



Where is the Shelley article?  If you have it on hand, keep it and I will

presently tell you what to do with it.



Don't forget to tell me.

                         Yours Sincerely

                                   S. L. C.





     The Shelley article mentioned in this letter was the "Defense of

     Harriet Sheller," one of the very best of his essays.  How he could

     have written this splendid paper at a time of such distraction

     passes comprehension.  Furthermore, it is clear that he had revised,

     indeed rewritten, the long story of Pudd'nhead Wilson.





                      To Fred J. Hall, in New York:



                                                  July 30, '93.

DEAR MR. HALL,--This time "Pudd'nhead Wilson" is a success!  Even Mrs.

Clemens, the most difficult of critics, confesses it, and without

reserves or qualifications.  Formerly she would not consent that it be

published either before or after my death.  I have pulled the twins apart

and made two individuals of them; I have sunk them out of sight, they are

mere flitting shadows, now, and of no importance; their story has

disappeared from the book.  Aunt Betsy Hale has vanished wholly, leaving

not a trace behind; aunt Patsy Cooper and her daughter Rowena have almost

disappeared--they scarcely walk across the stage.  The whole story is

centered on the murder and the trial; from the first chapter the movement

is straight ahead without divergence or side-play to the murder and the

trial; everything that is done or said or that happens is a preparation

for those events.  Therefore, 3 people stand up high, from beginning to

end, and only 3--Pudd'nhead, "Tom" Driscoll, and his nigger mother,

Roxana; none of the others are important, or get in the way of the story

or require the reader's attention.  Consequently, the scenes and episodes

which were the strength of the book formerly are stronger than ever, now.



When I began this final reconstruction the story contained 81,500 words,

now it contains only 58,000.  I have knocked out everything that delayed

the march of the story--even the description of a Mississippi steamboat.

There's no weather in, and no scenery--the story is stripped for flight!



Now, then what is she worth?  The amount of matter is but 3,000 words

short of the American Claimant, for which the syndicate paid $12,500.

There was nothing new in that story, but the finger-prints in this one

is virgin ground--absolutely fresh, and mighty curious and interesting

to everybody.



I don't want any more syndicating--nothing short of $20,000, anyway, and

that I can't get--but won't you see how much the Cosmopolitan will stand?



Do your best for me, for I do not sleep these nights, for visions of the

poor-house.



This in spite of the hopeful tone of yours of 11th to Langdon (just

received) for in me hope is very nearly expiring.  Everything does look

so blue, so dismally blue!



By and by I shall take up the Rhone open-boat voyage again, but not now-

we are going to be moving around too much.  I have torn up some of it,

but still have 15,000 words that Mrs. Clemens approves of, and that I

like.  I may go at it in Paris again next winter, but not unless I know I

can write it to suit me.



Otherwise I shall tackle Adam once more, and do him in a kind of a

friendly and respectful way that will commend him to the Sunday schools.

I've been thinking out his first life-days to-day and framing his

childish and ignorant impressions and opinions for him.



Will ship Pudd'nhead in a few days.  When you get it cable



                    Mark Twain

                         Care Brownship, London

                                        Received.



I mean to ship "Pudd'nhead Wilson" to you-say, tomorrow.  It'll furnish

me hash for awhile I reckon.  I am almost sorry it is finished; it was

good entertainment to work at it, and kept my mind away from things.



We leave here in about ten days, but the doctors have changed our plans

again.  I think we shall be in Bohemia or thereabouts till near the end

of September, then go to Paris and take a rest.

                         Yours Sincerely

                                        S. L. C.



P. S.  Mrs. Clemens has come in since, and read your letter and is deeply

distressed.  She thinks that in some letter of mine I must have

reproached you.  She says it is wonderful that you have kept the ship

afloat in this storm that has seen fleets and fleets go down; that from

what she learns of the American business-situation from her home letters

you have accomplished a marvel in the circumstances, and that she cannot

bear to have a word said to you that shall voice anything but praise and

the heartiest appreciation--and not the shadow of a reproach will she

allow.



I tell her I didn't reproach you and never thought of such a thing.  And

I said I would break open my letter and say so.



Mrs. Clemens says I must tell you not to send any money for a month or

two--so that you may be afforded what little relief is in our power.

All right--I'm willing; (this is honest) but I wish Brer Chatto would

send along his little yearly contribution.  I dropped him a line about

another matter a week ago--asked him to subscribe for the Daily News for

me--you see I wanted to remind him in a covert way that it was pay-up

time--but doubtless I directed the letter to you or some one else, for I

don't hear from him and don't get any Daily News either.





To Fred J.  Hall, in New York:



                                             Aug.  6, '93.

DEAR MR. HALL,--I am very sorry--it was thoughtless in me.  Let the

reports go.  Send me once a month two items, and two only:



Cash liabilities--(so much)

Cash assets--(so much)



I can perceive the condition of the business at a glance, then, and that

will be sufficient.



Here we never see a newspaper, but even if we did I could not come

anywhere near appreciating or correctly estimating the tempest you have

been buffeting your way through--only the man who is in it can do that--

but I have tried not to burden you thoughtlessly or wantonly.  I have

been wrought and unsettled in mind by apprehensions, and that is a thing

that is not helpable when one is in a strange land and sees his resources

melt down to a two months' supply and can't see any sure daylight beyond.

The bloody machine offered but a doubtful outlook--and will still offer

nothing much better for a long time to come; for when Davis's "three

weeks" is up there's three months' tinkering to follow I guess.  That is

unquestionably the boss machine of the world, but is the toughest one on

prophets, when it is in an incomplete state, that has ever seen the

light.  Neither Davis nor any other man can foretell with any

considerable approach to certainty when it will be ready to get down to

actual work in a printing office.



                             [No signature.]





     Three days after the foregoing letter was written he wrote, briefly:



     "Great Scott but it's a long year-for you and me!  I never knew the

     almanac to drag so.  At least since I was finishing that other

     machine.



     "I watch for your letters hungrily--just as I used to watch for the

     cablegram saying the machine's finished; but when 'next week

     certainly' swelled into 'three weeks sure' I recognized the old

     familiar tune I used to hear so much.  Ward don't know what sick-

     heartedness is--but he is in a way to find out."



     Always the quaint form of his humor, no matter how dark the way.

     We may picture him walking the floor, planning, scheming, and

     smoking--always smoking--trying to find a way out.  It was not the

     kind of scheming that many men have done under the circumstances;

     not scheming to avoid payment of debts, but to pay them.





                      To Fred J. Hall, in New York:



                                                       Aug. 14, '93

DEAR MR. HALL,--I am very glad indeed if you and Mr. Langdon are able to

see any daylight ahead.  To me none is visible.  I strongly advise that

every penny that comes in shall be applied to paying off debts.  I may be

in error about this, but it seems to me that we have no other course

open.  We can pay a part of the debts owing to outsiders--none to the

Clemenses.  In very prosperous times we might regard our stock and

copyrights as assets sufficient, with the money owing to us, to square up

and quit even, but I suppose we may not hope for such luck in the present

condition of things.



What I am mainly hoping for, is to save my royalties.  If they come into

danger I hope you will cable me, so that I can come over and try to save

them, for if they go I am a beggar.



I would sail to-day if I had anybody to take charge of my family and help

them through the difficult journeys commanded by the doctors.  I may be

able to sail ten days hence; I hope so, and expect so.



We can never resurrect the L. A. L.  I would not spend any more money on

that book.  You spoke, a while back, of trying to start it up again as a

preparation to disposing of it, but we are not in shape to venture that,

I think.  It would require more borrowing, and we must not do that.

                    Yours Sincerely

                              S. L. C.



Aug.  16.  I have thought, and thought, but I don't seem to arrive in any

very definite place.  Of course you will not have an instant's safety

until the bank debts are paid.  There is nothing to be thought of but to

hand over every penny as fast as it comes in--and that will be slow

enough!  Or could you secure them by pledging part of our cash assets

and--



I am coming over, just as soon as I can get the family moved and settled.

                                             S. L. C.





     Two weeks following this letter he could endure the suspense no

     longer, and on August 29th sailed once more for America.  In New

     York, Clemens settled down at the Players Club, where he could live

     cheaply, and undertook some literary work while he was casting about

     for ways and means to relieve the financial situation.  Nothing

     promising occurred, until one night at the Murray Hill Hotel he was

     introduced by Dr. Clarence C. Rice to Henry H. Rogers, of the

     Standard Oil group of financiers.  Rogers had a keen sense of humor

     and had always been a great admirer of Mark Twain's work.  It was a

     mirthful evening, and certainly an eventful one in Mark Twain's

     life.  A day or two later Doctor Rice asked the millionaire to

     interest himself a little in Clemens's business affairs, which he

     thought a good deal confused.  Just what happened is not remembered

     now, but from the date of the next letter we realize that a

     discussion of the matter by Clemens and Rogers must have followed

     pretty promptly.





                       To Mrs. Clemens, in Europe:



                                                  Oct. 18, '93.

DEAR, DEAR SWEETHEART,--I don't seem to get even half a chance to write

you, these last two days, and yet there's lots to say.



Apparently everything is at last settled as to the giveaway of L. A. L.,

and the papers will be signed and the transfer made to-morrow morning.



Meantime I have got the best and wisest man in the whole Standard Oil

group of mufti-millionaires a good deal interested in looking into the

type-setter (this is private, don't mention it.) He has been searching

into that thing for three weeks, and yesterday he said to me, "I find the

machine to be all you represented it--I have here exhaustive reports from

my own experts, and I know every detail of its capacity, its immense

value, its construction, cost, history, and all about its inventor's

character.  I know that the New York Co. and the Chicago Co. are both

stupid, and that they are unbusinesslike people, destitute of money and

in a hopeless boggle."



Then he told me the scheme he had planned, then said: "If I can arrange

with these people on this basis--it will take several weeks to find out--

I will see to it that they get the money they need.  Then the thing will

move right along and your royalties will cease to be waste paper.  I will

post you the minute my scheme fails or succeeds.  In the meantime, you

stop walking the floor.  Go off to the country and try to be gay.  You

may have to go to walking again, but don't begin till I tell you my

scheme has failed."  And he added: "Keep me posted always as to where you

are--for if I need you and can use you--I want to know where to put my

hand on you."



If I should even divulge the fact that the Standard Oil is merely talking

remotely about going into the type-setter, it would send my royalties up.



With worlds and worlds of love and kisses to you all,

                                                       SAML.





With so great a burden of care shifted to the broad financial shoulders

of H. H. Rogers, Mark Twain's spirits went ballooning, soaring toward the

stars.  He awoke, too, to some of the social gaieties about him, and

found pleasure in the things that in the hour of his gloom had seemed

mainly mockery.  We find him going to a Sunday evening at Howells's, to

John Mackay's, and elsewhere.





                        To Mrs. Clemens, in Paris:



                                                       Dec. 2, '93.

LIVY DARLING,--Last night at John Mackay's the dinner consisted of soup,

raw oysters, corned beef and cabbage, and something like a custard.

I ate without fear or stint, and yet have escaped all suggestion of

indigestion.  The men present were old gray Pacific-coasters whom I knew

when I and they were young and not gray.  The talk was of the days when

we went gypsying a long time ago--thirty years.  Indeed it was a talk of

the dead.  Mainly that.  And of how they looked, and the harum-scarum

things they did and said.  For there were no cares in that life, no aches

and pains, and not time enough in the day (and three-fourths of the

night) to work off one's surplus vigor and energy.  Of the mid-night

highway robbery joke played upon me with revolvers at my head on the

windswept and desolate Gold Hill Divide, no witness is left but me, the

victim.  All the friendly robbers are gone.  These old fools last night

laughed till they cried over the particulars of that old forgotten crime.



John Mackay has no family here but a pet monkey--a most affectionate and

winning little devil.  But he makes trouble for the servants, for he is

full of curiosity and likes to take everything out of the drawers and

examine it minutely; and he puts nothing back.  The examinations of

yesterday count for nothing to-day--he makes a new examination every day.

But he injures nothing.



I went with Laffan to the Racquet Club the other night and played,

billiards two hours without starting up any rheumatism.  I suppose it was

all really taken out of me in Berlin.



Richard Harding Davis spoke yesterday of Clara's impersonations at Mrs.

Van Rensselaer's here and said they were a wonderful piece of work.



Livy dear, I do hope you are comfortable, as to quarters and food at the

Hotel Brighton.  But if you're not don't stay there.  Make one more

effort--don't give it up.  Dear heart, this is from one who loves you--

which is Saml.





     It was decided that Rogers and Clemens should make a trip to Chicago

     to investigate personally the type-setter situation there.  Clemens

     reports the details of the excursion to Mrs. Clemens in a long

     subdivided letter, most of which has no general interest and is here

     omitted.  The trip, as a whole, would seem to have been

     satisfactory.  The personal portions of the long Christmas letter

     may properly be preserved.





                        To Mrs. Clemens, in Paris:



                                             THE PLAYERS, Xmas, 1893.

                                  No. 1.

Merry Xmas, my darling, and all my darlings!  I arrived from Chicago

close upon midnight last night, and wrote and sent down my Christmas

cablegram before undressing: "Merry Xmas!  Promising progress made in

Chicago."  It would get to the telegraph office toward 8 this morning and

reach you at luncheon.



I was vaguely hoping, all the past week, that my Xmas cablegram would be

definite, and make you all jump with jubilation; but the thought always

intruded itself, "You are not going out there to negotiate with a man,

but with a louse.  This makes results uncertain."



I was asleep as Christmas struck upon the clock at mid night, and didn't

wake again till two hours ago.  It is now half past 10 Xmas morning; I

have had my coffee and bread, and shan't get out of bed till it is time

to dress for Mrs. Laflan's Christmas dinner this evening--where I shall

meet Bram Stoker and must make sure about that photo with Irving's

autograph.  I will get the picture and he will attend to the rest.  In

order to remember and not forget--well, I will go there with my dress

coat wrong side out; it will cause remark and then I shall remember.





                               No. 2 and 3.

I tell you it was interesting!  The Chicago campaign, I mean.  On the way

out Mr. Rogers would plan out the campaign while I walked the floor and

smoked and assented.  Then he would close it up with a snap and drop it

and we would totally change the subject and take up the scenery, etc.



(Here follows the long detailed report of the Chicago conference, of

interest only to the parties directly concerned.)





                                  No. 4.

We had nice tripe, going and coming.  Mr. Rogers had telegraphed the

Pennsylvania Railroad for a couple of sections for us in the fast train

leaving at 2 p. m.  the 22nd.  The Vice President telegraphed back that

every berth was engaged (which was not true--it goes without saying) but

that he was sending his own car for us.  It was mighty nice and

comfortable.  In its parlor it had two sofas, which could become beds at

night.  It had four comfortably-cushioned cane arm-chairs.  It had a very

nice bedroom with a wide bed in it; which I said I would take because I

believed I was a little wider than Mr. Rogers--which turned out to be

true; so I took it.  It had a darling back-porch--railed, roofed and

roomy; and there we sat, most of the time, and viewed the scenery and

talked, for the weather was May weather, and the soft dream-pictures of

hill and river and mountain and sky were clear and away beyond anything I

have ever seen for exquisiteness and daintiness.



The colored waiter knew his business, and the colored cook was a finished

artist.  Breakfasts: coffee with real cream; beefsteaks, sausage, bacon,

chops, eggs in various ways, potatoes in various--yes, and quite

wonderful baked potatoes, and hot as fire.  Dinners--all manner of

things, including canvas-back duck, apollinaris, claret, champagne, etc.



We sat up chatting till midnight, going and coming; seldom read a line,

day or night, though we were well fixed with magazines, etc.; then I

finished off with a hot Scotch and we went to bed and slept till 9.30a.m.

I honestly tried to pay my share of hotel bills, fees, etc., but I was

not allowed--and I knew the reason why, and respected the motive.  I will

explain when I see you, and then you will understand.



We were 25 hours going to Chicago; we were there 24 hours; we were 30

hours returning.  Brisk work, but all of it enjoyable.  We insisted on

leaving the car at Philadelphia so that our waiter and cook (to whom Mr.

R. gave $10 apiece,) could have their Christmas-eve at home.



Mr. Rogers's carriage was waiting for us in Jersey City and deposited me

at the Players.  There--that's all.  This letter is to make up for the

three letterless days.  I love you, dear heart, I love you all.

                                                                 SAML.









XXXIV



LETTERS 1894.  A WINTER IN NEW YORK.  BUSINESS FAILURE.

END OF THE MACHINE



The beginning of the new year found Mark Twain sailing buoyantly on a

tide of optimism.  He believed that with H. H. Rogers as his financial

pilot he could weather safely any storm or stress.  He could divert

himself, or rest, or work, and consider his business affairs with

interest and amusement, instead of with haggard anxiety.  He ran over to

Hartford to see an amateur play; to Boston to give a charity reading; to

Fair Haven to open the library which Mr. Rogers had established there; he

attended gay dinners, receptions, and late studio parties, acquiring the

name of the "Belle of New York."  In the letters that follow we get the

echo of some of these things.  The Mrs. Rice mentioned in the next brief

letter was the wife of Dr. Clarence C. Rice, who had introduced

H. H.  Rogers to Mark Twain.





                        To Mrs. Clemens, in Paris:



                                             Jan. 12, '94

Livy darling, I came down from Hartford yesterday with Kipling, and he

and Hutton and I had the small smoking compartment to ourselves and found

him at last at his ease, and not shy.  He was very pleasant company

indeed.  He is to be in the city a week, and I wish I could invite him to

dinner, but it won't do.  I should be interrupted by business, of course.

The construction of a contract that will suit Paige's lawyer (not Paige)

turns out to be very difficult.  He is embarrassed by earlier advice to

Paige, and hates to retire from it and stultify himself.  The

negotiations are being conducted, by means of tedious long telegrams and

by talks over the long-distance telephone.  We keep the wires loaded.



Dear me, dinner is ready.  So Mrs. Rice says.



                         With worlds of love,

                                             SAML.





Clemens and Oliver Wendell Holmes had met and become friends soon after

the publication of Innocents Abroad, in 1869.  Now, twenty-five years

later, we find a record of what without doubt was their last meeting.

It occurred at the home of Mrs. James T. Field.





                        To Mrs. Clemens, in Paris:



                                             BOSTON, Jan. 25, '94.

Livy darling, I am caught out worse this time than ever before, in the

matter of letters.  Tuesday morning I was smart enough to finish and mail

my long letter to you before breakfast--for I was suspecting that I would

not have another spare moment during the day.  It turned out just so.



In a thoughtless moment I agreed to come up here and read for the poor.

I did not reflect that it would cost me three days.  I could not get

released.  Yesterday I had myself called at 8 and ran out to Mr. Rogers's

house at 9, and talked business until half past 10; then caught 11

o'clock train and arrived here at 6; was shaven and dressed by 7 and

ready for dinner here in Mrs. Field's charming house.



Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes never goes out now (he is in his 84th year,)

but he came out this time-said he wanted to "have a time" once more with

me.



Mrs. Fields said Aldrich begged to come and went away crying because she

wouldn't let him.  She allowed only her family (Sarah Orne Jewett and

sister) to be present, because much company would overtax Dr. Holmes.



Well, he was just delightful!  He did as brilliant and beautiful talking

(and listening) as ever he did in his life, I guess.  Fields and Jewett

said he hadn't been in such splendid form in years.  He had ordered his

carriage for 9.



The coachman sent in for him at 9; but he said, "Oh, nonsense!--leave

glories and grandeurs like these?  Tell him to go away and come in an

hour!"



At 10 he was called for again, and Mrs. Fields, getting uneasy, rose, but

he wouldn't go--and so we rattled ahead the same as ever.  Twice more

Mrs. Fields rose, but he wouldn't go--and he didn't go till half past 10

--an unwarrantable dissipation for him in these days.  He was

prodigiously complimentary about some of my books, and is having

Pudd'nhead read to him.  I told him you and I used the Autocrat as a

courting book and marked it all through, and that you keep it in the

sacred green box with the love letters, and it pleased him.



Good-bye, my dear darling, it is 15 minutes to dinner and I'm not dressed

yet.  I have a reception to-night and will be out very late at that place

and at Irving's Theatre where I have a complimentary box.  I wish you

were all here.

                         SAML.





     In the next letter we meet James J. Corbett--"Gentleman Jim," as he

     was sometimes called--the champion pugilist of that day.



     The Howells incident so amusingly dramatized will perhaps be more

     appreciated if the reader remembers that Mark Twain himself had at

     intervals been a mind-healing enthusiast.  Indeed, in spite of his

     strictures on Mrs. Eddy, his interest in the subject of mind-cure

     continued to the end of his life.





                        To Mrs. Clemens, in Paris:



                                                  Sunday, 9.30 a. m.

Livy dear, when we got out to the house last night, Mrs. Rogers, who is

up and around, now, didn't want to go down stairs to dinner, but Mr. R.

persuaded her and we had a very good time indeed.  By 8 o'clock we were

down again and bought a fifteen-dollar box in the Madison Square Garden

(Rogers bought it, not I,) then he went and fetched Dr. Rice while I

(went) to the Players and picked up two artists--Reid and Simmons--and

thus we filled 5 of the 6 seats.  There was a vast multitude of people in

the brilliant place.  Stanford White came along presently and invited me

to go to the World-Champion's dressing room, which I was very glad to do.

Corbett has a fine face and is modest and diffident, besides being the

most perfectly and beautifully constructed human animal in the world.

I said:



"You have whipped Mitchell, and maybe you will whip Jackson in June--but

you are not done, then.  You will have to tackle me."



He answered, so gravely that one might easily have thought him in

earnest:



"No--I am not going to meet you in the ring.  It is not fair or right to

require it.  You might chance to knock me out, by no merit of your own,

but by a purely accidental blow; and then my reputation would be gone and

you would have a double one.  You have got fame enough and you ought not

to want to take mine away from me."



Corbett was for a long time a clerk in the Nevada Bank in San Francisco.



There were lots of little boxing matches, to entertain the crowd: then at

last Corbett appeared in the ring and the 8,000 people present went mad

with enthusiasm.  My two artists went mad about his form.  They said they

had never seen anything that came reasonably near equaling its perfection

except Greek statues, and they didn't surpass it.



Corbett boxed 3 rounds with the middle-weight Australian champion--oh,

beautiful to see!--then the show was over and we struggled out through a

perfect wash of humanity.  When we reached the street I found I had left

my arctics in the box.  I had to have them, so Simmons said he would go

back and get them, and I didn't dissuade him.  I couldn't see how he was

going to make his way a single yard into that solid oncoming wave of

people--yet he must plow through it full 50 yards.  He was back with the

shoes in 3 minutes!



How do you reckon he accomplished that miracle?  By saying:



"Way, gentlemen, please--coming to fetch Mr. Corbett's overshoes."



The word flew from mouth to mouth, the Red Sea divided, and Simmons

walked comfortably through and back, dry shod.  Simmons (this was

revealed to me under seal of secrecy by Reid) is the hero of "Gwen," and

he and Gwen's author were once engaged to marry.  This is "fire-escape"

Simmons, the inveterate talker, you know: "Exit--in case of Simmons."



I had an engagement at a beautiful dwelling close to the Players for

10.30; I was there by 10.45.  Thirty cultivated and very musical ladies

and gentlemen present--all of them acquaintances and many of them

personal friends of mine.  That wonderful Hungarian Band was there (they

charge $500 for an evening.) Conversation and Band until midnight; then a

bite of supper; then the company was compactly grouped before me and I

told about Dr. B. E. Martin and the etchings, and followed it with the

Scotch-Irish Christening.  My, but the Martin is a darling story!  Next,

the head tenor from the Opera sang half a dozen great songs that set the

company wild, yes, mad with delight, that nobly handsome young Damrosch

accompanying on the piano.



Just a little pause--then the Band burst out into an explosion of weird

and tremendous dance music, a Hungarian celebrity and his wife took the

floor--I followed; I couldn't help it; the others drifted in, one by one,

and it was Onteora over again.



By half past 4 I had danced all those people down--and yet was not tired;

merely breathless.  I was in bed at 5, and asleep in ten minutes.  Up at

9 and presently at work on this letter to you.  I think I wrote until 2

or half past.  Then I walked leisurely out to Mr. Rogers's (it is called

3 miles but it is short of it) arriving at 3.30, but he was out--

to return at 5.30--(and a person was in, whom I don't particularly like)

--so I didn't stay, but dropped over and chatted with the Howellses until

6.



First, Howells and I had a chat together.  I asked about Mrs. H.  He said

she was fine, still steadily improving, and nearly back to her old best

health.  I asked (as if I didn't know):



"What do you attribute this strange miracle to?"



"Mind-cure--simply mind-cure."



"Lord, what a conversion!  You were a scoffer three months ago."



"I?  I wasn't."



"You were.  You made elaborate fun of me in this very room."



"I did not, Clemens."



"It's a lie, Howells, you did."



I detailed to him the conversation of that time--with the stately

argument furnished by Boyesen in the fact that a patient had actually

been killed by a mind-curist; and Howells's own smart remark that when

the mind-curist is done with you, you have to call in a "regular" at last

because the former can't procure you a burial permit.



At last he gave in--he said he remembered that talk, but had now been a

mind-curist so long it was difficult for him to realize that he had ever

been anything else.



Mrs. H. came skipping in, presently, the very person, to a dot, that she

used to be, so many years ago.



Mrs. H. said: "People may call it what they like, but it is just

hypnotism, and that's all it is--hypnotism pure and simple.  Mind-cure!

--the idea!  Why, this woman that cured me hasn't got any mind.  She's a

good creature, but she's dull and dumb and illiterate and--"



"Now Eleanor!"



"I know what I'm talking about!--don't I go there twice a week?  And Mr.

Clemens, if you could only see her wooden and satisfied face when she

snubs me for forgetting myself and showing by a thoughtless remark that

to me weather is still weather, instead of being just an abstraction and

a superstition--oh, it's the funniest thing you ever saw!  A-n-d-when she

tilts up her nose-well, it's--it's--Well it's that kind of a nose that--"



"Now Eleanor!--the woman is not responsible for her nose--" and so-on and

so-on.  It didn't seem to me that I had any right to be having this feast

and you not there.



She convinced me before she got through, that she and William James are

right--hypnotism and mind-cure are the same thing; no difference between

them.  Very well; the very source, the very center of hypnotism is Paris.

Dr. Charcot's pupils and disciples are right there and ready to your hand

without fetching poor dear old Susy across the stormy sea.  Let Mrs.

Mackay (to whom I send my best respects), tell you whom to go to to learn

all you need to learn and how to proceed.  Do, do it, honey.  Don't lose

a minute.



.....At 11 o'clock last night Mr. Rogers said:



"I am able to feel physical fatigue--and I feel it now.  You never show

any, either in your eyes or your movements; do you ever feel any?"



I was able to say that I had forgotten what that feeling was like.  Don't

you remember how almost impossible it was for me to tire myself at the

Villa?  Well, it is just so in New York.  I go to bed unfatigued at 3,

I get up fresh and fine six hours later.  I believe I have taken only one

daylight nap since I have been here.



When the anchor is down, then I shall say:



"Farewell--a long farewell--to business!  I will never touch it again!"



I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it, I will swim

in ink!  Joan of Arc--but all this is premature; the anchor is not down

yet.



To-morrow (Tuesday) I will add a P. S. if I've any to add; but, whether

or no, I must mail this to morrow, for the mail steamer goes next day.



5.30 p. m.  Great Scott, this is Tuesday!  I must rush this letter into

the mail instantly.



Tell that sassy Ben I've got her welcome letter, and I'll write her as

soon as I get a daylight chance.  I've most time at night, but I'd

druther write daytimes.

                                             SAML.





     The Reid and Simmons mentioned in the foregoing were Robert Reid and

     Edward Simmons, distinguished painter--the latter a brilliant,

     fluent, and industrious talker.  The title; "Fire-escape Simmons,"

     which Clemens gives him, originated when Oliver Herford, whose

     quaint wit has so long delighted New-Yorkers, one day pinned up by

     the back door of the Players the notice: "Exit in case of Simmons."

     Gwen, a popular novel of that day, was written by Blanche Willis

     Howard.



     "Jamie" Dodge, in the next letter, was the son of Mrs. Mary Mapes

     Dodge, editor of St. Nicholas.





                       To Clara Clemens, in Paris:



                                   MR. ROGERS'S OFFICE, Feb.  5, '94.

Dear Benny--I was intending to answer your letter to-day, but I am away

down town, and will simply whirl together a sentence or two for good-

fellowship.  I have bought photographs of Coquelin and Jane Hading and

will ask them to sign them.  I shall meet Coquelin tomorrow night, and if

Hading is not present I will send her picture to her by somebody.



I am to breakfast with Madame Nordica in a few days, and meantime I hope

to get a good picture of her to sign.  She was of the breakfast company

yesterday, but the picture of herself which she signed and gave me does

not do her majestic beauty justice.



I am too busy to attend to the photo-collecting right, because I have to

live up to the name which Jamie Dodge has given me--the "Belle of New

York"--and it just keeps me rushing.  Yesterday I had engagements to

breakfast at noon, dine at 3, and dine again at 7.  I got away from the

long breakfast at 2 p. m., went and excused myself from the 3 o'clock

dinner, then lunched with Mrs. Dodge in 58th street, returned to the

Players and dressed, dined out at 9, and was back at Mrs. Dodge's at

10 p. m. where we had magic-lantern views of a superb sort, and a lot of

yarns until an hour after midnight, and got to bed at 2 this morning

--a good deal of a gain on my recent hours.  But I don't get tired; I

sleep as sound as a dead person, and always wake up fresh and strong--

usually at exactly 9.



I was at breakfast lately where people of seven separate nationalities

sat and the seven languages were going all the time.  At my side sat

a charming gentleman who was a delightful and active talker, and

interesting.  He talked glibly to those folks in all those seven

languages and still had a language to spare!  I wanted to kill him, for

very envy.



               I greet you with love and kisses.

                                                  PAPA.





                        To Mrs. Clemens, in Paris:



                                                       Feb.--.

Livy dear, last night I played billiards with Mr. Rogers until 11, then

went to Robert Reid's studio and had a most delightful time until 4 this

morning.  No ladies were invited this time.  Among the people present

were--



Coquelin;

Richard Harding Davis;

Harrison, the great out-door painter;

Wm. H. Chase, the artist;

Bettini, inventor of the new phonograph.

Nikola Tesla, the world-wide illustrious electrician; see article about

him in Jan. or Feb. Century.

John Drew, actor;

James Barnes, a marvelous mimic; my, you should see him!

Smedley the artist;

Zorn the artist;

Zogbaum the artist;

Reinhart the artist;

Metcalf the artist;

Ancona, head tenor at the Opera;



Oh, a great lot of others.  Everybody there had done something and was in

his way famous.



Somebody welcomed Coquelin in a nice little French speech; John Drew did

the like for me in English, and then the fun began.  Coquelin did some

excellent French monologues--one of them an ungrammatical Englishman

telling a colorless historiette in French.  It nearly killed the fifteen

or twenty people who understood it.



I told a yarn, Ancona sang half a dozen songs, Barnes did his darling

imitations, Harding Davis sang the hanging of Danny Deever, which was of

course good, but he followed it with that most fascinating (for what

reason I don't know) of all Kipling's poems, "On the Road to Mandalay,"

sang it tenderly, and it searched me deeper and charmed me more than the

Deever.



Young Gerrit Smith played some ravishing dance music and we all danced

about an hour.  There couldn't be a pleasanter night than that one was.

Some of those people complained of fatigue but I don't seem to know what

the sense of fatigue is.



Coquelin talks quite good English now.  He said:



"I have a brother who has the fine mind--ah, a charming and delicate

fancy, and he knows your writings so well, and loves them--and that is

the same with me.  It will stir him so when I write and tell him I have

seen you!"



Wasn't that nice?  We talked a good deal together.  He is as winning as

his own face.  But he wouldn't sign that photograph for Clara.  "That?

No!  She shall have a better one.  I will send it to you."



He is much driven, and will forget it, but Reid has promised to get the

picture for me, and I will try and keep him reminded.



Oh, dear, my time is all used up and your letters are not answered.



Mama, dear, I don't go everywhere--I decline most things.  But there are

plenty that I can't well get out of.



I will remember what you say and not make my yarning too common.



I am so glad Susy has gone on that trip and that you are trying the

electric.  May you both prosper.  For you are mighty dear to me and in my

thoughts always.

                                   SAML.





     The affairs of the Webster Publishing Company were by this time

     getting into a very serious condition indeed.  The effects of the

     panic of the year before could not be overcome.  Creditors were

     pressing their claims and profits were negligible.  In the following

     letter we get a Mark Twain estimate of the great financier who so

     cheerfully was willing to undertake the solving of Mark Twain's

     financial problems.





                        To Mrs. Clemens, in Paris:



                              THE PLAYERS, Feb. 15, '94.  11.30 p. m.

Livy darling, Yesterday I talked all my various matters over with Mr.

Rogers and we decided that it would be safe for me to leave here the 7th

of March, in the New York.  So his private secretary, Miss Harrison,

wrote and ordered a berth for me and then I lost no time in cabling you

that I should reach Southampton March 14, and Paris the 15th.  Land, but

it made my pulses leap, to think I was going to see you again!.....

One thing at a time.  I never fully laid Webster's disastrous condition

before Mr. Rogers until to-night after billiards.  I did hate to burden

his good heart and over-worked head with it, but he took hold with

avidity and said it was no burden to work for his friends, but a

pleasure.  We discussed it from various standpoints, and found it a

sufficiently difficult problem to solve; but he thinks that after he has

slept upon it and thought it over he will know what to suggest.



You must not think I am ever rude with Mr. Rogers, I am not.  He is not

common clay, but fine--fine and delicate--and that sort do not call out

the coarsenesses that are in my sort.  I am never afraid of wounding him;

I do not need to watch myself in that matter.  The sight of him is peace.



He wants to go to Japan--it is his dream; wants to go with me--which

means, the two families--and hear no more about business for awhile, and

have a rest.  And he needs it.  But it is like all the dreams of all busy

men--fated to remain dreams.



You perceive that he is a pleasant text for me.  It is easy to write

about him.  When I arrived in September, lord how black the prospect was

--how desperate, how incurably desperate!  Webster and Co had to have a

small sum of money or go under at once.  I flew to Hartford--to my

friends--but they were not moved, not strongly interested, and I was

ashamed that I went.  It was from Mr. Rogers, a stranger, that I got the

money and was by it saved.  And then--while still a stranger--he set

himself the task of saving my financial life without putting upon me (in

his native delicacy) any sense that I was the recipient of a charity,

a benevolence--and he has accomplished that task; accomplished it at a

cost of three months of wearing and difficult labor.  He gave that time

to me--time which could not be bought by any man at a hundred thousand

dollars a month--no, nor for three times the money.



Well, in the midst of that great fight, that long and admirable fight,

George Warner came to me and said:



"There is a splendid chance open to you.  I know a man--a prominent man--

who has written a book that will go like wildfire; a book that arraigns

the Standard Oil fiends, and gives them unmitigated hell, individual by

individual.  It is the very book for you to publish; there is a fortune

in it, and I can put you in communication with the author."



I wanted to say:



"The only man I care for in the world; the only man I would give a damn

for; the only man who is lavishing his sweat and blood to save me and

mine from starvation and shame, is a Standard Oil fiend.  If you know me,

you know whether I want the book or not."



But I didn't say that.  I said I didn't want any book; I wanted to get

out of the publishing business and out of all business, and was here for

that purpose and would accomplish it if I could.



But there's enough.  I shall be asleep by 3, and I don't need much sleep,

because I am never drowsy or tired these days.  Dear, dear Susy my

strength reproaches me when I think of her and you, my darling.



                                        SAML.





     But even so able a man as Henry Rogers could not accomplish the

     impossible.  The affairs of the Webster Company were hopeless, the

     business was not worth saving.  By Mr. Rogers's advice an assignment

     was made April, 18, 1894.  After its early spectacular success less

     than ten years had brought the business to failure.  The publication

     of the Grant memoirs had been its only great achievement.



     Clemens would seem to have believed that the business would resume,

     and for a time Rogers appears to have comforted him in his hope, but

     we cannot believe that it long survived.  Young Hall, who had made

     such a struggle for its salvation, was eager to go on, but he must

     presently have seen the futility of any effort in that direction.



     Of course the failure of Mark Twain's firm made a great stir in the

     country, and it is easy to understand that loyal friends would rally

     in his behalf.





                        To Mrs. Clemens, in Paris:



                                                       April 22, '94.

Dear old darling, we all think the creditors are going to allow us to

resume business; and if they do we shall pull through and pay the debts.

I am prodigiously glad we made an assignment.  And also glad that we did

not make it sooner.  Earlier we should have made a poor showing; but now

we shall make a good one.



I meet flocks of people, and they all shake me cordially by the hand and

say "I was so sorry to hear of the assignment, but so glad you did it.

It was around, this long time, that the concern was tottering, and all

your friends were afraid you would delay the assignment too long."



John Mackay called yesterday, and said, "Don't let it disturb you, Sam--

we all have to do it, at one time or another; it's nothing to be ashamed

of."



One stranger out in New York State sent me a dollar bill and thought he

would like to get up a dollar-subscription for me.  And Poultney

Bigelow's note came promptly, with his check for $1,000.  I had been

meeting him every day at the Club and liking him better and better all

the time.  I couldn't take his money, of course, but I thanked him

cordially for his good will.



Now and then a good and dear Joe Twichell or Susy Warner condoles with me

and says "Cheer up--don't be downhearted," and some other friend says,

"I am glad and surprised to see how cheerful you are and how bravely you

stand it"--and none of them suspect what a burden has been lifted from me

and how blithe I am inside.  Except when I think of you, dear heart--then

I am not blithe; for I seem to see you grieving and ashamed, and dreading

to look people in the face.  For in the thick of the fight there is

cheer, but you are far away and cannot hear the drums nor see the

wheeling squadrons.  You only seem to see rout, retreat, and dishonored

colors dragging in the dirt--whereas none of these things exist.  There

is temporary defeat, but no dishonor--and we will march again.  Charley

Warner said to-day, "Sho, Livy isn't worrying.  So long as she's got you

and the children she doesn't care what happens.  She knows it isn't her

affair."  Which didn't convince me.



Good bye my darling, I love you and all of the kids--and you can tell

Clara I am not a spitting gray kitten.

                                             SAML.





     Clemens sailed for Europe as soon as his affairs would permit him to

     go.  He must get settled where he could work comfortably.  Type-

     setter prospects seemed promising, but meantime there was need of

     funds.



     He began writing on the ship, as was his habit, and had completed

     his article on Fenimore Cooper by the time he reached London.  In

     August we find him writing to Mr. Rogers from Etretat, a little

     Norman watering-place.





                      To H. H. Rogers, in New York:



                                             ETRETAT, (NORMANDIE)

                                                  CHALET DES ABRIS

                                                       Aug.  25, '94.

DEAR MR. ROGERS,--I find the Madam ever so much better in health and

strength.  The air is superb and soothing and wholesome, and the Chalet

is remote from noise and people, and just the place to write in.  I shall

begin work this afternoon.



Mrs. Clemens is in great spirits on, account of the benefit which she has

received from the electrical treatment in Paris and is bound to take it

up again and continue it all the winter, and of course I am perfectly

willing.  She requires me to drop the lecture platform out of my mind and

go straight ahead with Joan until the book is finished.  If I should have

to go home for even a week she means to go with me--won't consent to be

separated again--but she hopes I won't need to go.



I tell her all right, "I won't go unless you send, and then I must."



She keeps the accounts; and as she ciphers it we can't get crowded for

money for eight months yet.  I didn't know that.  But I don't know much

anyway.

                    Sincerely yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     The reader may remember that Clemens had written the first half of

     his Joan of Arc book at the Villa Viviani, in Florence, nearly two

     years before.  He had closed the manuscript then with the taking of

     Orleans, and was by no means sure that he would continue the story

     beyond that point.  Now, however, he was determined to reach the

     tale's tragic conclusion.





                      To H. H. Rogers, in New York:



                                                       ETRETAT,

                                                  Sunday, Sept. 9, '94.

DEAR MR. ROGERS, I drove the quill too hard, and I broke down--in my

head.  It has now been three days since I laid up.  When I wrote you a

week ago I had added 10,000 words or thereabout to Joan.  Next day I

added 1,500 which was a proper enough day's work though not a full one;

but during Tuesday and Wednesday I stacked up an aggregate of 6,000

words--and that was a very large mistake.  My head hasn't been worth a

cent since.



However, there's a compensation; for in those two days I reached and

passed--successfully--a point which I was solicitous about before I ever

began the book: viz., the battle of Patay.  Because that would naturally

be the next to the last chapter of a work consisting of either two books

or one.  In the one case one goes right along from that point (as I shall

do now); in the other he would add a wind-up chapter and make the book

consist of Joan's childhood and military career alone.



I shall resume work to-day; and hereafter I will not go at such an

intemperate' rate.  My head is pretty cobwebby yet.



I am hoping that along about this time I shall hear that the machine is

beginning its test in the Herald office.  I shall be very glad indeed to

know the result of it.  I wish I could be there.

                    Sincerely yours

                              S. L. CLEMENS.





     Rouen, where Joan met her martyrdom, was only a short distance away,

     and they halted there en route to Paris, where they had arranged to

     spend the winter.  The health of Susy Clemens was not good, and they

     lingered in Rouen while Clemens explored the old city and

     incidentally did some writing of another sort.  In a note to Mr.

     Rogers he said: "To put in my odd time I am writing some articles

     about Paul Bourget and his Outre-Mer chapters--laughing at them and

     at some of our oracular owls who find them important.  What the hell

     makes them important, I should like to know!"



     He was still at Rouen two weeks later and had received encouraging

     news from Rogers concerning the type-setter, which had been placed

     for trial in the office of the Chicago Herald.  Clemens wrote: "I

     can hardly keep from sending a hurrah by cable.  I would certainly

     do it if I wasn't superstitious."  His restraint, though wise, was

     wasted the end was near.





                      To H. H. Rogers, in New York:



                                        169 RUE DE L'UNIVERSITE,

                                             PARIS, Dec. 22; '94.

DEAR MR. ROGERS,--I seemed to be entirely expecting your letter, and also

prepared and resigned; but Lord, it shows how little we know ourselves

and how easily we can deceive ourselves.  It hit me like a thunder-clap.

It knocked every rag of sense out of my head, and I went flying here and

there and yonder, not knowing what I was doing, and only one clearly

defined thought standing up visible and substantial out of the crazy

storm-drift that my dream of ten years was in desperate peril, and out of

the 60,000 or 90,000 projects for its rescue that came floating through

my skull, not one would hold still long enough for me to examine it and

size it up.  Have you ever been like that?  Not so much so, I reckon.



There was another clearly defined idea--I must be there and see it die.

That is, if it must die; and maybe if I were there we might hatch up some

next-to-impossible way to make it take up its bed and take a walk.



So, at the end of four hours I started, still whirling and walked over to

the rue Scribe--4 P. M.--and asked a question or two and was told I

should be running a big risk if I took the 9 P. M.  train for London and

Southampton; "better come right along at 6.52 per Havre special and step

aboard the New York all easy and comfortable."  Very! and I about two

miles from home, with no packing done.



Then it occurred to me that none of these salvation-notions that were

whirl-winding through my head could be examined or made available unless

at least a month's time could be secured.  So I cabled you, and said to

myself that I would take the French steamer tomorrow (which will be

Sunday).



By bedtime Mrs. Clemens had reasoned me into a fairly rational and

contented state of mind; but of course it didn't last long.  So I went on

thinking--mixing it with a smoke in the dressing room once an hour--until

dawn this morning.  Result--a sane resolution; no matter what your answer

to my cable might be, I would hold still and not sail until I should get

an answer to this present letter which I am now writing, or a cable

answer from you saying "Come" or "Remain."



I have slept 6 hours, my pond has clarified, and I find the sediment of

my 70,000 projects to be of this character:



[Several pages of suggestions for reconstructing the machine follow.]



Don't say I'm wild.  For really I'm sane again this morning.



                          ......................



I am going right along with Joan, now, and wait untroubled till I hear

from you.  If you think I can be of the least use, cable me "Come."

I can write Joan on board ship and lose no time.  Also I could discuss my

plan with the publisher for a deluxe Joan, time being an object, for some

of the pictures could be made over here cheaply and quickly, but would

cost much time and money in America.



                          ......................



If the meeting should decide to quit business Jan. 4, I'd like to have

Stoker stopped from paying in any more money, if Miss Harrison doesn't

mind that disagreeable job.  And I'll have to write them, too, of course.

                    With love,

                         S. L. CLEMENS.





     The "Stoker" of this letter was Bram Stoker, long associated with

     Sir Henry Irving.  Irving himself had also taken stock in the

     machine.  The address, 169 Rue de l'Universite, whence these letters

     are written, was the beautiful studio home of the artist Pomroy

     which they had taken for the winter.





                     To H.  H.  Rogers, in New York:



                                        169 RUE DE L'UNIVERSITE,

                                        PARIS, Dec. 27, '94.

DEAR MR. ROGERS,--Notwithstanding your heart is "old and hard," you make

a body choke up.  I know you "mean every word you say" and I do take it

"in the same spirit in which you tender it."  I shall keep your regard

while we two live--that I know; for I shall always remember what you have

done for me, and that will insure me against ever doing anything that

could forfeit it or impair it.  I am 59 years old; yet I never had a

friend before who put out a hand and tried to pull me ashore when he

found me in deep waters.



It is six days or seven days ago that I lived through that despairing

day, and then through a night without sleep; then settled down next day

into my right mind (or thereabouts,) and wrote you.  I put in the rest of

that day till 7 P. M.  plenty comfortably enough writing a long chapter

of my book; then went to a masked ball blacked up as Uncle Remus, taking

Clara along; and we had a good time.  I have lost no day since and

suffered no discomfort to speak of, but drove my troubles out of my mind

and had good success in keeping them out--through watchfulness.  I have

done a good week's work and put the book a good way ahead in the Great

Trial, which is the difficult part which requires the most thought and

carefulness.  I cannot see the end of the Trial yet, but I am on the

road.  I am creeping surely toward it.



"Why not leave them all to me."  My business bothers?  I take you by the

hand!  I jump at the chance!



I ought to be ashamed and I am trying my best to be ashamed--and yet I do

jump at the chance in spite of it.  I don't want to write Irving and I

don't want to write Stoker.  It doesn't seem as if I could.  But I can

suggest something for you to write them; and then if you see that I am

unwise, you can write them something quite different.  Now this is my

idea:



     1.  To return Stoker's $100 to him and keep his stock.



     2.  And tell Irving that when luck turns with me I will make good to

     him what the salvage from the dead Co. fails to pay him of his $500.





P. S.  Madam says No, I must face the music.  So I enclose my effort to

be used if you approve, but not otherwise.



There!  Now if you will alter it to suit your judgment and bang away, I

shall be eternally obliged.



We shall try to find a tenant for our Hartford house; not an easy matter,

for it costs heavily to live in.  We can never live in it again; though

it would break the family's hearts if they could believe it.



Nothing daunts Mrs. Clemens or makes the world look black to her--which

is the reason I haven't drowned myself.



We all send our deepest and warmest greetings to you and all of yours and

a Happy New Year!

                              S. L. CLEMENS.





Enclosure:



MY DEAR STOKER,--I am not dating this because it is not to be mailed at

present.



When it reaches you it will mean that there is a hitch in my machine-

enterprise--a hitch so serious as to make it take to itself the aspect of

a dissolved dream.  This letter, then, will contain cheque for the $100

which you have paid.  And will you tell Irving for me--I can't get up

courage enough to talk about this misfortune myself, except to you, whom

by good luck I haven't damaged yet that when the wreckage presently

floats ashore he will get a good deal of his $500 back; and a dab at a

time I will make up to him the rest.



I'm not feeling as fine as I was when I saw you there in your home.

Please remember me kindly to Mrs. Stoker.  I gave up that London lecture-

project entirely.  Had to--there's never been a chance since to find the

time.

                    Sincerely yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.









XXXV



LETTERS, 1895-96, TO H. H. ROGERS AND OTHERS.  FINISHING "JOAN OF ARC."

THE TRIP AROUND THE WORLD.  DEATH OF SUSY CLEMENS





                   To H.  H.  Rogers, in New York City:



                                                       [No date.]

DEAR MR. ROGERS,--Yours of Dec. 21 has arrived, containing the circular

to stockholders and I guess the Co. will really quit--there doesn't seem

to be any other wise course.



There's one thing which makes it difficult for me to soberly realize that

my ten year dream is actually dissolved; and that is, that it reveries my

horoscope.  The proverb says, "Born lucky, always lucky," and I am very

superstitious.  As a small boy I was notoriously lucky.  It was usual for

one or two of our lads (per annum) to get drowned in the Mississippi or

in Bear Creek, but I was pulled out in a 2/3 drowned condition 9 times

before I learned to swim, and was considered to be a cat in disguise.

When the "Pennsylvania" blew up and the telegraph reported my brother as

fatally injured (with 60 others) but made no mention of me, my uncle said

to my mother "It means that Sam was somewhere else, after being on that

boat a year and a half--he was born lucky."  Yes, I was somewhere else.

I am so superstitious that I have always been afraid to have business

dealings with certain relatives and friends of mine because they were

unlucky people.  All my life I have stumbled upon lucky chances of large

size, and whenever they were wasted it was because of my own stupidity

and carelessness.  And so I have felt entirely certain that that machine

would turn up trumps eventually.  It disappointed me lots of times, but I

couldn't shake off the confidence of a life-time in my luck.



Well, whatever I get out of the wreckage will be due to good luck--the

good luck of getting you into the scheme--for, but for that, there

wouldn't be any wreckage; it would be total loss.



I wish you had been in at the beginning.  Then we should have had the

good luck to step promptly ashore.



Miss Harrison has had a dream which promises me a large bank account,

and I want her to go ahead and dream it twice more, so as to make the

prediction sure to be fulfilled.



I've got a first rate subject for a book.  It kept me awake all night,

and I began it and completed it in my mind.  The minute I finish Joan

I will take it up.

               Love and Happy New Year to you all.

                         Sincerely yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     This was about the end of the machine interests so far as Clemens

     was concerned.  Paige succeeded in getting some new people

     interested, but nothing important happened, or that in any way

     affected Mark Twain.  Characteristically he put the whole matter

     behind him and plunged into his work, facing comparative poverty and

     a burden of debts with a stout heart.  The beginning of the new year

     found him really poorer in purse than he had ever been in his life,

     but certainly not crushed, or even discouraged--at least, not

     permanently--and never more industrious or capable.





                   To H.  H.  Rogers, in New York City:



                                        169 RUE DE L'UNIVERSITE,

                                             PARIS, Jan. 23, '95.

DEAR MR. ROGERS,--After I wrote you, two or three days ago I thought I

would make a holiday of the rest of the day--the second deliberate

holiday since I had the gout.  On the first holiday I wrote a tale of

about 6,000 words, which was 3 days' work in one; and this time I did

8,000 before midnight.  I got nothing out of that first holiday but the

recreation of it, for I condemned the work after careful reading and some

revision; but this time I fared better--I finished the Huck Finn tale

that lies in your safe, and am satisfied with it.



The Bacheller syndicate (117 Tribune Building) want a story of 5,000

words (lowest limit of their London agent) for $1,000 and offer to plank

the check on delivery, and it was partly to meet that demand that I took

that other holiday.  So as I have no short story that suits me (and can't

and shan't make promises), the best I can do is to offer the longer one

which I finished on my second holiday--"Tom Sawyer, Detective."



It makes 27 or 28,000 words, and is really written for grown folks,

though I expect young folk to read it, too.  It transfers to the banks of

the Mississippi the incidents of a strange murder which was committed in

Sweden in old times.



I'll refer applicants for a sight of the story to you or Miss Harrison.--

[Secretary to Mr. Rogers.]

                         Yours sincerely,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





                   To H.  H.  Rogers, in New York City:



                                        169 RUE DE L'UNIVERSITE,

                                             Apr. 29, '95.

DEAR MR. ROGERS,--Your felicitous delightful letter of the 15th arrived

three days ago, and brought great pleasure into the house.



There is one thing that weighs heavily on Mrs. Clemens and me.  That is

Brusnahan's money.  If he is satisfied to have it invested in the Chicago

enterprise, well and good; if not, we would like to have the money paid

back to him.  I will give him as many months to decide in as he pleases--

let him name 6 or 10 or 12--and we will let the money stay where it is in

your hands till the time is up.  Will Miss Harrison tell him so?  I mean

if you approve.  I would like him to have a good investment, but would

meantime prefer to protect him against loss.



At 6 minutes past 7, yesterday evening, Joan of Arc was burned at the

stake.



With the long strain gone, I am in a sort of physical collapse today, but

it will be gone tomorrow.  I judged that this end of the book would be

hard work, and it turned out so.  I have never done any work before that

cost so much thinking and weighing and measuring and planning and

cramming, or so much cautious and painstaking execution.  For I wanted

the whole Rouen trial in, if it could be got in in such a way that the

reader's interest would not flag--in fact I wanted the reader's interest

to increase; and so I stuck to it with that determination in view--with

the result that I have left nothing out but unimportant repetitions.

Although it is mere history--history pure and simple--history stripped

naked of flowers, embroideries, colorings, exaggerations, invention--the

family agree that I have succeeded.  It was a perilous thing to try in a

tale, but I never believed it a doubtful one--provided I stuck strictly

to business and didn't weaken and give up: or didn't get lazy and skimp

the work.  The first two-thirds of the book were easy; for I only needed

to keep my historical road straight; therefore I used for reference only

one French history and one English one--and shoveled in as much fancy

work and invention on both sides of the historical road as I pleased.

But on this last third I have constantly used five French sources and

five English ones and I think no telling historical nugget in any of them

has escaped me.



Possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing--it was written for

love.



There--I'm called to see company.  The family seldom require this of me,

but they know I am not working today.

                         Yours sincerely,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     "Brusnahan," of the foregoing letter, was an employee of the New

     York Herald, superintendent of the press-room--who had invested some

     of his savings in the type-setter.



     In February Clemens returned to New York to look after matters

     connected with his failure and to close arrangements for a reading-

     tour around the world.  He was nearly sixty years old, and time had

     not lessened his loathing for the platform.  More than once,

     however, in earlier years, he had turned to it as a debt-payer, and

     never yet had his burden been so great as now.  He concluded

     arrangements with Major Pond to take him as far as the Pacific

     Coast, and with R. S. Smythe, of Australia, for the rest of the

     tour.  In April we find him once more back in Paris preparing to

     bring the family to America, He had returned by way of London,

     where he had visited Stanley the explorer--an old friend.





                    To H. H. Rogers, in New York City:



                                             169 RUE DE L'UNIVERSITE,

                                                  Sunday, Apr.7,'95.

DEAR MR.  ROGERS,--..... Stanley is magnificently housed in London, in a

grand mansion in the midst of the official world, right off Downing

Street and Whitehall.  He had an extraordinary assemblage of brains and

fame there to meet me--thirty or forty (both sexes) at dinner, and more

than a hundred came in, after dinner.  Kept it up till after midnight.

There were cabinet ministers, ambassadors, admirals, generals, canons,

Oxford professors, novelists, playwrights, poets, and a number of people

equipped with rank and brains.  I told some yarns and made some speeches.

I promised to call on all those people next time I come to London, and

show them the wife and the daughters.  If I were younger and very strong

I would dearly love to spend a season in London--provided I had no work

on hand, or no work more exacting than lecturing.  I think I will lecture

there a month or two when I return from Australia.



There were many delightful ladies in that company.  One was the wife of

His Excellency Admiral Bridge, Commander-in Chief of the Australian

Station, and she said her husband was able to throw wide all doors to me

in that part of the world and would be glad to do it, and would yacht me

and my party around, and excursion us in his flag-ship and make us have a

great time; and she said she would write him we were coming, and we would

find him ready.  I have a letter from her this morning enclosing a letter

of introduction to the Admiral.  I already know the Admiral commanding in

the China Seas and have promised to look in on him out there.  He sleeps

with my books under his pillow.  P'raps it is the only way he can sleep.



According to Mrs. Clemens's present plans--subject to modification, of

course--we sail in May; stay one day, or two days in New York, spend

June, July and August in Elmira and prepare my lectures; then lecture in

San Francisco and thereabouts during September and sail for Australia

before the middle of October and open the show there about the middle of

November.  We don't take the girls along; it would be too expensive and

they are quite willing to remain behind anyway.



Mrs. C. is feeling so well that she is not going to try the New York

doctor till we have gone around the world and robbed it and made the

finances a little easier.

                    With a power of love to you all,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     There would come moments of depression, of course, and a week later

     he wrote: "I am tired to death all the time:"  To a man of less

     vitality, less vigor of mind and body, it is easy to believe that

     under such circumstances this condition would have remained

     permanent.  But perhaps, after all, it was his comic outlook on

     things in general that was his chief life-saver.





                    To H. H. Rogers, in New York City:



                              169 RUE DE L'UNIVERSITE, Apr. 29, '95.

DEAR MR. ROGERS,--I have been hidden an hour or two, reading proof of

Joan and now I think I am a lost child.  I can't find anybody on the

place.  The baggage has all disappeared, including the family.  I reckon

that in the hurry and bustle of moving to the hotel they forgot me.  But

it is no matter.  It is peacefuller now than I have known it for days and

days and days.



In these Joan proofs which I have been reading for the September Harper

I find a couple of tip-top platform readings--and I mean to read them on

our trip.  If the authorship is known by then; and if it isn't, I will

reveal it.  The fact is, there is more good platform-stuff in Joan than

in any previous book of mine, by a long sight.



Yes, every danged member of the tribe has gone to the hotel and left me

lost.  I wonder how they can be so careless with property.  I have got to

try to get there by myself now.



All the trunks are going over as luggage; then I've got to find somebody

on the dock who will agree to ship 6 of them to the Hartford Customhouse.

If it is difficult I will dump them into the river.  It is very careless

of Mrs. Clemens to trust trunks and things to me.

                         Sincerely yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     By the latter part of May they were at Quarry Farm, and Clemens,

     laid up there with a carbuncle, was preparing for his long tour.

     The outlook was not a pleasant one.  To Mr. Rogers he wrote: "I

     sha'n't be able to stand on the platform before we start west.  I

     sha'n't get a single chance to practice my reading; but will have to

     appear in Cleveland without the essential preparation.  Nothing in

     this world can save it from being a shabby, poor disgusting

     performance.  I've got to stand; I can't do it and talk to a house,

     and how in the nation am I going to sit?  Land of Goshen, it's this

     night week!  Pray for me."



     The opening at Cleveland July 15th appears not to have been much of

     a success, though from another reason, one that doubtless seemed

     amusing to him later.





                    To H. H. Rogers, in New York City:



                                                       (Forenoon)

                                             CLEVELAND, July 16, '95.

DEAR MR. ROGERS,--Had a roaring success at the Elmira reformatory Sunday

night.  But here, last night, I suffered defeat--There were a couple of

hundred little boys behind me on the stage, on a lofty tier of benches

which made them the most conspicuous objects in the house.  And there was

nobody to watch them or keep them quiet.  Why, with their scufflings and

horse-play and noise, it was just a menagerie.  Besides, a concert of

amateurs had been smuggled into the program (to precede me,) and their

families and friends (say ten per cent of the audience) kept encoring

them and they always responded.  So it was 20 minutes to 9 before I got

the platform in front of those 2,600 people who had paid a dollar apiece

for a chance to go to hell in this fashion.



I got started magnificently, but inside of half an hour the scuffling

boys had the audience's maddened attention and I saw it was a gone case;

so I skipped a third of my program and quit.  The newspapers are kind,

but between you and me it was a defeat.  There ain't going to be any more

concerts at my lectures.  I care nothing for this defeat, because it was

not my fault.  My first half hour showed that I had the house, and I

could have kept it if I hadn't been so handicapped.

                         Yours sincerely,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.



P. S.  Had a satisfactory time at Petoskey.  Crammed the house and turned

away a crowd.  We had $548 in the house, which was $300 more than it had

ever had in it before.  I believe I don't care to have a talk go off

better than that one did.





     Mark Twain, on this long tour, was accompanied by his wife and his

     daughter Clara--Susy and Jean Clemens remaining with their aunt at

     Quarry Farm.  The tour was a financial success from the start.

     By the time they were ready to sail from Vancouver five thousand

     dollars had been remitted to Mr. Rogers against that day of

     settlement when the debts of Webster & Co. were to be paid.  Perhaps

     it should be stated here that a legal settlement had been arranged

     on a basis of fifty cents on the dollar, but neither Clemens nor his

     wife consented to this as final.  They would pay in full.



     They sailed from Vancouver August 23, 1895.  About the only letter

     of this time is an amusing note to Rudyard Kipling, written at the

     moment of departure.





                     To Rudyard Kipling, in England:



                                                       August, 1895.

DEAR KIPLING,--It is reported that you are about to visit India.  This

has moved me to journey to that far country in order that I may unload

from my conscience a debt long due to you.  Years ago you came from India

to Elmira to visit me, as you said at the time.  It has always been my

purpose to return that visit and that great compliment some day.  I shall

arrive next January and you must be ready.  I shall come riding my ayah

with his tusks adorned with silver bells and ribbons and escorted by a

troop of native howdahs richly clad and mounted upon a herd of wild

bungalows; and you must be on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I

shall be thirsty.

                         Affectionately,

                              S. L. CLEMENS.





     Clemens, platforming in Australia, was too busy to write letters.

     Everywhere he was welcomed by great audiences, and everywhere

     lavishly entertained.  He was beset by other carbuncles, but would

     seem not to have been seriously delayed by them.  A letter to his

     old friend Twichell carries the story.





                  To Rev. Jos. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                   FRANK MOELLER'S MASONIC HOTEL,

                                             NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND,

                                                  November 29, '95.

DEAR JOE,--Your welcome letter of two months and five days ago has just

arrived, and finds me in bed with another carbuncle.  It is No. 3.  Not a

serious one this time.  I lectured last night without inconvenience, but

the doctors thought best to forbid to-night's lecture.  My second one

kept me in bed a week in Melbourne.



.....We are all glad it is you who is to write the article, it delights

us all through.



I think it was a good stroke of luck that knocked me on my back here at

Napier, instead of some hotel in the centre of a noisy city.  Here we

have the smooth and placidly-complaining sea at our door, with nothing

between us and it but 20 yards of shingle--and hardly a suggestion of

life in that space to mar it or make a noise.  Away down here fifty-five

degrees south of the Equator this sea seems to murmur in an unfamiliar

tongue--a foreign tongue--tongue bred among the ice-fields of the

Antarctic--a murmur with a note of melancholy in it proper to the vast

unvisited solitudes it has come from.  It was very delicious and solacing

to wake in the night and find it still pulsing there.  I wish you were

here--land, but it would be fine!



Livy and Clara enjoy this nomadic life pretty well; certainly better than

one could have expected they would.  They have tough experiences, in the

way of food and beds and frantic little ships, but they put up with the

worst that befalls with heroic endurance that resembles contentment.



No doubt I shall be on the platform next Monday.  A week later we shall

reach Wellington; talk there 3 nights, then sail back to Australia.  We

sailed for New Zealand October 30.



Day before yesterday was Livy's birthday (under world time), and tomorrow

will be mine.  I shall be 60--no thanks for it.



I and the others send worlds and worlds of love to all you dear ones.



                                   MARK.





     The article mentioned in the foregoing letter was one which Twichell

     had been engaged by Harper's Magazine to write concerning the home

     life and characteristics of Mark Twain.  By the time the Clemens

     party had completed their tour of India--a splendid, triumphant

     tour, too full of work and recreation for letter-writing--and had

     reached South Africa, the article had appeared, a satisfactory one,

     if we may judge by Mark Twain's next.



     This letter, however, has a special interest in the account it gives

     of Mark Twain's visit to the Jameson raiders, then imprisoned at

     Pretoria.





                  To Rev. Jos. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                   PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC,

                                        The Queen's Birthday, '96.

                                                       (May 24)

DEAR OLD JOE,--Harper for May was given to me yesterday in Johannesburg

by an American lady who lives there, and I read your article on me while

coming up in the train with her and an old friend and fellow-Missourian

of mine, Mrs. John Hays Hammond, the handsome and spirited wife of the

chief of the 4 Reformers, who lies in prison here under a 15-year

sentence, along with 50 minor Reformers who are in for 1 and 5-year

terms.  Thank you a thousand times Joe, you have praised me away above my

deserts, but I am not the man to quarrel with you for that; and as for

Livy, she will take your very hardiest statements at par, and be grateful

to you to the bottom of her heart.  Between you and Punch and Brander

Matthews, I am like to have my opinion of myself raised sufficiently

high; and I guess the children will be after you, for it is the study of

their lives to keep my self-appreciation down somewhere within bounds.



I had a note from Mrs. Rev. Gray (nee Tyler) yesterday, and called on her

to-day.  She is well.



Yesterday I was allowed to enter the prison with Mrs. Hammond.  A Boer

guard was at my elbow all the time, but was courteous and polite, only

he barred the way in the compound (quadrangle or big open court) and

wouldn't let me cross a white mark that was on the ground--the "death-

line" one of the prisoners called it.  Not in earnest, though, I think.

I found that I had met Hammond once when he was a Yale senior and a guest

of Gen. Franklin's.  I also found that I had known Capt. Mein intimately

32 years ago.  One of the English prisoners had heard me lecture in

London 23 years ago.  After being introduced in turn to all the

prisoners, I was allowed to see some of the cells and examine their food,

beds, etc.  I was told in Johannesburg that Hammond's salary of $150,000

a year is not stopped, and that the salaries of some of the others are

still continued.  Hammond was looking very well indeed, and I can say the

same of all the others.  When the trouble first fell upon them it hit

some of them very hard; several fell sick (Hammond among them), two or

three had to be removed to the hospital, and one of the favorites lost

his mind and killed himself, poor fellow, last week.  His funeral, with a

sorrowing following of 10,000, took the place of the public demonstration

the Americans were getting up for me.



These prisoners are strong men, prominent men, and I believe they are all

educated men.  They are well off; some of them are wealthy.  They have a

lot of books to read, they play games and smoke, and for awhile they will

be able to bear up in their captivity; but not for long, not for very

long, I take it.  I am told they have times of deadly brooding and

depression.  I made them a speech--sitting down.  It just happened so.

I don't prefer that attitude.  Still, it has one advantage--it is only a

talk, it doesn't take the form of a speech.  I have tried it once before

on this trip.  However, if a body wants to make sure of having "liberty,"

and feeling at home, he had better stand up, of course.  I advised them

at considerable length to stay where they were--they would get used to it

and like it presently; if they got out they would only get in again

somewhere else, by the look of their countenances; and I promised to go

and see the President and do what I could to get him to double their

jail-terms.



We had a very good sociable time till the permitted time was up and a

little over, and we outsiders had to go.  I went again to-day, but the

Rev. Mr. Gray had just arrived, and the warden, a genial, elderly Boer

named Du Plessis--explained that his orders wouldn't allow him to admit

saint and sinner at the same time, particularly on a Sunday.  Du Plessis

--descended from the Huguenot fugitives, you see, of 200 years ago--

but he hasn't any French left in him now--all Dutch.



It gravels me to think what a goose I was to make Livy and Clara remain

in Durban; but I wanted to save them the 30-hour railway trip to

Johannesburg.  And Durban and its climate and opulent foliage were so

lovely, and the friends there were so choice and so hearty that I

sacrificed myself in their interests, as I thought.  It is just the

beginning of winter, and although the days are hot, the nights are cool.

But it's lovely weather in these regions, too; and the friends are as

lovely as the weather, and Johannesburg and Pretoria are brimming with

interest.  I talk here twice more, then return to Johannesburg next

Wednesday for a fifth talk there; then to the Orange Free State capital,

then to some town on the way to Port Elizabeth, where the two will join

us by sea from Durban; then the gang will go to Kimberley and presently

to the Cape--and so, in the course of time, we shall get through and sail

for England; and then we will hunt up a quiet village and I will write

and Livy edit, for a few months, while Clara and Susy and Jean study

music and things in London.



We have had noble good times everywhere and every day, from Cleveland,

July 15, to Pretoria, May 24, and never a dull day either on sea or land,

notwithstanding the carbuncles and things.  Even when I was laid up 10

days at Jeypore in India we had the charmingest times with English

friends.  All over India the English well, you will never know how good

and fine they are till you see them.



Midnight and after! and I must do many things to-day, and lecture

tonight.



A world of thanks to you, Joe dear, and a world of love to all of you.



                                             MARK.





     Perhaps for readers of a later day a word as to what constituted the

     Jameson raid would not be out of place here.  Dr. Leander Starr

     Jameson was an English physician, located at Kimberley.  President

     Kruger (Oom Paul), head of the South African Republic, was one of

     his patients; also, Lobengula, the Matabele chief.  From Lobengula

     concessions were obtained which led to the formation of the South

     African Company.  Jameson gave up his profession and went in for

     conquest, associating himself with the projects of Cecil Rhodes.

     In time he became administrator of Rhodesia.  By the end of 1894.

     he was in high feather, and during a visit to England was feted as

     a sort of romantic conqueror of the olden time.  Perhaps this turned

     his head; at all events at the end of 1895 came the startling news

     that "Dr. Jim," as he was called, at the head of six hundred men,

     had ridden into the Transvaal in support of a Rhodes scheme for an

     uprising at Johannesburg.  The raid was a failure.  Jameson, and

     those other knights of adventure, were captured by the forces of

     "Oom Paul," and some of them barely escaped execution.  The Boer

     president handed them over to the English Government for punishment,

     and they received varying sentences, but all were eventually

     released.  Jameson, later, became again prominent in South-African

     politics, but there is no record of any further raids.



                        .........................



     The Clemens party sailed from South Africa the middle of July, 1896,

     and on the last day of the month reached England.  They had not

     planned to return to America, but to spend the winter in or near

     London in some quiet place where Clemens could write the book of his

     travels.



     The two daughters in America, Susy and Jean, were expected to arrive

     August 12th, but on that day there came, instead, a letter saying

     that Susy Clemens was not well enough to sail.  A cable inquiry was

     immediately sent, but the reply when it came was not satisfactory,

     and Mrs. Clemens and Clara sailed for America without further delay.

     This was on August 15th.  Three days later, in the old home at

     Hartford, Susy Clemens died of cerebral fever.  She had been

     visiting Mrs. Charles Dudley Warner, but by the physician's advice

     had been removed to the comfort and quiet of her own home, only a

     few steps away.



     Mark Twain, returning from his triumphant tour of the world in the

     hope that soon, now, he might be free from debt, with his family

     happily gathered about him, had to face alone this cruel blow.

     There was no purpose in his going to America; Susy would be buried

     long before his arrival.  He awaited in England the return of his

     broken family.  They lived that winter in a quiet corner of Chelsea,

     No. 23 Tedworth Square.





             To Rev. Joseph H.  Twichell, in Hartford, Conn.:



                                        Permanent address:

                                        % CHATTO & WINDUS

                                        111 T.  MARTIN'S LANE, LONDON,

                                                       Sept.  27, '96.

Through Livy and Katy I have learned, dear old Joe, how loyally you stood

poor Susy's friend, and mine, and Livy's: how you came all the way down,

twice, from your summer refuge on your merciful errands to bring the

peace and comfort of your beloved presence, first to that poor child, and

again to the broken heart of her poor desolate mother.  It was like you;

like your good great heart, like your matchless and unmatchable self.

It was no surprise to me to learn that you stayed by Susy long hours,

careless of fatigue and heat, it was no surprise to me to learn that you

could still the storms that swept her spirit when no other could; for she

loved you, revered you, trusted you, and "Uncle Joe" was no empty phrase

upon her lips!  I am grateful to you, Joe, grateful to the bottom of my

heart, which has always been filled with love for you, and respect and

admiration; and I would have chosen you out of all the world to take my

place at Susy's side and Livy's in those black hours.



Susy was a rare creature; the rarest that has been reared in Hartford in

this generation.  And Livy knew it, and you knew it, and Charley Warner

and George, and Harmony, and the Hillyers and the Dunhams and the

Cheneys, and Susy and Lilly, and the Bunces, and Henry Robinson and Dick

Burton, and perhaps others.  And I also was of the number, but not in the

same degree--for she was above my duller comprehension.  I merely knew

that she was my superior in fineness of mind, in the delicacy and

subtlety of her intellect, but to fully measure her I was not competent.

I know her better now; for I have read her private writings and sounded

the deeps of her mind; and I know better, now, the treasure that was mine

than I knew it when I had it.  But I have this consolation: that dull as

I was, I always knew enough to be proud when she commended me or my work

--as proud as if Livy had done it herself--and I took it as the accolade

from the hand of genius.  I see now--as Livy always saw--that she had

greatness in her; and that she herself was dimly conscious of it.



And now she is dead--and I can never tell her.



God bless you Joe--and all of your house.

                                             S. L. C.





               To Mr. Henry C.  Robinson, Hartford, Conn.:



                                             LONDON, Sept.  28, '96.

It is as you say, dear old friend, "the pathos of it" yes, it was a

piteous thing--as piteous a tragedy as any the year can furnish.  When we

started westward upon our long trip at half past ten at night, July 14,

1895, at Elmira, Susy stood on the platform in the blaze of the electric

light waving her good-byes to us as the train glided away, her mother

throwing back kisses and watching her through her tears.  One year, one

month, and one week later, Clara and her mother having exactly completed

the circuit of the globe, drew up at that platform at the same hour of

the night, in the same train and the same car--and again Susy had come a

journey and was near at hand to meet them.  She was waiting in the house

she was born in, in her coffin.



All the circumstances of this death were pathetic--my brain is worn to

rags rehearsing them.  The mere death would have been cruelty enough,

without overloading it and emphasizing it with that score of harsh and

wanton details.  The child was taken away when her mother was within

three days of her, and would have given three decades for sight of her.



In my despair and unassuageable misery I upbraid myself for ever parting

with her.  But there is no use in that.  Since it was to happen it would

have happened.

                         With love

                                        S. L. C.





     The life at Tedworth Square that winter was one of almost complete

     privacy.  Of the hundreds of friends which Mark Twain had in London

     scarcely half a dozen knew his address.  He worked steadily on his

     book of travels, 'Following the Equator', and wrote few letters

     beyond business communications to Mr. Rogers.  In one of these he

     said, "I am appalled!  Here I am trying to load you up with work

     again after you have been dray-horsing over the same tiresome ground

     for a year.  It's too bad, and I am ashamed of it."



     But late in November he sent a letter of a different sort--one that

     was to have an important bearing on the life of a girl today of

     unique and world-wide distinction.





                To Mrs. H.  H.  Rogers, in New York City:



For and in behalf of Helen Keller,

stone blind and deaf, and formerly dumb.



DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--Experience has convinced me that when one wishes to

set a hard-worked man at something which he mightn't prefer to be

bothered with, it is best to move upon him behind his wife.  If she can't

convince him it isn't worth while for other people to try.



Mr. Rogers will remember our visit with that astonishing girl at Lawrence

Hutton's house when she was fourteen years old.  Last July, in Boston,

when she was 16 she underwent the Harvard examination for admission to

Radcliffe College.  She passed without a single condition.  She was

allowed the same amount of time that is granted to other applicants, and

this was shortened in her case by the fact that the question papers had

to be read to her.  Yet she scored an average of 90 as against an average

of 78 on the part of the other applicants.



It won't do for America to allow this marvelous child to retire from her

studies because of poverty.  If she can go on with them she will make a

fame that will endure in history for centuries.  Along her special lines

she is the most extraordinary product of all the ages.



There is danger that she must retire from the struggle for a College

degree for lack of support for herself and for Miss Sullivan, (the

teacher who has been with her from the start--Mr. Rogers will remember

her.)  Mrs. Hutton writes to ask me to interest rich Englishmen in her

case, and I would gladly try, but my secluded life will not permit it.

I see nobody.  Nobody knows my address.  Nothing but the strictest hiding

can enable me to write my long book in time.



So I thought of this scheme: Beg you to lay siege to your husband and get

him to interest himself and Mess. John D. and William Rockefeller and the

other Standard Oil chiefs in Helen's case; get them to subscribe an

annual aggregate of six or seven hundred or a thousand dollars--and agree

to continue this for three or four years, until she has completed her

college course.  I'm not trying to limit their generosity--indeed no,

they may pile that Standard Oil, Helen Keller College Fund as high as

they please, they have my consent.



Mrs. Hutton's idea is to raise a permanent fund the interest upon which

shall support Helen and her teacher and put them out of the fear of want.

I shan't say a word against it, but she will find it a difficult and

disheartening job, and meanwhile what is to become of that miraculous

girl?



No, for immediate and sound effectiveness, the thing is for you to plead

with Mr. Rogers for this hampered wonder of your sex, and send him

clothed with plenary powers to plead with the other chiefs--they have

spent mountains of money upon the worthiest benevolences, and I think

that the same spirit which moved them to put their hands down through

their hearts into their pockets in those cases will answer "Here!" when

its name is called in this one.  638



There--I don't need to apologize to you or to H. H. for this appeal that

I am making; I know you too well for that.



Good-bye with love to all of you

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.



Laurence Hutton is on the staff of Harper's Monthly--close by, and handy

when wanted.





     The plea was not made in vain.  Mr. and Mrs. Rogers interested

     themselves most liberally in Helen Keller's fortune, and certainly

     no one can say that any of those who contributed to her success ever

     had reason for disappointment.



     In his letter of grateful acknowledgment, which follows, Clemens

     also takes occasion to thank Mr. Rogers for his further efforts in

     the matter of his own difficulties.  This particular reference

     concerns the publishing, complications which by this time had arisen

     between the American Publishing Company, of Hartford, and the house

     in Franklin Square.





                                             LONDON, Dec.  22, '96.

DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--It is superb!  And I am beyond measure grateful to you

both.  I knew you would be interested in that wonderful girl, and that

Mr. Rogers was already interested in her and touched by her; and I was

sure that if nobody else helped her you two would; but you have gone far

and away beyond the sum I expected--may your lines fall in pleasant

places here and Hereafter for it!



The Huttons are as glad and grateful as they can be, and I am glad for

their sakes as well as for Helen's.



I want to thank Mr. Rogers for crucifying himself again on the same old

cross between Bliss and Harper; and goodness knows I hope he will come to

enjoy it above all other dissipations yet, seeing that it has about it

the elements of stability and permanency.  However, at any time that he

says sign, we're going to do it.

                         Ever sincerely Yours

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.









XXXVI



LETTERS 1897.  LONDON, SWITZERLAND, VIENNA



Mark Twain worked steadily on his book that sad winter and managed to

keep the gloom out of his chapters, though it is noticeable that

'Following the Equator' is more serious than his other books of travel.

He wrote few letters, and these only to his three closest friends,

Howells, Twichell, and Rogers.  In the letter to Twichell, which follows,

there is mention of two unfinished manuscripts which he expects to

resume.  One of these was a dream story, enthusiastically begun, but

perhaps with insufficient plot to carry it through, for it never reached

conclusion.  He had already tried it in one or two forms and would begin

it again presently.  The identity of the other tale is uncertain.





                   To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                             LONDON, Jan. 19, '97.

DEAR JOE,--Do I want you to write to me?  Indeed I do.  I do not want

most people to write, but I do want you to do it.  The others break my

heart, but you will not.  You have a something divine in you that is not

in other men.  You have the touch that heals, not lacerates.  And you

know the secret places of our hearts.  You know our life--the outside of

it--as the others do--and the inside of it--which they do not.  You have

seen our whole voyage.  You have seen us go to sea, a cloud of sail--and

the flag at the peak; and you see us now, chartless, adrift--derelicts;

battered, water-logged, our sails a ruck of rags, our pride gone.  For it

is gone.  And there is nothing in its place.  The vanity of life was all

we had, and there is no more vanity left in us.  We are even ashamed of

that we had; ashamed that we trusted the promises of life and builded

high--to come to this!



I did know that Susy was part of us; I did not know that she could go

away; I did not know that she could go away, and take our lives with her,

yet leave our dull bodies behind.  And I did not know what she was.  To

me she was but treasure in the bank; the amount known, the need to look

at it daily, handle it, weigh it, count it, realize it, not necessary;

and now that I would do it, it is too late; they tell me it is not there,

has vanished away in a night, the bank is broken, my fortune is gone, I

am a pauper.  How am I to comprehend this?  How am I to have it?  Why am

I robbed, and who is benefited?



Ah, well, Susy died at home.  She had that privilege.  Her dying eyes

rested upon nothing that was strange to them, but only upon things which

they had known and loved always and which had made her young years glad;

and she had you, and Sue, and Katy, and John, and Ellen.  This was happy

fortune--I am thankful that it was vouchsafed to her.  If she had died in

another house-well, I think I could not have borne that.  To us, our

house was not unsentient matter--it had a heart, and a soul, and eyes to

see us with; and approvals, and solicitudes, and deep sympathies; it was

of us, and we were in its confidence, and lived in its grace and in the

peace of its benediction.  We never came home from an absence that its

face did not light up and speak out its eloquent welcome--and we could

not enter it unmoved.  And could we now, oh, now, in spirit we should

enter it unshod.



I am trying to add to the "assets" which you estimate so generously.

No, I am not.  The thought is not in my mind.  My purpose is other.  I am

working, but it is for the sake of the work--the "surcease of sorrow"

that is found there.  I work all the days, and trouble vanishes away when

I use that magic.  This book will not long stand between it and me, now;

but that is no matter, I have many unwritten books to fly to for my

preservation; the interval between the finishing of this one and the

beginning of the next will not be more than an hour, at most.

Continuances, I mean; for two of them are already well along--in fact

have reached exactly the same stage in their journey: 19,000 words each.

The present one will contain 180,000 words--130,000 are done.  I am well

protected; but Livy!  She has nothing in the world to turn to; nothing

but housekeeping, and doing things for the children and me.  She does not

see people, and cannot; books have lost their interest for her.  She sits

solitary; and all the day, and all the days, wonders how it all happened,

and why.  We others were always busy with our affairs, but Susy was her

comrade--had to be driven from her loving persecutions--sometimes at 1 in

the morning.  To Livy the persecutions were welcome.  It was heaven to

her to be plagued like that.  But it is ended now.  Livy stands so in

need of help; and none among us all could help her like you.



Some day you and I will walk again, Joe, and talk.  I hope so.  We could

have such talks!  We are all grateful to you and Harmony--how grateful it

is not given to us to say in words.  We pay as we can, in love; and in

this coin practicing no economy.

                         Good bye, dear old Joe!

                                                  MARK.





     The letters to Mr. Rogers were, for the most part, on matters of

     business, but in one of them he said: "I am going to write with all

     my might on this book, and follow it up with others as fast as I can

     in the hope that within three years I can clear out the stuff that

     is in me waiting to be written, and that I shall then die in the

     promptest kind of a way and no fooling around."  And in one he

     wrote: "You are the best friend ever a man had, and the surest."





                      To W. D. Howells, in New York



                                                  LONDON, Feb. 23, '97.

DEAR HOWELLS,-I find your generous article in the Weekly, and I want to

thank you for its splendid praises, so daringly uttered and so warmly.

The words stir the dead heart of me, and throw a glow of color into a

life which sometimes seems to have grown wholly wan.  I don't mean that I

am miserable; no--worse than that--indifferent.  Indifferent to nearly

everything but work.  I like that; I enjoy it, and stick to it.  I do it

without purpose and without ambition; merely for the love of it.



This mood will pass, some day--there is history for it.  But it cannot

pass until my wife comes up out of the submergence.  She was always so

quick to recover herself before, but now there is no rebound, and we are

dead people who go through the motions of life.  Indeed I am a mud image,

and it will puzzle me to know what it is in me that writes, and has

comedy-fancies and finds pleasure in phrasing them.  It is a law of our

nature, of course, or it wouldn't happen; the thing in me forgets the

presence of the mud image and goes its own way, wholly unconscious of it

and apparently of no kinship with it.  I have finished my book, but I go

on as if the end were indefinitely away--as indeed it is.  There is no

hurry--at any rate there is no limit.



Jean's spirits are good; Clara's are rising.  They have youth--the only

thing that was worth giving to the race.



These are sardonic times.  Look at Greece, and that whole shabby muddle.

But I am not sorry to be alive and privileged to look on.  If I were not

a hermit I would go to the House every day and see those people scuffle

over it and blether about the brotherhood of the human race.  This has

been a bitter year for English pride, and I don't like to see England

humbled--that is, not too much.  We are sprung from her loins, and it

hurts me.  I am for republics, and she is the only comrade we've got, in

that.  We can't count France, and there is hardly enough of Switzerland

to count.  Beneath the governing crust England is sound-hearted--and

sincere, too, and nearly straight.  But I am appalled to notice that the

wide extension of the surface has damaged her manners, and made her

rather Americanly uncourteous on the lower levels.



Won't you give our love to the Howellses all and particular?

                         Sincerely yours

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     The travel-book did not finish easily, and more than once when he

     thought it completed he found it necessary to cut and add and

     change.  The final chapters were not sent to the printer until the

     middle of May, and in a letter to Mr. Rogers he commented: "A

     successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out

     of it."  Clemens was at the time contemplating a uniform edition of

     his books, and in one of his letters to Mr. Rogers on the matter he

     wrote, whimsically, "Now I was proposing to make a thousand sets at

     a hundred dollars a set, and do the whole canvassing myself.....  I

     would load up every important jail and saloon in America with de

     luxe editions of my books.  But Mrs. Clemens and the children object

     to this, I do not know why."  And, in a moment of depression: "You

     see the lightning refuses to strike me--there is where the defect

     is.  We have to do our own striking as Barney Barnato did.  But

     nobody ever gets the courage until he goes crazy."



     They went to Switzerland for the summer to the village of Weggis, on

     Lake Lucerne--"The charmingest place we ever lived in," he declared,

     "for repose, and restfulness, and superb scenery."  It was here that

     he began work on a new story of Tom and Huck, and at least upon one

     other manuscript.  From a brief note to Mr. Rogers we learn

     something of his employments and economies.





                    To Henry H.  Rogers, in New York:



                         LUCERNE, August the something or other, 1897.

DEAR MR. ROGERS,--I am writing a novel, and am getting along very well

with it.



I believe that this place (Weggis, half an hour from Lucerne,) is the

loveliest in the world, and the most satisfactory.  We have a small house

on the hillside all to ourselves, and our meals are served in it from the

inn below on the lake shore.  Six francs a day per head, house and food

included.  The scenery is beyond comparison beautiful.  We have a row

boat and some bicycles, and good roads, and no visitors.  Nobody knows we

are here.  And Sunday in heaven is noisy compared to this quietness.

                         Sincerely yours

                                        S. L. C.





                  To Rev. J.  H.  Twichell, in Hartford:



                                                  LUCERNE, Aug. 22, '97.

DEAR JOE,--Livy made a noble find on the Lucerne boat the other day on

one of her shopping trips--George Williamson Smith--did I tell you about

it?  We had a lovely time with him, and such intellectual refreshment as

we had not tasted in many a month.



And the other night we had a detachment of the jubilee Singers--6.  I had

known one of them in London 24 years ago.  Three of the 6 were born in

slavery, the others were children of slaves.  How charming they were--in

spirit, manner, language, pronunciation, enunciation, grammar, phrasing,

matter, carriage, clothes--in every detail that goes to make the real

lady and gentleman, and welcome guest.  We went down to the village hotel

and bought our tickets and entered the beer-hall, where a crowd of German

and Swiss men and women sat grouped at round tables with their beer mugs

in front of them--self-contained and unimpressionable looking people, an

indifferent and unposted and disheartened audience--and up at the far end

of the room sat the Jubilees in a row.  The Singers got up and stood--the

talking and glass jingling went on.  Then rose and swelled out above

those common earthly sounds one of those rich chords the secret of whose

make only the Jubilees possess, and a spell fell upon that house.  It was

fine to see the faces light up with the pleased wonder and surprise of

it.  No one was indifferent any more; and when the singers finished, the

camp was theirs.  It was a triumph.  It reminded me of Launcelot riding

in Sir Kay's armor and astonishing complacent Knights who thought they

had struck a soft thing.  The Jubilees sang a lot of pieces.  Arduous and

painstaking cultivation has not diminished or artificialized their music,

but on the contrary--to my surprise--has mightily reinforced its

eloquence and beauty.  Away back in the beginning--to my mind--their

music made all other vocal music cheap; and that early notion is

emphasized now.  It is utterly beautiful, to me; and it moves me

infinitely more than any other music can.  I think that in the Jubilees

and their songs America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages;

and I wish it were a foreign product, so that she would worship it and

lavish money on it and go properly crazy over it.



Now, these countries are different: they would do all that, if it were

native.  It is true they praise God, but that is merely a formality, and

nothing in it; they open out their whole hearts to no foreigner.



The musical critics of the German press praise the Jubilees with great

enthusiasm--acquired technique etc, included.



One of the jubilee men is a son of General Joe Johnson, and was educated

by him after the war.  The party came up to the house and we had a

pleasant time.



This is paradise, here--but of course we have got to leave it by and by.

The 18th of August--[Anniversary of Susy Clemens's death.]--has come and

gone, Joe--and we still seem to live.

                         With love from us all.

                                                  MARK.





     Clemens declared he would as soon spend his life in Weggis "as

     anywhere else in the geography," but October found them in Vienna

     for the winter, at the Hotel Metropole.  The Austrian capital was

     just then in a political turmoil, the character of which is hinted

     in the following:





                   To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                             HOTEL METROPOLE,

                                                  VIENNA, Oct. 23, '97.

DEAR JOE,--We are gradually getting settled down and wonted.  Vienna is

not a cheap place to live in, but I have made one small arrangement

which: has a distinctly economical aspect.  The Vice Consul made the

contract for me yesterday-to-wit: a barber is to come every morning 8.30

and shave me and keep my hair trimmed for $2.50 a month.  I used to pay

$1.50 per shave in our house in Hartford.



Does it suggest to you reflections when you reflect that this is the most

important event which has happened to me in ten days--unless I count--in

my handing a cabman over to the police day before yesterday, with the

proper formalities, and promised to appear in court when his case comes

up.



If I had time to run around and talk, I would do it; for there is much

politics agoing, and it would be interesting if a body could get the hang

of it.  It is Christian and Jew by the horns--the advantage with the

superior man, as usual--the superior man being the Jew every time and in

all countries.  Land, Joe, what chance would the Christian have in a

country where there were 3 Jews to 10 Christians!  Oh, not the shade of a

shadow of a chance.  The difference between the brain of the average

Christian and that of the average Jew--certainly in Europe--is about the

difference between a tadpole's and an Archbishop's.  It's a marvelous,

race--by long odds the most marvelous that the world has produced, I

suppose.



And there's more politics--the clash between Czech and Austrian.  I wish

I could understand these quarrels, but of course I can't.



With the abounding love of us all

                                        MARK.





     In Following the Equator there was used an amusing picture showing

     Mark Twain on his trip around the world.  It was a trick photograph

     made from a picture of Mark Twain taken in a steamer-chair, cut out

     and combined with a dilapidated negro-cart drawn by a horse and an

     ox.  In it Clemens appears to be sitting luxuriously in the end of

     the disreputable cart.  His companions are two negroes.  To the

     creator of this ingenious effect Mark Twain sent a characteristic

     acknowledgment.





                             To T. S. Frisbie



                                                  VIENNA, Oct. 25, '97.

MR. T. S. FRISBIE,--Dear Sir:  The picture has reached me, and has moved

me deeply.  That was a steady, sympathetic and honorable team, and

although it was not swift, and not showy, it pulled me around the globe

successfully, and always attracted its proper share of attention, even in

the midst of the most costly and fashionable turnouts.  Princes and dukes

and other experts were always enthused by the harness and could hardly

keep from trying to buy it.  The barouche does not look as fine, now, as

it did earlier-but that was before the earthquake.



The portraits of myself and uncle and nephew are very good indeed, and

your impressionist reproduction of the palace of the Governor General of

India is accurate and full of tender feeling.



I consider that this picture is much more than a work of art.  How much

more, one cannot say with exactness, but I should think two-thirds more.



                    Very truly yours

                                   MARK TWAIN.





     Following the Equator was issued by subscription through Mark

     Twain's old publishers, the Blisses, of Hartford.  The sale of it

     was large, not only on account of the value of the book itself, but

     also because of the sympathy of the American people with Mark

     Twain's brave struggle to pay his debts.  When the newspapers began

     to print exaggerated stories of the vast profits that were piling

     up, Bliss became worried, for he thought it would modify the

     sympathy.  He cabled Clemens for a denial, with the following

     result:





                     To Frank E.  Bliss, in Hartford:



                                             VIENNA, Nov. 4, 1897.

DEAR BLISS,--Your cablegram informing me that a report is in circulation

which purports to come from me and which says I have recently made

$82,000 and paid all my debts has just reached me, and I have cabled

back my regret to you that it is not true.  I wrote a letter--a private

letter--a short time ago, in which I expressed the belief that I should

be out of debt within the next twelvemonth.  If you make as much as usual

for me out of the book, that belief will crystallize into a fact, and I

shall be wholly out of debt.  I am encoring you now.



It is out of that moderate letter that the Eighty-Two Thousand-Dollar

mare's nest has developed.  But why do you worry about the various

reports?  They do not worry me.  They are not unfriendly, and I don't see

how they can do any harm.  Be patient; you have but a little while to

wait; the possible reports are nearly all in.  It has been reported that

I was seriously ill--it was another man; dying--it was another man; dead

--the other man again.  It has been reported that I have received a

legacy it was another man; that I am out of debt--it was another man; and

now comes this $82,000--still another man.  It has been reported that I

am writing books--for publication; I am not doing anything of the kind.

It would surprise (and gratify) me if I should be able to get another

book ready for the press within the next three years.  You can see,

yourself, that there isn't anything more to be reported--invention is

exhausted.  Therefore, don't worry, Bliss--the long night is breaking.

As far as I can see, nothing remains to be reported, except that I have

become a foreigner.  When you hear it, don't you believe it.  And don't

take the trouble to deny it.  Merely just raise the American flag on our

house in Hartford, and let it talk.

                                   Truly yours,

                                             MARK TWAIN.



P. S.  This is not a private letter.  I am getting tired of private

letters.





                  To Rev. J.  H.  Twichell, in Hartford:



                                             VIENNA

                                        HOTEL METROPOLE, NOV. 19, '97.

DEAR JOE,--Above is our private (and permanent) address for the winter.

You needn't send letters by London.



I am very much obliged for Forrest's Austro-Hungarian articles.  I have

just finished reading the first one: and in it I find that his opinion

and Vienna's are the same, upon a point which was puzzling me--the

paucity (no, the absence) of Austrian Celebrities.  He and Vienna both

say the country cannot afford to allow great names to grow up; that the

whole safety and prosperity of the Empire depends upon keeping things

quiet; can't afford to have geniuses springing up and developing ideas

and stirring the public soul.  I am assured that every time a man finds

himself blooming into fame, they just softly snake him down and relegate

him to a wholesome obscurity.  It is curious and interesting.



Three days ago the New York World sent and asked a friend of mine

(correspondent of a London daily) to get some Christmas greetings from

the celebrities of the Empire.  She spoke of this.  Two or three bright

Austrians were present.  They said "There are none who are known all over

the world! none who have achieved fame; none who can point to their work

and say it is known far and wide in the earth: there are no names;

Kossuth (known because he had a father) and Lecher, who made the 12 hour

speech; two names-nothing more.  Every other country in the world,

perhaps, has a giant or two whose heads are away up and can be seen, but

ours.  We've got the material--have always had it--but we have to

suppress it; we can't afford to let it develop; our political salvation

depends upon tranquillity--always has."



Poor Livy!  She is laid up with rheumatism; but she is getting along now.

We have a good doctor, and he says she will be out of bed in a couple of

days, but must stay in the house a week or ten.



Clara is working faithfully at her music, Jean at her usual studies, and

we all send love.

                              MARK.





     Mention has already been made of the political excitement in Vienna.

     The trouble between the Hungarian and German legislative bodies

     presently became violent.  Clemens found himself intensely

     interested, and was present in one of the galleries when it was

     cleared by the police.  All sorts of stories were circulated as to

     what happened to him, one of which was cabled to America.  A letter

     to Twichell sets forth what really happened.





                   To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                                  HOTEL METROPOLE,

                                                  VIENNA, Dec. 10, '97.

DEAR JOE,--Pond sends me a Cleveland paper with a cablegram from here in

it which says that when the police invaded the parliament and expelled

the 11 members I waved my handkerchief and shouted 'Hoch die Deutschen!'

and got hustled out.  Oh dear, what a pity it is that one's adventures

never happen!  When the Ordner (sergeant-at-arms) came up to our gallery

and was hurrying the people out, a friend tried to get leave for me to

stay, by saying, "But this gentleman is a foreigner--you don't need to

turn him out--he won't do any harm."



"Oh, I know him very well--I recognize him by his pictures; and I should

be very glad to let him stay, but I haven't any choice, because of the

strictness of the orders."



And so we all went out, and no one was hustled.  Below, I ran across the

London Times correspondent, and he showed me the way into the first

gallery and I lost none of the show.  The first gallery had not

misbehaved, and was not disturbed.



.  .  .  We cannot persuade Livy to go out in society yet, but all the

lovely people come to see her; and Clara and I go to dinner parties, and

around here and there, and we all have a most hospitable good time.

Jean's woodcarving flourishes, and her other studies.



Good-bye Joe--and we all love all of you.

                                             MARK.





     Clemens made an article of the Austrian troubles, one of the best

     things he ever wrote, and certainly one of the clearest elucidations

     of the Austro-Hungarian confusions.  It was published in Harper's

     Magazine, and is now included in his complete works.



     Thus far none of the Webster Company debts had been paid--at least,

     none of importance.  The money had been accumulating in Mr. Rogers's

     hands, but Clemens was beginning to be depressed by the heavy

     burden.  He wrote asking for relief.





              Part of a letter to H. H. Rogers, in New York:



DEAR MR. ROGERS,--I throw up the sponge.  I pull down the flag.  Let us

begin on the debts.  I cannot bear the weight any longer.  It totally

unfits me for work.  I have lost three entire months now.  In that time I

have begun twenty magazine articles and books--and flung every one of

them aside in turn.  The debts interfered every time, and took the spirit

out of any work.  And yet I have worked like a bond slave and wasted no

time and spared no effort----



Rogers wrote, proposing a plan for beginning immediately upon the debts.

Clemens replied enthusiastically, and during the next few weeks wrote

every few days, expressing his delight in liquidation.





          Extracts from letters to H.  H.  Rogers, in New York:



.  .  .  We all delighted with your plan.  Only don't leave B--out.

Apparently that claim has been inherited by some women--daughters, no

doubt.  We don't want to see them lose any thing.  B----- is an ass, and

disgruntled, but I don't care for that.  I am responsible for the money

and must do the best I can to pay it.....  I am writing hard--writing for

the creditors.





                                                            Dec.  29.

Land we are glad to see those debts diminishing.  For the first time in

my life I am getting more pleasure out of paying money out than pulling

it in.





                                                            Jan.  2.

Since we have begun to pay off the debts I have abundant peace of mind

again--no sense of burden.  Work is become a pleasure again--it is not

labor any longer.





                                                            March 7.

Mrs. Clemens has been reading the creditors' letters over and over again

and thanks you deeply for sending them, and says it is the only really

happy day she has had since Susy died.









XXXVII



LETTERS, 1898, TO HOWELLS AND TWICHELL.  LIFE IN VIENNA.  PAYMENT OF THE

DEBTS.  ASSASSINATION OF THE EMPRESS



The end of January saw the payment of the last of Mark Twain's debts.

Once more he stood free before the world--a world that sounded his

praises.  The latter fact rather amused him.  "Honest men must be pretty

scarce," he said, "when they make so much fuss over even a defective

specimen."  When the end was in sight Clemens wrote the news to Howells

in a letter as full of sadness as of triumph.





                      To W. D. Howells, in New York:



                                        HOTEL METROPOLE,

                                             VIENNA, Jan. 22, '98.

DEAR HOWELLS,--Look at those ghastly figures.  I used to write it

"Hartford, 1871."  There was no Susy then--there is no Susy now.  And how

much lies between--one long lovely stretch of scented fields, and

meadows, and shady woodlands, and suddenly Sahara!  You speak of the

glorious days of that old time--and they were.  It is my quarrel--that

traps like that are set.  Susy and Winnie given us, in miserable sport,

and then taken away.



About the last time I saw you I described to you the culminating disaster

in a book I was going to write (and will yet, when the stroke is further

away)--a man's dead daughter brought to him when he had been through all

other possible misfortunes--and I said it couldn't be done as it ought to

be done except by a man who had lived it--it must be written with the

blood out of a man's heart.  I couldn't know, then, how soon I was to be

made competent.  I have thought of it many a time since.  If you were

here I think we could cry down each other's necks, as in your dream.

For we are a pair of old derelicts drifting around, now, with some of our

passengers gone and the sunniness of the others in eclipse.



I couldn't get along without work now.  I bury myself in it up to the

ears.  Long hours--8 and 9 on a stretch, sometimes.  And all the days,

Sundays included.  It isn't all for print, by any means, for much of it

fails to suit me; 50,000 words of it in the past year.  It was because of

the deadness which invaded me when Susy died.  But I have made a change

lately--into dramatic work--and I find it absorbingly entertaining.

I don't know that I can write a play that will play: but no matter, I'll

write half a dozen that won't, anyway.  Dear me, I didn't know there was

such fun in it.  I'll write twenty that won't play.  I get into immense

spirits as soon as my day is fairly started.  Of course a good deal of

this friskiness comes of my being in sight of land--on the Webster & Co.

debts, I mean.  (Private.) We've lived close to the bone and saved every

cent we could, and there's no undisputed claim, now, that we can't cash.

I have marked this "private" because it is for the friends who are

attending to the matter for us in New York to reveal it when they want to

and if they want to.  There are only two claims which I dispute and which

I mean to look into personally before I pay them.  But they are small.

Both together they amount to only $12,500.  I hope you will never get the

like of the load saddled onto you that was saddled onto me 3 years ago.

And yet there is such a solid pleasure in paying the things that I reckon

maybe it is worth while to get into that kind of a hobble, after all.

Mrs. Clemens gets millions of delight out of it; and the children have

never uttered one complaint about the scrimping, from the beginning.



We all send you and all of you our love.

                                             MARK.





     Howells wrote: "I wish you could understand how unshaken you are,

     you old tower, in every way; your foundations are struck so deep

     that you will catch the sunshine of immortal years, and bask in the

     same light as Cervantes and Shakespeare."



     The Clemens apartments at the Metropole became a sort of social

     clearing-house of the Viennese art and literary life, much more like

     an embassy than the home of a mere literary man.  Celebrities in

     every walk of life, persons of social and official rank, writers for

     the press, assembled there on terms hardly possible in any other

     home in Vienna.  Wherever Mark Twain appeared in public he was a

     central figure.  Now and then he read or spoke to aid some benefit,

     and these were great gatherings attended by members of the royal

     family.  It was following one such event that the next letter was

     written.





(Private)

                  To Rev. J.  H.  Twichell, in Hartford:



                                             HOTEL METROPOLE,

                                                  VIENNA, Feb. 3, '98.

DEAR JOE, There's that letter that I began so long ago--you see how

it is: can't get time to finish anything.  I pile up lots of work,

nevertheless.  There may be idle people in the world, but I'm not one of

them.  I say "Private" up there because I've got an adventure to tell,

and you mustn't let a breath of it get out.  First I thought I would lay

it up along with a thousand others that I've laid up for the same

purpose--to talk to you about, but--those others have vanished out of my

memory; and that must not happen with this.



The other night I lectured for a Vienna charity; and at the end of it

Livy and I were introduced to a princess who is aunt to the heir apparent

of the imperial throne--a beautiful lady, with a beautiful spirit, and

very cordial in her praises of my books and thanks to me for writing

them; and glad to meet me face to face and shake me by the hand--just the

kind of princess that adorns a fairy tale and makes it the prettiest tale

there is.



Very well, we long ago found that when you are noticed by supremacies,

the correct etiquette is to go, within a couple of days, and pay your

respects in the quite simple form of writing your name in the Visitors'

Book kept in the office of the establishment.  That is the end of it, and

everything is squared up and ship-shape.



So at noon today Livy and I drove to the Archducal palace, and got by the

sentries all right, and asked the grandly-uniformed porter for the book

and said we wished to write our names in it.  And he called a servant in

livery and was sending us up stairs; and said her Royal Highness was out

but would soon be in.  Of course Livy said "No--no--we only want the

book;" but he was firm, and said, "You are Americans?"



"Yes."



"Then you are expected, please go up stairs."



"But indeed we are not expected--please let us have the book and--"



"Her Royal Highness will be back in a very little while--she commanded me

to tell you so--and you must wait."



Well, the soldiers were there close by--there was no use trying to

resist--so we followed the servant up; but when he tried to beguile us

into a drawing-room, Livy drew the line; she wouldn't go in.  And she

wouldn't stay up there, either.  She said the princess might come in at

any moment and catch us, and it would be too infernally ridiculous for

anything.  So we went down stairs again--to my unspeakable regret.  For

it was too darling a comedy to spoil.  I was hoping and praying the

princess would come, and catch us up there, and that those other

Americans who were expected would arrive, and be taken for impostors by

the portier, and shot by the sentinels--and then it would all go into the

papers, and be cabled all over the world, and make an immense stir and be

perfectly lovely.  And by that time the princess would discover that we

were not the right ones, and the Minister of War would be ordered out,

and the garrison, and they would come for us, and there would be another

prodigious time, and that would get cabled too, and--well, Joe, I was in

a state of perfect bliss.  But happily, oh, so happily, that big portier

wouldn't let us out--he was sorry, but he must obey orders--we must go

back up stairs and wait.  Poor Livy--I couldn't help but enjoy her

distress.  She said we were in a fix, and how were we going to explain,

if the princess should arrive before the rightful Americans came?  We

went up stairs again--laid off our wraps, and were conducted through one

drawing room and into another, and left alone there and the door closed

upon us.



Livy was in a state of mind!  She said it was too theatrically

ridiculous; and that I would never be able to keep my mouth shut; that I

would be sure to let it out and it would get into the papers--and she

tried to make me promise--"Promise what?" I said--"to be quiet about

this?  Indeed I won't--it's the best thing that ever happened; I'll tell

it, and add to it; and I wish Joe and Howells were here to make it

perfect; I can't make all the rightful blunders myself--it takes all

three of us to do justice to an opportunity like this.  I would just like

to see Howells get down to his work and explain, and lie, and work his

futile and inventionless subterfuges when that princess comes raging in

here and wanting to know."  But Livy could not hear fun--it was not a

time to be trying to be funny--we were in a most miserable and shameful

situation, and if--



Just then the door spread wide and our princess and 4 more, and 3 little

princes flowed in!  Our princess, and her sister the Archduchess Marie

Therese (mother to the imperial Heir and to the young girl Archduchesses

present, and aunt to the 3 little princes)--and we shook hands all around

and sat down and had a most sociable good time for half an hour--and by

and by it turned out that we were the right ones, and had been sent for

by a messenger who started too late to catch us at the hotel.  We were

invited for 2 o'clock, but we beat that arrangement by an hour and a

half.



Wasn't it a rattling good comedy situation?  Seems a kind of pity we were

the right ones.  It would have been such nuts to see the right ones come,

and get fired out, and we chatting along comfortably and nobody

suspecting us for impostors.



We send lots and lots of love.

                                   MARK.





     The reader who has followed these pages has seen how prone Mark

     Twain was to fall a victim to the lure of a patent-right--how he

     wasted several small fortunes on profitless contrivances, and one

     large one on that insatiable demon of intricacy and despair, the

     Paige type-setter.  It seems incredible that, after that experience

     and its attending disaster, he should have been tempted again.  But

     scarcely was the ink dry on the receipts from his creditors when he

     was once more borne into the clouds on the prospect of millions,

     perhaps even billions, to be made from a marvelous carpet-pattern

     machine, the invention of Sczezepanik, an Austrian genius.  That

     Clemens appreciated his own tendencies is shown by the parenthetic

     line with which he opens his letter on the subject to Mr. Rogers.

     Certainly no man was ever a more perfect prototype of Colonel

     Sellers than the creator of that lovely, irrepressible visionary.





                       To Mr. Rogers, in New York:



                                                       March 24, '98.

DEAR MR. ROGERS,--(I feel like Col. Sellers).



Mr. Kleinberg [agent for Sczezepanik] came according to appointment, at

8.30 last night, and brought his English-speaking Secretary.  I asked

questions about the auxiliary invention (which I call "No. 2 ") and got

as good an idea of it as I could.  It is a machine.  It automatically

punches the holes in the jacquard cards, and does it with mathematical

accuracy.  It will do for $1 what now costs $3.  So it has value, but

"No. 2" is the great thing(the designing invention.) It saves $9 out of

$10 and the jacquard looms must have it.



Then I arrived at my new project, and said to him in substance, this:



"You are on the point of selling the No. 2 patents to Belgium, Italy,

etc.  I suggest that you stop those negotiations and put those people off

two or three months.  They are anxious now, they will not be less anxious

then--just the reverse; people always want a thing that is denied them.



"So far as I know, no great world-patent has ever yet been placed in the

grip of a single corporation.  This is a good time to begin.



"We have to do a good deal of guess-work here, because we cannot get hold

of just the statistics we want.  Still, we have some good statistics--and

I will use those for a test.



"You say that of the 1500 Austrian textile factories, 800 use the

jacquard.  Then we will guess that of the 4,000 American factories 2,000

use the jacquard and must have our No. 2.



"You say that a middle-sized Austrian factory employs from 20 to 30

designers and pays them from 800 to 3,000 odd florins a year--(a florin

is 2 francs).  Let us call the average wage 1500 florins ($600).



"Let us apply these figures (the low wages too) to the 2,000 American

factories--with this difference, to guard against over-guessing; that

instead of allowing for 20 to 30 designers to a middle-sized factory, we

allow only an average of 10 to each of the 2,000 factories--a total of

20,000 designers.  Wages at $600, a total of $12,000,000.  Let us

consider that No. 2 will reduce this expense to $2,000,000 a year.  The

saving is $5,000,000 per each of the $200,000,000 of capital employed in

the jacquard business over there.



"Let us consider that in the countries covered by this patent, an

aggregate of $1,500,000,000 of capital is employed in factories requiring

No. 2.



"The saving (as above) is $75,000,000 a year.  The Company holding in its

grip all these patents would collar $50,000,000 of that, as its share.

Possibly more.



"Competition would be at an end in the Jacquard business, on this planet.

Price-cutting would end.  Fluctuations in values would cease.  The

business would be the safest and surest in the world; commercial panics

could not seriously affect it; its stock would be as choice an investment

as Government bonds.  When the patents died the Company would be so

powerful that it could still keep the whole business in its hands.  Would

you like to grant me the privilege of placing the whole jacquard business

of the world in the grip of a single Company?  And don't you think that

the business would grow-grow like a weed?"



"Ach, America--it is the country of the big!  Let me get my breath--then

we will talk."



So then we talked--talked till pretty late.  Would Germany and England

join the combination?  I said the Company would know how to persuade

them.



Then I asked for a Supplementary Option, to cover the world, and we

parted.



I am taking all precautions to keep my name out of print in connection

with this matter.  And we will now keep the invention itself out of print

as well as we can.  Descriptions of it have been granted to the "Dry

Goods Economist" (New York) and to a syndicate of American papers.  I

have asked Mr. Kleinberg to suppress these, and he feels pretty sure he

can do it.

               With love,

                              S. L. C.





     If this splendid enthusiasm had not cooled by the time a reply came

     from Mr. Rogers, it must have received a sudden chill from the

     letter which he inclosed--the brief and concise report from a

     carpet-machine expert, who said: "I do not feel that it would be of

     any value to us in our mills, and the number of jacquard looms in

     America is so limited that I am of the opinion that there is no

     field for a company to develop the invention here.  A cursory

     examination of the pamphlet leads me to place no very high value

     upon the invention, from a practical standpoint."



     With the receipt of this letter carpet-pattern projects would seem

     to have suddenly ceased to be a factor in Mark Twain's calculations.

     Such a letter in the early days of the type-machine would have saved

     him a great sum in money and years of disappointment.  But perhaps

     he would not have heeded it then.



     The year 1898 brought the Spanish-American War.  Clemens was

     constitutionally against all wars, but writing to Twichell, whose

     son had enlisted, we gather that this one was an exception.





                   To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                        KALTENLEUTGEBEN, NEAR VIENNA,

                                                       June 17, '98.

DEAR JOE,--You are living your war-days over again in Dave, and it must

be a strong pleasure, mixed with a sauce of apprehension--enough to make

it just schmeck, as the Germans say.  Dave will come out with two or

three stars on his shoulder-straps if the war holds, and then we shall

all be glad it happened.



We started with Bull Run, before.  Dewey and Hobson have introduced an

improvement on the game this time.



I have never enjoyed a war-even in written history--as I am enjoying this

one.  For this is the worthiest one that was ever fought, so far as my

knowledge goes.  It is a worthy thing to fight for one's freedom; it is

another sight finer to fight for another man's.  And I think this is the

first time it has been done.



Oh, never mind Charley Warner, he would interrupt the raising of Lazarus.

He would say, the will has been probated, the property distributed, it

will be a world of trouble to settle the rows--better leave well enough

alone; don't ever disturb anything, where it's going to break the soft

smooth flow of things and wobble our tranquillity.



Company!  (Sh! it happens every day--and we came out here to be quiet.)



Love to you all.

                         MARK.





     They were spending the summer at Kaltenleutgeben, a pleasant village

     near Vienna, but apparently not entirely quiet.  Many friends came

     out from Vienna, including a number of visiting Americans.  Clemens,

     however, appears to have had considerable time for writing, as we

     gather from the next to Howells.





                      To W. D. Howells, in America:



                                        KALTENLEUTGEBEN, BEI WIEN,

                                                       Aug. 16, '98.

DEAR HOWELLS,--Your letter came yesterday.  It then occurred to me that I

might have known (per mental telegraph) that it was due; for a couple of

weeks ago when the Weekly came containing that handsome reference to me I

was powerfully moved to write you; and my letter went on writing itself

while I was at work at my other literature during the day.  But next day

my other literature was still urgent--and so on and so on; so my letter

didn't get put into ink at all.  But I see now, that you were writing,

about that time, therefore a part of my stir could have come across the

Atlantic per mental telegraph.  In 1876 or '75 I wrote 40,000 words of a

story called "Simon Wheeler" wherein the nub was the preventing of an

execution through testimony furnished by mental telegraph from the other

side of the globe.  I had a lot of people scattered about the globe who

carried in their pockets something like the old mesmerizer-button, made

of different metals, and when they wanted to call up each other and have

a talk, they "pressed the button" or did something, I don't remember

what, and communication was at once opened.  I didn't finish the story,

though I re-began it in several new ways, and spent altogether 70,000

words on it, then gave it up and threw it aside.



This much as preliminary to this remark: some day people will be able to

call each other up from any part of the world and talk by mental

telegraph--and not merely by impression, the impression will be

articulated into words.  It could be a terrible thing, but it won't be,

because in the upper civilizations everything like sentimentality (I was

going to say sentiment) will presently get materialized out of people

along with the already fading spiritualities; and so when a man is called

who doesn't wish to talk he will be like those visitors you mention: "not

chosen"--and will be frankly damned and shut off.



Speaking of the ill luck of starting a piece of literary work wrong-and

again and again; always aware that there is a way, if you could only

think it out, which would make the thing slide effortless from the pen-

the one right way, the sole form for you, the other forms being for men

whose line those forms are, or who are capabler than yourself: I've had

no end of experience in that (and maybe I am the only one--let us hope

so.) Last summer I started 16 things wrong--3 books and 13 mag.

articles--and could only make 2 little wee things, 1500 words altogether,

succeed:--only that out of piles and stacks of diligently-wrought MS.,

the labor of 6 weeks' unremitting effort.  I could make all of those

things go if I would take the trouble to re-begin each one half a dozen

times on a new plan.  But none of them was important enough except one:

the story I (in the wrong form) mapped out in Paris three or four years

ago and told you about in New York under seal of confidence--no other

person knows of it but Mrs. Clemens--the story to be called "Which was

the Dream?"



A week ago I examined the MS--10,000 words--and saw that the plan was a

totally impossible one-for me; but a new plan suggested itself, and

straightway the tale began to slide from the pen with ease and

confidence.  I think I've struck the right one this time.  I have already

put 12,000 words of it on paper and Mrs. Clemens is pretty outspokenly

satisfied with it-a hard critic to content.  I feel sure that all of the

first half of the story--and I hope three-fourths--will be comedy; but by

the former plan the whole of it (except the first 3 chapters) would have

been tragedy and unendurable, almost.  I think I can carry the reader a

long way before he suspects that I am laying a tragedy-trap.  In the

present form I could spin 16 books out of it with comfort and joy; but I

shall deny myself and restrict it to one.  (If you should see a little

short story in a magazine in the autumn called "My Platonic Sweetheart"

written 3 weeks ago) that is not this one.  It may have been a

suggester, though.



I expect all these singular privacies to interest you, and you are not to

let on that they don't.



We are leaving, this afternoon, for Ischl, to use that as a base for the

baggage, and then gad around ten days among the lakes and mountains to

rest-up Mrs. Clemens, who is jaded with housekeeping.  I hope I can get a

chance to work a little in spots--I can't tell.  But you do it--therefore

why should you think I can't?



                           [Remainder missing.]





     The dream story was never completed.  It was the same that he had

     worked on in London, and perhaps again in Switzerland.  It would be

     tried at other times and in other forms, but it never seemed to

     accommodate itself to a central idea, so that the good writing in it

     eventually went to waste.  The short story mentioned, "My Platonic

     Sweetheart," a charming, idyllic tale, was not published during Mark

     Twain's lifetime.  Two years after his death it appeared in Harper's

     Magazine.



     The assassination of the Empress of Austria at Geneva was the

     startling event of that summer.  In a letter to Twichell Clemens

     presents the tragedy in a few vivid paragraphs.  Later he treated it

     at some length in a magazine article which, very likely because of

     personal relations with members of the Austrian court, he withheld

     from print.  It has since been included in a volume of essays, What

     Is Man, etc.





                   To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                        KALTENLEUTGEBEN, Sep.  13, '98.

DEAR JOE,--You are mistaken; people don't send us the magazines.  No--

Harper, Century and McClure do; an example I should like to recommend to

other publishers.  And so I thank you very much for sending me Brander's

article.  When you say "I like Brander Matthews; he impresses me as a man

of parts and power," I back you, right up to the hub--I feel the same

way--.  And when you say he has earned your gratitude for cuffing me for

my crimes against the Leather stockings and the Vicar, I ain't making any

objection.  Dern your gratitude!



His article is as sound as a nut.  Brander knows literature, and loves

it; he can talk about it and keep his temper; he can state his case so

lucidly and so fairly and so forcibly that you have to agree with him,

even when you don't agree with him; and he can discover and praise such

merits as a book has, even when they are half a dozen diamonds scattered

through an acre of mud.  And so he has a right to be a critic.



To detail just the opposite of the above invoice is to describe me.  I

haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I

hate them.  I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden

me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I

have to stop every time I begin.



That good and unoffending lady the Empress is killed by a mad-man, and I

am living in the midst of world-history again.  The Queen's jubilee last

year, the invasion of the Reichsrath by the police, and now this murder,

which will still be talked of and described and painted a thousand years

from now.  To have a personal friend of the wearer of the crown burst in

at the gate in the deep dusk of the evening and say in a voice broken

with tears, "My God the Empress is murdered," and fly toward her home

before we can utter a question-why, it brings the giant event home to

you, makes you a part of it and personally interested; it is as if your

neighbor Antony should come flying and say "Caesar is butchered--the head

of the world is fallen!"



Of course there is no talk but of this.  The mourning is universal and

genuine, the consternation is stupefying.  The Austrian Empire is being

draped with black.  Vienna will be a spectacle to see, by next Saturday,

when the funeral cortege marches.  We are invited to occupy a room in the

sumptuous new hotel (the "Krantz" where we are to live during the Fall

and Winter) and view it, and we shall go.



Speaking of Mrs. Leiter, there is a noble dame in Vienna, about whom they

retail similar slanders.  She said in French--she is weak in French--that

she had been spending a Sunday afternoon in a gathering of the

"demimonde."  Meaning the unknown land, that mercantile land, that

mysterious half-world which underlies the aristocracy.  But these

Malaproperies are always inventions--they don't happen.



Yes, I wish we could have some talks; I'm full to the eye-lids.  Had a

noble good one with Parker and Dunham--land, but we were grateful for

that visit!

               Yours with all our loves.

                                        MARK.



                      [Inclosed with the foregoing.]



Among the inadequate attempts to account for the assassination we must

concede high rank to the German Emperor's.  He justly describes it as a

"deed unparalleled for ruthlessness," and then adds that it was "ordained

from above."



I think this verdict will not be popular "above."  A man is either a free

agent or he isn't.  If a man is a free agent, this prisoner is

responsible for what he has done; but if a man is not a free agent, if

the deed was ordained from above, there is no rational way of making this

prisoner even partially responsible for it, and the German court cannot

condemn him without manifestly committing a crime.  Logic is logic; and

by disregarding its laws even Emperors as capable and acute as William II

can be beguiled into making charges which should not be ventured upon

except in the shelter of plenty of lightning-rods.

                                                       MARK.





     The end of the year 1898 found Mark Twain once more in easy, even

     luxurious, circumstances.  The hard work and good fortune which had

     enabled him to pay his debts had, in the course of another year,

     provided what was comparative affluence: His report to Howells is

     characteristic and interesting.





                      To W. D. Howells, in New York:



                                   HOTEL KRANTZ, WIEN, L.  NEVER MARKT 6

                                                       Dec.  30, '98.

DEAR HOWELLS,--I begin with a date--including all the details--though I

shall be interrupted presently by a South-African acquaintance who is

passing through, and it may be many days before I catch another leisure

moment.  Note how suddenly a thing can become habit, and how

indestructible the habit is, afterward!  In your house in Cambridge a

hundred years ago, Mrs. Howells said to me, "Here is a bunch of your

letters, and the dates are of no value, because you don't put any in--

the years, anyway."  That remark diseased me with a habit which has cost

me worlds of time and torture and ink, and millions of vain efforts and

buckets of tears to break it, and here it is yet--I could easier get rid

of a virtue.....



I hope it will interest you (for I have no one else who would much care

to know it) that here lately the dread of leaving the children in

difficult circumstances has died down and disappeared and I am now having

peace from that long, long nightmare, and can sleep as well as anyone.

Every little while, for these three years, now, Mrs. Clemens has come

with pencil and paper and figured up the condition of things (she keeps

the accounts and the bank-book) and has proven to me that the clouds were

lifting, and so has hoisted my spirits temporarily and kept me going till

another figuring-up was necessary.  Last night she figured up for her own

satisfaction, not mine, and found that we own a house and furniture in

Hartford; that my English and American copyrights pay an income which

represents a value of $200,000; and that we have $107,000 cash in the

bank.  I have been out and bought a box of 6-cent cigars; I was smoking

4 1/2 centers before.



At the house of an English friend, on Christmas Eve, we saw the Mouse-

Trap played and well played.  I thought the house would kill itself with

laughter.  By George they played with life!  and it was most

devastatingly funny.  And it was well they did, for they put us Clemenses

in the front seat, and if they played it poorly I would have assaulted

them.  The head young man and girl were Americans, the other parts were

taken by English, Irish and Scotch girls.  Then there was a nigger-

minstrel show, of the genuine old sort, and I enjoyed that, too, for the

nigger-show was always a passion of mine.  This one was created and

managed by a Quaker doctor from Philada., (23 years old) and he was the

middle man.  There were 9 others--5 Americans from 5 States and a

Scotchman, 2 Englishmen and an Irishman--all post-graduate-medical young

fellows, of course--or, it could be music; but it would be bound to be

one or the other.



It's quite true--I don't read you "as much as I ought," nor anywhere near

half as much as I want to; still I read you all I get a chance to.

I saved up your last story to read when the numbers should be complete,

but before that time arrived some other admirer of yours carried off the

papers.  I will watch admirers of yours when the Silver Wedding journey

begins, and that will not happen again.  The last chance at a bound book

of yours was in London nearly two years ago--the last volume of your

short things, by the Harpers.  I read the whole book twice through and

some of the chapters several times, and the reason that that was as far

as I got with it was that I lent it to another admirer of yours and he is

admiring it yet.  Your admirers have ways of their own; I don't know

where they get them.



Yes, our project is to go home next autumn if we find we can afford to

live in New York.  We've asked a friend to inquire about flats and

expenses.  But perhaps nothing will come of it.  We do afford to live in

the finest hotel in Vienna, and have 4  bedrooms, a dining-room, a

drawing-room, 3 bath-rooms and 3 Vorzimmers, (and food) but we couldn't

get the half of it in New York for the same money ($600 a month).





Susy hovers about us this holiday week, and the shadows fall all about us

of



               "The days when we went gipsying

               A long time ago."



Death is so kind, so benignant, to whom he loves; but he goes by us

others and will not look our way.  We saw the "Master of Palmyra" last

night.  How Death, with the gentleness and majesty, made the human grand-

folk around him seem little and trivial and silly!



With love from all of us to all of you.

                                             MARK.









XXXVIII



LETTERS, 1899, TO HOWELLS AND OTHERS.  VIENNA.  LONDON.  A SUMMER IN

SWEDEN



The beginning of 1899 found the Clemens family still in Vienna, occupying

handsome apartments at the Hotel Krantz.  Their rooms, so often thronged

with gay and distinguished people, were sometimes called the "Second

Embassy."  Clemens himself was the central figure of these assemblies.

Of all the foreign visitors in the Austrian capital he was the most

notable.  Everywhere he was surrounded by a crowd of listeners--his

sayings and opinions were widely quoted.



A project for world disarmament promulgated by the Czar of Russia would

naturally interest Mark Twain, and when William T. Stead, of the Review

of Reviews, cabled him for an opinion on the matter, he sent at first a

brief word and on the same day followed it with more extended comment.

The great war which has since devastated the world gives to this incident

an added interest.





                       To Wm. T. Stead, in London:



No.  1.

                                                       VIENNA, Jan.  9.

DEAR MR.  STEAD,-The Czar is ready to disarm: I am ready to disarm.

Collect the others, it should not be much of a task now.

                                        MARK TWAIN.





To Wm.  T.  Stead, in London:



No.  2.

DEAR MR. STEAD,--Peace by compulsion.  That seems a better idea than the

other.  Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should

not be able to work it.  We should have to tame the human race first, and

history seems to show that that cannot be done.  Can't we reduce the

armaments little by little--on a pro rata basis--by concert of the

powers?  Can't we get four great powers to agree to reduce their strength

10 per cent a year and thrash the others into doing likewise?  For, of

course, we cannot expect all of the powers to be in their right minds at

one time.  It has been tried.  We are not going to try to get all of them

to go into the scheme peaceably, are we?  In that case I must withdraw my

influence; because, for business reasons, I must preserve the outward

signs of sanity.  Four is enough if they can be securely harnessed

together.  They can compel peace, and peace without compulsion would be

against nature and not operative.  A sliding scale of reduction of 10 per

cent a year has a sort of plausible look, and I am willing to try that if

three other powers will join.  I feel sure that the armaments are now

many times greater than necessary for the requirements of either peace or

war.  Take wartime for instance.  Suppose circumstances made it necessary

for us to fight another Waterloo, and that it would do what it did

before--settle a large question and bring peace.  I will guess that

400,000 men were on hand at Waterloo (I have forgotten the figures).

In five hours they disabled 50,000 men.  It took them that tedious, long

time because the firearms delivered only two or three shots a minute.

But we would do the work now as it was done at Omdurman, with shower

guns, raining 600 balls a minute.  Four men to a gun--is that the number?

A hundred and fifty shots a minute per man.  Thus a modern soldier is 149

Waterloo soldiers in one.  Thus, also, we can now retain one man out of

each 150 in service, disband the others, and fight our Waterloos just as

effectively as we did eighty-five years ago.  We should do the same

beneficent job with 2,800 men now that we did with 400,000 then.  The

allies could take 1,400 of the men, and give Napoleon 1,400 and then whip

him.



But instead what do we see?  In war-time in Germany, Russia and France,

taken together we find about 8 million men equipped for the field.  Each

man represents 149 Waterloo men, in usefulness and killing capacity.

Altogether they constitute about 350 million Waterloo men, and there are

not quite that many grown males of the human race now on this planet.

Thus we have this insane fact--that whereas those three countries could

arm 18,000 men with modern weapons and make them the equals of 3 million

men of Napoleon's day, and accomplish with them all necessary war work,

they waste their money and their prosperity creating forces of their

populations in piling together 349,982,000 extra Waterloo equivalents

which they would have no sort of use for if they would only stop drinking

and sit down and cipher a little.



Perpetual peace we cannot have on any terms, I suppose; but I hope we can

gradually reduce the war strength of Europe till we get it down to where

it ought to be--20,000 men, properly armed.  Then we can have all the

peace that is worth while, and when we want a war anybody can afford it.





                                                  VIENNA, January 9.

P. S.--In the article I sent the figures are wrong--"350 million" ought

to be 450 million; "349,982,000" ought to be 449,982,000, and the remark

about the sum being a little more than the present number of males on the

planet--that is wrong, of course; it represents really one and a half the

existing males.





     Now and then one of Mark Twain's old comrades still reached out to

     him across the years.  He always welcomed such letters--they came as

     from a lost land of romance, recalled always with tenderness.  He

     sent light, chaffing replies, but they were never without an

     undercurrent of affection.





              To Major "Jack" Downing, in Middleport, Ohio:



                              HOTEL KRANTZ, WEIN, I, NEUER MART 6,

                                                  Feb.  26, 1899.

DEAR MAJOR,--No: it was to Bixby that I was apprenticed.  He was to teach

me the river for a certain specified sum.  I have forgotten what it was,

but I paid it.  I steered a trip for Bart Bowen, of Keokuk, on the A. T.

Lacy, and I was partner with Will Bowen on the A. B. Chambers (one trip),

and with Sam Bowen a whole summer on a small Memphis packet.



The newspaper report you sent me is incorrect.  Bixby is not 67: he is

97.  I am 63 myself, and I couldn't talk plain and had just begun to walk

when I apprenticed myself to Bixby who was then passing himself off for

57 and successfully too, for he always looked 60 or 70 years younger than

he really was.  At that time he was piloting the Mississippi on a Potomac

commission granted him by George Washington who was a personal friend of

his before the Revolution.  He has piloted every important river in

America, on that commission, he has also used it as a passport in Russia.

I have never revealed these facts before.  I notice, too, that you are

deceiving the people concerning your age.  The printed portrait which you

have enclosed is not a portrait of you, but a portrait of me when I was

19.  I remember very well when it was common for people to mistake Bixby

for your grandson.  Is it spreading, I wonder--this disposition of pilots

to renew their youth by doubtful methods?  Beck Jolly and Joe Bryan--they

probably go to Sunday school now--but it will not deceive.



Yes, it is as you say.  All of the procession but a fraction has passed.

It is time for us all to fall in.

                         Sincerely yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





                      To W. D. Howells, in New York:



                                   HOTEL KRANTZ, WIEN I.  NEUER MARKT 6

                                                  April 2, '99.

DEAR HOWELLS,--I am waiting for the April Harper, which is about due now;

waiting, and strongly interested.  You are old enough to be a weary man,

with paling interests, but you do not show it.  You do your work in the

same old delicate and delicious and forceful and searching and perfect

way.  I don't know how you can--but I suspect.  I suspect that to you

there is still dignity in human life, and that Man is not a joke--a poor

joke--the poorest that was ever contrived.  Since I wrote my Bible, (last

year)--["What Is Man."]--which Mrs. Clemens loathes, and shudders over,

and will not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of

it, Man is not to me the respect-worthy person he was before; and so I

have lost my pride in him, and can't write gaily nor praisefully about

him any more.  And I don't intend to try.  I mean to go on writing, for

that is my best amusement, but I shan't print much.  (for I don't wish to

be scalped, any more than another.)



April 5.  The Harper has come.  I have been in Leipzig with your party,

and then went on to Karlsbad and saw Mrs. Marsh's encounter with the

swine with the toothpick and the other manners--["Their Silver Wedding

Journey."]--At this point Jean carried the magazine away.



Is it imagination, or--Anyway I seem to get furtive and fleeting glimpses

which I take to be the weariness and condolence of age; indifference to

sights and things once brisk with interest; tasteless stale stuff which

used to be champagne; the boredom of travel: the secret sigh behind the

public smile, the private What-in-hell-did-I-come-for!



But maybe that is your art.  Maybe that is what you intend the reader to

detect and think he has made a Columbus-discovery.  Then it is well done,

perfectly done.  I wrote my last travel book--[Following the Equator.]--

in hell; but I let on, the best I could, that it was an excursion through

heaven.  Some day I will read it, and if its lying cheerfulness fools me,

then I shall believe it fooled the reader.  How I did loathe that journey

around the world!--except the sea-part and India.



Evening.  My tail hangs low.  I thought I was a financier--and I bragged

to you.  I am not bragging, now.  The stock which I sold at such a fine

profit early in January, has never ceased to advance, and is now worth

$60,000 more than I sold it for.  I feel just as if I had been spending

$20,000 a month, and I feel reproached for this showy and unbecoming

extravagance.



Last week I was going down with the family to Budapest to lecture, and to

make a speech at a banquet.  Just as I was leaving here I got a telegram

from London asking for the speech for a New York paper.  I (this is

strictly private) sent it.  And then I didn't make that speech, but

another of a quite different character--a speech born of something

which the introducer said.  If that said speech got cabled and printed,

you needn't let on that it was never uttered.



That was a darling night, and those Hungarians were lively people.  We

were there a week and had a great time.  At the banquet I heard their

chief orator make a most graceful and easy and beautiful and delicious

speech--I never heard one that enchanted me more--although I did not

understand a word of it, since it was in Hungarian.  But the art of it!-

it was superlative.



They are wonderful English scholars, these people; my lecture audience--

all Hungarians--understood me perfectly--to judge by the effects.  The

English clergyman told me that in his congregation are 150 young English

women who earn their living teaching their language; and that there are.

others besides these.



For 60 cents a week the telephone reads the morning news to you at home;

gives you the stocks and markets at noon; gives you lessons in 3 foreign

languages during 3 hours; gives you the afternoon telegrams; and at night

the concerts and operas.  Of course even the clerks and seamstresses and

bootblacks and everybody else are subscribers.



(Correction.  Mrs. Clemens says it is 60 cents a month.)



I am renewing my youth.  I made 4 speeches at one banquet here last

Saturday night.  And I've been to a lot of football matches.



Jean has been in here examining the poll for the Immortals ("Literature,"

March 24,) in the hope, I think, that at last she should find me at the

top and you in second place; and if that is her ambition she has suffered

disappointment for the third time--and will never fare any better, I

hope, for you are where you belong, by every right.  She wanted to know

who it is that does the voting, but I was not able to tell her.  Nor when

the election will be completed and decided.



Next Morning.  I have been reading the morning paper.  I do it every

morning--well knowing that I shall find in it the usual depravities and

basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and

cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the

human race.  I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not

despair.



(Escaped from) 5 o'clock tea.  ('sh!) Oh, the American girl in Europe!

Often she is creditable, but sometimes she is just shocking.  This one,

a minute ago--19, fat-face, raspy voice, pert ways, the self-complacency

of God; and with it all a silly laugh (embarrassed) which kept breaking

out through her chatter all along, whereas there was no call for it, for

she said nothing that was funny.  "Spose so many 've told y' how they

'njoyed y'r chapt'r on the Germ' tongue it's bringin' coals to Newcastle

Kehe!  say anything 'bout it Ke-hehe!  Spent m' vacation 'n Russia, 'n

saw Tolstoi; he said--" It made me shudder.



April 12.  Jean has been in here with a copy of Literature, complaining

that I am again behind you in the election of the 10 consecrated members;

and seems troubled about it and not quite able to understand it.  But I

have explained to her that you are right there on the ground, inside the

pool-booth, keeping game--and that that makes a large difference in these

things.



13th.  I have been to the Knustausstellung with Mrs. Clemens.  The office

of art seems to be to grovel in the dirt before Emperors and this and

that and the other damned breed of priests.

                                   Yrs ever

                                             MARK.





     Howells and Clemens were corresponding regularly again, though not

     with the frequency of former years.  Perhaps neither of them was

     bubbling over with things to say; perhaps it was becoming yearly

     less attractive to pick up a pen and write, and then, of course,

     there was always the discouragement of distance.  Once Howells

     wrote: "I know this will find you in Austria before I can well turn

     round, but I must make believe you are in Kennebunkport before I can

     begin it."  And in another letter: "It ought to be as pleasant to

     sit down and write to you as to sit down and talk to you, but it

     isn't.....  The only reason why I write is that I want another

     letter from you, and because I have a whole afternoon for the job.

     I have the whole of every afternoon, for I cannot work later than

     lunch.  I am fagged by that time, and Sunday is the only day that

     brings unbearable leisure.  I hope you will be in New York another

     winter; then I shall know what to do with these foretastes of

     eternity."



     Clemens usually wrote at considerable length, for he had a good deal

     to report of his life in the Austrian capital, now drawing to a

     close.





                      To W. D. Howells, in New York:



                                                       May 12, 1899.

DEAR HOWELLS,--7.15 p.  m.  Tea (for Mr. and Mrs. Tower, who are leaving

for Russia) just over; nice people and rather creditable to the human

race: Mr. and Mrs. Tower; the new Minister and his wife; the Secretary of

Legation; the Naval (and Military) Attach; several English ladies; an

Irish lady; a Scotch lady; a particularly nice young Austrian baron who

wasn't invited but came and went supposing it was the usual thing and

wondered at the unusually large gathering; two other Austrians and

several Americans who were also in his fix; the old Baronin Langeman,

the only Austrian invited; the rest were Americans.  It made just a

comfortable crowd in our parlor, with an overflow into Clara's through

the folding doors.  I don't enjoy teas, and am daily spared them by Mrs.

Clemens, but this was a pleasant one.  I had only one accident.  The old

Baronin Langeman is a person I have a strong fondness for, for we

violently disagree on some subjects and as violently agree on others--

for instance, she is temperance and I am not: she has religious beliefs

and feelings and I have none; (she's a Methodist!) she is a democrat and

so am I; she is woman's rights and so am I; she is laborers' rights and

approves trades unions and strikes, and that is me.  And so on.  After

she was gone an English lady whom I greatly like, began to talk sharply

against her for contributing money, time, labor, and public expression of

favor to a strike that is on (for an 11-hour day) in the silk factories

of Bohemia--and she caught me unprepared and betrayed me into over-warm

argument.  I am sorry: for she didn't know anything about the subject,

and I did; and one should be gentle with the ignorant, for they are the

chosen of God.



(The new Minister is a good man, but out of place.  The Sec. of Legation

is a good man, but out of place.  The Attache is a good man, but out of

place.  Our government for displacement beats the new White Star ship;

and her possible is 17,200 tons.)



May 13, 4 p. m.  A beautiful English girl and her handsome English

husband came up and spent the evening, and she certainly is a bird.

English parents--she was born and reared in Roumania and couldn't talk

English till she was 8 or 10.  She came up clothed like the sunset, and

was a delight to look at.  (Roumanian costume.).....



Twenty-four young people have gone out to the Semmering to-day (and to-

morrow) and Mrs. Clemens and an English lady and old Leschetitzky and his

wife have gone to chaperon them.  They gave me a chance to go, but there

are no snow mountains that I want to look at.  Three hours out, three

hours back, and sit up all night watching the young people dance; yelling

conversationally and being yelled at, conversationally, by new

acquaintances, through the deafening music, about how I like Vienna, and

if it's my first visit, and how long we expect to stay, and did I see the

foot-washing, and am I writing a book about Vienna, and so on.  The terms

seemed too severe.  Snow mountains are too dear at the price ....



For several years I have been intending to stop writing for print as soon

as I could afford it.  At last I can afford it, and have put the pot-

boiler pen away.  What I have been wanting is a chance to write a book

without reserves--a book which should take account of no one's feelings,

and no one's prejudices, opinions, beliefs, hopes, illusions, delusions;

a book which should say my say, right out of my heart, in the plainest

language and without a limitation of any sort.  I judged that that would

be an unimaginable luxury, heaven on earth.



It is under way, now, and it is a luxury! an intellectual drunk: Twice I

didn't start it right; and got pretty far in, both times, before I found

it out.  But I am sure it is started right this time.  It is in tale-

form.  I believe I can make it tell what I think of Man, and how he is

constructed, and what a shabby poor ridiculous thing he is, and how

mistaken he is in his estimate of his character and powers and qualities

and his place among the animals.



So far, I think I am succeeding.  I let the madam into the secret day

before yesterday, and locked the doors and read to her the opening

chapters.  She said--



"It is perfectly horrible--and perfectly beautiful!"



"Within the due limits of modesty, that is what I think."



I hope it will take me a year or two to write it, and that it will turn

out to be the right vessel to contain all the abuse I am planning to dump

into it.

                         Yours ever

                                        MARK.





     The story mentioned in the foregoing, in which Mark Twain was to

     give his opinion of man, was The Mysterious Stranger.  It was not

     finished at the time, and its closing chapter was not found until

     after his death.  Six years later (1916) it was published serially

     in Harper's Magazine, and in book form.



     The end of May found the Clemens party in London, where they were

     received and entertained with all the hospitality they had known in

     earlier years.  Clemens was too busy for letter-writing, but in the

     midst of things he took time to report to Howells an amusing

     incident of one of their entertainments.





                      To W. D. Howells, in America:



                                                  LONDON, July 3, '99

DEAR HOWELLS,--..... I've a lot of things to write you, but it's no use--

I can't get time for anything these days.  I must break off and write a

postscript to Canon Wilberforce before I go to bed.  This afternoon he

left a luncheon-party half an hour ahead of the rest, and carried off my

hat (which has Mark Twain in a big hand written in it.) When the rest of

us came out there was but one hat that would go on my head--it fitted

exactly, too.  So wore it away.  It had no name in it, but the Canon was

the only man who was absent.  I wrote him a note at 8 p.m.; saying that

for four hours I had not been able to take anything that did not belong

to me, nor stretch a fact beyond the frontiers of truth, and my family

were getting alarmed.  Could he explain my trouble?  And now at 8.30 p.m.

comes a note from him to say that all the afternoon he has been

exhibiting a wonder-compelling mental vivacity and grace of expression,

etc., etc., and have I missed a hat?  Our letters have crossed.

                              Yours ever

                                             MARK.





     News came of the death of Robert Ingersoll.  Clemens had been always

     one of his most ardent admirers, and a warm personal friend.  To

     Ingersoll's niece he sent a word of heartfelt sympathy.





                    To Miss Eva Farrell, in New York:



                                   30 WELLINGTON COURT, ALBERT GATE.

DEAR MISS FARRELL,--Except my daughter's, I have not grieved for any

death as I have grieved for his.  His was a great and beautiful spirit,

he was a man--all man from his crown to his foot soles.  My reverence for

him was deep and genuine; I prized his affection for me and returned it

with usury.

                    Sincerely Yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     Clemens and family decided to spend the summer in Sweden, at Sauna,

     in order to avail themselves of osteopathic treatment as practised

     by Heinrick Kellgren.  Kellgren's method, known as the "Swedish

     movements," seemed to Mark Twain a wonderful cure for all ailments,

     and he heralded the discovery far and wide.  He wrote to friends far

     and near advising them to try Kellgren for anything they might

     happen to have.  Whatever its beginning, any letter was likely to

     close with some mention of the new panacea.





               To Rev. J. H. Twichell, traveling in Europe:



                                             SANNA, Sept. 6, '99.

DEAR JOE,--I've no business in here--I ought to be outside.  I shall

never see another sunset to begin with it this side of heaven.  Venice?

land, what a poor interest that is!  This is the place to be.  I have

seen about 60 sunsets here; and a good 40 of them were clear and away

beyond anything I had ever imagined before for dainty and exquisite and

marvellous beauty and infinite change and variety.  America?  Italy?  The

tropics?  They have no notion of what a sunset ought to be.  And this

one--this unspeakable wonder!  It discounts all the rest.  It brings the

tears, it is so unutterably beautiful.



If I had time, I would say a word about this curative system here.  The

people actually do several of the great things the Christian Scientists

pretend to do.  You wish to advise with a physician about it?  Certainly.

There is no objection.  He knows next to something about his own trade,

but that will not embarrass him in framing a verdict about this one.

I respect your superstitions--we all have them.  It would be quite

natural for the cautious Chinaman to ask his native priest to instruct

him as to the value of the new religious specialty which the Western

missionary is trying to put on the market, before investing in it.  (He

would get a verdict.)

                         Love to you all!

                                   Always Yours

                                                  MARK.



     Howells wrote that he was going on a reading-tour-dreading it, of

     course-and asking for any advice that Clemens felt qualified to

     give.  Naturally, Clemens gave him the latest he had in stock,

     without realizing, perhaps, that he was recommending an individual

     practice which few would be likely to imitate.  Nevertheless, what

     he says is interesting.





                      To W. D. Howells, in America:



                                        SANNA, SWEDEN, Sept. 26, '99.

DEAR HOWELLS,--Get your lecture by heart--it will pay you.  I learned a

trick in Vienna--by accident--which I wish I had learned years ago.  I

meant to read from a Tauchnitz, because I knew I hadn't well memorized

the pieces; and I came on with the book and read a few sentences, then

remembered that the sketch needed a few words of explanatory

introduction; and so, lowering the book and now and then unconsciously

using it to gesture with, I talked the introduction, and it happened to

carry me into the sketch itself, and then I went on, pretending that I

was merely talking extraneous matter and would come to the sketch

presently.  It was a beautiful success.  I knew the substance of the

sketch and the telling phrases of it; and so, the throwing of the rest of

it into informal talk as I went along limbered it up and gave it the snap

and go and freshness of an impromptu.  I was to read several pieces, and

I played the same game with all of them, and always the audience thought

I was being reminded of outside things and throwing them in, and was

going to hold up the book and begin on the sketch presently--and so I

always got through the sketch before they were entirely sure that it had

begun.  I did the same thing in Budapest and had the same good time over

again.  It's a new dodge, and the best one that was ever invented.  Try

it.  You'll never lose your audience--not even for a moment.  Their

attention is fixed, and never wavers.  And that is not the case where one

reads from book or MS., or where he stands up without a note and frankly

exposes the fact, by his confident manner and smooth phrasing, that he is

not improvising, but reciting from memory.  And in the heat of telling a

thing that is memorised in substance only, one flashes out the happiest

suddenly-begotten phrases every now and then!  Try it.  Such a phrase has

a life and sparkle about it that twice as good a one could not exhibit if

prepared beforehand, and it "fetches" an audience in such an enthusing

and inspiring and uplifting way that that lucky phrase breeds another

one, sure.



Your September instalment--["Their Silver Wedding journey."]--was

delicious--every word of it.  You haven't lost any of your splendid art.

Callers have arrived.

                              With love

                                        MARK.





     "Yes," wrote Howells, "if I were a great histrionic artist like you

     I would get my poor essays by heart, and recite them, but being what

     I am I should do the thing so lifelessly that I had better recognise

     their deadness frankly and read them."



     From Vienna Clemens had contributed to the Cosmopolitan, then owned

     by John Brisben Walker, his first article on Christian Science.  It

     was a delicious bit of humor and found such enthusiastic

     appreciation that Walker was moved to send an additional $200 check

     in payment for it.  This brought prompt acknowledgment.





               To John Brisben Walker, in Irvington, N. Y.:



                                             LONDON, Oct. 19, '99

DEAR MR. WALKER,--By gracious but you have a talent for making a man feel

proud and good!  To say a compliment well is a high art--and few possess

it.  You know how to do it, and when you confirm its sincerity with a

handsome cheque the limit is reached and compliment can no higher go.

I like to work for you: when you don't approve an article you say so,

recognizing that I am not a child and can stand it; and when you approve

an article I don't have to dicker with you as if I raised peanuts and you

kept a stand; I know I shall get every penny the article is worth.



You have given me very great pleasure, and I thank you for it.

                         Sincerely Yours

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     On the same day he sent word to Howells of the good luck which now

     seemed to be coming his way.  The Joan of Arc introduction was the

     same that today appears in his collected works under the title of

     Saint Joan of Arc.





                      To W. D. Howells, in New York:



                                             LONDON, Oct.  19, '99.

DEAR HOWELLS,--My, it's a lucky day!--of the sort when it never rains but

it pours.  I was to write an introduction to a nobler book--the English

translation of the Official Record (unabridged) of the Trials and

Rehabilitation of Joan of Arc, and make a lot of footnotes.  I wrote the

introduction in Sweden, and here a few days ago I tore loose from a tale

I am writing, and took the MS book and went at the grind of note-making

--a fearful job for a man not used to it.  This morning brought a note

from my excellent friend Murray, a rich Englishman who edits the

translation, saying, "Never mind the notes--we'll make the translators do

them."  That was comfort and joy.



The same mail brought a note from Canon Wilberforce, asking me to talk

Joan of Arc in his drawing-room to the Dukes and Earls and M. P.'s--

(which would fetch me out of my seclusion and into print, and I couldn't

have that,) and so of course I must run down to the Abbey and explain--

and lose an hour.  Just then came Murray and said "Leave that to me

--I'll go and do the explaining and put the thing off 3 months; you write

a note and tell him I am coming."



(Which I did, later.)  Wilberforce carried off my hat from a lunch party

last summer, and in to-day's note he said he wouldn't steal my new hat

this time.  In my note I said I couldn't make the drawing-room talk, now

--Murray would explain; and added a P. S.: "You mustn't think it is

because I am afraid to trust my hat in your reach again, for I assure you

upon honor it isn't.  I should bring my old one."



I had suggested to Murray a fortnight ago, that he get some big guns to

write introductory monographs for the book.



Miss X, Joan's Voices and Prophecies.



The Lord Chief Justice of England, the legal prodigies which she

performed before her judges.



Lord Roberts, her military genius.



Kipling, her patriotism.



And so on.  When he came this morning he said he had captured Miss X;

that Lord Roberts and Kipling were going to take hold and see if they

could do monographs worthy of the book.  He hadn't run the others to

cover yet, but was on their track.  Very good news.  It is a grand book,

and is entitled to the best efforts of the best people.  As for me, I

took pains with my Introduction, and I admit that it is no slouch of a

performance.



Then I came down to Chatto's, and found your all too beautiful letter,

and was lifted higher than ever.  Next came letters from America properly

glorifying my Christian Science article in the Cosmopolitan (and one

roundly abusing it,) and a letter from John Brisben Walker enclosing $200

additional pay for the article (he had already paid enough, but I didn't

mention that--which wasn't right of me, for this is the second time he

has done such a thing, whereas Gilder has done it only once and no one

else ever.) I make no prices with Walker and Gilder--I can trust them.



And last of all came a letter from M-.  How I do wish that man was in

hell.  Even-the briefest line from that idiot puts me in a rage.



But on the whole it has been a delightful day, and with M----in hell it

would have been perfect.  But that will happen, and I can wait.



Ah, if I could look into the inside of people as you do, and put it on

paper, and invent things for them to do and say, and tell how they said

it, I could writs a fine and readable book now, for I've got a prime

subject.  I've written 30,000 words of it and satisfied myself that the

stuff is there; so I am going to discard that MS and begin all over again

and have a good time with it.



Oh, I know how you feel!  I've been in hell myself.  You are there

tonight.  By difference in time you are at luncheon, now--and not eating

it.  Nothing is so lonesome as gadding around platforming.  I have

declined 45 lectures to-day-England and Scotland.  I wanted the money,

but not the torture: Good luck to you!--and repentance.

                         With love to all of you

                                             MARK.











LETTERS OF 1900, MAINLY TO TWICHELL.  THE BOER WAR.  BOXER TROUBLES.

THE RETURN TO AMERICA



The New Year found Clemens still in London, chiefly interested in

osteopathy and characteristically glorifying the practice at the expense

of other healing methods.





                  To Rev. J.  H.  Twichell, in Hartford:



                                             LONDON, Jan.  8, 1900.

DEAR JOE,--Mental Telepathy has scored another.  Mental Telegraphy will

be greatly respected a century hence.



By the accident of writing my sister and describing to her the remarkable

cures made by Kellgren with his hands and without drugs, I brought upon

myself a quite stunning surprise; for she wrote to me that she had been

taking this very treatment in Buffalo--and that it was an American

invention.



Well, it does really turn out that Dr. Still, in the middle of Kansas, in

a village, began to experiment in 1874, only five years after Kellgren

began the same work obscurely in the village of Gotha, in Germany.  Dr.

Still seems to be an honest man; therefore I am persuaded that Kellgren

moved him to his experiments by Mental Telegraphy across six hours of

longitude, without need of a wire.  By the time Still began to

experiment, Kellgren had completed his development of the principles of

his system and established himself in a good practice in London--1874

--and was in good shape to convey his discovery to Kansas, Mental

Telegraphically.



Yes, I was greatly surprised to find that my mare's nest was much in

arrears: that this new science was well known in America under the name

of Osteopathy.  Since then, I find that in the past 3 years it has got

itself legalized in 14 States in spite of the opposition of the

physicians; that it has established 20 Osteopathic schools and colleges;

that among its students are 75 allopathic physicians; that there is a

school in Boston and another in Philadelphia, that there are about 100

students in the parent college (Dr. Still's at Kirksville, Missouri,) and

that there are about 2,000 graduates practicing in America.  Dear me,

there are not 30 in Europe.  Europe is so sunk in superstitions and

prejudices that it is an almost impossible thing to get her to do

anything but scoff at a new thing--unless it come from abroad; as witness

the telegraph, dentistry, &c.



Presently the Osteopath will come over here from America and will soon

make himself a power that must be recognized and reckoned with; and then,

25 years from now, England will begin to claim the invention and tell all

about its origin, in the Cyclopedia B-----as in the case of the

telegraph, applied anaesthetics and the other benefactions which she

heaped her abuse upon when her inventors first offered them to her.



I cannot help feeling rather inordinately proud of America for the gay

and hearty way in which she takes hold of any new thing that comes along

and gives it a first rate trial.  Many an ass in America, is getting a

deal of benefit out of X-Science's new exploitation of an age-old healing

principle--faith, combined with the patient's imagination--let it boom

along!  I have no objection.  Let them call it by what name they choose,

so long as it does helpful work among the class which is numerically

vastly the largest bulk of the human race, i.e.  the fools, the idiots,

the pudd'nheads.



We do not guess, we know that 9 in 10 of the species are pudd'nheads.

We know it by various evidences; and one of them is, that for ages the

race has respected (and almost venerated) the physician's grotesque

system--the emptying of miscellaneous and harmful drugs into a person's

stomach to remove ailments which in many cases the drugs could not reach

at all; in many cases could reach and help, but only at cost of damage to

some other part of the man; and in the remainder of the cases the drug

either retarded the cure, or the disease was cured by nature in spite of

the nostrums.  The doctor's insane system has not only been permitted to

continue its follies for ages, but has been protected by the State and

made a close monopoly--an infamous thing, a crime against a free-man's

proper right to choose his own assassin or his own method of defending

his body against disease and death.



And yet at the same time, with curious and senile inconsistency, the

State has allowed the man to choose his own assassin--in one detail--the

patent-medicine detail--making itself the protector of that perilous

business, collecting money out of it, and appointing no committee of

experts to examine the medicines and forbid them when extra dangerous.

Really, when a man can prove that he is not a jackass, I think he is in

the way to prove that he is no legitimate member of the race.



I have by me a list of 52 human ailments--common ones--and in this list I

count 19 which the physician's art cannot cure.  But there isn't one

which Osteopathy or Kellgren cannot cure, if the patient comes early.



Fifteen years ago I had a deep reverence for the physician and the

surgeon.  But 6 months of closely watching the Kellgren business has

revolutionized all that, and now I have neither reverence nor respect for

the physician's trade, and scarcely any for the surgeon's,--I am

convinced that of all quackeries, the physician's is the grotesquest and

the silliest.  And they know they are shams and humbugs.  They have taken

the place of those augurs who couldn't look each other in the face

without laughing.



See what a powerful hold our ancient superstitions have upon us: two

weeks ago, when Livy committed an incredible imprudence and by

consequence was promptly stricken down with a heavy triple attack--

influenza, bronchitis, and a lung affected--she recognized the gravity of

the situation, and her old superstitions rose: she thought she ought to

send for a doctor--Think of it--the last man in the world I should want

around at such a time.  Of course I did not say no--not that I was

indisposed to take the responsibility, for I was not, my notion of a

dangerous responsibility being quite the other way--but because it is

unsafe to distress a sick person; I only said we knew no good doctor,

and it could not be good policy to choose at hazard; so she allowed me to

send for Kellgren.  To-day she is up and around-Lured.  It is safe to say

that persons hit in the same way at the same time are in bed yet, and

booked to stay there a good while, and to be in a shackly condition and

afraid of their shadows for a couple of years or more to come.



It will be seen by the foregoing that Mark Twain's interest in the

Kellgren system was still an ardent one.  Indeed, for a time he gave most

of his thought to it, and wrote several long appreciations, perhaps with

little idea of publication, but merely to get his enthusiasm physically

expressed.  War, however, presently supplanted medicine--the Boer

troubles in South Africa and the Boxer insurrection in China.  It was a

disturbing, exciting year.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Boston:



                                        WELLINGTON COURT, KNIGHTSBRIDGE,

                                                  Jan. 25, 1900.

DEAR HOWELLS,--If you got half as much as Pond prophesied, be content and

praise God--it has not happened to another.  But I am sorry he didn't go

with you; for it is marvelous to hear him yarn.  He is good company,

cheery and hearty, and his mill is never idle.  Your doing a lecture tour

was heroic.  It was the highest order of grit, and you have a right to be

proud of yourself.  No mount of applause or money or both could save it

from being a hell to a man constituted as you are.  It is that even to

me, who am made of coarser stuff.



I knew the audiences would come forward and shake hands with you--that

one infallible sign of sincere approval.  In all my life, wherever it

failed me I left the hall sick and ashamed, knowing what it meant.



Privately speaking, this is a sordid and criminal war, and in every way

shameful and excuseless.  Every day I write (in my head) bitter magazine

articles about it, but I have to stop with that.  For England must not

fall; it would mean an inundation of Russian and German political

degradations which would envelop the globe and steep it in a sort of

Middle-Age night and slavery which would last till Christ comes again.

Even wrong--and she is wrong--England must be upheld.  He is an enemy of

the human race who shall speak against her now.  Why was the human race

created?  Or at least why wasn't something creditable created in place of

it.  God had his opportunity.  He could have made a reputation.  But no,

He must commit this grotesque folly--a lark which must have cost him a

regret or two when He came to think it over and observe effects.  For a

giddy and unbecoming caprice there has been nothing like it till this

war.  I talk the war with both sides--always waiting until the other man

introduces the topic.  Then I say "My head is with the Briton, but my

heart and such rags of morals as I have are with the Boer--now we will

talk, unembarrassed and without prejudice."  And so we discuss, and have

no trouble.



                                                       Jan.  26.

It was my intention to make some disparaging remarks about the human

race; and so I kept this letter open for that purpose, and for the

purpose of telling my dream, wherein the Trinity were trying to guess a

conundrum, but I can do better--for I can snip out of the "Times" various

samples and side-lights which bring the race down to date, and expose it

as of yesterday.  If you will notice, there is seldom a telegram in a

paper which fails to show up one or more members and beneficiaries of our

Civilization as promenading in his shirt-tail, with the rest of his

regalia in the wash.



I love to see the holy ones air their smug pieties and admire them and

smirk over them, and at the same moment frankly and publicly show their

contempt for the pieties of the Boer--confidently expecting the approval

of the country and the pulpit, and getting it.



I notice that God is on both sides in this war; thus history repeats

itself.  But I am the only person who has noticed this; everybody here

thinks He is playing the game for this side, and for this side only.



               With great love to you all

                                             MARK.





     One cannot help wondering what Mark Twain would have thought of

     human nature had he lived to see the great World War, fought mainly

     by the Christian nations who for nearly two thousand years had been

     preaching peace on earth and goodwill toward men.  But his opinion

     of the race could hardly have been worse than it was.  And nothing

     that human beings could do would have surprised him.





                   To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                             LONDON, Jan. 27, 1900.

DEAR JOE,--Apparently we are not proposing to set the Filipinos free and

give their islands to them; and apparently we are not proposing to hang

the priests and confiscate their property.  If these things are so, the

war out there has no interest for me.



I have just been examining chapter LXX of "Following the Equator," to see

if the Boer's old military effectiveness is holding out.  It reads

curiously as if it had been written about the present war.



I believe that in the next chapter my notion of the Boer was rightly

conceived.  He is popularly called uncivilized, I do not know why.

Happiness, food, shelter, clothing, wholesale labor, modest and rational

ambitions, honesty, kindliness, hospitality, love of freedom and

limitless courage to fight for it, composure and fortitude in time of

disaster, patience in time of hardship and privation, absence of noise

and brag in time of victory, contentment with a humble and peaceful life

void of insane excitements--if there is a higher and better form of

civilization than this, I am not aware of it and do not know where to

look for it.  I suppose we have the habit of imagining that a lot of

artistic, intellectual and other artificialities must be added, or it

isn't complete.  We and the English have these latter; but as we lack the

great bulk of these others, I think the Boer civilization is the best of

the two.  My idea of our civilization is that it is a shabby poor thing

and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies, meannesses, and

hypocrisies.  As for the word, I hate the sound of it, for it conveys a

lie; and as for the thing itself, I wish it was in hell, where it

belongs.



Provided we could get something better in the place of it.  But that is

not possible, perhaps.  Poor as it is, it is better than real savagery,

therefore we must stand by it, extend it, and (in public) praise it.

And so we must not utter any hateful word about England in these days,

nor fail to hope that she will win in this war, for her defeat and fall

would be an irremediable disaster for the mangy human race.... Naturally,

then, I am for England; but she is profoundly in the wrong, Joe, and no

(instructed) Englishman doubts it.  At least that is my belief.



Maybe I managed to make myself misunderstood, as to the Osteopathists.

I wanted to know how the men impress you.  As to their Art, I know fairly

well about that, and should not value Hartford's opinion of it; nor a

physician's; nor that of another who proposed to enlighten me out of his

ignorance.  Opinions based upon theory, superstition and ignorance are

not very precious.



Livy and the others are off for the country for a day or two.

               Love to you all

                                   MARK.





     The next letter affords a pleasant variation.  Without doubt it was

     written on realizing that good nature and enthusiasm had led him

     into indiscretion.  This was always happening to him, and letters

     like this are not infrequent, though generally less entertaining.





                          To Mr. Ann, in London:



                                        WELLINGTON COURT, Feb. 23, '00.

DEAR MR. ANN,--Upon sober second thought, it won't do!--I withdraw that

letter.  Not because I said anything in it which is not true, for I

didn't; but because when I allow my name to be used in forwarding a

stock-scheme I am assuming a certain degree of responsibility as toward

the investor, and I am not willing to do that.  I have another objection,

a purely selfish one: trading upon my name, whether the enterprise scored

a success or a failure would damage me.  I can't afford that; even the

Archbishop of Canterbury couldn't afford it, and he has more character to

spare than I have.  (Ah, a happy thought!  If he would sign the letter

with me that would change the whole complexion of the thing, of course.

I do not know him, yet I would sign any commercial scheme that he would

sign.  As he does not know me, it follows that he would sign anything

that I would sign.  This is unassailable logic--but really that is all

that can be said for it.)



No, I withdraw the letter.  This virgin is pure up to date, and is going

to remain so.

                         Ys sincerely,

                                        S. L. C.





                   To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                                  WELLINGTON COURT,

                                             KNIGHTSBRIDGE, Mch. 4, '00.

DEAR JOE,--Henry Robinson's death is a sharp wound to me, and it goes

very deep.  I had a strong affection for him, and I think he had for me.

Every Friday, three-fourths of the year for 16 years he was of the

billiard-party in our house.  When we come home, how shall we have

billiard-nights again--with no Ned Bunce and no Henry Robinson?

I believe I could not endure that.  We must find another use for that

room.  Susy is gone, George is gone, Libby Hamersley, Ned Bunce, Henry

Robinson.  The friends are passing, one by one; our house, where such

warm blood and such dear blood flowed so freely, is become a cemetery.

But not in any repellent sense.  Our dead are welcome there; their life

made it beautiful, their death has hallowed it, we shall have them with

us always, and there will be no parting.



It was a moving address you made over Ward Cheney--that fortunate, youth!

Like Susy, he got out of life all that was worth the living, and got his

great reward before he had crossed the tropic frontier of dreams and

entered the Sahara of fact.  The deep consciousness of Susy's good

fortune is a constant comfort to me.



London is happy-hearted at last.  The British victories have swept the

clouds away and there are no uncheerful faces.  For three months the

private dinner parties (we go to no public ones) have been Lodges of

Sorrow, and just a little depressing sometimes; but now they are smiley

and animated again.  Joe, do you know the Irish gentleman and the Irish

lady, the Scotch gentleman and the Scotch lady?  These are darlings,

every one.  Night before last it was all Irish--24.  One would have to

travel far to match their ease and sociability and animation and sparkle

and absence of shyness and self-consciousness.



It was American in these fine qualities.  This was at Mr. Lecky's.  He is

Irish, you know.  Last night it was Irish again, at Lady Gregory's.  Lord

Roberts is Irish; and Sir William Butler; and Kitchener, I think; and a

disproportion of the other prominent Generals are of Irish and Scotch

breed-keeping up the traditions of Wellington, and Sir Colin Campbell of

the Mutiny.  You will have noticed that in S. A. as in the Mutiny, it is

usually the Irish and the Scotch that are placed in the fore-front of the

battle.  An Irish friend of mine says this is because the Kelts are

idealists, and enthusiasts, with age-old heroisms to emulate and keep

bright before the world; but that the low-class Englishman is dull and

without ideals, fighting bull-doggishly while he has a leader, but losing

his head and going to pieces when his leader falls--not so with the Kelt.

Sir Wm. Butler said "the Kelt is the spear-head of the British lance."

                         Love to you all.

                                             MARK.





     The Henry Robinson mentioned in the foregoing letter was Henry C.

     Robinson, one-time Governor of Connecticut, long a dear and intimate

     friend of the Clemens household.  "Lecky" was W. E. H. Lecky, the

     Irish historian whose History of European Morals had been, for many

     years, one of Mark Twain's favorite books:



     In July the Clemenses left the small apartment at 30 Wellington

     Court and established a summer household a little way out of London,

     at Dollis Hill.  To-day the place has been given to the public under

     the name of Gladstone Park, so called for the reason that in an

     earlier time Gladstone had frequently visited there.  It was a

     beautiful spot, a place of green grass and spreading oaks.  In a

     letter in which Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister she said: "It is

     simply divinely beautiful and peaceful; the great, old trees are

     beyond everything.  I believe nowhere in the world do you find such

     trees as in England."  Clemens wrote to Twichell:  "From the house

     you can see little but spacious stretches of hay-fields and green

     turf.....  Yet the massed, brick blocks of London are reachable in

     three minutes on a horse.  By rail we can be in the heart of London,

     in Baker Street, in seventeen minutes--by a smart train in five."



     Mail, however, would seem to have been less prompt.





                  To the Editor of the Times, in London:



SIR,--It has often been claimed that the London postal service was

swifter than that of New York, and I have always believed that the claim

was justified.  But a doubt has lately sprung up in my mind.  I live

eight miles from Printing House Square; the Times leaves that point at 4

o'clock in the morning, by mail, and reaches me at 5 in the afternoon,

thus making the trip in thirteen hours.



It is my conviction that in New York we should do it in eleven.



                              C.

DOLLIS HILL, N.  W.





                   To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                   DOLLIS HILL HOUSE, KILBURN, N. W.

                                             LONDON, Aug.  12, '00.

DEAR JOE,--The Sages Prof. Fiske and Brander Matthews were out here to

tea a week ago and it was a breath of American air to see them.  We

furnished them a bright day and comfortable weather--and they used it all

up, in their extravagant American way.  Since then we have sat by coal

fires, evenings.



We shall sail for home sometime in October, but shall winter in New York

where we can have an osteopath of good repute to continue the work of

putting this family in proper condition.



Livy and I dined with the Chief justice a month ago and he was as well-

conditioned as an athlete.



It is all China, now, and my sympathies are with the Chinese.  They have

been villainously dealt with by the sceptred thieves of Europe, and I

hope they will drive all the foreigners out and keep them out for good.

I only wish it; of course I don't really expect it.



Why, hang it, it occurs to me that by the time we reach New York you

Twichells will be invading Europe and once more we shall miss the

connection.  This is thoroughly exasperating.  Aren't we ever going to

meet again?

                    With no end of love from all of us,

                                        MARK.



P. S.  Aug. 18.

DEAR JOE,--It is 7.30 a. m.  I have been waking very early, lately.  If

it occurs once more, it will be habit; then I will submit and adopt it.



This is our day of mourning.  It is four years since Susy died; it is

five years and a month that I saw her alive for the last time-throwing

kisses at us from the railway platform when we started West around the

world.



Sometimes it is a century; sometimes it was yesterday.

                    With love

                                   MARK.





     We discover in the foregoing letter that the long European residence

     was drawing to an end.  More than nine years had passed since the

     closing of the Hartford house--eventful years that had seen failure,

     bereavement, battle with debt, and rehabilitated fortunes.  All the

     family were anxious to get home--Mark Twain most anxious of all.



     They closed Dollis Hill House near the end of September, and put up

     for a brief period at a family hotel, an amusing picture of which

     follows.





                   To J. Y. M.  MacAlister, in London:



                                                            Sep.  1900.

MY DEAR MACALISTER,--We do really start next Saturday.  I meant to sail

earlier, but waited to finish some studies of what are called Family

Hotels.  They are a London specialty, God has not permitted them to exist

elsewhere; they are ramshackle clubs which were dwellings at the time of

the Heptarchy.  Dover and Albemarle Streets are filled with them.  The

once spacious rooms are split up into coops which afford as much

discomfort as can be had anywhere out of jail for any money.  All the

modern inconveniences are furnished, and some that have been obsolete for

a century.  The prices are astonishingly high for what you get.  The

bedrooms are hospitals for incurable furniture.  I find it so in this

one.  They exist upon a tradition; they represent the vanishing home-like

inn of fifty years ago, and are mistaken by foreigners for it.  Some

quite respectable Englishmen still frequent them through inherited habit

and arrested development; many Americans also, through ignorance and

superstition.  The rooms are as interesting as the Tower of London, but

older I think.  Older and dearer.  The lift was a gift of William the

Conqueror, some of the beds are prehistoric.  They represent geological

periods.  Mine is the oldest.  It is formed in strata of Old Red

Sandstone, volcanic tufa, ignis fatuus, and bicarbonate of hornblende,

superimposed upon argillaceous shale, and contains the prints of

prehistoric man.  It is in No. 149.  Thousands of scientists come to see

it.  They consider it holy.  They want to blast out the prints but

cannot.  Dynamite rebounds from it.



Finished studies and sail Saturday in Minnehaha.

                    Yours ever affectionately,

                                             MARK TWAIN.





     They sailed for New York October 6th, and something more than a week

     later America gave them a royal welcome.  The press, far and wide,

     sounded Mark Twain's praises once more; dinners and receptions were

     offered on every hand; editors and lecture agents clamored for him.



     The family settled in the Earlington Hotel during a period of house-

     hunting.  They hoped eventually to return to Hartford, but after a

     brief visit paid by Clemens alone to the old place he wrote:





                     To Sylvester Baxter, in Boston:



                                             NEW YORK, Oct. 26, 1900.

DEAR MR. BAXTER,--It was a great pleasure to me to renew the other days

with you, and there was a pathetic pleasure in seeing Hartford and the

house again; but I realize that if we ever enter the house again to live,

our hearts will break.  I am not sure that we shall ever be strong enough

to endure that strain.

                         Sincerely yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     Mr. and Mrs. Rogers wished to have them in their neighborhood, but

     the houses there were not suitable, or were too expensive.  Through

     Mr. Frank Doubleday they eventually found, at 14 West Tenth Street,

     a large residence handsomely furnished, and this they engaged for

     the winter.  "We were lucky to get this big house furnished," he

     wrote MacAlister in London.  "There was not another one in town

     procurable that would answer us, but this one is all right--space

     enough in it for several families, the rooms all old-fashioned,

     great size."



     The little note that follows shows that Mark Twain had not entirely

     forgotten the days of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.





              To a Neighbor on West Tenth Street, New York:



                                                       Nov. 30.

DEAR MADAM,--I know I ought to respect my duty and perform it, but I am

weak and faithless where boys are concerned, and I can't help secretly

approving pretty bad and noisy ones, though I do object to the kind that

ring door-bells.  My family try to get me to stop the boys from holding

conventions on the front steps, but I basely shirk out of it, because I

think the boys enjoy it.



My wife has been complaining to me this evening about the boys on the

front steps and under compulsion I have made some promises.  But I am

very forgetful, now that I am old, and my sense of duty is getting

spongy.

                    Very truly yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Letters Vol. 4, by Mark Twain













MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS 1901-1906



ARRANGED WITH COMMENT BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE







VOLUME V.





XL



LETTERS OF 1901, CHIEFLY TO TWICHELL.  MARK TWAIN AS A REFORMER.

SUMMER AT SARANAC.  ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT McKINLEY



     An editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal, early in 1901, said:

     "A remarkable transformation, or rather a development, has taken

     place in Mark Twain.  The genial humorist of the earlier day is now

     a reformer of the vigorous kind, a sort of knight errant who does

     not hesitate to break a lance with either Church or State if he

     thinks them interposing on that broad highway over which he believes

     not a part but the whole of mankind has the privilege of passing in

     the onward march of the ages."



     Mark Twain had begun "breaking the lance" very soon after his return

     from Europe.  He did not believe that he could reform the world, but

     at least he need not withhold his protest against those things which

     stirred his wrath.  He began by causing the arrest of a cabman who

     had not only overcharged but insulted him; he continued by writing

     openly against the American policy in the Philippines, the

     missionary propaganda which had resulted in the Chinese uprising and

     massacre, and against Tammany politics.  Not all of his efforts were

     in the line of reform; he had become a sort of general spokesman

     which the public flocked to hear, whatever the subject.  On the

     occasion of a Lincoln Birthday service at Carnegie Hall he was

     chosen to preside, and he was obliged to attend more dinners than

     were good for his health.  His letters of this period were mainly

     written to his old friend Twichell, in Hartford.  Howells, who lived

     in New York, he saw with considerable frequency.



     In the letter which follows the medicine which Twichell was to take

     was Plasmon, an English proprietary remedy in which Mark Twain had

     invested--a panacea for all human ills which osteopathy could not

     reach.





                  To Rev. Joseph Twichell, in Hartford:



                                   14 W. 10TH ST.  Jan.  23, '01.

DEAR JOE,--Certainly.  I used to take it in my coffee, but it settled to

the bottom in the form of mud, and I had to eat it with a spoon; so I

dropped the custom and took my 2 teaspoonfuls in cold milk after

breakfast.  If we were out of milk I shoveled the dry powder into my

mouth and washed it down with water.  The only essential is to get it

down, the method is not important.



No, blame it, I can't go to the Alumni dinner, Joe.  It takes two days,

and I can't spare the time.  Moreover I preside at the Lincoln birthday

celebration in Carnegie Hall Feb. 11 and I must not make two speeches so

close together.  Think of it--two old rebels functioning there--I as

President, and Watterson as Orator of the Day!  Things have changed

somewhat in these 40 years, thank God.



Look here--when you come down you must be our guest--we've got a roomy

room for you, and Livy will make trouble if you go elsewhere.  Come

straight to 14 West 10th.



Jan. 24.  Livy says Amen to that; also, can you give us a day or two's

notice, so the room will be sure to be vacant?



I'm going to stick close to my desk for a month, now, hoping to write a

small book.

               Ys Ever

                         MARK





     The letter which follows is a fair sample of Mark Twain's private

     violence on a subject which, in public print, he could only treat

     effectively by preserving his good humor.  When he found it

     necessary to boil over, as he did, now and then, for relief, he

     always found a willing audience in Twichell.  The mention of his

     "Private Philosophy" refers to 'What Is Man?', privately published

     in 1906; reissued by his publishers in 1916.





                   To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                             14  W. 10th Jan.  29, '01.

DEAR JOE,--I'm not expecting anything but kicks for scoffing, and am

expecting a diminution of my bread and butter by it, but if Livy will let

me I will have my say.  This nation is like all the others that have been

spewed upon the earth--ready to shout for any cause that will tickle its

vanity or fill its pocket.  What a hell of a heaven it will be, when they

get all these hypocrites assembled there!



I can't understand it!  You are a public guide and teacher, Joe, and are

under a heavy responsibility to men, young and old; if you teach your

people--as you teach me--to hide their opinions when they believe the

flag is being abused and dishonored, lest the utterance do them and a

publisher a damage, how do you answer for it to your conscience?  You are

sorry for me; in the fair way of give and take, I am willing to be a

little sorry for you.



However, I seem to be going counter to my own Private Philosophy--which

Livy won't allow me to publish--because it would destroy me.  But I hope

to see it in print before I die.  I planned it 15 years ago, and wrote it

in '98.  I've often tried to read it to Livy, but she won't have it; it

makes her melancholy.  The truth always has that effect on people.  Would

have, anyway, if they ever got hold of a rag of it--Which they don't.



You are supposing that I am supposing that I am moved by a Large

Patriotism, and that I am distressed because our President has blundered

up to his neck in the Philippine mess; and that I am grieved because this

great big ignorant nation, which doesn't know even the A B C facts of the

Philippine episode, is in disgrace before the sarcastic world--drop that

idea!  I care nothing for the rest--I am only distressed and troubled

because I am befouled by these things.  That is all.  When I search

myself away down deep, I find this out.  Whatever a man feels or thinks

or does, there is never any but one reason for it--and that is a selfish

one.



At great inconvenience, and expense of precious time I went to the chief

synagogue the other night and talked in the interest of a charity school

of poor Jew girls.  I know--to the finest, shades--the selfish ends that

moved me; but no one else suspects.  I could give you the details if I

had time.  You would perceive how true they are.



I've written another article; you better hurry down and help Livy squelch

it.



She's out pottering around somewhere, poor housekeeping slave; and Clara

is in the hands of the osteopath, getting the bronchitis pulled and

hauled out of her.  It was a bad attack, and a little disquieting.  It

came day before yesterday, and she hasn't sat up till this afternoon.

She is getting along satisfactorily, now.

                    Lots of love to you all.

                                             MARK





     Mark Twain's religion had to do chiefly with humanity in its present

     incarnation, and concerned itself very little with any possible

     measure of reward or punishment in some supposed court of the

     hereafter.  Nevertheless, psychic investigation always interested

     him, and he was good-naturedly willing to explore, even hoping,

     perhaps, to be convinced that individuality continues beyond death.

     The letter which follows indicates his customary attitude in

     relation to spiritualistic research.  The experiments here

     mentioned, however, were not satisfactory.





                        To Mrs. Charles McQuiston:



                                                  DOBBS FERRY, N. Y.

                                                       March 26, 1901.

DEAR MRS. McQUISTON,--I have never had an experience which moved me to

believe the living can communicate with the dead, but my wife and I have

experimented in the matter when opportunity offered and shall continue to

do so.



I enclose a letter which came this morning--the second from the same

source.  Mrs. K----is a Missourian, and lately she discovered, by

accident, that she was a remarkable hypnotiser.  Her best subject is a

Missouri girl, Miss White, who is to come here soon and sustain strictly

scientific tests before professors at Columbia University.  Mrs. Clemens

and I intend to be present.  And we shall ask the pair to come to our

house to do whatever things they can do.  Meantime, if you thought well

of it, you might write her and arrange a meeting, telling her it is by my

suggestion and that I gave you her address.



Someone has told me that Mrs. Piper is discredited.  I cannot be sure,

but I think it was Mr. Myers, President of the London Psychical Research

Society--we heard of his death yesterday.  He was a spiritualist.  I am

afraid he was a very easily convinced man.  We visited two mediums whom

he and Andrew Lang considered quite wonderful, but they were quite

transparent frauds.



Mrs. Clemens corrects me: One of those women was a fraud, the other not a

fraud, but only an innocent, well-meaning, driveling vacancy.

                         Sincerely yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     In Mark Twain's Bermuda chapters entitled Idle Notes of an Idle

     Excursion he tells of an old sea captain, one Hurricane Jones, who

     explained biblical miracles in a practical, even if somewhat

     startling, fashion.  In his story of the prophets of Baal, for

     instance, the old captain declared that the burning water was

     nothing more nor less than petroleum.  Upon reading the "notes,"

     Professor Phelps of Yale wrote that the same method of explaining

     miracles had been offered by Sir Thomas Browne.



     Perhaps it may be added that Captain Hurricane Jones also appears in

     Roughing It, as Captain Ned Blakely.





                    To Professor William Lyon Phelps;



                                                  YALE UNIVERSITY,

                                             NEW YORK, April 24, 1901.

MY DEAR SIR,--I was not aware that old Sir Thomas had anticipated that

story, and I am much obliged to you for furnishing me the paragraph.

t is curious that the same idea should leave entered two heads so unlike

as the head of that wise old philosopher and that of Captain Ned Wakeman,

a splendidly uncultured old sailor, but in his own opinion a thinker by

divine right.  He was an old friend of mine of many years' standing;

I made two or three voyages with him, and found him a darling in many

ways.  The petroleum story was not told to me; he told it to Joe

Twichell, who ran across him by accident on a sea voyage where I think

the two were the only passengers.  A delicious pair, and admirably mated,

they took to each other at once and became as thick as thieves.  Joe was

passing under a fictitious name, and old Wakeman didn't suspect that he

was a parson; so he gave his profanity full swing, and he was a master of

that great art.  You probably know Twichell, and will know that that is a

kind of refreshment which he is very capable of enjoying.

                    Sincerely yours,

                              S. L. CLEMENS.





     For the summer Clemens and his family found a comfortable lodge in

     the Adirondacks--a log cabin called "The Lair"--on Saranac Lake.

     Soon after his arrival there he received an invitation to attend the

     celebration of Missouri's eightieth anniversary.  He sent the

     following letter:





                   To Edward L. Dimmitt, in St. Louis:



                              AMONG THE ADIRONDACK LAKES, July 19, 1901.

DEAR MR. DIMMITT,--By an error in the plans, things go wrong end first in

this world, and much precious time is lost and matters of urgent

importance are fatally retarded.  Invitations which a brisk young fellow

should get, and which would transport him with joy, are delayed and

impeded and obstructed until they are fifty years overdue when they reach

him.



It has happened again in this case.



When I was a boy in Missouri I was always on the lookout for invitations

but they always miscarried and went wandering through the aisles of time;

and now they are arriving when I am old and rheumatic and can't travel

and must lose my chance.



I have lost a world of delight through this matter of delaying

invitations.  Fifty years ago I would have gone eagerly across the world

to help celebrate anything that might turn up.  IT would have made no

difference to me what it was, so that I was there and allowed a chance to

make a noise.



The whole scheme of things is turned wrong end to.  Life should begin

with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its

capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.  As things are now, when in

youth a dollar would bring a hundred pleasures, you can't have it.  When

you are old, you get it and there is nothing worth buying with it then.



It's an epitome of life.  The first half of it consists of the capacity

to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without

the capacity.



I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along.

I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142.  This is

no time to be flitting about the earth.  I must cease from the activities

proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and

inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way

and imminent as indicated above.



Yours is a great and memorable occasion, and as a son of Missouri I

should hold it a high privilege to be there and share your just pride in

the state's achievements; but I must deny myself the indulgence, while

thanking you earnestly for the prized honor you have done me in asking me

to be present.

                    Very truly yours,

                              S. L. CLEMENS.





     In the foregoing Mark Twain touches upon one of his favorite

     fancies: that life should begin with old age and approach strong

     manhood, golden youth, to end at last with pampered and beloved

     babyhood.  Possibly he contemplated writing a story with this idea

     as the theme, but He seems never to have done so.



     The reader who has followed these letters may remember Yung Wing,

     who had charge of the Chinese educational mission in Hartford, and

     how Mark Twain, with Twichell, called on General Grant in behalf of

     the mission.  Yung Wing, now returned to China, had conceived the

     idea of making an appeal to the Government of the United States for

     relief of his starving countrymen.





                     To J. H.  Twichell, in Hartford:



                                        AMPERSAND, N. Y., July 28, '01.

DEAR JOE,--As you say, it is impracticable--in my case, certainly.  For

me to assist in an appeal to that Congress of land-thieves and liars

would be to bring derision upon it; and for me to assist in an appeal for

cash to pass through the hands of those missionaries out there, of any

denomination, Catholic or Protestant, wouldn't do at all.  They wouldn't

handle money which I had soiled, and I wouldn't trust them with it,

anyway.  They would devote it to the relief of suffering--I know that--

but the sufferers selected would be converts.  The missionary-utterances

exhibit no humane feeling toward the others, but in place of it a spirit

of hate and hostility.  And it is natural; the Bible forbids their

presence there, their trade is unlawful, why shouldn't their characters

be of necessity in harmony with--but never mind, let it go, it irritates

me.



Later....  I have been reading Yung Wing's letter again.  It may be that

he is over-wrought by his sympathies, but it may not be so.  There may be

other reasons why the missionaries are silent about the Shensi-2-year

famine and cannibalism.  It may be that there are so few Protestant

converts there that the missionaries are able to take care of them.  That

they are not likely to largely concern themselves about Catholic converts

and the others, is quite natural, I think.



That crude way of appealing to this Government for help in a cause which

has no money in it, and no politics, rises before me again in all its

admirable innocence!  Doesn't Yung Wing know us yet?  However, he has

been absent since '96 or '97.  We have gone to hell since then.  Kossuth

couldn't raise 30 cents in Congress, now, if he were back with his moving

Magyar-Tale.



I am on the front porch (lower one--main deck) of our little bijou of a

dwelling-house.  The lake-edge (Lower Saranac) is so nearly under me that

I can't see the shore, but only the water, small-pored with rain-

splashes--for there is a heavy down-pour.  It is charmingly like sitting

snuggled up on a ship's deck with the stretching sea all around--but very

much more satisfactory, for at sea a rain-storm is depressing, while here

of course the effect engendered is just a deep sense of comfort and

contentment.  The heavy forest shuts us solidly in on three sides there

are no neighbors.  There are beautiful little tan-colored impudent

squirrels about.  They take tea, 5 p. m., (not invited) at the table in

the woods where Jean does my typewriting, and one of them has been brave

enough to sit upon Jean's knee with his tail curved over his back and

munch his food.  They come to dinner, 7 p. m., on the front porch (not

invited).  They all have the one name--Blennerhasset, from Burr's friend

--and none of them answers to it except when hungry.



We have been here since June 21st.  For a little while we had some warm

days--according to the family's estimate; I was hardly discommoded

myself.  Otherwise the weather has been of the sort you are familiar with

in these regions: cool days and cool nights.  We have heard of the hot

wave every Wednesday, per the weekly paper--we allow no dailies to

intrude.  Last week through visitors also--the only ones we have had--

Dr. Root and John Howells.



We have the daily lake-swim; and all the tribe, servants included (but

not I) do a good deal of boating; sometimes with the guide, sometimes

without him--Jean and Clara are competent with the oars.  If we live

another year, I hope we shall spend its summer in this house.



We have taken the Appleton country seat, overlooking the Hudson, at

Riverdale, 25 minutes from the Grand Central Station, for a year,

beginning Oct. 1, with option for another year.  We are obliged to be

close to New York for a year or two.



Aug. 3rd.  I go yachting a fortnight up north in a 20-knot boat 225 feet

long, with the owner, (Mr. Rogers), Tom Reid, Dr. Rice, Col. A. G. Paine

and one or two others.  Judge Howland would go, but can't get away from

engagements; Professor Sloane would go, but is in the grip of an illness.

Come--will you go?  If you can manage it, drop a post-card to me c/o H.H.

Rogers, 26 Broadway.  I shall be in New York a couple of days before we

sail--July 31 or Aug. 1, perhaps the latter,--and I think I shall stop at

the Hotel Grosvenor, cor. l0th St and 5th ave.



We all send you and the Harmonies lots and gobs of love.

                                                            MARK





                  To Rev. J. H.  Twichell, in Hartford:



                                             AMPERSAND, N. Y., Aug. 28.

DEAR JOE,--Just a word, to scoff at you, with your extravagant suggestion

that I read the biography of Phillips Brooks--the very dullest book that

has been printed for a century.  Joe, ten pages of Mrs. Cheney's masterly

biography of her fathers--no, five pages of it--contain more meat, more

sense, more literature, more brilliancy, than that whole basketful of

drowsy rubbish put together.  Why, in that dead atmosphere even Brooks

himself is dull--he wearied me; oh how he wearied me!



We had a noble good time in the Yacht, and caught a Chinese missionary

and drowned him.

                    Love from us all to you all.

                                                  MARK.





     The assassination of President McKinley occurred September 6, 1901.

     Such an event would naturally stir Mark Twain to comment on human

     nature in general.  His letter to Twichell is as individual as it is

     sound in philosophy.  At what period of his own life, or under what

     circumstances, he made the long journey with tragic intent there is

     no means of knowing now.  There is no other mention of it elsewhere

     in the records that survive him.





                   To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                   AMPERSAND, Tuesday, (Sept. 10, 1901)

DEAR JOE,--It is another off day, but tomorrow I shall resume work to a

certainty, and bid a long farewell to letter-scribbling.



The news of the President looks decidedly hopeful, and we are all glad,

and the household faces are much improved, as to cheerfulness.  Oh, the

talk in the newspapers!  Evidently the Human Race is the same old Human

Race.  And how unjust, and unreflectingly discriminating, the talkers

are.  Under the unsettling effects of powerful emotion the talkers are

saying wild things, crazy things--they are out of themselves, and do not

know it; they are temporarily insane, yet with one voice they declare the

assassin sane--a man who has been entertaining fiery and reason--

debauching maggots in his head for weeks and months.  Why, no one is

sane, straight along, year in and year out, and we all know it.  Our

insanities are of varying sorts, and express themselves in varying forms

--fortunately harmless forms as a rule--but in whatever form they occur

an immense upheaval of feeling can at any time topple us distinctly over

the sanity-line for a little while; and then if our form happens to be of

the murderous kind we must look out--and so must the spectator.



This ass with the unpronounceable name was probably more insane than

usual this week or two back, and may get back upon his bearings by and

by, but he was over the sanity-border when he shot the President.  It is

possible that it has taken him the whole interval since the murder of the

King of Italy to get insane enough to attempt the President's life.

Without a doubt some thousands of men have been meditating the same act

in the same interval, but new and strong interests have intervened and

diverted their over-excited minds long enough to give them a chance to

settle, and tranquilize, and get back upon a healthy level again.  Every

extraordinary occurrence unsettles the heads of hundreds of thousands of

men for a few moments or hours or days.  If there had been ten kings

around when Humbert fell they would have been in great peril for a day or

more--and from men in whose presence they would have been quite safe

after the excess of their excitement had had an interval in which to cool

down.  I bought a revolver once and travelled twelve hundred miles to

kill a man.  He was away.  He was gone a day.  With nothing else to do,

I had to stop and think--and did.  Within an hour--within half of it--

I was ashamed of myself--and felt unspeakably ridiculous.  I do not know

what to call it if I was not insane.  During a whole week my head was in

a turmoil night and day fierce enough and exhausting enough to upset a

stronger reason than mine.



All over the world, every day, there are some millions of men in that

condition temporarily.  And in that time there is always a moment--

perhaps only a single one when they would do murder if their man was at

hand.  If the opportunity comes a shade too late, the chances are that it

has come permanently too late.  Opportunity seldom comes exactly at the

supreme moment.  This saves a million lives a day in the world--for sure.



No Ruler is ever slain but the tremendous details of it are ravenously

devoured by a hundred thousand men whose minds dwell, unaware, near the

temporary-insanity frontier--and over they go, now!  There is a day--two

days--three--during which no Ruler would be safe from perhaps the half of

them; and there is a single moment wherein he would not be safe from any

of them, no doubt.



It may take this present shooting-case six months to breed another ruler-

tragedy, but it will breed it.  There is at least one mind somewhere

which will brood, and wear, and decay itself to the killing-point and

produce that tragedy.



Every negro burned at the stake unsettles the excitable brain of another

one--I mean the inflaming details of his crime, and the lurid

theatricality of his exit do it--and the duplicate crime follows; and

that begets a repetition, and that one another one and so on.  Every

lynching-account unsettles the brains of another set of excitable white

men, and lights another pyre--115 lynchings last year, 102 inside of 8

months this year; in ten years this will be habit, on these terms.



Yes, the wild talk you see in the papers!  And from men who are sane when

not upset by overwhelming excitement.  A U. S. Senator-Cullom--wants this

Buffalo criminal lynched!  It would breed other lynchings--of men who are

not dreaming of committing murders, now, and will commit none if Cullom

will keep quiet and not provide the exciting cause.



And a District Attorney wants a law which shall punish with death

attempts upon a President's life--this, mind you, as a deterrent.

It would have no effect--or the opposite one.  The lunatic's mind-space

is all occupied--as mine was--with the matter in hand; there is no room

in it for reflections upon what may happen to him.  That comes after the

crime.



It is the noise the attempt would make in the world that would breed the

subsequent attempts, by unsettling the rickety minds of men who envy the

criminal his vast notoriety--his obscure name tongued by stupendous Kings

and Emperors--his picture printed everywhere, the trivialest details of

his movements, what he eats, what he drinks; how he sleeps, what he says,

cabled abroad over the whole globe at cost of fifty thousand dollars a

day--and he only a lowly shoemaker yesterday!--like the assassin of the

President of France--in debt three francs to his landlady, and insulted

by her--and to-day she is proud to be able to say she knew him

"as familiarly as you know your own brother," and glad to stand till she

drops and pour out columns and pages of her grandeur and her happiness

upon the eager interviewer.



Nothing will check the lynchings and ruler-murder but absolute silence--

the absence of pow-pow about them.  How are you going to manage that?

By gagging every witness and jamming him into a dungeon for life; by

abolishing all newspapers; by exterminating all newspaper men; and by

extinguishing God's most elegant invention, the Human Race.  It is quite

simple, quite easy, and I hope you will take a day off and attend to it,

Joe.  I blow a kiss to you, and am

                                   Lovingly Yours,

                                                  MARK.





     When the Adirondack summer ended Clemens settled for the winter in

     the beautiful Appleton home at Riverdale-on-the-Hudson.  It was a

     place of wide-spreading grass and shade-a house of ample room.  They

     were established in it in time for Mark Twain to take an active

     interest in the New York elections and assist a ticket for good

     government to defeat Tammany Hall.









XLI



LETTERS OF 1902.  RIVERDALE.  YORK HARBOR.  ILLNESS OF MRS.  CLEMENS



The year 1902 was an eventful one for Mark Twain.  In April he received a

degree of LL.D.  from the University of Missouri and returned to his

native State to accept it.  This was his last journey to the Mississippi

River.  During the summer Mrs. Clemens's health broke down and illnesses

of one sort or another visited other members of the family.  Amid so much

stress and anxiety Clemens had little time or inclination for work.  He

wrote not many letters and mainly somber ones.  Once, by way of

diversion, he worked out the idea of a curious club--which he formed--its

members to be young girls--girls for the most part whom he had never

seen.  They were elected without their consent from among those who wrote

to him without his consent, and it is not likely that any one so chosen

declined membership.  One selection from his letters to the French

member, Miss Helene Picard, of St.-Die, France, will explain the club and

present a side of Mask Twain somewhat different from that found in most

of his correspondence.





                   To Miss Picard, in St.-Die, France:



                              RIVERDALE-ON-THE-HUDSON, February 22, 1902.

DEAR MISS HELENE,--If you will let me call you so, considering that my

head is white and that I have grownup daughters.  Your beautiful letter

has given me such deep pleasure!  I will make bold to claim you for a

friend and lock you up with the rest of my riches; for I am a miser who

counts his spoil every day and hoards it secretly and adds to it when he

can, and is grateful to see it grow.



Some of that gold comes, like yourself, in a sealed package, and I can't

see it and may never have the happiness; but I know its value without

that, and by what sum it increases my wealth.



I have a Club, a private Club, which is all my own.  I appoint the

Members myself, and they can't help themselves, because I don't allow

them to vote on their own appointment and I don't allow them to resign!

They are all friends whom I have never seen (save one), but who have

written friendly letters to me.



By the laws of my Club there can be only one Member in each country, and

there can be no male Member but myself.  Some day I may admit males, but

I don't know--they are capricious and inharmonious, and their ways

provoke me a good deal.  It is a matter which the Club shall decide.



I have made four appointments in the past three or four months: You as

Member for France, a young Highland girl as Member for Scotland, a

Mohammedan girl as Member for Bengal, and a dear and bright young niece

of mine as Member for the United States--for I do not represent a country

myself, but am merely Member at Large for the Human Race.



You must not try to resign, for the laws of the Club do not allow that.

You must console yourself by remembering that you are in the best of

company; that nobody knows of your membership except myself--that no

Member knows another's name, but only her country; that no taxes are

levied and no meetings held (but how dearly I should like to attend

one!).



One of my Members is a Princess of a royal house, another is the daughter

of a village book-seller on the continent of Europe.  For the only

qualification for Membership is intellect and the spirit of good will;

other distinctions, hereditary or acquired, do not count.



May I send you the Constitution and Laws of the Club?  I shall be so

pleased if I may.  It is a document which one of my daughters typewrites

for me when I need one for a new Member, and she would give her eyebrows

to know what it is all about, but I strangle her curiosity by saying:

"There are much cheaper typewriters than you are, my dear, and if you try

to pry into the sacred mysteries of this Club one of your prosperities

will perish sure."



My favorite?  It is "Joan of Arc."  My next is "Huckleberry Finn," but

the family's next is "The Prince and the Pauper."  (Yes, you are right--

I am a moralist in disguise; it gets me into heaps of trouble when I go

thrashing around in political questions.)



I wish you every good fortune and happiness and I thank you so much for

your letter.

                    Sincerely yours,

                              S. L. CLEMENS.





     Early in the year Clemens paid a visit to Twichell in Hartford, and

     after one of their regular arguments on theology and the moral

     accountability of the human race, arguments that had been going on

     between them for more than thirty years--Twichell lent his visitor

     Freedom of the Will, by Jonathan Edwards, to read on the way home.

     The next letter was the result.





                   To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                             RIVERDALE-ON-THE-HUDSON.

                                                       Feb. '02.

DEAR JOE,--"After compliments."--[Meaning "What a good time you gave me;

what a happiness it was to be under your roof again; etc., etc."  See

opening sentence of all translations of letters passing between Lord

Roberts and Indian princes and rulers.]--From Bridgeport to New York;

thence to home; and continuously until near midnight I wallowed and

reeked with Jonathan in his insane debauch; rose immediately refreshed

and fine at 10 this morning, but with a strange and haunting sense of

having been on a three days' tear with a drunken lunatic.  It is years

since I have known these sensations.  All through the book is the glaze

of a resplendent intellect gone mad--a marvelous spectacle.  No, not all

through the book--the drunk does not come on till the last third, where

what I take to be Calvinism and its God begins to show up and shine red

and hideous in the glow from the fires of hell, their only right and

proper adornment.  By God I was ashamed to be in such company.



Jonathan seems to hold (as against the Arminian position) that the Man

(or his Soul or his Will) never creates an impulse itself, but is moved

to action by an impulse back of it.  That's sound!



Also, that of two or more things offered it, it infallibly chooses the

one which for the moment is most pleasing to ITSELF.  Perfectly correct!

An immense admission for a man not otherwise sane.



Up to that point he could have written chapters III and IV of my

suppressed "Gospel."  But there we seem to separate.  He seems to concede

the indisputable and unshakable dominion of Motive and Necessity (call

them what he may, these are exterior forces and not under the man's

authority, guidance or even suggestion)--then he suddenly flies the logic

track and (to all seeming) makes the man and not these exterior forces

responsible to God for the man's thoughts, words and acts.  It is frank

insanity.



I think that when he concedes the autocratic dominion of Motive and

Necessity he grants, a third position of mine--that a man's mind is a

mere machine--an automatic machine--which is handled entirely from the

outside, the man himself furnishing it absolutely nothing: not an ounce

of its fuel, and not so much as a bare suggestion to that exterior

engineer as to what the machine shall do, nor how it shall do it nor

when.



After that concession, it was time for him to get alarmed and shirk--for

he was pointing straight for the only rational and possible next-station

on that piece of road the irresponsibility of man to God.



And so he shirked.  Shirked, and arrived at this handsome result:



Man is commanded to do so-and-so.  It has been ordained from the

beginning of time that some men shan't and others can't.



These are to be blamed: let them be damned.



I enjoy the Colonel very much, and shall enjoy the rest of him with an

obscene delight.

               Joe, the whole tribe shout love to you and yours!

                                                       MARK.





     We have not heard of Joe Goodman since the trying days of '90 and

     '91, when he was seeking to promote the fortunes of the type-setting

     machine.  Goodman, meantime, who had in turn been miner, printer,

     publisher, and farmer; had been devoting his energies and genius to

     something entirely new: he had been translating the prehistoric

     Mayan inscriptions of Yucatan, and with such success that his work

     was elaborately published by an association of British scientists.

     In due time a copy of this publication came to Clemens, who was full

     of admiration of the great achievement.





                     To J. T. Goodman, in California:



                                        RIVERDALE-ON-THE-HUDSON,

                                                  June 13, '02.

DEAR JOE,--I am lost in reverence and admiration!  It is now twenty-four

hours that I have been trying to cool down and contemplate with quiet

blood this extraordinary spectacle of energy, industry, perseverance,

pluck, analytical genius, penetration, this irruption of thunders and

fiery splendors from a fair and flowery mountain that nobody had supposed

was a sleeping volcano, but I seem to be as excited as ever.  Yesterday

I read as much as half of the book, not understanding a word but

enchanted nevertheless--partly by the wonder of it all, the study, the

erudition, the incredible labor, the modesty, the dignity, the majestic

exclusiveness of the field and its lofty remoteness from things and

contacts sordid and mean and earthy, and partly by the grace and beauty

and limpidity of the book's unsurpassable English.  Science, always great

and worshipful, goes often in hodden grey, but you have clothed her in

garments meet for her high degree.



You think you get "poor pay" for your twenty years?  No, oh no.  You have

lived in a paradise of the intellect whose lightest joys were beyond the

reach of the longest purse in Christendom, you have had daily and nightly

emancipation from the world's slaveries and gross interests, you have

received a bigger wage than any man in the land, you have dreamed a

splendid dream and had it come true, and to-day you could not afford to

trade fortunes with anybody--not even with another scientist, for he must

divide his spoil with his guild, whereas essentially the world you have

discovered is your own and must remain so.



It is all just magnificent, Joe!  And no one is prouder or gladder than

               Yours always

                              MARK.





     At York Harbor, Maine, where they had taken a cottage for the

     summer--a pretty place, with Howells not far distant, at Kittery

     Point--Mrs. Clemens's health gave way.  This was at a period when

     telegraphic communication was far from reliable.  The old-time

     Western Union had fallen from grace; its "system" no longer

     justified the best significance of that word.  The new day of

     reorganization was coming, and it was time for it.  Mark Twain's

     letter concerning the service at York Harbor would hardly be

     warranted today, but those who remember conditions of that earlier

     time will agree that it was justified then, and will appreciate its

     satire.





           To the President of The Western Union, in New York:



                                             "THE PINES"

                                        YORK HARBOR, MAINE.

DEAR SIR,--I desire to make a complaint, and I bring it to you, the head

of the company, because by experience I know better than to carry it to a

subordinate.



I have been here a month and a half, and by testimony of friends,

reinforced by personal experience I now feel qualified to claim as an

established fact that the telegraphic service here is the worst in the

world except that Boston.



These services are actually slower than was the New York and Hartford

service in the days when I last complained to you--which was fifteen or

eighteen years ago, when telegraphic time and train time between the

mentioned points was exactly the same, to-wit, three hours and a half.

Six days ago--it was that raw day which provoked so much comment--my

daughter was on her way up from New York, and at noon she telegraphed me

from New Haven asking that I meet her with a cloak at Portsmouth.  Her

telegram reached me four hours and a quarter later--just 15 minutes too

late for me to catch my train and meet her.



I judge that the telegram traveled about 200 miles.  It is the best

telegraphic work I have seen since I have been here, and I am mentioning

it in this place not as a complaint but as a compliment.  I think a

compliment ought always to precede a complaint, where one is possible,

because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteous

and gentle reception.



Still, there is a detail or two connected with this matter which ought

perhaps to be mentioned.  And now, having smoothed the way with the

compliment, I will venture them.  The head corpse in the York Harbor

office sent me that telegram altho (1) he knew it would reach me too late

to be of any value; (2) also, that he was going to send it to me by his

boy; (3) that the boy would not take the trolley and come the 2 miles in

12 minutes, but would walk; (4) that he would be two hours and a quarter

on the road; (5) and that he would collect 25 cents for transportation,

for a telegram which the he knew to be worthless before he started it.

From these data I infer that the Western Union owes me 75 cents; that is

to say, the amount paid for combined wire and land transportation--

a recoup provided for in the printed paragraph which heads the telegraph-

blank.



By these humane and Christian stages we now arrive at the complaint

proper.  We have had a grave case of illness in the family, and a

relative was coming some six hundred miles to help in the sick-room

during the convalescing period.  It was an anxious time, of course,

and I wrote and asked to be notified as to the hour of the expected

arrival of this relative in Boston or in York Harbor.  Being afraid of

the telegraph--which I think ought not to be used in times of hurry and

emergency--I asked that the desired message be brought to me by some

swift method of transportation.  By the milkman, if he was coming this

way.  But there are always people who think they know more than you do,

especially young people; so of course the young fellow in charge of this

lady used the telegraph.  And at Boston, of all places!  Except York

Harbor.



The result was as usual; let me employ a statelier and exacter term, and

say, historical.



The dispatch was handed to the h. c. of the Boston office at 9 this

morning.  It said, "Shall bring A. S. to you eleven forty-five this

morning."  The distance traveled by the dispatch is forty or fifty miles,

I suppose, as the train-time is five minutes short of two hours, and the

trains are so slow that they can't give a W. U. telegram two hours and

twenty minutes start and overtake it.



As I have said, the dispatch was handed in at Boston at 9.  The expected

visitors left Boston at 9.40, and reached my house at 12 noon, beating

the telegram 2 solid hours, and 5 minutes over.



The boy brought the telegram.  It was bald-headed with age, but still

legible.  The boy was prostrate with travel and exposure, but still

alive, and I went out to condole with him and get his last wishes and

send for the ambulance.  He was waiting to collect transportation before

turning his passing spirit to less serious affairs.  I found him

strangely intelligent, considering his condition and where he is getting

his training.  I asked him at what hour the telegram was handed to the

h. c. in Boston.  He answered brightly, that he didn't know.



I examined the blank, and sure enough the wary Boston h. c.  had

thoughtfully concealed that statistic.  I asked him at what hour it had

started from Boston.  He answered up as brightly as ever, and said he

didn't know.



I examined the blank, and sure enough the Boston h. c. had left that

statistic out in the cold, too.  In fact it turned out to be an official

concealment--no blank was provided for its exposure.  And none required

by the law, I suppose.  "It is a good one-sided idea," I remarked;

"They can take your money and ship your telegram next year if they want

to--you've no redress.  The law ought to extend the privilege to all of

us."



The boy looked upon me coldly.



I asked him when the telegram reached York Harbor.  He pointed to some

figures following the signature at the bottom of the blank--"12.14.

"I said it was now 1.45 and asked--



"Do you mean that it reached your morgue an hour and a half ago?"



He nodded assent.



"It was at that time half an hour too late to be of any use to me, if I

wanted to go and meet my people--which was the case--for by the wording

of the message you can see that they were to arrive at the station at

11.45.  Why did, your h. c. send me this useless message?  Can't he read?

Is he dead?"



"It's the rules."



"No, that does not account for it.  Would he have sent it if it had been

three years old, I in the meantime deceased, and he aware of it?"



The boy didn't know.



"Because, you know, a rule which required him to forward to the cemetery

to-day a dispatch due three years ago, would be as good a rule as one

which should require him to forward a telegram to me to-day which he knew

had lost all its value an hour or two before he started it.  The

construction of such a rule would discredit an idiot; in fact an idiot--

I mean a common ordinary Christian idiot, you understand--would be

ashamed of it, and for the sake of his reputation wouldn't make it.  What

do you think?"



He replied with much natural brilliancy that he wasn't paid for thinking.



This gave me a better opinion of the commercial intelligence pervading

his morgue than I had had before; it also softened my feelings toward

him, and also my tone, which had hitherto been tinged with bitterness.



"Let bygones be bygones," I said, gently, "we are all erring creatures,

and mainly idiots, but God made us so and it is dangerous to criticise."

                         Sincerely

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     One day there arrived from Europe a caller with a letter of

     introduction from Elizabeth, Queen of Rumania, better known as

     Carmen Sylva.  The visitor was Madam Hartwig, formerly an American

     girl, returning now, because of reduced fortunes, to find profitable

     employment in her own land.  Her husband, a man of high principle,

     had declined to take part in an "affair of honor," as recognized by

     the Continental code; hence his ruin.  Elizabeth of Rumania was one

     of the most loved and respected of European queens and an author of

     distinction.  Mark Twain had known her in Vienna.  Her letter to him

     and his own letter to the public (perhaps a second one, for its date

     is two years later) follow herewith.





                     From Carmen Sylva to Mark Twain:



                                                  BUCAREST, May 9, 1902.

HONORED MASTER,--If I venture to address you on behalf of a poor lady,

who is stranded in Bucarest I hope not to be too disagreeable.



Mrs. Hartwig left America at the age of fourteen in order to learn to

sing which she has done thoroughly.  Her husband had quite a brilliant

situation here till he refused to partake 'dans une afaire onereuse',

so it seems.  They haven't a penny and each of them must try to find a

living.  She is very nice and pleasant and her school is so good that she

most certainly can give excellent singing lessons.



I beg your pardon for being a bore to one I so deeply love and admire,

to whom I owe days and days of forgetfulness of self and troubles and the

intensest of all joys: Hero-worship!  People don't always realize what a

happiness that is!  God bless you for every beautiful thought you poured

into my tired heart and for every smile on a weary way!



                                                  CARMEN SYLVA.





                      From Mark Twain to the Public:



                                                       Nov.  16, '04.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN,--I desire to recommend Madame Hartwig to my

friends and the public as a teacher of singing and as a concert-vocalist.

She has lived for fifteen years at the court of Roumania, and she brought

with her to America an autograph letter in which her Majesty the Queen of

Roumania cordially certified her to me as being an accomplished and

gifted singer and teacher of singing, and expressed a warm hope that her

professional venture among us would meet with success; through absence in

Europe I have had no opportunity to test the validity of the Queen's

judgment in the matter, but that judgment is the utterance of an entirely

competent authority--the best that occupies a throne, and as good as any

that sits elsewhere, as the musical world well knows--and therefore back

it without hesitation, and endorse it with confidence.



I will explain that the reason her Majesty tried to do her friend a

friendly office through me instead of through someone else was, not that

I was particularly the right or best person for the office, but because I

was not a stranger.  It is true that I am a stranger to some of the

monarchs--mainly through their neglect of their opportunities--but such

is not the case in the present instance.  The latter fact is a high

compliment to me, and perhaps I ought to conceal it.  Some people would.



                                        MARK TWAIN.









     Mrs. Clemens's improvement was scarcely perceptible.  It was not

     until October that they were able to remove her to Riverdale, and

     then only in a specially arranged invalid-car.  At the end of the

     long journey she was carried to her room and did not leave it again

     for many months.





                   To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                        RIVERDALE, N. Y., Oct. 31, '02.

DEAR JOE,--It is ten days since Susy [Twichell] wrote that you were laid

up with a sprained shoulder, since which time we have had no news about

it.  I hope that no news is good news, according to the proverb; still,

authoritative confirmation of it will be gladly received in this family,

if some of you will furnish it.  Moreover, I should like to know how and

where it happened.  In the pulpit, as like as not, otherwise you would

not be taking so much pains to conceal it.  This is not a malicious

suggestion, and not a personally-invented one: you told me yourself,

once, that you threw artificial power and impressiveness into places in

your sermons where needed, by "banging the bible"--(your own words.)

You have reached a time of life when it is not wise to take these risks.

You would better jump around.  We all have to change our methods as the

infirmities of age creep upon us.  Jumping around will be impressive now,

whereas before you were gray it would have excited remark.



Poor Livy drags along drearily.  It must be hard times for that turbulent

spirit.  It will be a long time before she is on her feet again.  It is a

most pathetic case.  I wish I could transfer it to myself.  Between

ripping and raging and smoking and reading, I could get a good deal of a

holiday out of it.



Clara runs the house smoothly and capably.  She is discharging a trial-

cook today and hiring another.

                    A power of love to you all!

                                                  MARK.





Such was the state of Mrs. Clemens's health that visitors were excluded

from the sick room, and even Clemens himself was allowed to see her no

more than a few moments at a time.  These brief, precious visits were the

chief interests of his long days.  Occasionally he was allowed to send

her a few lines, reporting his occupations, and these she was sometimes

permitted to answer.  Only one of his notes has been preserved, written

after a day, now rare, of literary effort.  Its signature, the letter Y,

stands for "Youth," always her name for him.





                             To Mrs. Clemens:



DEAR HEART,--I've done another full day's work, and finished before 4.

I have been reading and dozing since and would have had a real sleep a

few minutes ago but for an incursion to bring me a couple of unimportant

letters.  I've stuck to the bed all day and am getting back my lost

ground.  Next time I will be strictly careful and make my visit very

short--just a kiss and a rush.  Thank you for your dear, dear note; you

who are my own and only sweetheart.

                                        Sleep well!

                                                       Y.









XLII



LETTERS OF 1903.  TO VARIOUS PERSONS.  HARD DAYS AT RIVERDALE.

LAST SUMMER AT ELMIRA.  THE RETURN TO ITALY



The reader may perhaps recall that H. H. Rogers, some five or six years

earlier, had taken charge of the fortunes of Helen Keller, making it

possible for her to complete her education.  Helen had now written her

first book--a wonderful book--'The Story of My Life', and it had been

successfully published.  For a later generation it may be proper to

explain that the Miss Sullivan, later Mrs. Macy, mentioned in the letter

which follows, was the noble woman who had devoted her life to the

enlightenment of this blind, dumb girl--had made it possible for her to

speak and understand, and, indeed, to see with the eyes of luminous

imagination.



The case of plagiarism mentioned in this letter is not now remembered,

and does not matter, but it furnished a text for Mark Twain, whose

remarks on the subject in general are eminently worth while.





                   To Helen Keller, in Wrentham, Mass.:



                                             RIVERDALE-ON-THE-HUDSON,

                                             ST.  PATRICK'S DAY, '03.

DEAR HELEN,--I must steal half a moment from my work to say how glad I am

to have your book, and how highly I value it, both for its own sake and

as a remembrances of an affectionate friendship which has subsisted

between us for nine years without a break, and without a single act of

violence that I can call to mind.  I suppose there is nothing like it in

heaven; and not likely to be, until we get there and show off.  I often

think of it with longing, and how they'll say, "There they come--sit

down in front!" I am practicing with a tin halo.  You do the same.  I was

at Henry Rogers's last night, and of course we talked of you.  He is not

at all well; you will not like to hear that; but like you and me, he is

just as lovely as ever.



I am charmed with your book-enchanted.  You are a wonderful creature,

the most wonderful in the world--you and your other half together--

Miss Sullivan, I mean, for it took the pair of you to make a complete

and perfect whole.  How she stands out in her letters! her brilliancy,

penetration, originality, wisdom, character, and the fine literary

competencies of her pen--they are all there.



Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was

that "plagiarism" farce!  As if there was much of anything in any human

utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism!  The kernal, the soul--let

us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable

material of all human utterances--is plagiarism.  For substantially all

ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million

outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and

satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas

there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little

discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his

temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.  When

a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries

and ten thousand men--but we call it his speech, and really some

exceedingly small portion of it is his.  But not enough to signify.  It

is merely a Waterloo.  It is Wellington's battle, in some degree, and we

call it his; but there are others that contributed.  It takes a thousand

men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a

photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing--and the last man

gets the credit and we forget the others.  He added his little mite--that

is all he did.  These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine

parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure

and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest.  But nothing can do

that.



Then why don't we unwittingly reproduce the phrasing of a story, as well

as the story itself?  It can hardly happen--to the extent of fifty words

except in the case of a child: its memory-tablet is not lumbered with

impressions, and the actual language can have graving-room there, and

preserve the language a year or two, but a grown person's memory-tablet

is a palimpsest, with hardly a bare space upon which to engrave a phrase.

It must be a very rare thing that a whole page gets so sharply printed

upon a man's mind, by a single reading, that it will stay long enough to

turn up some time or other and be mistaken by him for his own.  No doubt

we are constantly littering our literature with disconnected sentences

borrowed from books at some unremembered time and now imagined to be our

own, but that is about the most we can do.  In 1866 I read Dr. Holmes's

poems, in the Sandwich Islands.  A year and a half later I stole his

dictation, without knowing it, and used it to dedicate my "Innocents

Abroad" with.  Then years afterwards I was talking with Dr. Holmes about

it.  He was not an ignorant ass--no, not he: he was not a collection of

decayed human turnips, like your "Plagiarism Court;" and so when I said,

"I know now where I stole it, but whom did you steal it from," he said,

"I don't remember; I only know I stole it from somebody, because I have

never originated anything altogether myself, nor met anybody who had."



To think of those solemn donkeys breaking a little child's heart with

their ignorant rubbish about plagiarism!  I couldn't sleep for

blaspheming about it last night. Why, their whole lives, their whole

histories, all their learning, all their thoughts, all their opinions

were one solid ruck of plagiarism, and they didn't know it and never

suspected it.  A gang of dull and hoary pirates piously setting

themselves the task of disciplining and purifying a kitten that they

think they've caught filching a chop!  Oh, dam--



But you finish it, dear, I am running short of vocabulary

today.  Ever lovingly your friend,

                                        MARK.



(Edited and modified by Clara Clemens, deputy to her mother, who for more

than 7 months has been ill in bed and unable to exercise her official

function.)





     The burden of the Clemens household had fallen almost entirely upon

     Clara Clemens.  In addition to supervising its customary affairs,

     she also shouldered the responsibility of an unusual combination of

     misfortunes, for besides the critical condition of her mother, her

     sister, Jean Clemens, was down with pneumonia, no word of which must

     come to Mrs. Clemens.  Certainly it was a difficult position.  In

     some account of it, which he set down later, Clemens wrote: "It was

     fortunate for us all that Clara's reputation for truthfulness was so

     well established in her mother's mind.  It was our daily protection

     from disaster.  The mother never doubted Clara's word.  Clara could

     tell her large improbabilities without exciting any suspicion,

     whereas if I tried to market even a small and simple one the case

     would have been different.  I was never able to get a reputation

     like Clara's."



     The accumulation of physical ailments in the Clemens home had

     somewhat modified Mark Twain's notion of medical practice.  He was

     no longer radical; he had become eclectic.  It is a good deal of a

     concession that he makes to Twichell, after those earlier letters

     from Sweden, in which osteopathy had been heralded as the anodyne

     for all human ills.





                  To Rev. J.  H.  Twichell, in Hartford:



DEAR JOE,--Livy does really make a little progress these past 3 or 4

days, progress which is visible to even the untrained eye.  The

physicians are doing good work with her, but my notion is, that no art of

healing is the best for all ills.  I should distribute the ailments

around: surgery cases to the surgeons; lupus to the actinic-ray

specialist; nervous prostration to the Christian Scientist; most ills to

the allopath and the homeopath; (in my own particular case) rheumatism,

gout and bronchial attacks to the osteopathist.



Mr. Rogers was to sail southward this morning--and here is this weather!

I am sorry.  I think it's a question if he gets away tomorrow.

                              Ys Ever

                                        MARK.





     It was through J. Y. M. MacAlister, to whom the next letter is

     written, that Mark Twain had become associated with the Plasmon

     Company, which explains the reference to "shares."  He had seen much

     of MacAlister during the winter at Tedworth Square, and had grown

     fond of him.  It is a characteristic letter, and one of interesting

     fact.





                    To J. Y. M. MacAlister, in London:



                                                  RIVERDALE, NEW YORK.

                                                       April, 7, '03.

DEAR MACALISTER,--Yours arrived last night, and God knows I was glad to

get it, for I was afraid I had blundered into an offence in some way and

forfeited your friendship--a kind of blunder I have made so many times in

my life that I am always standing in a waiting and morbid dread of its

occurrence.



Three days ago I was in condition--during one horribly long night--to

sympathetically roast with you in your "hell of troubles."  During that

night I was back again where I was in the black days when I was buried

under a mountain of debt.  I called the daughters to me in private

council and paralysed them with the announcement, "Our outgo has

increased in the past 8 months until our expenses are now 125 per cent.

greater than our income."



It was a mistake.  When I came down in the morning a gray and aged wreck,

and went over the figures again, I found that in some unaccountable way

(unaccountable to a business man but not to me) I had multiplied the

totals by 2.  By God I dropped 75 years on the floor where I stood.



Do you know it affected me as one is affected when he wakes out of a

hideous dream and finds that it was only a dream.  It was a great comfort

and satisfaction to me to call the daughters to a private meeting of the

Board again and say, "You need not worry any more; our outgo is only a

third more than our income; in a few months your mother will be out of

her bed and on her feet again--then we shall drop back to normal and be

all right."



Certainly there is a blistering and awful reality about a well-arranged

unreality.  It is quite within the possibilities that two or three nights

like that night of mine could drive a man to suicide.  He would refuse to

examine the figures; they would revolt him so, and he could go to his

death unaware that there was nothing serious about them.  I cannot get

that night out of my head, it was so vivid, so real, so ghastly.  In any

other year of these 33 the relief would have been simple: go where you

can cut your cloth to fit your income.  You can't do that when your wife

can't be moved, even from one room to the next.



Clam spells the trained nurse afternoons; I am allowed to see Mrs.

Clemens 20 minutes twice a day and write her two letters a day provided I

put no news in them.  No other person ever sees her except the physician

and now and then a nerve-specialist from New York.  She saw there was

something the matter that morning, but she got no facts out of me.  But

that is nothing--she hasn't had anything but lies for 8 months.  A fact

would give her a relapse.



The doctor and a specialist met in conspiracy five days ago, and in their

belief she will by and by come out of this as good as new, substantially.

They ordered her to Italy for next winter--which seems to indicate that

by autumn she will be able to undertake the voyage.  So Clara is writing

a Florence friend to take a look round among the villas for us in the

regions near that city.  It seems early to do this, but Joan Bergheim

thought it would be wise.



He and his wife lunched with us here yesterday.  They have been abroad in

Havana 4 months, and they sailed for England this morning.



I am enclosing an order for half of my (your) Founders shares.  You are

not to refuse them this time, though you have done it twice before.  They

are yours, not mine, and for your family's sake if not your own you

cannot in these cloudy days renounce this property which is so clearly

yours and theirs.  You have been generous long enough; be just, now to

yourself.  Mr. Rogers is off yachting for 5 or 6 weeks--I'll get them

when he returns.  The head of the house joins me in warmest greetings and

remembrances to you and Mrs. MacAlister.

                         Ever yours,

                                        Mark.



May 8.  Great Scott!  I never mailed this letter!  I addressed it, put

"Registered" on it--then left it lying unsealed on the arm of my chair,

and rushed up to my bed quaking with a chill.  I've never been out of the

bed since--oh, bronchitis, rheumatism, two sets of teeth aching, land,

I've had a dandy time for 4 weeks.  And to-day--great guns, one of the

very worst!  .  .  .



I'm devilish sorry, and I do apologise--for although I am not as slow as

you are about answering letters, as a rule, I see where I'm standing this

time.



Two weeks ago Jean was taken down again--this time with measles, and I

haven't been able to go to her and she hasn't been able to come to me.



But Mrs. Clemens is making nice progress, and can stand alone a moment or

two at a time.



Now I'll post this.

                                   MARK





     The two letters that follow, though written only a few days apart,

     were separated in their arrival by a period of seven years.  The

     second letter was, in some way, mislaid and not mailed; and it was

     not until after the writer of it was dead that it was found and

     forwarded.



     Mark Twain could never get up much enthusiasm for the writings of

     Scott.  His praise of Quentin Durward is about the only approval he

     ever accorded to the works of the great romanticist.





                    To Brander Matthews, in New York:



                                             NEW YORK CITY, May 4, '03.

DEAR BRANDER,--I haven't been out of my bed for four weeks, but--well, I

have been reading, a good deal, and it occurs to me to ask you to sit

down, some time or other when you have 8 or 9 months to spare, and jot me

down a certain few literary particulars for my help and elevation.  Your

time need not be thrown away, for at your further leisure you can make

Colombian lectures out of the results and do your students a good turn.



1.  Are there in Sir Walter's novels passages done in good English--

English which is neither slovenly or involved?



2.  Are there passages whose English is not poor and thin and

commonplace, but is of a quality above that?



3.  Are there passages which burn with real fire--not punk, fox-fire,

make believe?



4.  Has he heroes and heroines who are not cads and cadesses?



5.  Has he personages whose acts and talk correspond with their

characters as described by him?



6.  Has he heroes and heroines whom the reader admires, admires, and

knows why?



7.  Has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages that

are humorous?



8.  Does he ever chain the reader's interest, and make him reluctant to

lay the book down?



9.  Are there pages where he ceases from posing, ceases from admiring the

placid flood and flow of his own dilutions, ceases from being artificial,

and is for a time, long or short, recognizably sincere and in earnest?



10.  Did he know how to write English, and didn't do it because he didn't

want to?



11.  Did he use the right word only when he couldn't think of another

one, or did he run so much to wrong because he didn't know the right one

when he saw it?



13.  Can you read him?  and keep your respect for him?  Of course a

person could in his day--an era of sentimentality and sloppy romantics--

but land!  can a body do it today?



Brander, I lie here dying, slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter.

I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, and as far as chapter XIX of Guy

Mannering, and I can no longer hold my head up nor take my nourishment.

Lord, it's all so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy; and such wax

figures and skeletons and spectres.  Interest?  Why, it is impossible to

feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these milk-and-water humbugs.

And oh, the poverty of the invention!  Not poverty in inventing

situations, but poverty in furnishing reasons for them.  Sir Walter

usually gives himself away when he arranges for a situation--elaborates,

and elaborates, and elaborates, till if you live to get to it you don't

believe in it when it happens.



I can't find the rest of Rob Roy, I can't stand any more Mannering--I do

not know just what to do, but I will reflect, and not quit this great

study rashly.  He was great, in his day, and to his proper audience; and

so was God in Jewish times, for that matter, but why should either of

them rank high now?  And do they?--honest, now, do they?  Dam'd if I

believe it.



My, I wish I could see you and Leigh Hunt!

`                             Sincerely Yours

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.





                    To Brander Matthews, in New York:



                              RIVERDALE, May 8,'03 (Mailed June, 1910).

DEAR BRANDER,--I'm still in bed, but the days have lost their dulness

since I broke into Sir Walter and lost my temper.  I finished Guy

Mannering--that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows

jabbering around a single flesh-and-blood being--Dinmont; a book crazily

put together out of the very refuse of the romance-artist's stage

properties--finished it and took up Quentin Durward, and finished that.



It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living: it was like

withdrawing from the infant class in the College of journalism to sit

under the lectures in English literature in Columbia University.



I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward?

                                   Yrs ever

                                             MARK.





     In 1903, preparations were going on for a great world's fair, to be

     held in St. Louis, and among other features proposed was a World's

     Literary Convention, with a week to be set apart in honor of Mark

     Twain, and a special Mark Twain Day in it, on which the National

     Association would hold grand services in honor of the distinguished

     Missourian.  A letter asking his consent to the plan brought the

     following reply.





                      To T.  F.  Gatts, of Missouri:



                                                  NEW YORK, May 30, 1903.

DEAR MR. GATTS,--It is indeed a high compliment which you offer me in

naming an association after me and in proposing the setting apart of a

Mark Twain day at the great St. Louis fair, but such compliments are not

proper for the living; they are proper and safe for the dead only.  I

value the impulse which moves you to tender me these honors.  I value it

as highly as any one can, and am grateful for it, but I should stand in a

sort of terror of the honors themselves.  So long as we remain alive we

are not safe from doing things which, however righteously and honorably

intended, can wreck our repute and extinguish our friendships.



I hope that no society will be named for me while I am still alive, for I

might at some time or other do something which would cause its members to

regret having done me that honor.  After I shall have joined the dead I

shall follow the customs of those people and be guilty of no conduct that

can wound any friend; but until that time shall come I shall be a

doubtful quantity like the rest of our race.

                              Very truly yours,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     The National Mark Twain Association did not surrender easily.  Mr.

     Gatts wrote a second letter full of urgent appeal.  If Mark Twain

     was tempted, we get no hint of it in his answer.





                       To T. F. Gatts, of Missouri:



                                             NEW YORK, June 8, 1903.

DEAR MR. GATTS,--While I am deeply touched by the desire of my friends of

Hannibal to confer these great honors upon me, I must still forbear to

accept them.  Spontaneous and unpremeditated honors, like those which

came to me at Hannibal, Columbia, St. Louis and at the village stations

all down the line, are beyond all price and are a treasure for life in

the memory, for they are a free gift out of the heart and they come

without solicitations; but I am a Missourian and so I shrink from

distinctions which have to be arranged beforehand and with my privity,

for I then became a party to my own exalting.  I am humanly fond of

honors that happen but chary of those that come by canvass and intention.

With sincere thanks to you and your associates for this high compliment

which you have been minded to offer me, I am,

                                   Very truly yours,

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.





     We have seen in the letter to MacAlister that Mark Twain's wife had

     been ordered to Italy and plans were in progress for an

     establishment there.  By the end of June Mrs. Clemens was able to

     leave Riverdale, and she made the journey to Quarry Farm, Elmira,

     where they would remain until October, the month planned for their

     sailing.  The house in Hartford had been sold; and a house which,

     prior to Mrs. Clemens's breakdown they had bought near Tarrytown

     (expecting to settle permanently on the Hudson) had been let.  They

     were going to Europe for another indefinite period.



     At Quarry Farm Mrs. Clemens continued to improve, and Clemens, once

     more able to work, occupied the study which Mrs. Crane had built for

     him thirty years before, and where Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and the

     Wandering Prince had been called into being.





               To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford, Conn.:



                                             QUARRY FARM, ELMIRA, N. Y.,

                                                       July 21, '03.

DEAR JOE,--That love-letter delighted Livy beyond any like utterance

received by her these thirty years and more.  I was going to answer it

for her right away, and said so; but she reserved the privilege to

herself.  I judge she is accumulating Hot Stuff--as George Ade would say

.  .  .  .



Livy is coming along: eats well, sleeps some, is mostly very gay, not

very often depressed; spends all day on the porch, sleeps there a part of

the night, makes excursions in carriage and in wheel-chair; and, in the

matter of superintending everything and everybody, has resumed business

at the old stand.



Did you ever go house-hunting 3,000 miles away?  It costs three months of

writing and telegraphing to pull off a success.  We finished 3 or 4 days

ago, and took the Villa Papiniano (dam the name, I have to look at it a

minutes after writing it, and then am always in doubt) for a year by

cable.  Three miles outside of Florence, under Fiesole--a darling

location, and apparently a choice house, near Fiske.



There's 7 in our gang.  All women but me.  It means trunks and things.

But thanks be!  To-day (this is private) comes a most handsome voluntary

document with seals and escutcheons on it from the Italian Ambassador

(who is a stranger to me) commanding the Customs people to keep their

hands off the Clemens's things.  Now wasn't it lovely of him?  And wasn't

it lovely of me to let Livy take a pencil and edit my answer and knock a

good third of it out?



And that's a nice ship--the Irene!  new--swift--13,000 tons--rooms up in

the sky, open to sun and air--and all that.  I was desperately troubled

for Livy--about the down-cellar cells in the ancient "Latin."



The cubs are in Riverdale, yet; they come to us the first week in August.

               With lots and lots of love to you all,

                                        MARK.





     The arrangement for the Villa Papiniano was not completed, after

     all, and through a good friend, George Gregory Smith, a resident of

     Florence, the Villa Quarto, an ancient home of royalty, on the hills

     west of Florence, was engaged.  Smith wrote that it was a very

     beautiful place with a south-eastern exposure, looking out toward

     Valombrosa and the Chianti Hills.  It had extensive grounds and

     stables, and the annual rental for it all was two thousand dollars a

     year.  It seemed an ideal place, in prospect, and there was great

     hope that Mrs. Clemens would find her health once more in the

     Italian climate which she loved.



     Perhaps at this point, when Mark Twain is once more leaving America,

     we may offer two letters from strangers to him--letters of

     appreciation--such as he was constantly receiving from those among

     the thousands to whom he had given happiness.  The first is from

     Samuel Merwin, one day to become a popular novelist, then in the

     hour of his beginnings.





                    To Mark Twain, from Samuel Merwin:



                                                       PLAINFIELD, N. J.

                                                       August 4, 1903.

DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--For a good many years I have been struggling with the

temptation to write you and thank you for the work you have done; and to-

day I seem to be yielding.



During the past two years I have been reading through a group of writers

who seem to me to represent about the best we have--Sir Thomas Malory,

Spenser, Shakespeare, Boswell, Carlyle, Le Sage.  In thinking over one

and then another, and then all of them together, it was plain to see why

they were great men and writers: each brought to his time some new blood,

new ideas,--turned a new current into the stream.  I suppose there have

always been the careful, painstaking writers, the men who are always

taken so seriously by their fellow craftsmen.  It seems to be the

unconventional man who is so rare--I mean the honestly unconventional

man, who has to express himself in his own big way because the

conventional way isn't big enough, because ne needs room and freedom.



We have a group of the more or less conventional men now--men of dignity

and literary position.  But in spite of their influence and of all the

work they have done, there isn't one of them to whom one can give one's

self up without reservation, not one whose ideas seem based on the deep

foundation of all true philosophy,--except Mark Twain.



I hope this letter is not an impertinence.  I have just been turning

about, with my head full of Spenser and Shakespeare and "Gil Blas,"

looking for something in our own present day literature to which I could

surrender myself as to those five gripping old writings.  And nothing

could I find until I took up "Life on the Mississippi," and "Huckleberry

Finn," and, just now, the "Connecticut Yankee."  It isn't the first time

I have read any of these three, and it's because I know it won't be the

last, because these books are the only ones written in my lifetime that

claim my unreserved interest and admiration and, above all, my feelings,

that I've felt I had to write this letter.



I like to think that "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" will be looked

upon, fifty or a hundred years from now, as the picture of buoyant,

dramatic, human American life.  I feel, deep in my own heart, pretty sure

that they will be.  They won't be looked on then as the work of a

"humorist" any more than we think of Shakespeare as a humorist now.

I don't mean by this to set up a comparison between Mark Twain and

Shakespeare: I don't feel competent to do it; and I'm not at all sure

that it could be done until Mark Twain's work shall have its fair share

of historical perspective.  But Shakespeare was a humorist and so, thank

Heaven! is Mark Twain.  And Shakespeare plunged deep into the deep, sad

things of life; and so, in a different way (but in a way that has more

than once brought tears to my eyes) has Mark Twain.  But after all, it

isn't because of any resemblance for anything that was ever before

written that Mark Twain's books strike in so deep: it's rather because

they've brought something really new into our literature--new, yet old as

Adam and Eve and the Apple.  And this achievement, the achievement of

putting something into literature that was not there before, is, I should

think, the most that any writer can ever hope to do.  It is the one mark

of distinction between the "lonesome" little group of big men and the

vast herd of medium and small ones.  Anyhow, this much I am sure of--to

the young man who hopes, however feebly, to accomplish a little

something, someday, as a writer, the one inspiring example of our time is

Mark Twain.

                         Very truly yours,

                                        SAMUEL MERWIN.





Mark Twain once said he could live a month on a good compliment, and from

his reply, we may believe this one to belong in, that class.





                 To Samuel Merwin, in Plainfield, N. J.:



                                                       Aug.  16, '03.

DEAR MR. MERWIN,--What you have said has given me deep pleasure--indeed I

think no words could be said that could give me more.

                              Very sincerely yours,

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.





     The next "compliment" is from one who remains unknown, for she

     failed to sign her name in full.  But it is a lovely letter, and

     loses nothing by the fact that the writer of it was willing to

     remain in obscurity.





                   To Mark Twain, from Margaret M----:



                                                  PORTLAND, OREGON

                                                  Aug. 18, 1903.

MY DEAR, DEAR MARK TWAIN,--May a little girl write and tell you how

dearly she loves and admires your writings?  Well, I do and I want to

tell you your ownself.  Don't think me too impertinent for indeed I don't

mean to be that!  I have read everything of yours that I could get and

parts that touch me I have read over and over again.  They seem such dear

friends to me, so like real live human beings talking and laughing,

working and suffering too!  One cannot but feel that it is your own life

and experience that you have painted.  So do not wonder that you seem a

dear friend to me who has never even seen you.  I often think of you as

such in my own thoughts.  I wonder if you will laugh when I tell you I

have made a hero of you?  For when people seem very sordid and mean and

stupid (and it seems as if everybody was) then the thought will come like

a little crumb of comfort "well, Mark Twain isn't anyway."  And it does

really brighten me up.



You see I have gotten an idea that you are a great, bright spirit of

kindness and tenderness.  One who can twist everybody's-even your own-

faults and absurdities into hearty laughs.  Even the person mocked must

laugh!  Oh, Dear!  How often you have made me laugh!  And yet as often

you have struck something infinite away down deep in my heart so that I

want to cry while half laughing!



So this all means that I want to thank you and to tell you.  "God always

love Mark Twain!" is often my wish. I dearly love to read books, and I

never tire of reading yours; they always have a charm for me.  Good-bye,

I am afraid I have not expressed what I feel.  But at least I have tried.

                         Sincerely yours.

                                   MARGARET M.----





     Clemens and family left Elmira October the 5th for New York City.

     They remained at the Hotel Grosvenor until their sailing date,

     October 24th.  A few days earlier, Mr. Frank Doubleday sent a volume

     of Kipling's poems and de Blowitz's Memoirs for entertainment on the

     ship.  Mark Twain's acknowledgment follows.





                     To F. N. Doubleday, in New York:



                                                       THE GROSVENOR,

                                                       October 12, '03.

DEAR DOUBLEDAY,--The books came--ever so many thanks.  I have been

reading "The Bell Buoy" and "The Old Men" over and over again--my custom

with Kipling's work-and saving up the rest for other leisurely and

luxurious meals.  A bell-buoy is a deeply impressive fellow-being.  In

these many recent trips up and down the Sound in the Kanawha--

[Mr. Rogers's yacht.]--he has talked to me nightly, sometimes in his

pathetic and melancholy way, sometimes with his strenuous and urgent

note, and I got his meaning--now I have his words!  No one but Kipling

could do this strong and vivid thing.  Some day I hope to hear the poem

chanted or sung--with the bell-buoy breaking in, out of the distance.



"The Old Men," delicious, isn't it?  And so comically true.  I haven't

arrived there yet, but I suppose I am on the way....

                                   Yours ever,

                                             MARK.



P. S.  Your letter has arrived.  It makes me proud and glad--what Kipling

says.  I hope Fate will fetch him to Florence while we are there.

I would rather see him than any other man.



We've let the Tarrytown house for a year.  Man, you would never have

believed a person could let a house in these times.  That one's for sale,

the Hartford one is sold.  When we buy again may we--may I--be damned....



I've dipped into Blowitz and find him quaintly and curiously interesting.

I think he tells the straight truth, too.  I knew him a little, 23 years

ago.



     The appreciative word which Kipling had sent Doubleday was: "I love

     to think of the great and God-like Clemens.  He is the biggest man

     you have on your side of the water by a damn sight, and don't you

     forget it.  Cervantes was a relation of his."









XLIII



LETTERS OF 1904.  TO VARIOUS PERSONS.  LIFE IN VILLA QUARTO.  DEATH OF

MRS. CLEMENS.  THE RETURN TO AMERICA



Mrs. Clemens stood the voyage to Italy very well and, in due time, the

family were installed in the Villa Reale di Quarto, the picturesque old

Palace of Cosimo, a spacious, luxurious place, even if not entirely

cheerful or always comfortable during the changeable Tuscan winter.

Congratulated in a letter from MacAlister in being in the midst of

Florentine sunshine, he answered: "Florentine sunshine?  Bless you, there

isn't any.  We have heavy fogs every morning, and rain all day.  This

house is not merely large, it is vast--therefore I think it must always

lack the home feeling."



Neither was their landlady, the American wife of an Italian count, all

that could be desired.  From a letter to Twichell, however, we learn that

Mark Twain's work was progressing well.





                   To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                                  VILLA DI QUARTO,

                                             FLORENCE, Jan. 7, '04.

DEAR JOE,--.  .  .  I have had a handsome success, in one way, here.

I left New York under a sort of half promise to furnish to the Harper

magazines 30,000 words this year.  Magazining is difficult work because

every third page represents 2 pages that you have put in the fire;

(because you are nearly sure to start wrong twice) and so when you have

finished an article and are willing to let it go to print it represents

only 10 cents a word instead of 30.



But this time I had the curious (and unprecedented) luck to start right

in each case.  I turned out 37,000 words in 25 working days; and the

reason I think I started right every time is, that not only have I

approved and accepted the several articles, but the court of last resort

(Livy) has done the same.



On many of the between-days I did some work, but only of an idle and not

necessarily necessary sort, since it will not see print until I am dead.

I shall continue this (an hour per day) but the rest of the year I expect

to put in on a couple of long books (half-completed ones.) No more

magazine-work hanging over my head.



This secluded and silent solitude this clean, soft air and this

enchanting view of Florence, the great valley and the snow-mountains that

frame it are the right conditions for work.  They are a persistent

inspiration.  To-day is very lovely; when the afternoon arrives there

will be a new picture every hour till dark, and each of them divine--or

progressing from divine to diviner and divinest.  On this (second) floor

Clara's room commands the finest; she keeps a window ten feet high wide

open all the time and frames it in.  I go in from time to time, every day

and trade sass for a look.  The central detail is a distant and stately

snow-hump that rises above and behind blackforested hills, and its

sloping vast buttresses, velvety and sun-polished with purple shadows

between, make the sort of picture we knew that time we walked in

Switzerland in the days of our youth.



I wish I could show your letter to Livy--but she must wait a week or so

for it.  I think I told you she had a prostrating week of tonsilitis a

month ago; she has remained very feeble ever since, and confined to the

bed of course, but we allow ourselves to believe she will regain the lost

ground in another month.  Her physician is Professor Grocco--she could

not have a better.  And she has a very good trained nurse.



Love to all of you from all of us.  And to all of our dear Hartford

friends.

                    MARK



P. S.  3 days later.



Livy is as remarkable as ever.  The day I wrote you--that night, I mean--

she had a bitter attack of gout or rheumatism occupying the whole left

arm from shoulder to fingers, accompanied by fever.  The pains racked her

50 or 6o hours; they have departed, now--and already she is planning a

trip to Egypt next fall, and a winter's sojourn there!  This is life in

her yet.



You will be surprised that I was willing to do so much magazine-writing--

a thing I have always been chary about--but I had good reasons.  Our

expenses have been so prodigious for a year and a half, and are still so

prodigious, that Livy was worrying altogether too much about them, and

doing a very dangerous amount of lying awake on their account.  It was

necessary to stop that, and it is now stopped.



Yes, she is remarkable, Joe.  Her rheumatic attack set me to cursing and

swearing, without limit as to time or energy, but it merely concentrated

her patience and her unconquerable fortitude.  It is the difference

between us.  I can't count the different kinds of ailments which have

assaulted her in this fiendish year and a half--and I forgive none of

them--but here she comes up again as bright and fresh and enterprising as

ever, and goes to planning about Egypt, with a hope and a confidence

which are to me amazing.



Clara is calling for me--we have to go into town and pay calls.



                                   MARK.





     In Florence, that winter, Clemens began dictating to his secretary

     some autobiographical chapters.  This was the work which was "not to

     see print until I am dead."  He found it a pleasant, lazy occupation

     and wrote his delight in it to Howells in a letter which seems not

     to have survived.  In his reply, Howells wrote: "You do stir me

     mightily with the hope of dictating and I will try it when I get the

     chance.  But there is the tempermental difference.  You are dramatic

     and unconscious; you count the thing more than yourself; I am cursed

     with consciousness to the core, and can't say myself out; I am

     always saying myself in, and setting myself above all that I say, as

     of more worth.  Lately I have felt as if I were rotting with

     egotism.  I don't admire myself; I am sick of myself; but I can't

     think of anything else.  Here I am at it now, when I ought to be

     rejoicing with you at the blessing you have found ....  I'd like,

     immensely, to read your autobiography.  You always rather bewildered

     me by your veracity, and I fancy you may tell the truth about

     yourself.  But all of it?  The black truth which we all know of

     ourselves in our hearts, or only the whity-brown truth of the

     pericardium, or the nice, whitened truth of the shirtfront?  Even

     you won't tell the black heart's--truth.  The man who could do it

     would be famed to the last day the sun shone upon."



     We gather from Mark Twain's answer that he was not deceiving himself

     in the matter of his confessions.





                      To W. D. Howells, in New York:



                                             VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE,

                                                       March 14, '04.

DEAR HOWELLS,--Yes, I set up the safeguards, in the first day's

dictating; taking this position: that an autobiography is the truest of

all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the

truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with

hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is

there, between the lines, where the author is raking dust upon it, the

result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily

diligences.



The summer in England! you can't ask better luck than that.  Then you

will run over to Florence; we shall all be hungry to see you-all.  We are

hunting for another villa, (this one is plenty large enough but has no

room in it) but even if we find it I am afraid it will be months before

we can move Mrs. Clemens.  Of course it will.  But it comforts us to let

on that we think otherwise, and these pretensions help to keep hope alive

in her.

                    Good-bye, with love, Amen.

                              Yours ever

                                        MARK.





     News came of the death of Henry M.  Stanley, one of Mark Twain's

     oldest friends.  Clemens once said that he had met Stanley in St.

     Louis where he (Clemens) had delivered a lecture which Stanley had

     reported.  In the following letter he fixes the date of their

     meeting as early in 1867, which would be immediately after Mark

     Twain's return from California, and just prior to the Quaker City

     excursion--a fact which is interesting only because it places the

     two men together when each was at the very beginning of a great

     career.





                       To Lady Stanley, in England:



                                   VILLA DI QUARTO, FIRENZE, May 11, '04.

DEAR LADY STANLEY,--I have lost a dear and honored friend--how fast they

fall about me now, in my age!  The world has lost a tried and proved

hero.  And you--what have you lost?  It is beyond estimate--we who know

you, and what he was to you, know that.  How far he stretches across my

life!  I knew him when his work was all before him five years before the

great day that he wrote his name far-away up on the blue of the sky for

the world to see and applaud and remember; I have known him as friend and

intimate ever since.  It is 37 years.  I have known no other friend and

intimate so long, except John Hay--a friendship which dates from the same

year and the same half of it, the first half of 1867.  I grieve with you

and with your family, dear Lady Stanley, it is all I can do; but that I

do out of my heart.  It would be we, instead of I, if Mrs. Clemens knew,

but in all these 20 months that she has lain a prisoner in her bed we

have hidden from her all things that could sadden her.  Many a friend is

gone whom she still asks about and still thinks is living.



In deepest sympathy I beg the privilege of signing myself

                         Your friend,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





                  To  Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                        VILLA DI QUARTO, May 11, '04

DEAR JOE,--Yours has this moment arrived--just as I was finishing a note

to poor Lady Stanley.  I believe the last country-house visit we paid in

England was to Stanley's.  Lord, how my friends and acquaintances fall

about me now, in my gray-headed days!  Vereschagin, Mommsen, Dvorak,

Lenbach, Jokai--all so recently, and now Stanley.  I had known Stanley 37

years.  Goodness, who is it I haven't known!  As a rule the necrologies

find me personally interested--when they treat of old stagers.  Generally

when a man dies who is worth cabling, it happens that I have run across

him somewhere, some time or other.



Oh, say!  Down by the Laurentian Library there's a marble image that has

been sitting on its pedestal some 450 Years, if my dates are right--

Cosimo I.  I've seen the back of it many a time, but not the front; but

yesterday I twisted my head around after we had driven by, and the

profane exclamation burst from my mouth before I could think: "there's

Chauncey Depew!"



I mean to get a photo of it--and use it if it confirms yesterday's

conviction.  That's a very nice word from the Catholic Magazine and I am

glad you sent it.  I mean to show it to my priest--we are very fond of

him.  He is a stealing man, and is also learnedly scientific.  He

invented the thing which records the seismatic disturbances, for the

peoples of the earth.  And he's an astronomer and has an observatory of

his own.



Ah, many's the cry I have, over reflecting that maybe we could have had

Young Harmony for Livy, and didn't have wit enough to think of it.



Speaking of Livy reminds me that your inquiry arrives at a good time

(unberufen) It has been weeks (I don't know how many!) since we could

have said a hopeful word, but this morning Katy came the minute the day-

nurse came on watch and said words of a strange and long-forgotten sound:

"Mr. Clemens, Mrs. Clemens is really and truly better!--anybody can see

it; she sees it herself; and last night at 9 o'clock she said it."



There--it is heart-warming, it is splendid, it is sublime; let us enjoy

it, let us make the most of it today--and bet not a farthing on tomorrow.

The tomorrows have nothing for us.  Too many times they have breathed the

word of promise to our ear and broken it to our hope.  We take no

tomorrow's word any more.



You've done a wonder, Joe: you've written a letter that can be sent in to

Livy--that doesn't often happen, when either a friend or a stranger

writes.  You did whirl in a P. S. that wouldn't do, but you wrote it on a

margin of a page in such a way that I was able to clip off the margin

clear across both pages, and now Livy won't perceive that the sheet isn't

the same size it used to was.  It was about Aldrich's son, and I came

near forgetting to remove it.  It should have been written on a loose

strip and enclosed.  That son died on the 5th of March and Aldrich wrote

me on the night before that his minutes were numbered.  On the 18th Livy

asked after that patient, and I was prepared, and able to give her a

grateful surprise by telling her "the Aldriches are no longer uneasy

about him."



I do wish I could have been present and heard Charley Clark.  When he

can't light up a dark place nobody can.

                    With lots of love to you all.

                                                  MARK.





     Mrs. Clemens had her bad days and her good days-days when there

     seemed no ray of light, and others that seemed almost to promise

     recovery.  The foregoing letter to Twichell, and the one which

     follows, to Richard Watson Gilder, reflect the hope and fear that

     daily and hourly alternated at Villa Quarto





                  To Richard Watson Gilder, in New York:



                                        VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE,

                                             May 12, '04.

DEAR GILDER,--A friend of ours (the Baroness de Nolda) was here this

afternoon and wanted a note of introduction to the Century, for she has

something to sell to you in case you'll want to make her an offer after

seeing a sample of the goods.  I said "With pleasure: get the goods

ready, send the same to me, I will have Jean type-write them, then I will

mail them to the Century and tonight I will write the note to Mr. Gilder

and start it along.  Also write me a letter embodying what you have been

saying to me about the goods and your proposed plan of arranging and

explaining them, and I will forward that to Gilder too."



As to the Baroness.  She is a German; 30 years old; was married at 17; is

very pretty-indeed I might say very pretty; has a lot of sons (5) running

up from seven to 12 years old.  Her husband is a Russian.  They live half

the time in Russia and the other half in Florence, and supply population

alternately to the one country and then to the other.  Of course it is a

family that speaks languages.  This occurs at their table--I know it by

experience: It is Babel come again.  The other day, when no guests were

present to keep order, the tribes were all talking at once, and 6

languages were being traded in; at last the littlest boy lost his temper

and screamed out at the top of his voice, with angry sobs: "Mais,

vraiment, io non capisco gar nichts."



The Baroness is a little afraid of her English, therefore she will write

her remarks in French--I said there's a plenty of translators in New

York.  Examine her samples and drop her a line.



For two entire days, now, we have not been anxious about Mrs. Clemens

(unberufen).  After 20 months of bed-ridden solitude and bodily misery

she all of a sudden ceases to be a pallid shrunken shadow, and looks

bright and young and pretty.  She remains what she always was, the most

wonderful creature of fortitude, patience, endurance and recuperative

power that ever was.  But ah, dear, it won't last; this fiendish malady

will play new treacheries upon her, and I shall go back to my prayers

again--unutterable from any pulpit!

                    With love to you and yours,

                                             S. L. C.



May 13 10 A.M.  I have just paid one of my pair of permitted 2 minutes

visits per day to the sick room.  And found what I have learned to

expect--retrogression, and that pathetic something in the eye which

betrays the secret of a waning hope.





     The year of the World's Fair had come, and an invitation from Gov.

     Francis, of Missouri, came to Mark Twain in Florence, personally

     inviting him to attend the great celebration and carry off first

     prize.  We may believe that Clemens felt little in the spirit of

     humor, but to such an invitation he must send a cheerful, even if

     disappointing, answer.





                      To Gov. Francis, of Missouri:



                                             VILLA DI QUARTO, FIRENZE,

                                                       May 26, 1904.

DEAR GOVERNOR FRANCIS,--It has been a dear wish of mine to exhibit myself

at the Great Fair and get a prize, but circumstances beyond my control

have interfered, and I must remain in Florence.  Although I have never

taken prizes anywhere else I used to take them at school in Missouri half

a century ago, and I ought to be able to repeat, now, if I could have a

chance.  I used to get the medal for good spelling, every week, and I

could have had the medal for good conduct if there hadn't been so much

curruption in Missouri in those days; still, I got it several times by

trading medals and giving boot.  I am willing to give boot now, if--

however, those days are forever gone by in Missouri, and perhaps it is

better so.  Nothing ever stops the way it was in this changeable world.

Although I cannot be at the Fair, I am going to be represented there

anyway, by a portrait, by Professor Gelli.  You will find it excellent.

Good judges here say it is better than the original.  They say it has all

the merits of the original and keeps still, besides.  It sounds like

flattery, but it is just true.



I suppose you will get a prize, because you have created the most

prodigious and in all ways most wonderful Fair the planet has ever seen.

Very well, you have indeed earned it: and with it the gratitude of the

State and the nation.

                                   Sincerely yours,

                                                  MARK TWAIN



     It was only a few days after the foregoing was written that death

     entered Villa Quarto--unexpectedly at last--for with the first June

     days Mrs. Clemens had seemed really to improve.  It was on Sunday,

     June 5th, that the end came.  Clemens, with his daughter Jean, had

     returned from a long drive, during which they had visited a Villa

     with the thought of purchase.  On their return they were told that

     their patient had been better that afternoon than for three months.

     Yet it was only a few hours later that she left them, so suddenly

     and quietly that even those near her did not at first realize that

     she was gone.





                      To W. D. Howells, in New York.



                                        VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE,

                                             June 6, '94. [1904]

DEAR HOWELLS,--Last night at 9.20 I entered Mrs. Clemens's room to say

the usual goodnight--and she was dead--tho' no one knew it.  She had been

cheerfully talking, a moment before.  She was sitting up in bed--she had

not lain down for months--and Katie and the nurse were supporting her.

They supposed she had fainted, and they were holding the oxygen pipe to

her mouth, expecting to revive her.  I bent over her and looked in her

face, and I think I spoke--I was surprised and troubled that she did not

notice me.  Then we understood, and our hearts broke.  How poor we are

today!



But how thankful I am that her persecutions are ended.  I would not call

her back if I could.



Today, treasured in her worn old Testament, I found a dear and gentle

letter from you, dated Far Rockaway, Sept.  13, 1896, about our poor

Susy's death.  I am tired and old; I wish I were with Livy.



I send my love-and hers-to you all.

                                   S. L. C.





     In a letter to Twichell he wrote: "How sweet she was in death; how

     young, how beautiful, how like her dear, girlish self cf thirty

     years ago; not a gray hair showing."



     The family was now without plans for the future until they

     remembered the summer home of R. W. Gilder, at Tyringham,

     Massachusetts, and the possibility of finding lodgment for

     themselves in that secluded corner of New England.  Clemens wrote

     without delay, as follows:





                      To R. W. Gilder, in New York:



                                             VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE,

                                                  June 7, '04.

DEAR GILDER FAMILY,--I have been worrying and worrying to know what to

do: at last I went to the girls with an idea: to ask the Gilders to get

us shelter near their summer home.  It was the first time they have not

shaken their heads.  So to-morrow I will cable to you and shall hope to

be in time.



An, hour ago the best heart that ever beat for me and mine went silent

out of this house, and I am as one who wanders and has lost his way.  She

who is gone was our head, she was our hands.  We are now trying to make

plans--we: we who have never made a plan before, nor ever needed to.  If

she could speak to us she would make it all simple and easy with a word,

and our perplexities would vanish away.  If she had known she was near to

death she would have told us where to go and what to do: but she was not

suspecting, neither were we.  (She had been chatting cheerfully a moment

before, and in an instant she was gone from us and we did not know it.

We were not alarmed, we did not know anything had happened.  It was a

blessed death--she passed away without knowing it.) She was all our

riches and she is gone: she was our breath, she was our life and now we

are nothing.



We send you our love--and with it the love of you that was in her heart

when she died.

                         S.  L.  CLEMENS.





     Howells wrote his words of sympathy, adding: "The character which

     now remains a memory was one of the most perfect ever formed on the

     earth," and again, after having received Clemens's letter: "I cannot

     speak of your wife's having kept that letter of mine where she did.

     You know how it must humiliate a man in his unworthiness to have

     anything of his so consecrated.  She hallowed what she touched, far

     beyond priests."





                      To W. D. Howells, in New York:



                                        VILLA DI QUARTO, '04.

                                             June 12, 6 p. m.

DEAR HOWELLS,--We have to sit and hold our hands and wait--in the silence

and solitude of this prodigious house; wait until June 25, then we go to

Naples and sail in the Prince Oscar the 26th.  There is a ship 12 days

earlier (but we came in that one.) I see Clara twice a day--morning and

evening--greeting--nothing more is allowed.  She keeps her bed, and says

nothing.  She has not cried yet.  I wish she could cry.  It would break

Livy's heart to see Clara.  We excuse ourselves from all the friends that

call--though of course only intimates come.  Intimates--but they are not

the old old friends, the friends of the old, old times when we laughed.



Shall we ever laugh again?  If I could only see a dog that I knew in the

old times! and could put my arms around his neck and tell him all,

everything, and ease my heart.



Think-in 3 hours it will be a week!--and soon a month; and by and by a

year.  How fast our dead fly from us.



She loved you so, and was always as pleased as a child with any notice

you took of her.



Soon your wife will be with you, oh fortunate man!  And John, whom mine

was so fond of.  The sight of him was such a delight to her.  Lord, the

old friends, how dear they are.

                                   S. L. C.





                   To Rev. J. R. Twichell, in Hartford:



                                        VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE,

                                                  June 18, '04.

DEAR JOE,--It is 13 days.  I am bewildered and must remain so for a time

longer.  It was so sudden, so unexpected.  Imagine a man worth a hundred

millions who finds himself suddenly penniless and fifty million in debt

in his old age.



I was richer than any other person in the world, and now I am that pauper

without peer.  Some day I will tell you about it, not now.

                                                            MARK.





     A tide of condolence flowed in from all parts of the world.  It was

     impossible to answer all.  Only a few who had been their closest

     friends received a written line, but the little printed

     acknowledgment which was returned was no mere formality.  It was a

     heartfelt, personal word.



     They arrived in America in July, and were accompanied by Twichell to

     Elmira, and on the 14th Mrs. Clemens was laid to rest by the side of

     Susy and little Langdon.  R. W. Gilder had arranged for them to

     occupy, for the summer, a cottage on his place at Tyringham, in the

     Berkshire Hills.  By November they were at the Grosvenor, in New

     York, preparing to establish themselves in a house which they had

     taken on the corner of Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue--Number 21.





                     To F. N. Doubleday, in New York:



DEAR DOUBLEDAY,--I did not know you were going to England: I would have

freighted you with such messages of homage and affection to Kipling.

And I would have pressed his hand, through you, for his sympathy with

me in my crushing loss, as expressed by him in his letter to Gilder.

You know my feeling for Kipling and that it antedates that expression.



I was glad that the boys came here to invite me to the house-warming and

I think they understood why a man in the shadow of a calamity like mine

could not go.



It has taken three months to repair and renovate our house--corner of 9th

and 5th Avenue, but I shall be in it in io or 15 days hence.  Much of the

furniture went into it today (from Hartford).  We have not seen it for 13

years.  Katy Leary, our old housekeeper, who has been in our service more

than 24 years, cried when she told me about it to-day.  She said "I had

forgotten it was so beautiful, and it brought Mrs. Clemens right back to

me--in that old time when she was so young and lovely."



Jean and my secretary and the servants whom we brought from Italy because

Mrs. Clemens liked them so well, are still keeping house in the Berkshire

hills--and waiting.  Clara (nervously wrecked by her mother's death) is

in the hands of a specialist in 69th St., and I shall not be allowed to

have any communication with her--even telephone--for a year.  I am in

this comfortable little hotel, and still in bed--for I dasn't budge till

I'm safe from my pet devil, bronchitis.



Isn't it pathetic?  One hour and ten minutes before Mrs. Clemens died I

was saying to her "To-day, after five months search, I've found the villa

that will content you: to-morrow you will examine the plans and give it

your consent and I will buy it."  Her eyes danced with pleasure, for she

longed for a home of her own.  And there, on that morrow, she lay white

and cold.  And unresponsive to my reverent caresses--a new thing to me

and a new thing to her; that had not happened before in five and thirty

years.



I am coming to see you and Mrs. Doubleday by and bye.  She loved and

honored Mrs. Doubleday and her work.

                                   Always yours,

                                                  MARK.





     It was a presidential year and the air was thick with politics.

     Mark Twain was no longer actively interested in the political

     situation; he was only disheartened by the hollowness and pretense

     of office-seeking, and the methods of office-seekers in general.

     Grieved that Twichell should still pin his faith to any party when

     all parties were so obviously venal and time-serving, he wrote in

     outspoken and rather somber protest.





                  To Rev. J.  H.  Twichell, in Hartford:



                                             THE GROSVENOR, Nov. 4, '04.

Oh, dear!  get out of that sewer--party politics--dear Joe.  At least

with your mouth.  We hail only two men who could make speeches for their

parties and preserve their honor and their dignity.  One of them is dead.

Possibly there were four.  I am sorry for John Hay; sorry and ashamed.

And yet I know he couldn't help it.  He wears the collar, and he had to

pay the penalty.  Certainly he had no more desire to stand up before a

mob of confiding human incapables and debauch them than you had.

Certainly he took no more real pleasure in distorting history, concealing

facts, propagating immoralities, and appealing to the sordid side of

human nature than did you; but he was his party's property, and he had to

climb away down and do it.



It is interesting, wonderfully interesting--the miracles which party-

politics can do with a man's mental and moral make-up.  Look at McKinley,

Roosevelt, and yourself: in private life spotless in character;

honorable, honest, just, humane, generous; scorning trickeries,

treacheries, suppressions of the truth, mistranslations of the meanings

of facts, the filching of credit earned by another, the condoning of

crime, the glorifying of base acts: in public political life the reverse

of all this.



McKinley was a silverite--you concealed it.  Roosevelt was a silverite--

you concealed it.  Parker was a silverite--you publish it.  Along with a

shudder and a warning: "He was unsafe then.  Is he any safer now?"



Joe, even I could be guilty of such a thing as that--if I were in party-

politics; I really believe it.



Mr. Cleveland gave the country the gold standard; by implication you

credit the matter to the Republican party.



By implication you prove the whole annual pension-scoop, concealing the

fact that the bulk of the money goes to people who in no way deserve it.

You imply that all the batteners upon this bribery-fund are Republicans.

An indiscreet confession, since about half of them must have been

Democrats before they were bought.



You as good as praise Order 78.  It is true you do not shout, and you do

not linger, you only whisper and skip--still, what little you do in the

matter is complimentary to the crime.



It means, if it means anything, that our outlying properties will all be

given up by the Democrats, and our flag hauled down.  All of them?  Not

only the properties stolen by Mr. McKinley and Mr. Roosevelt, but the

properties honestly acquired?  Joe, did you believe that hardy statement

when you made it?  Yet you made it, and there it stands in permanent

print.  Now what moral law would suffer if we should give up the stolen

ones?  But--



"You know our standard-bearer.  He will maintain all that we have

gained"--by whatever process.  Land, I believe you!



By George, Joe, you are as handy at the game as if you had been in

training for it all your life.  Your campaign Address is built from the

ground up upon the oldest and best models.  There isn't a paragraph in it

whose facts or morals will wash--not even a sentence, I believe.



But you will soon be out of this.  You didn't want to do it--that is

sufficiently apparent, thanks be!--but you couldn't well get out of it.

In a few days you will be out of it, and then you can fumigate yourself

and take up your legitimate work again and resume your clean and

wholesome private character once more and be happy--and useful.



I know I ought to hand you some guff, now, as propitiation and apology

for these reproaches, but on the whole I believe I won't.



I have inquired, and find that Mitsikuri does not arrive here until to-

morrow night.  I shall watch out, and telephone again, for I greatly want

to see him.

                    Always Yours,

                                   MARK.



P. S.--Nov, 4.  I wish I could learn to remember that it is unjust and

dishonorable to put blame upon the human race for any of its acts.  For

it did not make itself, it did not make its nature, it is merely a

machine, it is moved wholly by outside influences, it has no hand in

creating the outside influences nor in choosing which of them it will

welcome or reject, its performance is wholly automatic, it has no more

mastership nor authority over its mind than it has over its stomach,

which receives material from the outside and does as it pleases with it,

indifferent to it's proprietor's suggestions, even, let alone his

commands; wherefore, whatever the machine does--so called crimes and

infamies included--is the personal act of its Maker, and He, solely, is

responsible.  I wish I could learn to pity the human race instead of

censuring it and laughing at it; and I could, if the outside influences

of old habit were not so strong upon my machine.  It vexes me to catch

myself praising the clean private citizen Roosevelt, and blaming the

soiled President Roosevelt, when I know that neither praise nor blame is

due to him for any thought or word or deed of his, he being merely a

helpless and irresponsible coffee-mill ground by the hand of God.



     Through a misunderstanding, Clemens, something more than a year

     earlier, had severed his connection with the Players' Club, of which

     he had been one of the charter members.  Now, upon his return to New

     York, a number of his friends joined in an invitation to him to

     return.  It was not exactly a letter they sent, but a bit of an old

     Scotch song--



                            "To Mark Twain

                                from

                             The Clansmen.

                         Will ye no come back again,

                         Will ye no come back again?

                         Better lo'ed ye canna be.

                         Will ye no come back again?"



     Those who signed it were David Monroe, of the North American Review;

     Robert Reid, the painter, and about thirty others of the Round Table

     Group, so called because its members were accustomed to lunching at

     a large round table in a bay window of the Player dining-room.  Mark

     Twain's reply was prompt and heartfelt.  He wrote:





                      To Robt.  Reid and the Others:



WELL-BELOVED,--Surely those lovely verses went to Prince Charley's heart,

if he had one, and certainly they have gone to mine.  I shall be glad and

proud to come back again after such a moving and beautiful compliment as

this from comrades whom I have loved so long.  I hope you can poll the

necessary vote; I know you will try, at any rate.  It will be many months

before I can foregather with you, for this black border is not

perfunctory, not a convention; it symbolizes the loss of one whose memory

is the only thing I worship.



It is not necessary for me to thank you--and words could not deliver what

I feel, anyway.  I will put the contents of your envelope in the small

casket where I keep the things which have become sacred to me.



                                                  S.  L.  C.





A year later, Mark Twain did "come back again," as an honorary life

member, and was given a dinner of welcome by those who had signed the

lines urging his return.









XLIV



LETTERS OF 1905.  TO TWICHELL, MR. DUNEKA AND OTHERS.

POLITICS AND HUMANITY.  A SUMMER AT DUBLIN.  MARK TWAIN AT 70



     In 1884 Mark Twain had abandoned the Republican Party to vote for

     Cleveland.  He believed the party had become corrupt, and to his

     last day it was hard for him to see anything good in Republican

     policies or performance.  He was a personal friend of Thedore

     Roosevelt's but, as we have seen in a former letter, Roosevelt the

     politician rarely found favor in his eyes.  With or without

     justification, most of the President's political acts invited his

     caustic sarcasm and unsparing condemnation.  Another letter to

     Twichell of this time affords a fair example.





                  To Rev. J.  H.  Twichell, in Hartford:



                                                       Feb. 16, '05.

DEAR JOE,--I knew I had in me somewhere a definite feeling about the

President if I could only find the words to define it with.  Here they

are, to a hair--from Leonard Jerome: "For twenty years I have loved

Roosevelt the man and hated Roosevelt the statesman and politician."



It's mighty good.  Every time, in 25 years, that I have met Roosevelt the

man, a wave of welcome has streaked through me with the hand-grip;

but whenever (as a rule) I meet Roosevelt the statesman and politician,

I find him destitute of morals and not respectworthy.  It is plain that

where his political self and his party self are concerned he has nothing

resembling a conscience; that under those inspirations he is naively

indifferent to the restraints of duty and even unaware of them; ready to

kick the Constitution into the back yard whenever it gets in the way; and

whenever he smells a vote, not only willing but eager to buy it, give

extravagant rates for it and pay the bill not out of his own pocket or

the party's, but out of the nation's, by cold pillage.  As per Order 78

and the appropriation of the Indian trust funds.



But Roosevelt is excusable--I recognize it and (ought to) concede it.

We are all insane, each in his own way, and with insanity goes

irresponsibility.  Theodore the man is sane; in fairness we ought to keep

in mind that Theodore, as statesman arid politician, is insane and

irresponsible.



Do not throw these enlightenments aside, but study them, let them raise

you to higher planes and make you better.  You taught me in my callow

days, let me pay back the debt now in my old age out of a thesaurus with

wisdom smelted from the golden ores of experience.

                         Ever yours for sweetness and light

                                                            MARK.





     The next letter to Twichell takes up politics and humanity in

     general, in a manner complimentary to neither.  Mark Twain was never

     really a pessimist, but he had pessimistic intervals, such as come

     to most of us in life's later years, and at such times he let

     himself go without stint concerning "the damned human race," as he

     called it, usually with a manifest sense of indignation that he

     should be a member of it.  In much of his later writing--

     A Mysterious Stranger for example--he said his say with but small

     restraint, and certainly in his purely intellectual moments he was

     likely to be a pessimist of the most extreme type, capably damning

     the race and the inventor of it.  Yet, at heart, no man loved his

     kind more genuinely, or with deeper compassion, than Mark Twain,

     perhaps for its very weaknesses.  It was only that he had intervals

     --frequent intervals, and rather long ones--when he did not admire

     it, and was still more doubtful as to the ways of providence.





                  To Rev. J.  H.  Twichell, in Hartford:



                                                       March 14, '05.

DEAR JOE,--I have a Puddn'head maxim:



"When a man is a pessimist before 48 he knows too much; if he is an

optimist after it, he knows too little."



It is with contentment, therefore, that I reflect that I am better and

wiser than you.  Joe, you seem to be dealing in "bulks," now; the "bulk"

of the farmers and U. S.  Senators are "honest."  As regards purchase and

sale with money?  Who doubts it?  Is that the only measure of honesty?

Aren't there a dozen kinds of honesty which can't be measured by the

money-standard?  Treason is treason--and there's more than one form of

it; the money-form is but one of them.  When a person is disloyal to any

confessed duty, he is plainly and simply dishonest, and knows it; knows

it, and is privately troubled about it and not proud of himself.  Judged

by this standard--and who will challenge the validity of it?--there isn't

an honest man in Connecticut, nor in the Senate, nor anywhere else.  I do

not even except myself, this time.



Am I finding fault with you and the rest of the populace?  No--I assure

you I am not.  For I know the human race's limitations, and this makes it

my duty--my pleasant duty--to be fair to it.  Each person in it is honest

in one or several ways, but no member of it is honest in all the ways

required by--by what?  By his own standard.  Outside of that, as I look

at it, there is no obligation upon him.



Am I honest?  I give you my word of honor (private) I am not.  For seven

years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I ought to

publish.  I hold it a duty to publish it.  There are other difficult

duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one.  Yes, even I

am dishonest.  Not in many ways, but in some.  Forty-one, I think it is.

We are certainly all honest in one or several ways--every man in the

world--though I have reason to think I am the only one whose black-list

runs so light.  Sometimes I feel lonely enough in this lofty solitude.



Yes, oh, yes, I am not overlooking the "steady progress from age to age

of the coming of the kingdom of God and righteousness."  "From age to

age"--yes, it describes that giddy gait.  I (and the rocks) will not live

to see it arrive, but that is all right--it will arrive, it surely will.

But you ought not to be always ironically apologizing for the Deity.  If

that thing is going to arrive, it is inferable that He wants it to

arrive; and so it is not quite kind of you, and it hurts me, to see you

flinging sarcasms at the gait of it.  And yet it would not be fair in me

not to admit that the sarcasms are deserved.  When the Deity wants a

thing, and after working at it for "ages and ages" can't show even a

shade of progress toward its accomplishment, we--well, we don't laugh,

but it is only because we dasn't.  The source of "righteousness"--is in

the heart?  Yes.  And engineered and directed by the brain?  Yes.  Well,

history and tradition testify that the heart is just about what it was in

the beginning; it has undergone no shade of change.  Its good and evil

impulses and their consequences are the same today that they were in Old

Bible times, in Egyptian times, in Greek times, in Middle Age times, in

Twentieth Century times.  There has been no change.



Meantime, the brain has undergone no change.  It is what it always was.

There are a few good brains and a multitude of poor ones.  It was so in

Old Bible times and in all other times--Greek, Roman, Middle Ages and

Twentieth Century.  Among the savages--all the savages--the average brain

is as competent as the average brain here or elsewhere.  I will prove it

to you, some time, if you like.  And there are great brains among them,

too.  I will prove that also, if you like.



Well, the 19th century made progress--the first progress after "ages and

ages"--colossal progress.  In what?  Materialities.  Prodigious

acquisitions were made in things which add to the comfort of many and

make life harder for as many more.  But the addition to righteousness?

Is that discoverable?  I think not.  The materialities were not invented

in the interest of righteousness; that there is more righteousness in the

world because of them than there, was before, is hardly demonstrable, I

think.  In Europe and America, there is a vast change (due to them) in

ideals--do you admire it?  All Europe and all America, are feverishly

scrambling for money.  Money is the supreme ideal--all others take tenth

place with the great bulk of the nations named.  Money-lust has always

existed, but not in the history of the world was it ever a craze, a

madness, until your time and mine.  This lust has rotted these nations;

it has made them hard, sordid, ungentle, dishonest, oppressive.



Did England rise against the infamy of the Boer war?  No--rose in favor

of it.  Did America rise against the infamy of the Phillipine war?  No--

rose in favor of it.  Did Russia rise against the infamy of the present

war?  No--sat still and said nothing.  Has the Kingdom of God advanced in

Russia since the beginning of time?



Or in Europe and America, considering the vast backward step of the

money-lust?  Or anywhere else?  If there has been any progress toward

righteousness since the early days of Creation--which, in my ineradicable

honesty, I am obliged to doubt--I think we must confine it to ten per

cent of the populations of Christendom, (but leaving, Russia, Spain and

South America entirely out.) This gives us 320,000,000 to draw the ten

per cent from.  That is to say, 32,000,000 have advanced toward

righteousness and the Kingdom of God since the "ages and ages" have been

flying along, the Deity sitting up there admiring.  Well, you see it

leaves 1,200,000,000 out of the race.  They stand just where they have

always stood; there has been no change.



N. B.  No charge for these informations.  Do come down soon, Joe.

                         With love,

                                        MARK.





     St. Clair McKelway, of The Brooklyn Eagle, narrowly escaped injuries

     in a railway accident, and received the following.  Clemens and

     McKelway were old friends.





                   To St. Clair McKelway, in Brooklyn:



                                        21 FIFTH AVE.  Sunday Morning.

                                                  April 30, 1905.

DEAR McKELWAY, Your innumerable friends are grateful, most grateful.



As I understand the telegrams, the engineer of your train had never seen

a locomotive before.  Very well, then, I am once more glad that there is

an Ever-watchful Providence to foresee possible results and send Ogdens

and McIntyres along to save our friends.



The Government's Official report, showing that our railways killed twelve

hundred persons last year and injured sixty thousand convinces me that

under present conditions one Providence is not enough to properly and

efficiently take care of our railroad business.  But it is

characteristically American--always trying to get along short-handed and

save wages.



I am helping your family congratulate themselves, and am your friend as

always.

                    S. L. CLEMENS.





     Clemens did not spend any more summers at Quarry Farm.  All its

     associations were beautiful and tender, but they could only sadden

     him.  The life there had been as of another world, sunlit, idyllic,

     now forever vanished.  For the summer of 1905 he leased the Copley

     Green house at Dublin, New Hampshire, where there was a Boston

     colony of writing and artistic folk, including many of his long-time

     friends.  Among them was Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who

     wrote a hearty letter of welcome when he heard the news.  Clemens

     replied in kind.





              To Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in Boston:



                              21 FIFTH AVE.  Sunday, March 26, z9o.5.

DEAR COL. HIGGINSON,--I early learned that you would be my neighbor in

the Summer and I rejoiced, recognizing in you and your family a large

asset.  I hope for frequent intercourse between the two households.  I

shall have my youngest daughter with me.  The other one will go from the

rest-cure in this city to the rest-cure in Norfolk Conn and we shall not

see her before autumn.  We have not seen her since the middle of October.



Jean (the youngest daughter) went to Dublin and saw the house and came

back charmed with it.  I know the Thayers of old--manifestly there is no

lack of attractions up there.  Mrs. Thayer and I were shipmates in a wild

excursion perilously near 40 years ago.



You say you "send with this" the story.  Then it should be here but it

isn't, when I send a thing with another thing, the other thing goes but

the thing doesn't, I find it later--still on the premises.  Will you look

it up now and send it?



Aldrich was here half an hour ago, like a breeze from over the fields,

with the fragrance still upon his spirit.  I am tired of waiting for that

man to get old.

                         Sincerely yours,

                                             S. L. C.





     Mark Twain was in his seventieth year, old neither in mind nor body,

     but willing to take life more quietly, to refrain from travel and

     gay events.  A sort of pioneers' reunion was to be held on the

     Pacific Coast, and a letter from Robert Fulton, of Reno, Nevada,

     invited Clemens to attend.  He did not go, but he sent a letter that

     we may believe was the next best thing to those who heard it read.





                    To Robert Fulton, in Reno, Nevada:



                                                  IN THE MOUNTAINS,

                                                       May 24, 1905.

DEAR MR. FULTON,--I remember, as if it were yesterday, that when I

disembarked from the overland stage in front of the Ormsby in Carson City

in August, 1861, I was not expecting to be asked to come again.  I was

tired, discouraged, white with alkali dust, and did not know anybody; and

if you had said then, "Cheer up, desolate stranger, don't be down-

hearted--pass on, and come again in 1905," you cannot think how grateful

I would have been and how gladly I would have closed the contract.

Although I was not expecting to be invited, I was watching out for it,

and was hurt and disappointed when you started to ask me and changed it

to, "How soon are you going away?"



But you have made it all right, now, the wound is closed.  And so I thank

you sincerely for the invitation; and with you, all Reno, and if I were a

few years younger I would accept it, and promptly.  I would go.  I would

let somebody else do the oration, but, as for me, I would talk--

just talk.  I would renew my youth; and talk--and talk--and talk

--and have the time of my life!  I would march the unforgotten and

unforgettable antiques by, and name their names, and give them reverent

Hailand-farewell as they passed: Goodman, McCarthy, Gillis, Curry,

Baldwin, Winters, Howard, Nye, Stewart; Neely Johnson, Hal Clayton,

North, Root,--and my brother, upon whom be peace!--and then the

desperadoes, who made life a joy and the "Slaughter-house" a precious

possession: Sam Brown, Farmer Pete, Bill Mayfield, Six-fingered Jake,

Jack Williams and the rest of the crimson discipleship--and so on and so

on.  Believe me, I would start a resurrection it would do you more good

to look at than the next one will, if you go on the way you are doing

now.



Those were the days! those old ones.  They will come no more.  Youth will

come no more.  They were so full to the brim with the wine of life; there

have been no others like them.  It chokes me up to think of them.  Would

you like me to come out there and cry?  It would not beseem my white

head.



Good-bye.  I drink to you all.  Have a good time--and take an old man's

blessing.

                    MARK TWAIN.





     A few days later he was writing to H. H. Bancroft, of San Francisco,

     who had invited him for a visit in event of his coming to the Coast.

     Henry James had just been there for a week and it was hoped that

     Howells would soon follow.





                   To H. H. Bancroft, in San Francisco:



                                                  UP IN NEW HAMPSHIRE,

                                                       May 27, 1905.

DEAR MR. BANCROFT,--I thank you sincerely for the tempting hospitalities

which you offer me, but I have to deny myself, for my wandering days are

over, and it is my desire and purpose to sit by the fire the rest of my

remnant of life and indulge myself with the pleasure and repose of work

--work uninterrupted and unmarred by duties or excursions.



A man who like me, is going to strike 70 on the 30th of next November has

no business to be flitting around the way Howells does--that shameless

old fictitious butter fly.  (But if he comes, don't tell him I said it,

for it would hurt him and I wouldn't brush a flake of powder from his

wing for anything.  I only say it in envy of his indestructible youth,

anyway.  Howells will be 88 in October.) With thanks again,

                              Sincerely yours,

                                        S. L. C.





     Clemens found that the air of the New Hampshire hills agreed with

     him and stimulated him to work.  He began an entirely new version of

     The Mysterious Stranger, of which he already had a bulky and nearly

     finished manuscript, written in Vienna.  He wrote several hundred

     pages of an extravaganza entitled, Three Thousand Years Among the

     Microbes, and then, having got his superabundant vitality reduced

     (it was likely to expend itself in these weird mental exploits),

     he settled down one day and wrote that really tender and beautiful

     idyl, Eve's Diary, which he had begun, or at least planned, the

     previous summer at Tyringham.  In a letter to Mr. Frederick A.

     Duneka, general manager of Harper & Brothers, he tells something of

     the manner of the story; also his revised opinion of Adam's Diary,

     written in '93, and originally published as a souvenir of Niagara

     Falls.





                  To Frederick A.  Duneka, in New York:



                                                  DUBLIN, July 16, '05.

DEAR MR. DUNEKA,--I wrote Eve's Diary, she using Adam's Diary as her

(unwitting and unconscious) text, of course, since to use any other text

would have been an imbecility--then I took Adam's Diary and read it.  It

turned my stomach.  It was not literature; yet it had been literature

once--before I sold it to be degraded to an advertisement of the Buffalo

Fair.  I was going to write and ask you to melt the plates and put it out

of print.



But this morning I examined it without temper, and saw that if I

abolished the advertisement it would be literature again.



So I have done it.  I have struck out 700 words and inserted 5 MS pages

of new matter (650 words), and now Adam's Diary is dam good--sixty times

as good as it ever was before.



I believe it is as good as Eve's Diary now--no, it's not quite that good,

I guess, but it is good enough to go in the same cover with Eve's.  I'm

sure of that.



I hate to have the old Adam go out any more--don't put it on the presses

again, let's put the new one in place of it; and next Xmas, let us bind

Adam and Eve in one cover.  They score points against each other--so, if

not bound together, some of the points would not be perceived.....



P. S.  Please send another Adam's Diary, so that I can make 2 revised

copies.  Eve's Diary is Eve's love-Story, but we will not name it that.

                                   Yrs ever,

                                                  MARK.





     The peace-making at Portsmouth between Japan and Russia was not

     satisfactory to Mark Twain, who had fondly hoped there would be no

     peace until, as he said, "Russian liberty was safe.  One more battle

     would have abolished the waiting chains of millions upon millions of

     unborn Russians and I wish it could have been fought."  He set down

     an expression of his feelings for the Associated Press, and it

     invited many letters.  Charles Francis Adams wrote, "It attracted my

     attention because it so exactly expresses the views I have myself

     all along entertained."



     Clemens was invited by Colonel George Harvey to dine with the

     Russian emissaries, Baron Rosen and Sergius Witte.  He declined, but

     his telegram so pleased Witte that he asked permission to publish

     it, and announced that he would show it to the Czar.





              Telegram.  To Col. George Harvey, in New York:



TO COLONEL HARVEY,--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be more than

glad of this opportunity to meet the illustrious magicians who came here

equipped with nothing but a pen, and with it have divided the honors of

the war with the sword.  It is fair to presume that in thirty centuries

history will not get done admiring these men who attempted what the world

regarded as impossible and achieved it.



     Witte would not have cared to show the Czar the telegram in its

     original form, which follows.





     Telegram (unsent).  To Col. George Harvey, in New York:



TO COLONEL HARVEY,--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be more than

glad of this opportunity to meet those illustrious magicians who with the

pen have annulled, obliterated, and abolished every high achievement of

the Japanese sword and turned the tragedy of a tremendous war into a gay

and blithesome comedy.  If I may, let me in all respect and honor salute

them as my fellow-humorists, I taking third place, as becomes one who was

not born to modesty, but by diligence and hard work is acquiring it.

                                                  MARK.



     Nor still another unsent form, perhaps more characteristic than

     either of the foregoing.



         Telegram (unsent).  To Col. George Harvey, in New York:



DEAR COLONEL,--No, this is a love-feast; when you call a lodge of sorrow

send for me.

                                                  MARK.





                       To Mrs. Crane, Quarry Farm:



                                             DUBLIN, Sept. 24, '05.

Susy dear, I have had a lovely dream.  Livy, dressed in black, was

sitting up in my bed (here) at my right and looking as young and sweet as

she used to do when she was in health.  She said: "what is the name of

your sweet sister?"  I said, "Pamela."  "Oh, yes, that is it, I thought

it was--" (naming a name which has escaped me) "Won't you write it down for

me?" I reached eagerly for a pen and pad--laid my hands upon both--then

said to myself, "It is only a dream," and turned back sorrowfully and

there she was, still.  The conviction flamed through me that our lamented

disaster was a dream, and this a reality.  I said, "How blessed it is,

how blessed it is, it was all a dream, only a dream!"  She only smiled

and did not ask what dream I meant, which surprised me.  She leaned her

head against mine and I kept saying, "I was perfectly sure it was a

dream, I never would have believed it wasn't."



I think she said several things, but if so they are gone from my memory.

I woke and did not know I had been dreaming.  She was gone.  I wondered

how she could go without my knowing it, but I did not spend any thought

upon that, I was too busy thinking of how vivid and real was the dream

that we had lost her and how unspeakably blessed it was to find that it

was not true and that she was still ours and with us.

                                                       S. L. C.





     One day that summer Mark Twain received a letter from the actress,

     Minnie Maddern Fiske, asking him to write something that would aid

     her in her crusade against bull-fighting.  The idea appealed to him;

     he replied at once.





                              To Mrs. Fiske:



DEAR MRS. FISKE,--I shall certainly write the story.  But I may not get

it to suit me, in which case it will go in the fire.  Later I will try

again--and yet again--and again.  I am used to this.  It has taken me

twelve years to write a short story--the shortest one I ever wrote, I

think.--[Probably "The Death Disk."]--So do not be discouraged; I will

stick to this one in the same way.  Sincerely yours,

                         S. L. CLEMENS.





     He did not delay in his beginning, and a few weeks later was sending

     word to his publisher about it.





                   To Frederick A. Duneka, in New York:



                                                  Oct.  2, '05.

DEAR MR. DUNEKA,--I have just finished a short story which I "greatly

admire," and so will you--"A Horse's Tale"--about 15,000 words, at a

rough guess.  It has good fun in it, and several characters, and is

lively.  I shall finish revising it in a few days or more, then Jean will

type it.



Don't you think you can get it into the Jan. and Feb. numbers and issue

it as a dollar booklet just after the middle of Jan. when you issue the

Feb. number?



It ought to be ably illustrated.



Why not sell simultaneous rights, for this once, to the Ladies' Home

Journal or Collier's, or both, and recoup yourself?--for I would like to

get it to classes that can't afford Harper's.  Although it doesn't

preach, there's a sermon concealed in it.

                              Yr sincerely,

                                             MARK.





     Five days later he added some rather interesting facts concerning

     the new story.





                      To F. A. Duneka, in New York:



                                        Oct.  7, 1906. ['05]

DEAR MR.  DUNEKA,--.....  I've made a poor guess as to number of words.

I think there must be 20,000.  My usual page of MS. contains about 130

words; but when I am deeply interested in my work and dead to everything

else, my hand-writing shrinks and shrinks until there's a great deal more

than 130 on a page--oh, yes, a deal more.  Well, I discover, this

morning, that this tale is written in that small hand.



This strong interest is natural, for the heroine is my daughter, Susy,

whom we lost.  It was not intentional--it was a good while before I found

it out.



So I am sending you her picture to use--and to reproduce with

photographic exactness the unsurpassable expression and all.  May you

find an artist who has lost an idol!



Take as good care of the picture as you can and restore it to me when I

come.



I hope you will illustrate this tale considerably.  Not humorous

pictures.  No.  When they are good (or bad) one's humor gets no chance to

play surprises on the reader.  A humorous subject illustrated seriously

is all right, but a humorous artist is no fit person for such work.  You

see, the humorous writer pretends to absolute seriousness (when he knows

his trade) then for an artist--to step in and give his calculated gravity

all away with a funny picture--oh, my land!  It gives me the dry gripes

just to think of it.  It would be just about up to the average comic

artist's intellectual level to make a funny picture of the horse kicking

the lungs out of a trader.  Hang it, the remark is funny--because the

horse is not aware of it but the fact is not humorous, it is tragic and

it is no subject for a humorous picture.



Could I be allowed to sit in judgment upon the pictures before they are

accepted--at least those in which Cathy may figure?



This is not essential.  It is but a suggestion, and it is hereby

withdrawn, if it would be troublesome or cause delay.



I hope you will reproduce the cat-pile, full page.  And save the photo

for me in as good condition as possible.  When Susy and Clara were little

tots those cats had their profoundest worship, and there is no duplicate

of this picture.  These cats all had thundering names, or inappropriate

ones--furnished by the children with my help.  One was named Buffalo

Bill.



Are you interested in coincidences?



After discovering, about the middle of the book, that Cathy was Susy

Clemens, I put her picture with my MS., to be reproduced.  After the book

was finished it was discovered that Susy had a dim model of Soldier Boy

in her arms; I had forgotten all about that toy.



Then I examined the cat-picture and laid it with the MS. for

introduction; but it was not until yesterday that I remembered that one

of the cats was named Buffalo Bill.

                              Sincerely yours,

                                                  MARK.





     The reference in this letter to shrinkage of his hand-writing with

     the increasing intensity of his interest, and the consequent

     addition of the number of words to the page, recalls another fact,

     noted by Mr. Duneka, viz.: that because of his terse Anglo-Saxon

     diction, Mark Twain could put more words on a magazine page than any

     other writer.  It is hardly necessary to add that he got more force

     into what he put on the page for the same reason.



     There was always a run of reporters at Mark Twain's New York home.

     His opinion was sought for on every matter of public interest, and

     whatever happened to him in particular was considered good for at

     least half a column of copy, with his name as a catch-line at the

     top.  When it was learned that he was to spend the summer in New

     Hampshire, the reporters had all wanted to find out about it.  Now

     that the summer was ending, they began to want to know how he had

     liked it, what work he had done and what were his plans for another

     year.  As they frequently applied to his publishers for these

     details it was finally suggested to him that he write a letter

     furnishing the required information.  His reply, handed to Mr.

     Duneka, who was visiting him at the moment, is full of interest.





                          Mem.  for Mr. Duneka:



                                                  DUBLIN, Oct. 9, 1905.

.....As to the other matters, here are the details.



Yes, I have tried a number of summer homes, here and in Europe together.



Each of these homes had charms of its own; charms and delights of its

own, and some of them--even in Europe had comforts.  Several of them had

conveniences, too.  They all had a "view."



It is my conviction that there should always be some water in a view--

a lake or a river, but not the ocean, if you are down on its level.  I

think that when you are down on its level it seldom inflames you with an

ecstasy which you could not get out of a sand-flat.  It is like being on

board ship, over again; indeed it is worse than that, for there's three

months of it.  On board ship one tires of the aspects in a couple of

days, and quits looking.  The same vast circle of heaving humps is spread

around you all the time, with you in the centre of it and never gaining

an inch on the horizon, so far as you can see; for variety, a flight of

flying-fish, mornings; a flock of porpoises throwing summersaults

afternoons; a remote whale spouting, Sundays; occasional phosphorescent

effects, nights; every other day a streak of black smoke trailing along

under the horizon; on the one single red letter day, the illustrious

iceberg.  I have seen that iceberg thirty-four times in thirty-seven

voyages; it is always the same shape, it is always the same size, it

always throws up the same old flash when the sun strikes it; you may set

it on any New York door-step of a June morning and light it up with a

mirror-flash; and I will engage to recognize it.  It is artificial, and

it is provided and anchored out by the steamer companies.  I used to like

the sea, but I was young then, and could easily get excited over any kind

of monotony, and keep it up till the monotonies ran out, if it was a

fortnight.



Last January, when we were beginning to inquire about a home for this

summer, I remembered that Abbott Thayer had said, three years before,

that the New Hampshire highlands was a good place.  He was right--it was

a good place.  Any place that is good for an artist in paint is good for

an artist in morals and ink.  Brush is here, too; so is Col. T. W.

Higginson; so is Raphael Pumpelly; so is Mr. Secretary Hitchcock; so is

Henderson; so is Learned; so is Summer; so is Franklin MacVeigh; so is

Joseph L. Smith; so is Henry Copley Greene, when I am not occupying his

house, which I am doing this season.  Paint, literature, science,

statesmanship, history, professorship, law, morals,--these are all

represented here, yet crime is substantially unknown.



The summer homes of these refugees are sprinkled, a mile apart, among the

forest-clad hills, with access to each other by firm smooth country roads

which are so embowered in dense foliage that it is always twilight in

there, and comfortable.  The forests are spider-webbed with these good

roads, they go everywhere; but for the help of the guide-boards, the

stranger would not arrive anywhere.



The village--Dublin--is bunched together in its own place, but a good

telephone service makes its markets handy to all those outliars.  I have

spelt it that way to be witty.  The village executes orders on, the

Boston plan--promptness and courtesy.



The summer homes are high-perched, as a rule, and have contenting

outlooks.  The house we occupy has one.  Monadnock, a soaring double

hump, rises into the sky at its left elbow--that is to say, it is close

at hand.  From the base of the long slant of the mountain the valley

spreads away to the circling frame of the hills, and beyond the frame the

billowy sweep of remote great ranges rises to view and flows, fold upon

fold, wave upon wave, soft and blue and unwordly, to the horizon fifty

miles away.  In these October days Monadnock and the valley and its

framing hills make an inspiring picture to look at, for they are

sumptuously splashed and mottled and be-torched from sky-line to sky-line

with the richest dyes the autumn can furnish; and when they lie flaming

in the full drench of the mid-afternoon sun, the sight affects the

spectator physically, it stirs his blood like military music.



These summer homes are commodious, well built, and well furnished--facts

which sufficiently indicate that the owners built them to live in

themselves.  They have furnaces and wood fireplaces, and the rest of the

comforts and conveniences of a city home, and can be comfortably occupied

all the year round.



We cannot have this house next season, but I have secured Mrs. Upton's

house which is over in the law and science quarter, two or three miles

from here, and about the same distance from the art, literary, and

scholastic groups.  The science and law quarter has needed improving,

this good while.



The nearest railway-station is distant something like an hour's drive; it

is three hours from there to Boston, over a branch line.  You can go to

New York in six hours per branch lines if you change cars every time you

think of it, but it is better to go to Boston and stop over and take the

trunk line next day, then you do not get lost.



It is claimed that the atmosphere of the New Hampshire highlands is

exceptionally bracing and stimulating, and a fine aid to hard and

continuous work.  It is a just claim, I think.  I came in May, and

wrought 35 successive days without a break.  It is possible that I could

not have done it elsewhere.  I do not know; I have not had any

disposition to try it, before.  I think I got the disposition out of the

atmosphere, this time.  I feel quite sure, in fact, that that is where it

came from.



I am ashamed to confess what an intolerable pile of manuscript I ground

out in the 35 days, therefore I will keep the number of words to myself.

I wrote the first half of a long tale--"The Adventures of a Microbe" and

put it away for a finish next summer, and started another long tale--"The

Mysterious Stranger;" I wrote the first half of it and put it with the

other for a finish next summer.  I stopped, then.  I was not tired, but I

had no books on hand that needed finishing this year except one that was

seven years old.  After a little I took that one up and finished it.  Not

for publication, but to have it ready for revision next summer.



Since I stopped work I have had a two months' holiday.  The summer has

been my working time for 35 years; to have a holiday in it (in America)

is new for me.  I have not broken it, except to write "Eve's Diary" and

"A Horse's Tale"--short things occupying the mill 12 days.



This year our summer is 6 months long and ends with November and the

flight home to New York, but next year we hope and expect to stretch it

another month and end it the first of December.



                             [No signature.]





     The fact that he was a persistent smoker was widely known, and many

     friends and admirers of Mark Twain sent him cigars, most of which he

     could not use, because they were too good.  He did not care for

     Havana cigars, but smoked the fragrant, inexpensive domestic tobacco

     with plenty of "pep" in it, as we say today.  Now and then he had an

     opportunity to head off some liberal friend, who wrote asking

     permission to contribute to his cigar collection, as instance the

     following.





                To Rev. L. M. Powers, in Haverhill, Mass.:



                                                  Nov. 9, 1905.

DEAR MR. POWERS,--I should accept your hospitable offer at once but for

the fact I couldn't do it and remain honest.  That is to say if I allowed

you to send me what you believe to be good cigars it would distinctly

mean that I meant to smoke them, whereas I should do nothing of the kind.

I know a good cigar better than you do, for I have had 60 years

experience.



No, that is not what I mean; I mean I know a bad cigar better than

anybody else; I judge by the price only; if it costs above 5 cents I know

it to be either foreign or half-foreign, and unsmokeable.  By me.  I have

many boxes of Havana cigars, of all prices from 20 cts apiece up to 1.66

apiece; I bought none of them, they were all presents, they are an

accumulation of several years.  I have never smoked one of them and never

shall, I work them off on the visitor.  You shall have a chance when you

come.



Pessimists are born not made; optimists are born not made; but no man is

born either pessimist wholly or optimist wholly, perhaps; he is

pessimistic along certain lines and optimistic along certain others.

That is my case.

                    Sincerely yours,

                              S. L. CLEMENS.





     In spite of all the fine photographs that were made of him, there

     recurred constantly among those sent him to be autographed a print

     of one which, years before, Sarony had made and placed on public

     sale.  It was a good photograph, mechanically and even artistically,

     but it did not please Mark Twain.  Whenever he saw it he recalled

     Sarony with bitterness and severity.  Once he received an inquiry

     concerning it, and thus feelingly expressed himself.





                         To Mr. Row (no address):



                                             21 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK,

                                                  November 14, 1905.

DEAR MR. ROW,--That alleged portrait has a private history.  Sarony was

as much of an enthusiast about wild animals as he was about photography;

and when Du Chaillu brought the first Gorilla to this country in 1819 he

came to me in a fever of excitement and asked me if my father was of

record and authentic.  I said he was; then Sarony, without any abatement

of his excitement asked if my grandfather also was of record and

authentic.  I said he was.  Then Sarony, with still rising excitement and

with joy added to it, said he had found my great grandfather in the

person of the gorilla, and had recognized him at once by his resemblance

to me.  I was deeply hurt but did not reveal this, because I knew Saxony

meant no offense for the gorilla had not done him any harm, and he was

not a man who would say an unkind thing about a gorilla wantonly.  I went

with him to inspect the ancestor, and examined him from several points of

view, without being able to detect anything more than a passing

resemblance.  "Wait," said Sarony with confidence, "let me show you."

He borrowed my overcoat--and put it on the gorilla.  The result was

surprising.  I saw that the gorilla while not looking distinctly like me

was exactly what my great grand father would have looked like if I had

had one.  Sarong photographed the creature in that overcoat, and spread

the picture about the world.  It has remained spread about the world ever

since.  It turns up every week in some newspaper somewhere or other.  It

is not my favorite, but to my exasperation it is everybody else's.

Do you think you could get it suppressed for me?  I will pay the limit.

                              Sincerely yours,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     The year 1905 closed triumphantly for Mark Twain.  The great

     "Seventieth Birthday" dinner planned by Colonel George Harvey is

     remembered to-day as the most notable festival occasion in New York

     literary history.  Other dinners and ovations followed.  At seventy

     he had returned to the world, more beloved, more honored than ever

     before.









XLV



LETTERS, 1906, TO VARIOUS PERSONS.  THE FAREWELL LECTURE.  A SECOND

SUMMER IN DUBLIN.  BILLIARDS AND COPYRIGHT



     MARK TWAIN at "Pier Seventy," as he called it, paused to look

     backward and to record some memoirs of his long, eventful past.  The

     Autobiography dictations begun in Florence were resumed, and daily

     he traveled back, recalling long-ago scenes and all-but-forgotten

     places.  He was not without reminders.  Now and again there came

     some message that brought back the old days--the Tom Sawyer and Huck

     Finn days--or the romance of the river that he never recalled other

     than with tenderness and a tone of regret that it was gone.  An

     invitation to the golden wedding of two ancient friends moved and

     saddened him, and his answer to it conveys about all the story of

     life.





                         To Mr. and Mrs. Gordon:



                                                       21 FIFTH AVENUE,

                                                       Jan. 24, '06.

DEAR GORDONS,--I have just received your golden-wedding "At Home" and am

trying to adjust my focus to it and realize how much it means.  It is

inconceivable!  With a simple sweep it carries me back over a stretch of

time measurable only in astronomical terms and geological periods.

It brings before me Mrs. Gordon, young, round-limbed, handsome; and with

her the Youngbloods and their two babies, and Laura Wright, that

unspoiled little maid, that fresh flower of the woods and the prairies.

Forty-eight years ago!



Life was a fairy-tale, then, it is a tragedy now.  When I was 43 and John

Hay 41 he said life was a tragedy after 40, and I disputed it.  Three

years ago he asked me to testify again: I counted my graves, and there

was nothing for me to say.



I am old; I recognize it but I don't realize it.  I wonder if a person

ever really ceases to feel young--I mean, for a whole day at a time.  My

love to you both, and to all of us that are left.

                                                  MARK.





     Though he used very little liquor of any kind, it was Mark Twain's

     custom to keep a bottle of Scotch whiskey with his collection of

     pipes and cigars and tobacco on a little table by his bed-side.

     During restless nights he found a small quantity of it conducive to

     sleep.  Andrew Carnegie, learning of this custom, made it his

     business to supply Scotch of his own special importation.  The first

     case came, direct from Scotland.  When it arrived Clemens sent this

     characteristic acknowledgment.





                     To Andrew Carnegie, in Scotland:



                                        21 FIFTH AVE.  Feb. 10, '06.

DEAR ST. ANDREW,--The whisky arrived in due course from over the water;

last week one bottle of it was extracted from the wood and inserted into

me, on the instalment plan, with this result: that I believe it to be the

best, smoothest whisky now on the planet.  Thanks, oh, thanks: I have

discarded Peruna.



Hoping that you three are well and happy and will be coming back before

the winter sets in.

                         I am,

                              Sincerely yours,

                                        MARK.





     It must have been a small bottle to be consumed by him in a week, or

     perhaps he had able assistance.  The next brief line refers to the

     manuscript of his article, "Saint Joan of Arc," presented to the

     museum at Rouen.





                           To Edward E. Clarke:



                                             21 FIFTH AVE., Feb., 1906.

DEAR SIR,--I have found the original manuscript and with great pleasure I

transmit it herewith, also a printed copy.



It is a matter of great pride to me to have any word of mine concerning

the world's supremest heroine honored by a place in that Museum.

                         Sincerely yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     The series of letters which follows was prepared by Mark Twain and

     General Fred Grant, mainly with a view of advertising the lecture

     that Clemens had agreed to deliver for the benefit of the Robert

     Fulton Monument Association.  It was, in fact, to be Mark Twain's

     "farewell lecture," and the association had really proposed to pay

     him a thousand dollars for it.  The exchange of these letters,

     however, was never made outside of Mark Twain's bed-room.  Propped

     against the pillows, pen in hand, with General Grant beside him,

     they arranged the series with the idea of publication.  Later the

     plan was discarded, so that this pleasant foolery appears here for

     the first, time.





                         PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL



                             (Correspondence)



                                 Telegram



                                             Army Headquarters (date)

MARK TWAIN, New York,--Would you consider a proposal to talk at Carnegie

Hall for the benefit of the Robert Fulton Monument Association, of which

you are a Vice President, for a fee of a thousand dollars?

                                        F. D. GRANT,

                                             President,

                                   Fulton Monument Association.





                           Telegraphic Answer:



MAJOR-GENERAL F. D. GRANT, Army Headquarters,--I shall be glad to do it,

but I must stipulate that you keep the thousand dollars and add it to the

Monument fund as my contribution.

                                        CLEMENS.





Letters:



DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--You have the thanks of the Association, and the terms

shall be as you say.  But why give all of it?  Why not reserve a portion

--why should you do this work wholly without compensation?

                                   Truly yours

                                        FRED. D. GRANT.





MAJOR GENERAL GRANT, Army Headquarters.



DEAR GENERAL,--Because I stopped talking for pay a good many years ago,

and I could not resume the habit now without a great deal of personal

discomfort.  I love to hear myself talk, because I get so much

instruction and moral upheaval out of it, but I lose the bulk of this joy

when I charge for it.  Let the terms stand.



General, if I have your approval, I wish to use this good occasion to

retire permanently from the platform.

                                   Truly yours

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.





DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--Certainly.  But as an old friend, permit me to say,

Don't do that.  Why should you?--you are not old yet.

                              Yours truly,

                                        FRED D. GRANT.





DEAR GENERAL,--I mean the pay-platform; I shan't retire from the gratis-

platform until after I am dead and courtesy requires me to keep still and

not disturb the others.



What shall I talk about?  My idea is this: to instruct the audience about

Robert Fulton, and.....  Tell me-was that his real name, or was it his

nom de plume?  However, never mind, it is not important--I can skip it,

and the house will think I knew all about it, but forgot.  Could you find

out for me if he was one of the Signers of the Declaration, and which

one?  But if it is any trouble, let it alone, I can skip it.  Was he out

with Paul Jones?  Will you ask Horace Porter?  And ask him if he brought

both of them home.  These will be very interesting facts, if they can be

established.  But never mind, don't trouble Porter, I can establish them

anyway.  The way I look at it, they are historical gems--gems of the very

first water.



Well, that is my idea, as I have said: first, excite the audience with a

spoonful of information about Fulton, then quiet down with a barrel of

illustration drawn by memory from my books--and if you don't say anything

the house will think they never heard of it before, because people don't

really read your books, they only say they do, to keep you from feeling

bad.  Next, excite the house with another spoonful of Fultonian fact,

then tranquilize them again with another barrel of illustration.  And so

on and so on, all through the evening; and if you are discreet and don't

tell them the illustrations don't illustrate anything, they won't notice

it and I will send them home as well-informed about Robert Fulton as I am

myself.  Don't be afraid; I know all about audiences, they believe

everything you say, except when you are telling the truth.

                    Truly yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.



P.S.  Mark all the advertisements "Private and Confidential," otherwise

the people will not read them.

                                   M. T.





DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--How long shall you talk?  I ask in order that we may

be able to say when carriages may be called.

                    Very Truly yours,

                              HUGH GORDON MILLER,

                                        Secretary.





DEAR MR.  MILLER,--I cannot say for sure.  It is my custom to keep on

talking till I get the audience cowed.  Sometimes it takes an hour and

fifteen minutes, sometimes I can do it in an hour.

                              Sincerely yours,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.



Mem.  My charge is 2 boxes free.  Not the choicest--sell the choicest,

and give me any 6-seat boxes you please.

                                        S. L. C.



I want Fred Grant (in uniform) on the stage; also the rest of the

officials of the Association; also other distinguished people--all the

attractions we can get.  Also, a seat for Mr. Albert Bigelow Paine, who

may be useful to me if he is near me and on the front.

                                        S. L. C.





     The seat chosen for the writer of these notes was to be at the front

     of the stage in order that the lecturer might lean over now and then

     and pretend to be asking information concerning Fulton.  I was not

     entirely happy in the thought of this showy honor, and breathed more

     freely when this plan was abandoned and the part assigned to General

     Grant.



     The lecture was given in Carnegie Hall, which had been gayly

     decorated for the occasion.  The house was more than filled, and a

     great sum of money was realized for the fund.



     It was that spring that Gorky and Tchaikowski, the Russian

     revolutionists, came to America hoping to arouse interest in their

     cause.  The idea of the overthrow of the Russian dynasty was

     pleasant to Mark Twain.  Few things would have given him greater

     comfort than to have known that a little more than ten years would

     see the downfall of Russian imperialism.  The letter which follows

     was a reply to an invitation from Tchaikowski, urging him to speak

     at one of the meetings.





DEAR MR. TCHAIKOWSKI,--I thank you for the honor of the invitation, but

I am not able to accept it, because on Thursday evening I shall be

presiding at a meeting whose object is to find remunerative work for

certain classes of our blind who would gladly support themselves if they

had the opportunity.



My sympathies are with the Russian revolution, of course.  It goes

without saying.  I hope it will succeed, and now that I have talked with

you I take heart to believe it will.  Government by falsified promises;

by lies, by treacheries, and by the butcher-knife for the aggrandizement

of a single family of drones and its idle and vicious kin has been borne

quite long enough in Russia, I should think, and it is to be hoped that

the roused nation, now rising in its strength, will presently put an end

to it and set up the republic in its place.  Some of us, even of the

white headed, may live to see the blessed day when Czars and Grand Dukes

will be as scarce there as I trust they are in heaven.

                         Most sincerely yours,

                                                  MARK TWAIN.





     There came another summer at Dublin, New Hampshire, this time in the

     fine Upton residence on the other slope of Monadnock, a place of

     equally beautiful surroundings, and an even more extended view.

     Clemens was at this time working steadily on his so-called

     Autobiography, which was not that, in fact, but a series of

     remarkable chapters, reminiscent, reflective, commentative, written

     without any particular sequence as to time or subject-matter.  He

     dictated these chapters to a stenographer, usually in the open air,

     sitting in a comfortable rocker or pacing up and down the long

     veranda that faced a vast expanse of wooded slope and lake and

     distant blue mountains.  It became one of the happiest occupations

     of his later years.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Maine:



                                   DUBLIN, Sunday, June 17, '06.

DEAR HOWELLS,--..... The dictating goes lazily and pleasantly on.  With

intervals.  I find that I have been at it, off and on, nearly two hours a

day for 155 days, since Jan. 9.  To be exact I've dictated 75 hours in 80

days and loafed 75 days.  I've added 60,000 words in the month that I've

been here; which indicates that I've dictated during 20 days of that

time--40 hours, at an average of 1,500 words an hour.  It's a plenty, and

I am satisfied.



There's a good deal of "fat" I've dictated, (from Jan. 9) 210,000 words,

and the "fat" adds about 50,000 more.



The "fat" is old pigeon-holed things, of the years gone by, which I or

editors didn't das't to print.  For instance, I am dumping in the little

old book which I read to you in Hartford about 30 years ago and which you

said "publish--and ask Dean Stanley to furnish an introduction; he'll do

it."  ("Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.") It reads quite to suit

me, without altering a word, now that it isn't to see print until I am

dead.



To-morrow I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs and assigns

burnt alive if they venture to print it this side of 2006 A.D.--which I

judge they won't.  There'll be lots of such chapters if I live 3 or 4

years longer.  The edition of A.D. 2006 will make a stir when it comes

out.  I shall be hovering around taking notice, along with other dead

pals.  You are invited.

                                   MARK.



     His tendency to estimate the measure of the work he was doing, and

     had completed, must have clung to him from his old printer days.



     The chapter which was to get his heirs and assigns burned alive was

     on the orthodox God, and there was more than one such chapter.  In

     the next letter he refers to two exquisite poems by Howells, and the

     writer of these notes recalls his wonderful reading of them aloud.

     'In Our Town' was a collection of short stories then recently issued

     by William Allen White.  Howells had recommended them.





                       To W. D. Howells, in Maine:



                                             21 FIFTH AVE., Tuesday Eve.

DEAR HOWELLS,--It is lovely of you to say those beautiful things--I don't

know how to thank you enough.  But I love you, that I know.



I read "After the Wedding" aloud and we felt all the pain of it and the

truth.  It was very moving and very beautiful--would have been over-

comingly moving, at times, but for the haltings and pauses compelled by

the difficulties of MS--these were a protection, in that they furnished

me time to brace up my voice, and get a new start.  Jean wanted to keep

the MS for another reading-aloud, and for "keeps," too, I suspected, but

I said it would be safest to write you about it.



I like "In Our Town," particularly that Colonel, of the Lookout Mountain

Oration, and very particularly pages 212-16.  I wrote and told White so.



After "After the Wedding" I read "The Mother" aloud and sounded its human

deeps with your deep-sea lead.  I had not read it before, since it was

first published.



I have been dictating some fearful things, for 4 successive mornings--for

no eye but yours to see until I have been dead a century--if then.  But

I got them out of my system, where they had been festering for years--and

that was the main thing.  I feel better, now.



I came down today on business--from house to house in 12 1/2 hours, and

expected to arrive dead, but am neither tired nor sleepy.

                         Yours as always

                                             MARK.





                To William Allen White, in Emporia, Kans.:



                                             DUBLIN, NEW HAMPSHIRE,

                                                  June 24, 1906.

DEAR MR. WHITE,--Howells told me that "In Our Town" was a charming book,

and indeed it is.  All of it is delightful when read one's self, parts of

it can score finely when subjected to the most exacting of tests--the

reading aloud.  Pages 197 and 216 are of that grade.  I have tried them a

couple of times on the family, and pages 212 and 216 are qualified to

fetch any house of any country, caste or color, endowed with those riches

which are denied to no nation on the planet--humor and feeling.



Talk again--the country is listening.

                              Sincerely yours,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     Witter Bynner, the poet, was one of the editors of McClure's

     Magazine at this time, but was trying to muster the courage to give

     up routine work for verse-making and the possibility of poverty.

     Clemens was fond of Bynner and believed in his work.  He did not

     advise him, however, to break away entirely from a salaried

     position--at least not immediately; but one day Bynner did so, and

     reported the step he had taken, with some doubt as to the answer he

     would receive.





                      To Witter Bynner, in New York:



                                                  DUBLIN, Oct. 5, 1906.

DEAR POET,--You have certainly done right for several good reasons; at

least, of them, I can name two:



1.  With your reputation you can have your freedom and yet earn your

living.   2. if you fall short of succeeding to your wish, your

reputation will provide you another job.  And so in high approval I

suppress the scolding and give you the saintly and fatherly pat instead.

                                                  MARK TWAIN.





     On another occasion, when Bynner had written a poem to Clara

     Clemens, her father pretended great indignation that the first poem

     written by Bynner to any one in his household should not be to him,

     and threatened revenge.  At dinner shortly after he produced from

     his pocket a slip of paper on which he had set down what he said was

     "his only poem."  He read the lines that follow:



               "Of all sad words of tongue or pen,

               The saddest are these: It might have been.

               Ah, say not so! as life grows longer, leaner, thinner,

               We recognize, O God, it might have Bynner!"



     He returned to New York in October and soon after was presented by

     Mrs. H. H. Rogers with a handsome billiard-table.



     He had a passion for the game, but had played comparatively little

     since the old Hartford days of fifteen years before, when a group of

     his friends used to assemble on Friday nights in the room at the top

     of the house for long, strenuous games and much hilarity.  Now the

     old fever all came back; the fascinations of the game superseded

     even his interest in the daily dictations.





                    To Mrs. H. H. Rogers, in New York:



                                   21 FIFTH AVENUE, Monday, Nov., 1906.

DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--The billiard table is better than the doctors.  It is

driving out the heartburn in a most promising way.  I have a billiardist

on the premises, and I walk not less than ten miles every day with the

cue in my hand.  And the walking is not the whole of the exercise, nor

the most health-giving part of it, I think.  Through the multitude of the

positions and attitudes it brings into play every muscle in the body and

exercises them all.



The games begin right after luncheon, daily, and continue until midnight,

with 2 hours' intermission for dinner and music.  And so it is 9 hours'

exercise per day, and 10 or 12 on Sunday.  Yesterday and last night it

was 12--and I slept until 8 this morning without waking.  The billiard

table, as a Sabbath breaker can beat any coal-breaker in Pennsylvania,

and give it 30 in, the game.  If Mr. Rogers will take to daily billiards

he can do without doctors and the massageur, I think.



We are really going to build a house on my farm, an hour and a half from

New York.  It is decided.  It is to be built by contract, and is to come

within $25,000.

                    With love and many thanks.

                                             S. L. C.



P.S.  Clara is in the sanitarium--till January 28 when her western

concert tour will begin.  She is getting to be a mighty competent singer.

You must know Clara better; she is one of the very finest and completest

and most satisfactory characters I have ever met.  Others knew it before,

but I have always been busy with other matters.





     The "billiardist on the premises" was the writer of these notes,

     who, earlier in the year, had become his biographer, and, in the

     course of time, his daily companion and friend.  The farm mentioned

     was one which he had bought at Redding, Connecticut, where, later,

     he built the house known as "Stormfield."



     Henry Mills Alden, for nearly forty years editor of Harper's

     Magazine, arrived at his seventieth birthday on November 11th that

     year, and Harper & Brothers had arranged to give him a great dinner

     in the offices of Franklin Square, where, for half a century, he had

     been an active force.  Mark Twain, threatened with a cold, and

     knowing the dinner would be strenuous, did not feel able to attend,

     so wrote a letter which, if found suitable, could be read at the

     gathering.





                           To Mr. Henry Alden:



ALDEN,--dear and ancient friend--it is a solemn moment.  You have now

reached the age of discretion.  You have been a long time arriving.  Many

years ago you docked me on an article because the subject was too old;

later, you docked me on an article because the subject was too new; later

still, you docked me on an article because the subject was betwixt and

between.  Once, when I wrote a Letter to Queen Victoria, you did not put

it in the respectable part of the Magazine, but interred it in that

potter's field, the Editor's Drawer.  As a result, she never answered it.

How often we recall, with regret, that Napoleon once shot at a magazine

editor and missed him and killed a publisher.  But we remember, with

charity, that his intentions were good.



You will reform, now, Alden.  You will cease from these economies, and

you will be discharged.  But in your retirement you will carry with you

the admiration and earnest good wishes of the oppressed and toiling

scribes.  This will be better than bread.  Let this console you when the

bread fails.



You will carry with you another thing, too--the affection of the scribes;

for they all love you in spite of your crimes.  For you bear a kind heart

in your breast, and the sweet and winning spirit that charms away all

hostilities and animosities, and makes of your enemy your friend and

keeps him so.  You have reigned over us thirty-six years, and, please

God, you shall reign another thirty-six--"and peace to Mahmoud on his

golden throne!"

                    Always yours

                                   MARK





     A copyright bill was coming up in Washington and a delegation of

     authors went down to work for it.  Clemens was not the head of the

     delegation, but he was the most prominent member of it, as well as

     the most useful.  He invited the writer to accompany him, and

     elsewhere I have told in detail the story of that excursion,--[See

     Mark Twain; A Biography, chap.  ccli,]--which need be but briefly

     touched upon here.



     His work was mainly done aside from that of the delegation.  They

     had him scheduled for a speech, however, which he made without notes

     and with scarcely any preparation.  Meantime he had applied to

     Speaker Cannon for permission to allow him on the floor of the

     House, where he could buttonhole the Congressmen.  He was not

     eligible to the floor without having received the thanks of

     Congress, hence the following letter:





             To Hon. Joseph Cannon, House of Representatives:



                                                       Dec. 7, 1906.

DEAR UNCLE JOSEPH,--Please get me the thanks of the Congress--not next

week but right away.  It is very necessary.  Do accomplish this for your

affectionate old friend right away; by persuasion, if you can, by

violence if you must, for it is imperatively necessary that I get on the

floor for two or three hours and talk to the members, man by man, in

behalf of the support, encouragement and protection of one of the

nation's most valuable assets and industries--its literature.  I have

arguments with me, also a barrel, with liquid in it.



Give me a chance.  Get me the thanks of Congress.  Don't wait for others;

there isn't time.  I have stayed away and let Congress alone for seventy-

one years and I am entitled to thanks.  Congress knows it perfectly well

and I have long felt hurt that this quite proper and earned expression of

gratitude has been merely felt by the House and never publicly uttered.

Send me an order on the Sergeant-at-Arms quick.  When shall I come?  With

love and a benediction.

                              MARK TWAIN.





     This was mainly a joke.  Mark Twain did not expect any "thanks," but

     he did hope for access to the floor, which once, in an earlier day,

     had been accorded him.  We drove to the Capitol and he delivered his

     letter to "Uncle Joe" by hand.  "Uncle Joe" could not give him the

     privilege of the floor; the rules had become more stringent.  He

     declared they would hang him if he did such a thing.  He added that

     he had a private room down-stairs, where Mark Twain might establish

     headquarters, and that he would assign his colored servant, Neal, of

     long acquaintanceship with many of the members, to pass the word

     that Mark Twain was receiving.



     The result was a great success.  All that afternoon members of

     Congress poured into the Speaker's room and, in an atmosphere blue

     with tobacco smoke, Mark Twain talked the gospel of copyright to his

     heart's content.



     The bill did not come up for passage that session, but Mark Twain

     lived to see his afternoon's lobbying bring a return.  In 1909,

     Champ Clark, and those others who had gathered around him that

     afternoon, passed a measure that added fourteen years to the

     copyright term.



     The next letter refers to a proposed lobby of quite a different

     sort.





                   To Helen Keller, in Wrentham, Mass.:



                                                       21 FIFTH AVENUE,

                                                       Dec.  23, '06.

DEAR HELEN KELLER,--.  .  .  You say, "As a reformer, you know that

ideas must be driven home again and again."



Yes, I know it; and by old experience I know that speeches and documents

and public meetings are a pretty poor and lame way of accomplishing it.

Last year I proposed a sane way--one which I had practiced with success

for a quarter of a century--but I wasn't expecting it to get any

attention, and it didn't.



Give me a battalion of 200 winsome young girls and matrons, and let me

tell them what to do and how to do it, and I will be responsible for

shining results.  If I could mass them on the stage in front of the

audience and instruct them there, I could make a public meeting take hold

of itself and do something really valuable for once.  Not that the real

instruction would be done there, for it wouldn't; it would be previously

done privately, and merely repeated there.



But it isn't going to happen--the good old way will be stuck to: there'll

be a public meeting: with music, and prayer, and a wearying report, and a

verbal description of the marvels the blind can do, and 17 speeches--then

the call upon all present who are still alive, to contribute.  This hoary

program was invented in the idiot asylum, and will never be changed.  Its

function is to breed hostility to good causes.



Some day somebody will recruit my 200--my dear beguilesome Knights of the

Golden Fleece--and you will see them make good their ominous name.



Mind, we must meet! not in the grim and ghastly air of the platform,

mayhap, but by the friendly fire--here at 21.

                         Affectionately your friend,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     They did meet somewhat later that winter in the friendly parlors of

     No. 21, and friends gathered in to meet the marvelous blind girl and

     to pay tribute to Miss Sullivan (Mrs. Macy) for her almost

     incredible achievement.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Letters Vol. 5, by Mark Twain













MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS  1907-1910



ARRANGED WITH COMMENT BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE







VOLUME VI.





XLVI



LETTERS 1907-08.  A DEGREE FROM OXFORD.  THE NEW HOME AT REDDING



     The author, J. Howard Moore, sent a copy of his book, The Universal

     Kinship, with a letter in which he said: "Most humorists have no

     anxiety except to glorify themselves and add substance to their

     pocket-books by making their readers laugh.  You have shown, on many

     occasions, that your mission is not simply to antidote the

     melancholy of a world, but includes a real and intelligent concern

     for the general welfare of your fellowman."



     The Universal Kinship was the kind of a book that Mark Twain

     appreciated, as his acknowledgment clearly shows.





                         To Mr. J. Howard Moore:



                                                       Feb. 2, '07.

DEAR MR. MOORE, The book has furnished me several days of deep pleasure

and satisfaction; it has compelled my gratitude at the same time, since

it saves me the labor of stating my own long-cherished opinions and

reflections and resentments by doing it lucidly and fervently and

irascibly for me.



There is one thing that always puzzles me: as inheritors of the mentality

of our reptile ancestors we have improved the inheritance by a thousand

grades; but in the matter of the morals which they left us we have gone

backward as many grades.  That evolution is strange, and to me

unaccountable and unnatural.  Necessarily we started equipped with their

perfect and blemishless morals; now we are wholly destitute; we have no

real, morals, but only artificial ones--morals created and preserved by

the forced suppression of natural and hellish instincts.  Yet we are dull

enough to be vain of them. Certainly we are a sufficiently comical

invention, we humans.

                         Sincerely Yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     Mark Twain's own books were always being excommunicated by some

     librarian, and the matter never failed to invite the attention and

     amusement of the press, and the indignation of many correspondents.

     Usually the books were Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, the morals of which

     were not regarded as wholly exemplary.  But in 1907 a small library,

     in a very small town, attained a day's national notoriety by putting

     the ban on Eve's Diary, not so much on account of its text as for

     the chaste and exquisite illustrations by Lester Ralph.  When the

     reporters came in a troop to learn about it, the author said: "I

     believe this time the trouble is mainly with the pictures.  I did

     not draw them.  I wish I had--they are so beautiful."



     Just at this time, Dr. William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, was giving a

     literary talk to the Teachers' Club, of Hartford, dwelling on the

     superlative value of Mark Twain's writings for readers old and

     young.  Mrs. F. G. Whitmore, an old Hartford friend, wrote Clemens

     of the things that Phelps had said, as consolation for Eve's latest

     banishment.  This gave him a chance to add something to what he had

     said to the reporters.





                      To Mrs. Whitmore, in Hartford:



                                                       Feb. 7, 1907.

DEAR MRS. WHITMORE,--But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book

of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected

youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it

delights me and doesn't anger me.  But even if it angered me such words

as those of Professor Phelps would take the sting all out.  Nobody

attaches weight to the freaks of the Charlton Library, but when a man

like Phelps speaks, the world gives attention.  Some day I hope to meet

him and thank him for his courage for saying those things out in public.

Custom is, to think a handsome thing in private but tame it down in the

utterance.



I hope you are all well and happy; and thereto I add my love.

                              Sincerely yours,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     In May, 1907, Mark Twain was invited to England to receive from

     Oxford the degree of Literary Doctor.  It was an honor that came to

     him as a sort of laurel crown at the end of a great career, and

     gratified him exceedingly.  To Moberly Bell, of the London Times,

     he expressed his appreciation.  Bell had been over in April and

     Clemens believed him concerned in the matter.





                       To Moberly Bell, in London:



                                        21 FIFTH AVENUE, May 3, '07

DEAR MR. BELL,--Your hand is in it! and you have my best thanks.

Although I wouldn't cross an ocean again for the price of the ship that

carried me, I am glad to do it for an Oxford degree.  I shall plan to

sail for England a shade before the middle of June, so that I can have a

few days in London before the 26th.

                                   Sincerely,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     He had taken a house at Tuxedo for the summer, desiring to be near

     New York City, and in the next letter he writes Mr. Rogers

     concerning his London plans.  We discover, also, in this letter that

     he has begun work on the Redding home and the cost is to come

     entirely out of the autobiographical chapters then running in the

     North American Review.  It may be of passing interest to note here

     that he had the usual house-builder's fortune.  He received thirty

     thousand dollars for the chapters; the house cost him nearly double

     that amount.





                      To H. H. Rogers, in New York:



                                                            TUXEDO PARK,

                                                            May 29, '07.

DEAR ADMIRAL,--Why hang it, I am not going to see you and Mrs. Rogers at

all in England!  It is a great disappointment.  I leave there a month

from now--June 29.  No, I shall see you; for by your itinerary you are

most likely to come to London June 21st or along there.  So that is very

good and satisfactory.  I have declined all engagements but two--Whitelaw

Reid (dinner) June 21, and the Pilgrims (lunch), June 25.  The Oxford

ceremony is June 26.  I have paid my return passage in the Minne-

something, but it is just possible that I may want to stay in England a

week or two longer--I can't tell, yet.  I do very much want to meet up

with the boys for the last time.



I have signed the contract for the building of the house on my

Connecticut farm and specified the cost limit, and work has been begun.

The cost has to all come out of a year's instalments of Autobiography in

the N. A. Review.



Clara, is winning her way to success and distinction with sure and steady

strides.  By all accounts she is singing like a bird, and is not afraid

on the concert stage any more.



Tuxedo is a charming place; I think it hasn't its equal anywhere.



Very best wishes to you both.

                                   S. L. C.





     The story of Mark Twain's extraordinary reception and triumph in

     England has been told.--[Mark Twain; A Biography, chaps.  cclvi-

     cclix]--It was, in fact, the crowning glory of his career.  Perhaps

     one of the most satisfactory incidents of his sojourn was a dinner

     given to him by the staff of Punch, in the historic offices at 10

     Bouverie Street where no other foreign visitor had been thus

     honored--a notable distinction.  When the dinner ended, little joy

     Agnew, daughter of the chief editor, entered and presented to the

     chief guest the original drawing of a cartoon by Bernard Partridge,

     which had appeared on the front page of Punch.  In this picture the

     presiding genius of the paper is offering to Mark Twain health, long

     life, and happiness from "The Punch Bowl."



     A short time after his return to America he received a pretty

     childish letter from little Miss Agnew acknowledging a photograph he

     had sent her, and giving a list of her pets and occupations.  Such a

     letter always delighted Mark Twain, and his pleasure in this one is

     reflected in his reply.





                      To Miss Joy Agnew, in London:



                                                  TUXEDO PARK, NEW YORK.

Unto you greetings and salutation and worship, you dear, sweet little

rightly-named Joy!  I can see you now almost as vividly as I saw you that

night when you sat flashing and beaming upon those sombre swallow-tails.



     "Fair as a star when only one

     Is shining in the sky."



Oh, you were indeed the only one--there wasn't even the remotest chance

of competition with you, dear!  Ah, you are a decoration, you little

witch!



The idea of your house going to the wanton expense of a flower garden!--

aren't you enough?  And what do you want to go and discourage the other

flowers for?  Is that the right spirit? is it considerate? is it kind?

How do you suppose they feel when you come around--looking the way you

look?  And you so pink and sweet and dainty and lovely and supernatural?

Why, it makes them feel embarrassed and artificial, of course; and in my

opinion it is just as pathetic as it can be.  Now then you want to

reform--dear--and do right.



Well certainly you are well off, Joy:



3 bantams;

3 goldfish;

3 doves;

6 canaries;

2 dogs;

1 cat;



All you need, now, to be permanently beyond the reach of want, is one

more dog--just one more good, gentle, high principled, affectionate,

loyal dog who wouldn't want any nobler service than the golden privilege

of lying at your door, nights, and biting everything that came along--and

I am that very one, and ready to come at the dropping of a hat.



Do you think you could convey my love and thanks to your "daddy" and Owen

Seaman and those other oppressed and down-trodden subjects of yours, you

darling small tyrant?



On my knees!  These--with the kiss of fealty from your other subject--



                                                  MARK TWAIN





     Elinor Glyn, author of Three Weeks and other erotic tales, was in

     America that winter and asked permission to call on Mark Twain.  An

     appointment was made and Clemens discussed with her, for an hour or

     more, those crucial phases of life which have made living a complex

     problem since the days of Eve in Eden.  Mrs. Glyn had never before

     heard anything like Mark Twain's wonderful talk, and she was anxious

     to print their interview.  She wrote what she could remember of it

     and sent it to him for approval.  If his conversation had been

     frank, his refusal was hardly less so.





                    To Mrs. Elinor Glyn, in New York:



                                                       Jan. 22, '08.

DEAR MRS. GLYN, It reads pretty poorly--I get the sense of it, but it is

a poor literary job; however, it would have to be that because nobody can

be reported even approximately, except by a stenographer.

Approximations, synopsized speeches, translated poems, artificial flowers

and chromos all have a sort of value, but it is small.  If you had put

upon paper what I really said it would have wrecked your type-machine.

I said some fetid, over-vigorous things, but that was because it was a

confidential conversation.  I said nothing for print.  My own report of

the same conversation reads like Satan roasting a Sunday school.  It, and

certain other readable chapters of my autobiography will not be published

until all the Clemens family are dead--dead and correspondingly

indifferent.  They were written to entertain me, not the rest of the

world.  I am not here to do good--at least not to do it intentionally.

You must pardon me for dictating this letter; I am sick a-bed and not

feeling as well as I might.

                              Sincerely Yours,

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.





     Among the cultured men of England Mark Twain had no greater admirer,

     or warmer friend, than Andrew Lang.  They were at one on most

     literary subjects, and especially so in their admiration of the life

     and character of Joan of Arc.  Both had written of her, and both

     held her to be something almost more than mortal.  When, therefore,

     Anatole France published his exhaustive biography of the maid of

     Domremy, a book in which he followed, with exaggerated minuteness

     and innumerable footnotes, every step of Joan's physical career at

     the expense of her spiritual life, which he was inclined to cheapen,

     Lang wrote feelingly, and with some contempt, of the performance,

     inviting the author of the Personal Recollections to come to the

     rescue of their heroine.  "Compare every one of his statements with

     the passages he cites from authorities, and make him the laughter of

     the world" he wrote.  "If you are lazy about comparing I can make

     you a complete set of what the authorities say, and of what this

     amazing novelist says that they say.  When I tell you that he thinks

     the Epiphany (January 6, Twelfth Night) is December 25th--Christmas

     Day-you begin to see what an egregious ass he is.  Treat him like

     Dowden, and oblige"--a reference to Mark Twain's defense of Harriet

     Shelley, in which he had heaped ridicule on Dowden's Life of the

     Poet--a masterly performance; one of the best that ever came from

     Mark Twain's pen.



     Lang's suggestion would seem to have been a welcome one.





                        To Andrew Lang, in London:



                                        NEW YORK, April 25, 1908.

DEAR MR. LANG,--I haven't seen the book nor any review of it, but only

not very-understandable references to it--of a sort which discomforted

me, but of course set my interest on fire.  I don't want to have to read

it in French--I should lose the nice shades, and should do a lot of gross

misinterpreting, too.  But there'll be a translation soon, nicht wahr?

I will wait for it.  I note with joy that you say: "If you are lazy about

comparing, (which I most certainly am), I can make you a complete set of

what the authorities say, and of what this amazing novelist says that

they say."



Ah, do it for me!  Then I will attempt the article, and (if I succeed in

doing it to my satisfaction,) will publish it.  It is long since I

touched a pen (3 1/2 years), and I was intending to continue this happy

holiday to the gallows, but--there are things that could beguile me to

break this blessed Sabbath.

                    Yours very sincerely,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     Certainly it is an interesting fact that an Englishman--one of the

     race that burned Joan--should feel moved to defend her memory

     against the top-heavy perversions of a distinguished French author.



     But Lang seems never to have sent the notes.  The copying would have

     been a tremendous task, and perhaps he never found the time for it.

     We may regret to-day that he did not, for Mark Twain's article on

     the French author's Joan would have been at least unique.



     Samuel Clemens could never accustom himself to the loss of his wife.

     From the time of her death, marriage-which had brought him his

     greatest joy in life-presented itself to him always with the thought

     of bereavement, waiting somewhere just behind.  The news of an

     approaching wedding saddened him and there was nearly always a

     somber tinge in his congratulations, of which the following to a

     dear friend is an example:





                   To Father Fitz-Simon, in Washington:



                                                  June 5, '08.

DEAR FATHER FITZ-SIMON,--Marriage--yes, it is the supreme felicity of

life, I concede it.  And it is also the supreme tragedy of life.  The

deeper the love the surer the tragedy.  And the more disconsolating when

it comes.



And so I congratulate you.  Not perfunctorily, not lukewarmly, but with a

fervency and fire that no word in the dictionary is strong enough to

convey.  And in the same breath and with the same depth and sincerity,

I grieve for you.  Not for both of you and not for the one that shall go

first, but for the one that is fated to be left behind.  For that one

there is no recompense.--For that one no recompense is possible.



There are times--thousands of times--when I can expose the half of my

mind, and conceal the other half, but in the matter of the tragedy of

marriage I feel too deeply for that, and I have to bleed it all out or

shut it all in.  And so you must consider what I have been through, and

am passing through and be charitable with me.



Make the most of the sunshine! and I hope it will last long--ever so

long.



I do not really want to be present; yet for friendship's sake and because

I honor you so, I would be there if I could.

                         Most sincerely your friend,

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.





     The new home at Redding was completed in the spring of 1908, and on

     the 18th of June, when it was entirely fitted and furnished, Mark

     Twain entered it for the first time.  He had never even seen the

     place nor carefully examined plans which John Howells had made for

     his house.  He preferred the surprise of it, and the general

     avoidance of detail.  That he was satisfied with the result will be

     seen in his letters.  He named it at first "Innocence at Home";

     later changing this title to "Stormfield."



     The letter which follows is an acknowledgment of an interesting

     souvenir from the battle-field of Tewksbury (1471), and some relics

     of the Cavalier and Roundhead Regiments encamped at Tewksbury in

     1643.





                          To an English admirer:



                              INNOCENCE AT HOME, REDDING, CONNECTICUT,

                                                  Aug. 15, '08.

DEAR SIR,--I highly prize the pipes, and shall intimate to people that

"Raleigh" smoked them, and doubtless he did.  After a little practice I

shall be able to go further and say he did; they will then be the most

interesting features of my library's decorations.  The Horse-shoe is

attracting a good deal of attention, because I have intimated that the

conqueror's horse cast it; it will attract more when I get my hand in and

say he cast it, I thank you for the pipes and the shoe; and also for the

official guide, which I read through at a single sitting.  If a person

should say that about a book of mine I should regard it as good evidence

of the book's interest.

                              Very truly yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     In his philosophy, What Is Man?, and now and again in his other

     writings, we find Mark Twain giving small credit to the human mind

     as an originator of ideas.  The most original writer of his time, he

     took no credit for pure invention and allowed none to others.  The

     mind, he declared, adapted, consciously or unconsciously; it did not

     create.  In a letter which follows he elucidates this doctrine.  The

     reference in it to the "captain" and to the kerosene, as the reader

     may remember, have to do with Captain "Hurricane" Jones and his

     theory of the miracles of "Isaac and of the prophets of Baal," as

     expounded in Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion.



     By a trick of memory Clemens gives The Little Duke as his suggestion

     for The Prince and the Pauper; he should have written The Prince and

     the Page, by the same author.





                    To Rev. F. Y. Christ, in New York:



                                        REDDING, CONN., Aug., '08.

DEAR SIR,--You say "I often owe my best sermons to a suggestion received

in reading or from other exterior sources."  Your remark is not quite in

accordance with the facts.  We must change it to--"I owe all my thoughts,

sermons and ideas to suggestions received from sources outside of myself."

The simplified English of this proposition is--"No man's brains ever

originated an idea."  It is an astonishing thing that after all these

ages the world goes on thinking the human brain machinery can originate a

thought.



It can't.  It never has done it.  In all cases, little and big, the

thought is born of a suggestion; and in all cases the suggestions come to

the brain from the outside.  The brain never acts except from exterior

impulse.



A man can satisfy himself of the truth of this by a single process,--let

him examine every idea that occurs to him in an hour; a day; in a week

--in a lifetime if he please.  He will always find that an outside

something suggested the thought, something which he saw with his eyes or

heard with his ears or perceived by his touch--not necessarily to-day,

nor yesterday, nor last year, nor twenty years ago, but sometime or

other.  Usually the source of the suggestion is immediately traceable,

but sometimes it isn't.



However, if you will examine every thought that occurs to you for the

next two days, you will find that in at least nine cases out of ten you

can put your finger on the outside suggestion--And that ought to convince

you that No. 10 had that source too, although you cannot at present hunt

it down and find it.



The idea of writing to me would have had to wait a long time if it waited

until your brain originated it.  It was born of an outside suggestion--

Sir Thomas and my old Captain.



The hypnotist thinks he has invented a new thing--suggestion.  This is

very sad.  I don't know where my captain got his kerosene idea.  (It was

forty-one years ago, and he is long ago dead.) But I know that it didn't

originate in his head, but it was born from a suggestion from the

outside.



Yesterday a guest said, "How did you come to think of writing 'The Prince

and the Pauper?'"  I didn't.  The thought came to me from the outside--

suggested by that pleasant and picturesque little history-book, Charlotte

M. Yonge's "Little Duke," I doubt if Mrs. Burnett knows whence came to

her the suggestion to write "Little Lord Fauntleroy," but I know; it came

to her from reading "The Prince and the Pauper."  In all my life I have

never originated an idea, and neither has she, nor anybody else.



Man's mind is a clever machine, and can work up materials into ingenious

fancies and ideas, but it can't create the material; none but the gods

can do that.  In Sweden I saw a vast machine receive a block of wood, and

turn it into marketable matches in two minutes.  It could do everything

but make the wood.  That is the kind of machine the human mind is.  Maybe

this is not a large compliment, but it is all I can afford.....

                         Your friend and well-wisher

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.





                To Mrs. H. H. Rogers, in Fair Hawn, Mass.:



                                        REDDING, CONN, Aug. 12, 1908.

DEAR MRS. ROGERS, I believe I am the wellest man on the planet to-day,

and good for a trip to Fair Haven (which I discussed with the Captain of

the New Bedford boat, who pleasantly accosted me in the Grand Central

August 5) but the doctor came up from New York day before yesterday, and

gave positive orders that I must not stir from here before frost.  It is

because I was threatened with a swoon, 10 or 12 days ago, and went to New

York a day or two later to attend my nephew's funeral and got horribly

exhausted by the heat and came back here and had a bilious collapse.  In

24 hours I was as sound as a nut again, but nobody believes it but me.



This is a prodigiously satisfactory place, and I am so glad I don't have

to go back to the turmoil and rush of New York.  The house stands high

and the horizons are wide, yet the seclusion is perfect.  The nearest

public road is half a mile away, so there is nobody to look in, and I

don't have to wear clothes if I don't want to.  I have been down stairs

in night-gown and slippers a couple of hours, and have been photographed

in that costume; but I will dress, now, and behave myself.



That doctor had half an idea that there is something the matter with my

brain.  .  .  Doctors do know so little and they do charge so much for

it.  I wish Henry Rogers would come here, and I wish you would come with

him.  You can't rest in that crowded place, but you could rest here, for

sure!  I would learn bridge, and entertain you, and rob you.

                         With love to you both,

                                        Ever yours,

                                                  S.  L.  C.





     In the foregoing letter we get the first intimation of Mark Twain's

     failing health.  The nephew who had died was Samuel E. Moffett, son

     of Pamela Clemens.  Moffett, who was a distinguished journalist--an

     editorial writer on Collier's Weekly, a man beloved by all who knew

     him--had been drowned in the surf off the Jersey beach.





                 To W. D. Howells, Kittery Point, Maine:



                                                       Aug. 12, '08.

DEAR HOWELLS,--Won't you and Mrs. Howells and Mildred come and give us as

many days as you can spare, and examine John's triumph?  It is the most

satisfactory house I am acquainted with, and the most satisfactorily

situated.



But it is no place to work in, because one is outside of it all the time,

while the sun and the moon are on duty.  Outside of it in the loggia,

where the breezes blow and the tall arches divide up the scenery and

frame it.



It's a ghastly long distance to come, and I wouldn't travel such a

distance to see anything short of a memorial museum, but if you can't

come now you can at least come later when you return to New York, for the

journey will be only an hour and a half per express-train.  Things are

gradually and steadily taking shape inside the house, and nature is

taking care of the outside in her ingenious and wonderful fashion--and

she is competent and asks no help and gets none.  I have retired from New

York for good, I have retired from labor for good, I have dismissed my

stenographer and have entered upon a holiday whose other end is in the

cemetery.

                    Yours ever,

                                   MARK.





     From a gentleman in Buffalo Clemens one day received a letter

     inclosing an incompleted list of the world's "One Hundred Greatest

     Men," men who had exerted "the largest visible influence on the life

     and activities of the race."  The writer asked that Mark Twain

     examine the list and suggest names, adding "would you include Jesus,

     as the founder of Christianity, in the list?"



     To the list of statesmen Clemens added the name of Thomas Paine; to

     the list of inventors, Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.  The

     question he answered in detail.





                      To-----------, Buffalo, N.  Y.



                              Private.  REDDING, CONN, Aug. 28, '08.

DEAR SIR,--By "private," I mean don't print any remarks of mine.



                            ..................

I like your list.



The "largest visible influence."



These terms require you to add Jesus.  And they doubly and trebly require

you to add Satan.  From A.D. 350 to A.D. 1850 these gentlemen exercised a

vaster influence over a fifth part of the human race than was exercised

over that fraction of the race by all other influences combined.  Ninety-

nine hundredths of this influence proceeded from Satan, the remaining

fraction of it from Jesus.  During those 1500 years the fear of Satan and

Hell made 99 Christians where love of God and Heaven landed one.  During

those 1500 years, Satan's influence was worth very nearly a hundred times

as much to the business as was the influence of all the rest of the Holy

Family put together.



You have asked me a question, and I have answered it seriously and

sincerely.  You have put in Buddha--a god, with a following, at one time,

greater than Jesus ever had: a god with perhaps a little better evidence

of his godship than that which is offered for Jesus's.  How then, in

fairness, can you leave Jesus out?  And if you put him in, how can you

logically leave Satan out?  Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but

it is the lightning that does the work.

                              Very truly yours,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     The "Children's Theatre" of the next letter was an institution of

     the New York East Side in which Mark Twain was deeply interested.

     The children were most, if not all, of Hebrew parentage, and the

     performances they gave, under the direction of Alice M. Herts, were

     really remarkable.  It seemed a pity that lack of funds should have

     brought this excellent educational venture to an untimely end.



     The following letter was in reply to one inclosing a newspaper

     clipping reporting a performance of The Prince and the Pauper, given

     by Chicago school children.





                       To Mrs. Hookway, in Chicago:

                                                  Sept., 1908.

DEAR MRS. HOOKWAY,--Although I am full of the spirit of work this

morning, a rarity with me lately--I must steal a moment or two for a word

in person: for I have been reading the eloquent account in the Record-

Herald and am pleasurably stirred, to my deepest deeps.  The reading

brings vividly back to me my pet and pride.  The Children's Theatre of

the East side, New York.  And it supports and re-affirms what I have so

often and strenuously said in public that a children's theatre is easily

the most valuable adjunct that any educational institution for the young

can have, and that no otherwise good school is complete without it.



It is much the most effective teacher of morals and promoter of good

conduct that the ingenuity of man has yet devised, for the reason that

its lessons are not taught wearily by book and by dreary homily, but by

visible and enthusing action; and they go straight to the heart, which is

the rightest of right places for them.  Book morals often get no further

than the intellect, if they even get that far on their spectral and

shadowy pilgrimage: but when they travel from a Children's Theatre they

do not stop permanently at that halfway house, but go on home.



The children's theatre is the only teacher of morals and conduct and high

ideals that never bores the pupil, but always leaves him sorry when the

lesson is over.  And as for history, no other teacher is for a moment

comparable to it: no other can make the dead heroes of the world rise up

and shake the dust of the ages from their bones and live and move and

breathe and speak and be real to the looker and listener: no other can

make the study of the lives and times of the illustrious dead a delight,

a splendid interest, a passion; and no other can paint a history-lesson

in colors that will stay, and stay, and never fade.



It is my conviction that the children's theatre is one of the very, very

great inventions of the twentieth century; and that its vast educational

value--now but dimly perceived and but vaguely understood--will presently

come to be recognized.  By the article which I have been reading I find

the same things happening in the Howland School that we have become

familiar with in our Children's Theatre (of which I am President, and

sufficiently vain of the distinction.) These things among others;



1.  The educating history-study does not stop with the little players,

but the whole school catches the infection and revels in it.



2.  And it doesn't even stop there; the children carry it home and infect

the family with it--even the parents and grandparents; and the whole

household fall to studying history, and bygone manners and customs and

costumes with eager interest.  And this interest is carried along to the

studying of costumes in old book-plates; and beyond that to the selecting

of fabrics and the making of clothes.  Hundreds of our children learn,

the plays by listening without book, and by making notes; then the

listener goes home and plays the piece--all the parts! to the family.

And the family are glad and proud; glad to listen to the explanations and

analyses, glad to learn, glad to be lifted to planes above their dreary

workaday lives.  Our children's theatre is educating 7,000 children--and

their families.  When we put on a play of Shakespeare they fall to

studying it diligently; so that they may be qualified to enjoy it to the

limit when the piece is staged.



3.  Your Howland School children do the construction-work, stage-

decorations, etc.  That is our way too.  Our young folks do everything

that is needed by the theatre, with their own hands; scene-designing,

scene-painting, gas-fitting, electric work, costume-designing--costume

making, everything and all things indeed--and their orchestra and its

leader are from their own ranks.



The article which I have been reading, says--speaking of the historical

play produced by the pupils of the Howland School--



"The question naturally arises, What has this drama done for those who so

enthusiastically took part?--The touching story has made a year out of

the Past live for the children as could no chronology or bald statement

of historical events; it has cultivated the fancy and given to the

imagination strength and purity; work in composition has ceased to be

drudgery, for when all other themes fall flat a subject dealing with some

aspect of the drama presented never fails to arouse interest and a rapid

pushing of pens over paper."



That is entirely true.  The interest is not confined to the drama's

story, it spreads out all around the period of the story, and gives to

all the outlying and unrelated happenings of that period a fascinating

interest--an interest which does not fade out with the years, but remains

always fresh, always inspiring, always welcome.  History-facts dug by the

job, with sweat and tears out of a dry and spiritless text-book--but

never mind, all who have suffered know what that is.  .  .

                                   I remain, dear madam,

                                             Sincerely yours,

                                                       S. L. CLEMENS.





     Mark Twain had a special fondness for cats.  As a boy he always

     owned one and it generally had a seat beside him at the table.

     There were cats at Quarry Farm and at Hartford, and in the house at

     Redding there was a gray mother-cat named Tammany, of which he was

     especially fond.  Kittens capering about were his chief delight.

     In a letter to a Chicago woman he tells how those of Tammany

     assisted at his favorite game.





               To Mrs. Mabel Larkin Patterson, in Chicago:



                                             REDDING, CONNECTICUT,

                                                       Oct. 2, '08.

DEAR MRS. PATTERSON,--The contents of your letter are very pleasant and

very welcome, and I thank you for them, sincerely.  If I can find a

photograph of my "Tammany" and her kittens, I will enclose it in this.



One of them likes to be crammed into a corner-pocket of the billiard

table--which he fits as snugly as does a finger in a glove and then he

watches the game (and obstructs it) by the hour, and spoils many a shot

by putting out his paw and changing the direction of a passing ball.

Whenever a ball is in his arms, or so close to him that it cannot be

played upon without risk of hurting him, the player is privileged to

remove it to anyone of the 3 spots that chances to be vacant.



Ah, no, my lecturing days are over for good and all.

                                        Sincerely yours,

                                                  S. L. CLEMENS.





     The letter to Howells which follows was written a short time before

     the passage of the copyright extension bill, which rendered Mark

     Twain's new plan, here mentioned, unneeded--at least for the time.





                      To W. D. Howells, in New York:



                                             Monday, Oct. 26, '08.

Oh, I say!  Where are you hiding, and why are you hiding?  You promised

to come here and you didn't keep your word.  (This sounds like

astonishment--but don't be misled by that.)



Come, fire up again on your fiction-mill and give us another good

promise.  And this time keep it--for it is your turn to be astonished.

Come and stay as long as you possibly can.  I invented a new copyright

extension scheme last Friday, and sat up all night arranging its details.

It will interest you.  Yesterday I got it down on paper in as compact a

form as I could.  Harvey and I have examined the scheme, and to-morrow or

next day he will send me a couple of copyright-experts to arrange about

getting certain statistics for me.



Authors, publishers and the public have always been damaged by the

copyright laws.  The proposed amendment will advantage all three--the

public most of all.  I think Congress will pass it and settle the vexed

question permanently.



I shall need your assent and the assent of about a dozen other authors.

Also the assent of all the large firms of the 300 publishers.  These

authors and publishers will furnish said assent I am sure.  Not even the

pirates will be able to furnish a serious objection, I think.



Come along.  This place seemed at its best when all around was summer-

green; later it seemed at its best when all around was burning with the

autumn splendors; and now once more it seems at its best, with the trees

naked and the ground a painter's palette.

                                   Yours ever,

                                             MARK.





     Clemens was a great admirer of the sea stories of W. W. Jacobs and

     generally kept one or more of this author's volumes in reach of his

     bed, where most of his reading was done.  The acknowledgment that

     follows was sent when he had finished Salthaven.





                       To W. W. Jacobs, in England:



                                                       REDDING, CONN,

                                                       Oct. 28, '08.

DEAR MR. JACOBS,--It has a delightful look.  I will not venture to say

how delightful, because the words would sound extravagant, and would

thereby lose some of their strength and to that degree misrepresent me.

It is my conviction that Dialstone Lane holds the supremacy over all

purely humorous books in our language, but I feel about Salthaven as the

Cape Cod poet feels about Simon Hanks:



               "The Lord knows all things, great and small,

               With doubt he's not perplexed:

               'Tis Him alone that knows it all

               But Simon Hanks comes next."



The poet was moved by envy and malice and jealousy, but I am not: I place

Salthaven close up next to Dialstone because I think it has a fair and

honest right to that high position.  I have kept the other book moving;

I shall begin to hand this one around now.



And many thanks to you for remembering me.



This house is out in the solitudes of the woods and the hills, an hour

and a half from New York, and I mean to stay in it winter and summer the

rest of my days.  I beg you to come and help occupy it a few days the

next time you visit the U.S.

                         Sincerely yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     One of the attractions of Stormfield was a beautiful mantel in the

     billiard room, presented by the Hawaiian Promotion Committee.  It

     had not arrived when the rest of the house was completed, but came

     in time to be set in place early in the morning of the owner's

     seventy-third birthday.  It was made of a variety of Hawaiian woods,

     and was the work of a native carver, F. M. Otremba.  Clemens was

     deeply touched by the offering from those "western isles"--the

     memory of which was always so sweet to him.





                         To Mr. Wood, in Hawaii:



                                                       Nov. 30, '08.

DEAR MR. WOOD,--The beautiful mantel was put in its place an hour ago,

and its friendly "Aloha" was the first uttered greeting my 73rd birthday

received.  It is rich in color, rich in quality, and rich in decoration,

therefore it exactly harmonizes with the taste for such things which was

born in me and which I have seldom been able to indulge to my content.

It will be a great pleasure to me, daily renewed, to have under my eye

this lovely reminder of the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored

in any ocean, and I beg to thank the Committee for providing me that

pleasure.

                    Sincerely Yours,

                              S. L. CLEMENS.









XLVII



LETTERS, 1909.  TO HOWELLS AND OTHERS.  LIFE AT STORMFIELD.  COPYRIGHT

EXTENSION.  DEATH OF JEAN CLEMENS



     Clemens remained at Stormfield all that winter.  New York was sixty

     miles away and he did not often care to make the journey.  He was

     constantly invited to this or that public gathering, or private

     party, but such affairs had lost interest for him.  He preferred the

     quiet of his luxurious home with its beautiful outlook, while for

     entertainment he found the billiard afternoons sufficient.  Guests

     came from the city, now and again, for week-end visits, and if he

     ever was restless or lonely he did not show it.



     Among the invitations that came was one from General O. O. Howard

     asking him to preside at a meeting to raise an endowment fund for a

     Lincoln Memorial University at Cumberland Gap, Tennessee.  Closing

     his letter, General Howard said, "Never mind if you did fight on the

     other side."





                         To General O. O. Howard:



                                        STORMFIELD, REDDING, CONNECTICUT,

                                                            Jan, 12, '09.

DEAR GENERAL HOWARD,--You pay me a most gratifying compliment in asking

me to preside, and it causes me very real regret that I am obliged to

decline, for the object of the meeting appeals strongly to me, since that

object is to aid in raising the $500,000 Endowment Fund for Lincoln

Memorial University.  The Endowment Fund will be the most fitting of all

the memorials the country will dedicate to the memory of Lincoln,

serving, as it will, to uplift his very own people.



I hope you will meet with complete success, and I am sorry I cannot be

there to witness it and help you rejoice.  But I am older than people

think, and besides I live away out in the country and never stir from

home, except at geological intervals, to fill left-over engagements in

mesozoic times when I was younger and indiscreeter.



You ought not to say sarcastic things about my "fighting on the other

side."  General Grant did not act like that.  General Grant paid me

compliments.  He bracketed me with Zenophon--it is there in his Memoirs

for anybody to read.  He said if all the confederate soldiers had

followed my example and adopted my military arts he could never have

caught enough of them in a bunch to inconvenience the Rebellion.  General

Grant was a fair man, and recognized my worth; but you are prejudiced,

and you have hurt my feelings.

          But I have an affection for you, anyway.

                                   MARK TWAIN.





     One of Mark Twain's friends was Henniker-Heaton, the so-called

     "Father of Penny Postage" between England and America.  When, after

     long years of effort, he succeeded in getting the rate established,

     he at once bent his energies in the direction of cheap cable service

     and a letter from him came one day to Stormfield concerning his new

     plans.  This letter happened to be over-weight, which gave Mark

     Twain a chance for some amusing exaggerations at his expense.





                      To Henniker-Heaton, in London:



                                   STORMFIELD, REDDING, CONNECTICUT,

                                             Jan.  18, 1909.

DEAR HENNIKER-HEATON,--I do hope you will succeed to your heart's desire

in your cheap-cablegram campaign, and I feel sure you will.  Indeed your

cheap-postage victory, achieved in spite of a quarter-century of

determined opposition, is good and rational prophecy that you will.

Wireless, not being as yet imprisoned in a Chinese wall of private cash

and high-placed and formidable influence, will come to your aid and make

your new campaign briefer and easier than the other one was.



Now then, after uttering my serious word, am I privileged to be frivolous

for a moment?  When you shall have achieved cheap telegraphy, are you

going to employ it for just your own selfish profit and other people's

pecuniary damage, the way you are doing with your cheap postage?  You get

letter-postage reduced to 2 cents an ounce, then you mail me a 4-ounce

letter with a 2-cent stamp on it, and I have to pay the extra freight at

this end of the line.  I return your envelope for inspection.  Look at

it.  Stamped in one place is a vast "T," and under it the figures "40,"

and under those figures appears an "L," a sinister and suspicious and

mysterious L.  In another place, stamped within a circle, in offensively

large capitals, you find the words "DUE 8 CENTS."  Finally, in the midst

of a desert space up nor-noreastard from that circle you find a figure

"3" of quite unnecessarily aggressive and insolent magnitude--and done

with a blue pencil, so as to be as conspicuous as possible.  I inquired

about these strange signs and symbols of the postman.  He said they were

P. O. Department signals for his instruction.



"Instruction for what?"



"To get extra postage."



"Is it so?  Explain.  Tell me about the large T and the 40.



"It's short for Take 40--or as we postmen say, grab 40"



Go on, please, while I think up some words to swear with."



"Due 8 means, grab 8 more."



"Continue."



"The blue-pencil 3 was an afterthought.  There aren't any stamps for

afterthoughts; the sums vary, according to inspiration, and they whirl in

the one that suggests itself at the last moment.  Sometimes they go

several times higher than this one.  This one only means hog 3 cents

more.  And so if you've got 51 cents about you, or can borrow it--"



"Tell me: who gets this corruption?"



"Half of it goes to the man in England who ships the letter on short

postage, and the other half goes to the P.O.D.  to protect cheap postage

from inaugurating a deficit."



"-------------------"



"I can't blame you; I would say it myself in your place, if these ladies

were not present.  But you see I'm only obeying orders, I can't help

myself."



"Oh, I know it; I'm not blaming you.  Finally, what does that L stand

for?"



"Get the money, or give him L.  It's English, you know."



"Take it and go.  It's the last cent I've got in the world--."



After seeing the Oxford pageant file by the grand stand, picture after

picture, splendor after splendor, three thousand five hundred strong, the

most moving and beautiful and impressive and historically-instructive

show conceivable, you are not to think I would miss the London pageant of

next year, with its shining host of 15,000 historical English men and

women dug from the misty books of all the vanished ages and marching in

the light of the sun--all alive, and looking just as they were used to

look!  Mr. Lascelles spent yesterday here on the farm, and told me all

about it.  I shall be in the middle of my 75th year then, and interested

in pageants for personal and prospective reasons.



I beg you to give my best thanks to the Bath Club for the offer of its

hospitalities, but I shall not be able to take advantage of it, because I

am to be a guest in a private house during my stay in London.

                              Sincerely yours,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     It was in 1907 that Clemens had seen the Oxford Pageant--during the

     week when he had been awarded his doctor's degree.  It gave him the

     greatest delight, and he fully expected to see the next one, planned

     for 1910.



     In the letter to Howells which follows we get another glimpse of

     Mark Twain's philosophy of man, the irresponsible machine.





                      To W. D. Howells, in New York:



                                        STORMFIELD, REDDING, CONN.,

                                                  Jan.  18, '09.

DEAR HOWELLS,--I have to write a line, lazy as I am, to say how your Poe

article delighted me; and to say that I am in agreement with

substantially all you say about his literature.  To me his prose is

unreadable--like Jane Austin's.  No, there is a difference.  I could read

his prose on salary, but not Jane's.  Jane is entirely impossible.  It

seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.



Another thing: you grant that God and circumstances sinned against Poe,

but you also grant that he sinned against himself--a thing which he

couldn't do and didn't do.



It is lively up here now.  I wish you could come.

                                   Yrs ever,

                                             MARK





                      To W. D. Howells, in New York:



                                        STORMFIELD, REDDING, CONNECTICUT,

                                        3 in the morning, Apl. 17, '09.

                                                  [Written with pencil].

My pen has gone dry and the ink is out of reach.  Howells, Did you write

me day-before-day before yesterday, or did I dream it?  In my mind's eye

I most vividly see your hand-write on a square blue envelop in the

mailpile.  I have hunted the house over, but there is no such letter.

Was it an illusion?



I am reading Lowell's letter, and smoking.  I woke an hour ago and am

reading to keep from wasting the time.  On page 305, vol.  I.  I have

just margined a note:



"Young friend!  I like that!  You ought to see him now."



It seemed startlingly strange to hear a person call you young.  It was a

brick out of a blue sky, and knocked me groggy for a moment.  Ah me, the

pathos of it is, that we were young then.  And he--why, so was he, but he

didn't know it.  He didn't even know it 9 years later, when we saw him

approaching and you warned me, saying, "Don't say anything about age--he

has just turned fifty, and thinks he is old and broods over it."



[Well, Clara did sing!  And you wrote her a dear letter.]



Time to go to sleep.

                         Yours ever,

                                        MARK.





                            To Daniel Kiefer:



                                                       [No date.]

DANL KIEFER ESQ.  DEAR SIR,--I should be far from willing to have a

political party named after me.



I would not be willing to belong to a party which allowed its members to

have political aspirations or to push friends forward for political

preferment.

                    Yours very truly,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     The copyright extension, for which the author had been working so

     long, was granted by Congress in 1909, largely as the result of that

     afternoon in Washington when Mark Twain had "received" in "Uncle

     Joe" Cannon's private room, and preached the gospel of copyright

     until the daylight faded and the rest of the Capitol grew still.

     Champ Clark was the last to linger that day and they had talked far

     into the dusk.  Clark was powerful, and had fathered the bill.  Now

     he wrote to know if it was satisfactory.





                      To Champ Clark, in Washington:



                              STORMFIELD, REDDING, CONN., June 5, '09.

DEAR CHAMP CLARK--Is the new copyright law acceptable to me?

Emphatically, yes!  Clark, it is the only sane, and clearly defined, and

just and righteous copyright law that has ever existed in the United

States.  Whosoever will compare it with its predecessors will have no

trouble in arriving at that decision.



The bill which was before the committee two years ago when I was down

there was the most stupefying jumble of conflicting and apparently

irreconcilable interests that was ever seen; and we all said "the case is

hopeless, absolutely hopeless--out of this chaos nothing can be built."

But we were in error; out of that chaotic mass this excellent bill has

been instructed; the warring interests have been reconciled, and the

result is as comely and substantial a legislative edifice as lifts its

domes and towers and protective lightning rods out of the statute book,

I think.  When I think of that other bill, which even the Deity couldn't

understand, and of this one which even I can understand, I take off my

hat to the man or men who devised this one.  Was it R. U. Johnson?  Was

it the Author's League?  Was it both together?  I don't know, but I take

off my hat, anyway.  Johnson has written a valuable article about the new

law--I enclose it.



At last--at last and for the first time in copyright history we are ahead

of England!  Ahead of her in two ways: by length of time and by fairness

to all interests concerned.  Does this sound like shouting?  Then I must

modify it: all we possessed of copyright-justice before the fourth of

last March we owed to England's initiative.

                                   Truly Yours,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     Because Mark Twain amused himself with certain aspects of Christian

     Science, and was critical of Mrs. Eddy, there grew up a wide

     impression that he jeered at the theory of mental healing; when, as

     a matter of fact, he was one of its earliest converts, and never

     lost faith in its power.  The letter which follows is an excellent

     exposition of his attitude toward the institution of Christian

     Science and the founder of the church in America.





                  To J. Wylie Smith, Glasgow, Scotland:



                                        "STORMFIELD," August 7, 1909

DEAR SIR,--My view of the matter has not changed.  To wit, that Christian

Science is valuable; that it has just the same value now that it had when

Mrs. Eddy stole it from Quimby; that its healing principle (its most

valuable asset) possesses the same force now that it possessed a million

years ago before Quimby was born; that Mrs. Eddy.  .  .  organized that

force, and is entitled to high credit for that.  Then, with a splendid

sagacity she hitched it to.  .  .  a religion, the surest of all ways to

secure friends for it, and support.  In a fine and lofty way--

figuratively speaking--it was a tramp stealing a ride on the lightning

express.  Ah, how did that ignorant village-born peasant woman know the

human being so well?  She has no more intellect than a tadpole--until it

comes to business then she is a marvel!  Am I sorry I wrote the book?

Most certainly not. You say you have 500 (converts) in Glasgow.  Fifty

years from now, your posterity will not count them by the hundred, but by

the thousand.  I feel absolutely sure of this.

                         Very truly yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     Clemens wrote very little for publication that year, but he enjoyed

     writing for his own amusement, setting down the things that boiled,

     or bubbled, within him: mainly chapters on the inconsistencies of

     human deportment, human superstition and human creeds.  The "Letters

     from the Earth" referred to in the following, were supposed to have

     been written by an immortal visitant from some far realm to a

     friend, describing the absurdities of mankind.  It is true, as he

     said, that they would not do for publication, though certainly the

     manuscript contains some of his mgt delicious writing.  Miss

     Wallace, to whom the next letter is written, had known Mark Twain in

     Bermuda, and, after his death, published a dainty volume entitled

     Mark Twain in the Happy Island.





                                   "STORMFIELD," REDDING, CONNECTICUT,

                                                       Nov.  13, '09.

DEAR BETSY,--I've been writing "Letters from the Earth," and if you will

come here and see us I will--what?  Put the MS in your hands, with the

places to skip marked?  No.  I won't trust you quite that far.  I'll read

messages to you.  This book will never be published--in fact it couldn't

be, because it would be felony to soil the mails with it, for it has much

Holy Scripture in it of the kind that .  .  .  can't properly be read

aloud, except from the pulpit and in family worship.  Paine enjoys it,

but Paine is going to be damned one of these days, I suppose.



The autumn splendors passed you by?  What a pity.  I wish you had been

here.  It was beyond words!  It was heaven and hell and sunset and

rainbows and the aurora all fused into one divine harmony, and you

couldn't look at it and keep the tears back.  All the hosannahing strong

gorgeousnesses have gone back to heaven and hell and the pole, now, but

no matter; if you could look out of my bedroom window at this moment, you

would choke up; and when you got your voice you would say: This is not

real, this is a dream.  Such a singing together, and such a whispering

together, and such a snuggling together of cosy soft colors, and such

kissing and caressing, and such pretty blushing when the sun breaks out

and catches those dainty weeds at it--you remember that weed-garden of

mine?--and then--then the far hills sleeping in a dim blue trance--oh,

hearing about it is nothing, you should be here to see it.



Good!  I wish I could go on the platform and read.  And I could, if it

could be kept out of the papers.  There's a charity-school of 400 young

girls in Boston that I would give my ears to talk to, if I had some more;

but--oh, well, I can't go, and it's no use to grieve about it.



This morning Jean went to town; also Paine; also the butler; also Katy;

also the laundress.  The cook and the maid, and the boy and the

roustabout and Jean's coachman are left--just enough to make it lonesome,

because they are around yet never visible.  However, the Harpers are

sending Leigh up to play billiards; therefore I shall survive.

                              Affectionately,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     Early in June that year, Clemens had developed unmistakable symptoms

     of heart trouble of a very serious nature.  It was angina pectoris,

     and while to all appearances he was as well as ever and usually felt

     so, he was periodically visited by severe attacks of acute "breast

     pains" which, as the months passed, increased in frequency and

     severity.  He was alarmed and distressed--not on his own account,

     but because of his daughter Jean--a handsome girl, who had long been

     subject to epileptic seizures.  In case of his death he feared that

     Jean would be without permanent anchorage, his other daughter,

     Clara--following her marriage to Ossip Gabrilowitsch in October--

     having taken up residence abroad.



     This anxiety was soon ended.  On the morning of December 24th, jean

     Clemens was found dead in her apartment.  She was not drowned in her

     bath, as was reported, but died from heart exhaustion, the result of

     her malady and the shock of cold water.

     [Questionable diagnosis!  D.W.]



     The blow to her father was terrible, but heavy as it was, one may

     perhaps understand that her passing in that swift, painless way must

     have afforded him a measure of relief.





                    To Mrs. Gabrilowitsch, in Europe:



                                                  REDDING, CONN.,

                                                  Dec.  29, '09.

O, Clara, Clara dear, I am so glad she is out of it and safe--safe!  I am

not melancholy; I shall never be melancholy again, I think.  You see, I

was in such distress when I came to realize that you were gone far away

and no one stood between her and danger but me--and I could die at any

moment, and then--oh then what would become of her!  For she was wilful,

you know, and would not have been governable.



You can't imagine what a darling she was, that last two or three days;

and how fine, and good, and sweet, and noble-and joyful, thank Heaven!--

and how intellectually brilliant.  I had never been acquainted with Jean

before.  I recognized that.



But I mustn't try to write about her--I can't.  I have already poured my

heart out with the pen, recording that last day or two.



I will send you that--and you must let no one but Ossip read it.



Good-bye.

               I love you so!

                         And Ossip.

                                   FATHER.





The writing mentioned in the last paragraph was his article 'The Death of

Jean,' his last serious writing, and one of the world's most beautiful

examples of elegiac prose.--[Harper's Magazine, Dec., 1910,] and later in

the volume, 'What Is Man and Other Essays.'









XLVIII



LETTERS OF 1910.  LAST TRIP TO BERMUDA.  LETTERS TO PAINE.

THE LAST LETTER



     Mark Twain had returned from a month's trip to Bermuda a few days

     before Jean died.  Now, by his physician's advice, he went back to

     those balmy islands.  He had always loved them, since his first trip

     there with Twichell thirty-three years earlier, and at "Bay House,"

     the residence of Vice-Consul Allen, where he was always a welcome

     guest, he could have the attentions and care and comforts of a home.

     Taking Claude, the butler, as his valet, he sailed January 5th, and

     presently sent back a letter in which he said, "Again I am leading

     the ideal life, and am immeasurably content."



     By his wish, the present writer and his family were keeping the

     Stormfield house open for him, in order that he might be able to

     return to its comforts at any time.  He sent frequent letters--one

     or two by each steamer--but as a rule they did not concern matters

     of general interest.  A little after his arrival, however, he wrote

     concerning an incident of his former visit--a trivial matter--but

     one which had annoyed him.  I had been with him in Bermuda on the

     earlier visit, and as I remember it, there had been some slight

     oversight on his part in the matter of official etiquette--something

     which doubtless no one had noticed but himself.





                       To A. B. Paine, in Redding:



                                             BAY HOUSE, Jan. 11, 1910.



DEAR PAINE,--.  .  .  There was a military lecture last night at the

Officer's Mess, prospect, and as the lecturer honored me with a special

and urgent invitation and said he wanted to lecture to me particularly,

I being "the greatest living master of the platform-art," I naturally

packed Helen and her mother into the provided carriage and went.



As soon as we landed at the door with the crowd the Governor came to me

at once and was very cordial, and apparently as glad to see me as he said

he was.  So that incident is closed.  And pleasantly and entirely

satisfactorily.  Everything is all right, now, and I am no longer in a

clumsy and awkward situation.



I "met up" with that charming Colonel Chapman, and other officers of the

regiment, and had a good time.



Commandant Peters of the "Carnegie" will dine here tonight and arrange a

private visit for us to his ship, the crowd to be denied access.

                    Sincerely Yours,

                                        S. L. C.





     "Helen" of this letter was Mr. and Mrs. Allen's young daughter,

     a favorite companion of his walks and drives.  "Loomis" and "Lark,"

     mentioned in the letters which follow, were Edward E. Loomis--his

     nephew by marriage--named by Mark Twain as one of the trustees of

     his estate, and Charles T. Lark, Mark Twain's attorney.





                      To A.  B.  Paine, in Redding:



                                             HAMILTON, Jan. 21, '10.

DEAR PAINE,--Thanks for your letter, and for its contenting news of the

situation in that foreign and far-off and vaguely-remembered country

where you and Loomis and Lark and other beloved friends are.



I have a letter from Clara this morning.  She is solicitous, and wants me

well and watchfully taken care of.  My, she ought to see Helen and her

parents and Claude administer that trust!



Also she says: "I hope to hear from you or Mr. Paine very soon."



I am writing her, and I know you will respond to your part of her prayer.

She is pretty desolate now, after Jean's emancipation--the only kindness

God ever did that poor unoffending child in all her hard life.

                              Ys ever

                                        S. L. C.





     Send Clara a copy of Howells's gorgeous letter.  I want a copy of my

     article that he is speaking of.





     The "gorgeous letter" was concerning Mark Twain's article, "The

     Turning-point in My Life" which had just appeared in one of the

     Harper publications.  Howells wrote of it, "While your wonderful

     words are warm in my mind yet, I want to tell you what you know

     already: that you never wrote anything greater, finer, than that

     turning-point paper of yours."



     From the early Bermuda letters we may gather that Mark Twain's days

     were enjoyable enough, and that his malady was not giving him

     serious trouble, thus far.  Near the end of January he wrote: "Life

     continues here the same as usual.  There isn't a flaw in it.  Good

     times, good home, tranquil contentment all day and every day,

     without a break.  I shouldn't know how to go about bettering my

     situation."  He did little in the way of literary work, probably

     finding neither time nor inclination for it.  When he wrote at all

     it was merely to set down some fanciful drolleries with no thought

     of publication.





               To Prof. William Lyon Phelps, Yale College:



                                             HAMILTON, March 12.

DEAR PROFESSOR PHELPS,--I thank you ever so much for the book--[Professor

Phelps's Essays on Modern Novelists.]--which I find charming--so charming

indeed, that I read it through in a single night, and did not regret the

lost night's sleep.  I am glad if I deserve what you have said about me:

and even if I don't I am proud and well contented, since you think I

deserve it.



Yes, I saw Prof. Lounsbury, and had a most pleasant time with him.  He

ought to have staid longer in this little paradise--partly for his own

sake, but mainly for mine.



I knew my poor Jean had written you.  I shall not have so dear and sweet

a secretary again.



Good health to you, and all good fortune attend you.

                         Sincerely yours,

                                   S. L. CLEMENS.





     He would appear to have written not many letters besides those to

     Mrs. Gabrilowitsch and to Stormfield, but when a little girl sent

     him a report of a dream, inspired by reading The Prince and the

     Pauper, he took the time and trouble to acknowledge it, realizing,

     no doubt, that a line from him would give the child happiness.





                      To Miss Sulamith, in New York:



                              "BAY HOUSE," BERMUDA, March 21, 1910.

DEAR MISS SULAMITH,--I think it is a remarkable dream for a girl of 13 to

have dreamed, in fact for a person of any age to have dreamed, because it

moves by regular grade and sequence from the beginning to the end, which

is not the habit of dreams.  I think your report of it is a good piece of

work, a clear and effective statement of the vision.



I am glad to know you like the "Prince and the Pauper" so well and I

believe with you that the dream is good evidence of that liking.  I think

I may say, with your sister that I like myself best when I am serious.

                         Sincerely yours,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     Through February, and most of March, letters and reports from him

     were about the same.  He had begun to plan for his return, and

     concerning amusements at Stormfield for the entertainment of the

     neighbors, and for the benefit of the library which he had founded

     soon after his arrival in Redding.  In these letters he seldom

     mentioned the angina pains that had tortured him earlier.  But once,

     when he sent a small photograph of himself, it seemed to us that his

     face had become thin and that he had suffered.  Certainly his next

     letter was not reassuring.





                       To A. B. Paine, in Redding:



DEAR PAINE,--We must look into the magic-lantern business.  Maybe the

modern lantern is too elaborate and troublesome for back-settlement use,

but we can inquire.  We must have some kind of a show at "Stormfield" to

entertain the countryside with.



We are booked to sail in the "Bermudian" April 23rd, but don't tell

anybody, I don't want it known.  I may have to go sooner if the pain in

my breast doesn't mend its ways pretty considerably.  I don't want to die

here for this is an unkind place for a person in that condition.  I

should have to lie in the undertaker's cellar until the ship would remove

me and it is dark down there and unpleasant.



The Colliers will meet me on the pier and I may stay with them a week or

two before going home.  It all depends on the breast pain--I don't want

to die there.  I am growing more and more particular about the place.

                         With love,

                                   S.  L.  C.





     This letter had been written by the hand of his "secretary," Helen

     Allen: writing had become an effort to him.  Yet we did not suspect

     how rapidly the end was approaching and only grew vaguely alarmed.

     A week later, however, it became evident that his condition was

     critical.





DEAR PAINE,--.  .  .  .  I have been having a most uncomfortable time for

the past 4 days with that breast-pain, which turns out to be an affection

of the heart, just as I originally suspected.  The news from New York is

to the effect that non-bronchial weather has arrived there at last,

therefore if I can get my breast trouble in traveling condition I may

sail for home a week or two earlier than has heretofore been proposed:

                         Yours as ever

                                   S. L. CLEMENS,

                                   (per H. S. A.)





     In this letter he seems to have forgotten that his trouble had been

     pronounced an affection of the heart long before he left America,

     though at first it had been thought that it might be gastritis.

     The same mail brought a letter from Mr. Allen explaining fully the

     seriousness of his condition.  I sailed immediately for Bermuda,

     arriving there on the 4th of April.  He was not suffering at the

     moment, though the pains came now with alarming frequency and

     violence.  He was cheerful and brave.  He did not complain.  He gave

     no suggestion of a man whose days were nearly ended.



     A part of the Stormfield estate had been a farm, which he had given

     to Jean Clemens, where she had busied herself raising some live

     stock and poultry.  After her death he had wished the place to be

     sold and the returns devoted to some memorial purpose.  The sale had

     been made during the winter and the price received had been paid in

     cash.  I found him full of interest in all affairs, and anxious to

     discuss the memorial plan.  A day or two later he dictated the

     following letter-the last he would ever send.



     It seemed fitting that this final word from one who had so long

     given happiness to the whole world should record a special gift to

     his neighbors.





                     To Charles T. Lark, in New York:



                                                  HAMILTON, BERMUDA.

                                                  April 6, 1910.

DEAR MR. LARK,--I have told Paine that I want the money derived from the

sale of the farm, which I had given, but not conveyed, to my daughter

Jean, to be used to erect a building for the Mark Twain Library of

Redding, the building to be called the Jean L. Clemens Memorial Building.



I wish to place the money $6,000.00 in the hands of three trustees,--

Paine and two others: H. A. Lounsbury and William E. Hazen, all of

Redding, these trustees to form a building Committee to decide on the

size and plan of the building needed and to arrange for and supervise the

work in such a manner that the fund shall amply provide for the building

complete, with necessary furnishings, leaving, if possible, a balance

remaining, sufficient for such repairs and additional furnishings as may

be required for two years from the time of completion.



Will you please draw a document covering these requirements and have it

ready by the time I reach New York (April 14th).

                              Very sincerely,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





     We sailed on the 12th of April, reaching New York on the 14th,

     as he had planned.  A day or two later, Mr. and Mrs. Gabrilowitsch,

     summoned from Italy by cable, arrived.  He suffered very little

     after reaching Stormfield, and his mind was comparatively clear up

     to the last day.  On the afternoon of April 21st he sank into a

     state of coma, and just at sunset he died.  Three days later, at

     Elmira, New York, he was laid beside Mrs. Clemens and those others

     who had preceded him.









                    THE LAST DAY AT STORMFIELD



                         By BLISS CARMAN.



                    At Redding, Connecticut,

                    The April sunrise pours

                    Over the hardwood ridges

                    Softening and greening now

                    In the first magic of Spring.



                    The wild cherry-trees are in bloom,

                    The bloodroot is white underfoot,

                    The serene early light flows on,

                    Touching with glory the world,

                    And flooding the large upper room

                    Where a sick man sleeps.

                    Slowly he opens his eyes,

                    After long weariness, smiles,

                    And stretches arms overhead,

                    While those about him take heart.



                    With his awakening strength,

                    (Morning and spring in the air,

                    The strong clean scents of earth,

                    The call of the golden shaft,

                    Ringing across the hills)

                    He takes up his heartening book,

                    Opens the volume and reads,

                    A page of old rugged Carlyle,

                    The dour philosopher

                    Who looked askance upon life,

                    Lurid, ironical, grim,

                    Yet sound at the core.

                    But weariness returns;

                    He lays the book aside

                    With his glasses upon the bed,

                    And gladly sleeps. Sleep,

                    Blessed abundant sleep,

                    Is all that he needs.



                    And when the close of day

                    Reddens upon the hills

                    And washes the room with rose,

                    In the twilight hush

                    The Summoner comes to him

                    Ever so gently, unseen,

                    Touches him on the shoulder;

                    And with the departing sun

                    Our great funning friend is gone.



                    How he has made us laugh!

                    A whole generation of men

                    Smiled in the joy of his wit.

                    But who knows whether he was not

                    Like those deep jesters of old

                    Who dwelt at the courts of Kings,

                    Arthur's, Pendragon's, Lear's,

                    Plying the wise fool's trade,

                    Making men merry at will,

                    Hiding their deeper thoughts

                    Under a motley array,--

                    Keen-eyed, serious men,

                    Watching the sorry world,

                    The gaudy pageant of life,

                    With pity and wisdom and love?



                    Fearless, extravagant, wild,

                    His caustic merciless mirth

                    Was leveled at pompous shams.

                    Doubt not behind that mask

                    There dwelt the soul of a man,

                    Resolute, sorrowing, sage,

                    As sure a champion of good

                    As ever rode forth to fray.



                    Haply--who knows?--somewhere

                    In Avalon, Isle of Dreams,

                    In vast contentment at last,

                    With every grief done away,

                    While Chaucer and Shakespeare wait,

                    And Moliere hangs on his words,

                    And Cervantes not far off

                    Listens and smiles apart,

                    With that incomparable drawl

                    He is jesting with Dagonet now.



                [Copyright, 1910, by Collier's Weekly.]









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Letters Vol. 6 by Mark Twain













THE BOYS' LIFE OF MARK TWAIN



By Albert Bigelow Paine







CONTENTS



          PREFACE

I.        THE FAMILY OF JOHN CLEMENS

II.       THE NEW HOME, AND UNCLE JOHN QUARLES'S FARM

III.      SCHOOL

IV.       EDUCATION OUT OF SCHOOL

V.        TOM SAWYER AND HIS BAND

VI.       CLOSING SCHOOL-DAYS

VII.      THE APPRENTICE

VIII.     ORION'S PAPER

IX.       THE OPEN ROAD

X.        A WIND OF CHANCE

XI.       THE LONG WAY To THE AMAZON

XII.      RENEWING AN OLD AMBITION

XIII.     LEARNING THE RIVER

XIV.      RIVER DAYS

XV.       THE WRECK OF THE "PENNSYLVANIA"

XVI.      THE PILOT

XVII.     THE END OF PILOTING

XVIII.    THE SOLDIER

XIX.      THE PIONEER

XX.       THE MINER

XXI.      THE TERRITORIAL ENTERPRISE

XXII.     "MARK TWAIN"

XXIII.    ARTEMUS WARD AND LITERARY SAN FRANCISCO

XXIV.     THE DISCOVERY OF "THE JUMPING FROG"

XXV.      HAWAII AND ANSON BURLINGAME

XXVI.     MARK TWAIN, LECTURER

XXVII.    AN INNOCENT ABROAD, AND HOME AGAIN

XXVIII.   OLIVIA LANGDON.  WORK ON THE "INNOCENTS"

XXIX.     THE VISIT TO ELMIRA AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

XXX.      THE NEW BOOK AND A WEDDING

XXXI.     MARK TWAIN IN BUFFALO

XXXII.    AT WORK ON "ROUGHING IT"

XXXIII.   IN ENGLAND

XXXIV.    A NEW BOOK AND NEW ENGLISH TRIUMPHS

XXXV.     BEGINNING "TOM SAWYER"

XXXVI.    THE NEW HOME

XXXVII.   "OLD TIMES, "SKETCHES," AND "TOM SAWYER"

XXXVIII.  HOME PICTURES

XXXIX.    TRAMPING ABROAD

XL.       "THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER"

XLI.      GENERAL GRANT AT HARTFORD

XLII.     MANY INVESTMENTS

XLIII.    BACK TO THE RIVER, WITH BIXBY

XLIV.     A READING-TOUR WITH CABLE

XLV.      "THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN"

XLVI.     PUBLISHER TO GENERAL GRANT

XLVII.    THE HIGH-TIDE OF FORTUNE

XLVIII.   BUSINESS DIFFICULTIES.  PLEASANTER THINGS

XLIX.     KIPLING AT ELMIRA.  ELSIE LESLIE.  THE "YANKEE"

L.        THE MACHINE.  GOOD-BY TO HARTFORD.  "JOAN" IS BEGUN

LI.       THE FAILURE OF WEBSTER & CO.  AROUND THE WORLD.  SORROW

LII.      EUROPEAN ECONOMIES

LIII.     MARK TWAIN PAYS HIS DEBTS

LIV.      RETURN AFTER EXILE

LV.       A PROPHET AT HOME

LVI.      HONORED BY MISSOURI

LVII.     THE CLOSE OF A BEAUTIFUL LIFE

LVIII.    MARK TWAIN AT SEVENTY

LIX.      MARK TWAIN ARRANGES FOR HIS BIOGRAPHY

LX.       WORKING WITH MARK TWAIN

LXI.      DICTATIONS AT DUBLIN, N. H.

LXII.     A NEW ERA OF BILLIARDS

LXIII.    LIVING WITH MARK TWAIN

LXIV.     A DEGREE FROM OXFORD

LXV.      THE REMOVAL TO REDDING

LXVI.     LIFE AT STORMFIELD

LXVII.    THE DEATH OF JEAN

LXVIII.   DAYS IN BERMUDA

LXIX.     THE RETURN TO REDDING

LXX.      THE CLOSE OF A GREAT LIFE









PREFACE



This is the story of a boy, born in the humblest surroundings, reared

almost without schooling, and amid benighted conditions such as to-day

have no existence, yet who lived to achieve a world-wide fame; to attain

honorary degrees from the greatest universities of America and Europe; to

be sought by statesmen and kings; to be loved and honored by all men in

all lands, and mourned by them when he died.  It is the story of one of

the world's very great men--the story of Mark Twain.









I.



THE FAMILY OF JOHN CLEMENS



A long time ago, back in the early years of another century, a family

named Clemens moved from eastern Tennessee to eastern Missouri--from a

small, unheard-of place called Pall Mall, on Wolf River, to an equally

small and unknown place called Florida, on a tiny river named the Salt.



That was a far journey, in those days, for railway trains in 1835 had not

reached the South and West, and John Clemens and his family traveled in

an old two-horse barouche, with two extra riding-horses, on one of which

rode the eldest child, Orion Clemens, a boy of ten, and on the other

Jennie, a slave girl.



In the carriage with the parents were three other children--Pamela and

Margaret, aged eight and five, and little Benjamin, three years old.  The

time was spring, the period of the Old South, and, while these youngsters

did not realize that they were passing through a sort of Golden Age, they

must have enjoyed the weeks of leisurely journeying toward what was then

the Far West--the Promised Land.



The Clemens fortunes had been poor in Tennessee.  John Marshall Clemens,

the father, was a lawyer, a man of education; but he was a dreamer, too,

full of schemes that usually failed.  Born in Virginia, he had grown up

in Kentucky, and married there Jane Lampton, of Columbia, a descendant of

the English Lamptons and the belle of her region.  They had left Kentucky

for Tennessee, drifting from one small town to another that was always

smaller, and with dwindling law-practice John Clemens in time had been

obliged to open a poor little store, which in the end had failed to pay.

Jennie was the last of several slaves he had inherited from his Virginia

ancestors.  Besides Jennie, his fortune now consisted of the horses and

barouche, a very limited supply of money, and a large, unsalable tract of

east Tennessee land, which John Clemens dreamed would one day bring his

children fortune.



Readers of the "Gilded Age" will remember the journey of the Hawkins

family from the "Knobs" of Tennessee to Missouri and the important part

in that story played by the Tennessee land.  Mark Twain wrote those

chapters, and while they are not history, but fiction, they are based

upon fact, and the picture they present of family hardship and struggle

is not overdrawn.  The character of Colonel Sellers, who gave the

Hawkinses a grand welcome to the new home, was also real.  In life he was

James Lampton, cousin to Mrs. Clemens, a gentle and radiant merchant of

dreams, who believed himself heir to an English earldom and was always on

the verge of colossal fortune.  With others of the Lampton kin, he was

already settled in Missouri and had written back glowing accounts; though

perhaps not more glowing than those which had come from another relative,

John Quarles, brother-in-law to Mrs. Clemens, a jovial, whole-hearted

optimist, well-loved by all who knew him.



It was a June evening when the Clemens family, with the barouche and the

two outriders, finally arrived in Florida, and the place, no doubt,

seemed attractive enough then, however it may have appeared later.  It

was the end of a long journey; relatives gathered with fond welcome;

prospects seemed bright.  Already John Quarles had opened a general store

in the little town.  Florida, he said, was certain to become a city.

Salt River would be made navigable with a series of locks and dams.  He

offered John Clemens a partnership in his business.



Quarles, for that time and place, was a rich man.  Besides his store he

had a farm and thirty slaves.  His brother-in-law's funds, or lack of

them, did not matter.  The two had married sisters.  That was capital

enough for his hearty nature.  So, almost on the moment of arrival in the

new land, John Clemens once more found himself established in trade.



The next thing was to find a home.  There were twenty-one houses in

Florida, and none of them large.  The one selected by John and Jane

Clemens had two main rooms and a lean-to kitchen--a small place and

lowly--the kind of a place that so often has seen the beginning of

exalted lives.  Christianity began with a babe in a manger; Shakespeare

first saw the light in a cottage at Stratford; Lincoln entered the world

by way of a leaky cabin in Kentucky, and into the narrow limits of the

Clemens home in Florida, on a bleak autumn day--November 30, 1835--there

was born one who under the name of Mark Twain would live to cheer and

comfort a tired world.



The name Mark Twain had not been thought of then, and probably no one

prophesied favorably for the new-comer, who was small and feeble, and not

over-welcome in that crowded household.  They named him Samuel, after his

paternal grandfather, and added Langhorne for an old friend--a goodly

burden for so frail a wayfarer.  But more appropriately they called him

"Little Sam," or "Sammy," which clung to him through the years of his

delicate childhood.



It seems a curious childhood, as we think of it now.  Missouri was a

slave State--Little Sam's companions were as often black as white.  All

the children of that time and locality had negroes for playmates, and

were cared for by them.  They were fond of their black companions and

would have felt lost without them.  The negro children knew all the best

ways of doing things--how to work charms and spells, the best way to cure

warts and heal stone-bruises, and to make it rain, and to find lost

money.  They knew what signs meant, and dreams, and how to keep off

hoodoo; and all negroes, old and young, knew any number of weird tales.



John Clemens must have prospered during the early years of his Florida

residence, for he added another slave to his household--Uncle Ned, a man

of all work--and he built a somewhat larger house, in one room of which,

the kitchen, was a big fireplace.  There was a wide hearth and always

plenty of wood, and here after supper the children would gather, with

Jennie and Uncle Ned, and the latter would tell hair-lifting tales of

"ha'nts," and lonely roads, and witch-work that would make his hearers

shiver with terror and delight, and look furtively over their shoulders

toward the dark window-panes and the hovering shadows on the walls.

Perhaps it was not the healthiest entertainment, but it was the kind to

cultivate an imagination that would one day produce "Tom Sawyer" and

"Huck Finn."



True, Little Sam was very young at this period, but even a little chap of

two or three would understand most of that fireside talk, and get

impressions more vivid than if the understanding were complete.  He was

barely four when this earliest chapter of his life came to a close.



John Clemens had not remained satisfied with Florida and his undertakings

there.  The town had not kept its promises.  It failed to grow, and the

lock-and-dam scheme that would make Salt River navigable fell through.

Then one of the children, Margaret, a black-eyed, rosy little girl of

nine, suddenly died.  This was in August, 1839.  A month or two later the

saddened family abandoned their Florida home and moved in wagons, with

their household furnishings, to Hannibal, a Mississippi River town,

thirty miles away.  There was only one girl left now, Pamela, twelve

years old, but there was another boy, baby Henry, three years younger

than Little Sam--four boys in all.









II.



THE NEW HOME, AND UNCLE JOHN QUARLES'S FARM



Hannibal was a town with prospects and considerable trade.  It was

slumbrous, being a slave town, but it was not dead.  John Clemens

believed it a promising place for business, and opened a small general

store with Orion Clemens, now fifteen, a studious, dreamy lad, for clerk.



The little city was also an attractive place of residence.  Mark Twain

remembered it as "the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer

morning, .  .  .  the great Mississippi, the magnificent Mississippi,

rolling its mile-wide tide along, ....  the dense forest away on the

other side."



The "white town" was built against green hills, and abutting the river

were bluffs--Holliday's Hill and Lover's Leap.  A distance below the town

was a cave--a wonderful cave, as every reader of Tom Sawyer knows--while

out in the river, toward the Illinois shore, was the delectable island

that was one day to be the meeting-place of Tom's pirate band, and later

to become the hiding-place of Huck and Nigger Jim.



The river itself was full of interest.  It was the highway to the outside

world.  Rafts drifted by; smartly painted steamboats panted up and down,

touching to exchange traffic and travelers, a never-ceasing wonder to

those simple shut-in dwellers whom the telegraph and railway had not yet

reached.  That Hannibal was a pleasant place of residence we may believe,

and what an attractive place for a boy to grow up in!



Little Sam, however, was not yet ready to enjoy the island and the cave.

He was still delicate--the least promising of the family.  He was queer

and fanciful, and rather silent.  He walked in his sleep and was often

found in the middle of the night, fretting with the cold, in some dark

corner.  Once he heard that a neighbor's children had the measles, and,

being very anxious to catch the complaint, slipped over to the house and

crept into bed with an infected playmate.  Some days later, Little Sam's

relatives gathered about his bed to see him die.  He confessed, long

after, that the scene gratified him.  However, he survived, and fell into

the habit of running away, usually in the direction of the river.



"You gave me more uneasiness than any child I had," his mother once said

to him, in her old age.



"I suppose you were afraid I wouldn't live," he suggested.



She looked at him with the keen humor which had been her legacy to him.

"No, afraid you would," she said.  Which was only her joke, for she had

the tenderest of hearts, and, like all mothers, had a weakness for the

child that demanded most of her mother's care.  It was chiefly on his

account that she returned each year to Florida to spend the summer on

John Quarles's farm.



If Uncle John Quarles's farm was just an ordinary Missouri farm, and his

slaves just average negroes, they certainly never seemed so to Little

Sam.  There was a kind of glory about everything that belonged to Uncle

John, and it was not all imagination, for some of the spirit of that

jovial, kindly hearted man could hardly fail to radiate from his

belongings.



The farm was a large one for that locality, and the farm-house was a big

double log building--that is, two buildings with a roofed-over passage

between, where in summer the lavish Southern meals were served, brought

in on huge dishes by the negroes, and left for each one to help himself.

Fried chicken, roast pig, turkeys, ducks, geese, venison just killed,

squirrels, rabbits, partridges, pheasants, prairie-chickens, green corn,

watermelon--a little boy who did not die on that bill of fare would be

likely to get well on it, and to Little Sam the farm proved a life-saver.



It was, in fact, a heavenly place for a little boy.  In the corner of the

yard there were hickory and black-walnut trees, and just over the fence

the hill sloped past barns and cribs to a brook, a rare place to wade,

though there were forbidden pools.  Cousin Tabitha Quarles, called

"Puss," his own age, was Little Sam's playmate, and a slave girl, Mary,

who, being six years older, was supposed to keep them out of mischief.

There were swings in the big, shady pasture, where Mary swung her charges

and ran under them until their feet touched the branches.  All the woods

were full of squirrels and birds and blooming flowers; all the meadows

were gay with clover and butterflies, and musical with singing

grasshoppers and calling larks; the fence-rows were full of wild

blackberries; there were apples and peaches in the orchard, and plenty of

melons ripening in the corn.  Certainly it was a glorious place!



Little Sam got into trouble once with the watermelons.  One of them had

not ripened quite enough when he ate several slices of it.  Very soon

after he was seized with such terrible cramps that some of the household

did not think he could live.



But his mother said: "Sammy will pull through.  He was not born to die

that way."  Which was a true prophecy.  Sammy's slender constitution

withstood the strain.  It was similarly tested more than once during

those early years.  He was regarded as a curious child.  At times dreamy

and silent, again wild-headed and noisy, with sudden impulses that sent

him capering and swinging his arms into the wind until he would fall with

shrieks and spasms of laughter and madly roll over and over in the grass.

It is not remembered that any one prophesied very well for his future at

such times.



The negro quarters on Uncle John's farm were especially fascinating.  In

one cabin lived a bedridden old woman whom the children looked upon with

awe.  She was said to be a thousand years old, and to have talked with

Moses.  She had lost her health in the desert, coming out of Egypt.  She

had seen Pharaoh drown, and the fright had caused the bald spot on her

head.  She could ward off witches and dissolve spells.



Uncle Dan'l was another favorite, a kind-hearted, gentle soul, who long

after, as Nigger Jim in the Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn tales, would

win world-wide love and sympathy.



Through that far-off, warm, golden summer-time Little Sam romped and

dreamed and grew.  He would return each summer to the farm during those

early years.  It would become a beautiful memory.  His mother generally

kept him there until the late fall, when the chilly evenings made them

gather around the wide, blazing fireplace.  Sixty years later he wrote:



     "I can see the room yet with perfect clearness.  I can see all

     its belongings, all its details; the family-room of the house, with

     the trundle-bed in one corner and the spinning-wheel in another--a

     wheel whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the

     mournfulest of all sounds to me and made me homesick and low-

     spirited and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the

     dead; the vast fireplace, piled high with flaming logs from whose

     ends a sugary sap bubbled out but did not go to waste, for we

     scraped it off and ate it; .  .  .  the lazy cat spread out on the

     rough hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the jambs,

     blinking; my aunt in one chimney-corner, and my uncle in the other,

     smoking his corn-cob pipe."



It is hard not to tell more of the farm, for the boy who was one day

going to write of Tom and Huck and the rest learned there so many things

that Tom and Huck would need to know.



But he must have "book-learning," too, Jane Clemens said.  On his return

to Hannibal that first summer, she decided that Little Sam was ready for

school.  He was five years old and regarded as a "stirring child."



"He drives me crazy with his didoes when he's in the house," his mother

declared, "and when he's out of it I'm expecting every minute that some

one will bring him home half dead."



Mark Twain used to say that he had had nine narrow escapes from drowning,

and it was at this early age that he was brought home one afternoon in a

limp state, having been pulled from a deep hole in Bear Creek by a slave

girl.



When he was restored, his mother said: "I guess there wasn't much danger.

People born to be hanged are safe in water."



Mark Twain's mother was the original of Aunt Polly in the story of Tom

Sawyer, an outspoken, keen-witted, charitable woman, whom it was good to

know.  She had a heart full of pity, especially for dumb creatures.  She

refused to kill even flies, and punished the cat for catching mice.  She

would drown young kittens when necessary, but warmed the water for the

purpose.  She could be strict, however, with her children, if occasion

required, and recognized their faults.



Little Sam was inclined to elaborate largely on fact.  A neighbor once

said to her: "You don't believe anything that child says, I hope."



"Oh yes, I know his average.  I discount him ninety per cent.  The rest

is pure gold."



She declared she was willing to pay somebody to take him off her hands

for a part of each day and try to teach him "manners."  A certain Mrs. E.

Horr was selected for the purpose.



Mrs. Horr's school on Main Street, Hannibal, was of the old-fashioned

kind.  There were pupils of all ages, and everything was taught up to the

third reader and long division.  Pupils who cared to go beyond those

studies went to a Mr. Cross, on the hill, facing what is now the public

square.  Mrs. Horr received twenty-five cents a week for each pupil, and

the rules of conduct were read daily.  After the rules came the A-B-C

class, whose recitation was a hand-to-hand struggle, requiring no study-

time.



The rules of conduct that first day interested Little Sam.  He wondered

how nearly he could come to breaking them and escape.  He experimented

during the forenoon, and received a warning.  Another experiment would

mean correction.  He did not expect to be caught again; but when he least

expected it he was startled by a command to go out and bring a stick for

his own punishment.



This was rather dazing.  It was sudden, and, then, he did not know much

about choosing sticks for such a purpose.  Jane Clemens had commonly used

her hand.  A second command was needed to start him in the right

direction, and he was still dazed when he got outside.  He had the

forests of Missouri to select from, but choice was not easy.  Everything

looked too big and competent.  Even the smallest switch had a wiry look.

Across the way was a cooper's shop.  There were shavings outside, and one

had blown across just in front of him.  He picked it up, and, gravely

entering the room, handed it to Mrs. Horr.  So far as known, it is the

first example of that humor which would one day make Little Sam famous

before all the world.



It was a failure in this instance.  Mrs. Horr's comic side may have

prompted forgiveness, but discipline must be maintained.



"Samuel Langhorne Clemens," she said (he had never heard it all strung

together in that ominous way), "I am ashamed of you!  Jimmy Dunlap, go

and bring a switch for Sammy."  And the switch that Jimmy Dunlap brought

was of a kind to give Little Sam a permanent distaste for school.  He

told his mother at noon that he did not care for education; that he did

not wish to be a great man; that his desire was to be an Indian and scalp

such persons as Mrs. Horr.  In her heart Jane Clemens was sorry for him,

but she openly said she was glad there was somebody who could take him in

hand.



Little Sam went back to school, but he never learned to like it.  A

school was ruled with a rod in those days, and of the smaller boys Little

Sam's back was sore as often as the next.  When the days of early summer

came again, when from his desk he could see the sunshine lighting the

soft green of Holliday's Hill, with the glint of the river and the purple

distance beyond, it seemed to him that to be shut up with a Webster

spelling-book and a cross teacher was more than human nature could bear.

There still exists a yellow slip of paper upon which, in neat, old-

fashioned penmanship is written:



     MISS PAMELA CLEMENS



     Has won the love of her teacher and schoolmates by her amiable

     deportment and faithful application to her various studies.



     E. HORR, Teacher.





Thus we learn that Little Sam's sister, eight years older than himself,

attended the same school, and that she was a good pupil.  If any such

reward of merit was ever conferred on Little Sam, it has failed to come

to light.  If he won the love of his teacher and playmates, it was

probably for other reasons.



Yet he must have learned somehow, for he could read, presently, and was a

good speller for his age.









IV.



EDUCATION OUT OF SCHOOL



On their arrival in Hannibal, the Clemens family had moved into a part of

what was then the Pavey Hotel.  They could not have remained there long,

for they moved twice within the next few years, and again in 1844 into a

new house which Judge Clemens, as he was generally called, had built

on Hill Street--a house still standing, and known to-day as the Mark

Twain home.



John Clemens had met varying fortunes in Hannibal.  Neither commerce nor

the practice of law had paid.  The office of justice of the peace, to

which he was elected, returned a fair income, but his business losses

finally obliged him to sell Jennie, the slave girl.  Somewhat later his

business failure was complete.  He surrendered everything to his

creditors, even to his cow and household furniture, and relied upon his

law practice and justice fees.  However, he seems to have kept the

Tennessee land, possibly because no one thought it worth taking.  There

had been offers for it earlier, but none that its owner would accept.  It

appears to have been not even considered by his creditors, though his own

faith in it never died.



The struggle for a time was very bitter.  Orion Clemens, now seventeen,

had learned the printer's trade and assisted the family with his wages.

Mrs. Clemens took a few boarders.  In the midst of this time of hardship

little Benjamin Clemens died.  He was ten years old.  It was the darkest

hour.



Then conditions slowly improved.  There was more law practice and better

justice fees.  By 1844 Judge Clemens was able to build the house

mentioned above--a plain, cheap house, but a shelter and a home.  Sam

Clemens--he was hardly "Little Sam" any more--was at this time nine years

old.  His boyhood had begun.



Heretofore he had been just a child--wild and mischievous, often

exasperating, but still a child--a delicate little lad to be worried

over, mothered, or spanked and put to bed.  Now at nine he had acquired

health, with a sturdy ability to look out for himself, as boys in such a

community will.  "Sam," as they now called him, was "grown up" at nine

and wise for his years.  Not that he was old in spirit or manner--he was

never that, even to his death--but he had learned a great number of

things, many of them of a kind not taught at school.



He had learned a good deal of natural history and botany--the habits of

plants, insects, and animals.  Mark Twain's books bear evidence of this

early study.  His plants, bugs, and animals never do the wrong things.

He was learning a good deal about men, and this was often less pleasant

knowledge.  Once Little Sam--he was still Little Sam then--saw an old man

shot down on Main Street at noon day.  He saw them carry him home, lay

him on the bed, and spread on his breast an open family Bible, which

looked as heavy as an anvil.  He thought if he could only drag that great

burden away the poor old dying man would not breathe so heavily.



He saw a young emigrant stabbed with a bowie-knife by a drunken comrade,

and two young men try to kill their uncle, one holding him while the

other snapped repeatedly an Allen revolver, which failed to go off.  Then

there was the drunken rowdy who proposed to raid the "Welshman's" house,

one sultry, threatening evening--he saw that, too.  With a boon

companion, John Briggs, he followed at a safe distance behind.  A widow

with her one daughter lived there.  They stood in the shadow of the dark

porch; the man had paused at the gate to revile them.  The boys heard the

mother's voice warning the intruder that she had a loaded gun and would

kill him if he stayed where he was.  He replied with a tirade, and she

warned him that she would count ten--that if he remained a second longer

she would fire.  She began slowly and counted up to five, the man

laughing and jeering.  At six he grew silent, but he did not go.  She

counted on: seven, eight, nine--



The boys, watching from the dark roadside, felt their hearts stop.  There

was a long pause, then the final count, followed a second later by a gush

of flame.  The man dropped, his breast riddled.  At the same instant the

thunder-storm that had been gathering broke loose.  The boys fled wildly,

believing that Satan himself had arrived to claim the lost soul.



That was a day and locality of violent impulse and sudden action.

Happenings such as these were not infrequent in a town like Hannibal.

And there were events connected with slavery.  Sam once saw a slave

struck down and killed with a piece of slag, for a trifling offense.  He

saw an Abolitionist attacked by a mob that would have lynched him had not

a Methodist minister defended him on a plea that he must be crazy.  He

did not remember in later years that he had ever seen a slave auction,

but he added:



     "I am suspicious that it was because the thing was a commonplace

     spectacle and not an uncommon or impressive one.  I do vividly

     remember seeing a dozen black men and women, chained together, lying

     in a group on the pavement, waiting shipment to a Southern slave-

     market.  They had the saddest faces I ever saw."



Readers of Mark Twain's books--especially the stories of Huck and Tom,

will hardly be surprised to hear of these early happenings that formed so

large a portion of the author's early education.  Sam, however, did not

regard them as education--not at the time.  They got into his dreams.  He

set them down as warnings, or punishments, intended to give him a taste

for a better life.  He felt that it was his conscience that made such

things torture him.  That was his mother's idea, and he had a high

respect for her opinion in such matters.  Among other things, he had seen

her one day defy a vicious and fierce Corsican--a common terror in the

town--who had chased his grown daughter with a heavy rope in his hand,

declaring he would wear it out on her.  Cautious citizens got out of the

way, but Jane Clemens opened her door to the fugitive; then, instead of

rushing in and closing it, spread her arms across it, barring the way.

The man raved, and threatened her with the rope, but she did not flinch

or show any sign of fear.  She stood there and shamed and defied him

until he slunk off, crestfallen and conquered.  Any one as brave as his

mother must have a perfect conscience, Sam thought, and would know how to

take care of it.  In the darkness he would say his prayers, especially

when a thunderstorm was coming, and vow to begin a better life.  He

detested Sunday-school as much as he did day-school, and once his brother

Orion, who was moral and religious, had threatened to drag him there by

the collar, but, as the thunder got louder, Sam decided that he loved

Sunday-school and would go the next Sunday without being invited.



Sam's days were not all disturbed by fierce events.  They were mostly

filled with pleasanter things.  There were picnics sometimes, and

ferryboat excursions, and any day one could roam the woods, or fish,

alone or in company.  The hills and woods around Hannibal were never

disappointing.  There was the cave with its marvels.  There was Bear

Creek, where he had learned to swim.  He had seen two playmates drown;

twice, himself, he had been dragged ashore, more dead than alive; once by

a slave girl, another time by a slave man--Neal Champ, of the Pavey

Hotel.  But he had persevered, and with success.  He could swim better

than any playmate of his age.



It was the river that he cared for most.  It was the pathway that led to

the great world outside.  He would sit by it for hours and dream.  He

would venture out on it in a quietly borrowed boat, when he was barely

strong enough to lift an oar.  He learned to know all its moods and

phases.



More than anything in the world he hungered to make a trip on one of the

big, smart steamers that were always passing.  "You can hardly imagine

what it meant," he reflected, once, "to a boy in those days, shut in as

we were, to see those steamboats pass up and down, and never take a trip

on them."



It was at the mature age of nine that he found he could endure this no

longer.  One day when the big packet came down and stopped at Hannibal,

he slipped aboard and crept under one of the boats on the upper deck.

Then the signal-bells rang, the steamer backed away and swung into

midstream; he was really going at last.  He crept from beneath the boat

and sat looking out over the water and enjoying the scenery.  Then it

began to rain--a regular downpour.  He crept back under the boat, but his

legs were outside, and one of the crew saw him.  He was dragged out and

at the next stop set ashore.  It was the town of Louisiana, where there

were Lampton relatives, who took him home.  Very likely the home-coming

was not entirely pleasant, though a "lesson," too, in his general

education.



And always, each summer, there was the farm, where his recreation was no

longer mere girl plays and swings, with a colored nurse following about,

but sports with his older boy cousins, who went hunting with the men, for

partridges by day and for 'coons and 'possums by night.  Sometimes the

little boy followed the hunters all night long, and returned with them

through the sparkling and fragrant morning, fresh, hungry, and

triumphant, just in time for breakfast.  So it is no wonder that Little

Sam, at nine, was no longer Little Sam, but plain Sam Clemens, and grown

up.  If there were doubtful spots in his education--matters related to

smoking and strong words--it is also no wonder, and experience even in

these lines was worth something in a book like Tom Sawyer.



The boy Sam Clemens was not a particularly attractive lad.  He was rather

undersized, and his head seemed too large for his body.  He had a mass of

light sandy hair, which he plastered down to keep from curling.  His eyes

were keen and blue and his features rather large.  Still, he had a fair,

delicate complexion when it was not blackened by grime and tan; a gentle,

winning manner; a smile and a slow way of speaking that made him a

favorite with his companions.  He did not talk much, and was thought to

be rather dull--was certainly so in most of his lessons--but, for some

reason, he never spoke that every playmate in hearing did not stop,

whatever he was doing, to listen.  Perhaps it would be a plan for a new

game or lark; perhaps it was something droll; perhaps it was just a

casual remark that his peculiar drawl made amusing.  His mother always

referred to his slow fashion of speech as "Sammy's long talk."  Her own

speech was even more deliberate, though she seemed not to notice it.  Sam

was more like his mother than the others.  His brother, Henry Clemens,

three years younger, was as unlike Sam as possible.  He did not have the

"long talk," and was a handsome, obedient little fellow whom the

mischievous Sam loved to tease.  Henry was to become the Sid of Tom

Sawyer, though he was in every way a finer character than Sid.  With the

death of little Benjamin, Sam and Henry had been drawn much closer

together, and, in spite of Sam's pranks, loved each other dearly.  For

the pranks were only occasional, and Sam's love for Henry was constant.

He fought for him oftener than with him.



Many of the home incidents in the Tom Sawyer book really happened.  Sam

did clod Henry for getting him into trouble about the colored thread

with which he sewed his shirt when he came home from swimming; he did

inveigle a lot of boys into whitewashing a fence for him; he did give

painkiller to Peter, the cat.  As for escaping punishment for his

misdeeds, as described in the book, this was a daily matter, and his

methods suited the occasions.  For, of course, Tom Sawyer was Sam Clemens

himself, almost entirely, as most readers of that book have imagined.

However, we must have another chapter for Tom Sawyer and his doings--the

real Tom and his real doings with those graceless, lovable associates,

Joe Harper and Huckleberry Finn.









V.



TOM SAWYER AND HIS BAND



In beginning "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" the author says, "Most of the

adventures recorded in this book really occurred," and he tells us that

Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer also, though not from a single

individual, being a composite of three boys whom Mark Twain had known.



The three boys were himself, almost entirely, with traces of two

schoolmates, John Briggs and Will Bowen.  John Briggs was also the

original of Joe Harper, the "Terror of the Seas."  As for Huck Finn, the

"Red-Handed," his original was a village waif named Tom Blankenship, who

needed no change for his part in the story.



The Blankenship family picked up an uncertain livelihood, fishing and

hunting, and lived at first under a tree in a bark shanty, but later

moved into a large, barn-like building, back of the Clemens home on Hill

Street.  There were three male members of the household: Old Ben, the

father, shiftless and dissolute; young Ben, the eldest son--a doubtful

character, with certain good traits; and Tom--that is to say, Huck, who

was just as he is described in the book--a ruin of rags, a river-rat,

kind of heart, and accountable for his conduct to nobody in the world.

He could come and go as he chose; he never had to work or go to school;

he could do all the things, good and bad, that other boys longed to do

and were forbidden.  To them he was the symbol of liberty; his knowledge

of fishing, trapping, signs, and of the woods and river gave value to his

society, while the fact that it was forbidden made it necessary to Sam

Clemens's happiness.



The Blankenships being handy to the back gate of the Hill Street house,

he adopted them at sight.  Their free mode of life suited him.  He was

likely to be there at any hour of the day, and Tom made cat-call signals

at night that would bring Sam out on the shed roof at the back and down a

little trellis and flight of steps to the group of boon companions,

which, besides Tom, usually included John Briggs, Will Pitts, and the two

younger Bowen boys.  They were not malicious boys, but just mischievous,

fun-loving boys--little boys of ten or twelve--rather thoughtless, being

mainly bent on having a good time.



They had a wide field of action: they ranged from Holliday's Hill on the

north to the cave on the south, and over the fields and through all the

woods between.  They explored both banks of the river, the islands, and

the deep wilderness of the Illinois shore.  They could run like turkeys

and swim like ducks; they could handle a boat as if born in one.  No

orchard or melon-patch was entirely safe from them.  No dog or slave

patrol was so watchful that they did not sooner or later elude it.  They

borrowed boats with or without the owner's consent--it did not matter.



Most of their expeditions were harmless enough.  They often cruised up to

Turtle Island, about two miles above Hannibal, and spent the day

feasting.  There were quantities of turtles and their eggs there, and

mussels, and plenty of fish.  Fishing and swimming were their chief

pastimes, with incidental raiding, for adventure.  Bear Creek was their

swimming-place by day, and the river-front at night-fall--a favorite spot

being where the railroad bridge now ends.  It was a good distance across

to the island where, in the book, Tom Sawyer musters his pirate band, and

where later Huck found Nigger Jim, but quite often in the evening they

swam across to it, and when they had frolicked for an hour or more on the

sandbar at the head of the island, they would swim back in the dusk,

breasting the strong, steady Mississippi current without exhaustion or

dread.  They could swim all day, those little scamps, and seemed to have

no fear.  Once, during his boyhood, Sam Clemens swam across to the

Illinois side, then turned and swam back again without landing, a

distance of at least two miles as he had to go.  He was seized with a

cramp on the return trip.  His legs became useless and he was obliged to

make the remaining distance with his arms.



The adventures of Sam Clemens and his comrades would fill several books

of the size of Tom Sawyer.  Many of them are, of course, forgotten now,

but those still remembered show that Mark Twain had plenty of real

material.



It was not easy to get money in those days, and the boys were often

without it.  Once "Huck" Blankenship had the skin of a 'coon he had

captured, and offered to sell it to raise capital.  At Selms's store, on

Wild Cat Corner, the 'coon-skin would bring ten cents.  But this was not

enough.  The boys thought of a plan to make it bring more.  Selms's back

window was open, and the place where he kept his pelts was pretty handy.

Huck went around to the front door and sold the skin for ten cents to

Selms, who tossed it back on the pile.  Then Huck came back and, after

waiting a reasonable time, crawled in the open window, got the 'coon-

skin, and sold it to Selms again.  He did this several times that

afternoon, and the capital of the band grew.  But at last John Pierce,

Selms's clerk, said:



"Look here, Mr. Selms, there's something wrong about this.  That boy has

been selling us 'coonskins all the afternoon."



Selms went back to his pile of pelts.  There were several sheep-skins and

some cow-hides, but only one 'coon-skin--the one he had that moment

bought.



Selms himself, in after years, used to tell this story as a great joke.



One of the boys' occasional pastimes was to climb Holliday's Hill and

roll down big stones, to frighten the people who were driving by.

Holliday's Hill above the road was steep; a stone once started would go

plunging downward and bound across the road with the deadly momentum of a

shell.  The boys would get a stone poised, then wait until they saw a

team approaching, and, calculating the distance, would give the boulder a

start.  Dropping behind the bushes, they would watch the sudden effect

upon the party below as the great missile shot across the road a few

yards before them.  This was huge sport, but they carried it too far.

For at last they planned a grand climax that would surpass anything

before attempted in the stone-rolling line.



A monstrous boulder was lying up there in the right position to go down-

hill, once started.  It would be a glorious thing to see that great stone

go smashing down a hundred yards or so in front of some peaceful-minded

countryman jogging along the road.  Quarrymen had been getting out rock

not far away and had left their picks and shovels handy.  The boys

borrowed the tools and went to work to undermine the big stone.  They

worked at it several hours.  If their parents had asked them to work like

that, they would have thought they were being killed.



Finally, while they were still digging, the big stone suddenly got loose

and started down.  They were not ready for it at all.  Nobody was coming

but an old colored man in a cart; their splendid stone was going to be

wasted.



One could hardly call it wasted, however; they had planned for a

thrilling result, and there was certainly thrill enough while it lasted.

In the first place the stone nearly caught Will Bowen when it started.

John Briggs had that moment quit digging and handed Will the pick.  Will

was about to take his turn when Sam Clemens leaped aside with a yell:



"Lookout, boys; she's coming!"



She came.  The huge boulder kept to the ground at first, then, gathering

momentum, it went bounding into the air.  About half-way down the hill it

struck a sapling and cut it clean off.  This turned its course a little,

and the negro in the cart, hearing the noise and seeing the great mass

come crashing in his direction, made a wild effort to whip up his mule.



The boys watched their bomb with growing interest.  It was headed

straight for the negro, also for a cooper-shop across the road.  It made

longer leaps with every bound, and, wherever it struck, fragments and

dust would fly.  The shop happened to be empty, but the rest of the

catastrophe would call for close investigation.  They wanted to fly, but

they could not move until they saw the rock land.  It was making mighty

leaps now, and the terrified negro had managed to get exactly in its

path.  The boys stood holding their breath, their mouths open.



Then, suddenly, they could hardly believe their eyes; a little way above

the road the boulder struck a projection, made one mighty leap into the

air, sailed clear over the negro and his mule, and landed in the soft

dirt beyond the road, only a fragment striking the shop, damaging, but

not wrecking it.  Half buried in the ground, the great stone lay there

for nearly forty years; then it was broken up.  It was the last rock the

boys ever rolled down.  Nearly sixty years later John Briggs and Mark

Twain walked across Holliday's Hill and looked down toward the river

road.



Mark Twain said: "It was a mighty good thing, John, that stone acted the

way it did.  We might have had to pay a fancy price for that old darky I

can see him yet."[1]



It can be no harm now, to confess that the boy Sam Clemens--a pretty

small boy, a good deal less than twelve at the time, and by no means

large for his years--was the leader of this unhallowed band.  In any

case, truth requires this admission.  If the band had a leader, it was

Sam, just as it was Tom Sawyer in the book.  They were always ready to

listen to him--they would even stop fishing to do that--and to follow his

plans.  They looked to him for ideas and directions, and he gloried in

being a leader and showing off, just as Tom did in the book.  It seems

almost a pity that in those far-off barefoot days he could not have

looked down the years and caught a glimpse of his splendid destiny.



But of literary fame he could never have dreamed.  The chief ambition--

the "permanent ambition"--of every Hannibal boy was to be a pilot.  The

pilot in his splendid glass perch with his supreme power and princely

salary was to them the noblest of all human creatures.  An elder Bowen

boy was already a pilot, and when he came home, as he did now and then,

his person seemed almost too sacred to touch.



Next to being a pilot, Sam thought he would like to be a pirate or a

bandit or a trapper-scout--something gorgeous and awe-inspiring, where

his word, his nod, would still be law.  The river kept his river ambition

always fresh, and with the cave and the forest round about helped him to

imagine those other things.



The cave was the joy of his heart.  It was a real cave, not merely a

hole, but a marvel of deep passages and vaulted chambers that led back

into the bluffs and far down into the earth, even below the river, some

said.  Sam Clemens never tired of the cave.  He was willing any time to

quit fishing or swimming or melon-hunting for the three-mile walk, or

pull, that brought them to its mystic door.  With its long corridors, its

royal chambers hung with stalactites, its remote hiding-places, it was

exactly suitable, Sam thought, to be the lair of an outlaw, and in it he

imagined and carried out adventures which his faithful followers may not

always have understood, though enjoying them none the less for that

reason.



In Tom Sawyer, Indian Joe dies in the cave.  He did not die there in real

life, but was lost there once and was very weak when they found him.  He

was not as bad as painted in the book, though he was dissolute and

accounted dangerous; and when one night he died in reality, there came a

thunder-storm so terrific that Sam Clemens at home, in bed, was certain

that Satan had come in person for the half-breed's soul.  He covered his

head and said his prayers with fearful anxiety lest the evil one might

decide to save another trip by taking him along then.



The treasure-digging adventure in the book had this foundation in fact:

It was said that two French trappers had once buried a chest of gold

about two miles above Hannibal, and that it was still there.  Tom

Blankenship (Huck) one morning said he had dreamed just where the

treasure was, and that if the boys--Sam Clemens and John Briggs--would go

with him and help dig, he would divide.  The boys had great faith in

dreams, especially in Huck's dreams.  They followed him to a place with

some shovels and picks, and he showed them just where to dig.  Then he

sat down under the shade of a pawpaw-bush and gave orders.



They dug nearly all day.  Huck didn't dig any himself, because he had

done the dreaming, which was his share.  They didn't find the treasure

that day, and next morning they took two long iron rods to push and drive

into the ground until they should strike something.  They struck a number

of things, but when they dug down it was never the money they found.

That night the boys said they wouldn't dig any more.



But Huck had another dream.  He dreamed the gold was exactly under the

little pawpaw-tree.  This sounded so circumstantial that they went back

and dug another day.  It was hot weather, too--August--and that night

they were nearly dead.  Even Huck gave it up then.  He said there was

something wrong about the way they dug.



This differs a good deal from the treasure incident in the book, but it

shows us what respect the boys had for the gifts of the ragamuffin

original of Huck Finn.  Tom Blankenship's brother Ben was also used, and

very importantly, in the creation of our beloved Huck.  Ben was

considerably older, but certainly no more reputable, than Tom.  He

tormented the smaller boys, and they had little love for him.  Yet

somewhere in Ben Blankenship's nature there was a fine, generous strain

of humanity that provided Mark Twain with that immortal episode--the

sheltering of Nigger Jim.  This is the real story:



     A slave ran off from Monroe County, Missouri, and got across the

     river into Illinois.  Ben used to fish and hunt over there in the

     swamps, and one day found him.  It was considered a most worthy act

     in those days to return a runaway slave; in fact, it was a crime not

     to do it.  Besides, there was for this one a reward of fifty

     dollars--a fortune to ragged, out-cast Ben Blankenship.  That money,

     and the honor he could acquire, must have been tempting to the waif,

     but it did not outweigh his human sympathy.  Instead of giving him

     up and claiming the reward, Ben kept the runaway over there in the

     marshes all summer.  The negro fished, and Ben carried him scraps of

     other food.  Then, by and by, the facts leaked out.  Some wood-

     choppers went on a hunt for the fugitive and chased him to what was

     called Bird Slough.  There, trying to cross a drift, he was drowned.



Huck's struggle in the book is between conscience and the law, on one

side, and deep human sympathy on the other.  Ben Blankenship's struggle,

supposing there was one, would be between sympathy and the offered

reward.  Neither conscience nor law would trouble him.  It was his native

humanity that made him shelter the runaway, and it must have been strong

and genuine to make him resist the lure of the fifty-dollar prize.



There was another chapter to this incident.  A few days after the

drowning of the runaway, Sam Clemens and his band made their way to the

place and were pushing the drift about, when, all at once, the negro shot

up out of the water, straight and terrible, a full half-length in the

air.  He had gone down foremost and had been caught in the drift.  The

boys did not stop to investigate, but flew in terror to report their

tale.



Those early days seem to have been full of gruesome things.  In "The

Innocents Abroad," the author tells how he once spent a night in his

father's office and discovered there a murdered man.  This was a true

incident.  The man had been stabbed that afternoon and carried into the

house to die.  Sam and John Briggs had been playing truant all day and

knew nothing of the matter.  Sam thought the office safer than his home,

where his mother was probably sitting up for him.  He climbed in by a

window and lay down on the lounge, but did not sleep.  Presently he

noticed what appeared to be an unusual shape on the floor.  He tried to

turn his face to the wall and forget it, but that would not do.  In agony

he watched the thing until at last a square of moonlight gradually

revealed a sight that he never forgot.  In the book he says:



     "I went away from there.  I do not say that I went in any sort of

     hurry, but I simply went--that is sufficient.  I went out of the

     window, and I carried the sash along with me.  I did not need the

     sash, but it was handier to take it than to leave it, and so I took

     it.  I was not scared, but I was considerable agitated."



Sam was not yet twelve, for his father was no longer living when the boy

had reached that age.  And how many things had crowded themselves into

his few brief years!  We must be content here with only a few of them.

Our chapter is already too long.



Ministers and deacons did not prophesy well for Sam Clemens and his mad

companions.  They spoke feelingly of state prison and the gallows.  But

the boys were a disappointing lot.  Will Bowen became a fine river-pilot.

Will Pitts was in due time a leading merchant and bank president.  John

Briggs grew into a well-to-do and highly respected farmer.  Huck Finn--

which is to say, Tom Blankenship--died an honored citizen and justice of

the peace in a Western town.  As for Sam Clemens, we shall see what he

became as the chapters pass.



[1] John Briggs died in 1907; earlier in the same year the writer of this

memoir spent an afternoon with him and obtained from him most of the

material for this chapter.









VI.



CLOSING SCHOOL-DAYS



Sam was at Mr. Cross's school on the Square in due time, and among the

pupils were companions that appealed to his gentler side.  There were the

RoBards boys--George, the best Latin scholar, and John, who always won

the good-conduct medal, and would one day make all the other boys envious

by riding away with his father to California, his curls of gold blowing

in the wind.



There was Buck Brown, a rival speller, and John Garth, who would marry

little Helen Kercheval, and Jimmy MacDaniel, whom it was well to know

because his father kept a pastry-shop and he used to bring cakes and

candy to school.



There were also a number of girls.  Bettie Ormsley, Artemisia Briggs, and

Jennie Brady were among the girls he remembered in later years, and Mary

Miller, who was nearly double his age and broke his heart by getting

married one day, a thing he had not expected at all.



Yet through it all he appears, like Tom Sawyer, to have had one faithful

sweetheart.  In the book it is Becky Thatcher--in real life she was Laura

Hawkins.  The Clemens and Hawkins families lived opposite, and the

children were early acquainted.  The "Black Avenger of the Spanish Main"

was very gentle when he was playing at house-building with little Laura,

and once, when he dropped a brick on her finger, he cried the louder and

longer of the two.



For he was a tender-hearted boy.  He would never abuse an animal, except

when his tendency to mischief ran away with him, as in the "pain-killer"

incident.  He had a real passion for cats.  Each summer he carried his

cat to the farm in a basket, and it always had a place by him at the

table.  He loved flowers--not as a boy botanist or gardener, but as a

companion who understood their thoughts.  He pitied dead leaves and dry

weeds because their lives were ended and they would never know summer

again or grow glad with another spring.  Even in that early time he had

that deeper sympathy which one day would offer comfort to humanity and

make every man his friend.



But we are drifting away from Sam Clemens's school-days.  They will not

trouble us much longer now.  More than anything in the world Sam detested

school, and he made any excuse to get out of going.  It is hard to say

just why, unless it was the restraint and the long hours of confinement.



The Square in Hannibal, where stood the school of Mr. Cross, was a grove

in those days, with plum-trees and hazel-bushes and grape-vines.  When

spring came, the children gathered flowers at recess, climbed trees, and

swung in the vines.  It was a happy place enough, only--it was school.

To Sam Clemens, the spelling-bee every Friday afternoon was the one thing

that made it worth while.  Sam was a leader at spelling--it was one of

his gifts--he could earn compliments even from Mr. Cross, whose name, it

would seem, was regarded as descriptive.  Once in a moment of inspiration

Sam wrote on his late:



            "Cross by name and Cross by nature,

             Cross jumped over an Irish potato."



John Briggs thought this a great effort, and urged the author to write it

on the blackboard at noon.  Sam hesitated.



"Oh, pshaw!" said John, "I wouldn't be afraid to do it."



"I dare you to do it," said Sam.



This was enough.  While Mr. Cross was at dinner John wrote in a large

hand the fine couplet.  The teacher returned and called the school to

order.  He looked at the blackboard, then, searchingly, at John Briggs.

The handwriting was familiar.



"Did you do that?" he asked, ominously.



It was a time for truth.



"Yes, sir," said John.



"Come here!"  And John came and paid handsomely for his publishing

venture.  Sam Clemens expected that the author would be called for next;

but perhaps Mr. Cross had exhausted himself on John.  Sam did not often

escape.  His back kept fairly warm from one "flailing" to the next.



Yet he usually wore one of the two medals offered in that school--the

medal for spelling.  Once he lost it by leaving the first "r" out of

February.  Laura Hawkins was on the floor against him, and he was a

gallant boy.  If it had only been Huck Brown he would have spelled that

and all the other months backward, to show off.  There were moments of

triumph that almost made school worth while; the rest of the time it was

prison and servitude.



But then one day came freedom.  Judge Clemens, who, in spite of

misfortune, had never lost faith in humanity, indorsed a large note for a

neighbor, and was obliged to pay it.  Once more all his property was

taken away.  Only a few scanty furnishings were rescued from the wreck.

A St. Louis cousin saved the home, but the Clemens family could not

afford to live in it.  They moved across the street and joined

housekeeping with another family.



Judge Clemens had one hope left.  He was a candidate for the clerkship of

the surrogate court, a good office, and believed his election sure.  His

business misfortunes had aroused wide sympathy.  He took no chances,

however, and made a house-to house canvas of the district, regardless of

the weather, probably undermining his health.  He was elected by a large

majority, and rejoiced that his worries were now at an end.  They were,

indeed, over.  At the end of February he rode to the county seat to take

the oath of office.  He returned through a drenching storm and reached

home nearly frozen. Pneumonia set in, and a few days later he was

dying.  His one comfort now was the Tennessee land.  He said it would

make them all rich and happy.  Once he whispered:



"Cling to the land; cling to the land and wait.  Let nothing beguile it

away from you."



He was a man who had rarely displayed affection for his children.  But

presently he beckoned to Pamela, now a lovely girl of nineteen, and,

putting his arm around her neck, kissed her for the first time in years.



"Let me die," he said.



He did not speak again.  A little more, and his worries had indeed ended.

The hard struggle of an upright, impractical man had come to a close.

This was in March, 1847.  John Clemens had lived less than forty-nine

years.



The children were dazed.  They had loved their father and honored his

nobility of purpose.  The boy Sam was overcome with remorse.  He recalled

his wildness and disobedience--a thousand things trifling enough at the

time, but heartbreaking now.  Boy and man, Samuel Clemens was never

spared by remorse.  Leading him into the room where his father lay, his

mother said some comforting words and asked him to make her a promise.



He flung himself into her arms, sobbing: "I will promise anything, if you

won't make me go to school!  Anything!"



After a moment his mother said: "No, Sammy, you need not go to school any

more.  Only promise me to be a better boy.  Promise not to break my

heart!"



He gave his promise to be faithful and industrious and upright, like his

father.  Such a promise was a serious matter, and Sam Clemens, underneath

all, was a serious lad.  He would not be twelve until November, but his

mother felt that he would keep his word.



Orion Clemens returned to St. Louis, where he was receiving a salary of

ten dollars a week--high wage for those days--out of which he could send

three dollars weekly to the family.  Pamela, who played the guitar and

piano very well, gave music lessons, and so helped the family fund.

Pamela Clemens, the original of Cousin Mary, in "Tom Sawyer," was a sweet

and noble girl.  Henry was too young to work, but Sam was apprenticed to

a printer named Ament, who had recently moved to Hannibal and bought a

weekly paper, "The Courier."  Sam agreed with his mother that the

printing trade offered a chance for further education without attending

school, and then, some day, there might be wages.









VII.



THE APPRENTICE



The terms of Samuel Clemens's apprenticeship were the usual thing for

that day: board and clothes--"more board than clothes, and not much of

either," Mark Twain used to say.



"I was supposed to get two suits of clothes a year, but I didn't get

them.  I got one suit and took the rest out in Ament's old garments,

which didn't fit me in any noticeable way.  I was only about half as big

as he was, and when I had on one of his shirts I felt as if I had on a

circus-tent.  I had to turn the trousers up to my ears to make them short

enough."



Another apprentice, a huge creature, named Wales McCormick, was so large

that Ament's clothes were much too small for him.  The two apprentices,

fitted out with their employer's cast-off garments, were amusing enough,

no doubt.  Sam and Wales ate in the kitchen at first, but later at the

family table with Mr. and Mrs. Ament and Pet McMurry, a journeyman

printer.  McMurry was a happy soul, as one could almost guess from his

name.  He had traveled far and learned much.  What the two apprentices

did not already know, Pet McMurry could teach them.  Sam Clemens had

promised to be a good boy, and he was so, by the standards of boyhood.

He was industrious, regular at his work, quick to learn, kind, and

truthful.  Angels could hardly be more than that in a printing-office.

But when food was scarce, even an angel--a young printer-angel--could

hardly resist slipping down the cellar stairs at night, for raw potatoes,

onions, and apples, which they cooked in the office, where the boys slept

on a pallet on the floor.  Wales had a wonderful way of cooking a potato

which his fellow apprentice never forgot.



How one wishes for a photograph of Sam Clemens at that period!  But in

those days there were only daguerreotypes, and they were expensive

things.  There is a letter, though, written long afterward, by Pet

McMurry to Mark Twain, which contains this paragraph:



     "If your memory extends so far back, you will recall a little sandy-

     haired boy of nearly a quarter of a century ago, in the printing-

     office at Hannibal, over the Brittingham drug-store, mounted upon a

     little box at the case, who used to love to sing so well the

     expression of the poor drunken man who was supposed to have fallen

     by the wayside, 'If ever I get up again, I'll stay up--if I kin.'"



And with this portrait we must be content--we cannot doubt its truth.



Sam was soon office favorite and in time became chief stand-by.  When he

had been at work a year, he could set type accurately, run the job press

to the tune of "Annie Laurie," and he had charge of the circulation.

That is to say, he carried the papers--a mission of real importance, for

a long, sagging span of telegraph-wire had reached across the river to

Hannibal, and Mexican-war news delivered hot from the front gave the

messenger a fine prestige.



He even did editing, of a kind.  That is to say, when Ament was not in

the office and copy was needed, Sam hunted him up, explained the

situation, and saw that the necessary matter was produced.  He was not

ambitious to write--not then.  He wanted to be a journeyman printer, like

Pet, and travel and see the world.  Sometimes he thought he would like to

be a clown, or "end man" in a minstrel troupe.  Once for a week he served

as subject for a traveling hypnotist-and was dazzled by his success.



But he stuck to printing, and rapidly became a neat, capable workman.

Ament gave him a daily task, after which he was free.  By three in the

afternoon he was likely to finish his stint.  Then he was off for the

river or the cave, joining his old comrades.  Or perhaps he would go with

Laura Hawkins to gather wild columbine on the high cliff above the river,

known as Lover's Leap.  When winter came these two sometimes went to Bear

Creek, skating; or together they attended parties, where the old-

fashioned games "Ring-around-Rosy" and "Dusty Miller" were the chief

amusements.



In "The Gilded Age," Laura Hawkins at twelve is pictured "with her dainty

hands propped into the ribbon-bordered pockets of her apron .  .  . a

vision to warm the coldest heart and bless and cheer the saddest."  That

was the real Laura, though her story in that book in no way resembles the

reality.



It was just at this time that an incident occurred which may be looked

back upon now as a turning-point in Samuel Clemens's life.  Coming home

from the office one afternoon, he noticed a square of paper being swept

along by the wind.  He saw that it was printed--was interested

professionally in seeing what it was like.  He chased the flying scrap

and overtook it.  It was a leaf from some old history of Joan of Arc, and

pictured the hard lot of the "maid" in the tower at Rouen, reviled and

mistreated by her ruffian captors.  There were some paragraphs of

description, but the rest was pitiful dialogue.



Sam had never heard of Joan before--he knew nothing of history.  He was

no reader.  Orion was fond of books, and Pamela; even little Henry had

read more than Sam.  But now, as he read, there awoke in him a deep

feeling of pity and indignation, and with it a longing to know more of

the tragic story.  It was an interest that would last his life through,

and in the course of time find expression in one of the rarest books ever

written.



The first result was that Sam began to read.  He hunted up everything he

could find on the subject of Joan, and from that went into French history

in general--indeed, into history of every kind.  Samuel Clemens had

suddenly become a reader--almost a student.  He even began the study of

languages, German and Latin, but was not able to go on for lack of time

and teachers.



He became a hater of tyranny, a champion of the weak.  Watching a game of

marbles or tops, he would remark to some offender, in his slow drawling

way, "You mustn't cheat that boy."



And the cheating stopped, or trouble followed.









VIII.



ORION'S PAPER



A Hannibal paper, the "Journal," was for sale under a mortgage of five

hundred dollars, and Orion Clemens, returning from St. Louis, borrowed

the money and bought it.  Sam's two years' apprenticeship with Ament had

been completed, and Orion felt that together they could carry on the

paper and win success.  Henry Clemens, now eleven, was also taken out of

school to learn type-setting.



Orion was a better printer than proprietor.  Like so many of his family,

he was a visionary, gentle and credulous, ready to follow any new idea.

Much advice was offered him, and he tried to follow it all.



He began with great hopes and energy.  He worked like a slave and did not

spare the others.  The paper was their hope of success.  Sam, especially,

was driven.  There were no more free afternoons.  In some chapters

written by Orion Clemens in later life, he said:



     "I was tyrannical and unjust to Sam.  He was swift and clean as a

     good journeyman.  I gave him 'takes,' and, if he got through well, I

     begrudged him the time and made him work more."



Orion did not mean to be unjust.  The struggle against opposition and

debt was bitter.  He could not be considerate.



The paper for a time seemed on the road to success, but Orion worked too

hard and tried too many schemes.  His enthusiasm waned and most of his

schemes turned out poorly.  By the end of the year the "Journal" was on

the down grade.



In time when the need of money became great, Orion made a trip to

Tennessee to try to raise something on the land which they still held

there.  He left Sam in charge of the paper, and, though its proprietor

returned empty-handed, his journey was worth while, for it was during his

absence that Samuel Clemens began the career that would one day make him

Mark Twain.



Sam had concluded to edit the paper in a way that would liven up the

circulation.  He had never written anything for print, but he believed he

knew what the subscribers wanted.  The editor of a rival paper had been

crossed in love, and was said to have tried to drown himself.  Sam wrote

an article telling all the history of the affair, giving names and

details.  Then on the back of two big wooden letters, used for bill-

printing, he engraved illustrations of the victim wading out into the

river, testing the depth of the water with a stick.



The paper came out, and the demand for it kept the Washington hand-press

busy.  The injured editor sent word that he was coming over to thrash the

whole Journal staff, but he left town, instead, for the laugh was too

general.



Sam also wrote a poem which startled orthodox readers.  Then Orion

returned and reduced him to the ranks.  In later years Orion saw his

mistake.



     "I could have distanced all competitors, even then," he wrote,

     "if I had recognized Sam's ability and let him go ahead, merely

     keeping him from offending worthy persons."



Sam was not discouraged.  He liked the taste of print.  He sent two

anecdotes to the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post.  Both were accepted

--without payment, of course, in those days--and when they appeared he

walked on air.  This was in 1851.  Nearly sixty years later he said:



      "Seeing them in print was a joy which rather exceeded anything in

      that line I have ever experienced since."



However, he wrote nothing further for the "Post."  Orion printed two of

his sketches in the "Journal," which was the extent of his efforts at

this time.  None of this early work has been preserved.  Files of the

"Post" exist, but the sketches were unsigned and could hardly be

identified.



The Hannibal paper dragged along from year to year.  Orion could pay

nothing on the mortgage--financial matters becoming always worse.  He

could barely supply the plainest food and clothing for the family.  Sam

and Henry got no wages, of course.  Then real disaster came.  A cow got

into the office one night, upset a type-case, and ate up two composition

rollers.  Somewhat later a fire broke out and did considerable damage.

There was partial insurance, with which Orion replaced a few necessary

articles; then, to save rent, he moved the office into the front room of

the home on Hill Street, where they were living again at this time.



Samuel Clemens, however, now in his eighteenth year, felt that he was no

longer needed in Hannibal.  He was a capable workman, with little to do

and no reward.  Orion, made irritable by his misfortunes, was not always

kind.  Pamela, who, meantime, had married well, was settled in St. Louis.

Sam told his mother that he would visit Pamela and look about the city.

There would be work in St. Louis at good wages.



He was going farther than St. Louis, but he dared not tell her.  Jane

Clemens, consenting, sighed as she put together his scanty belongings.

Sam was going away.  He had been a good boy of late years, but her faith

in his resisting powers was not strong.  Presently she held up a little

Testament.



"I want you to take hold of the other end of this, Sam," she said, "and

make me a promise."



The slim, wiry woman of forty-nine, gray-eyed, tender, and resolute,

faced the fair-cheeked youth of seventeen, his eyes as piercing and

unwavering as her own.  How much alike they were!



"I want you," Jane Clemens said, "to repeat after me, Sam, these words: I

do solemnly swear that I will not throw a card or drink a drop of liquor

while I am gone."



He repeated the vow after her, and she kissed him.



"Remember that, Sam, and write to us," she said.



"And so," writes Orion, "he went wandering in search of that comfort and

advancement, and those rewards of industry, which he had failed to find

where I was--gloomy, taciturn, and selfish.  I not only missed his labor;

we all missed his abounding activity and merriment."









IX.



THE OPEN ROAD



Samuel Clemens went to visit his sister Pamela in St. Louis and was

presently at work, setting type on the "Evening News."  He had no

intention, however, of staying there.  His purpose was to earn money

enough to take him to New York City.  The railroad had by this time

reached St. Louis, and he meant to have the grand experience of a long

journey "on the cars."  Also, there was a Crystal Palace in New York,

where a world's exposition was going on.



Trains were slow in 1853, and it required several days and nights to go

from St. Louis to New York City, but to Sam Clemens it was a wonderful

journey.  All day he sat looking out of the window, eating when he chose

from the food he carried, curling up in his seat at night to sleep.  He

arrived at last with a few dollars in his pocket and a ten-dollar bill

sewed into the lining of his coat.



New York was rather larger than he expected.  All of the lower end of

Manhattan Island was covered by it.  The Crystal Palace--some distance

out--stood at Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue--the present site of

Bryant Park.  All the world's newest wonders were to be seen there--a

dazzling exhibition.  A fragment of the letter which Sam Clemens wrote to

his sister Pamela--the earliest piece of Mark Twain's writing that has

been preserved--expresses his appreciation of the big fair:



     "From the gallery (second floor) you have a glorious sight--the

     flags of the different countries represented, the lofty dome,

     glittering jewelry, gaudy tapestry, etc., with the busy crowd

     passing to and fro--'tis a perfect fairy palace--beautiful beyond

     description.



     "The machinery department is on the main floor, but I cannot

     enumerate any of it on account of the lateness of the hour (past one

     o'clock).  It would take more than a week to examine everything on

     exhibition, and I was only in a little over two hours to-night.  I

     only glanced at about one-third of the articles; and, having a poor

     memory, I have enumerated scarcely any of even the principal

     objects.  The visitors to the Palace average 6,000 daily--double the

     population of Hannibal.  The price of admission being fifty cents,

     they take in about $3,000.



     "The Latting Observatory (height about 280 feet) is near the Palace.

     From it you can obtain a grand view of the city and the country

     around.  The Croton Aqueduct, to supply the city with water, is the

     greatest wonder yet.  Immense pipes are laid across the bed of the

     Harlem River, and pass through the country to Westchester County,

     where a whole river is turned from its course and brought to New

     York.  From the reservoir in the city to Westchester County

     reservoir the distance is thirty-eight miles, and, if necessary,

     they could easily supply every family in New York with one hundred

     barrels of water a day!



     "I am very sorry to learn that Henry has been sick.  He ought to go

     to the country and take exercise, for he is not half so healthy as

     Ma thinks he is.  If he had my walking to do, he would be another

     boy entirely.  Four times every day I walk a little over a mile; and

     working hard all day and walking four miles is exercise.  I am used

     to it now, though, and it is no trouble.  Where is it Orion's going

     to?  Tell Ma my promises are faithfully kept; and if I have my

     health I will take her to Ky. in the spring.  I shall save money for

     this.



     "(It has just struck 2 A.M., and I always get up at six and am at

     work at 7.) You ask where I spend my evenings.  Where would you

     suppose, with a free printers' library containing more than 4,000

     volumes within a quarter of a mile of me, and nobody at home to talk

     to?"



     "I shall write to Ella soon.  Write soon.

     "Truly your Brother,



     "SAMY.



     "P.S.--I have written this by a light so dim that you nor Ma could

     not read by it."



We get a fair idea of Samuel Clemens at seventeen from this letter.  For

one thing, he could write good, clear English, full of interesting facts.

He is enthusiastic, but not lavish of words.  He impresses us with his

statement that the visitors to the Palace each day are in number double

the population of Hannibal; a whole river is turned from its course to

supply New York City with water; the water comes thirty-eight miles, and

each family could use a hundred barrels a day!  The letter reveals his

personal side--his kindly interest in those left behind, his anxiety for

Henry, his assurance that the promise to his mother was being kept, his

memory of her longing to visit her old home.  And the boy who hated

school has become a reader--he is reveling in a printers' library of

thousands of volumes.  We feel, somehow, that Samuel Clemens has suddenly

become quite a serious-minded person, that he has left Tom Sawyer and Joe

Harper and Huck Finn somewhere in a beautiful country a long way behind.



He found work with the firm of John A. Gray & Green, general printers, in

Cliff Street.  His pay was four dollars a week, in wild-cat money--that

is, money issued by private banks--rather poor money, being generally at

a discount and sometimes worth less.  But if wages were low, living was

cheap in those days, and Sam Clemens, lodging in a mechanics' boarding-

house in Duane Street, sometimes had fifty cents left on Saturday night

when his board and washing were paid.



Luckily, he had not set out to seek his fortune, but only to see

something of the world.  He lingered in New York through the summer of

1853, never expecting to remain long.  His letters of that period were

few.  In October he said, in a letter to Pamela, that he did not write to

the family because he did not know their whereabouts, Orion having sold

the paper and left Hannibal.



     "I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to leave

     New York every day for the last two weeks," he adds, which sounds

     like the Mark Twain of fifty years later.  Farther along, he tells

     of going to see Edwin Forrest, then playing at the Broadway Theater:



     "The play was the 'Gladiator.'  I did not like part of it much, but

     other portions were really splendid.  In the latter part of the last

     act. . . the man's whole soul seems absorbed in the part he is

     playing; and it is real startling to see him.  I am sorry I did not

     see him play "Damon and Pythias," the former character being the

     greatest.  He appears in Philadelphia on Monday night."



A little farther along he says:



     "If my letters do not come often, you need not bother yourself about

     me; for if you have a brother nearly eighteen years old who is not

     able to take care of himself a few miles from home, such a brother

     is not worth one's thoughts."



Sam Clemens may have followed Forrest to Philadelphia.  At any rate, he

was there presently, "subbing" in the composing-rooms of the "Inquirer,"

setting ten thousand ems a day, and receiving pay accordingly.  When

there was no vacancy for him to fill, he put in the time visiting the

Philadelphia libraries, art galleries, and historic landmarks.  After

all, his chief business was sight-seeing.  Work was only a means to this

end.  Chilly evenings, when he returned to his boarding-house, his room-

mate, an Englishman named Sumner, grilled a herring over their small open

fire, and this was a great feast.  He tried writing--obituary poetry, for

the "Philadelphia Ledger"--but it was not accepted.



"My efforts were not received with approval" was his comment long after.



In the "Inquirer" office there was a printer named Frog, and sometimes,

when he went out, the office "devils" would hang over his case a line

with a hook on it baited with a piece of red flannel.  They never got

tired of this joke, and Frog never failed to get fighting mad when he saw

that dangling string with the bit of red flannel at the end.  No doubt

Sam Clemens had his share in this mischief.



Sam found that he liked Philadelphia.  He could save a little money and

send something to his mother--small amounts, but welcome.  Once he

inclosed a gold dollar, "to serve as a specimen of the kind of stuff we

are paid with in Philadelphia."  Better than doubtful "wild-cat,"

certainly.  Of his work he writes:



     "One man has engaged me to work for him every Sunday till the first

     of next April, when I shall return home to take Ma to Ky .  .  .  .

     If I want to, I can get subbing every night of the week.  I go to

     work at seven in the evening and work till three the next morning.

     .  .  . The type is mostly agate and minion, with some bourgeois,

     and when one gets a good agate "take," he is sure to make money.  I

     made $2.50 last Sunday."



There is a long description of a trip on the Fairmount stage in this

letter, well-written and interesting, but too long to have place here.

In the same letter he speaks of the graves of Benjamin Franklin and his

wife, which he had looked at through the iron railing of the locked

inclosure.  Probably it did not occur to him that there might be points

of similarity between Franklin's career and his own.  Yet in time these

would be rather striking: each learned the printer's trade; each worked

in his brother's office and wrote for the paper; each left quietly and

went to New York, and from New York to Philadelphia, as a journeyman

printer; each in due season became a world figure, many-sided, human, and

of incredible popularity.



Orion Clemens, meantime, had bought a paper in Muscatine, Iowa, and

located the family there.  Evidently by this time he had realized the

value of his brother as a contributor, for Sam, in a letter to Orion,

says, "I will try to write for the paper occasionally, but I fear my

letters will be very uninteresting, for this incessant night work dulls

one's ideas amazingly."



Meantime, he had passed his eighteenth birthday, winter was coming on, he

had been away from home half a year, and the first attack of homesickness

was due.  "One only has to leave home to learn how to write interesting

letters to an absent friend," he wrote; and again.  "I don't like our

present prospect for cold weather at all."



He declared he only wanted to get back to avoid night work, which was

injuring his eyes, but we may guess there was a stronger reason, which

perhaps he did not entirely realize.  The novelty of wandering had worn

off, and he yearned for familiar faces, the comfort of those he loved.



But he did not go.  He made a trip to Washington in January--a sight-

seeing trip--returning to Philadelphia, where he worked for the "Ledger"

and "North American."  Eventually he went back to New York, and from

there took ticket to St. Louis.  This was in the late summer of 1854; he

had been fifteen months away from his people when he stepped aboard the

train to return.



Sam was worn out when he reached St. Louis; but the Keokuk packet was

leaving, and he stopped only long enough to see Pamela, then went aboard

and, flinging himself into his berth, did not waken until the boat

reached Muscatine, Iowa, thirty-six hours later.



It was very early when he arrived, too early to rouse the family.  He sat

down in the office of a little hotel to wait for morning, and picked up a

small book that lay on the writing-table.  It contained pictures of the

English rulers with the brief facts of their reigns.  Sam Clemens

entertained himself learning these data by heart.  He had a fine memory

for such things, and in an hour or two had those details so perfectly

committed that he never forgot one of them as long as he lived.  The

knowledge acquired in this stray fashion he found invaluable in later

life.  It was his groundwork for all English history.









X.



A WIND OF CHANCE



Orion could not persuade his brother to remain in Muscatine.  Sam

returned to his old place on the "Evening News," in St. Louis, where he

remained until the following year, rooming with a youth named Burrough, a

journeyman chair-maker with literary taste, a reader of the English

classics, a companionable lad, and for Samuel Clemens a good influence.



By spring, Orion Clemens had married and had sold out in Muscatine.  He

was now located in Keokuk, Iowa.  When presently Brother Sam came

visiting to Keokuk, Orion offered him five dollars a week and his board

to remain.  He accepted.  Henry Clemens, now seventeen, was also in

Orion's employ, and a lad named Dick Hingham.  Henry and Sam slept in the

office; Dick and a young fellow named Brownell, who roomed above, came in

for social evenings.



They were pretty lively evenings.  A music-teacher on the floor below did

not care for them--they disturbed his class.  He was furious, in fact,

and assailed the boys roughly at first, with no result but to make

matters worse.  Then he tried gentleness, and succeeded.  The boys

stopped their capers and joined his class.  Sam, especially, became a

distinguished member of that body.  He was never a great musician, but

with his good nature, his humor, his slow, quaint speech and originality,

he had no rival in popularity.  He was twenty now, and much with young

ladies, yet he was always a beau rather than a suitor, a good comrade to

all, full of pranks and pleasantries, ready to stop and be merry with any

that came along.  If they prophesied concerning his future, it is not

likely that they spoke of literary fame.  They thought him just easy-

going and light-minded.  True, they noticed that he often carried a book

under his arm--a history, a volume of Dickens, or the tales of Poe.



He read more than any one guessed.  At night, propped up in bed--a habit

continued until his death--he was likely to read until a late hour.  He

enjoyed smoking at such times, and had made himself a pipe with a large

bowl which stood on the floor and had a long rubber stem, something like

the Turkish hubble-bubble.  He liked to fill the big bowl and smoke at

ease through the entire evening.  But sometimes the pipe went out, which

meant that he must strike a match and lean far over to apply it, just

when he was most comfortable.  Sam Clemens never liked unnecessary

exertion.  One night, when the pipe had gone out for the second time, he

happened to hear the young book-clerk, Brownell, passing up to his room

on the top floor.  Sam called to him:



"Ed, come here!"



Brownell poked his head in the door.  The two were great chums.



"What will you have, Sam?" he asked.



"Come in, Ed; Henry's asleep, and I'm in trouble.  I want somebody to

light my pipe."



"Why don't you light it yourself?" Brownell asked.



"I would, only I knew you'd be along in a few minutes and would do it for

me."



Brownell scratched a match, stooped down, and applied it.



"What are you reading, Sam?"



"Oh, nothing much--a so-called funny book.  One of these days I'll write

a funnier book myself."



Brownell laughed.  "No, you won't, Sam," he said.  "You're too lazy ever

to write a book."



Years later, in the course of a lecture which he delivered in Keokuk,

Mark Twain said that he supposed the most untruthful man in the world

lived right there in Keokuk, and that his name was Ed Brownell.



Orion Clemens did not have the gift of prosperity, and his printing-

office did not flourish.  When he could no longer pay Sam's wages he took

him into partnership, which meant that Sam got no wages at all, though

this was of less consequence, since his mother, now living with Pamela,

was well provided for.  The disorder of the office, however, distressed

him.  He wrote home that he could not work without system, and, a little

later, that he was going to leave Keokuk, that, in fact, he was planning

a great adventure--a trip to the upper Amazon!



His interest in the Amazon had been awakened by a book.  Lynch and

Herndon had surveyed the upper river, and Lieutenant Herndon's book was

widely read.  Sam Clemens, propped up in bed, pored over it through long

evenings, and nightly made fabulous fortunes collecting cocoa and other

rare things--resolving, meantime, to start in person for the upper Amazon

with no unnecessary delay.  Boy and man, Samuel Clemens was the same.

His vision of grand possibilities ahead blinded him to the ways and means

of arrival.  It was an inheritance from both sides of his parentage.

Once, in old age, he wrote:



     "I have been punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing

     things and reflecting afterward .  .  .  .  When I am reflecting on

     these occasions, even deaf persons can hear me think."



He believed, however, that he had reflected carefully concerning the

Amazon, and that in a brief time he should be there at the head of an

expedition, piling up untold wealth.  He even stirred the imaginations of

two other adventurers, a Dr. Martin and a young man named Ward.  To

Henry, then in St. Louis, he wrote, August 5, 1856:



     "Ward and I held a long consultation Sunday morning, and the result

     was that we two have determined to start to Brazil, if possible, in

     six weeks from now, in order to look carefully into matters there

     and report to Dr. Martin in time for him to follow on the first of

     March."



The matter of finance troubled him.  Orion could not be depended on for

any specified sum, and the fare to the upper Amazon would probably be

considerable.  Sam planned different methods of raising it.  One of them

was to go to New York or Cincinnati and work at his trade until he saved

the amount.  He would then sail from New York direct, or take boat for

New Orleans and sail from there.  Of course there would always be vessels

clearing for the upper Amazon.  After Lieutenant Herndon's book the ocean

would probably be full of them.



He did not make the start with Ward, as planned, and Ward and Martin seem

to have given up the Amazon idea.  Not so with Samuel Clemens.  He went

on reading Herndon, trying meantime to raise money enough to get him out

of Keokuk.  Was it fate or Providence that suddenly placed it in his

hands?  Whatever it was, the circumstance is so curious that it must be

classed as one of those strange facts that have no place in fiction.



The reader will remember how, one day in Hannibal, the wind had brought

to Sam Clemens, then printer's apprentice, a stray leaf from a book about

"Joan of Arc," and how that incident marked a turning-point in his mental

life.  Now, seven years later, it was the wind again that directed his

fortune.  It was a day in early November--bleak, bitter, and

gusty, with whirling snow; most persons were indoors.  Samuel Clemens,

going down Main Street, Keokuk, saw a flying bit of paper pass him and

lodge against a building.  Something about it attracted him and he

captured it.  It was a fifty-dollar bill!  He had never seen one before,

but he recognized it.  He thought he must be having a pleasant dream.



He was tempted to pocket his good fortune and keep still.  But he had

always a troublesome conscience.  He went to a newspaper office and

advertised that he had found a sum of money, a large bill.



Once, long after, he said: "I didn't describe it very particularly, and I

waited in daily fear that the owner would turn up and take away my

fortune.  By and by I couldn't stand it any longer.  My conscience had

gotten all that was coming to it.  I felt that I must take that money out

of danger."



Another time he said, "I advertised the find and left for the Amazon the

same day."  All of which we may take with his usual literary discount--

the one assigned to him by his mother in childhood.  As a matter of fact,

he remained for an ample time, and nobody came for the money.  What was

its origin?  Was it swept out of a bank, or caught up by the wind from

some counting-room table?  Perhaps it materialized out of the unseen.

Who knows?









XI.



THE LONG WAY TO THE AMAZON



Sam decided on Cincinnati as his base.  From there he could go either to

New York or New Orleans to catch the Amazon boat.  He paid a visit to St.

Louis, where his mother made him renew his promise as to drink and cards.

Then he was seized with a literary idea, and returned to Keokuk, where he

proposed to a thriving weekly paper, the "Saturday Post," to send letters

of travel, which might even be made into a book later on.  George Reese,

owner of the "Post," agreed to pay five dollars each for the letters,

which speaks well for his faith in Samuel Clemens's talent, five dollars

being good pay for that time and place--more than the letters were worth,

judged by present standards.  The first was dated Cincinnati, November

14, 1856, and was certainly not promising literature.  It was written in

the ridiculous dialect which was once thought to be the dress of humor;

and while here and there is a comic flash, there is in it little promise

of the future Mark Twain.  One extract is enough:



     "When we got to the depo', I went around to git a look at the iron

     hoss.  Thunderation!  It wasn't no more like a hoss than a meetin'-

     house.  If I was goin' to describe the animule, I'd say it looked

     like--well, it looked like--blamed if I know what it looked like,

     snorting fire and brimstone out of his nostrils, and puffin' out

     black smoke all 'round, and pantin', and heavin', and swellin', and

     chawin' up red-hot coals like they was good.  A feller stood in a

     little house like, feedin' him all the time; but the more he got,

     the more he wanted and the more he blowed and snorted.  After a

     spell the feller ketched him by the tail, and great Jericho! he set

     up a yell that split the ground for more'n a mile and a half, and

     the next minit I felt my legs a-waggin', and found myself at t'other

     end of the string o' vehickles.  I wasn't skeered, but I had three

     chills and a stroke of palsy in less than five minits, and my face

     had a cur'us brownish-yaller-greenbluish color in it, which was

     perfectly unaccountable.  'Well,' say I, 'comment is super-flu-ous.'"



How Samuel Clemens could have written that, and worse, at twenty-one, and

a little more than ten years later have written "The Innocents Abroad,"

is one of the mysteries of literature.  The letters were signed

"Snodgrass," and there are but two of them.  Snodgrass seems to have

found them hard work, for it is said he raised on the price, which,

fortunately, brought the series to a close.  Their value to-day lies in

the fact that they are the earliest of Mark Twain's newspaper

contributions that have been preserved--the first for which he received a

cash return.



Sam remained in Cincinnati until April of the following year, 1857,

working for Wrightson & Co., general printers, lodging in a cheap

boarding-house, saving every possible penny for his great adventure.



He had one associate at the boarding-house, a lank, unsmiling Scotchman

named Macfarlane, twice young Clemens's age, and a good deal of a

mystery.  Sam never could find out what Macfarlane did.  His hands were

hardened by some sort of heavy labor; he left at six in the morning and

returned in the evening at the same hour.  He never mentioned his work,

and young Clemens had the delicacy not to inquire.



For Macfarlane was no ordinary person.  He was a man of deep knowledge, a

reader of many books, a thinker; he was versed in history and philosophy,

he knew the dictionary by heart.  He made but two statements concerning

himself: one, that he had acquired his knowledge from reading, and not at

school; the other, that he knew every word in the English dictionary.  He

was willing to give proof of the last, and Sam Clemens tested him more

than once, but found no word that Macfarlane could not define.



Macfarlane was not silent--he would discuss readily enough the deeper

problems of life and had many startling theories of his own.  Darwin had

not yet published his "Descent of Man," yet Macfarlane was already

advancing ideas similar to those in that book.  He went further than

Darwin.  He had startling ideas of the moral evolution of man, and these

he would pour into the ears of his young listener until ten o'clock,

after which, like the English Sumner in Philadelphia, he would grill a

herring, and the evening would end.  Those were fermenting discourses

that young Samuel Clemens listened to that winter in Macfarlane's room,

and they did not fail to influence his later thought.



It was the high-tide of spring, late in April, when the prospective

cocoa-hunter decided that it was time to set out for the upper Amazon.

He had saved money enough to carry him at least as far as New Orleans,

where he would take ship, it being farther south and therefore nearer his

destination.  Furthermore, he could begin with a lazy trip down the

Mississippi, which, next to being a pilot, had been one of his most

cherished dreams.  The Ohio River steamers were less grand than those of

the Mississippi, but they had a homelike atmosphere and did not hurry.

Samuel Clemens had the spring fever and was willing to take his time.



In "Life on the Mississippi" we read that the author ran away, vowing

never to return until he could come home a pilot, shedding glory.  But

this is the fiction touch.  He had always loved the river, and his

boyhood dream of piloting had time and again returned, but it was not

uppermost when he bade good-by to Macfarlane and stepped aboard the "Paul

Jones," bound for New Orleans, and thus conferred immortality on that

ancient little craft.



Now he had really started on his voyage.  But it was a voyage that would

continue not for a week or a fortnight, but for four years--four

marvelous, sunlit years, the glory of which would color all that followed

them.









XII.



RENEWING AN OLD AMBITION



A reader of Mark Twain's Mississippi book gets the impression that the

author was a boy of about seventeen when he started to learn the river,

and that he was painfully ignorant of the great task ahead.  But this

also is the fiction side of the story.  Samuel Clemens was more than

twenty-one when he set out on the "Paul Jones," and in a way was familiar

with the trade of piloting.  Hannibal had turned out many pilots.  An

older brother of the Bowen boys was already on the river when Sam Clemens

was rolling rocks down Holliday's Hill.  Often he came home to air his

grandeur and hold forth on the wonder of his work.  That learning the

river was no light task Sam Clemens would know as well as any one who had

not tried it.



Nevertheless, as the drowsy little steamer went puffing down into softer,

sunnier lands, the old dream, the "permanent ambition" of boyhood,

returned, while the call of the far-off Amazon and cocoa drew faint.



Horace Bixby,[2] pilot of the "Paul Jones," a man of thirty-two, was

looking out over the bow at the head of Island No. 35 when he heard a

slow, pleasant voice say, "Good morning."



Bixby was a small, clean-cut man.  "Good morning, sir," he said, rather

briskly, without looking around.



He did not much care for visitors in the pilothouse.  This one entered

and stood a little behind him.



"How would you like a young man to learn the river?" came to him in that

serene, deliberate speech.



The pilot glanced over his shoulder and saw a rather slender, loose-

limbed youth with a fair, girlish complexion and a great mass of curly

auburn hair.



"I wouldn't like it.  Cub pilots are more trouble than they're worth.  A

great deal more trouble than profit."



"I am a printer by trade," the easy voice went on.  "It doesn't agree

with me.  I thought I'd go to South America."



Bixby kept his eye on the river, but there was interest in his voice when

he spoke.  "What makes you pull your words that way?" he asked--"pulling"

being the river term for drawling.



The young man, now seated comfortably on the visitors' bench, said more

slowly than ever: "You'll have to ask my mother--she pulls hers, too."



Pilot Bixby laughed.  The manner of the reply amused him.  His guest was

encouraged.



"Do you know the Bowen boys?" he asked, "pilots in the St. Louis and New

Orleans trade?"



"I know them well--all three of them.  William Bowen did his first

steering for me; a mighty good boy.  I know Sam, too, and Bart."



"Old schoolmates of mine in Hannibal.  Sam and Will, especially, were my

chums."



Bixby's tone became friendly.  "Come over and stand by me," he said.

"What is your name?"



The applicant told him, and the two stood looking out on the sunlit

water.



"Do you drink?"



"No."



"Do you gamble?"



"No, sir."



"Do you swear?"



"N-not for amusement; only under pressure."



"Do you chew?"



"No, sir, never; but I must--smoke."



"Did you ever do any steering?"



"I have steered everything on the river but a steamboat, I guess."



"Very well.  Take the wheel and see what you can do with a steamboat.

Keep her as she is--toward that lower cottonwood snag."



Bixby had a sore foot and was glad of a little relief.  He sat on the

bench where he could keep a careful eye on the course.  By and by he said

"There is just one way I would take a young man to learn the river--that

is, for money."



"What--do you--charge?"



"Five hundred dollars, and I to be at no expense whatever."



In those days pilots were allowed to carry a learner, or "cub," board

free.  Mr. Bixby meant that he was to be at no expense in port or for

incidentals.  His terms seemed discouraging.



"I haven't got five hundred dollars in money," Sam said.  "I've got a lot

of Tennessee land worth two bits an acre.  I'll give you two thousand

acres of that."



Bixby shook his head.  "No," he said, "I don't want any unimproved real

estate.  I have too much already."



Sam reflected.  He thought he might be able to borrow one hundred dollars

from William Moffett, Pamela's husband, without straining his credit.



"Well, then," he proposed, "I'll give you one hundred dollars cash, and

the rest when I earn it."



Something about this young man had won Horace Bixby's heart.  His slow,

pleasant speech, his unhurried, quiet manner at the wheel, his evident

simplicity and sincerity--the inner qualities of mind and heart which

would make the world love Mark Twain.  The terms proposed were accepted.

The first payment was to be in cash; the others were to begin when the

pupil had learned the river and was earning wages.  During the rest of

the trip to New Orleans the new pupil was often at the wheel, while Mr.

Bixby nursed his sore foot and gave directions.  Any literary ambitions

that Samuel Clemens still nourished waned rapidly.  By the time he had

reached New Orleans he had almost forgotten he had ever been a printer.

As for the Amazon and cocoa, why, there had been no ship sailing in that

direction for years, and it was unlikely that any would ever sail again,

a fact that rather amused the would-be adventurer now, since Providence

had regulated his affairs in accordance with his oldest and longest

cherished dream.



At New Orleans Bixby left the "Paul Jones" for a fine St. Louis boat,

taking his cub with him.  This was a sudden and happy change, and Sam was

a good deal impressed with his own importance in belonging to so imposing

a structure, especially when, after a few days' stay in New Orleans, he

stood by Bixby's side in the big glass turret while they backed out of

the line of wedged-in boats and headed up the great river.



This was glory, but there was sorrow ahead.  He had not really begun

learning the river as yet he had only steered under directions.  He had

known that to learn the river would be hard, but he had never realized

quite how hard.  Serenely he had undertaken the task of mastering twelve

hundred miles of the great, changing, shifting river as exactly and as

surely by daylight or darkness as one knows the way to his own features.

Nobody could realize the full size of that task--not till afterward.



[2] Horace Bixby lived until 1912 and remained at the wheel until within

a short time of his death, in his eighty-seventh year.  The writer of

this memoir visited him in 1910 and took down from his dictation the

dialogue that follows.







XIII.



LEARNING THE RIVER



In that early day, to be a pilot was to be "greater than a king."  The

Mississippi River pilot was a law unto himself--there was none above him.

His direction of the boat was absolute; he could start or lay up when he

chose; he could pass a landing regardless of business there, consulting

nobody, not even the captain; he could take the boat into what seemed

certain destruction, if he had that mind, and the captain was obliged to

stand by, helpless and silent, for the law was with the pilot in

everything.



Furthermore, the pilot was a gentleman.  His work was clean and

physically light.  It ended the instant the boat was tied to the landing,

and did not begin again until it was ready to back into the stream.

Also, for those days his salary was princely--the Vice-President of the

United States did not receive more.  As for prestige, the Mississippi

pilot, perched high in his glass inclosure, fashionably dressed, and

commanding all below him, was the most conspicuous and showy, the most

observed and envied creature in the world.  No wonder Sam Clemens, with

his love of the river and his boyish fondness for honors, should aspire

to that stately rank.  Even at twenty-one he was still just a boy--as,

indeed, he was till his death--and we may imagine how elated he was,

starting up the great river as a real apprentice pilot, who in a year or

two would stand at the wheel, as his chief was now standing, a monarch

with a splendid income and all the great river packed away in his head.



In that last item lay the trouble.  In the Mississippi book he tells of

it in a way that no one may hope to equal, and if the details are not

exact, the truth is there--at least in substance.



For a distance above New Orleans Mr. Bixby had volunteered information

about the river, naming the points and crossings, in what seemed a casual

way, all through his watch of four hours.  Their next watch began in the

middle of the night, and Mark Twain tells how surprised and disgusted he

was to learn that pilots must get up in the night to run their boats, and

his amazement to find Mr. Bixby plunging into the blackness ahead as if

it had been daylight.  Very likely this is mainly fiction, but hardly the

following:



     Presently he turned to me and said: "What's the name of the first

     point above New Orleans?"



     I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did.  I said I

     didn't know.



     "Don't know!"



     His manner jolted me.  I was down at the foot again, in a moment.

     But I had to say just what I had said before.



     "Well, you're a smart one," said Mr. Bixby.  "What's the name of the

     next point?"



     Once more I didn't know.



     "Well, this beats anything!  Tell me the name of any point or place

     I told you."



     I studied awhile and decided that I couldn't.



     "Look here!  What do you start from, above Twelve Mile Point, to

     cross over?"



     "I--I--don't know."



     "'You--you don't know,"' mimicking my drawling manner of speech.

     "What do you know?"



     "I--I--Nothing, for certain."



     Bixby was a small, nervous man, hot and quick-firing.  He went off

     now, and said a number of severe things.  Then:



     "Look here, what do you suppose I told you the names of those points

     for?"



     I tremblingly considered a moment--then the devil of temptation

     provoked me to say: "Well--to--to--be entertaining, I thought."



     This was a red flag to the bull.  He raged and stormed so (he was

     crossing the river at the time) that I judged it made him blind,

     because he ran over the steering-oar of a trading-scow.  Of course

     the traders sent up a volley of red-hot profanity.  Never was a man

     so grateful as Mr. Bixby was, because he was brimful, and here were

     subjects who would talk back.  He threw open a window, thrust his

     head out, and such an irruption followed as I had never heard before

     .  .  .  . When he closed the window he was empty.  Presently he

     said to me, in the gentlest way:



     "My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I

     tell you a thing, put it down right away.  There's only one way to

     be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart.  You have

     to know it just like A-B-C."



The little memorandum-book which Sam Clemens bought, probably at the next

daylight landing, still exists--the same that he says "fairly bristled

with the names of towns, points, bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc.";

but it made his heart ache to think he had only half the river set down,

for, as the watches were four hours off and four hours on, there were the

long gaps where he had slept.



It is not easy to make out the penciled notes today.  The small, neat

writing is faded, and many of them are in an abbreviation made only for

himself.  It is hard even to find these examples to quote:



MERIWETHER'S BEND



One-fourth less 3[3]--run shape of upper bar and go into the low place in

the willows about 200 (ft.) lower down than last year.



OUTSIDE OF MONTEZUMA



Six or eight feet more water.  Shape bar till high timber on towhead gets

nearly even with low willows.  Then hold a little open on right of low

willows--run 'em close if you want to, but come out 200 yards when you

get nearly to head of towhead.



The average mind would not hold a single one of these notes ten seconds,

yet by the time he reached St. Louis he had set down pages that to-day

make one's head weary even to contemplate.  And those long four-hour gaps

where he had been asleep--they are still there; and now, after nearly

sixty years, the old heartache is still in them.  He must have bought a

new book for the next trip and laid this one away.



To the new "cub" it seemed a long way to St. Louis that first trip, but

in the end it was rather grand to come steaming up to the big, busy city,

with its thronging waterfront flanked with a solid mile of steamboats,

and to nose one's way to a place in that stately line.



At St. Louis, Sam borrowed from his brother-in-law the one hundred

dollars he had agreed to pay, and so closed his contract with Bixby.  A

few days later his chief was engaged to go on a very grand boat indeed--a

"sumptuous temple," he tells us, all brass and inlay, with a pilot-house

so far above the water that he seemed perched on a mountain.  This part

of learning the river was worth while; and when he found that the

regiment of natty servants respectfully "sir'd" him, his happiness was

complete.



But he was in the depths again, presently, for when they started down the

river and he began to take account of his knowledge, he found that he had

none.  Everything had changed--that is, he was seeing it all from the

other direction.  What with the four-hour gaps and this transformation,

he was lost completely.



How could the easy-going, dreamy, unpractical man whom the world knew as

Mark Twain ever have persisted against discouragement like that to

acquire the vast, the absolute, limitless store of information necessary

to Mississippi piloting?  The answer is that he loved the river, the

picturesqueness and poetry of a steamboat, the ease and glory of a

pilot's life; and then, in spite of his own later claims to the contrary,

Samuel Clemens, boy and man, in the work suited to his tastes and gifts,

was the most industrious of persons.  Work of the other sort he avoided,

overlooked, refused to recognize, but never any labor for which he was

qualified by his talents or training.  Piloting suited him exactly, and

he proved an apt pupil.



Horace Bixby said to the writer of this memoir: "Sam was always good-

natured, and he had a natural taste for the river.  He had a fine memory

and never forgot what I told him."



Yet there must have been hard places all along, for to learn every crook

and turn and stump and snag and bluff and bar and sounding of that twelve

hundred miles of mighty, shifting water was a gigantic task.  Mark Twain

tells us how, when he was getting along pretty well, his chief one day

turned on him suddenly with this "settler":



     "What is the shape of Walnut Bend?"



     He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of

     protoplasm.  I replied respectfully and said I didn't know it had

     any particular shape.  My gun-powdery chief went off with a bang, of

     course, and then went on loading and firing until he was out of

     adjectives ....I waited.  By and by he said:



     "My boy, you've got to know the shape of the river perfectly.  It is

     all that is left to steer by on a very dark night.  Everything else

     is blotted out and gone.  But mind you, it hasn't got the same shape

     in the night that it has in the daytime."



     "How on earth am I going to learn it, then?"



     "How do you follow a hall at home in the dark?  Because you know the

     shape of it.  You can't see it."



     "Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million trifling

     variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well

     as I know the shape of the front hall at home?"



     "On my honor, you've got to know them better than any man ever did

     know the shapes of the halls in his own house."



     "I wish I was dead!"



But the reader must turn to Chapter VIII of "Life on the Mississippi" and

read, or reread, the pages which follow this extract--nothing can better

convey the difficulties of piloting.  That Samuel Clemens had the courage

to continue is the best proof, not only of his great love of the river,

but of that splendid gift of resolution that one rarely fails to find in

men of the foremost rank.



[3] Depth of water.  One-quarter less than three fathoms.









XIV.



RIVER DAYS



Piloting was only a part of Sam Clemens's education on the Mississippi.

He learned as much of the reefs and shallows of human nature as of the

river-bed.  In one place he writes:



     In that brief, sharp schooling I got personally and familiarly

     acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to

     be found in fiction, biography, or history.



All the different types, but most of them in the rough.  That Samuel

Clemens kept the promise made to his mother as to drink and cards during

those apprentice days is well worth remembering.



Horace Bixby, answering a call for pilots from the Missouri River,

consigned his pupil, as was customary, tonne of the pilots of the "John

J. Roe," a freight-boat, owned and conducted by some retired farmers, and

in its hospitality reminding Sam of his Uncle John Quarles's farm.  The

"Roe" was a very deliberate boat.  It was said that she could beat an

island to St. Louis, but never quite overtake the current going down-

stream.  Sam loved the "Roe."  She was not licensed to carry passengers,

but she always had a family party of the owners' relations aboard, and

there was a big deck for dancing and a piano in the cabin.  The young

pilot could play the chords, and sing, in his own fashion, about a

grasshopper that; sat on a sweet-potato vine, and about--



An old, old horse whose name was Methusalem,

Took him down and sold him in Jerusalem,

A long time ago.



The "Roe" was a heavenly place, but Sam's stay there did not last.  Bixby

came down from the Missouri, and perhaps thought he was doing a fine

thing for his pupil by transferring him to a pilot named Brown, then on a

large passenger-steamer, the "Pennsylvania."  The "Pennsylvania" was new

and one of the finest boats on the river.  Sam Clemens, by this time, was

accounted a good steersman, so it seemed fortunate and a good arrangement

for all parties.



But Brown was a tyrant.  He was illiterate and coarse, and took a dislike

to Sam from the start.  His first greeting was a question, harmless

enough in form but offensive in manner.



"Are you Horace Bigsby's cub?"--Bixby being usually pronounced "Bigsby"

in river parlance.



Sam answered politely enough that he was, and Brown proceeded to comment

on the "style" of his clothes and other personal matters.



He had made an effort to please Brown, but it was no use.  Brown was

never satisfied.  At a moment when Sam was steering, Brown, sitting on

the bench, would shout: "Here!  Where are you going now?  Pull her down!

Pull her down!  Do you hear me?  Blamed mud-cat!"



The young pilot soon learned to detest his chief, and presently was

putting in a good deal of his time inventing punishments for him.



I could imagine myself killing Brown; there was no law against that, and

that was the thing I always used to do the moment I was abed.  Instead of

going over the river in my mind, as was my duty, I threw business aside

for pleasure, and killed Brown.



He gave up trying to please Brown, and was even willing to stir him up

upon occasion.  One day when the cub was at the wheel his chief noticed

that the course seemed peculiar.



"Here!  Where you headin' for now?" he yelled.  "What in the nation you

steerin' at, anyway?  Blamed numskull!"



"Why," said Sam in his calm, slow way, "I didn't see much else I could

steer for, so I was heading for that white heifer on the bank."



"Get away from that wheel!  And get outen this pilot-house!" yelled

Brown.  "You ain't fitten to become no pilot!"  An order that Sam found

welcome enough.  The other pilot, George Ealer, was a lovable soul who

played the flute and chess during his off watch, and read aloud to Sam

from "Goldsmith" and "Shakespeare."  To be with George Ealer was to

forget the persecutions of Brown.



Young Clemens had been on the river nearly a year at this time, and,

though he had learned a good deal and was really a fine steersman, he

received no wages.  He had no board to pay, but there were things he must

buy, and his money supply had become limited.  Each trip of the

"Pennsylvania" she remained about two days and nights in New Orleans,

during which time the young man was free.  He found he could earn two and

a half to three dollars a night watching freight on the levee, and, as

this opportunity came around about once a month, the amount was useful.

Nor was this the only return; many years afterward he said:



     "It was a desolate experience, watching there in the dark, among

     those piles of freight; not a sound, not a living creature astir.

     But it was not a profitless one.  I used to have inspirations as I

     sat there alone those nights.  I used to imagine all sots of

     situations and possibilities.  These things got into my books by and

     by, and furnished me with many a chapter.  I can trace the effects

     of those nights through most of my books, in one way and another."



Piloting, even with Brown, had its pleasant side.  In St. Louis, young

Clemens stopped with his sister, and often friends were there from

Hannibal.  At both ends of the line he visited friendly boats, especially

the "Roe," where a grand welcome was always waiting.  Once among the

guests of that boat a young girl named Laura so attracted him that he

forgot time and space until one of the "Roe" pilots, Zeb Leavenworth,

came flying aft, shouting:



"The "Pennsylvania" is backing out!"



A hasty good-by, a wild flight across the decks of several boats, and a

leap across several feet of open water closed the episode.  He wrote to

Laura, but there was no reply.  He never saw her again, never heard from

her for nearly fifty years, when both were widowed and old.  She had not

received his letter.



Occasionally there were stirring adventures aboard the "Pennsylvania."

In a letter written in March, 1858, the young pilot tells of an exciting

night search in the running ice for Hat Island soundings:



Brown, the pilot, stood in the bow with an oar, to keep her head out, and

I took the tiller.  We would start the men, and all would go well until

the yawl would bring us on a heavy cake of ice, and then the men would

drop like so many tenpins, while Brown assumed the horizontal in the

bottom of the boat.  After an hour's hard work we got back, with ice half

an inch thick on the oars .  .  .  .  The next day was colder still.  I

was out in the yawl twice, and then we got through, but the infernal

steamboat came near running over us .  .  .  .  The "Maria Denning" was

aground at the head of the island; they hailed us; we ran alongside, and

they hoisted us in and thawed us out.  We had been out in the yawl from

four in the morning until half-past nine without being near a fire.

There was a thick coating of ice over men and yawl, ropes, and

everything, and we looked like rock-candy statuary.



He was at the right age to enjoy such adventures, and to feel a pride in

them.  In the same letter he tells how he found on the "Pennsylvania" a

small clerkship for his brother Henry, who was now nearly twenty, a

handsome, gentle boy of whom Sam was lavishly fond and proud.  The young

pilot was eager to have Henry with him--to see him started in life. How

little he dreamed what sorrow would come of his well-meant efforts in the

lad's behalf!  Yet he always believed, later, that he had a warning, for

one night at the end of May, in St. Louis, he had a vivid dream, which

time would presently fulfil.



An incident now occurred on the "Pennsylvania" that closed Samuel

Clemens's career on that boat.  It was the down trip, and the boat was in

Eagle Bend when Henry Clemens appeared on the hurricane deck with an

announcement from the captain of a landing a little lower down.  Brown,

who would never own that he was rather deaf, probably misunderstood the

order.  They were passing the landing when the captain appeared on the

deck.



"Didn't Henry tell you to land here?" he called to Brown.



"No, sir."



Captain Klinefelter turned to Sam.  "Didn't you hear him?"



"Yes, sir!"



Brown said: "Shut your mouth!  You never heard anything of the kind!"



Henry appeared, not suspecting any trouble.



Brown said, fiercely, "Here, why didn't you tell me we had got to land at

that plantation?"



"I did tell you, Mr. Brown," Henry said, politely.



"It's a lie!"



Sam Clemens could stand Brown's abuse of himself, but not of Henry.  He

said: "You lie yourself.  He did tell you!"



For a cub pilot to defy his chief was unheard of.  Brown was dazed, then

he shouted:



"I'll attend to your case in half a minute!"  And to Henry, "Get out of

here!"



Henry had started when Brown seized him by the collar and struck him in

the face.  An instant later Sam was upon Brown with a heavy stool and

stretched him on the floor.  Then all the repressed fury of months broke

loose; and, leaping upon Brown and holding him down with his knees,

Samuel Clemens pounded the tyrant with his fists till his strength gave

out.  He let Brown go then, and the latter, with pilot instinct, sprang

to the wheel, for the boat was drifting.  Seeing she was safe, he seized

a spy-glass as a weapon and ordered his chastiser out of the pilot-house.

But Sam lingered.  He had become very calm, and he openly corrected

Brown's English.



"Don't give me none of your airs!" yelled Brown.  "I ain't goin' to stand

nothin' more from you!"



"You should say, `Don't give me any of your airs,'" Sam said, sweetly,

"and the last half of your sentence almost defies correction."



A group of passengers and white-aproned servants, assembled on the deck

forward, applauded the victor.  Sam went down to find Captain

Klinefelter.  He expected to be put in irons, for it was thought to be

mutiny to strike a pilot.



The captain took Sam into his private room and made some inquiries.  Mark

Twain, in the "Mississippi" boot remembers them as follows:



"Did you strike him first?" Captain Klinefelter asked.



"Yes, sir."



"What with?"



"A stool, sir."



"Hard?"



"Middling, sir."



"Did it knock him down?"



"He--he fell, sir."



"Did you follow it up?  Did you do anything further?"



"Yes, sir."



"What did you do?"



"Pounded him, sir."



"Pounded him?"



"Yes, sir."



"Did you pound him much--that is, severely?"



"One might call it that, sir, maybe."



"I am mighty glad of it!  Hark ye--never mention that I said that!  You

have been guilty of a great crime; and don't ever be guilty of it again

on this boat, but--lay for him ashore!  Give him a good, sound thrashing,

do you hear?  I'll pay the expenses."



In a letter which Samuel Clemens wrote to Orion's wife, immediately after

this incident, he gives the details of the encounter with Brown and

speaks of Captain Klinefelter's approval.[4]  Brown declared he would

leave the boat at New Orleans if Sam Clemens remained on it, and the

captain told him to go, offering to let Sam himself run the daylight

watches back to St. Louis, thus showing his faith in the young steersman.

The "cub," however, had less confidence, and advised that Brown be kept

for the up trip, saying he would follow by the next boat.  It was a

decision that probably saved his life.



That night, watching on the levee, Henry joined him, when his own duties

were finished, and the brothers made the round together.  It may have

been some memory of his dream that made Samuel Clemens say:



"Henry, in case of accident, whatever you do, don't lose your head--the

passengers will do that.  Rush for the hurricane-deck and to the life-

boat, and obey the mate's orders.  When the boat is launched, help the

women and children into it.  Don't get in yourself.  The river is only a

mile wide.  You can swim ashore easily enough."



It was good, manly advice, but a long grief lay behind it.



[4] In the Mississippi book the author says that Brown was about to

strike Henry with a lump of coal, but in the letter above mentioned the

details are as here given.









XV.





THE WRECK OF THE "PENNSYLVANIA"



The "A. T. Lacy," that brought Samuel Clemens up the river, was two days

behind the "Pennsylvania."  At Greenville, Mississippi, a voice from

the landing shouted "The "Pennsylvania" is blown up just below Memphis,

at Ship Island.  One hundred and fifty lives lost!"



It proved a true report.  At six o'clock that warm mid-June morning,

while loading wood, sixty miles below Memphis, four out of eight of the

Pennsylvania's boilers had suddenly exploded, with fearful results.

Henry Clemens had been one of the victims.  He had started to swim for

the shore, only a few hundred yards away, but had turned back to assist

in the rescue of others.  What followed could not be clearly learned.  He

was terribly injured, and died on the fourth night after the catastrophe.

His brother was with him by that time, and believed he recognized the

exact fulfilment of his dream.



The young pilot's grief was very great.  In a letter home he spoke of the

dying boy as "My darling, my pride, my glory, my all."  His heavy sorrow,

and the fact that with unsparing self-blame he held himself in a measure

responsible for his brother's tragic death, saddened his early life.  His

early gaiety came back, but his face had taken on the serious, pathetic

look which from that time it always wore in repose.  Less than twenty-

three, he had suddenly the look of thirty, and while Samuel Clemens in

spirit, temperament, and features never would become really old, neither

would he ever look really young again.



He returned to the river as steersman for George Ealer, whom he loved,

and in September of that year obtained a full license as Mississippi

River pilot from St. Louis to New Orleans.  In eighteen months he had

packed away in his head all those wearisome details and acquired that

confidence that made him one of the elect.  He knew every snag and bank

and dead tree and depth in all those endless miles of shifting current,

every cut-off and crossing.  He could read the surface of the water by

day, he could smell danger in the dark.  To the writer of these chapters,

Horace Bixby said:



"In a year and a half from the time he came to the river, Sam was not

only a pilot, but a good one.  Sam was a fine pilot, and in a day when

piloting on the Mississippi required a great deal more brains and skill

and application than it does now.  There were no signal-lights along the

shore in those days, and no search-lights on the vessels; everything was

blind; and on a dark, misty night, in a river full of snags and shifting

sandbars and changing shores, a pilot's judgment had to be founded on

absolute certainty."



Bixby had returned from the Missouri by the time his pupil's license was

issued, and promptly took him as full partner on the "Crescent City," and

later on a fine new boat, the "New Falls City."  Still later, they appear

to have been together on a very large boat, the "City of Memphis," and

again on the "Alonzo Child."









XVI.



THE PILOT



For Samuel Clemens these were happy days--the happiest, in some respects,

he would ever know.  He had plenty of money now.  He could help his

mother with a liberal hand, and could put away fully a hundred dollars a

month for himself.  He had few cares, and he loved the ease and romance

and independence of his work as he would never quite love anything again.



His popularity on the river was very great.  His humorous stories and

quaint speech made a crowd collect wherever he appeared.  There were

pilot-association rooms in St. Louis and New Orleans, and his appearance

at one of these places was a signal for the members to gather.



A friend of those days writes: "He was much given to spinning yarns so

funny that his hearers were convulsed, and yet all the time his own face

was perfectly sober.  Occasionally some of his droll yarns got into the

papers.  He may have written them himself."



Another old river-man remembers how, one day, at the association, they

were talking of presence of mind in an accident, when Pilot Clemens said:



"Boys, I had great presence of mind once.  It was at a fire.  An old man

leaned out of a four-story building, calling for help.  Everybody in the

crowd below looked up, but nobody did anything.  The ladders weren't long

enough.  Nobody had any presence of mind--nobody but me.  I came to the

rescue.  I yelled for a rope.  When it came I threw the old man the end

of it.  He caught it, and I told him to tie it around his waist.  He did

so, and I pulled him down."



This was a story that found its way into print, probably his own

contribution.



"Sam was always scribbling when not at the wheel," said Bixby, "but the

best thing he ever did was the burlesque of old Isaiah Sellers.  He

didn't write it for print, but only for his own amusement and to show to

a few of the boys.  Bart Bowen, who was with him on the "Edward J. Gay"

at the time, got hold of it, and gave it to one of the New Orleans

papers."



The burlesque on Captain Sellers would be of little importance if it were

not for its association with the origin, or, at least, with the

originator, of what is probably the best known of literary names--the

name Mark Twain.



This strong, happy title--a river term indicating a depth of two fathoms

on the sounding-line--was first used by the old pilot, Isaiah Sellers,

who was a sort of "oldest inhabitant" of the river, with a passion for

airing his ancient knowledge before the younger men.  Sellers used to

send paragraphs to the papers, quaint and rather egotistical in tone,

usually beginning, "My opinion for the citizens of New Orleans," etc.,

prophesying river conditions and recalling memories as far back as 1811.

These he generally signed "Mark Twain."



Naturally, the younger pilots amused themselves by imitating Sellers, and

when Sam Clemens wrote abroad burlesque of the old man's contributions,

relating a perfectly impossible trip, supposed to have been made in 1763

with a Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew, it was regarded as a

masterpiece of wit.



It appeared in the "True Delta" in May, 1859, and broke Captain Sellers's

literary heart.  He never wrote another paragraph.  Clemens always

regretted the whole matter deeply, and his own revival of the name

afterward was a sort of tribute to the old man he had thoughtlessly and

unintentionally wounded.



Old pilots of that day remembered Samuel Clemens as a slender, fine-

looking man, well dressed, even dandified, generally wearing blue serge,

with fancy shirts, white duck trousers, and patent-leather shoes.  A

pilot could do that, for his surroundings were speckless.



The pilots regarded him as a great reader--a student of history, travels,

and the sciences.  In the association rooms they often saw him poring

over serious books.  He began the study of French one day in New Orleans,

when he had passed a school of languages where French, German, and

Italian were taught, one in each of three rooms.  The price vas twenty-

five dollars for one language, or three for fifty.  The student was

provided with a set of conversation cards for each, and was supposed to

walk from one apartment to another, changing his nationality at each

threshold.  The young pilot, with his usual enthusiasm, invested in all

three languages, but after a few round trips decided that French would

do.  He did not return to the school, but kept the cards and added text-

books.  He studied faithfully when off watch and in port, and his old

river note-book, still preserved, contains a number of advanced

exercises, neatly written out.



Still more interesting are the river notes themselves.  They are not the

timid, hesitating memoranda of the "little book" which, by Bixby's

advice, he bought for his first trip.  They are quick, vigorous records

that show confidence and knowledge.  Under the head of "Second high-water

trip--Jan., 1861 'Alonzo Child,'" the notes tell the story of a rising

river, with overflowing banks, blind passages, and cut-offs--a new river,

in fact, that must be judged by a perfect knowledge of the old--guessed,

but guessed right.



Good deal of water all over Cole's Creek Chute, 12 or 15 ft. bank--could

have gone up above General Taylor's--too much drift .  .  .  .



Night--didn't run either 77 or 76 towheads--8-ft. bank on main shore

Ozark chute.



To the reader to-day it means little enough, but one may imagine,

perhaps, a mile-wide sweep of boiling water, full of drift, shifting

currents with newly forming bars, and a lone figure in the dark pilot-

house, peering into the night for blind and disappearing landmarks.



But such nights were not all there was of piloting.  There were glorious

nights when the stars were blazing out, and the moon was on the water,

and the young pilot could follow a clear channel and dream long dreams.

He was very serious at such times--he reviewed the world's history he had

read, he speculated on the future, he considered philosophies, he lost

himself in a study of the stars.  Mark Twain's love of astronomy, which

never waned until his last day, began with those lonely river watches.

Once a great comet blazed in the sky, a "wonderful sheaf of light," and

glorified his long hours at the wheel.



Samuel Clemens was now twenty-five, full of health and strong in his

courage.  In the old notebook there remains a well-worn clipping, the

words of some unknown writer, which he may have kept as a sort of creed:



HOW TO TAKE LIFE.--Take it just as though it was--as it is--an earnest,

vital, and important affair.  Take it as though you were born to the task

of performing a merry part in it--as though the world had awaited for

your coming.  Take it as though it was a grand opportunity to do and

achieve, to carry forward great and good schemes to help and cheer a

suffering, weary, it may be heartbroken, brother.  Now and then a man

stands aside from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently,

and straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of

some sort.  The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates

what others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose.  The

miracle, or the power that elevates the few, is to be found in their

industry, application, and perseverance under the promptings of a brave,

determined spirit.



Bixby and Clemens were together that winter on the "Child," and were the

closest friends.  Once the young pilot invited his mother to make the

trip to New Orleans, and the river journey and a long drive about the

beautiful Southern city filled Jane Clemens with wonder and delight.  She

no longer shad any doubts of Sam.  He had long since become the head of

the family.  She felt called upon to lecture him, now and then, but down

in her heart she believed that he could really do no wrong.  They joked

each other unmercifully, and her wit, never at a loss, was quite as keen

as his.









XVII.



THE END OF PILOTING



When one remembers how much Samuel Clemens loved the river, and how

perfectly he seemed suited to the ease and romance of the pilot-life, one

is almost tempted to regret that it should so soon have come to an end.



Those trips of early '61, which the old note-book records, were the last

he would ever make.  The golden days of Mississippi steam-boating were

growing few.



Nobody, however, seemed to suspect it.  Even a celebrated fortune-teller

in New Orleans, whom the young pilot one day consulted as to his future,

did not mention the great upheaval then close at hand.  She told him

quite remarkable things, and gave him some excellent advice, but though

this was February, 1861, she failed to make any mention of the Civil War!

Yet, a month later, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated and trouble was in

the air.  Then in April Fort Sumter was fired upon and the war had come.



It was a feverish time among the pilots.  Some were for the Union--others

would go with the Confederacy.  Horace Bixby stood for the North, and in

time was chief of the Union river-service.  A pilot named Montgomery

(Clemens had once steered for him) went with the South and by and by

commanded the Confederate Mississippi fleet.  In the beginning a good

many were not clear as to their opinions.  Living both North and South,

as they did, they divided their sympathies.  Samuel Clemens was

thoughtful, and far from bloodthirsty.  A pilothouse, so fine and showy

in times of peace, seemed a poor place to be in when fighting was going

on.  He would consider the matter.



"I am not anxious to get up into a glass perch and be shot at by either

side," he said.  "I'll go home and reflect."



He went up the river as a passenger on a steamer named the "Uncle Sam."

Zeb Leavenworth, formerly of the "John J. Roe," was one of the pilots,

and Clemens usually stood the watch with him.  At Memphis they barely

escaped the blockade.  At Cairo they saw soldiers drilling--troops later

commanded by Grant.



The "Uncle Sam" came steaming up to St. Louis, glad to have slipped

through safely.  They were not quite through, however.  Abreast of

Jefferson Barracks they heard the boom of a cannon, and a great ring of

smoke drifted in their direction.  They did not recognize it as a

thunderous "Halt!" and kept on.  Less than a minute later, a shell

exploded directly in front of the pilot-house, breaking a lot of glass

and damaging the decoration.  Zeb Leavenworth tumbled into a corner.



"Gee-mighty, Sam!" he said.  "What do they mean by that?"



Clemens stepped from the visitors' bench to the wheel and brought the

boat around.



"I guess--they want us--to wait a minute--Zeb," he said.



They were examined and passed.  It was the last steamboat to make the

trip through from New Orleans to St. Louis.  Mark Twain's pilot days were

over.  He would have grieved had he known this fact.



"I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since," he

long afterward declared, "and I took a measureless pride in it."



At the time, like many others, he expected the war to be brief, and his

life to be only temporarily interrupted.  Within a year, certainly, he

would be back in the pilot-house.  Meantime the war must be settled; he

would go up to Hannibal to see about it.









XVIII.



THE SOLDIER



When he reached Hannibal, Samuel Clemens found a very mixed condition of

affairs.  The country was in an uproar of war preparation; in a border

State there was a confusion of sympathies, with much ignorance as to what

it was all about.  Any number of young men were eager to enlist for a

brief camping-out expedition, and small private companies were formed,

composed about half-and-half of Union and Confederate men, as it turned

out later.



Missouri, meantime, had allied herself with the South, and Samuel

Clemens, on his arrival in Hannibal, decided that, like Lee, he would go

with his State.  Old friends, who were getting up a company "to help

Governor `Claib' Jackson repel the invader," offered him a lieutenancy if

he would join.  It was not a big company; it had only about a dozen

members, most of whom had been schoolmates, some of them fellow-pilots,

and Sam Clemens was needed to make it complete.  It was just another Tom

Sawyer band, and they met in a secret place above Bear Creek Hill and

planned how they would sell their lives on the field of glory, just as

years before fierce raids had been arranged on peach-orchards and melon-

patches.  Secrecy was necessary, for the Union militia had a habit of

coming over from Illinois and arresting suspicious armies on sight.  It

would humiliate the finest army in the world to spend a night or two in

the calaboose.



So they met secretly at night, and one mysterious evening they called on

girls who either were their sweethearts or were pretending to be for the

occasion, and when the time came for good-by the girls were invited to

"walk through the pickets" with them, though the girls didn't notice any

pickets, because the pickets were calling on their girls, too, and were a

little late getting to their posts.



That night they marched, through brush and vines, because the highroad

was thought to be dangerous, and next morning arrived at the home of

Colonel Ralls, of Ralls County, who had the army form in dress parade and

made it a speech and gave it a hot breakfast in good Southern style.

Then he sent out to Col. Bill Splawn and Farmer Nuck Matson a requisition

for supplies that would convert this body of infantry into cavalry--

rough-riders of that early day.  The community did not wish to keep an

army on its hands, and were willing to send it along by such means as

they could spare handily.  When the outfitting was complete, Lieutenant

Samuel Clemens, mounted on a small yellow mule whose tail had been

trimmed in the paint-brush pattern then much worn by mules, and

surrounded by variously attached articles--such as an extra pair of

cowhide boots, a pair of gray blankets, a home-made quilt, a frying-pan,

a carpet-sack, a small valise, an overcoat, an old-fashioned Kentucky

rifle, twenty yards of rope, and an umbrella--was a fair sample of the

brigade.



An army like that, to enjoy itself, ought to go into camp; so it went

over to Salt River, near the town of Florida, and took up headquarters in

a big log stable.  Somebody suggested that an army ought to have its hair

cut, so that in a hand-to-hand conflict the enemy could not get hold of

it.  There was a pair of sheep-shears in the stable, and Private Tom

Lyons acted as barber.  They were not sharp shears, and a group of little

darkies gathered from the farm to enjoy the torture.



Regular elections were now held--all officers, down to sergeants and

orderlies, being officially chosen.  There were only three privates, and

you couldn't tell them from officers.  The discipline in that army was

very bad.



It became worse soon.  Pouring rain set in.  Salt River rose and

overflowed the bottoms.  Men ordered on picket duty climbed up into the

stable-loft and went to bed.  Twice, on black, drenching nights, word

came from the farmhouse that the enemy, commanded by a certain Col.

Ulysses Grant, was in the neighborhood, and the Hannibal division went

hastily slopping through mud and brush in the other direction, dragging

wearily back when the alarm was over.  Military ardor was bound to cool

under such treatment.  Then Lieutenant Clemens developed a very severe

boil, and was obliged to lie most of the day on some hay in a horse-

trough, where he spent his time denouncing the war and the mistaken souls

who had invented it.  When word that "General" Tom Harris, commander of

the district--formerly telegraph-operator in Hannibal--was at a near-by

farm-house, living on the fat of the land, the army broke camp without

further ceremony.  Halfway there they met General Harris, who ordered

them back to quarters.  They called him familiarly "Tom," and told him

they were through with that camp forever.  He begged them, but it was no

use.  A little farther on they stopped at a farm-house for supplies.  A

tall, bony woman came to the door.



"You're Secesh, ain't you?"



Lieutenant Clemens said: "We are, madam, defenders of the noble cause,

and we should like to buy a few provisions."



The request seemed to inflame her.



"Provisions!"  she screamed.  "Provisions for Secesh, and my husband a

colonel in the Union Army.  You get out of here!"



She reached for a hickory hoop-pole [5] that stood by the door, and the

army moved on.  When they reached the home of Col. Bill Splawn it was

night and the family had gone to bed.  So the hungry army camped in the

barn-yard and crept into the hay-loft to sleep.  Presently somebody

yelled "Fire!"  One of the boys had been smoking and had ignited the hay.



Lieutenant Clemens, suddenly wakened, made a quick rotary movement away

from the blaze, and rolled out of a big hay-window into the barn-yard

below.  The rest of the brigade seized the burning hay and pitched it out

of the same window.  The lieutenant had sprained his ankle when he

struck, and his boil was still painful, but the burning hay cured him--

for the moment.  He made a spring from under it; then, noticing that the

rest of the army, now that the fire was out, seemed to think his

performance amusing, he rose up and expressed himself concerning the war,

and military life, and the human race in general.  They helped him in,

then, for his ankle was swelling badly.



In the morning, Colonel Splawn gave the army a good breakfast, and it

moved on.  Lieutenant Clemens, however, did not get farther than Farmer

Nuck Matson's.  He was in a high fever by that time from his injured

ankle, and Mrs. Matson put him to bed.  So the army left him, and

presently disbanded.  Some enlisted in the regular service, North or

South, according to preference.  Properly officered and disciplined, that

"Tom Sawyer" band would have made as good soldiers as any.



Lieutenant Clemens did not enlist again.  When he was able to walk, he

went to visit Orion in Keokuk.  Orion was a Union Abolitionist, but there

would be no unpleasantness on that account.  Samuel Clemens was beginning

to have leanings in that direction himself.



[5] In an earlier day, barrel hoops were made of small hickory trees,

split and shaved.  The hoop-pole was a very familiar article of commerce,

and of household defense.









XIX.



THE PIONEER



He arrived in Keokuk at what seemed a lucky moment.  Through Edward

Bates, a member of Lincoln's Cabinet, Orion Clemens had received an

appointment as territorial secretary of Nevada, and only needed the money

to carry him to the seat of his office at Carson City.  Out of his

pilot's salary his brother had saved more than enough for the journey,

and was willing to pay both their fares and go along as private secretary

to Orion, whose position promised something in the way of adventure and a

possible opportunity for making a fortune.



The brothers went at once to St. Louis for final leave-taking, and there

took boat for "St. Jo," Missouri, terminus of the great Overland Stage

Route.  They paid one hundred and fifty dollars each for their passage,

and about the end of July, 1861, set out on that long, delightful trip,

behind sixteen galloping horses, never stopping except for meals or to

change teams, heading steadily into the sunset over the billowy plains

and snow-clad Rockies, covering the seventeen hundred miles between St.

Jo and Carson City in nineteen glorious days.



But one must read Mark Twain's "Roughing It" for the story of that long-

ago trip--the joy and wonder of it, and the inspiration.  "Even at this

day," he writes, "it thrills me through and through to think of the life,

the gladness, and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood

dance in my face on those fine overland mornings."



It was a hot dusty, August day when they arrived, dusty, unshaven, and

weather-beaten, and Samuel Clemens's life as a frontiersman began.

Carson City, the capital of Nevada, was a wooden town with an assorted

population of two thousand souls.  The mining excitement was at its

height and had brought together the drift of every race.



The Clemens brothers took up lodgings with a genial Irishwoman, the Mrs.

O'Flannigan of "Roughing It," and Orion established himself in a modest

office, for there was no capitol building as yet, no government

headquarters.  Orion could do all the work, and Samuel Clemens, finding

neither duties nor salary attached to his position, gave himself up to

the study of the life about him, and to the enjoyment of the freedom of

the frontier.  Presently he had a following of friends who loved his

quaint manner of speech and his yarns.  On cool nights they would collect

about Orion's office-stove, and he would tell stories in the wonderful

way that one day would delight the world.  Within a brief time Sam

Clemens (he was always "Sam" to the pioneers) was the most notable figure

on the Carson streets.  His great, bushy head of auburn hair, has

piercing, twinkling eyes, his loose, lounging walk, his careless disorder

of dress invited a second look, even from strangers.  From a river dandy

he had become the roughest-clad of pioneers--rusty slouch hat, flannel

shirt, coarse trousers slopping half in and half out of heavy cowhide

boots, this was his make-up.  Energetic citizens did not prophesy success

for him.  Often they saw him leaning against an awning support, staring

drowsily at the motley human procession, for as much as an hour at a

time.  Certainly that could not be profitable.



But they did like to hear him talk.



He did not catch the mining fever at once.  He was interested first in

the riches that he could see.  Among these was the timber-land around

Lake Bigler (now Tahoe)--splendid acres, to be had for the asking.  The

lake itself was beautifully situated.



With an Ohio boy, John Kinney, he made an excursion afoot to Tahoe, a

trip described in one of the best chapters of "Roughing It."  They staked

out a timber claim and pretended to fence it and to build a house, but

their chief employment was loafing in the quiet luxury of the great woods

or drifting in a boat on the transparent water.  They did not sleep in

the house.  In "Roughing It" he says:



     "It never occurred to us, for one thing; and, besides, it was built

     to hold the ground, and that was enough.  We did not wish to strain

     it."



They made their camp-fires on the borders of the lake, and one evening it

got away from them, fired the forest, and destroyed their fences and

habitation.  In a letter home he describes this fire in a fine, vivid

way.  At one place he says:



     "The level ranks of flame were relieved at intervals by the standard-

     bearers, as we called the tall dead trees, wrapped in fire, and

     waving their blazing banners a hundred feet in the air.  Then we

     could turn from the scene to the lake, and see every branch and leaf

     and cataract of flame upon its banks perfectly reflected, as in a

     gleaming, fiery mirror."



He was acquiring the literary vision and touch.  The description of this

same fire in "Roughing It," written ten years later, is scarcely more

vivid.



Most of his letters home at this time tell of glowing prospects--the

certainty of fortune ahead.  The fever of the frontier is in them.  Once,

to Pamela Moffett, he wrote:



     "Orion and I have enough confidence in this country to think that, if

     the war lets us alone, we can make Mr. Moffett rich without its ever

     costing him a cent or a particle of trouble."



From the same letter we gather that the brothers are now somewhat

interested in mining claims:



     "We have about 1,650 feet of mining-ground, and, if it proves good,

     Mr. Moffett's name will go in; and if not, I can get 'feet' for him

     in the spring."



This was written about the end of October.  Two months later, in

midwinter, the mining fever came upon him with full force.









XX.



THE MINER



The wonder is that Samuel Clemens, always speculative and visionary, had

not fallen an earlier victim.  Everywhere one heard stories of sudden

fortune--of men who had gone to bed paupers and awakened millionaires.

New and fabulous finds were reported daily.  Cart-loads of bricks--silver

and gold bricks--drove through the Carson streets.



Then suddenly from the newly opened Humboldt region came the wildest

reports.  The mountains there were said to be stuffed with gold.  A

correspondent of the "Territorial Enterprise" was unable to find words to

picture the riches of the Humboldt mines.



The air for Samuel Clemens began to shimmer.  Fortune was waiting to be

gathered in a basket.  He joined the first expedition for Humboldt--in

fact, helped to organize it.  In "Roughing It" he says:



     "Hurry was the word!  We wasted no time.  Our party consisted of four

     persons--a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and

     myself.  We bought a wagon and two miserable old horses.  We put

     eighteen hundred pounds of provisions and mining-tools in the wagon

     and drove out of Carson on a chilly December afternoon.."



The two young lawyers were W. H. Clagget, whom Clemens had known in

Keokuk, and A. W. Oliver, called Oliphant in "Roughing It."   The

blacksmith was named Tillou (Ballou in "Roughing It"), a sturdy, honest

man with a knowledge of mining and the repair of tools.  There were also

two dogs in the party--a curly-tailed mongrel and a young hound.



The horses were the weak feature of the expedition.  It was two hundred

miles to Humboldt, mostly across sand.  The miners rode only a little

way, then got out to lighten the load.  Later they pushed.  Then it began

to snow, also to blow, and the air became filled with whirling clouds of

snow and sand.  On and on they pushed and groaned, sustained by the

knowledge that they must arrive some time, when right away they would be

millionaires and all their troubles would be over.



The nights were better.  The wind went down and they made a camp-fire in

the shelter of the wagon, cooked their bacon, crept under blankets with

the dogs to warm them, and Sam Clemens spun yarns till they fell asleep.



There had been an Indian war, and occasionally they passed the charred

ruin of a cabin and new graves.  By and by they came to that deadly waste

known as the Alkali Desert, strewn with the carcasses of dead beasts and

with the heavy articles discarded by emigrants in their eagerness to

reach water.  All day and night they pushed through that choking,

waterless plain to reach camp on the other side.  When they arrived at

three in the morning, they dropped down exhausted.  Judge Oliver, the

last survivor of the party, in a letter to the writer of these chapters,

said:



     "The sun was high in the heavens when we were aroused from our sleep

     by a yelling band of Piute warriors.  We were upon our feet in an

     instant.  The picture of burning cabins and the lonely graves we had

     passed was in our minds.  Our scalps were still our own, and not

     dangling from the belts of our visitors.  Sam pulled himself

     together, put his hand on his head, as if to make sure he had not

     been scalped, and, with his inimitable drawl, said 'Boys, they have

     left us our scalps.  Let us give them all the flour and sugar they

     ask for.'  And we did give them a good supply, for we were grateful."



The Indians left them unharmed, and the prospective millionaires moved

on.  Across that two hundred miles to the Humboldt country they pushed,

arriving at the little camp of Unionville at the end of eleven weary

days.



In "Roughing It" Mark Twain has told us of Unionville and the mining

experience there.  Their cabin was a three-sided affair with a cotton

roof.  Stones rolled down the mountainside on them; also, the author

says, a mule and a cow.



The author could not gather fortune in a basket, as he had dreamed.

Masses of gold and silver were not lying about.  He gathered a back-load

of yellow, glittering specimens, but they proved worthless.  Gold in the

rough did not glitter, and was not yellow.  Tillou instructed the others

in prospecting, and they went to work with pick and shovel--then with

drill and blasting-powder.  The prospect of immediately becoming

millionaires vanished.



"One week of this satisfied me.  I resigned," is Mark Twain's brief

comment.



The Humboldt reports had been exaggerated.  The Clemens-Clagget-Oliver-

Tillou millionaire combination soon surrendered its claims.  Clemens and

Tillou set out for Carson City with a Prussian named Pfersdorff, who

nearly got them drowned and got them completely lost in the snow before

they arrived there.  Oliver and Clagget remained in Unionville, began law

practice, and were elected to office.  It is not known what became of the

wagon and horses and the two dogs.



It was the end of January when our miner returned to Carson.  He was not

discouraged--far from it.  He believed he had learned something that

would be useful to him in a camp where mines were a reality.  Within a

few weeks from his return we find him at Aurora, in the Esmeralda region,

on the edge of California.  It was here that the Clemens brothers owned

the 1,650 feet formerly mentioned.  He had came down to work it.



It was the dead of winter, but he was full of enthusiasm, confident of a

fortune by early summer.  To Pamela he wrote:



     "I expect to return to St. Louis in July--per steamer.  I don't say

     that I will return then, or that I shall be able to do it--but I

     expect to--you bet .  .  .  . If nothing goes wrong, we'll strike

     the ledge in June."



He was trying to be conservative, and further along he cautions his

sister not to get excited.



     "Don't you know I have only talked as yet, but proved nothing?  Don't

     you know I have never held in my hands a gold or silver bar that

     belonged to me?  Don't you know that people who always feel jolly,

     no matter where they are or what happens to them--who have the organ

     of hope preposterously developed--who are endowed with an

     uncongealable, sanguine temperament--who never feel concerned about

     the price of corn--and who cannot, by any possibility, discover any

     but the bright side of a picture--are very apt to go to extremes and

     exaggerate with a 40-horse microscopic power?



     "But-but--

     In the bright lexicon of youth,

     There is no such word as fail,

     and I'll prove it."



Whereupon he soars again, adding page after page full of glowing

expectations and plans such as belong only with speculation in treasures

buried in the ground--a very difficult place, indeed, to find them.



His money was about exhausted by this time, and funds to work the mining

claims must come out of Orion's rather modest salary.  The brothers owned

all claims in partnership, and it was now the part of "Brother Sam" to do

the active work.  He hated the hard picking and prying and blasting into

the flinty ledges, but the fever drove him on.  He camped with a young

man named Phillips at first, and, later on, with an experienced miner,

Calvin H. Higbie, to whom "Roughing It" would one day be dedicated.  They

lived in a tiny cabin with a cotton roof, and around their rusty stove

they would paw over their specimens and figure the fortune that their

mines would be worth in the spring.



Food ran low, money gave out almost entirely, but they did not give up.

When it was stormy and they could not dig, and the ex-pilot was in a

talkative vein, he would sit astride the bunk and distribute to his

hearers riches more valuable than any they would dig from the Esmeralda

hills.  At other times he did not talk at all, but sat in a corner and

wrote.  They thought he was writing home; they did not know that he was

"literary."  Some of his home letters had found their way into a Keokuk

paper and had come back to Orion, who had shown them to an assistant on

the "Territorial Enterprise," of Virginia City.  The "Enterprise" man had

caused one of them to be reprinted, and this had encouraged its author to

send something to the paper direct.  He signed these contributions

"Josh," and one told of:



          "An old, old horse whose name was Methusalem,

          Took him down and sold him in Jerusalem,

          A long time ago."



He received no pay for these offerings and expected none.  He considered

them of no value.  If any one had told him that he was knocking at the

door of the house of fame, however feebly, he would have doubted that

person's judgment or sincerity.



His letters to Orion, in Carson City, were hasty compositions, reporting

progress and progress, or calling for remittances to keep the work going.

On April 13, he wrote:



     "Work not begun on the Horatio and Derby--haven't seen it yet.  It is

     still in the snow.  Shall begin on it within three or four weeks--

     strike the ledge in July."



Again, later in the month:



     "I have been at work all day, blasting and digging in one of our new

     claims, 'Dashaway,' which I don't think a great deal of, but which I

     am willing to try.  We are down now ten or twelve feet."



It must have been disheartening work, picking away at the flinty ledges.

There is no further mention of the "Dashaway," but we hear of the

"Flyaway," the "Annipolitan," the "Live Yankee," and of many another,

each of which holds out a beacon of hope for a brief moment, then passes

from notice forever.  Still, he was not discouraged.  Once he wrote:



     "I am a citizen here and I am satisfied, though 'Ratio and I are

     'strapped' and we haven't three days' rations in the house.  I shall

     work the "Monitor" and the other claims with my own hands.



     "The pick and shovel are the only claims I have confidence in now,"

     he wrote, later; "my back is sore and my hands are blistered with

     handling them to-day."



His letters began to take on a weary tone.  Once in midsummer he wrote

that it was still snowing up there in the hills, and added, "It always

snows here I expect.  If we strike it rich, I've lost my guess, that's

all."  And the final heartsick line, "Don't you suppose they have pretty

much quit writing at home?"



In time he went to work in a quartz-mill at ten dollars a week, though it

was not entirely for the money, as in "Roughing It" he would have us

believe.  Samuel Clemens learned thoroughly what he undertook, and he

proposed to master the science of mining.  From Phillips and Higbie he

had learned what there was to know about prospecting.  He went to the

mill to learn refining, so that, when his claims developed, he could

establish a mill and personally superintend the work.  His stay was

brief.  He contracted a severe cold and came near getting poisoned by the

chemicals.  Recovering, he went with Higbie for an outing to Mono Lake, a

ghastly, lifeless alkali sea among the hills, vividly described in

"Roughing It."



At another time he went with Higbie on a walking trip to the Yosemite,

where they camped and fished undisturbed, for in those days few human

beings came to that far isolation.  Discouragement did not reach them

there--amid that vast grandeur and quiet the quest for gold hardly seemed

worth while.  Now and again that summer he went alone into the wilderness

to find his balance and to get entirely away from humankind.



In "Roughing It" Mark Twain tells the story of how he and Higbie finally

located a "blind lead," which made them really millionaires, until they

forfeited their claim through the sharp practice of some rival miners and

their own neglect.  It is true that the "Wide West" claim was forfeited

in some such manner, but the size of the loss was magnified in "Roughing

It," to make a good story.  There was never a fortune in "Wide West,"

except the one sunk in it by its final owners.  The story as told in

"Roughing It" is a tale of what might have happened, and ends the

author's days in the mines with a good story-book touch.



The mining career of Samuel Clemens really came to a close gradually, and

with no showy climax.  He fought hard and surrendered little by little,

without owning, even to the end, that he was surrendering at all.  It was

the gift of resolution that all his life would make his defeats long and

costly--his victories supreme.



By the end of July the money situation in the Aurora camp was getting

desperate.  Orion's depleted salary would no longer pay for food, tools,

and blasting-powder, and the miner began to cast about far means to earn

an additional sum, however small.  The "Josh" letters to the "Enterprise"

had awakened interest as to their author, and Orion had not failed to let

"Josh's" identity be known.  The result had been that here and there a

coast paper had invited contributions and even suggested payment.  A

letter written by the Aurora miner at the end of July tells this part of

the story:



     "My debts are greater than I thought for .  .  .  . The fact is, I

     must have something to do, and that shortly, too .  .  .  .  Now

     write to the "Sacramento Union" folks, or to Marsh, and tell them

     that I will write as many letters a week as they want, for $10 a

     week.  My board must be paid.



     "Tell them I have corresponded with the "New Orleans Crescent" and

     other papers--and the "Enterprise."



     "If they want letters from here--who'll run from morning till night

     collecting material cheaper?  I'll write a short letter twice a week,

     for the present, for the "Age," for $5 per week.  Now it has been a

     long time since I couldn't make my own living, and it shall be a long

     time before I loaf another year."



This all led to nothing, but about the same time the "Enterprise"

assistant already mentioned spoke to Joseph T. Goodman, owner and editor

of the paper, about adding "Josh" to their regular staff.  "Joe" Goodman,

a man of keen humor and literary perception, agreed that the author of

the "Josh" letters might be useful to them.  One of the sketches

particularly appealed to him--a burlesque report of a Fourth of July

oration.



"That is the kind of thing we want," he said.  "Write to him, Barstow,

and ask him if he wants to come up here."



Barstow wrote, offering twenty-five dollars a week--a tempting sum.  This

was at the end of July, 1862.



Yet the hard-pressed miner made no haste to accept the offer.  To leave

Aurora meant the surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of

another failure.  He wrote Barstow, asking when he thought he might be

needed.  And at the same time, in a letter to Orion, he said:



     "I shall leave at midnight to-night, alone and on foot, for a walk of

     sixty or seventy miles through a totally uninhabited country.  But

     do you write Barstow that I have left here for a week or so, and, in

     case he should want me, he must write me here, or let me know

     through you."



He had gone into the wilderness to fight out his battle alone, postponing

the final moment of surrender--surrender that, had he known, only meant

the beginning of victory.  He was still undecided when he returned eight

days later and wrote to his sister Pamela a letter in which there is no-

mention of newspaper prospects.



Just how and when the end came at last cannot be known; but one hot,

dusty August afternoon, in Virginia City, a worn, travel-stained pilgrim

dragged himself into the office of the "Territorial Enterprise," then in

its new building on C Street, and, loosening a heavy roll of blankets

from his shoulder, dropped wearily into a chair.  He wore a rusty slouch

hat, no coat, a faded blue-flannel shirt, a navy revolver; his trousers

were tucked into his boot-tops; a tangle of reddish-brown hair fell on

his shoulders; a mass of tawny beard, dingy with alkali dust, dropped

half-way to his waist.



Aurora lay one hundred and thirty miles from Virginia City.  He had

walked that distance, carrying his heavy load.  Editor Goodman was absent

at the moment, but the other proprietor, Dennis E. McCarthy, asked the

caller to state his errand.  The wanderer regarded him with a far-away

look and said, absently, and with deliberation:



     "My starboard leg seems to be unshipped.  I'd like about one hundred

     yards of line; I think I'm falling to pieces."  Then he added: "I

     want to see Mr. Barstow or Mr. Goodman.  My name is Clemens, and

     I've come to write for the paper."



It was the master of the world's widest estate come to claim his kingdom!









XXI.



THE TERRITORIAL ENTERPRISE



In 1852 Virginia City, Nevada, was the most flourishing of mining towns.

A half-crazy miner, named Comstock, had discovered there a vein of such

richness that the "Comstock Lode" was presently glutting the mineral

markets of the world.  Comstock himself got very little out of it, but

those who followed him made millions.  Miners, speculators, adventurers

swarmed in.  Every one seemed to have money.  The streets seethed with an

eager, affluent, boisterous throng whose chief business seemed to be to

spend the wealth that the earth was yielding in such a mighty stream.



Business of every kind boomed.  Less than two years earlier, J. T.

Goodman, a miner who was also a printer and a man of literary taste, had

joined with another printer, Dennis McCarthy, and the two had managed to

buy a struggling Virginia City paper, the "Territorial Enterprise."   But

then came the hightide of fortune.  A year later the "Enterprise," from a

starving sheet in a leaky shanty, had become a large, handsome paper in a

new building, and of such brilliant editorial management that it was the

most widely considered journal on the Pacific coast.



Goodman was a fine, forceful writer, and he surrounded himself with able

men.  He was a young man, full of health and vigor, overflowing with the

fresh spirit and humor of the West.  Comstockers would always laugh at a

joke, and Goodman was always willing to give it to them.  The

"Enterprise" was a newspaper, but it was willing to furnish entertainment

even at the cost of news.  William Wright, editorially next to Goodman,

was a humorist of ability.  His articles, signed Dan de Quille, were

widely copied.  R. M. Daggett (afterward United States Minister to

Hawaii) was also an "Enterprise" man, and there were others of their

sort.



Samuel Clemens fitted precisely into this group.  He brought with him a

new turn of thought and expression; he saw things with open eyes, and

wrote of them in a fresh, wild way that Comstockers loved.  He was

allowed full freedom.  Goodman suppressed nothing; his men could write as

they chose.  They were all young together--if they pleased themselves,

they were pretty sure to please their readers.  Often they wrote of one

another--squibs and burlesques, which gratified the Comstock far more

than mere news.  It was just the school to produce Mark Twain.



The new arrival found acquaintance easy.  The whole "Enterprise" force

was like one family; proprietors, editor, and printers were social

equals.  Samuel Clemens immediately became "Sam" to his associates, just

as De Quille was "Dan," and Goodman "Joe."  Clemens was supposed to

report city items, and did, in fact, do such work, which he found easy,

for his pilot-memory made notes unnecessary.



He could gather items all day, and at night put down the day's budget

well enough, at least, to delight his readers.  When he was tired of

facts, he would write amusing paragraphs, as often as not something about

Dan, or a reporter on a rival paper.  Dan and the others would reply, and

the Comstock would laugh.  Those were good old days.



Sometimes he wrote hoaxes.  Once he told with great circumstance and

detail of a petrified prehistoric man that had been found embedded in a

rock in the desert, and how the coroner from Humboldt had traveled more

than a hundred miles to hold an inquest over a man dead for centuries,

and had refused to allow miners to blast the discovery from its position.



The sketch was really intended as a joke on the Humboldt coroner, but it

was so convincingly written that most of the Coast papers took it

seriously and reprinted it as the story of a genuine discovery.  In time

they awoke, and began to inquire as to who was the smart writer on the

"Enterprise."



Mark Twain did a number of such things, some of which are famous on the

Coast to this day.



Clemens himself did not escape.  Lamps were used in the "Enterprise"

office, but he hated the care of a lamp, and worked evenings by the light

of a candle.  It was considered a great joke in the office to "hide Sam's

candle" and hear him fume and rage, walking in a circle meantime--a habit

acquired in the pilothouse--and scathingly denouncing the culprits.

Eventually the office-boy, supposedly innocent, would bring another

candle, and quiet would follow.  Once the office force, including De

Quille, McCarthy, and a printer named Stephen Gillis, of whom Clemens was

very fond, bought a large imitation meerschaum pipe, had a German-silver

plate set on it, properly engraved, and presented it to Samuel Clemens as

genuine, in testimony of their great esteem.  His reply to the

presentation speech was so fine and full of feeling that the jokers felt

ashamed of their trick.  A few days later, when he discovered the

deception, he was ready to destroy the lot of them.  Then, in atonement,

they gave him a real meerschaum.  Such things kept the Comstock

entertained.



There was a side to Samuel Clemens that, in those days, few of his

associates saw.  This was the poetic, the reflective side.  Joseph

Goodman, like Macfarlane in Cincinnati several years earlier, recognized

this phase of his character and developed it.  Often these two, dining or

walking together, discussed the books and history they had read, quoted

from poems that gave them pleasure.  Clemens sometimes recited with great

power the "Burial of Moses," whose noble phrasing and majestic imagery

seemed to move him deeply.  With eyes half closed and chin lifted, a

lighted cigar between his fingers, he would lose himself in the music of

the stately lines:



               By Nebo's lonely mountain,

                 On this side Jordan's wave,

               In a vale in the land of Moab

                 There lies a lonely grave.

               And no man knows that sepulcher,

                 And no man saw it e'er,

               For the angels of God upturned the sod,

                 And laid the dead man there.



That his own writing would be influenced by the simple grandeur of this

poem we can hardly doubt.  Indeed, it may have been to him a sort of

literary touchstone, that in time would lead him to produce, as has been

said, some of the purest English written by any modern author.









XXII.



"MARK TWAIN"



It was once when Goodman and Clemens were dining together that the latter

asked to be allowed to report the proceedings of the coming legislature

at Carson City.  He knew nothing of such work, and Goodman hesitated.

Then, remembering that Clemens would, at least, make his reports

readable, whether they were parliamentary or not, he consented.



So, at the beginning of the year (1863), Samuel Clemens undertook a new

and interesting course in the study of human nature--the political human

nature of the frontier.  There could have been no better school for him.

His wit, his satire, his phrasing had full swing--his letters, almost

from the beginning, were copied as choice reading up and down the Coast.

He made curious blunders, at first, as to the proceedings, but his open

confession of ignorance in the early letters made these blunders their

chief charm.  A young man named Gillespie, clerk of the House, coached

him, and in return was christened "Young Jefferson's Manual," a title

which he bore for many years.



A reporter named Rice, on a rival Virginia City paper, the "Union," also

earned for himself a title through those early letters.



Rice concluded to poke fun at the "Enterprise" reports, pointing out

their mistakes.  But this was not wise.  Clemens, in his next

contribution, admitted that Rice's reports might be parliamentary enough,

but declared his glittering technicalities were only to cover

misstatements of fact.  He vowed they were wholly untrustworthy, dubbed

the author of them "The Unreliable," and never thereafter referred to him

by any other term.  Carson and the Comstock papers delighted in this

foolery, and Rice became "The Unreliable" for life.  There was no real

feeling between Rice and Clemens.  They were always the best of friends.



But now we arrive at the story of still another name, one of vastly

greater importance than either of those mentioned, for it is the name

chosen by Samuel Clemens for himself.  In those days it was the fashion

for a writer to have a pen-name, especially for his journalistic and

humorous work.  Clemens felt that his "Enterprise" letters, copied up and

down the Coast, needed a mark of identity.



He gave the matter a good deal of thought.  He wanted something brief and

strong--something that would stick in the mind.  It was just at this time

that news came of the death of Capt. Isaiah Sellers, the old pilot who

had signed himself "Mark Twain."   Mark Twain!  That was the name he

wanted.  It was not trivial.  It had all the desired qualities.  Captain

Sellers would never need it again.  It would do no harm to keep it alive-

-to give it a new meaning in a new land.  Clemens took a trip from Carson

up to Virginia City.



"Joe," he said to Goodman, "I want to sign my articles.  I want to be

identified to a wider audience."



"All right, Sam.  What name do you want to use Josh?"



"No, I want to sign them Mark Twain.  It is an old river term, a

leadsman's call, signifying two fathoms--twelve feet.  It has a richness

about it; it was always a pleasant sound for a pilot to hear on a dark

night; it meant safe waters."



He did not mention that Captain Sellers had used and dropped the name.

He was not proud of his part in that episode, and it was too recent for

confession.



Goodman considered a moment.  "Very well, Sam," he said, "that sounds

like a good name."



A good name, indeed!  Probably, if he had considered every combination of

words in the language, he could not have found a better one.  To-day we

recognize it as the greatest nom de plume ever chosen, and, somehow, we

cannot believe that the writer of "Tom Sawyer" and "Huck Finn" and

"Roughing It" could have selected any other had he tried.



The name Mark Twain was first signed to a Carson letter, February 2,

1863, and after that to all of Samuel Clemens's work.  The letters that

had amused so many readers had taken on a new interest--the interest that

goes with a name.  It became immediately more than a pen-name.  Clemens

found he had attached a name to himself as well as to his letters.

Everybody began to address him as Mark.  Within a few weeks he was no

longer "Sam" or "Clemens," but Mark--Mark Twain.  The Coast papers liked

the sound of it.  It began to mean something to their readers.  By the

end of that legislative session Samuel Clemens, as Mark Twain, had

acquired out there on that breezy Western slope something resembling

fame.



Curiously, he fails to mention any of this success in his letters home of

that period.  Indeed, he seldom refers to his work, but more often speaks

of mining shares which he has accumulated, and their possible values.

His letters are airy, full of the joy of life and of the wild doings of

the frontier.  Closing one of them, he says: "I have just heard five

pistolshots down the street.  As such things are in my line, I will go

and see about it."



And in a postscript, later, he adds:



     "5 A.M.--The pistol-shots did their work well.  One man, a Jackson

     County Missourian, shot two of my friends (police officers) through

     the heart--both died within three minutes.  The murderer's name is

     John Campbell."



The Comstock was a great school for Mark Twain, and in "Roughing It" he

has left us a faithful picture of its long-vanished glory.



More than one national character came out of the Comstock school.

Senator James G. Fair was one of them, and John Mackay, both miners with

pick and shovel at first, though Mackay presently became a

superintendent.  Mark Twain one day laughingly offered to trade jobs with

Mackay.



"No," Mackay said, "I can't trade.  My business is not worth as much as

yours.  I have never swindled anybody, and I don't intend to begin now."



For both these men the future held splendid gifts: for Mackay vast

wealth, for Mark Twain the world's applause, and neither would have long

to wait.









XXIII.



ARTEMUS WARD AND LITERARY SAN FRANCISCO



It was about the end of 1863 that a new literary impulse came into Mark

Twain's life.  The gentle and lovable humorist Artemus Ward (Charles F.

Browne) was that year lecturing in the West, and came to Virginia City.

Ward had intended to stay only a few days, but the whirl of the Comstock

fascinated him.  He made the "Enterprise" office his headquarters and

remained three weeks.  He and Mark Twain became boon companions.  Their

humor was not unlike; they were kindred spirits, together almost

constantly.  Ward was then at the summit of his fame, and gave the

younger man the highest encouragement, prophesying great things for ha

work.  Clemens, on his side, was stirred, perhaps for the first time,

with a real literary ambition, and the thought that he, too, might win a

place of honor.  He promised Ward that he would send work to the Eastern

papers.



On Christmas Eve, Ward gave a dinner to the "Enterprise" staff, at

Chaumond's, a fine French restaurant of that day.  When refreshments

came, Artemus lifted his glass, and said:



"I give you Upper Canada."



The company rose and drank the toast in serious silence.  Then Mr.

Goodman said:



"Of course, Artemus, it's all right, but why did you give us Upper

Canada?"



"Because I don't want it myself," said Ward, gravely.



What would one not give to have listened to the talk of that evening!

Mark Twain's power had awakened; Artemus Ward was in his prime.  They

were giants of a race that became extinct when Mark Twain died.



Goodman remained rather quiet during the evening.  Ward had appointed him

to order the dinner, and he had attended to this duty without mingling

much in the conversation.  When Ward asked him why he did not join the

banter, he said:



"I am preparing a joke, Artemus, but I am keeping it for the present."



At a late hour Ward finally called for the bill.  It was two hundred and

thirty-seven dollars.



"What!" exclaimed Artemus.



"That's my joke," said Goodman.



"But I was only exclaiming because it was not twice as much," laughed

Ward, laying the money on the table.



Ward remained through the holidays, and later wrote back an affectionate

letter to Mark Twain.



"I shall always remember Virginia as a bright spot in my existence," he

said, "as all others must, or rather, cannot be, as it were."



With Artemus Ward's encouragement, Mark Twain now began sending work

eastward.  The "New York Sunday Mercury" published one, possibly more, of

his sketches, but they were not in his best vein, and made little

impression.  He may have been too busy for outside work, for the

legislative session of 1864 was just beginning.  Furthermore, he had been

chosen governor of the "Third House," a mock legislature, organized for

one session, to be held as a church benefit.  The "governor" was to

deliver a message, which meant that he was to burlesque from the platform

all public officials and personages, from the real governor down.



With the exception of a short talk he had once given at a printer's

dinner in Keokuk, it was Mark Twain's first appearance as a speaker, and

the beginning of a lifelong series of triumphs on the platform.  The

building was packed--the aisles full.  The audience was ready for fun,

and he gave it to them.  Nobody escaped ridicule; from beginning to end

the house was a storm of laughter and applause.



Not a word of this first address of Mark Twain's has been preserved, but

those who heard it always spoke of it as the greatest effort of his life,

as to them it seemed, no doubt.



For his Third House address, Clemens was presented with a gold watch,

inscribed "To Governor Mark Twain."  Everywhere, now, he was pointed out

as a distinguished figure, and his quaint remarks were quoted.  Few of

these sayings are remembered to-day, though occasionally one is still

unforgotten.  At a party one night, being urged to make a conundrum, he

said:



"Well, why am I like the Pacific Ocean?"



Several guesses were made, but he shook his head.  Some one said:



"We give it up.  Tell us, Mark, why are you like the Pacific Ocean?"



"I--don't--know," he drawled.  "I was just--asking for information."



The governor of Nevada was generally absent, and Orion Clemens was

executive head of the territory.  His wife, who had joined him in Carson

City, was social head of the little capital, and Brother Sam, with his

new distinction and now once more something of a dandy in dress, was

society's chief ornament--a great change, certainly, from the early

months of his arrival less than three years before.



It was near the end of May, 1864, when Mark Twain left Nevada for San

Francisco.  The immediate cause of his going was a duel--a duel

elaborately arranged between Mark Twain and the editor of a rival paper,

but never fought.  In fact, it was mainly a burlesque affair throughout,

chiefly concocted by that inveterate joker, Steve Gillis, already

mentioned in connection with the pipe incident.  The new dueling law,

however, did not distinguish between real and mock affrays, and the

prospect of being served with a summons made a good excuse for Clemens

and Gillis to go to San Francisco, which had long attracted them.  They

were great friends, these two, and presently were living together and

working on the same paper, the "Morning Call," Clemens as a reporter and

Gillis as a compositor.



Gillis, with his tendency to mischief, was a constant exasperation to his

room-mate, who, goaded by some new torture, would sometimes denounce him

in feverish terms.  Yet they were never anything but the closest friends.



Mark Twain did not find happiness in his new position on the "Call."

There was less freedom and more drudgery than he had known on the

"Enterprise."  His day was spent around the police court, attending

fires, weddings, and funerals, with brief glimpses of the theaters at

night.



Once he wrote: "It was fearful drudgery--soulless drudgery--and almost

destitute of interest.  It was an awful slavery for a lazy man."



It must have been so.  There was little chance for original work.  He had

become just a part of a news machine.  He saw many public abuses that he

wished to expose, but the policy of the paper opposed him.  Once,

however, he found a policeman asleep on his beat.  Going to a near-by

vegetable stall, he borrowed a large cabbage-leaf, came back, and stood

over the sleeper, gently fanning him.  He knew the paper would not

publish the policeman's negligence, but he could advertise it in his own

way.  A large crowd soon collected, much amused.  When he thought the

audience large enough, he went away.  Next day the joke was all over the

city.



He grew indifferent to the "Call" work, and, when an assistant was

allowed him to do part of the running for items, it was clear to

everybody that presently the assistant would be able to do it all.



But there was a pleasant and profitable side to the San Francisco life.

There were real literary people there--among them a young man, with rooms

upstairs in the "Call" office, Francis Bret Harte, editor of the

"Californian," a new literary weekly which Charles Henry Webb had

recently founded.  Bret Harte was not yet famous, but his gifts were

recognized on the Pacific slope, especially by the "Era" group of

writers, the "Golden Era" being a literary monthly of considerable

distinction.  Joaquin Miller recalls, from his diary of that period,

having seen Prentice Mulford, Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, Mark

Twain, Artemus Ward, and others, all assembled there at one time--a

remarkable group, certainly, to be dropped down behind the Sierras so

long ago.  They were a hopeful, happy lot, and sometimes received five

dollars for an article, which, of course, seemed a good deal more

precious than a much larger sum earned in another way.



Mark Twain had contributed to the "Era" while still in Virginia City, and

now, with Bret Harte, was ranked as a leader of the group.  The two were

much together, and when Harte became editor of the "Californian" he

engaged Clemens as a regular contributor at the very fancy rate of twelve

dollars an article.  Some of the brief chapters included to-day in

"Sketches New and Old" were done at this time.  They have humor, but are

not equal to his later work, and beyond the Pacific slope they seem to

have attracted little attention.



In "Roughing It" the author tells us how he finally was dismissed from

the "Call" for general incompetency, and presently found himself in the

depths of hard luck, debt, and poverty.  But this is only his old habit

of making a story on himself sound as uncomplimentary as possible.  The

true version is that the "Call" publisher and Mark Twain had a friendly

talk and decided that it was better for both to break off the connection.

Almost immediately he arranged to write a daily San Francisco letter for

the "Enterprise," for which he received thirty dollars a week.  This,

with his earnings from the "Californian," made his total return larger

than before.  Very likely he was hard up from time to time--literary men

are often that--but that he was ever in abject poverty, as he would have

us believe, is just a good story and not history.









XXIV.



THE DISCOVERY OF "THE JUMPING FROG"



Mark Twain's daily letters to the "Enterprise" stirred up trouble for him

in San Francisco.  He was free, now, to write what he chose, and he

attacked the corrupt police management with such fierceness that, when

copies of the "Enterprise" got back to San Francisco, they started a

commotion at the city hall.  Then Mark Twain let himself go more

vigorously than ever.  He sent letters to the "Enterprise" that made even

the printers afraid.  Goodman, however, was fearless, and let them go in,

word for word.  The libel suit which the San Francisco chief of police

brought against the Enterprise advertised the paper amazingly.



But now came what at the time seemed an unfortunate circumstance.  Steve

Gillis, always a fearless defender of the weak, one night rushed to the

assistance of two young fellows who had been set upon by three roughs.

Gillis, though small of stature, was a terrific combatant, and he

presently put two of the assailants to flight and had the other ready for

the hospital.  Next day it turned out that the roughs were henchmen of

the police, and Gillis was arrested.



Clemens went his bail, and advised Steve to go down to Virginia City

until the storm blew over.



But it did not blow over for Mark Twain.  The police department was only

too glad to have a chance at the author of the fierce "Enterprise"

letters, and promptly issued a summons for him, with an execution against

his personal effects.  If James N. Gillis, brother of Steve, had not

happened along just then and spirited Mark Twain away to his mining-camp

in the Tuolumne Hills, the beautiful gold watch given to the governor of

the Third House might have been sacrificed in the cause of friendship.



As it was, he found himself presently in the far and peaceful seclusion

of that land which Bret Harte would one day make famous with his tales of

"Roaring Camp" and "Sandy Bar."  Jim Gillis was, in fact, the Truthful

James of Bret Harte, and his cabin on jackass Hill had been the retreat

of Harte and many another literary wayfarer who had wandered there for

rest and refreshment and peace.  It was said the sick were made well, and

the well made better, in Jim Gillis's cabin.  There were plenty of books

and a variety of out-of-door recreation.  One could mine there if he

chose.  Jim would furnish the visiting author with a promising claim, and

teach him to follow the little fan-like drift of gold specks to the

pocket of treasure somewhere up the hillside.



Gillis himself had literary ability, though he never wrote.  He told his

stories, and with his back to the open fire would weave the most amazing

tales, invented as he went along.  His stories were generally wonderful

adventures that had happened to his faithful companion, Stoker; and

Stoker never denied them, but would smoke and look into the fire, smiling

a little sometimes, but never saying a word.  A number of the tales later

used by Mark Twain were first told by Jim Gillis in the cabin on Jackass

Hill.  "Dick Baker's Cat" was one of these, the jay-bird and acorn story

in "A Tramp Abroad" was another.  Mark Twain had little to add to these

stories.



"They are not mine, they are Jim's," he said, once; "but I never could

get them to sound like Jim--they were never as good as his."



It was early in December, 1864, when Mark Twain arrived at the humble

retreat, built of logs under a great live-oak tree, and surrounded by a

stretch of blue-grass.  A younger Gillis boy was there at the time, and

also, of course, Dick Stoker and his cat, Tom Quartz, which every reader

of "Roughing It" knows.



It was the rainy season, but on pleasant days they all went pocket-

mining, and, in January, Mark Twain, Gillis, and Stoker crossed over into

Calaveras County and began work near Angel's Camp, a place well known to

readers of Bret Harte.  They put up at a poor hotel in Angel's, and on

good days worked pretty faithfully.  But it was generally raining, and

the food was poor.



In his note-book, still preserved, Mark Twain wrote: "January 27 (1865).

--Same old diet--same old weather--went out to the pocket-claim--had to

rush back."



So they spent a good deal of their time around the rusty stove in the

dilapidated tavern at Angel's Camp.  It seemed a profitless thing to do,

but few experiences were profitless to Mark Twain, and certainly this one

was not.



At this barren mining hotel there happened to be a former Illinois River

pilot named Ben Coon, a solemn, sleepy person, who dozed by the stove or

told slow, pointless stories to any one who would listen.  Not many would

stay to hear him, but Jim Gillis and Mark Twain found him a delight.

They would let him wander on in his dull way for hours, and saw a vast

humor in a man to whom all tales, however trivial or absurd, were serious

history.



At last, one dreary afternoon, he told them about a frog--a frog that had

belonged to a man named Coleman, who had trained it to jump, and how the

trained frog had failed to win a wager because the owner of the rival

frog had slyly loaded the trained jumper with shot.  It was not a new

story in the camps, but Ben Coon made a long tale of it, and it happened

that neither Clemens nor Gillis had heard it before.  They thought it

amusing, and his solemn way of telling it still more so.



"I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's better than any other

frog," became a catch phrase among the mining partners; and, "I 'ain't

got no frog, but if I had a frog, I'd bet you."



Out on the claim, Clemens, watching Gillis and Stoker anxiously washing,

would say, "I don't see no pints about that pan o' dirt that's any better

than any other pan o' dirt."  And so they kept the tale going.  In his

note-book Mark Twain made a brief memorandum of the story for possible

use.



The mining was rather hopeless work.  The constant and heavy rains were

disheartening.  Clemens hated it, and even when, one afternoon, traces of

a pocket began to appear, he rebelled as the usual chill downpour set in.



"Jim," he said, "let's go home; we'll freeze here."



Gillis, as usual, was washing, and Clemens carrying the water.  Gillis,

seeing the gold "color" improving with every pan, wanted to go on washing

and climbing toward the precious pocket, regardless of wet and cold.

Clemens, shivering and disgusted, vowed that each pail of water would be

his last.  His teeth were chattering, and he was wet through.  Finally he

said:



"Jim, I won't carry any more water.  This work too disagreeable."



Gillis had just taken out a panful of dirt.



"Bring one more pail, Sam," he begged.



"Jim I won't do it.  I'm-freezing."



"Just one more pail, Sam!" Jim pleaded.



"No, sir; not a drop--not if I knew there was a million dollars in that

pan."



Gillis tore out a page of his note-book and hastily posted a thirty-day-

claim notice by the pan of dirt.  Then they set out for Angel's Camp,

never to return.  It kept on raining, and a letter came from Steve

Gillis, saying he had settled all the trouble in San Francisco.  Clemens

decided to return, and the miners left Angel's without visiting their

claim again.



Meantime the rain had washed away the top of the pan of dirt they had

left standing on the hillside, exposing a handful of nuggets, pure gold.

Two strangers, Austrians, happening along, gathered it up and, seeing the

claim notice posted by Jim Gillis, sat down to wait until it expired.

They did not mind the rain--not under the circumstances--and the moment

the thirty days were up they followed the lead a few pans farther and

took out, some say ten, some say twenty, thousand dollars.  In either

case it was a good pocket that Mark Twain missed by one pail of water.

Still, without knowing it, he had carried away in his note-book a single

nugget of far greater value the story of "The Jumping Frog."



He did not write it, however, immediately upon his return to San

Francisco.  He went back to his "Enterprise" letters and contributed some

sketches to the Californian.  Perhaps he thought the frog story too mild

in humor for the slope.  By and by he wrote it, and by request sent it to

Artemus Ward to be used in a book that Ward was about to issue.  It

arrived too late, and the publisher handed it to the editor of the

"Saturday Press," Henry Clapp, saying:



"Here, Clapp, is something you can use in your paper."



The "Press" was struggling, and was glad to get a story so easily.  "Jim

Smiley and his jumping Frog" appeared in the issue of November 18, 1865,

and was at once copied and quoted far and near.  It carried the name of

Mark Twain across the mountains and the prairies of the Middle West; it

bore it up and down the Atlantic slope.  Some one said, then or later,

that Mark Twain leaped into fame on the back of a jumping frog.



Curiously, this did not at first please the author.  He thought the tale

poor.  To his mother he wrote:



I do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful.  I wish I was back

there piloting up and down the river again.  Verily, all is vanity and

little worth--save piloting.



To think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused for

thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a

villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!--" Jim Smiley and his

Jumping Frog"--a squib which would never have been written but to please

Artemus Ward.



However, somewhat later he changed his mind considerably, especially when

he heard that James Russell Lowell had pronounced the story the finest

piece of humorous writing yet produced in America.









XXV.



HAWAII AND ANSON BURLINGAME



Mark Twain remained about a year in San Francisco after his return from

the Gillis cabin and Angel's Camp, adding to his prestige along the Coast

rather than to his national reputation.  Then, in the spring of 1866 he

was commissioned by the "Sacramento Union" to write a series of letters

that would report the life, trade, agriculture, and general aspects of

the Hawaiian group.  He sailed in March, and his four months in those

delectable islands remained always to him a golden memory--an experience

which he hoped some day to repeat.  He was young and eager for adventure

then, and he went everywhere--horseback and afoot--saw everything, did

everything, and wrote of it all for his paper.  His letters to the

"Union" were widely read and quoted, and, though not especially literary,

added much to his journalistic standing.  He was a great sight-seer in

those days, and a persevering one.  No discomfort or risk discouraged

him.  Once, with a single daring companion, he crossed the burning floor

of the mighty crater of Kilauea, racing across the burning lava, leaping

wide and bottomless crevices where a misstep would have meant death.  His

open-air life on the river and in the mining-camps had nerved and

hardened him for adventure.  He was thirty years old and in his physical

prime.  His mental growth had been slower, but it was sure, and it would

seem always to have had the right guidance at the right time.



Clemens had been in the islands three months when one day Anson

Burlingame arrived there, en route to his post as minister to China.

With him was his son Edward, a boy of eighteen, and General Van

Valkenburg, minister to Japan.  Young Burlingame had read about Jim

Smiley's jumping frog and, learning that the author was in Honolulu, but

ill after a long trip inland, sent word that the party would call on him

next morning.  But Mark Twain felt that he could not accept this honor,

and, crawling out of bed, shaved himself and drove to the home of the

American minister, where the party was staying.  He made a great

impression with the diplomats.  It was an occasion of good stories and

much laughter.  On leaving, General Van Valkenburg said to him:



     "California is proud of Mark Twain, and some day the American people

     will be, too, no doubt."  Which was certainly a good prophecy.



It was only a few days later that the diplomats rendered him a great

service.  Report had come of the arrival at Sanpahoe of an open boat

containing fifteen starving men, who had been buffeting a stormy sea for

forty-three days--sailors from the missing ship Hornet of New York,

which, it appeared, had been burned at sea.  Presently eleven of the

rescued men were brought to Honolulu and placed in the hospital.



Mark Twain recognized the great importance as news of this event.  It

would be a splendid beat if he could interview the castaways and be the

first to get their story in his paper.  There was no cable, but a vessel

was sailing for San Francisco next morning.  It seemed the opportunity of

a lifetime, but he was now bedridden and could scarcely move.



Then suddenly appeared in his room Anson Burlingame and his party, and,

almost before Mark Twain realized what was happening, he was on a cot

and, escorted by the heads of two legations, was on his way to the

hospital to get the precious interview.  Once there, Anson Burlingame,

with his gentle manner and courtly presence, drew from those enfeebled

castaways all the story of the burning of the vessel, followed by the

long privation and struggle that had lasted through forty-three fearful

days and across four thousand miles of stormy sea.  All that Mark Twain

had to do was to listen and make notes.  That night he wrote against

time, and next morning, just as the vessel was drifting from the dock, a

strong hand flung his bulky manuscript aboard and his great beat was

sure.  The three-column story, published in the "Sacramento Union" of

July 9, gave the public the first detailed history of the great disaster.

The telegraph carried it everywhere, and it was featured as a sensation.



Mark Twain and the Burlingame party were much together during the rest of

their stay in Hawaii, and Samuel Clemens never ceased to love and honor

the memory of Anson Burlingame.  It was proper that he should do so, for

he owed him much--far more than has already been told.



Anson Burlingame one day said to him: "You have great ability; I believe

you have genius.  What you need now is the refinement of association.

Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and character.  Refine

yourself and your work.  Never affiliate with inferiors; always climb."



This, coming to him from a man of Burlingame's character and position,

was like a gospel from some divine source.  Clemens never forgot the

advice.  It gave him courage, new hope, new resolve, new ideals.



Burlingame came often to the hotel, and they discussed plans for Mark

Twain's future.  The diplomat invited the journalist to visit him in

China:



"Come to Pekin," he said, "and make my house your home."



Young Burlingame also came, when the patient became convalescent, and

suggested walks.  Once, when Clemens hesitated, the young man said:



"But there is a scriptural command for you to go."



"If you can quote one, I'll obey," said Clemens.



"Very well; the Bible says: `If any man require thee to walk a mile, go

with him Twain.'"



The walk was taken.



Mark Twain returned to California at the end of July, and went down to

Sacramento.  It was agreed that a special bill should be made for the

"Hornet" report.



"How much do you think it ought to be, Mark?" asked one of the

proprietors.



Clemens said: "Oh, I'm a modest man; I don't want the whole "Union"

office; call it a hundred dollars a column."



There was a general laugh.  The bill was made out at that figure, and he

took it to the office for payment.



"The cashier didn't faint," he wrote many years later, "but he came

rather near it.  He sent for the proprietors, and they only laughed in

their jolly fashion, and said it was robbery, but `no matter, pay it.

It's all right.'  The best men that ever owned a paper." [6]



[6] "My Debut as a Literary Person."









XXVI.



MARK TWAIN, LECTURER



In spite of the success of his Sandwich Island letters, Samuel Clemens

felt, on his return to San Francisco, that his future was not bright.  He

was not a good, all-round newspaper man--he was special correspondent and

sketch-writer, out of a job.



He had a number of plans, but they did not promise much.  One idea was to

make a book from his Hawaiian material.  Another was to write magazine

articles, beginning with one on the Hornet disaster.  He did, in fact,

write the Hornet article, and its prompt acceptance by "Harper's

Magazine" delighted him, for it seemed a start in the right direction.  A

third plan was to lecture on the islands.



This prospect frightened him.  He had succeeded in his "Third House"

address of two years before, but then he had lectured without charge and

for a church benefit.  This would be a different matter.



One of the proprietors of a San Francisco paper, Col. John McComb, of the

"Alta California," was strong in his approval of the lecture idea.



"Do it, by all means," he said.  "Take the largest house in the city, and

charge a dollar a ticket."



Without waiting until his fright came back, Mark Twain hurried to the

manager of the Academy of Music, and engaged it for a lecture to be given

October 2d (1866), and sat down and wrote his announcement.  He began by

stating what he would speak upon, and ended with a few absurdities, such

as:



                         A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA

                    is in town, but has not been engaged.



                              Also

                    A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS

               will be on exhibition in the next block.

                    A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION

          may be expected; in fact, the public are privileged to

                    expect whatever they please.

     Doors open at 7 o'clock.  The trouble to begin at 8 o'clock.



Mark Twain was well known in San Francisco, and was pretty sure to have a

good house.  But he did not realize this, and, as the evening approached,

his dread of failure increased.  Arriving at the theater, he entered by

the stage door, half expecting to find the place empty.  Then, suddenly,

he became more frightened than ever; peering from the wings, he saw that

the house was jammed--packed from the footlights to the walls!

Terrified, his knees shaking, his tongue dry, he managed to emerge, and

was greeted with a roar, a crash of applause that nearly finished him.

Only for an instant--reaction followed; these people were his friends,

and he was talking to them.  He forgot to be afraid, and, as the applause

came in great billows that rose ever higher, he felt himself borne with

it as on a tide of happiness and success.  His evening, from beginning to

end, was a complete triumph.  Friends declared that for descriptive

eloquence, humor, and real entertainment nothing like his address had

ever been delivered.  The morning papers were enthusiastic.



Mark Twain no longer hesitated as to what he should do now.  He would

lecture.  The book idea no longer attracted him; the appearance of the

"Hornet" article, signed, through a printer's error, "Mark Swain," cooled

his desire to be a magazine contributor.  No matter--lecturing was the

thing.  Dennis McCarthy, who had sold his interest in the "Enterprise,"

was in San Francisco.  Clemens engaged this honest, happy-hearted

Irishman as manager, and the two toured California and Nevada with

continuous success.



Those who remember Mark Twain as a lecturer in that early day say that on

entering he would lounge loosely across the platform, his manuscript--

written on wrapping-paper and carried under his arm--looking like a

ruffled hen.  His delivery they recall as being even more quaint and

drawling than in later life.  Once, when his lecture was over, an old man

came up to him and said:



"Be them your natural tones of eloquence?"



In those days it was thought proper that a lecturer should be introduced,

and Clemens himself used to tell of being presented by an old miner, who

said:



"Ladies and gentlemen, I know only two things about this man: the first

is that he's never been in jail, and the second is, I don't know why."



When he reached Virginia, his old friend Goodman said, "Sam, you don't

need anybody to introduce you," and he suggested a novel plan.  That

night, when the curtain rose, it showed Mark Twain seated at a piano,

playing and singing, as if still cub pilot on the "John J. Roe:"



          "Had an old horse whose name was Methusalem,

            Took him down and sold him in Jerusalem,

                    A long time ago."



Pretending to be surprised and startled at the burst of applause, he

sprang up and began to talk.  How the audience enjoyed it!



Mark Twain continued his lecture tour into December, and then, on the

15th of that month, sailed by way of the Isthmus of Panama for New York.

He had made some money, and was going home to see his people.  He had

planned to make a trip around the world later, contributing a series of

letters to the "Alta California," lecturing where opportunity afforded.

He had been on the Coast five and a half years, and to his professions of

printing and piloting had added three others--mining, journalism, and

lecturing.  Also, he had acquired a measure of fame.  He could come back

to his people with a good account of his absence and a good heart for the

future.



But it seems now only a chance that he arrived at all.  Crossing the

Isthmus, he embarked for New York on what proved to be a cholera ship.

For a time there were one or more funerals daily.  An entry in his diary

says:



     "Since the last two hours all laughter, all levity, has ceased on the

     ship--a settled gloom is upon the faces of the passengers.



     "But the winter air of the North checked the contagion, and there

     were no new cases when New York City was reached."



Clemens remained but a short time in New York, and was presently in St.

Louis with his mother and sister.  They thought he looked old, but he had

not changed in manner, and the gay banter between mother and son was soon

as lively as ever.  He was thirty-one now, and she sixty-four, but the

years had made little difference.  She petted him, joked with him, and

scolded him.  In turn, he petted and comforted and teased her.  She

decided he was the same Sam and always would be--a true prophecy.



He visited Hannibal and lectured there, receiving an ovation that would

have satisfied even Tom Sawyer.  In Keokuk he lectured again, then

returned to St. Louis to plan his trip around the world.



He was not to make a trip around the world, however--not then.  In St.

Louis he saw the notice of the great "Quaker City" Holy Land excursion--

the first excursion of the kind ever planned--and was greatly taken with

the idea.  Impulsive as always, he wrote at once to the "Alta

California," proposing that they send him as their correspondent on this

grand ocean picnic.  The cost of passage was $1.200, and the "Alta"

hesitated, but Colonel McComb, already mentioned, assured his associates

that the investment would be sound.  The "Alta" wrote, accepting Mark

Twain's proposal, and agreed to pay twenty dollars each for letters.

Clemens hurried to New York to secure a berth, fearing the passenger-list

might be full.  Furthermore, with no one of distinction to vouch for him,

according to advertised requirements, he was not sure of being accepted.

Arriving in New York, he learned from an "Alta" representative that

passage had already been reserved for him, but he still doubted his

acceptance as one of the distinguished advertised company.  His mind was

presently relieved on this point.  Waiting his turn at the booking-desk,

he heard a newspaper man inquire:



"What notables are going?"



A clerk, with evident pride, rattled off the names:



"Lieutenant-General Sherman, Henry Ward Beecher, and Mark Twain; also,

probably, General Banks."



It was very pleasant to hear the clerk say that.  Not only was he

accepted, but billed as an attraction.



The "Quaker City" would not sail for two months yet, and during the

period of waiting Mark Twain was far from idle.  He wrote New York

letters to the "Alta," and he embarked in two rather important ventures--

he published his first book and he delivered a lecture in New York City.



Both these undertakings were planned and carried out by friends from the

Coast.  Charles Henry Webb, who had given up his magazine to come East,

had collected "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other

Sketches," and, after trying in vain to find a publisher for them,

brought them out himself, on the 1st of May, 1867.[7]  It seems curious

now that any publisher should have declined the little volume, for the

sketches, especially the frog story, had been successful, and there was

little enough good American humor in print.  However, publishing was a

matter not lightly undertaken in those days.



Mark Twain seems to have been rather pleased with the appearance of his

first book.  To Bret Harte he wrote:



The book is out and is handsome.  It is full of .  . . errors....but be a

friend and say nothing about those things.  When my hurry is over, I will

send you a copy to pizen the children with.



The little cloth-and-gold volume, so valued by book-collectors to-day,

contained the frog story and twenty-six other sketches, some of which are

still preserved in Mark Twain's collected works.  Most of them were not

Mark Twain's best literature, but they were fresh and readable and suited

the taste of that period.  The book sold very well, and, while it did not

bring either great fame or fortune to its author, it was by no means a

failure.



The "hurry" mentioned in Mark Twain's letter to Bret Harte related to his

second venture--that is to say, his New York lecture, an enterprise

managed by an old Comstock friend, Frank Fuller, ex-Governor of Utah.

Fuller, always a sanguine and energetic person, had proposed the lecture

idea as soon as Mark Twain arrived in New York.  Clemens shook his head.



"I have no reputation with the general public here," he said.  "We

couldn't get a baker's dozen to hear me."



But Fuller insisted, and eventually engaged the largest hall in New York,

the Cooper Union.  Full of enthusiasm and excitement, he plunged into the

business of announcing and advertising his attraction, and inventing

schemes for the sale of seats.  Clemens caught Fuller's enthusiasm by

spells, but between times he was deeply depressed.  Fuller had got up a

lot of tiny hand-bills, and had arranged to hang bunches of these in the

horse-cars.  The little dangling clusters fascinated Clemens, and he rode

about to see if anybody else noticed them.  Finally, after a long time, a

passenger pulled off one of the bills and glanced at it.  A man with him

asked:



"Who's Mark Twain?"



"Goodness knows!  I don't."



The lecturer could not ride any farther.  He hunted up his patron.



"Fuller," he groaned, "there isn't a sign--a ripple of interest."



Fuller assured him that things were "working underneath," and would be

all right.  But Clemens wrote home: "Everything looks shady, at least, if

not dark."  And he added that, after hiring the largest house in New

York, he must play against Schuyler Colfax, Ristori, and a double troupe

of Japanese jugglers, at other places of amusement.



When the evening of the lecture approached and only a few tickets had

been sold, the lecturer was desperate.



"Fuller," he said, "there'll be nobody in Cooper Union that night but you

and me.  I am on the verge of suicide.  I would commit suicide if I had

the pluck and the outfit.  You must paper the house, Fuller.  You must

send out a flood of complimentaries!"



"Very well," said Fuller.  "What we want this time is reputation, anyway--

money is secondary.  I'll put you before the choicest and most

intelligent audience that was ever gathered in New York City."



Fuller immediately sent out complimentary tickets to the school-teachers

of New York and Brooklyn---a general invitation to come and hear Mark

Twain's great lecture on the Sandwich Islands.  There was nothing to do

after that but wait results.



Mark Twain had lost faith--he did not believe anybody in New York would

come to hear him even on a free ticket.  When the night arrived, he drove

with Fuller to the Cooper Union half an hour before the lecture was to

begin.  Forty years later he said:



     "I couldn't keep away.  I wanted to see that vast Mammoth Cave, and

     die.  But when we got near the building, I saw all the streets were

     blocked with people and that traffic had stopped.  I couldn't

     believe that these people were trying to get to the Cooper

     Institute--but they were; and when I got to the stage, at last, the

     house was jammed full--packed; there wasn't room enough left for a

     child.



     "I was happy and I was excited beyond expression.  I poured the

     Sandwich Islands out on those people, and they laughed and shouted

     to my entire content.  For an hour and fifteen minutes I was in

     paradise."



So in its way this venture was a success.  It brought Mark Twain a good

deal of a reputation in New York, even if no financial profit, though, in

spite of the flood of complimentaries, there was a cash return of

something like three hundred dollars.  This went a good way toward paying

the expenses, while Fuller, in his royal way, insisted on making up the

deficit, declaring he had been paid for everything in the fun and joy of

the game.



"Mark," he said, "it's all right.  The fortune didn't come, but it will.

The fame has arrived; with this lecture and your book just out, you are

going to be the most-talked-of man in the country.  Your letters to the

"Alta" and the "Tribune" will get the widest reception of any letters of

travel ever written."









XXVII.



AN INNOCENT ABROAD, AND HOME AGAIN



It was early in May--the 6th--that Mark Twain had delivered his Cooper

Union lecture, and a month later, June 8, 1867, he sailed on the "Quaker

City," with some sixty-six other "pilgrims," on the great Holy Land

excursion, the story of which has been so fully and faithfully told in

"The Innocent Abroad."



What a wonderful thing it must have seemed in that time for a party of

excursionists to have a ship all to themselves to go a-gipsying in from

port to port of antiquity and romance!  The advertised celebrities did

not go, none of them but Mark Twain, but no one minded, presently, for

Mark Twain's sayings and stories kept the company sufficiently

entertained, and sometimes he would read aloud to his fellow-passengers

from the newspaper letters he was writing, and invite comment and

criticism.  That was entertainment for them, and it was good for him, for

it gave him an immediate audience, always inspiring to an author.

Furthermore, the comments offered were often of the greatest value,

especially suggestions from one Mrs. Fairbanks, of Cleveland, a middle-

aged, cultured woman, herself a correspondent for her husband's paper,

the "Herald".  It requires not many days for acquaintances to form on

shipboard, and in due time a little group gathered regularly each

afternoon to hear Mark Twain read what he had written of their day's

doings, though some of it he destroyed later because Mrs. Fairbanks

thought it not his best.



All of the "pilgrims" mentioned in "The Innocents Abroad" were real

persons.  "Dan" was Dan Slote, Mark Twain's room-mate; the Doctor who

confused the guides was Dr. A. Reeves Jackson, of Chicago; the poet

Lariat was Bloodgood H. Cutter, an eccentric from Long Island; "Jack" was

Jack Van Nostrand, of New Jersey; and "Moult" and "Blucher" and "Charlie"

were likewise real, the last named being Charles J. Langdon, of Elmira,

N. Y., a boy of eighteen, whose sister would one day become Mark Twain's

wife.



It has been said that Mark Twain first met Olivia Langdon on the "Quaker

City," but this is not quite true; he met only her picture--the original

was not on that ship.  Charlie Langdon, boy fashion, made a sort of hero

of the brilliant man called Mark Twain, and one day in the Bay of Smyrna

invited him to his cabin and exhibited his treasures, among them a dainty

miniature of a sister at home, Olivia, a sweet, delicate creature whom

the boy worshiped.



Samuel Clemens gazed long at the exquisite portrait and spoke of it

reverently, for in the sweet face he seemed to find something spiritual.

Often after that he came to young Langdon's cabin to look at the pictured

countenance, in his heart dreaming of a day when he might learn to know

its owner.



We need not follow in detail here the travels of the "pilgrims" and their

adventures.  Most of them have been fully set down in "The Innocents

Abroad," and with not much elaboration, for plenty of amusing things were

happening on a trip of that kind, and Mark Twain's old note-books are

full of the real incidents that we find changed but little in the book.

If the adventures of Jack, Dan, and the Doctor are embroidered here and

there, the truth is always there, too.



Yet the old note-books have a very intimate interest of their own.  It is

curious to be looking through them to-day, trying to realize that those

penciled memoranda were the fresh first impressions that would presently

grow into the world's most delightful book of travel; that they were set

down in the very midst of that historic little company that frolicked

through Italy and climbed wearily the arid Syrian hills.



It required five months for the "Quaker City" to make the circuit of the

Mediterranean and return to New York.  Mark Twain in that time

contributed fifty two or three letters to the "Alta California" and six

to the "New York Tribune," or an average of nearly three a week--a vast

amount of labor to be done in the midst of sight-seeing.  And what

letters of travel they were!  The most remarkable that had been written

up to that time.  Vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry,

they came as a revelation to a public weary of the tiresome descriptive

drivel of that day.  They preached a new gospel in travel literature--the

gospel of seeing honestly and speaking frankly--a gospel that Mark Twain

would continue to preach during the rest of his career.



Furthermore, the letters showed a great literary growth in their author.

No doubt the cultivated associations of the ship, the afternoon reading

aloud of his work, and Mrs. Fairbanks's advice had much to do with this.

But we may believe, also, that the author's close study of the King James

version of the Old Testament during the weeks of travel through Palestine

exerted a powerful influence upon his style.  The man who had recited

"The Burial of Moses" to Joe Goodman, with so much feeling, could not

fail to be mastered by the simple yet stately Bible phrase and imagery.

Many of the fine descriptive passages in "The Innocents Abroad" have

something almost Biblical in their phrasing.  The writer of this memoir

heard in childhood "The Innocents Abroad" read aloud, and has never

forgotten the poetic spell that fell upon him as he listened to a

paragraph written of Tangier:



     "Here is a crumbled wall that was old when Columbus discovered

     America; old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the

     Middle Ages to arm for the first Crusade; old when Charlemagne and

     his paladins beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants

     and genii in the fabled days of the olden time; old when Christ and

     His disciples walked the earth; stood where it stands to-day when

     the lips of Memnon were vocal and men bought and sold in the streets

     of ancient Thebes."



Mark Twain returned to America to find himself, if not famous, at least

in very high repute.  The "Alta" and "Tribune" letters had carried his

name to every corner of his native land.  He was in demand now.  To his

mother he wrote:



     "I have eighteen offers to lecture, at $100 each, in various parts of

     the Union--have declined them all .  .  .  .  Belong on the

     "Tribune" staff and shall write occasionally.  Am offered the same

     berth to-day on the 'Herald,' by letter."



He was in Washington at this time, having remained in New York but one

day.  He had accepted a secretaryship from Senator Stewart of Nevada, but

this arrangement was a brief one.  He required fuller freedom for his

Washington correspondence and general literary undertakings.



He had been in Washington but a few days when he received a letter that

meant more to him than he could possibly have dreamed at the moment.  It

was from Elisha Bliss, Jr., manager of the American Publishing Company,

of Hartford, Connecticut, and it suggested gathering the Mediterranean

travel-letters into a book.  Bliss was a capable, energetic man, with a

taste for humor, and believed there was money for author and publisher in

the travel-book.



The proposition pleased Mark Twain, who replied at once, asking for

further details as to Bliss's plan.  Somewhat later he made a trip to

Hartford, and the terms for the publication of "The Innocents Abroad"

were agreed upon.  It was to be a large illustrated book for subscription

sale, and the author was to receive five per cent of the selling price.

Bliss had offered him the choice between this royalty and ten thousand

dollars cash.  Though much tempted by the large sum to be paid in hand,

Mark Twain decided in favor of the royalty plan--"the best business

judgment I ever displayed," he used to say afterward.  He agreed to

arrange the letters for book publication, revising and rewriting where

necessary, and went back to Washington well pleased.  He did not realize

that his agreement with Bliss marked the beginning of one of the most

notable publishing connections in American literary history.









XXVIII.



OLIVIA LANGDON.  WORK ON THE "INNOCENTS"



Certainly this was a momentous period in Mark Twain's life.  It was a

time of great events, and among them was one which presently would come

to mean more to him than all the rest--the beginning of his acquaintance

with Olivia Langdon.



One evening in late December when Samuel Clemens had come to New York to

visit his old "Quaker City" room-mate, Dan Slote, he found there other

ship comrades, including Jack Van Nostrand and Charlie Langdon.  It was a

joyful occasion, but one still happier followed it.  Young Langdon's

father and sister Olivia were in New York, and an evening or two later

the boy invited his distinguished "Quaker City" shipmate to dine with

them at the old St. Nicholas Hotel.  We may believe that Samuel Clemens

went willingly enough.  He had never forgotten the September day in the

Bay of Smyrna when he had first seen the sweet-faced miniature--now, at

last he looked upon the reality.



Long afterward he said: "It was forty years ago.  From that day to this

she has never been out of my mind."



Charles Dickens gave a reading that night at Steinway Hall.  The Langdons

attended, and Samuel Clemens with them.  He recalled long after that

Dickens wore a black velvet coat with a fiery-red flower in his

buttonhole, and that he read the storm scene from "David Copperfield"--

the death of James Steerforth; but he remembered still more clearly the

face and dress and the slender, girlish figure of Olivia Langdon at his

side.



Olivia Langdon was twenty-two years old at this time, delicate as the

miniature he had seen, though no longer in the fragile health of her

girlhood.  Gentle, winning, lovable, she was the family idol, and Samuel

Clemens was no less her worshiper from the first moment of their meeting.



Miss Langdon, on her part, was at first rather dazed by the strange,

brilliant, handsome man, so unlike anything she had known before.  When

he had gone, she had the feeling that something like a great meteor had

crossed her sky.  To her brother, who was eager for her good opinion of

his celebrity, she admitted her admiration, if not her entire approval.

Her father had no doubts.  With a keen sense of humor and a deep

knowledge of men, Jervis Langdon was from that first evening the devoted

champion of Mark Twain.  Clemens saw Miss Langdon again during the

holidays, and by the week's end he had planned to visit Elmira--soon.

But fate managed differently.  He was not to see Elmira for the better

part of a year.



He returned to his work in Washington--the preparation of the book and

his newspaper correspondence.  It was in connection with the latter that

he first met General Grant, then not yet President.  The incident,

characteristic of both men, is worth remembering.  Mark Twain had called

by permission, elated with the prospect of an interview.  But when he

looked into the square, smileless face of the soldier he found himself,

for the first time in his life, without anything particular to say.

Grant nodded slightly and waited.  His caller wished something would

happen.  It did.  His inspiration returned.



"General," he said, "I seem to be slightly embarrassed.  Are you?"



Grant's severity broke up in laughter.  There were no further

difficulties.



Work on the book did not go so well.  There were many distractions in

Washington, and Clemens did not like the climate there.  Then he found

the "Alta" had copyrighted his letters and were reluctant to allow him to

use them.  He decided to sail at once for San Francisco.  If he could

arrange the "Alta" matter, he would finish his work there.  He did, in

fact, carry out this plan, and all difficulties vanished on his arrival.

His old friend Colonel McComb obtained for him free use of the "Alta"

letters.  The way was now clear for his book.  His immediate need of

funds, however, induced him to lecture.  In May he wrote Bliss:



     "I lectured here on the trip (the Quaker City excursion) the other

     night; $1,600 in gold in the house; every seat taken and paid for

     before night."



He settled down to work now with his usual energy, editing and rewriting,

and in two months had the big manuscript ready for delivery.



Mark Twain's friends urged him to delay his return to "the States" long

enough to make a lecture tour through California and Nevada.  He must

give his new lecture, they told him, to his old friends.  He agreed, and

was received at Virginia City, Carson, and elsewhere like a returning

conqueror.  He lectured again in San Francisco just before sailing.



The announcement of his lecture was highly original.  It was a hand-bill

supposed to have been issued by the foremost citizens of San Francisco, a

mock protest against his lecture, urging him to return to New York

without inflicting himself on them again.  On the same bill was printed

his reply.  In it he said:



     "I will torment the people if I want to.  It only costs them $1

     apiece, and, if they can't stand it, what do they stay here for?"



He promised positively to sail on July 6th if they would let him talk

just this once.



There was a good deal more of this drollery on the bill, which ended with

the announcement that he would appear at the Mercantile Library on July

2d.  It is unnecessary to say that the place was jammed on that evening.

It was probably the greatest lecture event San Francisco has ever known.

Four days later, July 6, 1868, Mark Twain sailed, via Aspinwall, for New

York, and on the 28th delivered the manuscript of "The Innocents Abroad,

or the New Pilgrim's Progress," to his Hartford publisher.









XXIX



THE VISIT TO ELMIRA AND ITS CONSEQUENCES



Samuel Clemens now decided to pay his long-deferred visit to the Langdon

home in Elmira.  Through Charlie Langdon he got the invitation renewed,

and for a glorious week enjoyed the generous hospitality of the beautiful

Langdon home and the society of fair Olivia Langdon--Livy, as they called

her--realizing more and more that for him there could never be any other

woman in the world.  He spoke no word of this to her, but on the morning

of the day when his visit would end he relieved himself to Charlie

Langdon, much to the young man's alarm.  Greatly as he admired Mark Twain

himself, he did not think him, or, indeed, any man, good enough for

"Livy," whom he considered little short of a saint.  Clemens was to take

a train that evening, but young Langdon said, when he recovered:



"Look here, Clemens, there's a train in half an hour.  I'll help you

catch it.  Don't wait until tonight; go now!"



Mark Twain shook his head.



"No, Charlie," he said, in his gentle drawl.  "I want to enjoy your

hospitality a little longer.  I promise to be circumspect, and I'll go

to-night."



That night after dinner, when it was time to take the train, a light two-

seated wagon was at the gate.  Young Langdon and his guest took the back

seat, which, for some reason, had not been locked in its place.  The

horse started with a quick forward spring, and the seat with its two

occupants described a circle and landed with force on the cobbled street.



Neither passenger was seriously hurt--only dazed a little for the moment.

But to Mark Twain there came a sudden inspiration.  Here was a chance to

prolong his visit.  When the Langdon household gathered with

restoratives, he did not recover at once, and allowed himself to be

supported to an arm-chair for further remedies.  Livy Langdon showed

especial anxiety.



He was not allowed to go, now, of course; he must stay until it was

certain that his recovery was complete.  Perhaps he had been internally

injured.  His visit was prolonged two weeks, two weeks of pure happiness,

and when he went away he had fully resolved to win Livy Langdon for his

wife.



Mark Twain now went to Hartford to look after his book proofs, and there

for the first time met the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, who would become his

closest friend.  The two men, so different in many ways, always had the

fondest admiration for each other; each recognized in the other great

courage, humanity, and sympathy.  Clemens would gladly have remained in

Hartford that winter.  Twichell presented him to many congenial people,

including Charles Dudley Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and other writing

folk.  But flattering lecture offers were made him, and he could no

longer refuse.



He called his new lecture "The Vandal Abroad," it being chapters from the

forthcoming book, and it was a great success everywhere.  His houses were

crowded; the newspapers were enthusiastic.  His delivery was described as

a "long, monotonous drawl, with fun invariably coming in at the end of a

sentence--after a pause."  He began to be recognized everywhere--to have

great popularity.  People came out on the street to see him pass.



Many of his lecture engagements were in central New York, no great

distance from Elmira.  He had a standing invitation to visit the Langdon

home, and went when he could.  His courtship, however, was not entirely

smooth.  Much as Mr. Langdon honored his gifts and admired him

personally, he feared that his daughter, who had known so little of life

and the outside world, and the brilliant traveler, lecturer, author,

might not find happiness in marriage.  Many absurd stories have been told

of Mark Twain's first interview with Jervis Langdon on this subject, but

these are without foundation.  It was an earnest discussion on both

sides, and left Samuel Clemens rather crestfallen, though not without

hope.  More than once the subject was discussed between the two men that

winter as the lecturer came and went, his fame always growing.  In time

the Langdon household had grown to feel that he belonged to them.  It

would be only a step further to make him really one of the family.



There was no positive engagement at first, for it was agreed between

Clemens and Jervis Langdon that letters should be sent by Mr. Langdon to

those who had known his would-be son-in-law earlier, with inquiries as to

his past conduct and general character.  It was a good while till answers

to these came, and when they arrived Samuel Clemens was on hand to learn

the result.  Mr. Langdon had a rather solemn look when they were alone

together.



Clemens asked, "You've heard from those gentlemen out there?"



"Yes, and from another gentlemen I wrote to concerning you."



"They don't appear to have been very enthusiastic, from your manner."



"Well, yes, some of them were."



"I suppose I may ask what particular form their emotion took."



"Oh, yes, yes; they agree unanimously that you are a brilliant, able man-

-a man with a future, and that you would make about the worst husband on

record."



The applicant had a forlorn look.  "There is nothing very evasive about

that," he said.



Langdon reflected.



"Haven't you any other friend that you could suggest?"



"Apparently none whose testimony would be valuable."



Jervis Langdon held out his hand.



"You have at least one," he said. "I believe in you.  I know you better

then they do."



The engagement of Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Olivia Lewis Langdon was

ratified next day, February 4, 1869.  To Jane Clemens her son wrote:

"She is a little body, but she hasn't her peer in Christendom."









XXX.



THE NEW BOOK AND A WEDDING



Clemens closed his lecture tour in March with a profit of something more

than eight thousand dollars.  He had intended to make a spring tour of

California, but went to Elmira instead.  The revised proofs of his book

were coming now, and he and gentle Livy Langdon read them together.

Samuel Clemens realized presently that the girl he had chosen had a

delicate literary judgment.  She became all at once his editor, a

position she held until her death.  Her refining influence had much to do

with Mark Twain's success, then and later, and the world owes her a debt

of gratitude.  Through that first pleasant summer these two worked at the

proofs and planned for their future, and were very happy indeed.



It was about the end of July when the big book appeared at last, and its

success was startling.  Nothing like it had ever been known before.  Mark

Twain's name seemed suddenly to be on every tongue--his book in

everybody's hands.  From one end of the country to the other, readers

were hailing him as the greatest humorist and descriptive writer of

modern times.  By the first of the year more than thirty thousand volumes

had been sold.  It was a book of travel; its lowest price was three and a

half dollars; the record has not been equaled since.  In England also

large editions had been issued, and translations into foreign languages

were under way.  It was and is a great book, because it is a human book--

a book written straight from the heart.



If Mark Twain had not been famous before, he was so now.  Indeed, it is

doubtful if any other American author was so widely known and read as the

author of "The Innocents Abroad" during that first half-year after its

publication.



Yet for some reason he still did not regard himself as a literary man.

He was a journalist, and began to look about for a paper which he could

buy-his idea being to establish a business and a home.  Through Mr.

Langdon's assistance, he finally obtained an interest in the "Buffalo

Express," and the end of the year 1869 found him established as its

associate editor, though still lecturing here and there, because his

wedding-day was near at hand and there must be no lack of funds.



It was the 2d of February, 1870, that Samuel Clemens and Olivia Langdon

were married.  A few days before, he sat down one night and wrote to

Jim Gillis, away out in the Tuolumne Hills, and told him of all his good

fortune, recalling their days at Angel's Camp, and the absurd frog story,

which he said had been the beginning of his happiness.  In the five years

since then he had traveled a long way, but he had not forgotten.



On the morning of his wedding-day Mark Twain received from his publisher

a check for four thousand dollars, his profit from three months' sales of

the book, a handsome sum.



The wedding was mainly a family affair.  Twichell and his wife came over

from Hartford--Twichell to assist Thomas K. Beecher in performing the

ceremony.  Jane Clemens could not come, nor Orion and his wife; but

Pamela, a widow now, and her daughter Annie, grown to a young lady,

arrived from St. Louis.  Not more than one hundred guests gathered in the

stately Langdon parlors that in future would hold so much history for

Samuel Clemens and Olivia Langdon--so much of the story of life and death

that thus made its beginning there.  Then, at seven in the evening, they

were married, and the bride danced with her father, and the Rev. Thomas

Beecher declared she wore the longest gloves he had ever seen.



It was the next afternoon that the wedding-party set out for Buffalo.

Through a Mr. Slee, an agent of Mr. Langdon's, Clemens had engaged, as he

supposed, a boarding-house, quiet and unpretentious, for he meant to

start his married life modestly.  Jervis Langdon had a plan of his own

for his daughter, but Clemens had received no inkling of it, and had full

faith in the letter which Slee had written, saying that a choice and

inexpensive boarding-house had been secured.  When, about nine o'clock

that night, the party reached Buffalo, they found Mr. Slee waiting at the

station.  There was snow, and sleighs had been ordered.  Soon after

starting, the sleigh of the bride and groom fell behind and drove about

rather aimlessly, apparently going nowhere in particular.  This disturbed

the groom, who thought they should arrive first and receive their guests.

He criticized Slee for selecting a house that was so hard to find, and

when they turned at last into Delaware Avenue, Buffalo's finest street,

and stopped before a handsome house, he was troubled concerning the

richness of the locality.



They were on the steps when the door opened and a perfect fairyland of

lights and decoration was revealed within.  The friends who had gone

ahead came out with greetings to lead in the bride and groom.  Servants

hurried forward to take bags and wraps.  They were ushered inside; they

were led through beautiful rooms, all newly appointed and garnished.  The

bridegroom was dazed, unable to understand the meaning of it all--the

completeness of their possession.  At last his young wife put her hand

upon his arm.



"Don't you understand, Youth?" she said--that was always her name for

him.  "Don't you understand?  It is ours, all ours--everything--a gift

from father."



But still he could not quite grasp it, and Mr. Langdon brought a little

box and, opening it, handed them the deeds.



Nobody quite remembers what was the first remark that Samuel Clemens

made, but either then or a little later he said:



"Mr. Langdon, whenever you are in Buffalo, if it's twice a year, come

right here.  Bring your bag and stay overnight if you want to.  It

sha'n't cost you a cent."









XXXI.



MARK TWAIN IN BUFFALO



Mark Twain remained less than two years in Buffalo--a period of much

affliction.



In the beginning, prospects could hardly have been brighter.  His

beautiful home seemed perfect.  At the office he found work to his hand,

and enjoyed it.  His co-editor, J. W. Larned, who sat across the table

from him, used to tell later how Mark enjoyed his work as he went along--

the humor of it--frequently laughing as some new absurdity came into his

mind.  He was not very regular in his arrivals, but he worked long hours

and turned in a vast amount of "copy"--skits, sketches, editorials, and

comments of a varied sort.  Not all of it was humorous; he would stop

work any time on an amusing sketch to attack some abuse or denounce an

injustice, and he did it in scorching words that made offenders pause.

Once, when two practical jokers had sent in a marriage notice of persons

not even contemplating matrimony, he wrote:



     "This deceit has been practised maliciously by a couple of men whose

     small souls will escape through their pores some day if they do not

     varnish their hides."



In May he considerably increased his income by undertaking a department

called "Memoranda" for the new "Galaxy" magazine.  The outlook was now so

promising that to his lecture agent, James Redpath, he wrote:



     "DEAR RED: I'm not going to lecture any more forever.  I've got

     things ciphered down to a fraction now.  I know just about what it

     will cost to live, and I can make the money without lecturing.

     Therefore, old man, count me out."



And in a second letter:



     "I guess I'm out of the field permanently.  Have got a lovely wife, a

     lovely house bewitchingly furnished, a lovely carriage, and a

     coachman whose style and dignity are simply awe-inspiring, nothing

     less; and I'm making more money than necessary, by considerable, and

     therefore why crucify myself nightly on the platform!  The

     subscriber will have to be excused, for the present season, at

     least."



The little household on Delaware Avenue was indeed a happy place during

those early months.  Neither Clemens nor his wife in those days cared

much for society, preferring the comfort of their own home.  Once when a

new family moved into a house across the way they postponed calling until

they felt ashamed.  Clemens himself called first.  One Sunday morning he

noticed smoke pouring from an upper window of their neighbor's house.

The occupants, seated on the veranda, evidently did not suspect their

danger.  Clemens stepped across to the gate and, bowing politely, said:



     "My name is Clemens; we ought to have called on you before, and I

     beg your pardon for intruding now in this informal way, but your

     house is on fire."



It was at the moment when life seemed at its best that shadows gathered.

Jervis Langdon had never accepted his son-in-law's playful invitation to

"bring his bag and stay overnight," and now the time for it was past.  In

the spring his health gave way.  Mrs. Clemens, who adored him, went to

Elmira to be at his bedside.  Three months of lingering illness brought

the end.  His death was a great blow to Mrs. Clemens, and the strain of

watching had been very hard.  Her own health, never robust, became poor.

A girlhood friend, who came to cheer her with a visit, was taken down

with typhoid fever.  Another long period of anxiety and nursing ended

with the young woman's death in the Clemens home.



To Mark Twain and his wife it seemed that their bright days were over.

The arrival of little Langdon Clemens, in November, brought happiness,

but his delicate hold on life was so uncertain that the burden of anxiety

grew.



Amid so many distractions Clemens found his work hard.  His "Memoranda"

department in the "Galaxy" must be filled and be bright and readable.

His work at the office could not be neglected.  Then, too, he had made a

contract with Bliss for another book "Roughing It"--and he was trying to

get started on that.



He began to chafe under the relentless demands of the magazine and

newspaper.  Finally he could stand it no longer.  He sold his interest in

the "Express," at a loss, and gave up the "Memoranda."  In the closing

number (April, 1871) he said:



     "For the last eight months, with hardly an interval, I have had for

     my fellows and comrades, night and day, doctors and watchers of the

     sick!  During these eight months death has taken two members of my

     home circle and malignantly threatened two others.  All this I have

     experienced, yet all the time have been under contract to furnish

     humorous matter, once a month, for this magazine ....  To be a

     pirate on a low salary and with no share of the profits in the

     business used to be my idea of an uncomfortable occupation, but I

     have other views now.  To be a monthly humorist in a cheerless time

     is drearier."









XXXII.



AT WORK ON "ROUGHING IT"



The Clemens family now went to Elmira, to Quarry Farm--a beautiful

hilltop place, overlooking the river and the town--the home of Mrs.

Clemens's sister, Mrs. Theodore Crane.  They did not expect to return to

Buffalo, and the house there was offered for sale.  For them the sunlight

had gone out of it.



Matters went better at Quarry Farm.  The invalids gained strength; work

on the book progressed.  The Clemenses that year fell in love with the

place that was to mean so much to them in the many summers to come.



Mark Twain was not altogether satisfied, however, with his writing.  He

was afraid it was not up to his literary standard.  His spirits were at

low ebb when his old first editor, Joe Goodman, came East and stopped off

at Elmira.  Clemens hurried him out to the farm, and, eagerly putting the

chapters of "Roughing It" into his hands, asked him to read them.

Goodman seated himself comfortably by a window, while the author went

over to a table and pretended to write, but was really watching Goodman,

who read page after page solemnly and with great deliberation.  Presently

Mark Twain could stand it no longer.  He threw down his pen, exclaiming:



"I knew it!  I knew it!  I've been writing nothing but rot.  You have sat

there all this time reading without a smile--but I am not wholly to

blame.  I have been trying to write a funny book with dead people and

sickness everywhere.  Oh, Joe, I wish I could die myself!"



"Mark," said Goodman, "I was reading critically, not for amusement, and

so far as I have read, and can judge, this is one of the best things you

have ever written.  I have found it perfectly absorbing.  You are doing a

great book!"



That was enough.  Clemens knew that Goodman never spoke idly of such

matters.  The author of "Roughing It" was a changed man--full of

enthusiasm, eager to go on.  He offered to pay Goodman a salary to stay

and furnish inspiration.  Goodman declined the salary, but remained for

several weeks, and during long walks which the two friends took over the

hills gave advice, recalled good material, and was a great help and

comfort.  In May, Clemens wrote to Bliss that he had twelve hundred

manuscript pages of the new book written and was turning out from thirty

to sixty-five per day.  He was in high spirits.  The family health had

improved--once more prospects were bright.  He even allowed Redpath to

persuade him to lecture again during the coming season.  Selling his

share of the "Express" at a loss had left Mark Twain considerably in debt

and lecture profits would furnish the quickest means of payment.



When the summer ended the Clemens family took up residence in Hartford,

Connecticut, in the fine old Hooker house, on Forest Street.  Hartford

held many attractions for Mark Twain.  His publishers were located there,

also it was the home of a distinguished group of writers, and of the Rev.

"Joe" Twichell.  Neither Clemens nor his wife had felt that they could

return to Buffalo.  The home there was sold--its contents packed and

shipped.  They did not see it again.



His book finished, Mark Twain lectured pretty steadily that winter, often

in the neighborhood of Boston, which was lecture headquarters.  Mark

Twain enjoyed Boston.  In Redpath's office one could often meet and "swap

stories" with Josh Billings (Henry W. Shaw) and Petroleum V. Nasby (David

R. Locke)--well-known humorists of that day--while in the strictly

literary circle there were William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich,

Bret Harte (who by this time had become famous and journeyed eastward),

and others of their sort.  They were all young and eager and merry, then,

and they gathered at luncheons in snug corners and talked gaily far into

the dimness of winter afternoons.  Harte had been immediately accorded a

high place in the Boston group.  Mark Twain as a strictly literary man

was still regarded rather doubtfully by members of the older set--the

Brahmins, as they were called--but the young men already hailed him

joyfully, reveling in the fine, fearless humor of his writing, his

wonderful talk, his boundless humanity.









XXXIII.



IN ENGLAND



Mark Twain closed his lecture season in February (1872), and during the

same month his new book, "Roughing It," came from the press.  He disliked

the lecture platform, and he felt that he could now abandon it.  He had

made up his loss in Buffalo and something besides.  Furthermore, the

advance sales on his book had been large.



"Roughing It," in fact, proved a very successful book.  Like "The

Innocents Abroad," it was the first of its kind, fresh in its humor and

description, true in its picture of the frontier life he had known.  In

three months forty thousand copies had been sold, and now, after more

than forty years, it is still a popular book.  The life it describes is

all gone-the scenes are changed.  It is a record of a vanished time--a

delightful history--as delightful to-day as ever.



Eighteen hundred and seventy-two was an eventful year for Mark Twain.  In

March his second child, a little girl whom they named Susy, was born, and

three months later the boy, Langdon, died.  He had never been really

strong, and a heavy cold and diphtheria brought the end.



Clemens did little work that summer.  He took his family to Saybrook,

Connecticut, for the sea air, and near the end of August, when Mrs.

Clemens had regained strength and courage, he sailed for England to

gather material for a book on English life and customs.  He felt very

friendly toward the English, who had been highly appreciative of his

writings, and he wished their better acquaintance.  He gave out no word

of the book idea, and it seems unlikely that any one in England ever

suspected it.  He was there three months, and beyond some notebook

memoranda made during the early weeks of his stay he wrote not a line.

He was too delighted with everything to write a book--a book of his kind.

In letters home he declared the country to be as beautiful as fairyland.

By all classes attentions were showered upon him--honors such as he had

never received even in America.  W. D. Howells writes:[8]



     "In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him.  Lord mayors,

     lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he

     was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the

     favor of periodicals, that spurned the rest of our nation."



He could not make a book--a humorous book--out of these people and their

country; he was too fond of them.



England fairly reveled in Mark Twain.  At one of the great banquets, a

roll of the distinguished guests was called, and the names properly

applauded.  Mark Twain, busily engaged in low conversation with his

neighbor, applauded without listening, vigorously or mildly, as the

others led.  Finally a name was followed by a great burst of long and

vehement clapping.  This must be some very great person indeed, and Mark

Twain, not to be outdone in his approval, stoutly kept his hands going

when all others had finished.



"Whose name was that we were just applauding?" he asked of his neighbor.



"Mark Twain's."



But it was no matter; they took it all as one of his jokes.  He was a

wonder and a delight to them.  Whatever he did or said was to them

supremely amusing.  When, on one occasion, a speaker humorously referred

to his American habit of carrying a cotton umbrella, his reply that he

did so "because it was the only kind of an umbrella that an Englishman

wouldn't steal," was repeated all over England next day as one of the

finest examples of wit since the days of Swift.



He returned to America at the end of November; promising to come back and

lecture to them the following year.



[7] From "My Mark Twain," by W. D. Howells.









XXXIV.



A NEW BOOK AND NEW ENGLISH TRIUMPHS



But if Mark Twain could find nothing to write of in England, he found no

lack of material in America.  That winter in Hartford, with Charles

Dudley Warner, he wrote "The Gilded Age."  The Warners were neighbors,

and the families visited back and forth.  One night at dinner, when the

two husbands were criticizing the novels their wives were reading, the

wives suggested that their author husbands write a better one.  The

challenge was accepted.  On the spur of the moment Warner and Clemens

agreed that they would write a book together, and began it immediately.



Clemens had an idea already in mind.  It was to build a romance around

that lovable dreamer, his mother's cousin, James Lampton, whom the reader

will recall from an earlier chapter.  Without delay he set to work and

soon completed the first three hundred and ninety-nine pages of the new

story.  Warner came over and, after listening to its reading, went home

and took up the story.  In two months the novel was complete, Warner

doing most of the romance, Mark Twain the character parts.  Warner's

portion was probably pure fiction, but Mark Twain's chapters were full of

history.



Judge Hawkins and wife were Mark Twain's father and mother; Washington

Hawkins, his brother Orion.  Their doings, with those of James Lampton as

Colonel Sellers, were, of course, elaborated, but the story of the

Tennessee land, as told in that book, is very good history indeed.  Laura

Hawkins, however, was only real in the fact that she bore the name of

Samuel Clemens's old playmate.  "The Gilded Age," published later in the

year, was well received and sold largely.  The character of Colonel

Sellers at once took a place among the great fiction characters of the

world, and is probably the best known of any American creation.  His

watchword, "There's millions in it!" became a byword.



The Clemenses decided to build in Hartford.  They bought a plot of land

on Farmington Avenue, in the literary neighborhood, and engaged an

architect and builder.  By spring, the new house was well under way, and,

matters progressing so favorably, the owners decided to take a holiday

while the work was going on.  Clemens had been eager to show England to

his wife; so, taking little Sissy, now a year old, they sailed in May, to

be gone half a year.



They remained for a time in London--a period of honors and entertainment.

If Mark Twain had been a lion on his first visit, he was hardly less than

royalty now.  His rooms at the Langham Hotel were like a court.  The

nation's most distinguished men--among them Robert Browning, Sir John

Millais, Lord Houghton, and Sir Charles Dilke--came to pay their

respects.  Authors were calling constantly.  Charles Reade and Wilkie

Collins could not get enough of Mark Twain.  Reade proposed to join with

him in writing a novel, as Warner had done.  Lewis Carroll did not call,

being too timid, but they met the author of "Alice in Wonderland" one

night at a dinner, "the shyest full-grown man, except Uncle Remiss, I

ever saw," Mark Twain once declared.



Little Sissy and her father thrived on London life, but it wore on Mrs.

Clemens.  At the end of July they went quietly to Edinburgh, and settled

at Veitch's Hotel, on George Street.  The strain of London life had been

too much for Mrs. Clemens, and her health became poor.  Unacquainted in

Edinburgh, Clemens only remembered that Dr. John Brown, author of "Rab

and His Friends," lived there.  Learning the address, he walked around to

23 Rutland Street, and made himself known.  Doctor Brown came forthwith,

and Mrs. Clemens seemed better from the moment of his arrival.



The acquaintance did not end there.  For a month the author of "Rab" and

the little Clemens family were together daily.  Often they went with him

to make his round of visits.  He was always leaning out of the carriage

to look at dogs.  It was told of him that once when he suddenly put his

head from a carriage window he dropped back with a disappointed look.



"Who was it?" asked his companion.  "Some one you know?"



"No, a dog I don't know."



Dr. John was beloved by everybody in Scotland, and his story of "Rab" had

won him a world-wide following.  Children adored him.  Little Susy and he

were playmates, and he named her "Megalopis," a Greek term, suggested by

her great, dark eyes.



Mark Twain kept his promise to lecture to a London audience.  On the 13th

of October, in the Queen's Concert Rooms, Hanover Square, he gave "Our

Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands."  The house was packed.  Clemens

was not introduced.  He appeared on the platform in evening dress,

assuming the character of a manager, announcing a disappointment.  Mr.

Clemens, he said, had fully expected to be present.  He paused, and loud

murmurs arose from the audience.  He lifted his hand and the noise

subsided.  Then he added, "I am happy to say that Mark Twain is present

and will now give his lecture."  The audience roared its approval.



He continued his lectures at Hanover Square through the week, and at no

time in his own country had he won such a complete triumph.  He was the

talk of the streets.  The papers were full of him.  The "London Times"

declared his lectures had only whetted the public appetite for more.  His

manager, George Dolby (formerly manager for Charles Dickens), urged him

to remain and continue the course through the winter.  Clemens finally

agreed that he would take his family back to America and come back

himself within the month.  This plan he carried out.  Returning to

London, he lectured steadily for two months in the big Hanover Square

rooms, giving his "Roughing It" address, and it was only toward the end

that his audience showed any sign of diminishing.  There is probably no

other such a lecture triumph on record.



Mark Twain was at the pinnacle of his first glory: thirty-six, in full

health, prosperous, sought by the world's greatest, hailed in the highest

places almost as a king.  Tom Sawyer's dreams of greatness had been all

too modest.  In its most dazzling moments his imagination had never led

him so far.









XXXV.



BEGINNING "TOM SAWYER"



It was at the end of January, 1874, when Mark Twain returned to America.

His reception abroad had increased his prestige at home.  Howells and

Aldrich came over from Boston to tell him what a great man he had become-

-to renew those Boston days of three years before--to talk and talk of

all the things between the earth and sky.  And Twichell came in, of

course, and Warner, and no one took account of time, or hurried, or

worried about anything at all.



"We had two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round,"

wrote Howells, long after, and he tells how he and Aldrich were so

carried away with Clemens's success in subscription publication that on

the way back to Boston they planned a book to sell in that way.  It was

to be called "Twelve Memorable Murders," and they had made two or three

fortunes from it by the time they reached Boston.



"But the project ended there.  We never killed a single soul," Howells

once confessed to the writer of this memoir.



At Quarry Farm that summer Mark Twain began the writing of "The

Adventures of Tom Sawyer."  He had been planning for some time to set

down the story of those far-off days along the river-front at Hannibal,

with John Briggs, Tom Blankenship, and the rest of that graceless band,

and now in the cool luxury of a little study which Mrs. Crane had built

for him on the hillside he set himself to spin the fabric of his youth.

The study was a delightful place to work.  It was octagonal in shape,

with windows on all sides, something like a pilot-house.  From any

direction the breeze could come, and there were fine views.  To Twichell

he wrote:



     "It is a cozy nest, and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three

     or four chairs, and when the storm sweeps down the remote valley and

     the lightning flashes behind the hills beyond, and the rain beats on

     the roof over my head, imagine the luxury of it!"



He worked steadily there that summer.  He would begin mornings, soon

after breakfast, keeping at it until nearly dinner-time, say until five

or after, for it was not his habit to eat the midday meal.  Other members

of the family did not venture near the place; if he was wanted urgently,

a horn was blown.  His work finished, he would light a cigar and,

stepping lightly down the stone flight that led to the house-level, he

would find where the family had assembled and read to them his day's

work.  Certainly those were golden days, and the tale of Tom and Huck and

Joe Harper progressed.  To Dr. John Brown, in Scotland, he wrote:



     "I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average,

     for some time now, ..  .  .  and consequently have been so wrapped

     up in it and dead to everything else that I have fallen mighty short

     in letter-writing."



But the inspiration of Tom and Huck gave out when the tale was half

finished, or perhaps it gave way to a new interest.  News came one day

that a writer in San Francisco, without permission, had dramatized "The

Gilded Age," and that it was being played by John T. Raymond, an actor of

much power.  Mark Twain had himself planned to dramatize the character of

Colonel Sellers and had taken out dramatic copyright.  He promptly

stopped the California production, then wrote the dramatist a friendly

letter, and presently bought the play of him, and set in to rewrite it.

It proved a great success.  Raymond played it for several years.  Colonel

Sellers on the stage became fully as popular as in the book, and very

profitable indeed.









XXXVI.



THE NEW HOME



The new home in Hartford was ready that autumn--the beautiful house

finished, or nearly finished, the handsome furnishings in place.  It was

a lovely spot.  There were trees and grass--a green, shady slope that

fell away to a quiet stream.  The house itself, quite different from the

most of the houses of that day, had many wings and balconies, and toward

the back a great veranda that looked down the shaded slope.  The kitchen

was not at the back.  As Mark Twain was unlike any other man that ever

lived, so his house was not like other houses.  When asked why he built

the kitchen toward the street, he said:



     "So the servants can see the circus go by without running into the

     front yard."



But this was probably his afterthought.  The kitchen wing extended toward

Farmington Avenue, but it was a harmonious detail of the general plan.



Many frequenters have tried to express the charm of Mark Twain's

household.  Few have succeeded, for it lay not in the house itself, nor

in its furnishings, beautiful as these things were, but in the

personality of its occupants--the daily round of their lives--the

atmosphere which they unconsciously created.  From its wide entrance-hall

and tiny, jewel like conservatory below to the billiard-room at the top

of the house, it seemed perfectly appointed, serenely ordered, and full

of welcome.  The home of one of the most unusual and unaccountable

personalities in the world was filled with gentleness and peace.  It was

Mrs. Clemens who was chiefly responsible.  She was no longer the half-

timid, inexperienced girl he had married.  Association, study, and travel

had brought her knowledge and confidence.  When the great ones of the

world came to visit America's most picturesque literary figure, she gave

welcome to them, and filled her place at his side with such sweet grace

that those who came to pay their dues to him often returned to pay still

greater devotion to his companion.  William Dean Howells, so often a

visitor there, once said to the writer:



     "Words cannot express Mrs. Clemens--her fineness, her delicate,

     wonderful tact."  And again, "She was not only a beautiful soul, but

     a woman of singular intellectual power."



There were always visitors in the Clemens home.  Above the mantel in the

library was written: "The ornament of a house is the friends that

frequent it," and the Clemens home never lacked of those ornaments, and

they were of the world's best.  No distinguished person came to America

that did not pay a visit to Hartford and Mark Twain.  Generally it was

not merely a call, but a stay of days.  The welcome was always genuine,

the entertainment unstinted.  George Warner, a close neighbor, once said:



     "The Clemens house was the only one I have ever known where there

     was never any preoccupation in the evenings and where visitors were

     always welcome.  Clemens was the best kind of a host; his evenings

     after dinner were an unending flow of stories."



As for friends living near, they usually came and went at will, often

without the ceremony of knocking or formal leave-taking.  The two Warner

famines were among these, the home of Charles Dudley Warner being only a

step away.  Dr. and Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe were also close neighbors,

while the Twichell parsonage was not far.  They were all like one great

family, of which Mark Twain's home was the central gathering-place.









XXXVII.



"OLD TIMES," "SKETCHES," AND "TOM SAWYER"



The Rev. Joseph H. Twichell and Mark Twain used to take many long walks

together, and once they decided to walk from Hartford to Boston--about

one hundred miles.  They decided to allow three days for the trip, and

really started one morning, with some luncheon in a basket, and a little

bag of useful articles.  It was a bright, brisk November day, and they

succeeded in getting to Westford, a distance of twenty-eight miles, that

evening.  But they were lame and foot-sore, and next morning, when they

had limped six miles or so farther, Clemens telegraphed to Redpath:



     "We have made thirty-five miles in less than five days.  This shows

     the thing can be done.  Shall finish now by rail.  Did you have any

     bets on us?"



He also telegraphed Howells that they were about to arrive in Boston, and

they did, in fact, reach the Howells home about nine o'clock, and found

excellent company--the Cambridge set--and a most welcome supper waiting.

Clemens and Twichell were ravenous.  Clemens demanded food immediately.

Howells writes:



     "I can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with

     his head thrown back, and in his hands a dish of those scalloped

     oysters without which no party in Cambridge was really a party,

     exulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the

     most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of

     their progress."



The pedestrians returned to Hartford a day or two later--by train.  It

was during another, though less extended, tour which Twichell and Clemens

made that fall, that the latter got his idea for a Mississippi book.

Howells had been pleading for something for the January "Atlantic," of

which he was now chief editor, but thus far Mark Twain's inspiration had

failed.  He wrote at last, "My head won't go," but later, the same day,

he sent another hasty line.



     "I take back the remark that I can't write for the January number,

     for Twichell and I have had a long walk in the woods, and I got to

     telling him about old Mississippi days of steam-boating glory and

     grandeur as I saw them (during four years) from the pilot-house.  He

     said, 'What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!'  I hadn't

     thought of that before.  Would you like a series of papers to run

     through three months, or six, or nine--or about four months, say?"



Howells wrote at once, welcoming the idea.  Clemens forthwith sent the

first instalment of that marvelous series of river chapters which rank

to-day among the very best of his work.  As pictures of the vanished

Mississippi life they are so real, so convincing, so full of charm that

they can never grow old.  As long as any one reads of the Mississippi

they will look up those chapters of Mark Twain's piloting days.  When the

first number appeared, John Hay wrote:



     "It is perfect; no more, no less.  I don't see how you do it."



The "Old Times" chapter ran through seven numbers of the "Atlantic," and

show Mark Twain at his very best.  They form now most of the early

chapters of "Life on the Mississippi."  The remainder of that book was

added about seven years later.



Those were busy literary days for Mark Twain.  Writing the river chapters

carried him back, and hardly had he finished them when he took up the

neglected story of "Tom and Huck," and finished that under full steam.

He at first thought of publishing it in the "Atlantic", but decided

against this plan.  He sent Howells the manuscript to read, and received

the fullest praise.  Howells wrote:



     "It is altogether the best boy's story I ever read.  It will be an

     immense success."



Clemens, however, delayed publication.  He had another volume in press--a

collection of his sketches--among them the "Jumping Frog," and others of

his California days.  The "Jumping Frog" had been translated into French,

and in this book Mark Twain published the French version and then a

literal retranslation of his own, which is one of the most amusing

features in the volume.  As an example, the stranger's remark, "I don't

see no p'ints about that frog that's any better than any other frog," in

the literal retranslation becomes, "I no saw not that that frog had

nothing of better than each frog," and Mark Twain parenthetically adds,

"If that isn't grammar gone to seed, then I count myself no judge."



"Sketches New and Old" went very well, but the book had no such sale as

"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," which appeared a year later, December,

1876.  From the date of its issue it took its place as foremost of

American stories of boy life, a place that to this day it shares only

with "Huck Finn."  Mark Twain's own boy life in the little drowsy town of

Hannibal, with John Briggs and Tom Blankenship--their adventures in and

about the cave and river--made perfect material.  The story is full of

pure delight.  The camp on the island is a picture of boy heaven.  No boy

that reads it but longs for the woods and a camp-fire and some bacon

strips in the frying-pan.  It is all so thrillingly told and so vivid.

We know certainly that it must all have happened.  "The Adventures of Tom

Sawyer" has taken a place side by side with "Treasure Island."









XXXVIII.



HOME PICTURES



Mark Twain was now regarded by many as the foremost American author.

Certainly he was the most widely known.  As a national feature he rivaled

Niagara Falls.  No civilized spot on earth that his name had not reached.

Letters merely addressed "Mark Twain" found their way to him.  "Mark

Twain, United States," was a common superscription.  "Mark Twain, The

World," also reached him without delay, while "Mark Twain, Somewhere,"

and "Mark Twain, Anywhere," in due time came to Hartford.  "Mark Twain,

God Knows Where," likewise arrived promptly, and in his reply he said,

"He did."  Then a letter addressed "The Devil Knows Where" also reached

him, and he answered, "He did, too."  Surely these were the farthermost

limits of fame.



Countless anecdotes went the rounds of the press.  Among them was one

which happened to be true:



Their near neighbor, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, was leaving for Florida

one morning, and Clemens ran over early to say good-by.  On his return

Mrs. Clemens looked at him severely.



"Why, Youth," she said, "you haven't on any collar and tie."



He said nothing, but went to his room, wrapped up those items in a neat

package, which he sent over by a servant to Mrs. Stowe, with the line:



     "Herewith receive a call from the rest of me."



Mrs. Stowe returned a witty note, in which she said he had discovered a

new principle--that of making calls by instalments, and asked whether in

extreme cases a man might not send his clothes and be himself excused.



Most of his work Mark Twain did at Quarry Farm.  Each summer the family--

there were two little girls now, Susy and Clara--went to that lovely

place on the hilltop above Elmira, where there were plenty of green

fields and cows and horses and apple-trees, a spot as wonderful to them

as John Quarles's farm had been to their father, so long ago.  All the

family loved Quarry Farm, and Mark Twain's work went more easily there.

His winters were not suited to literary creation--there were too many

social events, though once--it was the winter of '76--he wrote a play

with Bret Harte, who came to Hartford and stayed at the Clemens home

while the work was in progress.  It was a Chinese play, "Ah Sin," and the

two had a hilarious time writing it, though the result did not prove much

of a success with the public.  Mark Twain often tried plays--one with

Howells, among others--but the Colonel Sellers play was his only success.



Grand dinners, trips to Boston and New York, guests in his own home,

occupied much of Mark Twain's winter season.  His leisure he gave to his

children and to billiards.  He had a passion for the game, and at any

hour of the day or night was likely to be found in the room at the top of

the house, knocking the balls about alone or with any visitor that he had

enticed to that den.  He mostly received his callers there, and impressed

them into the game.  If they could play, well and good.  If not, so much

the better; he could beat them extravagantly, and he took huge delight in

such contests.  Every Friday evening a party of billiard lovers--Hartford

men--gathered and played, and told stories, and smoked, until the room

was blue.  Clemens never tired of the game.  He could play all night.  He

would stay until the last man dropped from sheer weariness, and then go

on knocking the balls about alone.



But many evenings at home--early evenings--he gave to Susy and Clara.

They had learned his gift as a romancer and demanded the most startling

inventions.  They would bring him a picture requiring him to fit a story

to it without a moment's delay.  Once he was suddenly ordered by Clara to

make a story out of a plumber and a "bawgunstictor," which, on the whole,

was easier than some of their requirements.  Along the book-shelves were

ornaments and pictures.  A picture of a girl whom they called "Emeline"

was at one end, and at the other a cat.  Every little while they

compelled him to make a story beginning with the cat and ending with

Emeline.  Always a new story, and never the other way about.  The

literary path from the cat to Emeline was a perilous one, but in time he

could have traveled it in his dreams.









XXXIX.



TRAMPING ABROAD



It was now going on ten years since the publication of "The Innocents

Abroad," and there was a demand for another Mark Twain book of travel.

Clemens considered the matter, and decided that a walking-tour in Europe

might furnish the material he wanted.  He spoke to his good friend, the

Rev. "Joe" Twichell, and invited him to become his guest on such an

excursion, because, as he explained, he thought he could "dig material

enough out of Joe to make it a sound investment."  As a matter of fact,

he loved Twichell's companionship, and was always inviting him to share

his journeys--to Boston, to Bermuda, to Washington--wherever interest or

fancy led him.  His plan now was to take the family to Germany in the

spring, and let Twichell join them later for a summer tramp down through

the Black Forest and Switzerland.  Meantime the Clemens household took up

the study of German.  The children had a German nurse--others a German

teacher.  The household atmosphere became Teutonic.  Of course it all

amused Mark Twain, as everything amused him, but he was a good student.

In a brief time he had a fair knowledge of every-day German and a

really surprising vocabulary.  The little family sailed in April (1878),

and a few weeks later were settled in the Schloss Hotel, on a hill above

Heidelberg, overlooking the beautiful old castle, the ancient town, with

the Neckar winding down the hazy valley--as fair a view as there is in

all Germany.



Clemens found a room for his work in a small house not far from the

hotel.  On the day of his arrival he had pointed out this house and said

he had decided to work there--that his room would be the middle one on

the third floor.  Mrs. Clemens laughed, and thought the occupants of the

house might be surprised when he came over to take possession.  They

amused themselves by watching "his people" and trying to make out what

they were like.  One day he went over that way, and, sure enough, there

was a sign, "Furnished Rooms," and the one he had pointed out from the

hotel was vacant.  It became his study forthwith.



The travelers were delighted with their location.  To Howells, Clemens

wrote:



     "Our bedroom has two great glass bird-cages (inclosed balconies), one

     looking toward the Rhine Valley and sunset, the other looking up the

     Neckar cul de sac, and, naturally, we spent nearly all our time in

     these.  We have tables and chairs in them .  .  .  .  It must have

     been a noble genius who devised this hotel.  Lord! how blessed is

     the repose, the tranquillity of this place!  Only two sounds: the

     happy clamor of the birds in the groves and the muffled music of the

     Neckar tumbling over the opposing dikes.  It is no hardship to lie

     awake awhile nights, for thin subdued roar has exactly the sound of

     a steady rain beating upon a roof.  It is so healing to the spirit;

     and it bears up the thread of one's imaginings as the accompaniment

     bears up a song."



Twichell was summoned for August, and wrote back eagerly at the prospect:



     "Oh, my!  Do you realize, Mark, what a symposium it is to be?  I do.

     To begin with, I am thoroughly tired, and the rest will be worth

     everything.  To walk with you and talk with you for weeks together--

     why, it's my dream of luxury!"



Meantime the struggle with the "awful German language" went on.  Rosa,

the maid, was required to speak to the children only in German, though

little Clara at first would have none of it.  Susy, two years older,

tried, and really made progress, but one day she said, pathetically:



     "Mama, I wish Rosa was made in English."



But presently she was writing to "Aunt Sue" (Mrs. Crane) at Quarry Farm:



     "I know a lot of German; everybody says I know a lot.  I give you a

     million dollars to see you, and you would give two hundred dollars

     to see the lovely woods we see."



Twichell arrived August 1st.  Clemens met him at Baden-Baden, and they

immediately set forth on a tramp through the Black Forest, excursioning

as they pleased and having a blissful time.  They did not always walk.

They were likely to take a carnage or a donkey-cart, or even a train,

when one conveniently happened along.  They did not hurry, but idled and

talked and gathered flowers, or gossiped with wayside natives--

picturesque peasants in the Black Forest costume.  In due time they

crossed into Switzerland and prepared to conquer the Alps.



The name Mark Twain had become about as well known in Europe as it was in

America.  His face, however, was less familiar.  He was not often

recognized in these wanderings, and his pen-name was carefully concealed.

It was a relief to him not to be an object of curiosity and lavish

attention.  Twichell's conscience now and then prompted him to reveal the

truth.  In one of his letters home he wrote how a young man at a hotel

had especially delighted in Mark's table conversation, and how he

(Twichell) had later taken the young man aside and divulged the speaker's

identity.



     "I could not forbear telling him who Mark was, and the mingled

     surprise and pleasure his face exhibited made me glad I had done so."



They did not climb many of the Alps on foot.  They did scale the Rigi,

after which Mark Twain was not in the best walking trim; though later

they conquered Gemmi Pass--no small undertaking--that trail that winds up

and up until the traveler has only the glaciers and white peaks and the

little high-blooming flowers for company.



All day long the friends would tramp and walk together, and when they did

not walk they would hire a diligence or any vehicle that came handy, but,

whatever their means of travel the joy of comradeship amid those superb

surroundings was the same.



In Twichell's letters home we get pleasant pictures of the Mark Twain of

that day:



     "Mark, to-day, was immensely absorbed in flowers.  He scrambled

     around and gathered a great variety, and manifested the intensest

     pleasure in them .  .  .  .  Mark is splendid to walk with amid such

     grand scenery, for he talks so well about it, has such a power of

     strong, picturesque expression.  I wish you might have heard him

     today.  His vigorous speech nearly did justice to the things we saw."



And in another place:



     "He can't bear to see the whip used, or to see a horse pull hard.

     To-day when the driver clucked up his horse and quickened his pace a

     little, Mark said, 'The fellow's got the notion that we were in a

     hurry.'"



Another extract refers to an incident which Mark Twain also mentions in

"A Tramp Abroad:" [8]



     "Mark is a queer fellow.  There is nothing so delights him as a

     swift, strong stream.  You can hardly get him to leave one when once

     he is in the influence of its fascinations.  To throw in stones and

     sticks seems to afford him rapture."



Twichell goes on to tell how he threw some driftwood into a racing

torrent and how Mark went running down-stream after it, waving and

shouting in a sort of mad ecstasy.



When a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below, he

would jump up and down and yell.  He acted just like a boy.



Boy he was, then and always.  Like Peter Pan, he never really grew up--

that is, if growing up means to grow solemn and uninterested in play.



Climbing the Gorner Grat with Twichell, they sat down to rest, and a lamb

from a near-by flock ventured toward them.  Clemens held out his hand and

called softly.  The lamb ventured nearer, curious but timid.



It was a scene for a painter: the great American humorist on one side of

the game, and the silly little creature on the other, with the Matterhorn

for a background.  Mark was reminded that the time he was consuming was

valuable, but to no purpose.  The Gorner Grat could wait.  He held on

with undiscouraged perseverance till he carried his point; the lamb

finally put its nose in Mark's hand, and he was happy all the rest of the

day.



"In A Tramp Abroad" Mark Twain burlesques most of the walking-tour with

Harris (Twichell), feeling, perhaps, that he must make humor at whatever

cost.  But to-day the other side of the picture seems more worth while.

That it seemed so to him, also, even at the time, we may gather from a

letter he sent after Twichell when it was all over and Twichell was on

his way home:



     "DEAR OLD JOE,--It is actually all over!  I was so low-spirited at

     the station yesterday, and this morning, when I woke, I couldn't

     seem to accept the dismal truth that you were really gone and the

     pleasant tramping and talking at an end.  Ah, my boy!  It has been

     such a rich holiday for me, and I feel under such deep and honest

     obligations to you for coming.  I am putting out of my mind all

     memory of the time when I misbehaved toward you and hurt you; I am

     resolved to consider it forgiven, and to store up and remember only

     the charming hours of the journey and the times when I was not

     unworthy to be with you and share a companionship which to me stands

     first after Livy's."



Clemens had joined his family at Lausanne, and presently they journeyed

down into Italy, returning later to Germany--to Munich, where they lived

quietly with Fraulein Dahlweiner at No. 1a Karlstrasse, while he worked

on his new book of travel.  When spring came they went to Paris, and

later to London, where the usual round of entertainment briefly claimed

them.  It was the 3d of September, 1879, when they finally reached New

York.  The papers said that Mark Twain had changed in his year and a half

of absence.  He had, somehow, taken on a traveled look.  One paper

remarked that he looked older than when he went to Germany, and that his

hair had turned quite gray.



[8] Chapter XXXIII.









XL.



"THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER"



They went directly to Quarry Farm, where Clemens again took up work on

his book, which he hoped to have ready for early publication.  But his

writing did not go as well as he had hoped, and it was long after they

had returned to Hartford that the book was finally in the printer's

hands.



Meantime he had renewed work on a story begun two years before at Quarry

Farm.  Browsing among the books there one summer day, he happened to pick

up "The Prince and the Page," by Charlotte M. Yonge.  It was a story of a

prince disguised as a blind beggar, and, as Mark Twain read, an idea came

to him for an altogether different story, or play, of his own.  He would

have a prince and a pauper change places, and through a series of

adventures learn each the trials and burdens of the other life.  He

presently gave up the play idea, and began it as a story.  His first

intention had been to make the story quite modern, using the late King

Edward VII. (then Prince of Wales) as his prince, but it seemed to him

that it would not do to lose a prince among the slums of modern London--

he could not make it seem real; so he followed back through history until

he came to the little son of Henry VIII., Edward Tudor, and decided that

he would do.



It was the kind of a story that Mark Twain loved to read and to write.

By the end of that first summer he had finished a good portion of the

exciting adventures of "The Prince and the Pauper," and then, as was

likely to happen, the inspiration waned and the manuscript was laid

aside.



But with the completion of "A Tramp Abroad"--a task which had grown

wearisome--he turned to the luxury of romance with a glad heart.  To

Howells he wrote that he was taking so much pleasure in the writing that

he wanted to make it last.



     "Did I ever tell you the plot of it?  It begins at 9 A.M., January

     27, 1547 .  .  .  .  My idea is to afford a realizing sense of the

     exceeding severity of the laws of that day by inflicting some of

     their penalties upon the king himself, and allowing him a chance to

     see the rest of them applied to others."



Susy and Clara Clemens were old enough now to understand the story, and

as he finished the chapters he read them aloud to his small home

audience--a most valuable audience, indeed, for he could judge from its

eager interest, or lack of attention, just the measure of his success.



These little creatures knew all about the writing of books.  Susy's

earliest recollection was "Tom Sawyer" read aloud from the manuscript.

Also they knew about plays.  They could not remember a time when they did

not take part in evening charades--a favorite amusement in the Clemens

home.



Mark Twain, who always loved his home and played with his children,

invented the charades and their parts for them, at first, but as they

grew older they did not need much help.  With the Twichell and Warner

children they organized a little company for their productions, and

entertained the assembled households.  They did not make any preparation

for their parts.  A word was selected and the syllables of it whispered

to the little actors.  Then they withdrew to the hall, where all sorts of

costumes had been laid out for the evening, dressed their parts, and each

group marched into the library, performed its syllable, and retired,

leaving the audience of parents to guess the answer.  Now and then, even

at this early day, they gave little plays, and of course Mark Twain could

not resist joining them.  In time the plays took the place of the

charades and became quite elaborate, with a stage and scenery, but we

shall hear of this later on.



"The Prince and the Pauper" came to an end in due season, in spite of the

wish of both author and audience for it to go on forever.  It was not

published at once, for several reasons, the main one being that "A Tramp

Abroad" had just been issued from the press, and a second book might

interfere with its sale.



As it was, the "Tramp" proved a successful book--never as successful as

the "Innocents," for neither its humor nor its description had quite the

fresh quality of the earlier work.  In the beginning, however, the sales

were large, the advance orders amounting to twenty-five thousand copies,

and the return to the author forty thousand dollars for the first year.









XLI.



GENERAL GRANT AT HARTFORD



A third little girl came to the Clemens household during the summer of

1880.  They were then at Quarry Farm, and Clemens wrote to his friend

Twichell:



     "DEAR OLD JOE,--Concerning Jean Clemens, if anybody said he "didn't

     see no p'ints about that frog that's any better than any other

     frog," I should think he was convicting himself of being a pretty

     poor sort of an observer. . .  It is curious to note the change in

     the stock-quotations of the Affection Board.  Four weeks ago the

     children put Mama at the head of the list right along, where she has

     always been, but now:



                                   Jean

                                   Mama

                                   Motley    }cat

                                   Fraulein  }cat

                                   Papa



     "That is the way it stands now.  Mama is become No. 2; I have dropped

     from 4 and become No. 5.  Some time ago it used to be nip and tuck

     between me and the cats, but after the cats "developed" I didn't

     stand any more show."



Those were happy days at Quarry Farm.  The little new baby thrived on

that summer hilltop.



Also, it may be said, the cats.  Mark Twain's children had inherited

his love for cats, and at the farm were always cats of all ages and

varieties.  Many of the bed-time stories were about these pets--stories

invented by Mark Twain as he went along--stories that began anywhere and

ended nowhere, and continued indefinitely from evening to evening,

trailing off into dreamland.



The great humorist cared less for dogs, though he was never unkind to

them, and once at the farm a gentle hound named Bones won his affection.

When the end of the summer came and Clemens, as was his habit, started

down the drive ahead of the carriage, Bones, half-way to the entrance,

was waiting for him.  Clemens stooped down, put his arms about him, and

bade him an affectionate good-by.



Eighteen hundred and eighty was a Presidential year.  Mark Twain was for

General Garfield, and made a number of remarkable speeches in his favor.

General Grant came to Hartford during the campaign, and Mark Twain was

chosen to make the address of welcome.  Perhaps no such address of

welcome was ever made before.  He began:



     "I am among those deputed to welcome you to the sincere and cordial

     hospitalities of Hartford, the city of the historic and revered

     Charter Oak, of which most of the town is built."



He seemed to be at a loss what to say next, and, leaning over, pretended

to whisper to Grant.  Then, as if he had been prompted by the great

soldier, he straightened up and poured out a fervid eulogy on Grant's

victories, adding, in an aside, as he finished, "I nearly forgot that

part of my speech," to the roaring delight of his hearers, while Grant

himself grimly smiled.



He then spoke of the General being now out of public employment, and how

grateful his country was to him, and how it stood ready to reward him in

every conceivable--inexpensive--way.



Grant had smiled more than once during the speech, and when this sentence

came out at the end his composure broke up altogether, while the throng

shouted approval.  Clemens made another speech that night at the opera-

house--a speech long remembered in Hartford as one of the great efforts

of his life.



A very warm friendship had grown up between Mark Twain and General Grant.

A year earlier, on the famous soldier's return from his trip around the

world, a great birthday banquet had been given him in Chicago, at which

Mark Twain's speech had been the event of the evening.  The colonel who

long before had chased the young pilot-soldier through the Mississippi

bottoms had become his conquering hero, and Grant's admiration for

America's foremost humorist was most hearty.  Now and again Clemens urged

General Grant to write his memoirs for publication, but the hero of many

battles was afraid to venture into the field of letters.  He had no

confidence in his ability to write.  He did not realize that the man who

had written "I will fight it out on this line if it takes all summer,"

and, later, "Let us have peace," was capable of English as terse and

forceful as the Latin of Caesar's Commentaries.









XLII



MANY INVESTMENTS



The "Prince and the Pauper," delayed for one reason and another, did not

make its public appearance until the end of 1881.  It was issued by

Osgood, of Boston, and was a different book in every way from any that

Mark Twain had published before.  Mrs. Clemens, who loved the story, had

insisted that no expense should be spared in its making, and it was,

indeed, a handsome volume.  It was filled with beautiful pen-and-ink

drawings, and the binding was rich.  The dedication to its two earliest

critics read:



               "To those good-mannered and agreeable

               children, Susy and Clara Clemens."



The story itself was unlike anything in Mark Twain's former work.  It was

pure romance, a beautiful, idyllic tale, though not without his touch of

humor and humanity on every page.  And how breathlessly interesting it

is!  We may imagine that first little audience--the "two good-mannered

and agreeable children," drawing up in their little chairs by the

fireside, hanging on every paragraph of the adventures of the wandering

prince and Tom Canty, the pauper king, eager always for more.



The story, at first, was not entirely understood by the reviewers.  They

did not believe it could be serious.  They expected a joke in it

somewhere.  Some even thought they had found it.  But it was not a joke,

it was just a simple tale--a beautiful picture of a long-vanished time.

One critic, wiser than the rest, said:



     "The characters of those two boys, twin in spirit, will rank with the

     purest and loveliest creations of child-life in the realm of

     fiction."



Mark Twain was now approaching the fullness of his fame and prosperity.

The income from his writing was large; Mrs. Clemens possessed a

considerable fortune of her own; they had no debts.  Their home was as

perfectly appointed as a home could well be, their family life was ideal.

They lived in the large, hospitable way which Mrs. Clemens had known in

her youth, and which her husband, with his Southern temperament, loved.

Their friends were of the world's chosen, and they were legion in number.

There were always guests in the Clemens home--so many, indeed, were

constantly coming and going that Mark Twain said he was going to set up a

private 'bus to save carnage hire.  Yet he loved it all dearly, and for

the most part realized his happiness.



Unfortunately, there were moments when he forgot that his lot was

satisfactory, and tried to improve it.  His Colonel Sellers imagination,

inherited from both sides of his family, led him into financial

adventures which were generally unprofitable.  There were no silver-mines

in the East into which to empty money and effort, as in the old Nevada

days, but there were plenty of other things--inventions, stock companies,

and the like.



When a man came along with a patent steam-generator which would save

ninety per cent. of the usual coal-supply, Mark Twain invested whatever

bank surplus he had at the moment, and saw that money no more forever.



After the steam-generator came a steam-pulley, a small affair, but

powerful enough to relieve him of thirty-two thousand dollars in a brief

time.



A new method of marine telegraphy was offered him by the time his balance

had grown again, a promising contrivance, but it failed to return the

twenty-five thousand dollars invested in it by Mark Twain.  The list of

such adventures is too long to set down here.  They differ somewhat, but

there is one feature common to all--none of them paid.  At last came a

chance in which there was really a fortune.  A certain Alexander Graham

Bell, an inventor, one day appeared, offering stock in an invention for

carrying the human voice on an electric wire.  But Mark Twain had grown

wise, he thought.  Long after he wrote:



     "I declined.  I said I did not want any more to do with wildcat

     speculation ....  I said I didn't want it at any price.  He (Bell)

     became eager; and insisted I take five hundred dollars' worth.  He

     said he would sell me as much as I wanted for five hundred dollars;

     offered to let me gather it up in my hands and measure it in a plug-

     hat; said I could have a whole hatful for five hundred dollars.  But

     I was a burnt child, and resisted all these temptations--resisted

     them easily; went off with my money, and next day lent five thousand

     of it to a friend who was going to go bankrupt three days later."



It was the chance of fortune thus thrown away which, perhaps, led him to

take up later with an engraving process--an adventure which lasted

through several years and ate up a heavy sum.  Altogether, these

experiences in finance cost Mark Twain a fair-sized fortune, though,

after all, they were as nothing compared with the great type-machine

calamity which we shall hear of in a later chapter.









XLIII



BACK TO THE RIVER, WITH BIXBY



Fortunately, Mark Twain was not greatly upset by his losses.  They

exasperated him for the moment, perhaps, but his violence waned

presently, and the whole matter was put aside forever.  His work went on

with slight interference.  Looking over his Mississippi chapters one day,

he was taken with a new interest in the river, and decided to make the

steamboat trip between St. Louis and New Orleans, to report the changes

that had taken place in his twenty-one years of absence.  His Boston

publisher, Osgood, agreed to accompany him, and a stenographer was

engaged to take down conversations and comments.



At St. Louis they took passage on the steamer "Gold Dust"--Clemens under

an assumed name, though he was promptly identified.  In his book he tells

how the pilot recognized him and how they became friends.  Once, in later

years, he said:



     "I spent most of my time up there with him.  When we got down below

     Cairo, where there was a big, full river--for it was high-water

     season and there was no danger of the boat hitting anything so long

     as she kept in the river--I had her most of the time on his watch.

     He would lie down and sleep and leave me there to dream that the

     years had not slipped away; that there had been no war, no mining

     days, no literary adventures; that I was still a pilot, happy and

     care-free as I had been twenty years before."



To heighten the illusion he had himself called regularly with the four-

o'clock watch, in order not to miss the mornings.  The points along the

river were nearly all new to him, everything had changed, but during

high-water this mattered little.  He was a pilot again--a young fellow in

his twenties, speculating on the problems of existence and reading his

fortunes in the stars.  The river had lost none of its charm for him.  To

Bixby he wrote:



     "I'd rather be a pilot than anything else I've ever been in my life.

     How do you run Plum Point?"



He met Bixby at New Orleans.  Bixby was a captain now, on the splendid

new Anchor Line steamer "City of Baton Rouge," one of the last of the

fine river boats.  Clemens made the return trip to St. Louis with Bixby

on the "Baton Rouge"--almost exactly twenty-five years from their first

trip together.  To Bixby it seemed wonderfully like those old days back

in the fifties.



"Sam was making notes in his memorandum-book, just as he always did,"

said Bixby, long after, to the writer of this history.



Mark Twain decided to see the river above St. Louis.  He went to Hannibal

to spend a few days with old friends.  "Delightful days," he wrote home,

"loitering around all day long, and talking with grayheads who were boys

and girls with me thirty or forty years ago."  He took boat for St. Paul

and saw the upper river, which he had never seen before.  He thought the

scenery beautiful, but he found a sadness everywhere because of the decay

of the river trade.  In a note-book entry he said: "The romance of

boating is gone now.  In Hannibal the steamboatman is no longer a god."



He worked at the Mississippi book that summer at the farm, but did not

get on very well, and it was not until the following year (1883) that it

came from the press.  Osgood published it, and Charles L. Webster, who

had married Mark Twain's niece, Annie (daughter of his sister Pamela),

looked after the agency sales.  Mark Twain, in fact, was preparing to

become his own publisher, and this was the beginning.  Webster was a man

of ability, and the book sold well.



"Life on the Mississippi" is one of Mark Twain's best books--one of those

which will live longest.  The first twenty chapters are not excelled in

quality anywhere in his writings.  The remainder of the book has an

interest of its own, but it lacks the charm of those memories of his

youth--the mellow light of other days which enhances all of his better

work.









XLIV.



A READING-TOUR WITH CABLE



Every little while Mark Twain had a fever of play-writing, and it was

about this time that he collaborated with W. D. Howells on a second

Colonel Sellers play.  It was a lively combination.



Once to the writer Howells said: "Clemens took one scene and I another.

We had loads of fun about it.  We cracked our sides laughing over it

as we went along.  We thought it mighty good, and I think to this day it

was mighty good."



But actors and managers did not agree with them.  Raymond, who had played

the original Sellers, declared that in this play the Colonel had not

become merely a visionary, but a lunatic.  The play was offered

elsewhere, and finally Mark Twain produced it at his own expense.  But

perhaps the public agreed with Raymond, for the venture did not pay.



It was about a year after this (the winter of 1884-5) that Mark Twain

went back to the lecture platform--or rather, he joined with George W.

Cable in a reading-tour.  Cable had been giving readings on his own

account from his wonderful Creole stories, and had visited Mark Twain in

Hartford.  While there he had been taken down with the mumps, and it was

during his convalescence that the plan for a combined reading-tour had

been made.  This was early in the year, and the tour was to begin in the

autumn.



Cable, meantime, having quite recovered, conceived a plan to repay Mark

Twain's hospitality.  It was to be an April-fool--a great complimentary

joke.  A few days before the first of the month he had a "private and

confidential" circular letter printed, and mailed it to one hundred and

fifty of Mark Twain's friends and admirers in Boston, New York, and

elsewhere, asking that they send the humorist a letter to arrive April 1,

requesting his autograph.  It would seem that each one receiving this

letter must have responded to it, for on the morning of April 1st an

immense pile of letters was unloaded on Mark Twain's table.  He did not

know what to make of it, and Mrs. Clemens, who was party to the joke,

slyly watched results.  They were the most absurd requests for autographs

ever written.  He was fooled and mystified at first, then realizing the

nature and magnitude of the joke, he entered into it fully-delighted, of

course, for it was really a fine compliment.  Some of the letters asked

for autographs by the yard, some by the pound.  Some commanded him to sit

down and copy a few chapters from "The Innocents Abroad."  Others asked

that his autograph be attached to a check.  John Hay requested that he

copy a hymn, a few hundred lines of Young's "Night Thoughts," etc., and

added:



     "I want my boy to form a taste for serious and elevated poetry, and

     it will add considerable commercial value to have it in your

     handwriting."



Altogether, the reading of the letters gave Mark Twain a delightful day.



The platform tour of Clemens and Cable that fall was a success.  They had

good houses, and the work of these two favorites read by the authors of

it made a fascinating program.



They continued their tour westward as far as Chicago and gave readings in

Hannibal and Keokuk.  Orion Clemens and his wife once more lived in

Keokuk, and with them Jane Clemens, brisk and active for her eighty-one

years.  She had visited Hartford more than once and enjoyed "Sam's fine

house," but she chose the West for home.  Orion Clemens, honest, earnest,

and industrious, had somehow missed success in life.  The more prosperous

brother, however, made an allowance ample for all.  Mark Twain's mother

attended the Keokuk reading.  Later, at home, when her children asked her

if she could still dance (she had been a great dancer in her youth), she

rose, and in spite of her fourscore, tripped as lightly as a girl.  It

was the last time that Mark Twain would see her in full health.



At Christmas-time Cable and Clemens took a fortnight's holiday, and

Clemens went home to Hartford.  There a grand surprise awaited him.  Mrs.

Clemens had made an adaptation of "The Prince and the Pauper" for the

stage, and his children, with those of the neighborhood, had learned the

parts.  A good stage had been set up in George Warner's home, with a

pretty drop-curtain and very good scenery indeed.  Clemens arrived in the

late afternoon, and felt an air of mystery in the house, but did not

guess what it meant.  By and by he was led across the grounds to George

Warner's home, into a large room, and placed in a seat directly fronting

the stage.  Then presently the curtain went up, the play began, and he

knew.  As he watched the little performers playing so eagerly the parts

of his story, he was deeply moved and gratified.



It was only the beginning of "The Prince and the Pauper" production.  The

play was soon repeated, Clemens himself taking the part of Miles Hendon.

In a "biography" of her father which Susy began a little later, she

wrote:



     "Papa had only three days to learn the part in, but still we were all

     sure he could do it .  .  .  .  I was the prince, and Papa and I

     rehearsed two or three times a day for the three days before the

     appointed evening.  Papa acted his part beautifully, and he added to

     the scene, making it a good deal longer.  He was inexpressibly

     funny, with his great slouch hat and gait--oh, such a gait!"



Susy's sister, Clara, took the part of Lady Jane Gray, while little Jean,

aged four, in the part of a court official, sat at a small table and

constantly signed state papers and death-warrants.









XLV.



"THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN"



Meantime, Mark Twain had really become a publisher.  His nephew by

marriage, Charles L. Webster, who, with Osgood, had handled the

"Mississippi" book, was now established under the firm name of Charles L.

Webster & Co., Samuel L. Clemens being the company.  Clemens had another

book ready, and the new firm were to handle it throughout.



The new book was a story which Mark Twain had begun one day at Quarry

Farm, nearly eight years before.  It was to be a continuation of the

adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, especially of the latter as told

by himself.  But the author had no great opinion of the tale and

presently laid it aside.  Then some seven years later, after his trip

down the river, he felt again the inspiration of the old days, and the

story of Huck's adventures had been continued and brought to a close.

The author believed in it by this time, and the firm of Webster & Co.

was really formed for the purpose of publishing it.



Mark Twain took an active interest in the process.  From the pages of

"Life" he selected an artist--a young man named E. W. Kemble, who would

later become one of our foremost illustrators of Southern character.  He

also gave attention to the selection of the paper and the binding--even

to the method of canvassing for the sales.  In a note to Webster, he

wrote:



     "Get at your canvassing early and drive it with all your might .  .

     .  .  If we haven't 40,000 subscriptions we simply postpone

     publication till we've got them."



Mark Twain was making himself believe that he was a business man, and in

this instance, at least, he seems to have made no mistake.  Some advanced

chapters of "Huck" appeared serially in the "Century Magazine," and the

public was eager for more.  By the time the "Century" chapters were

finished the forty thousand advance subscriptions for the book had been

taken, and Huck Finn's own story, so long pushed aside and delayed, came

grandly into its own.  Many grown-up readers and most critics declared

that it was greater than the "Tom Sawyer" book, though the younger

readers generally like the first book the best, it being rather more in

the juvenile vein.  Huck's story, in fact, was soon causing quite grown-

up discussions--discussions as to its psychology and moral phases,

matters which do not interest small people, who are always on Huck's side

in everything, and quite willing that he should take any risk of body or

soul for the sake of Nigger Jim.  Poor, vagrant Ben Blankenship, hiding

his runaway negro in an Illinois swamp, could not dream that his

humanity would one day supply the moral episode for an immortal book!



As literature, the story of "Huck Finn" holds a higher place than that of

"Tom Sawyer."  As stories, they stand side by side, neither complete

without the other, and both certain to live as long as there are real

boys and girls to read them.









XLVI.



PUBLISHER TO GENERAL GRANT



Mark Twain was now a successful publisher, but his success thus far was

nothing to what lay just ahead.  One evening he learned that General

Grant, after heavy financial disaster, had begun writing the memoirs

which he (Clemens) had urged him to undertake some years before.  Next

morning he called on the General to learn the particulars.  Grant had

contributed some articles to the "Century" war series, and felt in a mood

to continue the work.  He had discussed with the "Century" publishers the

matter of a book.  Clemens suggested that such a book should be sold only

by subscription and prophesied its enormous success.  General Grant was

less sure.  His need of money was very great and he was anxious to get as

much return as possible, but his faith was not large.  He was inclined to

make no special efforts in the matter of publication.  But Mark Twain

prevailed.  Like his own Colonel Sellers, he talked glowingly and

eloquently of millions.  He first offered to direct the general to his

own former subscription publisher, at Hartford, then finally proposed to

publish it himself, offering Grant seventy per cent. of the net returns,

and to pay all office expenses out of his own share.



Of course there could be nothing for any publisher in such an arrangement

unless the sales were enormous.  General Grant realized this, and at

first refused to consent.  Here was a friend offering to bankrupt himself

out of pure philanthropy, a thing he could not permit.  But Mark Twain

came again and again, and finally persuaded him that purely as business

proposition the offer was warranted by the certainty of great sales.



So the firm of Charles L. Webster & Co. undertook the Grant book, and the

old soldier, broken in health and fortune, was liberally provided with

means that would enable him to finish his task with his mind at peace.

He devoted himself steadily to the work--at first writing by hand, then

dictating to a stenographer that Webster & Co. provided.  His disease,

cancer, made fierce ravages, but he "fought it out on that line," and

wrote the last pages of his memoirs by hand when he could no longer speak

aloud.  Mark Twain was much with him, and cheered him with anecdotes and

news of the advance sale of his book.  In one of his memoranda of that

time Clemens wrote:



     "To-day (May 26) talked with General Grant about his and my first

     great Missouri campaign, in 1861.  He surprised an empty camp near

     Florida, Missouri, on Salt River, which I had been occupying a day

     or two before.  How near he came to playing the d-- with his future

     publisher."



At Mount McGregor, a few weeks before the end, General Grant asked if any

estimate could now be made of the sum which his family would obtain from

his work, and was deeply comforted by Clemens's prompt reply that more

than one hundred thousand sets had already been sold, the author's share

of which would exceed one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.  Clemens

added that the gross return would probably be twice as much more.



The last notes came from Grant's hands soon after that, and a few days

later, July 23, 1885, his task completed, he died.  To Henry Ward Beecher

Clemens wrote:



     "One day he put his pencil aside and said there was nothing more to

     do.  If I had been there I could have foretold the shock that struck

     the world three days later."



In a memorandum estimate made by Mark Twain soon after the canvass for

the Grant memoirs had begun, he had prophesied that three hundred

thousand sets of the book would be sold, and that he would pay General

Grant in royalties $420,000.  This prophecy was more than fulfilled.  The

first check paid to Mrs. Grant--the largest single royalty check in

history--was for $200,000.  Later payments brought her royalty return up

to nearly $450.000.  For once, at least, Mark Twain's business vision had

been clear.  A fortune had been realized for the Grant family.  Even his

own share was considerable, for out of that great sale more than a

hundred thousand dollars' profit was realized by Webster & Co.









XLVII



THE HIGH-TIDE OF FORTUNE



That summer at Quarry Farm was one of the happiest they had ever known.

Mark Twain, nearing fifty, was in the fullness of his manhood and in the

brightest hour of his fortune.  Susy, in her childish "biography," begun

at this time, gives us a picture of him.  She begins:



     "We are a happy family!  We consist of Papa, Mama, Jean, Clara, and

     me.  It is Papa I am writing about, and I shall have no trouble in

     not knowing what to say about him, as he is a very striking

     character.  Papa's appearance has been described many times, but

     very incorrectly; he has beautiful, curly, gray hair, not any too

     thick or any too long, just right; a Roman nose, which greatly

     improves the beauty of his features, kind blue eyes, and a small

     mustache; he has a wonderfully shaped head and profile; he has a

     very good figure--in short, is an extraordinarily fine-looking man."



     "He is a very good man, and a very funny one; he has got a temper,

     but we all have in this family.  He is the loveliest man I ever saw,

     or ever hope to see, and oh, so absent-minded!"



We may believe this is a true picture of Mark Twain at fifty.  He did not

look young for his years, but he was still young in spirit and body.

Susy tells how he blew bubbles for the children, filling them with

tobacco smoke.  Also, how he would play with the cats and come clear down

from his study to see how a certain kitten was getting along.



Susy adds that "there are eleven cats at the farm now," and tells of the

day's occupations, but the description is too long to quote.  It reveals

a beautiful, busy life.



Susy herself was a gentle, thoughtful, romantic child.  One afternoon she

discovered a wonderful tangle of vines and bushes, a still, shut-in

corner not far from the study.  She ran breathlessly to her aunt.



"Can I have it--can Clara and I have it all for our own?"



The petition was granted and the place was called Helen's Bower, for they

were reading "Thaddeus of Warsaw", and the name appealed to Susy's poetic

fancy.  Something happened to the "bower"--an unromantic workman mowed it

down--but by this time there was a little house there which Mrs. Clemens

had built, just for the children.  It was a complete little cottage, when

furnished.  There was a porch in front, with comfortable chairs.  Inside

were also chairs, a table, dishes, shelves, a broom, even a stove--small,

but practical.  They called the little house "Ellerslie," out of Grace

Aguilar's "Days of Robert Bruce."  There alone, or with their Langdon

cousins, how many happy summers they played and dreamed away.  Secluded

by a hillside and happy trees, overlooking the hazy, distant town, it was

a world apart--a corner of story-book land.  When the end of the summer

came its little owners went about bidding their treasures good-by,

closing and kissing the gates of Ellerslie.



Looking back now, Mark Twain at fifty would seem to have been in his

golden prime.  His family was ideal--his surroundings idyllic.  Favored

by fortune, beloved by millions, honored now even in the highest places,

what more had life to give?  When November 30th brought his birthday, one

of the great Brahmins, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote him a beautiful

poem.  Andrew Lang, England's foremost critic, also sent verses, while

letters poured in from all sides.



And Mark Twain realized his fortune and was disturbed by it.  To a friend

he said: "I am frightened at the proportions of my prosperity.  It seems

to me that whatever I touch turns to gold."









XLVIII.



BUSINESS DIFFICULTIES.  PLEASANTER THINGS



For the time it would seem that Mark Twain had given up authorship for

business.  The success of the Grant book had filled his head with plans

for others of a like nature.  The memoirs of General McClellan and

General Sheridan were arranged for.  Almost any war-book was considered a

good venture.  And there was another plan afoot.  Pope Leo XIII., in his

old age, had given sanction to the preparation of his memoirs, and it was

to be published, with his blessing, by Webster & Co., of Hartford.  It

was generally believed that such a book would have a tremendous sale, and

Colonel Sellers himself could not have piled the figures higher than did

his creator in counting his prospective returns.  Every Catholic in the

world must have a copy of the Pope's book, and in America alone there

were millions.  Webster went to Rome to consult with the Pope in person,

and was received in private audience.  Mark Twain's publishing firm

seemed on the top wave of success.



The McClellan and Sheridan books were issued, and, in due time, the Life

of Pope Leo XIII.--published simultaneously in six languages--issued from

the press.  A large advance sale had been guaranteed by the general

canvassing agents--a fortunate thing, as it proved.  For, strange as it

may seem, the book did not prove a great success.  It is hard to explain

just why.  Perhaps Catholics felt that there had been so many popes that

the life of any particular one was no great matter.  The book paid, but

not largely.  The McClellan and Sheridan books, likewise, were only

partially successful.  Perhaps the public was getting tired of war

memoirs.  Webster & Co. undertook books of a general sort--travel,

fiction, poetry.  Many of them did not pay.  Their business from a march

of triumph had become a battle.  They undertook a "Library of American

Literature," a work of many volumes, costly to make and even more so to

sell.  To float this venture they were obliged to borrow large sums.



It seems unfortunate that Mark Twain should have been disturbed by these

distracting things during what should have been his literary high-tide.

As it was, his business interests and cares absorbed the energy that

might otherwise have gone into books.  He was not entirely idle.  He did

an occasional magazine article or story, and he began a book which he

worked at from time to time the story of a Connecticut Yankee who

suddenly finds himself back in the days of King Arthur's reign.  Webster

was eager to publish another book by his great literary partner, but the

work on it went slowly.  Then Webster broke down from two years of

overwork, and the business management fell into other hands.  Though

still recognized as a great publishing-house, those within the firm of

Charles L. Webster & Co. knew that its prospects were not bright.



Furthermore, Mark Twain had finally invested in another patent, the type-

setting machine mentioned in a former chapter, and the demands for cash

to promote this venture were heavy.  To his sister Pamela, about the end

of 1887, he wrote: "The type-setter goes on forever at $3,000 a month....

We'll be through with it in three or four months, I reckon"--a false

hope, for the three or four months would lengthen into as many years.



But if there were clouds gathering in the business sky, they were not

often allowed to cast a shadow in Mark Twain's home.  The beautiful house

in Hartford was a place of welcome and merriment, of many guests and of

happy children.  Especially of happy children: during these years--the

latter half of the 'eighties--when Mark Twain's fortunes were on the

decline, his children were at the age to have a good time, and certainly

they had it.  The dramatic stage which had been first set up at George

Warner's for the Christmas "Prince and Pauper" performance was brought

over and set up in the Clemens schoolroom, and every Saturday there were

plays or rehearsals, and every little while there would be a grand

general performance in the great library downstairs, which would

accommodate just eighty-four chairs, filled by parents of the performers

and invited guests.  In notes dictated many years later, Mark Twain said:



     "We dined as we could, probably with a neighbor, and by quarter to

     eight in the evening the hickory fire in the hall was pouring a

     sheet of flame up the chimney, the house was in a drench of gas-

     light from the ground floor up, the guests were arriving, and there

     was a babble of hearty greetings, with not a voice in it that was

     not old and familiar and affectionate; and when the curtain went up,

     we looked out from the stage upon none but faces dear to us, none

     but faces that were lit up with welcome for us."



He was one of the children himself, you see, and therefore on the stage

with the others.  Katy Leary, for thirty years in the family service,

once said to the author: "The children were crazy about acting, and we

all enjoyed it as much as they did, especially Mr. Clemens, who was the

best actor of all.  I have never known a happier household than theirs

was during those years."



The plays were not all given by the children.  Mark Twain had kept up his

German study, and a class met regularly in his home to struggle with the

problems of der, die, and das.  By and by he wrote a play for the class,

"Meisterschaft," a picturesque mixture of German and English, which they

gave twice, with great success.  It was unlike anything attempted before

or since.  No one but Mark Twain could have written it.  Later (January,

1888), in modified form, it was published in the "Century Magazine."  It

is his best work of this period.



Many pleasant and amusing things could be recalled from these days if one

only had room.  A visit with Robert Louis Stevenson was one of them.

Stevenson was stopping at a small hotel near Washington Square, and he

and Clemens sat on a bench in the sunshine and talked through at least

one golden afternoon.  What marvelous talk that must have been!  "Huck

Finn" was one of Stevenson's favorites, and once he told how he had

insisted on reading the book aloud to an artist who was painting his

portrait.  The painter had protested at first, but presently had fallen a

complete victim to Huck's story.  Once, in a letter, Stevenson wrote:



     "My father, an old man, has been prevailed upon to read 'Roughing It'

     (his usual amusement being found in theology), and after one evening

     spent with the book he declared: 'I am frightened.  It cannot be

     safe for a man at my time of life to laugh so much.'"



Mark Twain had been a "mugwump" during the Blame-Cleveland campaign in

1880, which means that he had supported the independent Democratic

candidate, Grover Cleveland.  He was, therefore, in high favor at the

White House during both Cleveland administrations, and called there

informally whenever business took him to Washington.  But on one occasion

(it was his first visit after the President's marriage) there was to be a

party, and Mrs. Clemens, who could not attend, slipped a little note into

the pocket of his evening waistcoat, where he would be sure to find it

when dressing, warning him as to his deportment.  Being presented to

young Mrs. Cleveland, he handed her a card on which he had written, "He

didn't," and asked her to sign her name below those words.  Mrs.

Cleveland protested that she must know first what it was that he hadn't

done, finally agreeing to sign if he would tell her immediately all about

it, which he promised to do.  She signed, and he handed her Mrs.

Clemens's note.  It was very brief.  It said, "Don't wear your arctics in

the White House."



Mrs. Cleveland summoned a messenger and had the card mailed immediately

to Mrs. Clemens.



Absent-mindedness was characteristic of Mark Twain.  He lived so much in

the world within that to him the material outer world was often vague and

shadowy.  Once when he was knocking the balls about in the billiard-room,

George, the colored butler, a favorite and privileged household

character, brought up a card.  So many canvassers came to sell him one

thing and another that Clemens promptly assumed this to be one of them.

George insisted mildly, but firmly, that, though a stranger, the caller

was certainly a gentleman, and Clemens grumblingly descended the stairs.

As he entered the parlor the caller arose and extended his hand.  Clemens

took it rather limply, for he had noticed some water-colors and

engravings leaning against the furniture as if for exhibition, and he was

instantly convinced that the caller was a picture-canvasser.  Inquiries

by the stranger as to Mrs. Clemens and the children did not change Mark

Twain's conclusion.  He was polite, but unresponsive, and gradually

worked the visitor toward the front door.  His inquiry as to the home of

Charles Dudley Warner caused him to be shown eagerly in that direction.



Clemens, on his way back to the billiard-room, heard Mrs. Clemens call

him--she was ill that day: "Youth!"



"Yes, Livy."  He went in for a word.



"George brought me Mr. B.'s card.  I hope you were nice to him; the B's

were so nice to us, once, in Europe, while you were gone."



"The B's!  Why, Livy!"



"Yes, of course; and I asked him to be sure to call when he came to

Hartford."



"Well, he's been here."



"Oh Youth, have you done anything?"



"Yes, of course I have.  He seemed to have some pictures to sell, so I

sent him over to Warner's.  I noticed he didn't take them with him.  Land

sakes!  Livy, what can I do?"



"Go right after him--go quick!  Tell him what you have done."



He went without further delay, bareheaded and in his slippers, as usual.

Warner and B. were in cheerful conversation.  They had met before.

Clemens entered gaily.



"Oh, yes, I see!  You found him all right.  Charlie, we met Mr. B. and

his wife in Europe, and they made things pleasant for us.  I wanted to

come over here with him, but I was a good deal occupied just then.  Livy

isn't very well, but she seems now a good deal better; so I just followed

along to have a good talk, all together."



He stayed an hour, and whatever bad impression had formed in B.'s mind

faded long before the hour ended.  Returning home, Clemens noticed the

pictures still on the parlor floor.



"George," he said, "what pictures are these that gentleman left?"



"Why, Mr. Clemens, those are our own pictures!  Mrs. Clemens had me set

them around to see how they would look in new places.  The gentleman was

only looking at them while he waited for you to come down."



It was in June, 1888, that Yale College conferred upon Mark Twain the

degree of Master of Arts.  He was proud of the honor, for it was

recognition of a kind that had not come to him before--remarkable

recognition, when we remember how as a child he had hated all schools and

study, having ended his class-room days before he was twelve years old.

He could not go to New Haven at the time, but later in the year made the

students a delightful address.  In his capacity of Master of Arts, he

said, he had come down to New Haven to institute certain college reforms.



By advice, I turned my earliest attention to the Greek department.  I

told the Greek Professor I had concluded to drop the use of the Greek-

written character, because it is so hard to spell with and so impossible

to read after you get it spelt.  Let us draw the curtain there.  I saw by

what followed that nothing but early neglect saved him from being a very

profane man.



He said he had given advice to the mathematical department with about the

same result.  The astronomy department he had found in a bad way.  He had

decided to transfer the professor to the law department and to put a law-

student in his place.



A boy will be more biddable, more tractable--also cheaper.  It is true he

cannot be entrusted with important work at first, but he can comb the

skies for nebula till he gets his hand in.



It was hardly the sort of an address that the holder of a college degree

is expected to make, but doctors and students alike welcomed it

hilariously from Mark Twain.



Not many great things happened to Mark Twain during this long period of

semi-literary inaction, but many interesting ones.  When Bill Nye, the

humorist, and James Whitcomb Riley joined themselves in an entertainment

combination, Mark Twain introduced them to their first Boston audience--a

great event to them, and to Boston.  Clemens himself gave a reading now

and then, but not for money.  Once, when Col. Richard Malcolm Johnston

and Thomas Nelson Page were to give a reading in Baltimore, Page's wife

fell ill, and Colonel Johnston wired to Charles Dudley Warner, asking him

to come in Page's stead.  Warner, unable to go, handed the telegram to

Clemens, who promptly answered that he would come.  They read to a packed

house, and when the audience had gone and the returns were counted, an

equal amount was handed to each of the authors.  Clemens pushed his share

over to Johnston, saying:



"That's yours, Colonel.  I'm not reading for money these days."



Colonel Johnston, to whom the sum was important, tried to thank him, but

Clemens only said:



"Never mind, Colonel; it only gives me pleasure to do you that little

favor.  You can pass it along some day."





As a matter of fact, Mark Twain himself was beginning to be hard pressed

for funds at this time, but was strong in the faith that he would

presently be a multi-millionaire.  The typesetting machine was still

costing a vast sum, but each week its inventor promised that a few more

weeks or months would see it finished, and then a tide of wealth would

come rolling in.  Mark Twain felt that a man with ship-loads of money

almost in port could not properly entertain the public for pay.  He read

for institutions, schools, benefits, and the like, without charge.









XLIX.



KIPLING AT ELMIRA.  ELSIE LESLIE.  THE "YANKEE"



One day during the summer of 1889 a notable meeting took place in Elmira.

On a blazing forenoon a rather small and very hot young man, in a slow,

sizzling hack made his way up East Hill to Quarry Faun.  He inquired for

Mark Twain, only to be told that he was at the Langdon home, down in the

town which the young man had just left.  So he sat for a little time on

the pleasant veranda, and Mrs. Crane and Susy Clemens, who were there,

brought him some cool milk and listened to him talk in a way which seemed

to them very entertaining and wonderful.  When he went away he left his

card with a name on it strange to them--strange to the world at that

time.  The name was Rudyard Kipling.  Also on the card was the address

Allahabad, and Sissy kept it, because, to her, India was fairyland.



Kipling went down into Elmira and found Mark Twain.  In his book

"American Notes" he has left an account of that visit.  He claimed that

he had traveled around the world to see Mark Twain, and his article

begins:



     "You are a contemptible lot over yonder.  Some of you are

     commissioners, and some are lieutenant-governors, and some have the

     V. C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm

     with the viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning,

     have shaken his hand, and smoked a cigar--no, two cigars--with him,

     and talked with him for more than two hours!"



But one should read the article entire--it is so worth while.  Clemens

also, long after, dictated an account of the meeting.



Kipling came down and spent a couple of hours with me, and at the end of

that time I had surprised him as much as he had surprised me--and the

honors were easy.  I believed that he knew more than any person I had met

before, and I knew that he knew that I knew less than any person he had

met before.  .  .  When he had gone, Mrs. Langdon wanted to know about my

visitor.  I said:



"He is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man--and I am the

other one.  Between us we cover all knowledge.  He knows all that can be

known, and I know the rest."



He was a stranger to me and all the world, and remained so for twelve

months, but then he became suddenly known and universally known.  .  .

George Warner came into our library one morning, in Hartford, with a

small book in his hand, and asked me if I had ever heard of Rudyard

Kipling.  I said "No."



He said I would hear of him very soon, and that the noise he made would

be loud and continuous.  .  .  A day or two later he brought a copy of

the London "World" which had a sketch of Kipling in it and a mention of

the fact that he had traveled in the United States.  According to the

sketch he had passed through Elmira.  This remark, with the additional

fact that he hailed from India, attracted my attention--also Susy's.  She

went to her room and brought his card from its place in the frame of her

mirror, and the Quarry Farm visitor stood identified.



A theatrical production of "The Prince and the Pauper," dramatized by

Mrs. A. S. Richardson, was one of the events of this period.  It was a

charming performance, even if not a great financial success, and little

Elsie Leslie, who played the double part of the Prince and Tom Canty,

became a great favorite in the Clemens home.  She was also a favorite of

the actor and playwright, William Gillette, [9] and once when Clemens and

Gillette were together they decided to give the little girl a surprise--a

pair of slippers, in fact, embroidered by themselves.  In his

presentation letter to her, Mark Twain wrote:



"Either of us could have thought of a single slipper, but it took both of

us to think of two slippers.  In fact, one of us did think of one

slipper, and then, quick as a flash, the other thought of the other one."



He apologized for his delay:



"You see, it was my first attempt at art, and I couldn't rightly get the

hang of it, along at first.  And then I was so busy I couldn't get a

chance to work at home, and they wouldn't let me embroider on the cars;

they said it made the other passengers afraid.  .  .  Take the slippers

and wear them next your heart, Elsie dear, for every stitch in them is a

testimony of the affection which two of your loyalest friends bear you.

Every single stitch cost us blood.  I've got twice as many pores in me

now as I used to have .  .  .  .  Do not wear these slippers in public,

dear; it would only excite envy; and, as like as not, somebody would try

to shoot you."



For five years Mark Twain had not published a book.  Since the appearance

of "Huck Finn" at the end of 1884 he had given the public only an

occasional magazine story or article.  His business struggle and the

type-setter had consumed not only his fortune, but his time and energy.

Now, at last, however, a book was ready.  "A Connecticut Yankee in King

Arthur's Court" came from the press of Webster & Co. at the end of 1889,

a handsome book, elaborately and strikingly illustrated by Dan Beard--a

pretentious volume which Mark Twain really considered his last.  "It's my

swan-song, my retirement from literature permanently," he wrote Howells,

though certainly he was young, fifty-four, to have reached this

conclusion.



The story of the "Yankee"--a fanciful narrative of a skilled Yankee

mechanic swept backward through the centuries to the dim day of Arthur

and his Round Table--is often grotesque enough in its humor, but under it

all is Mark Twain's great humanity in fierce and noble protest against

unjust laws, the tyranny of an individual or of a ruling class--

oppression of any sort.  As in "The Prince and the Pauper," the wandering

heir to the throne is brought in contact with cruel injustice and misery,

so in the "Yankee" the king himself becomes one of a band of fettered

slaves, and through degradation and horror of soul acquires mercy and

humility.



The "Yankee in King Arthur's Court" is a splendidly imagined tale.

Edmund Clarence Stedman and William Dean Howells have ranked it very

high.  Howells once wrote: "Of all the fanciful schemes in fiction, it

pleases me most."  The "Yankee" has not held its place in public favor

with Mark Twain's earlier books, but it is a wonderful tale, and we

cannot afford to leave it unread.



When the summer came again, Mark Twain and his family decided for once to

forego Quarry Farm for a season in the Catskills, and presently found

themselves located in a cottage at Onteora in the midst of a most

delightful colony.  Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, then editor of St. Nicholas,

was there, and Mrs. Custer and Brander Matthews and Lawrence Hutton and a

score of other congenial spirits.  There was constant visiting from one

cottage to another, with frequent gatherings at the Inn, which was

general headquarters.  Susy Clemens, now eighteen, was a central figure,

brilliant, eager, intense, ambitious for achievement--lacking only in

physical strength.  She was so flower-like, it seemed always that her

fragile body must be consumed by the flame of her spirit.  It was a happy

summer, but it closed sadly.  Clemens was called to Keokuk in August, to

his mother's bedside.  A few weeks later came the end, and Jane Clemens

had closed her long and useful life.  She was in her eighty-eighth year.

A little later, at Elmira, followed the death of Mrs. Clemens's mother, a

sweet and gentle woman.



[9] Gillette was originally a Hartford boy.  Mark Twain had recognized

his ability, advanced him funds with which to complete his dramatic

education, and Gillette's first engagement seems to have been with the

Colonel Sellers company.  Mark Twain often advanced money in the interest

of education.  A young sculptor he sent to Paris for two years' study.

Among others, he paid the way of two colored students through college.









L.



THE MACHINE.  GOOD-BY TO HARTFORD.  "JOAN" IS BEGUN



It was hoped that the profits from the Yankee would provide for all needs

until the great sums which were to come from the type-setter should come

rolling in.  The book did yield a large return, but, alas! the hope of

the type-setter, deferred year after year and month after month, never

reached fulfilment.  Its inventor, James W. Paige, whom Mark Twain once

called "a poet, a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations

are written in steel," during ten years of persistent experiment had

created one of the most marvelous machines ever constructed.  It would

set and distribute type, adjust the spaces, detect flaws--would perform,

in fact, anything that a human being could do, with more exactness and

far more swiftness.  Mark Twain, himself a practical printer, seeing it

in its earlier stages of development, and realizing what a fortune must

come from a perfect type-setting machine, was willing to furnish his last

dollar to complete the invention.  But there the trouble lay.  It could

never be complete.  It was too intricate, too much like a human being,

too easy to get out of order, too hard to set right.  Paige, fully

confident, always believed he was just on the verge of perfecting some

appliance that would overcome all difficulties, and the machine finally

consisted of twenty thousand minutely exact parts, each of which required

expert workmanship and had to be fitted by hand.  Mark Twain once wrote:



     "All other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly

     into commonplaces contrasted with this awful, mechanical miracle."



This was true, and it conveys the secret of its failure.  It was too much

of a miracle to be reliable.  Sometimes it would run steadily for hours,

but then some part of its delicate mechanism would fail, and days, even

weeks, were required to repair it.  It is all too long a story to be

given here.  It has been fully told elsewhere.[10]  By the end of 1890

Mark Twain had put in all his available capital, and was heavily in debt.

He had spent one hundred and ninety thousand dollars on the machine, no

penny of which would ever be returned.  Outside capital to carry on the

enterprise was promised, but it failed him.  Still believing that there

were "millions in it," he realized that for the present, at least, he

could do no more.



Two things were clear: he must fall back on authorship for revenue, and

he must retrench.  In the present low stage of his fortunes he could no

longer afford to live in the Hartford house.  He decided to take the

family abroad, where living was cheaper, and where he might be able to

work with fewer distractions.



He began writing at a great rate articles and stories for the magazines.

He hunted out the old play he had written with Howells long before, and

made a book of it, "The American Claimant."  Then, in June, 1891, they

closed the beautiful Hartford house, where for seventeen years they had

found an ideal home; where the children had grown through their sweet,

early life; where the world's wisest had come and gone, pausing a little

to laugh with the world's greatest merrymaker.  The furniture was

shrouded, the curtains drawn, the light shut away.



While the carriage was waiting, Mrs. Clemens went back and took a last

look into each of the rooms, as if bidding a kind of good-by to the past.

Then she entered the carriage, and Patrick McAleer, who had been with

Mark Twain and his wife since their wedding-day, drove them to the

station for the last time.



Mark Twain had a contract for six newspaper letters at one thousand

dollars each.  He was troubled with rheumatism in his arm, and wrote his

first letter from Aix-les-Bains, a watering-place--a "health-factory," as

he called it--and another from Marienbad.  They were in Germany in

August, and one day came to Heidelberg, where they occupied their old

apartment of thirteen years before, room forty, in the Schloss Hotel,

with its far prospect of wood and hill, the winding Neckar, and the blue,

distant valley of the Rhine.  Then, presently, they came to Switzerland,

to Ouchy-Lausanne, by lovely Lake Geneva, and here Clemens left the

family and, with a guide and a boatman, went drifting down the Rhone in a

curious, flat-bottomed craft, thinking to find material for one or more

articles, possibly for a book.  But drifting down that fair river through

still September days, past ancient, drowsy villages, among sloping

vineyards, where grapes were ripening in the tranquil sunlight, was too

restful and soothing for work.  In a letter home, he wrote:



     "It's too delicious, floating with the swift current under the awning

     these superb, sunshiny days, in peace and quietness.  Some of the

     curious old historical towns strangely persuade me, but it's so

     lovely afloat that I don't stop, but view them from the outside and

     sail on. . . I want to do all the rivers of Europe in an open boat

     in summer weather."



One afternoon, about fifteen miles below the city of Valence, he made a

discovery.  Dreamily observing the eastward horizon, he noticed that a

distant blue mountain presented a striking profile outline of Napoleon

Bonaparte.  It seemed really a great natural wonder, and he stopped that

night at the village just below, Beauchastel, a hoary huddle of houses

with the roofs all run together, and took a room at the little hotel,

with a window looking to the eastward, from which, next morning, he saw

the profile of the great stone face, wonderfully outlined against the

sunrise.  He was excited over his discovery, and made a descriptive note

of it and an outline sketch.  Then, drifting farther down the river, he

characteristically forgot all about it and did not remember it again for

ten years, by which time he had forgotten the point on the river where

the Napoleon could be seen, forgotten even that he had made a note and

sketch giving full details.  He wished the Napoleon to be found again,

believing, as he declared, that it would become one of the natural

wonders of the world.  To travelers going to France he attempted to

describe it, and some of these tried to find it; but, as he located it

too far down the Rhone, no one reported success, and in time he spoke of

his discovery as the "Lost Napoleon."  It was not until after Mark

Twain's death that it was rediscovered, and then by the writer of this

memoir, who, having Mark Twain's note-book,[11] with its exact memoranda,

on another September day, motoring up the Rhone, located the blue profile

of the reclining Napoleon opposite the gray village of Beauchastel.  It

is a really remarkable effigy, and deserves to be visited.



Clemens finished his trip at Arles--a beautiful trip from beginning to

end, but without literary result.  When he undertook to write of it, he

found that it lacked incident, and, what was worse, it lacked humor.  To

undertake to create both was too much.  After a few chapters he put the

manuscript aside, unfinished, and so it remains to this day.



The Clemens family spent the winter in Berlin, a gay winter, with Mark

Twain as one of the distinguished figures of the German capital.  He was

received everywhere and made much of.  Once a small, choice dinner was

given him by Kaiser William II., and, later, a breakfast by the Empress.

His books were great favorites in the German royal family.  The Kaiser

particularly enjoyed the "Mississippi" book, while the essay on "The

Awful German Language," in the "Tramp Abroad," he pronounced one of the

finest pieces of humor ever written.  Mark Twain's books were favorites,

in fact, throughout Germany.  The door-man in his hotel had them all in

his little room, and, discovering one day that their guest, Samuel L.

Clemens, and Mark Twain were one, he nearly exploded with excitement.

Dragging the author to his small room, he pointed to the shelf:



"There," he said, "you wrote them!  I've found it out.  Ach!  I did not

know it before, and I ask a million pardons."



Affairs were not going well in America, and in June Clemens made a trip

over to see what could be done.  Probably he did very little, and he was

back presently at Nauheim, a watering-place, where he was able to work

rather quietly.  He began two stories--one of them, "The Extraordinary

Twins," which was the first form of "Pudd'nhead Wilson;" the other, "Tom

Sawyer Abroad," for "St. Nicholas."  Twichell came to Nauheim during the

summer, and one day he and Clemens ran over to Homburg, not far away.

The Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII.) was there, and Clemens and

Twichell, walking in the park, met the Prince with the British

ambassador, and were presented.  Twichell, in an account of the meeting,

said:



     "The meeting between the Prince and Mark was a most cordial one on

     both sides, and presently the Prince took Mark Twain's arm and the

     two marched up and down, talking earnestly together, the Prince

     solid, erect, and soldier-like; Clemens weaving along in his

     curious, swinging gait, in full tide of talk, and brandishing a sun

     umbrella of the most scandalous description."



At Villa Viviani, an old, old mansion outside of Florence, on the hill

toward Settignano, Mark Twain finished "Tom Sawyer Abroad," also

"Pudd'nhead Wilson", and wrote the first half of a book that really had

its beginning on the day when, an apprentice-boy in Hannibal, he had

found a stray leaf from the pathetic story of "Joan of Arc."  All his

life she had been his idol, and he had meant some day to write of her.

Now, in this weather-stained old palace, looking down on Florence,

medieval and hazy, and across to the villa-dotted hills, he began one of

the most beautiful stories ever written, "The Personal Recollections of

Joan of Arc."  He wrote in the first person, assuming the character of

Joan's secretary, Sieur Louis de Conte, who in his old age is telling the

great tale of the Maid of Orleans.  It was Mark Twain's purpose, this

time, to publish anonymously.  Walking the floor one day at Viviani, and

smoking vigorously, he said to Mrs. Clemens and Susy:



     "I shall never be accepted seriously over my own signature.  People

     always want to laugh over what I write, and are disappointed if they

     don't find a joke in it.  This is to be a serious book.  It means

     more to me than anything else I have ever undertaken.  I shall write

     it anonymously."



So it was that the gentle Sieur de Conte took up the pen, and the tale of

Joan was begun in the ancient garden of Viviani, a setting appropriate to

its lovely form.



He wrote rapidly when once his plan was perfected and his material

arranged.  The reading of his youth and manhood was now recalled, not

merely as reading, but as remembered reality.  It was as if he were truly

the old Sieur de Conte, saturated with memories, pouring out the tender,

tragic tale.  In six weeks he had written one hundred thousand words--

remarkable progress at any time, the more so when we consider that some

of the authorities he consulted were in a foreign tongue.  He had always

more or less kept up his study of French, begun so long ago on the river,

and it stood him now in good stead.  Still, it was never easy for him,

and the multitude of notes that still exist along the margin of his

French authorities show the magnitude of his work.  Others of the family

went down into the city almost daily, but he stayed in the still garden

with Joan.  Florence and its suburbs were full of delightful people, some

of them old friends.  There were luncheons, dinners, teas, dances, and

the like always in progress, but he resisted most of these things,

preferring to remain the quaint old Sieur de Conte, following again the

banner of the Maid of Orleans marshaling her twilight armies across his

illumined page.



But the next spring, March, 1893, he was obliged to put aside the

manuscript and hurry to America again, fruitlessly, of course, for a

financial stress was on the land; the business of Webster & Co. was on

the down-grade--nothing could save it.  There was new hope in the old

type-setting machine, but his faith in the resurrection was not strong.

The strain of his affairs was telling on him.  The business owed a great

sum, with no prospect of relief.  Back in Europe again, Mark Twain wrote

F. D. Hall, his business manager in New York:



     "I am terribly tired of business.  I am by nature and disposition

     unfit for it, and I want to get out of it.  I am standing on a

     volcano.  Get me out of business."



Tantalizing letters continued to come, holding out hope in the business--

the machine--in any straw that promised a little support through the

financial storm.  Again he wrote Hall:



     "Great Scott, but it's a long year for you and me!  I never knew the

     almanac to drag so.  .  .  I watch for your letters hungrily--just

     as I used to watch for the telegram saying the machine was finished

     --but when "next week certainly" suddenly swelled into "three weeks

     sure," I recognized the old familiar tune I used to hear so much.

     W. don't know what sick-heartedness is, but he is in a fair way to

     find out."



They closed Viviani in June and returned to Germany.  By the end of

August Clemens could stand no longer the strain of his American affairs,

and, leaving the family at some German baths, he once more sailed for New

York.



[11] At Mark Twain's death his various literary effects passed into the

hands of his biographer and literary executor, the present writer.









LI.



THE FAILURE OF WEBSTER & CO.  AROUND THE WORLD.  SORROW



In a room at the Players Club--"a cheap room," he wrote home, "at $1.5o

per day"--Mark Twain spent the winter, hoping against hope to weather the

financial storm.  His fortunes were at a lower ebb than ever before;

lower even than during those bleak mining days among the Esmeralda hills.

Then there had been no one but himself, and he was young.  Now, at fifty-

eight, he had precious lives dependent upon him, and he was weighed down

by debt.  The liabilities of his firm were fully two hundred thousand

dollars--sixty thousand of which were owing to Mrs. Clemens for money

advanced--but the large remaining sum was due to banks, printers,

binders, and the manufacturers of paper.  A panic was on the land and

there was no business.  What he was to do Clemens did not know.  He spent

most of his days in his room, trying to write, and succeeded in finishing

several magazine articles.  Outwardly cheerful, he hid the bitterness of

his situation.



A few, however, knew the true state of his affairs.  One of these one

night introduced him to Henry H. Rogers, the Standard Oil millionaire.



"Mr. Clemens," said Mr. Rogers, "I was one of your early admirers.  I

heard you lecture a long time ago, on the Sandwich Islands."



They sat down at a table, and Mark Twain told amusing stories.  Rogers

was in a perpetual gale of laughter.  They became friends from that

evening, and in due time the author had confessed to the financier all

his business worries.



"You had better let me look into things a little," Rogers said, and he

advised Clemens to "stop walking the floor."



It was characteristic of Mark Twain to be willing to unload his affairs

upon any one that he thought able to bear the burden.  He became a new

man overnight.  With Henry Rogers in charge, life was once more worth

while.  He accepted invitations from the Rogers family and from many

others, and was presently so gay, so widely sought, and seen in so many

places that one of his acquaintances, "Jamie" Dodge, dubbed him the

"Belle of New York."



Henry Rogers, meanwhile, was "looking into things."  He had reasonable

faith in the type-machine, and advanced a large sum on the chance of its

proving a success.  This, of course, lifted Mark Twain quite into the

clouds.  Daily he wrote and cabled all sorts of glowing hopes to his

family, then in Paris.  Once he wrote:



     "The ship is in sight now ....  When the anchor is down, then I shall

     say: Farewell--a long farewell--to business!  I will never touch it

     again!  I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it;

     I will swim in ink!"



Once he cabled, "Expect good news in ten days"; and a little later, "Look

out for good news"; and in a few days, "Nearing success."



Those Sellers-like messages could not but appeal, Mrs. Clemens's sense of

humor, even in those dark days.  To her sister she wrote, "They make me

laugh, for they are so like my beloved Colonel."



The affairs of Webster & Co. Mr. Rogers found a bad way.  When, at last,

in April, 1894, the crisis came--a demand by the chief creditors for

payment--he advised immediate assignment as the only course.



So the firm of Webster & Co. closed its doors.  The business which less

than ten years before had begun so prosperously had ended in failure.

Mark Twain, nearing fifty-nine, was bankrupt.  When all the firm's

effects had been sold and applied on the counts, he was still more than

seventy thousand dollars in debt.  Friends stepped in and offered to lend

him money, but he declined these offers.  Through Mr. Rogers a basis of

settlement at fifty cents on the dollar was arranged, and Mark Twain

said, "Give me time, and I will pay the other fifty."



No one but his wife and Mr. Rogers, however, believed that at his age he

would be able to make good the promise.  Many advised him not to attempt

it, but to settle once and for all on the legal basis as arranged.

Sometimes, in moments of despondency, he almost surrendered.  Once he

said:



"I need not dream of paying it.  I never could manage it."



But these were only the hard moments.  For the most part he kept up good

heart and confidence.  It is true that he now believed again in the

future of the type-setter, and that returns from it would pay him out of

bankruptcy.  But later in the year this final hope was taken away.  Mr.

Rogers wrote to him that in the final test the machine had failed to

prove itself practical and that the whole project had been finally and

permanently abandoned.  The shock of disappointment was heavy for the

moment, but then it was over--completely over--for that old mechanical

demon, that vampire of invention that had sapped his fortune so long, was

laid at last.  The worst had happened; there was nothing more to dread.

Within a week Mark Twain (he was now back in Paris with the family) had

settled down to work once more on the "Recollections of Joan," and all

mention and memory of the type-setter was forever put away.  The machine

stands to-day in the Sibley College of Engineering, where it is exhibited

as the costliest piece of mechanism for its size ever constructed.  Mark

Twain once received a letter from an author who had written a book to

assist inventors and patentees, asking for his indorsement.  He replied:



     "DEAR SIR,--I have, as you say, been interested in patents and

     patentees.  If your book tells how to exterminate inventors, send me

     nine editions.  Send them by express.



     "Very truly yours,



     "S. L. CLEMENS."



Those were economical days.  There was no income except from the old

books, and at the time this was not large.  The Clemens family, however,

was cheerful, and Mark Twain was once more in splendid working form.  The

story of Joan hurried to its tragic conclusion.  Each night he read to

the family what he had written that day, and Susy, who was easily moved,

would say, "Wait--wait till I get my handkerchief," and one night when

the last pages had been written and read, and the fearful scene at Rouen

had been depicted, Susy wrote in her diary, "To-night Joan of Arc was

burned at the stake!"  Meaning that the book was finished.



Susy herself had fine literary taste, and might have written had not her

greater purpose been to sing.  There are fragments of her writing that

show the true literary touch.  Both Susy and her father cared more for

Joan than for any of the former books.  To Mr. Rogers Clemens wrote,

"Possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing--it was mitten for

love."  It was placed serially with "Harper's Magazine" and appeared

anonymously, but the public soon identified the inimitable touch of Mark

Twain.



It was now the spring of 1895, and Mark Twain had decided upon a new plan

to restore his fortunes.  Platform work had always paid him well, and

though he disliked it now more than ever, he had resolved upon something

unheard of in that line--nothing less, in fact, than a platform tour

around the world.  In May, with the family, he sailed for America, and

after a month or two of rest at Quarry Farm he set out with Mrs. Clemens

and Clara and with his American agent, J. B. Pond, for the Pacific coast.

Susy and Jean remained behind with their aunt at the farm.  The travelers

left Elmira at night, and they always remembered the picture of Susy,

standing under the electric light of the railway platform, waving them

good-by.



Mark Twain's tour of the world was a success from the beginning.

Everywhere he was received with splendid honors--in America, in

Australia, in New Zealand, in India, in Ceylon, in South Africa--wherever

he went his welcome was a grand ovation, his theaters and halls were

never large enough to hold his audiences.  With the possible exception of

General Grant's long tour in 1878-9 there had hardly been a more gorgeous

progress than Mark Twain's trip around the world.  Everywhere they were

overwhelmed with attention and gifts.  We cannot begin to tell the story

of that journey here.  In "Following the Equator" the author himself

tells it in his own delightful fashion.



From time to time along the way Mark Twain forwarded his accumulated

profits to Mr. Rogers to apply against his debts, and by the time they

sailed from South Africa the sum was large enough to encourage him to

believe that, with the royalties to be derived from the book he would

write of his travels, he might be able to pay in full and so face the

world once more a free man.  Their long trip--it had lasted a full year--

was nearing its end.  They would spend the winter in London--Susy and

Jean were notified to join them there.  They would all be reunited again.

The outlook seemed bright once more.



They reached England the last of July.  Susy and Jean, with Katy Leary,

were to arrive on the 12th of August.  But the 12th did not bring them--

it brought, instead, a letter.  Susy was not well, the letter said; the

sailing had been postponed.  The letter added that it was nothing

serious, but her parents cabled at once for later news.  Receiving no

satisfactory answer, Mrs. Clemens, full of forebodings, prepared to sail

with Clara for America.  Clemens would remain in London to arrange for

the winter residence.  A cable came, saying Susy's recovery would be slow

but certain.  Mrs. Clemens and Clara sailed immediately.  In some notes

he once dictated, Mark Twain said:



     "That was the 15th of August, 1896.  Three days later, when my wife

     and Clara were about half-way across the ocean, I was standing in

     our dining-room, thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram

     was put into my hand.  It said, 'Susy was peacefully released to-

     day.'"



Mark Twain's life had contained other tragedies, but no other that

equaled this one.  The dead girl had been his heart's pride; it was a

year since they parted, and now he knew he would never see her again.

The blow had found him alone and among strangers.  In that day he could

not even reach out to those upon the ocean, drawing daily nearer to the

heartbreak.



Susy Clemens had died in the old Hartford home.  She had been well far a

time at the farm, but then her health had declined.  She worked

continuously at her singing lessons and over-tried her strength.  Then

she went on a visit to Mrs. Charles Dudley Warner, in Hartford; but she

did not rest, working harder than ever at her singing.  Finally she was

told that she must consult a physician.  The doctor came and prescribed

soothing remedies, and advised that she have the rest and quiet of her

own home.  Mrs. Crane came from Elmira, also her uncle Charles Langdon.

But Susy became worse, and a few days later her malady was pronounced

meningitis.  This was the 15th of August, the day that her mother and

Clara sailed from England.  She was delirious and burning with fever, but

at last sank into unconsciousness.  She died three days later, and on the

night that Mrs. Clemens and Clara arrived was taken to Elmira for burial.



They laid her beside the little brother that had died so long before, and

ordered a headstone with some lines which they had found in Australia,

written by Robert Richardson:



               Warm summer sun, shine kindly here;

               Warm southern wind, blow softly here;

               Green sod above, lie light, lie light!--

               Good night, dear heart, good night, good night.









LII.



EUROPEAN ECONOMIES



With Clara and Jean, Mrs. Clemens returned to England, and in a modest

house on Tedworth Square, a secluded corner of London, the stricken

family hid themselves away for the winter. Few, even of their closest

friends, knew of their whereabouts.  In time the report was circulated

that Mask Twain, old, sick, and deserted by his family, was living in

poverty, toiling to pay his debts.  Through the London publishers a

distant cousin, Dr. James Clemens, of St. Louis, located the house on

Tedworth Square, and wrote, offering assistance.  He was invited to call,

and found a quiet place--the life there simple--but not poverty.  By and

by there was another report--this time that Mark Twain was dead.  A

reporter found his way to Tedworth Square, and, being received by Mark

Twain himself, asked what he should say.



Clemens regarded him gravely, then, in his slow, nasal drawl, "Say--that

the report of my death--has been grossly--exaggerated, "a remark that a

day later was amusing both hemispheres.  He could not help his humor; it

was his natural form of utterance--the medium for conveying fact,

fiction, satire, philosophy.  Whatever his depth of despair, the quaint

surprise of speech would come, and it would be so until his last day.



By November he was at work on his book of travel, which he first thought

of calling "Around the World."  He went out not at all that winter, and

the work progressed steadily, and was complete by the following May

(1897).



Meantime, during his trip around the world, Mark Twain's publishers had

issued two volumes of his work--the "Joan of Arc" book, and another "Tom

Sawyer" book, the latter volume combining two rather short stories, "Tom

Sawyer Abroad," published serially in St. Nicholas, and "Tom Sawyer,

Detective."  The "Joan of Arc" book, the tenderest and most exquisite of

all Mark Twain's work--a tale told with the deepest sympathy and the

rarest delicacy--was dedicated by the author to his wife, as being the

only piece of his writing which he considered worthy of this honor.  He

regarded it as his best book, and this was an opinion that did not

change.  Twelve years later--it was on his seventy-third birthday--he

wrote as his final verdict, November 30, 1908:



     "I like the Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I

     know it perfectly well, and, besides, it furnished me seven times

     the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of

     preparation and two years of writing.  The others needed no

     preparation and got none.

                                                  MARK TWAIN."



The public at first did not agree with the author's estimate, and the

demand for the book was not large.  But the public amended its opinion.

The demand for "Joan" increased with each year until its sales ranked

with the most popular of Mark Twain's books.



The new stories of Tom and Huck have never been as popular as the earlier

adventures of this pair of heroes.  The shorter stories are less

important and perhaps less alive, but they are certainly very readable

tales, and nobody but Mark Twain could have written them.



Clemens began some new stories when his travel book was out of the way,

but presently with the family was on the way to Switzerland for the

summer.  They lived at Weggis, on Lake Lucerne, in the Villa Buhlegg--a

very modest five-franc-a-day pension, for they were economizing and

putting away money for the debts.  Mark Twain was not in a mood for work,

and, besides, proofs of the new book "Following the Equator," as it is

now called--were coming steadily.  But on the anniversary of Susy's death

(August 18th) he wrote a poem, "In Memoriam," in which he touched a

literary height never before attained.  It was published in "Harper's

Magazine," and now appears in his collected works.



Across from Villa Buhlegg on the lake-front there was a small shaded

inclosure where he loved to sit and look out on the blue water and lofty

mountains, one of which, Rigi, he and Twichell had climbed nineteen years

before.  The little retreat is still there, and to-day one of the trees

bears a tablet (in German), "Mark Twain's Rest."



Autumn found the family in Vienna, located for the winter at the Hotel

Metropole.  Mrs. Clemens realized that her daughters must no longer be

deprived of social and artistic advantages.  For herself, she longed only

for retirement.



Vienna is always a gay city, a center of art and culture and splendid

social functions.  From the moment of his arrival, Mark Twain and his

family were in the midst of affairs.  Their room at the Metropole became

an assembling-place for distinguished members of the several circles that

go to make up the dazzling Viennese life.  Mrs. Clemens, to her sister in

America, once wrote:



     "Such funny combinations are here sometimes: one duke, several

     counts, several writers, several barons, two princes, newspaper

     women, etc."



Mark Twain found himself the literary lion of the Austrian capital.

Every club entertained him and roared with delight at his German

speeches.  Wherever he appeared on the streets he was recognized.



"Let him pass!  Don't you see it is Herr Mark Twain!" commanded an

officer to a guard who, in the midst of a great assemblage, had presumed

to bar the way.









LIII.



MARK TWAIN PAYS HIS DEBTS



Mark Twain wrote much and well during this period, in spite of his social

life.  His article "Concerning the Jews" was written that first winter in

Vienna--a fine piece of special pleading; also the greatest of his short

stories--one of the greatest of all short stories--"The Man that

Corrupted Hadleyburg."



But there were good reasons why he should write better now; his mind was

free of a mighty load--he had paid his debts!



Soon after his arrival in Vienna he had written to Mr. Rogers:



     "Let us begin on those debts.  I cannot bear the weight any longer.

     It totally unfits me for work."



He had accumulated a large sum for the purpose, and the royalties from

the new book were beginning to roll in.  Payment of the debts was begun.

At the end of December he wrote again:



     "Land, we are glad to see those debts diminishing.  For the first

     time in my life I am getting more pleasure from paying money out

     than from pulling it in."



A few days later he wrote to Howells that he had "turned the corner"; and

again:



     "We've lived close to the bone and saved every cent we could, and

     there's no undisputed claim now that we can't cash .  .  .  .  I

     hope you will never get the like of the load saddled on to you that

     was saddled on to me, three years ago.  And yet there is such a

     solid pleasure in paying the things that I reckon it is worth while

     to get into that kind of a hobble, after all.  Mrs. Clemens gets

     millions of delight out of it, and the children have never uttered

     one complaint about the scrimping from the beginning."



By the end of January, 1898, Clemens had accumulated enough money to make

the final payments to his creditors.  At the time of his failure he had

given himself five years to achieve this result.  But he had needed less

than four.  A report from Mr. Rogers showed that a balance of thirteen

thousand dollars would remain to his credit after the last accounts were

wiped away.



Clemens had tried to keep his money affairs out of the newspapers, but

the payment of the final claims could not be concealed, and the press

made the most of it.  Head-lines shouted it.  Editorials heralded Mark

Twain as a second Walter Scott, because Scott, too, had labored to lift a

great burden of debt.  Never had Mark Twain been so beloved by his

fellow-men.



One might suppose now that he had had enough of invention and commercial

enterprises of every sort--that is, one who did not know Mark Twain might

suppose this--but it would not be true.  Within a month after his debts

were paid he was negotiating with the Austrian inventor Szczepanik for

the American rights in a wonderful carpet-pattern machine, and, Sellers-

like, was planning to organize a company with a capital of fifteen

hundred million dollars to control the carpet-weaving industries of the

world.  He wrote to Mr. Rogers about the great scheme, inviting the

Standard Oil to "come in"; but the plan failed to bear the test of Mr.

Rogers's investigation and was heard of no more.



Samuel Clemens's obligation to Henry Rogers was very great, but it was

not quite the obligation that many supposed it to be.  It was often

asserted that the financier lent, even gave, the humorist large sums, and

pointed out opportunities for speculation.  No part of this statement is

true.  Mr. Rogers neither lent nor gave Mark Twain money, and never

allowed him to speculate when he could prevent it.  He sometimes invested

Mark Twain's own funds for him, but he never bought for him a share of

stock without money in hand to pay for it in full--money belonging to,

and earned by, Clemens himself.



What Henry Rogers did give to Mark Twain was his priceless counsel and

time--gifts more precious than any mere sum of money--favors that Mark

Twain could accept without humiliation.  He did accept them, and never

ceased to be grateful.  He rarely wrote without expressing his gratitude,

and we get the size of Mark Twain's obligation when in one letter we

read:



     "I have abundant peace of mind again--no sense of burden.  Work is

     become a pleasure--it is not labor any longer."



He wrote much and well, mainly magazine articles, including some of those

chapters later gathered it his book on "Christian Science."  He reveled

like a boy in his new freedom and fortunes, in the lavish honors paid

him, in the rich circumstance of Viennese life.  But always just beneath

the surface were unforgetable sorrows.  His face in repose was always

sad.  Once, after writing to Howells of his successes, he added:



     "All those things might move and interest one.  But how desperately

     more I have been moved to-night by the thought of a little old copy

     in the nursery of "At the Back of the North Wind."  Oh, what happy

     days they were when that book was read, and how Susy loved it!"









LIV.



RETURN AFTER EXILE



News came to Vienna of the death of Orion Clemens, at the age of seventy-

two.  Orion had died as he had lived--a gentle dreamer, always with a new

plan.  He had not been sick at all.  One morning early he had seated

himself at a table, with pencil and paper, and was putting down the

details of his latest project, when death came--kindly, in the moment of

new hope.  He was a generous, upright man, beloved by all who understood

him.



The Clemenses remained two winters in Vienna, spending the second at the

Hotel Krantz, where their rooms were larger and finer than at the

Metropole, and even more crowded with notabilities.  Their salon acquired

the name of the "Second Embassy," and Mark Twain was, in fact, the most

representative American in the Austrian capital.  It became the fashion

to consult him on every question of public interest, his comments,

whether serious or otherwise, being always worth printing.  When European

disarmament was proposed, Editor William T. Stead, of the "Review of

Reviews," wrote for his opinion.  He replied:



          "DEAR Mr. STEAD,--The Tsar is ready to disarm.  I am

          ready to disarm.  Collect the others; it should not be

          much of a task now.                     MARK TWAIN."



He refused offers of many sorts.  He declined ten thousand dollars for a

tobacco endorsement, though he liked the tobacco well enough.  He

declined ten thousand dollars a year for five years to lend his name as

editor of a humorous periodical.  He declined another ten thousand for

ten lectures, and another offer for fifty lectures at the same rates--

that is, one thousand dollars per night.  He could get along without

these sums, he said, and still preserve some remnants of his self-

respect.



It was May, 1899, when Clemens and his family left Vienna.  They spent a

summer in Sweden on account of the health of Jean Clemens, and located

in London apartments--30 Wellington Court--for the winter.  Then followed

a summer at beautiful Dollis Hill, an old house where Gladstone had often

visited, on a shady hilltop just outside of London.  The city had not

quite enclosed the place then, and there were spreading oaks, a pond with

lily-pads, and wide spaces of grassy lawn.  The place to-day is converted

into a public garden called Gladstone Park.  Writing to Twichell in mid-

summer, Clemens said:



     "I am the only person who is ever in the house in the daytime, but I

     am working, and deep in the luxury of it.  But there is one

     tremendous defect.  Levy is all so enchanted with the place and so

     in love with it that she doesn't know how she is going to tear

     herself away from it."



However, there was one still greater attraction than Dollis Hill, and

that was America--home.  Mark Twain at sixty-five and a free man once

more had decided to return to his native land.  They closed Dollis Hill

at the end of September, and October 6, 1900, sailed on the Minnehaha for

New York, bidding good-by, as Mark Twain believed, and hoped, to foreign

travel.  Nine days later, to a reporter who greeted him on the ship, he

said:



     "If I ever get ashore I am going to break both of my legs so I can't

     get away again."









LV.



A PROPHET AT HOME



New York tried to outdo Vienna and London in honoring Mark Twain.  Every

newspaper was filled with the story of his great fight against debt, and

his triumph.  "He had behaved like Walter Scott," writes Howells, "as

millions rejoiced to know who had not known how Walter Scott behaved till

they knew it was like Clemens."  Clubs and societies vied with one

another in offering him grand entertainments.  Literary and lecture

proposals poured in.  He was offered at the rate of a dollar a word for

his writing--he could name his own terms for lectures.



These sensational offers did not tempt him.  He was sick of the platform.

He made a dinner speech here and there--always an event--but he gave no

lectures or readings for profit.  His literary work he confined to a few

magazines, and presently concluded an arrangement with "Harper &

Brothers" for whatever he might write, the payment to be twenty (later

thirty) cents per word.  He arranged with the same firm for the

publication of all his books, by this time collected in uniform edition.

He wished his affairs to be settled as nearly as might be.  His desire

was freedom from care.  Also he would have liked a period of quiet and

rest, but that was impossible.  He realized that the multitude of honors

tendered him was in a sense a vast compliment which he could not entirely

refuse.  Howells writes that Mark Twain's countrymen "kept it up past all

precedent," and in return Mark Twain tried to do his part.  "His friends

saw that he was wearing himself out," adds Howells, and certain it is

that he grew thin and pale and had a hacking cough.  Once to Richard

Watson Gilder he wrote:



          "In bed with a chest cold and other company.



          "DEAR GILDER,--I can't.  If I were a well man I could explain

          with this pencil, but in the cir--ces I will leave it all to

          your imagination.



          "Was it Grady that killed himself trying to do all the dining

          and speeching?  No, old man, no, no!



                                        "Ever yours, MARK."



In the various dinner speeches and other utterances made by Mark Twain at

this time, his hearers recognized a new and great seriousness of purpose.

It was not really new, only, perhaps, more emphasized.  He still made

them laugh, but he insisted on making them think, too.  He preached a new

gospel of patriotism--not the patriotism that means a boisterous cheering

of the Stars and Stripes wherever unfurled, but the patriotism that

proposes to keep the Stars and Stripes clean and worth shouting for.  In

one place he said:



     "We teach the boys to atrophy their independence.  We teach them to

     take their patriotism at second hand; to shout with the largest

     crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter--

     exactly as boys under monarchies are taught, and have always been

     taught."



He protested against the blind allegiance of monarchies.  He was seldom

"with the largest crowd" himself.  Writing much of our foreign affairs,

then in a good deal of a muddle, he assailed so fearlessly and fiercely

measures which he held to be unjust that he was caricatured as an armed

knight on a charger and as Huck Finn with a gun.



But he was not always warlike.  One of the speeches he made that winter

was with Col. Henry Watterson, a former Confederate soldier, at a Lincoln

birthday memorial at Carnegie Hall.  "Think of it!" he wrote Twichell,

"two old rebels functioning there; I as president and Watterson as orator

of the day.  Things have changed somewhat in these forty years, thank

God!"



The Clemens household did not go back to Hartford.  During their early

years abroad it had been Mrs. Clemens's dream to return and open the

beautiful home, with everything the same as before.  The death of Susy

had changed all this.  The mother had grown more and more to feel that

she could not bear the sorrow of Susy's absence in the familiar rooms.

After a trip which Clemens himself made to Hartford, he wrote, "I realize

that if we ever enter the house again to live, our hearts will break."



So they did not go back.  Mrs. Clemens had seen it for the last time on

that day when the carnage waited while she went back to take a last look

into the vacant rooms.  They had taken a house at 14 West Tenth Street

for the winter, and when summer came they went to a log cabin on Saranac

Lake, which they called "The Lair."  Here Mark Twain wrote "A Double-

barreled Detective Story," a not very successful burlesque of Sherlock

Holmes.  But most of the time that summer he loafed and rested, as was

his right.  Once during the summer he went on a cruise with H. H. Rogers,

Speaker "Tom" Reed, and others on Mr. Rogers's yacht.









LVI.



HONORED BY MISSOURI



The family did not return to New York.  They took a beautiful house at

Riverdale on the Hudson--the old Appleton homestead.  Here they

established themselves and settled down for American residence.  They

would have bought the Appleton place, but the price was beyond their

reach.



It was in the autumn of 1901 that Mark Twain settled in Riverdale.  In

June of the following year he was summoned West to receive the degree of

LL.D.  from the university of his native state.  He made the journey a

sort of last general visit to old associations and friends.  In St. Louis

he saw Horace Bixby, fresh, wiry, and capable as he had been forty-five

years before.  Clemens said:



     "I have become an old man.  You are still thirty-five."



They went over to the rooms of the pilots' association, where the river-

men gathered in force to celebrate his return.  Then he took train for

Hannibal.



He spent several days in Hannibal and saw Laura Hawkins--Mrs. Frazer, and

a widow now--and John Briggs, an old man, and John RoBards, who had worn

the golden curls and the medal for good conduct.  They drove him to the

old house on Hill Street, where once he had lived and set type;

photographers were there and photographed him standing at the front door.



"It all seems so small to me," he said, as he looked through the house.

"A boy's home is a big place to him.  I suppose if I should come back

again ten years from now it would be the size of a bird-house."  He did

not see "Huck"--Torn Blankenship had not lived in Hannibal for many

years.  But he was driven to all the familiar haunts--to Lover's Leap,

the cave, and the rest; and Sunday afternoon, with John Briggs, he walked

over Holliday's Hill--the "Cardiff Hill" of "Tom Sawyer."  It was just

such a day, as the one when they had damaged a cooper shop and so nearly

finished the old negro driver.  A good deal more than fifty years had

passed since then, and now here they were once more--Tom Sawyer and Joe

Harper--two old men, the hills still fresh and green, the river rippling

in the sun.  Looking across to the Illinois shore and the green islands

where they had played, and to Lover's Leap on the south, the man who had

been Sam Clemens said:



"John, that is one of the loveliest sights I ever saw.  Down there is the

place we used to swim, and yonder is where a man was drowned, and there's

where the steamboat sank.  Down there on Lover's Leap is where the

Millerites put on their robes one night to go to heaven.  None of them

went that night, but I suppose most of them have gone now."



John Briggs said, "Sam, do you remember the day we stole peaches from old

man Price, and one of his bow-legged niggers came after us with dogs, and

how we made up our minds we'd catch that nigger and drown him?"



And so they talked on of this thing and that, and by and by drove along

the river, and Sam Clemens pointed out the place where he swam it and was

taken with a cramp on the return.



"Once near the shore I thought I would let down," he said, "but was

afraid to, knowing that if the water was deep I was a goner, but finally

my knee struck the sand and I crawled out.  That was the closest call I

ever had."



They drove by a place where a haunted house had stood.  They drank from a

well they had always known--from the bucket, as they had always drunk--

talking, always talking, touching with lingering fondness that most

beautiful and safest of all our possessions--the past.



"Sam," said John, when they parted, "this is probably the last time we

shall meet on earth.  God bless you.  Perhaps somewhere we shall renew

our friendship."



"John," was the answer, "this day has been worth a thousand dollars to

me.  We were like brothers once, and I feel that we are the same now.

Good-by, John.  I'll try to meet you somewhere."



Clemens left next day for Columbia, where the university is located.  At

each station a crowd had gathered to cheer and wave as the train pulled

in and to offer him flowers.  Sometimes he tried to say a few words, but

his voice would not come.  This was more than even Tom Sawyer had

dreamed.



Certainly there is something deeply touching in the recognition of one's

native State; the return of the boy who has set out unknown to battle

with life and who is called back to be crowned is unlike any other home-

coming--more dramatic, more moving.  Next day at the university Mark

Twain, summoned before the crowded assembly-hall to receive his degree,

stepped out to the center of the stage and paused.  He seemed in doubt as

to whether he should make a speech or only express his thanks for the

honor received.  Suddenly and without signal the great audience rose and

stood in silence at his feet.  He bowed but he could not speak.  Then the

vast assembly began a peculiar chant, spelling out slowly the word M-i-s-

s-o-u-r-i, with a pause between each letter.  It was tremendously

impressive.



Mark Twain was not left in doubt as to what was required of him when the

chant ended.  The audience demanded a speech--a speech, and he made them

one--such a speech as no one there would forget to his dying day.



Back in St. Louis, he attended the rechristening of the St. Louis harbor

boat; it had been previously called the "St. Louis," but it was now to be

called the "Mark Twain."









LVII.



THE CLOSE OF A BEAUTIFUL LIFE



Life which had begun very cheerfully at Riverdale ended sadly enough.  In

August, at York Harbor, Maine, Mrs. Clemens's health failed and she was

brought home an invalid, confined almost entirely to her room.  She had

been always the life, the center, the mainspring of the household.  Now

she must not even be consulted--hardly visited.  On her bad days--and

they were many--Clemens, sad and anxious, spent most of his time

lingering about her door, waiting for news, or until he was permitted to

see her for a brief moment.  In his memorandum-book of that period he

wrote:



     "Our dear prisoner is where she is through overwork--day and night

     devotion to the children and me.  We did not know how to value it.

     We know now."



And on the margin of a letter praising him for what he had done for the

world's enjoyment, and for his triumph over debt, he wrote:



     "Livy never gets her share of those applauses, but it is because the

     people do not know.  Yet she is entitled to the lion's share."



She improved during the winter, but very slowly.  Her husband wrote in

his diary:



     "Feb. 2, 1903--Thirty-third wedding anniversary.  I was allowed to

     see Livy five minutes this morning, in honor of the day."



Mrs. Clemens had always remembered affectionately their winter in

Florence of ten years before, and she now expressed the feeling that if

she were in Florence again she would be better.  The doctors approved,

and it was decided that she should be taken there as soon as she was

strong enough to travel.  She had so far improved by June that they

journeyed to Elmira, where in the quiet rest of Quarry Farm her strength

returned somewhat and the hope of her recovery was strong.



Mark Twain wrote a story that summer in Elmira, in the little octagonal

study, shut in now by trees and overgrown with vines.  "A Dog's Tale," a

pathetic plea against vivisection, was the last story written in the

little retreat that had seen the beginning of "Tom Sawyer" twenty-nine

years before.



There was a feeling that the stay in Europe was this time to be

permanent.  On one of the first days of October Clemens wrote in his

note-book:



     "To-day I place flowers on Susy's grave--for the last time, probably

     --and read the words, 'Good night, dear heart, good night,

     good night.'"



They sailed on the 24th, by way of Naples and Genoa, and were presently

installed in the Villa Reale di Quarto, a fine old Italian palace, in an

ancient garden looking out over Florence toward Vallombrosa and the

Chianti hills.  It was a beautiful spot, though its aging walls and

cypresses and matted vines gave it a rather mournful look.  Mrs.

Clemens's health improved there for a time, in spite of dull, rainy,

depressing weather; so much so that in May, when the warmth and sun came

back, Clemens was driving about the country, seeking a villa that he

might buy for a home.



On one of these days--it was a Sunday in early June, the 5th--when he had

been out with Jean, and had found a villa which he believed would fill

all their requirements, he came home full of enthusiasm and hope, eager

to tell the patient about the discovery.  Certainly she seemed better.  A

day or two before she had been wheeled out on the terrace to enjoy the

wonder of early Italian summer.



He found her bright and cheerful, anxious to hear all their plans for the

new home.  He stayed with her alone through the dinner hour, and their

talk was as in the old days.  Summoned to go at last, he chided himself

for staying so long; but she said there was no harm and kissed him,

saying, "you will come back?" and he answered "Yes, to say good night,"

meaning at half-past nine, as was the permitted custom.  He stood a

moment at the door, throwing kisses to her, and she returned them, her

face bright with smiles.



He was so full of hope--they were going to be happy again.  Long ago he

had been in the habit of singing jubilee songs to the children.  He went

upstairs now to the piano and played the chorus and sang "Swing Low,

Sweet Chariot," and "My Lord He Calls Me."  He stopped then, but Jean,

who had come in, asked him to go on.  Mrs. Clemens, from her room, heard

the music and said to Katy Leary:



"He is singing a good-night carol to me."



The music ceased presently.  A moment later she asked to be lifted up.

Almost in that instant life slipped away without a sound.



Clemens, just then coming to say good-night, saw a little group gathered

about her bed, and heard Clara ask:



"Katy, is it true?  Oh, Katy, is it true?"



In his note-book that night he wrote:



     "At a quarter-past nine this evening she that was the life of my life

     passed to the relief and the peace of death, after twenty-two months

     of unjust and unearned suffering.  I first saw her thirty-seven

     years ago, and now I have looked upon her face for the last time....

     I was full of remorse for things done and said in these thirty-

     four years of married life that have hurt Livy's heart."



And to Howells a few days later:



     "To-day, treasured in her worn, old testament, I found a dear and

     gentle letter from you dated Far Rockaway, September 12, 1896, about

     our poor Susy's death.  I am tired and old; I wish I were with Livy."



They brought her to America; and from the house, and the rooms, where she

had been made a bride bore her to a grave beside Susy and little Langdon.









LVIII.



MARK TWAIN AT SEVENTY



In a small cottage belonging to Richard Watson Gilder, at Tyringham,

Massachusetts, Samuel Clemens and his daughters tried to plan for the

future.  Mrs. Clemens had always been the directing force--they were lost

without her.  They finally took a house in New York City, No. 21 Fifth

Avenue, at the corner of Ninth Street, installed the familiar

furnishings, and tried once more to establish a home.  The house was

handsome within and without--a proper residence for a venerable author

and sage--a suitable setting for Mark Twain.  But it was lonely for him.



It lacked soul--comfort that would reach the heart.  He added presently a

great Aeolian orchestrelle, with a variety of music for his different

moods.  Sometimes he played it himself, though oftener his secretary

played to him.  He went out little that winter--seeing only a few old and

intimate friends.  His writing, such as it was, was of a serious nature,

protests against oppression and injustice in a variety of forms.  Once he

wrote a "War Prayer," supposed to have been made by a mysterious, white-

robed stranger who enters a church during those ceremonies that precede

the marching of the nation's armies to battle.  The minister had prayed

for victory, a prayer which the stranger interprets as a petition that

the enemy's country be laid waste, its soldiers be torn by shells, its

people turned out roofless, to wander through their desolated land in

rags and hunger.  It was a scathing arraignment of war, a prophecy,

indeed, which to-day has been literally fulfilled.  He did not print it,

because then it would have been regarded as sacrilege.



When summer came again, in a beautiful house at Dublin, New Hampshire, on

the Monadnock slope, he seemed to get back into the old swing of work,

and wrote that pathetic story, "A Horse's Tale."  Also "Eve's Diary,"

which, under its humor, is filled with tenderness, and he began a wildly

fantastic tale entitled "Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes," a

satire in which Gulliver is outdone.  He never finished it.  He never

could finish it, for it ran off into amazing by-paths that led nowhere,

and the tale was lost.  Yet he always meant to get at it again some day

and make order out of chaos.



Old friends were dying, and Mark Twain grew more and more lonely.  "My

section of the procession has but a little way to go," he wrote when the

great English actor Henry Irving died.  Charles Henry Webb, his first

publisher, John Hay, Bret Harte, Thomas B. Reed, and, indeed, most of his

earlier associates were gone.  When an invitation came from San Francisco

to attend a California reunion he replied that his wandering days were

over and that it was his purpose to sit by the fire for the rest of his

life.  And in another letter:



     "I have done more for San Francisco than any other of its old

     residents.  Since I left there, it has increased in population fully

     300,000.  I could have done more--I could have gone earlier--it was

     suggested."



A choice example, by the way, of Mark Twain's best humor, with its

perfectly timed pause, and the afterthought.  Most humorists would have

been content to end with the statement, "I could have gone earlier."

Only Mark Twain could have added that final exquisite touch--"it was

suggested."



Mark Twain was nearing seventy.  With the 30th of November (1905) he

would complete the scriptural limitation, and the president of his

publishing-house, Col. George Harvey, of Harper's, proposed a great

dinner for him in celebration of his grand maturity.  Clemens would have

preferred a small assembly in some snug place, with only his oldest and

closest friends.  Colonel Harvey had a different view.  He had given a

small, choice dinner to Mark Twain on his sixty-seventh birthday; now it

must be something really worth while--something to outrank any former

literary gathering.  In order not to conflict with Thanksgiving holidays,

the 5th of December was selected as the date.  On that evening, two

hundred American and English men and women of letters assembled in

Delmonico's great banquet-hall to do honor to their chief.  What an

occasion it was!  The tables of gay diners and among them Mark Twain, his

snow-white hair a gleaming beacon for every eye.  Then, by and by,

presented by William Dean Howells, he rose to speak.  Instantly the

brilliant throng was on its feet, a shouting billow of life, the white

handkerchiefs flying foam-like on its crest.  It was a supreme moment!

The greatest one of them all hailed by their applause as he scaled the

mountaintop.



Never did Mark Twain deliver a more perfect address than he gave that

night.  He began with the beginning, the meagerness of that little hamlet

that had seen his birth, and sketched it all so quaintly and delightfully

that his hearers laughed and shouted, though there was tenderness under

it, and often the tears were just beneath the surface.  He told of his

habits of life, how he had reached seventy by following a plan of living

that would probably kill anybody else; how, in fact, he believed he had

no valuable habits at all.  Then, at last, came that unforgetable close:



     "Threescore years and ten!



     "It is the scriptural statute of limitations.  After that you owe no

     active duties; for you the strenuous life is over.  You are a time-

     expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: you have served your

     term, well or less well, and you are mustered out.  You are become

     an honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions

     are not for you, nor any bugle-call but "lights out."  You pay the

     time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline, if you prefer--and

     without prejudice--for they are not legally collectable.



     "The previous-engagement plea, which in forty years has cost you so

     many twinges, you can lay aside forever; on this side of the grave

     you will never need it again.  If you shrink at thought of night,

     and winter, and the late homecomings from the banquet and the lights

     and laughter, through the deserted streets--a desolation which would

     not remind you now, as for a generation it did, that your friends

     are sleeping and you must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them,

     but would only remind you that you need not tiptoe, you can never

     disturb them more--if you shrink at the thought of these things you

     need only reply, 'Your invitation honors me and pleases me because

     you still keep me in your remembrance, but I am seventy; seventy,

     and would nestle in the chimney-corner, and smoke my pipe, and read

     my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection, and

     that when you, in your turn, shall arrive at Pier 70 you may step

     aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay your

     course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart.'"



The tears that had been lying in wait were no longer kept back.  If there

were any present who did not let them flow without shame, who did not

shout their applause from throats choked with sobs, they failed to

mention the fact later.



Many of his old friends, one after another, rose to tell their love for

him--Cable, Carnegie, Gilder, and the rest.  Mr. Rogers did not speak,

nor the Reverend Twichell, but they sat at his special table.  Aldrich

could not be there, but wrote a letter.  A group of English authors,

including Alfred Austin, Barrie, Chesterton, Dobson, Doyle, Hardy,

Kipling, Lang, and others, joined in a cable.  Helen Keller wrote:



     "And you are seventy years old?  Or is the report exaggerated, like

     that of your death?  I remember, when I saw you last, at the house

     of dear Mr. Hutton, in Princeton, you said:



     "'If a man is a pessimist before he is forty-eight, he knows too

     much.  If he is an optimist after he is forty-eight, he knows too

     little.'



     "Now we know you are an optimist, and nobody would dare to accuse one

     on the "seven-terraced summit" of knowing little.  So probably you

     are not seventy, after all, but only forty-seven!"



Helen Keller was right.  Mark Twain was never a pessimist in his heart.









LIX.



MARK TWAIN ARRANGES FOR HIS BIOGRAPHY



It was at the beginning of 1906--a little more than a month after the

seventieth-birthday dinner--that the writer of these chapters became

personally associated with Mark Twain.  I had met him before, and from

time to time he had returned a kindly word about some book I had written

and inconsiderately sent him, for he had been my literary hero from

childhood.  Once, indeed, he had allowed me to use some of his letters in

a biography I was writing of Thomas Nast; he had been always an admirer

of the great cartoonist, and the permission was kindness itself.  Before

the seating at the birthday dinner I happened to find myself for a moment

alone with Mark Twain and remembered to thank him in person for the use

of the letters; a day or two later I sent him a copy of the book.  I did

not expect to hear from it again.



It was a little while after this that I was asked to join in a small

private dinner to be given to Mark Twain at the Players, in celebration

of his being made an honorary member of that club--there being at the

time only one other member of this class, Sir Henry Irving.  I was in the

Players a day or two before the event, and David Munro, of "The North

American Review," a man whose gentle and kindly nature made him "David"

to all who knew him, greeted me joyfully, his face full of something he

knew I would wish to hear.



He had been chosen, he said, to propose the Players' dinner to Mark

Twain, and had found him propped up in bed, and beside him a copy of the

Nast book.  I suspect now that David's generous heart prompted Mark Twain

to speak of the book, and that his comment had lost nothing in David's

eager retelling.  But I was too proud and happy to question any feature

of the precious compliment, and Munro--always most happy in making others

happy--found opportunity to repeat it, and even to improve upon it--

usually in the presence of others--several times during the evening.



The Players' dinner to Mark Twain was given on the evening of January 3,

19066, and the picture of it still remains clear to me.  The guests,

assembled around a single table in the private dining-room, did not

exceed twenty-five in number.  Brander Matthews presided, and the

knightly Frank Millet, who would one day go down on the "Titanic," was

there, and Gilder and Munro and David Bispham and Robert Reid, and others

of their kind.  It so happened that my seat was nearly facing the guest

of the evening, who by a custom of the Players is placed at the side and

not at the distant end of the long table.  Regarding him at leisure, I

saw that he seemed to be in full health.  He had an alert, rested look;

his complexion had the tints of a miniature painting.  Lit by the soft

glow of the shaded candles, outlined against the richness of the shadowed

walls, he made a figure of striking beauty.  I could not take my eyes

from it, for it stirred in me the farthest memories.  I saw the interior

of a farm-house sitting-room in the Middle West where I had first heard

the name of Mark Twain, and where night after night a group had gathered

around the evening lamp to hear read aloud the story of the Innocents on

their Holy Land pilgrimage, which to a boy of eight had seemed only a

wonderful poem and fairy-tale.  To Charles Harvey Genung, who sat next to

me, I whispered something of this, and how during the thirty-six years

since then no one had meant to me quite what Mark Twain had meant--in

literature and, indeed, in life.  Now here he was just across the table.

It was a fairy-tale come true.



Genung said: "You should write his life."



It seemed to me no more than a pleasant remark, but he came back to it

again and again, trying to encourage me with the word that Munro had

brought back concerning the biography of Nast.  However, nothing of what

he said had kindled any spark of hope.  I put him off by saying that

certainly some one of longer and closer friendship and larger experience

had been selected for the work.  Then the speaking began, and the matter

went out of my mind.  Later in the evening, when we had left our seats

and were drifting about the table, I found a chance to say a word to our

guest concerning his "Joan of Arc," which I had recently re-read.  To my

happiness, he told me that long-ago incident--the stray leaf from Joan's

life, blown to him by the wind--which had led to his interest in all

literature.  Then presently I was with Genung again and he was still

insisting that I write the life of Mark Twain.  It may have been his

faithful urging, it may have been the quick sympathy kindled by the name

of "Joan of Arc"; whatever it was, in the instant of bidding good-by to

our guest I was prompted to add:



"May I call to see you, Mr. Clemens, some day?"  And something--to this

day I do not know what--prompted him to answer:



"Yes, come soon."



Two days later, by appointment with his secretary, I arrived at 21 Fifth

Avenue, and waited in the library to be summoned to his room.  A few

moments later I was ascending the long stairs, wondering why I had come

on so useless an errand, trying to think up an excuse for having come at

all.



He was propped up in bed--a regal bed, from a dismantled Italian palace--

delving through a copy of "Huckleberry Finn," in search of a paragraph

concerning which some unknown correspondent had inquired.  He pushed the

cigars toward me, commenting amusingly on this correspondent and on

letter-writing in general.  By and by, when there came a lull, I told him

what so many thousands had told him before--what his work had meant to

me, so long ago, and recalled my childish impressions of that large

black-and-gilt book with its wonderful pictures and adventures "The

Innocents Abroad."  Very likely he was willing enough to let me change

the subject presently and thank him for the kindly word which David Munro

had brought.  I do not remember what was his comment, but I suddenly

found myself saying that out of his encouragement had grown a hope

(though certainly it was less), that I might some day undertake a book

about himself.  I expected my errand to end at this point, and his

silence seemed long and ominous.



He said at last that from time to time he had himself written chapters of

his life, but that he had always tired of the work and put it aside.  He

added that he hoped his daughters would one day collect his letters, but

that a biography--a detailed story of a man's life and effort--was

another matter.  I think he added one or two other remarks, then all at

once, turning upon me those piercing agate-blue eyes, he said:



"When would you like to begin?"



There was a dresser, with a large mirror, at the end of the room.  I

happened to catch my reflection in it, and I vividly recollect saying to

it, mentally "This is not true; it is only one of many similar dreams."

But even in a dream one must answer, and I said:



"Whenever you like.  I can begin now."



He was always eager in any new undertaking.



"Very good," he said, "the sooner, then, the better.  Let's begin while

we are in the humor.  The longer you postpone a thing of this kind, the

less likely you are ever to get at it."



This was on Saturday; I asked if Tuesday, January 9, would be too soon to

start.  He agreed that Tuesday would do, and inquired as to my plan of

work.  I suggested bringing a stenographer to make notes of his life-

story as he could recall it, this record to be supplemented by other

material--letters, journals, and what not.  He said:



"I think I should enjoy dictating to a stenographer with some one to

prompt me and act as audience.  The room adjoining this was fitted up for

my study.  My manuscript and notes and private books and many of my

letters are there, and there are a trunkful or two of such things in the

attic.  I seldom use the room myself.  I do my writing and reading in

bed.  I will turn that room over to you for this work.  Whatever you need

will be brought to you.  We can have the dictations here in the morning,

and you can put in the rest of the day to suit yourself.  You can have a

key and come and go as you please."



That was always his way.  He did nothing by halves.  He got up and showed

me the warm luxury of the study, with its mass of material--disordered,

but priceless.



I have no distinct recollections of how I came away, but presently, back

at the Players, I was confiding the matter to Charles Harvey Genung, who

said he was not surprised; but I think he was.









LX.



WORKING WITH MARK TWAIN



It was true, after all; and on Tuesday morning, January 9, 1906, I was on

hand with a capable stenographer, ready to begin.  Clemens, meantime, had

developed a new idea: he would like to add, he said, the new dictations

to his former beginnings, completing an autobiography which was to be

laid away and remain unpublished for a hundred years.  He would pay the

stenographer himself, and own the notes, allowing me, of course, free use

of them as material for my book.  He did not believe that he could follow

the story of his life in its order of dates, but would find it necessary

to wander around, picking up the thread as memory or fancy prompted.  I

could suggest subjects and ask questions.  I assented to everything, and

we set to work immediately.



As on my former visit, he was in bed when we arrived, though clad now in

a rich Persian dressing gown, and propped against great, snowy pillows.

A small table beside him held his pipes, cigars, papers, also a reading-

lamp, the soft light of which brought out his brilliant coloring and the

gleam of his snowy hair.  There was daylight, too, but it was dull winter

daylight, from the north, while the walls of the room were a deep,

unreflecting red.



He began that morning with some memories of the Comstock mine; then he

dropped back to his childhood, closing at last with some comment on

matters quite recent.  How delightful it was--his quaint, unhurried

fashion of speech, the unconscious habits of his delicate hands, the play

of his features as his fancies and phrases passed through his mind and

were accepted or put aside.  We were watching one of the great literary

creators of his time in the very process of his architecture.  Time did

not count.  When he finished, at last, we were all amazed to find that

more than two hours had slipped away.



"And how much I have enjoyed it," he said.  "It is the ideal plan for

this kind of work.  Narrative writing is always disappointing.  The

moment you pick up a pen you begin to lose the spontaneity of the

personal relation, which contains the very essence of interest.  With

short-hand dictation one can talk as if he were at his own dinner-table

always an inspiring place.  I expect to dictate all the rest of my life,

if you good people are willing to come and listen to it."



The dictations thus begun continued steadily from week to week, with

increasing charm.  We never knew what he was going to talk about, and it

was seldom that he knew until the moment of beginning.  But it was always

fascinating, and I felt myself the most fortunate biographer in the

world, as indeed I was.



It was not all smooth sailing, however.  In the course of time I began to

realize that these marvelous dictated chapters were not altogether

history, but were often partly, or even entirely, imaginary.  The creator

of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn had been embroidering old incidents or

inventing new ones too long to stick to history now, to be able to

separate the romance in his mind from the reality of the past.  Also, his

memory of personal events had become inaccurate.  He realized this, and

once said, in his whimsical, gentle way:



     "When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened

     or not; but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the

     latter."



Yet it was his constant purpose to stick to fact, and especially did he

make no effort to put himself in a good light.  Indeed, if you wanted to

know the worst of Mark Twain you had only to ask him for it.  He would

give it to the last syllable, and he would improve upon it and pile up

his sins, and sometimes the sins of others, without stint.  Certainly the

dictations were precious, for they revealed character as nothing else

could; but as material for history they often failed to stand the test of

the documents in the next room--the letters, notebooks, agreements, and

the like--from which I was gradually rebuilding the structure of the

years.



In the talks that we usually had when the dictations were ended and the

stenographer had gone I got much that was of great value.  It was then

that I usually made those inquiries which we had planned in the

beginning, and his answers, coming quickly and without reflection, gave

imagination less play.  Sometimes he would touch some point of special

interest and walk up and down, philosophizing, or commenting upon things

in general, in a manner not always complimentary to humanity and its

progress.



I seldom asked him a question during the dictation--or interrupted in any

way, though he had asked me to stop him when I found him repeating or

contradicting himself, or misstating some fact known to me.  At first I

lacked the courage to point out a mistake at the moment, and cautiously

mentioned the matter when he had finished.  Then he would be likely to

say:



     "Why didn't you stop me?  Why did you let me go on making a donkey

     of myself when you could have saved me?"



So then I used to take the risk of getting struck by lightning, and

nearly always stopped him in time.  But if it happened that I upset his

thought, the thunderbolt was apt to fly.  He would say:



     "Now you've knocked everything out of my head."



Then, of course, I was sorry and apologized, and in a moment the sky was

clear again.  There was generally a humorous complexion to the

dictations, whatever the subject.  Humor was his natural breath of life,

and rarely absent.



Perhaps I should have said sooner that he smoked continuously during the

dictations.  His cigars were of that delicious fragrance which belongs to

domestic tobacco.  They were strong and inexpensive, and it was only his

early training that made him prefer them.  Admiring friends used to send

him costly, imported cigars, but he rarely touched them, and they were

smoked by visitors.  He often smoked a pipe, and preferred it to be old

and violent.  Once when he had bought a new, expensive briar-root, he

handed it to me, saying:



"I'd like to have you smoke that a year or two, and when it gets so you

can't stand it, maybe it will suit me."









LXI.



DICTATIONS AT DUBLIN, N. H.



Following his birthday dinner, Mark Twain had become once more the "Belle

of New York," and in a larger way than ever before.  An editorial in the

"Evening Mail" referred to him as a kind of joint Aristides, Solon, and

Themistocles of the American metropolis, and added:



     "Things have reached a point where, if Mark Twain is not at a public

     meeting or banquet, he is expected to console it with one of his

     inimitable letters of advice and encouragement."



He loved the excitement of it, and it no longer seemed to wear upon him.

Scarcely an evening passed that he did not go out to some dinner or

gathering where he had promised to speak.  In April, for the benefit of

the Robert Fulton Society, he delivered his farewell lecture--the last

lecture, he said, where any one would have to pay to hear him.  It was at

Carnegie Hall, and the great place was jammed.  As he stood before that

vast, shouting audience, I wondered if he was remembering that night,

forty years before in San Francisco, when his lecture career had begun.

We hoped he might speak of it, but he did not do so.



In May the dictations were transferred to Dublin, New Hampshire, to the

long veranda of the Upton House, on the Monadnock slope.  He wished to

continue our work, he said; so the stenographer and myself were presently

located in the village, and drove out each morning, to sit facing one of

the rarest views in all New England, while he talked of everything and

anything that memory or fancy suggested.  We had begun in his bedroom,

but the glorious outside was too compelling.



The long veranda was ideal.  He was generally ready when we arrived, a

luminous figure in white flannels, pacing up and down before a background

of sky and forest, blue lake, and distant hills.  When it stormed we

would go inside to a bright fire.  The dictation ended, he would ask his

secretary to play the orchestrelle, which at great expense had been

freighted up from New York.  In that high situation, the fire and the

music and the stormbeat seemed to lift us very far indeed from reality.

Certain symphonies by Beethoven, an impromptu by Schubert, and a nocturne

by Chopin were the selections he cared for most,[12] though in certain

moods he asked, for the Scotch melodies.



There was a good deal of social life in Dublin, but, the dictations were

seldom interrupted.  He became lonely, now and then, and paid a brief

visit to New York, or to Mr. Rogers in Fairhaven, but he always returned

gladly, for he liked the rest and quiet, and the dictations gave him

employment.  A part of his entertainment was a trio of kittens which he

had rented for the summer--rented because then they would not lose

ownership and would find home and protection in the fall.  He named the

kittens Sackcloth and Ashes--Sackcloth being a black-and-white kit, and

Ashes a joint name owned by the two others, who were gray and exactly

alike.  All summer long these merry little creatures played up and down

the wide veranda, or chased butterflies and grasshoppers down the clover

slope, offering Mark Twain never-ending amusement.  He loved to see them

spring into the air after some insect, miss it, tumble back, and quickly

jump up again with a surprised and disappointed expression.



In spite of his resolve not to print any of his autobiography until he

had been dead a hundred years, he was persuaded during the summer to

allow certain chapters of it to be published in "The North American

Review."  With the price received, thirty thousand dollars, he announced

he was going to build himself a country home at Redding, Connecticut, on

land already purchased there, near a small country place of my own.  He

wished to have a fixed place to go each summer, he said, and his thought

was to call it "Autobiography House."



[12] His special favorites were Schubert's Op. 142, part 2, and Chopin's

Op. 37, part 2.









LXII



A NEW ERA OF BILLIARDS



With the return to New York I began a period of closer association with

Mark Twain.  Up to that time our relations had been chiefly of a literary

nature.  They now became personal as well.



It happened in this way: Mark Twain had never outgrown his love for the

game of billiards, though he had not owned a table since the closing of

the Hartford house, fifteen years before.  Mrs. Henry Rogers had proposed

to present him with a table for Christmas, but when he heard of the plan,

boylike, he could not wait, and hinted that if he had the table "right

now" he could begin to use it sooner.  So the table came--a handsome

combination affair, suitable to all games--and was set in place.  That

morning when the dictation ended he said:



"Have you any special place to lunch, to-day?"



I replied that I had not.



"Lunch here," he said, "and we'll try the new billiard-table."



I acknowledged that I had never played more than a few games of pool, and

those very long ago.



"No matter," he said "the poorer you play the better I shall like it."



So I remained for luncheon, and when it was over we began the first game

ever played on the "Christmas" table.  He taught me a game in which

caroms and pockets both counted, and he gave me heavy odds.  He beat me,

but it was a riotous, rollicking game, the beginning of a closer relation

between us.  We played most of the afternoon, and he suggested that I

"come back in the evening and play some more."  I did so, and the game

lasted till after midnight.  I had beginner's luck--"nigger luck," as he

called it--and it kept him working feverishly to win.  Once when I had

made a great fluke--a carom followed by most of the balls falling into

the pockets, he said:



     "When you pick up that cue this table drips at every pore."



The morning dictations became a secondary interest.  Like a boy, he was

looking forward to the afternoon of play, and it seemed never to come

quickly enough to suit him.  I remained regularly for luncheon, and he

was inclined to cut the courses short that we might the sooner get up-

stairs for billiards.  He did not eat the midday meal himself, but he

would come down and walk about the dining-room, talking steadily that

marvelous, marvelous talk which little by little I trained myself to

remember, though never with complete success.  He was only killing time,

and I remember once, when he had been earnestly discussing some deep

question, he suddenly noticed that the luncheon was ending.



"Now," he said, "we will proceed to more serious matters--it's your--

shot."



My game improved with practice, and he reduced my odds.  He was willing

to be beaten, but not too often.  We kept a record of the games, and he

went to bed happier if the tally-sheet showed a balance in his favor.



He was not an even-tempered player.  When the game went steadily against

him he was likely to become critical, even fault-finding, in his remarks.

Then presently he would be seized with remorse and become over-gentle and

attentive, placing the balls as I knocked them into the pockets, hurrying

to render this service.  I wished he would not do it.  It distressed me

that he should humble himself.  I was willing that he should lose his

temper, that he should be even harsh if he felt so inclined--his age, his

position, his genius gave him special privileges.  Yet I am glad, as I

remember it now, that the other side revealed itself, for it completes

the sum of his humanity.  Once in a burst of exasperation he made such an

onslaught on the balls that he landed a couple of them on the floor.  I

gathered them up and we went on playing as if nothing had happened, only

he was very gentle and sweet, like a summer meadow when the storm has

passed by.  Presently he said:



     "This is a most amusing game.  When you play badly it amuses me, and

     when I play badly and lose my temper it certainly must amuse you."



It was but natural that friendship should grow under such conditions.

The disparity of our ages and gifts no longer mattered.  The pleasant

land of play is a democracy where such things do not count.



We celebrated his seventy-first birthday by playing billiards all day.

He invented a new game for the occasion, and added a new rule for it with

almost every shot.  It happened that no other member of the family was at

home--ill-health had banished every one, even the secretary.  Flowers,

telegrams, and congratulations came, and a string of callers.  He saw no

one but a few intimate friends.



We were entirely alone for dinner, and I felt the great honor of being

his only guest on such an occasion.  On that night, a year before, the

flower of his profession had assembled to do him honor.  Once between the

courses, when he rose, as was his habit, to walk about, he wandered into

the drawing-room, and, seating himself at the orchestrelle, began to play

the beautiful "Flower Song" from Faust.  It was a thing I had not seen

him do before, and I never saw him do it again.

He was in his loveliest humor all that day and evening, and at night when

we stopped playing he said:



"I have never had a pleasanter day at this game."



I answered: "I hope ten years from to-night we shall be playing it."



"Yes," he said, "still playing the best game on earth."









LXIII.



LIVING WITH MARK TWAIN



I accompanied him on a trip he made to Washington in the interest of

copyright.  Speaker "Uncle Joe" Cannon lent us his private room in the

Capitol, and there all one afternoon Mark Twain received Congressmen, and

in an atmosphere blue with cigar-smoke preached the gospel of copyright.

It was a historic trip, and for me an eventful one, for it was on the way

back to New York that Mark Twain suggested that I take up residence in

his home.  There was a room going to waste, he said, and I would be

handier for the early and late billiard sessions.  I accepted, of course.



Looking back, now, I see pretty vividly three quite distinct pictures.

One of them, the rich, red interior of the billiard-room, with the

brilliant green square in the center on which the gay balls are rolling,

and bent over it his luminous white figure in the instant of play.  Then

there is the long lighted drawing-room, with the same figure stretched on

a couch in the corner, drowsily smoking while the rich organ tones summon

for him scenes and faces which the others do not see.  Sometimes he rose,

pacing the length of the parlors, but oftener he lay among the cushions,

the light flooding his white hair and dress, heightening his brilliant

coloring.  He had taken up the fashion of wearing white altogether at

this time.  Black, he said, reminded him of his funerals.



The third picture is that of the dinner-table--always beautifully laid,

and always a shrine of wisdom when he was there.  He did not always talk,

but he often did, and I see him clearest, his face alive with interest,

presenting some new angle of thought in his vivid, inimitable speech.

These are pictures that will not fade from my memory.  How I wish the

marvelous things he said were like them!  I preserved as much of them as

I could, and in time trained myself to recall portions of his exact

phrasing.  But even so they seemed never quite as he had said them.  They

lacked the breath of his personality.  His dinner-table talk was likely

to be political, scientific, philosophic.  He often discussed aspects of

astronomy, which was a passion with him.  I could succeed better with the

billiard-room talk--that was likely to be reminiscent, full of anecdotes.

I kept a pad on the window-sill, and made notes while he was playing.  At

one time he told me of his dreams.



"There is never a month passes," he said, "that I do not dream of being

in reduced circumstances and obliged to go back to the river to earn a

living.  Usually in my dream I am just about to start into a black shadow

without being able to tell whether it is Selma Bluff, or Hat Island, or

only a black wall of night.  Another dream I have is being compelled to

go back to the lecture platform.  In it I am always getting up before an

audience, with nothing to say, trying to be funny, trying to make the

audience laugh, realizing I am only making silly jokes.  Then the

audience realizes it, and pretty soon they commence to get up and leave.

That dream always ends by my standing there in the semi-darkness talking

to an empty house."



He did not return to Dublin the next summer, but took a house at Tuxedo,

nearer New York.  I did not go there with him, for in the spring it was

agreed that I should make a pilgrimage to the Mississippi and the Pacific

coast to see those few still remaining who had known Mark Twain in his

youth.  John Briggs was alive, also Horace Bixby, "Joe" Goodman, Steve

and Jim Gillis, and there were a few others.



It was a trip taken none too soon.  John Briggs, a gentle-hearted old man

who sat by his fire and through one afternoon told me of the happy days

along the river-front from the cave to Holliday's Hill, did not reach the

end of the year.  Horace Bixby, at eighty-one, was still young, and

piloting a government snag-boat.  Neither was Joseph Goodman old, by any

means, but Jim Gillis was near his end, and Steve Gillis was an invalid,

who said:



"Tell Sam I'm going to die pretty soon, but that I love him; that I've

loved him all my life, and I'll love him till I die."









LXIV.



A DEGREE FROM OXFORD



On my return I found Mark Twain elated: he had been invited to England to

receive the degree of Literary Doctor from the Oxford University.  It is

the highest scholastic honorary degree; and to come back, as I had, from

following the early wanderings of the barefoot truant of Hannibal, only

to find him about to be officially knighted by the world's most venerable

institution of learning, seemed rather the most surprising chapter even

of his marvelous fairy-tale.  If Tom Sawyer had owned the magic wand, he

hardly could have produced anything as startling as that.



He sailed on the 8th of June, 1907, exactly forty years from the day he

had sailed on the "Quaker City" to win his greater fame.  I did not

accompany him.  He took with him a secretary to make notes, and my

affairs held me in America.  He was absent six weeks, and no attentions

that England had ever paid him before could compare with her lavish

welcome during this visit.  His reception was really national.  He was

banqueted by the greatest clubs of London, he was received with special

favor at the King's garden party, he traveled by a royal train, crowds

gathering everywhere to see him pass.  At Oxford when he appeared on the

street the name Mark Twain ran up and down like a cry of fire, and the

people came running.  When he appeared on the stage at the Sheldonian

Theater to receive his degree, clad in his doctor's robe of scarlet and

gray, there arose a great tumult--the shouting of the undergraduates for

the boy who had been Tom Sawyer and had played with Huckleberry Finn.

The papers next day spoke of his reception as a "cyclone," surpassing any

other welcome, though Rudyard Kipling was one of those who received

degrees on that occasion, and General Booth and Whitelaw Reid, and other

famous men.



Perhaps the most distinguished social honor paid to Mark Twain at this

time was the dinner given him by the staff of London "Punch," in the

historic "Punch" editorial rooms on Bouverie Street.  No other foreigner

had ever been invited to that sacred board, where Thackeray had sat, and

Douglas Jerrold and others of the great departed.  "Punch" had already

saluted him with a front-page cartoon, and at this dinner the original

drawing was presented to him by the editor's little daughter, Joy Agnew.



The Oxford degree, and the splendid homage paid him by England at large,

became, as it were, the crowning episode of Mark Twain's career.  I think

he realized this, although he did not speak of it--indeed, he had very

little to say of the whole matter.  I telephoned a greeting when I knew

that he had arrived in New York, and was summoned to "come down and play

billiards."  I confess I went with a good deal of awe, prepared to sit in

silence and listen to the tale of the returning hero.  But when I arrived

he was already in the billiard-room, knocking the balls about--his coat

off, for it was a hot night.  As I entered, he said:



     "Get your cue--I've been inventing a new game."



That was all.  The pageant was over, the curtain was rung down.  Business

was resumed at the old stand.









LXV.



THE REMOVAL TO REDDING



There followed another winter during which I was much with Mark Twain,

though a part of it he spent with Mr. Rogers in Bermuda, that pretty

island resort which both men loved.  Then came spring again, and June,

and with it Mark Twain's removal to his newly built home, "Stormfield,"

at Redding, Connecticut.



The house had been under construction for a year.  He had never seen it--

never even seen the land I had bought for him.  He even preferred not to

look at any plans or ideas for decoration.



"When the house is finished and furnished, and the cat is purring on the

hearth, it will be time enough for me to see it," he had said more than

once.



He had only specified that the rooms should be large and that the

billiard-room should be red.  His billiard-rooms thus far had been of

that color, and their memory was associated in his mind with enjoyment

and comfort.  He detested details of preparation, and then, too, he

looked forward to the dramatic surprise of walking into a home that had

been conjured into existence as with a word.



It was the 18th of June, 1908, that he finally took possession.  The

Fifth Avenue house was not dismantled, for it was the plan then to use

Stormfield only as a summer place.  The servants, however, with one

exception, had been transferred to Redding, and Mark Twain and I remained

alone, though not lonely, in the city house; playing billiards most of

the time, and being as hilarious as we pleased, for there was nobody to

disturb.  I think he hardly mentioned the new home during that time.  He

had never seen even a photograph of the place, and I confess I had

moments of anxiety, for I had selected the site and had been more or less

concerned otherwise, though John Howells was wholly responsible for the

building.  I did not really worry, for I knew how beautiful and peaceful

it all was.



The morning of the 18th was bright and sunny and cool.  Mark Twain was up

and shaved by six o'clock in order to be in time.  The train did not

leave until four in the afternoon, but our last billiards in town must

begin early and suffer no interruption.  We were still playing when,

about three, word was brought up that the cab was waiting.  Arrived at

the station, a group collected, reporters and others, to speed him to his

new home.  Some of the reporters came along.



The scenery was at its best that day, and he spoke of it approvingly.

The hour and a half required to cover the sixty miles' distance seemed

short.  The train porters came to carry out the bags.  He drew from his

pocket a great handful of silver.



"Give them something," he said; "give everybody liberally that does any

service."



There was a sort of open-air reception in waiting--a varied assemblage of

vehicles festooned with flowers had gathered to offer gallant country

welcome.  It was a perfect June evening, still and dream-like; there

seemed a spell of silence on everything.  The people did not cheer--they

smiled and waved to the white figure, and he smiled and waved reply, but

there was no noise.  It was like a scene in a cinema.



His carriage led the way on the three-mile drive to the house on the

hilltop, and the floral procession fell in behind.  Hillsides were green,

fields were white with daisies, dogwood and laurel shone among the trees.

He was very quiet as we drove along.  Once, with gentle humor, looking

out over a white daisy-field, he said:



     "That is buckwheat.  I always recognize buckwheat when I see it.  I

     wish I knew as much about other things as I know about buckwheat."



The clear-running brooks, a swift-flowing river, a tumbling cascade where

we climbed a hill, all came in for his approval--then we were at the lane

that led to his new home, and the procession behind dropped away.  The

carriage ascended still higher, and a view opened across the Saugatuck

Valley, with its nestling village and church-spire and farmhouses, and

beyond them the distant hills.  Then came the house--simple in design,

but beautiful--an Italian villa, such as he had known in Florence,

adapted here to American climate and needs.



At the entrance his domestic staff waited to greet him, and presently he

stepped across the threshold and stood in his own home for the first time

in seventeen years.  Nothing was lacking--it was as finished, as

completely furnished, as if he had occupied it a lifetime.  No one spoke

immediately, but when his eyes had taken in the harmony of the place,

with its restful, home-like comfort, and followed through the open French

windows to the distant vista of treetops and farmsides and blue hills,

he said, very gently:



     "How beautiful it all is!  I did not think it could be as beautiful

     as this."  And later, when he had seen all of the apartments: "It is

     a perfect house--perfect, so far as I can see, in every detail.  It

     might have been here always."



There were guests that first evening--a small home dinner-party--and a

little later at the foot of the garden some fireworks were set off by

neighbors inspired by Dan Beard, who had recently located in Redding.

Mark Twain, watching the rockets that announced his arrival, said,

gently:



     "I wonder why they go to so much trouble for me.  I never go to any

     trouble for anybody."



The evening closed with billiards, hilarious games, and when at midnight

the cues were set in the rack no one could say that Mark Twain's first

day in his new home had not been a happy one.









LXVI



LIFE AT STORMFIELD



Mark Twain loved Stormfield.  Almost immediately he gave up the idea of

going back to New York for the winter, and I think he never entered the

Fifth Avenue house again.  The quiet and undisturbed comfort of

Stormfield came to him at the right time of life.  His day of being the

"Belle of New York" was over.  Now and then he attended some great

dinner, but always under protest.  Finally he refused to go at all.  He

had much company during that first summer--old friends, and now and again

young people, of whom he was always fond.  The billiard-room he called

"the aquarium," and a frieze of Bermuda fishes, in gay prints, ran around

the walls.  Each young lady visitor was allowed to select one of these as

her patron fish and attach her name to it.  Thus, as a member of the

"aquarium club," she was represented in absence.  Of course there were

several cats at Stormfield, and these really owned the premises.  The

kittens scampered about the billiard-table after the balls, even when the

game was in progress, giving all sorts of new angles to the shots.  This

delighted him, and he would not for anything have discommoded or removed

one of those furry hazards.



My own house was a little more than half a mile away, our lands joining,

and daily I went up to visit him--to play billiards or to take a walk

across the fields.  There was a stenographer in the neighborhood, and he

continued his dictations, but not regularly.  He wrote, too, now and

then, and finished the little book called "Is Shakespeare Dead?"



Winter came.  The walks were fewer, and there was even more company; the

house was gay and the billiard games protracted.  In February I made a

trip to Europe and the Mediterranean, to go over some of his ground

there.  Returning in April, I found him somewhat changed.  It was not

that he had grown older, or less full of life, but only less active, less

eager for gay company, and he no longer dictated, or very rarely.  His

daughter Jean, who had been in a health resort, was coming home to act as

his secretary, and this made him very happy.  We resumed our games, our

talks, and our long walks across the fields.  There were few guests, and

we were together most of the day and evening.  How beautiful the memory

of it all is now!  To me, of course, nothing can ever be like it again in

this world.



Mark Twain walked slowly these days.  Early in the summer there appeared

indications of the heart trouble that less than a year later would bring

the end.  His doctor advised diminished smoking, and forbade the old

habit of lightly skipping up and down stairs.  The trouble was with the

heart muscles, and at times there came severe deadly pains in his breast,

but for the most part he did not suffer.  He was allowed the walk,

however, and once I showed him a part of his estate he had not seen

before--a remote cedar hillside.  On the way I pointed out a little

corner of land which earlier he had given me to straighten our division

line.  I told him I was going to build a study on it and call it

"Markland."  I think the name pleased him.  Later he said:



"If you had a place for that extra billiard-table of mine" (the Rogers

table, which had been left in storage in New York), "I would turn it over

to you."



I replied that I could adapt the size of my proposed study to fit the

table, and he said:



"Now that will be very good.  Then when I want exercise I can walk down

and play billiards with you, and when you want exercise you can walk up

and play billiards with me.  You must build that study."



So it was planned, and the work was presently under way.



How many things we talked of!  Life, death, the future--all the things of

which we know so little and love so much to talk about.  Astronomy, as I

have said, was one of his favorite subjects.  Neither of us had any real

knowledge of the matter, which made its great facts all the more awesome.

The thought that the nearest fixed star was twenty-five trillions of

miles away--two hundred and fifty thousand times the distance to our own

remote sun--gave him a sort of splendid thrill.  He would figure out

those appalling measurements of space, covering sheets of paper with his

sums, but he was not a good mathematician, and the answers were generally

wrong.  Comets in particular interested him, and one day he said:



     "I came in with Halley's comet in 1835.  It is coming again next

     year, and I expect to go out with it.  It will be the greatest

     disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet."



He looked so strong, and full of color and vitality.  One could not

believe that his words held a prophecy.  Yet the pains recurred with

increasing frequency and severity; his malady, angina pectoris, was

making progress.  And how bravely he bore it all!  He never complained,

never bewailed.  I have seen the fierce attack crumple him when we were

at billiards, but he would insist on playing in his turn, bowed, his face

white, his hand digging at his breast.









LXVII



THE DEATH OF JEAN



Clara Clemens was married that autumn to Ossip Gabrilowitsch, the Russian

pianist, and presently sailed for Europe, where they would make their

home.  Jean Clemens was now head of the house, and what with her various

duties and poor health, her burden was too heavy.  She had a passion for

animal life of every kind, and in some farm-buildings at one corner of

the estate had set up quite an establishment of chickens and domestic

animals.  She was fond of giving these her personal attention, and this,

with her house direction and secretarial work, gave her little time for

rest.  I tried to relieve her of a share of the secretarial work, but she

was ambitious and faithful.  Still, her condition did not seem critical.



I stayed at Stormfield, now, most of the time--nights as well as days--

for the dull weather had come and Mark Twain found the house rather

lonely.  In November he had an impulse to go to Bermuda, and we spent a

month in the warm light of that summer island, returning a week before

the Christmas holidays.  And just then came Mark Twain's last great

tragedy--the death of his daughter Jean.



The holidays had added heavily to Jean's labors.  Out of her generous

heart she had planned gifts for everybody--had hurried to and from the

city for her purchases, and in the loggia set up a beautiful Christmas

tree.  Meantime she had contracted a heavy cold.  Her trouble was

epilepsy, and all this was bad for her.  On the morning of December 24,

she died, suddenly, from the shock of a cold bath.



Below, in the loggia, drenched with tinsel, stood the tree, and heaped

about it the packages of gifts which that day she had meant to open and

put in place.  Nobody had been overlooked.



Jean was taken to Elmira for burial.  Her father, unable to make the

winter journey, remained behind.  Her cousin, Jervis Langdon, came for

her.



It was six in the evening when she went away.  A soft, heavy snow was

falling, and the gloom of the short day was closing in.  There was not

the least noise, the whole world was muffled.  The lanterns shone out the

open door, and at an upper window, the light gleaming on his white hair,

her father watched her going away from him for the last time.  Later he

wrote:



     "From my window I saw the hearse and the carriages wind along the

     road and gradually grow vague and spectral in the falling snow, and

     presently disappear.  Jean was gone out of my life, and would not

     come back any more.  The cousin she had played with when they were

     babies together--he and her beloved old Katy--were conducting her to

     her distant childhood home, where she will lie by her mother's side

     once more, in the company of Susy and Langdon."









LXVIII



DAYS IN BERMUDA



Ten days later Mark Twain returned to Bermuda, accompanied only by a

valet.  He had asked me if we would be willing to close our home for the

winter and come to Stormfield, so that the place might be ready any time

for his return.  We came, of course, for there was no thought other than

for his comfort.  He did not go to a hotel in Bermuda, but to the home of

Vice-Consul Allen, where he had visited before.  The Allens were devoted

to him and gave him such care as no hotel could offer.



Bermuda agreed with Mark Twain, and for a time there he gained in

strength and spirits and recovered much of his old manner.  He wrote me

almost daily, generally with good reports of his health and doings, and

with playful counsel and suggestions.  Then, by and by, he did not write

with his own hand, but through his newly appointed "secretary," Mr.

Allen's young daughter, Helen, of whom he was very fond.  The letters,

however, were still gay.  Once he said:



     "While the matter is in my mind I will remark that if you ever send

     me another letter which is not paged at the top I will write you

     with my own hand, so that I may use in utter freedom and without

     embarrassment the kind of words which alone can describe such a

     criminal."



He had made no mention so far of the pains in his breast, but near the

end of March he wrote that he was coming home, if the breast pains did

not "mend their ways pretty considerable.  I do not want to die here," he

said.  "I am growing more and more particular about the place."  A week

later brought another alarming letter, also one from Mr. Allen, who

frankly stated that matters had become very serious indeed.  I went to

New York and sailed the next morning, cabling the Gabrilowitsches to come

without delay.



I sent no word to Bermuda that I was coming, and when I arrived he was

not expecting me.



"Why," he said, holding out his hand, "you did not tell us you were

coming?"



"No," I said, "it is rather sudden.  I didn't quite like the sound of

your last letters."



"But those were not serious.  You shouldn't have come on my account."



I said then that I had come on my own account, that I had felt the need

of recreation, and had decided to run down and come home with him.



"That's--very--good," he said, in his slow, gentle fashion.  "Wow I'm

glad to see you."



His breakfast came in and he ate with appetite.  I had thought him thin

and pale, at first sight, but his color had come back now, and his eyes

were bright.  He told me of the fierce attacks of the pain, and how he

had been given hypodermic injections which he amusingly termed "hypnotic

injunctions" and "the sub-cutaneous."  From Mr. and Mrs. Allen I learned

how slender had been his chances, and how uncertain were the days ahead.

Mr. Allen had already engaged passage home for April 12th.



He seemed so little like a man whose days were numbered.  On the

afternoon of my arrival we drove out, as we had done on our former visit,

and he discussed some of the old subjects in quite the old way.  I had

sold for him, for six thousand dollars, the farm where Jean had kept her

animals, and he wished to use the money in erecting for her some sort of

memorial.  He agreed that a building to hold the library which he had

already donated to the town of Redding would be appropriate and useful.

He asked me to write at once to his lawyer and have the matter arranged.



We did not drive out again.  The pains held off for several days, and he

was gay and went out on the lawn, but most of the time he sat propped up

in bed, reading and smoking.  When I looked at him there, so full of

vigor and the joy of life, I could not persuade myself that he would not

outlive us all.



He had written very little in Bermuda--his last work being a chapter of

amusing "Advice"--for me, as he confessed--what I was to do upon reaching

the gate of which St. Peter is said to keep the key.  As it is the last

writing he ever did, and because it is characteristic, one or two

paragraphs may be admitted here:



     "Upon arrival do not speak to St. Peter until spoken to.  It is not

     your place to begin.



     "Do not begin any remark with "Say."



     "When applying for a ticket avoid trying to make conversation.  If

     you must talk, let the weather alone. . .



     "You can ask him for his autograph--there is no harm in that--but be

     careful and don't remark that it is one of the penalties of

     greatness.  He has heard that before."



There were several pages of this counsel.









LXIX.



THE RETURN TO REDDING



I spent most of each day with him, merely sitting by the bed and reading.

I noticed when he slept that his breathing was difficult, and I could see

that he did not improve, but often he was gay and liked the entire family

to gather about and be merry.  It was only a few days before we sailed

that the severe attacks returned.  Then followed bad nights; but respite

came, and we sailed on the 12th, as arranged.  The Allen home stands on

the water, and Mr. Allen had chartered a tug to take us to the ship.  We

were obliged to start early, and the fresh morning breeze was

stimulating.  Mark Twain seemed in good spirits when we reached the

"Oceana," which was to take him home.



As long as I remember anything I shall remember the forty-eight hours of

that homeward voyage.  He was comfortable at first, and then we ran into

the humid, oppressive air of the Gulf Stream, and he could not breathe.

It seemed to me that the end might come at any moment, and this thought

was in his own mind, but he had no dread, and his sense of humor did not

fail.  Once when the ship rolled and his hat fell from the hook and made

the circuit of the cabin floor, he said:



     "The ship is passing the hat."



I had been instructed in the use of the hypodermic needle, and from time

to time gave him the "hypnotic injunction," as he still called it.  But

it did not afford him entire relief.  He could remain in no position for

any length of time.  Yet he never complained and thought only of the

trouble he might be making.  Once he said:



     "I am sorry for you, Paine, but I can't help it--I can't hurry this

     dying business."



And a little later:



     "Oh, it is such a mystery, and it takes so long!"



Relatives, physicians, and news-gatherers were at the dock to welcome

him.  Revived by the cool, fresh air of the North, he had slept for

several hours and was seemingly much better.  A special compartment on

the same train that had taken us first to Redding took us there now, his

physicians in attendance.  He did not seem to mind the trip or the drive

home.



As we turned into the lane that led to Stormfield he said:



"Can we see where you have built your billiard-room?"



The gable of the new study showed among the trees, and I pointed it out

to him.



"It looks quite imposing," he said.



Arriving at Stormfield, he stepped, unassisted, from the carriage to

greet the members of the household, and with all his old courtliness

offered each his hand.  Then in a canvas chair we had brought we carried

him up-stairs to his room--the big, beautiful room that looked out to the

sunset hills.  This was Thursday evening, April 14, 1910.









LXX.



THE CLOSE OF A GREAT LIFE



Mark Twain lived just a week from that day and hour.  For a time he

seemed full of life, talking freely, and suffering little.  Clara and

Ossip Gabrilowitsch arrived on Saturday and found him cheerful, quite

like himself.  At intervals he read.  "Suetonius" and "Carlyle" lay on

the bed beside him, and he would pick them up and read a page or a

paragraph.  Sometimes when I saw him thus--the high color still in his

face, the clear light in his eyes'--I said: "It is not reality.  He is

not going to die."



But by Wednesday of the following week it was evident that the end was

near.  We did not know it then, but the mysterious messenger of his birth

year, Halley's comet, became visible that night in the sky.[13]



On Thursday morning, the 21st, his mind was still fairly clear, and he

read a little from one of the volumes on his bed.  By Clara he sent word

that he wished to see me, and when I came in he spoke of two unfinished

manuscripts which he wished me to "throw away," as he briefly expressed

it, for his words were few, now, and uncertain.  I assured him that I

would attend to the matter and he pressed my hand.  It was his last word

to me.  During the afternoon, while Clara stood by him, he sank into a

doze, and from it passed into a deeper slumber and did not heed us any

more.



Through that peaceful spring afternoon the life-wave ebbed lower and

lower.  It was about half-past six, and the sun lay just on the horizon,

when Dr. Quintard noticed that the breathing, which had gradually become

more subdued, broke a little.  There was no suggestion of any struggle.

The noble head turned a little to one side, there was a fluttering sigh,

and the breath that had been unceasing for seventy-four tumultuous years

had stopped forever.



In the Brick Church, New York, Mark Twain--dressed in the white he loved

so well--lay, with the nobility of death upon him, while a multitude of

those who loved him passed by and looked at his face for the last time.

Flowers in profusion were banked about him, but on the casket lay a

single wreath which Dan Beard and his wife had woven from the laurel

which grows on Stormfield hill.  He was never more beautiful than as he

lay there, and it was an impressive scene to see those thousands file by,

regard him for a moment, gravely, thoughtfully, and pass on.  All sorts

were there, rich and poor; some crossed themselves, some saluted, some

paused a little to take a closer look.



That night we went with him to Elmira, and next day he lay in those

stately parlors that had seen his wedding-day, and where little Langdon

and Susy had lain, and Mrs. Clemens, and then Jean, only a little while

before.



The worn-out body had reached its journey's end; but his spirit had never

grown old, and to-day, still young, it continues to cheer and comfort a

tired world.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Boys' Life of Mark Twain,

by Albert Bigelow Paine













MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY



By Albert Bigelow Paine









[NOTE: Six individual volumes of this work have been previously published

by The Gutenberg Project in the following list; this 3mb text file

includes all six.  D.W.]



Mark Twain, A Biography 1907-1910, by Albert Paine[mt6bg10.txt]2987

Mark Twain, A Biography 1900-1907, by Albert Paine[mt5bg10.txt]2986

Mark Twain, A Biography 1886-1900, by Albert Paine[mt4bg10.txt]2985

Mark Twain, A Biography 1875-1886, by Albert Paine[mt3bg10.txt]2984

Mark Twain, A Biography 1866-1875, by Albert Paine[mt2bg10.txt]2983

Mark Twain, A Biography 1835-1866, by Albert Paine[mt1bg10.txt]2982







VOLUME I, Part 1: 1835-1866







                               MARK TWAIN

                              A BIOGRAPHY

                   THE PERSONAL AND LITERARY LIFE OF

                        SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS

                                   BY

                          ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE







                                   TO

                      CLARA CLEMENS GABRILOWITSCH

                        WHO STEADILY UPHELD THE

                       AUTHOR'S PURPOSE TO WRITE

                     HISTORY RATHER THAN EULOGY AS

                     THE STORY OF HER FATHER'S LIFE







                           AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT



Dear William Dean Howells, Joseph Hopkins Twichell, Joseph T.  Goodman,

and other old friends of Mark Twain:



I cannot let these volumes go to press without some grateful word to you

who have helped me during the six years and more that have gone to their

making.



First, I want to confess how I have envied you your association with Mark

Twain in those days when you and he "went gipsying, a long time ago."

Next, I want to express my wonder at your willingness to give me so

unstintedly from your precious letters and memories, when it is in the

nature of man to hoard such treasures, for himself and for those who

follow him.  And, lastly, I want to tell you that I do not envy you so

much, any more, for in these chapters, one after another, through your

grace, I have gone gipsying with you all.  Neither do I wonder now, for I

have come to know that out of your love for him grew that greater

unselfishness (or divine selfishness, as he himself might have termed

it), and that nothing short of the fullest you could do for his memory

would have contented your hearts.



My gratitude is measureless; and it is world-wide, for there is no land

so distant that it does not contain some one who has eagerly contributed

to the story.  Only, I seem so poorly able to put my thanks into words.



Albert Bigelow Paine.













                             PREFATORY NOTE



Certain happenings as recorded in this work will be found to differ

materially from the same incidents and episodes as set down in the

writings of Mr. Clemens himself.  Mark Twain's spirit was built of the

very fabric of truth, so far as moral intent was concerned, but in his

earlier autobiographical writings--and most of his earlier writings were

autobiographical--he made no real pretense to accuracy of time, place, or

circumstance--seeking, as he said, "only to tell a good story"--while in

later years an ever-vivid imagination and a capricious memory made

history difficult, even when, as in his so-called "Autobiography," his

effort was in the direction of fact.



"When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or

not," he once said, quaintly, "but I am getting old, and soon I shall

remember only the latter."



The reader may be assured, where discrepancies occur, that the writer of

this memoir has obtained his data from direct and positive sources:

letters, diaries, accountbooks, or other immediate memoranda; also from

the concurring testimony of eye-witnesses, supported by a unity of

circumstance and conditions, and not from hearsay or vagrant printed

items.











                               MARK TWAIN



                              A BIOGRAPHY





I



ANCESTORS



On page 492 of the old volume of Suetonius, which Mark Twain read until

his very last day, there is a reference to one Flavius Clemens, a man of

wide repute "for his want of energy," and in a marginal note he has

written:



"I guess this is where our line starts."



It was like him to write that.  It spoke in his whimsical fashion the

attitude of humility, the ready acknowledgment of shortcoming, which was

his chief characteristic and made him lovable--in his personality and in

his work.



Historically, we need not accept this identity of the Clemens ancestry.

The name itself has a kindly meaning, and was not an uncommon one in

Rome.  There was an early pope by that name, and it appears now and again

in the annals of the Middle Ages.  More lately there was a Gregory

Clemens, an English landowner who became a member of Parliament under

Cromwell and signed the death-warrant of Charles I.  Afterward he was

tried as a regicide, his estates were confiscated, and his head was

exposed on a pole on the top of Westminster Hall.



Tradition says that the family of Gregory Clemens did not remain in

England, but emigrated to Virginia (or New Jersey), and from them, in

direct line, descended the Virginia Clemenses, including John Marshall

Clemens, the father of Mark Twain.  Perhaps the line could be traced, and

its various steps identified, but, after all, an ancestor more or less

need not matter when it is the story of a descendant that is to be

written.



Of Mark Twain's immediate forebears, however, there is something to be

said.  His paternal grandfather, whose name also was Samuel, was a man of

culture and literary taste.  In 1797 he married a Virginia girl, Pamela

Goggin; and of their five children John Marshall Clemens, born August 11,

1798, was the eldest--becoming male head of the family at the age of

seven, when his father was accidentally killed at a house-raising.  The

family was not a poor one, but the boy grew up with a taste for work.  As

a youth he became a clerk in an iron manufactory, at Lynchburg, and

doubtless studied at night.  At all events, he acquired an education, but

injured his health in the mean time, and somewhat later, with his mother

and the younger children, removed to Adair County, Kentucky, where the

widow presently married a sweetheart of her girlhood, one Simon Hancock,

a good man.  In due course, John Clemens was sent to Columbia, the

countyseat, to study law.  When the living heirs became of age he

administered his father's estate, receiving as his own share three negro

slaves; also a mahogany sideboard, which remains among the Clemens

effects to this day.



This was in 1821.  John Clemens was now a young man of twenty-three,

never very robust, but with a good profession, plenty of resolution, and

a heart full of hope and dreams.  Sober, industrious, and unswervingly

upright, it seemed certain that he must make his mark.  That he was

likely to be somewhat too optimistic, even visionary, was not then

regarded as a misfortune.



It was two years later that he met Jane Lampton; whose mother was a Casey

--a Montgomery-Casey whose father was of the Lamptons (Lambtons) of

Durham, England, and who on her own account was reputed to be the

handsomest girl and the wittiest, as well as the best dancer, in all

Kentucky.  The Montgomeries and the Caseys of Kentucky had been Indian

fighters in the Daniel Boone period, and grandmother Casey, who had been

Jane Montgomery, had worn moccasins in her girlhood, and once saved her

life by jumping a fence and out-running a redskin pursuer.  The

Montgomery and Casey annals were full of blood-curdling adventures, and

there is to-day a Casey County next to Adair, with a Montgomery County

somewhat farther east.  As for the Lamptons, there is an earldom in the

English family, and there were claimants even then in the American

branch.  All these things were worth while in Kentucky, but it was rare

Jane Lampton herself--gay, buoyant, celebrated for her beauty and her

grace; able to dance all night, and all day too, for that matter--that

won the heart of John Marshall Clemens, swept him off his feet almost at

the moment of their meeting.  Many of the characteristics that made Mark

Twain famous were inherited from his mother.  His sense of humor, his

prompt, quaintly spoken philosophy, these were distinctly her

contribution to his fame.  Speaking of her in a later day, he once said:



"She had a sort of ability which is rare in man and hardly existent in

woman--the ability to say a humorous thing with the perfect air of not

knowing it to be humorous."



She bequeathed him this, without doubt; also her delicate complexion; her

wonderful wealth of hair; her small, shapely hands and feet, and the

pleasant drawling speech which gave her wit, and his, a serene and

perfect setting.



It was a one-sided love affair, the brief courtship of Jane Lampton and

John Marshall Clemens.  All her life, Jane Clemens honored her husband,

and while he lived served him loyally; but the choice of her heart had

been a young physician of Lexington with whom she had quarreled, and her

prompt engagement with John Clemens was a matter of temper rather than

tenderness.  She stipulated that the wedding take place at once, and on

May 6, 1823, they were married.  She was then twenty; her husband twenty-

five.  More than sixty years later, when John Clemens had long been dead,

she took a railway journey to a city where there was an Old Settlers'

Convention, because among the names of those attending she had noticed

the name of the lover of her youth.  She meant to humble herself to him

and ask forgiveness after all the years.  She arrived too late; the

convention was over, and he was gone.  Mark Twain once spoke of this, and

added:



"It is as pathetic a romance as any that has crossed the field of my

personal experience in a long lifetime."









II



THE FORTUNES OF JOHN AND JANE CLEMENS



With all his ability and industry, and with the-best of intentions, John

Clemens would seem to have had an unerring faculty for making business

mistakes.  It was his optimistic outlook, no doubt--his absolute

confidence in the prosperity that lay just ahead--which led him from one

unfortunate locality or enterprise to another, as long as he lived.

About a year after his marriage he settled with his young wife in

Gainsborough, Tennessee, a mountain town on the Cumberland River, and

here, in 1825, their first child, a boy, was born.  They named him

Orion--after the constellation, perhaps--though they changed the accent

to the first syllable, calling it Orion.  Gainsborough was a small place

with few enough law cases; but it could hardly have been as small, or

furnished as few cases; as the next one selected, which was Jamestown,

Fentress County, still farther toward the Eastward Mountains.  Yet

Jamestown had the advantage of being brand new, and in the eye of his

fancy John Clemens doubtless saw it the future metropolis of east

Tennessee, with himself its foremost jurist and citizen.  He took an

immediate and active interest in the development of the place,

established the county-seat there, built the first Court House, and was

promptly elected as circuit clerk of the court.



It was then that he decided to lay the foundation of a fortune for

himself and his children by acquiring Fentress County land.  Grants could

be obtained in those days at the expense of less than a cent an acre, and

John Clemens believed that the years lay not far distant when the land

would increase in value ten thousand, twenty, perhaps even a hundred

thousandfold.  There was no wrong estimate in that.  Land covered with

the finest primeval timber, and filled with precious minerals, could

hardly fail to become worth millions, even though his entire purchase of

75,000 acres probably did not cost him more than $500.  The great tract

lay about twenty nines to the southward of Jamestown.  Standing in the

door of the Court House he had built, looking out over the "Knob" of the

Cumberland Mountains toward his vast possessions, he said:



"Whatever befalls me now, my heirs are secure.  I may not live to see

these acres turn into silver and gold, but my children will."



Such was the creation of that mirage of wealth, the "Tennessee land,"

which all his days and for long afterward would lie just ahead--a golden

vision, its name the single watchword of the family fortunes--the dream

fading with years, only materializing at last as a theme in a story of

phantom riches, The Gilded Age.



Yet for once John Clemens saw clearly, and if his dream did not come true

he was in no wise to blame.  The land is priceless now, and a corporation

of the Clemens heirs is to-day contesting the title of a thin fragment of

it--about one thousand acres--overlooked in some survey.



Believing the future provided for, Clemens turned his attention to

present needs.  He built himself a house, unusual in its style and

elegance.  It had two windows in each room, and its walls were covered

with plastering, something which no one in Jamestown had ever seen

before.  He was regarded as an aristocrat.  He wore a swallow-tail coat

of fine blue jeans, instead of the coarse brown native-made cloth.  The

blue-jeans coat was ornamented with brass buttons and cost one dollar and

twenty-five cents a yard, a high price for that locality and time.  His

wife wore a calico dress for company, while the neighbor wives wore

homespun linsey-woolsey.  The new house was referred to as the Crystal

Palace.  When John and Jane Clemens attended balls--there were continuous

balls during the holidays--they were considered the most graceful

dancers.



Jamestown did not become the metropolis he had dreamed.  It attained

almost immediately to a growth of twenty-five houses--mainly log houses--

and stopped there.  The country, too, was sparsely settled; law practice

was slender and unprofitable, the circuit-riding from court to court was

very bad for one of his physique.  John Clemens saw his reserve of health

and funds dwindling, and decided to embark in merchandise.  He built

himself a store and put in a small country stock of goods.  These he

exchanged for ginseng, chestnuts, lampblack, turpentine, rosin, and other

produce of the country, which he took to Louisville every spring and fall

in six-horse wagons.  In the mean time he would seem to have sold one or

more of his slaves, doubtless to provide capital.  There was a second

baby now--a little girl, Pamela,--born in September, 1827.  Three years

later, May 1830, another little girl, Margaret, came.  By this time the

store and home were in one building, the store occupying one room, the

household requiring two--clearly the family fortunes were declining.



About a year after little Margaret was born, John Clemens gave up

Jamestown and moved his family and stock of goods to a point nine miles

distant, known as the Three Forks of Wolf.  The Tennessee land was safe,

of course, and would be worth millions some day, but in the mean time the

struggle for daily substance was becoming hard.



He could not have remained at the Three Forks long, for in 1832 we find

him at still another place, on the right bank of Wolf River, where a

post-office called Pall Mall was established, with John Clemens as

postmaster, usually addressed as "Squire" or "Judge." A store was run in

connection with the postoffice.  At Pall Mall, in June, 1832, another

boy, Benjamin, was born.



The family at this time occupied a log house built by John Clemens

himself, the store being kept in another log house on the opposite bank

of the river.  He no longer practised law.  In The Gilded Age we have

Mark Twain's picture of Squire Hawkins and Obedstown, written from

descriptions supplied in later years by his mother and his brother Orion;

and, while not exact in detail, it is not regarded as an exaggerated

presentation of east Tennessee conditions at that time.  The chapter is

too long and too depressing to be set down here.  The reader may look it

up for himself, if he chooses.  If he does he will not wonder that Jane

Clemens's handsome features had become somewhat sharper, and her manner a

shade graver, with the years and burdens of marriage, or that John

Clemens at thirty-six-out of health, out of tune with his environment--

was rapidly getting out of heart.  After all the bright promise of the

beginning, things had somehow gone wrong, and hope seemed dwindling away.



A tall man, he had become thin and unusually pale; he looked older than

his years.  Every spring he was prostrated with what was called

"sunpain," an acute form of headache, nerve-racking and destroying to all

persistent effort.  Yet he did not retreat from his moral and

intellectual standards, or lose the respect of that shiftless community.

He was never intimidated by the rougher element, and his eyes were of a

kind that would disconcert nine men out of ten.  Gray and deep-set under

bushy brows, they literally looked you through.  Absolutely fearless, he

permitted none to trample on his rights.  It is told of John Clemens, at

Jamestown, that once when he had lost a cow he handed the minister on

Sunday morning a notice of the loss to be read from the pulpit, according

to the custom of that community.  For some reason, the minister put the

document aside and neglected it.  At the close of the service Clemens

rose and, going to the pulpit, read his announcement himself to the

congregation.  Those who knew Mark Twain best will not fail to recall in

him certain of his father's legacies.



The arrival of a letter from "Colonel Sellers" inviting the Hawkins

family to come to Missouri is told in The Gilded Age.  In reality the

letter was from John Quarles, who had married Jane Clemens's sister,

Patsey Lampton, and settled in Florida, Monroe County, Missouri.  It was

a momentous letter in The Gilded Age, and no less so in reality, for it

shifted the entire scene of the Clemens family fortunes, and it had to do

with the birthplace and the shaping of the career of one whose memory is

likely to last as long as American history.









III



A HUMBLE BIRTHPLACE



Florida, Missouri, was a small village in the early thirties--smaller

than it is now, perhaps, though in that day it had more promise, even if

less celebrity.  The West was unassembled then, undigested, comparatively

unknown.  Two States, Louisiana and Missouri, with less than half a

million white persons, were all that lay beyond the great river.

St. Louis, with its boasted ten thousand inhabitants and its river trade

with the South, was the single metropolis in all that vast uncharted

region.  There was no telegraph; there were no railroads, no stage lines

of any consequence--scarcely any maps.  For all that one could see or

guess, one place was as promising as another, especially a settlement

like Florida, located at the forks of a pretty stream, Salt River, which

those early settlers believed might one day become navigable and carry

the merchandise of that region down to the mighty Mississippi, thence to

the world outside.



In those days came John A. Quarles, of Kentucky, with his wife, who had

been Patsey Ann Lampton; also, later, Benjamin Lampton, her father, and

others of the Lampton race.  It was natural that they should want Jane

Clemens and her husband to give up that disheartening east Tennessee

venture and join them in this new and promising land.  It was natural,

too, for John Quarles--happy-hearted, generous, and optimistic--to write

the letter.  There were only twenty-one houses in Florida, but Quarles

counted stables, out-buildings--everything with a roof on it--and set

down the number at fifty-four.



Florida, with its iridescent promise and negligible future, was just the

kind of a place that John Clemens with unerring instinct would be certain

to select, and the Quarles letter could have but one answer.  Yet there

would be the longing for companionship, too, and Jane Clemens must have

hungered for her people.  In The Gilded Age, the Sellers letter ends:



"Come!--rush!--hurry!--don't wait for anything!"



The Clemens family began immediately its preparation for getting away.

The store was sold, and the farm; the last two wagon-loads of produce

were sent to Louisville; and with the aid of the money realized, a few

hundred dollars, John Clemens and his family "flitted out into the great

mysterious blank that lay beyond the Knobs of Tennessee."  They had a

two-horse barouche, which would seem to have been preserved out of their

earlier fortunes.  The barouche held the parents and the three younger

children, Pamela, Margaret, anal the little boy, Benjamin.  There were

also two extra horses, which Orion, now ten, and Jennie, the house-girl,

a slave, rode.  This was early in the spring of 1835.



They traveled by the way of their old home at Columbia, and paid a visit

to relatives.  At Louisville they embarked on a steamer bound for St.

Louis; thence overland once more through wilderness and solitude into

what was then the Far West, the promised land.



They arrived one evening, and if Florida was not quite all in appearance

that John Clemens had dreamed, it was at least a haven--with John

Quarles, jovial, hospitable, and full of plans.  The great Mississippi

was less than fifty miles away.  Salt River, with a system of locks and

dams, would certainly become navigable to the Forks, with Florida as its

head of navigation.  It was a Sellers fancy, though perhaps it should be

said here that John Quarles was not the chief original of that lovely

character in The Gilded Age.  That was another relative--James Lampton, a

cousin--quite as lovable, and a builder of even more insubstantial

dreams.



John Quarles was already established in merchandise in Florida, and was

prospering in a small way.  He had also acquired a good farm, which he

worked with thirty slaves, and was probably the rich man and leading

citizen of the community.  He offered John Clemens a partnership in his

store, and agreed to aid him in the selection of some land.  Furthermore,

he encouraged him to renew his practice of the law.  Thus far, at least,

the Florida venture was not a mistake, for, whatever came, matters could

not be worse than they had been in Tennessee.



In a small frame building near the center of the village, John and Jane

Clemens established their household.  It was a humble one-story affair,

with two main rooms and a lean-to kitchen, though comfortable enough for

its size, and comparatively new.  It is still standing and occupied when

these lines are written, and it should be preserved and guarded as a

shrine for the American people; for it was here that the foremost

American-born author--the man most characteristically American in every

thought and word and action of his life--drew his first fluttering

breath, caught blinkingly the light of a world that in the years to come

would rise up and in its wide realm of letters hail him as a king.



It was on a bleak day, November 30, 1835, that he entered feebly the

domain he was to conquer.  Long, afterward, one of those who knew him

best said:



"He always seemed to me like some great being from another planet--never

quite of this race or kind."



He may have been, for a great comet was in the sky that year, and it

would return no more until the day when he should be borne back into the

far spaces of silence and undiscovered suns.  But nobody thought of this,

then.



He was a seven-months child, and there was no fanfare of welcome at his

coming.  Perhaps it was even suggested that, in a house so small and so

sufficiently filled, there was no real need of his coming at all.  One

Polly Ann Buchanan, who is said to have put the first garment of any sort

on him, lived to boast of the fact,--[This honor has been claimed also

for Mrs.  Millie Upton and a Mrs. Damrell.  Probably all were present and

assisted.]--but she had no particular pride in that matter then.  It was

only a puny baby with a wavering promise of life.  Still, John Clemens

must have regarded with favor this first gift of fortune in a new land,

for he named the little boy Samuel, after his father, and added the name

of an old and dear Virginia friend, Langhorne.  The family fortunes would

seem to have been improving at this time, and he may have regarded the

arrival of another son as a good omen.



With a family of eight, now, including Jennie, the slavegirl, more room

was badly needed, and he began building without delay.  The result was

not a mansion, by any means, being still of the one-story pattern, but it

was more commodious than the tiny two-room affair.  The rooms were

larger, and there was at least one ell, or extension, for kitchen and

dining-room uses.  This house, completed in 1836, occupied by the Clemens

family during the remainder of the years spent in Florida, was often in

later days pointed out as Mark Twain's birthplace.  It missed that

distinction by a few months, though its honor was sufficient in having

sheltered his early childhood.--[This house is no longer standing.

When it was torn down several years ago, portions of it were carried off

and manufactured into souvenirs.  Mark Twain himself disclaimed it as his

birthplace, and once wrote on a photograph of it: "No, it is too stylish,

it is not my birthplace."]









IV



BEGINNING A LONG JOURNEY



It was not a robust childhood.  The new baby managed to go through the

winter--a matter of comment among the family and neighbors.  Added

strength came, but slowly; "Little Sam," as they called him, was always

delicate during those early years.



It was a curious childhood, full of weird, fantastic impressions and

contradictory influences, stimulating alike to the imagination and that

embryo philosophy of life which begins almost with infancy.  John Clemens

seldom devoted any time to the company of his children.  He looked after

their comfort and mental development as well as he could, and gave advice

on occasion.  He bought a book now and then--sometimes a picture-book--

and subscribed for Peter Parley's Magazine, a marvel of delight to the

older children, but he did not join in their amusements, and he rarely,

or never, laughed.  Mark Twain did not remember ever having seen or heard

his father laugh.  The problem of supplying food was a somber one to John

Clemens; also, he was working on a perpetual-motion machine at this

period, which absorbed his spare time, and, to the inventor at least, was

not a mirthful occupation.  Jane Clemens was busy, too.  Her sense of

humor did not die, but with added cares and years her temper as well as

her features became sharper, and it was just as well to be fairly out of

range when she was busy with her employments.



Little Sam's companions were his brothers and sisters, all older than

himself: Orion, ten years his senior, followed by Pamela and Margaret at

intervals of two and three years, then by Benjamin, a kindly little lad

whose gentle life was chiefly devoted to looking after the baby brother,

three years his junior.  But in addition to these associations, there

were the still more potent influences Of that day and section, the

intimate, enveloping institution of slavery, the daily companionship of

the slaves.  All the children of that time were fond of the negroes and

confided in them.  They would, in fact, have been lost without such

protection and company.



It was Jennie, the house-girl, and Uncle Ned, a man of all work--

apparently acquired with the improved prospects--who were in real charge

of the children and supplied them with entertainment.  Wonderful

entertainment it was.  That was a time of visions and dreams, small.

gossip and superstitions.  Old tales were repeated over and over, with

adornments and improvements suggested by immediate events.  At evening

the Clemens children, big and little, gathered about the great open

fireplace while Jennie and Uncle Ned told tales and hair-lifting legends.

Even a baby of two or three years could follow the drift of this

primitive telling and would shiver and cling close with the horror and

delight of its curdling thrill.  The tales always began with "Once 'pon a

time," and one of them was the story of the "Golden Arm" which the

smallest listener would one day repeat more elaborately to wider

audiences in many lands.  Briefly it ran as follows:



"Once 'Pon a time there was a man, and he had a wife, and she had a' arm

of pure gold; and she died, and they buried her in the graveyard; and one

night her husband went and dug her up and cut off her golden arm and tuck

it home; and one night a ghost all in white come to him; and she was his

wife; and she says:



"W-h-a-r-r's my golden arm?  W-h-a-r-r's my golden arm?  W-h-a-r-r's my

g-o-l-den arm?"



As Uncle Ned repeated these blood-curdling questions he would look first

one and then another of his listeners in the eyes, with his bands drawn

up in front of his breast, his fingers turned out and crooked like claws,

while he bent with each question closer to the shrinking forms before

him.  The tone was sepulchral, with awful pause as if waiting each time

for a reply.  The culmination came with a pounce on one of the group, a

shake of the shoulders, and a shout of:



"YOU'VE got it!' and she tore him all to pieces!"



And the children would shout "Lordy!" and look furtively over their

shoulders, fearing to see a woman in white against the black wall; but,

instead, only gloomy, shapeless shadows darted across it as the

flickering flames in the fireplace went out on one brand and flared up on

another.  Then there was a story of a great ball of fire that used to

follow lonely travelers along dark roads through the woods.



"Once 'pon a time there was a man, and he was riding along de road and he

come to a ha'nted house, and he heard de chains'a-rattlin' and a-rattlin'

and a-rattlin', and a ball of fire come rollin' up and got under his

stirrup, and it didn't make no difference if his horse galloped or went

slow or stood still, de ball of fire staid under his stirrup till he got

plum to de front do', and his wife come out and say: 'My Gord, dat's

devil fire!' and she had to work a witch spell to drive it away."



"How big was it, Uncle Ned?"



"Oh, 'bout as big as your head, and I 'spect it's likely to come down dis

yere chimney 'most any time."



Certainly an atmosphere like this meant a tropic development for the

imagination of a delicate child.  All the games and daily talk concerned

fanciful semi-African conditions and strange primal possibilities.  The

children of that day believed in spells and charms and bad-luck signs,

all learned of their negro guardians.



But if the negroes were the chief companions and protectors of the

children, they were likewise one of their discomforts.  The greatest real

dread children knew was the fear of meeting runaway slaves.  A runaway

slave was regarded as worse than a wild beast, and treated worse when

caught.  Once the children saw one brought into Florida by six men who

took him to an empty cabin, where they threw him on the floor and bound

him with ropes.  His groans were loud and frequent.  Such things made an

impression that would last a lifetime.



Slave punishment, too, was not unknown, even in the household.  Jennie

especially was often saucy and obstreperous.  Jane Clemens, with more

strength of character than of body, once undertook to punish her for

insolence, whereupon Jennie snatched the whip from her hand.  John

Clemens was sent for in haste.  He came at once, tied Jennie's wrists

together with a bridle rein, and administered chastisement across the

shoulders with a cowhide.  These were things all calculated to impress a

sensitive child.



In pleasant weather the children roamed over the country, hunting berries

and nuts, drinking sugar-water, tying knots in love-vine, picking the

petals from daisies to the formula "Love me-love me not," always

accompanied by one or more, sometimes by half a dozen, of their small

darky followers.  Shoes were taken off the first of April.  For a time a

pair of old woolen stockings were worn, but these soon disappeared,

leaving the feet bare for the summer.  One of their dreads was the

possibility of sticking a rusty nail into the foot, as this was liable to

cause lockjaw, a malady regarded with awe and terror.  They knew what

lockjaw was--Uncle John Quarles's black man, Dan, was subject to it.

Sometimes when he opened his mouth to its utmost capacity he felt the

joints slip and was compelled to put down the cornbread, or jole and

greens, or the piece of 'possum he was eating, while his mouth remained a

fixed abyss until the doctor came and restored it to a natural position

by an exertion of muscular power that would have well-nigh lifted an ox.



Uncle John Quarles, his home, his farm, his slaves, all were sources of

never-ending delight.  Perhaps the farm was just an ordinary Missouri

farm and the slaves just average negroes, but to those children these

things were never apparent.  There was a halo about anything that

belonged to Uncle John Quarles, and that halo was the jovial, hilarious

kindness of that gentle-hearted, humane man.  To visit at his house was

for a child to be in a heaven of mirth and pranks continually.  When the

children came for eggs he would say:



"Your hens won't lay, eh?  Tell your maw to feed 'em parched corn and

drive 'em uphill," and this was always a splendid stroke of humor to his

small hearers.



Also, he knew how to mimic with his empty hands the peculiar patting and

tossing of a pone of corn-bread before placing it in the oven.  He would

make the most fearful threats to his own children, for disobedience, but

never executed any of them.  When they were out fishing and returned late

he would say:



"You--if I have to hunt you again after dark, I will make you smell like

a burnt horn!"



Nothing could exceed the ferocity of this threat, and all the children,

with delightful terror and curiosity, wondered what would happen--if it

ever did happen--that would result in giving a child that peculiar savor.

Altogether it was a curious early childhood that Little Sam had--at least

it seems so to us now.  Doubtless it was commonplace enough for that time

and locality.









V



THE WAY OF FORTUNE



Perhaps John Quarles's jocular, happy-go-lucky nature and general conduct

did not altogether harmonize with John Clemens's more taciturn business

methods.  Notwithstanding the fact that he was a builder of dreams,

Clemens was neat and methodical, with his papers always in order.  He had

a hearty dislike for anything resembling frivolity and confusion, which

very likely were the chief features of John Quarles's storekeeping.  At

all events, they dissolved partnership at the end of two or three years,

and Clemens opened business for himself across the street.  He also

practised law whenever there were cases, and was elected justice of the

peace, acquiring the permanent title of "Judge."  He needed some one to

assist in the store, and took in Orion, who was by this time twelve or

thirteen years old; but, besides his youth, Orion--all his days a

visionary--was a studious, pensive lad with no taste for commerce.  Then

a partnership was formed with a man who developed neither capital nor

business ability, and proved a disaster in the end.  The modest tide of

success which had come with John Clemens's establishment at Florida had

begun to wane.  Another boy, Henry, born in July, 1838, added one more

responsibility to his burdens.



There still remained a promise of better things.  There seemed at least a

good prospect that the scheme for making Salt River navigable was likely

to become operative.  With even small boats (bateaux) running as high as

the lower branch of the South Fork, Florida would become an emporium of

trade, and merchants and property-owners of that village would reap a

harvest.  An act of the Legislature was passed incorporating the

navigation company, with Judge Clemens as its president.  Congress was

petitioned to aid this work of internal improvement.  So confident was

the company of success that the hamlet was thrown into a fever of

excitement by the establishment of a boatyard and, the actual

construction of a bateau; but a Democratic Congress turned its back on

the proposed improvement.  No boat bigger than a skiff ever ascended Salt

River, though there was a wild report, evidently a hoax, that a party of

picnickers had seen one night a ghostly steamer, loaded and manned,

puffing up the stream.  An old Scotchman, Hugh Robinson, when he heard of

it, said:



"I don't doubt a word they say.  In Scotland, it often happens that when

people have been killed, or are troubled, they send their spirits abroad

and they are seen as much like themselves as a reflection in a looking-

glass.  That was a ghost of some wrecked steamboat."



But John Quarles, who was present, laughed:



"If ever anybody was in trouble, the men on that steamboat were," he

said.  "They were the Democratic candidates at the last election.  They

killed Salt River improvements, and Salt River has killed them.  Their

ghosts went up the river on a ghostly steamboat."



It is possible that this comment, which was widely repeated and traveled

far, was the origin of the term "Going up Salt River," as applied to

defeated political candidates.--[The dictionaries give this phrase as

probably traceable to a small, difficult stream in Kentucky; but it seems

more reasonable to believe that it originated in Quarles's witty

comment.]



No other attempt was ever made to establish navigation on Salt River.

Rumors of railroads already running in the East put an end to any such

thought.  Railroads could run anywhere and were probably cheaper and

easier to maintain than the difficult navigation requiring locks and

dams.  Salt River lost its prestige as a possible water highway and

became mere scenery.  Railroads have ruined greater rivers than the

Little Salt, and greater villages than Florida, though neither Florida

nor Salt River has been touched by a railroad to this day.  Perhaps such

close detail of early history may be thought unnecessary in a work of

this kind, but all these things were definite influences in the career of

the little lad whom the world would one day know as Mark Twain.









VI



A NEW HOME



The death of little Margaret was the final misfortune that came to the

Clemens family in Florida.  Doubtless it hastened their departure.

There was a superstition in those days that to refer to health as good

luck, rather than to ascribe it to the kindness of Providence, was to

bring about a judgment.  Jane Clemens one day spoke to a neighbor of

their good luck in thus far having lost no member of their family.  That

same day, when the sisters, Pamela and Margaret, returned from school,

Margaret laid her books on the table, looked in the glass at her flushed

cheeks, pulled out the trundle-bed, and lay down.



She was never in her right mind again.  The doctor was sent for and

diagnosed the case "bilious fever."  One evening, about nine o'clock,

Orion was sitting on the edge of the trundle-bed by the patient, when the

door opened and Little Sam, then about four years old, walked in from his

bedroom, fast asleep.  He came to the side of the trundle-bed and pulled

at the bedding near Margaret's shoulder for some time before he woke.

Next day the little girl was "picking at the coverlet," and it was known

that she could not live.  About a week later she died.  She was nine

years old, a beautiful child, plump in form, with rosy cheeks, black

hair, and bright eyes.  This was in August, 1839.  It was Little Sam's

first sight of death--the first break in the Clemens family: it left a

sad household.  The shoemaker who lived next door claimed to have seen

several weeks previous, in a vision, the coffin and the funeral-

procession pass the gate by the winding road, to the cemetery, exactly as

it happened.



Matters were now going badly enough with John Clemens.  Yet he never was

without one great comforting thought--the future of the Tennessee land.

It underlaid every plan; it was an anodyne for every ill.



"When we sell the Tennessee land everything will be all right," was the

refrain that brought solace in the darkest hours.  A blessing for him

that this was so, for he had little else to brighten his days.

Negotiations looking to the sale of the land were usually in progress.

When the pressure became very hard and finances were at their lowest ebb,

it was offered at any price--at five cents an acre, sometimes.  When

conditions improved, however little, the price suddenly advanced even to

its maximum of one thousand dollars an acre.  Now and then a genuine

offer came along, but, though eagerly welcomed at the moment, it was

always refused after a little consideration.



"We will struggle along somehow, Jane," he would say.  "We will not throw

away the children's fortune."



There was one other who believed in the Tennessee land--Jane Clemens's

favorite cousin, James Lampton, the courtliest, gentlest, most prodigal

optimist of all that guileless race.  To James Lampton the land always

had "millions in it"--everything had.  He made stupendous fortunes daily,

in new ways.  The bare mention of the Tennessee land sent him off into

figures that ended with the purchase of estates in England adjoining

those of the Durham Lamptons, whom he always referred to as "our

kindred," casually mentioning the whereabouts and health of the "present

earl."  Mark Twain merely put James Lampton on paper when he created

Colonel Sellers, and the story of the Hawkins family as told in The

Gilded Age reflects clearly the struggle of those days.  The words

"Tennessee land," with their golden promise, became his earliest

remembered syllables.  He grew to detest them in time, for they came to

mean mockery.



One of the offers received was the trifling sum of two hundred and fifty

dollars, and such was the moment's need that even this was considered.

Then, of course, it was scornfully refused.  In some autobiographical

chapters which Orion Clemens left behind he said:



"If we had received that two hundred and fifty dollars, it would have

been more than we ever made, clear of expenses, out of the whole of the

Tennessee land, after forty years of worry to three generations."



What a less speculative and more logical reasoner would have done in the

beginning, John Clemens did now; he selected a place which, though little

more than a village, was on a river already navigable--a steamboat town

with at least the beginnings of manufacturing and trade already

established--that is to say, Hannibal, Missouri--a point well chosen, as

shown by its prosperity to-day.



He did not delay matters.  When he came to a decision, he acted quickly.

He disposed of a portion of his goods and shipped the remainder overland;

then, with his family and chattels loaded in a wagon, he was ready to set

out for the new home.  Orion records that, for some reason, his father

did not invite him to get into the wagon, and how, being always sensitive

to slight, he had regarded this in the light of deliberate desertion.



"The sense of abandonment caused my heart to ache.  The wagon had gone a

few feet when I was discovered and invited to enter.  How I wished they

had not missed me until they had arrived at Hannibal.  Then the world

would have seen how I was treated and would have cried 'Shame!'"



This incident, noted and remembered, long after became curiously confused

with another, in Mark Twain's mind.  In an autobiographical chapter

published in The North American Review he tells of the move to Hannibal

and relates that he himself was left behind by his absentminded family.

The incident of his own abandonment did not happen then, but later, and

somewhat differently.  It would indeed be an absent-minded family if the

parents, and the sister and brothers ranging up to fourteen years of age,

should drive off leaving Little Sam, age four, behind.



--[As mentioned in the Prefatory Note, Mark Twain's memory played him

many tricks in later life.  Incidents were filtered through his vivid

imagination until many of them bore little relation to the actual

occurrence.  Some of these lapses were only amusing, but occasionally

they worked an unintentional injustice.  It is the author's purpose in

every instance, so far as is possible, to keep the record straight.]









VII



THE LITTLE TOWN OF HANNIBAL



Hannibal in 1839 was already a corporate community and had an atmosphere

of its own.  It was a town with a distinct Southern flavor, though rather

more astir than the true Southern community of that period; more Western

in that it planned, though without excitement, certain new enterprises

and made a show, at least, of manufacturing.  It was somnolent (a slave

town could not be less than that), but it was not wholly asleep--that is

to say, dead--and it was tranquilly content.  Mark Twain remembered it as

"the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer morning,.  .  .  the

great Mississippi, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide

tide along; .  .  .  the dense forest away on the other side."



The little city was proud of its scenery, and justly so: circled with

bluffs, with Holliday's Hill on the north, Lover's Leap on the south, the

shining river in the foreground, there was little to be desired in the

way of setting.



The river, of course, was the great highway.  Rafts drifted by;

steamboats passed up and down and gave communication to the outside

world; St. Louis, the metropolis, was only one hundred miles away.

Hannibal was inclined to rank itself as of next importance, and took on

airs accordingly.  It had society, too--all kinds--from the negroes and

the town drunkards ("General" Gaines and Jimmy Finn; later, Old Ben

Blankenship) up through several nondescript grades of mechanics and

tradesmen to the professional men of the community, who wore tall hats,

ruffled shirt-fronts, and swallow-tail coats, usually of some positive

color-blue, snuff-brown, and green.  These and their families constituted

the true aristocracy of the Southern town.  Most of them had pleasant

homes--brick or large frame mansions, with colonnaded entrances, after

the manner of all Southern architecture of that period, which had an

undoubted Greek root, because of certain drawing-books, it is said,

accessible to the builders of those days.  Most of them, also, had means

--slaves and land which yielded an income in addition to their

professional earnings.  They lived in such style as was considered

fitting to their rank, and had such comforts as were then obtainable.



It was to this grade of society that judge Clemens and his family

belonged, but his means no longer enabled him to provide either the

comforts or the ostentation of his class.  He settled his family and

belongings in a portion of a house on Hill Street--the Pavey Hotel; his

merchandise he established modestly on Main Street, with Orion, in a new

suit of clothes, as clerk.  Possibly the clothes gave Orion a renewed

ambition for mercantile life, but this waned.  Business did not begin

actively, and he was presently dreaming and reading away the time.  A

little later he became a printer's apprentice, in the office of the

Hannibal Journal, at his father's suggestion.



Orion Clemens perhaps deserves a special word here.  He was to be much

associated with his more famous brother for many years, and his

personality as boy and man is worth at least a casual consideration.

He was fifteen now, and had developed characteristics which in a greater

or less degree were to go with him through life.  Of a kindly, loving

disposition, like all of the Clemens children, quick of temper, but

always contrite, or forgiving, he was never without the fond regard of

those who knew him best.  His weaknesses were manifold, but, on the

whole, of a negative kind.  Honorable and truthful, he had no tendency to

bad habits or unworthy pursuits; indeed, he had no positive traits of any

sort.  That was his chief misfortune.  Full of whims and fancies,

unstable, indeterminate, he was swayed by every passing emotion and

influence.  Daily he laid out a new course of study and achievement, only

to fling it aside because of some chance remark or printed paragraph or

bit of advice that ran contrary to his purpose.  Such a life is bound to

be a succession of extremes--alternate periods of supreme exaltation and

despair.  In his autobiographical chapters, already mentioned, Orion sets

down every impulse and emotion and failure with that faithful humility

which won him always the respect, if not always the approval, of men.



Printing was a step downward, for it was a trade, and Orion felt it

keenly.  A gentleman's son and a prospective heir of the Tennessee land,

he was entitled to a profession.  To him it was punishment, and the

disgrace weighed upon him.  Then he remembered that Benjamin Franklin had

been a printer and had eaten only an apple and a bunch of grapes for his

dinner.  Orion decided to emulate Franklin, and for a time he took only a

biscuit and a glass of water at a meal, foreseeing the day when he should

electrify the world with his eloquence.  He was surprised to find how

clear his mind was on this low diet and how rapidly he learned his trade.



Of the other children Pamela, now twelve, and Benjamin, seven, were put

to school.  They were pretty, attractive children, and Henry, the baby,

was a sturdy toddler, the pride of the household.  Little Sam was the

least promising of the flock.  He remained delicate, and developed little

beyond a tendency to pranks.  He was a queer, fanciful, uncommunicative

child that detested indoors and would run away if not watched--always in

the direction of the river.  He walked in his sleep, too, and often the

rest of the household got up in the middle of the night to find him

fretting with cold in some dark corner.  The doctor was summoned for him

oftener than was good for the family purse--or for him, perhaps, if we

may credit the story of heavy dosings of those stern allopathic days.



Yet he would appear not to have been satisfied with his heritage of

ailments, and was ambitious for more.  An epidemic of measles--the black,

deadly kind--was ravaging Hannibal, and he yearned for the complaint.

He yearned so much that when he heard of a playmate, one of the Bowen

boys, who had it, he ran away and, slipping into the house, crept into

bed with the infection.  The success of this venture was complete.  Some

days later, the Clemens family gathered tearfully around Little Sam's bed

to see him die.  According to his own after-confession, this gratified

him, and he was willing to die for the glory of that touching scene.

However, he disappointed them, and was presently up and about in search

of fresh laurels.--[In later life Mr. Clemens did not recollect the

precise period of this illness.  With habitual indifference he assigned

it to various years, as his mood or the exigencies of his theme required.

Without doubt the "measles" incident occurred when he was very young.]--



He must have been a wearing child, and we may believe that Jane Clemens,

with her varied cares and labors, did not always find him a comfort.



"You gave me more uneasiness than any child I had," she said to him once,

in her old age.



"I suppose you were afraid I wouldn't live," he suggested, in his

tranquil fashion.



She looked at him with that keen humor that had not dulled in eighty

years.  "No; afraid you would," she said.  But that was only her joke,

for she was the most tenderhearted creature in the world, and, like

mothers in general, had a weakness for the child that demanded most of

her mother's care.



It was mainly on his account that she spent her summers on John Quarles's

farm near Florida, and it was during the first summer that an incident

already mentioned occurred.  It was decided that the whole family should

go for a brief visit, and one Saturday morning in June Mrs. Clemens, with

the three elder children and the baby, accompanied by Jennie, the slave-

girl, set out in a light wagon for the day's drive, leaving Judge Clemens

to bring Little Sam on horseback Sunday morning.  The hour was early when

Judge Clemens got up to saddle his horse, and Little Sam was still

asleep.  The horse being ready, Clemens, his mind far away, mounted and

rode off without once remembering the little boy, and in the course of

the afternoon arrived at his brother-in-law's farm.  Then he was

confronted by Jane Clemens, who demanded Little Sam.



"Why," said the judge, aghast, "I never once thought of him after I left

him asleep."



Wharton Lampton, a brother of Jane Clemens and Patsey Quarles, hastily

saddled a horse and set out, helter-skelter, for Hannibal.  He arrived in

the early dusk.  The child was safe enough, but he was crying with

loneliness and hunger.  He had spent most of the day in the locked,

deserted house playing with a hole in the meal-sack where the meal ran

out, when properly encouraged, in a tiny stream.  He was fed and

comforted, and next day was safe on the farm, which during that summer

and those that followed it, became so large a part of his boyhood and

lent a coloring to his later years.









VIII



THE FARM



We have already mentioned the delight of the Clemens children in Uncle

John Quarles's farm.  To Little Sam it was probably a life-saver.  With

his small cousin, Tabitha,--[Tabitha Quarles, now Mrs.  Greening, of

Palmyra, Missouri, has supplied most of the material for this chapter.]--

just his own age (they called her Puss), he wandered over that magic

domain, fording new marvels at every step, new delights everywhere.  A

slave-girl, Mary, usually attended them, but she was only six years

older, and not older at all in reality, so she was just a playmate, and

not a guardian to be feared or evaded.  Sometimes, indeed, it was

necessary for her to threaten to tell "Miss Patsey" or "Miss Jane," when

her little charges insisted on going farther or staying later than she

thought wise from the viewpoint of her own personal safety; but this was

seldom, and on the whole a stay at the farm was just one long idyllic

dream of summer-time and freedom.



The farm-house stood in the middle of a large yard entered by a stile

made of sawed-off logs of graduated heights.  In the corner of the yard

were hickory trees, and black walnut, and beyond the fence the hill fell

away past the barns, the corn-cribs, and the tobacco-house to a brook--

a divine place to wade, with deep, dark, forbidden pools.  Down in the

pasture there were swings under the big trees, and Mary swung the

children and ran under them until their feet touched the branches, and

then took her turn and "balanced" herself so high that their one wish was

to be as old as Mary and swing in that splendid way.  All the woods were

full of squirrels--gray squirrels and the red-fox species--and many birds

and flowers; all the meadows were gay with clover and butterflies, and

musical with singing grasshoppers and calling larks; there were

blackberries in the fence rows, apples and peaches in the orchard, and

watermelons in the corn.  They were not always ripe, those watermelons,

and once, when Little Sam had eaten several pieces of a green one, he was

seized with cramps so severe that most of the household expected him to

die forthwith.



Jane Clemens was not heavily concerned.



"Sammy will pull through," she said; "he wasn't born to die that way."



It is the slender constitution that bears the strain.  "Sammy" did pull

through, and in a brief time was ready for fresh adventure.



There were plenty of these: there were the horses to ride to and from the

fields; the ox-wagons to ride in when they had dumped their heavy loads;

the circular horsepower to ride on when they threshed the wheat.  This

last was a dangerous and forbidden pleasure, but the children would dart

between the teams and climb on, and the slave who was driving would

pretend not to see.  Then in the evening when the black woman came along,

going after the cows, the children would race ahead and set the cows

running and jingling their bells--especially Little Sam, for he was a

wild-headed, impetuous child of sudden ecstasies that sent him capering

and swinging his arms, venting his emotions in a series of leaps and

shrieks and somersaults, and spasms of laughter as he lay rolling in the

grass.



His tendency to mischief grew with this wide liberty, improved health,

and the encouragement of John Quarles's good-natured, fun-loving slaves.



The negro quarters beyond the orchard were especially attractive.  In one

cabin lived a bed-ridden, white-headed old woman whom the children

visited daily and looked upon with awe; for she was said to be a thousand

years old and to have talked with Moses.  The negroes believed this; the

children, too, of course, and that she had lost her health in the desert,

coming out of Egypt.  The bald spot on her head was caused by fright at

seeing Pharaoh drowned.  She also knew how to avert spells and ward off

witches, which added greatly to her prestige.  Uncle Dan'l was a

favorite, too-kind-hearted and dependable, while his occasional lockjaw

gave him an unusual distinction.  Long afterward he would become Nigger

Jim in the Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn tales, and so in his gentle

guilelessness win immortality and the love of many men.



Certainly this was a heavenly place for a little boy, the farm of Uncle

John Quarles, and the house was as wonderful as its surroundings.  It was

a two-story double log building, with a spacious floor (roofed in)

connecting the two divisions.  In the summer the table was set in the

middle of that shady, breezy pavilion, and sumptuous meals were served in

the lavish Southern style, brought to the table in vast dishes that left

only room for rows of plates around the edge.  Fried chicken, roast pig,

turkeys, ducks, geese, venison just killed, squirrels, rabbits,

partridges, pheasants, prairie-chickens--the list is too long to be

served here.  If a little boy could not improve on that bill of fare and

in that atmosphere, his case was hopeless indeed.  His mother kept him

there until the late fall, when the chilly evenings made them gather

around the wide, blazing fireplace.  Sixty years later he wrote of that

scene:



     I can see the room yet with perfect clearness.  I can see all its

     buildings, all its details: the family-room of the house, with the

     trundle-bed in one corner and the spinning-wheel in another a wheel

     whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the

     mournfulest of all sounds to me, and made me homesick and low-

     spirited, and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the

     dead; the vast fireplace, piled high with flaming logs, from whose

     ends a sugary sap bubbled out, but did not go to waste, for we

     scraped it off and ate it; .  .  .  the lazy cat spread out on the

     rough hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the jambs,

     blinking; my aunt in one chimney-corner and my uncle in the other

     smoking his corn-cob pipe; the slick and carpetless oak floor

     faintly mirroring the flame tongues, and freckled with black

     indentations where fire-coals had popped out and died a leisurely

     death; half a dozen children romping in the background twilight;

     splint-bottom chairs here and there--some with rockers; a cradle--

     out of service, but waiting with confidence.



One is tempted to dwell on this period, to quote prodigally from these

vivid memories--the thousand minute impressions which the child's

sensitive mind acquired in that long-ago time and would reveal everywhere

in his work in the years to come.  For him it was education of a more

valuable and lasting sort than any he would ever acquire from books.









IX



SCHOOL-DAYS



Nevertheless, on his return to Hannibal, it was decided that Little Sam

was now ready to go to school.  He was about five years old, and the

months on the farm had left him wiry and lively, even if not very robust.

His mother declared that he gave her more trouble than all the other

children put together.



"He drives me crazy with his didoes, when he is in the house," she used

to say; "and when he is out of it I am expecting every minute that some

one will bring him home half dead."



He did, in fact, achieve the first of his "nine narrow escapes from

drowning" about this time, and was pulled out of the river one afternoon

and brought home in a limp and unpromising condition.  When with mullein

tea and castor-oil she had restored him to activity, she said: "I guess

there wasn't much danger.  People born to be hanged are safe in water."



She declared she was willing to pay somebody to take him off her hands

for a part of each day and try to teach him manners.  Perhaps this is a

good place to say that Jane Clemens was the original of Tom Sawyer's

"Aunt Polly," and her portrait as presented in that book is considered

perfect.  Kind-hearted, fearless, looking and acting ten years older than

her age, as women did in that time, always outspoken and sometimes

severe, she was regarded as a "character" by her friends, and beloved by

them as, a charitable, sympathetic woman whom it was good to know.  Her

sense of pity was abnormal.  She refused to kill even flies, and punished

the cat for catching mice.  She, would drown the young kittens, when

necessary, but warmed the water for the purpose.  On coming to Hannibal,

she joined the Presbyterian Church, and her religion was of that clean-

cut, strenuous kind which regards as necessary institutions hell and

Satan, though she had been known to express pity for the latter for being

obliged to surround himself with such poor society.  Her children she

directed with considerable firmness, and all were tractable and growing

in grace except Little Sam.  Even baby Henry at two was lisping the

prayers that Sam would let go by default unless carefully guarded.  His

sister Pamela, who was eight years older and always loved him dearly,

usually supervised these spiritual exercises, and in her gentle care

earned immortality as the Cousin Mary of Tom Sawyer.  He would say his

prayers willingly enough when encouraged by sister Pamela, but he much

preferred to sit up in bed and tell astonishing tales of the day's

adventure--tales which made prayer seem a futile corrective and caused

his listeners to wonder why the lightning was restrained so long.  They

did not know they were glimpsing the first outcroppings of a genius that

would one day amaze and entertain the nations.  Neighbors hearing of

these things (also certain of his narrations) remonstrated with Mrs.

Clemens.



"You don't believe anything that child says, I hope."



"Oh yes, I know his average.  I discount him ninety per cent.  The rest

is pure gold."  At another time she said: "Sammy is a well of truth, but

you can't bring it all up in one bucket."



This, however, is digression; the incidents may have happened somewhat

later.



A certain Miss E. Horr was selected to receive the payment for taking

charge of Little Sam during several hours each day, directing him

mentally and morally in the mean time.  Her school was then in a log

house on Main Street (later it was removed to Third Street), and was of

the primitive old-fashioned kind, with pupils of all ages, ranging in

advancement from the primer to the third reader, from the tables to long

division, with a little geography and grammar and a good deal of

spelling.  Long division and the third reader completed the curriculum in

that school.  Pupils who decided to take a post-graduate course went to a

Mr. Cross, who taught in a frame house on the hill facing what is now the

Public Square.



Miss Horr received twenty-five cents a week for each pupil, and opened

her school with prayer; after which came a chapter of the Bible, with

explanations, and the rules of conduct.  Then the A B C class was called,

because their recital was a hand-to-hand struggle, requiring no

preparation.



The rules of conduct that first day interested Little Sam.  He calculated

how much he would need to trim in, to sail close to the danger-line and

still avoid disaster.  He made a miscalculation during the forenoon and

received warning; a second offense would mean punishment.  He did not

mean to be caught the second time, but he had not learned Miss Horr yet,

and was presently startled by being commanded to go out and bring a stick

for his own correction.



This was certainly disturbing.  It was sudden, and then he did not know

much about the selection of sticks.  Jane Clemens had usually used her

hand.  It required a second command to get him headed in the right

direction, and he was a trifle dazed when he got outside.  He had the

forests of Missouri to select from, but choice was difficult.  Everything

looked too big and competent.  Even the smallest switch had a wiry,

discouraging look.  Across the way was a cooper-shop with a good many

shavings outside.



One had blown across and lay just in front of him.  It was an

inspiration.  He picked it up and, solemnly entering the school-room,

meekly handed it to Miss Herr.



Perhaps Miss Horr's sense of humor prompted forgiveness, but discipline

must be maintained.



"Samuel Langhorne Clemens," she said (he had never heard it all strung

together in that ominous way), "I am ashamed of you!  Jimmy Dunlap, go

and bring a switch for Sammy."  And Jimmy Dunlap went, and the switch was

of a sort to give the little boy an immediate and permanent distaste for

school.  He informed his mother when he went home at noon that he did not

care for school; that he had no desire to be a great man; that he

preferred to be a pirate or an Indian and scalp or drown such people as

Miss Horr.  Down in her heart his mother was sorry for him, but what she

said was that she was glad there was somebody at last who could take him

in hand.



He returned to school, but he never learned to like it.  Each morning he

went with reluctance and remained with loathing--the loathing which he

always had for anything resembling bondage and tyranny or even the

smallest curtailment of liberty.  A School was ruled with a rod in those

days, a busy and efficient rod, as the Scripture recommended.  Of the

smaller boys Little Sam's back was sore as often as the next, and he

dreamed mainly of a day when, grown big and fierce, he would descend with

his band and capture Miss Horr and probably drag her by the hair, as he

had seen Indians and pirates do in the pictures.  When the days of early

summer came again; when from his desk he could see the sunshine lighting

the soft green of Holliday's Hill, with the purple distance beyond, and

the glint of the river, it seemed to him that to be shut up with a

Webster's spelling-book and a cross old maid was more than human nature

could bear.  Among the records preserved from that far-off day there

remains a yellow slip, whereon in neat old-fashioned penmanship is

inscribed:



                          MISS PAMELA CLEMENS



     Has won the love of her teacher and schoolmates by her amiable

     deportment and faithful application to her various studies.

                                                  E. Horr, Teacher.



If any such testimonial was ever awarded to Little Sam, diligent search

has failed to reveal it.  If he won the love of his teacher and playmates

it was probably for other reasons.



Yet he must have learned, somehow, for he could read presently and was

soon regarded as a good speller for his years.  His spelling came as a

natural gift, as did most of his attainments, then and later.



It has already been mentioned that Miss Horr opened her school with

prayer and Scriptural readings.  Little Sam did not especially delight in

these things, but he respected them.  Not to do so was dangerous.  Flames

were being kept brisk for little boys who were heedless of sacred

matters; his home teaching convinced him of that.  He also respected Miss

Horr as an example of orthodox faith, and when she read the text "Ask and

ye shall receive" and assured them that whoever prayed for a thing

earnestly, his prayer would be answered, he believed it.  A small

schoolmate, the balker's daughter, brought gingerbread to school every

morning, and Little Sam was just "honing" for some of it.  He wanted a

piece of that baker's gingerbread more than anything else in the world,

and he decided to pray for it.



The little girl sat in front of him, but always until that morning had

kept the gingerbread out of sight.  Now, however, when he finished his

prayer and looked up, a small morsel of the precious food lay in front of

him.  Perhaps the little girl could no longer stand that hungry look in

his eyes.  Possibly she had heard his petition; at all events his prayer

bore fruit and his faith at that moment would have moved Holliday's Hill.

He decided to pray for everything he wanted, but when he tried the

gingerbread supplication next morning it had no result.  Grieved, but

still unshaken, he tried next morning again; still no gingerbread; and

when a third and fourth effort left him hungry he grew despairing and

silent, and wore the haggard face of doubt.  His mother said:



"What's the matter, Sammy; are you sick?"



"No," he said, "but I don't believe in saying prayers any more, and I'm

never going to do it again."



"Why, Sammy, what in the world has happened?" she asked, anxiously.  Then

he broke down and cried on her lap and told her, for it was a serious

thing in that day openly to repudiate faith.  Jane Clemens gathered him

to her heart and comforted him.



"I'll make you a whole pan of gingerbread, better than that," she said,

"and school will soon be out, too, and you can go back to Uncle John's

farm."



And so passed and ended Little Sam's first school-days.









X



EARLY VICISSITUDE AND SORROW



Prosperity came laggingly enough to the Clemens household.  The year 1840

brought hard times: the business venture paid little or no return; law

practice was not much more remunerative.  Judge Clemens ran for the

office of justice of the peace and was elected, but fees were neither

large nor frequent.  By the end of the year it became necessary to part

with Jennie, the slave-girl--a grief to all of them, for they were fond

of her in spite of her wilfulness, and she regarded them as "her family."

She was tall, well formed, nearly black, and brought a good price.  A

Methodist minister in Hannibal sold a negro child at the same time to

another minister who took it to his home farther South.  As the steamboat

moved away from the landing the child's mother stood at the water's edge,

shrieking her anguish.  We are prone to consider these things harshly

now, when slavery has been dead for nearly half a century, but it was a

sacred institution then, and to sell a child from its mother was little

more than to sell to-day a calf from its lowing dam.  One could be sorry,

of course, in both instances, but necessity or convenience are matters

usually considered before sentiment.  Mark Twain once said of his mother:



"Kind-hearted and compassionate as she was, I think she was not conscious

that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted ursurpation.  She had

never heard it assailed in any pulpit, but had heard it defended and

sanctified in a thousand.  As far as her experience went, the wise, the

good, and the holy were unanimous in the belief that slavery was right,

righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the Deity, and a condition which

the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for."



Yet Jane Clemens must have had qualms at times--vague, unassembled doubts

that troubled her spirit.  After Jennie was gone a little black chore-boy

was hired from his owner, who had bought him on the east shore of

Maryland and brought him to that remote Western village, far from family

and friends.



He was a cheery spirit in spite of that, and gentle, but very noisy.  All

day he went about singing, whistling, and whooping until his noise became

monotonous, maddening.  One day Little Sam said:



"Ma--[that was the Southern term]--,make Sandy stop singing all the

time.  It's awful."



Tears suddenly came into his mother's eyes.



"Poor thing!  He is sold away from his home.  When he sings it shows

maybe he is not remembering.  When he's still I am afraid he is thinking,

and I can't bear it."



Yet any one in that day who advanced the idea of freeing the slaves was

held in abhorrence.  An abolitionist was something to despise, to stone

out of the community.  The children held the name in horror, as belonging

to something less than human; something with claws, perhaps, and a tail.



The money received for the sale of Jennie made judge Clemens easier for a

time.  Business appears to have improved, too, and he was tided through

another year during which he seems to have made payments on an expensive

piece of real estate on Hill and Main streets.  This property, acquired

in November, 1839, meant the payment of some seven thousand dollars, and

was a credit purchase, beyond doubt.  It was well rented, but the tenants

did not always pay; and presently a crisis came--a descent of creditors--

and John: Clemens at forty-four found himself without business and

without means.  He offered everything--his cow, his household furniture,

even his forks and spoons--to his creditors, who protested that he must

not strip himself.  They assured him that they admired his integrity so

much they would aid him to resume business; but when he went to St.

Louis to lay in a stock of goods he was coldly met, and the venture came

to nothing.



He now made a trip to Tennessee in the hope of collecting some old debts

and to raise money on the Tennessee land.  He took along a negro man

named Charlie, whom he probably picked up for a small sum, hoping to make

something through his disposal in a better market.  The trip was another

failure.  The man who owed him a considerable sum of money was solvent,

but pleaded hard times:



     It seems so very hard upon him--[John Clemens wrote home]--to pay

     such a sum that I could not have the conscience to hold him to it.

     .  .  I still have Charlie.  The highest price I had offered for him

     in New Orleans was $50, in Vicksburg $40.  After performing the

     journey to Tennessee, I expect to sell him for whatever he will

     bring.



     I do not know what I can commence for a business in the spring.  My

     brain is constantly on the rack with the study, and I can't relieve

     myself of it.  The future, taking its completion from the state of

     my health or mind, is alternately beaming in sunshine or over-

     shadowed with clouds; but mostly cloudy, as you may suppose.  I want

     bodily exercise--some constant and active employment, in the first

     place; and, in the next place, I want to be paid for it, if

     possible.



This letter is dated January 7, 1842.  He returned without any financial

success, and obtained employment for a time in a commission-house on the

levee.  The proprietor found some fault one day, and Judge Clemens walked

out of the premises.  On his way home he stopped in a general store, kept

by a man named Sehns, to make some purchases.  When he asked that these

be placed on account, Selms hesitated.  Judge Clemens laid down a five-

dollar gold piece, the last money he possessed in the world, took the

goods, and never entered the place again.



When Jane Clemens reproached him for having made the trip to Tennessee,

at a cost of two hundred dollars, so badly needed at this time, he only

replied gently that he had gone for what he believed to be the best.



"I am not able to dig in the streets," he added, and Orion, who records

this, adds:



"I can see yet the hopeless expression of his face."



During a former period of depression, such as this, death had come into

the Clemens home.  It came again now.  Little Benjamin, a sensitive,

amiable boy of ten, one day sickened, and died within a week, May 12,

1842.  He was a favorite child and his death was a terrible blow.  Little

Sam long remembered the picture of his parents' grief; and Orion recalls

that they kissed each other, something hitherto unknown.



Judge Clemens went back to his law and judicial practice.  Mrs. Clemens

decided to take a few boarders.  Orion, by this time seventeen and a very

good journeyman printer, obtained a place in St. Louis to aid in the

family support.



The tide of fortune having touched low-water mark, the usual gentle stage

of improvement set in.  Times grew better in Hannibal after those first

two or three years; legal fees became larger and more frequent.  Within

another two years judge Clemens appears to have been in fairly hopeful

circumstances again--able at least to invest some money in silkworm

culture and lose it, also to buy a piano for Pamela, and to build a

modest house on the Hill Street property, which a rich St. Louis cousin,

James Clemens, had preserved for him.  It was the house which is known

today as the "Mark Twain Home."--['This house, in 1911, was bought by

Mr. and Mrs.  George A.  Mahan, and presented to Hannibal for a memorial

museum.]--Near it, toward the corner of Main Street, was his office,

and here he dispensed law and justice in a manner which, if it did not

bring him affluence, at least won for him the respect of the entire

community.  One example will serve:



Next to his office was a stone-cutter's shop.  One day the proprietor,

Dave Atkinson, got into a muss with one "Fighting" MacDonald, and there

was a tremendous racket.  Judge Clemens ran out and found the men down,

punishing each other on the pavement.



"I command the peace!" he shouted, as he came up to them.



No one paid the least attention.



"I command the peace!" he shouted again, still louder, but with no

result.



A stone-cutter's mallet lay there, handy.  Judge Clemens seized it and,

leaning over the combatants, gave the upper one, MacDonald, a smart blow

on the head.



"I command the peace!" he said, for the third time, and struck a

considerably smarter blow.



That settled it.  The second blow was of the sort that made MacDonald

roll over, and peace ensued.  Judge Clemens haled both men into his

court, fined them, and collected his fee.  Such enterprise in the cause

of justice deserved prompt reward.









XI



DAYS OF EDUCATION



The Clemens family had made one or two moves since its arrival in

Hannibal, but the identity of these temporary residences and the period

of occupation of each can no longer be established.  Mark Twain once

said:



"In 1843 my father caught me in a lie.  It is not this fact that gives me

the date, but the house we lived in.  We were there only a year."



We may believe it was the active result of that lie that fixed his memory

of the place, for his father seldom punished him.  When he did, it was a

thorough and satisfactory performance.



It was about the period of moving into the new house (1844) that the Tom

Sawyer days--that is to say, the boyhood of Samuel Clemens--may be said

to have begun.  Up to that time he was just Little Sam, a child--wild,

and mischievous, often exasperating, but still a child--a delicate little

lad to be worried over, mothered, or spanked and put to bed.  Now, at

nine, he had acquired health, with a sturdy ability to look out for

himself, as boys will, in a community like that, especially where the

family is rather larger than the income and there is still a younger

child to claim a mother's protecting care.  So "Sam," as they now called

him, "grew up" at nine, and was full of knowledge for his years.  Not

that he was old in spirit or manner--he was never that, even to his

death--but he had learned a great number of things, mostly of a kind not

acquired at school.



They were not always of a pleasant kind; they were likely to be of a kind

startling to a boy, even terrifying.  Once Little Sam--he was still

Little Sam, then--saw an old man shot down on the main street, at

noonday.  He saw them carry him home, lay him on the bed, and spread on

his breast an open family Bible which looked as heavy as an anvil.  He

though, if he could only drag that great burden away, the poor, old dying

man would not breathe so heavily.  He saw a young emigrant stabbed with a

bowie-knife by a drunken comrade, and noted the spurt of life-blood that

followed; he saw two young men try to kill their uncle, one holding him

while the other snapped repeatedly an Allen revolver which failed to go

off.  Then there was the drunken rowdy who proposed to raid the

"Welshman's" house one dark threatening night--he saw that, too.  A widow

and her one daughter lived there, and the ruffian woke the whole village

with his coarse challenges and obscenities.  Sam Clemens and a boon

companion, John Briggs, went up there to look and listen.  The man was at

the gate, and the warren were invisible in the shadow of the dark porch.

The boys heard the elder woman's voice warning the man that she had a

loaded gun, and that she would kill him if he stayed where he was.  He

replied with a ribald tirade, and she warned that she would count ten-

that if he remained a second longer she would fire.  She began slowly and

counted up to five, with him laughing and jeering.  At six he grew

silent, but he did not go.  She counted on: seven--eight--nine--The boys

watching from the dark roadside felt their hearts stop.  There was a long

pause, then the final count, followed a second later by a gush of flame.

The man dropped, his breast riddled.  At the same instant the

thunderstorm that had been gathering broke loose.  The boys fled wildly,

believing that Satan himself had arrived to claim the lost soul.



Many such instances happened in a town like that in those days.  And

there were events incident to slavery.  He saw a slave struck down and

killed with a piece of slag for a trifling offense.  He saw an

abolitionist attacked by a mob, and they would have lynched him had not a

Methodist minister defended him on a plea that he must be crazy.  He did

not remember, in later years, that he had ever seen a slave auction, but

he added:



"I am suspicious that it is because the thing was a commonplace

spectacle, and not an uncommon or impressive one.  I do vividly remember

seeing a dozen black men and women chained together lying in a group on

the pavement, waiting shipment to a Southern slave-market.  They had the

saddest faces I ever saw."



It is not surprising that a boy would gather a store of human knowledge

amid such happenings as these.  They were wild, disturbing things.  They

got into his dreams and made him fearful when he woke in the middle of

the night.  He did not then regard them as an education.  In some vague

way he set them down as warnings, or punishments, designed to give him a

taste for a better life.  He felt that it was his own conscience that

made these things torture him.  That was his mother's idea, and he had a

high respect for her moral opinions, also for her courage.  Among other

things, he had seen her one day defy a vicious devil of a Corsican--a

common terror in the town-who was chasing his grown daughter with a heavy

rope in his hand, declaring he would wear it out on her.  Cautious

citizens got out of her way, but Jane Clemens opened her door wide to the

refugee, and then, instead of rushing in and closing it, spread her arms

across it, barring the way.  The man swore and threatened her with the

rope, but she did not flinch or show any sign of fear.  She stood there

and shamed him and derided him and defied him until he gave up the rope

and slunk off, crestfallen and conquered.  Any one who could do that must

have a perfect conscience, Sam thought.  In the fearsome darkness he

would say his prayers, especially when a thunderstorm was coming, and vow

to begin a better life in the morning.  He detested Sunday-school as much

as day-school, and once Orion, who was moral and religious, had

threatened to drag him there by the collar; but as the thunder got louder

Sam decided that he loved Sunday-school and would go the next Sunday

without being invited.



Fortunately there were pleasanter things than these.  There were picnics

sometimes, and ferry-boat excursions.  Once there was a great Fourth-of-

July celebration at which it was said a real Revolutionary soldier was to

be present.  Some one had discovered him living alone seven or eight

miles in the country.  But this feature proved a disappointment; for when

the day came and he was triumphantly brought in he turned out to be a

Hessian, and was allowed to walk home.



The hills and woods around Hannibal where, with his playmates, he roamed

almost at will were never disappointing.  There was the cave with its

marvels; there was Bear Creek, where, after repeated accidents, he had

learned to swim.  It had cost him heavily to learn to swim.  He had seen

two playmates drown; also, time and again he had, himself, been dragged

ashore more dead than alive, once by a slave-girl, another time by a

slaveman--Neal Champ, of the Pavey Hotel.  In the end he had conquered;

he could swim better than any boy in town of his age.



It was the river that meant more to him than all the rest.  Its charm was

permanent.  It was the path of adventure, the gateway to the world.  The

river with its islands, its great slow-moving rafts, its marvelous

steamboats that were like fairyland, its stately current swinging to the

sea!  He would sit by it for hours and dream.  He would venture out on it

in a surreptitiously borrowed boat when he was barely strong enough to

lift an oar out of the water.  He learned to know all its moods and

phases.  He felt its kinship.  In some occult way he may have known it as

his prototype--that resistless tide of life with its ever-changing sweep,

its shifting shores, its depths, its shadows, its gorgeous sunset hues,

its solemn and tranquil entrance to the sea.



His hunger for the life aboard the steamers became a passion.  To be even

the humblest employee of one of those floating enchantments would be

enough; to be an officer would be to enter heaven; to be a pilot was to

be a god.



"You can hardly imagine what it meant," he reflected once, "to a boy in

those days, shut in as we were, to see those steamboats pass up and down,

and never to take a trip on them."



He had reached the mature age of nine when he could endure this no

longer.  One day, when the big packet came down and stopped at Hannibal,

he slipped aboard and crept under one of the boats on the upper deck.

Presently the signal-bells rang, the steamboat backed away and swung into

midstream; he was really going at last.  He crept from beneath the boat

and sat looking out over the water and enjoying the scenery.  Then it

began to rain--a terrific downpour.  He crept back under the boat, but

his legs were outside, and one of the crew saw him.  So he was taken down

into the cabin and at the next stop set ashore.  It was the town of

Louisiana, and there were Lampton relatives there who took him home.

Jane Clemens declared that his father had got to take him in hand; which

he did, doubtless impressing the adventure on him in the usual way.

These were all educational things; then there was always the farm, where

entertainment was no longer a matter of girl-plays and swings, with a

colored nurse following about, but of manlier sports with his older boy

cousins, who had a gun and went hunting with the men for squirrels and

partridges by day, for coons and possums by night.  Sometimes the little

boy had followed the hunters all night long and returned with them

through the sparkling and fragrant morning fresh, hungry, and triumphant

just in time for breakfast.



So it is no wonder that at nine he was no longer "Little Sam," but Sam

Clemens, quite mature and self-dependent, with a wide knowledge of men

and things and a variety of accomplishments.  He had even learned to

smoke--a little--out there on the farm, and had tried tobacco-chewing,

though that was a failure.  He had been stung to this effort by a big

girl at a school which, with his cousin Puss, he sometimes briefly

attended.



"Do you use terbacker?" the big girl had asked, meaning did he chew it.



"No," he said, abashed at the confession.



"Haw!" she cried to the other scholars; "here's a boy that can't chaw

terbacker."



Degraded and ashamed, he tried to correct his fault, but it only made him

very ill; and he did not try again.



He had also acquired the use of certain strong, expressive words, and

used them, sometimes, when his mother was safely distant.  He had an

impression that she would "skin him alive" if she heard him swear.  His

education had doubtful spots in it, but it had provided wisdom.



He was not a particularly attractive lad.  He was not tall for his years,

and his head was somewhat too large for his body.  He had a "great ruck"

of light, sandy hair which he plastered down to keep it from curling;

keen blue-gray eyes, and rather large features.  Still, he had a fair,

delicate complexion, when it was not blackened by grime or tan; a gentle,

winning manner; a smile that, with his slow, measured way of speaking,

made him a favorite with his companions.  He did not speak much, and his

mental attainments were not highly regarded; but, for some reason,

whenever he did speak every playmate in hearing stopped whatever he was

doing and listened.  Perhaps it would be a plan for a new game or lark;

perhaps it was something droll; perhaps it was just a commonplace remark

that his peculiar drawl made amusing.  Whatever it was, they considered

it worth while.  His mother always referred to his slow fashion of

speaking as "Sammy's long talk."  Her own speech was still more

deliberate, but she seemed not to notice it.  Henry--a much handsomer lad

and regarded as far more promising--did not have it.  He was a lovable,

obedient little fellow whom the mischievous Sam took delight in teasing.

For this and other reasons the latter's punishments were frequent enough,

perhaps not always deserved.  Sometimes he charged his mother with

partiality.  He would say:



"Yes, no matter what it is, I am always the one to get punished"; and his

mother would answer:



"Well, Sam, if you didn't deserve it for that, you did for something

else."



Henry Clemens became the Sid of Tom Sawyer, though Henry was in every way

a finer character than Sid.  His brother Sam always loved him, and fought

for him oftener than with him.



With the death of Benjamin Clemens, Henry and Sam were naturally drawn

much closer together, though Sam could seldom resist the temptation of

tormenting Henry.  A schoolmate, George Butler (he was a nephew of

General Butler and afterward fought bravely in the Civil War), had a

little blue suit with a leather belt to match, and was the envy of all.

Mrs. Clemens finally made Sam and Henry suits of blue cotton velvet, and

the next Sunday, after various services were over, the two sauntered

about, shedding glory for a time, finally going for a stroll in the

woods.  They walked along properly enough, at first, then just ahead Sam

spied the stump of a newly cut tree, and with a wild whooping impulse

took a running leap over it.  There were splinters on the stump where the

tree had broken away, but he cleared them neatly.  Henry wanted to match

the performance, but was afraid to try, so Sam dared him.  He kept daring

him until Henry was goaded to the attempt.  He cleared the stump, but the

highest splinters caught the slack of his little blue trousers, and the

cloth gave way.  He escaped injury, but the precious trousers were

damaged almost beyond repair.  Sam, with a boy's heartlessness, was

fairly rolling on the ground with laughter at Henry's appearance.



"Cotton-tail rabbit!" he shouted.  "Cotton-tail rabbit!" while Henry,

weeping, set out for home by a circuitous and unfrequented road.  Let us

hope, if there was punishment for this mishap, that it fell in the proper

locality.



These two brothers were of widely different temperament.  Henry, even as

a little boy, was sturdy, industrious, and dependable.  Sam was volatile

and elusive; his industry of an erratic kind.  Once his father set him to

work with a hatchet to remove some plaster.  He hacked at it for a time

well enough, then lay down on the floor of the room and threw his hatchet

at such areas of the plaster as were not in easy reach.  Henry would have

worked steadily at a task like that until the last bit was removed and

the room swept clean.



The home incidents in 'Tom Sawyer', most of them, really happened.  Sam

Clemens did clod Henry for getting him into trouble about the colored

thread with which he sewed his shirt when he came home from swimming; he

did inveigle a lot of boys into whitewashing, a fence for him; he did

give Pain-killer to Peter, the cat.  There was a cholera scare that year,

and Pain-killer was regarded as a preventive.  Sam had been ordered to

take it liberally, and perhaps thought Peter too should be safeguarded.

As for escaping punishment for his misdeeds in the manner described in

that book, this was a daily matter, and the methods adapted themselves to

the conditions.  In the introduction to Tom Sawyer Mark Twain confesses

to the general truth of the history, and to the reality of its

characters.  "Huck Finn was drawn from life," he tells us.  "Tom Sawyer

also, but not from an individual--he is a combination of the

characteristics of three boys whom I knew."



The three boys were--himself, chiefly, and in a lesser degree John Briggs

and Will Bowen.  John Briggs was also the original of Joe Harper in that

book.  As for Huck Finn, his original was Tom Blankenship, neither

elaborated nor qualified.



There were several of the Blankenships: there was old Ben, the father,

who had succeeded "General" Gains as the town drunkard; young Ben, the

eldest son--a hard case with certain good traits; and Tom--that is to

say, Huck--who was just as he is described in Tom Sawyer: a ruin of rags,

a river-rat, an irresponsible bit of human drift, kind of heart and

possessing that priceless boon, absolute unaccountability of conduct to

any living soul.  He could came and go as he chose; he never had to work

or go to school; he could do all things, good or bad, that the other boys

longed to do and were forbidden.  He represented to them the very

embodiment of liberty, and his general knowledge of important matters,

such as fishing, hunting, trapping, and all manner of signs and spells

and hoodoos and incantations, made him immensely valuable as a companion.

The fact that his society was prohibited gave it a vastly added charm.



The Blankenships picked up a precarious living fishing and hunting, and

lived at first in a miserable house of bark, under a tree, but later

moved into quite a pretentious building back of the new Clemens home on

Hill Street.  It was really an old barn of a place--poor and ramshackle

even then; but now, more than sixty years later, a part of it is still

standing.  The siding of the part that stands is of black walnut, which

must have been very plentiful in that long-ago time.  Old drunken Ben

Blankenship never dreamed that pieces of his house would be carried off

as relics because of the literary fame of his son Tom--a fame founded on

irresponsibility and inconsequence.  Orion Clemens, who was concerned

with missionary work about this time, undertook to improve the

Blankenships spiritually.  Sam adopted them, outright, and took them to

his heart.  He was likely to be there at any hour of the day, and he and

Tom had cat-call signals at night which would bring him out on the back

single-story roof, and down a little arbor and flight of steps, to the

group of boon companions which, besides Tom, included John Briggs, the

Bowen boys, Will Pitts, and one or two other congenial spirits.  They

were not vicious boys; they were not really bad boys; they were only

mischievous, fun-loving boys-thoughtless, and rather disregardful of the

comforts and the rights of others.









XII



TOM SAWYER'S BAND



They ranged from Holliday's Hill on the north to the Cave on the south,

and over the fields and through all the woods about.  They navigated.

the river from Turtle Island to Glasscock's Island (now Pearl, or Tom

Sawyer's Island), and far below; they penetrated the wilderness of the

Illinois shore.  They could run like wild turkeys and swim like ducks;

they could handle a boat as if born in one.  No orchard or melon patch

was entirely safe from them; no dog or slave patrol so vigilant that they

did not sooner or later elude it.  They borrowed boats when their owners

were not present.  Once when they found this too much trouble, they

decided to own a boat, and one Sunday gave a certain borrowed craft a

coat of red paint (formerly it had been green), and secluded it for a

season up Bear Creek.  They borrowed the paint also, and the brush,

though they carefully returned these the same evening about nightfall, so

the painter could have them Monday morning.  Tom Blankenship rigged up a

sail for the new craft, and Sam Clemens named it Cecilia, after which

they didn't need to borrow boats any more, though the owner of it did;

and he sometimes used to observe as he saw it pass that, if it had been

any other color but red, he would have sworn it was his.



Some of their expeditions were innocent enough.  They often cruised up to

Turtle Island, about two miles above Hannibal, and spent the day

feasting.  You could have loaded a car with turtles and their eggs up

there, and there were quantities of mussels and plenty of fish.  Fishing

and swimming were their chief pastimes, with general marauding for

adventure.  Where the railroad-bridge now ends on the Missouri side was

their favorite swimming-hole--that and along Bear Creek, a secluded

limpid water with special interests of its own.  Sometimes at evening

they swam across to Glasscock's Island--the rendezvous of Tom Sawyer's

"Black Avengers" and the hiding-place of Huck and Nigger Jim; then, when

they had frolicked on the sand-bar at the head of the island for an hour

or more, they would swim back in the dusk, a distance of half a mile,

breasting the strong, steady Mississippi current without exhaustion or

fear.  They could swim all day, likely enough, those graceless young

scamps.  Once--though this was considerably later, when he was sixteen--

Sam Clemens swam across to the Illinois side, and then turned and swam

back again without landing, a distance of at least two miles, as he had

to go.  He was seized with a cramp on the return trip.  His legs became

useless, and he was obliged to make the remaining distance with his arms.

It was a hardy life they led, and it is not recorded that they ever did

any serious damage, though they narrowly missed it sometimes.



One of their Sunday pastimes was to climb Holliday's Hill and roll down

big stones, to frighten the people who were driving to church.

Holliday's Hill above the road was steep; a stone once started would go

plunging and leaping down and bound across the road with the deadly

swiftness of a twelve-inch shell.  The boys would get a stone poised,

then wait until they saw a team approaching, and, calculating the

distance, would give it a start.  Dropping down behind the bushes, they

would watch the dramatic effect upon the church-goers as the great

missile shot across the road a few yards before them.  This was Homeric

sport, but they carried it too far.  Stones that had a habit of getting

loose so numerously on Sundays and so rarely on other days invited

suspicion, and the "Patterollers" (river patrol--a kind of police of

those days) were put on the watch.  So the boys found other diversions

until the Patterollers did not watch any more; then they planned a grand

coup that would eclipse anything before attempted in the stone-rolling

line.



A rock about the size of an omnibus was lying up there, in a good

position to go down hill, once, started.  They decided it would be a

glorious thing to see that great boulder go smashing down, a hundred

yards or so in front of some unsuspecting and peaceful-minded church-

goer.  Quarrymen were getting out rock not far away, and left their picks

and shovels over Sundays.  The boys borrowed these, and went to work to

undermine the big stone.  It was a heavier job than they had counted on,

but they worked faithfully, Sunday after Sunday.  If their parents had

wanted them to work like that, they would have thought they were being

killed.



Finally one Sunday, while they were digging, it suddenly got loose and

started down.  They were not quite ready for it.  Nobody was coming but

an old colored man in a cart, so it was going to be wasted.  It was not

quite wasted, however.  They had planned for a thrilling result; and

there was thrill enough while it lasted.  In the first place, the stone

nearly caught Will Bowen when it started.  John Briggs had just that

moment quit digging and handed Will the pick.  Will was about to step

into the excavation when Sam Clemens, who was already there, leaped out

with a yell:



"Look out, boys, she's coming!"



She came.  The huge stone kept to the ground at first, then, gathering a

wild momentum, it went bounding into the air.  About half-way down the

hill it struck a tree several inches through and cut it clean off.  This

turned its course a little, and the negro in the cart, who heard the

noise, saw it come crashing in his direction and made a wild effort to

whip up his horse.  It was also headed toward a cooper-shop across the

road.  The boys watched it with growing interest.  It made longer leaps

with every bound, and whenever it struck the fragments the dust would

fly.  They were certain it would demolish the negro and destroy the

cooper-shop.  The shop was empty, it being Sunday, but the rest of the

catastrophe would invite close investigation, with results.  They wanted

to fly, but they could not move until they saw the rock land.  It was

making mighty leaps now, and the terrified negro had managed to get

directly in its path.  They stood holding their breath, their mouths

open.  Then suddenly they could hardly believe their eyes; the boulder

struck a projection a distance above the road, and with a mighty bound

sailed clear over the negro and his mule and landed in the soft dirt

beyond-only a fragment striking the shop, damaging but not wrecking it.

Half buried in the ground, that boulder lay there for nearly forty years;

then it was blasted up for milling purposes.  It was the last rock the

boys ever rolled down.  They began to suspect that the sport was not

altogether safe.



Sometimes the boys needed money, which was not easy to get in those days.

On one occasion of this sort, Tom Blankenship had the skin of a coon he

had captured, which represented the only capital in the crowd.  At

Selms's store on Wild Cat corner the coonskin would bring ten cents, but

that was not enough.  They arranged a plan which would make it pay a good

deal more than that.  Selins's window was open, it being summer-time, and

his pile of pelts was pretty handy.  Huck--that is to say, Tom--went in

the front door and sold the skin for ten cents to Selms, who tossed it

back on the pile.  Tom came back with the money and after a reasonable

period went around to the open window, crawled in, got the coonskin, and

sold it to Selms again.  He did this several times that afternoon; then

John Pierce, Selins's clerk, said:



"Look here, Selms, there is something wrong about this.  That boy has

been selling us coonskins all the afternoon."



Selms went to his pile of pelts.  There were several sheepskins and some

cowhides, but only one coonskin--the one he had that moment bought.

Selms himself used to tell this story as a great joke.



Perhaps it is not adding to Mark Twain's reputation to say that the boy

Sam Clemens--a pretty small boy, a good deal less than twelve at this

time--was the leader of this unhallowed band; yet any other record would

be less than historic.  If the band had a leader, it was he.  They were

always ready to listen to him--they would even stop fishing to do that--

and to follow his projects.  They looked to him for ideas and

organization, whether the undertaking was to be real or make-believe.

When they played "Bandit" or "Pirate" or "Indian," Sam Clemens was always

chief; when they became real raiders it is recorded that he was no less

distinguished.  Like Tom Sawyer, he loved the glare and trappings of

leadership.  When the Christian Sons of Temperance came along with a

regalia, and a red sash that carried with it rank and the privilege of

inventing pass-words, the gaud of these things got into his eyes, and he

gave up smoking (which he did rather gingerly) and swearing (which he did

only under heavy excitement), also liquor (though he had never tasted it

yet), and marched with the newly washed and pure in heart for a full

month--a month of splendid leadership and servitude.  Then even the red

sash could not hold him in bondage.  He looked up Tom Blankenship and

said:



"Say, Tom, I'm blamed tired of this!  Let's go somewhere and smoke!"

Which must have been a good deal of a sacrifice, for the uniform was a

precious thing.



Limelight and the center of the stage was a passion of Sam Clemens's

boyhood, a love of the spectacular that never wholly died.  It seems

almost a pity that in those far-off barefoot old days he could not have

looked down the years to a time when, with the world at his feet,

venerable Oxford should clothe him in a scarlet gown.



He could not by any chance have dreamed of that stately honor.  His

ambitions did not lie in the direction of mental achievement.  It is true

that now and then, on Friday at school, he read a composition, one of

which--a personal burlesque on certain older boys--came near resulting in

bodily damage.  But any literary ambition he may have had in those days

was a fleeting thing.  His permanent dream was to be a pirate, or a

pilot, or a bandit, or a trapper-scout; something gorgeous and active,

where his word--his nod, even--constituted sufficient law.  The river

kept the pilot ambition always fresh, and the cave supplied a background

for those other things.



The cave was an enduring and substantial joy.  It was a real cave, not

merely a hole, but a subterranean marvel of deep passages and vaulted

chambers that led away into bluffs and far down into the earth's black

silences, even below the river, some said.  For Sam Clemens the cave had

a fascination that never faded.  Other localities and diversions might

pall, but any mention of the cave found him always eager and ready for

the three-mile walk or pull that brought them to its mystic door.  With

its long corridors, its royal chambers hung with stalactites, its remote

hiding-places, its possibilities as the home of a gallant outlaw band, it

contained everything that a romantic boy could love or long for.  In Tom

Sawyer Indian Joe dies in the cave.  He did not die there in real life,

but was lost there once, and was living on bats when they found him.  He

was a dissolute reprobate, and when, one night, he did die there came up

a thunder-storm so terrific that Sam Clemens at home and in bed was

certain that Satan had come in person for the half-breed's wicked soul.

He covered his head and said his prayers industriously, in the fear that

the evil one might conclude to save another trip by taking him along,

too.



The treasure-digging adventure in the book had a foundation in fact.

There was a tradition concerning some French trappers who long before had

established a trading-post two miles above Hannibal, on what is called

the "bay."  It is said that, while one of these trappers was out hunting,

Indians made a raid on the post and massacred the others.  The hunter on

returning found his comrades killed and scalped, but the Indians had

failed to find the treasure which was buried in a chest.  He left it

there, swam across to Illinois, and made his way to St. Louis, where he

told of the massacre and the burial of the, chest of gold.  Then he

started to raise a party to go back for it, but was taken sick and died.

Later some men came up from St. Louis looking for the chest.  They did

not find it, but they told the circumstances, and afterward a good many

people tried to find the gold.



Tom Blankenship one morning came to Sam Clemens and John Briggs and said

he was going to dig up the treasure.  He said he had dreamed just where

it was, and said if they would go with him and dig he would divide up.

The boys had great faith in dreams, especially Tom's dreams.  Tom's

unlimited freedom gave him a large importance in their eyes.  The dreams

of a boy like that were pretty sure to mean something.  They followed Tom

to the place with some shovels and a pick, and he showed them where to

dig.  Then he sat down under the shade of a papaw-tree and gave orders.



They dug nearly all day.  Now and then they stopped to rest, and maybe to

wonder a little why Tom didn't dig some himself; but, of course, he had

done the dreaming, which entitled him to an equal share.



They did not find it that day, and when they went back next morning they

took two long iron rods; these they would push and drive into the ground

until they struck something hard.  Then they would dig down to see what

it was, but it never turned out to be money.  That night the boys

declared they would not dig any more.  But Tom had another dream.  He

dreamed the gold was exactly under the, little papaw-tree.  This sounded

so circumstantial that they went back and dug another day.  It was hot

weather too, August, and that night they were nearly dead.  Even Tom gave

it up, then.  He said there was something about the way they dug, but he

never offered to do any digging himself.



This differs considerably from the digging incident in the book, but it

gives us an idea of the respect the boys had for the ragamuffin original

of Huckleberry Finn.--[Much of the detail in this chapter was furnished

to the writer by John Briggs shortly before his death in 1907.]--Tom

Blankenship's brother, Ben, was also drawn upon for that creation, at

least so far as one important phase of Huck's character is concerned.  He

was considerably older, as well as more disreputable, than Tom.  He was

inclined to torment the boys by tying knots in their clothes when they

went swimming, or by throwing mud at them when they wanted to come out,

and they had no deep love for him.  But somewhere in Ben Blankenship

there was a fine generous strain of humanity that provided Mark Twain

with that immortal episode in the story of Huck Finn--in sheltering the

Nigger Jim.



This is the real story:



A slave ran off from Monroe County, Missouri, and got across the river

into Illinois.  Ben used to fish and hunt over there in the swamps, and

one day found him.  It was considered a most worthy act in those days to

return a runaway slave; in fact, it was a crime not to do it.  Besides,

there was for this one a reward of fifty dollars, a fortune to ragged

outcast Ben Blankenship.  That money and the honor he could acquire must

have been tempting to the waif, but it did not outweigh his human

sympathy.  Instead of giving him up and claiming the reward, Ben kept the

runaway over there in the marshes all summer.  The negro would fish and

Ben would carry him scraps of other food.  Then, by and by, it leaked

out.  Some wood-choppers went on a hunt for the fugitive, and chased him

to what was called "Bird Slough."  There trying to cross a drift he was

drowned.



In the book, the author makes Huck's struggle a psychological one between

conscience and the law, on one side, and sympathy on the other.  With Ben

Blankenship the struggle--if there was a struggle--was probably between

sympathy and cupidity.  He would care very little for conscience and

still less for law.  His sympathy with the runaway, however, would be

large and elemental, and it must have been very large to offset the lure

of that reward.



There was a gruesome sequel to this incident.  Some days following the

drowning of the runaway, Sam Clemens, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys

went to the spot and were pushing the drift about, when suddenly the

negro rose before them, straight and terrible, about half his length out

of the water.  He had gone down feet foremost, and the loosened drift had

released him.  The boys did not stop to investigate.  They thought he was

after them and flew in wild terror, never stopping until they reached

human habitation.



How many gruesome experiences there appear to have been in those early

days!  In 'The Innocents Abroad' Mark Twain tells of the murdered man he

saw one night in his father's office.  The man's name was McFarlane.  He

had been stabbed that day in the old Hudson-McFarlane feud and carried in

there to die.  Sam Clemens and John Briggs had run away from school and

had been sky larking all that day, and knew nothing of the affair. Sam

decided that his father's office was safer for him than to face his

mother, who was probably sitting up, waiting.  He tells us how he lay on

the lounge, and how a shape on the floor gradually resolved itself into

the outlines of a man; how a square of moonlight from the window

approached it and gradually revealed the dead face and the ghastly

stabbed breast.



"I went out of there," he says.  "I do not say that I went away in any

sort of a hurry, but I simply went; that is sufficient.  I went out of

the window, and I carried the sash along with me.  I did not need the

sash, but it was handier to take it than to, leave it, and so I took it.

I was not scared, but I was considerably agitated."



He was not yet twelve, for his father was no longer alive when the boy

reached that age.  Certainly these were disturbing, haunting things.

Then there was the case of the drunken tramp in the calaboose to whom the

boys kind-heartedly enough carried food and tobacco.  Sam Clemens spent

some of his precious money to buy the tramp a box of Lucifer matches--a

brand new invention then, scarce and high.  The tramp started a fire with

the matches and burned down the calaboose, himself in it.  For weeks the

boy was tortured, awake and in his dreams, by the thought that if he had

not carried the man the matches the tragedy could not have happened.

Remorse was always Samuel Clemens's surest punishment.  To his last days

on earth he never outgrew its pangs.



What a number of things crowded themselves into a few brief years!  It is

not easy to curtail these boyhood adventures of Sam Clemens and his

scapegrace friends, but one might go on indefinitely with their mad

doings.  They were an unpromising lot.  Ministers and other sober-minded

citizens freely prophesied sudden and violent ends for them, and

considered them hardly worth praying for.  They must have proven a

disappointing lot to those prophets.  The Bowen boys became fine river-

pilots; Will Pitts was in due time a leading merchant and bank director;

John Briggs grew into a well-to-do and highly respected farmer; even Huck

Finn--that is to say, Tom Blankenship--is reputed to have ranked as an

honored citizen and justice of the peace in a Western town.  But in those

days they were a riotous, fun-loving band with little respect for order

and even less for ordinance.









XIII



THE GENTLER SIDE



His associations were not all of that lawless breed.  At his school (he

had sampled several places of learning, and was now at Mr. Cross's on the

Square) were a number of less adventurous, even if not intrinsically

better playmates.  There was George Robards, the Latin scholar, and John,

his brother, a handsome boy, who rode away at last with his father into

the sunset, to California, his golden curls flying in the wind.  And

there was Jimmy McDaniel, a kind-hearted boy whose company was worth

while, because his father was a confectioner, and he used to bring candy

and cake to school.  Also there was Buck Brown, a rival speller, and John

Meredith, the doctor's son, and John Garth, who was one day to marry

little Helen Kercheval, and in the end would be remembered and honored

with a beautiful memorial building not far from the site of the old

school.



Furthermore, there were a good many girls.  Tom Sawyer had an

impressionable heart, and Sam Clemens no less so.  There was Bettie

Ormsley, and Artemisia Briggs, and Jennie Brady; also Mary Miller, who

was nearly twice his age and gave him his first broken heart.



"I believe I was as miserable as a grown man could be," he said once,

remembering.



Tom Sawyer had heart sorrows too, and we may imagine that his emotions at

such times were the emotions of Sam Clemens, say at the age of ten.



But, as Tom Sawyer had one faithful sweetheart, so did he.  They were one

and the same.  Becky Thatcher in the book was Laura Hawkins in reality.

The acquaintance of these two had begun when the Hawkins family moved

into the Virginia house on the corner of Hill and Main streets.--[The

Hawkins family in real life bore no resemblance to the family of that

name in The Gilded Age.  Judge Hawkins of The Gilded Age, as already

noted, was John Clemens.  Mark Twain used the name Hawkins, also the name

of his boyhood sweetheart, Laura, merely for old times' sake, and because

in portraying the childhood of Laura Hawkins he had a picture of the real

Laura in his mind.]--The Clemens family was then in the new home across

the way, and the children were soon acquainted.  The boy could be tender

and kind, and was always gentle in his treatment of the other sex.  They

visited back and forth, especially around the new house, where there were

nice pieces of boards and bricks for play-houses.  So they played

"keeping house," and if they did not always agree well, since the

beginning of the world sweethearts have not always agreed, even in

Arcady.  Once when they were building a house--and there may have been

some difference of opinion as to its architecture--the boy happened to

let a brick fall on the little girl's finger.  If there had been any

disagreement it vanished instantly with that misfortune.  He tried to

comfort her and soothe the pain; then he wept with her and suffered most

of the two, no doubt.  So, you see, he was just a little boy, after all,

even though he was already chief of a red-handed band, the "Black

Avengers of the Spanish Main."



He was always a tender-hearted lad.  He would never abuse an animal,

unless, as in the Pain-killer incident, his tendency to pranking ran away

with him.  He had indeed a genuine passion for cats; summers when he went

to the farm he never failed to take his cat in a basket.  When he ate, it

sat in a chair beside him at the table.  His sympathy included inanimate

things as well.  He loved flowers--not as the embryo botanist or

gardener, but as a personal friend.  He pitied the dead leaf and the

murmuring dried weed of November because their brief lives were ended,

and they would never know the summer again, or grow glad with another

spring.  His heart went out to them; to the river and the sky, the sunlit

meadow and the drifted hill.  That his observation of all nature was

minute and accurate is shown everywhere in his writing; but it was never

the observation of a young naturalist it was the subconscious observation

of sympathetic love.



We are wandering away from his school-days.  They were brief enough and

came rapidly to an end.  They will not hold us long.  Undoubtedly Tom

Sawyer's distaste for school and his excuses for staying at home--usually

some pretended illness--have ample foundation in the boyhood of Sam

Clemens.  His mother punished him and pleaded with him, alternately.  He

detested school as he detested nothing else on earth, even going to

church.  "Church ain't worth shucks," said Tom Sawyer, but it was better

than school.



As already noted, the school of Mr. Cross stood in or near what is now

the Square in Hannibal.  The Square was only a grove then, grown up with

plum, hazel, and vine--a rare place for children.  At recess and the noon

hour the children climbed trees, gathered flowers, and swung in grape-

vine swings.  There was a spelling-bee every Friday afternoon, for Sam

the only endurable event of the school exercises.  He could hold the

floor at spelling longer than Buck Brown.  This was spectacular and

showy; it invited compliments even from Mr. Cross, whose name must have

been handed down by angels, it fitted him so well.  One day Sam Clemens

wrote on his slate:



          Cross by name and cross by nature

          Cross jumped over an Irish potato.



He showed this to John Briggs, who considered it a stroke of genius.  He

urged the author to write it on the board at noon, but the poet's

ambition did not go so far.



"Oh, pshaw!" said John.  "I wouldn't be afraid to do it.



"I dare you to do it," said Sam.



John Briggs never took a dare, and at noon, when Mr. Cross was at home at

dinner, he wrote flamingly the descriptive couplet.  When the teacher

returned and "books" were called he looked steadily at John Briggs.  He

had recognized the penmanship.



"Did you do that?" he asked, ominously.



It was a time for truth.



"Yes, sir," said John.



"Come here!"  And John came, and paid for his exploitation of genius

heavily.  Sam Clemens expected that the next call would be for "author,"

but for some reason the investigation ended there.  It was unusual for

him to escape.  His back generally kept fairly warm from one "frailing"

to the next.



His rewards were not all of a punitive nature.  There were two medals in

the school, one for spelling, the other for amiability.  They were

awarded once a week, and the holders wore them about the neck

conspicuously, and were envied accordingly.  John Robards--he of the

golden curls--wore almost continuously the medal for amiability, while

Sam Clemens had a mortgage on the medal for spelling.  Sometimes they

traded, to see how it would seem, but the master discouraged this

practice by taking the medals away from them for the remainder of the

week.  Once Sam Clemens lost the medal by leaving the first "r" out of

February.  He could have spelled it backward, if necessary; but Laura

Hawkins was the only one on the floor against him, and he was a gallant

boy.



The picture of that school as presented in the book written thirty years

later is faithful, we may believe, and the central figure is a tender-

hearted, romantic, devil-may-care lad, loathing application and longing

only for freedom.  It was a boon which would come to him sooner even than

he had dreamed.









XIV



THE PASSING OF JOHN CLEMENS



Judge Clemens, who time and again had wrecked or crippled his fortune by

devices more or less unusual, now adopted the one unfailing method of

achieving disaster.  He endorsed a large note, for a man of good repute,

and the payment of it swept him clean: home, property, everything

vanished again.  The St. Louis cousin took over the home and agreed to

let the family occupy it on payment of a small interest; but after an

attempt at housekeeping with a few scanty furnishings and Pamela's piano

--all that had been saved from the wreck--they moved across the street

into a portion of the Virginia house, then occupied by a Dr.  Grant.  The

Grants proposed that the Clemens family move over and board them, a

welcome arrangement enough at this time.



Judge Clemens had still a hope left.  The clerkship of the Surrogate

Court was soon to be filled by election.  It was an important

remunerative office, and he was regarded as the favorite candidate for

the position.  His disaster had aroused general sympathy, and his

nomination and election were considered sure.  He took no chances; he

made a canvass on horseback from house to house, often riding through

rain and the chill of fall, acquiring a cough which was hard to overcome.

He was elected by a heavy majority, and it was believed he could hold the

office as long as he chose.  There seemed no further need of worry.  As

soon as he was installed in office they would live in style becoming

their social position.  About the end of February he rode to Palmyra to

be sworn in.  Returning he was drenched by a storm of rain and sleet,

arriving at last half frozen.  His system was in no condition to resist

such a shock.  Pneumonia followed; physicians came with torments of

plasters and allopathic dosings that brought no relief.  Orion returned

from St. Louis to assist in caring for him, and sat by his bed,

encouraging him and reading to him, but it was evident that he grew daily

weaker.  Now and then he became cheerful and spoke of the Tennessee land

as the seed of a vast fortune that must surely flower at last.  He

uttered no regrets, no complaints.  Once only he said:



"I believe if I had stayed in Tennessee I might have been worth twenty

thousand dollars to-day."



On the morning of the 24th of March, 1847, it was evident that he could

not live many hours.  He was very weak.  When he spoke, now and then, it

was of the land.  He said it would soon make them all rich and happy.



"Cling to the land," he whispered.  "Cling to the land, and wait.  Let

nothing beguile it away from you."



A little later he beckoned to Pamela, now a lovely girl of nineteen, and,

putting his arm about her neck, kissed her for the first time in years.



"Let me die," he said.



He never spoke after that.  A little more, and the sad, weary life that

had lasted less than forty-nine years was ended: A dreamer and a

moralist, an upright man honored by all, he had never been a financier.

He ended life with less than he had begun.









XV



A YOUNG BEN FRANKLIN



For a third time death had entered the Clemens home: not only had it

brought grief now, but it had banished the light of new fortune from the

very threshold.  The disaster seemed complete.



The children were dazed.  Judge Clemens had been a distant, reserved man,

but they had loved him, each in his own way, and they had honored his

uprightness and nobility of purpose.  Mrs. Clemens confided to a neighbor

that, in spite of his manner, her husband had been always warm-hearted,

with a deep affection for his family.  They remembered that he had never

returned from a journey without bringing each one some present, however

trifling.  Orion, looking out of his window next morning, saw old Abram

Kurtz, and heard him laugh.  He wondered how anybody could still laugh.



The boy Sam was fairly broken down.  Remorse, which always dealt with him

unsparingly, laid a heavy hand on him now.  Wildness, disobedience,

indifference to his father's wishes, all were remembered; a hundred

things, in themselves trifling, became ghastly and heart-wringing in the

knowledge that they could never be undone.  Seeing his grief, his mother

took him by the hand and led him into the room where his father lay.



"It is all right, Sammy," she said.  "What's done is done, and it does

not matter to him any more; but here by the side of him now I want you to

promise me----"



He turned, his eyes streaming with tears, and flung himself into her

arms.



"I will promise anything," he sobbed, "if you won't make me go to school!

Anything!"



His mother held him for a moment, thinking, then she said:



"No, Sammy; you need not go to school any more.  Only promise me to be a

better boy.  Promise not to break my heart."



So he promised her to be a faithful and industrious man, and upright,

like his father.  His mother was satisfied with that.  The sense of honor

and justice was already strong within him.  To him a promise was a

serious matter at any time; made under conditions like these it would be

held sacred.



That night--it was after the funeral--his tendency to somnambulism

manifested itself.  His mother and sister, who were sleeping together,

saw the door open and a form in white enter.  Naturally nervous at such a

time, and living in a day of almost universal superstition, they were

terrified and covered their heads.  Presently a hand was laid on the

coverlet, first at the foot, then at the head of the bed.  A thought

struck Mrs. Clemens:



"Sam!" she said.



He answered, but he was sound asleep and fell to the floor.  He had risen

and thrown a sheet around him in his dreams.  He walked in his sleep

several nights in succession after that.  Then he slept more soundly.



Orion returned to St. Louis.  He was a very good book and job printer by

this time and received a salary of ten dollars a week (high wages in

those frugal days), of which he sent three dollars weekly to the family.

Pamela, who had acquired a considerable knowledge of the piano and

guitar, went to the town of Paris, in Monroe County, about fifty miles

away, and taught a class of music pupils, contributing whatever remained

after paying for her board and clothing to the family fund.  It was a

hard task for the girl, for she was timid and not over-strong; but she

was resolute and patient, and won success.  Pamela Clemens was a noble

character and deserves a fuller history than can be afforded in this

work.



Mrs. Clemens and her son Samuel now had a sober talk, and, realizing that

the printing trade offered opportunity for acquiring further education as

well as a livelihood, they agreed that he should be apprenticed to Joseph

P. Ament, who had lately moved from Palmyra to Hannibal and bought a

weekly Democrat paper, the Missouri Courier.  The apprentice terms were

not over-liberal.  They were the usual thing for that time: board and

clothes--"more board than clothes, and not much of either," Mark Twain

used to say.



"I was supposed to get two suits of clothes a year, like a nigger, but I

didn't get them.  I got one suit and took the rest out in Ament's old

garments, which didn't fit me in any noticeable way.  I was only about

half as big as he was, and when I had on one of his shirts I felt as if I

had on a circus tent.  I had to turn the trousers up to my ears to make

them short enough."



There was another apprentice, a young fellow of about eighteen, named

Wales McCormick, a devilish fellow and a giant.  Ament's clothes were too

small for Wales, but he had to wear them, and Sam Clemens and Wales

McCormick together, fitted out with Ament's clothes, must have been a

picturesque pair.  There was also, for a time, a boy named Ralph; but he

appears to have presented no features of a striking sort, and the memory

of him has become dim.



The apprentices ate in the kitchen at first, served by the old slave-cook

and her handsome mulatto daughter; but those printer's "devils" made it

so lively there that in due time they were promoted to the family table,

where they sat with Mr. and Mrs. Ament and the one journeyman, Pet

McMurry--a name that in itself was an inspiration.  What those young

scamps did not already know Pet McMurry could teach them.  Sam Clemens

had promised to be a good boy, and he was, by the standards of boyhood.

He was industrious, regular at his work, quick to learn, kind, and

truthful.  Angels could hardly be more than that in a printing-office;

but when food was scarce even an angel--a young printer angel--could

hardly resist slipping down the cellar stairs at night for raw potatoes,

onions, and apples which they carried into the office, where the boys

slept on a pallet on the floor, and this forage they cooked on the office

stove.  Wales especially had a way of cooking a potato that his associate

never forgot.



It is unfortunate that no photographic portrait has been preserved of Sam

Clemens at this period.  But we may imagine him from a letter which, long

years after, Pet McMurry wrote to Mark Twain.  He said:



     If your memory extends so far back, you will recall a little sandy-

     haired boy--[The color of Mark Twain's hair in early life has been

     variously referred to as red, black, and brown.  It was, in fact, as

     stated by McMurry, "sandy" in boyhood, deepening later to that rich,

     mahogany tone known as auburn.]--of nearly a quarter of a century

     ago, in the printing-office at Hannibal, over the Brittingham

     drugstore, mounted upon a little box at the case, pulling away at a

     huge cigar or a diminutive pipe, who used to love to sing so well

     the expression of the poor drunken man who was supposed to have

     fallen by the wayside: "If ever I get up again, I'll stay up--if I

     kin."  .  .  .  Do you recollect any of the serious conflicts that

     mirth-loving brain of yours used to get you into with that

     diminutive creature Wales McCormick--how you used to call upon me to

     hold your cigar or pipe, whilst you went entirely through him?



This is good testimony, without doubt.  When he had been with Ament

little more than a year Sam had become office favorite and chief standby.

Whatever required intelligence and care and imagination was given to Sam

Clemens.  He could set type as accurately and almost as rapidly as Pet

McMurry; he could wash up the forms a good deal better than Pet; and he

could run the job-press to the tune of "Annie Laurie" or "Along the Beach

at Rockaway," without missing a stroke or losing a finger.  Sometimes, at

odd moments, he would "set up" one of the popular songs or some favorite

poem like "The Blackberry Girl," and of these he sent copies printed on

cotton, even on scraps of silk, to favorite girl friends; also to Puss

Quarles, on his uncle's farm, where he seldom went now, because he was

really grown up, associating with men and doing a man's work.  He had

charge of the circulation--which is to say, he carried the papers.

During the last year of the Mexican War, when a telegraph-wire found its

way across the Mississippi to Hannibal--a long sagging span, that for

some reason did not break of its own weight--he was given charge of the

extras with news from the front; and the burning importance of his

mission, the bringing of news hot from the field of battle, spurred him

to endeavors that won plaudits and success.



He became a sort of subeditor.  When the forms of the paper were ready to

close and Ament was needed to supply more matter, it was Sam who was

delegated to find that rather uncertain and elusive person and labor with

him until the required copy was produced.  Thus it was he saw literature

in the making.



It is not believed that Sam had any writing ambitions of his own.  His

chief desire was to be an all-round journeyman printer like Pet McMurry;

to drift up and down the world in Pet's untrammeled fashion; to see all

that Pet had seen and a number of things which Pet appeared to have

overlooked.  He varied on occasion from this ambition.  When the first

negro minstrel show visited Hannibal and had gone, he yearned for a brief

period to be a magnificent "middle man" or even the "end-man" of that

combination; when the circus came and went, he dreamed of the day when, a

capering frescoed clown, he would set crowded tiers of spectators

guffawing at his humor; when the traveling hypnotist arrived, he

volunteered as a subject, and amazed the audience by the marvel of his

performance.



In later life he claimed that he had not been hypnotized in any degree,

but had been pretending throughout--a statement always denied by his

mother and his brother Orion.  This dispute was never settled, and never

could be.  Sam Clemens's tendency to somnambulism would seem to suggest

that he really might have taken on a hypnotic condition, while his

consummate skill as an actor, then and always, and his early fondness of

exhibition and a joke, would make it not unlikely that he was merely

"showing off" and having his fun.  He could follow the dictates of a

vivid imagination and could be as outrageous as he chose without

incurring responsibility of any sort.  But there was a penalty: he must

allow pins and needles to be thrust into his flesh and suffer these

tortures without showing discomfort to the spectators.  It is difficult

to believe that any boy, however great his exhibitory passion, could

permit, in the full possession of his sensibilities, a needle to be

thrust deeply into his flesh without manifestations of a most unmesmeric

sort.  The conclusion seems warranted that he began by pretending, but

that at times he was at least under semi-mesmeric control.  At all

events, he enjoyed a week of dazzling triumph, though in the end he

concluded to stick to printing as a trade.



We have said that he was a rapid learner and a neat workman.  At Ament's

he generally had a daily task, either of composition or press-work, after

which he was free.  When he had got the hang of his work he was usually

done by three in the afternoon; then away to the river or the cave, as in

the old days, sometimes with his boy friends, sometimes with Laura

Hawkins gathering wild columbine on that high cliff overlooking the

river, Lover's Leap.



He was becoming quite a beau, attending parties on occasion, where old-

fashioned games--Forfeits, Ring-around-a-Rosy, Dusty Miller, and the

like--were regarded as rare amusements.  He was a favorite with girls of

his own age.  He was always good-natured, though he played jokes on them,

too, and was often a severe trial.  He was with Laura Hawkins more than

the others, usually her escort.  On Saturday afternoons in winter he

carried her skates to Bear Creek and helped her to put them on.  After

which they skated "partners," holding hands tightly, and were a likely

pair of children, no doubt.  In The Gilded Age Laura Hawkins at twelve is

pictured "with her dainty hands propped into the ribbon-bordered pockets

of her apron .  .  .  a vision to warm the coldest heart and bless and

cheer the saddest."  The author had the real Laura of his childhood in

his mind when he wrote that, though the story itself bears no resemblance

to her life.



They were never really sweethearts, those two.  They were good friends

and comrades.  Sometimes he brought her magazines--exchanges from the

printing--office--Godey's and others.  These were a treat, for such

things were scarce enough.  He cared little for reading, himself, beyond

a few exciting tales, though the putting into type of a good deal of

miscellaneous matter had beyond doubt developed in him a taste for

general knowledge.  It needed only to be awakened.









XVI



THE TURNING-POINT



There came into his life just at this period one of those seemingly

trifling incidents which, viewed in retrospect, assume pivotal

proportions.  He was on his way from the office to his home one afternoon

when he saw flying along the pavement a square of paper, a leaf from a

book.  At an earlier time he would not have bothered with it at all, but

any printed page had acquired a professional interest for him now.  He

caught the flying scrap and examined it.  It was a leaf from some history

of Joan of Arc.  The "maid" was described in the cage at Rouen, in the

fortress, and the two ruffian English soldiers had stolen her clothes.

There was a brief description and a good deal of dialogue--her reproaches

and their ribald replies.



He had never heard of the subject before.  He had never read any history.

When he wanted to know any fact he asked Henry, who read everything

obtainable.  Now, however, there arose within him a deep compassion for

the gentle Maid of Orleans, a burning resentment toward her captors, a

powerful and indestructible interest in her sad history.  It was an

interest that would grow steadily for more than half a lifetime and

culminate at last in that crowning work, the Recollections, the loveliest

story ever told of the martyred girl.



The incident meant even more than that: it meant the awakening of his

interest in all history--the world's story in its many phases--a passion

which became the largest feature of his intellectual life and remained

with him until his very last day on earth.  From the moment when that

fluttering leaf was blown into his hands his career as one of the world's

mentally elect was assured.  It gave him his cue--the first word of a

part in the human drama.  It crystallized suddenly within him sympathy

with the oppressed, rebellion against tyranny and treachery, scorn for

the divine rights of kings.  A few months before he died he wrote a paper

on "The Turning-point of My Life."  For some reason he did not mention

this incident.  Yet if there was a turning-point in his life, he reached

it that bleak afternoon on the streets of Hannibal when a stray leaf from

another life was blown into his hands.



He read hungrily now everything he could find relating to the French

wars, and to Joan in particular.  He acquired an appetite for history in

general, the record of any nation or period; he seemed likely to become a

student.  Presently he began to feel the need of languages, French and

German.  There was no opportunity to acquire French, that he could

discover, but there was a German shoemaker in Hannibal who agreed to

teach his native tongue.  Sam Clemens got a friend--very likely it was

John Briggs--to form a class with him, and together they arranged for

lessons.  The shoemaker had little or no English.  They had no German.

It would seem, however, that their teacher had some sort of a "word-

book," and when they assembled in his little cubby-hole of a retreat he

began reading aloud from it this puzzling sentence:



"De hain eet flee whoop in de hayer."



"Dere!" he said, triumphantly; "you know dose vord?"



The students looked at each other helplessly.



The teacher repeated the sentence, and again they were helpless when he

asked if they recognized it.



Then in despair he showed them the book.  It was an English primer, and

the sentence was:



"The hen, it flies up in the air."



They explained to him gently that it was German they wished to learn, not

English--not under the circumstances.  Later, Sam made an attempt at

Latin, and got a book for that purpose, but gave it up, saying:



"No, that language is not for me.  I'll do well enough to learn English."

A boy who took it up with him became a Latin scholar.



His prejudice against oppression he put into practice.  Boys who were

being imposed upon found in him a ready protector.  Sometimes, watching a

game of marbles or tops, he would remark in his slow, impressive way:



"You mustn't cheat that boy."  And the cheating stopped.  When it didn't,

there was a combat, with consequences.









XVII



THE HANNIBAL "JOURNAL"





Orion returned from St. Louis.  He felt that he was needed in Hannibal

and, while wages there were lower, his expenses at home were slight;

there was more real return for the family fund.  His sister Pamela was

teaching a class in Hannibal at this time.  Orion was surprised when his

mother and sister greeted him with kisses and tears.  Any outward display

of affection was new to him.



The family had moved back across the street by this time.  With Sam

supporting himself, the earnings of Orion and Pamela provided at least a

semblance of comfort.  But Orion was not satisfied.  Then, as always, he

had a variety of vague ambitions.  Oratory appealed to him, and he

delivered a temperance lecture with an accompaniment of music, supplied

chiefly by Pamela.  He aspired to the study of law, a recurring

inclination throughout his career.  He also thought of the ministry, an

ambition which Sam shared with him for a time.  Every mischievous boy has

it, sooner or later, though not all for the same reasons.



"It was the most earnest ambition I ever had," Mark Twain once remarked,

thoughtfully.  "Not that I ever really wanted to be a preacher, but

because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned.  It

looked like a safe job."



A periodical ambition of Orion's was to own and conduct a paper in

Hannibal.  He felt that in such a position he might become a power in

Western journalism.  Once his father had considered buying the Hannibal

Journal to give Orion a chance, and possibly to further his own political

ambitions.  Now Orion considered it for himself.  The paper was for sale

under a mortgage, and he was enabled to borrow the $500 which would

secure ownership.  Sam's two years at Ament's were now complete, and

Orion induced him to take employment on the Journal.  Henry at eleven was

taken out of school to learn typesetting.



Orion was a gentle, accommodating soul, but he lacked force and

independence.



"I followed all the advice I received," he says in his record.  "If two

or more persons conflicted with each other, I adopted the views of the

last."



He started full of enthusiasm.  He worked like a slave to save help:

wrote his own editorials, and made his literary selections at night.  The

others worked too.  Orion gave them hard tasks and long hours.  He had

the feeling that the paper meant fortune or failure to them all; that all

must labor without stint.  In his usual self-accusing way he wrote

afterward:



I was tyrannical and unjust to Sam.  He was as swift and as clean as a

good journeyman.  I gave him tasks, and if he got through well I

begrudged him the time and made him work more.  He set a clean proof, and

Henry a very dirty one.  The correcting was left to be done in the form

the day before publication.  Once we were kept late, and Sam complained

with tears of bitterness that he was held till midnight on Henry's dirty

proofs.



Orion did not realize any injustice at the time.  The game was too

desperate to be played tenderly.  His first editorials were so brilliant

that it was not believed he could have written them.  The paper

throughout was excellent, and seemed on the high road to success.  But

the pace was too hard to maintain.  Overwork brought weariness, and

Orion's enthusiasm, never a very stable quantity, grew feeble.  He became

still more exacting.



It is not to be supposed that Sam Clemens had given up all amusements to

become merely a toiling drudge or had conquered in any large degree his

natural taste for amusement.  He had become more studious; but after the

long, hard days in the office it was not to be expected that a boy of

fifteen would employ the evening--at least not every evening--in reading

beneficial books.  The river was always near at hand--for swimming in the

summer and skating in the winter--and once even at this late period it

came near claiming a heavy tribute.  That was one winter's night when

with another boy he had skated until nearly midnight.  They were about in

the middle of the river when they heard a terrific and grinding noise

near the shore.  They knew what it was.  The ice was breaking up, and

they set out for home forthwith.  It was moonlight, and they could tell

the ice from the water, which was a good thing, for there were wide

cracks toward the shore, and they had to wait for these to close.  They

were an hour making the trip, and just before they reached the bank they

came to a broad space of water.  The ice was lifting and falling and

crunching all around them.  They waited as long as they dared and decided

to leap from cake to cake.  Sam made the crossing without accident, but

his companion slipped in when a few feet from shore.  He was a good

swimmer and landed safely, but the bath probably cost him his hearing.

He was taken very ill.  One disease followed another, ending with scarlet

fever and deafness.



There was also entertainment in the office itself.  A country boy named

Jim Wolfe had come to learn the trade--a green, good-natured, bashful

boy.  In every trade tricks are played on the new apprentice, and Sam

felt that it was his turn to play them.  With John Briggs to help him,

tortures for Jim Wolfe were invented and applied.



They taught him to paddle a canoe, and upset him.  They took him sniping

at night and left him "holding the bag" in the old traditional fashion

while they slipped off home and went to bed.



But Jim Wolfe's masterpiece of entertainment was one which he undertook

on his own account.  Pamela was having a candy-pull down-stairs one

night--a grown-up candy-pull to which the boys were not expected.  Jim

would not have gone, anyway, for he was bashful beyond belief, and always

dumb, and even pale with fear, in the presence of pretty Pamela Clemens.

Up in their room the boys could hear the merriment from below and could

look out in the moonlight on the snowy sloping roof that began just

beneath their window.  Down at the eaves was the small arbor, green in

summer, but covered now with dead vines and snow.  They could hear the

candymakers come out, now and then, doubtless setting out pans of candy

to cool.  By and by the whole party seemed to come out into the little

arbor, to try the candy, perhaps the joking and laughter came plainly to

the boys up-stairs.  About this time there appeared on the roof from

somewhere two disreputable cats, who set up a most disturbing duel of

charge and recrimination.  Jim detested the noise, and perhaps was

gallant enough to think it would disturb the party.  He had nothing to

throw at them, but he said:



"For two cents I'd get out there and knock their heads off."



"You wouldn't dare to do it," Sam said, purringly.



This was wormwood to Jim.  He was really a brave spirit.



"I would too," he said, "and I will if you say that again."



"Why, Jim, of course you wouldn't dare to go out there.  You might catch

cold."



"You wait and see," said Jim Wolfe.



He grabbed a pair of yarn stockings for his feet, raised the window, and

crept out on the snowy roof.  There was a crust of ice on the snow, but

Jim jabbed his heels through it and stood up in the moonlight, his legs

bare, his single garment flapping gently in the light winter breeze.

Then he started slowly toward the cats, sinking his heels in the snow

each time for a footing, a piece of lath in his hand.  The cats were on

the corner of the roof above the arbor, and Jim cautiously worked his way

in that direction.  The roof was not very steep.  He was doing well

enough until he came to a place where the snow had melted until it was

nearly solid ice.  He was so intent on the cats that he did not notice

this, and when he struck his heel down to break the crust nothing

yielded.  A second later Jim's feet had shot out from under him, and he

vaulted like an avalanche down the icy roof out on the little vine-clad

arbor, and went crashing through among those candypullers, gathered there

with their pans of cooling taffy.  There were wild shrieks and a general

flight.  Neither Jim nor Sam ever knew how he got back to their room, but

Jim was overcome with the enormity of his offense, while Sam was in an

agony of laughter.



"You did it splendidly, Jim," he drawled, when he could speak.  "Nobody

could have done it better; and did you see how those cats got out of

there?  I never had any idea when you started that you meant to do it

that way.  And it was such a surprise to the folks down-stairs.  How did

you ever think of it?"



It was a fearful ordeal for a boy like Jim Wolfe, but he stuck to his

place in spite of what he must have suffered.  The boys made him one of

them soon after that.  His initiation was thought to be complete.



An account of Jim Wolfe and the cats was the first original story Mark

Twain ever told.  He told it next day, which was Sunday, to Jimmy

McDaniel, the baker's son, as they sat looking out over the river, eating

gingerbread.  His hearer laughed immoderately, and the story-teller was

proud and happy in his success.









XVIII



THE BEGINNING OF A LITERARY LIFE



Orion's paper continued to go downhill.  Following some random counsel,

he changed the name of it and advanced the price--two blunders.  Then he

was compelled to reduce the subscription, also the advertising rates.  He

was obliged to adopt a descending scale of charges and expenditures to

keep pace with his declining circulation--a fatal sign.  A publisher must

lead his subscription list, not follow it.



"I was walking backward," he said, "not seeing where I stepped."



In desperation he broke away and made a trip to Tennessee to see if

something could not be realized on the land, leaving his brother Sam in

charge of the office.  It was a journey without financial results; yet it

bore fruit, for it marked the beginning of Mark Twain's literary career.



Sam, in his brother's absence, concluded to edit the paper in a way that

would liven up the circulation.  He had never done any writing--not for

print--but he had the courage of his inclinations.  His local items were

of a kind known as "spicy"; his personals brought prompt demand for

satisfaction.  The editor of a rival paper had been in love, and was said

to have gone to the river one night to drown himself.  Sam gave a

picturesque account of this, with all the names connected with the

affair.  Then he took a couple of big wooden block letters, turned them

upside down, and engraved illustrations for it, showing the victim wading

out into the river with a stick to test the depth of the water.  When

this issue of the paper came out the demand for it was very large.  The

press had to be kept running steadily to supply copies.  The satirized

editor at first swore that he would thrash the whole journal office, then

he left town and did not come back any more.  The embryo Mark Twain also

wrote a poem.  It was addressed "To Mary in Hannibal," but the title was

too long to be set in one column, so he left out all the letters in

Hannibal, except the first and the last, and supplied their place with a

dash, with a startling result.  Such were the early flickerings of a

smoldering genius.  Orion returned, remonstrated, and apologized.  He

reduced Sam to the ranks.  In later years he saw his mistake.



"I could have distanced all competitors even then," he said, "if I had

recognized Sam's ability and let him go ahead, merely keeping him from

offending worthy persons."



Sam was subdued, but not done for.  He never would be, now.  He had got

his first taste of print, and he liked it.  He promptly wrote two

anecdotes which he thought humorous and sent them to the Philadelphia

Saturday Evening Post.  They were accepted--without payment, of course,

in those days; and when the papers containing them appeared he felt

suddenly lifted to a lofty plane of literature.  This was in 1851.



"Seeing them in print was a joy which rather exceeded anything in that

line I have ever experienced since," he said, nearly sixty years later.



Yet he did not feel inspired to write anything further for the Post.

Twice during the next two years he contributed to the Journal; once

something about Jim Wolfe, though it was not the story of the cats, and

another burlesque on a rival editor whom he pictured as hunting snipe

with a cannon, the explosion of which was said to have blown the snipe

out of the country.  No contributions of this time have been preserved.

High prices have been offered for copies of the Hannibal journal

containing them, but without success.  The Post sketches were unsigned

and have not been identified.  It is likely they were trivial enough.

His earliest work showed no special individuality or merit, being mainly

crude and imitative, as the work of a boy--even a precocious boy--is

likely to be.  He was not especially precocious--not in literature.  His

literary career would halt and hesitate and trifle along for many years

yet, gathering impetus and equipment for the fuller, statelier swing

which would bring a greater joy to the world at large, even if not to

himself, than that first, far-off triumph.--[In Mark Twain's sketch "My

First Literary Venture" he has set down with characteristic embroideries

some account of this early authorship.]



Those were hard financial days.  Orion could pay nothing on his mortgage

--barely the interest.  He had promised Sam three dollars and a half a

week, but he could do no more than supply him with board and clothes--

"poor, shabby clothes," he says in his record.



"My mother and sister did the housekeeping.  My mother was cook.  She

used the provisions I supplied her.  We therefore had a regular diet of

bacon, butter, bread, and coffee."



Mrs. Clemens again took a few boarders; Pamela, who had given up teaching

for a time, organized another music class.  Orion became despondent.  One

night a cow got into the office, upset a typecase, and ate up two

composition rollers.  Orion felt that fate was dealing with a heavy hand.

Another disaster quickly followed.  Fire broke out in the office, and the

loss was considerable.  An insurance company paid one hundred and fifty

dollars.  With it Orion replaced such articles as were absolutely needed

for work, and removed his plant into the front room of the Clemens

dwelling.  He raised the one-story part of the building to give them an

added room up-stairs; and there for another two years, by hard work and

pinching economies, the dying paper managed to drag along.  It was the

fire that furnished Sam Clemens with his Jim Wolfe sketch.  In it he

stated that Jim in his excitement had carried the office broom half a

mile and had then come back after the wash-pan.



In the meantime Pamela Clemens married.  Her husband was a well-to-do

merchant, William A. Moffett, formerly of Hannibal, but then of St.

Louis, where he had provided her with the comforts of a substantial home.



Orion tried the experiment of a serial story.  He wrote to a number of

well-known authors in the East, but was unable to find one who would

supply a serial for the price he was willing to pay.  Finally he obtained

a translation of a French novel for the sum offered, which was five

dollars.  It did not save the sinking ship, however.  He made the

experiment of a tri-weekly, without success.  He noticed that even his

mother no longer read his editorials, but turned to the general news.

This was a final blow.



"I sat down in the dark," he says, "the moon glinting in at the open

door.  I sat with one leg over the chair and let my mind float."



He had received an offer of five hundred dollars for his office--the

amount of the mortgage--and in his moonlight reverie he decided to

dispose of it on those terms.  This was in 1853.



His brother Samuel was no longer with him.  Several months before, in

June, Sam decided he would go out into the world.  He was in his

eighteenth year now, a good workman, faithful and industrious, but he had

grown restless in unrewarded service.  Beyond his mastery of the trade he

had little to show for six years of hard labor.  Once when he had asked

Orion for a few dollars to buy a second-hand gun, Orion, exasperated by

desperate circumstances, fell into a passion and rated him for thinking

of such extravagance.  Soon afterward Sam confided to his mother that he

was going away; that he believed Orion hated him; that there was no

longer a place for him at home.  He said he would go to St. Louis, where

Pamela was.  There would be work for him in St. Louis, and he could send

money home.  His intention was to go farther than St. Louis, but he dared

not tell her.  His mother put together sadly enough the few belongings of

what she regarded as her one wayward boy; then she held up a little

Testament:



"I want you to take hold of the other end of this, Sam," she said, "and

make me a promise."



If one might have a true picture of that scene: the shin, wiry woman of

forty-nine, her figure as straight as her deportment, gray-eyed, tender,

and resolute, facing the fair-cheeked, auburn-haired youth of seventeen,

his eyes as piercing and unwavering as her own.  Mother and son, they

were of the same metal and the same mold.



"I want you to repeat after me, Sam, these words," Jane Clemens said.

"I do solemnly swear that I will not throw a card or drink a drop of

liquor while I am gone."



He repeated the oath after her, and she kissed him.



"Remember that, Sam, and write to us," she said.



"And so," Orion records, "he went wandering in search of that comfort and

that advancement and those rewards of industry which he had failed to

find where I was--gloomy, taciturn, and selfish.  I not only missed his

labor; we all missed his bounding activity and merriment."











XIX



IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF FRANKLIN



He went to St. Louis by the night boat, visited his sister Pamela, and

found a job in the composing-room of the Evening News.  He remained on

the paper only long enough to earn money with which to see the world.

The "world" was New York City, where the Crystal Palace Fair was then

going on.  The railway had been completed by this time, but he had not

traveled on it.  It had not many comforts; several days and nights were

required for the New York trip; yet it was a wonderful and beautiful

experience.  He felt that even Pet McMurry could hardly have done

anything to surpass it.  He arrived in New York with two or three dollars

in his pocket and a ten-dollar bill concealed in the lining of his coat.



New York was a great and amazing city.  It almost frightened him.  It

covered the entire lower end of Manhattan Island; visionary citizens

boasted that one day it would cover it all.  The World's Fair building,

the Crystal Palace, stood a good way out.  It was where Bryant Park is

now, on Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue.  Young Clemens classed it

as one of the wonders of the world and wrote lavishly of its marvels.

A portion of a letter to his sister Pamela has been preserved and is

given here not only for what it contains, but as the earliest existing

specimen of his composition.  The fragment concludes what was doubtless

an exhaustive description.



     From the gallery (second floor) you have a glorious sight--the flags

     of the different countries represented, the lofty dome, glittering

     jewelry, gaudy tapestry, etc., with the busy crowd passing to and

     fro 'tis a perfect fairy palace--beautiful beyond description.



     The machinery department is on the main floor, but I cannot

     enumerate any of it on account of the lateness of the hour (past 1

     o'clock).  It would take more than a week to examine everything on

     exhibition; and I was only in a little over two hours to-night.

     I only glanced at about one-third of the articles; and, having a

     poor memory, I have enumerated scarcely any of even the principal

     objects.  The visitors to the Palace average 6,000 daily--double the

     population of Hannibal.  The price of admission being 50 cents, they

     take in about $3,000.



     The Latting Observatory (height about 280 feet) is near the Palace-

     from it you can obtain a grand view of the city and the country

     around.  The Croton Aqueduct, to supply the city with water, is the

     greatest wonder yet.  Immense sewers are laid across the bed of the

     Hudson River, and pass through the country to Westchester County,

     where a whole river is turned from its course and brought to New

     York.  From the reservoir in the city to the Westchester County

     reservoir the distance is thirty-eight miles and, if necessary, they

     could easily supply every family in New York with one hundred

     barrels of water per day!



     I am very sorry to learn that Henry has been sick.  He ought to go

     to the country and take exercise, for he is not half so healthy as

     Ma thinks he is.  If he had my walking to do, he would be another

     boy entirely.  Four times every day I walk a little over a mile; and

     working hard all day and walking four miles is exercise.  I am used

     to it now, though, and it is no trouble.  Where is it Orion's going

     to?  Tell Ma my promises are faithfully kept; and if I have my

     health I will take her to Ky. in the spring--I shall save money for

     this.  Tell Jim (Wolfe) and all the rest of them to write, and give

     me all the news ....



     (It has just struck 2 A.M., and I always get up at 6, and am at work

     at 7.) You ask where I spend my evenings.  Where would you suppose,

     with a free printer's library containing more than 4,000 volumes

     within a quarter of a mile of me, and nobody at home to talk to?

     Write soon.



                         Truly your brother,        SAM



     P.S.-I have written this by a light so dim that you nor Ma could not

     read by it.  Write, and let me know how Henry is.





It is a good letter; it is direct and clear in its descriptive quality,

and it gives us a scale of things.  Double the population of Hannibal

visited the Crystal Palace in one day! and the water to supply the city

came a distance of thirty-eight miles!  Doubtless these were amazing

statistics.



Then there was the interest in family affairs--always strong--his concern

for Henry, whom he loved tenderly; his memory of the promise to his

mother; his understanding of her craving to visit her old home.  He did

not write to her direct, for the reason that Orion's plans were then

uncertain, and it was not unlikely that he had already found a new

location.  From this letter, too, we learn that the boy who detested

school was reveling in a library of four thousand books--more than he had

ever seen together before.  We have somehow the feeling that he had all

at once stepped from boyhood to manhood, and that the separation was

marked by a very definite line.



The work he had secured was in Cliff Street in the printing establishment

of John A. Gray & Green, who agreed to pay him four dollars a week, and

did pay that amount in wildcat money, which saved them about twenty-five

per cent. of the sum.  He lodged at a mechanics' boarding-house in Duane

Street, and when he had paid his board and washing he sometimes had as

much as fifty cents to lay away.



He did not like the board.  He had been accustomed to the Southern mode

of cooking, and wrote home complaining that New-Yorkers did not have

"hot-bread" or biscuits, but ate "light-bread," which they allowed to get

stale, seeming to prefer it in that way.  On the whole, there was not

much inducement to remain in New York after he had satisfied himself with

its wonders.  He lingered, however, through the hot months of 1853, and

found it not easy to go.  In October he wrote to Pamela, suggesting plans

for Orion; also for Henry and Jim Wolfe, whom he seems never to have

overlooked.  Among other things he says:



     I have not written to any of the family for some time, from the

     fact, firstly, that I didn't know where they were, and, secondly,

     because I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to

     leave New York every day for the last two weeks.  I have taken a

     liking to the abominable place, and every time I get ready to leave

     I put it off a day or so, from some unaccountable cause.  I think I

     shall get off Tuesday, though.



     Edwin Forrest has been playing for the last sixteen days at the

     Broadway Theater, but I never went to see him till last night.  The

     play was the "Gladiator."  I did not like parts of it much, but

     other portions were really splendid.  In the latter part of the last

     act, where the "Gladiator" (Forrest) dies at his brother's feet (in

     all the fierce pleasure of gratified revenge), the man's whole soul

     seems absorbed in the part he is playing; and it is really startling

     to see him.  I am sorry I did not see him play "Damon and Pythias"--

     the former character being the greatest.  He appears in Philadelphia

     on Monday night.



     I have not received a letter from home lately, but got a "Journal"

     the other day, in which I see the office has been sold .  .  .  .



     If my letters do not come often, you need not bother yourself about

     me; for if you have a brother nearly eighteen years of age who is

     not able to take care of himself a few miles from home, such a

     brother is not worth one's thoughts; and if I don't manage to take

     care of No. 1, be assured you will never know it.  I am not afraid,

     however; I shall ask favors of no one and endeavor to be (and shall

     be) as "independent as a wood-sawyer's clerk.". . .



     Passage to Albany (160 miles) on the finest steamers that ply the

     Hudson is now 25 cents--cheap enough, but is generally cheaper than

     that in the summer.



"I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to leave New

York" is distinctly a Mark Twain phrase.  He might have said that fifty

years later.



He did go to Philadelphia presently and found work "subbing" on a daily

paper,'The Inquirer.'  He was a fairly swift compositor.  He could set

ten thousand ems a day, and he received pay according to the amount of

work done.  Days or evenings when there was no vacant place for him to

fill he visited historic sites, the art-galleries, and the libraries.

He was still acquiring education, you see.  Sometimes at night when he

returned to his boardinghouse his room-mate, an Englishman named Sumner,

grilled a herring, and this was regarded as a feast.  He tried his hand

at writing in Philadelphia, though this time without success.  For some

reason he did not again attempt to get into the Post, but offered his

contributions to the Philadelphia 'Ledger'--mainly poetry of an obituary

kind.  Perhaps it was burlesque; he never confessed that, but it seems

unlikely that any other obituary poetry would have failed of print.



"My efforts were not received with approval," was all he ever said of it

afterward.



There were two or three characters in the 'Inquirer' office whom he did

not forget.  One of these was an old compositor who had "held a case" in

that office for many years.  His name was Frog, and sometimes when he

went away the "office devils" would hang a line over his case, with a

hook on it baited with a piece of red flannel.  They never got tired of

this joke, and Frog was always able to get as mad over it as he had been

in the beginning.  Another old fellow there furnished amusement.  He

owned a house in the distant part of the city and had an abnormal fear of

fire.  Now and then, when everything was quiet except the clicking of the

types, some one would step to the window and say with a concerned air:



"Doesn't that smoke--[or that light, if it was evening]--seem to be in

the northwestern part of the city?" or "There go the fire-bells again!"

and away the old man would tramp up to the roof to investigate.  It was

not the most considerate sport, and it is to be feared that Sam Clemens

had his share in it.



He found that he liked Philadelphia.  He could save a little money there,

for one thing, and now and then sent something to his mother--small

amounts, but welcome and gratifying, no doubt.  In a letter to Orion--

whom he seems to have forgiven with absence--written October 26th, he

incloses a gold dollar to buy her a handkerchief, and "to serve as a

specimen of the kind of stuff we are paid with in Philadelphia."  Further

along he adds:



     Unlike New York, I like this Philadelphia amazingly, and the people

     in it.  There is only one thing that gets my "dander" up--and that

     is the hands are always encouraging me: telling me "it's no use to

     get discouraged--no use to be downhearted, for there is more work

     here than you can do!"  "Downhearted," the devil!  I have not had a

     particle of such a feeling since I left Hannibal, more than four

     months ago.  I fancy they'll have to wait some time till they see me

     downhearted or afraid of starving while I have strength to work and

     am in a city of 400,000 inhabitants.  When I was in Hannibal, before

     I had scarcely stepped out of the town limits, nothing could have

     convinced me that I would starve as soon as I got a little way from

     home.



He mentions the grave of Franklin in Christ Churchyard with its

inscription "Benjamin and Deborah Franklin," and one is sharply reminded

of the similarity between the early careers of Benjamin Franklin and

Samuel Clemens.  Each learned the printer's trade; each worked in his

brother's printing-office and wrote for the paper; each left quietly and

went to New York, and from New York to Philadelphia, as a journeyman

printer; each in due season became a world figure, many-sided, human, and

of incredible popularity.



The foregoing letter ends with a long description of a trip made on the

Fairmount stage.  It is a good, vivid description--impressions of a

fresh, sensitive mind, set down with little effort at fine writing; a

letter to convey literal rather than literary enjoyment.  The Wire

Bridge, Fairmount Park and Reservoir, new buildings--all these passed in

review.  A fine residence about completed impressed him:



     It was built entirely of great blocks of red granite.  The pillars

     in front were all finished but one.  These pillars were beautiful,

     ornamental fluted columns, considerably larger than a hogshead at

     the base, and about as high as Clapinger's second-story front

     windows .  .  .  .  To see some of them finished and standing, and

     then the huge blocks lying about, looks so massy, and carries one,

     in imagination, to the ruined piles of ancient Babylon.  I despise

     the infernal bogus brick columns plastered over with mortar.  Marble

     is the cheapest building-stone about Philadelphia.



There is a flavor of the 'Innocents' about it; then a little further

along:



     I saw small steamboats, with their signs up--"For Wissahickon and

     Manayunk 25 cents."  Geo. Lippard, in his Legends of Washington and

     his Generals, has rendered the Wissahickon sacred in my eyes, and I

     shall make that trip, as well as one to Germantown, soon .  .  .  .



     There is one fine custom observed in Phila.  A gentleman is always

     expected to hand up a lady's money for her.  Yesterday I sat in the

     front end of the bus, directly under the driver's box--a lady sat

     opposite me.  She handed me her money, which was right.  But, Lord!

     a St. Louis lady would think herself ruined if she should be so

     familiar with a stranger.  In St. Louis a man will sit in the front

     end of the stage, and see a lady stagger from the far end to pay her

     fare.



There are two more letters from Philadelphia: one of November, 28th, to

Orion, who by this time had bought a paper in Muscatine, Iowa, and

located the family there; and one to Pamela dated December 5th.

Evidently Orion had realized that his brother might be of value as a

contributor, for the latter says:



     I will try to write for the paper occasionally, but I fear my

     letters will be very uninteresting, for this incessant night work

     dulls one's ideas amazingly....  I believe I am the only person in

     the Inquirer office that does not drink.  One young fellow makes $18

     for a few weeks, and gets on a grand "bender" and spends every cent

     of it.



     How do you like "free soil"?--I would like amazingly to see a good

     old-fashioned negro.  My love to all.



                         Truly your brother,        SAM



In the letter to Pamela he is clearly homesick.



"I only want to return to avoid night work, which is injuring my eyes,"

is the excuse, but in the next sentence he complains of the scarcity of

letters from home and those "not written as they should be."  "One only

has to leave home to learn how to write interesting letters to an absent

friend," he says, and in conclusion, "I don't like our present prospect

for cold weather at all."



He had been gone half a year, and the first attack of home-longing, for a

boy of his age, was due.  The novelty of things had worn off; it was

coming on winter; changes had taken place among his home people and

friends; the life he had known best and longest was going on and he had

no part in it.  Leaning over his case, he sometimes hummed:



     "An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain."



He weathered the attack and stuck it out for more than half a year

longer.  In January, when the days were dark and he grew depressed, he

made a trip to Washington to see the sights of the capital.  His stay was

comparatively brief, and he did not work there.  He returned to

Philadelphia, working for a time on the Ledger and North American.

Finally he went back to New York.  There are no letters of this period.

His second experience in New York appears not to have been recorded, and

in later years was only vaguely remembered.  It was late in the summer of

1854 when he finally set out on his return to the West.  His 'Wanderjahr'

had lasted nearly fifteen months.



He went directly to St. Louis, sitting up three days and nights in a

smoking-car to make the journey.  He was worn out when he arrived, but

stopped there only a few hours to see Pamela.  It was his mother he was

anxious for.  He took the Keokuk Packet that night, and, flinging himself

on his berth, slept the clock three times around, scarcely rousing or

turning over, only waking at last at Muscatine.  For a long time that

missing day confused his calculations.



When he reached Orion's house the family sat at breakfast.  He came in

carrying a gun.  They had not been expecting him, and there was a general

outcry, and a rush in his direction.  He warded them off, holding the

butt of the gun in front of him.



"You wouldn't let me buy a gun," he said, "so I bought one myself, and I

am going to use it, now, in self-defense."



"You, Sam!  You, Sam!" cried Jane Clemens.  "Behave yourself," for she

was wary of a gun.



Then he had had his joke and gave himself into his mother's arms.









XX



KEOKUK DAYS



Orion wished his brother to remain with him in the Muscatine office, but

the young man declared he must go to St. Louis and earn some money before

he would be able to afford that luxury: He returned to his place on the

St. Louis Evening News, where he remained until late winter or early

spring of the following year.



He lived at this time with a Pavey family, probably one of the Hannibal

Paveys, rooming with a youth named Frank E. Burrough, a journeyman chair-

maker with a taste for Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, and Disraeli.  Burrough

had really a fine literary appreciation for his years, and the boys were

comrades and close friends.  Twenty-two years later Mark Twain exchanged

with Burrough some impressions of himself at that earlier time.  Clemens

wrote:



     MY DEAR BURROUGH,--As you describe me I can picture myself as I was

     22 years ago.  The portrait is correct.  You think I have grown

     some; upon my word there was room for it.  You have described a

     callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug, stern

     in air, heaving at his bit of dung, imagining that he is remodeling

     the world and is entirely capable of doing it right....  That is

     what I was at 19-20.



Orion Clemens in the mean time had married and removed to Keokuk.  He had

married during a visit to that city, in the casual, impulsive way so

characteristic of him, and the fact that he had acquired a wife in the

operation seemed at first to have escaped his inner consciousness.  He

tells it himself; he says:



     At sunrise on the next morning after the wedding we left in a stage

     for Muscatine.  We halted for dinner at Burlington.  After

     despatching that meal we stood on the pavement when the stage drove

     up, ready for departure.  I climbed in, gathered the buffalo robe

     around me, and leaned back unconscious that I had anything further

     to do.  A gentleman standing on the pavement said to my wife, "Miss,

     do you go by this stage?"  I said, "Oh, I forgot!" and sprang out

     and helped her in.  A wife was a new kind of possession to which I

     had not yet become accustomed; I had forgotten her.



Orion's wife had been Mary Stotts; her mother a friend of Jane Clemens's

girlhood.  She proved a faithful helpmate to Orion; but in those early

days of marriage she may have found life with him rather trying, and it

was her homesickness that brought them to Keokuk.  Brother Sam came up

from St. Louis, by and by, to visit them, and Orion offered him five

dollars a week and board to remain.  He accepted.  The office at this

time, or soon after, was located on the third floor of 52 Main Street, in

the building at present occupied by the Paterson Shoe Company.  Henry

Clemens, now seventeen, was also in Orion's employ, and a lad by the name

of Dick Hingham.  Henry and Sam slept in the office, and Dick came in for

social evenings.  Also a young man named Edward Brownell, who clerked in

the book-store on the ground floor.



These were likely to be lively evenings.  A music dealer and teacher,

Professor Isbell, occupied the floor just below, and did not care for

their diversions.  He objected, but hardly in the right way.  Had he gone

to Samuel Clemens gently, he undoubtedly would have found him willing to

make any concessions.  Instead, he assailed him roughly, and the next

evening the boys set up a lot of empty wine-bottles, which they had found

in a barrel in a closet, and, with stones for balls, played tenpins on

the office floor.  This was Dick and Sam; Henry declined to join the

game.  Isbell rushed up-stairs and battered on the door, but they paid no

attention.  Next morning he waited for the young men and denounced them

wildly.  They merely ignored him, and that night organized a military

company, made up of themselves and a new German apprentice-boy, and

drilled up and down over the singing-class.  Dick Hingham led these

military manoeuvers.  He was a girlish sort of a fellow, but he had a

natural taste for soldiering.  The others used to laugh at him.  They

called him a disguised girl, and declared he would run if a gun were

really pointed in his direction.  They were mistaken; seven years later

Dick died at Fort Donelson with a bullet in his forehead: this, by the

way.



Isbell now adopted new tactics.  He came up very pleasantly and said:



"I like your military practice better than your tenpin exercise, but on

the whole it seems to disturb the young ladies.  You see how it is

yourself.  You couldn't possibly teach music with a company of raw

recruits drilling overhead--now, could you?  Won't you please stop it?

It bothers my pupils."



Sam Clemens regarded him with mild surprise.



"Does it?" he said, very deliberately.  "Why didn't you mention it

before?  To be sure we don't want to disturb the young ladies."



They gave up the horse-play, and not only stopped the disturbance, but

joined one of the singing--classes.  Samuel Clemens had a pretty good

voice in those days and could drum fairly well on a piano and guitar.

He did not become a brilliant musician, but he was easily the most

popular member of the singing-class.



They liked his frank nature, his jokes, and his humor; his slow, quaint

fashion of speech.  The young ladies called him openly and fondly a

"fool"--a term of endearment, as they applied it meaning only that he

kept them in a more or less constant state of wonder and merriment; and

indeed it would have been hard for them to say whether he was really

light-minded and frivolous or the wisest of them all.  He was twenty now

and at the age for love-making; yet he remained, as in Hannibal, a beau

rather than a suitor, good friend and comrade to all, wooer of none.

Ella Creel, a cousin on the Lampton side, a great belle; also Ella

Patterson (related through Orion's wife and generally known as "Ick"),

and Belle Stotts were perhaps his favorite companions, but there were

many more.  He was always ready to stop and be merry with them, full of

his pranks and pleasantries; though they noticed that he quite often

carried a book under his arm--a history or a volume of Dickens or the

tales of Edgar Allan Poe.



He read at odd moments; at night voluminously--until very late,

sometimes.  Already in that early day it was his habit to smoke in bed,

and he had made him an Oriental pipe of the hubble-bubble variety,

because it would hold more and was more comfortable than the regular

short pipe of daytime use.



But it had its disadvantages.  Sometimes it would go out, and that would

mean sitting up and reaching for a match and leaning over to light the

bowl which stood on the floor.  Young Brownell from below was passing

upstairs to his room on the fourth floor one night when he heard Sam

Clemens call.  The two were great chums by this time, and Brownell poked

his head in at the door.



"What will you have, Sam?" he asked.



"Come in, Ed; Henry's asleep, and I am in trouble.  I want somebody to

light my pipe."



"Why don't you get up and light it yourself?" Brownell asked.



"I would, only I knew you'd be along in a few minutes and would do it for

me."



Brownell scratched the necessary match, stooped down, and applied it.



"What are you reading, Sam?" he asked.



"Oh, nothing much--a so-called funny book--one of these days I'll write a

funnier book than that, myself."



Brownell laughed.



"No, you won't, Sam," he said.  "You are too lazy ever to write a book."



A good many years later when the name "Mark Twain" had begun to stand for

American humor the owner of it gave his "Sandwich Island" lecture in

Keokuk.  Speaking of the unreliability of the islanders, he said: "The

king is, I believe, one of the greatest liars on the face of the earth,

except one; and I am very sorry to locate that one right here in the city

of Keokuk, in the person of Ed Brownell."



The Keokuk episode in Mark Twain's life was neither very long nor very

actively important.  It extended over a period of less than two years--

two vital years, no doubt, if all the bearings could be known--but they

were not years of startling occurrence.



Yet he made at least one beginning there: at a printers' banquet he

delivered his first after-dinner speech; a hilarious speech--its humor of

a primitive kind.  Whatever its shortcomings, it delighted his audience,

and raised him many points in the public regard.  He had entered a field

of entertainment in which he would one day have no rival.  They impressed

him into a debating society after that, and there was generally a stir of

attention when Sam Clemens was about to take the floor.



Orion Clemens records how his brother undertook to teach the German

apprentice music.



"There was an old guitar in the office and Sam taught Fritz a song

beginning:



     "Grasshopper sitting on a sweet-potato vine,

     Turkey came along and yanked him from behind."



The main point in the lesson was in giving to the word "yanked" the

proper expression and emphasis, accompanied by a sweep of the fingers

across the strings.  With serious face and deep earnestness Fritz in his

broken English would attempt these lines, while his teacher would bend

over and hold his sides with laughter at each ridiculous effort.  Without

intending it, Fritz had his revenge.  One day his tormentor's hand was

caught in the press when the German boy was turning the wheel.  Sam

called to him to stop, but the boy's mind was slow to grasp the

situation.  The hand was badly wounded, though no bones were broken.  In

due time it recovered, its power and dexterity, but the trace of the

scars remained.



Orion's printing-office was not a prosperous one; he had not the gift of

prosperity in any form.  When he found it difficult to pay his brother's

wages, he took him into partnership, which meant that Sam got no wages at

all, barely a living, for the office could not keep its head above water.



The junior partner was not disturbed, however.  He cared little for money

in those days, beyond his actual needs, and these were modest enough.

His mother, now with Pamela, was amply provided for.  Orion himself tells

how his business dwindled away.  He printed a Keokuk directory, but it

did not pay largely.  He was always too eager for the work; too low in

his bid for it.  Samuel Clemens in this directory is set down as "an

antiquarian" a joke, of course, though the point of it is now lost.



Only two of his Keokuk letters have been preserved.  The first indicates

the general disorder of the office and a growing dissatisfaction.  It is

addressed to his mother and sister and bears date of June 10, 1856.



     I don't like to work at too many things at once.  They take Henry

     and Dick away from me, too.  Before we commenced the Directory,--

     [Orion printed two editions of the directory.  This was probably the

     second one.]--I could tell before breakfast just how much work

     could be done during the day, and manage accordingly--but now, they

     throw all my plans into disorder by taking my hands away from their

     work....  I am not getting along well with the job-work.  I can't

     work blindly--without system.  I gave Dick a job yesterday, which I

     calculated he could set in two hours and I could work off on the

     press in three, and therefore just finish it by supper-time, but he

     was transferred to the Directory, and the job, promised this

     morning, remains untouched.  Through all the great pressure of job-

     work lately, I never before failed in a promise of the kind .  .  .



The other letter is dated two months later, August 5th.  It was written

to Henry, who was visiting in St. Louis or Hannibal at the time, and

introduces the first mention of the South American fever, which now

possessed the writer.  Lynch and Herndon had completed their survey of

the upper Amazon, and Lieutenant Herndon's account of the exploration was

being widely read.  Poring over the book nights, young Clemens had been

seized with a desire to go to the headwaters of the South American river,

there to collect coca and make a fortune.  All his life he was subject to

such impulses as that, and ways and means were not always considered.  It

did not occur to him that it would be difficult to get to the Amazon and

still more difficult to ascend the river.  It was his nature to see

results with a dazzling largeness that blinded him to the detail of their

achievement.  In the "Turning-point" article already mentioned he refers

to this.  He says:



     That was more than fifty years ago.  In all that time my temperament

     has not changed by even a shade.  I have been punished many and many

     a time, and bitterly, for doing things and reflecting afterward, but

     these tortures have been of no value to me; I still do the thing

     commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and reflect afterward.

     Always violently.  When I am reflecting on these occasions, even

     deaf persons can hear me think.



In the letter to Henry we see that his resolve was already made, his

plans matured; also that Orion had not as yet been taken into full

confidence.



     Ma knows my determination, but even she counsels me to keep it from

     Orion.  She says I can treat him as I did her when I started to St.

     Louis and went to New York--I can start for New York and go to South

     America.



He adds that Orion had promised him fifty or one hundred dollars, but

that he does not depend upon it, and will make other arrangements.  He

fears obstacles may be put in his way, and he will bring various

influences to bear.



     I shall take care that Ma and Orion are plentifully supplied with

     South American books: They have Herndon's report now.  Ward and the

     Dr. and myself will hold a grand consultation to-night at the

     office.  We have agreed that no more shall be admitted into our

     company.



He had enlisted those two adventurers in his enterprise: a Doctor Martin

and the young man, Ward.  They were very much in earnest, but the start

was not made as planned, most likely for want of means.



Young Clemens, however, did not give up the idea.  He made up his mind to

work in the direction of his desire, following his trade and laying by

money for the venture.  But Fate or Providence or Accident--whatever we

may choose to call the unaccountable--stepped in just then, and laid

before him the means of turning another sharp corner in his career.  One

of those things happened which we refuse to accept in fiction as

possible; but fact has a smaller regard for the credibilities.



As in the case of the Joan of Arc episode (and this adds to its marvel),

it was the wind that brought the talismanic gift.  It was a day in early

November--bleak, bitter, and gusty, with curling snow; most persons were

indoors.  Samuel Clemens, going down Main Street, saw a flying bit of

paper pass him and lodge against the side of a building.  Something about

it attracted him and he captured it.  It was a fifty-dollar bill.  He had

never seen one before, but he recognized it.  He thought he must be

having a pleasant dream.



The temptation came to pocket his good-fortune and say nothing.  His need

of money was urgent, but he had also an urgent and troublesome

conscience; in the end he advertised his find.



"I didn't describe it very particularly, and I waited in daily fear that

the owner would turn up and take away my fortune.  By and by I couldn't

stand it any longer.  My conscience had gotten all that was coming to it.

I felt that I must take that money out of danger."



In the "Turning-point" article he says: "I advertised the find and left

for the Amazon the same day," a statement which we may accept with a

literary discount.



As a matter of fact, he remained ample time and nobody ever came for the

money.  It may have been swept out of a bank or caught up by the wind

from some counting-room table.  It may have materialized out of the

unseen--who knows?  At all events it carried him the first stage of a

journey, the end of which he little dreamed.









XXI



SCOTCHMAN NAMED MACFARLANE



He concluded to go to Cincinnati, which would be on the way either to New

York or New Orleans (he expected to sail from one of these points), but

first paid a brief visit to his mother in St. Louis, for he had a far

journey and along absence in view.  Jane Clemens made him renew his

promise as to cards and liquor, and gave him her blessing.  He had

expected to go from St. Louis to Cincinnati, but a new idea--a literary

idea--came to him, and he returned to Keokuk.  The Saturday Post, a

Keokuk weekly, was a prosperous sheet giving itself certain literary

airs.  He was in favor with the management, of which George Rees was the

head, and it had occurred to him that he could send letters of his

travels to the Post--for, a consideration.  He may have had a still

larger ambition; at least, the possibility of a book seems to have been

in his consciousness.  Rees agreed to take letters from him at five

dollars each--good payment for that time and place.  The young traveler,

jubilant in the prospect of receiving money for literature, now made

another start, this time by way of Quincy, Chicago, and Indianapolis

according to his first letter in the Post.--[Supplied by Thomas Rees, of

the Springfield (Illinois) Register, son of George Rees named.]



This letter is dated Cincinnati, November 14, 1856, and it is not a

promising literary production.  It was written in the exaggerated dialect

then regarded as humorous, and while here and there are flashes of the

undoubted Mark Twain type, they are few and far between.  The genius that

a little more than ten years later would delight the world flickered

feebly enough at twenty-one.  The letter is a burlesque account of the

trip to Cincinnati.  A brief extract from it, as characteristic as any,

will serve.



     I went down one night to the railroad office there, purty close onto

     the Laclede House, and bought about a quire o' yaller paper, cut up

     into tickets--one for each railroad in the United States, I thought,

     but I found out afterwards that the Alexandria and Boston Air-Line

     was left out--and then got a baggage feller to take my trunk down to

     the boat, where he spilled it out on the levee, bustin' it open and

     shakin' out the contents, consisting of "guides" to Chicago, and

     "guides" to Cincinnati, and travelers' guides, and all kinds of sich

     books, not excepting a "guide to heaven," which last aint much use

     to a Teller in Chicago, I kin tell you.  Finally, that fast packet

     quit ringing her bell, and started down the river--but she hadn't

     gone morn a mile, till she ran clean up on top of a sand-bar, whar

     she stuck till plum one o'clock, spite of the Captain's swearin'--

     and they had to set the whole crew to cussin' at last afore they got

     her off.



This is humor, we may concede, of that early American type which a little

later would have its flower in Nasby and Artemus Ward.  Only careful

examination reveals in it a hint of the later Mark Twain.  The letters

were signed "Snodgrass," and there are but two of them.  The second,

dated exactly four months after the first, is in the same assassinating

dialect, and recounts among other things the scarcity of coal in

Cincinnati and an absurd adventure in which Snodgrass has a baby left on

his hands.



From the fewness of the letters we may assume that Snodgrass found them

hard work, and it is said he raised on the price.  At all events, the

second concluded the series.  They are mainly important in that they are

the first of his contributions that have been preserved; also the first

for which he received a cash return.



He secured work at his trade in Cincinnati at the printing-office of

Wrightson & Co., and remained there until April, 1857.  That winter in

Cincinnati was eventless enough, but it was marked by one notable

association--one that beyond doubt forwarded Samuel Clemens's general

interest in books, influenced his taste, and inspired in him certain

views and philosophies which he never forgot.



He lodged at a cheap boarding-house filled with the usual commonplace

people, with one exception.  This exception was a long, lank, unsmiling

Scotchman named Macfarlane, who was twice as old as Clemens and wholly

unlike him--without humor or any comprehension of it.  Yet meeting on the

common plane of intellect, the two became friends.  Clemens spent his

evenings in Macfarlane's room until the clock struck ten; then Macfarlane

grilled a herring, just as the Englishman Sumner in Philadelphia had done

two years before, and the evening ended.



Macfarlane had books, serious books: histories, philosophies, and

scientific works; also a Bible and a dictionary.  He had studied these

and knew them by heart; he was a direct and diligent talker.  He never

talked of himself, and beyond the statement that he had acquired his

knowledge from reading, and not at school, his personality was a mystery.

He left the house at six in the morning and returned at the same hour in

the evening.  His hands were hardened from some sort of toil-mechanical

labor, his companion thought, but he never knew.  He would have liked to

know, and he watched for some reference to slip out that would betray

Macfarlane's trade; but this never happened.



What he did learn was that Macfarlane was a veritable storehouse of

abstruse knowledge; a living dictionary, and a thinker and philosopher

besides.  He had at least one vanity: the claim that he knew every word

in the English dictionary, and he made it good.  The younger man tried

repeatedly to discover a word that Macfarlane could not define.



Perhaps Macfarlane was vain of his other mental attainments, for he never

tired of discoursing upon deep and grave matters, and his companion never

tired of listening.  This Scotch philosopher did not always reflect the

conclusions of others; he had speculated deeply and strikingly on his own

account.  That was a good while before Darwin and Wallace gave out--their

conclusions on the Descent of Man; yet Macfarlane was already advancing a

similar philosophy.  He went even further: Life, he said, had been

developed in the course of ages from a few microscopic seed-germs--from

one, perhaps, planted by the Creator in the dawn of time, and that from

this beginning development on an ascending scale had finally produced

man.  Macfarlane said that the scheme had stopped there, and failed; that

man had retrograded; that man's heart was the only bad one in the animal

kingdom: that man was the only animal capable of malice, vindictiveness,

drunkenness--almost the only animal that could endure personal

uncleanliness.  He said that man's intellect was a depraving addition to

him which, in the end, placed him in a rank far below the other beasts,

though it enabled him to keep them in servitude and captivity, along with

many members of his own race.



They were long, fermenting discourses that young Samuel Clemens listened

to that winter in Macfarlane's room, and those who knew the real Mark

Twain and his philosophies will recognize that those evenings left their

impress upon him for life.











XXII



THE OLD CALL OF THE RIVER



When spring came, with budding life and quickening impulses; when the

trees in the parks began to show a hint of green, the Amazonian idea

developed afresh, and the would-be coca-hunter prepared for his

expedition.  He had saved a little money--enough to take him to New

Orleans--and he decided to begin his long trip with a peaceful journey

down the Mississippi, for once, at least, to give himself up to that

indolent luxury of the majestic stream that had been so large a part of

his early dreams.



The Ohio River steamers were not the most sumptuous craft afloat, but

they were slow and hospitable.  The winter had been bleak and hard.

"Spring fever" and a large love of indolence had combined in that drowsy

condition which makes one willing to take his time.



Mark Twain tells us in Life on the Mississippi that he "ran away," vowing

never to return until he could come home a pilot, shedding glory.  This

is a literary statement.  The pilot ambition had never entirely died; but

it was coca and the Amazon that were uppermost in his head when he

engaged passage on the Paul Jones for New Orleans, and so conferred

immortality on that ancient little craft.  He bade good-by to Macfarlane,

put his traps aboard, the bell rang, the whistle blew, the gang-plank was

hauled in, and he had set out on a voyage that was to continue not for a

week or a fortnight, but for four years--four marvelous, sunlit years,

the glory of which would color all that followed them.



In the Mississippi book the author conveys the impression of being then a

boy of perhaps seventeen.  Writing from that standpoint he records

incidents that were more or less inventions or that happened to others.

He was, in reality, considerably more than twenty-one years old, for it

was in April, 1857, that he went aboard the Paul Jones; and he was fairly

familiar with steamboats and the general requirements of piloting.  He

had been brought up in a town that turned out pilots; he had heard the

talk of their trade.  One at least of the Bowen boys was already on the

river while Sam Clemens was still a boy in Hannibal, and had often been

home to air his grandeur and dilate on the marvel of his work.  That

learning the river was no light task Sam Clemens very well knew.

Nevertheless, as the little boat made its drowsy way down the river into

lands that grew ever pleasanter with advancing spring, the old "permanent

ambition" of boyhood stirred again, and the call of the far-away Amazon,

with its coca and its variegated zoology, grew faint.



Horace Bixby, pilot of the Paul Jones, then a man of thirty-two, still

living (1910) and at the wheel,--[The writer of this memoir interviewed

Mr. Bixby personally, and has followed his phrasing throughout.]--was

looking out over the bow at the head of Island No. 35 when he heard a

slow, pleasant voice say:



"Good morning."



Bixby was a clean-cut, direct, courteous man.



"Good morning, sir," he said, briskly, without looking around.



As a rule Mr. Bixby did not care for visitors in the pilot-house.  This

one presently came up and stood a little behind him.



"How would you like a young man to learn the river?" he said.



The pilot glanced over his shoulder and saw a rather slender, loose-

limbed young fellow with a fair, girlish complexion and a great tangle of

auburn hair.



"I wouldn't like it.  Cub pilots are more trouble than they're worth.

A great deal more trouble than profit."



The applicant was not discouraged.



"I am a printer by trade," he went on, in his easy, deliberate way.

"It doesn't agree with me.  I thought I'd go to South America."



Bixby kept his eye on the river; but a note of interest crept into his

voice.



"What makes you pull your words that way?" ("pulling" being the river

term for drawling), he asked.



The young man had taken a seat on the visitors' bench.



"You'll have to ask my mother," he said, more slowly than ever.  "She

pulls hers, too."



Pilot Bixby woke up and laughed; he had a keen sense of humor, and the

manner of the reply amused him.  His guest made another advance.



"Do you know the Bowen boys?" he asked--"pilots in the St. Louis and New

Orleans trade?"



"I know them well--all three of them.  William Bowen did his first

steering for me; a mighty good boy, too.  Had a Testament in his pocket

when he came aboard; in a week's time he had swapped it for a pack of

cards.  I know Sam, too, and Bart."



"Old schoolmates of mine in Hannibal.  Sam and Will especially were my

chums."



"Come over and stand by the side of me," he said.  "What is your name?"



The applicant told him, and the two stood looking at the sunlit water.



"Do you drink?"



"No."



"Do you gamble?"



"No, Sir."



"Do you swear?"



"Not for amusement; only under pressure."



"Do you chew?"



"No, sir, never; but I must smoke."



"Did you ever do any steering?" was Bixby's next question.



"I have steered everything on the river but a steamboat, I guess."



"Very well; take the wheel and see what you can do with a steamboat.

Keep her as she is--toward that lower cottonwood, snag."



Bixby had a sore foot and was glad of a little relief.  He sat down on

the bench and kept a careful eye on the course.  By and by he said:



"There is just one way that I would take a young man to learn the river:

that is, for money."



"What do you charge?"



"Five hundred dollars, and I to be at no expense whatever."



In those days pilots were allowed to carry a learner, or "cub," board

free.  Mr. Bixby meant that he was to be at no expense in port, or for

incidentals.  His terms looked rather discouraging.



"I haven't got five hundred dollars in money," Sam said; "I've got a lot

of Tennessee land worth twenty-five cents an acre; I'll give you two

thousand acres of that."



Bixby dissented.



"No; I don't want any unimproved real estate.  I have too much already."



Sam reflected upon the amount he could probably borrow from Pamela's

husband without straining his credit.



"Well, then, I'll give you one hundred dollars cash and the rest when I

earn it."



Something about this young man had won Horace Bixby's heart.  His slow,

pleasant speech; his unhurried, quiet manner with the wheel, his evident

sincerity of purpose--these were externals, but beneath them the pilot

felt something of that quality of mind or heart which later made the

world love Mark Twain.  The terms proposed were agreed upon.  The

deferred payments were to begin when the pupil had learned the river and

was receiving pilot's wages.  During Mr. Bixby's daylight watches his

pupil was often at the wheel, that trip, while the pilot sat directing

him and nursing his sore foot.  Any literary ambitions Samuel Clemens may

have had grew dim; by the time they had reached New Orleans he had almost

forgotten he had been a printer, and when he learned that no ship would

be sailing to the Amazon for an indefinite period the feeling grew that a

directing hand had taken charge of his affairs.



From New Orleans his chief did not return to Cincinnati, but went to St.

Louis, taking with him his new cub, who thought it fine, indeed, to come

steaming up to that great city with its thronging water-front; its levee

fairly packed with trucks, drays, and piles of freight, the whole flanked

with a solid mile of steamboats lying side by side, bow a little up-

stream, their belching stacks reared high against the blue--a towering

front of trade.  It was glorious to nose one's way to a place in that

stately line, to become a unit, however small, of that imposing fleet.

At St. Louis Sam borrowed from Mr. Moffett the funds necessary to make up

his first payment, and so concluded his contract.  Then, when he suddenly

found himself on a fine big boat, in a pilot-house so far above the water

that he seemed perched on a mountain--a "sumptuous temple"--his happiness

seemed complete.









XXIII



THE SUPREME SCIENCE



In his Mississippi book Mark Twain has given us a marvelous exposition of

the science of river-piloting, and of the colossal task of acquiring and

keeping a knowledge requisite for that work.  He has not exaggerated this

part of the story of developments in any detail; he has set down a simple

confession.



Serenely enough he undertook the task of learning twelve hundred miles of

the great changing, shifting river as exactly and as surely by daylight

or darkness as one knows the way to his own features.  As already

suggested, he had at least an inkling of what that undertaking meant.

His statement that he "supposed all that a pilot had to do was to keep

his boat in the river" is not to be accepted literally.  Still he could

hardly have realized the full majesty of his task; nobody could do that--

not until afterward.



Horace Bixby was a "lightning" pilot with a method of instruction as

direct and forcible as it was effective.  He was a small man, hot and

quick-firing, though kindly, too, and gentle when he had blown off.

After one rather pyrotechnic misunderstanding as to the manner of

imparting and acquiring information he said:



"My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell you

a thing put it down right away.  There's only one way to be a pilot, and

that is to get this entire river by heart.  You have to know it just like

A B C."



So Sam Clemens got the little book, and presently it "fairly bristled"

with the names of towns, points, bars, islands, bends, and reaches, but

it made his heart ache to think that he had only half of the river set

down; for, as the "watches" were four hours off and four hours on, there

were long gaps during which he had slept.



The little note-book still exists--thin and faded, with black water-proof

covers--its neat, tiny, penciled notes still, telling, the story of that

first trip.  Most of them are cryptographic abbreviations, not readily

deciphered now.  Here and there is an easier line:



                            MERIWEATHER'S BEND



     1/4 less 3--[Depth of water.  One-quarter less than three

     fathoms.]----run shape of upper bar and go into the low place in

     willows about 200(ft.) lower down than last year.



One simple little note out of hundreds far more complicated.  It would

take days for the average mind to remember even a single page of such

statistics.  And those long four-hour gaps where he had been asleep, they

are still there, and somehow, after more than fifty years, the old heart-

ache is still in them.  He got a new book, maybe, for the next trip, and

laid this one away.



There is but one way to account for the fact that the man whom the world

knew as Mark Twain--dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to details--ever

persisted in acquiring knowledge like that--in the vast, the absolutely

limitless quantity necessary to Mississippi piloting.  It lies in the

fact that he loved the river in its every mood and aspect and detail, and

not only the river, but a steam boat; and still more, perhaps, the

freedom of the pilot's life and its prestige.  Wherever he has written of

the river--and in one way or another he was always writing of it we feel

the claim of the old captivity and that it still holds him.  In the

Huckleberry Finn book, during those nights and days with Huck and Nigger

Jim on the raft--whether in stormlit blackness, still noontide, or the

lifting mists of morning--we can fairly "smell" the river, as Huck

himself would say, and we know that it is because the writer loved it

with his heart of hearts and literally drank in its environment and

atmosphere during those halcyon pilot days.



So, in his love lay the secret of his marvelous learning, and it is

recorded (not by himself, but by his teacher) that he was an apt pupil.

Horace Bixby has more than once declared:



"Sam was always good-natured, and he had a natural taste for the river.

He had a fine memory and never forgot anything I told him."



Mark Twain himself records a different opinion of his memory, with the

size of its appalling task.  It can only be presented in his own words.

In the pages quoted he had mastered somewhat of the problem, and had

begun to take on airs.  His chief was a constant menace at such moments:



     One day he turned on me suddenly with this settler:



     "What is the shape of Walnut Bend?"



     He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of

     protoplasm.  I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't know

     it had any particular shape.  My gun-powdery chief went off with a

     bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was

     out of adjectives....  I waited.  By and by he said:



     "My boy, you've got to know the shape of the river perfectly.  It is

     all there is left to steer by on a very dark night.  Everything is

     blotted out and gone.  But mind you, it hasn't the same shape in the

     night that it has in the daytime."



     "How on earth am I ever going to learn it, then?"



     "How do you follow a hall at home in the dark?  Because you know the

     shape of it.  You can't see it."



     "Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million trifling

     variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well

     as I know the shape of the front hall at home?"



     "On my honor, you've got to know them better than any man ever did

     know the shapes of the halls in his own house."



     "I wish I was dead!"



     "Now, I don't want to discourage you, but----"



     "Well, pile it on me; I might as well have it now as another time."



     "You see, this has got to be learned; there isn't any getting around

     it.  A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that, if you

     didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly, you would claw away from

     every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it

     for a solid cape; and, you see, you would be getting scared to death

     every fifteen minutes by the watch.  You would be fifty yards from

     shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it.

     You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly

     where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are

     coming to it.  Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a

     very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a

     starlight night.  All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and

     mighty dim ones, too; and you'd run them for straight lines, only

     you know better.  You boldly drive your boat right into what seems

     to be a solid, straight wall (you know very well that in reality

     there is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way for

     you.  Then there's your gray mist.  You take a night when there's

     one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any

     particular shape to a shore.  A gray mist would tangle the head of

     the oldest man that ever lived.  Well, then, different kinds of

     moonlight change the shape of the river in different ways.

     You see----"



     "Oh, don't say any more, please!  Have I got to learn the shape of

     the river according to all these five hundred thousand different

     ways?  If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make

     me stoop-shouldered."



     "No!  you only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it with

     such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape

     that's in your head, and never mind the one that's before your

     eyes."



     "Very well, I'll try it; but, after I have learned it, can I depend

     on it?  Will it keep the same form, and not go fooling around?"



     Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W. came in to take the watch, and

     he said:



     "Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's island, and all that

     country clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens.  The banks are

     caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything.  Why,

     you wouldn't know the point about 40.  You can go up inside the old

     sycamore snag now."



     So that question was answered.  Here were leagues of shore changing

     shape.  My spirits were down in the mud again.  Two things seemed

     pretty apparent to me.  One was that in order to be a pilot a man

     had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know;

     and the other was that he must learn it all over again in a

     different way every twenty-four hours.



     I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the

     eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or

     hands on, that was the chief.  I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp,

     wooded point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of

     me and go to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain; and

     just as I was beginning to succeed to my satisfaction we would draw

     up to it, and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and

     fold back into the bank!



     It was plain that I had got to learn the shape of the river in all

     the different ways that could be thought of--upside down, wrong end

     first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and "thort-ships,"--and then know

     what to do on gray nights when it hadn't any shape at all.  So I set

     about it.  In the course of time I began to get the best of this

     knotty lesson, and my self-complacency moved to the front once more.

     Mr. Bixby was all fixed and ready to start it to the rear again.  He

     opened on me after this fashion:



     "How much water did we have in the middle crossing at Hole-in-The-

     Wall, trip before last?"



     I considered this an outrage.  I said:



     "Every trip down and up the leadsmen are singing through that

     tangled place for three-quarters of an hour on a stretch.  How do

     you reckon I can remember such a mess as that?"



     "My boy, you've got to remember it.  You've got to remember the

     exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the

     shoalest water, in every one of the five hundred shoal places

     between St. Louis and New Orleans; and you mustn't get the shoal

     soundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the shoal soundings

     and marks of another, either, for they're not often twice alike.

     You must keep them separate."



     When I came to myself again, I said:



     "When I get so that I can do that, I'll be able to raise the dead,

     and then I won't have to pilot a steamboat to make a living.  I want

     to retire from this business.  I want a slush-bucket and a brush;

     I'm only fit for a roustabout.  I haven't got brains enough to be a

     pilot; and if I had I wouldn't have strength enough to carry them

     around, unless I went on crutches."



     "Now drop that!  When I say I'll learn a man the river I mean it.

     And you can depend on it, I'll learn him or kill him."



We have quoted at length from this chapter because it seems of very

positive importance here.  It is one of the most luminous in the book so

far as the mastery of the science of piloting is concerned, and shows

better than could any other combination of words something of what is

required of the learner.  It does not cover the whole problem, by any

means--Mark Twain himself could not present that; and even considering

his old-time love of the river and the pilot's trade, it is still

incredible that a man of his temperament could have persisted, as he did,

against such obstacles.









XXIV



THE RIVER CURRICULUM



He acquired other kinds of knowledge.  As the streets of Hannibal in

those early days, and the printing-offices of several cities, had taught

him human nature in various unvarnished aspects, so the river furnished

an added course to that vigorous education.  Morally, its atmosphere

could not be said to be an improvement on the others.  Navigation in the

West had begun with crafts of the flat-boat type--their navigators rude,

hardy men, heavy drinkers, reckless fighters, barbaric in their sports,

coarse in their wit, profane in everything.  Steam-boatmen were the

natural successors of these pioneers--a shade less coarse, a thought less

profane, a veneer less barbaric.  But these things were mainly "above

stairs."  You had but to scratch lightly a mate or a deck-hand to find

the old keel-boatman savagery.  Captains were overlords, and pilots kings

in this estate; but they were not angels.  In Life on the Mississippi

Clemens refers to his chief's explosive vocabulary and tells us how he

envied the mate's manner of giving an order.  It was easier to acquire

those things than piloting, and, on the whole, quicker.  One could

improve upon them, too, with imagination and wit and a natural gift for

terms.  That Samuel Clemens maintained his promise as to drink and cards

during those apprentice days is something worth remembering; and if he

did not always restrict his profanity to moments of severe pressure or

sift the quality of his wit, we may also remember that he was an extreme

example of a human being, in that formative stage which gathers all as

grist, later to refine it for the uses and delights of men.



He acquired a vast knowledge of human character.  He says:



     In that brief, sharp schooling I got personally and familiarly

     acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to

     be found in fiction, biography, or history.  When I find a well-

     drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm

     personal interest in him, for the reason that I have, known him

     before--met him on the river.



Undoubtedly the river was a great school for the study of life's broader

philosophies and humors: philosophies that avoid vague circumlocution and

aim at direct and sure results; humors of the rugged and vigorous sort

that in Europe are known as "American" and in America are known as

"Western."  Let us be thankful that Mark Twain's school was no less than

it was--and no more.



The demands of the Missouri River trade took Horace Bixby away from the

Mississippi, somewhat later, and he consigned his pupil, according to

custom, to another pilot--it is not certain, now, to just which pilot,

but probably to Zeb Leavenworth or Beck Jolly, of the John J.  Roe.  The

Roe was a freight-boat, "as slow as an island and as comfortable as a

farm."  In fact, the Roe was owned and conducted by farmers, and Sam

Clemens thought if John Quarles's farm could be set afloat it would

greatly resemble that craft in the matter of good-fellowship,

hospitality, and speed.  It was said of her that up-stream she could even

beat an island, though down-stream she could never quite overtake the

current, but was a "love of a steamboat" nevertheless.  The Roe was not

licensed to carry passengers, but she always had a dozen "family guests"

aboard, and there was a big boiler-deck for dancing and moonlight

frolics, also a piano in the cabin.  The young pilot sometimes played on

the piano and sang to his music songs relating to the "grasshopper on the

sweet-potato vine," or to an old horse by the name of Methusalem:



          Took him down and sold him in Jerusalem,

                    A long time ago.



There were forty-eight stanzas about this ancient horse, all pretty much

alike; but the assembled company was not likely to be critical, and his

efforts won him laurels.  He had a heavenly time on the John J. Roe, and

then came what seemed inferno by contrast.  Bixby returned, made a trip

or two, then left and transferred him again, this time to a man named

Brown.  Brown had a berth on the fine new steamer Pennsylvania, one of

the handsomest boats on the river, and young Clemens had become a fine

steersman, so it is not unlikely that both men at first were gratified by

the arrangement.



But Brown was a fault-finding, tyrannical chief, ignorant, vulgar, and

malicious.  In the Mississippi book the author gives his first interview

with Brown, also his last one.  For good reasons these occasions were

burned into his memory, and they may be accepted as substantially

correct.  Brown had an offensive manner.  His first greeting was a surly

question.



"Are you Horace Bigsby's cub?"



"Bixby" was usually pronounced "Bigsby" on the river, but Brown made it

especially obnoxious and followed it up with questions and comments and

orders still more odious.  His subordinate soon learned to detest him

thoroughly.  It was necessary, however, to maintain a respectable

deportment--custom, discipline, even the law, required that--but it must

have been a hard winter and spring the young steersman put in during

those early months of 1858, restraining himself from the gratification of

slaying Brown.  Time would bring revenge--a tragic revenge and at a

fearful cost; but he could not guess that, and he put in his spare time

planning punishments of his own.



     I could imagine myself killing Brown; there was no law against that,

     and that was the thing I always used to do the moment I was abed.

     Instead of going over my river in my mind, as was my duty, I threw

     business aside for pleasure and killed Brown.  I killed Brown every

     night for a month; not in old, stale, commonplace ways, but in new

     and picturesque ones--ways that were sometimes surprising for

     freshness of design and ghastly for situation and environment.



Once when Brown had been more insulting than usual his subordinate went

to bed and killed him in "seventeen different ways--all of them new."



He had made an effort at first to please Brown, but it was no use.  Brown

was the sort of a man that refused to be pleased; no matter how carefully

his subordinate steered, he as always at him.



"Here," he would shout, "where are you going now?  Pull her down!  Pull

her down!  Don't you hear me?  Dod-derned mud-cat!"



His assistant lost all desire to be obliging to such a person and even

took occasion now and then to stir him up.  One day they were steaming up

the river when Brown noticed that the boat seemed to be heading toward

some unusual point.



"Here, where are you heading for now?" he yelled.  "What in nation are

you steerin' at, anyway?  Deyned numskull!"



"Why," said Sam, in unruffled deliberation, "I didn't see much else I

could steer for, and I was heading for that white heifer on the bank."



"Get away from that wheel! and get outen this pilothouse!" yelled Brown.

"You ain't fit to become no pilot!"



Which was what Sam wanted.  Any temporary relief from the carping tyranny

of Brown was welcome.



He had been on the river nearly a year now, and, though universally liked

and accounted a fine steersman, he was receiving no wages.  There had

been small need of money for a while, for he had no board to pay; but

clothes wear out at last, and there were certain incidentals.  The

Pennsylvania made a round trip in about thirty-five days, with a day or

two of idle time at either end.  The young pilot found that he could get

night employment, watching freight on the New Orleans levee, and thus

earn from two and a half to three dollars for each night's watch.

Sometimes there would be two nights, and with a capital of five or six

dollars he accounted himself rich.



"It was a desolate experience," he said, long afterward, "watching there

in the dark among those piles of freight; not a sound, not a living

creature astir.  But it was not a profitless one: I used to have

inspirations as I sat there alone those nights.  I used to imagine all

sorts of situations and possibilities.  Those things got into my books by

and by and furnished me with many a chapter.  I can trace the effect of

those nights through most of my books in one way and another."



Many of the curious tales in the latter half of the Mississippi book came

out of those long night-watches.  It was a good time to think of such

things.









XXV



LOVE-MAKING AND ADVENTURE



Of course, life with Brown was not all sorrow.  At either end of the trip

there was respite and recreation.  In St. Louis, at Pamela's there was

likely to be company: Hannibal friends mostly, schoolmates--girls, of

course.  At New Orleans he visited friendly boats, especially the John J.

Roe, where he was generously welcomed.  One such visit on the Roe he

never forgot.  A young girl was among the boat's guests that trip--

another Laura, fifteen, winning, delightful.  They met, and were mutually

attracted; in the life of each it was one of those bright spots which are

likely to come in youth: one of those sudden, brief periods of romance,

love--call it what you will the thing that leads to marriage, if pursued.



"I was not four inches from that girl's elbow during our waking hours for

the next three days."



Then came a sudden interruption: Zeb Leavenworth came flying aft

shouting:



"The Pennsylvania is backing out."



A flutter of emotion, a fleeting good-by, a flight across the decks, a

flying leap from romance back to reality, and it was all over.  He wrote

her, but received no reply.  He never saw her again, never heard from her

for forty-eight years, when both were married, widowed, and old.  She had

not received his letter.



Even on the Pennsylvania life had its interests.  A letter dated March 9,

1858, recounts a delightfully dangerous night-adventure in the steamer's

yawl, hunting for soundings in the running ice.



     Then the fun commenced.  We made fast a line 20 fathoms long, to the

     bow of the yawl, and put the men (both crews) to it like horses on

     the shore.  Brown, the pilot, stood in the bow, with an oar, to keep

     her head out, and I took the tiller.  We would start the men, and

     all would go well till the yawl would bring up on a heavy cake of

     ice, and then the men would drop like so many tenpins, while Brown

     assumed the horizontal in the bottom of the boat.  After an hour's

     hard work we got back, with ice half an inch thick on the oars.

     Sent back and warped up the other yawl, and then George (George

     Ealer, the other pilot) and myself took a double crew of fresh men

     and tried it again.  This time we found the channel in less than

     half an hour, and landed on an island till the Pennsylvania came

     along and took us off.  The next day was colder still.  I was out in

     the yawl twice, and then we got through, but the infernal steamboat

     came near running over us....  We sounded Hat Island, warped up

     around a bar, and sounded again--but in order to understand our

     situation you will have to read Dr. Kane.  It would have been

     impossible to get back to the boat.  But the Maria Denning was

     aground at the head of the island--they hailed us--we ran alongside,

     and they hoisted us in and thawed us out.  We had then been out in

     the yawl from four o'clock in the morning till half past nine

     without being near a fire.  There was a thick coating of ice over

     men, and yawl, ropes and everything else, and we looked like rock-

     candy statuary.



This was the sort of thing he loved in those days.  We feel the writer's

evident joy and pride in it.  In the same letter he says: "I can't

correspond with the paper, because when one is learning the river he is

not allowed to do or think about anything else."  Then he mentions his

brother Henry, and we get the beginning of that tragic episode for which,

though blameless, Samuel Clemens always held himself responsible.



     Henry was doing little or nothing here (St. Louis), and I sent him

     to our clerk to work his way for a trip, measuring wood-piles,

     counting coal-boxes, and doing other clerkly duties, which he

     performed satisfactorily.  He may go down with us again.



Henry Clemens was about twenty at this time, a handsome, attractive boy

of whom his brother was lavishly fond and proud.  He did go on the next

trip and continued to go regularly after that, as third clerk in line of

promotion.  It was a bright spot in those hard days with Brown to have

Henry along.  The boys spent a good deal of their leisure with the other

pilot, George Ealer, who "was as kindhearted as Brown wasn't," and quoted

Shakespeare and Goldsmith, and played the flute to his fascinated and

inspiring audience.  These were things worth while.  The young steersman

could not guess that the shadow of a long sorrow was even then stretching

across the path ahead.



Yet in due time he received a warning, a remarkable and impressive

warning, though of a kind seldom heeded.  One night, when the

Pennsylvania lay in St. Louis, he slept at his sister's house and had

this vivid dream:



He saw Henry, a corpse, lying in a metallic burial case in the sitting-

room, supported on two chairs.  On his breast lay a bouquet of flowers,

white, with a single crimson bloom in the center.



When he awoke, it was morning, but the dream was so vivid that he

believed it real.  Perhaps something of the old hypnotic condition was

upon him, for he rose and dressed, thinking he would go in and look at

his dead brother.  Instead, he went out on the street in the early

morning and had walked to the middle of the block before it suddenly

flashed upon him that it was only a dream.  He bounded back, rushed to

the sitting-room, and felt a great trembling revulsion of joy when he

found it really empty.  He told Pamela the dream, then put it out of his

mind as quickly as he could.  The Pennsylvania sailed from St. Louis as

usual, and made a safe trip to New Orleans.



A safe trip, but an eventful one; on it occurred that last interview with

Brown, already mentioned.  It is recorded in the Mississippi book, but

cannot be omitted here.  Somewhere down the river (it was in Eagle Bend)

Henry appeared on the hurricane deck to bring an order from the captain

for a landing to be made a little lower down.  Brown was somewhat deaf,

but would never confess it.  He may not have understood the order; at all

events he gave no sign of having heard it, and went straight ahead.  He

disliked Henry as he disliked everybody of finer grain than himself, and

in any case was too arrogant to ask for a repetition.  They were passing

the landing when Captain Klinefelter appeared on deck and called to him

to let the boat come around, adding:



"Didn't Henry tell you to land here?"



"No, sir."



Captain.  Klinefelter turned to Sam:



"Didn't you hear him?"



"Yes, sir."



Brown said: "Shut your mouth!  You never heard anything of the kind."



By and by Henry came into the pilot-house, unaware of any trouble.  Brown

set upon him in his ugliest manner.



"Here, why didn't you tell me we had got to land at that plantation?" he

demanded.



Henry was always polite, always gentle.



"I did tell you, Mr. Brown."



"It's a lie."



Sam Clemens could stand Brown's abuse of himself, but not of Henry.  He

said: "You lie yourself.  He did tell you."



Brown was dazed for a moment and then he shouted:



"I'll attend to your case in half a minute!" and ordered Henry out of

the pilot-house.



The boy had started, when Brown suddenly seized him by the collar and

struck him in the face.--[In the Mississippi book the writer states

that Brown started to strike Henry with a large piece of coal; but, in a

letter written soon after the occurrence to Mrs. Orion Clemens, he says:

"Henry started out of the pilot-house-Brown jumped up and collared him--

turned him half-way around and struck him in the face!-and him nearly six

feet high-struck my little brother.  I was wild from that moment.  I left

the boat to steer herself, and avenged the insult--and the captain said I

was right."]--Instantly Sam was upon Brown, with a heavy stool, and

stretched him on the floor.  Then all the bitterness and indignation that

had been smoldering for months flamed up, and, leaping upon Brown and

holding him with his knees, he pounded him with his fists until strength

and fury gave out.  Brown struggled free, then, and with pilot instinct

sprang to the wheel, for the vessel had been drifting and might have got

into trouble.  Seeing there was no further danger, he seized a spy-glass

as a weapon.



"Get out of this here pilot-house," he raged.



But his subordinate was not afraid of him now.



"You should leave out the 'here,'" he drawled, critically.  "It is

understood, and not considered good English form."



"Don't you give me none of your airs," yelled Brown.  "I ain't going to

stand nothing more from you."



"You should say, 'Don't give me any of your airs,'" Sam said, sweetly,

"and the last half of your sentence almost defies correction."



A group of passengers and white-aproned servants, assembled on the deck

forward, applauded the victor.



Brown turned to the wheel, raging and growling.  Clemens went below,

where he expected Captain Klinefelter to put him in irons, perhaps, for

it was thought to be felony to strike a pilot.  The officer took him into

his private room and closed the door.  At first he looked at the culprit

thoughtfully, then he made some inquiries:



     "Did you strike him first?" Captain Klinefelter asked.



     "Yes, sir."



     "What with?"



     "A stool, sir."



     "Hard?"



     "Middling, sir."



     "Did it knock him down?"



     "He--he fell, sir."



     "Did you follow it up?  Did you do anything further?"



     "Yes, sir."



     "What did you do?"



     "Pounded him, sir."



     "Pounded him?"



     "Yes, sir."



     "Did you pound him much--that is, severely?"



     "One might call it that, sir, maybe."



     "I am deuced glad of it!  Hark ye, never mention that I said that.

     You have been guilty of a great crime; and don't ever be guilty of

     it again on this boat, but--lay for him ashore!  Give him a good

     sound thrashing; do you hear?  I'll pay the expenses."--["Life on

     the Mississippi."]



Captain Klinefelter told him to clear out, then, and the culprit heard

him enjoying himself as the door closed behind him.  Brown, of course,

forbade him the pilothouse after that, and he spent the rest of the trip

"an emancipated slave" listening to George Ealer's flute and his readings

from Goldsmith and Shakespeare; playing chess with him sometimes, and

learning a trick which he would use himself in the long after-years--that

of taking back the last move and running out the game differently when he

saw defeat.



Brown swore that he would leave the boat at New Orleans if Sam Clemens

remained on it, and Captain Klinefelter told Brown to go.  Then when

another pilot could not be obtained to fill his place, the captain

offered to let Clemens himself run the daylight watches, thus showing his

confidence in the knowledge of the young steersman, who had been only a

little more than a year at the wheel.  But Clemens himself had less

confidence and advised the captain to keep Brown back to St. Louis.  He

would follow up the river by another boat and resume his place as

steersman when Brown was gone.  Without knowing it, he may have saved his

life by that decision.



It is doubtful if he remembered his recent disturbing dream, though some

foreboding would seem to have hung over him the night before the

Pennsylvania sailed.  Henry liked to join in the night-watches on the

levee when he had finished his duties, and the brothers often walked the

round chatting together.  On this particular night the elder spoke of

disaster on the river.  Finally he said:



"In case of accident, whatever you do, don't lose your head--the

passengers will do that.  Rush for the hurricane deck and to the life-

boat, and obey the mate's orders.  When the boat is launched, help the

women and children into it.  Don't get in yourself.  The river is only a

mile wide.  You can swim ashore easily enough."



It was good manly advice, but it yielded a long harvest of sorrow.









XXVI



THE TRAGEDY OF THE "PENNSYLVANIA"



Captain Klinefelter obtained his steersman a pass on the A. T. Lacey,

which left two days behind the Pennsylvania.  This was pleasant, for Bart

Bowen had become captain of that fine boat.  The Lacey touched at

Greenville, Mississippi, and a voice from the landing shouted:



"The Pennsylvania is blown up just below Memphis, at Ship Island!  One

hundred and fifty lives lost!"



Nothing further could be learned there, but that evening at Napoleon a

Memphis extra reported some of the particulars.  Henry Clemens's name was

mentioned as one of those, who had escaped injury.  Still farther up the

river they got a later extra.  Henry was again mentioned; this time as

being scalded beyond recovery.  By the time they reached Memphis they

knew most of the details:  At six o'clock that warm mid-June morning,

while loading wood from a large flat-boat sixty miles below Memphis, four

out of eight of the Pennsylvania's boilers had suddenly exploded with

fearful results.  All the forward end of the boat had been blown out.

Many persons had been killed outright; many more had been scalded and

crippled and would die.  It was one of those hopeless, wholesale

steamboat slaughters which for more than a generation had made the

Mississippi a river of death and tears.



Samuel Clemens found his brother stretched upon a mattress on the floor

of an improvised hospital--a public hall--surrounded by more than thirty

others more or less desperately injured.  He was told that Henry had

inhaled steam and that his body was badly scalded.  His case was

considered hopeless.



Henry was one of those who had been blown into the river by the

explosion.  He had started to swim for the shore, only a few hundred

yards away, but presently, feeling no pain and believing himself unhurt,

he had turned back to assist in the rescue of the others.  What he did

after that could not be clearly learned.  The vessel had taken fire; the

rescued were being carried aboard the big wood-boat still attached to the

wreck.  The fire soon raged so that the rescuers and all who could be

saved were driven into the wood-flat, which was then cut adrift and

landed.  There the sufferers had to lie in the burning sun many hours

until help could come.  Henry was among those who were insensible by that

time.  Perhaps he had really been uninjured at first and had been scalded

in his work of rescue; it will never be known.



His brother, hearing these things, was thrown into the deepest agony and

remorse.  He held himself to blame for everything; for Henry's presence

on the boat; for his advice concerning safety of others; for his own

absence when he might have been there to help and protect the boy.  He

wanted to telegraph at once to his mother and sister to come, but the

doctors persuaded him to wait--just why, he never knew.  He sent word of

the disaster to Orion, who by this time had sold out in Keokuk and was in

East Tennessee studying law; then he set himself to the all but hopeless

task of trying to bring Henry back to life.  Many Memphis ladies were

acting as nurses, and one, a Miss Wood, attracted by the boy's youth and

striking features, joined in the desperate effort.  Some medical students

had come to assist the doctors, and one of these also took special

interest in Henry's case.  Dr. Peyton, an old Memphis practitioner,

declared that with such care the boy might pull through.



But on the fourth night he was considered to be dying.  Half delirious

with grief and the strain of watching, Samuel Clemens wrote to his mother

and to his sister-in-law in Tennessee.  The letter to Orion Clemens's

wife has been preserved.



     MEMPHIS, TENN., Friday, June 18, 1858.



     DEAR SISTER MOLLIE,--Long before this reaches you my poor Henry--my

     darling, my pride, my glory, my all will have finished his blameless

     career, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter

     darkness.  The horrors of three days have swept over me--they have

     blasted my youth and left me an old man before my time.  Mollie,

     there are gray hairs in my head to-night.  For forty-eight hours I

     labored at the bedside of my poor burned and bruised but

     uncomplaining brother, and then the star of my hope went out and

     left me in the gloom of despair.  Men take me by the hand and

     congratulate me, and call me "lucky" because I was not on the

     Pennsylvania when she blew up!  May God forgive them, for they know

     not what they say.



     I was on the Pennsylvania five minutes before she left N. Orleans,

     and I must tell you the truth, Mollie--three hundred human beings

     perished by that fearful disaster.  But may God bless Memphis, the

     noblest city on the face of the earth.  She has done her duty by

     these poor afflicted creatures--especially Henry, for he has had

     five--aye, ten, fifteen, twenty times the care and attention that

     any one else has had.  Dr. Peyton, the best physician in Memphis (he

     is exactly like the portraits of Webster), sat by him for 36 hours.

     There are 32 scalded men in that room, and you would know Dr.

     Peyton better than I can describe him if you could follow him around

     and hear each man murmur as he passes, "May the God of Heaven bless

     you, Doctor!"  The ladies have done well, too.  Our second mate, a

     handsome, noble-hearted young fellow, will die.  Yesterday a

     beautiful girl of 15 stooped timidly down by his side and handed him

     a pretty bouquet.  The poor suffering boy's eyes kindled, his lips

     quivered out a gentle "God bless you, Miss," and he burst into

     tears.  He made them write her name on a card for him, that he might

     not forget it.



     Pray for me, Mollie, and pray for my poor sinless brother.

     Your unfortunate brother,



     SAML.  L.  CLEMENS.



     P. S.--I got here two days after Henry.





But, alas, this was not all, nor the worst.  It would seem that Samuel

Clemens's cup of remorse must be always overfull.  The final draft that

would embitter his years was added the sixth night after the accident--

the night that Henry died.  He could never bring himself to write it.  He

was never known to speak of it but twice.



Henry had rallied soon after the foregoing letter had been mailed, and

improved slowly that day and the next: Dr. Peyton came around about

eleven o'clock on the sixth night and made careful examination.  He said:



"I believe he is out of danger and will get well.  He is likely to be

restless during the night; the groans and fretting of the others will

disturb him.  If he cannot rest without it, tell the physician in charge

to give him one-eighth of a grain of morphine."



The boy did wake during the night, and was disturbed by the complaining

of the other sufferers.  His brother told the young medical student in

charge what the doctor had said about the morphine.  But morphine was a

new drug then; the student hesitated, saying:



"I have no way of measuring.  I don't know how much an eighth of a grain

would be."



Henry grew rapidly worse--more and more restless.  His brother was half

beside himself with the torture of it.  He went to the medical student.



"If you have studied drugs," he said, "you ought to be able to judge an

eighth of a grain of morphine."



The young man's courage was over-swayed.  He yielded and ladled out in

the old-fashioned way, on the point of a knife-blade, what he believed to

be the right amount.  Henry immediately sank into a heavy sleep.  He died

before morning.  His chance of life had been infinitesimal, and his death

was not necessarily due to the drug, but Samuel Clemens, unsparing in his

self-blame, all his days carried the burden of it.



He saw the boy taken to the dead room, then the long strain of grief, the

days and nights without sleep, the ghastly realization of the end

overcame him.  A citizen of Memphis took him away in a kind of daze and

gave him a bed in his house, where he fell into a stupor of fatigue and

surrender.  It was many hours before he woke; when he did, at last, he

dressed and went to where Henry lay.  The coffin provided for the dead

were of unpainted wood, but the youth and striking face of Henry Clemens

had aroused a special interest.  The ladies of Memphis had made up a fund

of sixty dollars and bought for him a metallic case.  Samuel Clemens

entering, saw his brother lying exactly as he had seen him in his dream,

lacking only the bouquet of white flowers with its crimson center--a

detail made complete while he stood there, for at that moment an elderly

lady came in with a large white bouquet, and in the center of it was a

single red rose.



Orion arrived from Tennessee, and the brothers took their sorrowful

burden to St. Louis, subsequently to Hannibal, his old home.  The death

of this lovely boy was a heavy sorrow to the community where he was

known, for he had been a favorite with all.--[For a fine

characterization of Henry Clemens the reader is referred to a letter

written by Orion Clemens to Miss Wood.  See Appendix A, at the end of the

last volume.]



From Hannibal the family returned to Pamela's home in St. Louis.  There

one night Orion heard his brother moaning and grieving and walking the

floor of his room.  By and by Sam came in to where Orion was.  He could

endure it no longer, he said; he must, "tell somebody."



Then he poured all the story of that last tragic night.  It has been set

down here because it accounts for much in his after-life.  It magnified

his natural compassion for the weakness and blunders of humanity, while

it increased the poor opinion implanted by the Scotchman Macfarlane of

the human being as a divine invention.  Two of Mark Twain's chief

characteristics were--consideration for the human species, and contempt

for it.



In many ways he never overcame the tragedy of Henry's death.  He never

really looked young again.  Gray hairs had come, as he said, and they did

not disappear.  His face took on the serious, pathetic look which from

that time it always had in repose.  At twenty-three he looked thirty.  At

thirty he looked nearer forty.  After that the discrepancy in age and

looks became less notable.  In vigor, complexion, and temperament he was

regarded in later life as young for his years, but never in looks.









XXVII



THE PILOT



The young pilot returned to the river as steersman for George Ealer, whom

he loved, and in September of that year obtained a full license as

Mississippi River pilot.--[In Life on the Mississippi he gives his

period of learning at from two to two and a half years; but documentary

evidence as well as Mr. Bixby's testimony places the apprenticeship at

eighteen months]--Bixby had returned by this time, and they were again

together, first on the Crescent City, later on a fine new boat called the

New Falls City.  Clemens was still a steersman when Bixby returned; but

as soon as his license was granted (September 9, 1858) his old chief took

him as full partner.



He was a pilot at last.  In eighteen months he had packed away in his

head all the multitude of volatile statistics and acquired that

confidence and courage which made him one of the elect, a river

sovereign.  He knew every snag and bank and dead tree and reef in all

those endless miles between St. Louis and New Orleans, every cut-off and

current, every depth of water--the whole story--by night and by day.  He

could smell danger in the dark; he could read the surface of the water as

an open page.  At twenty-three he had acquired a profession which

surpassed all others for absolute sovereignty and yielded an income equal

to that then earned by the Vice-President of the United States.  Boys

generally finish college at about that age, but it is not likely that any

boy ever finished college with the mass of practical information and

training that was stored away in Samuel Clemens's head, or with his

knowledge of human nature, his preparation for battle with the world.



"Not only was he a pilot, but a good one."  These are Horace Bixby's

words, and he added:



"It is the fashion to-day to disparage Sam's piloting.  Men who were born

since he was on the river and never saw him will tell you that Sam was

never much of a pilot.  Most of them will tell you that he was never a

pilot at all.  As a matter of fact, Sam was a fine pilot, and in a day

when piloting on the Mississippi required a great deal more brains and

skill and application than it does now.  There were no signal-lights

along the shore in those days, and no search-lights on the vessels;

everything was blind, and on a dark, misty night in a river full of snags

and shifting sand--bars and changing shores, a pilot's judgment had to be

founded on absolute certainty."



He had plenty of money now.  He could help his mother with a liberal

hand, and he did it.  He helped Orion, too, with money and with advice.

From a letter written toward the end of the year, we gather the new

conditions.  Orion would seem to have been lamenting over prospects, and

the young pilot, strong and exalted in his new estate, urges him to

renewed consistent effort:



     What is a government without energy?--[he says]--.  And what is a

     man without energy?  Nothing--nothing at all.  What is the grandest

     thing in "Paradise Lost"--the Arch-Fiend's terrible energy!  What

     was the greatest feature in Napoleon's character?  His unconquerable

     energy!  Sum all the gifts that man is endowed with, and we give our

     greatest share of admiration to his energy.  And to-day, if I were a

     heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and worship

     it!



     I want a man to--I want you to--take up a line of action, and follow

     it out, in spite of the very devil.



Orion and his wife had returned to Keokuk by this time, waiting for

something in the way of a business opportunity.



His pilot brother, wrote him more than once letters of encouragement and

council.  Here and there he refers to the tragedy of Henry's death, and

the shadow it has cast upon his life; but he was young, he was

successful, his spirits were naturally exuberant.  In the exhilaration of

youth and health and success he finds vent at times in that natural human

outlet, self-approval.  He not only exhibits this weakness, but confesses

it with characteristic freedom.



     Putting all things together, I begin to think I am rather lucky than

     otherwise--a notion which I was slow to take up.  The other night I

     was about to "round to" for a storm, but concluded that I could find

     a smoother bank somewhere.  I landed five miles below.  The storm

     came, passed away and did not injure us.  Coming up, day before

     yesterday, I looked at the spot I first chose, and half the trees on

     the bank were torn to shreds.  We couldn't have lived 5 minutes in

     such a tornado.  And I am also lucky in having a berth, while all

     the other young pilots are idle.  This is the luckiest circumstance

     that ever befell me.  Not on account of the wages--for that is a

     secondary consideration-but from the fact that the City of Memphis

     is the largest boat in the trade, and the hardest to pilot, and

     consequently I can get a reputation on her, which is a thing I never

     could accomplish on a transient boat.  I can "bank" in the

     neighborhood of $100 a month on her, and that will satisfy me for

     the present (principally because the other youngsters are sucking

     their fingers).  Bless me! what a pleasure there is in revenge!--and

     what vast respect Prosperity commands!  Why, six months ago, I could

     enter the "Rooms," and receive only the customary fraternal greeting

     now they say, "Why, how are you, old fellow--when did you get in?"



     And the young pilots who use to tell me, patronizingly, that I could

     never learn the river cannot keep from showing a little of their

     chagrin at seeing me so far ahead of them.  Permit me to "blow my

     horn," for I derive a living pleasure from these things, and I must

     confess that when I go to pay my dues, I rather like to let the

     d---d rascals get a glimpse of a hundred-dollar bill peeping out

     from amongst notes of smaller dimensions whose face I do not

     exhibit!  You will despise this egotism, but I tell you there is a

     "stern joy" in it.



We are dwelling on this period of Mark Twain's life, for it was a period

that perhaps more than any other influenced his future years.  He became

completely saturated with the river its terms, its memories, its

influence remained a definite factor in his personality to the end of his

days.  Moreover, it was his first period of great triumph.  Where before

he had been a subaltern not always even a wage-earner--now all in a

moment he had been transformed into a high chief.  The fullest ambition

of his childhood had been realized--more than realized, for in that day

he had never dreamed of a boat or of an income of such stately

proportions.  Of great personal popularity, and regarded as a safe pilot,

he had been given one of the largest, most difficult of boats.  Single-

handed and alone he had fought his way into the company of kings.



And we may pardon his vanity.  He could hardly fail to feel his glory and

revel in it and wear it as a halo, perhaps, a little now and then in the

Association Rooms.  To this day he is remembered as a figure there,

though we may believe, regardless of his own statement, that it was not

entirely because of his success.  As the boys of Hannibal had gathered

around to listen when Sam Clemens began to speak, so we may be certain

that the pilots at St. Louis and New Orleans laid aside other things when

he had an observation to make or a tale to tell.



     He was much given to spinning yarns--[writes one associate of those

     days]--so funny that his hearers were convulsed, and yet all the

     time his own face was perfectly sober.  If he laughed at all, it

     must have been inside.  It would have killed his hearers to do that.

     Occasionally some of his droll yarns would get into the papers.  He

     may have written them himself.



Another riverman of those days has recalled a story he heard Sam Clemens

tell:



     We were speaking of presence of mind in accidents--we were always

     talking of such things; then he said:



     "Boys, I had great presence of mind once.  It was at a fire.  An old

     man leaned out of a four-story building calling for help.  Everybody

     in the crowd below looked up, but nobody did anything.  The ladders

     weren't long enough.  Nobody had any presence of mind--nobody but

     me.  I came to the rescue.  I yelled for a rope.  When it came I

     threw the old man the end of it.  He caught it and I told him to tie

     it around his waist.  He did so, and I pulled him down."



This was one of the stories that got into print and traveled far.

Perhaps, as the old pilot suggests, he wrote some of them himself, for

Horace Bixby remembers that "Sam was always scribbling when not at the

wheel."



But if he published any work in those river-days he did not acknowledge

it later--with one exception.  The exception was not intended for

publication, either.  It was a burlesque written for the amusement of his

immediate friends.  He has told the story himself, more than once, but it

belongs here for the reason that some where out of the general

circumstance of it there originated a pseudonym, one day to become the

best-known in the hemispheres the name Mark Twain.



That terse, positive, peremptory, dynamic pen-name was first used by an

old pilot named Isaiah Sellers--a sort of "oldest inhabitant" of the

river, who made the other pilots weary with the scope and antiquity of

his reminiscent knowledge.  He contributed paragraphs of general

information and Nestorian opinions to the New Orleans Picayune, and

signed them "Mark Twain."  They were quaintly egotistical in tone,

usually beginning: "My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New

Orleans," and reciting incidents and comparisons dating as far back as

1811.



Captain Sellers naturally was regarded as fair game by the young pilots,

who amused themselves by imitating his manner and general attitude of

speech.  But Clemens went further; he wrote at considerable length a

broadly burlesque imitation signed "Sergeant Fathom," with an

introduction which referred to the said Fathom as "one of the oldest cub

pilots on the river."  The letter that followed related a perfectly

impossible trip, supposed to have been made in 1763 by the steamer "the

old first Jubilee" with a "Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew."  It is a

gem of its kind, and will bear reprint in full today.--[See Appendix B,

at the end of the last volume.]



The burlesque delighted Bart Bowen, who was Clemens's pilot partner on

the Edward J. Gay at the time.  He insisted on showing it to others and

finally upon printing it.  Clemens was reluctant, but consented.  It

appeared in the True Delta (May 8 or 9, 1859), and was widely and

boisterously enjoyed.



It broke Captain Sellers's literary heart.  He never contributed another

paragraph.  Mark Twain always regretted the whole matter deeply, and his

own revival of the name was a sort of tribute to the old man he had

thoughtlessly wounded.  If Captain Sellers has knowledge of material

matters now, he is probably satisfied; for these things brought to him,

and to the name he had chosen, what he could never himself have achieved

--immortality.











XXVIII



PILOTING AND PROPHECY



Those who knew Samuel Clemens best in those days say that he was a

slender, fine-looking man, well dressed--even dandified--given to patent

leathers, blue serge, white duck, and fancy striped shirts.  Old for his

years, he heightened his appearance at times by wearing his beard in the

atrocious mutton-chop fashion, then popular, but becoming to no one,

least of all to him.  The pilots regarded him as a great reader--

a student of history, travels, literature, and the sciences--a young man

whom it was an education as well as an entertainment to know.  When not

at the wheel, he was likely to be reading or telling yarns in the

Association Rooms.



He began the study of French one day when he passed a school of

languages, where three tongues, French, German, and Italian, were taught,

one in each of three rooms.  The price was twenty-five dollars for one

language, or three for fifty dollars.  The student was provided with a

set of cards for each room and supposed to walk from one apartment to

another, changing tongues at each threshold.  With his unusual enthusiasm

and prodigality, the young pilot decided to take all three languages, but

after the first two or three round trips concluded that for the present

French would do.  He did not return to the school, but kept his cards and

bought text-books.  He must have studied pretty faithfully when he was

off watch and in port, for his river note-book contains a French

exercise, all neatly written, and it is from the Dialogues of Voltaire.



This old note-book is interesting for other things.  The notes are no

longer timid, hesitating memoranda, but vigorous records made with the

dash of assurance that comes from confidence and knowledge, and with the

authority of one in supreme command.  Under the head of "2d high-water

trip--Jan., 1861--Alonzo Child," we have the story of a rising river with

its overflowing banks, its blind passages and cut-offs--all the

circumstance and uncertainty of change.



     Good deal of water all over Coles Creek Chute, 12 or 15 ft.  bank--

     could have gone up shore above General Taylor's--too much drift....



     Night--didn't run either 77 or 76 towheads--8 ft. bank on main shore

     Ozark Chute....



And so on page after page of cryptographic memoranda.  It means little

enough to the lay reader, yet one gets an impression somehow of the

swirling, turbulent water and a lonely figure in that high glassed-in

place peering into the dark for blind land-marks and possible dangers,

picking his way up the dim, hungry river of which he must know every foot

as well as a man knows the hall of his own home.  All the qualifications

must come into play, then memory, judgment, courage, and the high art of

steering.  "Steering is a very high, art," he says; "one must not keep a

rudder dragging across a boat's stern if he wants to get up the river

fast."



He had an example of the perfection of this art one misty night on the

Alonzo Child.  Nearly fifty years later, sitting on his veranda in the

dark, he recalled it.  He said:



"There was a pilot in those days by the name of Jack Leonard who was a

perfectly wonderful creature.  I do not know that Jack knew anymore about

the river than most of us and perhaps could not read the water any

better, but he had a knack of steering away ahead of our ability, and I

think he must have had an eye that could see farther into the darkness.



"I had never seen Leonard steer, but I had heard a good deal about it.  I

had heard it said that the crankiest old tub afloat--one that would kill

any other man to handle--would obey and be as docile as a child when Jack

Leonard took the wheel.  I had a chance one night to verify that for

myself.  We were going up the river, and it was one of the nastiest

nights I ever saw.  Besides that, the boat was loaded in such a way that

she steered very hard, and I was half blind and crazy trying to locate

the safe channel, and was pulling my arms out to keep her in it.  It was

one of those nights when everything looks the same whichever way you

look: just two long lines where the sky comes down to the trees and where

the trees meet the water with all the trees precisely the same height--

all planted on the same day, as one of the boys used to put it--and not a

thing to steer by except the knowledge in your head of the real shape of

the river.  Some of the boats had what they call a 'night hawk' on the

jackstaff, a thing which you could see when it was in the right position

against the sky or the water, though it seldom was in the right position

and was generally pretty useless.



"I was in a bad way that night and wondering how I could ever get through

it, when the pilot-house door opened, and Jack Leonard walked in.  He was

a passenger that trip, and I had forgotten he was aboard.  I was just

about in the worst place and was pulling the boat first one way, then

another, running the wheel backward and forward, and climbing it like a

squirrel.



"'Sam,' he said, "let me take the wheel.  Maybe I have been over this

place since you have.'



"I didn't argue the question.  Jack took the wheel, gave it a little turn

one way, then a little turn the other; that old boat settled down as

quietly as a lamb--went right along as if it had been broad daylight in a

river without snags, bars, bottom, or banks, or anything that one could

possibly hit.  I never saw anything so beautiful.  He stayed my watch out

for me, and I hope I was decently grateful.  I have never forgotten it."



The old note-book contained the record of many such nights as that; but

there were other nights, too, when the stars were blazing out, or when

the moon on the water made the river a wide mysterious way of speculative

dreams.  He was always speculating; the planets and the remote suns were

always a marvel to him.  A love of astronomy--the romance of it, its vast

distances, and its possibilities--began with those lonely river-watches

and never waned to his last day.  For a time a great comet blazed in the

heavens, a "wonderful sheaf of light" that glorified his lonely watch.

Night after night he watched it as it developed and then grew dim, and he

read eagerly all the comet literature that came to his hand, then or

afterward.  He speculated of many things: of life, death, the reason of

existence, of creation, the ways of Providence and Destiny.  It was a

fruitful time for such meditation; out of such vigils grew those larger

philosophies that would find expression later, when the years had

conferred the magic gift of phrase.



Life lay all ahead of him then, and during those still watches he must

have revolved many theories of how the future should be met and mastered.

In the old notebook there still remains a well-worn clipping, the words

of some unknown writer, which he had preserved and may have consulted as

a sort of creed.  It is an interesting little document--a prophetic one,

the reader may concede:



     HOW TO TAKE LIFE.--Take it just as though it was--as it is--an

     earnest, vital, and important affair.  Take it as though you were

     born to the task of performing a merry part in it--as though the

     world had awaited for your coming.  Take it as though it was a grand

     opportunity to do and achieve, to carry forward great and good

     schemes; to help and cheer a suffering, weary, it may be

     heartbroken, brother.  Now and then a man stands aside from the

     crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and straightway

     becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of some sort.

     The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates what

     others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose.  The

     miracle, or the power that elevates the few, is to be found in their

     industry, application, and perseverance under the promptings of a

     brave, determined spirit.



The old note-book contains no record of disasters.  Horace Bixby, who

should know, has declared:



"Sam Clemens never had an accident either as a steersman or as a pilot,

except once when he got aground for a few hours in the bagasse (cane)

smoke, with no damage to anybody though of course there was some good

luck in that too, for the best pilots do not escape trouble, now and

then."



Bixby and Clemens were together that winter on the Alonzo Child, and a

letter to Orion contains an account of great feasting which the two

enjoyed at a "French restaurant" in New Orleans--"dissipating on a ten-

dollar dinner--tell it not to Ma!"--where they had sheepshead fish,

oysters, birds, mushrooms, and what not, "after which the day was too far

gone to do anything."  So it appears that he was not always reading

Macaulay or studying French and astronomy, but sometimes went frivoling

with his old chief, now his chum, always his dear friend.



Another letter records a visit with Pamela to a picture-gallery in St.

Louis where was being exhibited Church's "Heart of the Andes."  He

describes the picture in detail and with vast enthusiasm.



"I have seen it several times," he concludes, "but it is always a new

picture--totally new--you seem to see nothing the second time that you

saw the first."



Further along he tells of having taken his mother and the girls--his

cousin Ella Creel and another--for a trip down the river to New Orleans.



     Ma was delighted with her trip, but she was disgusted with the girls

     for allowing me to embrace and kiss them--and she was horrified at

     the 'schottische' as performed by Miss Castle and myself.  She was

     perfectly willing for me to dance until 12 o'clock at the imminent

     peril of my going to sleep on the after-watch--but then she would

     top off with a very inconsistent sermon on dancing in general;

     ending with a terrific broadside aimed at that heresy of heresies,

     the 'schottische'.



     I took Ma and the girls in a carriage round that portion of New

     Orleans where the finest gardens and residences are to be seen, and,

     although it was a blazing hot, dusty day, they seemed hugely

     delighted.  To use an expression which is commonly ignored in polite

     society, they were "hell-bent" on stealing some of the luscious-

     looking oranges from branches which overhung the fence, but I

     restrained them.



In another letter of this period we get a hint of the future Mark Twain.

It was written to John T. Moore, a young clerk on the John J. Roe.



     What a fool old Adam was.  Had everything his own way; had succeeded

     in gaining the love of the best-looking girl in the neighborhood,

     but yet, unsatisfied with his conquest, he had to eat a miserable

     little apple.  Ah, John, if you had been in his place you would not

     have eaten a mouthful of the apple--that is, if it had required any

     exertion.  I have noticed that you shun exertion.  There comes in

     the difference between us.  I court exertion.  I love work.  Why,

     sir, when I have a piece of work to perform, I go away to myself,

     sit down in the shade, and muse over the coming enjoyment.

     Sometimes I am so industrious that I muse too long.



There remains another letter of this period--a sufficiently curious

document.  There was in those days a famous New Orleans clairvoyant known

as Madame Caprell.  Some of the' young pilot's friends.  had visited her

and obtained what seemed to be satisfying results.  From time to time

they had urged him to visit the fortune-teller, and one idle day he

concluded to make the experiment.  As soon as he came away he wrote to

Orion in detail.



     She's a very pleasant little lady--rather pretty--about 28--say

     5 feet 2 1/4--would weigh 116--has black eyes and hair--is polite

     and intelligent--used good language, and talks much faster than I

     do.



     She invited me into the little back parlor, closed the door; and we

     were alone.  We sat down facing each other.  Then she asked my age.

     Then she put her hands before her eyes a moment, and commenced

     talking as if she had a good deal to say and not much time to say it

     in.  Something after this style:



     'Madame.'  Yours is a watery planet; you gain your livelihood on the

     water; but you should have been a lawyer--there is where your

     talents lie; you might have distinguished yourself as an orator, or

     as an editor--, you have written a great deal; you write well--but

     you are rather out of practice; no matter--you will be in practice

     some day; you have a superb constitution, and as excellent health as

     any man in the world; you have great powers of endurance; in your

     profession your strength holds out against the longest sieges

     without flagging; still, the upper part of your lungs, the top of

     them, is slightly affected--you must take care of yourself; you do

     not drink, but you use entirely too much tobacco; and you must stop

     it; mind, not moderate, but stop the use of it, totally; then I can

     almost promise you 86, when you will surely die; otherwise, look out

     for 28, 31, 34, 47, and 65; be careful--for you are not of a long-

     lived race, that is, on your father's side; you are the only healthy

     member of your family, and the only one in it who has anything like

     the certainty of attaining to a great age--so, stop using tobacco,

     and be careful of yourself....  In some respects you take after your

     father, but you are much more like your mother, who belongs to the

     long-lived, energetic side of the house....  You never brought all

     your energies to bear upon any subject but what you accomplished it

     --for instance, you are self-made, self-educated.



     'S. L. C.'  Which proves nothing.



     'Madame.'  Don't interrupt.  When you sought your present

     occupation, you found a thousand obstacles in your way--obstacles

     unknown--not even suspected by any save you and me, since you keep

     such matter to yourself--but you fought your way, and hid the long

     struggle under a mask of cheerfulness, which saved your friends

     anxiety on your account.  To do all this requires the qualities

     which I have named.



     'S. L. C.'  You flatter well, Madame.



     'Madame.'  Don't interrupt.  Up to within a short time you had

     always lived from hand to mouth--now you are in easy circumstances--

     for which you need give credit to no one but yourself.  The turning-

     point in your life occurred in 1840-7-8.



     'S. L. C.'  Which was?



     'Madame.'  A death, perhaps, and this threw you upon the world and

     made you what you are; it was always intended that you should make

     yourself; therefore, it was well that this calamity occurred as

     early as it did.  You will never die of water, although your career

     upon it in the future seems well sprinkled with misfortune.  You

     will continue upon the water for some time yet; you will not retire

     finally until ten years from now....  What is your brother's age?

     23--and a lawyer?  and in pursuit of an office?  Well, he stands a

     better chance than the other two, and he may get it; he is too

     visionary--is always flying off on a new hobby; this will never do--

     tell him I said so.  He is a good lawyer--a very good lawyer--and a

     fine speaker--is very popular and much respected, and makes many

     friends; but although he retains their friendship, he loses their

     confidence by displaying his instability of character....  The land

     he has now will be very valuable after a while----



     'S. L. C.'  Say 250 years hence, or thereabouts, Madame----



     'Madame.'  No--less time--but never mind the land, that is a

     secondary consideration--let him drop that for the present, and

     devote himself to his business and politics with all his might, for

     he must hold offices under Government....



     After a while you will possess a good deal of property--retire at

     the end of ten years--after which your pursuits will be literary--

     try the law--you will certainly succeed.  I am done now.  If you

     have any questions to ask--ask them freely--and if it be in my

     power, I will answer without reserve--without reserve.



     I asked a few questions of minor importance-paid her and left-under

     the decided impression that going to the fortune-teller's was just

     as good as going to the opera, and cost scarcely a trifle more--

     ergo, I will disguise myself and go again, one of these days, when

     other amusements fail.  Now isn't she the devil?  That is to say,

     isn't she a right smart little woman?



     When you want money, let Ma know, and she will send it.  She and

     Pamela are always fussing about change, so I sent them a hundred and

     twenty quarters yesterday--fiddler's change enough to last till I

     get back, I reckon.

                                             SAM.



In the light of preceding and subsequent events, we must confess that

Madame Caprell was "indeed a right smart little woman."  She made

mistakes enough (the letter is not quoted in full), but when we remember

that she not only gave his profession at the moment, but at least

suggested his career for the future; that she approximated the year of

his father's death as the time when he was thrown upon the world; that

she admonished him against his besetting habit, tobacco; that she read.

minutely not only his characteristics, but his brother Orion's; that she

outlined the struggle in his conquest of the river; that she seemingly

had knowledge of Orion's legal bent and his connection with the Tennessee

land, all seems remarkable enough, supposing, of course, she had no

material means of acquiring knowledge--one can never know certainly about

such things.











XXIX



THE END OF PILOTING



It is curious, however, that Madame Caprell, with clairvoyant vision,

should not have seen an important event then scarcely more than two

months distant: the breaking-out of the Civil War, with the closing of

the river and the end of Mark Twain's career as a pilot.  Perhaps these

things were so near as to be "this side" the range of second sight.



There had been plenty of war-talk, but few of the pilots believed that

war was really coming.  Traveling that great commercial highway, the

river, with intercourse both of North and South, they did not believe

that any political differences would be allowed to interfere with the

nation's trade, or would be settled otherwise than on the street corners,

in the halls of legislation, and at the polls.  True, several States,

including Louisiana, had declared the Union a failure and seceded; but

the majority of opinions were not clear as to how far a State had rights

in such a matter, or as to what the real meaning of secession might be.

Comparatively few believed it meant war.  Samuel Clemens had no such

belief.  His Madame Caprell letter bears date of February 6, 1861, yet

contains no mention of war or of any special excitement in New Orleans--

no forebodings as to national conditions.



Such things came soon enough: President Lincoln was inaugurated on the

4th of March, and six weeks later Fort Sumter was fired upon.  Men began

to speak out then and to take sides.



It was a momentous time in the Association Rooms.  There were pilots who

would go with the Union; there were others who would go with the

Confederacy.  Horace Bixby was one of the former, and in due time became

chief of the Union River Service.  Another pilot named Montgomery (Samuel

Clemens had once steered for him) declared for the South, and later

commanded the Confederate Mississippi fleet.  They were all good friends,

and their discussions, though warm, were not always acrimonious; but they

took sides.



A good many were not very clear as to their opinions.  Living both North

and South as they did, they saw various phases of the question and

divided their sympathies.  Some were of one conviction one day and of

another the next.  Samuel Clemens was of the less radical element.  He

knew there was a good deal to be said for either cause; furthermore, he

was not then bloodthirsty.  A pilot-house with its elevated position and

transparency seemed a poor place to be in when fighting was going on.



"I'll think about it," he said.  "I'm not very anxious to get up into a

glass perch and be shot at by either side.  I'll go home and reflect on

the matter."



He did not realize it, but he had made his last trip as a pilot.  It is

rather curious that his final brief note-book entry should begin with his

future nom de plume--a memorandum of soundings--"mark twain," and should

end with the words "no lead."



He went up the river as a passenger on a steamer named the Uncle Sam.

Zeb Leavenworth was one of the pilots, and Sam Clemens usually stood

watch with him.  They heard war-talk all the way and saw preparations,

but they were not molested, though at Memphis they basely escaped the

blockade.  At Cairo, Illinois, they saw soldiers drilling--troops later

commanded by Grant.  The Uncle Sam came steaming up toward St. Louis,

those on board congratulating themselves on having come through

unscathed.  They were not quite through, however.  Abreast of Jefferson

Barracks they suddenly heard the boom of a cannon and saw a great whorl

of smoke drifting in their direction.  They did not realize that it was a

signal--a thunderous halt--and kept straight on.  Less than a minute

later there was another boom, and a shell exploded directly in front of

the pilot-house, breaking a lot of glass and destroying a good deal of

the upper decoration.  Zeb Leavenworth fell back into a corner with a

yell.



"Good Lord Almighty!  Sam;" he said, "what do they mean by that?"



Clemens stepped to the wheel and brought the boat around.  "I guess they

want us to wait a minute, Zeb," he said.



They were examined and passed.  It was the last steamboat to make the

trip from New Orleans to St. Louis.  Mark Twain's pilot-days were over.

He would have grieved had he known this fact.



"I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since," he

long afterward declared, "and I took a measureless pride in it."



The dreamy, easy, romantic existence suited him exactly.  A sovereign and

an autocrat, the pilot's word was law; he wore his responsibilities as a

crown.  As long as he lived Samuel Clemens would return to those old days

with fondness and affection, and with regret that they were no more.









XXX



THE SOLDIER



Clemens spent a few days in St. Louis (in retirement, for there was a

pressing war demand for Mississippi pilots), then went up to Hannibal to

visit old friends.  They were glad enough to see him, and invited him to

join a company of gay military enthusiasts who were organizing to "help

Gov. 'Claib' Jackson repel the invader."  A good many companies were

forming in and about Hannibal, and sometimes purposes were conflicting

and badly mixed.  Some of the volunteers did not know for a time which

invader they intended to drive from Missouri soil, and more than one

company in the beginning was made up of young fellows whose chief

ambition was to have a lark regardless as to which cause they might

eventually espouse.



--[The military organizations of Hannibal and Palmyra, in 1861, were as

follows: The Marion Artillery; the Silver Grays; Palmyra Guards; the W.

E. Dennis company, and one or two others.  Most of them were small

private affairs, usually composed of about half-and-half Union and

Confederate men, who knew almost nothing of the questions or conditions,

and disbanded in a brief time, to attach themselves to the regular

service according as they developed convictions.  The general idea of

these companies was a little camping-out expedition and a good time.  One

such company one morning received unexpected reinforcements.  They saw

the approach of the recruits, and, remarking how well drilled the new

arrivals seemed to be, mistook them for the enemy and fled.]





Samuel Clemens had by this time decided, like Lee, that he would go with

his State and lead battalions to victory.  The "battalion" in this

instance consisted of a little squad of young fellows of his own age,

mostly pilots and schoolmates, including Sam Bowen, Ed Stevens, and Ab

Grimes, about a dozen, all told.  They organized secretly, for the Union

militia was likely to come over from Illinois any time and look up any

suspicious armies that made an open demonstration.  An army might lose

enthusiasm and prestige if it spent a night or two in the calaboose.



So they met in a secret place above Bear Creek Hill, just as Tom Sawyer's

red-handed bandits had gathered so long before (a good many of them were

of the same lawless lot), and they planned how they would sell their

lives on the field of glory, just as Tom Sawyer's band might have done if

it had thought about playing "War," instead of "Indian" and "Pirate" and

"Bandit" with fierce raids on peach orchards and melon patches.  Then, on

the evening before marching away, they stealthily called on their

sweethearts--those who had them did, and the others pretended sweethearts

for the occasion--and when it was dark and mysterious they said good-by

and suggested that maybe those girls would never see them again.  And as

always happens in such a case, some of them were in earnest, and two or

three of the little group that slipped away that night never did come

back, and somewhere sleep in unmarked graves.



The "two Sams"--Sam Bowen and Sam Clemens--called on Patty Gore and Julia

Willis for their good-by visit, and, when they left, invited the girls to

"walk through the pickets" with them, which they did as far as Bear Creek

Hill.  The girls didn't notice any pickets, because the pickets were away

calling on girls, too, and probably wouldn't be back to begin picketing

for some time.  So the girls stood there and watched the soldiers march

up Bear Creek Hill and disappear among the trees.



The army had a good enough time that night, marching through the brush

and vines toward New London, though this sort of thing grew rather

monotonous by morning.  When they took a look at themselves by daylight,

with their nondescript dress and accoutrements, there was some thing

about it all which appealed to one's sense of humor rather than to his

patriotism.  Colonel Ralls, of Ralls County, however, received them

cordially and made life happier for them with a good breakfast and some

encouraging words.  He was authorized to administer the oath of office,

he said, and he proceeded to do it, and made them a speech besides; also

he sent out notice to some of the neighbors--to Col. Bill Splawn, Farmer

Nuck Matson, and others--that the community had an army on its hands and

perhaps ought to do something for it.  This brought in a number of

contributions, provisions, paraphernalia, and certain superfluous horses

and mules, which converted the battalion into a cavalry, and made it

possible for it to move on to the front without further delay.  Samuel

Clemens, mounted on a small yellow mule whose tail had been trimmed down

to a tassel at the end in a style that suggested his name, Paint Brush,

upholstered and supplemented with an extra pair of cowskin boots, a pair

of gray blankets, a home-made quilt, frying-pan, a carpet sack, a small

valise, an overcoat, an old-fashioned Kentucky rifle, twenty yards of

rope, and an umbrella, was a representative unit of the brigade.  The

proper thing for an army loaded like that was to go into camp, and they

did it.  They went over on Salt River, near Florida, and camped not far

from a farm-house with a big log stable; the latter they used as

headquarters.  Somebody suggested that when they went into battle they

ought to have short hair, so that in a hand-to-hand conflict the enemy

could not get hold of it.  Tom Lyon found a pair of sheep-shears in the

stable and acted as barber.  They were not very sharp shears, but the

army stood the torture for glory in the field, and a group of little

darkies collected from the farm-house to enjoy the performance.  The army

then elected its officers.  William Ely was chosen captain, with Asa

Glasscock as first lieutenant.  Samuel Clemens was then voted second

lieutenant, and there were sergeants and orderlies.  There were only

three privates when the election was over, and these could not be

distinguished by their deportment.  There was scarcely any discipline in

this army.



Then it set in to rain.  It rained by day and it rained by night.  Salt

River rose until it was bank full and overflowed the bottoms.  Twice

there was a false night alarm of the enemy approaching, and the battalion

went slopping through the mud and brush into the dark, picking out the

best way to retreat, plodding miserably back to camp when the alarm was

over.  Once they fired a volley at a row of mullen stalks, waving on the

brow of a hill, and once a picket shot at his own horse that had got

loose and had wandered toward him in the dusk.



The rank and file did not care for picket duty.  Sam Bowen--ordered by

Lieutenant Clemens to go on guard one afternoon--denounced his superior

and had to be threatened with court-martial and death.  Sam went finally,

but he sat in a hot open place and swore at the battalion and the war in

general, and finally went to sleep in the broiling sun.  These things

began to tell on patriotism.  Presently Lieutenant Clemens developed a

boil, and was obliged to make himself comfortable with some hay in a

horse-trough, where he lay most of the day, violently denouncing the war

and the fools that invented it.  Then word came that "General" Tom

Harris, who was in command of the district, was stopping at a farmhouse

two miles away, living on the fat of the land.



That settled it.  Most of them knew Tom Harris, and they regarded his

neglect of them as perfidy.  They broke camp without further ceremony.



Lieutenant Clemens needed assistance to mount Paint Brush, and the little

mule refused to cross the river; so Ab Grimes took the coil of rope,

hitched one end of it to his own saddle and the other end to Paint

Brush's neck.  Grimes was mounted on a big horse, and when he started it

was necessary for Paint Brush to follow.  Arriving at the farther bank,

Grimes looked around, and was horrified to see that the end of the rope

led down in the water with no horse and rider in view.  He spurred up the

bank, and the hat of Lieutenant Clemens and the ears of Paint Brush

appeared.



"Ah," said Clemens, as he mopped his face, "do you know that little devil

waded all the way across?"



A little beyond the river they met General Harris, who ordered them back

to camp.  They admonished him to "go there himself."  They said they had

been in that camp and knew all about it.  They were going now where there

was food--real food and plenty of it.  Then he begged them, but it was no

use.  By and by they stopped at a farm-house for supplies.  A tall, bony

woman came to the door:



"You're secesh, ain't you?"



They acknowledged that they were defenders of the cause and that they

wanted to buy provisions.  The request seemed to inflame her.



"Provisions!" she screamed.  "Provisions for secesh, and my husband a

colonel in the Union Army.  You get out of here!"



She reached for a hickory hoop-pole that stood by the door, and the army

moved on.  When they arrived at Col. Bill Splawn's that night Colonel

Splawn and his family had gone to bed, and it seemed unwise to disturb

them.  The hungry army camped in the barnyard and crept into the hay-loft

to sleep.  Presently somebody yelled "Fire!" One of the boys had been

smoking and started the hay.  Lieutenant Clemens suddenly wakened, made a

quick rolling movement from the blaze, and rolled out of a big hay-window

into the barnyard below.  The rest of the army, startled into action,

seized the burning hay and pitched it out of the same window.  The

lieutenant had sprained his ankle when he struck the ground, and his boil

was far from well, but when the burning hay descended he forgot his

disabilities.  Literally and figuratively this was the final straw.  With

a voice and vigor suited to the urgencies of the case, he made a spring

from under the burning stuff, flung off the remnants, and with them his

last vestige of interest in the war.  The others, now that the fire was,

out, seemed to think the incident boisterously amusing.  Whereupon the

lieutenant rose up and told them, collectively and individually, what he

thought of them; also he spoke of the war and the Confederacy, and of the

human race at large.  They helped him in, then, for his ankle was

swelling badly.  Next morning, when Colonel Splawn had given them a good

breakfast, the army set out for New London.



But Lieutenant Clemens never got any farther than Nuck Matson's farm-

house.  His ankle was so painful by that time that Mrs. Matson had him

put to bed, where he stayed for several weeks, recovering from the injury

and stress of war.  A little negro boy was kept on watch for Union

detachments--they were passing pretty frequently now--and when one came

in sight the lieutenant was secluded until the danger passed.  When he

was able to travel, he had had enough of war and the Confederacy.  He

decided to visit Orion in Keokuk.  Orion was a Union abolitionist and

might lead him to mend his doctrines.



As for the rest of the army, it was no longer a unit in the field.  Its

members had drifted this way and that, some to return to their

occupations, some to continue in the trade of war.  Sam Bowen is said to

have been caught by the Federal troops and put to sawing wood in the

stockade at Hannibal.  Ab (A. C.) Grimes became a noted Confederate spy

and is still among those who have lived to furnish the details here set

down.  Properly officered and disciplined, that detachment would have

made as brave soldiers as any.  Military effectiveness is a matter of

leaders and tactics.



Mark Twain's own Private History of a 'Campaign that Failed' is, of

course, built on this episode.  He gives us a delicious account, even if

it does not strikingly resemble the occurrence.  The story might have

been still better if he had not introduced the shooting of the soldier in

the dark.  The incident was invented, of course, to present the real

horror of war, but it seems incongruous in this burlesque campaign, and,

to some extent at least, it missed fire in its intention.



--[In a book recently published, Mark Twain's "nephew" is quoted as

authority for the statement that Mark Twain was detailed for river duty,

captured, and paroled, captured again, and confined in a tobacco-

warehouse in St. Louis, etc.  Mark Twain had but one nephew: Samuel E.

Moffett, whose Biographical Sketch (vol. xxii, Mark Twain's Works)

contains no such statement; and nothing of the sort occurred.]









XXXI



OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY



When Madame Caprell prophesied that Orion Clemens would hold office under

government, she must have seen with true clairvoyant vision.  The

inauguration of Abraham Lincoln brought Edward Bates into his Cabinet,

and Bates was Orion's friend.  Orion applied for something, and got it.

James W. Nye had been appointed Territorial governor of Nevada, and Orion

was made Territorial secretary.  You could strain a point and refer to

the office as "secretary of state," which was an imposing title.

Furthermore, the secretary would be acting governor in the governor's

absence, and there would be various subsidiary honors.  When Lieutenant

Clemens arrived in Keokuk, Orion was in the first flush of his triumph

and needed only money to carry him to the scene of new endeavor.  The

late lieutenant C. S. A.  had accumulated money out of his pilot salary,

and there was no comfortable place just then in the active Middle West

for an officer of either army who had voluntarily retired from the

service.  He agreed that if Orion would overlook his recent brief

defection from the Union and appoint him now as his (Orion's) secretary,

he would supply the funds for both overland passages, and they would

start with no unnecessary delay for a country so new that all human

beings, regardless of previous affiliations and convictions, were flung

into the common fusing-pot and recast in the general mold of pioneer.



The offer was a boon to Orion.  He was always eager to forgive, and the

money was vitally necessary.  In the briefest possible time he had packed

his belongings, which included a large unabridged dictionary, and the

brothers were on their way to St. Louis for final leave-taking before

setting out for the great mysterious land of promise--the Pacific West.

From St. Louis they took the boat for St. Jo, whence the Overland stage

started, and for six days "plodded" up the shallow, muddy, snaggy

Missouri, a new experience for the pilot of the Father of Waters.



     In fact, the boat might almost as well have gone to St. Jo by land,

     for she was walking most of the time, anyhow--climbing over reefs

     and clambering over snags patiently and laboriously all day long.

     The captain said she was a "bully" boat, and all she wanted was some

     "shear" and a bigger wheel.  I thought she wanted a pair of stilts,

     but I had the deep sagacity not to say so.'--['Roughing It'.]--



At St. Jo they paid one hundred and fifty dollars apiece for their stage

fare (with something extra for the dictionary), and on the twenty-sixth

of July, 1861, set out on that long, delightful trip behind sixteen

galloping horses--or mules--never stopping except for meals or to change

teams, heading steadily into the sunset, following it from horizon to

horizon over the billowy plains, across the snow-clad Rockies, covering

the seventeen hundred miles between St. Jo and Carson City (including a

two-day halt in Salt Lake City) in nineteen glorious days.  What an

inspiration in such a trip!  In 'Roughing It' he tells it all, and says:

"Even at this day it thrills me through and through to think of the life,

the gladness, and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood

dance in my face on those fine Overland mornings."



The nights, with the uneven mail-bags for a bed and the bounding

dictionary for company, were less exhilarating; but then youth does not

mind.



     All things being now ready, stowed the uneasy dictionary where it

     would lie as quiet as possible, and placed the water-canteen and

     pistols where we could find them in the dark.  Then we smoked a

     final pipe and swapped a final yarn; after which we put the pipes,

     tobacco, and bag of coin in snug holes and caves among the mail-

     bags, and made the place as dark as the inside of a cow, as the

     conductor phrased it in his picturesque way.  It was certainly as

     dark as any place could be--nothing was even dimly visible in it.

     And finally we rolled ourselves up like silkworms, each person in

     his own blanket, and sank peacefully to sleep.



Youth loves that sort of thing, despite its inconvenience.  And sometimes

the clatter of the pony-rider swept by in the night, carrying letters at

five dollars apiece and making the Overland trip in eight days; just a

quick beat of hoofs in the distance, a dash, and a hail from the

darkness, the beat of hoofs again, then only the rumble of the stage and

the even, swinging gallop of the mules.  Sometimes they got a glimpse of

the ponyrider by day--a flash, as it were, as he sped by.  And every

morning brought new scenery, new phases of frontier life, including, at

last, what was to them the strangest phase of all, Mormonism.



They spent two wonderful days at Salt Lake City, that mysterious and

remote capital of the great American monarchy, who still flaunts her

lawless, orthodox creed the religion of David and Solomon--and thrives.

An obliging official made it his business to show them the city and the

life there, the result of which would be those amusing chapters in

'Roughing It' by and by.  The Overland travelers set out refreshed from

Salt Lake City, and with a new supply of delicacies--ham, eggs, and

tobacco--things that make such a trip worth while.  The author of

'Roughing It' assures us of this:



     Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs.  Ham and eggs, and after

     these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and

     scenery, a "down-grade," a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a

     contented heart--these make happiness.  It is what all the ages have

     struggled for.



But one must read all the story of that long-ago trip.  It was a trip so

well worth taking, so well worth recording, so well worth reading and

rereading to-day.  We can only read of it now.  The Overland stage long

ago made its last trip, and will not start any more.  Even if it did, the

life and conditions, the very scenery itself, would not be the same.









XXXII



THE PIONEER



It was a hot, dusty August 14th that the stage reached Carson City and

drew up before the Ormsby Hotel.  It was known that the Territorial

secretary was due to arrive; and something in the nature of a reception,

with refreshments and frontier hospitality, had been planned.  Governor

Nye, formerly police commissioner in New York City, had arrived a short

time before, and with his party of retainers ("heelers" we would call

them now), had made an imposing entrance.  Perhaps something of the sort

was expected with the advent of the secretary of state.  Instead, the

committee saw two way-worn individuals climb down from the stage,

unkempt, unshorn--clothed in the roughest of frontier costume, the same

they had put on at St. Jo--dusty, grimy, slouchy, and weather-beaten with

long days of sun and storm and alkali desert dust.  It is not likely

there were two more unprepossessing officials on the Pacific coast at

that moment than the newly arrived Territorial secretary and his brother:

Somebody identified them, and the committee melted away; the half-formed

plan of a banquet faded out and was not heard of again.  Soap and water

and fresh garments worked a transformation; but that first impression had

been fatal to festivities of welcome.



Carson City, the capital of Nevada, was a "wooden town," with a

population of two thousand souls.  Its main street consisted of a few

blocks of small frame stores, some of which are still standing.  In

'Roughing It' the author writes:



     In the middle of the town, opposite the stores, was a "Plaza," which

     is native to all towns beyond the Rocky Mountains, a large,

     unfenced, level vacancy with a Liberty Pole in it, and very useful

     as a place for public auctions, horse trades, and mass-meetings, and

     likewise for teamsters to camp in.  Two other sides of the Plaza

     were faced by stores, offices, and stables.  The rest of Carson City

     was pretty scattering.



One sees the place pretty clearly from this brief picture of his, but it

requires an extract from a letter written to his mother somewhat later to

populate it.  The mineral excitement was at its height in those days of

the early sixties, and had brought together such a congress of nations as

only the greed for precious metal can assemble.  The sidewalks and

streets of Carson, and the Plaza, thronged all day with a motley

aggregation--a museum of races, which it was an education merely to gaze

upon.  Jane Clemens had required him to write everything just as it was--

"no better and no worse."



     Well--[he says]--,"Gold Hill" sells at $5,000 per foot, cash down;

     "Wild Cat" isn't worth ten cents.  The country is fabulously rich in

     gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, marble,

     granite, chalk, plaster of Paris (gypsum), thieves, murderers,

     desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians, Indians,

     Chinamen, Spaniards, gamblers, sharpens; coyotes (pronounced ki-yo-

     ties), poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits.  I overheard a

     gentleman say, the other day, that it was "the d---dest country

     under the sun," and that comprehensive conception I fully subscribe

     to.  It never rains here, and the dew never falls.  No flowers grow

     here, and no green thing gladdens the eye.  The birds that fly over

     the land carry their provisions with them.  Only the crow and the

     raven tarry with us.  Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the

     purest, most unadulterated and uncompromising sand, in which

     infernal soil nothing but that fag-end of vegetable creation, "sage-

     brush," ventures to grow. .  .  .  I said we are situated in a flat,

     sandy desert--true.  And surrounded on all sides by such prodigious

     mountains that when you look disdainfully down (from them) upon the

     insignificant village of Carson, in that instant you are seized with

     a burning desire to stretch forth your hand, put the city in your

     pocket, and walk off with it.



     As to churches, I believe they have got a Catholic one here, but,

     like that one the New York fireman spoke of, I believe "they don't

     run her now."



Carson has been through several phases of change since this was written--

for better and for worse.  It is a thriving place in these later days,

and new farming conditions have improved the country roundabout.  But it

was a desert outpost then, a catch-all for the human drift which every

whirlwind of discovery sweeps along.  Gold and silver hunting and mine

speculations were the industries--gambling, drinking, and murder were the

diversions--of the Nevada capital.  Politics developed in due course,

though whether as a business or a diversion is not clear at this time.



The Clemens brothers took lodging with a genial Irishwoman, Mrs. Murphy,

a New York retainer of Governor Nye, who boarded the camp-followers.--

[The Mrs, O'Flannigan of 'Roughing It'.]--This retinue had come in the

hope of Territorial pickings and mine adventure--soldiers of fortune they

were, and a good-natured lot all together.  One of them, Bob Howland, a

nephew of the governor, attracted Samuel Clemens by his clean-cut manner

and commanding eye.



"The man who has that eye doesn't need to go armed," he wrote later.  "He

can move upon an armed desperado and quell him and take him a prisoner

without saying a single word."  It was the same Bob Howland who would be

known by and by as the most fearless man in the Territory; who, as city

marshal of Aurora, kept that lawless camp in subjection, and, when the

friends of a lot of condemned outlaws were threatening an attack with

general massacre, sent the famous message to Governor Nye:  "All quiet in

Aurora.  Five men will be hung in an hour."  And it was quiet, and the

programme was carried out.  But this is a digression and somewhat

premature.



Orion Clemens, anxious for laurels, established himself in the meager

fashion which he thought the government would approve; and his brother,

finding neither duties nor salary attached to his secondary position,

devoted himself mainly to the study of human nature as exhibited under

frontier conditions.  Sometimes, when the nights were cool, he would

build a fire in the office stove, and, with Bob Howland and a few other

choice members of the "Brigade" gathered around, would tell river yarns

in that inimitable fashion which would win him devoted audiences all his

days.  His river life had increased his natural languor of habit, and his

slow speech heightened the lazy impression which he was never unwilling

to convey.  His hearers generally regarded him as an easygoing, indolent

good fellow with a love of humor--with talent, perhaps--but as one not

likely ever to set the world afire.  They did not happen to think that

the same inclination which made them crowd about to listen and applaud

would one day win for him the attention of all mankind.



Within a brief time Sam Clemens (he was never known as otherwise than

"Sam" among those pioneers) was about the most conspicuous figure on the

Carson streets.  His great bushy head of auburn hair, his piercing,

twinkling eyes, his loose, lounging walk, his careless disorder of dress,

drew the immediate attention even of strangers; made them turn to look a

second time and then inquire as to his identity.



He had quickly adapted himself to the frontier mode.  Lately a river

sovereign and dandy, in fancy percales and patent leathers, he had become

the roughest of rough-clad pioneers, in rusty slouch hat, flannel shirt,

coarse trousers slopping half in and half out of the heavy cowskin boots

Always something of a barbarian in love with the loose habit of

unconvention, he went even further than others and became a sort of

paragon of disarray.  The more energetic citizens of Carson did not

prophesy much for his future among them.  Orion Clemens, with the stir

and bustle of the official new broom, earned their quick respect; but his

brother--well, they often saw him leaning for an hour or more at a time

against an awning support at the corner of King and Carson streets,

smoking a short clay pipe and staring drowsily at the human kaleidoscope

of the Plaza, scarcely changing his position, just watching, studying,

lost in contemplation--all of which was harmless enough, of course, but

how could any one ever get a return out of employment like that?



Samuel Clemens did not catch the mining fever immediately; there was too

much to see at first to consider any special undertaking.  The mere

coming to the frontier was for the present enough; he had no plans.  His

chief purpose was to see the world beyond the Rockies, to derive from it

such amusement and profit as might fall in his way.  The war would end,

by and by, and he would go back to the river, no doubt.  He was already

not far from homesick for the "States" and his associations there.  He

closed one letter:



     I heard a military band play "What Are the Wild Waves Saying" the

     other night, and it brought Ella Creel and Belle (Stotts) across the

     desert in an instant, for they sang the song in Orion's yard the

     first time I ever heard it.  It was like meeting an old friend.  I

     tell you I could have swallowed that whole band, trombone and all,

     if such a compliment would have been any gratification to them.



His friends contracted the mining mania; Bob Howland and Raish Phillips

went down to Aurora and acquired "feet" in mini-claims and wrote him

enthusiastic letters.  With Captain Nye, the governor's brother, he

visited them and was presented with an interest which permitted him to

contribute an assessment every now and then toward the development of the

mine; but his enthusiasm still languished.



He was interested more in the native riches above ground than in those

concealed under it.  He had heard that the timber around Lake Bigler

(Tahoe) promised vast wealth which could be had for the asking.  The lake

itself and the adjacent mountains were said to be beautiful beyond the

dream of art.  He decided to locate a timber claim on its shores.



He made the trip afoot with a young Ohio lad, John Kinney, and the

account of this trip as set down in 'Roughing It' is one of the best

things in the book.  The lake proved all they had expected--more than

they expected; it was a veritable habitation of the gods, with its

delicious, winy atmosphere, its vast colonnades of pines, its measureless

depths of water, so clear that to drift on it was like floating high

aloft in mid-nothingness.  They staked out a timber claim and made a

semblance of fencing it and of building a habitation, to comply with the

law; but their chief employment was a complete abandonment to the quiet

luxury of that dim solitude: wandering among the trees, lounging along

the shore, or drifting on that transparent, insubstantial sea.  They did

not sleep in their house, he says:



"It never occurred to us, for one thing; and, besides, it was built to

hold the ground, and that was enough.  We did not wish to strain it."



They lived by their camp-fire on the borders of the lake, and one day--it

was just at nightfall--it got away from them, fired the forest, and

destroyed their fence and habitation.  His picture in 'Roughing It' of

the superb night spectacle, the mighty mountain conflagration reflected

in the waters of the lake, is splendidly vivid.  The reader may wish to

compare it with this extract from a letter written to Pamela at the time.



     The level ranks of flame were relieved at intervals by the standard-

     bearers, as we called the tall, dead trees, wrapped in fire, and

     waving their blazing banners a hundred feet in the air.  Then we

     could turn from the scene to the lake, and see every branch and leaf

     and cataract of flame upon its banks perfectly reflected, as in a

     gleaming, fiery mirror.  The mighty roaring of the conflagration,

     together with our solitary and somewhat unsafe position (for there

     was no one within six miles of us), rendered the scene very

     impressive.  Occasionally one of us would remove his pipe from his

     mouth and say, "Superb, magnificent!--beautifull--but--by the Lord

     God Almighty, if we attempt to sleep in this little patch to-night,

     we'll never live till morning!"



This is good writing too, but it lacks the fancy and the choice of

phrasing which would develop later.  The fire ended their first excursion

to Tahoe, but they made others and located other claims--claims in which

the "folks at home, "Mr. Moffett, James Lampton, and others, were

included.  It was the same James Lampton who would one day serve as a

model for Colonel Sellers.  Evidently Samuel Clemens had a good opinion

of his business capacity in that earlier day, for he writes:



     This is just the country for cousin Jim to live in.  I don't believe

     it would take him six months to make $100,000 here if he had $3,000

     to commence with.  I suppose he can't leave his family, though.



Further along in the same letter his own overflowing Seller's optimism

develops.



     Orion and I have confidence enough in this country to think that if

     the war lets us alone we can make Mr. Moffett rich without its ever

     costing him a cent or a particle of trouble.



This letter bears date of October 25th, and from it we gather that a

certain interest in mining claims had by this time developed.



     We have got about 1,650 feet of mining ground, and, if it proves

     good, Mr. Moffett's name will go in, and if not I can get "feet" for

     him in the spring.



     You see, Pamela, the trouble does not consist in getting mining

     ground--for there is plenty enough--but the money to work it with

     after you get it.



He refers to Pamela's two little children, his niece Annie and Baby Sam,

--[Samuel E. Moffett, in later life a well-known journalist and editor.]

--and promises to enter claims for them--timber claims probably--for he

was by no means sanguine as yet concerning the mines.  That was a long

time ago.  Tahoe land is sold by the lot, now, to summer residents.

Those claims would have been riches to-day, but they were all abandoned

presently, forgotten in the delirium which goes only with the pursuit of

precious ores.











XXXIII



THE PROSPECTOR



It was not until early winter that Samuel Clemens got the real mining

infection.  Everybody had it by that time; the miracle is that he had not

fallen an earlier victim.  The wildest stories of sudden fortune were in

the air, some of them undoubtedly true.  Men had gone to bed paupers, on

the verge of starvation, and awakened to find themselves millionaires.

Others had sold for a song claims that had been suddenly found to be

fairly stuffed with precious ores.  Cart-loads of bricks--silver and

gold--daily drove through the streets.



In the midst of these things reports came from the newly opened Humboldt

region--flamed up with a radiance that was fairly blinding.  The papers

declared that Humboldt County "was the richest mineral region on God's

footstool."  The mountains were said to be literally bursting with gold

and silver.  A correspondent of the daily Territorial Enterprise fairly

wallowed in rhetoric, yet found words inadequate to paint the measureless

wealth of the Humboldt mines.  No wonder those not already mad speedily

became so.  No wonder Samuel Clemens, with his natural tendency to

speculative optimism, yielded to the epidemic and became as "frenzied as

the craziest."  The air to him suddenly began to shimmer; all his

thoughts were of "leads" and "ledges" and "veins"; all his clouds had

silver linings; all his dreams were of gold.  He joined an expedition at

once; he reproached himself bitterly for not having started earlier.



     Hurry was the word!  We wasted no time.  Our party consisted of four

     persons--a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and

     myself.  We bought a wagon and two miserable old horses.  We put

     1,800 pounds of provisions and mining tools in the wagon and drove

     out of Carson on a chilly December afternoon.



In a letter to his mother he states that besides provisions and mining

tools, their load consisted of certain luxuries viz., ten pounds of

killikinick, Watts's Hymns, fourteen decks of cards, Dombey and Son, a

cribbage-board, one small keg of lager-beer, and the "Carmina Sacra."



The two young lawyers were A. W.(Gus) Oliver (Oliphant in 'Roughing It'),

and W. H. Clagget.  Sam Clemens had known Billy Clagget as a law student

in Keokuk, and they were brought together now by this association.  Both

Clagget and Oliver were promising young men, and would be heard from in

time.  The blacksmith's name was Tillou (Ballou), a sturdy, honest soul

with a useful knowledge of mining and the repair of tools.  There were

also two dogs in the party--a small curly-tailed mongrel, Curney, the

property of Mr. Tillou, and a young hound.  The combination seemed a

strong one.



It proved a weak one in the matter of horses.  Oliver and Clemens had

furnished the team, and their selection had not been of the best.  It was

two hundred miles to Humboldt, mostly across sand.  The horses could not

drag their load and the miners too, so the miners got out.  Then they

found it necessary to push.



     Not because we were fond of it, Ma--oh, no! but on Bunker's account.

     Bunker was the "near" horse on the larboard side, named after the

     attorney-general of this Territory.  My horse--and I am sorry you do

     not know him personally, Ma, for I feel toward him, sometimes, as if

     he were a blood relation of our family--he is so lazy, you know--my

     horse--I was going to say, was the "off" horse on the starboard

     side.  But it was on Bunker's account, principally, that we pushed

     behind the wagon.  In fact, Ma, that horse had something on his mind

     all the way to Humboldt.--[S. L. C.  to his mother.  Published in

     the Keokuk (Iowa) Gate city.]--



So they had to push, and most of that two hundred miles through snow and

sand storm they continued to push and swear and groan, sustained only by

the thought that they must arrive at last, when their troubles would all

be at an end, for they would be millionaires in a brief time and never

know want or fatigue any more.



There were compensations: the camp-fire at night was cheerful, the food

satisfying.  They bundled close under the blankets and, when it was too

cold to sleep, looked up at the stars, while the future entertainer of

kings would spin yarn after yarn that made his hearers forget their

discomforts.  Judge Oliver, the last one of the party alive, in a recent

letter to the writer of this history, says:



     He was the life of the camp; but sometimes there would come a

     reaction and he could hardly speak for a day or two.  One day a pack

     of wolves chased us, and the hound Sam speaks of never stopped to

     look back till he reached the next station, many miles ahead.



Judge Oliver adds that an Indian war had just ended, and that they

occasionally passed the charred ruin of a shack, and new graves: This was

disturbing enough.  Then they came to that desolation of desolations, the

Alkali Desert, where the sand is of unknown depth, where the road is

strewn thickly with the carcasses of dead beasts of burden, the charred

remains of wagons, chains, bolts, and screws, which thirsty emigrants,

grown desperate, have thrown away in the grand hope of being able, when

less encumbered, to reach water.



They traveled all day and night, pushing through that fierce, waterless

waste to reach camp on the other side.  It was three o'clock in the

morning when they got across and dropped down utterly exhausted.  Judge

Oliver in his letter tells what happened then:



     The sun was high in the heavens when we were aroused from our sleep

     by a yelling band of Piute warriors.  We were upon our feet in an

     instant.  The pictures of burning cabins and the lonely graves we

     had passed were in our minds.  Our scalps were still our own, and

     not dangling from the belts of our visitors.  Sam pulled himself

     together, put his hand on his head as if to make sure he had not

     been scalped, and then with his inimitable drawl said: "Boys, they

     have left us our scalps.  Let's give them all the flour and sugar

     they ask for."  And we did give them a good supply, for we were

     grateful.



They were eleven weary days pushing their wagon and team the two hundred

miles to Unionville, Humboldt County, arriving at last in a driving snow-

storm.  Unionville consisted of eleven poor cabins built in the bottom of

a canon, five on one side and six facing them on the other.  They were

poor, three-sided, one-room huts, the fourth side formed by the hill; the

roof, a spread of white cotton.  Stones used to roll down on them

sometimes, and Mark Twain tells of live stock--specifically of a mule and

cow--that interrupted the patient, long-suffering Oliver, who was trying

to write poetry, and only complained when at last "an entire cow came

rolling down the hill, crashed through on the table, and made a shapeless

wreck of everything."--['The Innocents Abroad.']



Judge Oliver still does not complain; but he denies the cow.  He says

there were no cows in Humboldt in those days, so perhaps it was only a

literary cow, though in any case it will long survive.  Judge Oliver's

name will go down with it to posterity.



In the letter which Samuel Clemens wrote home he tells of what they found

in Unionville.



     "National" there was selling at $50 per foot and assayed $2,496 per

     ton at the mint in San Francisco.  And the "Alda Nueva," "Peru,"

     "Delirio," "Congress," "Independent," and others were immensely rich

     leads.  And moreover, having winning ways with us, we could get

     "feet" enough to make us all rich one of these days.



"I confess with shame," says the author of 'Roughing It', "that I

expected to find masses of silver lying all about the ground."  And he

adds that he slipped away from the cabin to find a claim on his own

account, and tells how he came staggering back under a load of golden

specimens; also how his specimens proved to be only worthless mica; and

how he learned that in mining nothing that glitters is gold.  His account

in 'Roughing It' of the Humboldt mining experience is sufficiently good

history to make detail here unnecessary.  Tillou instructed them in

prospecting, and in time they located a fairly promising claim.  They

went to work on it with pick and shovel, then with drill and blasting-

powder.  Then they gave it up



"One week of this satisfied me.  I resigned."



They tried to tunnel, but soon resigned again.  It was pleasanter to

prospect and locate and trade claims and acquire feet in every new ledge

than it was to dig-and about as profitable.  The golden reports of

Humboldt had been based on assays of selected rich specimens, and were

mainly delirium and insanity.  The Clemens-Clagget-Oliver-Tillou

combination never touched their claims again with pick and shovel, though

their faith, or at least their hope, in them did not immediately die.

Billy Clagget put out his shingle as notary public, and Gus Oliver put

out his as probate judge.  Sam Clemens and Tillou, with a fat-witted,

arrogant Prussian named Pfersdoff (Ollendorf) set out for Carson City.

It is not certain what became of the wagon and team, or of the two dogs.



The Carson travelers were water-bound at a tavern on the Carson River

(the scene of the "Arkansas" sketch), with a fighting, drinking lot.

Pfersdoff got them nearly drowned getting away, and finally succeeded in

getting them absolutely lost in the snow.  The author of 'Roughing It'

tells us how they gave themselves up to die, and how each swore off

whatever he had in the way of an evil habit, how they cast their

tempters-tobacco, cards, and whisky-into the snow.  He further tells us

how next morning, when they woke to find themselves alive, within a few

rods of a hostelry, they surreptitiously dug up those things again and,

deep in shame and luxury, resumed their fallen ways: It was the 29th of

January when they reached Carson City.  They had been gone not quite two

months, one of which had been spent in travel.  It was a brief period,

but it contained an episode, and it seemed like years.









XXXIV



TERRITORIAL CHARACTERISTICS



Meantime, the Territorial secretary had found difficulties in launching

the ship of state.  There was no legislative hall in Carson City; and if

Abram Curry, one of the original owners of the celebrated Gould and Curry

mine--"Curry--old Curry--old Abe Curry," as he called himself--had not

tendered the use of a hall rent free, the first legislature would have

been obliged to "sit in the desert."  Furthermore, Orion had met with

certain acute troubles of his own.  The government at Washington had not

appreciated his economies in the matter of cheap office rental, and it

had stipulated the price which he was to pay for public printing and

various other services-prices fixed according to Eastern standards.

These prices did not obtain in Nevada, and when Orion, confident that

because of his other economies the comptroller would stretch a point and

allow the increased frontier tariff, he was met with the usual thick-

headed official lack of imagination, with the result that the excess paid

was deducted from his slender salary.  With a man of less conscience this

condition would easily have been offset by another wherein other rates,

less arbitrary, would have been adjusted to negotiate the official

deficit.  With Orion Clemens such a remedy was not even considered;

yielding, unstable, blown by every wind of influence though he was,

Orion's integrity was a rock.



Governor Nye was among those who presently made this discovery.  Old

politician that he was--former police commissioner of New York City--Nye

took care of his own problems in the customary manner.  To him, politics

was simply a game--to be played to win.  He was a popular, jovial man,

well liked and thought of, but he did not lie awake, as Orion did,

planning economies for the government, or how to make up excess charges

out of his salary.  To him Nevada was simply a doorway to the United

States Senate, and in the mean time his brigade required official

recognition and perquisites.  The governor found Orion Clemens an

impediment to this policy.  Orion could not be brought to a proper

political understanding of "special bills and accounts," and relations

between the secretary of state and the governor were becoming strained.



It was about this time that the man who had been potentate of the pilot-

house of a Mississippi River steamer returned from Humboldt.  He was fond

of the governor, but he had still higher regard for the family integrity.

When he had heard Orion's troubled story, he called on Governor Nye and

delivered himself in his own fashion.  In his former employments he had

acquired a vocabulary and moral backbone sufficient to his needs.  We may

regret that no stenographic report was made of the interview.  It would

be priceless now.  But it is lost; we only know that Orion's rectitude

was not again assailed, and that curiously enough Governor Nye apparently

conceived a strong admiration and respect for his brother.



Samuel Clemens, miner, remained but a brief time in Carson City--only

long enough to arrange for a new and more persistent venture.  He did not

confess his Humboldt failure to his people; in fact, he had not as yet

confessed it to himself; his avowed purpose was to return to Humboldt

after a brief investigation of the Esmeralda mines.  He had been paying

heavy assessments on his holdings there; and, with a knowledge of mining

gained at Unionville, he felt that his personal attention at Aurora might

be important.  As a matter of fact, he was by this time fairly daft on

the subject of mines and mining, with the rest of the community for

company.



His earlier praises of the wonders and climate of Tahoe had inspired his

sister Pamela, always frail, with a desire to visit that health-giving

land.  Perhaps he felt that he recommended the country somewhat too

highly.



"By George, Pamela," he said, "I begin to fear that I have invoked a

spirit of some kind or other, which I will find more than difficult to

allay."  He proceeds to recommend California as a residence for any or

all of them, but he is clearly doubtful concerning Nevada.



     Some people are malicious enough to think that if the devil were set

     at liberty and told to confine himself to Nevada Territory, he would

     come here and look sadly around awhile, and then get homesick and go

     back to hell again ....  Why, I have had my whiskers and mustaches

     so full of alkali dust that you'd have thought I worked in a starch

     factory and boarded in a flour barrel.



But then he can no longer restrain his youth and optimism.  How could he,

with a fortune so plainly in view?  It was already in his grasp in

imagination; he was on the way home with it.



     I expect to return to St. Louis in July--per steamer.  I don't say

     that I will return then, or that I shall be able to do it--but I

     expect to--you bet.  I came down here from Humboldt, in order to

     look after our Esmeralda interests.  Yesterday, Bob Howland arrived

     here, and I have had a talk with him.  He owns with me in the

     "Horatio and Derby" ledge.  He says our tunnel is in 52 feet, and a

     small stream of water has been struck, which bids fair to become a

     "big thing" by the time the ledge is reached--sufficient to supply a

     mill.  Now, if you knew anything of the value of water here, you

     would perceive at a glance that if the water should amount to 50 or

     100 inches, we wouldn't care whether school kept or not.  If the

     ledge should prove to be worthless, we'd sell the water for money

     enough to give us quite a lift.  But, you see, the ledge will not

     prove to be worthless.  We have located, near by, a fine site for a

     mill, and when we strike the ledge, you know, we'll have a mill-

     site, water-power, and payrock, all handy.  Then we sha'n't care

     whether we have capital or not.  Mill folks will build us a mill,

     and wait for their pay.  If nothing goes wrong, we'll strike the

     ledge in June--and if we do, I'll be home in July, you know.



He pauses at this point for a paragraph of self-analysis--characteristic

and crystal-clear.



     So, just keep your clothes on, Pamela, until I come.  Don't you know

     that undemonstrated human calculations won't do to bet on?  Don't

     you know that I have only talked, as yet, but proved nothing?  Don't

     you know that I have expended money in this country but have made

     none myself?  Don't you know that I have never held in my hands a

     gold or silver bar that belonged to me?  Don't you know that it's

     all talk and no cider so far?  Don't you know that people who always

     feel jolly, no matter where they are or what happens to them--who

     have the organ of Hope preposterously developed--who are endowed

     with an unconcealable sanguine temperament--who never feel concerned

     about the price of corn--and who cannot, by any possibility,

     discover any but the bright side of a picture--are very apt to go to

     extremes and exaggerate with 40-horse microscopic power?



                              But-but

                    In the bright lexicon of youth,

                    There is no such word as Fail--

                         and I'll prove it!



Whereupon, he lets himself go again, full-tilt:



     By George, if I just had a thousand dollars I'd be all right!  Now

     there's the "Horatio," for instance.  There are five or six

     shareholders in it, and I know I could buy half of their interests

     at, say $20 per foot, now that flour is worth $50 per barrel and

     they are pressed for money, but I am hard up myself, and can't buy--

     and in June they'll strike the ledge, and then "good-by canary."  I

     can't get it for love or money.  Twenty dollars a foot!  Think of

     it!  For ground that is proven to be rich.  Twenty dollars, Madam-

     and we wouldn't part with a foot of our 75 for five times the sum.

     So it will be in Humboldt next summer.  The boys will get pushed and

     sell ground for a song that is worth a fortune.  But I am at the

     helm now.  I have convinced Orion that he hasn't business talent

     enough to carry on a peanut-stand, and he has solemnly promised me

     that he will meddle no more with mining or other matters not

     connected with the secretary's office.  So, you see, if mines are to

     be bought or sold, or tunnels run or shafts sunk, parties have to

     come to me--and me only.  I'm the "firm," you know.



There are pages of this, all glowing with golden expectations and plans.

Ah, well!  we have all written such letters home at one time and another-

of gold-mines of one form or another.



He closes at last with a bit of pleasantry for his mother.



     Ma says: "It looks like a man can't hold public office and be

     honest."  Why, certainly not, Madam.  A man can't hold public office

     and be honest.  Lord bless you, it is a common practice with Orion

     to go about town stealing little things that happen to be lying

     around loose.  And I don't remember having heard him speak the truth

     since we have been in Nevada.  He even tries to prevail upon me to

     do these things, Ma, but I wasn't brought up in that way, you know.

     You showed the public what you could do in that line when you raised

     me, Madam.  But then you ought to have raised me first, so that

     Orion could have had the benefit of my example.  Do you know that he

     stole all the stamps out of an 8-stamp quartz-mill one night, and

     brought them home under his overcoat and hid them in the back room?









XXXV



THE MINER



He had about exhausted his own funds by this time, and it was necessary

that Orion should become the financier.  The brothers owned their

Esmeralda claims in partnership, and it was agreed that Orion, out of his

modest depleted pay, should furnish the means, while the other would go

actively into the field and develop their riches.  Neither had the

slightest doubt but that they would be millionaires presently, and both

were willing to struggle and starve for the few intervening weeks.



It was February when the printer-pilot-miner arrived in Aurora, that

rough, turbulent camp of the Esmeralda district lying about one hundred

miles south of Carson City, on the edge of California, in the Sierra

slopes.  Everything was frozen and covered with snow; but there was no

lack of excitement and prospecting and grabbing for "feet" in this ledge

and that, buried deep under the ice and drift.  The new arrival camped

with Horatio Phillips (Raish), in a tiny cabin with a domestic roof (the

ruin of it still stands), and they cooked and bunked together and

combined their resources in a common fund.  Bob Howland joined them

presently, and later an experienced miner, Calvin H. Higbie (Cal), one

day to be immortalized in the story of 'Roughing It' and in the

dedication of that book.  Around the cabin stove they would gather, and

paw over their specimens, or test them with blow-pipe and "horn" spoon,

after which they would plan tunnels and figure estimates of prospective

wealth.  Never mind if the food was poor and scanty, and the chill wind

came in everywhere, and the roof leaked like a filter; they were living

in a land where all the mountains were banked with nuggets, where all the

rivers ran gold.  Bob Howland declared later that they used to go out at

night and gather up empty champagne-bottles and fruit-tins and pile them

in the rear of their cabin to convey to others the appearance of

affluence and high living.  When they lacked for other employment and

were likely to be discouraged, the ex-pilot would "ride the bunk" and

smoke and, without money and without price, distribute riches more

valuable than any they would ever dig out of those Esmeralda Hills.  At

other times he talked little or not at all, but sat in one corner and

wrote, wholly oblivious of his surroundings.  They thought he was writing

letters, though letters were not many and only to Orion during this

period.  It was the old literary impulse stirring again, the desire to

set things down for their own sake, the natural hunger for print.  One or

two of his earlier letters home had found their way into a Keokuk paper--

the 'Gate City'.  Copies containing them had gone back to Orion, who had

shown them to a representative of the Territorial Enterprise, a young man

named Barstow, who thought them amusing.  The Enterprise reprinted at

least one of these letters, or portions of it, and with this

encouragement the author of it sent an occasional contribution direct to

that paper over the pen-name "Josh."  He did not care to sign his own

name.  He was a miner who was soon to be a magnate; he had no desire to

be known as a camp scribbler.



He received no pay for these offerings, and expected none.  They were

sketches of a broadly burlesque sort, the robust horse-play kind of humor

that belongs to the frontier.  They were not especially promising

efforts.  One of them was about an old rackabones of a horse, a sort of

preliminary study for "Oahu," of the Sandwich Islands, or "Baalbec" and

"Jericho," of Syria.  If any one had told him, or had told any reader of

this sketch, that the author of it was knocking at the door of the house

of fame such a person's judgment or sincerity would have been open to

doubt.  Nevertheless, it was true, though the knock was timid and halting

and the summons to cross the threshold long delayed.



A winter mining-camp is the most bleak and comfortless of places.  The

saloon and gambling-house furnished the only real warmth and cheer.  Our

Aurora miners would have been less than human, or more, if they had not

found diversion now and then in the happy harbors of sin.  Once there was

a great ball given at a newly opened pavilion, and Sam Clemens is said to

have distinguished himself by his unrestrained and spontaneous enjoyment

of the tripping harmony.  Cal Higbie, who was present, writes:



     In changing partners, whenever he saw a hand raised he would grasp

     it with great pleasure and sail off into another set, oblivious to

     his surroundings.  Sometimes he would act as though there was no use

     in trying to go right or to dance like other people, and with his

     eyes closed he would do a hoe-down or a double-shuffle all alone,

     talking to himself and saying that he never dreamed there was so

     much pleasure to be obtained at a ball.  It was all as natural as a

     child's play.  By the second set, all the ladies were falling over

     themselves to get him for a partner, and most of the crowd, too full

     of mirth to dance, were standing or sitting around, dying with

     laughter.



What a child he always was--always, to the very end?  With the first

break of winter the excitement that had been fermenting and stewing

around camp stoves overflowed into the streets, washed up the gullies,

and assailed the hills.  There came then a period of madness, beside

which the Humboldt excitement had been mere intoxication.  Higbie says:



     It was amazing how wild the people became all over the Pacific

     coast.  In San Francisco and other large cities barbers, hack-

     drivers, servant-girls, merchants, and nearly every class of people

     would club together and send agents representing all the way from

     $5,000 to $500,000 or more to buy mines.  They would buy anything.

     in the shape of quartz, whether it contained any mineral value or

     not.



The letters which went from the Aurora miner to Orion are humanly

documentary.  They are likely to be staccato in their movement; they show

nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and suppressed excitement;

they are not always coherent; they are seldom humorous, except in a

savage way; they are often profane; they are likely to be violent.  Even

the handwriting has a terse look; the flourish of youth has gone out of

it.  Altogether they reveal the tense anxiety of the gambling mania of

which mining is the ultimate form.  An extract from a letter of April is

a fair exhibit:



     Work not yet begun on the "Horatio and Derby"--haven't seen it yet.

     It is still in the snow.  Shall begin on it within 3 or 4 weeks--

     strike the ledge in July: Guess it is good--worth from $30 to $50 a

     foot in California....



     Man named Gebhart shot here yesterday while trying to defend a claim

     on Last Chance Hill.  Expect he will die.



     These mills here are not worth a d--n--except Clayton's--and it is

     not in full working trim yet.



     Send me $40 or $50--by mail-immediately.  I go to work to-morrow

     with pick and shovel.  Something's got to come, by G--, before I let

     go here.



By the end of April work had become active in the mines, though the snow

in places was still deep and the ground stony with frost.  On the 28th he

writes:



     I have been at work all day blasting and digging, and d--ning one of

     our new claims--"Dashaway"--which I don't think a great deal of, but

     which I am willing to try.  We are down, now, 10 or 12 a feet.  We

     are following down under the ledge, but not taking it out.  If we

     get up a windlass to-morrow we shall take out the ledge, and see

     whether it is worth anything or not.



It must have been hard work picking away at the flinty ledges in the

cold; and the "Dashaway" would seem to have proven a disappointment, for

there is no promising mention of it again.  Instead, we hear of the

"Flyaway;" and "Annipolitan" and the "Live Yankee" and of a dozen

others, each of which holds out the beacon of hope for a little while and

then passes from notice forever.  In May it is the "Monitor" that is sure

to bring affluence, though realization is no longer regarded as

immediate.



     To use a French expression, I have "got my d---d satisfy" at last.

     Two years' time will make us capitalists, in spite of anything.



     Therefore we need fret and fume and worry and doubt no more, but

     just lie still and put up with privation for six months.  Perhaps 3

     months will "let us out."  Then, if government refuses to pay the

     rent on your new office we can do it ourselves.  We have got to wait

     six weeks, anyhow, for a dividend--maybe longer--but that it will

     come there is no shadow of a doubt.  I have got the thing sifted

     down to a dead moral certainty.  I own one-eighth of the new

     "Monitor Ledge, Clemens Company," and money can't buy a foot of it;

     because I know it to contain our fortune.  The ledge is six feet

     wide, and one needs no glass to see gold and silver in it....



     When you and I came out here we did not expect '63 or '64 to find us

     rich men--and if that proposition had been made we would have

     accepted it gladly.  Now, it is made.  I am willing, now, that

     "Neary's tunnel" or anybody else's tunnel shall succeed.  Some of

     them may beat us a few months, but we shall be on hand in the

     fullness of time, as sure as fate.  I would hate to swap chances

     with any member of the tribe .  .  .  .



It is the same man who twenty-five years later would fasten his faith and

capital to a type-setting machine and refuse to exchange stock in it,

share for share, with the Mergenthaler linotype.  He adds:



     But I have struck my tent in Esmeralda, and I care for no mines but

     those which I can superintend myself.  I am a citizen here now, and

     I am satisfied, although Ratio and I are "strapped" and we haven't

     three days' rations in the house....  I shall work the "Monitor" and

     the other claims with my own hands.  I prospected 3/4 of a pound of

     "Monitor" yesterday, and Raish reduced it with the blow-pipe, and

     got about 10 or 12 cents in gold and silver, besides the other half

     of it which we spilt on the floor and didn't get....



     I tried to break a handsome chunk from a huge piece of my darling

     "Monitor" which we brought from the croppings yesterday, but it all

     splintered up, and I send you the scraps.  I call that "choice"--any

     d---d fool would.



     Don't ask if it has been assayed, for it hasn't.  It don't need it.

     It is simply able to speak for itself.  It is six feet wide on top,

     and traversed through with veins whose color proclaims their worth.



     What the devil does a man want with any more feet when he owns in

     the invincible bomb-proof "Monitor"?



There is much more of this, and other such letters, most of them ending

with demands for money.  The living, the tools, the blasting-powder, and

the help eat it up faster than Orion's salary can grow.



"Send me $50 or $100, all you can spare; put away $150 subject to my

call--we shall need it soon for the tunnel."  The letters are full of

such admonition, and Orion, more insane, if anything, than his brother,

is scraping his dollars and pennies together to keep the mines going.  He

is constantly warned to buy no claims on his own account and promises

faithfully, but cannot resist now and then when luring baits are laid

before him, though such ventures invariably result in violent and profane

protests from Aurora.



"The pick and shovel are the only claims I have any confidence in now,"

the miner concludes, after one fierce outburst.  "My back is sore, and my

hands are blistered with handling them to-day."



But even the pick and shovel did not inspire confidence a little later.

He writes that the work goes slowly, very slowly, but that they still

hope to strike it some day.  "But--if we strike it rich--I've lost my

guess, that's all."  Then he adds: "Couldn't go on the hill to-day.  It

snowed.  It always snows here, I expect"; and the final heart-sick line,

"Don't you suppose they have pretty much quit writing at home?"



This is midsummer, and snow still interferes with the work.  One feels

the dreary uselessness of the quest.



Yet resolution did not wholly die, or even enthusiasm.  These things were

as recurrent as new prospects, which were plentiful enough.  In a still

subsequent letter he declares that he will never look upon his mother's

face again, or his sister's, or get married, or revisit the "Banner

State," until he is a rich man, though there is less assurance than

desperation in the words.



In 'Roughing It' the author tells us that, when flour had reached one

dollar a pound and he could no longer get the dollar, he abandoned mining

and went to milling "as a common laborer in a quartz-mill at ten dollars

a week."  This statement requires modification.  It was not entirely for

the money that he undertook the laborious task of washing "riffles" and

"screening tailings."  The money was welcome enough, no doubt, but the

greater purpose was to learn refining, so that when his mines developed

he could establish his own mill and personally superintend the work.  It

is like him to wish us to believe that he was obliged to give up being a

mining magnate to become a laborer in a quartz-mill, for there is a grim

humor in the confession.  That he abandoned the milling experiment at the

end of a week is a true statement.  He got a violent cold in the damp

place, and came near getting salivated, he says in a letter, "working in

the quicksilver and chemicals.  I hardly think I shall try the experiment

again.  It is a confining business, and I will not be confined for love

or money."



As recreation after this trying experience, Higbie took him on a tour,

prospecting for the traditional "Cement Mine," a lost claim where, in a

deposit of cement rock, gold nuggets were said to be as thick as raisins

in a fruitcake.  They did not find the mine, but they visited Mono Lake--

that ghastly, lifeless alkali sea among the hills, which in 'Roughing It'

he has so vividly pictured.  It was good to get away from the stress of

things; and they repeated the experiment.  They made a walking trip to

Yosemite, carrying their packs, camping and fishing in that far,

tremendous isolation, which in those days few human beings had ever

visited at all.  Such trips furnished a delicious respite from the

fevered struggle around tunnel and shaft.  Amid mountain-peaks and giant

forests and by tumbling falls the quest for gold hardly seemed worth

while.  More than once that summer he went alone into the wilderness to

find his balance and to get away entirely from humankind.









XXXVI



LAST MINING DAYS



It was late in July when he wrote:



     If I do not forget it, I will send you, per next mail, a pinch of

     decom. (decomposed rock) which I pinched with thumb and finger from

     Wide West ledge a while ago.  Raish and I have secured 200 out of a

     company with 400 ft. in it, which perhaps (the ledge, I mean) is a

     spur from the W. W.--our shaft is about 100 ft.  from the W. W.

     shaft.  In order to get in, we agreed to sink 30 ft.  We have sublet

     to another man for 50 ft., and we pay for powder and sharpening

     tools.



This was the "Blind Lead" claim of Roughing It, but the episode as set

down in that book is somewhat dramatized.  It is quite true that he

visited and nursed Captain Nye while Higbie was off following the

"Cement" 'ignus fatuus' and that the "Wide West" holdings were forfeited

through neglect.  But if the loss was regarded as a heavy one, the

letters fail to show it.  It is a matter of dispute to-day whether or not

the claim was ever of any value.  A well-known California author--[Ella

Sterling Cummins, author of The Story of the Files, etc]--declares:



     No one need to fear that he ran any chance of being a millionaire

     through the "Wide West" mine, for the writer, as a child, played

     over that historic spot and saw only a shut-down mill and desolate

     hole in the ground to mark the spot where over-hopeful men had sunk

     thousands and thousands, that they never recovered.



The "Blind Lead" episode, as related, is presumably a tale of what might

have happened--a possibility rather than an actuality.  It is vividly

true in atmosphere, however, and forms a strong and natural climax for

closing the mining episode, while the literary privilege warrants any

liberties he may have taken for art's sake.



In reality the close of his mining career was not sudden and spectacular;

it was a lingering close, a reluctant and gradual surrender.  The "Josh"

letters to the Enterprise had awakened at least a measure of interest,

and Orion had not failed to identify their author when any promising

occasion offered; as a result certain tentative overtures had been made

for similar material.  Orion eagerly communicated such chances, for the

money situation was becoming a desperate one.  A letter from the Aurora

miner written near the end of July presents the situation very fully.  An

extract or two will be sufficient:



     My debts are greater than I thought for--I bought $25 worth of

     clothing and sent $25 to Higbie, in the cement diggings.  I owe

     about $45 or $50, and have got about $45 in my pocket.  But how in

     the h--l I am going to live on something over $100 until October or

     November is singular.  The fact is, I must have something to do, and

     that shortly, too....  Now write to the Sacramento Union folks, or

     to Marsh, and tell them I'll write as many letters a week as they

     want for $10 a week.  My board must be paid.  Tell them I have

     corresponded with the N. Orleans Crescent and other papers--and the

     Enterprise.



     If they want letters from here--who'll run from morning till night

     collecting material cheaper?  I'll write a short letter twice a

     week, for the present for the 'Age', for $5 per week.  Now it has

     been a long time since I couldn't make my own living, and it shall

     be a long time before I loaf another year.



Nothing came of these possibilities, but about this time Barstow, of the

Enterprise, conferred with Joseph T. Goodman, editor and owner of the

paper, as to the advisability of adding the author of the "Josh" letters

to their local staff.  Joe Goodman, who had as keen a literary perception

as any man that ever pitched a journalistic tent on the Pacific coast

(and there could be no higher praise than that), looked over the letters

and agreed with Barstow that the man who wrote them had "something in

him."  Two of the sketches in particular he thought promising.  One of

them was a burlesque report of an egotistical lecturer who was referred

to as "Professor Personal Pronoun."  It closed by stating that it was

"impossible to print his lecture in full, as the type-cases had run out

of capital I's."  But it was the other sketch which settled Goodman's

decision.  It was also a burlesque report, this time of a Fourth-of-July

oration.  It opened, "I was sired by the Great American Eagle and foaled

by a continental dam."  This was followed by a string of stock patriotic

phrases absurdly arranged.  But it was the opening itself that won

Goodman's heart.



"That is the sort of thing we want," he said.  "Write to him, Barstow,

and ask him if he wants to come up here."



Barstow wrote, offering twenty-five dollars a week, a tempting sum.  This

was at the end of July, 1862.



In 'Roughing It' we are led to believe that the author regarded this as a

gift from heaven and accepted it straightaway.  As a matter of fact, he

fasted and prayed a good while over the "call."  To Orion he wrote

Barstow has offered me the post as local reporter for the Enterprise at

$25 a week, and I have written him that I will let him know next mail, if

possible.



There was no desperate eagerness, you see, to break into literature, even

under those urgent conditions.  It meant the surrender of all hope in the

mines, the confession of another failure.  On August 7th he wrote again

to Orion.  He had written to Barstow, he said, asking when they thought

he might be needed.  He was playing for time to consider.



Now, I shall leave at midnight to-night, alone and on foot, for a walk of

60 or 70 miles through a totally uninhabited country, and it is barely

possible that mail facilities may prove infernally "slow."  But do you

write Barstow that I have left here for a week or so, and in case he

should want me, he must write me here, or let me know through you.



So he had gone into the wilderness to fight out his battle alone.  But

eight days later, when he had returned, there was still no decision.  In

a letter to Pamela of this date he refers playfully to the discomforts of

his cabin and mentions a hope that he will spend the winter in San

Francisco; but there is no reference in it to any newspaper prospects--

nor to the mines, for that matter.  Phillips, Howland, and Higbie would

seem to have given up by this time, and he was camping with Dan Twing and

a dog, a combination amusingly described.  It is a pleasant enough

letter, but the note of discouragement creeps in:



     I did think for a while of going home this fall--but when I found

     that that was, and had been, the cherished intention and the darling

     aspiration every year of these old care-worn Californians for twelve

     weary years, I felt a little uncomfortable, so I stole a march on

     Disappointment and said I would not go home this fall.  This country

     suits me, and it shall suit me whether or no.



He was dying hard, desperately hard; how could he know, to paraphrase the

old form of Christian comfort, that his end as a miner would mean, in

another sphere, "a brighter resurrection" than even his rainbow

imagination could paint?









XXXVII



THE NEW ESTATE



It was the afternoon of a hot, dusty August day when a worn, travel-

stained pilgrim drifted laggingly into the office of the Virginia City

Enterprise, then in its new building on C Street, and, loosening a heavy

roll of blankets from his shoulders, dropped wearily into a chair.  He

wore a rusty slouch hat, no coat, a faded blue flannel shirt, a Navy

revolver; his trousers were hanging on his boot tops.  A tangle of

reddish-brown hair fell on his shoulders, and a mass of tawny beard,

dingy with alkali dust, dropped half-way to his waist.



Aurora lay one hundred and thirty miles from Virginia.  He had walked

that distance, carrying his heavy load.  Editor Goodman was absent at the

moment, but the other proprietor, Denis E. McCarthy, signified that the

caller might state his errand.  The wanderer regarded him with a far-away

look and said, absently and with deliberation:



"My starboard leg seems to be unshipped.  I'd like about one hundred

yards of line; I think I am falling to pieces."  Then he added: "I want

to see Mr. Barstow, or Mr. Goodman.  My name is Clemens, and I've come to

write for the paper."



It was the master of the world's widest estate come to claim his kingdom:



William Wright, who had won a wide celebrity on the Coast as Dan de

Quille, was in the editorial chair and took charge of the new arrival.

He was going on a trip to the States soon; it was mainly on this account

that the new man had been engaged.  The "Josh" letters were very good, in

Dan's opinion; he gave their author a cordial welcome, and took him

around to his boarding-place.  It was the beginning of an association

that continued during Samuel Clemens's stay in Virginia City and of a

friendship that lasted many years.



The Territorial Enterprise was one of the most remarkable frontier papers

ever published.  Its editor-in-chief, Joseph Goodman, was a man with rare

appreciation, wide human understanding, and a comprehensive newspaper

policy.  Being a young man, he had no policy, in fact, beyond the general

purpose that his paper should be a forum for absolutely free speech,

provided any serious statement it contained was based upon knowledge.

His instructions to the new reporter were about as follows:



"Never say we learn so and so, or it is rumored, or we understand so and

so; but go to headquarters and get the absolute facts; then speak out and

say it is so and so.  In the one case you are likely to be shot, and in

the other you are pretty certain to be; but you will preserve the public

confidence."



Goodman was not new to the West.  He had come to California as a boy and

had been a miner, explorer, printer, and contributor by turns.  Early in

'61, when the Comstock Lode--[Named for its discoverer, Henry T. P.

Comstock, a half-crazy miner, who realized very little from his

stupendous find.]--was new and Virginia in the first flush of its

monster boom, he and Denis McCarthy had scraped together a few dollars

and bought the paper.  It had been a hand-to-hand struggle for a while,

but in a brief two years, from a starving sheet in a shanty the

Enterprise, with new building, new presses, and a corps of swift

compositors brought up from San Francisco, had become altogether

metropolitan, as well as the most widely considered paper on the Coast.

It had been borne upward by the Comstock tide, though its fearless,

picturesque utterance would have given it distinction anywhere.  Goodman

himself was a fine, forceful writer, and Dan de Quille and R. M. Daggett

(afterward United States minister to Hawaii) were representative of

Enterprise men.--[The Comstock of that day became famous for its

journalism.  Associated with the Virginia papers then or soon afterward

were such men as Tom Fitch (the silver-tongued orator), Alf Doten, W. J.

Forbes, C. C. Goodwin, H. R.  Mighels, Clement T. Rice, Arthur McEwen,

and Sam Davis--a great array indeed for a new Territory.]--



Samuel Clemens fitted precisely into this group.  He added the fresh,

rugged vigor of thought and expression that was the very essence of the

Comstock, which was like every other frontier mining-camp, only on a more

lavish, more overwhelming scale.



There was no uncertainty about the Comstock; the silver and gold were

there.  Flanking the foot of Mount Davidson, the towns of Gold Hill and

Virginia and the long street between were fairly underburrowed and

underpinned by the gigantic mining construction of that opulent lode

whose treasures were actually glutting the mineral markets of the world.

The streets overhead seethed and swarmed with miners, mine owners, and

adventurers--riotous, rollicking children of fortune, always ready to

drink and make merry, as eager in their pursuit of pleasure as of gold.

Comstockers would always laugh at a joke; the rougher the better.  The

town of Virginia itself was just a huge joke to most of them.  Everybody

had, money; everybody wanted to laugh and have a good time.  The

Enterprise, "Comstock to the backbone," did what it could to help things

along.



It was a sort of free ring, with every one for himself.  Goodman let the

boys write and print in accordance with their own ideas and upon any

subject.  Often they wrote of each other--squibs and burlesques, which

gratified the Comstock far more than mere news.--[The indifference to

'news' was noble--none the less so because it was so blissfully

unconscious.  Editors Mark or Dan would dismiss a murder with a couple of

inches and sit down and fill up a column with a fancy sketch: "Arthur

McEwen"]--It was the proper class-room for Mark Twain, an encouraging

audience and free utterance: fortune could have devised nothing better

for him than that.



He was peculiarly fitted for the position.  Unspoiled humanity appealed

to him, and the Comstock presented human nature in its earliest landscape

forms.  Furthermore, the Comstock was essentially optimistic--so was he;

any hole in the ground to him held a possible, even a probable, fortune.



His pilot memory became a valuable asset in news-gathering.  Remembering

marks, banks, sounding, and other river detail belonged apparently in the

same category of attainments as remembering items and localities of news.

He could travel all day without a note-book and at night reproduce the

day's budget or at least the picturesqueness of it, without error.  He

was presently accounted a good reporter, except where statistics--

measurements and figures--were concerned.  These he gave "a lick and a

promise," according to De Quille, who wrote afterward of their

associations.  De Quille says further:



     Mark and I agreed well in our work, which we divided when there was

     a rush of events; but we often cruised in company, he taking the

     items of news he could handle best, and I such as I felt competent

     to work up.  However, we wrote at the same table and frequently

     helped each other with such suggestions as occurred to us during the

     brief consultations we held in regard to the handling of any matters

     of importance.  Never was there an angry word between us in all the

     time we worked together.



De Quille tells how Clemens clipped items with a knife when there were no

scissors handy, and slashed through on the top of his desk, which in time

took on the semblance "of a huge polar star, spiritedly dashing forth a

thousand rays."



The author of 'Roughing It' has given us a better picture of the Virginia

City of those days and his work there than any one else will ever write.

He has made us feel the general spirit of affluence that prevailed; how

the problem was not to get money, but to spend it; how "feet" in any one

of a hundred mines could be had for the asking; how such shares were

offered like apples or cigars or bonbons, as a natural matter of courtesy

when one happened to have his supply in view; how any one connected with

a newspaper would have stocks thrust upon him, and how in a brief time he

had acquired a trunk ful of such riches and usually had something to sell

when any of the claims made a stir on the market.  He has told us of the

desperadoes and their trifling regard for human life, and preserved other

elemental characters of these prodigal days.  The funeral of Buck Fanshaw

that amazing masterpiece--is a complete epitome of the social frontier.



It would not be the part of wisdom to attempt another inclusive

presentation of Comstock conditions.  We may only hope to add a few

details of history, justified now by time and circumstances, to

supplement the picture with certain data of personality preserved from

the drift of years.









XXXVIII



ONE OF THE "STAFF"



The new reporter found acquaintance easy.  The office force was like one

family among which there was no line of caste.  Proprietors, editors, and

printers were social equals; there was little ceremony among them--none

at all outside of the office.--["The paper went to press at two in the

morning, then all the staff and all the compositors gathered themselves

together in the composing-room and drank beer and sang the popular war-

songs of the day until dawn."--S. L. C., in 1908.]--Samuel Clemens

immediately became "Sam," or "Josh," to his associates, just as De Quille

was "Dan" and Goodman "Joe."  He found that he disliked the name of Josh,

and, as he did not sign it again, it was presently dropped.  The office,

and Virginia City generally, quickly grew fond of him, delighting in his

originality and measured speech.  Enterprise readers began to identify

his work, then unsigned, and to enjoy its fresh phrasing, even when it

was only the usual local item or mining notice.  True to its name and

reputation, the paper had added a new attraction.



It was only a brief time after his arrival in Virginia City that Clemens

began the series of hoaxes which would carry his reputation, not always

in an enviable fashion, across the Sierras and down the Pacific coast.

With one exception these are lost to-day, for so far as known there is

not a single file of the Enterprise in existence.  Only a few stray

copies and clippings are preserved, but we know the story of some of

these literary pranks and of their results.  They were usually intended

as a special punishment of some particular individual or paper or

locality; but victims were gathered by the wholesale in their seductive

web.  Mark Twain himself, in his book of Sketches, has set down something

concerning the first of these, "The Petrified Man," and of another, "My

Bloody Massacre," but in neither case has he told it all.  "The Petrified

Man" hoax was directed at an official named Sewall, a coroner and justice

of the peace at Humboldt, who had been pompously indifferent in the

matter of supplying news.  The story, told with great circumstance and

apparent care as to detail, related the finding of a petrified

prehistoric man, partially imbedded in a rock, in a cave in the desert

more than one hundred miles from Humboldt, and how Sewall had made the

perilous five-day journey in the alkali waste to hold an inquest over a

man that had been dead three hundred years; also how, "with that delicacy

so characteristic of him," Sewall had forbidden the miners from blasting

him from his position.  The account further stated that the hands of the

deceased were arranged in a peculiar fashion; and the description of the

arrangement was so skilfully woven in with other matters that at first,

or even second, reading one might not see that the position indicated was

the ancient one which begins with the thumb at the nose and in many ages

has been used impolitely to express ridicule and the word "sold."  But

the description was a shade too ingenious.  The author expected that the

exchanges would see the jolt and perhaps assist in the fun he would have

with Sewall.  He did not contemplate a joke on the papers themselves.  As

a matter of fact, no one saw the "sell" and most of the papers printed

his story of the petrified man as a genuine discovery.  This was a

surprise, and a momentary disappointment; then he realized that he had

builded better than he knew.  He gathered up a bundle of the exchanges

and sent them to Sewall; also he sent marked copies to scientific men in

various parts of the United States.  The papers had taken it seriously;

perhaps the scientists would.  Some of them did, and Sewall's days became

unhappy because of letters received asking further information.  As

literature, the effort did not rank high, and as a trick on an obscure

official it was hardly worth while; but, as a joke on the Coast exchanges

and press generally, it was greatly regarded and its author, though as

yet unnamed, acquired prestige.



Inquiries began to be made as to who was the smart chap in Virginia that

did these things.  The papers became wary and read Enterprise items twice

before clipping them.  Clemens turned his attention to other matters to

lull suspicion.  The great "Dutch Nick Massacre" did not follow until a

year later.



Reference has already been made to the Comstock's delight in humor of a

positive sort.  The practical joke was legal tender in Virginia.  One

might protest and swear, but he must take it.  An example of Comstock

humor, regarded as the finest assay, is an incident still told of Leslie

Blackburn and Pat Holland, two gay men about town.  They were coming down

C Street one morning when they saw some fine watermelons on a fruit-stand

at the International Hotel corner.  Watermelons were rare and costly in

that day and locality, and these were worth three dollars apiece.

Blackburn said:



"Pat, let's get one of those watermelons.  You engage that fellow in

conversation while I stand at the corner, where I can step around out of

sight easily.  When you have got him interested, point to something on

the back shelf and pitch me a melon."



This appealed to Holland, and he carried out his part of the plan

perfectly; but when he pitched the watermelon Blackburn simply put his

hands in his pockets, and stepped around the comer, leaving the melon a

fearful disaster on the pavement.  It was almost impossible for Pat to

explain to the fruit-man why he pitched away a three-dollar melon like

that even after paying for it, and it was still more trying, also more

expensive, to explain to the boys facing the various bars along C Street.



Sam Clemens, himself a practical joker in his youth, found a healthy

delight in this knock-down humor of the Comstock.  It appealed to his

vigorous, elemental nature.  He seldom indulged physically in such

things; but his printed squibs and hoaxes and his keen love of the

ridiculous placed him in the joker class, while his prompt temper, droll

manner, and rare gift of invective made him an enticing victim.



Among the Enterprise compositors was one by the name of Stephen E.

Gillis (Steve, of course--one of the "fighting Gillises"), a small,

fearless young fellow, handsome, quick of wit, with eyes like needle-

points.



"Steve weighed only ninety-five pounds," Mark Twain once wrote of him,

"but it was well known throughout the Territory that with his fists he

could whip anybody that walked on two legs, let his weight and science be

what they might."



Clemens was fond of Steve Gillis from the first.  The two became closely

associated in time, and were always bosom friends; but Steve was a

merciless joker, and never as long as they were together could he "resist

the temptation of making Sam swear," claiming that his profanity was

grander than any music.



A word hereabout Mark Twain's profanity.  Born with a matchless gift of

phrase, the printing-office, the river, and the mines had developed it in

a rare perfection.  To hear him denounce a thing was to give one the

fierce, searching delight of galvanic waves.  Every characterization

seemed the most perfect fit possible until he applied the next.  And

somehow his profanity was seldom an offense.  It was not mere idle

swearing; it seemed always genuine and serious.  His selection of epithet

was always dignified and stately, from whatever source--and it might be

from the Bible or the gutter.  Some one has defined dirt as misplaced

matter.  It is perhaps the greatest definition ever uttered.  It is

absolutely universal in its application, and it recurs now, remembering

Mark Twain's profanity.  For it was rarely misplaced; hence it did not

often offend.  It seemed, in fact, the safety-valve of his high-pressure

intellectual engine.  When he had blown off he was always calm, gentle;

forgiving, and even tender.  Once following an outburst he said,

placidly:



"In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate

circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer."



It seems proper to add that it is not the purpose of this work to magnify

or modify or excuse that extreme example of humankind which forms its

chief subject; but to set him down as he was inadequately, of course, but

with good conscience and clear intent.



Led by Steve Gillis, the Enterprise force used to devise tricks to set

him going.  One of these was to hide articles from his desk.  He detested

the work necessary to the care of a lamp, and wrote by the light of a

candle.  To hide "Sam's candle" was a sure way to get prompt and vigorous

return.  He would look for it a little; then he would begin a slow,

circular walk--a habit acquired in the limitations of the pilot-house--

and his denunciation of the thieves was like a great orchestration of

wrong.  By and by the office boy, supposedly innocent, would find another

for him, and all would be forgotten.  He made a placard, labeled with

fearful threats and anathemas, warning any one against touching his

candle; but one night both the placard and the candle were gone.



Now, amoung his Virginia acquaintances was a young minister, a Mr.

Rising, "the fragile, gentle new fledgling" of the Buck Fanshaw episode.

Clemens greatly admired Mr. Rising's evident sincerity, and the young

minister had quickly recognized the new reporter's superiority of mind.

Now and then he came to the office to call on him.  Unfortunately, he

happened to step in just at that moment when, infuriated by the latest

theft of his property, Samuel Clemens was engaged in his rotary

denunciation of the criminals, oblivious of every other circumstance.

Mr. Rising stood spellbound by this, to him, new phase of genius, and at

last his friend became dimly aware of him.  He did not halt in his

scathing treadmill and continued in the slow monotone of speech:



"I know, Mr. Rising, I know it's wicked to talk like this; I know it is

wrong.  I know I shall certainly go to hell for it.  But if you had a

candle, Mr. Rising, and those thieves should carry it off every night, I

know that you would say, just as I say, Mr. Rising, G-d d--n their

impenitent souls, may they roast in hell for a million years."



The little clergyman caught his breath.



"Maybe I should, Mr. Clemens," he replied, "but I should try to say,

'Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.'"



"Oh, well! if you put it on the ground that they are just fools, that

alters the case, as I am one of that class myself.  Come in and we'll try

to forgive them and forget about it."



Mark Twain had a good many experiences with young ministers.  He was

always fond of them, and they often sought him out.  Once, long

afterward, at a hotel, he wanted a boy to polish his shoes, and had rung

a number of times without getting any response.  Presently, he thought he

heard somebody approaching in the hall outside.  He flung open the door,

and a small, youngish-looking person, who seemed to have been hesitating

at the door, made a movement as though to depart hastily.  Clemens

grabbed him by the collar.



"Look here," he said, "I've been waiting and ringing here for half an

hour.  Now I want you to take those shoes, and polish them, quick.  Do

you hear?"



The slim, youthful person trembled a good deal, and said: "I would, Mr.

Clemens, I would indeed, sir, if I could.  But I'm a minister of the

Gospel, and I'm not prepared for such work."









XXXIX



PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY



There was a side to Samuel Clemens that in those days few of his

associates saw.  This was the poetic, the philosophic, the contemplative

side.  Joseph Goodman recognized this phase of his character, and, while

he perhaps did not regard it as a future literary asset, he delighted in

it, and in their hours of quiet association together encouraged its

exhibition.  It is rather curious that with all his literary penetration

Goodman did not dream of a future celebrity for Clemens.  He afterward

said:



"If I had been asked to prophesy which of the two men, Dan de Quille or

Sam, would become distinguished, I should have said De Quille.  Dan was

talented, industrious, and, for that time and place, brilliant.  Of

course, I recognized the unusualness of Sam's gifts, but he was eccentric

and seemed to lack industry; it is not likely that I should have

prophesied fame for him then."



Goodman, like MacFarlane in Cincinnati, half a dozen years before, though

by a different method, discovered and developed the deeper vein.  Often

the two, dining together in a French restaurant, discussed life, subtler

philosophies, recalled various phases of human history, remembered and

recited the poems that gave them especial enjoyment.  "The Burial of

Moses," with its noble phrasing and majestic imagery, appealed strongly

to Clemens, and he recited it with great power.  The first stanza in

particular always stirred him, and it stirred his hearer as well.  With

eyes half closed and chin lifted, a lighted cigar between his fingers, he

would lose himself in the music of the stately lines.



          By Nebo's lonely mountain,

          On this side Jordan's wave,

          In a vale in the land of Moab,

          There lies a lonely grave.



          And no man knows that sepulchre,

          And no man saw it e'er,

          For the angels of God, upturned the sod,

          And laid the dead man there.



Another stanza that he cared for almost as much was the one beginning:



          And had he not high honor--

          The hill-side for a pall,

          To lie in state while angels wait

          With stars for tapers tall,

          And the dark rock-pines, like tossing plumes,

          Over his bier to wave,

          And God's own hand in that lonely land,

          To lay him in the grave?



Without doubt he was moved to emulate the simple grandeur of that poem,

for he often repeated it in those days, and somewhat later we find it

copied into his notebook in full.  It would seem to have become to him a

sort of literary touchstone; and in some measure it may be regarded as

accountable for the fact that in the fullness of time "he made use of the

purest English of any modern writer."  These are Goodman's words, though

William Dean Howells has said them, also, in substance, and Brander

Matthews, and many others who know about such things.  Goodman adds, "The

simplicity and beauty of his style are almost without a parallel, except

in the common version of the Bible," which is also true.  One is reminded

of what Macaulay said of Milton:



"There would seem at first sight to be no more in his words than in other

words.  But they are words of enchantment.  No sooner are they pronounced

than the past is present and the distance near.  New forms of beauty

start at once into existence, and all the burial-places of the memory

give up their dead."



One drifts ahead, remembering these things.  The triumph of words, the

mastery of phrases, lay all before him at the time of which we are

writing now.  He was twenty-seven.  At that age Rudyard Kipling had

reached his meridian.  Samuel Clemens was still in the classroom.

Everything came as a lesson-phrase, form, aspect, and combination;

nothing escaped unvalued.  The poetic phase of things particularly

impressed him.  Once at a dinner with Goodman, when the lamp-light from

the chandelier struck down through the claret on the tablecloth in a

great red stain, he pointed to it dramatically "Look, Joe," he said, "the

angry tint of wine."



It was at one of these private sessions, late in '62, that Clemens

proposed to report the coming meeting of the Carson legislature.  He knew

nothing of such work and had small knowledge of parliamentary

proceedings.  Formerly it had been done by a man named Gillespie, but

Gillespie was now clerk of the house.  Goodman hesitated; then,

remembering that whether Clemens got the reports right or not, he would

at least make them readable, agreed to let him undertake the work.











XL



"MARK TWAIN"



The early Nevada legislature was an interesting assembly.  All State

legislatures are that, and this was a mining frontier.  No attempt can be

made to describe it.  It was chiefly distinguished for a large ignorance

of procedure, a wide latitude of speech, a noble appreciation of humor,

and plenty of brains.  How fortunate Mask Twain was in his schooling, to

be kept away from institutional training, to be placed in one after

another of those universities of life where the sole curriculum is the

study of the native inclinations and activities of mankind!  Sometimes,

in after-years, he used to regret the lack of systematic training.  Well

for him--and for us--that he escaped that blight.



For the study of human nature the Nevada assembly was a veritable

lecture-room.  In it his understanding, his wit, his phrasing, his self-

assuredness grew like Jack's bean-stalk, which in time was ready to break

through into a land above the sky.  He made some curious blunders in his

reports, in the beginning; but he was so frank in his ignorance and in

his confession of it that the very unsophistication of his early letters

became their chief charm.  Gillespie coached him on parliamentary

matters, and in time the reports became technically as well as

artistically good.  Clemens in return christened Gillespie "Young,

Jefferson's Manual," a title which he bore, rather proudly indeed, for

many years.



Another "entitlement" growing out of those early reports, and possibly

less satisfactory to its owner, was the one accorded to Clement T. Rice,

of the Virginia City Union.  Rice knew the legislative work perfectly and

concluded to poke fun at the Enterprise letters.



But this was a mistake.  Clemens in his next letter declared that Rice's

reports might be parliamentary enough, but that they covered with

glittering technicalities the most festering mass of misstatement, and

even crime.  He avowed that they were wholly untrustworthy; dubbed the

author of them "The Unreliable," and in future letters never referred to

him by any other term.  Carson and the Comstock and the papers of the

Coast delighted in this burlesque journalistic warfare, and Rice was "The

Unreliable" for life.



Rice and Clemens, it should be said, though rivals, were the best of

friends, and there was never any real animosity between them.



Clemens quickly became a favorite with the members; his sharp letters,

with their amusing turn of phrase and their sincerity, won general

friendship.  Jack Simmons, speaker of the house, and Billy Clagget, the

Humboldt delegation, were his special cronies and kept him on the inside

of the political machine.  Clagget had remained in Unionville after the

mining venture, warned his Keokuk sweetheart, and settled down into

politics and law.  In due time he would become a leading light and go to

Congress.  He was already a notable figure of forceful eloquence and

tousled, unkempt hair.  Simmons, Clagget, and Clemens were easily the

three conspicuous figures of the session.



It must have been gratifying to the former prospector and miner to come

back to Carson City a person of consequence, where less than a year

before he had been regarded as no more than an amusing indolent fellow, a

figure to smile at, but unimportant.  There is a photograph extant of

Clemens and his friends Clagget and Simmons in a group, and we gather

from it that he now arrayed himself in a long broadcloth cloak, a

starched shirt, and polished boots.  Once more he had become the glass of

fashion that he had been on the river.  He made his residence with Orion,

whose wife and little daughter Jennie had by this time come out from the

States.  "Sister Mollie," as wife of the acting governor, was presently

social leader of the little capital; her brilliant brother-in-law its

chief ornament.  His merriment and songs and good nature made him a

favorite guest.  His lines had fallen in pleasant places; he could afford

to smile at the hard Esmeralda days.



He was not altogether satisfied.  His letters, copied and quoted all

along the Coast, were unsigned.  They were easily identified with one

another, but not with a personality.  He realized that to build a

reputation it was necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a name.



He gave the matter a good deal of thought.  He did not consider the use

of his own name; the 'nom de plume' was the fashion of the time.  He

wanted something brief, crisp, definite, unforgettable.  He tried over a

good many combinations in his mind, but none seemed convincing.  Just

then--this was early in 1863--news came to him that the old pilot he had

wounded by his satire, Isaiah Sellers, was dead.  At once the pen-name of

Captain Sellers recurred to him.  That was it; that was the sort of name

he wanted.  It was not trivial; it had all the qualities--Sellers would

never need it again.  Clemens decided he would give it a new meaning and

new association in this far-away land.  He went up to Virginia City.



"Joe," he said, to Goodman, "I want to sign my articles.  I want to be

identified to a wider audience."



"All right, Sam.  What name do you want to use 'Josh'?"



"No, I want to sign them 'Mark Twain.' It is an old river term, a leads-

man's call, signifying two fathoms--twelve feet.  It has a richness about

it; it was always a pleasant sound for a pilot to hear on a dark night;

it meant safe water."



He did not then mention that Captain Isaiah Sellers had used and dropped

the name.  He was ashamed of his part in that episode, and the offense

was still too recent for confession.  Goodman considered a moment:



"Very well, Sam," he said, "that sounds like a good name."



It was indeed a good name.  In all the nomenclature of the world no more

forceful combination of words could have been selected to express the man

for whom they stood.  The name Mark Twain is as infinite, as fundamental

as that of John Smith, without the latter's wasting distribution of

strength.  If all the prestige in the name of John Smith were combined in

a single individual, its dynamic energy might give it the carrying power

of Mark Twain.  Let this be as it may, it has proven the greatest 'nom de

plume' ever chosen--a name exactly in accord with the man, his work, and

his career.



It is not surprising that Goodman did not recognize this at the moment.

We should not guess the force that lies in a twelve-inch shell if we had

never seen one before or heard of its seismic destruction.  We should

have to wait and see it fired, and take account of the result.



It was first signed to a Carson letter bearing date of February 2, 1863,

and from that time was attached to all Samuel Clemens's work.  The work

was neither better nor worse than before, but it had suddenly acquired

identification and special interest.  Members of the legislature and

friends in Virginia and Carson immediately began to address him as

"Mark."  The papers of the Coast took it up, and within a period to be

measured by weeks he was no longer "Sam" or "Clemens" or "that bright

chap on the Enterprise," but "Mark"--"Mark Twain."  No 'nom de plume' was

ever so quickly and generally accepted as that.  De Quille, returning

from the East after an absence of several months, found his room and

deskmate with the distinction of a new name and fame.



It is curious that in the letters to the home folks preserved from that

period there is no mention of his new title and its success.  In fact,

the writer rarely speaks of his work at all, and is more inclined to tell

of the mining shares he has accumulated, their present and prospective

values.  However, many of the letters are undoubtedly missing.  Such as

have been preserved are rather airy epistles full of his abounding joy of

life and good nature.  Also they bear evidence of the renewal of his old

river habit of sending money home--twenty dollars in each letter, with

intervals of a week or so between.









XLI



THE CREAM OF COMSTOCK HUMOR



With the adjournment of the legislature, Samuel Clemens returned to

Virginia City distinctly a notability--Mark Twain.  He was regarded as

leading man on the Enterprise--which in itself was high distinction on

the Comstock--while his improved dress and increased prosperity commanded

additional respect.  When visitors of note came along--well-known actors,

lecturers, politicians--he was introduced as one of the Comstock features

which it was proper to see, along with the Ophir and Gould and Curry

mines, and the new hundred-stamp quartz-mill.



He was rather grieved and hurt, therefore, when, after several

collections had been taken up in the Enterprise office to present various

members of the staff with meerschaum pipes, none had come to him.  He

mentioned this apparent slight to Steve Gillis:



"Nobody ever gives me a meerschaum pipe," he said, plaintively.  "Don't I

deserve one yet?"



Unhappy day!  To that remorseless creature, Steve Gillis, this was a

golden opportunity for deviltry of a kind that delighted his soul.  This

is the story, precisely as Gillis himself told it to the writer of these

annals more than a generation later:



"There was a German kept a cigar store in Virginia City and always had a

fine assortment of meerschaum pipes.  These pipes usually cost anywhere

from forty to seventy-five dollars.



"One day Denis McCarthy and I were walking by the old German's place, and

stopped to look in at the display in the window.  Among other things

there was one large imitation meerschaum with a high bowl and a long

stem, marked a dollar and a half.



"I decided that that would be just the pipe for Sam.  We went in and

bought it, also a very much longer stem.  I think the stem alone cost

three dollars.  Then we had a little German-silver plate engraved with

Mark's name on it and by whom presented, and made preparations for the

presentation.  Charlie Pope--[afterward proprietor of Pope's Theater,

St. Louis]--was playing at the Opera House at the time, and we engaged

him to make the presentation speech.



"Then we let in Dan de Quille, Mark's closest friend, to act the part of

Judas--to tell Mark privately that he, was going to be presented with a

fine pipe, so that he could have a speech prepared in reply to Pope's.

It was awful low-down in Dan.  We arranged to have the affair come off in

the saloon beneath the Opera House after the play was over.



"Everything went off handsomely; but it was a pretty remorseful occasion,

and some of us had a hang-dog look; for Sam took it in such sincerity,

and had prepared one of the most beautiful speeches I ever heard him

make.  Pope's presentation, too, was beautifully done.  He told Sam how

his friends all loved him, and that this pipe, purchased at so great an

expense, was but a small token of their affection.  But Sam's reply,

which was supposed to be impromptu, actually brought the tears to the

eyes of some of us, and he was interrupted every other minute with

applause.  I never felt so sorry for anybody.



"Still, we were bent on seeing the thing through.  After Sam's speech was

finished, he ordered expensive wines--champagne and sparkling Moselle.

Then we went out to do the town, and kept things going until morning to

drown our sorrow.



"Well, next day, of course, he started in to color the pipe.  It wouldn't

color any more than a piece of chalk, which was about all it was.  Sam

would smoke and smoke, and complain that it didn't seem to taste right,

and that it wouldn't color.  Finally Denis said to him one day:



"'Oh, Sam, don't you know that's just a damned old egg-shell, and that

the boys bought it for a dollar and a half and presented you with it for

a joke?'



"Then Sam was furious, and we laid the whole thing on Dan de Quille.  He

had a thunder-cloud on his face when he started up for the Local Room,

where Dan was.  He went in and closed the door behind him, and locked it,

and put the key in his pocket--an awful sign.  Dan was there alone,

writing at his table.



"Sam said, 'Dan, did you know, when you invited me to make that speech,

that those fellows were going to give me a bogus pipe?'



"There was no way for Dan to escape, and he confessed.  Sam walked up and

down the floor, as if trying to decide which way to slay Dan.  Finally he

said:



"'Oh, Dan, to think that you, my dearest friend, who knew how little

money I had, and how hard I would work to prepare a speech that would

show my gratitude to my friends, should be the traitor, the Judas, to

betray me with a kiss!  Dan, I never want to look on your face again.

You knew I would spend every dollar I had on those pirates when I

couldn't afford to spend anything; and yet you let me do it; you aided

and abetted their diabolical plan, and you even got me to get up that

damned speech to make the thing still more ridiculous.'



"Of course Dan felt terribly, and tried to defend himself by saying that

they were really going to present him with a fine pipe--a genuine one,

this time.  But Sam at first refused to be comforted; and when, a few

days later, I went in with the pipe and said, 'Sam, here's the pipe the

boys meant to give you all the time,' and tried to apologize, he looked

around a little coldly, and said:



"'Is that another of those bogus old pipes?'



"He accepted it, though, and general peace was restored.  One day, soon

after, he said to me:



"'Steve, do you know that I think that that bogus pipe smokes about as

well as the good one?'"



Many years later (this was in his home at Hartford, and Joe Goodman was

present) Mark Twain one day came upon the old imitation pipe.



"Joe," he said, "that was a cruel, cruel trick the boys played on me;

but, for the feeling I had during the moment when they presented me with

that pipe and when Charlie Pope was making his speech and I was making my

reply to it--for the memory of that feeling, now, that pipe is more

precious to me than any pipe in the world!"



Eighteen hundred and sixty-three was flood-tide on the Comstock.  Every

mine was working full blast.  Every mill was roaring and crunching,

turning out streams of silver and gold.  A little while ago an old

resident wrote:



     When I close my eyes I hear again the respirations of hoisting-

     engines and the roar of stamps; I can see the "camels" after

     midnight packing in salt; I can see again the jam of teams on C

     Street and hear the anathemas of the drivers--all the mighty work

     that went on in order to lure the treasures from the deep chambers

     of the great lode and to bring enlightenment to the desert.



Those were lively times.  In the midst of one of his letters home Mark

Twain interrupts himself to say: "I have just heard five pistol-shots

down the street--as such things are in my line, I will go and see about

it," and in a postscript added a few hours later:



     5 A.M.  The pistol-shot did its work well.  One man, a Jackson

     County Missourian, shot two of my friends (police officers) through

     the heart--both died within three minutes.  The murderer's name is

     John Campbell.



"Mark and I had our hands full," says De Quille, "and no grass grew under

our feet."  In answer to some stray criticism of their policy, they

printed a sort of editorial manifesto:



     Our duty is to keep the universe thoroughly posted concerning

     murders and street fights, and balls, and theaters, and pack-trains,

     and churches, and lectures, and school-houses, and city military

     affairs, and highway robberies, and Bible societies, and hay-wagons,

     and the thousand other things which it is in the province of local

     reporters to keep track of and magnify into undue importance for the

     instruction of the readers of a great daily newspaper.



It is easy to recognize Mark Twain's hand in that compendium of labor,

which, in spite of its amusing apposition, was literally true, and so

intended, probably with no special thought of humor in its construction.

It may be said, as well here as anywhere, that it was not Mark Twain's

habit to strive for humor.  He saw facts at curious angles and phrased

them accordingly.  In Virginia City he mingled with the turmoil of the

Comstock and set down what he saw and thought, in his native speech.  The

Comstock, ready to laugh, found delight in his expression and discovered

a vast humor in his most earnest statements.



On the other hand, there were times when the humor was intended and

missed its purpose.  We have already recalled the instance of the

"Petrified Man" hoax, which was taken seriously; but the "Empire City

Massacre" burlesque found an acceptance that even its author considered

serious for a time.  It is remembered to-day in Virginia City as the

chief incident of Mark Twain's Comstock career.



This literary bomb really had two objects, one of which was to punish the

San Francisco Bulletin for its persistent attacks on Washoe interests;

the other, though this was merely incidental, to direct an unpleasant

attention to a certain Carson saloon, the Magnolia, which was supposed to

dispense whisky of the "forty rod" brand--that is, a liquor warranted to

kill at that range.  It was the Bulletin that was to be made especially.

ridiculous.  This paper had been particularly disagreeable concerning the

"dividend-cooking" system of certain of the Comstock mines, at the same

time calling invidious attention to safer investments in California

stocks.  Samuel Clemens, with "half a trunkful" of Comstock shares, had

cultivated a distaste for California things in general: In a letter of

that time he says:



"How I hate everything that looks or tastes or smells like California!"

With his customary fickleness of soul, he was glorifying California less

than a year later, but for the moment he could see no good in that

Nazareth.  To his great satisfaction, one of the leading California

corporations, the Spring Valley Water Company, "cooked" a dividend of its

own about this time, resulting in disaster to a number of guileless

investors who were on the wrong side of the subsequent crash.  This

afforded an inviting opportunity for reprisal.  With Goodman's consent he

planned for the California papers, and the Bulletin in particular, a

punishment which he determined to make sufficiently severe.  He believed

the papers of that State had forgotten his earlier offenses, and the

result would show he was not mistaken.



There was a point on the Carson River, four miles from Carson City, known

as "Dutch Nick's," and also as Empire City, the two being identical.

There was no forest there of any sort nothing but sage-brush.  In the one

cabin there lived a bachelor with no household.  Everybody in Virginia

and Carson, of course, knew these things.



Mark Twain now prepared a most lurid and graphic account of how one

Phillip Hopkins, living "just at the edge of the great pine forest which

lies between Empire City and 'Dutch Nick's'," had suddenly gone insane and

murderously assaulted his entire family consisting of his wife and their

nine children, ranging in ages from one to nineteen years.  The wife had

been slain outright, also seven of the children; the other two might

recover.  The murder had been committed in the most brutal and ghastly

fashion, after which Hopkins had scalped his wife, leaped on a horse, cut

his own throat from ear to ear, and ridden four miles into Carson City,

dropping dead at last in front of the Magnolia saloon, the red-haired

scalp of his wife still clutched in his gory hand.  The article further

stated that the cause of Mr. Hopkins's insanity was pecuniary loss, he

having withdrawn his savings from safe Comstock investments and, through

the advice of a relative, one of the editors of the San Francisco

Bulletin, invested them in the Spring Valley Water Company.  This absurd

tale with startling head-lines appeared in the Enterprise, in its issue

of October 28, 1863.



It was not expected that any one in Virginia City or Carson City would

for a moment take any stock in the wild invention, yet so graphic was it

that nine out of ten on first reading never stopped to consider the

entire impossibility of the locality and circumstance.  Even when these

things were pointed out many readers at first refused to confess

themselves sold.  As for the Bulletin and other California papers, they

were taken-in completely, and were furious.  Many of them wrote and

demanded the immediate discharge of its author, announcing that they

would never copy another line from the Enterprise, or exchange with it,

or have further relations with a paper that had Mark Twain on its staff.

Citizens were mad, too, and cut off their subscriptions.  The joker was

in despair.



"Oh, Joe," he said, "I have ruined your business, and the only reparation

I can make is to resign.  You can never recover from this blow while I am

on the paper."



"Nonsense," replied Goodman.  "We can furnish the people with news, but

we can't supply them with sense.  Only time can do that.  The flurry will

pass.  You just go ahead.  We'll win out in the long run."



But the offender was in torture; he could not sleep.  "Dan, Dan," he

said, "I am being burned alive on both sides of the mountains."



"Mark," said Dan.  "It will all blow over.  This item of yours will be

remembered and talked about when the rest of your Enterprise work is

forgotten."



Both Goodman and De Quille were right.  In a month papers and people had

forgotten their humiliation and laughed.  "The Dutch Nick Massacre" gave

to its perpetrator and to the Enterprise an added vogue.



--[For full text of the "Dutch Nick" hoax see Appendix C, at the end of

last volume: also, for an anecdote concerning a reporting excursion made

by Alf. Doten and Mark Twain.]--









XLII



REPORTORIAL DAYS



Reference has already been made to the fashion among Virginia City papers

of permitting reporters to use the editorial columns for ridicule of one

another.  This custom was especially in vogue during the period when Dan

de Quille and Mark Twain and The Unreliable were the shining journalistic

lights of the Comstock.  Scarcely a week went by that some apparently

venomous squib or fling or long burlesque assault did not appear either

in the Union or the Enterprise, with one of those jokers as its author

and another as its target.  In one of his "home" letters of that year

Mark Twain says:



     I have just finished writing up my report for the morning paper and

     giving The Unreliable a column of advice about how to conduct

     himself in church.



The advice was such as to call for a reprisal, but it apparently made no

difference in personal relations, for a few weeks later he is with The

Unreliable in San Francisco, seeing life in the metropolis, fairly

swimming in its delights, unable to resist reporting them to his mother.



     We fag ourselves completely out every day and go to sleep without

     rocking every night.  When I go down Montgomery Street shaking hands

     with Tom, Dick, and Harry, it is just like being on Main Street in

     Hannibal and meeting the old familiar faces.  I do hate to go back

     to Washoe.  We take trips across the bay to Oakland, and down to San

     Leandro and Alameda, and we go out to the Willows and Hayes Park and

     Fort Point, and up to Benicia; and yesterday we were invited out on

     a yachting excursion, and had a sail in the fastest yacht on the

     Pacific coast.  Rice says: "Oh no--we are not having any fun, Mark--

     oh no--I reckon it's somebody else--it's probably the gentleman in

     the wagon" (popular slang phrase), and when I invite Rice to the

     Lick House to dinner the proprietor sends us champagne and claret,

     and then we do put on the most disgusting airs.  The Unreliable says

     our caliber is too light--we can't stand it to be noticed.



Three days later he adds that he is going sorrowfully "to the snows and

the deserts of Washoe," but that he has "lived like a lord to make up for

two years of privation."



Twenty dollars is inclosed in each of these letters, probably as a bribe

to Jane Clemens to be lenient with his prodigalities, which in his

youthful love of display he could not bring himself to conceal.  But

apparently the salve was futile, for in another letter, a month later, he

complains that his mother is "slinging insinuations" at him again, such

as "where did you get that money" and "the company I kept in San

Francisco."  He explains:



     Why, I sold Wild Cat mining ground that was given me, and my credit

     was always good at the bank for $2,000 or $3,000, and I never gamble

     in any shape or manner, and never drink anything stronger than

     claret and lager beer, which conduct is regarded as miraculously

     temperate in this place.  As for company, I went in the very best

     company to be found in San Francisco.  I always move in the best

     society in Virginia and have a reputation to preserve.



He closes by assuring her that he will be more careful in future and that

she need never fear but that he will keep her expenses paid.  Then he

cannot refrain from adding one more item of his lavish life:



"Put in my washing, and it costs me one hundred dollars a month to live."



De Quille had not missed the opportunity of his comrade's absence to

payoff some old scores.  At the end of the editorial column of the

Enterprise on the day following his departure he denounced the absent one

and his "protege," The Unreliable, after the intemperate fashion of the

day.



     It is to be regretted that such scrubs are ever permitted to visit

     the bay, as the inevitable effect will be to destroy that exalted

     opinion of the manners and morality of our people which was inspired

     by the conduct of our senior editor--[which is to say, Dan

     himself]--.



The diatribe closed with a really graceful poem, and the whole was no

doubt highly regarded by the Enterprise readers.



What revenge Mark Twain took on his return has not been recorded, but it

was probably prompt and adequate; or he may have left it to The

Unreliable.  It was clearly a mistake, however, to leave his own local

work in the hands of that properly named person a little later.  Clemens

was laid up with a cold, and Rice assured him on his sacred honor that he

would attend faithfully to the Enterprise locals, along with his own

Union items.  He did this, but he had been nursing old injuries too long.

What was Mark Twain's amazement on looking over the Enterprise next

morning to find under the heading "Apologetic" a statement over his own

nom de plume, purporting to be an apology for all the sins of ridicule to

the various injured ones.



     To Mayor Arick, Hon. Wm. Stewart, Marshal Perry, Hon. J. B. Winters,

     Mr. Olin, and Samuel Wetherill, besides a host of others whom we

     have ridiculed from behind the shelter of our reportorial position,

     we say to these gentlemen we acknowedge our faults, and, in all

     weakness and humility upon our bended marrow bones, we ask their

     forgiveness, promising that in future we will give them no cause for

     anything but the best of feeling toward us.  To "Young Wilson" and

     The Unreliable (as we have wickedly termed them), we feel that no

     apology we can make begins to atone for the many insults we have

     given them.  Toward these gentlemen we have been as mean as a man

     could be--and we have always prided ourselves on this base quality.

     We feel that we are the least of all humanity, as it were.  We will

     now go in sack-cloth and ashes for the next forty days.



This in his own paper over his own signature was a body blow; but it had

the effect of curing his cold.  He was back in the office forthwith, and

in the next morning's issue denounced his betrayer.



     We are to blame for giving The Unreliable an opportunity to

     misrepresent us, and therefore refrain from repining to any great

     extent at the result.  We simply claim the right to deny the truth

     of every statement made by him in yesterday's paper, to annul all

     apologies he coined as coming from us, and to hold him up to public

     commiseration as a reptile endowed with no more intellect, no more

     cultivation, no more Christian principle than animates and adorns

     the sportive jackass-rabbit of the Sierras.  We have done.



These were the things that enlivened Comstock journalism.  Once in a

boxing bout Mark Twain got a blow on the nose which caused it to swell to

an unusual size and shape.  He went out of town for a few days, during

which De Quille published an extravagant account of his misfortune,

describing the nose and dwelling on the absurdity of Mark Twain's ever

supposing himself to be a boxer.



De Quille scored heavily with this item but his own doom was written.

Soon afterward he was out riding and was thrown from his horse and

bruised considerably.



This was Mark's opportunity.  He gave an account of Dan's disaster; then,

commenting, he said:



     The idea of a plebeian like Dan supposing he could ever ride a

     horse!  He! why, even the cats and the chickens laughed when they

     saw him go by.  Of course, he would be thrown off.  Of course, any

     well-bred horse wouldn't let a common, underbred person like Dan

     stay on his back!  When they gathered him up he was just a bag of

     scraps, but they put him together, and you'll find him at his old

     place in the Enterprise office next week, still laboring under the

     delusion that he's a newspaper man.



The author of 'Roughing It' tells of a literary periodical called the

Occidental, started in Virginia City by a Mr. F.  This was the silver-

tongued Tom Fitch, of the Union, an able speaker and writer, vastly

popular on the Coast.  Fitch came to Clemens one day and said he was

thinking of starting such a periodical and asked him what he thought of

the venture.  Clemens said:



"You would succeed if any one could, but start a flower-garden on the

desert of Sahara; set up hoisting-works on Mount Vesuvius for mining

sulphur; start a literary paper in Virginia City; h--l!"



Which was a correct estimate of the situation, and the paper perished

with the third issue.  It was of no consequence except that it contained

what was probably the first attempt at that modern literary abortion, the

composite novel.  Also, it died too soon to publish Mark Twain's first

verses of any pretension, though still of modest merit--"The Aged Pilot

Man"--which were thereby saved for 'Roughing It.'



Visiting Virginia now, it seems curious that any of these things could

have happened there.  The Comstock has become little more than a memory;

Virginia and Gold Hill are so quiet, so voiceless, as to constitute

scarcely an echo of the past.  The International Hotel, that once so

splendid edifice, through whose portals the tide of opulent life then

ebbed and flowed, is all but deserted now.  One may wander at will

through its dingy corridors and among its faded fripperies, seeking in

vain for attendance or hospitality, the lavish welcome of a vanished day.

Those things were not lacking once, and the stream of wealth tossed up

and down the stair and billowed up C Street, an ebullient tide of metals

and men from which millionaires would be struck out, and individuals

known in national affairs.  William M. Stewart who would one day become a

United States Senator, was there, an unnoticed unit; and John Mackay and

James G. Fair, one a senator by and by, and both millionaires, but poor

enough then--Fair with a pick on his shoulder and Mackay, too, at first,

though he presently became a mine superintendent.  Once in those days

Mark Twain banteringly offered to trade businesses with Mackay.



"No," Mackay said, "I can't trade.  My business is not worth as much as

yours.  I have never swindled anybody, and I don't intend to begin now."



Neither of those men could dream that within ten years their names would

be international property; that in due course Nevada would propose

statues to their memory.



Such things came out of the Comstock; such things spring out of every

turbulent frontier.









XLIII



ARTEMUS WARD



Madame Caprell's warning concerning Mark Twain's health at twenty-eight

would seem to have been justified.  High-strung and neurotic, the strain

of newspaper work and the tumult of the Comstock had told on him.  As in

later life, he was subject to bronchial colds, and more than once that

year he found it necessary to drop all work and rest for a time at

Steamboat Springs, a place near Virginia City, where there were boiling

springs and steaming fissures in the mountain-side, and a comfortable

hotel.  He contributed from there sketches somewhat more literary in form

than any of his previous work.  "Curing a Cold" is a more or less

exaggerated account of his ills.



     [Included in Sketches New and Old.  "Information for the Million,"

     and "Advice to Good Little Girls," included in the "Jumping Frog"

     Collection, 1867, but omitted from the Sketches, are also believed

     to belong to this period.]



A portion of a playful letter to his mother, written from the springs,

still exists.



     You have given my vanity a deadly thrust.  Behold, I am prone to

     boast of having the widest reputation as a local editor of any man

     on the Pacific coast, and you gravely come forward and tell me "if I

     work hard and attend closely to my business, I may aspire to a place

     on a big San Francisco daily some day."  There's a comment on human

     vanity for you!  Why, blast it, I was under the impression that I

     could get such a situation as that any time I asked for it.  But I

     don't want it.  No paper in the United States can afford to pay me

     what my place on the Enterprise is worth.  If I were not naturally a

     lazy, idle, good-for-nothing vagabond, I could make it pay me

     $20,000 a year.  But I don't suppose I shall ever be any account.  I

     lead an easy life, though, and I don't care a cent whether school

     keeps or not.  Everybody knows me, and I fare like a prince wherever

     I go, be it on this side of the mountain or the other.  And I am

     proud to say I am the most conceited ass in the Territory.



     You think that picture looks old?  Well, I can't help it--in reality

     I'm not as old as I was when I was eighteen.



Which was a true statement, so far as his general attitude was concerned.

At eighteen, in New York and Philadelphia, his letters had been grave,

reflective, advisory.  Now they were mostly banter and froth, lightly

indifferent to the serious side of things, though perhaps only

pretendedly so, for the picture did look old.  From the shock and

circumstance of his brother's death he--had never recovered.  He was

barely twenty-eight.  From the picture he might have been a man of forty.



It was that year that Artemus Ward (Charles F. Browne) came to Virginia

City.  There was a fine opera-house in Virginia, and any attraction that

billed San Francisco did not fail to play to the Comstock.  Ward intended

staying only a few days to deliver his lectures, but the whirl of the

Comstock caught him like a maelstrom, and he remained three weeks.



He made the Enterprise office his headquarters, and fairly reveled in the

company he found there.  He and Mark Twain became boon companions.  Each

recognized in the other a kindred spirit.  With Goodman, De Quille, and

McCarthy, also E. E. Hingston--Ward's agent, a companionable fellow--they

usually dined at Chaumond's, Virginia's high-toned French restaurant.



Those were three memorable weeks in Mark Twain's life.  Artemus Ward was

in the height of his fame, and he encouraged his new-found brother-

humorist and prophesied great things of him.  Clemens, on his side,

measured himself by this man who had achieved fame, and perhaps with good

reason concluded that Ward's estimate was correct, that he too could win

fame and honor, once he got a start.  If he had lacked ambition before

Ward's visit, the latter's unqualified approval inspired him with that

priceless article of equipment.  He put his soul into entertaining the

visitor during those three weeks; and it was apparent to their associates

that he was at least Ward's equal in mental stature and originality.

Goodman and the others began to realize that for Mark Twain the rewards

of the future were to be measured only by his resolution and ability to

hold out.  On Christmas eve Artemus lectured in Silver City and afterward

came to the Enterprise office to give the boys a farewell dinner.  The

Enterprise always published a Christmas carol, and Goodman sat at his

desk writing it.  He was just finishing as Ward came in:



"Slave, slave," said Artemus.  "Come out and let me banish care from

you."



They got the boys and all went over to Chaumond's, where Ward commanded

Goodman to order the dinner.  When the cocktails came on, Artemus lifted

his glass and said:



"I give you Upper Canada."



The company rose, drank the toast in serious silence; then Goodman said:



"Of course, Artemus, it's all right, but why did you give us Upper

Canada?"



"Because I don't want it myself," said Ward, gravely.



Then began a rising tide of humor that could hardly be matched in the

world to-day.  Mark Twain had awakened to a fuller power; Artemus Ward

was in his prime.  They were giants of a race that became extinct when

Mark Twain died.  The youth, the wine, the whirl of lights and life, the

tumult of the shouting street-it was as if an electric stream of

inspiration poured into those two human dynamos and sent them into a

dazzling, scintillating whirl.  All gone--as evanescent, as forgotten, as

the lightnings of that vanished time; out of that vast feasting and

entertainment only a trifling morsel remains.  Ward now and then asked

Goodman why he did not join in the banter.  Goodman said:



"I'm preparing a joke, Artemus, but I'm keeping it for the present."



It was near daybreak when Ward at last called for the bill.  It was two

hundred and thirty-seven dollars.



"What"' exclaimed Artemus.



"That's my joke."  said Goodman.



"But I was only exclaiming because it was not twice as much," returned

Ward.



He paid it amid laughter, and they went out into the early morning air.

It was fresh and fine outside, not yet light enough to see clearly.

Artemus threw his face up to the sky and said:



"I feel glorious.  I feel like walking on the roofs."



Virginia was built on the steep hillside, and the eaves of some of the

houses almost touched the ground behind them.



"There is your chance, Artemus," Goodman said, pointing to a row of these

houses all about of a height.



Artemus grabbed Mark Twain, and they stepped out upon the long string of

roofs and walked their full length, arm in arm.  Presently the others

noticed a lonely policeman cocking his revolver and getting ready to aim

in their direction.  Goodman called to him:



"Wait a minute.  What are you going to do?"



"I'm going to shoot those burglars," he said.



"Don't for your life.  Those are not burglars.  That's Mark Twain and

Artemus Ward."



The roof-walkers returned, and the party went down the street to a corner

across from the International Hotel.  A saloon was there with a barrel

lying in front, used, perhaps for a sort of sign.  Artemus climbed

astride the barrel, and somebody brought a beer-glass and put it in his

hand.  Virginia City looks out over the Eastward Desert.  Morning was

just breaking upon the distant range-the scene as beautiful as when the

sunrise beams across the plain of Memnon.  The city was not yet awake.

The only living creatures in sight were the group of belated diners, with

Artemus Ward, as King Gambrinus, pouring a libation to the sunrise.



That was the beginning of a week of glory.  The farewell dinner became a

series.  At the close of one convivial session Artemus went to a concert-

hall, the "Melodeon," blacked his face, and delivered a speech.  He got

away from Virginia about the close of the year.



A day or two later he wrote from Austin, Nevada, to his new-found comrade

as "My dearest Love," recalling the happiness of his stay:



"I shall always remember Virginia as a bright spot in my existence, as

all others must or rather cannot be, as it were."



Then reflectively he adds:



"Some of the finest intellects in the world have been blunted by liquor."



Rare Artemus Ward and rare Mark Twain!  If there lies somewhere a place

of meeting and remembrance, they have not failed to recall there those

closing days of '63.









XLIV



GOVERNOR OF THE "THIRD HOUSE"



With Artemus Ward's encouragement, Clemens began to think of extending

his audience eastward.  The New York Sunday Mercury published literary

matter.  Ward had urged him to try this market, and promised to write a

special letter to the editors, introducing Mark Twain and his work.

Clemens prepared a sketch of the Comstock variety, scarcely refined in

character and full of personal allusion, a humor not suited to the

present-day reader.  Its general subject was children; it contained some

absurd remedies, supposedly sent to his old pilot friend Zeb Leavenworth,

and was written as much for a joke on that good-natured soul as for

profit or reputation.



"I wrote it especially for Beck Jolly's use," the author declares, in a

letter to his mother, "so he could pester Zeb with it."



We cannot know to-day whether Zeb was pestered or not.  A faded clipping

is all that remains of the incident.  As literature the article, properly

enough, is lost to the world at large.  It is only worth remembering as

his metropolitan beginning.  Yet he must have thought rather highly of it

(his estimation of his own work was always unsafe), for in the letter

above quoted he adds:



     I cannot write regularly for the Mercury, of course, I sha'n't have

     time.  But sometimes I throw off a pearl (there is no self-conceit

     about that, I beg you to observe) which ought for the eternal

     welfare of my race to have a more extensive circulation than is

     afforded by a local daily paper.



     And if Fitzhugh Ludlow (author of the 'Hasheesh Eater') comes your

     way, treat him well.  He published a high encomium upon Mark Twain

     (the same being eminently just and truthful, I beseech you to

     believe) in a San Francisco paper.  Artemus Ward said that when my

     gorgeous talents were publicly acknowledged by such high authority I

     ought to appreciate them myself, leave sage-brush obscurity, and

     journey to New York with him, as he wanted me to do.  But I

     preferred not to burst upon the New York public too suddenly and

     brilliantly, so I concluded to remain here.



He was in Carson City when this was written, preparing for the opening of

the next legislature.  He was beyond question now the most conspicuous

figure of the capital; also the most wholesomely respected, for his

influence had become very large.  It was said that he could control more

votes than any legislative member, and with his friends, Simmons and

Clagget, could pass or defeat any bill offered.  The Enterprise was a

powerful organ--to be courted and dreaded--and Mark Twain had become its

chief tribune.  That he was fearless, merciless, and incorruptible,

without doubt had a salutary influence on that legislative session.  He

reveled in his power; but it is not recorded that he ever abused it.  He

got a bill passed, largely increasing Orion's official fees, but this was

a crying need and was so recognized.  He made no secret promises, none at

all that he did not intend to fulfill.  "Sam's word was as fixed as

fate," Orion records, and it may be added that he was morally as

fearless.



The two Houses of the last territorial legislature of Nevada assembled

January 12, 1864.--[Nevada became a State October 31, 1864.]--



A few days later a "Third House" was organized--an institution quite in

keeping with the happy atmosphere of that day and locality, for it was a

burlesque organization, and Mark Twain was selected as its "Governor."



The new House prepared to make a public occasion of this first session,

and its Governor was required to furnish a message.  Then it was decided

to make it a church benefit.  The letters exchanged concerning this

proposition still exist; they explain themselves:



                              CARSON CITY, January 23, 1864.



     GOV. MARK TWAIN, Understanding from certain members of the Third

     House of the territorial Legislature that that body will have

     effected a permanent organization within a day or two, and be ready

     for the reception of your Third Annual Message,--[ There had been

     no former message.  This was regarded as a great joke.]--we desire

     to ask your permission, and that of the Third House, to turn the

     affair to the benefit of the Church by charging toll-roads,

     franchises, and other persons a dollar apiece for the privilege of

     listening to your communication.

                              S. PIXLEY,

                              G. A. SEARS,

                                        Trustees.





                              CARSON CITY, January 23, 1864.



     GENTLEMEN,--Certainly.  If the public can find anything in a grave

     state paper worth paying a dollar for, I am willing they should pay

     that amount, or any other; and although I am not a very dusty

     Christian myself, I take an absorbing interest in religious affairs,

     and would willingly inflict my annual message upon the Church itself

     if it might derive benefit thereby.  You can charge what you please;

     I promise the public no amusement, but I do promise a reasonable

     amount of instruction.  I am responsible to the Third House only,

     and I hope to be permitted to make it exceedingly warm for that

     body, without caring whether the sympathies of the public and the

     Church be enlisted in their favor, and against myself, or not.

                              Respectfully,

                              MARK TWAIN.





Mark Twain's reply is closely related to his later style in phrase and

thought.  It might have been written by him at almost any subsequent

period.  Perhaps his association with Artemus Ward had awakened a new

perception of the humorous idea--a humor of repression, of

understatement.  He forgot this often enough, then and afterward, and

gave his riotous fancy free rein; but on the whole the simpler, less

florid form seemingly began to attract him more and more.



His address as Governor of the Third House has not been preserved, but

those who attended always afterward referred to it as the "greatest

effort of his life."  Perhaps for that audience and that time this

verdict was justified.



It was his first great public opportunity.  On the stage about him sat

the membership of the Third House; the building itself was packed, the

aisles full.  He knew he could let himself go in burlesque and satire,

and he did.  He was unsparing in his ridicule of the Governor, the

officials in general, the legislative members, and of individual

citizens.  From the beginning to the end of his address the audience was

in a storm of laughter and applause.  With the exception of the dinner

speech made to the printers in Keokuk, it was his first public utterance

--the beginning of a lifelong series of triumphs.



Only one thing marred his success.  Little Carrie Pixley, daughter of one

of the "trustees," had promised to be present and sit in a box next the

stage.  It was like him to be fond of the child, and he had promised to

send a carriage for her.  Often during his address he glanced toward the

box; but it remained empty.  When the affair was ended, he drove home

with her father to inquire the reason.  They found the little girl, in

all her finery, weeping on the bed.  Then he remembered he had forgotten

to send the carriage; and that was like him, too.



For his Third House address Judge A. W. (Sandy) Baldwin and Theodore

Winters presented him with a gold watch inscribed to "Governor Mark

Twain."  He was more in demand now than ever; no social occasion was

regarded as complete without him.  His doings were related daily and his

sayings repeated on the streets.  Most of these things have passed away

now, but a few are still recalled with smiles.  Once, when conundrums

were being asked at a party, he was urged to make one.



"Well," he sand, "why am I like the Pacific Ocean?"



Several guesses were made, but none satisfied him.  Finally all gave it

up.



"Tell us, Mark, why are you like the Pacific Ocean?"



"I don't know," he drawled.  "I was just asking for information."



At another time, when a young man insisted on singing a song of eternal

length, the chorus of which was, "I'm going home, I'm going home, I'm

going home tomorrow," Mark Twain put his head in the window and said,

pleadingly:



"For God's sake go to-night."



But he was also fond of quieter society.  Sometimes, after the turmoil of

a legislative morning, he would drop in to Miss Keziah Clapp's school and

listen to the exercises, or would call on Colonel Curry--"old Curry, old

Abe Curry"--and if the colonel happened to be away, he would talk with

Mrs. Curry, a motherly soul (still alive at ninety-three, in 1910), and

tell her of his Hannibal boyhood or his river and his mining adventures,

and keep her laughing until the tears ran.



He was a great pedestrian in those days.  Sometimes he walked from

Virginia to Carson, stopping at Colonel Curry's as he came in for rest

and refreshment.



"Mrs. Curry," he said once, "I have seen tireder men than I am, and

lazier men, but they were dead men."  He liked the home feeling there--

the peace and motherly interest.  Deep down, he was lonely and homesick;

he was always so away from his own kindred.



Clemens returned now to Virginia City, and, like all other men who ever

met her, became briefly fascinated by the charms of Adah Isaacs Menken,

who was playing Mazeppa at the Virginia Opera House.  All men--kings,

poets, priests, prize-fighters--fell under Menken's spell.  Dan de Quille

and Mark Twain entered into a daily contest as to who could lavish the

most fervid praise on her in the Enterprise.  The latter carried her his

literary work to criticize.  He confesses this in one of his home

letters, perhaps with a sort of pride.



I took it over to show to Miss Menken the actress, Orpheus C. Ken's wife.

She is a literary cuss herself.



She has a beautiful white hand, but her handwriting is infamous; she

writes fast and her chirography is of the door-plate order--her letters

are immense.  I gave her a conundrum, thus:



"My dear madam, why ought your hand to retain its present grace and

beauty always?  Because you fool away devilish little of it on your

manuscript."



But Menken was gone presently, and when he saw her again, somewhat later,

in San Francisco, his "madness" would have seemed to have been allayed.









XLV



A COMSTOCK DUEL



The success--such as it was--of his occasional contributions to the New

York Sunday Mercury stirred Mark Twain's ambition for a wider field of

labor.  Circumstance, always ready to meet his wishes, offered

assistance, though in an unexpected form.



Goodman, temporarily absent, had left Clemens in editorial charge.  As in

that earlier day, when Orion had visited Tennessee and returned to find

his paper in a hot personal warfare with certain injured citizens, so the

Enterprise, under the same management, had stirred up trouble.  It was

just at the time of the "Flour Sack Sanitary Fund," the story of which is

related at length in 'Roughing It'.  In the general hilarity of this

occasion, certain Enterprise paragraphs of criticism or ridicule had

incurred the displeasure of various individuals whose cause naturally

enough had been espoused by a rival paper, the Chronicle.  Very soon the

original grievance, whatever it was, was lost sight of in the fireworks

and vitriol-throwing of personal recrimination between Mark Twain and the

Chronicle editor, then a Mr. Laird.



A point had been reached at length when only a call for bloodshed--a

challenge--could satisfy either the staff or the readers of the two

papers.  Men were killed every week for milder things than the editors

had spoken each of the other.  Joe Goodman himself, not so long before,

had fought a duel with a Union editor--Tom Fitch--and shot him in the

leg, so making of him a friend, and a lame man, for life.  In Joe's

absence the prestige of the paper must be maintained.



Mark Twain himself has told in burlesque the story of his duel, keeping

somewhat nearer to the fact than was his custom in such writing, as may

be seen by comparing it with the account of his abettor and second--of

course, Steve Gillis.  The account is from Mr. Gillis's own hand:



     When Joe went away, he left Sam in editorial charge of the paper.

     That was a dangerous thing to do.  Nobody could ever tell what Sam

     was going to write.  Something he said stirred up Mr. Laird, of the

     Chronicle, who wrote a reply of a very severe kind.  He said some

     things that we told Mark could only be wiped out with blood.  Those

     were the days when almost every man in Virginia City had fought with

     pistols either impromptu or premeditated duels.  I had been in

     several, but then mine didn't count.  Most of them were of the

     impromptu kind.  Mark hadn't had any yet, and we thought it about

     time that his baptism took place.



     He was not eager for it; he was averse to violence, but we finally

     prevailed upon him to send Laird a challenge, and when Laird did not

     send a reply at once we insisted on Mark sending him another

     challenge, by which time he had made himself believe that he really

     wanted to fight, as much as we wanted him to do.  Laird concluded to

     fight, at last.  I helped Mark get up some of the letters, and a man

     who would not fight after such letters did not belong in Virginia

     City--in those days.



     Laird's acceptance of Mark's challenge came along about midnight, I

     think, after the papers had gone to press.  The meeting was to take

     place next morning at sunrise.



     Of course I was selected as Mark's second, and at daybreak I had him

     up and out for some lessons in pistol practice before meeting Laird.

     I didn't have to wake him.  He had not been asleep.  We had been

     talking since midnight over the duel that was coming.  I had been

     telling him of the different duels in which I had taken part, either

     as principal or second, and how many men I had helped to kill and

     bury, and how it was a good plan to make a will, even if one had not

     much to leave.  It always looked well, I told him, and seemed to be

     a proper thing to do before going into a duel.  So Mark made a will

     with a sort of gloomy satisfaction, and as soon as it was light

     enough to see, we went out to a little ravine near the meeting-

     place, and I set up a board for him to shoot at.  He would step out,

     raise that big pistol, and when I would count three he would shut

     his eyes and pull the trigger.  Of course he didn't hit anything; he

     did not come anywhere near hitting anything.  Just then we heard

     somebody shooting over in the next ravine.  Sam said:



     "What's that, Steve?"



     "Why," I said, "that's Laud.  His seconds are practising him over

     there."



     It didn't make my principal any more cheerful to hear that pistol go

     off every few seconds over there.  Just then I saw a little mud-hen

     light on some sage-brush about thirty yards away.



     "Mark," I said, "let me have that pistol.  I'll show you how to

     shoot."



     He handed it to me, and I let go at the bird and shot its head off,

     clean.  About that time Laird and his second came over the ridge to

     meet us.  I saw them coming and handed Mark back the pistol.  We

     were looking at the bird when they came up.



     "Who did that?" asked Laird's second.



     "Sam," I said.



     "How far off was it?"



     "Oh, about thirty yards."



     "Can he do it again?"



     "Of course," I said; "every time.  He could do it twice that far."



     Laud's second turned to his principal.



     "Laird," he said, "you don't want to fight that man.  It's just like

     suicide.  You'd better settle this thing, now."



     So there was a settlement.  Laird took back all he had said; Mark

     said he really had nothing against Laird--the discussion had been

     purely journalistic and did not need to be settled in blood.  He

     said that both he and Laird were probably the victims of their

     friends.  I remember one of the things Laird said when his second

     told him he had better not fight.



     "Fight!  H--l, no!  I am not going to be murdered by that d--d

     desperado."



     Sam had sent another challenge to a man named Cutler, who had been

     somehow mixed up with the muss and had written Sam an insulting

     letter; but Cutler was out of town at the time, and before he got

     back we had received word from Jerry Driscoll, foreman of the Grand

     jury, that the law just passed, making a duel a penitentiary offense

     for both principal and second, was to be strictly enforced, and

     unless we got out of town in a limited number of hours we would be

     the first examples to test the new law.



We concluded to go, and when the stage left next morning for San

Francisco we were on the outside seat.  Joe Goodman had returned by this

time and agreed to accompany us as far as Henness Pass.  We were all in

good spirits and glad we were alive, so Joe did not stop when he got to

Henness Pass, but kept on.  Now and then he would say, "Well, I had

better be going back pretty soon," but he didn't go, and in the end he

did not go back at all, but went with us clear to San Francisco, and we

had a royal good time all the way.  I never knew any series of duels to

close so happily.



So ended Mark Twain's career on the Comstock.  He had come to it a weary

pilgrim, discouraged and unknown; he was leaving it with a new name and

fame--elate, triumphant, even if a fugitive.









XLVI



GETTING SETTLED IN SAN FRANCISCO



This was near the end of May, 1864.  The intention of both Gillis and

Clemens was to return to the States; but once in San Francisco both

presently accepted places, Clemens as reporter and Gillis as compositor,

on the 'Morning Call'.



From 'Roughing It' the reader gathers that Mark Twain now entered into a

life of butterfly idleness on the strength of prospective riches to be

derived from the "half a trunkful of mining stocks," and that presently,

when the mining bubble exploded, he was a pauper.  But a good many

liberties have been taken with the history of this period.  Undoubtedly

he expected opulent returns from his mining stocks, and was disappointed,

particularly in an investment in Hale and Norcross shares, held too long

for the large profit which could have been made by selling at the proper

time.



The fact is, he spent not more than a few days--a fortnight at most--in

"butterfly idleness," at the Lick House before he was hard at work on the

'Call', living modestly with Steve Gillis in the quietest place they

could find, never quiet enough, but as far as possible from dogs and cats

and chickens and pianos, which seemed determined to make the mornings

hideous, when a weary night reporter and compositor wanted to rest.  They

went out socially, on occasion, arrayed in considerable elegance; but

their recreations were more likely to consist of private midnight orgies,

after the paper had gone to press--mild dissipations in whatever they

could find to eat at that hour, with a few glasses of beer, and perhaps a

game of billiards or pool in some all-night resort.  A printer by the

name of Ward--"Little Ward,"--[L. P. Ward; well known as an athlete in

San Francisco.  He lost his mind and fatally shot himself in 1903.]--

they called him--often went with them for these refreshments.  Ward and

Gillis were both bantam game-cocks, and sometimes would stir up trouble

for the very joy of combat.  Clemens never cared for that sort of thing

and discouraged it, but Ward and Gillis were for war.  "They never

assisted each other.  If one had offered to assist the other against some

overgrown person, it would have been an affront, and a battle would have

followed between that pair of little friends."--[S. L. C., 1906.]--

Steve Gillis in particular, was fond of incidental encounters, a

characteristic which would prove an important factor somewhat later in

shaping Mark Twain's career.  Of course, the more strenuous nights were

not frequent.  Their home-going was usually tame enough and they were

glad enough to get there.



Clemens, however, was never quite ready for sleep.  Then, as ever, he

would prop himself up in bed, light his pipe, and lose himself in English

or French history until sleep conquered.  His room-mate did not approve

of this habit; it interfered with his own rest, and with his fiendish

tendency to mischief he found reprisal in his own fashion.  Knowing his

companion's highly organized nervous system he devised means of torture

which would induce him to put out the light.  Once he tied a nail to a

string; an arrangement which he kept on the floor behind the bed.

Pretending to be asleep, he would hold the end of the string, and lift it

gently up and down, making a slight ticking sound on the floor, maddening

to a nervous man.  Clemens would listen a moment and say:



"What in the nation is that noise"



Gillis's pretended sleep and the ticking would continue.



Clemens would sit up in bed, fling aside his book, and swear violently.



"Steve, what is that d--d noise?" he would say.



Steve would pretend to rouse sleepily.



"What's the matter, Sam?  What noise?  Oh, I guess that is one of those

death-ticks; they don't like the light.  Maybe it will stop in a minute."



It usually did stop about that time, and the reading would be apt to

continue.  But no sooner was there stillness than it began again--tick,

tick, tick.  With a wild explosion of blasphemy, the book would go across

the floor and the light would disappear.  Sometimes, when he couldn't

sleep, he would dress and walk out in the street for an hour, while the

cruel Steve slept like the criminal that he was.



At last, one night, he overdid the thing and was caught.  His tortured

room-mate at first reviled him, then threatened to kill him, finally put

him to shame.  It was curious, but they always loved each other, those

two; there was never anything resembling an estrangement, and to his last

days Mark Twain never could speak of Steve Gillis without tenderness.



They moved a great many times in San Francisco.  Their most satisfactory

residence was on a bluff on California Street.  Their windows looked down

on a lot of Chinese houses--"tin-can houses," they were called--small

wooden shanties covered with beaten-out cans.  Steve and Mark would look

down on these houses, waiting until all the Chinamen were inside; then

one of them would grab an empty beer-bottle, throw it down on those tin

can roofs, and dodge behind the blinds.  The Chinamen would swarm out and

look up at the row of houses on the edge of the bluff, shake their fists,

and pour out Chinese vituperation.  By and by, when they had retired and

everything was quiet again, their tormentors would throw another bottle.

This was their Sunday amusement.



At a place on Minna Street they lived with a private family.  At first

Clemens was delighted.



"Just look at it, Steve," he said.  "What a nice, quiet place.  Not a

thing to disturb us."



But next morning a dog began to howl.  Gillis woke this time, to find his

room-mate standing in the door that opened out into a back garden,

holding a big revolver, his hand shaking with cold and excitement.



"Came here, Steve," he said.  "Come here and kill him.  I'm so chilled

through I can't get a bead on him."



"Sam," said Steve, "don't shoot him.  Just swear at him.  You can easily

kill him at that range with your profanity."



Steve Gillis declares that Mark Twain then let go such a scorching,

singeing blast that the brute's owner sold him next day for a Mexican

hairless dog.



We gather that they moved, on an average, about once a month.  A home

letter of September 25, 1864, says:



     We have been here only four months, yet we have changed our lodging

     five times.  We are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have

     no fault to find with the rooms or the people.  We are the only

     lodgers-in a well-to-do private family .  .  .  .  But I need change

     and must move again.



This was the Minna Street place--the place of the dog.  In the same

letter he mentions having made a new arrangement with the Call, by which

he is to receive twenty-five dollars a week, with no more night-work; he

says further that he has closed with the Californian for weekly articles

at twelve dollars each.









XLVII



BOHEMIAN DAYS



Mark Twain's position on the 'Call' was uncongenial from the start.  San

Francisco was a larger city than Virginia; the work there was necessarily

more impersonal, more a routine of news-gathering and drudgery.  He once

set down his own memories of it:



     At nine in the morning I had to be at the police court for an hour

     and make a brief history of the squabbles of the night before.  They

     were usually between Irishmen and Irishmen, and Chinamen and

     Chinamen, with now and then a squabble between the two races, for a

     change.



     During the rest of the day we raked the town from end to end,

     gathering such material as we might, wherewith to fill our required

     columns; and if there were no fires to report, we started some.  At

     night we visited the six theaters, one after the other, seven nights

     in the week.  We remained in each of those places five minutes, got

     the merest passing glimpse of play and opera, and with that for a

     text we "wrote up" those plays and operas, as the phrase goes,

     torturing our souls every night in the effort to find something to

     say about those performances which we had not said a couple of

     hundred times before.



     It was fearful drudgery-soulless drudgery--and almost destitute of

     interest.  It was an awful slavery for a lazy man.



On the Enterprise he had been free, with a liberty that amounted to

license.  He could write what he wished, and was personally responsible

to the readers.  On the Call he was simply a part of a news-machine;

restricted by a policy, the whole a part of a still greater machine--

politics.  Once he saw some butchers set their dogs on an unoffending

Chinaman, a policeman looking on with amused interest.  He wrote an

indignant article criticizing the city government and raking the police.

In Virginia City this would have been a welcome delight; in San Francisco

it did not appear.



At another time he found a policeman asleep on his beat.  Going to a

near-by vegetable stall he borrowed a large cabbage-leaf, came back and

stood over the sleeper, gently fanning him.  It would be wasted effort to

make an item of this incident; but he could publish it in his own

fashion.  He stood there fanning the sleeping official until a large

crowd collected.  When he thought it was large enough he went away.  Next

day the joke was all over the city.



Only one of the several severe articles he wrote criticizing officials

and institutions seems to have appeared--an attack on an undertaker whose

establishment formed a branch of the coroner's office.  The management of

this place one day refused information to a Call reporter, and the next

morning its proprietor was terrified by a scathing denunciation of his

firm.  It began, "Those body-snatchers" and continued through half a

column of such scorching strictures as only Mark Twain could devise.  The

Call's policy of suppression evidently did not include criticisms of

deputy coroners.



Such liberty, however, was too rare for Mark Twain, and he lost interest.

He confessed afterward that he became indifferent and lazy, and that

George E. Barnes, one of the publishers of the Call, at last allowed him

an assistant.  He selected from the counting-room a big, hulking youth by

the name of McGlooral, with the acquired prefix of "Smiggy."  Clemens had

taken a fancy to Smiggy McGlooral--on account of his name and size

perhaps--and Smiggy, devoted to his patron, worked like a slave gathering

news nights--daytimes, too, if necessary--all of which was demoralizing

to a man who had small appetite for his place anyway.  It was only a

question of time when Smiggy alone would be sufficient for the job.



There were other and pleasanter things in San Francisco.  The personal

and literary associations were worth while.  At his right hand in the

Call office sat Frank Soule--a gentle spirit--a graceful versifier who

believed himself a poet.  Mark Twain deferred to Frank Soule in those

days.  He thought his verses exquisite in their workmanship; a word of

praise from Soule gave him happiness.  In a luxurious office up-stairs

was another congenial spirit--a gifted, handsome fellow of twenty-four,

who was secretary of the Mint, and who presently became editor of a new

literary weekly, the Californian, which Charles Henry Webb had founded.

This young man's name was Francis Bret Harte, originally from Albany,

later a miner and school-teacher on the Stanislaus, still later a

compositor, finally a contributor, on the Golden Era.  His fame scarcely

reached beyond San Francisco as yet; but among the little coterie of

writing folk that clustered about the Era office his rank was high.  Mark

Twain fraternized with Bret Harte and the Era group generally.  He felt

that he had reached the land--or at least the borderland--of Bohemia,

that Ultima Thule of every young literary dream.



San Francisco did, in fact, have a very definite literary atmosphere and

a literature of its own.  Its coterie of writers had drifted from here

and there, but they had merged themselves into a California body-poetic,

quite as individual as that of Cambridge, even if less famous, less

fortunate in emoluments than the Boston group.  Joseph E. Lawrence,

familiarly known as "Joe" Lawrence, was editor of the Golden Era,--[The

Golden Era, California's first literary publication, was founded by

Rollin M.  Daggett and J. McDonough Foard in 1852.]--and his kindness

and hospitality were accounted sufficient rewards even when his pecuniary

acknowledgments were modest enough.  He had a handsome office, and the

literati, local and visiting, used to gather there.  Names that would be

well known later were included in that little band.  Joaquin Miller

recalls from an old diary, kept by him then, having seen Adah Isaacs

Menken, Prentice Mulford, Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, Fitzhugh

Ludlow, Mark Twain, Orpheus C. Kerr, Artemus Ward, Gilbert Densmore,

W. S. Kendall, and Mrs. Hitchcock assembled there at one time.  The Era

office would seem to have been a sort of Mount Olympus, or Parnassus,

perhaps; for these were mainly poets, who had scarcely yet attained to

the dignity of gods.  Miller was hardly more than a youth then, and this

grand assemblage impressed him, as did the imposing appointments of the

place.



     The Era rooms were elegant--[he says]--,the most grandly carpeted

     and most gorgeously furnished that I have ever seen.  Even now in my

     memory they seem to have been simply palatial.  I have seen the

     world well since then--all of its splendors worth seeing--yet those

     carpeted parlors, with Joe Lawrence and his brilliant satellites,

     outshine all things else, as I turn to look back.



More than any other city west of the Alleghanies, San Francisco has

always been a literary center; and certainly that was a remarkable group

to be out there under the sunset, dropped down there behind the Sierras,

which the transcontinental railway would not climb yet, for several

years.  They were a happy-hearted, aspiring lot, and they got as much as

five dollars sometimes for an Era article, and were as proud of it as if

it had been a great deal more.  They felt that they were creating

literature, as they were, in fact; a new school of American letters

mustered there.



Mark Twain and Bret Harte were distinctive features of this group.  They

were already recognized by their associates as belonging in a class by

themselves, though as yet neither had done any of the work for which he

would be remembered later.  They were a good deal together, and it was

when Harte was made editor of the Californian that Mark Twain was put on

the weekly staff at the then unexampled twelve-dollar rate.  The

Californian made larger pretensions than the Era, and perhaps had a

heavier financial backing.  With Mark Twain on the staff and Bret Harte

in the chair, himself a frequent contributor, it easily ranked as first

of San Francisco periodicals.  A number of the sketches collected by Webb

later, in Mark Twain's first little volume, the Celebrated Jumping Frog,

Etc., appeared in the Era or Californian in 1864 and 1865.  They were

smart, bright, direct, not always refined, but probably the best humor of

the day.  Some of them are still preserved in this volume of sketches.

They are interesting in what they promise, rather than in what they

present, though some of them are still delightful enough.  "The Killing

of Julius Caesar Localized" is an excellent forerunner of his burlesque

report of a gladiatorial combat in The Innocents Abroad.  The Answers to

Correspondents, with his vigorous admonition of the statistical moralist,

could hardly have been better done at any later period.  The Jumping Frog

itself was not originally of this harvest.  It has a history of its own,

as we shall see a little further along.



The reportorial arrangement was of brief duration.  Even the great San

Francisco earthquake of that day did not awaken in Mark Twain any

permanent enthusiasm for the drudgery of the 'Call'.  He had lost

interest, and when Mark Twain lost interest in a subject or an

undertaking that subject or that undertaking were better dead, so far as

he was concerned.  His conclusion of service with the Call was certain,

and he wondered daily why it was delayed so long.  The connection had

become equally unsatisfactory to proprietor and employee.  They had a

heart-to-heart talk presently, with the result that Mark Twain was free.

He used to claim, in after-years, with his usual tendency to confess the

worst of himself, that he was discharged, and the incident has been

variously told.  George Barnes himself has declared that Clemens resigned

with great willingness.  It is very likely that the paragraph at the end

of Chapter LVIII in 'Roughing It' presents the situation with fair

accuracy, though, as always, the author makes it as unpleasant for

himself as possible:



"At last one of the proprietors took me aside, with a charity I still

remember with considerable respect, and gave me an opportunity to resign

my berth, and so save myself the disgrace of a dismissal."



As an extreme contrast with the supposititious "butterfly idleness" of

his beginning in San Francisco, and for no other discoverable reason, he

doubtless thought it necessary, in the next chapter of that book, to

depict himself as having reached the depths of hard luck, debt, and

poverty.



"I became an adept at slinking," he says.  "I slunk from back street to

back street....  I slunk to my bed.  I had pawned everything but the

clothes I had on."



This is pure fiction.  That he occasionally found himself short of funds

is likely enough--a literary life invites that sort of thing--but that he

ever clung to a single "silver ten-cent piece," as he tells us, and

became the familiar of mendicancy, was a condition supplied altogether by

his later imagination to satisfy what he must have regarded as an

artistic need.  Almost immediately following his separation from the

'Call' he arranged with Goodman to write a daily letter for the

Enterprise, reporting San Francisco matters after his own notion with a

free hand.  His payment for this work was thirty dollars a week, and he

had an additional return from his literary sketches.  The arrangement was

an improvement both as to labor and income.



Real affluence appeared on the horizon just then, in the form of a

liberal offer for the Tennessee land.  But alas! it was from a wine-

grower who wished to turn the tract into great vineyards, and Orion had a

prohibition seizure at the moment, so the trade was not made.  Orion

further argued that the prospective purchaser would necessarily be

obliged to import horticultural labor from Europe, and that those people

might be homesick, badly treated, and consequently unhappy in those far

eastern Tennessee mountains.  Such was Orion's way.









XLVIII



THE REFUGE OF THE HILLS



Those who remember Mark Twain's Enterprise letters (they are no longer

obtainable)--[Many of these are indeed now obtainable by a simple Web

search.  D.W.]--declare them to have been the greatest series of daily

philippics ever written.  However this may be, it is certain that they

made a stir.  Goodman permitted him to say absolutely what he pleased

upon any subject.  San Francisco was fairly weltering in corruption,

official and private.  He assailed whatever came first to hand with all

the fierceness of a flaming indignation long restrained.



Quite naturally he attacked the police, and with such ferocity and

penetration that as soon as copies of the Enterprise came from Virginia

the City Hall began to boil and smoke and threaten trouble.  Martin G.

Burke, then chief of police, entered libel suit against the Enterprise,

prodigiously advertising that paper, copies of which were snatched as

soon as the stage brought them.



Mark Twain really let himself go then.  He wrote a letter that on the

outside was marked, "Be sure and let Joe see this before it goes in."

He even doubted himself whether Goodman would dare to print it, after

reading.  It was a letter describing the city's corrupt morals under the

existing police government.  It began, "The air is full of lechery, and

rumors of lechery," and continued in a strain which made even the

Enterprise printers aghast.



"You can never afford to publish that," the foreman said to, Goodman.



"Let it all go in, every word," Goodman answered.  "If Mark can stand it,

I can!"



It seemed unfortunate (at the time) that Steve Gillis should select this

particular moment to stir up trouble that would involve both himself and

Clemens with the very officials which the latter had undertaken to

punish.  Passing a saloon one night alone, Gillis heard an altercation

going on inside, and very naturally stepped in to enjoy it.  Including

the barkeeper, there were three against two.  Steve ranged himself on the

weaker side, and selected the barkeeper, a big bruiser, who, when the

fight was over, was ready for the hospital.  It turned out that he was

one of Chief Burke's minions, and Gillis was presently indicted on a

charge of assault with intent to kill.  He knew some of the officials in

a friendly way, and was advised to give a straw bond and go into

temporary retirement.  Clemens, of course, went his bail, and Steve set

out for Virginia City, until the storm blew over.



This was Burke's opportunity.  When the case was called and Gillis did

not appear, Burke promptly instituted an action against his bondsman,

with an execution against his loose property.  The watch that had been

given him as Governor of the Third House came near being thus sacrificed

in the cause of friendship, and was only saved by skilful manipulation.



Now, it was down in the chain of circumstances that Steve Gillis's

brother, James N. Gillis, a gentle-hearted hermit, a pocket-miner of the

halcyon Tuolumne district--the Truthful James of Bret Harte--happened to

be in San Francisco at this time, and invited Clemens to return with him

to the far seclusion of his cabin on Jackass Hill.  In that peaceful

retreat were always rest and refreshment for the wayfarer, and more than

one weary writer besides Bret Harte had found shelter there.  James

Gillis himself had fine literary instincts, but he remained a pocket-

miner because he loved that quiet pursuit of gold, the Arcadian life, the

companionship of his books, the occasional Bohemian pilgrim who found

refuge in his retreat.  It is said that the sick were made well, and the

well made better, in Jim Gillis's cabin on the hilltop, where the air was

nectar and the stillness like enchantment.  One could mine there if he

wished to do so; Jim would always furnish him a promising claim, and

teach him the art of following the little fan-like drift of gold specks

to the nested deposit of nuggets somewhere up the hillside.  He regularly

shared his cabin with one Dick Stoker (Dick Baker, of 'Roughing It'),

another genial soul who long ago had retired from the world to this

forgotten land, also with Dick's cat, Tom Quartz; but there was always

room for guests.



In 'Roughing It', and in a later story, "The Californian's Tale," Mark

Twain has made us acquainted with the verdant solitude of the Tuolumne

hills, that dreamy, delicious paradise where once a vast population had

gathered when placer-mining had been in its bloom, a dozen years before.

The human swarm had scattered when the washings failed to pay, leaving

only a quiet emptiness and the few pocket-miners along the Stanislaus and

among the hills.  Vast areas of that section present a strange appearance

to-day.  Long stretches there are, crowded and jammed and drifted with

ghostly white stones that stand up like fossils of a prehistoric life--

the earth deposit which once covered them entirely washed away, every

particle of it removed by the greedy hordes, leaving only this vast

bleaching drift, literally the "picked bones of the land."  At one place

stands Columbia, regarded once as a rival to Sacramento, a possible State

capital--a few tumbling shanties now--and a ruined church.



It was the 4th of December, 1864, when Mark Twain arrived at Jim Gillis's

cabin.  He found it a humble habitation made of logs and slabs, partly

sheltered by a great live-oak tree, surrounded by a stretch of grass.

It had not much in the way of pretentious furniture, but there was a

large fireplace, and a library which included the standard authors.

A younger Gillis boy, William, was there at this time, so that the family

numbered five in all, including Tom Quartz, the cat.  On rainy days they

would gather about the big, open fire and Jim Gillis, with his back to

the warmth, would relate diverting yarns, creations of his own, turned

out hot from the anvil, forged as he went along.  He had a startling

imagination, and he had fostered it in that secluded place.  His stories

usually consisted of wonderful adventures of his companion, Dick Stoker,

portrayed with humor and that serene and vagrant fancy which builds as it

goes, careless as to whither it is proceeding and whether the story shall

end well or ill, soon or late, if ever.  He always pretended that these

extravagant tales of Stoker were strictly true; and Stoker--"forty-six

and gray as a rat"--earnest, thoughtful, and tranquilly serene, would

smoke and look into the fire and listen to those astonishing things of

himself, smiling a little now and then but saying never a word.  What did

it matter to him?  He had no world outside of the cabin and the hills, no

affairs; he would live and die there; his affairs all had ended long ago.

A number of the stories used in Mark Twain's books were first told by Jim

Gillis, standing with his hands crossed behind him, back to the fire, in

the cabin on jackass Hill.  The story of Dick Baker's cat was one of

these; the jaybird and Acorn story of 'A Tramp Abroad' was another; also

the story of the "Burning Shame," and there are others.  Mark Twain had

little to add to these stories; in fact, he never could get them to sound

as well, he said, as when Jim Gillis had told them.



James Gillis's imagination sometimes led him into difficulties.  Once a

feeble old squaw came along selling some fruit that looked like green

plums.  Stoker, who knew the fruit well enough, carelessly ventured the

remark that it might be all right, but he had never heard of anybody

eating it, which set Gillis off into eloquent praises of its delights,

all of which he knew to be purely imaginary; whereupon Stoker told him if

he liked the fruit so well, to buy some of it.  There was no escape after

that; Jim had to buy some of those plums, whose acid was of the hair-

lifting aqua-fortis variety, and all the rest of the day he stewed them,

adding sugar, trying to make them palatable, tasting them now and then,

boasting meanwhile of their nectar-like deliciousness.  He gave the

others a taste by and by--a withering, corroding sup--and they derided

him and rode him down.  But Jim never weakened.  He ate that fearful

brew, and though for days his mouth was like fire he still referred to

the luscious health-giving joys of the "Californian plums."



Jackass Hill was not altogether a solitude; here and there were

neighbors.  Another pocket-miner; named Carrington, had a cabin not far

away, and a mile or two distant lived an old couple with a pair of pretty

daughters, so plump and trim and innocent, that they were called the

"Chapparal Quails."  Young men from far and near paid court to them, and

on Sunday afternoons so many horses would be tied to their front fence as

to suggest an afternoon service there.  Young "Billy" Gillis knew them,

and one Sunday morning took his brother's friend, Sam Clemens, over for a

call.  They went early, with forethought, and promptly took the girls for

a walk.  They took a long walk, and went wandering over the hills, toward

Sandy Bar and the Stanislaus--through that reposeful land which Bret

Harte would one day light with idyllic romance--and toward evening found

themselves a long way from home.  They must return by the nearest way to

arrive before dark.  One of the young ladies suggested a short cut

through the Chemisal, and they started.  But they were lost, presently,

and it was late, very late, when at last they reached the ranch.  The

mother of the "Quails" was sitting up for them, and she had something to

say.  She let go a perfect storm of general denunciation, then narrowed

the attack to Samuel Clemens as the oldest of the party.  He remained

mildly serene.



"It wasn't my fault," he ventured at last; "it was Billy Gillis's fault."



"No such thing.  You know better.  Mr. Gillis has been here often.  It

was you."



"But do you realize, ma'am, how tired and hungry we are?  Haven't you got

a bite for us to eat?"



"No, sir, not a bite--for such as you."



The offender's eyes, wandering about the room, spied something in a

corner.



"Isn't that a guitar over there?" he asked.



"Yes, sir, it is; what of it?"



The culprit walked over, and taking it up, tuned the strings a little and

struck the chords.  Then he began to sing.  He began very softly and sang

"Fly Away, Pretty Moth," then "Araby's Daughter."  He could sing very

well in those days, following with the simpler chords.  Perhaps the

mother "Quail" had known those songs herself back in the States, for her

manner grew kindlier, almost with the first notes.  When he had finished

she was the first to ask him to go on.



"I suppose you are just like all young folks," she said.  "I was young

myself once.  While you sing I'll get some supper."



She left the door to the kitchen open so that she could hear, and cooked

whatever she could find for the belated party.









XLIX



THE JUMPING FROG



It was the rainy season, the winter of 1864 and 1865, but there were many

pleasant days, when they could go pocket-hunting, and Samuel Clemens soon

added a knowledge of this fascinating science to his other acquirements.

Sometimes he worked with Dick Stoker, sometimes with one of the Gillis

boys.  He did not make his fortune at pocket-mining; he only laid its

corner-stone.  In the old note-book he kept of that sojourn we find that,

with Jim Gillis, he made a trip over into Calaveras County soon after

Christmas and remained there until after New Year's, probably

prospecting; and he records that on New Year's night, at Vallecito, he

saw a magnificent lunar rainbow in a very light, drizzling rain.  A lunax

rainbow is one of the things people seldom see.  He thought it an omen of

good-fortune.



They returned to the cabin on the hill; but later in the month, on the

they crossed over into Calaveras again, and began pocket-hunting not far

from Angel's Camp.  The note-book records that the bill of fare at the

Camp hotel consisted wholly of beans and something which bore the name of

coffee; also that the rains were frequent and heavy.



     January 27.  Same old diet--same old weather--went out to the

     pocket-claim--had to rush back.



They had what they believed to be a good claim.  Jim Gillis declared the

indications promising, and if they could only have good weather to work

it, they were sure of rich returns.  For himself, he would have been

willing to work, rain or shine.  Clemens, however, had different views on

the subject.  His part was carrying water for washing out the pans of

dirt, and carrying pails of water through the cold rain and mud was not

very fascinating work.  Dick Stoker came over before long to help.

Things went a little better then; but most of their days were spent in

the bar-room of the dilapidated tavern at Angel's Camp, enjoying the

company of a former Illinois River pilot, Ben Coon,--[This name has been

variously given as "Ros Coon," "Coon Drayton," etc.  It is given here as

set down in Mark Twain's notes, made on the spot.  Coon was not (as has

been stated) the proprietor of the hotel (which was kept by a Frenchman),

but a frequenter of it.]--a solemn, fat-witted person, who dozed by the

stove, or old slow, endless stories, without point or application.

Listeners were a boon to him, for few came and not many would stay.  To

Mark Twain and Jim Gillis, however, Ben Coon was a delight.  It was

soothing and comfortable to listen to his endless narratives, told in

that solemn way, with no suspicion of humor.  Even when his yarns had

point, he did not recognize it.  One dreary afternoon, in his slow,

monotonous fashion, he told them about a frog--a frog that had belonged

to a man named Coleman, who trained it to jump, but that failed to win a

wager because the owner of a rival frog had surreptitiously loaded the

trained jumper with shot.  The story had circulated among the camps, and

a well-known journalist, named Samuel Seabough, had already made a squib

of it, but neither Clemens nor Gillis had ever happened to hear it

before.  They thought the tale in itself amusing, and the "spectacle of a

man drifting serenely along through such a queer yarn without ever

smiling was exquisitely absurd."  When Coon had talked himself out, his

hearers played billiards on the frowsy table, and now and then one would

remark to the other:



"I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other

frog," and perhaps the other would answer:



"I ain't got no frog, but if I had a frog I'd bet you."



Out on the claim, between pails of water, Clemens, as he watched Jim

Gillis or Dick Stoker "washing," would be apt to say, "I don't see no

p'ints about that pan o' dirt that's any better'n any other pan o' dirt,"

and so they kept it up.



Then the rain would come again and interfere with their work.  One

afternoon, when Clemens and Gillis were following certain tiny-sprayed

specks of gold that were leading them to pocket--somewhere up the long

slope, the chill downpour set in.  Gillis, as usual, was washing, and

Clemens carrying water.  The "color" was getting better with every pan,

and Jim Gillis believed that now, after their long waiting, they were to

be rewarded.  Possessed with the miner's passion, he would have gone on

washing and climbing toward the precious pocket, regardless of

everything.  Clemens, however, shivering and disgusted, swore that each

pail of water was his last.  His teeth were chattering and he was wet

through.  Finally he said, in his deliberate way:



"Jim, I won't carry any more water.  This work is too disagreeable."



Gillis had just taken out a panful of dirt.



"Bring one more pail, Sam," he pleaded.



"Oh, hell, Jim, I won't do it; I'm freezing!"



"Just one more pail, Sam," he pleaded.



"No, sir, not a drop, not if I knew there were a million dollars in that

pan."



Gillis tore a page out of his note-book, and hastily posted a thirty-day

claim notice by the pan of dirt, and they set out for Angel's Camp.  It

kept on raining and storming, and they did not go back.  A few days later

a letter from Steve Gillis made Clemens decide to return to San

Francisco.  With Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker he left Angel's and walked

across the mountains to Jackass Hill in the snow-storm--"the first I ever

saw in California," he says in his notes.



In the mean time the rain had washed away the top of the pan of earth

they had left standing on the hillside, and exposed a handful of nuggets-

pure gold.  Two strangers, Austrians, had come along and, observing it,

had sat down to wait until the thirty-day claim notice posted by Jim

Gillis should expire.  They did not mind the rain--not with all that gold

in sight--and the minute the thirty days were up they followed the lead a

few pans farther and took out--some say ten, some say twenty, thousand

dollars.  In either case it was a good pocket.  Mark Twain missed it by

one pail of water.  Still, it is just as well, perhaps, when one

remembers that vaster nugget of Angel's Camp--the Jumping Frog.  Jim

Gillis always declared, "If Sam had got that pocket he would have

remained a pocket-miner to the end of his days, like me."



In Mark Twain's old note-book occurs a memorandum of the frog story--a

mere casual entry of its main features:



     Coleman with his jumping frog--bet stranger $50--stranger had no

     frog, and C. got him one:--in the mean time stranger filled C.'s

     frog full of shot and he couldn't jump.  The stranger's frog won.



It seemed unimportant enough, no doubt, at the time; but it was the

nucleus around which was built a surpassing fame.  The hills along the

Stanislaus have turned out some wonderful nuggets in their time, but no

other of such size as that.









L



BACK TO THE TUMULT



FROM the note-book:



     February 25.  Arrived in Stockton 5 P.m.  Home again home again at

     the Occidental Hotel, San Francisco--find letters from Artemus Ward

     asking me to write a sketch for his new book of Nevada Territory

     Travels which is soon to come out.  Too late--ought to have got the

     letters three months ago.  They are dated early in November.



He was sorry not to oblige Ward, sorry also not to have representation in

his book.  He wrote explaining the circumstance, and telling the story of

his absence.  Steve Gillis, meantime, had returned to San Francisco, and

settled his difficulties there.  The friends again took up residence

together.



Mark Twain resumed his daily letters to the Enterprise, without further

annoyance from official sources.  Perhaps there was a temporary truce in

that direction, though he continued to attack various abuses--civic,

private, and artistic--becoming a sort of general censor, establishing

for himself the title of the "Moralist of the Main."  The letters were

reprinted in San Francisco and widely read.  Now and then some one had

the temerity to answer them, but most of his victims maintained a

discreet silence.  In one of these letters he told of the Mexican oyster,

a rather tough, unsatisfactory article of diet, which could not stand

criticism, and presently disappeared from the market.  It was a mistake,

however, for him to attack an Alta journalist by the name of Evans.

Evans was a poet, and once composed an elegy with a refrain which ended:



          Gone, gone, gone--

          Gone to his endeavor;

          Gone, gone, gone,

          Forever and forever.



In the Enterprise letter following its publication Mark Twain referred to

this poem.  He parodied the refrain and added, "If there is any criticism

to make on it I should say there is a little too much 'gone' and not

enough 'forever.'"



It was a more or less pointless witticism, but it had a humorous quotable

flavor, and it made Evans mad.  In a squib in the Alta he retaliated:



     Mark Twain has killed the Mexican oyster.  We only regret that the

     act was not inspired by a worthier motive.  Mark Twain's sole reason

     for attacking the Mexican oyster was because the restaurant that

     sold them refused him credit.



A deadly thrust like that could not be parried in print.  To deny or

recriminate would be to appear ridiculous.  One could only sweat and

breathe vengeance.



"Joe," he said to Goodman, who had come over for a visit, "my one object

in life now is to make enough money to stand trial and then go and murder

Evans."



He wrote verses himself sometimes, and lightened his Enterprise letters

with jingles.  One of these concerned Tom Maguire, the autocrat manager

of San Francisco theaters.  It details Maguire's assault on one of his

actors.



          Tom Maguire,

          Roused to ire,

          Lighted on McDougal;

          Tore his coat,

          Clutched his throat,

          And split him in the bugle.



          For shame!  oh, fie!

          Maguire, why

          Will you thus skyugle?

          Why curse and swear,

          And rip and tear

          The innocent McDougal?



          Of bones bereft,

          Almost, you've left

          Vestvali, gentle Jew gal;

          And now you've smashed

          And almost hashed

          The form of poor McDougall



Goodman remembers that Clemens and Gillis were together again on

California Street at this time, and of hearing them sing, "The Doleful

Ballad of the Rejected Lover," another of Mark Twain's compositions.  It

was a wild, blasphemous outburst, and the furious fervor with which Mark

and Steve delivered it, standing side by side and waving their fists, did

not render it less objectionable.  Such memories as these are set down

here, for they exhibit a phase of that robust personality, built of the

same primeval material from which the world was created--built of every

variety of material, in fact, ever incorporated in a human being--equally

capable of writing unprintable coarseness and that rarest and most tender

of all characterizations, the 'Recollections of JOAN of ARC'.









LI



THE CORNER-STONE



Along with his Enterprise work, Clemens continued to write occasionally

for the Californian, but for some reason he did not offer the story of

the jumping frog.  For one thing, he did not regard it highly as literary

material.  He knew that he had enjoyed it himself, but the humor and

fashion of its telling seemed to him of too simple and mild a variety in

that day of boisterous incident and exaggerated form.  By and by Artemus

Ward turned up in San Francisco, and one night Mark Twain told him his

experiences with Jim Gillis, and in Angel's Camp; also of Ben Coon and

his tale of the Calaveras frog.  Ward was delighted.



"Write it," he said.  "There is still time to get it into my volume of

sketches.  Send it to Carleton, my publisher in New York."--[This is in

accordance with Mr. Clemens's recollection of the matter.  The author can

find no positive evidence that Ward was on the Pacific coast again in

1865.  It seems likely, therefore, that the telling of the frog story and

his approval of it were accomplished by exchange of letters.]--



Clemens promised to do this, but delayed fulfilment somewhat, and by the

time the sketch reached Carleton, Ward's book was about ready for the

press.  It did not seem worth while to Carleton to make any change of

plans that would include the frog story.  The publisher handed it over to

Henry Clapp, editor of the Saturday Press, a perishing sheet, saying:

"Here, Clapp, here's something you can use in your paper."  Clapp took it

thankfully enough, we may believe.



"Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog"--[This was the original title.]--

appeared in the Saturday Press of November 18, 1865, and was immediately

copied and quoted far and near.  It brought the name of Mark Twain across

the mountains, bore it up and down the Atlantic coast, and out over the

prairies of the Middle West.  Away from the Pacific slope only a reader

here and there had known the name before.  Now every one who took a

newspaper was treated to the tale of the wonderful Calaveras frog, and

received a mental impress of the author's signature.  The name Mark Twain

became hardly an institution, as yet, but it made a strong bid for

national acceptance.



As for its owner, he had no suspicion of these momentous happenings for a

considerable time.  The telegraph did not carry such news in those days,

and it took a good while for the echo of his victory to travel to the

Coast.  When at last a lagging word of it did arrive, it would seem to

have brought disappointment, rather than exaltation, to the author.  Even

Artemus Ward's opinion of the story had not increased Mark Twain's regard

for it as literature.  That it had struck the popular note meant, as he

believed, failure for his more highly regarded work.  In a letter written

January 20, 1866, he says these things for himself:



     I do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful.  I wish I was

     back there piloting up and down the river again.  Verily, all is

     vanity and little worth--save piloting.



     To think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused

     for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out

     a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!  "Jim Smiley and

     His Jumping Frog"--a squib which would never have been written but

     to please Artemus Ward, and then it reached New York too late to

     appear in his book.



     But no matter.  His book was a wretchedly poor one, generally

     speaking, and it could be no credit to either of us to appear

     between its covers.



This paragraph is from the New York correspondence of the San Francisco

Alta:



     "Mark Twain's story in the Saturday Press of November 18th, called

     "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," has set all New York in a roar,

     and he may be said to have made his mark.  I have been asked fifty

     times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and

     near.  It is voted the best thing of the day.  Cannot the

     'Californian' afford to keep Mark all to itself?  It should not let

     him scintillate so widely without first being filtered through the

     California press."



     The New York publishing house of Carleton & Co.  gave the sketch to

     the Saturday Press when they found it was too late for the book.



It is difficult to judge the jumping Frog story to-day.  It has the

intrinsic fundamental value of one of AEsop's Fables.--[The resemblance

of the frog story to the early Greek tales must have been noted by Prof.

Henry Sidgwick, who synopsized it in Greek form and phrase for his book,

Greek Prose Composition.  Through this originated the impression that the

story was of Athenian root.  Mark Twain himself was deceived, until in

1899, when he met Professor Sidgwick, who explained that the Greek

version was the translation and Mark Twain's the original; that he had

thought it unnecessary to give credit for a story so well known.  See The

Jumping Frog, Harper & Bros., 1903, p. 64.]--It contains a basic idea

which is essentially ludicrous, and the quaint simplicity of its telling

is convincing and full of charm.  It appeared in print at a time when

American humor was chaotic, the public taste unformed.  We had a vast

appreciation for what was comic, with no great number of opportunities

for showing it.  We were so ready to laugh that when a real opportunity

came along we improved it and kept on laughing and repeating the cause of

our merriment, directing the attention of our friends to it.  Whether the

story of "Jim Smiley's Frog," offered for the first time today, would

capture the public, and become the initial block of a towering fame, is

another matter.  That the author himself underrated it is certain.  That

the public, receiving it at what we now term the psychological moment,

may have overrated it is by no means impossible.  In any case, it does

not matter now.  The stone rejected by the builder was made the corner-

stone of his literary edifice.  As such it is immortal.



In the letter already quoted, Clemens speaks of both Bret Harte and

himself as having quit the 'Californian' in future expecting to write for

Eastern papers.  He adds:



     Though I am generally placed at the head of my breed of scribblers

     in this part of the country, the place properly belongs to Bret

     Harte, I think, though he denies it, along with the rest.  He wants

     me to club a lot of old sketches together with a lot of his, and

     publish a book.  I wouldn't do it, only he agrees to take all the

     trouble.  But I want to know whether we are going to make anything

     out of it, first.  However, he has written to a New York publisher,

     and if we are offered a bargain that will pay for a month's labor we

     will go to work and prepare the volume for the press.



Nothing came of the proposed volume, or of other joint literary schemes

these two had then in mind.  Neither of them would seem to have been

optimistic as to their future place in American literature; certainly in

their most exalted moments they could hardly have dreamed that within

half a dozen years they would be the head and front of a new school of

letters--the two most talked-of men in America.









LII



A COMMISSION TO THE SANDWICH ISLANDS



Whatever his first emotions concerning the success of "Jim Smiley's Frog"

may have been, the sudden astonishing leap of that batrachian into

American literature gave the author an added prestige at home as well as

in distant parts.  Those about him were inclined to regard him, in some

degree at least, as a national literary figure and to pay tribute

accordingly.  Special honors began to be shown to him.  A fine new

steamer, the Ajax, built for the Sandwich Island trade, carried on its

initial trip a select party of guests of which he was invited to make

one.  He did not go, and reproached himself sorrowfully afterward.



If the Ajax were back I would go quick, and throw up my correspondence.

She had fifty-two invited guests aboard--the cream of the town--gentlemen

and ladies, and a splendid brass band.  I could not accept because there

would be no one to write my correspondence while I was gone.



In fact, the daily letter had grown monotonous.  He was restless, and the

Ajax excursion, which he had been obliged to forego, made him still more

dissatisfied.  An idea occurred to him: the sugar industry of the islands

was a matter of great commercial interest to California, while the life

and scenery there, picturesquely treated, would appeal to the general

reader.  He was on excellent terms with James Anthony and Paul Morrill,

of the Sacramento Union; he proposed to them that they send him as their

special correspondent to report to their readers, in a series of letters,

life, trade, agriculture, and general aspect of the islands.  To his vast

delight, they gave him the commission.  He wrote home joyously now:



I am to remain there a month and ransack the islands, the cataracts and

volcanoes completely, and write twenty or thirty letters, for which they

pay as much money as I would get if I stayed at home.



He adds that on his return he expects to start straight across the

continent by way of the Columbia River, the Pend Oreille Lakes, through

Montana and down the Missouri River.  "Only two hundred miles of land

travel from San Francisco to New Orleans."



So it is: man proposes, while fate, undisturbed, spins serenely on.



He sailed by the Ajax on her next trip, March 7 (1866), beginning his

first sea voyage--a brand-new experience, during which he acquired the

names of the sails and parts of the ship, with considerable knowledge of

navigation, and of the islands he was to visit--whatever information

passengers and sailors could furnish.  It was a happy, stormy voyage

altogether.  In 'Roughing It' he has given us some account of it.



It was the 18th of March when he arrived at Honolulu, and his first

impression of that tranquil harbor remained with him always.  In fact,

his whole visit there became one of those memory-pictures, full of golden

sunlight and peace, to be found somewhere in every human past.



The letters of introduction he had brought, and the reputation which had

preceded him, guaranteed him welcome and hospitality.  Officials and

private citizens were alike ready to show him their pleasant land, and he

fairly reveled in its delicious air, its summer warmth, its soft repose.



     Oh, islands there are on the face of the deep

     Where the leaves never fade and the skies never weep,



he quotes in his note-book, and adds:



     Went with Mr. Damon to his cool, vine-shaded home; no careworn or

     eager, anxious faces in this land of happy contentment.  God, what a

     contrast with California and the Washoe!



And in another place:



     They live in the S. I.--no rush, no worry--merchant goes down to his

     store like a gentleman at nine--goes home at four and thinks no more

     of business till next day.  D--n San F. style of wearing out life.



He fitted in with the languorous island existence, but he had come for

business, and he lost not much time.  He found there a number of friends

from Washoe, including the Rev. Mr. Rising, whose health had failed from

overwork.  By their direction, and under official guidance, he set out on

Oahu, one of the several curious horses he has immortalized in print,

and, accompanied by a pleasant party of ladies and gentlemen, encircled

the island of that name, crossed it and recrossed it, visited its various

battle-fields, returning to Honolulu, lame, sore, sunburnt, but

triumphant.  His letters home, better even than his Union correspondence,

reveal his personal interest and enthusiasms.



     I have got a lot of human bones which I took from one of these

     battle-fields.  I guess I will bring you some of them.  I went with

     the American Minister and took dinner this evening with the King's

     Grand Chamberlain, who is related to the royal family, and though

     darker than a mulatto he has an excellent English education, and in

     manners is an accomplished gentleman.  He is to call for me in the

     morning; we will visit the King in the palace, After dinner they

     called in the "singing girls," and we had some beautiful music, sung

     in the native tongue.



It was his first association with royalty, and it was human that he

should air it a little.  In the same letter he states: "I will sail in a

day or two on a tour of the other islands, to be gone two months."



'In Roughing It' he has given us a picture of his visits to the islands,

their plantations, their volcanoes, their natural and historic wonders.

He was an insatiable sight-seer then, and a persevering one.  The very

name of a new point of interest filled him with an eager enthusiasm to be

off.  No discomfort or risk or distance discouraged him.  With a single

daring companion--a man who said he could find the way--he crossed the

burning floor of the mighty crater of Kilauea (then in almost constant

eruption), racing across the burning lava floor, jumping wide and

bottomless crevices, when a misstep would have meant death.



By and by Marlette shouted "Stop!" I never stopped quicker in my life.

I asked what the matter was.  He said we were out of the path.  He said

we must not try to go on until we found it again, for we were surrounded

with beds of rotten lava, through which we could easily break and plunge

down 1,000 feet.  I thought Boo would answer for me, and was about to say

so, when Marlette partly proved his statement, crushing through and

disappearing to his arm-pits.



They made their way across at last, and stood the rest of the night

gazing down upon a spectacle of a crater in quivering action, a veritable

lake of fire.  They had risked their lives for that scene, but it seemed

worth while.



His open-air life on the river, and the mining camps, had prepared Samuel

Clemens for adventurous hardships.  He was thirty years old, with his

full account of mental and physical capital.  His growth had been slow,

but he was entering now upon his golden age; he was fitted for conquest

of whatever sort, and he was beginning to realize his power.









LIII



ANSON BURLINGAME AND THE "HORNET" DISASTER



It was near the end of June when he returned to Honolulu from a tour of

all the islands, fairly worn out and prostrated with saddle boils.  He

expected only to rest and be quiet for a season, but all unknown to him

startling and historic things were taking place in which he was to have a

part--events that would mark another forward stride in his career.



The Ajax had just come in, bringing his Excellency Anson Burlingame, then

returning to his post as minister to China; also General Van Valkenburg,

minister to Japan; Colonel Rumsey and Minister Burlingame's son, Edward,

--[Edward L. Burlingame, now for many years editor of Scribner's

Magazine.]--then a lively boy of eighteen.  Young Burlingame had read

"The Jumping Frog," and was enthusiastic about Mark Twain and his work.

Learning that he was in Honolulu, laid up at his hotel, the party sent

word that they would call on him next morning.



Clemens felt that he must not accept this honor, sick or well.  He

crawled out of bed, dressed and shaved himself as quickly as possible,

and drove to the American minister's, where the party was staying.  They

had a hilariously good time.  When he returned to his hotel he sent them,

by request, whatever he had on hand of his work.  General Van Valkenburg

had said to him:



"California is proud of Mark Twain, and some day the American people will

be, too, no doubt."



There has seldom been a more accurate prophecy.



But a still greater event was imminent.  On that very day (June 21, 1866)

there came word of the arrival at Sanpahoe, on the island of Hawaii, of

an open boat containing fifteen starving wretches, who on short, ten-day

rations had been buffeting a stormy sea for forty-three days!  A vessel,

the Hornet, from New York, had taken fire and burned "on the line," and

since early in May, on that meager sustenance, they had been battling

with hundreds of leagues of adverse billows, seeking for land.



A few days following the first report, eleven of the rescued men were

brought to Honolulu and placed in the hospital.  Mark Twain recognized

the great news importance of the event.  It would be a splendid beat if

he could interview the castaways and be the first to get their story to

his paper.  There was no cable in those days; a vessel for San Francisco

would sail next morning.  It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and he

must not miss it.  Bedridden as he was, the undertaking seemed beyond his

strength.



But just at this time the Burlingame party descended on him, and almost

before he knew it he was on the way to the hospital on a cot, escorted by

the heads of the joint legations of China and Japan.  Once there, Anson

Burlingame, with his splendid human sympathy and handsome, courtly

presence, drew from those enfeebled castaways all the story of their long

privation and struggle, that had stretched across forty-three distempered

days and four thousand miles of sea.  All that Mark Twain had to do was

to listen and make the notes.



He put in the night-writing against time.  Next morning, just as the

vessel for the States was drifting away from her dock, a strong hand

flung his bulky envelope of manuscript aboard, and if the vessel arrived

his great beat was sure.  It did arrive, and the three-column story on

the front page of the Sacramento Union, in its issue of July 19th, gave

the public the first detailed history of the terrible Hornet disaster and

the rescue of those starving men.  Such a story occupied a wider place in

the public interest than it would in these crowded days.  The telegraph

carried it everywhere, and it was featured as a sensation.



Mark Twain always adored the name and memory of Anson Burlingame.  In his

letter home he tells of Burlingame's magnanimity in "throwing away an

invitation to dine with princes and foreign dignitaries" to help him.

"You know I appreciate that kind of thing," he says; which was a true

statement, and in future years he never missed an opportunity of paying

an instalment on his debt of gratitude.  It was proper that he should do

so, for the obligation was a far greater one than that contracted in

obtaining the tale of the Hornet disaster.  It was the debt which one

owes to a man who, from the deep measure of his understanding, gives

encouragement and exactly needed and convincing advice.  Anson Burlingame

said to Samuel Clemens:



"You have great ability; I believe you have genius.  What you need now is

the refinement of association.  Seek companionship among men of superior

intellect and character.  Refine yourself and your work.  Never affiliate

with inferiors; always climb."



Clemens never forgot that advice.  He did not always observe it, but he

rarely failed to realize its gospel.  Burlingame urged him to travel.



"Come to Pekin next winter," he said, "and visit me.  Make my house your

home.  I will give you letters and introduce you.  You will have

facilities for acquiring information about China."



It is not surprising then that Mark Twain never felt his debt to Anson

Burlingame entirely paid.  Burlingame came more than once to the hotel,

for Clemens was really ill now, and they discussed plans for his future

betterment.



He promised, of course, to visit China, and when he was alone put in a

good deal of time planning a trip around the world which would include

the great capitals.  When not otherwise employed he read; though there

was only one book in the hotel, a "blue and gold" edition of Dr.

Holmes's Songs in Many Keys, and this he soon knew almost by heart, from

title-page to finis.



He was soon up and about.  No one could remain ill long in those happy

islands.  Young Burlingame came, and suggested walks.  Once, when Clemens

hesitated, the young man said:



"But there is a Scriptural command for you to go."



"If you can quote one I'll obey it," said Clemens.



"Very well.  The Bible says, 'If any man require thee to walk a mile, go

with him, Twain.'"



The command was regarded as sufficient.  Clemens quoted the witticism

later (in his first lecture), and it was often repeated in after-years,

ascribed to Warner, Ward, and a dozen others.  Its origin was as here set

down.



Under date of July 4 (1866), Mark Twain's Sandwich Island note-book says:



     Went to a ball 8.30 P.M.--danced till 12.30; stopped at General Van

     Valkenburg's room and talked with him and Mr. Burlingame and Ed

     Burlingame until 3 A.M.



From which we may conclude that he had altogether recovered.  A few days

later.  the legation party had sailed for China and Japan, and on the

19th Clemens himself set out by a slow sailing-vessel to San Francisco.

They were becalmed and were twenty-five days making the voyage.  Captain

Mitchell and others of the wrecked Hornet were aboard, and he put in a

good deal of time copying their diaries and preparing a magazine article

which, he believed, would prove his real entrance to the literary world.



The vessel lay almost perfectly still, day after day, and became a

regular playground at sea.  Sundays they had services and Mark Twain led

the choir.



"I hope they will have a better opinion of our music in heaven than I

have down here," he says in his notes.  "If they don't, a thunderbolt

will knock this vessel endways."  It is perhaps worthy of mention that on

the night of the 27th of July he records having seen another "splendidly

colored, lunar rainbow."  That he regarded this as an indication of

future good-fortune is not surprising, considering the events of the

previous year.



It was August 13th when he reached San Francisco, and the note-book entry

of that day says:



     Home again.  No--not home again--in prison again, end all the wild

     sense of freedom gone.  The city seems so cramped and so dreary with

     toil and care and business anxiety.  God help me, I wish I were at

     sea again!



There were compensations, however.  He went over to Sacramento, and was

abundantly welcomed.  It was agreed that, in addition to the twenty

dollars allowed for each letter, a special bill should be made for the

Hornet report.



"How much do you think it ought to be, Mark?" James Anthony asked.



"Oh, I'm a modest man; I don't want the whole Union office.  Call it $100

a column."



There was a general laugh.  The bill was made out at that figure, and he

took it to the business office for payment.



"The cashier didn't faint," he wrote, many years later, "but he came

rather near it.  He sent for the proprietors, and they only laughed in

their jolly fashion, and said it was a robbery, but 'no matter, pay it.

It's all right.' The best men that ever owned a newspaper."--["My Debut

as a Literary Person."--Collected works.]--



Though inferior to the descriptive writing which a year later would give

him a world-wide fame, the Sandwich Island letters added greatly to his

prestige on the Pacific coast.  They were convincing, informing; tersely

--even eloquently--descriptive, with a vein of humor adapted to their

audience.  Yet to read them now, in the fine nonpareil type in which they

were set, is such a wearying task that one can only marvel at their

popularity.  They were not brilliant literature, by our standards to-day.

Their humor is usually of a muscular kind, varied with grotesque

exaggerations; the literary quality is pretty attenuated.  Here and there

are attempts at verse.  He had a fashion in those days of combining two

or more poems with distracting, sometimes amusing, effect.  Examples of

these dislocations occur in the Union letters; a single stanza will

present the general idea:



     The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,



     The turf with their bayonets turning,

     And his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold,

     And our lanterns dimly burning.



Only a trifling portion of the letters found their way into his Sandwich

Island chapters of 'Roughing It', five years later.  They do, however,

reveal a sort of transition stage between the riotous florescence of the

Comstock and the mellowness of his later style.  He was learning to see

things with better eyes, from a better point of view.  It is not

difficult to believe that this literary change of heart was in no small

measure due to the influence of Anson Burlingame.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext Volume I, Part 1 of MARK TWAIN,

A BIOGRAPHY, 1835-1866 by Albert Bigelow Paine













MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY



By Albert Bigelow Paine







VOLUME I, Part 2: 1866-1875







LIV



THE LECTURER



It was not easy to take up the daily struggle again, but it was

necessary.--[Clemens once declared he had been so blue at this period

that one morning he put a loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked

courage to pull the trigger.]--Out of the ruck of possibilities (his

brain always thronged with plans) he constructed three or four resolves.

The chief of these was the trip around the world; but that lay months

ahead, and in the mean time ways and means must be provided.  Another

intention was to finish the Hornet article, and forward it to Harper's

Magazine--a purpose carried immediately into effect.  To his delight the

article found acceptance, and he looked forward to the day of its

publication as the beginning of a real career.  He intended to follow it

up with a series on the islands, which in due time might result in a book

and an income.  He had gone so far as to experiment with a dedication for

the book--an inscription to his mother, modified later for use in 'The

Innocents Abroad'.  A third plan of action was to take advantage of the

popularity of the Hawaiian letters, and deliver a lecture on the same

subject.  But this was a fearsome prospect--he trembled when he thought

of it.  As Governor of the Third House he had been extravagantly received

and applauded, but in that case the position of public entertainer had

been thrust upon him.  To come forward now, offering himself in the same

capacity, was a different matter.  He believed he could entertain, but he

lacked the courage to declare himself; besides, it meant a risk of his

slender capital.  He confided his situation to Col. John McComb, of the

Alta California, and was startled by McComb's vigorous endorsement.



"Do it, by all means!" urged McComb.  "It will be a grand success--I know

it!  Take the largest house in town, and charge a dollar a ticket."



Frightened but resolute, he went to the leading theater manager the same

Tom Maguire of his verses--and was offered the new opera-house at half

rates.  The next day this advertisement appeared:



                       MAGUIRE'S ACADEMY OF MUSIC

                      PINE STREET, NEAR MONTGOMERY



                          THE SANDWICH ISLANDS



                               MARK TWAIN



            (HONOLULU CORRESPONDENT OF THE SACRAMENTO UNION)

                             WILL DELIVER A

                    LECTURE ON THE SANDWICH ISLANDS



                        AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC

                      ON TUESDAY EVENING, OCT. 2d

                                 (1866)



  In which passing mention will be made of Harris, Bishop Staley, the

American missionaries, etc., and the absurd customs and characteristics

   of the natives duly discussed and described.  The great volcano of

              Kilauea will also receive proper attention.



                          A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA

                  is in town, but has not been engaged

                                  ALSO

                     A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS

                will be on exhibition in the next block

                         MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS

were in contemplation for this occasion, but the idea has been abandoned

                     A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION

 may be expected; in fact, the public are privileged to expect whatever

                              they please.



                Dress Circle, $1.00   Family Circle, 50c

      Doors open at 7 o'clock   The Trouble to begin at 8 o'clock





The story of that first lecture, as told in Roughing It, is a faithful

one, and need only be summarized here.



Expecting to find the house empty, he found it packed from the footlights

to the walls.  Sidling out from the wings--wobbly-kneed and dry of

tongue--he was greeted by a murmur, a roar, a very crash of applause that

frightened away his remaining vestiges of courage.  Then, came reaction--

these were his friends, and he began to talk to them.  Fear melted away,

and as tide after tide of applause rose and billowed and came breaking at

his feet, he knew something of the exaltation of Monte Cristo when he

declared "The world is mine!"



It was a vast satisfaction to have succeeded.  It was particularly

gratifying at this time, for he dreaded going back into newspaper

harness.  Also; it softened later the disappointment resulting from

another venture; for when the December Harper appeared, with his article,

the printer and proof-reader had somehow converted Mark Twain into "Mark

Swain," and his literary dream perished.



As to the literary value of his lecture, it was much higher than had,

been any portion of his letters, if we may judge from its few remaining

fragments.  One of these--a part of the description of the great volcano

Haleakala, on the island of Maui--is a fair example of his eloquence.



It is somewhat more florid than his later description of the same scene

in Roughing It, which it otherwise resembles; and we may imagine that its

poetry, with the added charm of its delivery, held breathless his

hearers, many of whom believed that no purer eloquence had ever been

uttered or written.



It is worth remembering, too, that in this lecture, delivered so long

ago, he advocated the idea of American ownership of these islands,

dwelling at considerable length on his reasons for this ideal.



--[For fragmentary extracts from this first lecture of Mark Twain and

news comment, see Appendix D, end of last volume.]--



There was a gross return from his venture of more than $1,200, but with

his usual business insight, which was never foresight, he had made an

arrangement by which, after paying bills and dividing with his manager,

he had only about one-third of, this sum left.  Still, even this was

prosperity and triumph.  He had acquired a new and lucrative profession

at a bound.  The papers lauded him as the "most piquant and humorous

writer and lecturer on the Coast since the days of the lamented John

Phoenix."  He felt that he was on the highroad at last.



Denis McCarthy, late of the Enterprise, was in San Francisco, and was

willing to become his manager.  Denis was capable and honest, and Clemens

was fond of him.  They planned a tour of the near-by towns, beginning

with Sacramento, extending it later even to the mining camps, such as Red

Dog and Grass Valley; also across into Nevada, with engagements at Carson

City, Virginia, and Gold Hill.  It was an exultant and hilarious

excursion--that first lecture tour made by Denis McCarthy and Mark Twain.

Success traveled with them everywhere, whether the lecturer looked across

the footlights of some pretentious "opera-house" or between the two

tallow candles of some camp "academy."  Whatever the building, it was

packed, and the returns were maximum.



Those who remember him as a lecturer in that long-ago time say that his

delivery was more quaint, his drawl more exaggerated, even than in later

life; that his appearance and movements on the stage were natural, rather

than graceful; that his manuscript, which he carried under his arm,

looked like a ruffled hen.  It was, in fact, originally written on sheets

of manila paper, in large characters, so that it could be read easily by

dim light, and it was doubtless often disordered.



There was plenty of amusing experience on this tour.  At one place, when

the lecture was over, an old man came to him and said:



"Be them your natural tones of eloquence?"



At Grass Valley there was a rival show, consisting of a lady tight-rope

walker and her husband.  It was a small place, and the tight-rope

attraction seemed likely to fail.  The lady's husband had formerly been a

compositor on the Enterprise, so that he felt there was a bond of

brotherhood between him and Mark Twain.



"Look here," he said.  "Let's combine our shows.  I'll let my wife do the

tight-rope act outside and draw a crowd, and you go inside and lecture."



The arrangement was not made.



Following custom, the lecturer at first thought it necessary to be

introduced, and at each place McCarthy had to skirmish around and find

the proper person.  At Red Dog, on the Stanislaus, the man selected

failed to appear, and Denis had to provide another on short notice.

He went down into the audience and captured an old fellow, who ducked and

dodged but could not escape.  Denis led him to the stage, a good deal

frightened.



"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "this is the celebrated Mark Twain from

the celebrated city of San Francisco, with his celebrated lecture about

the celebrated Sandwich Islands."



That was as far as he could go; but it was far enough.  Mark Twain never

had a better introduction.  The audience was in a shouting humor from the

start.



Clemens himself used to tell of an introduction at another camp, where

his sponsor said:



"Ladies and gentlemen, I know only two things about this man: the first

is that he's never been in jail, and the second is I don't know why."



But this is probably apocryphal; there is too much "Mark Twain" in it.



When he reached Virginia, Goodman said to him:



"Sam, you do not need anybody to introduce you.  There's a piano on the

stage in the theater.  Have it brought out in sight, and when the curtain

rises you be seated at the piano, playing and singing that song of yours,

'I Had an Old Horse Whose Name Was Methusalem,' and don't seem to notice

that the curtain is up at first; then be surprised when you suddenly find

out that it is up, and begin talking, without any further preliminaries."



This proved good advice, and the lecture, thus opened, started off with

general hilarity and applause.









LV



HIGHWAY ROBBERY



His Nevada, lectures were bound to be immensely successful.  The people

regarded him as their property over there, and at Carson and Virginia the

houses overflowed.  At Virginia especially his friends urged and begged

him to repeat the entertainment, but he resolutely declined.



"I have only one lecture yet," he said.  "I cannot bring myself to give

it twice in the same town."



But that irresponsible imp, Steve Gillis, who was again in Virginia,

conceived a plan which would make it not only necessary for him to

lecture again, but would supply him with a subject.  Steve's plan was

very simple: it was to relieve the lecturer of his funds by a friendly

highway robbery, and let an account of the adventure furnish the new

lecture.



In 'Roughing It' Mark Twain has given a version of this mock robbery

which is correct enough as far as it goes; but important details are

lacking.  Only a few years ago (it was April, 1907), in his cabin on

jackass Hill, with Joseph Goodman and the writer of this history present,

Steve Gillis made his "death-bed" confession as is here set down:



"Mark's lecture was given in Piper's Opera House, October 30, 1866.  The

Virginia City people had heard many famous lectures before, but they were

mere sideshows compared with Mark's.  It could have been run to crowded

houses for a week.  We begged him to give the common people a chance; but

he refused to repeat himself.  He was going down to Carson, and was

coming back to talk in Gold Hill about a week later, and his agent, Denis

McCarthy, and I laid a plan to have him robbed on the Divide between Gold

Hill and Virginia, after the Gold Hill lecture was over and he and Denis

would be coming home with the money.  The Divide was a good lonely place,

and was famous for its hold-ups.  We got City Marshal George Birdsall

into it with us, and took in Leslie Blackburn, Pat Holland, Jimmy

Eddington, and one or two more of Sam's old friends.  We all loved him,

and would have fought for him in a moment.  That's the kind of friends

Mark had in Nevada.  If he had any enemies I never heard of them.



"We didn't take in Dan de Quille, or Joe here, because Sam was Joe's

guest, and we were afraid he would tell him.  We didn't take in Dan

because we wanted him to write it up as a genuine robbery and make a big

sensation.  That would pack the opera-house at two dollars a seat to hear

Mark tell the story.



"Well, everything went off pretty well.  About the time Mark was

finishing his lecture in Gold Hill the robbers all went up on the Divide

to wait, but Mark's audience gave him a kind of reception after his

lecture, and we nearly froze to death up there before he came along.

By and by I went back to see what was the matter.  Sam and Denis were

coming, and carrying a carpet-sack about half full of silver between

them.  I shadowed them and blew a policeman's whistle as a signal to the

boys when the lecturers were within about a hundred yards of the place.

I heard Sam say to Denis:



"'I'm glad they've got a policeman on the Divide.  They never had one in

my day.'



"Just about that time the boys, all with black masks on and silver

dollars at the sides of their tongues to disguise their voices, stepped

out and stuck six-shooters at Sam and Denis and told them to put up their

hands.  The robbers called each other 'Beauregard' and 'Stonewall

Jackson.'  Of course Denis's hands went up, and Mark's, too, though Mark

wasn't a bit scared or excited.  He talked to the robbers in his regular

fashion.  He said:



"'Don't flourish those pistols so promiscuously.  They might go off by

accident.'



"They told him to hand over his watch and money; but when he started to

take his hands down they made him put them up again.  Then he asked how

they expected him to give them his valuables with his hands up in the

sky.  He said his treasures didn't lie in heaven.  He told them not to

take his watch, which was the one Sandy Baldwin and Theodore Winters had

given him as Governor of the Third House, but we took it all the same.



"Whenever he started to put his hands down we made him put them up again.

Once he said:



"'Don't you fellows be so rough.  I was tenderly reared.'



"Then we told him and Denis to keep their hands up for fifteen minutes

after we were gone--this was to give us time to get back to Virginia and

be settled when they came along.  As we were going away Mark called:



"'Say, you forgot something.'



"'What is it?'



"Why, the carpet-bag.'



"He was cool all the time.  Senator Bill Stewart, in his Autobiography,

tells a great story of how scared Mark was, and how he ran; but Stewart

was three thousand miles from Virginia by that time, and later got mad at

Mark because he made a joke about him in 'Roughing It'.



"Denis wanted to take his hands down pretty soon after we were gone, but

Mark said:



"'No, Denis, I'm used to obeying orders when they are given in that

convincing way; we'll just keep our hands up another fifteen minutes or

so for good measure.'



"We were waiting in a big saloon on C Street when Mark and Denis came

along.  We knew they would come in, and we expected Mark would be

excited; but he was as unruffled as a mountain lake.  He told us they had

been robbed, and asked me if I had any money.  I gave him a hundred

dollars of his own money, and he ordered refreshments for everybody.

Then we adjourned to the Enterprise office, where he offered a reward,

and Dan de Quille wrote up the story and telegraphed it to the other

newspapers.  Then somebody suggested that Mark would have to give another

lecture now, and that the robbery would make a great subject.  He entered

right into the thing, and next day we engaged Piper's Opera House, and

people were offering five dollars apiece for front seats.  It would have

been the biggest thing that ever came to Virginia if it had come off.

"But we made a mistake, then, by taking Sandy Baldwin into the joke.  We

took in Joe here, too, and gave him the watch and money to keep, which

made it hard for Joe afterward.  But it was Sandy Baldwin that ruined us.

He had Mark out to dinner the night before the show was to come off, and

after he got well warmed up with champagne he thought it would be a smart

thing to let Mark into what was really going on.



"Mark didn't see it our way.  He was mad clear through."



At this point Joseph Goodman took up the story.  He said:



"Those devils put Sam's money, watch, keys, pencils, and all his things

into my hands.  I felt particularly mean at being made accessory to the

crime, especially as Sam was my guest, and I had grave doubts as to how

he would take it when he found out the robbery was not genuine.



"I felt terribly guilty when he said:



"'Joe, those d--n thieves took my keys, and I can't get into my trunk.

Do you suppose you could get me a key that would fit my trunk?'



"I said I thought I could during the day, and after Sam had gone I took

his own key, put it in the fire and burnt it to make it look black.  Then

I took a file and scratched it here and there, to make it look as if I

had been fitting it to the lock, feeling guilty all the time, like a man

who is trying to hide a murder.  Sam did not ask for his key that day,

and that evening he was invited to judge Baldwin's to dinner.  I thought

he looked pretty silent and solemn when he came home; but he only said:



"'Joe, let's play cards; I don't feel sleepy.'



"Steve here, and two or three of the other boys who had been active in

the robbery, were present, and they did not like Sam's manner, so they

excused themselves and left him alone with me.  We played a good while;

then he said:



"'Joe, these cards are greasy.  I have got some new ones in my trunk.

Did you get that key to-day?'



"I fished out that burnt, scratched-up key with fear and trembling.  But

he didn't seem to notice it at all, and presently returned with the

cards.  Then we played, and played, and played--till one o'clock--two

o'clock--Sam hardly saying a word, and I wondering what was going to

happen.  By and by he laid down his cards and looked at me, and said:



"'Joe, Sandy Baldwin told me all about that robbery to-night.  Now, Joe,

I have found out that the law doesn't recognize a joke, and I am going to

send every one of those fellows to the penitentiary.'



"He said it with such solemn gravity, and such vindictiveness, that I

believed he was in dead earnest.



"I know that I put in two hours of the hardest work I ever did, trying to

talk him out of that resolution.  I used all the arguments about the boys

being his oldest friends; how they all loved him, and how the joke had

been entirely for his own good; I pleaded with him, begged him to

reconsider; I went and got his money and his watch and laid them on the

table; but for a time it seemed hopeless.  And I could imagine those

fellows going behind the bars, and the sensation it would make in

California; and just as I was about to give it up he said:



"'Well, Joe, I'll let it pass--this time; I'll forgive them again; I've

had to do it so many times; but if I should see Denis McCarthy and Steve

Gillis mounting the scaffold to-morrow, and I could save them by turning

over my hand, I wouldn't do it!'



"He canceled the lecture engagement, however, next morning, and the day

after left on the Pioneer Stage, by the way of Donner Lake, for

California.  The boys came rather sheepishly to see him off; but he would

make no show of relenting.  When they introduced themselves as

Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, etc., he merely said:



"'Yes, and you'll all be behind the bars some day.  There's been a good

deal of robbery around here lately, and it's pretty clear now who did

it.'  They handed him a package containing the masks which the robbers

had worn.  He received it in gloomy silence; but as the stage drove away

he put his head out of the window, and after some pretty vigorous

admonition resumed his old smile, and called out: 'Good-by, friends;

good-by, thieves; I bear you no malice.'  So the heaviest joke was on his

tormentors after all."



This is the story of the famous Mark Twain robbery direct from

headquarters.  It has been garbled in so many ways that it seems worth

setting down in full.  Denis McCarthy, who joined him presently in San

Francisco, received a little more punishment there.



"What kind of a trip did you boys have?" a friend asked of them.



Clemens, just recovering from a cold which the exposure on the Divide had

given him, smiled grimly:



"Oh, pretty good, only Denis here mistook it for a spree."



He lectured again in San Francisco, this time telling the story of his

Overland trip in 1861, and he did the daring thing of repeating three

times the worn-out story of Horace Greeley's ride with Hank Monk, as

given later in 'Roughing It'.  People were deadly tired of that story out

there, and when he told it the first time, with great seriousness, they

thought he must be failing mentally.  They did not laugh--they only felt

sorry.  He waited a little, as if expecting a laugh, and presently led

around to it and told it again.  The audience was astonished still more,

and pitied him thoroughly.  He seemed to be waiting pathetically in the

dead silence for their applause, then went on with his lecture; but

presently, with labored effort, struggled around to the old story again,

and told it for the third time.  The audience suddenly saw the joke then,

and became vociferous and hysterical in their applause; but it was a

narrow escape.  He would have been hysterical himself if the relief had

not came when it did.



--[A side-light on the Horace Greeley story and on Mr. Greeley's

eccentricities is furnished by Mr. Goodman:



When I was going East in 1869 I happened to see Hank Monk just before I

started.  "Mr. Goodman," he said, "you tell Horace Greeley that I want to

come East, and ask him to send me a pass."  "All right, Hank," I said,

"I will."  It happened that when I got to New York City one of the first

men I met was Greeley.  "Mr. Greeley," said, "I have a message for you

from Hank Monk."  Greeley bristled and glared at me.  "That--rascal?" he

said, "He has done me more injury than any other man in America."]









LVI



BACK TO THE STATES



In the mean time Clemens had completed his plan for sailing, and had

arranged with General McComb, of the Alta California, for letters during

his proposed trip around the world.  However, he meant to visit his

people first, and his old home.  He could go back with means now, and

with the prestige of success.



"I sail to-morrow per Opposition--telegraphed you to-day," he wrote on

December 14th, and a day later his note-book entry says:



     Sailed from San Francisco in Opposition (line) steamer America,

     Capt.  Wakeman, at noon, 15th Dec., 1866.  Pleasant sunny day, hills

     brightly clad with green grass and shrubbery.



So he was really going home at last!  He had been gone five and a half

years--eventful, adventurous years that had made him over completely, at

least so far as ambitions and equipment were concerned.  He had came

away, in his early manhood, a printer and a pilot, unknown outside of his

class.  He was returning a man of thirty-one, with a fund of hard

experience, three added professions--mining, journalism, and lecturing--

also with a new name, already famous on the sunset slopes of its

adoption, and beginning to be heard over the hills and far away.  In some

degree, at least, he resembled the prince of a fairy tale who, starting

out humble and unnoticed, wins his way through a hundred adventures and

returns with gifts and honors.



The homeward voyage was a notable one.  It began with a tempest a little

way out of San Francisco--a storm terrible but brief, that brought the

passengers from their berths to the deck, and for a time set them

praying.  Then there was Captain Ned Wakeman, a big, burly, fearless

sailor, who had visited the edges of all continents and archipelagos; who

had been born at sea, and never had a day's schooling in his life, but

knew the Bible by heart; who was full of human nature and profanity, and

believed he was the only man on the globe who knew the secret of the

Bible miracles.  He became a distinct personality in Mark Twain's work--

the memory of him was an unfailing delight.  Captain "Ned Blakely," in

'Roughing It', who with his own hands hanged Bill Noakes, after reading

him promiscuous chapters from the Bible, was Captain Wakeman.  Captain

"Stormfield," who had the marvelous visit to heaven, was likewise Captain

Wakeman; and he appears in the "Idle Excursion" and elsewhere.



Another event of the voyage was crossing the Nicaragua Isthmus--the trip

across the lake and down the San Juan River--a, brand-new experience,

between shores of splendid tropic tangle, gleaming with vivid life.  The

luxuriance got into his note-book.



Dark grottos, fairy festoons, tunnels, temples, columns, pillars, towers,

pilasters, terraces, pyramids, mounds, domes, walls, in endless confusion

of vine-work--no shape known to architecture unimitated--and all so

webbed together that short distances within are only gained by glimpses.

Monkeys here and there; birds warbling; gorgeous plumaged birds on the

wing; Paradise itself, the imperial realm of beauty-nothing to wish for

to make it perfect.



But it was beyond the isthmus that the voyage loomed into proportions

somber and terrible.  The vessel they took there, the San Francisco,

sailed from Greytown January 1, 1867, the beginning of a memorable year

in Mark Twain's life.  Next day two cases of Asiatic cholera were

reported in the steerage.  There had been a rumor of it in Nicaragua, but

no one expected it on the ship.



The nature of the disease was not hinted at until evening, when one of

the men died.  Soon after midnight, the other followed.  A minister

making the voyage home, Rev. J. G. Fackler, read the burial service.  The

gaiety of the passengers, who had become well acquainted during the

Pacific voyage, was subdued.  When the word "cholera" went among them,

faces grew grave and frightened.  On the morning of January 4th Reverend

Fackler's services were again required.  The dead man was put overboard

within half an hour after he had ceased to breathe.



Gloom settled upon the ship.  All steam was made to put into Key West.

Then some of the machinery gave way and the ship lay rolling, helplessly

becalmed in the fierce heat of the Gulf, while repairs were being made.

The work was done at a disadvantage, and the parts did not hold.  Time

and again they were obliged to lie to, in the deadly tropic heat,

listening to the hopeless hammering, wondering who would be the next to

be sewed up hastily in a blanket and slipped over the ship's side.  On

the 5th seven new cases of illness were reported.  One of the crew, a man

called "Shape," was said to be dying.  A few hours later he was dead.  By

this time the Reverend Fackler himself had been taken.



"So they are burying poor 'Shape' without benefit of clergy," says the

note-book.



General consternation now began to prevail.  Then it was learned that the

ship's doctor had run out of medicines.  The passengers became

demoralized.  They believed their vessel was to become a charnel ship.

Strict sanitary orders were issued, and a hospital was improvised.



     Verily the ship is becoming a floating hospital herself--not an hour

     passes but brings its fresh sensation, its new disaster, its

     melancholy tidings.  When I think of poor "Shape" and the preacher,

     both so well when I saw them yesterday evening, I realize that I

     myself may be dead to-morrow.



     Since the last two hours all laughter, all levity, has ceased on the

     ship--a settled gloom is upon the faces of the passengers.



By noon it was evident that the minister could not survive.  He died at

two o'clock next morning; the fifth victim in less than five days.  The

machinery continued to break and the vessel to drag.  The ship's doctor

confessed to Clemens that he was helpless.  There were eight patients in

the hospital.



But on January 6th they managed to make Key West, and for some reason

were not quarantined.  Twenty-one passengers immediately deserted the

ship and were heard of no more.



"I am glad they are gone.  D--n them," says the notebook.  Apparently he

had never considered leaving, and a number of others remained.  The

doctor restocked his medicine-locker, and the next day they put to sea

again.  Certainly they were a daring lot of voyagers.  On the 8th another

of the patients died.  Then the cooler weather seemed to check the

contagion, and it was not until the night of the 11th, when the New York

harbor lights were in view, that the final death occurred.  There were no

new cases by this time, and the other patients were convalescent.  A

certificate was made out that the last man had died of "dropsy."  There

would seem to have been no serious difficulty in docking the vessel and

landing the passengers.  The matter would probably be handled differently

to-day.









LVII



OLD FRIENDS AND NEW PLANS



It had been more than thirteen years since his first arrival in New York.

Then he had been a youth, green, untraveled, eager to get away from home.

Now a veteran, he was as eager to return.



He stopped only long enough in New York to see Charles Henry Webb, late

of California, who had put together a number of the Mark Twain sketches,

including "The Jumping Frog," for book publication.  Clemens himself

decided to take the book to Carleton, thinking that, having missed the

fame of the "Frog" once, he might welcome a chance to stand sponsor for

it now.  But Carleton was wary; the "Frog" had won favor, and even fame,

in its fugitive, vagrant way, but a book was another matter.  Books were

undertaken very seriously and with plenty of consideration in those days.

Twenty-one years later, in Switzerland, Carleton said to Mark Twain:



"My chief claim to immortality is the distinction of having declined your

first book."



Clemens was ready enough to give up the book when Carleton declined it,

but Webb said he would publish it himself, and he set about it forthwith.

The author waited no longer now, but started for St. Louis, and was soon

with his mother and sister, whom he had not seen since that eventful

first year of the war.  They thought he looked old, which was true

enough, but they found him unchanged in his manner: buoyant, full of

banter and gravely quaint remarks--he was always the same.  Jane Clemens

had grown older, too.  She was nearly sixty-four, but as keen and

vigorous as ever-proud (even if somewhat critical) of this handsome,

brilliant man of new name and fame who had been her mischievous, wayward

boy.  She petted him, joked with him, scolded him, and inquired

searchingly into his morals and habits.  In turn he petted, comforted,

and teased her.  She decided that he was the same Sam, and always would

be--a true prophecy.



He went up to Hannibal to see old friends.  Many were married; some had

moved away; some were dead--the old story.  He delivered his lecture

there, and was the center of interest and admiration--his welcome might

have satisfied even Tom Sawyer.  From Hannibal he journeyed to Keokuk,

where he lectured again to a crowd of old friends and new, then returned

to St. Louis for a more extended visit.



It was while he was in St. Louis that he first saw the announcement of

the Quaker City Holy Land Excursion, and was promptly fascinated by what

was then a brand-new idea in ocean travel--a splendid picnic--a choice

and refined party that would sail away for a long summer's journeying to

the most romantic of all lands and seas, the shores of the Mediterranean.

No such argosy had ever set out before in pursuit of the golden fleece of

happiness.



His projected trip around the world lost its charm in the light of this

idyllic dream.  Henry Ward Beecher was advertised as one of the party;

General Sherman as another; also ministers, high-class journalists--the

best minds of the nation.  Anson Burlingame had told him to associate

with persons of refinement and intellect.  He lost no time in writing to

the Alta, proposing that they send him in this select company.



Noah Brooks, who was then on the Alta, states--[In an article published

in the Century Magazine.]--that the management was staggered by the

proposition, but that Col. John McComb insisted that the investment in

Mark Twain would be sound.  A letter was accordingly sent, stating that a

check for his passage would be forwarded in due season, and that meantime

he could contribute letters from New York City.  The rate for all letters

was to be twenty dollars each.  The arrangement was a godsend, in the

fullest sense of the word, to Mark Twain.



It was now April, and he was eager to get back to New York to arrange his

passage.  The Quaker City would not sail for two months yet (two eventful

months), but the advertisement said that passages must be secured by the

5th, and he was there on that day.  Almost the first man he met was the

chief of the New York Alta bureau with a check for twelve hundred and

fifty dollars (the amount of his ticket) and a telegram saying, "Ship

Mark Twain in the Holy Land Excursion and pay his passage."



     --[The following letter, which bears no date, was probably handed to

     him later in the New York Alta office as a sort of credential:



     ALTA CALIFORNIA OFFICE, 42 JOHN STREET, NEW YORK.



     Sam'l Clemens, Esq., New York.



     DEAR SIR,--I have the honor to inform you that Fred'k. MacCrellish

     & Co., Proprietors of Alta California, San Francisco, Cal., desire

     to engage your services as Special Correspondent on the pleasure

     excursion now about to proceed from this City to the Holy Land.  In

     obedience to their instructions I have secured a passage for you on

     the vessel about to convey the excursion party referred to, and made

     such arrangements as I hope will secure your comfort and

     convenience.  Your only instructions are that you will continue to

     write at such times and from such places as you deem proper, and in

     the same style that heretofore secured you the favor of the readers

     of the Alta California.  I have the honor to remain, with high

     respect and esteem,



     Your ob'dt.  Servant,



     JOHN J. MURPHY.]





The Alta, it appears, had already applied for his berth; but, not having

been vouched for by Mr. Beecher or some other eminent divine, Clemens was

fearful he might not be accepted.  Quite casually he was enlightened on

this point.  While waiting for attention in the shipping-office, with the

Alta agent, he heard a newspaper man inquire what notables were going.

A clerk, with evident pride, rattled off the names:



"Lieutenant-General Sherman, Henry Ward Beecher, and Mask Twain; also

probably General Banks."



So he was billed as an attraction.  It was his first surreptitious taste

of fame on the Atlantic coast, and not without its delight.  The story

often told of his being introduced by Ned House, of the Tribune, as a

minister, though often repeated by Mark Twain himself, was in the nature

of a joke, and mainly apocryphal.  Clemens was a good deal in House's

company at the time, for he had made an arrangement to contribute

occasional letters to the Tribune, and House no doubt introduced him

jokingly as one of the Quaker City ministers.









LVIII



A NEW BOOK AND A LECTURE



Webb, meantime, had pushed the Frog book along.  The proofs had been read

and the volume was about ready for issue.  Clemens wrote to his mother

April 15th:



     My book will probably be in the bookseller's hands in about two

     weeks.  After that I shall lecture.  Since I have been gone, the

     boys have gotten up a "call" on me signed by two hundred

     Californians.



The lecture plan was the idea of Frank Fuller, who as acting Governor of

Utah had known Mark Twain on the Comstock, and prophesied favorably of

his future career.  Clemens had hunted up Fuller on landing in New York

in January, and Fuller had encouraged the lecture then; but Clemens was

doubtful.



"I have no reputation with the general public here," he said.  "We

couldn't get a baker's dozen to hear me."



But Fuller was a sanguine person, with an energy and enthusiasm that were

infectious.  He insisted that the idea was sound.  It would solidify Mark

Twain's reputation on the Atlantic coast, he declared, insisting that the

largest house in New York, Cooper Union, should be taken.  Clemens had

partially consented, and Fuller had arranged with all the Pacific slope

people who had come East, headed by ex-Governor James W. Nye (by this

time Senator at Washington), to sign a call for the "Inimitable Mark

Twain" to appear before a New York audience.  Fuller made Nye agree to be

there and introduce the lecturer, and he was burningly busy and happy in

the prospect.



But Mark Twain was not happy.  He looked at that spacious hall and

imagined the little crowd of faithful Californian stragglers that might

gather in to hear him, and the ridicule of the papers next day.  He

begged Fuller to take a smaller hall, the smallest he could get.  But

only the biggest hall in New York would satisfy Fuller.  He would have

taken a larger one if he could have found it.  The lecture was announced

for May 6th.  Its subject was "Kanakadom, or the Sandwich Islands"--

tickets fifty cents.  Fuller timed it to follow a few days after Webb's

book should appear, so that one event might help the other.



Mark Twain's first book, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveyas

County, and Other Sketches', was scheduled for May 1st, and did, in fact,

appear on that date; but to the author it was no longer an important

event.  Jim Smiley's frog as standard-bearer of his literary procession

was not an interesting object, so far as he was concerned--not with that

vast, empty hall in the background and the insane undertaking of trying

to fill it.  The San Francisco venture had been as nothing compared with

this.  Fuller was working night and day with abounding joy, while the

subject of his labor felt as if he were on the brink of a fearful

precipice, preparing to try a pair of wings without first learning to

fly.  At one instant he was cold with fright, the next glowing with an

infection of Fuller's faith.  He devised a hundred schemes for the sale

of seats.  Once he came rushing to Fuller, saying:



"Send a lot of tickets down to the Chickering Piano Company.  I have

promised to put on my programme, 'The piano used at this entertainment is

manufactured by Chickering."'



"But you don't want a piano, Mark," said Fuller, "do you?"



"No, of course not; but they will distribute the tickets for the sake of

the advertisement, whether we have the piano or not."



Fuller got out a lot of handbills and hung bunches of them in the stages,

omnibuses, and horse-cars.  Clemens at first haunted these vehicles to

see if anybody noticed the bills.  The little dangling bunches seemed

untouched.  Finally two men came in; one of them pulled off a bill and

glanced at it.  His friend asked:



"Who's Mark Twain?"



"God knows; I don't!"



The lecturer could not ride any more.  He was desperate.



"Fuller," he groaned, "there isn't a sign--a ripple of interest."



Fuller assured him that everything was working all right "working

underneath," Fuller said--but the lecturer was hopeless.  He reported his

impressions to the folks at home:



     Everything looks shady, at least, if not dark; I have a good agent;

     but now, after we have hired the Cooper Institute, and gone to an

     expense in one way or another of $500, it comes out that I have got

     to play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall, Ristori, and also the

     double troop of Japanese jugglers, the latter opening at the great

     Academy of Music--and with all this against me I have taken the

     largest house in New York and cannot back water.



He might have added that there were other rival entertainments: "The

Flying Scud" was at Wallack's, the "Black Crook" was at Niblo's, John

Brougham at the Olympic; and there were at least a dozen lesser

attractions.  New York was not the inexhaustible city in those days;

these things could gather in the public to the last man.  When the day

drew near, and only a few tickets had been sold, Clemens was desperate.



"Fuller," he said, "there'll be nobody in the Cooper Union that night but

you and me.  I am on the verge of suicide.  I would commit suicide if I

had the pluck and the outfit.  You must paper the house, Fuller.  You

must send out a flood of complementaries."



"Very well," said Fuller; "what we want this time is reputation anyway--

money is secondary.  I'll put you before the choicest, most intelligent

audience that ever was gathered in New York City.  I will bring in the

school-instructors--the finest body of men and women in the world."



Fuller immediately sent out a deluge of complimentary tickets, inviting

the school-teachers of New York and Brooklyn, and all the adjacent

country, to come free and hear Mark Twain's great lecture on Kanakadom.

This was within forty-eight hours of the time he was to appear.



Senator Nye was to have joined Clemens and Fuller at the Westminster,

where Clemens was stopping, and they waited for him there with a

carriage, fuming and swearing, until it was evident that he was not

coming.  At last Clemens said:



"Fuller, you've got to introduce me."



"No," suggested Fuller; "I've got a better scheme than that.  You get up

and begin by bemeaning Nye for not being there.  That will be better

anyway."



Clemens said:



"Well, Fuller, I can do that.  I feel that way.  I'll try to think up

something fresh and happy to say about that horse-thief."



They drove to Cooper Union with trepidation.  Suppose, after all, the

school-teachers had declined to come?  They went half an hour before the

lecture was to begin.  Forty years later Mark Twain said:



"I couldn't keep away.  I wanted to see that vast Mammoth cave and die.

But when we got near the building I saw that all the streets were blocked

with people, and that traffic had stopped.  I couldn't believe that these

people were trying to get into Cooper Institute; but they were, and when

I got to the stage at last the house was jammed full-packed; there wasn't

room enough left for a child.



"I was happy and I was excited beyond expression.  I poured the Sandwich

Islands out on those people, and they laughed and shouted to my entire

content.  For an hour and fifteen minutes I was in paradise."



And Fuller to-day, alive and young, when so many others of that ancient

time and event have vanished, has added:



"When Mark appeared the Californians gave a regular yell of welcome.

When that was over he walked to the edge of the platform, looked

carefully down in the pit, round the edges as if he were hunting for

something.  Then he said:  'There was to have been a piano here, and a

senator to introduce me.  I don't seem to discover them anywhere.  The

piano was a good one, but we will have to get along with such music as I

can make with your help.  As for the senator--Then Mark let himself go

and did as he promised about Senator Nye.  He said things that made men

from the Pacific coast, who had known Nye, scream with delight.  After

that came his lecture.  The first sentence captured the audience.  From

that moment to the end it was either in a roar of laughter or half

breathless by his beautiful descriptive passages.  People were positively

ill for days, laughing at that lecture."



So it was a success: everybody was glad to have been there; the papers

were kind, congratulations numerous.



--[Kind but not extravagant; those were burning political times, and the

doings of mere literary people did not excite the press to the extent of

headlines.  A jam around Cooper Union to-day, followed by such an

artistic triumph, would be a news event.  On the other hand, Schuyler

Colfax, then Speaker of the House, was reported to the extent of a

column, nonpareil.  His lecture was of no literary importance, and no

echo of it now remains.  But those were political, not artistic, days.



Of Mark Twain's lecture the Times notice said:



"Nearly every one present came prepared for considerable provocation for

enjoyable laughter, and from the appearance of their mirthful faces

leaving the hall at the conclusion of the lecture but few were

disappointed, and it is not too much to say that seldom has so large an

audience been so uniformly pleased as the one that listened to Mark

Twain's quaint remarks last evening.  The large hall of the Union was

filled to its utmost capacity by fully two thousand persons, which fact

spoke well for the reputation of the lecturer and his future success.

Mark Twain's style is a quaint one both in manner and method, and through

his discourse he managed to keep on the right side of the audience, and

frequently convulsed it with hearty laughter....  During a description of

the topography of the Sandwich Islands the lecturer surprised his hearers

by a graphic and eloquent description of the eruption of the great

volcano, which occurred in 1840, and his language was loudly applauded.



"Judging from the success achieved by the lecturer last evening, he

should repeat his experiment at an early date."]





                            COOPER INSTITUTE

     By Invitation of s large number of prominent Californians and

                         Citizens of New York,



                               MARK TWAIN



                             WILL DELIVER A

                         SERIO-HUMEROUS LECTURE

                               CONERNING



                                KANAKDOM

                                   OR

                         THE SANDWICH ISLANDS,



                           COOPER INSTITUTE,

                     On Monday Evening, May 6,1867.



                          TICKETS FIFTY GENTS.

  For Sale at Chickering and Sons, 852 Broadway, and at the Principal

                                 Hotel



     Doors open at 7 o'clock.   The Wisdom will begin to flow at 8.





Mark Twain always felt grateful to the school-teachers for that night.

Many years later, when they wanted him to read to them in Steinway Hall,

he gladly gave his services without charge.



Nor was the lecture a complete financial failure.  In spite of the flood

of complementaries, there was a cash return of some three hundred dollars

from the sale of tickets--a substantial aid in defraying the expenses

which Fuller assumed and insisted on making good on his own account.

That was Fuller's regal way; his return lay in the joy of the game, and

in the winning of the larger stake for a friend.



"Mark," he said, "it is all right.  The fortune didn't come, but it will.

The fame has arrived; with this lecture and your book just out you are

going to be the most talked-of man in the country.  Your letters for the

Alta and the Tribune will get the widest reception of any letters of

travel ever written."











LIX



THE FIRST BOOK



With the shadow of the Cooper Institute so happily dispelled, The

Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and his following of Other

Sketches, became a matter of more interest.  The book was a neat blue-

and-gold volume printed by John A.  Gray & Green, the old firm for which

the boy, Sam Clemens, had set type thirteen years before.  The title-page

bore Webb's name as publisher, with the American News Company as selling

agents.  It further stated that the book was edited by "John Paul," that

is to say by Webb himself.  The dedication was in keeping with the

general irresponsible character of the venture.  It was as follows:



                                   TO

                               JOHN SMITH

                 WHOM I HAVE KNOWN IN DIVERS AND SUNDRY

                   PLACES ABOUT THE WORLD, AND WHOSE

                     MANY AND MANIFOLD VIRTUES DID

                       ALWAYS COMMAND MY ESTEEM,

                          I DEDICATE THIS BOOK



It is said that the man to whom a volume is dedicated always buys a copy.

If this prove true in the present instance, a princely affluence is about

to burst upon

                                                  THE AUTHOR.





The "advertisement" stated that the author had "scaled the heights of

popularity at a single jump, and won for himself the sobriquet of the

'Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope'; furthermore, that he was known to

fame as the 'Moralist of the Main,'" and that as such he would be likely

to go down to posterity, adding that it was in his secondary character,

as humorist, rather than in his primal one of moralist, that the volume

aimed to present him.--[The advertisement complete, with extracts from

the book, may be found under Appendix E, at the end of last volume.]



Every little while, during the forty years or more that have elapsed

since then, some one has come forward announcing Mark Twain to be as much

a philosopher as a humorist, as if this were a new discovery.  But it was

a discovery chiefly to the person making the announcement.  Every one who

ever knew Mark Twain at any period of his life made the same discovery.

Every one who ever took the trouble to familiarize himself with his work

made it.  Those who did not make it have known his work only by hearsay

and quotation, or they have read it very casually, or have been very

dull.  It would be much more of a discovery to find a book in which he

has not been serious--a philosopher, a moralist, and a poet.  Even in the

Jumping Frog sketches, selected particularly for their inconsequence, the

under-vein of reflection and purpose is not lacking.  The answer to Moral

Statistician--[In "Answers to Correspondents," included now in Sketches

New and Old.  An extract from it, and from "A Strange Dream," will be

found in Appendix E.]--is fairly alive with human wisdom and righteous

wrath.  The "Strange Dream," though ending in a joke, is aglow with

poetry.  Webb's "advertisement" was playfully written, but it was

earnestly intended, and he writes Mark Twain down a moralist--not as a

discovery, but as a matter of course.  The discoveries came along later,

when the author's fame as a humorist had dazzled the nations.



It is as well to say it here as anywhere, perhaps, that one reason why

Mark Twain found it difficult to be accepted seriously was the fact that

his personality was in itself so essentially humorous.  His physiognomy,

his manner of speech, this movement, his mental attitude toward events--

all these were distinctly diverting.  When we add to this that his medium

of expression was nearly always full of the quaint phrasing and those

surprising appositions which we recognize as amusing, it is not so

astonishing that his deeper, wiser, more serious purpose should be

overlooked.  On the whole these unabated discoverers serve a purpose, if

only to make the rest of their species look somewhat deeper than the

comic phrase.



The little blue-and-gold volume which presented the Frog story and

twenty-six other sketches in covers is chiefly important to-day as being

Mark Twain's first book.  The selections in it were made for a public

that had been too busy with a great war to learn discrimination, and most

of them have properly found oblivion.  Fewer than a dozen of them were

included in his collected Sketches issued eight years later, and some

even of those might have been spared; also some that were added, for that

matter; but detailed literary criticism is not the province of this work.

The reader may investigate and judge for himself.



Clemens was pleased with the appearance of his book.  To Bret Harte he

wrote:



The book is out and it is handsome.  It is full of damnable errors of

grammar and deadly inconsistencies of spelling in the Frog sketch,

because I was away and did not read proofs; but be a friend and say

nothing about these things.  When my hurry is over, I will send you a

copy to pisen the children with.



That he had no exaggerated opinion of the book's contents or prospects we

may gather from his letter home:



As for the Frog book, I don't believe it will ever pay anything worth a

cent.  I published it simply to advertise myself, and not with the hope

of making anything out of it.



He had grown more lenient in his opinion of the merits of the Frog story

itself since it had made friends in high places, especially since James

Russell Lowell had pronounced it "the finest piece of humorous writing

yet produced in America"; but compared with his lecture triumph, and his

prospective journey to foreign seas, his book venture, at best, claimed

no more than a casual regard.  A Sandwich Island book (he had collected

his Union letters with the idea of a volume) he gave up altogether after

one unsuccessful offer of it to Dick & Fitzgerald.



Frank Fuller's statement, that the fame had arrived, had in it some

measure of truth.  Lecture propositions came from various directions.

Thomas Nast, then in the early day of his great popularity, proposed a

joint tour, in which Clemens would lecture, while he, Nast, illustrated

the remarks with lightning caricatures.  But the time was too short; the

Quaker City would sail on the 8th of June, and in the mean time the Alta

correspondent was far behind with his New York letters.  On May 29th he

wrote:



I am 18 Alta letters behind, and I must catch up or bust.  I have refused

all invitations to lecture.  Don't know how my book is coming on.



He worked like a slave for a week or so, almost night and day, to clean

up matters before his departure.  Then came days of idleness and

reaction-days of waiting, during which his natural restlessness and the

old-time regret for things done and undone, beset him.



     My passage is paid, and if the ship sails I sail on her; but I make

     no calculations, have bought no cigars, no sea-going clothing--have

     made no preparations whatever--shall not pack my trunk till the

     morning we sail.



     All I do know or feel is that I am wild with impatience to move--

     move--move!  Curse the endless delays!  They always kill me--they

     make me neglect every duty, and then I have a conscience that tears

     me like a wild beast.  I wish I never had to stop anywhere a month.

     I do more mean things the moment I get a chance to fold my hands and

     sit down than ever I get forgiveness for.



     Yes, we are to meet at Mr. Beach's next Thursday night, and I

     suppose we shall have to be gotten up regardless of expense, in

     swallow-tails, white kids and everything 'en regle'.



     I am resigned to Rev.  Mr. Hutchinson's or anybody else's

     supervision.  I don't mind it.  I am fixed.  I have got a splendid,

     immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless roommate who is as

     good and true and right-minded a man as ever lived--a man whose

     blameless conduct and example will always be an eloquent sermon to

     all who shall come within their influence.  But send on the

     professional preachers--there are none I like better to converse

     with; if they're not narrowminded and bigoted they make good

     companions.



The "splendid immoral room-mate" was Dan Slote--"Dan," of The Innocents,

a lovable character--all as set down.  Samuel Clemens wrote one more

letter to his mother and sister--a conscience-stricken, pessimistic

letter of good-by written the night before sailing.  Referring to the

Alta letters he says:



     I think they are the stupidest letters ever written from New York.

     Corresponding has been a perfect drag ever since I got to the

     States.  If it continues abroad, I don't know what the Tribune and

     Alta folk will think.



He remembers Orion, who had been officially eliminated when Nevada had

received statehood.



     I often wonder if his law business is going satisfactorily.  I wish

     I had gone to Washington in the winter instead of going West.  I

     could have gouged an office out of Bill Stewart for him, and that

     would have atoned for the loss of my home visit.  But I am so

     worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish

     anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory.  My mind is

     stored full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all, and

     an accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and

     restless moving from place to place.  If I could only say I had done

     one thing for any of you that entitled me to your good opinions (I

     say nothing of your love, for I am sure of that, no matter how

     unworthy of it I may make myself--from Orion down, you have always

     given me that; all the days of my life, when God Almighty knows I

     have seldom deserved it), I believe I could go home and stay there--

     and I know I would care little for the world's praise or blame.

     There is no satisfaction in the world's praise anyhow, and it has no

     worth to me save in the way of business.  I tried to gather up its

     compliments to send you, but the work was distasteful and I dropped

     it.



     You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that

     is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt.  I can get away

     from that at sea, and be tranquil and satisfied; and so, with my

     parting love and benediction for Orion and all of you, I say good-by

     and God bless you all-and welcome the wind that wafts a weary soul

     to the sunny lands of the Mediterranean!



                              Yrs.  forever,

                                             SAM











LX



THE INNOCENTS AT SEA



          HOLY LAND PLEASURE EXCURSION



          Steamer: Quaker City.



          Captain C. C. Duncan.



          Left New York at 2 P.m., June 8, 1867.



          Rough weather--anchored within the harbor to lay all night.



That first note recorded an event momentous in Mark Twain's career--an

event of supreme importance; if we concede that any link in a chain

regardless of size is of more importance than any other link.

Undoubtedly it remains the most conspicuous event, as the world views it

now, in retrospect.



The note further heads a new chapter of history in sea-voyaging.  No such

thing as the sailing of an ocean steamship with a pleasure-party on a

long transatlantic cruise had ever occurred before.  A similar project

had been undertaken the previous year, but owing to a cholera scare in

the East it had been abandoned.  Now the dream had become a fact--a

stupendous fact when we consider it.  Such an important beginning as that

now would in all likelihood furnish the chief news story of the day.



But they had different ideas of news in those days.  There were no

headlines announcing the departure of the Quaker City--only the barest

mention of the ship's sailing, though a prominent position was given to

an account of a senatorial excursion-party which set out that same

morning over the Union Pacific Railway, then under construction.  Every

name in that political party was set dawn, and not one of them except

General Hancock will ever be heard of again.  The New York Times,

however, had some one on its editorial staff who thought it worth while

to comment a little on the history-making Quaker City excursion.  The

writer was pleasantly complimentary to officers and passengers.  He

referred to Moses S. Beach, of the Sun, who was taking with him type and

press, whereby he would "skilfully utilize the brains of the company for

their mutual edification."  Mr. Beecher and General Sherman would find

talent enough aboard to make the hours go pleasantly (evidently the

writer had not interested himself sufficiently to know that these

gentlemen were not along), and the paragraph closed by prophesying other

such excursions, and wishing the travelers "good speed, a happy voyage,

and a safe return."



That was handsome, especially for those days; only now, some fine day,

when an airship shall start with a band of happy argonauts to land beyond

the sunrise for the first time in history, we shall feature it and

emblazon it with pictures in the Sunday papers, and weeklies, and in the

magazines.--[The Quaker City idea was so unheard-of that in some of the

foreign ports visited, the officials could not believe that the vessel

was simply a pleasure-craft, and were suspicious of some dark, ulterior

purpose.]



That Henry Ward Beecher and General Sherman had concluded not to go was a

heavy disappointment at first; but it proved only a temporary disaster.

The inevitable amalgamation of all ship companies took place.  The sixty-

seven travelers fell into congenial groups, or they mingled and devised

amusements, and gossiped and became a big family, as happy and as free

from contention as families of that size are likely to be.



The Quaker City was a good enough ship and sizable for her time.  She was

registered eighteen hundred tons--about one-tenth the size of

Mediterranean excursion-steamers today--and when conditions were

favorable she could make ten knots an hour under steam--or, at least, she

could do it with the help of her auxiliary sails.  Altogether she was a

cozy, satisfactory ship, and they were a fortunate company who had her

all to themselves and went out on her on that long-ago ocean gipsying.

She has grown since then, even to the proportions of the Mayflower.  It

was necessary for her to grow to hold all of those who in later times

claimed to have sailed in her on that voyage with Mark Twain.--[The

Quaker City passenger list will be found under Appendix F, at the end of

last volume.]



They were not all ministers and deacons aboard the Quaker City.  Clemens

found other congenial spirits be sides his room-mate Dan Slote--among

them the ship's surgeon, Dr. A. Reeve Jackson (the guide-destroying

"Doctor" of The Innocents); Jack Van Nostrand, of New Jersey ("Jack");

Julius Moulton, of St. Louis ("Moult"), and other care-free fellows, the

smoking-room crowd which is likely to make comradeship its chief

watchword.  There were companionable people in the cabin crowd also--

fine, intelligent men and women, especially one of the latter, a middle-

aged, intellectual, motherly soul--Mrs. A. W. Fairbanks, of Cleveland,

Ohio.  Mrs. Fairbanks--herself a newspaper correspondent for her

husband's paper, the Cleveland Herald had a large influence on the

character and general tone of those Quaker City letters which established

Mark Twain's larger fame.  She was an able writer herself; her judgment

was thoughtful, refined, unbiased--altogether of a superior sort.  She

understood Samuel Clemens, counseled him, encouraged him to read his

letters aloud to her, became in reality "Mother Fairbanks," as they

termed her, to him and to others of that ship who needed her kindly

offices.



In one of his home letters, later, he said of her:



     She was the most refined, intelligent, cultivated lady in the ship,

     and altogether the kindest and best.  She sewed my buttons on, kept

     my clothing in presentable trim, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I

     behaved), lectured me awfully on the quarter-deck on moonlit

     promenading evenings, and cured me of several bad habits.  I am

     under lasting obligations to her.  She looks young because she is so

     good, but she has a grown son and daughter at home.



In one of the early letters which Mrs. Fairbanks wrote to her paper she

is scarcely less complimentary to him, even if in a different way.



     We have D.D.'s and M.D.'s--we have men of wisdom and men of wit.

     There is one table from which is sure to come a peal of laughter,

     and all eyes are turned toward Mark Twain, whose face is, perfectly

     mirth-provoking.  Sitting lazily at the table, scarcely genteel in

     his appearance, there is something, I know not what, that interests

     and attracts.  I saw to-day at dinner venerable divines and sage-

     looking men convulsed with laughter at his drolleries and quaint,

     odd manners.



It requires only a few days on shipboard for acquaintances to form, and

presently a little afternoon group was gathering to hear Mark Twain read

his letters.  Mrs. Fairbanks was there, of course, also Mr. and Mrs. S.

L. Severance, likewise of Cleveland, and Moses S. Beach, of the Sun, with

his daughter Emma, a girl of seventeen.  Dan Slote was likely to be

there, too, and Jack, and the Doctor, and Charles J. Langdon, of Elmira,

New York, a boy of eighteen, who had conceived a deep admiration for the

brilliant writer.  They were fortunate ones who first gathered to hear

those daring, wonderful letters.



But the benefit was a mutual one. He furnished a priceless entertainment,

and he derived something equally priceless in return--the test of

immediate audience and the boon of criticism.  Mrs. Fairbanks especially

was frankly sincere.  Mr. Severance wrote afterward:



     One afternoon I saw him tearing up a bunch of the soft, white paper-

     copy paper, I guess the newspapers call it-on which he had written

     something, and throwing the fragments into the Mediterranean.  I

     inquired of him why he cast away the fruits of his labors in that

     manner.



"Well," he drawled, "Mrs. Fairbanks thinks it oughtn't to be printed,

and, like as not, she is right."



And Emma Beach (Mrs. Abbott Thayer) remembers hearing him say:



"Well, Mrs. Fairbanks has just destroyed another four hours' work for

me."



Sometimes he played chess with Emma Beach, who thought him a great hero

because, once when a crowd of men were tormenting a young lad, a

passenger, Mark Twain took the boy's part and made them desist.



"I am sure I was right, too," she declares; "heroism came natural to

him."



Mr. Severance recalls another incident which, as he says, was trivial

enough, but not easy to forget:



We were having a little celebration over the birthday anniversary of Mrs.

Duncan, wife of our captain.  Mark Twain got up and made a little speech,

in which he said Mrs. Duncan was really older than Methuselah because she

knew a lot of things that Methuselah never heard of.  Then he mentioned a

number of more or less modern inventions, and wound up by saying, "What

did Methuselah know about a barbed-wire fence?"



Except Following the Equator, The Innocents Abroad comes nearer to being

history than any other of Mark Twain's travel-books.  The notes for it

were made on the spot, and there was plenty of fact, plenty of fresh, new

experience, plenty of incident to set down.  His idea of descriptive

travel in those days was to tell the story as it happened; also, perhaps,

he had not then acquired the courage of his inventions.  We may believe

that the adventures with Jack, Dan, and the Doctor are elaborated here

and there; but even those happened substantially as recorded.  There is

little to add, then, to the story of that halcyon trip, and not much to

elucidate.



The old note-books give a light here and there that is interesting.  It

is curious to be looking through them now, trying to realize that these

penciled memoranda were the fresh, first impressions that would presently

grow into the world's most delightful book of travel; that they were set

down in the very midst of that care-free little company that frolicked

through Italy, climbed wearily the arid Syrian hills.  They are all dead

now; but to us they are as alive and young to-day as when they followed

the footprints of the Son of Man through Palestine, and stood at last

before the Sphinx, impressed and awed by its "five thousand slow-

revolving years."



Some of the items consist of no more than a few terse, suggestive words--

serious, humorous, sometimes profane.  Others are statistical,

descriptive, elaborated.  Also there are drawings--"not copied," he marks

them, with a pride not always justified by the result.  The earlier notes

are mainly comments on the "pilgrims," the freak pilgrims: "the Frenchy-

looking woman who owns a dog and keeps up an interminable biography of

him to the passengers"; the "long-legged, simple, wide-mouthed, horse-

laughing young fellow who once made a sea voyage to Fortress Monroe, and

quotes eternally from his experiences"; also, there is reference to

another young man, "good, accommodating, pleasant but fearfully green."

This young person would become the "Interrogation Point," in due time,

and have his picture on page 71 (old edition), while opposite him, on

page 70, would appear the "oracle," identified as one Doctor Andrews, who

(the note-book says) had the habit of "smelling in guide-books for

knowledge and then trying to play it for old information that has been

festering in his brain."  Sometimes there are abstract notes such as:



How lucky Adam was.  He knew when he said a good thing that no one had

ever said it before.



Of the "character" notes, the most important and elaborated is that which

presents the "Poet Lariat."  This is the entry, somewhat epitomized:



                         BLOODGOOD H.  CUTTER



     He is fifty years old, and small of his age.  He dresses in

     homespun, and is a simple-minded, honest, old-fashioned farmer, with

     a strange proclivity for writing rhymes.  He writes them on all

     possible subjects, and gets them printed on slips of paper, with his

     portrait at the head.  These he will give to any man who comes

     along, whether he has anything against him or not .  .  .  .



     Dan said:



     "It must be a great happiness to you to sit down at the close of day

     and put its events all down in rhymes and poetry, like Byron and

     Shakespeare and those fellows."



     "Oh yes, it is--it is--Why, many's the time I've had to get up in

     the night when it comes on me:



          Whether we're on the sea or the land

          We've all got to go at the word of command--



     "Hey!  how's that?"



A curious character was Cutter--a Long Island farmer with the obsession

of rhyme.  In his old age, in an interview, he said:



"Mark was generally writing and he was glum.  He would write what we were

doing, and I would write poetry, and Mark would say:



"'For Heaven's sake, Cutter, keep your poems to yourself.'



"Yes, Mark was pretty glum, and he was generally writing."



Poor old Poet Lariat--dead now with so many others of that happy crew.

We may believe that Mark learned to be "glum" when he saw the Lariat

approaching with his sheaf of rhymes.  We may believe, too, that he was

"generally writing."  He contributed fifty-three letters to the Alta

during that five months and six to the Tribune.  They would average about

two columns nonpareil each, which is to say four thousand words, or

something like two hundred and fifty thousand words in all.  To turn out

an average of fifteen hundred words a day, with continuous sight-seeing

besides, one must be generally writing during any odd intervals; those

who are wont to regard Mark Twain as lazy may consider these statistics.

That he detested manual labor is true enough, but at the work for which

he was fitted and intended it may be set down here upon authority (and

despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that to his last

year he was the most industrious of men.









LXI



THE INNOCENTS ABROAD



It was Dan, Jack, and the Doctor who with Mark Twain wandered down

through Italy and left moral footprints that remain to this day.  The

Italian guides are wary about showing pieces of the True Cross, fragments

of the Crown of Thorns, and the bones of saints since then.  They show

them, it is true, but with a smile; the name of Mark Twain is a touch-

stone to test their statements.  Not a guide in Italy but has heard the

tale of that iconoclastic crew, and of the book which turned their

marvels into myths, their relics into bywords.



It was Doctor Jackson, Colonel Denny, Doctor Birch, and Samuel Clemens

who evaded the quarantine and made the perilous night trip to Athens and

looked upon the Parthenon and the sleeping city by moonlight.  It is all

set down in the notes, and the account varies little from that given in

the book; only he does not tell us that Captain Duncan and the

quartermaster, Pratt, connived at the escapade, or how the latter watched

the shore in anxious suspense until he heard the whistle which was their

signal to be taken aboard.  It would have meant six months' imprisonment

if they had been captured, for there was no discretion in the Greek law.



It was T. D. Crocker, A. N. Sanford, Col. Peter Kinney, and William

Gibson who were delegated to draft the address to the Emperor of Russia

at Yalta, with Samuel L.  Clemens as chairman of that committee.  The

chairman wrote the address, the opening sentence of which he grew so

weary of hearing:



     We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply

     for recreation, and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial

     state.



The address is all set down in the notes, and there also exists the first

rough draft, with the emendations in his own hand.  He deplores the time

it required:



     That job is over.  Writing addresses to emperors is not my strong

     suit.  However, if it is not as good as it might be it doesn't

     signify--the other committeemen ought to have helped me write it;

     they had nothing to do, and I had my hands full.  But for bothering

     with this I would have caught up entirely with my New York Tribune

     correspondence and nearly up with the San Francisco.



They wanted him also to read the address to the Emperor, but he pointed

out that the American consul was the proper person for that office.  He

tells how the address was presented:



August 26th.  The Imperial carriages were in waiting at eleven, and at

twelve we were at the palace....



The Consul for Odessa read the address and the Czar said frequently,

"Good--very good; indeed"--and at the close, "I am very, very grateful."



It was not improper for him to set down all this, and much more, in his

own note-book--not then for publication.  It was in fact a very proper

record--for today.



One incident of the imperial audience Mark Twain omitted from his book,

perhaps because the humor of it had not yet become sufficiently evident.

"The humorous perception of a thing is a pretty slow growth sometimes,"

he once remarked.  It was about seventeen years before he could laugh

enjoyably at a slight mistake he made at the Emperor's reception.  He set

down a memorandum of it, then, for fear it might be lost:



     There were a number of great dignitaries of the Empire there, and

     although, as a general thing, they were dressed in citizen's

     clothing, I observed that the most of them wore a very small piece

     of ribbon in the lapels of their coats.  That little touch of color

     struck my fancy, and it seemed to me a good idea to add it to my own

     attractions; not imagining that it had any special significance.  So

     I stepped aside, hunted up a bit of red ribbon, and ornamented my

     lapel with it.  Presently, Count Festetics, the Grand Master of

     ceremonies, and the only man there who was gorgeously arrayed, in

     full official costume, began to show me a great many attentions.  He

     was particularly polite, and pleasant, and anxious to be of service

     to me.  Presently, he asked me what order of nobility I belonged to?

     I said, "I didn't belong to any."  Then he asked me what order of

     knighthood I belonged to?  I said, "None."  Then he asked me what

     the red ribbon in my buttonhole stood for?  I saw, at once, what an

     ass I had been making of myself, and was accordingly confused and

     embarrassed.  I said the first thing that came into my mind, and

     that was that the ribbon was merely the symbol of a club of

     journalists to which I belonged, and I was not pursued with any more

     of Count Festetic's attentions.



     Later, I got on very familiar terms with an old gentleman, whom I

     took to be the head gardener, and walked him all about the gardens,

     slipping my arm into his without invitation, yet without demur on

     his part, and by and by was confused again when I found that he was

     not a gardener at all, but the Lord High Admiral of Russia!  I

     almost made up my mind that I would never call on an Emperor again.



Like all Mediterranean excursionists, those first pilgrims were

insatiable collectors of curios, costumes, and all manner of outlandish

things.  Dan Slote had the stateroom hung and piled with such gleanings.

At Constantinople his room-mate writes:



     I thought Dan had got the state-room pretty full of rubbish at last,

     but awhile ago his dragoman arrived with a brand-new ghastly

     tombstone of the Oriental pattern, with his name handsomely carved

     and gilted on it in Turkish characters.  That fellow will buy a

     Circassian slave next.



It was Church, Denny, Jack, Davis, Dan, Moult, and Mark Twain who made

the "long trip" through Syria from Beirut to Jerusalem with their

elaborate camping outfit and decrepit nags "Jericho," "Baalbec," and the

rest.  It was better camping than that Humboldt journey of six years

before, though the horses were not so dissimilar, and altogether it was a

hard, nerve-racking experience, climbing the arid hills of Palestine in

that torrid summer heat.  Nobody makes that trip in summer-time now.

Tourists hurry out of Syria before the first of April, and they do not go

back before November.  One brief quotation from Mark Twain's book gives

us an idea of what that early party of pilgrims had to undergo:



     We left Damascus at noon and rode across the plain a couple of

     hours, and then the party stopped a while in the shade of some fig-

     trees to give me a chance to rest.  It was the hottest day we had

     seen yet--the sun-flames shot down like the shafts of fire that

     stream out before a blow-pipe; the rays seemed to fall in a deluge

     on the head and pass downward like rain from a roof.  I imagined I

     could distinguish between the floods of rays.  I thought I could

     tell when each flood struck my head, when it reached my shoulders,

     and when the next one came.  It was terrible.



He had been ill with cholera at Damascus, a light attack; but any attack

of that dread disease is serious enough.  He tells of this in the book,

but he does not mention, either in the book or in his notes, the attack

which Dan Slote had some days later.  It remained for William F. Church,

of the party, to relate that incident, for it was the kind of thing that

Mark Twain was not likely to record, or even to remember.  Doctor Church

was a deacon with orthodox views and did not approve of Mark Twain; he

thought him sinful, irreverent, profane.



"He was the worst man I ever knew," Church said; then he added, "And the

best."



What happened was this: At the end of a terrible day of heat, when the

party had camped on the edge of a squalid Syrian village, Dan was taken

suddenly ill.  It was cholera, beyond doubt.  Dan could not go on--he

might never go on.  The chances were that way.  It was a serious matter

all around.  To wait with Dan meant to upset their travel schedule--it

might mean to miss the ship.  Consultation was held and a resolution

passed (the pilgrims were always passing resolutions) to provide for Dan

as well as possible, and leave him behind.  Clemens, who had remained

with Dan, suddenly appeared and said:



"Gentlemen, I understand that you are going to leave Dan Slote here

alone.  I'll be d---d if I do!"



And he didn't.  He stayed there and brought Dan into Jerusalem, a few

days late, but convalescent.



Perhaps most of them were not always reverent during that Holy Land trip.

It was a trying journey, and after fierce days of desert hills the

reaction might not always spare even the holiest memories.  Jack was

particularly sinful.  When they learned the price for a boat on Galilee,

and the deacons who had traveled nearly half around the world to sail on

that sacred water were confounded by the charge, Jack said:



"Well, Denny, do you wonder now that Christ walked?"



It was the irreverent Jack who one morning (they had camped the night

before by the ruins of Jericho) refused to get up to see the sun rise

across the Jordan.  Deacon Church went to his tent.



"Jack, my boy, get up.  Here is the place where the Israelites crossed

over into the Promised Land, and beyond are the mountains of Moab, where

Moses lies buried."



"Moses who!" said Jack.



"Oh, Jack, my boy, Moses, the great lawgiver--who led the Israelites out

of Egypt-forty years through the wilderness--to the Promised Land."



"Forty years!" said Jack.  "How far was it?"



"It was three hundred miles, Jack; a great wilderness, and he brought

them through in safety."



Jack regarded him with scorn.  "Huh, Moses--three hundred miles forty

years--why, Ben Holiday would have brought them through in thirty-six

hours!"--[Ben Holiday, owner of the Overland stages, and a man of great

executive ability.  This incident, a true one, is more elaborately told

in Roughing It, but it seems pertinent here.]



Jack probably learned more about the Bible during that trip-its history

and its heroes-than during all his former years.  Nor was Jack the only

one of that group thus benefited.  The sacred landmarks of Palestine

inspire a burning interest in the Scriptures, and Mark Twain probably did

not now regret those early Sunday-school lessons; certainly he did not

fail to review them exhaustively on that journey.  His note-books fairly

overflow with Bible references; the Syrian chapters in The Innocents

Abroad are permeated with the poetry and legendary beauty of the Bible

story.  The little Bible he carried on that trip, bought in

Constantinople, was well worn by the time they reached the ship again at

Jaffa.  He must have read it with a large and persistent interest; also

with a double benefit.  For, besides the knowledge acquired, he was

harvesting a profit--probably unsuspected at the time---viz., the

influence of the most direct and beautiful English--the English of the

King James version--which could not fail to affect his own literary

method at that impressionable age.  We have already noted his earlier

admiration for that noble and simple poem, "The Burial of Moses," which

in the Palestine note-book is copied in full.  All the tendency of his

expression lay that way, and the intense consideration of stately Bible

phrase and imagery could hardly fail to influence his mental processes.

The very distinct difference of style, as shown in The Innocents Abroad

and in his earlier writings, we may believe was in no small measure due

to his study of the King James version during those weeks in Palestine.



He bought another Bible at Jerusalem; but it was not for himself.  It was

a little souvenir volume bound in olive and balsam wood, and on the fly-

leaf is inscribed:



     Mrs. Jane Clemens from her son.  Jerusalem, Sept.  24, 1867.



There is one more circumstance of that long cruise-recorded neither in

the book nor the notes--an incident brief, but of more importance in the

life of Samuel Clemens than any heretofore set down.  It occurred in the

beautiful Bay of Smyrna, on the fifth or sixth of September, while the

vessel lay there for the Ephesus trip.



Reference has been made to young Charles Langdon, of Elmira (the

"Charley" once mentioned in the Innocents), as an admirer of Mark Twain.

There was a good deal of difference in their ages, and they were seldom

of the same party; but sometimes the boy invited the journalist to his

cabin and, boy-like, exhibited his treasures.  He had two sisters at

home; and of Olivia, the youngest, he had brought a dainty miniature done

on ivory in delicate tints--a sweet-pictured countenance, fine and

spiritual.  On that fateful day in the day of Smyrna, Samuel Clemens,

visiting in young Langdon's cabin, was shown this portrait.  He looked at

it with long admiration, and spoke of it reverently, for the delicate

face seemed to him to be something more than a mere human likeness.  Each

time he came, after that, he asked to see the picture, and once even

begged to be allowed to take it away with him.  The boy would not agree

to this, and the elder man looked long and steadily at the miniature,

resolving in his mind that some day he would meet the owner of that

lovely face--a purpose for once in accord with that which the fates had

arranged for him, in the day when all things were arranged, the day of

the first beginning.









LXII



THE RETURN OF THE PILGRIMS



The last note-book entry bears date of October 11th:



     At sea, somewhere in the neighborhood of Malta.  Very stormy.



     Terrible death to be talked to death.  The storm has blown two small

     land birds and a hawk to sea and they came on board.  Sea full of

     flying-fish.



That is all.  There is no record of the week's travel in Spain, which a

little group of four made under the picturesque Gibraltar guide, Benunes,

still living and quite as picturesque at last accounts.  This side-trip

is covered in a single brief paragraph in the Innocents, and the only

account we have of it is in a home letter, from Cadiz, of October 24th:



     We left Gibraltar at noon and rode to Algeciras (4 hours), thus

     dodging the quarantine--took dinner, and then rode horseback all

     night in a swinging trot, and at daylight took a caleche (a-wheeled

     vehicle), and rode 5 hours--then took cars and traveled till twelve

     at night.  That landed us at Seville, and we were over the hard part

     of our trip and somewhat tired.  Since then we have taken things

     comparatively easy, drifting around from one town to another and

     attracting a good deal of attention--for I guess strangers do not

     wander through Andalusia and the other southern provinces of Spain

     often.  The country is precisely what it was when Don Quixote and

     Sancho Panza were possible characters.



     But I see now what the glory of Spain must have been when it was

     under Moorish domination.  No, I will not say that--but then when

     one is carried away, infatuated, entranced, with the wonders of the

     Alhambra and the supernatural beauty of the Alcazar, he is apt to

     overflow with admiration for the splendid intellects that created

     them.



We may wish that he had left us a chapter of that idyllic journey, but it

will never be written now.  A night or two before the vessel reached New

York there was the usual good-by assembly, and for this occasion, at Mrs.

Severance's request, Mark Twain wrote some verses.  They were not

especially notable, for meter and rhyme did not come easy to him, but one

prophetic stanza is worth remembering.  In the opening lines the

passengers are referred to as a fleet of vessels, then follows:



          Lo! other ships of that parted fleet

          Shall suffer this fate or that:

          One shall be wrecked, another shall sink,

          Or ground on treacherous flat.

          Some shall be famed in many lands

          As good ships, fast and fair,

          And some shall strangely disappear,

          Men know not when or where.



The Quaker City returned to America on November 19, 1867, and Mark Twain

found himself, if not famous, at least in very wide repute.  The fifty-

three letters to the Alta and the half-dozen to the New York Tribune had

carried his celebrity into every corner of the States and Territories.

Vivid, fearless, full of fresh color, humor, poetry, they came as a

revelation to a public weary of the driveling, tiresome travel-letters of

that period.  They preached a new gospel in travel-literature: the gospel

of seeing with an overflowing honesty; a gospel of sincerity in according

praises to whatever seemed genuine, and ridicule to the things considered

sham.  It was the gospel that Mark Twain would continue to preach during

his whole career.  It became his chief literary message to the world-a

world waiting for that message.



Moreover, the letters were literature.  He had received, from whatever

source, a large and very positive literary impulse, a loftier conception

and expression.  It was at Tangier that he first struck the grander

chord, the throbbing cadence of human story.



Here is a crumbling wall that was old when Columbus discovered America;

old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to

arm for the first Crusade; old when Charlemagne and his paladins

beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the

fabled days of the olden time; old when Christ and his disciples walked

the earth; stood where it stands to-day when the lips of Memnon were

vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes.



This is pure poetry.  He had never touched so high a strain before, but

he reached it often after that, and always with an ever-increasing

mastery and confidence.  In Venice, in Rome, in Athens, through the Holy

Land, his retrospection becomes a stately epic symphony, a processional

crescendo that swings ever higher until it reaches that sublime strain,

the ageless contemplation of the Sphinx.  We cannot forego a paragraph or

two of that word-picture:



     After years of waiting it was before me at last.  The great face was

     so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient.  There was a dignity not

     of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as

     never anything human wore.  It was stone, but it seemed sentient.

     If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking.  It was looking

     toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing--nothing

     but distance and vacancy.  It was looking over and beyond everything

     of the present, and far into the past....  It was thinking of the

     wars of the departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and

     destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose

     progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy

     and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five

     thousand slow-revolving years .  .  .  .



     The Sphinx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its

     magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its

     story.  And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this

     eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of

     all ages, which reveals to one something of what we shall feel when

     we shall stand at last in the awful presence of God.



Then that closing word of Egypt.  He elaborated it for the book, and did

not improve it.  Let us preserve here its original form.



     We are glad to have seen Egypt.  We are glad to have seen that old

     land which taught Greece her letters--and through Greece, Rome--and

     through Rome, the world--that venerable cradle of culture and

     refinement which could have humanized and civilized the Children of

     Israel, but allowed them to depart out of her borders savages--those

     Children whom we still revere, still love, and whose sad

     shortcomings we still excuse--not because they were savages, but

     because they were the chosen savages of God.



The Holy Land letters alone would have brought him fame.  They presented

the most graphic and sympathetic picture of Syrian travel ever written--

one that will never become antiquated or obsolete so long as human nature

remains unchanged.  From beginning to end the tale is rarely, reverently

told.  Its closing paragraph has not been surpassed in the voluminous

literature of that solemn land:



     Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.  Over it broods the spell of

     a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.

     Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers that solemn

     sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing

     exists--over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs

     motionless and dead--about whose borders nothing grows but weeds and

     scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises

     refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch.

     Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of

     Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing one finds

     only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the

     accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle left

     it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in

     their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to

     remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour's

     presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks

     by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, goodwill to men,

     is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature

     that is pleasant to the eye.  Renowned Jerusalem itself, the

     stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and

     is become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer

     there to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the

     wonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of Israel is

     gone, and the Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on

     that most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared the

     Holy Cross.  The noted Sea of Galilee, where Roman fleets once rode

     at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed in their ships,

     was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and commerce, and its

     borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a shapeless ruin;

     Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin have

     vanished from the earth, and the "desert places" round about them

     where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour's voice and ate

     the miraculous bread sleep in the hush of a solitude that is

     inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.



     Palestine is desolate and unlovely.  And why should it be otherwise?

     Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?



It would be easy to quote pages here--a pictorial sequence from Gibraltar

to Athens, from Athens to Egypt, a radiant panoramic march.  In time he

would write technically better.  He would avoid solecism, he would become

a greater master of vocabulary and phrase, but in all the years ahead he

would never match the lambent bloom and spontaneity of those fresh, first

impressions of Mediterranean lands and seas.  No need to mention the

humor, the burlesque, the fearless, unrestrained ridicule of old masters

and of sacred relics, so called.  These we have kept familiar with much

repetition.  Only, the humor had grown more subtle, more restrained; the

burlesque had become impersonal and harmless, the ridicule so frank and

good-natured, that even the old masters themselves might have enjoyed it,

while the most devoted churchman, unless blinded by bigotry, would find

in it satisfaction, rather than sacrilege.



The final letter was written for the New York Herald after the arrival,

and was altogether unlike those that preceded it.  Gaily satirical and

personal--inclusively so--it might better have been left unwritten, for

it would seem to have given needless offense to a number of goodly

people, whose chief sin was the sedateness of years. However, it is all

past now, and those who were old then, and perhaps queer and pious and

stingy, do not mind any more, and those who were young and frivolous have

all grown old too, and most of them have set out on the still farther

voyage.  Somewhere, it may be, they gather, now; and then, and lightly,

tenderly recall their old-time journeying.









LXIII



IN WASHINGTON--A PUBLISHING PROPOSITION



Clemens remained but one day in New York.  Senator Stewart had written,

about the time of the departure of the Quaker City, offering him the

position of private secretary--a position which was to give him leisure

for literary work, with a supporting salary as well.  Stewart no doubt

thought it would be considerably to his advantage to have the brilliant

writer and lecturer attached to his political establishment, and Clemens

likewise saw possibilities in the arrangement.  From Naples, in August,

he had written accepting Stewart's offer; he lost no time now in

discussing the matter in person.--[In a letter home, August 9th, he

referred to the arrangement: "I wrote to Bill Stewart to-day accepting

his private secretaryship in Washington, next winter."]



There seems to have been little difficulty in concluding the arrangement.

When Clemens had been in Washington a week we find him writing:



     DEAR FOLKS, Tired and sleepy--been in Congress all day and making

     newspaper acquaintances.  Stewart is to look up a clerkship in the

     Patent Office for Orion.  Things necessarily move slowly where there

     is so much business and such armies of office-seekers to be attended

     to.  I guess it will be all right. I intend it shall be all right.



     I have 18 invitations to lecture, at $100 each, in various parts

     of the Union--have declined them all.  I am for business now.



     Belong on the Tribune Staff, and shall write occasionally.  Am

     offered the same berth to-day on the Herald by letter.  Shall write

     Mr. Bennett and accept, as soon as I hear from Tribune that it will

     not interfere.  Am pretty well known now--intend to be better known.

     Am hobnobbing with these old Generals and Senators and other humbugs

     for no good purpose.  Don't have any more trouble making friends

     than I did in California.  All serene.  Good-by.  Shall continue on

     the Alta.

                              Yours affectionately,

                                                  SAM.



     P.S.--I room with Bill Stewart and board at Willard's Hotel.



But the secretary arrangement was a brief matter.  It is impossible to

conceive of Mark Twain as anybody's secretary, especially as the

secretary of Senator Stewart.



--[In Senator Stewart's memoirs he refers unpleasantly to Mark Twain, and

after relating several incidents that bear only strained relations to the

truth, states that when the writer returned from the Holy Land he

(Stewart) offered him a secretaryship as a sort of charity.  He adds that

Mark Twain's behavior on his premises was such that a threat of a

thrashing was necessary.  The reason for such statements becomes

apparent, however, when he adds that in 'Roughing It' the author accuses

him of cheating, prints a picture of him with a hatch over his eye, and

claims to have given him a sound thrashing, none of which statements,

save only the one concerning the picture (an apparently unforgivable

offense to his dignity), is true, as the reader may easily ascertain for

himself.]



Within a few weeks he was writing humorous accounts of "My Late

Senatorial Secretaryship,"  "Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation,"

etc., all good-natured burlesque, but inspired, we.  may believe, by the

change: These articles appeared in the New York Tribune, the New York

Citizen, and the Galaxy Magazine.



There appears to have been no ill-feeling at this time between Clemens

and Stewart.  If so, it is not discoverable in any of the former's

personal or newspaper correspondence.  In fact, in his article relating

to his "late senatorial secretaryship" he puts the joke, so far as it is

a joke, on Senator James W. Nye, probably as an additional punishment for

Nye's failure to appear on the night of his lecture.  He established

headquarters with a brilliant newspaper correspondent named Riley.  "One

of the best men in Washington--or elsewhere," he tells us in a brief

sketch of that person.--[See Riley, newspaper correspondent.  Sketches

New and Old.]--He had known Riley in San Francisco; the two were

congenial, and settled down to their several undertakings.



Clemens was chiefly concerned over two things: he wished to make money

and he wished to secure a government appointment for Orion.  He had used

up the most of his lecture accumulations, and was moderately in debt.

His work was in demand at good rates, for those days, and with working

opportunity he could presently dispose of his financial problem.  The

Tribune was anxious for letters; the Enterprise and Alta were waiting for

them; the Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the magazines--all had solicited

contributions; the lecture bureaus pursued him.  Personally his outlook

was bright.



The appointment for Orion was a different matter.  The powers were not

especially interested in a brother; there were too many brothers and

assorted relatives on the official waiting-list already.  Clemens was

offered appointments for himself--a consulship, a post-mastership; even

that of San Francisco.  From the Cabinet down, the Washington political

contingent had read his travel-letters, and was ready to recognize

officially the author of them in his own person and personality.



Also, socially: Mark Twain found himself all at once in the midst of

receptions, dinners, and speech-making; all very exciting for a time at

least, but not profitable, not conducive to work.  At a dinner of the

Washington Correspondents Club his response to the toast, "Women," was

pronounced by Schuyler Colfax to be "the best after dinner speech ever

made."  Certainly it was a refreshing departure from the prosy or clumsy-

witted efforts common to that period.  He was coming altogether into his

own.--[This is the first of Mark Twain's after-dinner speeches to be

preserved.  The reader will find it complete, as reported next day, in

Appendix G, at the end of last volume.]



He was not immediately interested in the matter of book publication.

The Jumping Frog book was popular, and in England had been issued by

Routledge; but the royalty returns were modest enough and slow in

arrival.  His desire was for prompter results.  His interest in book

publication had never been an eager one, and related mainly to the

advertising it would furnish, which he did not now need; or to the money

return, in which he had no great faith.  Yet at this very moment a letter

for him was lying in the Tribune office in New York which would bring the

book idea into first prominence and spell the beginning of his fortune.



Among those who had read and found delight in the Tribune letters was

Elisha Bliss, Jr., of the American Publishing Company, of Hartford.

Bliss was a shrewd and energetic man, with a keen appreciation for humor

and the American fondness for that literary quality.  He had recently

undertaken the management of a Hartford concern, and had somewhat alarmed

its conservative directorate by publishing books that furnished

entertainment to the reader as well as moral instruction.  Only his

success in paying dividends justified this heresy and averted his

downfall.  Two days after the arrival of the Quaker City Bliss wrote the

letter above mentioned.  It ran as follows:



                         OFFICE OF THE AMERICAN PUBLISHING CO.

                         HARTFORD, CONN., November 21, 1867.



SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, ESQ.,

Tribune Office, New York.



DEAR SIR,--We take the liberty to address you this, in place of a letter

which we had recently written and were about to forward to you, not

knowing your arrival home was expected so soon.  We are desirous of

obtaining from you a work of some kind, perhaps compiled from your

letters from the past, etc., with such interesting additions as may be

proper.  We are the publishers of A. D. Richardson's works, and flatter

ourselves that we can give an author a favorable term and do as full

justice to his productions as any other house in the country.  We are

perhaps the oldest subscription house in the country, and have never

failed to give a book an immense circulation.  We sold about 100,000

copies of Richardson's F. D. and E.  ('Field, Dungeon and Escape'), and

are now printing 41,000 of 'Beyond the Mississippi', and large orders

ahead.  If you have any thought of writing a book, or could be induced to

do so, we should be pleased to see you, and will do so.  Will you do us

the favor of reply at once, at your earliest convenience.



                                   Very truly etc.,



                                        E. BLISS, JR.,

                                        Secretary.



After ten days' delay this letter was forwarded to the Tribune bureau in

Washington, where Clemens received it.  He replied promptly.





                              WASHINGTON, December 2, 1867.



E. BLISS, JR., ESQ.,

Secretary American Publishing Co.



DEAR SIR,--I only received your favor of November 21st last night, at the

rooms of the Tribune Bureau here.  It was forwarded from the Tribune

office, New York where it had lain eight or ten days.  This will be a

sufficient apology for the seeming discourtesy of my silence.



I wrote fifty-two letters for the San Francisco Alta California during

the Quakes City excusion, about half of which number have been printed

thus far.  The Alta has few exchanges in the East, and I suppose scarcely

any of these letters have been copied on this side of the Rocky

Mountains.  I could weed them of their chief faults of construction and

inelegancies of expression, and make a volume that would be more

acceptable in many respects than any I could now write.  When those

letters were written my impressions were fresh, but now they have lost

that freshness; they were warm then, they are cold now.  I could strike

out certain letters, and write new ones wherewith to supply their places.

If you think such a book would suit your purpose, please drop me a line,

specifying the size and general style of the volume--when the matter

ought to be ready; whether it should have pictures in it or not; and

particularly what your terms with me would be, and what amount of money

I might possibly make out of it.  The latter clause has a degree of

importance for me which is almost beyond my own comprehension.  But you

understand that, of course.



I have other propositions for a book, but have doubted the propriety of

interfering with good newspaper engagements, except my way as an author

could be demonstrated to be plain before me.  But I know Richardson, and

learned from him some months ago something of an idea of the subscription

plan of publishing.  If that is your plan invariably it looks safe.



I am on the New York Tribune staff here as an "occasional," among other

things, and a note from you addressed to

                    Very truly, etc.,

                                   SAM. L. CLEMENS,

                                   New York Tribune Bureau, Washington

will find me, without fail.





The exchange of those two letters marked the beginning of one of the most

notable publishing connections in American literary history.



Consummation, however, was somewhat delayed.  Bliss was ill when the

reply came, and could not write again in detail until nearly a month

later.  In this letter he recited the profits made by Richardson and

others through subscription publication, and named the royalties paid.

Richardson had received four per cent. of the sale price, a small enough

rate for these later days; but the cost of manufacture was larger then,

and the sale and delivery of books through agents has ever been an

expensive process.  Even Horace Greeley had received but a fraction more

on his Great American Conflict.  Bliss especially suggested and

emphasized a "humorous work--that is to say, a work humorously inclined."

He added that they had two arrangements for paying authors: outright

purchase, and royalty.  He invited a meeting in New York to arrange

terms.









LXIV



OLIVIA LANGDON



Clemens did in fact go to New York that same evening, to spend Christmas

with Dan Slote, and missed Bliss's second letter.  It was no matter.

Fate had his affairs properly in hand, and had prepared an event of still

larger moment than the publication even of Innocents Abroad.  There was a

pleasant reunion at Dan Slote's.  He wrote home about it:



     Charley Langdon, Jack Van Nostrand, Dan and I (all Quaker City

     night-hawks) had a blow-out at Dan's house and a lively talk over

     old times.  I just laughed till my sides ached at some of our

     reminiscences.  It was the unholiest gang that ever cavorted through

     Palestine, but those are the best boys in the world.



This, however, was not the event; it was only preliminary to it.  We are

coming to that now.  At the old St. Nicholas Hotel, which stood on the

west of Broadway between Spring and Broome streets, there were stopping

at this time Jervis Langdon, a wealty coal-dealer and mine-owner of

Elmira, his son Charles and his daughter Olivia, whose pictured face

Samuel Clemens had first seen in the Bay of Smyrna one September day.

Young Langdon had been especially anxious to bring his distinguished

Quaker City friend and his own people together, and two days before

Christmas Samuel Clemens was invited to dine at the hotel.  He went very

willingly. The lovely face of that miniature had been often a part of

his waking dreams.  For the first time now he looked upon its reality.

Long afterward he said:



"It is forty years ago.  From that day to this she has never been out of

my mind."



Charles Dickens was in New York then, and gave a reading that night in

Steinway Hall.  The Langdons went, and Samuel Clemens accompanied them.

He remembered afterward that Dickens wore a black velvet coat with a

fiery red flower in his buttonhole, and that he read the storm scene from

Copperfield--the death of James Steerforth.  But he remembered still more

clearly the face and dress of that slender girlish figure at his side.



Olivia Langdon was twenty-two years old at this time, delicate as the

miniature he had seen, fragile to look upon, though no longer with the

shattered health of her girlhood.  At sixteen, through a fall upon the

ice, she had become a complete invalid, confined to her bed for two

years, unable to sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position

except upon her back.  Great physicians and surgeons, one after another,

had done their best for her but she had failed steadily until every hope

had died.  Then, when nothing else was left to try, a certain Doctor

Newton, of spectacular celebrity, who cured by "laying on of hands," was

brought to Elmira to see her.  Doctor Newton came into the darkened room

and said:



"Open the windows--we must have light!"



They protested that she could not bear the light, but the windows were

opened.  Doctor Newton came to the bedside of the helpless girl,

delivered a short, fervent prayer, put his arm under her shoulders, and

bade her sit up.  She had not moved for two years, and the family were

alarmed, but she obeyed, and he assisted her into a chair.  Sensation

came back to her limbs.  With his assistance she even made a feeble

attempt to walk.  He left then, saying that she would gradually improve,

and in time be well, though probably never very strong.  On the same day

he healed a boy, crippled and drawn with fever.



It turned out as he had said.  Olivia Langdon improved steadily, and now

at twenty-two, though not robust--she was never that--she was

comparatively well.  Gentle, winning, lovable, she was the family idol,

and Samuel Clemens joined in their worship from the moment of that first

meeting.



Olivia Langdon, on her part, was at first dazed and fascinated, rather

than attracted, by this astonishing creature, so unlike any one she had

ever known.  Her life had been circumscribed, her experiences of a simple

sort.  She had never seen anything resembling him before.  Indeed, nobody

had.  Somewhat carelessly, even if correctly, attired; eagerly, rather

than observantly, attentive; brilliant and startling, rather than

cultured, of speech--a blazing human solitaire, unfashioned, unset,

tossed by the drift of fortune at her feet.  He disturbed rather than

gratified her.  She sensed his heresy toward the conventions and forms

which had been her gospel; his bantering, indifferent attitude toward

life--to her always so serious and sacred; she suspected that he even

might have unorthodox views on matters of religion.  When he had gone she

somehow had the feeling that a great fiery meteor of unknown portent had

swept across her sky.



To her brother, who was eager for her approval of his celebrity, Miss

Langdon conceded admiration.  As for her father, he did not qualify his

opinion.  With hearty sense of humor, and a keen perception of verity and

capability in men, Jervis Langdon accepted Samuel Clemens from the start,

and remained his stanch admirer and friend.  Clemens left that night with

an invitation to visit Elmira by and by, and with the full intention of

going--soon.  Fate, however, had another plan.  He did not see Elmira for

the better part of a year.



He saw Miss Langdon again within the week.  On New-Year's Day he set

forth to pay calls, after the fashion of the time--more lavish then than

now.  Miss Langdon was receiving with Miss Alice Hooker, a niece of Henry

Ward Beecher, at the home of a Mrs. Berry; he decided to go there first.

With young Langdon he arrived at eleven o'clock in the morning, and they

did not leave until midnight.  If his first impression upon Olivia

Langdon had been meteoric, it would seem that he must now have become to

her as a streaming comet that swept from zenith to horizon.  One thing is

certain: she had become to him the single, unvarying beacon of his future

years.  He visited Henry Ward Beecher on that trip and dined with him by

invitation.  Harriet Beecher Stowe was present, and others of that

eminent family.  Likewise his old Quaker City comrades, Moses S.  and

Emma Beach.  It was a brilliant gathering, a conclave of intellectual

gods--a triumph to be there for one who had been a printer-boy on the

banks of the Mississippi, and only a little while before a miner with

pick and shovel.  It was gratifying to be so honored; it would be

pleasant to write home; but the occasion lacked something too--

everything, in fact--for when he ran his eye around the board the face of

the minature was not there.



Still there were compensations; inadequate, of course, but pleasant

enough to remember.  It was Sunday evening and the party adjourned to

Plymouth Church.  After services Mr. Beecher invited him to return home

with him for a quiet talk.  Evidently they had a good time, for in the

letter telling of these things Samuel Clemens said: "Henry Ward Beecher

is a brick."









LXV



A CONTRACT WITH ELISHA BLISS, JR.



He returned to Washington without seeing Miss Langdon again, though he

would seem to have had permission to write--friendly letters.  A little

later (it was on the evening of January 9th) he lectured in Washington--

on very brief notice indeed.  The arrangement for his appearance had been

made by a friend during his absence--"a friend," Clemens declared

afterward, "not entirely sober at the time."  To his mother he wrote:



I scared up a doorkeeper and was ready at the proper time, and by pure

good luck a tolerably good house assembled and I was saved.  I hardly

knew what I was going to talk about, but it went off in splendid style.



The title of the lecture delivered was "The Frozen Truth"--"more truth in

the title than in the lecture," according to his own statement.  What it

dealt with is not remembered now.  It had to do with the Quaker City

trip, perhaps, and it seems to have brought a financial return which was

welcome enough.  Subsequently he delivered it elsewhere; though just how

far the tour extended cannot be learned from the letters, and he had but

little memory of it in later years.



There was some further correspondence with Bliss, then about the 21st of

January (1868) Clemens made a trip to Hartford to settle the matter.

Bliss had been particularly anxious to meet him, personally and was a

trifle disappointed with his appearance.  Mark Twain's traveling costume

was neither new nor neat, and he was smoking steadily a pipe of power.

His general make-up was hardly impressive.



Bliss's disturbance was momentary.  Once he began to talk the rest did

not matter.  He was the author of those letters, and Bliss decided that

personally he was even greater than they.  The publisher, confined to his

home with illness, offered him the hospitality of his household.  Also,

he made him two propositions: he would pay him ten thousand dollars cash

for his copyright, or he would pay five per cent. royalty, which was a

fourth more than Richardson had received.  He advised the latter

arrangement.



Clemens had already taken advice and had discussed the project a good

deal with Richardson.  The ten thousand dollars was a heavy temptation,

but he withstood it and closed on the royalty basis--"the best business

judgment I ever displayed," he was wont to declare.  A letter written to

his mother and sister near the end of this Hartford stay is worth quoting

pretty fully here, for the information and "character" it contains.  It

bears date of January 24th.



     This is a good week for me.  I stopped in the Herald office, as I

     came through New York, to see the boys on the staff, and young James

     Gordon Bennett asked me to write twice a week, impersonally, for the

     Herald, and said if I would I might have full swing, and about

     anybody and everything I wanted to.  I said I must have the very

     fullest possible swing, and he said, "All right."  I said, "It's a

     contract--" and that settled that matter.



     I'll make it a point to write one letter a week anyhow.  But the

     best thing that has happened is here.  This great American

     Publishing Company kept on trying to bargain with me for a book till

     I thought I would cut the matter short by coming up for a talk.  I

     met Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, and with his usual whole-souled

     way of dropping his own work to give other people a lift when he

     gets a chance, he said: "Now, here, you are one of the talented men

     of the age--nobody is going to deny that--but in matters of business

     I don't suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains.

     I'll tell you what to do and how to do it."  And he did.



     And I listened well, and then came up here and made a splendid

     contract for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large pages, with

     illustrations, the manuscript to be placed in the publisher's hands

     by the middle of July.--[The contract was not a formal one.  There

     was an exchange of letters agreeing to the terms, but no joint

     document was drawn until October 16 (1868).]--My percentage is to

     be a fourth more than they have ever paid any author except Greeley.

     Beecher will be surprised, I guess, when he hears this.



     These publishers get off the most tremendous editions of their books

     you can imagine.  I shall write to the Enterprise and Alta every

     week, as usual, I guess, and to the Herald twice a week,

     occasionally to the Tribune and the magazines (I have a stupid

     article in the Galaxy, just issued), but I am not going to write to

     this and that and the other paper any more.



     I have had a tiptop time here for a few days (guest of Mr. Jno.

     Hooker's family--Beecher's relatives--in a general way of Mr. Bliss

     also, who is head of the publishing firm).  Puritans are mighty

     straight-laced, and they won't let me smoke in the parlor, but the

     Almighty don't make any better people.



     I have to make a speech at the annual Herald dinner on the 6th of

     May.



So the book, which would establish his claim to a peerage in the literary

land, was arranged for, and it remained only to prepare the manuscript, a

task which he regarded as not difficult.  He had only to collate the Alta

and Tribune letters, edit them, and write such new matter as would be

required for completeness.



Returning to Washington, he plunged into work with his usual terrific

energy, preparing the copy--in the mean time writing newspaper

correspondence and sketches that would bring immediate return.  In

addition to his regular contributions, he entered into a syndicate

arrangement with John Swinton (brother of William Swinton, the historian)

to supply letters to a list of newspapers.



"I have written seven long newspaper letters and a short magazine article

in less than two days," he wrote home, and by the end of January he had

also prepared several chapters of his book.



The San Francisco post-mastership was suggested to him again, but he put

the temptation behind him.  He refers to this more than once in his home

letters, and it is clear that he wavered.



     Judge Field said if I wanted the place he could pledge me the

     President's appointment, and Senator Corners said he would guarantee

     me the Senate's confirmation.  It was a great temptation, but it

     would render it impossible to fill my book contract, and I had to

     drop the idea....



     And besides I did not want the office.



He made this final decision when he heard that the chief editor of the

Alta wanted the place, and he now threw his influence in that quarter.

"I would not take ten thousand dollars out of a friend's pocket," he

said.



But then suddenly came the news from Goodman that the Alta publishers had

copyrighted his Quaker City letters and proposed getting them out in a

book, to reimburse themselves still further on their investment.  This

was sharper than a serpent's tooth.  Clemens got confirmation of the

report by telegraph.  By the same medium he protested, but to no purpose.

Then he wrote a letter and sat down to wait.  He reported his troubles to

Orion:



     I have made a superb contract for a book, and have prepared the

     first ten chapters of the sixty or eighty, but I will bet it never

     sees the light.  Don't you let the folks at home hear that.  That

     thieving Alta copyrighted the letters, and now shows no disposition

     to let me use them.  I have done all I can by telegraph, and now

     await the final result by mail.  I only charged them for 50 letters

     what (even in) greenbacks would amount to less than two thousand

     dollars, intending to write a good deal for high-priced Eastern

     papers, and now they want to publish my letters in book form

     themselves to get back that pitiful sum.



Orion was by this time back from Nevada, setting type in St. Louis.  He

was full of schemes, as usual, and his brother counsels him freely.  Then

he says:



     We chase phantoms half the days of our lives.  It is well if we

     learn wisdom even then, and save the other half.



     I am in for it.  I must go on chasing them, until I marry, then I am

     done with literature and all other bosh--that is, literature

     wherewith to please the general public.



     I shall write to please myself then.



He closes by saying that he rather expects to go with Anson Burlingame on

the Chinese embassy.  Clearly he was pretty hopeless as to his book

prospects.



His first meeting with General Grant occurred just at this time.  In one

of his home letters he mentions, rather airily, that he will drop in

someday on the General for an interview; and at last, through Mrs. Grant,

an appointment was made for a Sunday evening when the General would be at

home.  He was elated with the prospect of an interview; but when he

looked into the imperturbable, square, smileless face of the soldier he

found himself, for the first time in his life, without anything

particular to say.  Grant nodded slightly and waited.  His caller wished

something would happen.  It did.  His inspiration returned.



"General," he said, "I seem to be a little embarrassed.  Are you?"



That broke the ice.  There were no further difficulties.--[Mark Twain

has variously related this incident.  It is given here in accordance with

the letters of the period.]









LXVI



BACK TO SAN FRANCISCO



Reply came from the Alta, but it was not promising.  It spoke rather

vaguely of prior arrangements and future possibilities.  Clemens gathered

that under certain conditions he might share in the profits of the

venture.  There was but one thing to do; he knew those people--some of

them--Colonel McComb and a Mr. McCrellish intimately.  He must confer

with them in person.



He was weary of Washington, anyway.  The whole pitiful machinery of

politics disgusted him.  In his notebook he wrote:



     Whiskey is taken into the committee rooms in demijohns and carried

     out in demagogues.



And in a letter:



     This is a place to get a poor opinion of everybody in.  There are

     some pitiful intellects in this Congress!  There isn't one man in

     Washington in civil office who has the brains of Anson Burlingame,

     and I suppose if China had not seized and saved his great talents to

     the world this government would have discarded him when his time was

     up.--[Anson Burlingame had by this time become China's special

     ambassador to the nations.]



Furthermore, he was down on the climate of Washington.  He decided to go

to San Francisco and see "those Alta thieves face to face."  Then, if a

book resulted, he could prepare it there among friends.  Also, he could

lecture.



He had been anxious to visit his people before sailing, but matters were

too urgent to permit delay.  He obtained from Bliss an advance of royalty

and took passage, by way of Aspinwall, on the sidewheel steamer Henry

Chauncey, a fine vessel for those days.  The name of Mark Twain was

already known on the isthmus, and when it was learned he had arrived on

the Chauncey a delegation welcomed him on the wharf, and provided him

with refreshments and entertainment.  Mr. Tracy Robinson, a poet, long a

resident of that southern land, was one of the group.  Beyond the isthmus

Clemens fell in again with his old captain, Ned Wakeman, who during the

trip told him the amazing dream that in due time would become Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.  He made the first draft of this story soon

after his arrival in San Francisco, as a sort of travesty of Elizabeth

Stuart Phelps's Gates Ajar, then very popular.  Clemens, then and later,

had a high opinion of Capt. Ned Wakeman's dream, but his story of it

would pass through several stages before finally reaching the light of

publication.--[Mr. John P.  Vollmer, now of Lewiston, Idaho, a

companion of that voyage, writes of a card game which took place beyond

the isthmus.  The notorious crippled gambler, "Smithy," figured in it,

and it would seem to have furnished the inspiration for the exciting

story in Chapter XXXVI of the Mississippi book.]



In San Francisco matters turned out as he had hoped.  Colonel McComb was

his stanch friend; McCrellish and Woodward, the proprietors, presently

conceded that they had already received good value for the money paid.

The author agreed to make proper acknowledgments to the Alta in his

preface, and the matter was settled with friendliness all around.



The way was now clear, the book assured.  First, however, he must provide

himself with funds.  He delivered a lecture, with the Quaker City

excursion as his subject.  On the 5th of May he wrote to Bliss:



I lectured here on the trip the other night; over $1,600 in gold in the

house; every seat taken and paid for before night.



He reports that he is steadily at work, and expects to start East with

the completed manuscript about the middle of June.



But this was a miscalculation.  Clemens found that the letters needed

more preparation than he had thought.  His literary vision and equipment

had vastly altered since the beginning of that correspondence.  Some of

the chapters he rewrote; others he eliminated entirely.  It required two

months of fairly steady work to put the big manuscript together.



Some of the new chapters he gave to Bret Harte for the Overland Monthly,

then recently established.  Harte himself was becoming a celebrity about

this time.  His "Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat,"

published in early numbers of the Overland, were making a great stir in

the East, arousing there a good deal more enthusiasm than in the magazine

office or the city of their publication.  That these two friends, each

supreme in his own field, should have entered into their heritage so

nearly at the same moment, is one of the many seemingly curious

coincidences of literary history.



Clemens now concluded to cover his lecture circuit of two years before.

He was assured that it would be throwing away a precious opportunity not

to give his new lecture to his old friends.  The result justified that

opinion.  At Virginia, at Carson, and elsewhere he was received like a

returned conqueror.  He might have been accorded a Roman triumph had

there been time and paraphernalia.  Even the robbers had reformed, and

entire safety was guaranteed him on the Divide between Virginia and Gold

Hill.  At Carson he called on Mrs. Curry, as in the old days, and among

other things told her how snow from the Lebanon Mountains is brought to

Damascus on the backs of camels.



"Sam," she said, "that's just one of your yarns, and if you tell it in

your lecture to-night I'll get right up and say so."



But he did tell it, for it was a fact; and though Mrs. Curry did not rise

to deny it she shook her finger at him in a way he knew.



He returned to San Francisco and gave one more lecture, the last he would

ever give in California.  His preparatory advertising for that occasion

was wholly unique, characteristic of him to the last degree.  It assumed

the form of a handbill of protest, supposed to have been issued by the

foremost citizens of San Francisco, urging him to return to the States

without inflicting himself further upon them.  As signatures he made free

with the names of prominent individuals, followed by those of

organizations, institutions, "Various Benevolent Societies, Citizens on

Foot and Horseback, and fifteen hundred in the Steerage."



Following this (on the same bill) was his reply, "To the fifteen hundred

and others," in which he insisted on another hearing:



     I will torment the people if I want to....  It only costs the people

     $1 apiece, and if they can't stand it what do they stay here for?...

     My last lecture was not as fine as I thought it was, but I have

     submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they have

     pronounced it good.  Now, therefore, why should I withhold it?



He promised positively to sail on the 6th of July if they would let him

talk just this once.  Continuing, the handbill presented a second

protest, signed by the various clubs and business firms; also others

bearing variously the signatures of the newspapers, and the clergy,

ending with the brief word:



     You had better go.    Yours,    CHIEF OF POLICE.



All of which drollery concluded with his announcement of place and date

of his lecture, with still further gaiety at the end.  Nothing short of a

seismic cataclysm--an earthquake, in fact--could deter a San Francisco

audience after that.  Mark Twain's farewell address, given at the

Mercantile Library July 2 (1868), doubtless remains today the leading

literary event in San Francisco's history.--[Copy of the lecture

announcement, complete, will be found in Appendix H, at the end of last

volume.]



He sailed July 6th by the Pacific mail steamer Montana to Acapulco,

caught the Henry Chauncey at Aspinwall, reached New York on the 28th, and

a day or two later had delivered his manuscript at Hartford.



But a further difficulty had arisen.  Bliss was having troubles himself,

this time, with his directors.  Many reports of Mark Twain's new book had

been traveling the rounds of the press, some of which declared it was to

be irreverent, even blasphemous, in tone.  The title selected, The New

Pilgrim's Progress, was in itself a sacrilege.  Hartford was a

conservative place; the American Publishing Company directors were of

orthodox persuasion.  They urged Bliss to relieve the company of this

impending disaster of heresy.  When the author arrived one or more of

them labored with him in person, without avail.  As for Bliss, he was

stanch; he believed in the book thoroughly, from every standpoint.  He

declared if the company refused to print it he would resign the

management and publish the book himself.  This was an alarming suggestion

to the stockholders.  Bliss had returned dividends--a boon altogether too

rare in the company's former history.  The objectors retired and were

heard of no more.  The manuscript was placed in the hands of Fay and Cox,

illustrators, with an order for about two hundred and fifty pictures.



Fay and Cox turned it over to True Williams, one of the well-known

illustrators of that day.  Williams was a man of great talent--of fine

imagination and sweetness of spirit--but it was necessary to lock him in

a room when industry was required, with nothing more exciting than cold

water as a beverage.  Clemens himself aided in the illustrating by

obtaining of Moses S. Beach photographs from the large collection he had

brought home.









LXVII



A VISIT TO ELMIRA



Meantime he had skilfully obtained a renewal of the invitation to spend a

week in the Langdon home.



He meant to go by a fast train, but, with his natural gift for

misunderstanding time-tables, of course took a slow one, telegraphing his

approach from different stations along the road.  Young Langdon concluded

to go down the line as far as Waverly to meet him.  When the New York

train reached there the young man found his guest in the smoking-car,

travel-stained and distressingly clad.  Mark Twain was always

scrupulously neat and correct of dress in later years, but in that

earlier day neatness and style had not become habitual and did not give

him comfort.  Langdon greeted him warmly but with doubt.  Finally he

summoned courage to say, hesitatingly--



"You've got some other clothes, haven't you?"



The arriving guest was not in the least disturbed.



"Oh yes," he said with enthusiasm, "I've got a fine brand-new outfit in

this bag, all but a hat.  It will be late when we get in, and I won't see

any one to-night.  You won't know me in the morning.  We'll go out early

and get a hat."



This was a large relief to the younger man, and the rest of the journey

was happy enough.  True to promise, the guest appeared at daylight

correctly, even elegantly clad, and an early trip to the shops secured

the hat.  A gay and happy week followed--a week during which Samuel

Clemens realized more fully than ever that in his heart there was room

for only one woman in all the world: Olivia Langdon--"Livy," as they all

called her--and as the day of departure drew near it may be that the

gentle girl had made some discoveries, too.



No word had passed between them.  Samuel Clemens had the old-fashioned

Southern respect for courtship conventions, and for what, in that day at

least, was regarded as honor.  On the morning of the final day he said to

young Langdon:



"Charley, my week is up, and I must go home."



The young man expressed a regret which was genuine enough, though not

wholly unqualified.  His older sister, Mrs. Crane, leaving just then for

a trip to the White Mountains, had said:



"Charley, I am sure Mr. Clemens is after our Livy.  You mustn't let him

carry her off before our return."



The idea was a disturbing one.  The young man did not urge his guest to

prolong his-visit.  He said:



"We'll have to stand it, I guess, but you mustn't leave before to-night."



"I ought to go by the first train," Clemens said, gloomily.  "I am in

love."



"In what!"



"In love-with your sister, and I ought to get away from here."



The young man was now very genuinely alarmed.  To him Mark Twain was a

highly gifted, fearless, robust man--a man's man--and as such altogether

admirable--lovable.  But Olivia--Livy--she was to him little short of a

saint.  No man was good enough for her, certainly not this adventurous

soldier of letters from the West.  Delightful he was beyond doubt,

adorable as a companion, but not a companion for Livy.



"Look here, Clemens," he said, when he could get his voice.  "There's a

train in half an hour.  I'll help you catch it.  Don't wait till to-

night.  Go now."



Clemens shook his head.



"No, Charley," he said, in his gentle drawl, "I want to enjoy your

hospitality a little longer.  I promise to be circumspect, and I'll go

to-night."



That night, after dinner, when it was time to take the New York train, a

light two-seated wagon was at the gate.  The coachman was in front, and

young Langdon and his guest took the back seat.  For some reason the seat

had not been locked in its place, and when, after the good-bys, the

coachman touched the horse it made a quick spring forward, and the back

seat, with both passengers, described a half-circle and came down with

force on the cobbled street.  Neither passenger was seriously hurt;

Clemens not at all--only dazed a little for a moment.  Then came an

inspiration; here was a chance to prolong his visit.  Evidently it was

not intended that he should take that train.  When the Langdon household

gathered around with restoratives he did not recover too quickly.  He

allowed them to support or carry him into the house and place him in an

arm-chair and apply remedies.  The young daughter of the house especially

showed anxiety and attention.  This was pure happiness.  He was perjuring

himself, of course, but they say Jove laughs at such things.



He recovered in a day or two, but the wide hospitality of the handsome

Langdon home was not only offered now; it was enforced.  He was still

there two weeks later, after which he made a trip to Cleveland to confide

in Mrs. Fairbanks how he intended to win Livy Langdon for his wife.









LXVIII



THE REV. "JOE" TWICHELL



He returned to Hartford to look after the progress of his book.  Some of

it was being put into type, and with his mechanical knowledge of such

things he was naturally interested in the process.



He made his headquarters with the Blisses, then living at 821 Asylum

Avenue, and read proof in a little upper room, where the lamp was likely

to be burning most of the time, where the atmosphere was nearly always

blue with smoke, and the window-sill full of cigar butts.  Mrs. Bliss

took him into the quiet social life of the neighborhood--to small church

receptions, society gatherings and the like--all of which he seemed to

enjoy.  Most of the dwellers in that neighborhood were members of the

Asylum Hill Congregational Church, then recently completed; all but the

spire.  It was a cultured circle, well-off in the world's goods, its male

members, for the most part, concerned in various commercial ventures.



The church stood almost across the way from the Bliss home, and Mark

Twain, with his picturesque phrasing, referred to it as the "stub-tailed

church," on account of its abbreviated spire; also, later, with a

knowledge of its prosperous membership, as the "Church of the Holy

Speculators."  He was at an evening reception in the home of one of its

members when he noticed a photograph of the unfinished building framed

and hanging on the wall.



"Why, yes," he commented, in his slow fashion, "this is the 'Church of

the Holy Speculators.'"



"Sh," cautioned Mrs. Bliss.  "Its pastor is just behind you.  He knows

your work and wants to meet you."  Turning, she said: "Mr. Twichell, this

is Mr. Clemens.  Most people know him as Mark Twain."



And so, in this casual fashion, he met the man who was presently to

become his closest personal friend and counselor, and would remain so for

more than forty years.



Joseph Hopkins Twichell was a man about his own age, athletic and

handsome, a student and a devout Christian, yet a man familiar with the

world, fond of sports, with an exuberant sense of humor and a wide

understanding of the frailties of humankind.  He had been "port waist

oar" at Yale, and had left college to serve with General "Dan" Sickles as

a chaplain who had followed his duties not only in the camp, but on the

field.



Mention has already been made of Mark Twain's natural leaning toward

ministers of the gospel, and the explanation of it is easier to realize

than to convey.  He was hopelessly unorthodox--rankly rebellious as to

creeds.  Anything resembling cant or the curtailment of mental liberty

roused only his resentment and irony.  Yet something in his heart always

warmed toward any laborer in the vineyard, and if we could put the

explanation into a single sentence, perhaps we might say it was because

he could meet them on that wide, common ground sympathy with mankind.

Mark Twain's creed, then and always, may be put into three words,

"liberty, justice, humanity."  It may be put into one word, "humanity."



Ministers always loved Mark Twain.  They did not always approve of him,

but they adored him: The Rev. Mr. Rising, of the Comstock, was an early

example of his ministerial friendships, and we have seen that Henry Ward

Beecher cultivated his company.  In a San Francisco letter of two years

before, Mark Twain wrote his mother, thinking it would please her:



I am as thick as thieves with the Reverend Stebbins.  I am laying for the

Reverend Scudder and the Reverend Doctor Stone.  I am running on

preachers now altogether, and I find them gay.



So it may be that his first impulse toward Joseph Twichell was due to the

fact that he was a young member of that army whose mission is to comfort

and uplift mankind.  But it was only a little time till the impulse had

grown into a friendship that went beyond any profession or doctrine, a

friendship that ripened into a permanent admiration and love for "Joe"

Twichell himself, as one of the noblest specimens of his race.



He was invited to the Twichell home, where he met the young wife and got

a glimpse of the happiness of that sweet and peaceful household.  He had

a neglected, lonely look, and he loved to gather with them at their

fireside.  He expressed his envy of their happiness, and Mrs. Twichell

asked him why, since his affairs were growing prosperous, he did not

establish a household of his own.  Long afterward Mr. Twichell wrote:



     Mark made no answer for a little, but, with his eyes bent on the

     floor, appeared to be deeply pondering.  Then he looked up, and said

     slowly, in a voice tremulous with earnestness (with what sympathy he

     was heard may be imagined): "I am taking thought of it.  I am in

     love beyond all telling with the dearest and best girl in the whole

     world.  I don't suppose she will marry me.  I can't think it

     possible.  She ought not to.  But if she doesn't I shall be sure

     that the best thing I ever did was to fall in love with her, and

     proud to have it known that I tried to win her!"



It was only a brief time until the Twichell fireside was home to him.  He

came and went, and presently it was "Mark" and "Joe," as by and by it

would be "Livy" and "Harmony," and in a few years "Uncle Joe" and "Uncle

Mark,"  "Aunt Livy" and "Aunt Harmony," and so would remain until the

end.









LXIX



A LECTURE TOUR



James Redpath, proprietor of the Boston Lyceum Bureau, was the leading

lecture agent of those days, and controlled all, or nearly all, of the

platform celebrities.  Mark Twain's success at the Cooper Union the year

before had interested Redpath.  He had offered engagements then and

later, but Clemens had not been free for the regular circuit.  Now there

was no longer a reason for postponement of a contract.  Redpath was eager

for the new celebrity, and Clemens closed with him for the season of

1868-9.  With his new lecture, "The Vandal Abroad," he was presently

earning a hundred dollars and more a night, and making most of the nights

count.



This was affluence indeed.  He had become suddenly a person of substance-

an associate of men of consequence, with a commensurate income.  He could

help his mother lavishly now, and he did.



His new lecture was immensely popular.  It was a resume of the 'Quaker

City' letters--a foretaste of the book which would presently follow.

Wherever he went, he was hailed with eager greetings.  He caught such

drifting exclamations as, "There he is!  There goes Mark Twain!"  People

came out on the street to see him pass.  That marvelous miracle which we

variously call "notoriety," "popularity," "fame," had come to him.  In

his notebook he wrote, "Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the

only, earthly certainty oblivion."



The newspapers were filled with enthusiasm both as to his matter and

method.  His delivery was described as a "long, monotonous drawl, with

the fun invariably coming in at the end of a sentence--after a pause."

His appearance at this time is thus set down:



     Mark Twain is a man of medium height, about five feet ten, sparsely

     built, with dark reddish-brown hair and mustache.  His features are

     fair, his eyes keen and twinkling.  He dresses in scrupulous evening

     attire.  In lecturing he hangs about the desk, leaning on it or

     flirting around the corners of it, then marching and countermarching

     in the rear of it.  He seldom casts a glance at his manuscript.



No doubt this fairly presents Mark Twain, the lecturer of that day.  It

was a new figure on the platform, a man with a new method.  As to his

manuscript, the item might have said that he never consulted it at all.

He learned his lecture; what he consulted was merely a series of

hieroglyphics, a set of crude pictures drawn by himself, suggestive of

the subject-matter underneath new head.  Certain columns represented the

Parthenon; the Sphinx meant Egypt, and so on.  His manuscript lay there

in case of accident, but the accident did not happen.



A number of his engagements were in the central part of New York, at

points not far distant from Elmira.  He had a standing invitation to

visit the Langdon home, and he made it convenient to avail himself of

that happiness.



His was not an unruffled courtship.  When at last he reached the point of

proposing for the daughter of the house, neither the daughter nor the

household offered any noticeable encouragement to his suit.  Many absurd

anecdotes have been told of his first interview with Mr. Langdon on the

subject, but they are altogether without foundation.  It was a proper and

dignified discussion of a very serious matter.  Mr. Langdon expressed

deep regard for him and friendship but he was not inclined to add him to

the family; the young lady herself, in a general way, accorded with these

views.  The applicant for favor left sadly enough, but he could not

remain discouraged or sad.  He lectured at Cleveland with vast success,

and the news of it traveled quickly to Elmira.  He was referred to by

Cleveland papers as a "lion" and "the coming man of the age."  Two days

later, in Pittsburgh (November 19th), he "played" against Fanny Kemble,

the favorite actress of that time, with the result that Miss Kemble had

an audience of two hundred against nearly ten times the number who

gathered to hear Mark Twain.  The news of this went to Elmira, too.  It

was in the papers there next morning; surely this was a conquering hero--

a gay Lochinvar from out of the West--and the daughter of the house must

be guarded closely, that he did not bear her away.  It was on the second

morning following the Pittsburgh triumph, when the Langdon family were

gathered at breakfast, that a bushy auburn head poked fearfully in at the

door, and a low, humble voice said:



"The calf has returned; may the prodigal have some breakfast?"



No one could be reserved or reprovingly distant, or any of those

unfriendly things with a person like that; certainly not Jervis Langdon,

who delighted in the humor and the tricks and turns and oddities of this

eccentric visitor.  Giving his daughter to him was another matter, but

even that thought was less disturbing than it had been at the start.  In

truth, the Langdon household had somehow grown to feel that he belonged

to them.  The elder sister's husband, Theodore Crane, endorsed him fully.

He had long before read some of the Mark Twain sketches that had traveled

eastward in advance of their author, and had recognized, even in the

crudest of them, a classic charm.  As for Olivia Langdon's mother and

sister, their happiness lay in hers.  Where her heart went theirs went

also, and it would appear that her heart, in spite of herself, had found

its rightful keeper.  Only young Langdon was irreconciled, and eventually

set out for a voyage around the world to escape the situation.



There was only a provisional engagement at first.  Jervis Langdon

suggested, and Samuel Clemens agreed with him, that it was proper to know

something of his past, as well as of his present, before the official

parental sanction should be given.  When Mr. Langdon inquired as to the

names of persons of standing to whom he might write for credentials,

Clemens pretty confidently gave him the name of the Reverend Stebbins and

others of San Francisco, adding that he might write also to Joe Goodman

if he wanted to, but that he had lied for Goodman a hundred times and

Goodman would lie for him if necessary, so his testimony would be of no

value.  The letters to the clergy were written, and Mr. Langdon also

wrote one on his own account.



It was a long mail-trip to the Coast and back in those days.  It might be

two months before replies would come from those ministers.  The lecturer

set out again on his travels, and was radiantly and happily busy.  He

went as far west as Illinois, had crowded houses in Chicago, visited

friends and kindred in Hannibal, St. Louis, and Keokuk, carrying the

great news, and lecturing in old familiar haunts.









LXX



INNOCENTS AT HOME--AND "THE INNOCENTS ABROAD"



He was in Jacksonville, Illinois, at the end of January (1869), and in a

letter to Bliss states that he will be in Elmira two days later, and asks

that proofs of the book be sent there.  He arrived at the Langdon home,

anxious to hear the reports that would make him, as the novels might say,

"the happiest or the most miserable of men."  Jervis Langdon had a rather

solemn look when they were alone together.  Clemens asked:



"You've heard from those gentlemen out there?"



"Yes, and from another gentleman I wrote concerning you."



"They don't appear to have been very enthusiastic, from your manner."



"Well, yes, some of them were."



"I suppose I may ask what particular form their emotion took?"



"Oh yes, yes; they agree unanimously that you are a brilliant, able man,

a man with a future, and that you would make about the worst husband on

record."



The applicant for favor had a forlorn look.



"There's nothing very evasive about that," he said:



There was a period of reflective silence.  It was probably no more than a

few seconds, but it seemed longer.



"Haven't you any other friend that you could suggest?" Langdon said.



"Apparently none whose testimony would be valuable."



Jervis Langdon held out his hand.  "You have at least one," he said.

"I believe in you.  I know you better than they do."



And so came the crown of happiness.  The engagement of Samuel Langhorne

Clemens and Olivia Lewis Langdon was ratified next day, February 4, 1869.



But if the friends of Mark Twain viewed the idea of the carnage with

scant favor, the friends of Miss Langdon regarded it with genuine alarm.

Elmira was a conservative place--a place of pedigree and family

tradition; that a stranger, a former printer, pilot, miner, wandering

journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the daughter of one of the

oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not to be lightly permitted.

The fact that he had achieved a national fame did not count against other

considerations.  The social protest amounted almost to insurrection, but

it was not availing.  The Langdon family had their doubts too, though of

a different sort.  Their doubts lay in the fear that one, reared as their

daughter had been, might be unable to hold a place as the wife of this

intellectual giant, whom they felt that the world was preparing to honor.

That this delicate, sheltered girl could have the strength of mind and

body for her position seemed hard to believe.  Their faith overbore such

questionings, and the future years proved how fully it was justified.



To his mother Samuel Clemens wrote:



     She is only a little body, but she hasn't her peer in Christendom.

     I gave her only a plain gold engagement ring, when fashion

     imperatively demands a two-hundred-dollar diamond one, and told her

     it was typical of her future life-namely, that she would have to

     flourish on substance, rather than luxuries (but you see I know the

     girl--she don't care anything about luxuries)....  She spends no

     money but her astral year's allowance, and spends nearly every cent

     of that on other people.  She will be a good, sensible little wife,

     without any airs about her.  I don't make intercession for her

     beforehand, and ask you to love her, for there isn't any use in

     that--you couldn't help it if you were to try.  I warn you that

     whoever comes within the fatal influence of her beautiful nature is

     her willing slave forevermore.



To Mrs. Crane, absent in March, her father wrote:



     DEAR SUE,--I received your letter yesterday with a great deal of

     pleasure, but the letter has gone in pursuit of one S. L. Clemens,

     who has been giving us a great deal of trouble lately.  We cannot

     have a joy in our family without a feeling, on the part of the

     little incorrigible in our family, that this wanderer must share it,

     so, as soon as read, into her pocket and off upstairs goes your

     letter, and in the next two minutes into the mail, so it is

     impossible for me now to refer to it, or by reading it over gain an

     inspiration in writing you.  .  .



Clemens closed his lecture tour in March, acid went immediately to

Elmira.  He had lectured between fifty and sixty times, with a return of

something more than $8,000, not a bad aggregate for a first season on the

circuit.  He had planned to make a spring tour to California, but the

attraction at Elmira was of a sort that discouraged distant travel.

Furthermore, he disliked the platform, then and always.  It was always a

temptation to him because of its quick and abundant return, but it was

none the less distasteful.  In a letter of that spring he wrote:



     I most cordially hate the lecture field.  And after all, I shudder

     to think I may never get out of it.  In all conversation with Gough,

     and Anna Dickinson, Nasby, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips,

     and the other old stagers, I could not observe that they ever

     expected or hoped to get out of the business.  I don't want to get

     wedded to it as they are.



He declined further engagements on the excuse that he must attend to

getting out his book.  The revised proofs were coming now, and he and

gentle Livy Langdon read them together.  He realized presently that with

her sensitive nature she had also a keen literary perception.  What

he lacked in delicacy--and his lack was likely to be large enough in that

direction--she detected, and together they pruned it away.  She became

his editor during those happy courtship days--a position which she held

to her death.  The world owed a large debt of gratitude to Mark Twain's

wife, who from the very beginning--and always, so far as in her strength

she was able--inspired him to give only his worthiest to the world,

whether in written or spoken word, in counsel or in deed.  Those early

days of their close companionship, spiritual and mental, were full of

revelation to Samuel Clemens, a revelation that continued from day to

day, and from year to year, even to the very end.



The letter to Bliss and the proofs were full of suggested changes that

would refine and beautify the text.  In one of them he settles the

question of title, which he says is to be:



                          THE INNOCENTS ABROAD

                                   or

                       THE NEW PILGRIM'S PROGRESS



and we may be sure that it was Olivia Langdon's voice that gave the

deciding vote for the newly adopted chief title, which would take any

suggestion of irreverence out of the remaining words.



The book was to have been issued in the spring, but during his wanderings

proofs had been delayed, and there was now considerable anxiety about it,

as the agencies had become impatient for the canvass.  At the end of

April Clemens wrote: "Your printers are doing well.  I will hurry the

proofs"; but it was not until the early part of June that the last

chapters were revised and returned.  Then the big book, at last

completed, went to press on an edition of twenty thousand, a large number

for any new book, even to-day.



In later years, through some confusion of circumstance, Mark Twain was

led to believe that the publication of The Innocents Abroad was long and

unnecessarily delayed.  But this was manifestly a mistake.  The book went

to press in June.  It was a big book and a large edition.  The first copy

was delivered July 20 (1869), and four hundred and seventeen bound

volumes were shipped that month.  Even with the quicker mechanical

processes of to-day a month or more is allowed for a large book between

the final return of proofs and the date of publication.  So it is only

another instance of his remembering, as he once quaintly put it, "the

thing that didn't happen."--[In an article in the North American Review

(September 21, 1906) Mr. Clemens stated that he found it necessary to

telegraph notice that he would bring suit if the book was not immediately

issued.  In none of the letters covering this period is there any

suggestion of delay on the part of the publishers, and the date of the

final return of proofs, together with the date of publication, preclude

the possibility of such a circumstance.  At some period of his life he

doubtless sent, or contemplated sending, such a message, and this fact,

through some curious psychology, became confused in his mind with the

first edition of The Innocents Abroad.]









LXXI



THE GREAT BOOK OF TRAVEL



'The Innocents Abroad' was a success from the start.  The machinery for

its sale and delivery was in full swing by August 1, and five thousand

one hundred and seventy copies were disposed of that month--a number that

had increased to more than thirty-one thousand by the first of the year.

It was a book of travel; its lowest price was three and a half dollars.

No such record had been made by a book of that description; none has

equaled it since.--[One must recall that this was the record only up to

1910. D.W.]



If Mark Twain was not already famous, he was unquestionably famous now.

As the author of The New Pilgrim's Progress he was swept into the domain

of letters as one riding at the head of a cavalcade--doors and windows

wide with welcome and jubilant with applause.  Newspapers chorused their

enthusiasm; the public voiced universal approval; only a few of the more

cultured critics seemed hesitant and doubtful.



They applauded--most of them--but with reservation.  Doctor Holland

regarded Mark Twain as a mere fun maker of ephemeral popularity, and was

not altogether pleasant in his dictum.  Doctor Holmes, in a letter to the

author, speaks of the "frequently quaint and amusing conceits," but does

not find it in his heart to refer to the book as literature.  It was

naturally difficult for the East to concede a serious value to one who

approached his subject with such militant aboriginality, and occasionally

wrote "those kind."  William Dean Howells reviewed the book in the

Atlantic, which was of itself a distinction, whether the review was

favorable or otherwise.  It was favorable on the whole, favorable to the

humor of the book, its "delicious impudence," the charm of its good-

natured irony.  The review closed:



     It is no business of ours to fix his rank among the humorists

     California has given us, but we think he is, in an entirely

     different way from all the others, quite worthy of the company of

     the best.



This is praise, but not of an intemperate sort, nor very inclusive.  The

descriptive, the poetic, the more pretentious phases of the book did not

receive attention.  Mr. Howells was perhaps the first critic of eminence

to recognize in Mark Twain not only the humorist, but the supreme genius-

the "Lincoln of our literature."  This was later.  The public--the silent

public--with what Howells calls "the inspired knowledge of the simple-

hearted multitude," reached a similar verdict forthwith.  And on

sufficient evidence: let the average unprejudiced person of to-day take

up the old volume and read a few chapters anywhere and decide whether it

is the work of a mere humorist, or also of a philosopher, a poet, and a

seer.  The writer well remembers a little group of "the simple-hearted

multitude" who during the winter of '69 and '70 gathered each evening to

hear the Innocents read aloud, and their unanimous verdict that it was

the "best book of modern times."



It was the most daring book of its day.  Passages of it were calculated

to take the breath of the orthodox reader; only, somehow, it made him

smile, too.  It was all so good-natured, so openly sincere.  Without

doubt it preached heresy--the heresy of viewing revered landmarks and

relics joyously, rather than lugubriously; reverentially, when they

inspired reverence; satirically, when they invited ridicule, and with

kindliness always.



The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain's greatest book of travel.  The

critical and the pure in speech may object to this verdict.  Brander

Matthews regards it second to A Tramp Abroad, the natural viewpoint of

the literary technician.  The 'Tramp' contains better usage without

doubt, but it lacks the "color" which gives the Innocents its perennial

charm.  In the Innocents there is a glow, a fragrance, a romance of

touch, a subtle something which is idyllic, something which is not quite

of reality, in the tale of that little company that so long ago sailed

away to the harbors of their illusions beyond the sea, and, wandered

together through old palaces and galleries, and among the tombs of the

saints, and down through ancient lands.  There is an atmosphere about it

all, a dream-like quality that lies somewhere in the telling, maybe, or

in the tale; at all events it is there, and the world has felt it ever

since.  Perhaps it could be defined in a single word, perhaps that word

would be "youth."  That the artist, poor True Williams, felt its

inspiration is certain.  We may believe that Williams was not a great

draftsman, but no artist ever caught more perfectly the light and spirit

of the author's text.  Crude some of the pictures are, no doubt, but they

convey the very essence of the story; they belong to it, they are a part

of it, and they ought never to perish.  'A Tramp Abroad' is a rare book,

but it cannot rank with its great predecessor in human charm.  The

public, which in the long run makes mistakes, has rendered that verdict.

The Innocents by far outsells the Tramp, and, for that matter, any other

book of travel.





THE PURCHASE OF A PAPER



It is curious to reflect that Mark Twain still did not regard himself as

a literary man.  He had no literary plans for the future; he scarcely

looked forward to the publication of another book.  He considered himself

a journalist; his ambition lay in the direction of retirement in some

prosperous newspaper enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a

home.  During his travels he had already been casting about for a

congenial and substantial association in newspaperdom, and had at one

time considered the purchase of an interest in the Cleveland Herald.  But

Buffalo was nearer Elmira, and when an opportunity offered, by which he

could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo Express for $25,000, the

purchase was decided upon.  His lack of funds prompted a new plan for a

lecture tour to the Pacific coast, this time with D. R. Locke (Nasby),

then immensely popular, in his lecture "Cussed Be Canaan."



Clemens had met Nasby on the circuit, and was very fond of him.  The two

had visited Boston together, and while there had called on Doctor Holmes;

this by the way.  Nasby was fond of Clemens too, but doubtful about the

trip-doubtful about his lecture:



     Your proposition takes my breath away.  If I had my new lecture

     completed I wouldn't hesitate a moment, but really isn't "Cussed Be

     Canaan" too old?  You know that lemon, our African brother, juicy as

     he was in his day, has been squeezed dry.  Why howl about his wrongs

     after said wrongs have been redressed?  Why screech about the

     "damnable spirit of Cahst" when the victim thereof sits at the first

     table, and his oppressor mildly takes, in hash, what he leaves?  You

     see, friend Twain, the Fifteenth Amendment busted "Cussed Be

     Canaan."  I howled feelingly on the subject while it was a living

     issue, for I felt all that I said and a great deal more; but now

     that we have won our fight why dance frantically on the dead corpse

     of our enemy?  The Reliable Contraband is contraband no more, but a

     citizen of the United States, and I speak of him no more.



     Give me a week to think of your proposition.  If I can jerk a

     lecture in time I will go with you.  The Lord knows I would like to.

     --[Nasby's lecture, "Cussed Be Canaan," opened, "We are all

     descended from grandfathers!"  He had a powerful voice, and always

     just on the stroke of eight he rose and vigorously delivered this

     sentence.  Once, after lecturing an entire season--two hundred and

     twenty-five nights--he went home to rest.  That evening he sat,

     musingly drowsing by the fire, when the clock struck eight.  Without

     a moment's thought Nasby sprang to his feet and thundered out, "We

     are all descended from grandfathers!"]



Nasby did not go, and Clemens's enthusiasm cooled at the prospect of

setting out alone on that long tour.  Furthermore, Jervis Langdon

promptly insisted on advancing the money required to complete the

purchase of the Express, and the trade was closed.--[Mr. Langdon is just

as good for $25,000 for me, and has already advanced half of it in cash.

I wrote and asked whether I had better send him my note, or a due bill,

or how he would prefer to have the indebtedness made of record, and he

answered every other topic in the letter pleasantly, but never replied to

that at all.  Still, I shall give my note into a hands of his business

agent here, and pay him the interest as it falls due.--S. L. C. to his

mother.]



The Buffalo Express was at this time in the hands of three men--Col.

George F. Selkirk, J. L. Lamed, and Thomas A. Kennett.  Colonel Selkirk

was business manager, Lamed was political editor.  With the purchase of

Kennett's share Clemens became a sort of general and contributing editor,

with a more or less "roving commission"--his hours and duties not very

clearly defined.  It was believed by his associates, and by Clemens

himself, that his known connection with the paper would give it prestige

and circulation, as Nasby's connection had popularized the Toledo Blade.

The new editor entered upon his duties August 14 (1869).  The members of

the Buffalo press gave him a dinner that evening, and after the manner of

newspaper men the world over, were handsomely cordial to the "new enemy

in their midst."



There is an anecdote which relates that next morning, when Mark Twain

arrived in the Express office (it was then at 14 Swan Street), there

happened to be no one present who knew him.  A young man rose very

bruskly and asked if there was any one he would like to see.  It is

reported that he replied, with gentle deliberation:



"Well, yes, I should like to see some young man offer the new editor a

chair."



It is so like Mark Twain that we are inclined to accept it, though it

seems of doubtful circumstance.  In any case it deserves to be true.  His

"Salutatory" (August 18th) is sufficiently genuine:



     Being a stranger, it would be immodest for me to suddenly and

     violently assume the associate editorship of the Buffalo Express

     without a single word of comfort or encouragement to the unoffending

     patrons of the paper, who are about to be exposed to constant

     attacks of my wisdom and learning.  But the word shall be as brief

     as possible.  I only want to assure parties having a friendly

     interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going to

     hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time.  I am not

     going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to

     make trouble....  I shall not make use of slang and vulgarity upon

     any occasion or under any circumstances, and shall never use

     profanity except when discussing house rent and taxes.  Indeed, upon

     a second thought, I shall not use it even then, for it is

     unchristian, inelegant, and degrading; though, to speak truly, I do

     not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a

     cent without it.  I shall not often meddle with politics, because we

     have a political Editor who is already excellent and only needs to

     serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect.  I shall not

     write any poetry unless I conceive a spite against the subscribers.



     Such is my platform.  I do not see any use in it, but custom is law

     and must be obeyed.



John Harrison Mills, who was connected with the Express in those days,

has written:



     I cannot remember that there was any delay in getting down to his

     work.  I think within five minutes the new editor had assumed the

     easy look of one entirely at home, pencil in hand and a clutch of

     paper before him, with an air of preoccupation, as of one intent on

     a task delayed.  It was impossible to be conscious of the man

     sitting there, and not feel his identity with all that he had

     enjoyed, and the reminiscence of it he that seemed to radiate; for

     the personality was so absolutely in accord with all the record of

     himself and his work.  I cannot say he seemed to be that vague thing

     they call a type in race or blood, though the word, if used in his

     case for temperament, would decidedly mean what they used to call

     the "sanguine."



     I thought that, pictorially, the noble costume of the Albanian would

     have well become him.  Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the

     horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric's warriors; or stood at the prow

     of one of the swift craft of the Vikings.  His eyes, which have been

     variously described, were, it seemed to me, of an indescribable

     depth of the bluish moss-agate, with a capacity of pupil dilation

     that in certain lights had the effect of a deep black....



Mr. Mills adds that in dress he was now "well groomed," and that

consequently they were obliged to revise their notions as to the careless

negligee which gossip had reported.--[From unpublished Reminiscences

kindly lent to the author by Mr. Mills]









LXXIII



THE FIRST MEETING WITH HOWELLS



Clemens' first period of editorial work was a brief one, though he made

frequent contributions to the paper: sketches, squibs, travel-notes, and

experiences, usually humorous in character.  His wedding-day had been set

for early in the year, and it was necessary to accumulate a bank account

for that occasion.  Before October he was out on the lecture circuit,

billed now for the first time for New England, nervous and apprehensive

in consequence, though with good hope.  To Pamela he wrote

(November 9th):



To-morrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience--

4,000 critics--and on the success of this matter depends my future

success in New England.  But I am not distressed.  Nasby is in the same

boat.  Tonight decides the fate of his brand-new lecture.  He has just

left my room--been reading his lecture to me--was greatly depressed.  I

have convinced him that he has little to fear.



Whatever alarm Mark Twain may have felt was not warranted.  His success

with the New England public was immediate and complete.  He made his

headquarters in Boston, at Redpath's office, where there was pretty sure

to be a congenial company, of which he was presently the center.



It was during one of these Boston sojourns that he first met William Dean

Howells, his future friend and literary counselor.  Howells was assistant

editor of the Atlantic at this time; James T. Fields, its editor.

Clemens had been gratified by the Atlantic review, and had called to

express his thanks for it.  He sat talking to Fields, when Howells

entered the editorial rooms, and on being presented to the author of the

review, delivered his appreciation in the form of a story, sufficiently

appropriate, but not qualified for the larger types.--[He said: "When I

read that review of yours, I felt like the woman who was so glad her baby

had come white."]



His manner, his humor, his quaint colloquial forms all delighted Howells

--more, in fact, than the opulent sealskin overcoat which he affected at

this period--a garment astonishing rather than esthetic, as Mark Twain's

clothes in those days of his first regeneration were likely to be

startling enough, we may believe; in the conservative atmosphere of the

Atlantic rooms.  And Howells--gentle, genial, sincere--filled with the

early happiness of his calling, won the heart of Mark Twain and never

lost it, and, what is still more notable, won his absolute and unvarying

confidence in all literary affairs.  It was always Mark Twain's habit to

rely on somebody, and in matters pertaining to literature and to literary

people in general he laid his burden on William Dean Howells from that

day.  Only a few weeks after that first visit we find him telegraphing to

Howells, asking him to look after a Californian poet, then ill and

friendless in Brooklyn.  Clemens states that he does not know the poet,

but will contribute fifty dollars if Howells will petition the steamboat

company for a pass; and no doubt Howells complied, and spent a good deal

more than fifty dollars' worth of time to get the poet relieved and

started; it would be like him.









LXXIV



THE WEDDING-DAY



The wedding was planned, at first, either for Christmas or New-Year's

Day; but as the lecture engagements continued into January it was decided

to wait until these were filled.  February 2d, a date near the

anniversary of the engagement, was agreed upon, also a quiet wedding with

no "tour."  The young people would go immediately to Buffalo, and take up

a modest residence, in a boardinghouse as comfortable, even as luxurious,

as the husband's financial situation justified.  At least that was Samuel

Clemens's understanding of the matter.  He felt that he was heavily in

debt--that his first duty was to relieve himself of that obligation.



There were other plans in Elmira, but in the daily and happy letters he

received there was no inkling of any new purpose.



He wrote to J. D. F. Slee, of Buffalo, who was associated in business

with Mr. Langdon, and asked him to find a suitable boarding-place, one

that would be sufficiently refined for the woman who was to be his wife,

and sufficiently reasonable to insure prosperity.  In due time Slee

replied that, while boarding was a "miserable business anyhow," he had

been particularly fortunate in securing a place on one of the most

pleasant streets--"the family a small one and choice spirits, with no

predilection for taking boarders, and consenting to the present

arrangement only because of the anticipated pleasure of your company."

The price, Slee added, would be reasonable.  As a matter of fact a house

on Delaware Avenue--still the fine residence street of Buffalo--had been

bought and furnished throughout as a present to the bride and groom.  It

stands to-day practically unchanged--brick and mansard without, Eastlake

within, a type then much in vogue--spacious and handsome for that period.

It was completely appointed.  Diagrams of the rooms had been sent to

Elmira and Miss Langdon herself had selected the furnishings.  Everything

was put in readiness, including linen, cutlery, and utensils.  Even the

servants had been engaged and the pantry and cellar had been stocked.



It must have been hard for Olivia Langdon to keep this wonderful surprise

out of those daily letters.  A surprise like that is always watching a

chance to slip out unawares, especially when one is eagerly impatient to

reveal it.



However, the traveler remained completely in the dark.  He may have

wondered vaguely at the lack of enthusiasm in the boarding idea, and

could he have been certain that the sales of the book would continue, or

that his newspaper venture would yield an abundant harvest, he might have

planned his domestic beginning on a more elaborate scale.  If only the

Tennessee land would yield the long-expected fortune now!  But these were

all incalculable things.  All that he could be sure of was the coming of

his great happiness, in whatever environment, and of the dragging weeks

between.



At last the night of the final lecture came, and he was off for Elmira

with the smallest possible delay.  Once there, the intervening days did

not matter.  He could join in the busy preparations; he could write

exuberantly to his friends.  To Laura Hawkins, long since Laura Frazer he

sent a playful line; to Jim Gillis, still digging and washing on the

slopes of the old Tuolumne hills, he wrote a letter which eminently

belongs here:





                              Elmira, N. Y., January 26, 1870.



     DEAR Jim,--I remember that old night just as well!  And somewhere

     among my relics I have your remembrance stored away.  It makes my

     heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days.  Still it

     shouldn't, for right in the depths of their poverty and their

     pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune.

     You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal

     sojourn in the rain and mud of Angel's Camp--I mean that day we sat

     around the tavern stove and heard that chap tell about the frog and

     how they filled him with shot.  And you remember how we quoted from

     the yarn and laughed over it out there on the hillside while you and

     dear old Stoker panned and washed.  I jotted the story down in my

     note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen

     dollars for it--I was just that blind.  But then we were so hard up.

     I published that story, and it became widely known in America,

     India, China, England, and the reputation it made for me has paid me

     thousands and thousands of dollars since.  Four or five months ago I

     bought into the Express (I have ordered it sent to you as long as

     you live, and if the bookkeeper sends you any bills you let me hear

     of it).  I went heavily in debt--never could have dared to do that,

     Jim, if we hadn't heard the jumping Frog story that day.



     And wouldn't I love to take old Stoker by the hand, and wouldn't I

     love to see him in his great specialty, his wonderful rendition of

     Rinalds in the "Burning Shame!"  Where is Dick and what is he doing?

     Give him my fervent love and warm old remembrances.



     A week from to-day I shall be married-to a girl even better and

     lovelier than the peerless "Chapparal Quails."  You can't come so

     far, Jim, but still I cordially invite you to come anyhow, and I

     invite Dick too.  And if you two boys were to land here on that

     pleasant occasion we would make you right royally welcome.

                              Truly your friend,

                                             SAML. L. CLEMENS.



     P.S.---California plums are good.  Jim, particularly when they are

     stewed.



It had been only five years before--that day in Angel's Camp--but how

long ago and how far away it seemed to him now!  So much had happened

since then, so much of which that was the beginning--so little compared

with the marvel of the years ahead, whose threshold he was now about to

cross, and not alone.



A day or two before the wedding he was asked to lecture on the night of

February 2d.  He replied that he was sorry to disappoint the applicant,

but that he could not lecture on the night of February 2d, for the reason

that he was going to marry a young lady on that evening, and that he

would rather marry that young lady than deliver all the lectures in the

world.



And so came the wedding-day.  It began pleasantly; the postman brought a

royalty check that morning of $4,000, the accumulation of three months'

sales, and the Rev. Joseph Twichell and Harmony, his wife, came from

Hartford--Twichell to join with the Rev. Thomas K.  Beecher in

solemnizing the marriage.  Pamela Moffett, a widow now, with her daughter

Annie, grown to a young lady, had come all the way from St. Louis, and

Mrs. Fairbanks from Cleveland.



Yet the guests were not numerous, not more than a hundred at most, so it

was a quiet wedding there in the Langdon parlors, those dim, stately

rooms that in the future would hold so much of his history--so much of

the story of life and death that made its beginning there.



The wedding-service was about seven o'clock, for Mr. Beecher had a

meeting at the church soon after that hour.  Afterward followed the

wedding-supper and dancing, and the bride's father danced with the bride.

To the interested crowd awaiting him at the church Mr. Beecher reported

that the bride was very beautiful, and had on the longest white gloves he

had ever seen; he declared they reached to her shoulders.--[Perhaps for

a younger generation it should be said that Thomas K. Beecher was a

brother of Henry Ward Beecher.  He lived and died in Elmira, the almost

worshiped pastor of the Park Congregational Church.  He was a noble,

unorthodox teacher.  Samuel Clemens at the time of his marriage already

strongly admired him, and had espoused his cause in an article signed

"S'cat!" in the Elmira Advertiser, when he (Beecher) had been assailed by

the more orthodox Elmira clergy.  For the "S'cat" article see Appendix I,

at the end of last volume.]



It was the next afternoon when they set out for Buffalo, accompanied by

the bride's parents, the groom's relatives, the Beechers, and perhaps one

or two others of that happy company.  It was nine o'clock at night when

they arrived, and found Mr. Slee waiting at the station with sleighs to

convey the party to the "boarding-house" he had selected.  They drove and

drove, and the sleigh containing the bride and groom got behind and

apparently was bound nowhere in particular, which disturbed the groom a

good deal, for he thought it proper that they should arrive first, to

receive their guests.  He commented on Slee's poor judgment in selecting

a house that was so hard to find, and when at length they turned into

fashionable Delaware Avenue, and stopped before one of the most

attractive places in the neighborhood, he was beset with fear concerning

the richness of the locality.



They were on the steps when the doors opened, and a perfect fairyland of

lights and decoration was revealed within.  The friends who had gone

ahead came out with greetings, to lead in the bride and groom.  Servants

hurried forward to take bags and wraps.  They were ushered inside; they

were led through beautiful rooms, all newly appointed and garnished.  The

bridegroom was dazed, unable to understand the meaning of things, the

apparent ownership and completeness of possession.



At last the young wife put her hand upon his arm:



"Don't you understand, Youth," she said; that was always her name for

him.  "Don't you understand?  It is ours, all ours--everything--a gift

from father!"



But even then he could not grasp it; not at first, not until Mr. Langdon

brought a little box and, opening it, handed them the deeds.



Nobody quite remembers what was the first remark that Samuel Clemens made

then; but either then or a little later he said:



"Mr. Langdon, whenever you are in Buffalo, if it's twice a year, come

right here.  Bring your bag and stay overnight if you want to.  It

sha'n't cost you a cent!"



They went in to supper then, and by and by the guests were gone and the

young wedded pair were alone.



Patrick McAleer, the young coachman, who would grow old in their employ,

and Ellen, the cook, came in for their morning orders, and were full of

Irish delight at the inexperience and novelty of it all.  Then they were

gone, and only the lovers in their new house and their new happiness

remained.



And so it was they entered the enchanted land.









LXXV



AS TO DESTINY



If any reader has followed these chapters thus far, he may have wondered,

even if vaguely, at the seeming fatality of events.  Mark Twain had but

to review his own life for justification of his doctrine of inevitability

--an unbroken and immutable sequence of cause and effect from the

beginning.  Once he said:



"When the first living atom found itself afloat on the great Laurentian

sea the first act of that first atom led to the second act of that first

atom, and so on down through the succeeding ages of all life, until, if

the steps could be traced, it would be shown that the first act of that

first atom has led inevitably to the act of my standing here in my

dressing-gown at this instant talking to you."



It seemed the clearest presentment ever offered in the matter of

predestined circumstance--predestined from the instant when that primal

atom felt the vital thrill.  Mark Twain's early life, however imperfectly

recorded, exemplifies this postulate.  If through the years still ahead

of us the course of destiny seems less clearly defined, it is only

because thronging events make the threads less easy to trace.  The web

becomes richer, the pattern more intricate and confusing, but the line of

fate neither breaks nor falters, to the end.









LXXVI



ON THE BUFFALO "EXPRESS"



With the beginning of life in Buffalo, Mark Twain had become already a

world character--a man of large consequence and events.  He had no proper

realization of this, no real sense of the size of his conquest; he still

regarded himself merely as a lecturer and journalist, temporarily

popular, but with no warrant to a permanent seat in the world's literary

congress.  He thought his success something of an accident.  The fact

that he was prepared to settle down as an editorial contributor to a

newspaper in what was then only a big village is the best evidence of a

modest estimate of his talents.



He "worked like a horse," is the verdict of those who were closely

associated with him on the Express.  His hours were not regular, but they

were long.  Often he was at his desk at eight in the morning, and

remained there until ten or eleven at night.



His working costume was suited to comfort rather than show.  With coat,

vest, collar, and tie usually removed (sometimes even his shoes), he

lounged in his chair, in any attitude that afforded the larger ease,

pulling over the exchanges; scribbling paragraphs, editorials, humorous

skits, and what not, as the notion came upon him.  J. L. Lamed, his co-

worker (he sat on the opposite side of the same table), remembers that

Mark Twain enjoyed his work as he went along--the humor of it--and that

he frequently laughed as some whimsicality or new absurdity came into his

mind.



"I doubt," writes Lamed, "if he ever enjoyed anything more than the

jackknife engraving that he did on a piece of board of a military map of

the siege of Paris, which was printed in the Express from his original

plate, with accompanying explanations and comments.  His half-day of

whittling and laughter that went with it are something that I find

pleasant to remember.  Indeed, my whole experience of association with

him is a happy memory, which I am fortunate in having....  What one saw

of him was always the actual Mark Twain, acting out of his own nature

simply, frankly, without pretense, and almost without reserve.  It was

that simplicity and naturalness in the man which carried his greatest

charm."



Lamed, like many others, likens Mark Twain to Lincoln in various of his

characteristics.  The two worked harmoniously together: Lamed attending

to the political direction of the journal, Clemens to the literary, and

what might be termed the sentimental side.  There was no friction in the

division of labor, never anything but good feeling between them.  Clemens

had a poor opinion of his own comprehension of politics, and perhaps as

little regard for Lamed's conception of humor.  Once when the latter

attempted something in the way of pleasantry his associate said:



"Better leave the humor on this paper to me, Lamed"; and once when Lamed

was away attending the Republican State Convention at Saratoga, and some

editorial comment seemed necessary, Clemens thought it best to sign the

utterance, and to make humor of his shortcomings.



     I do not know much about politics, and am not sitting up nights to

     learn .  .  .  .



     I am satisfied that these nominations are all right and sound, and

     that they are the only ones that can bring peace to our distracted

     country (the only political phrase I am perfectly familiar with and

     competent to hurl at the public with fearless confidence--the other

     editor is full of them), but being merely satisfied is not enough.

     I always like to know before I shout.  But I go for Mr. Curtis with

     all my strength!  Being certain of him, I hereby shout all I know

     how.  But the others may be a split ticket, or a scratched ticket,

     or whatever you call it.



     I will let it alone for the present.  It will keep.  The other young

     man will be back to-morrow, and he will shout for it, split or no

     split, rest assured of that.  He will prance into this political

     ring with his tomahawk and his war-whoop, and then you will hear a

     crash and see the scalps fly.  He has none of my diffidence.  He

     knows all about these nominees, and if he don't he will let on to in

     such a natural way as to deceive the most critical.  He knows

     everything--he knows more than Webster's Unabridged and the American

     Encyclopedia--but whether he knows anything about a subject or not

     he is perfectly willing to discuss it.  When he gets back he will

     tell you all about these candidates as serenely as if he had been

     acquainted with them a hundred years, though, speaking

     confidentially, I doubt if he ever heard of any of them till to-day.

     I am right well satisfied it is a good, sound, sensible ticket, and

     a ticket to win; but wait till he comes.



     In the mean time I go for George William Curtis and take the

     chances.

                                             MARK TWAIN.



He had become what Mr. Howells calls entirely "desouthernized" by this

time.  From having been of slaveholding stock, and a Confederate soldier,

he had become a most positive Republican, a rampant abolitionist--had

there been anything left to abolish.  His sympathy had been always with

the oppressed, and he had now become their defender.  His work on the

paper revealed this more and more.  He wrote fewer sketches and more

editorials, and the editorials were likely to be either savage assaults

upon some human abuse, or fierce espousals of the weak.  They were

fearless, scathing, terrific.  Of some farmers of Cohocton, who had taken

the law into their own hands to punish a couple whom they believed to be

a detriment to the community, he wrote:



"The men who did that deed are capable of doing any low, sneaking,

cowardly villainy that could be invented in perdition.  They are the very

bastards of the devil."



He appended a full list of their names, and added:



"If the farmers of Cohocton are of this complexion, what on earth must a

Cohocton rough be like?"



But all this happened a long time ago, and we need not detail those

various old interests and labors here.  It is enough to say that Mark

Twain on the Express was what he had been from the beginning, and would

be to the end--the zealous champion of justice and liberty; violent and

sometimes wrong in his viewpoint, but never less than fearless and

sincere.  Invariably he was for the oppressed.  He had a natural instinct

for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the under dog.



Among the best of his editorial contributions is a tribute to Anson

Burlingame, who died February 23, 1870, at St. Petersburg, on his trip

around the world as special ambassador for the Chinese Empire.  In this

editorial Clemens endeavored to pay something of his debt to the noble

statesman.  He reviewed Burlingame's astonishing career--the career which

had closed at forty-seven, and read like a fairy-tale-and he dwelt

lovingly on his hero's nobility of character.  At the close he said:



"He was a good man, and a very, very great man.  America, lost a son, and

all the world a servant, when he died."



Among those early contributions to the Express is a series called "Around

the World," an attempt at collaboration with Prof. D. R. Ford, who did

the actual traveling, while Mark Twain, writing in the first person, gave

the letters his literary stamp.  At least some of the contributions were

written in this way, such as "Adventures in Hayti,"  "The Pacific," and

"Japan."  These letters exist to-day only in the old files of the

Express, and indeed this is the case with most of Clemens's work for that

paper.  It was mainly ephemeral or timely work, and its larger value has

disappeared.  Here and there is a sentence worth remembering.  Of two

practical jokers who sent in a marriage notice of persons not even

contemplating matrimony, he said: "This deceit has been practised

maliciously by a couple of men whose small souls will escape through

their pores some day if they do not varnish their hides."



Some of the sketches have been preserved.  "Journalism in Tennessee," one

of the best of his wilder burlesques, is as enjoyable to-day as when

written.  "A Curious Dream" made a lasting impression on his Buffalo

readers, and you are pretty certain to hear of it when you mention Mark

Twain in that city to-day.  It vividly called attention to the neglect of

the old North Street graveyard.  The gruesome vision of the ancestors

deserting with their coffins on their backs was even more humiliating

than amusing, and inspired a movement for reform.  It has been effective

elsewhere since then, and may still be read with profit--or satisfaction

--for in a note at the end the reader is assured that if the cemeteries

of his town are kept in good order the dream is not leveled at his town

at all, but "particularly and venomously at the next town."









LXXVII



THE "GALAXY"



Mark Twain's work on the Express represented only a portion of his

literary activities during his Buffalo residence.  The Galaxy, an

ambitious New York magazine of that day--[published by Sheldon & Co.  at

498 and 500 Broadway]--, proposed to him that he conduct for them a

humorous department.  They would pay $2,400 a year for the work, and

allow him a free hand.  There was some discussion as to book rights, but

the arrangement was concluded, and his first instalment, under the

general title of "Memoranda," appeared in the May number, 1870.  In his

Introductory he outlined what the reader might expect, such as

"exhaustive statistical tables,"  "Patent Office reports," and "complete

instructions about farming, even from the grafting of the seed to the

harrowing of the matured crops."  He declared that he would throw a

pathos into the subject of agriculture that would surprise and delight

the world.  He added that the "Memoranda" was not necessarily a humorous

department.



     I would not conduct an exclusively and professedly humorous

     department for any one.  I would always prefer to have the privilege

     of printing a serious and sensible remark, in case one occurred to

     me, without the reader's feeling obliged to consider himself

     outraged....  Puns cannot be allowed a place in this department....

     No circumstance, however dismal, will ever be considered a

     sufficient excuse for the admission of that last and saddest

     evidence of intellectual poverty, the pun.



The Galaxy was really a fine magazine, with the best contributors

obtainable; among them Justin McCarthy, S. M. B. Piatt, Richard Grant

White, and many others well known in that day, with names that still

flicker here and there in its literary twilight.  The new department

appealed to Clemens, and very soon he was writing most of his sketches

for it.  They were better literature, as a rule, than those published in

his own paper.



The first number of the "Memoranda" was fairly representative of those

that followed it.  "The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract,"

a manuscript which he had undertaken three years before and mislaid, was

its initial contribution.  Besides the "Beef Contract," there was a

tribute to George Wakeman, a well-known journalist of those days; a

stricture on the Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage, who had delivered from the

pulpit an argument against workingmen occupying pews in fashionable

churches; a presentment of the Chinese situation in San Francisco,

depicting the cruel treatment of the Celestial immigrant; a burlesque of

the Sunday-school "good little boy" story,--["The Story of the Good

Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper" and the "Beef Contract" are included in

Sketches New and Old; also the Chinese sketch, under the title,

"Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy."]--and several shorter skits--and

anecdotes, ten pages in all; a rather generous contract.



Mark Twain's comment on Talmage was prompted by an article in which

Talmage had assumed the premise that if workingmen attended the churches

it would drive the better class of worshipers away.  Among other things

he said:



     I have a good Christian friend who, if he sat in the front pew in

     church, and a workingman should enter the door at the other end,

     would smell him instantly.  My friend is not to blame for the

     sensitiveness of his nose, any more than you would flog a pointer

     for being keener on the scent than a stupid watch-dog. The fact is,

     if you had all the churches free, by reason of the mixing of the

     common people with the uncommon, you would keep one-half of

     Christendom sick at their stomach.  If you are going to kill the

     church thus with bad smells I will have nothing to do with this work

     of evangelization.



Commenting on this Mark Twain said--well, he said a good deal more than

we have room for here, but a portion of his closing paragraphs is worth

preserving.  He compares the Reverend Mr. Talmage with the early

disciples of Christ--Paul and Peter and the others; or, rather, he

contrasts him with them.



     They healed the very beggars, and held intercourse with people of a

     villainous odor every day.  If the subject of these remarks had been

     chosen among the original Twelve Apostles he would not have

     associated with the rest, because he could not have stood the fishy

     smell of some of his comrades who came from around the Sea of

     Galilee.  He would have resigned his commission with some such

     remark as he makes in the extract quoted above: "Master, if thou art

     going to kill the church thus with bad smells I will have nothing to

     do with this work of evangelization."  He is a disciple, and makes

     that remark to the Master; the only difference is that he makes it

     in the nineteenth instead of the first century.



Talmage was immensely popular at this time, and Mark Twain's open attack

on him must have shocked a good many Galaxy readers, as perhaps his

article on the Chinese cruelties offended the citizens of San Francisco.

It did not matter.  He was not likely to worry over the friends he would

lose because of any stand taken for human justice.  Lamed said of him:

"He was very far from being one who tried in any way to make himself

popular."  Certainly he never made any such attempt at the expense of his

convictions.



The first Galaxy instalment was a sort of platform of principles for the

campaign that was to follow.  Not that each month's contribution

contained personal criticism, or a defense of the Chinese (of whom he was

always the champion as long as he lived), but a good many of them did.

In the October number he began a series of letters under the general

title of "Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again," supposed to have been written

by a Chinese immigrant in San Francisco, detailing his experience there.

In a note the author says: "No experience is set down in the following

letters which had to be invented.  Fancy is not needed to give variety to

the history of the Chinaman's sojourn in America.  Plain fact is amply

sufficient."  The letters show how the supposed Chinese writer of them

had set out for America, believing it to be a land whose government was

based on the principle that all men are created equal, and treated

accordingly; how, upon arriving in San Francisco, he was kicked and

bruised and beaten, and set upon by dogs, flung into jail, tried and

condemned without witnesses, his own race not being allowed to testify

against Americans--Irish-Americans--in the San Francisco court.  They are

scathing, powerful letters, and one cannot read them, even in this day of

improved conditions, without feeling the hot waves of resentment and

indignation which Mark Twain must have felt when he penned them.



Reverend Mr. Talmage was not the only divine to receive attention in the

"Memoranda."  The Reverend Mr. Sabine, of New York, who had declined to

hold a church burial service for the old actor, George Holland, came in

for the most caustic as well as the most artistic stricture of the entire

series.  It deserves preservation to-day, not only for its literary

value, but because no finer defense of the drama, no more searching

sermon on self-righteousness, has ever been put into concrete form.

--["The Indignity Put Upon the Remains of Gorge Holland by the Rev. Mr.

Sabine"; Galaxy for February, 1871.  The reader will find it complete

under Appendix J, at the end of last volume.]



The "Little Church Around the Corner" on Twenty-ninth Street received

that happy title from this incident.



"There is a little church around the corner that will, perhaps, permit

the service," Mr. Sabine had said to Holland's friends.



The little church did permit the service, and there was conferred upon it

the new name, which it still bears.  It has sheltered a long line of

actor folk and their friends since then, earning thereby reverence,

gratitude, and immortal memory.--[Church of the Transfiguration.

Memorial services were held there for Joseph Jefferson; and a memorial

window, by John La Farge, has been placed there in memory of Edwin

Booth.]



Of the Galaxy contributions a number are preserved in Sketches New and

Old.  "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper" is one of the best of these--

an excellent example of Mark Twain's more extravagant style of humor.  It

is perennially delightful; in France it has been dramatized, and is still

played.



A successful Galaxy feature, also preserved in the Sketches, was the

"Burlesque Map of Paris," reprinted from the Express.  The Franco-

Prussian War was in progress, and this travesty was particularly timely.

It creates only a smile of amusement to-day, but it was all fresh and

delightful then.  Schuyler Colfax, by this time Vice-President, wrote to

him: "I have had the heartiest possible laugh over it, and so have all my

family.  You are a wicked, conscienceless wag, who ought to be punished

severely."



The "Official Commendations," which accompany the map, are its chief

charm.  They are from Grant, Bismarck, Brigham Young, and others, the

best one coming from one J. Smith, who says:



     My wife was for years afflicted with freckles, and though everything

     was done for her relief that could be done, all was in vain.  But,

     sir, since her first glance at your map they have entirely left her.

     She has nothing but convulsions now.



It is said that the "Map of Paris" found its way to Berlin, where the

American students in the beer-halls used to pretend to quarrel over it

until they attracted the attention of the German soldiers that might be

present.  Then they would wander away and leave it on the table and watch

results.  The soldiers would pounce upon it and lose their tempers over

it; then finally abuse it and revile its author, to the satisfaction of

everybody.



The larger number of "Memoranda" sketches have properly found oblivion

to-day.  They were all, or nearly all, collected by a Canadian pirate,

C. A. Backas, in a volume bearing the title of Memoranda,--[Also by a

harpy named John Camden Hotten (of London), of whom we shall hear again.

Hotten had already pirated The Innocents, and had it on the market before

Routledge could bring out the authorized edition.  Routledge later

published the "Memoranda" under the title of Sketches, including the

contents of the Jumping Frog book.]--a book long ago suppressed.  Only

about twenty of the Galaxy contributions found place in Sketches New and

Old, five years later, and some of these might have been spared as

literature.  "To Raise Poultry,"  "John Chinaman in New York," and

"History Repeats Itself" are valuable only as examples of his work at

that period.  The reader may consult them for himself.











LXXVIII



THE PRIMROSE PATH



But we are losing sight of more important things.  From the very

beginning Mark Twain's home meant always more to him than his work.  The

life at 472 Delaware Avenue had begun with as fair a promise as any

matrimonial journey ever undertaken: There seemed nothing lacking: a

beautiful home, sufficient income, bright prospects--these things, with

health and love; constitute married happiness.  Mrs. Clemens wrote to her

sister, Mrs. Crane, at the end of February: "Sue, we are two as happy

people as you ever saw.  Our days seem to be made up of only bright

sunlight, with no shadow in them."  In the same letter the husband added:

"Livy pines and pines every day for you, and I pine and pine every day

for you, and when we both of us are pining at once you would think it was

a whole pine forest let loose."



To Redpath, who was urging lecture engagements for the coming season, he

wrote:



     DEAR RED,--I am not going to lecture any more forever.  I have got

     things ciphered down to a fraction now.  I know just about what it

     will cost to live, and I can make the money without lecturing.

     Therefore, old man, count me out.



And still later, in May:



     I guess I am out of the field permanently.  Have got a lovely wife,

     a lovely house, bewitchingly furnished, a lovely carriage, and a

     coachman whose style and dignity are simply awe-in-spiring, nothing

     less; and I am making more money than necessary, by considerable,

     and therefore why crucify myself nightly on the platform?  The

     subscriber will have to be excused for the present season at least.



So they were very happy during those early months, acquiring pleasantly

the education which any matrimonial experience is sure to furnish,

accustoming themselves to the uses of housekeeping, to life in

partnership, with all the discoveries and mental and spiritual

adaptations that belong to the close association of marriage.  They were

far, very far, apart on many subjects.  He was unpolished, untrained,

impulsive, sometimes violent.  Twichell remembers that in the earlier

days of their acquaintance he wore a slouch hat pulled down in front, and

smoked a cigar that sometimes tilted up and touched the brim of it.  The

atmosphere and customs of frontier life, the Westernisms of that day,

still clung to him.  Mrs. Clemens, on the other hand, was conservative,

dainty, cultured, spiritual.  He adored her as little less than a saint,

and she became, indeed, his saving grace.  She had all the personal

refinement which he lacked, and she undertook the work of polishing and

purifying her life companion.  She had no wish to destroy his

personality, to make him over, but only to preserve his best, and she set

about it in the right way--gently, and with a tender gratitude in each

achievement.



She did not entirely approve of certain lines of his reading; or, rather,

she did not understand them in those days.  That he should be fond of

history and the sciences was natural enough, but when the Life of P. T.

Barnum, Written by Himself, appeared, and he sat up nights to absorb it,

and woke early and lighted the lamp to follow the career of the great

showman, she was at a loss to comprehend this particular literary

passion, and indeed was rather jealous of it.  She did not realize then

his vast interest in the study of human nature, or that such a book

contained what Mr. Howells calls "the root of the human matter," the

inner revelation of the human being at first hand.



Concerning his religious observances her task in the beginning was easy

enough.  Clemens had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines

of his own.  His natural kindness of heart, and especially his love for

his wife, inclined him toward the teachings and customs of her Christian

faith--unorthodox but sincere, as Christianity in the Langdon family was

likely to be.  It took very little persuasion on his wife's part to

establish family prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the

morning reading of a Bible chapter.  Joe Goodman, who made a trip East,

and visited them during the early days of their married life, was

dumfounded to see Mark Twain ask a blessing and join in family worship.

Just how long these forms continued cannot be known to-day; the time of

their abandonment has perished from the recollection of any one now

living.



It would seem to have been the Bible-reading that wrought the change.

The prayer and the blessing were to him sincere and gracious; but as the

readings continued he realized that he had never before considered the

Bible from a doctrinal point of view, as a guide to spiritual salvation.

To his logical reasoning mind, a large portion of it seemed absurd: a

mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology.  From such material

humanity had built its mightiest edifice of hope, the doctrines of its

faith.  After a little while he could stand it no longer.



"Livy," he said one day, "you may keep this up if you want to, but I must

ask you to excuse me from it.  It is making me a hypocrite.  I don't

believe in this Bible.  It contradicts my reason.  I can't sit here and

listen to it, letting you believe that I regard it, as you do, in the

light of gospel, the word of God."



He was moved to write an article on the human idea of God, ancient and

modern.  It contained these paragraphs:



     The difference in importance, between the God of the Bible and the

     God of the present day, cannot be described, it can only be vaguely

     and inadequately figured to the mind .  .  .  .  If you make figures

     to represent the earth and moon, and allow a space of one inch

     between them, to represent the four hundred thousand miles of

     distance which lies between the two bodies, the map will have to be

     eleven miles long in order to bring in the nearest fixed star.--

     [His figures were far too small.  A map drawn on the scale of

     400,000 miles to the inch would need to be 1,100 miles long to take

     in both the earth and the nearest fixed star.  On such a map the

     earth would be one-fiftieth of an inch in diameter--the size of a

     small grain of sand.]--So one cannot put the modern heavens on a

     map, nor the modern God; but the Bible God and the Bible heavens can

     be set down on a slate and yet not be discommoded .  .  .  .



     The difference between that universe and the modern one revealed by

     science is as the difference between a dust-flecked ray in a barn

     and the sublime arch of the Milky Way in the skies.  Its God was

     strictly proportioned to its dimensions.  His sole solicitude was

     about a handful of truculent nomads.  He worried and fretted over

     them in a peculiarly and distractingly human way.  One day he coaxed

     and petted them beyond their due, the next he harried and lashed

     them beyond their deserts.  He sulked, he cursed, he raged, he

     grieved, according to his mood and the circumstances, but all to no

     purpose; his efforts were all vain, he could not govern them.  When

     the fury was on him he was blind to all reason--he not only

     slaughtered the offender, but even his harmless little children and

     dumb cattle....



     To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive,

     fierce and ever fickle and changeful master; to trust the true God

     is to trust a Being who has uttered no promises, but whose

     beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering of the machinery of his

     colossal universe is proof that he is at least steadfast to his

     purposes; whose unwritten laws, so far as they affect man, being

     equal and impartial, show that he is just and fair; these things,

     taken together, suggest that if he shall ordain us to live

     hereafter, he will still be steadfast, just, and fair toward us.  We

     shall not need to require anything more.



It seems mild enough, obvious, even orthodox, now--so far have we

traveled in forty years.  But such a declaration then would have shocked

a great number of sincerely devout persons.  His wife prevailed upon him

not to print it.  She respected his honesty--even his reasoning, but his

doubts were a long grief to her, nevertheless.  In time she saw more

clearly with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived more

with the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the

proportions of created things.



They did not mingle much or long with the social life of Buffalo.  They

received and returned calls, attended an occasional reception; but

neither of them found such things especially attractive in those days, so

they remained more and more in their own environment.  There is an

anecdote which seems to belong here.



One Sunday morning Clemens noticed smoke pouring from the upper window of

the house across the street.  The owner and his wife, comparatively

newcomers, were seated upon the veranda, evidently not aware of impending

danger.  The Clemens household thus far had delayed calling on them, but

Clemens himself now stepped briskly across the street.  Bowing with

leisurely politeness, he said:



"My name is Clemens; we ought to have called on you before, and I beg

your pardon for intruding now in this informal way, but your house is on

fire."



Almost the only intimate friends they had in Buffalo were in the family

of David Gray, the poet-editor of the Courier.  Gray was a gentle,

lovable man.  "The gentlest spirit and the loveliest that ever went

clothed in clay, since Sir Galahad laid him to rest," Mark Twain once

said of him.  Both Gray and Clemens were friends of John Hay, and their

families soon became intimate.  Perhaps, in time, the Clemens household

would have found other as good friends in the Buffalo circles; but heavy

clouds that had lain unseen just beyond the horizon during those earlier

months of marriage rose suddenly into view, and the social life, whatever

it might have become, was no longer a consideration.









LXXIX



THE OLD HUMAN STORY



Jervis Langdon was never able to accept his son-in-law's invitation to

the new home.  His health began to fail that spring, and at the end of

March, with his physician and Mrs. Langdon, he made a trip to the South.

In a letter written at Richmond he said, "I have thrown off all care,"

and named a list of the four great interests in which he was involved.

Under "number 5," he included "everything," adding, "so you see how good

I am to follow the counsel of my children."  He closed: "Samuel, I love

your wife and she loves me.  I think it is only fair that you should know

it, but you need not flare up.  I loved her before you did, and she loved

me before she did you, and has not ceased since.  I see no way but for

you to make the most of it."  He was already a very ill man, and this

cheerful letter was among the last he ever wrote.



He was absent six weeks and seemed to improve, but suffered an attack

early in May; in June his condition became critical.  Clemens and his

wife were summoned to Elmira, and joined in the nursing, day and night.

Clemens surprised every one by his ability as a nurse.  His delicacy and

thoughtfulness were unfailing; his original ways of doing things always

amused and interested the patient.  In later years Mark Twain once said:



     "How much of the nursing did I do?  My main watch was from midnight

     to four in the morning, nearly four hours.  My other watch was a

     midday watch, and I think it was nearly three hours.  The two

     sisters divided the remaining seventeen hours of the twenty-four

     hours between them, and each of them tried generously and

     persistently to swindle the other out of a part of her watch.  I

     went to bed early every night, and tried to get sleep enough by

     midnight to fit me for my work, but it was always a failure.  I went

     on watch sleepy and remained miserable, sleepy, and wretched,

     straight along through the four hours.  I can still see myself

     sitting by that bed in the melancholy stillness of the sweltering

     night, mechanically waving a palm-leaf fan over the drawn, white

     face of the patient.  I can still recall my noddings, my fleeting

     unconsciousness, when the fan would come to a standstill in my hand,

     and I woke up with a start and a hideous shock.  During all that

     dreary time I began to watch for the dawn long before it came.  When

     the first faint gray showed through the window-blinds I felt as no

     doubt a castaway feels when the dim threads of the looked-for ship

     appear against the sky.  I was well and strong, but I was a man,

     afflicted with a man's infirmity--lack of endurance."



He always dealt with himself in this unsparing way; but those who were

about him then have left a different story.



It was all without avail.  Mr. Langdon rallied, and early in July there

was hope for his recovery.  He failed again, and on the afternoon of the

6th of August he died.  To Mrs. Clemens, delicate and greatly worn with

the anxiety and strain of watching, the blow was a crushing one.  It was

the beginning of a series of disasters which would mark the entire

remaining period of their Buffalo residence.



There had been a partial plan for spending the summer in England, and a

more definite one for joining the Twichells in the Adirondacks.  Both of

these projects were now abandoned.  Mrs. Clemens concluded that she would

be better at home than anywhere else, and invited an old school friend, a

Miss Emma Nye, to visit her.



But the shadow of death had not been lifted from the Clemens household.

Miss Nye presently fell ill with typhoid fever.  There followed another

long period of anxiety and nursing, ending with the death of the visitor

in the new home, September 29th.  The young wife was now in very delicate

health; genuinely ill, in fact.  The happy home had become a place of

sorrow-of troubled nights and days.  Another friend came to cheer them,

and on this friend's departure Mrs. Clemens drove to the railway station.

It was a hurried trip over rough streets to catch the train.  She was

prostrated on her return, and a little later, November 7, 1870, her first

child, Langdon, was prematurely born.  A dangerous illness followed, and

complete recovery was long delayed.  But on the 12th the crisis seemed

passed, and the new father wrote a playful letter to the Twichells, as

coming from the late arrival:



     DEAR UNCLE AND AUNT,--I came into the world on the 7th inst., and

     consequently am about five days old now.  I have had wretched health

     ever since I made my appearance .  .  .  I am not corpulent, nor am

     I robust in any way.  At birth I only weighed four and one-half

     pounds with my clothes on--and the clothes were the chief feature of

     the weight, too, I am obliged to confess, but I am doing finely, all

     things considered .  .  .  .  My little mother is very bright and

     cheery, and I guess she is pretty happy, but I don't know what

     about.  She laughs a great deal, notwithstanding she is sick abed.



     P. S.--Father says I had better write because you will be more

     interested in me, just now, than in the rest of the family.



A week later Clemens, as himself, wrote:



     Livy is up and the prince keeps her busy and anxious these latter

     days and nights, but I am a bachelor up-stairs and don't have to

     jump up and get the soothing sirup, though I would as soon do it as

     not, I assure you.  (Livy will be certain to read this letter.)



     Tell Harmony that I do hold the baby, and do it pretty handily too,

     though with occasional apprehensions that his loose head will fall

     off.  I don't have to quiet him; he hardly ever utters a cry.  He is

     always thinking about something.  He is a patient, good little baby.



Further along he refers to one of his reforms:



     Smoke?  I always smoke from three till five on Sunday afternoons,

     and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week, day and night.  But

     when Livy is well I smoke only those two hours on Sunday.  I'm boss

     of the habit now, and shall never let it boss me any more.

     Originally I quit solely on Livy's account (not that I believed

     there was the faintest reason in the matter, but just as I would

     deprive myself of sugar in my coffee if she wished it, or quit

     wearing socks if she thought them immoral), and I stick to it yet on

     Livy's account, and shall always continue to do so without a pang.

     But somehow it seems a pity that you quit, for Mrs. T. didn't mind

     it, if I remember rightly.  Ah, it is turning one's back upon a

     kindly Providence to spurn away from us the good creature he sent to

     make the breath of life a luxury as well as a necessity, enjoyable

     as well as useful.  To go quit smoking, when there ain't any

     sufficient excuse for it!--why, my old boy, when they used to tell

     me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew

     the devotee they were wasting their puerile words upon; they little

     knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no

     smoking in it!  But I won't persuade you, Twichell--I won't until I

     see you again--but then we'll smoke for a week together, and then

     shut off again.









LXXX



LITERARY PROJECTS



The success of the Innocents naturally made a thrifty publisher like

Bliss anxious for a second experiment.  He had begun early in the year to

talk about another book, but nothing had come of it beyond a project or

two, more or less hazy and unpursued.  Clemens at one time developed a

plan for a Noah's Ark book, which was to detail the cruise of the Ark in

diaries kept by various members of it-Shem, Ham, and the others.  He

really wrote some of it at the time, and it was an idea he never entirely

lost track of.  All along among his manuscripts appear fragments from

those ancient voyagers.  One of the earlier entries will show the style

and purpose of the undertaking.  It is from Shem's record:



     Friday: Papa's birthday.  He is 600 years old.  We celebrated it in

     a big, black tent.  Principal men of the tribe present.  Afterward

     they were shown over the ark, which was looking desolate and empty

     and dreary on account of a misunderstanding with the workmen about

     wages.  Methuselah was as free with his criticisms as usual, and as

     voluble and familiar, which I and my brothers do not like; for we

     are past our one hundredth year and married.  He still calls me

     Shemmy, just as he did when I was a child of sixty.  I am still but

     a youth, it is true, but youth has its feelings, and I do not like

     this .  .  .  .



     Saturday: Keeping the Sabbath.



     Sunday: Papa has yielded the advance and everybody is hard at work.

     The shipyard is so crowded that the men hinder each other; everybody

     hurrying or being hurried; the rush and confusion and shouting and

     wrangling are astonishing to our family, who have always been used

     to a quiet, country life.



It was from this germ that in a later day grew the diaries of Adam and

Eve, though nothing very satisfactory ever came of this preliminary

attempt.  The author had faith in it, however.  To Bliss he wrote:



     I mean to take plenty of time and pains with the Noah's Ark book;

     maybe it will be several years before it is all written, but it will

     be a perfect lightning striker when it is done.



     You can have the first say (that is plain enough) on that or any

     other book I may prepare for the press, as long as you deal in a

     fair, open, and honorable way with me.  I do not think you will ever

     find me doing otherwise with you.  I can get a book ready for you

     any time you want it; but you can't want one before this time next

     year, so I have plenty of time.



Bliss was only temporarily appeased.  He realized that to get a book

ready by the time he wanted it-a book of sufficient size and importance

to maintain the pace set by the Innocents meant rather more immediate

action than his author seemed to contemplate.  Futhermore, he knew that

other publishers were besieging the author of the Innocents; a

disquieting thought.  In early July, when Mr. Langdon's condition had

temporarily improved, Bliss had come to Elmira and proposed a book which

should relate the author's travels and experiences in the Far West.  It

was an inviting subject, and Clemens, by this time more attracted by the

idea of authorship and its rewards, readily enough agreed to undertake

the volume.  He had been offered half profits, and suggested that the new

contract be arranged upon these terms. Bliss, figuring on a sale of

100,000 copies, proposed seven and one-half per cent. royalty as an

equivalent, and the contract was so arranged.  In after-years, when the

cost of manufacture and paper had become greatly reduced, Clemens, with

but a confused notion of business details, believed he had been misled by

Bliss in this contract, and was bitter and resentful accordingly.  The

figures remain, however, to show that Bliss dealt fairly.  Seven and one-

half per cent.  of a subscription book did represent half profits up to

100,000 copies when the contract was drawn; but it required ten years to

sell that quantity, and in that time conditions had changed.  Bliss could

hardly foresee that these things would be so, and as he was dead when the

book touched the 100,000 mark he could not explain or readjust matters,

whatever might have been his inclination.



Clemens was pleased enough with the contract when it was made.  To Orion

he wrote July 15 (1870):



     Per contract I must have another six-hundred-page book ready for my

     publisher January 1st, and I only began it to-day.  The subject of

     it is a secret, because I may possibly change it.  But as it stands

     I propose to do up Nevada and California, beginning with the trip

     across the country in the stage.  Have you a memorandum of the route

     we took, or the names of any of the stations we stopped at?  Do you

     remember any of the scenes, names, incidents, or adventures of the

     coach trip?--for I remember next to nothing about the matter.  Jot

     down a foolscap page of items for me.  I wish I could have two days'

     talk with you.



     I suppose I am to get the biggest copyright this time ever paid on a

     subscription book in this country.



The work so promptly begun made little progress.  Hard days of illness

and sorrow followed, and it was not until September that it was really

under way.  His natural enthusiasm over any new undertaking possessed

him.  On the 4th he wrote Bliss:



During the past week I have written the first four chapters of the book,

and I tell you 'The Innocents Abroad' will have to get up early to beat

it.  It will be a book that will jump straight into continental celebrity

the first month it is issued.



He prophesied a sale of 90,000 copies during the first twelve months and

declared, "I see the capabilities of the subject."



But further disasters, even then impending, made continued effort

impossible; the prospect of the new book for a time became gloomy, the

idea of it less inspiring.  Other plans presented themselves, and at one

time he thought of letting the Galaxy publishers get out a volume of his

sketches.  In October he wrote Bliss that he was "driveling along

tolerably fair on the book, getting off from twelve to twenty pages of

manuscript a day."  Bliss naturally discouraged the Galaxy idea, and

realizing that the new book might be long delayed, agreed to get out a

volume of miscellany sufficiently large and important for subscription

sales.  He was doubtful of the wisdom of this plan, and when Clemens

suddenly proposed a brand-new scheme his publisher very readily agreed to

hold back the publication of Sketches indefinitely.



The new book was to be adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa,

then newly opened and of wide public interest.  Clemens did not propose

to visit the mines himself, but to let another man do the traveling, make

the notes, and write or tell him the story, after which Clemens would

enlarge and elaborate it in his own fashion.  His adaptation of the

letters of Professor Ford, a year earlier, had convinced him that his

plan would work out successfully on a larger scale; he fixed upon his old

friend, J. H. Riley, of Washington--["Riley-Newspaper Correspondent."

See Sketches.]--(earlier of San Francisco), as the proper person to do

the traveling.  At the end of November he wrote Bliss:



     I have put my greedy hands upon the best man in America for my

     purpose, and shall start him to the diamond field in South Africa

     within a fortnight at my expense .  .  .  that the book will have a

     perfectly beautiful sale.



He suggested that Bliss advance Riley's expense money, the amount to be

deducted from the first royalty returns; also he proposed an increased

royalty, probably in view of the startling splendor of the new idea.

Bliss was duly impressed, and the agreement was finally made on a basis

of eight and one-half per cent., with an advance of royalty sufficient to

see Riley to South Africa and return.



Clemens had not yet heard from Riley definitely when he wrote his glowing

letter to Bliss.  He took it for granted that Riley, always an

adventurous sort, would go.  When Riley wrote him that he felt morally

bound to the Alta, of which he was then Washington correspondent, also in

certain other directions till the end of the session, Clemens wrote him

at great length, detailing his scheme in full and urging him to write

instantly to the Alta and others, asking a release on the ground of being

offered a rare opportunity to improve his fortunes.



You know right well that I would not have you depart a hair from any

obligation for any money.  The, boundless confidence that I have in you

is born of a conviction of your integrity in small as well as in great

things.  I know plenty of men whose integrity I would trust to here, but

not off yonder in Africa.



His proposal, in brief, to Riley was that the latter should make the trip

to Africa without expense to himself, collect memoranda, and such diamond

mines as might be found lying about handy.  Upon his return he was to

take up temporary residence in the Clemens household until the book was

finished, after which large benefits were to accrue to everybody

concerned.  In the end Riley obtained a release from his obligations and

was off for the diamond mines and fortune.



Poor fellow!  He was faithful in his mission, and it is said that he

really located a mining claim that would have made him and his

independent for all time to come; but returning home with his precious

memoranda and the news of good fortune, he accidentally wounded himself

with a fork while eating; blood-poisoning set in (they called it cancer

then), and he was only able to get home to die.  His memoranda were never

used, his mining claim was never identified.  Certainly, death was

closely associated with Mark Twain's fortunes during those earlier days

of his married life.



On the whole the Buffalo residence was mainly a gloomy one; its ventures

were attended by ill-fortune.  For some reason Mark Twain's connection

with the Express, while it had given the paper a wide reputation, had not

largely increased its subscription.  Perhaps his work on it was too

varied and erratic.  Nasby, who had popularized the Toledo Blade, kept

steadily to one line.  His farmer public knew always just what to expect

when their weekly edition arrived.



Clemens and his wife dreamed of a new habitation, and new faces and

surroundings.  They agreed to offer their home and his interests in the

Express for sale.  They began to talk of Hartford, where Twichell lived,

and where Orion Clemens and his wife had recently located.



Mark Twain's new fortunes had wrought changes in the affairs of his

relatives.  Already, before his marriage, he had prospected towns here

and there with a view to finding an Eastern residence for his mother and

sister, and he had kept Orion's welfare always in mind.  When Pamela and

her daughter came to his wedding he told them of a little city by the

name of Fredonia (New York), not far from Buffalo, where he thought they

might find a pleasant home.



"I went in there by night and out by night," he said, "so I saw none of

it, but I had an intelligent, attractive audience.  Prospect Fredonia and

let me know what it is like.  Try to select a place where a good many

funerals pass.  Ma likes funerals.  If you can pick a good funeral corner

she will be happy."



It was in her later life that Jane Clemens had developed this particular

passion.  She would consult the morning paper for any notice of obsequies

and attend those that were easy of access.  Watching the processions go

by gave her a peculiar joy.  Mrs. Moffett and her daughter did go to

Fredonia immediately following the wedding.  They found it residentially

attractive, and rented a house before returning to St. Louis, a

promptness that somewhat alarmed the old lady, who did not altogether

fancy the idea of being suddenly set down in a strange house, in a

strange land, even though it would be within hailing distance of Sam and

his new wife.  Perhaps the Fredonia funerals were sufficiently numerous

and attractive, for she soon became attached to the place, and entered

into the spirit of the life there, joining its temperance crusades, and

the like, with zest and enjoyment.



Orion remained in St. Louis, but when Bliss established a paper called

The Publisher, and wanted an editor, he was chosen for the place,

originally offered to his brother; the latter, writing to Orion, said:



If you take the place with an air of perfect confidence in yourself,

never once letting anything show in your bearing but a quiet, modest,

entire, and perfect confidence in your ability to do pretty much anything

in the world, Bliss will think you are the very man he needs; but don't

show any shadow of timidity or unsoldierly diffidence, for that sort of

thing is fatal to advancement.



I warn you thus because you are naturally given to knocking your pot over

in this way, when a little judicious conduct would make it boil.









LXXXI



SOME FURTHER LITERARY MATTERS



Meantime The Innocents Abroad had continued to prosper.  Its author

ranked mainly as a humorist, but of such colossal proportions that his

contemporaries had seemed to dwindle; the mighty note of the "Frog of

Calaveras" had dwarfed a score of smaller peepers.  At the end of a year

from its date of publication the book had sold up to 67,000 and was

continuing at the rate of several thousand monthly.



"You are running it in staving, tiptop, first-class style," Clemens wrote

to Bliss.  "On the average ten people a day come and hunt me up to tell

me I am a benefactor!  I guess that is a part of the program we didn't

expect, in the first place."



Apparently the book appealed to readers of every grade.  One hundred and

fifteen copies were in constant circulation at the Mercantile Library, in

New York, while in the most remote cabins of America it was read and

quoted.  Jack Van Nostrand, making a long horseback tour of Colorado,

wrote:



I stopped a week ago in a ranch but a hundred miles from nowhere.  The

occupant had just two books: the Bible and The Innocents Abroad--the

former in good repair.



Across the ocean the book had found no less favor, and was being

translated into many and strange tongues.  By what seems now some

veritable magic its author's fame had become literally universal.  The

consul at Hongkong, discussing English literature with a Chinese

acquaintance, a mandarin, mentioned The Pilgrim's Progress.



"Yes, indeed, I have read it!" the mandarin said, eagerly.  "We are

enjoying it in China, and shall have it soon in our own language.  It is

by Mark Twain."



In England the book had an amazing vogue from the beginning, and English

readers were endeavoring to outdo the Americans in appreciation.  Indeed,

as a rule, English readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an

understanding of Mark Twain's literary value with greater promptness than

did the same class of readers at home.  There were exceptions, of course.

There were English critics who did not take Mark Twain seriously, there

were American critics who did.  Among the latter was a certain William

Ward, an editor of a paper down in Macon, Georgia--The Beacon.  Ward did

not hold a place with the great magazine arbiters of literary rank.  He

was only an obscure country editor, but he wrote like a prophet.  His

article--too long to quote in full--concerned American humorists in

general, from Washington Irving, through John Phoenix, Philander

Doesticks, Sut Lovingwood, Artemus Ward, Josh Billings and Petroleum V.

Nasby, down to Mark Twain.  With the exception of the first and last

named he says of them:



     They have all had, or will have, their day.  Some of them are

     resting beneath the sod, and others still live whose work will

     scarcely survive them.  Since Irving no humorist in prose has held

     the foundation of a permanent fame except it be Mark Twain, and

     this, as in the case of Irving, is because he is a pure writer.

     Aside from any subtle mirth that lurks through his composition, the

     grace and finish of his more didactic and descriptive sentences

     indicate more than mediocrity.



The writer then refers to Mark Twain's description of the Sphinx,

comparing it with Bulwer's, which he thinks may have influenced it.  He

was mistaken in this, for Clemens had not read Bulwer--never could read

him at any length.



Of the English opinions, that of The Saturday Review was perhaps most

doubtful.  It came along late in 1870, and would hardly be worth

recalling if it were not for a resulting, or collateral, interest.

Clemens saw notice of this review before he saw the review itself.  A

paragraph in the Boston Advertiser spoke of The Saturday Review as

treating the absurdities of the Innocents from a serious standpoint.  The

paragraph closed:



     We can imagine the delight of the humorist in reading this tribute

     to his power; and indeed it is so amusing in itself that he can

     hardly do better than reproduce the article in full in his next

     monthly "Memoranda."



The old temptation to hoax his readers prompted Mark Twain to "reproduce"

in the Galaxy, not the Review article, which he had not yet seen, but an

imaginary Review article, an article in which the imaginary reviewer

would be utterly devoid of any sense of humor and treat the most absurd

incidents of The New Pilgrim's Progress as if set down by the author in

solemn and serious earnest.  The pretended review began:



     Lord Macaulay died too soon.  We never felt this so deeply as when

     we finished the last chapter of the above-named extravagant work.

     Macaulay died too soon; for none but he could mete out complete and

     comprehensive justice to the insolence, the impudence, the

     presumption, the mendacity, and, above all, the majestic ignorance

     of this author.



The review goes on to cite cases of the author's gross deception.  It

says:



     Let the cultivated English student of human nature picture to

     himself this Mark Twain as a person capable of doing the following

     described things; and not only doing them, but, with incredible

     innocence, printing them tranquilly and calmly in a book.  For

     instance:



     He states that he entered a hair-dresser's in Paris to get a shave,

     and the first "rake" the barber gave him with his razor it loosened

     his "hide," and lifted him out of the chair.



     This is unquestionably extravagant.  In Florence he was so annoyed

     by beggars that he pretends to have seized and eaten one in a

     frantic spirit of revenge.  There is, of course, no truth in this.

     He gives at full length the theatrical program, seventeen or

     eighteen hundred years old, which he professes to have found in the

     ruins of the Colosseum, among the dirt-and mold and rubbish.  It is

     a sufficient comment upon this subject to remark that even a cast-

     iron program would not have lasted so long under the circumstances.



There were two and one-half pages of this really delightful burlesque

which the author had written with huge-enjoyment, partly as a joke on the

Review, partly to trick American editors, who he believed would accept it

as a fresh and startling proof of the traditional English lack of humor.



But, as in the early sage-brush hoaxes, he rather overdid the thing.

Readers and editors readily enough accepted it as genuine, so far as

having come from The Saturday Review; but most of them, regarded it as a

delicious bit of humor which Mark Twain himself had taken seriously, and

was therefore the one sold.  This was certainly startling, and by no

means gratifying.  In the next issue he undertook that saddest of all

performances with tongue or pen: he explained his joke, and insisted on

the truth of the explanation.  Then he said:



     If any man doubts my word now I will kill him.  No, I will not kill

     him; I will win his money.  I will bet him twenty to one, and let

     any New York publisher hold the stakes, that the statements I have

     above made as to the authorship of the article in question are

     entirely true.





But the Cincinnati Enquirer persisted in continuing the joke--in "rubbing

it in," as we say now.  The Enquirer declared that Mark Twain had been

intensely mortified at having been so badly taken in; that his

explanation in the Galaxy was "ingenious, but unfortunately not true."

The Enquirer maintained that The Saturday Review of October 8, 1870, did

contain the article exactly as printed in the "Memoranda," and advised

Mark Twain to admit that he was sold, and say no more about it.



This was enraging.  Mark Twain had his own ideas as to how far a joke

might be carried without violence, and this was a good way beyond the

limits.  He denounced the Enquirer's statement as a "pitiful, deliberate

falsehood," in his anger falling into the old-time phrasing of newspaper

editorial abuse.  He offered to bet them a thousand dollars in cash

that they could not prove their assertions, and asked pointedly, in

conclusion: "Will they swallow that falsehood ignominiously, or will they

send an agent to the Galaxy office?  I think the Cincinnati Enquirer must

be edited by children."  He promised that if they did not accept his

financial proposition he would expose them in the next issue.



The incident closed there.  He was prevented, by illness in his

household, from contributing to the next issue, and the second issue

following was his final "Memoranda" installment.  So the matter perished

and was forgotten.  It was his last editorial hoax.  Perhaps he concluded

that hoaxes in any form were dangerous playthings; they were too likely

to go off at the wrong end.



It was with the April number (1871) that he concluded his relations with

the Galaxy.  In a brief valedictory he gave his reasons:



     I have now written for the Galaxy a year.  For the last eight

     months, with hardly an interval, I have had for my fellows and

     comrades, night and day, doctors and watchers of the sick!  During

     these eight months death has taken two members of my home circle and

     malignantly threatened two others.  All this I have experienced, yet

     all the time have been under contract to furnish "humorous" matter,

     once a month, for this magazine.  I am speaking the exact truth in

     the above details.  Please to put yourself in my place and

     contemplate the grisly grotesqueness of the situation.  I think that

     some of the "humor" I have written during this period could have

     been injected into a funeral sermon without disturbing the solemnity

     of the occasion.



     The "Memoranda" will cease permanently with this issue of the

     magazine.  To be a pirate on a low salary, and with no share in the

     profits of the business, used to be my idea of an uncomfortable

     occupation, but I have other views now.  To be a monthly humorist in

     a cheerless time is drearier.



Without doubt he felt a glad relief in being rid of this recurrent,

imperative demand.  He wrote to Orion that he had told the Galaxy people

he would not write another article, long or short, for less than $500,

and preferred not to do it at all.



The Galaxy department and the work on the Express were Mark Twain's

farewell to journalism; for the "Memoranda" was essentially journalistic,

almost as much so, and as liberally, as his old-time Enterprise position.

Apparently he wrote with absolute freedom, unhampered by editorial policy

or restriction.  The result was not always pleasant, and it was not

always refined.  We may be certain that it was because of Mrs. Clemens's

heavy burdens that year, and her consequent inability to exert a

beneficent censorship, that more than one--more than a dozen--of the

"Memoranda" contributions were permitted to see the light of print.



As a whole, the literary result of Mark Twain's Buffalo period does not

reach the high standard of The Innocents Abroad.  It was a retrogression

--in some measure a return to his earlier form.  It had been done under

pressure, under heavy stress of mind, as he said.  Also there was another

reason; neither the subject treated nor the environment of labor had

afforded that lofty inspiration which glorified every step of the Quaker

City journey.  Buffalo was a progressive city--a beautiful city, as

American cities go--but it was hardly an inspiring city for literature,

and a dull, dingy newspaper office was far, very far, from the pleasant

decks of the Quaker City, the camp-fires of Syria, the blue sky and sea

of the Medit&ranean.









LXXXII



THE WRITING OF "ROUGHING IT"



The third book published by Mark Twain was not the Western book he was

preparing for Bliss. It was a small volume, issued by Sheldon & Co.,

entitled Mark Twain's Autobiography (Burlesque) and First Romance.  The

Romance was the "Awful, Terrible Medieval Romance" which had appeared in

the Express at the beginning of 1870.  The burlesque autobiography had

not previously appeared.  The two made a thin little book, which, in

addition to its literary features, had running through it a series of

full-page, irrelevant pictures---cartoons of the Erie Railroad Ring,

presented as illustrations of a slightly modified version of "The House

That Jack Built."  The "House" was the Erie headquarters, the purpose

being to illustrate the swindling methods of the Ring.  The faces of Jay

Gould, James Fisk, Jr., John T. Hoffman, and others of the combination,

are chiefly conspicuous.  The publication was not important, from any

standpoint.  Literary burlesque is rarely important, and it was far from

Mark Twain's best form of expression.  A year or two later he realized

the mistake of this book, bought in the plates and destroyed them.



Meantime the new Western book was at a standstill.  To Orion, in March,

he wrote:



     I am still nursing Livy night and day.  I am nearly worn out.  We

     shall go to Elmira ten days hence (if Livy can travel on a mattress

     then), and stay there until I finish the California book, say three

     months.  But I can't begin work right away when I get there; must

     have a week's rest, for I have been through thirty days' terrific

     siege.



He promised to forward some of the manuscript soon.



     Hold on four or five days and I will see if I can get a few chapters

     fixed to send to Bliss .  .  .  .



     I have offered this house and the Express for sale, and when we go

     to Elmira we leave here for good.  I shall not select a new home

     till the book is finished, but we have little doubt that Hartford

     will be the place.



He disposed of his interest in the Express in April, at a sacrifice of

$10,000 on the purchase price.  Mrs. Clemens and the baby were able to

travel, and without further delay he took them to Elmira, to Quarry Farm.



Quarry Farm, the home of Mrs. Clemens's sister, Mrs. Theodore Crane, is a

beautiful hilltop, with a wide green slope, overlooking the hazy city and

the Chemung River, beyond which are the distant hills.  It was bought

quite incidentally by Mr. and Mrs. Langdon, who, driving by one evening,

stopped to water the horses and decided that it would make a happy summer

retreat, where the families could combine their housekeeping arrangements

during vacation days.  When the place had first been purchased, they had

debated on a name for it.  They had tried several, among them "Go-as-you-

please Hall,"  "Crane's Nest," and had finally agreed upon "Rest and Be

Thankful."  But this was only its official name.  There was an abandoned

quarry up the hill, a little way from the house, and the title suggested

by Thomas K. Beecher came more naturally to the tongue.  The place became

Quarry Farm, and so remains.



Clemens and his wife had fully made up their minds to live in Hartford.

They had both conceived an affection for the place, Clemens mainly

because of Twichell, while both of them yearned for the congenial

literary and social atmosphere, and the welcome which they felt awaited

them.  Hartford was precisely what Buffalo in that day was not--a home

for the literary man.  It held a distinguished group of writers, most of

whom the Clemenses already knew.  Furthermore, with Bliss as publisher of

the Mark Twain books, it held their chief business interests.



Their plans for going were not very definite as to time.  Clemens found

that his work went better at the farm, and that Mrs. Clemens and the

delicate baby daily improved.  They decided to remain at Quarry Farm for

the summer, their first summer in that beautiful place which would mean

so much to them in the years to come.



It was really Joe Goodman, as much as anything, that stirred a fresh

enthusiasm in the new book.  Goodman arrived just when the author's

spirits were at low ebb.



"Joe," he said, "I guess I'm done for.  I don't appear to be able to get

along at all with my work, and what I do write does not seem valuable.

I'm afraid I'll never be able to reach the standard of 'The Innocents

Abroad' again.  Here is what I have written, Joe.  Read it, and see if

that is your opinion."



Goodman took the manuscript and seated himself in a chair, while Clemens

went over to a table and pretended to work.  Goodman read page after

page, critically, and was presently absorbed in it.  Clemens watched him

furtively, till he could stand it no longer.  Then he threw down his pen,

exclaiming:



"I knew it!  I knew it!  I am writing nothing but rot.  You have sat

there all this time reading without a smile, and pitying the ass I am

making of myself.  But I am not wholly to blame.  I am not strong enough

to fight against fate.  I have been trying to write a funny book, with

dead people and sickness a verywhere.  Mr. Langdon died first, then a

young lady in our house, and now Mrs. Clemens and the baby have been at

the point of death all winter!  Oh, Joe, I wish to God I could die

myself!"



"Mark," said Joe, "I was reading critically, not for amusement, and so

far as I have read, and can judge, this is one of the best things you

have ever written.  I have found it perfectly absorbing.  You are doing a

great book!"



Clemens knew that Goodman never spoke except from conviction, and the

verdict was to him like a message of life handed down by an archangel.

He was a changed man instantly.  He was all enthusiasm, full of his

subject, eager to go on.  He proposed to pay Goodman a salary to stay

there and keep him company and furnish him with inspiration--the Pacific

coast atmosphere and vernacular, which he feared had slipped away from

him.  Goodman declined the salary, but extended his visit as long as his

plans would permit, and the two had a happy time together, recalling old

Comstock days.  Every morning, for a month or more, they used to tramp

over the farm.  They fell into the habit of visiting the old quarry and

pawing over the fragments in search of fossil specimens.  Both of them

had a poetic interest in geology, its infinite remotenesses and its

testimonies.  Without scientific knowledge, they took a deep pleasure in

accumulating a collection, which they arranged on boards torn from an old

fence, until they had enough specimens to fill a small museum.  They

imagined they could distinguish certain geological relations and

families, and would talk about trilobites, the Old Red Sandstone period,

and the azoic age, or follow random speculation to far-lying conclusions,

developing vague humors of phrase and fancy, having altogether a joyful

good time.



Another interest that developed during Goodman's stay was in one Ruloff,

who was under death sentence for a particularly atrocious murder.  The

papers were full of Ruloff's prodigious learning.  It was said that he

had in preparation a work showing the unity of all languages.  Goodman

and Clemens agreed that Ruloff's death would be a great loss to mankind,

even though he was clearly a villain and deserved his sentence.  They

decided that justice would be served just as well if some stupid person

were hung in his place, and following out this fancy Clemens one morning

put aside his regular work and wrote an article to the Tribune, offering

to supply a substitute for Ruloff.  He signed it simply "Samuel

Langhorne," and it was published as a serious communication, without

comment, so far as the Tribune was concerned.  Other papers, however,

took it up and it was widely copied and commented upon.  Apparently no

one ever identified, Mark Twain with the authorship of the letter, which,

by the way, does not appear to have prolonged Ruloff's earthly

usefulness.--[The reader will find the Ruloff letter in full under

Appendix K, at the end of last volume.]



Life at the farm may have furnished agricultural inspiration, for Clemens

wrote something about Horace Greeley's farming, also a skit concerning

Henry Ward Beecher's efforts in that direction.  Of Mr. Beecher's farming

he said:



"His strawberries would be a comfortable success if robins would eat

turnips."



The article amused Beecher, and perhaps Greeley was amused too, for he

wrote:



     MARK,--You are mistaken as to my criticisms on your farming.  I

     never publicly made any, while you have undertaken to tell the exact

     cost per pint of my potatoes and cabbages, truly enough the

     inspiration of genius.  If you will really betake yourself to

     farming, or even to telling what you know about it, rather than what

     you don't know about mine, I will not only refrain from disparaging

     criticism, but will give you my blessing.



                              Yours,   HORACE GREELEY.





The letter is in Mr. Greeley's characteristic scrawl, and no doubt

furnished inspiration for the turnip story in 'Roughing It', also the

model for the pretended facsimile of Greeley's writing.



Altogether that was a busy, enterprising summer at Quarry Farm.  By the

middle of May, Clemens wrote to Bliss that he had twelve hundred

manuscript pages of the new book already written, and that he was turning

out the remainder at the rate of from thirty to sixty-five per day.  He

was in high spirits by this time.  The family health had improved, and

prospects were bright.



I have enough manuscript on hand now to make (allowing for engravings)

about four hundred pages of the book, consequently am two-thirds done.

I intended to run up to Hartford about the middle of the week and take it

along, but I find myself so thoroughly interested in my work now (a thing

I have not experienced for months) that I can't bear to lose a single

moment of the inspiration.  So I will stay here and peg away as long as

it lasts.  My present idea is to write as much more as I have already

written, and then collect from the mass the very best chapters and

discard the rest.  When I get it done I want to see the man who will

begin to read it and not finish it.  Nothing grieves me now; nothing

troubles me, nothing bothers me or gets my attention.  I don't think of

anything but the book, and don't have an hour's unhappiness about

anything, and don't care two cents whether school keeps or not.  The book

will be done soon now.  It will be a starchy book; the dedication will be

worth the price of the volume.  Thus:



                            TO THE LATE CAIN

                         THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED



     not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little

     respect; not on account of sympathy for him, for his bloody deed

     places him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking, but

     out of a mere humane commiseration for him, in that it was his

     misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent

     insanity plea.





Probably Mrs. Clemens diverted this picturesque dedication in favor of

the Higbie inscription, or perhaps the author never really intended the

literary tribute to Cain.  The impulse that inspired it, however, was

characteristic.



In a postscript to this letter he adds:



     My stock is looking up.  I am getting the bulliest offers for books

     and almanacs; am flooded with lecture invitations, and one

     periodical offers me $6,000 cash for twelve articles of any length,

     and on any subject, treated humorously or otherwise.



He set in to make hay while the sun was shining.  In addition to the

California book, which was now fast nearing completion, he discussed a

scheme with Goodman for a six-hundred-page work which they were to do

jointly; he planned and wrote one or two scenes from a Western play, to

be built from episodes in the new book (one of them was the "Arkansas"

incident, related in Chapter XXXI); he perfected one of his several

inventions--an automatically adjusting vest-strap; he wrote a number of

sketches, made an occasional business trip to New York and Hartford;

prospected the latter place for a new home.  The shadow which had hung

over the sojourn in Buffalo seemed to have lifted.



He had promised Bliss some contributions for his new paper, and in June

he sent three sketches.  In an accompanying letter he says:



     Here are three articles which you may have if you will pay $125 for

     the lot.  If you don't want them I'll sell them to the Galaxy, but

     not for a cent less than three times the money.... If you take them

     pay one-tenth of the $125 in weekly instalments to Orion till he has

     received it all.



He reconsidered his resolution not to lecture again, and closed with

Redpath for the coming season.  He found himself in a lecture-writing

fever.  He wrote three of them in succession: one on Artemus Ward,

another on "Reminiscences of Some Pleasant Characters I Have Met," and a

third one based on chapters from the new book.  Of the "Reminiscence"

lecture he wrote Redpath:



"It covers my whole acquaintance; kings, lunatics, idiots, and all."

Immediately afterward he wrote that he had prepared still another

lecture, "title to be announced later."



"During July I'll decide which one I like best," he said.  He instructed

Redpath not to make engagements for him to lecture in churches.  "I never

made a success of a lecture in a church yet.  People are afraid to laugh

in a church."



Redpath was having difficulties in arranging a circuit to suit him.

Clemens had prejudices against certain towns and localities, prejudices

that were likely to change overnight.  In August he wrote:



     DEAR RED,--I am different from other women; my mind changes oftener.

     People who have no mind can easily be stead fast and firm, but when

     a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy sea

     of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo.

     See?  Therefore, if you will notice, one week I am likely to give

     rigid instructions to confine me to New England; the next week send

     me to Arizona; the next week withdraw my name; the next week give

     you full, untrammeled swing; and the week following modify it.  You

     must try to keep the run of my mind, Redpath that is your business,

     being the agent, and it always was too many for me....  Now about

     the West this week, I am willing that you shall retain all the

     Western engagements.  But what I shall want next week is still with

     God.

                                   Yours,    MARK.



He was in Hartford when this letter was written, arranging for residence

there and the removal of his belongings.  He finally leased the fine

Hooker house on Ford Street, in that pleasant seclusion known as Nook

Farm--the literary part of Hartford, which included the residence of

Charles Dudley Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe.  He arranged for

possession of the premises October 1st.  So the new home was settled

upon; then learning that Nasby was to be in Boston, he ran over to that

city for a few days of recreation after his season's labors.



Preparations for removal to Hartford were not delayed.  The Buffalo

property was disposed of, the furnishings were packed and shipped away.

The house which as bride and groom they had entered so happily was left

empty and deserted, never to be entered by them again.  In the year and a

half of their occupancy it had seen well-nigh all the human round, all

that goes to make up the happiness and the sorrow of life.









LXXXIII



LECTURING DAYS



Life in Hartford, in the autumn of 1871, began in the letter, rather than

in the spirit.  The newcomers were received with a wide, neighborly

welcome, but the disorder of establishment and the almost immediate

departure of the head of the household on a protracted lecturing tour

were disquieting things; the atmosphere of the Clemens home during those

early Hartford days gave only a faint promise of its future loveliness.



As in a far later period, Mark Twain had resorted to lecturing to pay off

debt.  He still owed a portion of his share in the Express; also he had

been obliged to obtain an advance from the lecture bureau.  He dreaded,

as always, the tedium of travel, the clatter of hotel life, the monotony

of entertainment, while, more than most men, he loved the tender luxury

of home.  It was only that he could not afford to lose the profit offered

on the platform.



His season opened at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, October 16th, and his

schedule carried him hither and thither, to and fro, over distances that

lie between Boston and Chicago.  There were opportunities to run into

Hartford now and then, when he was not too far away, and in November he

lectured there on Artemus Ward.



He changed his entertainment at least twice that season. He began with

the "Reminiscences," the lecture which he said would treat of all those

whom he had met, "idiots, lunatics, and kings," but he did not like it,

or it did not go well.  He wrote Redpath of the Artemus Ward address:



"It suits me, and I'll never deliver the nasty, nauseous 'Reminiscences'

any more."



But the Ward lecture was good for little more than a month, for on

December 8th he wrote again:



     Notify all hands that from this time I shall talk nothing but

     selections from my forthcoming book, 'Roughing It'.  Tried it twice

     last night; suits me tiptop.



And somewhat later:



     Had a splendid time with a splendid audience in Indianapolis last

     night; a perfectly jammed house, just as I have all the time out

     here....  I don't care now to have any appointments canceled.  I'll

     even "fetch" those Dutch Pennsylvanians with this lecture.



     Have paid up $4,000 indebtedness.  You are the last on my list.

     Shall begin to pay you in a few days, and then I shall be a free man

     again.



Undoubtedly he reveled in the triumphs of a platform tour, though at no

time did he regard it as a pleasure excursion.  During those early weeks

the proofs of his new book, chasing him from place to place, did not add

to his comfort.  Still, with large, substantial rewards in hand and in

prospect, one could endure much.



In the neighborhood of Boston there were other compensations.  He could

spend a good part of his days at the Lyceum headquarters, in School

Street, where there was always congenial fellowship--Nasby, Josh

Billings, and the rest of the peripatetic group that about the end of the

year collected there.  Their lectures were never tried immediately in

Boston, but in the outlying towns; tried and perfected--or discarded.

When the provincial audiences were finally satisfied, then the final.

test in the Boston Music Hall was made, and if this proved successful the

rest of the season was safe.  Redpath's lecturers put up at Young's

Hotel, and spent their days at the bureau, smoking and spinning yarns, or

talking shop.  Early in the evening they scattered to the outlying towns,

Lowell, Lexington, Concord, New Bedford.  There is no such a condition

to-day: lecturers are few, lecture bureaus obscure; there are no great

reputations made on the platform.



Neither is there any such distinct group of humorists as the one just

mentioned.  Humor has become universal since then.  Few writers of this

age would confess to taking their work so seriously as to be at all times

unsmiling in it; only about as many, in fact, as in that day would

confess to taking their work so lightly that they could regard life's

sterner phases and philosophies with a smile.



Josh Billings was one of the gentlest and loveliest of our pioneers of

laughter.  The present generation is not overfamiliar even with his name,

but both the name and sayings of that quaint soul were on everybody's

lips at the time of which we are writing.  His true name was Henry W.

Shaw, and he was a genuine, smiling philosopher, who might have built up

a more permanent and serious reputation had he not been induced to

disfigure his maxims with ridiculous spelling in order to popularize them

and make them bring a living price.  It did not matter much with Nasby's

work.  An assumed illiteracy belonged with the side of life which he

presented; but it is pathetic now to consider some of the really masterly

sayings of Josh Billings presented in that uncouth form which was

regarded as a part of humor a generation ago.  Even the aphorisms that

were essentially humorous lose value in that degraded spelling.



"When a man starts down hill everything is greased for the occasion,"

could hardly be improved upon by distorted orthography, and here are a

few more gems which have survived that deadly blight.



"Some folks mistake vivacity for wit; whereas the difference between

vivacity and wit is the same as the difference between the lightning-bug

and the lightning."



"Don't take the bull by the horns-take him by the tail; then you can let

go when you want to."



"The difficulty is not that we know so much, but that we know so much

that isn't so."



Josh Billings, Nasby, and Mark Twain were close friends.  They had

themselves photographed in a group, and there was always some pleasantry

going on among them.  Josh Billings once wrote on "Lekturing," and under

the head of "Rule Seven," which treated of unwisdom of inviting a

lecturer to a private house, he said:



     Think of asking Mark Twain home with yu, for instance.  Yure good

     wife has put her house in apple-pie order for the ockashun;

     everything is just in the right place.  Yu don't smoke in yure

     house, never.  Yu don't put yure feet on the center-table, yu don't

     skatter the nuzepapers all over the room, in utter confushion: order

     and ekonemy governs yure premises.  But if yu expeckt Mark Twain to

     be happy, or even kumfortable yu hav got to buy a box of cigars

     worth at least seventeen dollars and yu hav got to move all the

     tender things out ov yure parlor.  Yu hav got to skatter all the

     latest papers around the room careless, you hav got to hav a pitcher

     ov icewater handy, for Mark is a dry humorist.  Yu hav got to ketch

     and tie all yure yung ones, hed and foot, for Mark luvs babys only

     in theory; yu hav got to send yure favorite kat over to the nabors

     and hide yure poodle.  These are things that hav to be done, or Mark

     will pak hiz valise with hiz extry shirt collar and hiz lektur on

     the Sandwich Islands, and travel around yure streets, smoking and

     reading the sighns over the store doorways untill lektur time

     begins.



As we-are not likely to touch upon Mark Twain's lecturing, save only

lightly, hereafter, it may be as well to say something of his method at

this period.  At all places visited by lecturers there was a committee,

and it was the place of the chairman to introduce the lecturer, a

privilege which he valued, because it gave him a momentary association

with distinction and fame.  Clemens was a great disappointment to these

officials.  He had learned long ago that he could introduce himself more

effectively than any one else.  His usual formula was to present himself

as the chairman of the committee, introducing the lecturer of the

evening; then, with what was in effect a complete change of personality,

to begin his lecture.  It was always startling and amusing, always a

success; but the papers finally printed this formula, which took the

freshness out of it, so that he had to invent others.  Sometimes he got

up with the frank statement that he was introducing himself because he

had never met any one who could pay a proper tribute to his talents; but

the newspapers printed that too, and he often rose and began with no

introduction at all.



Whatever his method of beginning, Mark Twain's procedure probably was the

purest exemplification of the platform entertainer's art which this

country has ever seen.  It was the art that makes you forget the

artisanship, the art that made each hearer forget that he was not being

personally entertained by a new and marvelous friend, who had traveled a

long way for his particular benefit.  One listener has written that he

sat "simmering with laughter" through what he supposed was the

continuation of the introduction, waiting for the traditional lecture to

begin, when presently the lecturer, with a bow, disappeared, and it was

over.  The listener looked at his watch; he had been there more than an

hour.  He thought it could be no more than ten minutes, at most.  Many

have tried to set down something of the effect his art produced on them,

but one may not clearly convey the story of a vanished presence and a

silent voice.



There were other pleasant associations in Boston.  Howells was there, and

Aldrich; also Bret Harte, who had finished his triumphal progress across

the continent to join the Atlantic group.  Clemens appears not to have

met Aldrich before, though their acquaintance had begun a year earlier,

when Aldrich, as editor of Every Saturday, had commented on a poem

entitled, "The Three Aces," which had appeared in the Buffalo Express.

Aldrich had assumed the poem to be the work of Mark Twain, and had

characterized it as "a feeble imitation of Bret Harte's 'Heathen

Chinee.'"  Clemens, in a letter, had mildly protested as to the charge of

authorship, and Aldrich had promptly printed the letter with apologetic

explanation.  A playful exchange of personal letters followed, and the

beginning of a lifelong friendship.



One of the letters has a special interest here.  Clemens had followed his

protest with an apology for it, asking that no further notice be taken of

the matter.  Aldrich replied that it was too late to prevent "doing him

justice," as his explanation was already on the press, but that if

Clemens insisted he would withdraw it in the next issue.  Clemens then

wrote that he did not want it withdrawn, and explained that he hated to

be accused of plagiarizing Bret Harte, to whom he was deeply indebted for

literary schooling in the California days.  Continuing he said:



     Do you know the prettiest fancy and the neatest that ever shot

     through Harte's brain?  It was this.  When they were trying to

     decide upon a vignette cover for the Overland a grizzly bear (of the

     arms of the State of California) was chosen.  Nahl Bros. carved him

     and the page was printed with him in it.



     As a bear he was a success.  He was a good bear, but then, it was

     objected, he was an objectless bear--a bear that meant nothing,

     signified nothing, simply stood there, snarling over his shoulder at

     nothing, and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured

     intruder upon the fair page.  All hands said that none were

     satisfied; they hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as

     much to have him there when there was no point to him.  But

     presently Harte took a pencil and drew two simple lines under his

     feet, and behold he was a magnificent success!--the ancient symbol

     of California savagery, snarling at the approaching type of high and

     progressive civilization, the first Overland locomotive!  I just

     think that was nothing less than an inspiration.--[The "bear" was

     that which has always appeared on the Overland cover; the "two

     lines" formed a railway track under his feet.  Clemens's original

     letter contained crude sketches illustrating these things.]



Among the Boston group was another Californian, Ralph Keeler, an

eccentric, gifted, and altogether charming fellow, whom Clemens had known

on the Pacific slope.  Keeler had been adopted by the Boston writers, and

was grateful and happy accordingly.  He was poor of purse, but

inexhaustibly rich in the happier gifts of fortune.  He was unfailingly

buoyant, light-hearted, and hopeful.  On an infinitesimal capital he had

made a tour of many lands, and had written of it for the Atlantic.  In

that charmed circle he was as overflowingly happy as if he had been

admitted to the company of the gods.  Keeler was affectionately regarded

by all who knew him, and he offered a sort of worship in return.  He

often accompanied Mark Twain on his lecture engagements to the various

outlying towns, and Clemens brought him back to his hotel for breakfast,

where they had good, enjoyable talks together.  Once Keeler came eagerly

to the hotel and made his way up to Clemens's room.



"Come with me," he said.  "Quick!"



"What is it?  What's happened?"



"Don't wait to talk.  Come with me."



They tramped briskly through the streets till they reached the public

library, entered, Keeler leading the way, not stopping till he faced a

row of shelves filled with books.  He pointed at one of them, his face

radiant with joy.



"Look," he said.  "Do you see it?"



Clemens looked carefully now and identified one of the books as a still-

born novel which Keeler had published.



"This is a library," said Keeler, eagerly, "and they've got it!"



His whole being was aglow with the wonder of it.  He had been

investigating; the library records showed that in the two years the book

had been there it had been taken out and read three times!  It never

occurred to Clemens even to smile.  Knowing Mark Twain, one would guess

that his eyes were likely to be filled with tears.



In his book about Mark Twain, Howells tells of a luncheon which Keeler

gave to his more famous associates--Aldrich, Fields, Harte, Clemens, and

Howells himself--a merry informal occasion.  Says Howells:



     Nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and

     aimless and joyful talk--play, beginning and ending nowhere, of

     eager laughter, of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat-

     lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional

     concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it

     gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full of

     good-fellowship, Bret Harte's leering dramatization of Clemens's

     mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates.  "Why,

     fellows," he spluttered, "this is the dream of Mark's life," and I

     remember the glance from under Clemens's feathery eyebrows which

     betrayed his enjoyment of the fun.



Very likely Keeler gave that luncheon in celebration of his book's

triumph; it would be like him.



Keeler's end was a mystery.  The New York Tribune commissioned him to go

to Cuba to report the facts of some Spanish outrages.  He sailed from New

York in the steamer, and was last seen alive the night before the vessel

reached Havana.  He had made no secret of his mission, but had discussed

it in his frank, innocent way.  There were some Spanish military men on

the ship.



Clemens, commenting on the matter, once said:



"It may be that he was not flung into the sea, still the belief was

general that that was what had happened."



In his book Howells refers to the doubt with which Mark Twain was then

received by the polite culture of Boston; which, on the other hand,

accepted Bret Harte as one of its own, forgiving even social

shortcomings.



The reason is not difficult to understand.  Harte had made his appeal

with legitimate fiction of the kind which, however fresh in flavor and

environment, was of a sort to be measured and classified.  Harte spoke a

language they could understand; his humor, his pathos, his point of view

were all recognizable.  It was an art already standardized by a master.

It is no reflection on the genius of Bret Harte to liken his splendid

achievements to those of Charles Dickens.  Much of Harte's work is in no

way inferior to that of his great English prototype.  Dickens never wrote

a better short story than "The Outcasts of Poker Flats."  He never wrote

as good a short story as "The Luck of Roaring Camp."  Boston critics

promptly realized these things and gave Harte his correct rating.  That

they failed to do this with Mark Twain, lay chiefly in the fact that he

spoke to them in new and startling tongues.  His gospels were likely to

be heresies; his literary eccentricities were all unclassified.  Of the

ultrafastidious set Howells tells us that Charles Eliot Norton and Prof.

Francis J. Child were about the only ones who accorded him unqualified

approval.  The others smiled and enjoyed him, but with that condescension

which the courtier is likely to accord to motley and the cap and bells.

Only the great, simple-hearted, unbiased multitude, the public, which had

no standards but the direct appeal from one human heart to another, could

recognize immediately his mightier heritage, could exalt and place him on

the throne.







LXXXIV



"ROUGHING IT"



Telegram to Redpath:



     How in the name of God does a man find his way from here to Amherst,

     and when must he start?  Give me full particulars, and send a man

     with me.  If I had another engagement I would rot before I would

     fill it.                       S.  L.  CLEMENS.



This was at the end of February, and he believed that he was standing on

the platform for the last time.  He loathed the drudgery of the work, and

he considered there was no further need.  He was no longer in debt, and

his income he accounted ample.  His new book, 'Roughing It',--[It was

Bliss who had given the new book the title of Roughing It.  Innocents at

Home had been its provision title, certainly a misleading one, though it

has been retained in England for the second volume; for what reason it

would be difficult to explain.]--had had a large advance sale, and its

earnings promised to rival those of the 'Innocents'.  He resolved in the

future to confine himself to the trade and profits of authorship.



The new book had advantages in its favor.  Issued early in the year, it

was offered at the best canvassing season; particularly so, as the

author's lectures had prepared the public for its reception.

Furthermore, it dealt with the most picturesque phases of American life,

scenes and episodes vastly interesting at that time, and peculiarly

adapted to Mark Twain's literary expression.  In a different way

'Roughing It' is quite as remarkable as 'The Innocents Abroad.'  If it

has less charm, it has greater interest, and it is by no means without

charm.  There is something delicious, for instance, in this bit of pure

enjoyment of the first day's overland travel:



     It was now just dawn, and as we stretched our cramped legs full

     length on the mail-sacks, and gazed out through the windows across

     the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist to where

     there was an expectant look in the Eastern horizon, our perfect

     enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy.  The

     stage whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping the

     curtains and suspended coats in a most exhilarating way; the cradle

     swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering of the horses' hoofs,

     the cracking of the driver's whip, and his "Hi-yi! g'lang!" were

     music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees appeared to give

     us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after us

     with interest and envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the

     pipe of peace, and compared all this luxury with the years of

     tiresome city life that had gone before it, we felt that there was

     only one complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had

     found it.



Also, there is that lofty presentation of South Pass, and a picture of

the alkali desert, so parching, so withering in its choking realism, that

it makes the throat ache and the tongue dry to read it.  Just a bit of

the desert in passing:



     The sun beats down with a dead, blistering, relentless malignity;

     the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but

     scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface--it is absorbed

     before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air

     stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the

     brilliant firmament; there is not a living creature visible in any

     direction whither one searches the blank level that stretches its

     monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound, not a sigh,

     not a whisper, not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of

     bird; not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that

     dead air.



As for the humor of the book, it has been chiefly famous for that.  "Buck

Fanshaw's Funeral" has become a classic, and the purchase of the "Mexican

Plug."  But it is to no purpose to review the book here in detail.  We

have already reviewed the life and environment out of which it grew.



Without doubt the story would have contained more of the poetic and

contemplative, in which he was always at his best, if the subject itself,

as in the Innocents, had lent itself oftener to this form of writing.  It

was the lack of that halo perhaps which caused the new book never quite

to rank with its great forerunner in public favor.  There could hardly be

any other reason.  It presented a fresher theme; it abounded in humor;

technically, it was better written; seemingly it had all the elements of

popularity and of permanence.  It did, in fact, possess these qualities,

but its sales, except during the earlier months of its canvass, never

quite equaled those of The Innocents Abroad.



'Roughing It' was accepted by the public for just what it was and is, a

great picture of the Overland Pioneer days--a marvelous picture of

frontier aspects at a time when the frontier itself, even with its

hardships and its tragedies, was little more than a vast primal joke;

when all frontiersmen were obliged to be laughing philosophers in order

to survive the stress of its warfares.



A word here about this Western humor: It is a distinct product.  It grew

out of a distinct condition--the battle with the frontier.  The fight was

so desperate, to take it seriously was to surrender.  Women laughed that

they might not weep; men, when they could no longer swear.  "Western

humor" was the result.  It is the freshest, wildest humor in the world,

but there is tragedy behind it.



'Roughing It' presented the picture of those early conditions with the

startling vividness and truth of a great novel, which, in effect, it was.

It was not accurate history, even of the author's own adventures.  It was

true in its aspects, rather than in its details.  The greater artist

disregards the truth of detail to render more strikingly a phase or a

condition, to produce an atmosphere, to reconstruct a vanished time.

This was what Mark Twain did in 'Roughing It'.  He told the story of

overland travel and the frontier, for his own and future generations, in

what is essentially a picaresque novel, a work of unperishing fiction,

founded on fact.



The sales of 'Roughing It' during the first three months aggregated

nearly forty thousand copies, and the author was lavishly elate

accordingly.  To Orion (who had already closed his career with Bliss, by

exercise of those hereditary eccentricities through which he so often

came to grief) he gave $1,000 out of the first royalty check, in

acknowledgment of the memorandum book and other data which Orion had

supplied.  Clemens believed the new book would sell one hundred thousand

copies within the year; but the sale diminished presently, and at the end

of the first year it was considerably behind the Innocents for the same

period.  As already stated, it required ten years for Roughing It to

reach the one-hundred-thousand mark, which the Innocents reached in

three.









LXXXV



A BIRTH, A DEATH, AND A VOYAGE



The year 1872 was an eventful one in Mark Twain's life.  At Elmira, on

March 19th, his second child, a little girl, whom they named Susan

Olivia, was born.  On June 2d, in the new home in Hartford, to which they

had recently moved, his first child, a little boy, Langdon, died.  He had

never been strong, his wavering life had often been uncertain, always

more of the spirit than the body, and in Elmira he contracted a heavy

cold, or perhaps it was diphtheria from the beginning.  In later years,

whenever Clemens spoke of the little fellow, he never failed to accuse

himself of having been the cause of the child's death.  It was Mrs.

Clemens's custom to drive out each morning with Langdon, and once when

she was unable to go Clemens himself went instead.



"I should not have been permitted to do it," he said, remembering.

"I was not qualified for any such responsibility as that.  Some one

should have gone who had at least the rudiments of a mind.  Necessarily

I would lose myself dreaming.  After a while the coachman looked around

and noticed that the carriage-robes had dropped away from the little

fellow, and that he was exposed to the chilly air.  He called my

attention to it, but it was too late.  Tonsilitis or something of the

sort set in, and he did not get any better, so we took him to Hartford.

There it was pronounced diphtheria, and of course he died."



So, with or without reason, he added the blame of another tragedy to the

heavy burden of remorse which he would go on piling up while he lived.



The blow was a terrible one to Mrs. Clemens; even the comfort of the

little new baby on her arm could not ease the ache in her breast.  It

seemed to her that death was pursuing her.  In one of her letters she

says:



"I feel so often as if my path is to be lined with graves," and she

expresses the wish that she may drop out of life herself before her

sister and her husband--a wish which the years would grant.



They did not return to Elmira, for it was thought that the air of the

shore would be better for the little girl; so they spent the summer at

Saybrook, Connecticut, at Fenwick Hall, leaving Orion and his wife in

charge of the house at Hartford.



Beyond a few sketches, Clemens did very little literary work that summer,

but he planned a trip to Europe, and he invented what is still known and

sold as the "Mark Twain Scrap-Book."



He wrote to Orion of his proposed trip to England, and dilated upon his

scrap-book with considerable enthusiasm.  The idea had grown out of the

inconvenience of finding a paste-jar, and the general mussiness of scrap-

book keeping.  His new plan was a self-pasting scrap-book with the gum

laid on in narrow strips, requiring only to be dampened with a sponge or

other moist substance to be ready for the clipping.  He states that he

intends to put the invention into the hands of Slote, Woodman & Co., of

whom Dan Slote, his old Quaker City room-mate, was the senior partner,

and have it manufactured for the trade.



About this time began Mark Twain's long and active interest in copyright.

Previously he had not much considered the subject; he had taken it for

granted there was no step that he could take, while international piracy

was a recognized institution.  On both sides of the water books were

appropriated, often without profit, sometimes even without credit, to the

author.  To tell the truth, Clemens had at first regarded it rather in

the nature of a compliment that his books should be thought worth

pirating in England, but as time passed he realized that he was paying

heavily for this recognition.  Furthermore, he decided that he was

forfeiting a right; rather that he was being deprived of it: something

which it was in his nature to resent.



When 'Roughing It' had been ready for issue he agreed with Bliss that

they should try the experiment of copyrighting it in England, and see how

far the law would protect them against the voracious little publisher,

who thus far had not only snapped up everything bearing Mark Twain's

signature, but had included in a volume of Mark Twain sketches certain

examples of very weak humor with which Mark Twain had been previously

unfamiliar.



Whatever the English pirate's opinion of the copyright protection of

'Roughing It' may have been, he did not attempt to violate it.  This was

gratifying.  Clemens came to regard England as a friendly power.  He

decided to visit it and spy out the land.  He would make the acquaintance

of its people and institutions and write a book, which would do these

things justice.



He gave out no word of his real purpose.  He merely said that he was

going over to see his English publishers, and perhaps to arrange for a

few lectures.  He provided himself with some stylographic note-books, by

which he could produce two copies of his daily memoranda--one for himself

and one to mail to Mrs. Clemens--and sailed on the Scotia August 21,

1872.



Arriving in Liverpool he took train for London, and presently the

wonderful charm of that old, finished country broke upon him.  His "first

hour in England was an hour of delight," he records; "of rapture and

ecstasy.  These are the best words I can find, but they are not adequate;

they are not strong enough to convey the feeling which this first vision

of rural England brought me."  Then he noticed that the gentleman

opposite in his compartment paid no attention to the scenery, but was

absorbed in a green-covered volume.  He was so absorbed in it that, by

and by, Clemens's curiosity was aroused.  He shifted his position a

little and his eye caught the title.  It was the first volume of the

English edition of The Innocents Abroad.  This was gratifying for a

moment; then he remembered that the man had never laughed, never even

smiled during the hour of his steady reading.  Clemens recalled what he

had heard of the English lack of humor.  He wondered if this was a fair

example of it, and if the man could be really taking seriously every word

he was reading.  Clemens could not look at the scenery any more for

watching his fellow-passenger, waiting with a fascinated interest for the

paragraph that would break up that iron-clad solemnity.  It did not come.

During all the rest of the trip to London the atmosphere of the

compartment remained heavy with gloom.



He drove to the Langham Hotel, always popular with Americans, established

himself, and went to look up his publishers.  He found the Routledges

about to sit down to luncheon in a private room, up-stairs, in their

publishing house.  He joined them, and not a soul stirred from that table

again until evening.  The Routledges had never heard Mark Twain talk

before, never heard any one talk who in the least resembled him.  Various

refreshments were served during the afternoon, came and went, while this

marvelous creature talked on and they listened, reveling, and wondering

if America had any more of that sort at home.  By and by dinner was

served; then after a long time, when there was no further excuse for

keeping him there, they took him to the Savage Club, where there were yet

other refreshments and a gathering of the clans to welcome this new

arrival as a being from some remote and unfamiliar star.



Tom Hood, the younger, was there, and Harry Lee, and Stanley the

explorer, who had but just returned from finding Livingstone, and Henry

Irving, and many another whose name remains, though the owners of those

names are all dead now, and their laughter and their good-fellowship are

only a part of that intangible fabric which we call the past.'--[Clemens

had first known Stanley as a newspaper man.  "I first met him when he

reported a lecture of mine in St. Louis," he said once in a conversation

where the name of Stanley was mentioned.]









LXXXVI



ENGLAND



From that night Mark Twain's stay in England could not properly be called

a gloomy one.



Routledge, Hood, Lee, and, in fact, all literary London, set themselves

the task of giving him a good time.  Whatever place of interest they

could think of he was taken there; whatever there was to see he saw it.

Dinners, receptions, and assemblies were not complete without him.  The

White Friars' Club and others gave banquets in his honor.  He was the

sensation of the day.  When he rose to speak on these occasions he was

greeted with wild cheers.  Whatever he said they eagerly applauded--too

eagerly sometimes, in the fear that they might be regarded as insensible

to American humor.  Other speakers delighted in chaffing him in order to

provoke his retorts.  When a speaker humorously referred to his American

habit of carrying a cotton umbrella, his reply that he followed this

custom because a cotton umbrella was the only kind of an umbrella that an

Englishman wouldn't steal, was all over England next day, and regarded as

one of the finest examples of wit since the days of Swift.



The suddenness and completeness of his acceptance by the great ones of

London rather overwhelmed and frightened him made him timid.  Joaquin

Miller writes:



     He was shy as a girl, although time was already coyly flirting white

     flowers at his temples, and could hardly be coaxed to meet the

     learned and great who wanted to take him by the hand.



Many came to call on him at his hotel, among them Charles Reade and Canon

Kingsley.  Kingsley came twice without finding him; then wrote, asking

for an appointment.  Reade invited his assistance on a novel.  Indeed, it

was in England that Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come

into his rightful heritage.  Whatever may have been the doubts concerning

him in America, there was no question in England.  Howells says:



     In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him.  Lord mayors,

     lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he

     was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the

     favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation.



After that first visit of Mark Twain's, when Americans in England,

referring to their great statesmen, authors, and the like, naturally

mentioned the names of Seward, Webster, Lowell, or Holmes, the English

comment was likely to be: "Never mind those.  We can turn out academic

Sewards by the dozen, and cultured humorists like Lowell and Holmes by

the score.  Tell us of Lincoln, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain.  We cannot

match these; they interest us."  And it was true.  History could not

match them, for they were unique.



Clemens would have been more than human if in time he had not realized

the fuller meaning of this triumph, and exulted in it a little to the

folks at home.  There never lived a more modest, less pretentious, less

aggressive man than Mark Twain, but there never lived a man who took a

more childlike delight in genuine appreciation; and, being childlike, it

was only human that he should wish those nearest to him to share his

happiness.  After one memorable affair he wrote:



     I have been received in a sort of tremendous way to-night by the

     brains of London, assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of

     London; mine being (between you and me) a name which was received

     with a thundering outburst of spontaneous applause when the long

     list of guests was called.



I might have perished on the spot but for the friendly support and

assistance of my excellent friend, Sir John Bennett.



This letter does not tell all of the incident or the real reason why he

might have perished on the spot.  During the long roll-call of guests he

had lost interest a little, and was conversing in whispers with his

"excellent friend," Sir John Bennett, stopping to applaud now and then

when the applause of the others indicated that some distinguished name

had been pronounced.  All at once the applause broke out with great

vehemence.  This must be some very distinguished person indeed.  He

joined in it with great enthusiasm.  When it was over he whispered to Sir

John:



"Whose name was that we were just applauding?"



"Mark Twain's."



Whereupon the support was needed.



Poor little pirate Hotten did not have a happy time during this visit.

He had reveled in the prospect at first, for he anticipated a large

increase to be derived from his purloined property; but suddenly, one

morning, he was aghast to find in the Spectator a signed letter from Mark

Twain, in which he was repudiated, referred to as "John Camden

Hottentot," an unsavory person generally.  Hotten also sent a letter to

the Spectator, in which he attempted to justify himself, but it was a

feeble performance.  Clemens prepared two other communications, each

worse than the other and both more destructive than the first one.  But

these were only to relieve his mind.  He did not print them.  In one of

them he pursued the fancy of John Camden Hottentot, whom he offers as a

specimen to the Zoological Gardens.



It is not a bird.  It is not a man.  It is not a fish.  It does not seem

to be in all respects a reptile.  It has the body and features of a man,

but scarcely any of the instincts that belong to such a structure....  I

am sure that this singular little creature is the missing link between

the man and the hyena.



Hotten had preyed upon explorer Stanley and libeled him in a so-called.

biography to a degree that had really aroused some feeling against

Stanley in England.  Only for the moment--the Queen invited Stanley to

luncheon, and newspaper criticism ceased.  Hotten was in general

disrepute, therefore, so it was not worth while throwing a second brick

at him.



In fact, now that Clemens had expended his venom, on paper, Hotten seemed

to him rather an amusing figure than otherwise.  An incident grew out of

it all, however, that was not amusing.  E. P. Hingston, whom the reader

may remember as having been with Artemus Ward in Virginia City, and one

of that happy group that wined and dined the year away, had been engaged

by Hotten to write the introductory to his edition of The Innocents

Abroad.  It was a well-written, highly complimentary appreciation.

Hingston did not dream that he was committing an offense, nor did Clemens

himself regard it as such in the beginning.



But Mark Twain's views had undergone a radical change, and with

characteristic dismissal of previous conditions he had forgotten that he

had ever had any other views than those he now held.  Hingston was in

London, and one evening, at a gathering, approached Clemens with

outstretched hand.  But Clemens failed to see Hingston's hand or to

recognize him.  In after-years his conscience hurt him terribly for this.

He remembered it only with remorse and shame.  Once, in his old age, he

spoke of it with deep sorrow.









LXXXVII



THE BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN



The book on England, which he had prepared for so carefully, was never

written.  Hundreds of the stylographic pages were filled, and the

duplicates sent home for the entertainment of Olivia Clemens, but the

notes were not completed, and the actual writing was never begun.  There

was too much sociability in London for one thing, and then he found that

he could not write entertainingly of England without introducing too many

personalities, and running the risk of offending those who had taken him

into their hearts and homes.  In a word, he would have to write too

seriously or not at all.



He began his memoranda industriously enough, and the volume might have

been as charming and as valuable as any he has left behind.  The reader

will hardly fail to find a few of the entries interesting.  They are

offered here as examples of his daily observation during those early

weeks of his stay, and to show somewhat of his purpose:



                             AN EXPATRIATE



     There was once an American thief who fled his country and took

     refuge in England.  He dressed himself after the fashion of the

     Londoners, and taught his tongue the peculiarities of the London

     pronunciation and did his best in all ways to pass himself for a

     native.  But he did two fatal things: he stopped at the Langham

     Hotel, and the first trip he took was to visit Stratford-on-Avon and

     the grave of Shakespeare.  These things betrayed his nationality.





                         STANLEY AND THE QUEEN



     See the power a monarch wields!  When I arrived here, two weeks ago,

     the papers and geographers were in a fair way to eat poor Stanley up

     without salt or sauce.  The Queen says, "Come four hundred miles up

     into Scotland and sit at my luncheon-table fifteen minutes"; which,

     being translated, means, "Gentlemen, I believe in this man and take

     him under my protection"; and not another yelp is heard.





                         AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM



     What a place it is!



     Mention some very rare curiosity of a peculiar nature--a something

     which you have read about somewhere but never seen--they show you a

     dozen!  They show you all the possible varieties of that thing!

     They show you curiously wrought jeweled necklaces of beaten gold,

     worn by the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Etruscans, Greeks,

     Britons--every people of the forgotten ages, indeed.  They show you

     the ornaments of all the tribes and peoples that live or ever did

     live.  Then they show you a cast taken from Cromwell's face in

     death; then the venerable vase that once contained the ashes of

     Xerxes.



     I am wonderfully thankful for the British Museum.  Nobody comes

     bothering around me--nobody elbows me--all the room and all the

     light I want, under this huge dome--no disturbing noises--and people

     standing ready to bring me a copy of pretty much any book that ever

     was printed under the sun--and if I choose to go wandering about the

     long corridors and galleries of the great building the secrets of

     all the earth and all the ages axe laid open to me.  I am not

     capable of expressing my gratitude for the British Museum--it seems

     as if I do not know any but little words and weak ones.





                       WESTMINSTER ABBEY BY NIGHT



     It was past eleven o'clock and I was just going to bed.  But this

     friend of mine was as reliable as he was eccentric, and so there was

     not a doubt in my mind that his "expedition" had merit in it.  I put

     on my coat and boots again, and we drove away.



     "Where is it?  Where are we going?"



     "Don't worry.  You'll see."



     He was not inclined to talk.  So I thought this must be a weighty

     matter.  My curiosity grew with the minutes, but I kept it manfully

     under the surface.  I watched the lamps, the signs, the numbers as

     we thundered down the long street.  I am always lost in London, day

     or night.  It was very chilly, almost bleak.  People leaned against

     the gusty blasts as if it were the dead of winter.  The crowds grew

     thinner and thinner, and the noises waxed faint and seemed far away.

     The sky was overcast and threatening.  We drove on, and still on,

     till I wondered if we were ever going to stop.  At last we passed by

     a spacious bridge and a vast building, and presently entered a

     gateway, passed through a sort of tunnel, and stopped in a court

     surrounded by the black outlines of a great edifice.  Then we

     alighted, walked a dozen steps or so, and waited.  In a little while

     footsteps were heard, a man emerged from the darkness, and we

     dropped into his wake without saying anything.  He led us under an

     archway of masonry, and from that into a roomy tunnel, through a

     tall iron gate, which he locked behind us.  We followed him down

     this tunnel, guided more by his footsteps on the stone flagging than

     by anything we could very distinctly see.  At the end of it we came

     to another iron gate, and our conductor stopped there and lit a

     bull's-eye lantern.  Then he unlocked the gate; and I wished he had

     oiled it first, it grated so dismally.  The gate swung open and we

     stood on the threshold of what seemed a limitless domed and pillared

     cavern, carved out of the solid darkness.  The conductor and my

     friend took off their hats reverently, and I did likewise.  For the

     moment that we stood thus there was not a sound, and the stillness

     seemed to add to the solemnity of the gloom.  I looked my inquiry!



     "It is the tomb of the great dead of England-Westminster Abbey."...



     We were among the tombs; on every hand dull shapes of men, sitting,

     standing, or stooping, inspected us curiously out of the darkness--

     reached out their hands toward us--some appealing, some beckoning,

     some warning us away.  Effigies they were--statues over the graves;

     but they looked human and natural in the murky shadows.  Now a

     little half-grown black and white cat squeezed herself through the

     bars of the iron gate and came purring lovingly about us, unawed by

     the time or the place, unimpressed by the marble pomp that

     sepulchers a line of mighty dead that ends with a great author of

     yesterday and began with a sceptered monarch away back in the dawn

     of history, more than twelve hundred years ago .  .  .  .



     Mr. Wright flashed his lantern first upon this object and then upon

     that, and kept up a running commentary that showed there was nothing

     about the venerable Abbey that was trivial in his eyes or void of

     interest.  He is a man in authority, being superintendent, and his

     daily business keeps him familiar with every nook and corner of the

     great pile.  Casting a luminous ray now here, now yonder, he would

     say:



     "Observe the height of the Abbey--one hundred and three feet to the

     base of the roof; I measured it myself the other day.  Notice the

     base of this column--old, very old--hundreds and hundreds of years--

     and how well they knew how to build in those old days!  Notice it--

     every stone is laid horizontally; that is to say, just as nature

     laid it originally in the quarry not set up edgewise; in our day

     some people set them on edge, and then wonder why they split and

     flake.  Architects cannot teach nature anything.  Let me remove this

     matting--it is put here to preserve the pavement; now there is a bit

     of pavement that is seven hundred years old; you can see by these

     scattering clusters of colored mosaics how beautiful it was before

     time and sacrilegious idlers marred it.  Now there, in the border,

     was an inscription, once see, follow the circle-you can trace it by

     the ornaments that have been pulled out--here is an A and there is

     an O, and yonder another A--all beautiful Old English capitals;

     there is no telling what the inscription was--no record left now.

     Now move along in this direction, if you please.  Yonder is where

     old King Sebert the Saxon lies his monument is the oldest one in the

     Abbey; Sebert died in 616,--[Clemens probably misunderstood the

     name.  It was Ethelbert who died in 616.  The name Sebert does not

     appear in any Saxon annals accessible to the author.]--and that's

     as much, as twelve hundred and fifty years ago think of it!  Twelve

     hundred and fifty years!  Now yonder is the last one--Charles

     Dickens--there on the floor, with the brass letters on the slab--and

     to this day the people come and put flowers on it....  There is

     Garrick's monument; and Addison's, and Thackeray's bust--and

     Macaulay lies there.  And close to Dickens and Garrick lie Sheridan

     and Dr. Johnson--and here is old Parr....



     "That stone there covers Campbell the poet.  Here are names you know

     pretty well--Milton, and Gray who wrote the Elegy, and Butler who

     wrote Hudibras; and Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson--there are three

     tablets to him scattered about the Abbey, and all got 'O, Rare Ben

     Jonson' cut on them.  You were standing on one of them just now he

     is buried standing up.  There used to be a tradition here that

     explains it.  The story goes that he did not dare ask to be buried

     in the Abbey, so he asked King James if he would make him a present

     of eighteen inches of English ground, and the King said 'yes,' and

     asked him where he would have it, and he said in Westminster Abbey.

     Well, the King wouldn't go back on his word, and so there he is,

     sure enough-stood up on end."



The reader may regret that there are not more of these entries, and that

the book itself was never written.  Just when he gave up the project is

not recorded.  He was urged to lecture in London, but declined.  To Mrs.

Clemens, in September, he wrote:



Everybody says lecture, lecture, lecture, but I have not the least idea

of doing it; certainly not at present.  Mr. Dolby, who took Dickens to

America, is coming to talk business tomorrow, though I have sent him word

once before that I can't be hired to talk here; because I have no time to

spare.  There is too much sociability; I do not get along fast enough

with work.



In October he declared that he was very homesick, and proposed that Mrs.

Clemens and Susie join him at once in London, unless she would prefer to

have him come home for the winter and all of them return to London in the

spring.  So it is likely that the book was not then abandoned.  He felt

that his visit was by no means ended; that it was, in fact, only just

begun, but he wanted the ones he loved most to share it with him.  To his

mother and sister, in November, he wrote:



I came here to take notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend

dinners and make speeches.  I have had a jolly good time, and I do hate

to go away from these English folks; they make a stranger feel entirely

at home, and they laugh so easily that it is a comfort to make after-

dinner speeches here.  I have made hundreds of friends; and last night,

in the crush at the opening of the new Guild Hall Library and Museum, I

was surprised to meet a familiar face every other step.



All his impressions of England had been happy ones.  He could deliver a

gentle satire now and then at certain British institutions--certain

London localities and features--as in his speech at the Savage Club,

--[September 28, 1872.  This is probably the most characteristic speech

made by Mark Twain during his first London visit; the reader will find it

in full in Appendix L, at the end of last volume.]--but taking the snug

island as a whole, its people, its institutions, its fair, rural aspects,

he had found in it only delight.  To Mrs. Crane he wrote:



     If you and Theodore will come over in the spring with Livy and me,

     and spend the summer, you shall see a country that is so beautiful

     that you will be obliged to believe in fairy-land.  There is nothing

     like it elsewhere on the globe.  You should have a season ticket and

     travel up and down every day between London and Oxford and worship

     nature.



     And Theodore can browse with me among dusty old dens that look now

     as they looked five hundred years ago; and puzzle over books in the

     British Museum that were made before Christ was born; and in the

     customs of their public dinners, and the ceremonies of every

     official act, and the dresses of a thousand dignitaries, trace the

     speech and manners of all the centuries that have dragged their

     lagging decades over England since the Heptarchy fell asunder.  I

     would a good deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you

     over.



He sailed November 12th, on the Batavia, loaded with Christmas presents

for everybody; jewelry, furs, laces; also a practical steam-engine for

his namesake, Sam Moffett.  Half-way across the Atlantic the Batavia ran

into a hurricane and was badly damaged by heavy seas, and driven far out

of her course.  It was a lucky event on the whole, for she fell in with a

water-logged lumber bark, a complete wreck, with nine surviving sailors

clinging to her rigging.  In the midst of the wild gale a lifeboat was

launched and the perishing men were rescued.  Clemens prepared a graphic

report of the matter for the Royal Humane Society, asking that medals be

conferred upon the brave rescuers, a document that was signed by his

fellow-passengers and obtained for the men complete recognition and wide

celebrity.  Closing, the writer said:



     As might have been anticipated, if I have been of any service toward

     rescuing these nine shipwrecked human beings by standing around the

     deck in a furious storm, without an umbrella, keeping an eye on

     things and seeing that they were done right, and yelling whenever a

     cheer seemed to be the important thing, I am glad and I am

     satisfied.  I ask no reward.  I would do it again under the same

     circumstances.  But what I do plead for, earnestly and sincerely, is

     that the Royal Humane Society will remember our captain and our

     life-boat crew, and in so remembering them increase the high honor

     and esteem in which the society is held all over the civilized

     world.



The Batavia reached New York November 26, 1872.  Mark Twain had been

absent three months, during which he had been brought to at least a

partial realization of what his work meant to him and to mankind.



An election had taken place during his absence--an election which

gratified him deeply, for it had resulted in the second presidency of

General Grant and in the defeat of Horace Greeley, whom he admired

perhaps, but not as presidential material.  To Thomas Nast, who had aided

very effectually in Mr. Greeley's overwhelming defeat, Clemens wrote:



Nast, you more than any other man have won a prodigious victory for

Grant--I mean, rather, for civilization and progress.  Those pictures

were simply marvelous, and if any man in the land has a right to hold his

head up and be honestly proud of his share in this year's vast events

that man is unquestionably yourself.  We all do sincerely honor you, and

are proud of you.



Horace Greeley's peculiar abilities and eccentricities won celebrity for

him, rather than voters.  Mark Twain once said of him:



"He was a great man, an honest man, and served his, country well and was

an honor to it.  Also, he was a good-natured man, but abrupt with

strangers if they annoyed him when he was busy.  He was profane, but that

is nothing; the best of us is that.  I did not know him well, but only

just casually, and by accident.  I never met him but once.  I called on

him in the Tribune office, but I was not intending to.  I was looking for

Whitelaw Reid, and got into the wrong den.  He was alone at his desk,

writing, and we conversed--not long, but just a little.  I asked him if

he was well, and he said, 'What the hell do you want?'  Well, I couldn't

remember what I wanted, so I said I would call again.  But I didn't."



Clemens did not always tell the incident just in this way.  Sometimes it

was John Hay he was looking for instead of Reid, and the conversation

with Greeley varied; but perhaps there was a germ of history under it

somewhere, and at any rate it could have happened well enough, and not

have been out of character with either of the men.









LXXXVIII



"THE GILDED AGE"



Mark Twain did not go on the lecture circuit that winter.  Redpath had

besought him as usual, and even in midsummer had written:



"Will you?  Won't you?  We have seven thousand to eight thousand dollars

in engagements recorded for you," and he named a list of towns ranging

geographically from Boston to St. Paul.



But Clemens had no intention then of ever lecturing any more, and again

in November, from London, he announced (to Redpath):



"When I yell again for less than $500 I'll be pretty hungry, but I

haven't any intention of yelling at any price."



Redpath pursued him, and in January proposed $400 for a single night in

Philadelphia, but without result.  He did lecture two nights in Steinway

Hall for the Mercantile Library Association, on the basis of half

profits, netting $1,300 for the two nights as his share; and he lectured

one night in Hartford, at a profit Of $1,500, for charity.  Father

Hawley, of Hartford, had announced that his missionary work was suffering

for lack of funds.  Some of his people were actually without food, he

said, their children crying with hunger.  No one ever responded to an

appeal like that quicker than Samuel Clemens.  He offered to deliver a

lecture free, and to bear an equal proportion of whatever expenses were

incurred by the committee of eight who agreed to join in forwarding the

project.  He gave the Sandwich Island lecture, and at the close of it a

large card was handed him with the figures of the receipts printed upon

it.  It was held up to view, and the house broke into a storm of cheers.



He did very little writing during the early weeks following his return.

Early in the year (January 3 and 6, 1873) he contributed two Sandwich

Island letters to the Tribune, in which, in his own peculiar fashion, he

urged annexation.



"We must annex those people," he declared, and proceeded to specify the

blessings we could give them, such as "leather-headed juries, the

insanity law, and the Tweed Ring."



     We can confer Woodhull and Clafin on them, and George Francis Train.

     We can give them lecturers!  I will go myself.



     We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner

     on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy

     civilization.  Annexation is what the poor islanders need!



     "Shall we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?"



His success in England became an incentive to certain American

institutions to recognize his gifts at home.  Early in the year he was

dined as the guest of the Lotos Club of New York, and a week or two later

elected to its membership.  This was but a beginning.  Some new

membership or honor was offered every little while, and so many banquets

that he finally invented a set form for declining them.  He was not yet

recognized as the foremost American man of letters, but undoubtedly he

had become the most popular; and Edwin Whipple, writing at this time, or

but little later, said:



"Mark Twain is regarded chiefly as a humorist, but the exercise of his

real talents would rank him with the ablest of our authors in the past

fifty years."  So he was beginning to be "discovered" in high places.



It was during this winter that the Clemens household enjoyed its first

real home life in Hartford, its first real home life anywhere since those

earliest days of marriage.  The Hooker mansion was a comfortable place.

The little family had comparatively good health.  Their old friends were

stanch and lavishly warm-hearted, and they had added many new ones.

Their fireside was a delightful nucleus around which gathered those they

cared for most, the Twichells, the Warner families, the Trumbulls--all

certain of a welcome there.  George Warner, only a little while ago,

remembering, said:



"The Clemens house was the only one I have ever known where there was

never any preoccupation in the evenings, and where visitors were always

welcome.  Clemens was the best kind of a host; his evenings after dinner

were an unending flow of stories."



Friends living near by usually came and went at will, often without the

ceremony of knocking or formal leave-taking.  They were more like one

great family in that neighborhood, with a community of interests, a unity

of ideals.  The Warner families and the Clemenses were particularly

intimate, and out of their association grew Mark Twain's next important

literary undertaking, his collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner in

'The Gilded Age'.



A number of more or less absurd stories have been printed about the

origin of this book.  It was a very simple matter, a perfectly natural

development.



At the dinner-table one night, with the Warners present, criticisms of

recent novels were offered, with the usual freedom and severity of

dinner-table talk.  The husbands were inclined to treat rather lightly

the novels in which their wives were finding entertainment.  The wives

naturally retorted that the proper thing for the husbands to do was to

furnish the American people with better ones.  This was regarded in the

nature of a challenge, and as such was accepted--mutually accepted: that

is to say, in partnership.  On the spur of the moment Clemens and Warner

agreed that they would do a novel together, that they would begin it

immediately.  This is the whole story of the book's origin; so far, at

least, as the collaboration is concerned.  Clemens, in fact, had the

beginning of a story in his mind, but had been unwilling to undertake an

extended work of fiction alone.  He welcomed only too eagerly, therefore,

the proposition of joint authorship.  His purpose was to write a tale

around that lovable character of his youth, his mother's cousin, James

Lampton--to let that gentle visionary stand as the central figure against

a proper background.  The idea appealed to Warner, and there was no delay

in the beginning.  Clemens immediately set to work and completed 399

pages of the manuscript, the first eleven chapters of the book, before

the early flush of enthusiasm waned.



Warner came over then, and Clemens read it aloud to him.  Warner had some

plans for the story, and took it up at this point, and continued it

through the next twelve chapters; and so they worked alternately, "in the

superstition," as Mark Twain long afterward declared, "that we were

writing one coherent yarn, when I suppose, as a matter of fact, we were

writing two incoherent ones."--[The reader may be interested in the

division of labor.  Clemens wrote chapters I to XI; also chapters XXIV,

XXV, XXVII, XXVIII, XXX, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XLII,

XLIII, XLV, LI, LII, LIII, LVII, LIX, LX, LXI, LXII, and portions of

chapters XXXV, XLIX, LVI.  Warner wrote chapters XII to XXIII; also

chapters XXVI, XXIX, XXXI, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL, XLI, XLIV, XLVI, XLVII,

XLVITT, L, LIV, LV, LVIII, LXIII, and portions of chapters XXXV, XLIX,

and LVI.  The work was therefore very evenly divided.



There was another co-worker on The Gilded Age before the book was finally

completed.  This was J. Hammond Trumbull, who prepared the variegated,

marvelous cryptographic chapter headings: Trumbull was the most learned

man that ever lived in Hartford.  He was familiar with all literary and

scientific data, and according to Clemens could swear in twenty-seven

languages.  It was thought to be a choice idea to get Trumbull to supply

a lingual medley of quotations to precede the chapters in the new book,

the purpose being to excite interest and possibly to amuse the reader--a

purpose which to some extent appears to have miscarried.]



The book was begun in February and finished in April, so the work did not

lag.  The result, if not highly artistic, made astonishingly good

reading.  Warner had the touch of romance, Clemens, the gift of creating,

or at least of portraying, human realities.  Most of his characters

reflected intimate personalities of his early life.  Besides the

apotheosis of James Lampton into the immortal Sellers, Orion became

Washington Hawkins, Squire Clemens the judge, while Mark Twain's own

personality, in a greater or lesser degree, is reflected in most of his

creations.  As for the Tennessee land, so long a will-o'the-wisp and a

bugbear, it became tangible property at last.  Only a year or two before

Clemens had written to Orion:



     Oh, here!  I don't want to be consulted at all about Tennessee.  I

     don't want it even mentioned to me.  When I make a suggestion it is

     for you to act upon it or throw it aside, but I beseech you never to

     ask my advice, opinion, or consent about that hated property.



But it came in good play now.  It is the important theme of the story.



Mark Twain was well qualified to construct his share of the tale.  He

knew his characters, their lives, and their atmospheres perfectly.

Senator Dilworthy (otherwise Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, then notorious

for attempted vote-buying) was familiar enough.  That winter in

Washington had acquainted Clemens with the life there, its political

intrigues, and the disrepute of Congress.  Warner was equally well

qualified for his share of the undertaking, and the chief criticism that

one may offer is the one stated by Clemens himself--that the divisions of

the tale remain divisions rather than unity.



As for the story itself--the romance and tragedy of it--the character of

Laura in the hands of either author is one not easy to forget.  Whether

this means that the work is well done, or only strikingly done, the

reader himself must judge.  Morally, the character is not justified.

Laura was a victim of circumstance from the beginning.  There could be no

poetic justice in her doom.  To drag her out of a steamer wreck, only to

make her the victim of a scoundrel, later an adventuress, and finally a

murderess, all may be good art, but of a very bad kind.  Laura is a sort

of American Becky Sharp; but there is retributive justice in Becky's

fate, whereas Laura's doom is warranted only by the author's whim.  As

for her end, whatever the virtuous public of that day might have done, a

present-day audience would not have pelted her from the stage, destroyed

her future, taken away her life.



The authors regarded their work highly when it was finished, but that is

nothing.  Any author regards his work highly at the moment of its

completion.  In later years neither of them thought very well of their

production; but that also is nothing.  The author seldom cares very

deeply for his offspring once it is turned over to the public charge.

The fact that the story is still popular, still delights thousands of

readers, when a myriad of novels that have been written since it was

completed have lived their little day and died so utterly that even their

names have passed out of memory, is the best verdict as to its worth.









LXXXIX



PLANNING A NEW HOME



Clemens and his wife bought a lot for the new home that winter, a fine,

sightly piece of land on Farmington Avenue--table-land, slopingdown to a

pretty stream that wound through the willows and among the trees.  They

were as delighted as children with their new purchase and the prospect of

building.  To her sister Mrs. Clemens wrote:



     Mr. Clemens seems to glory in his sense of possession; he goes daily

     into the lot, has had several falls trying to lay off the land by

     sliding around on his feet....



     For three days the ice has covered the trees, and they have been

     glorious.  We could do nothing but watch the beauty outside; if you

     looked at the trees as the sun struck them, with your back toward

     the sun, they were covered with jewels.  If you looked toward the

     sun it was all crystal whiteness, a perfect fairy-land.  Then the

     nights were moonlight, and that was a great beauty, the moon giving

     us the same prismatic effect.



This was the storm of which Mark Twain wrote his matchless description,

given first in his speech on New England weather, and later preserved in

'Following the Equator', in more extended form.  In that book he likens

an ice-storm to his impressions derived from reading descriptions of the

Taj Mahal, that wonderful tomb of a fair East Indian queen.  It is a

marvelous bit of word-painting--his description of that majestic vision:

"When every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and

the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond

plume."  It will pay any one to look up that description and read it all,

though it has been said, by the fortunate one or two who heard him first

give it utterance as an impromptu outburst, that in the subsequent

process of writing the bloom of its original magnificence was lost.



The plans for the new house were drawn forthwith by that gentle architect

Edward Potter, whose art to-day may be considered open to criticism, but

not because of any lack of originality.  Hartford houses of that period

were mainly of the goods-box form of architecture, perfectly square,

typifying the commercial pursuits of many of their owners.  Potter agreed

to get away from this idea, and a radical and even frenzied departure was

the result.  Certainly his plans presented beautiful pictures, and all

who saw them were filled with wonder and delight.  Architecture has

lavished itself in many florescent forms since then, but we may imagine

that Potter's "English violet" order of design, as he himself designated

it, startled, dazzled, and captivated in a day, when most houses were

mere habitations, built with a view to economy and the largest possible

amount of room.



Workmen were put on the ground without delay, to prepare for the

builders, and work was rapidly pushed along.  Then in May the whole

matter was left in the hands of the architect and the carpenters (with

Lawyer Charles E. Perkins to stand between Potter and the violent

builder, who roared at Potter and frightened him when he wanted changes),

while the Clemens household, with Clara Spaulding, a girlhood friend of

Mrs. Clemens, sailed away to England for a half-year holiday.









XC



A LONG ENGLISH HOLIDAY



They sailed on the Batavia, and with them went a young man named

Thompson, a theological student whom Clemens had consented to take as an

amanuensis.  There is a pathetic incident connected with this young man,

and it may as well be set down here.  Clemens found, a few weeks after

his arrival in England, that so great was the tax upon his time that he

could make no use of Thompson's services.  He gave Thompson fifty

dollars, and upon the possibility of the young man's desiring to return

to America, advanced him another fifty dollars, saying that he could

return it some day, and never thought of it again.  But the young man

remembered it, and one day, thirty-six years later, after a life of

hardship and struggle, such as the life of a country minister is apt to

be, he wrote and inclosed a money-order, a payment on his debt.  That

letter and its inclosure brought only sorrow to Mark Twain.  He felt that

it laid upon him the accumulated burden of the weary thirty-six years'

struggle with ill-fortune.  He returned the money, of course, and in a

biographical note commented:



     How pale painted heroisms of romance look beside it!  Thompson's

     heroism, which is real, which is colossal, which is sublime, and

     which is costly beyond all estimate, is achieved in profound

     obscurity, and its hero walks in rags to the end of his days.  I had

     forgotten Thompson completely, but he flashes before me as vividly

     as lightning.  I can see him now.  It was on the deck of the

     Batavia, in the dock.  The ship was casting off, with that hubbub

     and confusion and rushing of sailors, and shouting of orders and

     shrieking of boatswain whistles, which marked the departure

     preparations in those days--an impressive contrast with the solemn

     silence which marks the departure preparations of the giant ships of

     the present day.  Mrs. Clemens, Clara Spaulding, little Susy, and

     the nurse-maid were all properly garbed for the occasion.  We all

     had on our storm-rig, heavy clothes of somber hue, but new and

     designed and constructed for the purpose, strictly in accordance

     with sea-going etiquette; anything wearable on land being distinctly

     and odiously out of the question.



     Very well.  On that deck, and gliding placidly among those honorable

     and properly upholstered groups, appeared Thompson, young, grave,

     long, slim, with an aged fuzzy plug hat towering high on the upper

     end of him and followed by a gray duster, which flowed down, without

     break or wrinkle, to his ankles.  He came straight to us, and shook

     hands and compromised us.  Everybody could see that we knew him.  A

     nigger in heaven could not have created a profounder astonishment.



     However, Thompson didn't know that anything was happening.  He had

     no prejudices about clothes.  I can still see him as he looked when

     we passed Sandy Hook and the winds of the big ocean smote us.

     Erect, lofty, and grand he stood facing the blast, holding his plug

     on with both hands and his generous duster blowing out behind, level

     with his neck.  There were scoffers observing, but he didn't know

     it; he wasn't disturbed.



     In my mind, I see him once afterward, clothed as before, taking me

     down in shorthand.  The Shah of Persia had come to England and Dr.

     Hosmer, of the Herald, had sent me to Ostend, to view his Majesty's

     progress across the Channel and write an account of it.  I can't

     recall Thompson after that, and I wish his memory had been as poor

     as mine.



They had been a month in London, when the final incident referred to took

place--the arrival of the Shah of Persia--and were comfortably quartered

at the Langham Hotel.  To Twichell Clemens wrote:



     We have a luxuriously ample suite of apartments on the third floor,

     our bedroom looking straight up Portland Place, our parlor having a

     noble array of great windows looking out upon both streets (Portland

     Place and the crook that joins it onto Regent Street).



     Nine p.m.  full twilight, rich sunset tints lingering in the west.



     I am not going to write anything; rather tell it when I get back.

     I love you and Harmony, and that is all the fresh news I've got

     anyway.  And I mean to keep that fresh all the time.



Mrs. Clemens, in a letter to her sister, declared: "It is perfectly

discouraging to try to write you.  There is so much to write about that

it makes me feel as if it was no use to begin."



It was a period of continuous honor and entertainment.  If Mark Twain had

been a lion on his first visit, he was little less than royalty now.  His

rooms at the Langham were like a court.  Miss Spaulding (now Mrs. John B.

Stanchfield) remembers that Robert Browning, Turgenieff, Sir John

Millais, Lord Houghton, and Sir Charles Dilke (then at the height of his

fame) were among those that called to pay their respects.  In a recent

letter she says:



     I remember a delightful luncheon that Charles Kingsley gave for Mr.

     Clemens; also an evening when Lord Dunraven brought Mr. Home, the

     medium, Lord Dunraven telling many of the remarkable things he had

     seen Mr. Home do.  I remember I wanted so much to see him float out

     of a seven or eight story window, and enter another, which Lord

     Dunraven said he had seen him do many times.  But Mr. Home had been

     very ill, and said his power had left him.  My great regret was that

     we did not see Carlyle, who was too sad and ill for visits.



Among others they met Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland,

and found him so shy that it was almost impossible to get him to say a

word on any subject.



"The shyest full-grown man, except Uncle Remus, I ever met," Clemens once

wrote.  "Dr. MacDonald and several other lively talkers were present, and

the talk went briskly on for a couple of hours, but Carroll sat still all

the while, except now and then when he answered a question."



At a dinner given by George Smalley they met Herbert Spencer, and at a

luncheon-party at Lord Houghton's, Sir Arthur Helps, then a world-wide

celebrity.



     Lord Elcho, a large, vigorous man, sat at some distance down the

     table.  He was talking earnestly about the town of Godalming.  It

     was a deep, flowing, and inarticulate rumble, but I caught the

     Godalming pretty nearly every time it broke free of the rumbling,

     and as all the strength was on the first end of the word, it

     startled me every time, because it sounded so like swearing.  In the

     middle of the luncheon Lady Houghton rose, remarked to the guests on

     her right and on her left, in a matter-of-fact way, "Excuse me, I

     have an engagement," and without further ceremony, she went off to

     meet it.  This would have been doubtful etiquette in America.  Lord

     Houghton told a number of delightful stories.  He told them in

     French, and I lost nothing of them but the nubs.



Little Susy and her father thrived on London life, but after a time it

wore on Mrs. Clemens.  She delighted in the English cordiality and

culture, but the demands were heavy, the social forms sometimes trying.

Life in London was interesting, and in its way charming, but she did not

enter into it with quite her husband's enthusiasm and heartiness.  In the

end they canceled all London engagements and quietly set out for

Scotland.  On the way they rested a few days in York, a venerable place

such as Mark Twain always loved to describe.  In a letter to Mrs. Langdon

he wrote:



     For the present we shall remain in this queer old walled town, with

     its crooked, narrow lanes, that tell us of their old day that knew

     no wheeled vehicles; its plaster-and-timber dwellings, with upper

     stories far overhanging the street, and thus marking their date,

     say three hundred years ago; the stately city walls, the castellated

     gates, the ivy-grown, foliage-sheltered, most noble and picturesque

     ruin of St. Mary's Abbey, suggesting their date, say five hundred

     years ago, in the heart of Crusading times and the glory of English

     chivalry and romance; the vast Cathedral of York, with its worn

     carvings and quaintly pictured windows, preaching of still remoter

     days; the outlandish names of streets and courts and byways that

     stand as a record and a memorial, all these centuries, of Danish

     dominion here in still earlier times; the hint here and there of

     King Arthur and his knights and their bloody fights with Saxon

     oppressors round about this old city more than thirteen hundred

     years gone by; and, last of all, the melancholy old stone coffins

     and sculptured inscriptions, a venerable arch and a hoary tower of

     stone that still remain and are kissed by the sun and caressed by

     the shadows every day, just as the sun and the shadows have kissed

     and, caressed them every lagging day since the Roman Emperor's

     soldiers placed them here in the times when Jesus the Son of Mary

     walked the streets of Nazareth a youth, with no more name or fame

     than the Yorkshire boy who is loitering down this street this

     moment.



They reached Edinburgh at the end of July and secluded themselves in

Veitch's family hotel in George Street, intending to see no one.  But

this plan was not a success; the social stress of London had been too

much for Mrs. Clemens, and she collapsed immediately after their arrival.

Clemens was unacquainted in Edinburgh, but remembered that Dr. John

Brown, who had written Rab and His Friend, lived there.  He learned his

address, and that he was still a practising physician.  He walked around

to 23 Rutland Street, and made himself known.  Dr. Brown came forthwith,

and Mrs. Clemens speedily recovered under his able and inspiring

treatment.



The association did not end there.  For nearly a month Dr. Brown was

their daily companion, either at the hotel, or in his own home, or on

protracted drives when he made his round of visits, taking these new

friends along.  Dr. John was beloved by everybody in Edinburgh, everybody

in Scotland, for that matter, and his story of Rab had won him a

following throughout Christendom.  He was an unpretentious sovereign.

Clemens once wrote of him:



     His was a sweet and winning face, as beautiful a face as I have ever

     known.  Reposeful, gentle, benignant; the face of a saint at peace

     with all the world and placidly beaming upon it the sunshine of love

     that filled his heart.



He was the friend of all dogs, and of all people.  It has been told of

him that once, when driving, he thrust his head suddenly out of the

carriage window, then resumed his place with a disappointed look.



"Who was it?" asked his companion.  "Some one you know?"



"No," he said.  "A dog I don't know."



He became the boon companion and playmate of little Susy, then not quite

a year and a half old.  He called her Megalopis, a Greek term, suggested

by her eyes; those deep, burning eyes that seemed always so full of

life's sadder philosophies, and impending tragedy.  In a collection of

Dr. Brown's letters he refers to this period.  In one place he says:



     Had the author of The Innocents Abroad not come to Edinburgh at that

     time we in all human probability might never have met, and what a

     deprivation that would have been to me during the last quarter of a

     century!



And in another place:



     I am attending the wife of Mark Twain.  His real name is Clemens.

     She is a quite lovely little woman, modest and clever, and she has a

     girlie eighteen months old, her ludicrous miniature--and such eyes!



Those playmates, the good doctor and Megalopis, romped together through

the hotel rooms with that complete abandon which few grown persons can

assume in their play with children, and not all children can assume in

their play with grown-ups.  They played "bear," and the "bear" (which was

a very little one, so little that when it stood up behind the sofa you

could just get a glimpse of yellow hair) would lie in wait for her

victim, and spring out and surprise him and throw him into frenzies of

fear.



Almost every day they made his professional rounds with him.  He always

carried a basket of grapes for his patients.  His guests brought along

books to read while they waited.  When he stopped for a call he would

say:



"Entertain yourselves while I go in and reduce the population."



There was much sight-seeing to do in Edinburgh, and they could not quite

escape social affairs.  There were teas and luncheons and dinners with

the Dunfermlines and the Abercrombies, and the MacDonalds, and with

others of those brave clans that no longer slew one another among the

grim northern crags and glens, but were as sociable and entertaining

lords and ladies as ever the southland could produce.  They were very

gentle folk indeed, and Mrs. Clemens, in future years, found her heart

going back oftener to Edinburgh than to any other haven of those first

wanderings.  August 24th she wrote to her sister:



     We leave Edinburgh to-morrow with sincere regret; we have had such a

     delightful stay here--we do so regret leaving Dr. Brown and his

     sister, thinking that we shall probably never see them again [as

     indeed they never did].



They spent a day or two at Glasgow and sailed for Ireland, where they put

in a fortnight, and early in September were back in England again, at

Chester, that queer old city where; from a tower on the wall, Charles I.

read the story of his doom.  Reginald Cholmondeley had invited them to

visit his country seat, beautiful Condover Hall, near Shrewsbury, and in

that lovely retreat they spent some happy, restful days.  Then they were

in the whirl of London once more, but escaped for a fortnight to Paris,

sight-seeing and making purchases for the new home.



Mrs. Clemens was quite ready to return to America, by this time.



     I am blue and cross and homesick [she wrote].  I suppose what makes

     me feel the latter is because we are contemplating to stay in London

     another month.  There has not one sheet of Mr. Clemens's proof come

     yet, and if he goes home before the book is published here he will

     lose his copyright.  And then his friends feel that it will be

     better for him to lecture in London before his book is published,

     not only that it will give him a larger but a more enviable

     reputation.  I would not hesitate one moment if it were simply for

     the money that his copyright will bring him, but if his reputation

     will be better for his staying and lecturing, of course he ought to

     stay....  The truth is, I can't bear the thought of postponing going

     home.



It is rather gratifying to find Olivia Clemens human, like that, now and

then.  Otherwise, on general testimony, one might well be tempted to

regard her as altogether of another race and kind.









XCI



A LONDON LECTURE



Clemens concluded to hasten the homeward journey, but to lecture a few

nights in London before starting.  He would then accompany his little

family home, and return at once to continue the lecture series and

protect his copyright.  This plan was carried out.  In a communication to

the Standard, October 7th, he said:



     SIR,--In view of the prevailing frenzy concerning the Sandwich

     Islands, and the inflamed desire of the public to acquire

     information concerning them, I have thought it well to tarry yet

     another week in England and deliver a lecture upon this absorbing

     subject.  And lest it should be thought unbecoming in me, a

     stranger, to come to the public rescue at such a time, instead of

     leaving to abler hands a matter of so much moment, I desire to

     explain that I do it with the best motives and the most honorable

     intentions.  I do it because I am convinced that no one can allay

     this unwholesome excitement as effectually as I can, and to allay

     it, and allay it as quickly as possible, is surely one thing that is

     absolutely necessary at this juncture.  I feel and know that I am

     equal to this task, for I can allay any kind of an excitement by

     lecturing upon it.  I have saved many communities in this way.  I

     have always been able to paralyze the public interest in any topic

     that I chose to take hold of and elucidate with all my strength.



     Hoping that this explanation will show that if I am seeming to

     intrude I am at least doing it from a high impulse, I am, sir, your

     obedient servant,

                                   MARK TWAIN.





A day later the following announcement appeared:



                         QUEEN'S CONCERT ROOMS,

                            HANOVER SQUARE.



                 MR. GEORGE DOLBY begs to announce that



                             MR. MARK TWAIN



                             WILL DELIVER A

                                LECTURE

                                  OF A

                          HUMOROUS CHARACTER,



                              AS ABOVE, ON

                MONDAY EVENING NEXT, OCTOBER 13th, 1873,

                  AND REPEAT IT IN THE SAME PLACE, ON

                     TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 14th,

                     WEDNESDAY "         "    15th,

                     THURSDAY  "         "    16th,

                     FRIDAY    "         "    17th,



                           At Eight o'Clock,

                                  AND

                   SATURDAY AFTERNOON, OCTOBER 18th,

                           At Three o'Clock.



                                SUBJECT:

              "Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands."



     As Mr. TWAIN has spent several months in these Islands, and is well

     acquainted with his subject, the Lecture may be expected to furnish

     matter of interest.



               STALLS, 5s.       UNRESERVED SEATS, 3s.





The prospect of a lecture from Mark Twain interested the London public.

Those who had not seen him were willing to pay even for that privilege.

The papers were encouraging; Punch sounded a characteristic note:



                    WELCOME TO A LECTURER



    "'Tis time we Twain did show ourselves."  'Twas said

     By Caesar, when one Mark had lost his head:

     By Mark, whose head's quite bright, 'tis said again:

     Therefore, "go with me, friends, to bless this Twain."



                                             --Punch.





Dolby had managed the Dickens lectures, and he proved his sound business

judgment and experience by taking the largest available hall in London

for Mark Twain.



On the evening of October 13th, in the spacious Queen's Concert Rooms,

Hanover Square, Mark Twain delivered his first public address in England.

The subject was "Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands," the old

lecture with which he had made his first great successes.  He was not

introduced.  He appeared on the platform in evening dress, assuming the

character of a manager announcing a disappointment.



Mr. Clemens, he said, had fully expected to be present.  He paused and

loud murmurs arose from the audience.  He lifted his hand and they

subsided.  Then he added, "I am happy to say that Mark Twain is present,

and will now give his lecture."  Whereupon the audience roared its

approval.



It would be hardly an exaggeration to say that his triumph that week was

a regal one.  For five successive nights and a Saturday matinee the

culture and fashion of London thronged to hear him discourse of their

"fellow savages."  It was a lecture event wholly without precedent.  The

lectures of Artemus Ward,--["Artemus the delicious," as Charles Reade

called him, came to London in June, 1866, and gave his "piece" in

Egyptian Hall.  The refined, delicate, intellectual countenance, the

sweet, gave, mouth, from which one might have expected philosophical

lectures retained their seriousness while listeners were convulsed with

laughter.  There was something magical about it.  Every sentence was a

surprise.  He played on his audience as Liszt did on a piano most easily

when most effectively.  Who can ever forget his attempt to stop his

Italian pianist-" a count in his own country, but not much account in

this "-who went on playing loudly while he was trying to tell us an

"affecting incident" that occurred near a small clump of trees shown on

his panorama of the Far West.  The music stormed on-we could see only

lips and arms pathetically moving till the piano suddenly ceased, and we

heard-it was all we heard "and, she fainted in Reginald's arms."  His

tricks have been at tempted in many theaters, but Artemus Ward was

inimitable.  And all the time the man was dying. (Moneure D. Conway,

Autobiography.)]--who had quickly become a favorite in London, had

prepared the public for American platform humor, while the daily doings

of this new American product, as reported by the press, had aroused

interest, or curiosity, to a high pitch.  On no occasion in his own

country had he won such a complete triumph.  The papers for a week

devoted columns of space to appreciation and editorial comment.  The

Daily News of October 17th published a column-and-a-half editorial on

American humor, with Mark Twain's public appearance as the general text.

The Times referred to the continued popularity of the lectures:



     They can't be said to have more than whetted the public appetite, if

     we are to take the fact which has been imparted to us, that the

     holding capacity of the Hanover Square Rooms has been inadequate to

     the demand made upon it every night by Twain's lecturing, as a

     criterion.  The last lecture of this too brief course was delivered

     yesterday before an audience which crammed to discomfort every part

     of the principal apartment of the Hanover Square Rooms....



At the close of yesterday's lecture Mark Twain was so loudly applauded

that he returned to the stage, and, as soon as the audience gave him a

chance of being heard, he said, with much apparent emotion:



     "Ladies and Gentlemen,--I won't keep you one single moment in this

     suffocating atmosphere.  I simply wish to say that this is the last

     lecture I shall have the honor to deliver in London until I return

     from America, four weeks from now.  I only wish to say (here Mr.

     Clemens faltered as if too much affected to proceed) I am very

     grateful.  I do not wish to appear pathetic, but it is something

     magnificent for a stranger to come to the metropolis of the world

     and be received so handsomely as I have been.  I simply thank you."



The Saturday Review devoted a page, and Once a Week, under the head of

"Cracking jokes," gave three pages, to praise of the literary and lecture

methods of the new American humorist.  With the promise of speedy return,

he left London, gave the lecture once in Liverpool, and with his party

(October 21st) set sail for home.



In mid-Atlantic he remembered Dr. Brown, and wrote him:



     We have plowed a long way over the sea, and there's twenty-two

     hundred miles of restless water between us now, besides the railway

     stretch.  And yet you are so present with us, so close to us, that a

     span and a whisper would bridge the distance.



So it would seem that of all the many memories of that eventful half-

year, that of Dr.  Brown was the most present, the most tender.









XCII



FURTHER LONDON LECTURE TRIUMPHS



Orion Clemens records that he met "Sam and Livy" on their arrival from

England, November 2d, and that the president of the Mercantile Library

Association sent up his card "four times," in the hope of getting a

chance to propose a lecture engagement--an incident which impressed Orion

deeply in its evidence of his brother's towering importance.  Orion

himself was by this time engaged in various projects.  He was inventing a

flying-machine, for one thing, writing a Jules Verne story, reading proof

on a New York daily, and contemplating the lecture field.  This great

blaze of international appreciation which had come to the little boy who

used to set type for him in Hannibal, and wash up the forms and cry over

the dirty proof, made him gasp.



They went to see Booth in Hamlet [he says], and Booth sent for Sam to

come behind the scenes, and when Sam proposed to add a part to Hamlet,

the part of a bystander who makes humorous modern comment on the

situations in the play, Booth laughed immoderately.



Proposing a sacrilege like that to Booth!  To what heights had this

printer-pilot, miner-brother not attained!--[This idea of introducing a

new character in Hamlet was really attempted later by Mark Twain, with

the connivance of Joe Goodman [of all men], sad to relate.  So far as is

known it is the one stain on Goodman's literary record.]



Clemens returned immediately to England--the following Saturday, in fact

--and was back in London lecturing again after barely a month's absence.

He gave the "Roughing It" address, this time under the title of "Roughing

It on the Silver Frontier," and if his audiences were any less

enthusiastic, or his houses less crowded than before, the newspapers of

that day have left no record of it.  It was the height of the season now,

and being free to do so, he threw himself into the whirl of it, and for

two months, beyond doubt, was the most talked-of figure in London.  The

Athenaeum Club made him a visiting member (an honor considered next to

knighthood); Punch quoted him; societies banqueted him; his apartments,

as before; were besieged by callers.  Afternoons one was likely to find

him in "Poets' Corner" of the Langham smoking-room, with a group of

London and American authors--Reade, Collins, Miller, and the others--

frankly rioting in his bold fancies.  Charles Warren Stoddard was in

London at the time, and acted as his secretary.  Stoddard was a gentle

poet, a delightful fellow, and Clemens was very fond of him.  His only

complaint of Stoddard was that he did not laugh enough at his humorous

yarns.  Clemens once said:



"Dolby and I used to come in after the lecture, or perhaps after being

out to some dinner, and we liked to sit down and talk it over and tell

yarns, and we expected Stoddard to laugh at them, but Stoddard would lie

there on the couch and snore.  Otherwise, as a secretary, he was

perfect."



The great Tichborne trial was in progress then, and the spectacle of an

illiterate impostor trying to establish his claim as the rightful heir to

a great estate was highly diverting to Mark Twain.--[In a letter of this

period he speaks of having attended one of the Claimant's "Evenings."]--

He wanted to preserve the evidence as future literary material, and

Stoddard day after day patiently collected the news reports and neatly

pasted them into scrap-books, where they still rest, a complete record of

that now forgotten farce.  The Tichborne trial recalled to Mark Twain the

claimant in the Lampton family, who from time to time wrote him long

letters, urging him to join in the effort to establish his rights to the

earldom of Durham.  This American claimant was a distant cousin, who had

"somehow gotten hold of, or had fabricated a full set of documents."



Colonel Henry Watterson, just quoted (also a Lampton connection), adds:



     During the Tichborne trial Mark and I were in London, and one day he

     said to me: "I have investigated this Durham business down at the

     Herald's office.  There is nothing to it.  The Lamptons passed out

     of the earldom of Durham a hundred years ago.  There were never any

     estates; the title lapsed; the present earldom is a new creation,

     not in the same family at all.  But I'll tell you what: if you'll

     put up $500, I'll put up $500 more; we'll bring our chap over here

     and set him in as claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy's fat boy

     won't be a marker to him."



It was a characteristic Mark Twain project, one of the sort he never

earned out in reality, but loved to follow in fancy, and with the pen

sometimes.  The "Rightful Earl of Durham" continued to send letters for a

long time after that (some of them still exist), but he did not establish

his claim.  No one but Mark Twain ever really got anything out of it.

Like the Tennessee land, it furnished material by and by for a book.

Colonel Watterson goes on to say that Clemens was only joking about

having looked up the matter in the peerage; that he hadn't really looked

it up at all, and that the earldom lies still in the Lampton family.



Another of Clemens's friends in London at this time was Prentice Mulford,

of California.  In later years Mulford acquired a wide reputation for his

optimistic and practical psychologies.  Through them he lifted himself

out of the slough of despond, and he sought to extend a helping hand to

others.  His "White Cross Library" had a wide reading and a wide

influence; perhaps has to this day.  But in 1873 Mulford had not found

the tangibility of thought, the secret of strength; he was only finding

it, maybe, in his frank acknowledgment of shortcoming:



     Now, Mark, I am down-very much down at present; you are up-where you

     deserve to be.  I can't ask this on the score of any past favors,

     for there have been none.  I have not always spoken of you in terms

     of extravagant praise; have sometimes criticized you, which was due,

     I suppose, in part to an envious spirit.  I am simply human.  Some

     people in the same profession say they entertain no jealousy of

     those more successful.  I can't.  They are divine; I am not.



It was only that he wished Clemens to speak a word for him to Routledge,

to get him a hearing for his work.  He adds:



     I shall be up myself some day, although my line is far apart from

     yours.  Whether you can do anything that I ask of you or not, I

     shall be happy then, as I would be now, to do you any just and right

     service....  Perhaps I have mistaken my vocation.  Certainly, if I

     was back with my rocker on the Tuolumne, I'd make it rattle livelier

     than ever I did before.  I have occasionally thought of London

     Bridge, but the Thames is now so d---d cold and dirty, and besides I

     can swim, and any attempt at drowning would, through the mere

     instinct of self-preservation, only result in my swimming ashore and

     ruining my best clothes; wherefore I should be worse off than ever.



Of course Mark Twain granted the favor Mulford asked, and a great deal

more, no doubt, for that was his way.  Mulford came up, as he had

prophesied, but the sea in due time claimed him, though not in the way he

had contemplated.  Years after he was one day found drifting off the

shores of Long Island in an open boat, dead.



Clemens made a number of notable dinner speeches during this second

London lecture period.  His response to the toast of the "Ladies,"

delivered at the annual dinner of the Scottish Corporation of London, was

the sensational event of the evening.



He was obliged to decline an invitation to the Lord Mayor's dinner,

whereupon his Lordship wrote to urge him to be present at least at the

finale, when the welcome would be "none the less hearty," and bespoke his

attendance for any future dinners.



Clemens lectured steadily at the Hanover Square Rooms during the two

months of his stay in London, and it was only toward the end of this

astonishing engagement that the audience began to show any sign of

diminishing.  Early in January he wrote to Twichell:



I am not going to the provinces because I cannot get halls that are large

enough.  I always felt cramped in the Hanover Square Rooms, but I find

that everybody here speaks with awe and respect of that prodigious hall

and wonders that I could fill it so long.



I am hoping to be back in twenty days, but I have so much to go home to

and enjoy with a jubilant joy that it hardly seems possible that it can

come to pass in so uncertain a world as this.



In the same letter he speaks of attending an exhibition of Landseer's

paintings at the Royal Academy:



     Ah, they are wonderfully beautiful!  There are such rich moonlights

     and dusks in the "Challenge" and the "Combat," and in that long

     flight of birds across a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or

     sunrise, for no man can ever tell t'other from which in a picture,

     except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the

     water), and there is such a grave analytical profundity in the face

     of the connoisseurs; and such pathos in the picture of a fawn

     suckling its dead mother on a snowy waste, with only the blood in

     the footprints to hint that she is not asleep.  And the way that he

     makes animals' flesh and blood, insomuch that if the room were

     darkened ever so little, and a motionless living animal placed

     beside the painted one, no man could tell which was which.



I interrupted myself here, to drop a line to Shirley Brooks and suggest a

cartoon for Punch.  It was this: in one of the Academy saloons (in a

suite where these pictures are) a fine bust of Landseer stands on a

pedestal in the center of the room.  I suggested that some of Landseer's

best known animals be represented as having come down out of their frames

in the moonlight and grouped themselves about the bust in mourning

attitudes.



He sailed January 13 (1874.), on the Paythia, and two weeks later was at

home, where all was going well.  The Gilded Age had been issued a day or

two before Christmas, and was already in its third edition.  By the end

of January 26,000 copies had been sold, a sale that had increased to

40,000 a month later.  The new house was progressing, though it was by no

means finished.  Mrs. Clemens was in good health.  Little Susy was full

of such American activities as to earn the name of "The Modoc."  The

promise of the year was bright.









XCIII



THE REAL COLONEL SELLERS-GOLDEN DAYS



There are bound to be vexations, flies in the ointment, as we say.  It

was Warner who conferred the name of Eschol Sellers on the chief figure

of the collaborated novel.  Warner had known it as the name of an obscure

person, or perhaps he had only heard of it.  At all events, it seemed a

good one for the character and had been adopted.  But behold, the book

had been issued but a little while when there rose "out of the vasty

deeps" a genuine Eschol Sellers, who was a very respectable person.  He

was a stout, prosperous-looking man, gray and about fifty-five years old.

He came into the American Publishing Company offices and asked permission

to look at the book.  Mr. Bliss was out at the moment, but presently

arrived.  The visitor rose and introduced himself.



"My name is Eschol Sellers," he said.  "You have used it in one of your

publications.  It has brought upon me a lot of ridicule.  My people wish

me to sue you for $10,000 damages."



He had documents to prove his identity, and there was only one thing to

be done; he must be satisfied.  Bliss agreed to recall as many of the

offending volumes as possible and change the name on the plates.  He

contacted the authors, and the name Beriah was substituted for the

offending Eschol.  It turned out that the real Sellers family was a large

one, and that the given name Eschol was not uncommon in its several

branches.  This particular Eschol Sellers, curiously enough, was an

inventor and a promoter, though of a much more substantial sort than his

fiction namesake.  He was also a painter of considerable merit, a writer

and an antiquarian.  He was said to have been a grandson of the famous

painter, Rembrandt Peale.



Clemens vowed that he would not lecture in America that winter.  The

irrepressible Redpath besieged him as usual, and at the end of January

Clemens telegraphed him, as he thought, finally.  Following it with a

letter of explanation, he added:



"I said to her, 'There isn't money enough in America to hire me to leave

you for one day.'"



But Redpath was a persistent devil.  He used arguments and held out

inducements which even Mrs. Clemens thought should not be resisted, and

Clemens yielded from time to time, and gave a lecture here and there

during February.  Finally, on the 3d of March (1879.) he telegraphed his

tormentor:



"Why don't you congratulate me?  I never expect to stand on a lecture

platform again after Thursday night."



Howells tells delightfully of a visit which he and Aldrich paid to

Hartford just at this period.  Aldrich went to visit Clemens and Howells

to visit Charles Dudley Warner, Clemens coming as far as Springfield to

welcome them.



     In the good-fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two such

     days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round.  There was

     constant running in and out of friendly houses where the lively

     hosts and guests called one another by their Christian names or

     nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at

     doors.  Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he

     satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another

     sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which

     enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance.



Howells tells how Clemens dilated on the advantages of subscription sale

over the usual methods of publication, and urged the two Boston authors

to prepare something which canvassers could handle.



"Why, any other means of bringing out a book is privately printing it,"

he declared, and added that his subscription books in Bliss's hands sold

right along, "just like the Bible."



On the way back to Boston Howells and Aldrich planned a subscription book

which would sell straight along, like the Bible.  It was to be called

"Twelve Memorable Murders."  They had dreamed two or three fortunes by

the time they had reached Boston, but the project ended there.



"We never killed a single soul," Howells said once to the writer of this

memoir.



Clemens was always urging Howells to visit him after that.  He offered

all sorts of inducements.



     You will find us the most reasonable people in the world.  We had

     thought of precipitating upon you, George Warner and his wife one

     day, Twichell and his jewel of a wife another day, and Charles

     Perkins and wife another.  Only those--simply members of our family

     they are.  But I'll close the door against them all, which will

     "fix" all of the lot except Twichell, who will no more hesitate to

     climb in the back window than nothing.



     And you shall go to bed when you please, get up when you please,

     talk when you please, read when you please.



A little later he was urging Howells or Aldrich, or both of them; to come

to Hartford to live.



     Mr. Hall, who lives in the house next to Mrs. Stowe's (just where we

     drive in to go to our new house), will sell for $16,000 or $17,000.

     You can do your work just as well here as in Cambridge, can't you?

     Come!  Will one of you boys buy that house?  Now, say yes.



Certainly those were golden, blessed days, and perhaps, as Howells says,

the sun does not shine on their like any more--not in Hartford, at least,

for the old group that made them no longer assembles there.  Hartford

about this time became a sort of shrine for all literary visitors, and

for other notables as well, whether of America or from overseas.  It was

the half-way place between Boston and New York, and pilgrims going in

either direction rested there.  It is said that travelers arriving in

America, were apt to remember two things they wished to see: Niagara

Falls and Mark Twain.  But the Falls had no such recent advertising

advantage as that spectacular success in London.  Visitors were apt to

begin in Hartford.



Howells went with considerable frequency after that, or rather with

regularity, twice a year, or oftener, and his coming was always hailed

with great rejoicing.  They visited and ate around at one place and

another among that pleasant circle of friends.  But they were happiest

afterward together, Clemens smoking continually, "soothing his tense

nerves with a mild hot Scotch," says Howells, "while we both talked, and

talked, and tasked of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and the

waters under the earth.  After two days of this talk I would come away

hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust-shells

which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of summer."

Sometimes Clemens told the story of his early life, "the inexhaustible,

the fairy, the Arabian Nights story, which I could never tire of even

when it began to be told over again."









XCIV



BEGINNING "TOM SAWYER"



The Clemens household went to Quarry Farm in April, leaving the new house

once more in the hands of the architect and builders.  It was costing a

vast sum of money, and there was a financial stress upon land.  Mrs.

Clemens, always prudent, became a little uneasy at times, though without

warrant in those days, for her business statement showed that her

holdings were only a little less than a quarter of a million in her own

right, while her husband's books and lectures had been highly

remunerative, and would be more so.  They were justified in living in

ample, even luxurious comfort, and how free from financial worries they

could have lived for the rest of their days!



Clemens, realizing his happiness, wrote Dr. Brown:



Indeed I am thankful for the wifey and the child, and if there is one

individual creature on all this footstool who is more thoroughly and

uniformly and, unceasingly happy than I am I defy the world to produce

him and prove him.  In my opinion he don't exist.  I was a mighty rough,

coarse, unpromising subject when Livy took charge of me, four years ago,

and I may still be to the rest of the world, but not to her.  She has

made a very creditable job of me.



Truly fortune not only smiled, but laughed.  Every mail brought great

bundles of letters that sang his praises.  Robert Watt, who had

translated his books into Danish, wrote of their wide popularity among

his people.  Madame Blanc (Th. Bentzon), who as early as 1872 had

translated The Jumping Frog into French, and published it, with extended

comment on the author and his work, in the 'Revue des deux mondes', was

said to be preparing a review of 'The Gilded Age'.  All the world seemed

ready to do him honor.



Of course, one must always pay the price, usually a vexatious one.  Bores

stopped him on the street to repeat ancient and witless stories.

Invented anecdotes, some of them exasperating ones, went the rounds of

the press.  Impostors in distant localities personated him, or claimed to

be near relatives, and obtained favors, sometimes money, in his name.

Trivial letters, seeking benefactions of every kind, took the savor from

his daily mail.  Letters from literary aspirants were so numerous that he

prepared a "form" letter of reply:



DEAR SIR OR MADAM,--Experience has not taught me very much, still it has

taught me that it is not wise to criticize a piece of literature, except

to an enemy of the person who wrote it; then if you praise it that enemy

admires--you for your honest manliness, and if you dispraise it he

admires you for your sound judgment.



                              Yours truly,    S.  L.  C.



Even Orion, now in Keokuk on a chicken farm, pursued him with manuscripts

and proposals of schemes.  Clemens had bought this farm for Orion, who

had counted on large and quick returns, but was planning new enterprises

before the first eggs were hatched.  Orion Clemens was as delightful a

character as was ever created in fiction, but he must have been a trial

now and then to Mark Twain.  We may gather something of this from a

letter written by the latter to his mother and sister at this period:



     I can't "encourage" Orion.  Nobody can do that conscientiously, for

     the reason that before one's letter has time to reach him he is off

     on some new wild-goose chase.  Would you encourage in literature a

     man who the older he grows the worse he writes?



     I cannot encourage him to try the ministry, because he would change

     his religion so fast that he would have to keep a traveling agent

     under wages to go ahead of him to engage pulpits and board for him.



     I cannot conscientiously encourage him to do anything but potter

     around his little farm and put in his odd hours contriving new and

     impossible projects at the rate of 365 a year which is his customary

     average.  He says he did well in Hannibal!  Now there is a man who

     ought to be entirely satisfied with the grandeurs, emoluments, and

     activities of a hen farm.



     If you ask me to pity Orion I can do that.  I can do it every day

     and all day long.  But one can't "encourage" quicksilver; because

     the instant you put your finger on it, it isn't there.  No, I am

     saying too much.  He does stick to his literary and legal

     aspirations, and he naturally would elect the very two things which

     he is wholly and preposterously unfitted for.  If I ever become

     able, I mean to put Orion on a regular pension without revealing the

     fact that it is a pension.



     He did presently allow the pension, a liberal one, which continued

     until neither Orion Clemens nor his wife had further earthly need of

     it.



Mark Twain for some time had contemplated one of the books that will

longest preserve his memory, 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'.  The success

of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for other autobiographical

material, and he remembered those days along the river-front in Hannibal

--his skylarking with Tom Blankenship, the Bowen boys, John Briggs, and

the rest.  He had recognized these things as material--inviting material

it was--and now in the cool luxury of Quarry Farm he set himself to spin

the fabric of youth.



He found summer-time always his best period for literary effort, and on a

hillside just by the old quarry, Mrs. Crane had built for him that spring

a study--a little room of windows, somewhat suggestive of a pilot-house--

overlooking the long sweep of grass and the dreamlike city below.  Vines

were planted that in the course of time would cover and embower it; there

was a tiny fireplace for chilly days.  To Twichell, of his new retreat,

Clemens wrote:



It is the loveliest study you ever saw.  It is octagonal, with a peaked

roof, each face filled with a spacious window, and it sits perched in

complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of

valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills.  It is a

cozy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four

chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the

lightning flashes behind the hills beyond, and the rain beats upon the

roof over my head, imagine the luxury of it.



He worked steadily there that summer.  He would go up mornings, after

breakfast, remaining until nearly dinner-time, say until five o'clock or

after, for it was not his habit to eat luncheon.  Other members of the

family did not venture near the place, and if he was urgently wanted they

blew a horn.  Each evening he brought down his day's performance to read

to the assembled family.  He felt the need of audience and approval.

Usually he earned the latter, but not always.  Once, when for a day he

put aside other matters to record a young undertaker's love-affair, and

brought down the result in the evening, fairly bubbling with the joy of

it, he met with a surprise.  The tale was a ghastly burlesque, its humor

of the most disheartening, unsavory sort.  No one spoke during the

reading, nobody laughed: The air was thick with disapproval.  His voice

lagged and faltered toward the end.  When he finished there was heavy

silence.  Mrs. Clemens was the only one who could speak:



"Youth, let's walk a little," she said.



The "Undertaker's Love Story" is still among the manuscripts of that

period, but it is unlikely that it will ever see the light of print.

--[This tale bears no relation to "The Undertaker's Story" in Sketches

New and Old.]



The Tom Sawyer tale progressed steadily and satisfactorily.  Clemens

wrote Dr. Brown:



     I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average,

     for some time now, on a book (a story), and consequently  have been

     so wrapped up in it, and dead to everything else, that I have fallen

     mighty short in letter-writing....



     On hot days I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with

     brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the

     same thin linen we make shirts of.



He incloses some photographs in this letter.



     The group [he says] represents the vine-clad carriageway in front of

     the farm-house.  On the left is Megalopis sitting in the lap of her

     German nurse-maid.  I am sitting behind them.  Mrs. Crane is in the

     center.  Mr. Crane next to her.  Then Mrs. Clemens and the new baby.

     Her Irish nurse stands at her back.  Then comes the table waitress,

     a young negro girl, born free.  Next to her is Auntie Cord (a

     fragment of whose history I have just sent to a magazine).  She is

     the cook; was in slavery more than forty years; and the self-

     satisfied wench, the last of the group, is the little baby's

     American nurse-maid.  In the middle distance my mother-in-law's

     coachman (up on errand) has taken a position unsolicited to help out

     the picture.  No, that is not true.  He was waiting there a minute

     or two before the photographer came.  In the extreme background,

     under the archway, you glimpse my study.



The "new baby," "Bay," as they came to call her, was another little

daughter, born in June, a happy, healthy addition to the household.

In a letter written to Twichell we get a sweet summer picture of this

period, particularly of little sunny-haired, two-year-old Susy.



     There is nothing selfish about the Modoc.  She is fascinated with

     the new baby.  The Modoc rips and tears around outdoors most of the

     time, and consequently is as hard as a pineknot and as brown as an

     Indian.  She is bosom friend to all the chickens, ducks, turkeys,

     and guinea-hens on the place.  Yesterday, as she marched along the

     winding path that leads up the hill through the red-clover beds to

     the summer-house, there was a long procession of these fowls

     stringing contentedly after her, led by a stately rooster, who can

     look over the Modoc's head.  The devotion of these vassals has been

     purchased with daily largess of Indian meal, and so the Modoc,

     attended by her body-guard, moves in state wherever she goes.



There were days, mainly Sundays, when he did not work at all; peaceful

days of lying fallow, dreaming in shady places, drowsily watching little

Susy, or reading with Mrs. Clemens.  Howells's "Foregone Conclusion" was

running in the Atlantic that year, and they delighted in it.  Clemens

wrote the author:



     I should think that this must be the daintiest, truest, most

     admirable workmanship that was ever put on a story.  The creatures

     of God do not act out their natures more unerringly than yours do.

     If your genuine stories can die I wonder by what right old Walter

     Scott's artificialities shall continue to live.



At other times he found comfort in the society of Theodore Crane.  These

two were always fond of each other, and often read together the books in

which they were mutually interested.  They had portable-hammock

arrangements, which they placed side by side on the lawn, and read and

discussed through summer afternoons.  The 'Mutineers of the Bounty' was

one of the books they liked best, and there was a story of an Iceland

farmer, a human document, that had an unfading interest.  Also there were

certain articles in old numbers of the Atlantic that they read and

reread.  'Pepys' Diary', 'Two Years Before the Mast', and a book on the

Andes were reliable favorites.  Mark Twain read not so many books, but

read a few books often.  Those named were among the literature he asked

for each year of his return to Quarry Farm.  Without them, the farm and

the summer would not be the same.



Then there was 'Lecky's History of European Morals'; there were periods

when they read Lecky avidly and discussed it in original and unorthodox

ways.  Mark Twain found an echo of his own philosophies in Lecky.  He

made frequent marginal notes along the pages of the world's moral

history--notes not always quotable in the family circle.  Mainly,

however, they were short, crisp interjections of assent or disapproval.

In one place Lecky refers to those who have undertaken to prove that all

our morality is a product of experience, holding that a desire to obtain

happiness and to avoid pain is the only possible motive to action; the

reason, and the only reason, why we should perform virtuous actions being

"that on the whole such a course will bring us the greatest amount of

happiness."  Clemens has indorsed these philosophies by writing on the

margin, "Sound and true."  It was the philosophy which he himself would

always hold (though, apparently, never live by), and in the end would

embody a volume of his own.--[What Is Man?  Privately printed in 1906.]--

In another place Lecky, himself speaking, says:



     Fortunately we are all dependent for many of our pleasures on

     others.  Co-operation and organization are essential to our

     happiness, and these are impossible without some restraint being

     placed upon our appetites.  Laws are made to secure this restraint,

     and being sustained by rewards, and punishments they make it the

     interest of the individual to regard that of the community.



"Correct!" comments Clemens.  "He has proceeded from unreasoned

selfishness to reasoned selfishness.  All our acts, reasoned and

unreasoned, are selfish."  It was a conclusion he logically never

departed from; not the happiest one, it would seem, at first glance, but

one easier to deny than to disprove.



On the back of an old envelope Mark Twain set down his literary

declaration of this period.



"I like history, biography, travels, curious facts and strange

happenings, and science.  And I detest novels, poetry, and theology."



But of course the novels of Howells would be excepted; Lecky was not

theology, but the history of it; his taste for poetry would develop

later, though it would never become a fixed quantity, as was his devotion

to history and science.  His interest in these amounted to a passion.









XCV



AN "ATLANTIC" STORY AND A PLAY



The reference to "Auntie Cord" in the letter to Dr. Brown brings us to

Mark Twain's first contribution to the Atlantic Monthly.  Howells in his

Recollections of his Atlantic editorship, after referring to certain

Western contributors, says:



     Later came Mark Twain, originally of Missouri, but then

     provisionally of Hartford, and now ultimately of the solar system,

     not to say the universe.  He came first with "A True Story," one of

     those noble pieces of humanity with which the South has atoned

     chiefly, if not solely, through him for all its despite to the

     negro.



Clemens had long aspired to appear in the Atlantic, but such was his own

rating of his literature that he hardly hoped to qualify for its pages.

Twichell remembers his "mingled astonishment and triumph" when he was

invited to send something to the magazine.



He was obliged to "send something" once or twice before the acceptance of

"A True Story," the narrative of Auntie Cord, and even this acceptance

brought with it the return of a fable which had accompanied it, with the

explanation that a fable like that would disqualify the magazine for

every denominational reader, though Howells hastened to express his own

joy in it, having been particularly touched by the author's reference to

Sisyphus and Atlas as ancestors of the tumble-bug.  The "True Story," he

said, with its "realest king of black talk," won him, and a few days

later he wrote again: "This little story delights me more and more.  I

wish you had about forty of 'em."



And so, modestly enough, as became him, for the story was of the

simplest, most unpretentious sort, Mark Twain entered into the school of

the elect.



In his letter to Howells, accompanying the MS., the author said:



     I inclose also "A True Story," which has no humor in it.  You can

     pay as lightly as you choose for that if you want it, for it is

     rather out of my line.  I have not altered the old colored woman's

     story, except to begin it at the beginning, instead of the middle,

     as she did--and traveled both ways.



Howells in his Recollections tells of the business anxiety in the

Atlantic office in the effort to estimate the story's pecuniary value.

Clemens and Harte had raised literary rates enormously; the latter was

reputed to have received as much as five cents a word from affluent

newspapers!  But the Atlantic was poor, and when sixty dollars was

finally decided upon for the three pages (about two and a half cents a

word) the rate was regarded as handsome--without precedent in Atlantic

history.  Howells adds that as much as forty times this amount was

sometimes offered to Mark Twain in later years.  Even in '74 he had

received a much higher rate than that offered by the Atlantic,--but no

acceptance, then, or later, ever made him happier, or seemed more richly

rewarded.



"A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It" was precisely what

it claimed to be.--[Atlantic Monthly for November, 1874; also included

in Sketches New and Old.]--Auntie Cord, the Auntie Rachel of that tale,

cook at Quarry Farm, was a Virginia negress who had been twice sold as a

slave, and was proud of the fact; particularly proud that she had brought

$1,000 on the block.  All her children had been sold away from her, but

it was a long time ago, and now at sixty she was fat and seemingly

without care.  She had told her story to Mrs. Crane, who had more than

once tried to persuade her to tell it to Clemens; but Auntie Cord was

reluctant.  One evening, however, when the family sat on the front

veranda in the moonlight, looking down on the picture city, as was their

habit, Auntie Cord came around to say good night, and Clemens engaged her

in conversation.  He led up to her story, and almost before she knew it

she was seated at his feet telling the strange tale in almost the exact

words in which it was set down by him next morning.  It gave Mark Twain a

chance to exercise two of his chief gifts--transcription and portrayal.

He was always greater at these things than at invention.  Auntie Cord's

story is a little masterpiece.



He wished to do more with Auntie Cord and her associates of the farm, for

they were extraordinarily interesting.  Two other negroes on the place,

John Lewis and his wife (we shall hear notably of Lewis later), were not

always on terms of amity with Auntie Cord.  They disagreed on religion,

and there were frequent battles in the kitchen.  These depressed the

mistress of the house, but they gave only joy to Mark Twain.  His

Southern raising had given him an understanding of their humors, their

native emotions which made these riots a spiritual gratification.  He

would slip around among the shrubbery and listen to the noise and strife

of battle, and hug himself with delight.  Sometimes they resorted to

missiles--stones, tinware--even dressed poultry which Auntie Cord was

preparing for the oven.  Lewis was very black, Auntie Cord was a bright

mulatto, Lewis's' wife several shades lighter.  Wherever the discussion

began it promptly shaded off toward the color-line and insult.  Auntie

Cord was a Methodist; Lewis was a Dunkard.  Auntie Cord was ignorant and

dogmatic; Lewis could read and was intelligent.  Theology invariably led

to personality, and eventually to epithets, crockery, geology, and

victuals.  How the greatest joker of the age did enjoy that summer

warfare!



The fun was not all one-sided.  An incident of that summer probably

furnished more enjoyment for the colored members of the household than it

did for Mark Twain.  Lewis had some fowls, and among them was a

particularly pestiferous guinea-hen that used to get up at three in the

morning and go around making the kind of a noise that a guinea-hen must

like and is willing to get up early to hear.  Mark Twain did not care for

it.  He stood it as long as he could one morning, then crept softly from

the house to stop it.



It was a clear, bright night; locating the guinea-hen, he slipped up

stealthily with a stout stick.  The bird was pouring out its heart,

tearing the moonlight to tatters.  Stealing up close, Clemens made a

vicious swing with his bludgeon, but just then the guinea stepped forward

a little, and he missed.  The stroke and his explosion frightened the

fowl, and it started to run.  Clemens, with his mind now on the single

purpose of revenge, started after it.  Around the trees, along the paths,

up and down the lawn, through gates and across the garden, out over the

fields, they raced, "pursuer and pursued."  The guinea nor longer sang,

and Clemens was presently too exhausted to swear.  Hour after hour the

silent, deadly hunt continued, both stopping to rest at intervals; then

up again and away.  It was like something in a dream.  It was nearly

breakfast-time when he dragged himself into the house at last, and the

guinea was resting and panting under a currant-bush.  Later in the day

Clemens gave orders to Lewis to "kill and eat that guinea-hen," which

Lewis did.  Clemens himself had then never eaten a guinea, but some years

later, in Paris, when the delicious breast of one of those fowls was

served him, he remembered and said:



"And to think, after chasing that creature all night, John Lewis got to

eat him instead of me."



The interest in Tom and Huck, or the inspiration for their adventures,

gave out at last, or was superseded by a more immediate demand.  As early

as May, Goodman, in San Francisco, had seen a play announced there,

presenting the character of Colonel Sellers, dramatized by Gilbert S.

Densmore and played by John T.  Raymond.  Goodman immediately wrote

Clemens; also a letter came from Warner, in Hartford, who had noticed in

San Francisco papers announcements of the play.  Of course Clemens would

take action immediately; he telegraphed, enjoining the performance.  Then

began a correspondence with the dramatist and actor.  This in time

resulted in an amicable arrangement, by which the dramatist agreed to

dispose of his version to Clemens.  Clemens did not wait for it to

arrive, but began immediately a version of his own.  Just how much or how

little of Densmore's work found its way into the completed play, as

presented by Raymond later, cannot be known now.  Howells conveys the

impression that Clemens had no hand in its authorship beyond the

character of Sellers as taken from the book.  But in a letter still

extant, which Clemens wrote to Howells at the time, he says:



     I worked a month on my play, and launched it in New York last

     Wednesday.  I believe it will go.  The newspapers have been

     complimentary.  It is simply a setting for one character, Colonel

     Sellers.  As a play I guess it will not bear critical assault in

     force.



The Warners are as charming as ever.  They go shortly to the devil for a

year--that is, to Egypt.



Raymond, in a letter which he wrote to the Sun, November 3, 1874,

declared that "not one line" of Densmore's dramatization was used,

"except that which was taken bodily from The Gilded Age."  During the

newspaper discussion of the matter, Clemens himself prepared a letter for

the Hartford Post.  This letter was suppressed, but it still exists.  In

it he says:



     I entirely rewrote the play three separate and distinct times.  I

     had expected to use little of his [Densmore's] language and but

     little of his plot.  I do not think there are now twenty sentences

     of Mr. Densmore's in the play, but I used so much of his plot that I

     wrote and told him that I should pay him about as much more as I had

     already paid him in case the play proved a success.  I shall keep my

     word.



This letter, written while the matter was fresh in his mind, is

undoubtedly in accordance with the facts.  That Densmore was fully

satisfied may be gathered from an acknowledgment, in which he says:

"Your letter reached me on the ad, with check.  In this place permit me

to thank you for the very handsome manner in which you have acted in this

matter."



Warner, meantime, realizing that the play was constructed almost entirely

of the Mark Twain chapters of the book, agreed that his collaborator

should undertake the work and financial responsibilities of the dramatic

venture and reap such rewards as might result.  Various stories have been

told of this matter, most of them untrue.  There was no bitterness

between the friends, no semblance of an estrangement of any sort.  Warner

very generously and promptly admitted that he was not concerned with the

play, its authorship, or its profits, whatever the latter might amount

to.  Moreover, Warner was going to Egypt very soon, and his labors and

responsibilities were doubly sufficient as they stood.



Clemens's estimate of the play as a dramatic composition was correct

enough, but the public liked it, and it was a financial success from the

start.  He employed a representative to travel with Raymond, to assist in

the management and in the division of spoil.  The agent had instructions

to mail a card every day, stating the amount of his share in the profits.

Howells once arrived in Hartford just when this postal tide of fortune

was at its flood:



One hundred and fifty dollars--two hundred dollars--three hundred dollars

were the gay figures which they bore, and which he flaunted in the air,

before he sat down at the table, or rose from it to brandish, and then,

flinging his napkin in the chair, walked up and down to exult in.



Once, in later years, referring to the matter, Howells said

"He was never a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and

he wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream."

Which was a true word.  Mark Twain with money was like a child with a

heap of bright pebbles, ready to pile up more and still more, then

presently to throw them all away and begin gathering anew.









XCVI



THE NEW HOME



The Clemenses returned to Hartford to find their new house "ready,"

though still full of workmen, decorators, plumbers, and such other

minions of labor as make life miserable to those with ambitions for new

or improved habitations.  The carpenters were still on the lower floor,

but the family moved in and camped about in rooms up-stairs that were

more or less free from the invader.  They had stopped in New York ten

days to buy carpets and furnishings, and these began to arrive, with no

particular place to put them; but the owners were excited and happy with

it all, for it was the pleasant season of the year, and all the new

features of the house were fascinating, while the daily progress of the

decorators furnished a fresh surprise when they roamed through the rooms

at evening.  Mrs. Clemens wrote home:



     We are perfectly delighted with everything here and do so want you

     all to see it.



Her husband, as he was likely to do, picked up the letter and finished

it:



     Livy appoints me to finish this; but how can a headless man perform

     an intelligent function?  I have been bully-ragged all day by the

     builder, by his foreman, by the architect, by the tapestry devil who

     is to upholster the furniture, by the idiot who is putting down the

     carpets, by the scoundrel who is setting up the billiard-table (and

     has left the balls in New York), by the wildcat who is sodding the

     ground and finishing the driveway (after the sun went down), by a

     book agent, whose body is in the back yard and the coroner notified.

     Just think of this thing going on the whole day long, and I a man

     who loathes details with all his heart!  But I haven't lost my

     temper, and I've made Livy lie down most of the time; could anybody

     make her lie down all the time?



Warner wrote from Egypt expressing sympathy for their unfurnished state

of affairs, but added, "I would rather fit out three houses and fill them

with furniture than to fit out one 'dahabiyeh'."  Warner was at that

moment undertaking his charmingly remembered trip up the Nile.



The new home was not entirely done for a long time.  One never knows when

a big house like that--or a little house, for that matters done.  But

they were settled at last, with all their beautiful things in place; and

perhaps there have been richer homes, possibly more artistic ones, but

there has never been a more charming home, within or without, than that

one.



So many frequenters have tried to express the charm of that household.

None of them has quite succeeded, for it lay not so much in its

arrangement of rooms or their decorations or their outlook, though these

were all beautiful enough, but rather in the personality, the atmosphere;

and these are elusive things to convey in words.  We can only see and

feel and recognize; we cannot translate them.  Even Howells, with his

subtle touch, can present only an aspect here and there; an essence, as

it were, from a happy garden, rather than the fullness of its bloom.



As Mark Twain was unlike any other man that ever lived, so his house was

unlike any other house ever built.  People asked him why he built the

kitchen toward the street, and he said:



"So the servants can see the circus go by without running out into the

front yard."



But this was probably an after-thought.  The kitchen end of the house

extended toward Farmington Avenue, but it was by no means unbeautiful.

It was a pleasing detail of the general scheme.  The main entrance faced

at right angles with the street and opened to a spacious hall.  In turn,

the hall opened to a parlor, where there was a grand piano, and to the

dining-room and library, and the library opened to a little conservatory,

semicircular in form, of a design invented by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Says Howells:



     The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines climbed

     up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of the

     fountain companied by Callas and other waterloving lilies.  There,

     while we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled

     the pretty bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the

     delicate accents of its varied blossoms.



In the library was an old carved mantel which Clemens and his wife had

bought in Scotland, salvage from a dismantled castle, and across the top

of the fireplace a plate of brass with the motto, "The ornament of a

house is the friends that frequent it," surely never more appropriately

inscribed.



There was the mahogany room, a large bedroom on the ground floor, and

upstairs were other spacious bedrooms and many baths, while everywhere

were Oriental rugs and draperies, and statuary and paintings.  There was

a fireplace under a window, after the English pattern, so that in winter-

time one could at the same moment watch the blaze and the falling snow.

The library windows looked out over the valley with the little stream in

it, and through and across the tree-tops.  At the top of the house was

what became Clemens's favorite retreat, the billiard-room, and here and

there were unexpected little balconies, which one could step out upon for

the view.



Below was a wide, covered veranda, the "ombra," as they called it,

secluded from the public eye--a favorite family gathering-place on

pleasant days.



But a house might easily have all these things without being more than

usually attractive, and a house with a great deal less might have been as

full of charm; only it seemed just the proper setting for that particular

household, and undoubtedly it acquired the personality of its occupants.



Howells assures us that there never was another home like it, and we may

accept his statement.  It was unique.  It was the home of one of the most

unusual and unaccountable personalities in the world, yet was perfectly

and serenely ordered.  Mark Twain was not responsible for this blissful

condition.  He was its beacon-light; it was around Mrs. Clemens that its

affairs steadily revolved.



If in the four years and more of marriage Clemens had made advancement in

culture and capabilities, Olivia Clemens also had become something more

than the half-timid, inexperienced girl he had first known.  In a way her

education had been no less notable than his.  She had worked and studied,

and her half-year of travel and entertainment abroad had given her

opportunity for acquiring knowledge and confidence.  Her vision of life

had vastly enlarged; her intellect had flowered; her grasp of

practicalities had become firm and sure.



In spite of her delicate physical structure, her continued uncertainty of

health, she capably undertook the management of their large new house,

and supervised its economies.  Any one of her undertakings was sufficient

for one woman, but she compassed them all.  No children had more careful

direction than hers.  No husband had more devoted attendance and

companionship.  No household was ever directed with a sweeter and gentler

grace, or with greater perfection of detail.  When the great ones of the

world came to visit America's most picturesque literary figure she gave

welcome to them all, and filled her place at his side with such sweet and

capable dignity that those who came to pay their duties to him often

returned to pay even greater devotion to his companion.  Says Howells:



     She was, in a way, the loveliest person I have ever seen--the

     gentlest, the kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united

     wonderful tact with wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted

     her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced, he gloried in it.



And once, in an interview with the writer of these chapters, Howells

declared: "She was not only a beautiful soul, but a woman of singular

intellectual power.  I never knew any one quite like her."  Then he

added: "Words cannot express Mrs. Clemens--her fineness, her delicate,

her wonderful tact with a man who was in some respects, and wished to be,

the most outrageous creature that ever breathed."



Howells meant a good many things by that, no doubt: Clemens's violent

methods, for one thing, his sudden, savage impulses, which sometimes

worked injustice and hardship for others, though he was first to discover

the wrong and to repair it only too fully.  Then, too, Howells may have

meant his boyish teasing tendency to disturb Mrs. Clemens's exquisite

sense of decorum.



Once I remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in a

pair of white cowskin slippers with the hair out, and do a crippled

colored uncle, to the joy of all beholders.  I must not say all, for I

remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of

"Oh, Youth!"



He was continually doing such things as the "crippled colored uncle,";

partly for the very joy of the performance, but partly, too, to disturb

her serenity, to incur her reproof, to shiver her a little--"shock" would

be too strong a word.  And he liked to fancy her in a spirit and attitude

of belligerence, to present that fancy to those who knew the measure of

her gentle nature.  Writing to Mrs. Howells of a picture of herself in a

group, he said:



     You look exactly as Mrs. Clemens does after she has said: "Indeed, I

     do not wonder that you can frame no reply; for you know only too

     well that your conduct admits of no excuse, palliation, or argument-

     none!"



Clemens would pretend to a visitor that she had been violently indignant

over some offense of his; perhaps he would say:



"Well I contradicted her just now, and the crockery will begin to fly

pretty soon."



She could never quite get used to this pleasantry, and a faint glow would

steal over her face.  He liked to produce that glow.  Yet always his

manner toward her was tenderness itself.  He regarded her as some dainty

bit of porcelain, and it was said that he was always following her about

with a chair.  Their union has been regarded as ideal.  That is

Twichell's opinion and Howells's.  The latter sums up:



     Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be,

     but from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the

     most perfect.









XCVII



THE WALK TO BOSTON



The new home became more beautiful to them as things found their places,

as the year deepened; and the wonder of autumn foliage lit up their

landscape.  Sitting on one of the little upper balconies Mrs. Clemens

wrote:



     The atmosphere is very hazy, and it makes the autumn tints even more

     soft and beautiful than usual.  Mr. Twichell came for Mr. Clemens to

     go walking with him; they returned at dinner-time, heavily laden

     with autumn leaves.



And as usual Clemens, finding the letter unfinished, took up the story.



     Twichell came up here with me to luncheon after services, and I went

     back home with him and took Susy along in her little carriage.  We

     have just got home again, middle of afternoon, and Livy has gone to

     rest and left the west balcony to me.  There is a shining and most

     marvelous miracle of cloud-effects mirrored in the brook; a picture

     which began with perfection, and has momently surpassed it ever

     since, until at last it is almost unendurably beautiful....



     There is a cloud-picture in the stream now whose hues are as

     manifold as those in an opal and as delicate as the tintings of a

     sea-shell.  But now a muskrat is swimming through it and

     obliterating it with the turmoil of wavelets he casts abroad from

     his shoulders.



     The customary Sunday assemblage of strangers is gathered together in

     the grounds discussing the house.



Twichell and Clemens took a good many walks these days; long walks, for

Twichell was an athlete and Clemens had not then outgrown the Nevada

habit of pedestrian wandering.  Talcott's Tower, a wooden structure about

five miles from Hartford, was one of their favorite objective points; and

often they walked out and back, talking so continuously, and so absorbed

in the themes of their discussions, that time and distance slipped away

almost unnoticed.  How many things they talked of in those long walks!

They discussed philosophies and religions and creeds, and all the range

of human possibility and shortcoming, and all the phases of literature

and history and politics.  Unorthodox discussions they were,

illuminating, marvelously enchanting, and vanished now forever.

Sometimes they took the train as far as Bloomfield, a little station on

the way, and walked the rest of the distance, or they took the train from

Bloomfield home.  It seems a strange association, perhaps, the fellowship

of that violent dissenter with that fervent soul dedicated to church and

creed, but the root of their friendship lay in the frankness with which

each man delivered his dogmas and respected those of his companion.



It was during one of their walks to the tower that they planned a far

more extraordinary undertaking--nothing less, in fact, than a walk from

Hartford to Boston.  This was early in November.  They did not delay the

matter, for the weather was getting too uncertain.



Clemens wrote Redpath:



DEAR REDPATH,--Rev. J. H. Twichell and I expect to start at 8 o'clock

Thursday morning to walk to Boston in twenty four hours--or more.  We

shall telegraph Young's Hotel for rooms Saturday night, in order to allow

for a low average of pedestrianism.



It was half past eight on Thursday morning, November 12, 1874, that they

left Twichell's house in a carriage, drove to the East Hartford bridge,

and there took to the road, Twichell carrying a little bag and Clemens a

basket of lunch.



The papers had got hold of it by this time, and were watching the result.

They did well enough that first day, following the old Boston stage road,

arriving at Westford about seven o'clock in the evening, twenty-eight

miles from the starting-point.  There was no real hotel at Westford, only

a sort of tavern, but it afforded the luxury of rest.  "Also," says

Twichell, in a memoranda of the trip, "a sublimely profane hostler whom

you couldn't jostle with any sort of mild remark without bringing down

upon yourself a perfect avalanche of oaths."



This was a joy to Clemens, who sat behind the stove, rubbing his lame

knees and fairly reveling in Twichell's discomfiture in his efforts to

divert the hostler's blasphemy.  There was also a mellow inebriate there

who recommended kerosene for Clemens's lameness, and offered as testimony

the fact that he himself had frequently used it for stiffness in his

joints after lying out all night in cold weather, drunk: altogether it

was a notable evening.



Westford was about as far as they continued the journey afoot.  Clemens

was exceedingly lame next morning, and had had a rather bad night; but he

swore and limped along six miles farther, to North Ashford, then gave it

up.  They drove from North Ashford to the railway, where Clemens

telegraphed Redpath and Howells of their approach.  To Redpath:



     We have made thirty-five miles in less than five days.  This

     demonstrates that the thing can be done.  Shall now finish by rail.

     Did you have any bets on us?



To Howells:



     Arrive by rail at seven o'clock, the first of a series of grand

     annual pedestrian tours from Hartford to Boston to be performed by

     us.  The next will take place next year.



Redpath read his despatch to a lecture audience, with effect.  Howells

made immediate preparation for receiving two way-worn, hungry men.  He

telegraphed to Young's Hotel: "You and Twichell come right up to 37

Concord Avenue, Cambridge, near observatory.  Party waiting for you."



They got to Howells's about nine o'clock, and the refreshments were

waiting.  Miss Longfellow was there, Rose Hawthorne, John Fiske, Larkin

G. Mead, the sculptor, and others of their kind.  Howells tells in his

book how Clemens, with Twichell, "suddenly stormed in," and immediately

began to eat and drink:



     I can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with

     his head thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped

     oysters without which no party in Cambridge was really a party,

     exulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the

     most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of

     their progress.



Clemens gave a dinner, next night, to Howells, Aldrich, Osgood, and the

rest.  The papers were full of jokes concerning the Boston expedition;

some even had illustrations, and it was all amusing enough at the time.



Next morning, sitting in the writing-room of Young's Hotel, he wrote a

curious letter to Mrs. Clemens, though intended as much for Howells and

Aldrich as for her.  It was dated sixty-one years ahead, and was a sort

of Looking Backwards, though that notable book had not yet been written.

It presupposed a monarchy in which the name of Boston has been changed to

"Limerick," and Hartford to "Dublin."  In it, Twichell has become the

"Archbishop of Dublin," Howells "Duke of Cambridge," Aldrich "Marquis of

Ponkapog," Clemens the "Earl of Hartford."  It was too whimsical and

delightful a fancy to be forgotten.--[This remarkable and amusing

document will be found under Appendix M, at the end of last volume.]



A long time afterward, thirty-four year, he came across this letter.  He

said:



"It seems curious now that I should have been dreaming dreams of a future

monarchy and never suspect that the monarchy was already present and the

Republic a thing of the past."



What he meant, was the political succession that had fostered those

commercial trusts which, in turn, had established party dominion.



To Howells, on his return, Clemens wrote his acknowledgments, and added:



     Mrs. Clemens gets upon the verge of swearing, and goes tearing

     around in an unseemly fury when I enlarge upon the delightful time

     we had in Boston, and she not there to have her share.  I have tried

     hard to reproduce Mrs. Howells to her, and have probably not made a

     shining success of it.









XCVIII



"OLD TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI"



Howells had been urging Clemens to do something more for the Atlantic,

specifically something for the January number.  Clemens cudgeled his

brains, but finally declared he must give it up:



     Mrs. Clemens has diligently persecuted me day by day with urgings to

     go to work and do that something, but it's no use.  I find I can't.

     We are in such a state of worry and endless confusion that my head

     won't go.



Two hours later he sent another hasty line:



     I take back the remark that I can't write for the January number,

     for Twichell and I have had a long walk in the woods, and I got to

     telling him about old Mississippi days of steam-boating glory and

     grandeur as I saw them (during four years) from the pilot-house.  He

     said, "What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!" I hadn't

     thought of that before.  Would you like a series of papers to run

     through three months or six or nine--or about four months, say?



Howells welcomed this offer as an echo of his own thought.  He had come

from a piloting family himself, and knew the interest that Mark Twain

could put into such a series.



Acting promptly under the new inspiration, Clemens forthwith sent the

first chapter of that monumental, that absolutely unique, series of

papers on Mississippi River life, which to-day constitutes one of his

chief claims to immortality.



His first number was in the nature of an experiment.  Perhaps, after all,

the idea would not suit the Atlantic readers.



"Cut it, scarify it, reject it, handle it with entire freedom," he wrote,

and awaited the result.



The "result" was that Howells expressed his delight:



     The piece about the Mississippi is capital.  It almost made the

     water in our ice-pitcher muddy as I read it.  I don't think I shall

     meddle much with it, even in the way of suggestion.  The sketch of

     the low-lived little town was so good that I could have wished there

     was more of it.  I want the sketches, if you can make them, every

     month.



Mark Twain was now really interested in this new literary venture.  He

was fairly saturated with memories.  He was writing on the theme that lay

nearest to his heart.  Within ten days he reported that he had finished

three of the papers, and had begun the fourth.



And yet I have spoken of nothing but piloting as a science so far, and I

doubt if I ever get beyond that portion of my subject.  And I don't care

to.  Any Muggins can write about old days on the Mississippi of five

hundred different kinds, but I am the only man alive that can scribble

about the piloting of that day, and no man has ever tried to scribble

about it yet.  Its newness pleases me all the time, and it is about the

only new subject I know of.



He became so enthusiastic presently that he wanted to take Howells with

him on a trip down the Mississippi, with their wives for company, to go

over the old ground again and obtain added material enough for a book.

Howells was willing enough--agreed to go, in fact--but found it hard to

get away.  He began to temporize and finally backed out.  Clemens tried

to inveigle Osgood into the trip, but without success; also John Hay, but

Hay had a new baby at his house just then--"three days old, and with a

voice beyond price," he said, offering it as an excuse for non-

acceptance.  So the plan for revisiting the river and the conclusion of

the book were held in abeyance for nearly seven years.



Those early piloting chapters, as they appeared in the Atlantic,

constituted Mark Twain's best literary exhibit up to that time.  In some

respects they are his best literature of any time.  As pictures of an

intensely interesting phase of life, they are so convincing, so real, and

at the same time of such extraordinary charm and interest, that if the

English language should survive a thousand years, or ten times as long,

they would be as fresh and vivid at the end of that period as the day

they were penned.  In them the atmosphere of, the river and its

environment--its pictures, its thousand aspects of life--are reproduced

with what is no less than literary necromancy.  Not only does he make you

smell the river you can fairly hear it breathe.  On the appearance of the

first number John Hay wrote:



"It is perfect; no more nor less.  I don't see how you do it," and added,

"you know what my opinion is of time not spent with you."



Howells wrote:



     You are doing the science of piloting splendidly.  Every word

     interesting, and don't you drop the series till you've got every bit

     of anecdote and reminiscence into it.



He let Clemens write the articles to suit himself.  Once he said:



     If I might put in my jaw at this point I should say, stick to actual

     fact and character in the thing and give things in detail.  All that

     belongs to the old river life is novel, and is now mostly

     historical.  Don't write at any supposed Atlantic audience, but yarn

     it off as if into my sympathetic ear.



Clemens replied that he had no dread of the Atlantic audience; he

declared it was the only audience that did not require a humorist to

"paint himself striped and stand on his head to amuse it."



The "Old Times" papers ran through seven numbers of the Atlantic.  They

were reprinted everywhere by the newspapers, who in that day had little

respect for magazine copyrights, and were promptly pirated in book form

in Canada.  They added vastly to Mark Twain's literary capital, though

Howells informs us that the Atlantic circulation did not thrive

proportionately, for the reason that the newspapers gave the articles to

their readers from advanced sheets of the magazine, even before the

latter could be placed on sale.  It so happened that in the January

Atlantic, which contained the first of the Mississippi papers, there

appeared Robert Dale Owen's article on "Spiritualism," which brought such

humility both to author and publisher because of the exposure of the

medium Katie King, which came along while the magazine was in press.

Clemens has written this marginal note on the opening page of the copy at

Quarry Farm:



While this number of the Atlantic was being printed the Katie King

manifestations were discovered to be the cheapest, wretchedest shams and

frauds, and were exposed in the newspapers.  The awful humiliation of it

unseated Robert Dale Owen's reason, and he died in the madhouse.









XCIX



A TYPEWRITER, AND A JOKE ON ALDRICH



It was during the trip to Boston with Twichell that Mark Twain saw for

the first time what was then--a brand-new invention, a typewriter; or it

may have been during a subsequent visit, a week or two later.  At all

events, he had the machine and was practising on it December 9, 1874, for

he wrote two letters on it that day, one to Howells and the other to

Orion Clemens.  In the latter he says:



     I am trying to get the hang of this new-fangled writing-machine, but

     am not making a shining success of it.  However, this is the first

     attempt I ever have made, and yet I perceive that I shall soon

     easily acquire a fine facility in its use.  I saw the thing in

     Boston the other day and was greatly taken with it.



He goes on to explain the new wonder, and on the whole his first attempt

is a very creditable performance.  With his usual enthusiasm over an

innovation, he believes it is going to be a great help to him, and

proclaims its advantages.



This is the letter to Howells, with the errors preserved:



     You needn't answer this; I am only practicing to get three; anothe

     slip-up there; only practici?ng ti get the hang of the thing.  I

     notice I miss fire & get in a good many unnecessary letters &

     punctuation marks.  I am simply using you for a target to bang at.

     Blame my cats, but this thing requires genius in order to work it

     just right.



In an article written long after he tells how he was with Nasby when he

first saw the machine in Boston through a window, and how they went in to

see it perform.  In the same article he states that he was the first

person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature, and that he

thinks the story of Tom Sawyer was the first type-copied manuscript.

--[Tom Sawyer was not then complete, and had been laid aside.  The first

type-copied manuscript was probably early chapters of the Mississippi

story, two discarded typewritten pages of which still exist.]



The new enthusiasm ran its course and died.  Three months later, when the

Remington makers wrote him for a recommendation of the machine, he

replied that he had entirely stopped using it.  The typewriter was not

perfect in those days, and the keys did not always respond readily.

He declared it was ruining his morals--that it made him "want to swear."

He offered it to Howells because, he said, Howells had no morals anyway.

Howells hesitated, so Clemens traded the machine to Bliss for a side-

saddle.  But perhaps Bliss also became afraid of its influence, for in

due time he brought it back.  Howells, again tempted, hesitated, and this

time was lost.  What eventually became of the machine is not history.



One of those, happy Atlantic dinners which Howells tells of came about

the end of that year.  It was at the Parker House, and Emerson was there;

and Aldrich, and the rest of that group.



"Don't you dare to refuse the invitation," said Howells, and naturally

Clemens didn't, and wrote back:



     I want you to ask Mrs. Howells to let you stay all night at the

     Parker House and tell lies and have an improving time, and take

     breakfast with me in the morning.  I will have a good room for you

     and a fire.  Can't you tell her it always makes you sick to go home

     late at night or something like that?  That sort of thing arouses

     Mrs. Clemens's sympathies easily.



Two memories of that old dinner remain to-day.  Aldrich and Howells were

not satisfied with the kind of neckties that Mark Twain wore (the old-

fashioned black "string" tie, a Western survival), so they made him a

present of two cravats when he set out on his return for Hartford.  Next

day he wrote:



     You and Aldrich have made one woman deeply and sincerely grateful--

     Mrs. Clemens.  For months--I may even say years--she has shown an

     unaccountable animosity toward my necktie, even getting up in the

     night to take it with the tongs and blackguard it, sometimes also

     getting so far as to threaten it.



     When I said you and Aldrich had given me two new neckties, and that

     they were in a paper in my overcoat pocket, she was in a fever of

     happiness until she found I was going to frame them; then all the

     venom in her nature gathered itself together; insomuch that I, being

     near to a door, went without, perceiving danger.



It is recorded that eventually he wore the neckties, and returned no more

to the earlier mode.



Another memory of that dinner is linked to a demand that Aldrich made of

Clemens that night, for his photograph.  Clemens, returning to Hartford,

put up fifty-two different specimens in as many envelopes, with the idea

of sending one a week for a year.  Then he concluded that this was too

slow a process, and for a week sent one every morning to "His Grace of

Ponkapog."



Aldrich stood it for a few days, then protested.  "The police," he said,

"are in the habit of swooping down upon a publication of that sort."



On New-Year's no less than twenty pictures came at once--photographs and

prints of Mark Twain, his house, his family, his various belongings.

Aldrich sent a warning then that the perpetrator of this outrage was

known to the police as Mark Twain, alias "The Jumping Frog," a well-known

California desperado, who would be speedily arrested and brought to

Ponkapog to face his victim.  This letter was signed "T. Bayleigh, Chief

of Police," and on the outside of the envelope there was a statement that

it would be useless for that person to send any more mail-matter, as the

post-office had been blown up.  The jolly farce closed there.  It was the

sort of thing that both men enjoyed.



Aldrich was writing a story at this time which contained some Western

mining incident and environment.  He sent the manuscript to Clemens for

"expert" consideration and advice.  Clemens wrote him at great length and

in careful detail.  He was fond of Aldrich, regarding him as one of the

most brilliant of men.  Once, to Robert Louis Stevenson, he said:



     "Aldrich has never had his peer for prompt and pithy and witty and

     humorous sayings.  None has equaled him, certainly none has

     surpassed him, in the felicity of phrasing with which he clothed

     these children of his fancy.  Aldrich is always brilliant; he can't

     help it; he is a fire-opal set round with rose diamonds; when he is

     not speaking you know that his dainty fancies are twinkling and

     glimmering around in him; when he speaks the diamonds flash.  Yes,

     he is always brilliant, he will always be brilliant; he will be

     brilliant in hell-you will see."



Stevenson, smiling a chuckly smile, said, "I hope not."



"Well, you will, and he will dim even those ruddy fires and look like a

transfigured Adonis backed against a pink sunset."--[North American

Review, September, 1906.]









C



RAYMOND, MENTAL TELEGRAPHY, ETC.



The Sellers play was given in Hartford, in January (1875), to as many

people as could crowd into the Opera House.  Raymond had reached the

perfection of his art by that time, and the townsmen of Mark Twain saw

the play and the actor at their best.  Kate Field played the part of

Laura Hawkins, and there was a Hartford girl in the company; also a

Hartford young man, who would one day be about as well known to playgoers

as any playwright or actor that America has produced.  His name was

William Gillette, and it was largely due to Mark Twain that the author of

Secret Service and of the dramatic "Sherlock Holmes" got a fair public

start.  Clemens and his wife loaned Gillette the three thousand dollars

which tided him through his period of dramatic education.  Their faith in

his ability was justified.



Hartford would naturally be enthusiastic on a first "Sellers-Raymond"

night.  At the end of the fourth act there was an urgent demand for the

author of the play, who was supposed to be present.  He was not there in

person, but had sent a letter, which Raymond read:



MY DEAR RAYMOND,--I am aware that you are going to be welcomed to our

town by great audiences on both nights of your stay there, and I beg to

add my hearty welcome also, through this note.  I cannot come to the

theater on either evening, Raymond, because there is something so

touching about your acting that I can't stand it.



(I do not mention a couple of colds in my head, because I hardly mind

them as much as I would the erysipelas, but between you and me I would

prefer it if they were rights and lefts.)



And then there is another thing.  I have always taken a pride in earning

my living in outside places and spending it in Hartford; I have said that

no good citizen would live on his own people, but go forth and make it

sultry for other communities and fetch home the result; and now at this

late day I find myself in the crushed and bleeding position of fattening

myself upon the spoils of my brethren!  Can I support such grief as this?

(This is literary emotion, you understand.  Take the money at the door

just the same.)



Once more I welcome you to Hartford, Raymond,  but as for me let me stay

at home and blush.



                                   Yours truly,    MARK.



The play was equally successful wherever it went.  It made what in that

day was regarded as a fortune.  One hundred thousand dollars is hardly

too large an estimate of the amount divided between author and actor.

Raymond was a great actor in that part, as he interpreted it, though he

did not interpret it fully, or always in its best way.  The finer side,

the subtle, tender side of Colonel Sellers, he was likely to overlook.

Yet, with a natural human self-estimate, Raymond believed he had created

a much greater part than Mark Twain had written.  Doubtless from the

point of view of a number of people this was so, though the idea, was

naturally obnoxious to Clemens.  In course of time their personal

relations ceased.



Clemens that winter gave another benefit for Father Hawley.  In reply to

an invitation to appear in behalf of the poor, he wrote that he had quit

the lecture field, and would not return to the platform unless driven

there by lack of bread.  But he added:



By the spirit of that remark I am debarred from delivering this proposed

lecture, and so I fall back upon the letter of it, and emerge upon the

platform for this last and final time because I am confronted by a lack

of bread-among Father Hawley's flock.



He made an introductory speech at an old-fashioned spelling-bee, given at

the Asylum Hill Church; a breezy, charming talk of which the following is

a sample:



     I don't see any use in spelling a word right--and never did.  I mean

     I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of

     spelling words.  We might as well make all clothes alike and cook

     all dishes alike.  Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing.  I

     have a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me;

     there is such a breezy, unfettered originality about his

     orthography.  He always spells "kow" with a large "K."  Now that is

     just as good as to spell it with a small one.  It is better.  It

     gives the imagination a broader field, a wider scope.  It suggests

     to the mind a grand, vague, impressive new kind of a cow.



     He took part in the contest, and in spite of his early reputation,

     was spelled down on the word "chaldron," which he spelled

     "cauldron," as he had been taught, while the dictionary used as

     authority gave that form as second choice.



Another time that winter, Clemens read before the Monday Evening Club a

paper on "Universal Suffrage," which is still remembered by the surviving

members of that time.  A paragraph or two will convey its purport:



     Our marvelous latter-day statesmanship has invented universal

     suffrage.  That is the finest feather in our cap.  All that we

     require of a voter is that he shall be forked, wear pantaloons

     instead of petticoats, and bear a more or less humorous resemblance

     to the reported image of God.  He need not know anything whatever;

     he may be wholly useless and a cumberer of the earth; he may even be

     known to be a consummate scoundrel.  No matter.  While he can steer

     clear of the penitentiary his vote is as weighty as the vote of a

     president, a bishop, a college professor, a merchant prince.  We

     brag of our universal, unrestricted suffrage; but we are shams after

     all, for we restrict when we come to the women.



The Monday Evening Club was an organization which included the best minds

of Hartford.  Dr. Horace Bushnell, Prof. Calvin E. Stowe, and J. Hammond

Trumbull founded it back in the sixties, and it included such men as Rev.

Dr. Parker, Rev. Dr. Burton, Charles H. Clark, of the Courant, Warner,

and Twichell, with others of their kind.  Clemens had been elected after

his first sojourn in England (February, 1873), and had then read a paper

on the "License of the Press."  The club met alternate Mondays, from

October to May.  There was one paper for each evening, and, after the

usual fashion of such clubs, the reading was followed by discussion.

Members of that time agree that Mark Twain's association with the club

had a tendency to give it a life, or at least an exhilaration, which it

had not previously known.  His papers were serious in their purpose he

always preferred to be serious--but they evidenced the magic gift which

made whatever he touched turn to literary jewelry.



Psychic theories and phenomena always attracted Mark Twain.  In thought-

transference, especially, he had a frank interest--an interest awakened

and kept alive by certain phenomena--psychic manifestations we call them

now.  In his association with Mrs. Clemens it not infrequently happened

that one spoke the other's thought, or perhaps a long-procrastinated

letter to a friend would bring an answer as quickly as mailed; but these

are things familiar to us all.  A more startling example of thought-

communication developed at the time of which we are writing, an example

which raised to a fever-point whatever interest he may have had in the

subject before.  (He was always having these vehement interests--rages we

may call them, for it would be inadequate to speak of them as fads,

inasmuch as they tended in the direction of human enlightenment, or

progress, or reform.)



Clemens one morning was lying in bed when, as he says, suddenly a red-hot

new idea came whistling down into my camp."  The idea was that the time

was ripe for a book that would tell the story of the Comstock-of the

Nevada silver mines.  It seemed to him that the person best qualified for

the work was his old friend William Wright--Dan de Quille.  He had not

heard from Dan, or of him, for a long time, but decided to write and urge

him to take up the idea.  He prepared the letter, going fully into the

details of his plan, as was natural for him to do, then laid it aside

until he could see Bliss and secure his approval of the scheme from a

publishing standpoint.  Just a week later, it was the 9th of March, a

letter came--a thick letter bearing a Nevada postmark, and addressed in a

handwriting which he presently recognized as De Quille's.  To a visitor

who was present he said:



"Now I will do a miracle.  I will tell you everything this letter

contains--date, signature, and all without breaking the seal."



He stated what he believed was in the letter.  Then he opened it and

showed that he had correctly given its contents, which were the same in

all essential details as those of his own letter, not yet mailed.



In an article on "Mental Telegraphy" (he invented the name) he relates

this instance, with others, and in 'Following the Equator' and elsewhere

he records other such happenings.  It was one of the "mysteries" in which

he never lost interest, though his concern in it in time became a passive

one.



The result of the De Quille manifestation, however, he has not recorded.

Clemens immediately wrote, urging Dan to come to Hartford for an extended

visit.  De Quille came, and put in a happy spring in his old comrade's

luxurious home, writing 'The Big Bonanza', which Bliss successfully

published a year later.



Mark Twain was continually inviting old friends to share his success with

him.  Any comrade of former days found welcome in his home as often as he

would come, and for as long as he would stay.  Clemens dropped his own

affairs to advise in their undertakings; and if their undertakings were

literary he found them a publisher.  He did this for Joaquin Miller and

for Bret Harte, and he was always urging Goodman to make his house a

home.



The Beecher-Tilton trial was the sensation of the spring of 1875, and

Clemens, in common with many others, was greatly worked up over it.  The

printed testimony had left him decidedly in doubt as to Beecher's

innocence, though his blame would seem to have been less for the possible

offense than because of the great leader's attitude in the matter.  To

Twichell he said:



"His quibbling was fatal.  Innocent or guilty, he should have made an

unqualified statement in the beginning."



Together they attended one of the sessions, on a day when Beecher himself

was on the witness-stand.  The tension was very great; the excitement was

painful.  Twichell thought that Beecher appeared well under the stress of

examination and was deeply sorry for him; Clemens was far from convinced.



The feeling was especially strong in Hartford, where Henry Ward Beecher's

relatives were prominent, and animosities grew out of it.  They are all

forgotten now; most of those who cherished bitterness are dead.  Any

feeling that Clemens had in the matter lasted but a little while.

Howells tells us that when he met him some months after the trial ended,

and was tempted to mention it, Clemens discouraged any discussion of the

event.  Says Howells:



     He would only say the man had suffered enough; as if the man had

     expiated his wrong, and he was not going to do anything to renew his

     penalty.  I found that very curious, very delicate.  His continued

     blame could not come to the sufferer's knowledge, but he felt it his

     duty to forbear it.



It was one hundred years, that 19th of April, since the battles of

Lexington and Concord, and there was to be a great celebration.  The

Howellses had visited Hartford in March, and the Clemenses were invited

to Cambridge for the celebration.  Only Clemens could go, which in the

event proved a good thing perhaps; for when Clemens and Howells set out

for Concord they did not go over to Boston to take the train, but decided

to wait for it at Cambridge.  Apparently it did not occur to them that

the train would be jammed the moment the doors were opened at the Boston

station; but when it came along they saw how hopeless was their chance.

They had special invitations and passage from Boston, but these were only

mockeries now.  It yeas cold and chilly, and they forlornly set out in

search of some sort of a conveyance.  They tramped around in the mud and

raw wind, but vehicles were either filled or engaged, and drivers and

occupants were inclined to jeer at them.  Clemens was taken with an acute

attack of indigestion, which made him rather dismal and savage.  Their

effort finally ended with his trying to run down a tally-ho which was

empty inside and had a party of Harvard students riding atop.  The

students, who did not recognize their would-be fare, enjoyed the race.

They encouraged their pursuer, and perhaps their driver, with merriment

and cheers.  Clemens was handicapped by having to run in the slippery

mud, and soon "dropped by the wayside."



"I am glad," says Howells, "I cannot recall what he said when he came

back to me."



They hung about a little longer, then dragged themselves home, slipped

into the house, and built up a fine, cheerful fire on the hearth.  They

proposed to practise a deception on Mrs. Howells by pretending they had

been to Concord and returned.  But it was no use.  Their statements were

flimsy, and guilt was plainly written on their faces.  Howells recalls

this incident delightfully, and expresses the belief that the humor of

the situation was finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than the actual

visit to Concord would have been.



Twichell did not have any such trouble in attending the celebration.  He

had adventures (he was always having adventures), but they were of a more

successful kind.  Clemens heard the tale of them when he returned to

Hartford.  He wrote it to Howells:



     Joe Twichell preached morning and evening here last Sunday; took

     midnight train for Boston; got an early breakfast and started by

     rail at 7.30 A.M.  for Concord; swelled around there until 1 P.M.,

     seeing everything; then traveled on top of a train to Lexington; saw

     everything there; traveled on top of a train to Boston (with

     hundreds in company), deluged with dust, smoke, and cinders; yelled

     and hurrahed all the way like a school-boy; lay flat down, to dodge

     numerous bridges, and sailed into the depot howling with excitement

     and as black as a chimneysweep; got to Young's Hotel at 7 P.M.; sat

     down in the reading-room and immediately fell asleep; was promptly

     awakened by a porter, who supposed he was drunk; wandered around an

     hour and a half; then took 9 P.M.  train, sat down in a smoking-car,

     and remembered nothing more until awakened by conductor as the train

     came into Hartford at 1.30 A.M.  Thinks he had simply a glorious

     time, and wouldn't have missed the Centennial for the world.  He

     would have run out to see us a moment at Cambridge but he was too

     dirty.  I wouldn't have wanted him there; his appalling energy would

     have been an insufferable reproach to mild adventurers like you and

     me.









CI



CONCLUDING "TOM SAWYER"--MARK TWAIN's "EDITORS"



Meantime the "inspiration tank," as Clemens sometimes called it, had

filled up again.  He had received from somewhere new afflatus for the

story of Tom and Huck, and was working on it steadily.  The family

remained in Hartford, and early in July, under full head of steam, he

brought the story to a close.  On the 5th he wrote Howells:



     I have finished the story and didn't take the chap beyond boyhood.

     I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but

     autobiographically, like Gil Blas.  I perhaps made a mistake in not

     writing it in the first person.  If I went on now, and took him into

     manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in

     literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him.

     It is not a boy's book at all.  It will only be read by adults.  It

     is only written for adults.



He would like to see the story in the Atlantic, he said, but doubted the

wisdom of serialization.



"By and by I shall take a boy of twelve and run him through life (in the

first person), but not Tam Sawyer, he would not make a good character for

it."  From which we get the first glimpse of Huck's later adventures.



Of course he wanted Howells to look at the story.  It was a tremendous

favor to ask, he said, and added, "But I know of no other person whose

judgment I could venture to take, fully and entirely.  Don't hesitate to

say no, for I know how your time is taxed, and I would have honest need

to blush if you said yes."



"Send on your MS.," wrote Howells.  "You've no idea what I may ask you to

do for me some day."



But Clemens, conscience-stricken, "blushed and weakened," as he said.

When Howells insisted, he wrote:



     But I will gladly send it to you if you will do as follows:

     dramatize it, if you perceive that you can, and take, for your

     remuneration, half of the first $6,000 which I receive for its

     representation on the stage.  You could alter the plot entirely if

     you chose.  I could help in the work most cheerfully after you had

     arranged the plot.  I have my eye upon two young girls who can play

     Tom and Huck.



Howells in his reply urged.  Clemens to do the playwriting himself.  He

could never find time, he said, and he doubted whether he could enter

into the spirit of another man's story.  Clemens did begin a

dramatization then or a little later, but it was not completed.  Mrs.

Clemens, to whom he had read the story as it proceeded, was as anxious as

her husband for Howells's opinion, for it was the first extended piece of

fiction Mark Twain had undertaken alone.  He carried the manuscript over

to Boston himself, and whatever their doubts may have been, Howells's

subsequent letter set them at rest.  He wrote that he had sat up till one

in the morning to get to the end of it, simply because it was impossible

to leave off.



It is altogether the best boy story I ever read.  It will be an immense

success, but I think you ought to treat it explicitly as a boy's story;

grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do, and if you should put it

forth as a story of boys' character from the grown-up point of view you

give the wrong key to it.



Viewed in the light of later events, there has never been any better

literary opinion than that--none that has been more fully justified.



Clemens was delighted.  He wrote concerning a point here and there, one

inquiry referring to the use of a certain strong word.  Howells's reply

left no doubt:



     I'd have that swearing out in an instant.  I suppose I didn't notice

     it because the location was so familiar to my Western sense, and so

     exactly the thing Huck would say, but it won't do for children.



It was in the last chapter, where Huck relates to Tom the sorrows of

reform and tells how they comb him "all to thunder."  In the original,

"They comb me all to hell," says Huck; which statement, one must agree,

is more effective, more the thing Huck would be likely to say.



Clemens's acknowledgment of the correction was characteristic:



     Mrs. Clemens received the mail this morning, and the next minute she

     lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her

     tongue, "Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?"  Then I had

     to miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to

     her.  Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape

     with my scalp.  Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go

     a little one-sided?



The Clemens family did not, go to Elmira that year.  The children's

health seemed to require the sea-shore, and in August they went to

Bateman's Point, Rhode Island, where Clemens most of the time played

tenpins in an alley that had gone to ruin.  The balls would not stay on

the track; the pins stood at inebriate angles.  It reminded him of the

old billiard-tables of Western mining-camps, and furnished the same

uncertainty of play.  It was his delight, after he had become accustomed

to the eccentricities of the alley, to invite in a stranger and watch his

suffering and his frantic effort to score.









CII



"SKETCHES NEW AND OLD"



The long-delayed book of Sketches, contracted for five years before, was

issued that autumn.  "The Jumping Frog," which he had bought from Webb,

was included in the volume, also the French translation which Madame

Blanc (Th. Bentzon) had made for the Revue des deux mondes, with Mark

Twain's retranslation back into English, a most astonishing performance

in its literal rendition of the French idiom.  One example will suffice

here.  It is where the stranger says to Smiley, "I don't see no p'ints

about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."



Says the French, retranslated:



"Eh bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each

frog" (Je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait mieux qu'aucune

grenouille).  (If that isn't grammar gone to seed then I count myself no

judge.--M. T.)



"Possible that you not it saw not," said Smiley; "possible that you you

comprehend frogs; possible that you not you there comprehend nothing;

possible that you had of the experience, and possible that you not be but

an amateur.  Of all manner (de toute maniere) I bet forty dollars that

she batter in jumping, no matter which frog of the county of Calaveras."



He included a number of sketches originally published with the Frog, also

a selection from the "Memoranda" and Buffalo Express contributions, and

he put in the story of Auntie Cord, with some matter which had never

hitherto appeared.  True Williams illustrated the book, but either it

furnished him no inspiration or he was allowed too much of another sort,

for the pictures do not compare with his earlier work.



Among the new matter in the book were-"Some Fables for Good Old Boys and

Girls," in which certain wood creatures are supposed to make a scientific

excursion into a place at some time occupied by men.  It is the most

pretentious feature of the book, and in its way about as good as any.

Like Gulliver's Travels, its object was satire, but its result is also

interest.



Clemens was very anxious that Howells should be first to review this

volume.  He had a superstition that Howells's verdicts were echoed by the

lesser reviewers, and that a book was made or damned accordingly; a

belief hardly warranted, for the review has seldom been written that

meant to any book the difference between success and failure.  Howells's

review of Sketches may be offered as a case in point.  It was highly

commendatory, much more so than the notice of the 'Innocents' had been,

or even that of 'Roughing It', also more extensive than the latter.  Yet

after the initial sale of some twenty thousand copies, mainly on the

strength of the author's reputation, the book made a comparatively poor

showing, and soon lagged far behind its predecessors.



We cannot judge, of course, the taste of that day, but it appears now an

unattractive, incoherent volume.  The pictures were absurdly bad, the

sketches were of unequal merit.  Many of them are amusing, some of them

delightful, but most of them seem ephemeral.  If we except "The Jumping

Frog," and possibly "A True Story" (and the latter was altogether out of

place in the collection), there is no reason to suppose that any of its

contents will escape oblivion.  The greater number of the sketches, as

Mark Twain himself presently realized and declared, would better have

been allowed to die.



Howells did, however, take occasion to point out in his review, or at

least to suggest, the more serious side of Mark Twain.  He particularly

called attention to "A True Story," which the reviewers, at the time of

its publication in the Atlantic, had treated lightly, fearing a lurking

joke in it; or it may be they had not read it, for reviewers are busy

people.  Howells spoke of it as the choicest piece of work in the volume,

and of its "perfect fidelity to the tragic fact."  He urged the reader to

turn to it again, and to read it as a "simple dramatic report of

reality," such as had been equaled by no other American writer.



It was in this volume of sketches that Mark Twain first spoke in print

concerning copyright, showing the absurd injustice of discriminating

against literary ownership by statute of limitation.  He did this in the

form of an open petition to Congress, asking that all property, real and

personal, should be put on the copyright basis, its period of ownership

limited to a "beneficent term of forty-two years."  Generally this was

regarded as a joke, as in a sense it was; but like most of Mark Twain's

jokes it was founded on reason and justice.



The approval with which it was received by his literary associates led

him to still further flights.  He began a determined crusade for

international copyright laws.  It was a transcendental beginning, but it

contained the germ of what, in the course of time, he would be largely

instrumental in bringing to a ripe and magnificent conclusion.  In this

first effort he framed a petition to enact laws by which the United

States would declare itself to be for right and justice, regardless of

other nations, and become a good example to the world by refusing to

pirate the books of any foreign author.  He wrote to Howells, urging him

to get Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and others to sign this

petition.



I will then put a gentlemanly chap under wages, and send him personally

to every author of distinction in the country and corral the rest of the

signatures.  Then I'll have the whole thing lithographed (about one

thousand copies), and move upon the President and Congress in person, but

in the subordinate capacity of the party who is merely the agent of

better and wiser men, or men whom the country cannot venture to laugh at.

I will ask the President to recommend the thing in his message (and if he

should ask me to sit down and frame the paragraph for him I should blush,

but still I would frame it).  And then if Europe chooses to go on

stealing from us we would say, with noble enthusiasm, "American lawmakers

do steal, but not from foreign authors--not from foreign authors,"....

If we only had some God in the country's laws, instead of being in such a

sweat to get Him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.



The petition never reached Congress.  Holmes agreed to sign it with a

smile, and the comment that governments were not in the habit of setting

themselves up as high moral examples, except for revenue.  Longfellow

also pledged himself, as did a few others; but if there was any general

concurrence in the effort there is no memory of it now.  Clemens

abandoned the original idea, but remained one of the most persistent and

influential advocates of copyright betterment, and lived to see most of

his dream fulfilled.--[For the petition concerning copyright term in the

United States, see Sketches New and Old.  For the petition concerning

international copyright and related matters, see Appendix N, at the end

of last volume.]









CIII



"ATLANTIC" DAYS



It was about this period that Mark Twain began to exhibit openly his more

serious side; that is to say his advocacy of public reforms.  His paper

on "Universal Suffrage" had sounded a first note, and his copyright

petitions were of the same spirit.  In later years he used to say that he

had always felt it was his mission to teach, to carry the banner of moral

reconstruction, and here at forty we find him furnishing evidences of

this inclination.  In the Atlantic for October, 1875, there was published

an unsigned three-page article entitled, "The Curious Republic of

Gondour."  In this article was developed the idea that the voting

privilege should be estimated not by the individuals, but by their

intellectual qualifications.  The republic of Gondour was a Utopia, where

this plan had been established:



     It was an odd idea and ingenious.  You must understand the

     constitution gave every man a vote; therefore that vote was a vested

     right, and could not be taken away.  But the constitution did not

     say that certain individuals might not be given two votes or ten.

     So an amendatory clause was inserted in a quiet way, a clause which

     authorized the enlargement of the suffrage in certain cases to be

     specified by statute....



     The victory was complete.  The new law was framed and passed.  Under

     it every citizen, howsoever poor or ignorant, possessed one vote, so

     universal suffrage still reigned; but if a man possessed a good

     common-school education and no money he had two votes, a high-school

     education gave him four; if he had property, likewise, to the value

     of three thousand sacos he wielded one more vote; for every fifty

     thousand sacos a man added to his property, he was entitled to

     another vote; a University education entitled a man to nine votes,

     even though he owned no property.



The author goes on to show the beneficent results of this enaction; how

the country was benefited and glorified by this stimulus toward

enlightenment and industry.  No one ever suspected that Mark Twain was

the author of this fable.  It contained almost no trace of his usual

literary manner.  Nevertheless he wrote it, and only withheld his name,

as he did in a few other instances, in the fear that the world might

refuse to take him seriously over his own signature or nom de plume.



Howells urged him to follow up the "Gondour" paper; to send some more

reports from that model land.  But Clemens was engaged in other things by

that time, and was not pledged altogether to national reforms.



He was writing a skit about a bit of doggerel which was then making

nights and days unhappy for many undeserving persons who in an evil

moment had fallen upon it in some stray newspaper corner.  A certain car

line had recently adopted the "punch system," and posted in its cars, for

the information of passengers and conductor, this placard:



A Blue Trip Slip for an 8 Cents Fare,

A Buff Trip Slip for a 6 Cents Fare,

A Pink Trip Slip for a 3 Cents Fare,

For Coupon And Transfer, Punch The Tickets.



Noah Brooks and Isaac Bromley were riding down-town one evening on the

Fourth Avenue line, when Bromley said:



"Brooks, it's poetry.  By George, it's poetry!"



Brooks followed the direction of Bromley's finger and read the card of

instructions.  They began perfecting the poetic character of the notice,

giving it still more of a rhythmic twist and jingle; arrived at the

Tribune office, W. C. Wyckoff, scientific editor, and Moses P. Handy lent

intellectual and poetic assistance, with this result:



          Conductor, when you receive a fare,



          Punch in the presence of the passenjare!

          A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,

          A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,

          A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare.

          Punch in the presence of the passenjare!



     CHORUS

          Punch, brothers!  Punch with care!

          Punch in the presence of the passenjare!



It was printed, and street-car poetry became popular.  Different papers

had a turn at it, and each usually preceded its own effort with all other

examples, as far as perpetrated.  Clemens discovered the lines, and on

one of their walks recited them to Twichell.  "A Literary Nightmare" was

written a few days later.  In it the author tells how the jingle took

instant and entire possession of him and went waltzing through his brain;

how, when he had finished his breakfast, he couldn't tell whether he had

eaten anything or not; and how, when he went to finish the novel he was

writing, and took up his pen, he could only get it to say:



Punch in the presence of the passenjare.



He found relief at last in telling it to his reverend friend, that is,

Twichell, upon whom he unloaded it with sad results.



It was an amusing and timely skit, and is worth reading to-day.  Its

publication in the Atlantic had the effect of waking up horse-car poetry

all over the world.  Howells, going to dine at Ernest Longfellow's the

day following its appearance, heard his host and Tom Appleton urging each

other to "Punch with care."  The Longfellow ladies had it by heart.

Boston was devastated by it.  At home, Howells's children recited it to

him in chorus.  The streets were full of it; in Harvard it became an

epidemic.



It was transformed into other tongues.  Even Swinburne, the musical, is

said to have done a French version for the 'Revue des deux mondes'*.  A

St. Louis magazine, The Western, found relief in a Latin anthem with this

chorus:



Pungite, fratres, pungite,

Pungite cum amore,

Pungite pro vectore,

Diligentissime pungite.





                    * LE CHANT DU CONDUCTEUR



               Ayant ete paye, le conducteur

               Percera en pleine vue du voyageur,

               Quand il regoit trois sous un coupon vert,

               Un coupon jaune pour six sous c'est l'affaire,

               Et pour huit sous c'est un coupon couleur

               De rose, en pleine vue du voyageur.



          CHOEUR

               Donc, percez soigneusement, mes freres

               Tout en pleine vue des voyageurs, etc.











CIV



MARK TWAIN AND HIS WIFE



Clemens and his wife traveled to Boston for one of those happy fore-

gatherings with the Howellses, which continued, at one end of the journey

or another, for so many years.  There was a luncheon with Longfellow at

Craigie House, and, on the return to Hartford, Clemens reported to

Howells how Mrs. Clemens had thrived on the happiness of the visit.  Also

he confesses his punishment for the usual crimes:



     I "caught it" for letting Mrs. Howells bother and bother about her

     coffee, when it was a "good deal better than we get at home."  I

     "caught it" for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last moment and losing

     her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that MS.

     when the printers are done with it.  I "caught it" once more for

     personating that drunken Colonel James.  I "caught it" for

     mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and

     when, after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I

     had privately suggested to you that we hadn't any frames, and that

     if you wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the

     madam was simply speechless for the space of a minute.  Then she

     said:



     "How could you, Youth!  The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his

     sensitive nature, upon such a repulsive er--"



     "Oh, Howells won't mind it!  You don't know Howells.  Howells is a

     man who--"



     She was gone.  But George was the first person she stumbled on in

     the hall, so she took it out of George.  I am glad of that, because

     it saved the babies.



Clemens used to admit, at a later day, that his education did not advance

by leaps and bounds, but gradually, very gradually; and it used to give

him a pathetic relief in those after-years, when that sweet presence had

gone out of his life, to tell the way of it, to confess over-fully,

perhaps, what a responsibility he had been to her.



He used to tell how, for a long time, he concealed his profanity from

her; how one morning, when he thought the door was shut between their

bedroom and the bathroom, he was in there dressing and shaving,

accompanying these trying things with language intended only for the

strictest privacy; how presently, when he discovered a button off the

shirt he intended to put on, he hurled it through the window into the

yard with appropriate remarks, followed it with another shirt that was in

the same condition, and added certain collars and neckties and bath-room

requisites, decorating the shrubbery outside, where the people were going

by to church; how in this extreme moment he heard a slight cough and

turned to find that the door was open!  There was only one door to the

bath-room, and he knew he had to pass her.  He felt pale and sick, and

sat down for a few moments to consider.  He decided to assume that she

was asleep, and to walk out and through the room, head up, as if he had

nothing on his conscience.  He attempted it, but without success.  Half-

way across the room he heard a voice suddenly repeat his last terrific

remark.  He turned to see her sitting up in bed, regarding him with a

look as withering as she could find in her gentle soul.  The humor of it

struck him.



"Livy," he said, "did it sound like that?"



"Of course it did," she said, "only worse.  I wanted you to hear just how

it sounded."



"Livy," he said, "it would pain me to think that when I swear it sounds

like that.  You got the words right, Livy, but you don't know the tune."



Yet he never willingly gave her pain, and he adored her and gloried in

her dominion, his life long.  Howells speaks of his beautiful and tender

loyalty to her as the "most moving quality of his most faithful soul."



It was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives,

and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all

the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character.



She guarded his work sacredly; and reviewing the manuscripts which he was

induced to discard, and certain edited manuscripts, one gets a partial

idea of what the reading world owes to Olivia Clemens.  Of the discarded.

manuscripts (he seems seldom to have destroyed them) there are a

multitude, and among them all scarcely one that is not a proof of her

sanity and high regard for his literary honor.  They are amusing--some of

them; they are interesting--some of them; they are strong and virile--

some of them; but they are unworthy--most of them, though a number remain

unfinished because theme or interest failed.



Mark Twain was likely to write not wisely but too much, piling up

hundreds of manuscript pages only because his brain was thronging as with

a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of darting, flashing ideas demanding

release.  As often as not he began writing with only a nebulous idea of

what he proposed to do.  He would start with a few characters and

situations, trusting in Providence to supply material as needed.  So he

was likely to run ashore any time.  As for those other attempts--stories

"unavailable" for one reason or another--he was just as apt to begin

those as the better sort, for somehow he could never tell the difference.

That is one of the hall-marks of genius--the thing which sharply

differentiates genius from talent.  Genius is likely to rate a literary

disaster as its best work.  Talent rarely makes that mistake.



Among the abandoned literary undertakings of these early years of

authorship there is the beginning of what was doubtless intended to

become a book, "The Second Advent," a story which opens with a very

doubtful miraculous conception in Arkansas, and leads only to grotesquery

and literary disorder.  There is another, "The Autobiography of a Damn

Fool," a burlesque on family history, hopelessly impossible; yet he began

it with vast enthusiasm and, until he allowed her to see the manuscript,

thought it especially good.  "Livy wouldn't have it," he said, "so I gave

it up."  There is another, "The Mysterious Chamber," strong and fine in

conception, vividly and intensely interesting; the story of a young lover

who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old castle and

cannot announce himself.  He wanders at last down into subterranean

passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation for twenty

years.  The question of sustenance was the weak point in the story.

Clemens could invent no way of providing it, except by means of a waste

or conduit from the kitchen into which scraps of meat, bread, and other

items of garbage were thrown.  This he thought sufficient, but Mrs.

Clemens did not highly regard such a literary device.  Clemens could

think of no good way to improve upon it, so this effort too was consigned

to the penal colony, a set of pigeonholes kept in his study.  To Howells

and others, when they came along, he would read the discarded yarns, and

they were delightful enough for such a purpose, as delightful as the

sketches which every artist has, turned face to the wall.



"Captain Stormfield" lay under the ban for many a year, though never

entirely abandoned.  This manuscript was even recommended for publication

by Howells, who has since admitted that it would not have done then; and

indeed, in its original, primitive nakedness it would hardly have done

even in this day of wider toleration.



It should be said here that there is not the least evidence (and the

manuscripts are full of evidence) that Mrs. Clemens was ever super-

sensitive, or narrow, or unliterary in her restraints.  She became his

public, as it were, and no man ever had a more open-minded, clear-headed

public than that.  For Mark Twain's reputation it would have been better

had she exercised her editorial prerogative even more actively--if, in

her love for him and her jealousy of his reputation, she had been even

more severe.  She did all that lay in her strength, from the beginning to

the end, and if we dwell upon this phase of their life together it is

because it is so large a part of Mark Twain's literary story.  On her

birthday in the year we are now closing (1875) he wrote her a letter

which conveys an acknowledgment of his debt.



LIVY DARLING,--Six years have gone by since I made my first great success

in life and won you, and thirty years have passed since Providence made

preparation for that happy success by sending you into the world.  Every

day we live together adds to the security of my confidence that we can

never any more wish to be separated than we can imagine a regret that we

were ever joined.  You are dearer to me to-day, my child, than you were

upon the last anniversary of this birthday; you were dearer then than you

were a year before; you have grown more and more dear from the first of

those anniversaries, and I do not doubt that this precious progression

will continue on to the end.



Let us look forward to the coming anniversaries, with their age and their

gray hairs, without fear and without depression, trusting and believing

that the love we bear each other will be sufficient to make them blessed.



So, with abounding affection for you and our babies I hail this day that

brings you the matronly grace and dignity of three decades!









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext Volume I, Part 2 of MARK TWAIN,

A BIOGRAPHY, 1866-1875 by Albert Bigelow Paine













MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY



By Albert Bigelow Paine







VOLUME II, Part 1: 1875-1886







CV



MARK TWAIN AT FORTY



In conversation with John Hay, Hay said to Clemens:



"A man reaches the zenith at forty, the top of the hill.  From that time

forward he begins to descend.  If you have any great undertaking ahead,

begin it now.  You will never be so capable again."



Of course this was only a theory of Hay's, a rule where rules do not

apply, where in the end the problem resolves itself into a question of

individualities.  John Hay did as great work after forty as ever before,

so did Mark Twain, and both of them gained in intellectual strength and

public honor to the very end.



Yet it must have seemed to many who knew him, and to himself, like

enough, that Mark Twain at forty had reached the pinnacle of his fame and

achievement.  His name was on every lip; in whatever environment

observation and argument were likely to be pointed with some saying or

anecdote attributed, rightly or otherwise, to Mark Twain.  "As Mark Twain

says," or, "You know that story of Mark Twain's," were universal and

daily commonplaces.  It was dazzling, towering fame, not of the best or

most enduring kind as yet, but holding somewhere within it the structure

of immortality.



He was in a constant state of siege, besought by all varieties and

conditions of humanity for favors such as only human need and abnormal

ingenuity can invent.  His ever-increasing mail presented a marvelous

exhibition of the human species on undress parade.  True, there were

hundreds of appreciative tributes from readers who spoke only out of a

heart's gratitude; but there were nearly as great a number who came with

a compliment, and added a petition, or a demand, or a suggestion, usually

unwarranted, often impertinent.  Politicians, public speakers, aspiring

writers, actors, elocutionists, singers, inventors (most of them he had

never seen or heard of) cheerfully asked him for a recommendation as to

their abilities and projects.



Young men wrote requesting verses or sentiments to be inscribed in young

ladies' autograph albums; young girls wrote asking him to write the story

of his life, to be used as a school composition; men starting obscure

papers coolly invited him to lend them his name as editor, assuring him

that he would be put to no trouble, and that it would help advertise his

books; a fruitful humorist wrote that he had invented some five thousand

puns, and invited Mark Twain to father this terrific progeny in book form

for a share of the returns.  But the list is endless.  He said once:



"The symbol of the race ought to be a human being carrying an ax, for

every human being has one concealed about him somewhere, and is always

seeking the opportunity to grind it."



Even P. T. Barnum had an ax, the large ax of advertising, and he was

perpetually trying to grind it on Mark Twain's reputation; in other

words, trying to get him to write something that would help to popularize

"The Greatest Show on Earth."



There were a good many curious letters-letters from humorists, would-be

and genuine.  A bright man in Duluth sent him an old Allen "pepper-box"

revolver with the statement that it had been found among a pile of bones

under a tree, from the limb of which was suspended a lasso and a buffalo

skull; this as evidence that the weapon was the genuine Allen which Bemis

had lost on that memorable Overland buffalo-hunt.  Mark Twain enjoyed

that, and kept the old pepper-box as long as he lived.  There were

letters from people with fads; letters from cranks of every description;

curious letters even from friends.  Reginald Cholmondeley, that lovely

eccentric of Condover Hall, where Mr. and Mrs. Clemens had spent some

halcyon days in 1873, wrote him invitations to be at his castle on a

certain day, naming the hour, and adding that he had asked friends to

meet him.  Cholmondeley had a fancy for birds, and spared nothing to

improve his collection.  Once he wrote Clemens asking him to collect for

him two hundred and five American specimens, naming the varieties and the

amount which he was to pay for each.  Clemens was to catch these birds

and bring them over to England, arriving at Condover on a certain day,

when there would be friends to meet him, of course.



Then there was a report which came now and then from another English

castle--the minutes of a certain "Mark Twain Club," all neatly and

elaborately written out, with the speech of each member and the

discussions which had followed--the work, he found out later, of another

eccentric; for there was no Mark Twain Club, the reports being just the

mental diversion of a rich young man, with nothing else to do.--[In

Following the Equator Clemens combined these two pleasant characters in

one story, with elaborations.]



Letters came queerly addressed.  There is one envelope still in existence

which bears Clemens's name in elaborate design and a very good silhouette

likeness, the work of some talented artist.  "Mark Twain, United States,"

was a common address; "Mark Twain, The World," was also used; "Mark

Twain, Somewhere," mailed in a foreign country, reached him promptly, and

"Mark Twain, Anywhere," found its way to Hartford in due season.  Then

there was a letter (though this was later; he was abroad at the time),

mailed by Brander Matthews and Francis Wilson, addressed, "Mark Twain,

God Knows Where."  It found him after traveling half around the world on

its errand, and in his answer he said, "He did."  Then some one sent a

letter addressed, "The Devil Knows Where."  Which also reached him, and

he answered, "He did, too."



Surely this was the farthest horizon of fame.



Countless Mark Twain anecdotes are told of this period, of every period,

and will be told and personally vouched for so long as the last soul of

his generation remains alive.  For seventy years longer, perhaps, there

will be those who will relate "personal recollections" of Mark Twain.

Many of them will be interesting; some of them will be true; most of them

will become history at last.  It is too soon to make history of much of

this drift now.  It is only safe to admit a few authenticated examples.



It happens that one of the oftenest-told anecdotes has been the least

elaborated.  It is the one about his call on Mrs. Stowe.  Twichell's

journal entry, set down at the time, verifies it:



Mrs. Stowe was leaving for Florida one morning, and Clemens ran over

early to say good-by.  On his return Mrs. Clemens regarded him

disapprovingly:



"Why, Youth," she said, "you haven't on any collar and tie."



He said nothing, but went up to his room, did up these items in a neat

package, and sent it over by a servant, with a line:



"Herewith receive a call from the rest of me."



Mrs. Stowe returned a witty note, in which she said that he had

discovered a new principle, the principle of making calls by instalments,

and asked whether, in extreme cases, a man might not send his hat, coat,

and boots and be otherwise excused.



Col. Henry Watterson tells the story of an after-theater supper at the

Brevoort House, where Murat Halstead, Mark Twain, and himself were

present.  A reporter sent in a card for Colonel Watterson, who was about

to deny himself when Clemens said:



"Give it to me; I'll fix it."  And left the table.  He came back in a

moment and beckoned to Watterson.



"He is young and as innocent as a lamb," he said.  "I represented myself

as your secretary.  I said that you were not here, but if Mr. Halstead

would do as well I would fetch him out.  I'll introduce you as Halstead,

and we'll have some fun."



Now, while Watterson and Halstead were always good friends, they were

political enemies.  It was a political season and the reporter wanted

that kind of an interview.  Watterson gave it to him, repudiating every

principle that Halstead stood for, reversing him in every expressed

opinion.  Halstead was for hard money and given to flying the "bloody

shirt" of sectional prejudice; Watterson lowered the bloody shirt and

declared for greenbacks in Halstead's name.  Then he and Clemens returned

to the table and told frankly what they had done.  Of course, nobody

believed it.  The report passed the World night-editor, and appeared,

next morning.  Halstead woke up, then, and wrote a note to the World,

denying the interview throughout.  The World printed his note with the

added line:



"When Mr. Halstead saw our reporter he had dined."



It required John Hay (then on the Tribune) to place the joke where it

belonged.



There is a Lotos Club anecdote of Mark Twain that carries the internal

evidence of truth.  Saturday evening at the Lotos always brought a

gathering of the "wits," and on certain evenings--"Hens and chickens"

nights--each man had to tell a story, make a speech, or sing a song.  On

one evening a young man, an invited guest, was called upon and recited a

very long poem.



One by one those who sat within easy reach of the various exits melted

away, until no one remained but Mark Twain.  Perhaps he saw the

earnestness of the young man, and sympathized with it.  He may have

remembered a time when he would have been grateful for one such attentive

auditor.  At all events, he sat perfectly still, never taking his eyes

from the reader, never showing the least inclination toward discomfort or

impatience, but listening, as with rapt attention, to the very last line.

Douglas Taylor, one of the faithful Saturday-night members, said to him

later:



"Mark, how did you manage to sit through that dreary, interminable poem?"



"Well," he said, "that young man thought he had a divine message to

deliver, and I thought he was entitled to at least one auditor, so I

stayed with him."



We may believe that for that one auditor the young author was willing to

sacrifice all the others.



One might continue these anecdotes for as long as the young man's poem

lasted, and perhaps hold as large an audience.  But anecdotes are not all

of history.  These are set down because they reflect a phase of the man

and an aspect of his life at this period.  For at the most we can only

present an angle here and there, and tell a little of the story, letting

each reader from his fancy construct the rest.









CVI



HIS FIRST STAGE APPEARANCE



Once that winter the Monday Evening Club met at Mark Twain's home, and

instead of the usual essay he read them a story: "The Facts Concerning

the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut."  It was the story of a

man's warfare with a personified conscience--a, sort of "William Wilson"

idea, though less weird, less somber, and with more actuality, more

verisimilitude.  It was, in fact, autobiographical, a setting-down of the

author's daily self-chidings.  The climax, where conscience is slain, is

a startling picture which appeals to most of humanity.  So vivid is it

all, that it is difficult in places not to believe in the reality of the

tale, though the allegory is always present.



The club was deeply impressed by the little fictional sermon.  One of its

ministerial members offered his pulpit for the next Sunday if Mark Twain

would deliver it to his congregation.  Howells welcomed it for the

Atlantic, and published it in June.  It was immensely successful at the

time, though for some reason it seems to be little known or remembered

to-day.  Now and then a reader mentions it, always with enthusiasm.

Howells referred to it repeatedly in his letters, and finally persuaded

Clemens to let Osgood bring it out, with "A True Story," in dainty,

booklet form.  If the reader does not already know the tale, it will pay

him to look it up and read it, and then to read it again.



Meantime Tom Sawyer remained unpublished.



"Get Bliss to hurry it up!" wrote Howells.  "That boy is going to make a

prodigious hit."



But Clemens delayed the book, to find some means to outwit the Canadian

pirates, who thus far had laid hands on everything, and now were

clamoring at the Atlantic because there was no more to steal.



Moncure D. Conway was in America, and agreed to take the manuscript of

Sawyer to London and arrange for its publication and copyright.  In

Conway's Memoirs he speaks of Mark Twain's beautiful home, comparing it

and its surroundings with the homes of Surrey, England.  He tells of an

entertainment given to Harriet Beecher Stowe, a sort of animated jarley

wax-works.  Clemens and Conway went over as if to pay a call, when

presently the old lady was rather startled by an invasion of costumed.

figures.  Clemens rose and began introducing them in his gay, fanciful

fashion.  He began with a knight in full armor, saying, as if in an

aside, "Bring along that tinshop," and went on to tell the romance of the

knight's achievements.



Conway read Tom Sawyer on the ship and was greatly excited over it.

Later, in London, he lectured on it, arranging meantime for its

publication with Chatto & Windus, thus establishing a friendly business

relation with that firm which Mark Twain continued during his lifetime.



Clemens lent himself to a number of institutional amusements that year,

and on the 26th of April, 1876, made his first public appearance on the

dramatic stage.



It was an amateur performance, but not of the usual kind.  There was

genuine dramatic talent in Hartford, and the old play of the "Loan of the

Lover," with Mark Twain as Peter Spuyk and Miss Helen Smith--[Now Mrs.

William W.  Ellsworth.]--as Gertrude, with a support sufficient for their

needs, gave a performance that probably furnished as much entertainment

as that pleasant old play is capable of providing.  Mark Twain had in him

the making of a great actor.  Henry Irving once said to him:





"You made a mistake by not adopting the stage as a profession.  You would

have made even a greater actor than a writer."



Yet it is unlikely that he would ever have been satisfied with the stage.

He had too many original literary ideas.  He would never have been

satisfied to repeat the same part over and over again, night after night

from week to month, and from month to year.  He could not stick to the

author's lines even for one night.  In his performance of the easy-going,

thick-headed Peter Spuyk his impromptu additions to the lines made it

hard on the company, who found their cues all at sixes and sevens, but it

delighted the audience beyond measure.  No such impersonation of that.

character was ever given before, or ever will be given again.  It was

repeated with new and astonishing variations on the part of Peter, and it

could have been put on for a long run.  Augustin Daly wrote immediately,

offering the Fifth Avenue Theater for a "benefit" performance, and again,

a few days later, urging acceptance.  "Not for one night, but for many."



Clemens was tempted, no doubt.  Perhaps, if he had yielded, he would

today have had one more claim on immortality.









CVII



HOWELLS, CLEMENS, AND "GEORGE"



Howells and Clemens were visiting back and forth rather oftener just

then.  Clemens was particularly fond of the Boston crowd--Aldrich,

Fields, Osgood, and the rest--delighting in those luncheons or dinners

which Osgood, that hospitable publisher, was always giving on one pretext

or another.  No man ever loved company more than Osgood, or to play the

part of host and pay for the enjoyment of others.  His dinners were

elaborate affairs, where the sages and poets and wits of that day (and

sometimes their wives) gathered.  They were happy reunions, those fore-

gatherings, though perhaps a more intimate enjoyment was found at the

luncheons, where only two or three were invited, usually Aldrich,

Howells, and Clemens, and the talk continued through the afternoon and

into the deepening twilight, such company and such twilight as somehow

one seems never to find any more.



On one of the visits which Howells made to Hartford that year he took his

son John, then a small boy, with him.  John was about six years old at

the time, with his head full of stories of Aladdin, and of other Arabian

fancies.  On the way over his father said to him:



"Now, John, you will see a perfect palace."



They arrived, and John was awed into silence by the magnificence and

splendors of his surroundings until they went to the bath-room to wash

off the dust of travel.  There he happened to notice a cake of pink soap.



"Why," he said, "they've even got their soap painted!" Next morning he

woke early--they were occupying the mahogany room on the ground floor--

and slipping out through the library, and to the door of the dining-room,

he saw the colored butler, George--the immortal George--setting the

breakfast-table.  He hurriedly tiptoed back and whispered to his father:



"Come quick!  The slave is setting the table!"



This being the second mention of George, it seems proper here that he

should be formally presented.  Clemens used to say that George came one

day to wash windows and remained eighteen years.  He was precisely the

sort of character that Mark Twain loved.  He had formerly been the body-

servant of an army general and was typically racially Southern, with

those delightful attributes of wit and policy and gentleness which go

with the best type of negro character.  The children loved him no less

than did their father.  Mrs. Clemens likewise had a weakness for George,

though she did not approve of him.  George's morals were defective.  He

was an inveterate gambler.  He would bet on anything, though prudently

and with knowledge.  He would investigate before he invested.  If he

placed his money on a horse, he knew the horse's pedigree and the

pedigree of the horses against it, also of their riders.  If he invested

in an election, he knew all about the candidates.  He had agents among

his own race, and among the whites as well, to supply him with

information.  He kept them faithful to him by lending them money--at

ruinous interest.  He buttonholed Mark Twain's callers while he was

removing their coats concerning the political situation, much to the

chagrin of Mrs. Clemens, who protested, though vainly, for the men liked

George and his ways, and upheld him in his iniquities.



Mrs. Clemens's disapproval of George reached the point, now and then,

where she declared he could not remain.



She even discharged him once, but next morning George was at the

breakfast-table, in attendance, as usual.  Mrs. Clemens looked at him

gravely:



"George," she said, "didn't I discharge you yesterday?"



"Yes, Mis' Clemens, but I knew you couldn't get along without me, so I

thought I'd better stay a while."



In one of the letters to Howells, Clemens wrote:



When George first came he was one of the most religious of men.  He had

but one fault--young George Washington's.  But I have trained him; and

now it fairly breaks Mrs. Clemens's heart to hear him stand at that front

door and lie to an unwelcome visitor.



George was a fine diplomat.  He would come up to the billiard-room with a

card or message from some one waiting below, and Clemens would fling his

soul into a sultry denial which became a soothing and balmy subterfuge

before it reached the front door.



The "slave" must have been setting the table in good season, for the

Clemens breakfasts were likely to be late.  They usually came along about

nine o'clock, by which time Howells and John were fairly clawing with

hunger.



Clemens did not have an early appetite, but when it came it was a good

one.  Breakfast and dinner were his important meals.  He seldom ate at

all during the middle of the day, though if guests were present he would

join them at luncheon-time and walk up and down while they were eating,

talking and gesticulating in his fervent, fascinating way.  Sometimes

Mrs. Clemens would say:



"Oh, Youth, do come and sit down with us.  We can listen so much better."



But he seldom did.  At dinner, too, it was his habit, between the

courses, to rise from the table and walk up and down the room, waving his

napkin and talking!--talking in a strain and with a charm that he could

never quite equal with his pen.  It's the opinion of most people who knew

Mark Twain personally that his impromptu utterances, delivered with that

ineffable quality of speech, manifested the culmination of his genius.



When Clemens came to Boston the Howells household was regulated, or

rather unregulated, without regard to former routine.  Mark Twain's

personality was of a sort that unconsciously compelled the general

attendance of any household.  The reader may recall Josh Billings's

remark on the subject.  Howells tells how they kept their guest to

themselves when he visited their home in Cambridge, permitting him to

indulge in as many unconventions as he chose; how Clemens would take a

room at the Parker House, leaving the gas burning day and night, and

perhaps arrive at Cambridge, after a dinner or a reading, in evening

dress and slippers, and joyously remain with them for a day or more in

that guise, slipping on an overcoat and a pair of rubbers when they went

for a walk.  Also, how he smoked continuously in every room of the house,

smoked during every waking moment, and how Howells, mindful of his

insurance, sometimes slipped in and removed the still-burning cigar after

he was asleep.



Clemens had difficulty in getting to sleep in that earlier day, and for a

time found it soothing to drink a little champagne on retiring.  Once,

when he arrived in Boston, Howells said:



"Clemens, we've laid in a bottle of champagne for you."



But he answered:



"Oh, that's no good any more.  Beer's the thing."



So Howells provided the beer, and always afterward had a vision of his

guest going up-stairs that night with a pint bottle under each arm.



He invented other methods of inducing slumber as the years went by, and

at one time found that this precious boon came more easily when he

stretched himself on the bath-room floor.



He was a perpetual joy to the Howells family when he was there, even

though the household required a general reorganization when he was gone.



Mildred Howells remembers how, as a very little girl, her mother

cautioned her not to ask for anything she wanted at the table when

company was present, but to speak privately of it to her.  Miss Howells

declares that while Mark Twain was their guest she nearly starved because

it was impossible to get her mother's attention; and Mrs. Howells, after

one of those visits of hilarity and disorder, said:



"Well, it 'most kills me, but it pays," a remark which Clemens vastly

enjoyed.  Howells himself once wrote:



Your visit was a perfect ovation for us; we never enjoy anything so much

as those visits of yours.  The smoke and the Scotch and the late hours

almost kill us; but we look each other in the eyes when you are gone, and

say what a glorious time it was, and air the library, and begin sleeping

and longing to have you back again....









CVIII



SUMMER LABORS AT QUARRY FARM



They went to Elmira, that summer of '76, to be "hermits and eschew caves

and live in the sun," as Clemens wrote in a letter to Dr. Brown.  They

returned to the place as to Paradise: Clemens to his study and the books

which he always called for, Mrs. Clemens to a blessed relief from social

obligations, the children to the shady play-places, the green, sloping

hill, where they could race and tumble, and to all their animal friends.



Susy was really growing up.  She had had several birthdays, quite grand

affairs, when she had been brought down in the morning, decked, and with

proper ceremonies, with subsequent celebration.  She was a strange,

thoughtful child, much given to reflecting on the power and presence of

infinity, for she was religiously taught.  Down in the city, one night,

there was a grand display of fireworks, and the hilltop was a good place

from which to enjoy it; but it grew late after a little, and Susy was

ordered to bed.  She said, thoughtfully:



"I wish I could sit up all night, as God does."



The baby, whom they still called "Bay," was a tiny, brown creature who

liked to romp in the sun and be rocked to sleep at night with a song.

Clemens often took them for extended' walks, pushing Bay in her carriage.

Once, in a preoccupied moment, he let go of the little vehicle and it

started downhill, gaining speed rapidly.



He awoke then, and set off in wild pursuit.  Before he could overtake the

runaway carriage it had turned to the roadside and upset.  Bay was lying

among the stones and her head was bleeding.  Hastily binding the wound

with a handkerchief he started full speed with her up the hill toward the

house, calling for restoratives as he came.  It was no serious matter.

The little girl was strong and did not readily give way to affliction.



The children were unlike: Susy was all contemplation and nerves; Bay

serene and practical.  It was said, when a pet cat died--this was some

years later--that Susy deeply reflected as to its life here and

hereafter, while Bay was concerned only as to the style of its funeral.

Susy showed early her father's quaintness of remark.  Once they bought

her a heavier pair of shoes than she approved of.  She was not in the

best of humors during the day, and that night, when at prayer-time her

mother said, "Now, Susy, put your thoughts on God," she answered, "Mama,

I can't with those shoes."



Clemens worked steadily that summer and did a variety of things.  He had

given up a novel, begun with much enthusiasm, but he had undertaken

another long manuscript.  By the middle of August he had written several

hundred pages of a story which was to be a continuation of Tam Sawyer--

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Now, here is a curious phase of

genius.  The novel which for a time had filled him with enthusiasm and

faith had no important literary value, whereas, concerning this new tale,

he says:



"I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have gone, and may possibly

pigeonhole or burn the manuscript when it is done"--this of the story

which, of his books of pure fiction, will perhaps longest survive.  He

did, in fact, give the story up, and without much regret, when it was

about half completed, and let it lie unfinished for years.



He wrote one short tale, "The Canvasser's Story," a burlesque of no

special distinction, and he projected for the Atlantic a scheme of

"blindfold novelettes," a series of stories to be written by well-known

authors and others, each to be constructed on the same plot.  One can

easily imagine Clemens's enthusiasm over a banal project like that; his

impulses were always rainbow-hued, whether valuable or not; but it is

curious that Howells should welcome and even encourage an enterprise so

far removed from all the traditions of art.  It fell to pieces, at last,

of inherent misconstruction.  The title was to be, "A Murder and a

Marriage."  Clemens could not arrive at a logical climax that did not

bring the marriage and the hanging on the same day.



The Atlantic started its "Contributors' Club," and Howells wrote to

Clemens for a paragraph or more of personal opinion on any subject,

assuring him that he could "spit his spite" out at somebody or something

as if it were a passage from a letter.  That was a fairly large

permission to give Mark Twain.  The paragraph he sent was the sort of

thing he would write with glee, and hug himself over in the thought of

Howells's necessity of rejecting it.  In the accompanying note he said:



Say, Boss, do you want this to lighten up your old freight-train with?

I suppose you won't, but then it won't take long to say, so.



He was always sending impossible offerings to the magazines; innocently

enough sometimes, but often out of pure mischievousness.  Yet they were

constantly after him, for they knew they were likely to get a first-water

gem.  Mary Mopes Dodge, of St. Nicholas, wrote time and again, and

finally said:



"I know a man who was persecuted by an editor till he went distracted."



In his reading that year at the farm he gave more than customary

attention to one of his favorite books, Pepys' Diary, that captivating

old record which no one can follow continuously without catching the

infection of its manner and the desire of imitation.  He had been reading

diligently one day, when he determined to try his hand on an imaginary

record of conversation and court manners of a bygone day, written in the

phrase of the period.  The result was Fireside Conversation in the Time

of Queen Elizabeth, or, as he later called it, 1601.  The "conversation,"

recorded by a supposed Pepys of that period, was written with all the

outspoken coarseness and nakedness of that rank day, when fireside

sociabilities were limited only by the range of loosened fancy,

vocabulary, and physical performance, and not by any bounds of

convention.  Howells has spoken of Mark Twain's "Elizabethan breadth of

parlance," and how he, Howells, was always hiding away in discreet holes

and corners the letters in which Clemens had "loosed his bold fancy to

stoop on rank suggestion."  "I could not bear to burn them," he

declares, "and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look

at them."



In the 1601 Mark Twain outdid himself in the Elizabethan field.  It was

written as a letter to that robust divine, Rev. Joseph Twichell, who had

no special scruples concerning Shakespearian parlance and customs.

Before it was mailed it was shown to David Gray, who was spending a

Sunday at Elmira.  Gray said:



"Print it and put your name to it, Mark.  You have never done a greater

piece of work than that."



John Hay, whom it also reached in due time, pronounce it a classic--a

"most exquisite bit of old English morality."  Hay surreptitiously

permitted some proofs to be made of it, and it has been circulated

privately, though sparingly, ever since.  At one time a special font of

antique type was made for it and one hundred copies were taken on hand-

made paper.  They would easily bring a hundred dollars each to-day.



1601 is a genuine classic, as classics of that sort go.  It is better

than the gross obscenities of Rabelais, and perhaps, in some day to come,

the taste that justified Gargantua and the Decameron will give this

literary refugee shelter and setting among the more conventional writings

of Mark Twain.  Human taste is a curious thing; delicacy is purely a

matter of environment and point of view.--[In a note-book of a later

period Clemens himself wrote:  "It depends on who writes a thing whether

it is coarse or not.  I once wrote a conversation between Elizabeth,

Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Sir W. Raleigh, Lord Bacon, Sir

Nicholas Throckmorton, and a stupid old nobleman--this latter being cup-

bearer to the queen and ostensible reporter of the talk.



"There were four maids of honor present and a sweet young girl two years

younger than the boy Beaumont.  I built a conversation which could have

happened--I used words such as were used at that time--1601.  I sent it

anonymously to a magazine, and how the editor abused it and the sender!

But that man was a praiser of Rabelais, and had been saying, 'O that we

had a Rabelais!'  I judged that I could furnish him one."]





Eighteen hundred and seventy-six was a Presidential year--the year of the

Hayes-Tilden campaign.  Clemens and Howells were both warm Republicans

and actively interested in the outcome, Clemens, as he confessed, for the

first time in his life.  Before his return to Hartford he announced

himself publicly as a Hayes man, made so by Governor Hayes's letter of

acceptance, which, he said, "expresses my own political convictions."

His politics had not been generally known up to that time, and a Tilden

and Hendricks club in Jersey City had invited him to be present and give

them some political counsel, at a flag-raising.  He wrote, declining

pleasantly enough, then added:



"You have asked me for some political counsel or advice: In view of Mr.

Tilden's Civil War record my advice is not to raise the flag."



He wrote Howells: "If Tilden is elected I think the entire country will

go pretty straight to--Mrs. Howells's bad place."



Howells was writing a campaign biography of Hayes, which he hoped would

have a large sale, and Clemens urged him to get it out quickly and save

the country.  Howells, working like a beaver, in turn urged Clemens to

take the field in the cause.  Returning to Hartford, Clemens presided at

a political rally and made a speech, the most widely quoted of the

campaign.  All papers, without distinction as to party, quoted it, and

all readers, regardless of politics, read it with joy.



Yet conditions did not improve.  When Howells's book had been out a

reasonable length of time he wrote that it had sold only two thousand

copies.



"There's success for you," he said.  "It makes me despair of the

Republic, I can tell you."



Clemens, however, did not lose faith, and went on shouting for Hayes and

damning Tilden till the final vote was cast.  In later life he changed

his mind about Tilden (as did many others) through sympathy.  Sympathy

could make--Mark Twain change his mind any time.  He stood for the right,

but, above all, for justice.  He stood for the wronged, regardless of all

other things.









CIX



THE PUBLIC APPEARANCE OF "TOM SAWYER"



Clemens gave a few readings in Boston and Philadelphia, but when urged to

go elsewhere made the excuse that he was having his portrait painted and

could not leave home.



As a matter of fact, he was enjoying himself with Frank Millet, who had

been invited to the house to do the portrait and had captured the fervent

admiration of the whole family.  Millet was young, handsome, and lively;

Clemens couldn't see enough of him, the children adored him and added his

name to the prayer which included each member of the household--the "Holy

Family," Clemens called it.



Millet had brought with him but one piece of canvas for the portrait, and

when the first sketch was finished Mrs. Clemens was so delighted with it

that she did not wish him to touch it again.  She was afraid of losing

some particular feeling in it which she valued.  Millet went to the city.

for another canvas and Clemens accompanied him.  While Millet was doing

his shopping it happened to occur to Clemens that it would be well to

fill in the time by having his hair cut.  He left word with a clerk to

tell Millet that he had gone across the street.  By and by the artist

came over, and nearly wept with despair when he saw his subject sheared

of the auburn, gray-sprinkled aureola that had made his first sketch a

success.  He tried it again, and the result was an excellent likeness,

but it never satisfied Millet.



The 'Adventures of Tom Sawyer' appeared late in December (1876), and

immediately took its place as foremost of American stories of boy life,

a place which it unquestionably holds to this day.  We have already

considered the personal details of this story, for they were essentially

nothing more than the various aspects of Mark Twain's own boyhood.  It is

only necessary to add a word concerning the elaboration of this period in

literary form.



From every point it is a masterpiece, this picture of boy life in a

little lazy, drowsy town, with all the irresponsibility and general

disreputability of boy character coupled with that indefinable, formless,

elusive something we call boy conscience, which is more likely to be boy

terror and a latent instinct of manliness.  These things are so truly

portrayed that every boy and man reader finds the tale fitting into his

own remembered years, as if it had grown there.  Every boy has played off

sick to escape school; every boy has reflected in his heart Tom's picture

of himself being brought home dead, and gloated over the stricken

consciences of those who had blighted his young life; every boy--of that

day, at least--every normal, respectable boy, grew up to "fear God and

dread the Sunday-school," as Howells puts it in his review.



As for the story itself, the narrative of it, it is pure delight.  The

pirate camp on the island is simply boy heaven.  What boy, for instance,

would not change any other glory or boon that the world holds for this:



     They built a fire against the side of a great log twenty or thirty

     steps within the somber depths of the forest, and then cooked some

     bacon in the frying-pan for supper, and used up half of the corn

     "pone" stock they had brought.  It seemed glorious sport to be

     feasting in that wild, free way in the virgin forest of an

     unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of men, and

     they said they never would return to civilization.  The climbing

     fire lit up their faces and threw its ruddy glare upon the pillared

     tree-trunks of their forest-temple, and upon the varnished foliage

     and the festooning vines.



There is a magic in it.  Mark Twain, when he wrote it, felt renewed in

him all the old fascination of those days and nights with Tom

Blankenship, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys on Glasscock's Island.

Everywhere in Tom Sawyer there is a quality, entirely apart from the

humor and the narrative, which the younger reader is likely to overlook.

No one forgets the whitewashing scene, but not many of us, from our early

reading, recall this delicious bit of description which introduces it:



     The locust-trees were in bloom, and the fragrance of the blossoms

     filled the air.  Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was

     green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a

     delectable land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.



Tom's night visit home; the graveyard scene, with the murder of Dr.

Robinson; the adventures of Tom and Becky in the cave--these are all

marvelously invented.  Literary thrill touches the ultimate in one

incident of the cave episode.  Brander Matthews has written:



     Nor is there any situation quite as thrilling as that awful moment

     in the cave when the boy and girl are lost in the darkness, and when

     Tom suddenly sees a human hand bearing a light, and then finds that

     the hand is the hand of Indian Joe, his one mortal enemy.  I have

     always thought that the vision of the hand in the cave in Tom Sawyer

     was one of the very finest things in the literature of adventure

     since Robinson Crusoe first saw a single footprint in the sand of

     the sea-shore.



Mark Twain's invention was not always a reliable quantity, but with that

eccentricity which goes with any attribute of genius, it was likely at

any moment to rise supreme.  If to the critical, hardened reader the tale

seems a shade overdone here and there, a trifle extravagant in its

delineations, let him go back to his first long-ago reading of it and see

if he recalls anything but his pure delight in it then.  As a boy's story

it has not been equaled.



Tom Sawyer has ranked in popularity with Roughing It.



Its sales go steadily on from year to year, and are likely to continue so

long as boys and girls do not change, and men and women remember.



--[Col.  Henry Watterson, when he finished Tom Sawyer, wrote:  "I have

just laid down Tom Sawyer, and cannot resist the pressure.  It is

immense!  I read every word of it, didn't skip a line, and nearly

disgraced myself several times in the presence of a sleeping-car full of

honorable and pious people.  Once I had to get to one side and have a

cry, and as for an internal compound of laughter and tears there was no

end to it....  The 'funeral' of the boys, the cave business, and the hunt

for the hidden treasure are as dramatic as anything I know of in fiction,

while the pathos--particularly everything relating to Huck and Aunt

Polly--makes a cross between Dickens's skill and Thackeray's nature,

which, resembling neither, is thoroughly impressive and original."]









CX



MARK TWAIN AND BRET HARTE WRITE A PLAY



It was the fall and winter of '76 that Bret Harte came to Hartford and

collaborated with Mark Twain on the play "Ah Sin," a comedy-drama, or

melodrama, written for Charles T. Parsloe, the great impersonator of

Chinese character.  Harte had written a successful play which

unfortunately he had sold outright for no great sum, and was eager for

another venture.  Harte had the dramatic sense and constructive

invention.  He also had humor, but he felt the need of the sort of humor

that Mark Twain could furnish.  Furthermore, he believed that a play

backed by both their reputations must start with great advantages.

Clemens also realized these things, and the arrangement was made.

Speaking of their method of working, Clemens once said:



"Well, Bret came down to Hartford and we talked it over, and then Bret

wrote it while I played billiards, but of course I had to go over it to

get the dialect right.  Bret never did know anything about dialect."

Which is hardly a fair statement of the case.  They both worked on the

play, and worked hard.



During the, period of its construction Harte had an order for a story

which he said he must finish at once, as he needed the money.  It must be

delivered by the following night, and he insisted that he must be getting

at it without a moment's delay.  Still he seemed in no haste to begin.

The evening passed; bedtime came.  Then he asked that an open fire might

be made in his room and a bottle of whisky sent up, in case he needed.

something to keep him awake.  George attended to these matters, and

nothing more was heard of Harte until very early next morning, when he

rang for George and asked for a fresh fire and an additional supply of

whisky.  At breakfast-time he appeared, fresh, rosy, and elate, with the

announcement that his story was complete.



That forenoon the Saturday Morning Club met at the Clemens home.  It was

a young women's club, of which Mark Twain was a sort of honorary member--

a club for the purpose of intellectual advancement, somewhat on the order

of the Monday Evening Club of men, except that the papers read before it

were not prepared by members, but by men and women prominent in some

field of intellectual progress.  Bret Harte had agreed to read to them on

this particular occasion, and he gaily appeared and gave them the story

just finished, "Thankful Blossom," a tale which Mark Twain always

regarded as one of Harte's very best.



The new play, "Ah Sin," by Mark Twain and Bret Harte, was put on at

Washington, at the National Theater, on the evening of May 7, 1877.  It

had been widely exploited in the newspapers, and the fame of the authors

insured a crowded opening.  Clemens was unable to go over on account of a

sudden attack of bronchitis.  Parsloe was nervous accordingly, and the

presence of Harte does not seem to have added to his happiness.



"I am not very well myself," he wrote to Clemens.  "The excitement of the

first night is bad enough, but to have the annoyance with Harte that I

have is too much for a new beginner."



Nevertheless, the play seems to have gone well, with Parsloe as Ah Sin--

a Chinese laundryman who was also a great number of other diverting

things--with a fair support and a happy-go-lucky presentation of frontier

life, which included a supposed murder, a false accusation, and a general

clearing-up of mystery by the pleasant and wily and useful and

entertaining Ah Sin.  It was not a great play.  It was neither very

coherent nor convincing, but it had a lot of good fun in it, with

character parts which, if not faithful to life, were faithful enough to

the public conception of it to be amusing and exciting.  At the end of

each act not only Parsloe, but also the principal members of the company,

were called before the curtain for special acknowledgments.  When it was

over there was a general call for Ah Sin, who came before the curtain and

read a telegram.



CHARLES T. PARSLOE,--I am on the sick-list, and therefore cannot come to

Washington; but I have prepared two speeches--one to deliver in event of

failure of the play, and the other if successful.  Please tell me which I

shall send.  May be better to put it to vote.



                                        MARK TWAIN.





The house cheered the letter, and when it was put to vote decided

unanimously that the play had been a success--a verdict more kindly than

true.



J. I. Ford, of the theater management, wrote to Clemens, next morning

after the first performance, urging him to come to Washington in person

and "wet nurse" the play until "it could do for itself."



Ford expressed satisfaction with the play and its prospects, and

concludes:



I inclose notices.  Come if you can.  "Your presence will be worth ten

thousand men.  The king's name is a tower of strength."  I have urged the

President to come to-night.



The play made no money in Washington, but Augustin Daly decided to put it

on in New York at the Fifth Avenue Theater, with a company which

included, besides Parsloe, Edmund Collier, P. A. Anderson, Dora

Goldthwaite, Henry Crisp, and Mrs. Wells, a very worthy group of players

indeed.  Clemens was present at the opening, dressed in white, which he

affected only for warm-weather use in those days, and made a speech at

the end of the third act.



"Ah Sin" did not excite much enthusiasm among New York dramatic critics.

The houses were promising for a time, but for some reason the performance

as a whole did not contain the elements of prosperity.  It set out on its

provincial travels with no particular prestige beyond the reputation of

its authors; and it would seem that this was not enough, for it failed to

pay, and all parties concerned presently abandoned it to its fate and it

was heard of no more.  Just why "Ah Sin" did not prosper it would not

become us to decide at this far remove of time and taste.  Poorer plays

have succeeded and better plays have failed since then, and no one has

ever been able to demonstrate the mystery.  A touch somewhere, a pulling-

about and a readjustment, might have saved "Ali Sin," but the pullings

and haulings which they gave it did not.  Perhaps it still lies in some

managerial vault, and some day may be dragged to light and reconstructed

and recast, and come into its reward.  Who knows?  Or it may have drifted

to that harbor of forgotten plays, whence there is no returning.



As between Harte and Clemens, the whole matter was unfortunate.  In the

course of their association there arose a friction and the long-time

friendship disappeared.









CXI



A BERMUDA HOLIDAY



On the 16th of May, 1877, Mark Twain set out on what, in his note-book,

he declared to be "the first actual pleasure-trip" he had ever taken,

meaning that on every previous trip he had started with a purpose other

than that of mere enjoyment.  He took with him his, friend and pastor,

the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, and they sailed for Bermuda, an island

resort not so well known or so fashionable as to-day.



They did not go to a hotel.  Under assumed names they took up quarters in

a boarding-house, with a Mrs. Kirkham, and were unmolested and altogether

happy in their wanderings through four golden days.  Mark Twain could not

resist keeping a note-book, setting down bits of scenery and character

and incident, just as he had always done.  He was impressed with the

cheapness of property and living in the Bermuda of that period.  He makes

special mention of some cottages constructed of coral blocks: "All as

beautiful and as neat as a pin, at the cost of four hundred and eighty

dollars each."  To Twichell he remarked:



"Joe, this place is like Heaven, and I'm going to make the most of it."



"Mark," said Twichell, "that's right; make the most of a place that is

like Heaven while you have a chance."



In one of the entries--the final one--Clemens says:



"Bermuda is free (at present) from the triple curse of railways,

telegraphs, and newspapers, but this will not last the year.  I propose

to spend next year here and no more."



When they were ready to leave, and started for the steamer, Twichell made

an excuse to go back, his purpose being to tell their landlady and her

daughter that, without knowing it, they had been entertaining Mark Twain.



"Did you ever hear of Mark Twain?" asked Twichell.



The daughter answered.



"Yes," she said, "until I'm tired of the name.  I know a young man who

never talks of anything else."



"Well," said Twichell, "that gentleman with me is Mark Twain."



The Kirkhams declined to believe it at first, and then were in deep

sorrow that they had not known it earlier.  Twichell promised that he and

Clemens would come back the next year; and they meant to go back--we

always mean to go back to places--but it was thirty years before they

returned at last, and then their pleasant landlady was dead.



On the home trip they sighted a wandering vessel, manned by blacks,

trying to get to New York.  She had no cargo and was pretty helpless.

Later, when she was reported again, Clemens wrote about it in a Hartford

paper, telling the story as he knew it.  The vessel had shipped the crew,

on a basis of passage to New York, in exchange for labor.  So it was a

"pleasure-excursion!" Clemens dwelt on this fancy:



     I have heard of a good many pleasure-excursions, but this heads the

     list.  It is monumental, and if ever the tired old tramp is found I

     should like to be there and see him in his sorrowful rags and his

     venerable head of grass and seaweed, and hear the ancient mariners

     tell the story of their mysterious wanderings through the solemn

     solitudes of the ocean.



Long afterward this vagrant craft was reported again, still drifting with

the relentless Gulf Stream.  Perhaps she reached New York in time; one

would like to know, but there seems no good way to find out.



That first Bermuda voyage was always a happy memory to Mark Twain.  To

Twichell he wrote that it was the "joyousest trip" he had ever made:



     Not a heartache anywhere, not a twinge of conscience.  I often come

     to myself out of a reverie and detect an undertone of thought that

     had been thinking itself without volition of mind--viz., that if we

     had only had ten days of those walks and talks instead of four.



There was but one regret: Howells had not been with them.  Clemens

denounced him for his absence:



     If you had gone with us and let me pay the fifty dollars, which the

     trip and the board and the various knick-knacks and mementos would

     cost, I would have picked up enough droppings from your conversation

     to pay me five hundred per cent. profit in the way of the several

     magazine articles which I could have written; whereas I can now

     write only one or two, and am therefore largely out of pocket by

     your proud ways.



Clemens would not fail to write about his trip.  He could not help doing

that, and he began "Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion" as soon as

he landed in Hartford.  They were quite what the name would signify--

leisurely, pleasant commentaries on a loafing, peaceful vacation.  They

are not startling in their humor or description, but are gently amusing

and summery, reflecting, bubble-like, evanescent fancies of Bermuda.

Howells, shut up in a Boston editorial office, found them delightful

enough, and very likely his Atlantic readers agreed with him.  The story

of "Isaac and the Prophets of Baal" was one that Capt. Ned Wakeman had

told to Twichell during a voyage which the latter had made to Aspinwall

with that vigorous old seafarer; so in the "Rambling Notes" Wakeman

appears as Captain Hurricane Jones, probably a step in the evolution of

the later name of Stormfield.  The best feature of the series (there were

four papers in all) is a story of a rescue in mid-ocean; but surely the

brightest ripple of humor is the reference to Bermuda's mahogany-tree:



     There was exactly one mahogany-tree on the island.  I know this to

     be reliable because I saw a man who said he had counted it many a

     time and could not be mistaken.  He was a man with a haze lip and a

     pure heart, and everybody said he was as true as steel.  Such men

     are all too few.



Clemens cared less for these papers than did Howells.  He had serious

doubts about the first two and suggested their destruction, but with

Howells's appreciation his own confidence in them returned and he let

them all go in.  They did not especially advance his reputation, but

perhaps they did it no harm.









CXII



A NEW PLAY AND A NEW TALE



He wrote a short story that year which is notable mainly for the fact

that in it the telephone becomes a literary property, probably for the

first time.  "The Loves of Alonzo Fitz-Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton"

employed in the consummation what was then a prospect, rather than a

reality--long-distance communication.



His work that summer consisted mainly of two extensive undertakings, one

of which he completed without delay.  He still had the dramatic ambition,

and he believed that he was capable now of constructing a play entirely

from his own resources.



To Howells, in June, he wrote:



To-day I am deep in a comedy which I began this morning--principal

character an old detective.  I skeletoned the first act and wrote the

second to-day, and am dog-tired now.  Fifty-four pages of MS. in seven

hours.



Seven days later, the Fourth of July, he said:



I have piled up one hundred and fifty-one pages on my comedy.  The first,

second and fourth acts are done, and done to my satisfaction, too.  To-

morrow and next day will finish the third act, and the play.  Never had

so much fun over anything in my life never such consuming interest and

delight.  And just think!  I had Sol Smith Russell in my mind's eye for

the old detective's part, and bang it! he has gone off pottering with

Oliver Optic, or else the papers lie.



He was working with enthusiasm, you see, believing in it with a faith

which, alas, was no warrant for its quality.  Even Howells caught his

enthusiasm and became eager to see the play, and to have the story it

contained told for the Atlantic.



But in the end it proved a mistake.  Dion Boucicault, when he read the

manuscript, pronounced it better than "Ah Sin," but that was only

qualified praise.  Actors who considered the play, anxious enough to have

Mark Twain's name on their posters and small bills, were obliged to admit

that, while it contained marvelous lines, it wouldn't "go."  John

Brougham wrote:



     There is an absolute "embarrassment of riches" in your "Detective"

     most assuredly, but the difficulty is to put it into profitable

     form.  The quartz is there in abundance, only requiring the

     necessary manipulation to extract the gold.



     In narrative structure the story would be full of life, character,

     and the most exuberant fun, but it is altogether too diffuse in its

     present condition for dramatic representation, and I confess I do

     not feel sufficient confidence in my own experience (even if I had

     the time, which on reflection I find I have not) to undertake what,

     under different circumstances, would be a "labor of love."



                              Yours sincerely,    JOHN BROUGHAM.





That was frank, manly, and to the point; it covered the ground exactly.

"Simon Wheeler, the Amateur Detective," had plenty of good material in

it--plenty of dialogue and situations; but the dialogue wouldn't play,

and the situations wouldn't act.  Clemens realized that perhaps the drama

was not, after all, his forte; he dropped "Simon Wheeler," lost his

interest in "Ah Sin," even leased "Colonel Sellers" for the coming

season, and so, in a sort of fury, put theatrical matters out of his

mind.



He had entered upon what, for him, was a truer domain.  One day he picked

up from among the books at the farm a little juvenile volume, an English

story of the thirteenth century by Charlotte M. Yonge, entitled, The

Prince and the Page.  It was a story of Edward I. and his cousins,

Richard and Henry de Montfort; in part it told of the submerged

personality of the latter, picturing him as having dwelt in disguise as

a blind beggar for a period of years.  It was a story of a sort and with

a setting that Mark Twain loved, and as he read there came a correlative

idea.  Not only would he disguise a prince as a beggar, but a beggar as

a prince.  He would have them change places in the world, and each learn

the burdens of the other's life.--[There is no point of resemblance

between the Prince and the Pauper and the tale that inspired it.  No one

would ever guess that the one had grown out of the readings of the other,

and no comparison of any sort is possible between them.]



The plot presented physical difficulties.  He still had some lurking

thought of stage performance, and saw in his mind a spectacular

presentation, with all the costumery of an early period as background for

a young and beautiful creature who would play the part of prince.  The

old device of changelings in the cradle (later used in Pudd'nhead Wilson)

presented itself to him, but it could not provide the situations he had

in mind.  Finally came the thought of a playful interchange of raiment

and state (with startling and unlooked-for consequence)--the guise and

personality of Tom Canty, of Offal Court, for those of the son of Henry

VIII., little Edward Tudor, more lately sixth English king of that name.

This little prince was not his first selection for the part.  His

original idea had been to use the late King Edward VII. (then Prince of

Wales) at about fifteen, but he found that it would never answer to lose

a prince among the slums of modern London, and have his proud estate

denied and jeered at by a modern mob.  He felt that he could not make it

seem real; so he followed back through history, looking along for the

proper time and prince, till he came to little Edward, who was too young

--but no matter, he would do.



He decided to begin his new venture in story form.  He could dramatize it

later.  The situation appealed to him immensely.  The idea seemed a

brand-new one; it was delightful, it was fascinating, and he was

saturated with the atmosphere and literature and history--the data and

detail of that delightful old time.  He put away all thought of cheap,

modern play-acting and writing, to begin one of the loveliest and most

entertaining and instructive tales of old English life.  He decided to be

quite accurate in his picture of the period, and he posted himself on old

London very carefully.  He bought a pocket-map which he studied in the

minutest detail.



He wrote about four hundred manuscript pages of the tale that summer;

then, as the inspiration seemed to lag a little, put it aside, as was his

habit, to wait until the ambition for it should be renewed.  It was a

long wait, as usual.  He did not touch it again for more than three

years.









CXIII



TWO DOMESTIC DRAMAS



Some unusual happenings took place that summer of 1877.  John T. Lewis

(colored), already referred to as the religious antagonist of Auntie

Cord, by great presence of mind and bravery saved the lives of Mrs.

Clemens's sister-in-law, Mrs. Charles ("Charley") Langdon, her little

daughter Julia, and her nurse-maid.  They were in a buggy, and their

runaway horse was flying down East Hill toward Elmira to certain

destruction, when Lewis, laboring slowly homeward with a loaded wagon,

saw them coming and turned his team across the road, after which he

leaped out and with extraordinary strength and quickness grabbed the

horse's bridle and brought him to a standstill.  The Clemens and Crane

families, who had seen the runaway start at the farm gate, arrived half

wild with fear, only to find the supposed victims entirely safe.



Everybody contributed in rewarding Lewis.  He received money ($1,500) and

various other presents, including inscribed books and trinkets, also,

what he perhaps valued more than anything, a marvelous stem-winding gold

watch.  Clemens, writing a full account to Dr. Brown of the watch, says:



     And if any scoffer shall say, "behold this thing is out of

     character," there is an inscription within which will silence him;

     for it will teach him that this wearer aggrandizes the watch, not

     the watch the wearer.



In another paragraph he says:



     When Lewis arrived the other evening, after having saved those lives

     by a feat which I think is the most marvelous I can call to mind,

     when he arrived hunched up on his manure-wagon and as grotesquely

     picturesque as usual, everybody wanted to go and see how he looked.

     They came back and said he was beautiful.  It was so, too, and yet

     he would have photographed exactly as he would have done any day

     these past seven years that he has occupied this farm.



Lewis acknowledged his gifts in a letter which closed with a paragraph of

rare native loftiness:



     But I beg to say, humbly, that inasmuch as divine Providence saw fit

     to use me as an instrument for the saving of those preshious lives,

     the honner conferd upon me was greater than the feat performed.



Lewis lived to enjoy his prosperity, and the honor of the Clemens and

Langdon households, for twenty-nine years.  When he was too old to work

there was a pension, to which Clemens contributed; also Henry H. Rogers.

So the simple-hearted, noble old negro closed his days in peace.



Mrs. Crane, in a letter, late in July, 1906, told of his death:



     He was always cheerful, and seemed not to suffer much pain, told

     stories, and was able to eat almost everything.



     Three days ago a new difficulty appeared, on account of which his

     doctor said he must go to the hospital for care such as it was quite

     impossible to give in his home.



     He died on his way there.



     Thus it happened that he died on the road where he had performed his

     great deed.



A second unusual incident of that summer occurred in Hartford.  There had

been a report of a strange man seen about the Clemens place, thought to

be a prospecting burglar, and Clemens went over to investigate.  A little

searching inquiry revealed that the man was not a burglar, but a mechanic

out of employment, a lover of one of the house-maids, who had given him

food and shelter on the premises, intending no real harm.  When the girl

found that her secret was discovered, she protested that he was her

fiance, though she said he appeared lately to have changed his mind and

no longer wished to marry her.



The girl seemed heartbroken, and sympathy for her was naturally the first

and about the only feeling which Clemens developed, for the time being.

He reasoned with the young man, but without making much headway.  Finally

his dramatic instinct prompted him to a plan of a sort which would have

satisfied even Tom Sawyer.  He asked Twichell to procure a license for

the couple, and to conceal himself in a ground floor bath-room.  He

arranged with the chief of police to be on hand in another room; with the

rest of the servants quietly to prepare a wedding-feast, and finally with

Lizzie herself to be dressed for the ceremony.  He had already made an

appointment with the young man to come to, see him at a certain hour on a

"matter of business," and the young man arrived in the belief, no doubt,

that it was something which would lead to profitable employment.  When he

came in Clemens gently and quietly reviewed the situation, told him of

the young girl's love for him; how he had been sheltered and fed by her;

how through her kindness to him she had compromised her reputation for

honesty and brought upon her all the suspicion of having sheltered a

burglar; how she was ready and willing to marry him, and how he (Clemens)

was ready to assist them to obtain work and a start in life.



But the young man was not enthusiastic.  He was a Swede and slow of

action.  He resolutely declared that he was not ready to marry yet, and

in the end refused to do so.  Then came the dramatic moment.  Clemens

quietly but firmly informed him that the wedding ceremony must take

place; that by infesting his premises he had broken the law, not only

against trespass, but most likely against house-breaking.  There was a

brief discussion of this point.  Finally Clemens gave him five minutes to

make up his mind, with the statement that he had an officer in waiting,

and unless he would consent to the wedding he would be taken in charge.

The young man began to temporize, saying that it would be necessary for

him to get a license and a preacher.  But Clemens stepped to the door of

the bath-room, opened it, and let out Twichell, who had been sweltering

there in that fearful place for more than an hour, it being August.  The

delinquent lover found himself confronted with all the requisites of

matrimony except the bride, and just then this detail appeared on the

scene, dressed for the occasion.  Behind her ranged the rest of the

servants and a few invited guests.  Before the young man knew it he had a

wife, and on the whole did not seem displeased.  It ended with a gay

supper and festivities.  Then Clemens started them handsomely by giving

each of them a check for one hundred dollars; and in truth (which in this

case, at least, is stranger than fiction) they lived happily and

prosperously ever after.



Some years later Mark Twain based a story on this episode, but it was

never entirely satisfactory and remains unpublished.









CXIV



THE WHITTIER BIRTHDAY SPEECH



It was the night of December 17, 1877, that Mark Twain made his

unfortunate speech at the dinner given by the Atlantic staff to John G.

Whittier on his seventieth birthday.  Clemens had attended a number of

the dinners which the Atlantic gave on one occasion or another, and had

provided a part of the entertainment.  It is only fair to say that his

after-dinner speeches at such times had been regarded as very special

events, genuine triumphs of humor and delivery.  But on this particular

occasion he determined to outdo himself, to prepare something unusual,

startling, something altogether unheard of.



When Mark Twain had an impulse like that it was possible for it to result

in something dangerous, especially in those earlier days.  This time it

produced a bombshell; not just an ordinary bombshell, or even a twelve-

inch projectile, but a shell of planetary size.  It was a sort of hoax-

always a doubtful plaything--and in this case it brought even quicker and

more terrible retribution than usual.  It was an imaginary presentation

of three disreputable frontier tramps who at some time had imposed

themselves on a lonely miner as Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes, quoting

apposite selections from their verses to the accompaniment of cards and

drink, and altogether conducting themselves in a most unsavory fashion.

At the end came the enlightenment that these were not what they pretended

to be, but only impostors--disgusting frauds.  A feature like that would

be a doubtful thing to try in any cultured atmosphere.  The thought of

associating, ever so remotely, those three old bummers which he had

conjured up with the venerable and venerated Emerson, Longfellow, and

Holmes, the Olympian trinity, seems ghastly enough to-day, and must have

seemed even more so then.  But Clemens, dazzled by the rainbow splendor

of his conception, saw in it only a rare colossal humor, which would

fairly lift and bear his hearers along on a tide of mirth.  He did not

show his effort to any one beforehand.  He wanted its full beauty to

burst upon the entire company as a surprise.



It did that.  Howells was toastmaster, and when he came to present

Clemens he took particular pains to introduce him as one of his foremost

contributors and dearest friends.  Here, he said, was "a humorist who

never left you hanging you head for having enjoyed his joke."



Thirty years later Clemens himself wrote of his impressions as he rose to

deliver his speech.



     I vaguely remember some of the details of that gathering: dimly I

     can see a hundred people--no, perhaps fifty--shadowy figures,

     sitting at tables feeding, ghosts now to me, and nameless

     forevermore.  I don't know who they were, but I can very distinctly

     see, seated at the grand table and facing the rest of us, Mr.

     Emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; Mr. Whittier, grave,

     lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his face; Mr.

     Longfellow, with his silken-white hair and his benignant face; Dr.

     Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all good-

     fellowship everywhere, like a rose-diamond whose facets are being

     turned toward the light, first one way and then another--a charming

     man, and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he

     was sitting still (what he would call still, but what would be more

     or less motion to other people).  I can see those figures with

     entire distinctiness across this abyss of time.



William Winter, the poet, had just preceded him, and it seemed a moment

aptly chosen for his so-different theme.  "And then," to quote Howells,

"the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe was

upon us."



After the first two or three hundred words, when the general plan and

purpose of the burlesque had developed, when the names of Longfellow,

Emerson, and Holmes began to be flung about by those bleary outcasts, and

their verses given that sorry association, those Atlantic diners became

petrified with amazement and horror.  Too late, then, the speaker

realized his mistake.  He could not stop, he must go on to the ghastly

end.  And somehow he did it, while "there fell a silence weighing many

tons to the square inch, which deepened from moment to moment, and was

broken only by the hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single

guest, whose name shall not be handed down to infamy."



Howells can remember little more than that, but Clemens recalls that one

speaker made an effort to follow him--Bishop, the novelist, and that

Bishop didn't last long.



     It was not many sentences after his first before he began to

     hesitate and break, and lose his grip, and totter and wobble, and at

     last he slumped down in a limp and mushy pile.



The next man had not strength to rise, and somehow the company broke up.



Howells's next recollection is of being in a room of the hotel, and of

hearing Charles Dudley Warner saying in the gloom:



"Well, Mark, you're a funny fellow."



He remembers how, after a sleepless night, Clemens went out to buy some

bric-a-brac, with a soul far from bric-a-brac, and returned to Hartford

in a writhing agony of spirit.  He believed that he was ruined forever,

so far as his Boston associations were concerned; and when he confessed

all the tragedy to Mrs. Clemens it seemed to her also that the mistake

could never be wholly repaired.  The fact that certain papers quoted the

speech and spoke well of it, and certain readers who had not listened to

it thought it enormously funny, gave very little comfort.  But perhaps

his chief concern was the ruin which he believed he had brought upon

Howells.  He put his heart into a brief letter:



     MY DEAR HOWELLS,--My sense of disgrace does not abate.  It grows.

     I see that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies, a

     list of humiliations that extends back to when I was seven years

     old, and which keep on persecuting me regardless of my repentances.



     I feel that my misfortune has injured me all over the country;

     therefore it will be best that I retire from before the public at

     present.  It will hurt the Atlantic for me to appear in its pages

     now.  So it is my opinion, and my wife's, that the telephone story

     had better be suppressed.  Will you return those proofs or revises

     to me, so that I can use the same on some future occasion?



     It seems as if I must have been insane when I wrote that speech and

     saw no harm in it, no disrespect toward those men whom I reverenced

     so much.  And what shame I brought upon you, after what you said in

     introducing me!  It burns me like fire to think of it.



     The whole matter is a dreadful subject.  Let me drop it here--at

     least on paper.



                                   Penitently yours,    MARK





So, all in a moment, his world had come to an end--as it seemed.  But

Howells's letter, which came rushing back by first mail, brought hope.



"It was a fatality," Howells said.  "One of those sorrows into which a

man walks with his eyes wide open, no one knows why."



Howells assured him that Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes would so

consider it, beyond doubt; that Charles Eliot Norton had already

expressed himself exactly in the right spirit concerning it.  Howells

declared that there was no intention of dropping Mark Twain's work from

the Atlantic.



     You are not going to be floored by it; there is more justice than

     that even in this world.  Especially as regards me, just call the

     sore spot well.  I can say more, and with better heart, in praise of

     your good feeling (which was what I always liked in you), since this

     thing happened than I could before.



It was agreed that he should at once write a letter to Longfellow,

Emerson, and Holmes, and he did write, laying his heart bare to them.

Longfellow and Holmes answered in a fine spirit of kindliness, and Miss

Emerson wrote for her father in the same tone.  Emerson had not been

offended, for he had not heard the speech, having arrived even then at

that stage of semi-oblivion as to immediate things which eventually so

completely shut him away.  Longfellow's letter made light of the whole

matter.  The newspapers, he said, had caused all the mischief.



     A bit of humor at a dinner-table talk is one thing; a report of it

     in the morning papers is another.  One needs the lamplight and the

     scenery.  These failing, what was meant in jest assumes a serious

     aspect.



     I do not believe that anybody was much hurt.  Certainly I was not,

     and Holmes tells me that he was not.  So I think you may dismiss the

     matter from your mind, without further remorse.



     It was a very pleasant dinner, and I think Whittier enjoyed it very

     much.



Holmes likewise referred to it as a trifle.



     It never occurred to me for a moment to take offense, or to feel

     wounded by your playful use of my name.  I have heard some mild

     questioning as to whether, even in fun, it was good taste to

     associate the names of the authors with the absurdly unlike

     personalities attributed to them, but it seems to be an open

     question.  Two of my friends, gentlemen of education and the highest

     social standing, were infinitely amused by your speech, and stoutly

     defended it against the charge of impropriety.  More than this, one

     of the cleverest and best-known ladies we have among us was highly

     delighted with it.



Miss Emerson's letter was to Mrs. Clemens and its homelike New England

fashion did much to lift the gloom.



     DEAR MRS. CLEMENS,--At New Year's our family always meets, to spend

     two days together.  To-day my father came last, and brought with him

     Mr. Clemens's letter, so that I read it to the assembled family, and

     I have come right up-stairs to write to you about it.  My sister

     said, "Oh, let father write!" but my mother said, "No, don't wait

     for him.  Go now; don't stop to pick that up.  Go this minute and

     write.  I think that is a noble letter.  Tell them so."  First let

     me say that no shadow of indignation has ever been in any of our

     minds.  The night of the dinner, my father says, he did not hear Mr.

     Clemens's speech.  He was too far off, and my mother says that when

     she read it to him the next day it amused him.  But what you will

     want is to know, without any softening, how we did feel.  We were

     disappointed.  We have liked almost everything we have ever seen

     over Mark Twain's signature.  It has made us like the man, and we

     have delighted in the fun.  Father has often asked us to repeat

     certain passages of The Innocents Abroad, and of a speech at a

     London dinner in 1872, and we all expect both to approve and to

     enjoy when we see his name.  Therefore, when we read this speech it

     was a real disappointment.  I said to my brother that it didn't seem

     good or funny, and he said, "No, it was unfortunate.  Still some of

     those quotations were very good"; and he gave them with relish and

     my father laughed, though never having seen a card in his life, he

     couldn't understand them like his children.  My mother read it

     lightly and had hardly any second thoughts about it.  To my father

     it is as if it had not been; he never quite heard, never quite

     understood it, and he forgets easily and entirely.  I think it

     doubtful whether he writes to Mr. Clemens, for he is old and long

     ago gave up answering letters, I think you can see just how bad, and

     how little bad, it was as far as we are concerned, and this lovely

     heartbreaking letter makes up for our disappointment in our much-

     liked author, and restores our former feeling about him.



                                   ELLEN T.  EMERSON.





The sorrow dulled a little as the days passed.  Just after Christmas

Clemens wrote to Howells:



     I haven't done a stroke of work since the Atlantic dinner.  But I'm

     going to try to-morrow.  How could I ever----



     Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool.  But then I am God's fool,

     and all his work must be contemplated with respect.



So long as that unfortunate speech is remembered there will be

differences of opinion as to its merits and propriety.  Clemens himself,

reading it for the first time in nearly thirty years, said:



"I find it gross, coarse--well, I needn't go on with particulars.  I

don't like any part of it, from the beginning to the end.  I find it

always offensive and detestable.  How do I account for this change of

view?  I don't know."



But almost immediately afterward he gave it another consideration and

reversed his opinion completely.  All the spirit and delight of his old

first conception returned, and preparing it for publication, he wrote:



--[North American Review, December, 1907, now with comment included in

the volume of "Speeches."  (Also see Appendix O, at the end of last

volume.)--I have read it twice, and unless I am an idiot it hasn't a

single defect in it, from the first word to the last.  It is just as good

as good can be.  It is smart; it is saturated with humor.  There isn't a

suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere.]



It was altogether like Mark Twain to have those two absolutely opposing

opinions in that brief time; for, after all, it was only a question of

the human point of view, and Mark Twain's points of view were likely to

be as extremely human as they were varied.



Of course the first of these impressions, the verdict of the fresh mind

uninfluenced by the old conception, was the more correct one.  The speech

was decidedly out of place in that company.  The skit was harmless

enough, but it was of the Comstock grain.  It lacked refinement, and,

what was still worse, it lacked humor, at least the humor of a kind

suited to that long-ago company of listeners.  It was another of those

grievous mistakes which genius (and not talent) can make, for genius is a

sort of possession.  The individual is pervaded, dominated for a time by

an angel or an imp, and he seldom, of himself, is able to discriminate

between his controls.  A literary imp was always lying in wait for Mark

Twain; the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the 'outre', the

outlandish, the shocking thing.  It was this that Olivia Clemens had to

labor hardest against: the cheapening of his own high purpose with an

extravagant false note, at which sincerity, conviction, and artistic

harmony took wings and fled away.  Notably he did a good burlesque now

and then, but his fame would not have suffered if he had been delivered

altogether from his besetting temptation.









CXV



HARTFORD AND BILLIARDS



Clemens was never much inclined to work, away from his Elmira study.

"Magnanimous Incident Literature" (for the Atlantic) was about his only

completed work of the winter of 1877-78.  He was always tinkering with

the "Visit to Heaven," and after one reconstruction Howells suggested

that he bring it out as a book, in England, with Dean Stanley's

indorsement, though this may have been only semi-serious counsel.  The

story continued to lie in seclusion.



Clemens had one new book in the field--a small book, but profitable.  Dan

Slote's firm issued for him the Mark Twain Scrap-book, and at the end of

the first royalty period rendered a statement of twenty-five thousand

copies sold, which was well enough for a book that did not contain a

single word that critics could praise or condemn.  Slote issued another

little book for him soon after Punch, Brothers, Punch!--which, besides

that lively sketch, contained the "Random Notes" and seven other

selections.



Mark Twain was tempted to go into the lecture field that winter, not by

any of the offers, though these were numerous enough, but by the idea of

a combination which he thought night be not only profitable but pleasant.

Thomas Nast had made a great success of his caricature lectures, and

Clemens, recalling Nast's long-ago proposal, found it newly attractive.

He wrote characteristically:



     MY DEAR NAST,--I did not think I should ever stand on a platform

     again until the time was come for me to say, "I die innocent."  But

     the same old offers keep arriving.  I have declined them all, just

     as usual, though sorely tempted, as usual.



     Now, I do not decline because I mind talking to an audience, but

     because (1) traveling alone is so heartbreakingly dreary, and (2)

     shouldering the whole show is such a cheer-killing responsibility.



     Therefore, I now propose to you what you proposed to me in 1867, ten

     years ago (when I was unknown)--viz., that you stand on the platform

     and make pictures, and I stand by you and blackguard the audience.

     I should enormously enjoy meandering around (to big towns--don't

     want to go to the little ones), with you for company.



     My idea is not to fatten the lecture agents and lyceums on the

     spoils, but to put all the ducats religiously into two equal piles,

     and say to the artist and lecturer, "absorb these."



     For instance, [here follows a plan and a possible list of the cities

     to be visited].  The letter continues:



     Call the gross receipts $100,00 for four months and a half, and the

     profit from $60,000 to $75,000 (I try to make the figures large

     enough, and leave it to the public to reduce them).



     I did not put in Philadelphia because Pugh owns that town, and last

     winter, when I made a little reading-trip, he only paid me $300, and

     pretended his concert (I read fifteen minutes in the midst of a

     concert) cost him a vast sum, and so he couldn't afford any more.

     I could get up a better concert with a barrel of cats.



     I have imagined two or three pictures and concocted the accompanying

     remarks, to see how the thing would go.  I was charmed.



     Well, you think it over, Nast, and drop me a line.  We should have

     some fun.





Undoubtedly this would have been a profitable combination, but Nast had a

distaste for platforming--had given it up, as he thought, for life.  So

Clemens settled down to the fireside days, that afforded him always the

larger comfort.  The children were at an age "to be entertaining, and to

be entertained."  In either case they furnished him plenty of diversion

when he did not care to write.  They had learned his gift as a romancer,

and with this audience he might be as extravagant as he liked.  They

sometimes assisted by furnishing subjects.  They would bring him a

picture, requiring him to invent a story for it without a moment's delay.

Sometimes they suggested the names of certain animals or objects, and

demanded that these be made into a fairy tale.  If they heard the name of

any new creature or occupation they were likely to offer them as

impromptu inspiration.  Once he was suddenly required to make a story out

of a plumber and a "bawgunstrictor," but he was equal to it.  On one side

of the library, along the book-shelves that joined the mantelpiece, were

numerous ornaments and pictures.  At one end was the head of a girl, that

they called "Emeline," and at the other was an oil-painting of a cat.

When other subjects failed, the romancer was obliged to build a story

impromptu, and without preparation, beginning with the cat, working along

through the bric-a-brac, and ending with "Emeline."  This was the

unvarying program.  He was not allowed to begin with "Emeline" and end

with the cat, and he was not permitted to introduce an ornament from any

other portion of the room.  He could vary the story as much as he liked.

In fact, he was required to do that.  The trend of its chapters, from the

cat to "Emeline," was a well-trodden and ever-entertaining way.



He gave up his luxurious study to the children as a sort of nursery and

playroom, and took up his writing-quarters, first in a room over the

stables, then in the billiard-room, which, on the whole, he preferred to

any other place, for it was a third-story remoteness, and he could knock

the balls about for inspiration.



The billiard-room became his headquarters.  He received his callers there

and impressed them into the game.  If they could play, well and good; if

they could not play, so much the better--he could beat them

extravagantly, and he took a huge delight in such conquests.  Every

Friday evening, or oftener, a small party of billiard-lovers gathered,

and played until a late hour, told stories, and smoked till the room was

blue, comforting themselves with hot Scotch and general good-fellowship.

Mark Twain always had a genuine passion for billiards.  He was never

tired of the game.  He could play all night.  He would stay till the last

man gave out from sheer weariness; then he would go on knocking the balls

about alone.  He liked to invent new games and new rules for old games,

often inventing a rule on the spur of the moment to fit some particular

shot or position on the table.  It amused him highly to do this, to make

the rule advantage his own play, and to pretend a deep indignation when

his opponents disqualified his rulings and rode him down.  S. C. Dunham

was among those who belonged to the "Friday Evening Club," as they called

it, and Henry C. Robinson, long dead, and rare Ned Bunce, and F. G.

Whitmore; and the old room there at the top of the house, with its little

outside balcony, rang with their voices and their laughter in that day

when life and the world for them was young.  Clemens quoted to them

sometimes:



     Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring

     Your winter garment of repentance fling;

     The bird of time has but a little way

     To flutter, and the bird is on the wing.



Omar was new then on this side of the Atlantic, and to his serene "eat,

drink, and be merry" philosophy, in Fitzgerald's rhyme, these were early

converts.  Mark Twain had an impressive, musical delivery of verse; the

players were willing at any moment to listen as he recited:



     For some we loved, the loveliest and best

     That from his vintage rolling time has prest,

     Have drunk their cup a round or two before,

     And one by one crept silently to rest.

     Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,

     Before we too into the dust descend;

     Dust unto dust, and under dust to lie,

     Sans wine, sans song, sans singer, and--sans End.'



--[The 'Rubaiyat' had made its first appearance, in Hartford, a little

before in a column of extracts published in the Courant.]  Twichell

immediately wrote Clemens a card:



"Read (if you haven't) the extracts from Oman Khayyam, on the first page

of this morning's Courant.  I think we'll have to get the book.  I never

yet came across anything that uttered certain thoughts of mine so.

adequately.  And it's only a translation.  Read it, and we'll talk it

over.  There is something in it very like the passage of Emerson you read

me last night, in fact identical with it in thought.



"Surely this Omar was a great poet.  Anyhow, he has given me an immense

revelation this morning.



"Hoping that you are better,



                              J. H. T."



Twichell's "only a translation" has acquired a certain humor with time.









CXVI



OFF FOR GERMANY



The German language became one of the interests of the Clemens home

during the early months of 1878.  The Clemenses had long looked forward

to a sojourn in Europe, and the demand for another Mark Twain book of

travel furnished an added reason for their going.  They planned for the

spring sailing, and to spend a year or more on the Continent, making

their headquarters in Germany.  So they entered into the study of the

language with an enthusiasm and perseverance that insured progress.

There was a German nurse for the children, and the whole atmosphere of

the household presently became lingually Teutonic.  It amused Mark Twain,

as everything amused him, but he was a good student; he acquired a

working knowledge of the language in an extraordinarily brief time, just

as in an earlier day he had picked up piloting.  He would never become a

German scholar, but his vocabulary and use of picturesque phrases,

particularly those that combined English and German words, were often

really startling, not only for their humor, but for their expressiveness.



Necessarily the new study would infect his literature.  He conceived a

plan for making Captain Wakeman (Stormfield) come across a copy of

Ollendorf in Heaven, and proceed to learn the language of a near-lying

district.



They arranged to sail early in April, and, as on their former trip,

persuaded Miss Clara Spaulding, of Elmira, to accompany them.  They wrote

to the Howellses, breaking the news of the journey, urging them to come

to Hartford for a good-by visit.  Howells and his wife came.  The

Twichells, Warners, and other Hartford friends paid repeated farewell

calls.  The furniture was packed, the rooms desolated, the beautiful home

made ready for closing.



They were to have pleasant company on the ship.  Bayard Taylor, then

recently appointed Minister to Germany, wrote that he had planned to sail

on the same vessel; Murat Halstead's wife and daughter were listed among

the passengers.  Clemens made a brief speech at Taylor's "farewell

dinner."



The "Mark Twain" party, consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Clemens, Miss

Spaulding, little Susy and Clara ("Bay"), and a nurse-maid, Rosa, sailed

on the Holsatia, April 11, 1878.  Bayard Taylor and the Halstead ladies

also sailed, as per program; likewise Murat Halstead himself, for whom no

program had been made.  There was a storm outside, and the Holsatia

anchored down the bay to wait until the worst was over.  As the weather

began to moderate Halstead and others came down in a tug for a final word

of good-by.  When the tug left, Halstead somehow managed to get

overlooked, and was presently on his way across the ocean with only such

wardrobe as he had on, and what Bayard Taylor, a large man like himself,

was willing to lend him.  Halstead was accused of having intentionally

allowed himself to be left behind, and his case did have a suspicious

look; but in any event they were glad to have him along.



In a written word of good-by to Howells, Clemens remembered a debt of

gratitude, and paid it in the full measure that was his habit.



     And that reminds me, ungrateful dog that I am, that I owe as much to

     your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city boss

     who takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his

     art.  I was talking to Mrs. Clemens about this the other day, and

     grieving because I never mentioned it to you, thereby seeming to

     ignore it or to be unaware of it.  Nothing that has passed under

     your eye needs any revision before going into a volume, while all my

     other stuff does need so much.



In that ancient day, before the wireless telegraph, the voyager, when the

land fell away behind him, felt a mighty sense of relief and rest, which

to some extent has gone now forever.  He cannot entirely escape the world

in this new day; but then he had a complete sense of dismissal from all

encumbering cares of life.  Among the first note-book entries Mark Twain

wrote:



To go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings--"I am no

longer of ye; what ye say of me is now of no consequence--but of how much

consequence when I am with ye and of ye.  I know you will refrain from

saying harsh things because they cannot hurt me, since I am out of reach

and cannot hear them.  This is why we say no harsh things of the dead."



It was a rough voyage outside, but the company made it pleasant within.

Halstead and Taylor were good smoking-room companions.  Taylor had a

large capacity for languages and a memory that was always a marvel.  He

would repeat for them Arabian, Hungarian, and Russian poetry, and show

them the music and construction of it.  He sang German folk-lore songs

for them, and the "Lorelei," then comparatively unknown in America.  Such

was his knowledge of the language that even educated Germans on board

submitted questions of construction to him and accepted his decisions.

He was wisely chosen for the mission he had to fill, but unfortunately he

did not fill it long.  Both Halstead and Taylor were said to have heart

trouble.  Halstead, however, survived many years.  Taylor died

December 19, 1878.









CXVII



GERMANY AND GERMAN



From the note-book:



     It is a marvel that never loses its surprise by repetition, this

     aiming a ship at a mark three thousand miles away and hitting the

     bull's-eye in a fog--as we did.  When the fog fell on us the captain

     said we ought to be at such and such a spot (it had been eighteen

     hours since an observation was had), with the Scilly islands bearing

     so and so, and about so many miles away.  Hove the lead and got

     forty-eight fathoms; looked on the chart, and sure enough this depth

     of water showed that we were right where the captain said we were.



     Another idea.  For ages man probably did not know why God carpeted

     the ocean bottom with sand in one place, shells in another, and so

     on.  But we see now; the kind of bottom the lead brings up shows

     where a ship is when the soundings don't, and also it confirms the

     soundings.



They reached Hamburg after two weeks' stormy sailing.  They rested a few

days there, then went to Hanover and Frankfort, arriving at Heidelberg

early in May.



They had no lodgings selected in Heidelberg, and leaving the others at an

inn, Clemens set out immediately to find apartments.  Chance or

direction, or both, led him to the beautiful Schloss Hotel, on a hill

overlooking the city, and as fair a view as one may find in all Germany.

He did not go back after his party.  He sent a message telling them to

take carriage and drive at once to the Schloss, then he sat down to enjoy

the view.



Coming up the hill they saw him standing on the veranda, waving his hat

in welcome.  He led them to their rooms--spacious apartments--and pointed

to the view.  They were looking down on beautiful Heidelberg Castle,

densely wooded hills, the far-flowing Neckar, and the haze-empurpled

valley of the Rhine.  By and by, pointing to a small cottage on the

hilltop, he said:



"I have been picking out my little house to work in; there it is over

there; the one with the gable in the roof.  Mine is the middle room on

the third floor."



Mrs. Clemens thought the occupants of the house might be surprised if he

should suddenly knock and tell them he had come to take possession of his

room.  Nevertheless, they often looked over in that direction and

referred to it as his office.  They amused themselves by watching his

"people" and trying to make out what they were like.  One day he went

over there, and sure enough there was a sign out, "Moblirte Wohnung zu

Vermiethen."  A day or two later he was established in the very room he

had selected, it being the only room but one vacant.



In A Tramp Abroad Mark Twain tells of the beauty of their Heidelberg

environment.  To Howells he wrote:



     Our bedroom has two great glass bird-cages (inclosed balconies), one

     looking toward the Rhine Valley and sunset, the other looking up the

     Neckar cul-de-sac, and naturally we spend pearly all our time in

     these.  We have tables and chairs in them; we do our reading,

     writing, studying, smoking, and suppering in them .  .  .  .  It

     must have been a noble genius who devised this hotel.  Lord, how

     blessed is the repose, the tranquillity of this place!  Only two

     sounds: the happy clamor of the birds in the groves and the muffled

     music of the Neckar tumbling over the opposing dikes.  It is no

     hardship to lie awake awhile nights, for this subdued roar has

     exactly the sound of a steady rain beating upon a roof.  It is so

     healing to the spirit; and it bears up the thread of one's

     imaginings as the accompaniment bears up a song....



     I have waited for a "call" to go to work--I knew it would come.

     Well, it began to come a week ago; my note-book comes out more and

     more frequently every day since; three days ago I concluded to move

     my manuscripts over to my den.  Now the call is loud and decided at

     last.  So to-morrow I shall begin regular, steady work, and stick to

     it till the middle of July or August 1st, when I look for Twichell;

     we will then walk about Germany two or three weeks, and then I'll go

     to work again (perhaps in Munich).



The walking tour with Twichell had been contemplated in the scheme for

gathering book material, but the plan for it had not been completed when

he left Hartford.  Now he was anxious that they should start as soon as

possible.  Twichell, receiving the news in Hartford, wrote that it was a

great day for him: that his third son had been happily born early that

morning, and now the arrival of this glorious gift of a tramp through

Germany and Switzerland completed his blessings.



     I am almost too joyful for pleasure [he wrote].  I labor with my

     felicities.  How I shall get to sleep to-night I don't know, though

     I have had a good start, in not having slept much last night.  Oh,

     my! do you realize, Mark, what a symposium it is to be?  I do.  To

     begin with, I am thoroughly tired and the rest will be worth

     everything.  To walk with you and talk with you for weeks together--

     why, it's my dream of luxury.  Harmony, who at sunrise this morning

     deemed herself the happiest woman on the Continent when I read your

     letter to her, widened her smile perceptibly, and revived another

     degree of strength in a minute.  She refused to consider her being

     left alone; but: only the great chance opened to me.



     SHOES--Mark, remember that ever so much of our pleasure depends upon

     your shoes.  Don't fail to have adequate preparation made in that

     department.



Meantime, the struggle with the "awful German language" went on.  It was

a general hand-to-hand contest.  From the head of the household down to

little Clara not one was exempt.  To Clemens it became a sort of

nightmare.  Once in his note-book he says:



"Dreamed all bad foreigners went to German heaven; couldn't talk, and

wished they had gone to the other place"; and a little farther along,

"I wish I could hear myself talk German."



To Mrs. Crane, in Elmira, he reported their troubles:



     Clara Spaulding is working herself to death with her German; never

     loses an instant while she is awake--or asleep, either, for that

     matter; dreams of enormous serpents, who poke their heads up under

     her arms and glare upon her with red-hot eyes, and inquire about the

     genitive case and the declensions of the definite article.  Livy is

     bully-ragging herself about as hard; pesters over her grammar and

     her reader and her dictionary all day; then in the evening these two

     students stretch themselves out on sofas and sigh and say, "Oh,

     there's no use!  We never can learn it in the world!"  Then Livy

     takes a sentence to go to bed on: goes gaping and stretching to her

     pillow murmuring, "Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden--Ich bin Ihnen sehr

     verbunden--Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden--I wonder if I can get that

     packed away so it will stay till morning"--and about an hour after

     midnight she wakes me up and says, "I do so hate to disturb you, but

     is it 'Ich Ben Jonson sehr befinden'?"



And Mrs. Clemens wrote:



     Oh, Sue dear, strive to enter in at the straight gate, for many

     shall seek to enter it and shall not be able.  I am not striving

     these days.  I am just interested in German.



Rosa, the maid, was required to speak to the children only in German,

though Bay at first would have none of it.  The nurse and governess tried

to blandish her, in vain.  She maintained a calm and persistent attitude

of scorn.  Little Susy tried, and really made progress; but one, day she

said, pathetically:



"Mama, I wish Rosa was made in English."



Yet a little later Susy herself wrote her Aunt Sue:



     I know a lot of German; everybody says I know a lot.  I give you a

     million dollars to see you, and you would give two hundred dollars

     to see the lovely woods that we see.



Even Howells, in far-off America, caught the infection and began a letter

in German, though he hastened to add, "Or do you prefer English by this

time?  Really I could imagine the German going hard with you, for you

always seemed to me a man who liked to be understood with the least

possible personal inconvenience."



Clemens declared more than once that he scorned the "outrageous and

impossible German grammar," and abandoned it altogether.  In his note-

book he records how two Germans, strangers in Heidelberg, asked him a

direction, and that when he gave it, in the most elaborate and correct

German he could muster, one of them only lifted his eyes and murmured:



"Gott im Himmel!"



He was daily impressed with the lingual attainments of foreigners and his

own lack of them.  In the notes he comments:



     Am addressed in German, and when I can't speak it immediately the

     person tackles me in French, and plainly shows astonishment when I

     stop him.  They naturally despise such an ignoramus.  Our doctor

     here speaks as pure English, as I.



On the Fourth of July he addressed the American students in Heidelberg in

one of those mixtures of tongues for which he had a peculiar gift.



The room he had rented for a study was let by a typical German family,

and he was a great delight to them.  He practised his German on them, and

interested himself in their daily affairs.



Howells wrote insistently for some assurance of contributions to the

Atlantic.



"I must begin printing your private letters to satisfy the popular

demand," he said.  "People are constantly asking when you are going to

begin."



Clemens replied that he would be only too glad to write for the Atlantic

if his contributions could be copyrighted in Canada, where pirates were

persistently enterprising.



I do not know that I have any printable stuff just now--separatable

stuff, that is--but I shall have by and by.  It is very gratifying to

hear that it is wanted by anybody.  I stand always prepared to hear the

reverse, and am constantly surprised that it is delayed so long.

Consequently it is not going to astonish me when it comes.



The Clemens party enjoyed Heidelberg, though in different ways.  The

children romped and picnicked in the castle grounds, which adjoined the

hotel; Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding were devoted to bric-a-brac

hunting, picture-galleries, and music.  Clemens took long walks, or made

excursions by rail and diligence to farther points.  Art and opera did

not appeal to him.  The note-book says:



     I have attended operas, whenever I could not help it, for fourteen

     years now; I am sure I know of no agony comparable to the listening

     to an unfamiliar opera.  I am enchanted with the airs of "Trovatore"

     and other old operas which the hand-organ and the music-box have

     made entirely familiar to my ear.  I am carried away with delighted

     enthusiasm when they are sung at the opera.  But oh, how far between

     they are!  And what long, arid, heartbreaking and headaching

     "between-times" of that sort of intense but incoherent noise which

     always so reminds me of the time the orphan asylum burned down.



     Sunday night, 11th.  Huge crowd out to-night to hear the band play

     the "Fremersberg."  I suppose it is very low-grade music--I know it

     must be low-grade music--because it so delighted me, it so warmed

     me, moved me, stirred me, uplifted me, enraptured me, that at times

     I could have cried, and at others split my throat with shouting.

     The great crowd was another evidence that it was low-grade music,

     for only the few are educated up to a point where high-class music

     gives pleasure.  I have never heard enough classic music to be able

     to enjoy it, and the simple truth is I detest it.  Not mildly, but

     with all my heart.



     What a poor lot we human beings are anyway!  If base music gives me

     wings, why should I want any other?  But I do.  I want to like the

     higher music because the higher and better like it.  But you see I

     want to like it without taking the necessary trouble, and giving the

     thing the necessary amount of time and attention.  The natural

     suggestion is, to get into that upper tier, that dress-circle, by a

     lie--we will pretend we like it.  This lie, this pretense, gives to

     opera what support it has in America.



     And then there is painting.  What a red rag is to a bull Turner's

     "Slave Ship" is to me.  Mr. Ruskin is educated in art up to a point

     where that picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of pleasure as

     it throws me into one of rage.  His cultivation enables him to see

     water in that yellow mud; his cultivation reconciles the floating of

     unfloatable things to him--chains etc.; it reconciles him to fishes

     swimming on top of the water.  The most of the picture is a manifest

     impossibility, that is to say, a lie; and only rigid cultivation can

     enable a man to find truth in a lie.  A Boston critic said the

     "Slave Ship" reminded him of a cat having a fit in a platter of

     tomatoes.  That went home to my non-cultivation, and I thought, here

     is a man with an unobstructed eye.



Mark Twain has dwelt somewhat upon these matters in 'A Tramp Abroad'.  He

confesses in that book that later he became a great admirer of Turner,

though perhaps never of the "Slave Ship" picture.  In fact, Mark Twain

was never artistic, in the common acceptance of that term; neither his

art nor his tastes were of an "artistic" kind.











CXVIII



TRAMPING WITH TWICHELL



Twichell arrived on time, August 1st.  Clemens met him at Baden-Baden,

and they immediately set out on a tramp through the Black Forest,

excursioning as pleased them, and having an idyllic good time.  They did

not always walk, but they often did.  At least they did sometimes, when

the weather was just right and Clemens's rheumatism did not trouble him.

But they were likely to take a carriage, or a donkey-cart, or a train, or

any convenient thing that happened along.  They did not hurry, but idled

and talked and gathered flowers, or gossiped with wayside natives and

tourists, though always preferring to wander along together, beguiling

the way with discussion and speculation and entertaining tales.  They

crossed on into Switzerland in due time and considered the conquest of

the Alps.  The family followed by rail or diligence, and greeted them

here and there when they rested from their wanderings.  Mark Twain found

an immunity from attention in Switzerland, which for years he had not

known elsewhere.  His face was not so well known and his pen-name was

carefully concealed.



It was a large relief to be no longer an object of public curiosity; but

Twichell, as in the Bermuda trip, did not feel quite honest, perhaps, in

altogether preserving the mask of unrecognition.  In one of his letters

home he tells how; when a young man at their table was especially

delighted with Mark Twain's conversation, he could not resist taking the

young man aside and divulging to him the speaker's identity.



"I could not forbear telling him who Mark was," he says, "and the mingled

surprise and pleasure his face exhibited made me glad I had done so."



They climbed the Rigi, after which Clemens was not in good walking trim

for some time; so Twichell went on a trip on his own account, to give his

comrade a chance to rest.  Then away again to Interlaken, where the

Jungfrau rises, cold and white; on over the loneliness of Gemini Pass,

with glaciers for neighbors and the unfading white peaks against the

blue; to Visp and to Zermatt, where the Matterhorn points like a finger

that directs mankind to God.  This was true Alpine wandering--sweet

vagabondage.



The association of the wanderers was a very intimate one.  Their minds

were closely attuned, and there were numerous instances of thought--echo-

mind answering to mind--without the employment of words.  Clemens records

in his notes:



     Sunday A.M., August 11th.  Been reading Romola yesterday afternoon,

     last night, and this morning; at last I came upon the only passage

     which has thus far hit me with force--Tito compromising with his

     conscience, and resolving to do; not a bad thing, but not the best

     thing.  Joe entered the room five minutes--no, three minutes later--

     and without prelude said, "I read that book you've got there six

     years ago, and got a mighty good text for a sermon out of it the

     passage where the young fellow compromises with his conscience, and

     resolves to do, not a bad thing, but not the best thing."  This is

     Joe's first reference to this book since he saw me buy it twenty-

     four hours ago.  So my mind operated on his in this instance.  He

     said he was sitting yonder in the reading-room, three minutes ago (I

     have not got up yet), thinking of nothing in particular, and didn't

     know what brought Romola into his head; but into his head it came

     and that particular passage.  Now I, forty feet away, in another

     room, was reading that particular passage at that particular moment.



     Couldn't suggest Romola to him earlier, because nothing in the book

     had taken hold of me till I came to that one passage on page 112,

     Tauchnitz edition.



And again:



     The instances of mind-telegraphing are simply innumerable.  This

     evening Joe and I sat long at the edge of the village looking at the

     Matterhorn.  Then Joe said, "We ought to go to the Cervin Hotel and

     inquire for Livy's telegram."  If he had been but one instant later

     I should have said those words instead of him.



Such entries are frequent, and one day there came along a kind of object-

lesson.  They were toiling up a mountainside, when Twichell began telling

a very interesting story which had happened in connection with a friend

still living, though Twichell had no knowledge of his whereabouts at this

time.  The story finished just as they rounded a turn in, the cliff, and

Twichell, looking up, ended his last sentence, "And there's the man!"

Which was true, for they were face to face with the very man of whom he

had been telling.



Another subject that entered into their discussion was the law of

accidents.  Clemens held that there was no such thing an accident: that

it was all forewritten in the day of the beginning; that every event,

however slight, was embryonic in that first instant of created life, and

immutably timed to its appearance in the web of destiny.  Once on their

travels, when they were on a high bank above a brawling stream, a little

girl, who started to run toward them, slipped and rolled under the bottom

rail of the protecting fence, her feet momentarily hanging out over the

precipice and the tearing torrent below. It seemed a miraculous escape

from death, and furnished an illustration for their discussion.  The

condition of the ground, the force of her fall, the nearness of the fatal

edge, all these had grown inevitably out of the first great projection of

thought, and the child's fall and its escape had been invested in life's

primal atom.



The author of A Tramp Abroad tells us of the rushing stream that flows

out of the Arcadian sky valley, the Gasternthal, and goes plunging down

to Kandersteg, and how he took exercise by making "Harris" (Twichell) set

stranded logs adrift while he lounged comfortably on a boulder, and

watched them go tearing by; also how he made Harris run a race with one

of those logs.  But that is literature.  Twichell, in a letter home, has

preserved a likelier and lovelier story:



     Mark is a queer fellow.  There is nothing that he so delights in as

     a swift, strong stream.  You can hardly get him to leave one when

     once he is within the influence of its fascinations.  To throw in

     stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture.  Tonight, as we were

     on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood caught by

     the torrent side below the path, I climbed down and threw it in.

     When I got back to the path Mark was running down-stream after it as

     hard as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the

     wildest ecstasy, and when a piece went over a fall and emerged to

     view in the foam below he would jump up and down and yell.  He said

     afterward that he hadn't been so excited in three months.  He acted

     just like a boy; another feature of his extreme sensitiveness in

     certain directions.



Then generalizing, Twichell adds:



     He has coarse spots in him.  But I never knew a person so finely

     regardful of the feelings of others in some ways.  He hates to pass

     another person walking, and will practise some subterfuge to take

     off what he feels is the discourtesy of it.  And he is exceedingly

     timid, tremblingly timid, about approaching strangers; hates to ask

     a question.  His sensitive regard for others extends to animals.

     When we are driving his concern is all about the horse.  He can't

     bear to see the whip used, or to see a horse pull hard.  To-day,

     when the driver clucked up his horse and quickened his pace a

     little, Mark said, "The fellow's got the notion that we are in a

     hurry."  He is exceedingly considerate toward me in regard of

     everything--or most things.



The days were not all sunshine.  Sometimes it rained and they took

shelter by the wayside, or, if there was no shelter, they plodded along

under their umbrellas, still talking away, and if something occurred that

Clemens wanted to put down they would stand stock still in the rain, and

Twichell would hold the umbrella while Clemens wrote--a good while

sometimes--oblivious to storm and discomfort and the long way yet ahead.



After the day on Gemmi Pass Twichell wrote home:



     Mark, to-day, was immensely absorbed in the flowers.  He scrambled

     around and gathered a great variety, and manifested the intensest

     pleasure in them.  He crowded a pocket of his note-book with his

     specimens and wanted more room.  So I stopped the guide and got out

     my needle and thread, and out of a stiff paper, a hotel

     advertisement, I had about me made a paper bag, a cornucopia like,

     and tied it to his vest in front, and it answered the purpose

     admirably.  He filled it full with a beautiful collection, and as

     soon as we got here to-night he transferred it to a cardboard box

     and sent it by mail to Livy.  A strange Mark he is, full of

     contradictions.  I spoke last night of his sensitive to others'

     feelings.  To-day the guide got behind, and came up as if he would

     like to go by, yet hesitated to do so.  Mark paused, went aside and

     busied himself a minute picking a flower.  In the halt the guide got

     by and resumed his place in front.  Mark threw the flower away,

     saying, "I didn't want that.  I only wanted to give the old man a

     chance to go on without seeming to pass us."  Mark is splendid to

     walk with amid such grand scenery, for he talks so well about it,

     has such a power of strong, picturesque expression.  I wish you

     might have heard him to-day.  His vigorous speech nearly did justice

     to the things we saw.



In an address which Twichell gave many years later he recalls another

pretty incident of their travels.  They had been toiling up the Gorner

Grat.



As we paused for a rest, a lamb from a flock of sheep near by ventured

inquisitively toward us, whereupon Mark seated himself on a rock, and

with beckoning hand and soft words tried to get it to come to him.



On the lamb's part it was a struggle between curiosity and timidity, but

in a succession of advances and retreats it gained confidence, though at

a very gradual rate.  It was a scene for a painter: the great American

humorist on one side of the game and that silly little creature on the

other, with the Matterhorn for a background.  Mark was reminded that the

time he was consuming was valuable--but to no purpose.  The Gorner Grat

could wait.  He held on with undiscouraged perseverance till he carried

his point: the lamb finally put its nose in his hand, and he was happy

over it all the rest of the day.



The matter of religion came up now and again in the drift of their

discussions.  It was Twichell's habit to have prayers in their room every

night at the hotels, and Clemens was willing to join in the observances.

Once Twichell, finding him in a responsive mood--a remorseful mood--gave

his sympathy, and spoke of the larger sympathy of divinity.  Clemens

listened and seemed soothed and impressed, but his philosophies were too

wide and too deep for creeds and doctrines.  A day or two later, as they

were tramping along in the hot sun, his honesty had to speak out.



"Joe," he said, "I'm going to make a confession.  I don't believe in your

religion at all.  I've been living a lie right straight along whenever I

pretended to.  For a moment, sometimes, I have been almost a believer,

but it immediately drifts away from me again.  I don't believe one word

of your Bible was inspired by God any more than any other book.  I

believe it is entirely the work of man from beginning to end--atonement

and all.  The problem of life and death and eternity and the true

conception of God is a bigger thing than is contained in that book."



So the personal side of religious discussion closed between them, and was

never afterward reopened.



They joined Mrs. Clemens and the others at Lausanne at last, and their

Swiss holiday was over.  Twichell set out for home by way of England, and

Clemens gave himself up to reflection and rest after his wanderings.

Then, as the days of their companionship passed in review, quickly and

characteristically he sent a letter after his comrade:



     DEAR OLD JOE, It is actually all over! I was so low-spirited at the

     station yesterday, and this morning, when I woke, I couldn't seem to

     accept the dismal truth that you were really gone, and the pleasant

     tramping and talking at an end.  Ah, my boy! it has been such a

     rich holiday to me, and I feel under such deep and honest

     obligations to you for coming.  I am putting out of my mind all

     memory of the times when I misbehaved toward you and hurt you; I am

     resolved to consider it forgiven, and to store up and remember only

     the charming hours of the journeys and the times when I was not

     unworthy to be with you and share a companionship which to me stands

     first after Livy's.  It is justifiable to do this; for why should I

     let my small infirmities of disposition live and grovel among my

     mental pictures of the eternal sublimities of the Alps?



     Livy can't accept or endure the fact that you are gone.  But you

     are, and we cannot get around it.  So take our love with you, and

     bear it also over the sea to Harmony, and God bless you both.



                                             MARK.









CXIX



ITALIAN DAYS



The Clemens party wandered down into Italy--to the lakes, Venice,

Florence, Rome--loitering through the galleries, gathering here and there

beautiful furnishings--pictures, marbles, and the like--for the Hartford

home.



In Venice they bought an old careen bed, a massive regal affair with

serpentine columns surmounted by singularly graceful cupids, and with

other cupids sporting on the headboard: the work of some artist who had

been dust three centuries maybe, for this bed had come out of an old

Venetian palace, dismantled and abandoned.  It was a furniture with a

long story, and the years would add mightily to its memories.  It would

become a stately institution in the Clemens household.  The cupids on the

posts were removable, and one of the highest privileges of childhood

would be to occupy that bed and have down one of the cupids to play with.

It was necessary to be ill to acquire that privilege--not violently and

dangerously ill, but interestingly so--ill enough to be propped up with

pillows and have one's meals served on a tray, with dolls and picture-

books handy, and among them a beautiful rosewood cupid who had kept

dimpled and dainty for so many, many years.



They spent three weeks in Venice: a dreamlike experience, especially for

the children, who were on the water most of the time, and became fast

friends with their gondolier, who taught them some Italian words; then a

week in Florence and a fortnight in Rome.--[From the note-book:

"BAY--When the waiter brought my breakfast this morning I spoke to him in

Italian.

"MAMA--What did you say?

"B.--I said, 'Polly-vo fransay.'

"M.--What does it mean?

"B.--I don't know.  What does it mean, Susy?

"S.-It means, 'Polly wants a cracker."]



Clemens discovered that in twelve years his attitude had changed somewhat

concerning the old masters.  He no longer found the bright, new copies an

improvement on the originals, though the originals still failed to wake

his enthusiasm.  Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding spent long hours

wandering down avenues of art, accompanied by him on occasion, though not

always willingly.  He wrote his sorrow to Twichell:



I do wish you were in Rome to do my sight-seeing for me.  Rome interests

me as much as East Hartford could, and no more; that is, the Rome which

the average tourist feels an interest in.  There are other things here

which stir me enough to make life worth living.  Livy and Clara are

having a royal time worshiping the old masters, and I as good a time

gritting my ineffectual teeth over them.



Once when Sarah Orne Jewett was with the party he remarked that if the

old masters had labeled their fruit one wouldn't be so likely to mistake

pears for turnips.



"Youth," said Mrs. Clemens, gravely, "if you do not care for these

masterpieces yourself, you might at least consider the feelings of

others"; and Miss Jewett, regarding him severely, added, in her quaint

Yankee fashion:



"Now, you've been spoke to!"



He felt duly reprimanded, but his taste did not materially reform.  He

realized that he was no longer in a proper frame of mind to write of

general sight-seeing.  One must be eager, verdant, to write happily the

story of travel.  Replying to a letter from Howells on the subject he

said:



     I wish I could give those sharp satires on European life which you

     mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire except he

     be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas I hate travel, and I hate

     hotels, and I hate the opera, and I hate the old masters.  In truth

     I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with anything to

     satirize it.  No, I want to stand up before it and curse it and foam

     at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp.  I have

     got in two or three chapters about Wagner's operas, and managed to

     do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort

     would burst me.



Clemens became his own courier for a time in Italy, and would seem to

have made more of a success of it than he did a good many years

afterward, if we may believe the story he has left us of his later

attempt:



"Am a shining success as a courier," he records, "by the use of francs.

Have learned how to handle the railway guide intelligently and with

confidence."



He declares that he will have no more couriers; but possibly he could

have employed one to advantage on the trip out of Italy, for it was a

desperately hard one, with bad connections and delayed telegrams.  When,

after thirty-six hours weary, continuous traveling, they arrived at last

in Munich in a drizzle and fog, and were domiciled in their winter

quarters, at No. 1a, Karlstrasse, they felt that they had reached the

home of desolation itself, the very throne of human misery.



     And the rooms were so small, the conveniences so meager, and the

     porcelain stove was grim, ghastly, dismal, intolerable!  So Livy and

     Clara Spaulding sat down forlorn and cried, and I retired to a

     private place to pray.  By and by we all retired to our narrow

     German beds, and when Livy and I had finished talking across the

     room it was all decided that we should rest twenty-four hours, then

     pay whatever damages were required and straightway fly to the south

     of France.



The rooms had been engaged by letter, months before, of their

proprietress, Fraulein Dahlweiner, who had met them at the door with a

lantern in her hand, full of joy in their arrival and faith in her

ability to make them happy.  It was a faith that was justified.  Next

morning, when they all woke, rested, the weather had cleared, there were

bright fires in the rooms, the world had taken on a new aspect.  Fraulein

Dahlweiner, the pathetic, hard-working little figure, became almost

beautiful in their eyes in her efforts for their comfort.  She arranged

larger rooms and better conveniences for them.  Their location was

central and there was a near-by park.  They had no wish to change.

Clemens, in his letter to Howells, boasts that he brought the party

through from Rome himself, and that they never had so little trouble

before; but in looking over this letter, thirty years later, he

commented, "Probably a lie."



He secured a room some distance away for his work, but then could not

find his Swiss note-book.  He wrote Twichell that he had lost it, and

that after all he might not be obliged to write a volume of travels.  But

the notebook turned up and the work on the new book proceeded.  For a

time it went badly.  He wrote many chapters, only to throw them aside.

He had the feeling that he had somehow lost the knack of descriptive

narrative.  He had become, as it seemed, too didactic.  He thought his

description was inclined to be too literal, his humor manufactured.

These impressions passed, by and by; interest developed, and with it

enthusiasm and confidence.  In a letter to Twichell he reported his

progress:



I was about to write to my publisher and propose some other book, when

the confounded thing [the note-book] turned up, and down went my heart

into my boots.  But there was now no excuse, so I went solidly to work,

tore up a great part of the MS. written in Heidelberg--wrote and tore up,

continued to write and tear up--and at last, reward of patient and noble

persistence, my pen got the old swing again!  Since then I'm glad that

Providence knew better what to do with the Swiss notebook than I did.



Further along in the same letter there breaks forth a true heart-answer

to that voice of the Alps which, once heard, is never wholly silent:



     O Switzerland!  The further it recedes into the enriching haze of

     time, the more intolerably delicious the charm of it and the cheer

     of it and the glory and majesty, and solemnity and pathos of it

     grow.  Those mountains had a soul: they thought, they spoke.  And

     what a voice it was!  And how real!  Deep down in my memory it is

     sounding yet.  Alp calleth unto Alp!  That stately old Scriptural

     wording is the right one for God's Alps and God's ocean.  How puny

     we were in that awful Presence, and how painless it was to be so!

     How fitting and right it seemed, and how stingless was the sense of

     our unspeakable insignificance!  And Lord, how pervading were the

     repose and peace and blessedness that poured out of the heart of the

     invisible Great Spirit of the mountains!



     Now what is it?  There are mountains and mountains and mountains in

     this world, but only these take you by the heartstrings.  I wonder

     what the secret of it is.  Well, time and time and again it has

     seemed to me that I must drop everything and flee to Switzerland

     once more.  It is a longings deep, strong, tugging longing.  That is

     the word.  We must go again, Joe.









CXX



IN MUNICH



That winter in Munich was not recalled as an unpleasant one in after-

years.  His work went well enough--always a chief source of

gratification.  Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding found interest in the

galleries, in quaint shops, in the music and picturesque life of that

beautiful old Bavarian town.  The children also liked Munich.  It was

easy for them to adopt any new environment or custom.  The German

Christmas, with its lavish tree and toys and cakes, was an especial

delight.  The German language they seemed fairly to absorb.  Writing to

his mother Clemens said:



I cannot see but that the children speak German as well as they do

English.  Susy often translates Livy's orders to the servants.  I cannot

work and study German at the same time; so I have dropped the latter and

do not even read the language, except in the morning paper to get the

news.



In Munich--as was the case wherever they were known--there were many

callers.  Most Americans and many foreigners felt it proper to call on

Mark Twain.  It was complimentary, but it was wearying sometimes.  Mrs.

Clemens, in a letter written from Venice, where they had received even

more than usual attention, declared there were moments when she almost

wished she might never see a visitor again.



Originally there was a good deal about Munich in the new book, and some

of the discarded chapters might have been retained with advantage.  They

were ruled out in the final weeding as being too serious, along with the

French chapters.  Only a few Italian memories were left to follow the

Switzerland wanderings.



The book does record one Munich event, though transferring it to

Heilsbronn.  It is the incident of the finding of the lost sock in the

vast bedroom.  It may interest the reader to compare what really

happened, as set down in a letter to Twichell, with the story as written

for publication:



     Last night I awoke at three this morning, and after raging to myself

     for two interminable hours I gave it up.  I rose, assumed a catlike

     stealthiness, to keep from waking Livy, and proceeded to dress in

     the pitch-dark.  Slowly but surely I got on garment after garment--

     all down to one sock; I had one slipper on and the other in my hand.

     Well, on my hands and knees I crept softly around, pawing and

     feeling and scooping along the carpet, and among chair-legs, for

     that missing sock, I kept that up, and still kept it up, and kept it

     up.  At first I only said to myself, "Blame that sock," but that

     soon ceased to answer.  My expletives grew steadily stronger and

     stronger, and at last, when I found I was lost, I had to sit flat

     down on the floor and take hold of something to keep from lifting

     the roof off with the profane explosion that was trying to get out

     of me.  I could see the dim blur of the window, but of course it was

     in the wrong place and could give me no information as to where I

     was.  But I had one comfort--I had not waked Livy; I believed I

     could find that sock in silence if the night lasted long enough.

     So I started again and softly pawed all over the place, and sure

     enough, at the end of half an hour I laid my hand on the missing

     article.  I rose joyfully up and butted the washbowl and pitcher off

     the stand, and simply raised ---- so to speak.  Livy screamed, then

     said, "Who is it?  What is the matter?"  I said, "There ain't

     anything the matter.  I'm hunting for my sock."  She said, "Are you

     hunting for it with a club?"



     I went in the parlor and lit the lamp, and gradually the fury

     subsided and the ridiculous features of the thing began to suggest

     themselves.  So I lay on the sofa with note-book and pencil, and

     transferred the adventure to our big room in the hotel at

     Heilsbronn, and got it on paper a good deal to my satisfaction.



He wrote with frequency to Howells, and sent him something for the

magazine now and then: the "Gambetta Duel" burlesque, which would make a

chapter in the book later, and the story of "The Great Revolution in

Pitcairn."--[Included in The Stolen White Elephant volume.  The

"Pitcairn" and "Elephant" tales were originally chapters in 'A Tramp

Abroad'; also the unpleasant "Coffin-box" yarn, which Howells rejected

for the Atlantic and generally condemned, though for a time it remained a

favorite with its author.]





Howells's novel, 'The Lady of the Aroostook', was then running through

the 'Atlantic', and in one of his letters Clemens expresses the general

deep satisfaction of his household in that tale:



If your literature has not struck perfection now we are not able to see

what is lacking.  It is all such truth--truth to the life; everywhere

your pen falls it leaves a photograph .  .  .  .  Possibly you will not

be a fully accepted classic until you have been dead one hundred years--

it is the fate of the Shakespeares of all genuine professions--but then

your books will be as common as Bibles, I believe.  In that day I shall

be in the encyclopedias too, thus: "Mark Twain, history and occupation

unknown; but he was personally acquainted with Howells."



Though in humorous form, this was a sincere tribute.  Clemens always

regarded with awe William Dean Howells's ability to dissect and

photograph with such delicacy the minutiae of human nature; just as

Howells always stood in awe of Mark Twain's ability to light, with a

single flashing sentence, the whole human horizon.









CXXI



PARIS, ENGLAND, AND HOMEWARD BOUND



They decided to spend the spring months in Paris, so they gave up their

pleasant quarters with Fraulein Dahlweiner, and journeyed across Europe,

arriving at the French capital February 28, 1879.  Here they met another

discouraging prospect, for the weather was cold and damp, the cabmen

seemed brutally ill-mannered, their first hotel was chilly, dingy,

uninviting.  Clemens, in his note-book, set down his impressions of their

rooms.  A paragraph will serve:



     Ten squatty, ugly arm-chairs, upholstered in the ugliest and

     coarsest conceivable scarlet plush; two hideous sofas of the same--

     uncounted armless chairs ditto.  Five ornamental chairs, seats

     covered with a coarse rag, embroidered in flat expanse with a

     confusion of leaves such as no tree ever bore, six or seven a dirty

     white and the rest a faded red.  How those hideous chairs do swear

     at the hideous sofa near them! This is the very hatefulest room I

     have seen in Europe.



     Oh, how cold and raw and unwarmable it is!



It was better than that when the sun came out, and they found happier

quarters presently at the Hotel Normandy, rue de l'Echelle.



But, alas, the sun did not come out often enough.  It was one of those

French springs and summers when it rains nearly every day, and is

distressingly foggy and chill between times.  Clemens received a bad

impression of France and the French during that Parisian-sojourn, from

which he never entirely recovered.  In his note-book he wrote: "France

has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals.  Apart from these drawbacks

it is a fine country."



The weather may not have been entirely accountable for his prejudice, but

from whatever cause Mark Twain, to the day of his death, had no great

love for the French as a nation.  Conversely, the French as a nation did

not care greatly for Mark Twain.  There were many individual Frenchmen

that Mark Twain admired, as there were many Frenchmen who admired the

work and personality of Mark Twain; but on neither side was there the

warm, fond, general affection which elsewhere throughout Europe he

invited and returned.



His book was not yet finished.  In Paris he worked on it daily, but

without enthusiasm.  The city was too noisy, the weather too dismal.

His note-book says:



May 7th.  I wish this terrible winter would come to an end.  Have had

rain almost without intermission for two months and one week.



May 28th.  This is one of the coldest days of this most damnable and

interminable winter.



It was not all gloom and discomfort.  There was congenial company in

Paris, and dinner-parties, and a world of callers.  Aldrich the

scintillating--[ Of Aldrich Clemens used to say: "When Aldrich speaks it

seems to me he is the bright face of the moon, and I feel like the other

side."  Aldrich, unlike Clemens, was not given to swearing.  The Parisian

note-book has this memorandum:  "Aldrich gives his seat in the horse-car

to a crutched cripple, and discovers that what he took for a crutch is

only a length of walnut beading and the man not lame; whereupon Aldrich

uses the only profanity that ever escaped his lips: 'Damn a dam'd man who

would carry a dam'd piece of beading under his dam'd arm!'"]--was there,

also Gedney Bunce, of Hartford, Frank Millet and his wife, Hjalinar

Hjorth Boyesen and his wife, and a Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain, artist

people whom the Clemenses had met pleasantly in Italy.  Turgenieff, as in

London, came to call; also Baron Tauchnitz, that nobly born

philanthropist of German publishers, who devoted his life, often at his

personal cost, to making the literature of other nations familiar to his

own.  Tauchnitz had early published the 'Innocents', following it with

other Mark Twain volumes as they appeared, paying always, of his own will

and accord, all that he could afford to pay for this privilege; which was

not really a privilege, for the law did not require him to pay at all.

He traveled down to Paris now to see the author, and to pay his respects

to him.  "A mighty nice old gentleman," Clemens found him.  Richard

Whiteing was in Paris that winter, and there were always plenty of young

American painters whom it was good to know.



They had what they called the Stomach Club, a jolly organization, whose

purpose was indicated by its name.  Mark Twain occasionally attended its

sessions, and on one memorable evening, when Edwin A. Abbey was there,

speeches were made which never appeared in any printed proceedings.  Mark

Twain's address that night has obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs

of the world, though no line of it, or even its title has ever found its

way into published literature.



Clemens had a better time in Paris than the rest of his party.  He could

go and come, and mingle with the sociabilities when the abnormal weather

kept the others housed in.  He did a good deal of sight-seeing of his own

kind, and once went up in a captive balloon.  They were all studying

French, more or less, and they read histories and other books relating to

France.  Clemens renewed his old interest in Joan of Arc, and for the

first time appears to have conceived the notion of writing the story of

that lovely character.



The Reign of Terror interested him.  He reread Carlyle's Revolution, a

book which he was never long without reading, and they all read 'A Tale

of Two Cities'.  When the weather permitted they visited the scenes of

that grim period.



In his note-book he comments:



     "The Reign of Terror shows that, without distinction or rank, the

     people were savages.  Marquises, dukes, lawyers, blacksmiths, they

     each figure in due proportion to their crafts."



And again:



     "For 1,000 years this savage nation indulged itself in massacre;

     every now and then a big massacre or a little one.  The spirit is

     peculiar to France--I mean in Christendom--no other state has had

     it.  In this France has always walked abreast, kept her end up with

     her brethren, the Turks and the Burmese.  Their chief traits--love

     of glory and massacre."



Yet it was his sense of fairness that made him write, as a sort of

quittance:



     "You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances.

     It is the tourists' custom.  When I see a man jump from the Vendome

     Column I say, 'They like to do that in Paris.'"



Following this implied atonement, he records a few conclusions, drawn

doubtless from Parisian reading and observation:



     "Childish race and great."



     "I'm for cremation."



     "I disfavor capital punishment."



     "Samson was a Jew, therefore not a fool.  The Jews have the best

     average brain of any people in the world.  The Jews are the only

     race in the world who work wholly with their brains, and never with

     their hands.  There are no Jew beggars, no Jew tramps, no Jew

     ditchers, hod-carriers, day-laborers, or followers of toilsome

     mechanical trade.



     "They are peculiarly and conspicuously the world's intellectual

     aristocracy."



     "Communism is idiocy.  They want to divide up the property.  Suppose

     they did it.  It requires brains to keep money as well as to make

     it.  In a precious little while the money would be back in the

     former owner's hands and the communist would be poor again.  The

     division would have to be remade every three years or it would do

     the communist no good."



A curious thing happened one day in Paris.  Boyesen; in great excitement,

came to the Normandy and was shown to the Clemens apartments.  He was

pale and could hardly speak, for his emotion.  He asked immediately if.

his wife had come to their rooms.  On learning that she had not, he

declared that she was lost or had met with an accident.  She had been

gone several hours, he said, and had sent no word, a thing which she had

never done before.  He besought Clemens to aid him in his search for her,

to do something to help him find her.  Clemens, without showing the least

emotion or special concentration of interest, said quietly:



"I will."



"Where will you go first," Boyesen demanded.



Still in the same even voice Clemens said:



"To the elevator."



He passed out of the room, with Boyesen behind him, into the hall.  The

elevator was just coming up, and as they reached it, it stopped at their

landing, and Mrs. Boyesen stepped out.  She had been delayed by a

breakdown and a blockade.  Clemens said afterward that he had a positive

conviction that she would be on the elevator when they reached it.  It

was one of those curious psychic evidences which we find all along during

his life; or, if the skeptics prefer to call them coincidences, they are

privileged to do so.



     Paris, June 1, 1879.  Still this vindictive winter continues.  Had a

     raw, cold rain to-day.  To-night we sit around a rousing wood fire.



They stood it for another month, and then on the 10th of July, when it

was still chilly and disagreeable, they gave it up and left for Brussels,

which he calls "a dirty, beautiful (architecturally), interesting town."



Two days in Brussels, then to Antwerp, where they dined on the Trenton

with Admiral Roan, then to Rotterdam, Dresden, Amsterdam, and London,

arriving there the 29th of July, which was rainy and cold, in keeping

with all Europe that year.



     Had to keep a rousing big cannel-coal fire blazing in the grate all

     day.  A remarkable summer, truly!



London meant a throng of dinners, as always: brilliant, notable affairs,

too far away to recall.  A letter written by Mrs. Clemens at the time

preserves one charming, fresh bit of that departed bloom.



     Clara [Spaulding] went in to dinner with Mr. Henry James; she

     enjoyed him very much.  I had a little chat with him before dinner,

     and he was exceedingly pleasant and easy to talk with.  I had

     expected just the reverse, thinking one would feel looked over by

     him and criticized.



     Mr. Whistler, the artist, was at the dinner, but he did not attract

     me.  Then there was a lady, over eighty years old, a Mrs. Stuart,

     who was Washington Irving's love, and she is said to have been his

     only love, and because of her he went unmarried to his grave.--

     [Mrs. Clemens was misinformed.  Irving's only "love" was a Miss

     Hoffman.]--She was also an intimate friend of Madame Bonaparte.

     You would judge Mrs. Stuart to be about fifty, and she was the life

     of the drawing-room after dinner, while the ladies were alone,

     before the gentlemen came up.  It was lovely to see such a sweet old

     age; every one was so fond of her, every one deferred to her, yet

     every one was joking her, making fun of her, but she was always

     equal to the occasion, giving back as bright replies as possible;

     you had not the least sense that she was aged.  She quoted French in

     her stories with perfect ease and fluency, and had all the time such

     a kindly, lovely way.  When she entered the room, before dinner, Mr.

     James, who was then talking with me, shook hands with her and said,

     "Good evening, you wonderful lady."  After she had passed .  .  .

     he said, "She is the youngest person in London.  She has the

     youngest feelings and the youngest interests .  .  .  .  She is

     always interested."



     It was a perfect delight to hear her and see her.



For more than two years they had had an invitation from Reginald

Cholmondeley to pay him another visit.



So they went for a week to Condover, where many friends were gathered,

including Millais, the painter, and his wife (who had been the wife of

Ruskin), numerous relatives, and other delightful company.  It was one of

the happiest chapters of their foreign sojourn.--[Moncure D. Conway, who

was in London at the time, recalls, in his Autobiography, a visit which

he made with Mr. and Mrs. Clemens to Stratford-on-Avon.  "Mrs. Clemens

was an ardent Shakespearian, and Mark Twain determined to give her a

surprise.  He told her that we were going on a journey to Epworth, and

persuaded me to connive with the joke by writing to Charles Flower not to

meet us himself, but send his carriage.  On arrival at the station we

directed the driver to take us straight to the church.  When we entered,

and Mrs. Clemens read on Shakespeare's grave, 'Good friend, for Jesus'

sake, forbear,' she started back, exclaiming, 'where am I?'  Mark

received her reproaches with an affluence of guilt, but never did lady

enjoy a visit more than that to Avonbank.  Mrs. Charles Flower (nee

Martineau) took Mrs. Clemens to her heart, and contrived that every

social or other attraction of that region should surround her."]



From the note-book:



     Sunday, August 17,'79.  Raw and cold, and a drenching rain.  Went to

     hear Mr. Spurgeon.  House three-quarters full-say three thousand

     people.  First hour, lacking one minute, taken up with two prayers,

     two ugly hymns, and Scripture-reading.  Sermon three-quarters of an

     hour long.  A fluent talker, good, sonorous voice.  Topic treated in

     the unpleasant, old fashion: Man a mighty bad child, God working at

     him in forty ways and having a world of trouble with him.



     A wooden-faced congregation; just the sort to see no incongruity in

     the majesty of Heaven stooping to plead and sentimentalize over

     such, and see in their salvation an important matter.



     Tuesday, August 19th.  Went up Windermere Lake in the steamer.

     Talked with the great Darwin.



They had planned to visit Dr. Brown in Scotland.  Mrs. Clemens, in

particular, longed to go, for his health had not been of the best, and

she felt that they would never have a chance to see him again.  Clemens

in after years blamed himself harshly for not making the trip, declaring

that their whole reason for not going was an irritable reluctance on his

part to take the troublesome journey and a perversity of spirit for which

there was no real excuse.  There is documentary evidence against this

harsh conclusion.  They were, in fact, delayed here and there by

misconnections and the continued terrific weather, barely reaching

Liverpool in time for their sailing date, August 23d.  Unquestionably he

was weary of railway travel, far he always detested it.  Time would

magnify his remembered reluctance, until, in the end, he would load his

conscience with the entire burden of blame.



Their ship was the Gallia, and one night, when they were nearing the

opposite side of the Atlantic, Mark Twain, standing on deck, saw for the

third time in his experience a magnificent lunar rainbow: a complete

arch, the colors part of the time very brilliant, but little different

from a day rainbow.  It is not given to many persons in this world to see

even one of these phenomena.  After each previous vision there had come

to him a period of good-fortune.  Perhaps this also boded well for him.









CXXII



AN INTERLUDE



The Gallia reached New York September 3, 1879.  A report of his arrival,

in the New York Sun, stated that Mark Twain had changed in his absence;

that only his drawl seemed natural.



     His hat, as he stood on the deck of the incoming Cunarder, Gallia,

     was of the pattern that English officers wear in India, and his suit

     of clothes was such as a merchant might wear in his store.  He

     looked older than when he went to Germany, and his hair has turned

     quite gray.



It was a late hour when they were finally up to the dock, and Clemens,

anxious to get through the Custom House, urged the inspector to accept

his carefully prepared list of dutiable articles, without opening the

baggage.  But the official was dubious.  Clemens argued eloquently, and a

higher authority was consulted.  Again Clemens stated his case and

presented his arguments.  A still higher chief of inspection was

summoned, evidently from his bed.  He listened sleepily to the preamble,

then suddenly said: "Oh, chalk his baggage, of course!  Don't you know

it's Mark Twain and that he'll talk all night?"



They went directly to the farm, for whose high sunlit loveliness they had

been longing through all their days of absence.  Mrs. Clemens, in her

letters, had never failed to dwell on her hunger for that fair hilltop.

From his accustomed study-table Clemens wrote to Twichell:



"You have run about a good deal, Joe, but you have never seen any place

that was so divine as the farm.  Why don't you come here and take a

foretaste of Heaven?"  Clemens declared he would roam no more forever,

and settled down to the happy farm routine.  He took up his work, which

had not gone well in Paris, and found his interest in it renewed.  In the

letter to Twichell he said:



     I am revising my MS.  I did not expect to like it, but I do.  I have

     been knocking out early chapters for more than a year now, not

     because they had not merit, but merely because they hindered the

     flow of the narrative; it was a dredging process.  Day before

     yesterday my shovel fetched up three more chapters and laid them,

     reeking, on the festering shore-pile of their predecessors, and now

     I think the yarn swims right along, without hitch or halt.  I

     believe it will be a readable book of travels.  I cannot see that it

     lacks anything but information.



Mrs. Clemens was no less weary of travel than her husband.  Yet she had

enjoyed their roaming, and her gain from it had been greater than his.

Her knowledge of art and literature, and of the personal geography of

nations, had vastly increased; her philosophy of life had grown beyond

all counting.



She had lost something, too; she had outstripped her traditions.  One

day, when she and her sister had walked across the fields, and had

stopped to rest in a little grove by a pretty pond, she confessed,

timidly enough and not without sorrow, how she had drifted away from her

orthodox views.  She had ceased to believe, she said, in the orthodox

Bible God, who exercised a personal supervision over every human soul.

The hordes of people she had seen in many lands, the philosophies she had

listened to from her husband and those wise ones about him, the life away

from the restricted round of home, all had contributed to this change.

Her God had become a larger God; the greater mind which exerts its care

of the individual through immutable laws of time and change and

environment--the Supreme Good which comprehends the individual flower,

dumb creature, or human being only as a unit in the larger scheme of life

and love.  Her sister was not shocked or grieved; she too had grown with

the years, and though perhaps less positively directed, had by a path of

her own reached a wider prospect of conclusions.  It was a sweet day

there in the little grove by the water, and would linger in the memory of

both so long as life lasted.  Certainly it was the larger faith; though

the moment must always come when the narrower, nearer, more humanly

protecting arm of orthodoxy lends closer comfort.  Long afterward, in the

years that followed the sorrow of heavy bereavement, Clemens once said to

his wife, "Livy, if it comforts you to lean on the Christian faith do

so," and she answered," I can't, Youth.  I haven't any."



And the thought that he had destroyed her illusion, without affording a

compensating solace, was one that would come back to him, now and then,

all his days.









CXXIII



THE GRANT SPEECH OF 1879



If the lunar rainbow had any fortuitous significance, perhaps we may find

it in the two speeches which Mark Twain made in November and December of

that year.  The first of these was delivered at Chicago, on the occasion

of the reception of General Grant by the Army of the Tennessee, on the

evening of November 73, 1879.  Grant had just returned from his splendid

tour of the world.  His progress from San Francisco eastward had been

such an ovation as is only accorded to sovereignty.  Clemens received an

invitation to the reunion, but, dreading the long railway journey, was at

first moved to decline.  He prepared a letter in which he made "business"

his excuse, and expressed his regret that he would not be present to see

and hear the veterans of the Army of the Tennessee at the moment when

their old commander entered the room and rose in his place to speak.



"Besides," he said, "I wanted to see the General again anyway and renew

the acquaintance.  He would remember me, because I was the person who did

not ask him for an office."



He did not send the letter.  Reconsidering, it seemed to him that there

was something strikingly picturesque in the idea of a Confederate soldier

who had been chased for a fortnight in the rain through Ralls and Monroe

counties, Missouri, now being invited to come and give welcome home to

his old imaginary pursuer.  It was in the nature of an imperative

command, which he could not refuse to obey.



He accepted and agreed to speak.  They had asked him to respond to the

toast of "The Ladies," but for him the subject was worn out.  He had

already responded to that toast at least twice.  He telegraphed that

there was one class of the community that had always been overlooked upon

such occasions, and that if they would allow him to do so he would take

that class for a toast: the babies.  Necessarily they agreed, and he

prepared himself accordingly.



He arrived in Chicago in time for the prodigious procession of welcome.

Grant was to witness the march from a grand reviewing stand, which had

been built out from the second story of the Palmer House.  Clemens had

not seen the General since the "embarrassing" introduction in Washington,

twelve years before.  Their meeting was characteristic enough.  Carter

Harrison, Mayor of Chicago, arriving with Grant, stepped over to Clemens,

and asked him if he wouldn't like to be presented.  Grant also came

forward, and a moment later Harrison was saying:



"General, let me present Mr. Clemens, a man almost as great as yourself."

They shook hands; there was a pause of a moment, then Grant said, looking

at him gravely:



"Mr. Clemens, I am not embarrassed, are you?"



So he remembered that first, long-ago meeting.  It was a conspicuous

performance.  The crowd could not hear the words, but they saw the

greeting and the laugh, and cheered both men.



Following the procession, there were certain imposing ceremonies of

welcome at Haverly's Theater where long, laudatory eloquence was poured

out upon the returning hero, who sat unmoved while the storm of music and

cheers and oratory swept about him.  Clemens, writing of it that evening

to Mrs. Clemens, said:



     I never sat elbow to elbow with so many historic names before.

     Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Schofield, Pope, Logan, and so on.



     What an iron man Grant is!  He sat facing the house, with his right

     leg crossed over his left, his right boot sole tilted up at an

     angle, and his left hand and arm reposing on the arm of his chair.

     You note that position?  Well, when glowing references were made to

     other grandees on the stage, those grandees always showed a trifle

     of nervous consciousness, and as these references came frequently

     the nervous changes of position and attitude were also frequent.

     But Grant!  He was under a tremendous and ceaseless bombardment of

     praise and congratulation; but as true as I'm sitting here he never

     moved a muscle of his body for a single instant during thirty

     minutes!  You could have played him on a stranger for an effigy.

     Perhaps he never would have moved, but at last a speaker made such a

     particularly ripping and blood-stirring remark about him that the

     audience rose and roared and yelled and stamped and clapped an

     entire minute--Grant sitting as serene as ever-when General Sherman

     stepped up to him, laid his hand affectionately on his shoulder,

     bent respectfully down, and whispered in his ear.  Then Grant got up

     and bowed, and the storm of applause swelled into a hurricane.



But it was the next evening that the celebration rose to a climax.  This

was at the grand banquet at the Palmer House, where six hundred guests

sat down to dinner and Grant himself spoke, and Logan and Hurlbut, and

Vilas and Woodford and Pope, fifteen in all, including Robert G.

Ingersoll and Mark Twain.  Chicago has never known a greater event than

that dinner, for there has never been a time since when those great

soldiers and citizens could have been gathered there.



To Howells Clemens wrote:



     Imagine what it was like to see a bullet-shredded old battle-flag

     reverently unfolded to the gaze of a thousand middle-aged soldiers,

     most of whom hadn't seen it since they saw it advancing over

     victorious fields when they were in their prime.  And imagine what

     it was like when Grant, their first commander, stepped into view

     while they were still going mad over the flag, and then right in the

     midst of it all somebody struck up "When we were marching through

     Georgia."  Well, you should have heard the thousand voices lift that

     chorus and seen the tears stream down.  If I live a hundred years I

     sha'n't ever forget these things, nor be able to talk about them.  I

     sha'n't ever forget that I saw Phil Sheridan, with martial cloak and

     plumed chapeau, riding his big black horse in the midst of his own

     cannon; by all odds the superbest figure of a soldier.  I ever

     looked upon!

     Grand times, my boy, grand times!



Mark Twain declared afterward that he listened to four speeches that

night which he would remember as long as he lived.  One of them was by

Emory Storrs, another by General Vilas, another by Logan, and the last

and greatest by Robert Ingersoll, whose eloquence swept the house like a

flame.  The Howells letter continues:



     I doubt if America has ever seen anything quite equal to it; I am

     well satisfied I shall not live to see its equal again.  How pale

     those speeches are in print, but how radiant, how full of color, how

     blinding they were in the delivery!  Bob Ingersoll's music will sing

     through my memory always as the divinest that ever enchanted my

     ears.  And I shall always see him, as he stood that night on a

     dinner-table, under the flash of lights and banners, in the midst of

     seven hundred frantic shouters, the most beautiful human creature

     that ever lived.  "They fought, that a mother might own her child."

     The words look like any other print, but, Lord bless me!  he

     borrowed the very accent of the angel of mercy to say them in, and

     you should have seen that vast house rise to its feet; and you

     should have heard the hurricane that followed.  That's the only

     test!  People may shout, clap their hands, stamp, wave their

     napkins, but none but the master can make them get up on their feet.



Clemens's own speech came last.  He had been placed at the end to hold

the house.  He was preceded by a dull speaker, and his heart sank, for it

was two o'clock and the diners were weary and sleepy, and the dreary

speech had made them unresponsive.



They gave him a round of applause when he stepped up upon the table in

front of him--a tribute to his name.  Then he began the opening words of

that memorable, delightful fancy.



"We haven't all had the good-fortune to be ladies; we haven't all been

generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the

babies--we stand on common ground--"



The tired audience had listened in respectful silence through the first

half of the sentence.  He made one of his effective pauses on the word

"babies," and when he added, in that slow, rich measure of his, "we stand

on common ground," they let go a storm of applause.  There was no

weariness and inattention after that.  At the end of each sentence, he

had to stop to let the tornado roar itself out and sweep by.  When he

reached the beginning of the final paragraph, "Among the three or four

million cradles now rocking in the land are some which this nation would

preserve for ages as sacred things if we could know which ones they are,"

the vast audience waited breathless for his conclusion.  Step by step he

led toward some unseen climax--some surprise, of course, for that would

be his way.  Then steadily, and almost without emphasis, he delivered the

opening of his final sentence:



"And now in his cradle, somewhere under the flag, the future illustrious

commander-in-chief of the American armies is so little burdened with his

approaching grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole

strategic mind, at this moment, to trying to find out some way to get his

own big toe into his mouth, an achievement which (meaning no disrespect)

the illustrious guest of this evening also turned his attention to some

fifty-six years ago."



He paused, and the vast crowd had a chill of fear.  After all, he seemed

likely to overdo it to spoil everything with a cheap joke at the end.

No one ever knew better than Mark Twain the value of a pause.  He waited

now long enough to let the silence become absolute, until the tension was

painful, then wheeling to Grant himself he said, with all the dramatic

power of which he was master:



"And if the child is but the father of the man, there are mighty few who

will doubt that he succeeded!"



The house came down with a crash.  The linking of their hero's great

military triumphs with that earliest of all conquests seemed to them so

grand a figure that they went mad with the joy of it.  Even Grant's iron

serenity broke; he rocked and laughed while the tears streamed down his

cheeks.



They swept around the speaker with their congratulations, in their

efforts to seize his hand.  He was borne up and down the great dining-

hall.  Grant himself pressed up to make acknowledgments.



"It tore me all to pieces," he said; and Sherman exclaimed, "Lord bless

you, my boy!  I don't know how you do it!"



The little speech has been in "cold type" so many years since then that

the reader of it to-day may find it hard to understand the flame of

response it kindled so long ago.  But that was another day--and another

nation--and Mark Twain, like Robert Ingersoll, knew always his period and

his people.









CXXIV



ANOTHER "ATLANTIC" SPEECH



The December good-fortune was an opportunity Clemens had to redeem

himself with the Atlantic contingent, at a breakfast given to Dr. Holmes.



Howells had written concerning it as early as October, and the first

impulse had been to decline.  It would be something of an ordeal; for

though two years had passed since the fatal Whittier dinner, Clemens had

not been in that company since, and the lapse of time did not signify.

Both Howells and Warner urged him to accept, and he agreed to do so on

condition that he be allowed to speak.



If anybody talks there I shall claim the right to say a word myself, and

be heard among the very earliest, else it would be confoundedly awkward

for me--and for the rest, too.  But you may read what I say beforehand,

and strike out whatever you choose.



Howells advised against any sort of explanation.  Clemens accepted this

as wise counsel, and prepared an address relevant only to the guest of

honor.



It was a noble gathering.  Most of the guests of the Whittier dinner were

present, and this time there were ladies.  Emerson, Longfellow, and

Whittier were there, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Julia Ward Howe; also the

knightly Colonel Waring, and Stedman, and Parkman, and grand old John

Bigelow, old even then.--[He died in 1911 in his 94th year.]



Howells was conservative in his introduction this time.  It was better

taste to be so.  He said simply:



"We will now listen to a few words of truth and soberness from Mark

Twain."



Clemens is said to have risen diffidently, but that was his natural

manner.  It probably did not indicate anything of the inner tumult he

really felt.



Outwardly he was calm enough, and what he said was delicate and

beautiful, the kind of thing that he could say so well.  It seems fitting

that it should be included here, the more so that it tells a story not

elsewhere recorded.  This is the speech in full:



     MR. CHAIRMAN, LADIES, AND GENTLEMEN,--I would have traveled a much

     greater distance than I have come to witness the paying of honors to

     Dr. Holmes, for my feeling toward him has always been one of

     peculiar warmth.  When one receives a letter from a great man for

     the first time in his life it is a large event to him, as all of you

     know by your own experience.  You never can receive letters enough

     from famous men afterward to obliterate that one or dim the memory

     of the pleasant surprise it was and the gratification it gave you.

     Lapse of time cannot make it commonplace or cheap.  Well, the first

     great man who ever wrote me a letter was our guest, Oliver Wendell

     Holmes.  He was also the first great literary man I ever stole

     anything from, and that is how I came to write to him and he to me.

     When my first book was new a friend of mine said, "The dedication is

     very neat."  Yes, I said, I thought it was.  My friend said,

     "I always admired it, even before I saw it in The Innocents Abroad."

     I naturally said, "What do you mean?  Where did you ever see it

     before?" "Well, I saw it first, some years ago, as Dr. Holmes's

     dedication to his Songs in Many Keys."  Of course my first impulse

     was to prepare this man's remains for burial, but upon reflection I

     said I would reprieve him for a moment or two, and give him a chance

     to prove his assertion if he could.  We stepped into a book-store.

     and he did prove it.  I had stolen that dedication almost word for

     word.  I could not imagine how this curious thing happened; for I

     knew one thing, for a dead certainty--that a certain amount of pride

     always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, and that this pride

     protects a man from deliberately stealing other people's ideas.

     That is what a teaspoonful of brains will do for a man, and admirers

     had often told me I had nearly a basketful, though they were rather

     reserved as to the size of the basket.  However, I thought the thing

     out and solved the mystery.  Some years before I had been laid up a

     couple of weeks in the Sandwich Islands, and had read and reread Dr.

     Holmes's poems till my mental reservoir was filled with them to the

     brim.  The dedication lay on top and handy, so by and by I

     unconsciously took it.  Well, of course, I wrote to Dr. Holmes and

     told him I hadn't meant to steal, and he wrote back and said, in the

     kindest way, that it was all right, and no harm done, and added that

     he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in

     reading and hearing, imagining they were original with ourselves.

     He stated a truth and did it in such a pleasant way, and salved over

     my sore spot so gently and so healingly, that I was rather glad I

     had committed the crime, for the sake of the letter.  I afterward

     called on him and told him to make perfectly free with any ideas of

     mine that struck him as good protoplasm for poetry.  He could see by

     that time that there wasn't anything mean about me; so we got along,

     right from the start.--[Holmes in his letter had said: "I rather

     think The Innocents Abroad will have many more readers than Songs in

     Many Keys.  .  .  You will be stolen from a great deal oftener than

     you will borrow from other people."]



     I have met Dr. Holmes many times since; and lately he said--However,

     I am wandering wildly away from the one thing which I got on my feet

     to do; that is, to make my compliments to you, my fellow-teachers of

     the great public, and likewise to say I am right glad to see that

     Dr. Holmes is still in his prime and full of generous life, and as

     age is not determined by years but by trouble, and by infirmities of

     mind and body, I hope it may be a very long time yet before any can

     truthfully say, "He is growing old."



Whatever Mark Twain may have lost on that former occasion, came back to

him multiplied when he had finished this happy tribute.  So the year for

him closed prosperously.  The rainbow of promise was justified.









CXXV



THE QUIETER THINGS OF HOME



Upset and disturbed as Mark Twain often was, he seldom permitted his

distractions to interfere with the program of his fireside.  His days and

his nights might be fevered, but the evenings belonged to another world.

The long European wandering left him more than ever enamoured of his

home; to him it had never been so sweet before, so beautiful, so full of

peace.  Company came: distinguished guests and the old neighborhood

circles.  Dinner-parties were more frequent than ever, and they were

likely to be brilliant affairs.  The best minds, the brightest wits,

gathered around Mark Twain's table.  Booth, Barrett, Irving, Sheridan,

Sherman, Howells, Aldrich: they all assembled, and many more.  There was

always some one on the way to Boston or New York who addressed himself

for the day or the night, or for a brief call, to the Mark Twain

fireside.



Certain visitors from foreign lands were surprised at his environment,

possibly expecting to find him among less substantial, more bohemian

surroundings.  Henry Drummond, the author of Natural Law in the Spiritual

World, in a letter of this time, said:



     I had a delightful day at Hartford last Wednesday .  .  .  .  Called

     on Mark Twain, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the widow of Horace

     Bushnell.  I was wishing A---- had been at the Mark Twain interview.

     He is funnier than any of his books, and to my surprise a most

     respected citizen, devoted to things esthetic, and the friend of the

     poor and struggling.--[Life of Henry Drummond, by George Adam

     Smith.]



The quieter evenings were no less delightful.  Clemens did not often go

out.  He loved his own home best.  The children were old enough now to

take part in a form of entertainment that gave him and them especial

pleasure-acting charades.  These he invented for them, and costumed the

little performers, and joined in the acting as enthusiastically and as

unrestrainedly as if he were back in that frolicsome boyhood on John

Quarles's farm.  The Warner and Twichell children were often there and

took part in the gay amusements.  The children of that neighborhood

played their impromptu parts well and naturally.  They were in a dramatic

atmosphere, and had been from infancy.  There was never any preparation

for the charades.  A word was selected and the parts of it were whispered

to the little actors.  Then they withdrew to the hall, where all sorts of

costumes had been laid out for the evening, dressed their parts, and each

detachment marched into the library, performed its syllable and retired,

leaving the audience, mainly composed of parents, to guess the answer.

Often they invented their own words, did their own costuming, and

conducted the entire performance independent of grown-up assistance or

interference.  Now and then, even at this early period, they conceived

and produced little plays, and of course their father could not resist

joining in these.  At other times, evenings, after dinner, he would sit

at the piano and recall the old darky songs-spirituals and jubilee

choruses-singing them with fine spirit, if not with perfect technic, the

children joining in these moving melodies.



He loved to read aloud to them.  It was his habit to read his manuscript

to Mrs. Clemens, and, now that the children were older, he was likely to

include them in his critical audience.



It would seem to have been the winter after their return from Europe that

this custom was inaugurated, for 'The Prince and the Pauper' manuscript

was the first one so read, and it was just then he was resuming work on

this tale.  Each afternoon or evening, when he had finished his chapter,

he assembled his little audience and read them the result.  The children

were old enough to delight in that half real, half fairy tale of the

wandering prince and the royal pauper: and the charm and simplicity of

the story are measurably due to those two small listeners, to whom it was

adapted in that early day of its creation.



Clemens found the Prince a blessed relief from 'A Tramp Abroad', which

had become a veritable nightmare.  He had thought it finished when he

left the farm, but discovered that he must add several hundred pages to

complete its bulk.  It seemed to him that he had been given a life-

sentence.  He wrote six hundred pages and tore up all but two hundred and

eighty-eight.  He was about to destroy these and begin again, when Mrs.

Clemens's health became poor and he was advised to take her to Elmira,

though it was then midwinter.  To Howells he wrote:



     I said, "if there is one death that is painfuler than another, may I

     get it if I don't do that thing."



     So I took the 288 pages to Bliss and told him that was the very last

     line I should ever write on this book (a book which required 600

     pages of MS., and I have written nearly four thousand, first and

     last).



     I am as soary (and flighty) as a rocket to-day, with the unutterable

     joy of getting that Old Man of the Sea off my back, where he has

     been roosting more than a year and a half.



They remained a month at Elmira, and on their return Clemens renewed work

on 'The Prince and the Pauper'.  He reported to Howells that if he never

sold a copy his jubilant delight in writing it would suffer no

diminution.  A week later his enthusiasm had still further increased:



     I take so much pleasure in my story that I am loath to hurry, not

     wanting to get it done.  Did I ever tell you the plot of it?  It

     begins at 9 A.M., January 27, 1547.



He follows with a detailed synopsis of his plot, which in this instance

he had worked out with unusual completeness--a fact which largely

accounts for the unity of the tale.  Then he adds:



     My idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of

     the laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the

     king himself, and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them

     applied to others; all of which is to account for certain mildnesses

     which distinguished Edward VI.'s reign from those that precede it

     and follow it.



     Imagine this fact: I have even fascinated Mrs. Clemens with this

     yarn for youth.  My stuff generally gets considerable damning with

     faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other way.  She

     is become the horse-leech's daughter, and my mill doesn't grind fast

     enough to suit her.  This is no mean triumph, my dear sir.



He forgot, perhaps, to mention his smaller auditors, but we may believe

they were no less eager in their demands for the tale's continuance.









CXXVI



"A TRAMP ABROAD"



'A Tramp Abroad' came from the presses on the 13th of March, 1880.  It

had been widely heralded, and there was an advance sale of twenty-five

thousand copies.  It was of the same general size and outward character

as the Innocents, numerously illustrated, and was regarded by its

publishers as a satisfactory book.



It bore no very striking resemblance to the Innocents on close

examination.  Its pictures-drawn, for the most part, by a young art

student named Brown, whom Clemens had met in Paris--were extraordinarily

bad, while the crude engraving process by which they had been reproduced;

tended to bring them still further into disrepute.  A few drawings by

True Williams were better, and those drawn by Clemens himself had a value

of their own.  The book would have profited had there been more of what

the author calls his "works of art."



Mark Twain himself had dubious anticipations as to the book's reception.



But Howells wrote:



     Well, you are a blessing.  You ought to believe in God's goodness,

     since he has bestowed upon the world such a delightful genius as

     yours to lighten its troubles.



Clemens replied:



     Your praises have been the greatest uplift I ever had.  When a body

     is not even remotely expecting such things, how the surprise takes

     the breath away!  We had been interpreting your stillness to

     melancholy and depression, caused by that book.  This is honest.

     Why, everything looks brighter now.  A check for untold cash could

     not have made our hearts sing as your letter has done.



A letter from Tauchnitz, proposing to issue an illustrated edition in

Germany, besides putting it into his regular series, was an added

satisfaction.  To be in a Tauchnitz series was of itself a recognition of

the book's merit.



To Twichell, Clemens presented a special copy of the Tramp with a

personal inscription, which must not be omitted here:



     MY DEAR "HARRIS"--NO, I MEAN MY DEAR JOE,--Just imagine it for a

     moment: I was collecting material in Europe during fourteen months

     for a book, and now that the thing is printed I find that you, who

     were with me only a month and a half of the fourteen, are in actual

     presence (not imaginary) in 440 of the 531 pages the book contains!

     Hang it, if you had stayed at home it would have taken me fourteen

     years to get the material.  You have saved me an intolerable whole

     world of hated labor, and I'll not forget it, my boy.



     You'll find reminders of things, all along, that happened to us, and

     of others that didn't happen; but you'll remember the spot where

     they were invented.  You will see how the imaginary perilous trip up

     the Riffelberg is preposterously expanded.  That horse-student is on

     page 192.  The "Fremersberg" is neighboring.  The Black Forest novel

     is on page 211.  I remember when and where we projected that: in the

     leafy glades with the mountain sublimities dozing in the blue haze

     beyond the gorge of Allerheiligen.  There's the "new member," page

     213; the dentist yarn, 223; the true Chamois, 242; at page 248 is a

     pretty long yarn, spun from a mighty brief text meeting, for a

     moment, that pretty girl who knew me and whom I had forgotten; at

     281 is "Harris," and should have been so entitled, but Bliss has

     made a mistake and turned you into some other character; 305 brings

     back the whole Rigi tramp to me at a glance; at 185 and 186 are

     specimens of my art; and the frontispiece is the combination which I

     made by pasting one familiar picture over the lower half of an

     equally familiar one.  This fine work being worthy of Titian, I have

     shed the credit of it upon him.  Well, you'll find more reminders of

     things scattered through here than are printed, or could have been

     printed, in many books.



     All the "legends of the Neckar," which I invented for that unstoried

     region, are here; one is in the Appendix.  The steel portrait of me

     is just about perfect.



     We had a mighty good.  time, Joe, and the six weeks I would dearly

     like to repeat any time; but the rest of the fourteen months-never.

     With love,

                                        Yours, MARK.



     Hartford, March 16, 1880.





Possibly Twichell had vague doubts concerning a book of which he was so

large a part, and its favorable reception by the critics and the public

generally was a great comfort.  When the Howells letter was read to him

he is reported as having sat with his hands on his knees, his head bent

forward--a favorite attitude--repeating at intervals:



"Howells said that, did he?  Old Howells said that!"



There have been many and varying opinions since then as to the literary

merits of 'A Tramp Abroad'.  Human tastes differ, and a "mixed" book of

this kind invites as many opinions as it has chapters.  The word "uneven"

pretty safely describes any book of size, but it has a special

application to this one.  Written under great stress and uncertainty of

mind, it could hardly be uniform.  It presents Mark Twain at his best,

and at his worst.  Almost any American writer was better than Mark Twain

at his worst: Mark Twain at his best was unapproachable.



It is inevitable that 'A Tramp Abroad' and 'The Innocents Abroad' should

be compared, though with hardly the warrant of similarity.  The books are

as different as was their author at the periods when they were written.

'A Tramp Abroad' is the work of a man who was traveling and observing for

the purpose of writing a book, and for no other reason.  The Innocents

Abroad was written by a man who was reveling in every scene and

experience, every new phase and prospect; whose soul was alive to every

historic association, and to every humor that a gay party of young sight-

seers could find along the way.  The note-books of that trip fairly glow

with the inspiration of it; those of the later wanderings are mainly

filled with brief, terse records, interspersed with satire and

denunciation.  In the 'Innocents' the writer is the enthusiast with a

sense of humor.  In the 'Tramp' he has still the sense of humor, but he

has become a cynic; restrained, but a cynic none the less.  In the

'Innocents' he laughs at delusions and fallacies--and enjoys them.  In

the 'Tramp' he laughs at human foibles and affectations--and wants to

smash them.  Very often he does not laugh heartily and sincerely at all,

but finds his humor in extravagant burlesque.  In later life his gentler

laughter, his old, untroubled enjoyment of human weakness, would return,

but just now he was in that middle period, when the "damned human race"

amused him indeed, though less tenderly.  (It seems proper to explain

that in applying this term to mankind he did not mean that the race was

foredoomed, but rather that it ought to be.)



Reading the 'Innocents', the conviction grows that, with all its faults,

it is literature from beginning to end.  Reading the 'Tramp', the

suspicion arises that, regardless of technical improvement, its

percentage of literature is not large.  Yet, as noted in an earlier

volume, so eminent a critic as Brander Matthews has pronounced in its

favor, and he undoubtedly had a numerous following; Howells expressed.

his delight in the book at the time of its issue, though one wonders how

far the personal element entered into his enjoyment, and what would be

his final decision if he read the two books side by side to-day.  He

reviewed 'A Tramp Abroad' adequately and finely in the Atlantic, and

justly; for on the whole it is a vastly entertaining book, and he did not

overpraise it.



'A Tramp Abroad' had an "Introduction" in the manuscript, a pleasant word

to the reader but not a necessary one, and eventually it was omitted.

Fortunately the appendix remained.  Beyond question it contains some of

the very best things in the book.  The descriptions of the German Portier

and the German newspaper are happy enough, and the essay on the awful

German language is one of Mark Twain's supreme bits of humor.  It is Mark

Twain at his best; Mark Twain in a field where he had no rival, the field

of good-natured, sincere fun-making-ridicule of the manifest absurdities

of some national custom or institution which the nation itself could

enjoy, while the individual suffered no wound.  The present Emperor of

Germany is said to find comfort in this essay on his national speech when

all other amusements fail.  It is delicious beyond words to express; it

is unique.



In the body of the book there are also many delights.  The description of

the ant might rank next to the German language almost in its humor, and

the meeting with the unrecognized girl at Lucerne has a lively charm.



Of the serious matter, some of the word-pictures are flawless in their

beauty; this, for instance, suggested by the view of the Jungfrau from

Interlaken:



     There was something subduing in the influence of that silent and

     solemn and awful presence; one seemed to meet the immutable, the

     indestructible, the eternal, face to face, and to feel the trivial

     and fleeting nature of his own existence the more sharply by the

     contrast.  One had the sense of being under the brooding

     contemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice--a

     spirit which had looked down, through the slow drift of ages, upon a

     million vanished races of men and judged them; and would judge a

     million more--and still be there, watching unchanged and

     unchangeable, after all life should be gone and the earth have

     become a vacant desolation



     While I was feeling these things, I was groping, without knowing it,

     toward an understanding of what the spell is which people find in

     the Alps, and in no other mountains; that strange, deep, nameless

     influence which, once felt, cannot be forgotten; once felt, leaves

     always behind it a restless longing to feel it again--a longing

     which is like homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning, which

     will plead, implore, and persecute till it has its will.  I met

     dozens of people, imaginative and unimaginative, cultivated and

     uncultivated, who had come from far countries and roamed through the

     Swiss Alps year after year--they could not explain why.  They had

     come first, they said, out of idle curiosity, because everybody

     talked about it; they had come since because they could not help it,

     and they should keep on coming, while they lived, for the same

     reason; they had tried to break their chains and stay away, but it

     was futile; now they had no desire to break them.  Others came

     nearer formulating what they felt; they said they could find perfect

     rest and peace nowhere else when they were troubled: all frets and

     worries and chafings sank to sleep in the presence of the benignant

     serenity of the Alps; the Great Spirit of the mountain breathed his

     own peace upon their hurt minds and sore hearts, and healed them;

     they could not think base thoughts or do mean and sordid things

     here, before the visible throne of God.



Indeed, all the serious matter in the book is good.  The reader's chief

regret is likely to be that there is not more of it.  The main difficulty

with the humor is that it seems overdone.  It is likely to be carried too

far, and continued too long.  The ascent of Riffelberg is an example.

Though spotted with delights it seems, to one reader at least, less

admirable than other of the book's important features, striking, as it

does, more emphatically the chief note of the book's humor--that is to

say, exaggeration.



Without doubt there must be many--very many--who agree in finding a

fuller enjoyment in 'A Tramp Abroad' than in the 'Innocents'; only, the

burden of the world's opinion lies the other way.  The world has a

weakness for its illusions: the splendor that falls on castle walls, the

glory of the hills at evening, the pathos of the days that are no more.

It answers to tenderness, even on the page of humor, and to genuine

enthusiasm, sharply sensing the lack of these things; instinctively

resenting, even when most amused by it, extravagance and burlesque.  The

Innocents Abroad is more soul-satisfying than its successor, more poetic;

more sentimental, if you will.  The Tramp contains better English usage,

without doubt, but it is less full of happiness and bloom and the halo of

romance.  The heart of the world has felt this, and has demanded the book

in fewer numbers.--[The sales of the Innocents during the earlier years

more than doubled those of the Tramp during a similar period.  The later

ratio of popularity is more nearly three to one.  It has been repeatedly

stated that in England the Tramp has the greater popularity, an assertion

not sustained by the publisher's accountings.]









CXXVII



LETTERS, TALES, AND PLANS



The reader has not failed to remark the great number of letters which

Samuel Clemens wrote to his friend William Dean Howells; yet

comparatively few can even be mentioned.  He was always writing to

Howells, on every subject under the sun; whatever came into his mind--

business, literature, personal affairs--he must write about it to

Howells.  Once, when nothing better occurred, he sent him a series of

telegrams, each a stanza from an old hymn, possibly thinking they might

carry comfort.--["Clemens had then and for many years the habit of

writing to me about what he was doing, and still more of what he was

experiencing.  Nothing struck his imagination, in or out of the daily

routine, but he wished to write me of it, and he wrote with the greatest

fullness and a lavish dramatization, sometimes to the length of twenty or

forty pages:" (My Mark Twain, by W.  D.  Howells.)]  Whatever of

picturesque happened in the household he immediately set it down for

Howells's entertainment.  Some of these domestic incidents carry the

flavor of his best humor.  Once he wrote:



     Last night, when I went to bed, Mrs. Clemens said, "George didn't

     take the cat down to the cellar; Rosa says he has left it shut up in

     the conservatory."  So I went down to attend to Abner (the cat).

     About three in the morning Mrs. C.  woke me and said, "I do believe

     I hear that cat in the drawing-room.  What did you do with him?"  I

     answered with the confidence of a man who has managed to do the

     right thing for once, and said, "I opened the conservatory doors,

     took the library off the alarm, and spread everything open, so that

     there wasn't any obstruction between him and the cellar."  Language

     wasn't capable of conveying this woman's disgust.  But the sense of

     what she said was, "He couldn't have done any harm in the

     conservatory; so you must go and make the entire house free to him

     and the burglars, imagining that he will prefer the coal-bins to the

     drawing-room.  If you had had Mr. Howells to help you I should have

     admired, but not have been astonished, because I should know that

     together you would be equal to it; but how you managed to contrive

     such a stately blunder all by yourself is what I cannot understand."



     So, you see, even she knows how to apprecaite our gifts....



     I knocked off during these stirring hours, and don't intend to go to

     work again till we go away for the summer, four or six weeks hence.

     So I am writing to you, not because I have anything to say, but

     because you don't have to answer and I need something to do this

     afternoon.



     The rightful earl has----



                    Friday, 7th.



     Well, never mind about the rightful earl; he merely wanted to-borrow

     money.  I never knew an American earl that didn't.



After a trip to Boston, during which Mrs. Clemens did some bric-a-brac

shopping, he wrote:



     Mrs. Clemens has two imperishable topics now: the museum of andirons

     which she collected and your dinner.  It is hard to tell which she

     admires the most.  Sometimes she leans one way and sometimes the

     other; but I lean pretty steadily toward the dinner because I can

     appreciate that, whereas I am no prophet in andirons.  There has

     been a procession of Adams Express wagons filing before the door all

     day delivering andirons.



In a more serious vein he refers to the aged violinist Ole Bull and his

wife, whom they had met during their visit, and their enjoyment of that

gentle-hearted pair.



Clemens did some shorter work that spring, most of which found its way

into the Atlantic.  "Edward Mills and George Benton," one of the

contributions of this time, is a moral sermon in its presentation of a

pitiful human spectacle and misdirected human zeal.



It brought a pack of letters of approval, not only from laity, but the

church, and in some measure may have helped to destroy the silly

sentimentalism which manifested itself in making heroes of spectacular

criminals.  That fashion has gone out, largely.  Mark Twain wrote

frequently on the subject, though never more effectively than in this

particular instance.  "Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning" was another

Atlantic story, a companion piece to "Mrs. McWilliams's Experience with

the Membranous Croup," and in the same delightful vein--a vein in which

Mark Twain was likely to be at his best--the transcription of a scene not

so far removed in character from that in the "cat" letter just quoted:

something which may or may not have happened, but might have happened,

approximately as set down.  Rose Terry Cooke wrote:



     Horrid man, how did you know the way I behave in a thunderstorm?

     Have you been secreted in the closet or lurking on the shed roof?

     I hope you got thoroughly rained on; and worst of all is that you

     made me laugh at myself; my real terrors turned round and grimaced

     at me: they were sublime, and you have made them ridiculous just

     come out here another year and have four houses within a few rods of

     you struck and then see if you write an article of such exasperating

     levity.  I really hate you, but you are funny.



In addition to his own work, he conceived a plan for Orion.  Clemens

himself had been attempting, from time to time, an absolutely faithful

autobiography; a document in which his deeds and misdeeds, even his moods

and inmost thoughts, should be truly set down.  He had found it an

impossible task.  He confessed freely that he lacked the courage, even

the actual ability, to pen the words that would lay his soul bare, but he

believed Orion equal to the task.  He knew how rigidly honest he was, how

ready to confess his shortcomings, how eager to be employed at some

literary occupation.  It was Mark Twain's belief that if Orion would

record in detail his long, weary struggle, his succession of attempts and

failures, his past dreams and disappointments, along with his sins of

omission and commission, it would make one of those priceless human

documents such as have been left by Benvenuto Cellini, Cazenova, and

Rousseau.



"Simply tell your story to yourself," he wrote, "laying all hideousness

utterly bare, reserving nothing.  Banish the idea of the audience and all

hampering things."



Orion, out in Keokuk, had long since abandoned the chicken farm and a

variety of other enterprises.  He had prospected insurance, mining,

journalism, his old trade of printing, and had taken down and hung up his

law shingle between each of these seizures.  Aside from business, too, he

had been having a rather spectacular experience.  He had changed his

politics three times (twice in one day), and his religion as many more.

Once when he was delivering a political harangue in the street, at night,

a parade of the opposition (he had but just abandoned them) marched by

carrying certain flaming transparencies, which he himself had made for

them the day before.  Finally, after delivering a series of infidel

lectures; he had been excommunicated and condemned to eternal flames by

the Presbyterian Church.  He was therefore ripe for any new diversion,

and the Autobiography appealed to him.  He set about it with splendid

enthusiasm, wrote a hundred pages or so of his childhood with a startling

minutia of detail and frankness, and mailed them to his brother for

inspection.



They were all that Mark Twain had expected; more than he had expected.

He forwarded them to Howells with great satisfaction, suggesting, with

certain excisions, they be offered anonymously to the Atlantic readers.



But Howells's taste for realism had its limitations.  He found the story

interesting--indeed, torturingly, heart-wringingly so--and, advising

strongly against its publication, returned it.



Orion was steaming along at the rate of ten to twenty pages a day now,

forwarding them as fast as written, while his courage was good and the

fires warm.  Clemens, receiving a package by every morning mail, soon

lost interest, then developed a hunted feeling, becoming finally

desperate.  He wrote wildly to shut Orion off, urging him to let his

manuscript accumulate, and to send it in one large consignment at the

end.  This Orion did, and it is fair to say that in this instance at

least he stuck to his work faithfully to the bitter, disheartening end.

And it would have been all that Mark Twain had dreamed it would be, had

Orion maintained the simple narrative spirit of its early pages.  But he

drifted off into theological byways; into discussions of his

excommunication and infidelities, which were frank enough, but lacked

human interest.



In old age Mark Twain once referred to Orion's autobiography in print and

his own disappointment in it, which he attributed to Orion's having

departed from the idea of frank and unrestricted confession to exalt

himself as a hero-a statement altogether unwarranted, and due to one of

those curious confusions of memory and imagination that more than once

resulted in a complete reversal of the facts.  A quantity of Orion's

manuscript has been lost and destroyed, but enough fragments of it remain

to show its fidelity to the original plan.  It is just one long record of

fleeting hope, futile effort, and humiliation.  It is the story of a life

of disappointment; of a man who has been defeated and beaten down and

crushed by the world until he has nothing but confession left to

surrender.--[Howells, in his letter concerning the opening chapters,

said that they would some day make good material.  Fortunately the

earliest of these chapters were preserved, and, as the reader may

remember, furnished much of the childhood details for this biography.]



Whatever may have been Mark Twain's later impression of his brother's

manuscript, its story of failure and disappointment moved him to definite

action at the time.



Several years before, in Hartford, Orion had urged him to make his

publishing contracts on a basis of half profits, instead of on the

royalty plan.  Clemens, remembering this, had insisted on such an

arrangement for the publication of 'A Tramp Abroad', and when his first

statement came in he realized that the new contract was very largely to

his advantage.  He remembered Orion's anxiety in the matter, and made it

now a valid excuse for placing his brother on a firm financial footing.



Out of the suspicions which you bred in me years ago has grown this

result, to wit: that I shall within the twelve months get $40,000 out of

this Tramp, instead of $20,000.  $20,000, after taxes and other expenses

are stripped away, is worth to the investor about $75 a month, so I shall

tell Mr. Perkins [his lawyer and financial agent] to make your check that

amount per month hereafter....  This ends the loan business, and

hereafter you can reflect that you are living not on borrowed money, but

on money which you have squarely earned, and which has no taint or savor

of charity about it, and you can also reflect that the money which you

have been receiving of me is charged against the heavy bill which the

next publisher will have to stand who gets a book of mine.



From that time forward Orion Clemens was worth substantially twenty

thousand dollars--till the day of his death, and, after him, his widow.

Far better was it for him that the endowment be conferred in the form of

an income, than had the capital amount been placed in his hands.







CXXVIII



MARK TWAIN's ABSENT-MINDEDNESS



A number of amusing incidents have been more or less accurately reported

concerning Mark Twain's dim perception of certain physical surroundings,

and his vague resulting memories--his absent-mindedness, as we say.



It was not that he was inattentive--no man was ever less so if the

subject interested him--but only that the casual, incidental thing seemed

not to find a fixed place in his deeper consciousness.



By no means was Mark Twain's absent-mindedness a development of old age.

On the two occasions following he was in the very heyday of his mental

strength.  Especially was it, when he was engaged upon some absorbing or

difficult piece of literature, that his mind seemed to fold up and shut

most of the world away.  Soon after his return from Europe, when he was

still struggling with 'A Tramp Abroad', he wearily put the manuscript

aside, one day, and set out to invite F. G. Whitmore over for a game of

billiards.  Whitmore lived only a little way down the street, and Clemens

had been there time and again.  It was such a brief distance that he

started out in his slippers and with no hat.  But when he reached the

corner where the house, a stone's-throw away, was in plain view he

stopped.  He did not recognize it.  It was unchanged, but its outlines

had left no impress upon his mind.  He stood there uncertainly a little

while, then returned and got the coachman, Patrick McAleer, to show him

the way.



The second, and still more picturesque instance, belongs also to this

period.  One day, when he was playing billiards with Whitmore, George,

the butler, came up with a card.



"Who is he, George?" Clemens asked, without looking at the card.



"I don't know, suh, but he's a gentleman, Mr. Clemens."



"Now, George, how many times have I told you I don't want to see

strangers when I'm playing billiards!  This is just some book agent, or

insurance man, or somebody with something to sell.  I don't want to see

him, and I'm not going to."



"Oh, but this is a gentleman, I'm sure, Mr. Clemens.  Just look at his

card, suh."



"Yes, of course, I see--nice engraved card--but I don't know him, and if

it was St. Peter himself I wouldn't buy the key of salvation!  You tell

him so--tell him--oh, well, I suppose I've got to go and get rid of him

myself.  I'll be back in a minute, Whitmore."



He ran down the stairs, and as he got near the parlor door, which stood

open, he saw a man sitting on a couch with what seemed to be some framed

water-color pictures on the floor near his feet.



"Ah, ha!" he thought, "I see.  A picture agent.  I'll soon get rid of

him."



He went in with his best, "Well, what can I do for you?" air, which he,

as well as any man living, knew how to assume; a friendly air enough, but

not encouraging.  The gentleman rose and extended his hand.



"How are you, Mr. Clemens?" he said.



Of course this was the usual thing with men who had axes to grind or

goods to sell.  Clemens did not extend a very cordial hand.  He merely

raised a loose, indifferent hand--a discouraging hand.



"And how is Mrs. Clemens?" asked the uninvited guest.



So this was his game.  He would show an interest in the family and

ingratiate himself in that way; he would be asking after the children

next.



"Well--Mrs. Clemens is about as usual--I believe."



"And the children--Miss Susie and little Clara?"



This was a bit startling.  He knew their names!  Still, that was easy to

find out.  He was a smart agent, wonderfully smart.  He must be got rid

of.



"The children are well, quite well," and (pointing down at the pictures)-

-"We've got plenty like these.  We don't want any more.  No, we don't

care for any more," skilfully working his visitor toward the door as he

talked.



The man, looking non-plussed--a good deal puzzled--allowed himself to be

talked into the hall and toward the front door.  Here he paused a moment:



"Mr. Clemens, will you tell me where Mr. Charles Dudley Warner lives?"



This was the chance!  He would work him off on Charlie Warner.  Perhaps

Warner needed pictures.



"Oh, certainly, certainly!  Right across the yard.  I'll show you.

There's a walk right through.  You don't need to go around the front way

at all.  You'll find him at home, too, I'm pretty sure"; all the time

working his caller out and down the step and in the right direction.



The visitor again extended his hand.



"Please remember me to Mrs. Clemens and the children."



"Oh, certainly, certainly, with pleasure.  Good day.  Yes, that's the

house Good-by."



On the way back to the billiard-room Mrs. Clemens called to him.  She was

ill that day.



"Youth!"



"Yes, Livy."  He went in for a word.



"George brought me Mr. B----'s card.  I hope you were very nice to him;

the B----s were so nice to us, once last year, when you were gone.",



"The B----s--Why, Livy ----"



"Yes, of course, and I asked him to be sure to call when he came to

Hartford."



He gazed at her helplessly.



"Well, he's been here."



"Oh, Youth, have you done anything?"



"Yes, of course I have.  He seemed to have some pictures to sell, so I

sent him over to Warner's.  I noticed he didn't take them with him.  Land

sakes, Livy, what can I do?"



"Which way did he go, Youth?"



"Why, I sent him to Charlie Warner's.  I thought----"



"Go right after him.  Go quick!  Tell him what you have done."



He went without further delay, bareheaded and in his slippers, as usual.

Warner and B---- were in cheerful and friendly converse.  They had met

before.  Clemens entered gaily:



"Oh Yes, I see!  You found him all right.  Charlie, we met Mr. B---- and

his wife in Europe last summer and they made things pleasant for us.  I

wanted to come over here with him, but was a good deal occupied just

then.  Livy isn't very well, but she seems a good deal better, so I just

followed along to have a good talk, all together."



He stayed an hour, and whatever bad impression had formed in B----'s mind

faded long before the hour ended.  Returning home Clemens noticed the

pictures still on the parlor floor.



"George," he said, "what pictures are those that gentleman left?"



"Why, Mr. Clemens, those are our own pictures.  I've been straightening

up the room a little, and Mrs. Clemens had me set them around to see how

they would look in new places.  The gentleman was looking at them while

he was waiting for you to come down."









CXXIX



FURTHER AFFAIRS AT THE FARM



It was at Elmira, in July (1880), that the third little girl came--Jane

Lampton, for her grandmother, but always called Jean.  She was a large,

lovely baby, robust and happy.  When she had been with them a little more

than a month Clemens, writing to Twichell, said:



     DEAR OLD JOE,--Concerning Jean Clemens, if anybody said he "didn't

     see no pints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog," I

     should think he was convicting himself of being a pretty poor sort

     of observer.  She is the comeliest and daintiest and perfectest

     little creature the continents and archipelagos have seen since the

     Bay and Susy were her size.  I will not go into details; it is not

     necessary; you will soon be in Hartford, where I have already hired

     a hall; the admission fee will be but a trifle.



     It is curious to note the change in the stock-quotations of the

     Affection Board brought about by throwing this new security on the

     market.  Four weeks ago the children still put Mama at the head of

     the list right along, where she had always been.  But now:



                    Jean

                    Mama

                    Motley    |cats

                    Fraulein  |

                    Papa



     That is the way it stands now.  Mama is become No. 2; I have dropped

     from No. 4, and am become No. 5.  Some time ago it used to be nip

     and tuck between me and the cats, but after the cats "developed" I

     didn't stand any more show.



     Been reading Daniel Webster's Private Correspondence.  Have read a

     hundred of his diffuse, conceited, "eloquent," bathotic (or

     bathostic) letters, written in that dim (no, vanished) past, when he

     was a student.  And Lord!  to think that this boy, who is so real to

     me now, and so booming with fresh young blood and bountiful life,

     and sappy cynicisms about girls, has since climbed the Alps of fame

     and stood against the sun one brief, tremendous moment with the

     world's eyes on him, and then----fzt!  where is he?  Why, the only

     long thing, the only real thing about the whole shadowy business, is

     the sense of the lagging dull and hoary lapse of time that has

     drifted by since then; a vast, empty level, it seems, with a

     formless specter glimpsed fitfully through the smoke and mist that

     lie along its remote verge.



     Well, we are all getting along here first-rate.  Livy gains strength

     daily and sits up a deal; the baby is five weeks old and----But no

     more of this.  Somebody may be reading this letter eighty years

     hence.  And so, my friend (you pitying snob, I mean, who are holding

     this yellow paper in your hand in 1960), save yourself the trouble

     of looking further.  I know how pathetically trivial our small

     concerns would seem to you, and I will not let your eye profane

     them.  No, I keep my news; you keep your compassion.  Suffice it you

     to know, scoffer and ribald, that the little child is old and blind

     now, and once more tooth less; and the rest of us are shadows these

     many, many years. Yes, and your time cometh!

                                                            MARK.



It is the ageless story.  He too had written his youthful letters, and

later had climbed the Alps of fame and was still outlined against the

sun.  Happily, the little child was to evade that harsher penalty--the

unwarranted bitterness and affront of a lingering, palsied age.



Mrs. Clemens, in a letter somewhat later, set down a thought similar to

his:



"We are all going so fast.  Pretty soon we shall have been dead a hundred

years."



Clemens varied his work that summer, writing alternately on 'The Prince

and the Pauper' and on the story about 'Huck Finn', which he had begun

four years earlier.



He read the latter over and found in it a new interest.  It did not

fascinate him, as did the story of the wandering prince.  He persevered

only as the spirit moved him, piling up pages on both the tales.



He always took a boy's pride in the number of pages he could complete at

a sitting, and if the day had gone well he would count them triumphantly,

and, lighting a fresh cigar, would come tripping down the long stair that

led to the level of the farm-house, and, gathering his audience, would

read to them the result of his industry; that is to say, he proceeded

with the story of the Prince.  Apparently he had not yet acquired

confidence or pride enough in poor Huck to exhibit him, even to friends.



The reference (in the letter to Twichell) to the cats at the farm

introduces one of the most important features of that idyllic resort.

There were always cats at the farm.  Mark Twain himself dearly loved

cats, and the children inherited this passion.  Susy once said:



"The difference between papa and mama is, that mama loves morals and papa

loves cats."



The cats did not always remain the same, but some of the same ones

remained a good while, and were there from season to season, always

welcomed and adored.  They were commendable cats, with such names as

Fraulein, Blatherskite, Sour Mash, Stray Kit, Sin, and Satan, and when,

as happened now and then, a vacancy occurred in the cat census there

followed deep sorrow and elaborate ceremonies.



Naturally, there would be stories about cats: impromptu bedtime stories,

which began anywhere and ended nowhere, and continued indefinitely

through a land inhabited only by cats and dreams.  One of these stories,

as remembered and set down later, began:



     Once upon a time there was a noble, big cat whose christian name was

     Catasaqua, because she lived in that region; but she didn't have any

     surname, because she was a short-tailed cat, being a manx, and

     didn't need one.  It is very just and becoming in a long-tailed cat

     to have a surname, but it would be very ostentatious, and even

     dishonorable, in a manx.  Well, Catasaqua had a beautiful family of

     cattings; and they were of different colors, to harmonize with their

     characters.  Cattaraugus, the eldest, was white, and he had high

     impulses and a pure heart; Catiline, the youngest, was black, and he

     had a self-seeking nature, his motives were nearly always base, he

     was truculent and insincere.  He was vain and foolish, and often

     said that he would rather be what he was, and live like a bandit,

     yet have none above him, than be a cat-o'-nine-tails and eat with

     the king.



And so on without end, for the audience was asleep presently and the end

could wait.



There was less enthusiasm over dogs at Quarry Farm.



Mark Twain himself had no great love for the canine breed.  To a woman

who wrote, asking for his opinion on dogs, he said, in part:



     By what right has the dog come to be regarded as a "noble" animal?

     The more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your

     fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully

     misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve

     toward you afterward you can never get her full confidence again.



He was not harsh to dogs; occasionally he made friends with them.  There

was once at the farm a gentle hound, named Bones, that for some reason

even won his way into his affections.  Bones was always a welcome

companion, and when the end of summer came, and Clemens, as was his

habit, started down the drive ahead of the carriage, Bones, half-way to

the entrance, was waiting for him.  Clemens stooped down, put his arms

around him, and bade him an affectionate good-by.  He always recalled

Bones tenderly, and mentioned him in letters to the farm.









CXXX



COPYRIGHT AND OTHER FANCIES



The continued assault of Canadian pirates on his books kept Mark Twain's

interest sharply alive on the subject of copyright reform.  He invented

one scheme after another, but the public-mind was hazy on the subject,

and legislators were concerned with purposes that interested a larger

number of voters.  There were too few authors to be of much value at the

polls, and even of those few only a small percentage were vitally

concerned.  For the others, foreign publishers rarely paid them the

compliment of piracy, while at home the copyright limit of forty-two

years was about forty-two times as long as they needed protection.  Bliss

suggested a law making the selling of pirated books a penal offense, a

plan with a promising look, but which came to nothing.



Clemens wrote to his old friend Rollin M. Daggett, who by this time was a

Congressman.  Daggett replied that he would be glad to introduce any bill

that the authors might agree upon, and Clemens made at least one trip to

Washington to discuss the matter, but it came to nothing in the end.  It

was a Presidential year, and it would do just as well to keep the authors

quiet by promising to do something next year.  Any legislative stir is

never a good thing for a campaign.



Clemens's idea for copyright betterment was not a fixed one.  Somewhat

later, when an international treaty which would include protection for

authors was being discussed, his views had undergone a change.  He wrote,

asking Howells:



     Will the proposed treaty protect us (and effectually) against

     Canadian piracy?  Because, if it doesn't, there is not a single

     argument in favor of international copyright which a rational

     American Senate could entertain for a moment.  My notions have

     mightily changed lately.  I can buy Macaulay's History, three vols.;

     bound, for $1.25; Chambers's Cyclopaedia, ten vols., cloth, for

     $7.25 (we paid $60), and other English copyrights in proportion; I

     can buy a lot of the great copyright classics, in paper, at from

     three cents to thirty cents apiece.  These things must find their

     way into the very kitchens and hovels of the country.  A generation

     of this sort of thing ought to make this the most intelligent and

     the best-read nation in the world.  International copyright must

     becloud this sun and bring on the former darkness and dime novel

     reading.



     Morally this is all wrong; governmentally it is all right.  For it

     is the duty of governments and families to be selfish, and look out

     simply for their own.  International copyright would benefit a few

     English authors and a lot of American publishers, and be a profound

     detriment to twenty million Americans; it would benefit a dozen

     American authors a few dollars a year, and there an end.  The real

     advantages all go to English authors and American publishers.



     And even if the treaty will kill Canadian piracy, and thus save me

     an average of $5,000 a year, I'm down on it anyway, and I'd like

     cussed well to write an article opposing the treaty.



It is a characteristic expression.  Mark Twain might be first to grab for

the life-preserver, but he would also be first to hand it to a humanity

in greater need.  He could damn the human race competently, but in the

final reckoning it was the interest of that race that lay closest to his

heart.



Mention has been made in an earlier chapter of Clemens's enthusiasms or

"rages" for this thing and that which should benefit humankind.  He was

seldom entirely without them.  Whether it was copyright legislation, the

latest invention, or a new empiric practice, he rarely failed to have a

burning interest in some anodyne that would provide physical or mental

easement for his species.  Howells tells how once he was going to save

the human race with accordion letter-files--the system of order which

would grow out of this useful device being of such nerve and labor saving

proportions as to insure long life and happiness to all.  The fountain-

pen, in its first imperfect form, must have come along about the same

time, and Clemens was one of the very earliest authors to own one.  For a

while it seemed that the world had known no greater boon since the

invention of printing; but when it clogged and balked, or suddenly

deluged his paper and spilled in his pocket, he flung it to the outer

darkness.  After which, the stylo-graphic pen.  He tried one, and wrote

severally to Dr. Brown, to Howells, and to Twichell, urging its adoption.

Even in a letter to Mrs. Howells he could not forget his new possession:



     And speaking of Howells, he ought to use the stylographic pen, the

     best fountain-pen yet invented; he ought to, but of course he won't

     --a blamed old sodden-headed conservative--but you see yourself what

     a nice, clean, uniform MS. it makes.



And at the same time to Twichell:



     I am writing with a stylographic pen.  It takes a royal amount of

     cussing to make the thing go the first few days or a week, but by

     that time the dullest ass gets the hang of the thing, and after that

     no enrichments of expression are required, and said ass finds the

     stylographic a genuine God's blessing.  I carry one in each breeches

     pocket, and both loaded.  I'd give you one of them if I had you

     where I could teach you how to use it--not otherwise.  For the

     average ass flings the thing out of the window in disgust the second

     day, believing it hath no virtue, no merit of any sort; whereas the

     lack lieth in himself, God of his mercy damn him.



It was not easy to withstand Mark Twain's enthusiasm.  Howells, Twichell,

and Dr. Brown were all presently struggling and swearing (figuratively)

over their stylographic pens, trying to believe that salvation lay in

their conquest.  But in the midst of one letter, at last, Howells broke

down, seized his old steel weapon, and wrote savagely: "No white man

ought to use a stylographic pen, anyhow!"  Then, with the more ancient

implement, continued in a calmer spirit.



It was only a little later that Clemens himself wrote:



     You see I am trying a new pen.  I stood the stylograph as long as I

     could, and then retired to the pencil.  The thing I am trying now is

     that fountain-pen which is advertised to employ and accommodate

     itself to any kind of pen.  So I selected an ordinary gold pen--a

     limber one--and sent it to New York and had it cut and fitted to

     this thing.  It goes very well indeed--thus far; but doubtless the

     devil will be in it by tomorrow.



Mark Twain's schemes were not all in the line of human advancement; some

of them were projected, primarily at least, for diversion.  He was likely

at any moment to organize a club, a sort of private club, and at the time

of which we are writing he proposed what was called the "Modest" Club.

He wrote to Howells, about it:



     At present I am the only member, and as the modesty required must be

     of a quite aggravated type the enterprise did seem for a time doomed

     to stop dead still with myself, for lack of further material; but on

     reflection I have come to the conclusion that you are eligible.

     Therefore, I have held a meeting and voted to offer you the

     distinction of membership.  I do not know that we can find any

     others, though I have had some thought of Hay, Warner, Twichell,

     Aldrich, Osgood, Fields, Higginson, and a few more, together with

     Mrs. Howells, Mrs. Clemens, and certain others of the sex.  I have

     long felt there ought to be an organized gang of our kind.



He appends the by-laws, the main ones being:



     The object of the club shall be to eat and talk.



     Qualification for membership shall be aggravated modesty,

     unobtrusiveness, native humility, learning, talent, intelligence,

     unassailable character.



     There shall be no officers except a president, and any member who

     has anything to eat and talk about may constitute himself president

     for the time being.



     Any brother or sister of the order finding a brother or a sister in

     imminently deadly peril shall forsake his own concerns, no matter at

     what cost, and call the police.



     Any member knowing anything scandalous about himself shall

     immediately inform the club, so that they shall call a meeting and

     have the first chance to talk about it.



It was one of his whimsical fancies, and Howells replied that he would

like to join it, only that he was too modest--that is, too modest to

confess that he was modest enough for membership.



He added that he had sent a letter, with the rules, to Hay, but doubted

his modesty.  He said:



"He will think he has a right to belong as much as you or I."



Howells agreed that his own name might be put down, but the idea seems

never to have gone any further.  Perhaps the requirements of membership

were too severe.









CXXXI



WORKING FOR GARFIELD



Eighteen hundred and eighty was a Presidential year.  General Garfield

was nominated on the Republican ticket (against General Hancock), and

Clemens found him satisfactory.



Garfield suits me thoroughly and exactly [he wrote Howells].  I prefer

him to Grant's friends.  The Presidency can't add anything to Grant; he

will shine on without it.  It is ephemeral; he is eternal.



That was the year when the Republican party became panicky over the

disaffection in its ranks, due to the defeat of Grant in the convention,

and at last, by pleadings and promises, conciliated Platt and Conkling

and brought them into the field.  General Grant also was induced to save

the party from defeat, and made a personal tour of oratory for that

purpose.  He arrived in Hartford with his family on the 16th of October,

and while his reception was more or less partizan, it was a momentous

event.  A vast procession passed in review before him, and everywhere

houses and grounds were decorated.  To Mrs. Clemens, still in Elmira,

Clemens wrote:



     I found Mr. Beals hard at work in the rain with his decorations.

     With a ladder he had strung flags around our bedroom balcony, and

     thence around to the porte-cochere, which was elaborately flagged;

     thence the flags of all nations were suspended from a line which

     stretched past the greenhouse to the limit of our grounds.  Against

     each of the two trees on the mound, half-way down to our gate,

     stands a knight in complete armor.  Piles of still-bundled flags

     clutter up the ombra (to be put up), also gaudy shields of various

     shapes (arms of this and other countries), also some huge glittering

     arches and things done in gold and silver paper, containing mottoes

     in big letters.  I broke Mr. Beals's heart by persistently and

     inflexibly annulling and forbidding the biggest and gorgeousest of

     the arches--it had on it, in all the fires of the rainbow, "The Home

     of Mark Twain," in letters as big as your head.  Oh, we're going to

     be decorated sufficient, don't you worry about that, madam.



Clemens was one of those delegated to receive Grant and to make a speech

of welcome.  It was a short speech but an effective one, for it made

Grant laugh.  He began:



     "I am among those deputed to welcome you to the sincere and cordial

     hospitalities of Hartford, the city of the historic and revered

     Charter Oak, of which most of the town is built."  He seemed to be

     at loss what to say next, and, leaning over, pretended to whisper to

     Grant; then, as if he had obtained the information he wanted, he

     suddenly straightened up and poured out the old-fashioned eulogy on

     Grant's achievements, adding, in an aside, as he finished:



     "I nearly forgot that part of my speech," which evoked roars of

     laughter from the assembly and a grim smile from Grant.  He spoke of

     Grant as being out of public employment, with private opportunities

     closed against him, and added, "But your country will reward you,

     never fear."



Then he closed:



     When Wellington won Waterloo, a battle about on a level with any one

     of a dozen of your victories, sordid England tried to pay him for

     that service with wealth and grandeurs.  She made him a duke and

     gave him $4,000,000.  If you had done and suffered for any other

     country what you have done and suffered for your own you would have

     been affronted in the same sordid way.  But, thank God!  this vast

     and rich and mighty republic is imbued to the core with a delicacy

     which will forever preserve her from so degrading you.



     Your country loves you--your country's proud of you--your country is

     grateful to you.  Her applauses, which have been many, thundering in

     your ears all these weeks and months, will never cease while the

     flag you saved continues to wave.



     Your country stands ready from this day forth to testify her

     measureless love and pride and gratitude toward you in every

     conceivable--inexpensive way.  Welcome to Hartford, great soldier,

     honored statesman, unselfish citizen.



Grant's grim smile showed itself more than once during the speech, and

when Clemens reached the sentence that spoke of his country rewarding him

in "every conceivable--inexpensive way" his composure broke up completely

and he "nearly laughed his entire head off," according to later

testimony, while the spectators shouted their approval.



Grant's son, Col. Fred Grant,--[Maj.-Gen'l, U. S. Army, 1906.  Died

April, 1912.]--dined at the Clemens home that night, and Rev. Joseph

Twichell and Henry C.  Robinson.  Twichell's invitation was in the form

of a telegram.  It said:



     I want you to dine with us Saturday half past five and meet Col.

     Fred Grant.  No ceremony.  Wear the same shirt you always wear.



The campaign was at its height now, and on the evening of October 26th

there was a grand Republican rally at the opera-house with addresses by

Charles Dudley Warner, Henry C. Robinson, and Mark Twain.  It was an

unpleasant, drizzly evening, but the weather had no effect on their

audience.  The place was jammed and packed, the aisles, the windows, and

the gallery railings full.  Hundreds who came as late as the hour

announced for the opening were obliged to turn back, for the building had

been thronged long before.  Mark Twain's speech that night is still

remembered in Hartford as the greatest effort of his life.  It was hardly

that, except to those who were caught in the psychology of the moment,

the tumult and the shouting of patriotism, the surge and sweep of the

political tide.  The roaring delight of the audience showed that to them

at least it was convincing.  Howells wrote that he had read it twice, and

that he could not put it out of his mind.  Whatever its general effect

was need not now be considered.  Garfield was elected, and perhaps

Grant's visit to Hartford and the great mass-meeting that followed

contributed their mite to that result.



Clemens saw General Grant again that year, but not on political business.

The Educational Mission, which China had established in Hartford--a

thriving institution for eight years or more--was threatened now by

certain Chinese authorities with abolishment.  Yung Wing (a Yale

graduate), the official by whom it had been projected and under whose

management it had prospered, was deeply concerned, as was the Rev. Joseph

Twichell, whose interest in the mission was a large and personal one.

Yung Wing declared that if influence could be brought upon Li Hung Chang,

then the most influential of Chinese counselors, the mission might be

saved.  Twichell, remembering the great honors which Li Hung Chang had

paid to General Grant in China, also Grant's admiration of Mark Twain,

went to the latter without delay.  Necessarily Clemens would be

enthusiastic, and act promptly.  He wrote to Grant, and Grant replied by

telegraph, naming a day when he would see them in New York.



They met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.  Grant was in fine spirits, and by no

means the "silent man" of his repute.



He launched at once into as free and flowing talk as I have ever heard

[says Twichell], marked by broad and intelligent views on the subject of

China, her wants, disadvantages, etc.  Now and then he asked a question,

but kept the lead of the conversation.  At last he proposed, of his own

accord, to write a letter to Li Hung Chang, advising the continuance of

the Mission, asking only that I would prepare him some notes, giving him

points to go by.  Thus we succeeded easily beyond our expectations,

thanks, very largely, to Clemens's assistance.



Clemens wrote Howells of the interview, detailing at some length

Twichell's comical mixture of delight and chagrin at not being given time

to air the fund of prepared statistics with which he had come loaded.

It was as if he had come to borrow a dollar and had been offered a

thousand before he could unfold his case.











CXXXII



A NEW PUBLISHER



It was near the end of the year that Clemens wrote to his mother:



     I have two stories, and by the verbal agreement they are both going

     into the same book; but Livy says they're not, and by George! she

     ought to know.  She says they're going into separate books, and that

     one of them is going to be elegantly gotten up, even if the elegance

     of it eats up the publisher's profits and mine too.



     I anticipate that publisher's melancholy surprise when he calls here

     Tuesday.  However, let him suffer; it is his own fault.  People who

     fix up agreements with me without first finding out what Livy's

     plans are take their fate into their own hands.



     I said two stories, but one of them is only half done; two or three

     months' work on it yet.  I shall tackle it Wednesday or Thursday;

     that is, if Livy yields and allows both stories to go in one book,

     which I hope she won't.



The reader may surmise that the finished story--the highly regarded

story--was 'The Prince and the Pauper'.  The other tale--the unfinished

and less considered one was 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'.  Nobody

appears to have been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly,

the publisher.



The publisher was not the American Company.  Elisha Bliss, after long ill

health, had died that fall, and this fact, in connection with a growing

dissatisfaction over the earlier contracts, had induced Clemens to listen

to offers from other makers of books.  The revelation made by the "half-

profit" returns from A Tramp Abroad meant to him, simply that the profits

had not been fairly apportioned, and he was accordingly hostile.  To

Orion he wrote that, had Bliss lived, he would have remained with the

company and made it reimburse him for his losses, but that as matters

stood he would sever the long connection.  It seemed a pity, later, that

he did this, but the break was bound to come.  Clemens was not a business

man, and Bliss was not a philanthropist.  He was, in fact, a shrewd,

capable publisher, who made as good a contract as he could; yet he was

square in his dealings, and the contract which Clemens held most bitterly

against him--that of 'Roughing It'--had been made in good faith and in

accordance with the conditions, of that period.  In most of the later

contracts Clemens himself had named his royalties, and it was not in

human nature--business human nature--for Bliss to encourage the size of

these percentages.  If one wished to draw a strictly moral conclusion

from the situation, one might say that it would have been better for the

American Publishing Company, knowing Mark Twain, voluntarily to have

allowed him half profits, which was the spirit of his old understanding

even if not the letter of it, rather than to have waited till he demanded

it and then to lose him by the result.  Perhaps that would be also a

proper business deduction; only, as a rule, business morals are regulated

by the contract, and the contract is regulated by the necessities and the

urgency of demand.



Never mind.  Mark Twain revised 'The Prince and the Pauper', sent it to

Howells, who approved of it mightily (though with reservations as to

certain chapters), and gave it to James R. Osgood, who was grateful and

agreed to make it into a book upon which no expense for illustration or

manufacture should be spared.  It was to be a sort of partnership

arrangement as between author and publisher, and large returns were

anticipated.



Among the many letters which Clemens was just then writing to Howells one

was dated "Xmas Eve."  It closes with the customary pleasantries and the

final line:



"But it is growing dark.  Merry Christmas to all of you!"



That last was a line of large significance.  It meant that the air was

filled with the whisper of hovering events and that he must mingle with

the mystery of preparation.  Christmas was an important season in the

Clemens home.  Almost the entire day before, Patrick was out with the

sleigh, delivering food and other gifts in baskets to the poor, and the

home preparations were no less busy.  There was always a tree--a large

one--and when all the gifts had been gathered in--when Elmira and

Fredonia had delivered their contributions, and Orion and his wife in

Keokuk had sent the annual sack of hickory-nuts (the big river-bottom

nuts, big as a silver dollar almost, such nuts as few children of this

later generation ever see) when all this happy revenue had been gathered,

and the dusk of Christmas Eve had hurried the children off to bed, it was

Mrs. Clemens who superintended the dressing of the tree, her husband

assisting, with a willingness that was greater than his skill, and with a

boy's anticipation in the surprise of it next morning.



Then followed the holidays, with parties and dances and charades, and

little plays, with the Warner and Twichell children.  To the Clemens home

the Christmas season brought all the old round of juvenile happiness--the

spirit of kindly giving, the brightness and the merrymaking, the gladness

and tenderness and mystery that belong to no other season, and have been

handed down through all the ages since shepherds watched on the plains of

Bethlehem.









CXXXIII



THE THREE FIRES--SOME BENEFACTIONS



The tradition that fires occur in groups of three was justified in the

Clemens household that winter. On each of three successive days flames

started that might have led to ghastly results.



The children were croupy, and one morning an alcohol lamp near little

Clara's bed, blown by the draught, set fire to the canopy.  Rosa, the

nurse, entered just as the blaze was well started.  She did not lose her

presence of mind,--[Rosa was not the kind to lose her head.  Once, in

Europe, when Bay had crept between the uprights of a high balustrade, and

was hanging out over destruction, Rosa, discovering her, did not scream

but spoke to her playfully and lifted her over into safety.]--but

snatched the little girl out of danger, then opened the window and threw

the burning bedding on the lawn.  The child was only slightly scorched,

but the escape was narrow enough.



Next day little Jean was lying asleep in her crib, in front of an open

wood fire, carefully protected by a firescreen, when a spark, by some

ingenuity, managed to get through the mesh of the screen and land on the

crib's lace covering.  Jean's nurse, Julia, arrived to find the lace a

gust of flame and the fire spreading.  She grabbed the sleeping Jean and

screamed.  Rosa, again at hand, heard the scream, and rushing in once

more opened a window and flung out the blazing bedclothes.  Clemens

himself also arrived, and together they stamped out the fire.



On the third morning, just before breakfast-time, Susy was practising at

the piano in the school-room, which adjoined the nursery.  At one end of

the room a fire of large logs was burning.  Susy was at the other end of

the room, her back to the fire.  A log burned in two and fell, scattering

coals around the woodwork which supported the mantel.  Just as the blaze

was getting fairly started a barber, waiting to trim Mr. Clemens's hair,

chanced to look in and saw what was going on.  He stepped into the

nursery bath-room, brought a pitcher of water and extinguished the

flames.  This period was always referred to in the Clemens household as

the "three days of fire."



Clemens would naturally make philosophical deductions from these

coincidental dangers and the manner in which they had been averted.  He

said that all these things were comprehended in the first act of the

first atom; that, but for some particular impulse given in that remote

time, the alcohol flame would not have blown against the canopy, the

spark would not have found its way through the screen, the log would not

have broken apart in that dangerous way, and that Rosa and Julia and the

barber would not have been at hand to save precious life and property.

He did not go further and draw moral conclusions as to the purpose of

these things: he never drew conclusions as to purpose.  He was willing to

rest with the event.  Logically he did not believe in reasons for things,

but only that things were.



Nevertheless, he was always trying to change them; to have a hand in

their improvement.  Had you asked him, he would have said that this, too,

was all in the primal atom; that his nature, such as it was, had been

minutely embodied there.



In that charming volume, 'My Mark Twain', Howells tells us of Clemens's

consideration, and even tenderness, for the negro race and his effort to

repair the wrong done by his nation.  Mark Twain's writings are full of

similar evidence, and in his daily life he never missed an opportunity to

pay tribute to the humbler race.  He would go across the street to speak

to an old negro, and to take his hand.  He would read for a negro church

when he would have refused a cathedral.  Howells mentions the colored

student whose way through college Clemens paid as a partial reparation

"due from every white man to every black man."--[Mark Twain paid two

colored students through college.  One of them, educated in a Southern

institution, became a minister of the gospel.  The other graduated from

the Yale Law School.]--This incident belongs just to the period of which

we are now writing, and there is another which, though different enough,

indicates the same tendency.



Garfield was about to be inaugurated, and it was rumored that Frederick

Douglass might lose his position as Marshal of the District of Columbia.

Clemens was continually besought by one and another to use his influence

with the Administration, and in every case had refused.  Douglass had

made no such, application.  Clemens, learning that the old negro's place

was in danger, interceded for him of his own accord.  He closed his

letter to General Garfield:



     A simple citizen may express a desire, with all propriety, in the

     matter of recommendation to office, and so I beg permission to hope

     that you will retain Mr. Douglass in his present office of Marshal

     of the District of Columbia, if such a course will not clash with

     your own preferences or with the expediencies and interests of your

     Administration.  I offer this petition with peculiar pleasure and

     strong desire, because I so honor this man's high and blemishless

     character, and so admire his brave, long crusade for the liberties

     and elevation of his race.



     He is a personal friend of mine, but that is nothing to the point;

     his history would move me to say these things without that, and I

     feel them, too.



Douglass wrote to Clemens, thanking him for his interest; at the end he

said:



     I think if a man is mean enough to want an office he ought to be

     noble enough to ask for it, and use all honorable means of getting

     it.  I mean to ask, and I will use your letter as a part of my

     petition.  It will put the President-elect in a good humor, in any

     case, and that is very important.



               With great respect,

                         Gratefully yours,

                                   FREDERICK DOUGLASS.





Mark Twain's benefactions were not all for the colored race.  One morning

in February of this same year, while the family were at late breakfast,

George came in to announce "a lady waiting to see Mr. Clemens in the

drawing-room."  Clemens growled.



"George," he said, "it's a book agent.  I won't see her.  I'll die, in my

tracks first."



He went, fuming and raging inwardly, and began at once to ask the nature

of the intruder's business.  Then he saw that she was very young and

modest, with none of the assurance of a canvasser, so he gave her a

chance to speak.  She told him that a young man employed in Pratt &

Whitney's machine-shops had made a statue in clay, and would like to have

Mark Twain come and look at it and see if it showed any promise of future

achievement.  His name, she said, was Karl Gerhardt, and he was her

husband.  Clemens protested that he knew nothing about art, but the young

woman's manner and appearance (she seemed scarcely more than a child) won

him.  He wavered, and finally promised that he would come the first

chance he had; that in fact he would come some time during the next week.

On her suggestion he agreed to come early in the week; he specified

Monday, "without fail."



When she was gone, and the door shut behind her, his usual remorse came

upon him.  He said to himself:



"Why didn't I go now?  Why didn't I go with her now?"



She went from Clemens's over to Warner's.  Warner also resisted, but,

tempted beyond his strength by her charm, laid down his work and went at

once.  When he returned he urged Clemens to go without fail, and, true to

promise, Clemens took Patrick, the coachman, and hunted up the place.

Clemens saw the statue, a seminude, for which the young wife had posed,

and was struck by its evident merit.  Mrs. Gerhardt told him the story of

her husband's struggles between his daily work and the effort to develop

his talent.  He had never had a lesson, she said; if he could only have

lessons what might he not accomplish?



Mrs. Clemens and Miss Spaulding called next day, and were equally carried

away with Karl Gerhardt, his young wife, and his effort to win his way in

art.  Clemens and Warner made up their minds to interest themselves

personally in the matter, and finally persuaded the painter J. Wells

Champney to come over from New York and go with them to the Gerhardts'

humble habitation, to see his work.  Champney approved of it.  He thought

it well worth while, he said, for the people of Hartford to go to the

expense of Gerhardt's art education.  He added that it would be better to

get the judgment of a sculptor.  So they brought over John Quincy Adams

Ward, who, like all the others, came away bewitched with these young

people and their struggles for the sake of art.  Ward said:



"If any stranger had told me that this 'prentice did not model that thing

from plaster-casts I should not have believed it.  It's full of

crudities, but it's full of genius, too.  Hartford must send him to Paris

for two years; then, if the promise holds good, keep him there three

more."



When he was gone Mrs. Clemens said:



"Youth, we won't wait for Hartford to do it.  It would take too long.

Let us send the Gerhardts to Paris ourselves, and say nothing about it to

any one else."



So the Gerhardts, provided with funds and an arrangement that would

enable them to live for five years in Paris if necessary, were started

across the sea without further delay.



Clemens and his wife were often doing something of this sort.  There was

seldom a time that they were not paying the way of some young man or

woman through college, or providing means and opportunity for development

in some special field of industry.









CXXXIV



LITERARY PROJECTS AND A MONUMENT TO ADAM



Mark Twain's literary work languished during this period.  He had a world

of plans, as usual, and wrote plentifully, but without direction or

conclusion.  "A Curious Experience," which relates a circumstance told to

him by an army officer, is about the most notable of the few completed

manuscripts of this period.



Of the books projected (there were several), a burlesque manual of

etiquette would seem to have been the most promising.  Howells had faith

in it, and of the still remaining fragments a few seem worth quoting:



                              AT BILLIARDS



     If your ball glides along in the intense and immediate vicinity of

     the object-ball, and a count seems exquisitely imminent, lift one

     leg; then one shoulder; then squirm your body around in sympathy

     with the direction of the moving ball; and at the instant when the

     ball seems on the point of colliding throw up both of your arms

     violently.  Your cue will probably break a chandelier, but no

     matter; you have done what you could to help the count.



                              AT THE DOG-FIGHT



     If it occur in your block, courteously give way to strangers

     desiring a view, particularly ladies.



     Avoid showing partiality toward the one dog, lest you hurt the

     feelings of the other one.



     Let your secret sympathies and your compassion be always with the

     under dog in the fight--this is magnanimity; but bet on the other

     one--this is business.



                              AT POKER



     If you draw to a flush and fail to fill, do not continue the

     conflict.



     If you hold a pair of trays, and your opponent is blind, and it

     costs you fifty to see him, let him remain unperceived.



     If you hold nothing but ace high, and by some means you know that

     the other man holds the rest of the aces, and he calls, excuse

     yourself; let him call again another time.



                              WALL STREET



     If you live in the country, buy at 80, sell at 40.  Avoid all forms

     of eccentricity.



                              IN THE RESTAURANT



     When you wish to get the waiter's attention, do not sing out "Say!"

     Simply say "Szt!"





His old abandoned notion of "Hamlet" with an added burlesque character

came back to him and stirred his enthusiasm anew, until even Howells

manifested deep interest in the matter.  One reflects how young Howells

must have been in those days; how full of the joy of existence; also how

mournfully he would consider such a sacrilege now.



Clemens proposed almost as many things to Howells as his brother Orion

proposed to him.  There was scarcely a letter that didn't contain some

new idea, with a request for advice or co-operation.  Now it was some

book that he meant to write some day, and again it would be a something

that he wanted Howells to write.



Once he urged Howells to make a play, or at least a novel, out of Orion.

At another time he suggested as material the "Rightful Earl of Durham."



He is a perfectly stunning literary bonanza, and must be dug up and put

on the market.  You must get his entire biography out of him and have it

ready for Osgood's magazine.  Even if it isn't worth printing, you must

have it anyway, and use it one of these days in one of your stories or in

a play.



It was this notion about 'The American Claimant' which somewhat later

would lead to a collaboration with Howells on a drama, and eventually to

a story of that title.



But Clemens's chief interest at this time lay in publishing, rather than

in writing.  His association with Osgood inspired him to devise new

ventures of profit.  He planned a 'Library of American Humor', which

Howells (soon to leave the Atlantic) and "Charley" Clark--[Charles

Hopkins Clark, managing editor of the Hartford Courant.]--were to edit,

and which Osgood would publish, for subscription sale.  Without realizing

it, Clemens was taking his first step toward becoming his own publisher.

His contract with Osgood for 'The Prince and the Pauper' made him

essentially that, for by the terms of it he agreed to supply all the

money for the making of the book, and to pay Osgood a royalty of seven

and one-half per cent. for selling it, reversing the usual conditions.

The contract for the Library of Humor was to be a similar one, though in

this case Osgood was to have a larger royalty return, and to share

proportionately in the expense and risk.  Mark Twain was entering into a

field where he did not belong; where in the end he would harvest only

disaster and regret.



One curious project came to an end in 1881--the plan for a monument to

Adam.  In a sketch written a great many years later Mark Twain tells of

the memorial which the Rev. Thomas K. Beecher and himself once proposed

to erect to our great common ancestor.  The story is based on a real

incident.  Clemens, in Elmira one day (it was October, 1879), heard of a

jesting proposal made by F. G. Hall to erect a monument in Elmira to

Adam.  The idea promptly caught Mark Twain's fancy.  He observed to

Beecher that the human race really showed a pretty poor regard for its

great progenitor, who was about to be deposed by Darwin's simian, not to

pay him the tribute of a single monument.  Mankind, he said, would

probably accept the monkey ancestor, and in time the very name of Adam

would be forgotten.  He declared Mr. Hall's suggestion to be a sound

idea.



Beecher agreed that there were many reasons why a monument should be

erected to Adam, and suggested that a subscription be started for the

purpose.  Certain business men, seeing an opportunity for advertising the

city, took the matter semi-seriously, and offered to contribute large

sums in the interest of the enterprise.  Then it was agreed that Congress

should be petitioned to sanction the idea exclusively to Elmira,

prohibiting the erection of any such memorial elsewhere.  A document to

this effect was prepared, headed by F. G. Hall, and signed by other

leading citizens of Elmira, including Beecher himself.  General Joe

Hawley came along just then on a political speech-making tour.  Clemens

introduced him, and Hawley, in turn, agreed to father the petition in

Congress.  What had begun merely as pleasantry began to have a formidable

look.



But alas! in the end Hawley's courage had failed him.  He began to hate

his undertaking.  He was afraid of the national laugh it would arouse,

the jeers of the newspapers.  It was certain to leak out that Mark Twain

was behind it, in spite of the fact that his name nowhere appeared; that

it was one of his colossal jokes.  Now and then, in the privacy of his

own room at night, Hawley would hunt up the Adam petition and read it and

feel the cold sweat breaking out.  He postponed the matter from one

session to another till the summer of 1881, when he was about to sail for

Europe.  Then he gave the document to his wife, to turn over to Clemens,

and ignominiously fled.



[For text of the petition in full, etc., see Appendix P, at the end of

last volume.]



Mark Twain's introduction of Hawley at Elmira contained this pleasantry:

"General Hawley was president of the Centennial Commission.  Was a

gallant soldier in the war.  He has been Governor of Connecticut, member

of Congress, and was president of the convention that nominated Abraham

Lincoln."



General Hawley: "That nominated Grant."



Twain: "He says it was Grant, but I know better.  He is a member of my

church at Hartford, and the author of 'Beautiful Snow.' Maybe he will

deny that.  But I am only here to give him a character from his last

place.  As a pure citizen, I respect him; as a personal friend of years,

I have the warmest regard for him; as a neighbor whose vegetable garden

joins mine, why--why, I watch him.  That's nothing; we all do that with

any neighbor.  General Hawley keeps his promises, not only in private,

but in public.  He is an editor who believes what he writes in his own

paper.  As the author of 'Beautiful Snow' he added a new pang to winter.

He is broad-souled, generous, noble, liberal, alive to his moral and

religious responsibilities.  Whenever the contribution-box was passed I

never knew him to take out a cent."









CXXXV



A TRIP WITH SHERMAN AND AN INTERVIEW WITH GRANT.



The Army of the Potomac gave a dinner in Hartford on the 8th of June,

1881.  But little memory remains of it now beyond Mark Twain's speech and

a bill of fare containing original comments, ascribed to various revered

authors, such as Johnson, Milton, and Carlyle.  A pleasant incident

followed, however, which Clemens himself used to relate.  General Sherman

attended the banquet, and Secretary of War, Robert Lincoln.  Next morning

Clemens and Twichell were leaving for West Point, where they were to

address the military students, guests on the same special train on which

Lincoln and Sherman had their private car.  This car was at the end of

the train, and when the two passengers reached the station, Sherman and

Lincoln were out on the rear platform addressing the multitude.  Clemens

and Twichell went in and, taking seats, waited for them.



As the speakers finished the train started, but they still remained

outside, bowing and waving to the assembled citizens, so that it was

under good headway before they came in.  Sherman came up to Clemens, who

sat smoking unconcernedly.



"Well," he said, "who told you you could go in this car?"



"Nobody," said Clemens.



"Do you expect to pay extra fare?" asked Sherman.



"No," said Clemens.  "I don't expect to pay any fare."



"Oh, you don't.  Then you'll work your way."



Sherman took off his coat and military hat and made Clemens put them on.



"Now," said he, "whenever the train stops you go out on the platform and

represent me and make a speech."



It was not long before the train stopped, and Clemens, according to

orders, stepped out on the rear platform and bowed to the crowd.  There

was a cheer at the sight of his military uniform.  Then the cheer waned,

became a murmur of uncertainty, followed by an undertone of discussion.

Presently somebody said:



"Say, that ain't Sherman, that's Mark Twain," which brought another

cheer.



Then Sherman had to come out too, and the result was that both spoke.

They kept this up at the different stations, and sometimes Lincoln came

out with them.  When there was time all three spoke, much to the

satisfaction of their audiences.



President Garfield was shot that summer--July 2, 1881.--[On the day that

President Garfield was shot Mrs. Clemens received from their friend

Reginald Cholmondeley a letter of condolence on the death of her husband

in Australia; startling enough, though in reality rather comforting than

otherwise, for the reason that the "Mark Twain" who had died in Australia

was a very persistent impostor.  Clemens wrote Cholmondeley: "Being dead

I might be excused from writing letters, but I am not that kind of a

corpse.  May I never be so dead as to neglect the hail of a friend from a

far land."  Out of this incident grew a feature of an anecdote related in

Following the Equator the joke played by the man from Bendigo.]--He died

September 19th, and Arthur came into power.  There was a great feeling of

uncertainty as to what he would do.  He was regarded as "an excellent

gentleman with a weakness for his friends."  Incumbents holding

appointive offices were in a state of dread.



Howells's father was consul at Toronto, and, believing his place to be in

danger, he appealed to his son.  In his book Howells tells how, in turn,

he appealed to Clemens, remembering his friendship with Grant and Grant's

friendship with Arthur.  He asked Clemens to write to Grant, but Clemens

would hear of nothing less than a call on the General, during which the

matter would be presented to him in person.  Howells relates how the

three of them lunched together, in a little room just out of the office,

on baked beans and coffee, brought in from some near-by restaurant:



     The baked beans and coffee were of about the railroad-refreshment

     quality; but eating them with Grant was like sitting down to baked

     beans and coffee with Julius Caesar, or Alexander, or some other

     great Plutarchan captain.



Clemens, also recalling the interview, once added some interesting

details:



"I asked Grant if he wouldn't write a word on a card which Howells could

carry to Washington and hand to the President.  But, as usual, General

Grant was his natural self--that is to say, ready and determined to do a

great deal more for you than you could possibly ask him to do.  He said

he was going to Washington in a couple of days to dine with the

President, and he would speak to him himself on the subject and make it a

personal matter.  Grant was in the humor to talk--he was always in a

humor to talk when no strangers were present--he forced us to stay and

take luncheon in a private room, and continued to talk all the time.  It

was baked beans, but how 'he sits and towers,' Howells said, quoting

Dame.  Grant remembered 'Squibob' Derby (John Phoenix) at West Point very

well.  He said that Derby was always drawing caricatures of the

professors and playing jokes on every body.  He told a thing which I had

heard before but had never seen in print.  A professor questioning a

class concerning certain particulars of a possible siege said, 'Suppose a

thousand men are besieging a fortress whose equipment of provisions is

so-and-so; it is a military axiom that at the end of forty-five days the

fort will surrender.  Now, young men, if any of you were in command of

such a fortress, how would you proceed?'



"Derby held up his hand in token that he had an answer for that question.

He said, 'I would march out, let the enemy in, and at the end of forty-

five days I would change places with him.'



"I tried hard, during that interview, to get General Grant to agree to

write his personal memoirs for publication, but he wouldn't listen to the

suggestion.  His inborn diffidence made him shrink from voluntarily

coming before the public and placing himself under criticism as an

author.  He had no confidence in his ability to write well; whereas we

all know now that he possessed an admirable literary gift and style.  He

was also sure that the book would have no sale, and of course that would

be a humility too.  I argued that the book would have an enormous sale,

and that out of my experience I could save him from making unwise

contracts with publishers, and would have the contract arranged in such a

way that they could not swindle him, but he said he had no necessity for

any addition to his income.  Of course he could not foresee that he was

camping on a volcano; that as Ward's partner he was a ruined man even

then, and of course I had no suspicion that in four years from that time

I would become his publisher.  He would not agree to write his memoirs.

He only said that some day he would make very full notes and leave them

behind him, and then if his children chose to make them into a book they

could do so.  We came away then.  He fulfilled his promise entirely

concerning Howells's father, who held his office until he resigned of his

own accord."









CXXXVI



"THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER"



During the summer absence alterations were made in the Hartford home,

with extensive decorations by Tiffany.  The work was not completed when

the family returned.  Clemens wrote to Charles Warren Stoddard, then in

the Sandwich Islands, that the place was full of carpenters and

decorators, whereas what they really needed was "an incendiary."



If the house would only burn down we would pack up the cubs and fly to

the isles of the blest, and shut ourselves up in the healing solitudes of

the crater of Haleakala and get a good rest, for the mails do not intrude

there, nor yet the telephone and the telegraph; and after resting we

would come down the mountain a piece and board with a godly, breech-

clouted native, and eat poi and dirt, and give thanks to whom all thanks

belong for these privileges, and never housekeep any more.



They had acquired more ground.  One morning in the spring Mark Twain had

looked out of his window just in time to see a man lift an ax to cut down

a tree on the lot which lay between his own and that of his neighbor.  He

had heard that a house was to be built there; altogether too close to him

for comfort and privacy.  Leaning out of the window he called sonorously,

"Woodman, spare that tree!"  Then he hurried down, obtained a stay of

proceedings, and without delay purchased the lot from the next-door

neighbor who owned it, acquiring thereby one hundred feet of extra ground

and a greenhouse which occupied it.  It was a costly purchase; the owner

knew he could demand his own price; he asked and received twelve thousand

dollars for the strip.



In November, Clemens found that he must make another trip to Canada.

'The Prince and the Pauper' was ready for issue, and to insure Canadian

copyright the author must cross the line in person.  He did not enjoy the

prospect of a cold-weather trip to the north, and tried to tempt Howells

to go with him, but only succeeded in persuading Osgood, who would do

anything or go anywhere that offered the opportunity for pleasant company

and junket.



It was by no means an unhappy fortnight.  Clemens took a note-book, and

there are plenty of items that give reality to that long-ago excursion.

He found the Canadian girls so pretty that he records it as a relief now

and then to see a plain one.  On another page he tells how one night in

the hotel a mouse gnawed and kept him awake, and how he got up and hunted

for it, hoping to destroy it.  He made a rebus picture for the children

of this incident in a letter home.



We get a glimpse just here of how he was constantly viewing himself as

literary material--human material--an example from which some literary

aspect or lesson may be drawn.  Following the mouse adventure we find it

thus dramatized:

     Trace Father Brebeuf all through this trip, and when I am in a rage

     and can't endure the mouse be reading of Brebeuf's marvelous

     endurances and be shamed.



     And finally, after chasing the bright-eyed rascal several days, and

     throwing things and trying to jump on him when in my overshoes, he

     darts away with those same bright eyes, then straightway I read

     Brebeuf's magnificent martyrdom, and turn in, subdued and wondering.

     By and by the thought occurs to me, Brebeuf, with his good, great

     heart would spare even that poor humble mousie--and for his sake so

     will I--I will throw the trap in the fire--jump out of bed, reach

     under, fetch out the trap, and find him throttled there and not two

     minutes dead.



They gave him a dinner in Montreal.  Louis Frechette, the Canadian poet,

was there and Clemens addressed him handsomely in the response he made to

the speech of welcome.  From that moment Frechette never ceased to adore

Mark Twain, and visited him soon after the return to Hartford.



'The Prince and the Pauper' was published in England, Canada, Germany,

and America early in December, 1881.  There had been no stint of money,

and it was an extremely handsome book.  The pen-and-ink drawings were

really charming, and they were lavish as to number.  It was an attractive

volume from every standpoint, and it was properly dedicated "To those

good-mannered and agreeable children, Susy and Clara Clemens."



The story itself was totally unlike anything that Mark Twain had done

before.  Enough of its plan and purpose has been given in former chapters

to make a synopsis of it unnecessary here.  The story of the wandering

prince and the pauper king--an impressive picture of ancient legal and

regal cruelty--is as fine and consistent a tale as exists in the realm of

pure romance.  Unlike its great successor, the 'Yankee at King Arthur's

Court', it never sacrifices the illusion to the burlesque, while through

it all there runs a delicate vein of humor.  Only here and there is there

the slightest disillusion, and this mainly in the use of some ultra-

modern phrase or word.



Mark Twain never did any better writing than some of the splendid scenes

in 'The Prince and the Pauper'.  The picture of Old London Bridge; the

scene in the vagabond's retreat, with its presentation to the little king

of the wrongs inflicted by the laws of his realm; the episode of the jail

where his revelation reaches a climax--these are but a few of the

splendid pictures which the chapters portray, while the spectacle of

England acquiring mercy at the hands of two children, a king and a

beggar, is one which only genius could create.  One might quote here, but

to do so without the context would be to sacrifice atmosphere, half the

story's charm.  How breathlessly interesting is the tale of it!  We may

imagine that first little audience at Mark Twain's fireside hanging

expectant on every paragraph, hungry always for more.  Of all Mark

Twain's longer works of fiction it is perhaps the most coherent as to

plot, the most carefully thought out, the most perfect as to workmanship.

This is not to say that it is his greatest story.  Probably time will not

give it that rank, but it comes near to being a perfectly constructed

story, and it has an imperishable charm.



It was well received, though not always understood by the public.  The

reviewer was so accustomed to looking for the joke in Mark Twain's work,

that he found it hard to estimate this new product.  Some even went so

far as to refer to it as one of Mark Twain's big jokes, meaning probably

that he had created a chapter in English history with no foundation

beyond his fancy.  Of course these things pained the author of the book.

At one time, he had been inclined to publish it anonymously, to avert

this sort of misunderstanding, and sometimes now he regretted not having

done so.



Yet there were many gratifying notices.  The New York Herald reviewer

gave the new book two columns of finely intelligent appreciation.  In

part he said:



     To those who have followed the career of Mark Twain, his appearance

     as the author of a charming and noble romance is really no more of a

     surprise than to see a stately structure risen upon sightly ground

     owned by an architect of genius, with the resources of abundant

     building material and ample training at command.  Of his capacity

     they have had no doubt, and they rejoice in his taking a step which

     they felt he was able to take.  Through all his publications may be

     traced the marks of the path which half led up to this happy height.

     His humor has often been the cloak, but not the mask, of a sturdy

     purpose.  His work has been characterized by a manly love of truth,

     a hatred of humbug, and a scorn for cant.  A genial warmth and

     whole-souledness, a beautiful fancy, a fertile imagination, and a

     native feeling for the picturesque and a fine eye for color have

     afforded the basis of a style which has become more and more plastic

     and finished.



And in closing:



     The characters of these two boys, twins in spirit, will rank with

     the purest and loveliest creations of child-life in the realm of

     fiction.









CXXXVII



CERTAIN ATTACKS AND REPRISALS



Beyond the publication of The Prince and the Pauper Clemens was sparingly

represented in print in '81.  A chapter originally intended for the book,

the "Whipping Boy's Story," he gave to the Bazaar Budget, a little

special-edition sheet printed in Hartford.  It was the story of the 'Bull

and the Bees' which he later adapted for use in Joan of Arc, the episode

in which Joan's father rides a bull to a funeral.  Howells found that it

interfered with the action in the story of the Prince, and we might have

spared it from the story of Joan, though hardly without regret.



The military story "A Curious Episode" was published in the Century

Magazine for November.  The fact that Clemens had heard, and not

invented, the story was set forth quite definitely and fully in his

opening paragraphs.  Nevertheless, a "Captious Reader" thought it

necessary to write to a New York publication concerning its origin:



     I am an admirer of the writings of Mr. Mark Twain, and consequently,

     when I saw the table of contents of the November number of the

     Century, I bought it and turned at once to the article bearing his

     name, and entitled, "A Curious Episode."  When I began to read it,

     it struck me as strangely familiar, and I soon recognized the story

     as a true one, told me in the summer of 1878 by an officer of the

     United States artillery.  Query: Did Mr. Twain expect the public to

     credit this narrative to his clever brain?



The editor, seeing a chance for Mark Twain "copy," forwarded a clipping

to Clemens and asked him if he had anything to say in the matter.

Clemens happened to know the editor very well, and he did have something

to say, not for print, but for the editor's private ear.



     The newspaper custom of shooting a man in the back and then calling

     upon him to come out in a card and prove that he was not engaged in

     any infamy at the time is a good enough custom for those who think

     it justifiable.  Your correspondent is not stupid, I judge, but

     purely and simply malicious.  He knew there was not the shadow of a

     suggestion, from the beginning to the end of "A Curious Episode,"

     that the story was an invention; he knew he had no warrant for

     trying to persuade the public that I had stolen the narrative and

     was endeavoring to palm it off as a piece of literary invention; he

     also knew that he was asking his closing question with a base

     motive, else he would have asked it of me by letter, not spread it

     before the public.



     I have never wronged you in any way, and I think you had no right to

     print that communication; no right, neither any excuse.  As to

     publicly answering that correspondent, I would as soon think of

     bandying words in public with any other prostitute.



The editor replied in a manly, frank acknowledgment of error.  He had not

looked up the article itself in the Century before printing the

communication.



     "Your letter has taught me a lesson," he said.  "The blame belongs

     to me for not hunting up the proofs.  Please accept my apology."



Mark Twain was likely to be peculiarly sensitive to printed innuendos.

Not always.  Sometimes he would only laugh at them or be wholly

indifferent.  Indeed, in his later years, he seldom cared to read

anything about himself, one way or the other, but at the time of which we

are now writing--the period of the early eighties--he was alive to any

comment of the press.  His strong sense of humor, and still stronger

sense of human weakness, caused him to overlook many things which another

might regard as an affront; but if the thing printed were merely an

uncalled-for slur, an inexcusable imputation, he was inclined to rage and

plan violence.  Sometimes he conceived retribution in the form of libel

suits with heavy damages.  Sometimes he wrote blasting answers, which

Mrs. Clemens would not let him print.



At one time he planned a biography of a certain editor who seemed to be

making a deliberate personal campaign against his happiness.  Clemens had

heard that offending items were being printed in this man's paper;

friends, reporting with customary exaggeration, declared that these

sneers and brutalities appeared almost daily, so often as to cause

general remark.



This was enough.  He promptly began to collect data--damaging data--

relating to that editor's past history.  He even set a man to work in

England collecting information concerning his victim.  One of his

notebooks contains the memoranda; a few items will show how terrific was

to be the onslaught.



     When the naturalist finds a new kind of animal, he writes him up in

     the interest of science.  No matter if it is an unpleasant animal.

     This is a new kind of animal, and in the cause of society must be

     written up.  He is the polecat of our species .  .  .  .  He is

     purely and simply a Guiteau with the courage left out .  .  .  .



     Steel portraits of him as a sort of idiot, from infancy up--to a

     dozen scattered through the book--all should resemble him.



But never mind the rest.  When he had got thoroughly interested in his

project Mrs. Clemens, who had allowed the cyclone to wear itself out a

little with its own vehemence, suggested that perhaps it would be well to

have some one make an examination of the files of the paper and see just

what had been said of him.  So he subscribed for the paper himself and

set a man to work on the back numbers.  We will let him tell the

conclusion of the matter himself, in his report of it to Howells:



     The result arrived from my New York man this morning.  Oh, what a

     pitiable wreck of high hopes!  The "almost daily" assaults for two

     months consist of (1) adverse criticism of P. & P.  from an enraged

     idiot in the London Athenaeum, (2) paragraphs from some indignant

     Englishman in the Pall Mall Gazette, who pays me the vast compliment

     of gravely rebuking some imaginary ass who has set me up in the

     neighborhood of Rabelais, (3) a remark about the Montreal dinner,

     touched with an almost invisible satire, and, (4) a remark about

     refusal of Canadian copyright, not complimentary, but not

     necessarily malicious; and of course adverse criticism which is not

     malicious is a thing which none but fools irritate themselves about.



     There, that is the prodigious bugaboo in its entirety!  Can you

     conceive of a man's getting himself into a sweat over so diminutive

     a provocation?  I am sure I can't.  What the devil can those friends

     of mine have been thinking about to spread those three or four

     harmless things out into two months of daily sneers and affronts?



     Boiled down, this vast outpouring of malice amounts to simply this:

     one jest (one can make nothing more serious than that out of it).

     One jest, and that is all; for foreign criticisms do not count, they

     being matters of news, and proper for publication in anybody's

     newspaper .  .  .  .



     Well, my mountain has brought forth its mouse, and a sufficiently

     small mouse it is, God knows.  And my three weeks' hard work has got

     to go into the ignominious pigeonhole.  Confound it, I could have

     earned ten thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble.



Howells refers to this episode, and concludes:



     So the paper was acquitted and the editor's life was spared.  The

     wretch never, never knew how near he was to losing it, with

     incredible preliminaries of obloquy, and a subsequent devotion to

     lasting infamy.









CXXXVIII



MANY UNDERTAKINGS



To write a detailed biography of Mark Twain at this period would be to

defy perusal.  Even to set down all the interesting matters, interesting

to the public of his time, would mean not only to exhaust the subject,

but the reader.  He lived at the top of his bent, and almost anything

relating to him was regarded as news.  Daily and hourly he mingled with

important matters or spoke concerning them.  A bare list of the

interesting events of Mark Twain's life would fill a large volume.



He was so busy, so deeply interested himself, so vitally alive to every

human aspect.  He read the papers through, and there was always enough to

arouse his indignation--the doings of the human race at large could be

relied upon to do that--and he would write, and write, to relieve

himself.  His mental Niagara was always pouring away, turning out

articles, essays, communications on every conceivable subject, mainly

with the idea of reform.  There were many public and private abuses, and

he wanted to correct them all.  He covered reams of paper with lurid

heresies--political, religious, civic--for most of which there was no

hope of publication.



Now and then he was allowed to speak out: An order from the Past-office

Department at Washington concerning the superscription of envelopes

seemed to him unwarranted.  He assailed it, and directly the nation was

being entertained by a controversy between Mark Twain and the Postmaster-

General's private secretary, who subsequently receded from the field.

At another time, on the matter of postage rates he wrote a paper which

began: "Reader, suppose you were an idiot.  And suppose you were a member

of Congress.  But I repeat myself."



It is hardly necessary to add that the paper did not appear.



On the whole, Clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to print,

and such of these papers as are preserved to-day form a curious

collection of human documents.  Many of them could be printed to-day,

without distress to any one.  The conditions that invited them are

changed; the heresies are not heresies any more.  He may have had some

thought of their publication in later years, for once he wrote:



     Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put

     them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then

     all that ink and labor are wasted because I can't print the result.

     I have just finished an article of this kind, and it satisfies me

     entirely.  It does my weather-beaten soul good to read it, and

     admire the trouble it would make for me and the family.  I will

     leave it behind and utter it from the grave.  There is a free speech

     there, and no harm to the family.



It is too late and too soon to print most of these things; too late to

print them for their salutary influence, too soon to print them as

literature.



He was interested in everything: in music, as little as he knew of it.

He had an ear for melody, a dramatic vision, and the poetic conception of

sound.  Reading some lilting lyric, he could fancy the words marching to

melody, and would cast about among his friends for some one who could

supply a tuneful setting.  Once he wrote to his friend the Rev. Dr.

Parker, who was a skilled musician, urging him to write a score for

Tennyson's "Bugle Song," outlining an attractive scheme for it which the

order of his fancy had formulated.  Dr. Parker replied that the "Bugle

Song," often attempted, had been the despair of many musicians.



He was interested in business affairs.  Already, before the European

trip, he had embarked in, and disembarked from, a number of pecuniary

ventures.  He had not been satisfied with a strictly literary income.

The old tendency to speculative investment, acquired during those

restless mining days, always possessed him.  There were no silver mines

in the East, no holes in the ground into which to empty money and effort;

but there were plenty of equivalents--inventions, stock companies, and

the like.  He had begun by putting five thousand dollars into the

American Publishing Company; but that was a sound and profitable venture,

and deserves to be remembered for that reason.



Then a man came along with a patent steam generator which would save

ninety per cent. of the fuel energy, or some such amount, and Mark Twain

was early persuaded that it would revolutionize the steam manufactures of

the world; so he put in whatever bank surplus he had and bade it a

permanent good-by.



Following the steam generator came a steam pulley, a rather small

contrivance, but it succeeded in extracting thirty-two thousand dollars

from his bank account in a period of sixteen months.



By the time he had accumulated a fresh balance, a new method of marine

telegraphy was shown him, so he used it up on that, twenty-five thousand

dollars being the price of this adventure.



A watch company in western New York was ready to sell him a block of

shares by the time he was prepared to experiment again, but it did not

quite live to declare the first dividend on his investment.



Senator John P.  Jones invited him to join in the organization of an

accident insurance company, and such was Jones's confidence in the

venture that he guaranteed Clemens against loss.  Mark Twain's only

profit from this source was in the delivery of a delicious speech, which

he made at a dinner given to Cornelius Walford, of London, an insurance

author of repute.  Jones was paying back the money presently, and about

that time came a young inventor named Graham Bell, offering stock in a

contrivance for carrying the human voice on an electric wire.  At almost

any other time Clemens would eagerly have welcomed this opportunity; but

he was so gratified at having got his money out of the insurance venture

that he refused to respond to the happy "hello" call of fortune.  In some

memoranda made thirty years later he said:



I declined.  I said I didn't want anything more to do with wildcat

speculation.  Then he [Bell] offered the stock to me at twenty-five.  I

said I didn't want it at any price.  He became eager; insisted that I

take five hundred dollars' worth.  He said he would sell me as much as I

wanted for five hundred dollars; offered to let me gather it up in my

hands and measure it in a plug hat; said I could have a whole hatful for

five hundred dollars.  But I was the burnt child, and I resisted all

these temptations-resisted them easily; went off with my check intact,

and next day lent five thousand of it, on an unendorsed note, to a friend

who was going to go bankrupt three days later.



About the end of the year I put up a telephone wire from my house down to

the Courant office, the only telephone wire in town, and the first one

that was ever used in a private house in the world.



That had been only a little while before he sailed for Europe.  When he

returned he would have been willing to accept a very trifling interest in

the telephone industry for the amount of his insurance salvage.



He had a fresh interest in patents now, and when his old friend Dan Slote

got hold of a new process for engraving--the kaolatype or "chalk-plate"

process--which was going to revolutionize the world of illustration, he

promptly acquired a third interest, and eventually was satisfied with

nothing short of control.  It was an ingenious process: a sheet of

perfectly smooth steel was coated with a preparation of kaolin (or china

clay), and a picture was engraved through the coating down to the steel

surface.  This formed the matrix into which the molten metal was poured

to make the stereotype plate, or die, for printing.  It was Clemens's

notion that he could utilize this process for the casting of brass dies

for stamping book covers--that, so applied, the fortunes to be made out

of it would be larger and more numerous.  Howells tells how, at one time,

Clemens thought the "damned human race" was almost to be redeemed by a

process of founding brass without air-bubbles in it.  This was the time

referred to and the race had to go unredeemed; for, after long, worried,

costly experimenting, the brass refused to accommodate its nature to the

new idea, while the chalk plate itself, with all its subsidiary and

auxiliary possibilities, was infringed upon right and left, and the

protecting patent failed to hold.  The process was doomed, in any case.

It was barely established before the photographic etching processes,

superior in all ways, were developed and came quickly into use.  The

kaolatype enterprise struggled nobly for a considerable period.  Clemens

brought his niece's husband, young Charles L. Webster, from Fredonia to

manage it for him, and backed it liberally.  Webster was vigorous, hard-

working, and capable; but the end of each month showed a deficit, until

Clemens was from forty to fifty thousand dollars out of pocket in his

effort to save the race with chalk and brass.  The history of these

several ventures (and there were others), dismissed here in a few

paragraphs, would alone make a volume not without interest, certainly not

without humor.  Following came the type-setting machine, but we are not

ready for that.  Of necessity it is a longer, costlier story.



Mrs. Clemens did not share his enthusiasm in these various enterprises.

She did not oppose them, at least not strenuously, but she did not

encourage them.  She did not see their need.  Their home was beautiful;

they were happy; he could do his work in deliberation and comfort.  She

knew the value of money better than he, cared more for it in her own way;

but she had not his desire to heap up vast and sudden sums, to revel in

torrential golden showers.  She was willing to let well enough alone.

Clemens could not do this, and suffered accordingly.  In the midst of

fair home surroundings and honors we find him writing to his mother:



     Life has come to be a very serious matter with me.  I have a

     badgered, harassed feeling a good part of my time.  It comes mainly

     from business responsibilities and annoyances.



He had no moral right to be connected with business at all.  He had a

large perception of business opportunity, but no vision of its

requirements--its difficulties and details.  He was the soul of honor,

but in anything resembling practical direction he was but a child.

During any period of business venture he was likely to be in hot water:

eagerly excited, worried, impatient; alternately suspicious and over-

trusting, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset.



Yet never, even to the end of his days, would he permanently lose faith

in speculative ventures.  Human traits are sometimes modified, but never

eliminated.  The man who is born to be a victim of misplaced confidence

will continue to be one so long as he lives and there are men willing to

victimize him.  The man who believes in himself as an investor will

uphold that faith against all disaster so long as he draws breath and has

money to back his judgments.









CXXXIX



FINANCIAL AND LITERARY



By a statement made on the 1st of January, 1882, of Mark Twain's

disbursements for the preceding year, it is shown that considerably more

than one hundred thousand dollars had been expended during that twelve

months.  It is a large sum for an author to pay out in one year.  It

would cramp most authors to do it, and it was not the best financing,

even for Mark Twain.  It required all that the books could earn, all the

income from the various securities, and a fair sum from their principal.

There is a good deal of biography in the statement.  Of the amount

expended forty-six thousand dollars represented investments; but of this

comfortable sum less than five thousand dollars would cover the

legitimate purchases; the rest had gone in the "ventures" from whose

bourne no dollar would ever return.  Also, a large sum had been spent for

the additional land and for improvements on the home--somewhat more than

thirty thousand dollars altogether--while the home life had become more

lavish, the establishment had grown each year to a larger scale, the

guests and entertainments had become more and, more numerous, until the

actual household expenditure required about as much as the books and

securities could earn.



It was with the increased scale of living that Clemens had become

especially eager for some source of commercial profit; something that

would yield a return, not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands.

Like Colonel Sellers, he must have something with "millions in it."

Almost any proposition that seemed to offer these possible millions

appealed to him, and in his imagination he saw the golden freshet pouring

in.



His natural taste was for a simple, inexpensive life; yet in his large

hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur, he gloried in the

splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and delight of his guests.

There were always guests; they were coming and going constantly.  Clemens

used to say that he proposed to establish a bus line between their house

and the station for the accommodation of his company.  He had the

Southern hospitality.  Much company appealed to a very large element in

his strangely compounded nature.  For the better portion of the year he

was willing to pay the price of it, whether in money or in endurance, and

Mrs. Clemens heroically did her part.  She loved these things also, in

her own way.  She took pride in them, and realized that they were a part

of his vast success.  Yet in her heart she often longed for the simpler

life--above all, for the farm life at Elmira.  Her spirit cried out for

the rest and comfort there.  In one of her letters she says:

     The house has been full of company, and I have been "whirled

     around."  How can a body help it?  Oh, I cannot help sighing for the

     peace and quiet of the farm.  This is my work, and I know that I do

     very wrong when I feel chafed by it, but how can I be right about

     it?  Sometimes it seems as if the simple sight of people would drive

     me mad.  I am all wrong; if I would simply accept the fact that this

     is my work and let other things go, I know I should not be so

     fretted; but I want so much to do other things, to study and do

     things with the children, and I cannot.



     I have the best French teacher that I ever had, and if I could give

     any time to it I could not help learning French.



When we reflect on the conditions, we are inclined to say how much better

it would have been to have remained there among the hills in that quiet,

inexpensive environment, to have let the world go.  But that was not

possible.  The game was of far larger proportions than any that could be

restricted to the limits of retirement and the simpler round of life.

Mark Twain's realm had become too large for his court to be established

in a cottage.



It is hard to understand that in spite of a towering fame Mark Twain was

still not regarded by certain American arbiters of reputations as a

literary fixture; his work was not yet recognized by them as being of

important meaning and serious purport.



In Boston, at that time still the Athens of America, he was enjoyed,

delighted in; but he was not honored as being quite one of the elect.

Howells tells us that:



     In proportion as people thought themselves refined they questioned

     that quality which all recognize in him now, but which was then the

     inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude.



Even at the Atlantic dinners his place was "below the salt"--a place of

honor, but not of the greatest honor.  He did not sit on the dais with

Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Howells, and Aldrich.  We of a

later period, who remember him always as the center of every board--the

one supreme figure, his splendid head and crown of silver hair the target

of every eye-find it hard to realize the Cambridge conservatism that clad

him figuratively always in motley, and seated him lower than the throne

itself.



Howells clearly resented this condition, and from random review corners

had ventured heresy.  Now in 1882 he seems to have determined to declare

himself, in a large, free way, concerning his own personal estimate of

Mark Twain.  He prepared for the Century Magazine a biographical

appreciation, in which he served notice to the world that Mark Twain's

work, considered even as literature, was of very considerable importance

indeed.  Whether or not Howells then realized the "inspired knowledge of

the multitude," and that most of the nation outside of the counties of

Suffolk and Essex already recognized his claim, is not material.  Very

likely he did; but he also realized the mental dusk of the cultured

uninspired and his prerogative to enlighten them.  His Century article

was a kind of manifesto, a declaration of independence, no longer

confined to the obscurities of certain book notices, where of course one

might be expected to stretch friendly favor a little for a popular

Atlantic contributor.  In the open field of the Century Magazine Howells

ventured to declare:



     Mark Twain's humor is as simple in form and as direct as the

     statesmanship of Lincoln or the generalship of Grant.



     When I think how purely and wholly American it is I am a little

     puzzled at its universal acceptance .  .  .  .  Why, in fine, should

     an English chief-justice keep Mark Twain's books always at hand?

     Why should Darwin have gone to them for rest and refreshment at

     midnight, when spent with scientific research?



     I suppose that Mark Twain transcends all other American humorists in

     the universal qualities.  He deals very little with the pathetic,

     which he nevertheless knows very well how to manage, as he has

     shown, notably in the true story of the old slave-mother; but there

     is a poetic lift in his work, even when he permits you to recognize

     it only as something satirized.  There is always the touch of

     nature, the presence of a sincere and frank manliness in what he

     says, the companionship of a spirit which is at once delightfully

     open and deliciously shrewd.  Elsewhere I have tried to persuade the

     reader that his humor is, at its best, the foamy break of the strong

     tide of earnestness in him.  But it would be limiting him unjustly

     to describe him as a satirist, and it is hardly practicable to

     establish him in people's minds as a moralist; he has made them

     laugh too long; they will not believe him serious; they think some

     joke is always intended.  This is the penalty, as Dr. Holmes has

     pointed out, of making one's first success as a humorist.  There was

     a paper of Mark Twain's printed in the Atlantic Monthly some years

     ago and called, "The Facts Concerning the Late Carnival of Crime in

     Connecticut," which ought to have won popular recognition of the

     ethical intelligence underlying his humor.  It was, of course,

     funny; but under the fun it was an impassioned study of the human

     conscience.  Hawthorne or Bunyan might have been proud to imagine

     that powerful allegory, which had a grotesque force far beyond

     either of them....  Yet it quite failed of the response I had hoped

     for it, and I shall not insist here upon Mark Twain as a moralist;

     though I warn the reader that if he leaves out of the account an

     indignant sense of right and wrong, a scorn of all affectations and

     pretense, an ardent hate of meanness and injustice, he will come

     infinitely short of knowing Mark Twain.



Howells realized the unwisdom and weakness of dogmatic insistence, and

the strength of understatement.  To him Mark Twain was already the

moralist, the philosopher, and the statesman; he was willing that the

reader should take his time to realize these things.  The article, with

his subject's portrait as a frontispiece, appeared in the Century for

September, 1882.  If it carried no new message to many of its readers, it

at least set the stamp of official approval upon what they had already

established in their hearts.









CXL



DOWN THE RIVER



Osgood was doing no great things with The Prince and the Pauper, but

Clemens gave him another book presently, a collection of sketches--The

Stolen White Elephant.  It was not an especially important volume, though

some of the features, such as "Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning" and the

"Carnival of Crime," are among the best of their sort, while the

"Elephant" story is an amazingly good take-off on what might be called

the spectacular detective.  The interview between Inspector Blunt and the

owner of the elephant is typical.  The inspector asks:



     "Now what does this elephant eat, and how much?"



     "Well, as to what he eats--he will eat anything.  He will eat a man,

     he will eat a Bible; he will eat anything between a man and a

     Bible."



     "Good-very good, indeed, but too general.  Details are necessary;

     details are the only valuable thing in our trade.  Very well, as to

     men.  At one meal--or, if you prefer, during one day--how many men

     will he eat if fresh?"



     "He would not care whether they were fresh or not; at a single meal

     he would eat five ordinary men."



     "Very good; five men.  We will put that down.  What nationalities

     would he prefer?"



     "He is indifferent about nationalities.  He prefers acquaintances,

     but is not prejudiced against strangers."



     "Very good.  Now, as to Bibles.  How many Bibles would he eat at a

     meal?"



     "He would eat an entire edition."



Clemens and Osgood had a more important publishing enterprise on hand.

The long-deferred completion of the Mississippi book was to be

accomplished; the long-deferred trip down the river was to be taken.

Howells was going abroad, but the charming Osgood was willing to make the

excursion, and a young man named Roswell Phelps, of Hartford, was engaged

as a stenographer to take the notes.



Clemens made a farewell trip to Boston to see Howells before his

departure, and together they went to Concord to call on Emerson; a

fortunate thing, for he lived but a few weeks longer.  They went again in

the evening, not to see him, but to stand reverently outside and look at

his house.  This was in April.  Longfellow had died in March.  The fact

that Howells was going away indefinitely, made them reminiscent and sad.



Just what breach Clemens committed during this visit is not remembered

now, and it does not matter; but his letter to Howells, after his return

to Hartford, makes it pretty clear that it was memorable enough at the

time.  Half-way in it he breaks out:



     But oh, hell, there is no hope for a person that is built like me,

     because there is no cure, no cure.



     If I could only know when I have committed a crime: then I could

     conceal it, and not go stupidly dribbling it out, circumstance by

     circumstance, into the ears of a person who will give no sign till

     the confession is complete; and then the sudden damnation drops on a

     body like the released pile-driver, and he finds himself in the

     earth down to his chin.  When he merely supposed he was being

     entertaining.



Next day he was off with Osgood and the stenographer for St. Louis, where

they took the steamer Gold Dust down the river.  He intended to travel

under an assumed name, but was promptly recognized, both at the Southern

Hotel and on the boat.  In 'Life on the Mississippi' he has given us the

atmosphere of his trip, with his new impressions of old scenes; also his

first interview with the pilot, whom he did not remember, but who easily

remembered him.



"I did not write that story in the book quite as it happened," he

reflected once, many years later.  "We went on board at night.  Next

morning I was up bright and early and out on deck to see if I could

recognize any of the old landmarks.  I could not remember any.  I did not

know where we were at all.  It was a new river to me entirely.  I climbed

up in the pilot-house and there was a fellow of about forty at the wheel.

I said 'Good morning.' He answered pleasantly enough.  His face was

entirely strange to me.  Then I sat down on the high seat back of the

wheel and looked out at the river and began to ask a few questions, such

as a landsman would ask.  He began, in the old way, to fill me up with

the old lies, and I enjoyed letting him do it.  Then suddenly he turned

round to me and said:



"'I want to get a cup of coffee.  You hold her, will you, till I come

back?'  And before I could say a word he was out of the pilot-house door

and down the steps.  It all came so suddenly that I sprang to the wheel,

of course, as I would have done twenty years before.  Then in a moment I

realized my position.  Here I was with a great big steamboat in the

middle of the Mississippi River, without any further knowledge than that

fact, and the pilot out of sight.  I settled my mind on three

conclusions: first, that the pilot might be a lunatic; second, that he

had recognized me and thought I knew the river; third, that we were in a

perfectly safe place, where I could not possibly kill the steamboat.  But

that last conclusion, though the most comforting, was an extremely

doubtful one.  I knew perfectly well that no sane pilot would trust his

steamboat for a single moment in the hands of a greenhorn unless he were

standing by the greenhorn's side.  Of course, by force of habit, when I

grabbed the wheel, I had taken the steering marks ahead and astern, and I

made up my mind to hold her on those marks to the hair; but I could feel

myself getting old and gray.  Then all at once I recognized where we

were; we were in what is called the Grand Chain--a succession of hidden

rocks, one of the most dangerous places on the river.  There were two

rocks there only about seventy feet apart, and you've got to go exactly

between them or wreck the boat.  There was a time when I could have done

it without a tremor, but that time wasn't now.  I would have given any

reasonable sum to have been on the shore just at that moment.  I think I

was about ready to drop dead when I heard a step on the pilothouse stair;

then the door opened and the pilot came in, quietly picking his teeth,

and took the wheel, and I crawled weakly back to the seat.  He said:



"'You thought you were playing a nice joke on me, didn't you?  You

thought I didn't know who you were.  Why, I recognized that drawl of

yours as soon as you opened your mouth.'



"I said, 'Who the h--l are you?  I don't remember you.'



"'Well,'  he said, 'perhaps you don't, but I was a cub pilot on the

river before the war, when you were a licensed pilot, and I couldn't get

a license when I was qualified for one, because the Pilots' Association

was so strong at that time that they could keep new pilots out if they

wanted to, and the law was that I had to be examined by two licensed

pilots, and for a good while I could not get any one to make that

examination.  But one day you and another pilot offered to do it, and you

put me through a good, healthy examination and indorsed my application

for a license.  I had never seen you before, and I have never seen you

since until now, but I recognized you.'



"'All right,' I said.  'But if I had gone half a mile farther with that

steamboat we might have all been at the bottom of the river.'



"We got to be good friends, of course, and I spent most of my time up

there with him.  When we got down below Cairo, and there was a big, full

river--for it was highwater season and there was no danger of the boat

hitting anything so long as she kept in the river--I had her most of the

time on his watch.  He would lie down and sleep, and leave me there to

dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been no war, no

mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a pilot, happy and

care-free as I had been twenty years before."



From the book we gather that he could not keep out of the pilot-house.

He was likely to get up at any hour of the night to stand his watch, and

truly enough the years had slipped away.  He was the young fellow in his

twenties again, speculating on the problems of existence and reading his

fortune in the stars.  To heighten the illusion, he had himself called

regularly with the four-o'clock watch, in order not to miss the mornings.

--[It will repay the reader to turn to chap.  xxx of Life on the

Mississippi, and consider Mark Twain's word-picture of the river

sunrise.]



The majesty and solitude of the river impressed him more than ever

before, especially its solitude.  It had been so full of life in his

time; now it had returned once more to its primal loneliness--the

loneliness of God.



At one place two steamboats were in sight at once an unusual spectacle.

Once, in the mouth of a river, he noticed a small boat, which he made out

to be the Mark Twain.  There had been varied changes in twenty-one years;

only the old fascination of piloting remained unchanged.  To Bixby

afterward he wrote:



"I'd rather be a pilot than anything else I've ever done in my life.  How

do you run Plum Point?"



He met Bixby at New Orleans.  Bixby was captain now on a splendid new

Anchor Line steamboat, the City of Baton Rouge.  The Anchor Line steamers

were the acme of Mississippi River steamboat-building, and they were

about the end of it.  They were imposingly magnificent, but they were

only as gorgeous clouds that marked the sunset of Mississippi steamboat

travel.  Mark Twain made his trip down the river just in time.



In New Orleans he met George W. Cable and Joel Chandler Harris, and they

had a fraternizing good time together, mousing about the old French

Quarter or mingling with the social life of the modern city.  He made a

trip with Bixby in a tug to the Warmouth plantation, and they reviewed

old days together, as friends parted for twenty-one years will.

Altogether the New Orleans sojourn was a pleasant one, saddened only by a

newspaper notice of the death, in Edinburgh, of the kindly and gentle and

beloved Dr. Brown.



Clemens arranged to make the trip up the river on the Baton Rouge.  Bixby

had one pretty inefficient pilot, and stood most of the watches himself,

so that with "Sam Clemens" in the pilot-house with him, it was

wonderfully like those old first days of learning the river, back in the

fifties.



"Sam was ever making notes in his memorandum-book, just as he always

did," said Bixby to the writer, recalling the time.  "I was sorry I had

to stay at the wheel so much.  I wanted to have more time with Sam

without thinking of the river at all.  Sam was sorry, too, from what he

wrote after he got home."



Bixby produced a letter in the familiar handwriting.  It was a tender,

heart-spoken letter:



     I didn't see half enough of you.  It was a sore disappointment.

     Osgood could have told you, if he would--discreet old dog--I

     expected to have you with me all the time.  Altogether, the most

     pleasant part of my visit with you was after we arrived in St.

     Louis, and you were your old natural self again.  Twenty years have

     not added a month to your age or taken a fraction from your

     loveliness.



Said Bixby: "When we arrived in St. Louis we came to the Planters' Hotel;

to this very table where you and I are sitting now, and we had a couple

of hot Scotches between us, just as we have now, and we had a good last

talk over old times and old acquaintances.  After he returned to New York

he sent for my picture.  He wanted to use it in his book."



At St. Louis the travelers changed boats, and proceeded up the

Mississippi toward St. Paul.  Clemens laid off three days at Hannibal.



Delightful days [he wrote home].  Loitering around all day long,

examining the old localities, and talking with the gray heads who were

boys and girls with me thirty or forty years ago.  I spent my nights with

John and Helen Garth, three miles from town, in their spacious and

beautiful house.  They were children with me, and afterward schoolmates.

That world which I knew in its blooming youth is old and bowed and

melancholy now; its soft cheeks are leathery and withered, the fire has

gone out of its eyes, the spring from its step.  It will be dust and

ashes when I come again.



He had never seen the far upper river, and he found it very satisfying.

His note-book says:



     The bluffs all along up above St. Paul are exquisitely beautiful

     where the rough and broken turreted rocks stand up against the sky

     above the steep, verdant slopes.  They are inexpressibly rich and

     mellow in color; soft dark browns mingled with dull greens--the very

     tints to make an artist worship.



In a final entry he wrote:



The romance of boating is gone now.  In Hannibal the steamboat man is no

longer the god.









CXLI



LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY



Clemens took a further step toward becoming a publisher on his own

account.  Not only did he contract to supply funds for the Mississippi

book, but, as kaolatype, the chalk-engraving process, which had been

lingeringly and expensively dying, was now become merely something to

swear at, he had his niece's husband, Webster, installed as Osgood's New

York subscription manager, with charge of the general agencies.  There

was no delay in this move.  Webster must get well familiarized with the

work before the Mississippi book's publication.



He had expected to have the manuscript finished pretty promptly, but the

fact that he had promised it for a certain time paralyzed his effort.

Even at the farm he worked without making much headway.  At the end of

October he wrote Howells:



     The weather turned cold, and we had to rush home, while I still

     lacked thirty thousand words.  I had been sick and got delayed.  I

     am going to write all day and two-thirds of the night until the

     thing is done or break down at it.  The spur and burden of the

     contract are intolerable to me.  I can endure the irritation of it

     no longer.  I went to work at nine o'clock yesterday morning and

     went to bed an hour after midnight.  Result of the day (mainly

     stolen from books though credit given), 9,500 words, so I reduced my

     burden by one-third in one day.  It was five days' work in one.  I

     have nothing more to borrow or steal; the rest must all be written.

     It is ten days' work and unless something breaks it will be finished

     in five.



He had sworn once, when he had finally finished 'A Tramp Abroad', that he

would never limit himself as to time again.  But he had forgotten that

vow, and was suffering accordingly.



Howells wrote from London urging him to drop everything and come over to

Europe for refreshment.



     We have seen lots of nice people, and have been most pleasantly made

     of; but I would rather have you smoke in my face and talk for half a

     day, just for pleasure, than to go to the best house or club in

     London.



Clemens answered:



     Yes, it would be more profitable to me to do that because, with your

     society to help me, I should swiftly finish this now apparently

     interminable book.  But I cannot come, because I am not boss here,

     and nothing but dynamite can move Mrs. Clemens away from home in the

     winter season.



This was in November, and he had broken all restrictions as to time.  He

declared that he had never had such a fight over any book before, and

that he had told Osgood and everybody concerned that they must wait.



     I have said with sufficient positiveness that I will finish the book

     at no particular date; that I will not hurry it; that I will not

     hurry myself; that I will take things easy and comfortably--write

     when I choose to write, leave it alone when I do so prefer .  .  .

     I have got everything at a dead standstill, and that is where it

     ought to be, and that is where it must remain; to follow any other

     policy would be to make the book worse than it already is.  I ought

     to have finished it before showing it to anybody, and then sent it

     across the ocean to you to be edited, as usual; for you seem to be a

     great many shades happier than you deserve to be, and if I had

     thought of this thing earlier I would have acted upon it and taken

     the tuck somewhat out of your joyousness.



It was a long, heartfelt letter.  Near the end of it he said:



     Cable has been here, creating worshipers on all hands.  He is a

     marvelous talker on a deep subject.  I do not see how even Spencer

     could unwind a thought more smoothly or orderly, and do it in

     cleaner, clearer, crisper English.  He astounded Twichell with his

     faculty.  You know that when it comes down to moral honesty, limpid

     innocence, and utterly blemishless piety, the apostles were mere

     policemen to Cable; so with this in mind you must imagine him at a

     midnight dinner in Boston the other night, where we gathered around

     the board of the Summerset Club: Osgood full, Boyle O'Reilly full,

     Fairchild responsively loaded, and Aldrich and myself possessing the

     floor and properly fortified.  Cable told Mrs. Clemens, when he

     returned here, that he seemed to have been entertaining himself with

     horses, and had a dreamy idea that he must have gone to Boston in a

     cattle-car.  It was a very large time.  He called it an orgy.  And

     no doubt it was, viewed from his standpoint.



Osgood wanted Mark Twain to lecture that fall, as preliminary advertising

for the book, with "Life on the Mississippi" as his subject.  Osgood was

careful to make this proposition by mail, and probably it was just as

well; for if there was any single straw that could have broken the back

of Clemens's endurance and made him violent at this particular time, it

was a proposition to go back on the platform.  His answer to Osgood has

not been preserved.



Clemens spoke little that winter.  In February he addressed the Monday

Evening Club on "What is Happiness?" presenting a theory which in later

years he developed as a part of his "gospel," and promulgated in a

privately printed volume, 'What is Man'?  It is the postulate already

mentioned in connection with his reading of Lecky, that every human

action, bad or good, is the result of a selfish impulse; that is to say,

the result of a desire for the greater content of spirit.  It is not a

new idea; philosophers in all ages have considered it, and accepted or

rejected it, according to their temperament and teachings, but it was

startling and apparently new to the Monday Evening Club.  They scoffed

and jeered at it; denounced it as a manifest falsity.  They did not quite

see then that there may be two sorts of selfishness--brutal and divine;

that he who sacrifices others to himself exemplifies the first, whereas

he who sacrifices himself for others personifies the second--the divine

contenting of his soul by serving the happiness of his fellow-men.  Mark

Twain left this admonition in furtherance of that better sort:



"Diligently train your ideals upward, and still upward, toward a summit

where you will find your chiefest pleasure, in conduct which, while

contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbor and

the community."



It is a divine admonition, even if, in its suggested moral freedom, it

does seem to conflict with that other theorythe inevitable sequence of

cause and effect, descending from the primal atom.  There is seeming

irrelevance in introducing this matter here; but it has a chronological

relation, and it presents a mental aspect of the time.  Clemens was

forty-eight, and becoming more and more the philosopher; also, in logic

at least, a good deal of a pessimist.  He made a birthday aphorism on the

subject:



"The man who is a pessimist before he is forty-eight knows too much; the

man who is an optimist after he is forty-eight knows too little."



He was never more than a pessimist in theory at any time.  In practice he

would be a visionary; a builder of dreams and fortunes, a veritable

Colonel Sellers to the end of his days.









CXLII



"LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI"



The Mississippi book was completed at last and placed in Osgood's hands

for publication.  Clemens was immensely fond of Osgood.  Osgood would

come down to Hartford and spend days discussing plans and playing

billiards, which to Mark Twain's mind was the proper way to conduct

business.  Besides, there was Webster, who by this time, or a very little

later, had the word "publisher" printed in his letter-heads, and was

truly that, so far as the new book was concerned.  Osgood had become

little more than its manufacturer, shipping-agent, and accountant.  It

should be added that he made the book well, though somewhat expensively.

He was unaccustomed to getting out big subscription volumes.  His taste

ran to the artistic, expensive product.



"That book cost me fifty thousand dollars to make," Clemens once

declared.  "Bliss could have built a whole library, for that sum.  But

Osgood was a lovely fellow."



Life on the Mississippi was issued about the middle of May.  It was a

handsome book of its kind and a successful book, but not immediately a

profitable one, because of the manner of its issue.  It was experimental,

and experiments are likely to be costly, even when successful in the

final result.



Among other things, it pronounced the final doom of kaolatype.  The

artists who drew the pictures for it declined to draw them if they were

to be reproduced by that process, or indeed unless some one of the lately

discovered photographic processes was used.  Furthermore, the latter were

much cheaper, and it was to the advantage of Clemens himself to repudiate

kaolatype, even for his own work.



Webster was ordered to wind up the last ends of the engraving business

with as little sacrifice as possible, and attend entirely to more

profitable affairs--viz., the distribution of books.



As literature, the Mississippi book will rank with Mark Twain's best--so

far, at least, as the first twenty chapters of it are concerned.  Earlier

in this history these have been sufficiently commented upon.  They

constitute a literary memorial seemingly as enduring as the river itself.



Concerning the remaining chapters of the book, they are also literature,

but of a different class.  The difference is about the same as that

between 'A Tramp Abroad' and the 'Innocents'.  It is the difference

between the labors of love and duty; between art and industry, literature

and journalism.



But the last is hardly fair.  It is journalism, but it is literary

journalism, and there are unquestionably areas that are purely literary,

and not journalistic at all.  There would always be those in any book of

travel he might write.  The story of the river revisited is an

interesting theme; and if the revisiting had been done, let us say eight

or ten years earlier, before he had become a theoretical pessimist, and

before the river itself had become a background for pessimism, the tale

might have had more of the literary glamour and illusion, even if less

that is otherwise valuable.



'Life on the Mississippi' has been always popular in Germany.  The

Emperor William of Germany once assured Mark Twain that it was his

favorite American book, and on the same evening the portier of the

author's lodging in Berlin echoed the Emperor's opinion.



Paul Lindau, a distinguished German author and critic, in an interview at

the time the Mississippi book appeared, spoke of the general delight of

his countrymen in its author.  When he was asked, "But have not the

Germans been offended by Mark Twain's strictures on their customs and

language in his Tramp Abroadf" he replied, "We know what we are and how

we look, and the fanciful picture presented to our eyes gives us only

food for laughter, not cause for resentment.  The jokes he made on our

long words, our inverted sentences, and the position of the verb have

really led to a reform in style which will end in making our language as

compact and crisp as the French or English.  I regard Mark Twain as the

foremost humorist of the age."



Howells, traveling through Europe, found Lindau's final sentiment echoed

elsewhere, and he found something more: in Europe Mark Twain was already

highly regarded as a serious writer.  Thomas Hardy said to Howells one

night at dinner:



"Why don't people understand that Mark Twain is not merely a great

humorist?  He is a very remarkable fellow in a very different way."



The Rev. Dr. Parker, returning from England just then, declared that,

wherever he went among literary people, the talk was about Mark Twain;

also that on two occasions, when he had ventured diffidently to say that

he knew that author personally, he was at once so evidently regarded as

lying for effect that he felt guilty, and looked it, and did not venture

to say it any more; thus, in a manner, practising untruth to save his

reputation for veracity.



That the Mississippi book throughout did much to solidify this foreign

opinion of Mark Twain's literary importance cannot be doubted, and it is

one of his books that will live longest in the memory of men.









CXLIII



A GUEST OF ROYALTY



For purposes of copyright another trip to Canada was necessary, and when

the newspapers announced (May, 1883) that Mark Twain was about to cross

the border there came one morning the following telegram:



     Meeting of Literary and Scientific Society at Ottawa from 22d to

     26th.  It would give me much pleasure if you could come and be my

     guest during that time.



                                                  LORNE.





The Marquis of Lorne, then Governor-General of Canada, was the husband of

Queen Victoria's daughter, the Princess Louise.  The invitation was

therefore in the nature of a command.  Clemens obeyed it graciously

enough, and with a feeling of exaltation no doubt.  He had been honored

by the noble and the great in many lands, but this was royalty--English

royalty--paying a tribute to an American writer whom neither the Marquis

nor the Princess, his wife, had ever seen.  They had invited him because

they had cared enough for his books to make them wish to see him, to have

him as a guest in Rideau Hall, their home.  Mark Twain was democratic.

A king to him was no more than any other man; rather less if he were not

a good king.  But there was something national in this tribute; and,

besides, Lord Lorne and the Princess Louise were the kind of sovereigns

that honored their rank, instead of being honored by it.



It is a good deal like a fairy tale when you think of it; the barefooted

boy of Hannibal, who had become a printer, a pilot, a rough-handed miner,

being summoned, not so many years later, by royalty as one of America's

foremost men of letters.  The honor was no greater than many others he

had received, certainly not greater than the calls of Canon Kingsley and

Robert Browning and Turgenieff at his London hotel lodgings, but it was

of a less usual kind.



Clemens enjoyed his visit.  Princess Louise and the Marquis of Lorne kept

him with them almost continually, and were loath to let him go.  Once

they took him tobogganing--an exciting experience.



It happened that during his stay with them the opening of the Canadian

Parliament took place.  Lord Lorne and the principal dignitaries of state

entered one carriage, and in a carriage behind them followed Princess

Louise with Mark Twain.  As they approached the Parliament House the

customary salute was fired.  Clemens pretended to the Princess

considerable gratification.  The temptation was too strong to resist:



     "Your Highness," he said, "I have had other compliments paid to me,

     but none equal to this one.  I have never before had a salute fired

     in my honor."



Returning to Hartford, he sent copies of his books to Lord Lorne, and to

the Princess a special copy of that absurd manual, The New Guide of the

Conversation in Portuguese and English, for which he had written an

introduction.--[A serious work, in Portugal, though issued by Osgood

('83) as a joke.  Clemens in the introduction says: "Its delicious,

unconscious ridiculousness and its enchanting naivety are as supreme and

unapproachable in their way as Shakespeare's sublimities."  An extract,

the closing paragraph from the book's preface, will illustrate his

meaning:



"We expect then, who the little book (for the care that we wrote him, and

for her typographical correction), that maybe worth the acceptation of

the studious persons, and especially of the Youth, at which we dedicate

him particularly."]









CXLIV



A SUMMER LITERARY HARVEST



Arriving at the farm in June, Clemens had a fresh crop of ideas for

stories of many lengths and varieties.  His note-book of that time is

full of motifs and plots, most of them of that improbable and extravagant

kind which tended to defeat any literary purpose, whether humorous or

otherwise.  It seems worth while setting down one or more of these here,

for they are characteristic of the myriad conceptions that came and went,

and beyond these written memoranda left no trace behind.  Here is a fair

example of many:



     Two men starving on a raft.  The pauper has a Boston cracker,

     resolves to keep it till the multimillionaire is beginning to

     starve, then make him pay $50,000 for it.  Millionaire agrees.

     Pauper's cupidity rises, resolves to wait and get more; twenty-four

     hours later asks him a million for the cracker.  Millionaire agrees.

     Pauper has a wild dream of becoming enormously rich off his cracker;

     backs down; lies all night building castles in the air; next day

     raises his price higher and higher, till millionaire has offered

     $100,000,000, every cent he has in the world.  Pauper accepts.

     Millionaire: "Now give it to me."



     Pauper: "No; it isn't a trade until you sign documental history of

     the transaction and make an oath to pay."



     While pauper is finishing the document millionaire sees a ship.

     When pauper says, "Sign and take the cracker," millionaire smiles a

     smile, declines, and points to the ship.



Yet this is hardly more extravagant than another idea that is mentioned

repeatedly among the notes--that of an otherwise penniless man wandering

about London with a single million-pound bank-note in his possession, a

motif which developed into a very good story indeed.





                 IDEA FOR "STORMFIELD'S VISIT TO HEAVEN"



     In modern times the halls of heaven are warmed by registers

     connected with hell; and this is greatly applauded by Jonathan

     Edwards, Calvin, Baxter and Company, because it adds a new pang to

     the sinner's sufferings to know that the very fire which tortures

     him is the means of making the righteous comfortable.



Then there was to be another story, in which the various characters were

to have a weird, pestilential nomenclature; such as "Lockjaw Harris,"

"Influenza Smith," "Sinapism Davis," and a dozen or two more, a perfect

outbreak of disorders.



Another--probably the inspiration of some very hot afternoon--was to

present life in the interior of an iceberg, where a colony would live for

a generation or two, drifting about in a vast circular current year after

year, subsisting on polar bears and other Arctic game.



An idea which he followed out and completed was the 1002d Arabian Night,

in which Scheherazade continues her stories, until she finally talks the

Sultan to death.  That was a humorous idea, certainly; but when Howells

came home and read it in the usual way he declared that, while the

opening was killingly funny, when he got into the story itself it seemed

to him that he was "made a fellow-sufferer with the Sultan from

Scheherazade's prolixity."



"On the whole," he said, "it is not your best, nor your second best; but

all the way it skirts a certain kind of fun which you can't afford to

indulge in."



And that was the truth.  So the tale, neatly typewritten, retired to

seclusion, and there remains to this day.



Clemens had one inspiration that summer which was not directly literary,

but historical, due to his familiarity with English dates.  He wrote

Twichell:



     Day before yesterday, feeling not in condition for writing, I left

     the study, but I couldn't hold in--had to do something; so I spent

     eight hours in the sun with a yardstick, measuring off the reigns of

     the English kings on the roads in these grounds, from William the

     Conqueror to 1883, calculating to invent an open-air game which

     shall fill the children's heads with dates without study.  I give

     each king's reign one foot of space to the year and drive one stake

     in the ground to mark the beginning of each reign, and I make the

     children call the stake by the king's name.  You can stand in the

     door and take a bird's-eye view of English monarchy, from the

     Conqueror to Edward IV.; then you can turn and follow the road up

     the hill to the study and beyond with an opera-glass, and bird's-eye

     view the rest of it to 1883.



     You can mark the sharp difference in the length of reigns by the

     varying distances of the stakes apart.  You can see Richard II., two

     feet; Oliver Cromwell, two feet; James II., three feet, and so on--

     and then big skips; pegs standing forty-five, forty-six, fifty,

     fifty-six, and sixty feet apart (Elizabeth, Victoria, Edward III.,

     Henry III., and George III.).  By the way, third's a lucky number

     for length of days, isn't it?  Yes, sir; by my scheme you get a

     realizing notion of the time occupied by reigns.



     The reason it took me eight hours was because, with little Jean's

     interrupting assistance, I had to measure from the Conquest to the

     end of Henry VI. three times over, and besides I had to whittle out

     all those pegs.



     I did a full day's work and a third over, yesterday, but was full of

     my game after I went to bed trying to fit it for indoors.  So I

     didn't get to sleep till pretty late; but when I did go off I had

     contrived a new way to play my history game with cards and a board.



We may be sure the idea of the game would possess him, once it got a fair

start like that.  He decided to save the human race that year with a

history game.  When he had got the children fairly going and interested

in playing it, he adapted it to a cribbage-board, and spent his days and

nights working it out and perfecting it to a degree where the world at

large might learn all the facts of all the histories, not only without

effort, but with an actual hunger for chronology.  He would have a game

not only of the English kings, but of the kings of every other nation;

likewise of great statesmen, vice-chancellors, churchmen, of celebrities

in every line.  He would prepare a book to accompany these games.  Each

game would contain one thousand facts, while the book would contain eight

thousand; it would be a veritable encyclopedia.  He would organize clubs

throughout the United States for playing the game; prizes were to be

given.  Experts would take it up.  He foresaw a department in every

newspaper devoted to the game and its problems, instead of to chess and

whist and other useless diversions.  He wrote to Orion, and set him to

work gathering facts and dates by the bushel.  He wrote to Webster, sent

him a plan, and ordered him to apply for the patent without delay.

Patents must also be applied for abroad.  With all nations playing this

great game, very likely it would produce millions in royalties; and so,

in the true Sellers fashion, the iridescent bubble was blown larger and

larger, until finally it blew up.  The game on paper had become so large,

so elaborate, so intricate, that no one could play it.  Yet the first

idea was a good one: the king stakes driven along the driveway and up the

hillside of Quarry Farm.  The children enjoyed it, and played it through

many sweet summer afternoons.  Once, in the days when he had grown old,

he wrote, remembering:



     Among the principal merits of the games which we played by help of

     the pegs were these: that they had to be played in the open air, and

     that they compelled brisk exercise.  The peg of William the

     Conqueror stood in front of the house; one could stand near the

     Conqueror and have all English history skeletonized and landmarked

     and mile-posted under his eye .  .  .  .  The eye has a good memory.

     Many years have gone by and the pegs have disappeared, but I still

     see them and each in its place; and no king's name falls upon my ear

     without my seeing his pegs at once, and noticing just how many feet

     of space he takes up along the road.



It turned out an important literary year after all.  In the Mississippi

book he had used a chapter from the story he had been working at from

time to time for a number of years, 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'.

Reading over the manuscript now he found his interest in it sharp and

fresh, his inspiration renewed.  The trip down the river had revived it.

The interest in the game became quiescent, and he set to work to finish

the story at a dead heat.



To Howells, August 22 (1883), he wrote:



     I have written eight or nine hundred manuscript pages in such a

     brief space of time that I mustn't name the number of days; I

     shouldn't believe it myself, and of course couldn't expect you to.

     I used to restrict myself to four and five hours a day and five days

     in the week, but this time I have wrought from breakfast till 5.15

     P.M.  six days in the week, and once or twice I smouched a Sunday

     when the boss wasn't looking.  Nothing is half so good as literature

     hooked on Sunday, on the sly.



He refers to the game, though rather indifferently.



     When I wrote you I thought I had it; whereas I was merely entering

     upon the initiatory difficulties of it.  I might have known it

     wouldn't be an easy job or somebody would have invented a decent

     historical game long ago--a thing which nobody has done.



Notwithstanding the fact that he was working at Huck with enthusiasm, he

seems to have been in no hurry to revise it for publication, either as a

serial or as a book.  But the fact that he persevered until Huck Finn at

last found complete utterance was of itself a sufficient matter for

congratulation.









CXLV



HOWELLS AND CLEMENS WRITE A PLAY



Before Howells went abroad Clemens had written:



     Now I think that the play for you to write would be one entitled,

     "Colonel Mulberry Sellers in Age" (75), with Lafayette Hawkins (at

     50) still sticking to him and believing in him and calling him "My

     lord."  He [Sellers] is a specialist and a scientist in various

     ways.  Your refined people and purity of speech would make the best

     possible background, and when you are done, I could take your

     manuscript and rewrite the Colonel's speeches, and make him properly

     extravagant, and I would let the play go to Raymond, and bind him up

     with a contract that would give him the bellyache every time he read

     it.  Shall we think this over, or drop it as being nonsense?



Howells, returned and settled in Boston once more, had revived an

interest in the play idea.  He corresponded with Clemens concerning it

and agreed that the American Claimant, Leathers, should furnish the

initial impulse of the drama.



They decided to revive Colonel Sellers and make him the heir; Colonel

Sellers in old age, more wildly extravagant than ever, with new schemes,

new patents, new methods of ameliorating the ills of mankind.



Howells came down to Hartford from Boston full of enthusiasm.  He found

Clemens with some ideas of the plan jotted down: certain effects and

situations which seemed to him amusing, but there was no general scheme

of action.  Howells, telling of it, says:



     I felt authorized to make him observe that his scheme was as nearly

     nothing as chaos could be.  He agreed hilariously with me, and was

     willing to let it stand in proof of his entire dramatic inability.



Howells, in turn, proposed a plan which Clemens approved, and they set to

work.  Howells could imitate Clemens's literary manner, and they had a

riotously jubilant fortnight working out their humors.  Howells has told

about it in his book, and he once related it to the writer of this

memoir.  He said:



"Clemens took one scene and I another.  We had loads and loads of fun

about it.  We cracked our sides laughing over it as it went along.  We

thought it mighty good, and I think to this day that it was mighty good.

We called the play 'Colonel Sellers.'  We revived him.  Clemens had a

notion of Sellers as a spiritual medium-there was a good deal of

excitement about spiritualism then; he also had a notion of Sellers

leading a women's temperance crusade.  We conceived the idea of Sellers

wanting to try, in the presence of the audience, how a man felt who had

fallen, through drink.  Sellers was to end with a sort of corkscrew

performance on the stage.  He always wore a marvelous fire extinguisher,

one of his inventions, strapped on his back, so in any sudden emergency,

he could give proof of its effectiveness."



In connection with the extinguisher, Howells provided Sellers with a pair

of wings, which Sellers declared would enable him to float around in any

altitude where the flames might break out.  The extinguisher, was not to

be charged with water or any sort of liquid, but with Greek fire, on the

principle that like cures like; in other words, the building was to be

inoculated with Greek fire against the ordinary conflagration.  Of course

the whole thing was as absurd as possible, and, reading the old

manuscript to-day, one is impressed with the roaring humor of some of the

scenes, and with the wild extravagance of the farce motive, not wholly

warranted by the previous character of Sellers, unless, indeed, he had

gone stark mad.  It is, in fact, Sellers caricatured.  The gentle, tender

side of Sellers--the best side--the side which Clemens and Howells

themselves cared for most, is not there.  Chapter III of Mark Twain's

novel, The American Claimant, contains a scene between Colonel Sellers

and Washington Hawkins which presents the extravagance of the Colonel's

materialization scheme.  It is a modified version of one of the scenes in

the play, and is as amusing and unoffending as any.



The authors' rollicking joy in their work convinced them that they had

produced a masterpiece for which the public in general, and the actors in

particular, were waiting.  Howells went back to Boston tired out, but

elate in the prospect of imminent fortune.









CXLVI



DISTINGUISHED VISITORS



Meantime, while Howells had been in Hartford working at the play with

Clemens, Matthew Arnold had arrived in Boston.  On inquiring for Howells,

at his home, the visitor was told that he had gone to see Mark Twain.

Arnold was perhaps the only literary Englishman left who had not accepted

Mark Twain at his larger value.  He seemed surprised and said:



"Oh, but he doesn't like that sort of thing, does he?"



To which Mrs. Howells replied:



"He likes Mr. Clemens very much, and he thinks him one of the greatest

men he ever knew."



Arnold proceeded to Hartford to lecture, and one night Howells and

Clemens went to meet him at a reception.  Says Howells:



     While his hand laxly held mine in greeting I saw his eyes fixed

     intensely on the other side of the room.  "Who--who in the world is

     that?"  I looked and said, "Oh, that is Mark Twain."  I do not

     remember just how their instant encounter was contrived by Arnold's

     wish; but I have the impression that they were not parted for long

     during the evening, and the next night Arnold, as if still under the

     glamour of that potent presence, was at Clemens's house.



He came there to dine with the Twichells and the Rev. Dr. Edwin P.

Parker.  Dr. Parker and Arnold left together, and, walking quietly

homeward, discussed the remarkable creature whose presence they had just

left.  Clemens had been at his best that night--at his humorous best.  He

had kept a perpetual gale of laughter going, with a string of comment and

anecdote of a kind which Twichell once declared the world had never

before seen and would never see again.  Arnold seemed dazed by it, unable

to come out from under its influence.  He repeated some of the things

Mark Twain had said; thoughtfully, as if trying to analyze their magic.

Then he asked solemnly:



"And is he never serious?"



And Dr. Parker as solemnly answered:



"Mr. Arnold, he is the most serious man in the world."  Dr. Parker,

recalling this incident, remembered also that Protap Chunder Mazoomdar, a

Hindoo Christian prelate of high rank, visited Hartford in 1883, and that

his one desire was to meet Mark Twain.  In some memoranda of this visit

Dr. Parker has written:



     I said that Mark Twain was a friend of mine, and we would

     immediately go to his house.  He was all eagerness, and I perceived

     that I had risen greatly in this most refined and cultivated

     gentleman's estimation.  Arriving at Mr. Clemens's residence, I

     promptly sought a brief private interview with my friend for his

     enlightenment concerning the distinguished visitor, after which they

     were introduced and spent a long while together.  In due time

     Mazoomdar came forth with Mark's likeness and autograph, and as we

     walked away his whole air and manner seemed to say, with Simeon of

     old, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace!"









CXLVII



THE FORTUNES OF A PLAY



Howells is of the impression that the "Claimant" play had been offered to

other actors before Raymond was made aware of it; but there are letters

(to Webster) which indicate that Raymond was to see the play first,

though Clemens declares, in a letter of instruction, that he hopes

Raymond will not take it.  Then he says:



     Why do I offer him the play at all?  For these reasons: he plays

     that character well; there are not thirty actors in the country who

     can do it better; and, too, he has a sort of sentimental right to be

     offered the piece, though no moral, or legal, or other kind of

     right.



     Therefore we do offer it to him; but only once, not twice.  Let us

     have no hemming and hawing; make short, sharp work of the business.

     I decline to have any correspondence with R. myself in any way.



This was at the end of November, 1883, while the play was still being

revised.  Negotiations with Raymond had already begun, though he does not

appear to have actually seen the play during that theatrical season, and

many and various were the attempts made to place it elsewhere; always

with one result--that each actor or manager, in the end, declared it to

be strictly a Raymond play.  The thing was hanging fire for nearly a

year, altogether, while they were waiting on Raymond, who had a

profitable play, and was in no hurry for the recrudescence of Sellers.

Howells tells how he eventually took the manuscript to Raymond, whom he

found "in a mood of sweet reasonableness" at one of Osgood's luncheons.

Raymond said he could not do the play then, but was sure he would like it

for the coming season, and in any case would be glad to read it.



In due time Raymond reported favorably on the play, at least so far as

the first act was concerned, but he objected to the materialization

feature and to Sellers as claimant for the English earldom.  He asked

that these features be eliminated, or at least much ameliorated; but as

these constituted the backbone and purpose of the whole play, Clemens and

Howells decided that what was left would be hardly worth while.  Raymond

finally agreed to try the play as it was in one of the larger towns--

Howells thinks in Buffalo.  A week later the manuscript came back to

Webster, who had general charge of the business negotiations, as indeed

he had of all Mark Twain's affairs at this time, and with it a brief

line:



     DEAR SIR,--I have just finished rereading the play, and am convinced

     that in its present form it would not prove successful.  I return

     the manuscript by express to your address.



     Thanking you for your courtesy, I am,



     Yours truly, JOHN T.  RAYMOND.



     P.S.--If the play is altered and made longer I will be pleased to

     read it again.





In his former letter Raymond had declared that "Sellers, while a very

sanguine man, was not a lunatic, and no one but a lunatic could for a

moment imagine that he had done such a work" (meaning the

materialization).  Clearly Raymond wanted a more serious presentation,

something akin to his earlier success, and on the whole we can hardly

blame him.  But the authors had faith in their performance as it stood,

and agreed they would make no change.



Finally a well-known elocutionist, named Burbank, conceived the notion of

impersonating Raymond as well as Sellers, making of it a sort of double

burlesque, and agreed to take the play on those terms.  Burbank came to

Hartford and showed what he could do.  Howells and Clemens agreed to give

him the play, and they hired the old Lyceum Theater for a week, at seven

hundred dollars, for its trial presentation.  Daniel Frohman promoted it.

Clemens and Howells went over the play and made some changes, but they

were not as hilarious over it or as full of enthusiasm as they had been

in the beginning.  Howells put in a night of suffering--long, dark hours

of hot and cold waves of fear--and rising next morning from a tossing

bed, wrote: "Here's a play which every manager has put out-of-doors and

which every actor known to us has refused, and now we go and give it to

an elocutioner.  We are fools."



Clemens hurried over to Boston to consult with Howells, and in the end

they agreed to pay the seven hundred dollars for the theater, take the

play off and give Burbank his freedom.  But Clemens's faith in it did not

immediately die.  Howells relinquished all right and title in it, and

Clemens started it out with Burbank and a traveling company, doing one-

night stands, and kept it going for a week or more at his own expense.

It never reached New York.



"And yet," says Howells, "I think now that if it had come it would have

been successful.  So hard does the faith of the unsuccessful dramatist

die."--[This was as late as the spring of 1886, at which time Howells's

faith in the play was exceedingly shaky.  In one letter he wrote: "It is

a lunatic that we have created, and while a lunatic in one act might

amuse, I'm afraid that in three he would simply bore."



And again:



"As it stands, I believe the thing will fail, and it would be a disgrace

to have it succeed."]









CXLVIII



CABLE AND HIS GREAT JOKE



Meanwhile, with the completion of the Sellers play Clemens had flung

himself into dramatic writing once more with a new and more violent

impetuosity than ever.  Howells had hardly returned to Boston when he

wrote:



Now let's write a tragedy.



The inclosed is not fancy, it is history; except that the little girl was

a passing stranger, and not kin to any of the parties.  I read the

incident in Carlyle's Cromwell a year ago, and made a note in my note-

book; stumbled on the note to-day, and wrote up the closing scene of a

possible tragedy, to see how it might work.



If we made this colonel a grand fellow, and gave him a wife to suit--hey?

It's right in the big historical times--war; Cromwell in big, picturesque

power, and all that.



Come, let's do this tragedy, and do it well.  Curious, but didn't

Florence want a Cromwell?  But Cromwell would not be the chief figure

here.



It was the closing scene of that pathetic passage in history from which

he would later make his story, "The Death Disc."  Howells was too tired

and too occupied to undertake immediately a new dramatic labor, so

Clemens went steaming ahead alone.



     My billiard-table is stacked up with books relating to the Sandwich

     Islands; the walls are upholstered with scraps of paper penciled

     with notes drawn from them.  I have saturated myself with knowledge

     of that unimaginably beautiful land and that most strange and

     fascinating people.  And I have begun a story.  Its hidden motive

     will illustrate a but-little considered fact in human nature: that

     the religious folly you are born in you will die in, no matter what

     apparently reasonabler religious folly may seem to have taken its

     place; meanwhile abolished and obliterated it.  I start Bill

     Ragsdale at eleven years of age, and the heroine at four, in the

     midst of the ancient idolatrous system, with its picturesque and

     amazing customs and superstitions, three months before the arrival

     of the missionaries and--the erection of a shallow Christianity upon

     the ruins of the old paganism.



     Then these two will become educated Christians and highly civilized.



     And then I will jump fifteen years and do Ragsdale's leper business.

     When we come to dramatize, we can draw a deal of matter from the

     story, all ready to our hand.



He made elaborate preparations for the Sandwich Islands story, which he

and Howells would dramatize later, and within the space of a few weeks he

actually did dramatize 'The Prince and the Pauper' and 'Tom Sawyer', and

was prodding Webster to find proper actors or managers; stipulating at

first severe and arbitrary terms, which were gradually modified, as one

after another of the prospective customers found these dramatic wares

unsuited to their needs.  Mark Twain was one of the most dramatic

creatures that ever lived, but he lacked the faculty of stage arrangement

of the dramatic idea.  It is one of the commonest defects in the literary

make-up; also one of the hardest to realize and to explain.



The winter of 1883-84 was a gay one in the Clemens home.  Henry Irving

was among those entertained, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Aldrich and his

wife, Howells of course, and George W. Cable.  Cable had now permanently

left the South for the promised land which all authors of the South and

West seek eventually, and had in due course made his way to Hartford.

Clemens took Cable's fortunes in hand, as he had done with many another,

invited him to his home, and undertook to open negotiations with the

American Publishing Company, of which Frank Bliss was now the manager,

for the improvement of his fortunes.



Cable had been giving readings from his stories and had somewhere picked

up the measles.  He suddenly came down with the complaint during his

visit to Clemens, and his case was a violent one.  It required the

constant attendance of a trained nurse and one or two members of the

household to pull him through.



In the course of time he was convalescent, and when contagion was no

longer to be feared guests were invited in for his entertainment.  At one

of these gatherings, Cable produced a curious book, which he said had

been lent to him by Prof. Francis Bacon, of New Haven, as a great rarity.

It was a little privately printed pamphlet written by a Southern youth,

named S. Watson Wolston, a Yale student of 1845, and was an absurd

romance of the hyperflorid, grandiloquent sort, entitled, "Love

Triumphant, or the Enemy Conquered."  Its heroine's name was Ambulinia,

and its flowery, half-meaningless periods and impossible situations

delighted Clemens beyond measure.  He begged Cable to lend it to him, to

read at the Saturday Morning Club, declaring that he certainly must own

the book, at whatever cost.  Henry C. Robinson, who was present,

remembered having seen a copy in his youth, and Twichell thought he

recalled such a book on sale in New Haven during his college days.

Twichell said nothing as to any purpose in the matter; but somewhat

later, being in New Haven, he stepped into the old book-store and found

the same proprietor, who remembered very well the book and its author.

Twichell rather fearfully asked if by any chance a copy of it might still

be obtained.



"Well," was the answer, "I undertook to put my cellar in order the other

day, and found about a cord of them down there.  I think I can supply

you."



Twichell took home six of the books at ten cents each, and on their first

spring walk to Talcott's Tower casually mentioned to Clemens the quest

for the rare Ambulinia.  But Clemens had given up the pursuit.  New York

dealers had reported no success in the matter.  The book was no longer in

existence.



"What would you give for a copy?" asked.  Twichell.



Clemens became excited.



"It isn't a question of price," he said; "that would be for the owner to

set if I could find him."



Twichell drew a little package from his pocket.



"Well, Mark," he said, "here are six copies of that book, to begin with.

If that isn't enough, I can get you a wagon-load."



It was enough.  But it did not deter Clemens in his purpose, which was to

immortalize the little book by pointing out its peculiar charms.  He did

this later, and eventually included the entire story, with comments, in

one of his own volumes.



Clemens and Twichell did not always walk that spring.  The early form of

bicycle, the prehistoric high-wheel, had come into vogue, and they each

got one and attempted its conquest.  They practised in the early morning

hours on Farmington Avenue, which was wide and smooth, and they had an

instructor, a young German, who, after a morning or two, regarded Mark

Twain helplessly and said:



"Mr. Clemens, it's remarkable--you can fall off of a bicycle more

different ways than the man that invented it."



They were curious things, those old high-wheel machines.  You were

perched away up in the air, with the feeling that you were likely at any

moment to strike a pebble or something that would fling you forward with

damaging results.  Frequently that is what happened.  The word "header"

seems to have grown out of that early bicycling period.  Perhaps Mark

Twain invented it.  He had enough experience to do it.  He always

declared afterward that he invented all the new bicycle profanity that

has since come into general use.  Once he wrote:



     There was a row of low stepping-stones across one end of the street,

     a measured yard apart.  Even after I got so I could steer pretty

     fairly I was so afraid of those stones that I always hit them.  They

     gave me the worst falls I ever got in that street, except those

     which I got from dogs.  I have seen it stated that no expert is

     quick enough to run over a dog; that a dog is always able to skip

     out of his way.  I think that that may be true; but I think that the

     reason he couldn't run over the dog was because he was trying to.  I

     did not try to run over any dog.  But I ran over every dog that came

     along.  I think it makes a great deal of difference.  If you try to

     run over the dog he knows how to calculate, but if you are trying to

     miss him he does not know how to calculate, and is liable to jump

     the wrong way every time.  It was always so in my experience.  Even

     when I could not hit a wagon I could hit a dog that came to see me

     practise.  They all liked to see me practise, and they all came, for

     there was very little going on in our neighborhood to entertain a

     dog.



He conquered, measurably, that old, discouraging thing, and he and

Twichell would go on excursions, sometimes as far as Wethersfield or to

the tower.  It was a pleasant change, at least it was an interesting one;

but bicycling on the high wheel was never a popular diversion with Mark

Twain, and his enthusiasm in the sport had died before the "safety" came

along.



He had his machine sent out to Elmira, but there were too many hills in

Chemung County, and after one brief excursion he came in, limping and

pushing his wheel, and did not try it again.



To return to Cable.  When the 1st of April (1884) approached he concluded

it would be a good time to pay off his debt of gratitude for his recent

entertainment in the Clemens's home.  He went to work at it

systematically.  He had a "private and confidential" circular letter

printed, and he mailed it to one hundred and fifty of Mark Twain's

literary friends in Boston, Hartford, Springfield, New York, Brooklyn,

Washington, and elsewhere, suggesting that they write to him, so that

their letters would reach him simultaneously April 1st, asking for his

autograph.  No stamps or cards were to be inclosed for reply, and it was

requested that "no stranger to Mr. Clemens and no minor" should take

part.  Mrs. Clemens was let into the secret, so that she would see to it

that her husband did not reject his mail or commit it to the flames

unopened.



It would seem that every one receiving the invitation must have responded

to it, for on the morning of April 1st a stupefying mass of letters was

unloaded on Mark Twain's table.  He did not know what to make of it, and

Mrs. Clemens stood off to watch the results.  The first one he opened was

from Dean Sage, a friend whom he valued highly.  Sage wrote from

Brooklyn:



     DEAR CLEMENS,--I have recently been asked by a young lady who

     unfortunately has a mania for autograph-collecting, but otherwise is

     a charming character, and comely enough to suit your fastidious

     taste, to secure for her the sign manual of the few distinguished

     persons fortunate enough to have my acquaintance.  In enumerating

     them to her, after mentioning the names of Geo. Shepard Page, Joe

     Michell, Capt. Isaiah Ryndus, Mr. Willard, Dan Mace, and J. L.

     Sullivan, I came to yours.  "Oh!" said she, "I have read all his

     works--Little Breeches, The Heathen Chinee, and the rest--and think

     them delightful.  Do oblige me by asking him for his autograph,

     preceded by any little sentiment that may occur to him, provided it

     is not too short."



     Of course I promised, and hope you will oblige me by sending some

     little thing addressed to Miss Oakes.



     We are all pretty well at home just now, though indisposition has

     been among us for the past fortnight.  With regards to Mrs. Clemens

     and the children, in which my wife joins,



                                   Yours truly,   DEAN SAGE.





It amused and rather surprised him, and it fooled him completely; but

when he picked up a letter from Brander Matthews, asking, in some absurd

fashion, for his signature, and another from Ellen Terry, and from

Irving, and from Stedman, and from Warner, and Waring, and H. C. Bunner,

and Sarony, and Laurence Hutton, and John Hay, and R. U.  Johnson, and

Modjeska, the size and quality of the joke began to overawe him.  He was

delighted, of course; for really it was a fine compliment, in its way,

and most of the letters were distinctly amusing.  Some of them asked for

autographs by the yard, some by the pound.  Henry Irving said:



     I have just got back from a very late rehearsal-five o'clock--very

     tired--but there will be no rest till I get your autograph.



Some requested him to sit down and copy a few chapters from The Innocents

Abroad for them or to send an original manuscript.  Others requested that

his autograph be attached to a check of interesting size.  John Hay

suggested that he copy a hymn, a few hundred lines of Young's "Night

Thoughts," and an equal amount of Pollak's "Course of Time."



     I want my boy to form a taste for serious and elevated poetry, and

     it will add considerable commercial value to have them in your

     handwriting.



Altogether the reading of the letters gave him a delightful day, and his

admiration for Cable grew accordingly.  Cable, too, was pleased with the

success of his joke, though he declared he would never risk such a thing

again.  A newspaper of the time reports him as saying:



     I never suffered so much agony as for a few days previous to the 1st

     of April.  I was afraid the letters would reach Mark when he was in

     affliction, in which case all of us would never have ceased flying

     to make it up to him.

     When I visited Mark we used to open our budgets of letters together

     at breakfast.  We used to sing out whenever we struck an autograph-

     hunter.  I think the idea came from that.  The first person I spoke

     to about it was Robert Underwood Johnson, of the Century.  My most

     enthusiastic ally was the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher.  We never thought

     it would get into the papers.  I never played a practical joke

     before.  I never will again, certainly.



Mark Twain in those days did not encourage the regular autograph-

collectors, and seldom paid any attention to their requests for his

signature.  He changed all this in later years, and kept a supply always

on hand to satisfy every request; but in those earlier days he had no

patience with collecting fads, and it required a particularly pleasing

application to obtain his signature.









CXLIX



MARK TWAIN IN BUSINESS



Samuel Clemens by this time was definitely engaged in the publishing

business.  Webster had a complete office with assistants at 658 Broadway,

and had acquired a pretty thorough and practical knowledge of

subscription publishing.  He was a busy, industrious young man,

tirelessly energetic, and with a good deal of confidence, by no means

unnecessary to commercial success.  He placed this mental and physical

capital against Mark Twain's inspiration and financial backing, and the

combination of Charles L. Webster & Co.  seemed likely to be a strong

one.



Already, in the spring of 1884., Webster had the new Mark Twain book,

'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', well in hand, and was on the watch

for promising subscription books by other authors.  Clemens, with his

usual business vision and eye for results, with a generous disregard of

detail, was supervising the larger preliminaries, and fulminating at the

petty distractions and difficulties as they came along.  Certain plays he

was trying to place were enough to keep him pretty thoroughly upset

during this period, and proof-reading never added to his happiness.  To

Howells he wrote:



     My days are given up to cursings, both loud and deep, for I am

     reading the 'Huck Finn' proofs.  They don't make a very great many

     mistakes, but those that do occur are of a nature that make a man

     swear his teeth loose.



Whereupon Howells promptly wrote him that he would help him out with the

Huck Finn proofs for the pleasure of reading the story.  Clemens, among

other things, was trying to place a patent grape-scissors, invented by

Howells's father, so that there was, in some degree, an equivalent for

the heavy obligation.  That it was a heavy one we gather from his fervent

acknowledgment:



     It took my breath away, and I haven't recovered it yet, entirely--I

     mean the generosity of your proposal to read the proofs of Huck

     Finn.



     Now, if you mean it, old man--if you are in earnest-proceed, in

     God's name, and be by me forever blessed.  I can't conceive of a

     rational man deliberately piling such an atrocious job upon himself.

     But if there be such a man, and you be that man, pile it on.  The

     proof-reading of 'The Prince and the Pauper' cost me the last rags

     of my religion.



Clemens decided to have the Huckleberry Finn book illustrated after his

own ideas.  He looked through the various comic papers to see if he could

find the work of some new man that appealed to his fancy.  In the pages

of Life he discovered some comic pictures illustrating the possibility of

applying electrical burners to messenger boys, waiters, etc.  The style

and the spirit of these things amused him.  He instructed Webster to look

up the artist, who proved to be a young man, E. W. Kemble by name, later

one of our foremost cartoonists.  Webster engaged Kemble and put the

manuscript in his hands.  Through the publication of certain chapters of

Huck Finn in the Century Magazine, Kemble was brought to the notice of

its editors, who wrote Clemens that they were profoundly indebted to him

for unearthing "such a gem of an illustrator."



Clemens, encouraged and full of enthusiasm, now endeavored to interest

himself in the practical details of manufacture, but his stock of

patience was light and the details were many.  His early business period

resembles, in some of its features, his mining experience in Esmeralda,

his letters to Webster being not unlike those to Orion in that former

day.  They are much oftener gentle, considerate, even apologetic, but

they are occasionally terse, arbitrary, and profane.  It required effort

for him to be entirely calm in his business correspondence.  A criticism

of one of Webster's assistants will serve as an example of his less quiet

method:



     Charley, your proof-reader, is an idiot; and not only an idiot, but

     blind; and not only blind, but partly dead.



Of course, one must regard many of Mark Twain's business aspects

humorously.  To consider them otherwise is to place him in a false light

altogether.  He wore himself out with his anxieties and irritations; but

that even he, in the midst of his furies, saw the humor of it all is

sufficiently evidenced by the form of his savage phrasing.  There were

few things that did not amuse him, and certainly nothing amused more, or

oftener, than himself.



It is proper to add a detail in evidence of a business soundness which he

sometimes manifested.  He had observed the methods of Bliss and Osgood,

and had drawn his conclusions.  In the beginning of the Huck Finn canvass

he wrote Webster:



     Keep it diligently in mind that we don't issue till we have made a

     big sale.



     Get at your canvassing early and drive it with all your might, with

     an intent and purpose of issuing on the 1oth or 15th of next

     December (the best time in the year to tumble a big pile into the

     trade); but if we haven't 40,000 subscriptions we simply postpone

     publication till we've got them.  It is a plain, simple policy, and

     would have saved both of my last books if it had been followed.

     [That is to say, 'The Prince and the Pauper' and the Mississippi

     book, neither of which had sold up to his expectations on the,

     initial canvass.]









CL



FARM PICTURES



Gerhardt returned from Paris that summer, after three years of study, a

qualified sculptor.  He was prepared to take commissions, and came to

Elmira to model a bust of his benefactor.  The work was finished after

four or five weeks of hard effort and pronounced admirable; but Gerhardt,

attempting to make a cast one morning, ruined it completely.  The family

gathered round the disaster, which to them seemed final, but the sculptor

went immediately to work, and in an amazingly brief time executed a new

bust even better than the first, an excellent piece of modeling and a

fine likeness.  It was decided that a cut of it should be used as a

frontispiece for the new book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.



Clemens was at this time giving the final readings to the Huck Finn

pages, a labor in which Mrs. Clemens and the children materially

assisted.  In the childish biography which Susy began of her father, a

year later, she says:



     Ever since papa and mama were married papa has written his books and

     then taken them to mama in manuscript, and she has expurgated--

     [Susy's spelling is preserved]--them.  Papa read Huckleberry Finn to

     us in manuscript,--[Probably meaning proof.]--just before it came

     out, and then he would leave parts of it with mama to expurgate,

     while he went off to the study to work, and sometimes Clara and I

     would be sitting with mama while she was looking the manuscript

     over, and I remember so well, with what pangs of regret we used to

     see her turn down the leaves of the pages, which meant that some

     delightfully terrible part must be scratched out.  And I remember

     one part pertickularly which was perfectly fascinating it was so

     terrible, that Clara and I used to delight in and oh, with what

     despair we saw mama turn down the leaf on which it was written, we

     thought the book would almost be ruined without it.  But we

     gradually came to think as mama did.



Commenting on this phase of Huck's evolution Mark Twain has since

written:



     I remember the special case mentioned by Susy, and can see the group

     yet--two-thirds of it pleading for the life of the culprit sentence

     that was so fascinatingly dreadful, and the other third of it

     patiently explaining why the court could not grant the prayer of the

     pleaders; but I do not remember what the condemned phrase was.  It

     had much company, and they all went to the gallows; but it is

     possible that that especially dreadful one which gave those little

     people so much delight was cunningly devised and put into the book

     for just that function, and not with any hope or expectation that it

     would get by the "expergator" alive.  It is possible, for I had that

     custom.



Little Jean was probably too youthful yet to take part in that literary

arbitration.  She was four, and had more interest in cows.  In some

memoranda which her father kept of that period--the "Children's Book"--he

says:



     She goes out to the barn with one of us every evening toward six

     o'clock, to look at the cows--which she adores--no weaker word can

     express her feeling for them.  She sits rapt and contented while

     David milks the three, making a remark now and then--always about

     the cows.  The time passes slowly and drearily for her attendant,

     but not for her.  She could stand a week of it.  When the milking is

     finished, and "Blanche," "Jean," and "the cross cow" are turned into

     the adjoining little cow-lot, we have to set Jean on a shed in that

     lot, and stay by her half an hour, till Eliza, the German nurse,

     comes to take her to bed.  The cows merely stand there, and do

     nothing; yet the mere sight of them is all-sufficient for Jean.  She

     requires nothing more.  The other evening, after contemplating them

     a long time, as they stood in the muddy muck chewing the cud, she

     said, with deep and reverent appreciation, "Ain't this a sweet

     little garden?"



     Yesterday evening our cows (after being inspected and worshiped by

     Jean from the shed for an hour) wandered off down into the pasture

     and left her bereft.  I thought I was going to get back home, now,

     but that was an error.  Jean knew of some more cows in a field

     somewhere, and took my hand and led me thitherward.  When we turned

     the corner and took the right-hand road, I saw that we should

     presently be out of range of call and sight; so I began to argue

     against continuing the expedition, and Jean began to argue in favor

     of it, she using English for light skirmishing and German for

     "business."  I kept up my end with vigor, and demolished her

     arguments in detail, one after the other, till I judged I had her

     about cornered.  She hesitated a moment, then answered up, sharply:



     "Wir werden nichts mehr daruber sprechen!" (We won't talk any more

     about it.)



     It nearly took my breath away, though I thought I might possibly

     have misunderstood.  I said:



     "Why, you little rascal!  Was hast du gesagt?"



     But she said the same words over again, and in the same decided way.

     I suppose I ought to have been outraged, but I wasn't; I was

     charmed.



His own note-books of that summer are as full as usual, but there are

fewer literary ideas and more philosophies.  There was an excitement,

just then, about the trichina germ in pork, and one of his memoranda

says:



     I think we are only the microscopic trichina concealed in the blood

     of some vast creature's veins, and that it is that vast creature

     whom God concerns himself about and not us.



And there is another which says:



     People, in trying to justify eternity, say we can put it in by

     learning all the knowledge acquired by the inhabitants of the

     myriads of  stars.  We sha'n't need that.  We could use up two

     eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own

     world, and the thousands of nations that have risen, and flourished,

     and vanished from it.  Mathematics alone would occupy me eight

     million years.



He records an incident which he related more fully in a letter to

Howells:



     Before I forget it I must tell you that Mrs. Clemens has said a

     bright thing.  A drop-letter came to me asking me to lecture here

     for a church debt.  I began to rage over the exceedingly cool

     wording of the request, when Mrs. Clemens said: "I think I know that

     church, and, if so, this preacher is a colored man; he doesn't know

     how to write a polished letter.  How should he?"



     My manner changed so suddenly and so radically that Mrs. C. said: "I

     will give you a motto, and it will be useful to you if you will

     adopt it: 'Consider every man colored till he is proved white.'"



It is dern good, I think.



One of the note-books contains these entries:



     Talking last night about home matters, I said, "I wish I had said to

     George when we were leaving home, 'Now, George, I wish you would

     take advantage of these three or four months' idle time while I am

     away----'"



     "To learn to let my matches alone," interrupted Livy.  The very

     words I was going to use.  Yet George had not been mentioned before,

     nor his peculiarities.



Several years ago I said:



     "Suppose I should live to be ninety-two, and just as I was dying a

     messenger should enter and say----"



     "You are become Earl of Durham," interrupted Livy.  The very words I

     was going to utter.  Yet there had not been a word said about the

     earl, or any other person, nor had there been any conversation

     calculated to suggest any such subject.









CLI



MARK TWAIN MUGWUMPS



The Republican Presidential nomination of James G. Blaine resulted in a

political revolt such as the nation had not known.  Blaine was immensely

popular, but he had many enemies in his own party.  There were strong

suspicions of his being connected with doubtful financiering-enterprises,

more or less sensitive to official influence, and while these scandals

had become quieted a very large portion of the Republican constituency

refused to believe them unjustified.  What might be termed the

intellectual element of Republicanism was against Blame: George William

Curtis, Charles Dudley Warner, James Russell Lowell, Henry Ward Beecher,

Thomas Nast, the firm of Harper & Brothers, Joseph W.  Hawley, Joseph

Twichell, Mark Twain--in fact the majority of thinking men who held

principle above party in their choice.



On the day of the Chicago nomination, Henry C. Robinson, Charles E.

Perkins, Edward M.  Bunce, F. G. Whitmore, and Samuel C. Dunham were

collected with Mark Twain in his billiard-room, taking turns at the game

and discussing the political situation, with George, the colored butler,

at the telephone down-stairs to report the returns as they came in.  As

fast as the ballot was received at the political headquarters down-town,

it was telephoned up to the house and George reported it through the

speaking-tube.



The opposition to Blaine in the convention was so strong that no one of

the assembled players seriously expected his nomination.  What was their

amazement, then, when about mid-afternoon George suddenly announced

through the speaking-tube that Blaine was the nominee.  The butts of the

billiard cues came down on the floor with a bump, and for a moment the

players were speechless.  Then Henry Robinson said:



"It's hard luck to have to vote for that man."



Clemens looked at him under his heavy brows.



"But--we don't--have to vote for him," he said.



"Do you mean to say that you're not going to vote for him?"



"Yes, that is what I mean to say.  I am not going to vote for him."



There was a general protest.  Most of those assembled declared that when

a party's representatives chose a man one must stand by him.  They might

choose unwisely, but the party support must be maintained.  Clemens said:



"No party holds the privilege of dictating to me how I shall vote.  If

loyalty to party is a form of patriotism, I am no patriot.  If there is

any valuable difference between a monarchist and an American, it lies in

the theory that the American can decide for himself what is patriotic and

what isn't.  I claim that difference.  I am the only person in the sixty

millions that is privileged to dictate my patriotism."



There was a good deal of talk back and forth, and, in the end, most of

those there present remained loyal to Blaine.  General Hawley and his

paper stood by Blaine.  Warner withdrew from his editorship of the

Courant and remained neutral.  Twichell stood with Clemens and came near

losing his pulpit by it.  Open letters were published in the newspapers

about him.  It was a campaign when politics divided neighbors, families,

and congregations.  If we except the Civil War period, there never had

been a more rancorous political warfare than that waged between the

parties of James G. Blaine and Grover Cleveland in 1884.



That Howells remained true to Blaine was a grief to Clemens.  He had gone

to the farm with Howells on his political conscience and had written

fervent and imploring letters on the subject.  As late as September 17th,

he said:



     Somehow I can't seem to rest quiet under the idea of your voting for

     Blaine.  I believe you said something about the country and the

     party.  Certainly allegiance to these is well, but certainly a man's

     first duty is to his own conscience and honor; the party and country

     come second to that, and never first.  I don't ask you to vote at

     all.  I only urge you not to soil yourself by voting for Blaine....

     Don't be offended; I mean no offense.  I am not concerned about the

     rest of the nation, but well, good-by.

                                                  Yours ever, MARK.



Beyond his prayerful letters to Howells, Clemens did not greatly concern

himself with politics on the farm, but, returning to Hartford, he went

vigorously into the campaign, presided, as usual, at mass-meetings, and

made political speeches which invited the laughter of both parties, and

were universally quoted and printed without regard to the paper's

convictions.



It was during one such speech as this that, in the course of his remarks,

a band outside came marching by playing patriotic music so loudly as to

drown his voice.  He waited till the band got by, but by the time he was

well under way again another band passed, and once more he was obliged to

wait till the music died away in the distance.  Then he said, quite

serenely:



"You will find my speech, without the music, in the morning paper."



In introducing Carl Schurz at a great mugwump mass-meeting at Hartford,

October 20, 1884., he remarked that he [Clemens] was the only

legitimately elected officer, and was expected to read a long list of

vice-presidents; but he had forgotten all about it, and he would ask all

the gentlemen there, of whatever political complexion, to do him a great

favor by acting as vice-presidents.  Then he said:



     As far as my own political change of heart is concerned, I have not

     been convinced by any Democratic means.  The opinion I hold of Mr.

     Blaine is due to the comments of the Republican press before the

     nomination.  Not that they have said bitter or scandalous things,

     because Republican papers are above that, but the things they said

     did not seem to be complimentary, and seemed to me to imply

     editorial disapproval of Mr. Blame and the belief that he was not

     qualified to be President of the United States.



     It is just a little indelicate for me to be here on this occasion

     before an assemblage of voters, for the reason that the ablest

     newspaper in Colorado--the ablest newspaper in the world--has

     recently nominated me for President.  It is hardly fit for me to

     preside at a discussion of the brother candidate, but the best among

     us will do the most repulsive things the moment we are smitten with

     a Presidential madness.  If I had realized that this canvass was to

     turn on the candidate's private character I would have started that

     Colorado paper sooner.  I know the crimes that can be imputed and

     proved against me can be told on the fingers of your hands.  This

     cannot be said of any other Presidential candidate in the field.



Inasmuch as the Blaine-Cleveland campaign was essentially a campaign of

scurrility, this touch was loudly applauded.



Mark Twain voted for Grover Cleveland, though up to the very eve of

election he was ready to support a Republican nominee in whom he had

faith, preferably Edmunds, and he tried to inaugurate a movement by which

Edmunds might be nominated as a surprise candidate and sweep the country.



It was probably Dr. Burchard's ill-advised utterance concerning the three

alleged R's of Democracy, "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion," that defeated

Blaine, and by some strange, occult means Mark Twain's butler George got

wind of this damning speech before it became news on the streets of

Hartford.  George had gone with his party, and had a considerable sum of

money wagered on Blaine's election; but he knew it was likely to be very

close, and he had an instant and deep conviction that these three fatal

words and Blaine's failure to repudiate them meant the candidate's

downfall.  He immediately abandoned everything in the shape of household

duties, and within the briefest possible time had changed enough money to

make him safe, and leave him a good margin of winnings besides, in the

event of Blame's defeat.  This was evening.  A very little later the news

of Blaine's blunder, announced from the opera-house stage, was like the

explosion of a bomb.  But it was no news to George, who went home

rejoicing with his enemies.









CLII



PLATFORMING WITH CABLE



The drain of many investments and the establishment of a publishing house

had told heavily on Clemens's finances.  It became desirable to earn a

large sum of money with as much expedition as possible.  Authors'

readings had become popular, and Clemens had read in Philadelphia and

Boston with satisfactory results.  He now conceived the idea of a grand

tour of authors as a commercial enterprise.  He proposed to Aldrich,

Howells, and Cable that he charter a private car for the purpose, and

that with their own housekeeping arrangements, cooking, etc., they could

go swinging around the circuit, reaping, a golden harvest.  He offered to

be general manager of the expedition, the impresario as it were, and

agreed to guarantee the others not less than seventy-five dollars a day

apiece as their net return from the "circus," as he called it.



Howells and Aldrich liked well enough to consider it as an amusing

prospect, but only Cable was willing to realize it.  He had been scouring

the country on his own account, and he was willing enough to join forces

with Mark Twain.



Clemens detested platforming, but the idea of reading from his books or

manuscript for some reason seemed less objectionable, and, as already

stated, the need of much money had become important.



He arranged with J. B. Pond for the business side of the expedition,

though in reality he was its proprietor.  The private-car idea was given

up, but he employed Cable at a salary of four hundred and fifty dollars a

week and expenses, and he paid Pond a commission.  Perhaps, without going

any further, we may say that the tour was a financial success, and

yielded a large return of the needed funds.



Clemens and Cable had a pleasant enough time, and had it not been for the

absence from home and the disagreeableness of railway travel, there would

have been little to regret.  They were a curiously associated pair.

Cable was orthodox in his religion, devoted to Sunday-school, Bible

reading, and church affairs in general.  Clemens--well, Clemens was

different.  On the first evening of their tour, when the latter was

comfortably settled in bed with an entertaining book, Cable appeared with

his Bible, and proceeded to read a chapter aloud.  Clemens made no

comment, and this went on for an evening or two more.  Then he said:



"See here, Cable, we'll have to cut this part of the program out.  You

can read the Bible as much as you please so long as you don't read it to

me."



Cable retired courteously.  He had a keen sense of humor, and most things

that Mark Twain did, whether he approved or not, amused him.  Cable did

not smoke, but he seemed always to prefer the smoking compartment when

they traveled, to the more respectable portions of the car.  One day

Clemens sand to him:



"Cable, why do you sit in here?  You don't smoke, and you know I always

smoke, and sometimes swear."



Cable said, "I know, Mark, I don't do these things, but I can't help

admiring the way you do them."



When Sunday came it was Mark Twain's great happiness to stay in bed all

day, resting after his week of labor; but Cable would rise, bright and

chipper, dress himself in neat and suitable attire, and visit the various

churches and Sunday-schools in town, usually making a brief address at

each, being always invited to do so.



It seems worth while to include one of the Clemens-Cable programs here--

a most satisfactory one.  They varied it on occasion, and when they were

two nights in a place changed it completely, but the program here given

was the one they were likely to use after they had proved its worth:



                                 PROGRAM



                    Richling's visit to Kate Riley

                                             GEO. W. CABLE



                    King Sollermun

                                             MARK TWAIN



                    (a) Kate Riley and Ristofolo

                    (b) Narcisse in mourning for "Lady Byron"

                    (c) Mary's Night Ride

                                             GEO.  W.  CABLE

                    (a) Tragic Tale of the Fishwife

                    (b) A Trying Situation

                    (c) A Ghost Story

                                             MARK TWAIN





At a Mark Twain memorial meeting (November 30, 1910), where the few who

were left of his old companions told over quaint and tender memories,

George Cable recalled their reading days together and told of Mark

Twain's conscientious effort to do his best, to be worthy of himself,

regardless of all other concerns.  He told how when they had been

traveling for a while Clemens seemed to realize that he was only giving

the audience nonsense; making them laugh at trivialities which they would

forget before they had left the entertainment hall.  Cable said that up

to that time he had supposed Clemens's chief thought was the

entertainment of the moment, and that if the audience laughed he was

satisfied.  He told how he had sat in the wings, waiting his turn, and

heard the tides of laughter gather and roll forward and break against the

footlights, time and time again, and how he had believed his colleague to

be glorying in that triumph.  What was his surprise, then, on the way to

the hotel in the carriage, when Clemens groaned and seemed writhing in

spirit and said:



"Oh, Cable, I am demeaning myself.  I am allowing myself to be a mere

buffoon.  It's ghastly.  I can't endure it any longer."



Cable added that all that night and the next day Mark Twain devoted

himself to the study and rehearsal of selections which were justified not

only as humor, but as literature and art.



A good many interesting and amusing things would happen on such a tour.

Many of these are entirely forgotten, of course, but of others certain

memoranda have been preserved.  Grover Cleveland had been elected when

they set out on their travels, but was still holding his position in

Albany as Governor of New York.  When they reached Albany Cable and

Clemens decided to call on him.  They drove to the Capitol and were shown

into the Governor's private office.  Cleveland made them welcome, and,

after greetings, said to Clemens:



"Mr. Clemens, I was a fellow-citizen of yours in Buffalo a good many

months some years ago, but you never called on me then.  How do you

explain this?"



Clemens said: "Oh, that is very simple to answer, your Excellency.  In

Buffalo you were a sheriff.  I kept away from the sheriff as much as

possible, but you're Governor now, and on the way to the Presidency.

It's worth while coming to see you."



Clemens meantime had been resting, half sitting, on the corner of the

Executive desk.  He leaned back a little, and suddenly about a dozen

young men opened various doors, filed in and stood at attention, as if

waiting for orders.



No one spoke for a moment; then the Governor said to this collection of

attendants:



"You are dismissed, young gentlemen.  Your services are not required.

Mr. Clemens is sitting on the bells."



In Buffalo, when Clemens appeared on the stage, he leisurely considered

the audience for a moment; then he said:



"I miss a good many faces.  They have gone--gone to the tomb, to the

gallows, or to the White House.  All of us are entitled to at least one

of these distinctions, and it behooves us to be wise and prepare for

all."



On Thanksgiving Eve the readers were in Morristown, New Jersey, where

they were entertained by Thomas Nast.  The cartoonist prepared a quiet

supper for them and they remained overnight in the Nast home.  They were

to leave next morning by an early train, and Mrs. Nast had agreed to see

that they were up in due season.  When she woke next morning there seemed

a strange silence in the house and she grew suspicious.  Going to the

servants' room, she found them sleeping soundly.  The alarm-clock in the

back hall had stopped at about the hour the guests retired.  The studio

clock was also found stopped; in fact, every timepiece on the premises

had retired from business.  Clemens had found that the clocks interfered

with his getting to sleep, and he had quieted them regardless of early

trains and reading engagements.  On being accused of duplicity he said:



"Well, those clocks were all overworked, anyway.  They will feel much

better for a night's rest."



A few days later Nast sent him a caricature drawing--a picture which

showed Mark Twain getting rid of the offending clocks.



At Christmas-time they took a fortnight's holiday and Clemens went home

to Hartford.  A surprise was awaiting him there.  Mrs. Clemens had made

an adaptation of 'The Prince and the Pauper' play, and the children of

the neighborhood had prepared a presentation of it for his special

delectation.  He knew, on his arrival home, that something mysterious was

in progress, for certain rooms were forbidden him; but he had no inkling

of their plan until just before the performance--when he was led across

the grounds to George Warner's home, into the large room there where it

was to be given, and placed in a seat directly in front of the stage.



Gerhardt had painted the drop-curtain, and assisted in the general

construction of scenery and effects.  The result was really imposing; but

presently, when the curtain rose and the guest of honor realized what it

was all about, and what they had undertaken for his pleasure, he was

deeply moved and supremely gratified.



There was but one hitch in the performance.  There is a place where the

Prince says, "Fathers be alike, mayhap; mine hath not a doll's temper."



This was Susy's part, and as she said it the audience did not fail to

remember its literal appropriateness.  There was a moment's silence, then

a titter, followed by a roar of laughter, in which everybody but the

little actors joined.  They did not see the humor and were disturbed and

grieved.  Curiously enough, Mrs Clemens herself, in arranging and casting

the play, had not considered the possibility of this effect.  The parts

were all daintily played.  The children wore their assumed personalities

as if native to them.  Daisy Warner played the part of Tom Canty, Clara

Clemens was Lady Jane Grey.



It was only the beginning of The Prince and the Pauper productions.  The

play was repeated, Clemens assisting, adding to the parts, and himself

playing the role of Miles Hendon.  In her childish biography Susy says:



     Papa had only three days to learn the part in, but still we were all

     sure that he could do it.  The scene that he acted in was the scene

     between Miles Hendon and the Prince, the "Prithee, pour the water"

     scene.  I was the Prince and papa and I rehearsed together two or

     three times a day for the three days before the appointed evening.

     Papa acted his part beautifully, and he added to the scene, making

     it a good deal longer.  He was inexpressibly funny, with his great

     slouch hat and gait----oh such a gait!  Papa made the Miles Hendon

     scene a splendid success and every one was delighted with the scene,

     and papa too.  We had great fun with our "Prince and Pauper," and I

     think we none of us shall forget how immensely funny papa was in it.

     He certainly could have been an actor as well as an author.



The holidays over, Cable and Clemens were off on the circuit again.  At

Rochester an incident happened which led to the writing of one of Mark

Twain's important books, 'A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court'.

Clemens and Cable had wandered into a book-store for the purpose of

finding something to read.  Pulling over some volumes on one of the

tables, Clemens happened to pick up a little green, cloth-bound book, and

after looking at the title turned the pages rather curiously and with

increasing interest.



"Cable," he said, "do you know anything about this book, the Arthurian

legends of Sir Thomas Malory, Morte Arthure?"



Cable answered: "Mark, that is one of the most beautiful books in the

world.  Let me buy it for you.  You will love it more than any book you

ever read."



So Clemens came to know the old chronicler's version of the rare Round

Table legends, and from that first acquaintance with them to the last

days of his life seldom let the book go far from him.  He read and reread

those quaint, stately tales and reverenced their beauty, while fairly

reveling in the absurdities of that ancient day.  Sir Ector's lament he

regarded as one of the most simply beautiful pieces of writing in the

English tongue, and some of the combats and quests as the most ridiculous

absurdities in romance.  Presently he conceived the idea of linking that

day, with its customs, costumes, and abuses, with the progress of the

present, or carrying back into that age of magicians and armor and

superstition and cruelties a brisk American of progressive ideas who

would institute reforms.  His note-book began to be filled with memoranda

of situations and possibilities for the tale he had in mind.  These were

vague, unformed fancies as yet, and it would be a long time before the

story would become a fact.  This was the first entry:



     Dream of being a knight-errant in armor in the Middle Ages.  Have

     the notions and habits, though, of the present day mixed with the

     necessities of that.  No pockets in the armor.  No way to manage

     certain requirements of nature.  Can't scratch.  Cold in the head

     and can't blow.  Can't get a handkerchief; can't use iron sleeve;

     iron gets red-hot in the sun; leaks in the rain; gets white with

     frost and freezes me solid in winter; makes disagreeable clatter

     when I enter church.  Can't dress or undress myself.  Always getting

     struck by lightning.  Fall down and can't get up.



Twenty-one years later, discussing the genesis of the story, he said:



"As I read those quaint and curious old legends I suppose I naturally

contrasted those days with ours, and it made me curious to fancy what

might be the picturesque result if we could dump the nineteenth century

down into the sixth century and observe the consequences."



The reading tour continued during the first two months of the new year

and carried them as far west as Chicago.  They read in Hannibal and

Keokuk, and Clemens spent a day in the latter place with his mother, now

living with Orion, brisk and active for her years and with her old-time

force of character.  Mark Twain, arranging for her Keokuk residence, had

written:



     Ma wants to board with you, and pay her board.  She will pay you $20

     a month (she wouldn't pay a cent more in heaven; she is obstinate on

     this point), and as long as she remains with you and is content I

     will add $25 a month to the sum Perkins already sends you.



Jane Clemens attended the Keokuk reading, and later, at home, when her

children asked her if she could still dance, she rose, and at eighty-one

tripped as lightly as a girl.  It was the last time that Mark Twain ever

saw his mother in the health and vigor which had been always so much a

part of her personality.



Clemens saw another relative on that trip; in St. Louis, James Lampton,

the original of Colonel Sellers, called.



He was become old and white-headed, but he entered to me in the same old

breezy way of his earlier life, and he was all there, yet--not a detail

wanting: the happy light in his eye, the abounding hope in his heart, the

persuasive tongue, the miracle-breeding imagination--they were all there;

and before I could turn around he was polishing up his Aladdin's lamp and

flashing the secret riches of the world before me.  I said to myself:

"I did not overdraw him by a shade, I set him down as he was; and he is

the same man to-day.  Cable will recognize him."



Clemens opened the door into Cable's room and allowed the golden dream-

talk to float in.  It was of a "small venture" which the caller had

undertaken through his son.



"Only a little thing--a, mere trifle--a bagatelle.  I suppose there's a

couple of millions in it, possibly three, but not more, I think; still,

for a boy, you know----"



It was the same old Cousin Jim.  Later, when he had royally accepted some

tickets for the reading and bowed his exit, Cable put his head in at the

door.



"That was Colonel Sellers," he said.









CLIII



HUCK FINN COMES INTO HIS OWN



In the December Century (1884) appeared a chapter from 'The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn', "The Grangerford-Shepherdson Feud," a piece of writing

which Edmund Clarence Stederian, Brander Matthews, and others promptly

ranked as among Mark Twain's very best; when this was followed, in the

January number, by "King Sollermun," a chapter which in its way delighted

quite as many readers, the success of the new book was accounted certain.

--[Stedman, writing to Clemens of this instalment, said: "To my mind it

is not only the most finished and condensed thing you have done.  but as

dramatic and powerful an episode as I know in modern literature."]



'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' was officially published in England

and America in December, 1884, but the book was not in the canvassers'

hands for delivery until February.  By this time the orders were

approximately for forty thousand copies, a number which had increased to

fifty thousand a few weeks later.  Webster's first publication venture

was in the nature of a triumph.  Clemens wrote to him March 16th:



"Your news is splendid.  Huck certainly is a success."



He felt that he had demonstrated his capacity as a general director and

Webster had proved his efficiency as an executive.  He had no further

need of an outside publisher.



The story of Huck Finn will probably stand as the best of Mark Twain's

purely fictional writings.  A sequel to Tom Sawyer, it is greater than

its predecessor; greater artistically, though perhaps with less immediate

interest for the juvenile reader.  In fact, the books are so different

that they are not to be compared--wherein lies the success of the later

one.  Sequels are dangerous things when the story is continuous, but in

Huckleberry Finn the story is a new one, wholly different in environment,

atmosphere, purpose, character, everything.  The tale of Huck and Nigger

Jim drifting down the mighty river on a raft, cross-secting the various

primitive aspects of human existence, constitutes one of the most

impressive examples of picaresque fiction in any language.  It has been

ranked greater than Gil Blas, greater even than Don Quixote; certainly it

is more convincing, more human, than either of these tales.  Robert Louis

Stevenson once wrote, "It is a book I have read four times, and am quite

ready to begin again to-morrow."



It is by no means a flawless book, though its defects are trivial enough.

The illusion of Huck as narrator fails the least bit here and there; the

"four dialects" are not always maintained; the occasional touch of broad

burlesque detracts from the tale's reality.  We are inclined to resent

this.  We never wish to feel that Huck is anything but a real character.

We want him always the Huck who was willing to go to hell if necessary,

rather than sacrifice Nigger Jim; the Huck who watched the river through

long nights, and, without caring to explain why, felt his soul go out to

the sunrise.



     Two or three days and nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum

     by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely.  Here is the way

     we put in the time.  It was a monstrous big river down there--

     sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights and laid up and hid

     daytimes; soon as the night was most gone we stopped navigating and

     tied up--nearly always in the dead water under a towhead; and then

     cut young cottonwoods and willows and hid the raft with them.  Then

     we set out the lines.  Next we slid into the river and had a swim,

     so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy

     bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight

     come.  Not a sound anywheres--perfectly still--just like the whole

     world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-cluttering, maybe.

     The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of

     dull line--that was the woods on t'other side, you couldn't make

     nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness,

     spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn't

     black anymore, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting

     along, ever so far away--trading scows, and such things; and long

     black streaks--rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or

     jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by-

     and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the

     look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current

     which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see

     the mist curl up off the water, and the east reddens up, and the

     river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away

     on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a wood-yard, likely,

     and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it

     anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you

     over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the

     woods and the flowers....  And next you've got the full day, and

     everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!



This is the Huck we want, and this is the Huck we usually have, and that

the world has long been thankful for.



Take the story as a whole, it is a succession of startling and unique

pictures.  The cabin in the swamp which Huck and his father used together

in their weird, ghastly relationship; the night adventure with Jim on the

wrecked steamboat; Huck's night among the towheads; the Grangerford-

Shepherdson battle; the killing of Boggs--to name a few of the many vivid

presentations--these are of no time or literary fashion and will never

lose their flavor nor their freshness so long as humanity itself does not

change.  The terse, unadorned Grangerford-Shepherdson episode--built out

of the Darnell--Watson feuds--[See Life on the Mississippi, chap.  xxvi.

Mark Twain himself, as a cub pilot, came near witnessing the battle he

describes.]--is simply classic in its vivid casualness, and the same may

be said of almost every incident on that long river-drift; but this is

the strength, the very essence of picaresque narrative.  It is the way

things happen in reality; and the quiet, unexcited frame of mind in which

Huck is prompted to set them down would seem to be the last word in

literary art.  To Huck, apparently, the killing of Boggs and Colonel

Sherburn's defiance of the mob are of about the same historical

importance as any other incidents of the day's travel.  When Colonel

Sherburn threw his shotgun across his arm and bade the crowd disperse

Huck says:



     The crowd washed back sudden, and then broke all apart and went

     tearing off every which way, and Buck Harkness he heeled it after

     them, looking tolerable cheap.  I could a staid if I'd a wanted to,

     but I didn't want to.



     I went to the circus, and loafed around the back side till the

     watchman went by, and then dived in under the tent.



That is all.  No reflections, no hysterics; a murder and a mob dispersed,

all without a single moral comment.  And when the Shepherdsons had got

done killing the Grangerfords, and Huck had tugged the two bodies ashore

and covered Buck Grangerford's face with a handkerchief, crying a little

because Buck had been good to him, he spent no time in sentimental

reflection or sermonizing, but promptly hunted up Jim and the raft and

sat down to a meal of corn-dodgers, buttermilk, pork and cabbage, and

greens:



     There ain't nothing in the world so good, when it is cooked right;

     and while I eat my supper we talked, and had a good time.  I was

     powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away

     from the swamp.  We said there warn't no home like a raft, after

     all.  Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft

     don't; you feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.



It was Huck Finn's morality that caused the book to be excluded from the

Concord Library, and from other libraries here and there at a later day.

The orthodox mental attitude of certain directors of juvenile literature

could not condone Huck's looseness in the matter of statement and

property rights, and in spite of New England traditions, Massachusetts

librarians did not take any too kindly to his uttered principle that,

after thinking it over and taking due thought on the deadly sin of

abolition, he had decided that he'd go to hell rather than give Jim over

to slavery.  Poor vagrant Ben Blankenship, hiding his runaway negro in an

Illinois swamp, could not dream that his humanity would one day supply

the moral episode of an immortal book.



Able critics have declared that the psychology of Huck Finn is the book's

large feature: Huck's moral point of view--the struggle between his heart

and his conscience concerning the sin of Jim's concealment, and his final

decision of self-sacrifice.  Time may show that as an epic of the river,

the picture of a vanished day, it will rank even greater.  The problems

of conscience we have always with us, but periods once passed are gone

forever.  Certainly Huck's loyalty to that lovely soul Nigger Jim was

beautiful, though after all it may not have been so hard for Huck, who

could be loyal to anything.  Huck was loyal to his father, loyal to Tom

Sawyer of course, loyal even to those two river tramps and frauds, the

King and the Duke, for whom he lied prodigiously, only weakening when a

new and livelier loyalty came into view--loyalty to Mary Wilks.



The King and the Duke, by the way, are not elsewhere matched in fiction.

The Duke was patterned after a journeyman-printer Clemens had known in

Virginia City, but the King was created out of refuse from the whole

human family--"all tears and flapdoodle," the very ultimate of disrepute

and hypocrisy--so perfect a specimen that one must admire, almost love,

him.  "Hain't we all the fools in town on our side? and ain't that a big

enough majority in any town?" he asks in a critical moment--a remark

which stamps him as a philosopher of classic rank.  We are full of pity

at last when this pair of rapscallions ride out of the history on a rail,

and feel some of Huck's inclusive loyalty and all the sorrowful truth of

his comment: "Human beings can be awful cruel to one another."



The "poor old king" Huck calls him, and confesses how he felt "ornery and

humble and to blame, somehow," for the old scamp's misfortunes.  "A

person's conscience ain't got no sense," he says, and Huck is never more

real to us, or more lovable, than in that moment.  Huck is what he is

because, being made so, he cannot well be otherwise.  He is a boy

throughout--such a boy as Mark Twain had known and in some degree had

been.  One may pettily pick a flaw here and there in the tale's

construction if so minded, but the moral character of Huck himself is not

open to criticism.  And indeed any criticism of this the greatest of Mark

Twain's tales of modern life would be as the mere scratching of the

granite of an imperishable structure.  Huck Finn is a monument that no

puny pecking will destroy.  It is built of indestructible blocks of human

nature; and if the blocks do not always fit, and the ornaments do not

always agree, we need not fear.  Time will blur the incongruities and

moss over the mistakes.  The edifice will grow more beautiful with the

years.









CLIV



THE MEMOIRS OF GENERAL GRANT



The success of Huck Finn, though sufficiently important in itself,

prepared the way for a publishing venture by the side of which it

dwindled to small proportions.  One night (it was early in November,

1884), when Cable and Clemens had finished a reading at Chickering Hall,

Clemens, coming out into the wet blackness, happened to hear Richard

Watson Gilder's voice say to some unseen companion:



"Do you know General Grant has actually determined to write his memoirs

and publish them.  He has said so to-day, in so many words."



Of course Clemens was immediately interested.  It was the thing he had

proposed to Grant some three years previously, during his call that day

with Howells concerning the Toronto consulship.



With Mrs. Clemens, he promptly overtook Gilder and accompanied him to his

house, where they discussed the matter in its various particulars.

Gilder said that the Century Editors had endeavored to get Grant to

contribute to their war series, but that not until his financial

disaster, as a member of the firm of Grant & Ward, had he been willing to

consider the matter.  He said that Grant now welcomed the idea of

contributing three papers to the series, and that the promised payment of

five hundred dollars each for these articles had gladdened his heart and

relieved him of immediate anxiety.--[Somewhat later the Century Company,

voluntarily, added liberally to this sum.]



Gilder added that General Grant seemed now determined to continue his

work until he had completed a book, though this at present was only a

prospect.



Clemens was in the habit of calling on Grant, now and then, to smoke a

cigar with him, and he dropped in next morning to find out just how far

the book idea had developed, and what were the plans of publication.  He

found the General and his son, Colonel Fred Grant, discussing some

memoranda, which turned out to be a proposition from the Century Company

for the book publication of his memoirs.  Clemens asked to be allowed to

look over the proposed terms, and when he had done so he said:



"General, it is clear that the Century people do not realize the

importance--the commercial magnitude of your book.  It is not strange

that this is true, for they are comparatively new publishers and have had

little or no experience with books of this class.  The terms they propose

indicate that they expect to sell five, possibly ten thousand copies.  A

book from your hand, telling the story of your life and battles, should

sell not less than a quarter of a million, perhaps twice that sum.  It

should be sold only by subscription, and you are entitled to double the

royalty here proposed.  I do not believe it is to your interest to

conclude this contract without careful thought and investigation.  Write

to the American Publishing Company at Hartford and see what they will do

for you."



But Grant demurred.  He said that, while no arrangements had been made

with the Century Company, he thought it only fair and right that they

should have the book on reasonable terms; certainly on terms no greater

than he could obtain elsewhere.  He said that, all things being equal,

the book ought to go to the man who had first suggested it to him.



Clemens spoke up: "General, if that is so, it belongs to me."



Grant did not understand until Clemens recalled to him how he had urged

him, in that former time, to write his memoirs; had pleaded with him,

agreeing to superintend the book's publication.  Then he said:



"General, I am publishing my own book, and by the time yours is ready it

is quite possible that I shall have the best equipped subscription

establishment in the country.  If you will place your book with my firm--

and I feel that I have at least an equal right in the consideration--I

will pay you twenty per cent. of the list price, or, if you prefer, I

will give you seventy per cent. of the net returns and I will pay all

office expenses out of my thirty per cent."



General Grant was really grieved at this proposal.  It seemed to him

that here was a man who was offering to bankrupt himself out of pure

philanthropy--a thing not to be permitted.  He intimated that he had

asked the Century Company president, Roswell Smith, a careful-headed

business man, if he thought his book would pay as well as Sherman's,

which the Scribners had published at a profit to Sherman of twenty-five

thousand dollars, and that Smith had been unwilling to guarantee that

amount to the author.--[Mark Twain's note-book, under date of March,

1885, contains this memorandum:  "Roswell Smith said to me: 'I'm glad you

got the book, Mr. Clemens; glad there was somebody with courage enough to

take it, under the circumstances.  What do you think the General wanted

to require of me?'



"'He wanted me to insure a sale of twenty-five thousand sets of his book.

I wouldn't risk such a guarantee on any book that was ever published.'"



Yet Roswell Smith, not so many years later, had so far enlarged his views

of subscription publishing that he fearlessly and successfully invested a

million dollars or more in a dictionary, regardless of the fact that the

market was already thought to be supplied.]



Clemens said:



"General, I have my check-book with me.  I will draw you a check now for

twenty-five thousand dollars for the first volume of your memoirs, and

will add a like amount for each volume you may write as an advance

royalty payment, and your royalties will continue right along when this

amount has been reached."



Colonel Fred Grant now joined in urging that matters be delayed, at least

until more careful inquiry concerning the possibilities of publishing

could be made.



Clemens left then, and set out on his trip with Cable, turning the whole

matter over to Webster and Colonel Fred for settlement.  Meantime, the

word that General Grant was writing his memoirs got into the newspapers

and various publishing propositions came to him.  In the end the General

sent over to Philadelphia for his old friend, George W. Childs, and laid

the whole matter before him.  Childs said later it was plain that General

Grant, on the score of friendship, if for no other reason, distinctly

wished to give the book to Mark Twain.  It seemed not to be a question of

how much money he would make, but of personal feeling entirely.

Webster's complete success with Huck Finn being now demonstrated, Colonel

Fred Grant agreed that he believed Clemens and Webster could handle the

book as profitably as anybody; and after investigation Childs was of the

same opinion.  The decision was that the firm of Charles L. Webster & Co.

should have the book, and arrangements for drawing the contract were

made.



General Grant, however, was still somewhat uneasy as to the terms.

He thought he was taking an unfair advantage in receiving so large a

proportion of the profits.  He wrote to Clemens, asking him which of his

two propositions--the twenty per cent. gross-royalty or the seventy per

cent. of the net profit--would be the best all around.  Clemens sent

Webster to tell him that he believed the simplest, as well as the most

profitable for the author, would be the twenty per cent. arrangement.

Whereupon Grant replied that he would take the alternative; as in that

case, if the book were a failure, and there were no profits, Clemens

would not be obliged to pay him anything.  He could not consent to the

thought of receiving twenty per cent. on a book published at a loss.



Meantime, Grant had developed a serious illness.  The humiliation of his

business failure had undermined his health.  The papers announced his

malady as cancer of the tongue.  In a memorandum which Clemens made,

February 26, 1885, he states that on the 21st he called at the Grant

home, 3 East 66th Street, and was astonished to see how thin and weak the

General looked.  He was astonished because the newspaper, in a second

report, had said the threatening symptoms had disappeared, that the

cancer alarm was a false one.



     I took for granted the report, and said I had been glad to see that

     news.  He smiled and said, "Yes--if it had only been true."



     One of the physicians was present, and he startled me by saying the

     General's condition was the opposite of encouraging.



     Then the talk drifted to business, and the General presently said:

     "I mean you shall have the book--I have about made up my mind to

     that--but I wish to write to Mr. Roswell Smith first, and tell him I

     have so decided.  I think this is due him."



     From the beginning the General has shown a fine delicacy toward

     those people--a delicacy which was native to the character of the

     man who put into the Appomattox terms of surrender the words,

     "Officers may retain their side-arms," to save General Lee the

     humiliation of giving up his sword.  [Note-book.]



The physician present was Dr. Douglas, and upon Clemens assuming that the

General's trouble was probably due to smoking, also that it was a warning

to those who smoked to excess, himself included, Dr. Douglas said that

General Grant's affliction could not be attributed altogether to smoking,

but far more to his distress of mind, his year-long depression of spirit,

the grief of his financial disaster.  Dr. Douglas's remark started

General Grant upon the subject of his connection with Ward, which he

discussed with great freedom and apparent relief of mind.  Never at any

time did he betray any resentment toward Ward, but characterized him as

one might an offending child.  He spoke as a man who has been deeply

wronged and humiliated and betrayed, but without a venomous expression or

one with revengeful nature.  Clemens confessed in his notes that all the

time he himself was "inwardly boiling--scalping Ward--flaying him alive--

breaking him on the wheel--pounding him to a jelly."



While he was talking Colonel Grant said:



"Father is letting you see that the Grant family are a pack of fools, Mr.

Clemens."



The General objected to this statement.  He said that the facts could be

produced which would show that when Ward laid siege to a man he was

pretty certain to turn out to be a fool; as much of a fool as any of the

Grant family.  He said that nobody could call the president of the Erie

Railroad a fool, yet Ward had beguiled him of eight hundred thousand

dollars, robbed him of every cent of it.



He cited another man that no one could call a fool who had invested in

Ward to the extent of half a million.  He went on to recall many such

cases.  He told of one man who had come to the office on the eve of

departure for Europe and handed Ward a check for fifty thousand dollars,

saying:



"I have no use for it at present.  See what you can do with it for me."

By and by this investor, returning from Europe, dropped in and said:



"Well, did anything happen?"



Ward indifferently turned to his private ledger, consulted it, then drew

a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and handed it over,

with the casual remark:



"Well, yes, something happened; not much yet--a little too soon."



The man stared at the check, then thrust it back into Ward's hand.

"That's all right.  It's plenty good enough for me.  Set that hen again,"

and left the place.



Of course Ward made no investments.  His was the first playing on a

colossal scale of the now worn-out "get rich quick" confidence game.

Such dividends as were made came out of the principal.  Ward was the

Napoleon of that game, whether he invented it or not.  Clemens agreed

that, as far as himself or any of his relatives were concerned, they

would undoubtedly have trusted Ward.



Colonel Grant followed him to the door when he left, and told him that

the physicians feared his father might not live more than a few weeks

longer, but that meantime he had been writing steadily, and that the

first volume was complete and fully half the second.  Three days later

the formal contract was closed, and Webster & Co.  promptly advanced.

General Grant ten thousand dollars for imminent demands, a welcome

arrangement, for Grant's debts and expenses were many, and his available

resources restricted to the Century payments for his articles.



Immediately the office of Webster & Co.  was warm with affairs.

Reporters were running hot-foot for news of the great contract by which

Mark Twain was to publish the life of General Grant.  No publishing

enterprise of such vast moment had ever been undertaken, and no

publishing event, before or since, ever received the amount of newspaper

comment.  The names of General Grant and Mark Twain associated would

command columns, whatever the event, and that Mark Twain was to become

the publisher of Grant's own story of his battles was of unprecedented

importance.



The partners were sufficiently occupied.  Estimates and prices for vast

quantities of paper were considered, all available presses were

contracted for, binderies were pledged exclusively for the Grant book.

Clemens was boiling over with plans and suggestions for distribution.

Webster was half wild with the tumult of the great campaign.

Applications for agencies poured in.



In those days there were general subscription agencies which divided the

country into districts, and the heads of these agencies Webster summoned

to New York and laid down the law to them concerning the, new book.  It

was not a time for small dealings, and Webster rose to the occasion.  By

the time these men returned to their homes they had practically pledged

themselves to a quarter of a million sets of the Grant Memoirs, and this

estimate they believed to be conservative.



Webster now moved into larger and more pretentious quarters.  He took a

store-room at 42 East 14th Street, Union Square, and surrounded himself

with a capable force of assistants.  He had become, all at once, the most

conspicuous publisher in the world.











CLV



DAYS WITH A DYING HERO



The contract for the publication of the Grant Life was officially closed

February 27, 1885.  Five days later, on the last day and at the last hour

of President Arthur's administration, and of the Congress then sitting, a

bill was passed placing Grant as full General, with full pay, on the

retired army list.  The bill providing for this somewhat tardy

acknowledgment was rushed through at the last moment, and it is said that

the Congressional clock was set back so that this enactment might become

a law before the administration changed.



Clemens was with General Grant when the news of this action was read to

him.  Grant had greatly desired such recognition, and it meant more to

him than to any one present, yet Clemens in his notes records:



     Every face there betrayed strong excitement and emotion except one-

     General Grant's.  He read the telegram, but not a shade or

     suggestion of a change exhibited itself in his iron countenance.

     The volume of his emotion was greater than all the other emotions

     there present combined, but he was able to suppress all expression

     of it and make no sign.



Grant's calmness, endurance, and consideration during these final days

astonished even those most familiar with his noble character.  One night

Gerhardt came into the library at Hartford with the announcement that he

wished to show his patron a small bust he had been making in clay of

General Grant.  Clemens did not show much interest in the prospect, but

when the work was uncovered he became enthusiastic.  He declared it was

the first likeness he had ever seen of General Grant that approached

reality.  He agreed that the Grant family ought to see it, and that he

would take Gerhardt with him next day in order that he might be within

reach in case they had any suggestions.  They went to New York next

morning, and called at the Grant home during the afternoon.



From the note-book:



     Friday, March 20, 1885.  Gerhardt and I arrived at General Grant's

     about 2.30 P.m.  and I asked if the family would look at a small

     clay bust of the General which Gerhardt had made from a photograph.

     Colonel Fred and Jesse were absent to receive their sister, Mrs.

     Sartoris, who would arrive from Europe about 4.30; but the three

     Mrs. Grants examined the work and expressed strong approval of it,

     and also great gratification that Mr. Gerhardt had undertaken it.

     Mrs. Jesse Grant had lately dreamed that she was inquiring where the

     maker of my bust could be found (she had seen a picture of it in

     Huck Finn, which was published four weeks ago), for she wanted the

     same artist to make one of General Grant.  The ladies examined the

     bust critically and pointed out defects, while Gerhardt made the

     necessary corrections.  Presently Mrs. General Grant suggested that

     Gerhardt step in and look at the General.  I had been in there

     talking with the General, but had never thought of asking him to let

     a stranger come in.  So Gerhardt went in with the ladies and me, and

     the inspection and cross-fire began: "There, I was sure his nose was

     so and so," and, "I was sure his forehead was so and so," and,

     "Don't you think his head is so and so?" And so everybody walked

     around and about the old hero, who lay half reclining in his easy

     chair, but well muffled up, and submitting to all this as serenely

     as if he were used to being served so.  One marked feature of

     General Grant's character is his exceeding gentleness, goodness,

     sweetness.  Every time I have been in his presence--lately and

     formerly--my mind was drawn to that feature.  I wonder it has not

     been more spoken of.



     Presently he said, let Gerhardt bring in his clay and work there, if

     Gerhardt would not mind his reclining attitude.  Of course we were

     glad.  A table for the bust was moved up in front of him; the ladies

     left the room; I got a book; Gerhardt went to work; and for an hour

     there was perfect stillness, and for the first time during the day

     the General got a good, sound, peaceful nap.  General Badeau came

     in, and probably interrupted that nap.  He spoke out as strongly as

     the others concerning the great excellence of the likeness.  He had

     some sheets of MS. in his hand, and said, "I've been reading what

     you wrote this morning, General, and it is of the utmost value; it

     solves a riddle that has puzzled men's brains all these years and

     makes the thing clear and rational."  I asked what the puzzle was,

     and he said, "It was why Grant did not immediately lay siege to

     Vicksburg after capturing Port Hudson" (at least that is my

     recollection, now toward midnight, of General Badeau's answer).



The little bust of Grant which Gerhardt worked on that day was widely

reproduced in terra-cotta, and is still regarded by many as the most

nearly correct likeness of Grant.  The original is in possession of the

family.



General Grant worked industriously on his book.  He had a superb memory

and worked rapidly.  Webster & Co. offered to supply him with a

stenographer, and this proved a great relief.  Sometimes he dictated ten

thousand words at a sitting.  It was reported at the time, and it has

been stated since, that Grant did not write the Memoirs himself, but only

made notes, which were expanded by others.  But this is not true.

General Grant wrote or dictated every word of the story himself, then had

the manuscript read aloud to him and made his own revisions.  He wrote

against time, for he knew that his disease was fatal.  Fortunately the

lease of life granted him was longer than he had hoped for, though the

last chapters were written when he could no longer speak, and when

weakness and suffering made the labor a heavy one indeed; but he never

flinched or faltered, never at any time suggested that the work be

finished by another hand.



Early in April General Grant's condition became very alarming, and on the

night of the 3d it was believed he could not live until morning.  But he

was not yet ready to surrender.  He rallied and renewed his task; feebly

at first, but more perseveringly as each day seemed to bring a little

added strength, or perhaps it was only resolution.  Now and then he

appeared depressed as to the quality of his product.  Once Colonel Fred

Grant suggested to Clemens that if he could encourage the General a

little it might be worth while.  Clemens had felt always such a reverence

and awe for the great soldier that he had never dreamed of complimenting

his literature.



"I was as much surprised as Columbus's cook could have been to learn that

Columbus wanted his opinion as to how Columbus was doing his navigating."



He did not hesitate to give it, however, and with a clear conscience.

Grant wrote as he had fought; with a simple, straightforward dignity,

with a style that is not a style at all but the very absence of it, and

therefore the best of all literary methods.  It happened that Clemens had

been comparing some of Grant's chapters with Caesar's Commentaries, and

was able to say, in all sincerity, that the same high merits

distinguished both books: clarity of statement, directness, simplicity,

manifest truthfulness, fairness and justice toward friend and foe alike,

soldierly candor and frankness, and soldierly avoidance of flowery

speech.



"I placed the two books side by side upon the same level," he said, "and

I still think that they belong there.  I learned afterward that General

Grant was pleased with this verdict.  It shows that he was just a man,

just a human being, just an author."



Within two months after the agents had gone to work canvassing for the

Grant Memoirs--which is to say by the 1st of May, 1885--orders for sixty

thousand sets had been received, and on that day Mark Twain, in his note-

book, made a memorandum estimate of the number of books that the country

would require, figuring the grand total at three hundred thousand sets of

two volumes each.  Then he says:



     If these chickens should really hatch according to my account,

     General Grant's royalties will' amount to $420,000, and will make

     the largest single check ever paid an author in the world's history.

     Up to the present time the largest one ever paid was to Macaulay on

     his History of England, L20,000.  If I pay the General in silver

     coin at $12 per pound it will weigh seventeen tons.



Certainly this has a flavor in it of Colonel Sellers, but we shall see by

and by in how far this calculation was justified.



Grant found the society of Mark Twain cheering and comforting, and

Clemens held himself in readiness to go to the dying man at call.  On the

26th of May he makes this memorandum:



     It is curious and dreadful to sit up in this way and talk cheerful

     nonsense to General Grant, and he under sentence of death with that

     cancer.  He says he has made the book too large by 200 pages--not a

     bad fault.  A short time ago we were afraid we would lack 400 of

     being enough.



     To-day talked with General Grant about his and my first great

     Missouri campaign in 1861.  He surprised an empty camp near Florida,

     Missouri, on Salt River, which I had been occupying a day or two

     before.  How near he came to playing the devil with his future

     publisher.



Of course Clemens would amuse the old commander with the tale of his

soldiering, how his company had been chased through the brush and mud by

the very announcement that Grant was coming.  Some word of this got to

the Century editors, who immediately proposed that Mark Twain contribute

to the magazine War Series the story of his share in the Rebellion, and

particularly of his war relations with General Grant.  So the "Private

History of a Campaign that Failed" was prepared as Mark Twain's side-

light on the history of the Rebellion; and if it was not important

history it was at least amusing, and the telling of that tale in Mark

Twain's inimitable fashion must have gone far toward making cheerful

those last sad days of his ancient enemy.



During one of their talks General Grant spoke of the question as to

whether he or Sherman had originated the idea of the march to the sea.

Grant said:



"Neither of us originated the idea of that march.  The enemy did it."



Reports were circulated of estrangements between General Grant and the

Century Company, and between Mark Twain and the Century Company, as a

result of the book decision.  Certain newspapers exploited and magnified

these rumors--some went so far as to accuse Mark Twain of duplicity, and

to charge him with seeking to obtain a vast fortune for himself at the

expense of General Grant and his family.  All of which was the merest

nonsense.  The Century Company, Webster & Co., General Grant, and Mark

Twain individually, were all working harmoniously, and nothing but the

most cordial relations and understanding prevailed.  As to the charge of

unfair dealing on the part of Mark Twain, this was too absurd, even then,

to attract more than momentary attention.  Webster & Co., somewhat later

in the year, gave to the press a clear statement of their publishing

arrangement, though more particularly denying the report that General

Grant had been unable to complete his work.









CLVI



THE CLOSE OF A GREAT CAREER



The Clemens household did not go to Elmira that year until the 27th of

June.  Meantime General Grant had been taken to Mount McGregor, near the

Adirondacks.  The day after Clemens reached Elmira there came a summons

saying that the General had asked to see him.  He went immediately, and

remained several days.  The resolute old commander was very feeble by

this time.  It was three months since he had been believed to be dying,

yet he was still alive, still at work, though he could no longer speak.

He was adding, here and there, a finishing touch to his manuscript,

writing with effort on small slips of paper containing but a few words

each.  His conversation was carried on in the same way.  Mark Twain

brought back a little package of those precious slips, and some of them

are still preserved.  The writing is perfectly legible, and shows no

indication of a trembling hand.



On one of these slips is written:



     There is much more that I could do if I was a well man.  I do not

     write quite as clearly as I could if well.  If I could read it over

     myself many little matters of anecdote and incident would suggest

     themselves to me.



On another:



     Have you seen any portion of the second volume?  It is up to the

     end, or nearly so.  As much more work as I have done to-day will

     finish it.  I have worked faster than if I had been well.  I have

     used my three boys and a stenographer.



And on still another:



     If I could have two weeks of strength I could improve it very much.

     As I am, however, it will have to go about as it is, with

     verifications by the boys and by suggestions which will enable me to

     make a point clear here and there.



Certainly no campaign was ever conducted with a braver heart.  As long as

his fingers could hold a pencil he continued at his task.  Once he asked

if any estimate could now be made of what portion would accrue to his

family from the publication.  Clemens's prompt reply, that more than one

hundred thousand sets had been sold, and that already the amount of his

share, secured by safe bonds, exceeded one hundred and fifty thousand

dollars, seemed to give him deep comfort.  Clemens told him that the

country was as yet not one-third canvassed, and that without doubt there

turns would be twice as much more by the end of the year.  Grant made no

further inquiry, and probably never again mentioned the subject to any

one.



When Clemens left, General Grant was sitting, fully dressed, with a shawl

about his shoulders, pencil and paper beside him.  It was a picture that

would never fade from the memory.  In a later memorandum he says:



     I then believed he would live several months.  He was still adding

     little perfecting details to his book, and preface, among other

     things.  He was entirely through a few days later.  Since then the

     lack of any strong interest to employ his mind has enabled the

     tedious weariness to kill him.  I think his book kept him alive

     several months.  He was a very great man and superlatively good.



This note was made July 23, 1885, at 10 A.M., on receipt of the news that

General Grant was dead.  To Henry Ward Beecher, Clemens wrote:



     One day he put his pencil aside and said there was nothing more to

     do.  If I had been there I could have foretold the shock that struck

     the world three days later.



It can be truly said that all the nation mourned.  General Grant had no

enemies, political or sectional, in those last days.  The old soldier

battling with a deadly disease, yet bravely completing his task, was a

figure at once so pathetic and so noble that no breath of animosity

remained to utter a single word that was not kind.



Memorial services were held from one end of the country to the other.

Those who had followed him in peace or war, those who had fought beside

him or against him, alike paid tribute to his memory.  Twichell, from the

mountains of Vermont, wrote:



     I suppose I have said to Harmony forty times since I got up here,

     "How I wish I could see Mark!" My notion is that between us we could

     get ourselves expressed.  I have never known any one who could help

     me read my own thoughts in such a case as you can and have done many

     a time, dear old fellow.



     I'd give more to sit on a log with you in the woods this afternoon,

     while we twined a wreath together for Launcelot's grave, than

     to hear any conceivable eulogy of him pronounced by mortal lips.



The death of Grant so largely and so suddenly augmented the orders for

his Memoirs that it seemed impossible to get the first volume printed in

time for the delivery, which had been promised for December 1st.  J. J.

Little had the contract of manufacture, and every available press and

bindery was running double time to complete the vast contract.



In the end more than three hundred thousand sets of two volumes each were

sold, and between four hundred and twenty and four hundred and fifty

thousand dollars was paid to Mrs. Grant.  The first check of two hundred

thousand dollars, drawn February 27, 1886, remains the largest single

royalty check in history.  Mark Twain's prophecy had been almost exactly

verified.









CLVII



MINOR MATTERS OF A GREAT YEAR



The Grant episode, so important in all its phases, naturally overshadowed

other events of 1885.  Mark Twain was so deeply absorbed in this great

publishing enterprise that he wasted little thought or energy in other

directions.



Yet there are a few minor things that it seems worth while to remember.

Howells has told something of the Authors' Reading given for the

Longfellow Memorial, an entertainment managed by George Parsons Lathrop,

though Howells justly claims the glory of having fixed the price of

admission at five dollars.  Then he recalls a pleasing anecdote of

Charles Eliot Norton, who introduced the attractions.



Norton presided, and when it came Clemens's turn to read he introduced

him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give, but before

he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which are the

peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact.  He was reminded of

Darwin's delight in Mark Twain, and how when he came from his long day's

exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a volume of

Mark Twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him, and

whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt

secure of a good night's rest from it.  A sort of blank ensued which

Clemens filled in the only possible way.  He said he should always be

glad he had contributed to the repose of that great man, to whom science

owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every breast to

burst forth, he began to read.



Howells tells of Mark Twain's triumph on this occasion, and in a letter

at the time he wrote: "You simply straddled down to the footlights and

took that house up in the hollow of your hand and tickled it."



Howells adds that the show netted seventeen hundred dollars.  This was

early in May.



Of literary work, beyond the war paper, the "Private History of a

Campaign that Failed" (published December, 1885), Clemens appears to have

done very little.  His thoughts were far too busy with plans for

furthering the sale of the great military Memoir to follow literary

ventures of his own.  At one time he was impelled to dictate an

autobiography--Grant's difficulties in his dying hour suggesting this--

and he arranged with Redpath, who was no longer a lecture agent and

understood stenography, to co-operate with him in the work.  He dictated

a few chapters, but he was otherwise too much occupied to continue.

Also, he was unused to dictation, and found it hard and the result

unsatisfactory.



Two open communications from Mark Twain that year deserve to be

remembered.  One of these; unsigned, was published in the Century

Magazine, and expressed the need for a "universal tinker," the man who

can accept a job in a large household or in a community as master of all

trades, with sufficient knowledge of each to be ready to undertake

whatever repairs are likely to be required in the ordinary household,

such as--"to put in windowpanes, mend gas leaks, jack-plane the edges of

doors that won't shut, keep the waste-pipe and other water-pipe joints,

glue and otherwise repair havoc done in furniture, etc."  The letter was

signed X. Y. Z., and it brought replies from various parts of the world.

None of the applicants seemed universally qualified, but in Kansas City a

business was founded on the idea, adopting "The Universal Tinker" as its

firm name.



The other letter mentioned was written to the 'Christian Union', inspired

by a tale entitled, "What Ought We to Have Done?"  It was a tale

concerning the government of children; especially concerning the

government of one child--John Junior--a child who, as it would appear

from the tale, had a habit of running things pretty much to his own

notion.  The performance of John junior, and of his parents in trying to

manage him, stirred Mark Twain considerably--it being "enough to make a

body's blood boil," as he confesses--and it impelled him to set down

surreptitiously his impressions of what would have happened to John

Junior as a member of the Clemens household.  He did not dare to show the

communication to Mrs. Clemens before he sent it, for he knew pretty well

what its fate would be in that case.  So he took chances and printed it

without her knowledge.  The letter was published July 16, 1885.  It is

too long to be included entire, but it is too illuminating to be

altogether omitted.  After relating, in considerable detail, Mrs.

Clemens's method of dealing with an unruly child--the gentleness yet

firmness of her discipline--he concludes:



     The mother of my children adores them--there is no milder term for

     it--and they worship her; they even worship anything which the touch

     of her hand has made sacred.  They know her for the best and truest

     friend they have ever had, or ever shall have; they know her for one

     who never did them a wrong, and cannot do them a wrong; who never

     told them a lie, nor the shadow of one; who never deceived them by

     even an ambiguous gesture; who never gave them an unreasonable

     command, nor ever contented herself with anything short of a perfect

     obedience; who has always treated them as politely and considerately

     as she would the best and oldest in the land, and has always

     required of them gentle speech and courteous conduct toward all, of

     whatsoever degree with whom they chanced to come in contact; they

     know her for one whose promise, whether of reward or punishment, is

     gold, and always worth its face, to the uttermost farthing.  In a

     word, they know her, and I know her, for the best and dearest mother

     that lives--and by a long, long way the wisest....



     In all my life I have never made a single reference to my wife in

     print before, as far as I can remember, except once in the

     dedication of a book; and so, after these fifteen years of silence,

     perhaps I may unseal my lips this one time without impropriety or

     indelicacy.  I will institute one other novelty: I will send this

     manuscript to the press without her knowledge and without asking her

     to edit it.  This will save it from getting edited into the stove.



Susy's biography refers to this incident at considerable length.  She

states that her father had misgivings after he had sent it to the

Christian Union, and that he tried to recall the manuscript, but found it

too late.  She sets down some comments of her own on her mother's

government, then tells us of the appearance of the article:



When the Christian Union reached the farm and papa's article in it, all

ready and waiting to be read to mama, papa hadn't the courage to show it

to her (for he knew she wouldn't like it at all) at first, and he didn't,

but he might have let it go and never let her see it; but finally he gave

his consent to her seeing it, and told Clara and I we could take it to

her, which we did with tardiness, and we all stood around mama while she

read it, all wondering what she would say and think about it.



She was too much surprised (and pleased privately too) to say much at

first; but, as we all expected, publicly (or rather when she remembered

that this article was to be read by every one that took the Christian

Union) she was rather shocked and a little displeased.



Susy goes on to tell that the article provoked a number of letters, most

of them pleasant ones, but some of them of quite another sort.  One of

the latter fell into her mother's hands, after which there was general

regret that the article had been printed, and the subject was no longer

discussed at Quarry Farm.



Susy's biography is a unique record.  It was a sort of combined memoir

and journal, charming in its innocent frankness and childish insight.

She used to keep it under her pillow, and after she was asleep the

parents would steal it out and find a tender amusement and pathos in its

quaint entries.  It is a faithful record so far as it goes, and the

period it covers is an important one; for it presents a picture of Mark

Twain in the fullness of his manhood, in the golden hour of his fortune.

Susy's beginning has a special value here:--[Susy's' spelling and

punctuation are preserved.]



     We are a very happy family!  We consist of papa, mama, Jean, Clara

     and me.  It is papa I am writing about, and I shall have no trouble

     in not knowing what to say about him, as he is a very striking

     character.  Papa's appearance has been described many times, but

     very incorrectly; he has beautiful curly grey hair, not any too

     thick, or any too long, just right; a Roman nose, which greatly

     improves the beauty of his features, kind blue eyes, and a small

     mustache, he has a wonderfully shaped head, and profile, he has a

     very good figure in short he is an extraordinarily fine looking man.

     All his features are perfect, except that he hasn't extraordinary

     teeth.  His complexion is very fair, and he doesn't ware a beard:



     He is a very good man, and a very funny one; he has got a temper but

     we all of us have in this family.  He is the loveliest man I ever

     saw, or ever hope to see, and oh so absent-minded!



That this is a fair statement of the Clemens home, and the truest picture

of Mark Twain at fifty that has been preserved, cannot be doubted.  His

hair was iron-gray, not entirely white at this time, the auburn tints

everywhere mingled with the shining white that later would mantle it like

a silver crown.  He did not look young for his years, but he was still

young, always young--indestructibly young in spirit and bodily vigor.

Susy tells how that summer he blew soap-bubbles for the children, filling

the bubbles with tobacco smoke; how he would play with the cats, and come

clear down from his study on the hill to see how "Sour Mash," then a

kitten, was getting along; also how he wrote a poem for Jean's donkey,

Cadichon (which they made Kiditchin): She quotes the poem:



                         KIDITCHIN



                    O du lieb' Kiditchin

                    Du bist ganz bewitchin,

                    Waw- - - -he!



                    In summer days Kiditchin

                    Thou'rt dear from nose to britchin

                    Waw----he!



                    No dought thoult get a switchin

                    When for mischief thou'rt itchin'

                    Waw- - - -he!



                    But when you're good Kiditchin

                    You shall feast in James's kitchin

                    Waw- - - -he!



                    O now lift up thy song

                    Thy noble note prolong

                    Thou living Chinese gong!

                    Waw---he!  waw---he waw

                    Sweetest donkey man ever saw.





Clemens undertook to ride Kiditchin one day, to show the children how it

should be done, but Kiditchin resented this interference and promptly

flung him over her head.  He thought she might have been listening to the

poem he had written of her.



Susy's discovery that the secret of her biography was known is shown by

the next entry, and the touch of severity in it was probably not entirely

unconscious:



     Papa said the other day, "I am a mugwump and a mugwump is pure from

     the marrow out."  (Papa knows that I am writing this biography of

     him, and he said this for it.) He doesn't like to go to church at

     all, why I never understood, until just now.  He told us the other

     day that he couldn't bear to hear anyone talk but himself, but that

     he could listen to himself talk for hours without getting tired, of

     course he said this in joke, but I've no doubt it was founded on

     truth.



Susy's picture of life at Quarry Farm at this period is realistic and

valuable--too valuable to be spared from this biography:



     There are eleven cats at the farm here now.  Papa's favorite is a

     little tortoise-shell kitten he has named "Sour Mash," and a little

     spotted one "Fannie."  It is very pretty to see what papa calls the

     cat procession; it was formed in this way.  Old Minniecat headed,

     (the mother of all the cats) next to her came aunt Susie, then Clara

     on the donkey, accompanied by a pile of cats, then papa and Jean

     hand in hand and a pile of cats brought up in the rear, mama and I

     made up the audience.



     Our varius occupations are as follows.  Papa rises about 1/2  past 7

     in the morning, breakfasts at eight, writes, plays tennis with Clara

     and me and tries to make the donkey go, in the morning; does varius

     things in P.M., and in the evening plays tennis with Clara and me

     and amuses Jean and the donkey.



     Mama rises about 1/4 to eight, breakfasts at eight, teaches Jean

     German reading from 9-10; reads German with me from 10-11.  Then she

     reads studdies or visits with aunt Susie for a while, and then she

     reads to Clara and I till lunch time things connected with English

     history (for we hope to go to England next summer) while we sew.

     Then we have lunch.  She studdies for about half an hour or visits

     with aunt Susie, then reads to us an hour or more, then studdies

     writes reads and rests till supper time.  After supper she sits out

     on the porch and works till eight o'clock, from eight o'clock to

     bedtime she plays whist with papa and after she has retired she

     reads and studdies German for a while.



     Clara and I do most everything from practicing to donkey riding and

     playing tag.  While Jean's time is spent in asking mama what she can

     have to eat.



It is impossible, at this distance, to convey all that the farm meant to

the children during the summers of their infancy and childhood and

girlhood which they spent there.  It was the paradise, the dreamland they

looked forward to during all the rest of the year.  Through the long,

happy months there they grew strong and brown, and drank deeply of the

joy of life.  Their cousins Julia, Jervis, and Ida Langdon ranged about

their own ages and were almost their daily companions.  Their games were

mainly of the out-of-doors; the woods and meadows and hillside pastures

were their playground.  Susy was thirteen when she began her diary; a

gentle, thoughtful, romantic child.  One afternoon she discovered a

wonderful tangle of vines and bushes between the study and the sunset--a

rare hiding-place.  She ran breathlessly to her aunt:



"Can I have it?  Can Clara and I have it all for our own?"



The petition was granted, of course, and the place was named Helen's

Bower, for they were reading Thaddeus of Warsaw and the name appealed to

Susy's poetic fancy.  Then Mrs. Clemens conceived the idea of building a

house for the children just beyond the bower.  It was a complete little

cottage when finished, with a porch and with furnishings contributed by

friends and members of the family.  There was a stove--a tiny affair, but

practical--dishes, table, chairs, shelves, and a broom.  The little house

was named Ellerslie, out of Grace Aguilar's Days of Robert Bruce, and

became one of the children's most beloved possessions.  But alas for

Helen's Bower!  A workman was sent to clear away the debris after the

builders, and being a practical man, he cut away Helen's Bower--destroyed

it utterly.  Susy first discovered the vandalism, and came rushing to the

house in a torrent of sorrow.  For her the joy of life seemed ended, and

it was long before she could be comforted.  But Ellerslie in time

satisfied her hunger for retreat, became, in fact, the nucleus around

which the children's summer happiness centered.



To their elders the farm remained always the quiet haven.  Once to

Orion's wife Clemens wrote:



     This is a superb Sunday .  .  .  .



     The city in the valley is purple with shade, as seen from up here at

     the study.  The Cranes are reading and loafing in the canvas-

     curtained summer-house, fifty yards away, on a higher (the highest)

     point; the cats are loafing over at Ellerslie, which is the

     children's estate and dwelling house in their own private grounds

     (by deed from Susie Crane), a hundred yards from the study, among

     the clover and young oaks and willows.  Livy is down at the house,

     but I shall now go and bring her up to the Cranes to help us occupy

     the lounges and hammocks, whence a great panorama of distant hills

     and valley and city is seeable.  The children have gone on a lark

     through the neighboring hills and woods, Susie and Clara horseback

     and Jean, driving a buggy, with the coachman for comrade and

     assistant at need.  It is a perfect day indeed.



The ending of each year's summer brought only regret.  Clemens would

never take away all his things.  He had an old superstition that to leave

some article insured return.  Mrs. Clemens also left something--her

heart's content.  The children went around bidding various objects good-

by and kissed the gates of Ellerslie too.









CLVIII



MARK TWAIN AT FIFTY



Mark Twain's fiftieth birthday was one of the pleasantly observed events

of that year.  There was no special celebration, but friends sent kindly

messages, and The Critic, then conducted by Jeannette and Joseph Gilder,

made a feature of it.  Miss Gilder wrote to Oliver Wendell Holmes and

invited some verses, which with his never-failing kindliness he sent,

though in his accompanying note he said:



"I had twenty-three letters spread out on my table for answering, all

marked immediate, when your note came."



Dr. Holmes's stanzas are full of his gentle spirit:





                    TO MARK TWAIN



                    (On his fiftieth birthday)



                    Ah, Clemens, when I saw thee last,

                    We both of us were younger;

                    How fondly mumbling o'er the past

                    Is Memory's toothless hunger!



                    So fifty years have fled, they say,

                    Since first you took to drinking;

                    I mean in Nature's milky way

                    Of course no ill I'm thinking.



                    But while on life's uneven road

                    Your track you've been pursuing,

                    What fountains from your wit have flowed

                    What drinks you have been brewing!



                    I know whence all your magic came,

                    Your secret I've discovered,

                    The source that fed your inward flame,

                    The dreams that round you hovered.



                    Before you learned to bite or munch,

                    Still kicking in your cradle,

                    The Muses mixed a bowl of punch

                    And Hebe seized the ladle.



                    Dear babe, whose fiftieth year to-day

                    Your ripe half-century rounded,

                    Your books the precious draught betray

                    The laughing Nine compounded.



                    So mixed the sweet, the sharp, the strong,

                    Each finds its faults amended,

                    The virtues that to each belong

                    In happiest union blended.



                    And what the flavor can surpass

                    Of sugar, spirit, lemons?

                    So while one health fills every glass

                    Mark Twain for Baby Clemens!



                    OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.





Frank R. Stockton, Charles Dudley Warner, and Joel Chandler Harris sent

pleasing letters.  Warner said:



     You may think it an easy thing to be fifty years old, but you will

     find it's not so easy to stay there, and your next fifty years will

     slip away much faster than those just accomplished.



Many wrote letters privately, of course, and Andrew Lang, like Holmes,

sent a poem that has a special charm.





                         FOR MARK TWAIN



                    To brave Mark Twain, across the sea,

                    The years have brought his jubilee.

                    One hears it, half in pain,

                    That fifty years have passed and gone

                    Since danced the merry star that shone

                    Above the babe Mark Twain.



                    We turn his pages and we see

                    The Mississippi flowing free;

                    We turn again and grin

                    O'er all Tom Sawyer did and planned

                    With him of the ensanguined hand,

                    With Huckleberry Finn!



                    Spirit of Mirth, whose chime of bells

                    Shakes on his cap, and sweetly swells

                    Across the Atlantic main,

                    Grant that Mark's laughter never die,

                    That men through many a century

                    May chuckle o'er Mark Twain!





Assuredly Mark Twain was made happy by these attentions; to Dr. Holmes he

wrote:



DEAR DR. HOLMES,--I shall never be able to tell you the half of how

proud you have made me.  If I could you would say you were nearly paid

for the trouble you took.  And then the family: If I could convey the

electrical surprise and gratitude and exaltation of the wife and the

children last night, when they happened upon that Critic where I had,

with artful artlessness, spread it open and retired out of view to see

what would happen--well, it was great and fine and beautiful to see, and

made me feel as the victor feels when the shouting hosts march by: and if

you also could have seen it you would have said the account was squared.

For I have brought them up in your company, as in the company of a warm

and friendly and beneficent but far-distant sun; and so, for you to do

this thing was for the sun to send down out of the skies the miracle of a

special ray and transfigure me before their faces.  I knew what that poem

would be to them; I knew it would raise me up to remote and shining

heights in their eyes, to very fellowship with the chambered Nautilus

itself, and that from that fellowship they could never more dissociate me

while they should live; and so I made sure to be by when the surprise

should come.



Charles Dudley Warner is charmed with the poem for its own felicitous

sake; and so indeed am I, but more because it has drawn the sting of my

fiftieth year; taken away the pain of it, the grief of it, the somehow

shame of it, and made me glad and proud it happened.



               With reverence and affection,

                         Sincerely yours,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





So Samuel Clemens had reached the half-century mark; reached it in what

seemed the fullness of success from every viewpoint.  If he was not yet

the foremost American man of letters, he was at least the most widely

known he sat upon the highest mountain-top.  Furthermore, it seemed to

him that fortune was showering her gifts into his lap.  His unfortunate

investments were now only as the necessary experiments that had led him

to larger successes.  As a publisher, he was already the most conspicuous

in the world, and he contemplated still larger ventures: a type-setting

machine patent, in which he had invested, and now largely controlled, he

regarded as the chief invention of the age, absolutely certain to yield

incalculable wealth.  His connection with the Grant family had associated

him with an enterprise looking to the building of a railway from

Constantinople to the Persian Gulf.  Charles A.  Dana, of the Sun, had

put him in the way of obtaining for publication the life of the Pope, Leo

XIII, officially authorized by the Pope himself, and this he regarded as

a certain fortune.



Now that the tide had turned he felt no hesitancy in reckoning a fortune

from almost any venture.  The Grant book, even on the liberal terms

allowed to the author, would yield a net profit of one hundred and fifty

thousand dollars to its publishers.  Huck Finn would yield fifty thousand

dollars more.  The sales of his other books had considerably increased.

Certainly, at fifty, Mark Twain's fortunes were at flood-tide; buoyant

and jubilant, he was floating on the topmost wave.  If there were

undercurrents and undertow they were down somewhere out of sight.  If

there were breakers ahead, they were too far distant to be heard.  So

sure was he of the triumphant consummation of every venture that to a

friend at his home one night he said:



"I am frightened at the proportions of my prosperity.  It seems to me

that whatever I touch turns to gold."









CLIX



THE LIFE OF THE POPE



As Mark Twain in the earlier days of his marriage had temporarily put

aside authorship to join in a newspaper venture, so now again literature

had dropped into the background, had become an avocation, while financial

interests prevailed.  There were two chief ventures--the business of

Charles L. Webster & Co.  and the promotion of the Paige type-setting

machine.  They were closely identified in fortunes, so closely that in

time the very existence of each depended upon the success of the other;

yet they were quite distinct, and must be so treated in this story.



The success of the Grant Life had given the Webster business an immense

prestige.  It was no longer necessary to seek desirable features for

publication.  They came uninvited.  Other war generals preparing their

memoirs naturally hoped to appear with their great commander.

McClellan's Own Story was arranged for without difficulty.  A Genesis of

the Civil War, by Gen. Samuel Wylie Crawford, was offered and accepted.

General Sheridan's Memoirs were in preparation, and negotiations with

Webster & Co.  for their appearance were not delayed.  Probably neither

Webster nor Clemens believed that the sale of any of these books would

approach those of the Grant Life, but they expected them to be large, for

the Grant book had stimulated the public taste for war literature, and

anything bearing the stamp of personal battle experience was considered

literary legal-tender.



Moreover, these features, and even the Grant book itself, seemed likely

to dwindle in importance by the side of The Life of Pope Leo XIII., who

in his old and enfeebled age had consented to the preparation of a

memoir, to be published with his sanction and blessing.--[By Bernard

O'Reilly, D.D., LL.D.  "Written with the Encouragement, Approbation, and

Blessings of His Holiness the Pope."]--Clemens and Webster--every one,

in fact, who heard of the project--united in the belief that no book,

with the exception of the Holy Scripture itself or the Koran, would have

a wider acceptance than the biography of the Pope.  It was agreed by good

judges--and they included Howells and Twichell and even the shrewd

general agents throughout the country--that every good Catholic would

regard such a book not only as desirable, but as absolutely necessary to

his salvation.  Howells, recalling Clemens's emotions of this time,

writes:



     He had no words in which to paint the magnificence of the project or

     to forecast its colossal success.  It would have a currency bounded

     only by the number of Catholics in Christendom.  It would be

     translated into every language which was anywhere written or

     printed; it would be circulated literally in every country of the

     globe.



The formal contract for this great undertaking was signed in Rome in

April, 1886, and Webster immediately prepared to go over to consult with

his Holiness in person as to certain details, also, no doubt, for the

newspaper advertising which must result from such an interview.



It was decided to carry a handsome present to the Pope in the form of a

specially made edition of the Grant Memoirs in a rich-casket, and it was

Clemens's idea that the binding of the book should be solid gold--this to

be done by Tiffany at an estimated cost of about three thousand dollars.

In the end, however, the binding was not gold, but the handsomest that

could be designed of less precious and more appropriate materials.



Webster sailed toward the end of June, and was warmly received and highly

honored in Rome.  The great figures of the Grant success had astonished

Europe even more than America, where spectacular achievements were more

common.  That any single publication should pay a profit to author and

publisher of six hundred thousand dollars was a thing which belonged with

the wonders of Aladdin's garden.  It was natural, therefore, that

Webster, who had rubbed the magic lamp with this result, who was Mark

Twain's partner, and who had now traveled across the seas to confer with

the Pope himself, should be received with royal honors.  In letters

written at the time, Webster relates how he found it necessary to have an

imposing carriage and a footman to maintain the dignity of his mission,

and how, after various impressive formalities, he was granted a private

audience, a very special honor indeed.  Webster's letter gives us a

picture of his Holiness which is worth preserving.



     We--[Mrs. Webster, who, the reader will remember, was Annie Moffett,

     a daughter of Pamela Clemens, was included in the invitation to the

     Presence Chamber.]--found ourselves in a room perhaps twenty-five by

     thirty-five feet; the furniture was gilt, upholstered in light-red

     silk, and the side-walls were hung with the same material.  Against

     the wall by which we entered and in the middle space was a large

     gilt throne chair, upholstered in red plush, and upon it sat a man

     bowed with age; his hair was silvery white and as pure as the driven

     snow.  His head was partly covered with a white skullcap; he was

     dressed in a long white cassock which reached to his feet, which

     rested upon a red-plush cushion and were inclosed in red embroidered

     slippers with a design of a cross.  A golden chain was about his

     neck and suspended by it in his lap was a gold cross set in precious

     stones.  Upon a finger of his right hand was a gold ring with an

     emerald setting nearly an inch in diameter.  His countenance was

     smiling, and beamed with benevolence.  His face at once impressed us

     as that of a noble, pure man who could not do otherwise than good.



     This was the Pope of Rome, and as we advanced, making the three

     genuflexions prescribed by etiquette, he smiled benignly upon us.

     We advanced and, kneeling at his feet, kissed the seal upon his

     ring.  He took us each by the hand repeatedly during the audience

     and made us perfectly at our ease.



They remained as much as half an hour in the Presence; and the Pope

conversed on a variety of subjects, including the business failure of

General Grant, his last hours, and the great success of his book.  The

figures seemed to him hardly credible, and when Webster assured him that

already a guaranteed sale of one hundred thousand copies of his own

biography had been pledged by the agents he seemed even more astonished.

"We in Italy cannot comprehend such things," he said.  "I know you do

great work in America; I know you have done a great and noble work in

regard to General Grant's book, but that my Life should have such a sale

seems impossible."



He asked about their home, their children, and was in every way the

kindly, gentle-hearted man that his pictured face has shown him.  Then he

gave them his final blessing and the audience closed.



     We each again kissed the seal on his ring.  As Annie was about to

     kiss it he suddenly withdrew his hand and said, "And will you, a

     little Protestant, kiss the Pope's ring?"  As he said this, his face

     was all smiles, and mischief was clearly delineated upon it.  He

     immediately put back his hand and she kissed the ring.  We now

     withdrew, backing out and making three genuflexions as before.  Just

     as we reached the door he called to Dr. O'Reilly, "Now don't praise

     me too much; tell the truth, tell the truth."









CLX



A GREAT PUBLISHER AT HOME



Men are likely to be spoiled by prosperity, to be made arrogant, even

harsh.  Success made Samuel Clemens merely elate, more kindly, more

humanly generous.  Every day almost he wrote to Webster, suggesting some

new book or venture, but always considerately, always deferring to

suggestions from other points of view.  Once, when it seemed to him that

matters were not going as well as usual, a visit from Webster showed him

that it was because of his own continued absence from the business that

he did not understand.  Whereupon he wrote:



     DEAR CHARLEY,--Good--it's all good news.  Everything is on the

     pleasantest possible basis now, and is going to stay so.  I blame

     myself in not looking in on you oftener in the past--that would have

     prevented all trouble.  I mean to stand to my duty better now.



At another time, realizing the press of responsibility, and that Webster

was not entirely well, he sent a warning from Mrs. Clemens against

overwork.  He added:



     Your letter shows that you need such a warning.  So I warn you

     myself to look after that.  Overwork killed Mr. Langdon and it can

     kill you.



Clemens found his own cares greatly multiplied.  His connection with the

firm was widely known, and many authors sent him their manuscripts or

wrote him personal letters concerning them.  Furthermore, he was beset by

all the cranks and beggars in Christendom.  His affairs became so

numerous at length that he employed a business agent, F. G. Whitmore, to

relieve him of a part of his burden.  Whitmore lived close by, and was a

good billiard-player.  Almost anything from the morning mail served as an

excuse to send for Whitmore.



Clemens was fond of affairs when they were going well; he liked the game

of business, especially when it was pretentious and showily prosperous.

It is probable that he was never more satisfied with his share of fortune

than just at this time.  Certainly his home life was never happier.

Katie Leary, for thirty years in the family service, has set down some

impressions of that pleasant period.



     Mr. Clemens was a very affectionate father.  He seldom left the

     house at night, but would read to the family, first to the children

     until bedtime, afterward to Mrs. Clemens.  He usually read Browning

     to her.  They were very fond of it.  The children played charades a

     great deal, and he was wonderful at that game and always helped

     them.  They were very fond of private theatricals.  Every Saturday

     of their lives they had a temporary stage put up in the school-room

     and we all had to help.  Gerhardt painted the scenery.  They

     frequently played the balcony scene from "Romeo and Juliet" and

     several plays they wrote themselves.  Now and then we had a big

     general performance of "The Prince and the Pauper."  That would be

     in the library and the dining-room with the folding-doors open.  The

     place just held eighty-four chairs, and the stage was placed back

     against the conservatory.  The children were crazy about acting and

     we all enjoyed it as much as they did, especially Mr. Clemens, who

     was the best actor of all.  I had a part, too, and George.  I have

     never known a happier household than theirs was during those years.



     Mr. Clemens spent most of his time up in the billiard-room, writing

     or playing billiards.  One day when I went in, and he was shooting

     the balls around the tables, I noticed smoke coming up from the

     hearth.  I called Patrick, and John O'Neill, the gardener, and we

     began taking up the hearth to see what was the matter.  Mr. Clemens

     kept on playing billiards right along and paid no attention to what

     we were doing.  Finally, when we got the hearth up, a lot of flame

     and smoke came out into the room.  The house was on fire.  Mr.

     Clemens noticed then what we were about, and went over to the corner

     where there were some bottle fire-extinguishers.  He took one down

     and threw it into the flames.  This put them out a good deal, and he

     took up his cue, went back to the table, and began to shoot the

     balls around again as if nothing had happened.  Mrs. Clemens came in

     just then and said, "Why, the house is afire!"



     "Yes, I know it," he said, but went on playing.



     We had a telephone and it didn't work very well.  It annoyed him a

     good deal and sometimes he'd say:



     "I'll tear it out."



     One day he tried to call up Mrs. Dr. Tafft.  He could not hear

     plainly and thought he was talking to central.  "Send down and take

     this d---thing out of here," he said; "I'm tired of it."  He was

     mad, and using a good deal of bad language.  All at once he heard

     Mrs. Dr. Tafft say, "Oh, Mr. Clemens, good morning."  He said, "Why,

     Mrs. Tafft, I have just come to the telephone.  George, our butler,

     was here before me and I heard him swearing as I came up.  I shall

     have to talk to him about it."



     Mrs. Tafft often told it on him.--[ Mark Twain once wrote to the

     telephone management: "The time is coming very soon when the

     telephone will be a perfect instrument, when proximity will no

     longer be a hindrance to its performance, when, in fact, one will

     hear a man who is in the next block just as easily and comfortably

     as he would if that man were in San Francisco."]

     Mrs. Clemens, before I went there, took care of his desk, but little

     by little I began to look after it when she was busy at other

     things.  Finally I took care of it altogether, but he didn't know it

     for a long time.  One morning he caught me at it.  "What are you

     doing here?" he asked.



     "Dusting, Mr. Clemens," I said.



     "You have no business here," he said, very mad.



     "I've been doing it for a year, Mr. Clemens," I said.  "Mrs. Clemens

     told me to do it."



     After that, when he missed anything--and he missed things often--he

     would ring for me.  "Katie," he would say, "you have lost that

     manuscript."



     "Oh, Mr. Clemens,", I would say, "I am sure I didn't touch it."



     "Yes, you did touch it, Katie.  You put it in the fire.  It is

     gone."



     He would scold then, and fume a great deal.  Then he would go over

     and mark out with his toe on the carpet a line which I was never to

     cross.  "Katie," he would say, "you are never to go nearer to my

     desk than that line.  That is the dead-line."  Often after he had

     scolded me in the morning he would come in in the evening where I

     was dressing Mrs. Clemens to go out and say, "Katie, I found that

     manuscript."  And I would say, "Mr. Clemens, I felt so bad this

     morning that I wanted to go away."



     He had a pipe-cleaner which he kept on a high shelf.  It was an

     awful old dirty one, and I didn't know that he ever used it.  I took

     it to the balcony which was built out into the woods and threw it

     away as far as I could throw it.  Next day he asked, "Katie, did you

     see my pipe-cleaner?  You did see it; I can tell by your looks."



     I said, "Yes, Mr. Clemens, I threw it away."



     "Well," he said, "it was worth a thousand dollars," and it seemed so

     to me, too, before he got done scolding about it.



It is hard not to dwell too long on the home life of this period.  One

would like to make a long chapter out of those play-acting evenings

alone.  They remained always fresh in Mark Twain's memory.  Once he wrote

of them:



     We dined as we could, probably with a neighbor, and by quarter to

     eight in the evening the hickory fire in the hall was pouring a

     sheet of flame up the chimney, the house was in a drench of gas-

     light from the ground floor up, the guests were arriving, and there

     was a babble of hearty greetings, with not a voice in it that was

     not old and familiar and affectionate; and when the curtain went up

     we looked out from the stage upon none but faces that were dear to

     us, none but faces that were lit up with welcome for us.









CLXI



HISTORY: MAINLY BY SUSY



Suzy, in her biography, which she continued through this period, writes:



     Mama and I have both been very much troubled of late because papa,

     since he had been publishing General Grant's books, has seemed to

     forget his own books and works entirely; and the other evening, as

     papa and I were promonading up and down the library, he told me that

     he didn't expect to write but one more book, and then he was ready

     to give up work altogether, die, or, do anything; he said that he

     had written more than he had ever expected to, and the only book

     that he had been pertickularly anxious to write was one locked up in

     the safe downstairs, not yet published.



The book locked in the safe was Captain Stormfield, and the one he

expected to write was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.  He

had already worked at it in a desultory way during the early months of

1886, and once wrote of it to Webster:



     I have begun a book whose scene is laid far back in the twilight of

     tradition; I have saturated myself with the atmosphere of the day

     and the subject and got myself into the swing of the work.  If I peg

     away for some weeks without a break I am safe.



But he could not peg away.  He had too many irons in the fire for that.

Matthew Arnold had criticized General Grant's English, and Clemens

immediately put down other things to rush to his hero's defense.  He

pointed out that in Arnold's criticism there were no less than "two

grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and

slovenly English," and said:



     There is that about the sun which makes us forget his spots, and

     when we think of General Grant our pulses quicken and his grammar

     vanishes; we only remember that this is the simple soldier, who, all

     untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an

     art surpassing the art of the schools, and put into them a something

     which will still bring to American ears, as long as America shall

     last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching

     hosts.--[Address to Army and Navy Club.  For full text see

     Appendix]



Clemens worked at the Yankee now and then, and Howells, when some of the

chapters were read to him, gave it warm approval and urged its

continuance.



Howells was often in Hartford at this time.  Webster & Co.  were planning

to publish The Library of Humor, which Howells and "Charley" Clark had

edited several years before, and occasional conferences were desirable.

Howells tells us that, after he and Clark had been at great trouble to

get the matter logically and chronologically arranged, Clemens pulled it

all to pieces and threw it together helter-skelter, declaring that there

ought to be no sequence in a book of that sort, any more than in the

average reader's mind; and Howells admits that this was probably the

truer method in a book made for the diversion rather than the instruction

of the reader.



One of the literary diversions of this time was a commentary on a

delicious little book by Caroline B. Le Row--English as She Is Taught--

being a compilation of genuine answers given to examination questions by

pupils in our public schools.  Mark Twain was amused by such definitions

as: "Aborigines, system of mountains"; "Alias--a good man in the Bible";

"Ammonia--the food of the gods," and so on down the alphabet.



Susy, in her biography, mentions that her father at this is time read to

them a little article which he had just written, entitled "Luck," and

that they thought it very good.  It was a story which Twichell had heard

and told to Clemens, who set it down about as it came to him.  It was

supposed to be true, yet Clemens seemed to think it too improbable for

literature and laid it away for a number of years.  We shall hear of it

again by and by.



From Susy's memoranda we gather that humanity at this time was to be

healed of all evils and sorrows through "mind cure."



     Papa has been very much interested of late in the "mind-cure"

     theory.  And, in fact, so have we all.  A young lady in town has

     worked wonders by using the "mind cure" upon people; she is

     constantly busy now curing peoples' diseases in this way--and curing

     her own, even, which to me seems the most remarkable of all.



     A little while past papa was delighted with the knowledge of what he

     thought the best way of curing a cold, which was by starving it.

     This starving did work beautifully, and freed him from a great many

     severe colds.  Now he says it wasn't the starving that helped his

     colds, but the trust in the starving, the "mind cure" connected with

     the starving.



     I shouldn't wonder if we finally became firm believers in "mind

     cure."  The next time papa has a cold I haven't a doubt he will send

     for Miss Holden, the young lady who is doctoring in the "mind-cure"

     theory, to cure him of it.



Again, a month later, she writes:



     April 19, 1886.  Yes, the "mind cure" does seem to be working

     wonderfully.  Papa, who has been using glasses now for more than a

     year, has laid them off entirely.  And my near-sightedness is really

     getting better.  It seems marvelous.  When Jean has stomack-ache

     Clara and I have tried to divert her by telling her to lie on her

     side and try "mind cure."  The novelty of it has made her willing to

     try it, and then Clara and I would exclaim about how wonderful it

     was she was getting better.  And she would think it realy was

     finally, and stop crying, to our delight.



     The other day mama went into the library and found her lying on the

     sofa with her back toward the door.  She said, "Why, Jean, what's

     the matter?  Don't you feel well?"  Jean said that she had a little

     stomack-ache, and so thought she would lie down.  Mama said, "Why

     don't you try 'mind cure'?"  "I am," Jean answered.



Howells and Twichell were invited to try the "mind cure," as were all

other friends who happened along.  To the end of his days Clemens would

always have some panacea to offer to allay human distress.  It was a good

trait, when all is said, for it had its root in his humanity.  The "mind

cure" did not provide all the substance of things hoped for, though he

always allowed for it a wide efficacy.  Once, in later years, commenting

on Susy's record, he said:



     The mind cannot heal broken bones, and doubtless there are many

     other physical ills which it cannot heal, but it can greatly help to

     modify the severities of all of them without exception, and there

     are mental and nervous ailments which it can wholly heal without the

     help of physician or surgeon.



Susy records another burning interest of this time:



     Clara sprained her ankle a little while ago by running into a tree

     when coasting, and while she was unable to walk with it she played

     solotaire with cards a great deal.  While Clara was sick and papa

     saw her play solotaire so much he got very much interested in the

     game, and finally began to play it himself a little; then Jean took

     it up, and at last mama even played it occasionally; Jean's and

     papa's love for it rapidly increased, and now Jean brings the cards

     every night to the table and papa and mama help her play, and before

     dinner is at an end papa has gotten a separate pack of cards and is

     playing alone, with great interest.  Mama and Clara next are made

     subject to the contagious solotaire, and there are four

     solotarireans at the table, while you hear nothing but "Fill up the

     place," etc.  It is dreadful!



But a little further along Susy presents her chief subject more

seriously.  He is not altogether absorbed with "mind cure" and solitaire,

or even with making humorous tales.



     Papa has done a great deal in his life I think that is good and very

     remarkable, but I think if he had had the advantages with which he

     could have developed the gifts which he has made no use of in

     writing his books, or in any other way, for peoples' pleasure and

     benefit outside of his own family and intimate friends, he could

     have done more than he has, and a great deal more, even.  He is

     known to the public as a humorist, but he has much more in him that

     is earnest than that is humorous.  He has a keen sense of the

     ludicrous, notices funny stories and incidents, knows how to tell

     them, to improve upon them, and does not forget them.



And again:



     When we are all alone at home nine times out of ten he talks about

     some very earnest subject (with an occasional joke thrown in), and

     he a good deal more often talks upon such subjects than upon the

     other kind.



     He is as much of a philosopher as anything, I think.  I think he

     could have done a great deal in this direction if he had studied

     while young, for he seems to enjoy reasoning out things, no matter

     what; in a great many such directions he has greater ability than in

     the gifts which have made him famous.



It was with the keen eyes and just mind of childhood that Susy estimated,

and there is little to add to her valuation.



Susy's biography came to an end that summer after starting to record a

visit which they all made to Keokuk to see Grandma Clemens.  They went by

way of the Lakes and down the Mississippi from St.  Paul.  A pleasant

incident happened that first evening on the river.  Soon after nightfall

they entered a shoal crossing.  Clemens, standing alone on the hurricane-

deck, heard the big bell forward boom out the call for leads.  Then came

the leadsman's long-drawn chant, once so familiar, the monotonous

repeating in river parlance of the depths of water.  Presently the lead

had found that depth of water signified by his nom de plume and the call

of "Mark Twain, Mark Twain" floated up to him like a summons from the

past.  All at once a little figure came running down the deck, and Clara

confronted him, reprovingly:



"Papa," she said, "I have hunted all over the boat for you.  Don't you

know they are calling for you?"



They remained in Keokuk a week, and Susy starts to tell something of

their visit there.  She begins:



"We have arrived in Keokuk after a very pleasant----"



The sentence remains unfinished.  We cannot know what was the

interruption or what new interest kept her from her task.  We can only

regret that the loving little hand did not continue its pleasant history.

Years later, when Susy had passed from among the things we know, her

father, commenting, said:



     When I look at the arrested sentence that ends the little book it

     seems as if the hand that traced it cannot be far--it is gone for a

     moment only, and will come again and finish it.  But that is a

     dream; a creature of the heart, not of the mind--a feeling, a

     longing, not a mental product; the same that lured Aaron Burr, old,

     gray, forlorn, forsaken, to the pier day after day, week after week,

     there to stand in the gloom and the chill of the dawn, gazing

     seaward through veiling mists and sleet and snow for the ship which

     he knew was gone down, the ship that bore all his treasure--his

     daughter.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext Volume 2, Part 1 of MARK TWAIN,

A BIOGRAPHY 1875-1886 by Albert Bigelow Paine













MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY



By Albert Bigelow Paine







VOLUME II, Part 2: 1886-1900





CLXII



BROWNING, MEREDITH, AND MEISTERSCHAFT



The Browning readings must have begun about this time.  Just what kindled

Mark Twain's interest in the poetry of Robert Browning is not remembered,

but very likely his earlier associations with the poet had something to

do with it.  Whatever the beginning, we find him, during the winter of

1886 and 1887, studiously, even violently, interested in Browning's

verses, entertaining a sort of club or class who gathered to hear his

rich, sympathetic, and luminous reading of the Payleyings--"With Bernard

de Mandeville," "Daniel Bartoli," or "Christopher Smart."  Members of the

Saturday Morning Club were among his listeners and others-friends of the

family.  They were rather remarkable gatherings, and no one of that group

but always vividly remembered the marvelously clear insight which Mark

Twain's vocal personality gave to those somewhat obscure measures.  They

did not all of them realize that before reading a poem he studied it line

by line, even word by word; dug out its last syllable of meaning, so far

as lay within human possibility, and indicated with pencil every shade of

emphasis which would help to reveal the poet's purpose.  No student of

Browning ever more devoutly persisted in trying to compass a master's

intent--in such poems as "Sordello," for instance--than Mark Twain.

Just what permanent benefit he received from this particular passion it

is difficult to know.  Once, at a class-meeting, after finishing "Easter

Day," he made a remark which the class requested him to "write down."

It is recorded on the fly-leaf of Dramatis Personae as follows:



     One's glimpses & confusions, as one reads Browning, remind me of

     looking through a telescope (the small sort which you must move with

     your hand, not clock-work).  You toil across dark spaces which are

     (to your lens) empty; but every now & then a splendor of stars &

     suns bursts upon you and fills the whole field with flame.  Feb.

     23, 1887.



In another note he speaks of the "vague dim flash of splendid hamming-

birds through a fog."  Whatever mental treasures he may or may not have

laid up from Browning there was assuredly a deep gratification in the

discovery of those splendors of "stars and suns" and the flashing

"humming-birds," as there must also have been in pointing out those

wonders to the little circle of devout listeners.  It all seemed so worth

while.



It was at a time when George Meredith was a reigning literary favorite.

There was a Meredith cult as distinct as that of Browning.  Possibly it

exists to-day, but, if so, it is less militant.  Mrs. Clemens and her

associates were caught in the Meredith movement and read Diana of the

Crossways and the Egoist with reverential appreciation.



The Meredith epidemic did not touch Mark Twain.  He read but few novels

at most, and, skilful as was the artistry of the English favorite, he

found his characters artificialities--ingeniously contrived puppets

rather than human beings, and, on the whole, overrated by their creator.

Diana of the Crossways was read aloud, and, listening now and then, he

was likely to say:



"It doesn't seem to me that Diana lives up to her reputation.  The author

keeps telling us how smart she is, how brilliant, but I never seem to

hear her say anything smart or brilliant.  Read me some of Diana's smart

utterances."



He was relentless enough in his criticism of a literature he did not care

for, and he never learned to care for Meredith.



He read his favorite books over and over with an everchanging point of

view.  He re-read Carlyle's French Revolution during the summer at the

farm, and to Howells he wrote:



     How stunning are the changes which age makes in man while he sleeps!

     When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871 I was a

     Girondin; every time I have read it since I have read it

     differently--being influenced & changed, little by little, by life &

     environment (& Taine & St. Simon); & now I lay the book down once

     more, & recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--And not a pale,

     characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat.  Carlyle teaches no such

     gospel, so the change is in me--in my vision of the evidences.



     People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it

     did at all former milestones in their journey.  I wonder how they

     can lie so.  It comes of practice, no doubt.  They would not say

     that of Dickens's or Scott's books.  Nothing remains the same.  When

     a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood it has always

     shrunk; there is no instance of such house being as big as the

     picture in memory & imagination call for.  Shrunk how?  Why, to its

     correct dimensions; the house hasn't altered; this is the first time

     it has been in focus.



     Well, that's loss.  To have house & Bible shrink so, under the

     disillusioning corrected angle, is loss--for a moment.  But there

     are compensations.  You tilt the tube skyward & bring planets &

     comets & corona flames a hundred & fifty thousand miles high into

     the field.  Which I see you have done, & found Tolstoi.  I haven't

     got him in focus yet, but I've got Browning.



In time the Browning passion would wane and pass, and the club was

succeeded by, or perhaps it blended with, a German class which met at

regular intervals at the Clemens home to study "der, die, and das" and

the "gehabt habens" out of Meisterschaft and such other text-books as

Professor Schleutter could provide.  They had monthly conversation days,

when they discussed in German all sorts of things, real and imaginary.

Once Dr. Root, a prominent member, and Clemens had a long wrangle over

painting a house, in which they impersonated two German neighbors.



Clemens finally wrote for the class a three-act play" Meisterschaft"--a

literary achievement for which he was especially qualified, with its

picturesque mixture of German and English and its unfailing humor.  It

seems unlike anything ever attempted before or since.  No one but Mark

Twain could have written it.  It was given twice by the class with

enormous success, and in modified form it was published in the Century

Magazine (January, 1888).  It is included to-day in his "Complete Works,"

but one must have a fair knowledge of German to capture the full delight

of it.--[On the original manuscript Mark Twain wrote: "There is some

tolerably rancid German here and there in this piece.  It is attributable

to the proof-reader."  Perhaps the proof-reader resented this and cut it

out, for it does not appear as published.]



Mark Twain probably exaggerated his sentiments a good deal when in the

Carlyle letter he claimed to be the most rabid of Sansculottes.  It is

unlikely that he was ever very bare-kneed and crimson in his anarchy.  He

believed always that cruelty should be swiftly punished, whether in king

or commoner, and that tyrants should be destroyed.  He was for the people

as against kings, and for the union of labor as opposed to the union of

capital, though he wrote of such matters judicially--not radically.  The

Knights of Labor organization, then very powerful, seemed to Clemens the

salvation of oppressed humanity.  He wrote a vehement and convincing

paper on the subject, which he sent to Howells, to whom it appealed very

strongly, for Howells was socialistic, in a sense, and Clemens made his

appeal in the best and largest sense, dramatizing his conception in a

picture that was to include, in one grand league, labor of whatever form,

and, in the end, all mankind in a final millennium.  Howells wrote that

he had read the essay "with thrills amounting to yells of satisfaction,"

and declared it to be the best thing yet said on the subject.  The essay

closed:



     He [the unionized workman] is here and he will remain.  He is the

     greatest birth of the greatest age the nations of the world have

     known.  You cannot sneer at him--that time has gone by.  He has

     before him the most righteous work that was ever given into the hand

     of man to do; and he will do it.  Yes, he is here; and the question

     is not--as it has been heretofore during a thousand ages--What shall

     we do with him?  For the first time in history we are relieved of

     the necessity of managing his affairs for him.  He is not a broken

     dam this time--he is the Flood!



It must have been about this time that Clemens developed an intense, even

if a less permanent, interest in another matter which was to benefit the

species.  He was one day walking up Fifth Avenue when he noticed the sign



                           PROFESSOR LOISETTE

                            SCHOOL OF MEMORY

               The Instantaneous Art of Never Forgetting



Clemens went inside.  When he came out he had all of Professor Loisette's

literature on "predicating correlation," and for the next several days

was steeping himself in an infusion of meaningless words and figures and

sentences and forms, which he must learn backward and forward and

diagonally, so that he could repeat them awake and asleep in order to

predicate his correlation to a point where remembering the ordinary facts

of life, such as names, addresses, and telephone numbers, would be a mere

diversion.



It was another case of learning the multitudinous details of the

Mississippi River in order to do the apparently simple thing of steering

a boat from New Orleans to St. Louis, and it is fair to say that, for the

time he gave it, he achieved a like success.  He was so enthusiastic over

this new remedy for human distress that within a very brief time he was

sending out a printed letter recommending Loisette to the public at

large.  Here is an extract:



     .  .  .  I had no SYSTEM--and some sort of rational order of

     procedure is, of course, necessary to success in any study.  Well,

     Loisette furnished me a system.  I cannot undertake to say it is the

     best, or the worst, because I don't know what the other systems are.

     Loisette, among other cruelties, requires you to memorize a great

     long string of words that, haven't any apparent connection or

     meaning--there are perhaps 500 of these words, arranged in maniacal

     lines of 6 to 8 or 9 words in each line--71 lines in all.  Of course

     your first impulse is to resign, but at the end of three or four

     hours you find to your surprise that you've GOT them and can deliver

     them backward or forward without mistake or hesitation.  Now, don't

     you see what a world of confidence that must necessarily breed?--

     confidence in a memory which before you wouldn't even venture to

     trust with the Latin motto of the U. S. lest it mislay it and the

     country suffer.



     Loisette doesn't make memories, he furnishes confidence in memories

     that already exist.  Isn't that valuable?  Indeed it is to me.

     Whenever hereafter I shall choose to pack away a thing properly in

     that refrigerator I sha'n't be bothered with the aforetime doubts; I

     shall know I'm going to find it sound and sweet when I go for it

     again.



Loisette naturally made the most of this advertising and flooded the

public with Mark Twain testimonials.  But presently Clemens decided that

after all the system was not sufficiently simple to benefit the race at

large.  He recalled his printed letters and prevailed upon Loisette to

suppress his circulars.  Later he decided that the whole system was a

humbug.









CLXIII



LETTER TO THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND



It was one day in 1887 that Clemens received evidence that his reputation

as a successful author and publisher--a man of wealth and revenues--had

penetrated even the dimness of the British Tax Offices.  A formidable

envelope came, inclosing a letter from his London publishers and a very

large printed document all about the income tax which the Queen's

officers had levied upon his English royalties as the result of a report

that he had taken Buckenham Hall, Norwich, for a year, and was to become

an English resident.  The matter amused and interested him.  To Chatto &

Windus he wrote:



     I will explain that all that about Buckenham Hall was an English

     newspaper's mistake.  I was not in England, and if I had been I

     wouldn't have been at Buckenham Hall anyway, but Buckingham Palace,

     or I would have endeavored to have found out the reason why .  .  .



     But we won't resist.  We'll pay as if I were really a resident.  The

     country that allows me copyright has a right to tax me.



Reflecting on the matter, Clemens decided to make literature of it.  He

conceived the notion of writing an open letter to the Queen in the

character of a rambling, garrulous, but well-disposed countryman whose

idea was that her Majesty conducted all the business of the empire

herself.  He began:



                              HARTFORD, November 6, 2887.



     MADAM, You will remember that last May Mr. Edward Bright, the clerk

     of the Inland Revenue Office, wrote me about a tax which he said was

     due from me to the Government on books of mine published in London--

     that is to say, an income tax on the royalties.  I do not know Mr.

     Bright, and it is embarrassing to me to correspond with strangers,

     for I was raised in the country and have always lived there, the

     early part in Marion County, Missouri, before the war, and this part

     in Hartford County, Connecticut, near Bloomfield and about 8 miles

     this side of Farmington, though some call it 9, which it is

     impossible to be, for I have walked it many and many a time in

     considerably under three hours, and General Hawley says he has done

     it in two and a quarter, which is not likely; so it has seemed best

     that I write your Majesty.



The letter proceeded to explain that he had never met her Majesty

personally, but that he once met her son, the Prince of Wales, in Oxford

Street, at the head of a procession, while he himself was on the top of

an omnibus.  He thought the Prince would probably remember him on account

of a gray coat with flap pockets which he wore, he being the only person

on the omnibus who had on that kind of a coat.



"I remember him," he said, "as easily as I would a comet."



He explained the difficulty he had in understanding under what heading he

was taxed.  There was a foot-note on the list which stated that he was

taxed under "Schedule D, section 14."  He had turned to that place and

found these three things: "Trades, Offices, Gas Works."  He did not

regard authorship as a trade, and he had no office, so he did not

consider that he was taxable under "Schedule D, section 14."  The letter

concludes:



     Having thus shown your Majesty that I am not taxable, but am the

     victim of the error of a clerk who mistakes the nature of my

     commerce, it only remains for me to beg that you will, of your

     justice, annul my letter that I spoke of, so that my publisher can

     keep back that tax money which, in the confusion and aberration

     caused by the Document, I ordered him to pay.  You will not miss the

     sum, but this is a hard year for authors, and as for lectures I do

     not suppose your Majesty ever saw such a dull season.



     With always great and ever-increasing respect, I beg to sign myself

     your Majesty's servant to command,

                                             MARK TWAIN.

     Her Majesty the Queen, London.





The letter, or "petition," as it was called, was published in the

Harper's Magazine "Drawer" (December, 1889), and is now included in the

"Complete Works."  Taken as a whole it is one of the most exquisite of

Mark Twain's minor humors.  What other humorist could have refrained from

hinting, at least, the inference suggested by the obvious "Gas Works"?

Yet it was a subtler art to let his old, simple-minded countryman ignore

that detail.  The little skit was widely copied and reached the Queen

herself in due time, and her son, Prince Edward, who never forgot its

humor.



Clemens read a notable paper that year before the Monday Evening Club.

Its subject was "Consistency"--political consistency--and in it he took

occasion to express himself pretty vigorously regarding the virtue of

loyalty to party before principle, as exemplified in the Blaine-Cleveland

campaign.  It was in effect a scathing reply to those who, three years,

before, had denounced Twichell and himself for standing by their

convictions.--[ Characteristic paragraphs from this paper will be found

under Appendix R, at the end of last volume.]









CLXIV



SOME FURTHER ACCOUNT OF CHARLES L. WEBSTER & CO.



Flood-tide is a temporary condition, and the ebb in the business of

Charles L. Webster & Co., though very deliberate, was not delayed in its

beginning.  Most of the books published--the early ones at least-were

profitable.  McClellan's memoirs paid, as did others of the war series.



Even The Life of Pope Leo XIII. paid.  What a statement to make, after

all their magnificent dreams and preparations!  It was published

simultaneously in six languages.  It was exploited in every conceivable

fashion, and its aggregate sales fell far short of the number which the

general agents had promised for their first orders.  It was amazing, it

was incredible, but, alas! it was true.  The prospective Catholic

purchaser had decided that the Pope's Life was not necessary to his

salvation or even to his entertainment.  Howells explains it, to his own

satisfaction at least, when he says:



     We did not consider how often Catholics could not read, how often,

     when they could, they might not wish to read.  The event proved

     that, whether they could read or not, the immeasurable majority did

     not wish to read The Life of the Pope, though it was written by a

     dignitary of the Church and issued to the world with sanction from

     the Vatican.



Howells, of course, is referring to the laboring Catholic of that day.

There are no Catholics of this day--no American Catholics, at least--who

do not read, and money among them has become plentiful.  Perhaps had the

Pope's Life been issued in this new hour of enlightenment the tale of its

success might have been less sadly told.



A variety of books followed.  Henry Ward Beecher agreed to write an

autobiography, but he died just when he was beginning the work, and the

biography, which his family put together, brought only a moderate return.

A book of Sandwich Islands tales and legends, by his Hawaiian Majesty

King Kalakaua, edited by Clemens's old friend, Rollin M. Daggett, who had

become United States minister to the islands, barely paid for the cost of

manufacture, while a volume of reminiscences by General Hancock was still

less fortunate.  The running expenses of the business were heavy.  On the

strength of the Grant success Webster had moved into still larger

quarters at No. 3 East Fifteenth Street, and had a ground floor for a

salesroom.  The force had become numerous and costly.  It was necessary

that a book should pay largely to maintain this pretentious

establishment.  A number of books were published at a heavy loss.  Never

mind their titles; we may forget them, with the name of the bookkeeper

who presently embezzled thirty thousand dollars of the firm's money and

returned but a trifling sum.



By the end of 1887 there were three works in prospect on which great

hopes were founded--'The Library of Humor', which Howells and Clark had

edited; a personal memoir of General Sheridan's, and a Library of

American Literature in ten volumes, compiled by Edmund Clarence Stedman

and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson.  It was believed these would restore the

fortunes and the prestige of the firm.  They were all excellent,

attractive features.  The Library of Humor was ably selected and

contained two hundred choice drawings by Kemble.  The Sheridan Memoir was

finely written, and the public interest in it was bound to be general.

The Library of American Literature was a collection of the best American

writing, and seemed bound to appeal to every American reading-home.  It

was necessary to borrow most of the money required to build these books,

for the profit made from the Grant Life and less fortunate ventures was

pretty well exhausted.  Clemens presently found a little drift of his

notes accumulating at this bank and that--a disturbing condition, when he

remembered it, for he was financing the typesetting machine by this time,

and it was costing a pretty sum.



Meantime, Webster was no longer active in the management.  In two years

he had broken down from overwork, and was now desperately ill with an

acute neuralgia that kept him away from the business most of the time.

Its burdens had fallen upon his assistant, Fred J. Hall, a willing,

capable young man, persevering and hopeful, lacking only years and

experience.  Hall worked like a beaver, and continually looked forward to

success.  He explained, with each month's report of affairs, just why the

business had not prospered more during that particular month, and just

why its profits would be greater during the next.  Webster finally

retired from the business altogether, and Hall was given a small

partnership in the firm.  He reduced expenses, worked desperately,

pumping out the debts, and managed to keep the craft afloat.



The Library of Humor, the Life of Sheridan, and The Library of American

Literature all sold very well; not so well as had been hoped, but the

sales yielded a fair profit.  It was thought that if Clemens himself

would furnish a new book now and then the business might regain something

of its original standing.



We may believe that Clemens had not been always patient, not always

gentle, during this process of decline.  He had differed with Webster,

and occasionally had gone down and reconstructed things after his own

notions.  Once he wrote to Orion that he had suddenly awakened to find

that there was no more system in the office than in a nursery without a

nurse.



"But," he added, "I have spent a good deal of time there since, and

reduced everything to exact order and system."



Just what were the new features of order instituted it would be

interesting to know.  That the financial pressure was beginning to be

felt even in the Clemens home is shown by a Christmas letter to Mrs.

Moffett.



                              HARTFORD, December 18, 1887.



DEAR PAMELA,--Will you take this $15 & buy some candy or other trifle for

yourself & Sam & his wife to remind you that we remember you?



If we weren't a little crowded this year by the type-setter I'd send a

check large enough to buy a family Bible or some other useful thing like

that.  However, we go on & on, but the type-setter goes on forever--at

$3,000 a month; which is much more satisfactory than was the case the

first 17 months, when the bill only averaged $2,000, & promised to take a

thousand years.  We'll be through now in 3 or 4  months, I reckon, & then

the strain will let up and we can breathe freely once more, whether

success ensues or failure.



Even with a type-setter on hand we ought not to be in the least scrimped-

but it would take a long letter to explain why & who is to blame.



All the family send love to all of you, & best Christmas wishes for your

prosperity.



Affectionately,



SAM.









CLXV



LETTERS, VISITS, AND VISITORS



There were many pleasanter things, to be sure.  The farm life never

failed with each returning summer; the winters brought gay company and

fair occasions.  Sir Henry and Lady Stanley, visiting.  America, were

entertained in the Clemens home, and Clemens went on to Boston to

introduce Stanley to his lecture audience.  Charles Dickens's son, with

his wife and daughter, followed a little later.  An incident of their

visit seems rather amusing now.  There is a custom in England which

requires the host to give the guest notice of bedtime by handing him a

lighted candle.  Mrs. Clemens knew of this custom, but did not have the

courage to follow it in her own home, and the guests knew of no other way

to relieve the situation; as a result, all sat up much later than usual.

Eventually Clemens himself suggested that possibly the guests would like

to retire.



Robert Louis Stevenson came down from Saranac, and Clemens went in to

visit him at his New York hotel, the St. Stevens, on East Eleventh

Street.  Stevenson had orders to sit in the sunshine as much as possible,

and during the few days of their association he and Clemens would walk

down to Washington Square and sit on one of the benches and talk.  They

discussed many things--philosophies, people, books; it seems a pity their

talk could not have been preserved.



Stevenson was a great admirer of Mark Twain's work.  He said that during

a recent painting of his portrait he had insisted on reading Huck Finn

aloud to the artist, a Frenchman, who had at first protested, and finally

had fallen a complete victim to Huck's yarn.  In one of Stevenson's

letters to Clemens he wrote:



     My father, an old man, has been prevailed upon to read Roughing It

     (his usual amusement being found in theology), and after one evening

     spent with the book he declared: "I am frightened.  It cannot be

     safe for a man at my time of life to laugh so much."



What heaps of letters, by the way, remain from this time, and how curious

some of them are!  Many of them are requests of one sort or another,

chiefly for money--one woman asking for a single day's income,

conservatively estimated at five thousand dollars.  Clemens seldom

answered an unwarranted letter; but at one time he began a series of

unmailed answers--that is to say, answers in which he had let himself go

merely to relieve his feelings and to restore his spiritual balance.  He

prepared an introduction for this series.  In it he said:



     .  .  .  You receive a letter.  You read it.  It will be tolerably

     sure to produce one of three results: 1, pleasure;  2, displeasure;

     3, indifference.  I do not need to say anything about Nos.  1 & 3;

     everybody knows what to do with those breeds of letters; it is breed

     No. 2 that I am after.  It is the one that is loaded up with

     trouble.



     When you get an exasperating letter what happens?  If you are young

     you answer it promptly, instantly--and mail the thing you have

     written.  At forty what do you do?  By that time you have found out

     that a letter written in a passion is a mistake in ninety-nine cases

     out of a hundred; that it usually wrongs two persons, and always

     wrongs one--yourself.  You have grown weary of wronging yourself and

     repenting; so you manacle, you fetter, you log-chain the frantic

     impulse to write a pulverizing answer.  You will wait a day or die.

     But in the mean time what do you do?  Why, if it is about dinner-

     time, you sit at table in a deep abstraction all through the meal;

     you try to throw it off and help do the talking; you get a start

     three or four times, but conversation dies on your lips every time-

     your mind isn't on it; your heart isn't in it.  You give up, and

     subside into a bottomless deep of silence, permanently; people must

     speak to you two or three times to get your attention, and then say

     it over again to make you understand.  This kind of thing goes on

     all the rest of the evening; nobody can interest you in anything;

     you are useless, a depressing influence, a burden.  You go to bed at

     last; but at three in the morning you are as wide awake as you were

     in the beginning.  Thus we see what you have been doing for nine

     hours--on the outside.  But what were you doing on the inside?  You

     were writing letters--in your mind.  And enjoying it, that is quite

     true; that is not to be denied.  You have been flaying your

     correspondent alive with your incorporeal pen; you have been

     braining him, disemboweling him, carving him into little bits, and

     then--doing it all over again.  For nine hours.



     It was wasted time, for you had no intention of putting any of this

     insanity on paper and mailing it.  Yes, you know that, and confess

     it--but what were you to do?  Where was your remedy?  Will anybody

     contend that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, Go, and

     be obeyed?



     No, he cannot; that is certainly true.  Well, then, what is he to

     do?  I will explain by the suggestion contained in my opening

     paragraph.  During the nine hours he has written as many as forty-

     seven furious letters--in his mind.  If he had put just one of them

     on paper it would have brought him relief, saved him eight hours of

     trouble, and given him an hour's red-hot pleasure besides.



     He is not to mail this letter; he understands that, and so he can

     turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no harm.  He is only

     writing it to get the bile out.  So to speak, he is a volcano:

     imaging himself erupting does no good; he must open up his crater

     and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he would

     get relief.



     Before he has filled his first sheet sometimes the relief is there.

     He degenerates into good-nature from that point.



     Sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one writes as many as

     three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a very angry

     one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot embers in

     it here and there.  He pigeonholes these and then does one of two

     things--dismisses the whole matter from his mind or writes the

     proper sort of letter and mails it.



     To this day I lose my balance and send an overwarm letter--or more

     frequently telegram--two or three times a year.  But that is better

     than doing it a hundred times a year, as I used to do years ago.

     Perhaps I write about as many as ever, but I pigeonhole them.  They

     ought not to be thrown away.  Such a letter a year or so old is as

     good as a sermon to the maw who wrote it.  It makes him feel small

     and shabby, but--well, that wears off.  Any sermon does; but the

     sermon does some little good, anyway.  An old cold letter like that

     makes you wonder how you could ever have got into such a rage about

     nothing.



The unmailed answers that were to accompany this introduction were

plentiful enough and generally of a fervent sort.  One specimen will

suffice.  It was written to the chairman of a hospital committee.



     DEAR SIR,--If I were Smithfield I would certainly go out and get

     behind something and blush.  According to your report, "the

     politicians are afraid to tax the people for the support" of so

     humane and necessary a thing as a hospital.  And do your "people"

     propose to stand that?--at the hands of vermin officials whom the

     breath of their votes could blow out of official existence in a

     moment if they had the pluck to band themselves together and blow.

     Oh, come, these are not "people"--they are cowed school-boys with

     backbones made of boiled macaroni.  If you are not misreporting

     those "people" you are just in the right business passing the

     mendicant hat for them.  Dear sir, communities where anything like

     citizenship exists are accustomed to hide their shames, but here we

     have one proposing to get up a great "exposition" of its dishonor

     and advertise it all it can.



     It has been eleven years since I wrote anything for one of those

     graveyards called a "Fair paper," and so I have doubtless lost the

     knack of it somewhat; still I have done the best I could for you.



     This was from a burning heart and well deserved.  One may almost

     regret that he did not send it.



Once he received a letter intended for one Samuel Clements, of Elma, New

York, announcing that the said Clements's pension had been allowed.  But

this was amusing.  When Clemens had forwarded the notice to its proper

destination he could not resist sending this comment to the commissioner

at Washington:



     DEAR SIR,--I have not applied for a pension.  I have often wanted a

     pension--often--ever so often--I may say, but in as much as the only

     military service I performed during the war was in the Confederate

     army, I have always felt a delicacy about asking you for it.

     However, since you have suggested the thing yourself, I feel

     strengthened.  I haven't any very pensionable diseases myself, but I

     can furnish a substitute--a man who is just simply a chaos, a museum

     of all the different kinds of aches and pains, fractures,

     dislocations and malformations there are; a man who would regard

     "rheumatism and sore eyes" as mere recreation and refreshment after

     the serious occupations of his day.  If you grant me the pension,

     dear sir, please hand it to General Jos. Hawley, United States

     Senator--I mean hand him the certificate, not the money, and he will

     forward it to me. You will observe by this postal-card which I

     inclose that he takes a friendly interest in the matter.  He thinks

     I've already got the pension, whereas I've only got the rheumatism;

     but didn't want that--I had that before.  I wish it were catching. I

     know a man that I would load up with it pretty early.  Lord, but we

     all feel that way sometimes.  I've seen the day when but never mind

     that; you may be busy; just hand it to Hawley--the certificate, you

     understand, is not transferable.



Clemens was in good standing at Washington during the Cleveland

administration, and many letters came, asking him to use his influence

with the President to obtain this or that favor.  He always declined,

though once--a few years later, in Europe--when he learned that Frank

Mason, consul-general at Frankfort, was about to be displaced, Clemens,

of his own accord, wrote to Baby Ruth Cleveland about it.





     MY DEAR RUTH, I belong to the Mugwumps, and one of the most sacred

     rules of our order prevents us from asking favors of officials or

     recommending men to office, but there is no harm in writing a

     friendly letter to you and telling you that an infernal outrage is

     about to be committed by your father in turning out of office the

     best Consul I know (and I know a great many) just because he is a

     Republican and a Democrat wants his place.



     He went on to recall Mason's high and honorable record, suggesting

     that Miss Ruth take the matter into her own hands.  Then he said:



     I can't send any message to the President, but the next time you

     have a talk with him concerning such matters I wish you would tell

     him about Captain Mason and what I think of a Government that so

     treats its efficient officials.



Just what form of appeal the small agent made is not recorded, but by and

by Mark Twain received a tiny envelope, postmarked Washington, inclosing

this note in President Cleveland's handwriting:



     Miss Ruth Cleveland begs to acknowledge the receipt of Mr. Twain's

     letter and say that she took the liberty of reading it to the

     President, who desires her to thank Mr. Twain for her information,

     and to say to him that Captain Mason will not be disturbed in the

     Frankfort Consulate.  The President also desires Miss Cleveland to

     say that if Mr. Twain knows of any other cases of this kind he will

     be greatly obliged if he will write him concerning them at his

     earliest convenience.



Clemens immensely admired Grover Cleveland, also his young wife, and his

visits to Washington were not infrequent.  Mrs. Clemens was not always

able to accompany him, and he has told us how once (it was his first

visit after the President's marriage) she put a little note in the pocket

of his evening waistcoat, which he would be sure to find when dressing,

warning him about his deportment.  Being presented to Mrs. Cleveland, he

handed her a card on which he had written "He didn't," and asked her to

sign her name below those words.  Mrs. Cleveland protested that she

couldn't sign it unless she knew what it was he hadn't done; but he

insisted, and she promised to sign if he would tell her immediately

afterward all about it.  She signed, and he handed her Mrs. Clemens's

note, which was very brief.  It said:



"Don't wear your arctics in the White House."



Mrs. Cleveland summoned a messenger and had the card she had signed

mailed at once to Mrs. Clemens at Hartford.



He was not always so well provided against disaster.  Once, without

consulting his engagements, he agreed to assist Mrs. Cleveland at a

dedication, only to find that he must write an apology later.  In his

letter he said:



     I do not know how it is in the White House, but in this house of

     ours whenever the minor half of the administration tries to run

     itself without the help of the major half it gets aground.



He explained his position, and added:



     I suppose the President often acts just like that; goes and makes an

     impossible promise, and you never find it out until it is next to

     impossible to break it up and set things straight again.  Well, that

     is just our way exactly--one-half the administration always busy

     getting the family into trouble and the other half busy getting it

     out.









CLVXI



A "PLAYER" AND A MASTER OF ARTS



One morning early in January Clemens received the following note:





                    DALY'S THEATER, NEW YORK, January 2, 1888.



     Mr. Augustin Daly will be very much pleased to have Mr. S.  L.

     Clemens meet Mr. Booth, Mr. Barrett, and Mr. Palmer and a few

     friends at lunch on Friday next, January 6th (at one o'clock in

     Delmonico's), to discuss the formation of a new club which it is

     thought will claim your (sic) interest.



     R. S. V. P.





There were already in New York a variety of literary and artistic

societies, such as The Kinsmen and Tile clubs, with which Clemens was

more or less associated.  It was proposed now to form a more

comprehensive and pretentious organization--one that would include the

various associated arts.  The conception of this new club, which was to

be called The Players, had grown out of a desire on the part of Edwin

Booth to confer some enduring benefit upon the members of his profession.

It had been discussed during a summer cruise on Mr. E. C. Benedict's

steam-yacht by a little party which, besides the owner, consisted of

Booth himself, Aldrich, Lawrence Barrett, William Bispham, and Laurence

Hutton.  Booth's original idea had been to endow some sort of an actors'

home, but after due consideration this did not appear to be the best

plan.  Some one proposed a club, and Aldrich, with never-failing

inspiration, suggested its name, The Players, which immediately impressed

Booth and the others.  It was then decided that members of all the

kindred arts should be admitted, and this was the plan discussed and

perfected at the Daly luncheon.  The guests became charter members, and

The Players became an incorporated fact early in January, 1888.

--[Besides Mr. Booth himself, the charter members were: Lawrence Barrett,

William Bispham, Samuel L. Clemens, Augustin Daly, Joseph F. Daly, John

Drew, Henry Edwards, Laurence Hutton, Joseph Jefferson, John A. Lane,

James Lewis, Brander Matthews, Stephen H. Olin, A. M. Palmer, and William

T. Sherman.]--Booth purchased the fine old brownstone residence at 16

Gramercy Park, and had expensive alterations made under the directions of

Stanford White to adapt it for club purposes.  He bore the entire cost,

furnished it from garret to cellar, gave it his books and pictures, his

rare collections of every sort.  Laurence Hutton, writing of it

afterward, said:



And on the first Founder's Night, the 31st of December, 1888, he

transferred it all to the association, a munificent gift; absolutely

without parallel in its way.  The pleasure it gave to Booth during the

few remaining years of his life was very great.  He made it his home.

Next to his own immediate family it was his chief interest, care, and

consolation.  He nursed and petted it, as it nursed and petted and

honored him.  He died in it.  And it is certainly his greatest monument.



There is no other club quite like The Players.  The personality of Edwin

Booth pervades it, and there is a spirit in its atmosphere not found in

other large clubs--a spirit of unity, and ancient friendship, and

mellowness which usually come only of small membership and long

establishment.  Mark Twain was always fond of The Players, and more than

once made it his home.  It is a true home, and its members are a genuine

brotherhood.



It was in June, 1888, that Yale College conferred upon Samuel Clemens the

degree of Master of Arts.  It was his first honor of this kind, and he

was proud of it.  To Charles Hopkins ("Charley") Clark, who had been

appointed to apprise him of the honor, he wrote:



     I felt mighty proud of that degree; in fact I could squeeze the

     truth a little closer and say vain of it.  And why shouldn't I be?

     I am the only literary animal of my particular subspecies who has

     ever been given a degree by any college in any age of the world as

     far as I know.



To which Clark answered:



     MY DEAR FRIEND, You are "the only literary animal of your particular

     subspecies" in existence, and you've no cause for humility in the

     fact.  Yale has done herself at least as much credit as she has done

     you, and "don't you forget it."

                                             C. H. C.



Clemens could not attend the alumni dinner, being at Elmira and unable to

get away, but in an address he made at Yale College later in the year he

thus freely expressed himself:



     I was sincerely proud and grateful to be made a Master of Arts by

     this great and venerable University, and I would have come last June

     to testify this feeling, as I do now testify it, but that the sudden

     and unexpected notice of the honor done me found me at a distance

     from home and unable to discharge that duty and enjoy that

     privilege.



     Along at first, say for the first month or so, I, did not quite know

     hove to proceed because of my not knowing just what authorities and

     privileges belonged to the title which had been granted me, but

     after that I consulted some students of Trinity--in Hartford--and

     they made everything clear to me.  It was through them that I found

     out that my title made me head of the Governing Body of the

     University, and lodged in me very broad and severely responsible

     powers.



     I was told that it would be necessary to report to you at this time,

     and of course I comply, though I would have preferred to put it off

     till I could make a better showing; for indeed I have been so

     pertinaciously hindered and obstructed at every turn by the faculty

     that it would be difficult to prove that the University is really in

     any better shape now than it was when I first took charge.  By

     advice, I turned my earliest attention to the Greek department.  I

     told the Greek professor I had concluded to drop the use of Greek-

     written character because it is so hard to spell with, and so

     impossible to read after you get it spelt.  Let us draw the curtain

     there.  I saw by what followed that nothing but early neglect saved

     him from being a very profane man.  I ordered the professor of

     mathematics to simplify the whole system, because the way it was I

     couldn't understand it, and I didn't want things going on in the

     college in what was practically a clandestine fashion.  I told him

     to drop the conundrum system; it was not suited to the dignity of a

     college, which should deal in facts, not guesses and suppositions;

     we didn't want any more cases of if A and B stand at opposite poles

     of the earth's surface and C at the equator of Jupiter, at what

     variations of angle will the left limb of the moon appear to these

     different parties?--I said you just let that thing alone; it's

     plenty time to get in a sweat about it when it happens; as like as

     not it ain't going to do any harm, anyway.  His reception of these

     instructions bordered on insubordination, insomuch that I felt

     obliged to take his number and report him.  I found the astronomer

     of the University gadding around after comets and other such odds

     and ends--tramps and derelicts of the skies.  I told him pretty

     plainly that we couldn't have that. I told him it was no economy to

     go on piling up and piling up raw material in the way of new stars

     and comets and asteroids that we couldn't ever have any use for till

     we had worked off the old stock.  At bottom I don't really mind

     comets so much, but somehow I have always been down on asteroids.

     There is nothing mature about them; I wouldn't sit up nights the way

     that man does if I could get a basketful of them.  He said it was

     the bast line of goods he had; he said he could trade them to

     Rochester for comets, and trade the comets to Harvard for nebulae,

     and trade the nebula to the Smithsonian for flint hatchets.  I felt

     obliged to stop this thing on the spot; I said we couldn't have the

     University turned into an astronomical junk shop.  And while I was

     at it I thought I might as well make the reform complete; the

     astronomer is extraordinarily mutinous, and so, with your approval,

     I will transfer him to the law department and put one of the law

     students in his place.  A boy will be more biddable, more tractable,

     also cheaper.  It is true he cannot be intrusted with important work

     at first, but he can comb the skies for nebulae till he gets his

     hand in.  I have other changes in mind, but as they are in the

     nature of surprises I judge it politic to leave them unspecified at

     this time.



Very likely it was in this new capacity, as the head of the governing

body, that he wrote one morning to Clark advising him as to the misuse of

a word in the Courant, though he thought it best to sign the

communication with the names of certain learned friends, to give it

weight with the public, as he afterward explained.



     SIR,--The word "patricide" in your issue of this morning (telegrams)

     was an error.  You meant it to describe the slayer of a father; you

     should have used "parricide" instead.  Patricide merely means the

     killing of an Irishman--any Irishman, male or female.



               Respectfully,

                         J. HAMMOND TRUMBULL.

                         N. J. BURTON.

                         J. H. TWICHELL.









CLXVII



NOTES AND LITERARY MATTERS



Clemens' note-books of this time are full of the vexations of his

business ventures, figures, suggestions, and a hundred imagined

combinations for betterment--these things intermingled with the usual

bits of philosophy and reflections, and amusing reminders.



     Aldrich's man who painted the fat toads red, and naturalist chasing

     and trying to catch them.



     Man who lost his false teeth over Brooklyn Bridge when he was on his

     way to propose to a widow.



     One believes St. Simon and Benvenuto and partly believes the

     Margravine of Bayreuth.  There are things in the confession of

     Rousseau which one must believe.



     What is biography?  Unadorned romance.  What is romance?  Adorned

     biography.  Adorn it less and it will be better than it is.



     If God is what people say there can be none in the universe so

     unhappy as he; for he sees unceasingly myriads of his creatures

     suffering unspeakable miseries, and, besides this, foresees all they

     are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives.  One might

     well say "as unhappy as God."



In spite of the financial complexities and the drain of the enterprises

already in hand he did not fail to conceive others.  He was deeply

interested in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress at the moment, and from

photography and scenic effect he presaged a possibility to-day realized

in the moving picture.



Dress up some good actors as Apollyon, Greatheart, etc., & the other

Bunyan characters, take them to a wild gorge and photograph them--Valley

of the Shadow of Death; to other effective places & photo them along with

the scenery; to Paris, in their curious costumes, place them near the Arc

de l'Etoile & photo them with the crowd-Vanity Fair; to Cairo, Venice,

Jerusalem, & other places (twenty interesting cities) & always make them

conspicuous in the curious foreign crowds by their costume.  Take them to

Zululand.  It would take two or three years to do the photographing &

cost $10,000; but this stereopticon panorama of Bunyan's Pilgrim's

Progress could be exhibited in all countries at the same time & would

clear a fortune in a year.  By & by I will do this.



     If in 1891 I find myself not rich enough to carry out my scheme of

     buying Christopher Columbus's bones & burying them under the Statue

     of Liberty Enlightening the World I will give the idea to somebody

     who is rich enough.



Incidentally he did an occasional piece of literary work.  Early in the

year, with Brander Matthews, he instructed and entertained the public

with a copyright controversy in the Princeton Review.  Matthews would

appear to have criticized the English copyright protection, or rather the

lack of it, comparing it unfavorably with American conditions.  Clemens,

who had been amply protected in Great Britain, replied that America was

in no position to criticize England; that if American authors suffered in

England they had themselves to blame for not taking the proper trouble

and precautions required by the English law, that is to say, "previous

publication" on English soil.  He declared that his own books had been as

safe in England as at home since he had undertaken to comply with English

requirements, and that Professor Matthews was altogether mistaken, both

as to premise and conclusion.



"You are the very wrong-headedest person in America," he said; "and you

are injudicious."  And of the article: "I read it to the cat--well, I

never saw a cat carry on so before .  .  .  .  The American author can go

to Canada, spend three days there and come home with an English and

American copyright as strong as if it had been built out of railroad

iron."



Matthews replied that not every one could go to Canada, any more than to

Corinth.  He said:



"It is not easy for a poor author who may chance to live in Florida or

Texas, those noted homes of literature, to go to Canada."



Clemens did not reply again; that is to say, he did not publish his

reply.  It was a capable bomb which he prepared, well furnished with

amusing instance, sarcasm, and ridicule, but he did not use it.  Perhaps

he was afraid it would destroy his opponent, which would not do.  In his

heart he loved Matthews.  He laid the deadly thing away and maintained a

dignified reserve.



Clemens often felt called upon to criticize American institutions, but he

was first to come to their defense, especially when the critic was an

alien.  When Matthew Arnold offered some strictures on America.  Clemens

covered a good many quires of paper with caustic replies.  He even

defended American newspapers, which he had himself more than once

violently assailed for misreporting him and for other journalistic

shortcomings, and he bitterly denounced every shaky British institution,

touched upon every weak spot in hereditary rule.  He did not print--not

then--[An article on the American press, probably the best of those

prepared at this time, was used, in part, in The American Claimant, as

the paper read before the Mechanics' Club, by "Parker," assistant editor

of the 'Democrat'.]--he was writing mainly for relief--without success,

however, for he only kindled the fires of his indignation.  He was at

Quarry Farm and he plunged into his neglected story--A Yankee in King

Arthur's Court--and made his astonishing hero the mouthpiece of his

doctrines.  He worked with an inspiration and energy born of his

ferocity.  To Whitmore, near the end of the summer, he wrote:



I've got 16 working-days left yet, and in that time I will add another

120,000 words to my book if I have luck.



In his memoranda of this time he says:



     There was never a throne which did not represent a crime.  There is

     no throne to-day which does not represent a crime ....



Show me a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn't tell from a

journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all that is worth

being, is the shoemaker's inferior; and in the shoemaker I will show you

a dull animal, a poor-spirited insect; for there are enough of him to

rise and chuck the lords and royalties into the sea where they belong,

and he doesn't do it.



But his violence waned, maybe, for he did not finish the Yankee in the

sixteen days as planned.  He brought the manuscript back to Hartford, but

found it hard work there, owing to many interruptions.  He went over to

Twichell's and asked for a room where he might work in seclusion.  They

gave him a big upper chamber, but some repairs were going on below.  From

a letter written to Theodore Crane we gather that it was not altogether

quiet.



                              Friday, October 5, 1888.



     DEAR THEO, I am here in Twichell's house at work, with the noise of

     the children and an army of carpenters to help: Of course they don't

     help, but neither do they hinder.  It's like a boiler factory for

     racket, and in nailing a wooden ceiling on to the room under me the

     hammering tickles my feet amazingly sometimes and jars my table a

     good deal, but I never am conscious of the racket at all, and I move

     my feet into positions of relief without knowing when I do it.  I

     began here Monday morning, and have done eighty pages since.  I was

     so tired last night that I thought I would lie abed and rest to-day;

     but I couldn't resist.  I mean to try to knock off tomorrow, but

     it's doubtful if I do.  I want to finish the day the machine

     finishes, and a week ago the closest calculations for that indicated

     Oct. 22--but experience teaches me that the calculations will miss

     fire as usual.



     The other day the children were projecting a purchase, Livy and I to

     furnish the money--a dollar and a half.  Jean discouraged the idea.

     She said, "We haven't got any money.  Children, if you would think,

     you would remember the machine isn't done."



     It's billiards to-night.  I wish you were here.



     With love to you both,                        S.  L.  C.



     P. S.  I got it all wrong.  It wasn't the children, it was Marie.

     She wanted a box of blacking for the children's shoes.  Jean

     reproved her and said, "Why, Marie, you mustn't ask for things now.

     The machine isn't done."



Neither the Yankee nor the machine was completed that fall, though

returns from both were beginning to be badly needed.  The financial pinch

was not yet severe, but it was noticeable, and it did not relax.



A memorandum of this time tells of an anniversary given to Charles and

Susan Warner in their own home.  The guests assembled at the Clemens

home, the Twichells among them, and slipped across to Warner's, entering

through a window.  Dinner was then announced to the Warners, who were

sitting by their library fire.  They came across the hall and opened the

dining-room door, to be confronted by a table fully spread and lighted

and an array of guests already seated.









CLXVIII



INTRODUCING NYE AND RILEY AND OTHERS



It was the winter (1888-89) that the Bill Nye and James Whitcomb Riley

entertainment combination set out on its travels.  Mark Twain introduced

them to their first Boston audience.  Major J. B. Pond was exploiting Nye

and Riley, and Clemens went on to Boston especially to hear them.  Pond

happened upon him in the lobby of the Parker House and insisted that

nothing would do but he must introduce them.  In his book of memories

which he published later Pond wrote:



He replied that he believed I was his mortal enemy, and determined that

he should never have an evening's enjoyment in my presence.  He

consented, however, and conducted his brother-humorist and the Hoosier

poet to the platform.  Mark's presence was a surprise to the audience,

and when they recognized him the demonstration was tremendous.  The

audience rose in a body, and men and women shouted at the very top of

their voices.  Handkerchiefs waved, the organist even opened every forte

key and pedal in the great organ, and the noise went on unabated for

minutes.  It took some time for the crowd to get down to listening, but

when they did subside, as Mark stepped to the front, the silence was as

impressive as the noise had been.



He presented the Nye-Riley pair as the Siamese Twins.  "I saw them

first," he sand, "a great many years ago, when Mr. Barnum had them, and

they were just fresh from Siam.  The ligature was their best hold then,

but literature became their best hold later, when one of them committed

an indiscretion, and they had to cut the old bond to accommodate the

sheriff."



He continued this comic fancy, and the audience was in a proper frame of

mind, when he had finished, to welcome the "Twins of Genius" who were to

entertain them:



Pond says:



It was a carnival of fun in every sense of the word.  Bostonians will not

have another such treat in this generation.



Pond proposed to Clemens a regular tour with Nye and Riley.  He wrote:



     I will go partners with you, and I will buy Nye and Riley's time and

     give an entertainment something like the one we gave in Boston.  Let

     it be announced that you will introduce the "Twins of Genius."

     Ostensibly a pleasure trip for you.  I will take one-third of the

     profits and you two-thirds.  I can tell you it will be the biggest

     thing that can be brought before the American public.



But Clemens, badly as he was beginning to need the money, put this

temptation behind him.  His chief diversion these days was in gratuitous

appearances.  He had made up his mind not to read or lecture again for

pay, but he seemed to take a peculiar enjoyment in doing these things as

a benefaction.  That he was beginning to need the money may have added a

zest to the joy of his giving.  He did not respond to all invitations; he

could have been traveling constantly had he done so.  He consulted with

Mrs. Clemens and gave himself to the cause that seemed most worthy.  In

January Col. Richard Malcolm Johnston was billed to give a reading with

Thomas Nelson Page in Baltimore.  Page's wife fell ill and died, and

Colonel Johnston, in extremity, wired Charles Dudley Warner to come in

Page's place.  Warner, unable to go, handed the invitation to Clemens,

who promptly wired that he would come.  They read to a packed house, and

when the audience was gone and the returns had been counted an equal

division of the profits was handed to each of the authors.  Clemens

pushed his share over to Johnston, saying:



"That's yours, Colonel.  I'm not reading for money these days."



Colonel Johnston, to whom the sum was important, tried to thank him, but

he only said:



"Never mind, Colonel, it only gave me pleasure to do you that little

favor.  You can pass it on some day."



As a matter of fact, hard put to it as he was for funds, Clemens at this

time regarded himself as a potential multi-millionaire.  The type-setting

machine which for years had been sapping his financial strength was

believed to be perfected, and ship-loads of money were waiting in the

offing.  However, we shall come to this later.



Clemens read for the cadets at West Point and for a variety of

institutions and on many special occasions.  He usually gave chapters

from his Yankee, now soon to be finished, chapters generally beginning

with the Yankee's impression of the curious country and its people,

ending with the battle of the Sun-belt, when the Yankee and his fifty-

four adherents were masters of England, with twenty-five thousand dead

men lying about them.  He gave this at West Point, including the chapter

where the Yankee has organized a West Point of his own in King Arthur's

reign.



In April, '89, he made an address at a dinner given to a victorious

baseball team returning from a tour of the world by way of the Sandwich

Islands.  He was on familiar ground there.  His heart was in his words.

He began:



     I have been in the Sandwich Islands-twenty-three years ago--that

     peaceful land, that beautiful land, that far-off home of solitude,

     and soft idleness, and repose, and dreams, where life is one long

     slumberous Sabbath, the climate one long summer day, and the good

     that die experience no change, for they but fall asleep in one

     heaven and wake up in another.  And these boys have played baseball

     there!--baseball, which is the very symbol, the outward and visible

     expression, of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the

     living, tearing, booming nineteenth, the mightiest of all the

     centuries!



He told of the curious island habits for his hearers' amusement, but at

the close the poetry of his memories once more possessed him:



     Ah, well, it is refreshment to the jaded, it is water to the

     thirsty, to look upon men who have so lately breathed the soft air

     of those Isles of the Blest and had before their eyes the

     inextinguishable vision of their beauty.  No alien land in all the

     earth has any deep, strong charm for me but that one; no other land

     could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and

     waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done.  Other things

     leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the

     same.  For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas

     flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; I can see

     its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing

     by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the

     cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, I hear the

     plashing of the brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of

     flowers that perished twenty years ago.









CLXIX



THE COMING OF KIPLING



It was the summer of 1889 that Mark Twain first met Rudyard Kipling.

Kipling was making his tour around the world, a young man wholly unheard

of outside of India.  He was writing letters home to an Indian journal,

The Pioneer, and he came to Elmira especially to see Mark Twain.  It was

night when he arrived, and next morning some one at the hotel directed

him to Quarry Farm.  In a hired hack he made his way out through the

suburbs, among the buzzing planing-mills and sash factories, and toiled

up the long, dusty, roasting east hill, only to find that Mark Twain was

at General Langdon's, in the city he had just left behind.  Mrs. Crane

and Susy Clemens were the only ones left at the farm, and they gave him a

seat on the veranda and brought him glasses of water or cool milk while

he refreshed them with his talk-talk which Mark Twain once said might be

likened to footprints, so strong and definite was the impression which it

left behind.  He gave them his card, on which the address was Allahabad,

and Susy preserved it on that account, because to her India was a

fairyland, made up of magic, airy architecture, and dark mysteries.

Clemens once dictated a memory of Kipling's visit.



     Kipling had written upon the card a compliment to me.  This gave it

     an additional value in Susy's eyes, since, as a distinction, it was

     the next thing to being recognized by a denizen of the moon.



     Kipling came down that afternoon and spent a couple of hours with

     me, and at the end of that time I had surprised him as much as he

     had surprised me--and the honors were easy.  I believed that he knew

     more than any person I had met before, and I knew that he knew that

     I knew less than any person he had met before--though he did not say

     it, and I was not expecting that he would.  When he was gone Mrs.

     Langdon wanted to know about my visitor.  I said:



     "He is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man--and I am

     the other one.  Between us we cover all knowledge; he knows all that

     can be known, and I know the rest."



     He was a stranger to me and to all the world, and remained so for

     twelve months, then he became suddenly known, and universally known.

     From that day to this he has held this unique distinction--that of

     being the only living person, not head of a nation, whose voice is

     heard around the world the moment it drops a remark; the only such

     voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail, but

     always travels first-class--by cable.



     About a year after Kipling's visit in Elmira George Warner came into

     our library one morning in Hartford with a small book in his hand

     and asked me if I had ever heard of Rudyard Kipling.  I said, "No."



     He said I would hear of him very soon, and that the noise he was

     going to make would be loud and continuous.  The little book was the

     Plain Tales, and he left it for me to read, saying it was charged

     with a new and inspiriting fragrance, and would blow a refreshing

     breath around the world that would revive the nations.  A day or two

     later he brought a copy of the London World which had a sketch of

     Kipling in it, and a mention of the fact that he had traveled in the

     United States.  According to this sketch he had passed through

     Elmira.  This remark, with the additional fact that he hailed from

     India, attracted my attention--also Susy's.  She went to her room

     and brought his card from its place in the frame of her mirror, and

     the Quarry Farm visitor stood identified.



Kipling also has left an account of that visit.  In his letter recording

it he says:



     You are a contemptible lot over yonder.  Some of you are

     Commissioners and some are Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the

     V. C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm

     with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning,

     have shaken his hand and smoked a cigar--no, two cigars--with him,

     and talked with him for more than two hours!  Understand clearly

     that I do not despise you; indeed, I don't.  I am only very sorry

     for you, from the Viceroy downward.



     A big, darkened drawing-room; a huge chair; a man with eyes, a mane

     of grizzled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth as delicate as a

     woman's, a strong, square hand shaking mine, and the slowest,

     calmest, levelest voice in all the world saying:



     "Well, you think you owe me something, and you've come to tell me

     so.  That's what I call squaring a debt handsomely."



     "Piff!" from a cob-pipe (I always said that a Missouri meerschaum

     was the best smoking in the world), and behold!  Mark Twain had

     curled himself up in the big arm-chair, and I was smoking

     reverently, as befits one in the presence of his superior.



     The thing that struck me first was that he was an elderly man; yet,

     after a minute's thought, I perceived that it was otherwise, and in

     five minutes, the eyes looking at me, I saw that the gray hair was

     an accident of the most trivial.  He was quite young.  I was shaking

     his hand.  I was smoking his cigar, and I was hearing him talk--this

     man I had learned to love and admire fourteen thousand miles away.



     Reading his books, I had striven to get an idea of his personality,

     and all my preconceived notions were wrong and beneath the reality.

     Blessed is the man who finds no disillusion when he is brought face

     to face with a revered writer.



The meeting of those two men made the summer of '89 memorable in later

years.  But it was recalled sadly, too.  Theodore Crane, who had been

taken suddenly and dangerously ill the previous autumn, had a recurring

attack and died July 3d.  It was the first death in the immediate

families for more than seventeen years, Mrs. Clemens, remembering that

earlier period of sorrow, was depressed with forebodings.











CLXX



"THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER" ON THE STAGE



There was an unusual dramatic interest in the Clemens home that autumn.

Abby Sage Richardson had dramatized 'The Prince and the Pauper', and

Daniel Frohman had secured Elsie Leslie (Lyde) to take the double role of

the Prince and Tom Canty.  The rehearsals were going on, and the Clemens

children were naturally a good deal excited over the outcome.  Susy

Clemens was inspired to write a play of her own--a pretty Greek fancy,

called "The Triumph of Music," and when it was given on Thanksgiving

night, by herself, with Clara and Jean and Margaret Warner, it was really

a lovely performance, and carried one back to the days when emotions were

personified, and nymphs haunted the seclusions of Arcady.  Clemens was

proud of Susy's achievement, and deeply moved by it.  He insisted on

having the play repeated, and it was given again later in the year.



Pretty Elsie Leslie became a favorite of the Clemens household.  She was

very young, and when she visited Hartford Jean and she were companions

and romped together in the hay-loft.  She was also a favorite of William

Gillette.  One day when Clemens and Gillette were together they decided

to give the little girl a surprise--a unique one.  They agreed to

embroider a pair of slippers for her--to do the work themselves.  Writing

to her of it, Mark Twain said:



     Either one of us could have thought of a single slipper, but it took

     both of us to think of two slippers.  In fact, one of us did think

     of one slipper, and then, quick as a flash, the other of the other

     one.  It shows how wonderful the human mind is....



     Gillette embroidered his slipper with astonishing facility and

     splendor, but I have been a long time pulling through with mine.

     You see, it was my very first attempt at art, and I couldn't rightly

     get the hang of it along at first.  And then I was so busy that I

     couldn't get a chance to work at it at home, and they wouldn't let

     me embroider on the cars; they said it made the other passengers

     afraid.  They didn't like the light that flared into my eye when I

     had an inspiration.  And even the most fair-minded people doubted me

     when I explained what it was I was making--especially brakemen.

     Brakemen always swore at it and carried on, the way ignorant people

     do about art.  They wouldn't take my word that it was a slipper;

     they said they believed it was a snow-shoe that had some kind of

     disease.



He went on to explain and elucidate the pattern of the slipper, and how

Dr. Root had come in and insisted on taking a hand in it, and how

beautiful it was to see him sit there and tell Mrs. Clemens what had been

happening while they were away during the summer, holding the slipper up

toward the end of his nose, imagining the canvas was a "subject" with a

scalp-wound, working with a "lovely surgical stitch," never hesitating a

moment in his talk except to say "Ouch!" when he stuck himself with the

needle.



     Take the slippers and wear them next your heart, Elsie dear; for

     every stitch in them is a testimony of the affection which two of

     your loyalest friends bear you.  Every single stitch cost us blood.

     I've got twice as many pores in me now as I used to have; and you

     would never believe how many places you can stick a needle in

     yourself until you go into the embroidery line and devote yourself

     to art.



     Do not wear these slippers in public, dear; it would only excite

     envy; and, as like as not, somebody would try to shoot you.



     Merely use them to assist you in remembering that among the many,

     many people who think all the world of you is your friend,



                                        MARK TWAIN.





The play of "The Prince and the Pauper," dramatized by Mrs. Richardson

and arranged for the stage by David Belasco, was produced at the Park

Theater, Philadelphia, on Christmas Eve.  It was a success, but not a

lavish one.  The play was well written and staged, and Elsie Leslie was

charming enough in her parts, but in the duality lay the difficulty.  The

strongest scenes in the story had to be omitted when one performer played

both Tom Canty and the little Prince.  The play came to New York--to the

Broadway Theater--and was well received.  On the opening night there Mark

Twain made a speech, in which he said that the presentation of "The

Prince and the Pauper" realized a dream which fifteen years before had

possessed him all through a long down-town tramp, amid the crowds and

confusion of Broadway.  In Elsie Leslie, he said, he had found the

embodiment of his dream, and to her he offered homage as the only prince

clothed in a divine right which was not rags and sham--the divine right

of an inborn supremacy in art.



It seems incredible to-day that, realizing the play's possibilities as

Mark Twain did, and as Belasco and Daniel Frohman must have done, they

did not complete their partial triumph by finding another child actress

to take the part of Tom Canty.  Clemens urged and pleaded with them, but

perhaps the undertaking seemed too difficult--at all events they did not

find the little beggar king.  Then legal complications developed.  Edward

House, to whom Clemens had once given a permission to attempt a

dramatization of the play, suddenly appeared with a demand for

recognition, backed by a lawsuit against all those who had a proprietary

interest in the production.  House, with his adopted Japanese daughter

Koto, during a period of rheumatism and financial depression, had made a

prolonged visit in the Clemens home and originally undertook the

dramatization as a sort of return for hospitality.  He appears not to

have completed it and to have made no arrangement for its production or

to have taken any definite step until Mrs. Richardson's play was

profitably put on; whereupon his suit and injunction.



By the time a settlement of this claim had been reached the play had run

its course, and it was not revived in that form.  It was brought out in

England, where it was fairly prosperous, though it seems not to have been

long continued.  Variously reconstructed, it has occasionally been played

since, and always, when the parts of Tom Canty and the Prince were

separate, with great success.  Why this beautiful drama should ever be

absent from the boards is one of the unexplainable things.  It is a play

for all times and seasons, the difficulty of obtaining suitable "twin"

interpreters for the characters of the Prince and the Pauper being its

only drawback.









CLXXI



"A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT"



From every point of view it seemed necessary to make the 'Yankee in King

Arthur's Court' an important and pretentious publication.  It was Mark

Twain's first book after a silence of five years; it was a book badly

needed by his publishing business with which to maintain its prestige and

profit; it was a book which was to come out of his maturity and present

his deductions, as to humanity at large and kings in particular, to a

waiting public.  It was determined to spare no expense on the

manufacture, also that its illustrations must be of a sort to illuminate

and, indeed, to elaborate the text.  Clemens had admired some pictures

made by Daniel Carter ("Dan") Beard for a Chinese story in the

Cosmopolitan, and made up his mind that Beard was the man for the Yankee.

The manuscript was sent to Beard, who met Clemens a little later in the

office of Webster & Co.  to discuss the matter.  Clemens said:



"Mr. Beard, I do not want to subject you to any undue suffering, but I

wish you would read the book before you make the pictures."



Beard replied that he had already read it twice.



"Very good," Clemens said; "but I wasn't led to suppose that that was the

usual custom among illustrators, judging from some results I have seen.

You know," he went on, "this Yankee of mine has neither the refinement

nor the weakness of a college education; he is a perfect ignoramus; he is

boss of a machine shop; he can build a locomotive or a Colt's revolver,

he can put up and run a telegraph line, but he's an ignoramus,

nevertheless.  I am not going to tell you what to draw.  If a man comes

to me and says, 'Mr. Clemens, I want you to write me a story,' I'll write

it for him; but if he undertakes to tell me what to write I'll say, 'Go

hire a typewriter.'"



To Hall a few days later he wrote:



     Tell Beard to obey his own inspirations, and when he sees a picture

     in his mind put that picture on paper, be it humorous or be it

     serious.  I want his genius to be wholly unhampered.  I sha'n't have

     any fear as to results.



Without going further it is proper to say here that the pictures in the

first edition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court justified

the author's faith in the artist of his selection.  They are far and away

Dan Beard's best work.  The socialism of the text strongly appealed to

him.  Beard himself had socialistic tendencies, and the work inspired him

to his highest flights of fancy and to the acme of his technic.  Clemens

examined the pictures from time to time, and once was moved to write:



     My pleasure in them is as strong and as fresh as ever.  I do not

     know of any quality they lack.  Grace, dignity, poetry, spirit,

     imagination, these enrich them and make them charming and beautiful;

     and wherever humor appears it is high and fine--easy, unforced, kept

     under, masterly, and delicious.



He went on to describe his appreciation in detail, and when the drawings

were complete he wrote again:



     Hold me under permanent obligations.  What luck it was to find you!

     There are hundreds of artists who could illustrate any other book of

     mine, but there was only one who could illustrate this one.  Yes, it

     was a fortunate hour that I went netting for lightning-bugs and

     caught a meteor.  Live forever!



This was not too much praise.  Beard realized the last shade of the

author's allegorical intent and portrayed it with a hundred accents which

the average reader would otherwise be likely to miss.



Clemens submitted his manuscript to Howells and to Stedman, and he read

portions of it, at least, to Mrs. Clemens, whose eyes were troubling her

so that she could not read for herself.  Stedman suggested certain

eliminations, but, on the whole, would seem to have approved of the book.

Howells was enthusiastic.  It appealed to him as it had appealed to

Beard.  Its sociology and its socialism seemed to him the final word that

could be said on those subjects.  When he had partly finished it he

wrote:



     It's a mighty great book and it makes my heart, burn with wrath.  It

     seems that God didn't forget to put a soul in you.  He shuts most

     literary men off with a brain, merely.



A few days later he wrote again:



     The book is glorious-simply noble.  What masses of virgin truth

     never touched in print before!



And when he had finished it:



     Last night I read your last chapter.  As Stedman says of the whole

     book, it's titanic.



Clemens declared, in one of his replies to Howells:



     I'm not writing for those parties who miscall themselves critics,

     and I don't care to have them paw the book at all.  It's my swan

     song, my retirement from literature permanently, and I wish to pass

     to the cemetery unclodded .  .  .  .  Well, my book is written--let

     it go, but if it were only to write over again there wouldn't be so

     many things left out.  They burn in me; they keep multiplying and

     multiplying, but now they can't ever be said; and besides they would

     require a library--and a pen warmed up in hell.



In another letter of this time to Sylvester Baxter, apropos of the

tumbling Brazilian throne, he wrote:



     When our great brethren, the disenslaved Brazilians, frame their

     declaration of independence I hope they will insert this missing

     link: "We hold these truths to be self-evident--that all monarchs

     are usurpers and descendants of usurpers, for the reason that no

     throne was ever set up in this world by the will, freely exercised,

     of the only body possessing the legitimate right to set it up--the

     numerical mass of the nation."



He was full of it, as he had been all along, and 'A Connecticut Yankee in

King Arthur's Court' is nothing less than a brief for human rights and

human privileges.  That is what it is, and it is a pity that it should be

more than that.  It is a pity that he should have been beset by his old

demon of the burlesque, and that no one should have had the wisdom or the

strength to bring it under control.



There is nothing more charming in any of Mark Twain's work than his

introductory chapter, nothing more delightful than the armoring of the

Yankee and the outset and the wandering with Alisande.  There is nothing

more powerful or inspiring than his splendid panoramic picture--of the

King learning mercy through his own degradation, his daily intercourse

with a band of manacled slaves; nothing more fiercely moving than that

fearful incident of the woman burned to warm those freezing chattels, or

than the great gallows scene, where the priest speaks for the young

mother about to pay the death penalty for having stolen a halfpenny's

worth, that her baby might have bread.  Such things as these must save

the book from oblivion; but alas! its greater appeal is marred almost to

ruin by coarse and extravagant burlesque, which destroys illusion and

antagonizes the reader often at the very moment when the tale should fill

him with a holy fire of a righteous wrath against wrong.  As an example

of Mark Twain at his literary worst and best the Yankee ranks supreme.

It is unnecessary to quote examples; one cannot pick up the volume and

read ten pages of it, or five pages, without finding them.  In the midst

of some exalted passage, some towering sublimity, you are brought

suddenly to earth with a phrase which wholly destroys the illusion and

the diviner purpose.  Howells must have observed these things, or was he

so dazzled by the splendor of its intent, its righteous charge upon the

ranks of oppression, that he regarded its offenses against art as

unimportant.  This is hard to explain, for the very thing that would

sustain such a great message and make it permanent would be the care, the

restraint, the artistic worthiness of its construction.  One must believe

in a story like that to be convinced of its logic.  To lose faith in it--

in its narrative--is absolutely fatal to its purpose.  The Yankee in King

Arthur's Court not only offended the English nation, but much of it

offended the better taste of Mark Twain's own countrymen, and in time it

must have offended even Mark Twain himself.  Reading it, one can

visualize the author as a careering charger, with a bit in his teeth,

trampling the poetry and the tradition of the romantic days, the very

things which he himself in his happier moods cared for most.  Howells

likened him to Cervantes, laughing Spain's chivalry away.  The comparison

was hardly justified.  It was proper enough to laugh chivalry out of

court when it was a reality; but Mark Twain, who loved Sir Thomas Malory

to the end of his days, the beauty and poetry of his chronicles; who had

written 'The Prince and the Pauper', and would one day write that divine

tale of the 'Maid of Orleans'; who was himself no more nor less than a

knight always ready to redress wrong, would seem to have been the last

person to wish to laugh it out of romance.



And yet, when all is said, one may still agree with Howells in ranking

the Yankee among Mark Twain's highest achievements in the way of "a

greatly imagined and symmetrically developed tale."  It is of that class,

beyond doubt.  Howells goes further:



     Of all the fanciful schemes in fiction it pleases me most, and I

     give myself with absolute delight to its notion of a keen East

     Hartford Yankee finding himself, by a retroactionary spell, at the

     court of King Arthur of Britain, and becoming part of the sixth

     century with all the customs and ideas of the nineteenth in him and

     about him.  The field for humanizing satire which this scheme opens

     is illimitable.



Colossal it certainly is, as Howells and Stedman agreed: colossal in its

grotesqueness as in its sublimity.  Howells, summarizing Mark Twain's

gifts (1901), has written:



     He is apt to burlesque the lighter colloquiality, and it is only in

     the more serious and most tragical junctures that his people utter

     themselves with veracious simplicity and dignity.  That great, burly

     fancy of his is always tempting him to the exaggeration which is the

     condition of so much of his personal humor, but which when it

     invades the drama spoils the illusion.  The illusion renews itself

     in the great moments, but I wish it could be kept intact in the

     small, and I blame him that he does not rule his fancy better.



All of which applies precisely to the writing of the Yankee in King

Arthur's Court.  Intended as a fierce heart-cry against human injustice--

man's inhumanity to man--as such it will live and find readers; but, more

than any other of Mark Twain's pretentious works, it needs editing--

trimming by a fond but relentless hard.









CLXXII



THE "YANKEE" IN ENGLAND



The London publishers of the Yankee were keenly anxious to revise the

text for their English readers.  Clemens wrote that he had already

revised the Yankee twice, that Stedman had critically read it, and that

Mrs. Clemens had made him strike out many passages and soften others.  He

added that he had read chapters of it in public several times where

Englishmen were present and had profited by their suggestions.  Then he

said:



     Now, mind you, I have taken all this pains because I wanted to say a

     Yankee mechanic's say against monarchy and its several natural

     props, and yet make a book which you would be willing to print

     exactly as it comes to you, without altering a word.



     We are spoken of (by Englishmen) as a thin-skinned people.  It is

     you who are thin-skinned.  An Englishman may write with the most

     brutal frankness about any man or institution among us and we

     republish him without dreaming of altering a line or a word.  But

     England cannot stand that kind of a book written about herself.  It

     is England that is thin-skinned.  It causeth me to smile when I read

     the modifications of my language which have been made in my English

     editions to fit them for the sensitive English palate.



     Now, as I say, I have taken laborious pains to so trim this book of

     offense that you'll not lack the nerve to print it just as it

     stands.  I am going to get the proofs to you just as early as I can.

     I want you to read it carefully.  If you can publish it without

     altering a single word, go ahead.  Otherwise, please hand it to

     J. R. Osgood in time for him to have it published at my expense.



     This is important, for the reason that the book was not written for

     America; it was written for England.  So many Englishmen have done

     their sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that

     it seems to me high time that some of us should substantially

     recognize the good intent by trying to pry up the English nation to

     a little higher level of manhood in turn.



So the Yankee was published in England just as he had written it,--[The

preface was shortened and modified for both the American and English

editions.  The reader will find it as originally written under Appendix

S, at the end of last volume.]--and the criticisms were as plentiful as

they were frank.  It was referred to as a "lamentable failure" and as an

"audacious sacrilege" and in terms still less polite.  Not all of the

English critics were violent.  The Daily Telegraph gave it something more

than a column of careful review, which did not fail to point out the

book's sins with a good deal of justice and dignity; but the majority of

English papers joined in a sort of objurgatory chorus which, for a time

at least, spared neither the author nor his work.  Strictures on the

Yankee extended to his earlier books.  After all, Mark Twain's work was

not for the cultivated class.



These things must have begun to gravel Clemens a good deal at last, for

he wrote to Andrew Lang at considerable length, setting forth his case in

general terms--that is to say, his position as an author--inviting Lang

to stand as his advocate before the English public.  In part he said:



     The critic assumes every time that if a book doesn't meet the

     cultivated-class standard it isn't valuable .  .  .  The critic has

     actually imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by

     Raphael is more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a

     chromo; and the august opera more than the hurdy-gurdy and the

     villagers' singing society; and the Latin classics than Kipling's

     far-reaching bugle-note; and Jonathan Edwards than the Salvation

     Army .  .  .  .  If a critic should start a religion it would not

     have any object but to convert angels, and they wouldn't need it.

     It is not that little minority who are already saved that are best

     worth lifting up, I should think, but the mighty mass of the

     uncultivated who are underneath!  That mass will never see the old

     masters--that sight is for the few; but the chromo-maker can lift

     them all one step upward toward appreciation of art; they cannot

     have the opera, but the hurdy-gurdy and the singing-class lift them

     a little way toward that far height; they will never know Homer, but

     the passing rhymester of their day leaves them higher than he found

     them; they may never even hear of the Latin classics, but they will

     strike step with Kipling's drum-beat and they will march; for all

     Jonathan Edwards's help they would die in their slums, but the

     Salvation Army will beguile some of them to a purer air and a

     cleaner life .



     .  .  .  I have never tried, in even one single little instance, to

     help cultivate the cultivated classes.  I was not equipped for it

     either by native gifts or training.  And I never had any ambition in

     that direction, but always hunted for bigger game--the masses.  I

     have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them, but I have done my

     best to entertain them, for they can get instruction elsewhere .  .

     .  .  My audience is dumb; it has no voice in print, and so I cannot

     know whether I have won its approval or only got its censure.



He closed by asking that Lang urge the critics to adopt a rule

recognizing the masses, and to formulate a standard whereby work done for

them might be judged.  "No voice can reach further than yours in a case

of this kind," he said, "or carry greater weight of authority."  There

was no humor in this letter, and the writer of it was clearly in earnest.



Lang's response was an article published in the Illustrated London News

on the art of Mark Twain.  He began by gently ridiculing hyperculture--

the new culture--and ended with a eulogy on Huck Finn.  It seems worth

while, however, to let Andrew Lang speak for himself.



     I have been educated till I nearly dropped; I have lived with the

     earliest apostles of culture, in the days when Chippendale was first

     a name to conjure with, and Japanese art came in like a raging lion,

     and Ronsard was the favorite poet, and Mr. William Morris was a

     poet, too, and blue and green were the only wear, and the name of

     Paradise was Camelot.  To be sure, I cannot say that I took all this

     quite seriously, but "we, too, have played" at it, and know all

     about it.  Generally speaking, I have kept up with culture.  I can

     talk (if desired) about Sainte-Beuve, and Merimee, and Felicien

     Rops; I could rhyme "Ballades" when they were "in," and knew what a

     "pantoom" was .  .  .  .  And yet I have not culture.  My works are

     but tinkling brass because I have not culture.  For culture has got

     into new regions where I cannot enter, and, what is perhaps worse,

     I find myself delighting in a great many things which are under the

     ban of culture.



He confesses that this is a dreadful position; one that makes a man feel

like one of those Liberal politicians who are always "sitting on the

fence," and who follow their party, if follow it they do, with the

reluctant acquiescence of the prophet's donkey.  He further confesses

that he has tried Hartmann and prefers Plato, that he is shaky about

Blake, though stalwart concerning Rudyard Kipling.



     This is not the worst of it.  Culture has hardly a new idol but I

     long to hurl things at it.  Culture can scarcely burn anything, but

     I am impelled to sacrifice to that same.  I am coming to suspect

     that the majority of culture's modern disciples are a mere crowd of

     very slimly educated people who have no natural taste or impulses;

     who do not really know the best things in literature; who have a

     feverish desire to admire the newest thing, to follow the latest

     artistic fashion; who prate about "style," without the faintest

     acquaintance with the ancient examples of style in Greek, French, or

     English; who talk about the classics and--criticize the classical

     critics and poets, without being able to read a line of them in the

     original.  Nothing of the natural man is left in these people; their

     intellectual equipment is made up of ignorant vanity and eager

     desire for novelty, and a yearning to be in the fashion.  Take, for

     example--and we have been a long time in coming to him--Mark Twain.

     [Here follow some observations concerning the Yankee, which Lang

     confesses that he has not read, and has abstained from reading

     because----].  Here Mark Twain is not, and cannot be, at the proper

     point of view.  He has not the knowledge which would enable him to

     be a sound critic of the ideals of the Middle Ages.  An Arthurian

     Knight in New York or in Washington would find as much to blame, and

     justly, as a Yankee at Camelot.



Of Mark Twain's work in general he speaks with another conclusion:



     Mark Twain is a benefactor beyond most modern writers, and the

     cultured who do not laugh are merely to be pitied.  But his art is

     not only that of the maker of the scarce article--mirth.  I have no

     hesitation in saying that Mark Twain is one among the greatest

     contemporary makers of fiction .  .  .  .  I can never forget or be

     ungrateful for the exquisite pleasure with which I read Huckleberry

     Finn for the first time years ago.  I read it again last night,

     deserting Kenilworth for Huck.  I never laid it down till I had

     finished it.  I perused several passages more than once, and rose

     from it with a higher opinion of its merits than ever.



     What is it that we want in a novel?  We want a vivid and original

     picture of life; we want character naturally displayed in action;

     and if we get the excitement of adventure into the bargain, and that

     adventure possible and plausible, I so far differ from the newest

     school of criticism as to think that we have additional cause for

     gratitude.  If, moreover, there is an unstrained sense of humor in

     the narrator we have a masterpiece, and Huckleberry Finn is, nothing

     less.



He reviews Huck sympathetically in detail, and closes:



     There are defects of taste, or passages that to us seem deficient in

     taste, but the book remains a nearly flawless gem of romance and of

     humor.  The world appreciates it, no doubt, but "cultured critics"

     are probably unaware of its singular value.  The great American

     novel has escaped the eyes of those who watch to see this new planet

     swim into their ken.  And will Mark Twain never write such another?

     One is enough for him to live by, and for our gratitude, but not

     enough for our desire.



In the brief column and a half which it occupies, this comment of Andrew

Lang's constitutes as thoughtful and fair an estimate of Mark Twain's

work as was ever written.



W. T. Stead, of the Review of Reviews, was about the only prominent

English editor to approve of the Yankee and to exploit its merits.  Stead

brought down obloquy upon himself by so doing, and his separation from

his business partner would seem to have been at least remotely connected

with this heresy.



The Yankee in King Arthur's Court was dramatized in America by Howard

Taylor, one of the Enterprise compositors, whom Clemens had known in the

old Comstock days.  Taylor had become a playwright of considerable

success, with a number of well-known actors and actresses starring in his

plays.  The Yankee, however, did not find a manager, or at least it seems

not to have reached the point of production.









CLXXIII



A SUMMER AT ONTEORA



With the exception of one article--" A Majestic Literary Fossil"--

[Harper's Magazine, February, 1890.  Included in the "Complete Works."]--

Clemens was writing nothing of importance at this time.  This article

grew out of a curious old medical work containing absurd prescriptions

which, with Theodore Crane, he had often laughed over at the farm.  A

sequel to Huckleberry Finn--Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians--

was begun, and a number of its chapters were set in type on the new Paige

compositor, which had cost such a gallant sum, and was then thought to be

complete.  There seems to have been a plan to syndicate the story, but at

the end of Chapter IX Huck and Tom had got themselves into a predicament

from which it seemed impossible to extricate them, and the plot was

suspended for further inspiration, which apparently never came.



Clemens, in fact, was troubled with rheumatism in his arm and shoulder,

which made writing difficult.  Mrs. Clemens, too, had twinges of the

malady.  They planned to go abroad for the summer of 1890, to take the

waters of some of the German baths, but they were obliged to give up the

idea.  There were too many business complications; also the health of

Clemens's mother had become very feeble.  They went to Tannersville in

the Catskills, instead--to the Onteora Club, where Mrs. Candace Wheeler

had gathered a congenial colony in a number of picturesque cottages, with

a comfortable hotel for the more transient visitor.  The Clemenses

secured a cottage for the season.  Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, Laurence

Hutton, Carroll Beckwith, the painter; Brander Matthews, Dr. Heber

Newton, Mrs. Custer, and Dora Wheeler were among those who welcomed Mark

Twain and his family at a generous home-made banquet.



It was the beginning of a happy summer.  There was a constant visiting

from one cottage to another, with frequent assemblings at the Bear and

Fox Inn, their general headquarters.  There were pantomimes and charades,

in which Mark Twain and his daughters always had star parts.  Susy

Clemens, who was now eighteen, brilliant and charming, was beginning to

rival her father as a leader of entertainment.  Her sister Clara gave

impersonations of Modjeska and Ada Rehan.  When Fourth of July came there

were burlesque races, of which Mark Twain was starter, and many of that

lighthearted company took part.  Sometimes, in the evening, they gathered

in one of the cottages and told stories by the firelight, and once he

told the story of the Golden Arm, so long remembered, and brought them up

with the same old jump at the sudden climax.  Brander Matthews remembers

that Clemens was obliged frequently to go to New York on business

connected with the machine and the publishing, and that during one of

these absences a professional entertainer came along, and in the course

of his program told a Mark Twain story, at which Mrs. Clemens and the

girls laughed without recognizing its authorship.  Matthews also

remembers Jean, as a little girl of ten, allowed to ride a pony and to go

barefoot, to her great delight, full of health and happiness, a favorite

of the colony.



Clemens would seem to have forgiven Brander Matthews for his copyright

articles, for he walked over to the Matthews cottage one morning and

asked to be taught piquet, the card game most in vogue there that season.

At odd times he sat to Carroll Beckwith for his portrait, and smoked a

cob pipe meantime, so Beckwith painted him in that way.



It was a season that closed sadly.  Clemens was called to Keokuk in

August, to his mother's bedside, for it was believed that her end was

near.  She rallied, and he returned to Onteora.  But on the 27th of

October came the close of that long, active life, and the woman who two

generations before had followed John Clemens into the wilderness, and

along the path of vicissitude, was borne by her children to Hannibal and

laid to rest at his side.  She was in her eighty-eighth year.



The Clemens family were back in Hartford by this time, and it was only a

little later that Mrs. Clemens was summoned to the death-bed of her own

mother, in Elmira.  Clemens accompanied her, but Jean being taken

suddenly ill he returned to Hartford.  Watching by the little girl's

bedside on the night of the 27th of November, he wrote Mrs. Clemens a

birthday letter, telling of Jean's improved condition and sending other

good news and as many loving messages as he could devise.  But it proved

a sad birthday for Mrs. Clemens, for on that day her mother's gentle and

beautiful soul went out from among them.  The foreboding she had felt at

the passing of Theodore Crane had been justified.  She had a dread that

the harvest of death was not yet ended.  Matters in general were going

badly with them, and an anxiety began to grow to get away from America,

and so perhaps leave sorrow and ill-luck behind.  Clemens, near the end

of December, writing to his publishing manager, Hall, said:



     Merry Christmas to you, and I wish to God I could have one myself

     before I die.



The house was emptier that winter than before, for Susy was at Bryn Mawr.

Clemens planned some literary work, but the beginning, after his long

idleness, was hard.  A diversion was another portrait of himself, this

time undertaken by Charles Noel Flagg.  Clemens rather enjoyed portrait-

sittings.  He could talk and smoke, and he could incidentally acquire

information.  He liked to discuss any man's profession with him, and in

his talks with Flagg he made a sincere effort to get that insight which

would enable him to appreciate the old masters.  Flagg found him a

tractable sitter, and a most interesting one.  Once he paid him a

compliment, then apologized for having said the obvious thing.



"Never mind the apology," said Clemens.  "The compliment that helps us on

our way is not the one that is shut up in the mind, but the one that is

spoken out."



When Flagg's portrait was about completed, Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Crane

came to the studio to look at it.  Mrs. Clemens complained only that the

necktie was crooked.



"But it's always crooked," said Flagg, "and I have a great fancy for the

line it makes."



She straightened it on Clemens himself, but it immediately became crooked

again.  Clemens said:



"If you were to make that necktie straight people would say; ' Good

portrait, but there is something the matter with it.  I don't know where

it is.'"



The tie was left unchanged.









CLXXIV



THE MACHINE



The reader may have realized that by the beginning of 1891 Mark Twain's

finances were in a critical condition.  The publishing business had

managed to weather along.  It was still profitable, and could have been

made much more so if the capital necessary to its growth had not been

continuously and relentlessly absorbed by that gigantic vampire of

inventions--that remorseless Frankenstein monster--the machine.



The beginning of this vast tragedy (for it was no less than that) dated

as far back as 1880, when Clemens one day had taken a minor and purely

speculative interest in patent rights, which was to do away with setting

type by hand.  In some memoranda which he made more than ten years later,

when the catastrophe was still a little longer postponed, he gave some

account of the matter.



     This episode has now spread itself over more than one-fifth of my

     life, a considerable stretch of time, as I am now 55 years old.



     Ten or eleven years ago Dwight Buell, a jeweler, called at our house

     and was shown up to the billiard-room-which was my study; and the

     game got more study than the other sciences.  He wanted me to take

     some stock in a type-setting machine.  He said it was at the Colt's

     Arms factory, and was about finished.  I took $2,000 of the stock.

     I was always taking little chances like that, and almost always

     losing by it, too.  Some time afterward I was invited to go down to

     the factory and see the machine.  I went, promising myself nothing,

     for I knew all about type-setting by practical experience, and held

     the settled and solidified opinion that a successful type-setting

     machine was an impossibility, for the reason that a machine cannot

     be made to think, and the thing that sets movable type must think or

     retire defeated.  So, the performance I witnessed did most

     thoroughly amaze me.  Here was a machine that was really setting

     type, and doing it with swiftness and accuracy, too.  Moreover, it

     was distributing its case at the same time.  The distribution was

     automatic; the machine fed itself from a galley of dead matter and

     without human help or suggestion, for it began its work of its own

     accord when the type channels needed filling, and stopped of its own

     accord when they were full enough.  The machine was almost a

     complete compositor; it lacked but one feature--it did not "justify"

     the lines.  This was done by the operator's assistant.



     I saw the operator set at the rate of 3,000 ems an hour, which,

     counting distribution, was but little short of four casemen's work.

     William Hamersley was there.  He said he was already a considerable

     owner, and was going to take as much more of the stock as he could

     afford.  Wherefore, I set down my name for an additional $3,000.  It

     is here that the music begins.



It was the so-called Farnham machine that he saw, invented by James W.

Paige, and if they had placed it on the market then, without waiting for

the inventor to devise improvements, the story might have been a

different one.  But Paige was never content short of absolute perfection

--a machine that was not only partly human, but entirely so.  Clemens'

used to say later that the Paige type-setter would do everything that a

human being could do except drink and swear and go on a strike.  He might

properly have omitted the last item, but of that later.  Paige was a

small, bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed man, with a crystal-clear

mind, but a dreamer and a visionary.  Clemens says of him: "He is a poet;

a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in

steel."



It is easy to see now that Mark Twain and Paige did not make a good

business combination.  When Paige declared that, wonderful as the machine

was, he could do vastly greater things with it, make it worth many more

and much larger fortunes by adding this attachment and that, Clemens was

just the man to enter into his dreams and to furnish the money to realize

them.  Paige did not require much money at first, and on the capital

already invested he tinkered along with his improvements for something

like four or five years; Hamersley and Clemens meantime capitalizing the

company and getting ready to place the perfected invention on the market.

By the time the Grant episode had ended Clemens had no reason to believe

but that incalculable wealth lay just ahead, when the newspapers should

be apprised of the fact that their types were no longer to be set by

hand.  Several contracts had been made with Paige, and several new

attachments had been added to the machine.  It seemed to require only one

thing more, the justifier, which would save the labor of the extra man.

Paige could be satisfied with nothing short of that, even though the

extra man's wage was unimportant.  He must have his machine do it all,

and meantime five precious years had slipped away.  Clemens, in his

memoranda, says:



     End of 1885.  Paige arrives at my house unheralded.  I had seen

     little or nothing of him for a year or two.  He said:



     "What will you complete the machine for?"



     "What will it cost?"



     "Twenty thousand dollars; certainly not over $30,000."



     "What will you give?"



     "I'll give you half."



Clemens was "flush" at this time.  His reading tour with Cable, the great

sale of Huck Finn, the prospect of the Grant book, were rosy realities.

He said:



     "I'll do it, but the limit must be $30,000."



They agreed to allow Hamersley a tenth interest for the money he had

already invested and for legal advice.



Hamersley consented readily enough, and when in February, 1886, the new

contract was drawn they believed themselves heir to the millions of the

Fourth Estate.



By this time F. G. Whitmore had come into Clemens's business affairs, and

he did not altogether approve of the new contract.  Among other things,

it required that Clemens should not only complete the machine, but

promote it, capitalize it commercially.  Whitmore said:



"Mr. Clemens, that clause can bankrupt you."



Clemens answered: "Never mind that, Whitmore; I've considered that.  I

can get a thousand men worth a million apiece to go in with me if I can

get a perfect machine."



He immediately began to calculate the number of millions he would be

worth presently when the machine was completed and announced to the

waiting world.  He covered pages with figures that never ran short of

millions, and frequently approached the billion mark.  Colonel Sellers in

his happiest moments never dreamed more lavishly.  He obtained a list of

all the newspapers in the United States and in Europe, and he counted up

the machines that would be required by each.  To his nephew, Sam Moffett,

visiting him one day, he declared that it would take ten men to count the

profits from the typesetter.  He realized clearly enough that a machine

which would set and distribute type and do the work of half a dozen men

or more would revolutionize type composition.  The fact that other

inventors besides Paige were working quite as diligently and perhaps

toward more simple conclusions did not disturb him.  Rumors came of the

Rogers machine and the Thorne machine and the Mergenthaler linotype, but

Mark Twain only smiled.  When the promoters of the Mergenthaler offered

to exchange half their interests for a half interest in the Paige patent,

to obtain thereby a wider insurance of success, it only confirmed his

trust, and he let the golden opportunity go by.



Clemens thinks the thirty thousand dollars lasted about a year.  Then

Paige confessed that the machine was still incomplete, but he said that

four thousand dollars more would finish it, and that with ten thousand

dollars he could finish it and give a big exhibition in New York.  He had

discarded the old machine altogether, it seems, and at Pratt & Whitney's

shops was building a new one from the ground up--a machine of twenty

thousand minutely exact parts, each of which must be made by expert hand

workmanship after elaborate drawings and patterns even more expensive.

It was an undertaking for a millionaire.



Paige offered to borrow from Clemens the amount needed, offering the

machine as security.  Clemens supplied the four thousand dollars, and

continued to advance money from time to time at the rate of three to four

thousand dollars a month, until he had something like eighty thousand

dollars invested, with the machine still unfinished.  This would be early

in 1888, by which time other machines had reached a state of completion

and were being placed on the market.  The Mergenthaler, in particular,

was attracting wide attention.  Paige laughed at it, and Clemens, too,

regarded it as a joke.  The moment their machine was complete all other

machines would disappear.  Even the fact that the Tribune had ordered

twenty-three of the linotypes, and other journals were only waiting to

see the paper in its new dress before ordering, did not disturb them.

Those linotypes would all go into the scrap-heap presently.  It was too

bad people would waste their money so.  In January, 1888, Paige promised

that the machine would be done by the 1st of April.  On the 1st of April

he promised it for September, but in October he acknowledged there were

still eighty-five days' work to be done on it.  In November Clemens wrote

to Orion:



The machine is apparently almost done--but I take no privileges on that

account; it must be done before I spend a cent that can be avoided.  I

have kept this family on very short commons for two years and they must

go on scrimping until the machine is finished, no matter how long that

may be.



By the end of '88 the income from the books and the business and Mrs.

Clemens's Elmira investments no longer satisfied the demands of the type-

setter, in addition to the household expense, reduced though the latter

was; and Clemens began by selling and hypothecating his marketable

securities.  The whole household interest by this time centered in the

machine.  What the Tennessee land had been to John and Jane Clemens and

their children, the machine had now become to Samuel Clemens and his

family.  "When the machine is finished everything will be all right

again" afforded the comfort of that long-ago sentence, "When the

Tennessee land is sold."



They would have everything they wanted then.  Mrs. Clemens planned

benefactions, as was her wont.  Once she said to her sister:



"How strange it will seem to have unlimited means, to be able to do

whatever you want to do, to give whatever you want to give without

counting the cost."



Straight along through another year the three thousand dollars and more a

month continued, and then on the 5th of January, 1889, there came what

seemed the end--the machine and justifier were complete!  In his notebook

on that day Mark Twain set down this memorandum:



                                 EUREKA!



     Saturday, January 5, 1889-12.20 P.M.  At this moment I have seen a

     line of movable type spaced and justified by machinery!  This is the

     first time in the history of the world that this amazing thing has

     ever been done.  Present:

     J. W. Paige, the inventor;

     Charles Davis, | Mathematical assistants

     Earll          | & mechanical

     Graham         | experts

     Bates, foreman, and S.  L.  Clemens.

     This record is made immediately after the prodigious event.





Two days later he made another note:



     Monday, January 7--4.45 P.m.  The first proper name ever set by this

     new keyboard was William Shakspeare.  I set it at the above hour; &

     I perceive, now that I see the name written, that I either mis-

     spelled it then or I've misspelled it now.



     The space-bar did its duty by the electric connections & steam &

     separated the two words preparatory to the reception of the space.



It seemed to him that his troubles were at an end.  He wrote overflowing

letters, such as long ago he had written about his first mining claims,

to Orion and to other members of the family and to friends in America and

Europe.  One of these letters, written to George Standring, a London

printer and publisher, also an author, will serve as an example.



     The machine is finished!  An hour and forty minutes ago a line of

     movable type was spaced and justified by machinery for the first

     time in the history of the world.  And I was there to see.



     That was the final function.  I had before seen the machine set

     type, automatically, and distribute type, and automatically

     distribute its eleven different thicknesses of spaces.  So now I

     have seen the machine, operated by one individual, do the whole

     thing, and do it a deal better than any man at the case can do it.



     This is by far and away the most marvelous invention ever contrived

     by man.  And it is not a thing of rags and patches; it is made of

     massive steel, and will last a century.



     She will do the work of six men, and do it better than any six men

     that ever stood at a case.



     The death-warrant of all other type-setting machines in this world

     was signed at 12.20 this afternoon, when that first line was shot

     through this machine and came out perfectly spaced and justified.

     And automatically, mind you.



     There was a speck of invisible dirt on one of those nonpareil types.

     Well, the machine allowed for that by inserting of its own accord a

     space which was the 5-1,000 of an inch thinner than it would have

     used if the dirt had been absent.  But when I send you the details

     you will see that that's nothing for this machine to do; you'll see

     that it knows more and has got more brains than all the printers in

     the world put together.



His letter to Orion was more technical, also more jubilant.  At the end

he said:



     All the witnesses made written record of the immense historical

     birth--the first justification of a line of movable type by

     machinery--& also set down the hour and the minute.  Nobody had

     drank anything, & yet everybody seemed drunk.  Well-dizzy,

     stupefied, stunned.



     All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty

     nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical

     miracle.  Telephones, telegraphs, locomotives, cotton-gins, sewing-

     machines, Babbage calculators, jacquard looms, perfecting presses,

     all mere toys, simplicities!  The Paige Compositor marches alone and

     far in the land of human inventions.



In one paragraph of Orion's letter he refers to the machine as a "cunning

devil, knowing more than any man that ever lived."  That was a profound

truth, though not as he intended it.  That creation of James Paige's

brain reflected all the ingenuity and elusiveness of its creator, and

added something on its own account.  It was discovered presently that it

had a habit of breaking the types.  Paige said it was a trifling thing:

he could fix it, but it meant taking down the machine, and that deadly

expense of three thousand or four thousand dollars a month for the band

of workmen and experts in Pratt & Whitney's machine shops did not cease.

In February the machine was again setting and justifying type "to a

hair," and Whitmore's son, Fred, was running it at a rate of six thousand

ems an hour, a rate of composition hitherto unknown in the history of the

world.  His speed was increased to eight thousand ems an hour by the end

of the year, and the machine was believed to have a capacity of eleven

thousand.  No type-setter invented to this day could match it for

accuracy and precision when it was in perfect order, but its point of

perfection was apparently a vanishing point.  It would be just reached,

when it would suddenly disappear, and Paige would discover other needed

corrections.  Once, when it was apparently complete as to every detail;

and running like a human thing, with such important customers as the New

York Herald and other great papers ready to place their orders, Paige

suddenly discovered that it required some kind of an air-blast, and it

was all taken down again and the air-blast, which required months to

invent and perfect, was added.



But what is the use of remembering all these bitter details?  The steady

expense went on through another year, apparently increasing instead of

diminishing, until, by the beginning of 1890, Clemens was finding it

almost impossible to raise funds to continue the work.  Still he

struggled on.  It was the old mining fascination--"a foot farther into

the ledge and we shall strike the vein of gold."



He sent for Joe Goodman to come and help him organize a capital-stock

company, in which Senator Jones and John Mackay, old Comstock friends,

were to be represented.  He never for a moment lost faith in the final

outcome, and he believed that if they could build their own factory the

delays and imperfections of construction would be avoided.  Pratt &

Whitney had been obliged to make all the parts by hand.  With their own

factory the new company would have vast and perfect machinery dedicated

entirely to the production of type-setters.



Nothing short of two million dollars capitalization was considered, and

Goodman made at least three trips from California to the East and labored

with Jones and Mackay all that winter and at intervals during the

following year, through which that "cunning devil," the machine, consumed

its monthly four thousand dollars--money that was the final gleanings and

sweepings of every nook and corner of the strong-box and bank-account and

savings of the Clemens family resources.  With all of Mark Twain's fame

and honors his life at this period was far from an enviable one.  It was,

in fact, a fevered delirium, often a veritable nightmare.



Reporters who approached him for interviews, little guessing what he was

passing through, reported that Mark Twain's success in life had made him

crusty and sour.



Goodman remembers that when they were in Washington, conferring with

Jones, and had rooms at the Arlington, opening together, often in the

night he would awaken to see a light burning in the next room and to hear

Mark Twain's voice calling:



"Joe, are you awake?"



"Yes, Mark, what is it?"



"Oh, nothing, only I can't sleep.  Won't you talk awhile?  I know it's

wrong to disturb you, but I am so d--d miserable that I can't help it."



Whereupon he would get up and talk and talk, and pace the floor and curse

the delays until he had refreshed himself, and then perhaps wallow in

millions until breakfast-time.



Jones and Mackay, deeply interested, were willing to put up a reasonable

amount of money, but they were unable to see a profit in investing so

large a capital in a plant for constructing the machines.



Clemens prepared estimates showing that the American business alone would

earn thirty-five million dollars a year, and the European business twenty

million dollars more.  These dazzled, but they did not convince the

capitalists.  Jones was sincerely anxious to see the machine succeed, and

made an engagement to come out to see it work, but a day or two before he

was to come Paige was seized with an inspiration.  The type-setter was

all in parts when the day came, and Jones's visit had to be postponed.

Goodman wrote that the fatal delay had "sicklied over the bloom" of

Jones's original enthusiasm.



Yet Clemens seems never to have been openly violent with Paige.  In the

memorandum which he completed about this time he wrote:



     Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms, and yet he

     knows perfectly well that if I had him in a steel trap I would shut

     out all human succor and watch that trap until he died.



He was grabbing at straws now.  He offered a twentieth or a hundredth or

a thousandth part of the enterprise for varying sums, ranging from one

thousand to one hundred thousand dollars.  He tried to capitalize his

advance (machine) royalties, and did dispose of a few of these; but when

the money came in for them he was beset by doubts as to the final

outcome, and though at his wit's ends for further funds, he returned the

checks to the friends who had sent them.  One five-thousand-dollar check

from a friend named Arnot, in Elmira, went back by the next mail.  He was

willing to sacrifice his own last penny, but he could not take money from

those who were blindly backing his judgment only and not their own.  He

still had faith in Jones, faith which lasted up to the 13th of February,

1891.  Then came a final letter, in which Jones said that he had

canvassed the situation thoroughly with such men as Mackay, Don Cameron,

Whitney, and others, with the result that they would have nothing to do

with the machine.  Whitney and Cameron, he said, were large stockholders

in the Mergenthaler.  Jones put it more kindly and more politely than

that, and closed by saying that there could be no doubt as to the

machine's future an ambiguous statement.  A letter from young Hall came

about the same time, urging a heavy increase of capital in the business.

The Library of American Literature, its leading feature, was handled on

the instalment plan.  The collections from this source were deferred

driblets, while the bills for manufacture and promotion must be paid down

in cash.  Clemens realized that for the present at least the dream was

ended.  The family securities were exhausted.  The book trade was dull;

his book royalties were insufficient even to the demands of the

household.  He signed further notes to keep business going, left the

matter of the machine in abeyance, and turned once more to the trade of

authorship.  He had spent in the neighborhood of one hundred and ninety

thousand dollars on the typesetter--money that would better have been

thrown into the Connecticut River, for then the agony had been more

quickly over.  As it was, it had shadowed many precious years.











CLXXV



"THE CLAIMANT"--LEAVING HARTFORD



For the first time in twenty years Mark Twain was altogether dependent on

literature.  He did not feel mentally unequal to the new problem; in

fact, with his added store of experience, he may have felt himself more

fully equipped for authorship than ever before.  It had been his habit to

write within his knowledge and observation.  To a correspondent of this

time he reviewed his stock in trade



     .  .  .  I confine myself to life with which I am familiar when

     pretending to portray life.  But I confined myself to the boy-life

     out on the Mississippi because that had a peculiar charm for me, and

     not because I was not familiar with other phases of life.  I was a

     soldier two weeks once in the beginning of the war, and was hunted

     like a rat the whole time.  Familiar?  My splendid Kipling himself

     hasn't a more burnt-in, hard-baked, and unforgetable familiarity

     with that death-on-the-pale-horse-with-hell-following-after, which

     is a raw soldier's first fortnight in the field--and which, without

     any doubt, is the most tremendous fortnight and the vividest he is

     ever going to see.



     Yes, and I have shoveled silver tailings in a quartz-mill a couple

     of weeks, and acquired the last possibilities of culture in that

     direction.  And I've done "pocket-mining" during three months in the

     one little patch of ground in the whole globe where Nature conceals

     gold in pockets--or did before we robbed all of those pockets and

     exhausted, obliterated, annihilated the most curious freak Nature

     ever indulged in.  There are not thirty men left alive who, being

     told there was a pocket hidden on the broad slope of a mountain,

     would know how to go and find it, or have even the faintest idea of

     how to set about it; but I am one of the possible 20 or 30 who

     possess the secret, and I could go and put my hand on that hidden

     treasure with a most deadly precision.



     And I've been a prospector, and know pay rock from poor when I find

     it--just with a touch of the tongue.  And I've been a silver miner

     and know how to dig and shovel and drill and put in a blast.  And so

     I know the mines and the miners interiorly as well as Bret Harte

     knows them exteriorly.



     And I was a newspaper reporter four years in cities, and so saw the

     inside of many things; and was reporter in a legislature two

     sessions and the same in Congress one session, and thus learned to

     know personally three sample bodies of the smallest minds and the

     selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes.



     And I was some years a Mississippi pilot, and familiarly knew all

     the different kinds of steamboatmen--a race apart, and not like

     other folk.



     And I was for some years a traveling "jour" printer, and wandered

     from city to city--and so I know that sect familiarly.



     And I was a lecturer on the public platform a number of seasons and

     was a responder to toasts at all the different kinds of banquets--

     and so I know a great many secrets about audiences--secrets not to

     be got out of books, but only acquirable by experience.



     And I watched over one dear project of mine for years, spent a

     fortune on it, and failed to make it go--and the history of that

     would make a large book in which a million men would see themselves

     as in a mirror; and they would testify and say, Verily, this is not

     imagination; this fellow has been there--and after would they cast

     dust upon their heads, cursing and blaspheming.



     And I am a publisher, and did pay to one author's widow (General

     Grant's) the largest copyright checks this world has seen-

     aggregating more than L80,000 in the first year.



     And I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.



     Now then: as the most valuable capital or culture or education

     usable in the building of novels is personal experience I ought to

     be well equipped for that trade.



     I surely have the equipment, a wide culture, and all of it real,

     none of it artificial, for I don't know anything about books.



This generous bill of literary particulars was fully warranted.  Mark

Twain's equipment was equal to his occasions.  It is true that he was no

longer young, and that his health was not perfect, but his resolution and

his energy had not waned.



His need was imminent and he lost no time.  He dug out from his

pigeonholes such materials as he had in stock, selecting a few completed

manuscripts for immediate disposal--among them his old article entitled,

"Mental Telegraphy," written in 1878, when he had hesitated to offer it,

in the fear that it would not be accepted by the public otherwise than as

a joke.  He added to it now a supplement and sent it to Mr. Alden, of

Harper's Magazine.



Psychic interest had progressed in twelve years; also Mark Twain had come

to be rather more seriously regarded.  The article was accepted promptly!

--[The publication of this article created a good deal of a stir and

resulted in the first general recognition of what later became known as

Telepathy.  A good many readers insisted on regarding the whole matter as

one of Mark Twain's jokes, but its serious acceptance was much wider.]--

The old sketch, "Luck," also found its way to Harper's Magazine, and

other manuscripts were looked over and furbished up with a view to their

disposal.  Even the history game was dragged from the dust of its

retirement, and Hall was instructed to investigate its chance of profit.



Then Mark Twain went to work in earnest.  Within a week after the

collapse of the Jones bubble he was hard at work on a new book--the

transmigration of the old "Claimant" play into a novel.



Ever since the appearance of the Yankee there had been what was evidently

a concerted movement to induce him to write a novel with the theories of

Henry George as the central idea.  Letters from every direction had urged

him to undertake such a story, and these had suggested a more serious

purpose for the Claimant book.  A motif in which there is a young lord

who renounces his heritage and class to come to America and labor with

his hands; who attends socialistic meetings at which men inspired by

readings of 'Progress and Poverty' and 'Looking Backward' address their

brothers of toil, could have in it something worth while.  Clemens

inserted portions of some of his discarded essays in these addresses, and

had he developed this element further, and abandoned Colonel Sellers's

materialization lunacies to the oblivion they had earned, the result

might have been more fortunate.



But his faith in the new Sellers had never died, and the temptation to

use scenes from the abandoned play proved to be too strong to be

resisted.  The result was incongruous enough.  The author, however,

admired it amazingly at the time.  He sent Howells stirring reports of

his progress.  He wrote Hall that the book would be ready soon and that

there must be seventy-five thousand orders by the date of issue, "not a

single one short of that."  Then suddenly, at the end of February, the

rheumatism came back into his shoulder and right arm and he could hardly

hold the pen.  He conceived the idea of dictating into a phonograph, and

wrote Howells to test this invention and find out as to terms for three

months, with cylinders enough to carry one hundred and seventy-five

thousand words.



     I don't want to erase any of them.  My right arm is nearly disabled

     by rheumatism, but I am bound to write this book (and sell 100,000

     copies of it-no, I mean 1,000,000--next fall).  I feel sure I can

     dictate the book into a phonograph if I don't have to yell.  I write

     2,000 words a day.  I think I can dictate twice as many.



     But mind, if this is going to be too much trouble to you--go ahead

     and do it all the same.



Howells replied encouragingly.  He had talked a letter into a phonograph

and the phonograph man had talked his answer into it, after which the

cylinder had been taken to a typewriter in the-next room and correctly

written out.  If a man had the "cheek" to dictate his story into a

phonograph, Howells said, all the rest seemed perfectly easy.



Clemens ordered a phonograph and gave it a pretty fair trial.  It was

only a partial success.  He said he couldn't write literature with it

because it hadn't any ideas or gift for elaboration, but was just as

matter-of-fact, compressive and unresponsive, grave and unsmiling as the

devil--a poor audience.



I filled four dozen cylinders in two sittings, then I found I could have

said it about as easy with the pen, and said it a deal better.  Then I

resigned.



He did not immediately give it up.  To relieve his aching arm he

alternated the phonograph with the pen, and the work progressed rapidly.

Early in May he was arranging for its serial disposition, and it was

eventually sold for twelve thousand dollars to the McClure Syndicate, who

placed it with a number of papers in America and with the Idler Magazine

in England.  W. M. Laffan, of the Sun, an old and tried friend, combined

with McClure in the arrangement.  Laffan also proposed to join with

McClure in paying Mark Twain a thousand dollars each for a series of six

European letters.  This was toward the end of May, 1891, when Clemens had

already decided upon a long European sojourn.



There were several reasons why this was desirable.  Neither Clemens nor

his wife was in good health.  Both of them were troubled with rheumatism,

and a council of physicians had agreed that Mrs. Clemens had some

disturbance of the heart.  The death of Charles L. Webster in April--the

fourth death among relatives in two years--had renewed her forebodings.

Susy, who had been at Bryn Mawr, had returned far from well.  The

European baths and the change of travel it was believed would be

beneficial to the family health.  Furthermore, the maintenance of the

Hartford home was far too costly for their present and prospective

income.  The house with its associations of seventeen incomparable years

must be closed.  A great period had ended.



They arranged to sail on the 6th of June by the French line.--[On the

Gascogne.]--Mrs. Crane was to accompany them, and came over in April to

help in breaking the news to the servants.  John and Ellen O'Neill (the

gardener and his wife) were to remain in charge; places were found for

George and Patrick.  Katie Leary was retained to accompany the family.

It was a sad dissolution.



The day came for departure and the carriage was at the door.  Mrs.

Clemens did not come immediately.  She was looking into the rooms,

bidding a kind of silent good-by to the home she had made and to all its

memories.  Following the others she entered the carriage, and Patrick

McAleer drove them together for the last time.  They were going on a long

journey.  They did not guess how long, or that the place would never be

home to them again.









CLXXVI



A EUROPEAN SUMMER



They landed at Havre and went directly to Paris, where they remained

about a week.  From Paris Clemens wrote to Hall that a deal by which he

had hoped to sell out his interest in the type-setter to the Mallorys, of

the Churchman, had fallen through.



"Therefore," he said, "you will have to modify your instalment system to

meet the emergency of a constipated purse; for if you should need to

borrow any more money I would not know how or where to raise it."



The Clemens party went to Geneva, then rested for a time at the baths of

Aix; from Aix to Bayreuth to attend the Wagner festival, and from

Bayreuth to Marienbad for further additions of health.  Clemens began

writing his newspaper letters at Aix, the first of which consists of

observations at that "paradise of rheumatics."  This letter is really a

careful and faithful description of Aix-les-Bains, with no particular

drift of humor in it.  He tells how in his own case the baths at first

developed plenty of pain, but that the subsequent ones removed almost all

of it.



"I've got back the use of my arm the last few days, and I am going away

now," he says, and concludes by describing the beautiful drives and

scenery about Aix--the pleasures to be found paddling on little Lake

Bourget and the happy excursions to Annecy.



     At the end of an hour you come to Annecy and rattle through its old

     crooked lanes, built solidly up with curious old houses that are a

     dream of the Middle Ages, and presently you come to the main object

     of your trip--Lake Annecy.  It is a revelation.  It is a miracle.

     It brings the tears to a body's eyes.  It is so enchanting.  That is

     to say, it affects you just as all other things that you instantly

     recognize as perfect affect you--perfect music, perfect eloquence,

     perfect art, perfect joy, perfect grief.



He was getting back into his old descriptive swing, but his dislike for

travel was against him, and he found writing the letters hard.  From

Bayreuth he wrote "At the Shrine of St. Wagner," one of the best

descriptions of that great musical festival that has been put into words.

He paid full tribute to the performance, also to the Wagner devotion,

confessing its genuineness.



     This opera of "Tristan and Isolde" last night broke the hearts of

     all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some, and have

     heard of many, who could not sleep after it, but cried the night

     away.  I feel strongly out of place here.  Sometimes I feel like the

     one sane person in the community of the mad; sometimes I feel like

     the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in

     the college of the learned, and always during service I feel like a

     heretic in heaven.



He tells how he really enjoyed two of the operas, and rejoiced in

supposing that his musical regeneration was accomplished and perfected;

but alas! he was informed by experts that those particular events were

not real music at all.  Then he says:



     Well, I ought to have recognized the sign the old, sure sign that

     has never failed me in matters of art.  Whenever I enjoy anything in

     art it means that it is mighty poor.  The private knowledge of this

     fact has saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of

     many and many a chromo.  However, my base instinct does bring me

     profit sometimes; I was the only man out of 3,200 who got his money

     back on those two operas.



His third letter was from Marienbad, in Bohemia, another "health-

factory," as he calls it, and is of the same general character as those

preceding.  In his fourth letter he told how he himself took charge of

the family fortunes and became courier from Aix to Bayreuth.  It is a

very delightful letter, most of it, and probably not greatly burlesqued

or exaggerated in its details.  It is included now in the "Complete

Works," as fresh and delightful as ever.  They returned to Germany at the

end of August, to Nuremberg, which he notes as the "city of exquisite

glimpses," and to Heidelberg, where they had their old apartment of

thirteen years before, Room 40 at the Schloss Hotel, with its wonderful

prospect of wood and hill, and the haze-haunted valley of the Rhine.

They remained less than a week in that beautiful place, and then were off

for Switzerland, Lucerne, Brienz, Interlaken, finally resting at the

Hotel Beau Rivage, Ouchy, Lausanne, on beautiful Lake Leman.



Clemens had agreed to write six of the newspaper letters, and he had by

this time finished five of them, the fifth being dated from Interlaken,

its subject, "Switzerland, the Cradle of Liberty."  He wrote to Hall that

it was his intention to write another book of travel and to take a year

or two to collect the material.  The Century editors were after him for a

series after the style of Innocents Abroad.  He considered this

suggestion, but declined by cable, explaining to Hall that he intended to

write for serial publication no more than the six newspaper letters.  He

said:



     To write a book of travel would be less trouble than to write six

     detached chapters.  Each of these letters requires the same variety

     of treatment and subject that one puts into a book; but in the book

     each chapter doesn't have to be rounded and complete in itself.



He suggested that the six letters be gathered into a small volume which

would contain about thirty-five or forty thousand words, to be sold as

low as twenty-five cents, but this idea appears to have been dropped.



At Ouchy Clemens conceived the idea of taking a little trip on his own

account, an excursion that would be a rest after the strenuous three

months' travel and sightseeing--one that he could turn into literature.

He engaged Joseph Very, a courier used during their earlier European

travels, and highly recommended in the Tramp Abroad.  He sent Joseph over

to Lake Bourget to engage a boat and a boatman for a ten days' trip down

the river Rhone.  For five dollars Joseph bought a safe, flat-bottom

craft; also he engaged the owner as pilot.  A few days later--September

19--Clemens followed.  They stopped overnight on an island in Lake

Bourget, and in his notes Clemens tells how he slept in the old castle of

Chatillon, in the room where a pope was born.  They started on their

drift next morning.  To Mrs. Clemens, in some good-by memoranda, he said:



     The lake is as smooth as glass; a brilliant sun is shining.



     Our boat is so comfortable and shady with its awning.



     11.20.  We have crossed the lake and are entering the canal.  Shall

     presently be in the Rhone.



     Noon.  Nearly down to the Rhone, passing the village of Chanaz.



     Sunday, 3.15 P.M.  We have been in the Rhone three hours.  It

     is unimaginably still & reposeful & cool & soft & breezy.  No rowing

     or work of any kind to do--we merely float with the current we glide

     noiseless and swift--as fast as a London cab-horse rips along--8

     miles an hour--the swiftest current I've ever boated in. We have the

     entire river to ourselves nowhere a boat of any kind.



Pleasant it must have been in the warm September days to go swinging down

that swift, gray stream which comes racing out of Switzerland into

France, fed from a thousand glaciers.  He sent almost daily memoranda of

his progress.  Half-way to Arles he wrote:



     It's too delicious, floating with the swift current under the

     awning these superb, sunshiny days in deep peace and quietness.



     Some of these curious old historical towns strangely persuade me,

     but it is so lovely afloat that I don't stop, but view them from the

     outside and sail on.  We get abundance of grapes and peaches for

     next to nothing.  My, but that inn was suffocating with garlic where

     we stayed last night!  I had to hold my nose as we went up-stairs or

     I believe I should have fainted.



     Little bit of a room, rude board floor unswept, 2 chairs, unpainted

     white pine table--void the furniture!  Had a good firm bed, solid as

     a rock, & you could have brained an ox with the bolster.



     These six hours have been entirely delightful.  I want to do all the

     rivers of Europe in an open boat in summer weather.



     Still further along he described one of their shore accommodations.



     Night caught us yesterday where we had to take quarters in a

     peasant's house which was occupied by the family and a lot of cows &

     calves, also several rabbits.--[His word for fleas.  Neither fleas

     nor mosquitoes ever bit him--probably because of his steady use of

     tobacco.]--The latter had a ball & I was the ballroom; but they

     were very friendly and didn't bite.



     The peasants were mighty kind and hearty & flew around & did their

     best to make us comfortable.  This morning I breakfasted on the

     shore in the open air with two sociable dogs & a cat.  Clean cloth,

     napkins & table furniture, white sugar, a vast hunk of excellent

     butter, good bread, first-class coffee with pure milk, fried fish

     just caught.  Wonderful that so much cleanliness should come out of

     such a phenomenally dirty house.



     An hour ago we saw the Falls of the Rhone, a prodigiously rough and

     dangerous-looking place; shipped a little water, but came to no

     harm.  It was one of the most beautiful pieces of piloting & boat

     management I ever saw.  Our admiral knew his business.



     We have had to run ashore for shelter every time it has rained

     heretofore, but Joseph has been putting in his odd time making a

     waterproof sun-bonnet for the boat, & now we sail along dry,

     although we have had many heavy showers this morning.



Here follows a pencil-drawing of the boat and its new awning, and he

adds: "I'm on the stern, under the shelter, and out of sight."



The trip down the Rhone proved more valuable as an outing than as

literary material.  Clemens covered one hundred and seventy-four pages

with his notes of it, then gave it up.  Traveling alone with no one but

Joseph and the Admiral (former owner of the craft) was reposeful and

satisfactory, but it did not inspire literary flights.  He tried to

rectify the lack of companionship by introducing fictitious characters,

such as Uncle Abner, Fargo, and Stavely, a young artist; also Harris,

from the Tramp Abroad; but Harris was not really there this time, and

Mark Twain's genius, given rather to elaboration than to construction,

found it too severe a task to imagine a string of adventures without at

least the customary ten per cent. of fact to build upon.



It was a day above Avignon that he had an experience worth while.  They

were abreast of an old castle, nearing a village, one of the huddled

jumble of houses of that locality, when, glancing over his left shoulder

toward the distant mountain range, he received what he referred to later

as a soul-stirring shock.  Pointing to the outline of the distant range

he said to the courier:



"Name it.  Who is it?"



The courier said, "Napoleon."



Clemens assented.  The Admiral, when questioned, also promptly agreed

that the mountain outlined was none other than the reclining figure of

the great commander himself.  They watched and discussed the phenomenon

until they reached the village.  Next morning Clemens was up for a first

daybreak glimpse of his discovery.  Later he reported it to Mrs. Clemens:



     I did so long for you and Sue yesterday morning--the most superb

     sunrise--the most marvelous sunrise--& I saw it all, from the very

     faintest suspicion of the coming dawn, all the way through to the

     final explosion of glory.  But it had an interest private to itself

     & not to be found elsewhere in the world; for between me & it, in

     the far-distant eastward, was a silhouetted mountain range, in which

     I had discovered, the previous afternoon, a most noble face upturned

     to the sky, & mighty form outstretched, which I had named Napoleon

     Dreaming of Universal Empire--& now this prodigious face, soft,

     rich, blue, spirituelle, asleep, tranquil, reposeful, lay against

     that giant conflagration of ruddy and golden splendors, all rayed

     like a wheel with the up-streaming & far-reaching lances of the sun.

     It made one want to cry for delight, it was so supreme in its

     unimaginable majesty & beauty.



He made a pencil-sketch of the Napoleon head in his note-book, and stated

that the apparition could be seen opposite the castle of Beauchastel; but

in later years his treacherous memory betrayed him, and, forgetting these

identifying marks, he told of it as lying a few hours above Arles, and

named it the "Lost Napoleon," because those who set out to find it did

not succeed.  He even wrote an article upon the subject, in which he

urged tourists to take steamer from Arles and make a short trip upstream,

keeping watch on the right-hand bank, with the purpose of rediscovering

the natural wonder.  Fortunately this sketch was not published.  It would

have been set down as a practical joke by disappointed travelers.  One of

Mark Twain's friends, Mr. Theodore Stanton, made a persistent effort to

find the Napoleon, but with the wrong directions naturally failed.



It required ten days to float to Arles.  Then the current gave out and

Clemens ended the excursion and returned to Lausanne by rail.  He said:



"It was twenty-eight miles to Marseilles, and somebody would have to row.

That would not have been pleasure; it would have meant work for the

sailor, and I do not like work even when another person does it."



To Twichell in America he wrote:



     You ought to have been along--I could have made room for you easily,

     & you would have found that a pedestrian tour in Europe doesn't

     begin with a raft voyage for hilarity & mild adventure & intimate

     contact with the unvisited native of the back settlements &

     extinction from the world and newspapers & a conscience in a state

     of coma & lazy comfort & solid happiness.  In fact, there's nothing

     that's so lovely.



But it's all over.  I gave the raft away yesterday at Arles & am loafing

along back by short stages on the rail to Ouchy, Lausanne, where the

tribe are staying at the Beau Rivage and are well and prosperous.









CLXXVII



KORNERSTRASSE,7



They had decided to spend the winter in Berlin, and in October Mrs.

Clemens and Mrs. Crane, after some previous correspondence with an agent,

went up to that city to engage an apartment.  The elevator had not

reached the European apartment in those days, and it was necessary, on

Mrs. Clemens's account, to have a ground floor.  The sisters searched a

good while without success, and at last reached Kornerstrasse, a short,

secluded street, highly recommended by the agent.  The apartment they

examined in Kornerstrasse was Number 7, and they were so much pleased

with the conveniences and comfort of it and so tired that they did not

notice closely its, general social environment.  The agent supplied an

assortment of furniture for a consideration, and they were soon settled

in the attractive, roomy place.  Clemens and the children, arriving

somewhat later, expressed themselves as satisfied.



Their contentment was somewhat premature.  When they began to go out

socially, which was very soon, and friends inquired as to their location,

they noticed that the address produced a curious effect.  Semi-

acquaintances said, "Ah, yes, Kornerstrasse"; acquaintances said, "Dear

me, do you like it?"  An old friend exclaimed, "Good gracious!  How in

the world did you ever come to locate there?"  Then they began to notice

what they had not at first seen.  Kornerstrasse was not disreputable, but

it certainly was not elegant.  There were rag warehouses across the

street and women who leaned out the windows to gossip.  The street itself

was thronged with children.  They played on a sand pile and were often

noisy and seldom clean.  It was eminently not the place for a

distinguished man of letters.  The family began to be sensitive on the

subject of their address.



Clemens, of course, made humor out of it.  He wrote a newspaper letter on

the subject, a burlesque, naturally, which the family prevailed upon him

not to print.  But the humiliation is out of it now, and a bit of its

humor may be preserved.  He takes upon himself the renting of the place,

and pictures the tour of inspection with the agent's assistant.



He was greatly moved when they came to the street and said, softly and

lovingly:



     "Ah, Korner Street, Korner Street, why did I not think of you

     before!  A place fit for the gods, dear sir.  Quiet?--notice how

     still it is; and remember this is noonday--noonday.  It is but one

     block long, you see, just a sweet, dear little nest hid away here in

     the heart of the great metropolis, its presence and its sacred quiet

     unsuspected by the restless crowds that swarm along the stately

     thoroughfares yonder at its two extremities.  And----"



     "This building is handsome, but I don't think much of the others.

     They look pretty commonplace, compared with the rest of Berlin."



     "Dear! dear! have you noticed that?  It is just an affectation of

     the nobility.  What they want----"



     "The nobility?  Do they live in----"



     "In this street?  That is good!  very good, indeed!  I wish the Duke

     of Sassafras-Hagenstein could hear you say that.  When the Duke

     first moved in here he----"



     "Does he live in this street?"



     "Him!  Well, I should say so!  Do you see the big, plain house over

     there with the placard in the third floor window?  That's his

     house."



     "The placard that says 'Furnished rooms to let'?  Does he keep

     boarders?"



     "What an idea!  Him!  With a rent-roll of twelve hundred thousand

     marks a year?  Oh, positively this is too good."



     "Well, what does he have that sign up for?"



     The assistant took me by the buttonhole & said, with a merry light

     beaming in his eye:



     "Why, my dear sir, a person would know you are new to Berlin just by

     your innocent questions.  Our aristocracy, our old, real, genuine

     aristocracy, are full of the quaintest eccentricities,

     eccentricities inherited for centuries, eccentricities which they

     are prouder of than they are of their titles, and that sign-board

     there is one of them.  They all hang them out.  And it's regulated

     by an unwritten law.  A baron is entitled to hang out two, a count

     five, a duke fifteen----"



     "Then they are all dukes over on that side, I sup----"



     "Every one of them.  Now the old Duke of Backofenhofenschwartz not

     the present Duke, but the last but one, he----"



     "Does he live over the sausage-shop in the cellar?"



     "No, the one farther along, where the eighteenth yellow cat is

     chewing the door-mat----"



     "But all the yellow cats are chewing the door-mats."



     "Yes, but I mean the eighteenth one.  Count.  No, never mind;

     there's a lot more come.  I'll get you another mark.  Let me see---"



They could not remain permanently in Komerstrasse, but they stuck it out

till the end of December--about two months.  Then they made such

settlement with the agent as they could--that is to say, they paid the

rest of their year's rent--and established themselves in a handsome

apartment at the Hotel Royal, Unter den Linden.  There was no need to be

ashamed of this address, for it was one of the best in Berlin.



As for Komerstrasse, it is cleaner now.  It is still not aristocratic,

but it is eminently respectable.  There is a new post-office that takes

in Number 7, where one may post mail and send telegrams and use the

Fernsprecher--which is to say the telephone--and be politely treated by

uniformed officials, who have all heard of Mark Twain, but have no

knowledge of his former occupation of their premises.









CLXXVIII



A WINTER IN BERLIN



Clemens, meantime, had been trying to establish himself in his work, but

his rheumatism racked him occasionally and was always a menace.  Closing

a letter to Hall, he said:



     "I must stop-my arm is howling."



He put in a good deal of time devising publishing schemes, principal

among them being a plan for various cheap editions of his books,

pamphlets, and such like, to sell for a few cents.  These projects appear

never to have been really undertaken, Hall very likely fearing that a

flood of cheap issues would interfere with the more important trade.  It

seemed dangerous to trifle with an apparently increasing prosperity, and

Clemens was willing enough to agree with this view.



Clemens had still another letter to write for Laffan and McClure, and he

made a pretty careful study of Berlin with that end in view.  But his arm

kept him from any regular work.  He made notes, however.  Once he wrote:



     The first gospel of all monarchies should be Rebellion; the second

     should be Rebellion; and the third and all gospels, and the only

     gospel of any monarchy, should be Rebellion--against Church and

     State.



And again:



     I wrote a chapter on this language 13 years ago and tried my level

     best to improve it and simplify it for these people, and this is the

     result--a, word of thirty-nine letters.  It merely concentrates the

     alphabet with a shovel.  It hurts me to know that that chapter is

     not in any of their text-books and they don't use it in the

     university.



Socially, that winter in Berlin was eventful enough.  William Walter

Phelps, of New Jersey (Clemens had known him in America), was United

States minister at the German capital, while at the Emperor's court there

was a cousin, Frau von Versen, nee Clemens, one of the St. Louis family.

She had married a young German officer who had risen to the rank of a

full general.  Mark Twain and his family were welcome guests at all the

diplomatic events--often brilliant levees, gatherings of distinguished

men and women from every circle of achievement.  Labouchere of 'Truth'

was there, De Blowitz of the 'Times', and authors, ambassadors, and

scientists of rank.  Clemens became immediately a distinguished figure at

these assemblies.  His popularity in Germany was openly manifested.  At

any gathering he was surrounded by a brilliant company, eager to do him

honor.  He was recognized whenever he appeared on the street, and

saluted, though in his notes he says he was sometimes mistaken for the

historian Mommsen, whom he resembled in hair and features.  His books

were displayed for sale everywhere, and a special cheap edition of them

was issued at a few cents per copy.



Captain Bingham (later General Bingham, Commissioner of Police in New

York City) and John Jackson were attaches of the legation, both of them

popular with the public in general, and especially so with the Clemens

family.  Susy Clemens, writing to her father during a temporary absence,

tells of a party at Mrs. Jackson's, and especially refers to Captain

Bingham in the most complimentary terms.



"He never left me sitting alone, nor in an awkward situation of any kind,

but always came cordially to the rescue.  My gratitude toward him was

absolutely limitless."



She adds that Mrs. Bingham was very handsome and decidedly the most

attractive lady present.  Berlin was Susy's first real taste of society,

and she was reveling in it.  In her letter she refers to Minister Phelps

by the rather disrespectful nickname of "Yaas," a term conferred because

of his pronounciation of that affirmative.  The Clemens children were not

entirely happy in the company of the minister.  They were fond of him,

but he was a great tease.  They were quite young enough, but it seemed

always to give him delight to make them appear much younger.  In the

letter above quoted Susy says:



     When I saw Mr. Phelps I put out my hand enthusiastically and said,

     "Oh, Mr. Phelps, good evening," whereat he drew back and said, so

     all could hear, "What, you here! why, you're too young.  Do you

     think you know how to behave?"  As there were two or three young

     gentlemen near by to whom I hadn't been introduced I wasn't exactly

     overjoyed at this greeting.



We may imagine that the nickname "Yaas" had been invented by Susy in

secret retaliation, though she was ready enough to forgive him, for he

was kindness itself at heart.



In one of his later dictations Clemens related an anecdote concerning a

dinner with Phelps, when he (Clemens) had been invited to meet Count

S----, a cabinet minister of long and illustrious descent.  Clemens, and

Phelps too, it seems, felt overshadowed by this ancestry.



     Of course I wanted to let out the fact that I had some ancestors,

     too; but I did not want to pull them out of their graves by the

     ears, and I never could seem to get the chance to work them in, in a

     way that would look sufficiently casual.  I suppose Phelps was in

     the same difficulty.  In fact he looked distraught now and then just

     as a person looks who wants to uncover an ancestor purely by

     accident and cannot think of a way that will seem accidental enough.

     But at last, after dinner, he made a try.  He took us about his

     drawing-room, showing us the pictures, and finally stopped before a

     rude and ancient engraving.  It was a picture of the court that

     tried Charles I.  There was a pyramid of judges in Puritan slouch

     hats, and below them three bareheaded secretaries seated at a table.

     Mr. Phelps put his finger upon one of the three and said, with

     exulting indifference:



     "An ancestor of mine."



     I put a finger on a judge and retorted with scathing languidness:

     "Ancestor of mine.  But it is a small matter.  I have others."



Clemens was sincerely fond of Phelps and spent a good deal of time at the

legation headquarters.  Sometimes he wrote there.  An American

journalist, Henry W.  Fischer, remembers seeing him there several times

scribbling on such scraps of paper as came handy, and recalls that on one

occasion he delivered an address to a German and English audience on the

"Awful German Tongue."  This was probably the lecture that brought

Clemens to bed with pneumonia.  With Mrs. Clemens he had been down to

Ilsenburg, in the Hartz Mountains, for a week of change.  It was pleasant

there, and they would have remained longer but for the Berlin lecture

engagement.  As it was, they found Berlin very cold and the lecture-room

crowded and hot.  When the lecture was over they stopped at General von

Versen's for a ball, arriving at home about two in the morning.  Clemens

awoke with a heavy cold and lung congestion.  He remained in bed, a very

sick man indeed, for the better part of a month.  It was unpleasant

enough at first, though he rather enjoyed the convalescent period.  He

could sit up in bed and read and receive occasional callers.  Fischer

brought him Memoirs of the Margravine of Bayreuth, always a favorite.

--[Clemens was deeply interested in the Margravine, and at one time began

a novel with her absorbing history as its theme.  He gave it up, probably

feeling that the romantic form could add nothing to the Margravine's own

story.]--The Emperor sent Frau von Versen with an invitation for him to

attend the consecration of some flags in the palace.  When she returned,

conveying thanks and excuses, his Majesty commanded her to prepare a

dinner at her home for Mark Twain and himself and a few special guests,

the date to be arranged when Clemens's physician should pronounce him

well enough to attend.



Members of the Clemens household were impressed by this royal attention.

Little Jean was especially awed.  She said:



"I wish I could be in papa's clothes"; then, after reflection, "but that

wouldn't be any use.  I reckon the Emperor wouldn't recognize me."  And a

little later, when she had been considering all the notables and

nobilities of her father's recent association, she added:



"Why, papa, if it keeps on like this, pretty soon there won't be anybody

for you to get acquainted with but God," which Mark Twain decided was not

quite as much of a compliment as it had at first seemed.



It was during the period of his convalescence that Clemens prepared his

sixth letter for the New York Sun and McClure's syndicate, "The German

Chicago," a finely descriptive article on Berlin, and German customs and

institutions generally.  Perhaps the best part of it is where he

describes the grand and prolonged celebration which had been given in

honor of Professor Virchow's seventieth birthday.--[Rudolph Virchow, an

eminent German pathologist and anthropologist and scholar; then one of

the most prominent figures of the German Reichstag.  He died in 1902.]--

He tells how the demonstrations had continued in one form or another day

after day, and merged at last into the seventieth birthday of Professor

Helmholtz--[Herman von Helmholtz, an eminent German physicist, one of

the most distinguished scientists of the nineteenth century.  He died in

1894.]--also how these great affairs finally culminated in a mighty

'commers', or beer-fest, given in their honor by a thousand German

students.  This letter has been published in Mark Twain's "Complete

Works," and is well worth reading to-day.  His place had been at the

table of the two heroes of the occasion, Virchow and Helmholtz, a place

where he could see and hear all that went on; and he was immensely

impressed at the honor which Germany paid to her men of science.  The

climax came when Mommsen unexpectedly entered the room.--[Theodor

Mommsen (1817-1903), an eminent German historian and archeologist, a

powerful factor in all liberal movements.  From 1874-1895 permanent

secretary of the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences.]



     There seemed to be some signal whereby the students on the platform

     were made aware that a professor had arrived at the remote door of

     entrance, for you would see them suddenly rise to their feet, strike

     an erect military attitude, then draw their swords; the swords of

     all their brethren standing guard at the innumerable tables would

     flash from the scabbard and be held aloft--a handsome spectacle.

     Three clear bugle-notes would ring out, then all these swords would

     come down with a crash, twice repeated, on the tables and be

     uplifted and held aloft again; then in the distance you would see

     the gay uniforms and uplifted swords of a guard of honor clearing

     the way and conducting the guest down to his place.  The songs were

     stirring, and the immense outpour from young life and young lungs,

     the crash of swords, and the thunder of the beer-mugs gradually

     worked a body up to what seemed the last possible summit of

     excitement.  It surely seemed to me that I had reached that summit,

     that I had reached my limit, and that there was no higher lift

     devisable for me.  When apparently the last eminent guest had long

     ago taken his place, again those three bugle-blasts rang out, and

     once more the swords leaped from their scabbards.  Who might this

     late comer be?  Nobody was interested to inquire.  Still, indolent

     eyes were turned toward the distant entrance, and we saw the silken

     gleam and the lifted sword of a guard of honor plowing through the

     remote crowds.  Then we saw that end of the house rising to its

     feet; saw it rise abreast the advancing guard all along like a wave.

     This supreme honor had been offered to no one before.  There was an

     excited whisper at our table--"Mommsen!"--and the whole house rose--

     rose and shouted and stamped and clapped and banged the beer-mugs.

     Just simply a storm!  Then the little man with his long hair and

     Emersonian face edged his way past us and took his seat.  I could

     have touched him with my hand--Mommsen!--think of it!



     This was one of those immense surprises that can happen only a few

     times in one's life.  I was not dreaming of him; he was to me only a

     giant myth, a world-shadowing specter, not a reality.  The surprise

     of it all can be only comparable to a man's suddenly coming upon

     Mont Blanc, with its awful form towering into the sky, when he

     didn't suspect he was in its neighborhood.  I would have walked a

     great many miles to get a sight of him, and here he was, without

     trouble, or tramp, or cost of any kind.  Here he was, clothed in a

     titanic deceptive modesty which made him look like other men.  Here

     he was, carrying the Roman world and all the Caesars in his

     hospitable skull, and doing it as easily as that other luminous

     vault, the skull of the universe, carries the Milky Way and the

     constellations.



During his convalescent days, Clemens had plenty of time to reflect and

to look out of the window.  His notebook preserves some of his

reflections.  In one place he says:



     The Emperor passes in a modest open carnage.  Next that happy 12-

     year-old butcher-boy, all in white apron and turban, standing up

     & so proud!



     How fast they drive-nothing like it but in London.  And the horses

     seem to be of very fine breed, though I am not an expert in horses

     & do not speak with assurance.  I can always tell which is the front

     end of a horse, but beyond that my art is not above the ordinary.



     The "Court Gazette" of a German paper can be covered with a playing-

     card.  In an English paper the movements of titled people take up

     about three times that room.  In the papers of Republican France

     from six to sixteen times as much.  There, if a Duke's dog should

     catch cold in the head they would stop the press to announce it and

     cry about it.  In Germany they respect titles, in England they

     revere them, in France they adore them.  That is, the French

     newspapers do.



     Been taken for Mommsen twice.  We have the same hair, but on

     examination it was found the brains were different.



On February 14th he records that Professor Helmholtz called, but

unfortunately leaves no further memorandum of that visit.  He was quite

recovered by this time, but was still cautioned about going out in the

severe weather.  In the final entry he says:



     Thirty days sick abed--full of interest--read the debates and get

     excited over them, though don't 'versteh'.  By reading keep in a

     state of excited ignorance, like a blind man in a house afire;

     flounder around, immensely but unintelligently interested; don't

     know how I got in and can't find the way out, but I'm having a

     booming time all to myself.



Don't know what a 'Schelgesetzentwurf' is, but I keep as excited over it

and as worried about it as if it was my own child.  I simply live on the

Sch.; it is my daily bread.  I wouldn't have the question settled for

anything in the world.  Especially now that I've lost the 'offentliche

Militargericht circus'.  I read all the debates on that question with a

never-failing interest, but all at once they sprung a vote on me a couple

of days ago & did something by a vote of 100 to 143, but I couldn't find

out what it was.









CLXXIX



A DINNER WITH WILLIAM II.



The dinner with Emperor William II. at General von Versen's was set for

the 20th of February.  A few days before, Mark Twain entered in his note-

book:



     In that day the Imperial lion and the Democratic lamb shall sit down

     together, and a little General shall feed them.



Mark Twain was the guest of honor on this occasion, and was seated at the

Emperor's right hand.  The Emperor's brother, Prince Heinrich, sat

opposite; Prince Radolin farther along.  Rudolf Lindau, of the Foreign

Office, was also present.  There were fourteen at the table, all told.

In his memorandum made at the time, Clemens gave no account of the dinner

beyond the above details, only adding:



     After dinner 6 or 8 officers came in, & all hands adjourned to the

     big room out of the smoking-room and held a "smoking parliament"

     after the style of the ancient Potsdam one, till midnight, when the

     Emperor shook hands and left.



It was not until fourteen years later that Mark Twain related some

special matters pertaining to that evening.  He may have expanded then

somewhat to fill out spaces of his memory, and embroidered them, as was

his wont; but that something happened, either in reality or in his

imagination, which justified his version of it we may believe.  He told

it as here given, premising: "This may appear in print after I am dead,

but not before.



     "From 1891 until day before yesterday I had never mentioned the

     matter, nor set it down with a pen, nor ever referred to it in any

     way--not even to my wife, to whom I was accustomed to tell

     everything that happened to me.



     "At the dinner his Majesty chatted briskly and entertainingly along

     in easy and flowing English, and now and then he interrupted himself

     to address a remark to me or to some other individual of the guests.

     When the reply had been delivered he resumed his talk.  I noticed

     that the table etiquette tallied with that which was the law of my

     house at home when we had guests; that is to say, the guests

     answered when the host favored them with a remark, and then quieted

     down and behaved themselves until they got another chance.  If I had

     been in the Emperor's chair and he in mine I should have felt

     infinitely comfortable and at home, but I was guest now, and

     consequently felt less at home.  From old experience I was familiar

     with the rules of the game and familiar with their exercise from the

     high place of host; but I was not familiar with the trammeled and

     less satisfactory position of guest, therefore I felt a little

     strange and out of place.  But there was no animosity--no, the

     Emperor was host, therefore, according to my own rule, he had a

     right to do the talking, and it was my honorable duty to intrude no

     interruptions or other improvements except upon invitation; and of

     course it could be my turn some day--some day, on some friendly

     visit of inspection to America, it might be my pleasure and

     distinction to have him as guest at my table; then I would give him

     a rest and a quiet time.



     "In one way there was a difference between his table and mine-for

     instance, atmosphere; the guests stood in awe of him, and naturally

     they conferred that feeling upon me, for, after all, I am only

     human, although I regret it.  When a guest answered a question he

     did it with a deferential voice and manner; he did not put any

     emotion into it, and he did not spin it out, but got it out of his

     system as quickly as he could, and then looked relieved.  The

     Emperor was used to this atmosphere, and it did not chill his blood;

     maybe it was an inspiration to him, for he was alert, brilliant, and

     full of animation; also he was most gracefully and felicitously

     complimentary to my books--and I will remark here that the happy

     phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts and the

     happy delivery of it another.  I once mentioned the high compliment

     which he paid to the book 'Old Times on the Mississippi'; but there

     were others, among them some high praise of my description in 'A

     Tramp Abroad' of certain striking phases of German student life.



     "Fifteen or twenty minutes before the dinner ended the Emperor made

     a remark to me in praise of our generous soldier pensions; then,

     without pausing, he continued the remark, not speaking to me, but

     across the table to his brother, Prince Heinrich.  The Prince

     replied, endorsing the Emperor's view of the matter.  Then I

     followed with my own view of it.  I said that in the beginning our

     government's generosity to the soldier was clear in its intent and

     praiseworthy, since the pensions were conferred upon soldiers who

     had earned them, soldiers who had been disabled in the war and could

     no longer earn a livelihood for themselves and their families, but

     that the pensions decreed and added later lacked the virtue of a

     clean motive, and had, little by little, degenerated into a wider

     and wider and more and more offensive system of vote-purchasing, and

     was now become a source of corruption, which was an unpleasant thing

     to contemplate and was a danger besides.  I think that that was

     about the substance of my remark; but in any case the remark had a

     quite definite result, and that is the memorable thing about it--

     manifestly it made everybody uncomfortable.  I seemed to perceive

     this quite plainly.  I had committed an indiscretion.  Possibly it

     was in violating etiquette by intruding a remark when I had not been

     invited to make one; possibly it was in taking issue with an opinion

     promulgated by his Majesty.  I do not know which it was, but I quite

     clearly remember the effect which my act produced--to wit, the

     Emperor refrained from addressing any remarks to me afterward, and

     not merely during the brief remainder of the dinner, but afterward

     in the kneip-room, where beer and cigars and hilarious anecdoting

     prevailed until about midnight.  I am sure that the Emperor's good

     night was the only thing he said to me in all that time.



     "Was this rebuke studied and intentional?  I don't know, but I

     regarded it in that way.  I can't be absolutely sure of it because

     of modifying doubts created afterward by one or two circumstances.

     For example: the Empress Dowager invited me to her palace, and the

     reigning Empress invited me to breakfast, and also sent for General

     von Versen to come to her palace and read to her and her ladies from

     my books."



It was a personal message from the Emperor that fourteen years later

recalled to him this curious circumstance.  A gentleman whom Clemens knew

went on a diplomatic mission to Germany.  Upon being presented to Emperor

William, the latter had immediately begun to talk of Mark Twain and his

work.  He spoke of the description of German student life as the greatest

thing of its kind ever written, and of the sketch on the German language

as wonderful; then he said:



"Convey to Mr. Clemens my kindest regards, ask him if he remembers that

dinner at Von Versen's, and ask him why he didn't do any more talking at

that dinner."



It seemed a mysterious message.  Clemens thought it might have been meant

to convey some sort of an imperial apology; but again it might have meant

that Mark Twain's breach and the Emperor's coolness on that occasion were

purely imaginary, and that the Emperor had really expected him to talk

far more than he did.



Returning to the Royal Hotel after the Von Versen dinner, Mark Twain

received his second high compliment that day on the Mississippi book.

The portier, a tow-headed young German, must have been comparatively new

at the hotel; for apparently he had just that day learned that his

favorite author, whose books he had long been collecting, was actually

present in the flesh.  Clemens, all ready to apologize for asking so late

an admission, was greeted by the portier's round face all sunshine and

smiles.  The young German then poured out a stream of welcome and

compliments and dragged the author to a small bedroom near the front

door, where he excitedly pointed out a row of books, German translations

of Mark Twain.



"There," he said; "you wrote them.  I've found it out.  Lieber Gott!

I did not know it before, and I ask a million pardons.  That one there,

Old Times on the Mississippi, is the best you ever wrote."



The note-book records only one social event following the Emperor's

dinner--a dinner with the secretary of the legation.  The note says:



At the Emperor's dinner black cravats were ordered.  Tonight I went in a

black cravat and everybody else wore white ones.  Just my luck.



The Berlin activities came to an end then.  He was still physically far

from robust, and his doctors peremptorily ordered him to stay indoors or

to go to a warmer climate.  This was March 1st.  Clemens and his wife

took Joseph Very, and, leaving the others for the time in Berlin, set out

for Mentone, in the south of France.









CLXXX



MANY WANDERINGS



Mentone was warm and quiet, and Clemens worked when his arm permitted.

He was alone there with Mrs. Clemens, and they wandered about a good

deal, idling and picture-making, enjoying a sort of belated honeymoon.

Clemens wrote to Susy:



Joseph is gone to Nice to educate himself in kodaking--and to get the

pictures mounted which mama thinks she took here; but I noticed she

didn't take the plug out, as a rule.  When she did she took nine pictures

on top of each other--composites.



They remained a month in Mentone, then went over to Pisa, and sent Joseph

to bring the rest of the party to Rome.  In Rome they spent another

month--a period of sight-seeing, enjoyable, but to Clemens pretty

profitless.



"I do not expect to be able to write any literature this year," he said

in a letter to Hall near the end of April.  "The moment I take up my pen

my rheumatism returns."



Still he struggled along and managed to pile up a good deal of copy in

the course of weeks.  From Rome to Florence, at the end of April, and so

pleasing was the prospect, and so salubrious the air of that ancient

city, that they resolved to engage residence there for the next winter.

They inspected accommodations of various kinds, and finally, through

Prof. Willard Fiske, were directed to the Villa Viviani, near Settignano,

on a hill to the eastward of Florence, with vineyard and olive-grove

sloping away to the city lying in a haze-a vision of beauty and peace.

They closed the arrangement for Viviani, and about the middle of May went

up to Venice for a fortnight of sight-seeing--a break in the travel back

to Germany.  William Gedney Bunce, the Hartford artist, was in Venice,

and Sarah Orne Jewett and other home friends.



From Venice, by way of Lake Como and "a tangled route" (his note-book

says) to Lucerne, and so northward to Berlin and on to Bad Nauheim, where

they had planned to spend the summer.  Clemens for some weeks had

contemplated a trip to America, for matters there seemed to demand his

personal attention.  Summer arrangements for the family being now

concluded, he left within the week and set sail on the Havel for New

York.  To Jean he wrote a cheerful good-by letter, more cheerful, we may

believe, than he felt.



                                   BREMEN, 7.45 A.M., June 14, 1892.



DEAR JEAN CLEMENS,--I am up & shaved & got my clean shirt on & feel

mighty fine, & am going down to show off before I put on the rest of my

clothes.



Perhaps mama & Mrs. Hague can persuade the Hauswirth to do right; but if

he don't you go down & kill his dog.



I wish you would invite the Consul-General and his ladies down to take

one of those slim dinners with mama, then he would complain to the

Government.





Clemens felt that his presence in America, was demanded by two things.

Hall's reports continued, as ever, optimistic; but the semi-annual

statements were less encouraging.  The Library of Literature and some of

the other books were selling well enough; but the continuous increase of

capital required by a business conducted on the instalment plan had

steadily added to the firm's liabilities, while the prospect of a general

tightening in the money-market made the outlook not a particularly happy

one.  Clemens thought he might be able to dispose of the Library or an

interest in it, or even of his share of the business itself, to some one

with means sufficient to put it on an easier financial footing.  The

uncertainties of trade and the burden of increased debt had become a

nightmare which interfered with his sleep.  It seemed hard enough to earn

a living with a crippled arm, without this heavy business care.



The second interest requiring attention was that other old one--the

machine.  Clemens had left the matter in Paige's hands, and Paige, with

persuasive eloquence, had interested Chicago capital to a point where a

company had been formed to manufacture the type-setter in that city.

Paige reported that he had got several million dollars subscribed for the

construction of a factory, and that he had been placed on a salary as a

sort of general "consulting omniscient" at five thousand dollars a month.

Clemens, who had been negotiating again with the Mallorys for the

disposal of his machine royalties, thought it proper to find out just

what was going on.  He remained in America less than two weeks, during

which he made a flying trip to Chicago and found that Paige's company

really had a factory started, and proposed to manufacture fifty machines.

It was not easy to find out the exact status of this new company, but

Clemens at least was hopeful enough of its prospects to call off the

negotiations with the Mallorys which had promised considerable cash in

hand.  He had been able to accomplish nothing material in the publishing

situation, but his heart-to-heart talk with Hall for some reason had

seemed comforting.  The business had been expanding; they would now

"concentrate."  He returned on the Lahn, and he must have been in better

health and spirits, for it is said he kept the ship very merry during the

passage.  He told many extravagantly amusing yarns; so many that a court

was convened to try him on the charge of "inordinate and unscientific

lying."  Many witnesses testified, and his own testimony was so

unconvincing that the jury convicted him without leaving the bench.  He

was sentenced to read aloud from his own works for a considerable period

every day until the steamer should reach port.  It is said that he

faithfully carried out this part of the program, and that the proceeds

from the trial and the various readings amounted to something more than

six hundred dollars, which was turned over to the Seamen's Fund.



Clemens's arm was really much better, and he put in a good deal of spare

time during the trip writing an article on "All Sorts and Conditions of

Ships," from Noah's Ark down to the fine new Havel, then the latest word

in ship-construction.  It was an article written in a happy vein and is

profitable reading to-day.  The description of Columbus as he appeared on

the deck of his flag-ship is particularly rich and flowing:



     If the weather was chilly he came up clad from plumed helmet to

     spurred heel in magnificent plate-armor inlaid with arabesques of

     gold, having previously warmed it at the galley fire.  If the

     weather was warm he came up in the ordinary sailor toggery of the

     time-great slouch hat of blue velvet, with a flowing brush of snowy

     ostrich-plumes, fastened on with a flashing cluster of diamonds and

     emeralds; gold-embroidered doublet of green velvet, with slashed

     sleeves exposing undersleeves of crimson satin; deep collar and cuff

     ruffles of rich, limp lace; trunk hose of pink velvet, with big

     knee-knots of brocaded yellow ribbon; pearl-tinted silk stockings,

     clocked and daintily embroidered; lemon-colored buskins of unborn

     kid, funnel-topped, and drooping low to expose the pretty stockings;

     deep gauntlets of finest white heretic skin, from the factory of the

     Holy Inquisition, formerly part of the person of a lady of rank;

     rapier with sheath crusted with jewels and hanging from a broad

     baldric upholstered with rubies and sapphires.









CLXXXI



NAUHEIM AND THE PRINCE OF WALES



Clemens was able to write pretty steadily that summer in Nauheim and

turned off a quantity of copy.  He completed several short articles and

stories, and began, or at least continued work on, two books--'Tom Sawyer

Abroad' and 'Those Extraordinary Twins'--the latter being the original

form of 'Pudd'nhead Wilson'.  As early as August 4th he wrote to Hall

that he had finished forty thousand words of the "Tom Sawyer" story, and

that it was to be offered to some young people's magazine, Harper's Young

People or St. Nicholas; but then he suddenly decided that his narrative

method was altogether wrong.  To Hall on the 10th he wrote:



     I have dropped that novel I wrote you about because I saw a more

     effective way of using the main episode--to wit, by telling it

     through the lips of Huck Finn.  So I have started Huck Finn & Tom

     Sawyer (still 15 years old) & their friend the freed slave Jim

     around the world in a stray balloon, with Huck as narrator, &

     somewhere after the end of that great voyage he will work in that

     original episode & then nobody will suspect that a whole book has

     been written & the globe circumnavigated merely to get that episode

     in in an effective (& at the same time apparently unintentional)

     way.  I have written 12,000 words of this new narrative, & find that

     the humor flows as easily as the adventures & surprises--so I shall

     go along and make a book of from 50,000 to 100,000 words.



     It is a story for boys, of course, & I think it will interest any

     boy between 8 years & 80.



     When I was in New York the other day Mrs. Dodge, editor of St.

     Nicholas, wrote and offered me $5,000 for (serial right) a story for

     boys 50,000 words long.  I wrote back and declined, for I had other

     matter in my mind then.



     I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write

     so that it will not only interest boys, but will also strongly

     interest any man who has ever been a boy.  That immensely enlarges

     the audience.



     Now, this story doesn't need to be restricted to a child's magazine

     --it is proper enough for any magazine, I should think, or for a

     syndicate.  I don't swear it, but I think so.



     Proposed title--New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.



He was full of his usual enthusiasm in any new undertaking, and writes of

the Extraordinary Twins:



     By and by I shall have to offer (for grown folks' magazine) a novel

     entitled, 'Those Extraordinary Twins'.  It's the howling farce I

     told you I had begun awhile back.  I laid it aside to ferment while

     I wrote Tom Sawyer Abroad, but I took it up again on a little

     different plan lately, and it is swimming along satisfactorily now.

     I think all sorts of folks will read it.  It is clear out of the

     common order--it is a fresh idea--I don't think it resembles

     anything in literature.



He was quite right; it did not resemble anything in literature, nor did

it greatly resemble literature, though something at least related to

literature would eventually grow out of it.



In a letter written many years afterward by Frank Mason, then consul-

general at Frankfort, he refers to "that happy summer at Nauheim."  Mason

was often a visitor there, and we may believe that his memory of the

summer was justified.  For one thing, Clemens himself was in better

health and spirits and able to continue his work.  But an even greater

happiness lay in the fact that two eminent physicians had pronounced Mrs.

Clemens free from any organic ills.  To Orion, Clemens wrote:



     We are in the clouds because the bath physicians say positively that

     Livy has no heart disease but has only weakness of the heart muscles

     and will soon be well again.  That was worth going to Europe to find

     out.



It was enough to change the whole atmosphere of the household, and

financial worries were less considered.  Another letter to Orion relates

history:



     The Twichells have been here four days & we have had good times with

     them.  Joe & I ran over to Homburg, the great pleasure-resort,

     Saturday, to dine with friends, & in the morning I went walking in

     the promenade & met the British ambassador to the Court of Berlin

     and he introduced me to the Prince of Wales.  I found him a most

     unusually comfortable and unembarrassing Englishman.



Twichell has reported Mark Twain's meeting with the Prince (later Edward

VII) as having come about by special request of the latter, made through

the British ambassador.  "The meeting," he says, "was a most cordial one

on both sides, and presently the Prince took Mark Twain's arm and the two

marched up and down, talking earnestly together, the Prince, solid,

erect, and soldierlike, Clemens weaving along in his curious, swinging

gait in a full tide of talk, and brandishing a sun-umbrella of the most

scandalous description."



When they parted Clemens said:



"It has been, indeed, a great pleasure to meet your Royal Highness."



The Prince answered:



"And it is a pleasure, Mr. Clemens, to have met you--again."



Clemens was puzzled to reply.



"Why," he said, "have we met before?"



The Prince smiled happily.



"Oh yes," he said; "don't you remember that day on the Strand when you

were on the top of a bus and I was heading a procession and you had on

your new overcoat with flap-pockets?"--[See chap.  clxiii, "A Letter to

the Queen of England."]



It was the highest compliment he could have paid, for it showed that he

had read, and had remembered all those years.  Clemens expressed to

Twichell regret that he had forgotten to mention his visit to the

Prince's sister, Louise, in Ottawa, but he had his opportunity at a

dinner next day.  Later the Prince had him to supper and they passed an

entire evening together.



There was a certain uneasiness in the Nauheim atmosphere that year, for

the cholera had broken out at Hamburg, and its victims were dying at a

terrific rate.  It was almost impossible to get authentic news as to the

spread of the epidemic, for the German papers were curiously conservative

in their reports.  Clemens wrote an article on the subject but concluded

not to print it.  A paragraph will convey its tenor.



     What I am trying to make the reader understand is the strangeness of

     the situation here--a mighty tragedy being played upon a stage that

     is close to us, & yet we are as ignorant of its details as we should

     be if the stage were in China.  We sit "in front," & the audience is

     in fact the world; but the curtain is down, & from behind it we hear

     only an inarticulate murmur.  The Hamburg disaster must go into

     history as the disaster without a history.



He closes with an item from a physician's letter--an item which he says

"gives you a sudden and terrific sense of the situation there."

     For in a line it flashes before you--this ghastly picture--a thing

     seen by the physician: a wagon going along the street with five sick

     people in it, and with them four dead ones.









CLXXXII



THE VILLA VIVIANI



'The American Claimant', published in May l (1892), did not bring a very

satisfactory return.  For one thing, the book-trade was light, and then

the Claimant was not up to his usual standard.  It had been written under

hard circumstances and by a pen long out of practice; it had not paid,

and its author must work all the harder on the new undertakings.  The

conditions at Nauheim seemed favorable, and they lingered there until

well into September.  To Mrs. Crane, who had returned to America, Clemens

wrote on the 18th, from Lucerne, in the midst of their travel to Italy:



     We remained in Nauheim a little too long.  If we had left four or

     five days earlier we should have made Florence in three days.  Hard

     trip because it was one of those trains that gets tired every 7

     minutes and stops to rest three-quarters of an hour.  It took us

     3 1/2 hours to get there instead of the regulation 2 hours.  We

     shall pull through to Milan to-morrow if possible.  Next day we

     shall start at 10 AM and try to make Bologna, 5 hours.  Next day,

     Florence, D. V.  Next year we will walk.  Phelps came to Frankfort

     and we had some great times--dinner at his hotel; & the Masons,

     supper at our inn--Livy not in it.  She was merely allowed a

     glimpse, no more.  Of course Phelps said she was merely pretending

     to be ill; was never looking so well & fine.



     A Paris journal has created a happy interest by inoculating one of

     its correspondents with cholera.  A man said yesterday he wished to

     God they would inoculate all of them.  Yes, the interest is quite

     general and strong & much hope is felt.



     Livy says I have said enough bad things, and better send all our

     loves & shut up.  Which I do--and shut up.



They lingered at Lucerne until Mrs. Clemens was rested and better able to

continue the journey, arriving at last in Florence, September 26th.  They

drove out to the Villa Viviani in the afternoon and found everything in

readiness for their reception, even to the dinner, which was prepared and

on the table.  Clemens, in his notes, speaks of this and adds:



It takes but a sentence to state that, but it makes an indolent person

tired to think of the planning & work and trouble that lie concealed in

it.



Some further memoranda made at this time have that intimate interest

which gives reality and charm.  The 'contadino' brought up their trunks

from the station, and Clemens wrote:



     The 'contadino' is middle-aged & like the rest of the peasants--that

     is to say, brown, handsome, good-natured, courteous, & entirely

     independent without making any offensive show of it.  He charged too

     much for the trunks, I was told.  My informer explained that this

     was customary.



     September 27.  The rest of the trunks brought up this morning.  He

     charged too much again, but I was told that this was also customary.

     It's all right, then.  I do not wish to violate the customs.  Hired

     landau, horses, & coachman.  Terms, 480 francs a month & a pourboire

     to the coachman, I to furnish lodging for the man & the horses, but

     nothing else.  The landau has seen better days & weighs 30 tons.

     The horses are feeble & object to the landau; they stop & turn

     around every now & then & examine it with surprise & suspicion.

     This causes delay.  But it entertains the people along the road.

     They came out & stood around with their hands in their pockets &

     discussed the matter with each other.  I was told that they said

     that a 30-ton landau was not the thing for horses like those--what

     they needed was a wheelbarrow.



His description of the house pictures it as exactly today as it did then,

for it has not changed in these twenty years, nor greatly, perhaps, in

the centuries since it was built.

     It is a plain, square building, like a box, & is painted light

     yellow & has green window-shutters.  It stands in a commanding

     position on the artificial terrace of liberal dimensions, which is

     walled around with masonry.  From the walls the vineyards & olive

     orchards of the estate slant away toward the valley.  There are

     several tall trees, stately stone-pines, also fig-trees & trees of

     breeds not familiar to me.  Roses overflow the retaining-walls, &

     the battered & mossy stone urn on the gate-posts, in pink & yellow

     cataracts exactly as they do on the drop-curtains in the theaters.

     The house is a very fortress for strength.  The main walls--all

     brick covered with plaster--are about 3 feet thick.  I have several

     times tried to count the rooms of the house, but the irregularities

     baffle me.  There seem to be 28.  There are plenty of windows &

     worlds of sunlight.  The floors are sleek & shiny & full of

     reflections, for each is a mirror in its way, softly imaging all

     objects after the subdued fashion of forest lakes.  The curious

     feature of the house is the salon.  This is a spacious & lofty

     vacuum which occupies the center of the house.  All the rest of the

     house is built around it; it extends up through both stories & its

     roof projects some feet above the rest of the building.  The sense

     of its vastness strikes you the moment you step into it & cast your

     eyes around it & aloft.  There are divans distributed along its

     walls.  They make little or no show, though their aggregate length

     is 57 feet.  A piano in it is a lost object.  We have tried to

     reduce the sense of desert space & emptiness with tables & things,

     but they have a defeated look, & do not do any good.  Whatever

     stands or moves under that soaring painted vault is belittled.



He describes the interior of this vast room (they grew to love it),

dwelling upon the plaster-relief portraits above its six doors,

Florentine senators and judges, ancient dwellers there and former owners

of the estate.



     The date of one of them is 1305--middle-aged, then, & a judge--he

     could have known, as a youth, the very greatest Italian artists, &

     he could have walked & talked with Dante, & probably did.  The date

     of another is 1343--he could have known Boccaccio & spent his

     afternoons wandering in Fiesole, gazing down on plague-reeking

     Florence & listening to that man's improper tales, & he probably

     did.  The date of another is 1463--he could have met Columbus & he

     knew the magnificent Lorenzo, of course.  These are all Cerretanis--

     or Cerretani-Twains, as I may say, for I have adopted myself into

     their family on account of its antiquity--my origin having been

     heretofore too recent to suit me.



We are considering the details of Viviani at some length, for it was in

this setting that he began and largely completed what was to be his most

important work of this later time--in some respects his most important of

any time--the 'Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc'.  If the reader

loves this book, and he must love it if he has read it, he will not

begrudge the space here given to the scene of its inspiration.  The

outdoor picture of Viviani is of even more importance, for he wrote

oftener out-of-doors than elsewhere.  Clemens added it to his notes

several months later, but it belongs here.



     The situation of this villa is perfect.  It is three miles from

     Florence, on the side of a hill.  Beyond some hill-spurs is Fiesole

     perched upon its steep terraces; in the immediate foreground is the

     imposing mass of the Ross castle, its walls and turrets rich with

     the mellow weather-stains of forgotten centuries; in the distant

     plain lies Florence, pink & gray & brown, with the ruddy, huge dome

     of the cathedral dominating its center like a captive balloon, &

     flanked on the right by the smaller bulb of the Medici chapel & on

     the left by the airy tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; all around the

     horizon is a billowy rim of lofty blue hills, snowed white with

     innumerable villas.  After nine months of familiarity with this

     panorama I still think, as I thought in the beginning, that this is

     the fairest picture on our planet, the most enchanting to look upon,

     the most satisfying to the eye & the spirit.  To see the sun sink

     down, drowned in his pink & purple & golden floods, & overwhelm

     Florence with tides of color that make all the sharp lines dim &

     faint & turn the solid city into a city of dreams, is a sight to

     stir the coldest nature & make a sympathetic one drunk with ecstasy.



The Clemens household at Florence consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Clemens,

Susy, and Jean.  Clara had soon returned to Berlin to attend Mrs.

Willard's school and for piano instruction.  Mrs. Clemens improved in the

balmy autumn air of Florence and in the peaceful life of their well-

ordered villa.  In a memorandum of October 27th Clemens wrote:



     The first month is finished.  We are wonted now.  This carefree life

     at a Florentine villa is an ideal existence.  The weather is divine,

     the outside aspects lovely, the days and nights tranquil and

     reposeful, the seclusion from the world and its worries as

     satisfactory as a dream.  Late in the afternoons friends come out

     from the city & drink tea in the open air & tell what is happening

     in the world; & when the great sun sinks down upon Florence & the

     daily miracle begins they hold their breath & look.  It is not a

     time for talk.



No wonder he could work in that environment.  He finished 'Tom Sawyer

Abroad', also a short story, 'The L 1,000,000 Bank-Note' (planned many

years before), discovered the literary mistake of the 'Extraordinary

Twins' and began converting it into the worthier tale, 'Pudd'nhead

Wilson', soon completed and on its way to America.



With this work out of his hands, Clemens was ready for his great new

undertaking.  A seed sown by the wind more than forty years before was

ready to bloom.  He would write the story of Joan of Arc.









CLXXXIII



THE SIEUR DE CONTE AND JOAN



In a note which he made many years later Mark Twain declared that he was

fourteen years at work on Joan of Arc; that he had been twelve years

preparing for it, and that he was two years in writing it.



There is nothing in any of his earlier notes or letters to indicate that

he contemplated the story of Joan as early as the eighties; but there is

a bibliographical list of various works on the subject, probably compiled

for him not much later than 1880, for the latest published work of the

list bears that date.  He was then too busy with his inventions and

publishing schemes to really undertake a work requiring such vast

preparation; but without doubt he procured a number of books and renewed

that old interest begun so long ago when a stray wind had blown a leaf

from that tragic life into his own.  Joan of Arc, by Janet Tuckey, was

apparently the first book he read with the definite idea of study, for

this little volume had been recently issued, and his copy, which still

exists, is filled with his marginal notes.  He did not speak of this

volume in discussing the matter in after-years.  He may have forgotten

it.  He dwelt mainly on the old records of the trial which had been dug

out and put into modern French by Quicherat; the 'Jeanne d'Arc' of J.

Michelet, and the splendid 'Life of the Maid' of Lord Ronald Gower, these

being remembered as his chief sources of information.--[The book of

Janet Tuckey, however, and ten others, including those mentioned, are

credited as "authorities examined in verification" on a front page of his

published book.  In a letter written at the conclusion of "Joan" in 1895,

the author states that in the first two-thirds of the story he used one

French and one English authority, while in the last third he had

constantly drawn from five French and five English sources.]



"I could not get the Quicherat and some of the other books in English,"

he said, "and I had to dig them out of the French.  I began the story

five times."



None of these discarded beginnings exists to-day, but we may believe they

were wisely put aside, for no story of the Maid could begin more

charmingly, more rarely, than the one supposedly told in his old age by

Sieur Louis de Conte, secretary of Joan of Arc, and translated by Jean

Francois Alden for the world to read.  The impulse which had once

prompted Mark Twain to offer The Prince and the Pauper anonymously now

prevailed.  He felt that the Prince had missed a certain appreciation by

being connected with his signature, and he resolved that its companion

piece (he so regarded Joan) should be accepted on its merits and without

prejudice.  Walking the floor one day at Viviani, smoking vigorously, he

said to Mrs. Clemens and Susy:



"I shall never be accepted seriously over my own signature.  People

always want to laugh over what I write and are disappointed if they don't

find a joke in it.  This is to be a serious book.  It means more to me

than anything I have ever undertaken.  I shall write it anonymously."



So it was that that gentle, quaint Sieur de Conte took up the pen, and

the tale of Joan was begun in that beautiful spot which of all others

seems now the proper environment for its lovely telling.



He wrote rapidly once he got his plan perfected and his material

arranged.  The reading of his youth and manhood, with the vivid

impressions of that earlier time, became now something remembered, not

merely as reading, but as fact.



Others of the family went down into the city almost daily, but he

remained in that still garden with Joan as his companion--the old Sieur

de Conte, saturated with memories, pouring out that marvelous and tragic

tale.  At the end of each day he would read to the others what he had

written, to their enjoyment and wonder.



How rapidly he worked may be judged from a letter which he wrote to Hall

in February, in which he said:



I am writing a companion piece to 'The Prince and the Pauper', which is

half done & will make 200,000 words.



That is to say, he had written one hundred thousand words in a period of

perhaps six weeks, marvelous work when one remembers that after all he

was writing history, some of which he must dig laboriously from a foreign

source.  He had always, more or less, kept up his study of the French,

begun so long ago on the river and it stood him in good stead now.

Still, it was never easy for him, and the multitude of notes along the

margin of his French authorities bears evidence of his faithfulness and

the magnitude of his toil.  No previous work had ever required so much of

him, such thorough knowledge; none had ever so completely commanded his

interest.  He would have been willing to remain shut away from visitors,

to have been released altogether from social obligations; and he did

avoid most of them.  Not all, for he could not always escape, and perhaps

did not always really wish to.  Florence and its suburbs were full of

delightful people--some of them his old friends.  There were luncheons,

dinners, teas, dances, concerts, operas always in progress somewhere, and

not all of these were to be resisted even by an absorbed author who was

no longer himself, but sad old Sieur de Conte, following again the banner

of the Maid of Orleans, marshaling her twilight armies across his

illumined page.









CLXXXIV



NEW HOPE IN THE MACHINE



If all human events had not been ordered in the first act of the primal

atom, and so become inevitable, it would seem a pity now that he must

abandon his work half-way, and make another hard, distracting trip to

America.



But it was necessary for him to go.  Even Hall was no longer optimistic.

His letters provided only the barest shreds of hope.  Times were hard and

there was every reason to believe they would be worse.  The World's Fair

year promised to be what it speedily became--one of the hardest financial

periods this country has ever seen.  Chicago could hardly have selected a

more profitless time for her great exposition.  Clemens wrote urging Hall

to sell out all, or a portion, of the business--to do anything, indeed,

that would avoid the necessity of further liability and increased dread.

Every payment that could be spared from the sales of his manuscript was

left in Hall's hands, and such moneys as still came to Mrs. Clemens from

her Elmira interests were flung into the general fund.  The latter were

no longer large, for Langdon & Co. were suffering heavily in the general

depression, barely hoping to weather the financial storm.



It is interesting to note that age and misfortune and illness had a

tempering influence on Mark Twain's nature.  Instead of becoming harsh

and severe and bitter, he had become more gentle, more kindly.  He wrote

often to Hall, always considerately, even tenderly.  Once, when something

in Hall's letter suggested that he had perhaps been severe, he wrote:



     Mrs. Clemens is deeply distressed, for she thinks I have been

     blaming you or finding fault with you about something.  But most

     assuredly that cannot be.  I tell her that although I am prone to

     write hasty and regrettable things to other people I am not a bit

     likely to write such things to you.  I can't believe I have done

     anything so ungrateful.  If I have, pile coals of fire upon my head

     for I deserve it.  You have done magnificently with the business, &

     we must raise the money somehow to enable you to reap a reward for

     all that labor.



He was fond of Hall.  He realized how honest and resolute and industrious

he had been.  In another letter he wrote him that it was wonderful he had

been able to "keep the ship afloat in the storm that has seen fleets and

fleets go down"; and he added: "Mrs. Clemens says I must tell you not to

send us any money for a month or two, so that you may be afforded what

little relief is in our power."



The type-setter situation seemed to promise something.  In fact, the

machine once more had become the principal hope of financial salvation.

The new company seemed really to begetting ahead in spite of the money

stringency, and was said to have fifty machines well under way: About the

middle of March Clemens packed up two of his shorter manuscripts which he

had written at odd times and forwarded them to Hall, in the hope that

they would be disposed of and the money waiting him on his arrival; and a

week later, March 22, 1893, he sailed from Genoa on the Kaiser Wilhelm

II, a fine, new boat.  One of the manuscripts was 'The Californian's

Tale' and the other was 'Adam's Diary'.--[It seems curious that neither

of these tales should have found welcome with the magazines.  "The

Californian's Tale" was published in the Liber Scriptorum, an Authors'

Club book, edited by Arthur Stedman.  The 'Diary' was disposed of to the

Niagara Book, a souvenir of Niagara Falls, which contained sketches by

Howells, Clemens, and others.  Harper's Magazine republished both these

stories in later years--the Diary especially with great success.]



Some joke was likely to be played on Mark Twain during these ocean

journeys, and for this particular voyage an original one was planned.

They knew how he would fume and swear if he should be discovered with

dutiable goods and held up in the Custom House, and they planned for this

effect.  A few days before arriving in New York one passenger after

another came to him, each with a box of expensive cigars, and some

pleasant speech expressing friendship and appreciation and a hope that

they would be remembered in absence, etc., until he had perhaps ten or a

dozen very choice boxes of smoking material.  He took them all with

gratitude and innocence.  He had never declared any dutiable baggage,

entering New York alone, and it never occurred to him that he would need

to do so now.  His trunk and bags were full; he had the cigars made into

a nice package, to be carried handily, and on his arrival at the North

German Lloyd docks stood waiting among his things for the formality of

Customs examination, his friends assembled for the explosion.



They had not calculated well; the Custom-House official came along

presently with the usual "Open your baggage, please," then suddenly

recognizing the owner of it he said:



"Oh, Mr. Clemens, excuse me.  We have orders to extend to you the

courtesies of the port.  No examination of your effects is necessary."



It was the evening of Monday, April 3d, when he landed in New York and

went to the Hotel Glenham.  In his notes he tells of having a two-hour

talk with Howells on the following night.  They had not seen each other

for two years, and their correspondence had been broken off.  It was a

happy, even if somewhat sad, reunion, for they were no longer young, and

when they called the roll of friends there were many vacancies.  They had

reached an age where some one they loved died every year.  Writing to

Mrs. Crane, Clemens speaks of the ghosts of memory; then he says:



     I dreamed I was born & grew up & was a pilot on the Mississippi & a

     miner & a journalist in Nevada & a pilgrim in the Quaker City & had

     a wife & children & went to live in a villa at Florence--& this

     dream goes on & on & sometimes seems so real that I almost believe

     it is real.  I wonder if it is?  But there is no way to tell, for if

     one applies tests they would be part of the dream, too, & so would

     simply aid the deceit.  I wish I knew whether it is a dream or real.



He was made handsomely welcome in New York.  His note-book says:



     Wednesday.  Dined with Mary Mapes Dodge, Howells, Rudyard Kipling &

     wife, Clarke,--[ William Fayal Clarke, now editor of St. Nicholas

     Magazine.]--Jamie Dodge & wife.



     Thursday, 6th.  Dined with Andrew Carnegie, Prof.  Goldwin Smith,

     John Cameron, Mr. Glenn.  Creation of league for absorbing Canada

     into our Union.  Carnegie also wants to add Great Britain & Ireland.



It was on this occasion that Carnegie made his celebrated maxim about the

basket and the eggs.  Clemens was suggesting that Carnegie take an

interest in the typesetter, and quoted the old adage that one should not

put all of his eggs into one basket.  Carnegie regarded him through half-

closed lids, as was his custom, and answered:



     "That's a mistake; put all your eggs into one basket--and watch that

     basket."



He had not come to America merely for entertainment.  He was at the New

York office of the type-setter company, acquiring there what seemed to be

good news, for he was assured that his interests were being taken care

of, and that within a year at most his royalty returns would place him

far beyond the fear of want.  He forwarded this good news to Italy, where

it was sorely needed, for Mrs. Clemens found her courage not easy to

sustain in his absence.  That he had made his letter glowing enough, we

may gather from her answer.



     It does not seem credible that we are really again to have money to

     spend.  I think I will jump around and spend money just for fun, and

     give a little away, if we really get some.  What should we do and

     how should we feel if we had no bright prospects before us, and yet

     how many people are situated in that way?



He decided to make another trip to Chicago to verify, with his own eyes,

the manufacturing reports, and to see Paige, who would appear to have

become more elusive than ever as to contracts, written and implied.  He

took Hall with him, and wrote Orion to meet him at the Great Northern

Hotel.  This would give him a chance to see Orion and would give Orion a

chance to see the great Fair.  He was in Chicago eleven days, and in bed

with a heavy cold almost the whole of that time.  Paige came to see him

at his rooms, and, as always, was rich in prospects and promises; full of

protestations that, whatever came, when the tide of millions rolled in,

they would share and share alike.  The note-book says:



     Paige shed even more tears than usual.  What a talker he is!  He

     could persuade a fish to come out and take a walk with him.  When he

     is present I always believe him; I can't help it.



Clemens returned to New York as soon as he was able to travel.  Going

down in the elevator a man stepped in from one of the floors swearing

violently.  Clemens, leaning over to Hall, with his hand to his mouth,

and in a whisper audible to every one, said:



"Bishop of Chicago."



The man, with a quick glance, recognized his fellow-passenger and

subsided.



On May 13th Clemens took the Kaiser Wilhelm II. for Genoa.  He had

accomplished little, but he was in better spirits as to the machine.

If only the strain of his publishing business had slackened even for a

moment!  Night and day it was always with him.  Hall presently wrote that

the condition of the money-market was "something beyond description.  You

cannot get money on anything short of government bonds."  The Mount

Morris Bank would no longer handle their paper.  The Clemens household

resorted to economies hitherto undreamed of.  Mrs. Clemens wrote to her

sister that she really did not see sometimes where their next money would

come from.  She reported that her husband got up in the night and walked

the floor in his distress.



He wrote again to Hall, urging him to sell and get rid of the debts and

responsibilities at whatever sacrifice:



     I am terribly tired of business.  I am by nature and disposition

     unfit for it, & I want to get out of it.  I am standing on the Mount

     Morris volcano with help from the machine a long, long way off--&

     doubtless a long way further off than the Connecticut company

     imagine.



     Get me out of business!



He knew something of the delays of completing a typesetting machine, and

he had little faith in any near relief from that source.  He wrote again

go Hall, urging him to sell some of his type-setter royalties.  They

should be worth something now since the manufacturing company was

actually in operation; but with the terrible state of the money-market

there was no sale for anything.  Clemens attempted to work, but put in

most of his time footing up on the margin of his manuscript the amount of

his indebtedness, the expenses of his household, and the possibilities of

his income.  It was weary, hard, nerve-racking employment.  About the

muddle of June they closed Viviani.  Susy Clemens went to Paris to

cultivate her voice, a rare soprano, with a view to preparing for the

operatic stage.  Clemens took Mrs. Clemens, with little Jean, to Germany

for the baths.  Clara, who had graduated from Mrs. Willard's school in

Berlin, joined them in Munich, and somewhat later Susy also joined them,

for Madame Marchesi, the great master of voice-culture, had told her that

she must acquire physique to carry that voice of hers before she would

undertake to teach her.



In spite of his disturbed state of mind Clemens must have completed some

literary work during this period, for we find first mention, in a letter

to Hall, of his immortal defense of Harriet Shelley, a piece of writing

all the more marvelous when we consider the conditions of its

performance.  Characteristically, in the same letter, he suddenly

develops a plan for a new enterprise--this time for a magazine which

Arthur Stedman or his father will edit, and the Webster company will

publish as soon as their present burdens are unloaded.  But we hear no

more of this project.



But by August he was half beside himself with anxiety.  On the 6th he

wrote Hall:



     Here we never see a newspaper, but even if we did I could not come

     anywhere near appreciating or correctly estimating the tempest you

     have been buffeting your way through--only the man who is in it can

     do that--but I have tried not to burden you thoughtlessly or

     wantonly.  I have been overwrought & unsettled in mind by

     apprehensions, & that is a thing that is not helpable when one is in

     a strange land & sees his resources melt down to a two months'

     supply & can't see any sure daylight beyond.  The bloody machine

     offers but a doubtful outlook--& will still offer nothing much

     better for a long time to come; for when the "three weeks" are up,

     there will be three months' tinkering to follow, I guess.  That is

     unquestionably the boss machine of the world, but is the toughest

     one on prophets when it is in an incomplete state that has ever seen

     the light.



And three days later:



     Great Scott, but it's a long year--for you & me!  I never knew the

     almanac to drag so.  At least not since I was finishing that other

     machine.



     I watch for your letters hungrily--just as I used to watch for the

     telegram saying the machine's finished--but when "next week

     certainly" suddenly swelled into "three weeks sure" I recognized the

     old familiar tune I used to hear so much.  W---- don't know what

     sick-heartedness is--but he is in a way to find out.



And finally, on the 4th:



     I am very glad indeed if you and Mr. Langdon are able to see any

     daylight ahead.  To me none is visible.  I strongly advise that

     every penny that comes in shall be applied to paying off debts.  I

     may be in error about this, but it seems to me that we have no other

     course open.  We can pay a part of the debts owing to outsiders--

     none to Clemenses.  In very prosperous times we might regard our

     stock & copyrights as assets sufficient, with the money owing to us,

     to square up & quit even, but I suppose we may not hope for such

     luck in the present condition of things.



     What I am mainly hoping for is to save my book royalties.  If they

     come into danger I hope you will cable me so that I can come over &

     try to save them, for if they go I am a beggar.



     I would sail to-day if I had anybody to take charge of my family &

     help them through the difficult journeys commanded by the doctors.



A few days later he could stand it no longer, and on August 29 (1893)

sailed, the second time that year, for New York.









CLXXXV



AN INTRODUCTION TO H. H. ROGERS



Clemens took a room at The Players--"a cheap room," he wrote, "at $1.50

per day."  It was now the end of September, the beginning of a long half-

year, during which Mark Twain's fortunes were at a lower ebb than ever

before; lower, even, than during those mining days among the bleak

Esmeralda hills.  Then he had no one but him self and was young.  Now, at

fifty-eight, he had precious lives dependent upon him, and he was weighed

down with a vast burden of debt.  The liabilities of Charles L. Webster

& Co. were fully two hundred thousand dollars. Something like sixty

thousand dollars of this was money supplied by Mrs. Clemens, but the vast

remaining sum was due to banks, to printers, to binders, and to dealers

in various publishing materials.  Somehow it must be paid. As for their

assets, they looked ample enough on paper, but in reality, at a time like

this, they were problematical. In fact, their value was very doubtful

indeed.  What he was to do Clemens did not know.  He could not even send

cheerful reports to Europe.  There was no longer anything to promise

concerning the type-setter.  The fifty machines which the company had

started to build had dwindled to ten machines; there was a prospect that

the ten would dwindle to one, and that one a reconstruction of the

original Hartford product, which had cost so much money and so many weary

years.  Clemens spent a good part of his days at The Players, reading or

trying to write or seeking to divert his mind in the company of the

congenial souls there, waiting for-he knew not what.



Yet at this very moment a factor was coming into his life, a human

element, a man to whom in his old age Mark Twain owed more than to any

other of his myriad of friends.  One night, when he was with Dr. Clarence

C. Rice at the Murray Hill Hotel, Rice said:



"Clemens, I want you to know my friend, Mr. H. H. Rogers.  He is an

admirer of your books."



Clemens turned and was looking into the handsome, clean-cut features of

the great financier, whose name was hardly so familiar then as it became

at a later period, but whose power was already widely known and felt

among his kind.



"Mr. Clemens," said Mr. Rogers, "I was one of your early admirers.

I heard you lecture a long time ago on the Sandwich Islands.  I was

interested in the subject in those days, and I heard that Mark Twain was

a man who had been there.  I didn't suppose I'd have any difficulty

getting a seat, but I did; the house was jammed.  When I came away I

realized that Mark Twain was a great man, and I have read everything of

yours since that I could get hold of."



They sat down at a table, and Clemens told some of his amusing stories.

Rogers was in a perpetual gale of laughter.  When at last he rose to go

the author and the financier were as old friends.  Mr. Rogers urged him

to visit him at his home.  He must introduce him to Mrs. Rogers, he said,

who was also his warm admirer.  It was only a little while after this

that Dr. Rice said to the millionaire:



"Mr. Rogers, I wish you would look into Clemens's finances a little: I am

afraid they are a good deal confused."



This would be near the end of September, 1893.  On October 18 Clemens

wrote home concerning a possible combination of Webster & Co. with John

Brisben Walker, of the 'Cosmopolitan', and added:



     I have got the best and wisest man of the whole Standard Oil group-a

     multi-millionaire--a good deal interested in looking into the type-

     setter.  He has been searching into that thing for three weeks and

     yesterday he said to me:



     "I find the machine to be all you represent it.  I have here

     exhaustive reports from my own experts, and I know every detail of

     its capacity, its immense construction, its cost, its history, and

     all about its inventor's character.  I know that the New York

     company and the Chicago company are both stupid, and that they are

     unbusinesslike people, destitute of money and in a hopeless boggle."



Then he told me the scheme he had planned and said:



     "If I can arrange with these people on this basis--it will take

     several weeks to find out--I will see to it that they get the money

     they need.  In the mean time you 'stop walking the floor'."



Of course, with this encouragement, Clemens was in the clouds again.

Furthermore, Rogers had suggested to his son-in-law, William Evarts

Benjamin, also a subscription publisher, that he buy from the Webster

company The Library of American Literature for fifty thousand dollars, a

sum which provided for the more insistent creditors.  There was hope that

the worst was over.  Clemens did in reality give up walking the floor,

and for the time, at least, found happier diversions.  He must not return

to Europe as yet, for the type-setter matter was still far from

conclusion.  On the 11th of November he was gorgeously entertained by the

Lotos Club in its new building.  Introducing him, President Frank

Lawrence said:



"What name is there in literature that can be likened to his?  Perhaps

some of the distinguished gentlemen about this table can tell us, but I

know of none.  Himself his only parallel, it seems to me.  He is all our

own--a ripe and perfect product of the American soil."









CLXXXVI



"THE BELLE OF NEW YORK"



Those were feverish weeks of waiting, with days of alternate depression

and exaltation as the pendulum swung to and fro between hope and despair.

By daylight Clemens tried to keep himself strenuously busy; evenings and

nights he plunged into social activities--dinners, amusements, suppers,

balls, and the like.  He was be sieged with invitations, sought for by

the gayest and the greatest; "Jamie" Dodge conferred upon him the

appropriate title: of "The Belle of New York."  In his letters home he

describes in detail many of the festivities and the wildness with which

he has flung himself into them, dilating on his splendid renewal of

health, his absolute immunity from fatigue.  He attributes this to his

indifference to diet and regularities of meals and sleep; but we may

guess that it was due to a reaction from having shifted his burden to

stronger financial shoulders.  Henry Rogers had taken his load upon him.



"It rests me," Rogers said, "to experiment with the affairs of a friend

when I am tired of my own.  You enjoy yourself.  Let me work at the

puzzle a little."



And Clemens, though his conscience pricked him, obeyed, as was his habit

at such times.  To Mrs. Clemens (in Paris now, at the Hotel Brighton) he

wrote:



     He is not common clay, but fine-fine & delicate.  I did hate to

     burden his good heart & overworked head, but he took hold with

     avidity & said it was no burden to work for his friends, but a

     pleasure.  When I arrived in September, Lord! how black the prospect

     was & how desperate, how incurably desperate!  Webster & Co. had to

     have a small sum of money or go under at once.  I flew to Hartford--

     to my friends--but they were not moved, not strongly interested, & I

     was ashamed that I went.  It was from Mr. Rogers, a stranger, that I

     got the money and was by it saved.  And then--while still a

     stranger--he set himself the task of saving my financial life

     without putting upon me (in his native delicacy) any sense that I

     was the recipient of a charity, a benevolence.  He gave time to me--

     time, which could not be bought by any man at $100,000 a month--no,

     nor for three times the money.



He adds that a friend has just offered to Webster & Co. a book that

arraigns the Standard Oil magnates individual by individual.



     I wanted to say the only man I care for in the world, the only man I

     would give a d---n for, the only man who is lavishing his sweat &

     blood to save me & mine from starvation is a Standard Oil magnate.

     If you know me, you know whether I want the book or not.



     But I didn't say that.  I said I didn't want any book; I wanted to

     get out of this publishing business & out of all business & was here

     for that purpose & would accomplish it if I could.



He tells how he played billiards with Rogers, tirelessly as always, until

the millionaire had looked at him helplessly and asked:



"Don't you ever get tired?"



And he answered:



"I don't know what it is to get tired.  I wish I did."



He wrote of going with Mr. Rogers to the Madison Square Garden to see an

exhibition of boxing given by the then splendid star of pugilism, James

J. Corbett.  Dr. Rice accompanied him, and painters Robert Reid and

Edward Simmons, from The Players.  They had five seats in a box, and

Stanford White came along presently and took Clemens into the champion's

dressing-room.



     Corbett has a fine face and is modest and diffident, besides being

     the most perfectly & beautifully constructed human animal in the

     world.  I said:



     "You have whipped Mitchell & maybe you will whip Jackson in June--

     but you are not done then.  You will have to tackle me."



     He answered, so gravely that one might easily have thought him in

     earnest:



     "No, I am not going to meet you in the ring.  It is not fair or

     right to require it.  You might chance to knock me out, by no merit

     of your own, but by a purely accidental blow, & then my reputation

     would be gone & you would have a double one.  You have got fame

     enough & you ought not to want to take mine away from me."



     Corbett was for a long time a clerk in the Nevada Bank, in San

     Francisco.



     There were lots of little boxing-matches to entertain the crowd;

     then at last Corbett appeared in the ring & the 8,000 people present

     went mad with enthusiasm.  My two artists went mad about his form.

     They said they had never seen anything that came reasonably near

     equaling its perfection except Greek statues, & they didn't surpass

     it.



     Corbett boxed 3 rounds with the middle-weight Australian champion--

     oh, beautiful to see!--then the show was over and we struggled out

     through a perfect mash of humanity.  When we reached the street I

     found I had left my arctics in the box.  I had to have them, so

     Simmons said he would go back & get them, & I didn't dissuade him.

     I wouldn't see how he was going to make his way a single yard into

     that solid incoming wave of people--yet he must plow through it full

     50 yards.  He was back with the shoes in 3 minutes!



     How do you reckon he accomplished that miracle?  By saying:



     "Way, gentlemen, please--coming to fetch Mr. Corbett's overshoes."



     The word flew from mouth to mouth, the Red Sea divided, & Simmons

     walked comfortably through & back, dry-shod.  This is Fire-escape

     Simmons, the inveterate talker, you know: Exit--in case of Simmons.



     I had an engagement at a beautiful dwelling close to The Players for

     10.30; I was there by 10.45.  Thirty cultivated & very musical

     ladies & gentlemen present--all of them acquaintances & many of them

     personal friends of mine.  That wonderful Hungarian band was there

     (they charge $500 for an evening).  Conversation and band until

     midnight; then a bite of supper; then the company was compactly

     grouped before me & I told them about Dr. B. E. Martin & the

     etchings, & followed it with the Scotch-Irish christening.  My, but

     the Martin is a darling story!  Next, the head tenor from the Opera

     sang half a dozen great songs that set the company wild, yes, mad

     with delight, that nobly handsome young Damrosch accompanying on the

     piano.



     Just a little pause, then the band burst out into an explosion of

     weird and tremendous dance-music, a Hungarian celebrity & his wife

     took the floor; I followed--I couldn't help it; the others drifted

     in, one by one, & it was Onteora over again.



     By half past 4.  I had danced all those people down--& yet was not

     tired; merely breathless.  I was in bed at 5 & asleep in ten

     minutes.  Up at 9 & presently at work on this letter to you.  I

     think I wrote until 2 or half past.  Then I walked leisurely out to

     Mr. Rogers's (it is called 3 miles, but is short of it), arriving at

     3.30, but he was out--to return at 5.30--so I didn't stay, but

     dropped over and chatted with Howells until five.



--[Two Mark Twain anecdotes are remembered of that winter at The Players:



Just before Christmas a member named Scott said one day:



"Mr. Clemens, you have an extra overcoat hanging in the coatroom.  I've

got to attend my uncle's funeral and it's raining very hard.  I'd like to

wear it."



The coat was an old one, in the pockets of which Clemens kept a

melancholy assortment of pipes, soiled handkerchiefs, neckties, letters,

and what not.



"Scott," he said, "if you won't lose anything out of the pockets of that

coat you may wear it."



An hour or two later Clemens found a notice in his mail-box that a

package for him was in the office.  He called for it and found a neat

bundle, which somehow had a Christmas look.  He carried it up to the

reading-room with a showy, air.



"Now, boys," he said, "you may make all the fun of Christmas you like,

but it's pretty nice, after all, to be remembered."



They gathered around and he undid the package.  It was filled with the

pipes, soiled handkerchiefs, and other articles from the old overcoat.

Scott had taken special precautions against losing them.



Mark Twain regarded them a moment in silence, then he drawled:



"Well--, d---n Scott.  I hope his uncle's funeral will be a failure!"



The second anecdote concerns The Player egg-cups.  They easily hold two

eggs, but not three.  One morning a new waiter came to take the breakfast

order.  Clemens said:



"Boy, put three soft eggs in that cup for me."



By and by the waiter returned, bringing the breakfast.  Clemens looked at

the egg portion and asked:



"Boy, what was my order?"



"Three soft eggs broken in the cup, Mr. Clemens."



"And you've filled that order, have you?"



"Yes, Mr. Clemens."



"Boy, you are trifling with the truth; I've been trying all winter to get

three eggs into that cup."]



In one letter he tells of a dinner with his old Comstock friend, John

Mackay--a dinner without any frills, just soup and raw oysters and corned

beef and cabbage, such as they had reveled in sometimes, in prosperous

moments, thirty years before.



"The guests were old gray Pacific coasters," he said, "whom I knew when

they were young and not gray.  The talk was of the days when we went

gipsying-along time ago--thirty years."



Indeed, it was a talk of the dead.  Mainly that.  And of how they looked

& the harum-scarum things they did & said.  For there were no cares in

that life, no aches & pains, & not time enough in the day (& three-

fourths of the night) to work off one's surplus vigor & energy.  Of the

midnight highway-robbery joke played upon me with revolvers at my head on

the windswept & desolate Gold Hill Divide no witness was left but me, the

victim.  Those old fools last night laughed till they cried over the

particulars of that old forgotten crime.



In still another letter he told of a very wonderful entertainment at

Robert Reid's studio.  There were present, he says:



     Coquelin;

     Richard Harding Davis;

     Harrison, the great outdoor painter;

     Wm. H. Chase, the artist;

     Bettini, inventor of the new phonograph;

     Nikola Tesla, the world-wide illustrious electrician; see article

     about him in Jan. or Feb. Century.

     John Drew, actor;

     James Barnes, a marvelous mimic; my, you should see him!

     Smedley, the artist;

     Zorn,      " "

     Zogbaum,   " "

     Reinhart,  " "

     Metcalf,   " "

     Ancona, head tenor at the Opera;



     Oh, & a great lot of others.  Everybody there had done something &

     was in his way famous.



     Somebody welcomed Coquelin in a nice little French speech, John Drew

     did the like for me in English, & then the fun began.  Coquelin did

     some excellent French monologues--one of them an ungrammatical

     Englishman telling a colorless historiette in French.  It nearly

     killed the fifteen or twenty people who understood it.



     I told a yarn, Ancona sang half a dozen songs, Barnes did his

     darling imitations, Handing Davis sang the hanging of Danny Deever,

     which was of course good, but he followed it with that mast

     fascinating (for what reason I don't know) of all Kipling's poems,

     "On the Road to Mandalay," sang it tenderly, & it searched me deeper

     & charmed me more than the Deever.



     Young Gerrit Smith played some ravishing dance-music, & we all

     danced about an hour.  There couldn't be a pleasanter night than

     that one was.  Some of those people complained of fatigue, but I

     don't seem to know what the sense of fatigue is.



In his reprieve he was like some wild thing that had regained liberty.



He refers to Susy's recent illness and to Mrs. Clemens's own poor state

of health.



     Dear, dear Susy!  My strength reproaches me when I think of her and

     you.



     It is an unspeakable pity that you should be without any one to go

     about with the girls, & it troubles me, & grieves me, & makes me

     curse & swear; but you see, dear heart, I've got to stick right

     where I am till I find out whether we are rich or whether the

     poorest person we are acquainted with in anybody's kitchen is better

     off than we are.  .  I stand on the land-end of a springboard, with

     the family clustered on the other end; if I take my foot----



He realized his hopes to her as a vessel trying to make port; once he

wrote:



     The ship is in sight now ....



     When the anchor is down then I shall say:



     "Farewell--a long farewell--to business! I will never touch it

     again!"



     I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it; I will

     swim in ink!  'Joan of Arc'--but all this is premature; the anchor

     is not down yet.



Sometimes he sent her impulsive cables calculating to sustain hope.  Mrs.

Clemens, writing to her sister in January, said:



     Mr. Clemens now for ten days has been hourly expecting to send me

     word that Paige had signed the (new) contract, but as yet no

     despatch comes .  .  .  .  On the 5th of this month I received a

     cable, "Expect good news in ten days."  On the 15th I receive a

     cable, "Look out for good news."  On the 19th a cable, "Nearing

     success."



It appealed to her sense of humor even in these dark days.  She added:



     They make me laugh, for they are so like my beloved "Colonel."



Mr. Rogers had agreed that he would bring Paige to rational terms, and

with Clemens made a trip to Chicago.  All agreed now that the machine

promised a certain fortune as soon as a contract acceptable to everybody

could be concluded--Paige and his lawyer being the last to dally and

dicker as to terms.  Finally a telegram came from Chicago saying that

Paige had agreed to terms.  On that day Clemens wrote in his note-book:



This is a great date in my history.  Yesterday we were paupers with but

3 months' rations of cash left and $160,000 in debt, my wife & I, but

this telegram makes us wealthy.



But it was not until a fortnight later that Paige did actually sign.

This was on the 1st of February, '94, and Clemens that night cabled to

Paris, so that Mrs. Clemens would have it on her breakfast-plate the

morning of their anniversary:



"Wedding news.  Our ship is safe in port.  I sail the moment Rogers can

spare me."



So this painted bubble, this thing of emptiness, had become as substance

again--the grand hope.  He was as concerned with it as if it had been an

actual gold-mine with ore and bullion piled in heaps--that shadow, that

farce, that nightmare.  One longs to go back through the years and face

him to the light and arouse him to the vast sham of it all.









CLXXXVII



SOME LITERARY MATTERS



Clemens might have lectured that winter with profit, and Major Pond did

his best to persuade him; but Rogers agreed that his presence in New York

was likely to be too important to warrant any schedule of absence.  He

went once to Boston to lecture for charity, though his pleasure in the

experience was a sufficient reward.  On the evening before the lecture

Mrs. James T. Fields had him to her house to dine with Dr. Holmes, then

not far from the end of his long, beautiful life.--[He died that same

year, October, 1894.]



Clemens wrote to Paris of their evening together:



Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes never goes out (he is in his 84th year), but he

came out this time--said he wanted to "have a time" once more with me.



Mrs. Fields said Aldrich begged to come, & went away crying because she

wouldn't let him.  She allowed only her family (Sarah Orne Jewett &

sister) to be present, because much company would overtax Dr. Holmes.



Well, he was just delightful!  He did as brilliant and beautiful talking

(& listening) as he ever did in his life, I guess.  Fields and Jewett

said he hadn't been in such splendid form for years.  He had ordered his

carriage for 9.  The coachman sent in for him at 9, but he said, "Oh,

nonsense!--leave glories & grandeurs like these?  Tell him to go away &

come in an hour!"



At 10 he was called for again, & Mrs. Fields, getting uneasy, rose, but

he wouldn't go--& so we rattled ahead the same as ever.  Twice more Mrs.

Fields rose, but he wouldn't go--& he didn't go till half past 10--an

unwarrantable dissipation for him in these days.  He was prodigiously

complimentary about some of my books, & is having Pudd'nhead read to him.

I told him you & I used the Autocrat as a courting book & marked it all

through, & that you keep it in the sacred green box with the loveletters,

& it pleased him.



One other address Clemens delivered that winter, at Fair Haven, on the

opening of the Millicent Library, a present to the town from Mrs. Rogers.

Mrs. Rogers had suggested to her husband that perhaps Mr. Clemens would

be willing to say a few words there.  Mr. Rogers had replied, "Oh,

Clemens is in trouble.  I don't like to ask him," but a day or two later

told him of Mrs. Rogers's wish, adding:



"Don't feel at all that you need to do it.  I know just how you are

feeling, how worried you are."



Clemens answered, "Mr. Rogers, do you think there is anything I could do

for you that I wouldn't do?"



It was on this occasion that he told for the first time the "stolen

watermelon" story, so often reprinted since; how once he had stolen a

watermelon, and when he found it to be a green one, had returned it to

the farmer, with a lecture on honesty, and received a ripe one in its

place.



In spite of his cares and diversions Clemens's literary activities of

this time were considerable.  He wrote an article for the Youth's

Companion--"How to Tell a Story"--and another for the North American

Review on Fenimore Cooper's "Literary Offenses."  Mark Twain had not much

respect for Cooper as a literary artist.  Cooper's stilted

artificialities and slipshod English exasperated him and made it hard for

him to see that in spite of these things the author of the Deerslayer was

a mighty story-teller.  Clemens had also promised some stories to Walker,

of the Cosmopolitan, and gave him one for his Christmas number,

"Traveling with a Reformer," which had grown out of some incidents of

that long-ago journey with Osgood to Chicago, supplemented by others that

had happened on the more recent visit to that city with Hall.  This story

had already appeared when Clemens and Rogers had made their Chicago trip.

Rogers had written for passes over the Pennsylvania road, and the

president, replying, said:



"No, I won't give Mark Twain a pass over our road.  I've been reading his

'Traveling with a Reformer,' in which he abuses our road.  I wouldn't let

him ride over it again if I could help it.  The only way I'll agree to

let him go over it at all is in my private car.  I have stocked it with

everything he can possibly want, and have given orders that if there is

anything else he wants the train is to be stopped until they can get it."



"Pudd'nhead Wilson" was appearing in the Century during this period, and

"Tom Sawyer Abroad" in the St. Nicholas.  The Century had issued a tiny

calendar of the Pudd'nhead maxims, and these quaint bits of philosophy,

the very gems of Mark Twain mental riches, were in everybody's mouth.

With all this going on, and with his appearance at various social events,

he was rather a more spectacular figure that winter than ever before.



From the note-book:



     The Haunted Looking-glass.  The guest (at midnight a dim light

     burning) wakes up & sees appear & disappear the faces that have

     looked into the glass during 3 centuries.



     Love seems the swiftest but is the slowest of all growths.  No man

     and woman really know what perfect love is until they have been

     married a quarter of a century.



     It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.



     Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made the

     slave of the lash--that one is the cat.



     Truth is stranger than fiction--to some people, but I am measurably

     familiar with it.









CLXXXVIII



FAILURE



It was the first week in March before it was thought to be safe for

Clemens to return to France, even for a brief visit to his family.  He

hurried across and remained with them what seemed an infinitesimal time,

a bare three weeks, and was back again in New York by the middle of

April.  The Webster company difficulties had now reached an acute stage.

Mr. Rogers had kept a close watch on its financial affairs, hoping to be

able to pull it through or to close it without failure, paying all the

creditors in full; but on the afternoon of the 16th of April, 1894, Hall

arrived at Clemens's room at The Players in a panic.  The Mount Morris

Bank had elected a new president and board of directors, and had

straightway served notice on him that he must pay his notes--two notes of

five thousand dollars each in a few days when due.  Mr. Rogers was

immediately notified, of course, and said he would sleep on it and advise

them next day.  He did not believe that the bank would really push them

to the wall.  The next day was spent in seeing what could be done, and by

evening it was clear that unless a considerable sum of money was raised a

voluntary assignment was the proper course.  The end of the long struggle

had come.  Clemens hesitated less on his own than on his wife's account.

He knew that to her the word failure would be associated with disgrace.

She had pinched herself with a hundred economies to keep the business

afloat, and was willing to go on economizing to avert this final

disaster.  Mr. Rogers said:



"Mr. Clemens, assure her from me that there is not even a tinge of

disgrace in making this assignment.  By doing it you will relieve

yourself of a fearful load of dread, and in time will be able to pay

everything and stand clear before the world.  If you don't do it you will

probably never be free from debt, and it will kill you and Mrs. Clemens

both.  If there is any disgrace it would be in not taking the course that

will give you and her your freedom and your creditors a better chance for

their claims.  Most of them will be glad enough to help you."



It was on the afternoon of the next day, April 18, 1894, that the firm of

Charles L. Webster & Co.  executed assignment papers and closed its

doors.  A meeting of the creditors was called, at which H. H. Rogers was

present, representing Clemens.  For the most part the creditors were

liberal and willing to agree to any equitable arrangement.  But there

were a few who were grumpy and fussy.  They declared that Mark Twain

should turn over his copyrights, his Hartford home, and whatever other

odds and ends could be discovered.  Mr. Rogers, discussing the matter in

1908, said:



"They were bent on devouring every pound of flesh in sight and picking

the bones afterward, as Clemens and his wife were perfectly willing they

should do.  I was getting a little warm all the time at the highhanded

way in which these few men were conducting the thing, and presently I got

on my feet and said, 'Gentlemen, you are not going to have this thing all

your way.  I have something to say about Mr. Clemens's affairs.  Mrs.

Clemens is the chief creditor of this firm.  Out of her own personal

fortune she has lent it more than sixty thousand dollars.  She will be a

preferred creditor, and those copyrights will be assigned to her until

her claim is paid in full.  As for the home in Hartford, it is hers

already.'



"There was a good deal of complaint, but I refused to budge.  I insisted

that Mrs. Clemens had the first claims on the copyrights, though, to tell

the truth, these did not promise much then, for in that hard year the

sale of books was small enough.  Besides Mrs. Clemens's claim the debts

amounted to one hundred thousand dollars, and of course there must be a

definite basis of settlement, so it was agreed that Clemens should pay

fifty cents on the dollar, when the assets were finally realized upon,

and receive a quittance.  Clemens himself declared that sooner or later

he would pay the other fifty cents, dollar for dollar, though I believe

there was no one besides himself and his wife and me who believed he

would ever be able to do it.  Clemens himself got discouraged sometimes,

and was about ready to give it up, for he was getting on in years--nearly

sixty--and he was in poor health.  Once when we found the debt, after the

Webster salvage, was going to be at least seventy thousand dollars, he

said, 'I need not dream of paying it.  I never could manage it.'  But he

stuck to it.  He was at my house a good deal at first.  We gave him a

room there and he came and went as he chose.  The worry told upon him.

He became frail during those weeks, almost ethereal, yet it was strange

how brilliant he was, how cheerful."



The business that had begun so promisingly and prosperously a decade

before had dwindled to its end.  The last book it had in hand was 'Tom

Sawyer Abroad', just ready for issue.  It curiously happened that on the

day of the failure copies of it were filed in Washington for copyright.

Frank Bliss came over from Hartford, and Clemens arranged with him for

the publication of 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', thereby renewing the old

relationship with the American Publishing Company after a break of a

dozen years.



Naturally, the failure of Mark Twain's publishing firm made a public

stir, and it showed how many and sincere were his friends, how ready they

were with sympathy and help of a more material kind.  Those who

understood best, congratulated him on being out of the entanglement.



Poultney Bigelow, Douglas Taylor, Andrew Carnegie, Charles Dudley Warner,

and others extended financial help, Bigelow and Taylor each inclosing him

a check of one thousand dollars for immediate necessities.  He was

touched by these things, but the checks were returned.  Many of his

creditors sent him personal letters assuring him that he was to forget

his obligation to them completely until such time as the remembering

would cost him no uneasiness.



Clemens, in fact, felt relieved, now that the worst had come, and wrote

bright letters home.  In one he said:



Mr. Rogers is perfectly satisfied that our course was right, absolutely

right and wise--cheer up, the best is yet to come.



And again:



     Now & then a good and dear Joe Twichell or Susy Warner condoles with

     me & says, "Cheer up-don't be downhearted," and some other friend

     says, "I'm glad and surprised to see how cheerful you are & how

     bravely you stand it," & none of them suspect what a burden has been

     lifted from me & how blithe I am inside.  Except when I think of

     you, dear heart--then I am not blithe; for I seem to see you

     grieving and ashamed, & dreading to look people in the face.  For in

     the thick of the fight there is cheer, but you are far away & cannot

     hear the drum nor see the wheeling squadrons.  You only seem to see

     rout, retreat, & dishonored colors dragging in the dirt--whereas

     none of these things exist.  There is temporary defeat, but no

     dishonor--& we will march again.  Charley Warner said to-day, "Sho,

     Livy isn't worrying.  So long as she's got you and the children she

     doesn't care what happens.  She knows it isn't her affair."  Which

     didn't convince me.



Olivia Clemens wrote bravely and encouragingly to him, and more

cheerfully than she felt, for in a letter to her sister she said:



     The hideous news of Webster & Co.'s failure reached me by cable on

     Thursday, and Friday morning Galignani's Messenger had a squib about

     it.  Of course I knew it was likely to come, but I had great hope

     that it would be in some way averted.  Mr. Rogers was so sure there

     was no way out but failure that I suppose it was true.  But I have a

     perfect horror and heart-sickness over it.  I cannot get away from

     the feeling that business failure means disgrace.  I suppose it

     always will mean that to me.  We have put a great deal of money into

     the concern, and perhaps there would have been nothing but to keep

     putting it in and losing it.  We certainly now have not much to

     lose.  We might have mortgaged the house; that was the only thing I

     could think of to do.  Mr. Clemens felt that there would never be

     any end, and perhaps he was right.  At any rate, I know that he was

     convinced that it was the only thing, because when he went back he

     promised me that if it was possible to save the thing he would do so

     if only on account of my sentiment in the matter.



     Sue, if you were to see me you would see that I have grown old very

     fast during this last year.  I have wrinkled.



     Most of the time I want to lie down and cry.  Everything seems to me

     so impossible.  I do not make things go very well, and I feel that

     my life is an absolute and irretrievable failure.  Perhaps I am

     thankless, but I so often feel that I should like to give it up and

     die.  However, I presume that if I could have the opportunity I

     should at once desire to live.



     Clemens now hurried back to Paris, arriving about the middle of May,

     his second trip in two months.  Scarcely had he got the family

     settled at La Bourboule-les-Bains, a quiet watering-place in the

     southern part of France, when a cable from Mr. Rogers, stating that

     the typesetter was perfected, made him decide to hurry back to

     America to assist in securing the new fortune.  He did not go,

     however.  Rogers wrote that the machine had been installed in the

     Times-Herald office, Chicago, for a long and thorough trial.  There

     would be plenty of time, and Clemens concluded to rest with his

     family at La Bourboule-les-Bains.  Later in the summer they went to

     Etretat, where he settled down to work.









CLXXXIX



AN EVENTFUL YEAR ENDS



That summer (July, '94.) the 'North American Review' published "In

Defense of Harriet Shelley," a rare piece of literary criticism and

probably the most human and convincing plea ever made for that injured,

ill-fated woman.  An admirer of Shelley's works, Clemens could not resist

taking up the defense of Shelley's abandoned wife.  It had become the

fashion to refer to her slightingly, and to suggest that she had not been

without blame for Shelley's behavior.  A Shelley biography by Professor

Dowden, Clemens had found particularly irritating.  In the midst of his

tangle of the previous year he had paused to give it attention.  There

were times when Mark Twain wrote without much sequence, digressing this

way and that, as his fancy led him, charmingly and entertainingly enough,

with no large, logical idea.  He pursued no such method in this instance.

The paper on Harriet Shelley is a brief as direct and compact and

cumulative as could have been prepared by a trained legal mind of the

highest order, and it has the added advantage of being the utterance of a

human soul voicing an indignation inspired by human suffering and human

wrong.  By no means does it lack humor, searching and biting sarcasm.

The characterization of Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley as a "literary

cake-walk" is a touch which only Mark Twain could have laid on.  Indeed,

the "Defense of Harriet Shelly," with those early chapters of Joan at

Florence, maybe counted as the beginning for Mark Twain of a genuine

literary renaissance.  It was to prove a remarkable period less

voluminous than the first, but even more choice, containing, as it would,

besides Joan and the Shelley article, the rest of that remarkable series

collected now as Literary Essays; the Hadleyburg story; "Was it Heaven or

Hell?"; those masterly articles on our national policies; closing at last

with those exquisite memories, in his final days.



The summer of 1894 found Mark Twain in the proper frame of mind for

literary work.  He was no longer in a state of dread.  At Etretat, a

watering-place on the French coast, he returned eagerly to the long-

neglected tale of Joan--"a book which writes itself," he wrote Mr.

Rogers"--a tale which tells itself; I merely have to hold the pen."

Etretat, originally a fishing-village, was less pretentious than to-day,

and the family had taken a small furnished cottage a little way back from

the coast--a charming place, and a cheap one--as became their means.

Clemens worked steadily at Etretat for more than a month, finishing the

second part of his story, then went over to Rouen to visit the hallowed

precincts where Joan dragged out those weary months that brought her to

the stake.  Susy Clemens was taken ill at Rouen, and they lingered in

that ancient city, wandering about its venerable steets, which have been

changed but slowly by the centuries, and are still full of memories.



They returned to Paris at length--to the Brighton; their quarters of the

previous winter--but presently engaged for the winter the studio home of

the artist Pomroy at 169 rue de l'Universite, beyond the Seine.  Mark

Twain wrote of it once:



     It was a lovely house; large, rambling, quaint, charmingly furnished

     and decorated, built upon no particular plan, delightfully uncertain

     and full of surprises.  You were always getting lost in it, and

     finding nooks and corners which you did not know were there and

     whose presence you had not suspected before.  It was built by a rich

     French artist, and he had also furnished it and decorated it

     himself.  The studio was coziness itself.  With us it served as a

     drawing-room, sitting-room, living-room, dancing-room--we used it

     for everything.  We couldn't get enough of it.  It is odd that it

     should have been so cozy, for it was 40 feet long, 40 feet high, and

     30 feet wide, with a vast fireplace on, each side, in the middle,

     and a musicians' gallery at one end.



Mrs. Clemens had hoped to return to America, to their Hartford home.

That was her heart's desire--to go back once more to their old life and

fireside, to forget all this period of exile and wandering.  Her letters

were full of her home-longing; her three years of absence seemed like an

eternity.



In its way, the Pomroy house was the best substitute for home they had

found.  Its belongings were of the kind she loved.  Susy had better

health, and her husband was happy in his work.  They had much delightful

and distinguished company.  Her letters tell of these attractive things,

and of their economies to make their income reach.



It was near the end of the year that the other great interest--the

machine--came finally to a conclusion.  Reports from the test had been

hopeful during the summer.  Early in October Clemens, receiving a copy of

the Times-Herald, partly set by the machine, wrote: "The Herald has just

arrived, and that column is healing for sore eyes.  It affects me like

Columbus sighting land."  And again on the 28th:



     It seems to me that things couldn't well be going better at Chicago

     than they are.  There's no other machine that can set type eight

     hours with only seventeen minutes' stoppage through cussedness.  The

     others do rather more stopping than working.  By and by our machines

     will be perfect; then they won't stop at all.



But that was about the end of the good news.  The stoppages became worse

and worse.  The type began to break--the machine had its old trouble: it

was too delicately adjusted--too complicated.



"Great guns, what is the matter with it?" wrote Clemens in November when

he received a detailed account of its misconduct.



Mr. Rogers and his son-in-law, Mr. Broughton, went out to Chicago to

investigate.  They went to the Times-Herald office to watch the type-

setter in action.  Mr. Rogers once told of this visit to the writer of

these chapters.  He said:



"Certainly it was a marvelous invention.  It was the nearest approach to

a human being in the wonderful things it could do of any machine I have

ever known.  But that was just the trouble; it was too much of a human

being and not enough of a machine.  It had all the complications of the

human mechanism, all the liability of getting out of repair, and it could

not be replaced with the ease and immediateness of the human being.  It

was too costly; too difficult of construction; too hard to set up.  I

took out my watch and timed its work and counted its mistakes.  We

watched it a long time, for it was most interesting, most fascinating,

but it was not practical--that to me was clear."



It had failed to stand the test.  The Times-Herald would have no more of

it.  Mr. Rogers himself could see the uselessness of the endeavor.  He

instructed Mr. Broughton to close up the matter as best he could and

himself undertook the harder task of breaking the news to Mark Twain.

His letters seem not to have been preserved, but the replies to them tell

the story.



                                   169 rue de l'Universite,



     PARIS, December 22, 1894.



     DEAR MR. ROGERS,--I seemed to be entirely expecting your letter, and

     also prepared and resigned; but Lord, it shows how little we know

     ourselves and how easily we can deceive ourselves.  It hit me like a

     thunder-clap.  It knocked every rag of sense out of my head, and I

     went flying here and there and yonder, not knowing what I was doing,

     and only one clearly defined thought standing up visible and

     substantial out of the crazy storm-drift--that my dream of ten years

     was in desperate peril and out of the 60,000 or 70,000 projects for

     its rescue that came flocking through my skull not one would hold

     still long enough for me to examine it and size it up.  Have you

     ever been like that?  Not so much, I reckon.



     There was another clearly defined idea--I must be there and see it

     die.  That is, if it must die; and maybe if I were there we might

     hatch up some next-to-impossible way to make it take up its bed and

     take a walk.



     So, at the end of four hours I started, still whirling, and walked

     over to the rue Scribe--4 p.m.--and asked a question or two and was

     told I should be running a big risk if I took the 9 p.m.  train for

     London and Southampton; "better come right along at 6.52 per Havre

     special and step aboard the New York all easy and comfortable."

     Very! and I about two miles from home and no packing done.



     Then it occurred to me that none of these salvation notions that

     were whirlwinding through my head could be examined or made

     available unless at least a month's time could be secured.  So I

     cabled you, and said to myself that I would take the French steamer

     to-morrow (which will be Sunday).



     By bedtime Mrs. Clemens had reasoned me into a fairly rational and

     contented state of mind; but of course it didn't last long.  So I

     went on thinking--mixing it with a smoke in the dressing-room once

     an hour--until dawn this morning.  Result--a sane resolution; no

     matter what your answer to my cable might be I would hold still and

     not sail until I should get an answer to this present letter which I

     am now writing or a cable answer from you saying "Come" or "Remain."



     I have slept 6 hours, my pond has clarified, and I find the sediment

     of my 70,000 projects to be of this character:



He follows with a detailed plan for reconstructing the machine, using

brass type, etc., and concludes:



     Don't say I'm wild.  For really I'm sane again this morning.



     I am going right along with Joan now, and wait untroubled till I

     hear from you.  If you think I can be of the least use cable me

     "Come."  I can write Joan on board ship and lose no time.  Also I

     could discuss my plan with the publisher for a de luxe Joan, time

     being an object, for some of the pictures could be made over here,

     cheaply and quickly, that would cost much more time and money in

     America.



The second letter followed five days later:



                              169 rue de l'Universite,

                              PARIS, December 27, 1894.



     DEAR MR. ROGERS,--Notwithstanding your heart is "old and hard" you

     make a body choke up.  I know you "mean every word you say" and I do

     take it "in the same spirit in which you tender it."  I shall keep

     your regard while we two live--that I know; for I shall always

     remember what you have done for me, and that will insure me against

     ever doing anything that could forfeit it or impair it.



     It is six days or seven days ago that I lived through that

     despairing day, and then through a night without sleep; then settled

     down next day into my right mind (or thereabouts) and wrote you.  I

     put in the rest of that day till 7 P.m.  plenty comfortably enough

     writing a long chapter of my book; then went to a masked ball

     blacked up as Uncle Remus, taking Clara along, and we had a good

     time.  I have lost no day since, and suffered no discomfort to speak

     of, but drove my troubles out of my mind and had good success in

     keeping them out--through watchfulness.  I have done a good week's

     work and put the book a good way ahead in the Great Trial [of Joan],

     which is the difficult part: the part which requires the most

     thought and carefulness.  I cannot see the end of the Trial yet, but

     I am on the road.  I am creeping surely toward it.



     "Why not leave them all to me?" My business brothers?  I take you by

     the hand!  I jump at the chance!



     I ought to be ashamed and I am trying my best to be ashamed--and yet

     I do jump at the chance in spite of it.  I don't want to write

     Irving and I don't want to write Stoker.  It doesn't seem as if I

     could.  But I can suggest something for you to write them; and then

     if you see that I am unwise you can write them something quite

     different.  Now this is my idea:



          1.  To return Stoker's $100 to him and keep his stock.



          2.  And tell Irving that when luck turns with me I will make

          good to him what the salvage from the dead Co. fails to pay him

          of his $500.



     [P. S.  Madam says No, I must face the music.  So I inclose my

     effort--to be used if you approve, but not otherwise.]



     We shall try to find a tenant for our Hartford house; not an easy

     matter, for it costs heavily to live in.  We can never live in it

     again; though it would break the family's hearts if they could

     believe it.



     Nothing daunts Mrs. Clemens or makes the world look black to her--

     which is the reason I haven't drowned myself.



     I got the Xmas journals which you sent and I thank you for that Xmas

     remembrance.



     We all send our deepest and warmest greetings to you and all of

     yours and a Happy New Year!



                              S. L. CLEMENS.



--[Brain Stoker and Sir Henry Irving had each taken a small interest in

the machine.  The inclosure for Stoker ran as follows:]



     MY DEAR STOKER,--I am not dating this, because it is not to be

     mailed at present.



     When it reaches you it will mean that there is a hitch in my machine

     enterprise--a, hitch so serious as to make it take to itself the

     aspect of a dissolved dream.  This letter, then, will contain cheque

     for the $100 which you have paid.  And will you tell Irving for me--

     I can't get up courage enough to talk about this misfortune myself,

     except to you, whom by good luck I haven't damaged yet--that when

     the wreckage presently floats ashore he will get a good deal of his

     $500 back; and a dab at a time I will make up to him the rest.



     I'm not feeling as fine as I was when I saw you there in your home.

     Please remember me kindly to Mrs. Stoker.  I gave up that London

     lecture-project entirely.  Had to--there's never been a chance since

     to find the time.



     Sincerely yours,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.



A week later he added what was about his final word on the subject:



     Yours of December 21 has arrived, containing the circular to

     stockholders, and I guess the Co. will really quit--there doesn't

     seem to be any other wise course.



     There's one thing which makes it difficult for me to soberly realize

     that my ten-year dream is actually dissolved; and that is that it

     reverses my horoscope.  The proverb says, "Born lucky, always lucky."

     It was usual for one or two of our lads (per annum) to get drowned

     in the Mississippi or in Bear Creek, but I was pulled out in a

     drowned condition 9 times before I learned to swim, and was

     considered to be a cat in disguise.  When the Pennsylvania blew up

     and the telegraph reported my brother as fatally injured (with 60

     others) but made no mention of me, my uncle said to my mother "it

     means that Sam was somewhere else, after being on that boat a year

     and a half--he was born lucky."  Yes, I was somewhere else.  I am so

     superstitious that I have always been afraid to have business

     dealings with certain relatives and friends of mine because they

     were unlucky people.  All my life I have stumbled upon lucky chances

     of large size, and whenever they were wasted it was because of my

     own stupidity and carelessness.  And so I have felt entirely certain

     that the machine would turn up trumps eventually.  It disappointed

     me lots of times, but I couldn't shake off the confidence of a

     lifetime in my luck.



     Well, whatever I get out of the wreckage will be due to good luck-

     the good luck of getting you into the scheme--for, but for that

     there wouldn't be any wreckage; it would be total loss.



     I wish you had been in at the beginning.  Then we should have had

     the good luck to step promptly ashore.



So it was that the other great interest died and was put away forever.

Clemens scarcely ever mentioned it again, even to members of his family.

It was a dead issue; it was only a pity that it had ever seemed a live

one.  A combination known as the Regius Company took over Paige's

interest, but accomplished nothing.  Eventually--irony of fate--the

Mergenthaler Company, so long scorned and derided, for twenty thousand

dollars bought out the rights and assets and presented that marvelous

work of genius, the mechanical wonder of the age, to the Sibley College

of Engineering, where it is shown as the costliest piece of machinery,

for its size, ever constructed.  Mark Twain once received a letter from

an author who had written a book calculated to assist inventors and

patentees, asking for his indorsement.  He replied:



     DEAR SIR,--I have, as you say, been interested in patents and

     patentees.  If your books tell how to exterminate inventors send me

     nine editions.  Send them by express.



                              Very truly yours,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.



The collapse of the "great hope" meant to the Clemens household that

their struggle with debt was to continue, that their economies were to

become more rigid.  In a letter on her wedding anniversary, February a

(1895), Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister:



As I was starting down the stairs for my breakfast this morning Mr.

Clemens called me back and took out a five-franc piece and gave it to me,

saying: "It is our silver-wedding day, and so I give you a present."



It was a symbol of their reduced circumstances--of the change that

twenty-five years had brought.



Literary matters, however, prospered.  The new book progressed amazingly.

The worst had happened; other and distracting interests were dead.  He

was deep in the third part-the story of Joan's trial and condemnation,

and he forgot most other things in his determination to make that one a

reality.



As at Viviani, Clemens read his chapters to the family circle.  The story

was drawing near the end now; tragedy was closing in on the frail martyr;

the farce of her trial was wringing their hearts.  Susy would say, "Wait,

wait till I get a handkerchief," and one night when the last pages had

been written and read, and Joan had made the supreme expiation for

devotion to a paltry king, Susy wrote in her diary, "To-night Joan of Arc

was burned at the stake," meaning that the book was finished.



Susy herself had literary taste and might have written had it not been

that she desired to sing.  There are fragments of her writing that show

the true literary touch.  Her father, in an unpublished article which he

once wrote of her, quoted a paragraph, doubtless intended some day to

take its place at the end of a story:



     And now at last when they lie at rest they must go hence.  It is

     always so.  Completion; perfection, satisfaction attained--a human

     life has fulfilled its earthly destiny.  Poor human life!  It may

     not pause and rest, for it must hasten on to other realms and

     greater consummations.



She was a deep reader, and she had that wonderful gift of brilliant,

flowing, scintillating speech.  From her father she had inherited a rare

faculty of oral expression, born of a superior depth of mind, swiftness

and clearness of comprehension, combined with rapid, brilliant, and

forceful phrasing.  Her father wrote of her gift:



     Sometimes in those days of swift development her speech was rocket-

     like for vividness and for the sense it carried of visibility.  I

     seem to see it stream into the sky and burst full in a shower of

     colored fire.



We are dwelling here a moment on Susy, for she was at her best that

winter.



She was more at home than the others.  Her health did not permit her to

go out so freely and her father had more of her companionship.  They

discussed many things--the problems of life and of those beyond life,

philosophies of many kinds, and the subtleties of literary art.  He

recalled long after how once they lost themselves in trying to solve the

mystery of the emotional effect of certain word-combinations--certain

phrases and lines of verse--as, for instance, the wild, free breath of

the open that one feels in "the days when we went gipsying a long time

ago" and the tender, sunlit, grassy slope and mossy headstones suggested

by the simple words, "departed this life."  Both Susy and her father

cared more for Joan than any of the former books.  To Mr. Rogers, Clemens

wrote:



"Possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing--it was written for

love."  A memorandum which he made at the time, apparently for no one but

himself, brings us very close to the personality behind it.



     Do you know that shock?  I mean when you come at your regular hour

     into the sick-room where you have watched for months and find the

     medicine-bottles all gone, the night-table removed, the bed

     stripped, the furniture set stiffly to rights, the windows up, the

     room cold, stark, vacant--& you catch your breath & realize what has

     happened.



     Do you know that shock?



     The man who has written a long book has that experience the morning

     after he has revised it for the last time & sent it away to the

     printer.  He steps into his study at the hour established by the

     habit of months--& he gets that little shock.  All the litter &

     confusion are gone.  The piles of dusty reference-books are gone

     from the chairs, the maps from the floor; the chaos of letters,

     manuscripts, note-books, paper-knives, pipes, matches, photographs,

     tobacco-jars, & cigar-boxes is gone from the writing-table, the

     furniture is back where it used to be in the long-ago.  The

     housemaid, forbidden the place for five months, has been there &

     tidied it up & scoured it clean & made it repellent & awful.



     I stand here this morning contemplating this desolation, & I realize

     that if I would bring back the spirit that made this hospital home-

     like & pleasant to me I must restore the aids to lingering

     dissolution to their wonted places & nurse another patient through

     & send it forth for the last rites, With many or few to assist

     there, as may happen; & that I will do.









CXC



STARTING ON THE LONG TRAIL



The tragedy of 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', with its splendid illustrations by

Louis Loeb, having finished its course in the Century Magazine, had been

issued by the American Publishing Company.  It proved not one of Mark

Twain's great books, but only one of his good books.  From first to last

it is interesting, and there are strong situations and chapters finely

written.  The character of Roxy is thoroughly alive, and her weird

relationship with her half-breed son is startling enough.  There are not

many situations in fiction stronger than that where half-breed Tom sells

his mother down the river into slavery.  The negro character is well

drawn, of course-Mark Twain could not write it less than well, but its

realism is hardly to be compared with similar matter in his other books--

in Tom Sawyer, for instance, or Huck Finn.  With the exceptions of Tom,

Roxy, and Pudd'nhead the characters are slight.  The Twins are mere

bodiless names that might have been eliminated altogether.  The character

of Pudd'nhead Wilson is lovable and fine, and his final triumph at the

murder trial is thrilling in the extreme.  Identification by thumb-marks

was a new feature in fiction then--in law, too, for that matter.  But it

is chiefly Pudd'nhead Wilson's maxims, run at the head of each chapter,

that will stick in the memory of men.  Perhaps the book would live

without these, but with them it is certainly immortal.



Such aphorisms as: "Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits";

"Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good

example"; "When angry count four, and when very angry swear," cannot

perish; these, with the forty or so others in this volume and the added

collection of rare philosophies that head the chapters of Following the

Equator, have insured to Philosopher Pudd'nhead a respectful hearing for

all time.--[The story of Pudd'nhead Wilson was dramatized by Frank Mayo,

who played it successfully as long as he lived.  It is by no means dead,

and still pays a royalty to the Mayo and Clemens estates.]



Clemens had meant to begin another book, but he decided first to make a

trip to America, to give some personal attention to publishing matters

there.  They were a good deal confused.  The Harpers had arranged for the

serial and book publication of Joan, and were negotiating for the Webster

contracts.  Mr. Rogers was devoting priceless time in an effort to

establish amicable relations between the Harpers and the American Company

at Hartford so that they could work on some general basis that would be

satisfactory and profitable to all concerned.  It was time that Clemens

was on the scene of action.  He sailed on the New York on the end of

February, and a little more than a month later returned by the Paris--

that is, at the end of March.  By this time he had altogether a new

thought. It was necessary to earn a large sum of money as promptly as

possible, and he adopted the plan which twice before in his life in 1872

and in 1884:--had supplied him with needed funds.  Loathing the platform

as he did, he was going back to it.  Major Pond had proposed.  a lecture

tour soon after his failure.



"The loss of a fortune is tough," wrote Pond, "but there are other

resources for another fortune.  You and I will make the tour together."



Now he had resolved to make a tour-one that even Pond himself had not

contemplated.  He would go platforming around the world!  He would take

Pond with him as far as the Pacific coast, arranging with some one

equally familiar with the lecture circuit on the other side of the

Pacific.  He had heard of R. S. Smythe, who had personally conducted

Henry M. Stanley and other great lecturers through Australia and the

East, and he wrote immediately, asking information and advice concerning

such a tour.  Clemens himself has told us in one of his chapters how his

mental message found its way to Smythe long before his written one, and

how Smythe's letter, proposing just such a trip, crossed his own.



He sailed for America, with the family on the 11th of May, and a little

more than a week later, after four years of exile, they found themselves

once more at beautiful Quarry Farm.  We may imagine how happy they were

to reach that peaceful haven.  Mrs. Clemens had written:



"It is, in a way, hard to go home and feel that we are not able to open

our house.  But it is an immense delight to me to think of seeing our

friends."



Little at the farm was changed.  There were more vines on the home--the

study was overgrown--that was all.  Even Ellerslie remained as the

children had left it, with all the small comforts and utensils in place.

Most of the old friends were there; only Mrs. Langdon and Theodore Crane

were missing.  The Beechers drove up to see them, as formerly, and the

old discussions on life and immortality were taken up in the old places.



Mrs. Beecher once came with some curious thin layers of leaves of stone

which she had found, knowing Mark Twain's interest in geology.  Later,

when they had been discussing the usual problems, he said he would write

an agreement on those imperishable leaves, to be laid away until the ages

should solve their problems.  He wrote it in verse:



               If you prove right and I prove wrong,

               A million years from now,

               In language plain and frank and strong

               My error I'll avow

               To your dear waking face.



               If I prove right, by God His grace,

               Full sorry I shall be,

               For in that solitude no trace

               There'll be of you and me.



               A million years, O patient stone,

               You've waited for this message.

               Deliver it a million hence;

               (Survivor pays expressage.)

                                             MARK TWAIN



     Contract with Mrs. T. K. Beecher, July 2, 1895.





Pond came to Elmira and the route westward was arranged.  Clemens decided

to give selections from his books, as he had done with Cable, and to

start without much delay.  He dreaded the prospect of setting out on that

long journey alone, nor could Mrs. Clemens find it in her heart to

consent to such a plan.  It was bitterly hard to know what to do, but it

was decided at last that she and one of the elder daughters should

accompany him, the others remaining with their aunt at Quarry Farm.

Susy, who had the choice, dreaded ocean travel, and felt that she would

be happier and healthier to rest in the quiet of that peaceful hilltop.

She elected to remain with her aunt and jean; and it fell to Clara to go.

Major Pond and his wife would accompany them as far as Vancouver.  They

left Elmira on the night of the 14th of July.  When the train pulled away

their last glimpse was of Susy, standing with the others under the

electric light of the railway platform, waving them good-by.









CXCI



Clemens had been ill in Elmira with a distressing carbuncle, and was

still in no condition to undertake steady travel and entertainment in

that fierce summer heat.  He was fearful of failure.  "I sha'n't be able

to stand on a platform," he wrote Mr. Rogers; but they pushed along

steadily with few delays.  They began in Cleveland, thence by the Great

Lakes, traveling by steamer from one point to another, going constantly,

with readings at every important point--Duluth, Minneapolis, St. Paul,

Winnipeg, Butte, and through the great Northwest, arriving at Vancouver

at last on August 16th, but one day behind schedule time.



It had been a hot, blistering journey, but of immense interest, for none

of them had traveled through the Northwest, and the wonder and grandeur

of it all, its scenery, its bigness, its mighty agriculture, impressed

them.  Clemens in his notes refers more than once to the "seas" and

"ocean" of wheat.



     There is the peace of the ocean about it and a deep contentment, a

     heaven-wide sense of ampleness, spaciousness, where pettiness and

     all small thoughts and tempers must be out of place, not suited to

     it, and so not intruding.  The scattering, far-off homesteads, with

     trees about them, were so homelike and remote from the warring

     world, so reposeful and enticing.  The most distant and faintest

     under the horizon suggested fading ships at sea.



The Lake travel impressed him; the beauties and cleanliness of the Lake

steamers, which he compares with those of Europe, to the disadvantage of

the latter.  Entering Port Huron he wrote:



     The long approach through narrow ways with flat grass and wooded

     land on both sides, and on the left a continuous row of summer

     cottages, with small-boat accommodations for visiting across the

     little canals from family to family, the groups of summer-dressed

     young people all along waving flags and handkerchiefs and firing

     cannon, our boat replying with toots of the hoarse whistle and now

     and then a cannon, and meeting steamers in the narrow way, and once

     the stately sister-ship of the line crowded with summer-dressed

     people waving-the rich browns and greens of the rush-grown, far-

     reaching flat-lands, with little glimpses of water away on their

     farther edges, the sinking sun throwing a crinkled broad carpet of

     gold on the water-well, it is the perfection of voyaging.



It had seemed a doubtful experiment to start with Mrs. Clemens on that

journey in the summer heat; but, strange to say, her health improved, and

she reached Vancouver by no means unfit for the long voyage ahead.  No

doubt the change and continuous interest and their splendid welcome

everywhere and their prosperity were accountable.  Everywhere they were

entertained; flowers filled their rooms; carriages and committees were

always waiting.  It was known that Mark Twain had set out for the purpose

of paying his debts, and no cause would make a deeper appeal to his

countrymen than that, or, for that matter, to the world at large.



From Winnipeg he wrote to Mr. Rogers:



     At the end of an hour and a half I offered to let the audience go,

     but they said "go on," and I did.



He had five thousand dollars to forward to Rogers to place against his

debt account by the time he reached the Coast, a fine return for a

month's travel in that deadly season.  At no more than two places were

the houses less than crowded.  One of these was Anaconda, then a small

place, which they visited only because the manager of the entertainment

hall there had known Clemens somewhere back in the sixties and was eager

to have him.  He failed to secure the amount of the guarantee required by

Pond, and when Pond reported to Clemens that he had taken "all he had"

Clemens said:



"And you took the last cent that poor fellow had.  Send him one hundred

dollars, and if you can't afford to stand your share charge it all to me.

I'm not going around robbing my friends who are disappointed in my

commercial value.  I don't want to get money that way."



"I sent the money," said Pond afterward, "and was glad of the privilege

of standing my share."



Clemens himself had not been in the best of health during the trip.  He

had contracted a heavy cold and did not seem to gain strength.  But in a

presentation copy of 'Roughing It', given to Pond as a souvenir, he

wrote:



"Here ends one of the smoothest and pleasantest trips across the

continent that any group of five has ever made."



There were heavy forest fires in the Northwest that year, and smoke

everywhere.  The steamer Waryimoo, which was to have sailed on the 16th,

went aground in the smoke, and was delayed a week.  While they were

waiting, Clemens lectured in Victoria, with the Governor-General and Lady

Aberdeen and their little son in the audience.  His note-book says:



     They came in at 8.45, 15 minutes late; wish they would always be

     present, for it isn't permissible to begin until they come; by that

     time the late-comers are all in.



Clemens wrote a number of final letters from Vancouver.  In one of them

to Mr. J. Henry Harper, of Harper & Brothers, he expressed the wish that

his name might now be printed as the author of "Joan," which had begun

serially in the April Magazine.  He thought it might, help his lecturing

tour and keep his name alive.  But a few days later, with Mrs. Clemens's

help, he had reconsidered, and wrote:



     My wife is a little troubled by my wanting my nom de plume put to

     the "Joan of Arc" so soon.  She thinks it might go counter to your

     plans, and that you ought to be left free and unhampered in the

     matter.



     All right-so be it.  I wasn't strenuous about it, and wasn't meaning

     to insist; I only thought my reasons were good, and I really think

     so yet, though I do confess the weight and fairness of hers.



As a matter of fact the authorship of "Joan" had been pretty generally

guessed by the second or third issue.  Certain of its phrasing and humor

could hardly have come from another pen than Mark Twain's.  The

authorship was not openly acknowledged, however, until the publication of

the book, the following May.



Among the letters from Vancouver was this one to Rudyard Kipling



     DEAR KIPLING,--It is reported that you are about to visit India.

     This has moved me to journey to that far country in order that I may

     unload from my conscience a debt long due to you.  Years ago you

     came from India to Elmira to visit me, as you said at the time.  It

     has always been my purpose to return that visit & that great

     compliment some day.  I shall arrive next January & you must be

     ready.  I shall come riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with

     silver bells & ribbons & escorted by a troop of native howdahs

     richly clad & mounted upon a herd of wild bungalows; & you must be

     on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I shall be thirsty.



To the press he gave this parting statement:



     It has been reported that I sacrificed for the benefit of the

     creditors the property of the publishing firm whose financial backer

     I was and that I am now lecturing for my own benefit.  This is an

     error.  I intend the lectures as well as the property for the

     creditors.  The law recognizes no mortgage on a man's brain, and a

     merchant who has given up all he has may take advantage of the laws

     of insolvency and start free again for himself.  But I am not a

     business man, and honor is a harder master than the law.  It cannot

     compromise for less than 100 cents on the dollar and its debts never

     outlaw.  From my reception thus far on my lecturing tour I am

     confident that if I live I can pay off the last debt within four

     years, after which, at the age of sixty-four, I can make a fresh and

     unincumbered start in life.  I am going to Australia, India, and

     South Africa, and next year I hope to make a tour of the great

     cities of the United States.  I meant, when I began, to give my

     creditors all the benefit of this, but I am beginning to feel that I

     am gaining something from it, too, and that my dividends, if not

     available for banking purposes, may be even more satisfactory than

     theirs.



There was one creditor, whose name need, not be "handed down to infamy,"

who had refused to consent to any settlement except immediate payment in

full, and had pursued with threatened attachment of earnings and

belongings, until Clemens, exasperated, had been disposed to turn over to

his creditors all remaining properties and let that suffice, once and for

all.  But this was momentary.  He had presently instructed Mr. Rogers to

"pay Shylock in full," and to assure any others that he would pay them,

too, in the end.  But none of the others annoyed him.



It was on the afternoon of August 23, 1895, that they were off at last.

Major Pond and his wife lunched with them on board and waved them good-by

as long as they could see the vessel.  The far voyage which was to carry

them for the better part of the year to the under side of the world had

begun.









CXCII



"FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR"



Mark Twain himself has written with great fulness the story of that

traveling--setting down what happened, and mainly as it happened, with

all the wonderful description, charm, and color of which he was so great

a master.  We need do little more than summarize then--adding a touch

here and there, perhaps, from another point of view.



They had expected to stop at the Sandwich Islands, but when they arrived

in the roadstead of Honolulu, word came that cholera had broken out and

many were dying daily.  They could not land.  It was a double

disappointment; not only were the lectures lost, but Clemens had long

looked forward to revisiting the islands he had so loved in the days of

his youth.  There was nothing for them to do but to sit on the decks in

the shade of the awnings and look at the distant shore.  In his book he

says:



     We lay in luminous blue water; shoreward the water was green-green

     and brilliant; at the shore itself it broke in a long, white ruffle,

     and with no crash, no sound that we could hear.  The town was buried

     under a mat of foliage that looked like a cushion of moss.  The

     silky mountains were clothed in soft, rich splendors of melting

     color, and some of the cliffs were veiled in slanting mists.  I

     recognized it all.  It was just as I had seen it long before, with

     nothing of its beauty lost, nothing of its charm wanting.



In his note-book he wrote: "If I might, I would go ashore and never

leave."



This was the 31 st of August.  Two days later they were off again,

sailing over the serene Pacific, bearing to the southwest for Australia.

They crossed the equator, which he says was wisely put where it is,

because if it had been run through Europe all the kings would have tried

to grab it.  They crossed it September 6th, and he notes that Clara

kodaked it.  A day or two later the north star disappeared behind them

and the constellation of the Cross came into view above the southern

horizon.  Then presently they were among the islands of the southern

Pacific, and landed for a little time on one of the Fiji group.  They had

twenty-four days of halcyon voyaging between Vancouver and Sydney with

only one rough day.  A ship's passengers get closely acquainted on a trip

of that length and character.  They mingle in all sorts of diversions to

while away the time; and at the end have become like friends of many

years.



On the night of September 15th-a night so dark that from the ship's deck

one could not see the water--schools of porpoises surrounded the ship,

setting the water alive with phosphorescent splendors: "Like glorified

serpents thirty to fifty feet long.  Every curve of the tapering long

body perfect.  The whole snake dazzlingly illumined.  It was a weird

sight to see this sparkling ghost come suddenly flashing along out of the

solid gloom and stream past like a meteor."



They were in Sydney next morning, September 16, 1895, and landed in a

pouring rain, the breaking up of a fierce drought.  Clemens announced

that he had brought Australia good-fortune, and should expect something

in return.



Mr. Smythe was ready for them and there was no time lost in getting to

work.  All Australia was ready for them, in fact, and nowhere in their

own country were they more lavishly and royally received than in that

faraway Pacific continent.  Crowded houses, ovations, and gorgeous

entertainment--public and private--were the fashion, and a little more

than two weeks after arrival Clemens was able to send back another two

thousand dollars to apply on his debts.  But he had hard luck, too, for

another carbuncle developed at Melbourne and kept him laid up for nearly

a week.  When he was able to go before an audience again he said:



"The doctor says I am on the verge of being a sick man.  Well, that may

be true enough while I am lying abed all day trying to persuade his

cantankerous, rebellious medicines to agree with each other; but when I

come out at night and get a welcome like this I feel as young and healthy

as anybody, and as to being on the verge of being a sick man I don't take

any stock in that.  I have been on the verge of being an angel all my

life, but it's never happened yet."



In his book Clemens has told us his joy in Australia, his interest in the

perishing native tribes, in the wonderfully governed cities, in the gold-

mines, and in the advanced industries.  The climate he thought superb;

"a darling climate," he says in a note-book entry.



Perhaps one ought to give a little idea of the character of his

entertainment.  His readings were mainly from his earlier books,

'Roughing It' and 'Innocents Abroad'.  The story of the dead man which,

as a boy, he had discovered in his father's office was one that he often

told, and the "Mexican Plug" and his "Meeting with Artemus Ward" and the

story of Jim Blaine's old ram; now and again he gave chapters from 'Huck

Finn' and 'Tom Sawyer'.  He was likely to finish with that old fireside

tale of his early childhood, the "Golden Arm."  But he sometimes told the

watermelon story, written for Mrs. Rogers, or gave extracts from Adam's

Diary, varying his program a good deal as he went along, and changing it

entirely where he appeared twice in one city.



Mrs. Clemens and Clara, as often as they had heard him, generally went

when the hour of entertainment came: They enjoyed seeing his triumph with

the different audiences, watching the effect of his subtle art.



One story, the "Golden Arm," had in it a pause, an effective, delicate

pause which must be timed to the fraction of a second in order to realize

its full value.  Somewhere before we have stated that no one better than

Mark Twain knew the value of a pause.  Mrs. Clemens and Clara were

willing to go night after night and hear that tale time and again, for

its effect on each new, audience.



From Australia to New Zealand--where Clemens had his third persistent

carbuncle,--[In Following the Equator the author says: "The dictionary

says a carbuncle is a kind of jewel.  Humor is out of place in a

dictionary."]--and again lost time in consequence.  It was while he was

in bed with this distressing ailment that he wrote Twichell:



     I think it was a good stroke of luck that knocked me on my back here

     at Napier instead of in some hotel in the center of a noisy city.

     Here we have the smooth & placidly complaining sea at our door, with

     nothing between us & it but 20 yards of shingle--& hardly a

     suggestion of life in that space to mar it or to make a noise.  Away

     down here fifty-five degrees south of the equator this sea seems to

     murmur in an unfamiliar tongue--a foreign tongue--a tongue bred

     among the ice-fields of the antarctic--a murmur with a note of

     melancholy in it proper to the vast unvisited solitudes it has come

     from.  It was very delicious and solacing to wake in the night &

     find it still pulsing there.  I wish you were here--land, but it

     would be fine!



Mrs. Clemens and himself both had birthdays in New Zealand; Clemens

turned sixty, and his wife passed the half-century mark.



"I do not like it one single bit," she wrote to her sister.  "Fifty years

old-think of it; that seems very far on."



And Clemens wrote:



     Day before yesterday was Livy's birthday (underworld time) &

     tomorrow will be mine.  I shall be 60--no thanks for it!



From New Zealand back to Australia, and then with the new year away to

Ceylon.  Here they were in the Orient at last, the land of color,

enchantment, and gentle races.  Clemens was ill with a heavy cold when

they arrived; and in fact, at no time during this long journeying was his

health as good as that of his companions.  The papers usually spoke of

him as looking frail, and he was continually warned that he must not

remain in India until the time of the great heat.  He was so determined

to work, however, and working was so profitable, that he seldom spared

himself.



He traveled up and down and back and forth the length and breadth of

India--from Bombay to Allahabad, to Benares, to Calcutta and Darjeeling,

to Lahore, to Lucknow, to Delhi--old cities of romance--and to Jeypore--

through the heat and dust on poor, comfortless railways, fighting his

battle and enjoying it too, for he reveled in that amazing land--its

gorgeous, swarming life, the patience and gentleness of its servitude,

its splendid pageantry, the magic of its architecture, the maze and

mystery of its religions, the wonder of its ageless story.



One railway trip he enjoyed--a thirty-five-mile flight down the steep

mountain of Darjeeling in a little canopied hand-car.  In his book he

says:



     That was the most enjoyable time I have spent in the earth.  For

     rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday trip that

     approaches the bird-flight down the Himalayas in a handcar.  It has

     no fault, no blemish, no lack, except that there are only thirty-

     five miles of it, instead of five hundred.



Mark Twain found India all that Rudyard Kipling had painted it and more.

"INDIA THE MARVELOUS" he printed in his note-book in large capitals, as

an effort to picture his thought, and in his book he wrote:



     So far as I am able to judge nothing has been left undone, either by

     man or Nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the

     sun visits on his rounds.  "Where every prospect pleases, and only

     man is vile."



Marvelous India is, certainly; and he saw it all to the best advantage,

for government official and native grandee spared no effort to do honor

to his party--to make their visit something to be remembered for a

lifetime.  It was all very gratifying, and most of it of extraordinary

interest.  There are not many visitors who get to see the inner household

of a native prince of India, and the letter which Mark Twain wrote to

Kumar Shri Samatsinhji, a prince of the Palitana state, at Bombay, gives

us a notion of how his unostentatious, even if lavish, hospitality was

appreciated.



     DEAR KUMAR SAHIB,--It would be hard for me to put into words how

     much my family & I enjoyed our visit to your hospitable house.  It

     was our first glimpse of the home of an Eastern Prince, & the charm

     of it, the grace & beauty & dignity of it realized to us the

     pictures which we had long ago gathered from books of travel &

     Oriental tales.  We shall not forget that happy experience, nor your

     kind courtesies to us, nor those of her Highness to my wife &

     daughter.  We shall keep always the portrait & the beautiful things

     you gave us; & as long as we live a glance at them will bring your

     house and its life & its sumptuous belongings & rich harmonies of

     color instantly across the years & the oceans, & we shall see them

     again, & how welcome they will be!



     We make our salutation to your Highness & to all members of your

     family--including, with affectionate regard, that littlest little

     sprite of a Princess--& I beg to sign myself



                         Sincerely yours,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.



     BENARES, February 5, 1896.





They had been entertained in truly royal fashion by Prince Kumar, who,

after refreshments, had ordered in "bales of rich stuffs" in the true

Arabian Nights fashion, and commanded his servants to open them and allow

his guests to select for themselves.



With the possible exception of General Grant's long trip in '78 and '79

there has hardly been a more royal progress than Mark Twain's trip around

the world.  Everywhere they were overwhelmed with honors and invitations,

and their gifts became so many that Mrs. Clemens wrote she did not see

how they were going to carry them all.  In a sense, it was like the Grant

trip, for it was a tribute which the nations paid not only to a beloved

personality, but to the American character and people.



The story of that East Indian sojourn alone would fill a large book, and

Mark Twain, in his own way, has written that book, in the second volume

of Following the Equator, an informing, absorbing, and enchanting story

of Indian travel.



Clemens lectured everywhere to jammed houses, which were rather less

profitable than in Australia, because in India the houses were not built

for such audiences as he could command.  He had to lecture three times in

Calcutta, and then many people were turned away.  At one place, however,

his hall was large enough.  This was in the great Hall of the Palace,

where durbars are held, at Bombay.



Altogether they were two months in India, and then about the middle of

March an English physician at Jeypore warned them to fly for Calcutta and

get out of the country immediately before the real heat set in.



They sailed toward the end of March, touched at Madras and again at

Ceylon, remaining a day or two at Colombo, and then away to sea again,

across the Indian Ocean on one of those long, peaceful, eventless, tropic

voyages, where at night one steeps on deck and in daytime wears the

whitest and lightest garments and cares to do little more than sit

drowsily in a steamer-chair and read and doze and dream.



From the note-book:



     Here in the wastes of the Indian Ocean just under the equator the

     sea is blue, the motion gentle, the sunshine brilliant, the broad

     decks with their grouped companies of talking, reading, or game-

     playing folk suggestive of a big summer hotel--but outside of the

     ship is no life visible but the occasional flash of a flying-fish.

     I would like the voyage, under these conditions, to continue

     forever.



               The Injian Ocean sits and smiles

               So sof', so bright, so bloomin' blue,

               There aren't a wave for miles an' miles

               Excep' the jiggle of the screw.



                                            --KIP.



     How curiously unanecdotical the colonials and the ship-going English

     are--I believe I haven't told an anecdote or heard one since I left

     America, but Americans when grouped drop into anecdotes as soon as

     they get a little acquainted.



     Preserve your illusions.  When they are gone you may still exist,

     but not live.



     Swore off from profanity early this morning--I was on deck in the

     peaceful dawn, the calm of holy dawn.  Went down, dressed, bathed,

     put on white linen, shaved--a long, hot, troublesome job and no

     profanity.  Then started to breakfast.  Remembered my tonic--first

     time in 3 months without being told--poured it into measuring-glass,

     held bottle in one hand, it in the other, the cork in my teeth--

     reached up & got a tumbler--measuring-glass slipped out of my

     fingers--caught it, poured out another dose, first setting the

     tumbler on wash-stand--just got it poured, ship lurched, heard a

     crash behind me--it was the tumbler, broken into millions of

     fragments, but the bottom hunk whole.  Picked it up to throw out of

     the open port, threw out the measuring-glass instead--then I

     released my voice.  Mrs. Clemens behind me in the door.



     "Don't reform any more.  It is not an improvement."



     This is a good time to read up on scientific matters and improve the

     mind, for about us is the peace of the great deep.  It invites to

     dreams, to study, to reflection.  Seventeen days ago this ship

     sailed out of Calcutta, and ever since, barring a day or two in

     Ceylon, there has been nothing in sight but the tranquil blue sea &

     a cloudless blue sky.  All down the Bay of Bengal it was so.  It is

     still so in the vast solitudes of the Indian Ocean--17 days of

     heaven.  In 11 more it will end.  There will be one passenger who

     will be sorry.  One reads all day long in this delicious air.  Today

     I have been storing up knowledge from Sir John Lubbock about the

     ant.  The thing which has struck me most and most astonished me is

     the ant's extraordinary powers of identification--memory of his

     friend's person.  I will quote something which he says about Formica

     fusca.  Formica fusca is not something to eat; it's the name of a

     breed of ants.



He does quote at great length and he transferred most of it later to his

book.  In another note he says:



     In the past year have read Vicar of Wakefield and some of Jane

     Austen--thoroughly artificial.  Have begun Children of the Abbey.

     It begins with this "Impromptu" from the sentimental heroine:



     "Hail, sweet asylum of my infancy!  Content and innocence reside

     beneath your humble roof and charity unboastful of the good it

     renders .  .  .  .  Here unmolested may I wait till the rude storm

     of sorrow is overblown and my father's arms are again extended to

     receive me."



     Has the ear-marks of preparation.



They were at the island of Mauritius by the middle of April, that curious

bit of land mainly known to the world in the romance of Paul and

Virginia, a story supposed by some in Mauritius to be "a part of the

Bible."  They rested there for a fortnight and then set sail for South

Africa on the ship Arundel Castle, which he tells us is the finest boat

he has seen in those waters.



It was the end of the first week in May when they reached Durban and felt

that they were nearing home.



One more voyage and they would be in England, where they had planned for

Susy and Jean to join them.



Mrs. Clemens, eager for letters, writes of her disappointment in not

finding one from Susy.  The reports from Quarry Farm had been cheerful,

and there had been small snap-shot photographs which were comforting, but

her mother heart could not be entirely satisfied that Susy did not send

letters.  She had a vague fear that some trouble, some illness, had come

to Susy which made her loath to write.  Susy was, in fact, far from well,

though no one, not even Susy herself, suspected how serious was her

condition.



Mrs. Clemens writes of her own hopefulness, but adds that her husband is

often depressed.



     Mr. Clemens has not as much courage as I wish he had, but, poor old

     darling, he has been pursued with colds and inabilities of various

     sorts.  Then he is so impressed with the fact that he is sixty years

     old.  Naturally I combat that thought all I can, trying to make him

     rejoice that he is not seventy .  .  .  .



     He does not believe that any good thing will come, but that we must

     all our lives live in poverty.  He says he never wants to go back to

     America.  I cannot think that things are as black as he paints them,

     and I trust that if I get him settled down for work in some quiet

     English village he will get back much of his cheerfulness; in fact,

     I believe he will because that is what he wants to do, and that is

     the work that he loves: The platform he likes for the two hours that

     he is on it, but all the rest of the time it grinds him, and he says

     he is ashamed of what he is doing.  Still, in spite of this sad

     undercurrent, we are having a delightful trip.  People are so nice,

     and with people Mr. Clemens seems cheerful.  Then the ocean trips

     are a great rest to him.



Mrs. Clemens and Clara remained at the hotel in Durban while Clemens made

his platform trip to the South African cities.  It was just at the time

when the Transvaal invasion had been put down--when the Jameson raid had

come to grief and John Hares Hammond, chief of the reformers, and fifty

or more supporters were lying in the jail at Pretoria under various

sentences, ranging from one to fifteen years, Hammond himself having

received the latter award.  Mrs. Hammond was a fellow-Missourian; Clemens

had known her in America.  He went with her now to see the prisoners, who

seemed to be having a pretty good time, expecting to be pardoned

presently; pretending to regard their confinement mainly as a joke.

Clemens, writing of it to Twichell, said:



     A Boer guard was at my elbow all the time, but was courteous &

     polite, only he barred the way in the compound (quadrangle or big

     open court) & wouldn't let me cross a white mark that was on the

     ground--the "deathline," one of the prisoners called it.  Not in

     earnest, though, I think.  I found that I had met Hammond once when

     he was a Yale senior & a guest of General Franklin's.  I also found

     that I had known Captain Mein intimately 32 years ago.  One of the

     English prisoners had heard me lecture in London 23 years ago....



     These prisoners are strong men, prominent men, & I believe they are

     all educated men.  They are well off; some of them are wealthy.

     They have a lot of books to read, they play games & smoke, & for a

     while they will be able to bear up in their captivity; but not for

     long, not for very long, I take it.  I am told they have times of

     deadly brooding and depression.  I made them a speech--sitting down.

     It just happened so.  I don't prefer that attitude.  Still, it has

     one advantage--it is only a talk, it doesn't take the form of a

     speech .  .  .  .  I advised them at considerable length to stay

     where they were--they would get used to it & like it presently; if

     they got out they would only get in again somewhere else, by the

     look of their countenances; & I promised to go and see the President

     & do what I could to get him to double their jail terms....

     We had a very good sociable time till the permitted time was up &.

     a little over & we outsiders had to go.  I went again to-day, but

     the Rev. Mr. Gray had just arrived, & the warden, a genial, elderly

     Boer named Du Plessis, explained that his orders wouldn't allow him

     to admit saint & sinner at the same time, particularly on a Sunday.

     Du Plessis descended from the Huguenot fugitives, you see, of 200

     years ago--but he hasn't any French left in him now--all Dutch.



Clemens did visit President Kruger a few days later, but not for the

purpose explained.  John Hayes Hammond, in a speech not long ago (1911),

told how Mark Twain was interviewed by a reporter after he left the jail,

and when the reporter asked if the prisoners were badly treated Clemens

had replied that he didn't think so, adding:



"As a matter of fact, a great many of these gentlemen have fared far

worse in the hotels and mining-camps of the West."



Said Hammond in his speech: "The result of this was that the interview

was reported literally and a leader appeared in the next morning's issue

protesting against such lenience.  The privations, already severe enough,

were considerably augmented by that remark, and it required some three or

four days' search on the part of some of our friends who were already

outside of jail to get hold of Mark Twain and have him go and explain to

Kruger that it was all a joke."



Clemens made as good a plea to "Oom Paul" as he could, and in some degree

may have been responsible for the improved treatment and the shortened

terms of the unlucky reformers.



They did not hurry away from South Africa.  Clemens gave many readings

and paid a visit to the Kimberley mines.  His note-book recalls how poor

Riley twenty-five years before had made his fatal journey.



It was the 14th of July, 1896, a year to a day since they left Elmira,

that they sailed by the steamer Norman for England, arriving at

Southampton the 31st.  It was from Southampton that they had sailed for

America fourteen months before.  They had completed the circuit of the

globe.









CXCII



THE PASSING OF SUSY



It had been arranged that Katie Leary should bring Jean and Susy to

England.  It was expected that they would arrive soon, not later than the

12th, by which time the others would be established.  The travelers

proceeded immediately to London and engaged for the summer a house in

Guildford, modest quarters, for they were still economizing, though Mark

Twain had reason to hope that with the money already earned and the

profits of the book he would write of his travels he could pay himself

free.  Altogether, the trip had been prosperous.  Now that it was behind

him, his health and spirits had improved.  The outlook was brighter.



August 12th came, but it did not bring Katie and the children.  A letter

came instead.  Clemens long afterward wrote:



     It explained that Susy was slightly ill-nothing of consequence.  But

     we were disquieted and began to cable for later news.  This was

     Friday.  All day no answer--and the ship to leave Southampton next

     day at noon.  Clara and her mother began packing, to be ready in

     case the news should be bad.  Finally came a cablegram saying, "Wait

     for cablegram in the morning."  This was not satisfactory--not

     reassuring.  I cabled again, asking that the answer be sent to

     Southampton, for the day was now closing.  I waited in the post-

     office that night till the doors were closed, toward midnight, in

     the hope that good news might still come, but there was no message.

     We sat silent at home till one in the morning waiting--waiting for

     we knew not what.  Then we took the earlier morning train, and when

     we reached Southampton the message was there.  It said the recovery

     would be long but certain.  This was a great relief to me, but not

     to my wife.  She was frightened.  She and Clara went aboard the

     steamer at once and sailed for America, to nurse Susy.  I remained

     behind to search for another and larger house in Guildford.



     That was the 15th of August, 1896.  Three days later, when my wife

     and Clara were about half-way across the ocean, I was standing in

     our dining-room, thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram

     was put into my hand.  It said, "Susy was peacefully released to-

     day."



Some of those who in later years wondered at Mark Twain's occasional

attitude of pessimism and bitterness toward all creation, when his

natural instinct lay all the other way, may find here some reasons in his

logic of gloom.  For years he and his had been fighting various impending

disasters.  In the end he had torn his family apart and set out on a

weary pilgrimage to pay, for long financial unwisdom, a heavy price--a

penance in which all, without complaint, had joined.  Now, just when it

seemed about ended, when they were ready to unite and be happy once more,

when he could hold up his head among his fellows--in this moment of

supreme triumph had come the message that Susy's lovely and blameless

life was ended.  There are not many greater dramas in fiction or in

history than this.  The wonder is not that Mark Twain so often preached

the doctrine of despair during his later life, but that he did not

exemplify it--that he did not become a misanthrope in fact.



Mark Twain's life had contained other tragedies, but no other that

equaled this one.  This time none of the elements were lacking--not the

smallest detail.  The dead girl had been his heart's pride; it was a year

since he had seen her face, and now by this word he knew that he would

never see it again.  The blow had found him alone absolutely alone among

strangers--those others--half-way across the ocean, drawing nearer and

nearer to it, and he with no way to warn them, to prepare them, to

comfort them.



Clemens sought no comfort for himself.  Just as nearly forty years before

he had writhed in self-accusation for the death of his younger brother,

and as later he held himself to blame for the death of his infant son, so

now he crucified himself as the slayer of Susy.  To Mrs. Clemens he

poured himself out in a letter in which he charged himself categorically

as being wholly and solely responsible for the tragedy, detailing step by

step with fearful reality his mistakes and weaknesses which had led to

their downfall, the separation from Susy, and this final incredible

disaster.  Only a human being, he said, could have done these things.



Susy Clemens had died in the old Hartford home.  She had been well for a

time at Quarry Farm, well and happy, but during the summer of '96 she had

become restless, nervous, and unlike herself in many ways.  Her health

seemed to be gradually failing, and she renewed the old interest in

mental science, always with the approval of her parents.  Clemens had

great faith in mind over matter, and Mrs. Clemens also believed that

Susy's high-strung nature was especially calculated to receive benefit

from a serene and confident mental attitude.  From Bombay, in January,

she wrote Mrs. Crane:



I am very glad indeed that Susy has taken up Mental Science, and I do

hope it may do her as much good as she hopes.  Last winter we were so

very anxious to have her get hold of it, and even felt at one time that

we must go to America on purpose to have her have the treatment, so it

all seems very fortunate that it should have come about as it has this

winter.



Just how much or how little Susy was helped by this treatment cannot be

known.  Like Stevenson, she had "a soul of flame in a body of gauze," a

body to be guarded through the spirit.  She worked continuously at her

singing and undoubtedly overdid herself.  Early in the year she went over

to Hartford to pay some good-by visit, remaining most of the time in the

home of Charles Dudley Warner, working hard at her singing.  Her health

did not improve, and when Katie Leary went to Hartford to arrange for

their departure she was startled at the change in her.



"Miss Susy; you are sick," she said.  "You must have the doctor come."



Susy refused at first, but she grew worse and the doctor was sent for.

He thought her case not very serious--the result, he said, of overwork.

He prescribed some soothing remedies, and advised that she be kept very

quiet, away from company, and that she be taken to her own home, which

was but a step away.  It was then that the letter was written and the

first cable sent to England.  Mrs. Crane was summoned from Elmira, also

Charles Langdon.  Mr. Twichell was notified and came down from his summer

place in the Adirondacks.



Susy did not improve.  She became rapidly worse, and a few days later the

doctor pronounced her ailment meningitis.  This was on the 15th of

August--that hot, terrible August of 1896.  Susy's fever increased and

she wandered through the burning rooms in delirium and pain; then her

sight left her, an effect of the disease.  She lay down at last, and

once, when Katie Leary was near her, she put her hands on Katie's face

and said, "mama."  She did not speak after that, but sank into

unconsciousness, and on the evening of Tuesday, August 18th, the flame

went out forever.



To Twichell Clemens wrote of it:



     Ah, well, Susy died at home.  She had that privilege.  Her dying

     eyes rested upon no thing that was strange to them, but only upon

     things which they had known & loved always & which had made her

     young years glad; & she had you & Sue & Katie & & John & Ellen.

     This was happy fortune--I am thankful that it was vouchsafed to her.

     If she had died in another house--well, I think I could not have

     borne that.  To us our house was not unsentient matter--it had a

     heart & a soul & eyes to see us with, & approvals & solicitudes &

     deep sympathies; it was of us, & we were in its confidence, & lived

     in its grace & in the peace of its benediction.  We never came home

     from an absence that its face did not light up & speak out its

     eloquent welcome--& we could not enter it unmoved.  And could we

     now?  oh, now, in spirit we should enter it unshod.



A tugboat with Dr. Rice, Mr. Twichell, and other friends of the family

went down the bay to meet the arriving vessel with Mrs. Clemens and Clara

on board.  It was night when the ship arrived, and they did not show

themselves until morning; then at first to Clara.  There had been little

need to formulate a message--their presence there was enough--and when a

moment later Clara returned to the stateroom her mother looked into her

face and she also knew.  Susy already had been taken to Elmira, and at

half past ten that night Mrs. Clemens and Clara arrived there by the

through train--the same train and in the same coach which they had taken

one year and one month before on their journey westward around the world.



And again Susy was there, not waving her welcome in the glare of the

lights as she had waved her farewell to us thirteen months before, but

lying white and fair in her coffin in the house where she was born.



They buried her with the Langdon relatives and the little brother, and

ordered a headstone with some lines which they had found in Australia:



               Warm summer sun shine kindly here;

               Warm southern wind blow softly here;

               Green sod above lie light, lie light

               Good night, dear heart, good night, good night.



--[These lines at first were generally attributed to Clemens himself.

When this was reported to him he ordered the name of the Australian poet,

Robert Richardson, cut beneath them.  The word "southern" in the original

read "northern," as in Australia.  the warm wind is from the north.

Richardson died in England in 1901.]









CXCIV



WINTER IN TEDWORTH SQUARE



Mrs. Clemens, Clara, and Jean, with Katie Leary, sailed for England

without delay.  Arriving there, they gave up the house in Guildford, and

in a secluded corner of Chelsea, on the tiny and then almost unknown

Tedworth Square (No. 23), they hid themselves away for the winter.  They

did not wish to be visited; they did not wish their whereabouts known

except to a few of their closest friends.  They wanted to be alone with

their sorrow, and not a target for curious attention.  Perhaps not a

dozen people in London knew their address and the outside world was

ignorant of it altogether.  It was through this that a wild report

started that Mark Twain's family had deserted him--that ill and in

poverty he was laboring alone to pay his debts.  This report--exploited

in five-column head-lines by a hyper-hysterical paper of that period

received wide attention.



James Ross Clemens, of the St. Louis branch, a nephew of Frau von Versen,

was in London just then, and wrote at once, through Chatto & Windus,

begging Mark Twain to command his relative's purse.  The reply to this

kind offer was an invitation to tea, and "Young Doctor Jim," as he was

called, found his famous relative by no means abandoned or in want, but

in pleasant quarters, with his family still loyal.  The general

impression survived, however, that Mark Twain was sorely pressed, and the

New York Herald headed a public benefit fund for the payment of his

debts.  The Herald subscribed one thousand dollars on its own account,

and Andrew Carnegie followed with another thousand, but the enterprise

was barely under way when Clemens wrote a characteristic letter, in which

he declared that while he would have welcomed the help offered, being

weary of debt, his family did not wish him to accept and so long as he

was able to take care of them through his own efforts.



Meantime he was back into literary harness; a notebook entry for

October 24, 1896, says:



"Wrote the fist chapter of the book to-day-'Around the World'."



He worked at it uninterruptedly, for in work; there was respite, though

his note-books show something of his mental torture, also his spiritual

heresies.  His series of mistakes and misfortunes, ending with the death

of Susy, had tended to solidify his attitude of criticism toward things

in general and the human race in particular.



"Man is the only animal that blushes, or that needs to," was one of his

maxims of this period, and in another place he sets down the myriad

diseases which human flesh is heir to and his contempt for a creature

subject to such afflictions and for a Providence that could invent them.

Even Mrs. Clemens felt the general sorrow of the race.  "Poor, poor human

nature," she wrote once during that long, gloomy winter.



Many of Mark Twain's notes refer to Susy.  In one he says:



"I did not hear her glorious voice at its supremest--that was in Hartford

a month or two before the end."



Notes of heavy regret most of them are, and self-reproach and the

hopelessness of it all.  In one place he records her accomplishment of

speech, adding:



"And I felt like saying 'you marvelous child,' but never said it; to my

sorrow I remember it now.  But I come of an undemonstrative race."



He wrote to Twichell:



     But I have this consolation: that dull as I was I always knew enough

     to be proud when she commended me or my work--as proud as if Livy

     had done it herself--& I took it as the accolade from the hand of

     genius.  I see now--as Livy always saw--that she had greatness in

     her, & that she herself was dimly conscious of it.



     And now she is dead--& I can never tell her.



And closing a letter to Howells:



     Good-by.  Will healing ever come, or life have value again?



     And shall we see Susy?  Without doubt!  without a shadow of doubt if

     it can furnish opportunity to break our hearts again.



On November 26th, Thanksgiving, occurs this note:



     "We did not celebrate it.  Seven years ago Susy gave her play for

     the first time."



And on Christmas:



     London, 11.30 Xmas morning.  The Square & adjacent streets are not

     merely quiet, they are dead.  There is not a sound.  At intervals a

     Sunday-looking person passes along.  The family have been to

     breakfast.  We three sat & talked as usual, but the name of the day

     was not mentioned.  It was in our minds, but we said nothing.



And a little later:



     Since bad luck struck us it is risky for people to have to do with

     us.  Our cook's sweetheart was healthy.  He is rushing for the grave

     now.  Emily, one of the maids, has lost the sight of one eye and the

     other is in danger.  Wallace carried up coal & blacked the boots two

     months--has suddenly gone to the hospital--pleurisy and a bad case.

     We began to allow ourselves to see a good deal of our friends, the

     Bigelows--straightway their baby sickened & died.  Next Wilson got

     his skull fractured.



     January 23, 1897.  I wish the Lord would disguise Himself in

     citizen's clothing & make a personal examination of the sufferings

     of the poor in London.  He would be moved & would do something for

     them Himself.









CXCV



"PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC"



Meantime certain publishing events had occurred.  During his long voyage

a number of Mark Twain's articles had appeared in the magazines, among

them "Mental Telegraphy Again," in Harpers, and in the North American

Review that scorching reply to Paul Bourget's reflections upon America.

Clemens could criticize his own nation freely enough, but he would hardly

be patient under the strictures of a Frenchman, especially upon American

women.



There had been book publication also during this period.  The Harpers had

issued an edition of 'Tom Sawyer Abroad', which included another Tom and

Huck story 'Tom Sawyer, Detective', written in Paris, and the contents of

the old White Elephant book.



But there had been a much more important book event.  The chapters of his

story of Joan having run their course in Harper's Magazine had been

issued as a volume.



As already mentioned, Joan had been early recognized as Mark Twain's

work, and it was now formally acknowledged as such on the title-page.  It

is not certain now that the anonymous beginning had been a good thing.

Those who began reading it for its lofty charm, with the first hint of

Mark Twain as the author became fearful of some joke or burlesque.  Some

who now promptly hastened to read it as Mark Twain's, were inclined to be

disappointed at the very lack of these features.  When the book itself

appeared the general public, still doubtful as to its merits, gave it a

somewhat dubious reception.  The early sales were disappointing.



Nor were the reviewers enthusiastic, as a rule.  Perhaps they did not

read it over-carefully, or perhaps they were swayed a good deal by a sort

of general verdict that, in attempting 'Joan of Arc', Mark Twain had gone

out of his proper field.  Furthermore, there were a number of Joan books

published just then, mainly sober, somber books, in which Joan was

pictured properly enough as a saint, and never as anything else--never

being permitted to smile or enjoy the lighter side of life, to be a human

being, in fact, at all.



But this is just the very wonder of Mark Twain's Joan.  She is a saint;

she is rare, she is exquisite, she is all that is lovely, and she is a

human being besides.  Considered from every point of view, Joan of Arc is

Mark Twain's supreme literary expression, the loftiest, the most

delicate, the most luminous example of his work.  It is so from the first

word of its beginning, that wonderful "Translator's Preface," to the last

word of the last chapter, where he declares that the figure of Joan with

the martyr's crown upon her head shall stand for patriotism through all

time.



The idyllic picture of Joan's childhood with her playmates around the

fairy tree is so rare in its delicacy and reality that any attempt to

recall it here would disturb its bloom.  The little poem, "L'Arbre fee de

Bourlemont," Mark Twain's own composition, is a perfect note, and that

curiously enough, for in versification he was not likely to be strong.

Joan's girlhood, the picture of her father's humble cottage, the singing

there by the wandering soldier of the great song of Roland which stirred

her deepest soul with the love of France, Joan's heroism among her

playmates, her wisdom, her spiritual ideals-are not these all reverently

and nobly told, and with that touch of tenderness which only Mark Twain

could give?  And the story of her voices, and her march, and of her first

appearance before the wavering king.  And then the great coronation scene

at Rheims, and the dramatic moment when Joan commands the march on Paris

--the dragging of the hopeless trial, and that last, fearful day of

execution, what can surpass these?  Nor must we forget those charming,

brighter moments where Joan is shown just as a human being, laughing

until the tears run at the absurdities of the paladin or the simple home

prattle of her aged father and uncle.  Only here and there does one find

a touch--and it is never more than that--of the forbidden thing, the

burlesque note which was so likely to be Mark Twain's undoing.



It seems incredible to-day that any reader, whatever his preconceived

notions of the writer might have been, could have followed these chapters

without realizing their majesty, and that this tale of Joan was a book

such as had not before been written.  Let any one who read it then and

doubted, go back and consider it now.  A surprise will await him, and it

will be worth while.  He will know the true personality of Joan of Arc

more truly than ever before, and he will love her as the author loved

her, for "the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable child the

ages have produced."



The tale is matchless in its workmanship.  The quaint phrasing of the old

Sieur de Conte is perfectly adapted to the subject-matter, and the lovely

character of the old narrator himself is so perfectly maintained that we

find ourselves all the time as in an atmosphere of consecration, and feel

that somehow we are helping him to weave a garland to lay on Joan's tomb.

Whatever the tale he tells, he is never more than a step away.  We are

within sound of his voice, we can touch his presence; we ride with him

into battle; we laugh with him in the by-play and humors of warfare; we

sit hushed at his side through the long, fearful days of the deadly

trial, and when it is all ended it is to him that we turn to weep for

Joan--with him only would we mingle our tears.  It is all bathed in the

atmosphere of romance, but it is the ultimate of realism, too; not hard,

sordid, ugly realism, but noble, spiritual, divine realism, belonging to

no particular class or school--a creation apart.  Not all of Mark Twain's

tales have been convincing, but there is no chapter of his Joan that we

doubt.  We believe it all happened--we know that it must have happened,

for our faith in the Sieur de Conte never for an instant wavers.



Aside from the personality of the book--though, in truth, one never is

aside from it--the tale is a marvel in its pageantry, its splendid

panorama and succession of stirring and stately scenes.  The fight before

Orleans, the taking of the Tourelles and of Jargeau, all the movement of

that splendid march to Rheims, there are few better battle-pictures than

these.  Howells, always interested mainly in the realism of to-day, in

his review hints at staginess in the action and setting and even in Joan

herself.  But Howells himself did not accept his earlier judgment as

final.  Five years later he wrote:



"She is indeed realized to the modern sense as few figures of the past

have been realized in fiction."



As for the action, suppose we consider a brief bit of Joan's warfare.  It

is from the attack on the Tourelles:



     Joan mounted her horse now with her staff about her, and when our

     people saw us coming they raised a great shout, and were at once

     eager for another assault on the boulevard.  Joan rode straight to

     the foss where she had received her wound, and, standing there in

     the rain of bolts and arrows, she ordered the paladin to let her

     long standard blow free, and to note when its fringes should touch

     the fortress.  Presently he said:



     "It touches."



     "Now, then," said Joan to the waiting battalions, "the place is

     yours--enter in!  Bugles, sound the assault!  Now, then--all

     together--go!"



     And go it was.  You never saw anything like it.  We swarmed up the

     ladders and over the battlements like a wave--and the place was our

     property.  Why, one might live a thousand years and never see so

     gorgeous a thing as that again....



     We were busy and never heard the five cannon-shots fired, but they

     were fired a moment after Joan had ordered the assault; and so,

     while we were hammering and being hammered in the smaller fortress,

     the reserve on the Orleans side poured across the bridge and

     attacked the Tourelles from that side.  A fireboat was brought down

     and moored under the drawbridge which connected the Tourelles with

     our boulevard; wherefore, when at last we drove our English ahead of

     us, and they tried to cross that drawbridge and join their friends

     in the Tourelles, the burning timbers gave way under them and

     emptied them in a mass into the river in their heavy armor--and a

     pitiful sight it was to see brave men die such a death as that.



     "God pity them!" said Joan, and wept to see that sorrowful

     spectacle.  She said those gentle words and wept those compassionate

     tears, although one of those perishing men had grossly insulted her

     with a coarse name three days before when she had sent him a message

     asking him to surrender.  That was their leader, Sir William

     Glasdale, a most valorous knight.  He was clothed all in steel; so

     he plunged under the water like a lance, and of course came up no

     more.



     We soon patched a sort of bridge together and threw ourselves

     against the last stronghold of the English power that barred Orleans

     from friends and supplies.  Before the sun was quite down Joan's

     forever memorable day's work was finished, her banner floated from

     the fortress of the Tourelles, her promise was fulfilled, she had

     raised the siege of Orleans!



England had resented the Yankee, but it welcomed Joan.  Andrew Lang

adored it, and some years later contemplated dedicating his own book,

'The Maid of France', to Mark Twain.'--[His letter proposing this

dedication, received in 1909, appears to have been put aside and

forgotten by Mr. Clemens, whose memory had not improved with failing

health.]



Brander Matthews ranks Huck Finn before Joan of Arc, but that is

understandable.  His literary culture and research enable him, in some

measure, to comprehend the production of Joan; whereas to him Huck is

pure magic.  Huck is not altogether magic to those who know the West--the

character of that section and the Mississippi River, especially of an

older time--it is rather inspiration resulting from these existing

things.  Joan is a truer literary magic--the reconstruction of a far-

vanished life and time.  To reincarnate, as in a living body of the

present, that marvelous child whose life was all that was pure and

exalted and holy, is veritable necromancy and something more.  It is the

apotheosis of history.



Throughout his life Joan of Arc had been Mark Twain's favorite character

in the world's history.  His love for her was a beautiful and a sacred

thing.  He adored young maidenhood always and nobility of character, and

he was always the champion of the weak and the oppressed.  The

combination of these characteristics made him the ideal historian of an

individuality and of a career like hers.  It is fitting that in his old

age (he was nearing sixty when it was finished) he should have written

this marvelously beautiful thing.  He could not have written it at an

earlier time.  It had taken him all these years to prepare for it; to

become softened, to acquire the delicacy of expression, the refinement of

feeling, necessary to the achievement.



It was the only book of all he had written that Mark Twain considered

worthy of this dedication:



                  1870       To MY WIFE           1895

                         OLIVIA LANGDON CLEMENS

                               THIS BOOK



          is tendered on our wedding anniversary in grateful recognition

          of her twenty-five years of valued service as my literary

          adviser and editor.



                                             THE AUTHOR



The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was a book not understood in

the beginning, but to-day the public, that always renders justice in the

end, has reversed its earlier verdict.  The demand for Joan has

multiplied many fold and it continues to multiply with every year.  Its

author lived long enough to see this change and to be comforted by it,

for though the creative enthusiasm in his other books soon passed, his

glory in the tale of Joan never died.  On his seventy-third birthday,

when all of his important books were far behind him, and he could judge

them without prejudice, he wrote as his final verdict:



                                        Nov. 30, 1908



I like the Joan of Arc best of all my books; & it is the best; I know it

perfectly well.  And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure

afforded me by any of the others: 12 years of preparation & a years of

writing.  The others needed no preparation, & got none.



                                        MARK TWAIN.









CXCVI



MR. ROGERS AND HELEN KELLER



It was during the winter of '96, in London, that Clemens took an active

interest in the education of Helen Keller and enlisted the most valuable

adherent in that cause, that is to say, Henry H. Rogers.  It was to Mrs.

Rogers that he wrote, heading his letter:



               For & in behalf

                    of Helen Keller,

                         Stone blind & deaf,

                              & formerly dumb.



     DEAR MRS.  ROGERS,--Experience has convinced me that when one

     wished to set a hard-worked man at something which he mightn't

     prefer to be bothered with it is best to move upon him behind his

     wife.  If she can't convince him it isn't worth while for other

     people to try.



     Mr. Rogers will remember our visit with that astonishing girl at

     Lawrence Hutton's house when she was fourteen years old.  Last July,

     in Boston, when she was 16 she underwent the Harvard examination for

     admission to Radcliffe College.  She passed without a single

     condition.  She was allowed only the same amount of time that is

     granted to other applicants, & this was shortened in her case by the

     fact that the question-papers had to be read to her.  Yet she scored

     an average of 90, as against an average of 78 on the part of the

     other applicants.



     It won't do for America to allow this marvelous child to retire from

     her studies because of poverty.  If she can go on with them she will

     make a fame that will endure in history for centuries.  Along her

     special lines she is the most extraordinary product of all the ages.



     There is danger that she must retire from the struggle for a college

     degree for lack of support for herself & for Miss Sullivan (the

     teacher who has been with her from the start--Mr. Rogers will

     remember her).  Mrs. Hutton writes to ask me to interest rich

     Englishmen in her case, & I would gladly try, but my secluded life

     will not permit it.  I see nobody.  Nobody knows my address.

     Nothing but the strictest hiding can enable me to write my book in

     time.



     So I thought of this scheme: Beg you to lay siege to your husband &

     get him to interest himself and Messrs. John D. & William

     Rockefeller & the other Standard Oil chiefs in Helen's case; get

     them to subscribe an annual aggregate of six or seven hundred or a

     thousand dollars--& agree to continue this for three or four years,

     until she has completed her college course.  I'm not trying to limit

     their generosity--indeed no; they may pile that Standard Oil Helen

     Keller College Fund as high as they please; they have my consent.



     Mrs. Hutton's idea is to raise a permanent fund, the interest upon

     which shall support Helen & her teacher & put them out of the fear

     of want.  I sha'n't say a word against it, but she will find it a

     difficult & disheartening job, & meanwhile what is to become of that

     miraculous girl?



     No, for immediate and sound effectiveness, the thing is for you to

     plead with Mr. Rogers for this hampered wonder of your sex, & send

     him clothed with plenary powers to plead with the other chiefs--they

     have spent mountains of money upon the worthiest benevolences, & I

     think that the same spirit which moved them to put their hands down

     through their hearts into their pockets in those cases will answer.

     "Here!" when its name is called in this one.



     There--I don't need to apologize to you or to H. H. for this appeal

     that I am making; I know you too well for that:



     Good-by, with love to all of you,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





The result of this letter was that Mr. Rogers personally took charge of

Helen Keller's fortunes, and out of his own means made it possible for

her to continue her education and to achieve for herself the enduring

fame which Mark Twain had foreseen.



Mr. Rogers wrote that, by a curious coincidence, a letter had come to him

from Mrs. Hutton on the same morning that Mrs. Rogers had received hers

from Tedworth Square.  Clemens sent grateful acknowledgments to Mrs.

Rogers.



     DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--It is superb!  And I am beyond measure grateful

     to you both.  I knew you would be interested in that wonderful girl,

     & that Mr. Rogers was already interested in her & touched by her; &

     I was sure that if nobody else helped her you two would; but you

     have gone far & away beyond the sum I expected--may your lines fall

     in pleasant places here, & Hereafter for it!



     The Huttons are as glad & grateful as they can be, & I am glad for

     their sakes as well as for Helen's.



     I want to thank Mr. Rogers for crucifying himself on the same old

     cross between Bliss & Harper; & goodness knows I hope he will come

     to enjoy it above all other dissipations yet, seeing that it has

     about it the elements of stability & permanency.  However, at any

     time that he says sign we're going to do it.



                              Ever sincerely yours,

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.









CXCVII



FINISHING THE BOOK OF TRAVEL



One reading the Equator book to-day, and knowing the circumstances under

which it was written, might be puzzled to reconcile the secluded

household and its atmosphere of sorrow with certain gaieties of the

subject matter.  The author himself wondered at it, and to Howells wrote:

     I don't mean that I am miserable; no-worse than that--indifferent.

     Indifferent to nearly everything but work.  I like that; I enjoy it,

     & stick to it.  I do it without purpose & without ambition; merely

     for the love of it.  Indeed, I am a mud-image; & it puzzles me to

     know what it is in me that writes & has comedy fancies & finds

     pleasure in phrasing them.  It is the law of our nature, of course,

     or it wouldn't happen; the thing in me forgets the presence of the

     mud-image, goes its own way wholly unconscious of it & apparently of

     no kinship with it.



He saw little company.  Now and, then a good friend, J.Y.W.  MacAlister,

came in for a smoke with him.  Once Clemens sent this line:



     You speak a language which I understand.  I would like to see you.

     Could you come and smoke some manilas; I would, of course, say dine,

     but my family are hermits & cannot see any one, but I would have a

     fire in my study, & if you came at any time after your dinner that

     might be most convenient for you you would find me & a welcome.



Clemens occasionally went out to dinner, but very privately.  He dined

with Bram Stoker, who invited Anthony Hope and one or two others, and

with the Chattos and Mr. Percy Spalding; also with Andrew Lang, who

wrote, "Your old friend, Lord Lome, wants to see you again"; with the

Henry M. Stanleys and Poultney Bigelow, and with Francis H. Skrine, a

government official he had met in India.  But in all such affairs he was

protected from strangers and his address was kept a secret from the

public.  Finally, the new-found cousin, Dr. Jim Clemens, fell ill, and

the newspapers had it presently that Mark Twain was lying at the point of

death.  A reporter ferreted him out and appeared at Tedworth Square with

cabled instructions from his paper.  He was a young man, and innocently

enough exhibited his credentials.  His orders read:



"If Mark Twain very ill, five hundred words.  If dead, send one

thousand."



Clemens smiled grimly as he handed back the cable.



"You don't need as much as that," he said.  "Just say the report of my

death has been grossly exaggerated."



The young man went away quite seriously, and it was not until he was

nearly to his office that he saw the joke.  Then, of course, it was

flashed all over the world.



Clemens kept grinding steadily at the book, for it was to be a very large

volume--larger than he had ever written before.  To MacAlister, April 6,

1897, he wrote, replying to some invitation:



     Ah, but I mustn't stir from my desk before night now when the

     publisher is hurrying me & I am almost through.  I am up at work

     now--4 o'clock in the morning-and a few more spurts will pull me

     through.  You come down here & smoke; that is better than tempting a

     working-man to strike & go to tea.



     And it would move me too deeply to see Miss Corelli.  When I saw her

     last it was on the street in Homburg, & Susy was walking with me.



On April 13th he makes a note-book entry: "I finished my book to-day,"

and on the 15th he wrote MacAlister, inclosing some bits of manuscript:



     I finished my book yesterday, and the madam edited this stuff out of

     it--on the ground that the first part is not delicate & the last

     part is indelicate.  Now, there's a nice distinction for you--&

     correctly stated, too, & perfectly true.



It may interest the reader to consider briefly the manner in which Mark

Twain's "editor" dealt with his manuscript, and a few pages of this

particular book remain as examples.  That he was not always entirely

tractable, or at least submissive, but that he did yield, and graciously,

is clearly shown.



In one of her comments Mrs. Clemens wrote:



     Page 597.  I hate to say it, but it seems to me that you go too

     minutely into particulars in describing the feats of the

     aboriginals.  I felt it in the boomerang-throwing.



And Clemens just below has written:



     Boomerang has been furnished with a special train--that is, I've

     turned it into "Appendix."  Will that answer?



     Page 1002.  I don't like the "shady-principled cat that has a family

     in every port."



     Then I'll modify him just a little.



     Page 1020.  9th line from the top.  I think some other word would be

     better than "stench."  You have used that pretty often.



     But can't I get it in anywhere?  You've knocked it out every time.

     Out it goes again.  And yet "stench" is a noble, good word.



     Page 1038.  I hate to have your father pictured as lashing a slave

     boy.



     It's out, and my father is whitewashed.



     Page 1050.  2d line from the bottom.  Change breech-clout.  It's a

     word that you love and I abominate.  I would take that and "offal"

     out of the language.



     You are steadily weakening the English tongue, Livy.



     Page 1095.  Perhaps you don't care, but whoever told you that the

     Prince's green stones were rubies told an untruth.  They were superb

     emeralds.  Those strings of pearls and emeralds were famous all over

     Bombay.



     All right, I'll make them emeralds, but it loses force.  Green

     rubies is a fresh thing.  And besides it was one of the Prince's own

     staff liars that told me.



That the book was not quite done, even after the triumphant entry of

April 13th, is shown by another note which followed something more than a

month later:



     May 18, 1897.  Finished the book again--addition of 30,000 words.



And to MacAlister he wrote:



     I have finished the book at last--and finished it for good this

     time.  Now I am ready for dissipation with a good conscience.  What

     night will you come down & smoke?



His book finished, Clemens went out rather more freely, and one evening

allowed MacAlister to take him around to the Savage Club.  There happened

to be a majority of the club committee present, and on motion Mark Twain

was elected an honorary life member.  There were but three others on whom

this distinction had been conferred--Stanley, Nansen, and the Prince of

Wales.  When they told Mark Twain this he said:



"Well, it must make the Prince feel mighty fine."--[In a volume of Savage

Club anecdotes the date of Mark Twain's election to honorary membership

is given as 1899.  Clemens's notebook gives it in 1897.]



He did not intend to rest; in another entry we find:



     May 23, 1897.  Wrote first chapter of above story to-day.



The "above story" is a synopsis of a tale which he tried then and later

in various forms--a tale based on a scientific idea that one may dream an

episode covering a period of years in minute detail in what, by our

reckoning, may be no more than a few brief seconds.  In this particular

form of the story a man sits down to write some memories and falls into a

doze.  The smell of his cigarette smoke causes him to dream of the

burning of his home, the destruction of his family, and of a long period

of years following.  Awakening a few seconds later, and confronted by his

wife and children, he refuses to believe in their reality, maintaining

that this condition, and not the other, is the dream.  Clemens tried the

psychological literary experiment in as many as three different ways

during the next two or three years, and each at considerable length; but

he developed none of them to his satisfaction, or at least he brought

none of them to conclusion.  Perhaps the most weird of these attempts,

and the most intensely interesting, so long as the verisimilitude is

maintained, is a dream adventure in a drop of water which, through an

incredible human reduction to microbic, even atomic, proportions, has

become a vast tempestuous sea.  Mark Twain had the imagination for these

undertakings and the literary workmanship, lacking only a definite plan

for development of his tale--a lack which had brought so many of his

literary ventures to the rocks.











CXCVIII



A SUMMER IN SWITZERLAND



The Queen's Jubilee came along--June 22, 1897, being the day chosen to

celebrate the sixty-year reign.  Clemens had been asked to write about it

for the American papers, and he did so after his own ideas, illustrating

some of his material with pictures of his own selection.  The selections

were made from various fashion-plates, which gave him a chance to pick

the kind of a prince or princess or other royal figure that he thought

fitted his description without any handicap upon his imagination.  Under

his portrait of Henry V.  (a very correctly dressed person in top hat and

overcoat) he wrote:



     In the original the King has a crown on.  That is no kind of a thing

     for the King to wear when he has come home on business.  He ought to

     wear something he can collect taxes in.  You will find this

     represenation of Henry V.  active, full of feeling, full of

     sublimity.  I have pictured him looking out over the battle of

     Agincourt and studying up where to begin.



Mark Twain's account of the Jubilee probably satisfied most readers; but

James Tufts, then managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner, had a

rather matter-of-fact Englishman on the staff, who, after reading the

report, said:



"Well, Jim Tufts, I hope you are satisfied with that Mark Twain cable."



"Why, yes," said Tufts; "aren't you?"



"I should say not.  Just look what he says about the number of soldiers.

He says, 'I never saw so many soldiers anywhere except on the stage of a

theater.'  Why, Tufts, don't you know that the soldiers in the theater are

the same old soldiers marching around and around?  There aren't more than

a hundred soldiers in the biggest army ever put on the stage."



It was decided to vacate the house in Tedworth Square and go to

Switzerland for the summer.  Mrs. Crane and Charles Langdon's daughter,

Julia, joined them early in July, and they set out for Switzerland a few

days later.  Just before leaving, Clemens received an offer from Pond of

fifty thousand dollars for one hundred and twenty-five nights on the

platform in America.  It was too great a temptation to resist at once,

and they took it under advisement.  Clemens was willing to accept, but

Mrs. Clemens opposed the plan.  She thought his health no longer equal to

steady travel.  She believed that with continued economy they would be

able to manage their problem without this sum.  In the end the offer was

declined.



They journeyed to Switzerland by way of Holland and Germany, the general

destination being Lucerne.  They did not remain there, however.  They

found a pretty little village farther up the lake--Weggis, at the foot of

the Rigi--where, in the Villa Buhlegg, they arranged for the summer at

very moderate rates indeed.  Weggis is a beautiful spot, looking across

the blue water to Mount Pilatus, the lake shore dotted with white

villages.  Down by the water, but a few yards from the cottage--for it

was scarcely a villa except by courtesy--there was a little inclosure,

and a bench under a large tree, a quiet spot where Clemens often sat to

rest and smoke.  The fact is remembered there to-day, and recorded.  A

small tablet has engraved upon it "Mark Twain Ruhe."  Farther along the

shore he discovered a neat, white cottage were some kindly working-people

agreed to rent him an upper room for a study.  It was a sunny room with

windows looking out upon the lake, and he worked there steadily.  To

Twichell he wrote:



This is the charmingest place we have ever lived in for repose and

restfulness, superb scenery whose beauty undergoes a perpetual change

from one miracle to another, yet never runs short of fresh surprises and

new inventions.  We shall always come here for the summers if we can.



The others have climbed the Rigi, he says, and he expects to some day if

Twichell will come and climb it with him.  They had climbed it together

during that summer vagabondage, nineteen years before.



He was full of enthusiasm over his work.  To F. H. Skrine, in London, he

wrote that he had four or five books all going at once, and his note-book

contains two or three pages merely of titles of the stories he proposed

to write.



But of the books begun that summer at Weggis none appears to have been

completed.  There still exists a bulky, half-finished manuscript about

Tom and Huck, most of which was doubtless written at this time, and there

is the tale already mentioned, the "dream" story; and another tale with a

plot of intricate psychology and crime; still another with the burning

title of "Hell-Fire Hotchkiss"--a, story of Hannibal life--and some short

stories.  Clemens appeared to be at this time out of tune with fiction.

Perhaps his long book of travel had disqualified his invention.  He

realized that these various literary projects were leading nowhere, and

one after another he dropped them.  The fact that proofs of the big book

were coming steadily may also have interfered with his creative faculty.



As was his habit, Clemens formed the acquaintance of a number of the

native residents, and enjoyed talking to them about their business and

daily affairs.  They were usually proud and glad of these attentions,

quick to see the humor of his remarks.



But there was an old watchmaker-an 'Uhrmacher' who remained indifferent.

He would answer only in somber monosyllables, and he never smiled.

Clemens at last brought the cheapest kind of a watch for repairs.



"Be very careful of this watch," he said.  "It is a fine one."



The old man merely glared at him.



"It is not a valuable watch.  It is a worthless watch."



"But I gave six francs for it in Paris."



"Still, it is a cheap watch," was the unsmiling answer.  Defeat waits

somewhere for every conqueror.



Which recalls another instance, though of a different sort.  On one of

his many voyages to America, he was sitting on deck in a steamer-chair

when two little girls stopped before him.  One of them said,

hesitatingly:



"Are you Mr. Mark Twain?"



"Why, yes, dear, they call me that."



"Won't you please say something funny?"



And for the life of him he couldn't make the required remark.



In one of his letters to Twichell of that summer, Clemens wrote of the

arrival there of the colored jubilee singers, always favorites of his,

and of his great delight in them.



     We went down to the village hotel & bought our tickets & entered the

     beer-hall, where a crowd of German & Swiss men & women sat grouped

     around tables with their beer-mugs in front of them--self-contained

     & unimpressionable-looking people--an indifferent & unposted &

     disheartening audience--& up at the far end of the room sat the

     jubilees in a row.  The singers got up & stood--the talking & glass-

     jingling went on.  Then rose & swelled out above those common

     earthly sounds one of those rich chords, the secret of whose make

     only the jubilees possess, & a spell fell upon that house.  It was

     fine to see the faces light up with the pleased wonder & surprise of

     it.  No one was indifferent any more; & when the singers finished

     the camp was theirs.  It was a triumph.  It reminded me of Lancelot

     riding in Sir Kay's armor, astonishing complacent knights who

     thought they had struck a soft thing.  The jubilees sang a lot of

     pieces.  Arduous & painstaking cultivation has not diminished or

     artificialized their music, but on the contrary--to my surprise--has

     mightily reinforced its eloquence and beauty.  Away back in the

     beginning--to my mind--their music made all other vocal music cheap;

     & that early notion is emphasized now.  It is entirely beautiful to

     me; & it moves me infinitely more than any other music can.  I think

     that in the jubilees & their songs America has produced the

     perfectest flower of the ages; & I wish it were a foreign product,

     so that she would worship it & lavish money on it & go properly

     crazy over it.



     Now, these countries are different: they would do all that if it

     were native.  It is true they praise God, but that is merely a

     formality, & nothing in it; they open out their whole hearts to no

     foreigner.



As the first anniversary of Susy's death drew near the tension became

very great.  A gloom settled on the household, a shadow of restraint.  On

the morning of the 18th Clemens went early to his study.  Somewhat later

Mrs. Clemens put on her hat and wrap, and taking a small bag left the

house.  The others saw her go toward the steamer-landing, but made no

inquiries as to her destination.  They guessed that she would take the

little boat that touched at the various points along the lake shore.

This she did, in fact, with no particular plan as to where she would

leave it.  One of the landing-places seemed quiet and inviting, and there

she went ashore, and taking a quiet room at a small inn spent the day in

reading Susy's letters.  It was evening when she returned, and her

husband, lonely and anxious, was waiting for her at the landing.  He had

put in the day writing the beautiful poem, "In Memoriam," a strain lofty,

tender, and dirge-like-liquidly musical, though irregular in form.--[Now

included in the Uniform Edition.]









CXCIX



WINTER IN VIENNA



They remained two months in Weggis--until toward the end of September;

thence to Vienna, by way of Innsbruck, in the Tyrol, "where the mountains

seem more approachable than in Switzerland."  Clara Clemens wished to

study the piano under Leschetizky, and this would take them to Austria

for the winter.  Arriving at Vienna, they settled in the Hotel Metropole,

on the banks of the Danube.  Their rooms, a corner suite, looked out on a

pretty green square, the Merzimplatz, and down on the Franz Josef quay.

A little bridge crosses the river there, over which all kinds of life are

continually passing.  On pleasant days Clemens liked to stand on this

bridge and watch the interesting phases of the Austrian capital.  The

Vienna humorist, Poetzl, quickly formed his acquaintance, and they

sometimes stood there together.  Once while Clemens was making some

notes, Poetzl interested the various passers by asking each one--the

errand-boy, the boot-black, the chestnut-vender, cabmen, and others--to

guess who the stranger was and what he wanted.  Most of them recognized

him when their attention was called, for the newspapers had proudly

heralded his arrival and his picture was widely circulated.



Clemens had scarcely arrived in Vienna, in fact, before he was pursued by

photographers, journalists, and autograph-hunters.  The Viennese were his

fond admirers, and knowing how the world elsewhere had honored him they

were determined not to be outdone.  The 'Neues Viener Tageblatt', a

fortnight after his arrival, said:



     It is seldom that a foreign author has found such a hearty reception

     in Vienna as that accorded to Mark Twain, who not only has the

     reputation of being the foremost humorist in the whole civilized.

     world, but one whose personality arouses everywhere a peculiar

     interest on account of the genuine American character which sways

     it.



He was the guest of honor at the Concordia Club soon after his arrival,

and the great ones of Vienna assembled to do him honor.  Charlemagne

Tower, then American minister, was also one of the guests.  Writers,

diplomats, financiers, municipal officials, everybody in Vienna that was

worth while, was there.  Clemens gave them a surprise, for when Ferdinand

Gross, Concordia president, introduced him first in English, then in

German, Mark Twain made his reply wholly in the latter language.



The paper just quoted gives us a hint of the frolic and wassail of that

old 'Festkneipe' when it says:



     At 9 o'clock Mark Twain appeared in the salon, and amid a storm of

     applause took his seat at the head of the table.  His characteristic

     shaggy and flowing mane of hair adorning a youthful countenance

     attracted the attention at once of all present.  After a few formal

     convivial commonplaces the president of the Concordia, Mr. Ferdinand

     Gross, delivered an excellent address in English, which he wound up

     with a few German sentences.  Then Mr. Tower was heard in praise of

     his august countryman.  In the course of his remarks he said he

     could hardly find words enough to express his delight at the

     presence of the popular American.  Then followed the greatest

     attraction of the evening, an impromptu speech by Mark Twain in the

     German language, which it is true he has not fully mastered, but

     which he nevertheless controls sufficiently well to make it

     difficult to detect any harsh foreign accent.  He had entitled his

     speech, "Die Schrecken der Deutschen Sprache" (the terrors of the

     German language).  At times he would interrupt himself in English

     and ask, with a stuttering smile, "How do you call this word in

     German" or "I only know that in mother-tongue."  The Festkneipe

     lasted far into the morning hours.



It was not long after their arrival in Vienna that the friction among the

unamalgamated Austrian states flamed into a general outbreak in the

Austrian Reichsrath, or Imperial Parliament.  We need not consider just

what the trouble was.  Any one wishing to know can learn from Mark

Twain's article on the subject, for it is more clearly pictured there

than elsewhere.  It is enough to say here that the difficulty lay mainly

between the Hungarian and German wings of the house; and in the midst of

it Dr. Otto Lecher made his famous speech, which lasted twelve hours

without a break, in order to hold the floor against the opposing forces.

Clemens was in the gallery most of the time while that speech, with its

riotous accompaniment, was in progress.--["When that house is

legislating you can't tell it from artillery practice."  From Mark

Twain's report, "Stirring Times in Austria," in Literary Essays,]--He

was intensely interested.  Nothing would appeal to him more than that,

unless it should be some great astronomic or geologic change.  He was

also present somewhat later when a resolution was railroaded through

which gave the chair the right to invoke the aid of the military, and he

was there when the military arrived and took the insurgents in charge.

It was a very great occasion, a "tremendous episode," he says.



     The memory of it will outlast all the others that exist to-day.  In

     the whole history of free parliament the like of it had been seen

     but three times before.  It takes imposing place among the world's

     unforgetable things.  I think that in my lifetime I have not twice

     seen abiding history made before my eyes, but I know that I have

     seen it once.



Wild reports were sent to the American press; among them one that Mark

Twain had been hustled out with the others, and that, having waved his

handkerchief and shouted "Hoch die Deutschen!" he had been struck by an

officer of the law.  Of course nothing of the kind happened.  The

sergeant-at-arms, who came to the gallery where he sat, said to a friend

who suggested that Clemens be allowed to remain:



"Oh, I know him very well.  I recognize him by his pictures, and I should

be very glad to let him stay, but I haven't any choice because of the

strictness of the order."



Clemens, however, immediately ran across a London Times correspondent,

who showed him the way into the first gallery, which it seems was not

emptied, so he lost none of the exhibit.



Mark Twain's report of the Austrian troubles, published in Harper's

Magazine the following March and now included with the Literary Essays,

will keep that episode alive and important as literature when otherwise

it would have been merely embalmed, and dimly remembered, as history.



It was during these exciting political times in Vienna that a

representative of a New York paper wrote, asking for a Mark Twain

interview.  Clemens replied, giving him permission to call.  When the

reporter arrived Clemens was at work writing in bed, as was so much his

habit.  At the doorway the reporter paused, waiting for a summons to

enter.  The door was ajar and he heard Mrs. Clemens say:



"Youth, don't you think it will be a little embarrassing for him, your

being in bed?"



And he heard Mark Twain's easy, gentle, deliberate voice reply:



"Why, Livy, if you think so, we might have the other bed made up for

him."



Clemens became a privileged character in Vienna.  Official rules were

modified for his benefit.  Everything was made easy for him.  Once, on a

certain grand occasion, when nobody was permitted to pass beyond a

prescribed line, he was stopped by a guard, when the officer in charge

suddenly rode up:



"Let him pass," he commanded.  "Lieber Gott!  Don't you see it's Herr

Mark Twain?"



The Clemens apartments at the Metropole were like a court, where with

those of social rank assembled the foremost authors, journalists,

diplomats, painters, philosophers, scientists, of Europe, and therefore

of the world.  A sister of the Emperor of Germany lived at the Metropole

that winter and was especially cordial.  Mark Twain's daily movements

were chronicled as if he had been some visiting potentate, and, as usual,

invitations and various special permissions poured in.  A Vienna paper

announced:



     He has been feted and dined from morn till eve.  The homes of the

     aristocracy are thrown open to him, counts and princes delight to do

     him honor, and foreign audiences hang upon the words that fall from

     his lips, ready to burst out any instant into roars of laughter.



Deaths never came singly in the Clemens family.  It was on the 11th of

December, 1897, something more than a year after the death of Susy, that

Orion Clemens died, at the age of seventy-two.  Orion had remained the

same to the end, sensitively concerned as to all his brother's doings,

his fortunes and misfortunes: soaring into the clouds when any good news

came; indignant, eager to lend help and advice in the hour of defeat;

loyal, upright, and generally beloved by those who knew and understood

his gentle nature.  He had not been ill, and, in fact, only a few days

before he died had written a fine congratulatory letter on his brother's

success in accumulating means for the payment of his debts, entering

enthusiastically into some literary plans which Mark Twain then had in

prospect, offering himself for caricature if needed.



I would fit in as a fool character, believing, what the Tennessee

mountaineers predicted, that I would grow up to be a great man and go to

Congress.  I did not think it worth the trouble to be a common great man

like Andy Johnson.  I wouldn't give a pinch of snuff, little as I needed

it, to be anybody, less than Napoleon.  So when a farmer took my father's

offer for some chickens under advisement till the next day I said to

myself, "Would Napoleon Bonaparte have taken under advisement till the

next day an offer to sell him some chickens?"



To his last day and hour Orion was the dreamer, always with a new plan.

It was one morning early that he died.  He had seated himself at a table

with pencil and paper and was setting down the details of his latest

project when death came to him, kindly enough, in the moment of new hope.



There came also, just then, news of the death of their old Hartford

butler, George.  It saddened them as if it had been a member of the

household.  Jean, especially, wept bitterly.









CC



MARK TWAIN PAYS HIS DEBTS



'Following the Equator'--[In England, More Tramps Abroad.]--had come from

the press in November and had been well received.  It was a large,

elaborate subscription volume, more elaborate than artistic in

appearance.  Clemens, wishing to make some acknowledgment to his

benefactor, tactfully dedicated it to young Harry Rogers:



"With recognition of what he is, and an apprehension of what he may

become unless he form himself a little more closely upon the model of the

author."



Following the Equator was Mark Twain's last book of travel, and it did

not greatly resemble its predecessors.  It was graver than the Innocents

Abroad; it was less inclined to cynicism and burlesque than the Tramp.

It was the thoughtful, contemplative observation and philosophizing of

the soul-weary, world-weary pilgrim who has by no means lost interest,

but only his eager, first enthusiasm.  It is a gentler book than the

Tramp Abroad, and for the most part a pleasanter one.  It is better

history and more informing.  Its humor, too, is of a worthier sort, less

likely to be forced and overdone.  The holy Hindoo pilgrim's "itinerary

of salvation" is one of the richest of all Mark Twain's fancies, and is

about the best thing in the book.  The revised philosophies of Pudd'nhead

Wilson, that begin each chapter, have many of them passed into our daily

speech.  That some of Mark Twain's admirers were disappointed with the

new book is very likely, but there were others who could not praise it

enough.  James Whitcomb Riley wrote:



DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--For a solid week-night sessions--I have been glorying

in your last book-and if you've ever done anything better, stronger, or

of wholesomer uplift I can't recall it.  So here's my heart and here's my

hand with all the augmented faith and applause of your proudest

countryman!  It's just a hail I'm sending you across the spaces--not to

call you from your blessed work an instant, but simply to join my voice

in the universal cheer that is steadfastly going up for you.



As gratefully as delightedly,

                         Your abiding friend,

                                        JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY.





Notwithstanding the belief that the sale of single subscription volumes

had about ended, Bliss did well with the new book.  Thirty or forty

thousand copies were placed without much delay, and the accumulated

royalties paid into Mr. Rogers's hands.  The burden of debt had become a

nightmare.  Clemens wrote:



Let us begin on those debts.  I cannot bear the weight any longer.  It

totally unfits me for work.



This was November 10, 1897.  December 29th he wrote:



Land, we are glad to see those debts diminishing.  For the first time in

my life I am getting more pleasure from paying money out than pulling it

in.



To Howells, January 3d, Clemens wrote that they had "turned the corner,"

and a month later:



We've lived close to the bone and saved every cent we could, & there's no

undisputed claim now that we can't cash.  There are only two claims which

I dispute & which I mean to look into personally before I pay them.  But

they are small.  Both together they amount to only $12,500.  I hope you

will never get the like of the load saddled onto you that was saddled

onto me 3 years ago.  And yet there is such a solid pleasure in paying

the things that I reckon maybe it is worth while to get into that kind of

a hobble after all.  Mrs. Clemens gets millions of delight out of it; &

the children have never uttered one complaint about the scrimping from

the beginning.



By the end of January, 1898, Mark Twain had accumulated enough money to

make the final payment to his creditors and stand clear of debt.  At the

time of his failure he said he had given himself five years in which to

clear himself of the heavy obligation.  He had achieved that result in

less than three.  The world heralded it as a splendid triumph.



Miss Katharine I. Harrison, Henry Rogers's secretary, who had been in

charge of the details, wrote in her letter announcing his freedom:



"I wish I could shout it across the water to you so that you would get it

ten days ahead of this letter."



Miss Harrison's letter shows that something like thirteen thousand

dollars would remain to his credit after the last accounts were wiped

away.



Clemens had kept his financial progress from the press, but the payment

of the final claims was distinctly a matter of news and the papers made

the most of it.  Head-lines shouted it, there were long editorials in

which Mark Twain was heralded as a second Walter Scott, though it was

hardly necessary that he should be compared with anybody; he had been in

that--as in those peculiarities which had invited his disaster--just

himself.



One might suppose now that he had had enough of inventions and commercial

enterprises of every sort that is, one who did not know Mark Twain might

suppose this; but it would not be true.  Within a month after the debts

were paid he had negotiated with the great Austrian inventor, Szczepanik,

and his business manager for the American rights of a wonderful carpet-

pattern machine, obtained an option for these rights at fifteen hundred

thousand dollars, and, Sellers-like, was planning to organize a company

with a capital of fifteen hundred million dollars to control carpet-

weaving industries of the world.  He records in his note-book that a

certain Mr. Wood, representing the American carpet interests, called upon

him and, in the course of their conversation, asked him at what price he

would sell his option.



     I declined, and got away from the subject.  I was afraid he would

     offer me $500,000 for it.  I should have been obliged to take it,

     but I was born with a speculative instinct & I did not want that

     temptation put in my way.



He wrote to Mr. Rogers about the great scheme, inviting the Standard Oil

to furnish the capital for it--but it appears not to have borne the test

of Mr. Rogers's scrutiny, and is heard of no more.



Szczepanik had invented the 'Fernseher', or Telelectroscope, the machine

by which one sees at a distance.  Clemens would have invested heavily in

this, too, for he had implicit faith in its future, but the 'Fernseher'

was already controlled for the Paris Exposition; so he could only employ

Szczepanik as literary material, which he did in two instances: "The

Austrian Edison Keeping School Again" and "From the London Times of

1904"--magazine articles published in the Century later in the year.  He

was fond of Szczepanik and Szczepanik's backer, Mr. Kleinburg.  In one of

his note-book entries he says:



Szczepanik is not a Paige.  He is a gentleman; his backer, Mr. Kleinburg,

is a gentleman, too, yet is not a Clemens--that is to say, he is not an

ass.



Clemens did not always consult his financial adviser, Rogers, any more

than he always consulted his spiritual adviser, Twichell, or his literary

adviser, Howells, when he intended to commit heresies in their respective

provinces.  Somewhat later an opportunity came along to buy an interest

in a preparation of skimmed milk, an invalid food by which the human race

was going to be healed of most of its ills.  When Clemens heard that

Virchow had recommended this new restorative, the name of which was

plasmon, he promptly provided MacAlister with five thousand pounds to

invest in a company then organizing in London.  It should be added that

this particular investment was not an entire loss, for it paid very good

dividends for several years.  We shall hear of it again.



For the most part Clemens was content to let Henry Rogers do his

financiering, and as the market was low with an upward incline, Rogers

put the various accumulations into this thing and that, and presently had

some fifty thousand dollars to Mark Twain's credit, a very comfortable

balance for a man who had been twice that amount in debt only a few years

before.  It has been asserted most strenuously, by those in a position to

know least about the matter, that Henry Rogers lent, and even gave, Mark

Twain large sums, and pointed out opportunities whereby he could make

heavily by speculation.  No one of these statements is true.  Mr. Rogers

neither lent nor gave Mark Twain money for investment, and he never

allowed him to speculate when he could prevent it.  He invested for him

wisely, but he never bought for him a share of stock that he did not have

the money in hand to pay for in full-money belonging to and earned by

Clemens himself.  What he did give to Mark Twain was his priceless

counsel and time--gifts more precious than any mere sum of money--boons

that Mark Twain could accept without humiliation.  He did accept them and

was unceasingly grateful.--[Mark Twain never lost an opportunity for

showing his gratitude to Henry Rogers.  The reader is referred to

Appendix T, at the end of the last volume, for a brief tribute which

Clemens prepared in 1902.  Mr. Rogers would not consent to its

publication.]









CCI



SOCIAL LIFE IN VIENNA



Clemens, no longer worried about finances and full of ideas and

prospects, was writing now at a great rate, mingling with all sorts of

social events, lecturing for charities, and always in the lime-light.



I have abundant peace of mind again--no sense of burden.  Work is become

a pleasure--it is not labor any longer.



He was the lion of the Austrian capital, and it was natural that he

should revel in his new freedom and in the universal tribute.  Mrs.

Clemens wrote that they were besieged with callers of every description:



     Such funny combinations are here sometimes: one duke, several

     counts, several writers, several barons, two princes, newspaper

     women, etc.  I find so far, without exception, that the high-up

     aristocracy are simple and cordial and agreeable.



When Clemens appeared as a public entertainer all society turned out to

hear him and introductions were sought by persons of the most exclusive

rank.  Once a royal introduction led to an adventure.  He had been giving

a charity reading in Vienna, and at the end of it was introduced, with

Mrs. Clemens, to her Highness, Countess Bardi, a princess of the

Portuguese royal house by marriage and sister to the Austrian Archduchess

Maria Theresa.  They realized that something was required after such an

introduction; that, in fact, they must go within a day or two and pay

their respects by writing their names in the visitors' book, kept in a

sort of anteroom of the royal establishment.  A few days later, about

noon, they drove to the archducal palace, inquired their way to the royal

anteroom, and informed the grandly uniformed portier that they wished to

write their names in the visitors' book.  The portier did not produce the

book, but summoned a man in livery and gold lace and directed him to take

them up-stairs, remarking that her Royal Highness was out, but would be

in presently.  They protested that her Royal Highness was not looking for

them, that they were not calling, but had merely come to sign the

visitors' book, but he said:



"You are Americans, are you not?"



"Yes, we are Americans."



"Then you are expected.  Please go up-stairs."



Mrs. Clemens said:



"Oh no, we are not expected; there is some mistake.  Please let us sign

the book and we will go away."



But it was no use.  He insisted that her Royal Highness would be back in

a very little while; that she had commanded him to say so and that they

must wait.  They were shown up-stairs, Clemens going willingly enough,

for he scented an adventure; but Mrs. Clemens was far from happy.  They

were taken to a splendid drawing-room, and at the doorway she made her

last stand, refusing to enter.  She declared that there was certainly

some mistake, and begged them to let her sign her name in the book and

go, without parleying.  It was no use.  Their conductor insisted that

they remove their wraps and sit down, which they finally did--Mrs.

Clemens miserable, her husband in a delightful state of anticipation.

Writing of it to Twichell that night he said:



     I was hoping and praying that the Princess would come and catch us

     up there, & that those other Americans who were expected would

     arrive and be taken as impostors by the portier & be shot by the

     sentinels & then it would all go into the papers & be cabled all

     over the world & make an immense stir and be perfectly lovely.



     Livy was in a state of mind; she said it was too theatrically

     ridiculous & that I would never be able to keep my mouth shut; that

     I would be sure to let it out & it would get into the papers, & she

     tried to make me promise.



     "Promise what?"  I said.



     "To be quiet about this."



     "Indeed I won't; it's the best thing ever happened.  I'll tell it

     and add to it & I wish Joe & Howells were here to make it perfect; I

     can't make all the rightful blunders by myself--it takes all three

     of us to do justice to an opportunity like this.  I would just like

     to see Howells get down to his work & explain & lie & work his

     futile & inventionless subterfuges when that Princess comes raging

     in here & wanting to know."



     But Livy could not hear fun--it was not a time to be trying to be

     funny.  We were in a most miserable & shameful situation, & it----

     Just then the door spread wide & our Princess & 4  more & 3 little

     Princes flowed in!  Our Princess & her sister, the Archduchess Maria

     Theresa (mother to the imperial heir & to the a young girl

     Archduchesses present, & aunt to the 3 little Princes), & we shook

     hands all around & sat down & had a most sociable time for half an

     hour, & by & by it turned out that we were the right ones & had been

     sent for by a messenger who started too late to catch us at the

     hotel.  We were invited for a o'clock, but we beat that arrangement

     by an hour & a half.



     Wasn't it a rattling good comedy situation?  Seems a kind of pity we

     were the right ones.  It would have been such nuts to see the right

     ones come and get fired out, & we chatting along comfortably &

     nobody suspecting us for impostors.



Mrs. Clemens to Mrs. Crane:



     Of course I know that I should have courtesied to her Imperial

     Majesty & not quite so deep to her Royal Highness, and that Mr.

     Clemens should have kissed their hands; but it was all so unexpected

     that I had no time to prepare, and if I had had I should not have

     been there; I only went in to help Mr. C. with my bad German.  When

     our minister's wife is going to be presented to the Archduchess she

     practises her courtesying beforehand.



They had met royalty in simple American fashion and no disaster had

followed.



We have already made mention of the distinguished visitors who gathered

in the Clemens apartments at the Hotel Metropole.  They were of many

nations and ranks.  It was the winter in London of twenty-five years

before over again.  Only Mark Twain was not the same.  Then he had been

unsophisticated, new, not always at his ease; now he was the polished

familiar of courts and embassies--at home equally with poets and princes,

authors and ambassadors and kings.  Such famous ones were there as

Vereshchagin, Leschetizky, Mark Hambourg, Dvorak, Lenbach, and Jokai,

with diplomats of many nations.  A list of foreign names may mean little

to the American reader, but among them were Neigra, of Italy; Paraty, of

Portugal; Lowenhaupt, of Sweden; and Ghiki, of Rumania.  The Queen of

Rumania, Carmen Sylva, a poetess in her own right, was a friend and warm

admirer of Mark Twain.  The Princess Metternich, and Madame de

Laschowska, of Poland, were among those who came, and there were Nansen

and his wife, and Campbell-Bannerman, who was afterward British Premier.

Also there was Spiridon, the painter, who made portraits of Clara Clemens

and her father, and other artists and potentates--the list is too long.



Those were brilliant, notable gatherings and are remembered in Vienna

today.  They were not always entirely harmonious, for politics was in the

air and differences of opinion were likely to be pretty freely expressed.



Clemens and his family, as Americans, did not always have a happy time of

it.  It was the eve of the Spanish American War and most of continental

Europe sided with Spain.  Austria, in particular, was friendly to its

related nation; and from every side the Clemenses heard how America was

about to take a brutal and unfair advantage of a weaker nation for the

sole purpose of annexing Cuba.



Charles Langdon and his son Jervis happened to arrive in Vienna about

this time, bringing straight from America the comforting assurance that

the war was not one of conquest or annexation, but a righteous defense of

the weak.  Mrs. Clemens gave a dinner for them, at which, besides some

American students, were Mark Hambourg, Gabrilowitsch, and the great

Leschetizky himself.  Leschetizky, an impetuous and eloquent talker, took

this occasion to inform the American visitors that their country was only

shamming, that Cuba would soon be an American dependency.  No one not

born to the language could argue with Leschetizky.  Clemens once wrote of

him:



He is a most capable and felicitous talker-was born for an orator, I

think.  What life, energy, fire in a man past 70! & how he does play!  He

is easily the greatest pianist in the world.  He is just as great & just

as capable today as ever he was.



Last Sunday night, at dinner with us, he did all the talking for 3 hours,

and everybody was glad to let him.  He told his experiences as a

revolutionist 50 years ago in '48, & his battle-pictures were

magnificently worded.  Poetzl had never met him before.  He is a talker

himself & a good one--but he merely sat silent & gazed across the table

at this inspired man, & drank in his words, & let his eyes fill & the

blood come & go in his face & never said a word.



Whatever may have been his doubts in the beginning concerning the Cuban

War, Mark Twain, by the end of May, had made up his mind as to its

justice.  When Theodore Stanton invited him to the Decoration Day banquet

to be held in Paris, he replied:



I thank you very much for your invitation and I would accept if I were

foot-free.  For I should value the privilege of helping you do honor to

the men who rewelded our broken Union and consecrated their great work

with their lives; and also I should like to be there to do, homage to our

soldiers and sailors of today who are enlisted for another most righteous

war, and utter the hope that they may make short and decisive work of it

and leave Cuba free and fed when they face for home again.  And finally I

should like to be present and see you interweave those two flags which,

more than any others, stand for freedom and progress in the earth-flags

which represent two kindred nations, each great and strong by itself,

competent sureties for the peace of the world when they stand together.



That is to say, the flags of England and America.  To an Austrian friend

he emphasized this thought:



The war has brought England and America close together--and to my mind

that is the biggest dividend that any war in this world has ever paid.

If this feeling is ever to grow cold again I do not wish to live to see

it.



And to Twichell, whose son David had enlisted:



You are living your war-days over again in Dave & it must be strong

pleasure mixed with a sauce of apprehension .  .  .  .



I have never enjoyed a war, even in history, as I am enjoying this one,

for this is the worthiest one that was ever fought, so far as my

knowledge goes.  It is a worthy thing to fight for one's own country.  It

is another sight finer to fight for another man's.  And I think this is

the first time it has been done.



But it was a sad day for him when he found that the United States really

meant to annex the Philippines, and his indignation flamed up.  He said:



"When the United States sent word to Spain that the Cuban atrocities must

end she occupied the highest moral position ever taken by a nation since

the Almighty made the earth.  But when she snatched the Philippines she

stained the flag."









CCII



LITERARY WORK IN VIENNA



One must wonder, with all the social demands upon him, how Clemens could

find time to write as much as he did during those Vienna days.  He piled

up a great heap of manuscript of every sort.  He wrote Twichell:



     There may be idle people in the world, but I am not one of them.



And to Howells:



     I couldn't get along without work now.  I bury myself in it up to

     the ears.  Long hours--8 & 9 on a stretch sometimes.  It isn't all

     for print, by any means, for much of it fails to suit me; 50,000

     words of it in the past year.  It was because of the deadness which

     invaded me when Susy died.



He projected articles, stories, critiques, essays, novels, autobiography,

even plays; he covered the whole literary round.  Among these activities

are some that represent Mark Twain's choicest work.  "Concerning the

Jews," which followed the publication of his "Stirring Times in Austria"

(grew out of it, in fact), still remains the best presentation of the

Jewish character and racial situation.  Mark Twain was always an ardent

admirer of the Jewish race, and its oppression naturally invited his

sympathy.  Once he wrote to Twichell:



The difference between the brain of the average Christian and that of the

average Jew--certainly in Europe--is about the difference between a

tadpole's brain & an archbishop's.  It is a marvelous race; by long odds

the most marvelous race the world has produced, I suppose.



Yet he did not fail to see its faults and to set them down in his summary

of Hebrew character.  It was a reply to a letter written to him by a

lawyer, and he replied as a lawyer might, compactly, logically,

categorically, conclusively.  The result pleased him.  To Mr. Rogers he

wrote:



The Jew article is my "gem of the ocean."  I have taken a world of

pleasure in writing it & doctoring it & fussing at it.  Neither Jew nor

Christian will approve of it, but people who are neither Jews nor

Christian will, for they are in a condition to know the truth when they

see it.



Clemens was not given to race distinctions.  In his article he says:



I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices, and I think I

have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices.

Indeed I know it.  I can stand any society.  All that I care to know is

that a man is a human being, that is enough for me; he can't be any

worse.



We gather from something that follows that the one race which he bars is

the French, and this, just then, mainly because of the Dreyfus

agitations.



He also states in this article:



I have no special regard for Satan, but I can at least claim that I have

no prejudice against him.  It may even be that I lean a little his way on

account of his not having a fair show.



Clemens indeed always had a friendly feeling toward Satan (at least, as

he conceived him), and just at this time addressed a number of letters to

him concerning affairs in general--cordial, sympathetic, informing

letters enough, though apparently not suited for publication.  A good

deal of the work done at this period did not find its way into print.  An

interview with Satan; a dream-story concerning a platonic sweetheart, and

some further comment on Austrian politics, are among the condemned

manuscripts.



Mark Twain's interest in Satan would seem later to have extended to his

relatives, for there are at least three bulky manuscripts in which he has

attempted to set down some episodes in the life of one "Young Satan," a

nephew, who appears to have visited among the planets and promoted some

astonishing adventures in Austria several centuries ago.  The idea of a

mysterious, young, and beautiful stranger who would visit the earth and

perform mighty wonders, was always one which Mark Twain loved to play

with, and a nephew of Satan's seemed to him properly qualified to carry

out his intention.  His idea was that this celestial visitant was not

wicked, but only indifferent to good and evil and suffering, having no

personal knowledge of any of these things.  Clemens tried the experiment

in various ways, and portions of the manuscript are absorbingly

interesting, lofty in conception, and rarely worked out--other portions

being merely grotesque, in which the illusion of reality vanishes.



Among the published work of the Vienna period is an article about a

morality play, the "Master of Palmyra,"--[About play-acting, Forum,

October, 1898.]--by Adolf Wilbrandt, an impressive play presenting

Death, the all-powerful, as the principal part.



The Cosmopolitan Magazine for August published "At the Appetite-Cure," in

which Mark Twain, in the guise of humor, set forth a very sound and

sensible idea concerning dietetics, and in October the same magazine

published his first article on "Christian Science and the Book of Mrs.

Eddy."  As we have seen, Clemens had been always deeply interested in

mental healing, and in closing this humorous skit he made due

acknowledgments to the unseen forces which, properly employed, through

the imagination work physical benefits:



"Within the last quarter of a century," he says, "in America, several

sects of curers have appeared under various names and have done notable

things in the way of healing ailments without the use of medicines."



Clemens was willing to admit that Mrs. Eddy and her book had benefited

humanity, but he could not resist the fun-making which certain of her

formulas and her phrasing invited.  The delightful humor of the

Cosmopolitan article awoke a general laugh, in which even devout

Christian Scientists were inclined to join.--[It was so popular that

John Brisben Walker voluntarily added a check for two hundred dollars to

the eight hundred dollars already paid.]--Nothing that he ever did

exhibits more happily that peculiar literary gift upon which his fame

rests.



But there is another story of this period that will live when most of

those others mentioned are but little remembered.  It is the story of

"The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg."  This is a tale that in its own way

takes its place with the half-dozen great English short stories of the

world-with such stories as "The Fall of the House of Usher," by Poe;

"The Luck of Roaring Camp," by Harte; "The Man Who Would be King," by

Kipling; and "The Man Without a Country," by Hale.  As a study of the

human soul, its flimsy pretensions and its pitiful frailties, it outranks

all the rest.  In it Mark Twain's pessimistic philosophy concerning the

"human animal" found a free and moral vent.  Whatever his contempt for a

thing, he was always amused at it; and in this tale we can imagine him a

gigantic Pantagruel dangling a ridiculous manikin, throwing himself back

and roaring out his great bursting guffaws at its pitiful antics.  The

temptation and the downfall of a whole town was a colossal idea, a

sardonic idea, and it is colossally and sardonically worked out.



Human weakness and rotten moral force were never stripped so bare or so

mercilessly jeered at in the marketplace.  For once Mark Twain could hug

himself with glee in derision of self-righteousness, knowing that the

world would laugh with him, and that none would be so bold as to gainsay

his mockery.  Probably no one but Mark Twain ever conceived the idea of

demoralizing a whole community--of making its "nineteen leading citizens"

ridiculous by leading them into a cheap, glittering temptation, and

having them yield and openly perjure themselves at the very moment when

their boasted incorruptibility was to amaze the world.  And it is all

wonderfully done.  The mechanism of the story is perfect, the drama of it

is complete.  The exposure of the nineteen citizens in the very sanctity

of the church itself, and by the man they have discredited, completing

the carefully prepared revenge of the injured stranger, is supreme in its

artistic triumph.  "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg" is one of the

mightiest sermons against self-righteousness ever preached.  Its

philosophy, that every man is strong until his price is named; the

futility of the prayer not to be led into temptation, when it is only by

resisting temptation that men grow strong--these things blaze out in a

way that makes us fairly blink with the truth of them.



It is Mark Twain's greatest short story.  It is fine that it should be

that, as well as much more than that; for he was no longer essentially a

story-teller.  He had become more than ever a moralist and a sage.

Having seen all of the world, and richly enjoyed and deeply suffered at

its hands, he sat now as in a seat of judgment, regarding the passing

show and recording his philosophies.









CCIII



AN IMPERIAL TRAGEDY



For the summer they went to Kaltenleutgeben, just out of Vienna, where

they had the Villa Paulhof, and it was while they were there, September

10, 1898, that the Empress Elizabeth of Austria was assassinated at

Geneva by an Italian vagabond, whose motive seemed to have been to gain

notoriety.  The news was brought to them one evening, just at supper-

time, by Countess Wydenbouck-Esterhazy.



Clemens wrote to Twichell:



     That good & unoffending lady, the Empress, is killed by a madman, &

     I am living in the midst of world-history again.  The Queen's

     Jubilee last year, the invasion of the Reichsrath by the police, &

     now this murder, which will still be talked of & described & painted

     a thousand years from now.  To have a personal friend of the wearer

     of two crowns burst in at the gate in the deep dusk of the evening &

     say, in a voice broken with tears, "My God!  the Empress is

     murdered," & fly toward her home before we can utter a question--

     why, it brings the giant event home to you, makes you a part of it &

     personally interested; it is as if your neighbor Antony should come

     flying & say, "Caesar is butchered--the head of the world is

     fallen!"



Of course there is no talk but of this.  The mourning is universal and

genuine, the consternation is stupefying.  The Austrian Empire is being

draped with black.  Vienna will be a spectacle to see by next Saturday,

when the funeral cortege marches.



Clemens and the others went into Vienna for the funeral ceremonies and

witnessed them from the windows of the new Krantz Hotel, which faces the

Capuchin church where the royal dead lie buried.  It was a grandly

impressive occasion, a pageant of uniforms of the allied nations that

made up the Empire of Austria.  Clemens wrote of it at considerable

length, and sent the article to Mr. Rogers to offer to the magazines.

Later, however, he recalled it just why is not clear.  In one place he

wrote:



Twice the Empress entered Vienna in state; the first time was in

1854, when she was a bride of seventeen, & when she rode in measureless

pomp through a world of gay flags & decorations down the streets, walled

on both hands with the press of shouting & welcoming subjects; & the

second time was last Wednesday, when she entered the city in her coffin,

& moved down the same streets in the dead of night under waving black

flags, between human walls again, but everywhere was a deep stillness now

& a stillness emphasized rather than broken by the muffled hoofbeats of

the long cavalcade over pavements cushioned with sand, & the low sobbing

of gray-headed women who had witnessed the first entrance, forty-four

years before, when she & they were young & unaware....  She was so

blameless--the Empress; & so beautiful in mind & heart, in person &

spirit; & whether with the crown upon her head, or without it & nameless,

a grace to the human race, almost a justification of its creation; would

be, indeed, but that the animal that struck her down re-establishes the

doubt.



They passed a quiet summer at Kaltenleutgeben.  Clemens wrote some

articles, did some translating of German plays, and worked on his

"Gospel," an elaboration of his old essay on contenting one's soul

through selfishness, later to be published as 'What is Man?'  A. C.

Dunham and Rev. Dr. Parker, of Hartford, came to Vienna, and Clemens

found them and brought them out to Kaltenleutgeben and read them chapters

of his doctrines, which, he said, Mrs. Clemens would not let him print.

Dr. Parker and Dunham returned to Hartford and reported Mark Twain more

than ever a philosopher; also that he was the "center of notability and

his house a court."









CCIV



THE SECOND WINTER IN VIENNA



The Clemens family did not return to the Metropole for the winter, but

went to the new Krantz, already mentioned, where they had a handsome and

commodious suite looking down on the Neuer Markt and on the beautiful

facade of the Capuchin church, with the great cathedral only a step away.

There they passed another brilliant and busy winter.  Never in Europe had

they been more comfortably situated; attention had been never more

lavishly paid to them.  Their drawing-room was a salon which acquired the

name of the "Second Embassy."  Clemens in his note-book wrote:



During 8 years now I have filled the position--with some credit, I trust,

of self-appointed ambassador-at-large of the United States of America--

without salary.



Which was a joke; but there was a large grain of truth in it, for Mark

Twain, more than any other American in Europe, was regarded as typically

representing his nation and received more lavish honors.



It had become the fashion to consult him on every question of public

interest, for he was certain to say something worth printing, whether

seriously or otherwise.  When the Tsar of Russia proposed the disarmament

of the nations William T.  Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews, wrote

for Mark Twain's opinion.  He replied:



DEAR MR. STEADY,--The Tsar is ready to disarm.  I am ready to disarm.

Collect the others; it should not be much of a task now.



                                                  MARK TWAIN.





He was on a tide of prosperity once more, one that was to continue now

until the end.  He no longer had any serious financial qualms.  He could

afford to be independent.  He refused ten thousand dollars for a tobacco

indorsement, though he liked the tobacco well enough; and he was aware

that even royalty was willing to put a value on its opinions.  He

declined ten thousand dollars a year for five years to lend his name as

editor of a humorous periodical, though there was no reason to suppose

that the paper would be otherwise than creditably conducted.  He declined

lecture propositions from Pond at the rate of about one a month.  He

could get along without these things, he said, and still preserve some

remnants of self-respect.  In a letter to Rogers he said:



Pond offers me $10,000 for 10 nights, but I do not feel strongly tempted.

Mrs. Clemens ditto.



Early in 1899 he wrote to Howells that Mrs. Clemens had proved to him

that they owned a house and furniture in Hartford, that his English and

American copyrights paid an income on the equivalent of two hundred

thousand dollars, and that they had one hundred and seven thousand

dollars' accumulation in the bank.



"I have been out and bought a box of 6c. cigars," he says; "I was smoking

4 1/2c. before."



The things that men are most likely to desire had come to Mark Twain, and

no man was better qualified to rejoice in them.  That supreme, elusive

thing which we call happiness might have been his now but for the tragedy

of human bereavement and the torture of human ills.  That he did rejoice

--reveled indeed like a boy in his new fortunes, the honors paid him, and

in all that gay Viennese life-there is no doubt.  He could wave aside

care and grief and remorse, forget their very existence, it seemed; but

in the end he had only driven them ahead a little way and they waited by

his path.  Once, after reciting his occupations and successes, he wrote:



     All these things might move and interest one.  But how, desperately

     more I have been moved to-night by the thought of a little old copy

     in the nursery of 'At the Back of the North Wind'.  Oh, what happy

     days they were when that book was read, and how Susy loved it!...

     Death is so kind, benignant, to whom he loves, but he goes by us

     others & will not look our way.



And to Twichell a few days later:



     A Hartford with no Susy in it--& no Ned Bunce!--It is not the city

     of Hartford, it is the city of Heartbreak....  It seems only a few

     weeks since I saw Susy last--yet that was 1895 & this is 1899....



     My work does not go well to-day.  It failed yesterday--& the day

     before & the day before that.  And so I have concluded to put the

     MS. in the waste-basket & meddle with some other subject.  I was

     trying to write an article advocating the quadrupling of the

     salaries of our ministers & ambassadors, & the devising of an

     official dress for them to wear.  It seems an easy theme, yet I

     couldn't do the thing to my satisfaction.  All I got out of it was

     an article on Monaco & Monte Carlo--matters not connected with the

     subject at all.  Still, that was something--it's better than a total

     loss.



He finished the article--"Diplomatic Pay and Clothes"--in which he shows

how absurd it is for America to expect proper representation on the

trifling salaries paid to her foreign ministers, as compared with those

allowed by other nations.



He prepared also a reminiscent article--the old tale of the shipwrecked

Hornet and the magazine article intended as his literary debut a

generation ago.  Now and again he worked on some one of the several

unfinished longer tales, but brought none of them to completion.  The

German drama interested him.  Once he wrote to Mr. Rogers that he had

translated "In Purgatory" and sent it to Charles Frohman, who pronounced

it "all jabber and no play."



Curious, too, for it tears these Austrians to pieces with laughter.  When

I read it, now, it seems entirely silly; but when I see it on the stage

it is exceedingly funny.



He undertook a play for the Burg Theater, a collaboration with a Vienna

journalist, Siegmund Schlesinger.  Schlesinger had been successful with

several dramas, and agreed with Clemens to do some plays dealing with

American themes.  One of them was to be called "Die Goldgraeberin," that

is, "The Woman Gold-Miner."  Another, "The Rival Candidates," was to

present the humors of female suffrage.  Schlesinger spoke very little

English, and Clemens always had difficulty in comprehending rapid-fire

German.  So the work did not progress very well.  By the time they had

completed a few scenes of mining-drama the interest died, and they good-

naturedly agreed that it would be necessary to wait until they understood

each other's language more perfectly before they could go on with the

project.  Frau Kati Schratt, later morganatic wife of Emperor Franz

Josef, but then leading comedienne of the Burg Theater, is said to have

been cast for the leading part in the mining-play; and Director-General

Herr Schlenther, head of the Burg Theater management, was deeply

disappointed.  He had never doubted that a play built by Schlesinger and

Mark Twain, with Frau Schratt in the leading role, would have been a

great success.



Clemens continued the subject of Christian Science that winter.  He wrote

a number of articles, mainly criticizing Mrs. Eddy and her financial

methods, and for the first time conceived the notion of a book on the

subject.  The new hierarchy not only amused but impressed him.  He

realized that it was no ephemeral propaganda, that its appeal to human

need was strong, and that its system of organization was masterful and

complete.  To Twichell he wrote:



Somehow I continue to feel sure of that cult's colossal future....  I am

selling my Lourdes stock already & buying Christian Science trust.  I

regard it as the Standard Oil of the future.



He laid the article away for the time and, as was his custom, put the

play quite out of his mind and invented a postal-check which would be far

more simple than post-office orders, because one could buy them in any

quantity and denomination and keep them on hand for immediate use, making

them individually payable merely by writing in the name of the payee.  It

seems a fine, simple scheme, one that might have been adopted by the

government long ago; but the idea has been advanced in one form or

another several times since then, and still remains at this writing

unadopted.  He wrote John Hay about it, remarking at the close that the

government officials would probably not care to buy it as soon as they

found they couldn't kill Christians with it.



He prepared a lengthy article on the subject, in dialogue form, making it

all very clear and convincing, but for some reason none of the magazines

would take it.  Perhaps it seemed too easy, too simple, too obvious.

Great ideas, once developed, are often like that.









CCV



SPEECHES THAT WERE NOT MADE



In a volume of Mark Twain's collected speeches there is one entitled

"German for the Hungarians--Address at the jubilee Celebration of the

Emancipation of the Hungarian Press, March 26, 1899."  An introductory

paragraph states that the ministers and members of Parliament were

present, and that the subject was the "Ausgleich"--i.e., the arrangement

for the apportionment of the taxes between Hungary and Austria.  The

speech as there set down begins:



     Now that we are all here together I think that it will be a good

     idea to arrange the Ausgleich.  If you will act for Hungary I shall

     be quite willing to act for Austria, and this is the very time for

     it.



It is an excellent speech, full of good-feeling and good-humor, but it

was never delivered.  It is only a speech that Mark Twain intended to

deliver, and permitted to be copied by a representative of the press

before he started for Budapest.



It was a grand dinner, brilliant and inspiring, and when, Mark Twain was

presented to that distinguished company he took a text from something the

introducer had said and became so interested in it that his prepared

speech wholly disappeared from his memory.



I think I will never embarrass myself with a set speech again [he wrote

Twichell].  My memory is old and rickety and cannot stand the strain.

But I had this luck.  What I did was to furnish a text for a part of the

splendid speech which was made by the greatest living orator of the

European world--a speech which it was a great delight to listen to,

although I did not understand any word of it, it being in Hungarian.

I was glad I came, it was a great night, & I heard all the great men in

the German tongue.



The family accompanied Clemens to Budapest, and while there met Franz,

son of Louis Kossuth, and dined with him.



I assure you [wrote Mrs. Clemens] that I felt stirred, and I kept saying

to myself "This is Louis Kossuth's son."  He came to our room one day,

and we had quite a long and a very pleasant talk together.  He is a man

one likes immensely.  He has a quiet dignity about him that is very

winning.  He seems to be a man highly esteemed in Hungary.  If I am not

mistaken, the last time I saw the old picture of his father it was

hanging in a room that we turned into a music-room for Susy at the farm.



They were most handsomely treated in Budapest.  A large delegation

greeted them on arrival, and a carriage and attendants were placed

continually at their disposal.  They remained several days, and Clemens

showed his appreciation by giving a reading for charity.



It was hinted to Mark Twain that spring, that before leaving Vienna, it

would be proper for him to pay his respects to Emperor Franz Josef, who

had expressed a wish to meet him.  Clemens promptly complied with the

formalities and the meeting was arranged.  He had a warm admiration for

the Austrian Emperor, and naturally prepared himself a little for what he

wanted to say to him.  He claimed afterward that he had compacted a sort

of speech into a single German sentence of eighteen words.  He did not

make use of it, however.  When he arrived at the royal palace and was

presented, the Emperor himself began in such an entirely informal way

that it did no occur to his visitor to deliver his prepared German

sentence.  When he returned from the audience he said:



"We got along very well.  I proposed to him a plan to exterminate the

human race by withdrawing the oxygen from the air for a period of two

minutes.  I said Szczepanik would invent it for him.  I think it

impressed him.  After a while, in the course of our talk I remembered and

told the Emperor I had prepared and memorized a very good speech but had

forgotten it.  He was very agreeable about it.  He said a speech wasn't

necessary.  He seemed to be a most kind-hearted emperor, with a great

deal of plain, good, attractive human nature about him.  Necessarily he

must have or he couldn't have unbent to me as he did.  I couldn't unbend

if I were an emperor.  I should feel the stiffness of the position.

Franz Josef doesn't feel it.  He is just a natural man, although an

emperor.  I was greatly impressed by him, and I liked him exceedingly.

His face is always the face of a pleasant man and he has a fine sense of

humor.  It is the Emperor's personality and the confidence all ranks have

in him that preserve the real political serenity in what has an outside

appearance of being the opposite.  He is a man as well as an emperor--an

emperor and a man."



Clemens and Howells were corresponding with something of the old-time

frequency.  The work that Mark Twain was doing--thoughtful work with

serious intent--appealed strongly to Howells.  He wrote:



     You are the greatest man of your sort that ever lived, and there is

     no use saying anything else .  .  .  .  You have pervaded your

     century almost more than any other man of letters, if not more; and

     it is astonishing how you keep spreading .  .  .  .  You are my

     "shadow of a great rock in a weary land" more than any other writer.



Clemens, who was reading Howells's serial, "Their Silver-Wedding

journey," then running in Harper's Magazine, responded:



     You are old enough to be a weary man with paling interests, but you

     do not show it; you do your work in the same old, delicate &

     delicious & forceful & searching & perfect way.  I don't know how

     you can--but I suspect.  I suspect that to you there is still

     dignity in human life, & that man is not a joke--a poor joke--the

     poorest that was ever contrived.  Since I wrote my Bible--[The

     "Gospel," What is Man?]--(last year), which Mrs. Clemens loathes &

     shudders over & will not listen to the last half nor allow me to

     print any part of it, man is not to me the respect-worthy person he

     was before, & so I have lost my pride in him & can't write gaily nor

     praisefully about him any more .  .  .  .



     Next morning.  I have been reading the morning paper.  I do it every

     morning--well knowing that I shall find in it the usual depravities

     & basenesses & hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization &

     cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of

     the human race.  I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do

     not despair.



He was not greatly changed.  Perhaps he had fewer illusions and less

iridescent ones, and certainly he had more sorrow; but the letters to

Howells do not vary greatly from those written twenty-five years before.

There is even in them a touch of the old pretense as to Mrs. Clemens's

violence.



I mustn't stop to play now or I shall never get those helfiard letters

answered.  (That is not my spelling.  It is Mrs. Clemens's, I have told

her the right way a thousand times, but it does no good, she never

remembers.)



All through this Vienna period (as during several years before and after)

Henry Rogers was in full charge of Mark Twain's American affairs.

Clemens wrote him almost daily, and upon every matter, small or large,

that developed, or seemed likely to develop, in his undertakings.  The

complications growing out of the type machine and Webster failures were

endless.--["I hope to goodness I sha'n't get you into any more jobs such

as the type-setter and Webster business and the Bliss-Harper campaigns

have been.  Oh, they were sickeners."  (Clemens to Rogers,

November 15, 1898.)]--The disposal of the manuscripts alone was work for

a literary agent.  The consideration of proposed literary, dramatic, and

financial schemes must have required not only thought, but time.  Yet Mr.

Rogers comfortably and genially took care of all these things and his own

tremendous affairs besides, and apologized sometimes when he felt,

perhaps, that he had wavered a little in his attention.  Clemens once

wrote him:



     Oh, dear me, you don't have to excuse yourself for neglecting me;

     you are entitled to the highest praise for being so limitlessly

     patient and good in bothering with my confused affairs, and pulling

     me out of a hole every little while.



     It makes me lazy, the way that Steel stock is rising.  If I were

     lazier--like Rice--nothing could keep me from retiring.  But I work

     right along, like a poor person.  I shall figure up the rise, as the

     figures come in, and push up my literary prices accordingly, till I

     get my literature up to where nobody can afford it but the family.

     (N. B.--Look here, are you charging storage?  I am not going to

     stand that, you know.) Meantime, I note those encouraging illogical

     words of yours about my not worrying because I am to be rich when I

     am 68; why didn't you have Cheiro make it 90, so that I could have

     plenty of room?



     It would be jolly good if some one should succeed in making a play

     out of "Is He Dead?"--[Clemens himself had attempted to make a play

     out of his story "Is He Dead?" and had forwarded the MS. to Rogers.

     Later he wrote: "Put 'Is He Dead?' in the fire.  God will bless you.

     I too.  I started to convince myself that I could write a play, or

     couldn't.  I'm convinced.  Nothing can disturb that conviction."]--

     From what I gather from dramatists, he will have his hands something

     more than full--but let him struggle, let him struggle.



     Is there some way, honest or otherwise, by which you can get a copy

     of Mayo's play, "Pudd'nhead Wilson," for me?  There is a capable

     young Austrian here who saw it in New York and wants to translate it

     and see if he can stage it here.  I don't think these people here

     would understand it or take to it, but he thinks it will pay us to

     try.



     A couple of London dramatists want to bargain with me for the right

     to make a high comedy out of the "Million-Pound Note."  Barkis is

     willing.



This is but one of the briefer letters.  Most of them were much longer

and of more elaborate requirements.  Also they overflowed with the gaiety

of good-fortune and with gratitude.  From Vienna in 1899 Clemens wrote:



     Why, it is just splendid!  I have nothing to do but sit around and

     watch you set the hen and hatch out those big broods and make my

     living for me.  Don't you wish you had somebody to do the same for

     you?--a magician who can turn steel add copper and Brooklyn gas into

     gold.  I mean to raise your wages again--I begin to feel that I can

     afford it.



     I think the hen ought to have a name; she must be called Unberufen.

     That is a German word which is equivalent to it "sh! hush' don't let

     the spirits hear you!"  The superstition is that if you happen to

     let fall any grateful jubilation over good luck that you've had or

     are hoping to have you must shut square off and say "Unberufen!" and

     knock wood.  The word drives the evil spirits away; otherwise they

     would divine your joy or your hopes and go to work and spoil your

     game.  Set her again--do!



     Oh, look here!  You are just like everybody; merely because I am

     literary you think I'm a commercial somnambulist, and am not

     watching you with all that money in your hands.  Bless you, I've got

     a description of you and a photograph in every police-office in

     Christendom, with the remark appended: "Look out for a handsome,

     tall, slender young man with a gray mustache and courtly manners and

     an address well calculated to deceive, calling himself by the name

     of Smith."  Don't you try to get away--it won't work.



From the note-book:



     Midnight.  At Miss Bailie's home for English governesses. Two

     comedies & some songs and ballads.  Was asked to speak & did it.

     (And rung in the "Mexican Plug.")



     A Voice.  "The Princess Hohenlohe wishes you to write on her fan."



     "With pleasure--where is she?"



     "At your elbow."



     I turned & took the fan & said, "Your Highness's place is in a fairy

     tale; & by & by I mean to write that tale," whereat she laughed a

     happy girlish laugh, & we moved through the crowd to get to a

     writing-table--& to get in a strong light so that I could see her

     better.  Beautiful little creature, with the dearest friendly ways &

     sincerities & simplicities & sweetnesses--the ideal princess of the

     fairy tales.  She is 16 or 17, I judge.



     Mental Telegraphy.  Mrs. Clemens was pouring out the coffee this

     morning; I unfolded the Neue Freie Presse, began to read a paragraph

     & said:



     "They've found a new way to tell genuine gems from false----"



     "By the Roentgen ray!" she exclaimed.



     That is what I was going to say.  She had not seen the paper, &

     there had been no talk about the ray or gems by herself or by me.

     It was a plain case of telegraphy.



     No man that ever lived has ever done a thing to please God--

     primarily.  It was done to please himself, then God next.



     The Being who to me is the real God is the one who created this

     majestic universe & rules it.  He is the only originator, the only

     originator of thoughts; thoughts suggested from within, not from

     without; the originator of colors & of all their possible

     combinations; of forces & the laws that govern them; of forms &

     shapes of all forms-man has never invented a new one.  He is the

     only originator.  He made the materials of all things; He made the

     laws by which, & by which only, man may combine them into the

     machines & other things which outside influences suggest to him.  He

     made character--man can portray it but not "create" it, for He is

     the only creator.



     He, is the perfect artisan, the perfect artist.









CCVI



A SUMMER IN SWEDEN



A part of the tragedy of their trip around the world had been the

development in Jean Clemens of a malady which time had identified as

epilepsy.  The loss of one daughter and the invalidism of another was the

burden which this household had now to bear.  Of course they did not for

a moment despair of a cure for the beautiful girl who had been so cruelly

stricken, and they employed any agent that promised relief.



They decided now to go to London, in the hope of obtaining beneficial

treatment.  They left Vienna at the end of May, followed to the station

by a great crowd, who loaded their compartment with flowers and lingered

on the platform waving and cheering, some of them in tears, while the

train pulled away.  Leschetizky himself was among them, and Wilbrandt,

the author of the Master of Palmyra, and many artists and other notables,

"most of whom," writes Mrs. Clemens, "we shall probably never see again

in this world."



Their Vienna sojourn had been one of the most brilliant periods of their

life, as well as one of the saddest.  The memory of Susy had been never

absent, and the failing health of Jean was a gathering cloud.



They stopped a day or two at Prague, where they were invited by the

Prince of Thurn and Taxis to visit his castle.  It gave them a glimpse of

the country life of the Bohemian nobility which was most interesting.

The Prince's children were entirely familiar with Tom Sawyer and

Huckleberry Finn, which they had read both in English and in the

translation.



They journeyed to London by way of Cologne, arriving by the end of May.

Poultney Bigelow was there, and had recently been treated with great

benefit by osteopathy (then known as the Swedish movements), as practised

by Heinrick Kellgren at Sanna, Sweden.  Clemens was all interest

concerning Kellgren's method and eager to try it for his daughter's

malady.  He believed she could be benefited, and they made preparation to

spend some months at least in Sanna.  They remained several weeks in

London, where they were welcomed with hospitality extraordinary.  They

had hardly arrived when they were invited by Lord Salisbury to Hatfield

House, and by James Bryce to Portland Place, and by Canon Wilberforce to

Dean's Yard.  A rather amusing incident happened at one of the luncheon-

parties.  Canon Wilberforce was there and left rather early.  When

Clemens was ready to go there was just one hat remaining.  It was not

his, and he suspected, by the initials on the inside, that it belonged to

Canon Wilberforce.  However, it fitted him exactly and he wore it away.

That evening he wrote:



                         PRINCE OF WALES HOTEL, DE VERE GARDENS,

                                             July,3, 1899.



DEAR CANON WILBERFORCE,--It is 8 P.M.  During the past four hours I have

not been able to take anything that did not belong to me; during all that

time I have not been able to stretch a fact beyond the frontiers of truth

try as I might, & meantime, not only my morals have moved the

astonishment of all who have come in contact with me, but my manners have

gained more compliments than they have been accustomed to.  This mystery

is causing my family much alarm.  It is difficult to account for it.

I find I haven't my own hat.  Have you developed any novelties of conduct

since you left Mr. Murray's, & have they been of a character to move the

concern of your friends?  I think it must be this that has put me under

this happy charm; but, oh dear!  I tremble for the other man!



                                   Sincerely yours,

                                                  S. L. CLEMENS.





Scarcely was this note on its way to Wilberforce when the following one

arrived, having crossed it in transit:



July 3, 1899.



DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--I have been conscious of a vivacity and facility of

expression this afternoon beyond the normal and I have just discovered

the reason!!  I have seen the historic signature "Mark Twain" in my hat!!

Doubtless you have been suffering from a corresponding dullness & have

wondered why.  I departed precipitately, the hat stood on my umbrella and

was a new Lincoln & Bennett--it fitted me exactly and I did not discover

the mistake till I got in this afternoon.  Please forgive me.  If you

should be passing this way to-morrow will you look in and change hats?

or shall I send it to the hotel?



                              I am, very sincerely yrs.,

20 Dean's Yard.                              BASIL WILBERFORCE.





Clemens was demanded by all the bohemian clubs, the White Friars, the

Vagabonds, the Savage, the Beefsteak, and the Authors.  He spoke to them,

and those "Mark Twain Evenings" have become historic occasions in each of

the several institutions that gave him welcome.  At the Vagabonds he told

them the watermelon story, and at the White Friars he reviewed the old

days when he had been elected to that society; "days," he said, "when all

Londoners were talking about nothing else than that they had discovered

Livingstone, and that the lost Sir Roger Tichborne had been found and

they were trying him for it."



At the Savage Club, too, he recalled old times and old friends, and

particularly that first London visit, his days in the club twenty-seven

years before.



"I was 6 feet 4 in those days," he said.  "Now I am 5 feet 8 1/2 and

daily diminishing in altitude, and the shrinkage of my principles goes on

.  .  .  .  Irving was here then, is here now.  Stanley is here, and Joe

Hatton, but Charles Reade is gone and Tom Hood and Harry Lee and Canon

Kingsley.  In those days you could have carried Kipling around in a

lunch-basket; now he fills the world.  I was young and foolish then; now

I am old and foolisher."



At the Authors Club he paid a special tribute to Rudyard Kipling, whose

dangerous illness in New York City and whose daughter's death had aroused

the anxiety and sympathy of the entire American nation.  It had done much

to bring England and America closer together, Clemens said.  Then he

added that he had been engaged the past eight days compiling a pun and

had brought it there to lay at their feet, not to ask for their

indulgence, but for their applause.  It was this:



"Since England and America have been joined in Kipling, may they not be

severed in Twain."



Hundreds of puns had been made on his pen-name, but this was probably his

first and only attempt, and it still remains the best.



They arrived in Sweden early in July and remained until October.  Jean

was certainly benefited by the Kellgren treatment, and they had for a

time the greatest hopes of her complete recovery.  Clemens became

enthusiastic over osteopathy, and wrote eloquently to every one, urging

each to try the great new curative which was certain to restore universal

health.  He wrote long articles on Kellgren and his science, largely

justified, no doubt, for certainly miraculous benefits were recorded;

though Clemens was not likely to underestimate a thing which appealed to

both his imagination and his reason.  Writing to Twichell he concluded,

with his customary optimism over any new benefit:



     Ten years hence no sane man will call a doctor except when the knife

     must be used--& such cases will be rare.  The educated physician

     will himself be an osteopath.  Dave will become one after he has

     finished his medical training.  Young Harmony ought to become one

     now.  I do not believe there is any difference between Kellgren's

     science and osteopathy; but I am sending to America to find out.  I

     want osteopathy to prosper; it is common sense & scientific, & cures

     a wider range of ailments than the doctor's methods can reach.



Twichell was traveling in Europe that summer, and wrote from Switzerland:



     I seemed ever and anon to see you and me swinging along those

     glorious Alpine woods, staring at the new unfoldings of splendor

     that every turn brought into view-talking, talking, endlessly

     talking the days through-days forever memorable to me.  That was

     twenty-one years ago; think of it!  We were youngsters then, Mark,

     and how keen our relish of everything was!  Well, I can enjoy myself

     now; but not with that zest and rapture.  Oh, a lot of items of our

     tramp travel in 1878 that I had long forgotten came back to me as we

     sped through that enchanted region, and if I wasn't on duty with

     Venice I'd stop and set down some of them, but Venice must be

     attended to.  For one thing, there is Howells's book to be read at

     such intervals as can be snatched from the quick-time march on which

     our rustling leader keeps us.  However, in Venice so far we want to

     be gazing pretty steadily from morning till night, and by the grace

     of the gondola we can do it without exhaustion.  Really I am drunk

     with Venice.



But Clemens was full of Sweden.  The skies there and the sunsets be

thought surpassed any he had ever known.  On an evening in September he

wrote:



     DEAR JOE,--I've no business in here-I ought to be outside.  I shall

     never see another sunset to begin with it this side of heaven.

     Venice? land, what a poor interest that is!  This is the place to

     be.  I have seen about 60 sunsets here; & a good 40 of them were

     away & beyond anything I had ever imagined before for dainty &

     exquisite & marvelous beauty & infinite change & variety.  America?

     Italy?  the tropics?  They have no notion of what a sunset ought to

     be.  And this one--this unspeakable wonder!  It discounts all the

     rest.  It brings the tears, it is so unutterably beautiful.



Clemens read a book during his stay in Sweden which interested him

deeply.  It was the Open Question, by Elizabeth Robbins--a fine study of

life's sterner aspects.  When he had finished he was moved to write the

author this encouraging word:



     DEAR MISS ROBBINS,--A relative of Matthew Arnold lent us your 'Open

     Question' the other day, and Mrs. Clemens and I are in your debt.  I

     am not able to put in words my feeling about the book--my admiration

     of its depth and truth and wisdom and courage, and the fine and

     great literary art and grace of the setting.  At your age you cannot

     have lived the half of the things that are in the book, nor

     personally penetrated to the deeps it deals in, nor covered its wide

     horizons with your very own vision--and so, what is your secret?

     how have you written this miracle?  Perhaps one must concede that

     genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old

     experience.



     Well, in any case, I am grateful to you.  I have not been so

     enriched by a book for many years, nor so enchanted by one.  I seem

     to be using strong language; still, I have weighed it.



                                   Sincerely yours,

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.









CCVII



30, WELLINGTON COURT



Clemens himself took the Kellgren treatment and received a good deal of

benefit.



"I have come back in sound condition and braced for work," he wrote

MacAlister, upon his return to London.  "A long, steady, faithful siege

of it, and I begin now in five minutes."



They had settled in a small apartment at 30, Wellington Court, Albert

Gate, where they could be near the London branch of the Kellgren

institution, and he had a workroom with Chatto & Windus, his publishers.

His work, however, was mainly writing speeches, for he was entertained

constantly, and it seemed impossible for him to escape.  His note-book

became a mere jumble of engagements.  He did write an article or a story

now and then, one of which, "My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It," was

made the important Christmas feature of the 'New York Sunday World.'

--[Now included in the Hadleyburg volume; "Complete Works."]



Another article of this time was the "St. Joan of Arc," which several

years later appeared in Harper's Magazine.  This article was originally

written as the Introduction of the English translation of the official

record of the trials and rehabilitation of Joan, then about to be

elaborately issued.  Clemens was greatly pleased at being invited to

prepare the Introduction of this important volume, but a smug person with

pedagogic proclivities was in charge of the copy and proceeded to edit

Mark Twain's manuscript; to alter its phrasing to conform to his own

ideas of the Queen's English.  Then he had it all nicely typewritten, and

returned it to show how much he had improved it, and to receive thanks

and compliments.  He did not receive any thanks.  Clemens recorded a few

of the remarks that he made when he saw his edited manuscript:



     I will not deny that my feelings rose to 104 in the shade.  "The

     idea!  That this long-eared animal this literary kangaroo this

     illiterate hostler with his skull full of axle-grease--this....."

     But I stopped there, for this was not the Christian spirit.



His would-be editor received a prompt order to return the manuscript,

after which Clemens wrote a letter, some of which will go very well here.



     DEAR MR. X.,--I have examined the first page of my amended

     Introduction,--& will begin now & jot down some notes upon your

     corrections.  If I find any changes which shall not seem to me to be

     improvements I will point out my reasons for thinking so.  In this

     way I may chance to be helpful to you, & thus profit you perhaps as

     much as you have desired to profit me.



     First Paragraph.  "Jeanne d'Arc."  This is rather cheaply pedantic,

     & is not in very good taste.  Joan is not known by that name among

     plain people of our race & tongue.  I notice that the name of the

     Deity occurs several times in the brief instalment of the Trials

     which you have favored me with.  To be consistent, it will be

     necessary that you strike out "God" & put in "Dieu."  Do not neglect

     this.



     Second Paragraph.  Now you have begun on my punctuation.  Don't you

     realize that you ought not to intrude your help in a delicate art

     like that with your limitations?  And do you think that you have

     added just the right smear of polish to the closing clause of the

     sentence?



     Third Paragraph.  Ditto.



     Fourth Paragraph.  Your word "directly" is misleading; it could be

     construed to mean "at once."  Plain clarity is better than ornate

     obscurity.  I note your sensitive marginal remark: "Rather unkind to

     French feelings--referring to Moscow."  Indeed I have not been

     concerning myself about French feelings, but only about stating the

     facts.  I have said several uncourteous things about the French--

     calling them a "nation of ingrates" in one place--but you have been

     so busy editing commas & semicolons that you overlooked them &

     failed to get scared at them.  The next paragraph ends with a slur

     at the French, but I have reasons for thinking you mistook it for a

     compliment.  It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like

     yours.  You ought to get it out & dance on it.



     That would take some of the rigidity out of it.  And you ought to

     use it sometimes; that would help.  If you had done this every now &

     then along through life it would not have petrified.



     Fifth Paragraph.  Thus far I regard this as your masterpiece!  You

     are really perfect in the great art of reducing simple & dignified

     speech to clumsy & vapid commonplace.



     Sixth Paragraph.  You have a singularly fine & aristocratic

     disrespect for homely & unpretending English.  Every time I use "go

     back" you get out your polisher & slick it up to "return."  "Return"

     is suited only to the drawing-room--it is ducal, & says itself with

     a simper & a smirk.



     Seventh Paragraph.  "Permission" is ducal.  Ducal and affected.

     "Her" great days were not "over," they were only half over.  Didn't

     you know that?  Haven't you read anything at all about Joan of Arc?

     The truth is you do not pay any attention; I told you on my very

     first page that the public part of her career lasted two years, &

     you have forgotten it already.  You really must get your mind out

     and have it repaired; you see yourself that it is all caked

     together.



     Eighth Paragraph.  She "rode away to assault & capture a

     stronghold."  Very well; but you do not tell us whether she

     succeeded or not.  You should not worry the reader with

     uncertainties like that.  I will remind you once more that clarity

     is a good thing in literature.  An apprentice cannot do better than

     keep this useful rule in mind.



     Ninth Paragraph.  "Known" history.  That word has a polish which is

     too indelicate for me; there doesn't seem to be any sense in it.

     This would have surprised me last week.



     .  .  .  "Breaking a lance" is a knightly & sumptuous phrase, & I

     honor it for its hoary age & for the faithful service it has done in

     the prize-composition of the school-girl, but I have ceased from

     employing it since I got my puberty, & must solemnly object to

     fathering it here.  And, besides, it makes me hint that I have

     broken one of those things before in honor of the Maid, an

     intimation not justified by the facts.  I did not break any lances

     or other furniture; I only wrote a book about her.



                                   Truly yours,

                                             MARK TWAIN.





     It cost me something to restrain myself and say these smooth & half-

     flattering things of this immeasurable idiot, but I did it, & have

     never regretted it.  For it is higher & nobler to be kind to even a

     shad like him than just .  .  .  .  I could have said hundreds of

     unpleasant things about this tadpole, but I did not even feel them.



Yet, in the end, he seems not to have sent the letter.  Writing it had

served every purpose.



An important publishing event of 1899 was the issue by the American

Publishing Company of Mark Twain's "Complete Works in Uniform Edition."

Clemens had looked forward to the day when this should be done, perhaps

feeling that an assembling of his literary family in symmetrical dress

constituted a sort of official recognition of his authorship.  Brander

Matthews was selected to write the Introduction and prepared a fine

"Biographical Criticism," which pleased Clemens, though perhaps he did

not entirely agree with its views.  Himself of a different cast of mind,

he nevertheless admired Matthews.



Writing to Twichell he said:



     When you say, "I like Brander Matthews, he impresses me as a man of

     parts & power," I back you, right up to the hub--I feel the same

     way.  And when you say he has earned your gratitude for cuffing me

     for my crimes against the Leather-stockings & the Vicar I ain't

     making any objection.  Dern your gratitude!



     His article is as sound as a nut.  Brander knows literature & loves

     it; he can talk about it & keep his temper; he can state his case so

     lucidly & so fairly & so forcibly that you have to agree with him

     even when you don't agree with him; & he can discover & praise such

     merits as a book has even when they are merely half a dozen diamonds

     scattered through an acre of mud.  And so he has a right to be a

     critic.



     To detail just the opposite of the above invoice is to describe me.

     I haven't any right to criticize books, & I don't do it except when

     I hate them.  I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books

     madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; &

     therefore I have to stop every time I begin.'--[Once at a dinner

     given to Matthews, Mark Twain made a speech which consisted almost

     entirely of intonations of the name "Brander Matthews" to express

     various shades of human emotion.  It would be hopeless, of course,

     to attempt to convey in print any idea of this effort, which, by

     those who heard it, is said to have been a masterpiece of

     vocalization.]



Clemens also introduced the "Uniform Edition" with an Author's Preface,

the jurisdiction of which, he said, was "restricted to furnishing reasons

for the publication of the collection as a whole."



     This is not easy to do.  Aside from the ordinary commercial reasons

     I find none that I can offer with dignity: I cannot say without

     immodesty that the books have merit; I cannot say without immodesty

     that the public want a "Uniform Edition"; I cannot say without

     immodesty that a "Uniform Edition" will turn the nation toward high

     ideals & elevated thought; I cannot say without immodesty that a

     "Uniform Edition" will eradicate crime, though I think it will.  I

     find no reason that I can offer without immodesty except the rather

     poor one that I should like to see a "Uniform Edition" myself.  It

     is nothing; a cat could say it about her kittens.  Still, I believe

     I will stand upon that.  I have to have a Preface & a reason, by law

     of custom, & the reason which I am putting forward is at least

     without offense.









CCVIII



MARK TWAIN AND THE WARS



English troubles in South Africa came to a head that autumn.  On the day

when England's ultimatum to the Boers expired Clemens wrote:



     LONDON, 3.07 P.m., Wednesday, October 11, 1899.  The time is up!

     Without a doubt the first shot in the war is being fired to-day in

     South Africa at this moment.  Some man had to be the first to fall;

     he has fallen.  Whose heart is broken by this murder?  For, be he

     Boer or be he Briton, it is murder, & England committed it by the

     hand of Chamberlain & the Cabinet, the lackeys of Cecil Rhodes & his

     Forty Thieves, the South Africa Company.



Mark Twain would naturally sympathize with the Boer--the weaker side, the

man defending his home.  He knew that for the sake of human progress

England must conquer and must be upheld, but his heart was all the other

way.  In January, 1900, he wrote a characteristic letter to Twichell,

which conveys pretty conclusively his sentiments concerning the two wars

then in progress.



     DEAR JOE,--Apparently we are not proposing to set the Filipinos free

     & give their islands to them; & apparently we are not proposing to

     hang the priests & confiscate their property.  If these things are

     so the war out there has no interest for me.



     I have just been examining Chapter LXX of Following the Equator to

     see if the Boer's old military effectiveness is holding out.  It

     reads curiously as if it had been written about the present war.



     I believe that in the next chapter my notion of the Boer was rightly

     conceived.  He is popularly called uncivilized; I do not know why.

     Happiness, food, shelter, clothing, wholesome labor, modest &

     rational ambitions, honesty, kindliness, hospitality, love of

     freedom & limitless courage to fight for it, composure & fortitude

     in time of disaster, patience in time of hardship & privation,

     absence of noise & brag in time of victory, contentment with humble

     & peaceful life void of insane excitements--if there is a higher &

     better form of civilization than this I am not aware of it & do not

     know where to look for it.  I suppose that we have the habit of

     imagining that a lot of artistic & intellectual & other

     artificialities must be added or it isn't complete.  We & the

     English have these latter; but as we lack the great bulk of those

     others I think the Boer civilization is the best of the two.  My

     idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing & full

     of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies, meannesses, & hypocrisies.



     Provided we could get something better in the place of it.  But that

     is not possible perhaps.  Poor as it is, it is better than real

     savagery, therefore we must stand by it, extend it, & (in public)

     praise it.  And so we must not utter any hurtful word about England

     in these days, nor fail to hope that she will win in this war, for

     her defeat & fall would be an irremediable disaster for the mangy

     human race.  Naturally, then, I am for England; but she is

     profoundly in the wrong, Joe, & no (instructed) Englishman doubts

     it.  At least that is my belief.



Writing to Howells somewhat later, he calls the conflict in South Africa,

a "sordid and criminal war," and says that every day he is writing (in

his head) bitter magazine articles against it.



     But I have to stop with that.  Even if wrong--& she is wrong England

     must be upheld.  He is an enemy of the human race who shall speak

     against her now.  Why was the human race created?  Or at least why

     wasn't something creditable created in place of it?  .  .  .  I talk

     the war with both sides--always waiting until the other man

     introduces the topic.  Then I say, "My head is with the Briton, but

     my heart & such rags of morals as I have are with the Boer--now we

     will talk, unembarrassed and without prejudice."  And so we discuss

     & have no trouble.



     I notice that God is on both sides in this war; thus history repeats

     itself.  But I am the only person who has noticed this; everybody

     here thinks He is playing the game for this side, & for this side

     only.



Clemens wrote one article for anonymous publication in the Times.  But

when the manuscript was ready to mail in an envelope stamped and

addressed to Moberly Bell--he reconsidered and withheld it.  It still

lies in the envelope with the accompanying letter, which says:



Don't give me away, whether you print it or not.  But I think you ought

to print it and get up a squabble, for the weather is just suitable.











CCIX



PLASMON, AND A NEW MAGAZINE



Clemens was not wholly wedded to osteopathy.  The financial interest

which he had taken in the new milk albumen, "a food for invalids," tended

to divide his faith and make him uncertain as to which was to be the

chief panacea for all ills--osteopathy or plasmon.



MacAlister, who was deeply interested in the plasmon fortunes, was

anxious to get the product adopted by the army.  He believed, if he could

get an interview with the Medical Director-General, he could convince him

of its merits.  Discussing the matter with Clemens, the latter said:



"MacAlister, you are going at it from the wrong end.  You can't go direct

to that man, a perfect stranger, and convince him of anything.  Who is

his nearest friend?"



MacAlister knew a man on terms of social intimacy with the official.



Clemens said, "That is the man to speak to the Director-General."



"But I don't know him, either," said MacAlister.



"Very good.  Do you know any one who does know him?"



"Yes, I know his most intimate friend."



"Then he is the man for you to approach.  Convince him that plasmon is

what the army needs, that the military hospitals are suffering for it.

Let him understand that what you want is to get this to the Director-

General, and in due time it will get to him in the proper way.  You'll

see."



This proved to be a true prophecy.  It was only a little while until the

British army had experimented with plasmon and adopted it.  MacAlister

reported the success of the scheme to Clemens, and out of it grew the

story entitled, "Two Little Tales," published in November of the

following year (1901) in the Century Magazine.  Perhaps the reader will

remember that in the "Two Little Tales" the Emperor is very ill and the

lowest of all his subjects knows a certain remedy, but he cannot seek the

Emperor direct, so he wisely approaches him through a series of

progressive stages--finally reaching and curing his stricken Majesty.



Clemens had the courage of his investments.  He adopted plasmon as his

own daily food, and induced various members of the family to take it in

its more palatable forms, one of these being a preparation of chocolate.

He kept the reading-table by his bed well stocked with a variety of the

products and invited various callers to try a complimentary sample lot.

It was really an excellent and harmless diet, and both the company and

its patients would seem to have prospered--perhaps are prospering still.



There was another business opportunity came along just at this time.

S. S. McClure was in England with a proposition for starting a new

magazine whose complexion was to be peculiarly American, with Mark Twain

as its editor.  The magazine was to be called 'The Universal', and by the

proposition Clemens was to receive a tenth interest in it for his first

year's work, and an added twentieth interest for each of the two

succeeding years, with a guarantee that his shares should not earn him

less than five thousand dollars the first year, with a proportionate

increase as his holdings grew.



The scheme appealed to Clemens, it being understood in the beginning that

he was to give very little time to the work, with the privilege of doing

it at his home, wherever that might happen to be.  He wrote of the matter

to Mr. Rogers, explaining in detail, and Rogers replied, approving the

plan.  Mr. Rogers said he knew that he [Rogers] would have to do most of

the work in editing the magazine, and further added:



     One thing I shall insist upon, however, if I have anything to do

     with the matter, and it is this: that when you have made up your

     mind on the subject you will stick to it.  I have not found in your

     composition that element of stubbornness which is a constant source

     of embarrassment to me in all friendly and social ways, but which,

     when applied to certain lines of business, brings in the dollar and

     fifty-cent pieces.  If you accept the position, of course that means

     that you have to come to this country.  If you do, the yachting will

     be a success.



There was considerable correspondence with McClure over the new

periodical.  In one letter Clemens set forth his general views of the

matter quite clearly:



     Let us not deceive any one, nor allow any one to deceive himself, if

     it can be prevented.  This is not to be comic magazine.  It is to be

     simply a good, clean, wholesome collection of well-written &

     enticing literary products, like the other magazines of its class;

     not setting itself to please but one of man's moods, but all of

     them.  It will not play but one kind of music, but all kinds.  I

     should not be able to edit a comic periodical satisfactorily, for

     lack of interest in the work.  I value humor highly, & am

     constitutionally fond of it, but I should not like it as a steady

     diet.  For its own best interests, humor should take its outings in

     grave company; its cheerful dress gets heightened color from the

     proximity of sober hues.  For me to edit a comic magazine would be

     an incongruity & out of character, for of the twenty-three books

     which I have written eighteen do not deal in humor as their chiefs

     feature, but are half & half admixtures of fun & seriousness.  I

     think I have seldom deliberately set out to be humorous, but have

     nearly always allowed the humor to drop in or stay out, according to

     its fancy.  Although I have many times been asked to write something

     humorous for an editor or a publisher I have had wisdom enough to

     decline; a person could hardly be humorous with the other man

     watching him like that.  I have never tried to write a humorous

     lecture; I have only tried to write serious ones--it is the only way

     not to succeed.



     I shall write for this magazine every time the spirit moves me; but

     I look for my largest entertainment in editing.  I have been edited

     by all kinds of people for more than thirty-eight years; there has

     always been somebody in authority over my manuscript & privileged to

     improve it; this has fatigued me a good deal, & I have often longed

     to move up from the dock to the bench & rest myself and fatigue

     others.  My opportunity is come, but I hope I shall not abuse it

     overmuch.  I mean to do my best to make a good magazine; I mean to

     do my whole duty, & not shirk any part of it.  There are plenty of

     distinguished artists, novelists, poets, story-tellers,

     philosophers, scientists, explorers, fighters, hunters, followers of

     the sea, & seekers of adventure; & with these to do the hard & the

     valuable part of the work with the pen & the pencil it will be

     comfort & joy to me to walk the quarter-deck & superintend.



Meanwhile McClure's enthusiasm had had time to adjust itself to certain

existing facts.  Something more than a month later he wrote from America

at considerable length, setting forth the various editorial duties and

laying stress upon the feature of intimate physical contact with the

magazine.  He went into the matter of the printing schedule, the various

kinds of paper used, the advertising pages, illustrations--into all the

detail, indeed, which a practical managing editor must compass in his

daily rounds.  It was pretty evident that Clemens would not be able to go

sailing about on Mr. Rogers's yacht or live at will in London or New York

or Vienna or Elmira, but that he would be more or less harnessed to a

revolving chair at an editorial desk, the thing which of all fates he

would be most likely to dread The scheme appears to have died there--the

correspondence to have closed.



Somewhat of the inducement in the McClure scheme had been the thought in

Clemens's mind that it would bring him back to America.  In a letter to

Mr. Rogers (January 8, 1900) he said, "I am tired to death of this

everlasting exile."  Mrs. Clemens often wrote that he was restlessly

impatient to return.  They were, in fact, constantly discussing the

practicability of returning to their own country now and opening the

Hartford home.  Clemens was ready to do that or to fall in with any plan

that would bring him across the water and settle him somewhere

permanently.  He was tired of the wandering life they had been leading.

Besides the long trip of '95 and '96 they had moved two or three times a

year regularly since leaving Hartford, nine years before.  It seemed to

him that they were always packing and unpacking.



"The poor man is willing to live anywhere if we will only let him 'stay

put,"  wrote Mrs. Clemens, but he did want to settle in his own land.

Mrs. Clemens, too, was weary with wandering, but the Hartford home no

longer held any attraction for her.  There had been a time when her every

letter dwelt on their hope of returning to it.  Now the thought filled

her with dread.  To her sister she wrote:



Do you think we can live through the first going into the house in

Hartford?  I feel if we had gotten through the first three months all

might be well, but consider the first night.



The thought of the responsibility of that great house--the taking up

again of the old life-disheartened her, too.  She had added years and she

had not gained in health or strength.



     When I was comparatively young I found the burden of that house very

     great.  I don't think I was ever fitted for housekeeping.  I dislike

     the practical part of it so much.  I hate it when the servants don't

     do well, and I hate the correcting them.



     Yet no one ever had better discipline in her domestic affairs or

     ever commanded more devoted service.  Her strength of character and

     the proportions of her achievement show large when we consider this

     confession.



They planned to return in the spring, but postponed the date for sailing.

Jean was still under Kellgren's treatment, and, though a cure had been

promised her, progress was discouragingly slow.  They began to look about

for summer quarters in or near London.









CCX



LONDON SOCIAL AFFAIRS



All this time Clemens had been tossing on the London social tide.  There

was a call for him everywhere.  No distinguished visitor of whatever

profession or rank but must meet Mark Twain.  The King of Sweden was

among his royal conquests of that season.



He was more happy with men of his own kind.  He was often with Moberly

Bell, editor of the Times; E. A. Abbey, the painter; Sir Henry Lucy, of

Punch (Toby, M.P.); James Bryce, and Herbert Gladstone; and there were a

number of brilliant Irishmen who were his special delight.  Once with

Mrs. Clemens he dined with the author of his old favorite, 'European

Morals', William E. H. Lecky.  Lady Gregory was there and Sir Dennis

Fitz-Patrick; who had been Governor-General at Lahore when they were in

India, and a number of other Irish ladies and gentlemen.  It was a

memorable evening.  To Twichell Clemens wrote:



     Joe, do you know the Irish gentleman & the Irish lady, the Scotch

     gentleman & the Scotch lady?  These are darlings, every one.  Night

     before last it was all Irish--24.  One would have to travel far to

     match their ease & sociability & animation & sparkle & absence of

     shyness & self-consciousness.  It was American in these fine

     qualities.  This was at Mr. Lecky's.  He is Irish, you know.  Last

     night it was Irish again, at Lady Gregory's.  Lord Roberts is Irish,

     & Sir William Butler, & Kitchener, I think, & a disproportion of the

     other prominent generals are of Irish & Scotch breed keeping up the

     traditions of Wellington & Sir Colin Campbell, of the Mutiny.  You

     will have noticed that in S. A., as in the Mutiny, it is usually the

     Irish & Scotch that are placed in the forefront of the battle....

     Sir William Butler said, "the Celt is the spearhead of the British

     lance."



He mentions the news from the African war, which had been favorable to

England, and what a change had come over everything in consequence.  The

dinner-parties had been lodges of sorrow and depressing.  Now everybody

was smiling again.  In a note-book entry of this time he wrote:



     Relief of Mafeking (May 18, 1900).  The news came at 9.17 P.M.

     Before 10 all London was in the streets, gone mad with joy.  By then

     the news was all over the American continent.



Clemens had been talking copyright a good deal in London, and introducing

it into his speeches.  Finally, one day he was summoned before a

committee of the House of Lords to explain his views.  His old idea that

the product of a man's brain is his property in perpetuity and not for

any term of years had not changed, and they permitted him to dilate on

this (to them) curious doctrine.  The committee consisted of Lords

Monkswell, Knutsford, Avebury, Farrar, and Thwing.  When they asked for

his views he said:



"In my opinion the copyright laws of England and America need only the

removal of the forty-two-year limit and the return to perpetual copyright

to be perfect.  I consider that at least one of the reasons advanced in

justification of limited copyright is fallacious--namely, the one which

makes a distinction between an author's property and real estate, and

pretends that the two are not created, produced, or acquired in the same

way, thus warranting a different treatment of the two by law."



Continuing, he dwelt on the ancient doctrine that there was no property

in an idea, showing how the far greater proportion of all property

consisted of nothing more than elaborated ideas--the steamship,

locomotive, telephone, the vast buildings in the world, how all of these

had been constructed upon a basic idea precisely as a book is

constructed, and were property only as a book is property, and therefore

rightly subject to the same laws.  He was carefully and searchingly

examined by that shrewd committee.  He kept them entertained and

interested and left them in good-nature, even if not entirely converted.

The papers printed his remarks, and London found them amusing.



A few days after the copyright session, Clemens, responding to the toast,

"Literature," at the Royal Literary Fund Banquet, made London laugh

again, and early in June he was at the Savoy Hotel welcoming Sir Henry

Irving back to England after one of his successful American tours.



On the Fourth of July (1900) Clemens dined with the Lord Chief-Justice,

and later attended an American banquet at the Hotel Cecil.  He arrived

late, when a number of the guests were already going.  They insisted,

however, that he make a speech, which he did, and considered the evening

ended.  It was not quite over.  A sequel to his "Luck" story, published

nine years before, suddenly developed.



To go back a little, the reader may recall that "Luck" was a story which

Twichell had told him as being supposedly true.  The hero of it was a

military officer who had risen to the highest rank through what at least

seemed to be sheer luck, including a number of fortunate blunders.

Clemens thought the story improbable, but wrote it and laid it away for

several years, offering it at last in the general house-cleaning which

took place after the first collapse of the machine.  It was published in

Harper's Magazine for August, 1891, and something less than a year later,

in Rome, an English gentleman--a new acquaintance--said to him:



"Mr. Clemens, shall you go to England?"



"Very likely."



"Shall you take your tomahawk with you?"



"Why--yes, if it shall seem best."



"Well, it will.  Be advised.  Take it with you."



"Why?"



"Because of that sketch of yours entitled 'Luck.' That sketch is current

in England, and you will surely need your tomahawk."



"What makes you think so?"



"I think so because the hero of the sketch will naturally want your

scalp, and will probably apply for it.  Be advised.  Take your tomahawk

along."



"Why, even with it I sha'n't stand any chance, because I sha'n't know him

when he applies, and he will have my scalp before I know what his errand

is."



"Come, do you mean to say that you don't know who the hero of that sketch

is?"



"Indeed I haven't any idea who the hero of the sketch is.  Who is it?"



His informant hesitated a moment, then named a name of world-wide

military significance.



As Mask Twain finished his Fourth of July speech at the Cecil and started

to sit down a splendidly uniformed and decorated personage at his side

said:



"Mr. Clemens, I have been wanting to know you a long time," and he was

looking down into the face of the hero of "Luck."



"I was caught unprepared," he said in his notes of it.  "I didn't sit

down--I fell down.  I didn't have my tomahawk, and I didn't know what

would happen.  But he was, composed, and pretty soon I got composed and

we had a good, friendly time.  If he had ever heard of that sketch of

mine he did not manifest it in any way, and at twelve, midnight, I took

my scalp home intact."









CCXI



DOLLIS HILL AND HOME



It was early in July, 1900, that they removed to Dollis Hill House, a

beautiful old residence surrounded by trees on a peaceful hilltop, just

outside of London.  It was literally within a stone's-throw of the city

limits, yet it was quite rural, for the city had not overgrown it then,

and it retained all its pastoral features--a pond with lily-pads, the

spreading oaks, the wide spaces of grassy lawn.  Gladstone, an intimate

friend of the owner, had made it a favorite retreat at one period of his

life, and the place to-day is converted into a public garden called

Gladstone Park.  The old English diplomat used to drive out and sit in

the shade of the trees and read and talk and translate Homer, and pace

the lawn as he planned diplomacy, and, in effect, govern the English

empire from that retired spot.



Clemens, in some memoranda made at the moment, doubts if Gladstone was

always at peace in his mind in this retirement.



"Was he always really tranquil within," he says, "or was he only

externally so--for effect?  We cannot know; we only know that his rustic

bench under his favorite oak has no bark on its arms.  Facts like this

speak louder than words."



The red-brick residential wave of London was still some distance away in

1900.  Clemens says:



     The rolling sea of green grass still stretches away on every hand,

     splotches with shadows of spreading oaks in whose black coolness

     flocks of sheep lie peacefully dreaming.  Dreaming of what?  That

     they are in London, the metropolis of the world, Post-office

     District, N. W.?  Indeed no.  They are not aware of it.  I am aware

     of it, but that is all.  It is not possible to realize it.  For

     there is no suggestion of city here; it is country, pure & simple,

     & as still & reposeful as is the bottom of the sea.



They all loved Dollis Hill.  Mrs. Clemens wrote as if she would like to

remain forever in that secluded spot.



     It is simply divinely beautiful & peaceful; .  .  .  the great old

     trees are beyond everything.  I believe nowhere in the world do you

     find such trees as in England .  .  .  .  Jean has a hammock swung

     between two such great trees, & on the other side of a little pond,

     which is full of white & yellow pond-lilies, there is tall grass &

     trees & Clara & Jean go there in the afternoons, spread down a rug

     on the grass in the shade & read & sleep.



They all spent most of their time outdoors at Dollis Hill under those

spreading trees.



Clemens to Twichell in midsummer wrote:



     I am the only person who is ever in the house in the daytime, but I

     am working & deep in the luxury of it.  But there is one tremendous

     defect.  Livy is all so enchanted with the place & so in love with

     it that she doesn't know how she is going to tear herself away from

     it.



Much company came to them at Dollis Hill.  Friends drove out from London,

and friends from America came often, among them--the Sages, Prof.

Willard Fiske, and Brander Matthews with his family.  Such callers were

served with tea and refreshment on the lawn, and lingered, talking and

talking, while the sun got lower and the shadows lengthened, reluctant to

leave that idyllic spot.



"Dollis Hill comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home I ever

occupied," he wrote when the summer was about over.



But there was still a greater attraction than Dollis Hill.  Toward the

end of summer they willingly left that paradise, for they had decided at

last to make that home-returning voyage which had invited them so long.

They were all eager enough to go--Clemens more eager than the rest,

though he felt a certain sadness, too, in leaving the tranquil spot which

in a brief summer they had so learned to love.



Writing to W. H. Helm, a London newspaper man who had spent pleasant

hours with him chatting in the shade, he said:



     .  .  .  The packing & fussing & arranging have begun, for the

     removal to America &, by consequence, the peace of life is marred &

     its contents & satisfactions are departing.  There is not much

     choice between a removal & a funeral; in fact, a removal is a

     funeral, substantially, & I am tired of attending them.



They closed Dollis Hill, spent a few days at Brown's Hotel, and sailed

for America, on the Minnehaha, October 6, 1900, bidding, as Clemens

believed, and hoped, a permanent good-by to foreign travel.  They reached

New York on the 15th, triumphantly welcomed after their long nine years

of wandering.  How glad Mark Twain was to get home may be judged from his

remark to one of the many reporters who greeted him.



     "If I ever get ashore I am going to break both of my legs so I

     can't, get away again."









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext Volume 2, Part 2 of MARK TWAIN,

A BIOGRAPHY by Albert Bigelow Paine













MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY



By Albert Bigelow Paine







VOLUME III, Part 1: 1900-1907







CCXII



THE RETURN OF THE CONQUEROR



It would be hard to exaggerate the stir which the newspapers and the

public generally made over the homecoming of Mark Twain.  He had left

America, staggering under heavy obligation and set out on a pilgrimage of

redemption.  At the moment when this Mecca, was in view a great sorrow

had befallen him and, stirred a world-wide and soul-deep tide of human

sympathy.  Then there had followed such ovation as has seldom been

conferred upon a private citizen, and now approaching old age, still in

the fullness of his mental vigor, he had returned to his native soil with

the prestige of these honors upon him and the vast added glory of having

made his financial fight single-handed-and won.



He was heralded literally as a conquering hero.  Every paper in the land

had an editorial telling the story of his debts, his sorrow, and his

triumphs.



"He had behaved like Walter Scott," says Howells, "as millions rejoiced

to know who had not known how Walter Scott had behaved till they knew it

was like Clemens."



Howells acknowledges that he had some doubts as to the permanency of the

vast acclaim of the American public, remembering, or perhaps assuming, a

national fickleness.  Says Howells:



     He had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or more largely

     imagined in Europe, and I suppose it was my sense of this that

     inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider

     "the state of polite learning" among us, "You mustn't expect people

     to keep it up here as they do in England."  But it appeared that his

     countrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in

     honor of him past all precedent.



Clemens went to the Earlington Hotel and began search for a furnished

house in New York.  They would not return to Hartford--at least not yet.

The associations there were still too sad, and they immediately became

more so.  Five days after Mark Twain's return to America, his old friend

and co-worker, Charles Dudley Warner, died.  Clemens went to Hartford to

act as a pall-bearer and while there looked into the old home.  To

Sylvester Baxter, of Boston, who had been present, he wrote a few days

later:



     It was a great pleasure to me to renew the other days with you, &

     there was a pathetic pleasure in seeing Hartford & the house again;

     but I realized that if we ever enter the house again to live our

     hearts will break.  I am not sure that we shall ever be strong

     enough to endure that strain.



Even if the surroundings had been less sorrowful it is not likely that

Clemens would have returned to Hartford at this time.  He had become a

world-character, a dweller in capitals.  Everywhere he moved a world

revolved about him.  Such a figure in Germany would live naturally in

Berlin; in England London; in France, Paris; in Austria, Vienna; in

America his headquarters could only be New York.



Clemens empowered certain of his friends to find a home for him, and Mr.

Frank N. Doubleday discovered an attractive and handsomely furnished

residence at 14 West Tenth Street, which was promptly approved.

Doubleday, who was going to Boston, left orders with the agent to draw

the lease and take it up to the new tenant for signature.  To Clemens he

said:



"The house is as good as yours.  All you've got to do is to sign the

lease.  You can consider it all settled."



When Doubleday returned from Boston a few days later the agent called on

him and complained that he couldn't find Mark Twain anywhere.  It was

reported at his hotel that he had gone and left no address.  Doubleday

was mystified; then, reflecting, he had an inspiration.  He walked over

to 14 West Tenth Street and found what he had suspected--Mark Twain had

moved in.  He had convinced the caretaker that everything was all right

and he was quite at home.  Doubleday said:



"Why, you haven't executed the lease yet."



"No," said Clemens, "but you said the house was as good as mine," to

which Doubleday agreed, but suggested that they go up to the real-estate

office and give the agent notice that he was in possession of the

premises.



Doubleday's troubles were not quite over, however.  Clemens began to find

defects in his new home and assumed to hold Doubleday responsible for

them.  He sent a daily postal card complaining of the windows, furnace,

the range, the water-whatever he thought might lend interest to

Doubleday's life.  As a matter of fact, he was pleased with the place.

To MacAlister he wrote:



     We were very lucky to get this big house furnished.  There was not

     another one in town procurable that would answer us, but this one is

     all right-space enough in it for several families, the rooms all

     old-fashioned, great size.



The house at 14 West Tenth Street became suddenly one of the most

conspicuous residences in New York.  The papers immediately made its

appearance familiar.  Many people passed down that usually quiet street,

stopping to observe or point out where Mark Twain lived.  There was a

constant procession of callers of every kind.  Many were friends, old and

new, but there was a multitude of strangers.  Hundreds came merely to

express their appreciation of his work, hoping for a personal word or a

hand-shake or an autograph; but there were other hundreds who came with

this thing and that thing--axes to grind--and there were newspaper

reporters to ask his opinion on politics, or polygamy, or woman's

suffrage; on heaven and hell and happiness; on the latest novel; on the

war in Africa, the troubles in China; on anything under the sun,

important or unimportant, interesting or inane, concerning which one

might possibly hold an opinion.  He was unfailing "copy" if they could

but get a word with him.  Anything that he might choose to say upon any

subject whatever was seized upon and magnified and printed with

head-lines.  Sometimes opinions were invented for him.  If he let fall a

few words they were multiplied into a column interview.



"That reporter worked a miracle equal to the loaves and fishes," he said

of one such performance.



Many men would have become annoyed and irritable as these things

continued; but Mark Twain was greater than that.  Eventually he employed

a secretary to stand between him and the wash of the tide, as a sort of

breakwater; but he seldom lost his temper no matter what was the request

which was laid before him, for he recognized underneath it the great

tribute of a great nation.



Of course his literary valuation would be affected by the noise of the

general applause.  Magazines and syndicates besought him for manuscripts.

He was offered fifty cents and even a dollar a word for whatever he might

give them.  He felt a child-like gratification in these evidences of his

market advancement, but he was not demoralized by them.  He confined his

work to a few magazines, and in November concluded an arrangement with

the new management of Harper & Brothers, by which that firm was to have

the exclusive serial privilege of whatever he might write at a fixed rate

of twenty cents per word--a rate increased to thirty cents by a later

contract, which also provided an increased royalty for the publication of

his books.



The United States, as a nation, does not confer any special honors upon

private citizens.  We do not have decorations and titles, even though

there are times when it seems that such things might be not

inappropriately conferred.  Certain of the newspapers, more lavish in

their enthusiasm than others, were inclined to propose, as one paper

phrased it, "Some peculiar recognition--something that should appeal to

Samuel L.  Clemens, the man, rather than to Mark Twain, the literate.

Just what form this recognition should take is doubtful, for the case has

no exact precedent."



Perhaps the paper thought that Mark Twain was entitled--as he himself

once humorously suggested-to the "thanks of Congress" for having come

home alive and out of debt, but it is just as well that nothing of the

sort was ever seriously considered.  The thanks of the public at large

contained more substance, and was a tribute much more to his mind.  The

paper above quoted ended by suggesting a very large dinner and memorial

of welcome as being more in keeping with the republican idea and the

American expression of good-will.



But this was an unneeded suggestion.  If he had eaten all the dinners

proposed he would not have lived to enjoy his public honors a month.  As

it was, he accepted many more dinners than he could eat, and presently

fell into the habit of arriving when the banqueting was about over and

the after-dinner speaking about to begin.  Even so the strain told on

him.



"His friends saw that he was wearing himself out," says Howells, and

perhaps this was true, for he grew thin and pale and contracted a hacking

cough.  He did not spare himself as often as he should have done.  Once

to Richard Watson Gilder he sent this line of regrets:



     In bed with a chest cold and other company--Wednesday.

     DEAR GILDER,--I can't.  If I were a well man I could explain with

     this pencil, but in the cir---ces I will leave it all to your

     imagination.



     Was it Grady who killed himself trying to do all the dining and

     speeching?



     No, old man, no, no!     Ever yours,    MARK.





He became again the guest of honor at the Lotos Club, which had dined him

so lavishly seven years before, just previous to his financial collapse.

That former dinner had been a distinguished occasion, but never before

had the Lotos Club been so brimming with eager hospitality as on the

second great occasion.  In closing his introductory speech President

Frank Lawrence said, "We hail him as one who has borne great burdens with

manliness and courage, who has emerged from great struggles victorious,"

and the assembled diners roared out their applause.  Clemens in his reply

said:



     Your president has referred to certain burdens which I was weighted

     with.  I am glad he did, as it gives me an opportunity which I

     wanted--to speak of those debts.  You all knew what he meant when he

     referred to it, & of the poor bankrupt firm of C. L. Webster & Co.

     No one has said a word about those creditors.  There were ninety-six

     creditors in all, & not by a finger's weight did ninety-five out of

     the ninety-six add to the burden of that time.  They treated me

     well; they treated me handsomely.  I never knew I owed them

     anything; not a sign came from them.



It was like him to make that public acknowledgment.  He could not let an

unfair impression remain that any man or any set of men had laid an

unnecessary burden upon him-his sense of justice would not consent to it.

He also spoke on that occasion of certain national changes.



     How many things have happened in the seven years I have been away

     from home!  We have fought a righteous war, and a righteous war is a

     rare thing in history.  We have turned aside from our own comfort

     and seen to it that freedom should exist, not only within our own

     gates, but in our own neighborhood.  We have set Cuba free and

     placed her among the galaxy of free nations of the world.  We

     started out to set those poor Filipinos free, but why that righteous

     plan miscarried perhaps I shall never know.  We have also been

     making a creditable showing in China, and that is more than all the

     other powers can say.  The "Yellow Terror" is threatening the world,

     but no matter what happens the United States says that it has had no

     part in it.



     Since I have been away we have been nursing free silver.  We have

     watched by its cradle, we have done our best to raise that child,

     but every time it seemed to be getting along nicely along came some

     pestiferous Republican and gave it the measles or something.  I fear

     we will never raise that child.



     We've done more than that.  We elected a President four years ago.

     We've found fault and criticized him, and here a day or two ago we

     go and elect him for another four years, with votes enough to spare

     to do it over again.



One club followed another in honoring Mark Twain--the Aldine, the St.

Nicholas, the Press clubs, and other associations and societies.  His old

friends were at these dinners--Howells, Aldrich, Depew, Rogers,

ex-Speaker Reed--and they praised him and gibed him to his and their

hearts' content.



It was a political year, and he generally had something to say on matters

municipal, national, or international; and he spoke out more and more

freely, as with each opportunity he warmed more righteously to his

subject.



At the dinner given to him by the St. Nicholas Club he said, with deep

irony:



     Gentlemen, you have here the best municipal government in the world,

     and the most fragrant and the purest.  The very angels of heaven

     envy you and wish they had a government like it up there.  You got

     it by your noble fidelity to civic duty; by the stern and ever

     watchful exercise of the great powers lodged in you as lovers and

     guardians of your city; by your manly refusal to sit inert when base

     men would have invaded her high places and possessed them; by your

     instant retaliation when any insult was offered you in her person,

     or any assault was made upon her fair fame.  It is you who have made

     this government what it is, it is you who have made it the envy and

     despair of the other capitals of the world--and God bless you for

     it, gentlemen, God bless you!  And when you get to heaven at last

     they'll say with joy, "Oh, there they come, the representatives of

     the perfectest citizenship in the universe show them the archangel's

     box and turn on the limelight!"



Those hearers who in former years had been indifferent to Mark Twain's

more serious purpose began to realize that, whatever he may have been

formerly, he was by no means now a mere fun-maker, but a man of deep and

grave convictions, able to give them the fullest and most forcible

expression.  He still might make them laugh, but he also made them think,

and he stirred them to a truer gospel of patriotism.  He did not preach a

patriotism that meant a boisterous cheering of the Stars and Stripes

right or wrong, but a patriotism that proposed to keep the Stars and

Stripes clean and worth shouting for.  In an article, perhaps it was a

speech, begun at this time he wrote:



     We teach the boys to atrophy their independence.  We teach them to

     take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest

     crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter--

     exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been

     taught.  We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion

     and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, & so here in our

     democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most

     foreign to it & out of place--the delivery of our political

     conscience into somebody else's keeping.  This is patriotism on the

     Russian plan.



Howells tells of discussing these vital matters with him in "an upper

room, looking south over a quiet, open space of back yards where," he

says, "we fought our battles in behalf of the Filipinos and Boers, and he

carried on his campaign against the missionaries in China."



Howells at the time expressed an amused fear that Mark Twain's

countrymen, who in former years had expected him to be merely a humorist,

should now, in the light of his wider acceptance abroad, demand that he

be mainly serious.



But the American people were quite ready to accept him in any of his

phases, fully realizing that whatever his philosophy or doctrine it would

have somewhat of the humorous form, and whatever his humor, there would

somewhere be wisdom in it.  He had in reality changed little; for a

generation he had thought the sort of things which he now, with advanced

years and a different audience, felt warranted in uttering openly.  The

man who in '64 had written against corruption in San Francisco, who a few

years later had defended the emigrant Chinese against persecution, who at

the meetings of the Monday Evening Club had denounced hypocrisy in

politics, morals, and national issues, did not need to change to be able

to speak out against similar abuses now.  And a newer generation as

willing to herald Mark Twain as a sage as well as a humorist, and on

occasion to quite overlook the absence of the cap and bells.









CCXIII



MARK TWAIN--GENERAL SPOKESMAN



Clemens did not confine his speeches altogether to matters of reform.  At

a dinner given by the Nineteenth Century Club in November, 1900, he spoke

on the "Disappearance of Literature," and at the close of the discussion

of that subject, referring to Milton and Scott, he said:



     Professor Winchester also said something about there being no modern

     epics like "Paradise Lost."  I guess he's right.  He talked as if he

     was pretty familiar with that piece of literary work, and nobody

     would suppose that he never had read it.  I don't believe any of you

     have ever read "Paradise Lost," and you don't want to.  That's

     something that you just want to take on trust.  It's a classic, just

     as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a

     classic--something that everybody wants to have read and nobody

     wants to read.



     Professor Trent also had a good deal to say about the disappearance

     of literature.  He said that Scott would outlive all his critics.

     I guess that's true.  That fact of the business is you've got to be

     one of two ages to appreciate Scott.  When you're eighteen you can

     read Ivanhoe, and you want to wait until you're ninety to read some

     of the rest.  It takes a pretty well-regulated abstemious critic to

     live ninety years.



But a few days later he was back again in the forefront of reform,

preaching at the Berkeley Lyceum against foreign occupation in China.

It was there that he declared himself a Boxer.



     Why should not China be free from the foreigners, who are only

     making trouble on her soil?  If they would only all go home what a

     pleasant place China would be for the Chinese!  We do not allow

     Chinamen to come here, and I say, in all seriousness, that it would

     be a graceful thing to let China decide who shall go there.



     China never wanted foreigners any more than foreigners wanted

     Chinamen, and on this question I am with the Boxers every time.  The

     Boxer is a patriot.  He loves his country better than he does the

     countries of other people.  I wish him success.  We drive the

     Chinaman out of our country; the Boxer believes in driving us out of

     his country.  I am a Boxer, too, on those terms.



Introducing Winston Churchill, of England, at a dinner some weeks later,

he explained how generous England and America had been in not requiring

fancy rates for "extinguished missionaries" in China as Germany had done.

Germany had required territory and cash, he said, in payment for her

missionaries, while the United States and England had been willing to

settle for produce--firecrackers and tea.



The Churchill introduction would seem to have been his last speech for

the year 1900, and he expected it, with one exception, to be the last for

a long time.  He realized that he was tired and that the strain upon him

made any other sort of work out of the question.  Writing to MacAlister

at the end of the year, he said, "I seem to have made many speeches, but

it is not so.  It is not more than ten, I think."  Still, a respectable

number in the space of two months, considering that each was carefully

written and committed to memory, and all amid crushing social pressure.

Again to MacAlister:



     I declined 7 banquets yesterday (which is double the daily average)

     & answered 29 letters.  I have slaved at my mail every day since we

     arrived in mid-October, but Jean is learning to typewrite &

     presently I'll dictate & thereby save some scraps of time.



He added that after January 4th he did not intend to speak again for a

year--that he would not speak then only that the matter concerned the

reform of city government.



The occasion of January 4, 1901, was a rather important one.  It was a

meeting of the City Club, then engaged in the crusade for municipal

reform.  Wheeler H. Peckham presided, and Bishop Potter made the opening

address.  It all seems like ancient history now, and perhaps is not very

vital any more; but the movement was making a great stir then, and Mark

Twain's declaration that he believed forty-nine men out of fifty were

honest, and that the forty-nine only needed to organize to disqualify the

fiftieth man (always organized for crime), was quoted as a sort of slogan

for reform.



Clemens was not permitted to keep his resolution that he wouldn't speak

again that year.  He had become a sort of general spokesman on public

matters, and demands were made upon him which could not be denied.  He

declined a Yale alumni dinner, but he could not refuse to preside at the

Lincoln Birthday celebration at Carnegie Hall, February 11th, where he

must introduce Watterson as the speaker of the evening.



"Think of it!" he wrote Twichell.  "Two old rebels functioning there: I

as president and Watterson as orator of the day!  Things have changed

somewhat in these forty years, thank God!"



The Watterson introduction is one of the choicest of Mark Twain's

speeches--a pure and perfect example of simple eloquence, worthy of the

occasion which gave it utterance, worthy in spite of its playful

paragraphs (or even because of them, for Lincoln would have loved them),

to become the matrix of that imperishable Gettysburg phrase with which he

makes his climax.  He opened by dwelling for a moment on Colonel

Watterson as a soldier, journalist, orator, statesman, and patriot; then

he said:



     It is a curious circumstance that without collusion of any kind, but

     merely in obedience to a strange and pleasant and dramatic freak of

     destiny, he and I, kinsmen by blood--[Colonel Watterson's forebears

     had intermarried with the Lamptons.]--for we are that--and one-time

     rebels--for we were that--should be chosen out of a million

     surviving quondam rebels to come here and bare our heads in

     reverence and love of that noble soul whom 40 years ago we tried

     with all our hearts and all our strength to defeat and dispossess--

     Abraham Lincoln!  Is the Rebellion ended and forgotten?  Are the

     Blue and the Gray one to-day?  By authority of this sign we may

     answer yes; there was a Rebellion--that incident is closed.



     I was born and reared in a slave State, my father was a slaveowner;

     and in the Civil War I was a second lieutenant in the Confederate

     service.  For a while.  This second cousin of mine, Colonel

     Watterson, the orator of this present occasion, was born and reared

     in a slave State, was a colonel in the Confederate service, and

     rendered me such assistance as he could in my self-appointed great

     task of annihilating the Federal armies and breaking up the Union.

     I laid my plans with wisdom and foresight, and if Colonel Watterson

     had obeyed my orders I should have succeeded in my giant

     undertaking.  It was my intention to drive General Grant into the

     Pacific--if I could get transportation--and I told Colonel Watterson

     to surround the Eastern armies and wait till I came.  But he was

     insubordinate, and stood upon a punctilio of military etiquette; he

     refused to take orders from a second lieutenant--and the Union was

     saved.  This is the first time that this secret has been revealed.

     Until now no one outside the family has known the facts.  But there

     they stand: Watterson saved the Union.  Yet to this day that man

     gets no pension.  Those were great days, splendid days.  What an

     uprising it was!  For the hearts of the whole nation, North and

     South, were in the war.  We of the South were not ashamed; for, like

     the men of the North, we were fighting for 'flags we loved; and when

     men fight for these things, and under these convictions, with

     nothing sordid to tarnish their cause, that cause is holy, the blood

     spilt for it is sacred, the life that is laid down for it is

     consecrated.  To-day we no longer regret the result, to-day we are

     glad it came out as it did, but we are not ashamed that we did our

     endeavor; we did our bravest best, against despairing odds, for the

     cause which was precious to us and which our consciences approved;

     and we are proud--and you are proud--the kindred blood in your veins

     answers when I say it--you are proud of the record we made in those

     mighty collisions in the fields.



     What an uprising it was!  We did not have to supplicate for soldiers

     on either side.  "We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred

     thousand strong!"  That was the music North and South.  The very

     choicest young blood and brawn and brain rose up from Maine to the

     Gulf and flocked to the standards--just as men always do when in

     their eyes their cause is great and fine and their hearts are in it;

     just as men flocked to the Crusades, sacrificing all they possessed

     to the cause, and entering cheerfully upon hardships which we cannot

     even imagine in this age, and upon toilsome and wasting journeys

     which in our time would be the equivalent of circumnavigating the

     globe five times over.



     North and South we put our hearts into that colossal struggle, and

     out of it came the blessed fulfilment of the prophecy of the

     immortal Gettysburg speech which said: "We here highly resolve that

     these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God,

     shall have a new birth of freedom; and that a government of the

     people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the

     earth."



     We are here to honor the birthday of the greatest citizen, and the

     noblest and the best, after Washington, that this land or any other

     has yet produced.  The old wounds are healed, you and we are

     brothers again; you testify it by honoring two of us, once soldiers

     of the Lost Cause, and foes of your great and good leader--with the

     privilege of assisting here; and we testify it by laying our honest

     homage at the feet of Abraham Lincoln, and in forgetting that you of

     the North and we of the South were ever enemies, and remembering

     only that we are now indistinguishably fused together and nameable

     by one common great name--Americans!









CCXIV



MARK TWAIN AND THE MISSIONARIES



Mark Twain had really begun his crusade for reform soon after his arrival

in America in a practical hand-to-hand manner.  His housekeeper, Katie

Leary, one night employed a cabman to drive her from the Grand Central

Station to the house at 14 West Tenth Street.  No contract had been made

as to price, and when she arrived there the cabman's extortionate charge

was refused.  He persisted in it, and she sent into the house for her

employer.  Of all men, Mark Twain was the last one to countenance an

extortion.  He reasoned with the man kindly enough at first; when the

driver at last became abusive Clemens demanded his number, which was at

first refused.  In the end he paid the legal fare, and in the morning

entered a formal complaint, something altogether unexpected, for the

American public is accustomed to suffering almost any sort of imposition

to avoid trouble and publicity.



In some notes which Clemens had made in London four years earlier he

wrote:



     If you call a policeman to settle the dispute you can depend on one

     thing--he will decide it against you every time.  And so will the

     New York policeman.  In London if you carry your case into court the

     man that is entitled to win it will win it.  In New York--but no one

     carries a cab case into court there.  It is my impression that it is

     now more than thirty years since any one has carried a cab case into

     court there.



Nevertheless, he was promptly on hand when the case was called to sustain

the charge and to read the cabdrivers' union and the public in general a

lesson in good-citizenship.  At the end of the hearing, to a

representative of the union he said:



"This is not a matter of sentiment, my dear sir.  It is simply practical

business.  You cannot imagine that I am making money wasting an hour or

two of my time prosecuting a case in which I can have no personal

interest whatever.  I am doing this just as any citizen should do.  He

has no choice.  He has a distinct duty.  He is a non-classified

policeman.  Every citizen is, a policeman, and it is his duty to assist

the police and the magistracy in every way he can, and give his time, if

necessary, to do so.  Here is a man who is a perfectly natural product of

an infamous system in this city--a charge upon the lax patriotism in this

city of New York that this thing can exist.  You have encouraged him, in

every way you know how to overcharge.  He is not the criminal here at

all.  The criminal is the citizen of New York and the absence of

patriotism.  I am not here to avenge myself on him.  I have no quarrel

with him.  My quarrel is with the citizens of New York, who have

encouraged him, and who created him by encouraging him to overcharge in

this way."



The driver's license was suspended.  The case made a stir in the

newspapers, and it is not likely that any one incident ever contributed

more to cab-driving morals in New York City.



But Clemens had larger matters than this in prospect.  His many speeches

on municipal and national abuses he felt were more or less ephemeral.  He

proposed now to write himself down more substantially and for a wider

hearing.  The human race was behaving very badly: unspeakable corruption

was rampant in the city; the Boers were being oppressed in South Africa;

the natives were being murdered in the Philippines; Leopold of Belgium

was massacring and mutilating the blacks in the Congo, and the allied

powers, in the cause of Christ, were slaughtering the Chinese.  In his

letters he had more than once boiled over touching these matters, and for

New-Year's Eve, 1900, had written:





         A GREETING FROM THE NINETEENTH TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY



     I bring you the stately nation named Christendom, returning,

     bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiao-

     Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul

     full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of

     pious hypocrisies.  Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking-

     glass.--[Prepared for Red Cross Society watch-meeting, which was

     postponed until March.  Clemens recalled his "Greeting" for that

     reason and for one other, which he expressed thus:  "The list of

     greeters thus far issued by you contains only vague generalities and

     one definite name--mine: 'Some kings and queens and Mark Twain.' Now

     I am not enjoying this sparkling solitude and distinction.  It makes

     me feel like a circus-poster in a graveyard."]



This was a sort of preliminary.  Then, restraining himself no longer, he

embodied his sentiments in an article for the North American Review

entitled, "To the Person Sitting in Darkness."  There was crying need for

some one to speak the right word.  He was about the only one who could do

it and be certain of a universal audience.  He took as his text some

Christmas Eve clippings from the New York Tribune and Sun which he had

been saving for this purpose.  The Tribune clipping said:



     Christmas will dawn in the United States over a people full of hope

     and aspiration and good cheer.  Such a condition means contentment

     and happiness.  The carping grumbler who may here and there go forth

     will find few to listen to him.  The majority will wonder what is

     the matter with him, and pass on.



A Sun clipping depicted the "terrible offenses against humanity committed

in the name of politics in some of the most notorious East Side districts

"--the unmissionaried, unpoliced darker New York.  The Sun declared that

they could not be pictured even verbally.  But it suggested enough to

make the reader shudder at the hideous depths of vice in the sections

named.  Another clipping from the same paper reported the "Rev. Mr.

Ament, of the American Board of Foreign Missions," as having collected

indemnities for Boxer damages in China at the rate of three hundred taels

for each murder, "full payment for all destroyed property belonging to

Christians, and national fines amounting to thirteen times the

indemnity."  It quoted Mr. Ament as saying that the money so obtained was

used for the propagation of the Gospel, and that the amount so collected

was moderate when compared with the amount secured by the Catholics, who

had demanded, in addition to money, life for life, that is to say, "head

for head"--in one district six hundred and eighty heads having been so

collected.



The despatch made Mr. Ament say a great deal more than this, but the gist

here is enough.  Mark Twain, of course, was fiercely stirred.  The

missionary idea had seldom appealed to him, and coupled with this

business of bloodshed, it was less attractive than usual.  He printed the

clippings in full, one following the other; then he said:



     By happy luck we get all these glad tidings on Christmas Eve--just

     the time to enable us to celebrate the day with proper gaiety and

     enthusiasm.  Our spirits soar and we find we can even make jokes;

     taels I win, heads you lose.



He went on to score Ament, to compare the missionary policy in China to

that of the Pawnee Indians, and to propose for him a monument--

subscriptions to be sent to the American Board.  He denounced the

national policies in Africa, China, and the Philippines, and showed by

the reports and by the private letters of soldiers home, how cruel and

barbarous and fiendish had been the warfare made by those whose avowed

purpose was to carry the blessed light of civilization and Gospel "to the

benighted native"--how in very truth these priceless blessings had been

handed on the point of a bayonet to the "Person Sitting in Darkness."



Mark Twain never wrote anything more scorching, more penetrating in its

sarcasm, more fearful in its revelation of injustice and hypocrisy, than

his article "To the Person Sitting in Darkness."  He put aquafortis on

all the raw places, and when it was finished he himself doubted the

wisdom of printing it.  Howells, however, agreed that it should be

published, and "it ought to be illustrated by Dan Beard," he added, "with

such pictures as he made for the Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but you'd

better hang yourself afterward."



Meeting Beard a few days later, Clemens mentioned the matter and said:



"So if you make the pictures, you hang with me."



But pictures were not required.  It was published in the North American

Review for February, 1901, as the opening article; after which the

cyclone.  Two storms moving in opposite directions produce a cyclone, and

the storms immediately developed; one all for Mark Twain and his

principles, the other all against him.  Every paper in England and

America commented on it editorially, with bitter denunciations or with

eager praise, according to their lights and convictions.



At 14 West Tenth Street letters, newspaper clippings, documents poured in

by the bushel--laudations, vituperations, denunciations, vindications; no

such tumult ever occurred in a peaceful literary home.  It was really as

if he had thrown a great missile into the human hive, one-half of which

regarded it as a ball of honey and the remainder as a cobblestone.

Whatever other effect it may have had, it left no thinking person

unawakened.



Clemens reveled in it.  W. A. Rogers, in Harper's Weekly, caricatured him

as Tom Sawyer in a snow fort, assailed by the shower of snowballs,

"having the time of his life."  Another artist, Fred Lewis, pictured him

as Huck Finn with a gun.



The American Board was naturally disturbed.  The Ament clipping which

Clemens had used had been public property for more than a month--its

authenticity never denied; but it was immediately denied now, and the

cable kept hot with inquiries.



The Rev. Judson Smith, one of the board, took up the defense of Dr.

Ament, declaring him to be one who had suffered for the cause, and asked

Mark Twain, whose "brilliant article," he said, "would produce an effect

quite beyond the reach of plain argument," not to do an innocent man an

injustice.  Clemens in the same paper replied that such was not his

intent, that Mr. Ament in his report had simply arraigned himself.



Then it suddenly developed that the cable report had "grossly

exaggerated" the amount of Mr. Ament's collections.  Instead of thirteen

times the indemnity it should have read "one and a third times" the

indemnity; whereupon, in another open letter, the board demanded

retraction and apology.  Clemens would not fail to make the apology--at

least he would explain.  It was precisely the kind of thing that would

appeal to him--the delicate moral difference between a demand thirteen

times as great as it should be and a demand that was only one and a third

times the correct amount.  "To My Missionary Critics," in the North

American Review for April (1901), was his formal and somewhat lengthy

reply.



"I have no prejudice against apologies," he wrote.  "I trust I shall

never withhold one when it is due."



He then proceeded to make out his case categorically.  Touching the

exaggerated indemnity, he said:



To Dr. Smith the "thirteen-fold-extra" clearly stood for "theft and

extortion," and he was right, distinctly right, indisputably right.  He

manifestly thinks that when it got scaled away down to a mere "one-third"

a little thing like that was some other than "theft and extortion."  Why,

only the board knows!



I will try to explain this difficult problem so that the board can get an

idea of it.  If a pauper owes me a dollar and I catch him unprotected and

make him pay me fourteen dollars thirteen of it is "theft and extortion."

If I make him pay only one dollar thirty-three and a third cents the

thirty-three and a third cents are "theft and extortion," just the same.



I will put it in another way still simpler.  If a man owes me one dog--

any kind of a dog, the breed is of no consequence--and I--but let it go;

the board would never understand it.  It can't understand these involved

and difficult things.



He offered some further illustrations, including the "Tale of a King and

His Treasure" and another tale entitled "The Watermelons."



     I have it now.  Many years ago, when I was studying for the gallows,

     I had a dear comrade, a youth who was not in my line, but still a

     scrupulously good fellow though devious.  He was preparing to

     qualify for a place on the board, for there was going to be a

     vacancy by superannuation in about five years.  This was down South,

     in the slavery days.  It was the nature of the negro then, as now,

     to steal watermelons.  They stole three of the melons of an adoptive

     brother of mine, the only good ones he had.  I suspected three of a

     neighbor's negroes, but there was no proof, and, besides, the

     watermelons in those negroes' private patches were all green and

     small and not up to indemnity standard.  But in the private patches

     of three other negroes there was a number of competent melons.  I

     consulted with my comrade, the understudy of the board.  He said

     that if I would approve his arrangements he would arrange.  I said,

     "Consider me the board; I approve; arrange."  So he took a gun and

     went and collected three large melons for my brother-on-the-

     halfshell, and one over.  I was greatly pleased and asked:



     "Who gets the extra one?"

     "Widows and orphans."



     "A good idea, too.  Why didn't you take thirteen?"



     "It would have been wrong; a crime, in fact-theft and extortion."



     "What is the one-third extra--the odd melon--the same?"



     It caused him to reflect.  But there was no result.



     The justice of the peace was a stern man.  On the trial he found

     fault with the scheme and required us to explain upon what we based

     our strange conduct--as he called it.  The understudy said:



     "On the custom of the niggers.  They all do it."--[The point had

     been made by the board that it was the Chinese custom to make the

     inhabitants of a village responsible for individual crimes; and

     custom, likewise, to collect a third in excess of the damage, such

     surplus having been applied to the support of widows and orphans of

     the slain converts.]



     The justice forgot his dignity and descended to sarcasm.



     "Custom of the niggers!  Are our morals so inadequate that we have

     to borrow of niggers?"



     Then he said to the jury: "Three melons were owing; they were

     collected from persons not proven to owe them: this is theft; they

     were collected by compulsion: this is extortion.  A melon was added

     for the widows and orphans.  It was owed by no one.  It is another

     theft, another extortion.  Return it whence it came, with the

     others.  It is not permissible here to apply to any purpose goods

     dishonestly obtained; not even to the feeding of widows and orphans,

     for this would be to put a shame upon charity and dishonor it."



     He said it in open court, before everybody, and to me it did not

     seem very kind.



It was in the midst of the tumult that Clemens, perhaps feeling the need

of sacred melody, wrote to Andrew Carnegie:



DEAR SIR & FRIEND,--You seem to be in prosperity.  Could you lend an

admirer $1.50 to buy a hymn-book with?  God will bless you.  I feel it;

I know it.



N. B.--If there should be other applications, this one not to count.

                                             Yours, MARK.



P. S.-Don't send the hymn-book; send the money; I want to make the

selection myself.





Carnegie answered:



     Nothing less than a two-dollar & a half hymn-book gilt will do for

     you.  Your place in the choir (celestial) demands that & you shall

     have it.



     There's a new Gospel of Saint Mark in the North American which I

     like better than anything I've read for many a day.



     I am willing to borrow a thousand dollars to distribute that sacred

     message in proper form, & if the author don't object may I send that

     sum, when I can raise it, to the Anti-Imperialist League, Boston, to

     which I am a contributor, the only missionary work I am responsible

     for.



     Just tell me you are willing & many thousands of the holy little

     missals will go forth.  This inimitable satire is to become a

     classic.  I count among my privileges in life that I know you, the

     author.



Perhaps a few more of the letters invited by Mark Twain's criticism of

missionary work in China may still be of interest to the reader:

Frederick T. Cook, of the Hospital Saturday and Sunday Association,

wrote: "I hail you as the Voltaire of America.  It is a noble

distinction.  God bless you and see that you weary not in well-doing

in this noblest, sublimest of crusades."



Ministers were by no means all against him.  The associate pastor of the

Every-day Church, in Boston, sent this line: "I want to thank you for

your matchless article in the current North American.  It must make

converts of well-nigh all who read it."



But a Boston school-teacher was angry.  "I have been reading the North

American," she wrote, "and I am filled with shame and remorse that I have

dreamed of asking you to come to Boston to talk to the teachers."



On the outside of the envelope Clemens made this pencil note:



"Now, I suppose I offended that young lady by having an opinion of my

own, instead of waiting and copying hers.  I never thought.  I suppose

she must be as much as twenty-five, and probably the only patriot in the

country."



A critic with a sense of humor asked: "Please excuse seeming

impertinence, but were you ever adjudged insane?  Be honest.  How much

money does the devil give you for arraigning Christianity and missionary

causes?"



But there were more of the better sort.  Edward S. Martin, in a grateful

letter, said: "How gratifying it is to feel that we have a man among us

who understands the rarity of the plain truth, and who delights to utter

it, and has the gift of doing so without cant and with not too much

seriousness."



Sir Hiram Maxim wrote: "I give you my candid opinion that what you have

done is of very great value to the civilization of the world.  There is

no man living whose words carry greater weight than your own, as no one's

writings are so eagerly sought after by all classes."



Clemens himself in his note-book set down this aphorism:



"Do right and you will be conspicuous."









CCXV



SUMMER AT "THE LAIR"



In June Clemens took the family to Saranac Lake, to Ampersand.  They

occupied a log cabin which he called "The Lair," on the south shore, near

the water's edge, a remote and beautiful place where, as had happened

before, they were so comfortable and satisfied that they hoped to return

another summer.  There were swimming and boating and long walks in the

woods; the worry and noise of the world were far away.  They gave little

enough attention to the mails.  They took only a weekly paper, and were

likely to allow it to lie in the postoffice uncalled for.  Clemens,

especially, loved the place, and wrote to Twichell:



     I am on the front porch (lower one-main deck) of our little bijou of

     a dwelling-house.  The lake edge (Lower Saranac) is so nearly under

     me that I can't see the shore, but only the water, small-poxed with

     rain splashes--for there is a heavy down pour.  It is charmingly

     like sitting snuggled up on a ship's deck with the stretching sea

     all around but very much more satisfactory, for at sea a rainstorm

     is depressing, while here of course the effect engendered is just a

     deep sense of comfort & contentment.  The heavy forest shuts us

     solidly in on three sides--there are no neighbors.  There are

     beautiful little tan-colored impudent squirrels about.  They take

     tea 5 P.M. (not invited) at the table in the woods where Jean does

     my typewriting, & one of them has been brave enough to sit upon

     Jean's knee with his tail curved over his back & munch his food.

     They come to dinner 7 P.M.  on the front porch (not invited), but

     Clara drives them away.  It is an occupation which requires some

     industry & attention to business.  They all have the one name-

     Blennerhasset, from Burr's friend--& none of them answers to it

     except when hungry.



Clemens could work at "The Lair," often writing in shady seclusions along

the shore, and he finished there the two-part serial,--[ Published in

Harper's Magazine for January and February, 1902.]--"The Double-

Barrelled Detective Story," intended originally as a burlesque on

Sherlock Holmes.  It did not altogether fulfil its purpose, and is hardly

to be ranked as one of Mark Twain's successes.  It contains, however, one

paragraph at least by which it is likely to be remembered, a hoax--his

last one--on the reader.  It runs as follows:



     It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October.  The lilacs and

     laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and

     flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind nature

     for the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops

     and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their

     purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the

     slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable

     deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the

     empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing;

     everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God.



The warm light and luxury of this paragraph are factitious.  The careful

reader will, note that its various accessories are ridiculously

associated, and only the most careless reader will accept the oesophagus

as a bird.  But it disturbed a great many admirers, and numerous letters

of inquiry came wanting to know what it was all about.  Some suspected

the joke and taunted him with it; one such correspondent wrote:



     MY DEAR MARK TWAIN,--Reading your "Double-Barrelled Detective Story"

     in the January Harper's late one night I came to the paragraph where

     you so beautifully describe "a crisp and spicy morning in early

     October."  I read along down the paragraph, conscious only of its

     woozy sound, until I brought up with a start against your oesophagus

     in the empty sky.  Then I read the paragraph again.  Oh, Mark Twain!

     Mark Twain!  How could you do it?  Put a trap like that into the

     midst of a tragical story?  Do serenity and peace brood over you

     after you have done such a thing?



     Who lit the lilacs, and which end up do they hang?  When did larches

     begin to flame, and who set out the pomegranates in that canyon?

     What are deciduous flowers, and do they always "bloom in the fall,

     tra la"?



     I have been making myself obnoxious to various people by demanding

     their opinion of that paragraph without telling them the name of the

     author.  They say, "Very well done."  "The alliteration is so

     pretty."  "What's an oesophagus, a bird?"  "What's it all mean,

     anyway?"  I tell them it means Mark Twain, and that an oesophagus is

     a kind of swallow.  Am I right?  Or is it a gull?  Or a gullet?



     Hereafter if you must write such things won't you please be so kind

     as to label them?

                              Very sincerely yours,

                                             ALLETTA F. DEAN.



Mark Twain to Miss Dean:



     Don't you give that oesophagus away again or I'll never trust you

     with another privacy!



So many wrote, that Clemens finally felt called upon to make public

confession, and as one searching letter had been mailed from Springfield,

Massachusetts, he made his reply through the Republican of that city.

After some opening comment he said:



     I published a short story lately & it was in that that I put the

     oesophagus.  I will say privately that I expected it to bother some

     people--in fact, that was the intention--but the harvest has been

     larger than I was calculating upon.  The oesophagus has gathered in

     the guilty and the innocent alike, whereas I was only fishing for

     the innocent--the innocent and confiding.



He quoted a letter from a schoolmaster in the Philippines who thought the

passage beautiful with the exception of the curious creature which "slept

upon motionless wings."  Said Clemens:



     Do you notice?  Nothing in the paragraph disturbed him but that one

     word.  It shows that that paragraph was most ably constructed for

     the deception it was intended to put upon the reader.  It was my

     intention that it should read plausibly, and it is now plain that it

     does; it was my intention that it should be emotional and touching,

     and you see yourself that it fetched this public instructor.  Alas!

     if I had but left that one treacherous word out I should have

     scored, scored everywhere, and the paragraph would have slidden

     through every reader's sensibilities like oil and left not a

     suspicion behind.



     The other sample inquiry is from a professor in a New England

     university.  It contains one naughty word (which I cannot bear to

     suppress), but he is not in the theological department, so it is no

     harm:



     "DEAR MR. CLEMENS,--'Far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus

     slept upon motionless wing.'



     "It is not often I get a chance to read much periodical literature,

     but I have just gone through at this belated period, with much

     gratification and edification, your 'Double-Barrelled Detective

     Story.'



     "But what in hell is an oesophagus?  I keep one myself, but it never

     sleeps in the air or anywhere else.  My profession is to deal with

     words, and oesophagus interested me the moment I lighted upon it.

     But, as a companion of my youth used to say, 'I'll be eternally, co-

     eternally cussed' if I can make it out.  Is it a joke or am I an

     ignoramus?"



     Between you and me, I was almost ashamed of having fooled that man,

     but for pride's sake I was not going to say so.  I wrote and told

     him it was a joke--and that is what I am now saying to my

     Springfield inquirer.  And I told him to carefully read the whole

     paragraph and he would find not a vestige of sense in any detail of

     it.  This also I recommend to my Springfield inquirer.



     I have confessed.  I am sorry--partially.  I will not do so any

     more--for the present.  Don't ask me any more questions; let the

     oesophagus have a rest--on his same old motionless wing.



He wrote Twichell that the story had been a six-day 'tour de force',

twenty-five thousand words, and he adds:



     How long it takes a literary seed to sprout sometimes! This seed was

     planted in your house many years ago when you sent me to bed with a

     book not heard of by me until then--Sherlock Holmes .  .  .  .

     I've done a grist of writing here this summer, but not for

     publication soon, if ever.  I did write two satisfactory articles

     for early print, but I've burned one of them & have buried the other

     in my large box of posthumous stuff.  I've got stacks of literary

     remains piled up there.



Early in August Clemens went with H. H. Rogers in his yacht Kanawha on a

cruise to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.  Rogers had made up a party,

including ex-Speaker Reed, Dr. Rice, and Col. A. G. Paine.  Young Harry

Rogers also made one of the party.  Clemens kept a log of the cruise,

certain entries of which convey something of its spirit.  On the 11th, at

Yarmouth, he wrote:



     Fog-bound.  The garrison went ashore.  Officers visited the yacht in

     the evening & said an anvil had been missed.  Mr. Rogers paid for

     the anvil.



     August 13th.  There is a fine picture-gallery here; the sheriff

     photographed the garrison, with the exception of Harry (Rogers) and

     Mr. Clemens.



     August 14th.  Upon complaint of Mr. Reed another dog was procured.

     He said he had been a sailor all his life, and considered it

     dangerous to trust a ship to a dog-watch with only one dog in it.



     Poker, for a change.



     August 15th.  To Rockland, Maine, in the afternoon, arriving about 6

     P.M.  In the night Dr. Rice baited the anchor with his winnings &

     caught a whale 90 feet long.  He said so himself.  It is thought

     that if there had been another witness like Dr. Rice the whale would

     have been longer.



     August 16th.  We could have had a happy time in Bath but for the

     interruptions caused by people who wanted Mr. Reed to explain votes

     of the olden time or give back the money.  Mr. Rogers recouped them.



     Another anvil missed.  The descendant of Captain Kidd is the only

     person who does not blush for these incidents.  Harry and Mr.

     Clemens blush continually.  It is believed that if the rest of the

     garrison were like these two the yacht would be welcome everywhere

     instead of being quarantined by the police in all the ports.  Mr.

     Clemens & Harry have attracted a great deal of attention, & men have

     expressed a resolve to turn over a new leaf & copy after them from

     this out.



     Evening.  Judge Cohen came over from another yacht to pay his

     respects to Harry and Mr. Clemens, he having heard of their

     reputation from the clergy of these coasts.  He was invited by the

     gang to play poker apparently as a courtesy & in a spirit of seeming

     hospitality, he not knowing them & taking it all at par.  Mr. Rogers

     lent him clothes to go home in.



     August 17th. The Reformed Statesman growling and complaining again--

     not in a frank, straightforward way, but talking at the Commodore,

     while letting on to be talking to himself.  This time he was

     dissatisfied about the anchor watch; said it was out of date,

     untrustworthy, & for real efficiency didn't begin with the

     Waterbury, & was going on to reiterate, as usual, that he had been a

     pilot all his life & blamed if he ever saw, etc., etc., etc.



     But he was not allowed to finish.  We put him ashore at Portland.



That is to say, Reed landed at Portland, the rest of the party returning

with the yacht.



"We had a noble good time in the yacht," Clemens wrote Twichell on their

return.  "We caught a Chinee missionary and drowned him."



Twichell had been invited to make one of the party, and this letter was

to make him feel sorry he had not accepted.









CCXVI



RIVERDALE--A YALE DEGREE



The Clemens household did not return to 14 West Tenth Street.  They spent

a week in Elmira at the end of September, and after a brief stop in New

York took up their residence on the northern metropolitan boundary, at

Riverdale-on-the-Hudson, in the old Appleton home.  They had permanently

concluded not to return to Hartford.  They had put the property there

into an agent's hands for sale.  Mrs. Clemens never felt that she had the

strength to enter the house again.



They had selected the Riverdale place with due consideration.  They

decided that they must have easy access to the New York center, but they

wished also to have the advantage of space and spreading lawn and trees,

large rooms, and light.  The Appleton homestead provided these things.

It was a house built in the first third of the last century by one of the

Morris family, so long prominent in New York history.  On passing into

the Appleton ownership it had been enlarged and beautified and named

"Holbrook Hall."  It overlooked the Hudson and the Palisades.  It had

associations: the Roosevelt family had once lived there, Huxley, Darwin,

Tyndall, and others of their intellectual rank had been entertained there

during its occupation by the first Appleton, the founder of the

publishing firm.  The great hall of the added wing was its chief feature.

Clemens once remembered:



"We drifted from room to room on our tour of inspection, always with a

growing doubt as to whether we wanted that house or not; but at last,

when we arrived in a dining-room that was 60 feet long, 30 feet wide, and

had two great fireplaces in it, that settled it."



There were pleasant neighbors at Riverdale, and had it not been for the

illnesses that seemed always ready to seize upon that household the home

there might have been ideal.  They loved the place presently, so much so

that they contemplated buying it, but decided that it was too costly.

They began to prospect for other places along the Hudson shore.  They

were anxious to have a home again--one that they could call their own.



Among the many pleasant neighbors at Riverdale were the Dodges, the

Quincy Adamses, and the Rev. Mr. Carstensen, a liberal-minded minister

with whom Clemens easily affiliated.  Clemens and Carstensen visited back

and forth and exchanged views.  Once Mr. Carstensen told him that he was

going to town to dine with a party which included the Reverend Gottheil,

a Catholic bishop, an Indian Buddhist, and a Chinese scholar of the

Confucian faith, after which they were all going to a Yiddish theater.

Clemens said:



"Well, there's only one more thing you need to make the party complete--

that is, either Satan or me."



Howells often came to Riverdale.  He was living in a New York apartment,

and it was handy and made an easy and pleasant outing for him.  He says:



"I began to see them again on something like the sweet old terms.  They

lived far more unpretentiously than they used, and I think with a notion

of economy, which they had never very successfully practised.  I recall

that at the end of a certain year in Hartford, when they had been saving

and paying cash for everything, Clemens wrote, reminding me of their

avowed experiment, and asking me to guess how many bills they had at New-

Year's; he hastened to say that a horse-car would not have held them.  At

Riverdale they kept no carriage, and there was a snowy night when I drove

up to their handsome old mansion in the station carryall, which was

crusted with mud, as from the going down of the Deluge after transporting

Noah and his family from the Ark to whatever point they decided to settle

provisionally.  But the good talk, the rich talk, the talk that could

never suffer poverty of mind or soul was there, and we jubilantly found

ourselves again in our middle youth."



Both Howells and Clemens were made doctors of letters by Yale that year

and went over in October to receive their degrees.  It was Mark Twain's

second Yale degree, and it was the highest rank that an American

institution of learning could confer.



Twichell wrote:



I want you to understand, old fellow, that it will be in its intention

the highest public compliment, and emphatically so in your case, for it

will be tendered you by a corporation of gentlemen, the majority of whom

do not at all agree with the views on important questions which you have

lately promulgated in speech and in writing, and with which you are

identified to the public mind.  They grant, of course, your right to hold

and express those views, though for themselves they don't like 'em; but

in awarding you the proposed laurel they will make no count of that

whatever.  Their action will appropriately signify simply and solely

their estimate of your merit and rank as a man of letters, and so, as I

say, the compliment of it will be of the pure, unadulterated quality.



Howells was not especially eager to go, and tried to conspire with

Clemens to arrange some excuse which would keep them at home.



I remember with satisfaction [he wrote] our joint success in keeping away

from the Concord Centennial in 1875, and I have been thinking we might

help each other in this matter of the Yale Anniversary.  What are your

plans for getting left, or shall you trust to inspiration?



Their plans did not avail.  Both Howells and Clemens went to New Haven to

receive their honors.



When they had returned, Howells wrote formally, as became the new rank:



     DEAR SIR,--I have long been an admirer of your complete works,

     several of which I have read, and I am with you shoulder to shoulder

     in the cause of foreign missions.  I would respectfully request a

     personal interview, and if you will appoint some day and hour most

     inconvenient to you I will call at your baronial hall.  I cannot

     doubt, from the account of your courtesy given me by the Twelve

     Apostles, who once visited you in your Hartford home and were

     mistaken for a syndicate of lightning-rod men, that our meeting will

     be mutually agreeable.



                              Yours truly,

                                        W. D. HOWELLS.

     DR. CLEMENS.









CCXVII



MARK TWAIN IN POLITICS



There was a campaign for the mayoralty of New York City that fall, with

Seth Low on the Fusion ticket against Edward M. Shepard as the Tammany

candidate.  Mark Twain entered the arena to try to defeat Tammany Hall.

He wrote and he spoke in favor of clean city government and police

reform.  He was savagely in earnest and openly denounced the clan of

Croker, individually and collectively.  He joined a society called 'The

Acorns'; and on the 17th of October, at a dinner given by the order at

the Waldorf-Astoria, delivered a fierce arraignment, in which he

characterized Croker as the Warren Hastings of New York.  His speech was

really a set of extracts from Edmund Burke's great impeachment of

Hastings, substituting always the name of Croker, and paralleling his

career with that of the ancient boss of the East India Company.



It was not a humorous speech.  It was too denunciatory for that.  It

probably contained less comic phrasing than any former effort.  There is

hardly even a suggestion of humor from beginning to end.  It concluded

with this paraphrase of Burke's impeachment:



     I impeach Richard Croker of high crimes and misdemeanors.  I impeach

     him in the name of the people, whose trust he has betrayed.



     I impeach him in the name of all the people of America, whose

     national character he has dishonored.



     I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of

     justice which he has violated.



     I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has

     cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every

     age, rank, situation, and condition of life.



The Acorn speech was greatly relied upon for damage to the Tammany ranks,

and hundreds of thousands of copies of it were printed and circulated.--

[The "Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany" speech had originally been

written as an article for the North American Review.]



Clemens was really heart and soul in the campaign.  He even joined a

procession that marched up Broadway, and he made a speech to a great

assemblage at Broadway and Leonard Street, when, as he said, he had been

sick abed two days and, according to the doctor, should be in bed then.



     But I would not stay at home for a nursery disease, and that's what

     I've got.  Now, don't let this leak out all over town, but I've been

     doing some indiscreet eating--that's all.  It wasn't drinking.  If

     it had been I shouldn't have said anything about it.



     I ate a banana.  I bought it just to clinch the Italian vote for

     fusion, but I got hold of a Tammany banana by mistake.  Just one

     little nub of it on the end was nice and white.  That was the

     Shepard end.  The other nine-tenths were rotten.  Now that little

     white end won't make the rest of the banana good.  The nine-tenths

     will make that little nub rotten, too.



     We must get rid of the whole banana, and our Acorn Society is going

     to do its share, for it is pledged to nothing but the support of

     good government all over the United States.  We will elect the

     President next time.



     It won't be I, for I have ruined my chances by joining the Acorns,

     and there can be no office-holders among us.



There was a movement which Clemens early nipped in the bud--to name a

political party after him.



"I should be far from willing to have a political party named after me,"

he wrote, "and I would not be willing to belong to a party which allowed

its members to have political aspirations or push friends forward for

political preferment."



In other words, he was a knight-errant; his sole purpose for being in

politics at all--something he always detested--was to do what he could

for the betterment of his people.



He had his reward, for when Election Day came, and the returns were in,

the Fusion ticket had triumphed and Tammany had fallen.  Clemens received

his share of the credit.  One paper celebrated him in verse:



                    Who killed Croker?

                    I, said Mark Twain,

                    I killed Croker,

                    I, the jolly joker!



Among Samuel Clemens's literary remains there is an outline plan for a

"Casting-Vote party," whose main object was "to compel the two great

parties to nominate their best man always."  It was to be an organization

of an infinite number of clubs throughout the nation, no member of which

should seek or accept a nomination for office in any political

appointment, but in each case should cast its vote as a unit for the

candidate of one of the two great political parties, requiring that the

man be of clean record and honest purpose.



     From constable up to President [runs his final clause] there is no

     office for which the two great parties cannot furnish able, clean,

     and acceptable men.  Whenever the balance of power shall be lodged

     in a permanent third party, with no candidate of its own and no

     function but to cast its whole vote for the best man put forward by

     the Republicans and Democrats, these two parties will select the

     best man they have in their ranks.  Good and clean government will

     follow, let its party complexion be what it may, and the country

     will be quite content.



It was a Utopian idea, very likely, as human nature is made; full of that

native optimism which was always overflowing and drowning his gloomier

logic.  Clearly he forgot his despair of humanity when he formulated that

document, and there is a world of unselfish hope in these closing lines:



     If in the hands of men who regard their citizenship as a high trust

     this scheme shall fail upon trial a better must be sought, a better

     must be invented; for it cannot be well or safe to let the present

     political conditions continue indefinitely.  They can be improved,

     and American citizenship should arouse up from its disheartenment

     and see that it is done.



Had this document been put into type and circulated it might have founded

a true Mark Twain party.



Clemens made not many more speeches that autumn, closing the year at last

with the "Founder's Night" speech at The Players, the short address

which, ending on the stroke of midnight, dedicates each passing year to

the memory of Edwin Booth, and pledges each new year in a loving-cup

passed in his honor.









CCXVIII



NEW INTERESTS AND INVESTMENTS



The spirit which a year earlier had prompted Mark Twain to prepare his

"Salutation from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century" inspired him

now to conceive the "Stupendous International Procession," a gruesome

pageant described in a document (unpublished) of twenty-two typewritten

pages which begin:



                        THE STUPENDOUS PROCESSION



     At the appointed hour it moved across the world in following order:





                          The Twentieth Century



     A fair young creature, drunk and disorderly, borne in the arms of

     Satan.  Banner with motto, "Get What You Can, Keep What You Get."



     Guard of Honor--Monarchs, Presidents, Tammany Bosses, Burglars, Land

     Thieves, Convicts, etc., appropriately clothed and bearing the

     symbols of their several trades.





                               Christendom



     A majestic matron in flowing robes drenched with blood.  On her head

     a golden crown of thorns; impaled on its spines the bleeding heads

     of patriots who died for their countries Boers, Boxers, Filipinos;

     in one hand a slung-shot, in the other a Bible, open at the text "Do

     unto others," etc.  Protruding from pocket bottle labeled "We bring

     you the blessings of civilization."  Necklace-handcuffs and a

     burglar's jimmy.

     Supporters--At one elbow Slaughter, at the other Hypocrisy.

     Banner with motto--"Love Your Neighbor's Goods as Yourself."

     Ensign--The Black Flag.

     Guard of Honor--Missionaries and German, French, Russian, and

     British soldiers laden with loot.



And so on, with a section for each nation of the earth, headed each by

the black flag, each bearing horrid emblems, instruments of torture,

mutilated prisoners, broken hearts, floats piled with bloody corpses.  At

the end of all, banners inscribed:



          "All White Men are Born Free and Equal."



               "Christ died to make men holy,

               Christ died to make men free."



with the American flag furled and draped in crepe, and the shade of

Lincoln towering vast and dim toward the sky, brooding with sorrowful

aspect over the far-reaching pageant.  With much more of the same sort.

It is a fearful document, too fearful, we may believe, for Mrs. Clemens

ever to consent to its publication.



Advancing years did little toward destroying Mark Twain's interest in

human affairs.  At no time in his life was he more variously concerned

and employed than in his sixty-seventh year--matters social, literary,

political, religious, financial, scientific.  He was always alive, young,

actively cultivating or devising interests--valuable and otherwise,

though never less than important to him.



He had plenty of money again, for one thing, and he liked to find

dazzlingly new ways for investing it.  As in the old days, he was always

putting "twenty-five or forty thousand dollars," as he said, into

something that promised multiplied returns.  Howells tells how he found

him looking wonderfully well, and when he asked the name of his elixir he

learned that it was plasmon.



     I did not immediately understand that plasmon was one of the

     investments which he had made from "the substance of things hoped

     for," and in the destiny of a disastrous disappointment.  But after

     paying off the creditors of his late publishing firm he had to do

     something with his money, and it was not his fault if he did not

     make a fortune out of plasmon.



It was just at this period (the beginning of 1902) that he was promoting

with his capital and enthusiasm the plasmon interests in America,

investing in it one of the "usual amounts," promising to make Howells

over again body and soul with the life-giving albuminate.  Once he wrote

him explicit instructions:



     Yes--take it as a medicine--there is nothing better, nothing surer

     of desired results.  If you wish to be elaborate--which isn't

     necessary--put a couple of heaping teaspoonfuls of the powder in an

     inch of milk & stir until it is a paste; put in some more milk and

     stir the paste to a thin gruel; then fill up the glass and drink.



     Or, stir it into your soup.



     Or, into your oatmeal.



     Or, use any method you like, so's you get it down--that is the only

     essential.



He put another "usual sum" about this time in a patent cash register

which was acknowledged to be "a promise rather than a performance," and

remains so until this day.



He capitalized a patent spiral hat-pin, warranted to hold the hat on in

any weather, and he had a number of the pins handsomely made to present

to visitors of the sex naturally requiring that sort of adornment and

protection.  It was a pretty and ingenious device and apparently

effective enough, though it failed to secure his invested thousands.



He invested a lesser sum in shares of the Booklover's Library, which was

going to revolutionize the reading world, and which at least paid a few

dividends.  Even the old Tennessee land will-o'-the-wisp-long since

repudiated and forgotten--when it appeared again in the form of a

possible equity in some overlooked fragment, kindled a gentle interest,

and was added to his list of ventures.



He made one substantial investment at this period.  They became more and

more in love with the Hudson environment, its beauty and its easy access

to New York.  Their house was what they liked it to be--a gathering--

place for friends and the world's notables, who could reach it easily and

quickly from New York.  They had a steady procession of company when Mrs.

Clemens's health would permit, and during a single week in the early part

of this year entertained guests at no less than seventeen out of their

twenty-one meals, and for three out of the seven nights--not an unusual

week.  Their plan for buying a home on the Hudson ended with the purchase

of what was known as Hillcrest, or the Casey place, at Tarrytown,

overlooking that beautiful stretch of river, the Tappan Zee, close to the

Washington Irving home.  The beauty of its outlook and surroundings

appealed to them all.  The house was handsome and finely placed, and they

planned to make certain changes that would adapt it to their needs.  The

price, which was less than fifty thousand dollars, made it an attractive

purchase; and without doubt it would have made them a suitable and happy

home had it been written in the future that they should so inherit it.



Clemens was writing pretty steadily these days.  The human race was

furnishing him with ever so many inspiring subjects, and he found time to

touch more or less on most of them.  He wreaked his indignation upon the

things which exasperated him often--even usually--without the expectation

of print; and he delivered himself even more inclusively at such times as

he walked the floor between the luncheon or dinner courses, amplifying on

the poverty of an invention that had produced mankind as a supreme

handiwork.  In a letter to Howells he wrote:



Your comments on that idiot's "Ideals" letter reminds me that I preached

a good sermon to my family yesterday on his particular layer of the human

race, that grotesquest of all the inventions of the Creator.  It was a

good sermon, but coldly received, & it seemed best not to try to take up

a collection.



He once told Howells, with the wild joy of his boyish heart, how Mrs.

Clemens found some compensation, when kept to her room by illness, in the

reflection that now she would not hear so much about the "damned human

race."



Yet he was always the first man to champion that race, and the more

unpromising the specimen the surer it was of his protection, and he never

invited, never expected gratitude.



One wonders how he found time to do all the things that he did.  Besides

his legitimate literary labors and his preachments, he was always writing

letters to this one and that, long letters on a variety of subjects,

carefully and picturesquely phrased, and to people of every sort.  He

even formed a curious society, whose members were young girls--one in

each country of the earth.  They were supposed to write to him at

intervals on some subject likely to be of mutual interest, to which

letters he agreed to reply.  He furnished each member with a typewritten

copy of the constitution and by-laws of the juggernaut Club, as he called

it, and he apprised each of her election, usually after this fashion:



     I have a club--a private club, which is all my own.  I appoint the

     members myself, & they can't help themselves, because I don't allow

     them to vote on their own appointment & I don't allow them to

     resign!  They are all friends whom I have never seen (save one), but

     who have written friendly letters to me.  By the laws of my club

     there can be only one member in each country, & there can be no male

     member but myself.  Some day I may admit males, but I don't know-

     they are capricious & inharmonious, & their ways provoke me a good

     deal.  It is a matter, which the club shall decide.  I have made

     four appointments in the past three or four months: You as a member

     for Scotland--oh, this good while!; a young citizeness of Joan of

     Arc's home region as a member for France; a Mohammedan girl as

     member for Bengal; & a dear & bright young niece of mine as member

     for the United States--for I do not represent a country myself, but

     am merely member-at-large for the human race.  You must not try to

     resign, for the laws of the club do not allow that.  You must

     console yourself by remembering that you are in the best company;

     that nobody knows of your membership except yourself; that no member

     knows another's name, but only her country; that no taxes are levied

     and no meetings held (but how dearly I should like to attend one!).

     One of my members is a princess of a royal house, another is the

     daughter of a village bookseller on the continent of Europe, for the

     only qualification for membership is intellect & the spirit of good-

     will; other distinctions, hereditary or acquired, do not count.  May

     I send you the constitution & laws of the club?  I shall be so glad

     if I may.



It was just one of his many fancies, and most of the active memberships

would not long be maintained; though some continued faithful in their

reports, as he did in his replies, to the end.



One of the more fantastic of his conceptions was a plan to advertise for

ante-mortem obituaries of himself--in order, as he said, that he might

look them over and enjoy them and make certain corrections in the matter

of detail.  Some of them he thought might be appropriate to read from the

platform.



     I will correct them--not the facts, but the verdicts--striking out

     such clauses as could have a deleterious influence on the other

     side, and replacing them with clauses of a more judicious character.



He was much taken with the new idea, and his request for such obituaries,

with an offer of a prize for the best--a portrait of himself drawn by his

own hand--really appeared in Harper's Weekly later in the year.

Naturally he got a shower of responses--serious, playful, burlesque.

Some of them were quite worth while.



The obvious "Death loves a shining Mark" was of course numerously

duplicated, and some varied it "Death loves an Easy Mark," and there was

"Mark, the perfect man."



The two that follow gave him especial pleasure.



                        OBITUARY FOR "MARK TWAIN"



     Worthy of his portrait, a place on his monument, as well as a place

     among his "perennial-consolation heirlooms":



                    "Got up; washed; went to bed."



     The subject's own words (see Innocents Abroad).  Can't go back on

     your own words, Mark Twain.  There's nothing "to strike out";

     nothing "to replace."  What more could be said of any one?



     "Got up!"--Think of the fullness of meaning!  The possibilities of

     life, its achievements--physical, intellectual, spiritual.  Got up

     to the top!--the climax of human aspiration on earth!



     "Washed"--Every whit clean; purified--body, soul, thoughts,

     purposes.



     "Went to bed"--Work all done--to rest, to sleep.  The culmination of

     the day well spent!



     God looks after the awakening.



                                   Mrs. S. A. OREN-HAYNES.





     Mark Twain was the only man who ever lived, so far as we know, whose

     lies were so innocent, and withal so helpful, as to make them worth

     more than a whole lot of fossilized priests' eternal truths.



                                   D. H. KENNER.









CCXIX



YACHTING AND THEOLOGY



Clemens made fewer speeches during the Riverdale period.  He was as

frequently demanded, but he had a better excuse for refusing, especially

the evening functions.  He attended a good many luncheons with friendly

spirits like Howells, Matthews, James L. Ford, and Hamlin Garland.  At

the end of February he came down to the Mayor's dinner given to Prince

Henry of Prussia, but he did not speak.  Clemens used to say afterward

that he had not been asked to speak, and that it was probably because of

his supposed breach of etiquette at the Kaiser's dinner in Berlin; but

the fact that Prince Henry sought him out, and was most cordially and

humanly attentive during a considerable portion of the evening, is

against the supposition.



Clemens attended a Yale alumni dinner that winter and incidentally

visited Twichell in Hartford.  The old question of moral responsibility

came up and Twichell lent his visitor a copy of Jonathan Edwards's

'Freedom of the Will' for train perusal.  Clemens found it absorbing.

Later he wrote Twichell his views.



     DEAR JOE,--(After compliments.)--[Meaning "What a good time you gave

     me; what a happiness it was to be under your roof again," etc.  See

     opening sentence of all translations of letters passing between Lord

     Roberts and Indian princes and rulers.]--From Bridgeport to New

     York, thence to home, & continuously until near midnight I wallowed

     & reeked with Jonathan in his insane debauch; rose immensely

     refreshed & fine at ten this morning, but with a strange & haunting

     sense of having been on a three days' tear with a drunken lunatic.

     It is years since I have known these sensations.  All through the

     book is the glare of a resplendent intellect gone mad--a marvelous

     spectacle.  No, not all through the book

    --the drunk does not come on till the last third, where what I take

     to be Calvinism & its God begins to show up & shine red & hideous in

     the glow from the fires of hell, their only right and proper

     adornment.



     Jonathan seems to hold (as against the Armenian position) that the

     man (or his soul or his will) never creates an impulse itself, but

     is moved to action by an impulse back of it.  That's sound!



     Also, that of two or more things offered it, it infallibly chooses

     the one which for the moment is most pleasing to ITSELF.  Perfectly

     correct!  An immense admission for a man not otherwise sane.



     Up to that point he could have written Chapters III & IV of my

     suppressed Gospel.  But there we seem to separate.  He seems to

     concede the indisputable & unshaken dominion of Motive & Necessity

     (call them what he may, these are exterior forces & not under the

     man's authority, guidance, or even suggestion); then he suddenly

     flies the logical track & (to all seeming) makes the man & not those

     exterior forces responsible to God for the man's thoughts, words, &

     acts.  It is frank insanity.



     I think that when he concedes the autocratic dominion of Motive and

     Necessity he grants a third position of mine--that a man's mind is a

     mere machine--an automatic machine--which is handled entirely from

     the outside, the man himself furnishing it absolutely nothing; not

     an ounce of its fuel, & not so much as a bare suggestion to that

     exterior engineer as to what the machine shall do nor how it shall

     do it nor when.



     After that concession it was time for him to get alarmed & shirk--

     for he was pointed straight for the only rational & possible next

     station on that piece of road--the irresponsibility of man to God.



     And so he shirked.  Shirked, and arrived at this handsome result:



     Man is commanded to do so & so.



     It has been ordained from the beginning of time that some men

     sha'n't & others can't.



     These are to blame: let them be damned.



     I enjoy the Colonel very much, & shall enjoy the rest of him with an

     obscene delight.



     Joe, the whole tribe shout love to you & yours!

                                                       MARK.



Clemens was moved to set down some theology of his own, and did so in a

manuscript which he entitled, "If I Could Be There."  It is in the

dialogue form he often adopted for polemic writing.  It is a colloquy

between the Master of the Universe and a Stranger.  It begins:





I



If I could be there, hidden under the steps of the throne, I should hear

conversations like this:



A STRANGER.  Lord, there is one who needs to be punished, and has been

overlooked.  It is in the record.  I have found it.



LORD.  By searching?



S.  Yes, Lord.



L.  Who is it?  What is it?



S.  A man.



L.  Proceed.



S.  He died in sin.  Sin committed by his great-grandfather.



L.  When was this?



S.  Eleven million years ago.



L.  Do you know what a microbe is?



S.  Yes, Lord.  It is a creature too small to be detected by my eye.



L.  He commits depredations upon your blood?



S.  Yes, Lord.



L.  I give you leave to subject him to a billion years of misery for this

offense.  Go!  Work your will upon him.



S.  But, Lord, I have nothing against him; I am indifferent to him.



L.  Why?



S.  He is so infinitely small and contemptible.  I am to him as is a

mountain-range to a grain of sand.



L.  What am I to man?



S.  (Silent.)



L.  Am I not, to a man, as is a billion solar systems to a grain of sand?



S.  It is true, Lord.



L.  Some microbes are larger than others.  Does man regard the

difference?



S.  No, Lord.  To him there is no difference of consequence.  To him they

are all microbes, all infinitely little and equally inconsequential.



L.  To me there is no difference of consequence between a man & a

microbe.  Man looks down upon the speck at his feet called a microbe from

an altitude of a thousand miles, so to speak, and regards him with

indifference; I look down upon the specks called a man and a microbe from

an altitude of a billion leagues, so to speak, and to me they are of a

size.  To me both are inconsequential.  Man kills the microbes when he

can?



S.  Yes, Lord.



L.  Then what?  Does he keep him in mind years and years and go on

contriving miseries for him?



S.  No, Lord.



L.  Does he forget him?



S.  Yes, Lord.



L.  Why?



S.  He cares nothing more about him.



L.  Employs himself with more important matters?



S.  Yes, Lord.



L.  Apparently man is quite a rational and dignified person, and can

divorce his mind from uninteresting trivialities.  Why does he affront me

with the fancy that I interest Myself in trivialities--like men and

microbes?





II



L.  Is it true the human race thinks the universe was created for its

convenience?



S.  Yes, Lord.



L.  The human race is modest.  Speaking as a member of it, what do you

think the other animals are for?



S.  To furnish food and labor for man.



L.  What is the sea for?



S.  To furnish food for man.  Fishes.



L.  And the air?



S.  To furnish sustenance for man.  Birds and breath.



L.  How many men are there?



S.  Fifteen hundred millions.



L.  (Referring to notes.) Take your pencil and set down some statistics.

In a healthy man's lower intestine 28,000,000 microbes are born daily and

die daily.  In the rest of a man's body 122,000,000 microbes are born

daily and die daily.  The two sums aggregate-what?



S.  About 150,000,000.



L.  In ten days the aggregate reaches what?



S.  Fifteen hundred millions.



L.  It is for one person.  What would it be for the whole human

population?



S.  Alas, Lord, it is beyond the power of figures to set down that

multitude.  It is billions of billions multiplied by billions of

billions, and these multiplied again and again by billions of billions.

The figures would stretch across the universe and hang over into space on

both sides.



L.  To what intent are these uncountable microbes introduced into the

human race?



S.  That they may eat.



L.  Now then, according to man's own reasoning, what is man for?



S.  Alas-alas!



L.  What is he for?



S.  To-to-furnish food for microbes.



L.  Manifestly.  A child could see it.  Now then, with this common-sense

light to aid your perceptions, what are the air, the land, and the ocean

for?



S.  To furnish food for man so that he may nourish, support, and multiply

and replenish the microbes.



L.  Manifestly.  Does one build a boarding-house for the sake of the

boarding-house itself or for the sake of the boarders?



S.  Certainly for the sake of the boarders.



L.  Man's a boarding-house.



S.  I perceive it, Lord.



L.  He is a boarding-house.  He was never intended for anything else.  If

he had had less vanity and a clearer insight into the great truths that

lie embedded in statistics he would have found it out early.  As concerns

the man who has gone unpunished eleven million years, is it your belief

that in life he did his duty by his microbes?



S.  Undoubtedly, Lord.  He could not help it.



L.  Then why punish him?  He had no other duty to perform.





Whatever else may be said of this kind of doctrine, it is at least

original and has a conclusive sound.  Mark Twain had very little use for

orthodoxy and conservatism.  When it was announced that Dr. Jacques Loeb,

of the University of California, had demonstrated the creation of life by

chemical agencies he was deeply interested.  When a newspaper writer

commented that a "consensus of opinion among biologists" would probably

rate Dr. Loeb as a man of lively imagination rather than an inerrant

investigator of natural phenomena, he felt called to chaff the consensus

idea.



     I wish I could be as young as that again.  Although I seem so old

     now I was once as young as that.  I remember, as if it were but

     thirty or forty years ago, how a paralyzing consensus of opinion

     accumulated from experts a-setting around about brother experts who

     had patiently and laboriously cold-chiseled their way into one or

     another of nature's safe-deposit vaults and were reporting that they

     had found something valuable was plenty for me.  It settled it.



     But it isn't so now-no.  Because in the drift of the years I by and

     by found out that a Consensus examines a new thing with its feelings

     rather oftener than with its mind.



     There was that primitive steam-engine-ages back, in Greek times: a

     Consensus made fun of it.  There was the Marquis of Worcester's

     steam-engine 250 years ago: a Consensus made fun of it.  There was

     Fulton's steamboat of a century ago: a French Consensus, including

     the great Napoleon, made fun of it.  There was Priestley, with his

     oxygen: a Consensus scoffed at him, mobbed him, burned him out,

     banished him.  While a Consensus was proving, by statistics and

     things, that a steamship could not cross the Atlantic, a steamship

     did it.



And so on through a dozen pages or more of lively satire, ending with an

extract from Adam's Diary.



     Then there was a Consensus about it.  It was the very first one.  It

     sat six days and nights.  It was then delivered of the verdict that

     a world could not be made out of nothing; that such small things as

     sun and moon and stars might, maybe, but it would take years and

     years if there was considerable many of them.  Then the Consensus

     got up and looked out of the window, and there was the whole outfit,

     spinning and sparkling in space!  You never saw such a disappointed

     lot.

                                                         ADAM.



He was writing much at this time, mainly for his own amusement, though

now and then he offered one of his reflections for print.  That beautiful

fairy tale, "The Five Boons of Life," of which the most precious is

"Death," was written at this period.  Maeterlinck's lovely story of the

bee interested him; he wrote about that.  Somebody proposed a Martyrs'

Day; he wrote a paper ridiculing the suggestion.  In his note-book, too,

there is a memorandum for a love-story of the Quarternary Epoch which

would begin, "On a soft October afternoon 2,000,000 years ago."  John

Fiske's Discovery of America, Volume I, he said, was to furnish the

animals and scenery, civilization and conversation to be the same as to-

day; but apparently this idea was carried no further.  He ranged through

every subject from protoplasm to infinity, exalting, condemning,

ridiculing, explaining; his brain was always busy--a dynamo that rested

neither night nor day.



In April Clemens received notice of another yachting trip on the Kanawha,

which this time would sail for the Bahama and West India islands.  The

guests were to be about the same.--[The invited ones of the party were

Hon. T. B. Reed, A. G. Paine, Laurence Hutton, Dr. C. C. Rice, W. T.

Foote, and S. L. Clemens.  "Owners of the yacht," Mr. Rogers called them,

signing himself as "Their Guest."]



He sent this telegram:



H. H. ROGERS,

Fairhaven, Mass.



Can't get away this week.  I have company here from tonight till middle

of next week.  Will Kanawha be sailing after that & can I go as Sunday-

school superintendent at half rate?  Answer and prepay.

                                                       DR.  CLEMENS.



The sailing date was conveniently arranged and there followed a happy

cruise among those balmy islands.  Mark Twain was particularly fond of

"Tom" Reed, who had been known as "Czar" Reed in Congress, but was

delightfully human in his personal life.  They argued politics a good

deal, and Reed, with all his training and intimate practical knowledge of

the subject, confessed that he "couldn't argue with a man like that."



"Do you believe the things you say?" he asked once, in his thin, falsetto

voice.



"Yes," said Clemens.  "Some of them."



"Well, you want to look out.  If you go on this way, by and by you'll get

to believing nearly everything you say."



Draw poker appears to have been their favorite diversion.  Clemens in his

notes reports that off the coast of Florida Reed won twenty-three pots in

succession.  It was said afterward that they made no stops at any harbor;

that when the chief officer approached the poker-table and told them they

were about to enter some important port he received peremptory orders to

"sail on and not interrupt the game."  This, however, may be regarded as

more or less founded on fiction.









CCXX



MARK TWAIN AND THE PHILIPPINES



Among the completed manuscripts of the early part of 1902 was a North

American Review article (published in April)--"Does the Race of Man Love

a Lord?"--a most interesting treatise on snobbery as a universal

weakness.  There were also some papers on the Philippine situation.  In

one of these Clemens wrote:



     We have bought some islands from a party who did not own them; with

     real smartness and a good counterfeit of disinterested friendliness

     we coaxed a confiding weak nation into a trap and closed it upon

     them; we went back on an honored guest of the Stars and Stripes when

     we had no further use for him and chased him to the mountains; we

     are as indisputably in possession of a wide-spreading archipelago as

     if it were our property; we have pacified some thousands of the

     islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their

     villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors;

     furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable

     patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent

     Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have

     acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves

     of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our

     protecting flag over that swag.



     And so, by these Providences of God--the phrase is the government's,

     not mine--we are a World Power; and are glad and proud, and have a

     back seat in the family.  With tacks in it.  At least we are letting

     on to be glad and proud; it is the best way.  Indeed, it is the only

     way.  We must maintain our dignity, for people are looking.  We are

     a World Power; we cannot get out of it now, and we must make the

     best of it.



And again he wrote:



     I am not finding fault with this use of our flag, for in order not

     to seem eccentric I have swung around now and joined the nation in

     the conviction that nothing can sully a flag.  I was not properly

     reared, and had the illusion that a flag was a thing which must be

     sacredly guarded against shameful uses and unclean contacts lest it

     suffer pollution; and so when it was sent out to the Philippines to

     float over a wanton war and a robbing expedition I supposed it was

     polluted, and in an ignorant moment I said so.  But I stand

     corrected.  I concede and acknowledge that it was only the

     government that sent it on such an errand that was polluted.  Let us

     compromise on that.  I am glad to have it that way.  For our flag

     could not well stand pollution, never having been used to it, but it

     is different with the administration.



But a much more conspicuous comment on the Philippine policy was the so-

called "Defense of General Funston" for what Funston himself referred to

as a "dirty Irish trick"; that is to say, deception in the capture of

Aguinaldo.  Clemens, who found it hard enough to reconcile himself to-

any form of warfare, was especially bitter concerning this particular

campaign.  The article appeared in the North American Review for May,

1902, and stirred up a good deal of a storm.  He wrote much more on the

subject--very much more--but it is still unpublished.









CCXXI



THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE



One day in April, 1902, Samuel Clemens received the following letter from

the president of the University of Missouri:



MY DEAR MR. CLEMENS, Although you received the degree of doctor of

literature last fall from Yale, and have had other honors conferred upon

you by other great universities, we want to adopt you here as a son of

the University of Missouri.  In asking your permission to confer upon you

the degree of LL.D.  the University of Missouri does not aim to confer an

honor upon you so much as to show her appreciation of you.  The rules of

the University forbid us to confer the degree upon any one in absentia.

I hope very much that you can so arrange your plans as to be with us on

the fourth day of next June, when we shall hold our Annual Commencement.



                              Very truly yours,

                                        R. H. JESSE.





Clemens had not expected to make another trip to the West, but a

proffered honor such as this from one's native State was not a thing to

be declined.



It was at the end of May when he arrived in St. Louis, and he was met at

the train there by his old river instructor and friend, Horace Bixby--as

fresh, wiry, and capable as he had been forty-five years before.



"I have become an old man.  You are still thirty-five," Clemens said.



They went to the Planters Hotel, and the news presently got around that

Mark Twain was there.  There followed a sort of reception in the hotel

lobby, after which Bixby took him across to the rooms of the Pilots

Association, where the rivermen gathered in force to celebrate his

return.  A few of his old comrades were still alive, among them Beck

Jolly.  The same afternoon he took the train for Hannibal.



It was a busy five days that he had in Hannibal.  High-school

commencement day came first.  He attended, and willingly, or at least

patiently, sat through the various recitals and orations and

orchestrations, dreaming and remembering, no doubt, other high-school

commencements of more than half a century before, seeing in some of those

young people the boys and girls he had known in that vanished time.  A

few friends of his youth were still there, but they were among the

audience now, and no longer fresh and looking into the future.  Their

heads were white, and, like him, they were looking down the recorded

years.  Laura Hawkins was there and Helen Kercheval (Mrs. Frazer and Mrs.

Garth now), and there were others, but they were few and scattering.



He was added to the program, and he made himself as one of the graduates,

and told them some things of the young people of that earlier time that

brought their laughter and their tears.



He was asked to distribute the diplomas, and he undertook the work in his

own way.  He took an armful of them and said to the graduates:



"Take one.  Pick out a good one.  Don't take two, but be sure you get a

good one."



So each took one "unsight and unseen" aid made the more exact

distributions among themselves later.



Next morning it was Saturday--he visited the old home on Hill Street, and

stood in the doorway all dressed in white while a battalion of

photographers made pictures of "this return of the native" to the

threshold of his youth.



"It all seems so small to me," he said, as he looked through the house;

"a boy's home is a big place to him.  I suppose if I should come back

again ten years from now it would be the size of a birdhouse."



He went through the rooms and up-stairs where he had slept and looked out

the window down in the back yard where, nearly sixty years before, Tom

Sawyer, Huck Finn, Joe Harper, and the rest--that is to say, Tom

Blankenship, John Briggs, Will Pitts, and the Bowen boys--set out on

their nightly escapades.  Of that lightsome band Will Pitts and John

Briggs still remained, with half a dozen others--schoolmates of the less

adventurous sort.  Buck Brown, who had been his rival in the spelling

contests, was still there, and John Robards, who had worn golden curls

and the medal for good conduct, and Ed Pierce.  And while these were

assembled in a little group on the pavement outside the home a small old

man came up and put out his hand, and it was Jimmy MacDaniel, to whom so

long before, sitting on the river-bank and eating gingerbread, he had

first told the story of Jim Wolfe and the cats.



They put him into a carriage, drove him far and wide, and showed the

hills and resorts and rendezvous of Tom Sawyer and his marauding band.



He was entertained that evening by the Labinnah Club (whose name was

achieved by a backward spelling of Hannibal), where he found most of the

survivors of his youth.  The news report of that occasion states that he

was introduced by Father McLoughlin, and that he "responded in a very

humorous and touchingly pathetic way, breaking down in tears at the

conclusion.  Commenting on his boyhood days and referring to his mother

was too much for the great humorist.  Before him as he spoke were sitting

seven of his boyhood friends."



On Sunday morning Col. John Robards escorted him to the various churches

and Sunday-schools.  They were all new churches to Samuel Clemens, but he

pretended not to recognize this fact.  In each one he was asked to speak

a few words, and he began by saying how good it was to be back in the old

home Sunday-school again, which as a boy he had always so loved, and he

would go on and point out the very place he had sat, and his escort

hardly knew whether or not to enjoy the proceedings.  At one place he

told a moral story.  He said:



Little boys and girls, I want to tell you a story which illustrates the

value of perseverance--of sticking to your work, as it were.  It is a

story very proper for a Sunday-school.  When I was a little boy in

Hannibal I used to play a good deal up here on Holliday's Hill, which of

course you all know.  John Briggs and I played up there.  I don't suppose

there are any little boys as good as we were then, but of course that is

not to be expected.  Little boys in those days were 'most always good

little boys, because those were the good old times when everything was

better than it is now, but never mind that.  Well, once upon a time, on

Holliday's Hill, they were blasting out rock, and a man was drilling for

a blast.  He sat there and drilled and drilled and drilled perseveringly

until he had a hole down deep enough for the blast.  Then he put in the

powder and tamped and tamped it down, but maybe he tamped it a little too

hard, for the blast went off and he went up into the air, and we watched

him.  He went up higher and higher and got smaller and smaller.  First he

looked as big as a child, then as big as a dog, then as big as a kitten,

then as big as a bird, and finally he went out of sight. John Briggs was

with me, and we watched the place where he went out of sight, and by and

by we saw him coming down first as big as a bird, then as big as a

kitten, then as big as a dog, then as big as a child, and then he was a

man again, and landed right in his seat and went to drilling just

persevering, you see, and sticking to his work.  Little boys and girls,

that's the secret of success, just like that poor but honest workman on

Holliday's Hill.  Of course you won't always be appreciated.  He wasn't.

His employer was a hard man, and on Saturday night when he paid him he

docked him fifteen minutes for the time he was up in the air--but never

mind, he had his reward.



He told all this in his solemn, grave way, though the Sunday-school was

in a storm of enjoyment when he finished.  There still remains a doubt in

Hannibal as to its perfect suitability, but there is no doubt as to its

acceptability.



That Sunday afternoon, with John Briggs, he walked over Holliday's Hill--

the Cardiff Hill of Tom Sawyer.  It was jest such a Sunday as that one

when they had so nearly demolished the negro driver and had damaged a

cooper-shop.  They calculated that nearly three thousand Sundays had

passed since then, and now here they were once more, two old men with the

hills still fresh and green, the river still sweeping by and rippling in

the sun.  Standing there together and looking across to the low-lying

Illinois shore, and to the green islands where they had played, and to

Lover's Leap on the south, the man who had been Sam Clemens said:



"John, that is one of the loveliest sights I ever saw.  Down there by the

island is the place we used to swim, and yonder is where a man was

drowned, and there's where the steamboat sank.  Down there on Lover's

Leap is where the Millerites put on their robes one night to go to

heaven.  None of them went that night, but I suppose most of them have

gone now."



John Briggs said:



"Sam, do you remember the day we stole the peaches from old man Price and

one of his bow-legged niggers came after us with the dogs, and how we

made up our minds that we'd catch that nigger and drown him?"



They came to the place where they had pried out the great rock that had

so nearly brought them to grief.  Sam Clemens said:



"John, if we had killed that man we'd have had a dead nigger on our hands

without a cent to pay for him."



And so they talked on of this thing and that, and by and by they drove

along the river, and Sam Clemens pointed out the place where he swam it

and was taken with a cramp on the return swim, and believed for a while

that his career was about to close.



"Once, near the shore, I thought I would let down," he said, "but was

afraid to, knowing that if the water was deep I was a goner, but finally

my knees struck the sand and I crawled out.  That was the closest call I

ever had."



They drove by the place where the haunted house had stood.  They drank

from a well they had always known, and from the bucket as they had always

drunk, talking and always talking, fondling lovingly and lingeringly that

most beautiful of all our possessions, the past.



"Sam," said John, when they parted, "this is probably the last time we

shall meet on this earth.  God bless you.  Perhaps somewhere we shall

renew our friendship."



"John," was the answer, "this day has been worth thousands of dollars to

me.  We were like brothers once, and I feel that we are the same now.

Good-by, John.  I'll try to meet you--somewhere."









CCXXII



A PROPHET HONORED IN HIS COUNTRY



Clemens left next day for Columbia.  Committees met him at Rensselaer,

Monroe City, Clapper, Stoutsville, Paris, Madison, Moberly--at every

station along the line of his travel.  At each place crowds were gathered

when the train pulled in, to cheer and wave and to present him with

flowers.  Sometimes he spoke a few words; but oftener his eyes were full

of tears--his voice would not come.



There is something essentially dramatic in official recognition by one's

native State--the return of the lad who has set out unknown to battle

with life, and who, having conquered, is invited back to be crowned.  No

other honor, however great and spectacular, is quite like that, for there

is in it a pathos and a completeness that are elemental and stir emotions

as old as life itself.



It was on the 4th of June, 1902, that Mark Twain received his doctor of

laws degree from the State University at Columbia, Missouri.  James

Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture, and Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Secretary of

the Interior, were among those similarly honored.  Mark Twain was

naturally the chief attraction.  Dressed in his Yale scholastic gown he

led the procession of graduating students, and, as in Hannibal, awarded

them their diplomas.  The regular exercises were made purposely brief in

order that some time might be allowed for the conferring of the degrees.

This ceremony was a peculiarly impressive one.  Gardner Lathrop read a

brief statement introducing "America's foremost author and best-loved

citizen, Samuel Langhorne Clemens--Mark Twain."



Clemens rose, stepped out to the center of the stage, and paused.  He

seemed to be in doubt as to whether he should make a speech or simply

express his thanks and retire.  Suddenly, and without a signal, the great

audience rose as one man and stood in silence at his feet.  He bowed, but

he could not speak.  Then that vast assembly began a peculiar chant,

spelling out slowly the word Missouri, with a pause between each letter.

It was dramatic; it was tremendous in its impressiveness.  He had

recovered himself when they finished.  He said he didn't know whether he

was expected to make a speech or not.  They did not leave'him in doubt.

They cheered and demanded a speech, a speech, and he made them one--one

of the speeches he could make best, full of quaint phrasing, happy humor,

gentle and dramatic pathos.  He closed by telling the watermelon story

for its "moral effect."



He was the guest of E. W. Stevens in Columbia, and a dinner was given in

his honor.  They would have liked to keep him longer, but he was due in

St. Louis again to join in the dedication of the grounds, where was to be

held a World's Fair, to celebrate the Louisiana Purchase.  Another

ceremony he attended was the christening of the St. Louis harbor-boat, or

rather the rechristening, for it had been decided to change its name from

the St. Louis--[Originally the Elon G.  Smith, built in 1873.]--to the

Mark Twain.  A short trip was made on it for the ceremony.  Governor

Francis and Mayor Wells were of the party, and Count and Countess

Rochambeau and Marquis de Lafayette, with the rest of the French group

that had come over for the dedication of the World's Fair grounds.



Mark Twain himself was invited to pilot the harbor boat, and so returned

for the last time to his old place at the wheel.  They all collected in

the pilot-house behind him, feeling that it was a memorable occasion.

They were going along well enough when he saw a little ripple running out

from the shore across the bow.  In the old days he could have told

whether it indicated a bar there or was only caused by the wind, but he

could not be sure any more.  Turning to the pilot languidly, he said:

"I feel a little tired.  I guess you had better take the wheel."



Luncheon was served aboard, and Mayor Wells made the christening speech;

then the Countess Rochambeau took a bottle of champagne from the hand of

Governor Francis and smashed it on the deck, saying, "I christen thee,

good boat, Mark Twain."  So it was, the Mississippi joined in according

him honors.  In his speech of reply he paid tribute to those illustrious

visitors from France and recounted something of the story of French

exploration along that great river.



"The name of La Salle will last as long as the river itself," he said;

"will last until commerce is dead.  We have allowed the commerce of the

river to die, but it was to accommodate the railroads, and we must be

grateful."



Carriages were waiting for them when the boat landed in the afternoon,

and the party got in and were driven to a house which had been identified

as Eugene Field's birthplace.  A bronze tablet recording this fact had

been installed, and this was to be the unveiling.  The place was not in

an inviting quarter of the town.  It stood in what is known as Walsh's

Row--was fashionable enough once, perhaps, but long since fallen into

disrepute.  Ragged children played in the doorways, and thirsty lodgers

were making trips with tin pails to convenient bar-rooms.  A curious

nondescript audience assembled around the little group of dedicators,

wondering what it was all about.  The tablet was concealed by the

American flag, which could be easily pulled away by an attached cord.

Governor Francis spoke a few words, to the effect that they had gathered

here to unveil a tablet to an American poet, and that it was fitting that

Mark Twain should do this.  They removed their hats, and Clemens, his

white hair blowing in the wind, said:



"My friends; we are here with reverence and respect to commemorate and

enshrine in memory the house where was born a man who, by his life, made

bright the lives of all who knew him, and by his literary efforts cheered

the thoughts of thousands who never knew him.  I take pleasure in

unveiling the tablet of Eugene Field."



The flag fell and the bronze inscription was revealed.  By this time the

crowd, generally, had recognized who it was that was speaking.  A

working-man proposed three cheers for Mark Twain, and they were heartily

given.  Then the little party drove away, while the neighborhood

collected to regard the old house with a new interest.



It was reported to Clemens later that there was some dispute as to the

identity of the Field birthplace.  He said:



"Never mind.  It is of no real consequence whether it is his birthplace

or not.  A rose in any other garden will bloom as sweet."









CCXXIII



AT YORK HARBOR



They decided to spend the summer at York Harbor, Maine.  They engaged a

cottage, there, and about the end of June Mr. Rogers brought his yacht

Kanawha to their water-front at Riverdale, and in perfect weather took

them to Maine by sea.  They landed at York Harbor and took possession of

their cottage, The Pines, one of their many attractive summer lodges.

Howells, at Kittery Point, was not far away, and everything promised a

happy summer.



Mrs. Clemens wrote to Mrs. Crane:



     We are in the midst of pines.  They come up right about us, and the

     house is so high and the roots of the trees are so far below the

     veranda that we are right in the branches.  We drove over to call on

     Mr. and Mrs. Howells.  The drive was most beautiful, and never in my

     life have I seen such a variety of wild flowers in so short a space.



Howells tells us of the wide, low cottage in a pine grove overlooking

York River, and how he used to sit with Clemens that summer at a corner

of the veranda farthest away from Mrs. Clemens's window, where they could

read their manuscripts to each other, and tell their stories and laugh

their hearts out without disturbing her.



Clemens, as was his habit, had taken a work-room in a separate cottage

"in the house of a friend and neighbor, a fisherman and a boatman":



     There was a table where he could write, and a bed where he could lie

     down and read; and there, unless my memory has played me one of

     those constructive tricks that people's memories indulge in, he read

     me the first chapters of an admirable story.  The scene was laid in

     a Missouri town, and the characters such as he had known in boyhood;

     but often as I tried to make him own it, he denied having written

     any such story; it is possible that I dreamed it, but I hope the MS.

     will yet be found.



Howells did not dream it; but in one way his memory misled him.  The

story was one which Clemens had heard in Hannibal, and he doubtless

related it in his vivid way.  Howells, writing at a later time, quite

naturally included it among the several manuscripts which Clemens read

aloud to him.  Clemens may have intended to write the tale, may even have

begun it, though this is unlikely.  The incidents were too well known and

too notorious in his old home for fiction.



Among the stories that Clemens did show, or read, to Howells that summer

was "The Belated Passport," a strong, intensely interesting story with

what Howells in a letter calls a "goat's tail ending," perhaps meaning

that it stopped with a brief and sudden shake--with a joke, in fact,

altogether unimportant, and on the whole disappointing to the reader.  A

far more notable literary work of that summer grew out of a true incident

which Howells related to Clemens as they sat chatting together on the

veranda overlooking the river one summer afternoon.  It was a pathetic

episode in the life of some former occupants of The Pines--the tale of a

double illness in the household, where a righteous deception was carried

on during several weeks for the benefit of a life that was about to slip

away.  Out of this grew the story, "Was it Heaven? or Hell?" a

heartbreaking history which probes the very depths of the human soul.

Next to "Hadleyburg," it is Mark Twain's greatest fictional sermon.



Clemens that summer wrote, or rather finished, his most pretentious poem.

One day at Riverdale, when Mrs. Clemens had been with him on the lawn,

they had remembered together the time when their family of little folks

had filled their lives so full, conjuring up dream-like glimpses of them

in the years of play and short frocks and hair-plaits down their backs.

It was pathetic, heart-wringing fancying; and later in the day Clemens

conceived and began the poem which now he brought to conclusion.  It was

built on the idea of a mother who imagines her dead child still living,

and describes to any listener the pictures of her fancy.  It is an

impressive piece of work; but the author, for some reason, did not offer

it for publication.--[This poem was completed on the anniversary of

Susy's death and is of considerable length.  Some selections from it will

be found under Appendix U, at the end of this work.]



Mrs. Clemens, whose health earlier in the year had been delicate, became

very seriously ill at York Harbor.  Howells writes:



At first she had been about the house, and there was one gentle afternoon

when she made tea for us in the parlor, but that was the last time I

spoke with her.  After that it was really a question of how soonest and

easiest she could be got back to Riverdale.



She had seemed to be in fairly good health and spirits for several weeks

after the arrival at York.  Then, early in August, there came a great

celebration of some municipal anniversary, and for two or three days

there were processions, mass-meetings, and so on by day, with fireworks

at night.  Mrs. Clemens, always young in spirit, was greatly interested.

She went about more than her strength warranted, seeing and hearing and

enjoying all that was going on.  She was finally persuaded to forego the

remaining ceremonies and rest quietly on the pleasant veranda at home;

but she had overtaxed herself and a collapse was inevitable.  Howells and

two friends called one afternoon, and a friend of the Queen of Rumania, a

Madame Hartwig, who had brought from that gracious sovereign a letter

which closed in this simple and modest fashion:



     I beg your pardon for being a bore to one I so deeply love and

     admire, to whom I owe days and days of forgetfulness of self and

     troubles, and the intensest of all joys-hero-worship!  People don't

     always realize what a happiness that is!  God bless you for every

     beautiful thought you poured into my tired heart, and for every

     smile on a weary way.                        CARMEN SYLVA.



This was the occasion mentioned by Howells when Mrs. Clemens made tea for

them in the parlor for the last time.  Her social life may be said to

have ended that afternoon.  Next morning the break came.  Clemens, in his

notebook for that day, writes:



Tuesday, August 12, 1902.  At 7 A.M.  Livy taken violently ill.

Telephoned and Dr. Lambert was here in 1/2 hour.  She could not breathe-

was likely to stifle.  Also she had severe palpitation.  She believed she

was dying.  I also believed it.



Nurses were summoned, and Mrs. Crane and others came from Elmira.  Clara

Clemens took charge of the household and matters generally, and the

patient was secluded and guarded from every disturbing influence.

Clemens slipped about with warnings of silence.  A visitor found notices

in Mark Twain's writing pinned to the trees near Mrs. Clemens's window

warning the birds not to sing too loudly.



The patient rallied, but she remained very much debilitated.  On

September 3d the note-book says:



     Always Mr. Rogers keeps his yacht Kanawha in commission & ready to

     fly here and take us to Riverdale on telegraphic notice.



But Mrs. Clemens was unable to return by sea.  When it was decided at

last, in October, that she could be removed to Riverdale, Clemens and

Howells went to Boston and engaged an invalid car to make the journey

from York Harbor to Riverdale without change.  Howells tells us that

Clemens gave his strictest personal attention to the arrangement of these

details, and that they absorbed him.



     There was no particular of the business which he did not scrutinize

     and master .  .  .  .  With the inertness that grows upon an aging

     man he had been used to delegate more and more things, but of that

     thing I perceived that he would not delegate the least detail.



They made the journey on the 16th, in nine and a half hours.  With the

exception of the natural weariness due to such a trip, the invalid was

apparently no worse on their arrival.  The stout English butler carried

her to her room.  It would be many months before she would leave it

again.  In one of his memoranda Clemens wrote:



     Our dear prisoner is where she is through overwork-day & night

     devotion to the children & me.  We did not know how to value it.  We

     know now.



And in a notation, on a letter praising him for what he had done for the

world's enjoyment, and for his splendid triumph over debt, he said:



     Livy never gets her share of these applauses, but it is because the

     people do not know.  Yet she is entitled to the lion's share.



He wrote Twichell at the end of October:



     Livy drags along drearily.  It must be hard times for that turbulent

     spirit.  It will be a long time before she is on her feet again.  It

     is a most pathetic case.  I wish I could transfer it to myself.

     Between ripping & raging & smoking & reading I could get a good deal

     of holiday out of it.  Clara runs the house smoothly & capitally.



Heavy as was the cloud of illness, he could not help pestering Twichell a

little about a recent mishap--a sprained shoulder:



     I should like to know how & where it happened.  In the pulpit, as

     like as not, otherwise you would not be taking so much pains to

     conceal it.  This is not a malicious suggestion, & not a personally

     invented one: you told me yourself once that you threw artificial

     power & impressiveness in your sermons where needed by "banging the

     Bible"--(your own words).  You have reached a time of life when it

     is not wise to take these risks.  You would better jump around.  We

     all have to change our methods as the infirmities of age creep upon

     us.  Jumping around will be impressive now, whereas before you were

     gray it would have excited remark.



Mrs. Clemens seemed to improve as the weeks passed, and they had great

hopes of her complete recovery.  Clemens took up some work--a new Huck

Finn story, inspired by his trip to Hannibal.  It was to have two parts--

Huck and Tom in youth, and then their return in old age.  He did some

chapters quite in the old vein, and wrote to Howells of his plan.

Howells answered:



     It is a great lay-out: what I shall enjoy most will be the return of

     the old fellows to the scene and their tall lying.  There is a

     matchless chance there.  I suppose you will put in plenty of pegs in

     this prefatory part.



But the new story did not reach completion.  Huck and Tom would not come

back, even to go over the old scenes.









CCXXIV



THE SIXTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY DINNER



It was on the evening of the 27th of November, 1902, I at the

Metropolitan Club, New York City, that Col.  George Harvey, president of

the Harper Company, gave Mark Twain a dinner in celebration of his sixty-

seventh birthday.  The actual date fell three days later; but that would

bring it on Sunday, and to give it on Saturday night would be more than

likely to carry it into Sabbath morning, and so the 27th was chosen.

Colonel Harvey himself presided, and Howells led the speakers with a

poem, "A Double-Barreled Sonnet to Mark Twain," which closed:



          Still, to have everything beyond cavil right,

          We will dine with you here till Sunday night.



Thomas Brackett Reed followed with what proved to be the last speech he

would ever make, as it was also one of his best.  All the speakers did

well that night, and they included some of the country's foremost in

oratory: Chauncey Depew, St. Clair McKelway, Hamilton Mabie, and Wayne

MacVeagh.  Dr. Henry van Dyke and John Kendrick Bangs read poems.  The

chairman constantly kept the occasion from becoming too serious by

maintaining an attitude of "thinking ambassador" for the guest of the

evening, gently pushing Clemens back in his seat when he attempted to

rise and expressing for him an opinion of each of the various tributes.



"The limit has been reached," he announced at the close of Dr. van Dyke's

poem.  "More that is better could not be said.  Gentlemen, Mr. Clemens."



It is seldom that Mark Twain has made a better after-dinner speech than

he delivered then.  He was surrounded by some of the best minds of the

nation, men assembled to do him honor.  They expected much of him--to

Mark Twain always an inspiring circumstance.  He was greeted with cheers

and hand-clapping that came volley after volley, and seemed never ready

to end.  When it had died away at last he stood waiting a little in the

stillness for his voice; then he said, "I think I ought to be allowed to

talk as long as I want to," and again the storm broke.



It is a speech not easy to abridge--a finished and perfect piece of

after-dinner eloquence,--[The "Sixty-seventh Birthday Speech" entire is

included in the volume Mark Twain's Speeches.]--full of humorous stories

and moving references to old friends--to Hay; and Reed, and Twichell, and

Howells, and Rogers, the friends he had known so long and loved so well.

He told of his recent trip to his boyhood home, and how he had stood with

John Briggs on Holliday's Hill and they had pointed out the haunts of

their youth.  Then at the end he paid a tribute to the companion of his

home, who could not be there to share his evening's triumph.  This

peroration--a beautiful heart-offering to her and to those that had

shared in long friendship--demands admission:



     Now, there is one invisible guest here.  A part of me is not

     present; the larger part, the better part, is yonder at her home;

     that is my wife, and she has a good many personal friends here, and

     I think it won't distress any one of them to know that, although she

     is going to be confined to her bed for many months to come from that

     nervous prostration, there is not any danger and she is coming along

     very well--and I think it quite appropriate that I should speak of

     her.  I knew her for the first time just in the same year that I

     first knew John Hay and Tom Reed and Mr. Twichell--thirty-six years

     ago--and she has been the best friend I have ever had, and that is

     saying a good deal--she has reared me--she and Twichell together--

     and what I am I owe to them.  Twichell--why, it is such a pleasure

     to look upon Twichell's face!  For five and twenty years I was under

     the Rev. Mr. Twichell's tuition, I was in his pastorate occupying a

     pew in his church and held him in due reverence.  That man is full

     of all the graces that go to make a person companionable and

     beloved; and wherever Twichell goes to start a church the people

     flock there to buy the land; they find real estate goes up all

     around the spot, and the envious and the thoughtful always try to

     get Twichell to move to their neighborhood and start a church; and

     wherever you see him go you can go and buy land there with

     confidence, feeling sure that there will be a double price for you

     before very long.



     I have tried to do good in this world, and it is marvelous in how

     many different ways I have done good, and it is comfortable to

     reflect--now, there's Mr. Rogers--just out of the affection I bear

     that man many a time I have given him points in finance that he had

     never thought of--and if he could lay aside envy, prejudice, and

     superstition, and utilize those ideas in his business, it would make

     a difference in his bank-account.



     Well, I liked the poetry.  I liked all the speeches and the poetry,

     too.  I liked Dr. van Dyke's poem.  I wish I could return thanks in

     proper measure to you, gentlemen, who have spoken and violated your

     feelings to pay me compliments; some were merited and some you

     overlooked, it is true; and Colonel Harvey did slander every one of

     you, and put things into my mouth that I never said, never thought

     of at all.



     And now my wife and I, out of our single heart, return you our

     deepest and most grateful thanks, and--yesterday was her birthday.



The sixty-seventh birthday dinner was widely celebrated by the press, and

newspaper men generally took occasion to pay brilliant compliments to

Mark Twain.  Arthur Brisbane wrote editorially:



     For more than a generation he has been the Messiah of a genuine

     gladness and joy to the millions of three continents.



It was little more than a week later that one of the old friends he had

mentioned, Thomas Brackett Reed, apparently well and strong that birthday

evening, passed from the things of this world.  Clemens felt his death

keenly, and in a "good-by" which he wrote for Harper's Weekly he said:



     His was a nature which invited affection--compelled it, in fact--and

     met it half-way.  Hence, he was "Tom" to the most of his friends and

     to half of the nation .  .  .  .



     I cannot remember back to a time when he was not "Tom" Reed to me,

     nor to a time when he could have been offended at being so addressed

     by me.  I cannot remember back to a time when I could let him alone

     in an after-dinner speech if he was present, nor to a time when he

     did not take my extravagance concerning him and misstatements about

     him in good part, nor yet to a time when he did not pay them back

     with usury when his turn came.  The last speech he made was at my

     birthday dinner at the end of November, when naturally I was his

     text; my last word to him was in a letter the next day; a day later

     I was illustrating a fantastic article on art with his portrait

     among others--a portrait now to be laid reverently away among the

     jests that begin in humor and end in pathos.  These things happened

     only eight days ago, and now he is gone from us, and the nation is

     speaking of him as one who was.  It seems incredible, impossible.

     Such a man, such a friend, seems to us a permanent possession; his

     vanishing from our midst is unthinkable, as was the vanishing of the

     Campanile, that had stood for a thousand years and was turned to

     dust in a moment.



The appreciation closes:



     I have only wished to say how fine and beautiful was his life and

     character, and to take him by the hand and say good-by, as to a

     fortunate friend who has done well his work and gees a pleasant

     journey.









CCXXV



CHRISTIAN SCIENCE CONTROVERSIES



The North American Review for December (1902) contained an instalment of

the Christian Science series which Mark Twain had written in Vienna

several years before.  He had renewed his interest in the doctrine, and

his admiration for Mrs. Eddy's peculiar abilities and his antagonism

toward her had augmented in the mean time.  Howells refers to the "mighty

moment when Clemens was building his engines of war for the destruction

of Christian Science, which superstition nobody, and he least of all,

expected to destroy":



     He believed that as a religious machine the Christian Science Church

     was as perfect as the Roman Church, and destined to be more

     formidable in its control of the minds of men .  .  .  .



     An interesting phase of his psychology in this business was not.

     only his admiration for the masterly policy of the Christian Science

     hierarchy, but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers

     to be tried on his friends and family if they wished it.  He had a

     tender heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the

     newer sorts of scienticians, but he seemed to base his faith in them

     largely upon the failure of the regulars, rather than upon their own

     successes, which also he believed in.  He was recurrently, but not

     insistently, desirous that you should try their strange magics when

     you were going to try the familiar medicines.



Clemens never had any quarrel with the theory of Christian Science or

mental healing, or with any of the empiric practices.  He acknowledged

good in all of them, and he welcomed most of them in preference to

materia medica.  It is true that his animosity for the founder of the

Christian Science cult sometimes seems to lap over and fringe the

religion itself; but this is apparent rather than real.  Furthermore, he

frequently expressed a deep obligation which humanity owed to the founder

of the faith, in that she had organized a healing element ignorantly and

indifferently employed hitherto.  His quarrel with Mrs. Eddy lay in the

belief that she herself, as he expressed it, was "a very unsound

Christian Scientist."



     I believe she has a serious malady--self-edification--and that it

     will be well to have one of the experts demonstrate over her.  [But

     he added]: Closely examined, painstakingly studied, she is easily

     the most interesting person on the planet, and in several ways as

     easily the most extraordinary woman that was ever born upon it.



Necessarily, the forces of Christian Science were aroused by these

articles, and there were various replies, among them, one by the founder

herself, a moderate rejoinder in her usual literary form.



     "Mrs. Eddy in Error," in the North American Review for April, 1903,

     completed what Clemens had to say on the matter for this time.



He was putting together a book on the subject, comprised of his various

published papers and some added chapters.  It would not be a large

volume, and he offered to let his Christian Science opponents share it

with him, stating their side of the case.  Mr. William D.  McCrackan, one

of the church's chief advocates, was among those invited to participate.

McCrackan and Clemens, from having begun as enemies, had become quite

friendly, and had discussed their differences face to face at

considerable length.  Early in the controversy Clemens one night wrote

McCrackan a pretty savage letter.  He threw it on the hall table for

mailing, but later got out of bed and slipped down-stairs to get it.  It

was too late--the letters had been gathered up and mailed.  Next evening

a truly Christian note came from McCrackan, returning the hasty letter,

which he said he was sure the writer would wish to recall.  Their

friendship began there.  For some reason, however, the collaborated

volume did not materialize.  In the end, publication was delayed a number

of years, by which time Clemens's active interest was a good deal

modified, though the practice itself never failed to invite his

attention.



Howells refers to his anti-Christian Science rages, which began with the

postponement of the book, and these Clemens vented at the time in another

manuscript entitled, "Eddypus," an imaginary history of a thousand years

hence, when Eddyism should rule the world.  By that day its founder would

have become a deity, and the calendar would be changed to accord with her

birth.  It was not publishable matter, and really never intended as such.

It was just one of the things which Mark Twain wrote to relieve mental

pressure.









CCXXVI



"WAS IT HEAVEN? OR HELL?"



The Christmas number of Harper's Magazine for 1902 contained the story,

"Was it Heaven? or Hell?" and it immediately brought a flood of letters

to its author from grateful readers on both sides of the ocean.  An

Englishman wrote: "I want to thank you for writing so pathetic and so

profoundly true a story"; and an American declared it to be the best

short story ever written.  Another letter said:



     I have learned to love those maiden liars--love and weep over them--

     then put them beside Dante's Beatrice in Paradise.



There were plenty of such letters; but there was one of a different sort.

It was a letter from a man who had but recently gone through almost

precisely the experience narrated in the tale.  His dead daughter had

even borne the same name--Helen.  She had died of typhus while her mother

was prostrated with the same malady, and the deception had been

maintained in precisely the same way, even to the fictitiously written

letters.  Clemens replied to this letter, acknowledging the striking

nature of the coincidence it related, and added that, had he invented the

story, he would have believed it a case of mental telegraphy.



     I was merely telling a true story just as it had been told to me by

     one who well knew the mother and the daughter & all the beautiful &

     pathetic details.  I was living in the house where it had happened,

     three years before, & I put it on paper at once while it was fresh

     in my mind, & its pathos still straining at my heartstrings.



Clemens did not guess that the coincidences were not yet complete, that

within a month the drama of the tale would be enacted in his own home.

In his note-book, under the date of December 24(1902), he wrote:



     Jean was hit with a chill: Clara was completing her watch in her

     mother's room and there was no one able to force Jean to go to bed.

     As a result she is pretty ill to-day-fever & high temperature.



Three days later he added:



     It was pneumonia.  For 5 days jean's temperature ranged between 103

     & 104 2/5, till this morning, when it got down to 101.  She looks

     like an escaped survivor of a forest fire.  For 6 days now my story

     in the Christmas Harper's "Was it Heaven? or Hell?"--has been

     enacted in this household.  Every day Clara & the nurses have lied

     about Jean to her mother, describing the fine times she is having

     outdoors in the winter sports.



That proved a hard, trying winter in the Clemens home, and the burden of

it fell chiefly, indeed almost entirely, upon Clara Clemens.  Mrs.

Clemens became still more frail, and no other member of the family, not

even her husband, was allowed to see her for longer than the briefest

interval.  Yet the patient was all the more anxious to know the news, and

daily it had to be prepared--chiefly invented--for her comfort.  In an

account which Clemens once set down of the "Siege and Season of

Unveracity," as he called it, he said:



     Clara stood a daily watch of three or four hours, and hers was a

     hard office indeed.  Daily she sealed up in her heart a dozen

     dangerous truths, and thus saved her mother's life and hope and

     happiness with holy lies.  She had never told her mother a lie in

     her life before, and I may almost say that she never told her a

     truth afterward.  It was fortunate for us all that Clara's

     reputation for truthfulness was so well established in her mother's

     mind.  It was our daily protection from disaster.  The mother never

     doubted Clara's word.  Clara could tell her large improbabilities

     without exciting any suspicion, whereas if I tried to market even a

     small and simple one the case would have been different.  I was

     never able to get a reputation like Clara's.  Mrs. Clemens

     questioned Clara every day concerning Jean's health, spirits,

     clothes, employments, and amusements, and how she was enjoying

     herself; and Clara furnished the information right along in minute

     detail--every word of it false, of course.  Every day she had to

     tell how Jean dressed, and in time she got so tired of using Jean's

     existing clothes over and over again, and trying to get new effects

     out of them, that finally, as a relief to her hard-worked invention,

     she got to adding imaginary clothes to Jean's wardrobe, and probably

     would have doubled it and trebled it if a warning note in her

     mother's comments had not admonished her that she was spending more

     money on these spectral gowns and things than the family income

     justified.



Some portions of detailed accounts of Clara's busy days of this period,

as written at the time by Clemens to Twichell and to Mrs. Crane, are

eminently worth preserving.  To Mrs. Crane:



     Clara does not go to her Monday lesson in New York today [her mother

     having seemed not so well through the night], but forgets that fact

     and enters her mother's room (where she has no business to be)

     toward train-time dressed in a wrapper.



     LIVY.  Why, Clara, aren't you going to your lesson?

     CLARA (almost caught).  Yes.

     L.  In that costume?

     CL.  Oh no.

     L.  Well, you can't make your train; it's impossible.

     CL.  I know, but I'm going to take the other one.

     L.  Indeed that won't do--you'll be ever so much too late for

     your lesson.

     CL.  No, the lesson-time has been put an hour later.

     L.  (satisfied, then suddenly).  But, Clara, that train and the late

     lesson together will make you late to Mrs. Hapgood's luncheon.

     CL.  No, the train leaves fifteen minutes earlier than it used to.

     L.  (satisfied).  Tell Mrs. Hapgood, etc., etc., etc.  (which Clara

     promises to do).  Clara, dear, after the luncheon--I hate to put

     this on you--but could you do two or three little shopping-errands

     for me?

     CL.  Oh, it won't trouble me a bit-I can do it.  (Takes a list of

     the things she is to buy-a list which she will presently hand to

     another.)



     At 3 or 4 P.M.  Clara takes the things brought from New York,

     studies over her part a little, then goes to her mother's room.



     LIVY.  It's very good of you, dear.  Of course, if I had known it

     was going to be so snowy and drizzly and sloppy I wouldn't have

     asked you to buy them.  Did you get wet?

     CL.  Oh, nothing to hurt.

     L.  You took a cab both ways?

     CL.  Not from the station to the lesson-the weather was good enough

     till that was over.

     L.  Well, now, tell me everything Mrs. Hapgood said.



     Clara tells her a long yarn-avoiding novelties and surprises and

     anything likely to inspire questions difficult to answer; and of

     course detailing the menu, for if it had been the feeding of the

     5,000 Livy would have insisted on knowing what kind of bread it was

     and how the fishes were served.  By and by, while talking of

     something else:



     LIVY.  Clams!--in the end of December.  Are you sure it was clams?

     CL.  I didn't say cl---I meant Blue Points.

     L.  (tranquilized).  It seemed odd.  What is Jean doing?

     CL.  She said she was going to do a little typewriting.

     L.  Has she been out to-day?

     CL.  Only a moment, right after luncheon.  She was determined to go

     out again, but----



     L.  How did you know she was out?

     CL.  (saving herself in time).  Katie told me.  She was determined

     to go out again in the rain and snow, but I persuaded her to stay

     in.

     L.  (with moving and grateful admiration).  Clara, you are

     wonderful!  the wise watch you keep over Jean, and the influence you

     have over her; it's so lovely of you, and I tied here and can't take

     care of her myself.  (And she goes on with these undeserved praises

     till Clara is expiring with shame.)



To Twichell:



     I am to see Livy a moment every afternoon until she has another bad

     night; and I stand in dread, for with all my practice I realize that

     in a sudden emergency I am but a poor, clumsy liar, whereas a fine

     alert and capable emergency liar is the only sort that is worth

     anything in a sick-chamber.



     Now, Joe, just see what reputation can do.  All Clara's life she has

     told Livy the truth and now the reward comes; Clara lies to her

     three and a half hours every day, and Livy takes it all at par,

     whereas even when I tell her a truth it isn't worth much without

     corroboration .  .  .  .



     Soon my brief visit is due.  I've just been up listening at Livy's

     door.



     5 P.M.  A great disappointment.  I was sitting outside Livy's door

     waiting.  Clara came out a minute ago and said L ivy is not so well,

     and the nurse can't let me see her to-day.



That pathetic drama was to continue in some degree for many a long month.

All that winter and spring Mrs. Clemens kept but a frail hold on life.

Clemens wrote little, and refused invitations everywhere he could.  He

spent his time largely in waiting for the two-minute period each day when

he could stand at the bed-foot and say a few words to the invalid, and he

confined his writing mainly to the comforting, affectionate messages

which he was allowed to push under her door.  He was always waiting there

long before the moment he was permitted to enter.  Her illness and her

helplessness made manifest what Howells has fittingly characterized as

his "beautiful and tender loyalty to her, which was the most moving

quality of his most faithful soul."









CCXXVII



THE SECOND RIVERDALE WINTER



Most of Mark Twain's stories have been dramatized at one time or another,

and with more or less success.  He had two plays going that winter, one

of them the little "Death Disk," which--in story form had appeared a year

before in Harper's Magazine.  It was put on at the Carnegie Lyceum with

considerable effect, but it was not of sufficient importance to warrant a

long continuance.



Another play of that year was a dramatization of Huckleberry Finn, by Lee

Arthur.  This was played with a good deal of success in Baltimore,

Philadelphia, and elsewhere, the receipts ranging from three hundred to

twenty-one hundred dollars per night, according to the weather and

locality.  Why the play was discontinued is not altogether apparent;

certainly many a dramatic enterprise has gone further, faring worse.



Huck in book form also had been having adventures a little earlier, in

being tabooed on account of his morals by certain librarians of Denver

and Omaha.  It was years since Huck had been in trouble of that sort, and

he acquired a good deal of newspaper notoriety in consequence.



Certain entries in Mark Twain's note-book reveal somewhat of his life and

thought at this period.  We find such entries as this:



     Saturday, January 3, 1903.  The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity,

     ostentation, arrogance, tyranny.



     Sunday, January 4, 1903.  The offspring of poverty: Greed,

     sordidness, envy, hate, malice, cruelty, meanness, lying, shirking,

     cheating, stealing, murder.





     Monday, February 2, 1903.  33d wedding anniversary.  I was allowed

     to see Livy 5 minutes this morning in honor of the day.  She makes

     but little progress toward recovery, still there is certainly some,

     we are sure.



     Sunday, March 1, 1903.  We may not doubt that society in heaven

     consists mainly of undesirable persons.



     Thursday, March 19, 1903.  Susy's birthday.  She would be 31 now.



The family illnesses, which presently included an allotment for himself,

his old bronchitis, made him rage more than ever at the imperfections of

the species which could be subject to such a variety of ills.  Once he

wrote:



     Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.



And again:



     Adam, man's benefactor--he gave him all that he has ever received

     that was worth having--death.



The Riverdale home was in reality little more than a hospital that

spring.  Jean had scarcely recovered her physical strength when she was

attacked by measles, and Clara also fell a victim to the infection.

Fortunately Mrs. Clemens's health had somewhat improved.



It was during this period that Clemens formulated his eclectic

therapeutic doctrine.  Writing to Twichell April 4, 1903, he said:



     Livy does make a little progress these past 3 or 4 days, progress

     which is visible to even the untrained eye.  The physicians are

     doing good work for her, but my notion is, that no art of healing is

     the best for all ills.  I should distribute the ailments around:

     surgery cases to the surgeon; lupus to the actinic-ray specialist;

     nervous prostration to the Christian Scientist; most ills to the

     allopath & the homeopath; & (in my own particular case) rheumatism,

     gout, & bronchial attack to the osteopathist.





He had plenty of time to think and to read during those weeks of

confinement, and to rage, and to write when he felt the need of that

expression, though he appears to have completed not much for print beyond

his reply to Mrs. Eddy, already mentioned, and his burlesque,

"Instructions in Art," with pictures by himself, published in the

Metropolitan for April and May.



Howells called his attention to some military outrages in the

Philippines, citing a case where a certain lieutenant had tortured one of

his men, a mild offender, to death out of pure deviltry, and had been

tried but not punished for his fiendish crime.--[The torture to death of

Private Edward C.  Richter, an American soldier, by orders of a

commissioned officer of the United States army on the night of February

7, 1902.  Private Richter was bound and gagged and the gag held in his

mouth by means of a club while ice-water was slowly poured into his face,

a dipper full at a time, for two hours and a half, until life became

extinct.]



Clemens undertook to give expression to his feelings on this subject, but

he boiled so when he touched pen to paper to write of it that it was

simply impossible for him to say anything within the bounds of print.

Then his only relief was to rise and walk the floor, and curse out his

fury at the race that had produced such a specimen.



Mrs. Clemens, who perhaps got some drift or the echo of these tempests,

now and then sent him a little admonitory, affectionate note.



Among the books that Clemens read, or tried to read, during his

confinement were certain of the novels of Sir Walter Scott.  He had never

been able to admire Scott, and determined now to try to understand this

author's popularity and his standing with the critics; but after wading

through the first volume of one novel, and beginning another one, he

concluded to apply to one who could speak as having authority.  He wrote

to Brander Matthews:



     DEAR BRANDER,--I haven't been out of my bed for 4 weeks, but-well, I

     have been reading a good deal, & it occurs to me to ask you to sit

     down, some time or other when you have 8 or 9 months to spare, & jot

     me down a certain few literary particulars for my help & elevation.

     Your time need not be thrown away, for at your further leisure you

     can make Columbian lectures out of the results & do your students a

     good turn.



     1.  Are there in Sir Walter's novels passages done in good English--

     English which is neither slovenly nor involved?



     2.  Are there passages whose English is not poor & thin &

     commonplace, but is of a quality above that?



     3.  Are there passages which burn with real fire--not punk, fox-

     fire, make-believe?

     4.  Has he heroes & heroines who are not cads and cadesses?



     5.  Has he personages whose acts & talk correspond with their

     characters as described by him?



     6.  Has he heroes & heroines whom the reader admires--admires and

     knows why?



     7.  Has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages

     that are humorous?



     8.  Does he ever chain the reader's interest & make him reluctant to

     lay the book down?



     9.  Are there pages where he ceases from posing, ceases from

     admiring the placid flood & flow of his own dilution, ceases from

     being artificial, & is for a time, long or short, recognizably

     sincere & in earnest?



     10.  Did he know how to write English, & didn't do it because he

     didn't want to?



     11.  Did he use the right word only when he couldn't think of

     another one, or did he run so much to wrong words because he didn't

     know the right one when he saw it?



     12.  Can you read him and keep your respect for him?  Of course a

     person could in his day--an era of sentimentality & sloppy

     romantics--but land! can a body do it to-day?



     Brander, I lie here dying; slowly dying, under the blight of Sir

     Walter.  I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, & as far as

     Chapter XIX of Guy Mannering, & I can no longer hold my head up or

     take my nourishment.  Lord, it's all so juvenile! so artificial, so

     shoddy; & such wax figures & skeletons & specters.  Interest?  Why,

     it is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these

     milk-&-water humbugs.  And oh, the poverty of invention!  Not

     poverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing reasons

     for them.  Sir Walter usually gives himself away when he arranges

     for a situation--elaborates & elaborates & elaborates till, if you

     live to get to it, you don't believe in it when it happens.



     I can't find the rest of Rob Roy, I, can't stand any more Mannering-

     I do not know just what to do, but I will reflect, & not quit this

     great study rashly ....



     My, I wish I could see you & Leigh Hunt!



     Sincerely yours,



                                                  S. L. CLEMENS.





But a few days later he experienced a revelation.  It came when he

perseveringly attacked still a third work of Scott--Quentin Durward.

Hastily he wrote to Matthews again:



I'm still in bed, but the days have lost their dullness since I broke

into Sir Walter & lost my temper.  I finished Guy Mannering that curious,

curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows gibbering around a single

flesh-&-blood being--Dinmont; a book crazily put together out of the very

refuse of the romance artist's stage properties--finished it & took up

Quentin Durward & finished that.



It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living; it was like

withdrawing from the infant class in the college of journalism to sit

under the lectures in English literature in Columbia University.



I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward?--[This letter, enveloped, addressed,

and stamped, was evidently mislaid.  It was found and mailed seven years

later, June, 1910 message from the dead.]



Among other books which he read that winter and spring was Helen Keller's

'The Story of My Life', then recently published.  That he finished it in

a mood of sweet gentleness we gather from a long, lovely letter which he

wrote her--a letter in which he said:



I am charmed with your book--enchanted.  You are a wonderful creature,

the most wonderful in the world--you and your other half together--Miss

Sullivan, I mean--for it took the pair of you to make a complete &

perfect whole.  How she stands out in her letters!  her brilliancy,

penetration, originality, wisdom, character, & the fine literary

competencies of her pen--they are all there.



When reading and writing failed as diversion, Mark Twain often turned to

mathematics.  With no special talent for accuracy in the matter of

figures, he had a curious fondness for calculations, scientific and

financial, and he used to cover pages, ciphering at one thing and

another, arriving pretty inevitably at the wrong results.  When the

problem was financial, and had to do with his own fortunes, his figures

were as likely as not to leave him in a state of panic.  The expenditures

were naturally heavy that spring; and one night, when he had nothing

better to do, he figured the relative proportion to his income.  The

result showed that they were headed straight for financial ruin.  He put

in the rest of the night fearfully rolling and tossing, and

reconstructing his figures that grew always worse, and next morning

summoned Jean and Clara and petrified them with the announcement that the

cost of living was one hundred and twenty-five per cent. more than the

money-supply.



Writing to MacAlister three days later he said:



     It was a mistake.  When I came down in the morning, a gray and aged

     wreck, I found that in some unaccountable way (unaccountable to a

     business man, but not to me) I had multiplied the totals by two.  By

     God, I dropped seventy-five years on the floor where I stood!



     Do you know it affected me as one is affected when one wakes out of

     a hideous dream & finds it was only a dream.  It was a great comfort

     & satisfaction to me to call the daughters to a private meeting of

     the board again.  Certainly there is a blistering & awful reality

     about a well-arranged unreality.  It is quite within the

     possibilities that two or three nights like that of mine would drive

     a man to suicide.  He would refuse to examine the figures, they

     would revolt him so, & he would go to his death unaware that there

     was nothing serious about them.  I cannot get that night out of my

     head, it was so vivid, so real, so ghastly: In any other year of

     these thirty-three the relief would have been simple: go where you

     can, cut your cloth to fit your income.  You can't do that when your

     wife can't be moved, even from one room to the next.



     The doctor & a specialist met in conspiracy five days ago, & in

     their belief she will by and by come out of this as good as new,

     substantially.  They ordered her to Italy for next winter--which

     seems to indicate that by autumn she will be able to undertake the

     voyage.  So Clara is writing to a Florence friend to take a look

     around among the villas for us in the regions near that city.









CCXXVIII



PROFFERED HONORS



Mark Twain had been at home well on toward three years; but his

popularity showed no signs of diminishing.  So far from having waned, it

had surged to a higher point than ever before.  His crusade against

public and private abuses had stirred readers, and had set them to

thinking; the news of illness in his household; a report that he was

contemplating another residence abroad--these things moved deeply the

public heart, and a tide of letters flowed in, letters of every sort--of

sympathy, of love, or hearty endorsement, whatever his attitude of

reform.



When a writer in a New York newspaper said, "Let us go outside the realm

of practical politics next time in choosing our candidates for the

Presidency," and asked, "Who is our ablest and most conspicuous private

citizen?" another editorial writer, Joseph Hollister, replied that Mark

Twain was "the greatest man of his day in private life, and entitled to

the fullest measure of recognition."



But Clemens was without political ambitions.  He knew the way of such

things too well.  When Hollister sent him the editorial he replied only

with a word of thanks, and did not, even in jest, encourage that tiny

seed of a Presidential boom.  One would like to publish many of the

beautiful letters received during this period, for they are beautiful,

most of them, however illiterate in form, however discouraging in length

--beautiful in that they overflow with the writers' sincerity and

gratitude.



So many of them came from children, usually without the hope of a reply,

some signed only with initials, that the writers might not be open to the

suspicion of being seekers for his autograph.  Almost more than any other

reward, Mark Twain valued this love of the children.



A department in the St. Nicholas Magazine offered a prize for a

caricature drawing of some well-known man.  There were one or two of

certain prominent politicians and capitalists, and there was literally a

wheelbarrow load of Mark Twain.  When he was informed of this he wrote:

"No tribute could have pleased me more than that--the friendship of the

children."



Tributes came to him in many forms.  In his native State it was proposed

to form a Mark Twain Association, with headquarters at Hannibal, with the

immediate purpose of having a week set apart at the St. Louis World's

Fair, to be called the Mark Twain week, with a special Mark Twain day, on

which a national literary convention would be held.  But when his consent

was asked, and his co-operation invited, he wrote characteristically:



It is indeed a high compliment which you offer me, in naming an

association after me and in proposing the setting apart of a Mark Twain

day at the great St. Louis Fair, but such compliments are not proper for

the living; they are proper and safe for the dead only.  I value the

impulse which moves you to tender me these honors.  I value it as highly

as any one can, and am grateful for it, but I should stand in a sort of

terror of the honors themselves.  So long as we remain alive we are not

safe from doing things which, however righteously and honorably intended,

can wreck our repute and extinguish our friendships.



I hope that no society will be named for me while I am still alive, for I

might at some time or other do something which would cause its members to

regret having done me that honor.  After I shall have joined the dead I

shall follow the custom of those people, and be guilty of no conduct that

can wound any friend; but until that time shall come I shall be a

doubtful quantity, like the rest of our race.



The committee, still hoping for his consent, again appealed to him.  But

again he wrote:



While I am deeply touched by the desire of my friends of Hannibal to

confer these great honors upon me I must still forbear to accept them.

Spontaneous and unpremeditated honors, like those which came to me at

Hannibal, Columbia, St. Louis, and at the village stations all down the

line, are beyond all price and are a treasure for life in the memory, for

they are a free gift out of the heart and they come without solicitation;

but I am a Missourian, and so I shrink from distinctions which have to be

arranged beforehand and with my privity, for I then become a party to my

own exalting.  I am humanly fond of honors that happen, but chary of

those that come by canvass and intention.



Somewhat later he suggested a different feature for the fair; one that

was not practical, perhaps, but which certainly would have aroused

interest--that is to say, an old-fashioned six-day steamboat-race from

New Orleans to St. Louis, with the old-fashioned accessories, such as

torch-baskets, forecastle crowds of negro singers, with a negro on the

safety-valve.  In his letter to President Francis he said:



As to particulars, I think that the race should be a genuine reproduction

of the old-time race, not just an imitation of it, and that it should

cover the whole course.  I think the boats should begin the trip at New

Orleans, and side by side (not an interval between), and end it at North

St. Louis, a mile or two above the Big Mound.



In a subsequent letter to Governor Francis he wrote:



It has been a dear wish of mine to exhibit myself at the great Fair & get

a prize, but circumstances beyond my control have interfered .  .  .  .



I suppose you will get a prize, because you have created the most

prodigious Fair the planet has ever seen.  Very well, you have indeed

earned it, and with it the gratitude of the State and the nation.



Newspaper men used every inducement to get interviews from him.  They

invited him to name a price for any time he could give them, long or

short.  One reporter offered him five hundred dollars for a two-hour

talk.  Another proposed to pay him one hundred dollars a week for a

quarter of a day each week, allowing him to discuss any subject he

pleased.  One wrote asking him two questions: the first, "Your favorite

method of escaping from Indians"; the second, "Your favorite method of

escaping capture by the Indians when they were in pursuit of you."  They

inquired as to his favorite copy-book maxim; as to what he considered

most important to a young man's success; his definition of a gentleman.

They wished to know his plan for the settlement of labor troubles.  But

they did not awaken his interest, or his cupidity.  To one applicant he

wrote:



No, there are temptations against which we are fire-proof.  Your

proposition is one which comes to me with considerable frequency, but it

never tempts me.  The price isn't the objection; you offer plenty.  It is

the nature of the work that is the objection--a kind of work which I

could not do well enough to satisfy me.  To multiply the price by twenty

would not enable me to do the work to my satisfaction, & by consequence

would make no impression upon me.



Once he allowed himself to be interviewed for the Herald, when from Mr.

Rogers's yacht he had watched Sir Thomas Lipton's Shamrock go down to

defeat; but this was a subject which appealed to him--a kind of

hotweather subject--and he could be as light-minded about it as he chose.











CCXXXIX



THE LAST SUMMER AT ELMIRA



The Clemenses were preparing to take up residence in Florence, Italy.

The Hartford house had been sold in May, ending forever the association

with the city that had so long been a part of their lives.  The Tarrytown

place, which they had never occupied, they also agreed to sell, for it

was the belief now that Mrs. Clemens's health would never greatly prosper

there.  Howells says, or at least implies, that they expected their

removal to Florence to be final.  He tells us, too, of one sunny

afternoon when he and Clemens sat on the grass before the mansion at

Riverdale, after Mrs. Clemens had somewhat improved, and how they "looked

up toward a balcony where by and by that lovely presence made itself

visible, as if it had stooped there from a cloud.  A hand frailly waved a

handkerchief; Clemens ran over the lawn toward it, calling tenderly."  It

was a greeting to Howells the last he would ever receive from her.



Mrs. Clemens was able to make a trip to Elmira by the end of June, and on

the 1st of July Mr. Rogers brought Clemens and his wife down the river on

his yacht to the Lackawanna pier, and they reached Quarry Farm that

evening.  She improved in the quietude and restfulness of that beloved

place.  Three weeks later Clemens wrote to Twichell:



Livy is coming along: eats well, sleeps some, is mostly very gay, not

very often depressed; spends all day on the porch, sleeps there a part of

the night; makes excursions in carriage & in wheel-chair; &, in the

matter of superintending everything & everybody, has resumed business at

the old stand.



During three peaceful months she spent most of her days reclining on the

wide veranda, surrounded by those dearest to her, and looking out on the

dreamlike landscape--the long, grassy slope, the drowsy city, and the

distant hills--getting strength for the far journey by sea.  Clemens did

some writing, occupying the old octagonal study--shut in now and

overgrown with vines--where during the thirty years since it was built so

many of his stories had been written.  'A Dog's Tale'--that pathetic

anti-vivisection story--appears to have been the last manuscript ever

completed in the spot consecrated by Huck and Tom, and by Tom Canty the

Pauper and the little wandering Prince.



It was October 5th when they left Elmira.  Two days earlier Clemens had

written in his note-book:



     Today I placed flowers on Susy's grave--for the last time probably--

     & read words:



          "Good-night, dear heart, good-night."



They did not return to Riverdale, but went to the Hotel Grosvenor for the

intervening weeks.  They had engaged passage for Italy on the Princess

Irene, which would sail on the 24th.  It was during the period of their

waiting that Clemens concluded his final Harper contract.  On that day,

in his note-book, he wrote:



                               THE PROPHECY



In 1895 Cheiro the palmist examined my hand & said that in my 68th year

(1903) I would become suddenly rich.  I was a bankrupt & $94,000 in debt

at the time through the failure of Charles L. Webster & Co.  Two years

later--in London--Cheiro repeated this long-distance prediction, & added

that the riches would come from a quite unexpected source.  I am

superstitious.  I kept the prediction in mind & often thought of it.

When at last it came true, October 22, 1903, there was but a month & 9

days to spare.



The contract signed that day concentrates all my books in Harper's hands

& now at last they are valuable; in fact they are a fortune.  They

guarantee me $25,000 a year for 5 years, and they will yield twice as

much as that.--[In earlier note-books and letters Clemens more than once

refers to this prophecy and wonders if it is to be realized.  The Harper

contract, which brought all of his books into the hands of one publisher

(negotiated for him by Mr. Rogers), proved, in fact, a fortune.  The

books yielded always more than the guarantee; sometimes twice that

amount, as he had foreseen.]



During the conclusion of this contract Clemens made frequent visits to

Fairhaven on the Kanawha.  Joe Goodman came from the Pacific to pay him a

good-by visit during this period.  Goodman had translated the Mayan

inscriptions, and his work had received official recognition and

publication by the British Museum.  It was a fine achievement for a man

in later life and Clemens admired it immensely.  Goodman and Clemens

enjoyed each other in the old way at quiet resorts where they could talk

over the old tales.  Another visitor of that summer was the son of an old

friend, a Hannibal printer named Daulton.  Young Daulton came with

manuscripts seeking a hearing of the magazine editors, so Clemens wrote a

letter which would insure that favor:



INTRODUCING MR. GEO. DAULTON:



TO GILDER, ALDEN, HARVEY, McCLURE, WALKER, PAGE, BOK, COLLIER, and such

other members of the sacred guild as privilege me to call them friends-

these:



Although I have no personal knowledge of the bearer of this, I have what

is better: He comes recommended to me by his own father--a thing not

likely to happen in any of your families, I reckon.  I ask you, as a

favor to me, to waive prejudice & superstition for this once & examine

his work with an eye to its literary merit, instead of to the chastity of

its spelling.  I wish to God you cared less for that particular.



I set (or sat) type alongside of his father, in Hannibal, more than 50

years ago, when none but the pure in heart were in that business.  A true

man he was; and if I can be of any service to his son--and to you at the

same time, let me hope--I am here heartily to try.



Yours by the sanctions of time & deserving,



                    Sincerely,

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





Among the kindly words which came to Mark Twain before leaving America

was this one which Rudyard Kipling had written to his publisher, Frank

Doubleday:



     I love to think of the great and godlike Clemens.  He is the biggest

     man you have on your side of the water by a damn sight, and don't

     you forget it.  Cervantes was a relation of his.



It curiously happened that Clemens at the same moment was writing to

Doubleday about Kipling:



     I have been reading "The Bell Buoy" and "The Old Man" over and over

     again-my custom with Kipling's work--and saving up the rest for

     other leisurely and luxurious meals.  A bell-buoy is a deeply

     impressive fellow-being.  In these many recent trips up and down the

     Sound in the Kanawha he has talked to me nightly sometimes in his

     pathetic and melancholy way, sometimes with his strenuous and urgent

     note, and I got his meaning--now I have his words!  No one but

     Kipling could do this strong and vivid thing.  Some day I hope to

     hear the poem chanted or sung-with the bell-buoy breaking in out of

     the distance.



     P. S.--Your letter has arrived.  It makes me proud and glad--what

     Kipling says.  I hope Fate will fetch him to Florence while we are

     there.  I would rather see him than any other man.









CCXXX



THE RETURN TO FLORENCE



From the note-book:



     Saturday, October 24, 1903.  Sailed in the Princess Irene for Genoa

     at 11.  Flowers & fruit from Mrs. Rogers & Mrs. Coe.  We have with

     us Katie Leary (in our domestic service 23 years) & Miss Margaret

     Sherry (trained nurse).



Two days later he wrote:



     Heavy storm all night.  Only 3 stewardesses.  Ours served 60 meals

     in rooms this morning.



On the 27th:



     Livy is enduring the voyage marvelously well.  As well as Clara &

     Jean, I think, & far better than the trained nurse.



     She has been out on deck an hour.



     November 2.  Due at Gibraltar 10 days from New York.  3 days to

     Naples, then 2 day to Genoa.

     At supper the band played "Cavalleria Rusticana," which is forever

     associated in my mind with Susy.  I love it better than any other,

     but it breaks my heart.



It was the "Intermezzo" he referred to, which had been Susy's favorite

music, and whenever he heard it he remembered always one particular

opera-night long ago, and Susy's face rose before him.



They were in Naples on the 5th; thence to Genoa, and to Florence, where

presently they were installed in the Villa Reale di Quarto, a fine old

Italian palace built by Cosimo more than four centuries ago.  In later

times it has been occupied and altered by royal families of Wurtemberg

and Russia.  Now it was the property of the Countess Massiglia, from whom

Clemens had leased it.



They had hoped to secure the Villa Papiniano, under Fiesole, near

Professor Fiske, but negotiations for it had fallen through.  The Villa

Quarto, as it is usually called, was a more pretentious place and as

beautifully located, standing as it does in an ancient garden looking out

over Florence toward Vallombrosa and the Chianti hills.  Yet now in the

retrospect, it seems hardly to have been the retreat for an invalid.  Its

garden was supernaturally beautiful, all that one expects that a garden

of Italy should be--such a garden as Maxfield Parrish might dream; but

its beauty was that which comes of antiquity--the accumulation of dead

years.  Its funereal cypresses, its crumbling walls and arches, its

clinging ivy and moldering marbles, and a clock that long ago forgot the

hours, gave it a mortuary look.  In a way it suggested Arnold Bocklin's

"Todteninsel," and it might well have served as the allegorical setting

for a gateway to the bourne of silence.



The house itself, one of the most picturesque of the old Florentine

suburban palaces, was historically interesting, rather than cheerful.

The rooms, in number more than sixty, though richly furnished, were vast

and barnlike, and there were numbers of them wholly unused and never

entered.  There was a dearth of the modern improvements which Americans

have learned to regard as a necessity, and the plumbing, such as it was,

was not always in order.  The place was approached by narrow streets,

along which the more uninviting aspects of Italy were not infrequent.

Youth and health and romance might easily have reveled in the place; but

it seems now not to have been the best choice for that frail invalid, to

whom cheer and brightness and freshness and the lovelier things of hope

meant always so much.--[Villa Quarto has recently been purchased by

Signor P.  de Ritter Lahony, and thoroughly restored and refreshed and

beautified without the sacrifice of any of its romantic features.]

--Neither was the climate of Florence all that they had hoped for.

Their former sunny winter had misled them.  Tradition to the contrary,

Italy--or at least Tuscany--is not one perpetual dream of sunlight.  It

is apt to be damp and cloudy; it is likely to be cold.  Writing to

MacAlister, Clemens said:



Florentine sunshine?  Bless you, there isn't any.  We have heavy fogs

every morning & rain all day.  This house is not merely large, it is

vast--therefore I think it must always lack the home feeling.



His dissatisfaction in it began thus early, and it grew as one thing

after another went wrong.  With it all, however, Mrs. Clemens seemed to

gain a little, and was glad to see company--a reasonable amount of

company--to brighten her surroundings.



Clemens began to work and wrote a story or two, and those lively articles

about the Italian language.



To Twichell he reported progress:



     I have a handsome success in one way here.  I left New York under a

     sort of half-promise to furnish to the Harper magazines 30,000 words

     this year.  Magazining is difficult work because every third page

     represents two pages that you have put in the fire (you are nearly

     sure to start wrong twice), & so when you have finished an article &

     are willing to let it go to print it represents only 10 cents a word

     instead of 30.



     But this time I had the curious (& unprecedented) luck to start

     right in each case.  I turned out 37,000 words in 25 working days; &

     the reason I think I started right every time is, that not only have

     I approved and accepted the several articles, but the court of last

     resort (Livy) has done the same.



     On many of the between-days I did some work, but only of an idle &

     not necessarily necessary sort, since it will not see print until I

     am dead.  I shall continue this (an hour per day), but the rest of

     the year I expect to put in on a couple of long books (half-

     completed ones).  No more magazine work hanging over my head.



     This secluded & silent solitude, this clean, soft air, & this

     enchanting view of Florence, the great valley & snow-mountains that

     frame it, are the right conditions for work.  They are a persistent

     inspiration.  To-day is very lovely; when the afternoon arrives

     there will be a new picture every hour till dark, & each of them

     divine--or progressing from divine to diviner & divinest.  On this

     (second) floor Clara's room commands the finest; she keeps a window

     ten feet high wide open all the time & frames it in that.  I go in

     from time to time every day & trade sass for a look.  The central

     detail is a distant & stately snow-hump that rises above & behind

     black-forested hills, & its sloping vast buttresses, velvety & sun-

     polished, with purple shadows between, make the sort of picture we

     knew that time we walked in Switzerland in the days of our youth.



From this letter, which is of January 7, 1904, we gather that the weather

had greatly improved, and with it Mrs. Clemens's health, notwithstanding

she had an alarming attack in December.  One of the stories he had

finished was "The $30,000 Bequest."  The work mentioned, which would not

see print until after his death, was a continuation of those

autobiographical chapters which for years he had been setting down as the

mood seized him.



He experimented with dictation, which he had tried long before with

Redpath, and for a time now found it quite to his liking.  He dictated

some of his copyright memories, and some anecdotes and episodes; but his

amanuensis wrote only longhand, which perhaps hampered him, for he tired

of it by and by and the dictations were discontinued.



Among these notes there is one elaborate description of the Villa di

Quarto, dictated at the end of the winter, by which time we are not

surprised to find he had become much attached to the place.  The Italian

spring was in the air, and it was his habit to grow fond of his

surroundings.  Some atmospheric paragraphs of these impressions invite us

here:



     We are in the extreme south end of the house, if there is any such

     thing as a south end to a house, whose orientation cannot be

     determined by me, because I am incompetent in all cases where an

     object does not point directly north & south.  This one slants

     across between, & is therefore a confusion.  This little private

     parlor is in one of the two corners of what I call the south end of

     the house.  The sun rises in such a way that all the morning it is

     pouring its light through the 33 glass doors or windows which pierce

     the side of the house which looks upon the terrace & garden; the

     rest of the day the light floods this south end of the house, as I

     call it; at noon the sun is directly above Florence yonder in the

     distance in the plain, directly across those architectural features

     which have been so familiar to the world in pictures for some

     centuries, the Duomo, the Campanile, the Tomb of the Medici, & the

     beautiful tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; in this position it begins

     to reveal the secrets of the delicious blue mountains that circle

     around into the west, for its light discovers, uncovers, & exposes a

     white snowstorm of villas & cities that you cannot train yourself to

     have confidence in, they appear & disappear so mysteriously, as if

     they might not be villas & cities at all, but the ghosts of perished

     ones of the remote & dim Etruscan times; & late in the afternoon the

     sun sets down behind those mountains somewhere, at no particular

     time & at no particular place, so far as I can see.



Again at the end of March he wrote:



     Now that we have lived in this house four and a half months my

     prejudices have fallen away one by one & the place has become very

     homelike to me.  Under certain conditions I should like to go on

     living in it indefinitely.  I should wish the Countess to move out

     of Italy, out of Europe, out of the planet.  I should want her

     bonded to retire to her place in the next world & inform me which of

     the two it was, so that I could arrange for my own hereafter.



Complications with their landlady had begun early, and in time, next to

Mrs. Clemens's health, to which it bore such an intimate and vital

relation, the indifference of the Countess Massiglia to their needs

became the supreme and absorbing concern of life at the villa, and led to

continued and almost continuous house-hunting.



Days when the weather permitted, Clemens drove over the hills looking for

a villa which he could lease or buy--one with conveniences and just the

right elevation and surroundings.  There were plenty of villas; but some

of them were badly situated as to altitude or view; some were falling to

decay, and the search was rather a discouraging one.  Still it was not

abandoned, and the reports of these excursions furnished new interest and

new hope always to the invalid at home.



"Even if we find it," he wrote Howells, "I am afraid it will be months

before we can move Mrs. Clemens.  Of course it will.  But it comforts us

to let on that we think otherwise, and these pretensions help to keep

hope alive in her."



She had her bad days and her good days, days when it was believed she had

passed the turning-point and was traveling the way to recovery; but the

good days were always a little less hopeful, the bad days a little more

discouraging.  On February 22d Clemens wrote in his note-book:



At midnight Livy's pulse went to 192 & there was a collapse.  Great

alarm.  Subcutaneous injection of brandy saved her.



And to MacAlister toward the end of March:



We are having quite perfect weather now & are hoping that it will bring

effects for Mrs. Clemens.



But a few days later he added that he was watching the driving rain

through the windows, and that it was bad weather for the invalid.  "But

it will not last," he said.



The invalid improved then, and there was a concert in Florence at which

Clara Clemens sang.  Clemens in his note-book says:



     April 8.  Clara's concert was a triumph.  Livy woke up & sent for

     her to tell her all about it, near midnight.



But a day or two later she was worse again--then better.  The hearts in

that household were as pendulums, swinging always between hope and

despair.



One familiar with the Clemens history might well have been filled with

forebodings.  Already in January a member of the family, Mollie Clemens,

Orion's wife, died, news which was kept from Mrs. Clemens, as was the

death of Aldrich's son, and that of Sir Henry M. Stanley, both of which

occurred that spring.



Indeed, death harvested freely that year among the Clemens friendships.

Clemens wrote Twichell:



     Yours has just this moment arrived-just as I was finishing a note to

     poor Lady Stanley.  I believe the last country-house visit we paid

     in England was to Stanley's.  Lord!  how my friends & acquaintances

     fall about me now in my gray-headed days!  Vereshchagin, Mommsen,

     Dvorak, Lenbach, & Jokai, all so recently, & now Stanley.  I have

     known Stanley 37 years.  Goodness, who is there I haven't known?









CCXXXI



THE CLOSE OF A BEAUTIFUL LIFE



In one of his notes near the end of April Clemens writes that once more,

as at Riverdale, he has been excluded from Mrs. Clemens's room except for

the briefest moment at a time.  But on May 12th, to R. W. Gilder, he

reported:



     For two days now we have not been anxious about Mrs. Clemens

     (unberufen).  After 20 months of bedridden solitude & bodily misery

     she all of a sudden ceases to be a pallid, shrunken shadow, & looks

     bright & young & pretty.  She remains what she always was, the most

     wonderful creature of fortitude, patience, endurance, and

     recuperative power that ever was.  But ah, dear!  it won't last;

     this fiendish malady will play new treacheries upon her, and I shall

     go back to my prayers again--unutterable from any pulpit!



     May 13, A.M.  I have just paid one of my pair of permitted 2-minute

     visits per day to the sick-room.  And found what I have learned to

     expect--retrogression.



There was a day when she was brought out on the terrace in a wheel-chair

to see the wonder of the early Italian summer.  She had been a prisoner

so long that she was almost overcome with the delight of it all--the more

so, perhaps, in the feeling that she might so soon be leaving it.



It was on Sunday, the 5th of June, that the end came.  Clemens and Jean

had driven out to make some calls, and had stopped at a villa, which

promised to fulfil most of the requirements.  They came home full of

enthusiasm concerning it, and Clemens, in his mind, had decided on the

purchase.  In the corridor Clara said:



"She is better to-day than she has been for three months."



Then quickly, under her breath, "Unberufen," which the others, too, added

hastily--superstitiously.



Mrs. Clemens was, in fact, bright and cheerful, and anxious to hear all

about the new property which was to become their home.  She urged him to

sit by her during the dinner-hour and tell her the details; but once,

when the sense of her frailties came upon her, she said they must not

mind if she could not go very soon, but be content where they were.  He

remained from half past seven until eight--a forbidden privilege, but

permitted because she was so animated, feeling so well.  Their talk was

as it had been in the old days, and once during it he reproached himself,

as he had so often done, and asked forgiveness for the tears he had

brought into her life.  When he was summoned to go at last he chided

himself for remaining so long; but she said there was no harm, and kissed

him, saying: "You will come back," and he answered, "Yes, to say good

night," meaning at half past nine, as was the permitted custom.  He stood

a moment at the door throwing kisses to her, and she returning them, her

face bright with smiles.



He was so hopeful and happy that it amounted to exaltation.  He went to

his room at first, then he was moved to do a thing which he had seldom

done since Susy died.  He went to the piano up-stairs and sang the old

jubilee songs that Susy had liked to hear him sing.  Jean came in

presently, listening.  She had not done this before, that he could

remember.  He sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," and "My Lord He Calls Me."

He noticed Jean then and stopped, but she asked him to go on.



Mrs. Clemens, in her room, heard the distant music, and said to her

attendant:



"He is singing a good-night carol to me."



The music ceased presently, and then a moment later she asked to be

lifted up.  Almost in that instant life slipped away without a sound.



Clemens, coming to say good night, saw a little group about her bed,

Clara and Jean standing as if dazed.  He went and bent over and looked

into her face, surprised that she did not greet him.  He did not suspect

what had happened until he heard one of the daughters ask:



"Katie, is it true?  Oh, Katie, is it true?"



He realized then that she was gone.



In his note-book that night he wrote:



     At a quarter past 9 this evening she that was the life of my life

     passed to the relief & the peace of death after as months of unjust

     & unearned suffering.  I first saw her near 37 years ago, & now I

     have looked upon her face for the last time.  Oh, so unexpected!...

     I was full of remorse for things done & said in these 34 years of

     married life that hurt Livy's heart.



He envied her lying there, so free from it all, with the great peace upon

her face.  He wrote to Howells and to Twichell, and to Mrs. Crane, those

nearest and dearest ones.  To Twichell he said:



     How sweet she was in death, how young, how beautiful, how like her

     dear girlish self of thirty years ago, not a gray hair showing!

     This rejuvenescence was noticeable within two hours after her death;

     & when I went down again (2.3o) it was complete.  In all that night

     & all that day she never noticed my caressing hand--it seemed

     strange.



To Howells he recalled the closing scene:



     I bent over her & looked in her face & I think I spoke--I was

     surprised & troubled that she did not notice me.  Then we understood

     & our hearts broke.  How poor we are to-day!



     But how thankful I am that her persecutions are ended!  I would not

     call her back if I could.



     To-day, treasured in her worn, old Testament, I found a dear &

     gentle letter from you dated Far Rockaway, September 13, 1896, about

     our poor Susy's death.  I am tired & old; I wish I were with Livy.



And in a few days:



It would break Livy's heart to see Clara.  We excuse ourself from all the

friends that call--though, of course, only intimates come.  Intimates--

but they are not the old, old friends, the friends of the old, old times

when we laughed.  Shall we ever laugh again?  If I could only see a dog

that I knew in the old times & could put my arms around his neck and tell

him all, everything, & ease my heart!









CCXXXII



THE SAD JOURNEY HOME



A tidal wave of sympathy poured in.  Noble and commoner, friend and

stranger--humanity of every station--sent their messages of condolence to

the friend of mankind.  The cablegrams came first--bundles of them from

every corner of the world--then the letters, a steady inflow.  Howells,

Twichell, Aldrich--those oldest friends who had themselves learned the

meaning of grief--spoke such few and futile words as the language can

supply to allay a heart's mourning, each recalling the rarity and beauty

of the life that had slipped away.  Twichell and his wife wrote:



DEAR, DEAR MARK,--There is nothing we can say.  What is there to say?

But here we are--with you all every hour and every minute--filled with

unutterable thoughts; unutterable affection for the dead and for the

living.

                                        HARMONY AND JOE.





Howells in his letter said:



She hallowed what she touched far beyond priests .  .  .  .  What are you

going to do, you poor soul?





A hundred letters crowd in for expression here, but must be denied--not,

however, the beam of hope out of Helen Keller's illumined night:



     Do try to reach through grief and feel the pressure of her hand, as

     I reach through darkness and feel the smile on my friends' lips and

     the light in their eyes though mine are closed.



They were adrift again without plans for the future.  They would return

to America to lay Mrs. Clemens to rest by Susy and little Langdon, but

beyond that they could not see.  Then they remembered a quiet spot in

Massachusetts, Tyringham, near Lee, where the Gilders lived, and so, on

June 7th, he wrote:



     DEAR GILDER FAMILY,--I have been worrying and worrying to know what

     to do; at last I went to the girls with an idea--to ask the Gilders

     to get us shelter near their summer home.  It was the first time

     they have not shaken their heads.  So to-morrow I will cable to you

     and shall hope to be in time.



     An hour ago the best heart that ever beat for me and mine was

     carried silent out of this house, and I am as one who wanders and

     has lost his way.  She who is gone was our head, she was our hands.

     We are now trying to make plans--we: we who have never made a plan

     before, nor ever needed to.  If she could speak to us she would make

     it all simple and easy with a word, & our perplexities would vanish

     away.  If she had known she was near to death she would have told us

     where to go and what to do, but she was not suspecting, neither were

     we.  She was all our riches and she is gone; she was our breath, she

     was our life, and now we are nothing.



     We send you our love-and with it the love of you that was in her

     heart when she died.

                                        S. L. CLEMENS.





They arranged to sail on the Prince Oscar on the 29th of June.  There was

an earlier steamer, but it was the Princess Irene, which had brought

them, and they felt they would not make the return voyage on that vessel.

During the period of waiting a curious thing happened.  Clemens one day

got up in a chair in his room on the second floor to pull down the high

window-sash.  It did not move easily and his hand slipped.  It was only

by the merest chance that he saved himself from falling to the ground far

below.  He mentions this in his note-book, and once, speaking of it to

Frederick Duneka, he said:



"Had I fallen it would probably have killed me, and in my bereaved

circumstances the world would have been convinced that it was suicide.

It was one of those curious coincidences which are always happening and

being misunderstood."



The homeward voyage and its sorrowful conclusion are pathetically

conveyed in his notes:



     June 29, 1904.  Sailed last night at 10.  The bugle-call to

     breakfast.  I recognized the notes and was distressed.  When I heard

     them last Livy heard them with me; now they fall upon her ear

     unheeded.



     In my life there have been 68 Junes--but how vague & colorless 67 of

     them are contrasted with the deep blackness of this one!



     July 1, 1904.  I cannot reproduce Livy's face in my mind's eye--I

     was never in my life able to reproduce a face.  It is a curious

     infirmity--& now at last I realize it is a calamity.



     July 2, 1904.  In these 34 years we have made many voyages together,

     Livy dear--& now we are making our last; you down below & lonely; I

     above with the crowd & lonely.



     July 3, 1904.  Ship-time, 8 A.M.  In 13 hours & a quarter it will be

     4 weeks since Livy died.



     Thirty-one years ago we made our first voyage together--& this is

     our last one in company.  Susy was a year old then.  She died at 24

     & had been in her grave 8 years.



     July 10, 1904.  To-night it will be 5 weeks.  But to me it remains

     yesterday--as it has from the first.  But this funeral march--how

     sad & long it is!



     Two days more will end the second stage of it.



     July 14, 1904 (ELMIRA).  Funeral private in the house of Livy's

     young maidenhood.  Where she stood as a bride 34 years ago there her

     coffin rested; & over it the same voice that had made her a wife

     then committed her departed spirit to God now.



It was Joseph Twichell who rendered that last service.  Mr. Beecher was

long since dead.  It was a simple, touching utterance, closing with this

tender word of farewell:



     Robert Browning, when he was nearing the end of his earthly days,

     said that death was the thing that we did not believe in.  Nor do we

     believe in it.  We who journeyed through the bygone years in

     companionship with the bright spirit now withdrawn are growing old.

     The way behind is long; the way before is short.  The end cannot be

     far off.  But what of that?  Can we not say, each one:



          "So long that power hath blessed me, sure it still

                            Will lead me on;

            O'er moor and fen; o'er crag and torrent, till

                           The night is gone;

              And with the morn, their angel faces smile,

            Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!"



     And so good-by.  Good-by, dear heart!  Strong, tender, and true.

     Good-by until for us the morning break and these shadows fly away.



Dr. Eastman, who had succeeded Mr. Beecher, closed the service with a

prayer, and so the last office we can render in this life for those we

love was finished.



Clemens ordered that a simple marker should be placed at the grave,

bearing, besides the name, the record of birth and death, followed by the

German line:



                  'Gott sei dir gnadig, O meine Wonne'!











CCXXXIII



BEGINNING ANOTHER HOME



There was an extra cottage on the Gilder place at Tyringham, and this

they occupied for the rest of that sad summer.  Clemens, in his note-

book, has preserved some of its aspects and incidents.



July 24, 1904.  Rain--rain--rain.  Cold.  We built a fire in my room.

Then clawed the logs out & threw water, remembering there was a brood of

swallows in the chimney.  The tragedy was averted.



July 31.  LEE, MASSACHUSETTS (BERKSHIRE HILLS).  Last night the young

people out on a moonlight ride.  Trolley frightened Jean's horse--

collision--horse killed.  Rodman Gilder picked Jean up, unconscious; she

was taken to the doctor, per the car.  Face, nose, side, back contused;

tendon of left ankle broken.



August 10.  NEW YORK.  Clam here sick--never well since June 5.  Jean is

at the summer home in the Berkshire Hills crippled.



The next entry records the third death in the Clemens family within a

period of eight months--that of Mrs. Moffett, who had been Pamela

Clemens.  Clemens writes:



     September 1.  Died at Greenwich, Connecticut, my sister, Pamela

     Moffett, aged about 73.



     Death dates this year January 14, June 5, September 1.



That fall they took a house in New York City, on the corner of Ninth

Street and Fifth Avenue, No. 21, remaining for a time at the Grosvenor

while the new home was being set in order.  The home furniture was

brought from Hartford, unwrapped, and established in the light of strange

environment.  Clemens wrote:



We have not seen it for thirteen years.  Katie Leary, our old

housekeeper, who has been in our service more than twenty-four years,

cried when she told me about it to-day.  She said, "I had forgotten it

was so beautiful, and it brought Mrs. Clemens right back to me--in that

old time when she was so young and lovely."



Clara Clemens had not recovered from the strain of her mother's long

illness and the shock of her death, and she was ordered into retirement

with the care of a trained nurse.  The life at 21 Fifth Avenue,

therefore, began with only two remaining members of the broken family--

Clemens and Jean.



Clemens had undertaken to divert himself with work at Tyringham, though

without much success.  He was not well; he was restless and disturbed;

his heart bleak with a great loneliness.  He prepared an article on

Copyright for the 'North American Review',--[Published Jan., 7905.  A

dialogue presentation of copyright conditions, addressed to Thorwald

Stolberg, Register of Copyrights, Washington, D.  C.  One of the best of

Mark Twain's papers on the subject.]--and he began, or at least

contemplated, that beautiful fancy, 'Eve's Diary', which in the widest

and most reverential sense, from the first word to the last, conveys his

love, his worship, and his tenderness for the one he had laid away.

Adam's single comment at the end, "Wheresoever she was, there was Eden,"

was his own comment, and is perhaps the most tenderly beautiful line he

ever wrote.  These two books, Adam's Diary and Eve's--amusing and

sometimes absurd as they are, and so far removed from the literal--are as

autobiographic as anything he has done, and one of them as lovely in its

truth.  Like the first Maker of men, Mark Twain created Adam in his own

image; and his rare Eve is no less the companion with whom, half a

lifetime before, he had begun the marriage journey.  Only here the

likeness ceases.  No Serpent ever entered their Eden.  And they never

left it; it traveled with them so long as they remained together.



In the Christmas Harper for 1904 was published "Saint Joan of Arc"--the

same being the Joan introduction prepared in London five years before.

Joan's proposed beatification had stirred a new interest in the martyred

girl, and this most beautiful article became a sort of key-note of the

public heart.  Those who read it were likely to go back and read the

Recollections, and a new appreciation grew for that masterpiece.  In his

later and wider acceptance by his own land, and by the world at large,

the book came to be regarded with a fresh understanding.  Letters came

from scores of readers, as if it were a newly issued volume.  A

distinguished educator wrote:



     I would rather have written your history of Joan of Arc than any

     other piece of literature in any language.



And this sentiment grew.  The demand for the book increased, and has

continued to increase, steadily and rapidly.  In the long and last

analysis the good must prevail.  A day will come when there will be as

many readers of Joan as of any other of Mark Twain's works.



[The growing appreciation of Joan is shown by the report of sales for the

three years following 1904.  The sales for that year in America were

1,726; for 1905, 2,445 for 1906, 5,381; for 1907, 6,574.  At this point

it passed Pudd'nhead Wilson, the Yankee, The Gilded Age, Life on the

Mississippi, overtook the Tramp Abroad, and more than doubled The

American Claimant.  Only The Innocents Abroad, Huckleberry Finn, Tom

Sawyer, and Roughing It still ranged ahead of it, in the order named.]









CCXXXIV



LIFE AT 21 FIFTH AVENUE



The house at 21 Fifth Avenue, built by the architect who had designed

Grace Church, had a distinctly ecclesiastical suggestion about its

windows, and was of fine and stately proportions within.  It was a proper

residence for a venerable author and a sage, and with the handsome

Hartford furnishings distributed through it, made a distinctly suitable

setting for Mark Twain.  But it was lonely for him.  It lacked soul.  He

added, presently, a great AEolian Orchestrelle, with a variety of music

for his different moods.  He believed that he would play it himself when

he needed the comfort of harmony, and that Jean, who had not received

musical training, or his secretary could also play to him.  He had a

passion for music, or at least for melody and stately rhythmic measures,

though his ear was not attuned to what are termed the more classical

compositions.  For Wagner, for instance, he cared little, though in a

letter to Mrs. Crane he said:



Certainly nothing in the world is so solemn and impressive and so

divinely beautiful as "Tannhauser."  It ought to be used as a religious

service.



Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies also moved him deeply.  Once, writing

to Jean, he asked:



What is your favorite piece of music, dear?  Mine is Beethoven's Fifth

Symphony.  I have found that out within a day or two.



It was the majestic movement and melodies of the second part that he

found most satisfying; but he oftener inclined to the still tenderer

themes of Chopin's nocturnes and one of Schubert's impromptus, while the

"Lorelei" and the "Erlking" and the Scottish airs never wearied him.

Music thus became a chief consolation during these lonely days--rich

organ harmonies that filled the emptiness of his heart and beguiled from

dull, material surroundings back into worlds and dreams that he had known

and laid away.



He went out very little that winter--usually to the homes of old and

intimate friends.  Once he attended a small dinner given him by George

Smalley at the Metropolitan Club; but it was a private affair, with only

good friends present.  Still, it formed the beginning of his return to

social life, and it was not in his nature to retire from the brightness

of human society, or to submerge himself in mourning.  As the months wore

on he appeared here and there, and took on something of his old-time

habit.  Then his annual bronchitis appeared, and he was confined a good

deal to his home, where he wrote or planned new reforms and enterprises.



The improvement of railway service, through which fewer persons should be

maimed and destroyed each year, interested him.  He estimated that the

railroads and electric lines killed and wounded more than all of the wars

combined, and he accumulated statistics and prepared articles on the

subject, though he appears to have offered little of such matter for

publication.  Once, however, when his sympathy was awakened by the victim

of a frightful trolley and train collision in Newark, New Jersey, he

wrote a letter which promptly found its way into print.



     DEAR MISS MADELINE, Your good & admiring & affectionate brother has

     told me of your sorrowful share in the trolley disaster which

     brought unaccustomed tears to millions of eyes & fierce resentment

     against those whose criminal indifference to their responsibilities

     caused it, & the reminder has brought back to me a pang out of that

     bygone time.  I wish I could take you sound & whole out of your bed

     & break the legs of those officials & put them in it--to stay there.

     For in my spirit I am merciful, and would not break their necks &

     backs also, as some would who have no feeling.



     It is your brother who permits me to write this line--& so it is not

     an intrusion, you see.



     May you get well-& soon!

                              Sincerely yours,

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.





A very little later he was writing another letter on a similar subject to

St. Clair McKelway, who had narrowly escaped injury in a railway

accident.



     DEAR McKELWAY, Your innumerable friends are grateful, most grateful.



     As I understand the telegrams, the engineers of your train had never

     seen a locomotive before .  .  .  .  The government's official

     report, showing that our railways killed twelve hundred persons last

     year & injured sixty thousand, convinces me that under present

     conditions one Providence is not enough properly & efficiently to

     take care of our railroad business.  But it is characteristically

     American--always trying to get along short-handed & save wages.



A massacre of Jews in Moscow renewed his animosity for semi-barbaric

Russia.  Asked for a Christmas sentiment, he wrote:



     It is my warm & world-embracing Christmas hope that all of us that

     deserve it may finally be gathered together in a heaven of rest &

     peace, & the others permitted to retire into the clutches of Satan,

     or the Emperor of Russia, according to preference--if they have a

     preference.



An article, "The Tsar's Soliloquy," written at this time, was published

in the North American Review for March (1905).  He wrote much more, but

most of the other matter he put aside.  On a subject like that he always

discarded three times as much as he published, and it was usually about

three times as terrific as that which found its way into type.  "The

Soliloquy," however, is severe enough.  It represents the Tsar as

contemplating himself without his clothes, and reflecting on what a poor

human specimen he presents:



     Is it this that 140,000,000 Russians kiss the dust before and

     worship?--manifestly not!  No one could worship this spectacle which

     is Me.  Then who is it, what is it, that they worship?  Privately,

     none knows better than I: it is my clothes!  Without my clothes I

     should be as destitute of authority as any other naked person.  No

     one could tell me from a parson and barber tutor.  Then who is the

     real Emperor of Russia!  My clothes!  There is no other.



The emperor continues this fancy, and reflects on the fierce cruelties

that are done in his name.  It was a withering satire on Russian

imperialism, and it stirred a wide response.  This encouraged Clemens to

something even more pretentious and effective in the same line.  He wrote

"King Leopold's Soliloquy," the reflections of the fiendish sovereign who

had maimed and slaughtered fifteen millions of African subjects in his

greed--gentle, harmless blacks-men, women, and little children whom he

had butchered and mutilated in his Congo rubber-fields.  Seldom in the

history of the world have there been such atrocious practices as those of

King Leopold in the Congo, and Clemens spared nothing in his picture of

them.  The article was regarded as not quite suitable for magazine

publication, and it was given to the Congo Reform Association and issued

as a booklet for distribution, with no return to the author, who would

gladly have written a hundred times as much if he could have saved that

unhappy race and have sent Leopold to the electric chair.--[The book was

price-marked twenty-five cents, but the returns from such as were sold

went to the cause.  Thousands of them were distributed free.  The Congo,

a domain four times as large as the German empire, had been made the ward

of Belgium at a convention in Berlin by the agreement of fourteen

nations, America and thirteen European states.  Leopold promptly seized

the country for his personal advantage and the nations apparently found

themselves powerless to depose him.  No more terrible blunder was ever

committed by an assemblage of civilized people.]



Various plans and movements were undertaken for Congo reform, and Clemens

worked and wrote letters and gave his voice and his influence and

exhausted his rage, at last, as one after another of the half-organized

and altogether futile undertakings showed no results.  His interest did

not die, but it became inactive.  Eventually he declared: "I have said

all I can say on that terrible subject.  I am heart and soul in any

movement that will rescue the Congo and hang Leopold, but I cannot write

any more."



His fires were likely to burn themselves out, they raged so fiercely.

His final paragraph on the subject was a proposed epitaph for Leopold

when time should have claimed him.  It ran:



     Here under this gilded tomb lies rotting the body of one the smell

     of whose name will still offend the nostrils of men ages upon ages

     after all the Caesars and Washingtons & Napoleons shall have ceased

     to be praised or blamed & been forgotten--Leopold of Belgium.



Clemens had not yet lost interest in the American policy in the

Philippines, and in his letters to Twichell he did not hesitate to

criticize tile President's attitude in this and related matters.  Once,

in a moment of irritation, he wrote:



     DEAR JOE,--I knew I had in me somewhere a definite feeling about the

     President.  If I could only find the words to define it with!  Here

     they are, to a hair--from Leonard Jerome:



     "For twenty years I have loved Roosevelt the man, and hated

     Roosevelt the statesman and politician."



     It's mighty good.  Every time in twenty-five years that I have met

     Roosevelt the man a wave of welcome has streaked through me with the

     hand-grip; but whenever (as a rule) I meet Roosevelt the statesman &

     politician I find him destitute of morals & not respect-worthy.  It

     is plain that where his political self & party self are concerned he

     has nothing resembling a conscience; that under those inspirations

     he is naively indifferent to the restraints of duty & even unaware

     of them; ready to kick the Constitution into the back yard whenever

     it gets in his way....



     But Roosevelt is excusable--I recognize it & (ought to) concede it.

     We are all insane, each in his own way, & with insanity goes

     irresponsibility.  Theodore the man is sane; in fairness we ought to

     keep in mind that Theodore, as statesman & politician, is insane &

     irresponsible.



He wrote a great deal more from time to time on this subject; but that is

the gist of his conclusions, and whether justified by time, or otherwise,

it expresses today the deduction of a very large number of people.  It is

set down here, because it is a part of Mark Twain's history, and also

because a little while after his death there happened to creep into print

an incomplete and misleading note (since often reprinted), which he once

made in a moment of anger, when he was in a less judicial frame of mind.

It seems proper that a man's honest sentiments should be recorded

concerning the nation's servants.



Clemens wrote an article at this period which he called the "War Prayer."

It pictured the young recruits about to march away for war--the

excitement and the celebration--the drum-beat and the heart-beat of

patriotism--the final assembly in the church where the minister utters

that tremendous invocation:



               God the all-terrible!  Thou who ordainest,

               Thunder, Thy clarion, and lightning, Thy sword!



and the "long prayer" for victory to the nation's armies.  As the prayer

closes a white-robed stranger enters, moves up the aisle, and takes the

preacher's place; then, after some moments of impressive silence, he

begins:



     "I come from the Throne-bearing a message from Almighty God!.....

     He has heard the prayer of His servant, your shepherd, & will grant

     it if such shall be your desire after I His messenger shall have

     explained to you its import--that is to say its full import.  For it

     is like unto many of the prayers of men in that it asks for more

     than he who utters it is aware of--except he pause & think.



     "God's servant & yours has prayed his prayer.  Has he paused & taken

     thought?  Is it one prayer?  No, it is two--one uttered, the other

     not.  Both have reached the ear of Him who heareth all

     supplications, the spoken & the unspoken .  .  .  .



     "You have heard your servant's prayer--the uttered part of it.  I am

     commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it--that

     part which the pastor--and also you in your hearts--fervently

     prayed, silently.  And ignorantly & unthinkingly?  God grant that it

     was so!  You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our

     God!' That is sufficient.  The whole of the uttered prayer is

     completed into those pregnant words.



     "Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken

     part of the prayer.  He commandeth me to put it into words.  Listen!



          "O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go

          forth to battle--be Thou near them!  With them--in spirit--we

          also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to

          smite the foe.



          "O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody

          shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields

          with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the

          thunder of the guns with the wounded, writhing in pain; help us

          to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help

          us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with

          unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their

          little children to wander unfriended through wastes of their

          desolated land in rags & hunger & thirst, sport of the sun-

          flames of summer & the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit,

          worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave &

          denied it--for our sakes, who adore Thee, Lord, blast their

          hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage,

          make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain

          the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!  We ask of

          one who is the Spirit of love & who is the ever-faithful refuge

          & friend of all that are sore beset, & seek His aid with humble

          & contrite hearts.  Grant our prayer, O Lord; & Thine shall be

          the praise & honor & glory now & ever, Amen."



          (After a pause.) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it,

          speak!--the messenger of the Most High waits."



                    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



          It was believed, afterward, that the man was a lunatic, because

          there was no sense in what he said.



To Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him, Clemens read the "War Prayer,"

stating that he had read it to his daughter Jean, and others, who had

told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege.



"Still you--are going to publish it, are you not?"



Clemens, pacing up and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers,

shook his head.



"No," he said, "I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men

can tell the truth in this world.  It can be published after I am dead."



He did not care to invite the public verdict that he was a lunatic, or

even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions and traditions and

conclusions of mankind.  To Twichell he wrote, playfully but sincerely:



Am I honest?  I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not.  For

seven years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I ought

to publish.  I hold it a duty to publish it.  There are other difficult

duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one.  Yes, even I

am dishonest.  Not in many ways, but in some.  Forty-one, I think it is.

We are certainly all honest in one or several ways--every man in the

world--though I have a reason to think I am the only one whose blacklist

runs so light.  Sometimes I feel lonely enough in this lofty solitude.



It was his Gospel he referred to as his unpublished book, his doctrine of

Selfishness, and of Man the irresponsible Machine.  To Twichell he

pretended to favor war, which he declared, to his mind, was one of the

very best methods known of diminishing the human race.



What a life it is!--this one!  Everything we try to do, somebody intrudes

& obstructs it.  After years of thought & labor I have arrived within one

little bit of a step of perfecting my invention for exhausting the oxygen

in the globe's air during a stretch of two minutes, & of course along

comes an obstructor who is inventing something to protect human life.

Damn such a world anyway.



He generally wrote Twichell when he had things to say that were outside

of the pale of print.  He was sure of an attentive audience of one, and

the audience, whether it agreed with him or not, would at least

understand him and be honored by his confidence.  In one letter of that

year he said:



I have written you to-day, not to do you a service, but to do myself one.

There was bile in me.  I had to empty it or lose my day to-morrow.  If I

tried to empty it into the North American Review--oh, well, I couldn't

afford the risk.  No, the certainty!  The certainty that I wouldn't be

satisfied with the result; so I would burn it, & try again to-morrow;

burn that and try again the next day.  It happens so nearly every time.

I have a family to support, & I can't afford this kind of dissipation.

Last winter when I was sick I wrote a magazine article three times before

I got it to suit me.  I Put $500 worth of work on it every day for ten

days, & at last when I got it to suit me it contained but 3,000 words-

$900.  I burned it & said I would reform.



And I have reformed.  I have to work my bile off whenever it gets to

where I can't stand it, but I can work it off on you economically,

because I don't have to make it suit me.  It may not suit you, but that

isn't any matter; I'm not writing it for that.  I have used you as an

equilibrium--restorer more than once in my time, & shall continue, I

guess.  I would like to use Mr. Rogers, & he is plenty good-natured

enough, but it wouldn't be fair to keep him rescuing me from my leather-

headed business snarls & make him read interminable bile-irruptions

besides; I can't use Howells, he is busy & old & lazy, & won't stand it;

I dasn't use Clara, there's things I have to say which she wouldn't put

up with--a very dear little ashcat, but has claws.  And so--you're It.



     [See the preface to the "Autobiography of Mark Twain": 'I am writing

     from the grave.  On these terms only can a man be approximately

     frank.  He cannot be straitly and unqualifiedly frank either in the

     grave or out of it.'  D.W.]









CCXXXV



A SUMMER IN NEW HAMPSHIRE



He took for the summer a house at Dublin, New Hampshire, the home of

Henry Copley Greene, Lone Tree Hill, on the Monadnock slope.  It was in a

lovely locality, and for neighbors there were artists, literary people,

and those of kindred pursuits, among them a number of old friends.

Colonel Higginson had a place near by, and Abbott H. Thayer, the painter,

and George de Forest Brush, and the Raphael Pumpelly family, and many

more.



Colonel Higginson wrote Clemens a letter of welcome as soon as the news

got out that he was going to Dublin; and Clemens, answering, said:



     I early learned that you would be my neighbor in the summer & I

     rejoiced, recognizing in you & your family a large asset.  I hope

     for frequent intercourse between the two households.  I shall have

     my youngest daughter with me.  The other one will go from the rest-

     cure in this city to the rest-cure in Norfolk, Connecticut; & we

     shall not see her before autumn.  We have not seen her since the

     middle of October.



     Jean, the younger daughter, went to Dublin & saw the house & came

     back charmed with it.  I know the Thayers of old--manifestly there

     is no lack of attractions up there.  Mrs. Thayer and I were

     shipmates in a wild excursion perilously near 40 years ago.



     Aldrich was here half an hour ago, like a breeze from over the

     fields, with the fragrance still upon his spirit.  I am tired

     wanting for that man to get old.



They went to Dublin in May, and became at once a part of the summer

colony which congregated there.  There was much going to and fro among

the different houses, pleasant afternoons in the woods, mountain-climbing

for Jean, and everywhere a spirit of fine, unpretentious comradeship.



The Copley Greene house was romantically situated, with a charming

outlook.  Clemens wrote to Twichell:



     We like it here in the mountains, in the shadows of Monadnock.  It

     is a woody solitude.  We have no near neighbors.  We have neighbors

     and I can see their houses scattered in the forest distances, for we

     live on a hill.  I am astonished to find that I have known 8 of

     these 14 neighbors a long time; 10 years is the shortest; then seven

     beginning with 25 years & running up to 37 years' friendship.  It is

     the most remarkable thing I ever heard of.



This letter was written in July, and he states in it that he has turned

out one hundred thousand words of a large manuscript.  .  It was a

fantastic tale entitled "3,000 Years among the Microbes," a sort of

scientific revel--or revelry--the autobiography of a microbe that had

been once a man, and through a failure in a biological experiment

transformed into a cholera germ when the experimenter was trying to turn

him into a bird.  His habitat was the person of a disreputable tramp

named Blitzowski, a human continent of vast areas, with seething microbic

nations and fantastic life problems.  It was a satire, of course--

Gulliver's Lilliput outdone--a sort of scientific, socialistic,

mathematical jamboree.



He tired of it before it reached completion, though not before it had

attained the proportions of a book of size.  As a whole it would hardly

have added to his reputation, though it is not without fine and humorous

passages, and certainly not without interest.  Its chief mission was to

divert him mentally that summer during, those days and nights when he

would otherwise have been alone and brooding upon his loneliness.--[For

extracts from "3,000 Years among the Microbes" see Appendix V, at the end

of this work.]



MARK TWAIN'S SUGGESTED TITLE-PAGE FOR HIS MICROBE BOOK:





                               3000 YEARS

                           AMONG THE MICROBES



                              By a Microbe



                               WITH NOTES

                         added by the same Hand

                            7000 years later



                      Translated from the Original

                                Microbic

                                   by



                               Mark Twain





His inability to reproduce faces in his mind's eye he mourned as an

increasing calamity.  Photographs were lifeless things, and when he tried

to conjure up the faces of his dead they seemed to drift farther out of

reach; but now and then kindly sleep brought to him something out of that

treasure-house where all our realities are kept for us fresh and fair,

perhaps for a day when we may claim them again.  Once he wrote to Mrs.

Crane:



     SUSY DEAR,--I have had a lovely dream.  Livy, dressed in black, was

     sitting up in my bed (here) at my right & looking as young & sweet

     as she used to when she was in health.  She said, "What is the name

     of your sweet sister?"  I said," Pamela."  "Oh yes, that is it, I

     thought it was--(naming a name which has escaped me) won't you write

     it down for me?"  I reached eagerly for a pen & pad, laid my hands

     upon both, then said to myself, "It is only a dream," and turned

     back sorrowfully & there she was still.  The conviction flamed

     through me that our lamented disaster was a dream, & this a reality.

     I said, "How blessed it is, how blessed it is, it was all a dream,

     only a dream!"  She only smiled and did not ask what dream I meant,

     which surprised me.  She leaned her head against mine & kept saying,

     "I was perfectly sure it was a dream; I never would have believed it

     wasn't."  I think she said several things, but if so they are gone

     from my memory.  I woke & did not know I had been dreaming.  She was

     gone.  I wondered how she could go without my knowing it, but I did

     not spend any thought upon that.  I was too busy thinking of how

     vivid & real was the dream that we had lost her, & how unspeakably

     blessed it was to find that it was not true & that she was still

     ours & with us.



He had the orchestrelle moved to Dublin, although it was no small

undertaking, for he needed the solace of its harmonies; and so the days

passed along, and he grew stronger in body and courage as his grief

drifted farther behind him.  Sometimes, in the afternoon or in the

evening; when the neighbors had come in for a little while, he would walk

up and down and talk in his old, marvelous way of all the things on land

and sea, of the past and of the future, "Of Providence, foreknowledge,

will, and fate," of the friends he had known and of the things he had

done, of the sorrow and absurdities of the world.



It was the same old scintillating, incomparable talk of which Howells

once said:



"We shall never know its like again.  When he dies it will die with him."



It was during the summer at Dublin that Clemens and Rogers together made

up a philanthropic ruse on Twichell.  Twichell, through his own prodigal

charities, had fallen into debt, a fact which Rogers knew.  Rogers was a

man who concealed his philanthropies when he could, and he performed many

of them of which the world will never know: In this case he said:



"Clemens, I want to help Twichell out of his financial difficulty.  I

will supply the money and you will do the giving.  Twichell must think it

comes from you."



Clemens agreed to this on the condition that he be permitted to leave a

record of the matter for his children, so that he would not appear in a

false light to them, and that Twichell should learn the truth of the

gift, sooner or later.  So the deed was done, and Twichell and his wife

lavished their thanks upon Clemens, who, with his wife, had more than

once been their benefactors, making the deception easy enough now.

Clemens writhed under these letters of gratitude, and forwarded them to

Clara in Norfolk, and later to Rogers himself.  He pretended to take

great pleasure in this part of the conspiracy, but it was not an unmixed

delight.  To Rogers he wrote:



     I wanted her [Clara] to see what a generous father she's got.  I

     didn't tell her it was you, but by and by I want to tell her, when I

     have your consent; then I shall want her to remember the letters.  I

     want a record there, for my Life when I am dead, & must be able to

     furnish the facts about the Relief-of-Lucknow-Twichell in case I

     fall suddenly, before I get those facts with your consent, before

     the Twichells themselves.



     I read those letters with immense pride!  I recognized that I had

     scored one good deed for sure on my halo account.  I haven't had

     anything that tasted so good since the stolen watermelon.



     P. S.-I am hurrying them off to you because I dasn't read them

     again!  I should blush to my heels to fill up with this unearned

     gratitude again, pouring out of the thankful hearts of those poor

     swindled people who do not suspect you, but honestly believe I gave

     that money.



Mr. Rogers hastily replied:



     MY DEAR CLEMENS,--The letters are lovely.  Don't breathe.  They are

     so happy!  It would be a crime to let them think that you have in

     any way deceived them.  I can keep still.  You must.  I am sending

     you all traces of the crime, so that you may look innocent and tell

     the truth, as you usually do when you think you can escape

     detection.  Don't get rattled.



     Seriously.  You have done a kindness.  You are proud of it, I know.

     You have made your friends happy, and you ought to be so glad as to

     cheerfully accept reproof from your conscience.  Joe Wadsworth and I

     once stole a goose and gave it to a poor widow as a Christmas

     present.  No crime in that.  I always put my counterfeit money on

     the plate.  "The passer of the sasser" always smiles at me and I get

     credit for doing generous things.  But seriously again, if you do

     feel a little uncomfortable wait until I see you before you tell

     anybody.  Avoid cultivating misery.  I am trying to loaf ten solid

     days.  We do hope to see you soon.



The secret was kept, and the matter presently (and characteristically)

passed out of Clemens's mind altogether.  He never remembered to tell

Twichell, and it is revealed here, according to his wish.



The Russian-Japanese war was in progress that summer, and its settlement

occurred in August.  The terms of it did not please Mark Twain.  When a

newspaper correspondent asked him for an expression of opinion on the

subject he wrote:



     Russia was on the highroad to emancipation from an insane and

     intolerable slavery.  I was hoping there would be no peace until

     Russian liberty was safe.  I think that this was a holy war, in the

     best and noblest sense of that abused term, and that no war was ever

     charged with a higher mission.



     I think there can be no doubt that that mission is now defeated and

     Russia's chain riveted; this time to stay.  I think the Tsar will

     now withdraw the small humanities that have been forced from him,

     and resume his medieval barbarisms with a relieved spirit and an

     immeasurable joy.  I think Russian liberty has had its last chance

     and has lost it.



     I think nothing has been gained by the peace that is remotely

     comparable to what has been sacrificed by it.  One more battle would

     have abolished the waiting chains of billions upon billions of

     unborn Russians, and I wish it could have been fought.  I hope I am

     mistaken, yet in all sincerity I believe that this peace is entitled

     to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political history.



It was the wisest public utterance on the subject--the deep, resonant

note of truth sounding amid a clamor of foolish joy-bells.  It was the

message of a seer--the prophecy of a sage who sees with the clairvoyance

of knowledge and human understanding.  Clemens, a few days later, was

invited by Colonel Harvey to dine with Baron Rosen and M. Sergius Witte;

but an attack of his old malady--rheumatism--prevented his acceptance.

His telegram of declination apparently pleased the Russian officials, for

Witte asked permission to publish it, and declared that he was going to

take it home to show to the Tsar.  It was as follows:



To COLONEL HARVEY,--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be more than

glad of this opportunity to meet the illustrious magicians who came here

equipped with nothing but a pen, & with it have divided the honors of the

war with the sword.  It is fair to presume that in thirty centuries

history will not get done in admiring these men who attempted what the

world regarded as the impossible & achieved it.

                                                  MARK TWAIN.





But this was a modified form.  His original draft would perhaps have been

less gratifying to that Russian embassy.  It read:



     To COLONEL HARVEY,--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be more

     than glad of this opportunity to meet those illustrious magicians

     who with the pen have annulled, obliterated, & abolished every high

     achievement of the Japanese sword and turned the tragedy of a

     tremendous war into a gay & blithesome comedy.  If I may, let me in

     all respect and honor salute them as my fellow-humorists, I taking

     third place, as becomes one who was not born to modesty, but by

     diligence & hard work is acquiring it.

                                                       MARK.







There was still another form, brief and expressive:



DEAR COLONEL,--No, this is a love-feast; when you call a lodge of sorrow

send for me.                                 MARK.





Clemens's war sentiment was given the widest newspaper circulation, and

brought him many letters, most of them applauding his words.  Charles

Francis Adams wrote him:



     It attracted my attention because it so exactly expresses the views

     I have myself all along entertained.



And this was the gist of most of the expressed sentiments which came to

him.



Clemens wrote a number of things that summer, among them a little essay

entitled, "The Privilege of the Grave"--that is to say, free speech.

He was looking forward, he said, to the time when he should inherit that

privilege, when some of the things he had said, written and laid away,

could be published without damage to his friends or family.  An article

entitled, "Interpreting the Deity," he counted as among the things to be

uttered when he had entered into that last great privilege.  It is an

article on the reading of signs and auguries in all ages to discover the

intentions of the Almighty, with historical examples of God's judgments

and vindications.  Here is a fair specimen.  It refers to the chronicle

of Henry Huntington:



     All through this book Henry exhibits his familiarity with the

     intentions of God and with the reasons for the intentions.

     Sometimes very often, in fact--the act follows the intention after

     such a wide interval of time that one wonders how Henry could fit

     one act out of a hundred to one intention, and get the thing right

     every time, when there was such abundant choice among acts and

     intentions.  Sometimes a man offends the Deity with a crime, and is

     punished for it thirty years later; meantime he has committed a

     million other crimes: no matter, Henry can pick out the one that

     brought the worms.  Worms were generally used in those days for the

     slaying of particularly wicked people.  This has gone out now, but

     in the old times it was a favorite.  It always indicated a case of

     "wrath."  For instance:



     "The just God avenging Robert Fitzhildebrand's perfidity, a worm

     grew in his vitals which, gradually gnawing its way through his

     intestines, fattened on the abandoned man till, tortured with

     excruciating sufferings and venting himself in bitter moans, he was

     by a fitting punishment brought to his end" (p. 400).



     It was probably an alligator, but we cannot tell; we only know it

     was a particular breed, and only used to convey wrath.  Some

     authorities think it was an ichthyosaurus, but there is much doubt.



The entire article is in this amusing, satirical strain, and might well

enough be printed to-day.  It is not altogether clear why it was

withheld, even then.



He finished his Eve's Diary that summer, and wrote a story which was

originally planned to oblige Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske, to aid her in a

crusade against bullfighting in Spain.  Mrs. Fiske wrote him that she had

read his dog story, written against the cruelties of vivisection, and

urged him to do something to save the horses that, after faithful

service, were sacrificed in the bull-ring.  Her letter closed:



     I have lain awake nights very often wondering if I dare ask you to

     write a story of an old horse that is finally given over to the

     bull-ring.  The story you would write would do more good than all

     the laws we are trying to have made and enforced for the prevention

     of cruelty to animals in Spain.  We would translate and circulate

     the story in that country.  I have wondered if you would ever write

     it.



     With most devoted homage,

                                   Sincerely yours,

                                             MINNIE MADDERN FISKE.



Clemens promptly replied:



DEAR MRS. FISKE, I shall certainly write the story.  But I may not get it

to suit me, in which case it will go in the fire.  Later I will try it

again--& yet again--& again.  I am used to this.  It has taken me twelve

years to write a short story--the shortest one I ever wrote, I think.--

[Probably "The Death Disk:"]--So do not be discouraged; I will stick to

this one in the same way.



                         Sincerely yours,

                                                  S. L. CLEMENS.





It was an inspiring subject, and he began work on it immediately.  Within

a month from the time he received Mrs. Fiske's letter he had written that

pathetic, heartbreaking little story, "A Horse's Tale," and sent it to

Harper's Magazine for illustration.  In a letter written to Mr. Duneka at

the time, he tells of his interest in the narrative, and adds:



     This strong interest is natural, for the heroine is my small

     daughter Susy, whom we lost.  It was not intentional--it was a good

     while before I found it out, so I am sending you her picture to use

     --& to reproduce with photographic exactness the unsurpassable

     expression & all.  May you find an artist who has lost an idol.



He explains how he had put in a good deal of work, with his secretary, on

the orchestrelle to get the bugle-calls.



     We are to do these theatricals this evening with a couple of

     neighbors for audience, and then pass the hat.



It is not one of Mark Twain's greatest stories, but its pathos brings the

tears, and no one can read it without indignation toward the custom which

it was intended to oppose.  When it was published, a year later, Mrs.

Fiske sent him her grateful acknowledgments, and asked permission to have

it printed for pamphlet circulation m Spain.



A number of more or less notable things happened in this, Mark Twain's

seventieth year.  There was some kind of a reunion going on in

California, and he was variously invited to attend.  Robert Fulton, of

Nevada, was appointed a committee of one to invite him to Reno for a

great celebration which was to be held there.  Clemens replied that he

remembered, as if it were but yesterday, when he had disembarked from the

Overland stage in front of the Ormsby Hotel, in Carson City, and told how

he would like to accept the invitation.



If I were a few years younger I would accept it, and promptly, and I

would go.  I would let somebody else do the oration, but as for me I

would talk--just talk.  I would renew my youth; and talk--and talk--and

talk--and have the time of my life!  I would march the unforgotten and

unforgetable antiques by, and name their names, and give them reverent

hail and farewell as they passed--Goodman, McCarthy, Gillis, Curry,

Baldwin, Winters, Howard, Nye, Stewart, Neely Johnson, Hal Clayton,

North, Root--and my brother, upon whom be peace!--and then the

desperadoes, who made life a joy, and the "slaughter-house," a precious

possession: Sam Brown, Farmer Pete, Bill Mayfield, Six-fingered Jake,

Jack Williams, and the rest of the crimson discipleship, and so on, and

so on.  Believe me, I would start a resurrection it would do you more

good to look at than the next one will, if you go on the way you are

going now.



Those were the days!--those old ones.  They will come no more; youth will

come no more.  They were so full to the brim with the wine of life; there

have been no others like them.  It chokes me up to think of them.  Would

you like me to come out there and cry?  It would not beseem my white

head.



Good-by.  I drink to you all.  Have a good time-and take an old man's

blessing.



In reply to another invitation from H. H. Bancroft, of San Francisco, he

wrote that his wandering days were over, and that it was his purpose to

sit by the fire for the rest of his "remnant of life."



     A man who, like me, is going to strike 70 on the 30th of next

     November has no business to be flitting around the way Howells does

     --that shameless old fictitious butterfly.  (But if he comes don't

     tell him I said it, for it would hurt him & I wouldn't brush a flake

     of powder from his wing for anything.  I only say it in envy of his

     indestructible youth anyway.  Howells will be 88 in October.)



And it was either then or on a similar occasion that he replied after

this fashion:



     I have done more for San Francisco than any other of its old

     residents.  Since I left there it has increased in population fully

     300,000.  I could have done more--I could have gone earlier--it was

     suggested.



Which, by the way, is a perfect example of Mark Twain's humorous manner,

the delicately timed pause, and the afterthought.  Most humorists would

have been contented to end with the statement, "I could have gone

earlier."  Only Mark Twain could have added that final exquisite touch--

"it was suggested."









CCXXXVI



AT PIER 70



Mark Twain was nearing seventy, the scriptural limitation of life, and

the returns were coming in.  Some one of the old group was dying all the

time.  The roll-call returned only a scattering answer.  Of his oldest

friends, Charles Henry Webb, John Hay, and Sir Henry Irving, all died

that year.  When Hay died Clemens gave this message to the press:



     I am deeply grieved, & I mourn with the nation this loss which is

     irreparable.  My friendship with Mr. Hay & my admiration of him

     endured 38 years without impairment.



It was only a little earlier that he had written Hay an anonymous letter,

a copy of which he preserved.  It here follows:



     DEAR & HONORED SIR,--I never hear any one speak of you & of your

     long roll of illustrious services in other than terms of pride &

     praise--& out of the heart.  I think I am right in believing you to

     be the only man in the civil service of the country the cleanness of

     whose motives is never questioned by any citizen, & whose acts

     proceed always upon a broad & high plane, never by accident or

     pressure of circumstance upon a narrow or low one.  There are

     majorities that are proud of more than one of the nation's great

     servants, but I believe, & I think I know, that you are the only one

     of whom the entire nation is proud.  Proud & thankful.



     Name & address are lacking here, & for a purpose: to leave you no

     chance to make my words a burden to you and a reproach to me, who

     would lighten your burdens if I could, not add to them.



Irving died in October, and Clemens ordered a wreath for his funeral.  To

MacAlister he wrote:



     I profoundly grieve over Irving's death.  It is another reminder.

     My section of the procession has but a little way to go.  I could

     not be very sorry if I tried.



Mark Twain, nearing seventy, felt that there was not much left for him to

celebrate; and when Colonel Harvey proposed a birthday gathering in his

honor, Clemens suggested a bohemian assembly over beer and sandwiches in

some snug place, with Howells, Henry Rogers, Twichell, Dr. Rice, Dr.

Edward Quintard, Augustus Thomas, and such other kindred souls as were

still left to answer the call.  But Harvey had something different in

view: something more splendid even than the sixty-seventh birthday feast,

more pretentious, indeed, than any former literary gathering.  He felt

that the attainment of seventy years by America's most distinguished man

of letters and private citizen was a circumstance which could not be

moderately or even modestly observed.  The date was set five days later

than the actual birthday--that is to say, on December 5th, in order that

it might not conflict with the various Thanksgiving holidays and

occasions.  Delmonico's great room was chosen for the celebration of it,

and invitations were sent out to practically every writer of any

distinction in America, and to many abroad.  Of these nearly two hundred

accepted, while such as could not come sent pathetic regrets.



What an occasion it was!  The flower of American literature gathered to

do honor to its chief.  The whole atmosphere of the place seemed

permeated with his presence, and when Colonel Harvey presented William

Dean Howells, and when Howells had read another double-barreled sonnet,

and introduced the guest of the evening with the words, "I will not say,

'O King, live forever,' but, 'O King, live as long as you like!'" and

Mark Twain rose, his snow-white hair gleaming above that brilliant

assembly, it seemed that a world was speaking out in a voice of applause

and welcome.  With a great tumult the throng rose, a billow of life, the

white handkerchiefs flying foam-like on its crest.  Those who had

gathered there realized that it was a mighty moment, not only in his life

but in theirs.  They were there to see this supreme embodiment of the

American spirit as he scaled the mountain-top.  He, too, realized the

drama of that moment--the marvel of it--and he must have flashed a swift

panoramic view backward over the long way he had come, to stand, as he

had himself once expressed it, "for a single, splendid moment on the Alps

of fame outlined against the sun."  He must have remembered; for when he

came to speak he went back to the very beginning, to his very first

banquet, as he called it, when, as he said, "I hadn't any hair; I hadn't

any teeth; I hadn't any clothes."  He sketched the meagerness of that

little hamlet which had seen his birth, sketched it playfully,

delightfully, so that his hearers laughed and shouted; but there was

always a tenderness under it all, and often the tears were not far

beneath the surface.  He told of his habits of life, how he had attained

seventy years by simply sticking to a scheme of living which would kill

anybody else; how he smoked constantly, loathed exercise, and had no

other regularity of habits.  Then, at last, he reached that wonderful,

unforgetable close:



     Threescore years and ten!



     It is the scriptural statute of limitations.  After that you owe no

     active duties; for you the strenuous life is over.  You are a time-

     expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: You have served your

     term, well or less well, and you are mustered out.  You are become

     an honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions

     are not for you, nor any bugle-call but "lights out."  You pay the

     time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline if you prefer--and

     without prejudice--for they are not legally collectable.



     The previous-engagement plea, which in forty years has cost you so

     many twinges, you can lay aside forever; on this side of the grave

     you will never need it again.  If you shrink at thought of night,

     and winter, and the late homecomings from the banquet and the lights

     and laughter through the deserted streets--a desolation which would

     not remind you now, as for a generation it did, that your friends

     are sleeping and you must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them,

     but would only remind you that you need not tiptoe, you can never

     disturb them more--if you shrink at the thought of these things you

     need only reply, "Your invitation honors me and pleases me because

     you still keep me in your remembrance, but I am seventy; seventy,

     and would nestle in the chinmey-corner, and smoke my pipe, and read

     my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection, and

     that when you in your turn shall arrive at Pier 70 you may step

     aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay your

     course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart."



The tears that had been lying in wait were not restrained now.  If there

were any present who did not let them flow without shame, who did not

shout their applause from throats choked with sobs, the writer of these

lines failed to see them or to hear of them.  There was not one who was

ashamed to pay the great tribute of tears.



Many of his old friends, one after another, rose to tell their love for

him--Brander Matthews, Cable, Kate Douglas Riggs, Gilder, Carnegie,

Bangs, Bacheller--they kept it up far into the next morning.  No other

arrival at Pier 70 ever awoke a grander welcome.









CCXXXVII



AFTERMATH



The announcement of the seventieth birthday dinner had precipitated a

perfect avalanche of letters, which continued to flow in until the news

accounts of it precipitated another avalanche.  The carriers' bags were

stuffed with greetings that came from every part of the world, from every

class of humanity.  They were all full of love and tender wishes.  A card

signed only with initials said: "God bless your old sweet soul for having

lived."



Aldrich, who could not attend the dinner, declared that all through the

evening he had been listening in his mind to a murmur of voices in the

hall at Delmonico's.  A group of English authors in London combined in a

cable of congratulations.  Anstey, Alfred Austin, Balfour, Barrie, Bryce,

Chesterton, Dobson, Doyle, Gosse, Hardy, Hope, Jacobs, Kipling, Lang,

Parker, Tenniel, Watson, and Zangwill were among the signatures.



Helen Keller wrote:



     And you are seventy years old?  Or is the report exaggerated, like

     that of your death?  I remember, when I saw you last, at the house

     of dear Mr. Hutton, in Princeton, you said:



     "If a man is a pessimist before he is forty-eight he knows too much.

     If he is an optimist after he is forty-eight he knows too little."



     Now we know you are an optimist, and nobody would dare to accuse one

     on the "seven-terraced summit" of knowing little.  So probably you

     are not seventy after all, but only forty-seven!



Helen Keller was right.  Mark Twain was not a pessimist in his heart, but

only by premeditation.  It was his observation and his logic that led him

to write those things that, even in their bitterness, somehow conveyed

that spirit of human sympathy which is so closely linked to hope.  To

Miss Keller he wrote:



"Oh, thank you for your lovely words!"



He was given another birthday celebration that month--this time by the

Society of Illustrators.  Dan Beard, president, was also toast-master;

and as he presented Mark Twain there was a trumpet-note, and a lovely

girl, costumed as Joan of Arc, entered and, approaching him, presented

him with a laurel wreath.  It was planned and carried out as a surprise

to him, and he hardly knew for the moment whether it was a vision or a

reality.  He was deeply affected, so much so that for several moments he

could not find his voice to make any acknowledgments.



Clemens was more than ever sought now, and he responded when the cause

was a worthy one.  He spoke for the benefit of the Russian sufferers at

the Casino on December 18th.  Madame Sarah Bernhardt was also there, and

spoke in French.  He followed her, declaring that it seemed a sort of

cruelty to inflict upon an audience our rude English after hearing that

divine speech flowing in that lucid Gallic tongue.



     It has always been a marvel to me--that French language; it has

     always been a puzzle to me.  How beautiful that language is!  How

     expressive it seems to be!  How full of grace it is!



     And when it comes from lips like those, how eloquent and how limpid

     it is!  And, oh, I am always deceived--I always think I am going to

     understand it.



     It is such a delight to me, such a delight to me, to meet Madame

     Bernhardt, and laugh hand to hand and heart to heart with her.  I

     have seen her play, as we all have, and, oh, that is divine; but I

     have always wanted to know Madame Bernhardt herself--her fiery self.

     I have wanted to know that beautiful character.



     Why, she is the youngest person I ever saw, except myself--for I

     always feel young when I come in the presence of young people.



And truly, at seventy, Mark Twain was young, his manner, his movement,

his point of view-these were all, and always, young.



A number of palmists about that time examined impressions of his hand

without knowledge as to the owner, and they all agreed that it was the

hand of a man with the characteristics of youth, with inspiration, and

enthusiasm, and sympathy--a lover of justice and of the sublime.  They

all agreed, too, that he was a deep philosopher, though, alas!  they

likewise agreed that he lacked the sense of humor, which is not as

surprising as it sounds, for with Mark Twain humor was never mere fun-

making nor the love of it; rather it was the flower of his philosophy--

its bloom arid fragrance.



When the fanfare and drum-beat of his birthday honors had passed by, and

a moment of calm had followed, Mark Twain set down some reflections on

the new estate he had achieved.  The little paper, which forms a perfect

pendant to the "Seventieth Birthday Speech," here follows:



                             OLD AGE



     I think it likely that people who have not been here will be

     interested to know what it is like.  I arrived on the thirtieth of

     November, fresh from carefree & frivolous 69, & was disappointed.



     There is nothing novel about it, nothing striking, nothing to thrill

     you & make your eye glitter & your tongue cry out, "Oh, it is

     wonderful, perfectly wonderful!"  Yes, it is disappointing.  You

     say, "Is this it?--this?  after all this talk and fuss of a thousand

     generations of travelers who have crossed this frontier & looked

     about them & told what they saw & felt?  Why, it looks just like

     69."



     And that is true.  Also it is natural, for you have not come by the

     fast express; you have been lagging & dragging across the world's

     continents behind oxen; when that is your pace one country melts

     into the next one so gradually that you are not able to notice the

     change; 70 looks like 69; 69 looked like 68; 68 looked like 67--& so

     on back & back to the beginning.  If you climb to a summit & look

     back--ah, then you see!



     Down that far-reaching perspective you can make out each country &

     climate that you crossed, all the way up from the hot equator to the

     ice-summit where you are perched.  You can make out where Infancy

     verged into Boyhood; Boyhood into down-lipped Youth; Youth into

     bearded, indefinite Young-Manhood; indefinite Young-Manhood into

     definite Manhood; definite Manhood, with large, aggressive

     ambitions, into sobered & heedful Husbandhood & Fatherhood; these

     into troubled & foreboding Age, with graying hair; this into Old

     Age, white-headed, the temple empty, the idols broken, the

     worshipers in their graves, nothing left but You, a remnant, a

     tradition, belated fag-end of a foolish dream, a dream that was so

     ingeniously dreamed that it seemed real all the time; nothing left

     but You, center of a snowy desolation, perched on the ice-summit,

     gazing out over the stages of that long trek & asking Yourself,

     "Would you do it again if you had the chance?"









CCXXXVIII



THE WRITER MEETS MARK TWAIN



We have reached a point in this history where the narrative becomes

mainly personal, and where, at the risk of inviting the charge of

egotism, the form of the telling must change.



It was at the end of 1901 that I first met Mark Twain--at The Players

Club on the night when he made the Founder's Address mentioned in an

earlier chapter.



I was not able to arrive in time for the address, but as I reached the

head of the stairs I saw him sitting on the couch at the dining-room

entrance, talking earnestly to some one, who, as I remember it, did not

enter into my consciousness at all.  I saw only that crown of white hair,

that familiar profile, and heard the slow modulations of his measured

speech.  I was surprised to see how frail and old he looked.  From his

pictures I had conceived him different.  I did not realize that it was a

temporary condition due to a period of poor health and a succession of

social demands.  I have no idea how long I stood there watching him.  He

had been my literary idol from childhood, as he had been of so many

others; more than that, for the personality in his work had made him

nothing less than a hero to his readers.



He rose presently to go, and came directly toward me.  A year before I

had done what new writers were always doing--I had sent him a book I had

written, and he had done what he was always doing--acknowledged it with a

kindly letter.  I made my thanks now an excuse for addressing him.  It

warmed me to hear him say that he remembered the book, though at the time

I confess I thought it doubtful.  Then he was gone; but the mind and ear

had photographed those vivid first impressions that remain always clear.



It was the following spring that I saw him again--at an afternoon

gathering, and the memory of that occasion is chiefly important because I

met Mrs. Clemens there for the only time, and like all who met her,

however briefly, felt the gentleness and beauty of her spirit.  I think I

spoke with her at two or three different moments during the afternoon,

and on each occasion was impressed with that feeling of acquaintanceship

which we immediately experience with those rare beings whose souls are

wells of human sympathy and free from guile.  Bret Harte had just died,

and during the afternoon Mr. Clemens asked me to obtain for him some item

concerning the obsequies.



It was more than three years before I saw him again.  Meantime, a sort of

acquaintance had progressed.  I had been engaged in writing the life of

Thomas Nast, the cartoonist, and I had found among the material a number

of letters to Nast from Mark Twain.  I was naturally anxious to use those

fine characteristic letters, and I wrote him for his consent.  He wished

to see the letters, and the permission that followed was kindness itself.

His admiration of Nast was very great.



It was proper, under the circumstances, to send him a copy of the book

when it appeared; but that was 1904, his year of sorrow and absence, and

the matter was postponed.  Then came the great night of his seventieth

birthday dinner, with an opportunity to thank him in person for the use

of the letters.  There was only a brief exchange of words, and it was the

next day, I think, that I sent him a copy of the book.  It did not occur

to me that I should hear of it again.



We step back a moment here.  Something more than a year earlier, through

a misunderstanding, Mark Twain's long association with The Players had

been severed.  It was a sorrow to him, and a still greater sorrow to the

club.  There was a movement among what is generally known' as the "Round

Table Group"--because its members have long had a habit of lunching at a

large, round table in a certain window--to bring him back again.  David

Munro, associate editor of the North American Review-" David," a man well

loved of men--and Robert Reid, the painter, prepared this simple

document:



                                   TO

                               MARK TWAIN

                                  from

                              THE CLANSMEN



                         Will ye no come back again?

                         Will ye no come back again?

                         Better lo'ed ye canna be,

                         Will ye no come back again?



It was signed by Munro and by Reid and about thirty others, and it

touched Mark Twain deeply.  The lines had always moved him.  He wrote:



     TO ROBT. REID & THE OTHERS--



     WELL-BELOVED,--Surely those lovely verses went to Prince Charlie's

     heart, if he had one, & certainly they have gone to mine.  I shall

     be glad & proud to come back again after such a moving & beautiful

     compliment as this from comrades whom I have loved so long.  I hope

     you can poll the necessary vote; I know you will try, at any rate.

     It will be many months before I can foregather with you, for this

     black border is not perfunctory, not a convention; it symbolizes the

     loss of one whose memory is the only thing I worship.



     It is not necessary for me to thank you--& words could not deliver

     what I feel, anyway.  I will put the contents of your envelope in

     the small casket where I keep the things which have become sacred to

     me.

                                   S. L. C.





So the matter was temporarily held in abeyance until he should return.

to social life.  At the completion of his seventieth year the club had

taken action, and Mark Twain had been brought back, not in the regular

order of things, but as an honorary life member without dues or duties.

There was only one other member of this class, Sir Henry Irving.



The Players, as a club, does not give dinners.  Whatever is done in that

way is done by one or more of the members in the private dining-room,

where there is a single large table that holds twenty-five, even thirty

when expanded to its limit.  That room and that table have mingled with

much distinguished entertainment, also with history.  Henry James made

his first after-dinner speech there, for one thing--at least he claimed

it was his first, though this is by the way.



A letter came to me which said that those who had signed the plea for the

Prince's return were going to welcome him in the private dining-room on

the 5th of January.  It was not an invitation, but a gracious privilege.

I was in New York a day or two in advance of the date, and I think David

Munro was the first person I met at The Players.  As he greeted me his

eyes were eager with something he knew I would wish to hear.  He had been

delegated to propose the dinner to Mark Twain, and had found him propped

up in bed, and noticed on the table near him a copy of the Nast book.  I

suspect that Munro had led him to speak of it, and that the result had

lost nothing filtered through that radiant benevolence of his.



The night of January 5, 1906, remains a memory apart from other dinners.

Brander Matthews presided, and Gilder was there, and Frank Millet and

Willard Metcalf and Robert Reid, and a score of others; some of them are

dead now, David Munro among them.  It so happened that my seat was nearly

facing the guest of the evening, who, by custom of The Players, is placed

at the side and not at the end of the long table.  He was no longer frail

and thin, as when I had first met him.  He had a robust, rested look; his

complexion had the tints of a miniature painting.  Lit by the glow of the

shaded candles, relieved against the dusk richness of the walls, he made

a picture of striking beauty.  One could not take his eyes from it, and

to one guest at least it stirred the farthest memories.  I suddenly saw

the interior of a farm-house sitting-room in the Middle West, where I had

first heard uttered the name of Mark Twain, and where night after night a

group gathered around the evening lamp to hear the tale of the first

pilgrimage, which, to a boy of eight, had seemed only a wonderful poem

and fairy tale.  To Charles Harvey Genung, who sat next to me, I

whispered something of this, and how, during the thirty-six years since

then, no other human being to me had meant quite what Mark Twain had

meant--in literature, in life, in the ineffable thing which means more

than either, and which we call "inspiration," for lack of a truer word.

Now here he was, just across the table.  It was the fairy tale come true.



Genung said:



"You should write his life."



His remark seemed a pleasant courtesy, and was put aside as such.  When

he persisted I attributed it to the general bloom of the occasion, and a

little to the wine, maybe, for the dinner was in its sweetest stage just

then--that happy, early stage when the first glass of champagne, or the

second, has proved its quality.  He urged, in support of his idea, the

word that Munro had brought concerning the Nast book, but nothing of what

he said kindled any spark of hope.  I could not but believe that some one

with a larger equipment of experience, personal friendship, and abilities

had already been selected for the task.  By and by the speaking began--

delightful, intimate speaking in that restricted circle--and the matter

went out of my mind.



When the dinner had ended, and we were drifting about the table in

general talk, I found an opportunity to say a word to the guest of the

evening about his Joan of Arc, which I had recently re-read.  To my

happiness, he detained me while he told me the long-ago incident which

had led to his interest, not only in the martyred girl, but in all

literature.  I think we broke up soon after, and descended to the lower

rooms.  At any rate, I presently found the faithful Charles Genung

privately reasserting to me the proposition that I should undertake the

biography of Mark Twain.  Perhaps it was the brief sympathy established

by the name of Joan of Arc, perhaps it was only Genung's insistent

purpose--his faith, if I may be permitted the word.  Whatever it was,

there came an impulse, in the instant of bidding good-by to our guest of

honor, which prompted me to say:



"May I call to see you, Mr. Clemens, some day?"



And something--dating from the primal atom, I suppose--prompted him to

answer:



"Yes, come soon."



This was on Wednesday night, or rather on Thursday morning, for it was

past midnight, and a day later I made an appointment with his secretary

to call on Saturday.



I can say truly that I set out with no more than the barest hope of

success, and wondering if I should have the courage, when I saw him, even

to suggest the thought in my mind.  I know I did not have the courage to

confide in Genung that I had made the appointment--I was so sure it would

fail.  I arrived at 21 Fifth Avenue and was shown into that long library

and drawing-room combined, and found a curious and deep interest in the

books and ornaments along the shelves as I waited.  Then I was summoned,

and I remember ascending the stairs, wondering why I had come on so

futile an errand, and trying to think of an excuse to offer for having

come at all.



He was propped up in bed--in that stately bed-sitting, as was his habit,

with his pillows placed at the foot, so that he might have always before

him the rich, carved beauty of its headboard.  He was delving through a

copy of Huckleberry Finn, in search of a paragraph concerning which some

random correspondent had asked explanation.  He was commenting

unfavorably on this correspondent and on miscellaneous letter-writing in

general.  He pushed the cigars toward me, and the talk of these matters

ran along and blended into others more or less personal.  By and by I

told him what so many thousands had told him before: what he had meant to

me, recalling the childhood impressions of that large, black-and-gilt-

covered book with its wonderful pictures and adventures--the

Mediterranean pilgrimage.  Very likely it bored him--he had heard it so

often--and he was willing enough, I dare say, to let me change the

subject and thank him for the kindly word which David Munro had brought.

I do not remember what he said then, but I suddenly found myself

suggesting that out of his encouragement had grown a hope--though

certainly it was something less--that I might some day undertake a book

about himself.  I expected the chapter to end at this point, and his

silence which followed seemed long and ominous.



He said, at last, that at various times through his life he had been

preparing some autobiographical matter, but that he had tired of the

undertaking, and had put it aside.  He added that he had hoped his

daughters would one day collect his letters; but that a biography--

a detailed story of personality and performance, of success and failure--

was of course another matter, and that for such a work no arrangement had

been made.  He may have added one or two other general remarks; then,

turning those piercing agate-blue eyes directly upon me, he said:



"When would you like to begin?"



There was a dresser with a large mirror behind him.  I happened to catch

my reflection in it, and I vividly recollect saying to it mentally: "This

is not true; it is only one of many similar dreams."  But even in a dream

one must answer, and I said:



"Whenever you like.  I can begin now."



He was always eager in any new undertaking.



"Very good," he said.  "The sooner, then, the better.  Let's begin while

we are in the humor.  The longer you postpone a thing of this kind the

less likely you are ever to get at it."



This was on Saturday, as I have stated.  I mentioned that my family was

still in the country, and that it would require a day or two to get

established in the city.  I asked if Tuesday, January 9th, would be too

soon to begin.  He agreed that Tuesday would do, and inquired something

about my plan of work.  Of course I had formed nothing definite, but I

said that in similar undertakings a part of the work had been done with a

stenographer, who had made the notes while I prompted the subject to

recall a procession of incidents and episodes, to be supplemented with

every variety of material obtainable--letters and other documentary

accumulations.  Then he said:



"I think I should enjoy dictating to a stenographer, with some one to

prompt me and to act as audience.  The room adjoining this was fitted up

for my study.  My manuscripts and notes and private books and many of my

letters are there, and there are a trunkful or two of such things in the

attic.  I seldom use the room myself.  I do my writing and reading in

bed.  I will turn that room over to you for this work.  Whatever you need

will be brought to you.  We can have the dictation here in the morning,

and you can put in the rest of the day to suit yourself.  You can have a

key and come and go as you please."



That was always his way.  He did nothing by halves; nothing without

unquestioning confidence and prodigality.  He got up and showed me the

lovely luxury of the study, with its treasures of material.  I did not

believe it true yet.  It had all the atmosphere of a dream, and I have no

distinct recollection of how I came away.  When I returned to The Players

and found Charles Harvey Genung there, and told him about it, it is quite

certain that he perjured himself when he professed to believe it true and

pretended that he was not surprised.









CCXXXIX



WORKING WITH MARK TWAIN



On Tuesday, January 9, 1906, I was on hand with a capable stenographer--

Miss Josephine Hobby, who had successively, and successfully, held

secretarial positions with Charles Dudley Warner and Mrs. Mary Mapes

Dodge, and was therefore peculiarly qualified for the work in hand.



Clemens, meantime, had been revolving our plans and adding some features

of his own.  He proposed to double the value and interest of our

employment by letting his dictations continue the form of those earlier

autobiographical chapters, begun with Redpath in 1885, and continued

later in Vienna and at the Villa Quarto.  He said he did not think he

could follow a definite chronological program; that he would like to

wander about, picking up this point and that, as memory or fancy

prompted, without any particular biographical order.  It was his purpose,

he declared, that his dictations should not be published until he had

been dead a hundred years or more--a prospect which seemed to give him an

especial gratification.--[As early as October, 1900, he had proposed to

Harper & Brothers a contract for publishing his personal memoirs at the

expiration of one hundred years from date; and letters covering the

details were exchanged with Mr. Rogers.  The document, however, was not

completed.]



He wished to pay the stenographer, and to own these memoranda, he said,

allowing me free access to them for any material I might find valuable.

I could also suggest subjects for dictation, and ask particulars of any

special episode or period.  I believe this covered the whole arrangement,

which did not require more than five minutes, and we set to work without

further prologue.



I ought to state that he was in bed when we arrived, and that he remained

there during almost all of these earlier dictations, clad in a handsome

silk dressing-gown of rich Persian pattern, propped against great snowy

pillows.  He loved this loose luxury and ease, and found it conducive to

thought.  On the little table beside him, where lay his cigars, papers,

pipes, and various knickknacks, shone a reading-lamp, making more

brilliant the rich coloring of his complexion and the gleam of his

shining hair.  There was daylight, too, but it was north light, and the

winter days were dull.  Also the walls of the room were a deep,

unreflecting red, and his eyes were getting old.  The outlines of that

vast bed blending into the luxuriant background, the whole focusing to

the striking central figure, remain in my mind to-day--a picture of

classic value.



He dictated that morning some matters connected with the history of the

Comstock mine; then he drifted back to his childhood, returning again to

the more modern period, and closed, I think, with some comments on

current affairs.  It was absorbingly interesting; his quaint, unhurried

fashion of speech, the unconscious movement of his hands, the play of his

features as his fancies and phrases passed in mental review and were

accepted or waved aside.  We were watching one of the great literary

creators of his time in the very process of his architecture.  We

constituted about the most select audience in the world enjoying what

was, likely enough, its most remarkable entertainment.  When he turned at

last and inquired the time we were all amazed that two hours and more had

slipped away.



"And how much I have enjoyed it!" he said.  "It is the ideal plan for

this kind of work.  Narrative writing is always disappointing.  The

moment you pick up a pen you begin to lose the spontaneity of the

personal relation, which contains the very essence of interest.  With

shorthand dictation one can talk as if he were at his own dinner-table--

always a most inspiring place.  I expect to dictate all the rest of my

life, if you good people are willing to come and listen to it."



The dictations thus begun continued steadily from week to week, and

always with increasing charm.  We never knew what he was going to talk

about, and it was seldom that he knew until the moment of beginning; then

he went drifting among episodes, incidents, and periods in his

irresponsible fashion; the fashion of table-conversation, as he said, the

methodless method of the human mind.  It was always delightful, and

always amusing, tragic, or instructive, and it was likely to be one of

these at one instant, and another the next.  I felt myself the most

fortunate biographer in the world, as undoubtedly I was, though not just

in the way that I first imagined.



It was not for several weeks that I began to realize that these marvelous

reminiscences bore only an atmospheric relation to history; that they

were aspects of biography rather than its veritable narrative, and built

largely--sometimes wholly--from an imagination that, with age, had

dominated memory, creating details, even reversing them, yet with a

perfect sincerity of purpose on the part of the narrator to set down the

literal and unvarnished truth.  It was his constant effort to be frank

and faithful to fact, to record, to confess, and to condemn without

stint.  If you wanted to know the worst of Mark Twain you had only to ask

him for it.  He would give it, to the last syllable--worse than the

worst, for his imagination would magnify it and adorn it with new

iniquities, and if he gave it again, or a dozen times, he would improve

upon it each time, until the thread of history was almost impossible to

trace through the marvel of that fabric; and he would do the same for

another person just as willingly.  Those vividly real personalities that

he marched and countermarched before us were the most convincing

creatures in the world; the most entertaining, the most excruciatingly

humorous, or wicked, or tragic; but, alas, they were not always safe to

include in a record that must bear a certain semblance to history.  They

often disagreed in their performance, and even in their characters, with

the documents in the next room, as I learned by and by when those

records, disentangled, began to rebuild the structure of the years.



His gift of dramatization had been exercised too long to be discarded

now.  The things he told of Mrs. Clemens and of Susy were true--

marvelously and beautifully true, in spirit and in aspect--and the actual

detail of these mattered little in such a record.  The rest was history

only as 'Roughing It' is history, or the 'Tramp Abroad'; that is to say,

it was fictional history, with fact as a starting-point.  In a prefatory

note to these volumes we have quoted Mark Twain's own lovely and

whimsical admission, made once when he realized his deviations:



"When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or

not; but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter."



At another time he paraphrased one of Josh Billings's sayings in the

remark: "It isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can

remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so."



I do not wish to say, by any means, that his so-called autobiography is a

mere fairy tale.  It is far from that.  It is amazingly truthful in the

character-picture it represents of the man himself.  It is only not

reliable--and it is sometimes even unjust--as detailed history.  Yet,

curiously enough, there were occasional chapters that were

photographically exact, and fitted precisely with the more positive, if

less picturesque, materials.  It is also true that such chapters were

likely to be episodes intrinsically so perfect as to not require the

touch of art.



In the talks which we usually had, when the dictations were ended and

Miss Hobby had gone, I gathered much that was of still greater value.

Imagination was temporarily dispossessed, as it were, and, whether

expounding some theory or summarizing some event, he cared little for

literary effect, and only for the idea and the moment immediately

present.



It was at such times that he allowed me to make those inquiries we had

planned in the beginning, and which apparently had little place in the

dictations themselves.  Sometimes I led him to speak of the genesis of

his various books, how he had come to write them, and I think there was

not a single case where later I did not find his memory of these matters

almost exactly in accord with the letters of the moment, written to

Howells or Twichell, or to some member of his family.  Such reminiscence

was usually followed by some vigorous burst of human philosophy, often

too vigorous for print, too human, but as dazzling as a search-light in

its revelation.



It was during this earlier association that he propounded, one day, his

theory of circumstance, already set down, that inevitable sequence of

cause and effect, beginning with the first act of the primal atom.  He

had been dictating that morning his story of the clairvoyant dream which

preceded his brother's death, and the talk of foreknowledge had

continued.  I said one might logically conclude from such a circumstance

that the future was a fixed quantity.



"As absolutely fixed as the past," he said; and added the remark already

quoted.--[Chap. lxxv] A little later he continued:



"Even the Almighty Himself cannot check or change that sequence of events

once it is started.  It is a fixed quantity, and a part of the scheme is

a mental condition during certain moments usually of sleep--when the mind

may reach out and grasp some of the acts which are still to come."



It was a new angle to me--a line of logic so simple and so utterly

convincing that I have remained unshaken in it to this day.  I have never

been able to find any answer to it, nor any one who could even attempt to

show that the first act of the first created atom did not strike the key-

note of eternity.



At another time, speaking of the idea that God works through man, he

burst out:



"Yes, of course, just about as much as a man works through his microbes!"



He had a startling way of putting things like that, and it left not much

to say.



I was at this period interested a good deal in mental healing, and had

been treated for neurasthenia with gratifying results.  Like most of the

world, I had assumed, from his published articles, that he condemned

Christian Science and its related practices out of hand.  When I

confessed, rather reluctantly, one day, the benefit I had received, he

surprised me by answering:



"Of course you have been benefited.  Christian Science is humanity's

boon.  Mother Eddy deserves a place in the Trinity as much as any member

of it.  She has organized and made available a healing principle that for

two thousand years has never been employed, except as the merest kind of

guesswork.  She is the benefactor of the age."



It seemed strange, at the time, to hear him speak in this way concerning

a practice of which he was generally regarded as the chief public

antagonist.  It was another angle of his many-sided character.









CCXL



THE DEFINITION OF A GENTLEMAN



That was a busy winter for him socially.  He was constantly demanded for

this thing and that--for public gatherings, dinners--everywhere he was a

central figure.  Once he presided at a Valentine dinner given by some

Players to David Munro.  He had never presided at a dinner before, he

said, and he did it in his own way, which certainly was a taking one,

suitable to that carefree company and occasion--a real Scotch occasion,

with the Munro tartan everywhere, the table banked with heather, and a

wild piper marching up and down in the anteroom, blowing savage airs in

honor of Scotland's gentlest son.



An important meeting of that winter was at Carnegie Hall--a great

gathering which had assembled for the purpose of aiding Booker T.

Washington in his work for the welfare of his race.  The stage and the

auditorium were thronged with notables.  Joseph H. Choate and Mark Twain

presided, and both spoke; also Robert C. Ogden and Booker T. Washington

himself.  It was all fine and interesting.  Choate's address was ably

given, and Mark Twain was at his best.  He talked of politics and of

morals--public and private--how the average American citizen was true to

his Christian principles three hundred and sixty-three days in the year,

and how on the other two days of the year he left those principles at

home and went to the tax-office and the voting-booths, and did his best

to damage and undo his whole year's faithful and righteous work.



     I used to be an honest man, but I am crumbling--no, I have crumbled.

     When they assessed me at $75,000 a fortnight ago I went out and

     tried to borrow the money and couldn't.  Then when I found they were

     letting a whole crowd of millionaires live in New York at a third of

     the price they were charging me I was hurt, I was indignant, and

     said, this is the last feather.  I am not going to run this town all

     by myself.  In that moment--in that memorable moment, I began to

     crumble.  In fifteen minutes the disintegration was complete.  In

     fifteen minutes I was become just a mere moral sand-pile, and I

     lifted up my hand, along with those seasoned and experienced

     deacons, and swore off every rag of personal property I've got in

     the world.



I had never heard him address a miscellaneous audience.  It was marvelous

to see how he convulsed it, and silenced it, and controlled it at will.

He did not undertake any special pleading for the negro cause; he only

prepared the way with cheerfulness.



Clemens and Choate joined forces again, a few weeks later, at a great

public meeting assembled in aid of the adult blind.  Helen Keller was to

be present, but she had fallen ill through overwork.  She sent to Clemens

one of her beautiful letters, in which she said:



     I should be happy if I could have spelled into my hand the words as

     they fall from your lips, and receive, even as it is uttered, the

     eloquence of our newest ambassador to the blind.



Clemens, dictating the following morning, told of his first meeting with

Helen Keller at a little gathering in Lawrence Hutton's home, when she

was about the age of fourteen.  It was an incident that invited no

elaboration, and probably received none.



     Henry Rogers and I went together.  The company had all assembled and

     had been waiting a while.  The wonderful child arrived now with her

     about equally wonderful teacher, Miss Sullivan, and seemed quite

     well to recognize the character of her surroundings.  She said, "Oh,

     the books, the books, so many, many books.  How lovely!"



     The guests were brought one after another.  As she shook hands with

     each she took her hand away and laid her fingers lightly against

     Miss Sullivan's lips, who spoke against them the person's name.



     Mr. Howells seated himself by Helen on the sofa, and she put her

     fingers against his lips and he told her a story of considerable

     length, and you could see each detail of it pass into her mind and

     strike fire there and throw the flash of it into her face.



     After a couple of hours spent very pleasantly some one asked if

     Helen would remember the feel of the hands of the company after this

     considerable interval of time and be able to discriminate the hands

     and name the possessors of them.  Miss Sullivan said, "Oh, she will

     have no difficulty about that."  So the company filed past, shook

     hands in turn, and with each hand-shake Helen greeted the owner of

     the hand pleasantly and spoke the name that belonged to it without

     hesitation.



     By and by the assemblage proceeded to the dining-room and sat down

     to the luncheon.  I had to go away before it was over, and as I

     passed by Helen I patted her lightly on the head and passed on.

     Miss Sullivan called to me and said, "Stop, Mr. Clemens, Helen is

     distressed because she did not recognize your hand.  Won't you come

     back and do that again?"  I went back and patted her lightly on the

     head, and she said at once, "Oh, it's Mr. Clemens."



     Perhaps some one can explain this miracle, but I have never been

     able to do it.  Could she feel the wrinkles in my hand through her

     hair?  Some one else must answer this.



It was three years following this dictation that the mystery received a

very simple and rather amusing solution.  Helen had come to pay a visit

to Mark Twain's Connecticut home, Stormfield, then but just completed.

He had met her, meantime, but it had not occurred to him before to ask

her how she had recognized him that morning at Hutton's, in what had

seemed such a marvelous way.  She remembered, and with a smile said:



"I smelled you."  Which, after all, did not make the incident seem much

less marvelous.



On one of the mornings after Miss Hobby had gone Clemens said:



"A very curious thing has happened--a very large-sized-joke."  He was

shaving at the time, and this information came in brief and broken

relays, suited to a performance of that sort.  The reader may perhaps

imagine the effect without further indication of it.



"I was going on a yachting trip once, with Henry Rogers, when a reporter

stopped me with the statement that Mrs. Astor had said that there had

never been a gentleman in the White House, and he wanted me to give him

my definition of a gentleman.  I didn't give him my definition; but he

printed it, just the same, in the afternoon paper.  I was angry at first,

and wanted to bring a damage suit.  When I came to read the definition it

was a satisfactory one, and I let it go.  Now to-day comes a letter and a

telegram from a man who has made a will in Missouri, leaving ten thousand

dollars to provide tablets for various libraries in the State, on which

shall be inscribed Mark Twain's definition of a gentleman.  He hasn't got

the definition--he has only heard of it, and he wants me to tell him in

which one of my books or speeches he can find it.  I couldn't think, when

I read that letter, what in the nation the man meant, but shaving somehow

has a tendency to release thought, and just now it all came to me."



It was a situation full of amusing possibilities; but he reached no

conclusion in the matter.  Another telegram was brought in just then,

which gave a sadder aspect to his thought, for it said that his old

coachman, Patrick McAleer, who had begun in the Clemens service with the

bride and groom of thirty-six years before, was very low, and could not

survive more than a few days.  This led him to speak of Patrick, his

noble and faithful nature, and how he always claimed to be in their

service, even during their long intervals of absence abroad.  Clemens

gave orders that everything possible should be done for Patrick's

comfort.  When the end came, a few days later, he traveled to Hartford to

lay flowers on Patrick's bier, and to serve, with Patrick's friends--

neighbor coachmen and John O'Neill, the gardener--as pall-bearer, taking

his allotted place without distinction or favor.



It was the following Sunday, at the Majestic Theater, in New York, that

Mark Twain spoke to the Young Men's Christian Association.  For several

reasons it proved an unusual meeting.  A large number of free tickets had

been given out, far more than the place would hold; and, further, it had

been announced that when the ticket-holders had been seated the admission

would be free to the public.  The subject chosen for the talk was

"Reminiscences."



When we arrived the streets were packed from side to side for a

considerable distance and a riot was in progress.  A great crowd had

swarmed about the place, and the officials, instead of throwing the doors

wide and letting the theater fill up, regardless of tickets, had locked

them.  As a result there was a shouting, surging human mass that

presently dashed itself against the entrance.  Windows and doors gave

way, and there followed a wild struggle for entrance.  A moment later the

house was packed solid.  A detachment of police had now arrived, and in

time cleared the street.  It was said that amid the tumult some had lost

their footing and had been trampled and injured, but of this we did not

learn until later.  We had been taken somehow to a side entrance and

smuggled into boxes.--[The paper next morning bore the head-lines:

"10,000 Stampeded at the Mark Twain Meeting.  Well-dressed Men and Women

Clubbed by Police at Majestic Theater."  In this account the paper stated

that the crowd had collected an hour before the time for opening; that

nothing of the kind had been anticipated and no police preparation had

been made.]



It was peaceful enough in the theater until Mark Twain appeared on the

stage.  He was wildly greeted, and when he said, slowly and seriously,

"I thank you for this signal recognition of merit," there was a still

noisier outburst.  In the quiet that followed he began his memories, and

went wandering along from one anecdote to another in the manner of his

daily dictations.



At last it seemed to occur to him, in view of the character of his

audience, that he ought to close with something in the nature of counsel

suited to young men.



     It is from experiences such as mine [he said] that we get our

     education of life.  We string them into jewels or into tinware, as

     we may choose.  I have received recently several letters asking for

     counsel or advice, the principal request being for some incident

     that may prove helpful to the young.  It is my mission to teach, and

     I am always glad to furnish something.  There have been a lot of

     incidents in my career to help me along--sometimes they helped me

     along faster than I wanted to go.



He took some papers from his pocket and started to unfold one of them;

then, as if remembering, he asked how long he had been talking.  The

answer came, "Thirty-five minutes."  He made as if to leave the stage,

but the audience commanded him to go on.



"All right," he said, "I can stand more of my own talk than any one I

ever knew."  Opening one of the papers, a telegram, he read:



"In which one of your works can we find the definition of a gentleman?"

Then he added:



     I have not answered that telegram.  I couldn't.  I never wrote any

     such definition, though it seems to me that if a man has just,

     merciful, and kindly instincts he would be a gentleman, for he would

     need nothing else in this world.



He opened a letter.  "From Howells," he said.



     My old friend, William Dean Howells--Howells, the head of American

     literature.  No one is able to stand with him.  He is an old, old

     friend of mine, and he writes me, "To-morrow I shall be sixty-nine

     years old."  Why, I am surprised at Howells writing so.  I have

     known him myself longer than that.  I am sorry to see a man trying

     to appear so young.  Let's see.  Howells says now, "I see you have

     been burying Patrick.  I suppose he was old, too."



The house became very still.  Most of them had read an account of Mark

Twain's journey to Hartford and his last service to his faithful

servitor.  The speaker's next words were not much above a whisper, but

every syllable was distinct.



     No, he was never old-Patrick.  He came to us thirty-six years ago.

     He was our coachman from the day that I drove my young bride to our

     new home.  He was a young Irishman, slender, tall, lithe, honest,

     truthful, and he never changed in all his life.  He really was with

     us but twenty-five years, for he did not go with us to Europe; but

     he never regarded that a separation.  As the children grew up he was

     their guide.  He was all honor, honesty, and affection.  He was with

     us in New Hampshire last summer, and his hair was just as black, his

     eyes were just as blue, his form just as straight, and his heart

     just as good as on the day we first met.  In all the long years

     Patrick never made a mistake.  He never needed an order; he never

     received a command.  He knew.  I have been asked for my idea of an

     ideal gentleman, and I give it to you--Patrick McAleer.



It was the sort of thing that no one but Mark Twain has quite been able

to do, and it was just that recognized quality behind it that had made

crowds jam the street and stampede the entrance to be in his presence-to

see him and to hear his voice.









CCXLI



GORKY, HOWELLS, AND MARK TWAIN



Clemens was now fairly back again in the wash of banquets and speech-

making that had claimed him on his return from England, five years

before.  He made no less than a dozen speeches altogether that winter,

and he was continually at some feasting or other, where he was sure to be

called upon for remarks.  He fell out of the habit of preparing his

addresses, relying upon the inspiration of the moment, merely following

the procedure of his daily dictations, which had doubtless given him

confidence for this departure from his earlier method.  There was seldom

an afternoon or an evening that he was not required, and seldom a morning

that the papers did not have some report of his doings.  Once more, and

in a larger fashion than ever, he had become "the belle of New York."

But he was something further.  An editorial in the Evening Mail said:



     Mark Twain, in his "last and best of life for which the first was

     made," seems to be advancing rapidly to a position which makes him a

     kind of joint Aristides, Solon, and Themistocles of the American

     metropolis--an Aristides for justness and boldness as well as

     incessancy of opinion, a Solon for wisdom and cogency, and a

     Themistocles for the democracy of his views and the popularity of

     his person.



     Things have reached the point where, if Mark Twain is not at a

     public meeting or banquet, he is expected to console it with one of

     his inimitable letters of advice and encouragement.  If he deigns to

     make a public appearance there is a throng at the doors which

     overtaxes the energy and ability of the police.  We must be glad

     that we have a public commentator like Mark Twain always at hand and

     his wit and wisdom continually on tap.  His sound, breezy

     Mississippi Valley Americanism is a corrective to all sorts of

     snobbery.  He cultivates respect for human rights by always making

     sure that he has his own.



He talked one afternoon to the Barnard girls, and another afternoon to

the Women's University Club, illustrating his talk with what purported to

be moral tales.  He spoke at a dinner given to City Tax Commissioner Mr.

Charles Putzel; and when he was introduced there as the man who had said,

"When in doubt tell the truth," he replied that he had invented that

maxim for others, but that when in doubt himself, he used more sagacity.



The speeches he made kept his hearers always in good humor; but he made

them think, too, for there was always substance and sound reason and

searching satire in the body of what he said.



It was natural that there should be reporters calling frequently at Mark

Twain's home, and now and then the place became a veritable storm-center

of news.  Such a moment arrived when it became known that a public

library in Brooklyn had banished Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer from the

children's room, presided over by a young woman of rather severe morals.

The incident had begun in November of the previous year.  One of the

librarians, Asa Don Dickinson, who had vigorously voted against the

decree, wrote privately of the matter.  Clemens had replied:



     DEAR SIR,--I am greatly troubled by what you say.  I wrote Tom

     Sawyer & Huck Finn for adults exclusively, & it always distresses me

     when I find that boys & girls have been allowed access to them.  The

     mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean.

     I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an

     unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young

     life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an

     unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old.  None can do

     that and ever draw a clean, sweet breath again this side of the

     grave.  Ask that young lady--she will tell you so.



     Most honestly do I wish that I could say a softening word or two in

     defense of Huck's character since you wish it, but really, in my

     opinion, it is no better than those of Solomon, David, & the rest of

     the sacred brotherhood.



     If there is an unexpurgated in the Children's Department, won't you

     please help that young woman remove Tom & Huck from that

     questionable companionship?



                         Sincerely yours,

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.



     I shall not show your letter to any one-it is safe with me.





Mr. Dickinson naturally kept this letter from the public, though he read

it aloud to the assembled librarians, and the fact of its existence and

its character eventually leaked out.--[It has been supplied to the

writer by Mr. Dickinson, and is published here with his consent.]--One

of the librarians who had heard it mentioned it at a theater-party in

hearing of an unrealized newspaper man.  This was near the end of the

following March.



The "tip" was sufficient.  Telephone-bells began to jingle, and groups of

newspaper men gathered simultaneously on Mr. Dickinson's and on Mark

Twain's door-steps.  At a 21 Fifth Avenue you could hardly get in or out,

for stepping on them.  The evening papers surmised details, and Huck and

Tom had a perfectly fresh crop of advertising, not only in America, but

in distant lands.  Dickinson wrote Clemens that he would not give out the

letter without his authority, and Clemens replied:



     Be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove!  The newspaper boys want

     that letter--don't you let them get hold of it.  They say you refuse

     to allow them to see it without my consent.  Keep on refusing, and

     I'll take care of this end of the line.



In a recent letter to the writer Mr. Dickinson states that Mark Twain's

solicitude was for the librarian, whom he was unwilling to involve in

difficulties with his official superiors, and he adds:



     There may be some doubt as to whether Mark Twain was or was not a

     religious man, for there are many definitions of the word religion.

     He was certainly a hater of conventions, had no patience with

     sanctimony and bibliolatry, and was perhaps irreverent.  But any one

     who reads carefully the description of the conflict in Huck's soul,

     in regard to the betrayal of Jim, will credit the creator of the

     scene with deep and true moral feeling.



The reporters thinned out in the course of a few days when no result was

forthcoming; but they were all back again presently when the Maxim Gorky

fiasco came along.  The distinguished revolutionist, Tchaykoffsky, as a

sort of advance agent for Gorky, had already called upon Clemens to

enlist his sympathy in their mission, which was to secure funds in the

cause of Russian emancipation.  Clemens gave his sympathy, and now

promised his aid, though he did not hesitate to discourage the mission.

He said that American enthusiasm in such matters stopped well above their

pockets, and that this revolutionary errand would fail.  Howells, too,

was of this opinion.  In his account of the episode he says:



     I told a valued friend of his and mine that I did not believe he

     could get twenty-five hundred dollars, and I think now I set the

     figure too high.



Clemens's interest, however, grew.  He attended a dinner given to Gorky

at the "A Club," No. 3 Fifth Avenue, and introduced Gorky to the diners.

Also he wrote a letter to be read by Tchaykoffsky at a meeting held at

the Grand Central Palace, where three thousand people gathered to hear

this great revolutionist recite the story of Russia's wrongs.  The letter

ran:



     DEAR MR. TCHAYKOFFSKY,--My sympathies are with the Russian

     revolution, of course.  It goes without saying.  I hope it will

     succeed, and now that I have talked with you I take heart to believe

     it will.  Government by falsified promises, by lies, by treachery,

     and by the butcher-knife, for the aggrandizement of a single family

     of drones and its idle and vicious kin has been borne quite long

     enough in Russia, I should think.  And it is to be hoped that the

     roused nation, now rising in its strength, will presently put an end

     to it and set up the republic in its place.  Some of us, even the

     white-headed, may live to see the blessed day when tsars and grand

     dukes will be as scarce there as I trust they are in heaven.

               Most sincerely yours,

                                        MARK TWAIN.



Clemens and Howells called on Gorky and agreed to figure prominently in a

literary dinner to be given in his honor.  The movement was really

assuming considerable proportions, when suddenly something happened which

caused it to flatten permanently, and rather ridiculously.



Arriving at 21 Fifth Avenue, one afternoon, I met Howells coming out.

I thought he had an unhappy, hunted look.  I went up to the study, and on

opening the door I found the atmosphere semi-opaque with cigar smoke, and

Clemens among the drifting blue wreaths and layers, pacing up and down

rather fiercely.  He turned, inquiringly, as I entered.  I had clipped a

cartoon from a morning paper, which pictured him as upsetting the Tsar's

throne--the kind of thing he was likely to enjoy.  I said:



"Here is something perhaps you may wish to see, Mr. Clemens."



He shook his head violently.



"No, I can't see anything now," and in another moment had disappeared

into his own room.  Something extraordinary had happened.  I wondered if,

after all their lifelong friendship, he and Howells had quarreled.  I was

naturally curious, but it was not a good time to investigate.  By and by

I went down on the street, where the newsboys were calling extras.  When

I had bought one, and glanced at the first page, I knew.  Gorky had been

expelled from his hotel for having brought to America, as his wife, a

woman not so recognized by the American laws.  Madame Andreieva, a

Russian actress, was a leader in the cause of freedom, and by Russian

custom her relation with Gorky was recognized and respected; but it was

not sufficiently orthodox for American conventions, and it was certainly

unfortunate that an apostle of high purpose should come handicapped in

that way.  Apparently the news had already reached Howells and Clemens,

and they had been feverishly discussing what was best to do about the

dinner.



Within a day or two Gorky and Madame Andreieva were evicted from a

procession of hotels, and of course the papers rang with the head-lines.

An army of reporters was chasing Clemens and Howells.  The Russian

revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more intimate

domestic interest.  Howells came again, the reporters following and

standing guard at the door below.  In 'My Mark Twain' he says:



     That was the moment of the great Vesuvian eruption, and we figured

     ourselves in easy reach of a volcano which was every now and then

     "blowing a cone off," as the telegraphic phrase was.  The roof of

     the great market in Naples had just broken in under its load of

     ashes and cinders, and crushed hundreds of people; and we asked each

     other if we were not sorry we had not been there, where the pressure

     would have been far less terrific than it was with us in Fifth

     Avenue.  The forbidden butler came up with a message that there were

     some gentlemen below who wanted to see Clemens.



     "How many?" he demanded.



     "Five," the butler faltered.



     "Reporters?"



     The butler feigned uncertainty.



     "What would you do?" he asked me.



     "I wouldn't see them," I said, and then Clemens went directly down

     to them.  How or by what means he appeased their voracity I cannot

     say, but I fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which

     was harmless enough.  They went away joyfully, and he came back in

     radiant satisfaction with having seen them.



It is not quite clear at this time just what word was sent to Gorky but

the matter must have been settled that night, for Clemens was in a fine

humor next morning.  It was before dictation time, and he came drifting

into the study and began at once to speak of the dinner and the

impossibility of its being given now.  Then he said:



"American public opinion is a delicate fabric.  It shrivels like the webs

of morning at the lightest touch."



Later in the day he made this memorandum:



     Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly

     transgressed custom brings sure punishment.  The penalty may be

     unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a cruelty; no matter, it will be

     inflicted just the same.  Certainly, then, there can be but one wise

     thing for a visiting stranger to do--find out what the country's

     customs are and refrain from offending against them.



     The efforts which have been made in Gorky's justification are

     entitled to all respect because of the magnanimity of the motive

     back of them, but I think that the ink was wasted.  Custom is

     custom: it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts,

     seasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle

     winds have upon Gibraltar.--[To Dan Beard he said, "Gorky made an

     awful mistake, Dan.  He might as well have come over here in his

     shirt-tail."]



The Gorky disturbance had hardly begun to subside when there came another

upheaval that snuffed it out completely.  On the afternoon of the 18th of

April I heard, at The Players, a wandering telephonic rumor that a great

earthquake was going on in San Francisco.  Half an hour later, perhaps, I

met Clemens coming out of No. 21.  He asked:



"Have you heard the news about San Francisco?"



I said I had heard a rumor of an earthquake; and had seen an extra with

big scare-heads; but I supposed the matter was exaggerated.



"No," he said, "I am afraid it isn't.  We have just had a telephone

message that it is even worse than at first reported.  A great fire is

consuming the city.  Come along to the news-stand and we'll see if there

is a later edition."



We walked to Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street and got some fresh extras.

The news was indeed worse, than at first reported.  San Francisco was

going to destruction.  Clemens was moved deeply, and began to recall this

old friend and that whose lives and property might be in danger.  He

spoke of Joe Goodman and the Gillis families, and pictured conditions in

the perishing city.









CCXLII



MARK TWAIN'S GOOD-BY TO THE PLATFORM



It was on April 19, 1906, the day following the great earthquake, that

Mark Twain gave a "Farewell Lecture" at Carnegie Hall for the benefit of

the Robert Fulton Memorial Association.  Some weeks earlier Gen.

Frederick D. Grant, its president, had proposed to pay one thousand

dollars for a Mark Twain lecture; but Clemens' had replied that he was

permanently out of the field, and would never again address any audience

that had to pay to hear him.



"I always expect to talk as long as I can get people to listen to me," he

sand, "but I never again expect to charge for it."  Later came one of his

inspirations, and he wrote: "I will lecture for one thousand dollars, on

one condition: that it will be understood to be my farewell lecture, and

that I may contribute the thousand dollars to the Fulton Association."



It was a suggestion not to be discouraged, and the bills and notices,

"Mark Twain's Farewell Lecture," were published without delay.



I first heard of the matter one afternoon when General Grant had called.

Clemens came into the study where I was working; he often wandered in and

out-sometimes without a word, sometimes to relieve himself concerning

things in general.  But this time he suddenly chilled me by saying:



"I'm going to deliver my farewell lecture, and I want you to appear on

the stage and help me."



I feebly expressed my pleasure at the prospect.  Then he said:



"I am going to lecture on Fulton--on the story of his achievements.  It

will be a burlesque, of course, and I am going to pretend to forget my

facts, and I want you to sit there in a chair.  Now and then, when I seem

to get stuck, I'll lean over and pretend to ask you some thing, and I

want you to pretend to prompt me.  You don't need to laugh, or to pretend

to be assisting in the performance any more than just that."





HANDBILL OF MARK TWAIN'S "FAREWELL LECTURE":



                               MARK TWAIN



                   Will Deliver His Farewell Lecture

                  ---------------------------------



                             CARNEGIE HALL



                            APRIL 19TH, 1906



                           FOR THE BENEFIT OF



                   Robert Fulton Memorial Association



                   MILITARY ORGANIZATION OLD GUARD IN

                   FULL DRESS UNIFORM WILL BE PRESENT



                        MUSIC BY OLD GUARD BAND



               TICKETS AND BOXES ON SALE AT CARNEGIE HALL

                          AND WALDORF-ASTORIA



                      SEATS $1.50, $1.00, 50 CENTS





It was not likely that I should laugh.  I had a sinking feeling in the

cardiac region which does not go with mirth.  It did not for the moment

occur to me that the stage would be filled with eminent citizens and

vice-presidents, and I had a vision of myself sitting there alone in the

chair in that wide emptiness, with the chief performer directing

attention to me every other moment or so, for perhaps an hour.  Let me

hurry on to say that it did not happen.  I dare say he realized my

unfitness for the work, and the far greater appropriateness of conferring

the honor on General Grant, for in the end he gave him the assignment, to

my immeasurable relief.



It was a magnificent occasion.  That spacious hall was hung with bunting,

the stage was banked and festooned with decoration of every sort.

General Grant, surrounded by his splendidly uniformed staff, sat in the

foreground, and behind was ranged a levee of foremost citizens of the

republic.  The band played "America" as Mark Twain entered, and the great

audience rose and roared out its welcome.  Some of those who knew him

best had hoped that on this occasion of his last lecture he would tell of

that first appearance in San Francisco, forty years before, when his

fortunes had hung in the balance.  Perhaps he did not think of it, and no

one had had the courage to suggest it.  At all events, he did a different

thing.  He began by making a strong plea for the smitten city where the

flames were still raging, urging prompt help for those who had lost not

only their homes, but the last shred of their belongings and their means

of livelihood.  Then followed his farcical history of Fulton, with

General Grant to make the responses, and presently he drifted into the

kind of lecture he had given so often in his long trip around the world-

retelling the tales which had won him fortune and friends in many lands.



I do not know whether the entertainment was long or short.  I think few

took account of time.  To a letter of inquiry as to how long the

entertainment would last, he had replied:



     I cannot say for sure.  It is my custom to keep on talking till I

     get the audience cowed.  Sometimes it takes an hour and fifteen

     minutes, sometimes I can do it in an hour.



There was no indication at any time that the audience was cowed.  The

house was packed, and the applause was so recurrent and continuous that

often his voice was lost to those in its remoter corners.  It did not

matter.  The tales were familiar to his hearers; merely to see Mark

Twain, in his old age and in that splendid setting, relating them was

enough.  The audience realized that it was witnessing the close of a

heroic chapter in a unique career.









CCXLIII



AN INVESTMENT IN REDDING



Many of the less important happenings seem worth remembering now.  Among

them was the sale, at the Nast auction, of the Mark Twain letters,

already mentioned.  The fact that these letters brought higher prices

than any others offered in this sale was gratifying.  Roosevelt, Grant,

and even Lincoln items were sold; but the Mark Twain letters led the

list.  One of them sold for forty-three dollars, which was said to be the

highest price ever paid for the letter of a living man.  It was the

letter written in 1877, quoted earlier in this work, in which Clemens

proposed the lecture tour to Nast.  None of the Clemens-Nast letters

brought less than twenty-seven dollars, and some of them were very brief.

It was a new measurement of public sentiment.  Clemens, when he heard of

it, said:



"I can't rise to General Grant's lofty place in the estimation of this

country; but it is a deep satisfaction to me to know that when it comes

to letter-writing he can't sit in the front seat along with me.  That

forty-three-dollar letter ought to be worth as much as eighty-six dollars

after I'm dead."



A perpetual string of callers came to 21 Fifth Avenue, and it kept the

secretary busy explaining to most of them why Mark Twain could not

entertain their propositions, or listen to their complaints, or allow

them to express in person their views on public questions.  He did see a

great many of what might be called the milder type persons who were

evidently sincere and not too heavily freighted with eloquence.  Of these

there came one day a very gentle-spoken woman who had promised that she

would stay but a moment, and say no more than a few words, if only she

might sit face to face with the great man.  It was in the morning hour

before the dictations, and he received her, quite correctly clad in his

beautiful dressing-robe and propped against his pillows.  She kept her

contract to the letter; but when she rose to go she said, in a voice of

deepest reverence:



"May I kiss your hand?"



It was a delicate situation, and might easily have been made ludicrous.

Denial would have hurt her.  As it was, he lifted his hand, a small,

exquisite hand it was, with the gentle dignity and poise of a king, and

she touched her lips to it with what was certainly adoration.  Then, as

she went, she said:



"How God must love you!"



"I hope so," he said, softly, and he did not even smile; but after she

had gone he could not help saying, in a quaint, half-pathetic voice

"I guess she hasn't heard of our strained relations."



Sitting in that royal bed, clad in that rich fashion, he easily conveyed

the impression of royalty, and watching him through those marvelous

mornings he seemed never less than a king, as indeed he was--the king of

a realm without national boundaries.  Some of those nearest to him fell

naturally into the habit of referring to him as "the King," and in time

the title crept out of the immediate household and was taken up by others

who loved him.



He had been more than once photographed in his bed; but it was by those

who had come and gone in a brief time, with little chance to study his

natural attitudes.  I had acquired some knowledge of the camera, and I

obtained his permission to let me photograph him--a permission he seldom

denied to any one.  We had no dictations on Saturdays, and I took the

pictures on one of these holiday mornings.  He was so patient and

tractable, and so natural in every attitude, that it was a delight to

make the negatives.  I was afraid he would become impatient, and made

fewer exposures than I might otherwise have done.  I think he expected

very little from this amateur performance; but, by that happy element of

accident which plays so large a part in photographic success, the results

were better than I had hoped for.  When I brought him the prints, a few

days later, he expressed pleasure and asked, "Why didn't you make more?"



Among them was one in an attitude which had grown so familiar to us, that

of leaning over to get his pipe from the smoking-table, and this seemed

to give him particular satisfaction.  It being a holiday, he had not

donned his dressing-gown, which on the whole was well for the

photographic result.  He spoke of other pictures that had been made of

him, especially denouncing one photograph, taken some twenty years before

by Sarony, a picture, as he said, of a gorilla in an overcoat, which the

papers and magazines had insisted on using ever since.



"Sarony was as enthusiastic about wild animals as he was about

photography, and when Du Chaillu brought over the first gorilla he sent

for me to look at it and see if our genealogy was straight.  I said it

was, and Sarony was so excited that I had recognized the resemblance

between us, that he wanted to make it more complete, so he borrowed my

overcoat and put it on the gorilla and photographed it, and spread that

picture out over the world as mine.  It turns up every week in some

newspaper or magazine; but it's not my favorite; I have tried to get it

suppressed."



Mark Twain made his first investment in Redding that spring.  I had

located there the autumn before, and bought a vacant old house, with a

few acres of land, at what seemed a modest price.  I was naturally

enthusiastic over the bargain, and the beauty and salubrity of the

situation.  His interest was aroused, and when he learned that there was

a place adjoining, equally reasonable and perhaps even more attractive,

he suggested immediately that I buy it for him; and he wanted to write a

check then for the purchase price, for fear the opportunity might be

lost.  I think there was then no purpose in his mind of building a

country home; but he foresaw that such a site, at no great distance from

New York, would become more valuable, and he had plenty of idle means.

The purchase was made without difficulty--a tract of seventy-five acres,

to which presently was added another tract of one hundred and ten acres,

and subsequently still other parcels of land, to complete the ownership

of the hilltop, for it was not long until he had conceived the idea of a

home.  He was getting weary of the heavy pressure of city life.  He

craved the retirement of solitude--one not too far from the maelstrom, so

that he might mingle with it now and then when he chose.  The country

home would not be begun for another year yet, but the purpose of it was

already in the air.  No one of the family had at this time seen the

location.









CCXLIV



TRAITS AND PHILOSOPHIES



I brought to the dictation one morning the Omar Khayyam card which

Twichell had written him so long ago; I had found it among the letters.

It furnished him a subject for that morning.  He said:



     How strange there was a time when I had never heard of Omar Khayyam!

     When that card arrived I had already read the dozen quatrains or so

     in the morning paper, and was still steeped in the ecstasy of

     delight which they occasioned.  No poem had ever given me so much

     pleasure before, and none has given me so much pleasure since.  It

     is the only poem I have ever carried about with me.  It has not been

     from under my hand all these years.



He had no general fondness for poetry; but many poems appealed to him,

and on occasion he liked to read them aloud.  Once, during the dictation,

some verses were sent up by a young authoress who was waiting below for

his verdict.  The lines pictured a phase of negro life, and she wished to

know if he thought them worthy of being read at some Tuskegee ceremony.

He did not fancy the idea of attending to the matter just then and said:



"Tell her she can read it.  She has my permission.  She may commit any

crime she wishes in my name."



It was urged that the verses were of high merit and the author a very

charming young lady.



"I'm very glad," he said, "and I am glad the Lord made her; I hope He

will make some more just like her.  I don't always approve of His

handiwork, but in this case I do."



Then suddenly he added:



"Well, let me see it--no time like the present to get rid of these

things."



He took the manuscript and gave such a rendition of those really fine

verses as I believe could not be improved upon.  We were held breathless

by his dramatic fervor and power.  He returned a message to that young

aspirant that must have made her heart sing.  When the dictation had

ended that day, I mentioned his dramatic gift.



"Yes," he said, "it is a gift, I suppose, like spelling and punctuation

and smoking.  I seem to have inherited all those."  Continuing, he spoke

of inherited traits in general.



"There was Paige," he said; "an ignorant man who could not make a machine

himself that would stand up, nor draw the working plans for one; but he

invented the eighteen thousand details of the most wonderful machine the

world has ever known.  He watched over the expert draftsmen, and

superintended the building of that marvel.  Pratt & Whitney built it; but

it was Paige's machine, nevertheless--the child of his marvelous gift.

We don't create any of our traits; we inherit all of them.  They have

come down to us from what we impudently call the lower animals.  Man is

the last expression, and combines every attribute of the animal tribes

that preceded him.  One or two conspicuous traits distinguish each family

of animals from the others, and those one or two traits are found in

every member of each family, and are so prominent as to eternally and

unchangeably establish the character of that branch of the animal world.

In these cases we concede that the several temperaments constitute a law

of God, a command of God, and that whatsoever is done in obedience to

that law is blameless.  Man, in his evolution, inherited the whole sum of

these numerous traits, and with each trait its share of the law of God.

He widely differs from them in this: that he possesses not a single

characteristic that is equally prominent in each member of his race.  You

can say the housefly is limitlessly brave, and in saying it you describe

the whole house-fly tribe; you can say the rabbit is limitlessly timid,

and by the phrase you describe the whole rabbit tribe; you can say the

spider and the tiger are limitlessly murderous, and by that phrase you

describe the whole spider and tiger tribes; you can say the lamb is

limitlessly innocent and sweet and gentle, and by that phrase you

describe all the lambs.  There is hardly a creature that you cannot

definitely and satisfactorily describe by one single trait--except man.

Men are not all cowards like the rabbit, nor all brave like the house-

fly, nor all sweet and innocent and gentle like the lamb, nor all

murderous like the spider and the tiger and the wasp, nor all thieves

like the fox and the bluejay, nor all vain like the peacock, nor all

frisky like the monkey.  These things are all in him somewhere, and they

develop according to the proportion of each he received in his allotment:

We describe a man by his vicious traits and condemn him; or by his fine

traits and gifts, and praise him and accord him high merit for their

possession.  It is comical.  He did not invent these things; he did not

stock himself with them.  God conferred them upon him in the first

instant of creation.  They constitute the law, and he could not escape

obedience to the decree any more than Paige could have built the type-

setter he invented, or the Pratt & Whitney machinists could have invented

the machine which they built."



He liked to stride up and down, smoking as he talked, and generally his

words were slowly measured, with varying pauses between them.  He halted

in the midst of his march, and without a suggestion of a smile added:



"What an amusing creature the human being is!"



It is absolutely impossible, of course, to preserve the atmosphere and

personality of such talks as this--the delicacies of his speech and

manner which carried an ineffable charm.  It was difficult, indeed, to

record the substance.  I did not know shorthand, and I should not have

taken notes at such times in any case; but I had trained myself in

similar work to preserve, with a fair degree of accuracy, the form of

phrase, and to some extent its wording, if I could get hold of pencil and

paper soon enough afterward.  In time I acquired a sort of phonographic

faculty; though it always seemed to me that the bouquet, the subtleness

of speech, was lacking in the result.  Sometimes, indeed, he would

dictate next morning the substance of these experimental reflections; or

I would find among his papers memoranda and fragmentary manuscripts where

he had set them down himself, either before or after he had tried them

verbally.  In these cases I have not hesitated to amend my notes where it

seemed to lend reality to his utterance, though, even so, there is always

lacking--and must be--the wonder of his personality.









CCXLV



IN THE DAY'S ROUND



A number of dictations of this period were about Susy, her childhood, and

the biography she had written of him, most of which he included in his

chapters.  More than once after such dictations he reproached himself

bitterly for the misfortunes of his house.  He consoled himself a little

by saying that Susy had died at the right time, in the flower of youth

and happiness; but he blamed himself for the lack of those things which

might have made her childhood still more bright.  Once he spoke of the

biography she had begun, and added:



"Oh, I wish I had paid more attention to that little girl's work!  If I

had only encouraged her now and then, what it would have meant to her,

and what a beautiful thing it would have been to have had her story of me

told in her own way, year after year!  If I had shown her that I cared,

she might have gone on with it.  We are always too busy for our children;

we never give them the time nor the interest they deserve.  We lavish

gifts upon them; but the most precious gift-our personal association,

which means so much to them-we give grudgingly and throw it away on those

who care for it so little."  Then, after a moment of silence: "But we are

repaid for it at last.  There comes a time when we want their company and

their interest.  We want it more than anything in the world, and we are

likely to be starved for it, just as they were starved so long ago.

There is no appreciation of my books that is so precious to me as

appreciation from my children.  Theirs is the praise we want, and the

praise we are least likely to get."



His moods of remorse seemed to overwhelm him at times.  He spoke of

Henry's death and little Langdon's, and charged himself with both.

He declared that for years he had filled Mrs. Clemens's life with

privations, that the sorrow of Susy's death had hastened her own end.

How darkly he painted it!  One saw the jester, who for forty years had

been making the world laugh, performing always before a background of

tragedy.



But such moods were evanescent.  He was oftener gay than somber.  One

morning before we settled down to work he related with apparent joy how

he had made a failure of story-telling at a party the night before.  An

artist had told him a yarn, he said, which he had considered the most

amusing thing in the world.  But he had not been satisfied with it, and

had attempted to improve on it at the party.  He had told it with what he

considered the nicest elaboration of detail and artistic effect, and when

he had concluded and expected applause, only a sickening silence had

followed.



"A crowd like that can make a good deal of silence when they combine," he

said, "and it probably lasted as long as ten seconds, because it seemed

an hour and a half.  Then a lady said, with evident feeling, 'Lord, how

pathetic!' For a moment I was stupefied.  Then the fountains of my great

deeps were broken up, and I rained laughter for forty days and forty

nights during as much as three minutes.  By that time I realized it was

my fault.  I had overdone the thing.  I started in to deceive them with

elaborate burlesque pathos, in order to magnify the humorous explosion at

the end; but I had constructed such a fog of pathos that when I got to

the humor you couldn't find it."



He was likely to begin the morning with some such incident which perhaps

he did not think worth while to include in his dictations, and sometimes

he interrupted his dictations to relate something aside, or to outline

some plan or scheme which his thought had suggested.



Once, when he was telling of a magazine he had proposed to start, the

Back Number, which was, to contain reprints of exciting events from

history--newspaper gleanings--eye-witness narrations, which he said never

lost their freshness of interest--he suddenly interrupted himself to

propose that we start such a magazine in the near future--he to be its

publisher and I its editor.  I think I assented, and the dictation

proceeded, but the scheme disappeared permanently.



He usually had a number of clippings or slips among the many books on the

bed beside him from which he proposed to dictate each day, but he seldom

could find the one most needed.  Once, after a feverishly impatient

search for a few moments, he invited Miss Hobby to leave the room

temporarily, so, as he said, that he might swear.  He got up and we began

to explore the bed, his profanity increasing amazingly with each moment.

It was an enormously large bed, and he began to disparage the size of it.



"One could lose a dog in this bed," he declared.



Finally I suggested that he turn over the clipping which he had in his

hand.  He did so, and it proved to be the one he wanted.  Its discovery

was followed by a period of explosions, only half suppressed as to

volume.  Then he said:



"There ought to be a room in this house to swear in.  It's dangerous to

have to repress an emotion like that."



A moment later, when Miss Hobby returned, he was serene and happy again.

He was usually gentle during the dictations, and patient with those

around him--remarkably so, I thought, as a rule.  But there were moments

that involved risk.  He had requested me to interrupt his dictation at

any time that I found him repeating or contradicting himself, or

misstating some fact known to me.  At first I hesitated to do this, and

cautiously mentioned the matter when he had finished.  Then he was likely

to say:



"Why didn't you stop me?  Why did you let me go on making a jackass of

myself when you could have saved me?"



So then I used to take the risk of getting struck by lightning, and

nearly always stopped him at the time.  But if it happened that I upset

his thought the thunderbolt was apt to fly.  He would say:



"Now you've knocked everything out of my head."



Then, of course, I would apologize and say I was sorry, which would

rectify matters, though half an hour later it might happen again.  I

became lightning-proof at last; also I learned better to select the

psychological moment for the correction.



There was a humorous complexion to the dictations which perhaps I have

not conveyed to the reader at all; humor was his natural breath and life,

and was not wholly absent in his most somber intervals.



But poetry was there as well.  His presence was full of it: the grandeur

of his figure; the grace of his movement; the music of his measured

speech.  Sometimes there were long pauses when he was wandering in

distant valleys of thought and did not speak at all.  At such times he

had a habit of folding and refolding the sleeve of his dressing-gown

around his wrist, regarding it intently, as it seemed.  His hands were so

fair and shapely; the palms and finger-tips as pink as those of a child.

Then when he spoke he was likely to fling back his great, white mane, his

eyes half closed yet showing a gleam of fire between the lids, his

clenched fist lifted, or his index-finger pointing, to give force and

meaning to his words.  I cannot recall the picture too often, or remind

myself too frequently how precious it was to be there, and to see him and

to hear him.  I do not know why I have not said before that he smoked

continually during these dictations--probably as an aid to thought--

though he smoked at most other times, for that matter.  His cigars were

of that delicious fragrance which characterizes domestic tobacco; but I

had learned early to take refuge in another brand when he offered me one.

They were black and strong and inexpensive, and it was only his early

training in the printing-office and on the river that had seasoned him to

tobacco of that temper.  Rich, admiring friends used to send him

quantities of expensive imported cigars; but he seldom touched them, and

they crumbled away or were smoked by visitors.  Once, to a minister who

proposed to send him something very special, he wrote:



     I should accept your hospitable offer at once but for the fact that

     I couldn't do it and remain honest.  That is to say, if I allowed

     you to send me what you believed to be good cigars it would

     distinctly mean that I meant to smoke them, whereas I should do

     nothing of the kind.  I know a good cigar better than you do, for I

     have had 60 years' experience.



     No, that is not what I mean; I mean I know a bad cigar better than

     anybody else.  I judge by the price only; if it costs above 5 cents

     I know it to be either foreign or half foreign & unsmokable--by me.

     I have many boxes of Havana cigars, of all prices from 20 cents

     apiece up to $1.66 apiece; I bought none of them, they were all

     presents; they are an accumulation of several years.  I have never

     smoked one of them & never shall; I work them off on the visitor.

     You shall have a chance when you come.



He smoked a pipe a good deal, and he preferred it to be old and violent;

and once, when he had bought a new, expensive English brier-root he

regarded it doubtfully for a time, and then handed it over to me, saying:



"I'd like to have you smoke that a year or two, and when it gets so you

can't stand it, maybe it will suit me."



I am happy to add that subsequently he presented me with the pipe

altogether, for it apparently never seemed to get qualified for his

taste, perhaps because the tobacco used was too mild.



One day, after the dictation, word was brought up that a newspaper man

was down-stairs who wished to see him concerning a report that Chauncey

Depew was to resign his Senatorial seat and Mark Twain was to be

nominated in his place.  The fancy of this appealed to him, and the

reporter was allowed to come up.  He was a young man, and seemed rather

nervous, and did not wish to state where the report had originated.  His

chief anxiety was apparently to have Mark Twain's comment on the matter.

Clemens said very little at the time.  He did not wish to be a Senator;

he was too busy just now dictating biography, and added that he didn't

think he would care for the job, anyway.  When the reporter was gone,

however, certain humorous possibilities developed.  The Senatorship would

be a stepping-stone to the Presidency, and with the combination of

humorist, socialist, and peace-patriot in the Presidential chair the

nation could expect an interesting time.  Nothing further came of the

matter.  There was no such report.  The young newspaper man had invented

the whole idea to get a "story" out of Mark Twain.  The item as printed

next day invited a good deal of comment, and Collier's Weekly made it a

text for an editorial on his mental vigor and general fitness for the

place.



If it happened that he had no particular engagement for the afternoon, he

liked to walk out, especially when the pleasant weather came.  Sometimes

we walked up Fifth Avenue, and I must admit that for a good while I could

not get rid of a feeling of self-consciousness, for most people turned to

look, though I was fully aware that I did not in the least come into

their scope of vision.  They saw only Mark Twain.  The feeling was a more

comfortably one at The Players, where we sometimes went for luncheon, for

the acquaintance there and the democracy of that institution had a

tendency to eliminate contrasts and incongruities.  We sat at the Round

Table among those good fellows who were always so glad to welcome him.



Once we went to the "Music Master," that tender play of Charles Klein's,

given by that matchless interpreter, David Warfield.  Clemens was

fascinated, and said more than once:



"It is as permanent as 'Rip Van Winkle.' Warfield, like Jefferson, can go

on playing it all his life."



We went behind when it was over, and I could see that Warfield glowed

with Mark Twain's unstinted approval.  Later, when I saw him at The

Players, he declared that no former compliment had ever made him so

happy.



There were some billiard games going on between the champions Hoppe and

Sutton, at the Madison Square Garden, and Clemens, with his eager

fondness for the sport, was anxious to attend them.  He did not like to

go anywhere alone, and one evening he invited me to accompany him.  Just

as he stepped into the auditorium there was a vigorous round of applause.

The players stopped, somewhat puzzled, for no especially brilliant shot

had been made.  Then they caught the figure of Mark Twain and realized

that the game, for the moment, was not the chief attraction.  The

audience applauded again, and waved their handkerchiefs.  Such a tribute

is not often paid to a private citizen.



Clemens had a great admiration for the young champion Hoppe, which the

billiardist's extreme youth and brilliancy invited, and he watched his

game with intense eagerness.  When it was over the referee said a few

words and invited Mark Twain to speak.  He rose and told them a story-

probably invented on the instant.  He said:



     "Once in Nevada I dropped into a billiard-room casually, and picked

     up a cue and began to knock the balls around.  The proprietor, who

     was a red-haired man, with such hair as I have never seen anywhere

     except on a torch, asked me if I would like to play.  I said, 'Yes.'

     He said, 'Knock the balls around a little and let me see how you can

     shoot.'  So I knocked them around, and thought I was doing pretty

     well, when he said, 'That's all right; I'll play you left-handed.'

     It hurt my pride, but I played him.  We banked for the shot and he

     won it.  Then he commenced to play, and I commenced to chalk my cue

     to get ready to play, and he went on playing, and I went on chalking

     my cue; and he played and I chalked all through that game.  When he

     had run his string out I said:



     "That's wonderful! perfectly wonderful!  If you can play that way

     left-handed what could you do right-handed?'



     "'Couldn't do anything,' he said.  'I'm a left-handed man.'"



How it delighted them!  I think it was the last speech of any sort he

made that season.  A week or two later he went to Dublin, New Hampshire,

for the summer--this time to the Upton House, which had been engaged a

year before, the Copley Greene place being now occupied by its owner.









CCXLVI



THE SECOND SUMMER AT DUBLIN



The Upton House stands on the edge of a beautiful beech forest some two

or three miles from Dublin, just under Monadnock--a good way up the

slope.  It is a handsome, roomy frame-house, and had a long colonnaded

veranda overlooking one of the most beautiful landscape visions on the

planet: lake, forest, hill, and a far range of blue mountains--all the

handiwork of God is there.  I had seen these things in paintings, but I

had not dreamed that such a view really existed.  The immediate

foreground was a grassy slope, with ancient, blooming apple-trees; and

just at the right hand Monadnock rose, superb and lofty, sloping down to

the panorama below that stretched away, taking on an ever deeper blue,

until it reached that remote range on which the sky rested and the world

seemed to end.  It was a masterpiece of the Greater Mind, and of the

highest order, perhaps, for it had in it nothing of the touch of man.  A

church spire glinted here and there, but there was never a bit of field,

or stone wall, or cultivated land.  It was lonely; it was unfriendly; it

cared nothing whatever for humankind; it was as if God, after creating

all the world, had wrought His masterwork here, and had been so engrossed

with the beauty of it that He had forgotten to give it a soul.  In a

sense this was true, for He had not made the place suitable for the

habitation of men.  It lacked the human touch; the human interest, and I

could never quite believe in its reality.



The time of arrival heightened this first impression.  It was mid-May and

the lilacs were prodigally in bloom; but the bright sunlight was chill

and unnatural, and there was a west wind that laid the grass flat and

moaned through the house, and continued as steadily as if it must never

stop from year's end to year's end.  It seemed a spectral land, a place

of supernatural beauty.  Warm, still, languorous days would come, but

that first feeling of unreality would remain permanent.  I believe Jean

Clemens was the only one who ever really loved the place.  Something

about it appealed to her elemental side and blended with her melancholy

moods.  She dressed always in white, and she was tall and pale and

classically beautiful, and she was often silent, like a spirit.  She had

a little retreat for herself farther up the mountain-side, and spent most

of her days there wood-carving, which was her chief diversion.



Clara Clemens did not come to the place at all.  She was not yet strong,

and went to Norfolk, Connecticut, where she could still be in quiet

retirement and have her physician's care.  Miss Hobby came, and on the

21st of May the dictations were resumed.  We began in his bedroom, as

before, but the feeling there was depressing--the absence of the great

carved bed and other furnishings, which had been so much a part of the

picture, was felt by all of us.  Nothing of the old luxury and richness

was there.  It was a summer-furnished place, handsome but with the

customary bareness.  At the end of this first session he dressed in his

snowy flannels, which he had adopted in the place of linen for summer

wear, and we descended to the veranda and looked out over that wide,

wonderful expanse of scenery.



"I think I shall like it," he said, "when I get acquainted with it, and

get it classified and labeled, and I think we'll do our dictating out

here hereafter.  It ought to be an inspiring place."



So the dictations were transferred to the long veranda, and he was

generally ready for them, a white figure pacing up and down before that

panoramic background.  During the earlier, cooler weeks he usually

continued walking with measured step during the dictations, pausing now

and then to look across the far-lying horizon.  When it stormed we moved

into the great living-room, where at one end there was a fireplace with

blazing logs, and at the other the orchestrelle, which had once more been

freighted up those mountain heights for the comfort of its harmonies.

Sometimes, when the wind and rain were beating outside, and he was

striding up and down the long room within, with only the blurred shapes

of mountains and trees outlined through the trailing rain, the feeling of

the unreality became so strong that it was hard to believe that somewhere

down below, beyond the rain and the woods, there was a literal world--a

commonplace world, where the ordinary things of life were going on in the

usual way.  When the dictation finished early, there would be music--the

music that he loved most--Beethoven's symphonies, or the Schubert

impromptu, or the sonata by Chopin.--[Schubert, Op. 142, No. 2; Chopin,

Op. 37, No. 2.]--It is easy to understand that this carried one a remove

farther from the customary things of life.  It was a setting far out of

the usual, though it became that unique white figure and his occupation.

In my notes, made from day to day, I find that I have set down more than

once an impression of the curious unreality of the place and its

surroundings, which would show that it was not a mere passing fancy.



I had lodgings in the village, and drove out mornings for the dictations,

but often came out again afoot on pleasant afternoons; for he was not

much occupied with social matters, and there was opportunity for quiet,

informing interviews.  There was a woods path to the Upton place, and it

was a walk through a fairyland.  A part of the way was through such a

growth of beech timber as I have never seen elsewhere: tall, straight,

mottled trees with an undergrowth of laurel, the sunlight sifting

through; one found it easy to expect there storybook ladies, wearing

crowns and green mantles, riding on white palfreys.  Then came a more

open way, an abandoned grass-grown road full of sunlight and perfume; and

this led to a dim, religious place, a natural cathedral, where the

columns were stately pine-trees branching and meeting at the top: a

veritable temple in which it always seemed that music was about to play.

You crossed a brook and climbed a little hill, and pushed through a hedge

into a place more open, and the house stood there among the trees.



The days drifted along, one a good deal like another, except, as the

summer deepened, the weather became warmer, the foliage changed, a drowsy

haze gathered along the valleys and on the mountain-side.  He sat more

often now in a large rocking-chair, and generally seemed to be looking

through half-dosed lids toward the Monadnock heights, that were always

changing in aspect-in color and in form--as cloud shapes drifted by or

gathered in those lofty hollows.  White and yellow butterflies hovered

over the grass, and there were some curious, large black ants--the

largest I have ever seen and quite harmless--that would slip in and out

of the cracks on the veranda floor, wholly undisturbed by us.  Now and

then a light flutter of wind would come murmuring up from the trees

below, and when the apple-bloom was falling there would be a whirl of

white and pink petals that seemed a cloud of smaller butterflies.



On June 1st I find in my note-book this entry:



     Warm and pleasant.  The dictation about Grant continues; a great

     privilege to hear this foremost man, of letters review his

     associations with that foremost man of arms.  He remained seated

     today, dressed in white as usual, a large yellow pansy in his

     buttonhole, his white hair ruffled by the breeze.  He wears his worn

     morocco slippers with black hose; sits in the rocker, smoking and

     looking out over the hazy hills, delivering his sentences with a

     measured accuracy that seldom calls for change.  He is speaking just

     now of a Grant dinner which he attended where Depew spoke.  One is

     impressed with the thought that we are looking at and listening to

     the war-worn veteran of a thousand dinners--the honored guest of

     many; an honored figure of all.  Earlier, when he had been

     chastising some old offender, he added, "However, he's dead, and I

     forgive him."  Then, after a moment's reflection, "No; strike that

     last sentence out."  When we laughed, he added, "We can't forgive

     him yet."



A few days later--it was June 4th, the day before the second anniversary

of the death of Mrs. Clemens--we found him at first in excellent humor

from the long dictation of the day before.  Then his mind reverted to the

tragedy of the season, and he began trying to tell of it.  It was hard

work.  He walked back and forth in the soft sunlight, saying almost

nothing.  He gave it up at last, remarking, "We will not work to-morrow."

So we went away.



He did not dictate on the 5th or the 6th, but on the 7th he resumed the

story of Mrs. Clemens's last days at Florence.  The weather had changed:

the sunlight and warmth had all gone; a chill, penetrating mist was on

the mountains; Monadnock was blotted out.  We expected him to go to the

fire, but evidently he could not bear being shut in with that subject in

his mind.  A black cape was brought out and thrown about his shoulders,

which seemed to fit exactly into the somberness of the picture.  For two

hours or more we sat there in the gloom and chill, while he paced up and

down, detailing as graphically as might be that final chapter in the life

of the woman he had loved.



It is hardly necessary to say that beyond the dictation Clemens did very

little literary work during these months.  He had brought his "manuscript

trunk" as usual, thinking, perhaps, to finish the "microbe" story and

other of the uncompleted things; but the dictation gave him sufficient

mental exercise, and he did no more than look over his "stock in trade,"

as he called it, and incorporate a few of the finished manuscripts into

"autobiography."  Among these were the notes of his trip down the Rhone,

made in 1891, and the old Stormfield story, which he had been treasuring

and suppressing so long.  He wrote Howells in June:



     The dictating goes lazily and pleasantly on.  With intervals.  I

     find that I've been at it, off & on, nearly two hours for 155 days

     since January 9.  To be exact, I've dictated 75 hours in 80 days &

     loafed 75 days.  I've added 60,000 words in the month that I've been

     here; which indicates that I've dictated during 20 days of that

     time--40 hours, at an average of 1,500 words an hour.  It's a

     plenty, & I'm satisfied.



     There's a good deal of "fat."  I've dictated (from January 9)

     210,000 words, & the "fat" adds about 50,000 more.



     The "fat" is old pigeonholed things of the years gone by which I or

     editors didn't das't to print.  For instance, I am dumping in the

     little old book which I read to you in Hartford about 30 years ago &

     which you said "publish & ask Dean Stanley to furnish an

     introduction; he'll do it" (Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven).

     It reads quite to suit me without altering a word now that it isn't

     to see print until I am dead.



     To-morrow I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs &

     assigns burned alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D.

     2006--which I judge they won't.  There'll be lots of such chapters

     if I live 3 or 4 years longer.  The edition of A.D. 2006 will make a

     stir when it comes out.  I shall be hovering around taking notice,

     along with other dead pals.  You are invited.



The chapter which was to invite death at the stake for his successors was

naturally one of religious heresies a violent attack on the orthodox,

scriptural God, but really an expression of the highest reverence for the

God which, as he said, had created the earth and sky and the music of the

constellations.  Mark Twain once expressed himself concerning reverence

and the lack of it:



"I was never consciously and purposely irreverent in my life, yet one

person or another is always charging me with a lack of reverence.

Reverence for what--for whom?  Who is to decide what ought to command my

reverence--my neighbor or I?  I think I ought to do the electing myself.

The Mohammedan reveres Mohammed--it is his privilege; the Christian

doesn't--apparently that is his privilege; the account is square enough.

They haven't any right to complain of the other, yet they do complain of

each other, and that is where the unfairness comes in.  Each says that

the other is irreverent, and both are mistaken, for manifestly you can't

have reverence for a thing that doesn't command it.  If you could do that

you could digest what you haven't eaten, and do other miracles and get a

reputation."



He was not reading many books at this time--he was inclined rather to be

lazy, as he said, and to loaf during the afternoons; but I remember that

he read aloud 'After the Wedding' and 'The Mother'--those two beautiful

word-pictures by Howells--which he declared sounded the depths of

humanity with a deep-sea lead.  Also he read a book by William Allen

White, 'In Our Town', a collection of tales that he found most admirable.

I think he took the trouble to send White a personal, hand-written letter

concerning them, although, with the habit of dictation, he had begun, as

he said, to "loathe the use of the pen."



There were usually some sort of mild social affairs going on in the

neighborhood, luncheons and afternoon gatherings like those of the

previous year, though he seems to have attended fewer of them, for he did

not often leave the house.  Once, at least, he assisted in an afternoon

entertainment at the Dublin Club, where he introduced his invention of

the art of making an impromptu speech, and was assisted in its

demonstration by George de Forest Brush and Joseph Lindon Smith, to the

very great amusement of a crowd of summer visitors.  The "art" consisted

mainly of having on hand a few reliable anecdotes and a set formula which

would lead directly to them from any given subject.



Twice or more he collected the children of the neighborhood for charades

and rehearsed them, and took part in the performance, as in the Hartford

days.  Sometimes he drove out or took an extended walk.  But these things

were seldom.



Now and then during the summer he made a trip to New York of a semi-

business nature, usually going by the way of Fairhaven, where he would

visit for a few days, journeying the rest of the way in Mr. Rogers's

yacht.  Once they made a cruise of considerable length to Bar Harbor and

elsewhere.  Here is an amusing letter which he wrote to Mrs. Rogers after

such a visit:



     DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--In packing my things in your house yesterday

     morning I inadvertently put in some articles that was laying around,

     I thinking about theology & not noticing, the way this family does

     in similar circumstances like these.  Two books, Mr. Rogers' brown

     slippers, & a ham.  I thought it was ourn, it looks like one we used

     to have.  I am very sorry it happened, but it sha'n't occur again &

     don't you worry.  He will temper the wind to the shorn lamb & I will

     send some of the things back anyway if there is some that won't

     keep.









CCXLVI



DUBLIN, CONTINUED



In time Mark Twain became very lonely in Dublin.  After the brilliant

winter the contrast was too great.  He was not yet ready for exile.  In

one of his dictations he said:



     The skies are enchantingly blue.  The world is a dazzle of sunshine.

     Monadnock is closer to us than usual by several hundred yards.  The

     vast extent of spreading valley is intensely green--the lakes as

     intensely blue.  And there is a new horizon, a remoter one than we

     have known before, for beyond the mighty half-circle of hazy

     mountains that form the usual frame of the picture rise certain

     shadowy great domes that are unfamiliar to our eyes .  .  .  .



     But there is a defect--only one, but it is a defect which almost

     entitles it to be spelled with a capital D.  This is the defect of

     loneliness.  We have not a single neighbor who is a neighbor.

     Nobody lives within two miles of us except Franklin MacVeagh, and he

     is the farthest off of any, because he is in Europe .  .  .  .



     I feel for Adam and Eve now, for I know how it was with them.  I am

     existing, broken-hearted, in a Garden of Eden....  The Garden of

     Eden I now know was an unendurable solitude.  I know that the advent

     of the serpent was a welcome change--anything for society .  .  .  .



     I never rose to the full appreciation of the utter solitude of this

     place until a symbol of it--a compact and visible allegory of it--

     furnished me the lacking lift three days ago.  I was standing alone

     on this veranda, in the late afternoon, mourning over the stillness,

     the far-spreading, beautiful desolation, and the absence of visible

     life, when a couple of shapely and graceful deer came sauntering

     across the grounds and stopped, and at their leisure impudently

     looked me over, as if they had an idea of buying me as bric-a-brac.

     Then they seemed to conclude that they could do better for less

     money elsewhere, and they sauntered indolently away and disappeared

     among the trees.  It sized up this solitude.  It is so complete, so

     perfect, that even the wild animals are satisfied with it.  Those

     dainty creatures were not in the least degree afraid of me.



This was no more than a mood--though real enough while it lasted--somber,

and in its way regal.  It was the loneliness of a king--King Lear.  Yet

he returned gladly enough to solitude after each absence.



It was just before one of his departures that I made another set of

pictures of him, this time on the colonnaded veranda, where his figure

had become so familiar.  He had determined to have his hair cut when he

reached New York, and I was anxious to get the pictures before this

happened.  When the proofs came seven of them--he arranged them as a

series to illustrate what he called "The Progress of a Moral Purpose."

He ordered a number of sets of this series, and he wrote a legend on each

photograph, numbering them from 1 to 7, laying each set in a sheet of

letter-paper which formed a sort of wrapper, on which was written:



     This series of q photographs registers with scientific precision,

     stage by stage, the progress of a moral purpose through the

     mind of the human race's Oldest Friend.            S. L. C.



He added a personal inscription, and sent one to each of his more

intimate friends.  One of the pictures amused him more than the others,

because during the exposure a little kitten, unnoticed, had walked into

it, and paused near his foot.  He had never outgrown his love for cats,

and he had rented this kitten and two others for the summer from a

neighbor.  He didn't wish to own them, he said, for then he would have to

leave them behind uncared for, so he preferred to rent them and pay

sufficiently to insure their subsequent care.  These kittens he called

Sackcloth and Ashes--Ashes being the joint name of the two that looked

exactly alike, and so did not need distinctive titles.  Their gambols

always amused him.  He would stop any time in the midst of dictation to

enjoy them.  Once, as he was about to enter the screen-door that led into

the hall, two of the kittens ran up in front of him and stood waiting.

With grave politeness he opened the door, made a low bow, and stepped

back and said: "Walk in, gentlemen.  I always give precedence to

royalty."  And the kittens marched in, tails in air.  All summer long

they played up and down the wide veranda, or chased grasshoppers and

butterflies down the clover slope.  It was a never-ending amusement to

him to see them jump into the air after some insect, miss it and tumble

back, and afterward jump up, with a surprised expression and a look of

disappointment and disgust.  I remember once, when he was walking up and

down discussing some very serious subject--and one of the kittens was

lying on the veranda asleep--a butterfly came drifting along three feet

or so above the floor.  The kitten must have got a glimpse of the insect

out of the corner of its eye, and perhaps did not altogether realize its

action.  At all events, it suddenly shot straight up into the air,

exactly like a bounding rubber ball, missed the butterfly, fell back on

the porch floor with considerable force and with much surprise.  Then it

sprang to its feet, and, after spitting furiously once or twice, bounded

away.  Clemens had seen the performance, and it completely took his

subject out of his mind.  He laughed extravagantly, and evidently cared

more for that moment's entertainment than for many philosophies.



In that remote solitude there was one important advantage--there was no

procession of human beings with axes to grind, and few curious callers.

Occasionally an automobile would find its way out there and make a

circuit of the drive, but this happened too seldom to annoy him.  Even

newspaper men rarely made the long trip from Boston or New York to secure

his opinions, and when they came it was by permission and appointment.

Newspaper telegrams arrived now and then, asking for a sentiment on some

public condition or event, and these he generally answered willingly

enough.  When the British Premier, Campbell-Bannerman, celebrated his

seventieth birthday, the London Tribune and the New York Herald requested

a tribute.  He furnished it, for Bannerman was a very old friend.  He had

known him first at Marienbad in '91, and in Vienna in '98, in daily

intercourse, when they had lived at the same hotel.  His tribute ran:



To HIS EXCELLENCY THE BRITISH PREMIER,--Congratulations, not condolences.

Before seventy we are merely respected, at best, and we have to behave

all the time, or we lose that asset; but after seventy we are respected,

esteemed, admired, revered, and don't have to behave unless we want to.

When I first knew you, Honored Sir, one of us was hardly even respected.

                                                  MARK TWAIN.



He had some misgivings concerning the telegram after it had gone, but he

did not recall it.



Clemens became the victim of a very clever hoax that summer.  One day a

friend gave him two examples of the most deliciously illiterate letters,

supposed to have been written by a woman who had contributed certain

articles of clothing to the San Francisco sufferers, and later wished to

recall them because of the protests of her household.  He was so sure

that the letters were genuine that he included them in his dictations,

after reading them aloud with great effect.  To tell the truth, they did

seem the least bit too well done, too literary in their illiteracy; but

his natural optimism refused to admit of any suspicion, and a little

later he incorporated one of the Jennie Allen letters in a speech which

he made at a Press Club dinner in New York on the subject of simplified

spelling--offering it as an example of language with phonetic brevity

exercising its supreme function, the direct conveyance of ideas.  The

letters, in the end, proved to be the clever work of Miss Grace Donworth,

who has since published them serially and in book form.  Clemens was not

at all offended or disturbed by the exposure.  He even agreed to aid the

young author in securing a publisher, and wrote to Miss Stockbridge,

through whom he had originally received the documents:



     DEAR MISS STOCKBRIDGE (if she really exists),



     257 Benefit Street (if there is any such place):



     Yes, I should like a copy of that other letter.  This whole fake is

     delightful; & I tremble with fear that you are a fake yourself &

     that I am your guileless prey.  (But never mind, it isn't any

     matter.)



     Now as to publication----



He set forth his views and promised his assistance when enough of the

letters should be completed.



Clemens allowed his name to be included with the list of spelling

reformers, but he never employed any of the reforms in his letters or

writing.  His interest was mainly theoretical, and when he wrote or spoke

on the subject his remarks were not likely to be testimonials in its

favor.  His own theory was that the alphabet needed reform, first of all,

so that each letter or character should have one sound, and one sound

only; and he offered as a solution of this an adaptation of shorthand.

He wrote and dictated in favor of this idea to the end of his life.  Once

he said:



"Our alphabet is pure insanity.  It can hardly spell any large word in

the English language with any degree of certainty.  Its sillinesses are

quite beyond enumeration.  English orthography may need reforming and

simplifying, but the English alphabet needs it a good many times as

much."



He would naturally favor simplicity in anything.  I remember him reading,

as an example of beautiful English, The Death of King Arthur, by Sir

Thomas Malory, and his verdict:



"That is one of the most beautiful things ever written in English, and

written when we had no vocabulary."



"A vocabulary, then, is sometimes a handicap?"



"It is indeed."



Still I think it was never a handicap with him, but rather the plumage of

flight.  Sometimes, when just the right word did not come, he would turn

his head a little at different angles, as if looking about him for the

precise term.  He would find it directly, and it was invariably the word

needed.  Most writers employ, now and again, phrases that do not sharply

present the idea--that blur the picture like a poor opera-glass.  Mark

Twain's English always focused exactly.









CCXLVIII



"WHAT IS MAN?" AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY



Clemens decided to publish anonymously, or, rather, to print privately,

the Gospel, which he had written in Vienna some eight years before and

added to from time to time.  He arranged with Frank Doubleday to take

charge of the matter, and the De Vinne Press was engaged to do the work.

The book was copyrighted in the name of J. W. Bothwell, the

superintendent of the De Vinne company, and two hundred and fifty

numbered copies were printed on hand-made paper, to be gradually

distributed to intimate friends.--[In an introductory word (dated

February, 1905) the author states that the studies for these papers had

been made twenty-five or twenty-seven years before.  He probably referred

to the Monday Evening Club essay, "What Is Happiness?" (February, 1883).

See chap.  cxli.]--A number of the books were sent to newspaper

reviewers, and so effectually had he concealed the personality of his

work that no critic seems to have suspected the book's authorship.  It

was not over-favorably received.  It was generally characterized as a

clever, and even brilliant, expose of philosophies which were no longer

startlingly new.  The supremacy of self-interest and "man the

irresponsible machine" are the main features of 'What Is Man' and both of

these and all the rest are comprehended in his wider and more absolute

doctrine of that inevitable life-sequence which began with the first

created spark.  There can be no training of the ideals, "upward and still

upward," no selfishness and unselfishness, no atom of voluntary effort

within the boundaries of that conclusion.  Once admitting the postulate,

that existence is merely a sequence of cause and effect beginning with

the primal atom, and we have a theory that must stand or fall as a whole.

We cannot say that man is a creature of circumstance and then leave him

free to select his circumstance, even in the minutest fractional degree.

It was selected for him with his disposition; in that first instant of

created life.  Clemens himself repeatedly emphasized this doctrine, and

once, when it was suggested to him that it seemed to "surround every

thing, like the sky," he answered:



"Yes, like the sky; you can't break through anywhere."



Colonel Harvey came to Dublin that summer and persuaded Clemens to let

him print some selections from the dictations in the new volume of the

North American Review, which he proposed to issue fortnightly.  The

matter was discussed a good deal, and it was believed that one hundred

thousand words could be selected which would be usable forthwith, as well

as in that long-deferred period for which it was planned.  Colonel Harvey

agreed to take a copy of the dictated matter and make the selections

himself, and this plan was carried out.  It may be said that most of the

chapters were delightful enough; though, had it been possible to edit

them with the more positive documents as a guide, certain complications

might have been avoided.  It does not matter now, and it was not a matter

of very wide import then.



The payment of these chapters netted Clemens thirty thousand dollars--a

comfortable sum, which he promptly proposed to spend in building on the

property at Redding.  He engaged John Mead Howells to prepare some

preliminary plans.



Clara Clemens, at Norfolk, was written to of the matter.



A little later I joined her in Redding, and she was the first of the

family to see that beautiful hilltop.  She was well pleased with the

situation, and that day selected the spot where the house should stand.

Clemens wrote Howells that he proposed to call it "Autobiography House,"

as it was to be built out of the Review money, and he said:



"If you will build on my farm and live there it will set Mrs. Howells's

health up for sure.  Come and I'll sell you the site for twenty-five

dollars.  John will tell you it is a choice place."



The unusual summer was near its close.  In my notebook, under date of

September 16th, appears this entry:



     Windy in valleys but not cold.  This veranda is protected.  It is

     peaceful here and perfect, but we are at the summer's end.



This is my last entry, and the dictations must have ceased a few days

later.  I do not remember the date of the return to New York, and

apparently I made no record of it; but I do not think it could have been

later than the 20th.  It had been four months since the day of arrival, a

long, marvelous summer such as I would hardly know again.  When I think

of that time I shall always hear the ceaseless slippered, shuffling walk,

and see the white figure with its rocking, rolling movement passing up

and down the long gallery, with that preternaturally beautiful landscape

behind, and I shall hear his deliberate speech--always deliberate, save

at rare intervals; always impressive, whatever the subject might be;

whether recalling some old absurdity of youth, or denouncing orthodox

creeds, or detailing the shortcomings of human-kind.









CCXLIX



BILLIARDS



The return to New York marked the beginning of a new era in my relations

with Mark Twain.  I have not meant to convey up to this time that there

was between us anything resembling a personal friendship.  Our relations

were friendly, certainly, but they were relations of convenience and

mainly of a business, or at least of a literary nature.  He was twenty-

six years my senior, and the discrepancy of experience and attainments

was not measurable.  With such conditions friendship must be a deliberate

growth; something there must be to bridge the dividing gulf.  Truth

requires the confession that, in this case, the bridge took a very solid,

material form, it being, in fact, nothing less than a billiard-table.--

[Clemens had been without a billiard-table since 1891, the old one having

been disposed of on the departure from Hartford.]



It was a present from Mrs. Henry H.  Rogers, and had been intended for

his Christmas; but when he heard of it he could not wait, and suggested

delicately that if he had it "right now" he could begin using it sooner.

So he went one day with Mr. Rogers to the Balke-Collender Company, and

they selected a handsome combination table suitable to all games--the

best that money could buy.  He was greatly excited over the prospect, and

his former bedroom was carefully measured, to be certain that it was

large enough for billiard purposes.  Then his bed was moved into the

study, and the bookcases and certain appropriate pictures were placed and

hung in the billiard-room to give it the proper feeling.



The billiard-table arrived and was put in place, the brilliant green

cloth in contrast with the rich red wallpaper and the bookbindings and

pictures making the room wonderfully handsome and inviting.



Meantime, Clemens, with one of his sudden impulses, had conceived the

notion of spending the winter in Egypt, on the Nile.  He had gone so far,

within a few hours after the idea developed, as to plan the time of his

departure, and to partially engage a traveling secretary, so that he

might continue his dictations.  He was quite full of the idea just at the

moment when the billiard table was being installed.  He had sent for a

book on the subject--the letters of Lady Duff-Gordon, whose daughter,

Janet Ross, had become a dear friend in Florence during the Viviani days.

He spoke of this new purpose on the morning when we renewed the New York

dictations, a month or more following the return from Dublin.  When the

dictation ended he said:



"Have you any special place to lunch to-day?"



I replied that I had not.



"Lunch here," he said, "and we'll try the new billiard-table."



I said what was eminently true--that I could not play--that I had never

played more "than a few games of pool, and those very long ago.



"No matter," he answered; "the poorer you play, the better I shall like

it."



So I remained for luncheon and we began, November 2d, the first game ever

played on the Christmas table.  We played the English game, in which

caroms and pockets both count.  I had a beginner's luck, on the whole,

and I remember it as a riotous, rollicking game, the beginning of a

closer understanding between us--of a distinct epoch in our association.

When it was ended he said:



"I'm not going to Egypt.  There was a man here yesterday afternoon who

said it was bad for bronchitis, and, besides, it's too far away from this

billiard-table."



He suggested that I come back in the evening and play some more.  I did

so, and the game lasted until after midnight.  He gave me odds, of

course, and my "nigger luck," as he called it, continued.  It kept him

sweating and swearing feverishly to win.  Finally, once I made a great

fluke--a carom, followed by most of the balls falling into the pockets.



"Well," he said, "when you pick up that cue this damn table drips at

every pore."



After that the morning dictations became a secondary interest.  Like a

boy, he was looking forward to the afternoon of play, and it never seemed

to come quick enough to suit him.  I remained regularly for luncheon, and

he was inclined to cut the courses short, that he might the sooner get

up-stairs to the billiard-room.  His earlier habit of not eating in the

middle of the day continued; but he would get up and dress, and walk

about the dining-room in his old fashion, talking that marvelous,

marvelous talk which I was always trying to remember, and with only

fractional success at best.  To him it was only a method of killing time.

I remember once, when he had been discussing with great earnestness the

Japanese question, he suddenly noticed that the luncheon was about

ending, and he said:



"Now we'll proceed to more serious matters--it's your--shot."  And he was

quite serious, for the green cloth and the rolling balls afforded him a

much larger interest.



To the donor of his new possession Clemens wrote:



     DEAR MRS.  ROGERS,--The billiard-table is better than the doctors.

     I have a billiardist on the premises, & walk not less than ten miles

     every day with the cue in my hand.  And the walking is not the whole

     of the exercise, nor the most health giving part of it, I think.

     Through the multitude of the positions and attitudes it brings into

     play every muscle in the body & exercises them all.



     The games begin right after luncheons, daily, & continue until

     midnight, with 2 hours' intermission for dinner & music.  And so it

     is 9 hours' exercise per day & 10 or 12 on Sunday.  Yesterday & last

     night it was 12--& I slept until 8 this morning without waking.  The

     billiard-table as a Sabbath-breaker can beat any coal-breaker in

     Pennsylvania & give it 30 in the game.  If Mr. Rogers will take to

     daily billiards he can do without the doctors & the massageur, I

     think.



     We are really going to build a house on my farm, an hour & a half

     from New York.  It is decided.



     With love & many thanks.

                                             S. L. C.



Naturally enough, with continued practice I improved my game, and he

reduced my odds accordingly.  He was willing to be beaten, but not too

often.  Like any other boy, he preferred to have the balance in his

favor.  We set down a record of the games, and he went to bed happier if

the tally-sheet showed him winner.



It was natural, too, that an intimacy of association and of personal

interest should grow under such conditions--to me a precious boon--and I

wish here to record my own boundless gratitude to Mrs. Rogers for her

gift, which, whatever it meant to him, meant so much more to me.  The

disparity of ages no longer existed; other discrepancies no longer

mattered.  The pleasant land of play is a democracy where such things do

not count.



To recall all the humors and interesting happenings of those early

billiard-days would be to fill a large volume.  I can preserve no more

than a few characteristic phases.



He was not an even-tempered player.  When the balls were perverse in

their movements and his aim unsteady, he was likely to become short with

his opponent--critical and even fault-finding.  Then presently a reaction

would set in, and he would be seized with remorse.  He would become

unnecessarily gentle and kindly--even attentive--placing the balls as I

knocked them into the pockets, hurrying from one end of the table to

render this service, endeavoring to show in every way except by actual

confession in words that he was sorry for what seemed to him, no doubt,

an unworthy display of temper, unjustified irritation.



Naturally, this was a mood that I enjoyed less than that which had

induced it.  I did not wish him to humble himself; I was willing that he

should be severe, even harsh, if he felt so inclined; his age, his

position, his genius entitled him to special privileges; yet I am glad,

as I remember it now, that the other side revealed itself, for it

completes the sum of his great humanity.



Indeed, he was always not only human, but superhuman; not only a man, but

superman.  Nor does this term apply only to his psychology.  In no other

human being have I ever seen such physical endurance.  I was

comparatively a young man, and by no means an invalid; but many a time,

far in the night, when I was ready to drop with exhaustion, he was still

as fresh and buoyant and eager for the game as at the moment of

beginning.  He smoked and smoked continually, and followed the endless

track around the billiard-table with the light step of youth.  At three

or four o'clock in the morning he would urge just one more game, and

would taunt me for my weariness.  I can truthfully testify that never

until the last year of his life did he willingly lay down the billiard-

cue, or show the least suggestion of fatigue.



He played always at high pressure.  Now and then, in periods of

adversity, he would fly into a perfect passion with things in general.

But, in the end, it was a sham battle, and he saw the uselessness and

humor of it, even in the moment of his climax.  Once, when he found it

impossible to make any of his favorite shots, he became more and more

restive, the lightning became vividly picturesque as the clouds

blackened.  Finally, with a regular thunder-blast, he seized the cue with

both hands and literally mowed the balls across the table, landing one or

two of them on the floor.  I do not recall his exact remarks during the

performance; I was chiefly concerned in getting out of the way, and those

sublime utterances were lost.  I gathered up the balls and we went on

playing as if nothing had happened, only he was very gentle and sweet,

like the sun on the meadows after the storm has passed by.  After a

little he said:



"This is a most amusing game.  When you play badly it amuses me, and when

I play badly and lose my temper it certainly must amuse you."



His enjoyment of his opponent's perplexities was very keen.  When he had

left the balls in some unfortunate position which made it almost

impossible for me to score he would laugh boisterously.  I used to affect

to be injured and disturbed by this ridicule.  Once, when he had made the

conditions unusually hard for me, and was enjoying the situation

accordingly, I was tempted to remark:



"Whenever I see you laugh at a thing like that I always doubt your sense

of humor."  Which seemed to add to his amusement.



Sometimes, when the balls were badly placed for me, he would offer

ostensible advice, suggesting that I should shoot here and there--shots

that were possible, perhaps, but not promising.  Often I would follow his

advice, and then when I failed to score his amusement broke out afresh.



Other billiardists came from time to time: Colonel Harvey, Mr. Duneka,

and Major Leigh, of the Harper Company, and Peter Finley Dunne (Mr.

Dooley); but they were handicapped by their business affairs, and were

not dependable for daily and protracted sessions.  Any number of his

friends were willing, even eager, to come for his entertainment; but the

percentage of them who could and would devote a number of hours each day

to being beaten at billiards and enjoy the operation dwindled down to a

single individual.  Even I could not have done it--could not have

afforded it, however much I might have enjoyed the diversion--had it not

been contributory to my work.  To me the association was invaluable; it

drew from him a thousand long-forgotten incidents; it invited a stream of

picturesque comments and philosophies; it furnished the most intimate

insight into his character.



He was not always glad to see promiscuous callers, even some one that he

might have met pleasantly elsewhere.  One afternoon a young man whom he

had casually invited to "drop in some day in town" happened to call in

the midst of a very close series of afternoon games.  It would all have

been well enough if the visitor had been content to sit quietly on the

couch and "bet on the game," as Clemens suggested, after the greetings

were over; but he was a very young man, and he felt the necessity of

being entertaining.  He insisted on walking about the room and getting in

the way, and on talking about the Mark Twain books he had read, and the

people he had met from time to time who had known Mark Twain on the

river, or on the Pacific coast, or elsewhere.  I knew how fatal it was

for him to talk to Clemens during his play, especially concerning matters

most of which had been laid away.  I trembled for our visitor.  If I

could have got his ear privately I should have said: "For heaven's sake

sit down and keep still or go away!  There's going to be a combination of

earthquake and cyclone and avalanche if you keep this thing up."



I did what I could.  I looked at my watch every other minute.  At last,

in desperation, I suggested that I retire from the game and let the

visitor have my cue.  I suppose I thought this would eliminate an element

of danger.  He declined on the ground that he seldom played, and

continued his deadly visit.  I have never been in an atmosphere so

fraught with danger.  I did not know how the game stood, and I played

mechanically and forgot to count the score.  Clemens's face was grim and

set and savage.  He no longer ventured even a word.  By and by I noticed

that he was getting white, and I said, privately, "Now, this young man's

hour has come."



It was certainly by the mercy of God just then that the visitor said:



"I'm sorry, but I've got to go.  I'd like to stay longer, but I've got an

engagement for dinner."



I don't remember how he got out, but I know that tons lifted as the door

closed behind him.  Clemens made his shot, then very softly said:



"If he had stayed another five minutes I should have offered him twenty-

five cents to go."



But a moment later he glared at me.



"Why in nation did you offer him your cue?"



"Wasn't that the courteous thing to do?" I asked.



"No!" he ripped out.  "The courteous and proper thing would have been to

strike him dead.  Did you want to saddle that disaster upon us for life?"



He was blowing off steam, and I knew it and encouraged it.  My impulse

was to lie down on the couch and shout with hysterical laughter, but I

suspected that would be indiscreet.  He made some further comment on the

propriety of offering a visitor a cue, and suddenly began to sing a

travesty of an old hymn:



              "How tedious are they

               Who their sovereign obey,"



and so loudly that I said:



"Aren't you afraid he'll hear you and come back?"  Whereupon he pretended

alarm and sang under his breath, and for the rest of the evening was in

boundless good-humor.



I have recalled this incident merely as a sample of things that were

likely to happen at any time in his company, and to show the difficulty

one might find in fitting himself to his varying moods.  He was not to be

learned in a day, or a week, or a month; some of those who knew him

longest did not learn him at all.



We celebrated his seventy-first birthday by playing billiards all day.

He invented a new game for the occasion; inventing rules for it with

almost every shot.



It happened that no member of the family was at home on this birthday.

Ill health had banished every one, even the secretary.  Flowers,

telegrams, and congratulations came, and there was a string of callers;

but he saw no one beyond some intimate friends--the Gilders--late in the

afternoon.  When they had gone we went down to dinner.  We were entirely

alone, and I felt the great honor of being his only guest on such an

occasion.  Once between the courses, when he rose, as usual, to walk

about, he wandered into the drawing-room, and seating himself at the

orchestrelle began to play the beautiful flower-song from "Faust."  It

was a thing I had not seen him do before, and I never saw him do it

again.  When he came back to the table he said:



"Speaking of companions of the long ago, after fifty years they become

only shadows and might as well be in the grave.  Only those whom one has

really loved mean anything at all.  Of my playmates I recall John Briggs,

John Garth, and Laura Hawkins--just those three; the rest I buried long

ago, and memory cannot even find their graves."



He was in his loveliest humor all that day and evening; and that night,

when he stopped playing, he said:



"I have never had a pleasanter day at this game."



I answered, "I hope ten years from to-night we shall still be playing

it."



"Yes," he said, "still playing the best game on earth."











CCL



PHILOSOPHY AND PESSIMISM



In a letter to MacAlister, written at this time, he said:



     The doctors banished Jean to the country 5 weeks ago; they banished

     my secretary to the country for a fortnight last Saturday; they

     banished Clara to the country for a fortnight last Monday .  .  .  .

     They banished me to Bermuda to sail next Wednesday, but I struck and

     sha'n't go.  My complaint is permanent bronchitis & is one of the

     very best assets I've got, for it excuses me from every public

     function this winter--& all other winters that may come.



If he had bronchitis when this letter was written, it must have been of a

very mild form, for it did not interfere with billiard games, which were

more protracted and strenuous than at almost any other period.  I

conclude, therefore, that it was a convenient bronchitis, useful on

occasion.



For a full ten days we were alone in the big house with the servants.  It

was a holiday most of the time.  We hurried through the mail in the

morning and the telephone calls; then, while I answered such letters as

required attention, he dictated for an hour or so to Miss Hobby, after

which, billiards for the rest of the day and evening.  When callers were

reported by the butler, I went down and got rid of them.  Clara Clemens,

before her departure, had pinned up a sign, "NO BILLIARDS AFTER 10 P.M.,"

which still hung on the wall, but it was outlawed.  Clemens occasionally

planned excursions to Bermuda and other places; but, remembering the

billiard-table, which he could not handily take along, he abandoned these

projects.  He was a boy whose parents had been called away, left to his

own devices, and bent on a good time.



There were likely to be irritations in his morning's mail, and more often

he did not wish to see it until it had been pretty carefully sifted.  So

many people wrote who wanted things, so many others who made the claim of

more or less distant acquaintanceship the excuse for long and trivial

letters.



"I have stirred up three generations," he said; "first the grandparents,

then the children, and now the grandchildren; the great-grandchildren

will begin to arrive soon."



His mail was always large; but often it did not look interesting.  One

could tell from the envelope and the superscription something of the

contents.  Going over one assortment he burst out:



"Look at them!  Look how trivial they are!  Every envelope looks as if it

contained a trivial human soul."



Many letters were filled with fulsome praise and compliment, usually of

one pattern.  He was sated with such things, and seldom found it possible

to bear more than a line or two of them.  Yet a fresh, well-expressed

note of appreciation always pleased him.



"I can live for two months on a good compliment," he once said.

Certain persistent correspondents, too self-centered to realize their

lack of consideration, or the futility of their purpose, followed him

relentlessly.  Of one such he remarked:



"That woman intends to pursue me to the grave.  I wish something could be

done to appease her."



And again:



"Everybody in the world who wants something--something of no interest to

me--writes to me to get it."



These morning sessions were likely to be of great interest.  Once a

letter spoke of the desirability of being an optimist.  "That word

perfectly disgusts me," he said, and his features materialized the

disgust, "just as that other word, pessimist, does; and the idea that one

can, by any effort of will, be one or the other, any more than he can

change the color of his hair.  The reason why a man is a pessimist or an

optimist is not because he wants to be, but because he was born so; and

this man [a minister of the Gospel who was going to explain life to him]

is going to tell me why he isn't a pessimist.  Oh, he'll do it, but he

won't tell the truth; he won't make it short enough."



Yet he was always patient with any one who came with spiritual messages,

theological arguments, and consolations.  He might have said to them:

"Oh, dear friends, those things of which you speak are the toys that long

ago I played with and set aside."  He could have said it and spoken the

truth; but I believe he did not even think it.  He listened to any one

for whom he had respect, and was grateful for any effort in his behalf.

One morning he read aloud a lecture given in London by George Bernard

Shaw on religion, commenting as he read.  He said:



"This letter is a frank breath of expression [and his comments were

equally frank].  There is no such thing as morality; it is not immoral

for the tiger to eat the wolf, or the wolf the cat, or the cat the bird,

and so on down; that is their business.  There is always enough for each

one to live on.  It is not immoral for one nation to seize another nation

by force of arms, or for one man to seize another man's property or life

if he is strong enough and wants to take it.  It is not immoral to create

the human species--with or without ceremony; nature intended exactly

these things."



At one place in the lecture Shaw had said: "No one of good sense can

accept any creed to-day without reservation."



"Certainly not," commented Clemens; "the reservation is that he is a d--d

fool to accept it at all."



He was in one of his somber moods that morning.  I had received a print

of a large picture of Thomas Nast--the last one taken.  The face had a

pathetic expression which told the tragedy of his last years.  Clemens

looked at the picture several moments without speaking.  Then he broke

out:



"Why can't a man die when he's had his tragedy?  I ought to have died

long ago."  And somewhat later: "Once Twichell heard me cussing the human

race, and he said, 'Why, Mark, you are the last person in the world to do

that--one selected and set apart as you are.'  I said 'Joe, you don't

know what you are talking about.  I am not cussing altogether about my

own little troubles.  Any one can stand his own misfortunes; but when I

read in the papers all about the rascalities and outrages going on I

realize what a creature the human animal is.  Don't you care more about

the wretchedness of others than anything that happens to you?' Joe said

he did, and shut up."



It occurred to me to suggest that he should not read the daily papers.

"No difference," he said.  "I read books printed two hundred years ago,

and they hurt just the same."



"Those people are all dead and gone," I objected.



"They hurt just the same," he maintained.



I sometimes thought of his inner consciousness as a pool darkened by his

tragedies, its glassy surface, when calm, reflecting all the joy and

sunlight and merriment of the world, but easily--so easily--troubled and

stirred even to violence.  Once following the dictation, when I came to

the billiard-room he was shooting the balls about the table, apparently

much depressed.  He said:



"I have been thinking it out--if I live two years more I will put an end

to it all.  I will kill myself."



"You have much to live for----"



"But I am so tired of the eternal round," he interrupted; "so tired."

And I knew he meant that he was ill of the great loneliness that had come

to him that day in Florence, and would never pass away.



I referred to the pressure of social demands in the city, and the relief

he would find in his country home.  He shook his head.



"The country home I need," he said, fiercely, "is a cemetery."



Yet the mood changed quickly enough when the play began.  He was gay and

hilarious presently, full of the humors and complexities of the game.

H. H. Rogers came in with a good deal of frequency, seldom making very

long calls, but never seeming to have that air of being hurried which one

might expect to find in a man whose day was only twenty-four hours long,

and whose interests were so vast and innumerable.  He would come in where

we were playing, and sit down and watch the game, or perhaps would pick

up a book and read, exchanging a remark now and then.  More often,

however, he sat in the bedroom, for his visits were likely to be in the

morning.  They were seldom business calls, or if they were, the business

was quickly settled, and then followed gossip, humorous incident, or

perhaps Clemens would read aloud something he had written.  But once,

after greetings, he began:



"Well, Rogers, I don't know what you think of it, but I think I have had

about enough of this world, and I wish I were out of it."



Mr. Rogers replied, "I don't say much about it, but that expresses my

view."



This from the foremost man of letters and one of the foremost financiers

of the time was impressive.  Each at the mountain-top of his career, they

agreed that the journey was not worth while--that what the world had

still to give was not attractive enough to tempt them to prevent a desire

to experiment with the next stage.  One could remember a thousand poor

and obscure men who were perfectly willing to go on struggling and

starving, postponing the day of settlement as long as possible; but

perhaps, when one has had all the world has to give, when there are no

new worlds in sight to conquer, one has a different feeling.



Well, the realization lay not so far ahead for either of them, though at

that moment they both seemed full of life and vigor--full of youth.  One

could not imagine the day when for them it would all be over.









CCLI



A LOBBYING EXPEDITION



Clara Clemens came home now and then to see how matters were progressing,

and very properly, for Clemens was likely to become involved in social

intricacies which required a directing hand.  The daughter inherited no

little of the father's characteristics of thought and phrase, and it was

always a delight to see them together when one could be just out of range

of the crossfire.  I remember soon after her return, when she was making

some searching inquiries concerning the billiard-room sign, and other

suggested or instituted reforms, he said:



"Oh well, never mind, it doesn't matter.  I'm boss in this house."



She replied, quickly: "Oh no, you're not.  You're merely owner.  I'm the

captain--the commander-in-chief."



One night at dinner she mentioned the possibility of going abroad that

year.  During several previous summers she had planned to visit Vienna to

see her old music-master, Leschetizky, once more before his death.  She

said:



"Leschetizky is getting so old.  If I don't go soon I'm afraid I sha'n't

be in time for his funeral."



"Yes," said her father, thoughtfully, "you keep rushing over to

Leschetizky's funeral, and you'll miss mine."



He had made one or two social engagements without careful reflection, and

the situation would require some delicacy of adjustment.  During a moment

between the courses, when he left the table and was taking his exercise

in the farther room, she made some remark which suggested a doubt of her

father's gift for social management.  I said:



"Oh, well, he is a king, you know, and a king can do no wrong."



"Yes, I know," she answered.  "The king can do no wrong; but he frightens

me almost to death, sometimes, he comes so near it."



He came back and began to comment rather critically on some recent

performance of Roosevelt's, which had stirred up a good deal of newspaper

amusement--it was the Storer matter and those indiscreet letters which

Roosevelt had written relative to the ambassadorship which Storer so much

desired.  Miss Clemens was inclined to defend the President, and spoke

with considerable enthusiasm concerning his elements of popularity, which

had won him such extraordinary admiration.



"Certainly he is popular," Clemens admitted, "and with the best of

reasons.  If the twelve apostles should call at the White House, he would

say, 'Come in, come in!  I am delighted to see you.  I've been watching

your progress, and I admired it very much.'  Then if Satan should come,

he would slap him on the shoulder and say, 'Why, Satan, how do you do?  I

am so glad to meet you.  I've read all your works and enjoyed every one

of them.'  Anybody could be popular with a gift like that."



It was that evening or the next, perhaps, that he said to her:



"Ben [one of his pet names for her], now that you are here to run the

ranch, Paine and I are going to Washington on a vacation.  You don't seem

to admire our society much, anyhow."



There were still other reasons for the Washington expedition.  There was

an important bill up for the extension of the book royalty period, and

the forces of copyright were going down in a body to use every possible

means to get the measure through.



Clemens, during Cleveland's first administration, some nineteen years

before, had accompanied such an expedition, and through S. S. ("Sunset")

Cox had obtained the "privileges of the floor" of the House, which had

enabled him to canvass the members individually.  Cox assured the

doorkeeper that Clemens had received the thanks of Congress for national

literary service, and was therefore entitled to that privilege.  This was

not strictly true; but regulations were not very severe in those days,

and the ruse had been regarded as a good joke, which had yielded

excellent results.  Clemens had a similar scheme in mind now, and

believed that his friendship with Speaker Cannon--" Uncle Joe"--would

obtain for him a similar privilege.  The Copyright Association working in

its regular way was very well, he said, but he felt he could do more as

an individual than by acting merely as a unit of that body.



"I canvassed the entire House personally that other time," he said.  "Cox

introduced me to the Democrats, and John D. Long, afterward Secretary of

the Navy, introduced me to the Republicans.  I had a darling time

converting those members, and I'd like to try the experiment again."



I should have mentioned earlier, perhaps, that at this time he had begun

to wear white clothing regularly, regardless of the weather and season.

On the return from Dublin he had said:



"I can't bear to put on black clothes again.  I wish I could wear white

all winter.  I should prefer, of course, to wear colors, beautiful

rainbow hues, such as the women have monopolized.  Their clothing makes a

great opera audience an enchanting spectacle, a delight to the eye and to

the spirit--a garden of Eden for charm and color.



"The men, clothed in odious black, are scattered here and there over the

garden like so many charred stumps.  If we are going to be gay in spirit,

why be clad in funeral garments?  I should like to dress in a loose and

flowing costume made all of silks and velvets resplendent with stunning

dyes, and so would every man I have ever known; but none of us dares to

venture it.  If I should appear on Fifth Avenue on a Sunday morning

clothed as I would like to be clothed the churches would all be vacant

and the congregation would come tagging after me.  They would scoff, of

course, but they would envy me, too.  When I put on black it reminds me

of my funerals.  I could be satisfied with white all the year round."



It was not long after this that he said:



"I have made up my mind not to wear black any more, but white, and let

the critics say what they will."



So his tailor was sent for, and six creamy flannel and serge suits were

ordered, made with the short coats, which he preferred, with a gray suit

or two for travel, and he did not wear black again, except for evening

dress and on special occasions.  It was a gratifying change, and though

the newspapers made much of it, there was no one who was not gladdened by

the beauty of his garments and their general harmony with his person.  He

had never worn anything so appropriate or so impressive.



This departure of costume came along a week or two before the Washington

trip, and when his bags were being packed for the excursion he was

somewhat in doubt as to the propriety of bursting upon Washington in

December in that snowy plumage.  I ventured:



"This is a lobbying expedition of a peculiar kind, and does not seem to

invite any half-way measures.  I should vote in favor of the white suit."



I think Miss Clemens was for it, too.  She must have been or the vote

wouldn't have carried, though it was clear he strongly favored the idea.

At all events, the white suits came along.



We were off the following afternoon: Howells, Robert Underwood Johnson,

one of the Appletons, one of the Putnams, George Bowker, and others were

on the train.  On the trip down in the dining-car there was a discussion

concerning the copyrighting of ideas, which finally resolved itself into

the possibility of originating a new one.  Clemens said:



"There is no such thing as a new idea.  It is impossible.  We simply take

a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.  We

give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.  We keep on

turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same

old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages."



We put up at the Willard, and in the morning drove over to the

Congressional Library, where the copyright hearing was in progress.

There was a joint committee of the two Houses seated round a long table

at work, and a number of spectators more or less interested in the bill,

mainly, it would seem, men concerned with the protection of mechanical

music-rolls.  The fact that this feature was mixed up with literature was

not viewed with favor by most of the writers.  Clemens referred to the

musical contingent as "those hand-organ men who ought to have a bill of

their own."



I should mention that early that morning Clemens had written this letter

to Speaker Cannon:



December 7, 1906.



DEAR UNCLE JOSEPH,--Please get me the thanks of the Congress--not next

week, but right away.  It is very necessary.  Do accomplish this for your

affectionate old friend right away; by persuasion, if you can; by

violence, if you must, for it is imperatively necessary that I get on the

floor for two or three hours and talk to the members, man by man, in

behalf of the support, encouragement, and protection of one of the

nation's most valuable assets and industries--its literature.  I have

arguments with me, also a barrel with liquid in it.



Give me a chance.  Get me the thanks of Congress.  Don't wait for others

--there isn't time.  I have stayed away and let Congress alone for

seventy-one years and I am entitled to thanks.  Congress knows it

perfectly well, and I have long felt hurt that this quite proper and

earned expression of gratitude has been merely felt by the House and

never publicly uttered.  Send me an order on the Sergeant-at-Arms quick.

When shall I come?

                    With love and a benediction;

                                                  MARK TWAIN.





We went over to the Capitol now to deliver to "Uncle Joe" this

characteristic letter.  We had picked up Clemens's nephew, Samuel E.

Moffett, at the Library, and he came along and led the way to the

Speaker's room.  Arriving there, Clemens laid off his dark overcoat and

stood there, all in white, certainly a startling figure among those

clerks, newspaper men, and incidental politicians.  He had been noticed

as he entered the Capitol, and a number of reporters had followed close

behind.  Within less than a minute word was being passed through the

corridors that Mark Twain was at the Capitol in his white suit.  The

privileged ones began to gather, and a crowd assembled in the hall

outside.



Speaker Cannon was not present at the moment; but a little later he

"billowed" in--which seems to be the word to express it--he came with

such a rush and tide of life.  After greetings, Clemens produced the

letter and read it to him solemnly, as if he were presenting a petition.

Uncle Joe listened quite seriously, his head bowed a little, as if it

were really a petition, as in fact it was.  He smiled, but he said, quite

seriously:



"That is a request that ought to be granted; but the time has gone by

when I am permitted any such liberties.  Tom Reed, when he was Speaker,

inaugurated a strict precedent excluding all outsiders from the use of

the floor of the House."



"I got in the other time," Clemens insisted.



"Yes," said Uncle Joe; "but that ain't now.  Sunset Cox could let you in,

but I can't.  They'd hang me."  He reflected a moment, and added: "I'll

tell you what I'll do: I've got a private room down-stairs that I never

use.  It's all fitted up with table and desk, stationery, chinaware, and

cutlery; you could keep house there, if you wanted to.  I'll let you have

it as long as you want to stay here, and I'll give you my private

servant, Neal, who's been here all his life and knows every official,

every Senator and Representative, and they all know him.  He'll bring you

whatever you want, and you can send in messages by him.  You can have the

members brought down singly or in bunches, and convert them as much as

you please.  I'd give you a key to the room, only I haven't got one

myself.  I never can get in when I want to, but Neal can get in, and

he'll unlock it for you.  You can have the room, and you can have Neal.

Now, will that do you?"



Clemens said it would.  It was, in fact, an offer without precedent.

Probably never in the history of the country had a Speaker given up his

private room to lobbyists.  We went in to see the House open, and then

went down with Neal and took possession of the room.  The reporters had

promptly seized upon the letter, and they now got hold of its author, led

him to their own quarters, and, gathering around him, fired questions at

him, and kept their note-books busy.  He made a great figure, all in

white there among them, and they didn't fail to realize the value of it

as "copy."  He talked about copyright, and about his white clothes, and

about a silk hat which Howells wore.



Back in the Speaker's room, at last, he began laying out the campaign,

which would begin next day.  By and by he said:



"Look here!  I believe I've got to speak over there in that committee-

room to-day or to-morrow.  I ought to know just when it is."



I had not heard of this before, and offered to go over and see about it,

which I did at once.  I hurried back faster than I had gone.



"Mr. Clemens, you are to speak in half an hour, and the room is crowded

full; people waiting to hear you."



"The devil!" he said.  "Well, all right; I'll just lie down here a few

minutes and then we'll go over.  Take paper and pencil and make a few

headings."



There was a couch in the room.  He lay down while I sat at the table with

a pencil, making headings now and then, as he suggested, and presently he

rose and, shoving the notes into his pocket, was ready.  It was half past

three when we entered the committee-room, which was packed with people

and rather dimly lighted, for it was gloomy outside.  Herbert Putnam, the

librarian, led us to seats among the literary group, and Clemens,

removing his overcoat, stood in that dim room clad as in white armor.

There was a perceptible stir.  Howells, startled for a moment, whispered:



"What in the world did he wear that white suit for?" though in his heart

he admired it as much as the others.



I don't remember who was speaking when we came in, but he was saying

nothing important.  Whoever it was, he was followed by Dr. Edward Everett

Hale, whose age always commanded respect, and whose words always invited

interest.  Then it was Mark Twain's turn.  He did not stand by his chair,

as the others had done, but walked over to the Speaker's table, and,

turning, faced his audience.  I have never seen a more impressive sight

than that snow-white figure in that dim-lit, crowded room.  He never

touched his notes; he didn't even remember them.  He began in that even,

quiet, deliberate voice of his the most even, the most quiet, the most

deliberate voice in the world--and, without a break or a hesitation for a

word, he delivered a copyright argument, full of humor and serious

reasoning, such a speech as no one in that room, I suppose, had ever

heard.  Certainly it was a fine and dramatic bit of impromptu pleading.

The weary committee, which had been tortured all day with dull,

statistical arguments made by the mechanical device fiends, and dreary

platitudes unloaded by men whose chief ambition was to shine as copyright

champions, suddenly realized that they were being rewarded for the long

waiting.  They began to brighten and freshen, and uplift and smile, like

flowers that have been wilted by a drought when comes the refreshing

shower that means renewed life and vigor.  Every listener was as if

standing on tiptoe.  When the last sentence was spoken the applause came

like an explosion.--[Howells in his book My Mark Twain speaks of

Clemens's white clothing as "an inspiration which few men would have had

the courage to act upon."  He adds:  "The first time I saw him wear it

was at the authors' hearing before the Congressional Committee on

Copyright in Washington.  Nothing could have been more dramatic than the

gesture with which he flung off his long, loose overcoat and stood forth

in white from his feet to the crown of his silvery head.  It was a

magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup; but the magnificent speech

which he made, tearing to shreds the venerable farrago of nonsense about

nonproperty in ideas which had formed the basis of all copyright

legislation, made you forget even his spectacularity."]



There came a universal rush of men and women to get near enough for a

word and to shake his hand.  But he was anxious to get away.  We drove to

the Willard and talked and smoked, and got ready for dinner.  He was

elated, and said the occasion required full-dress.  We started down at

last, fronted and frocked like penguins.



I did not realize then the fullness of his love for theatrical effect.

I supposed he would want to go down with as little ostentation as

possible, so took him by the elevator which enters the dining-room

without passing through the long corridor known as "Peacock Alley,"

because of its being a favorite place for handsomely dressed fashionables

of the national capital.  When we reached the entrance of the dining-room

he said:



"Isn't there another entrance to this place?"



I said there was, but that it was very conspicuous.  We should have to go

down the long corridor.



"Oh, well," he said, "I don't mind that.  Let's go back and try it

over."



So we went back up the elevator, walked to the other end of the hotel,

and came down to the F Street entrance.  There is a fine, stately flight

of steps--a really royal stair--leading from this entrance down into

"Peacock Alley."  To slowly descend that flight is an impressive thing to

do.  It is like descending the steps of a throne-room, or to some royal

landing-place where Cleopatra's barge might lie.  I confess that I was

somewhat nervous at the awfulness of the occasion, but I reflected that I

was powerfully protected; so side by side, both in full-dress, white

ties, white-silk waistcoats, and all, we came down that regal flight.



Of course he was seized upon at once by a lot of feminine admirers, and

the passage along the corridor was a perpetual gantlet.  I realize now

that this gave the dramatic finish to his day, and furnished him with

proper appetite for his dinner.  I did not again make the mistake of

taking him around to the more secluded elevator.  I aided and abetted him

every evening in making that spectacular descent of the royal stairway,

and in running that fair and frivolous gantlet the length of "Peacock

Alley."  The dinner was a continuous reception.  No sooner was he seated

than this Congressman and that Senator came over to shake hands with Mark

Twain.  Governor Francis of Missouri also came.  Eventually Howells

drifted in, and Clemens reviewed the day, its humors and successes.  Back

in the rooms at last he summed up the progress thus far--smoked, laughed

over "Uncle Joe's" surrender to the "copyright bandits," and turned in

for the night.



We were at the Capitol headquarters in Speaker Cannon's private room

about eleven o'clock next morning.  Clemens was not in the best humor

because I had allowed him to oversleep.  He was inclined to be

discouraged at the prospect, and did not believe many of the members

would come down to see him.  He expressed a wish for some person of

influence and wide acquaintance, and walked up and down, smoking

gloomily.  I slipped out and found the Speaker's colored body-guard,

Neal, and suggested that Mr. Clemens was ready now to receive the

members.



That was enough.  They began to arrive immediately.  John Sharp Williams

came first, then Boutell, from Illinois, Littlefield, of Maine, and after

them a perfect procession, including all the leading lights--Dalzell,

Champ Clark, McCall--one hundred and eighty or so in all during the next

three or four hours.



Neal announced each name at the door, and in turn I announced it to

Clemens when the press was not too great.  He had provided boxes of

cigars, and the room was presently blue with smoke, Clemens in his white

suit in the midst of it, surrounded by those darker figures--shaking

hands, dealing out copyright gospel and anecdotes--happy and wonderfully

excited.  There were chairs, but usually there was only standing room.

He was on his feet for several hours and talked continually; but when at

last it was over, and Champ Clark, who I believe remained longest and was

most enthusiastic in the movement, had bade him good-by, he declared that

he was not a particle tired, and added:



"I believe if our bill could be presented now it would pass."



He was highly elated, and pronounced everything a perfect success.  Neal,

who was largely responsible for the triumph, received a ten-dollar bill.



We drove to the hotel and dined that night with the Dodges, who had been

neighbors at Riverdale.  Later, the usual crowd of admirers gathered

around him, among them I remember the minister from Costa Rica, the

Italian minister, and others of the diplomatic service, most of whom he

had known during his European residence.  Some one told of traveling in

India and China, and how a certain Hindu "god" who had exchanged

autographs with Mark Twain during his sojourn there was familiar with

only two other American names--George Washington and Chicago; while the

King of Siam had read but three English books--the Bible, Bryce's

American Commonwealth, and The Innocents Abroad.



We were at Thomas Nelson Page's for dinner next evening--a wonderfully

beautiful home, full of art treasures.  A number of guests had been

invited.  Clemens naturally led the dinner-talk, which eventually drifted

to reading.  He told of Mrs. Clemens's embarrassment when Stepniak had

visited them and talked books, and asked her what her husband thought of

Balzac, Thackeray, and the others.  She had been obliged to say that he

had not read them.



"'How interesting!' said Stepniak.  But it wasn't interesting to Mrs.

Clemens.  It was torture."



He was light-spirited and gay; but recalling Mrs. Clemens saddened him,

perhaps, for he was silent as we drove to the hotel, and after he was in

bed he said, with a weary despair which even the words do not convey:



"If I had been there a minute earlier, it is possible--it is possible

that she might have died in my arms.  Sometimes I think that perhaps

there was an instant--a single instant--when she realized that she was

dying and that I was not there."



In New York I had once brought him a print of the superb "Adams

Memorial," by Saint-Gaudens--the bronze woman who sits in the still court

in the Rock Creek Cemetery at Washington.



On the morning following the Page dinner at breakfast, he said:



"Engage a carriage and we will drive out and see the Saint-Gaudens

bronze."



It was a bleak, dull December day, and as we walked down through the

avenues of the dead there was a presence of realized sorrow that seemed

exactly suited to such a visit.  We entered the little inclosure of

cedars where sits the dark figure which is art's supreme expression of

the great human mystery of life and death.  Instinctively we removed our

hats, and neither spoke until after we had come away.  Then:



"What does he call it?" he asked.



I did not know, though I had heard applied to it that great line of

Shakespeare's--"the rest is silence."



"But that figure is not silent," he said.



And later, as we were driving home:



"It is in deep meditation on sorrowful things."



When we returned to New York he had the little print framed, and kept it

always on his mantelpiece.









CCLII



THEOLOGY AND EVOLUTION



From the Washington trip dates a period of still closer association with

Mark Twain.  On the way to New York he suggested that I take up residence

in his house--a privilege which I had no wish to refuse.  There was room

going to waste, he said, and it would be handier for the early and late

billiard sessions.  So, after that, most of the days and nights I was

there.



Looking back on that time now, I see pretty vividly three quite distinct

pictures.  One of them, the rich, red interior of the billiard-room with

the brilliant, green square in the center, on which the gay balls are

rolling, and bending over it that luminous white figure in the instant of

play.  Then there is the long, lighted drawing-room with the same figure

stretched on a couch in the corner, drowsily smoking, while the rich

organ tones fill the place summoning for him scenes and faces which

others do not see.  This was the hour between dinner and billiards--the

hour which he found most restful of the day.  Sometimes he rose, walking

the length of the parlors, his step timed to the music and his thought.

Of medium height, he gave the impression of being tall-his head thrown

up, and like a lion's, rather large for his body.  But oftener he lay

among the cushions, the light flooding his white hair and dress and

heightening his brilliant coloring.



The third picture is that of the dinner-table--always beautifully laid,

and always a shrine of wisdom when he was there.  He did not always talk;

but it was his habit to do so, and memory holds the clearer vision of him

when, with eyes and face alive with interest, he presented some new angle

of thought in fresh picturesqueness of speech.  These are the pictures

that have remained to me out of the days spent under his roof, and they

will not fade while memory lasts.



Of Mark Twain's table philosophies it seems proper to make rather

extended record.  They were usually unpremeditated, and they presented

the man as he was, and thought.  I preserved as much of them as I could,

and have verified phrase and idea, when possible, from his own notes and

other unprinted writings.



This dinner-table talk naturally varied in character from that of the

billiard-room.  The latter was likely to be anecdotal and personal; the

former was more often philosophical and commentative, ranging through a

great variety of subjects scientific, political, sociological, and

religious.  His talk was often of infinity--the forces of creation--and

it was likely to be satire of the orthodox conceptions, intermingled with

heresies of his own devising.



Once, after a period of general silence, he said:



"No one who thinks can imagine the universe made by chance.  It is too

nicely assembled and regulated.  There is, of course, a great Master

Mind, but it cares nothing for our happiness or our unhappiness."



It was objected, by one of those present, that as the Infinite Mind

suggested perfect harmony, sorrow and suffering were defects which that

Mind must feel and eventually regulate.



"Yes," he said, "not a sparrow falls but He is noticing, if that is what

you mean; but the human conception of it is that God is sitting up nights

worrying over the individuals of this infinitesimal race."



Then he recalled a fancy which I have since found among his memoranda.

In this note he had written:



     The suns & planets that form the constellations of a billion billion

     solar systems & go pouring, a tossing flood of shining globes,

     through the viewless arteries of space are the blood-corpuscles in

     the veins of God; & the nations are the microbes that swarm and

     wiggle & brag in each, & think God can tell them apart at that

     distance & has nothing better to do than try.  This--the

     entertainment of an eternity.  Who so poor in his ambitions as to

     consent to be God on those terms?  Blasphemy?  No, it is not

     blasphemy.  If God is as vast as that, He is above blasphemy; if He

     is as little as that, He is beneath it.



"The Bible," he said, "reveals the character of its God with minute

exactness.  It is a portrait of a man, if one can imagine a man with evil

impulses far beyond the human limit.  In the Old Testament He is pictured

as unjust, ungenerous, pitiless, and revengeful, punishing innocent

children for the misdeeds of their parents; punishing unoffending people

for the sins of their rulers, even descending to bloody vengeance upon

harmless calves and sheep as punishment for puny trespasses committed by

their proprietors.  It is the most damnatory biography that ever found

its way into print.  Its beginning is merely childish.  Adam is forbidden

to eat the fruit of a certain tree, and gravely informed that if he

disobeys he shall die.  How could that impress Adam?  He could have no

idea of what death meant.  He had never seen a dead thing.  He had never

heard of one.  If he had been told that if he ate the apples he would be

turned into a meridian of longitude that threat would have meant just as

much as the other one.  The watery intellect that invented that notion

could be depended on to go on and decree that all of Adam's descendants

down to the latest day should be punished for that nursery trespass in

the beginning.



"There is a curious poverty of invention in Bibles.  Most of the great

races each have one, and they all show this striking defect.  Each

pretends to originality, without possessing any.  Each of them borrows

from the other, confiscates old stage properties, puts them forth as

fresh and new inspirations from on high.  We borrowed the Golden Rule

from Confucius, after it had seen service for centuries, and copyrighted

it without a blush.  We went back to Babylon for the Deluge, and are as

proud of it and as satisfied with it as if it had been worth the trouble;

whereas we know now that Noah's flood never happened, and couldn't have

happened--not in that way.  The flood is a favorite with Bible-makers.

Another favorite with the founders of religions is the Immaculate

Conception.  It had been worn threadbare; but we adopted it as a new

idea.  It was old in Egypt several thousand years before Christ was born.

The Hindus prized it ages ago.  The Egyptians adopted it even for some of

their kings.  The Romans borrowed the idea from Greece.  We got it

straight from heaven by way of Rome.  We are still charmed with it."



He would continue in this strain, rising occasionally and walking about

the room.  Once, considering the character of God--the Bible God-he said:



"We haven't been satisfied with God's character as it is given in the Old

Testament; we have amended it.  We have called Him a God of mercy and

love and morals.  He didn't have a single one of those qualities in the

beginning.  He didn't hesitate to send the plagues on Egypt, the most

fiendish punishments that could be devised--not for the king, but for his

innocent subjects, the women and the little children, and then only to

exhibit His power just to show off--and He kept hardening Pharaoh's heart

so that He could send some further ingenuity of torture, new rivers of

blood, and swarms of vermin and new pestilences, merely to exhibit

samples of His workmanship.  Now and then, during the forty years'

wandering, Moses persuaded Him to be a little more lenient with the

Israelites, which would show that Moses was the better character of the

two.  That Old Testament God never had an inspiration of His own."



He referred to the larger conception of God, that Infinite Mind which had

projected the universe.  He said:



"In some details that Old Bible God is probably a more correct picture

than our conception of that Incomparable One that created the universe

and flung upon its horizonless ocean of space those giant suns, whose

signal-lights are so remote that we only catch their flash when it has

been a myriad of years on its way.  For that Supreme One is not a God of

pity or mercy--not as we recognize these qualities.  Think of a God of

mercy who would create the typhus germ, or the house-fly, or the

centipede, or the rattlesnake, yet these are all His handiwork.  They are

a part of the Infinite plan.  The minister is careful to explain that all

these tribulations are sent for a good purpose; but he hires a doctor to

destroy the fever germ, and he kills the rattlesnake when he doesn't run

from it, and he sets paper with molasses on it for the house-fly.



"Two things are quite certain: one is that God, the limitless God,

manufactured those things, for no man could have done it.  The man has

never lived who could create even the humblest of God's creatures.  The

other conclusion is that God has no special consideration for man's

welfare or comfort, or He wouldn't have created those things to disturb

and destroy him.  The human conception of pity and morality must be

entirely unknown to that Infinite God, as much unknown as the conceptions

of a microbe to man, or at least as little regarded.



"If God ever contemplates those qualities in man He probably admires

them, as we always admire the thing which we do not possess ourselves;

probably a little grain of pity in a man or a little atom of mercy would

look as big to Him as a constellation.  He could create a constellation

with a thought; but He has been all the measureless ages, and He has

never acquired those qualities that we have named--pity and mercy and

morality.  He goes on destroying a whole island of people with an

earthquake, or a whole cityful with a plague, when we punish a man in the

electric chair for merely killing the poorest of our race.  The human

being needs to revise his ideas again about God.  Most of the scientists

have done it already; but most of them don't dare to say so."



He pointed out that the moral idea was undergoing constant change; that

what was considered justifiable in an earlier day was regarded as highly

immoral now.  He pointed out that even the Decalogue made no reference to

lying, except in the matter of bearing false witness against a neighbor.

Also, that there was a commandment against covetousness, though

covetousness to-day was the basis of all commerce: The general conclusion

being that the morals of the Lord had been the morals of the beginning;

the morals of the first-created man, the morals of the troglodyte, the

morals of necessity; and that the morals of mankind had kept pace with

necessity, whereas those of the Lord had remained unchanged.  It is

hardly necessary to say that no one ever undertook to contradict any

statements of this sort from him.  In the first place, there was no

desire to do so; and in the second place, any one attempting it would

have cut a puny figure with his less substantial arguments and his less

vigorous phrase.  It was the part of wisdom and immeasurably the part of

happiness to be silent and listen.



On another evening he began:



"The mental evolution of the species proceeds apparently by regular

progress side by side with the physical development until it comes to

man, then there is a long, unexplained gulf.  Somewhere man acquired an

asset which sets him immeasurably apart from the other animals--his

imagination.  Out of it he created for himself a conscience, and clothes,

and immodesty, and a hereafter, and a soul.  I wonder where he got that

asset.  It almost makes one agree with Alfred Russel Wallace that the

world and the universe were created just for his benefit, that he is the

chief love and delight of God.  Wallace says that the whole universe was

made to take care of and to keep steady this little floating mote in the

center of it, which we call the world.  It looks like a good deal of

trouble for such a small result; but it's dangerous to dispute with a

learned astronomer like Wallace.  Still, I don't think we ought to decide

too soon about it--not until the returns are all in.  There is the

geological evidence, for instance.  Even after the universe was created,

it took a long time to prepare the world for man.  Some of the

scientists, ciphering out the evidence furnished by geology, have arrived

at the conviction that the world is prodigiously old.  Lord Kelvin

doesn't agree with them.  He says that it isn't more than a hundred

million years old, and he thinks the human race has inhabited it about

thirty thousand years of that time.  Even so, it was 99,970,000 years

getting ready, impatient as the Creator doubtless was to see man and

admire him.  That was because God first had to make the oyster.  You

can't make an oyster out of nothing, nor you can't do it in a day.

You've got to start with a vast variety of invertebrates, belemnites,

trilobites, jebusites, amalekites, and that sort of fry, and put them

into soak in a primary sea and observe and wait what will happen.  Some

of them will turn out a disappointment; the belemnites and the amalekites

and such will be failures, and they will die out and become extinct in

the course of the nineteen million years covered by the experiment; but

all is not lost, for the amalekites will develop gradually into

encrinites and stalactites and blatherskites, and one thing and another,

as the mighty ages creep on and the periods pile their lofty crags in the

primordial seas, and at last the first grand stage in the preparation of

the world for man stands completed; the oyster is done.  Now an oyster

has hardly any more reasoning power than a man has, so it is probable

this one jumped to the conclusion that the nineteen million years was a

preparation for him.  That would be just like an oyster, and, anyway,

this one could not know at that early date that he was only an incident

in a scheme, and that there was some more to the scheme yet.



"The oyster being finished, the next step in the preparation of the world

for man was fish.  So the old Silurian seas were opened up to breed the

fish in.  It took twenty million years to make the fish and to fossilize

him so we'd have the evidence later.



"Then, the Paleozoic limit having been reached, it was necessary to start

a new age to make the reptiles.  Man would have to have some reptiles--

not to eat, but to develop himself from.  Thirty million years were

required for the reptiles, and out of such material as was left were made

those stupendous saurians that used to prowl about the steamy world in

remote ages, with their snaky heads forty feet in the air and their sixty

feet of body and tail racing and thrashing after them.  They are all gone

now, every one of them; just a few fossil remnants of them left on this

far-flung fringe of time.



"It took all those years to get one of those creatures properly

constructed to proceed to the next step.  Then came the pterodactyl, who

thought all that preparation all those millions of years had been

intended to produce him, for there wasn't anything too foolish for a,

pterodactyl to imagine.  I suppose he did attract a good deal of

attention, for even the least observant could see that there was the

making of a bird in him, also the making of a mammal, in the course of

time.  You can't say too much for the picturesqueness of the pterodactyl

--he was the triumph of his period.  He wore wings and had teeth, and was

a starchy-looking creature.  But the progression went right along.



"During the next thirty million years the bird arrived, and the kangaroo,

and by and by the mastodon, and the giant sloth, and the Irish elk, and

the old Silurian ass, and some people thought that man was about due.

But that was a mistake, for the next thing they knew there came a great

ice-sheet, and those creatures all escaped across the Bering Strait and

wandered around in Asia and died, all except a few to carry on the

preparation with.  There were six of those glacial periods, with two

million years or so between each.  They chased those poor orphans up and

down the earth, from weather to weather, from tropic temperature to fifty

degrees below.  They never knew what kind of weather was going to turn up

next, and if they settled any place the whole continent suddenly sank

from under them, and they had to make a scramble for dry land.  Sometimes

a volcano would turn itself loose just as they got located.  They led

that uncertain, strenuous existence for about twenty-five million years,

always wondering what was going to happen next, never suspecting that it

was just a preparation for man, who had to be done just so or there

wouldn't be any proper or harmonious place for him when he arrived, and

then at last the monkey came, and everybody could see at a glance that

man wasn't far off now, and that was true enough.  The monkey went on

developing for close upon five million years, and then he turned into a

man--to all appearances.



"It does look like a lot of fuss and trouble to go through to build

anything, especially a human being, and nowhere along the way is there

any evidence of where he picked up that final asset--his imagination.  It

makes him different from the others--not any better, but certainly

different.  Those earlier animals didn't have it, and the monkey hasn't

it or he wouldn't be so cheerful."



     [Paine records Twain's thoughts in that magnificent essay: "Was the

     World Made for Man" published long after his death in the group of

     essays under the title "Letters from the Earth.  There are minor

     additions in the published version: 'coal' to fry the fish in; and

     the remnants of life being chased from pole to pole "without a dry

     rag on them,"; and the coat of paint on the top of the bulb on top

     of the Eiffel Tower representing man's portion of this world's

     history."  D.W.]



He often held forth on the shortcomings of the human race--always a

favorite subject--the incompetencies and imperfections of this final

creation, in spite of, or because of, his great attribute--the

imagination.  Once (this was in the billiard-room) I started him by

saying that whatever the conditions in other planets, there seemed no

reason why life should not develop in each, adapted as perfectly to

prevailing conditions as man is suited to conditions here.  He said:



"Is it your idea, then, that man is perfectly adapted to the conditions

of this planet?"



I began to qualify, rather weakly; but what I said did not matter.  He

was off on his favorite theme.



"Man adapted to the earth?" he said.  "Why, he can't sleep out-of-doors

without freezing to death or getting the rheumatism or the malaria; he

can't keep his nose under water over a minute without being drowned; he

can't climb a tree without falling out and breaking his neck.  Why, he's

the poorest, clumsiest excuse of all the creatures that inhabit this

earth.  He has got to be coddled and housed and swathed and bandaged and

up holstered to be able to live at all.  He is a rickety sort of a thing,

anyway you take him, a regular British Museum of infirmities and

inferiorities.  He is always under going repairs.  A machine that is as

unreliable as he is would have no market.  The higher animals get their

teeth without pain or inconvenience.  The original cave man, the

troglodyte, may have got his that way.  But now they come through months

and months of cruel torture, and at a time of life when he is least able

to bear it.  As soon as he gets them they must all be pulled out again,

for they were of no value in the first place, not worth the loss of a

night's rest.  The second set will answer for a while; but he will never

get a set that can be depended on until the dentist makes one.  The

animals are not much troubled that way.  In a wild state, a natural

state, they have few diseases; their main one is old age.  But man starts

in as a child and lives on diseases to the end as a regular diet.  He has

mumps, measles, whooping-cough, croup, tonsilitis, diphtheria, scarlet-

fever, as a matter of course.  Afterward, as he goes along, his life

continues to be threatened at every turn by colds, coughs, asthma,

bronchitis, quinsy, consumption, yellow-fever, blindness, influenza,

carbuncles, pneumonia, softening of the brain, diseases of the heart and

bones, and a thousand other maladies of one sort and another.  He's just

a basketful of festering, pestilent corruption, provided for the support

and entertainment of microbes.  Look at the workmanship of him in some of

its particulars.  What are his tonsils for?  They perform no useful

function; they have no value.  They are but a trap for tonsilitis and

quinsy.  And what is the appendix for?  It has no value.  Its sole

interest is to lie and wait for stray grape-seeds and breed trouble.

What is his beard for?  It is just a nuisance.  All nations persecute it

with the razor.  Nature, however, always keeps him supplied with it,

instead of putting it on his head, where it ought to be.  You seldom see

a man bald-headed on his chin, but on his head.  A man wants to keep his

hair.  It is a graceful ornament, a comfort, the best of all protections

against weather, and he prizes it above emeralds and rubies, and Nature

half the time puts it on so it won't stay.



"Man's sight and smell and hearing are all inferior.  If he were suited

to the conditions he could smell an enemy; he could hear him; he could

see him, just as the animals can detect their enemies.  The robin hears

the earthworm burrowing his course under the ground; the bloodhound

follows a scent that is two days old.  Man isn't even handsome, as

compared with the birds; and as for style, look at the Bengal tiger--that

ideal of grace, physical perfection, and majesty.  Think of the lion and

the tiger and the leopard, and then think of man--that poor thing!--the

animal of the wig, the ear-trumpet, the glass eye, the porcelain teeth,

the wooden leg, the trepanned skull, the silver wind-pipe--a creature

that is mended and patched all over from top to bottom.  If he can't get

renewals of his bric-a-brac in the next world what will he look like?  He

has just that one stupendous superiority--his imagination, his intellect.

It makes him supreme--the higher animals can't match him there.  It's

very curious."



A letter which he wrote to J. Howard Moore concerning his book The

Universal Kinship was of this period, and seems to belong here.



     DEAR MR. MOORE, The book has furnished me several days of deep

     pleasure & satisfaction; it has compelled my gratitude at the same

     time, since it saves me the labor of stating my own long-cherished

     opinions & reflections & resentments by doing it lucidly & fervently

     & irascibly for me.



     There is one thing that always puzzles me: as inheritors of the

     mentality of our reptile ancestors we have improved the inheritance

     by a thousand grades; but in the matter of the morals which they

     left us we have gone backward as many grades.  That evolution is

     strange & to me unaccountable & unnatural.  Necessarily we started

     equipped with their perfect and blemishless morals; now we are

     wholly destitute; we have no real morals, but only artificial ones--

     morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural &

     healthy instincts.  Yes, we are a sufficiently comical invention, we

     humans.



                    Sincerely yours,

                                             S. L.  CLEMENS.









CCLIII



AN EVENING WITH HELEN KELLER



I recall two pleasant social events of that winter: one a little party

given at the Clemenses' home on New-Year's Eve, with charades and story-

telling and music.  It was the music feature of this party that was

distinctive; it was supplied by wire through an invention known as the

telharmonium which, it was believed, would revolutionize musical

entertainment in such places as hotels, and to some extent in private

houses.  The music came over the regular telephone wire, and was

delivered through a series of horns or megaphones--similar to those used

for phonographs--the playing being done, meanwhile, by skilled performers

at the central station.  Just why the telharmonium has not made good its

promises of popularity I do not know.  Clemens was filled with enthusiasm

over the idea.  He made a speech a little before midnight, in which he

told how he had generally been enthusiastic about inventions which had

turned out more or less well in about equal proportions.  He did not

dwell on the failures, but he told how he had been the first to use a

typewriter for manuscript work; how he had been one of the earliest users

of the fountain-pen; how he had installed the first telephone ever used

in a private house, and how the audience now would have a demonstration

of the first telharmonium music so employed.  It was just about the

stroke of midnight when he finished, and a moment later the horns began

to play chimes and "Auld Lang Syne" and "America."



The other pleasant evening referred to was a little company given in

honor of Helen Keller.  It was fascinating to watch her, and to realize

with what a store of knowledge she had lighted the black silence of her

physical life.  To see Mark Twain and Helen Keller together was something

not easily to be forgotten.  When Mrs. Macy (who, as Miss Sullivan, had

led her so marvelously out of the shadows) communicated his words to her

with what seemed a lightning touch of the fingers her face radiated every

shade of his meaning-humorous, serious, pathetic.  Helen visited the

various objects in the room, and seemed to enjoy them more than the usual

observer of these things, and certainly in greater detail.  Her sensitive

fingers spread over articles of bric-a-brac, and the exclamations she

uttered were always fitting, showing that she somehow visualized each

thing in all its particulars.  There was a bronze cat of handsome

workmanship and happy expression, and when she had run those all--seeing

fingers of hers over it she said: "It is smiling."









CCLIV



BILLIARD-ROOM NOTES



The billiard games went along pretty steadily that winter.  My play

improved, and Clemens found it necessary to eliminate my odds altogether,

and to change the game frequently in order to keep me in subjection.

Frequently there were long and apparently violent arguments over the

legitimacy of some particular shot or play--arguments to us quite as

enjoyable as the rest of the game.  Sometimes he would count a shot which

was clearly out of the legal limits, and then it was always a delight to

him to have a mock-serious discussion over the matter of conscience, and

whether or not his conscience was in its usual state of repair.  It would

always end by him saying: "I don't wish even to seem to do anything which

can invite suspicion.  I refuse to count that shot," or something of like

nature. Sometimes when I had let a questionable play pass without

comment, he would watch anxiously until I had made a similar one and then

insist on my scoring it to square accounts.  His conscience was always

repairing itself.



He had experimented, a great many years before, with what was in the

nature of a trick on some unsuspecting player.  It consisted in turning

out twelve pool-balls on the table with one cue ball, and asking his

guest how many caroms he thought he could make with all those twelve

balls to play on.  He had learned that the average player would seldom

make more than thirty-one counts, and usually, before this number was

reached, he would miss through some careless play or get himself into a

position where he couldn't play at all.  The thing looked absurdly easy.

It looked as if one could go on playing all day long, and the victim was

usually eager to bet that he could make fifty or perhaps a hundred; but

for more than an hour I tried it patiently, and seldom succeeded in

scoring more than fifteen or twenty without missing.  Long after the play

itself ceased to be amusing to me, he insisted on my going on and trying

it some more, and he would throw himself back and roar with laughter, the

tears streaming down his cheeks, to see me work and fume and fail.



It was very soon after that that Peter Dunne ("Mr. Dooley") came down for

luncheon, and after several games of the usual sort, Clemens quietly--as

if the idea had just occurred to him--rolled out the twelve balls and

asked Dunne how, many caroms he thought he could make without a miss.

Dunne said he thought he could make a thousand.  Clemens quite

indifferently said that he didn't believe he could make fifty.  Dunne

offered to bet five dollars that he could, and the wager was made.  Dunne

scored about twenty-five the first time and missed; then he insisted on

betting five dollars again, and his defeats continued until Clemens had

twenty-five dollars of Dunne's money, and Dunne was sweating and

swearing, and Mark Twain rocking with delight.  Dunne went away still

unsatisfied, promising that he would come back and try it again.  Perhaps

he practised in his absence, for when he returned he had learned

something.  He won his twenty-five dollars back, and I think something

more added.  Mark Twain was still ahead, for Dunne furnished him with a

good five hundred dollars' worth of amusement.



Clemens never cared to talk and never wished to be talked to when the

game was actually in progress.  If there was anything to be said on

either side, he would stop and rest his cue on the floor, or sit down on

the couch, until the matter was concluded.  Such interruptions happened

pretty frequently, and many of the bits of personal comment and incident

scattered along through this work are the result of those brief rests.

Some shot, or situation, or word would strike back through the past and

awaken a note long silent, and I generally kept a pad and pencil on the

window-sill with the score-sheet, and later, during his play, I would

scrawl some reminder that would be precious by and by.



On one of these I find a memorandum of what he called his three recurrent

dreams.  All of us have such things, but his seem worth remembering.



"There is never a month passes," he said, "that I do not dream of being

in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn a

living.  It is never a pleasant dream, either.  I love to think about

those days; but there's always something sickening about the thought that

I have been obliged to go back to them; and usually in my dream I am just

about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell whether it

is Selma bluff, or Hat Island, or only a black wall of night.



"Another dream that I have of that kind is being compelled to go back to

the lecture platform.  I hate that dream worse than the other.  In it I

am always getting up before an audience with nothing to say, trying to be

funny; trying to make the audience laugh, realizing that I am only making

silly jokes.  Then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they

commence to get up and leave.  That dream always ends by my standing

there in the semidarkness talking to an empty house.



"My other dream is of being at a brilliant gathering in my night-

garments.  People don't seem to notice me there at first, and then pretty

soon somebody points me out, and they all begin to look at me

suspiciously, and I can see that they are wondering who I am and why I am

there in that costume.  Then it occurs to me that I can fix it by making

myself known.  I take hold of some man and whisper to him, 'I am Mark

Twain'; but that does not improve it, for immediately I can hear him

whispering to the others, 'He says he is Mark Twain,' and they all look

at me a good deal more suspiciously than before, and I can see that they

don't believe it, and that it was a mistake to make that confession.

Sometimes, in that dream, I am dressed like a tramp instead of being in

my night-clothes; but it all ends about the same--they go away and leave

me standing there, ashamed.  I generally enjoy my dreams, but not those

three, and they are the ones I have oftenest."



Quite often some curious episode of the world's history would flash upon

him--something amusing, or coarse, or tragic, and he would bring the game

to a standstill and recount it with wonderful accuracy as to date and

circumstance.  He had a natural passion for historic events and a gift

for mentally fixing them, but his memory in other ways was seldom

reliable.  He was likely to forget the names even of those he knew best

and saw oftenest, and the small details of life seldom registered at all.



He had his breakfast served in his room, and once, on a slip of paper, he

wrote, for his own reminder:



The accuracy of your forgetfulness is absolute--it seems never to fail.

I prepare to pour my coffee so it can cool while I shave--and I always

forget to pour it.



Yet, very curiously, he would sometimes single out a minute detail,

something every one else had overlooked, and days or even weeks afterward

would recall it vividly, and not always at an opportune moment.  Perhaps

this also was a part of his old pilot-training.  Once Clara Clemens

remarked:



"It always amazes me the things that father does and does not remember.

Some little trifle that nobody else would notice, and you are hoping that

he didn't, will suddenly come back to him just when you least expect it

or care for it."



My note-book contains the entry:



     February 11, 1907.  He said to-day:



     "A blindfolded chess-player can remember every play and discuss the

     game afterward, while we can't remember from one shot to the next."



     I mentioned his old pilot-memory as an example of what he could do

     if he wished.



     "Yes," he answered, "those are special memories; a pilot will tell

     you the number of feet in every crossing at any time, but he can't

     remember what he had for breakfast."



     "How long did you keep your pilot-memory?" I asked.



     "Not long; it faded out right away, but the training served me, for

     when I went to report on a paper a year or two later I never had to

     make any notes."



     "I suppose you still remember some of the river?"



     "Not much.  Hat Island, Helena and here and there a place; but that

     is about all."









CCLV



FURTHER PERSONALITIES



Like every person living, Mark Twain had some peculiar and petty

economies.  Such things in great men are noticeable.  He lived

extravagantly.  His household expenses at the time amounted to more than

fifty dollars a day.  In the matter of food, the choicest, and most

expensive the market could furnish was always served in lavish abundance.

He had the best and highest-priced servants, ample as to number.  His

clothes he bought generously; he gave without stint to his children; his

gratuities were always liberal.  He never questioned pecuniary outgoes--

seldom worried as to the state of his bank-account so long as there was

plenty.  He smoked cheap cigars because he preferred their flavor.  Yet

he had his economies.  I have seen him, before leaving a room, go around

and carefully lower the gas-jets, to provide against that waste.  I have

known him to examine into the cost of a cab, and object to an apparent

overcharge of a few cents.



It seemed that his idea of economy might be expressed in these words: He

abhorred extortion and visible waste.



Furthermore, he had exact ideas as to ownership.  One evening, while we

were playing billiards, I noticed a five-cent piece on the floor.  I

picked it up, saying:



"Here is five cents; I don't know whose it is."



He regarded the coin rather seriously, I thought, and said:



"I don't know, either."



I laid it on the top of the book-shelves which ran around the room.  The

play went on, and I forgot the circumstance.  When the game ended that

night I went into his room with him, as usual, for a good-night word.  As

he took his change and keys from the pocket of his trousers, he looked

the assortment over and said:



"That five-cent piece you found was mine."



I brought it to him at once, and he took it solemnly, laid it with the

rest of his change, and neither of us referred to it again.  It may have

been one of his jokes, but I think it more likely that he remembered

having had a five-cent piece, probably reserved for car fare, and that it

was missing.



More than once, in Washington, he had said:



"Draw plenty of money for incidental expenses.  Don't bother to keep

account of them."



So it was not miserliness; it was just a peculiarity, a curious attention

to a trifling detail.



He had a fondness for riding on the then newly completed Subway, which he

called the Underground.  Sometimes he would say:



"I'll pay your fare on the Underground if you want to take a ride with

me."  And he always insisted on paying the fare, and once when I rode far

up-town with him to a place where he was going to luncheon, and had taken

him to the door, he turned and said, gravely:



"Here is five cents to pay your way home."  And I took it in the same

spirit in which it had been offered.  It was probably this trait which

caused some one occasionally to claim that Mark Twain was close in money

matters.  Perhaps there may have been times in his life when he was

parsimonious; but, if so, I must believe that it was when he was sorely

pressed and exercising the natural instinct of self-preservation.  He

wished to receive the full value (who does not?) of his labors and

properties.  He took a childish delight in piling up money; but it became

greed only when he believed some one with whom he had dealings was trying

to get an unfair division of profits.  Then it became something besides

greed.  It became an indignation that amounted to malevolence.  I was

concerned in a number of dealings with Mark Twain, and at a period in his

life when human traits are supposed to become exaggerated, which is to

say old age, and if he had any natural tendency to be unfair, or small,

or greedy in his money dealings I think I should have seen it.

Personally, I found him liberal to excess, and I never observed in him

anything less than generosity to those who were fair with him.



Once that winter, when a letter came from Steve Gillis saying that he was

an invalid now, and would have plenty of tune to read Sam's books if he

owned them, Clemens ordered an expensive set from his publishers, and did

what meant to him even more than the cost in money--he autographed each

of those twenty-five volumes.  Then he sent them, charges paid, to that

far Californian retreat.  It was hardly the act of a stingy man.



He had the human fondness for a compliment when it was genuine and from

an authoritative source, and I remember how pleased he was that winter

with Prof. William Lyon Phelps's widely published opinion, which ranked

Mark Twain as the greatest American novelist, and declared that his fame

would outlive any American of his time.  Phelps had placed him above

Holmes, Howells, James, and even Hawthorne.  He had declared him to be

more American than any of these--more American even than Whitman.

Professor Phelps's position in Yale College gave this opinion a certain

official weight; but I think the fact of Phelps himself being a writer of

great force, with an American freshness of style, gave it a still greater

value.



Among the pleasant things that winter was a meeting with Eugene F. Ware,

of Kansas, with whose penname--"Ironquill"--Clemens had long been

familiar.



Ware was a breezy Western genius of the finest type.  If he had abandoned

law for poetry, there is no telling how far his fame might have reached.

There was in his work that same spirit of Americanism and humor and

humanity that is found in Mark Twain's writings, and he had the added

faculty of rhyme and rhythm, which would have set him in a place apart.

I had known Ware personally during a period of Western residence, and

later, when he was Commissioner of Pensions under Roosevelt.  I usually

saw him when he came to New York, and it was a great pleasure now to

bring together the two men whose work I so admired.  They met at a small

private luncheon at The Players, and Peter Dunne was there, and Robert

Collier, and it was such an afternoon as Howells has told of when he and

Aldrich and Bret Harte and those others talked until the day faded into

twilight, and twilight deepened into evening.  Clemens had put in most of

the day before reading Ware's book of poems, 'The Rhymes of Ironquill',

and had declared his work to rank with the very greatest of American

poetry--I think he called it the most truly American in flavor.  I

remember that at the luncheon he noted Ware's big, splendid physique and

his Western liberties of syntax with a curious intentness.  I believe he

regarded him as being nearer his own type in mind and expression than any

one he had met before.



Among Ware's poems he had been especially impressed with the "Fables,"

and with some verses entitled "Whist," which, though rather more

optimistic, conformed to his own philosophy.  They have a distinctly

"Western" feeling.



                                 WHIST

            Hour after hour the cards were fairly shuffled,

               And fairly dealt, and still I got no hand;

             The morning came; but I, with mind unruffled,

                 Did simply say, "I do not understand."

             Life is a game of whist.  From unseen sources

            The cards are shuffled, and the hands are dealt.

              Blind are our efforts to control the forces

            That, though unseen, are no less strongly felt.

             I do not like the way the cards are shuffled,

              But still I like the game and want to play;

          And through the long, long night will I, unruffled,

                Play what I get, until the break of day.









End of this Project Gutenberg Etext Volume 3, Part 1 of MARK TWAIN,

A BIOGRAPHY by Albert Bigelow Paine













MARK TWAIN, A BIOGRAPHY



By Albert Bigelow Paine







VOLUME III, Part 2: 1907-1910







CCLVI



HONORS FROM OXFORD



Clemens made a brief trip to Bermuda during the winter, taking Twichell

along; their first return to the island since the trip when they had

promised to come back so soon-nearly thirty years before.  They had been

comparatively young men then.  They were old now, but they found the

green island as fresh and full of bloom as ever.  They did not find their

old landlady; they could not even remember her name at first, and then

Twichell recalled that it was the same as an author of certain

schoolbooks in his youth, and Clemens promptly said, "Kirkham's Grammar."

Kirkham was truly the name, and they went to find her; but she was dead,

and the daughter, who had been a young girl in that earlier time, reigned

in her stead and entertained the successors of her mother's guests.  They

walked and drove about the island, and it was like taking up again a

long-discontinued book and reading another chapter of the same tale.  It

gave Mark Twain a fresh interest in Bermuda, one which he did not allow

to fade again.



Later in the year (March, 1907) I also made a journey; it having been

agreed that I should take a trip to the Mississippi and to the Pacific

coast to see those old friends of Mark Twain's who were so rapidly

passing away.  John Briggs was still alive, and other Hannibal

schoolmates; also Joe Goodman and Steve Gillis, and a few more of the

early pioneers--all eminently worth seeing in the matter of such work as

I had in hand.  The billiard games would be interrupted; but whatever

reluctance to the plan there may have been on that account was put aside

in view of prospective benefits.  Clemens, in fact, seemed to derive joy

from the thought that he was commissioning a kind of personal emissary to

his old comrades, and provided me with a letter of credentials.



It was a long, successful trip that I made, and it was undertaken none

too soon.  John Briggs, a gentle-hearted man, was already entering the

valley of the shadow as he talked to me by his fire one memorable

afternoon, and reviewed the pranks of those days along the river and in

the cave and on Holliday's Hill.  I think it was six weeks later that he

died; and there were others of that scattering procession who did not

reach the end of the year.  Joe Goodman, still full of vigor (in 1912),

journeyed with me to the green and dreamy solitudes of Jackass Hill to

see Steve and Jim Gillis, and that was an unforgetable Sunday when Steve

Gillis, an invalid, but with the fire still in his eyes and speech, sat

up on his couch in his little cabin in that Arcadian stillness and told

old tales and adventures.  When I left he said:



"Tell Sam I'm going to die pretty soon, but that I love him; that I've

loved him all my life, and I'll love him till I die.  This is the last

word I'll ever send to him."  Jim Gillis, down in Sonora, was already

lying at the point of death, and so for him the visit was too late,

though he was able to receive a message from his ancient mining partner,

and to send back a parting word.



I returned by way of New Orleans and the Mississippi River, for I wished

to follow that abandoned water highway, and to visit its presiding

genius, Horace Bixby,--[He died August 2, 1912, at the age of 86]--still

alive and in service as pilot of the government snagboat, his

headquarters at St. Louis.



Coming up the river on one of the old passenger steam boats that still

exist, I noticed in a paper which came aboard that Mark Twain was to

receive from Oxford University the literary doctor's degree.  There had

been no hint of this when I came away, and it seemed rather too sudden

and too good to be true.  That the little barefoot lad that had played

along the river-banks at Hannibal, and received such meager advantages in

the way of schooling--whose highest ambition had been to pilot such a

craft as this one--was about to be crowned by the world's greatest

institution of learning, to receive the highest recognition for

achievement in the world of letters, was a thing which would not be

likely to happen outside of a fairy tale.



Returning to New York, I ran out to Tuxedo, where he had taken a home for

the summer (for it was already May), and walking along the shaded paths

of that beautiful suburban park, he told me what he knew of the Oxford

matter.



Moberly Bell, of the London Times, had been over in April, and soon after

his return to England there had come word of the proposed honor.  Clemens

privately and openly (to Bell) attributed it largely to his influence.

He wrote to him:



     DEAR MR. BELL,--Your hand is in it & you have my best thanks.

     Although I wouldn't cross an ocean again for the price of the ship

     that carried me I am glad to do it for an Oxford degree.  I shall

     plan to sail for England a shade before the middle of June, so that

     I can have a few days in London before the 26th.



A day or two later, when the time for sailing had been arranged, he

overtook his letter with a cable:



     I perceive your hand in it.  You have my best thanks.  Sail on

     Minneapolis June 8th.  Due in Southampton ten days later.



Clemens said that his first word of the matter had been a newspaper

cablegram, and that he had been doubtful concerning it until a cablegram

to himself had confirmed it.



"I never expected to cross the water again," he said; "but I would be

willing to journey to Mars for that Oxford degree."



He put the matter aside then, and fell to talking of Jim Gillis and the

others I had visited, dwelling especially on Gillis's astonishing faculty

for improvising romances, recalling how he had stood with his back to the

fire weaving his endless, grotesque yarns, with no other guide than his

fancy.  It was a long, happy walk we had, though rather a sad one in its

memories; and he seemed that day, in a sense, to close the gate of those

early scenes behind him, for he seldom referred to them afterward.



He was back at 21 Fifth Avenue presently, arranging for his voyage.

Meantime, cable invitations of every sort were pouring in, from this and

that society and dignitary; invitations to dinners and ceremonials, and

what not, and it was clear enough that his English sojourn was to be a

busy one.  He had hoped to avoid this, and began by declining all but two

invitations--a dinner-party given by Ambassador Whitelaw Reid and a

luncheon proposed by the "Pilgrims."  But it became clear that this

would not do.  England was not going to confer its greatest collegiate

honor without being permitted to pay its wider and more popular tribute.



Clemens engaged a special secretary for the trip--Mr. Ralph W. Ashcroft,

a young Englishman familiar with London life.  They sailed on the 8th of

June, by a curious coincidence exactly forty years from the day he had

sailed on the Quaker City to win his great fame.  I went with him to the

ship.  His first elation had passed by this time, and he seemed a little

sad, remembering, I think, the wife who would have enjoyed this honor

with him but could not share it now.









CCLVII



A TRUE ENGLISH WELCOME



Mark Twain's trip across the Atlantic would seem to have been a pleasant

one.  The Minneapolis is a fine, big ship, and there was plenty of

company.  Prof. Archibald Henderson, Bernard Shaw's biographer, was

aboard;--[Professor .Henderson has since then published a volume on Mark

Twain-an interesting commentary on his writings-mainly from the

sociological point of view.]--also President Patton, of the Princeton

Theological Seminary; a well-known cartoonist, Richards, and some very

attractive young people--school-girls in particular, such as all through

his life had appealed to Mark Twain.  Indeed, in his later life they made

a stronger appeal than ever.  The years had robbed him of his own little

flock, and always he was trying to replace them.  Once he said:



"During those years after my wife's death I was washing about on a

forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making in high and holy causes, and

these things furnished me intellectual cheer, and entertainment; but they

got at my heart for an evening only, then left it dry and dusty.  I had

reached the grandfather stage of life without grandchildren, so I began

to adopt some."



He adopted several on that journey to England and on the return voyage,

and he kept on adopting others during the rest of his life.  These

companionships became one of the happiest aspects of his final days, as

we shall see by and by.



There were entertainments on the ship, one of them given for the benefit

of the Seamen's Orphanage.  One of his adopted granddaughters--"Charley"

he called her--played a violin solo and Clemens made a speech.  Later his

autographs were sold at auction.  Dr. Patton was auctioneer, and one

autographed postal card brought twenty-five dollars, which is perhaps the

record price for a single Mark Twain signature.  He wore his white suit

on this occasion, and in the course of his speech referred to it.  He

told first of the many defects in his behavior, and how members of his

household had always tried to keep him straight.  The children, he said,

had fallen into the habit of calling it "dusting papa off."  Then he went

on:



     When my daughter came to see me off last Saturday at the boat she

     slipped a note in my hand and said, "Read it when you get aboard the

     ship."  I didn't think of it again until day before yesterday, and

     it was a "dusting off."  And if I carry out all the instructions

     that I got there I shall be more celebrated in England for my

     behavior than for anything else.  I got instructions how to act on

     every occasion.  She underscored "Now, don't you wear white clothes

     on ship or on shore until you get back," and I intended to obey.  I

     have been used to obeying my family all my life, but I wore the

     white clothes to-night because the trunk that has the dark clothes

     in it is in the cellar.  I am not apologizing for the white clothes;

     I am only apologizing to my daughter for not obeying her.



He received a great welcome when the ship arrived at Tilbury.  A throng

of rapid-fire reporters and photographers immediately surrounded him, and

when he left the ship the stevedores gave him a round of cheers.  It was

the beginning of that almost unheard-of demonstration of affection and

honor which never for a moment ceased, but augmented from day to day

during the four weeks of his English sojourn.



In a dictation following his return, Mark Twain said:



     Who began it?  The very people of all people in the world whom I

     would have chosen: a hundred men of my own class--grimy sons of

     labor, the real builders of empires and civilizations, the

     stevedores!  They stood in a body on the dock and charged their

     masculine lungs, and gave me a welcome which went to the marrow of

     me.



J. Y. W. MacAlister was at the St. Pancras railway station to meet him,

and among others on the platform was Bernard Shaw, who had come down to

meet Professor Henderson.  Clemens and Shaw were presented, and met

eagerly, for each greatly admired the other.  A throng gathered.  Mark

Twain was extricated at last, and hurried away to his apartments at

Brown's Hotel, "a placid, subdued, homelike, old-fashioned English inn,"

he called it, "well known to me years ago, a blessed retreat of a sort

now rare in England, and becoming rarer every year."



But Brown's was not placid and subdued during his stay.  The London

newspapers declared that Mark Twain's arrival had turned Brown's not only

into a royal court, but a post-office--that the procession of visitors

and the bundles of mail fully warranted this statement.  It was, in fact,

an experience which surpassed in general magnitude and magnificence

anything he had hitherto known.  His former London visits, beginning with

that of 1872, had been distinguished by high attentions, but all of them

combined could not equal this.  When England decides to get up an

ovation, her people are not to be outdone even by the lavish Americans.

An assistant secretary had to be engaged immediately, and it sometimes

required from sixteen to twenty hours a day for two skilled and busy men

to receive callers and reduce the pile of correspondence.



A pile of invitations had already accumulated, and others flowed in.

Lady Stanley, widow of Henry M. Stanley, wrote:



     You know I want to see you and join right hand to right hand.  I

     must see your dear face again .  .  .  .  You will have no peace,

     rest, or leisure during your stay in London, and you will end by

     hating human beings.  Let me come before you feel that way.



Mary Cholmondeley, the author of Red Pottage, niece of that lovable

Reginald Cholmondeley, and herself an old friend, sent greetings and

urgent invitations.  Archdeacon Wilberforce wrote:



     I have just been preaching about your indictment of that scoundrel

     king of the Belgians and telling my people to buy the book.  I am

     only a humble item among the very many who offer you a cordial

     welcome in England, but we long to see you again, and I should like

     to change hats with you again.  Do you remember?



The Athenaeum, the Garrick, and a dozen other London clubs had

anticipated his arrival with cards of honorary membership for the period

of his stay.  Every leading photographer had put in a claim for sittings.

It was such a reception as Charles Dickens had received in America in

1842, and again in 1867.  A London paper likened it to Voltaire's return

to Paris in 1778, when France went mad over him.  There is simply no

limit to English affection and, hospitality once aroused.  Clemens wrote:



     Surely such weeks as this must be very rare in this world: I had

     seen nothing like them before; I shall see nothing approaching them

     again!



Sir Thomas Lipton and Bram Stoker, old friends, were among the first to

present themselves, and there was no break in the line of callers.



Clemens's resolutions for secluding himself were swept away.  On the very

next morning following his arrival he breakfasted with J. Henniker

Heaton, father of International Penny Postage, at the Bath Club, just

across Dover Street from Brown's.  He lunched at the Ritz with Marjorie

Bowen and Miss Bisland.  In the afternoon he sat for photographs at

Barnett's, and made one or two calls.  He could no more resist these

things than a debutante in her first season.



He was breakfasting again with Heaton next morning; lunching with "Toby,

M.P.," and Mrs. Lucy; and having tea with Lady Stanley in the afternoon,

and being elaborately dined next day at Dorchester House by Ambassador

and Mrs. Reid.  These were all old and tried friends.  He was not a

stranger among them, he said; he was at home.  Alfred Austin, Conan

Doyle, Anthony Hope, Alma Tadema, E. A. Abbey, Edmund Goss, George

Smalley, Sir Norman Lockyer, Henry W. Lucy, Sidney Brooks, and Bram

Stoker were among those at Dorchester House--all old comrades, as were

many of the other guests.



"I knew fully half of those present," he said afterward.



Mark Twain's bursting upon London society naturally was made the most of

by the London papers, and all his movements were tabulated and

elaborated, and when there was any opportunity for humor in the situation

it was not left unimproved.  The celebrated Ascot racing-cup was stolen

just at the time of his arrival, and the papers suggestively mingled

their head-lines, "Mark Twain Arrives: Ascot Cup Stolen," and kept the

joke going in one form or another.  Certain state jewels and other

regalia also disappeared during his stay, and the news of these

burglaries was reported in suspicious juxtaposition with the news of Mark

Twain's doings.



English reporters adopted American habits for the occasion, and invented

or embellished when the demand for a new sensation was urgent.  Once,

when following the custom of the place, he descended the hotel elevator

in a perfectly proper and heavy brown bath robe, and stepped across

narrow Dover Street to the Bath Club, the papers flamed next day with the

story that Mark Twain had wandered about the lobby of Brown's and

promenaded Dover Street in a sky-blue bath robe attracting wide

attention.



Clara Clemens, across the ocean, was naturally a trifle disturbed by such

reports, and cabled this delicate "dusting off":



"Much worried.  Remember proprieties."



To which he answered:



"They all pattern after me," a reply to the last degree characteristic.



It was on the fourth day after his arrival, June 22d, that he attended

the King's garden-party at Windsor Castle.  There were eighty-five

hundred guests at the King's party, and if we may judge from the London

newspapers, Mark Twain was quite as much a figure in that great throng as

any member of the royal family.  His presentation to the King and the

Queen is set down as an especially notable incident, and their

conversation is quite fully given.  Clemens himself reported:



     His Majesty was very courteous.  In the course of the conversation

     I reminded him of an episode of fifteen years ago, when I had the

     honor to walk a mile with him when he was taking the waters at

     Homburg, in Germany.  I said that I had often told about that

     episode, and that whenever I was the historian I made good history

     of it and it was worth listening to, but that it had found its way

     into print once or twice in unauthentic ways and was badly damaged

     thereby.  I said I should like to go on repeating this history, but

     that I should be quite fair and reasonably honest, and while I

     should probably never tell it twice in the same way I should at

     least never allow it to deteriorate in my hands.  His Majesty

     intimated his willingness that I should continue to disseminate that

     piece of history; and he added a compliment, saying that he knew

     good and sound history would not suffer at my hands, and that if

     this good and sound history needed any improvement beyond the facts

     he would trust me to furnish that improvement.



     I think it is not an exaggeration to say that the Queen looked as

     young and beautiful as she did thirty-five years ago when I saw her

     first.  I did not say this to her, because I learned long ago never

     to say the obvious thing, but leave the obvious thing to commonplace

     and inexperienced people to say.  That she still looked to me as

     young and beautiful as she did thirty-five years ago is good

     evidence that ten thousand people have already noticed this and have

     mentioned it to her.  I could have said it and spoken the truth, but

     I was too wise for that.  I kept the remark unuttered and saved her

     Majesty the vexation of hearing it the ten-thousand-and-oneth time.



     All that report about my proposal to buy Windsor Castle and its

     grounds was a false rumor.  I started it myself.



     One newspaper said I patted his Majesty on the shoulder--an

     impertinence of which I was not guilty; I was reared in the most

     exclusive circles of Missouri and I know how to behave.  The King

     rested his hand upon my arm a moment or two while we were chatting,

     but he did it of his own accord.  The newspaper which said I talked

     with her Majesty with my hat on spoke the truth, but my reasons for

     doing it were good and sufficient--in fact unassailable.  Rain was

     threatening, the temperature had cooled, and the Queen said, "Please

     put your hat on, Mr. Clemens."  I begged her pardon and excused

     myself from doing it.  After a moment or two she said, "Mr. Clemens,

     put your hat on"--with a slight emphasis on the word "on" "I can't

     allow you to catch cold here."  When a beautiful queen commands it

     is a pleasure to obey, and this time I obeyed--but I had already

     disobeyed once, which is more than a subject would have felt

     justified in doing; and so it is true, as charged; I did talk with

     the Queen of England with my hat on, but it wasn't fair in the

     newspaper man to charge it upon me as an impoliteness, since there

     were reasons for it which he could not know of.



Nearly all the members of the British royal family were there, and there

were foreign visitors which included the King of Siam and a party of

India princes in their gorgeous court costumes, which Clemens admired

openly and said he would like to wear himself.



The English papers spoke of it as one of the largest and most

distinguished parties ever given at Windsor.  Clemens attended it in

company with Mr. and Mrs. J. Henniker Heaton, and when it was over Sir

Thomas Lipton joined them and motored with them back to Brown's.



He was at Archdeacon Wilberforce's next day, where a curious circumstance

developed.  When he arrived Wilberforce said to him, in an undertone:



"Come into my library.  I have something to show you."



In the library Clemens was presented to a Mr. Pole, a plain-looking man,

suggesting in dress and appearance the English tradesman.  Wilberforce

said:



"Mr. Pole, show to Mr. Clemens what you have brought here."



Mr. Pole unrolled a long strip of white linen and brought to view at last

a curious, saucer-looking vessel of silver, very ancient in appearance,

and cunningly overlaid with green glass.  The archdeacon took it and

handed it to Clemens as some precious jewel.  Clemens said:



"What is it?"



Wilberforce impressively answered:



"It is the Holy Grail."



Clemens naturally started with surprise.



"You may well start," said Wilberforce; "but it's the truth.  That is the

Holy Grail."



Then he gave this explanation: Mr. Pole, a grain merchant of Bristol, had

developed some sort of clairvoyant power, or at all events he had dreamed

several times with great vividness the location of the true Grail.

Another dreamer, a Dr. Goodchild, of Bath, was mixed up in the matter,

and between them this peculiar vessel, which was not a cup, or a goblet,

or any of the traditional things, had been discovered.  Mr. Pole seemed a

man of integrity, and it was clear that the churchman believed the

discovery to be genuine and authentic.  Of course there could be no

positive proof.  It was a thing that must be taken on trust.  That the

vessel itself was wholly different from anything that the generations had

conceived, and was apparently of very ancient make, was opposed to the

natural suggestion of fraud.



Clemens, to whom the whole idea of the Holy Grail was simply a poetic

legend and myth, had the feeling that he had suddenly been transmigrated,

like his own Connecticut Yankee, back into the Arthurian days; but he

made no question, suggested no doubt.  Whatever it was, it was to them

the materialization of a symbol of faith which ranked only second to the

cross itself, and he handled it reverently and felt the honor of having

been one of the first permitted to see the relic.  In a subsequent

dictation he said:



     I am glad I have lived to see that half-hour--that astonishing half-

     hour.  In its way it stands alone in my life's experience.  In the

     belief of two persons present this was the very vessel which was

     brought by night and secretly delivered to Nicodemus, nearly

     nineteen centuries ago, after the Creator of the universe had

     delivered up His life on the cross for the redemption of the human

     race; the very cup which the stainless Sir Galahad had sought with

     knightly devotion in far fields of peril and adventure in Arthur's

     time, fourteen hundred years ago; the same cup which princely

     knights of other bygone ages had laid down their lives in long and

     patient efforts to find, and had passed from life disappointed--and

     here it was at last, dug up by a grain-broker at no cost of blood or

     travel, and apparently no purity required of him above the average

     purity of the twentieth-century dealer in cereal futures; not even a

     stately name required--no Sir Galahad, no Sir Bors de Ganis, no Sir

     Lancelot of the Lake--nothing but a mere Mr. Pole.--[From the New

     York Sun somewhat later: "Mr. Pole communicated the discovery to a

     dignitary of the Church of England, who summoned a number of eminent

     persons, including psychologists, to see and discuss it.  Forty

     attended, including some peers with ecclesiastical interests,

     Ambassador Whitelaw Reid, Professor Crookas, and ministers of

     various religious bodies, including the Rev. R. J. Campbell.  They

     heard Mr. Pole's story with deep attention, but he could not prove

     the genuineness of the relic."]



Clemens saw Mr. and Mrs. Rogers at Claridge's Hotel that evening; lunched

with his old friends Sir Norman and Lady Lockyer next day; took tea with

T. P. O'Connor at the House of Commons, and on the day following, which

was June a 5th, he was the guest of honor at one of the most elaborate

occasions of his visit--a luncheon given by the Pilgrims at the Savoy

Hotel.  It would be impossible to set down here a report of the doings,

or even a list of the guests, of that gathering.  The Pilgrims is a club

with branches on both sides of the ocean, and Mark Twain, on either side,

was a favorite associate.  At this luncheon the picture on the bill of

fare represented him as a robed pilgrim, with a great pen for his staff,

turning his back on the Mississippi River and being led along his

literary way by a huge jumping frog, to which he is attached by a string.

On a guest-card was printed:



     Pilot of many Pilgrims since the shout

     "Mark Twain!"--that serves you for a deathless sign--

     On Mississippi's waterway rang out

     Over the plummet's line--



     Still where the countless ripples laugh above

     The blue of halcyon seas long may you keep

     Your course unbroken, buoyed upon a love

     Ten thousand fathoms deep!



                                  --O. S.  [OWEN SEAMAN].



Augustine Birrell made the speech of introduction, closing with this

paragraph:



     Mark Twain is a man whom Englishmen and Americans do well to honor.

     He is a true consolidator of nations.  His delightful humor is of

     the kind which dissipates and destroys national prejudices.  His

     truth and his honor--his love of truth and his love of honor--

     overflow all boundaries.  He has made the world better by his

     presence, and we rejoice to see him here.  Long may he live to reap

     a plentiful harvest of hearty honest human affection.



The toast was drunk standing.  Then Clemens rose and made a speech which

delighted all England.  In his introduction Mr. Birrell had happened to

say, "How I came here I will not ask!"  Clemens remembered this, and

looking down into Mr. Birrell's wine-glass, which was apparently unused,

he said:



"Mr. Birrell doesn't know how he got here.  But he will be able to get

away all right--he has not drunk anything since he came."



He told stories about Howells and Twichell, and how Darwin had gone to

sleep reading his books, and then he came down to personal things and

company, and told them how, on the day of his arrival, he had been

shocked to read on a great placard, "Mark Twain Arrives: Ascot Cup

Stolen."



     No doubt many a person was misled by those sentences joined together

     in that unkind way.  I have no doubt my character has suffered from

     it.  I suppose I ought to defend my character, but how can I defend

     it?  I can say here and now that anybody can see by my face that I

     am sincere--that I speak the truth, and that I have never seen that

     Cup.  I have not got the Cup, I did not have a chance to get it.  I

     have always had a good character in that way.  I have hardly ever

     stolen anything, and if I did steal anything I had discretion enough

     to know about the value of it first.  I do not steal things that are

     likely to get myself into trouble.  I do not think any of us do

     that.  I know we all take things--that is to be expected; but really

     I have never taken anything, certainly in England, that amounts to

     any great thing.  I do confess that when I was here seven years ago

     I stole a hat--but that did not amount to anything.  It was not a

     good hat it was only a clergyman's hat, anyway.  I was at a

     luncheon-party and Archdeacon Wilberforce was there also. I dare say

     he is archdeacon now--he was a canon then--and he was serving in the

     Westminster Battery, if that is the proper term.  I do not know, as

     you mix military and ecclesiastical things together so much.



He recounted the incident of the exchanged hats; then he spoke of graver

things.  He closed:



     I cannot always be cheerful, and I cannot always be chaffing.  I

     must sometimes lay the cap and bells aside and recognize that I am

     of the human race.  I have my cares and griefs, and I therefore

     noticed what Mr. Birrell said--I was so glad to hear him say it--

     something that was in the nature of these verses here at the top of

     the program:



               He lit our life with shafts of sun

               And vanquished pain.

               Thus two great nations stand as one

               In honoring Twain.



I am very glad to have those verses.  I am very glad and very grateful

for what Mr. Birrell said in that connection.  I have received since I

have been here, in this one week, hundreds of letters from all conditions

of people in England, men, women, and children, and there is compliment,

praise, and, above all, and better than all, there is in them a note of

affection.



Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection--that is the last and

final and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character

or achievement, and I am very grateful to have that reward.  All these

letters make me feel that here in England, as in America, when I stand

under the English or the American flag I am not a, stranger, I am not an

alien, but at home.









CCLVIII



DOCTOR OF LITERATURE, OXFORD



He left, immediately following the Pilgrim luncheon, with Hon. Robert P.

Porter, of the London Times, for Oxford, to remain his guest there during

the various ceremonies.  The encenia--the ceremony of conferring the

degrees--occurred at the Sheldonian Theater the following morning, June

26, 1907.



It was a memorable affair.  Among those who were to receive degrees that

morning besides Samuel Clemens were: Prince Arthur of Connaught; Prime

Minister Campbell-Bannerman; Whitelaw Reid; Rudyard Kipling; Sidney Lee;

Sidney Colvin; Lord Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of Ireland; Sir Norman

Lockyer; Auguste Rodin, the sculptor; Saint-Saens, and Gen. William

Booth, of the Salvation Army-something more than thirty, in all, of the

world's distinguished citizens.



The candidates assembled at Magdalen College, and led by Lord Curzon, the

Chancellor, and clad in their academic plumage, filed in radiant

procession to the Sheldonian Theater, a group of men such as the world

seldom sees collected together.  The London Standard said of it:

     So brilliant and so interesting was the list of those who had been

     selected by Oxford University on Convocation to receive degrees,

     'honoris causa', in this first year of Lord Curzon's chancellorship,

     that it is small wonder that the Sheldonian Theater was besieged

     today at an early hour.



     Shortly after 11 o'clock the organ started playing the strains of

     "God Save the King," and at once a great volume of sound arose as

     the anthem was taken up by the undergraduates and the rest of the

     assemblage.  Every one stood up as, headed by the mace of office,

     the procession slowly filed into the theater, under the leadership

     of Lord Curzon, in all the glory of his robes of office, the long

     black gown heavily embroidered with gold, the gold-tasseled mortar-

     board, and the medals on his breast forming an admirable setting,

     thoroughly in keeping with the dignity and bearing of the late

     Viceroy of India.  Following him came the members of Convocation, a

     goodly number consisting of doctors of divinity, whose robes of

     scarlet and black enhanced the brilliance of the scene.  Robes of

     salmon and scarlet-which proclaim the wearer to be a doctor of civil

     law--were also seen in numbers, while here and there was a gown of

     gray and scarlet, emblematic of the doctorate of science or of

     letters.



The encenia is an impressive occasion; but it is not a silent one.  There

is a splendid dignity about it; but there goes with it all a sort of

Greek chorus of hilarity, the time-honored prerogative of the Oxford

undergraduate, who insists on having his joke and his merriment at the

expense of those honored guests.  The degrees of doctor of law were

conferred first.  Prince Arthur was treated with proper dignity by the

gallery; but when Whitelaw Reid stepped forth a voice shouted, "Where's

your Star-spangled Banner?" and when England's Prime Minister-Campbell-

Bannerman--came forward some one shouted, "What about the House of

Lords?" and so they kept it up, cheering and chaffing, until General

Booth was introduced as the "Passionate advocate of the dregs of the

people, leader of the submerged tenth," and general of the Salvation

Army," when the place broke into a perfect storm of applause, a storm

that a few minutes later became, according to the Daily News, "a

veritable cyclone," for Mark Twain, clad in his robe of scarlet and gray,

had been summoned forward to receive the highest academic honors which

the world has to give.  The undergraduates went wild then.  There was

such a mingling of yells and calls and questions, such as, "Have you

brought the jumping Frog with you?"  "Where is the Ascot Cup?" "Where are

the rest of the Innocents?" that it seemed as if it would not be possible

to present him at all; but, finally, Chancellor Curzon addressed him (in

Latin), "Most amiable and charming sir, you shake the sides of the whole

world with your merriment," and the great degree was conferred.

If only Tom Sawyer could have seen him then!  If only Olivia Clemens

could have sat among those who gave him welcome!  But life is not like

that.  There is always an incompleteness somewhere, and the shadow across

the path.



Rudyard Kipling followed--another supreme favorite, who was hailed with

the chorus, "For he's a jolly good fellow," and then came Saint-Satins.

The prize poems and essays followed, and then the procession of newly

created doctors left the theater with Lord Curzon at their head.  So it

was all over-that for which, as he said, he would have made the journey

to Mars.  The world had nothing more to give him now except that which he

had already long possessed-its honor and its love.



The newly made doctors were to be the guests of Lord Curzon at All Souls

College for luncheon.  As they left the theater (according to Sidney

Lee):



     The people in the streets singled out Mark Twain, formed a vast and

     cheering body-guard around him and escorted him to the college

     gates.  But before and after the lunch it was Mark Twain again whom

     everybody seemed most of all to want to meet.  The Maharajah of

     Bikanir, for instance, finding himself seated at lunch next to Mrs.

     Riggs (Kate Douglas Wiggin), and hearing that she knew Mark Twain,

     asked her to present him a ceremony duly performed later on the

     quadrangle.  At the garden-party given the same afternoon in the

     beautiful grounds of St.  John's, where the indefatigable Mark put

     in an appearance, it was just the same--every one pressed forward

     for an exchange of greetings and a hand-shake.  On the following

     day, when the Oxford pageant took place, it was even more so.  "Mark

     Twain's Pageant," it was called by one of the papers.--[There was a

     dinner that evening at one of the colleges where, through mistaken

     information, Clemens wore black evening dress when he should have

     worn his scarlet gown.  "When I arrived," he said, "the place was

     just a conflagration--a kind of human prairie-fire.  I looked as out

     of place as a Presbyterian in hell."]





Clemens remained the guest of Robert Porter, whose house was besieged

with those desiring a glimpse of their new doctor of letters.  If he went

on the streets he was instantly recognized by some newsboy or cabman or

butcher-boy, and the word ran along like a cry of fire, while the crowds

assembled.



At a luncheon which the Porters gave him the proprietor of the catering

establishment garbed himself as a waiter in order to have the distinction

of serving Mark Twain, and declared it to have been the greatest moment

of his life.  This gentleman--for he was no less than that--was a man

well-read, and his tribute was not inspired by mere snobbery.  Clemens,

learning of the situation, later withdrew from the drawing-room for a

talk with him.



"I found," he said, "that he knew about ten or fifteen times as much

about my books as I knew about them myself."



Mark Twain viewed the Oxford pageant from a box with Rudyard Kipling and

Lord Curzon, and as they sat there some one passed up a folded slip of

paper, on the outside of which was written, "Not true."  Opening it, they

read:



          East is East and West is West,

          And never the Twain shall meet,



              --a quotation from Kipling.



They saw the panorama of history file by, a wonderful spectacle which

made Oxford a veritable dream of the Middle Ages.  The lanes and streets

and meadows were thronged with such costumes as Oxford had seen in its

long history.  History was realized in a manner which no one could

appreciate more fully than Mark Twain.



"I was particularly anxious to see this pageant," he said, "so that I

could get ideas for my funeral procession, which I am planning on a large

scale."



He was not disappointed; it was a realization to him of all the gorgeous

spectacles that his soul had dreamed from youth up.



He easily recognized the great characters of history as they passed by,

and he was recognized by them in turn; for they waved to him and bowed

and sometimes called his name, and when he went down out of his box, by

and by, Henry VIII. shook hands with him, a monarch he had always

detested, though he was full of friendship for him now; and Charles I.

took off his broad, velvet-plumed hat when they met, and Henry II.  and

Rosamond and Queen Elizabeth all saluted him--ghosts of the dead

centuries.









CCLIX



LONDON SOCIAL HONORS



We may not detail all the story of that English visit; even the path of

glory leads to monotony at last.  We may only mention a few more of the

great honors paid to our unofficial ambassador to the world: among them a

dinner given to members of the Savage Club by the Lord Mayor of London at

the Mansion House, also a dinner given by the American Society at the

Hotel Cecil in honor of the Fourth of July.  Clemens was the guest of

honor, and responded to the toast given by Ambassador Reid, "The Day we

Celebrate."  He made an amusing and not altogether unserious reference to

the American habit of exploding enthusiasm in dangerous fireworks.



To English colonists he gave credit for having established American

independence, and closed:



     We have, however, one Fourth of July which is absolutely our own,

     and that is the memorable proclamation issued forty years ago by

     that great American to whom Sir Mortimer Durand paid that just and

     beautiful tribute--Abraham Lincoln: a proclamation which not only

     set the black slave free, but set his white owner free also.  The

     owner was set free from that burden and offense, that sad condition

     of things where he was in so many instances a master and owner of

     slaves when he did not want to be.  That proclamation set them all

     free.  But even in this matter England led the way, for she had set

     her slaves free thirty years before, and we but followed her

     example.  We always follow her example, whether it is good or bad.

     And it was an English judge, a century ago, that issued that other

     great proclamation, and established that great principle, that when

     a slave, let him belong to whom he may, and let him come whence he

     may, sets his foot upon English soil his fetters, by that act, fall

     away and he is a free man before the world!



     It is true, then, that all our Fourths of July, and we have five of

     them, England gave to us, except that one that I have mentioned--the

     Emancipation Proclamation; and let us not forget that we owe this

     debt to her.  Let us be able to say to old England, this great-

     hearted, venerable old mother of the race, you gave us our Fourths

     of July, that we love and that we honor and revere; you gave us the

     Declaration of Independence, which is the charter of our rights;

     you, the venerable Mother of Liberties, the Champion and Protector

     of Anglo-Saxon Freedom--you gave us these things, and we do most

     honestly thank you for them.



It was at this dinner that he characteristically confessed, at last, to

having stolen the Ascot Cup.



He lunched one day with Bernard Shaw, and the two discussed the

philosophies in which they were mutually interested.  Shaw regarded

Clemens as a sociologist before all else, and gave it out with great

frankness that America had produced just two great geniuses--Edgar Allan

Poe and Mark Twain.  Later Shaw wrote him a note, in which he said:



I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your works

as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts

of Voltaire.  I tell you so because I am the author of a play in which a

priest says, "Telling the truth's the funniest joke in the world," a

piece of wisdom which you helped to teach me.



Clemens saw a great deal of Moberly Bell.  The two lunched and dined

privately together when there was opportunity, and often met at the

public gatherings.



The bare memorandum of the week following July Fourth will convey

something of Mark Twain's London activities:



     Friday, July 5.  Dined with Lord and Lady Portsmouth.



     Saturday, July 6.  Breakfasted at Lord Avebury's.  Lord Kelvin, Sir

     Charles Lyell, and Sir Archibald Geikie were there.  Sat 22 times

     for photos, 16 at Histed's.  Savage Club dinner in the evening.

     White suit.  Ascot Cup.



     Sunday, July 7.  Called on Lady Langattock and others.  Lunched with

     Sir Norman Lockyer.



     Monday, July 8.  Lunched with Plasmon directors at Bath Club.  Dined

     privately at C. F. Moberly Bell's.



     Tuesday, July 9.  Lunched at the House with Sir Benjamin Stone.

     Balfour and Komura were the other guests of honor.  Punch dinner in

     the evening.  Joy Agnew and the cartoon.



     Wednesday, July 10.  Went to Liverpool with Tay Pay.  Attended

     banquet in the Town Hall in the evening.



     Thursday, July 11.  Returned to London with Tay Pay.  Calls in the

     afternoon.



The Savage Club would inevitably want to entertain him on its own

account, and their dinner of July 6th was a handsome, affair.  He felt at

home with the Savages, and put on white for the only time publicly in

England.  He made them one of his reminiscent speeches, recalling his

association with them on his first visit to London, thirty-seven years

before.  Then he said:



     That is a long time ago, and as I had come into a very strange land,

     and was with friends, as I could see, that has always remained in my

     mind as a peculiarly blessed evening, since it brought me into

     contact with men of my own kind and my own feelings.  I am glad to

     be here, and to see you all, because it is very likely that I shall

     not see you again.  I have been received, as you know, in the most

     delightfully generous way in England ever since I came here.  It

     keeps me choked up all the time.  Everybody is so generous, and they

     do seem to give you such a hearty welcome.  Nobody in the world can

     appreciate it higher than I do.



The club gave him a surprise in the course of the evening.  A note was

sent to him accompanied by a parcel, which, when opened, proved to

contain a gilded plaster replica of the Ascot Gold Cup.  The note said:



     Dere Mark, i return the Cup.  You couldn't keep your mouth shut

     about it.  'Tis 2 pretty 2 melt, as you want me 2; nest time I work

     a pinch ile have a pard who don't make after-dinner speeches.



There was a postcript which said: "I changed the acorn atop for another

nut with my knife."  The acorn was, in fact, replaced by a well-modeled

head of Mark Twain.



So, after all, the Ascot Cup would be one of the trophies which he would

bear home with him across the Atlantic.



Probably the most valued of his London honors was the dinner given to him

by the staff of Punch.  Punch had already saluted him with a front-page

cartoon by Bernard Partridge, a picture in which the presiding genius of

that paper, Mr. Punch himself, presents him with a glass of the

patronymic beverage with the words, "Sir, I honor myself by drinking your

health.  Long life to you--and happiness--and perpetual youth!"



Mr. Agnew, chief editor; Linley Sambourne, Francis Burnand, Henry Lucy,

and others of the staff welcomed him at the Punch offices at 10 Bouverie

Street, in the historic Punch dining-room where Thackeray had sat, and

Douglas Jerrold, and so many of the great departed.  Mark Twain was the

first foreign visitor to be so honored--in fifty years the first stranger

to sit at the sacred board--a mighty distinction.  In the course of the

dinner they gave him a pretty surprise, when little joy Agnew presented

him with the original drawing of Partridge's cartoon.



Nothing could have appealed to him more, and the Punch dinner, with its

associations and that dainty presentation, remained apart in his memory

from all other feastings.



Clemens had intended to return early in July, but so much was happening

that he postponed his sailing until the 13th.  Before leaving America, he

had declined a dinner offered by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool.



Repeatedly urged to let Liverpool share in his visit, he had reconsidered

now, and on the day following the Punch dinner, on July loth, they

carried him, with T. P. O'Connor (Tay Pay) in the Prince of Wales's

special coach to Liverpool, to be guest of honor at the reception and

banquet which Lord Mayor Japp tendered him at the Town Hall.  Clemens was

too tired to be present while the courses were being served, but arrived

rested and fresh to respond to his toast.  Perhaps because it was his

farewell speech in England, he made that night the most effective address

of his four weeks' visit--one of the most effective of his whole career:

He began by some light reference to the Ascot Cup and the Dublin Jewels

and the State Regalia, and other disappearances that had been laid to his

charge, to amuse his hearers, and spoke at greater length than usual, and

with even greater variety.  Then laying all levity aside, he told them,

like the Queen of Sheba, all that was in his heart.



     .  .  .  Home is dear to us all, and now I am departing to my own

     home beyond the ocean.  Oxford has conferred upon me the highest

     honor that has ever fallen to my share of this life's prizes.  It is

     the very one I would have chosen, as outranking all and any others,

     the one more precious to me than any and all others within the gift

     of man or state.  During my four weeks' sojourn in England I have

     had another lofty honor, a continuous honor, an honor which has

     flowed serenely along, without halt or obstruction, through all

     these twenty-six days, a most moving and pulse-stirring honor--the

     heartfelt grip of the hand, and the welcome that does not descend

     from the pale-gray matter of the brain, but rushes up with the red

     blood from the heart.  It makes me proud and sometimes it makes me

     humble, too.  Many and many a year ago I gathered an incident from

     Dana's Two Years Before the Mast.  It was like this: There was a

     presumptuous little self-important skipper in a coasting sloop

     engaged in the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade, and he was

     always hailing every ship that came in sight.  He did it just to

     hear himself talk and to air his small grandeur.  One day a majestic

     Indiaman came plowing by with course on course of canvas towering

     into the sky, her decks and yards swarming with sailors, her hull

     burdened to the Plimsoll line with a rich freightage of precious

     spices, lading the breezes with gracious and mysterious odors of the

     Orient.  It was a noble spectacle, a sublime spectacle!  Of course

     the little skipper popped into the shrouds and squeaked out a hail,

     "Ship ahoy!  What ship is that?  And whence and whither?"  In a deep

     and thunderous bass the answer came back through the speaking-

     trumpet, "The Begum, of Bengal--142 days out from Canton--homeward

     bound!  What ship is that?"  Well, it just crushed that poor little

     creature's vanity flat, and he squeaked back most humbly, "Only the

     Mary Ann, fourteen hours out from Boston, bound for Kittery Point--

     with nothing to speak of!"  Oh, what an eloquent word that "only,"

     to express the depths of his humbleness!  That is just my case.

     During just one hour in the twenty-four--not more--I pause and

     reflect in the stillness of the night with the echoes of your

     English welcome still lingering in my ears, and then I am humble.

     Then I am properly meek, and for that little while I am only the

     Mary Ann, fourteen hours out, cargoed with vegetables and tinware;

     but during all the other twenty-three hours my vain self-complacency

     rides high on the white crests of your approval, and then I am a

     stately Indiaman, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas and

     laden with the kindest words that have ever been vouchsafed to any

     wandering alien in this world, I think; then my twenty-six fortunate

     days on this old mother soil seem to be multiplied by six, and I am

     the Begum, of Bengal, 142 days out from Canton--homeward bound!



He returned to London, and with one of his young acquaintances, an

American--he called her Francesca--paid many calls.  It took the

dreariness out of that social function to perform it in that way.  With a

list of the calls they were to make they drove forth each day to cancel

the social debt.  They paid calls in every walk of life.  His young

companion was privileged to see the inside of London homes of almost

every class, for he showed no partiality; he went to the homes of the

poor and the rich alike.  One day they visited the home of an old

bookkeeper whom he had known in 1872 as a clerk in a large establishment,

earning a salary of perhaps a pound a week, who now had risen mightily,

for he had become head bookkeeper in that establishment on a salary of

six pounds a week, and thought it great prosperity and fortune for his

old age.



He sailed on July 13th for home, besought to the last moment by a crowd

of autograph-seekers and reporters and photographers, and a multitude who

only wished to see him and to shout and wave good-by.  He was sailing

away from them for the last time.  They hoped he would make a speech, but

that would not have been possible.  To the reporters he gave a farewell

message: "It has been the most enjoyable holiday I have ever had, and I

am sorry the end of it has come.  I have met a hundred, old friends, and

I have made a hundred new ones.  It is a good kind of riches to have;

there is none better, I think."  And the London Tribune declared that

"the ship that bore him away had difficulty in getting clear, so thickly

was the water strewn with the bay-leaves of his triumph.  For Mark Twain

has triumphed, and in his all-too-brief stay of a month has done more for

the cause of the world's peace than will be accomplished by the Hague

Conference.  He has made the world laugh again."



His ship was the Minnetonka, and there were some little folks aboard to

be adopted as grandchildren.  On July 5th, in a fog, the Minnetonka

collided with the bark Sterling, and narrowly escaped sinking her.  On

the whole, however, the homeward way was clear, and the vessel reached

New York nearly a day in advance of their schedule.  Some ceremonies of

welcome had been prepared for him; but they were upset by the early

arrival, so that when he descended the gang-plank to his native soil only

a few who had received special information were there to greet him.  But

perhaps he did not notice it.  He seldom took account of the absence of

such things.  By early afternoon, however, the papers rang with the

announcement that Mark Twain was home again.



It is a sorrow to me that I was not at the dock to welcome him.  I had

been visiting in Elmira, and timed my return for the evening of the a 2d,

to be on hand the following morning, when the ship was due.  When I saw

the announcement that he had already arrived I called a greeting over the

telephone, and was told to come down and play billiards.  I confess I

went with a certain degree of awe, for one could not but be overwhelmed

with the echoes of the great splendor he had so recently achieved, and I

prepared to sit a good way off in silence, and hear something of the tale

of this returning conqueror; but when I arrived he was already in the

billiard-room knocking the balls about--his coat off, for it was a hot

night.  As I entered he said:



"Get your cue.  I have been inventing a new game."  And I think there

were scarcely ten words exchanged before we were at it.  The pageant was

over; the curtain was rung down.  Business was resumed at the old stand.









CCLX



MATTERS PSYCHIC AND OTHERWISE



He returned to Tuxedo and took up his dictations, and mingled freely with

the social life; but the contrast between his recent London experience

and his semi-retirement must have been very great.  When I visited him

now and then, he seemed to me lonely--not especially for companionship,

but rather for the life that lay behind him--the great career which in a

sense now had been completed since he had touched its highest point.

There was no billiard-table at Tuxedo, and he spoke expectantly of

getting back to town and the games there, also of the new home which was

then building in Redding, and which would have a billiard-room where we

could assemble daily--my own habitation being not far away.  Various

diversions were planned for Redding; among them was discussed a possible

school of philosophy, such as Hawthorne and Emerson and Alcott had

established at Concord.



He spoke quite freely of his English experiences, but usually of the more

amusing phases.  He almost never referred to the honors that had been

paid to him, yet he must have thought of them sometimes, and cherished

them, for it had been the greatest national tribute ever paid to a

private citizen; he must have known that in his heart.  He spoke

amusingly of his visit to Marie Corelli, in Stratford, and of the Holy

Grail incident, ending the latter by questioning--in words at least--all

psychic manifestations.  I said to him:



"But remember your own dream, Mr. Clemens, which presaged the death of

your brother."



He answered: "I ask nobody to believe that it ever happened.  To me it is

true; but it has no logical right to be true, and I do not expect belief

in it."  Which I thought a peculiar point of view, but on the whole

characteristic.



He was invited to be a special guest at the Jamestown Exposition on

Fulton Day, in September, and Mr. Rogers lent him his yacht in which to

make the trip.  It was a break in the summer's monotonies, and the

Jamestown honors must have reminded him of those in London.  When he

entered the auditorium where the services were to be held there was a

demonstration which lasted more than five minutes.  Every person in the

hall rose and cheered, waving handkerchiefs and umbrellas.  He made them

a brief, amusing talk on Fulton and other matters, then introduced

Admiral Harrington, who delivered a masterly address and was followed by

Martin W. Littleton, the real orator of the day.  Littleton acquitted

himself so notably that Mark Twain conceived for him a deep admiration,

and the two men quickly became friends.  They saw each other often during

the remainder of the Jamestown stay, and Clemens, learning that Littleton

lived just across Ninth Street from him in New York, invited him to come

over when he had an evening to spare and join the billiard games.



So it happened, somewhat later, when every one was back in town, Mr. and

Mrs. Littleton frequently came over for billiards, and the games became

three-handed with an audience--very pleasant games played in that way.

Clemens sometimes set himself up as umpire, and became critic and gave

advice, while Littleton and I played.  He had a favorite shot that he

frequently used himself and was always wanting us to try, which was to

drive the ball to the cushion at the beginning of the shot.



He played it with a good deal of success, and achieved unexpected results

with it.  He was even inspired to write a poem on the subject.



                    "CUSHION FIRST"



          When all your days are dark with doubt,

          And dying hope is at its worst;

          When all life's balls are scattered wide,

          With not a shot in sight, to left or right,

          Don't give it up;

          Advance your cue and shut your eyes,

          And take the cushion first.



The Harry Thaw trial was in progress just then, and Littleton was Thaw's

chief attorney.  It was most interesting to hear from him direct the

day's proceedings and his views of the situation and of Thaw.



Littleton and billiards recall a curious thing which happened one

afternoon.  I had been absent the evening before, and Littleton had been

over.  It was after luncheon now, and Clemens and I began preparing for

the customary games.  We were playing then a game with four balls, two

white and two red.  I began by placing the red balls on the table, and

then went around looking in the pockets for the two white cue-balls.

When I had made the round of the table I had found but one white ball.  I

thought I must have overlooked the other, and made the round again.  Then

I said:



"There is one white ball missing."



Clemens, to satisfy himself, also made the round of the pockets, and

said:



"It was here last night."  He felt in the pockets of the little white-

silk coat which he usually wore, thinking that he might unconsciously

have placed it there at the end of the last game, but his coat pockets

were empty.



He said: "I'll bet Littleton carried that ball home with him."



Then I suggested that near the end of the game it might have jumped off

the table, and I looked carefully under the furniture and in the various

corners, but without success.  There was another set of balls, and out of

it I selected a white one for our play, and the game began.  It went

along in the usual way, the balls constantly falling into the pockets,

and as constantly being replaced on the table.  This had continued for

perhaps half an hour, there being no pocket that had not been frequently

occupied and emptied during that time; but then it happened that Clemens

reached into the middle pocket, and taking out a white ball laid it in

place, whereupon we made the discovery that three white balls lay upon

the table.  The one just taken from the pocket was the missing ball.  We

looked at each other, both at first too astonished to say anything at

all.  No one had been in the room since we began to play, and at no time

during the play had there been more than two white balls in evidence,

though the pockets had been emptied at the end of each shot.  The pocket

from which the missing ball had been taken had been filled and emptied

again and again.  Then Clemens said:



"We must be dreaming."



We stopped the game for a while to discuss it, but we could devise no

material explanation.  I suggested the kobold--that mischievous invisible

which is supposed to play pranks by carrying off such things as pencils,

letters, and the like, and suddenly restoring them almost before one's

eyes.  Clemens, who, in spite of his material logic, was always a mystic

at heart, said:



"But that, so far as I know, has never happened to more than one person

at a time, and has been explained by a sort of temporary mental

blindness.  This thing has happened to two of us, and there can be no

question as to the positive absence of the object."



"How about dematerialization?"



"Yes, if one of us were a medium that might be considered an

explanation."



He went on to recall that Sir Alfred Russel Wallace had written of such

things, and cited instances which Wallace had recorded.  In the end he

said:



"Well, it happened, that's all we can say, and nobody can ever convince

me that it didn't."



We went on playing, and the ball remained solid and substantial ever

after, so far as I know.



I am reminded of two more or less related incidents of this period.

Clemens was, one morning, dictating something about his Christian Union

article concerning Mrs. Clemens's government of children, published in

1885.  I had discovered no copy of it among the materials, and he was

wishing very much that he could see one.  Somewhat later, as he was

walking down Fifth Avenue, the thought of this article and his desire for

it suddenly entered his mind.  Reaching the corner of Forty-second

Street, he stopped a moment to let a jam of vehicles pass.  As he did so

a stranger crossed the street, noticed him, and came dodging his way

through the blockade and thrust some clippings into his hand.



"Mr. Clemens," he said, "you don't know me, but here is something you may

wish to have.  I have been saving them for more than twenty years, and

this morning it occurred to me to send them to you.  I was going to mail

them from my office, but now I will give them to you," and with a word or

two he disappeared.  The clippings were from the Christian Union of 1885,

and were the much-desired article.  Clemens regarded it as a remarkable

case of mental telegraphy.



"Or, if it wasn't that," he said, "it was a most remarkable coincidence."



The other circumstance has been thought amusing.  I had gone to Redding

for a few days, and while there, one afternoon about five o'clock, fell

over a coal-scuttle and scarified myself a good deal between the ankle

and the knee.  I mention the hour because it seems important.  Next

morning I received a note, prompted by Mr. Clemens, in which he said:



Tell Paine I am sorry he fell and skinned his shin at five o'clock

yesterday afternoon.



I was naturally astonished, and immediately wrote:



I did fall and skin my shin at five o'clock yesterday afternoon, but how

did you find it out?



I followed the letter in person next day, and learned that at the same

hour on the same afternoon Clemens himself had fallen up the front steps

and, as he said, peeled off from his "starboard shin a ribbon of skin

three inches long."  The disaster was still uppermost in his mind at the

time of writing, and the suggestion of my own mishap had flashed out for

no particular reason.



Clemens was always having his fortune told, in one way or another, being

superstitious, as he readily confessed, though at times professing little

faith in these prognostics.  Once when a clairvoyant, of whom he had

never even heard, and whom he had reason to believe was ignorant of his

family history, told him more about it than he knew himself, besides

reading a list of names from a piece of paper which Clemens had concealed

in his vest pocket he came home deeply impressed.  The clairvoyant added

that he would probably live to a great age and die in a, foreign land--a

prophecy which did not comfort him.









CCLXI



MINOR EVENTS AND DIVERSIONS



Mark Twain was deeply interested during the autumn of 1907 in the

Children's Theater of the Jewish Educational Alliance, on the lower East

Side--a most worthy institution which ought to have survived.  A Miss

Alice M. Herts, who developed and directed it, gave her strength and

health to build up an institution through which the interest of the

children could be diverted from less fortunate amusements.  She had

interested a great body of Jewish children in the plays of Shakespeare,

and of more modern dramatists, and these they had performed from time to

time with great success.  The admission fee to the performance was ten

cents, and the theater was always crowded with other children--certainly

a better diversion for them than the amusements of the street, though of

course, as a business enterprise, the theater could not pay.  It required

patrons.  Miss Herts obtained permission to play "The Prince and the

Pauper," and Mark Twain agreed to become a sort of chief patron in using

his influence to bring together an audience who might be willing to

assist financially in this worthy work.



"The Prince and the Pauper" evening turned out a distinguished affair.

On the night of November 19, 1907, the hall of the Educational Alliance

was crowded with such an audience as perhaps never before assembled on

the East Side; the finance and the fashion of New York were there.  It

was a gala night for the little East Side performers.  Behind the curtain

they whispered to each other that they were to play before queens.  The

performance they gave was an astonishing one.  So fully did they enter

into the spirit of Tom Canty's rise to royalty that they seemed

absolutely to forget that they were lowly-born children of the Ghetto.

They had become little princesses and lords and maids-in-waiting, and

they moved through their pretty tinsel parts as if all their ornaments

were gems and their raiment cloth of gold.  There was no hesitation, no

awkwardness of speech or gesture, and they rose really to sublime heights

in the barn scene where the little Prince is in the hands of the mob.

Never in the history of the stage has there been assembled a mob more

wonderful than that.  These children knew mobs!  A mob to them was a

daily sight, and their reproduction of it was a thing to startle you with

its realism.  Never was it absurd; never was there a single note of

artificiality in it.  It was Hogarthian in its bigness.



Both Mark Twain and Miss Herts made brief addresses, and the audience

shouted approval of their words.  It seems a pity that such a project as

that must fail, and I do not know why it happened.  Wealthy men and women

manifested an interest; but there was some hitch somewhere, and the

Children's Theater exists to-day only as history.--[In a letter to a Mrs.

Amelia Dunne Hookway, who had conducted some children's plays at the

Howland School, Chicago, Mark Twain once wrote: "If I were going to

begin life over again I would have a children's theater and watch it, and

work for it, and see it grow and blossom and bear its rich moral and

intellectual fruitage; and I should get more pleasure and a saner and

healthier profit out of my vocation than I should ever be able to get out

of any other, constituted as I am.  Yes, you are easily the most

fortunate of women, I think."]



It was at a dinner at The Players--a small, private dinner given by Mr.

George C. Riggs-that I saw Edward L. Burlingame and Mark Twain for the

only time together.  They had often met during the forty-two years that

had passed since their long-ago Sandwich Island friendship; but only

incidentally, for Mr. Burlingame cared not much for great public

occasions, and as editor of Scribner's Magazine he had been somewhat out

of the line of Mark Twain's literary doings.



Howells was there, and Gen. Stewart L. Woodford, and David Bispham, John

Finley, Evan Shipman, Nicholas Biddle, and David Munro.  Clemens told

that night, for the first time, the story of General Miles and the three-

dollar dog, inventing it, I believe, as he went along, though for the

moment it certainly did sound like history.  He told it often after that,

and it has been included in his book of speeches.



Later, in the cab, he said:



"That was a mighty good dinner.  Riggs knows how to do that sort of

thing.  I enjoyed it ever so much.  Now we'll go home and play

billiards."



We began about eleven o'clock, and played until after midnight.  I

happened to be too strong for him, and he swore amazingly.  He vowed that

it was not a gentleman's game at all, that Riggs's wine had demoralized

the play.  But at the end, when we were putting up the cues, he said:



"Well, those were good games.  There is nothing like billiards after

all."



We did not play billiards on his birthday that year.  He went to the

theater in the afternoon; and it happened that, with Jesse Lynch

Williams, I attended the same performance--the "Toy-Maker of Nuremberg"--

written by Austin Strong.  It proved to be a charming play, and I could

see that Clemens was enjoying it.  He sat in a box next to the stage, and

the actors clearly were doing their very prettiest for his benefit.



When later I mentioned having seen him at the play, he spoke freely of

his pleasure in it.



"It is a fine, delicate piece of work," he said.  "I wish I could do such

things as that."



"I believe you are too literary for play-writing."



"Yes, no doubt.  There was never any question with the managers about my

plays.  They always said they wouldn't act.  Howells has come pretty near

to something once or twice.  I judge the trouble is that the literary man

is thinking of the style and quality of the thing, while the playwright

thinks only of how it will play.  One is thinking of how it will sound,

the other of how it will look."



"I suppose," I said, "the literary man should have a collaborator with a

genius for stage mechanism.  John Luther Long's exquisite plays would

hardly have been successful without David Belasco to stage them.  Belasco

cannot write a play himself, but in the matter of acting construction his

genius is supreme."



"Yes, so it is; it was Belasco who made it possible to play "The Prince

and the Pauper"--a collection of literary garbage before he got hold of

it."



Clemens attended few public functions now.  He was beset with

invitations, but he declined most of them.  He told the dog story one

night to the Pleiades Club, assembled at the Brevoort; but that was only

a step away, and we went in after the dining was ended and came away

before the exercises were concluded.



He also spoke at a banquet given to Andrew Carnegie--Saint Andrew, as he

called him--by the Engineers Club, and had his usual fun at the chief

guest's expense.



     I have been chief guest at a good many banquets myself, and I know

     what brother Andrew is feeling like now.  He has been receiving

     compliments and nothing but compliments, but he knows that there is

     another side to him that needs censure.



     I am going to vary the complimentary monotony.  While we have all

     been listening to the complimentary talk Mr. Carnegie's face has

     scintillated with fictitious innocence.  You'd think he never

     committed a crime in his life.  But he has.



     Look at his pestiferous simplified spelling.  Imagine the calamity

     on two sides of the ocean when he foisted his simplified spelling on

     the whole human race.  We've got it all now so that nobody could

     spell .  .  .  .



     If Mr. Carnegie had left spelling alone we wouldn't have had any

     spots on the sun, or any San Francisco quake, or any business

     depression.



     There, I trust he feels better now and that he has enjoyed my abuse

     more than he did his compliments.  And now that I think I have him

     smoothed down and feeling comfortable I just want to say one thing

     more--that his simplified spelling is all right enough, but, like

     chastity, you can carry it too far.



As he was about to go, Carnegie called his attention to the beautiful

souvenir bronze and gold-plated goblets that stood at each guest's plate.

Carnegie said:



"The club had those especially made at Tiffany's for this occasion.  They

cost ten dollars apiece."



Clemens sand: "Is that so?  Well, I only meant to take my own; but if

that's the case I'll load my cab with them."



We made an attempt to reform on the matter of billiards.  The continued

strain of late hours was doing neither of us any particular good.  More

than once I journeyed into the country on one errand and another, mainly

for rest; but a card saying that he was lonely and upset, for lack of his

evening games, quickly brought me back again.  It was my wish only to

serve him; it was a privilege and an honor to give him happiness.



Billiards, however, was not his only recreation just then.  He walked out

a good deal, and especially of a pleasant Sunday morning he liked the

stroll up Fifth Avenue.  Sometimes we went as high as Carnegie's, on

Ninety-second Street, and rode home on top of the electric stage--always

one of Mark Twain's favorite diversions.



From that high seat he liked to look down on the panorama of the streets,

and in that free, open air he could smoke without interference.  Oftener,

however, we turned at Fifty-ninth Street, walking both ways.



When it was pleasant we sometimes sat on a bench in Central Park; and

once he must have left a handkerchief there, for a few days later one of

his handkerchiefs came to him accompanied by a note.  Its finder, a Mr.

Lockwood, received a reward, for Mark Twain wrote him:



     There is more rejoicing in this house over that one handkerchief

     that was lost and is found again than over the ninety and nine that

     never went to the wash at all.  Heaven will reward you, I know it

     will.



On Sunday mornings the return walk would be timed for about the hour that

the churches would be dismissed.  On the first Sunday morning we had

started a little early, and I thoughtlessly suggested, when we reached

Fifty-ninth Street, that if we returned at once we would avoid the

throng.  He said, quietly:



"I like the throng."



So we rested in the Plaza Hotel until the appointed hour.  Men and women

noticed him, and came over to shake his hand.  The gigantic man in

uniform; in charge of the carriages at the door, came in for a word.  He

had opened carriages for Mr. Clemens at the Twenty-third Street station,

and now wanted to claim that honor.  I think he received the most cordial

welcome of any one who came.  I am sure he did.  It was Mark Twain's way

to warm to the man of the lower social rank.  He was never too busy,

never too preoccupied, to grasp the hand of such a man; to listen to his

story, and to say just the words that would make that man happy

remembering them.



We left the Plaza Hotel and presently were amid the throng of outpouring

congregations.  Of course he was the object on which every passing eye

turned; the presence to which every hat was lifted.  I realized that this

open and eagerly paid homage of the multitude was still dear to him, not

in any small and petty way, but as the tribute of a nation, the

expression of that affection which in his London and Liverpool speeches

he had declared to be the last and final and most precious reward that

any man can win, whether by character or achievement.  It was his final

harvest, and he had the courage to claim it--the aftermath of all his

years of honorable labor and noble living.









CCLXII



FROM MARK TWAIN's MAIL



If the reader has any curiosity as to some of the less usual letters

which a man of wide public note may inspire, perhaps he will find a

certain interest in a few selected from the thousands which yearly came

to Mark Twain.



For one thing, he was constantly receiving prescriptions and remedies

whenever the papers reported one of his bronchial or rheumatic attacks.

It is hardly necessary to quote examples of these, but only a form of his

occasional reply, which was likely to be in this wise:



     DEAR SIR [or MADAM],--I try every remedy sent to me.  I am now on

     No. 87.  Yours is 2,653.  I am looking forward to its beneficial

     results.



Of course a large number of the nostrums and palliatives offered were

preparations made by the wildest and longest-haired medical cranks.  One

of these sent an advertisement of a certain Elixir of Life, which was

guaranteed to cure everything--to "wash and cleanse the human molecules,

and so restore youth and preserve life everlasting."



Anonymous letters are not usually popular or to be encouraged, but Mark

Twain had an especial weakness for compliments that came in that way.

They were not mercenary compliments.  The writer had nothing to gain.

Two such letters follow--both written in England just at the time of his

return.



     MARK TWAIN.



     DEAR SIR,--Please accept a poor widow's good-by and kindest wishes.

     I have had some of your books sent to me; have enjoyed them very

     much--only wish I could afford to buy some.



     I should very much like to have seen you.  I have many photos of you

     which I have cut from several papers which I read.  I have one where

     you are writing in bed, which I cut from the Daily News.  Like

     myself, you believe in lots of sleep and rest.  I am 70 and I find I

     need plenty.  Please forgive the liberty I have taken in writing to

     you.  If I can't come to your funeral may we meet beyond the river.



     May God guard you, is the wish of a lonely old widow.

                         Yours sincerely,





The other letter also tells its own story:



     DEAR, KIND MARK TWAIN,--For years I have wanted to write and thank

     you for the comfort you were to me once, only I never quite knew

     where you were, and besides I did not want to bother you; but to-day

     I was told by some one who saw you going into the lift at the Savoy

     that you looked sad and I thought it might cheer you a little tiny

     bit to hear how you kept a poor lonely girl from ruining her eyes

     with crying every night for long months.



     Ten years ago I had to leave home and earn my living as a governess

     and Fate sent me to spend a winter with a very dull old country

     family in the depths of Staffordshire.  According to the genial

     English custom, after my five charges had gone to bed, I took my

     evening meal alone in the school-room, where "Henry Tudor had supped

     the night before Bosworth," and there I had to stay without a soul

     to speak to till I went to bed.  At first I used to cry every night,

     but a friend sent me a copy of your Huckleberry Finn and I never

     cried any more.  I kept him handy under the copy-books and maps, and

     when Henry Tudor commenced to stretch out his chilly hands toward me

     I grabbed my dear Huck and he never once failed me; I opened him at

     random and in two minutes I was in another world.  That's why I am

     so grateful to you and so fond of you, and I thought you might like

     to know; for it is yourself that has the kind heart, as is easily

     seen from the way you wrote about the poor old nigger.  I am a

     stenographer now and live at home, but I shall never forget how you

     helped me.  God bless you and spare you long to those you are dear

     to.



A letter which came to him soon after his return from England contained a

clipping which reported the good work done by Christian missionaries in

the Congo, especially among natives afflicted by the terrible sleeping

sickness.  The letter itself consisted merely of a line, which said:



     Won't you give your friends, the missionaries, a good mark for this?



The writer's name was signed, and Mark Twain answered:



     In China the missionaries are not wanted, & so they ought to be

     decent & go away.  But I have not heard that in the Congo the

     missionary servants of God are unwelcome to the native.



     Evidently those missionaries axe pitying, compassionate, kind.  How

     it would improve God to take a lesson from them!  He invented &

     distributed the germ of that awful disease among those helpless,

     poor savages, & now He sits with His elbows on the balusters & looks

     down & enjoys this wanton crime.  Confidently, & between you & me-

     well, never mind, I might get struck by lightning if I said it.



     Those are good and kindly men, those missionaries, but they are a

     measureless satire upon their Master.



To which the writer answered:



     O wicked Mr. Clemens!  I have to ask Saint Joan of Arc to pray for

     you; then one of these days, when we all stand before the Golden

     Gates and we no longer "see through a glass darkly and know only in

     part," there will be a struggle at the heavenly portals between Joan

     of Arc and St. Peter, but your blessed Joan will conquer and she'll

     lead Mr. Clemens through the gates of pearl and apologize and plead

     for him.



Of the letters that irritated him, perhaps the following is as fair a

sample as any, and it has additional interest in its sequel.



     DEAR SIR,--I have written a book--naturally--which fact, however,

     since I am not your enemy, need give you no occasion to rejoice.

     Nor need you grieve, though I am sending you a copy.  If I knew of

     any way of compelling you to read it I would do so, but unless the

     first few pages have that effect I can do nothing.  Try the first

     few pages.  I have done a great deal more than that with your books,

     so perhaps you owe me some thing--say ten pages.  If after that

     attempt you put it aside I shall be sorry--for you.



     I am afraid that the above looks flippant--but think of the

     twitterings of the soul of him who brings in his hand an unbidden

     book, written by himself.  To such a one much is due in the way of

     indulgence.  Will you remember that?  Have you forgotten early

     twitterings of your own?



In a memorandum made on this letter Mark Twain wrote:



     Another one of those peculiarly depressing letters--a letter cast in

     artificially humorous form, whilst no art could make the subject

     humorous--to me.



Commenting further, he said:



     As I have remarked before about one thousand times the coat of arms

     of the human race ought to consist of a man with an ax on his

     shoulder proceeding toward a grindstone, or it ought to represent

     the several members of the human race holding out the hat to one

     another; for we are all beggars, each in his own way.  One beggar is

     too proud to beg for pennies, but will beg for an introduction into

     society; another does not care for society, but he wants a

     postmastership; another will inveigle a lawyer into conversation and

     then sponge on him for free advice.  The man who wouldn't do any of

     these things will beg for the Presidency.  Each admires his own

     dignity and greatly guards it, but in his opinion the others haven't

     any.



     Mendicancy is a matter of taste and temperament, no doubt, but no

     human being is without some form of it.  I know my own form, you

     know yours.  Let us conceal them from view and abuse the others.

     There is no man so poor but what at intervals some man comes to him

     with an ax to grind.  By and by the ax's aspect becomes familiar to

     the proprietor of the grindstone.  He perceives that it is the same

     old ax.  If you are a governor you know that the stranger wants an

     office.  The first time he arrives you are deceived; he pours out

     such noble praises of you and your political record that you are

     moved to tears; there's a lump in your throat and you are thankful

     that you have lived for this happiness.  Then the stranger discloses

     his ax, and you are ashamed of yourself and your race.  Six

     repetitions will cure you.  After that you interrupt the compliments

     and say, "Yes, yes, that's all right; never mind about that.  What

     is it you want?"



     But you and I are in the business ourselves.  Every now and then we

     carry our ax to somebody and ask a whet.  I don't carry mine to

     strangers--I draw the line there; perhaps that is your way.  This is

     bound to set us up on a high and holy pinnacle and make us look down

     in cold rebuke on persons who carry their axes to strangers.



     I do not know how to answer that stranger's letter.  I wish he had

     spared me.  Never mind about him--I am thinking about myself.  I

     wish he had spared me.  The book has not arrived yet; but no matter,

     I am prejudiced against it.



It was a few days later that he added:



     I wrote to that man.  I fell back upon the old Overworked, polite

     lie, and thanked him for his book and said I was promising myself

     the pleasure of reading it.  Of course that set me free; I was not

     obliged to read it now at all, and, being free, my prejudice was

     gone, and as soon as the book came I opened it to see what it was

     like.  I was not able to put it down until I had finished.  It was

     an embarrassing thing to have to write to that man and confess that

     fact, but I had to do it.  That first letter was merely a lie.  Do

     you think I wrote the second one to give that man pleasure?  Well, I

     did, but it was second-hand pleasure.  I wrote it first to give

     myself comfort, to make myself forget the original lie.



Mark Twain's interest was once aroused by the following:



     DEAR SIR,--I have had more or less of your works on my shelves for

     years, and believe I have practically a complete set now.  This is

     nothing unusual, of course, but I presume it will seem to you

     unusual for any one to keep books constantly in sight which the

     owner regrets ever having read.



     Every time my glance rests on the books I do regret having read

     them, and do not hesitate to tell you so to your face, and care not

     who may know my feelings.  You, who must be kept busy attending to

     your correspondence, will probably pay little or no attention to

     this small fraction of it, yet my reasons, I believe, are sound and

     are probably shared by more people than you are aware of.



     Probably you will not read far enough through this to see who has

     signed it, but if you do, and care to know why I wish I had left

     your work unread, I will tell you as briefly as possible if you will

     ask me.

                                        GEORGE B.  LAUDER.



Clemens did not answer the letter, but put it in his pocket, perhaps

intending to do so, and a few days later, in Boston, when a reporter

called, he happened to remember it.  The reporter asked permission to

print the queer document, and it appeared in his Mark Twain interview

next morning.  A few days later the writer of it sent a second letter,

this time explaining:



     MY DEAR SIR,--I saw in to-day's paper a copy of the letter which I

     wrote you October 26th.



     I have read and re-read your works until I can almost recall some of

     them word for word.  My familiarity with them is a constant source

     of pleasure which I would not have missed, and therefore the regret

     which I have expressed is more than offset by thankfulness.



     Believe me, the regret which I feel for having read your works is

     entirely due to the unalterable fact that I can never again have the

     pleasure of reading them for the first time.



                         Your sincere admirer,

                                        GEORGE B.  LADDER.



Mark Twain promptly replied this time:

     DEAR SIR, You fooled me completely; I didn't divine what the letter

     was concealing, neither did the newspaper men, so you are a very

     competent deceiver.

                              Truly yours,

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.



It was about the end of 1907 that the new St. Louis Harbor boat, was

completed.  The editor of the St. Louis Republic reported that it has

been christened "Mark Twain," and asked for a word of comment.  Clemens

sent this line:



     May my namesake follow in my righteous footsteps, then neither of us

     will need any fire insurance.









CCLXIII



SOME LITERARY LUNCHEONS



Howells, in his book, refers to the Human Race Luncheon Club, which

Clemens once organized for the particular purpose of damning the species

in concert.  It was to consist, beside Clemens himself, of Howells,

Colonel Harvey, and Peter Dunne; but it somehow never happened that even

this small membership could be assembled while the idea was still fresh,

and therefore potent.



Out of it, however, grew a number of those private social gatherings

which Clemens so dearly loved--small luncheons and dinners given at his

own table.  The first of these came along toward the end of 1907, when

Howells was planning to spend the winter in Italy.



"Howells is going away," he said, "and I should like to give him a stag-

party.  We'll enlarge the Human Race Club for the occasion."



So Howells, Colonel Harvey, Martin Littleton, Augustus Thomas, Robert

Porter, and Paderewski were invited.  Paderewski was unable to come, and

seven in all assembled.



Howells was first to arrive.



"Here comes Howells," Clemens said.  "Old Howells a thousand years old."



But Howells didn't look it.  His face was full of good-nature and

apparent health, and he was by no means venerable, either in speech or

action.  Thomas, Porter, Littleton, and Harvey drifted in.  Cocktails

were served and luncheon was announced.



Claude, the butler, had prepared the table with fine artistry--its center

a mass of roses.  There was to be no woman in the neighborhood--Clemens

announced this fact as a sort of warrant for general freedom of

expression.



Thomas's play, "The Witching Hour," was then at the height of its great

acceptance, and the talk naturally began there.  Thomas told something of

the difficulty which he found in being able to convince a manager that it

would succeed, and declared it to be his own favorite work.  I believe

there was no dissenting opinion as to its artistic value, or concerning

its purpose and psychology, though these had been the stumbling-blocks

from a managerial point of view.



When the subject was concluded, and there had come a lull, Colonel

Harvey, who was seated at Clemens's left, said:



"Uncle Mark"--he often called him that--"Major Leigh handed me a report

of the year's sales just as I was leaving.  It shows your royalty returns

this year to be very close to fifty thousand dollars.  I don't believe

there is another such return from old books on record."



This was said in an undertone, to Clemens only, but was overheard by one

or two of those who sat nearest.  Clemens was not unwilling to repeat it

for the benefit of all, and did so.  Howells said:



"A statement like that arouses my basest passions.  The books are no

good; it's just the advertising they get."



Clemens said: "Yes, my contract compels the publisher to advertise.  It

costs them two hundred dollars every time they leave the advertisement

out of the magazines."



"And three hundred every time we put it in," said Harvey.  "We often

debate whether it is more profitable to put in the advertisement or to

leave it out."



The talk switched back to plays and acting.  Thomas recalled an incident

of Beerbohm Tree's performance of "Hamlet."  W. S. Gilbert, of light-

opera celebrity, was present at a performance, and when the play ended

Mrs. Tree hurried over to him and said:



"Oh, Mr. Gilbert, what did you think of Mr. Tree's rendition of Hamlet?"

"Remarkable," said Gilbert.  "Funny without being vulgar."



It was with such idle tales and talk-play that the afternoon passed.  Not

much of it all is left to me, but I remember Howells saying, "Did it ever

occur to you that the newspapers abolished hell?  Well, they did--it was

never done by the church.  There was a consensus of newspaper opinion

that the old hell with its lake of fire and brimstone was an antiquated

institution; in fact a dead letter."  And again, "I was coming down

Broadway last night, and I stopped to look at one of the street-venders

selling those little toy fighting roosters.  It was a bleak, desolate

evening; nobody was buying anything, and as he pulled the string and kept

those little roosters dancing and fighting his remarks grew more and more

cheerless and sardonic.



"'Japanese game chickens,' he said; 'pretty toys, amuse the children with

their antics.  Child of three can operate it.  Take them home for

Christmas.  Chicken-fight at your own fireside.' I tried to catch his eye

to show him that I understood his desolation and sorrow, but it was no

use.  He went on dancing his toy chickens, and saying, over and over,

'Chicken-fight at your own fireside.'"



The luncheon over, we wandered back into the drawing-room, and presently

all left but Colonel Harvey.  Clemens and the Colonel went up to the

billiard-room and engaged in a game of cushion caroms, at twenty-five

cents a game.  I was umpire and stakeholder, and it was a most

interesting occupation, for the series was close and a very cheerful one.

It ended the day much to Mark Twain's satisfaction, for he was oftenest

winner.  That evening he said:



"We will repeat that luncheon; we ought to repeat it once a month.

Howells will be gone, but we must have the others.  We cannot have a

thing like that too often."



There was, in fact, a second stag-luncheon very soon after, at which

George Riggs was present and that rare Irish musician, Denis O'Sullivan.

It was another choice afternoon, with a mystical quality which came of

the music made by O'Sullivan on some Hindu reeds-pipes of Pan.  But we

shall have more of O'Sullivan presently--all too little, for his days

were few and fleeting.



Howells could not get away just yet.  Colonel Harvey, who, like James

Osgood, would not fail to find excuse for entertainment, chartered two

drawing-room cars, and with Mrs. Harvey took a party of fifty-five or

sixty congenial men and women to Lakewood for a good-by luncheon to

Howells.  It was a day borrowed from June, warm and beautiful.



The trip down was a sort of reception.  Most of the guests were

acquainted, but many of them did not often meet.  There was constant

visiting back and forth the full length of the two coaches.  Denis

O'Sullivan was among the guests.  He looked in the bloom of health, and

he had his pipes and played his mystic airs; then he brought out the tin-

whistle of Ireland, and blew such rollicking melodies as capering fairies

invented a long time ago.  This was on the train going down.



There was a brief program following the light-hearted feasting--an

informal program fitting to that sunny day.  It opened with some

recitations by Miss Kitty Cheatham; then Colonel Harvey introduced

Howells, with mention of his coming journey.  As a rule, Howells does not

enjoy speaking.  He is willing to read an address on occasion, but he has

owned that the prospect of talking without his notes terrifies him.  This

time, however, there was no reluctance, though he had prepared no speech.

He was among friends.  He looked even happy when he got on his feet, and

he spoke like a happy man.  He talked about Mark Twain.  It was all

delicate, delicious chaffing which showed Howells at his very best--all

too short for his listeners.



Clemens, replying, returned the chaff, and rambled amusingly among his

fancies, closing with a few beautiful words of "Godspeed and safe return"

to his old comrade and friend.



Then once more came Denis and his pipes.  No one will ever forget his

part of the program.  The little samples we had heard on the train were

expanded and multiplied and elaborated in a way that fairly swept his

listeners out of themselves into that land where perhaps Denis himself

wanders playing now; for a month later, strong and lusty and beautiful as

he seemed that day, he suddenly vanished from among us and his reeds were

silent.  It never occurred to us then that Denis could die; and as he

finished each melody and song there was a shout for a repetition, and I

think we could have sat there and let the days and years slip away

unheeded, for time is banished by music like that, and one wonders if it

might not even divert death.



It was dark when we crossed the river homeward; the myriad lights from

heaven-climbing windows made an enchanted city in the sky.  The evening,

like the day, was warm, and some of the party.  left the ferry-cabin to

lean over and watch the magic spectacle, the like of which is not to be

found elsewhere on the earth.











CCLXIV



"CAPTAIN STORMFIELD" IN PRINT



During the forty years or so that had elapsed since the publication of

the "Gates Ajar" and the perpetration of Mark Twain's intended burlesque,

built on Captain Ned Wakeman's dream, the Christian religion in its more

orthodox aspects had undergone some large modifications.  It was no

longer regarded as dangerous to speak lightly of hell, or even to suggest

that the golden streets and jeweled architecture of the sky might be

regarded as symbols of hope rather than exhibits of actual bullion and

lapidary construction.  Clemens re-read his extravaganza, Captain

Stoymfields Visit to Heaven, gave it a modernizing touch here and there,

and handed it to his publishers, who must have agreed that it was no

longer dangerous, for it was promptly accepted and appeared in the

December and January numbers (1907-8) of Harper's Magazine, and was also

issued as a small book.  If there were any readers who still found it

blasphemous, or even irreverent, they did not say so; the letters that

came--and they were a good many--expressed enjoyment and approval, also

(some of them) a good deal of satisfaction that Mark Twain "had returned

to his earlier form."



The publication of this story recalled to Clemens's mind another heresy

somewhat similar which he had written during the winter of 1891 and 1892

in Berlin.  This was a dream of his own, in which he had set out on a

train with the evangelist Sam Jones and the Archbishop of Canterbury for

the other world.  He had noticed that his ticket was to a different

destination than the Archbishop's, and so, when the prelate nodded and

finally went to sleep, he changed the tickets in their hats with

disturbing results.  Clemens thought a good deal of this fancy when he

wrote it, and when Mrs. Clemens had refused to allow it to be printed he

had laboriously translated it into German, with some idea of publishing

it surreptitiously; but his conscience had been too much for him.  He had

confessed, and even the German version had been suppressed.



Clemens often allowed his fancy to play with the idea of the orthodox

heaven, its curiosities of architecture, and its employments of

continuous prayer, psalm-singing, and harpistry.



"What a childish notion it was," he said, "and how curious that only a

little while ago human beings were so willing to accept such fragile

evidences about a place of so much importance.  If we should find

somewhere to-day an ancient book containing an account of a beautiful and

blooming tropical Paradise secreted in the center of eternal icebergs--an

account written by men who did not even claim to have seen it themselves

--no geographical society on earth would take any stock in that book, yet

that account would be quite as authentic as any we have of heaven.  If

God has such a place prepared for us, and really wanted us to know it, He

could have found some better way than a book so liable to alterations and

misinterpretation.  God has had no trouble to prove to man the laws of

the constellations and the construction of the world, and such things as

that, none of which agree with His so-called book.  As to a hereafter, we

have not the slightest evidence that there is any--no evidence that

appeals to logic and reason.  I have never seen what to me seemed an atom

of proof that there is a future life."



Then, after a long pause, he added:



"And yet--I am strongly inclined to expect one."









CCLXV



LOTOS CLUB HONORS



It was on January 11, 1908, that Mark Twain was given his last great

banquet by the Lotos Club.  The club was about to move again, into

splendid new quarters, and it wished to entertain him once more in its

old rooms.



He wore white, and amid the throng of black-clad men was like a white

moth among a horde of beetles.  The room fairly swarmed with them, and

they seemed likely to overwhelm him.



President Lawrence was toast-master of the evening, and he ended his

customary address by introducing Robert Porter, who had been Mark Twain's

host at Oxford.  Porter told something of the great Oxford week, and

ended by introducing Mark Twain.  It had been expected that Clemens would

tell of his London experiences.  Instead of doing this, he said he had

started a new kind of collection, a collection of compliments.  He had

picked up a number of valuable ones abroad and some at home.  He read

selections from them, and kept the company going with cheers and

merriment until just before the close of his speech.  Then he repeated,

in his most impressive manner, that stately conclusion of his Liverpool

speech, and the room became still and the eyes of his hearers grew dim.

It may have been even more moving than when originally given, for now the

closing words, "homeward bound," had only the deeper meaning.



Dr. John MacArthur followed with a speech that was as good a sermon as

any he ever delivered, and closed it by saying:



"I do not want men to prepare for heaven, but to prepare to remain on

earth, and it is such men as Mark Twain who make other men not fit to

die, but fit to live."



Andrew Carnegie also spoke, and Colonel Harvey, and as the speaking ended

Robert Porter stepped up behind Clemens and threw over his shoulders the

scarlet Oxford robe which had been surreptitiously brought, and placed

the mortar-board cap upon his head, while the diners vociferated their

approval.  Clemens was quite calm.



"I like this," he said, when the noise had subsided.  "I like its

splendid color.  I would dress that way all the time, if I dared."



In the cab going home I mentioned the success of his speech, how well it

had been received.



"Yes," he said; "but then I have the advantage of knowing now that I am

likely to be favorably received, whatever I say.  I know that my

audiences are warm and responseful.  It is an immense advantage to feel

that.  There are cold places in almost every speech, and if your audience

notices them and becomes cool, you get a chill yourself in those zones,

and it is hard to warm up again.  Perhaps there haven't been so many

lately; but I have been acquainted with them more than once."  And then I

could not help remembering that deadly Whittier birthday speech of more

than thirty years before--that bleak, arctic experience from beginning to

end.



"We have just time for four games," he said, as we reached the billiard-

room; but there was no sign of stopping when the four games were over.

We were winning alternately, and neither noted the time.  I was leaving

by an early train, and was willing to play all night.  The milk-wagons

were rattling outside when he said:



"Well, perhaps we'd better quit now.  It seems pretty early, though."  I

looked at my watch.  It was quarter to four, and we said good night.









CCLXVI



A WINTER IN BERMUDA



Edmund Clarence Stedman died suddenly at his desk, January 18, 1908, and

Clemens, in response to telegrams, sent this message:



I do not wish to talk about it.  He was a valued friend from days that

date back thirty-five years.  His loss stuns me and unfits me to speak.



He recalled the New England dinners which he used to attend, and where he

had often met Stedman.



"Those were great affairs," he said.  "They began early, and they ended

early.  I used to go down from Hartford with the feeling that it wasn't

an all-night supper, and that it was going to be an enjoyable time.

Choate and Depew and Stedman were in their prime then--we were all young

men together.  Their speeches were always worth listening to.  Stedman

was a prominent figure there.  There don't seem to be any such men now--

or any such occasions."



Stedman was one of the last of the old literary group.  Aldrich had died

the year before.  Howells and Clemens were the lingering "last leaves."



Clemens gave some further luncheon entertainments to his friends, and

added the feature of "doe" luncheons--pretty affairs where, with Clara

Clemens as hostess, were entertained a group of brilliant women, such as

Mrs. Kate Douglas Riggs, Geraldine Farrax, Mrs. Robert Collier, Mrs.

Frank Doubleday, and others.  I cannot report those luncheons, for I was

not present, and the drift of the proceedings came to me later in too

fragmentary a form to be used as history; but I gathered from Clemens

himself that he had done all of the talking, and I think they must have

been very pleasant afternoons.  Among the acknowledgments that followed

one of these affairs is this characteristic word-play from Mrs. Riggs:



     N. B.--A lady who is invited to and attends a doe luncheon is, of

     course, a doe.  The question is, if she attends two doe luncheons in

     succession is she a doe-doe?  If so is she extinct and can never

     attend a third?



Luncheons and billiards, however, failed to give sufficient brightness to

the dull winter days, or to insure him against an impending bronchial

attack, and toward the end of January he sailed away to Bermuda, where

skies were bluer and roadsides gay with bloom.  His sojourn was brief

this time, but long enough to cure him, he said, and he came back full of

happiness.  He had been driving about over the island with a newly

adopted granddaughter, little Margaret Blackmer, whom he had met one

morning in the hotel dining-room.  A part of his dictated story will

convey here this pretty experience.



     My first day in Bermuda paid a dividend--in fact a double dividend:

     it broke the back of my cold and it added a jewel to my collection.

     As I entered the breakfast-room the first object I saw in that

     spacious and far-reaching place was a little girl seated solitary at

     a table for two.  I bent down over her and patted her cheek and

     said:



     "I don't seem to remember your name; what is it?"



     By the sparkle in her brown eyes it amused her.  She said:



     "Why, you've never known it, Mr. Clemens, because you've never seen

     me before."



     "Why, that is true, now that I come to think; it certainly is true,

     and it must be one of the reasons why I have forgotten your name.

     But I remember it now perfectly--it's Mary."



     She was amused again; amused beyond smiling; amused to a chuckle,

     and she said:



     "Oh no, it isn't; it's Margaret."



     I feigned to be ashamed of my mistake and said:



     "Ah, well, I couldn't have made that mistake a few years ago; but I

     am old, and one of age's earliest infirmities is a damaged memory;

     but I am clearer now--clearer-headed--it all comes back to me just

     as if it were yesterday.  It's Margaret Holcomb."



     She was surprised into a laugh this time, the rippling laugh that a

     happy brook makes when it breaks out of the shade into the sunshine,

     and she said:



     "Oh, you are wrong again; you don't get anything right.  It isn't

     Holcomb, it's Blackmer."



     I was ashamed again, and confessed it; then:



     "How old are you, dear?"



     "Twelve; New-Year's.  Twelve and a month."



     We were close comrades-inseparables, in fact-for eight days.  Every

     day we made pedestrian excursions--called them that anyway, and

     honestly they were intended for that, and that is what they would

     have been but for the persistent intrusion of a gray and grave and

     rough-coated donkey by the name of Maud.  Maud was four feet long;

     she was mounted on four slender little stilts, and had ears that

     doubled her altitude when she stood them up straight.  Her tender

     was a little bit of a cart with seat room for two in it, and you

     could fall out of it without knowing it, it was so close to the

     ground.  This battery was in command of a nice, grave, dignified,

     gentlefaced little black boy whose age was about twelve, and whose

     name, for some reason or other, was Reginald.  Reginald and Maud--I

     shall not easily forget those names, nor the combination they stood

     for.  The trips going and coming were five or six miles, and it

     generally took us three hours to make it.  This was because Maud set

     the pace.  Whenever she detected an ascending grade she respected

     it; she stopped and said with her ears:



     "This is getting unsatisfactory.  We will camp here."



     The whole idea of these excursions was that Margaret and I should

     employ them for the gathering of strength, by walking, yet we were

     oftener in the cart than out of it.  She drove and I superintended.

     In the course of the first excursions I found a beautiful little

     shell on the beach at Spanish Point; its hinge was old and dry, and

     the two halves came apart in my hand.  I gave one of them to

     Margaret and said:



     "Now dear, sometime or other in the future I shall run across you

     somewhere, and it may turn out that it is not you at all, but will

     be some girl that only resembles you.  I shall be saying to myself

     'I know that this is a Margaret by the look of her, but I don't know

     for sure whether this is my Margaret or somebody else's'; but, no

     matter, I can soon find out, for I shall take my half shell out of

     my pocket and say, 'I think you are my Margaret, but I am not

     certain; if you are my Margaret you can produce the other half of

     this shell.'"



     Next morning when I entered the breakfast-room and saw the child I

     approached and scanned her searchingly all over, then said, sadly:



     "No, I am mistaken; it looks like my Margaret,--but it isn't, and I

     am so sorry.  I shall go away and cry now."



     Her eyes danced triumphantly, and she cried out:



     "No, you don't have to.  There!" and she fetched out the identifying

     shell.



     I was beside myself with gratitude and joyful surprise, and revealed

     it from every pore.  The child could not have enjoyed this thrilling

     little drama more if we had been playing it on the stage.  Many

     times afterward she played the chief part herself, pretending to be

     in doubt as to my identity and challenging me to produce my half of

     the shell.  She was always hoping to catch me without it, but I

     always defeated that game--wherefore she came to recognize at last

     that I was not only old, but very smart.



Sometimes, when they were not walking or driving, they sat on the

veranda, and he prepared history-lessons for little Margaret by making

grotesque figures on cards with numerous legs and arms and other

fantastic symbols end features to fix the length of some king's reign.

For William the Conqueror, for instance, who reigned twenty-one years, he

drew a figure of eleven legs and ten arms.  It was the proper method of

impressing facts upon the mind of a child.  It carried him back to those

days at Elmira when he had arranged for his own little girls the game of

kings.  A Miss Wallace, a friend of Margaret's, and usually one of the

pedestrian party, has written a dainty book of those Bermudian days.

--[Mark Twain and the Happy Islands, by Elizabeth Wallace.]



Miss Wallace says:



     Margaret felt for him the deep affection that children have for an

     older person who understands them and treats them with respect.  Mr.

     Clemens never talked down to her, but considered her opinions with a

     sweet dignity.



There were some pretty sequels to the shell incident.  After Mark Twain

had returned to New York, and Margaret was there, she called one day with

her mother, and sent up her card.  He sent back word, saying:



     "I seem to remember the name; but if this is really the person whom

     I think it is she can identify herself by a certain shell I once

     gave her, of which I have the other half.  If the two halves fit, I

     shall know that this is the same little Margaret that I remember."



The message went down, and the other half of the shell was promptly sent

up.  Mark Twain had the two half-shells incised firmly in gold, and one

of these he wore on his watch-fob, and sent the other to Margaret.



He afterward corresponded with Margaret, and once wrote her:



     I'm already making mistakes.  When I was in New York, six weeks ago,

     I was on a corner of Fifth Avenue and I saw a small girl--not a big

     one--start across from the opposite corner, and I exclaimed to

     myself joyfully, "That is certainly my Margaret!" so I rushed to

     meet her.  But as she came nearer I began to doubt, and said to

     myself, "It's a Margaret--that is plain enough--but I'm afraid it is

     somebody else's."  So when I was passing her I held my shell so she

     couldn't help but see it.  Dear, she only glanced at it and passed

     on!  I wondered if she could have overlooked it.  It seemed best to

     find out; so I turned and followed and caught up with her, and said,

     deferentially; "Dear Miss, I already know your first name by the

     look of you, but would you mind telling me your other one?" She was

     vexed and said pretty sharply, "It's Douglas, if you're so anxious

     to know.  I know your name by your looks, and I'd advise you to shut

     yourself up with your pen and ink and write some more rubbish.  I am

     surprised that they allow you to run' at large.  You are likely to

     get run over by a baby-carriage any time.  Run along now and don't

     let the cows bite you."



     What an idea!  There aren't any cows in Fifth Avenue.  But I didn't

     smile; I didn't let on to perceive how uncultured she was.  She was

     from the country, of course, and didn't know what a comical blunder.

     she was making.



Mr. Rogers's health was very poor that winter, and Clemens urged him to

try Bermuda, and offered to go back with him; so they sailed away to the

summer island, and though Margaret was gone, there was other entertaining

company--other granddaughters to be adopted, and new friends and old

friends, and diversions of many sorts.  Mr. Rogers's son-in-law, William

Evarts Benjamin, came down and joined the little group.  It was one of

Mark Twain's real holidays.  Mr. Rogers's health improved rapidly, and

Mark Twain was in fine trim.  To Mrs. Rogers, at the end of the first

week, he wrote:



     DEAR MRS. ROGERS, He is getting along splendidly!  This was the very

     place for him.  He enjoys himself & is as quarrelsome as a cat.



     But he will get a backset if Benjamin goes home.  Benjamin is the

     brightest man in these regions, & the best company.  Bright?  He is

     much more than that, he is brilliant.  He keeps the crowd intensely

     alive.



     With love & all good wishes.

                                        S. L. C.



Mark Twain and Henry Rogers were much together and much observed.  They

were often referred to as "the King" and "the Rajah," and it was always a

question whether it was "the King" who took care of "the Rajah," or vice

versa.  There was generally a group to gather around them, and Clemens

was sure of an attentive audience, whether he wanted to air his

philosophies, his views of the human race, or to read aloud from the

verses of Kipling.



"I am not fond of all poetry," he would say; "but there's something in

Kipling that appeals to me.  I guess he's just about my level."



Miss Wallace recalls certain Kipling readings in his room, when his

friends gathered to listen.



     On those Kipling evenings the 'mise-en-scene' was a striking one.

     The bare hotel room, the pine woodwork and pine furniture, loose

     windows which rattled in the sea-wind.  Once in a while a gust of

     asthmatic music from the spiritless orchestra downstairs came up the

     hallway.  Yellow, unprotected gas-lights burned uncertainly, and

     Mark Twain in the midst of this lay on his bed (there was no couch)

     still in his white serge suit, with the light from the jet shining

     down on the crown of his silver hair, making it gleam and glisten

     like frosted threads.



In one hand he held his book, in the other he had his pipe, which he used

principally to gesture with in the most dramatic passages.



Margaret's small successors became the earliest members of the Angel Fish

Club, which Clemens concluded to organize after a visit to the

spectacular Bermuda aquarium.  The pretty angel-fish suggested youth and

feminine beauty to him, and his adopted granddaughters became angel-fish

to him from that time forward.  He bought little enamel angel-fish pins,

and carried a number of them with him most of the time, so that he could

create membership on short notice.  It was just another of the harmless

and happy diversions of his gentler side.  He was always fond of youth

and freshness.  He regarded the decrepitude of old age as an unnecessary

part of life.  Often he said:



"If I had been helping the Almighty when, He created man, I would have

had Him begin at the other end, and start human beings with old age.  How

much better it would have been to start old and have all the bitterness

and blindness of age in the beginning!  One would not mind then if he

were looking forward to a joyful youth.  Think of the joyous prospect of

growing young instead of old!  Think of looking forward to eighteen

instead of eighty!  Yes, the Almighty made a poor job of it.  I wish He

had invited my assistance."



To one of the angel fish he wrote, just after his return:



     I miss you, dear.  I miss Bermuda, too, but not so much as I miss

     you; for you were rare, and occasional and select, and Ltd.; whereas

     Bermuda's charms and, graciousnesses were free and common and

     unrestricted--like the rain, you know, which falls upon the just and

     the unjust alike; a thing which would not happen if I were

     superintending the rain's affairs.  No, I would rain softly and

     sweetly upon the just, but whenever I caught a sample of the unjust

     outdoors I would drown him.









CCLXVII



VIEWS AND ADDRESSES



     [As I am beginning this chapter, April 16, 1912, the news comes of

     the loss, on her first trip, of the great White Star Line steamer

     Titanic, with the destruction of many passengers, among whom are

     Frank D. Millet, William T. Stead, Isadore Straus, John Jacob Astor,

     and other distinguished men.  They died as heroes, remaining with

     the ship in order that the women and children might be saved.



     It was the kind of death Frank Millet would have wished to die.

     He was always a soldier--a knight.  He has appeared from time to

     time in these pages, for he was a dear friend of the Clemens

     household.  One of America's foremost painters; at the time of his

     death he was head of the American Academy of Arts in Rome.]



Mark Twain made a number of addresses during the spring of 1908.

He spoke at the Cartoonists' dinner, very soon after his return from

Bermuda; he spoke at the Booksellers' banquet, expressing his debt of

obligation to those who had published and sold his books; he delivered a

fine address at the dinner given by the British Schools and University

Club at Delmonico's, May 25th, in honor of Queen Victoria's birthday.

In that speech he paid high tribute to the Queen for her attitude toward

America, during the crisis of the Civil Wax, and to her royal consort,

Prince Albert.



     What she did for us in America in our time of storm and stress we

     shall not forget, and whenever we call it to mind we shall always

     gratefully remember the wise and righteous mind that guided her in

     it and sustained and supported her--Prince Albert's.  We need not

     talk any idle talk here to-night about either possible or impossible

     war between two countries; there will be no war while we remain sane

     and the son of Victoria and Albert sits upon the throne.  In

     conclusion, I believe I may justly claim to utter the voice of my

     country in saying that we hold him in deep honor, and also in

     cordially wishing him a long life and a happy reign.



But perhaps his most impressive appearance was at the dedication of the

great City College (May 14, 1908), where President John Finley, who had

been struggling along with insufficient room, was to have space at last

for his freer and fuller educational undertakings.  A great number of

honored scholars, statesmen, and diplomats assembled on the college

campus, a spacious open court surrounded by stately college architecture

of medieval design.  These distinguished guests were clad in their

academic robes, and the procession could not have been widely different

from that one at Oxford of a year before.  But there was something rather

fearsome about it, too.  A kind of scaffolding had been reared in the

center of the campus for the ceremonies; and when those grave men in

their robes of state stood grouped upon it the picture was strikingly

suggestive of one of George Cruikshank's drawings of an execution scene

at the Tower of London.  Many of the robes were black--these would be the

priests--and the few scarlet ones would be the cardinals who might have

assembled for some royal martyrdom.  There was a bright May sunlight over

it all, one of those still, cool brightnesses which served to heighten

the weird effect.  I am sure that others felt it besides myself, for

everybody seemed wordless and awed, even at times when there was no

occasion for silence.  There was something of another age about the whole

setting, to say the least.



We left the place in a motor-car, a crowd of boys following after.  As

Clemens got in they gathered around the car and gave the college yell,

ending with "Twain!  Twain!  Twain!" and added three cheers for Tom

Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson.  They called for a speech, but

he only said a few words in apology for not granting their request.  He

made a speech to them that night at the Waldorf--where he proposed for

the City College a chair of citizenship, an idea which met with hearty

applause.



In the same address he referred to the "God Trust" motto on the coins,

and spoke approvingly of the President's order for its removal.



     We do not trust in God, in the important matters of life, and not

     even a minister of the Gospel will take any coin for a cent more

     than its accepted value because of that motto.  If cholera should

     ever reach these shores we should probably pray to be delivered from

     the plague, but we would put our main trust in the Board of Health.



Next morning, commenting on the report of this speech, he said:



"If only the reporters would not try to improve on what I say.  They seem

to miss the fact that the very art of saying a thing effectively is in

its delicacy, and as they can't reproduce the manner and intonation in

type they make it emphatic and clumsy in trying to convey it to the

reader."



I pleaded that the reporters were often young men, eager, and unmellowed

in their sense of literary art.



"Yes," he agreed, "they are so afraid their readers won't see my good

points that they set up red flags to mark them and beat a gong.  They

mean well, but I wish they wouldn't do it."



He referred to the portion of his speech concerning the motto on the

coins.  He had freely expressed similar sentiments on other public

occasions, and he had received a letter criticizing him for saying that

we do not really trust in God in any financial matter.



"I wanted to answer it," he said; "but I destroyed it.  It didn't seem

worth noticing."



I asked how the motto had originated.



"About 1853 some idiot in Congress wanted to announce to the world that

this was a religious nation, and proposed putting it there, and no other

Congressman had courage enough to oppose it, of course.  It took courage

in those days to do a thing like that; but I think the same thing would

happen to-day."



"Still the country has become broader.  It took a brave man before the

Civil War to confess he had read the 'Age of Reason'."



"So it did, and yet that seems a mild book now.  I read it first when I

was a cub pilot, read it with fear and hesitation, but marveling at its

fearlessness and wonderful power.  I read it again a year or two ago, for

some reason, and was amazed to see how tame it had become.  It seemed

that Paine was apologizing everywhere for hurting the feelings of the

reader."



He drifted, naturally, into a discussion of the Knickerbocker Trust

Company's suspension, which had tied up some fifty-five thousand dollars

of his capital, and wondered how many were trusting in God for the return

of these imperiled sums.  Clemens himself, at this time, did not expect

to come out whole from that disaster.  He had said very little when the

news came, though it meant that his immediate fortunes were locked up,

and it came near stopping the building activities at Redding.  It was

only the smaller things of life that irritated him.  He often met large

calamities with a serenity which almost resembled indifference.  In the

Knickerbocker situation he even found humor as time passed, and wrote a

number of gay letters, some of which found their way into print.



It should be added that in the end there was no loss to any of the

Knickerbocker depositors.









CCLXVIII



REDDING



The building of the new home at Redding had been going steadily forward

for something more than a year.  John Mead Howells had made the plans;

W. W. Sunderland and his son Philip, of Danbury, Connecticut, were the

builders, and in the absence of Miss Clemens, then on a concert tour,

Mark Twain's secretary, Miss I. V. Lyon, had superintended the

furnishing.



"Innocence at Home," as the place was originally named, was to be ready

for its occupant in June, with every detail in place, as he desired.  He

had never visited Redding; he had scarcely even glanced at the plans or

discussed any of the decorations of the new home.  He had required only

that there should be one great living-room for the orchestrelle, and

another big room for the billiard-table, with plenty of accommodations

for guests.  He had required that the billiard-room be red, for something

in his nature answered to the warm luxury of that color, particularly in

moments of diversion.  Besides, his other billiard-rooms had been red,

and such association may not be lightly disregarded.  His one other

requirement was that the place should be complete.



"I don't want to see it," he said, "until the cat is purring on the

hearth."



Howells says:



"He had grown so weary of change, and so indifferent to it, that he was

without interest."



But it was rather, I think, that he was afraid of losing interest by

becoming wearied with details which were likely to exasperate him; also,

he wanted the dramatic surprise of walking into a home that had been

conjured into existence as with a word.



It was expected that the move would be made early in the month; but there

were delays, and it was not until the 18th of June that he took

possession.



The plan, at this time, was only to use the Redding place as a summer

residence, and the Fifth Avenue house was not dismantled.  A few days

before the 18th the servants, with one exception, were taken up to the

new house, Clemens and myself remaining in the loneliness of No. 21,

attending to the letters in the morning and playing billiards the rest of

the time, waiting for the appointed day and train.  It was really a

pleasant three days.  He invented a new game, and we were riotous and

laughed as loudly as we pleased.  I think he talked very little of the

new home which he was so soon to see.  It was referred to no oftener than

once or twice a day, and then I believe only in connection with certain

of the billiard-room arrangements.  I have wondered since what picture of

it he could have had in his mind, for he had never seen a photograph.

He had a general idea that it was built upon a hill, and that its

architecture was of the Italian villa order.  I confess I had moments of

anxiety, for I had selected the land for him, and had been more or less

accessory otherwise.  I did not really worry, for I knew how beautiful

and peaceful it all was; also something of his taste and needs.



It had been a dry spring, and country roads were dusty, so that those who

were responsible had been praying for rain, to be followed by a pleasant

day for his arrival.  Both petitions were granted; June 18th would fall

on Thursday, and Monday night there came a good, thorough, and refreshing

shower that washed the vegetation clean and laid the dust.  The morning

of the 18th was bright and sunny and cool.  Clemens was up and shaved by

six o'clock in order to be in time, though the train did not leave until

four in the afternoon--an express newly timed to stop at Redding--its

first trip scheduled for the day of Mark Twain's arrival.



We were still playing billiards when word was brought up that the cab was

waiting.  My daughter, Louise, whose school on Long Island had closed

that day, was with us.  Clemens wore his white flannels and a Panama hat,

and at the station a group quickly collected, reporters and others, to

interview him and speed him to his new home.  He was cordial and

talkative, and quite evidently full of pleasant anticipation.  A reporter

or two and a special photographer came along, to be present at his

arrival.



The new, quick train, the green, flying landscape, with glimpses of the

Sound and white sails, the hillsides and clear streams becoming rapidly

steeper and dearer as we turned northward: all seemed to gratify him, and

when he spoke at all it was approvingly.  The hour and a half required to

cover the sixty miles of distance seemed very short.  As the train slowed

down for the Redding station, he said:



"We'll leave this box of candy"--he had bought a large box on the way--

"those colored porters sometimes like candy, and we can get some more."



He drew out a great handful of silver.



"Give them something--give everybody liberally that does any service."



There was a sort of open-air reception in waiting.  Redding had

recognized the occasion as historic.  A varied assemblage of vehicles

festooned with flowers had gathered to offer a gallant country welcome.



It was now a little before six o'clock of that long June day, still and

dreamlike; and to the people assembled there may have been something

which was not quite reality in the scene.  There was a tendency to be

very still.  They nodded, waved their hands to him, smiled, and looked

their fill; but a spell lay upon them, and they did not cheer.  It would

have been a pity if they had done so.  A noise, and the illusion would

have been shattered.



His carriage led away on the three-mile drive to the house on the

hilltop, and the floral turnout fell in behind.  No first impression of a

fair land could have come at a sweeter time.  Hillsides were green,

fields were white with daisies, dog-wood and laurel shone among the

trees.  And over all was the blue sky, and everywhere the fragrance of

June.



He was very quiet as we drove along.  Once with gentle humor, looking

over a white daisy field, he said:



"That is buckwheat.  I always recognize buckwheat when I see it.  I wish

I knew as much about other things as I know about buckwheat.  It seems to

be very plentiful here; it even grows by the roadside."  And a little

later: "This is the kind of a road I like; a good country road through

the woods."



The water was flowing over the mill-dam where the road crosses the

Saugatuck, and he expressed approval of that clear, picturesque little

river, one of those charming Connecticut streams.  A little farther on a

brook cascaded down the hillside, and he compared it with some of the

tiny streams of Switzerland, I believe the Giessbach.  The lane that led

to the new home opened just above, and as he entered the leafy way he

said, "This is just the kind of a lane I like," thus completing his

acceptance of everything but the house and the location.



The last of the procession had dropped away at the entrance of the lane,

and he was alone with those who had most anxiety for his verdict.  They

had not long to wait.  As the carriage ascended higher to the open view

he looked away, across the Saugatuck Valley to the nestling village and

church-spire and farm-houses, and to the distant hills, and declared the

land to be a good land and beautiful--a spot to satisfy one's soul.  Then

came the house--simple and severe in its architecture--an Italian villa,

such as he had known in Florence, adapted now to American climate and

needs.  The scars of building had not all healed yet, but close to the

house waved green grass and blooming flowers that might have been there

always.  Neither did the house itself look new.  The soft, gray stucco

had taken on a tone that melted into the sky and foliage of its

background.  At the entrance his domestic staff waited to greet him, and

then he stepped across the threshold into the wide hall and stood in his

own home for the first time in seventeen years.  It was an anxious

moment, and no one spoke immediately.  But presently his eye had taken in

the satisfying harmony of the place and followed on through the wide

doors that led to the dining-room--on through the open French windows to

an enchanting vista of tree-tops and distant farmside and blue hills.  He

said, very gently:



"How beautiful it all is?  I did not think it could be as beautiful as

this."



He was taken through the rooms; the great living-room at one end of the

hall--a room on the walls of which there was no picture, but only color-

harmony--and at the other end of the hall, the splendid, glowing

billiard-room, where hung all the pictures in which he took delight.

Then to the floor above, with its spacious apartments and a continuation

of color--welcome and concord, the windows open to the pleasant evening

hills.  When he had seen it all--the natural Italian garden below the

terraces; the loggia, whose arches framed landscape vistas and formed a

rare picture-gallery; when he had completed the round and stood in the

billiard-room--his especial domain--once more he said, as a final

verdict:



"It is a perfect house--perfect, so far as I can see, in every detail.

It might have been here always."



He was at home there from that moment--absolutely, marvelously at home,

for he fitted the setting perfectly, and there was not a hitch or flaw in

his adaptation.  To see him over the billiard-table, five minutes later,

one could easily fancy that Mark Twain, as well as the house, had "been

there always."  Only the presence of his daughters was needed now to

complete his satisfaction in everything.



There were guests that first evening--a small home dinner-party--and so

perfect were the appointments and service, that one not knowing would

scarcely have imagined it to be the first dinner served in that lovely

room.  A little later; at the foot of the garden of bay and cedar,

neighbors, inspired by Dan Beard, who had recently located near by, set

off some fireworks. Clemens stepped out on the terrace and saw rockets

climbing through the summer sky to announce his arrival.



"I wonder why they all go to so much trouble for me," he said, softly.

"I never go to any trouble for anybody"--a statement which all who heard

it, and all his multitude of readers in every land, stood ready to deny.



That first evening closed with billiards--boisterous, triumphant

billiards--and when with midnight the day ended and the cues were set in

the rack, there was none to say that Mark Twain's first day in his new

home had not been a happy one.









CCLXIX



FIRST DAYS AT STORMFIELD



I went up next afternoon, for I knew how he dreaded loneliness.  We

played billiards for a time, then set out for a walk, following the long

drive to the leafy lane that led to my own property.  Presently he said:



"In one way I am sorry I did not see this place sooner.  I never want to

leave it again.  If I had known it was so beautiful I should have vacated

the house in town and moved up here permanently."



I suggested that he could still do so, if he chose, and he entered

immediately into the idea.  By and by we turned down a deserted road,

grassy and beautiful, that ran along his land.  At one side was a slope

facing the west, and dotted with the slender, cypress-like cedars of New

England.  He had asked if that were part of his land, and on being told

it was he said:



"I would like Howells to have a house there.  We must try to give that to

Howells."



At the foot of the hill we came to a brook and followed it into a meadow.

I told him that I had often caught fine trout there, and that soon I

would bring in some for breakfast.  He answered:



"Yes, I should like that.  I don't care to catch them any more myself.  I

like them very hot."



We passed through some woods and came out near my own ancient little

house.  He noticed it and said:



"The man who built that had some memory of Greece in his mind when he put

on that little porch with those columns."



My second daughter, Frances, was coming from a distant school on the

evening train, and the carriage was starting just then to bring her.  I

suggested that perhaps he would find it pleasant to make the drive.



"Yes," he agreed, "I should enjoy that."



So I took the reins, and he picked up little Joy, who came running out

just then, and climbed into the back seat.  It was another beautiful

evening, and he was in a talkative humor.  Joy pointed out a small turtle

in the road, and he said:



"That is a wild turtle.  Do you think you could teach it arithmetic?"



Joy was uncertain.



"Well," he went on, "you ought to get an arithmetic--a little ten-cent

arithmetic--and teach that turtle."



We passed some swampy woods, rather dim and junglelike.



"Those," he said, "are elephant woods."



But Joy answered:



"They are fairy woods.  The fairies are there, but you can't see them

because they wear magic cloaks."



He said:  "I wish I had one of those magic cloaks, sometimes.  I had one

once, but it is worn out now."



Joy looked at him reverently, as one who had once been the owner of a

piece of fairyland.



It was a sweet drive to and from the village.  There are none too many

such evenings in a lifetime.  Colonel Harvey's little daughter, Dorothy,

came up a day or two later, and with my daughter Louise spent the first

week with him in the new home.  They were created "Angel-Fishes"--the

first in the new aquarium; that is to say, the billiard-room, where he

followed out the idea by hanging a row of colored prints of Bermuda

fishes in a sort of frieze around the walls.  Each visiting member was

required to select one as her particular patron fish and he wrote her

name upon it.  It was his delight to gather his juvenile guests in this

room and teach them the science of billiard angles; but it was so

difficult to resist taking the cue and making plays himself that he was

required to stand on a little platform and give instruction just out of

reach.  His snowy flannels and gleaming white hair, against those rich

red walls, with those small, summer-clad players, made a pretty picture.



The place did not retain its original name.  He declared that it would

always be "Innocence at Home" to the angel-fish visitors, but that the

title didn't remain continuously appropriate.  The money which he had

derived from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven had been used to build

the loggia wing, and he considered the name of "Stormfield" as a

substitute.  When, presently, the summer storms gathered on that rock-

bound, open hill, with its wide reaches of vine and shrub-wild, fierce

storms that bent the birch and cedar, and strained at the bay and

huckleberry, with lightning and turbulent wind and thunder, followed by

the charging rain--the name seemed to become peculiarly appropriate.

Standing with his head bared to the tumult, his white hair tossing in the

blast, and looking out upon the wide splendor of the spectacle, he

rechristened the place, and "Stormfield" it became and remained.



The last day of Mark Twain's first week in Redding, June 25th, was

saddened by the news of the death of Grover Cleveland at his home in

Princeton, New Jersey.  Clemens had always been an ardent Cleveland

admirer, and to Mrs. Cleveland now he sent this word of condolence--



     Your husband was a man I knew and loved and honored for twenty-five

     years.  I mourn with you.



And once during the evening he said:



"He was one of our two or three real Presidents.  There is none to take

his place."









CCLXX



THE ALDRICH MEMORIAL



At the end of June came the dedication at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, of

the Thomas Bailey Aldrich Memorial Museum, which the poet's wife had

established there in the old Aldrich homestead.  It was hot weather.

We were obliged to take a rather poor train from South Norwalk, and

Clemens was silent and gloomy most of the way to Boston.  Once there,

however, lodged in a cool and comfortable hotel, matters improved.

He had brought along for reading the old copy of Sir Thomas Malory's

Arthur Tales, and after dinner he took off his clothes and climbed into

bed and sat up and read aloud from those stately legends, with comments

that I wish I could remember now, only stopping at last when overpowered

with sleep.



We went on a special train to Portsmouth next morning through the summer

heat, and assembled, with those who were to speak, in the back portion of

the opera-house, behind the scenes: Clemens was genial and good-natured

with all the discomfort of it; and he liked to fancy, with Howells, who

had come over from Kittery Point, how Aldrich must be amused at the whole

circumstance if he could see them punishing themselves to do honor to his

memory.  Richard Watson Gilder was there, and Hamilton Mabie; also

Governor Floyd of New Hampshire; Colonel Higginson, Robert Bridges, and

other distinguished men.  We got to the more open atmosphere of the stage

presently, and the exercises began.  Clemens was last on the program.



The others had all said handsome, serious things, and Clemens himself had

mentally prepared something of the sort; but when his turn came, and he

rose to speak, a sudden reaction must have set in, for he delivered an

address that certainly would have delighted Aldrich living, and must have

delighted him dead, if he could hear it.  It was full of the most

charming humor, delicate, refreshing, and spontaneous.  The audience,

that had been maintaining a proper gravity throughout, showed its

appreciation in ripples of merriment that grew presently into genuine

waves of laughter.  He spoke out his regret for having worn black

clothes.  It was a mistake, he said, to consider this a solemn time--

Aldrich would not have wished it to be so considered.  He had been a man

who loved humor and brightness and wit, and had helped to make life merry

and delightful.  Certainly, if he could know, he would not wish this

dedication of his own home to be a lugubrious, smileless occasion.

Outside, when the services were ended, the venerable juvenile writer,

J. T. Trowbridge, came up to Clemens with extended hand.  Clemens said:

"Trowbridge, are you still alive?  You must be a thousand years old.

Why, I listened to your stories while I was being rocked in the cradle."

Trowbridge said:



"Mark, there's some mistake.  My earliest infant smile was wakened with

one of your jokes."



They stood side by side against a fence in the blazing sun and were

photographed--an interesting picture.



We returned to Boston that evening.  Clemens did not wish to hurry in the

summer heat, and we remained another day quietly sight-seeing, and

driving around and around Commonwealth Avenue in a victoria in the cool

of the evening.  Once, remembering Aldrich, he said:



"I was just planning Tom Sawyer when he was beginning the 'Story of a Bad

Boy'.  When I heard that he was writing that I thought of giving up mine,

but Aldrich insisted that it would be a foolish thing to do.  He thought

my Missouri boy could not by any chance conflict with his boy of New

England, and of course he was right."



He spoke of how great literary minds usually came along in company.  He

said:



"Now and then, on the stream of time, small gobs of that thing which we

call genius drift down, and a few of these lodge at some particular

point, and others collect about them and make a sort of intellectual

island--a towhead, as they say on the river--such an accumulation of

intellect we call a group, or school, and name it.



"Thirty years ago there was the Cambridge group.  Now there's been still

another, which included Aldrich and Howells and Stedman and Cable.  It

will soon be gone.  I suppose they will have to name it by and by."



He pointed out houses here and there of people he had known and visited

in other days.  The driver was very anxious to go farther, to other and

more distinguished sights.  Clemens mildly but firmly refused any

variation of the program, and so we kept on driving around and around the

shaded loop of Beacon Street until dusk fell and the lights began to

twinkle among the trees.









CCLXXI



DEATH OF "SAM" MOFFETT



Clemens' next absence from Redding came on August 1, 1908, when the

sudden and shocking news was received of the drowning of his nephew,

Samuel E. Moffett, in the surf of the Jersey shore.  Moffett was his

nearest male relative, and a man of fine intellect and talents.  He was

superior in those qualities which men love--he was large-minded and

large-hearted, and of noble ideals.  With much of the same sense of humor

which had made his uncle's fame, he had what was really an abnormal

faculty of acquiring and retaining encyclopedic data.  Once as a child he

had visited Hartford when Clemens was laboring over his history game.

The boy was much interested, and asked permission to help.  His uncle

willingly consented, and referred him to the library for his facts.  But

he did not need to consult the books; he already had English history

stored away, and knew where to find every detail of it.  At the time of

his death Moffett held an important editorial position on Collier's

Weekly.



Clemens was fond and proud of his nephew.  Returning from the funeral, he

was much depressed, and a day or two later became really ill.  He was in

bed for a few days, resting, he said, after the intense heat of the

journey.  Then he was about again and proposed billiards as a diversion.

We were all alone one very still, warm August afternoon playing, when he

suddenly said:



"I feel a little dizzy; I will sit down a moment."



I brought him a glass of water and he seemed to recover, but when he rose

and started to play I thought he had a dazed look.  He said:



"I have lost my memory.  I don't know which is my ball.  I don't know

what game we are playing."



But immediately this condition passed, and we thought little of it,

considering it merely a phase of biliousness due to his recent journey.

I have been told since, by eminent practitioners, that it was the first

indication of a more serious malady.



He became apparently quite himself again and showed his usual vigor-light

of step and movement, able to skip up and down stairs as heretofore.  In

a letter to Mrs. Crane, August 12th, he spoke of recent happenings:



     DEAR AUNT SUE,--It was a most moving, a most heartbreaking sight,

     the spectacle of that stunned & crushed & inconsolable family.  I

     came back here in bad shape, & had a bilious collapse, but I am all

     right again, though the doctor from New York has given peremptory

     orders that I am not to stir from here before frost.  O fortunate

     Sam Moffett! fortunate Livy Clemens! doubly fortunate Susy!  Those

     swords go through & through my heart, but there is never a moment

     that I am not glad, for the sake of the dead, that they have

     escaped.



     How Livy would love this place!  How her very soul would steep

     itself thankfully in this peace, this tranquillity, this deep

     stillness, this dreamy expanse of woodsy hill & valley!  You must

     come, Aunt Sue, & stay with us a real good visit.  Since June 26 we

     have had 21 guests, & they have all liked it and said they would

     come again.



To Howells, on the same day, he wrote:



     Won't you & Mrs. Howells & Mildred come & give us as many days as

     you can spare & examine John's triumph?  It is the most satisfactory

     house I am acquainted with, & the most satisfactorily situated .  .

     .  .  I have dismissed my stenographer, & have entered upon a

     holiday whose other end is the cemetery.









CCLXXII



STORMFIELD ADVENTURES



Clemens had fully decided, by this time, to live the year round in the

retirement at Stormfield, and the house at 21 Fifth Avenue was being

dismantled.  He had also, as he said, given up his dictations for the

time, at least, after continuing them, with more or less regularity, for

a period of two and a half years, during which he had piled up about half

a million words of comment and reminiscence.  His general idea had been

to add portions of this matter to his earlier books as the copyrights

expired, to give them new life and interest, and he felt that he had

plenty now for any such purpose.



He gave his time mainly to his guests, his billiards, and his reading,

though of course he could not keep from writing on this subject and that

as the fancy moved him, and a drawer in one of his dressers began to

accumulate fresh though usually fragmentary manuscripts. . .  He read the

daily paper, but he no longer took the keen, restless interest in public

affairs.  New York politics did not concern him any more, and national

politics not much.  When the Evening Post wrote him concerning the

advisability of renominating Governor Hughes he replied:



     If you had asked me two months ago my answer would have been prompt

     & loud & strong: yes, I want Governor Hughes renominated.  But it is

     too late, & my mouth is closed.  I have become a citizen & taxpayer

     of Connecticut, & could not now, without impertinence, meddle in

     matters which are none of my business.  I could not do it with

     impertinence without trespassing on the monopoly of another.



Howells speaks of Mark Twain's "absolute content" with his new home, and

these are the proper words' to express it.  He was like a storm-beaten

ship that had drifted at last into a serene South Sea haven.



The days began and ended in tranquillity.  There were no special morning

regulations: One could have his breakfast at any time and at almost any

place.  He could have it in bed if he liked, or in the loggia or

livingroom, or billiard-room.  He might even have it in the diningroom,

or on the terrace, just outside.  Guests--there were usually guests--

might suit their convenience in this matter--also as to the forenoons.

The afternoon brought games--that is, billiards, provided the guest knew

billiards, otherwise hearts.  Those two games were his safety-valves, and

while there were no printed requirements relating to them the unwritten

code of Stormfield provided that guests, of whatever age or previous

faith, should engage in one or both of these diversions.



Clemens, who usually spent his forenoon in bed with his reading and his

letters, came to the green table of skill and chance eager for the onset;

if the fates were kindly, he approved of them openly.  If not--well, the

fates were old enough to know better, and, as heretofore, had to take the

consequences.  Sometimes, when the weather was fine and there were no

games (this was likely to be on Sunday afternoons), there were drives

among the hills and along the Saugatuck through the Bedding Glen.



The cat was always "purring on the hearth" at Stormfield--several cats--

for Mark Twain's fondness for this clean, intelligent domestic animal

remained, to the end, one of his happiest characteristics.  There were

never too many cats at Stormfield, and the "hearth" included the entire

house, even the billiard-table.  When, as was likely to happen at any

time during the game, the kittens Sinbad, or Danbury, or Billiards would

decide to hop up and play with the balls, or sit in the pockets and grab

at them as they went by, the game simply added this element of chance,

and the uninvited player was not disturbed.  The cats really owned

Stormfield; any one could tell that from their deportment.  Mark Twain

held the title deeds; but it was Danbury and Sinbad and the others that

possessed the premises.  They occupied any portion of the house or its

furnishings at will, and they never failed to attract attention.  Mark

Twain might be preoccupied and indifferent to the comings and goings of

other members of the household; but no matter what he was doing, let

Danbury appear in the offing and he was observed and greeted with due

deference, and complimented and made comfortable.  Clemens would arise

from the table and carry certain choice food out on the terrace to

Tammany, and be satisfied with almost no acknowledgment by way of

appreciation.  One could not imagine any home of Mark Twain where the

cats were not supreme.  In the evening, as at 21 Fifth Avenue, there was

music--the stately measures of the orchestrelle--while Mark Twain smoked

and mingled unusual speculation with long, long backward dreams.



It was three months from the day of arrival in Redding that some guests

came to Stormfield without invitation--two burglars, who were carrying

off some bundles of silver when they were discovered.  Claude, the

butler, fired a pistol after them to hasten their departure, and Clemens,

wakened by the shots, thought the family was opening champagne and went

to sleep again.



It was far in the night; but neighbor H. A. Lounsbury and Deputy-Sheriff

Banks were notified, and by morning the thieves were captured, though

only after a pretty desperate encounter, during which the officer

received a bullet-wound.  Lounsbury and a Stormfield guest had tracked

them in the dark with a lantern to Bethel, a distance of some seven

miles.  The thieves, also their pursuers, had boarded the train there.

Sheriff Banks was waiting at the West Redding station when the train came

down, and there the capture was made.  It was a remarkably prompt and

shrewd piece of work.  Clemens gave credit for its success chiefly to

Lounsbury, whose talents in many fields always impressed him.  The

thieves were taken to the Redding Town Hall for a preliminary healing.

Subsequently they received severe sentences.



Clemens tacked this notice on his front door:



                                  NOTICE



                           TO THE NEXT BURGLAR



     There is nothing but plated ware in this house now and henceforth.



     You will find it in that brass thing in the dining-room over in the

     corner by the basket of kittens.



     If you want the basket put the kittens in the brass thing.  Do not

     make a noise--it disturbs the family.



     You will find rubbers in the front hall by that thing which has the

     umbrellas in it, chiffonnier, I think they call it, or pergola, or

     something like that.



     Please close the door when you go away!



                         Very truly yours,

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.









CCLXXIII



STORMFIELD PHILOSOPHIES



Now came the tranquil days of the Connecticut autumn.  The change of the

landscape colors was a constant delight to Mark Twain.  There were

several large windows in his room, and he called them his picture-

gallery.  The window-panes were small, and each formed a separate picture

of its own that was changing almost hourly.  The red tones that began to

run through the foliage; the red berry bushes; the fading grass, and the

little touches of sparkling frost that came every now and then at early

morning; the background of distant blue hills and changing skies-these

things gave his gallery a multitude of variation that no art-museums

could furnish.  He loved it all, and he loved to walk out in it, pacing

up and down the terrace, or the long path that led to the pergola at the

foot of a natural garden.  If a friend came, he was willing to walk much

farther; and we often descended the hill in one direction or another,

though usually going toward the "gorge," a romantic spot where a clear

brook found its way through a deep and rather dangerous-looking chasm.

Once he was persuaded to descend into this fairy-like place, for it was

well worth exploring; but his footing was no longer sure and he did not

go far.



He liked better to sit on the grass-grown, rocky arch above and look down

into it, and let his talk follow his mood.  He liked to contemplate the

geology of his surroundings, the record of the ageless periods of

construction required to build the world.  The marvels of science always

appealed to him.  He reveled in the thought of the almost limitless

stretches of time, the millions upon millions of years that had been

required for this stratum and that--he liked to amaze himself with the

sounding figures.  I remember him expressing a wish to see the Grand

Canon of Arizona, where, on perpendicular walls six thousand feet high,

the long story of geological creation is written.  I had stopped there

during my Western trip of the previous year, and I told him something of

its wonders.  I urged him to see them for himself, offering to go with

him.  He said:



"I should enjoy that; but the railroad journey is so far and I should

have no peace.  The papers would get hold of it, and I would have to make

speeches and be interviewed, and I never want to do any of those things

again."



I suggested that the railroads would probably be glad to place a private

car at his service, so that he might travel in comfort; but he shook his

head.



"That would only make me more conspicuous."



"How about a disguise?"



"Yes," he said, "I might put on a red wig and false whiskers and change

my name, but I couldn't disguise my drawling speech and they'd find me

out."



It was amusing, but it was rather sad, too.  His fame had deprived him of

valued privileges.



He talked of many things during these little excursions.  Once he told

how he had successively advised his nephew, Moffett, in the matter of

obtaining a desirable position.  Moffett had wanted to become a reporter.

Clemens devised a characteristic scheme.  He said:



"I will get you a place on any newspaper you may select if you promise

faithfully to follow out my instructions."



The applicant agreed, eagerly enough.  Clemens said:



"Go to the newspaper of your choice.  Say that you are idle and want

work, that you are pining for work--longing for it, and that you ask no

wages, and will support yourself.  All that you ask is work.  That you

will do anything, sweep, fill the inkstands, mucilage-bottles, run

errands, and be generally useful.  You must never ask for wages.  You

must wait until the offer of wages comes to you.  You must work just as

faithfully and just as eagerly as if you were being paid for it.  Then

see what happens."



The scheme had worked perfectly.  Young Moffett had followed his

instructions to the letter.  By and by he attracted attention.  He was

employed in a variety of ways that earned him the gratitude and the

confidence of the office.  In obedience to further instructions, he began

to make short, brief, unadorned notices of small news matters that came

under his eye and laid them on the city editor's desk.  No pay was asked;

none was expected.  Occasionally one of the items was used.  Then, of

course, it happened, as it must sooner or later at a busy time, that he

was given a small news assignment.  There was no trouble about his

progress after that.  He had won the confidence of the management and

shown that he was not afraid to work.



The plan had been variously tried since, Clemens said, and he could not

remember any case in which it had failed.  The idea may have grown out of

his own pilot apprenticeship on the river, when cub pilots not only

received no salary, but paid for the privilege of learning.



Clemens discussed public matters less often than formerly, but they were

not altogether out of his mind.  He thought our republic was in a fair

way to become a monarchy--that the signs were already evident.  He

referred to the letter which he had written so long ago in Boston, with

its amusing fancy of the Archbishop of Dublin and his Grace of Ponkapog,

and declared that, after all, it contained something of prophecy.--[See

chap. xcvii; also Appendix M.]--He would not live to see the actual

monarchy, he said, but it was coming.



"I'm not expecting it in my time nor in my children's time, though it may

be sooner than we think.  There are two special reasons for it and one

condition.  The first reason is, that it is in the nature of man to want

a definite something to love, honor, reverently look up to and obey; a

God and King, for example.  The second reason is, that while little

republics have lasted long, protected by their poverty and

insignificance, great ones have not.  And the condition is, vast power

and wealth, which breed commercial and political corruptions, and incite

public favorites to dangerous ambitions."



He repeated what I had heard him say before, that in one sense we already

had a monarchy; that is to say, a ruling public and political aristocracy

which could create a Presidential succession.  He did not say these

things bitterly now, but reflectively and rather indifferently.



He was inclined to speak unhopefully of the international plans for

universal peace, which were being agitated rather persistently.



"The gospel of peace," he said, "is always making a deal of noise, always

rejoicing in its progress but always neglecting to furnish statistics.

There are no peaceful nations now.  All Christendom is a soldier-camp.

The poor have been taxed in some nations to the starvation point to

support the giant armaments which Christian governments have built up,

each to protect itself from the rest of the Christian brotherhood, and

incidentally to snatch any scrap of real estate left exposed by a weaker

owner.  King Leopold II. of Belgium, the most intensely Christian

monarch, except Alexander VI., that has escaped hell thus far, has stolen

an entire kingdom in Africa, and in fourteen years of Christian endeavor

there has reduced the population from thirty millions to fifteen by

murder and mutilation and overwork, confiscating the labor of the

helpless natives, and giving them nothing in return but salvation and a

home in heaven, furnished at the last moment by the Christian priest.



"Within the last generation each Christian power has turned the bulk of

its attention to finding out newer and still newer and more and more

effective ways of killing Christians, and, incidentally, a pagan now and

then; and the surest way to get rich quickly in Christ's earthly kingdom

is to invent a kind of gun that can kill more Christians at one shot than

any other existing kind.  All the Christian nations are at it.  The more

advanced they are, the bigger and more destructive engines of war they

create."



Once, speaking of battles great and small, and how important even a small

battle must seem to a soldier who had fought in no other, he said:



"To him it is a mighty achievement, an achievement with a big A, when to

a wax-worn veteran it would be a mere incident.  For instance, to the

soldier of one battle, San Juan Hill was an Achievement with an A as big

as the Pyramids of Cheops; whereas, if Napoleon had fought it, he would

have set it down on his cuff at the time to keep from forgetting it had

happened.  But that is all natural and human enough.  We are all like

that."



The curiosities and absurdities of religious superstitions never failed

to furnish him with themes more or less amusing.  I remember one Sunday,

when he walked down to have luncheon at my house, he sat under the shade

and fell to talking of Herod's slaughter of the innocents, which he said

could not have happened.



"Tacitus makes no mention of it," he said, "and he would hardly have

overlooked a sweeping order like that, issued by a petty ruler like

Herod.  Just consider a little king of a corner of the Roman Empire

ordering the slaughter of the first-born of a lot of Roman subjects.

Why, the Emperor would have reached out that long arm of his and

dismissed Herod.  That tradition is probably about as authentic as those

connected with a number of old bridges in Europe which are said to have

been built by Satan.  The inhabitants used to go to Satan to build

bridges for them, promising him the soul of the first one that crossed

the bridge; then, when Satan had the bridge done, they would send over a

rooster or a jackass--a cheap jackass; that was for Satan, and of course

they could fool him that way every time.  Satan must have been pretty

simple, even according to the New Testament, or he wouldn't have led

Christ up on a high mountain and offered him the world if he would fall

down and worship him.  That was a manifestly absurd proposition, because

Christ, as the Son of God, already owned the world; and, besides, what

Satan showed him was only a few rocky acres of Palestine.  It is just as

if some one should try to buy Rockefeller, the owner of all the Standard

Oil Company, with a gallon of kerosene."



He often spoke of the unseen forces of creation, the immutable laws that

hold the planet in exact course and bring the years and the seasons

always exactly on schedule time.  "The Great Law" was a phrase often on

his lips.  The exquisite foliage, the cloud shapes, the varieties of

color everywhere: these were for him outward manifestations of the Great

Law, whose principle I understood to be unity--exact relations throughout

all nature; and in this I failed to find any suggestion of pessimism, but

only of justice.  Once he wrote on a card for preservation:



     From everlasting to everlasting, this is the law: the sum of wrong &

     misery shall always keep exact step with the sum of human

     blessedness.



     No "civilization," no "advance," has ever modified these proportions

     by even the shadow of a shade, nor ever can, while our race endures.









CCLXIV



CITIZEN AND FARMER



The procession of guests at Stormfield continued pretty steadily.

Clemens kept a book in which visitors set down their names and the dates

of arrival and departure, and when they failed to attend to these matters

he diligently did it himself after they were gone.



Members of the Harper Company came up with their wives; "angel-fish" swam

in and out of the aquarium; Bermuda friends came to see the new home;

Robert Collier, the publisher, and his wife--"Mrs. Sally," as Clemens

liked to call her--paid their visits; Lord Northcliffe, who was visiting

America, came with Colonel Harvey, and was so impressed with the

architecture of Stormfield that he adopted its plans for a country-place

he was about to build in Newfoundland.  Helen Keller, with Mr. and Mrs.

Macy, came up for a week-end visit.  Mrs. Crane came over from Elmira;

and, behold! one day came the long-ago sweetheart of his childhood,

little Laura Hawkins--Laura Frazer now, widowed and in the seventies,

with a granddaughter already a young lady quite grown up.



That Mark Twain was not wearying of the new conditions we may gather from

a letter written to Mrs. Rogers in October:



     I've grown young in these months of dissipation here.  And I have

     left off drinking--it isn't necessary now.  Society & theology are

     sufficient for me.



To Helen Allen, a Bermuda "Angel-Fish," he wrote:



     We have good times here in this soundless solitude on the hilltop.

     The moment I saw the house I was glad I built it, & now I am gladder

     & gladder all the time.  I was not dreaming of living here except in

     the summer-time--that was before I saw this region & the house, you

     see--but that is all changed now; I shall stay here winter & summer

     both & not go back to New York at all.  My child, it's as tranquil &

     contenting as Bermuda.  You will be very welcome here, dear.



He interested himself in the affairs and in the people of Redding.  Not

long after his arrival he had gathered in all the inhabitants of the

country-side, neighbors of every quality, for closer acquaintance, and

threw open to them for inspection every part of the new house.  He

appointed Mrs. Lounsbury, whose acquaintance was very wide; a sort of

committee on reception, and stood at the entrance with her to welcome

each visitor in person.



It was a sort of gala day, and the rooms and the grounds were filled with

the visitors.  In the dining-room there were generous refreshments.

Again, not long afterward, he issued a special invitation to all of

those-architects, builders, and workmen who had taken any part, however

great or small, in the building of his home.  Mr. and Mrs. Littleton were

visiting Stormfield at this time, and both Clemens and Littleton spoke to

these assembled guests from the terrace, and made them feel that their

efforts had been worth while.



Presently the idea developed to establish something that would be of

benefit to his neighbors, especially to those who did not have access to

much reading-matter.  He had been for years flooded with books by authors

and publishers, and there was a heavy surplus at his home in the city.

When these began to arrive he had a large number of volumes set aside as

the nucleus of a public library.  An unused chapel not far away--it could

be seen from one of his windows--was obtained for the purpose; officers

were elected; a librarian was appointed, and so the Mark Twain Library of

Redding was duly established.  Clemens himself was elected its first

president, with the resident physician, Dr. Ernest H. Smith, vice-

president, and another resident, William E. Grumman, librarian.  On the

afternoon of its opening the president made a brief address.  He said:



     I am here to speak a few instructive words to my fellow-farmers.

     I suppose you are all farmers: I am going to put in a crop next

     year, when I have been here long enough and know how.  I couldn't

     make a turnip stay on a tree now after I had grown it.  I like to

     talk.  It would take more than the Redding air to make me keep

     still, and I like to instruct people.  It's noble to be good, and

     it's nobler to teach others to be good, and less trouble.  I am glad

     to help this library.  We get our morals from books.  I didn't get

     mine from books, but I know that morals do come from books--

     theoretically at least.  Mr. Beard or Mr. Adams will give some land,

     and by and by we are going to have a building of our own.



This statement was news to both Mr. Beard and Mr. Adams and an

inspiration of the moment; but Mr. Theodore Adams, who owned a most

desirable site, did in fact promptly resolve to donate it for library

purposes.  Clemens continued:



     I am going to help build that library with contributions from my

     visitors.  Every male guest who comes to my house will have to

     contribute a dollar or go away without his baggage.--

     [A characteristic notice to guests requiring them to contribute a

     dollar to the Library Building Fund was later placed on the

     billiard-room mantel at Stormfield with good results.]--If those

     burglars that broke into my house recently had done that they would

     have been happier now, or if they'd have broken into this library

     they would have read a few books and led a better life.  Now they

     are in jail, and if they keep on they will go to Congress.  When a

     person starts downhill you can never tell where he's going to stop.

     I am sorry for those burglars.  They got nothing that they wanted

     and scared away most of my servants.  Now we are putting in a

     burglar-alarm instead of a dog.  Some advised the dog, but it costs

     even more to entertain a dog than a burglar.  I am having the ground

     electrified, so that for a mile around any one who puts his foot

     across the line sets off an alarm that will be heard in Europe.  Now

     I will introduce the real president to you, a man whom you know

     already--Dr. Smith.



So a new and important benefit was conferred upon the community, and

there was a feeling that Redding, besides having a literary colony, was

to be literary in fact.



It might have been mentioned earlier that Redding already had literary

associations when Mark Twain arrived.  As far back as Revolutionary days

Joel Barlow, a poet of distinction, and once Minister to France, had been

a resident of Redding, and there were still Barlow descendants in the

township.



William Edgar Grumman, the librarian, had written the story of Redding's

share in the Revolutionary War--no small share, for Gen. Israel Putnam's

army had been quartered there during at least one long, trying winter.

Charles Burr Todd, of one of the oldest Redding families, himself--still

a resident, was also the author of a Redding history.



Of literary folk not native to Redding, Dora Reed Goodale and her sister

Elaine, the wife of Dr. Charles A. Eastman, had, long been residents of

Redding Center; Jeanette L. Gilder and Ida M. Tarbell had summer homes on

Redding Ridge; Dan Beard, as already mentioned, owned a place near the

banks of the Saugatuck, while Kate V. St. Maur, also two of Nathaniel

Hawthorne's granddaughters had recently located adjoining the Stormfield

lands.  By which it will be seen that Redding was in no way unsuitable as

a home for Mark Twain.









CCLXV



A MANTEL AND A BABY ELEPHANT



Mark Twain was the receiver of two notable presents that year.  The first

of these, a mantel from Hawaii, presented to him by the Hawaiian

Promotion Committee, was set in place in the billiard-room on the morning

of his seventy-third birthday.  This committee had written, proposing to

build for his new home either a mantel or a chair, as he might prefer,

the same to be carved from the native woods.  Clemens decided on a

billiard-room mantel, and John Howells forwarded the proper measurements.

So, in due time, the mantel arrived, a beautiful piece of work and in

fine condition, with the Hawaiian word, "Aloha," one of the sweetest

forms of greeting in any tongue, carved as its central ornament.



To the donors of the gift Clemens wrote:



     The beautiful mantel was put in its place an hour ago, & its

     friendly "Aloha" was the first uttered greeting received on my 73d

     birthday.  It is rich in color, rich in quality, & rich in

     decoration; therefore it exactly harmonized with the taste for such

     things which was born in me & which I have seldom been able to

     indulge to my content.  It will be a great pleasure to me, daily

     renewed, to have under my eye this lovely reminder of the loveliest

     fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean, & I beg to thank

     the committee for providing me that pleasure.



To F. N. Otremba, who had carved the mantel, he sent this word:



     I am grateful to you for the valued compliment to me in the labor of

     heart and hand and brain which you have put upon it.  It is worthy

     of the choicest place in the house and it has it.



It was the second beautiful mantel in Stormfield--the Hartford library

mantel, removed when that house was sold, having been installed in the

Stormfield living-room.



Altogether the seventy-third birthday was a pleasant one.  Clemens, in

the morning, drove down to see the library lot which Mr. Theodore Adams

had presented, and the rest of the day there were fine, close billiard

games, during which he was in the gentlest and happiest moods.  He

recalled the games of two years before, and as we stopped playing I said:



"I hope a year from now we shall be here, still playing the great game."



And he answered, as then:



"Yes, it is a great game--the best game on earth."  And he held out his

hand and thanked me for coming, as he never failed to do when we parted,

though it always hurt me a little, for the debt was so largely mine.



Mark Twain's second present came at Christmas-time.  About ten days

earlier, a letter came from Robert J. Collier, saying that he had bought

a baby elephant which he intended to present to Mark Twain as a Christmas

gift.  He added that it would be sent as soon as he could get a car for

it, and the loan of a keeper from Barnum & Bailey's headquarters at

Bridgeport.



The news created a disturbance in Stormfield.  One could not refuse,

discourteously and abruptly, a costly present like that; but it seemed a

disaster to accept it.  An elephant would require a roomy and warm place,

also a variety of attention which Stormfield was not prepared to supply.

The telephone was set going and certain timid excuses were offered by the

secretary.  There was no good place to put an elephant in Stormfield, but

Mr. Collier said, quite confidently:



"Oh, put him in the garage."



"But there's no heat in the garage."



"Well, put him in the loggia, then.  That's closed in, isn't it, for the

winter?  Plenty of sunlight--just the place for a young elephant."



"But we play cards in the loggia.  We use it for a sort of sun-parlor."



"But that wouldn't matter.  He's a kindly, playful little thing.  He'll

be just like a kitten.  I'll send the man up to look over the place and

tell you just how to take care of him, and I'll send up several bales of

hay in advance.  It isn't a large elephant, you know: just a little one--

a regular plaything."



There was nothing further to be done; only to wait and dread until the

Christmas present's arrival.



A few days before Christmas ten bales of hay arrived and several bushels

of carrots.  This store of provender aroused no enthusiasm at Stormfield.

It would seem there was no escape now.



On Christmas morning Mr. Lounsbury telephoned up that there was a man at

the station who said he was an elephant-trainer from Barnum & Bailey's,

sent by Mr. Collier to look at the elephant's quarters and get him

settled when he should arrive.  Orders were given to bring the man over.

The day of doom was at hand.



But Lounsbury's detective instinct came once more into play.  He had seen

a good many elephant-trainers at Bridgeport, and he thought this one had

a doubtful look.



"Where is the elephant?" he asked, as they drove along.



"He will arrive at noon."



"Where are you going to put him?"



"In the loggia."



"How big is he?"



"About the size of a cow."



"How long have you been with Barnum and Bailey?"



"Six years."



"Then you must know some friends of mine" (naming two that had no

existence until that moment).



"Oh yes, indeed.  I know them well."



Lounsbury didn't say any more just then, but he had a feeling that

perhaps the dread at Stormfield had grown unnecessarily large.  Something

told him that this man seemed rather more like a butler, or a valet, than

an elephant-trainer.  They drove to Stormfield, and the trainer looked

over the place.  It would do perfectly, he said.  He gave a few

instructions as to the care of this new household feature, and was driven

back to the station to bring it.



Lounsbury came back by and by, bringing the elephant but not the trainer.

It didn't need a trainer.  It was a beautiful specimen, with soft, smooth

coat and handsome trappings, perfectly quiet, well-behaved and small--

suited to the loggia, as Collier had said--for it was only two feet long

and beautifully made of cloth and cotton--one of the forest toy elephants

ever seen anywhere.



It was a good joke, such as Mark Twain loved--a carefully prepared,

harmless bit of foolery.  He wrote Robert Collier, threatening him with

all sorts of revenge, declaring that the elephant was devastating

Stormfield.



"To send an elephant in a trance, under pretense that it was dead or

stuffed!" he said.  "The animal came to life, as you knew it would, and

began to observe Christmas, and we now have no furniture left and no

servants and no visitors, no friends, no photographs, no burglars--

nothing but the elephant.  Be kind, be merciful, be generous; take him

away and send us what is left of the earthquake."



Collier wrote that he thought it unkind of him to look a gift-elephant in

the trunk.  And with such chaffing and gaiety the year came to an end.









CCLXXVI



SHAKESPEARE-BACON TALK



When the bad weather came there was not much company at Stormfield, and

I went up regularly each afternoon, for it was lonely on that bleak hill,

and after his forenoon of reading or writing he craved diversion.  My own

home was a little more than a half mile away, and I enjoyed the walk,

whatever the weather.  I usually managed to arrive about three o'clock.

He would watch from his high windows until he saw me raise the hilltop,

and he would be at the door when I arrived, so that there might be no

delay in getting at the games.  Or, if it happened that he wished to show

me something in his room, I would hear his rich voice sounding down the

stair.  Once, when I arrived, I heard him calling, and going up I found

him highly pleased with the arrangement of two pictures on a chair,

placed so that the glasses of them reflected the sunlight on the ceiling.

He said:



"They seem to catch the reflection of the sky and the winter colors.

Sometimes the hues are wonderfully iridescent."



He pointed to a bunch of wild red berries on the mantel with the sun on

them.



"How beautifully they light up!" he said; "some of them in the sunlight,

some still in the shadow."



He walked to the window and stood looking out on the somber fields.



"The lights and colors are always changing there," he said.  "I never

tire of it."



To see him then so full of the interest and delight of the moment, one

might easily believe he had never known tragedy and shipwreck.  More than

any one I ever knew, he lived in the present.  Most of us are either

dreaming of the past or anticipating the future--forever beating the

dirge of yesterday or the tattoo of to-morrow.  Mark Twain's step was

timed to the march of the moment.  There were days when he recalled the

past and grieved over it, and when he speculated concerning the future;

but his greater interest was always of the now, and of the particular

locality where he found it.  The thing which caught his fancy, however

slight or however important, possessed him fully for the time, even if

never afterward.



He was especially interested that winter in the Shakespeare-Bacon

problem.  He had long been unable to believe that the actor-manager from

Stratford had written those great plays, and now a book just published,

'The Shakespeare Problem Restated', by George Greenwood, and another one

in press, 'Some Characteristic Signatures of Francis Bacon', by William

Stone Booth, had added the last touch of conviction that Francis Bacon,

and Bacon only, had written the Shakespeare dramas.  I was ardently

opposed to this idea.  The romance of the boy, Will Shakespeare, who had

come up to London and began, by holding horses outside of the theater,

and ended by winning the proudest place in the world of letters, was

something I did not wish to let perish.  I produced all the stock

testimony--Ben Jonson's sonnet, the internal evidence of the plays

themselves, the actors who had published them--but he refused to accept

any of it.  He declared that there was not a single proof to show that

Shakespeare had written one of them.



"Is there any evidence that he didn't?"  I asked.



"There's evidence that he couldn't," he said.  "It required a man with

the fullest legal equipment to have written them.  When you have read

Greenwood's book you will see how untenable is any argument for

Shakespeare's authorship."



I was willing to concede something, and offered a compromise.



"Perhaps," I said, "Shakespeare was the Belasoo of that day--the

managerial genius, unable to write plays himself, but with the supreme

gift of making effective drama from the plays of others.  In that case it

is not unlikely that the plays would be known as Shakespeare's.  Even in

this day John Luther Long's "Madam Butterfly" is sometimes called

Belasco's play; though it is doubtful if Belasco ever wrote a line of

it."



He considered this view, but not very favorably.  The Booth book was at

this time a secret, and he had not told me anything concerning it; but he

had it in his mind when he said, with an air of the greatest conviction:



"I know that Shakespeare did not write those plays, and I have reason to

believe he did not touch the text in any way."



"How can you be so positive?" I asked.



He replied:



"I have private knowledge from a source that cannot be questioned."



I now suspected that he was joking, and asked if he had been consulting a

spiritual medium; but he was clearly in earnest.



"It is the great discovery of the age," he said, quite seriously.  "The

world will soon ring with it.  I wish I could tell you about it, but I

have passed my word.  You will not have long to wait."



I was going to sail for the Mediterranean in February, and I asked if it

would be likely that I would know this great secret before I sailed.  He

thought not; but he said that more than likely the startling news would

be given to the world while I was on the water, and it might come to me

on the ship by wireless.  I confess I was amazed and intensely curious by

this time.  I conjectured the discovery of some document--some Bacon or

Shakespeare private paper which dispelled all the mystery of the

authorship.  I hinted that he might write me a letter which I could open

on the ship; but he was firm in his refusal.  He had passed his word, he

repeated, and the news might not be given out as soon as that; but he

assured me more than once that wherever I might be, in whatever remote

locality, it would come by cable, and the world would quake with it.

I was tempted to give up my trip, to be with him at Stormfield at the

time of the upheaval.



Naturally the Shakespeare theme was uppermost during the remaining days

that we were together.  He had engaged another stenographer, and was now

dictating, forenoons, his own views on the subject--views coordinated

with those of Mr. Greenwood, whom he liberally quoted, but embellished

and decorated in his own gay manner.  These were chapters for his

autobiography, he said, and I think he had then no intention of making a

book of them.  I could not quite see why he should take all this

argumentary trouble if he had, as he said, positive evidence that Bacon,

and not Shakespeare, had written the plays.  I thought the whole matter

very curious.



The Shakespeare interest had diverging by-paths.  One evening, when we

were alone at dinner, he said:



"There is only one other illustrious man in history about whom there is

so little known," and he added, "Jesus Christ."



He reviewed the statements of the Gospels concerning Christ, though he

declared them to be mainly traditional and of no value.  I agreed that

they contained confusing statements, and inflicted more or less with

justice and reason; but I said I thought there was truth in them, too.



"Why do you think so?" he asked.



"Because they contain matters that are self-evident--things eternally and

essentially just."



"Then you make your own Bible?"



"Yes, from those materials combined with human reason."



"Then it does not matter where the truth, as you call it, comes from?"



I admitted that the source did not matter; that truth from Shakespeare,

Epictetus, or Aristotle was quite as valuable as from the Scriptures.  We

were on common ground now.  He mentioned Marcus Aurelius, the Stoics, and

their blameless lives.  I, still pursuing the thought of Jesus, asked:



"Do you not think it strange that in that day when Christ came, admitting

that there was a Christ, such a character could have come at all--in the

time of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, when all was ceremony and

unbelief?"



"I remember," he said, "the Sadducees didn't believe in hell.  He brought

them one."



"Nor the resurrection.  He brought them that, also."



He did not admit that there had been a Christ with the character and

mission related by the Gospels.



"It is all a myth," he said.  "There have been Saviours in every age of

the world.  It is all just a fairy tale, like the idea of Santa Claus."



"But," I argued, "even the spirit of Christmas is real when it is

genuine.  Suppose that we admit there was no physical Saviour--that it is

only an idea--a spiritual embodiment which humanity has made for itself

and is willing to improve upon as its own spirituality improves, wouldn't

that make it worthy?"



"But then the fairy story of the atonement dissolves, and with it

crumbles the very foundations of any established church.  You can create

your own Testament, your own Scripture, and your own Christ, but you've

got to give up your atonement."



"As related to the crucifixion, yes, and good riddance to it; but the

death of the old order and the growth of spirituality comes to a sort of

atonement, doesn't it?"



He said:



"A conclusion like that has about as much to do with the Gospels and

Christianity as Shakespeare had to do with Bacon's plays.  You are

preaching a doctrine that would have sent a man to the stake a few

centuries ago.  I have preached that in my own Gospel."



I remembered then, and realized that, by my own clumsy ladder, I had

merely mounted from dogma, and superstition to his platform of training

the ideals to a higher contentment of soul.









CCLXXVII



"IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?"



I set out on my long journey with much reluctance.  However, a series of

guests with various diversions had been planned, and it seemed a good

time to go.  Clemens gave me letters of introduction, and bade me

Godspeed.  It would be near the end of April before I should see him

again.



Now and then on the ship, and in the course of my travels, I remembered

the great news I was to hear concerning Shakespeare.  In Cairo, at

Shepheard's, I looked eagerly through English newspapers, expecting any

moment to come upon great head-lines; but I was always disappointed.

Even on the return voyage there was no one I could find who had heard any

particular Shakespeare news.



Arriving in New York, I found that Clemens himself had published his

Shakespeare dictations in a little volume of his own, entitled, 'Is

Shakespeare Dead?'  The title certainly suggested spiritistic matters,

and I got a volume at Harpers', and read it going up on the train, hoping

to find somewhere in it a solution of the great mystery.  But it was only

matter I had already known; the secret was still unrevealed.



At Redding I lost not much time in getting up to Stormfield.  There had

been changes in my absence. Clara Clemens had returned from her travels,

and Jean, whose health seemed improved, was coming home to be her

father's secretary.  He was greatly pleased with these things, and

declared he was going to have a home once more with his children about

him.



He was quite alone that day, and we walked up and down the great living-

room for an hour, perhaps, while he discussed his new plans.  For one

thing, he had incorporated his pen-name, Mark Twain, in order that the

protection of his copyrights and the conduct of his literary business in

general should not require his personal attention.  He seemed to find a

relief in this, as he always did in dismissing any kind of

responsibility.  When we went in for billiards I spoke of his book, which

I had read on the way up, and of the great Shakespearian secret which was

to astonish the world.  Then he told me that the matter had been delayed,

but that he was no longer required to suppress it; that the revelation

was in the form of a book--a book which revealed conclusively to any one

who would take the trouble to follow the directions that the acrostic

name of Francis Bacon in a great variety of forms ran through many--

probably through all of the so-called Shakespeare plays.  He said it was

far and away beyond anything of the kind ever published; that Ignatius

Donnelly and others had merely glimpsed the truth, but that the author of

this book, William Stone Booth, had demonstrated, beyond any doubt or

question, that the Bacon signatures were there.  The book would be issued

in a few days, he said.  He had seen a set of proofs of it, and while it

had not been published in the best way to clearly demonstrate its great

revelation, it must settle the matter with every reasoning mind.  He

confessed that his faculties had been more or less defeated in,

attempting to follow the ciphers, and he complained bitterly that the

evidence had not been set forth so that he who merely skims a book might

grasp it.



He had failed on the acrostics at first; but more recently he had

understood the rule, and had been able to work out several Bacon

signatures.  He complimented me by saying that he felt sure that when the

book came I would have no trouble with it.



Without going further with this matter, I may say here that the book

arrived presently, and between us we did work out a considerable number

of the claimed acrostics by following the rules laid down.  It was

certainly an interesting if not wholly convincing occupation, and it

would be a difficult task for any one to prove that the ciphers are not

there.  Just why this pretentious volume created so little agitation it

would be hard to say.  Certainly it did not cause any great upheaval in

the literary world, and the name of William Shakespeare still continues

to be printed on the title-page of those marvelous dramas so long

associated with his name.



Mark Twain's own book on the subject--'Is Shakespeare Dead?'--found a

wide acceptance, and probably convinced as many readers.  It contained no

new arguments; but it gave a convincing touch to the old ones, and it was

certainly readable.--[Mark Twain had the fullest conviction as to the

Bacon authorship of the Shakespeare plays.  One evening, with Mr. Edward

Loomis, we attended a fine performance of "Romeo and Juliet" given by

Sothern and Marlowe.  At the close of one splendid scene he said, quite

earnestly, "That is about the best play that Lord Bacon ever wrote."]



Among the visitors who had come to Stormfield was Howells.  Clemens had

called a meeting of the Human Race Club, but only Howells was able to

attend.  We will let him tell of his visit:



     We got on very well without the absentees, after finding them in the

     wrong, as usual, and the visit was like those I used to have with

     him so many years before in Hartford, but there was not the old

     ferment of subjects.  Many things had been discussed and put away

     for good, but we had our old fondness for nature and for each other,

     who were so differently parts of it.  He showed his absolute content

     with his house, and that was the greater pleasure for me because it

     was my son who designed it.  The architect had been so fortunate as

     to be able to plan it where a natural avenue of savins, the close-

     knit, slender, cypress-like cedars of New England, led away from the

     rear of the villa to the little level of a pergola, meant some day

     to be wreathed and roofed with vines.  But in the early spring days

     all the landscape was in the beautiful nakedness of the Northern

     winter.  It opened in the surpassing loveliness of wooded and

     meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days blue, and the

     last gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor.  We walked up and

     down, up and down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and

     talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for

     the sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us; now

     we were far past turbulence or anger.  Once we took a walk together

     across the yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where

     the ice still knit the clayey banks together like crystal mosses;

     and the stream far down clashed through and over the stones and the

     shards of ice.  Clemens pointed out the scenery he had bought to

     give himself elbowroom, and showed me the lot he was going to have

     me build on.  The next day we came again with the geologist he had

     asked up to Stormfield to analyze its rocks.  Truly he loved the

     place .  .  .  .



     My visit at Stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his

     part and on mine.  Every morning before I dressed I heard him

     sounding my name through the house for the fun of it and I know for

     the fondness, and if I looked out of my door there he was in his

     long nightgown swaying up and down the corridor, and wagging his

     great white head like a boy that leaves his bed and comes out in the

     hope of frolic with some one.  The last morning a soft sugar-snow

     had fallen and was falling, and I drove through it down to the

     station in the carriage which had been given him by his wife's

     father when they were first married, and had been kept all those

     intervening years in honorable retirement for this final use.--[This

     carriage--a finely built coup--had been presented to Mrs. Crane when

     the Hartford house was closed.  When Stormfield was built she

     returned it to its original owner.]--Its springs had not grown

     yielding with time, it had rather the stiffness and severity of age;

     but for him it must have swung low like the sweet chariot of the

     negro "spiritual" which I heard him sing with such fervor when those

     wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way northward.



Howells's visit resulted in a new inspiration.  Clemens started to write

him one night when he could not sleep, and had been reading the volume of

letters of James Russell Lowell.  Then, next morning, he was seized with

the notion of writing a series of letters to such friends as Howells,

Twichell, and Rogers--letters not to be mailed, but to be laid away for

some future public.  He wrote two of these immediately--to Howells and to

Twichell.  The Howells letter (or letters, for it was really double) is

both pathetic and amusing. The first part ran:

                                   3 in the morning, April 17, 1909.



     My pen has gone dry and the ink is out of reach.  Howells, did you

     write me day-before-day-before yesterday or did I dream it?  In my

     mind's eye I most vividly see your hand-write on a square blue

     envelope in the mail-pile.  I have hunted the house over, but there

     is no such letter. Was it an illusion?



     I am reading Lowell's letters & smoking. I woke an hour ago & am

     reading to keep from wasting the time. On page 305, Vol. I, I have

     just margined a note:



     "Young friend!  I like that!  You ought to see him now."



     It seemed startlingly strange to hear a person call you young.  It

     was a brick out of a blue sky, & knocked me groggy for a moment. Ah

     me, the pathos of it is that we were young then.  And he--why, so

     was he, but he didn't know it.  He didn't even know it 9 years

     later, when we saw him approaching and you warned me, saying:



     "Don't say anything about age--he has just turned 50 & thinks he is

     old, & broods over it."



     Well, Clara did sing!  And you wrote her a dear letter.



     Time to go to sleep.



                              Yours ever,

                                             MARK





The second letter, begun at 10 A.M., outlines the plan by which he is to

write on the subject uppermost in his mind without restraint, knowing

that the letter is not to be mailed.



     . . .The scheme furnishes a definite target for each letter, & you

     can choose the target that's going to be the most sympathetic for

     what you are hungering & thirsting to say at that particular moment.

     And you can talk with a quite unallowable frankness & freedom

     because you are not going to send the letter.  When you are on fire

     with theology you'll not write it to Rogers, who wouldn't be an

     inspiration; you'll write it to Twichell, because it will make him

     writhe and squirm & break the furniture.  When you are on fire with

     a good thing that's indecent you won't waste it on Twichell; you'll

     save it for Howells, who will love it.  As he will never see it you

     can make it really indecenter than he could stand; & so no harm is

     done, yet a vast advantage is gained.



The letter was not finished, and the scheme perished there.  The Twichell

letter concerned missionaries, and added nothing to what he had already

said on the subject.



He wrote no letter to Mr. Rogers--perhaps never wrote to him again.









CCLXXVIII



THE DEATH OF HENRY ROGERS



Clemens, a little before my return, had been on a trip to Norfolk,

Virginia, to attend the opening ceremonies of the Virginia Railway.  He

had made a speech on that occasion, in which he had paid a public tribute

to Henry Rogers, and told something of his personal obligation to the

financier.



He began by telling what Mr. Rogers had done for Helen Keller, whom he

called "the most marvelous person of her sex that has existed on this

earth since Joan of Arc."  Then he said:



     That is not all Mr. Rogers has done, but you never see that side of

     his character because it is never protruding; but he lends a helping

     hand daily out of that generous heart of his.  You never hear of it.

     He is supposed to be a moon which has one side dark and the other

     bright.  But the other side, though you don't see it, is not dark;

     it is bright, and its rays penetrate, and others do see it who are

     not God.

     I would take this opportunity to tell something that I have never

     been allowed to tell by Mr. Rogers, either by my mouth or in print,

     and if I don't look at him I can tell it now.



     In 1894, when the publishing company of Charles L. Webster, of which

     I was financial agent, failed, it left me heavily in debt.  If you

     will remember what commerce was at that time you will recall that

     you could not sell anything, and could not buy anything, and I was

     on my back; my books were not worth anything at all, and I could not

     give away my copyrights.  Mr. Rogers had long-enough vision ahead to

     say, "Your books have supported you before, and after the panic is

     over they will support you again," and that was a correct

     proposition.  He saved my copyrights, and saved me from financial

     ruin.  He it was who arranged with my creditors to allow me to roam

     the face of the earth and persecute the nations thereof with

     lectures, promising at the end of four years I would pay dollar for

     dollar.  That arrangement was made, otherwise I would now be living

     out-of-doors under an umbrella, and a borrowed one at that.



     You see his white mustache and his hair trying to get white (he is

     always trying to look like me--I don't blame him for that).  These

     are only emblematic of his character, and that is all.  I say,

     without exception, hair and all, he is the whitest man I have ever

     known.



This had been early in April.  Something more than a month later Clemens

was making a business trip to New York to see Mr. Rogers.  I was

telephoned early to go up and look over some matters with him before he

started.  I do not remember why I was not to go along that day, for I

usually made such trips with him.  I think it was planned that Miss

Clemens, who was in the city, was to meet him at the Grand Central

Station.  At all events, she did meet him there, with the news that

during the night Mr. Rogers had suddenly died.  This was May 20, 1909.

The news had already come to the house, and I had lost no time in

preparations to follow by the next train.  I joined him at the Grosvenor

Hotel, on Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street.  He was upset and deeply

troubled by the loss of his stanch adviser and friend.  He had a helpless

look, and he said his friends were dying away from him and leaving him

adrift.



"And how I hate to do anything," he added, "that requires the least

modicum of intelligence!"



We remained at the Grosvenor for Mr. Rogers's funeral.  Clemens served as

one of the pall-bearers, but he did not feel equal to the trip to

Fairhaven.  He wanted to be very quiet, he said.  He could not undertake

to travel that distance among those whom he knew so well, and with whom

he must of necessity join in conversation; so we remained in the hotel

apartment, reading and saying very little until bedtime.  Once he asked

me to write a letter to Jean: "Say, 'Your father says every little while,

"How glad I am that Jean is at home again!"' for that is true and I think

of it all the time."



But by and by, after a long period of silence, he said:



"Mr. Rogers is under the ground now."



And so passed out of earthly affairs the man who had contributed so

largely to the comfort of Mark Twain's old age.  He was a man of fine

sensibilities and generous impulses; withal a keen sense of humor.



One Christmas, when he presented Mark Twain with a watch and a match-

case, he wrote:



     MY DEAR CLEMENS,--For many years your friends have been complaining

     of your use of tobacco, both as to quantity and quality.  Complaints

     are now coming in of your use of time.  Most of your friends think

     that you are using your supply somewhat lavishly, but the chief

     complaint is in regard to the quality.



     I have been appealed to in the mean time, and have concluded that it

     is impossible to get the right kind of time from a blacking-box.



     Therefore, I take the liberty of sending you herewith a machine that

     will furnish only the best.  Please use it with the kind wishes of

                              Yours truly,

                                             H. H. ROGERS.



     P. S.--Complaint has also been made in regard to the furrows you

     make in your trousers in scratching matches.  You will find a furrow

     on the bottom of the article inclosed.  Please use it.  Compliments

     of the season to the family.



He was a man too busy to write many letters, but when he did write (to

Clemens at least) they were always playful and unhurried.  One reading

them would not find it easy to believe that the writer was a man on whose

shoulders lay the burdens of stupendous finance-burdens so heavy that at

last he was crushed beneath their weight.









CCLXXIX



AN EXTENSION OF COPYRIGHT



One of the pleasant things that came to Mark Twain that year was the

passage of a copyright bill, which added to the royalty period an

extension of fourteen years.  Champ Clark had been largely instrumental

in the success of this measure, and had been fighting for it steadily

since Mark Twain's visit to Washington in 1906.  Following that visit,

Clark wrote:



     .  .  .  It [the original bill] would never pass because the bill

     had literature and music all mixed together.  Being a Missourian of

     course it would give me great pleasure to be of service to you.

     What I want to say is this: you have prepared a simple bill relating

     only to the copyright of books; send it to me and I will try to have

     it passed.



Clemens replied that he might have something more to say on the copyright

question by and by--that he had in hand a dialogue--[Similar to the "Open

Letter to the Register of Copyrights," North American Review, January,

1905.]--which would instruct Congress, but this he did not complete.

Meantime a simple bill was proposed and early in 1909 it became a law.

In June Clark wrote:



     DR. SAMUEL L. CLEMENS,

     Stormfield, Redding, Conn.



     MY DEAR DOCTOR,--I am gradually becoming myself again, after a

     period of exhaustion that almost approximated prostration.  After a

     long lecture tour last summer I went immediately into a hard

     campaign; as soon as the election was over, and I had recovered my

     disposition, I came here and went into those tariff hearings, which

     began shortly after breakfast each day, and sometimes lasted until

     midnight.  Listening patiently and meekly, withal, to the lying of

     tariff barons for many days and nights was followed by the work of

     the long session; that was followed by a hot campaign to take Uncle

     Joe's rules away from him; on the heels of that "Campaign that

     Failed" came the tariff fight in the House.  I am now getting time

     to breathe regularly and I am writing to ask you if the copyright

     law is acceptable to you.  If it is not acceptable to you I want to

     ask you to write and tell me how it should be changed and I will

     give my best endeavors to the work.  I believe that your ideas and

     wishes in the matter constitute the best guide we have as to what

     should be done in the case.

                    Your friend,

                                        CHAMP CLARK.



To this Clemens replied:



                              STORMFIELD, REDDING, CONN, June 5, 1909.



     DEAR CHAMP CLARK,--Is the new copyright law acceptable to me?

     Emphatically yes!  Clark, it is the only sane & clearly defined &

     just & righteous copyright law that has ever existed in the United

     States.  Whosoever will compare it with its predecessors will have

     no trouble in arriving at that decision.



     The bill which was before the committee two years ago when I was

     down there was the most stupefying jumble of conflicting &

     apparently irreconcilable interests that was ever seen; and we all

     said "the case is hopeless, absolutely hopeless--out of this chaos

     nothing can be built."  But we were in error; out of that chaotic

     mass this excellent bill has been constructed, the warring interests

     have been reconciled, and the result is as comely and substantial a

     legislative edifice as lifts its domes and towers and protective

     lightning-rods out of the statute book I think.  When I think of

     that other bill, which even the Deity couldn't understand, and of

     this one, which even I can understand, I take off my hat to the man

     or men who devised this one.  Was it R. U. Johnson?  Was it the

     Authors' League?  Was it both together?  I don't know, but I take

     off my hat, anyway.  Johnson has written a valuable article about

     the new law--I inclose it.



     At last--at last and for the first time in copyright history--we are

     ahead of England!  Ahead of her in two ways: by length of time and

     by fairness to all interests concerned.  Does this sound like

     shouting?  Then I must modify it: all we possessed of copyright

     justice before the 4th of last March we owed to England's

     initiative.

                              Truly yours,

                                             S. L. CLEMENS.



Clemens had prepared what was the final word an the subject of copyright

just before this bill was passed--a petition for a law which he believed

would regulate the whole matter.  It was a generous, even if a somewhat

Utopian, plan, eminently characteristic of its author.  The new fourteen-

year extension, with the prospect of more, made this or any other

compromise seem inadvisable.--[The reader may consider this last

copyright document by Mark Twain under Appendix N, at the end of this

volume.]









CCLXXX



A WARNING



Clemens had promised to go to Baltimore for the graduation of "Francesca"

of his London visit in 1907--and to make a short address to her class.



It was the eighth of June when we set out on this journey,--[The reader

may remember that it was the 8th of June, 1867, that Mark Twain sailed

for the Holy Land.  It was the 8th of June, 1907, that he sailed for

England to take his Oxford degree.  This 8th of June, 1909, was at least

slightly connected with both events, for he was keeping an engagement

made with Francesca in London, and my notes show that he discussed, on

the way to the station, some incidents of his Holy Land trip and his

attitude at that time toward Christian traditions.  As he rarely

mentioned the Quaker City trip, the coincidence seems rather curious.

It is most unlikely that Clemens himself in any way associated the two

dates.]--but the day was rather bleak and there was a chilly rain.

Clemens had a number of errands to do in New York, and we drove from one

place to another, attending to them.  Finally, in the afternoon, the rain

ceased, and while I was arranging some matters for him he concluded to

take a ride on the top of a Fifth Avenue stage.  It was fine and pleasant

when he started, but the weather thickened again and when he returned he

complained that he had felt a little chilly.  He seemed in fine

condition, however, next morning and was in good spirits all the way to

Baltimore.  Chauncey Depew was on the train and they met in the dining-

car--the last time, I think, they ever saw each other.  He was tired when

we reached the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore and did not wish to see the

newspaper men.  It happened that the reporters had a special purpose in

coming just at this time, for it had suddenly developed that in his

Shakespeare book, through an oversight, due to haste in publication, full

credit had not been given to Mr. Greenwood for the long extracts quoted

from his work.  The sensational head-lines in a morning paper, "Is Mark

Twain a Plagiarist?" had naturally prompted the newspaper men to see what

he would have to say on the subject.  It was a simple matter, easily

explained, and Clemens himself was less disturbed about it than anybody.

He felt no sense of guilt, he said; and the fact that he had been

stealing and caught at it would give Mr. Greenwood's book far more

advertising than if he had given him the full credit which he had

intended.  He found a good deal of amusement in the situation, his only

worry being that Clara and Jean would see the paper and be troubled.



He had taken off his clothes and was lying down, reading.  After a little

he got up and began walking up and down the room.  Presently he stopped

and, facing me, placed his hand upon his breast.  He said:



"I think I must have caught a little cold yesterday on that Fifth Avenue

stage.  I have a curious pain in my breast."



I suggested that he lie down again and I would fill his hot-water bag.

The pain passed away presently, and he seemed to be dozing.  I stepped

into the next room and busied myself with some writing.  By and by I

heard him stirring again and went in where he was.  He was walking up and

down and began talking of some recent ethnological discoveries--

something relating to prehistoric man.



"What a fine boy that prehistoric man must have been," he said--" the

very first one!  Think of the gaudy style of him, how he must have lorded

it over those other creatures, walking on his hind legs, waving his arms,

practising and getting ready for the pulpit."



The fancy amused him, but presently he paused in his walk and again put

his hand on his breast, saying:



"That pain has come back.  It's a curious, sickening, deadly kind of

pain.  I never had anything just like it."



It seemed to me that his face had become rather gray.  I said:



"Where is it, exactly, Mr. Clemens?"



He laid his hand in the center of his breast and said:



"It is here, and it is very peculiar indeed."



Remotely in my mind occurred the thought that he had located his heart,

and the "peculiar deadly pain" he had mentioned seemed ominous.  I

suggested, however, that it was probably some rheumatic touch, and this

opinion seemed warranted when, a few moments later, the hot water had

again relieved it.  This time the pain had apparently gone to stay, for

it did not return while we were in Baltimore.  It was the first positive

manifestation of the angina which eventually would take him from us.



The weather was pleasant in Baltimore, and his visit to St. Timothy's

School and his address there were the kind of diversions that meant most

to him.  The flock of girls, all in their pretty commencement dresses,

assembled and rejoicing at his playfully given advice: not to smoke--to

excess; not to drink--to excess; not to marry--to excess; he standing

there in a garb as white as their own--it made a rare picture--a sweet

memory--and it was the last time he ever gave advice from the platform to

any one.



Edward S. Martin also spoke to the school, and then there was a great

feasting in the big assembly-hall.



It was on the lawn that a reporter approached him with the news of the

death of Edward Everett Hale--another of the old group.  Clemens said

thoughtfully, after a moment:



"I had the greatest respect and esteem for Edward Everett Hale, the

greatest admiration for his work.  I am as grieved to hear of his death

as I can ever be to hear of the death of any friend, though my grief is

always tempered with the satisfaction of knowing that for the one that

goes, the hard, bitter struggle of life is ended."



We were leaving the Belvedere next morning, and when the subject of

breakfast came up for discussion he said:



"That was the most delicious Baltimore fried chicken we had yesterday

morning.  I think we'll just repeat that order.  It reminds me of John

Quarles's farm."



We had been having our meals served in the rooms, but we had breakfast

that morning down in the diningroom, and "Francesca" and her mother were

there.



As he stood on the railway platform waiting for the train, he told me how

once, fifty-five years before, as a boy of eighteen, he had changed cars

there for Washington and had barely caught his train--the crowd yelling

at him as he ran.



We remained overnight in New York, and that evening, at the Grosvenor, he

read aloud a poem of his own which I had not seen before.  He had brought

it along with some intention of reading it at St.  Timothy's, he said,

but had not found the occasion suitable.



"I wrote it a long time ago in Paris.  I'd been reading aloud to Mrs.

Clemens and Susy--in'93, I think--about Lord Clive and Warren Hastings,

from Macaulay--how great they were and how far they fell.  Then I took an

imaginary case--that of some old demented man mumbling of his former

state.  I described him, and repeated some of his mumblings.  Susy and

Mrs. Clemens said, 'Write it'--so I did, by and by, and this is it.  I

call it 'The Derelict.'"



He read in his effective manner that fine poem, the opening stanza of

which follows:



               You sneer, you ships that pass me by,

               Your snow-pure canvas towering proud!

               You traders base!--why, once such fry

               Paid reverence, when like a cloud

               Storm-swept I drove along,

               My Admiral at post, his pennon blue

               Faint in the wilderness of sky, my long

               Yards bristling with my gallant crew,

               My ports flung wide, my guns displayed,

               My tall spars hid in bellying sail!

              --You struck your topsails then, and made

               Obeisance--now your manners fail.



He had employed rhyme with more facility than was usual for him, and the

figure and phrasing were full of vigor.



"It is strong and fine," I said, when he had finished.



"Yes," he assented.  "It seems so as I read it now.  It is so long since

I have seen it that it is like reading another man's work.  I should call

it good, I believe."



He put the manuscript in his bag and walked up and down the floor

talking.



"There is no figure for the human being like the ship," he said; "no such

figure for the storm-beaten human drift as the derelict--such men as

Clive and Hastings could only be imagined as derelicts adrift, helpless,

tossed by every wind and tide."



We returned to Redding next day.  On the train going home he fell to

talking of books and authors, mainly of the things he had never been able

to read.



"When I take up one of Jane Austen's books," he said, "such as Pride and

Prejudice, I feel like a barkeeper entering the kingdom of heaven.  I

know, what his sensation would be and his private comments.  He would not

find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so."



He recalled again how Stepniak had come to Hartford, and how humiliated

Mrs. Clemens had been to confess that her husband was not familiar with

the writings of Thackeray and others.



"I don't know anything about anything," he said, mournfully, "and never

did.  My brother used to try to get me to read Dickens, long ago.  I

couldn't do it--I was ashamed; but I couldn't do it.  Yes, I have read

The Tale of Two Cities, and could do it again.  I have read it a good

many times; but I never could stand Meredith and most of the other

celebrities."



By and by he handed me the Saturday Times Review, saying:



"Here is a fine poem, a great poem, I think.  I can stand that."



It was "The Palatine (in the 'Dark Ages')," by Willa Sibert Cather,

reprinted from McClure's.  The reader will understand better than I can

express why these lofty opening stanzas appealed to Mark Twain:



                               THE PALATINE



                    "Have you been with the King to Rome,

                    Brother, big brother?"

                    "I've been there and I've come home,

                    Back to your play, little brother."



                    "Oh, how high is Caesar's house,

                    Brother, big brother?"

                    "Goats about the doorways browse;

                    Night-hawks nest in the burnt roof-tree,

                    Home of the wild bird and home of the bee.

                    A thousand chambers of marble lie

                    Wide to the sun and the wind and the sky.

                    Poppies we find amongst our wheat

                    Grow on Caesar's banquet seat.

                    Cattle crop and neatherds drowse

                    On the floors of Caesar's house."



                    "But what has become of Caesar's gold,

                    Brother, big brother?"

                    "The times are bad and the world is old--

                    Who knows the where of the Caesar's gold?

                    Night comes black on the Caesar's hill;

                    The wells are deep and the tales are ill.

                    Fireflies gleam in the damp and mold,

                    All that is left of the Caesar's gold.

                    Back to your play, little brother."





Farther along in our journey he handed me the paper again, pointing to

these lines of Kipling:



               How is it not good for the Christian's health

               To hurry the Aryan brown,

               For the Christian riles and the Aryan smiles,

               And he weareth the Christian down;

               And the end of the fight is a tombstone white

               And the name of the late deceased:

               And the epitaph drear: "A fool lies here

               Who tried to hustle the East."





"I could stand any amount of that," he said, and presently: "Life is too

long and too short.  Too long for the weariness of it; too short for the

work to be done.  At the very most, the average mind can only master a

few languages and a little history."



I said: "Still, we need not worry.  If death ends all it does not matter;

and if life is eternal there will be time enough."



"Yes," he assented, rather grimly, "that optimism of yours is always

ready to turn hell's back yard into a playground."



I said that, old as I was, I had taken up the study of French, and

mentioned Bayard Taylor's having begun Greek at fifty, expecting to need

it in heaven.



Clemens said, reflectively: "Yes--but you see that was Greek."









CCLXXXI



THE LAST SUMMER AT STORMFIELD



I was at Stormfield pretty constantly during the rest of that year.  At

first I went up only for the day; but later, when his health did not

improve, and when he expressed a wish for companionship evenings, I

remained most of the nights as well.  Our rooms were separated only by a

bath-room; and as neither of us was much given to sleep, there was likely

to be talk or reading aloud at almost any hour when both were awake.  In

the very early morning I would usually slip in, softly, sometimes to find

him propped up against his pillows sound asleep, his glasses on, the

reading-lamp blazing away as it usually did, day or night; but as often

as not he was awake, and would have some new plan or idea of which he was

eager to be delivered, and there was always interest, and nearly always

amusement in it, even if it happened to be three in the morning or

earlier.



Sometimes, when he thought it time for me to be stirring, he would call

softly, but loudly enough for me to hear if awake; and I would go in, and

we would settle again problems of life and death and science, or, rather,

he would settle them while I dropped in a remark here and there, merely

to hold the matter a little longer in solution.



The pains in his breast came back, and with a good deal of frequency as

the summer advanced; also, they became more severe.  Dr. Edward Quintard

came up from New York, and did not hesitate to say that the trouble

proceeded chiefly from the heart, and counseled diminished smoking, with

less active exercise, advising particularly against Clemens's lifetime

habit of lightly skipping up and down stairs.



There was no prohibition as to billiards, however, or leisurely walking,

and we played pretty steadily through those peaceful summer days, and

often took a walk down into the meadows or perhaps in the other

direction, when it was not too warm or windy.  Once we went as far as the

river, and I showed him a part of his land he had not seen before--a

beautiful cedar hillside, remote and secluded, a place of enchantment.

On the way I pointed out a little corner of land which earlier he had

given me to straighten our division line.  I told him I was going to

build a study on it, and call it "Markland."  He thought it an admirable

building-site, and I think he was pleased with the name.  Later he said:



"If you had a place for that extra billiard-table of mine [the Rogers

table, which had been left in New York] I would turn it over to you."



I replied that I could adapt the size of my proposed study to fit a

billiard-table, and he said:



"Now that will be very good.  Then, when I want exercise, I can walk down

and play billiards with you, and when you want exercise you can walk up

and play billiards with me.  You must build that study."



So it was we planned, and by and by Mr. Lounsbury had undertaken the

work.



During the walks Clemens rested a good deal.  There were the New England

hills to climb, and then he found that he tired easily, and that

weariness sometimes brought on the pain.  As I remember now, I think how

bravely he bore it.  It must have been a deadly, sickening, numbing pain,

for I have seen it crumple him, and his face become colorless while his

hand dug at his breast; but he never complained, he never bewailed, and

at billiards he would persist in going on and playing in his turn, even

while he was bowed with the anguish of the attack.



We had found that a glass of very hot water relieved it, and we kept

always a thermos bottle or two filled and ready.  At the first hint from

him I would pour out a glass and another, and sometimes the relief came

quickly; but there were times, and alas! they came oftener, when that

deadly gripping did not soon release him.  Yet there would come a week or

a fortnight when he was apparently perfectly well, and at such times we

dismissed the thought of any heart malady, and attributed the whole

trouble to acute indigestion, from which he had always suffered more or

less.



We were alone together most of the time.  He did not appear to care for

company that summer.  Clara Clemens had a concert tour in prospect, and

her father, eager for her success, encouraged her to devote a large part

of her time to study.  For Jean, who was in love with every form of

outdoor and animal life, he had established headquarters in a vacant

farm-house on one corner of the estate, where she had collected some

stock and poultry, and was over-flowingly happy.  Ossip Gabrilowitsch was

a guest in the house a good portion of the summer, but had been invalided

through severe surgical operations, and for a long time rarely appeared,

even at meal-times.  So it came about that there could hardly have been a

closer daily companionship than was ours during this the last year of

Mark Twain's life.  For me, of course, nothing can ever be like it again

in this world.  One is not likely to associate twice with a being from

another star.









CCLXXXII



PERSONAL MEMORANDA



In the notes I made of this period I caught a little drift of personality

and utterance, and I do not know better how to preserve these things than

to give them here as nearly as may be in the sequence and in the forth in

which they were set down.



One of the first of these entries occurs in June, when Clemens was

rereading with great interest and relish Andrew D. White's Science and

Theology, which he called a lovely book.--['A History of the Warfare of

Science with Theology in Christendom'.]

     June 21.  A peaceful afternoon, and we walked farther than usual,

     resting at last in the shade of a tree in the lane that leads to

     Jean's farm-house.  I picked a dandelion-ball, with some remark

     about its being one of the evidences of the intelligent principle in

     nature--the seeds winged for a wider distribution.



     "Yes," he said, "those are the great evidences; no one who reasons

     can doubt them."



     And presently he added:



     "That is a most amusing book of White's.  When you read it you see

     how those old theologians never reasoned at all.  White tells of an

     old bishop who figured out that God created the world in an instant

     on a certain day in October exactly so many years before Christ, and

     proved it.  And I knew a preacher myself once who declared that the

     fossils in the rocks proved nothing as to the age of the world.  He

     said that God could create the rocks with those fossils in them for

     ornaments if He wanted to.  Why, it takes twenty years to build a

     little island in the Mississippi River, and that man actually

     believed that God created the whole world and all that's in it in

     six days.  White tells of another bishop who gave two new reasons

     for thunder; one being that God wanted to show the world His power,

     and another that He wished to frighten sinners to repent.  Now

     consider the proportions of that conception, even in the pettiest

     way you can think of it.  Consider the idea of God thinking of all

     that.  Consider the President of the United States wanting to

     impress the flies and fleas and mosquitoes, getting up on the dome

     of the Capitol and beating a bass-drum and setting off red fire."



He followed the theme a little further, then we made our way slowly back

up the long hill, he holding to my arm, and resting here and there, but

arriving at the house seemingly fresh and ready for billiards.



     June 23.  I came up this morning with a basket of strawberries.  He

     was walking up and down, looking like an ancient Roman.  He said:



     "Consider the case of Elsie Sigel--[Granddaughter of Gen.  Franz

     Sigel.  She was mysteriously murdered while engaged in settlement

     work among the Chinese.]--what a ghastly ending to any life!"



     Then turning upon me fiercely, he continued:



     "Anybody that knows anything knows that there was not a single life

     that was ever lived that was worth living.  Not a single child ever

     begotten that the begetting of it was not a crime.  Suppose a

     community of people to be living on the slope of a volcano, directly

     under the crater and in the path of lava-flow; that volcano has been

     breaking out right along for ages and is certain to break out again.

     They do not know when it will break out, but they know it will do

     it--that much can be counted on.  Suppose those people go to a

     community in a far neighborhood and say, 'We'd like to change places

     with you.  Come take our homes and let us have yours.'  Those people

     would say, 'Never mind, we are not interested in your country.  We

     know what has happened there, and what will happen again.'  We don't

     care to live under the blow that is likely to fall at any moment;

     and yet every time we bring a child into the world we are bringing

     it to a country, to a community gathered under the crater of a

     volcano, knowing that sooner or later death will come, and that

     before death there will be catastrophes infinitely worse.  Formerly

     it was much worse than now, for before the ministers abolished hell

     a man knew, when he was begetting a child, that he was begetting a

     soul that had only one chance in a hundred of escaping the eternal

     fires of damnation.  He knew that in all probability that child

     would be brought to damnation--one of the ninety-nine black sheep.

     But since hell has been abolished death has become more welcome.

     I wrote a fairy story once.  It was published somewhere.  I don't

     remember just what it was now, but the substance of it was that a

     fairy gave a man the customary wishes.  I was interested in seeing

     what he would take.  First he chose wealth and went away with it,

     but it did not bring him happiness.  Then he came back for the

     second selection, and chose fame, and that did not bring happiness

     either.  Finally he went to the fairy and chose death, and the fairy

     said, in substance, 'If you hadn't been a fool you'd have chosen

     that in the first place.'



     "The papers called me a pessimist for writing that story.

     Pessimist--the man who isn't a pessimist is a d---d fool."



But this was one of his savage humors, stirred by tragic circumstance.

Under date of July 5th I find this happier entry:



     We have invented a new game, three-ball carom billiards, each player

     continuing until he has made five, counting the number of his shots

     as in golf, the one who finishes in the fewer shots wins.  It is a

     game we play with almost exactly equal skill, and he is highly

     pleased with it.  He said this afternoon:



     "I have never enjoyed billiards as I do now.  I look forward to it

     every afternoon as my reward at the end of a good day's work."--[His

     work at this time was an article on Marjorie Fleming, the "wonder

     child," whose quaint writings and brief little life had been

     published to the world by Dr. John Brown.  Clemens always adored the

     thought of Marjorie, and in this article one can see that she ranked

     almost next to Joan of Arc in his affections.]



We went out in the loggia by and by and Clemens read aloud from a book

which Professor Zubelin left here a few days ago--'The Religion of a

Democrat'.  Something in it must have suggested to Clemens his favorite

science, for presently he said:



     "I have been reading an old astronomy; it speaks of the perfect line

     of curvature of the earth in spite of mountains and abysses, and I

     have imagined a man three hundred thousand miles high picking up a

     ball like the earth and looking at it and holding it in his hand.

     It would be about like a billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it

     over in his hand and rub it with his thumb, and where he rubbed over

     the mountain ranges he might say, 'There seems to be some slight

     roughness here, but I can't detect it with my eye; it seems

     perfectly smooth to look at.'  The Himalayas to him, the highest

     peak, would be one-sixty-thousandth of his height, or about the one-

     thousandth part of an inch as compared with the average man."



I spoke of having somewhere read of some very tiny satellites, one as

small, perhaps, as six miles in diameter, yet a genuine world.



"Could a man live on a world so small as that?" I asked.



     "Oh yes," he said.  "The gravitation that holds it together would

     hold him on, and he would always seem upright, the same as here.

     His horizon would be smaller, but even if he were six feet tall he

     would only have one foot for each mile of that world's diameter, so

     you see he would be little enough, even for a world that he could

     walk around in half a day."



He talked astronomy a great deal--marvel astronomy.  He had no real

knowledge of the subject, and I had none of any kind, which made its

ungraspable facts all the more thrilling.  He was always thrown into a

sort of ecstasy by the unthinkable distances of space--the supreme drama

of the universe.  The fact that Alpha Centauri was twenty-five trillions

of miles away--two hundred and fifty thousand times the distance of our

own remote sun, and that our solar system was traveling, as a whole,

toward the bright star Vega, in the constellation of Lyra, at the rate of

forty-four miles a second, yet would be thousands upon thousands of years

reaching its destination, fairly enraptured him.



The astronomical light-year--that is to say, the distance which light

travels in a year--was one of the things which he loved to contemplate;

but he declared that no two authorities ever figured it alike, and that

he was going to figure it for himself.  I came in one morning, to find

that he had covered several sheets of paper with almost interminable rows

of ciphers, and with a result, to him at least, entirely satisfactory.

I am quite certain that he was prouder of those figures and their

enormous aggregate than if he had just completed an immortal tale; and

when he added that the nearest fixed star--Alpha Centauri--was between

four and five light-years distant from the earth, and that there was no

possible way to think that distance in miles or even any calculable

fraction of it, his glasses shone and his hair was roached up as with the

stimulation of these stupendous facts.



By and by he said:



"I came in with Halley's comet in 1835.  It is coming again next year,

and I expect to go out with it.  It will be the greatest disappointment

of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet.  The Almighty has said,

no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in

together, they must go out together.'  Oh!  I am looking forward to

that."  And a little later he added:



"I've got some kind of a heart disease, and Quintard won't tell me

whether it is the kind that carries a man off in an instant or keeps him

lingering along and suffering for twenty years or so.  I was in hopes

that Quintard would tell me that I was likely to drop dead any minute;

but he didn't.  He only told me that my blood-pressure was too strong.

He didn't give me any schedule; but I expect to go with Halley's comet."



I seem to have omitted making any entries for a few days; but among his

notes I find this entry, which seems to refer to some discussion of a

favorite philosophy, and has a special interest of its own:



     July 14, 1909.  Yesterday's dispute resumed, I still maintaining

     that, whereas we can think, we generally don't do it.  Don't do it,

     & don't have to do it: we are automatic machines which act

     unconsciously.  From morning till sleeping-time, all day long.  All

     day long our machinery is doing things from habit & instinct, &

     without requiring any help or attention from our poor little 7-by-9

     thinking apparatus.  This reminded me of something: thirty years

     ago, in Hartford, the billiard-room was my study, & I wrote my

     letters there the first thing every morning.  My table lay two

     points off the starboard bow of the billiard-table, & the door of

     exit and entrance bore northeast&-by-east-half-east from that

     position, consequently you could see the door across the length of

     the billiard-table, but you couldn't see the floor by the said

     table.  I found I was always forgetting to ask intruders to carry my

     letters down-stairs for the mail, so I concluded to lay them on the

     floor by the door; then the intruder would have to walk over them, &

     that would indicate to him what they were there for.  Did it?  No,

     it didn't.  He was a machine, & had habits.  Habits take precedence

     of thought.



     Now consider this: a stamped & addressed letter lying on the floor--

     lying aggressively & conspicuously on the floor--is an unusual

     spectacle; so unusual a spectacle that you would think an intruder

     couldn't see it there without immediately divining that it was not

     there by accident, but had been deliberately placed there & for a

     definite purpose.  Very well--it may surprise you to learn that that

     most simple & most natural & obvious thought would never occur to

     any intruder on this planet, whether he be fool, half-fool, or the

     most brilliant of thinkers.  For he is always an automatic machine &

     has habits, & his habits will act before his thinking apparatus can

     get a chance to exert its powers.  My scheme failed because every

     human being has the habit of picking up any apparently misplaced

     thing & placing it where it won't be stepped on.



     My first intruder was George.  He went and came without saying

     anything.  Presently I found the letters neatly piled up on the

     billiard-table.  I was astonished.  I put them on the floor again.

     The next intruder piled them on the billiard-table without a word.

     I was profoundly moved, profoundly interested.  So I set the trap

     again.  Also again, & again, & yet again--all day long.  I caught

     every member of the family, & every servant; also I caught the three

     finest intellects in the town.  In every instance old, time-worn

     automatic habit got in its work so promptly that the thinking

     apparatus never got a chance.



I do not remember this particular discussion, but I do distinctly recall

being one of those whose intelligence was not sufficient to prevent my

picking up the letter he had thrown on the floor in front of his bed, and

being properly classified for doing it.



Clemens no longer kept note-books, as in an earlier time, but set down

innumerable memoranda-comments, stray reminders, and the like--on small

pads, and bunches of these tiny sheets accumulated on his table and about

his room.  I gathered up many of them then and afterward, and a few of

these characteristic bits may be offered here.





                                   KNEE



It is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest & truest & highest

ideals, but there is seldom any money in them.





                                 JEHOVAH



He is all-good.  He made man for hell or hell for man, one or the other--

take your choice.  He made it hard to get into heaven and easy to get

into hell.  He commended man to multiply & replenish-what?  Hell.





                        MODESTY ANTEDATES CLOTHES



& will be resumed when clothes are no more.

[The latter part of this aphorism is erased and underneath it he adds:]





                               MODESTY DIED



when clothes were born.





                               MODESTY DIED

when false modesty was born.





                                 HISTORY



A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie.  Often he must

enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to

see it.





                                  MORALS



are not the important thing--nor enlightenment--nor civilization.  A man

can do absolutely well without them, but he can't do without something to

eat.  The supremest thing is the needs of the body, not of the mind &

spirit.





                                SUGGESTION



There is conscious suggestion & there is unconscious suggestion--both

come from outside--whence all ideas come.

                                  DUELS



I think I could wipe out a dishonor by crippling the other man, but I

don't see how I could do it by letting him cripple me.



I have no feeling of animosity toward people who do not believe as I do;

I merely do not respect 'em.  In some serious matters (relig.) I would

have them burnt.



I am old now and once was a sinner.  I often think of it with a kind of

soft regret.  I trust my days are numbered.  I would not have that detail

overlooked.



She was always a girl, she was always young because her heart was young;

& I was young because she lived in my heart & preserved its youth from

decay.







He often busied himself working out more extensively some of the ideas

that came to him--moral ideas, he called them.  One fancy which he

followed in several forms (some of them not within the privilege of

print) was that of an inquisitive little girl, Bessie, who pursues her

mother with difficult questionings.--[Under Appendix w, at the end of

this volume, the reader will find one of the "Bessie" dialogues.]--He

read these aloud as he finished them, and it is certain that they lacked

neither logic nor humor.



Sometimes he went to a big drawer in his dresser, where he kept his

finished manuscripts, and took them out and looked over them, and read

parts of them aloud, and talked of the plans he had had for them, and how

one idea after another had been followed for a time and had failed to

satisfy him in the end.



Two fiction schemes that had always possessed him he had been unable to

bring to any conclusion.  Both of these have been mentioned in former

chapters; one being the notion of a long period of dream-existence during

a brief moment of sleep, and the other being the story of a mysterious

visitant from another realm.  He had experimented with each of these

ideas in no less than three forms, and there was fine writing and

dramatic narrative in all; but his literary architecture had somehow

fallen short of his conception.  "The Mysterious Stranger" in one of its

forms I thought might be satisfactorily concluded, and he admitted that

he could probably end it without much labor.  He discussed something of

his plans, and later I found the notes for its conclusion.  But I suppose

he was beyond the place where he could take up those old threads, though

he contemplated, fondly enough, the possibility, and recalled how he had

read at least one form of the dream tale to Howells, who had urged him to

complete it.









CCLXXXIII



ASTRONOMY AND DREAMS



August 5, 1909.  This morning I noticed on a chair a copy of Flaubert's

Salammbo which I recently lent him.  I asked if he liked it.



"No," he said, "I didn't like any of it."



"But you read it?"



"Yes, I read every line of it."



"You admitted its literary art?"



"Well, it's like this: If I should go to the Chicago stockyards and they

should kill a beef and cut it up and the blood should splash all over

everything, and then they should take me to another pen and kill another

beef and the blood should splash over everything again, and so on to pen

after pen, I should care for it about as much as I do for that book."



"But those were bloody days, and you care very much for that period in

history."



"Yes, that is so.  But when I read Tacitus and know that I am reading

history I can accept it as such and supply the imaginary details and

enjoy it, but this thing is such a continuous procession of blood and

slaughter and stench it worries me.  It has great art--I can see that.

That scene of the crucified lions and the death canon and the tent scene

are marvelous, but I wouldn't read that book again without a salary."



August 16.  He is reading Suetonius, which he already knows by heart--so

full of the cruelties and licentiousness of imperial Rome.



This afternoon he began talking about Claudius.



"They called Claudius a lunatic," he said, "but just see what nice

fancies he had.  He would go to the arena between times and have captives

and wild beasts brought out and turned in together for his special

enjoyment.  Sometimes when there were no captives on hand he would say,

'Well, never mind; bring out a carpenter.'  Carpentering around the arena

wasn't a popular job in those days.  He went visiting once to a province

and thought it would be pleasant to see how they disposed of criminals

and captives in their crude, old-fashioned way, but there was no

executioner on hand.  No matter; the Emperor of Rome was in no hurry--he

would wait.  So he sat down and stayed there until an executioner came."



I said, "How do you account for the changed attitude toward these things?

We are filled with pity to-day at the thought of torture and suffering."



"Ah!  but that is because we have drifted that way and exercised the

quality of compassion.  Relax a muscle and it soon loses its vigor; relax

that quality and in two generations--in one generation--we should be

gloating over the spectacle of blood and torture just the same.  Why, I

read somewhere a letter written just before the Lisbon catastrophe in

1755 about a scene on the public square of Lisbon: A lot of stakes with

the fagots piled for burning and heretics chained for burning.  The

square was crowded with men and women and children, and when those fires

were lighted, and the heretics began to shriek and writhe, those men and

women and children laughed so they were fairly beside themselves with the

enjoyment of the scene.  The Greeks don't seem to have done these things.

I suppose that indicates earlier advancement in compassion."



Colonel Harvey and Mr. Duneka came up to spend the night.  Mr. Clemens

had one of his seizures during the evening.  They come oftener and last

longer.  One last night continued for an hour and a half.  I slept there.



September 7.  To-day news of the North Pole discovered by Peary.  Five

days ago the same discovery was reported by Cook.  Clemens's comment:

"It's the greatest joke of the ages."  But a moment later he referred to

the stupendous fact of Arcturus being fifty thousand times as big as the

sun.



September 21.  This morning he told me, with great glee, the dream he had

had just before wakening.  He said:



     "I was in an automobile going slowly, with 'a little girl beside me,

     and some uniformed person walking along by us.  I said, 'I'll get

     out and walk, too'; but the officer replied, 'This is only one of

     the smallest of our fleet.'



     "Then I noticed that the automobile had no front, and there were two

     cannons mounted where the front should be.  I noticed, too, that we

     were traveling very low, almost down on the ground.  Presently we

     got to the bottom of a hill and started up another, and I found

     myself walking ahead of the 'mobile.  I turned around to look for

     the little girl, and instead of her I found a kitten capering beside

     me, and when we reached the top of the hill we were looking out over

     a most barren and desolate waste of sand-heaps without a speck of

     vegetation anywhere, and the kitten said, 'This view beggars all

     admiration.'  Then all at once we were in a great group of people

     and I undertook to repeat to them the kitten's remark, but when I

     tried to do it the words were so touching that I broke down and

     cried, and all the group cried, too, over the kitten's moving

     remark."



     The joy with which he told this absurd sleep fancy made it supremely

     ridiculous and we laughed until tears really came.



One morning he said: "I was awake a good deal in the night, and I tried

to think of interesting things.  I got to working out geological periods,

trying to think of some way to comprehend them, and then astronomical

periods.  Of course it's impossible, but I thought of a plan that seemed

to mean something to me.  I remembered that Neptune is two billion eight

hundred million miles away.  That, of course, is incomprehensible, but

then there is the nearest fixed star with its twenty-five trillion miles-

-twenty-five trillion--or nearly a thousand times as far, and then I took

this book and counted the lines on a page and I found that there was an

average of thirty-two lines to the page and two hundred and forty pages,

and I figured out that, counting the distance to Neptune as one line,

there were still not enough lines in the book by nearly two thousand to

reach the nearest fixed star, and somehow that gave me a sort of dim idea

of the vastness of the distance and kind of a journey into space."



Later I figured out another method of comprehending a little of that

great distance by estimating the existence of the human race at thirty

thousand years (Lord Kelvin's figures) and the average generation to have

been thirty-three years with a world population of 1,500,000,000 souls.

I assumed the nearest fixed star to be the first station in Paradise and

the first soul to have started thirty thousand years ago.  Traveling at

the rate of about thirty miles a second, it would just now be arriving in

Alpha Centauri with all the rest of that buried multitude stringing out

behind at an average distance of twenty miles apart.



Few things gave him more pleasure than the contemplation of such figures

as these.  We made occasional business trips to New York, and during one

of them visited the Museum of Natural History to look at the brontosaur

and the meteorites and the astronomical model in the entrance hall.  To

him these were the most fascinating things in the world.  He contemplated

the meteorites and the brontosaur, and lost himself in strange and

marvelous imaginings concerning the far reaches of time and space whence

they had come down to us.



Mark Twain lived curiously apart from the actualities of life.  Dwelling

mainly among his philosophies and speculations, he observed vaguely, or

minutely, what went on about him; but in either case the fact took a

place, not in the actual world, but in a world within his consciousness,

or subconsciousness, a place where facts were likely to assume new and

altogether different relations from those they had borne in the physical

occurrence.  It not infrequently happened, therefore, when he recounted

some incident, even the most recent, that history took on fresh and

startling forms.  More than once I have known him to relate an occurrence

of the day before with a reality of circumstance that carried absolute

conviction, when the details themselves were precisely reversed.  If his

attention were called to the discrepancy, his face would take on a blank

look, as of one suddenly aroused from dreamland, to be followed by an

almost childish interest in your revelation and ready acknowledgment of

his mistake.  I do not think such mistakes humiliated him; but they often

surprised and, I think, amused him.



Insubstantial and deceptive as was this inner world of his, to him it

must have been much more real than the world of flitting physical.

shapes about him.  He would fix you keenly with his attention, but you

realized, at last, that he was placing you and seeing you not as a part

of the material landscape, but as an item of his own inner world--a world

in which philosophies and morals stood upright--a very good world indeed,

but certainly a topsy-turvy world when viewed with the eye of mere

literal scrutiny.  And this was, mainly, of course, because the routine

of life did not appeal to him.  Even members of his household did not

always stir his consciousness.



He knew they were there; he could call them by name; he relied upon them;

but his knowledge of them always suggested the knowledge that Mount

Everest might have of the forests and caves and boulders upon its slopes,

useful, perhaps, but hardly necessary to the giant's existence, and in no

important matter a part of its greater life.









CCLXXXIV



A LIBRARY CONCERT



In a letter which Clemens wrote to Miss Wallace at this time, he tells of

a concert given at Stormfield on September 21st for the benefit of the

new Redding Library.  Gabrilowitsch had so far recovered that he was up

and about and able to play.  David Bispham, the great barytone, always

genial and generous, agreed to take part, and Clara Clemens, already

accustomed to public singing, was to join in the program.  The letter to

Miss Wallace supplies the rest of the history.

     We had a grand time here yesterday.  Concert in aid of the little

     library.



                              TEAM



                    Gabrilowitsch, pianist.

                    David Bispham, vocalist.

                    Clara Clemens, ditto.

                    Mark Twain, introduces of team.



     Detachments and squads and groups and singles came from everywhere-

     Danbury, New Haven, Norwalk, Redding, Redding Ridge, Ridgefield, and

     even from New York: some in 60-h.p.  motor-cars, some in buggies and

     carriages, and a swarm of farmer-young-folk on foot from miles

     around--525 altogether.



     If we hadn't stopped the sale of tickets a day and a half before the

     performance we should have been swamped.  We jammed 160 into the

     library (not quite all had seats), we filled the loggia, the dining-

     room, the hall, clear into the billiard-room, the stairs, and the

     brick-paved square outside the dining-room door.



     The artists were received with a great welcome, and it woke them up,

     and I tell you they performed to the Queen's taste!  The program was

     an hour and three-quarters long and the encores added a half-hour to

     it.  The enthusiasm of the house was hair-lifting.  They all stayed

     an hour after the close to shake hands and congratulate.



     We had no dollar seats except in the library, but we accumulated

     $372 for the Building Fund.  We had tea at half past six for a

     dozen--the Hawthornes, Jeannette Gilder, and her niece, etc.; and

     after 8-o'clock dinner we had a private concert and a ball in the

     bare-stripped library until 10; nobody present but the team and Mr.

     and Mrs. Paine and Jean and her dog.  And me.  Bispham did "Danny

     Deever" and the "Erlkonig" in his majestic, great organ-tones and

     artillery, and Gabrilowitsch played the accompaniments as they were

     never played before, I do suppose.



There is not much to add to that account.  Clemens, introducing the

performers, was the gay feature of the occasion.  He spoke of the great

reputation of Bispham and Gabrilowitsch; then he said:



"My daughter is not as famous as these gentlemen, but she is ever so much

better-looking."



The music of the evening that followed, with Gabrilowitsch at the piano

and David Bispham to sing, was something not likely ever to be repeated.

Bispham sang the "Erlkonig" and "Killiecrankie" and the "Grenadiers" and

several other songs.  He spoke of having sung Wagner's arrangement of the

"Grenadiers" at the composer's home following his death, and how none of

the family had heard it before.



There followed dancing, and Jean Clemens, fine and handsome, apparently

full of life and health, danced down that great living-room as care-free

as if there was no shadow upon her life.  And the evening was

distinguished in another way, for before it ended Clara Clemens had

promised Ossip Gabrilowitsch to become his wife.









CCLXXXV



A WEDDING AT STORMFIELD



The wedding of Ossip Gabrilowitsch and Clara Clemens was not delayed.

Gabrilowitsch had signed for a concert tour in Europe, and unless the

marriage took place forthwith it must be postponed many months.  It

followed, therefore, fifteen days after the engagement.  They were busy

days.  Clemens, enormously excited and pleased over the prospect of the

first wedding in his family, personally attended to the selection of

those who were to have announcement-cards, employing a stenographer to

make the list.



October 6th was a perfect wedding-day.  It was one of those quiet, lovely

fall days when the whole world seems at peace.  Claude, the butler, with

his usual skill in such matters, had decorated the great living-room with

gay autumn foliage and flowers, brought in mainly from the woods and

fields.  They blended perfectly with the warm tones of the walls and

furnishings, and I do not remember ever having seen a more beautiful

room.  Only relatives and a few of the nearest friends were invited to

the ceremony.  The Twichells came over a day ahead, for Twichell, who had

assisted in the marriage rites between Samuel Clemens and Olivia Langdon,

was to perform that ceremony for their daughter now.  A fellow-student of

the bride and groom when they had been pupils of Leschetizky, in Vienna--

Miss Ethel Newcomb--was at the piano and played softly the Wedding March

from" Taunhauser."  Jean Clemens was the only bridesmaid, and she was

stately and classically beautiful, with a proud dignity in her office.

Jervis Langdon, the bride's cousin and childhood playmate, acted as best

man, and Clemens, of course, gave the bride away.  By request he wore his

scarlet Oxford gown over his snowy flannels, and was splendid beyond

words.  I do not write of the appearance of the bride and groom, for

brides and grooms are always handsome and always happy, and certainly

these were no exception.  It was all so soon over, the feasting ended,

and the principals whirling away into the future.  I have a picture in my

mind of them seated together in the automobile, with Richard Watson

Gilder standing on the step for a last good-by, and before them a wide

expanse of autumn foliage and distant hills.  I remember Gilder's voice

saying, when the car was on the turn, and they were waving back to us:



               "Over the hills and far away,

               Beyond the utmost purple rim,

               Beyond the night, beyond the day,

               Through all the world she followed him."



The matter of the wedding had been kept from the newspapers until the eve

of the wedding, when the Associated Press had been notified.  A

representative was there; but Clemens had characteristically interviewed

himself on the subject, and it was only necessary to hand the reporter a

typewritten copy.  Replying to the question (put to himself), "Are you

pleased with the marriage?" he answered:



     Yes, fully as much as any marriage could please me or any other

     father.  There are two or three solemn things in life and a happy

     marriage is one of them, for the terrors of life are all to come.

     I am glad of this marriage, and Mrs. Clemens would be glad, for she

     always had a warm affection for Gabrilowitsch.



There was another wedding at Stormfield on the following afternoon--an

imitation wedding.  Little Joy came up with me, and wished she could

stand in just the spot where she had seen the bride stand, and she

expressed a wish that she could get married like that.  Clemens said:



"Frankness is a jewel; only the young can afford it."



Then he happened to remember a ridiculous boy-doll--a white-haired

creature with red coat and green trousers, a souvenir imitation of

himself from one of the Rogerses' Christmas trees.  He knew where it was,

and he got it out.  Then he said:



"Now, Joy, we will have another wedding.  This is Mr. Colonel Williams,

and you are to become his wedded wife."



So Joy stood up very gravely and Clemens performed the ceremony, and I

gave the bride away, and Joy to him became Mrs. Colonel Williams

thereafter, and entered happily into her new estate.









CCLXXXVI



AUTUMN DAYS



A harvest of letters followed the wedding: a general congratulatory

expression, mingled with admiration, affection, and good-will.  In his

interview Clemens had referred to the pain in his breast; and many begged

him to deny that there was anything serious the matter with him, urging

him to try this relief or that, pathetically eager for his continued life

and health.  They cited the comfort he had brought to world-weary

humanity and his unfailing stand for human justice as reasons why he

should live.  Such letters could not fail to cheer him.



A letter of this period, from John Bigelow, gave him a pleasure of its

own.  Clemens had written Bigelow, apropos of some adverse expression on

the tariff:



     Thank you for any hard word you can say about the tariff.  I guess

     the government that robs its own people earns the future it is

     preparing for itself.



Bigelow was just then declining an invitation to the annual dinner of the

Chamber of Commerce.  In sending his regrets he said:



     The sentiment I would propose if I dared to be present would be the

     words of Mark Twain, the statesman:



     "The government that robs its own people earns the future it is

     preparing for itself."



Now to Clemens himself he wrote:



     Rochefoucault never said a cleverer thing, nor Dr. Franklin a wiser

     one .  .  .  .  Be careful, or the Demos will be running you for

     President when you are not on your guard.



     Yours more than ever,

                              JOHN BIGELOW.





Among the tributes that came, was a sermon by the Rev. Fred Window Adams,

of Schenectady, New York, with Mark Twain as its subject.  Mr. Adams

chose for his text, "Take Mark and bring him with thee; for he is

profitable for the ministry," and he placed the two Marks, St. Mark and

Mark Twain, side by side as ministers to humanity, and characterized him

as "a fearless knight of righteousness."  A few weeks later Mr. Adams

himself came to Stormfield, and, like all open-minded ministers of the

Gospel, he found that he could get on very well indeed with Mark Twain.



In spite of the good-will and the good wishes Clemens's malady did not

improve.  As the days grew chillier he found that he must remain closer

indoors.  The cold air seemed to bring on the pains, and they were

gradually becoming more severe; then, too, he did not follow the doctor's

orders in the matter of smoking, nor altogether as to exercise.



To Miss Wallace he wrote:



I can't walk, I can't drive, I'm not down-stairs much, and I don't see

company, but I drink barrels of water to keep the pain quiet; I read, and

read, and read, and smoke, and smoke, and smoke all the time (as

formerly), and it's a contented and comfortable life.



But this was not altogether accurate as to details.  He did come down-

stairs many times daily, and he persisted in billiards regardless of the

paroxysms.  We found, too, that the seizures were induced by mental

agitation.  One night he read aloud to Jean and myself the first chapter

of an article, "The Turning-Point in My Life," which he was preparing for

Harper's Bazar.  He had begun it with one of his impossible burlesque

fancies, and he felt our attitude of disappointment even before any word

had been said.  Suddenly he rose, and laying his hand on his breast said,

"I must lie down," and started toward the stair.  I supported him to his

room and hurriedly poured out the hot water.  He drank it and dropped

back on the bed.



"Don't speak to me," he said; "don't make me talk."



Jean came in, and we sat there several moments in silence.  I think we

both wondered if this might not be the end; but presently he spoke of his

own accord, declaring he was better, and ready for billiards.



We played for at least an hour afterward, and he seemed no worse for the

attack.  It is a curious malady--that angina; even the doctors are

acquainted with its manifestations, rather than its cause.  Clemens's

general habits of body and mind were probably not such as to delay its

progress; furthermore, there had befallen him that year one of those

misfortunes which his confiding nature peculiarly invited--a betrayal of

trust by those in whom it had been boundlessly placed--and it seems

likely that the resulting humiliation aggravated his complaint.  The

writing of a detailed history of this episode afforded him occupation and

a certain amusement, but probably did not contribute to his health.  One

day he sent for his attorney, Mr. Charles T. Lark, and made some final

revisions in his will.--[Mark Twain's estate, later appraised at

something more than $600,000 was left in the hands of trustees for his

daughters.  The trustees were Edward E. Loomis, Jervis Langdon, and

Zoheth S. Freeman.  The direction of his literary affairs was left to his

daughter Clara and the writer of this history.]



To see him you would never have suspected that he was ill.  He was in

good flesh, and his movement was as airy and his eye as bright and his

face as full of bloom as at any time during the period I had known him;

also, he was as light-hearted and full of ideas and plans, and he was

even gentler--having grown mellow with age and retirement, like good

wine.



And of course he would find amusement in his condition.  He said:



"I have always pretended to be sick to escape visitors; now, for the

first time, I have got a genuine excuse.  It makes me feel so honest."



And once, when Jean reported a caller in the livingroom, he said:



"Jean, I can't see her.  Tell her I am likely to drop dead any minute and

it would be most embarrassing."



But he did see her, for it was a poet--Angela Morgan--and he read her

poem, "God's Man," aloud with great feeling, and later he sold it for her

to Collier's Weekly.



He still had violent rages now and then, remembering some of the most

notable of his mistakes; and once, after denouncing himself, rather

inclusively, as an idiot, he said:



"I wish to God the lightning would strike me; but I've wished that fifty

thousand times and never got anything out of it yet.  I have missed

several good chances.  Mrs. Clemens was afraid of lightning, and would

never let me bare my head to the storm."



The element of humor was never lacking, and the rages became less violent

and less frequent.



I was at Stormfield steadily now, and there was a regular routine of

afternoon sessions of billiards or reading, in which we were generally

alone; for Jean, occupied with her farming and her secretary labors,

seldom appeared except at meal-times.  Occasionally she joined in the

billiard games; but it was difficult learning and her interest was not

great.  She would have made a fine player, for she had a natural talent

for games, as she had for languages, and she could have mastered the

science of angles as she had mastered tennis and French and German and

Italian.  She had naturally a fine intellect, with many of her father's

characteristics, and a tender heart that made every dumb creature her

friend.



Katie Leary, who had been Jean's nurse, once told how, as a little child,

Jean had not been particularly interested in a picture of the Lisbon

earthquake, where the people were being swallowed up; but on looking at

the next page, which showed a number of animals being overwhelmed, she

had said:



"Poor things!"



Katie said:



"Why, you didn't say that about the people!"



But Jean answered:



"Oh, they could speak."



One night at the dinner-table her father was saying how difficult it must

be for a man who had led a busy life to give up the habit of work.



"That is why the Rogerses kill themselves," he said.  "They would rather

kill themselves in the old treadmill than stop and try to kill time.

They have forgotten how to rest.  They know nothing but to keep on till

they drop."



I told of something I had read not long before.  It was about an aged

lion that had broken loose from his cage at Coney Island.  He had not

offered to hurt any one; but after wandering about a little, rather

aimlessly, he had come to a picket-fence, and a moment later began pacing

up and down in front of it, just the length of his cage.  They had come

and led him back to his prison without trouble, and he had rushed eagerly

into it.  I noticed that Jean was listening anxiously, and when I

finished she said:



"Is that a true story?"



She had forgotten altogether the point in illustration.  She was

concerned only with the poor old beast that had found no joy in his

liberty.



Among the letters that Clemens wrote just then was one to Miss Wallace,

in which he described the glory of the fall colors as seen from his

windows.



     The autumn splendors passed you by?  What a pity!  I wish you had

     been here.  It was beyond words!  It was heaven & hell & sunset &

     rainbows & the aurora all fused into one divine harmony, & you

     couldn't look at it and keep the tears back.



     Such a singing together, & such a whispering together, & such a

     snuggling together of cozy, soft colors, & such kissing & caressing,

     & such pretty blushing when the sun breaks out & catches those

     dainty weeds at it--you remember that weed-garden of mine?--& then--

     then the far hills sleeping in a dim blue trance--oh, hearing about

     it is nothing, you should be here to see it!



In the same letter he refers to some work that he was writing for his own

satisfaction--'Letters from the Earth'; said letters supposed to have

been written by an immortal visitant and addressed to other immortals in

some remote sphere.



     I'll read passages to you.  This book will never be published--

     in fact it couldn't be, because it would be felony .  .  .  Paine

     enjoys it, but Paine is going to be damned one of these days, I

     suppose.



I very well remember his writing those 'Letters from the Earth'.  He read

them to me from time to time as he wrote them, and they were fairly

overflowing with humor and philosophy and satire concerning the human

race.  The immortal visitor pointed out, one after another, the

absurdities of mankind, his ridiculous conception of heaven, and his

special conceit in believing that he was the Creator's pet--the

particular form of life for which all the universe was created.  Clemens

allowed his exuberant fancy free rein, being under no restrictions as to

the possibility of print or public offense.  He enjoyed them himself,

too, as he read them aloud, and we laughed ourselves weak over his bold

imaginings.



One admissible extract will carry something of the flavor of these

chapters.  It is where the celestial correspondent describes man's

religion.



     His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing,

     grotesque.  I give you my word it has not a single feature in it

     that he actually values.  It consists--utterly and entirely--of

     diversions which he cares next to nothing about here in the earth,

     yet he is quite sure he will like in heaven.  Isn't it curious?

     Isn't it interesting?  You must not think I am exaggerating, for it

     is not so.  I will give you the details.



     Most, men do not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay

     where others are singing if it be continued more than two hours.

     Note that.



     Only about two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument,

     and not four in a hundred have any wish to learn how.  Set that

     down.



     Many men pray, not many of them like to do it.  A few pray long, the

     others make a short-cut.



     More men go to church than want to.



     To forty-nine men in fifty the Sabbath day is a dreary, dreary bore.



     Further, all sane people detest noise.



     All people, sane or insane, like to have variety in their lives.

     Monotony quickly wearies them.



     Now then, you have the facts.  You know what men don't enjoy.  Well,

     they have invented a heaven, out of their own heads, all by

     themselves; guess what it is like?  In fifteen hundred years you

     couldn't do it.  They have left out the very things they care for

     most their dearest pleasures--and replaced them with prayer!



     In man's heaven everybody sings.  There are no exceptions.  The man

     who did not sing on earth sings there; the man who could not sing on

     earth sings there.  Thus universal singing is not casual, not

     occasional, not relieved by intervals of quiet; it goes on all day

     long and every day during a stretch of twelve hours.  And everybody

     stays where on earth the place would be empty in two hours.  The

     singing is of hymns alone.  Nay, it is one hymn alone.  The words

     are always the same in number--they are only about a dozen--there is

     no rhyme--there is no poetry.  "Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna unto the

     highest!" and a few such phrases constitute the whole service.



     Meantime, every person is playing on a harp!  Consider the deafening

     hurricane of sound.  Consider, further, it is a praise service--a

     service of compliment, flattery, adulation.  Do you ask who it is

     that is willing to endure this strange compliment, this insane

     compliment, and who not only endures it but likes it, enjoys it,

     requires it, commands it?  Hold your breath: It is God!  This race's

     God I mean--their own pet invention.



Most of the ideas presented in this his last commentary on human

absurdities were new only as to phrasing.  He had exhausted the topic

long ago, in one way or another; but it was one of the themes in which he

never lost interest.  Many subjects became stale to him at last; but the

curious invention called man remained a novelty to him to the end.



From my note-book:



     October 25.  I am constantly amazed at his knowledge of history--all

     history--religious, political, military.  He seems to have read

     everything in the world concerning Rome, France, and England

     particularly.



     Last night we stopped playing billiards while he reviewed, in the

     most vivid and picturesque phrasing, the reasons of Rome's decline.

     Such a presentation would have enthralled any audience--I could not

     help feeling a great pity that he had not devoted some of his public

     effort to work of that sort.  No one could have equaled him at it.

     He concluded with some comments on the possibility of America

     following Rome's example, though he thought the vote of the people

     would always, or at least for a long period, prevent imperialism.



     November 1.  To-day he has been absorbed in his old interest in

     shorthand.  "It is the only rational alphabet," he declared.  "All

     this spelling reform is nonsense.  What we need is alphabet reform,

     and shorthand is the thing.  Take the letter M, for instance; it is

     made with one stroke in shorthand, while in longhand it requires at

     least three.  The word Mephistopheles can be written in shorthand

     with one-sixth the number of strokes that is required in longhand.

     I tell you shorthand should be adopted as the alphabet."



     I said: "There is this objection: the characters are so slightly

     different that each writer soon forms a system of his own and it is

     seldom that two can read each other's notes."



     "You are talking of stenographic reporting," he said, rather warmly.

     "Nothing of the kind is true in the case of the regular alphabet.

     It is perfectly clear and legible."



     "Would you have it in the schools, then?"



     "Yes, it should be taught in the schools, not for stenographic

     purposes, but only for use in writing to save time."



     He was very much in earnest, and said he had undertaken an article

     on the subject.



     November 3.  He said he could not sleep last night, for thinking

     what a fool he had been in his various investments.



     "I have always been the victim of somebody," he said, "and always an

     idiot myself, doing things that even a child would not do.  Never

     asking anybody's advice--never taking it when it was offered.  I

     can't see how anybody could do the things I have done and have kept

     right on doing."

     I could see that the thought agitated him, and I suggested that we

     go to his room and read, which we did, and had a riotous time over

     the most recent chapters of the 'Letters from the Earth', and some

     notes he had made for future chapters on infant damnation and other

     distinctive features of orthodox creeds.  He told an anecdote of an

     old minister who declared that Presbyterianism without infant

     damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn't be

     identified because it had lost its tag.



     Somewhat on the defensive I said, "But we must admit that the so-

     called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive."



     He answered, "Yes, but in spite of their religion, not because of

     it.  The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the

     day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in

     child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical

     curse pronounced against Eve.  And every step in astronomy and

     geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition.

     The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five

     hundred years before the Christian religion was born.



     "I have been reading Gibbon's celebrated Fifteenth Chapter," he said

     later, "and I don't see what Christians found against it.  It is so

     mild--so gentle in its sarcasm."  He added that he had been reading

     also a little book of brief biographies and had found in it the

     saying of Darwin's father, "Unitarianism is a featherbed to catch

     falling Christians."



     "I was glad to find and identify that saying," he said; "it is so

     good."



     He finished the evening by reading a chapter from Carlyle's French

     Revolution--a fine pyrotechnic passage--the gathering at Versailles.

     I said that Carlyle somehow reminded me of a fervid stump-speaker

     who pounded his fists and went at his audience fiercely, determined

     to convince them.



     "Yes," he said, "but he is the best one that ever lived."



     November 10.  This morning early he heard me stirring and called.  I

     went in and found him propped up with a book, as usual.  He said:



     "I seldom read Christmas stories, but this is very beautiful.  It

     has made me cry.  I want you to read it."  (It was Booth

     Tarkington's 'Beasley's Christmas Party'.) "Tarkington has the true

     touch," he said; "his work always satisfies me."  Another book he

     has been reading with great enjoyment is James Branch Cabell's

     Chivalry.  He cannot say enough of the subtle poetic art with which

     Cabell has flung the light of romance about dark and sordid chapters

     of history.









CCLXXVII



MARK TWAIN'S READING



Perhaps here one may speak of Mark Twain's reading in general.  On the

table by him, and on his bed, and in the billiard-room shelves he kept

the books he read most.  They were not many--not more than a dozen--but

they were manifestly of familiar and frequent usage.  All, or nearly all,

had annotations--spontaneously uttered marginal notes, title prefatories,

or concluding comments.  They were the books he had read again and again,

and it was seldom that he had not had something to say with each fresh

reading.



There were the three big volumes by Saint-Simon--'The Memoirs'--which he

once told me he had read no less than twenty times.  On the fly-leaf of

the first volume he wrote



This, & Casanova & Pepys, set in parallel columns, could afford a good

coup d'oeil of French & English high life of that epoch.



All through those finely printed volumes are his commentaries, sometimes

no more than a word, sometimes a filled, closely written margin.  He

found little to admire in the human nature of Saint-Simon's period--

little to approve in Saint-Simon himself beyond his unrestrained

frankness, which he admired without stint, and in one paragraph where the

details of that early period are set down with startling fidelity he

wrote: "Oh, incomparable Saint-Simon!"



Saint-Simon is always frank, and Mark Twain was equally so.  Where the

former tells one of the unspeakable compulsions of Louis XIV., the latter

has commented:



We have to grant that God made this royal hog; we may also be permitted

to believe that it was a crime to do so.



And on another page:



In her memories of this period the Duchesse de St. Clair makes this

striking remark: "Sometimes one could tell a gentleman, but it was only

by his manner of using his fork."



His comments on the orthodox religion of Saint-Simon's period are not

marked by gentleness.  Of the author's reference to the Edict of Nantes,

which he says depopulated half of the realm, ruined its commerce, and

"authorized torments and punishments by which so many innocent people of

both sexes were killed by thousands," Clemens writes:



So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the

Gospel: "Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor's religion is."

Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it.  Divinity is claimed

for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to

add that new law to its code.



In the place where Saint-Simon describes the death of Monseigneur, son of

the king, and the court hypocrites are wailing their extravagantly

pretended sorrow, Clemens wrote:



It is all so true, all so human.  God made these animals.  He must have

noticed this scene; I wish I knew how it struck Him.



There were not many notes in the Suetonius, nor in the Carlyle

Revolution, though these were among the volumes he read oftenest.

Perhaps they expressed for him too completely and too richly their

subject-matter to require anything at his hand.  Here and there are

marked passages and occasional cross-references to related history and

circumstance.



There was not much room for comment on the narrow margins of the old copy

of Pepys, which he had read steadily since the early seventies; but here

and there a few crisp words, and the underscoring and marked passages are

plentiful enough to convey his devotion to that quaint record which,

perhaps next to Suetonius, was the book he read and quoted most.



Francis Parkman's Canadian Histories he had read periodically, especially

the story of the Old Regime and of the Jesuits in North America.  As late

as January, 1908, he wrote on the title-page of the Old Regime:



Very interesting.  It tells how people religiously and otherwise insane

came over from France and colonized Canada.



He was not always complimentary to those who undertook to Christianize

the Indians; but he did not fail to write his admiration of their

courage--their very willingness to endure privation and even the fiendish

savage tortures for the sake of their faith.  "What manner of men are

these?" he wrote, apropos of the account of Bressani, who had undergone

the most devilish inflictions which savage ingenuity could devise, and

yet returned maimed and disfigured the following spring to "dare again

the knives and fiery brand of the Iroquois."  Clemens was likely to be on

the side of the Indians, but hardly in their barbarism.  In one place he

wrote:



     That men should be willing to leave their happy homes and endure

     what the missionaries endured in order to teach these Indians the

     road to hell would be rational, understandable, but why they should

     want to teach them a way to heaven is a thing which the mind somehow

     cannot grasp.



Other histories, mainly English and French, showed how he had read them--

read and digested every word and line.  There were two volumes of Lecky,

much worn; Andrew D. White's 'Science and Theology'--a chief interest for

at least one summer--and among the collection a well-worn copy of 'Modern

English Literature--Its Blemishes and Defects', by Henry H.  Breen.  On

the title-page of this book Clemens had written:



     HARTFORD, 1876.  Use with care, for it is a scarce book.  England

     had to be ransacked in order to get it--or the bookseller speaketh

     falsely.



He once wrote a paper for the Saturday Morning Club, using for his text

examples of slipshod English which Breen had noted.



Clemens had a passion for biography, and especially for autobiography,

diaries, letters, and such intimate human history.  Greville's 'Journal

of the Reigns of George IV.  and William IV.'  he had read much and

annotated freely.  Greville, while he admired Byron's talents, abhorred

the poet's personality, and in one place condemns him as a vicious person

and a debauchee.  He adds:



Then he despises pretenders and charlatans of all sorts, while he is

himself a pretender, as all men are who assume a character which does not

belong to them and affect to be something which they are all the time

conscious they are not in reality.



Clemens wrote on the margin:



     But, dear sir, you are forgetting that what a man sees in the human

     race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own

     heart.  Byron despised the race because he despised himself.  I feel

     as Byron did, and for the same reason.  Do you admire the race (&

     consequently yourself)?



A little further along--where Greville laments that Byron can take no

profit to himself from the sinful characters he depicts so faithfully,

Clemens commented:



     If Byron--if any man--draws 50 characters, they are all himself--50

     shades, 50 moods, of his own character.  And when the man draws them

     well why do they stir my admiration?  Because they are me--I

     recognize myself.



A volume of Plutarch was among the biographies that showed usage, and the

Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself.  Two Years Before the Mast he

loved, and never tired of.  The more recent Memoirs of Andrew D. White

and Moncure D. Conway both, I remember, gave him enjoyment, as did the

Letters of Lowell.  A volume of the Letters of Madame de Sevigne had some

annotated margins which were not complimentary to the translator, or for

that matter to Sevigne herself, whom he once designates as a "nauseating"

person, many of whose letters had been uselessly translated, as well as

poorly arranged for reading.  But he would read any volume of letters or

personal memoirs; none were too poor that had the throb of life in them,

however slight.



Of such sort were the books that Mark Twain had loved best, and such were

a few of his words concerning them.  Some of them belong to his earlier

reading, and among these is Darwin's 'Descent of Man', a book whose

influence was always present, though I believe he did not read it any

more in later years.  In the days I knew him he read steadily not much

besides Suetonius and Pepys and Carlyle.  These and his simple

astronomies and geologies and the Morte Arthure and the poems of Kipling

were seldom far from his hand.









CCLXXXVIII



A BERMUDA BIRTHDAY



It was the middle of November, 1909, when Clemens decided to take another

Bermuda vacation, and it was the 19th that we sailed.  I went to New York

a day ahead and arranged matters, and on the evening of the 18th received

the news that Richard Watson Gilder had suddenly died.



Next morning there was other news.  Clemens's old friend, William M.

Laffan, of the Sun, had died while undergoing a surgical operation.  I

met Clemens at the train.  He had already heard about Gilder; but he had

not yet learned of Laffan's death.  He said:



"That's just it.  Gilder and Laffan get all the good things that come

along and I never get anything."



Then, suddenly remembering, he added:



"How curious it is!  I have been thinking of Laffan coming down on the

train, and mentally writing a letter to him on this Stetson-Eddy affair."



I asked when he had begun thinking of Laffan.



He said: "Within the hour."



It was within the hour that I had received the news, and naturally in my

mind had carried it instantly to him.  Perhaps there was something

telepathic in it.



He was not at all ill going down to Bermuda, which was a fortunate thing,

for the water was rough and I was quite disqualified.  We did not even

discuss astronomy, though there was what seemed most important news--the

reported discovery of a new planet.



But there was plenty of talk on the subject as soon as we got settled in

the Hamilton Hotel.  It was windy and rainy out-of-doors, and we looked

out on the drenched semi-tropical foliage with a great bamboo swaying and

bending in the foreground, while he speculated on the vast distance that

the new planet must lie from our sun, to which it was still a satellite.

The report had said that it was probably four hundred billions of miles

distant, and that on this far frontier of the solar system the sun could

not appear to it larger than the blaze of a tallow candle.  To us it was

wholly incredible how, in that dim remoteness, it could still hold true

to the central force and follow at a snail-pace, yet with unvarying

exactitude, its stupendous orbit.  Clemens said that heretofore Neptune,

the planetary outpost of our system, had been called the tortoise of the

skies, but that comparatively it was rapid in its motion, and had become

a near neighbor.  He was a good deal excited at first, having somehow the

impression that this new planet traveled out beyond the nearest fixed

star; but then he remembered that the distance to that first solar

neighbor was estimated in trillions, not billions, and that our little

system, even with its new additions, was a child's handbreadth on the

plane of the sky.  He had brought along a small book called The Pith of

Astronomy--a fascinating little volume--and he read from it about the

great tempest of fire in the sun, where the waves of flame roll up two

thousand miles high, though the sun itself is such a tiny star in the

deeps of the universe.



If I dwell unwarrantably on this phase of Mark Twain's character, it is

because it was always so fascinating to me, and the contemplation of the

drama of the skies always meant so much to him, and somehow always seemed

akin to him in its proportions.  He had been born under a flaming star, a

wanderer of the skies.  He was himself, to me, always a comet rushing

through space, from mystery to mystery, regardless of sun and systems. It

is not likely to rain long in Bermuda, and when the sun comes back it

brings summer, whatever the season.  Within a day after our arrival we

were driving about those coral roads along the beaches, and by that

marvelously variegated water.  We went often to the south shore,

especially to Devonshire Bay, where the reefs and the sea coloring seem

more beautiful than elsewhere. Usually, when we reached the bay, we got

out to walk along the indurated shore, stopping here and there to look

out over the jeweled water liquid turquoise, emerald lapis-lazuli, jade,

the imperial garment of the Lord.



At first we went alone with only the colored driver, Clifford Trott,

whose name Clemens could not recollect, though he was always attempting

resemblances with ludicrous results.  A little later Helen Allen, an

early angel-fish member already mentioned, was with us and directed the

drives, for she had been born on the island and knew every attractive

locality, though, for that matter, it would be hard to find there a place

that was not attractive.



Clemens, in fact, remained not many days regularly at the hotel.  He kept

a room and his wardrobe there; but he paid a visit to Bay House--the

lovely and quiet home of Helen's parents--and prolonged it from day to

day, and from week to week, because it was a quiet and peaceful place

with affectionate attention and limitless welcome.  Clifford Trott had

orders to come with the carriage each afternoon, and we drove down to Bay

House for Mark Twain and his playmate, and then went wandering at will

among the labyrinth of blossom-bordered, perfectly kept roadways of a

dainty paradise, that never, I believe, becomes quite a reality even to

those who know it best.



Clemens had an occasional paroxysm during these weeks, but they were not

likely to be severe or protracted; and I have no doubt the peace of his

surroundings, the remoteness from disturbing events, as well as the balmy

temperature, all contributed to his improved condition.



He talked pretty continuously during these drives, and he by no means

restricted his subjects to juvenile matters.  He discussed history and

his favorite sciences and philosophies, and I am sure that his drift was

rarely beyond the understanding of his young companion, for it was Mark

Twain's gift to phrase his thought so that it commanded not only the

respect of age, but the comprehension and the interest of youth.

I remember that once he talked, during an afternoon's drive, on the

French Revolution and the ridiculous episode of Anacharsis Cloots,

"orator and advocate of the human race," collecting the vast populace of

France to swear allegiance to a king even then doomed to the block.  The

very name of Cloots suggested humor, and nothing could have been more

delightful and graphic than the whole episode as he related it.

Helen asked if he thought such a thing as that could ever happen in

America.



"No," he said, "the American sense of humor would have laughed it out of

court in a week; and the Frenchman dreads ridicule, too, though he never

seems to realize how ridiculous he is--the most ridiculous creature in

the world."



On the morning of his seventy-fourth birthday he was looking wonderfully

well after a night of sound sleep, his face full of color and freshness,

his eyes bright and keen and full of good-humor.  I presented him with a

pair of cuff-buttons silver-enameled with the Bermuda lily, and I thought

he seemed pleased with them.



It was rather gloomy outside, so we remained indoors by the fire and

played cards, game after game of hearts, at which he excelled, and he was

usually kept happy by winning.  There were no visitors, and after dinner

Helen asked him to read some of her favorite episodes from Tom Sawyer, so

he read the whitewashing scene, Peter and the Pain-killer, and such

chapters until tea-time.  Then there was a birthday cake, and afterward

cigars and talk and a quiet fireside evening.



Once, in the course of his talk, he forgot a word and denounced his poor

memory:



"I'll forget the Lord's middle name some time," he declared, "right in

the midst of a storm, when I need all the help I can get."



Later he said:



"Nobody dreamed, seventy-four years ago to-day, that I would be in

Bermuda now."  And I thought he meant a good deal more than the words

conveyed.



It was during this Bermuda visit that Mark Twain added the finishing

paragraph to his article, "The Turning-Point in My Life," which, at

Howells's suggestion, he had been preparing for Harper's Bazar.  It was a

characteristic touch, and, as the last summary of his philosophy of human

life, may be repeated here.



     Necessarily the scene of the real turning-point of my life (and of

     yours) was the Garden of Eden.  It was there that the first link was

     forged of the chain that was ultimately to lead to the emptying of

     me into the literary guild.  Adam's temperament was the first

     command the Deity ever issued to a human being on this planet.  And

     it was the only command Adam would never be able to disobey.  It

     said, "Be weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable."

     The later command, to let the fruit alone, was certain to be

     disobeyed.  Not by Adam himself, but by his temperament--which he

     did not create and had no authority over.  For the temperament is

     the man; the thing tricked out with clothes and named Man is merely

     its Shadow, nothing more.  The law of the tiger's temperament is,

     Thou shaft kill; the law of the sheep's temperament is, Thou shalt

     not kill.  To issue later commands requiring the tiger to let the

     fat stranger alone, and requiring the sheep to imbrue its hands in

     the blood of the lion is not worth while, for those commands can't

     be obeyed.  They would invite to violations of the law of

     temperament, which is supreme, and takes precedence of all other

     authorities.  I cannot help feeling disappointed in Adam and Eve.

     That is, in their temperaments.  Not in them, poor helpless young

     creatures--afflicted with temperaments made out of butter, which

     butter was commanded to get into contact with fire and be melted.

     What I cannot help wishing is, that Adam and Eve had been postponed,

     and Martin Luther and Joan of Arc put in their place--that splendid

     pair equipped with temperaments not made of butter, but of asbestos.

     By neither sugary persuasions nor by hell-fire could Satan have

     beguiled them to eat the apple.



     There would have been results!  Indeed yes.  The apple would be

     intact to-day; there would be no human race; there would be no you;

     there would be no me.  And the old, old creation-dawn scheme of

     ultimately launching me into the literary guild would have been

     defeated.









CCLXXXIX



THE DEATH OF JEAN



He decided to go home for the holidays, and how fortunate it seems now

that he did so!  We sailed for America on the 18th of December, arriving

the 21st.  Jean was at the wharf to meet us, blue and shivering with the

cold, for it was wretchedly bleak there, and I had the feeling that she

should not have come.



She went directly, I think, to Stormfield, he following a day or two

later.  On the 23d I was lunching with Jean alone.  She was full of

interest in her Christmas preparations.  She had a handsome tree set up

in the loggia, and the packages were piled about it, with new ones

constantly arriving.  With her farm management, her housekeeping, her

secretary work, and her Christmas preparations, it seemed to me that she

had her hands overfull.  Such a mental pressure could not be good for

her.  I suggested that for a time at least I might assume a part of her

burden.



I was to remain at my own home that night, and I think it was as I left

Stormfield that I passed jean on the stair.  She said, cheerfully, that

she felt a little tired and was going up to lie down, so that she would

be fresh for the evening.  I did not go back, and I never saw her alive

again.



I was at breakfast next morning when word was brought in that one of the

men from Stormfield was outside and wished to see me immediately.  When I

went out he said: "Miss Jean is dead.  They have just found her in her

bath-room.  Mr. Clemens sent me to bring you."



It was as incomprehensible as such things always are.  I could not

realize at all that Jean, so full of plans and industries and action less

than a day before, had passed into that voiceless mystery which we call

death.



Harry Iles drove me rapidly up the hill.  As I entered Clemens's room he

looked at me helplessly and said:



"Well, I suppose you have heard of this final disaster."



He was not violent or broken down with grief.  He had come to that place

where, whatever the shock or the ill-turn of fortune, he could accept it,

and even in that first moment of loss he realized that, for Jean at

least, the fortune was not ill.  Her malady had never been cured, and it

had been one of his deepest dreads that he would leave her behind him.

It was believed, at first; that Jean had drowned, and Dr. Smith tried

methods of resuscitation; but then he found that it was simply a case of

heart cessation caused by the cold shock of her bath.



The Gabrilowitsches were by this time in Europe, and Clemens cabled them

not to come.  Later in the day he asked me if we would be willing to

close our home for the winter and come to Stormfield.  He said that he

should probably go back to Bermuda before long; but that he wished to

keep the house open so that it would be there for him to come to at any

time that he might need it.



We came, of course, for there was no thought among any of his friends but

for his comfort and peace of mind.  Jervis Langdon was summoned from

Elmira, for Jean would lie there with the others.



In the loggia stood the half-trimmed Christmas tree, and all about lay

the packages of gifts, and in Jean's room, on the chairs and upon her

desk, were piled other packages.  Nobody had been forgotten.  For her

father she had bought a handsome globe; he had always wanted one.  Once

when I went into his room he said:



"I have been looking in at Jean and envying her.  I have never greatly

envied any one but the dead.  I always envy the dead."



He told me how the night before they had dined together alone; how he had

urged her to turn over a part of her work to me; how she had clung to

every duty as if now, after all the years, she was determined to make up

for lost time.



While they were at dinner a telephone inquiry had come concerning his

health, for the papers had reported him as returning from Bermuda in a

critical condition.  He had written this playful answer:



     MANAGER ASSOCIATED PRESS,

     New York.



     I hear the newspapers say I am dying.  The charge is not true.  I

     would not do such a thing at my time of life.  I am behaving as good

     as I can.



     Merry Christmas to everybody!       MARK TWAIN.





Jean telephoned it for him to the press.  It had been the last secretary

service she had ever rendered.



She had kissed his hand, he said, when they parted, for she had a severe

cold and would not wish to impart it to him; then happily she had said

good night, and he had not seen her again.  The reciting of this was good

to him, for it brought the comfort of tears.



Later, when I went in again, he was writing:



"I am setting it down," he said--"everything.  It is a relief to me to

write it.  It furnishes me an excuse for thinking."



He continued writing most of the day, and at intervals during the next

day, and the next.



It was on Christmas Day that they went with Jean on her last journey.

Katie Leary, her baby nurse, had dressed her in the dainty gown which she

had worn for Clara's wedding, and they had pinned on it a pretty buckle

which her father had brought her from Bermuda, and which she had not

seen.  No Greek statue was ever more classically beautiful than she was,

lying there in the great living-room, which in its brief history had seen

so much of the round of life.



They were to start with jean at about six o'clock, and a little before

that time Clemens (he was unable to make the journey) asked me what had

been her favorite music.  I said that she seemed always to care most for

the Schubert Impromptu.--[Op.  142, No.  2.]--Then he said:



"Play it when they get ready to leave with her, and add the Intermezzo

for Susy and the Largo for Mrs. Clemens.  When I hear the music I shall

know that they are starting.  Tell them to set lanterns at the door, so I

can look down and see them go."



So I sat at the organ and began playing as they lifted and bore her away.

A soft, heavy snow was falling, and the gloom of those shortest days was

closing in.  There was not the least wind or noise, the whole world was

muffled.  The lanterns at the door threw their light out on the thickly

falling flakes.  I remained at the organ; but the little group at the

door saw him come to the window above--the light on his white hair as he

stood mournfully gazing down, watching Jean going away from him for the

last time.  I played steadily on as he had instructed, the Impromptu, the

Intermezzo from "Cavalleria," and Handel's Largo.  When I had finished I

went up and found him.



"Poor little Jean," he said; "but for her it is so good to go."



In his own story of it he wrote:



     From my windows I saw the hearse and the carriages wind along the

     road and gradually grow vague and spectral in the falling snow, and

     presently disappear.  Jean was gone out of my life, and would not

     come back any more.  The cousin she had played with when they were

     babies together--he and her beloved old Katie--Were conducting her

     to her distant childhood home, where she will lie by her mother's

     side once more, in the company of Susy and Langdon.



He did not come down to dinner, and when I went up afterward I found him

curiously agitated.  He said:



"For one who does not believe in spirits I have had a most peculiar

experience.  I went into the bath-room just now and closed the door.

You know how warm it always is in there, and there are no draughts.  All

at once I felt a cold current of air about me.  I thought the door must

be open; but it was closed.  I said, 'Jean, is this you trying to let me

know you have found the others?'  Then the cold air was gone."



I saw that the incident had made a very great impression upon him; but I

don't remember that he ever mentioned it afterward.



Next day the storm had turned into a fearful blizzard; the whole hilltop

was a raging, driving mass of white.  He wrote most of the day, but

stopped now and then to read some of the telegrams or letters of

condolence which came flooding in.  Sometimes he walked over to the

window to look out on the furious tempest.  Once, during the afternoon,

he said:



"Jean always so loved to see a storm like this, and just now at Elmira

they are burying her."



Later he read aloud some lines by Alfred Austin, which Mrs. Crane had

sent him lines which he had remembered in the sorrow for Susy:



          When last came sorrow, around barn and byre

          Wind-careen snow, the year's white sepulchre, lay.

          "Come in," I said, "and warm you by the fire";

          And there she sits and never goes away.



It was that evening that he came into the room where Mrs. Paine and I sat

by the fire, bringing his manuscript.



"I have finished my story of Jean's death," he said.  "It is the end of

my autobiography.  I shall never write any more.  I can't judge it myself

at all.  One of you read it aloud to the other, and let me know what you

think of it.  If it is worthy, perhaps some day it may be published."



It was, in fact, one of the most exquisite and tender pieces of writing

in the language.  He had ended his literary labors with that perfect

thing which so marvelously speaks the loftiness and tenderness of his

soul.  It was thoroughly in keeping with his entire career that he

should, with this rare dramatic touch, bring it to a close.  A paragraph

which he omitted may be printed now:



     December 27.  Did I know jean's value?  No, I only thought I did.

     I knew a ten-thousandth fraction of it, that was all.  It is always

     so, with us, it has always been so.  We are like the poor ignorant

     private soldier-dead, now, four hundred years--who picked up the

     great Sancy diamond on the field of the lost battle and sold it for

     a franc.  Later he knew what he had done.



     Shall I ever be cheerful again, happy again?  Yes.  And soon.  For

     I know my temperament.  And I know that the temperament is master of

     the man, and that he is its fettered and helpless slave and must in

     all things do as it commands.  A man's temperament is born in him,

     and no circumstances can ever change it.



     My temperament has never allowed my spirits to remain depressed long

     at a time.



     That was a feature of Jean's temperament, too.  She inherited it

     from me.  I think she got the rest of it from her mother.



Jean Clemens had two natural endowments: the gift of justice and a

genuine passion for all nature.  In a little paper found in her desk she

had written:



     I know a few people who love the country as I do, but not many.

     Most of my acquaintances are enthusiastic over the spring and summer

     months, but very few care much for it the year round.  A few people

     are interested in the spring foliage and the development of the wild

     flowers--nearly all enjoy the autumn colors--while comparatively few

     pay much attention to the coming and going of the birds, the changes

     in their plumage and songs, the apparent springing into life on some

     warm April day of the chipmunks and woodchucks, the skurrying of

     baby rabbits, and again in the fall the equally sudden disappearance

     of some of the animals and the growing shyness of others.  To me it

     is all as fascinating as a book--more so, since I have never lost

     interest in it.



It is simple and frank, like Thoreau.  Perhaps, had she exercised it,

there was a third gift--the gift of written thought.



Clemens remained at Stormfield ten days after Jean was gone.  The weather

was fiercely cold, the landscape desolate, the house full of tragedy.

He kept pretty closely to his room, where he had me bring the heaps of

letters, a few of which he answered personally; for the others he

prepared a simple card of acknowledgment.  He was for the most part in

gentle mood during these days, though he would break out now and then,

and rage at the hardness of a fate that had laid an unearned burden of

illness on Jean and shadowed her life.



They were days not wholly without humor--none of his days could be

altogether without that, though it was likely to be of a melancholy sort.



Many of the letters offered orthodox comfort, saying, in effect: "God

does not willingly punish us."



When he had read a number of these he said:



"Well, why does He do it then?  We don't invite it.  Why does He give

Himself the trouble?"



I suggested that it was a sentiment that probably gave comfort to the

writer of it.



"So it does," he said, "and I am glad of it--glad of anything that gives

comfort to anybody."



He spoke of the larger God--the God of the great unvarying laws, and by

and by dropped off to sleep, quite peacefully, and indeed peace came more

and more to him each day with the thought that Jean and Susy and their

mother could not be troubled any more.  To Mrs. Gabrilowitsch he wrote:



                              REDDING, CONN, December 29, 1909.



     O, Clara, Clara dear, I am so glad she is out of it & safe--safe!



     I am not melancholy; I shall never be melancholy again, I think.



     You see, I was in such distress when I came to realize that you were

     gone far away & no one stood between her & danger but me--& I could

     die at any moment, & then--oh then what would become of her!  For

     she was wilful, you know, & would not have been governable.



     You can't imagine what a darling she was that last two or three

     days; & how fine, & good, & sweet, & noble--& joyful, thank Heaven!

    --& how intellectually brilliant.  I had never been acquainted with

     Jean before.  I recognized that.



     But I mustn't try to write about her--I can't.  I have already

     poured my heart out with the pen, recording that last day or two.

     I will send you that--& you must let no one but Ossip read it.



     Good-by.  I love you so!  And Ossip.

                                             FATHER.









CCXC



THE RETURN TO BERMUDA



I don't think he attempted any further writing for print.  His mind was

busy with ideas, but he was willing to talk, rather than to write, rather

even than to play billiards, it seemed, although we had a few quiet

games--the last we should ever play together.  Evenings he asked for

music, preferring the Scotch airs, such as "Bonnie Doon" and "The

Campbells are Coming."  I remember that once, after playing the latter

for him, he told, with great feeling, how the Highlanders, led by Gen.

Colin Campbell, had charged at Lucknow, inspired by that stirring air.

When he had retired I usually sat with him, and he drifted into

literature, or theology, or science, or history--the story of the

universe and man.



One evening he spoke of those who had written but one immortal thing and

stopped there.  He mentioned "Ben Bolt."



"I met that man once," he said.  "In my childhood I sang 'Sweet Alice,

Ben Bolt,' and in my old age, fifteen years ago, I met the man who wrote

it.  His name was Brown.--[Thomas Dunn English.  Mr. Clemens apparently

remembered only the name satirically conferred upon him by Edgar Allan

Poe, "Thomas Dunn Brown."]--He was aged, forgotten, a mere memory.  I

remember how it thrilled me to realize that this was the very author of

'Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt.'  He was just an accident.  He had a vision and

echoed it.  A good many persons do that--the thing they do is to put in

compact form the thing which we have all vaguely felt.  'Twenty Years

Ago' is just like it 'I have wandered through the village, Tom, and sat

beneath the tree'--and Holmes's 'Last Leaf' is another: the memory of the

hallowed past, and the gravestones of those we love.  It is all so

beautiful--the past is always beautiful."



He quoted, with great feeling and effect:



               The massy marbles rest

               On the lips that we have pressed

               In their bloom,

               And the names we love to hear

               Have been carved for many a year

               On the tomb.



He continued in this strain for an hour or more.  He spoke of humor, and

thought it must be one of the chief attributes of God.  He cited plants

and animals that were distinctly humorous in form and in their

characteristics.  These he declared were God's jokes.



"Why," he said, "humor is mankind's greatest blessing."



"Your own case is an example," I answered.  "Without it, whatever your

reputation as a philosopher, you could never have had the wide-spread

affection that is shown by the writers of that great heap of letters."



"Yes," he said, gently, "they have liked to be amused."



I tucked him in for the night, promising to send him to Bermuda, with

Claude to take care of him, if he felt he could undertake the journey in

two days more.



He was able, and he was eager to go, for he longed for that sunny island,

and for the quiet peace of the Allen home.  His niece, Mrs. Loomis, came

up to spend the last evening in Stormfield, a happy evening full of quiet

talk, and next morning, in the old closed carriage that had been his

wedding-gift, he was driven to the railway station.  This was on January

4, 1910.



He was to sail next day, and that night, at Mr. Loomis's, Howells came

in, and for an hour or two they reviewed some of the questions they had

so long ago settled, or left forever unsettled, and laid away.  I

remember that at dinner Clemens spoke of his old Hartford butler, George,

and how he had once brought George to New York and introduced him at the

various publishing houses as his friend, with curious and sometimes

rather embarrassing results.



The talk drifted to sociology and to the labor-unions, which Clemens

defended as being the only means by which the workman could obtain

recognition of his rights.



Howells in his book mentions this evening, which he says "was made

memorable to me by the kind, clear, judicial sense with which he

explained and justified the labor-unions as the sole present help of the

weak against the strong."



They discussed dreams, and then in a little while Howells rose to go.  I

went also, and as we walked to his near-by apartment he spoke of Mark

Twain's supremacy.  He said:



"I turn to his books for cheer when I am down-hearted.  There was never

anybody like him; there never will be."



Clemens sailed next morning.  They did not meet again.









CCXCI



LETTERS FROM BERMUDA



Stormfield was solemn and empty without Mark Twain; but he wrote by every

steamer, at first with his own hand, and during the last week by the hand

of one of his enlisted secretaries--some member of the Allen family

usually Helen.  His letters were full of brightness and pleasantry--

always concerned more or less with business matters, though he was no

longer disturbed by them, for Bermuda was too peaceful and too far away,

and, besides, he had faith in the Mark Twain Company's ability to look

after his affairs.  I cannot do better, I believe, than to offer some

portions of these letters here.



He reached Bermuda on the 7th of January, 1910, and on the 12th he wrote:



     Again I am living the ideal life.  There is nothing to mar it but

     the bloody-minded bandit Arthur,--[A small playmate of Helen's of

     whom Clemens pretended to be fiercely jealous.  Once he wrote a

     memorandum to Helen: "Let Arthur read this book.  There is a page in

     it that is poisoned."]--who still fetches and carries Helen.

     Presently he will be found drowned.  Claude comes to Bay House twice

     a day to see if I need any service.  He is invaluable.  There was a

     military lecture last night at the Officers' Mess Prospect; as the

     lecturer honored me with a special urgent invitation, and said he

     wanted to lecture to me particularly, I naturally took Helen and her

     mother into the private carriage and went.



     As soon as we landed at the door with the crowd the Governor came to

     me& was very cordial.  I "met up" with that charming Colonel Chapman

     [we had known him on the previous visit] and other officers of the

     regiment & had a good time.



A few days later he wrote:



     Thanks for your letter & for its contenting news of the situation in

     that foreign & far-off & vaguely remembered country where you &

     Loomis & Lark and other beloved friends are.



     I had a letter from Clara this morning.  She is solicitous & wants

     me well & watchfully taken care of.  My, my, she ought to see Helen

     & her parents & Claude administer that trust.  Also she says, "I

     hope to hear from you or Mr. Paine very soon."



     I am writing her & I know you will respond to your part of her

     prayer.  She is pretty desolate now after Jean's emancipation--the

     only kindness that God ever did that poor, unoffending child in all

     her hard life.



     Send Clara a copy of Howells's gorgeous letter.



The "gorgeous letter" mentioned was an appreciation of his recent Bazar

article, "The Turning-Point in My Life," and here follows:



     January 18, 1910.



     DEAR CLEMENS,--While your wonderful words are warm in my mind yet I

     want to tell you what you know already: that you never wrote

     anything greater, finer, than that turning-point paper of yours.



     I shall feel it honor enough if they put on my tombstone "He was

     born in the same century and general section of Middle Western

     country with Dr. S. L. Clemens, Oxon., and had his degree three

     years before him through a mistake of the University."



     I hope you are worse.  You will never be riper for a purely

     intellectual life, and it is a pity to have you lagging along with a

     worn-out material body on top of your soul.



                         Yours ever,

                                        W. D. HOWELLS.



On the margin of this letter Clemens had written:



     I reckon this spontaneous outburst from the first critic of the day

     is good to keep, ain't it, Paine?



January 24th he wrote again of his contentment:



     Life continues here the same as usual.  There isn't a fault in it-

     good times, good home, tranquil contentment all day & every day

     without a break.  I know familiarly several very satisfactory people

     & meet them frequently: Mr. Hamilton, the Sloanes, Mr. & Mrs. Fells,

     Miss Waterman, & so on.  I shouldn't know how to go about bettering

     my situation.



On February 5th he wrote that the climate and condition of his health

might require him to stay in Bermuda pretty continuously, but that he

wished Stormfield kept open so that he might come to it at any time.  And

he added:



     Yesterday Mr. Allen took us on an excursion in Mr. Hamilton's big

     motor-boat.  Present: Mrs. Allen, Mr. & Mrs. & Miss Sloane, Helen,

     Mildred Howells, Claude, & me.  Several hours' swift skimming over

     ravishing blue seas, a brilliant sun; also a couple of hours of

     picnicking & lazying under the cedars in a secluded place.



     The Orotava is arriving with a6o passengers-I shall get letters by

     her, no doubt.



     P. S.-Please send me the Standard Unabridged that is on the table in

     my bedroom.  I have no dictionary here.



There is no mention in any of these letters of his trouble; but he was

having occasional spasms of pain, though in that soft climate they would

seem to have come with less frequency, and there was so little to disturb

him, and much that contributed to his peace.  Among the callers at the

Bay House to see him was Woodrow Wilson, and the two put in some pleasant

hours at miniature golf, "putting" on the Allen lawn.  Of course a

catastrophe would come along now and then--such things could not always

be guarded against.  In a letter toward the end of February he wrote:

     It is 2.30 in the morning & I am writing because I can't sleep.

     I can't sleep because a professional pianist is coming to-morrow

     afternoon to play for me.  My God!  I wouldn't allow Paderewski or

     Gabrilowitsch to do that.  I would rather have a leg amputated.

     I knew he was coming, but I never dreamed it was to play for me.

     When I heard the horrible news 4 hours ago, be d---d if I didn't

     come near screaming.  I meant to slip out and be absent, but now I

     can't.  Don't pray for me.  The thing is just as d---d bad as it can

     be already.



Clemens's love for music did not include the piano, except for very

gentle melodies, and he probably did not anticipate these from a

professional player.  He did not report the sequel of the matter; but it

is likely that his imagination had discounted its tortures.  Sometimes

his letters were pure nonsense.  Once he sent a sheet, on one side of

which was written:







                                        BAY HOUSE,

                                        March s, 1910.

          Received of S. L. C.

          Two Dollars and Forty Cents

          in return for my promise to believe everything he says

          hereafter.

                                        HELEN S.  ALLEN.



and on the reverse:



                                 FOR SALE



     The proprietor of the hereinbefore mentioned Promise desires to part

     with it on account of ill health and obliged to go away somewheres

     so as to let it recipricate, and will take any reasonable amount for

     it above 2 percent of its face because experienced parties think it

     will not keep but only a little while in this kind of weather & is a

     kind of proppity that don't give a cuss for cold storage nohow.



Clearly, however serious Mark Twain regarded his physical condition, he

did not allow it to make him gloomy.  He wrote that matters were going

everywhere to his satisfaction; that Clara was happy; that his household

and business affairs no longer troubled him; that his personal

surroundings were of the pleasantest sort.  Sometimes he wrote of what he

was reading, and once spoke particularly of Prof. William Lyon Phelps's

Literary Essays, which he said he had been unable to lay down until he

had finished the book.--[To Phelps himself he wrote: "I thank you ever

so much for the book, which I find charming--so charming, indeed, that I

read it through in a single night, & did not regret the lost night's

sleep.  I am glad if I deserve what you have said about me; & even if I

don't I am proud & well contented, since you think I deserve it."]



So his days seemed full of comfort.  But in March I noticed that he

generally dictated his letters, and once when he sent some small

photographs I thought he looked thinner and older.  Still he kept up his

merriment.  In one letter he said:



     While the matter is in my mind I will remark that if you ever send

     me another letter which is not paged at the top I will write you

     with my own hand, so that I may use with utter freedom & without

     embarrassment the kind of words which alone can describe such a

     criminal, to wit, - - - -; you will have to put into words those

     dashes because propriety will not allow me to do it myself in my

     secretary's hearing.  You are forgiven, but don't let it occur

     again.



He had still made no mention of his illness; but on the 25th of March he

wrote something of his plans for coming home.  He had engaged passage on

the Bermudian for April 23d, he said; and he added:



     But don't tell anybody.  I don't want it known.  I may have to go

     sooner if the pain in my breast does not mend its ways pretty

     considerable.  I don't want to die here, for this is an unkind place

     for a person in that condition.  I should have to lie in the

     undertaker's cellar until the ship would remove me & it is dark down

     there & unpleasant.



     The Colliers will meet me on the pier, & I may stay with them a week

     or two before going home.  It all depends on the breast pain.  I

     don't want to die there.  I am growing more and more particular

     about the place.



But in the same letter he spoke of plans for the summer, suggesting that

we must look into the magic-lantern possibilities, so that library

entertainments could be given at Stormfield.  I confess that this letter,

in spite of its light tone, made me uneasy, and I was tempted to sail for

Bermuda to bring him home.  Three days later he wrote again:



     I have been having a most uncomfortable time for the past four days

     with that breast pain, which turns out to be an affection of the

     heart, just as I originally suspected.  The news from New York is to

     the effect that non-bronchial weather has arrived there at last;

     therefore, if I can get my breast trouble in traveling condition I

     may sail for home a week or two earlier than has been proposed.



The same mail that brought this brought a letter from Mr. Allen, who

frankly stated that matters had become very serious indeed.  Mr. Clemens

had had some dangerous attacks, and the physicians considered his

condition critical.



These letters arrived April 1st.  I went to New York at once and sailed

next morning.  Before sailing I consulted with Dr. Quintard, who provided

me with some opiates and instructed me in the use of the hypodermic

needle.  He also joined me in a cablegram to the Gabrilowitsches, then in

Italy, advising them to sail without delay.









CCXCII



THE VOYAGE HOME



I sent no word to Bermuda that I was coming, and when on the second

morning I arrived at Hamilton, I stepped quickly ashore from the tender

and hurried to Bay House.  The doors were all open, as they usually are

in that summer island, and no one was visible.  I was familiar with the

place, and, without knocking, I went through to the room occupied by Mark

Twain.  As I entered I saw that he was alone, sitting in a large chair,

clad in the familiar dressing-gown.



Bay House stands upon the water, and the morning light, reflected in at

the window, had an unusual quality.  He was not yet shaven, and he seemed

unnaturally pale and gray; certainly he was much thinner.  I was too

startled, for the moment, to say anything.  When he turned and saw me he

seemed a little dazed.



"Why," he said, holding out his hand, "you didn't tell us you were

coming."



"No," I said, "it is rather sudden.  I didn't quite like the sound of

your last letters."



"But those were not serious," he protested.  "You shouldn't have come on

my account."



I said then that I had come on my own account; that I had felt the need

of recreation, and had decided to run down and come home with him.



"That's--very--good," he said, in his slow, gentle fashion.  "Now I'm

glad to see you."



His breakfast came in and he ate with an appetite.



When he had been shaved and freshly propped tip in his pillows it seemed

to me, after all, that I must have been mistaken in thinking him so

changed.  Certainly he was thinner, but his color was fine, his eyes were

bright; he had no appearance of a man whose life was believed to be in

danger.  He told me then of the fierce attacks he had gone through, how

the pains had torn at him, and how it had been necessary for him to have

hypodermic injections, which he amusingly termed "hypnotic injunctions"

and "subcutaneous applications," and he had his humor out of it, as of

course he must have, even though Death should stand there in person.



From Mr. and Mrs. Allen and from the physician I learned how slender had

been his chances and how uncertain were the days ahead.  Mr. Allen had

already engaged passage on the Oceana for the 12th, and the one purpose

now was to get him physically in condition for the trip.



How devoted those kind friends had been to him!  They had devised every

imaginable thing for his comfort.  Mr. Allen had rigged an electric bell

which connected with his own room, so that he could be aroused instantly

at any hour of the night.  Clemens had refused to have a nurse, for it

was only during the period of his extreme suffering that he needed any

one, and he did not wish to have a nurse always around.  When the pains

were gone he was as bright and cheerful, and, seemingly, as well as ever.



On the afternoon of my arrival we drove out, as formerly, and he

discussed some of the old subjects in quite the old way.  He had been

rereading Macaulay, he said, and spoke at considerable length of the

hypocrisy and intrigue of the English court under James II.  He spoke,

too, of the Redding Library.  I had sold for him that portion of the land

where Jean's farm-house had stood, and it was in his mind to use the

money for some sort of a memorial to Jean.  I had written, suggesting

that perhaps he would like to put up a small library building, as the

Adams lot faced the corner where Jean had passed every day when she rode

to the station for the mail.  He had been thinking this over, he said,

and wished the idea carried out.  He asked me to write at once to his

lawyer, Mr. Lark, and have a paper prepared appointing trustees for a

memorial library fund.



The pain did not trouble him that afternoon, nor during several

succeeding days.  He was gay and quite himself, and he often went out on

the lawn; but we did not drive out again.  For the most part, he sat

propped up in his bed, reading or smoking, or talking in the old way; and

as I looked at him he seemed so full of vigor and the joy of life that I

could not convince myself that he would not outlive us all.  I found that

he had been really very much alive during those three months--too much

for his own good, sometimes--for he had not been careful of his hours or

his diet, and had suffered in consequence.



He had not been writing, though he had scribbled some playful valentines

and he had amused himself one day by preparing a chapter of advice--for

me it appeared--which, after reading it aloud to the Allens and receiving

their approval, he declared he intended to have printed for my benefit.

As it would seem to have been the last bit of continued writing he ever

did, and because it is characteristic and amusing, a few paragraphs may

be admitted.  The "advice" is concerning deportment on reaching the Gate

which St. Peter is supposed to guard--



     Upon arrival do not speak to St. Peter until spoken to.  It is not

     your place to begin.



     Do not begin any remark with "Say."



     When applying for a ticket avoid trying to make conversation.  If

     you must talk let the weather alone.  St. Peter cares not a damn for

     the weather.  And don't ask him what time the 4.30 train goes; there

     aren't any trains in heaven, except through trains, and the less

     information you get about them the better for you.



     You can ask him for his autograph--there is no harm in that--but be

     careful and don't remark that it is one of the penalties of

     greatness.  He has heard that before.



     Don't try to kodak him.  Hell is full of people who have made that

     mistake.



     Leave your dog outside.  Heaven goes by favor.  If it went by merit

     you would stay out and the dog would go in.



     You will be wanting to slip down at night and smuggle water to those

     poor little chaps (the infant damned), but don't you try it.  You

     would be caught, and nobody in heaven would respect you after that.



     Explain to Helen why I don't come.  If you can.



There were several pages of this counsel.  One paragraph was written in

shorthand.  I meant to ask him to translate it; but there were many other

things to think of, and I did not remember.



I spent most of each day with him, merely sitting by the bed and reading

while he himself read or dozed.  His nights were wakeful--he found it

easier to sleep by day--and he liked to think that some one was there.

He became interested in Hardy's Jude, and spoke of it with high approval,

urging me to read it.  He dwelt a good deal on the morals of it, or

rather on the lack of them.  He followed the tale to the end, finishing

it the afternoon before we sailed.  It was his last continuous reading.

I noticed, when he slept, that his breathing was difficult, and I could

see from day to day that he did not improve; but each evening he would be

gay and lively, and he liked the entire family to gather around, while he

became really hilarious over the various happenings of the day.

It was only a few days before we sailed that the very severe attacks

returned.  The night of the 8th was a hard one.  The doctors were

summoned, and it was only after repeated injections of morphine that the

pain had been eased.  When I returned in the early morning he was sitting

in his chair trying to sing, after his old morning habit.  He took my

hand and said:



"Well, I had a picturesque night.  Every pain I had was on exhibition."



He looked out the window at the sunlight on the bay and green dotted

islands.  "'Sparkling and bright in the liquid light,'" he quoted.

"That's Hoffman.  Anything left of Hoffman?"



"No," I said.



"I must watch for the Bermudian and see if she salutes," he said,

presently.  "The captain knows I am here sick, and he blows two short

whistles just as they come up behind that little island.  Those are for

me."



He said he could breathe easier if he could lean forward, and I placed a

card-table in front of him.  His breakfast came in, and a little later he

became quite gay.  He drifted to Macaulay again, and spoke of King

James's plot to assassinate William II., and how the clergy had brought

themselves to see that there was no difference between killing a king in

battle and by assassination.  He had taken his seat by the window to

watch for the Bermudian.  She came down the bay presently, her bright red

stacks towering vividly above the green island.  It was a brilliant

morning, the sky and the water a marvelous blue.  He watched her

anxiously and without speaking.  Suddenly there were two white puffs of

steam, and two short, hoarse notes went up from her.



"Those are for me," he said, his face full of contentment.  "Captain

Fraser does not forget me."



There followed another bad night.  My room was only a little distance

away, and Claude came for me.  I do not think any of us thought he would

survive it; but he slept at last, or at least dozed.  In the morning he

said:



"That breast pain stands watch all night and the short breath all day.

I am losing enough sleep to supply a worn-out army.  I want a jugful of

that hypnotic injunction every night and every morning."



We began to fear now that he would not be able to sail on the 12th; but

by great good-fortune he had wonderfully improved by the 12th, so much so

that I began to believe, if once he could be in Stormfield, where the air

was more vigorous, he might easily survive the summer.  The humid

atmosphere of the season increased the difficulty of his breathing.



That evening he was unusually merry.  Mr. and Mrs. Allen and Helen and

myself went in to wish him good night.  He was loath to let us leave, but

was reminded that he would sail in the morning, and that the doctor had

insisted that he must be quiet and lie still in bed and rest.  He was

never one to be very obedient.  A little later Mrs. Allen and I, in the

sitting-room, heard some one walking softly outside on the veranda.  We

went out there, and he was marching up and down in his dressing-gown as

unconcerned as if he were not an invalid at all.  He hadn't felt sleepy,

he said, and thought a little exercise would do him good.  Perhaps it

did, for he slept soundly that night--a great blessing.



Mr. Allen had chartered a special tug to come to Bay House landing in the

morning and take him to the ship.  He was carried in a little hand-chair

to the tug, and all the way out he seemed light-spirited, anything but an

invalid: The sailors carried him again in the chair to his state-room,

and he bade those dear Bermuda friends good-by, and we sailed away.



As long as I remember anything I shall remember the forty-eight hours of

that homeward voyage.  It was a brief two days as time is measured; but

as time is lived it has taken its place among those unmeasured periods by

the side of which even years do not count.



At first he seemed quite his natural self, and asked for a catalogue of

the ship's library, and selected some memoirs of the Countess of Cardigan

for his reading.  He asked also for the second volume of Carlyle's French

Revolution, which he had with him.  But we ran immediately into the more

humid, more oppressive air of the Gulf Stream, and his breathing became

at first difficult, then next to impossible.  There were two large port-

holes, which I opened; but presently he suggested that it would be better

outside.  It was only a step to the main-deck, and no passengers were

there.  I had a steamer-chair brought, and with Claude supported him to

it and bundled him with rugs; but it had grown damp and chilly, and his

breathing did not improve.  It seemed to me that the end might come at

any moment, and this thought was in his mind, too, for once in the effort

for breath he managed to say:



"I am going--I shall be gone in a moment."



Breath came; but I realized then that even his cabin was better than

this.  I steadied him back to his berth and shut out most of that deadly

dampness.  He asked for the "hypnotic 'injunction" (for his humor never

left him), and though it was not yet the hour prescribed I could not deny

it.  It was impossible for him to lie down, even to recline, without

great distress.  The opiate made him drowsy, and he longed for the relief

of sleep; but when it seemed about to possess him the struggle for air

would bring him upright.



During the more comfortable moments he spoke quite in the old way, and

time and again made an effort to read, and reached for his pipe or a

cigar which lay in the little berth hammock at his side.  I held the

match, and he would take a puff or two with satisfaction.  Then the peace

of it would bring drowsiness, and while I supported him there would come

a few moments, perhaps, of precious sleep.  Only a few moments, for the

devil of suffocation was always lying in wait to bring him back for fresh

tortures.  Over and over again this was repeated, varied by him being

steadied on his feet or sitting on the couch opposite the berth.  In

spite of his suffering, two dominant characteristics remained--the sense

of humor, and tender consideration for another.



Once when the ship rolled and his hat fell from the hook, and made the

circuit of the cabin floor, he said:



"The ship is passing the hat."



Again he said:



"I am sorry for you, Paine, but I can't help it--I can't hurry this dying

business.  Can't you give me enough of the hypnotic injunction to put an

end to me?"



He thought if I could arrange the pillows so he could sit straight up it

would not be necessary to support him, and then I could sit on the couch

and read while he tried to doze.  He wanted me to read Jude, he said, so

we could talk about it.  I got all the pillows I could and built them up

around him, and sat down with the book, and this seemed to give him

contentment.  He would doze off a little and then come up with a start,

his piercing, agate eyes searching me out to see if I was still there.

Over and over--twenty times in an hour--this was repeated.  When I could

deny him no longer I administered the opiate, but it never completely

possessed him or gave him entire relief.



As I looked at him there, so reduced in his estate, I could not but

remember all the labor of his years, and all the splendid honor which the

world had paid to him.  Something of this may have entered his mind, too,

for once, when I offered him some of the milder remedies which we had

brought, he said:



"After forty years of public effort I have become just a target for

medicines."



The program of change from berth to the floor, from floor to the couch,

from the couch back to the berth among the pillows, was repeated again

and again, he always thinking of the trouble he might be making, rarely

uttering any complaint; but once he said:



"I never guessed that I was not going to outlive John Bigelow."  And

again:



"This is such a mysterious disease.  If we only had a bill of particulars

we'd have something to swear at."



Time and again he picked up Carlyle or the Cardigan Memoirs, and read, or

seemed to read, a few lines; but then the drowsiness would come and the

book would fall.  Time and again he attempted to smoke, or in his drowse

simulated the motion of placing a cigar to his lips and puffing in the

old way.



Two dreams beset him in his momentary slumber--one of a play in which the

title-role of the general manager was always unfilled.  He spoke of this

now and then when it had passed, and it seemed to amuse him.  The other

was a discomfort: a college assembly was attempting to confer upon him

some degree which he did not want.  Once, half roused, he looked at me

searchingly and asked:



"Isn't there something I can resign and be out of all this?  They keep

trying to confer that degree upon me and I don't want it."  Then

realizing, he said: "I am like a bird in a cage: always expecting to get

out, and always beaten back by the wires."  And, somewhat later: "Oh, it

is such a mystery, and it takes so long."



Toward the evening of the first day, when it grew dark outside, he asked:



"How long have we been on this voyage?"



I answered that this was the end of the first day.



"How many more are there?" he asked.



"Only one, and two nights."



"We'll never make it," he said.  "It's an eternity."



"But we must on Clara's account," I told him, and I estimated that Clara

would be more than half-way across the ocean by now.



"It is a losing race," he said; "no ship can outsail death."



It has been written--I do not know with what proof--that certain great

dissenters have recanted with the approach of death--have become weak,

and afraid to ignore old traditions in the face of the great mystery.

I wish to write here that Mark Twain, as he neared the end, showed never

a single tremor of fear or even of reluctance.  I have dwelt upon these

hours when suffering was upon him, and death the imminent shadow, in

order to show that at the end he was as he had always been, neither more

nor less, and never less than brave.



Once, during a moment when he was comfortable and quite himself, he said,

earnestly:



"When I seem to be dying I don't want to be stimulated back to life.  I

want to be made comfortable to go."



There was not a vestige of hesitation; there was no grasping at straws,

no suggestion of dread.



Somehow those two days and nights went by.  Once, when he was partially

relieved by the opiate, I slept, while Claude watched; and again, in the

fading end of the last night, when we had passed at length into the cold,

bracing northern air, and breath had come back to him, and with it sleep.



Relatives, physicians, and news-gatherers were at the dock to welcome

him.  He was awake, and the northern air had brightened him, though it

was the chill, I suppose, that brought on the pains in his breast, which,

fortunately, he had escaped during the voyage.  It was not a prolonged

attack, and it was, blessedly, the last one.



An invalid-carriage had been provided, and a compartment secured on the

afternoon express to Redding--the same train that had taken him there two

years before.  Dr. Robert H. Halsey and Dr. Edward Quintard attended him,

and he made the journey really in cheerful comfort, for he could breathe

now, and in the relief came back old interests.  Half reclining on the

couch, he looked through the afternoon papers.  It happened curiously

that Charles Harvey Genung, who, something more than four years earlier,

had been so largely responsible for my association with Mark Twain, was

on the same train, in the same coach, bound for his country-place at New

Hartford.



Lounsbury was waiting with the carriage, and on that still, sweet April

evening we drove him to Stormfield much as we had driven him two years

before.  Now and then he mentioned the apparent backwardness of the

season, for only a few of the trees were beginning to show their green.

As we drove into the lane that led to the Stormfield entrance, he said:



"Can we see where you have built your billiard-room?"



The gable showed above the trees, and I pointed it out to him.



"It looks quite imposing," he said.



I think it was the last outside interest he ever showed in anything.

He had been carried from the ship and from the train, but when we drew up

to Stormfield, where Mrs. Paine, with Katie Leary and others of the

household, was waiting to greet him, he stepped from the carriage alone

with something of his old lightness, and with all his old courtliness,

and offered each one his hand.  Then, in the canvas chair which we had

brought, Claude and I carried him up-stairs to his room and delivered him

to the physicians, and to the comforts and blessed air of home.  This was

Thursday evening, April 14, 1910.









CCXCIII



THE RETURN TO THE INVISIBLE



There would be two days more before Ossip and Clara Gabrilowitsch could

arrive.  Clemens remained fairly bright and comfortable during this

interval, though he clearly was not improving.  The physicians denied him

the morphine, now, as he no longer suffered acutely.  But he craved it,

and once, when I went in, he said, rather mournfully:



"They won't give me the subcutaneous any more."



It was Sunday morning when Clara came.  He was cheerful and able to talk

quite freely.  He did not dwell upon his condition, I think, but spoke

rather of his plans for the summer.  At all events, he did not then

suggest that he counted the end so near; but a day later it became

evident to all that his stay was very brief.  His breathing was becoming

heavier, though it seemed not to give him much discomfort.  His

articulation also became affected.  I think the last continuous talking

he did was to Dr. Halsey on the evening of April 17th--the day of Clara's

arrival.  A mild opiate had been administered, and he said he wished to

talk himself to sleep.  He recalled one of his old subjects, Dual

Personality, and discussed various instances that flitted through his

mind--Jekyll and Hyde phases in literature and fact.  He became drowsier

as he talked.  He said at last:



"This is a peculiar kind of disease.  It does not invite you to read; it

does not invite you to be read to; it does not invite you to talk, nor to

enjoy any of the usual sick-room methods of treatment.  What kind of a

disease is that?  Some kinds of sicknesses have pleasant features about

them.  You can read and smoke and have only to lie still."



And a little later he added:



"It is singular, very singular, the laws of mentality--vacuity.  I put

out my hand to reach a book or newspaper which I have been reading most

glibly, and it isn't there, not a suggestion of it."



He coughed violently, and afterward commented:



"If one gets to meddling with a cough it very soon gets the upper hand

and is meddling with you.  That is my opinion--of seventy-four years'

growth."



The news of his condition, everywhere published, brought great heaps of

letters, but he could not see them.  A few messages were reported to him.

At intervals he read a little.  Suetonius and Carlyle lay on the bed

beside him, and he would pick them up as the spirit moved him and read a

paragraph or a page.  Sometimes, when I saw him thus-the high color still

in his face, and the clear light in his eyes--I said: "It is not reality.

He is not going to die."  On Tuesday, the 19th, he asked me to tell Clara

to come and sing to him.  It was a heavy requirement, but she somehow

found strength to sing some of the Scotch airs which he loved, and he

seemed soothed and comforted.  When she came away he bade her good-by,

saying that he might not see her again.



But he lingered through the next day and the next.  His mind was

wandering a little on Wednesday, and his speech became less and less

articulate; but there were intervals when he was quite clear, quite

vigorous, and he apparently suffered little.  We did not know it, then,

but the mysterious messenger of his birth-year, so long anticipated by

him, appeared that night in the sky.--[The perihelion of Halley's Comet

for 1835 was November 16th; for 1910 it was April 20th.]



On Thursday morning, the 21st, his mind was generally clear, and it was

said by the nurses that he read a little from one of the volumes on his

bed, from the Suetonius, or from one of the volumes of Carlyle.  Early in

the forenoon he sent word by Clara that he wished to see me, and when I

came in he spoke of two unfinished manuscripts which he wished me to

"throw away," as he briefly expressed it, for he had not many words left

now.  I assured him that I would take care of them, and he pressed my

hand.  It was his last word to me.



Once or twice that morning he tried to write some request which he could

not put into intelligible words.



And once he spoke to Gabrilowitsch, who, he said, could understand him

better than the others.  Most of the time he dozed.



Somewhat after midday, when Clara was by him, he roused up and took her

hand, and seemed to speak with less effort.



"Good-by," he said, and Dr. Quintard, who was standing near, thought he

added: "If we meet"--but the words were very faint.  He looked at her for

a little while, without speaking, then he sank into a doze, and from it

passed into a deeper slumber, and did not heed us any more.



Through that peaceful spring afternoon the life-wave ebbed lower and

lower.  It was about half past six, and the sun lay just on the horizon

when Dr. Quintard noticed that the breathing, which had gradually become

more subdued, broke a little.  There was no suggestion of any struggle.

The noble head turned a little to one side, there was a fluttering sigh,

and the breath that had been unceasing through seventy-four tumultuous

years had stopped forever.



He had entered into the estate envied so long.  In his own words--the

words of one of his latest memoranda:



"He had arrived at the dignity of death--the only earthly dignity that is

not artificial--the only safe one.  The others are traps that can beguile

to humiliation.



"Death--the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose

peace and whose refuge are for all--the soiled and the pure--the rich and

the poor--the loved and the unloved."









CCXCIV



THE LAST RITES



It is not often that a whole world mourns.  Nations have often mourned a

hero--and races--but perhaps never before had the entire world really

united in tender sorrow for the death of any man.



In one of his aphorisms he wrote: "Let us endeavor so to live that when

we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry."  And it was thus that

Mark Twain himself had lived.



No man had ever so reached the heart of the world, and one may not even

attempt to explain just why.  Let us only say that it was because he was

so limitlessly human that every other human heart, in whatever sphere or

circumstance, responded to his touch.  From every remote corner of the

globe the cables of condolence swept in; every printed sheet in

Christendom was filled with lavish tribute; pulpits forgot his heresies

and paid him honor.  No king ever died that received so rich a homage as

his.  To quote or to individualize would be to cheapen this vast

offering.



We took him to New York to the Brick Church, and Dr. Henry van Dyke spoke

only a few simple words, and Joseph Twichell came from Hartford and

delivered brokenly a prayer from a heart wrung with double grief, for

Harmony, his wife, was nearing the journey's end, and a telegram that

summoned him to her death-bed came before the services ended.



Mark Twain, dressed in the white he loved so well, lay there with the

nobility of death upon him, while a multitude of those who loved him

passed by and looked at his face for the last time.  The flowers, of

which so many had been sent, were banked around him; but on the casket

itself lay a single laurel wreath which Dan Beard and his wife had woven

from the laurel which grows on Stormfield hill.  He was never more

beautiful than as he lay there, and it was an impressive scene to see

those thousands file by, regard him for a moment gravely, thoughtfully,

and pass on.  All sorts were there, rich and poor; some crossed

themselves, some saluted, some paused a little to take a closer look; but

no one offered even to pick a flower.  Howells came, and in his book he

says:



     I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient

     with the patience I had so often seen in it: something of a puzzle,

     a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of

     a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the

     unwise took for the whole of him.



That night we went with him to Elmira, and next day--a somber day of

rain--he lay in those stately parlors that had seen his wedding-day, and

where Susy had lain, and Mrs. Clemens, and Jean, while Dr. Eastman spoke

the words of peace which separate us from our mortal dead.  Then in the

quiet, steady rain of that Sunday afternoon we laid him beside those

others, where he sleeps well, though some have wished that, like De Soto,

he might have been laid to rest in the bed of that great river which must

always be associated with his name.









CCXCV



MARK TWAIN'S RELIGION



There is such a finality about death; however interesting it may be as an

experience, one cannot discuss it afterward with one's friends.  I have

thought it a great pity that Mark Twain could not discuss, with Howells

say, or with Twichell, the sensations and the particulars of the change,

supposing there be a recognizable change, in that transition of which we

have speculated so much, with such slender returns.  No one ever debated

the undiscovered country more than he.  In his whimsical, semi-serious

fashion he had considered all the possibilities of the future state--

orthodox and otherwise--and had drawn picturesquely original conclusions.

He had sent Captain Stormfield in a dream to report the aspects of the

early Christian heaven.  He had examined the scientific aspects of the

more subtle philosophies.  He had considered spiritualism,

transmigration, the various esoteric doctrines, and in the end he had

logically made up his mind that death concludes all, while with that less

logical hunger which survives in every human heart he had never ceased to

expect an existence beyond the grave.  His disbelief and his pessimism

were identical in their structure.  They were of his mind; never of his

heart.



Once a woman said to him:



"Mr. Clemens, you are not a pessimist, you only think you are."  And she

might have added, with equal force and truth:



"You are not a disbeliever in immortality; you only think you are."



Nothing could have conveyed more truly his attitude toward life and

death.  His belief in God, the Creator, was absolute; but it was a God

far removed from the Creator of his early teaching.  Every man builds his

God according to his own capacities.  Mark Twain's God was of colossal

proportions--so vast, indeed, that the constellated stars were but

molecules in His veins--a God as big as space itself.



Mark Twain had many moods, and he did not always approve of his own God;

but when he altered his conception, it was likely to be in the direction

of enlargement--a further removal from the human conception, and the

problem of what we call our lives.



In 1906 he wrote:--[See also 1870, chap. lxxviii; 1899, chap. ccv; and

various talks, 1906-07, etc.]

     Let us now consider the real God, the genuine God, the great God,

     the sublime and supreme God, the authentic Creator of the real

     universe, whose remotenesses are visited by comets only comets unto

     which incredible distant Neptune is merely an out post, a Sandy Hook

     to homeward-bound specters of the deeps of space that have not

     glimpsed it before for generations--a universe not made with hands

     and suited to an astronomical nursery, but spread abroad through the

     illimitable reaches of space by the flat of the real God just

     mentioned, by comparison with whom the gods whose myriads infest the

     feeble imaginations of men are as a swarm of gnats scattered and

     lost in the infinitudes of the empty sky.



At an earlier period-the date is not exactly fixable, but the stationery

used and the handwriting suggest the early eighties--he set down a few

concisely written pages of conclusions--conclusions from which he did

not deviate materially in after years.  The document follows:



     I believe in God the Almighty.



     I do not believe He has ever sent a message to man by anybody, or

     delivered one to him by word of mouth, or made Himself visible to

     mortal eyes at any time in any place.



     I believe that the Old and New Testaments were imagined and written

     by man, and that no line in them was authorized by God, much less

     inspired by Him.



     I think the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of God are

     manifested in His works: I perceive that they are manifested toward

     me in this life; the logical conclusion is that they will be

     manifested toward me in the life to come, if there should be one.



     I do not believe in special providences.  I believe that the

     universe is governed by strict and immutable laws: If one man's

     family is swept away by a pestilence and another man's spared it is

     only the law working: God is not interfering in that small matter,

     either against the one man or in favor of the other.



     I cannot see how eternal punishment hereafter could accomplish any

     good end, therefore I am not able to believe in it.  To chasten a

     man in order to perfect him might be reasonable enough; to

     annihilate him when he shall have proved himself incapable of

     reaching perfection might be reasonable enough; but to roast him

     forever for the mere satisfaction of seeing him roast would not be

     reasonable--even the atrocious God imagined by the Jews would tire

     of the spectacle eventually.



     There may be a hereafter and there may not be.  I am wholly

     indifferent about it.  If I am appointed to live again I feel sure

     it will be for some more sane and useful purpose than to flounder

     about for ages in a lake of fire and brimstone for having violated a

     confusion of ill-defined and contradictory rules said (but not

     evidenced) to be of divine institution.  If annihilation is to

     follow death I shall not be aware of the annihilation, and therefore

     shall not care a straw about it.



     I believe that the world's moral laws are the outcome of the world's

     experience.  It needed no God to come down out of heaven to tell men

     that murder and theft and the other immoralities were bad, both for

     the individual who commits them and for society which suffers from

     them.



     If I break all these moral laws I cannot see how I injure God by it,

     for He is beyond the reach of injury from me--I could as easily

     injure a planet by throwing mud at it.  It seems to me that my

     misconduct could only injure me and other men.  I cannot benefit God

     by obeying these moral laws--I could as easily benefit the planet by

     withholding my mud.  (Let these sentences be read in the light of

     the fact that I believe I have received moral laws only from man-

     none whatever from God.) Consequently I do not see why I should be

     either punished or rewarded hereafter for the deeds I do here.



If the tragedies of life shook his faith in the goodness and justice and

the mercy of God as manifested toward himself, he at any rate never

questioned that the wider scheme of the universe was attuned to the

immutable law which contemplates nothing less than absolute harmony.  I

never knew him to refer to this particular document; but he never

destroyed it and never amended it, nor is it likely that he would have

done either had it been presented to him for consideration even during

the last year of his life.



He was never intentionally dogmatic.  In a memorandum on a fly-leaf of

Moncure D. Conway's Sacred Anthology he wrote:



                                 RELIGION



The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly

teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

                              MARK TWAIN, 19th Cent. A.D.



And in another note:



I would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or

to weaken it.  I am not able to believe one's religion can affect his

hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion maybe.  But

it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life hence it is a

valuable possession to him.



Mark Twain's religion was a faith too wide for doctrines--a benevolence

too limitless for creeds.  From the beginning he strove against

oppression, sham, and evil in every form.  He despised meanness; he

resented with every drop of blood in him anything that savored of

persecution or a curtailment of human liberties.  It was a religion

identified with his daily life and his work.  He lived as he wrote, and

he wrote as he believed.  His favorite weapon was humor--good-humor--with

logic behind it.  A sort of glorified truth it was truth wearing a smile

of gentleness, hence all the more quickly heeded.



"He will be remembered with the great humorists of all time," says

Howells, "with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy of his

company; none of them was his equal in humanity."



Mark Twain understood the needs of men because he was himself supremely

human.  In one of his dictations he said:



I have found that there is no ingredient of the race which I do not

possess in either a small or a large way.  When it is small, as compared

with the same ingredient in somebody else, there is still enough of it

for all the purposes of examination.



With his strength he had inherited the weaknesses of our kind.  With him,

as with another, a myriad of dreams and schemes and purposes daily

flitted by.  With him, as with another, the spirit of desire led him

often to a high mountain-top, and was not rudely put aside, but

lingeringly--and often invited to return.  With him, as with another, a

crowd of jealousies and resentments, and wishes for the ill of others,

daily went seething and scorching along the highways of the soul.  With

him, as with another, regret, remorse, and shame stood at the bedside

during long watches of the night; and in the end, with him, the better

thing triumphed--forgiveness and generosity and justice--in a word,

Humanity.  Certain of his aphorisms and memoranda each in itself

constitutes an epitome of Mark Twain's creed.  His paraphrase, "When in

doubt tell the truth," is one of these, and he embodied his whole

attitude toward Infinity when in one of his stray pencilings he wrote:



Why, even poor little ungodlike man holds himself responsible for the

welfare of his child to the extent of his ability.  It is all that we

require of God.









CCXCVI



POSTSCRIPT



Every life is a drama--a play in all its particulars; comedy, farce,

tragedy--all the elements are there.  To examine in detail any life,

however conspicuous or obscure, is to become amazed not only at the

inevitable sequence of events, but at the interlinking of details, often

far removed, into a marvelously intricate pattern which no art can hope

to reproduce, and can only feebly imitate.



The biographer may reconstruct an episode, present a picture, or reflect

a mood by which the reader is enabled to feel something of the glow of

personality and know, perhaps, a little of the substance of the past.  In

so far as the historian can accomplish this his work is a success.  At

best his labor will be pathetically incomplete, for whatever its detail

and its resemblance to life, these will record mainly but an outward

expression, behind which was the mighty sweep and tumult of unwritten

thought, the overwhelming proportion of any life, which no other human

soul can ever really know.



Mark Twain's appearance on the stage of the world was a succession of

dramatic moments.  He was always exactly in the setting.  Whatever he

did, or whatever came to him, was timed for the instant of greatest

effect.  At the end he was more widely observed and loved and honored

than ever before, and at the right moment and in the right manner he

died.



How little one may tell of such a life as his!  He traveled always such a

broad and brilliant highway, with plumes flying and crowds following

after.  Such a whirling panorama of life, and death, and change!  I have

written so much, and yet I have put so much aside--and often the best

things, it seemed afterward, perhaps because each in its way was best and

the variety infinite.  One may only strive to be faithful--and I would

have made it better if I could.













                                 APPENDIX







APPENDIX A



LETTER FROM ORION CLEMENS TO MISS WOOD CONCERNING HENRY CLEMENS



(See Chapter xxvi)



                                   KEOKUK, Iowa, October 3, 1858.



MISS WOOD,--My mother having sent me your kind letter, with a request

that myself and wife should write to you, I hasten to do so.



In my memory I can go away back to Henry's infancy; I see his large, blue

eyes intently regarding my father when he rebuked him for his credulity

in giving full faith to the boyish idea of planting his marbles,

expecting a crop therefrom; then comes back the recollection of the time

when, standing we three alone by our father's grave, I told them always

to remember that brothers should be kind to each other; afterward I see

Henry returning from school with his books for the last time.  He must go

into my printing-office.  He learned rapidly.  A word of encouragement or

a word of discouragement told upon his organization electrically.  I

could see the effects in his day's work.  Sometimes I would say, "Henry!"

He would stand full front with his eyes upon mine--all attention.  If I

commanded him to do something, without a word he was off instantly,

probably in a run.  If a cat was to be drowned or shot Sam (though

unwilling yet firm) was selected for the work.  If a stray kitten was to

be fed and taken care of Henry was expected to attend to it, and he would

faithfully do so.  So they grew up, and many was the grave lecture

commenced by ma, to the effect that Sam was misleading and spoiling

Henry.  But the lectures were never concluded, for Sam would reply with a

witticism, or dry, unexpected humor, that would drive the lecture clean

out of my mother's mind, and change it to a laugh.  Those were happier

days.  My mother was as lively as any girl of sixteen.  She is not so

now.  And sister Pamela I have described in describing Henry; for she was

his counterpart.  The blow falls crushingly on her.  But the boys grew

up--Sam a rugged, brave, quick-tempered, generous-hearted fellow, Henry

quiet, observing, thoughtful, leaning on Sam for protection; Sam and I

too leaning on him for knowledge picked up from conversation or books,

for Henry seemed never to forget anything, and devoted much of his

leisure hours to reading.



Henry is gone!  His death was horrible!  How I could have sat by him,

hung over him, watched day and night every change of expression, and

ministered to every want in my power that I could discover.  This was

denied to me, but Sam, whose organization is such as to feel the utmost

extreme of every feeling, was there.  Both his capacity of enjoyment and

his capacity of suffering are greater than mine; and knowing how it would

have affected me to see so sad a scene, I can somewhat appreciate Sam's

sufferings.  In this time of great trouble, when my two brothers, whose

heartstrings have always been a part of my own, were suffering the utmost

stretch of mortal endurance, you were there, like a good angel, to aid

and console, and I bless and thank you for it with my whole heart.  I

thank all who helped them then; I thank them for the flowers they sent to

Henry, for the tears that fell for their sufferings, and when he died,

and all of them for all the kind attentions they bestowed upon the poor

boys.  We thank the physicians, and we shall always gratefully remember

the kindness of the gentleman who at so much expense to himself enabled

us to deposit Henry's remains by our father.



With many kind wishes for your future welfare, I remain your earnest

friend,

                              Respectfully,

                                             ORION CLEMENS.













APPENDIX B



MARK TWAIN'S BURLESQUE OF CAPTAIN ISAIAH SELLERS



(See Chapter xxvii)



The item which served as a text for the "Sergeant Fathom" communication

was as follows:



                                        VICKSBURG, May 4, 1859.



My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans: The water is

higher this far up than it has been since 1815. My opinion is that the

water will be four feet deep in Canal Street before the first of next

June.  Mrs. Turner's plantation at the head of Big Black Island is all

under water, and it has not been since 1815.

                                        I. SELLERS.--[Captain Sellers, as

                                        in this case, sometimes signed

                                        his own name to his

                                        communications.]







THE BURLESQUE



INTRODUCTORY



Our friend Sergeant Fathom, one of the oldest cub pilots on the river,

and now on the Railroad Line steamer Trombone, sends us a rather bad

account concerning the state of the river.  Sergeant Fathom is a "cub" of

much experience, and although we are loath to coincide in his view of the

matter, we give his note a place in our columns, only hoping that his

prophecy will not be verified in this instance.  While introducing the

Sergeant, "we consider it but simple justice (we quote from a friend of

his) to remark that he is distinguished for being, in pilot phrase,

'close,' as well as superhumanly 'safe.'"  It is a well-known fact that

he has made fourteen hundred and fifty trips in the New Orleans and St.

Louis trade without causing serious damage to a steamboat.  This

astonishing success is attributed to the fact that he seldom runs his

boat after early candle-light.  It is related of the Sergeant that upon

one occasion he actually ran the chute of Glasscock's Island, down-

stream, in the night, and at a time, too, when the river was scarcely

more than bank full.  His method of accomplishing this feat proves what

we have just said of his "safeness"--he sounded the chute first, and then

built a fire at the head of the island to run by.  As to the Sergeant's

"closeness," we have heard it whispered that he once went up to the right

of the "Old Hen,"--[Glasscock's Island and the "Old Hen" were

phenomenally safe places.]--but this is probably a pardonable little

exaggeration, prompted by the love and admiration in which he is held by

various ancient dames of his acquaintance (for albeit the Sergeant may

have already numbered the allotted years of man, still his form is erect,

his step is firm, his hair retains its sable hue, and, more than all, he

hath a winning way about him, an air of docility and sweetness, if you

will, and a smoothness of speech, together with an exhaustless fund of

funny sayings; and, lastly, an overflowing stream, without beginning, or

middle, or end, of astonishing reminiscences of the ancient Mississippi,

which, taken together, form a 'tout ensemble' which is sufficient excuse

for the tender epithet which is, by common consent, applied to him by all

those ancient dames aforesaid, of "che-arming creature!").  As the

Sergeant has been longer on the river, and is better acquainted with it

than any other "cub" extant, his remarks are entitled to far more

consideration, and are always read with the deepest interest by high and

low, rich and poor, from "Kiho" to Kamschatka, for let it be known that

his fame extends to the uttermost parts of the earth:







THE COMMUNICATION



R.R. Steamer Trombone, VICKSBURG, May 8, 1859.



The river from New Orleans up to Natchez is higher than it has been since

the niggers were executed (which was in the fall of 1813) and my opinion

is that if the rise continues at this rate the water will be on the roof

of the St. Charles Hotel before the middle of January.  The point at

Cairo, which has not even been moistened by the river since 1813, is now

entirely under water.



However, Mr. Editor, the inhabitants of the Mississippi Valley should not

act precipitately and sell their plantations at a sacrifice on account of

this prophecy of mine, for I shall proceed to convince them of a great

fact in regard to this matter, viz.: that the tendency of the Mississippi

is to rise less and less high every year (with an occasional variation of

the rule), that such has been the case for many centuries, and eventually

that it will cease to rise at all.  Therefore, I would hint to the

planters, as we say in an innocent little parlor game commonly called

"draw," that if they can only "stand the rise" this time they may enjoy

the comfortable assurance that the old river's banks will never hold a

"full" again during their natural lives.



In the summer of 1763 I came down the river on the old first Jubilee.

She was new then, however; a singular sort of a single-engine boat, with

a Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew, forecastle on her stern, wheels in

the center, and the jackstaff "nowhere," for I steered her with a window-

shutter, and when we wanted to land we sent a line ashore and "rounded

her to" with a yoke of oxen.



Well, sir, we wooded off the top of the big bluff above Selmathe only dry

land visible--and waited there three weeks, swapping knives and playing

"seven up" with the Indians, waiting for the river to fall.  Finally, it

fell about a hundred feet, and we went on.  One day we rounded to, and I

got in a horse-trough, which my partner borrowed from the Indians up

there at Selma while they were at prayers, and went down to sound around

No. 8, and while I was gone my partner got aground on the hills at

Hickman.  After three days' labor we finally succeeded in sparring her

off with a capstan bar, and went on to Memphis.  By the time we got there

the river had subsided to such an extent that we were able to land where

the Gayoso House now stands.  We finished loading at Memphis, and loaded

part of the stone for the present St. Louis Court House (which was then

in process of erection), to be taken up on our return trip.



You can form some conception, by these memoranda, of how high the

water was in 1763.  In 1775 it did not rise so high by thirty feet;

in 1790 it missed the original mark at least sixty-five feet; in

1797, one hundred and fifty feet; and in 1806, nearly two hundred and

fifty feet.  These were "high-water" years.  The "high waters" since then

have been so insignificant that I have scarcely taken the trouble to

notice them.  Thus, you will perceive that the planters need not feel

uneasy.  The river may make an occasional spasmodic effort at a flood,

but the time is approaching when it will cease to rise altogether.



In conclusion, sir, I will condescend to hint at the foundation of these

arguments: When me and De Soto discovered the Mississippi I could stand

at Bolivar Landing (several miles above "Roaring Waters Bar") and pitch a

biscuit to the main shore on the other side, and in low water we waded

across at Donaldsonville.  The gradual widening and deepening of the

river is the whole secret of the matter.



                              Yours, etc.

                                        SERGEANT FATHOM.









APPENDIX C





I



MARK TWAIN'S EMPIRE CITY HOAX

(See Chapter xli)



THE LATEST SENSATION



     A Victim to Jeremy Diddling Trustees--He Cuts his Throat from Ear to

     Ear, Scalps his Wife, and Dashes Out the Brains of Six Helpless

     Children!



From Abram Curry, who arrived here yesterday afternoon from Carson, we

learn the following particulars concerning a bloody massacre which was

committed in Ormsby County night before last.  It seems that during the

past six months a man named P. Hopkins, or Philip Hopkins, has been

residing with his family in the old log-house just at the edge of the

great pine forest which lies between Empire City and Dutch Nick's.  The

family consisted of nine children--five girls and four boys--the oldest

of the group, Mary, being nineteen years old, and the youngest, Tommy,

about a year and a half.  Twice in the past two months Mrs. Hopkins,

while visiting Carson, expressed fears concerning the sanity of her

husband, remarking that of late he had been subject to fits of violence,

and that during the prevalence of one of these he had threatened to take

her life.  It was Mrs. Hopkins's misfortune to be given to exaggeration,

however, and but little attention was given to what she said.



About 10 o'clock on Monday evening Hopkins dashed into Carson on

horseback, with his throat cut from ear to ear, and bearing in his hand a

reeking scalp, from which the warm, smoking blood was still dripping, and

fell in a dying condition in front of the Magnolia saloon.  Hopkins

expired, in the course of five minutes, without speaking.  The long, red

hair of the scalp he bore marked it as that of Mrs. Hopkins.  A number of

citizens, headed by Sheriff Gasherie, mounted at once and rode down to

Hopkins's house, where a ghastly scene met their eyes.  The scalpless

corpse of Mrs. Hopkins lay across the threshold, with her head split open

and her right hand almost severed from the wrist.  Near her lay the ax

with which the murderous deed had been committed.  In one of the bedrooms

six of the children were found, one in bed and the others scattered about

the floor.  They were all dead.  Their brains had evidently been dashed

out with a club, and every mark about them seemed to have been made with

a blunt instrument.  The children must have struggled hard for their

lives, as articles of clothing and broken furniture were strewn about the

room in the utmost confusion.  Julia and Emma, aged respectively fourteen

and seventeen, were found in the kitchen, bruised and insensible, but it

is thought their recovery is possible.  The eldest girl, Mary, must have

sought refuge, in her terror, in the garret, as her body was found there

frightfully mutilated, and the knife with which her wounds had been

inflicted still sticking in her side.  The two girls Julia and Emma, who

had recovered sufficiently to be able to talk yesterday morning, declare

that their father knocked them down with a billet of wood and stamped on

them.  They think they were the first attacked.  They further state that

Hopkins had shown evidence of derangement all day, but had exhibited no

violence.  He flew into a passion and attempted to murder them because

they advised him to go to bed and compose his mind.



Curry says Hopkins was about forty-two years of age, and a native of

western Pennsylvania; he was always affable and polite, and until very

recently no one had ever heard of his ill-treating his family.  He had

been a heavy owner in the best mines of Virginia and Gold Hill, but when

the San Francisco papers exposed our game of cooking dividends in order

to bolster up our stocks he grew afraid and sold out, and invested an

immense amount in the Spring Valley Water Company, of San Francisco.  He

was advised to do this by a relative of his, one of the editors of the

San Francisco Bulletin, who had suffered pecuniarily by the dividend-

cooking system as applied to the Daney Mining Company recently.  Hopkins

had not long ceased to own in the various claims on the Comstock lead,

however, when several dividends were cooked on his newly acquired

property, their water totally dried up, and Spring Valley stock went down

to nothing.  It is presumed that this misfortune drove him mad, and

resulted in his killing himself and the greater portion of his family.

The newspapers of San Francisco permitted this water company to go on

borrowing money and cooking dividends, under cover of which the cunning

financiers crept out of the tottering concern, leaving the crash to come

upon poor and unsuspecting stockholders, without offering to expose the

villainy at work.  We hope the fearful massacre detailed above may prove

the saddest result of their silence.







II



NEWS-GATHERING WITH MARK TWAIN



Alfred Doten's son gives the following account of a reporting trip made

by his father and Mark Twain, when the two were on Comstock papers:



My father and Mark Twain were once detailed to go over to Como and write

up some new mines that had been discovered over there.  My father was on

the Gold Hill News.  He and Mark had not met before, but became promptly

acquainted, and were soon calling each other by their first names.



They went to a little hotel at Carson, agreeing to do their work there

together next morning.  When morning came they set out, and suddenly on a

corner Mark stopped and turned to my father, saying:



"By gracious, Alf!  Isn't that a brewery?"



"It is, Mark.  Let's go in."



They did so, and remained there all day, swapping yarns, sipping beer,

and lunching, going back to the hotel that night.



The next morning precisely the same thing occurred.  When they were on

the same corner, Mark stopped as if he had never been there before, and

sand:



"Good gracious, Alf !  Isn't that a brewery?"



"It is, Mark.  Let's go in."



So again they went in, and again stayed all day.



This happened again the next morning, and the next.  Then my father

became uneasy.  A letter had come from Gold Hill, asking him where his

report of the mines was.  They agreed that next morning they would really

begin the story; that they would climb to the top of a hill that

overlooked the mines, and write it from there.



But the next morning, as before, Mark was surprised to discover the

brewery, and once more they went in.  A few moments later, however, a man

who knew all about the mines--a mining engineer connected with them--came

in.  He was a godsend.  My father set down a valuable, informing story,

while Mark got a lot of entertaining mining yarns out of him.



Next day Virginia City and Gold Hill were gaining information from my

father's article, and entertainment from Mark's story of the mines.









APPENDIX D



FROM MARK TWAIN'S FIRST LECTURE, DELIVERED OCTOBER 2, 1866



(See Chapter liv)



HAWAIIAN IMPORTANCE TO AMERICA



After a full elucidation of the sugar industry of the Sandwich Islands,

its profits and possibilities, he said:



I have dwelt upon this subject to show you that these islands have a

genuine importance to America--an importance which is not generally

appreciated by our citizens.  They pay revenues into the United States

Treasury now amounting to over a half a million a year.



I do not know what the sugar yield of the world is now, but ten years

ago, according to the Patent Office reports, it was 800,000 hogsheads.

The Sandwich Islands, properly cultivated by go-ahead Americans, are

capable of providing one-third as much themselves.  With the Pacific

Railroad built, the great China Mail Line of steamers touching at

Honolulu--we could stock the islands with Americans and supply a third of

the civilized world with sugar--and with the silkiest, longest-stapled

cotton this side of the Sea Islands, and the very best quality of rice

....  The property has got to fall to some heir, and why not the United

States?





NATIVE PASSION FOR FUNERALS



They are very fond of funerals.  Big funerals are their main weakness.

Fine grave clothes, fine funeral appointments, and a long procession are

things they take a generous delight in.  They are fond of their chief and

their king; they reverence them with a genuine reverence and love them

with a warm affection, and often look forward to the happiness they will

experience in burying them.  They will beg, borrow, or steal money

enough, and flock from all the islands, to be present at a royal funeral

on Oahu.  Years ago a Kanaka and his wife were condemned to be hanged for

murder.  They received the sentence with manifest satisfaction because it

gave an opening for a funeral, you know.  All they care for is a funeral.

It makes but little difference to them whose it is; they would as soon

attend their own funeral as anybody else's.  This couple were people of

consequence, and had landed estates.  They sold every foot of ground they

had and laid it out in fine clothes to be hung in.  And the woman

appeared on the scaffold in a white satin dress and slippers and fathoms

of gaudy ribbon, and the man was arrayed in a gorgeous vest, blue claw-

hammer coat and brass buttons, and white kid gloves.  As the noose was

adjusted around his neck, he blew his nose with a grand theatrical

flourish, so as to show his embroidered white handkerchief.  I never,

never knew of a couple who enjoyed hanging more than they did.







VIEW FROM HALEAKALA



It is a solemn pleasure to stand upon the summit of the extinct crater of

Haleakala, ten thousand feet above the sea, and gaze down into its awful

crater, 27 miles in circumference and ago feet deep, and to picture to

yourself the seething world of fire that once swept up out of the

tremendous abyss ages ago.



The prodigious funnel is dead and silent now, and even has bushes growing

far down in its bottom, where the deep-sea line could hardly have reached

in the old times, when the place was filled with liquid lava.  These

bushes look like parlor shrubs from the summit where you stand, and the

file of visitors moving through them on their mules is diminished to a

detachment of mice almost; and to them you, standing so high up against

the sun, ten thousand feet above their heads, look no larger than a

grasshopper.



This in the morning; but at three or four in the afternoon a thousand

little patches of white clouds, like handfuls of wool, come drifting

noiselessly, one after another, into the crater, like a procession of

shrouded phantoms, and circle round and round the vast sides, and settle

gradually down and mingle together until the colossal basin is filled to

the brim with snowy fog and all its seared and desolate wonders are

hidden from sight.



And then you may turn your back to the crater and look far away upon the

broad valley below, with its sugar-houses glinting like white specks in

the distance, and the great sugar-fields diminished to green veils amid

the lighter-tinted verdure around them, and abroad upon the limitless

ocean.  But I should not say you look down; you look up at these things.



You are ten thousand feet above them, but yet you seem to stand in a

basin, with the green islands here and there, and the valleys and the

wide ocean, and the remote snow-peak of Mauna Loa, all raised up before

and above you, and pictured out like a brightly tinted map hung at the

ceiling of a room.



You look up at everything; nothing is below you.  It has a singular and

startling effect to see a miniature world thus seemingly hung in mid-air.



But soon the white clouds come trooping along in ghostly squadrons and

mingle together in heavy masses a quarter of a mile below you and shut

out everything-completely hide the sea and all the earth save the

pinnacle you stand on.  As far as the eye can reach, it finds nothing to

rest upon but a boundless plain of clouds tumbled into all manner of

fantastic shapes-a billowy ocean of wool aflame with the gold and purple

and crimson splendors of the setting sun!  And so firm does this grand

cloud pavement look that you can hardly persuade yourself that you could

not walk upon it; that if you stepped upon it you would plunge headlong

and astonish your friends at dinner ten thousand feet below.



Standing on that peak, with all the world shut out by that vast plain of

clouds, a feeling of loneliness comes over a man which suggests to his

mind the last man at the flood, perched high upon the last rock, with

nothing visible on any side but a mournful waste of waters, and the ark

departing dimly through the distant mists and leaving him to storm and

night and solitude and death!









NOTICE OF MARK TWAIN'S LECTURE



"THE TROUBLE IS OVER"



"The inimitable Mark Twain, delivered himself last night of his first

lecture on the Sandwich Islands, or anything else.



"Some time before the hour appointed to open his head the Academy of Music

(on Pine Street) was densely crowded with one of the most fashionable

audiences it was ever my privilege to witness during my long residence in

this city.  The Elite of the town were there, and so was the Governor of

the State, occupying one of the boxes, whose rotund face was suffused

with a halo of mirth during the whole entertainment.  The audience

promptly notified Mark by the usual sign--stamping--that the auspicious

hour had arrived, and presently the lecturer came sidling and swinging

out from the left of the stage.  His very manner produced a generally

vociferous laugh from the assemblage.  He opened with an apology, by

saying that he had partly succeeded in obtaining a band, but at the last

moment the party engaged backed out.  He explained that he had hired a

man to play the trombone, but he, on learning that he was the only person

engaged, came at the last moment and informed him that he could not play.

This placed Mark in a bad predicament, and wishing to know his reasons

for deserting him at that critical moment, he replied, 'That he wasn't

going to make a fool of himself by sitting up there on the stage and

blowing his horn all by himself.'  After the applause subsided, he

assumed a very grave countenance and commenced his remarks proper with

the following well-known sentence: 'When, in the course of human events,'

etc.  He lectured fully an hour and a quarter, and his humorous sayings

were interspersed with geographical, agricultural, and statistical

remarks, sometimes branching off and reaching beyond, soaring, in the

very choicest language, up to the very pinnacle of descriptive power."











APPENDIX E



FROM "THE JUMPING FROG" BOOK (MARK TWAIN'S FIRST PUBLISHED VOLUME)



(See Chapters lviii and lix)



I



ADVERTISEMENT



"Mark Twain" is too well known to the public to require a formal

introduction at my hands.  By his story of the Frog he scaled the heights

of popularity at a single jump and won for himself the 'sobriquet' of The

Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope.  He is also known to fame as The

Moralist of the Main; and it is not unlikely that as such he will go down

to posterity.  It is in his secondary character, as humorist, however,

rather than in the primal one of moralist, that I aim to present him in

the present volume.  And here a ready explanation will be found for the

somewhat fragmentary character of many of these sketches; for it was

necessary to snatch threads of humor wherever they could be found--very

often detaching them from serious articles and moral essays with which

they were woven and entangled.  Originally written for newspaper

publication, many of the articles referred to events of the day, the

interest of which has now passed away, and contained local allusions,

which the general reader would fail to understand; in such cases excision

became imperative.  Further than this, remark or comment is unnecessary.

Mark Twain never resorts to tricks of spelling nor rhetorical buffoonery

for the purpose of provoking a laugh; the vein of his humor runs too rich

and deep to make surface gliding necessary.  But there are few who can

resist the quaint similes, keen satire, and hard, good sense which form

the staple of his writing.

                                             J. P.







II



FROM ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS



"MORAL STATISTICIAN"--I don't want any of your statistics.  I took your

whole batch and lit my pipe with it.  I hate your kind of people.  You

are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much

his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he

wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal

practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking

coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of

wine at dinner, etc., etc., etc.  .  .  .



Of course you can save money by denying yourself all these vicious little

enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it?  What use

can you put it to?  Money can't save your infinitesimal soul.  All the

use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this

life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment, where is

the use in accumulating cash?  It won't do for you to say that you can

use it to better purpose in furnishing good table, and in charities, and

in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people

who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you

stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and

hungry.  And you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor

wretch, seeing you in a good-humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you;

and in church you are always down on your knees, with your eyes buried in

the cushion, when the contribution-box comes around; and you never give

the revenue-officers a true statement of your income.  Now you all know

all these things yourself, don't you?  Very well, then, what is the use

of your stringing out your miserable lives to a clean and withered old

age?  What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless

to you?  In a word, why don't you go off somewhere and die, and not be

always trying to seduce people into becoming as "ornery" and unlovable as

you are yourselves, by your ceaseless and villainous "moral statistics"?

Now, I don't approve of dissipation, and I don't indulge in it, either;

but I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming

petty vices whatever, and so I don't want to hear from you any more.  I

think you are the very same man who read me a long lecture last week

about the degrading vice of smoking cigars and then came back, in my

absence, with your vile, reprehensible fire-proof gloves on, and carried

off my beautiful parlor-stove.









III



FROM "A STRANGE DREAM"



(Example of Mark Twain's Early Descriptive Writing)



.  .  .  In due time I stood, with my companion, on the wall of the vast

caldron which the natives, ages ago, named 'Hale mau mau'--the abyss

wherein they were wont to throw the remains of their chiefs, to the end

that vulgar feet might never tread above them.  We stood there, at dead

of night, a mile above the level of the sea, and looked down a thousand

feet upon a boiling, surging, roaring ocean of fire!--shaded our eyes

from the blinding glare, and gazed far away over the crimson waves with a

vague notion that a supernatural fleet, manned by demons and freighted

with the damned, might presently sail up out of the remote distance;

started when tremendous thunder-bursts shook the earth, and followed with

fascinated eyes the grand jets of molten lava that sprang high up toward

the zenith and exploded in a world of fiery spray that lit up the somber

heavens with an infernal splendor.



"What is your little bonfire of Vesuvius to this?"



My ejaculation roused my companion from his reverie, and we fell into a

conversation appropriate to the occasion and the surroundings.  We came

at last to speak of the ancient custom of casting the bodies of dead

chieftains into this fearful caldron; and my comrade, who is of the blood

royal, mentioned that the founder of his race, old King Kamehameha the

First--that invincible old pagan Alexander--had found other sepulture

than the burning depths of the 'Hale mau mau'.  I grew interested at

once; I knew that the mystery of what became of the corpse of the warrior

king hail never been fathomed; I was aware that there was a legend

connected with this matter; and I felt as if there could be no more

fitting time to listen to it than the present.  The descendant of the

Kamehamehas said:



The dead king was brought in royal state down the long, winding road that

descends from the rim of the crater to the scorched and chasm-riven plain

that lies between the 'Hale mau mau' and those beetling walls yonder in

the distance.  The guards were set and the troops of mourners began the

weird wail for the departed.  In the middle of the night came a sound of

innumerable voices in the air and the rush of invisible wings; the

funeral torches wavered, burned blue, and went out.  The mourners and

watchers fell to the ground paralyzed by fright, and many minutes elapsed

before any one dared to move or speak; for they believed that the phantom

messengers of the dread Goddess of Fire had been in their midst.  When at

last a torch was lighted the bier was vacant--the dead monarch had been

spirited away!









APPENDIX F



THE INNOCENTS ABROAD

(See Chapter lx)





NEW YORK "HERALD" EDITORIAL ON THE RETURN OF THE "QUAKER CITY"

PILGRIMAGE, NOVEMBER 19, 1867



In yesterday's Herald we published a most amusing letter from the pen of

that most amusing American genius, Mark Twain, giving an account of that

most amusing of all modern pilgrimages--the pilgrimage of the 'Quaker

City'.  It has been amusing all through, this Quaker City affair.  It

might have become more serious than amusing if the ship had been sold at

Jaffa, Alexandria, or Yalta, in the Black Sea, as it appears might have

happened.  In such a case the passengers would have been more effectually

sold than the ship.  The descendants of the Puritan pilgrims have,

naturally enough, some of them, an affection for ships; but if all that

is said about this religious cruise be true they have also a singularly

sharp eye to business.  It was scarcely wise on the part of the pilgrims,

although it was well for the public, that so strange a genius as Mark

Twain should have found admission into the sacred circle.  We are not

aware whether Mr. Twain intends giving us a book on this pilgrimage, but

we do know that a book written from his own peculiar standpoint, giving

an account of the characters and events on board ship and of the scenes

which the pilgrims witnessed, would command an almost unprecedented sale.

There are varieties of genius peculiar to America.  Of one of these

varieties Mark Twain is a striking specimen.  For the development of his

peculiar genius he has never had a more fitting opportunity.  Besides,

there are some things which he knows, and which the world ought to know,

about this last edition of the Mayflower.













APPENDIX G



MARK TWAIN AT THE CORRESPONDENTS CLUB, WASHINGTON



(See Chapter lxiii)



WOMAN



A EULOGY OF THE FAIR SEX



The Washington Correspondents Club held its anniversary on Saturday

night.  Mr. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, responded to the toast,

"Woman, the pride of the professions and the jewel of ours."  He said:



Mr. President,--I do not know why I should have been singled out to

receive the greatest distinction of the evening--for so the office of

replying to the toast to woman has been regarded in every age.

[Applause.] I do not know why I have received this distinction, unless it

be that I am a trifle less homely than the other members of the club.

But, be this as it may, Mr. President, I am proud of the position, and

you could not have chosen any one who would have accepted it more gladly,

or labored with a heartier good--will to do the subject justice, than I.

Because, Sir, I love the sex.  [Laughter.]  I love all the women, sir,

irrespective of age or color.  [Laughter.]



Human intelligence cannot estimate what we owe to woman, sir.  She sews

on our buttons [laughter]; she mends our clothes [laughter]; she ropes us

in at the church fairs; she confides in us; she tells us whatever she can

find out about the private affairs of the neighbors; she gives good

advice, and plenty of it; she gives us a piece of her mind sometimes--

and sometimes all of it; she soothes our aching brows; she bears our

children. (Ours as a general thing.)--[this last sentence appears in

Twain's published speeches and may have been added later.  D.W.]



In all relations of life, sir, it is but just and a graceful tribute to

woman to say of her that she is a brick.  [Great laughter.]



Wheresoever you place woman, sir--in whatsoever position or estate--she

is an ornament to that place she occupies, and a treasure to the world.

[Here Mr. Twain paused, looked inquiringly at his hearers, and remarked

that the applause should come in at this point.  It came in.  Mr. Twain

resumed his eulogy.] Look at the noble names of history!  Look at

Cleopatra!  Look at Desdemona!  Look at Florence Nightingale!  Look at

Joan of Arc!  Look at Lucretia Borgia!  [Disapprobation expressed.

"Well," said Mr. Twain, scratching his head, doubtfully, "suppose we let

Lucretia slide."] Look at Joyce Heth!  Look at Mother Eve!  I repeat,

sir, look at the illustrious names of history!  Look at the Widow

Machree!  Look at Lucy Stone!  Look at Elizabeth Cady Stanton!  Look at

George Francis Train!  [Great laughter.] And, sir, I say with bowed head

and deepest veneration, look at the mother of Washington!  She raised a

boy that could not lie--could not lie.  [Applause.] But he never had any

chance.  It might have been different with him if he had belonged to a

newspaper correspondents' club.  [Laughter, groans, hisses, cries of "put

him out."  Mark looked around placidly upon his excited audience, and

resumed.]



I repeat, sir, that in whatsoever position you place a woman she is an

ornament to society and a treasure to the world.  As a sweetheart she has

few equals and no superior [laughter]; as a cousin she is convenient; as

a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper she is precious; as a

wet nurse she has no equal among men!  [Laughter.]



What, sir, would the people of this earth be without woman?  They would

be scarce, sir. (Mighty scarce.)--[another line added later in the

published 'Speeches'. D.W.]  Then let us cherish her, let us protect her,

let us give her our support, our encouragement, our sympathy--ourselves,

if we get a chance.  [Laughter.]



But, jesting aside, Mr. President, woman is lovable, gracious, kind of

heart, beautiful; worthy of all respect, of all esteem, of all deference.

Not any here will refuse to drink her health right cordially, for each

and every one of us has personally known, loved, and honored the very

best one of them all--his own mother!  [Applause.]













APPENDIX H



ANNOUNCEMENT FOR LECTURE OF JULY 2, 1868



(See Chapter lxvi)



THE PUBLIC TO MARK TWAIN-CORRESPONDENCE



SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th.



MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--Hearing that you are about to sail for New

York in the P. M. S. S.  Company's steamer of the 6th July, to publish a

book, and learning with the deepest concern that you propose to read a

chapter or two of that book in public before you go, we take this method

of expressing our cordial desire that you will not.  We beg and implore

you do not.  There is a limit to human endurance.



We are your personal friends.  We have your welfare at heart.  We desire

to see you prosper.  And it is upon these accounts, and upon these only,

that we urge you to desist from the new atrocity you contemplate.  Yours

truly,



     60 names including: Bret Harte, Maj.-Gen. Ord, Maj.-Gen. Halleck,

     The Orphan Asylum, and various Benevolent Societies, Citizens on

     Foot and Horseback, and 1500 in the Steerage.







(REPLY)



                                   SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th



TO THE 1,500 AND OTHERS,--It seems to me that your course is entirely

unprecedented.  Heretofore, when lecturers, singers, actors, and other

frauds have said they were about to leave town, you have always been the

very first people to come out in a card beseeching them to hold on for

just one night more, and inflict just one more performance on the public,

but as soon as I want to take a farewell benefit you come after me, with

a card signed by the whole community and the board of aldermen, praying

me not to do it.  But it isn't of any use.  You cannot move me from my

fell purpose.  I will torment the people if I want to.  I have a better

right to do it than these strange lecturers and orators that come here

from abroad.  It only costs the public a dollar apiece, and if they can't

stand it what do they stay here for?  Am I to go away and let them have

peace and quiet for a year and a half, and then come back and only

lecture them twice?  What do you take me for?



No, gentlemen, ask of me anything else and I will do it cheerfully; but

do not ask me not to afflict the people.  I wish to tell them all I know

about VENICE.  I wish to tell them about the City of the Sea--that most

venerable, most brilliant, and proudest Republic the world has ever seen.

I wish to hint at what it achieved in twelve hundred years, and what it

lost in two hundred.  I wish to furnish a deal of pleasant information,

somewhat highly spiced, but still palatable, digestible, and eminently

fitted for the intellectual stomach.  My last lecture was not as fine as

I thought it was, but I have submitted this discourse to several able

critics, and they have pronounced it good.  Now, therefore, why should I

withhold it?



Let me talk only just this once, and I will sail positively on the 6th of

July, and stay away until I return from China--two years.

                                   Yours truly, MARK TWAIN.







(FURTHER REMONSTRANCE)



SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th.



MR. MARK TWAIN,--Learning with profound regret that you have concluded to

postpone your departure until the 6th July, and learning also, with

unspeakable grief, that you propose to read from your forthcoming book,

or lecture again before you go, at the New Mercantile Library, we hasten

to beg of you that you will not do it.  Curb this spirit of lawless

violence, and emigrate at once.  Have the vessel's bill for your passage

sent to us.  We will pay it.



                                   Your friends,

                                        Pacific Board of Brokers [and

                                        other financial and social

                                        institutions]







                                   SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th.



MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--Will you start now, without any unnecessary

delay?

                                   Yours truly,

                                        Proprietors of the Alta,

                                        Bulletin, Times, Call, Examiner

                                        [and other San Francisco

                                        publications].







                                   SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th.



MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--Do not delay your departure.  You can come

back and lecture another time.  In the language of the worldly--you can

"cut and come again."

                                   Your friends,

                                        THE CLERGY.







                                   SAN FRANCISCO, June 3oth.



MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--You had better go.

                                   Yours,

                                        THE CHIEF OF POLICE.







(REPLY)



SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th.



GENTLEMEN,--Restrain your emotions; you observe that they cannot avail.

Read:



                         NEW MERCANTILE LIBRARY

                               Bush Street



                     Thursday Evening, July 2, 1868

                             One Night Only



                            FAREWELL LECTURE

                                   of

                               MARK TWAIN

                                Subject:

                       The Oldest of the Republics

                                 VENICE

                            PAST AND PRESENT



                 Box-Office open Wednesday and Thursday

                   No extra charge for reserved seats



          ADMISSION .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  ONE DOLLAR

          Doors open at 7         Orgies to commence at 8 P.  M.



     The public displays and ceremonies projected to give fitting eclat

     to this occasion have been unavoidably delayed until the 4th.  The

     lecture will be delivered certainly on the 2d, and the event will be

     celebrated two days afterward by a discharge of artillery on the

     4th, a procession of citizens, the reading of the Declaration of

     Independence, and by a gorgeous display of fireworks from Russian

     Hill in the evening, which I have ordered at my sole expense, the

     cost amounting to eighty thousand dollars.



                        AT NEW MERCANTILE LIBRARY

                               Bush Street

                     Thursday Evening, July 2, 1868













APPENDIX I



MARK TWAIN'S CHAMPIONSHIP OF THOMAS K. BEECHER



(See Chapter lxxiv)



There was a religious turmoil in Elmira in 1869; a disturbance among the

ministers, due to the success of Thomas K. Beecher in a series of

meetings he was conducting in the Opera House.  Mr. Beecher's teachings

had never been very orthodox or doctrinal, but up to this time they had

been seemingly unobjectionable to his brother clergymen, who fraternized

with him and joined with him in the Monday meetings of the Ministerial

Union of Elmira, when each Monday a sermon was read by one of the

members.  The situation presently changed.  Mr. Beecher was preaching his

doubtful theology to large and nightly increasing audiences, and it was

time to check the exodus.  The Ministerial Union of Elmira not only

declined to recognize and abet the Opera House gatherings, but they

requested him to withdraw from their Monday meetings, on the ground that

his teachings were pernicious.  Mr. Beecher said nothing of the matter,

and it was not made public until a notice of it appeared in a religious

paper.  Naturally such a course did not meet with the approval of the

Langdon family, and awoke the scorn of a man who so detested bigotry in

any form as Mark Twain.  He was a stranger in the place, and not

justified to speak over his own signature, but he wrote an article and

read it to members of the Langdon family and to Dr. and Mrs. Taylor,

their intimate friends, who were spending an evening in the Langdon home.

It was universally approved, and the next morning appeared in the Elmira

Advertiser, over the signature of "S'cat."  It created a stir, of course.



The article follows:



MR. BEECHER AND THE CLERGY



"The Ministerial Union of Elmira, N. Y., at a recent meeting passed

resolutions disapproving the teachings of Rev. T. K. Beecher, declining

to co-operate with him in his Sunday evening services at the Opera House,

and requesting him to withdraw from their Monday morning meeting.  This

has resulted in his withdrawal, and thus the pastors are relieved from

further responsibility as to his action."--N. Y. Evangelist.





Poor Beecher!  All this time he could do whatever he pleased that was

wrong, and then be perfectly serene and comfortable over it, because the

Ministerial Union of Elmira was responsible to God for it.  He could lie

if he wanted to, and those ministers had to answer for it; he could

promote discord in the church of Christ, and those parties had to make it

right with the Deity as best they could; he could teach false doctrines

to empty opera houses, and those sorrowing lambs of the Ministerial Union

had to get out their sackcloth and ashes and stand responsible for it.

He had such a comfortable thing of it!  But he went too far.  In an evil

hour he slaughtered the simple geese that laid the golden egg of

responsibility for him, and now they will uncover their customary

complacency, and lift up their customary cackle in his behalf no more.

And so, at last, he finds himself in the novel position of being

responsible to God for his acts, instead of to the Ministerial Union of

Elmira.  To say that this is appalling is to state it with a degree of

mildness which amounts to insipidity.



We cannot justly estimate this calamity, without first reviewing certain

facts that conspired to bring it about.  Mr. Beecher was and is in the

habit of preaching to a full congregation in the Independent

Congregational Church, in this city.  The meeting-house was not large

enough to accommodate all the people who desired admittance.  Mr. Beecher

regularly attended the meetings of the Ministerial Union of Elmira every

Monday morning, and they received him into their fellowship, and never

objected to the doctrines which he taught in his church.  So, in an

unfortunate moment, he conceived the strange idea that they would connive

at the teaching of the same doctrines in the same way in a larger house.

Therefore he secured the Opera House and proceeded to preach there every

Sunday evening to assemblages comprising from a thousand to fifteen

hundred persons.  He felt warranted in this course by a passage of

Scripture which says, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel

unto every creature."  Opera-houses were not ruled out specifically in

this passage, and so he considered it proper to regard opera-houses as a

part of "all the world."  He looked upon the people who assembled there

as coming under the head of "every creature."  These ideas were as absurd

as they were farfetched, but still they were the honest ebullitions of a

diseased mind.  His great mistake was in supposing that when he had the

Saviour's indorsement of his conduct he had all that was necessary.  He

overlooked the fact that there might possibly be a conflict of opinion

between the Saviour and the Ministerial Union of Elmira.  And there was.

Wherefore, blind and foolish Mr. Beecher went to his destruction.  The

Ministerial Union withdrew their approbation, and left him dangling in

the air, with no other support than the countenance and approval of the

gospel of Christ.



Mr. Beecher invited his brother ministers to join forces with him and

help him conduct the Opera House meetings.  They declined with great

unanimity.  In this they were wrong.  Since they did not approve of those

meetings, it was a duty they owed to their consciences and their God to

contrive their discontinuance.  They knew this.  They felt it.  Yet they

turned coldly away and refused to help at those meetings, when they well

knew that their help, earnestly and persistently given, was able to kill

any great religious enterprise that ever was conceived of.



The ministers refused, and the calamitous meetings at the Opera House

continued; and not only continued, but grew in interest and importance,

and sapped of their congregations churches where the Gospel was preached

with that sweet monotonous tranquillity and that impenetrable profundity

which stir up such consternation in the strongholds of sin.  It is a pity

to have to record here that one clergyman refused to preach at the Opera

House at Mr. Beecher's request, even when that incendiary was sick and

disabled; and if that man's conscience justifies him in that refusal I do

not.  Under the plea of charity for a sick brother he could have preached

to that Opera House multitude a sermon that would have done incalculable

damage to the Opera House experiment.  And he need not have been

particular about the sermon he chose, either.  He could have relied on

any he had in his barrel.



The Opera House meetings went on; other congregations were thin, and grew

thinner, but the Opera House assemblages were vast.  Every Sunday night,

in spite of sense and reason, multitudes passed by the churches where

they might have been saved, and marched deliberately to the Opera House

to be damned.  The community talked, talked, talked.  Everybody discussed

the fact that the Ministerial Union disapproved of the Opera House

meetings; also the fact that they disapproved of the teachings put forth

there.  And everybody wondered how the Ministerial Union could tell

whether to approve or disapprove of those teachings, seeing that those

clergymen had never attended an Opera House meeting, and therefore didn't

know what was taught there.  Everybody wondered over that curious

question, and they had to take it out in wondering.



Mr. Beecher asked the Ministerial Union to state their objections to the

Opera House matter.  They could not--at least they did not.  He said to

them that if they would come squarely out and tell him that they desired

the discontinuance of those meetings he would discontinue them.  They

declined to do that.  Why should they have declined?  They had no right

to decline, and no excuse to decline, if they honestly believed that

those meetings interfered in the slightest degree with the best interests

of religion.  (That is a proposition which the profoundest head among

them cannot get around.)



But the Opera House meetings went on.  That was the mischief of it.  And

so, one Monday morning, when Mr. B. appeared at the usual Ministers'

meeting, his brother clergymen desired him to come there no more.  He

asked why.  They gave no reason.  They simply declined to have his

company longer.  Mr. B. said he could not accept of this execution

without a trial, and since he loved them and had nothing against them he

must insist upon meeting with them in the future just the same as ever.

And so, after that, they met in secret, and thus got rid of this man's

importunate affection.



The Ministerial Union had ruled out Beecher--a point gained.  He would

get up an excitement about it in public.  But that was a miscalculation.

He never mentioned it.  They waited and waited for the grand crash, but

it never came.  After all their labor-pains, their ministerial mountain

had brought forth only a mouse--and a still-born one at that.  Beecher

had not told on them; Beecher malignantly persisted in not telling on

them.  The opportunity was slipping away.  Alas, for the humiliation of

it, they had to come out and tell it themselves!  And after all, their

bombshell did not hurt anybody when they did explode it.  They had ceased

to be responsible to God for Beecher, and yet nobody seemed paralyzed

about it.  Somehow, it was not even of sufficient importance, apparently,

to get into the papers, though even the poor little facts that Smith has

bought a trotting team and Alderman Jones's child has the measles are

chronicled there with avidity.  Something must be done.  As the

Ministerial Union had told about their desolating action, when nobody

else considered it of enough importance to tell, they would also publish

it, now that the reporters failed to see anything in it important enough

to print.  And so they startled the entire religious world no doubt by

solemnly printing in the Evangelist the paragraph which heads this

article.  They have got their excommunication-bull started at last.  It

is going along quite lively now, and making considerable stir, let us

hope.  They even know it in Podunk, wherever that may be.  It excited a

two-line paragraph there.  Happy, happy world, that knows at last that a

little congress of congregationless clergymen of whom it had never heard

before have crushed a famous Beecher, and reduced his audiences from

fifteen hundred down to fourteen hundred and seventy-five at one fell

blow!  Happy, happy world, that knows at last that these obscure

innocents are no longer responsible for the blemishless teachings, the

power, the pathos, the logic, and the other and manifold intellectual

pyrotechnics that seduce, but to damn, the Opera House assemblages every

Sunday night in Elmira!  And miserable, O thrice miserable Beecher!  For

the Ministerial Union of Elmira will never, no, never more be responsible

to God for his shortcomings.  (Excuse these tears.)



(For the protection of a man who is uniformly charged with all the

newspaper deviltry that sees the light in Elmira journals, I take this

opportunity of stating, under oath, duly subscribed before a magistrate,

that Mr. Beecher did not write this article.  And further still, that he

did not inspire it.  And further still, the Ministerial Union of Elmira

did not write it.  And finally, the Ministerial Union did not ask me to

write it.  No, I have taken up this cudgel in defense of the Ministerial

Union of Elmira solely from a love of justice.  Without solicitation, I

have constituted myself the champion of the Ministerial Union of Elmira,

and it shall be a labor of love with me to conduct their side of a

quarrel in print for them whenever they desire me to do it; or if they

are busy, and have not the time to ask me, I will cheerfully do it

anyhow.  In closing this I must remark that if any question the right of

the clergymen of Elmira to turn Mr. Beecher out of the Ministerial Union,

to such I answer that Mr. Beecher recreated that institution after it had

been dead for many years, and invited those gentlemen to come into it,

which they did, and so of course they have a right to turn him out if

they want to.  The difference between Beecher and the man who put an

adder in his bosom is, that Beecher put in more adders than he did, and

consequently had a proportionately livelier time of it when they got

warmed up.)

                              Cheerfully,

                                             S'CAT.











APPENDIX J



THE INDIGNITY PUT UPON THE REMAINS OF GEORGE HOLLAND BY THE

REV. MR. SABINE



(See Chapter lxxvii)



What a ludicrous satire it was upon Christian charity!--even upon the

vague, theoretical idea of it which doubtless this small saint mouths

from his own pulpit every Sunday.  Contemplate this freak of nature, and

think what a Cardiff giant of self-righteousness is crowded into his

pigmy skin.  If we probe, and dissect; and lay open this diseased, this

cancerous piety of his, we are forced to the conviction that it is the

production of an impression on his part that his guild do about all the

good that is done on the earth, and hence are better than common clay--

hence are competent to say to such as George Holland, "You are unworthy;

you are a play-actor, and consequently a sinner; I cannot take the

responsibility of recommending you to the mercy of Heaven."  It must have

had its origin in that impression, else he would have thought, "We are

all instruments for the carrying out of God's purposes; it is not for me

to pass judgment upon your appointed share of the work, or to praise or

to revile it; I have divine authority for it that we are all sinners, and

therefore it is not for me to discriminate and say we will supplicate for

this sinner, for he was a merchant prince or a banker, but we will

beseech no forgiveness for this other one, for he was a play-actor."



It surely requires the furthest possible reach of self-righteousness to

enable a man to lift his scornful nose in the air and turn his back upon

so poor and pitiable a thing as a dead stranger come to beg the last

kindness that humanity can do in its behalf.  This creature has violated

the letter of the Gospel, and judged George Holland--not George Holland,

either, but his profession through him.  Then it is, in a measure, fair

that we judge this creature's guild through him.  In effect he has said,

"We are the salt of the earth; we do all the good work that is done; to

learn how to be good and do good men must come to us; actors and such are

obstacles to moral progress."  Pray look at the thing reasonably a

moment, laying aside all biases of education and custom.  If a common

public impression is fair evidence of a thing then this minister's

legitimate, recognized, and acceptable business is to tell people calmly,

coldly, and in stiff, written sentences, from the pulpit, to go and do

right, be just, be merciful, be charitable.  And his congregation forget

it all between church and home.  But for fifty years it was George

Holland's business on the stage to make his audience go and do right, and

be just, merciful, and charitable--because by his living, breathing,

feeling pictures he showed them what it was to do these things, and how

to do them, and how instant and ample was the reward!  Is it not a

singular teacher of men, this reverend gentleman who is so poorly

informed himself as to put the whole stage under ban, and say, "I do not

think it teaches moral lessons"?  Where was ever a sermon preached that

could make filial ingratitude so hateful to men as the sinful play of

"King Lear"?  Or where was there ever a sermon that could so convince men

of the wrong and the cruelty of harboring a pampered and unanalyzed

jealousy as the sinful play of "Othello"?  And where are there ten

preachers who can stand in the pulpit preaching heroism, unselfish

devotion, and lofty patriotism, and hold their own against any one of

five hundred William Tells that can be raised upon five hundred stages in

the land at a day's notice?  It is almost fair and just to aver (although

it is profanity) that nine-tenths of all the kindness and forbearance and

Christian charity and generosity in the hearts of the American people

today got there by being filtered down from their fountain-head, the

gospel of Christ, through dramas and tragedies and comedies on the stage,

and through the despised novel and the Christmas story, and through the

thousand and one lessons, suggestions, and narratives of generous deeds

that stir the pulses, and exalt and augment the nobility of the nation

day by day from the teeming columns of ten thousand newspapers, and not

from the drowsy pulpit.



All that is great and good in our particular civilization came straight

from the hand of Jesus Christ, and many creatures, and of divers sorts,

were doubtless appointed to disseminate it; and let us believe that this

seed and the result are the main thing, and not the cut of the sower's

garment; and that whosoever, in his way and according to his opportunity,

sows the one and produces the other, has done high service and worthy.

And further, let us try with all our strength to believe that whenever

old simple-hearted George Holland sowed this seed, and reared his crop of

broader charities and better impulses in men's hearts, it was just as

acceptable before the Throne as if the seed had been scattered in vapid

platitudes from the pulpit of the ineffable Sabine himself.



Am I saying that the pulpit does not do its share toward disseminating

the marrow, the meat of the gospel of Christ?  (For we are not talking of

ceremonies and wire-drawn creeds now, but the living heart and soul of

what is pretty often only a specter.)



No, I am not saying that.  The pulpit teaches assemblages of people twice

a week nearly two hours altogether--and does what it can in that time.

The theater teaches large audiences seven times a week--28 or 30 hours

altogether--and the novels and newspapers plead, and argue, and

illustrate, stir, move, thrill, thunder, urge, persuade, and supplicate,

at the feet of millions and millions of people every single day, and all

day long and far into the night; and so these vast agencies till nine-

tenths of the vineyard, and the pulpit tills the other tenth.  Yet now

and then some complacent blind idiot says, "You unanointed are coarse

clay and useless; you are not as we, the regenerators of the world; go,

bury yourselves elsewhere, for we cannot take the responsibility of

recommending idlers and sinners to the yearning mercy of Heaven."  How

does a soul like that stay in a carcass without getting mixed with the

secretions and sweated out through the pores?  Think of this insect

condemning the whole theatrical service as a disseminator of bad morals

because it has Black Crooks in it; forgetting that if that were

sufficient ground people would condemn the pulpit because it had Crooks

and Kallochs and Sabines in it!



No, I am not trying to rob the pulpit of any atom of its full share and

credit in the work of disseminating the meat and marrow of the gospel of

Christ; but I am trying to get a moment's hearing for worthy agencies in

the same work, that with overwrought modesty seldom or never claim a

recognition of their great services.  I am aware that the pulpit does its

excellent one-tenth (and credits itself with it now and then, though most

of the time a press of business causes it to forget it); I am aware that

in its honest and well-meaning way it bores the people with uninflammable

truisms about doing good; bores them with correct compositions on

charity; bores them, chloroforms them, stupefies them with argumentative

mercy without a flaw in the grammar or an emotion which the minister

could put in in the right place if he turned his back and took his finger

off the manuscript.  And in doing these things the pulpit is doing its

duty, and let us believe that it is likewise doing its best, and doing it

in the most harmless and respectable way.  And so I have said, and shall

keep on saying, let us give the pulpit its full share of credit in

elevating and ennobling the people; but when a pulpit takes to itself

authority to pass judgment upon the work and worth of just as legitimate

an instrument of God as itself, who spent a long life preaching from the

stage the selfsame gospel without the alteration of a single sentiment or

a single axiom of right, it is fair and just that somebody who believes

that actors were made for a high and good purpose, and that they

accomplish the object of their creation and accomplish it well, should

protest.  And having protested, it is also fair and just--being driven to

it, as it were--to whisper to the Sabine pattern of clergyman, under the

breath, a simple, instructive truth, and say, "Ministers are not the only

servants of God upon earth, nor his most efficient ones, either, by a

very, very long distance!"  Sensible ministers already know this, and it

may do the other kind good to find it out.



But to cease teaching and go back to the beginning again, was it not

pitiable--that spectacle?  Honored and honorable old George Holland,

whose theatrical ministry had for fifty years softened hard hearts, bred

generosity in cold ones, kindled emotion in dead ones, uplifted base

ones, broadened bigoted ones, and made many and many a stricken one glad

and filled it brimful of gratitude, figuratively spit upon in his

unoffending coffin by this crawling, slimy, sanctimonious, self-righteous

reptile!













APPENDIX K



A SUBSTITUTE FOR RULOFF HAVE WE A SIDNEY CARTON AMONG US?



(See Chapter lxxxii)



To EDITOR of 'Tribune'.



SIR,--I believe in capital punishment.  I believe that when a murder has

been done it should be answered for with blood.  I have all my life been

taught to feel this way, and the fetters of education are strong.  The

fact that the death--law is rendered almost inoperative by its very

severity does not alter my belief in its righteousness.  The fact that in

England the proportion of executions to condemnations is one to sixteen,

and in this country only one to twenty-two, and in France only one to

thirty-eight, does not shake my steadfast confidence in the propriety of

retaining the death-penalty.  It is better to hang one murderer in

sixteen, twenty-two, thirty-eight than not to hang any at all.



Feeling as I do, I am not sorry that Ruloff is to be hanged, but I am

sincerely sorry that he himself has made it necessary that his vast

capabilities for usefulness should be lost to the world.  In this, mine

and the public's is a common regret.  For it is plain that in the person

of Ruloff one of the most marvelous of intellects that any age has

produced is about to be sacrificed, and that, too, while half the mystery

of its strange powers is yet a secret.  Here is a man who has never

entered the doors of a college or a university, and yet by the sheer

might of his innate gifts has made himself such a colossus in abstruse

learning that the ablest of our scholars are but pigmies in his presence.

By the evidence of Professor Mather, Mr. Surbridge, Mr. Richmond, and

other men qualified to testify, this man is as familiar with the broad

domain of philology as common men are with the passing events of the day.

His memory has such a limitless grasp that he is able to quote sentence

after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, chapter after chapter, from a

gnarled and knotty ancient literature that ordinary scholars are capable

of achieving little more than a bowing acquaintance with.  But his memory

is the least of his great endowments.  By the testimony of the gentlemen

above referred to he is able to critically analyze the works of the old

masters of literature, and while pointing out the beauties of the

originals with a pure and discriminating taste is as quick to detect the

defects of the accepted translations; and in the latter case, if

exceptions be taken to his judgment, he straightway opens up the quarries

of his exhaustless knowledge, and builds a very Chinese wall of evidence

around his position.  Every learned man who enters Ruloff's presence

leaves it amazed and confounded by his prodigious capabilities and

attainments.  One scholar said he did not believe that in matters of

subtle analysis, vast knowledge in his peculiar field of research,

comprehensive grasp of subject, and serene kingship over its limitless

and bewildering details, any land or any era of modern times had given

birth to Ruloff's intellectual equal.  What miracles this murderer might

have wrought, and what luster he might have shed upon his country, if he

had not put a forfeit upon his life so foolishly!  But what if the law

could be satisfied, and the gifted criminal still be saved.  If a life be

offered up on the gallows to atone for the murder Ruloff did, will that

suffice?  If so, give me the proofs, for in all earnestness and truth I

aver that in such a case I will instantly bring forward a man who, in the

interests of learning and science, will take Ruloff's crime upon himself,

and submit to be hanged in Ruloff's place.  I can, and will do this

thing; and I propose this matter, and make this offer in good faith.  You

know me, and know my address.

                              SAMUEL LANGHORNE.

                                                  April 29, 1871.













APPENDIX L



ABOUT LONDON



ADDRESS AT A DINNER GIVEN BY THE SAVAGE CLUB, LONDON, SEPTEMBER 28, 1872



(See Chapter lxxxvii)



Reported by Moncure D. Conway in the Cincinnati Commercial



It affords me sincere pleasure to meet this distinguished club, a club

which has extended its hospitalities and its cordial welcome to so many

of my countrymen.  I hope [and here the speaker's voice became low and

fluttering] you will excuse these clothes.  I am going to the theater;

that will explain these clothes.  I have other clothes than these.

Judging human nature by what I have seen of it, I suppose that the

customary thing for a stranger to do when he stands here is to make a pun

on the name of this club, under the impression, of course, that he is the

first man that that idea has occurred to.  It is a credit to our human

nature, not a blemish upon it; for it shows that underlying all our

depravity (and God knows and you know we are depraved enough) and all our

sophistication, and untarnished by them, there is a sweet germ of

innocence and simplicity still.  When a stranger says to me, with a glow

of inspiration in his eye, some gentle, innocuous little thing about

"Twain and one flesh" and all that sort of thing, I don't try to crush

that man into the earth--no.  I feel like saying, "Let me take you by the

hand, sir; let me embrace you; I have not heard that pun for weeks."  We

will deal in palpable puns.  We will call parties named King "your

Majesty" and we will say to the Smiths that we think we have heard that

name before somewhere.  Such is human nature.  We cannot alter this.  It

is God that made us so for some good and wise purpose.  Let us not

repine.  But though I may seem strange, may seem eccentric, I mean to

refrain from punning upon the name of this club, though I could make a

very good one if I had time to think about it--a week.



I cannot express to you what entire enjoyment I find in this first visit

to this prodigious metropolis of yours.  Its wonders seem to me to be

limitless.  I go about as in a dream--as in a realm of enchantment--where

many things are rare and beautiful, and all things are strange and

marvelous.  Hour after hour I stand--I stand spellbound, as it were-and

gaze upon the statuary in Leicester Square.  [Leicester Square being a

horrible chaos, with the relic of an equestrian statue in the center, the

king being headless and limbless, and the horse in little better

condition.]  I visit the mortuary effigies of noble old Henry VIII., and

Judge Jeffreys, and the preserved gorilla, and try to make up my mind

which of my ancestors I admire the most.  I go to that matchless Hyde

Park and drive all around it, and then I start to enter it at the Marble

Arch--and am induced to "change my mind."  [Cabs are not permitted in

Hyde Park--nothing less aristocratic than a private carriage.]  It is a

great benefaction--is Hyde Park.  There, in his hansom cab, the invalid

can go--the poor, sad child of misfortune--and insert his nose between

the railings, and breathe the pure, health-giving air of the country and

of heaven.  And if he is a swell invalid who isn't obliged to depend upon

parks for his country air he can drive inside--if he owns his vehicle.

I drive round and round Hyde Park and the more I see of the edges of it

the more grateful I am that the margin is extensive.



And I have been to the Zoological Gardens.  What a wonderful place that

is!  I have never seen such a curious and interesting variety of wild-

animals in any garden before--except Mabille.  I never believed before

there were so many different kinds of animals in the world as you can

find there--and I don't believe it yet.  I have been to the British

Museum.  I would advise you to drop in there some time when you have

nothing to do for--five minutes--if you have never been there.  It seems

to me the noblest monument this nation has, yet erected to her greatness.

I say to her, our greatness--as a nation.  True, she has built other

monuments, and stately ones, as well; but these she has uplifted in honor

of two or three colossal demigods who have stalked across the world's

stage, destroying tyrants and delivering nations, and whose prodigies

will still live in the memories of men ages after their monuments shall

have crumbled to dust--I refer to the Wellington and Nelson monuments,

and--the Albert memorial.  [Sarcasm.  The Albert memorial is the finest

monument in the world, and celebrates the existence of as commonplace a

person as good luck ever lifted out of obscurity.]



The Library at the British Museum I find particularly astounding.  I have

read there hours together, and hardly made an impression on it.  I revere

that library.  It is the author's friend.  I don't care how mean a book

is, it always takes one copy.  [A copy of every book printed in Great

Britain must by law be sent to the British Museum, a law much complained

of by publishers.]  And then every day that author goes there to gaze at

that book, and is encouraged to go on in the good work.  And what a

touching sight it is of a Saturday afternoon to see the poor, careworn

clergymen gathered together in that vast reading-room cabbaging sermons

for Sunday!  You will pardon my referring to these things.  Everything in

this monster city interests me, and I cannot keep from talking, even at

the risk of being instructive.  People here seem always to express

distances by parables.  To a stranger it is just a little confusing to be

so parabolic--so to speak.  I collar a citizen, and I think I am going to

get some valuable information out of him.  I ask him how far it is to

Birmingham, and he says it is twenty-one shillings and sixpence.  Now we

know that doesn't help a man who is trying to learn.  I find myself down-

town somewhere, and I want to get some sort of idea where I am--being

usually lost when alone--and I stop a citizen and say, "How far is it to

Charing Cross?"  "Shilling fare in a cab," and off he goes.  I suppose if

I were to ask a Londoner how far it is from the sublime to the ridiculous

he would try to express it in a coin.  But I am trespassing upon your

time with these geological statistics and historical reflections.  I will

not longer keep you from your orgies.  'Tis a real pleasure for me to be

here, and I thank you for it.  The name of the Savage Club is associated

in my mind with the kindly interest and the friendly offices which you

lavished upon an old friend of mine who came among you a stranger, and

you opened your English hearts to him and gave him a welcome and a home--

Artemus Ward.  Asking that you will join me, I give you his Memory.













APPENDIX M



LETTER WRITTEN TO MRS. CLEMENS FROM BOSTON, NOVEMBER, 1874, PROPHESYING A

MONARCHY IN SIXTY-ONE YEARS



(See Chapter xcvii)



                                        BOSTON, November 16, 1935.



DEAR LIVY,--You observe I still call this beloved old place by the name

it had when I was young.  Limerick!  It is enough to make a body sick.



The gentlemen-in-waiting stare to see me sit here telegraphing this

letter to you, and no doubt they are smiling in their sleeves.  But let

them!  The slow old fashions are good enough for me, thank God, and I

will none other.  When I see one of these modern fools sit absorbed,

holding the end of a telegraph wire in his hand, and reflect that a

thousand miles away there is another fool hitched to the other end of it,

it makes me frantic with rage; and then I am more implacably fixed and

resolved than ever to continue taking twenty minutes to telegraph you

what I might communicate in ten seconds by the new way if I would so

debase myself.  And when I see a whole silent, solemn drawing-room full

of idiots sitting with their hands on each other's foreheads "communing"

I tug the white hairs from my head and curse till my asthma brings me the

blessed relief of suffocation.  In our old day such a gathering talked

pure drivel and "rot," mostly, but better that, a thousand times, than

these dreary conversational funerals that oppress our spirits in this mad

generation.



It is sixty years since I was here before.  I walked hither then with my

precious old friend.  It seems incredible now that we did it in two days,

but such is my recollection.  I no longer mention that we walked back in

a single day, it makes me so furious to see doubt in the face of the

hearer.  Men were men in those old times.  Think of one of the puerile

organisms in this effeminate age attempting such a feat.



My air-ship was delayed by a collision with a fellow from China loaded

with the usual cargo of jabbering, copper-colored missionaries, and so I

was nearly an hour on my journey.  But by the goodness of God thirteen of

the missionaries were crippled and several killed, so I was content to

lose the time.  I love to lose time anyway because it brings soothing

reminiscences of the creeping railroad days of old, now lost to us

forever.



Our game was neatly played, and successfully.  None expected us, of

course.  You should have seen the guards at the ducal palace stare when I

said, "Announce his Grace the Archbishop of Dublin and the Right

Honorable the Earl of Hartford."  Arrived within, we were all eyes to see

the Duke of Cambridge and his Duchess, wondering if we might remember

their faces and they ours.  In a moment they came tottering in; he, bent

and withered and bald; she, blooming with wholesome old age.  He peered

through his glasses a moment, then screeched in a reedy voice, "Come to

my arms!  Away with titles--I'll know ye by no names but Twain and

Twichell!"  Then fell he on our necks and jammed his trumpet in his ear,

the which we filled with shoutings to this effect: "God bless you, old

Howells, what is left of you!"



We talked late that night--none of your silent idiot "communings" for us

--of the olden time.  We rolled a stream of ancient anecdotes over our

tongues and drank till the Lord Archbishop grew so mellow in the mellow

past that Dublin ceased to be Dublin to him, and resumed its sweeter,

forgotten name of New York.  In truth he almost got back into his ancient

religion, too, good Jesuit as he has always been since O'Mulligan the

First established that faith in the empire.



And we canvassed everybody.  Bailey Aldrich, Marquis of Ponkapog, came

in, got nobly drunk, and told us all about how poor Osgood lost his

earldom and was hanged for conspiring against the second Emperor; but he

didn't mention how near he himself came to being hanged, too, for

engaging in the same enterprise.  He was as chaffy as he was sixty years

ago, too, and swore the Archbishop and I never walked to Boston; but

there was never a day that Ponkapog wouldn't lie, so be it by the grace

of God he got the opportunity.



The Lord High Admiral came in, a hale gentleman close upon seventy and

bronzed by the suns and storms of many climes and scarred by the wounds

got in many battles, and I told him how I had seen him sit in a high-

chair and eat fruit and cakes and answer to the name of Johnny.  His

granddaughter (the eldest) is but lately married to the youngest of the

Grand Dukes, and so who knows but a day may come when the blood of the

Howellses may reign in the land?  I must not forget to say, while I think

of it, that your new false teeth are done, my dear, and your wig.  Keep

your head well bundled with a shawl till the latter comes, and so cheat

your persecuting neuralgias and rheumatisms.  Would you believe it?--the

Duchess of Cambridge is deafer than you--deafer than her husband.  They

call her to breakfast with a salvo of artillery; and usually when it

thunders she looks up expectantly and says, "Come in."  But she has

become subdued and gentle with age and never destroys the furniture now,

except when uncommonly vexed.  God knows, my dear, it would be a happy

thing if you and old Lady Harmony would imitate this spirit.  But indeed

the older you grow the less secure becomes the furniture.  When I throw

chairs through the window I have sufficient reason to back it.  But you--

you are but a creature of passion.



The monument to the author of 'Gloverson and His Silent Partners' is

finished.--[Ralph Keeler.  See chap.  lxxxiii.]--It is the stateliest

and the costliest ever erected to the memory of any man.  This noble

classic has now been translated into all the languages of the earth and

is adored by all nations and known to all creatures.  Yet I have

conversed as familiarly with the author of it as I do with my own great-

grandchildren.



I wish you could see old Cambridge and Ponkapog.  I love them as dearly

as ever, but privately, my dear, they are not much improvement on idiots.

It is melancholy to hear them jabber over the same pointless anecdotes

three and four times of an evening, forgetting that they had jabbered

them over three or four times the evening before.  Ponkapog still writes

poetry, but the old-time fire has mostly gone out of it.  Perhaps his

best effort of late years is this:



               O soul, soul, soul of mine!

               Soul, soul, soul of throe!

               Thy soul, my soul, two souls entwine,

               And sing thy lauds in crystal wine!





This he goes about repeating to everybody, daily and nightly, insomuch

that he is become a sore affliction to all that know him.



But I must desist.  There are draughts here everywhere and my gout is

something frightful.  My left foot hath resemblance to a snuff-bladder.

God be with you.

                                             HARTFORD.



These to Lady Hartford, in the earldom of Hartford, in the

upper portion of the city of Dublin.













APPENDIX N



MARK TWAIN AND COPYRIGHT





I



PETITION



Concerning Copyright (1875)

(See Chapter cii)



TO THE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES IN

CONGRESS ASSEMBLED.



We, your petitioners, do respectfully represent as follows, viz.: That

justice, plain and simple, is a thing which right-feeling men stand ready

at all times to accord to brothers and strangers alike.  All such men

will concede that it is but plain, simple justice that American authors

should be protected by copyright in Europe; also, that European authors

should be protected by copyright here.



Both divisions of this proposition being true, it behooves our government

to concern itself with that division of it which comes peculiarly within

its province--viz., the latter moiety--and to grant to foreign authors

with all convenient despatch a full and effective copyright in America

without marring the grace of the act by stopping to inquire whether a

similar justice will be done our own authors by foreign governments.  If

it were even known that those governments would not extend this justice

to us it would still not justify us in withholding this manifest right

from their authors.  If a thing is right it ought to be done--the thing

called "expediency" or "policy" has no concern with such a matter.  And

we desire to repeat, with all respect, that it is not a grace or a

privilege we ask for our foreign brethren, but a right--a right received

from God, and only denied them by man.  We hold no ownership in these

authors, and when we take their work from them, as at present, without

their consent, it is robbery.  The fact that the handiwork of our own

authors is seized in the same way in foreign lands neither excuses nor

mitigates our sin.



With your permission we will say here, over our signatures, and earnestly

and sincerely, that we very greatly desire that you shall grant a full

copyright to foreign authors (the copyright fee for the entry in the

office of the Congressional Librarian to be the same as we pay

ourselves), and we also as greatly desire that this grant shall be made

without a single hampering stipulation that American authors shall

receive in turn an advantage of any kind from foreign governments.



Since no author who was applied to hesitated for a moment to append his

signature to this petition we are satisfied that if time had permitted we

could have procured the signature of every writer in the United States,

great and small, obscure or famous.  As it is, the list comprises the

names of about all our writers whose works have at present a European

market, and who are therefore chiefly concerned in this matter.



No objection to our proposition can come from any reputable publisher

among us--or does come from such a quarter, as the appended signatures of

our greatest publishing firms will attest.  A European copyright here

would be a manifest advantage to them.  As the matter stands now the

moment they have thoroughly advertised a desirable foreign book, and thus

at great expense aroused public interest in it, some small-spirited

speculator (who has lain still in his kennel and spent nothing) rushes

the same book on the market and robs the respectable publisher of half

the gains.



Then, since neither our authors nor the decent among our publishing firms

will object to granting an American copyright to foreign authors and

artists, who can there be to object?  Surely nobody whose protest is

entitled to any weight.



Trusting in the righteousness of our cause we, your petitioners, will

ever pray, etc.

                              With great respect,

                                             Your Ob't Serv'ts.









CIRCULAR TO AMERICAN AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS



DEAR SIR,--We believe that you will recognize the justice and the

righteousness of the thing we desire to accomplish through the

accompanying petition.  And we believe that you will be willing that our

country shall be the first in the world to grant to all authors alike the

free exercise of their manifest right to do as they please with the fruit

of their own labor without inquiring what flag they live under.  If the

sentiments of the petition meet your views, will you do us the favor to

sign it and forward it by post at your earliest convenience to our

secretary?

                                        }Committee

Address

         -------------------

Secretary of the Committee.











II



Communications supposed to have been written by the Tsar of Russia and

the Sultan of Turkey to Mark Twain on the subject of International

Copyright, about 1890.





                                        ST. PETERSBURG, February.



COL. MARK TWAIN, Washington.



Your cablegram received.  It should have been transmitted through my

minister, but let that pass.  I am opposed to international copyright.

At present American literature is harmless here because we doctor it in

such a way as to make it approve the various beneficent devices which we

use to keep our people favorable to fetters as jewelry and pleased with

Siberia as a summer resort.  But your bill would spoil this.  We should

be obliged to let you say your say in your own way.  'Voila'!  my empire

would be a republic in five years and I should be sampling Siberia

myself.



If you should run across Mr. Kennan--[George Kennan, who had graphically

pictured the fearful conditions of Siberian exile.]--please ask him to

come over and give some readings.  I will take good care of him.



                                             ALEXANDER III.



144--Collect.









                                        CONSTANTINOPLE, February.



DR.  MARK TWAIN, Washington.



Great Scott, no!  By the beard of the Prophet, no!  How can you ask such

a thing of me?  I am a man of family.  I cannot take chances, like other

people.  I cannot let a literature come in here which teaches that a

man's wife is as good as the man himself.  Such a doctrine cannot do any

particular harm, of course, where the man has only one wife, for then it

is a dead-level between them, and there is no humiliating inequality, and

no resulting disorder; but you take an extremely married person, like me,

and go to teaching that his wife is 964 times as good as he is, and

what's hell to that harem, dear friend?  I never saw such a fool as you.

Do not mind that expression; I already regret it, and would replace it

with a softer one if I could do it without debauching the truth.  I

beseech you, do not pass that bill.  Roberts College is quite all the

American product we can stand just now.  On top of that, do you want to

send us a flood of freedom-shrieking literature which we can't edit the

poison out of, but must let it go among our people just as it is?  My

friend, we should be a republic inside of ten years.



                                                       ABDUL II.







III



MARK TWAIN'S LAST SUGGESTION ON COPYRIGHT



A MEMORIAL RESPECTFULLY TENDERED TO THE MEMBERS OF THE SENATE AND THE

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES



(Prepared early in 1909 at the suggestion of Mr. Champ Clack but not

offered.  A bill adding fourteen years to the copyright period was passed

about this time.)



The Policy of Congress:--Nineteen or twenty years ago James Russell

Lowell, George Haven Putnam, and the under signed appeared before the

Senate Committee on Patents in the interest of Copyright.  Up to that

time, as explained by Senator Platt, of Connecticut, the policy of

Congress had been to limit the life of a copyright by a term of years,

with one definite end in view, and only one--to wit, that after an author

had been permitted to enjoy for a reasonable length of time the income

from literary property created by his hand and brain the property should

then be transferred "to the public" as a free gift.  That is still the

policy of Congress to-day.



The Purpose in View:--The purpose in view was clear: to so reduce the

price of the book as to bring it within the reach of all purses, and

spread it among the millions who had not been able to buy it while it was

still under the protection of copyright.



The Purpose Defeated:--This purpose has always been defeated.  That is to

say, that while the death of a copyright has sometimes reduced the price

of a book by a half for a while, and in some cases by even more, it has

never reduced it vastly, nor accomplished any reduction that was

permanent and secure.



The Reason:--The reason is simple: Congress has never made a reduction

compulsory.  Congress was convinced that the removal of the author's

royalty and the book's consequent (or at least probable) dispersal among

several competing publishers would make the book cheap by force of the

competition.  It was an error.  It has not turned out so.  The reason is,

a publisher cannot find profit in an exceedingly cheap edition if he must

divide the market with competitors.



Proposed Remedy:--The natural remedy would seem to be, amended law

requiring the issue of cheap editions.



Copyright Extension:--I think the remedy could be accomplished in the

following way, without injury to author or publisher, and with extreme

advantage to the public: by an amendment to the existing law providing as

follows--to wit: that at any time between the beginning of a book's

forty-first year and the ending of its forty-second the owner of the

copyright may extend its life thirty years by issuing and placing on sale

an edition of the book at one-tenth the price of the cheapest edition

hitherto issued at any time during the ten immediately preceding years.

This extension to lapse and become null and void if at any time during

the thirty years he shall fail during the space of three consecutive

months to furnish the ten per cent.  book upon demand of any person or

persons desiring to buy it.



The Result:--The result would be that no American classic enjoying the

thirty-year extension would ever be out of the reach of any American

purse, let its uncompulsory price be what it might.  He would get a two-

dollar book for 20 cents, and he could get none but copyright-expired

classics at any such rate.



The Final Result:--At the end of the thirty-year extension the

copyright would again die, and the price would again advance.  This by a

natural law, the excessively cheap edition no longer carrying with it an

advantage to any publisher.



Reconstruction of The Present Law Not Necessary:--A clause of the

suggested amendment could read about as follows, and would obviate the

necessity of taking the present law to pieces and building it over again:



     All books and all articles enjoying forty-two years copyright-life

     under the present law shall be admitted to the privilege of the

     thirty-year extension upon complying with the condition requiring

     the producing and placing upon permanent sale of one grade or form

     of said book or article at a price of 90 per cent. below the

     cheapest rate at which said book or article had been placed upon the

     market at any time during the immediately preceding ten years.





                                  REMARKS



If the suggested amendment shall meet with the favor of the present

Congress and become law--and I hope it will--I shall have personal

experience of its effects very soon.  Next year, in fact, in the person

of my first book, 'The Innocents Abroad'.  For its forty-two-year

copyright-life will then cease and its thirty-year extension begin--and

with the latter the permanent low-rate edition.  At present the highest

price of the book is eight dollars, and its lowest price three dollars

per copy.  Thus the permanent low rate will be thirty cents per copy.  A

sweeping reduction like this is what Congress from the beginning has

desired to achieve, but has not been able to accomplish because no

inducement was offered to publishers to run the risk.



                    Respectfully submitted,



                                             S. L. CLEMENS.





(A full and interesting elucidation of Mark Twain's views on Copyright

may be found in an article entitled "Concerning Copyright," published in

the North American Review for January, 1905.)













APPENDIX O

(See Chapter cxiv)



     Address of Samuel L.  Clemens (Mark Twain) from a report of the

     dinner given by the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly in honor of

     the Seventieth Anniversary of the Birth of John Greenleaf Whittier,

     at the Hotel Brunswick, Boston, December 17, 1877, as published in

     the Boston Evening Transcript, December 18, 1877.



MR. CHAIRMAN, This is an occasion peculiarly meet for the digging up of

pleasant reminiscences concerning literary folk, therefore I will drop

lightly into history myself.  Standing here on the shore of the Atlantic,

and contemplating certain of its largest literary billows, I am reminded

of a thing which happened to me thirteen years ago, when I had just

succeeded in stirring up a little Nevadian literary puddle myself, whose

spume-flakes were beginning to blow thinly California-ward.  I started an

inspection tramp through the southern mines of California.  I was callow

and conceited, and I resolved to try the virtue of my 'nom de guerre'.

I very soon had an opportunity.  I knocked at a miner's lonely log cabin

in the foothills of the Sierras just at nightfall.  It was snowing at the

time.  A jaded, melancholy man of fifty, barefooted, opened the door to

me.  When he heard my 'nom de guerre' he looked more dejected than

before.  He let me in-pretty reluctantly, I thought--and after the

customary bacon and beans, black coffee and hot whisky, I took a pipe.

This sorrowful man had not said three words up to this time.  Now he

spoke up and said, in the voice of one who is secretly suffering, "You're

the fourth--I'm going to move."  "The fourth what?" said I.  "The fourth

littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours--I'm going to move."

"You don't tell me!" said I; "who were the others?"  "Mr. Longfellow.

Mr. Emerson, and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes--consound the lot!"



You can easily believe I was interested.  I supplicated--three hot

whiskies did the rest--and finally the melancholy miner began.  Said he:



"They came here just at dark yesterday evening, and I let them in, of

course.  Said they were going to the Yosemite.  They were a rough lot,

but that's nothing; everybody looks rough that travels afoot.

Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed.  Mr. Holmes was

as fat as a balloon; he weighed as much as three hundered, and had double

chins all the way down to his stomach.  Mr. Longfellow was built like a

prize-fighter.  His head was cropped and bristly, like as if he had a wig

made of hair-brushes.  His nose lay straight down in his face, like a

finger with the end joint tilted up.  They had been drinking, I could see

that.  And what queer talk they used!  Mr. Holmes inspected this cabin,

then he took me by the buttonhole and says he:



          "'Through the deep caves of thought

          I hear a voice that sings,

          "Build thee more stately mansions,

          O my soul!"'



"Says I, 'I can't afford it, Mr. Holmes, and moreover I don't want to.'

Blamed if I liked it pretty well, either, coming from a stranger that

way.  However, I started to get out my bacon and beans when Mr. Emerson

came and looked on awhile, and then he takes me aside by the buttonhole

and says:



          "'Give me agates for my meat;

          Give me cantharids to eat;

          From air and ocean bring me foods,

          From all zones and altitudes.'



"Says I, 'Mr. Emerson, if you'll excuse me, this ain't no hotel.'  You

see, it sort of riled me--I warn't used to the ways of Jittery swells.

But I went on a-sweating over my work, and next comes Mr. Longfellow and

buttonholes me and interrupts me.  Says he:



          "'Honor be to Mudjekeewis!

          You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis--'



"But I broke in, and says I, 'Beg your pardon, Mr. Longfellow, if you'll

be so kind as to hold your yawp for about five minutes and let me get

this grub ready, you'll do me proud.'  Well, sir, after they'd filled up

I set out the jug.  Mr. Holmes looks at it and then he fires up all of a

sudden and yells:



          "'Flash out a stream of blood-red wine!

          For I would drink to other days.'



"By George, I was getting kind of worked up.  I don't deny it, I was

getting kind of worked up.  I turns to Mr. Holmes and says I, 'Looky

here, my fat friend, I'm a-running this shanty, and if the court knows

herself you'll take whisky straight or you'll go dry.'  Them's the very

words I said to him.  Now I don't want to sass such famous Littery

people, but you see they kind of forced me.  There ain't nothing

onreasonable 'bout me.  I don't mind a passel of guests a-treadin' on my

tail three or four times, but when it comes to standing on it it's

different, 'and if the court knows herself,' I says, 'you'll take whisky

straight or you'll go dry.'  Well, between drinks they'd swell around the

cabin and strike attitudes and spout; and pretty soon they got out a

greasy old deck and went to playing euchre at ten cents a corner--on

trust.  I began to notice some pretty suspicious things.  Mr. Emerson

dealt, looked at his hand, shook his head, says:



          "'I am the doubter and the doubt--'



and calmly bunched the hands and went to shuffling for a new lay-out.

Says he:



          "'They reckon ill who leave me out;

          They know not well the subtle ways I keep.

          I pass and deal again!'



Hang'd if he didn't go ahead and do it, too!  Oh, he was a cool one!

Well, in about a minute things were running pretty tight, but all of a

sudden I see by Mr. Emerson's eye he judged he had 'em.  He had already

corralled two tricks and each of the others one.  So now he kind of lifts

a little in his chair and says,



          "'I tire of globes and aces!

          Too long the game is played!'



and down he fetched a right bower.  Mr. Longfellow smiles as sweet as pie

and says,



          "'Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,

          For the lesson thou hast taught,'



and blamed if he didn't down with another right bower!  Emerson claps his

hand on his bowie, Longfellow claps his on his revolver, and I went under

a bunk.  There was going to be trouble; but that monstrous Holmes rose

up, wobbling his double chins, and says he, 'Order, gentlemen; the first

man that draws I'll lay down on him and smother him!'  All quiet on the

Potomac, you bet!



"They were pretty how-come-you-so by now, and they begun to blow.

Emerson says, 'The noblest thing I ever wrote was "Barbara Frietchie."'

Says Longfellow, 'It don't begin with my "Bigelow Papers."'  Says Holmes,

'My "Thanatopsis" lays over 'em both.' They mighty near ended in a fight.

Then they wished they had some more company, and Mr. Emerson pointed to

me and says:



          "'Is yonder squalid peasant all

          That this proud nursery could breed?'



He was a-whetting his bowie on his boot--so I let it pass.  Well, sir,

next they took it into their heads that they would like some music; so

they made me stand up and sing, 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home' till I

dropped--at thirteen minutes past four this morning.  That's what I've

been through, my friend.  When I woke at seven they were leaving, thank

goodness, and Mr. Longfellow had my only boots on and his'n under his

arm.  Says I, 'Hold on there, Evangeline, what are you going to do with

them?' He says, 'Going to make tracks with 'em, because--



          "'Lives of great men all remind us

          We can make our lives sublime;

          And, departing, leave behind us

          Footprints on the sands of time.'



"As I said, Mr. Twain, you are the fourth in twenty-four hours

and I'm going to move; I ain't suited to a Littery atmosphere."



I said to the miner, "Why, my dear sir, these were not the gracious

singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these

were impostors."



The miner investigated me with a calm eye for a while; then said he, "Ah!

impostors, were they?  Are you?"



I did not pursue the subject, and since then I have not traveled on my

'nom de guerre' enough to hurt.  Such was the reminiscence I was moved to

contribute, Mr. Chairman.  In my enthusiasm I may have exaggerated the

details a little, but you will easily forgive me that fault, since I

believe it is the first time I have ever deflected from perpendicular

fact on an occasion like this.













APPENDIX P



THE ADAM MONUMENT PETITION



(See Chapter cxxxiv)



TO THE HONORABLE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES

IN CONGRESS ASSEMBLED.



WHEREAS, A number of citizens of the city of Elmira in the State of New

York having covenanted among themselves to erect in that city a monument

in memory of Adam, the father of mankind, being moved thereto by a

sentiment of love and duty, and these having appointed the undersigned to

communicate with your honorable body, we beg leave to lay before you the

following facts and append to the same our humble petition.



1.  As far as is known no monument has ever been raised in any part of

the world to commemorate the services rendered to our race by this great

man, whilst many men of far less note and worship have been rendered

immortal by means of stately and indestructible memorials.



2.  The common father of mankind has been suffered to lie in entire

neglect, although even the Father of our Country has now, and has had for

many years, a monument in course of construction.



3.  No right-feeling human being can desire to see this neglect

continued, but all just men, even to the farthest regions of the globe,

should and will rejoice to know that he to whom we owe existence is about

to have reverent and fitting recognition of his works at the hands of the

people of Elmira.  His labors were not in behalf of one locality, but for

the extension of humanity at large and the blessings which go therewith;

hence all races and all colors and all religions are interested in seeing

that his name and fame shall be placed beyond the reach of the blight of

oblivion by a permanent and suitable monument.



4.  It will be to the imperishable credit of the United States if this

monument shall be set up within her borders; moreover, it will be a

peculiar grace to the beneficiary if this testimonial of affection and

gratitude shall be the gift of the youngest of the nations that have

sprung from his loins after 6,000 years of unappreciation on the part of

its elders.



5.  The idea of this sacred enterprise having originated in the city of

Elmira, she will be always grateful if the general government shall

encourage her in the good work by securing to her a certain advantage

through the exercise of its great authority.



Therefore, Your petitioners beg that your honorable body will be pleased

to issue a decree restricting to Elmira the right to build a monument to

Adam and inflicting a heavy penalty upon any other community within the

United States that shall propose or attempt to erect a monument or other

memorial to the said Adam, and to this end we will ever pray.



NAMES: (100 signatures)















APPENDIX Q



GENERAL GRANT'S GRAMMAR



(Written in 1886.  Delivered at an Army and Navy Club dinner in New York

City)



Lately a great and honored author, Matthew Arnold, has been finding fault

with General Grant's English.  That would be fair enough, maybe, if the

examples of imperfect English averaged more instances to the page in

General Grant's book than they do in Arnold's criticism on the book--but

they do not.  It would be fair enough, maybe, if such instances were

commoner in General Grant's book than they are in the works of the

average standard author--but they are not.  In fact, General Grant's

derelictions in the matter of grammar and construction are not more

frequent than such derelictions in the works of a majority of the

professional authors of our time, and of all previous times--authors as

exclusively and painstakingly trained to the literary trade as was

General Grant to the trade of war.  This is not a random statement: it is

a fact, and easily demonstrable.  I have a book at home called Modern

English Literature: Its Blemishes and Defects, by Henry H. Breen, a

countryman of Mr. Arnold.  In it I find examples of bad grammar and

slovenly English from the pens of Sydney Smith, Sheridan, Hallam,

Whately, Carlyle, Disraeli, Allison, Junius, Blair, Macaulay,

Shakespeare, Milton, Gibbon, Southey, Lamb, Landor, Smollett, Walpole,

Walker (of the dictionary), Christopher North, Kirk White, Benjamin

Franklin, Sir Walter Scott, and Mr. Lindley Murray (who made the

grammar).



In Mr. Arnold's criticism on General Grant's book we find two grammatical

crimes and more than several examples of very crude and slovenly English,

enough of them to entitle him to a lofty place in the illustrious list of

delinquents just named.



The following passage all by itself ought to elect him:

     "Meade suggested to Grant that he might wish to have immediately

     under him Sherman, who had been serving with Grant in the West.  He

     begged him not to hesitate if he thought it for the good of the

     service.  Grant assured him that he had not thought of moving him,

     and in his memoirs, after relating what had passed, he adds, etc."



To read that passage a couple of times would make a man dizzy; to read it

four times would make him drunk.



Mr. Breen makes this discriminating remark: "To suppose that because a

man is a poet or a historian he must be correct in his grammar is to

suppose that an architect must be a joiner, or a physician a compounder

of medicine."



People may hunt out what microscopic motes they please, but, after all,

the fact remains, and cannot be dislodged, that General Grant's book is a

great and, in its peculiar department, a unique and unapproachable

literary masterpiece.  In their line there is no higher literature than

those modest, simple memoirs.  Their style is at least flawless and no

man could improve upon it, and great books are weighed and measured by

their style and matter, and not by the trimmings and shadings of their

grammar.



There is that about the sun which makes us forget his spots, and when we

think of General Grant our pulses quicken and his grammar vanishes; we

only remember that this is the simple soldier who, all untaught of the

silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the

art of the schools and put into them a something which will still bring

to American ears, as long as America shall last, the roll of his vanished

drums and the tread of his marching hosts.  What do we care for grammar

when we think of those thunderous phrases, "Unconditional and immediate

surrender,"  "I propose to move immediately upon your works,"  "I propose

to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer."  Mr. Arnold would

doubtless claim that that last phrase is not strictly grammatical, and

yet it did certainly wake up this nation as a hundred million tons of A-

number-one fourth-proof, hard-boiled, hide-bound grammar from another

mouth could not have done.  And finally we have that gentler phrase, that

one which shows you another true side of the man, shows you that in his

soldier heart there was room for other than gory war mottoes and in his

tongue the gift to fitly phrase them: "Let us have peace."













APPENDIX R



PARTY ALLEGIANCE



BEING A PORTION OF A PAPER ON "CONSISTENCY," READ BEFORE THE MONDAY

EVENING CLUB IN 1887



(See Chapter clxiii)



.  .  .  I have referred to the fact that when a man retires from his

political party he is a traitor--that he is so pronounced in plain

language.  That is bold; so bold as to deceive many into the fancy that

it is true.  Desertion, treason--these are the terms applied.  Their

military form reveals the thought in the man's mind who uses them: to him

a political party is an army.  Well, is it?  Are the two things

identical?  Do they even resemble each other?  Necessarily a political

party is not an army of conscripts, for they are in the ranks by

compulsion.  Then it must be a regular army or an army of volunteers.

Is it a regular army?  No, for these enlist for a specified and well-

understood term, and can retire without reproach when the term is up.

Is it an army of volunteers who have enlisted for the war, and may

righteously be shot if they leave before the war is finished?  No, it is

not even an army in that sense.  Those fine military terms are high-

sounding, empty lies, and are no more rationally applicable to a

political party than they would be to an oyster-bed.  The volunteer

soldier comes to the recruiting office and strips himself and proves that

he is so many feet high, and has sufficiently good teeth, and no fingers

gone, and is sufficiently sound in body generally; he is accepted; but

not until he has sworn a deep oath or made other solemn form of promise

to march under, that flag until that war is done or his term of

enlistment completed.  What is the process when a voter joins a party?

Must he prove that he is sound in any way, mind or body?  Must he prove

that he knows anything--is capable of anything--whatever?  Does he take

an oath or make a promise of any sort?--or doesn't he leave himself

entirely free?  If he were informed by the political boss that if he

join, it must be forever; that he must be that party's chattel and wear

its brass collar the rest of his days--would not that insult him?  It

goes without saying.  He would say some rude, unprintable thing, and turn

his back on that preposterous organization.  But the political boss puts

no conditions upon him at all; and this volunteer makes no promises,

enlists for no stated term.  He has in no sense become a part of an army;

he is in no way restrained of his freedom.  Yet he will presently find

that his bosses and his newspapers have assumed just the reverse of that:

that they have blandly arrogated to themselves an ironclad military

authority over him; and within twelve months, if he is an average man, he

will have surrendered his liberty, and will actually be silly enough to

believe that he cannot leave that party, for any cause whatever, without

being a shameful traitor, a deserter, a legitimately dishonored man.



There you have the just measure of that freedom of conscience, freedom of

opinion, freedom of speech and action which we hear so much inflated

foolishness about as being the precious possession of the republic.

Whereas, in truth, the surest way for a man to make of himself a target

for almost universal scorn, obloquy, slander, and insult is to stop

twaddling about these priceless independencies and attempt to exercise

one of them.  If he is a preacher half his congregation will clamor for

his expulsion--and will expel him, except they find it will injure real

estate in the neighborhood; if he is a doctor his own dead will turn

against him.



I repeat that the new party-member who supposed himself independent will

presently find that the party have somehow got a mortgage on his soul,

and that within a year he will recognize the mortgage, deliver up his

liberty, and actually believe he cannot retire from that party from any

motive howsoever high and right in his own eyes without shame and

dishonor.



Is it possible for human wickedness to invent a doctrine more infernal

and poisonous than this?  Is there imaginable a baser servitude than it

imposes?  What slave is so degraded as the slave that is proud that he is

a slave?  What is the essential difference between a lifelong democrat

and any other kind of lifelong slave?  Is it less humiliating to dance to

the lash of one master than another?



This infamous doctrine of allegiance to party plays directly into the

hands of politicians of the baser sort--and doubtless for that it was

borrowed--or stolen--from the monarchial system.  It enables them to

foist upon the country officials whom no self-respecting man would vote

for if he could but come to understand that loyalty to himself is his

first and highest duty, not loyalty to any party name.



Shall you say the best good of the country demands allegiance to party?

Shall you also say that it demands that a man kick his truth and his

conscience into the gutter and become a mouthing lunatic besides?  Oh no,

you say; it does not demand that.  But what if it produce that in spite

of you?  There is no obligation upon a man to do things which he ought

not to do when drunk, but most men will do them just the same; and so we

hear no arguments about obligations in the matter--we only hear men

warned to avoid the habit of drinking; get rid of the thing that can

betray men into such things.



This is a funny business all around.  The same men who enthusiastically

preach loyal consistency to church and party are always ready and willing

and anxious to persuade a Chinaman or an Indian or a Kanaka to desert his

church or a fellow-American to desert his party.  The man who deserts to

them is all that is high and pure and beautiful--apparently; the man who

deserts from them is all that is foul and despicable.  This is

Consistency--with a capital C.



With the daintiest and self-complacentest sarcasm the lifelong loyalist

scoffs at the Independent--or as he calls him, with cutting irony, the

Mugwump; makes himself too killingly funny for anything in this world

about him.  But--the Mugwump can stand it, for there is a great history

at his back; stretching down the centuries, and he comes of a mighty

ancestry.  He knows that in the whole history of the race of men no

single great and high and beneficent thing was ever done for the souls

and bodies, the hearts and the brains of the children of this world, but

a Mugwump started it and Mugwumps carried it to victory: And their names

are the stateliest in history: Washington, Garrison, Galileo, Luther,

Christ.  Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a

human soul in this world-end never will.















APPENDIX S



ORIGINAL PREFACE FOR "A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT"



(See Chapter clxxii)



My object has been to group together some of the most odious laws which

have had vogue in the Christian countries within the past eight or ten

centuries, and illustrate them by the incidents of a story.



There was never a time when America applied the death-penalty to more

than fourteen crimes.  But England, within the memory of men still

living, had in her list of crimes 223 which were punishable by death!

And yet from the beginning of our existence down to a time within the

memory of babes England has distressed herself piteously over the

ungentleness of our Connecticut Blue Laws.  Those Blue Laws should have

been spared English criticism for two reasons:



1.  They were so insipidly mild, by contrast with the bloody and

atrocious laws of England of the same period, as to seem characterless

and colorless when one brings them into that awful presence.



2.  The Blue Laws never had any existence.  They were the fancy-work of

an English clergyman; they were never a part of any statute-book.  And

yet they could have been made to serve a useful and merciful purpose; if

they had been injected into the English law the dilution would have given

to the whole a less lurid aspect; or, to figure the effect in another

way, they would have been coca mixed into vitriol.



I have drawn no laws and no illustrations from the twin civilizations of

hell and Russia.  To have entered into that atmosphere would have

defeated my purpose, which was to show a great and genuine progress in

Christendom in these few later generations toward mercifulness--a wide

and general relaxing of the grip of the law.  Russia had to be left out

because exile to Siberia remains, and in that single punishment is

gathered together and concentrated all the bitter inventions of all the

black ages for the infliction of suffering upon human beings.  Exile for

life from one's hearthstone and one's idols--this is rack, thumb-screw,

the water-drop, fagot and stake, tearing asunder by horses, flaying

alive--all these in one; and not compact into hours, but drawn out into

years, each year a century, and the whole a mortal immortality of torture

and despair.  While exile to Siberia remains one will be obliged to admit

that there is one country in Christendom where the punishments of all the

ages are still preserved and still inflicted, that there is one country

in Christendom where no advance has been made toward modifying the

medieval penalties for offenses against society and the State.













APPENDIX T



A TRIBUTE TO HENRY H.  ROGERS



(See Chapter cc and earlier)



April 25, 1902.  I owe more to Henry Rogers than to any other man whom I

have known.  He was born in Fairhaven, Connecticut, in 1839, and is my

junior by four years.  He was graduated from the high school there in

1853, when he was fourteen years old, and from that time forward he

earned his own living, beginning at first as the bottom subordinate in

the village store with hard-work privileges and a low salary.  When he

was twenty-four he went out to the newly discovered petroleum fields in

Pennsylvania and got work; then returned home, with enough money to pay

passage, married a schoolmate, and took her to the oil regions.  He

prospered, and by and by established the Standard Oil Trust with Mr.

Rockefeller and others, and is still one of its managers and directors.



In 1893 we fell together by accident one evening in the Murray Hill

Hotel, and our friendship began on the spot and at once.  Ever since then

he has added my business affairs to his own and carried them through, and

I have had no further trouble with them.  Obstructions and perplexities

which would have driven me mad were simplicities to his master mind and

furnished him no difficulties.  He released me from my entanglements with

Paige and stopped that expensive outgo; when Charles L. Webster & Company

failed he saved my copyrights for Mrs. Clemens when she would have

sacrificed them to the creditors although they were in no way entitled to

them; he offered to lend me money wherewith to save the life of that

worthless firm; when I started lecturing around the world to make the

money to pay off the Webster debts he spent more than a year trying to

reconcile the differences between Harper & Brothers and the American

Publishing Company and patch up a working-contract between them and

succeeded where any other man would have failed; as fast as I earned

money and sent it to him he banked it at interest and held onto it,

refusing to pay any creditor until he could pay all of the 96 alike; when

I had earned enough to pay dollar for dollar he swept off the

indebtedness and sent me the whole batch of complimentary letters which

the creditors wrote in return; when I had earned $28,500 more, $18,500 of

which was in his hands, I wrote him from Vienna to put the latter into

Federal Steel and leave it there; he obeyed to the extent of $17,500, but

sold it in two months at $25,000 profit, and said it would go ten points

higher, but that it was his custom to "give the other man a chance" (and

that was a true word--there was never a truer one spoken).  That was at

the end of '99 and beginning of 1900; and from that day to this he has

continued to break up my bad schemes and put better ones in their place,

to my great advantage.  I do things which ought to try man's patience,

but they never seem to try his; he always finds a colorable excuse for

what I have done.  His soul was born superhumanly sweet, and I do not

think anything can sour it.  I have not known his equal among men for

lovable qualities.  But for his cool head and wise guidance I should

never have come out of the Webster difficulties on top; it was his good

steering that enabled me to work out my salvation and pay a hundred cents

on the dollar--the most valuable service any man ever did me.



His character is full of fine graces, but the finest is this: that he can

load you down with crushing obligations and then so conduct himself that

you never feel their weight.  If he would only require something in

return--but that is not in his nature; it would not occur to him.  With

the Harpers and the American Company at war those copyrights were worth

but little; he engineered a peace and made them valuable.  He invests

$100,000 for me here, and in a few months returns a profit of $31,000.  I

invest (in London and here) $66,000 and must wait considerably for

results (in case there shall be any).  I tell him about it and he finds

no fault, utters not a sarcasm.  He was born serene, patient, all-

enduring, where a friend is concerned, and nothing can extinguish that

great quality in him.  Such a man is entitled to the high gift of humor:

he has it at its very best.  He is not only the best friend I have ever

had, but is the best man I have known.



                              S. L. CLEMENS.











APPENDIX U



FROM MARK TWAIN'S LAST POEM



BEGUN AT RIVERDALE, NEW YORK.  FINISHED AT YORK HARBOR, MAINE,

AUGUST 18, 1902



(See Chapter ccxxiii)



(A bereft and demented mother speaks)



.  .  .  O, I can see my darling yet: the little form

In slip of flimsy stuff all creamy white,

Pink-belted waist with ample bows,

Blue shoes scarce bigger than the house-cat's ears--

Capering in delight and choked with glee.



It was a summer afternoon; the hill

Rose green above me and about, and in the vale below

The distant village slept, and all the world

Was steeped in dreams.  Upon me lay this peace,

And I forgot my sorrow in its spell.  And now

My little maid passed by, and she

Was deep in thought upon a solemn thing:

A disobedience, and my reproof.

Upon my face She must not look until the day was done;

For she was doing penance .  .  .  She?

O, it was I!  What mother knows not that?

And so she passed, I worshiping and longing .  .  .

It was not wrong?  You do not think me wrong?

I did it for the best.  Indeed I meant it so.



She flits before me now:

The peach-bloom of her gauzy crepe,

The plaited tails of hair,

The ribbons floating from the summer hat,

The grieving face, dropp'd head absorbed with care.

O, dainty little form!

I see it move, receding slow along the path,

By hovering butterflies besieged; I see it reach

The breezy top clear-cut against the sky, .  .  .

Then pass beyond and sink from sight-forever!



Within, was light and cheer; without,

A blustering winter's right.  There was a play;

It was her own; for she had wrought it out

Unhelped, from her own head-and she

But turned sixteen!  A pretty play,

All graced with cunning fantasies,

And happy songs, and peopled all with fays,

And sylvan gods and goddesses,

And shepherds, too, that piped and danced,

And wore the guileless hours away

In care-free romps and games.



Her girlhood mates played in the piece,

And she as well: a goddess, she,--

And looked it, as it seemed to me.



'Twas fairyland restored-so beautiful it was

And innocent.  It made us cry, we elder ones,

To live our lost youth o'er again

With these its happy heirs.



Slowly, at last, the curtain fell.

Before us, there, she stood, all wreathed and draped

In roses pearled with dew-so sweet, so glad,

So radiant!--and flung us kisses through the storm

Of praise that crowned her triumph .  .  .  .  O,

Across the mists of time I see her yet,

My Goddess of the Flowers!



.  .  .  The curtain hid her .  .  .  .

Do you comprehend?  Till time shall end!

Out of my life she vanished while I looked!



.  .  .  Ten years are flown.

O, I have watched so long,

So long.  But she will come no more.

No, she will come no more.



It seems so strange .  .  .  so strange .  .  .

Struck down unwarned!

In the unbought grace, of youth laid low--

In the glory of her fresh young bloom laid low--

In the morning of her life cut down!

And I not by!  Not by

When the shadows fell, the night of death closed down

The sun that lit my life went out.  Not by to answer

When the latest whisper passed the lips

That were so dear to me--my name!

Far from my post! the world's whole breadth away.

O, sinking in the waves of death she cried to me

For mother-help, and got for answer

Silence!



We that are old--we comprehend; even we

That are not mad: whose grown-up scions still abide;

Their tale complete:

Their earlier selves we glimpse at intervals

Far in the dimming past;

We see the little forms as once they were,

And whilst we ache to take them to our hearts,

The vision fades.  We know them lost to us--

Forever lost; we cannot have them back;

We miss them as we miss the dead,

We mourn them as we mourn the dead.













APPENDIX V



SELECTIONS FROM AN UNFINISHED BOOK, "3,000 YEARS AMONG THE MICROBES"



THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A MICROBE, WHO, IN A FORMER EXISTENCE, HAD BEEN A

MAN--HIS PRESENT HABITAT BEING THE ORGANISM OF A TRAMP, BLITZOWSKI.

(WRITTEN AT DUBLIN, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 1905)



(See Chapter ccxxxv)



Our world (the tramp) is as large and grand and awe-compelling to us

microscopic creatures as is man's world to man.  Our tramp is

mountainous, there are vast oceans in him, and lakes that are sea-like

for size, there are many rivers (veins and arteries) which are fifteen

miles across, and of a length so stupendous as to make the Mississippi

and the Amazon trifling little Rhode Island brooks by comparison.  As for

our minor rivers, they are multitudinous, and the dutiable commerce of

disease which they carry is rich beyond the dreams of the American

custom-house.



Take a man like Sir Oliver Lodge, and what secret of Nature can be hidden

from him?  He says: "A billion, that is a million millions,[?? Trillion

D.W.] of atoms is truly an immense number, but the resulting aggregate is

still excessively minute.  A portion of substance consisting, of a

billion atoms is only barely visible with the highest power of a

microscope; and a speck or granule, in order to be visible to the naked

eye, like a grain of lycopodium-dust, must be a million times bigger

still."



The human eye could see it then--that dainty little speck.  But with my

microbe-eye I could see every individual of the whirling billions of

atoms that compose the speck.  Nothing is ever at rest--wood, iron,

water, everything is alive, everything is raging, whirling, whizzing, day

and night and night and day, nothing is dead, there is no such thing as

death, everything is full of bristling life, tremendous life, even the

bones of the crusader that perished before Jerusalem eight centuries ago.

There are no vegetables, all things are animal; each electron is an

animal, each molecule is a collection of animals, and each has an

appointed duty to perform and a soul to be saved.  Heaven was not made

for man alone, and oblivion and neglect reserved for the rest of His

creatures.  He gave them life, He gave them humble services to perform,

they have performed them, and they will not be forgotten, they will have

their reward.  Man-always vain, windy, conceited-thinks he will be in the

majority there.  He will be disappointed.  Let him humble himself.  But

for the despised microbe and the persecuted bacillus, who needed a home

and nourishment, he would not have been created.  He has a mission,

therefore a reason for existing: let him do the service he was made for,

and keep quiet.



Three weeks ago I was a man myself, and thought and felt as men think and

feel; I have lived 3,000 years since then [microbic time], and I see the

foolishness of it now.  We live to learn, and fortunate are we when we

are wise enough to profit by it.



In matters pertaining to microscopy we necessarily have an advantage here

over the scientist of the earth, because, as I have just been indicating,

we see with our naked eyes minutenesses which no man-made microscope can

detect, and are therefore able to register as facts many things which

exist for him as theories only.  Indeed, we know as facts several things

which he has not yet divined even by theory.  For example, he does not

suspect that there is no life but animal life, and that all atoms are

individual animals endowed each with a certain degree of consciousness,

great or small, each with likes and dislikes, predilections and

aversions--that, in a word, each has a character, a character of its own.

Yet such is the case.  Some of the molecules of a stone have an aversion

for some of those of a vegetable or any other creature and will not

associate with them--and would not be allowed to, if they tried.  Nothing

is more particular about society than a molecule.  And so there are no

end of castes; in this matter India is not a circumstance.



"Tell me, Franklin [a microbe of great learning], is the ocean an

individual, an animal, a creature?"



"Yes."



"Then water--any water-is an individual?"



"Yes."



"Suppose you remove a drop of it?  Is what is left an individual?"



"Yes, and so is the drop."



"Suppose you divide the drop?"



"Then you have two individuals."



"Suppose you separate the hydrogen and the oxygen?"



"Again you have two individuals.  But you haven't water any more."



"Of course.  Certainly.  Well, suppose you combine them again, but in a

new way: make the proportions equal--one part oxygen to one of hydrogen?"



"But you know you can't.  They won't combine on equal terms."



I was ashamed to have made that blunder.  I was embarrassed; to cover it

I started to say we used to combine them like that where I came from, but

thought better of it, and stood pat.



"Now then," I said, "it amounts to this: water is an individual, an

animal, and is alive; remove the hydrogen and it is an animal and is

alive; the remaining oxygen is also an individual, an animal, and is

alive.  Recapitulation: the two individuals combined constitute a third

individual--and yet each continues to be an individual."



I glanced at Franklin, but .  .  .  upon reflection, held my peace.  I

could have pointed out to him that here was mute Nature explaining the

sublime mystery of the Trinity so luminously--that even the commonest

understanding could comprehend it, whereas many a trained master of words

had labored to do it with speech and failed.  But he would not have known

what I was talking about.  After a moment I resumed:



"Listen--and see if I have understood you rightly, to wit: All the atoms

that constitute each oxygen molecule are separate individuals, and each

is a living animal; all the atoms that constitute each hydrogen molecule

are separate individuals, and each one is a living animal; each drop of

water consists of millions of living animals, the drop itself is an

individual, a living animal, and the wide ocean is another.  Is that it?"



"Yes, that is correct."



"By George, it beats the band!"



He liked the expression, and set it down in his tablets.



"Franklin, we've got it down fine.  And to think--there are other animals

that are still smaller than a hydrogen atom, and yet it is so small that

it takes five thousand of them to make a molecule--a molecule so minute

that it could get into a microbe's eye and he wouldn't know it was

there!"



"Yes, the wee creatures that inhabit the bodies of us germs and feed upon

us, and rot us with disease: Ah, what could they have been created for?

They give us pain, they make our lives miserable, they murder us-and

where is the use of it all, where the wisdom?  Ah, friend Bkshp [microbic

orthography], we live in a strange and unaccountable world; our birth is

a mystery, our little life is a mystery, a trouble, we pass and are seen

no more; all is mystery, mystery, mystery; we know not whence we came,

nor why; we know not whither we go, nor why we go.  We only know we were

not made in vain, we only know we were made for a wise purpose, and that

all is well!  We shall not be cast aside in contumely and unblest after

all we have suffered.  Let us be patient, let us not repine, let us

trust.  The humblest of us is cared for--oh, believe it!--and this

fleeting stay is not the end!"



You notice that?  He did not suspect that he, also, was engaged in

gnawing, torturing, defiling, rotting, and murdering a fellow-creature--

he and all the swarming billions of his race.  None of them suspects it.

That is significant.  It is suggestive--irresistibly suggestive--

insistently suggestive.  It hints at the possibility that the procession

of known and listed devourers and persecutors is not complete.  It

suggests the possibility, and substantially the certainty, that man is

himself a microbe, and his globe a blood-corpuscle drifting with its

shining brethren of the Milky Way down a vein of the Master and Maker of

all things, whose body, mayhap--glimpsed part-wise from the earth by

night, and receding and lost to view in the measureless remotenesses of

space--is what men name the Universe.



Yes, that was all old to me, but to find that our little old familiar

microbes were themselves loaded up with microbes that fed them, enriched

them, and persistently and faithfully preserved them and their poor old

tramp-planet from destruction--oh, that was new, and too delicious!



I wanted to see them!  I was in a fever to see them!  I had lenses to

two-million power, but of course the field was no bigger than a person's

finger-nail, and so it wasn't possible to compass a considerable

spectacle or a landscape with them; whereas what I had been craving was a

thirty-foot field, which would represent a spread of several miles of

country and show up things in a way to make them worth looking at.  The

boys and I had often tried to contrive this improvement, but had failed.



I mentioned the matter to the Duke and it made him smile.  He said it was

a quite simple thing-he had it at home.  I was eager to bargain for the

secret, but he said it was a trifle and not worth bargaining for.

He said:



"Hasn't it occurred to you that all you have to do is to bend an X-ray to

an angle-value of 8.4 and refract it with a parabolism, and there you

are?"



Upon my word, I had never thought of that simple thing!  You could have

knocked me down with a feather.



We rigged a microscope for an exhibition at once and put a drop of my

blood under it, which got mashed flat when the lens got shut down upon

it.  The result was beyond my dreams. The field stretched miles away,

green and undulating, threaded with streams and roads, and bordered all

down the mellowing distances with picturesque hills.  And there was a

great white city of tents; and everywhere were parks of artillery and

divisions of cavalry and infantry waiting.  We had hit a lucky moment,

evidently there was going to be a march-past or some thing like that.  At

the front where the chief banner flew there was a large and showy tent,

with showy guards on duty, and about it were some other tents of a swell

kind.



The warriors--particularly the officers--were lovely to look at, they

were so trim-built and so graceful and so handsomely uniformed.  They

were quite distinct, vividly distinct, for it was a fine day, and they

were so immensely magnified that they looked to be fully a finger-nail

high.--[My own expression, and a quite happy one.  I said to the Duke:

"Your Grace, they're just about finger-milers!"

"How do you mean, m' lord?"

"This.  You notice the stately General standing there with his hand

resting upon the muzzle of a cannon?  Well, if you could stick your

little finger down against the ground alongside of him his plumes would

just reach up to where your nail joins the flesh."  The Duke said

"finger-milers was good"-good and exact; and he afterward used it several

times himself.]--Everywhere you could see officers moving smartly about,

and they looked gay, but the common soldiers looked sad.  Many wife-

swinks [" Swinks," an atomic race] and daughter-swinks and sweetheart-

swinks were about--crying, mainly.  It seemed to indicate that this was a

case of war, not a summer-camp for exercise, and that the poor labor-

swinks were being torn from their planet-saving industries to go and

distribute civilization and other forms of suffering among the feeble

benighted somewhere; else why should the swinkesses cry?



The cavalry was very fine--shiny black horses, shapely and spirited; and

presently when a flash of light struck a lifted bugle (delivering a

command which we couldn't hear) and a division came tearing down on a

gallop it was a stirring and gallant sight, until the dust rose an inch--

the Duke thought more--and swallowed it up in a rolling and tumbling long

gray cloud, with bright weapons glinting and sparkling in it.



Before long the real business of the occasion began.  A battalion of

priests arrived carrying sacred pictures.  That settled it: this was war;

these far-stretching masses of troops were bound for the front.  Their

little monarch came out now, the sweetest little thing that ever

travestied the human shape I think, and he lifted up his hands and

blessed the passing armies, and they looked as grateful as they could,

and made signs of humble and real reverence as they drifted by the holy

pictures.



It was beautiful--the whole thing; and wonderful, too, when those serried

masses swung into line and went marching down the valley under the long

array of fluttering flags.



Evidently they were going somewhere to fight for their king, which was

the little manny that blessed them; and to preserve him and his brethren

that occupied the other swell tents; to civilize and grasp a valuable

little unwatched country for them somewhere.  But the little fellow and

his brethren didn't fall in--that was a noticeable particular.  They

didn't fight; they stayed at home, where it was safe, and waited for the

swag.



Very well, then-what ought we to do?  Had we no moral duty to perform?

Ought we to allow this war to begin?  Was it not our duty to stop it, in

the name of right and righteousness?  Was it not our duty to administer a

rebuke to this selfish and heartless Family?



The Duke was struck by that, and greatly moved.  He felt as I did about

it, and was ready to do whatever was right, and thought we ought to pour

boiling water on the Family and extinguish it, which we did.



It extinguished the armies, too, which was not intended.  We both

regretted this, but the Duke said that these people were nothing to us,

and deserved extinction anyway for being so poor-spirited as to serve

such a Family.  He was loyally doing the like himself, and so was I, but

I don't think we thought of that.  And it wasn't just the same, anyway,

because we were sooflaskies, and they were only swinks.



Franklin realizes that no atom is destructible; that it has always

existed and will exist forever; but he thinks all atoms will go out of

this world some day and continue their life in a happier one.  Old

Tolliver thinks no atom's life will ever end, but he also thinks

Blitzowski is the only world it will ever see, and that at no time in its

eternity will it be either worse off or better off than it is now and

always has been.  Of course he thinks the planet Blitzowski is itself

eternal and indestructible--at any rate he says he thinks that.  It could

make me sad, only I know better.  D. T.  will fetch Blitzy yet one of

these days.



But these are alien thoughts, human thoughts, and they falsely indicate

that I do not want this tramp to go on living.  What would become of me

if he should disintegrate?  My molecules would scatter all around and

take up new quarters in hundreds of plants and animals; each would carry

its special feelings along with it, each would be content in its new

estate, but where should I be?  I should not have a rag of a feeling

left, after my disintegration--with his--was complete.  Nothing to think

with, nothing to grieve or rejoice with, nothing to hope or despair with.

There would be no more me.  I should be musing and thinking and dreaming

somewhere else--in some distant animal maybe--perhaps a cat--by proxy of

my oxygen I should be raging and fuming in some other creatures--a rat,

perhaps; I should be smiling and hoping in still another child of Nature

--heir to my hydrogen--a weed, or a cabbage, or something; my carbonic

acid (ambition) would be dreaming dreams in some lowly wood-violet that

was longing for a showy career; thus my details would be doing as much

feeling as ever, but I should not be aware of it, it would all be going

on for the benefit of those others, and I not in it at all.  I should be

gradually wasting away, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, as the years

went on, and at last I should be all distributed, and nothing left of

what had once been Me.  It is curious, and not without impressiveness: I

should still be alive, intensely alive, but so scattered that I would not

know it.  I should not be dead--no, one cannot call it that--but I should

be the next thing to it.  And to think what centuries and ages and aeons

would drift over me before the disintegration was finished, the last bone

turned to gas and blown away!  I wish I knew what it is going to feel

like, to lie helpless such a weary, weary time, and see my faculties

decay and depart, one by one, like lights which burn low, and flicker and

perish, until the ever-deepening gloom and darkness which--oh, away, away

with these horrors, and let me think of something wholesome!



My tramp is only 85; there is good hope that he will live ten years

longer--500,000 of my microbe years.  So may it be.



Oh, dear, we are all so wise!  Each of us knows it all, and knows he

knows it all--the rest, to a man, are fools and deluded.  One man knows

there is a hell, the next one knows there isn't; one man knows high

tariff is right, the next man knows it isn't; one man knows monarchy is

best, the next one knows it isn't; one age knows there are witches, the

next one knows there aren't; one sect knows its religion is the only true

one, there are sixty-four thousand five hundred million sects that know

it isn't so.  There is not a mind present among this multitude of

verdict-deliverers that is the superior of the minds that persuade and

represent the rest of the divisions of the multitude.  Yet this sarcastic

fact does not humble the arrogance nor diminish the know-it-all bulk of a

single verdict-maker of the lot by so much as a shade.  Mind is plainly

an ass, but it will be many ages before it finds it out, no doubt.  Why

do we respect the opinions of any man or any microbe that ever lived?  I

swear I don't know.  Why do I respect my own?  Well--that is different.















APPENDIX W



LITTLE BESSIE WOULD ASSIST PROVIDENCE



(See Chapter cclxxxii)



[It is dull, and I need wholesome excitements and distractions; so I will

go lightly excursioning along the primrose path of theology.]



Little Bessie was nearly three years old.  She was a good child, and not

shallow, not frivolous, but meditative and thoughtful, and much given to

thinking out the reasons of things and trying to make them harmonize with

results.  One day she said:



"Mama, why is there so much pain and sorrow and suffering?  What is it

all for?"



It was an easy question, and mama had no difficulty in answering it:



"It is for our good, my child.  In His wisdom and mercy the Lord sends us

these afflictions to discipline us and make us better."



"Is it He that sends them?"



"Yes."



"Does He send all of them, mama?"



"Yes, dear, all of them.  None of them comes by accident; He alone sends

them, and always out of love for us, and to make us better."



"Isn't it strange?"



"Strange?  Why, no, I have never thought of it in that way.  I have not

heard any one call it strange before.  It has always seemed natural and

right to me, and wise and most kindly and merciful."



"Who first thought of it like that, mama?  Was it you?"



"Oh no, child, I was taught it."



"Who taught you so, mama?"



"Why, really, I don't know--I can't remember.  My mother, I suppose; or

the preacher.  But it's a thing that everybody knows."



"Well, anyway, it does seem strange.  Did He give Billy Norris the

typhus?"



"Yes."



"What for?"



"Why, to discipline him and make him good."



"But he died, mama, and so it couldn't make him good."



"Well, then, I suppose it was for some other reason.  We know it was a

good reason, whatever it was."



"What do you think it was, mama?"



"Oh, you ask so many questions!  I think it was to discipline his

parents."



"Well, then, it wasn't fair, mama.  Why should his life be taken away for

their sake, when he wasn't doing anything?"



"Oh, I don't know!  I only know it was for a good and wise and merciful

reason."



"What reason, mama?"



"I think--I think-well, it was a judgment; it was to punish them for some

sin they had committed."



"But he was the one that was punished, mama.  Was that right?"



"Certainly, certainly.  He does nothing that isn't right and wise and

merciful.  You can't understand these things now, dear, but when you are

grown up you will understand them, and then you will see that they are

just and wise."



After a pause:



"Did He make the roof fall in on the stranger that was trying to save the

crippled old woman from the fire, mama?"



"Yes, my child.  Wait!  Don't ask me why, because I don't know.  I only

know it was to discipline some one, or be a judgment upon somebody, or to

show His power."



"That drunken man that stuck a pitchfork into Mrs. Welch's baby when--"



"Never mind about it, you needn't go into particulars; it was to

discipline the child--that much is certain, anyway."



"Mama, Mr. Burgess said in his sermon that billions of little creatures

are sent into us to give us cholera, and typhoid, and lockjaw, and more

than a thousand other sicknesses and--mama, does He send them?"



"Oh, certainly, child, certainly.  Of course."



"What for?"



"Oh, to discipline us!  Haven't I told you so, over and over again?"



"It's awful cruel, mama!  And silly!  and if I----"



"Hush, oh, hush!  Do you want to bring the lightning?"



"You know the lightning did come last week, mama, and struck the new

church, and burnt it down.  Was it to discipline the church?"



(Wearily.) "Oh, I suppose so."



"But it killed a hog that wasn't doing anything.  Was it to discipline

the hog, mama?"



"Dear child, don't you want to run out and play a while?  If you would

like to----"



"Mama, only think!  Mr. Hollister says there isn't a bird, or fish, or

reptile, or any other animal that hasn't got an enemy that Providence has

sent to bite it and chase it and pester it and kill it and suck its blood

and discipline it and make it good and religious.  Is that true, mother--

because if it is true why did Mr. Hollister laugh at it?"



"That Hollister is a scandalous person, and I don't want you to listen to

anything he says."



"Why, mama, he is very interesting, and I think he tries to be good.  He

says the wasps catch spiders and cram them down into their nests in the

ground--alive, mama!--and there they live and suffer days and days and

days, and the hungry little wasps chewing their legs and gnawing into

their bellies all the time, to make them good and religious and praise

God for His infinite mercies.  I think Mr. Hollister is just lovely, and

ever so kind; for when I asked him if he would treat a spider like that

he said he hoped to be damned if he would; and then he----Dear mama, have

you fainted!  I will run and bring help!  Now this comes of staying in

town this hot weather."













                               APPENDIX X



                A CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF MARK TWAIN'S WORK



                 PUBLISHED AND OTHERWISE--FROM 1851-1910





Note 1.--This is not a detailed bibliography, but merely a general list

of Mark Twain's literary undertakings, in the order of performance,

showing when, and usually where, the work was done, when and where first

published, etc.  An excellent Mark Twain bibliography has been compiled

by Mr. Merle Johnson, to whom acknowledgments are due for important

items.



Note 2.--Only a few of the more important speeches are noted.  Volumes

that are merely collections of tales or articles are not noted.



Note 3.--Titles are shortened to those most commonly in use, as "Huck

Finn" or "Huck" for "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."



Names of periodicals are abbreviated.



The initials U. E.  stand for the "Uniform Edition" of Mark Twain's

works.



The chapter number or numbers in the line with the date refers to the

place in this work where the items are mentioned.





                                 1851.

                    (See Chapter xviii of this work.)



Edited the Hannibal Journal during the absence of the owner and editor,

Orion Clemens.

Wrote local items for the Hannibal Journal.

Burlesque of a rival editor in the Hannibal Journal.

Wrote two sketches for The Sat.  Eve.  Post (Philadelphia).

To MARY IN H-l.  Hannibal Journal.





                                 1852-53.

                           (See Chapter xviii.)



JIM WOLFE AND THE FIRE--Hannibal Journal.

Burlesque of a rival editor in the Hannibal Journal.





                                  1853.

                           (See Chapter xix.)



Wrote obituary poems--not published.

Wrote first letters home.





                                 1855-56.

                        (See Chapters xx and xxi.)



First after-dinner speech; delivered at a printers' banquet in Keokuk,

Iowa.

Letters from Cincinnati, November 16, 1856, signed "Snodgrass"--

Saturday Post (Keokuk).



                                  1857.

                           (See Chapter xxi.)



Letters from Cincinnati, March 16, 1857, signed "Snodgrass"--Saturday

Post (Keokuk).





                                   1858.



Anonymous contributions to the New Orleans Crescent and probably to St.

Louis papers.



                                  1859.

                  (See Chapter xxvii; also Appendix B.)



Burlesque of Capt. Isaiah Sellers--True Delta (New Orleans), May 8 or 9.





                                   1861.

                      (See Chapters xxxiii to xxxv.)





Letters home, published in The Gate City (Keokuk).





                                   1862.

                      (See Chapters xxxv to xxxviii.)



Letters and sketches, signed "Josh," for the Territorial Enterprise

(Virginia City, Nevada).

REPORT OF THE LECTURE OF PROF. PERSONAL PRONOUN--Enterprise.

REPORT OF A FOURTH OF JULY ORATION--Enterprise.

THE PETRIFIED MAN--Enterprise.

Local news reporter for the Enterprise from August.





                                  1863.

              (See Chapters xli to xliii; also Appendix C.)



Reported the Nevada Legislature for the Enterprise.

First used the name "Mark Twain,"  February 2.

ADVICE TO THE UNRELIABLE--Enterprise.

CURING A COLD--Enterprise.  U. E.

INFORMATION FOR THE MILLION--Enterprise.

ADVICE TO GOOD LITTLE GIRLS--Enterprise.

THE DUTCH NICK MASSACRE--Enterprise.

Many other Enterprise sketches.

THE AGED PILOT MAN (poem)--" ROUGHING IT."  U. E.



                                  1864.

                    (See.  Chapters xliv to xlvii.)



Reported the Nevada Legislature for the Enterprise.

Speech as "Governor of the Third House."

Letters to New York Sunday Mercury.

Local reporter on the San Francisco Call.

Articles and sketches for the Golden Era.

Articles and sketches for the Californian.

Daily letters from San Francisco to the Enterprise.

(Several of the Era and Californian sketches appear in SKETCHES NEW AND

OLD.  U. E.)





                                  1865.

               (See Chapters xlix to li; also Appendix E.)



Notes for the Jumping Frog story; Angel's Camp, February.

Sketches etc., for the Golden Era and Californian.

Daily letter to the Enterprise.

THE JUMPING FROG (San Francisco)Saturday Press. New York,

November 18. U. E.





                                  1866.

               (See Chapters lii to lv; also Appendix D.)



Daily letter to the Enterprise.

Sandwich Island letters to the Sacramento Union.



Lecture on the Sandwich Islands, San Francisco, October 2.

FORTY-THREE DAYS IN AN OPEN BOAT--Harper's Magazine, December (error in

signature made it Mark Swain).





                                  1867.

        (See Chapters lvii to lxv; also Appendices E, F, and G.)



Letters to Alta California from New York.

JIM WOLFE AND THE CATS--N. Y. Sunday Mercury.

THE JUMPING FROG--book, published by Charles Henry Webb, May 1. U. E.

Lectured at Cooper Union, May, '66.

Letters to Alta California and New York Tribune from the Quaker City--

Holy Land excursion.

Letter to New York Herald on the return from the Holy Land.

After-dinner speech on "Women" (Washington).

Began arrangement for the publication of THE INNOCENTS ABROAD.





                                  1868.

          (See Chapters lxvi to lxix; also Appendices H and I.)



Newspaper letters, etc., from Washington, for New York Citizen, Tribune,

Herald, and other papers and periodicals.

Preparing Quaker City letters (in Washington and San Francisco) for book

publication.

CAPTAIN WAKEMAN'S (STORMFIELD'S) VISIT TO HEAVEN (San Francisco),

published Harper's Magazine, December, 1907-January, 1908 (also book,

Harpers).

Lectured in California and Nevada on the "Holy Land," July 2.

S'CAT!  Anonymous article on T. K. Beecher (Elmira), published in local

paper.

Lecture-tour, season 1868-69.





                                  1869.

                      (See Chapters lxx to lxxni.)



THE INNOCENTS ABROAD--book (Am. Pub. Co.), July 20. U. E.



Bought one-third ownership in the Buffalo Express.

Contributed editorials, sketches, etc., to the Express.

Contributed sketches to Packard's Monthly, Wood's Magazine, etc.

Lecture-tour, season 1869-70.





                                  1870.

             (See Chapters lxxiv to lxxx; also Appendix J.)



Contributed various matter to Buffalo Express.

Contributed various matter under general head of "MEMORANDA" to Galaxy

Magazine, May to April, '71.

ROUGHING IT begun in September (Buffalo).

SHEM'S DIARY (Buffalo) (unfinished).

GOD, ANCIENT AND MODERN (unpublished).





                                  1871.

            (See Chapters lxxxi and lxxxii; also Appendix K.)



MEMORANDA continued in Galaxy to April.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND FIRST ROMANCE--[THE FIRST ROMANCE had appeared in the

Express in 1870.  Later included in SKETCHES.]--booklet (Sheldon & Co.).

U. E.

ROUGHING IT finished (Quarry Farm).

Ruloff letter--Tribune.

Wrote several sketches and lectures (Quarry Farm).

Western play (unfinished).

Lecture-tour, season 1871-72.





                                  1872.

           (See Chapters lxxxiii to lxxxvii; also Appendix L.)



ROUGHING IT--book (Am. Pub. Co.), February.  U. E.

THE MARK TWAIN SCRAP-BOOK invented (Saybrook, Connecticut).

TOM SAWYER begun as a play (Saybrook, Connecticut).

A few unimportant sketches published in "Practical jokes," etc.

Began a book on England (London).





                                  1873.

                    (See Chapters lxxxviii to xcii.)



Letters on the Sandwich Islands-Tribune, January 3 and 6.

THE GILDED AGE (with C. D. Warner)--book (Am. Pub. Co), December.  U. E.

THE LICENSE OF THE PRESS--paper for The Monday Evening Club.

Lectured in London, October 18 and season 1873-74.





                                  1874.

            (See Chapters xciii to xcviii; also Appendix M.)



TOM SAWYER continued (in the new study at Quarry Farm).

A TRUE STORY (Quarry Farm)-Atlantic, November.  U. E.

FABLES (Quarry Farm).  U. E.

COLONEL SELLERS--play (Quarry Farm) performed by John T. Raymond.

UNDERTAKER'S LOVE-STORY (Quarry Farm) (unpublished).

OLD TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI (Hartford) Atlantic, January to July, 1875.

Monarchy letter to Mrs. Clemens, dated 1935 (Boston).





                                  1875.

                (See Chapters c to civ; also Appendix N.)



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE--paper for The Monday Evening Club.

SKETCHES NEW AND OLD--book (Am. Pub. Co.), July.  U. E.

TOM SAWYER concluded (Hartford).

THE CURIOUS REP. OF GONDOUR--Atlantic, October (unsigned).

PUNCH, CONDUCTOR, PUNCH--Atlantic, February, 1876.  U. E.

THE SECOND ADVENT (unfinished).

THE MYSTERIOUS CHAMBER (unfinished).

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A DAMN FOOL (unfinished).

Petition for International Copyright.

                                  1876.

                        (See Chapters cvi to cx.)



Performed in THE LOAN OF THE LOVER as Peter Spuyk (Hartford).

CARNIVAL OF CRIME--paper for The Monday Evening Club--Atlantic, June.

U. E.

HUCK FINN begun (Quarry Farm).

CANVASSER'S STORY (Quarry Farm)--Atlantic, December.  U. E.

"1601" (Quarry Farm), privately printed. [And not edited by Livy. D.W.]

AH SIN (with Bret Harte)--play, (Hartford).

TOM SAWYER--book (Am. Pub. Co.), December.  U. E.

Speech on "The Weather," New England Society, December 22.





                                  1877.

              (See Chapters cxii to cxv; also Appendix O.)



LOVES OF ALONZO FITZ-CLARENCE, ETC.  (Quarry Farm)--Atlantic.

IDLE EXCURSION (Quarry Farm)--Atlantic, October, November, December.

U. E.

SIMON WHEELER, DETECTIVE--play (Quarry Farm) (not produced).

PRINCE AND PAUPER begun (Quarry Farm).

Whittier birthday speech (Boston), December.





                                  1878.

                      (See Chapters cxvii to cxx.)



MAGNANIMOUS INCIDENT (Hartford)--Atlantic, May.  U. E.

A TRAMP ABROAD (Heidelberg and Munich).

MENTAL TELEGRAPHY--Harper's Magazine, December, 1891.  U. E.

GAMBETTA DUEL--Atlantic, February, 1879 (included in TRAMP). U. E.

REV. IN PITCAIRN--Atlantic, March, 1879.  U. E.

STOLEN WHITE ELEPHANT--book (Osgood & Co.), 1882.  U. E.

(The three items last named were all originally a part of the TRAMP

ABROAD.)





                                  1879.

(See Chapters cxxi to cxxiv; also Chapter cxxxiv and Appendix P.)



A TRAMP ABROAD continued (Paris, Elmira, and Hartford).

Adam monument scheme (Elmira).

Speech on "The Babies" (Grant dinner, Chicago), November.

Speech on "Plagiarism" (Holmes breakfast, Boston), December.





                                  1880.

                     (See Chapters cxxv to cxxxii.)



PRINCE AND PAUPER concluded (Hartford and Elmira).

HUCK FINN continued (Quarry Farm, Elmira).

A CAT STORY (Quarry Farm) (unpublished).

A TRAMP ABROAD--book (Am.  Pub.  Co.), March 13.  U. E.

EDWARD MILLS AND GEO. BENTON (Hartford)--Atlantic, August.  U. E.

MRS. McWILLIAMS AND THE LIGHTNING (Hartford)--Atlantic, September.  U. E.





                                  1881.

                    (See Chapters cxxxiv to cxxxvii.)



A CURIOUS EXPERIENCE--Century, November.  U. E.

A BIOGRAPHY OF -----(unfinished).

PRINCE AND PAUPER--book (Osgood R; CO.), December.

BURLESQUE ETIQUETTE (unfinished). [Included in LETTERS FROM THE EARTH

D.W.]





                                  1882.

                      (See Chapters cxl and cxli.)



LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI (Elmira and Hartford).





                                  1883.

                    (See Chapters cxlii to cxlviii.)



LIFE ON THE Mississippi--book (Osgood R CO.), May.  U. E.

WHAT Is HAPPINESS?--paper for The Monday Evening Club.

Introduction to Portuguese conversation book (Hartford).

HUCK FINN concluded (Quarry Farm).

HISTORY GAME (Quarry Farm).

AMERICAN CLAIMANT (with W. D. Howells)--play (Hartford), produced by

A. P. Burbank.

Dramatized TOM SAWYER and PRINCE AND PAUPER (not produced).





                                  1884.

                     (See Chapters cxlix to cliii.)



Embarked in publishing with Charles L. Webster.

THE CARSON FOOTPRINTS--the San Franciscan.

HUCK FINN--book (Charles L.  Webster & Co.), December.  U. E.

Platform-readings with George W. Cable, season '84-'85.





                                  1885.

                      (See Chapters cliv to clvii.)



Contracted for General Grant's Memoirs.

A CAMPAIGN THAT FAILED--Century, December.  U. E.

THE UNIVERSAL TINKER--Century, December (open letter signed X. Y. Z.

Letter on the government of children--Christian Union.)

KIDITCHIN (children's poem).





                                  1886.

              (See Chapters clix to clxi; also Appendix Q.)



Introduced Henry M.  Stanley (Boston).

CONNECTICUT YANKEE begun (Hartford).

ENGLISH AS SHE IS TAUGHT--Century, April, 1887.

LUCK--Harper's, August, 1891.

GENERAL GRANT AND MATTHEW ARNOLD--Army and Navy dinner speech.





                                  1887.

             (See Chapters clxii to clxiv; also Appendix R.)



MEISTERSCHAFT--play (Hartford)-Century, January, 1888.  U. E.

KNIGHTS OF LABOR--essay (not published).

To THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND--Harper's Magazine, December.  U. E.

CONSISTENCY--paper for The Monday Evening Club.





                                  1888.

                     (See Chapters clxv to clxviii.)



Introductory for "Unsent Letters" (unpublished).

Master of Arts degree from Yale.

Yale Alumni address (unpublished).

Copyright controversy with Brander Matthews--Princeton Review.

Replies to Matthew Arnold's American criticisms (unpublished).

YANKEE continued (Elmira and Hartford).

Introduction of Nye and Riley (Boston).





                                  1889.

            (See Chapters clxix to clxxiii; also Appendix S.)



A MAJESTIC LITERARY FOSSIL Harper's Magazine, February, 1890.  U. E.

HUCK AND TOM AMONG THE INDIANS (unfinished).

Introduction to YANKEE (not used).

LETTER To ELSIE LESLIE--St Nicholas, February, 1890.

CONNECTICUT YANKEE--book (Webster & Co.), December.  U. E.





                                  1890.

                    (See Chapters clxxii to clxxiv.)



Letter to Andrew Lang about English Criticism.

(No important literary matters this year.  Mark Twain engaged

promoting the Paige typesetting-machine.)





                                  1891.

                    (See Chapters clxxv to clxxvii.)



AMERICAN CLAIMANT (Hartford) syndicated; also book (Webster & Co.), May,

1892.  U. E.

European letters to New York Sun.

DOWN THE RHONE (unfinished).

KORNERSTRASSE (unpublished).





                                  1892.

                    (See Chapters clxxx to clxxxii.)



THE GERMAN CHICAGO (Berlin--Sun.)  U. E.

ALL KINDS OF SHIPS (at sea).  U. E.

Tom SAWYER ABROAD (Nauheim)--St.  Nicholas, November, '93, to April, '94.

U. E.

THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS (Nauheim).  U. E.

PUDD'NHEAD WILSON (Nauheim and Florence)--Century, December, '93, to

June, '94 U. E.

$100,000 BANK-NOTE (Florence)--Century, January, '93.  U. E.





                                  1893.

                  (See Chapters clxxxiii to clxxxvii.)



JOAN OF ARC begun (at Villa Viviani, Florence) and completed up to the

raising of the Siege of Orleans.

CALIFORNIAN'S TALE (Florence) Liber Scriptorum, also Harper's.

ADAM'S DIARY (Florence)--Niagara Book, also Harper's.

ESQUIMAU MAIDEN'S ROMANCE--Cosmopolitan, November.  U. E.

IS HE LIVING OR IS HE DEAD?--Cosmopolitan, September.  U. E.

TRAVELING WITH A REFORMER--Cosmopolitan, December.  U. E.

IN DEFENSE OF HARRIET SHELLEY (Florence)--N. A.--Rev., July, '94.  U. E.

FENIMORE COOPER'S LITERARY OFFENSES--[This may not have been written

until early in 1894.]--(Players, New York)--N.  A. Rev., July,'95  U. E.





                                  1894.

                    (See Chapters clxxxviii to cxc.)



JOAN OF ARC continued (Etretat and Paris).

WHAT PAUL BOURGET THINKS OF US (Etretat)--N. A. Rev., January, '95 U. E.

TOM SAWYER ABROAD--book (Webster & Co.), April.  U. E.

PUDD'NHEAD WILSON--book (Am. Pub. Co.), November.  U. E.

The failure of Charles L.  Webster & Co., April 18.

THE DERELICT--poem (Paris) (unpublished).





                                  1895.

                    (See Chapters clxxxix and cxcii.)



JOAN OF ARC finished (Paris), January 28, Harper's Magazine, April to

December.

MENTAL TELEGRAPHY AGAIN--Harper's, September.  U. E.

A LITTLE NOTE TO PAUL BOURGET.  U. E.

Poem to Mrs. Beecher (Elmira) (not published).  U. E.

Lecture-tour around the world, begun at Elmira, July 14, ended July 31.





                                  1896.

                      (See Chapters cxci to cxciv.)



JOAN OF ARC--book (Harpers) May.  U. E.

TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE, and other stories-book (Harpers), November.

FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR begun (23 Tedworth Square, London).





                                  1897.

                     (See Chapters cxcvii to cxcix.)



FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR--book (Am. Pub. Co.), November.

QUEEN'S JUBILEE (London), newspaper syndicate; book privately printed.

JAMES HAMMOND TRUMBULL--Century, November.

WHICH WAS WHICH?  (London and Switzerland) (unfinished).

TOM AND HUCK (Switzerland) (unfinished).



HELLFIRE HOTCHKISS (Switzerland) (unfinished).

IN MEMORIAM--poem (Switzerland)-Harper's Magazine.  U. E.

Concordia Club speech (Vienna).

STIRRING TIMES IN AUSTRIA (Vienna)--Harper's Magazine, March, 1898. U. E.





                                  1898.

              (See Chapters cc to cciii; also Appendix T.)



THE AUSTRIAN EDISON KEEPING SCHOOL AGAIN (Vienna)Century, August.  U. E.

AT THE APPETITE CURE (Vienna)--Cosmopolitan, August.  U. E.

FROM THE LONDON TIMES, 1904 (Vienna)--Century, November.  U. E.

ABOUT PLAY-ACTING (Vienna)--Forum, October.  U. E.

CONCERNING THE JEWS (Vienna)--Harper's Magazine, September, '99.  U. E.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND MRS.  EDDY (Vienna)--Cosmopolitan, October.  U. E.

THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG (Vienna)--Harper's Magazine, December,

'99 U. E.

Autobiographical chapters (Vienna); some of them used in the N. A. Rev.,

1906-07.

WHAT IS MAN?  (Kaltenleutgeben)--book (privately printed), August, 1906.

ASSASSINATION OF AN EMPRESS (Kaltenleutgeben) (unpublished).

THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER (unfinished).

Translations of German plays (unproduced).





                                  1899.

                     (See Chapters cciv to ccviii.)



DIPLOMATIC PAY AND CLOTHES (Vienna)--Forum, March.  U. E.

MY LITERARY DEBUT (Vienna)--Century, December.  U. E.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE (Vienna)--N. A. Rev., December, 1902, January and

February, 1903.

Translated German plays (Vienna) (unproduced).

Collaborated with Siegmund Schlesinger on plays (Vienna) (unfinished).

Planned a postal-check scheme (Vienna).

Articles about the Kellgren treatment (Sanna, Sweden) (unpublished).

ST. JOAN OF ARC (London)--Harper's Magazine, December, 1904.  U. E.

MY FIRST LIE, AND How I GOT OUT OF IT (London)--New York World.  U. E.



Articles on South African War (London) (unpublished)

Uniform Edition of Mark Twain's works (Am. Pub. Co.).



                                  1900.

                      (See Chapters ccix to ccxii.)



TWO LITTLE TALES (London)--Century, November, 1901.  U. E.

Spoke on "Copyright" before the House of Lords.

Delivered many speeches in London and New York.





                                  1901.

                    (See Chapters ccxiii to ccxviii.)



TO THE PERSON SITTING IN DARKNESS (14 West Tenth Street, New York)--

N. A. Rev., February.

TO MY MISSIONARY CRITICS (14 West Tenth Street, New York)--N. A. Rev.,

April.

DOUBLE-BARREL DETECTIVE STORY (Saranac Lake, "The Lair") Harper's

Magazine, January and February, 1902.

Lincoln Birthday Speech, February 11.

Many other speeches.

PLAN FOR CASTING VOTE PARTY (Riverdale) (unpublished).

THE STUPENDOUS PROCESSION (Riverdale) (unpublished).

ANTE-MORTEM OBITUARIES--Harper's Weekly.

Received degree of Doctor of Letters from Yale.





                                  1902.

            (See Chapters ccxix to ccxxiv; also Appendix U.)



DOES THE RACE OF MAN LOVE A LORD? (Riverdale)--N. A. Rev., April.  U. E.

FIVE BOONS of LIFE (Riverdale)--Harper's Weekly, July 5.  U. E.

WHY NOT ABOLISH IT?  (Riverdale)--Harper's Weekly, July 5.

DEFENSE OF GENERAL FUNSTON (Riverdale)--N. A. Rev., May.

IF I COULD BE THERE (Riverdale unpublished).

Wrote various articles, unfinished or unpublished.

Received degree of LL.D.  from the University of Missouri, June.



THE BELATED PASSPORT (York Harbor)--Harper's Weekly, December 6.  U. E.

WAS IT HEAVEN? OR HELL? (York Harbor)--Harper's Magazine, December. U. E.

Poem (Riverdale and York Harbor) (unpublished)

Sixty-seventh Birthday speech (New York), November 27.





                                  1903.

                     (See Chapters ccxxv to ccxxx.)



MRS. EDDY IN ERROR (Riverdale)--N. A. Rev., April.

INSTRUCTIONS IN ART (Riverdale)-Metropolitan, April and May.

EDDYPUS, and other C. S. articles (unfinished).

A DOG'S TALE (Elmira)--Harper's Magazine, December.  U. E.

ITALIAN WITHOUT A MASTER (Florence)--Harper's Weekly, January 21, 1904.

U. E.

ITALIAN WITH GRAMMAR (Florence)--Harper's Magazine, August, U.  E.

THE $30,000 BEQUEST (Florence)--Harper's Weekly, December 10, 1904. U. E.





                                  1904.

                    (See Chapters ccxxx to ccxxxiv.)



AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Florence)--portions published, N. A. Rev.  and Harper's

Weekly.

CONCERNING COPYRIGHT (Tyringham, Massachusetts)--N. A. Rev., January,

1905.

TSARS SOLILOQUY  (21 Fifth Avenue, New York)--N. A. Rev., March, 1905.

ADAM'S DIARY--book (Harpers), April.





                                  1905.

          (See Chapters ccxxxiv to ccxxxvii; also Appendix V.)



LEOPOLD'S SOLILOQUY (21 Fifth Avenue, New York)--pamphlet, P. R. Warren

Company.

THE WAR PRAYER (21 Fifth Avenue, New York) (unpublished).

EVE'S DIARY (Dublin, New Hampshire)--Harper's Magazine, December.

3,000 YEARS AMONG THE MICROBES (unfinished).

INTERPRETING THE DEITY (Dublin New Hampshire) (unpublished).

A HORSE'S TALE (Dublin, New Hampshire)-Harper's Magazine,

August and September, 1906.

Seventieth Birthday speech.

W. D. HOWELLS (21 Fifth Avenue, New York)-Harper's Magazine, July, 1906.





                                  1906.

                     (See Chapters ccxxxix to ccli.)



Autobiography dictation (21 Fifth Avenue, New York; and Dublin, New

Hampshire)--selections published, N. A. Rev., 1906 and 1907.

Many speeches.

Farewell lecture, Carnegie Hall, April 19.

WHAT IS MAN?--book (privately printed).

Copyright speech (Washington), December.





                                  1907.

                    (See Chapters cclvi to cclxiii.)



Autobiography dictations (27 Fifth Avenue, New York; and Tuxedo).

Degree of Doctor of Literature conferred by Oxford, June 26.

Made many London speeches.

Begum of Bengal speech (Liverpool).

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE--book (Harpers), February.  U. E.

CAPTAIN STORMFIELD'S VISIT To HEAVEN--book (Harpers).





                                  1908.

                     (See Chapters cclxiv to cclxx.)



Autobiography dictations (21 Fifth Avenue, New York; and Redding,

Connecticut).

Lotos Club and other speeches.

Aldrich memorial speech.





                                  1909.

      (See Chapters cclxxvi to cclxxxix; also Appendices N and W.)



IS SHAKESPEARE DEAD?--book (Harpers), April.

A FABLE--Harper's Magazine December.

Copyright documents (unpublished).

Address to St.  Timothy School.

MARJORIE FLEMING (Stormfield)--Harper's Bazar, December.

THE TURNING-POINT OF MY LIFE (Stormfield)--Harper's Bazar, February, 1910

BESSIE DIALOGUE (unpublished).

LETTERS FROM THE EARTH (unfinished).

THE DEATH OF JEAN--Harper's, December, 1910.

THE INTERNATIONAL LIGHTNING TRUST (unpublished).





                                  1910.

                          (See Chapter ccxcii.)



VALENTINES TO HELEN AND OTHERS (not published).

ADVICE TO PAINE (not published).



[The End]











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